Chapter Text
“The strange illness in your spark leaves it prone to wandering,” an old mech in a rundown neighborhood in the seedier part of the already quite seedy Kaon had told him once. He’d glanced her way to see her sitting in her stall, labeled for fortunetelling and soothsaying and promptly passed her by without a second glance.
That was in his insurgency days. Back before Cybertron fell into the shambling wreckage it was now. The mech was most certainly dead and Starscream was not much more a believer in the supernatural than he was back then.
Even so, the comment had stayed with him throughout the years, for some odd reason, gumming itself up in a distant part of his processor. His spark had proved to be quite… eccentric, usually in his favor. Though sometimes it ached when they were near black holes or massive solar storms, cosmic hurricanes, for reasons he’d never been able to deduce himself.
His spark was strangely responsive to forces beyond himself, is what Starscream settled on, lacking any sort of scientific explanation, and tired of searching for one.
He had died a few times, as much as he ever died, which apparently was pretty halfheartedly. He’d spasm a bit, give a death rattle, choke on a bit of his own energon, then be brought back into his frame sometime between a day and a few millennia with the cosmic supernatural hangover that apparently came from having visited the void and back.
Then, there was that one time Starscream brushed the matrix. It had been during a close range fight, which was about the only time he had gotten near enough to Optimus to touch him in such a way. They’d been fighting in some muddy slog of a field somewhere on Earth, Starscream’s gun kicked away, Optimus on top of him attempting to beat him into submission with his fists and chastising demeanor. As if that had ever worked previously.
Starscream had reached up, desperately trying to push him off. In the attempt, he ended up pressing his hand flat against the cool glass of Optimus’ windshield, right about where the matrix rested a few inches away within his frame. It was a feeble attempt and didn’t do much except leave a smear of energon, but it did make Optimus pause for a moment.
Starscream himself was gone. In some white misty chasm where he heard the whispers of mecha long dead and confined to the annals of Cybertron. He came back to himself with a bloodied nose, mud seeping into his seams, and finding that both Optimus and his own faction had left him for dead on the field.
As for the voices? They’d lingered with him for a while after that encounter, coming to him when ship halls were dark and no one was around to dispel that creeping feeling he got when-
Point being, his spark was weird. It did unexpected things. Starscream played with a hand of cards he would never fully understand.
All that aside, he’d really forgotten the whole spark issue of late. The war was dying down, outside a few violent sputters. It would be a few more millennia, most likely, Megatron and Optimus were not quite yet done dancing around each other for another turn of eternity.
There was also the fact Skyfire had recently resurfaced. That in itself superseded Starscream’s own spark in evoking queasy feelings of disease and uncomfortable pulls to places Starscream himself would rather not go. His mere presence mired Starscream in a bog of undigested feelings that whispered poisonous sentimentalities and conjured visions of a different time, a different reality, what could have been if Starscream merely had the spark to indulge in his weaker nature.
They hadn’t talked much. That is, Skyfire tried to talk, looking at Starscream with those big, open and ever so sad looking optics. And Starscream? Starscream did his best to steadfastly ignore him. They didn’t need anymore upsets in this slowly ceasing embattlement. If he could just hold things steady, manage to push things to the end of the war, perhaps- perhaps then-
Starscream didn’t allow himself to even think of it. He knew how well affection, hope, joy, all those soft, overly saccharine, ever so boring emotions could be turned against him and used as a weapon. There was no need, no purpose in engaging with them. It would be unwise, a fool’s errand.
So despite all his recent distractions, Starscream is unconcerned when Prowl shoots him dead on in the spark, downing him from the sky in a violent tailspin, landing with heavy impact to writhe in a muddy field until his spark gave out and then reignited.
He felt the familiar searing, blackout pain in his chest around the same time Megatron was roaring in rage over his comms and Starscream found he’s emotionally numb to it. Physically in agony. Yes. They’ll haul him off to Hook’s dour little medical dungeon where his idiot gestalt will slump over his body in befuddlement, looking at flatline readings until magically they start beeping again.
They’ll celebrate, the morons, off the back of Primus’ good graces and Starscream’s own strange fate. This is how it will go. Starscream is sure of this.
Then he heard someone bellowing his name, in that raw kind of way that really served to capture the agony, the shock, the distress. It struck right through to the spark, which was already seizing in pain that slowed his processor down to a chug. It took Starscream a moment to think of anyone that would scream like that for him, of all mecha, after all this time.
Then he recognized the voice and panicked. Skyfire was entering his blurring and fragmented vision, his face crumbling down into a mix of grief, denial, and shock. Huge hands find their way around his shoulders, offering a small bit of comfort and warmth through the agony.
