What Goes Around, Chapter 7: Fight or Flight
Title: What Goes Around
Status: IN PROGRESS
Rating: T/PG-13, with a couple of chapters of R.
Warnings: Crack. AU. Genderbending...sort of. Non-canon-ness. Total mucking around with Cybertronian history, culture, biology, social structure, and...yeah, just about everything, really. Reading the notes and the prologue is highly encouraged. If you can swallow the stuff that's in there, you'll probably be all right with this story. If not...Well, then you need read no farther than that.
Main Characters: Swoop, Starscream, Ratchet, Mirage, Wheeljack. With a touch of Prowl, Megatron, Optimus Prime, Soundwave, and Thundercracker.
Genre: Crack, but with a (hopefully) coherent plot!
Chapter Summary: Starscream snaps. And for the Decepticons, the results ain't pretty, 'cuz Screamer's apparently destructive when psychotic. Which I guess isn't too much of a surprise because he's pretty destructive when not psychotic... But still!
Sounds floated and flitted around me, an impenetrable and incomprehensible miasma that weighed on me in exactly the way that a miasma should not weigh on anyone. Strange, but true. The sounds that comprised this weighty miasma may or may not have been words. No, that wasn't entirely true. I knew that they were in fact words, although they sounded like so much gibberish to me. Still, I knew that they were words to which I was supposed to be paying attention. They were words that were, theoretically, important. Words said at mission briefings were generally important, after all.
Except that they weren't important. They might once have been important, but not anymore. The individual saying the words might once have been important, too, but not anymore. Nothing was nearly as important as desperately clinging to the one vanishingly-small sliver of sanity that I still had left in my possession but that, even now, was slowly, inexorably slipping from my grasp, hour by hour, minute by minute.
I was no longer entirely certain that I was awake at any given moment in time. I was no longer certain that I was ever, in fact, awake, that I wasn't simply lingering in some hallucination-plagued coma somewhere, entirely divorced from reality. Whatever reality was, of course; it wasn't as if I could remember anymore. Inflicting massive amounts of pain on myself no longer had any effect. Even channeling concentrated bursts of energy directly into my spark, for all that it was excruciatingly painful - I could now sympathize with her - hadn't stopped the hallucinations even for a few minutes. And it also hadn't killed me. The glorious release of death had, quite honestly, been my goal the first time I'd thought of attempting that particular tactic, as I'd gathered my courage and followed through with my plan…and afterwards I had been horrified to discover that I still existed. Multiple reiterations of the experiment only yielded the same results: It appeared that I could do nothing but exist, despite my best efforts to remove myself from the universe.
The corner of my mind that housed the spark of a scientist wanted desperately to chew on the question of why in the universe I was still alive, why something that by all rights should have quite effectively destroyed me somehow…hadn't. But that part of me had been almost entirely drowned out by her now. Everything was drowned out by her. She was a constant. The constant. I was hyperaware of her all the time. I knew exactly where she was relative to my position, to the nanometer, at any given moment; sometimes, I fancied that I could even tell what she was doing and what she was thinking. She insistently and irresistibly pulled at me like gravity, as if she had suddenly become a voracious, all-consuming black hole, the event horizon of which I'd crossed a month ago now. So now there was just a slow, inevitable degeneration until, with brutal mercy, she finally crushed me. But until that blessed, blessed moment arrived, she merely plagued me, whispering a constant litany in my mind, and haunting every one of my senses. I felt her, tasted her, heard her, smelled her, saw her. Everywhere. All the time. For all that she was thousands of miles away, she was at times as present and tangible to me as the chair in which I was currently sitting, and there was no escaping her. There was nowhere where I could hide from her because she - or at least the need for her, the want of her - had become an integral part of me. Yet, she was forever dancing out of reach and laughing at me while she did so. Untouchable. So close and yet so very, very far away…
A nudge to my flank brought my wandering, distracted attention back to semi-coherence, semi-awareness. The nudge had come from Thundercracker, of course. He was seated placidly next to me, and he was surreptitiously giving me That Look again, that frighteningly penetrating look of his that, until very recently, I hadn't realized was quite so penetrating, quite so damned perceptive. I was highly aware of that now, though; it was as if Thundercracker could see into my very spark and instantly glean all of its secrets. I supposed that this talent of his came of being the so-called quiet one, the imperturbable buffer who sat squarely and immovably between Skywarp and me and between the three of us and the rest of the Decepticons. He was one of the few individuals in the Decepticon ranks who knew much but said very little. He was like Soundwave that way. Only much less scary. And with a better voice.
And he knew something was up with me, Thundercracker did. Likely, he wasn't the only one who knew this, for I was certain that it had to be blazingly obvious even to the morons that surrounded me. But Thundercracker was probably the only one who cared, or at least was likely the only one who wasn't spending all of his free time trying to figure out how to use my current, deeply addled mental state against me. He was watching me closely, I knew, but for some perverse reason his watching was comforting, not at all threatening; I felt as if I had to watch my own back less because Thundercracker was already covering it, as he always did. Even when he grumbled about it, as he always did.
I had, over the past couple of weeks, in desolate, despairing moments of semi-sane quasi-clarity, seriously considered the notion of confiding in Thundercracker. Since he was a watcher, he also tended to be a good listener, and if one could get Thundercracker to say anything at all, one came to realize and indeed to appreciate the fact that he had an intelligence that was almost as penetrating as the looks that he could give. He was, therefore, a good one with whom to bounce around ideas, as I knew somewhere, vaguely, that I had done on occasion in the past.
