A Guilty Mind

[fascinationex]

A Guilty Mind. Crossposted to AO3 over here.

Curiosity made Starscream sneak into a gladiatorial match down in a pit in the lowest levels of Kaon.

---

It was curiosity that made Starscream sneak into a gladiatorial match down in a pit in the lowest levels of Kaon.

The arena was huge, partially open to the levels above because of the broken roof, which gave the illusion of a sky up there, somewhere. The floor, and the tiered rows of the stands were all hard-wearing duracrete, easy to hose down with solvents and not especially comfortable. The place was packed, though, full of big, scuffed-up, heavy frames. The arena itself might have existed on the edge of legality, but it was popular.

Like the few civilian frames he could see in the crowd, Starscream knew better than to tell anyone he’d actually been there.

The earliest matches, even from his high vantage at the very top of the stands, made him wonder if sneaking in wasn’t a mistake anyway. He couldn’t figure out why anyone would bother – let alone why they might pay to watch.

“This is stupid,” he opined aloud, kicking his legs against the duracrete lip of the stands. There were no real ‘seats’ up where he was – the actual arena seats were well and truly sold out – but a very streamlined and lightweight frame could fit up there.

Luckily, Starscream had no more armour than what he’d been forged with. He was built for speed, not haulage: a hit-and-run military model, or perhaps a racer or a fast courier, if one felt particularly generous. Either way, he had no interest in a military career, and he didn’t see any armour in his near future either.

“Then why’d you come,” said the mech seated below him, in the cheaper seats most distant from the action. It wasn’t a real question, he figured, just a pointed remonstrance.

Starscream answered it anyway. He was generous like that. “How would I know it was this stupid if I hadn’t seen it?”

Far below, another hot spray of oil and energon slapped the arena ground, and another big brute of a mech roared his victory out at the crowd. Starscream wasn’t sure what he’d expected, exactly, but… something a bit grander than a bunch of big ugly mechanisms scrabbling around in the oil and the dirt like stupid mechanimals ‘til one of them was dead. How was this not a waste of everybody’s time?

“First time, huh?” drawled the guy one seat below. He was bigger than Starscream, but not by much. He looked as though he, too, might have been made like Starscream in the beginning: a fast, light flyer. His armour made up the difference, though. Starscream would have bet anything that this jet had never pretended he wasn’t made for war. “The preliminary matches are always bloody – gets people really revved up for the main event.”

He had a mean smile, which he flashed up at Starscream. Nobody at the colleges ever smiled like that. Starscream felt his wings tick, gently, although he couldn’t say what feeling prompted it.

“What’s the matter?” the other flyer asked, with false concern. “You’re not a civilian build. Bet there's some kinda weaponry tucked away under there. You scared of a little oil?”

Starscream flicked one wing. He wasn’t upset by the oil and the energon soaking into the ground – part of the problem, really, when one wanted to study the sciences, especially nice, peaceful alternative energy research, and not even military development. But there was no hiding his frame. Everyone knew.

“Well, of course I dislike violence,” he lied loftily, “like any civilised mech. But no. It’s just a bit -- wasteful, isn't it? What are they winning? What’s the point? They’re not even good,” he added, warming to the topic despite himself, for although the fighters were certainly built for war, that didn’t mean they knew what they were doing, “if I want to see idiots wrestling clumsily on the dirt, I can go to any bar in the Upsilon level and see it for free.”

Not that he’d be caught dead in Upsilon. That was so deep down you couldn’t see the sky, and it was almost entirely Decepticons down there. And, yes, all right, Starscream was a Decepticon. But he didn't have to wallow in it. Couldn't, if he wanted to be taken seriously. He shouldn’t even have come here, really.

The jet snorted. “Because you paid for that seat?”

“Thankfully,” Starscream sneered, “no.”

But the jet wasn’t listening. “What they win,” he said, right over Starscream’s snide rejoinder, “is that they get to walk back out of the arena again, and they get paid so they can fuel themselves. Listen,” he smacked Starscream’s thruster, not very hard, but the shock of somebody actually striking him seemed to sing all the way up Starscream’s frame and settle in his circuits. It felt… familiar. His plating relaxed, unbidden, tight seams cracking open just a little. "Listen, it's -- disgusting, it's disgusting. You step out there, every one of them knows you gotta win, or you die. Some people are into that.” He said 'disgusting' like he meant it, but even still... he sounded excited. "Me... I like the main event."

Starscream's fuel pump thudded a little harder, deep behind his laser core. He tilted his head. All right, he thought, perhaps there was something to that. There was something in the struggle itself.

