What Goes Around, Chapter 12: Resolve
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 and Swoop have a...chat.
Ratchet made a beeline for me as soon as I walked into the medbay, a look of both worry and resolve on his face.
"You were right," he said quietly, without preamble, as he handed me a datapad. "As usual."
I frowned down at the pad that he had handed to me, for a moment having no idea what Ratchet was talking about. My thoughts were scattered and distracted. Even after two days of enforced rest, I still felt disoriented and somewhat…empty. I'd gotten rather used to the presence of the offspring sparks, and now that they were gone, all fifteen of them perfect and safely in stasis, it was almost as if I was missing them. No, not "almost." I did miss them. Being "alone" again was going to take some getting used to. And I was certain that going back to work would help. Staring at the walls of my quarters for two days certainly hadn't.
Ratchet, meanwhile, was continuing to talk to me, while I half-listened to him, selectively picking out the important things that he was telling me. He told me that they'd run some further tests on Starscream during my downtime, the results of which were on the pad that I now held. The tests and scans confirmed to Ratchet's satisfaction what I already knew all too well: that the imprint still existed between Starscream and me. I resisted the urge to laugh and spit an "I told you so" at him, and then my snippiness faded altogether as Ratchet further explained that he'd devised something of a temporary, stopgap solution, completely bypassing certain of Starscream's systems while suppressing others. The "treatment" seemed to make him a little less desperately crazy and much more consistently lucid, but he acknowledged that the treatment, such as it was, wasn't really good for Starscream in the long term. Really, it was merely buying us some time to come up with a more permanent solution to the problem at hand.
I'd given that particular problem an awful lot of thought during my downtime, since I hadn't had much else to do, and since it had become something of a…concern during my two days of downtime. I had come up with an idea, but I wasn't about to let Ratchet know what it was…yet. It would, as the saying went, freak him out. And first, I needed to have a talk with Starscream.
Thanking Ratchet absently, I pulled my own datapad out of its storage compartment in the side of my hip. It still contained the data from the scans that I'd performed on Starscream myself, the ones that had confirmed the unusual nature of Starscream's spark. I appended the data from Ratchet's pad to it, handed the empty pad back to Ratchet, and then headed toward the room where Starscream was now being kept.
They'd moved him to a larger room in my absence, one that was more secure but that had a window. If I was in Starscream's position, I knew that being able to see outside would at least offer some measure of comfort. I was surprised that Ratchet had thought of it…but it didn't even occur to me to be surprised that I knew exactly where Starscream was without asking.
"Where are you going?" Ratchet called after me as I moved purposefully toward Starscream's location.
I paused, turned back to him.
"I need to talk to Starscream," I answered simply, before turning away again to resume my journey.
"Wait!" Ratchet called out. "Not by yourself. I'll-"
I stopped in my tracks again, turned back to face him, glowered at him.
"By. Myself," I insisted, brooking no argument. "What I need to say to him no one else needs to hear. Not even you." At Ratchet's troubled look, I waved my datapad at him meaningfully and added, "He won't hurt me." And then I crossed my arms over my chest defiantly, staring Ratchet down. And he wasn't happy about doing so, but he subsided. "We just…need to settle this between us, Ratchet," I said, far more softly, attempting to mollify him. "That's all."
He sighed resignedly, silently acquiescing, and I turned away from him again to resume my course.
But as I turned away from him, I heard him murmur, bemusedly, "Sure. That's all. Settle it. Just like that."
Just like that, indeed. Or so I hoped, anyway…
* * * * *
When I walked into the room, Starscream was sitting on the berth, leaning back against the raised head of it and staring expressionlessly at the opposite wall, deep in thought. Or psychosis. Or something. He wasn't restrained anymore, and while that was somewhat surprising, I supposed that the monitors and feed lines and myriad system bypasses that were attached to him were tethering him almost as well as actual restraints would. And, as I had reminded Ratchet, I knew that he would not hurt me because he would have to be utterly stupid to do so. He needed me.
And I, I admitted, needed him, too. Wanted him.
This was what I had discovered during my two days of enforced rest. During that time, the want had started to consume me, no doubt strengthened by Starscream's proximity, the fact that he was conscious again, and the fact that I was alone again, that I no longer had offspring sparks to protect. Ironically, I hadn't been able to rest much during my days of rest because of the burning, aching want. The need. I realized now that carrying the offspring sparks had suppressed the effects of the imprint on me. Now, it picked at me, poked at me, made me itch and fidget. And it was strengthening quickly, almost by the minute, whispering urgently at me to go to Starscream, to take him. Have him. It would be so easy, and we both needed it, wanted it.
It was very hard not to heed the call, and I knew - from experience now - that it would only become harder to resist as time passed, until I could no longer resist it at all.
In the meantime, distraction helped. I had engaged in a few games of chess and a spate of fairly intense arguing with Slag over the fact that he had taken to snidely referring to me as "Her Majesty." I had watched a few movies while snuggled up with Sludge and Grimlock. Even just listening while Snarl read to me something out of some "fascinating" ancient Cybertronian text about the exploits of some distant ancestor of mine had been a welcome distraction. But the distraction was only temporary. The cloud of needful want was always hovering close at hand, simply waiting for the distraction to end so that it could settle over me again.