But in this case, confiding in Thundercracker would be dangerous. For both of us, naturally, but more so for Thundercracker because he probably wanted to continue to live. But that wasn't really what had stopped me from blabbing everything to my wingmate. No, in the end the thing that had stayed my hand was that, often, what was told to Thundercracker ended up being found out by Skywarp. And what Skywarp found out had a curious habit of being blabbed to everyone. And that just wouldn't be good. So, I continued to suffer alone, and Thundercracker would just have to do with giving me speculative looks. And timely nudges, when prudent.
Prompted by this latest nudge from my curiously faithful wingmate, I looked up from my rapt and very detailed inspection of the scratched tabletop in front of me to find myself eye-to-eye with a very disgruntled-looking and apparently expectant Megatron. He spouted some gibberish at me. At least, it sounded like so much gibberish to me although I was certain that, in the reality from which I was almost wholly disconnected, he had said perfectly coherent words, no doubt a demand for an explanation for my inattentiveness or something of that sort. But it didn't matter. Because for some reason, the look on Megatron's face sparked in me only vast and completely inappropriate amusement, and before I knew quite what was happening, I was laughing. Loudly.
It was, naturally, exactly the wrong thing to do. Dimly, as if from far, far away, I heard Megatron emit Enraged Noise #847 in his repertoire of approximately 1,000 distinctly different enraged noises. Number 847 was a particular bad one, one that had always boded very ill for me, personally. In fact, it was one that, now that I thought about it, he reserved pretty much solely for me. Perversely, now, it only made me laugh harder.
There was, of a sudden, a flurry of intense movement that erupted all around me, as Decepticons barreled en masse for the exit, as if they were a flock of birds and someone had spooked them. Whether they left because they had been so ordered or merely because they didn't want to be caught in the crossfire, I didn't know. Or much care, really. The only individual who didn't immediately leave was, perhaps not entirely unsurprisingly, Thundercracker. He stood up, but he otherwise didn't move, his fists clenching and unclenching indecisively, his gaze nervously flitting from Megatron to me, back and forth. I almost had to admire his foolish courage in the face of Megatron's displeasure, but in the end, I jerked my head toward the door, silently indicating to him that he, too, should leave. He frowned at me, clearly not liking the idea of leaving me alone to face Megatron's wrath, but in the end he behaved like a proper Decepticon for once in his life and saved his own hide, heading for the door. But he did make it a point to do so in a calm, collected, and decidedly reluctant manner, sending a clear message that he would likely pay for in some manner, later. He gave me one last reproachful look over his shoulder before leaving.
Once the doors slid closed in Thundercracker's wake, Megatron turned back to me. I'd gathered my few remaining wits by then, quieting myself and trying to push away the noise in my mind so that I could concentrate on him, so that I could hear and understand whatever he might say to me. Megatron had calmed himself as well. At least, he had done so on the surface; one rarely knew what was boiling in him just under the surface until it came spewing out of him in all its glory. For a long moment he seemed content to stare at me appraisingly, eyes narrowed and glowing dangerously. The moment seemed to stretch on forever before he said anything. And while Megatron stared, I slowly, unthreateningly, got to my feet, determined to keep the table between us. My mind was hazy, cloudy, and I wasn't quite entirely present, but enough of me was there to comprehend the notion that I might need to move, and quickly, in the very near future.
Best to be prepared.
Slowly, Megatron folded his arms over his broad chest, the room's pale lighting seeming to accent the huge fusion cannon mounted on his forearm. And then he spoke, his voice deceptively quiet. When Megatron went quiet, I knew that I needed to be on high alert, and that was somewhat difficult right now, as distracted as I was.
"What," Megatron asked, almost softly, "is the matter with you, Starscream?"
I hesitated before I answered him, kept hesitating for as long as I thought I could get away with it. I was trying to decide in my addled mind how best to answer Megatron's very simple question. In the end, I decided to try something new: The truth. Or at least a slightly modified version thereof. The truth was simple, and simple was just about all that I could handle, at the moment. This was indeed the level to which I, always a consummate master of weaving a complex web of deceit and lies, had been reduced.
"Her," I muttered quietly, my voice shaking in a very pathetic sort of way. As I said the word, I could hear her laughing at me in my mind, and I had to fight hard to resist the urge to tell her, aloud, to shut up.
At that, Megatron stared at me for a long beat…and then he laughed. Long and hard. It wasn't a pleasant sound at all, and it clashed with her laugh.
"So Soundwave wins that bet," Megatron announced to no one, and when I just gave him a quizzical look in response, he added, "Tell me, were you stupid enough not to…take care of her…before you killed her, then?" he asked. "Because you should be over this by now. It's been…what? A month?"
"You think I don't know that?" I growled peevishly at him. "You think I want to be like this?"
"Knowing you as I do, Starscream," Megatron barked with a humorless laugh, "it wouldn't surprise me if you did." At that, I glared at him, but he didn't respond, his expression instead turning thoughtful and speculative. "Still, I need you…not crazy. I need you awake and alert. Since she's dead - She is dead, yes?" he asked, nonchalantly interrupting himself, and there was suddenly a knife in his voice.
I regarded him squarely, locking my gaze with his, and unflinchingly lied, "Of course."
