"Skyfire." The scientist looked up from the datapad detailing the specifications of Wheeljack's planned newest creation. There was something wrong in the inventor's formulas, but just what, Skyfire hadn't figured out yet.

"Yes... Prowl," he said, minorly pleased to be able to correctly connect the name with the as-yet unfamiliar face of Optimus Prime's second. Ratchet had opined that the length of time he'd spent in the polar ice had damaged some of Skyfire's cerebral circuits, but assured him it was something his own nanites would be able to self-repair, given time.

"May I come in?" the tactician asked. "There are some things I would like to ask you about your recent interactions with Starscream."

"Certainly," Skyfire said, setting the datapad to the side. Prowl crossed the invisible threshhold of Skyfire's doorway, a door left open in subtle invitation to his new companions and crewmates. Skyfire knew only a few of them so far, and that was an uneasy feeling.

"Thank you." Prowl looked around Skyfire's quarters. They were a converted hangar; the Autobots stranded here on Earth had had no fliers among them, and certainly no one else of Skyfire's size. "You haven't many personal effects."

"I haven't had time to familiarize myself with the different Earth cultures yet," Skyfire replied. They were what most Autobots decorated their quarters with, memoirs of home being few and far between and mostly destroyed in the crash that had buried the Ark in Mount Saint Hilary. "You were interested in what I could tell you of Starscream?"

Prowl's mouth opened, closed, then opened again. His soft voice was quiet as he glanced quite deliberately back at the open door. "This... may be a conversation of a somewhat personal nature," he cautioned.

Understanding with a sinking feeling what Prowl wanted to talk about, Skyfire nodded, and remotely cycled the door closed. He really didn't want to have this conversation with a superior officer... but he couldn't well refuse either, and he doubted the temperate tactician was asking out of any sense of prurient interest.

Hera's Curse
by K. Stonham
first released 7th December 2007

"You and Starscream were... close," Prowl began carefully, not wanting to alienate the newest member of their crew. "Back on Cybertron."

Skyfire nodded, folding massive hands into one another. "We met during the course of our studies. I thought he was brilliant. A bit wild in his proposals at times, but what's a good scientist without some flare and determination?"

Prowl nodded. "Starscream has always been brilliant." He tilted his head slightly to one side, examining Skyfire's posture. The jet was cautious, but not defensive. "You were lovers?" he inquired.

"I... yes," Skyfire confessed with a sigh, looking down at his hands. "Until I crashed in that storm."

"But not bonded," Prowl asked, needing to confirm it.

"No." Skyfire shook his head.

"And after the Decepticons pulled you out of the ice?"

Skyfire looked up sharply at Prowl, eyes wide and blazing with an indeterminate emotion. Prowl met that gaze evenly, refusing to back down, and after a few seconds Skyfire's gaze dropped to his hands again. "I wanted to be," he said very, very quietly, and there was a raw note of hurt in his voice. "Starscream said... said I wasn't enough for him anymore." A gust of bitter laughter, self-deprecating. "That he had bigger plans now... bigger needs."

Prowl stepped closer. Giving comfort wasn't his forte, but even he could see that Starscream's rejection had deeply hurt someone who had loved the mech Starscream had once been. "What were his exact words?" he inquired softly.

Skyfire looked up again. "Why?"

"It may be important," Prowl told him. "Please try to remember."

Skyfire breathed out a low breath, his optics seeming to look past Prowl into nothing. "'It's over, Skyfire'," he said quotatively. "'Deactivated and done with a long time ago. You're... not mech enough to make me overload now. My sights have been set higher'."

"'Have been set'," Prowl mused aloud. This was confirming his theory.

"Is... is something wrong with Starscream?" Skyfire asked hesitantly, a rejected lover without all their long vorns of warfare to season the ache.

Prowl sighed, wings relaxing just a little. "If my theory is correct... quite possibly. And, unfortunately, incurably." He leaned back against the wall and looked speculatively up at Skyfire. "You would never have heard of 'Imprint'; it was developed after you left Cybertron. But had you ever heard of 'Open Your Optics'?"

