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niyazi-a.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
shadow_vector2012-03-04 11:08 am
Dark Doll
G1
Starscream/Skyfire, Megatron, Thundercracker, Skywarp
sticky, noncon, humiliation, necrophilia, dark
For this kink meme request.
Starscream should have figured it would be something like this. Megatron’s voice, over comm, was too gloating, almost effervescent with gloating. But he’d been too keyed up from the battle himself, riding high on the wave of confidence that this time, surely, he had convinced Megatron of his worth, that his cunning, which Megatron had sneeringly called ‘cowardice’ was really just a darker flavor of skill.
At worst, he’d expected to be shown his trinemates, the two he’d never wanted, never asked for, cowed and pleading. Megatron knew he hated them, had probably known when he’d forced the Princeling of Vos to bond with them, the guttersnipe and the arrogant fool. Oh they’d known the prize they’d gotten, and like sparklings with sticky fingers had delighted in smearing all over him.
He’d dared to have been optimistic, and he felt that buoyance shatter as he landed, thruster heels ringing hard against the stone outcrop. For a moment he looked at the twisted mass of charred metal, blackened and bent, unable to make any sense of it: a human building, collapsed? Another of their seemingly limitless variations on ‘tank’?
Megatron smirked, chassis nearly obscured by the broad cannon across his chest. “About time you arrived, Starscream.” An edge of impatience in the gravelly voice. And oh, how Starscream hated that voice, with the hatred that only comes from a love gone rancid.
“I was attending other matters,” he said, the sneer in his own voice almost automatic, along with the oppositional pose.
“Matters more important than your leader?” A knowing smirk. “I should have thought you’d want this.” One silver-bladed foot kicked out, ringing against the scorched metal.
‘Why should I want a pile of twisted junk?’ Starscream almost said, when his vocalizer discharged, entirely, hearing the familiar, soft moan. It took every effort to weld the sneer onto his faceplates, though he was sure the effect looked stilted, frozen. He would not give Megatron the pleasure of seeing how deeply the sound cut.
Skyfire. “I’m surprised,” Starscream managed, letting the bitterness seep, dark and bitter as old oil, over his voice, “that you suffered a rival to live.”
“Live?” Megatron’s hoarse laugh. “You misread my intent, Starscream. As ever.” He scraped his foot against the downed shuttle, metal screeching in protest. “He dies. At your hands. And you shall return to me his secrets.”
“Secrets. He has none.” None worth knowing. A desperate gambit, his optics running over the blackened metal, scouring for signs of life.
“His armor. The technology is lost to us. And the Autobot command codes.” A mocking haste in the voice, as though he shouldn’t have to stoop to explain such things. “You will hand them over to me.”
“I am not your servant, Megatron.”
A shrug, silver shoulder glinting in the fading sunlight. “I had thought, for old time’s sake. But then, I’m sure Hook could do the job, just as well. Only with less delicacy.” The smirk was poisonous, knowing tha the thought of Hook and his instruments probing into the shuttle’s remains was intolerable. Oh but of course, Megatron knew just enough about matters of the spark to twist them to his own ends.
“He would damage the codes,” Starscream said. “I shall attend to this. And you shall reward me when I do.”
“Reward. Haven’t I rewarded you enough already?” He gestured to the cliff above them, where Skywarp and Thundercracker were settling in to land.
Like carrion birds, Starscream thought. And doubtless responsible, at least in part, for this. The damage was beyond what was necessary, shots fired in violence, in cruelty. Waste, but also envy, rage, jealousy. He tipped his chin up, arrogant, gratified that they still envied his attraction for his former lover. “Them?” He scoffed. “You can reward me by separating me from those morons.”
“How unfortunate,” Megatron said. “I have heard that severing a trine bond is lethal for your kind.”
It was. But it would be worth it to be rid of the burden of the other two, their continual derision and defiance, their stupidity and arrogance. “A vorn. A vorn assigned to a separate command.” He might as well make the terms clear now.