Megatron nodded and continued, "Since she's dead, perhaps you should consider…someone else. It might not work…or it might work quite well. And if I'm not mistaken, Thundercracker seemed willing enough just a…"
Megatron's voice trailed off as the conference room's doors slid quietly but unexpectedly apart and Soundwave strode with his customary aplomb through them. He gave me a long and, so it seemed, deeply speculative look, and the look froze me, sent shivers dancing through my frame as dread for some reason suddenly and completely consumed me.
Without pausing even for half a beat, Soundwave strode over to the controls of the room's currently-inactive vidscreen. Almost nonchalantly, he dropped the cassette form of one of his annoying minions into the console and the vidscreen came immediately to life, immediately began to display what whichever of the cassettes it was had recorded. Soundwave gave Megatron a look that was nothing if not smug and then he turned an even more smug - if that was even possible - look on me.
Because, of course, the cassette contained footage of her. And according to the date stamp, that footage had been recorded a mere two hours ago.
My innards lurched at the sight of her, my gaze riveted to the vidscreen as memories of our encounter immediately began to flood my mind and my senses, effectively shunting aside the warnings about the extreme danger that I knew that I was in now. For a long moment, though, no one moved. No one made a sound. Not me, not Megatron, not Soundwave; all three of us simply stared at the image on the screen, watching her as she glided and banked gracefully. So very gracefully. For some bizarre reason, I fleetingly wondered whether the Autobots had actually let her out of her cage or if she'd managed to sneak out. She had to be near term now, so I couldn't imagine the former happening…
It also occurred to me that she looked completely different now, for some reason. Her form was sleek, stylized, and streamlined where once it had been boxy, primitive, and somewhat clumsy. Her color scheme was altered in a most pleasing fashion, too, now all dark blue, bright silver, and majestically-shimmering gold that sparkled dazzlingly where it caught the brilliant sunlight. Her coloration was reminiscent of Soundwave's now, which I found briefly amusing. Except that she, of course, was much prettier than Soundwave.
But she didn't, unfortunately for me, look different enough that Megatron wasn't instantly aware of who, exactly, she was. And I certainly knew who she was. Even though she was just an image on a vidscreen, she called to me like a siren from out of human myth, and I found myself taking several involuntary steps toward the vidscreen - and therefore toward Megatron. I was utterly mesmerized by just an image of her; I felt as if, somehow, I could simply reach into the screen and pull her to me and then blissfully devour her.
But then slowly, ever so slowly, dangerously slowly, Megatron turned to me, and I turned my head to look at him. The look on his face was indecipherable for a moment before it went ice cold, utterly devoid of any emotion whatsoever. It was his most dangerous not-expression, one that I remembered well; I had seen it for the first time moments before he had destroyed the queen, and I had, so far as I could remember, never seen it since.
"Well," Megatron drawled, his voice lethally quiet, "no wonder she still plagues you, Starscream."
What happened next was something of a blur. I'd thought that I was suicidal, that I would welcome death however it chose to claim me because I'd convinced myself that death was infinitely preferably to raving, irretrievable lunacy. But I'd been wrong. There was still, somewhere within me, something that was clinging desperately to the idea of self-preservation, of staying alive at all costs. The instinct had always been particularly strong in me, and it had more than a few times kept me alive and kicking when by all rights I should have been destroyed. As a side effect, it had also earned me a reputation for cowardice, but I'd come to accept that status over the years, even in some ways to embrace it. I'd realized, once all the fairytale illusions and ideals had been pushed aside by the grim reality of war, that cowards stayed alive while the foolishly brave didn't, and I had long ago decided that I preferred remaining a living coward to becoming a dead hero.
Self-sacrifice was entirely not in my nature. Not for anything. Not for anyone.
And the self-preservation instinct was apparently still there, strong as ever in the face of the prospect of death - or worse - at Megatron's hands. Long ago, as the once-trusting relationship between the two of us had slowly frayed and tattered beyond repair, to the point that I was keenly aware that Megatron now tolerated my continued existence only because my abilities were valuable to him, I had vowed to myself that I would never give Megatron the satisfaction of destroying me, should it ever come to pass that his abhorrence of me overcame my usefulness to him. It had meant eternally walking a very fine line, annoying Megatron for my own amusement but not too much. Betraying his "trust," but not too much. Poking carefully at limits, stretching boundaries to within millimeters of breaking them but never actually breaking them. I knew all the particulars of those limits, where it was safe to tread and where it wasn't. I understood my limits well. And when I'd decided to let her live, I had been very aware that I had made a decision that completely shattered those limits. I had simply decided that, despite any future consequences, the possible future benefits were worth it.
Of course, that was before she had started driving me out of my mind…
But now, somewhat sooner than I'd expected, Megatron had discovered that I'd utterly and willfully overstepped a boundary that had always existed, unspoken, between us: I could push Megatron so far but no farther before he would lethally retaliate. So, the moment had finally arrived when I had outlived my usefulness to him, when treachery and betrayal had finally overshadowed talent; I knew it deep down in the core of my spark. And I'd thought that I would welcome it, that I would view this moment as nothing but a release from my burdens. No more walking fine lines. No more games. No more insanity. No more her. No more…anything. Just the peace of oblivion. Yet, when squarely faced with the prospect of death at Megatron's hands, right here and right now, I found the concept still to be unbearable, abhorrent on a very deep and very primal level. I discovered a strong desire to prevent Megatron, specifically, from killing me.