It had occurred to me only the day before that this was what had been clawing relentlessly at Starscream for nigh on six weeks now. My level of sympathy skyrocketed.
Really, I had to admire Starscream's restraint, his level of self-control. Because mine began to fray as soon as Starscream's full attention settled on me as I walked into his room. His gaze was dull and seemed somewhat unfocused, but it nonetheless sent shivers through me that took effort to suppress. It occurred to me to wonder exactly what Ratchet had done to him. Later, I would ask Ratchet exactly that question. For now, I just had to hope that whatever Ratchet had done could be easily undone. But first…
"You are something of scientist, yes?" I asked quietly of Starscream.
Starscream eyed me warily, no doubt wondering if it was safe to answer my innocuous but odd question. He expected to be interrogated, and he was probably not expecting anything civilized in that regard, given who he was. Certain Autobots were indeed chomping at the bit to get their hands on him, and I knew that they had no intention of being gentle with him. But I was equally determined that no one was going to touch him, at least not until I understood what had happened, what was obviously still happening, between us.
So far, my will had prevailed. It was not entirely surprising; I had discovered that my new-found status had some unexpected benefits, all of them conveniently hard-wired into those around me. No one had ever felt a need to pay attention to me, a lowly Dinobot, before, much less to heed me. Now, many of those around me reflexively snapped to obey me whenever I asked them to do something. It was a heady thing, and I could easily see how such power could become overwhelming with time. I could easily see even now the long road of temptation and corruption that my mother had traveled, which had ultimately led to her destruction. The very same road lay before me now, and the same curious desire to see exactly how far I could push my fledgling authority nagged at me, but my mother's destruction was a powerful incentive to keep such childish impulses in check.
"Sometimes," Starscream decided to answer my question then, bringing me back to the here-and-now. His manner was guarded, suspicious, his voice quiet. His attention was focused on me yet somehow detached at the same time, as if he wasn't quite all there. This was, no doubt, the intended effect of Ratchet's cobbled-together treatment of Starscream's condition. "When the situation calls for it," Starscream was adding, "I am probably one of the closest things we have to a scientist. Why?"
I nodded at that, not answering right away. Instead, I toyed with the datapad that I held in my hands, staring down at it, suddenly reconsidering the wisdom of revealing to Starscream the information that it contained. The medic in me knew that he had a right to know everything about himself; the Autobot in me thought that the less he, as a Decepticon, knew about this particular aspect of himself, the better. But then, I argued back with myself, Starscream was quick. Smart. Probably much smarter than we gave him credit for. I was quite certain that he would figure it all out for himself soon enough, especially given recent evidence. It occurred to me, too, that revealing the information to him would perhaps begin to establish a level of trust between us. I had a feeling that we would need trust, going forward.
"I thought you might be interested in this," I said simply, approaching his berth more closely, watching his body stiffen in response to my closer proximity, and then offering him the datapad without any further explanation. "But it's a little…technical, so...."
Starscream frowned at me and then at the device that I was offering to him, his gaze flicking between me and the datapad. His eyes were narrowed suspiciously, as if he thought that I might be offering him a ticking bomb, and it was only reluctantly that he reached out and took the pad from me. His fingers brushed mine, lightly and incidentally, as he did so, and I had to fight to suppress a gasp at the contact, at the sensation almost of electric shock that knifed through me like a lightning bolt. He wasn't able to suppress his similar reaction entirely, and after he snatched the datapad roughly out of my hand, I stepped a few paces back from him. As if that would make some huge difference. As if I hadn't been driving him crazy from thousands of kilometers away, much less a mere meter or two away.
I watched as Starscream began to read the information that the pad displayed. I watched his expression shift rapidly between suspicion, shock, disbelief, and then something like satisfaction as he read and absorbed the information on the pad. I knew how he felt, knew well the feeling of satisfaction that arose when all of the scattered and seemingly unrelated pieces of a puzzle started to come together to make a coherent picture. After he had finished reading, after he'd taken a few moments to digest and assimilate what he'd read, Starscream let out a breath that he'd seemed to be holding for years, if the length and the force of it were any indication.
"This…" he said faintly, shaking the datapad meaningfully and then tilting his head back to stare up at the ceiling, "explains much." After a considered and somewhat awkward pause, he added, still without looking at me, "Thank you for sharing this. I know that you didn't have to do that."
"You're welcome," I answered quietly. I couldn't think of anything else to say to him.
"But there's still one thing that's not quite clear to me," he added then, as if he hadn't heard me. He turned his head to look at me then, his penetrating gaze resting heavily on me. I blinked curiously at him, and when I didn't say anything, he added intensely, leaning toward me, "Why are you, of all people, a queen? Why did any of this happen in the first place?"
I swallowed uncertainly, took a step back from him, and deliberated for a long moment about telling him the truth. But then, after realizing that there was nothing to be either gained or lost by doing so, I answered quietly, "Because I am apparently my mother's daughter."