Years later, Starscream would hear, over and over again, colleagues lament that nobody who saw the arena fights as entertainment really recognised gladiators as people. Perhaps that was true of the civilians, the Autobots. But Starscream knew by then that for a Decepticon, that knowledge was essential to enjoy them at all.

“All right,” he allowed, slowly, consideringly. “But it’s still a waste. Wouldn't it be better if they were fighting for something?"

"Uhh... Well, they're fighting for the money to buy fuel for themselves." The other jet shrugged expressively, his black and purple plating shifting. "What else is there?"

But despite his criminal lack of imagination, he had nonetheless convinced Starscream to linger and watch. An hour of semi-interesting bloodletting later (when the bigger jet, whose name was Skywarp, had already snorted and mocked him, ‘I don’t like violence,’ misquoted in a whining voice that sounded nothing like Starscream at all), he was... Well. Rewarded.

A big, rough-looking mech, painted silvery-grey like a cooling body, strode out onto the arena floor. And there was no fear in him. No hesitation. No uncertainty. Starscream’s attention narrowed upon him, fixed, intent, focused. The crowd was howling, but the mech was – Starscream imagined he could hear the steady, unaffected hum of him even from this distance. He couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t.

And then he fought.

It was messy, sure, but they’d all been messy. He was shockingly violent, yes, but they’d all been like that.

This was… effortless. Precise. Beautiful.

He ripped a whole arm out of a reinforced socket joint, so easily and purposefully that it almost didn’t seem real, right up until the oil hit the floor with a wet, loud slap and the screaming began, high and terrified and thrilling even over the sounds of the crowd.

There was no scrambling or clumsy grubbing in the dirt anymore: just hanging, endless, fevered minutes of glorious unremitting brutality.

Starscream could feel his fans spinning and his wings fluttering in shameless excitement. He leaned forward, gripping the lip of his seat with his unsteady hands. “What was this one called again?”

“Huh?”

Peripherally, he saw Skywarp glance up at him, but he did not take his optics off the fight. It wasn’t just the violence. If it had been, Starscream would have enjoyed the preliminaries more. It was the unapologetic way he went about it, in part: killing was what this mech did well, and he was not ashamed of it. And then, too, it was the precise, beautifully executed nature of the work: he clearly had a plan the moment each new comer stepped onto the arena floor, and every time, each piece fell perfectly into place, swift and sure and effortless and – and then the killing.

Starscream’s fans stalled twice at a killing blow, and each time forcing them on again set a rush of heat and then cold flushing right through him.

“Megatron,” said Skywarp, giving him a look that said that Starscream was pretty much more interesting to him than the fighting right then. “They call him Megatron. You sure you, uh, ‘dislike violence’?” he added. “He’s popular, but he’s not that popular.”

Starscream knocked his wing with one foot, and instead of taking offence, Skywarp smacked his leg right back, hard enough to sting.

“He’s magnificent,” said Starscream. And then, internally, I wonder how I can have him.

Wild, fevered fantasies lit up his circuitry for the fights, until even he could feel acutely how hot he was running in his excitement. His heat bounced right back from the solid materials of his uncomfortable perch and sank into his plating.

But it couldn’t last forever. Soon, mechs were filtering out of the arena – rowdy, loud, a little revved up, and, yes, largely Decepticons. Starscream hunched in his illegal seat, blowing hot air from his vents, letting his wings fan gently back and forth to dump as much heat through them into the atmosphere as possible.

Skywarp tapped his thruster. “Hey, pacifist,” he said, “you’re running awful hot there. You wanna…?”

Starscream stared down at him. His dark plating was scuffed here and there, and he was – not big, exactly. He wasn’t that much bigger than Starscream. But he was… armoured. Solid. There would be no pretending he was a dainty Autobot scientist. His armour was so thick it might even have been interstellar-grade. Starscream’s interface equipment, swollen with charge behind the weight and pressure of his plating, throbbed softly.

He'd never had another Decepticon before.

He was aching for it.

“Oh, fine,” he said, slithering down from his perch. Skywarp’s wings gave a twitch of surprise that wasn’t very flattering. “But make it quick, I have a class in three hours,” he added shortly.

“Uh-huh,” said Skywarp, giving Starscream’s entire frame a more thorough look over. “Sure,” he said, in the tone of a person who meant the exact opposite of what he was saying.

It was not quick.

Skywarp had a partner. Another jet, just the same, with the same heavy-duty, thick armour, blue and white against Skywarp's purple and black. Thundercracker was quieter, less forward, but he had the same easy, rough physicality.