"Fight or flight" was a universal concept. Pushed to a limit, faced with destruction, one decided in a split-second which of the two possible courses of action one was going to follow. In my experience, the foolishly heroic always chose to fight, and often they died in their attempt to be nobly heroic. Cowards like me, on the other hand, always chose to flee, but this meant that we lived to fight or flee another day, which to me had always been infinitely preferable. So here I was, making the choice again, and not surprisingly I made the habitual one.
As a warrior, my body considered weapons systems vital, so they still had full power at the cost of denying certain other systems that any non-warrior would consider far more vital than weaponry. So for perhaps the first time in my life, I appreciated the skewed physical priorities of my caste. It meant that even in my weakened state, I could launch every weapon at my disposal at Megatron, to put some buffering distance between us. And then, quite literally, I flew; it was faster than running. I transformed, missile-d the hell out of the bulkhead, and then escaped through the ruins of it into the corridor outside, dodging enraged fusion cannon blasts as I went. It took skill, focus, and concentration to navigate the corridors of Headquarters while in flight, and skill I had, in abundance. Focus and concentration rose to the occasion out of necessity, in the face of the very real possibility of my death, so suddenly unwanted.
I knew that I needed to escape, and to do that, I knew, suddenly, exactly where I needed to go. The docking tower was obvious and therefore not an option. But there was another way out of Decepticon Headquarters, one that not many thought about, but one of which I, forever walking that fine line between Megatron's tolerance and death, was keenly aware.
What had eventually become the main part of our headquarters had once been a spacegoing vessel. As such, it had emergency escape pods. The pods themselves had been cannibalized for parts long ago…but the launch tubes were still there, completely intact. Lowering protective force fields and opening up all of the tubes at once, scattered as they were throughout various levels of Headquarters, would almost entirely flood the main part of the base very quickly, which would be a very good diversion. And once the tubes were open, I had only to hop into one of them, endure a relatively short "flight" through water, and then there would be freedom. Of a sort, at least.
So instead of heading up toward the topside of Headquarters, where the docking bay was situated and where, no doubt, there would be a welcoming committee waiting for me, I headed instead for the ship's bowels, its very underbelly. Down there was one of the three auxiliary control rooms, from which I knew that I could open all of the escape pods' launch tubes. And just down the corridor from there was a tube that was my ticket out of here.
I encountered few individuals on my way, and all of those that I did encounter I incapacitated - permanently or not, I didn't know - so as not to have my position or intended destination reported too quickly. Alarms blared, Megatron's enraged voice boomed over the 'com system, and confusion generally reigned, but I was in short order ensconced, unharrassed, in the auxiliary control room that was my destination. Once there, I communed with the computers and quickly ordered them to systematically open the launch tubes, blowing their physical hatches and simultaneously lowering the force fields that were an additional level of protection against someone doing exactly what I was doing: flooding Headquarters. I left the tube through which I intended to escape for last. As I worked, the voices over the 'com became less and less concerned with me and more and more concerned with the rising floodwaters and collateral damage, and I allowed myself a smirk, satisfied with my handiwork. My fellow Decepticons would have their hands full for quite a while, indeed, with hopefully not a thought to spare for me.
And then, soon, once all of the 'com squawkings were all about water and the disgusting things that were coming in with it, it was time to go.
Rising from my seat, I headed for the door and poked my head cautiously out of it, looking up and down the corridor. No one was about, and the corridor was bathed in dim red emergency lighting in the face of the crisis at hand. Voices, some of them now panicked cries for help, still squawked over the comm channels, but I paid them no mind as I slipped quietly into the corridor.
Since there was only one escape pod tube on this level - which was why I had chosen it - the water wasn't very deep yet, only halfway to my ankle, so navigating was no problem. As I neared the tube, I could hear the water pouring in, though, crashing loudly as it spewed from the wide interior opening of the upwardly-canted tube and onto the deckplates and against the opposite bulkhead. The force of the incoming flood made it quite difficult to enter the tube, but I managed it, transforming as I did so, the width of the tube easily accommodating my wingspan. "Flying" against the incoming tide was difficult, too, but also manageable with thrusters at maximum. Once through the tube, overcoming the currents that wanted to suck me back into Headquarters like one of the disgusting organic creatures about which my comrades had been complaining was easier still, and soon I was fully away, slipping unseen and unchallenged into the eternal, abyssal darkness that shrouded Decepticon Headquarters. I headed for the surface with all possible haste; "flying" underwater was categorically not my idea of fun.
My energy levels were laughably low as I breached the surface of the Pacific, rocketing out of it and into the piercing sunshine above in a glittering arc of spray and noise. Most of my peripheral systems had shut down long ago, in the face of weeks of little-to-no recharge and even less energon, and now some of my vital systems were starting to give up the ghost, too. Other systems, some of them still fully powered, hadn't been at all happy about the swim. And I had a journey of a few thousand miles ahead of me, most of it over ocean. Given my condition, it was highly unlikely that I'd be able to complete the journey without meeting up with that ocean again at some point along the way.
But I had no choice now. This, I grimly realized as I adjusted course. I had saved my own hide in a somewhat spectacular fashion…but now there was simply nowhere else to go but my new intended destination. I was quite certain that, assuming that it/they survived the unexpected flood, Decepticon Headquarters and its inhabitants would never welcome me again, not after this. So now there was only one person in the entire universe who could conceivably help me. And if she wouldn't or couldn't help me, then at least she'd probably cheerfully reduce me to a zillion tiny bits. If it came to that…Well, that worked for me, too. If only because she wasn't Megatron.