"Your…what?" Starscream sputtered, after a few seconds spent gawking at me.
Drawing in a steadying breath, I repeated more loudly, more confidently, "My mother's daughter. You once knew me as Eclipse."
Starscream blinked harder at me, disbelievingly now.
"Eclipse," he repeated dully after a long moment of speechlessness. "The infant? But she was…"
"She…I wasn't killed," I said. "Obviously. My spark ended up in stasis somehow, and then the Autobots brought it with them when they left Cybertron. And then when it was time to create me…Well, here I am."
Starscream was still spluttering, though.
"That's…impossible," he protested weakly, staring at me as if he was incapable of looking away, as if someone had riveted his gaze to my face. "Royal sparks can't be transplanted, so you can't be..."
"And yet, here I am," I repeated, flippantly this time, when his voice trailed off. "Wonders never cease."
Despite myself, a grin was tugging at me; his stunned expression, his eyes wide and his mouth cycling from open to closed like a landed fish, was greatly amusing me.
"Are you…certain?" Starscream asked dazedly - more so than the revelation warranted, I thought, and I wondered why - once he'd found his voice again.
"As certain as we can be," I answered with a shrug. "There are…great similarities between my spark and Mirage's, at the very least. And nothing else really makes sense. I suppose I might not be Eclipse, maybe one of the others, but-"
A bark of humorless laughter escaped Starscream then, interrupting what had devolved into babbling. And maybe the interruption was a good thing; I'd been blithely telling him things that perhaps I shouldn't have been saying at all. I stared at Starscream, wondering at his reaction.
"Oh, you are most certainly Eclipse!" Starscream declared with utter certainty, his face twisted into a smirk that I couldn't quite interpret. "And I must say that the irony of that is absolutely delicious."
I blinked at him as he continued to snicker madly.
"I…don't understand," I confessed.
"Of course you don't!" Starscream answered flippantly, still chuckling. "But maybe someday you will. Maybe someday, if you're very good, I'll even tell you."
I resisted the urge to demand that he tell me right now, resisting because, if nothing else, I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to know. I'd had enough surprises and revelations in my life over the course of the last couple of months. I really didn't think that I could handle too many more.
I couldn't think of anything to say to Starscream, though, so a silence settled between us. It was a silence that wasn't necessarily comfortable because Starscream was still staring at me, sizing me up now as if he was a starving lion and I was a gravely-wounded wildebeest. I tried to drag my gaze away from his but discovered that, for some reason, I couldn't. And as we stared at each other, I felt a heat building in me, and it was suddenly all I could do not to go to him, to touch him, to…
Vaguely, it occurred to me that I should leave because being so close to him for any extended period of time was probably not the best of all possible ideas, not for me and certainly not for him. I was just turning to make good my escape when Starscream finally decided to speak up. It was almost as if he didn't want me to leave.
"So!" he said. "You are the genuine article, then. Not some freak, miraculous mutation."
"Yes," I answered faintly, halting my retreat and turning slowly back to him, inevitably but not completely willingly meeting his gaze. "I am who I am supposed to be. At least, that's what everyone tells me."
"Mmmm," Starscream murmured noncommittally, nodding. "And I am," he added after a moment, waving the datapad meaningfully in the air, "immortal."
"Not exactly immortal," I qualified. "But…definitely harder to kill than most, at least when it comes to energy input directly into the spark. You're like me that way, actually, since you seem to be enjoying irony so much today."
Starscream snorted, staring at me curiously and intently.
"Do you think it possible," he asked, "that this is why the imprint hasn't gone away? Because we have this…similarity?"
"Maybe," I answered diffidently, with an uncertain shrug. "That's one hypothesis, anyway," I added, smiling at him faintly.
"And if you're right," he said, tilting his head to the side as a thought occurred to him, "then it's not going to go away." His gaze drilled into me, demandingly, as he added, "I'll be stuck here, with you medics doing Primus-knows-what to my systems to keep me from…from…"
I bit down hard on my lower lip as his voice trailed off, as he turned his face away from me to stare almost longingly out of the window.
I answered him honestly, "I don't know, Starscream. There's no precedent for this, so I can't know. It…might not go away, no. But…But I did have a thought on that."
He turned his gaze back to me then, giving me a penetrating and inquisitive look, and I could have sworn that his eyes were suddenly glowing a brighter red as he narrowed them at me, his expression calculating.
"Do tell," he cooed.
I swallowed nervously, hesitating, while Starscream just watched me, expectantly. The look on his face pulled at me, and I found myself taking a few involuntary steps toward him. Starscream, unmoving, simply continued to stare at me, and then words began to tumble out of my mouth, as if their own volition.
"When we were…together," I said, suddenly nervous, "there were…things that were wrong with me."
Starscream gave me a twisted, ironic smile as he answered, "There were things wrong with both of us that night, Swoop."
"Besides that," I said quietly, ducking my head in embarrassment. "My spark was…It was rejecting my body. As you said, royal sparks aren't supposed to be transplanted, and things started to go crazy. So when I came back here, my systems started crashing and…I almost died, would have died if...."
