Bittersweet Memorial

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13 
G1 post-1986 movie
Skyfire, implied Skyfire/Starscream
ref to canon character death
for tf_speedwriting  prompts 'to the bitter end'

 

Endings, Skyfire realized, are bitter and sweet in turns.  It had been a hard lesson for him: he’d choked on the bitterness time and again, fighting against it. Fighting reality with a violence he abhorred seeing others use in life, as if reality was the worst enemy there was.

But it penetrated, even through his hardest resistance, even through his most violent denials, that Starscream…was not as he remembered.  But Starscream had spoken truth, on one of those tiny moments, snatched from battle, where, in the midst of chaos they had traded intimacies like razors, throwing the past at each other, as if trying to tear the canvas of the present.  Starscream was right: Skyfire was the one who had not changed.

And for the longest time, Skyfire had held that to be a point of honor—that he had stayed closer, truer to what they once shared, and that Starscream was the one who had turned away, grown distant. 

As if…as if adaptation was a crime.  As if changing to adapt was somehow wrong.

It was…ludicrous from a scientific standpoint. Adaptation was what life itself was all about. Adaptation was the great drive for survival in action.  How many vorns had he studied life, marveled at its infinite adaptations?  And yet, looking at this one, and the one of his beloved, he had balked, refused to see it as an adaptation. He’d tried to label it anything but—a perversion, a twisting, a regretful hampering, as if the force of life, the changes of evolution had marred something perfect, made ugly something once beautiful.

That had been Skyfire’s failing.  That had been the bitterness he had gagged on, that brought tears of pain to his optics, twisted at his core. He had been trying to fit Starscream into an old shape, to prune him back. 

And now that it was too late, Skyfire finally saw it.  Now that it was too late—Starscream murdered at the hands of his reborn leader—Skyfire could see Starscream as he was, without the bitter scrim of his own presumption.  He could see, finally, Starscream’s ambition, Starscream’s drive finally manifesting for him. Even though he hadn’t been there, he could imagine, and his laser core ached with the thought, Starscream triumphant, that half-bitter smile he’d worn ever since Skyfire had been revived blossoming open.

Skyfire could remember the seeds of that ambition from their time together.  Back then he had deemed it vision and drive.  Back then it seemed like an electrified cable, running power through everything—Starscream’s optics wild and alight, his mind quick and grasping. 

He could trace the lineage now. Now, that it was useless. Now that it meant nothing.  He could see how the mech he remembered, the mech he loved, had grown into this.  It was a winding path, but then, all of the changes that evolution wreaks are circuitous and meandering.  And Skyfire had always found tracing those lines to be a fascinating study in aesthetics and organic asymmetry.  Only he had not been able to see that in Starscream, until now.

The news had broken something open inside him, as if shattering a dark lens.  Breaking through the bitterness, the hardness of his own hurt and surprise—that Starscream had changed, had…left him.  That the white jet had gone somewhere Skyfire could not follow. 

It was awful that in his death, he had become alive again to Skyfire. It was miserably unobjective that it took his death for Skyfire to see his life—for him to become an artifact for the picture to snap into place.

And for the bitterness to shatter and melt into a slow sweetness of memory.

 

Comments

[playswithworms.livejournal.com]

Beautiful and heart-breaking - I love the analogies with evolution and adaptation, and the description of Starscream's ambition like an electrified cable. Being a rather unambitious person myself, that's a great capture of how it feels to me, looking at it in someone else. Exciting, invigorating, kinda scary if you're not sure if or where that cable is going to flail and spark.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm...ambition-deficient myself. I can admire people who are ambitious, but...I know I can't go there.

Glad you liked!

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Thanks! He's an interesting character to write--it's very tempting to make him too much of a dummy, instead of smart but awkward.

[femme4jack.livejournal.com]

Beautiful and painful introspection.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :D