AN: Written to the Tori Amos song of the same name. Starscream in the past and present.
Let them break, let them bleed, let them wash away, these precious things.
It's too late for much of anything, now, but sometimes, in the quiet spaces, Starscream thinks of precious things, and how they break. Thinks of how things are, and how things would be, with a little more time. A little grace.
Of how short and trembling and fragile both time and grace seem, now.
Time. Like the flow of quick-burning energon, leaving only a whisper and the shimmer of cracked fuel-lines as he opens his hand. When he was a sparkling, he hoped for time to be fast, so fast, he wanted to be an adult now. He'd be so sure, because adulthood seemed so full of bright, smiling things, of everything. And so he'd sat, in his parents' dry, still, dessicating house, feeling as though clustered around him were the flaking remains of crumbling, broken fuel-lines. Sat, and waited, as the paint cracked, tumbled, in the quiet and the slowness. Waited for a fairytale. Waited for a nightmare. Waited for a moment.
And one day he'd left that dry, still, unmoving house, where there was only the dark places and the tumbling of time and hands on his neck and his voice somehow swallowed and broken in the silence for company. Never looked over his shoulder. His parents had watched him leave. Not an emotional moment.
This is us and that is you and the time when the spaces of our lives brushed is passing. As they'd stepped apart, a silence had crossed between them.
Whatever you want. Go.
Go? Go my own way? Yes, I will.
You're never going to follow anyone else's road signs again, are you?
No… no, I don't think I will. You taught me how valueless that is.
Starscream hadn't looked back. Hadn't needed to. He'd known, even as a youngling, that time crosses its own boundaries, careless of all border-posts, ignorant of all guards.
Sometimes, though, he felt the stillness and decay of that house cling to his shoulders, and knew that you can sail every ocean and pass every star to escape from something, but nothing moves through time wholly lone and untouchable.
Sometimes, he felt as though every bright and pure fragment of him had stayed in that house, that house that was now a hundred thousand silent pieces in a broken city on a decayed planet that followed the ashen orbit-paths of a dead sun.
Starscream has never wanted to go home. Homesickness is not something with which he's familiar. But sometimes, he thinks that maybe if he did long for somewhere, maybe it would be that house, to go and lie in the silence for a while.
Despite his words, despite what would have been the defiance to his parents if there had been enough warmth for feeling between them, he was good at the Science Academy. Neat. Precise. Punctual. Orthodox. Because you can't always have what you want gift-wrapped.
(Where had that patience gone? Ah, Starscream supposes, but it's simple to have patience when you know what you want, what you need, will fall into your hands. Harder, so much harder, when you are struggling and uncertain and you know that somehow things are never going to be simple again. When, despite your words, you wonder if they'll ever be right again either.)
He'd learned a strange sort of patience, in that house. Learned that sometimes, in the silence, truth was never quite what you would want it to be, need it to be, so reshaping it is of little weight.
And he'd found Skyfire, and lost a little more of himself.
So much of himself, a little piece here, a little piece over there, that sometimes he felt shapeless and empty. There are pieces of me you never would have wanted to see, Skyfire. Some of them, you saw, and you hated, in this war. Some of them, no one's seen, and I keep them close to me, because I need something to hold.
And Skyfire was an old pain, not the oldest of all the anguishes that slept restlessly against his spark and woke unhappily to the touch of the silences, but maybe the most poignant. And he'd like to maybe someday drown in the matrix, and pull this most fractured hurt down with him, down into the darkness.
It's not a hurt that he can describe, like an old, ancient split lip, that stings and breaks freshly with every intake of air, and burns with every sip of energon. Or perhaps a scar, deep inside his body, that pulls and twists into lines of white pain every time he turns in the night.
And he is already describing it, but he can't help it. Always wanted to voice and quarrel and shape his arguments and thoughts, ever the scientist, and he can't help but form his pain, and watch helplessly as it tumbles and dissolves into shapeless grief again.
You always had those pieces of me, Skyfire, I just never realised. And you hold them still. You'll hold them in the matrix, beyond the end of all of this, and they'll be yours to keep, even beyond that. And I know that we'll never be one again. We're too much and too far gone, done too much and said too much and been too much. Earth took you from me for so long. Took you and wrapped you in whiteness and sang you lullabies as you lay, a secret in the ice, and now you'll never belong to any other being. I hate this Earth, because you spread your love like starlight across its land and its filthy creatures and left me in night. But nonetheless, it's all yours. Everything of me. I have things that I won't surrender to leave my cause, but you hold what's important.
My love. My silence. My darkness. My home.
And I'm glad that you have my home. Glad to know that it's out there, somewhere, right beside yours', and though both of those paths are now barred to me, you take my home and you rest it alongside yours.
It was Skyfire's disappearance (death) that closed the Academy's doors to him, and he'd stored all of the little pieces of that place inside of him and decided.
I did whatever you wanted, and I disappeared inside, and now your doors are locked to me?
Then I'll be what I want, and if any part of me vanishes, it'll be because I murdered it, and not because you stole it. I'll burn everything inside of me before anyone else can ever take it, and I'll give them ashes that still tremble with the heat of the fire.
Megatron had just been another point in his life. Megatron had brought hatred and despair and determination, and fire, another fire to burn Starscream up inside and tear it all down. And nothing had really changed.
His life with Megatron had been fast fast fast heat pain fast fast battle and death and fierce joy fast fast fast noise and strength and passion fast fast fast would he ever stop trying to hide from that silent house?
And it was what he'd been trying to find all along, but it felt brief, unfinished, and didn't fit in with anything. So he tried to find a new way, tried to find something else, tried to throw out, burn up the old and bleed his way through the ashes. And it didn't work, it never worked, but the joy of it, the joy of tearing it all down and dragging it from the ground anew never faded, and so it went on.
Skyfire keeps it all safe anyway, everything that he burns away, from Megatron and beyond, and Starscream hopes, with the last part of him that isn't despair cruelty desire breaking burning impatience grief treachery, that Skyfire will wait for him in the matrix, beyond everything. Because Skyfire is his home and his love and his silence and his stillness and everything that he can't find.