Breaking down

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
Bayverse: Seeker Academy AU 
Skywarp, Starscream
angst
wordcount: 708
written for hc_bingo  prompt "nervous breakdown"

This is a hurt/comfort prompt. Please do not read if it will offend or trigger you. This vignette fits in with my monster huge stupid Seeker Academy fic I'll be posting, apparently tomorrow. 

 

Skywarp was going to be late, Starscream thought. Again. And Windshear would not be pleased. And Thundercracker would be angry. There was still time. Starscream tapped the admit code to Skywarp’s recharge and was startled to hear the buzz of denial. He hit the overrides—they’d all promised each other, when they were still raw from the loss of Skyfire, to have no secrets, no locks. 

The door slid open. Skywarp lay on his berth, optics dulled, unfocusedly staring at the ceiling. “Skywarp?” Starscream said, quietly. “Are you ill? Shall I summon repair bots?” That wasn’t it, he thought. Skywarp would not lock himself in his recharge if he were ill. Starscream stepped into the room, letting the door close behind him, sealing them both into the dusk of Skywarp’s recharge. Starscream did not want to raise the illumination; not if Skywarp did not wish to be seen. 

Skywarp didn’t answer, acknowledging Starscream’s presence only by a roll of his helm along the berth. His optics tracked Starscream’s approach numbly, as if only partially registering.

Starscream’s systems hummed with worry. “Skywarp?” he repeated, by the edge of the berth. He extended a hand. Skywarp flinched at the light touch on his dermal plating. “Please tell me what is wrong,” Starscream murmured. 

“Nothing,” Skywarp said. Not even able, for a change, to inflect any life into the lie. “Can’t do this anymore.” 

Starscream dropped one hip onto the berth. “Do what?”

One hand waved vaguely around—the first active physical motion Skywarp had made. “This. Any of it.”

Starscream’s supraorbital plates furrowed. “You can.”

The hand pushed him away, petulantly. “I can’t. Tired of failing.” 

Starscream sighed. Yes. He was tired of it, too. No matter what, they seemed…incapable of pulling themselves together. He clutched on math tests, Skywarp was incapable of learning history, they were all…awful in different ways in flight maneuvers. He took Skywarp’s hand. The grey talons struggled in his own for a few kliks, before giving up. As though it were too much effort. Starscream stroked the wrist and forearm. He did not want Skywarp to hurt. For the Trine they now were, yes, but also…for Skywarp. Wild and playful and fun, he had lost all of that with Skyfire’s death. We have all lost, Starscream thought. We are all so different already from what we were. 

“I had a memory purge,” Skywarp, said, quietly, fixing his optics on the ceiling staunchly as if trying to deny Starscream’s presence. As though it were hard enough merely to speak the words aloud, much less in front of an audience. “And it wasn’t like…scary or anything. Not even all that bad. It just…,” the optics blinked, “it just drained me of hope.”

“What was it?” Starscream felt the hand inside his own unstiffen, slightly, accepting his touch. 

Skywarp shifted his head. “Just…no matter how hard I try, I just…can’t pull it through.”

Yes. How well Starscream knew that himself. “You have been working excessively hard lately, Skywarp. It was bound to catch up to you.”

“It’s still not good enough!” Skywarp said, his voice raw. “Never will be. We’ll never…,” he cut himself off as though what came next were too awful to speak. His optics flicked over to Starscream, meeting his gaze for the first time. The red lenses were wide with entreaty. His hand curled around Starscream’s. 

Starscream leaned down, leaned over, his free hand wrapping around Skywarp’s shoulders, rubbing his cheek along Skywarp’s, their narrow frames awkward on top of each other. For a moment, Skywarp was still, and then his own hand came up and tentatively stroked Starscream’s folded wing.

“You’re going to be late,” he said, softly, in Starscream’s audio, even while his hands grew more importunate, seeking the simple comfort of Starscream’s frame against his. He wanted, yet did not want, this comfort; wanted to be felt, heard, understood, yet didn’t want to have his weakness so nakedly exposed. 

“Do not worry about that,” Starscream said. He pulled away, just enough to look Skywarp’s face. He stroked Skywarp’s cheek. What did late matter compared to his Trinion in pain? “We shall be late together.” We shall be a Trine, Starscream thought. We do things together—mourn, love, succeed, fail, comfort. Always.

 

Comments

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

It didn't. PTSD started out in WWI as 'shellshock' and was considered something that a 'real man' would get over so he'd not abandon his comrades--Dr Rivers's notorious cure that both Sassoon and Owen (famous WWI poets) experienced was basically a guilt trip about how you were letting your comrades down.

WWII called it 'combat fatigue' again with the idea that it was...well, fatigue--you were just 'tired' and needed a bit of a rest before you jumped back in. There was no notion of any long term effect. It honestly WASn't until Vietnam that psychology (which was just over half a century old itself) cottoned onto the idea that there might be long term effects of exposure to trauma. Hence, PTSD starts in the 1960s!

Let's face it, war was probably even more traumatic and brutal in ancient Greece, where it was all hand-to-hand. They had NO notion of any sort of post-traumatic problem. I'd secretly love to go back in 'history' and interview Alexander the Great or any one of the famous warriors of the Classical world--by modern terms they'd be psychopaths either naturally or made by what they've experienced.

Robots with longer lives, might develop slower than humans. We live longer than cats: we develop to adults more slowly than they do.

And a culture that's been committed to war for millenia wouldn't have the time NOR the resources (much less the inclination) to muck around with soft science stuff like counseling and trauma therapy. The great warrior cultures through our history don't produce much great literature or art--and what little they do have glorifies their values, not undercuts them.

WOw, I've thought about this too much obviously! Sorry for the teal deer spill!

[shanfiction73.livejournal.com]

It's nice to know someone who knows (and pays attention to) history. I guess I was laughing because although it is true that the term PTSD originated relatively recently, acute stress reactions due to trauma (battle, rape etc) certainly existed in the past. It is merely that cultural influences (the Spartan mentality for the "warrior cultures" for example) and a lack of an organized medical community prevented it from being labeled (officially) until roughly the 20th century. I'm pretty sure in one of my classes we discussed the fact that Tacitus and Heroditus recorded cases that now would be identified as PTSD (idiosyncracies such as difficulty sleeping, hypervigilance, paranoia, medical aftereffects etc). And it was definitely seen during the Civil War, and documented as "battle exhaustion" and other things.

I can understand a culture like the Seekers' not wanting to accept or admit that something like PTSD could happen, but it doesn't seem logical that they would allow it to impair the function of a batch of Seekers like our Trine. A dysfunctional Trine would be less powerful/useful/reliable and therefore a burden for the rest of the Seekers. So you'd think they would have specific protocols to follow to get the "kids" straightened out.

Not to give you a bunny that you don't want, but possibly one reason Skywarp and Starscream are not being recognized as dysfunctional is because they are hiding it... because they know that the way their dysfunctionality would be dealt with would be terrible (reformatting? erasure of memory banks?) and they don't want that.