"Hence the new body?" Starscream concluded as my voice trailed off uncertainly, his expression curious, his head tilted slightly to the side as he regarded me. "Not just a vanity thing after all then, eh?"
I blinked at him.
"No," I said. "No, not at all. I just…woke up with it. It was designed and built to be compatible with my spark and with my…my function. That it's prettier than my old one is just a fringe benefit," I added lightly, forcing a smile.
Starscream nodded, smiling faintly in return as he digested what I'd told him.
"So," he said a moment later, "you nearly died. And I went crazy because the imprint didn't go away. And you think that it happened that way because of your…troubles, combined with our odd…similarities."
I nodded.
"That's my theory, yes," I said quietly.
"And your proposed solution?" he asked after a moment of silence between us, his voice suddenly intense and his gaze burning into me, heating me. "Assuming, of course, that it isn't the same one that Ratchet is subjecting me to."
The intensity of his stare pulled at me, and I found myself approaching him yet more closely, this time going so far as to settle myself on the very edge of his berth, extremely close to him but still not touching him. Even so, Starscream's breath hitched and then quickened, and a noticeable shiver ran through his body, but he otherwise held himself in check, his hands balling into fists with the effort.
Lowering my voice, as if I was afraid that someone would overhear, I leaned dangerously close to him, so that we were eye-to-eye, and murmured, "I think that we need to repeat the experiment. Maybe then things will reset as they're supposed to."
Starscream stared at me for a long moment, his gaze bright and locked with mine, breathing hard. His limbs twitched as he fought to keep them still.
"Except," he said, his voice shuddering as more shivers ran through him, "that we still have that similarity, so it might not-"
"But it might," I interrupted him insistently. "And it can hardly make things worse. At worst, it will give you some peace for a little while."
"Until it starts all over again," Starscream retorted with a quiet snort. His voice was low, but the bitterness in it was obvious.
"Yes," I said matter-of-factly.
"And then what?"
"And then…Another treatment, so to speak," I said, running one finger delicately down the center of his canopy, my eyes following and absorbing its path as it went.
Starscream went utterly and unexpectedly still. I looked up into his face again to see shocked curiosity reigning supreme there.
"You would do that?" he asked after a moment spent staring incredulously at me. "For me?"
"Yes," I said again. Solemnly. Without hesitation. "But not just for you. For me, too. At the questioning look he gave me, I explained, "You're not alone in this, Starscream. It's just been much worse for you. But now that the little ones are gone and you're here, it's getting worse for me, too. Very quickly."
"Oh," he breathed, blinking at me. Almost as if he was experimenting, he reached tentatively toward me and ran a hand down my arm.
At the contact, I gasped. His touch, light as it was, hesitant as it was, sent shocks firing through me. They tingled pleasantly along sensory pathways, and I shuddered in their grip.
"I thought it was just me," Starscream was saying, his voice low as he watched my reactions to what he was doing to me.
"It was, mostly," I answered with a gasp, my voice shuddering as he continued to run his hand lightly up and down my arm and as I fought back an urge to leap onto him and devour him. "Until about two days ago. But now…"
"Now?" he asked, his tone almost teasing.
"Now," I said, lowering my voice further, growling out the words, "I want you. And I know that you want me."
Starscream blinked at me for a few lingering seconds, likely surprised by my bluntness, but he recovered quickly enough.
"Well, when you put it that way…" he said, just before closing the small distance between our faces in order to kiss me.
It was very, very difficult to pull away from him. For very long and somewhat blissful moments, I didn't pull away. Instead, I melted fully against him, put aside rational thought as if flipping an off-switch, and just…felt. Felt his lips against mine. Felt the warmth of his body against mine, strange and yet familiar. Felt his arms closing possessively around me, holding me tightly against him. Felt curious fingers begin to explore my back, my wings. I had him at a disadvantage; I had a new body, he didn't. I dug my fingers into his chest as I broke the kiss with a groan in order to nibble at his lips, his jawline. I heard him gasp and growl at that, felt my own control slipping away inch by inch as desire rose, pure scalding lust surfacing with breath-taking swiftness…
…And then I pulled away from Starscream, scrambled off the berth, and backed away from him until I'd backed myself against a wall. It was eerily reminiscent of our first encounter. He didn't pursue, though. He stayed on the berth, panting just as I was, watching me hungrily.
"Not yet," I managed to say to him, panting out the words. "Have to reverse whatever Ratchet's done…or else it might not work."
He scowled at me, but he also nodded his understanding at me.
"Make it quick," he growled after he took a moment to collect himself.
"Oh, yes," I murmured and then, before I decided to do something crazy, I spun toward the door and left. There were preparations to make, not the least of which was…talking to Ratchet. I could already feel my audios burning, anticipating his reaction to what I wanted to do. What I was going to do, no matter what he had to say on the subject. The thought distracted me from the raging desire that was burning through me, or at least it distracted me for now.
Soon, I knew, nothing on Earth or anywhere else would be able to distract me.