Status: IN PROGRESS
Rating: T/PG-13, with a couple of chapters of R.
Warnings: Crack. AU. Genderbending...sort of. Non-canon-ness. Total mucking around with Cybertronian history, culture, biology, social structure, and...yeah, just about everything, really. Reading the notes and the prologue is highly encouraged. If you can swallow the stuff that's in there, you'll probably be all right with this story. If not...Well, then you need read no farther than that.
Main Characters: Swoop, Starscream, Ratchet, Mirage, Wheeljack. With a touch of Prowl, Megatron, Optimus Prime, Soundwave, and Thundercracker.
Genre: Crack, but with a (hopefully) coherent plot!
Chapter Summary: Starscream snaps. And for the Decepticons, the results ain't pretty, 'cuz Screamer's apparently destructive when psychotic. Which I guess isn't too much of a surprise because he's pretty destructive when not psychotic... But still!
Sounds floated and flitted around me, an impenetrable and incomprehensible miasma that weighed on me in exactly the way that a miasma should not weigh on anyone. Strange, but true. The sounds that comprised this weighty miasma may or may not have been words. No, that wasn't entirely true. I knew that they were in fact words, although they sounded like so much gibberish to me. Still, I knew that they were words to which I was supposed to be paying attention. They were words that were, theoretically, important. Words said at mission briefings were generally important, after all.
Except that they weren't important. They might once have been important, but not anymore. The individual saying the words might once have been important, too, but not anymore. Nothing was nearly as important as desperately clinging to the one vanishingly-small sliver of sanity that I still had left in my possession but that, even now, was slowly, inexorably slipping from my grasp, hour by hour, minute by minute.
I was no longer entirely certain that I was awake at any given moment in time. I was no longer certain that I was ever, in fact, awake, that I wasn't simply lingering in some hallucination-plagued coma somewhere, entirely divorced from reality. Whatever reality was, of course; it wasn't as if I could remember anymore. Inflicting massive amounts of pain on myself no longer had any effect. Even channeling concentrated bursts of energy directly into my spark, for all that it was excruciatingly painful - I could now sympathize with her - hadn't stopped the hallucinations even for a few minutes. And it also hadn't killed me. The glorious release of death had, quite honestly, been my goal the first time I'd thought of attempting that particular tactic, as I'd gathered my courage and followed through with my plan…and afterwards I had been horrified to discover that I still existed. Multiple reiterations of the experiment only yielded the same results: It appeared that I could do nothing but exist, despite my best efforts to remove myself from the universe.
The corner of my mind that housed the spark of a scientist wanted desperately to chew on the question of why in the universe I was still alive, why something that by all rights should have quite effectively destroyed me somehow…hadn't. But that part of me had been almost entirely drowned out by her now. Everything was drowned out by her. She was a constant. The constant. I was hyperaware of her all the time. I knew exactly where she was relative to my position, to the nanometer, at any given moment; sometimes, I fancied that I could even tell what she was doing and what she was thinking. She insistently and irresistibly pulled at me like gravity, as if she had suddenly become a voracious, all-consuming black hole, the event horizon of which I'd crossed a month ago now. So now there was just a slow, inevitable degeneration until, with brutal mercy, she finally crushed me. But until that blessed, blessed moment arrived, she merely plagued me, whispering a constant litany in my mind, and haunting every one of my senses. I felt her, tasted her, heard her, smelled her, saw her. Everywhere. All the time. For all that she was thousands of miles away, she was at times as present and tangible to me as the chair in which I was currently sitting, and there was no escaping her. There was nowhere where I could hide from her because she - or at least the need for her, the want of her - had become an integral part of me. Yet, she was forever dancing out of reach and laughing at me while she did so. Untouchable. So close and yet so very, very far away…
A nudge to my flank brought my wandering, distracted attention back to semi-coherence, semi-awareness. The nudge had come from Thundercracker, of course. He was seated placidly next to me, and he was surreptitiously giving me That Look again, that frighteningly penetrating look of his that, until very recently, I hadn't realized was quite so penetrating, quite so damned perceptive. I was highly aware of that now, though; it was as if Thundercracker could see into my very spark and instantly glean all of its secrets. I supposed that this talent of his came of being the so-called quiet one, the imperturbable buffer who sat squarely and immovably between Skywarp and me and between the three of us and the rest of the Decepticons. He was one of the few individuals in the Decepticon ranks who knew much but said very little. He was like Soundwave that way. Only much less scary. And with a better voice.
And he knew something was up with me, Thundercracker did. Likely, he wasn't the only one who knew this, for I was certain that it had to be blazingly obvious even to the morons that surrounded me. But Thundercracker was probably the only one who cared, or at least was likely the only one who wasn't spending all of his free time trying to figure out how to use my current, deeply addled mental state against me. He was watching me closely, I knew, but for some perverse reason his watching was comforting, not at all threatening; I felt as if I had to watch my own back less because Thundercracker was already covering it, as he always did. Even when he grumbled about it, as he always did.
I had, over the past couple of weeks, in desolate, despairing moments of semi-sane quasi-clarity, seriously considered the notion of confiding in Thundercracker. Since he was a watcher, he also tended to be a good listener, and if one could get Thundercracker to say anything at all, one came to realize and indeed to appreciate the fact that he had an intelligence that was almost as penetrating as the looks that he could give. He was, therefore, a good one with whom to bounce around ideas, as I knew somewhere, vaguely, that I had done on occasion in the past.