Megatron cocked his head, trying to see a down side, beyond lifting some iota of Starscream’s misery. He looked down at the tangled wreck of broken metal and smiled, weighing that as worth twice any ‘favor.’ “Very well.” He stepped closer, and Starscream could smell the reek of battle on him. “See that you don’t fail me this time.”
Starscream didn’t have to fake the seething hate in his red optics.
OoOoOoO
The remains filled the lab they cleared for him in the underwater base, and he had stood, imperious, pointing and sneering at them as they brought the large frame in, hiding his horror behind a mask of anger and sarcasm. It was what they expected: no one questioned, no one thought to look further.
Not even his blasted trinemates who had made a show of dropping the heat-bubbled chassis a little too hard onto the repair berth, casting gloating looks over the damaged facial plating. He seethed, trying to attach them the damage: which of you marred his face? Which was responsible for this shot that nearly severed his arm? It was a hot anger, but methodical, cataloging, noticing everything, waiting for revenge.
Waiting, beyond that, until he was finally alone in the lab, with what Skywarp had tittered was a ‘stinking corpse’. He closed the door, locked it, already having come up with the plausible excuse: no interruptions lest they light-contaminate the delicate operations he would have to perform to extract the codes. None of them knew any better, not even Hook.
Not the usage he intended for his Explorer’s training, where they’d been forced to memorize every spec of their partner’s anatomy, every tolerance, every system. Fond foolishness that he’d never purged it, in all these vorns, but, well, hadn’t Megatron told him again and again he was a fool?
Starscream smirked in the dimness, but it faded as he looked at the expanse of work before him: the size and scope of the damage.
No, he scolded himself. Overwhelmed is nothing. You know better: forward movement, forward thrust. Every flyer knows he must move, or else fall out of the sky.
Fall out of the sky. The ruins of Skyfire hinted at a horrible story, a hard plummet, a flaming, blazing crash into the desert’s hard stone.
No.
He pushed the thought aside, refusing to see Skyfire as a whole. He was parts. Just parts. And the less he let it hurt him, the less pleasure Megatron would get from it. That, he thought, was key: to ruin Megatron’s petty, vile, spiteful vengeance. Focus on the micro, on the now. Not the dead past or the withering future.
Well. He folded his arms over his chassis, feeling an agitated heat leak from his cockpit’s amber glass. Well, Starscream. Do you obey? Do you tear apart Skyfire—what’s left of him—for your own advancement? Or do you stand fast over some archaic principle, in front of a dead mech?
Ludicrous question, really. The only thing that even raised it as a question was the rank distaste of doing Megatron’s will.
He’d find a way. Later. He always did. He’d find a way to turn this against Megatron.
OoOoOoO
It had started idly, an excuse to get something done, delay the inevitable, but he found himself lingering over the long limbs with a cleansing rag and solvent, wiping down the bubbled, warped metal, pulling Skyfire into shape. He could always, he’d decided, say he needed to do it to map the neural relays. But the more white he revealed, the more it became less a time filler and more of an obsession in and of itself: revealing Skyfire as he had been, long white limbs, the crescents of the toeplates, the heavy hip gimbals, the long white swaths of the limbs.
“Beautiful,” he murmured, catching himself admiring the sweep of a thigh, the way it seemed to point, so elegantly, into the heavy greaves, the intricate plating that housed the space-rated drives. “It didn’t,” he said, chidingly, “have to be this way, you know.” His optics flicked to the helm. That, protected in Skyfire’s alt mode, had survived the most intact. “You should have listened to me.”
A sharp snort of a laugh, fading into a fondness. “Of course you didn’t listen. You never did.” He wouldn’t be Skyfire if he’d listened. He’d always been frustrating like that. And it was part of what had drawn Starscream to him: the shuttle’s complete immunity to his charm. Oh, Skyfire had fallen for him, but he’d had to work for it, Starscream’s rank and looks making no impression on him.
He swabbed the rag up the legs, over the pelvic expanse, and then to the broad chassis, a smile haunting his mouth: so many fond memories of that chassis armor. Until his optics fell on the Autobot tampograph on his chassis. It had burned like betrayal and for a moment his hand tightened in the rag, the black smear of char marring his fingers. “You always did make bad choices.”