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 and Swoop have a...chat.
Ratchet made a beeline for me as soon as I walked into the medbay, a look of both worry and resolve on his face.
"You were right," he said quietly, without preamble, as he handed me a datapad. "As usual."
I frowned down at the pad that he had handed to me, for a moment having no idea what Ratchet was talking about. My thoughts were scattered and distracted. Even after two days of enforced rest, I still felt disoriented and somewhat…empty. I'd gotten rather used to the presence of the offspring sparks, and now that they were gone, all fifteen of them perfect and safely in stasis, it was almost as if I was missing them. No, not "almost." I did miss them. Being "alone" again was going to take some getting used to. And I was certain that going back to work would help. Staring at the walls of my quarters for two days certainly hadn't.
Ratchet, meanwhile, was continuing to talk to me, while I half-listened to him, selectively picking out the important things that he was telling me. He told me that they'd run some further tests on Starscream during my downtime, the results of which were on the pad that I now held. The tests and scans confirmed to Ratchet's satisfaction what I already knew all too well: that the imprint still existed between Starscream and me. I resisted the urge to laugh and spit an "I told you so" at him, and then my snippiness faded altogether as Ratchet further explained that he'd devised something of a temporary, stopgap solution, completely bypassing certain of Starscream's systems while suppressing others. The "treatment" seemed to make him a little less desperately crazy and much more consistently lucid, but he acknowledged that the treatment, such as it was, wasn't really good for Starscream in the long term. Really, it was merely buying us some time to come up with a more permanent solution to the problem at hand.
I'd given that particular problem an awful lot of thought during my downtime, since I hadn't had much else to do, and since it had become something of a…concern during my two days of downtime. I had come up with an idea, but I wasn't about to let Ratchet know what it was…yet. It would, as the saying went, freak him out. And first, I needed to have a talk with Starscream.
Thanking Ratchet absently, I pulled my own datapad out of its storage compartment in the side of my hip. It still contained the data from the scans that I'd performed on Starscream myself, the ones that had confirmed the unusual nature of Starscream's spark. I appended the data from Ratchet's pad to it, handed the empty pad back to Ratchet, and then headed toward the room where Starscream was now being kept.
They'd moved him to a larger room in my absence, one that was more secure but that had a window. If I was in Starscream's position, I knew that being able to see outside would at least offer some measure of comfort. I was surprised that Ratchet had thought of it…but it didn't even occur to me to be surprised that I knew exactly where Starscream was without asking.
"Where are you going?" Ratchet called after me as I moved purposefully toward Starscream's location.
I paused, turned back to him.
"I need to talk to Starscream," I answered simply, before turning away again to resume my journey.
"Wait!" Ratchet called out. "Not by yourself. I'll-"
I stopped in my tracks again, turned back to face him, glowered at him.
"By. Myself," I insisted, brooking no argument. "What I need to say to him no one else needs to hear. Not even you." At Ratchet's troubled look, I waved my datapad at him meaningfully and added, "He won't hurt me." And then I crossed my arms over my chest defiantly, staring Ratchet down. And he wasn't happy about doing so, but he subsided. "We just…need to settle this between us, Ratchet," I said, far more softly, attempting to mollify him. "That's all."
He sighed resignedly, silently acquiescing, and I turned away from him again to resume my course.
But as I turned away from him, I heard him murmur, bemusedly, "Sure. That's all. Settle it. Just like that."
Just like that, indeed. Or so I hoped, anyway…
* * * * *
When I walked into the room, Starscream was sitting on the berth, leaning back against the raised head of it and staring expressionlessly at the opposite wall, deep in thought. Or psychosis. Or something. He wasn't restrained anymore, and while that was somewhat surprising, I supposed that the monitors and feed lines and myriad system bypasses that were attached to him were tethering him almost as well as actual restraints would. And, as I had reminded Ratchet, I knew that he would not hurt me because he would have to be utterly stupid to do so. He needed me.
And I, I admitted, needed him, too. Wanted him.
This was what I had discovered during my two days of enforced rest. During that time, the want had started to consume me, no doubt strengthened by Starscream's proximity, the fact that he was conscious again, and the fact that I was alone again, that I no longer had offspring sparks to protect. Ironically, I hadn't been able to rest much during my days of rest because of the burning, aching want. The need. I realized now that carrying the offspring sparks had suppressed the effects of the imprint on me. Now, it picked at me, poked at me, made me itch and fidget. And it was strengthening quickly, almost by the minute, whispering urgently at me to go to Starscream, to take him. Have him. It would be so easy, and we both needed it, wanted it.
It was very hard not to heed the call, and I knew - from experience now - that it would only become harder to resist as time passed, until I could no longer resist it at all.
In the meantime, distraction helped. I had engaged in a few games of chess and a spate of fairly intense arguing with Slag over the fact that he had taken to snidely referring to me as "Her Majesty." I had watched a few movies while snuggled up with Sludge and Grimlock. Even just listening while Snarl read to me something out of some "fascinating" ancient Cybertronian text about the exploits of some distant ancestor of mine had been a welcome distraction. But the distraction was only temporary. The cloud of needful want was always hovering close at hand, simply waiting for the distraction to end so that it could settle over me again.