Turns out they were wrong. Starscream wouldn't be dying alone. Not this time. A part of him, detached, insane, is laughing in the back of his processor at this latest punchline in the cosmic joke that was his life.
“Starscream,” Skyfire said, voice stalling out with emotion.
Starscream wished he could tell him, if only to spare himself the nuisance of his blubbering. Open up about his nasty little outlier spark and its tendency to resist the natural forces of death. He had the feeling it wouldn’t save Skyfire much pain, he probably wouldn’t believe him at all.
It brought him no joy to see Skyfire going through all the emotions Starscream knew so well, had experienced himself, though in a less gruesome manner, when Skyfire disappeared. But they don’t have any privacy to make that sort of revelation and Starscream’s intake was clogging up with energon now anyways.
Because of course Prowl, pit spawned son of Unicron that he was, had to go and hit a major line alongside his spark chamber. Some of it sprayed out in an unprovoked cough to dribble down his lips, much to Skyfire's increasing horror.
Starscream looked at him, and he thinks it's this that helps settle Skyfire down from his raw edge of panic. He attempted to at least convey this: whatever happened was going to happen, and Starscream was okay with it.
When Skyfire reached out to touch Starscream over the spark, he didn’t think anything of it. It was a common gesture of intimacy in their culture, to express love, to say goodbye to a deceased friend, to welcome a new spark into being. The universal wordless hello and goodbye of the Cybertronian world.
Skyfire’s fingers brushed over his plating, soft, always so gentle and measured for a mech his size. Starscream exhaled, feeling the ache of his frame and the rattle of his own intake. Then his vision went dark.
—
Consciousness came back in scattered flickers. A medley of noises, colors, indistinct voices that said things his sluggish processor couldn't hold onto long enough to parse. Then consciousness hit him like a brick wall.
He was in a transport shuttle, on a gurney, rattling this way and that as the transport most likely struggled to leave the atmosphere of the planet they'd been raiding. He was unstasis cuffed. Good. A quick assessment of the transport coloring and the blurry frames at the edge of his vision told Starscream he was in Autobot captivity. Not good. Starscream lurched himself up.
He swayed for a moment as a wash of disorientation and nausea roiled through him. Something was off with his systems, his processor felt too sluggish and off kilter to precisely land on what it was, but he had the sense he was looking through a pair of different lenses.
“Get back down,” A gruff voice commanded.
Hands were on him, pushing him back against the gurney. But they were small and Starscream was big. Had the Autobots always looked this diminutive? Starscream smashes his fist into the side of the transport. It has a surprising amount of impact, creating a booming thud, and leaving a dent in the wall an inch or two deep.
“You’re next if you don’t let me off this ship,” Starscream growled lowly.
“What’s going on back there?” a mech called, voice strained with something edging panic.
“Skyfire’s having a mental break,” someone shouted back. For the life of him Starscream couldn’t remember who all these scrubby little bottom ranking Autobots were, though some of them looked vaguely familiar.
“So sedate him! I’m trying to fly and you aftholes are tearing the ship apart,” a frantic voice called from somewhere in what Starscream assumed was the front of the transit.
He was just debating the merits of trying to storm the cockpit and hijack the transit to a gentle crash landing, when he felt it. There was a pinch, somewhere in the soft proto metal exposed at his waist.
“Easy big guy, easy,” The softness in the tone threw Starscream off as did the weakness in his knees that had him crashing down heavily.
A casual intimacy he wasn’t even afforded in his private life was now being thrust on him as enemy hands propped up his frame to prevent Starscream from keeling over and smashing his helm into the transport floor. He was allowed to tilt forward, and his body was lowered gently to the floor. He felt like he was in some sort of surreal dream state.
“Frag,” Starscream muttered in a voice that was definitely not his own, as his vision once again went out.
—
Sometimes the blackness of nonexistence felt like a blink. Other times it was an eternity. Starscream hadn’t yet died enough times to work out any sort of pattern as to what kind of death led to what kind of bout of nonexistence. But this time, it felt more like a small eternity, consuming in its wholeness and finality, eroding the edges of his memory with the sensation. This kind of darkness always left his processor sluggish and disoriented as it clawed its way back into alertness.
When Starscream finally woke up, the over-bright lights of the medbay were beating down into his optics. Everything hurt, as everything often did. He tried to sit up but found he couldn’t.
“Easy big guy, just relax, you don’t need to get up yet,” A gruff, but affable voice sounded from somewhere off to his right.