Starscream looked around the dimly-lit workspace, a sudden hard laugh bursting from his chassis. “Then again, so did I.”
OoOoOoO
“What’s taking so long?” Thundercracker lounged against the doorframe. “Megatron’s disappointed.”
Starscream sneered. “And I care because…?” Let Megatron be disappointed. Starscream intended to siphon off any pleasure Megatron might have from this, his little malice that was the only thing keeping him strong.
“You’re making us look bad,” Thundercracker said, haughty, looking down his nasal arch. “Incompetent.”
“Perhaps,” Starscream said, turning away to the monitor, wings blocking Thundercracker with deliberate insolence, “I have merely sunk to your level of incompetence.”
“Incompetence.” Thundercracker sneered. “You blame us for everything.”
I can blame you for this, Starscream thought, thinking of the damaged dead shuttle behind him. He knew their weapons well enough to read their signatures on Skyfire’s frame and he knew their personalities well enough to imagine them: Skywarp giggling as he fired, warping in and out of range like a taunt; Thundercracker sullenly popping rounds as though the whole idea bored him. “No,” Starscream said, pushing past the blue jet, placing himself between him and Skyfire’s corpse. “I blame myself for ever getting involved with you.”
Thundercracker sneered. “Too late, isn’t it?” He tapped the gold bell of his cockpit. “Bonded, now.”
Starscream knew it was bait, but he couldn’t stop himself from rising to it. “And I hope it makes you as miserable as it does me.”
Thundercracker laughed, easily. “It doesn’t. I’ve got Warp.” He jutted his chin. “What do you have?” His optics floated meaningfully over to the large, inert frame, before giving a hard snort of laughter, his thruster heels ringing like echoes of that laughter, high and mocking, as he turned and strode off. A petty move, to give himself the last word.
I’ve lose more than you ever had, Starscream thought, even as he twisted his mouth into a matching sneer—a reflex, a trained response— at the retreating blue wings.
[***]
Starscream hooked the leads up to the monitor. There had to be a way to activate the neural net, just enough to allow access to the latent memory files. It was ghastly work, and he’d had to stop more than once, catching himself on the brink of a sob, feeling his sanity blow around him in tatters, as he worked, cracking open the chassis, tracing the central lines, then prying open the access in the side of the helm, breaking through welds and dents. And above it all, Skyfire’s face, the beautiful, open planes and lines: a mech who’d never had to mask his feelings, a mech who’d never had to snarl or roar: the face of one who needed simply to speak.
But no speaking now, not anymore. Starscream felt his own mouth twist, as he clipped the last alligator lead onto the board. He’d brought a battery with a rheostat, one he could use to adjust the current: too much would fry out the cortex entirely.
“Heh,” he said, spooling the wires over his fingers, smoothing them straight, “After all this time I do remember science.” He looked up. “Do you remember? Basic anatomy. Survival repairs. That’s when we first teamed.” A laugh. “No one wanted to work with you because you were too big. No one wanted to work with me…,” the smile flattened, “Because, well, me.”
Starscream reached for the control spike, pausing before sliding it home in the cranial jack. “Data retrieval. You remember this lesson, right?” It was basic for all explorers: to know how to access the data centers of another’s cortex. Exploration was a dangerous mission and they were all told, from day one of class, that the data they’d capture was, and would always be, more important than their lives.
Back then, it had stirred Starscream: this idea of being a cog in something larger than he was, something important, that could change the world. “Innocent. All of us.” He braced one hand over Skyfire’s brow, as he slid the spike into its jack, almost reverently, wrapped in memories of the past when they’d both been so young and hopeful.
And pathetically naïve. He snorted, taking up the control box. “You most of all, Skyfire.” He wavered, reaching over to tweak one of the wires, brushing it off Skyfire’s cheek. “You know. I wonder sometimes, what would have happened to me.” He stopped himself, laughing, the tarnished sound of an old, fond joke. “Because, of course, it’s all about me.”