It had occurred to me only the day before that this was what had been clawing relentlessly at Starscream for nigh on six weeks now. My level of sympathy skyrocketed.
Really, I had to admire Starscream's restraint, his level of self-control. Because mine began to fray as soon as Starscream's full attention settled on me as I walked into his room. His gaze was dull and seemed somewhat unfocused, but it nonetheless sent shivers through me that took effort to suppress. It occurred to me to wonder exactly what Ratchet had done to him. Later, I would ask Ratchet exactly that question. For now, I just had to hope that whatever Ratchet had done could be easily undone. But first…
"You are something of scientist, yes?" I asked quietly of Starscream.
Starscream eyed me warily, no doubt wondering if it was safe to answer my innocuous but odd question. He expected to be interrogated, and he was probably not expecting anything civilized in that regard, given who he was. Certain Autobots were indeed chomping at the bit to get their hands on him, and I knew that they had no intention of being gentle with him. But I was equally determined that no one was going to touch him, at least not until I understood what had happened, what was obviously still happening, between us.
So far, my will had prevailed. It was not entirely surprising; I had discovered that my new-found status had some unexpected benefits, all of them conveniently hard-wired into those around me. No one had ever felt a need to pay attention to me, a lowly Dinobot, before, much less to heed me. Now, many of those around me reflexively snapped to obey me whenever I asked them to do something. It was a heady thing, and I could easily see how such power could become overwhelming with time. I could easily see even now the long road of temptation and corruption that my mother had traveled, which had ultimately led to her destruction. The very same road lay before me now, and the same curious desire to see exactly how far I could push my fledgling authority nagged at me, but my mother's destruction was a powerful incentive to keep such childish impulses in check.
"Sometimes," Starscream decided to answer my question then, bringing me back to the here-and-now. His manner was guarded, suspicious, his voice quiet. His attention was focused on me yet somehow detached at the same time, as if he wasn't quite all there. This was, no doubt, the intended effect of Ratchet's cobbled-together treatment of Starscream's condition. "When the situation calls for it," Starscream was adding, "I am probably one of the closest things we have to a scientist. Why?"
I nodded at that, not answering right away. Instead, I toyed with the datapad that I held in my hands, staring down at it, suddenly reconsidering the wisdom of revealing to Starscream the information that it contained. The medic in me knew that he had a right to know everything about himself; the Autobot in me thought that the less he, as a Decepticon, knew about this particular aspect of himself, the better. But then, I argued back with myself, Starscream was quick. Smart. Probably much smarter than we gave him credit for. I was quite certain that he would figure it all out for himself soon enough, especially given recent evidence. It occurred to me, too, that revealing the information to him would perhaps begin to establish a level of trust between us. I had a feeling that we would need trust, going forward.
"I thought you might be interested in this," I said simply, approaching his berth more closely, watching his body stiffen in response to my closer proximity, and then offering him the datapad without any further explanation. "But it's a little…technical, so...."
Starscream frowned at me and then at the device that I was offering to him, his gaze flicking between me and the datapad. His eyes were narrowed suspiciously, as if he thought that I might be offering him a ticking bomb, and it was only reluctantly that he reached out and took the pad from me. His fingers brushed mine, lightly and incidentally, as he did so, and I had to fight to suppress a gasp at the contact, at the sensation almost of electric shock that knifed through me like a lightning bolt. He wasn't able to suppress his similar reaction entirely, and after he snatched the datapad roughly out of my hand, I stepped a few paces back from him. As if that would make some huge difference. As if I hadn't been driving him crazy from thousands of kilometers away, much less a mere meter or two away.
I watched as Starscream began to read the information that the pad displayed. I watched his expression shift rapidly between suspicion, shock, disbelief, and then something like satisfaction as he read and absorbed the information on the pad. I knew how he felt, knew well the feeling of satisfaction that arose when all of the scattered and seemingly unrelated pieces of a puzzle started to come together to make a coherent picture. After he had finished reading, after he'd taken a few moments to digest and assimilate what he'd read, Starscream let out a breath that he'd seemed to be holding for years, if the length and the force of it were any indication.
"This…" he said faintly, shaking the datapad meaningfully and then tilting his head back to stare up at the ceiling, "explains much." After a considered and somewhat awkward pause, he added, still without looking at me, "Thank you for sharing this. I know that you didn't have to do that."
"You're welcome," I answered quietly. I couldn't think of anything else to say to him.
"But there's still one thing that's not quite clear to me," he added then, as if he hadn't heard me. He turned his head to look at me then, his penetrating gaze resting heavily on me. I blinked curiously at him, and when I didn't say anything, he added intensely, leaning toward me, "Why are you, of all people, a queen? Why did any of this happen in the first place?"
I swallowed uncertainly, took a step back from him, and deliberated for a long moment about telling him the truth. But then, after realizing that there was nothing to be either gained or lost by doing so, I answered quietly, "Because I am apparently my mother's daughter."
"Your…what?" Starscream sputtered, after a few seconds spent gawking at me.
Drawing in a steadying breath, I repeated more loudly, more confidently, "My mother's daughter. You once knew me as Eclipse."
Starscream blinked harder at me, disbelievingly now.
"Eclipse," he repeated dully after a long moment of speechlessness. "The infant? But she was…"
"She…I wasn't killed," I said. "Obviously. My spark ended up in stasis somehow, and then the Autobots brought it with them when they left Cybertron. And then when it was time to create me…Well, here I am."
Starscream was still spluttering, though.
"That's…impossible," he protested weakly, staring at me as if he was incapable of looking away, as if someone had riveted his gaze to my face. "Royal sparks can't be transplanted, so you can't be..."
"And yet, here I am," I repeated, flippantly this time, when his voice trailed off. "Wonders never cease."
Despite myself, a grin was tugging at me; his stunned expression, his eyes wide and his mouth cycling from open to closed like a landed fish, was greatly amusing me.
"Are you…certain?" Starscream asked dazedly - more so than the revelation warranted, I thought, and I wondered why - once he'd found his voice again.
"As certain as we can be," I answered with a shrug. "There are…great similarities between my spark and Mirage's, at the very least. And nothing else really makes sense. I suppose I might not be Eclipse, maybe one of the others, but-"
A bark of humorless laughter escaped Starscream then, interrupting what had devolved into babbling. And maybe the interruption was a good thing; I'd been blithely telling him things that perhaps I shouldn't have been saying at all. I stared at Starscream, wondering at his reaction.
"Oh, you are most certainly Eclipse!" Starscream declared with utter certainty, his face twisted into a smirk that I couldn't quite interpret. "And I must say that the irony of that is absolutely delicious."
I blinked at him as he continued to snicker madly.
"I…don't understand," I confessed.
"Of course you don't!" Starscream answered flippantly, still chuckling. "But maybe someday you will. Maybe someday, if you're very good, I'll even tell you."
I resisted the urge to demand that he tell me right now, resisting because, if nothing else, I wasn't entirely sure that I wanted to know. I'd had enough surprises and revelations in my life over the course of the last couple of months. I really didn't think that I could handle too many more.
I couldn't think of anything to say to Starscream, though, so a silence settled between us. It was a silence that wasn't necessarily comfortable because Starscream was still staring at me, sizing me up now as if he was a starving lion and I was a gravely-wounded wildebeest. I tried to drag my gaze away from his but discovered that, for some reason, I couldn't. And as we stared at each other, I felt a heat building in me, and it was suddenly all I could do not to go to him, to touch him, to…
Vaguely, it occurred to me that I should leave because being so close to him for any extended period of time was probably not the best of all possible ideas, not for me and certainly not for him. I was just turning to make good my escape when Starscream finally decided to speak up. It was almost as if he didn't want me to leave.
"So!" he said. "You are the genuine article, then. Not some freak, miraculous mutation."
"Yes," I answered faintly, halting my retreat and turning slowly back to him, inevitably but not completely willingly meeting his gaze. "I am who I am supposed to be. At least, that's what everyone tells me."
"Mmmm," Starscream murmured noncommittally, nodding. "And I am," he added after a moment, waving the datapad meaningfully in the air, "immortal."
"Not exactly immortal," I qualified. "But…definitely harder to kill than most, at least when it comes to energy input directly into the spark. You're like me that way, actually, since you seem to be enjoying irony so much today."
Starscream snorted, staring at me curiously and intently.
"Do you think it possible," he asked, "that this is why the imprint hasn't gone away? Because we have this…similarity?"
"Maybe," I answered diffidently, with an uncertain shrug. "That's one hypothesis, anyway," I added, smiling at him faintly.
"And if you're right," he said, tilting his head to the side as a thought occurred to him, "then it's not going to go away." His gaze drilled into me, demandingly, as he added, "I'll be stuck here, with you medics doing Primus-knows-what to my systems to keep me from…from…"
I bit down hard on my lower lip as his voice trailed off, as he turned his face away from me to stare almost longingly out of the window.
I answered him honestly, "I don't know, Starscream. There's no precedent for this, so I can't know. It…might not go away, no. But…But I did have a thought on that."
He turned his gaze back to me then, giving me a penetrating and inquisitive look, and I could have sworn that his eyes were suddenly glowing a brighter red as he narrowed them at me, his expression calculating.
"Do tell," he cooed.
I swallowed nervously, hesitating, while Starscream just watched me, expectantly. The look on his face pulled at me, and I found myself taking a few involuntary steps toward him. Starscream, unmoving, simply continued to stare at me, and then words began to tumble out of my mouth, as if their own volition.
"When we were…together," I said, suddenly nervous, "there were…things that were wrong with me."
Starscream gave me a twisted, ironic smile as he answered, "There were things wrong with both of us that night, Swoop."
"Besides that," I said quietly, ducking my head in embarrassment. "My spark was…It was rejecting my body. As you said, royal sparks aren't supposed to be transplanted, and things started to go crazy. So when I came back here, my systems started crashing and…I almost died, would have died if...."