But in this case, confiding in Thundercracker would be dangerous. For both of us, naturally, but more so for Thundercracker because he probably wanted to continue to live. But that wasn't really what had stopped me from blabbing everything to my wingmate. No, in the end the thing that had stayed my hand was that, often, what was told to Thundercracker ended up being found out by Skywarp. And what Skywarp found out had a curious habit of being blabbed to everyone. And that just wouldn't be good. So, I continued to suffer alone, and Thundercracker would just have to do with giving me speculative looks. And timely nudges, when prudent.
Prompted by this latest nudge from my curiously faithful wingmate, I looked up from my rapt and very detailed inspection of the scratched tabletop in front of me to find myself eye-to-eye with a very disgruntled-looking and apparently expectant Megatron. He spouted some gibberish at me. At least, it sounded like so much gibberish to me although I was certain that, in the reality from which I was almost wholly disconnected, he had said perfectly coherent words, no doubt a demand for an explanation for my inattentiveness or something of that sort. But it didn't matter. Because for some reason, the look on Megatron's face sparked in me only vast and completely inappropriate amusement, and before I knew quite what was happening, I was laughing. Loudly.
It was, naturally, exactly the wrong thing to do. Dimly, as if from far, far away, I heard Megatron emit Enraged Noise #847 in his repertoire of approximately 1,000 distinctly different enraged noises. Number 847 was a particular bad one, one that had always boded very ill for me, personally. In fact, it was one that, now that I thought about it, he reserved pretty much solely for me. Perversely, now, it only made me laugh harder.
There was, of a sudden, a flurry of intense movement that erupted all around me, as Decepticons barreled en masse for the exit, as if they were a flock of birds and someone had spooked them. Whether they left because they had been so ordered or merely because they didn't want to be caught in the crossfire, I didn't know. Or much care, really. The only individual who didn't immediately leave was, perhaps not entirely unsurprisingly, Thundercracker. He stood up, but he otherwise didn't move, his fists clenching and unclenching indecisively, his gaze nervously flitting from Megatron to me, back and forth. I almost had to admire his foolish courage in the face of Megatron's displeasure, but in the end, I jerked my head toward the door, silently indicating to him that he, too, should leave. He frowned at me, clearly not liking the idea of leaving me alone to face Megatron's wrath, but in the end he behaved like a proper Decepticon for once in his life and saved his own hide, heading for the door. But he did make it a point to do so in a calm, collected, and decidedly reluctant manner, sending a clear message that he would likely pay for in some manner, later. He gave me one last reproachful look over his shoulder before leaving.
Once the doors slid closed in Thundercracker's wake, Megatron turned back to me. I'd gathered my few remaining wits by then, quieting myself and trying to push away the noise in my mind so that I could concentrate on him, so that I could hear and understand whatever he might say to me. Megatron had calmed himself as well. At least, he had done so on the surface; one rarely knew what was boiling in him just under the surface until it came spewing out of him in all its glory. For a long moment he seemed content to stare at me appraisingly, eyes narrowed and glowing dangerously. The moment seemed to stretch on forever before he said anything. And while Megatron stared, I slowly, unthreateningly, got to my feet, determined to keep the table between us. My mind was hazy, cloudy, and I wasn't quite entirely present, but enough of me was there to comprehend the notion that I might need to move, and quickly, in the very near future.
Best to be prepared.
Slowly, Megatron folded his arms over his broad chest, the room's pale lighting seeming to accent the huge fusion cannon mounted on his forearm. And then he spoke, his voice deceptively quiet. When Megatron went quiet, I knew that I needed to be on high alert, and that was somewhat difficult right now, as distracted as I was.
"What," Megatron asked, almost softly, "is the matter with you, Starscream?"
I hesitated before I answered him, kept hesitating for as long as I thought I could get away with it. I was trying to decide in my addled mind how best to answer Megatron's very simple question. In the end, I decided to try something new: The truth. Or at least a slightly modified version thereof. The truth was simple, and simple was just about all that I could handle, at the moment. This was indeed the level to which I, always a consummate master of weaving a complex web of deceit and lies, had been reduced.
"Her," I muttered quietly, my voice shaking in a very pathetic sort of way. As I said the word, I could hear her laughing at me in my mind, and I had to fight hard to resist the urge to tell her, aloud, to shut up.
At that, Megatron stared at me for a long beat…and then he laughed. Long and hard. It wasn't a pleasant sound at all, and it clashed with her laugh.
"So Soundwave wins that bet," Megatron announced to no one, and when I just gave him a quizzical look in response, he added, "Tell me, were you stupid enough not to…take care of her…before you killed her, then?" he asked. "Because you should be over this by now. It's been…what? A month?"
"You think I don't know that?" I growled peevishly at him. "You think I want to be like this?"
"Knowing you as I do, Starscream," Megatron barked with a humorless laugh, "it wouldn't surprise me if you did." At that, I glared at him, but he didn't respond, his expression instead turning thoughtful and speculative. "Still, I need you…not crazy. I need you awake and alert. Since she's dead - She is dead, yes?" he asked, nonchalantly interrupting himself, and there was suddenly a knife in his voice.
I regarded him squarely, locking my gaze with his, and unflinchingly lied, "Of course."