He wasn’t shy about meeting Starscream, though.

(Starscream did not make it to class on time.

And no, there was absolutely no pretending that either of them might have been a nice, friendly Autobot scientist.)

“I’m just saying,” Thundercracker told Starscream, much, much later, when Starscream still had steam leaking up from between his transformation seams and his engine was growling like he was trying to take off, “there’s no point in trying to be an Autobot.”

Starscream had, at some point, made the mistake of telling both of them that he was going into research. He’d regretted it almost instantly, despite the deep, wonderful feeling of truly satisfying interface still lighting up his circuits. He'd never been... he felt so good. And so annoyed, at the same time. He huffed, loud and annoyed and pointed, but Thundercracker did not take his hint.

Skywarp groaned and rolled over, which was a dangerous feat for a winged mech on a berth full of other winged mechs. Somehow neither this, not the resulting clank of him coming to rest sprawled across Thundercracker's cockpit, deterred Thundercracker from going on.

“There are heaps of Autobots who are already Autobots without trying. You’re never going to be better at it than those guys are, and it’s a mistake to try.”

“Ugh,” said Sarscream, with feeling. He smacked him with the hard edge of one wing. Thundercracker didn’t flinch at that, either. He hadn’t flinched at anything. Armoured. War-frame. Starscream wasn’t sure he liked them, not Skywarp or Thundercracker as people, but he definitely liked their frames and their confident, hard hands. There were scuffs on his plating and he just wanted – again, more, harder. He wriggled into the berth. It smelled like heavy wax and interfacing.

“I don’t make mistakes,” he said, and then, when he sensed Skywarp about to say something else: “Put a lid on it.”

What he didn’t say, what he would not bother to tell either of them, because who even were these weirdos to him, anyway, was that he did not want to be an Autobot. He didn’t want to be a savage, stupid Decepticon, or a clever genteel Autobot scientist. What Starscream wanted was to be a Decepticon scientist.

He doubted they were able to understand such a thing, and he didn’t deign to share it with them.

---

Starscream followed, obliquely, Megatron’s career as a gladiator. How could he not? He paid attention to news of the fights, listened to Skywarp’s incredibly biased reviews. Sometimes, when he visited their rundown, cramped apartment in the lower levels (Omicron, which wasn’t quite Upsilon, but – well, best if nobody knew he’d been slumming it there, anyway), Thundercracker had a shaky, definitely-not-allowed video capture of a fight.

He didn’t think either of them was as interested as he was, but they both humoured him because watching the big, silvery gladiator take someone apart never failed to leave him helplessly, ridiculously, burning hot. They liked to ...take advantage. (He liked them to take advantage.)

But he did not go back to the arena itself – and he certainly never even looked up when Megatron was fighting. Now that he’d discovered the temptation of it, he knew he had to stay away.

Among the academics (with whom he did not quite fit in), there wasn’t a single bot who would admit to enjoying blood sports, and of those who even spoke about it – well, it was clear that they thought it was an entertainment for the stupid, ignorant, uneducated lower classes, who could not be expected to know better. By this they inevitably meant war-built Cybertronians. Decepticons. Starscream.

“Not you,” said one of them, a huge, gentle shuttle, made for long distance haulage. He lingered in the break room to remind him, watching Starscream stir his cube, against regulations, with a pipette. The energon inside it wasn't quite pure, and it had separated when it settled.

Starscream liked Skyfire the way he liked anyone: grudgingly, and against his better judgement. He wondered, sometimes, if he liked Skyfire because he was another flyer, even if he wasn’t the same as Starscream – or Skwarp, or Thundercracker, to whom he’d gravitated so strangely and naturally. Was it the same odd instinct, drawing him to anything with wings?

But the similarities between Skyfire and the others were superficial. Starscream couldn’t even begin to imagine Skyfire throwing him across a berth like Thundercracker had three days ago, shoving him face first into the fibres until he couldn’t see, pinning him there with all his extra mass, making him take it until he squealed –

– no. The similarities were superficial at best. If Starscream ever smacked Skyfire, casually, the way that felt so easy and familiar with Skywarp, he’d probably end up on probation and bored out of his processor in workplace safety seminars.

Besides, they both knew the only reason Starscream and Skyfire shared a work space was because Skyfire had the patience for it and... nobody else did.

“They don’t mean you. They just forget," he said, setting his own cube of energon down on the table in the break room. It was a huge cube. Flight-capable alt modes required it. "You’re so different.”

And that was good, wasn’t it? That was what he’d wanted to be, what he’d worked at, wasn’t it? The exception to the Decepticon rule. So normal and acceptable to the civilian scientists he worked with that they forgot he wasn’t just one of them. Wasn’t that what he’d wanted?

He let his wings twitch sharply and expressively.

Skyfire looked uncomfortable. “I mean… there are other, er, Decepticons. They aren’t much like you, are they?”

They are exactly like me, Starscream thought, but did not say. Oh, they weren’t half so clever or cunning, and he’d yet to meet one as handsome, but in the ways Skyfire meant, they were… exactly like Starscream.

Skyfire, he thought, eyeing him with one red optic. Nice guy, but he, too, would never understand what Starscream meant if he told him: No, I want to be a Decepticon and a scientist. Both. I want both.

“I’m sure they mean well,” Skyfire said then, weakly and awkwardly, and he wilted further when Starscream flicked one wing dismissively and then ignored him.

Unfortunately, fitting in, or at least not being a prickly waste-hole, was an extremely necessary part of being any kind of researcher. Starscream could charm and flatter and flutter his wings with the best of them – right up until someone made it clear that they considered themselves smarter than him, or until he had to actually work with them regularly. Whichever came first.

It was no surprise, and sometimes a source of very great amusement to his co-workers, when it was Starscream’s work that was consistently knocked back for grants. And it was no surprise to Starscream that, as the energon crisis grew more severe, it wasn’t smug Autobot scientists who suffered under the fuel shortage.

“I suppose they won’t bother to fund research into alternative energy until the civilian research council members who assess our projects get hungry,” he complained to Skywarp.

He had not exactly meant to keep coming back to see them, but it was much easier to avoid the gladiatorial pit than a pair of people who had fragged the life out of him and stolen his comm code. Besides, somehow they had turned up a shuttle-sized berth, which felt incredible to sprawl out upon, even if it was so obviously secondhand that Starscream did not even want to ask where it had come from. And they never once complained that Starscream was rough or wild or hurt them.

“Or they’ll say you’re too dumb and give it to someone else, probably,” Skywarp said lazily. He wasn’t what you’d call supportive. And unlike Thundercracker, he wasn’t even slightly diplomatic.

“Then I'll do it without them,” said Starscream, without ire, and dragged his thruster along the outside of Skywarp’s leg. "And then they'll see. My time will come."

"Uh-huh," said Skywarp, very detached. He grunted, but all his systems still spun up, noisy in the cramped and dirty room. Starscream smiled a sharp, narrow little smile in the dark. He was just as happy to be distracted.

---

Grindgear’s proposal was an astronomically costly mess, and it had still been given funding over Starscream’s.

All Starscream needed was the funding to pay a team and get the resources he needed to travel a few hundred mechanomiles east outside the city walls, where he could dig up some samples from the singing crystals that grew aimlessly out in the barren wastes -- dangerous, sure, but the dangers were known. On the spot where they were harvested fresh he would find out if his refinement process could squeeze energon out of them. Perhaps it couldn’t – and even if it could, it was a little bit dangerous, and it required the close supervision of someone who understood the process (which was, to date, a grand total of Starscream and… Starscream).

It was relatively low risk, given the potential rewards. But he had been knocked back, again, due to ‘safety concerns’ and a ‘hypothesis entirely unsupported by any existing documentation’.

That was, he wanted to be clear, the point of his research. He wanted to find the supporting evidence. But nobody – no Autobot, he suspected – had ever indicated it might be possible, and so it was too unlikely, too ambitious, and too unsafe.

Starscream found himself in the lab after hours. He shouldn’t have been in there with high-grade, or over-energised, and he should definitely not have ignored the protective sprays that bots usually put on at the door. It was a mechanology lab, anything could have been climbing his plating. He made no move to get up and spray on a protective coating. He ignored, too, the sounds of celebration from down the hall.

Instead he sat stupidly on the laboratory floor, with only the light of the data pad itself to read by, and contemplated the project submission Grindgear had made, which had been found so much more worthy than his own.

Grindgear’s project required taking two hundred turbohounds into space and exposing them indiscriminately to stellar winds to see if it changed the trace metals in their internal energon supply.

From his documentation, he had as yet no plan to control their exposure, no plan to regulate their energon intakes, and a budget document that did not even account for the care of the stupid mechanimals in the first place.

He leaned back against a store cupboard. It handles dug into his wings. He took another gulp of his high grade and read the last paragraph again, although the characters weren’t as easy to focus on as they had been when he’d started. From down the hall, he could still hear the delighted murmur of voices. Distracting. He tried again.

