Nightflight

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Nightflight
PG
G1, post movie
Skyfire/Starscream
for springkink : 6 Feb Transformers G1, Starscream/Skyfire: flying together - In a way, it was like dancing.

 

Skyfire had to get away. It wasn’t their fault, he told himself. It…wasn’t his fault, either, though.  The Autobots just didn’t understand.

It wasn’t a disloyalty thing. It wasn’t even, necessarily, an airframe thing. It was an old friend thing.  Even though, these later years, he had begun to wonder if that friendship actually meant anything.  But when he heard the news of Starscream’s death, something cold had burst above his lasercore, a heart of ice, feeling like sharp shrapnel digging and shifting with every move. 

Starscream was dead and now…there’d never be another chance.  There probably never had been, not for a long time, any real hope of some sort of resolution or reconciliation, but the sheer brutal finality of the news drove it home.  No, not now. Never again. The words themselves felt cold and scalpel-edged.

Perhaps, perhaps Ratchet had guessed. He had been the only one to look in Skyfire’s direction when they’d heard the news of Starscream’s death.  Everyone else was reeling, numb, over the double loss of Prowl and Optimus, swathed in their own grief. 

Ratchet had said nothing when Skyfire headed toward the entrance of the base. There was no need. Any notion he’d defect was gone—the reason gone, dead, by the report annihilated down to cinders and spall. Skyfire had never had much reason to fight, and never less than now.

The night air was cool against his heated wings, the open bowl of night swallowing the sounds of his engines.  The moon’s reflected light silvered the ocean waves beneath him, glittering like moving stars against the darkness.  Thick masses of cloud puffed in the sky, gossamer white in the moonlight, casting pewter shadows on the waves below.

The sea, restless, tossing, was like Starscream, Skyfire thought, while he was the quiet, still, slow-moving sky.  He knew the thought was ridiculous, absurd, knew that it was some permutation or reflex of grief, but willing to let his unscientific processor grind and chew its way through these terrible, icy awkward emotions.  Get through them, get over them.

But at the same time, it felt like a betrayal to want to be past grief, to be beyond mourning. It felt bad enough, betrayal enough, that he had not known, had not sensed Starscream’s death.  That he had laughed, or worked quietly, or dared to be happy, when Starscream was dead, or dying.  To live without pain, to imagine he might ever smile or laugh again sent sharp stabs of ice through him, like frozen treachery.

Had he suffered?  The thought tormented Skyfire, the worry that Starscream’s death had been…awful.  Another ridiculous thought, considering the pain Skyfire had seen since waking from the ice. The whole world seemed an exchange of pain, the war an enormous factory designed to produce suffering and death.  Why, how, could Starscream avoid his own share?

Still, if Skyfire could have taken it for him, he gladly would have, in spite of their cooling friendship, in honor of what they had once been. And perhaps, perhaps, as some recompense.  Some amends.  Something they might yet be, if they could defy or transcend this exchange of pain. 

His flight path took him through one of the clouds, the sudden white-darkness, the sudden cold moisture, enveloping him, blinding him to any sense of motion—the ocean below him no longer tossed, the heavens above no longer twinkled. He was merely wrapped in a thick blinding chill.

A metaphor for his mourning.

And if the metaphor held true, so long as he trusted his instrumentation and kept moving forward, sooner or later he would break through, back into the clean air, where the sky was the sky and the ground was the ground and loss didn’t feel like an icy flame. Where living didn’t feel quite so much like dying.

He saw, sensed, a flash of light, a flash of something, to his left. Too quick, too fleeting to be another swirl of water vapor. A bird perhaps? Or human plane?  But nothing showed on his scans.

Another flash, to his right and just ahead.  Not a bird. Nothing could move that fast, cross his flight vector so easily and in such silence.

No. Not silence.

Skyfire would swear he heard something. Not an engine, but a sharp echo, something like a laugh. Familiar across ages.  From before his frozen past.

Im-impossible. 

Impossible, he thought again, as another flash, a definite flash this time, spun below him. The flare of light, like silver over white, flashed deep into his cortex, unearthing a memory: Starscream and he, flipping, rolling, chasing each other across the skies of an alien system, thrusters carving precise lines in the sky, free, wild, careless of gravity, heedless of danger. As if death or pain could never touch either of them. As if it could never even touch them as long as they flew, staying in motion, dancing under a foreign heaven.

“Starscream?”  The word ripped itself from his vocalizer, defying logic and reason.  Defying everything he professed to believe in. Wishful superstition.  He’d never understood it more than now.

And yet….

Another echoing laugh, and then, a sound thrown back almost too fast against his audio. “…yfire.”

Don’t question, he told himself, something hot and huge welling up within him.  Don’t question. Don’t dispel this, even if it is an illusion. He changed his course, wheeling off to his right, plunging deeper into the cloudbank.  “Can’t catch me,” he said, feeling stupid. And not caring.  If no one was here, no one would witness. But if…but if….

He flew hard, maxing out his forward thrust before throwing himself skyward, his nose stabbing through the cloud until it pierced through, up and straight and into the open, star-spattered sky. The sound of his engines echoed back from the thick vapor of the clouds, filling the sky.  He felt gravity pull at his thrust, and gave into the stall, falling back into gravity’s embrace, succumbing to his inability to outrun this chaos of emotion, this fond illusion. Skyfire flipped his nose to the left, swinging into a downward dive, the cloudbank spread below him like a pillowy blanket, optics, all forward sensors, keen and fine-calibrated. 

THERE! A silvery shimmer, a swift ghost of motion, and the reverberating echo of too-familiar higher-pitched engines.  Something that eluded direct observation, skittering in his periphery, registering neither heat nor mass, but somehow showing as a faint but unmistakable blip of energy as he zipped past.

A hallucination?  A glitch in his system? Perhaps.  All Skyfire knew as his mass thrust him back down through the cloud, was that the cold sharp weight of grief and loss on his laser core had melted, to a warm, gentle heat. 

 

 

Comments

[oni-gil.livejournal.com]

D'awwwww, Skyfire, you're making me wibble...

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

He's an angsty guy? But it's kind of a happy ending? Okay, uhhh, I got nothin'. :(

[ithilgwath.livejournal.com]

That one made me sniffle a bit, but the ending was less sad. More bittersweet. *hugs Skyfire*

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

It is a sad one, I admit. Poor Skyfire!

[chibirisuchan.livejournal.com]

is this the canon where Starscream really does end up as a ghost? *hopes so; hopes it was real, poor Skyfire...*

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Yes! That's what I was going for--that after his death, the first thing he 'does' really, before he 'pulls himself together' and goes after Galvatron by taking over Cyclonus, is visit Skyfire. See? He does care! ;_;

[kyme.livejournal.com]

.....*rolls over and curls up to cry*

OH SKYFIRE. ;A; AND STARSCREAM. ;A;

[zatnik.livejournal.com]

Awwww....wwww.... All I can do now, is wibble, and hope that when Starscream gets his new body and goes tumbling out of control through space, cartooncidence results in to his coming back in to contact with Skyfire.