That wasn't right, a small voice in the back of Starscream's processor whispered, setting his frame on edge. Neither were the plain gray walls with an obnoxious orange line painted in the middle of them. This medbay was barren, brightly lit. Was it even a medbay? Was he in some sort of surgical torture room tucked somewhere out of Optimus’ oversight?
“I rather be in the brig than whatever you've got planned for me here, let me up,” Starscream snarled. He paused. There was something wrong with his vocalizer. It was pitched too deep, and had none of its usual rasp. A reboot error?
He tried to move again. A chronic victim of being handcuffed, Starscream had learned the trick of rubbing his fingers against his own palm to see if he was stasis cuffed or restrained through normal means.
He attempted to touch anything with his fingers and found that he could not.
“You’ve stasis cuffed me,” he said accusingly, only to find his voice was definitely lower. Had it sounded this way in the transport?
There was a rumbling growl and a depth to it he hadn’t heard out of his own vocalizer since Vos was still above the rubble.
“Easy now,” the voice near him soothed again.
It was Ratchet. Starscream’s processor started ticking through the details of the situation. A feeling deep in the pit of his fuel tank was telling him something wasn’t right. A scan through his own systems set things straight immediately.
“Skyfire,” he breathed, almost silently.
“It’s okay. I know you had a bit of a shock out on the field, seems like you passed out when you,” Ratchet paused, appearing to struggle with how to phrase the next bit. “Saw something traumatic.”
Starscream supposed death normally was traumatic to other mecha, he had probably just gotten a bit too blase about it. Distantly, Starscream found himself wondering what had happened with his own frame? He supposed they’d know soon enough, the report would come down that he was deceased.
Starscream stared down at the giant, white expanse of his frame, and tried not to ignore the uneasy well of volatile feelings that rose up at the unwelcome thought he might have somehow unintentionally erased Skyfire’s existence entirely. His spark had done many weird things, but that would be entirely outside of the realm of what Starscream thought was possible.
“When are you going to release me?” he asked Ratchet sharply.
“Just waiting on a few more results to come back. If those are all clear, I’d like to hold you another night,” Ratchet said, giving him a soft pat on his chest.
Starscream let out a frustrated growl.
“I know, easy big guy,” Ratchet soothed, expression showing only the slightest wrinkle of concern. “Besides the physical, are you feeling alright?”
A personal question. Starscream couldn’t dodge that minefield forever, but for now, his recent shaken up state would provide cover for any out of character behavior. Best course of action: don’t engage, minimize elaborating on personal details.
Starscream stared listlessly at the ceiling, waiting for Ratchet to get the hint and go away. After a lingering pause, Starscream felt a pat on his thigh and he did. The plating where Ratchet patted him tingled for a few moments. Starscream couldn’t imagine Hook ever doing such a thing, he wouldn’t dare. Not if he wanted to keep his fingers.
Dimly, Starscream wondered what it was with Autobots and their overly touchy manner of expressing feelings. Their careless penchant for trust, easily given and then ever so bemoaned when it was inevitably betrayed. And they had the gall to label Starscream a masochist.
Alone with nothing to do but ruminate, Starscream's thoughts wandered back to Skyfire. If Starscream was here, inhabiting his frame, then where was Skyfire? In the void where Starscream went between deaths, untethered to any sort of reality? Had he perhaps traded places, inhabiting Starscream's frame? That was a gravely and mutually dangerous situation if so.
Or worst of all, could it be that Skyfire had simply been overwritten? A swell of dread washed over Starscream’s spark at that, as he allowed himself to fully engage with the idea and its implications. Displacement could perhaps be rectified, but if there was nothing left to begin with, if Skyfire had simply ceased to exist the moment Starscream had entered his frame- What then?
Starscream was drawn out of the bog of dread and back into the present as he heard the pedefalls of Ratchet walking around near him again.
“You get some more rest, Sky, I'll be back to check on you in the morning,” Ratchet promised, casting him a warm smile over his shoulder as he headed to the door. Starscream watched him open it, envious of his escape from this tedious little room.
Then he flicked off the lights as he went and Starscream was left alone, in a foreign frame, on an enemy ship, dwelling on the potential reality that he had overwritten his oldest… colleague. His venting came out frantic, shaky and raspy, in out, in out. He was trapped, Skyfire was dead, the Autobots would soon find out his deceit.
Starscream shuttered his optics, vacated his mind, a practice one grew well acquainted with when living with the likes of Soundwave. His breathing regulated as he focused on maintaining his calm. Tomorrow he would be freed of his restraints. Tomorrow he could investigate the ship for an escape route. Everything would come in time, but for now, he had to maintain his wits.
Starscream attempted to give one last futile struggle with his restraints. Nothing. Then he listed off elements until consciousness slipped away into recharge.