"Hence the new body?" Starscream concluded as my voice trailed off uncertainly, his expression curious, his head tilted slightly to the side as he regarded me. "Not just a vanity thing after all then, eh?"
I blinked at him.
"No," I said. "No, not at all. I just…woke up with it. It was designed and built to be compatible with my spark and with my…my function. That it's prettier than my old one is just a fringe benefit," I added lightly, forcing a smile.
Starscream nodded, smiling faintly in return as he digested what I'd told him.
"So," he said a moment later, "you nearly died. And I went crazy because the imprint didn't go away. And you think that it happened that way because of your…troubles, combined with our odd…similarities."
I nodded.
"That's my theory, yes," I said quietly.
"And your proposed solution?" he asked after a moment of silence between us, his voice suddenly intense and his gaze burning into me, heating me. "Assuming, of course, that it isn't the same one that Ratchet is subjecting me to."
The intensity of his stare pulled at me, and I found myself approaching him yet more closely, this time going so far as to settle myself on the very edge of his berth, extremely close to him but still not touching him. Even so, Starscream's breath hitched and then quickened, and a noticeable shiver ran through his body, but he otherwise held himself in check, his hands balling into fists with the effort.
Lowering my voice, as if I was afraid that someone would overhear, I leaned dangerously close to him, so that we were eye-to-eye, and murmured, "I think that we need to repeat the experiment. Maybe then things will reset as they're supposed to."
Starscream stared at me for a long moment, his gaze bright and locked with mine, breathing hard. His limbs twitched as he fought to keep them still.
"Except," he said, his voice shuddering as more shivers ran through him, "that we still have that similarity, so it might not-"
"But it might," I interrupted him insistently. "And it can hardly make things worse. At worst, it will give you some peace for a little while."
"Until it starts all over again," Starscream retorted with a quiet snort. His voice was low, but the bitterness in it was obvious.
"Yes," I said matter-of-factly.
"And then what?"
"And then…Another treatment, so to speak," I said, running one finger delicately down the center of his canopy, my eyes following and absorbing its path as it went.
Starscream went utterly and unexpectedly still. I looked up into his face again to see shocked curiosity reigning supreme there.
"You would do that?" he asked after a moment spent staring incredulously at me. "For me?"
"Yes," I said again. Solemnly. Without hesitation. "But not just for you. For me, too. At the questioning look he gave me, I explained, "You're not alone in this, Starscream. It's just been much worse for you. But now that the little ones are gone and you're here, it's getting worse for me, too. Very quickly."
"Oh," he breathed, blinking at me. Almost as if he was experimenting, he reached tentatively toward me and ran a hand down my arm.
At the contact, I gasped. His touch, light as it was, hesitant as it was, sent shocks firing through me. They tingled pleasantly along sensory pathways, and I shuddered in their grip.
"I thought it was just me," Starscream was saying, his voice low as he watched my reactions to what he was doing to me.
"It was, mostly," I answered with a gasp, my voice shuddering as he continued to run his hand lightly up and down my arm and as I fought back an urge to leap onto him and devour him. "Until about two days ago. But now…"
"Now?" he asked, his tone almost teasing.
"Now," I said, lowering my voice further, growling out the words, "I want you. And I know that you want me."
Starscream blinked at me for a few lingering seconds, likely surprised by my bluntness, but he recovered quickly enough.
"Well, when you put it that way…" he said, just before closing the small distance between our faces in order to kiss me.
It was very, very difficult to pull away from him. For very long and somewhat blissful moments, I didn't pull away. Instead, I melted fully against him, put aside rational thought as if flipping an off-switch, and just…felt. Felt his lips against mine. Felt the warmth of his body against mine, strange and yet familiar. Felt his arms closing possessively around me, holding me tightly against him. Felt curious fingers begin to explore my back, my wings. I had him at a disadvantage; I had a new body, he didn't. I dug my fingers into his chest as I broke the kiss with a groan in order to nibble at his lips, his jawline. I heard him gasp and growl at that, felt my own control slipping away inch by inch as desire rose, pure scalding lust surfacing with breath-taking swiftness…
…And then I pulled away from Starscream, scrambled off the berth, and backed away from him until I'd backed myself against a wall. It was eerily reminiscent of our first encounter. He didn't pursue, though. He stayed on the berth, panting just as I was, watching me hungrily.
"Not yet," I managed to say to him, panting out the words. "Have to reverse whatever Ratchet's done…or else it might not work."
He scowled at me, but he also nodded his understanding at me.
"Make it quick," he growled after he took a moment to collect himself.
"Oh, yes," I murmured and then, before I decided to do something crazy, I spun toward the door and left. There were preparations to make, not the least of which was…talking to Ratchet. I could already feel my audios burning, anticipating his reaction to what I wanted to do. What I was going to do, no matter what he had to say on the subject. The thought distracted me from the raging desire that was burning through me, or at least it distracted me for now.
Soon, I knew, nothing on Earth or anywhere else would be able to distract me.