Megatron nodded and continued, "Since she's dead, perhaps you should consider…someone else. It might not work…or it might work quite well. And if I'm not mistaken, Thundercracker seemed willing enough just a…"
Megatron's voice trailed off as the conference room's doors slid quietly but unexpectedly apart and Soundwave strode with his customary aplomb through them. He gave me a long and, so it seemed, deeply speculative look, and the look froze me, sent shivers dancing through my frame as dread for some reason suddenly and completely consumed me.
Without pausing even for half a beat, Soundwave strode over to the controls of the room's currently-inactive vidscreen. Almost nonchalantly, he dropped the cassette form of one of his annoying minions into the console and the vidscreen came immediately to life, immediately began to display what whichever of the cassettes it was had recorded. Soundwave gave Megatron a look that was nothing if not smug and then he turned an even more smug - if that was even possible - look on me.
Because, of course, the cassette contained footage of her. And according to the date stamp, that footage had been recorded a mere two hours ago.
My innards lurched at the sight of her, my gaze riveted to the vidscreen as memories of our encounter immediately began to flood my mind and my senses, effectively shunting aside the warnings about the extreme danger that I knew that I was in now. For a long moment, though, no one moved. No one made a sound. Not me, not Megatron, not Soundwave; all three of us simply stared at the image on the screen, watching her as she glided and banked gracefully. So very gracefully. For some bizarre reason, I fleetingly wondered whether the Autobots had actually let her out of her cage or if she'd managed to sneak out. She had to be near term now, so I couldn't imagine the former happening…
It also occurred to me that she looked completely different now, for some reason. Her form was sleek, stylized, and streamlined where once it had been boxy, primitive, and somewhat clumsy. Her color scheme was altered in a most pleasing fashion, too, now all dark blue, bright silver, and majestically-shimmering gold that sparkled dazzlingly where it caught the brilliant sunlight. Her coloration was reminiscent of Soundwave's now, which I found briefly amusing. Except that she, of course, was much prettier than Soundwave.
But she didn't, unfortunately for me, look different enough that Megatron wasn't instantly aware of who, exactly, she was. And I certainly knew who she was. Even though she was just an image on a vidscreen, she called to me like a siren from out of human myth, and I found myself taking several involuntary steps toward the vidscreen - and therefore toward Megatron. I was utterly mesmerized by just an image of her; I felt as if, somehow, I could simply reach into the screen and pull her to me and then blissfully devour her.
But then slowly, ever so slowly, dangerously slowly, Megatron turned to me, and I turned my head to look at him. The look on his face was indecipherable for a moment before it went ice cold, utterly devoid of any emotion whatsoever. It was his most dangerous not-expression, one that I remembered well; I had seen it for the first time moments before he had destroyed the queen, and I had, so far as I could remember, never seen it since.
"Well," Megatron drawled, his voice lethally quiet, "no wonder she still plagues you, Starscream."
What happened next was something of a blur. I'd thought that I was suicidal, that I would welcome death however it chose to claim me because I'd convinced myself that death was infinitely preferably to raving, irretrievable lunacy. But I'd been wrong. There was still, somewhere within me, something that was clinging desperately to the idea of self-preservation, of staying alive at all costs. The instinct had always been particularly strong in me, and it had more than a few times kept me alive and kicking when by all rights I should have been destroyed. As a side effect, it had also earned me a reputation for cowardice, but I'd come to accept that status over the years, even in some ways to embrace it. I'd realized, once all the fairytale illusions and ideals had been pushed aside by the grim reality of war, that cowards stayed alive while the foolishly brave didn't, and I had long ago decided that I preferred remaining a living coward to becoming a dead hero.
Self-sacrifice was entirely not in my nature. Not for anything. Not for anyone.
And the self-preservation instinct was apparently still there, strong as ever in the face of the prospect of death - or worse - at Megatron's hands. Long ago, as the once-trusting relationship between the two of us had slowly frayed and tattered beyond repair, to the point that I was keenly aware that Megatron now tolerated my continued existence only because my abilities were valuable to him, I had vowed to myself that I would never give Megatron the satisfaction of destroying me, should it ever come to pass that his abhorrence of me overcame my usefulness to him. It had meant eternally walking a very fine line, annoying Megatron for my own amusement but not too much. Betraying his "trust," but not too much. Poking carefully at limits, stretching boundaries to within millimeters of breaking them but never actually breaking them. I knew all the particulars of those limits, where it was safe to tread and where it wasn't. I understood my limits well. And when I'd decided to let her live, I had been very aware that I had made a decision that completely shattered those limits. I had simply decided that, despite any future consequences, the possible future benefits were worth it.
Of course, that was before she had started driving me out of my mind…
But now, somewhat sooner than I'd expected, Megatron had discovered that I'd utterly and willfully overstepped a boundary that had always existed, unspoken, between us: I could push Megatron so far but no farther before he would lethally retaliate. So, the moment had finally arrived when I had outlived my usefulness to him, when treachery and betrayal had finally overshadowed talent; I knew it deep down in the core of my spark. And I'd thought that I would welcome it, that I would view this moment as nothing but a release from my burdens. No more walking fine lines. No more games. No more insanity. No more her. No more…anything. Just the peace of oblivion. Yet, when squarely faced with the prospect of death at Megatron's hands, right here and right now, I found the concept still to be unbearable, abhorrent on a very deep and very primal level. I discovered a strong desire to prevent Megatron, specifically, from killing me.