"The pleasure program?" Skyfire asked. Prowl nodded. "Only by name and function; I never experimented with it." He tilted his head to one side, expression curious. "How is this related to Starscream?"

"In the early days of the war, the Decepticons tried many recruitment programs," Prowl informed Skyfire. "One of their scientists took a copy of Open Your Optics and manipulated the program's code. The original was used by mechs and femmes involved in sensory deprivation play, or bondage or control games. At the end of the deprivation or control, most commonly by the removal of a blindfold, the program caused the individual affected to achieve overload. Thus the name." Skyfire nodded. "The mutated version of the program, however," Prowl continued, "causes an individual to only be able to achieve overload with the first person they see after becoming infected. Which is why it's called Imprint."

Horror was scribed large upon Skyfire's face. "And you think Starscream is infected with it?"

Prowl shrugged minutely. "It's a theory which fits all available data."

"There's... there's no way of reversing the effects?" Skyfire asked.

"Ratchet has never been able to create one," Prowl answered. "Though it's been a long time since he's taken a look at the problem. A fresh set of optics looking over his data couldn't hurt, of course," he added solicitously.

"The Decepticons... shouldn't they be infecting people right and left with this?" Skyfire demanded. "They'd win the war outright with a weapon like that!"

Prowl allowed himself a slight smile. "They might have, if things had gone differently," he allowed. "When the virus was first engineered, they tested it on a captured Autobot sympathizer, intending to imprint him on Megatron. He was rescued before that happened, and Ratchet was able to reverse-engineer a vaccine, which became a standard part of the Autobot inoculations." He paused as a thought occurred to him, and raised an inquisitive optical ridge. "Ratchet did give you the full spectrum of vaccines, didn't he?" he asked.

"Yes. What happened to the Autobot sympathizer?" Skyfire asked.

"He joined the army," Prowl replied. "His identity, as one infected, remains safely anonymous."

Skyfire gave a shuddering sigh. "And you think Starscream is infected."

"Logic would indicate that Megatron used Imprint on Starscream," Prowl agreed, nodding. "He's brilliant but unstable, and has long exhibited a love-hate relationship with his master that Megatron, logically, shouldn't let him get away with."

"Starscream..." the scientist sighed sadly. "So that's why he's a Decepticon."

Prowl blinked. "Skyfire..." he said slowly, not wanting to hurt his fellow Autobot further, but unable to avoid it.

Skyfire caught something in his tone and looked up at Prowl. "What is it, Prowl?" he asked.

Reluctance tugging at his CPU, but having no choice but to tell Skyfire the truth, Prowl spoke. "Starscream was with the Decepticons long before Imprint existed," he told the jet sadly. "Starscream was the one who created it."

Author's Note: A possible explanation for the always-intriguing Megatron/Starscream and Starscream/Skyfire dynamics. The title of "Hera's Curse" refers to Greek mythology. If you go far enough along in a liberal arts education, about the time you start getting terms like "cultural imperialism" and "cultural expansionism," you learn that it used to be quite common (and still is in some ways) for religions to expand into new geographical areas by going "Ooh, hey, your gods? Our gods! Your holidays? Our holidays! Let's party!" Which partially explains Apollo and Zeus chasing after every bit of royal or divine skirt on three continents as local deities were absorbed into the extant ones, or married or dallied with them. What it doesn't explain, however, is Hera, the goddess of marriage either sitting at home playing "Stand By Your Man" or chasing after Zeus' new paramour with divine wrath in her lovely eyes. What does explain this is a variant of the myth which states that Zeus put a curse on his sister-wife such that she could only *cough* "achieve fulfillment" *cough* with him. This really says something even worse about the ancient Greek idea of marriage, but makes for a really interesting character development of a goddess who is generally perceived as a one-note shrew.