He vented hard, and took another loooong sip of his high grade. He didn’t have to be here – he could have gone home. Stars knew, he did not want to celebrate Grindgear’s dubious successes. But free fuel was free fuel. It was getting so expensive it would have been a shame to waste any of it.

Eventually, Starscream stopped trying to read Grindgear’s ridiculous, hand-wavy proposal all together and just sat there, staring blankly ahead, while the light of the screen blinded him and the high grade filtered into his fuel lines.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t sure he even had the energy to be angry anymore, although he thought the amount of fuel he’d had ought to have ensured it.

Footsteps, then. The soft creak of a tyre. A shadow blocked out the light from the corridor, streaming across the floor in a dark shape much larger than the bot who cast it.

“Mercy, Starscream, is this where you are?”

Grindgear himself was really the last bot he wanted to hear from right now. He grunted, uncommitted.

“Drinking in the dark?” the door creaked open, enough to let him enter. Great. Fantastic. Given the general trajectory of Starscream’s life, he supposed he ought to have expected it.

“Shouldn’t you be celebrating?” Starscream wondered bitterly. He considered his cube of high grade, and then decided it was too expensive to throw anywhere. Least of all at Grindgear, who wouldn't even understand why he was upset.

Grindgear came closer, and Starscream could even feel the dull concern of him, bubbling like sludge in the pool of his elation. Yes, of course. Grindgear was another nice, friendly civilian scientist who meant nobody any harm. Starscream took another long drink. He felt old.

“You’re not sulking, are you?” Grindgear asked, with just the right amount of hesitancy. Polite. Delicate. Hmm. “I mean. Because. My, this is awkward.” Starscream heard him vent out, soft and anxious, and then he took another step forward. Starscream didn’t look up. “Well, it’s all, the council assesses these projects on the basis of their merits, of course, and it’s all, you know, may the best mech win, right?”

Ah. There was the anger.

And suddenly Starscream was not numb at all. He looked up at Grindgear. He was criminally over-energised, but his optics could focus enough for this.

“Excuse me?” Starscream asked, softly and dangerously.

“I mean, well… no hard feelings, right? Say, why don’t you come back to the party? Come on, it can’t be good for you to sit brooding in the dark--”

He offered his hand to Starscream guilelessly, a delicate thing painted a pale eggshell colour. Starscream took it very carefully and allowed him to help him balance as he rocked to his feet.

“No, of course not. It’s foolish of me,” Starscream said, deliberately mild, as his processes whirled and his circuitry heated up to a blistering simmer.

Like all Decepticons, Starscream had one thing that Autobots very much lacked.

On-board weaponry.

When Grindgear shot him a bright smile and then turned away to precede him out the door and leave the lab, Starscream smiled right back, just as friendly –

– and then, unflinching, he shot him in the back of the helm.

Metal fragments went flying. Some were hurled into the walls with such force they stuck there. Fuel hit the floor with a thick wet slap and sprayed indiscriminately across the store cupboards and Starscream’s own plating.

His fuel pump slammed away, hard and fast beneath his laser core, sending all that high grade through him even faster. Starscream’s wings trembled.

Grindgear’s frame hit the floor with a crash, astonishingly loud. The voices from deeper in the building paused uncertainly for a moment, and Starscream froze with them. But they picked up again when there were no further disruptive noises.

Starscream picked his way unsteadily around the smoking fragments of Grindgear’s helm where they were strewn across the laboratory floor. He made it to the body, and bent to inspect his rapidly greying frame: the blackened wires, the dying colours.

“No,” he said quietly, pensively, looking at the mess. There were sharp edges, dark with burnt paint, and a slow steady leak of energon. He smeared the leaking energon with his thumb, right across the grey of Grindgear’s chest plates. “No hard feelings.”

The burnt energon smelled so strongly Starscream wondered hazily if it was caught in his vents. He’d never killed anybody before. His memory was drawn, inexorably, to the arena fights he’d seen.

The moment Starscream rose over Grindgear’s leaking body, the reality of the situation crashed down upon him. There would be no ‘better luck next time’ now, no waiting for new opportunities. There would be no new opportunities among the civilian classes. With this, he had already proven himself more Decepticon than they would tolerate.

He glanced toward one of the security cameras. A fantasy unfolded in his processor: what if he could delete the footage from the server, clean up after himself, dispose of Grindgear’s frame –

But even over-energised, Starscream immediately knew none of that would serve. It would be impossible to get rid of Grindgear’s stupid body inconspicuously, and even if he could have erased the footage without detection – it wouldn’t change that somebody had gone missing, and he was the natural suspect in such an investigation. He was a Decepticon. And he’d been competing for funding.

He stood straight and spread his wings out wide, staring with unseeing optics at the big white fume hood on the other side of the laboratory space.

It occurred to Starscream that he had, in fact, confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt all that the Autobots might have thought about Decepticons like him with this one act. All their biases were vindicated now in him. No matter how loudly he screeched, “if you had just been fair ,” they would always be able to comfort themselves that they had been justified. That he had been – savage, violent, innately uncooperative, all along. ‘Not like you , Starscream’, would become, ‘well, he was a Decepticon after all, wasn’t he?’ by dawn.

All that work , he fumed silently. For what?

But it had been all for nothing anyway, hadn’t it? They never would have funded him anyway – not until the Autobot who made the assessments had felt hunger gnawing at his tanks. When Starscream lamented, internally, ‘all that work’ about his so-called career, all he was doing was deluding himself deeper into a sunk cost fallacy. And now, with the horrible clarity of a drunk mech lurching from crisis to crisis, he knew it.

...If there was one thing Starscream knew, it was when to cut his losses and run. He knew it instinctively, like other mechs knew how to pump fuel. This situation had just become absolutely critical, and those instincts were howling at him. He had to get out of the city before the body was discovered, or else he was dead. He knew it.

He stepped back over Grindgear’s body and opened a comm line.

:Skywarp ,: he sent. Nothing. : Skywarp .: Then, annoyed, he widened the comm, even though it wasn't Thundercracker he really wanted. : Thundercracker . Thundercr --:

:Do you know what time it is?: Thundercracker sent back, characters all clumsy with the lingering confusion of deep recharge.

Starscream ignored that, even as he went clattering through the laboratory, knocking tools and boxes over until he found exactly what he needed: a rotary tool with a compressed carbon blade. He shoved it into his subspace.

:Get Skywarp, I killed someone and I need to leave the city,: he sent.

That, or perhaps Thundercracker, woke Skywarp up fast. :What happened to ‘I don’t make mistakes’?:

That was really not the point. He dug up some tasteless but food-grade energon, too low a grade to be called distilled. It would do.

:I need a lift.: He teetered back and shoved his hand into Grindgear’s gross, still-cooling subspace – it took him a moment to realise his weapons systems were still online, and then to transform the barrel on his arm away so he could fit his hand in, but he got there – and came up with a bottle of high grade tied with a ribbon and a tin of wax. He shoved them in his subspace, too.

:What’s wrong with your wings?:

:I’m over-energised.:

:Oh, fantastic.:

He received the equivalent of an exhausted groan right back. A second passed in which Starscream contemplated what he would do if the both of them genuinely refused – he’d have to fly on his own, with a full subspace, and so dizzy with high-grade his optics couldn’t focus properly. He would be caught, he must be caught, but – he would try it anyway. He couldn’t sit around and just wait for the enforcers.

Thundercracker finally sent him a ping with an ETA, and plating Starscream had not realised he’d clamped down relaxed.

Good.

He wiped the energon off his plating with Grindgear’s polishing cloth and then dropped it on his grey chassis. He made sure he looked more or less presentable, and then he strode out and kicked the laboratory door closed behind him.

When his slow-spinning fans drew in the atmosphere outside of the laboratory he realised how different it smelled – the chemical reek of weapons discharge and burnt metals and spilt energon was strong, so strong that it had coated parts of his ventilation system. The particles remained trapped in there even as cleaner gasses filtered through.

He went quickly – or as quickly as he could, when he was this over-energised and every step was sort of a minor adventure – toward the elevators and smacked the keypad over and over until an elevator finally arrived with a soft ding .

Skyfire broke away from his conversation as soon as the doors opened and he saw Starscream standing there. “Starscream! I thought you’d already left!”

The other person inside the elevator was smaller than both of them, someone Starscream recognised vaguely from the physics department but whose name he couldn’t recall. He had a bright red paint job and a long, delicate looking scope that stuck out over one shoulder. Starscream would look up the name later, if he had to work with – no. No he wouldn’t. He’d never have to work with him.

“No,” said Starscream, stepping in and hitting the button for the roof top. The doors closed and the elevator began moving again, humming softly around them. “I was --” getting over-energised, sulking. Murdering his colleagues. He didn’t say any of it. “I didn’t leave.”

Skyfire looked at him with such earnest sympathy that it was almost hard to feel himself pitied and looked-down upon. Almost.

“Allow me to extend my condolences that your project failed to receive approval,” said the red one, apparently oblivious to the tense way Starscream’s wings had hiked up. “Have you considered yet your options for appeal?”