He shook it off, snatching the box again, doing one last quick check to the datastorage cube it was attached to. No more delays, Starscream. This was part of the job even back then. He nodded to himself, and flicked the switch, the other blue hand slowly sliding up the control board, inching up the voltage in the wires. The datastorage cube’s tell light began to blink, slowly, pulling data from the cortical memory storage. He upped the current until the light teetered on green, not knowing why he wanted to draw this out, other than that it was a connection to his old life.
Nonsense. Sentimentality! He berated himself and forced the rheo up into green.
A sudden twitch, the servos firing, air hissing through pistons, causing the arms to fly up and then flop down, enervated, lifeless and heavy, landing across the chassis, tangling in the wires. Starscream started up, the control box nearly falling from his limp, shocked hands, having to fumble for it as it threatened to tumble from his fingers.
The optics flared, too, that alien Autobot blue, and he found himself staring, at the fading light. It was like watching him die all over again, the limbs collapsing into death.
It was horrible, some metaphysical agony, even as his old training chirped up again, telling him it was simply reflex, a mindless firing of current down dormant lines. It was nothing: the falsity of life, an imitation, nothing else.
But it didn’t help. Logic and science said nothing to the spark, and he found himself flung forward, clutching the white hands, burrowing in the blue glass of the cockpit, a sob tearing from his vocalizer. Because that moment, that movement, made a difference and Skyfire wasn’t just a frame anymore, a hollow shell, a dead thing, but…his beloved who had just, it felt like, slipped through his fingers again.
“No,” he said, lifting his head, black helm casting a dark shadow over the white. “If that, then why not the rest?” If there was the ability to channel electricity…surely he could do more. Surely.
His hands reached for the limp ones, curled, innocently, on the broad chassis. “Skyfire.” He felt a swell of something, rough and jagged and dark but it felt like purpose. “Skyfire.”
OoOoOoO
The leads stretched over the enormous frame to the various sensor relays. Time to see how much was functional, though he suspected…not much. How much needed to be online for it to be Skyfire?
It was a question he kept putting off answering.
He stood back, soldering iron held loosely in his fingers, letting the last bit cool for a moment, letting his gaze wander up the massive frame.
The whoosh of a door behind him. Starscream felt his wingpanels twitch, glad he had the bulk of them to turn around before he had to face the doorway.
“Megatron,” he said, flatly. Of course. Who else had the door overrides for every room in the base? “What’s the matter, dear leader? Sending Thundercracker to do your dirty work palled?” The sneer was automatic, the insult almost glib to his glossa.
“I found myself with time to waste,” Megatron said, coolly. “And I find,” he said, entering the room, his optics raking and insolent up Skyfire’s frame, “you wasting time.” He folded his arms, in that way of his, the cannon jutting out over top. “I expected results, Starscream.”
“I have given you results,” Starscream retorted. “The datacodes.”
“The armor. We need it. I have plans for it.”
Plans that he was deliberately withholding from Starscream. If Starscream hadn’t been so inured to the lay of this land, it might have hurt. Right now, all he could think of was trying to push Megatron out of the room, those hard, hateful optics away from Skyfire.
“And you need the right data,” Starscream said. “Or else you’d blame me for haste.” He knew it was a no win. Nothing was ever fast enough. Starscream was always wrong. It got…old. And he longed for the days with Skyfire when it seemed he was flash and fire and right.
“And what is all this, then?” A deliberate tug at the wires snaking over the large frame, the optics watching Starscream’s reaction. Because that’s what he wanted: Starscream to react.
“Science,” Starscream snapped. It was a sore point with the Decepticon leader: for all his bluster, he was astonishingly unscientific. “Skyfire’s unique shielding may be part of a generated forcefield. To test that,” he gave a condescending grin, “electricity. Electrons are attracted to positive charge and the current of them running towards it generates--”
“I am aware of electricity.” That dour look, recognizing condescension. Of course, Megatron would have to be dull indeed not to notice it: Starscream was hardly subtle.
