Happy birthday!
Happy birthday,
kirin_saga!!!
I don't know if you have already received my package, but all the same, I've a little something else for you. Enjoy!
Sorry for all the mistake you'll probably find...
He looked intently at this little thing that came from him. He felt at once both enamored and repulsed by the being he gave life to. Primus, it was so tiny! It could have rested in his open palm without a qualm and, for a matter of fact; it did at some point before throwing a fuss about being held like that.
His tininess worried him. Starscream wasn’t an expert on sparkling, as he had been an only creation and nobody in his neighborhood had had creations younger than him, but he knew that his own sparkling was far too tiny.
It was perfectly natural, or so the medic who had helped him said; the seeker’s body wasn’t fully matured yet, and by overtaxing his systems and absorbing all the extra nutriment he took, Starscream had quickened the gestation period by at least twice the usual rate. Things like that took their toll on the sparkling’s frame, making them much smaller, and more prompt to being femmes.
The medic had said that to him while frowning at him, his optics silently accusing him of something, perhaps of being an easy mech that managed to get himself laid by anyone without thinking about the consequences, or of being a jerk in the way he had handled his carrying period, but Starscream didn’t care much for that.
Privately, however, he could agree with that, but he had excuses. His partner had been so handsome, so nice to him, so… loving. Starscream had never experienced so much care before, certainly not from his own creators anyway.
The two fraggers hadn’t even bothered to enroll him to a school or any activity or club where he could have met mechlings of his age. Instead, he was homeschooled by old mechs that bored him to tears and that didn’t even realized, half of the time that their young student was far more knowledgeable than them. He blamed them for his inability to relate to any other mech.
What had been their plans for him? Make him socially inapt, keep him ignorant, then present him to someone of their choosing, with a good social standing and more credits than they had, a minor Noble perhaps, that could grant them a small backdoor into some of the biggest socialists parties?
Starscream didn’t know the exact thrust, but he figured he couldn’t that far off the hook.
He had hated his tutors with passion, those insipid mechs that got along with his creators without saying anything.
Only the last of the bunch, a very old mech that managed at least to entertain him in some subject, such as history, had noticed his student sharp mind and great intelligence. After some tests that Starscream passed easily, he had tried to get him enrolled in the Science Academy. Starscream hadn’t been exactly fond of this mech, Kup, but he had been grateful for his efforts. Too bad his creators refused to finance him, on the ground that they didn’t thought that their creation could do that.
It truly hurt him to see that his own creators trusted him less than a mere tutor. Tutor that they had seen fit to dismiss for putting ‘silly ideas in their creation’s CPU’.
Silly ideas indeed. Less than two vorns later, Starscream had left too, heading down to Iacon, fully intending to one day enter the Academy. Kup had said he could enter, and Starscream fully believed him on this point. His parents wouldn’t pay for an inscription? No matter; Starscream would earn his own money for that.
But one thing lead to another, and well, he was still gathering money and living from odd jobs while waiting for his chance when he had learned what interfacing was from first hand, and that was why, instead of being at work like any other day, he was now lying on a berth in a rather shady clinic with a sparkling beside him.
Starscream had fully expected his offspring to be a femme, since the little one was birthed after roughly a third of the normal gestation period. But this one was a mech sparkling, and a strong one by the look of it.
But as far as looks went, he barely looked like his carrier, except for the bright red paintjob, and the little winglets that promised to grow into small wings… or would be absorbed back into the frame once the sparkling grew a little. It was more probable. Starscream silently scowled at that.
Just his luck that the sparkling seemed to have taken more after the slagging son of a glitch that knocked him up and left him alone the moment the Seeker told him he was expecting, which had taken a while, since at first he had no idea of what was happening to him…
Curse his tutors for never covering the interface and reproduction cycles of Cybertronians in their classes.
Honestly, until he conceived one, he hadn’t seen the link between interfacing and becoming a creator. To say he had been shocked was an understatement. After his lover left him, his mood had truly sank for a while, until he managed to get back to his feet, literally speaking, and do something about that.
So he took more energon and worked longer shifts and on more jobs so that, when the moment came, he could give birth to a sparkling he wouldn’t keep.
Starscream kept it, his still unnamed sparkling, with him from the moment a nurse gave it to him. The sparkling needed to be kept with him long enough for his spark to stabilize, and it gave him a few orns to decide if he was still determined to give away the little being.
Still, Starscream didn’t want to keep the sparkling… well, no, it wasn’t exactly true anymore; that little thing that spend his time trying to bite his fingers in hope of getting energon or crawling onto his torso while sucking at his chest in search for an external energon feed-line for nourishment was growing on him in a way.
But he couldn’t keep him.
Really, how would he be able to take care of this little one? He had no true home of his own, just a room provided by his current employer, a very old mech in need of someone to clean the house, and, despite the multiple jobs he undertook, he earned very little or spend the minimal amount possible.
He needed to gather enough money if he really wanted to pay the fees for entering the Science Academy. It would take time, and could he really follow his ambitions if he had a sparkling to take care of at the same time?
For he already knew that the raising of a sparkling took more funds that he had available now and in the foreseeable future. He could feed him from his own lines like most femmes did, but that wouldn’t be sufficient, especially once he started growing up a little. He would need a special brand of energon, toys, core temperature regulating blankets, regular checkups from a medic,then he would need upgrades, new firewalls, education, and the list was still long.
As for letting him in his own creators’ care, or asking them for currency… Starscream’s mouth thinned. Nobody deserved that, and he would be caught dead before he relented in asking for their help.
But… if he put the sparkling up for adoption, he would be compensated.
He would have to abandon his little one, let someone else take him in and raise him, unless he stayed into some orphanage primus knew where until he could hit his adulthood and then spend his life like he saw fit to.
The red seeker sighed deeply. Not an easy choice. Sparklings… You’d get easily ensnared by them.
Still, he didn’t have a true choice if he wanted a better destiny.
He would give up the sparkling.
As if sensing his creator’s decision, the little tyke gave him a weak punch to the chest and started kicking him with his two little pedes while wailing and clicking angrily. Starscream didn’t know if he should snap at him or chuckle goofily. Well, at least, as far as personality went, the little ‘bot took after him, already voicing his discontent noisily and fussily.
A medic coughed lightly next to him, trying to get his attention. Starscream acknowledged with a grunt, keeping his optics on his creation. “Do you have a designation in mind?” he heard the medic said quietly, and from the corner of his vision, Starscream could see that he was holding a datapad of some sort.
Starscream nodded, his optics still on the little red mech he had birthed, while stroking him with one hand in an attempt to calm him down. “I was thinking about calling him Cliffjumper…”