“Several times,” Starscream said tightly, flatly. Why were the lights were so bright in here? Starscream cycled his optics. They already felt gritty.

“If it would be beneficial, I would be very happy to read over your proposal and --”

“Perceptor,” said Skyfire quietly, and his friend looked confused. He peered between Skyfire and Starscream, and his expression didn’t clear, but he shut up.

The elevator moved much too slowly. It was, Starscream realised belatedly, going to the ground floor before it would rise to the roof. Starscream’s – rides – wouldn’t be able to land out there. If they did, there’d be plenty of officious idiots who would already have noticed two jets disregarding the check points and flying to a sector they had no pass to access. There was a reason Starscream visited them in their apartment and never bothered to invite them up here.

Every second longer that the elevator ride took was another one in which someone could notice Grindgear. That smell alone would attract attention.

“I thought the project was meritorious,” Perceptor said into the tense silence, “and deserved attention.”

Starscream was not in the right mindset to be flattered by a coworker deigning to allow that his work was excellent. He knew it was excellent. He sagged forward and, despairing of ever reaching his destination, jammed his thumb against the rooftop button on the elevator panel over and over and over. It had no effect, of course, and he ground his teeth.

“You’re not in any fit state to fly,” Skyfire said softly. “Would it be better if I took you home?”

“No,” said Starscream shortly, rudely, and this time even Skyfire pulled a face and drew away. Perceptor hunched a little more every time his finger smacked into the roof button.

“You know what you’re doing, I’m sure,” he said, and he probably intended it as an expression of trust in Starscream’s judgement, even when he was clearly intoxicated.

Do I? Starscream laughed, shrill, high, like a broken hinge.

“Do you have a ride home?” Skyfire persisted, even after the doors hissed open and Perceptor scrambled out like even a second longer was too long in Starscream’s company. “You can’t fly like this.”

He stood there, holding the doors open with his bulk, and Starscream got the very distinct impression that he would stand there like that, passive but immovable, until Starscream had answered to his satisfaction, or until the heat death of the universe – whichever came first.

Generally Starscream was more stubborn than anyone, especially a giant pushover like Skyfire, but he was in an uncommon hurry. “My ride is on the roof. You’re holding him up. It’ll be your fault if he leaves without me.”

“Oh,” said Skyfire. “Well. Of course. I’m glad you have a ride... And,” he added, finally getting out of the way of the doors just to clap one massive hand over Starscream’s shoulder and prevent their closing again, “I am sorry, Starscream. You should have had this one. It should have been –“

Starscream smacked his hand, hard, and Skyfire yanked it back with a cry of shock. This put his whole huge frame, finally, on the other side of the doors. Starscream slammed his hand in the general direction of the ‘close doors’ button without looking.

He turned away from Skyfire before they’d even finished closing, and entirely missed whatever stupid soft hurt expression was on his face.

He was almost at the roof before it occurred to him that this had been the very last time he’d ever see Skyfire, too. His hands curled into fists all on their own and shook.

The doors opened again. He took the four steps to the rooftop door without even wobbling that much. The night atmosphere washed the last of the smell of killing from his vents, cold and clear.

Above, Skywarp and Thundercracker were circling, dark silhouettes that blocked out the stars and glittered with their own indicator lights as they moved. Their engines hummed, well-tuned and efficient, but still – loud.

It occurred to Starscream to wonder why the hell Thundercracker was here. All he needed was Skywarp.

:Finally ,: Skywarp sent, and he dropped that line of thought . : Hurry up.:

Starscream transformed with a wobble and launched himself in a wavering line toward them.

Behind him, as he lifted off, he heard the alarms began to blare in the college. An announcement in a mild, polite voice sounded through the building, half-audible on the roof. It reminded them all to stay exactly where they were while investigations were undertaken, and that nobody should be alarmed. There was a situation, but the authorities had it under control…

Of course. He weaved uncertainly, but his plating struck Skywarp’s, and then there was a horrible icy chill and a giddy whirl and – pop! – he barely managed to get his root mode back before he was stumbling on the roof of another building, two mechanomiles away.

Another audial-cracking pop! and they were on a third roof top. His tanks flipped alarmingly. Ohh, that wasn’t good.

He might have purged a little, but nobody gave him any scrap about it – not even Thundercracker, who returned to his own root mode and watched Starscream, unimpressed.

“Here we are!” said Skywarp cheerfully.