“Ah, well you seem to be unaware of the complexities, my leader,” Starscream said, sweetly. “Science has a tendency to disobey timetables.”
Megatron swept forward, and Starscream’s backstruts were jammed against the table. “So do you, Starscream,” Megatron hissed, one had grabbing at a wingpanel, wrenching it. “So do you.”
Skyfire! Starscream’s only thought was for the fragile wiring, the exposed circuitboards of the body on the berth. “Which is why,” he retorted, “I am so good at it.” He felt his optics snap, defiant, up at Megatron’s face.
He knew what was coming. It was inevitable. More tiresome things, more humiliation and shame so deeply worn they barely stung. And he’d invited it this time, to save Skyfire, keep his project intact.
“There are other things you’re good at,” Megatron said, and one hand closed on Starscream’s hips, spinning him around, his other hand already groping between Starscream’s legs as he shoved the jet’s torso down, onto Skyfire’s cold, dead thigh.
The spike jabbed into his valve, hard and throbbing, as though Megatron was only aroused by that mix of contempt and defiance, the need to bring low.
It was rough, Megatron’s one hand hard on Starscream’s neck, pinning him down, so that his grunted exvents fogged Skyfire’s pelvic panels, the spike jolting in and out of the valve, scraping against the rim in sharp, hard stabs.
It was meant to hurt, meant to humiliate. And it did: Starscream hated the charge building up in his valve, the way his systems responded. Pure mechanics, he told himself. By this point, pure mechanics, circuits tripping current.
Megatron laughed, feeling the arousal, the valve fluttering over his ramming spike. “This,” he said, his voice thick with lust, “is what you’re good for.”
He’d always been heavy handed, driving a point home with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. And the triumphant crow as he overloaded, his hot fluid scalding like shame into Starscream’s valve, was a crowning mortification, that had Starscream’s dentae bite against the white span of Skyfire’s armor, optics squeezed shut.
Megatron shoved away, yanking his spike from the valve with undisguised contempt. “Get back to work. And I expect results this time.”
Starscream swallowed a retort, using all his strength to keep his knees from buckling, as he heard Megatron’s footsteps move to the door. Silence, long and heavy, settled over him, before he moved, raising his head, fretting at the scrapes on the white paint he’d made with his dentae.
“No,” he breathed, “no.” As if he could deny the experience, or even sadder, the banality of it all. It was somehow worse with Skyfire’s silent witnessing. “It’s…not like that. Or it wasn’t,” Starscream mumbled, “with us.” He rubbed the spot, hoping he could buff it out. He barely knew what he was saying, just trying to pile words between what had just happened and now. “It was different. You remember, don’t you? You remember what it felt like?” His hands stroked down over the interface hatch, sliding it reverently aside. Skyfire’s equipment covers lay, intact, gleaming, perfect. As though he had had no lovers since Starscream.
And Starscream felt filthy, his hands, his body fouled and dirty, but he couldn’t stop touching, circling the covers.
He moved in a daze, activating the primary electrical circuit he’d set up, hearing the basic physical systems hum online, feeling a low, flat EM field form around the large body.
He stepped around the long leg, clambering on the berth, at first telling himself it was to adjust a wire, test with his multimeter. But he knew it for a lie, even as he slid his own spike into the cold valve, his lubricant shocking against the chill. “Skyfire,” he breathed, shuddering. Cold and dead, it was still Skyfire.
The basic circuitry registered the contact, and he felt the system judder online, the calipers twitching to life, squeezing against his spike in their onlining tolerance tests, before settling down, snugging against him.
He had already transgressed: there was no point stopping now, no virtue in drawing back from the brink. He began moving, resting his weight on the larger mech, sliding his spike in the valve. He felt the chill fade, warmed by friction, the valve calipers cinched and ready. He sprawled against Skyfire, burying his face in the chassis, his hands clinging against the white armor as though gripping redemption, even as Megatron’s transfluid, cooling and sticky sour, leaked from his valve, dripping on both of them as he moved, spreading the taint.