"Fight or flight" was a universal concept. Pushed to a limit, faced with destruction, one decided in a split-second which of the two possible courses of action one was going to follow. In my experience, the foolishly heroic always chose to fight, and often they died in their attempt to be nobly heroic. Cowards like me, on the other hand, always chose to flee, but this meant that we lived to fight or flee another day, which to me had always been infinitely preferable. So here I was, making the choice again, and not surprisingly I made the habitual one.
As a warrior, my body considered weapons systems vital, so they still had full power at the cost of denying certain other systems that any non-warrior would consider far more vital than weaponry. So for perhaps the first time in my life, I appreciated the skewed physical priorities of my caste. It meant that even in my weakened state, I could launch every weapon at my disposal at Megatron, to put some buffering distance between us. And then, quite literally, I flew; it was faster than running. I transformed, missile-d the hell out of the bulkhead, and then escaped through the ruins of it into the corridor outside, dodging enraged fusion cannon blasts as I went. It took skill, focus, and concentration to navigate the corridors of Headquarters while in flight, and skill I had, in abundance. Focus and concentration rose to the occasion out of necessity, in the face of the very real possibility of my death, so suddenly unwanted.
I knew that I needed to escape, and to do that, I knew, suddenly, exactly where I needed to go. The docking tower was obvious and therefore not an option. But there was another way out of Decepticon Headquarters, one that not many thought about, but one of which I, forever walking that fine line between Megatron's tolerance and death, was keenly aware.
What had eventually become the main part of our headquarters had once been a spacegoing vessel. As such, it had emergency escape pods. The pods themselves had been cannibalized for parts long ago…but the launch tubes were still there, completely intact. Lowering protective force fields and opening up all of the tubes at once, scattered as they were throughout various levels of Headquarters, would almost entirely flood the main part of the base very quickly, which would be a very good diversion. And once the tubes were open, I had only to hop into one of them, endure a relatively short "flight" through water, and then there would be freedom. Of a sort, at least.
So instead of heading up toward the topside of Headquarters, where the docking bay was situated and where, no doubt, there would be a welcoming committee waiting for me, I headed instead for the ship's bowels, its very underbelly. Down there was one of the three auxiliary control rooms, from which I knew that I could open all of the escape pods' launch tubes. And just down the corridor from there was a tube that was my ticket out of here.
I encountered few individuals on my way, and all of those that I did encounter I incapacitated - permanently or not, I didn't know - so as not to have my position or intended destination reported too quickly. Alarms blared, Megatron's enraged voice boomed over the 'com system, and confusion generally reigned, but I was in short order ensconced, unharrassed, in the auxiliary control room that was my destination. Once there, I communed with the computers and quickly ordered them to systematically open the launch tubes, blowing their physical hatches and simultaneously lowering the force fields that were an additional level of protection against someone doing exactly what I was doing: flooding Headquarters. I left the tube through which I intended to escape for last. As I worked, the voices over the 'com became less and less concerned with me and more and more concerned with the rising floodwaters and collateral damage, and I allowed myself a smirk, satisfied with my handiwork. My fellow Decepticons would have their hands full for quite a while, indeed, with hopefully not a thought to spare for me.
And then, soon, once all of the 'com squawkings were all about water and the disgusting things that were coming in with it, it was time to go.
Rising from my seat, I headed for the door and poked my head cautiously out of it, looking up and down the corridor. No one was about, and the corridor was bathed in dim red emergency lighting in the face of the crisis at hand. Voices, some of them now panicked cries for help, still squawked over the comm channels, but I paid them no mind as I slipped quietly into the corridor.
Since there was only one escape pod tube on this level - which was why I had chosen it - the water wasn't very deep yet, only halfway to my ankle, so navigating was no problem. As I neared the tube, I could hear the water pouring in, though, crashing loudly as it spewed from the wide interior opening of the upwardly-canted tube and onto the deckplates and against the opposite bulkhead. The force of the incoming flood made it quite difficult to enter the tube, but I managed it, transforming as I did so, the width of the tube easily accommodating my wingspan. "Flying" against the incoming tide was difficult, too, but also manageable with thrusters at maximum. Once through the tube, overcoming the currents that wanted to suck me back into Headquarters like one of the disgusting organic creatures about which my comrades had been complaining was easier still, and soon I was fully away, slipping unseen and unchallenged into the eternal, abyssal darkness that shrouded Decepticon Headquarters. I headed for the surface with all possible haste; "flying" underwater was categorically not my idea of fun.
My energy levels were laughably low as I breached the surface of the Pacific, rocketing out of it and into the piercing sunshine above in a glittering arc of spray and noise. Most of my peripheral systems had shut down long ago, in the face of weeks of little-to-no recharge and even less energon, and now some of my vital systems were starting to give up the ghost, too. Other systems, some of them still fully powered, hadn't been at all happy about the swim. And I had a journey of a few thousand miles ahead of me, most of it over ocean. Given my condition, it was highly unlikely that I'd be able to complete the journey without meeting up with that ocean again at some point along the way.
But I had no choice now. This, I grimly realized as I adjusted course. I had saved my own hide in a somewhat spectacular fashion…but now there was simply nowhere else to go but my new intended destination. I was quite certain that, assuming that it/they survived the unexpected flood, Decepticon Headquarters and its inhabitants would never welcome me again, not after this. So now there was only one person in the entire universe who could conceivably help me. And if she wouldn't or couldn't help me, then at least she'd probably cheerfully reduce me to a zillion tiny bits. If it came to that…Well, that worked for me, too. If only because she wasn't Megatron.