Starscream cycled his optics. Off, on. Off, on. Off. He gave it a second. Then on again. The rooftop didn’t have anything on it, in particular. Not even an access door – it was just a flat duracrete structure, with a cap covering part of the building’s ventilation system further down. Above, the stars were bright.

The alarms sounded so distant that Starscream might have just been imagining them now.

Somehow he was leaning on Thundercracker, who still hadn’t said anything about it. How had that happened?

A shadow on the roof that he’d taken for just another, bigger building, rolled impatiently forward.

“I can’t warp us all the way out of the city, so, this is Astrotrain,” said Skywarp, and hustled Starscream into what had to be another mech with a shuttle alt mode. “He owes us a favour.”

“Must be a big favour,” said Starscream, even as he climbed in and Astrotrain’s plates tessellated back together behind them. Inside it was dark.

“I don’t want to fragging hear it,” said Astrotrain through his internal speakers in a strange, staticky version of what presumably, his voice must have sounded like. He didn’t sound that impressed, either. “All I know is that I’m helping a friend pick up his over-energised friend and we’re going wherever.”

“That’s right.” Skywarp banged gently on one wall with a fist. “You got it!”

Right. Starscream leaned against Astrotrain’s wall in the dimness. He could feel his powerful engines humming, vibrating in the warm living metal of his plating. He pressed his face against it.

“Where to?” Astrotrain prompted.

“East,” said Starscream.

“Uh… I was thinking, you know, more along the lines of ‘which city’,” Astrotrain prompted.

Starscream grunted. “No city,” he said. No civilised place would be safe for Starscream now. “They’ll have my image on the comms before morning even--”

“Hey,” Astrotrain barked. “What did I say?”

Right. “Just get me outside the walls. East wall. Outside the east wall.”

Despite these clear instructions, Astrotrain made an uncertain noise. “This sounds very legal and not criminal at all and all,” he prefaced. Starscream made a derisive noise. “But you know there’s nothing out there, right? Like… that’s why we call it ‘the wastes’? Nothing out there? Other than the things that want to kill you. Which is… all of them.”

Skywarp and Thundercracker were sharing a significant look over his head. He let his optics shut off again.

“Hey,” Thundercracker elbowed Starscream, hard enough to make him grunt. “He’s got a point. Is that really a good idea? We’re not exactly carrying a lot of supplies.”

“Yeah,” Skywarp said. “If you just wanted to die, you could have saved us the trouble of being accomplices.”

“What the frag did I say?” Astrotrain snarled. “If you say one more thing I’m going to drop –”

“Wow, these sure are cool drunken shenanigans you thought up,” Skywarp said loudly. “Nice, harmless, over-energised pranks. Ha, ha.”

Astrotrain’s engine gave a loud rumble that indicated, Starscream thought, that he was pretty much done with their slag, but he kept flying and didn’t drop any of them. Especially not Starscream, which was good, because of the three of them he was the one who wouldn’t be able to go anywhere.

“I’m not going to die,” said Starscream, without even opening his eyes. “I’m going to find my crystal, and then I’m going to refine my own energon, and prove every one of them wrong. You can stay here and rust in a cell if you like. This is--” he shook his head, but it did not in any way disperse the energon buzz. “-- This is just the, the push I needed. Yes.”

He could feel Thundercracker’s vents open wide in a colossal sigh. “That’s one way to look at it,” he said.

“East it is.” Skywarp’s voice didn’t lose its cheer.

“You’ve got processor rust,” Astrotrain opined, but he took them east anyway.

“Hey, Screamer, do you know you’ve got energon on your foot,” Skywarp said.

“Skywarp,” snapped Astrotrain, aggrieved.

“I’m sure it’s, uh, high-grade,” Thundercracker said, in a tone of voice that suggested pretty much the opposite.

Starscream mumbled something, mostly to himself, and listed sideways until he thumped into Skywarp. Even that didn’t really rouse him.

“Well, hi there,” said Skywarp, to which Starscream just growled incoherently.

When Starscream came online again, some six hours later, with his fuel tank throbbing and his vents gritty, all that greeted him was the enormous wide expanse of the purple-blue sky and the huge, sprawling, barren wastes.

And then a shadow fell over him.

"You're still online?"

Thundercracker.

Starscream grunted. Yes, he was still online. Relevance... pending.

A second shadow appeared, overlapping.

...Thundercracker and Skywarp. Huh.

“Sooo… what do we do now?” Skywarp wondered.

Starscream cycled his vents. They were already taking in too much dirt from being out here and he doubted he’d be getting an oil bath any time soon. Still, it was better than the alternative.

And he still had that cutter in his subspace. “I’ve got some ideas,” he said.