The overload was hard and sudden—and despite the horrid circumstance—real enough, tearing from his body , causing him to arch up, mouth open in a Seeker’s mating keen, as the valve’s basic protocols engaged, the calipers holding him fast, milking at his spike.
He fell back, shivering, heat and ions crackling around him, closing his optics to what he had done.
OoOoOoO
Starscream flopped on the berth. Finally, after years, he had asserted himself, to get his own berth, apart from his trinemates.
Trinemates. They had never been a trine, for all that: the two had been bonded far before they’d met him, ambition and vanity overcoming their natural dislike of the trining. But Megatron hadn’t been picky—or educated—wanting the prestige of a trine, wanting to cement Starscream’s skills and loyalty. And bonded to the two, he had no escape.
Not that he hadn’t tried. Oh in those middle vorns he had tried everything from escape to suicide, and always they had brought him back: Skywarp tracking him wherever he went, Thundercracker restraining him from the worst of his violence.
Only by sliding into a sullen hostility had he achieved any privacy, only by constant sneering had he gotten a berth to himself.
And normally on nights like this, it was worth it, separated from their obvious, noisy display of lust.
But tonight, the separation just cut sharper, hearing their obvious mutual desire, thinking of Skyfire, cold, inert in his lab. Earlier…earlier, he had rewired the facial circuits, breaking down as he activated the control board and the optics had lit up, the mouth still in that characteristic line: severe yet vulnerable, softening out of the rigor of death.
But they were suspicious enough already and he had enough self-preservation to tear himself away, to keep the appearance. He’d slammed into their eyrie, not having to feign the sour mood.
“Bad day in the windowless lab, Scree?” Skywarp had sneered, hips resting on a table, arms folded. “TC and I had a nice long flight.” He let his wings flick. “Sun on our wings, some great updrafts to ride. You missed out.”
“I missed nothing,” Starscream had retorted, “because you were there.”
Skywarp had laughed, tossing his head over to where Thundercracker had beckoned him to their berthroom, leaving him, they’d probably figured, to stew in his misery.
And he’d stewed, but not the way they thought.
So now, he lay, listening to their loud lust, all too easily able to picture what was happening, from a long experience he had gladly forgone. Skywarp, always noisy in his passion, the moans muffled by Thundercracker’s spike in his mouth. And Thundercracker would lie, wings spread behind him like a regal blue carpet, watching Skywarp bent above him, disdainful red optics flicking from the mouth gobbling vulgarly at his spike to the purple jet’s hand jerking at his own spike. He knew what was happening, every crass detail, because they made him, opening the trine bond to taunt him with what he didn’t have.
He didn’t want it: Greed and wantonness, common and low.
Unlike he and Skyfire. They’d never been like that, rutting like animals. It had been beautiful, sharing, giving and taking, complementing. Respect, he thought. Respect, despite their differences, in attitude, in size, in goals. That he longed for more than anything, more than the physical release, more than a simple, animal pleasure.
And he loathed himself for his indiscretion earlier, for giving into that base desire.
He flung himself onto his belly, his wings casting shadows in the darkness over him, squeezing against the bond, trying to imagine it was Skyfire’s bulk below him and not some cold, lonely, barren berth.
OoOoOoO
“I wonder if you’ve ever doubted,” Starscream said, back at work. He was brushing out the dents and scrapes he’d left on Skyfire’s armor. “I wonder if you’ve questioned yourself, about your choice, your decision.”
He ducked his head down, as if to muffle his voice. “I have.” He reached down for a buffing tool. “But you look back, sometimes, and you can’t find the first wrong step, the first place it—you—went wrong.” The buffer whined on, and he used it like a veil, like a cover for his voice as he stroked it over the paneling. “I feel wrong, sometimes. Maybe I always have been. Maybe you were my center, back then. Maybe you were the morals.” He bit his own lipplate, hard enough to hurt, looking up at the inert face, trying to imagine it was merely recharge, that Skyfire was just asleep, under the clinic-cold lights of the underwater lab.
This was no place for flyers: no air, no sweeping winds. Just heavy water pushing down against them, oppressive and murky.
“I don’t envy what they have,” Starscream said, abruptly. “I don’t want what they have: gross, disgusting. I want…you. I want what we should have had, what they make a blasphemy of.”
And the thought struck him, wild and mad like a trapped bird, that he could. The buffing tool’s whine died in his hands as he looked the white frame over, not daring to let the thought form into actual words.
It…was possible. It…could be done. He’d already wired most of the body systems.
Don’t think. For once, Starscream, don’t think, don’t try to leverage, or reason or scheme. Those are what brought you here. Don’t. Just do.
He clambered up the white frame, blue hands like invaders over the other’s armor, white and red. “We always talked about it,” he whispered. “Before that mission. About doing it after we’d settled in, when we were secure.” His hands reached under a chestplate for the release latch. “I remember, you said it was too dangerous.” A laugh. “As always.” That had always been one of the paradoxes of Skyfire: that he knew danger, evaluated risk, and…went on anyway.
The chestplate opened under his hand, revealing the laser core’s dull grey housing. Such an ugly mass , an ugly small house for a beautiful, untamed spirit.
He opened his own hatch, reaching inside his cockpit access to withdraw a cable. “We always said we’d do it, one day.” That was permission, right? That was consent? He’d given it in the past, and nothing in the lives that had unspooled before both of them could undo that. He’d wanted to. It was just a matter of when.
There wasn’t any more ‘when’ to put it off to.
Starscream found the other’s cable, attaching the two, leaning forward as his data rushed along the long-dormant equipment. His mouth searched, sliding forward until their cables were pulled taut, to kiss the cold, still lipplates. The other thing, the other day, had been a base thing, a low thing. A crime. Starscream’s systems revolt at the memory, even as a dark corner of him still longed, still wanted that intimacy, that unity, illusory or not.
Data and energy built and surged, and rushed across the hardline, cascading over Skyfire’s net, unstopped, untrammeled by any firewalls. And in this moment, Skyfire was his: utterly, completely, every system, every circuit. Every byte of memory, every ion of current. His.
He would call it too soon—it would always be too soon to let go of this wild ecstasy, this long awaited ownership, this union they’d never dared consummate.
He dared now, and it was beautiful, his cortex swimming with sensations, a whirlpool of dark and light, cold and heat, flashes of memory and touch, and sound, the beautiful sounds of flight, of airsong.
It seemed the world heaved beneath him, bucking with the overload. An illusion, a mad rush of powerful stimuli combined, overriding him.
Until.
He found himself on the floor, his cable screaming pain, torn from its socket.
And Skyfire, those blue optics glimmering with life he’d never been able to emulate with mere current, staring down at him: aghast, angry and…worst of all, sad.
Pitying.
He could feel it over the frangible bond he had made: hurt, shame, horror, and beneath it all, like the dull throb of a ship’s engine, that sad, tolerant understanding.
“Starscream,” Skyfire said, and his voice was filled with recrimination, as though he was asking the name in disbelief, not wanting to think that this was the mech he’d known: that Starscream could have possibly sunk to this.
This. Bonding with a corpse. Loving the dead.
It was all he had left.
Skyfire turned, his face hardening, and left, the door unlocking before him and closing after, leaving Starscream alone in what now seemed a cavernous emptiness.
Megatro would find out. A matter of time, and that short already, as klaxons began to sound, blaring at his audio, a pain of alarm. He would discover the facts, and maybe guess at the truth cowering behind them.
Megatron would gloat, his raspy voice grinding Starscream’s failure, abjection, perverseness, in his face. And his trinemates woul magnify his shame, his pain, twisting him deep enough to cut with their bond.
Bur worse than that—worse than all that jagged future was the present. That look, appalled and pitying from the wide blue optics, the loathing across the bond, the rejection, the rending agony of his last hopeful flicker of fantasy being snuffed. He would live with Skyfire’s daily disgust.
And, pitiful as he was, he would live for it, as well.
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Amazing story!
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oh the poor thing