Disclaimer: I do not own anything or anyone. Transformers are the property of Hasbro.
A/N: This is my first fanfiction, and English is not my first language (meaning: be kind; and point out any terrible mistakes if you see them).
I was never going to put this in writing, but inspiration had a gun pointed at my head.
So here it is – Starscream's descent into madness. No bright future prospects promised.
Movement
Chapter 1
He wished it was a technicolour nightmare. Nightmares did end.
His excruciating journey did not.
Starscream was terrified as never before in the millions of years of his existence. Lost, disoriented, desolate. Completely alone in the ever-expanding void of interstellar space.
He could not grasp for how long had he been flying in this direction – it could be breems or stellar cycles, or decades. Time had ceased to exist. He was but a ghost, a shadow going nowhere without direction, without guidance – without anything to hold on to.
Confined by eternal vastness.
Fuel reserves would run out… soon.
Silence was the most unnerving because it made his errant thoughts twice as loud. Clashing emotions swirled in his CPU fighting each other for dominance. It was torture. He tried looking past them in search for remains of confidence, but he found none. Hysteria was taking over, slowly and mercilessly.
How he wished his friend was there, chuckling good-humouredly at his pessimism, telling him everything was going to be all right. But he had left him there, on the accursed planet. Had he condemned him by trying to save him? Had he left too soon?
Starscream tried to picture Skyfire smiling assuredly, but everything his mind was able to come up was a broken and mangled shell, covered with a strange white substance. Lifeless optics accusing him of giving up the search too soon.
ooo
Starscream had wanted for the exploration mission to never end. He had been happy.
The tetrajet might have fashioned himself a lone mechanoid against the world, but in reality he would never admit to himself he yearned for acknowledgment. He needed to be spoken of, thought of… dreamed of – a constant reassurance he mattered.
Starscream was a black hole for attention, he took everything. Sadly, it was the same striving to become the epicentre of all, which made even kindred souls recoil in horror.
It had been so easy – travelling with Skyfire. There had been no-one to steal his spotlight, no-one his Skyfire would talk to or think of. Skyfire had listened to everything he rejoiced at, ranted about or sulked over, and Starscream had been grateful. He had been content and self-confident, revelling in the long sought after approval; thoughts so surprisingly calm and crystal clear. Had it been his friend's generous patience and kindness that tamed his quick temper?
There had been only one thing to be afraid of, making his processors glitch from worry, the moment he would have to return to Cybertron.
He had tried to fool himself, to pretend there was no going back home – all in vain. Skyfire had friends there, ones he was so ineffably jealous of. He would go – leave – as everybody did, and then they would be reduced to the mute figures nodding to each other when passing by on a crowded street. Phantoms of the past, reminders of what once had been – he had seen too many of the kind.
The very thought of going back to the normal, simple and predictable life on Cybertron repulsed him. He hated the rules society lived by with an ardent passion. For it was nothing more than a mind-numbing routine, much like a visual track on a loop. Nights at an energon bar, holidays spent on trips to the nearest friendly exoplanet to 'relax and see some amusing alien wildlife' – everything to forget the unnerving reality which was work. Or, as leaders of the High Council had once put oh-so-eloquently, the great machine of advancement.
What disturbed Starscream most was the fact that nobody seemed to notice the obvious absurdity of such existence. Slaves to the credits did not dare to raise optics and look outside the box. They knew no different.
But he was not one of them. He had always felt he was destined for something greater.
ooo
Life had a cruel sense of irony indeed.
He was now heading to the planet he had thought would take Skyfire from him, the very sphere he had been so reluctant to return to.
The breakneck speed at which his exostructure was cutting through clouds of interstellar grains did not seem fast enough anymore. Assorted warnings flashed threateningly in front of Starscream's visual receptors: low energy levels, damaged sensors, system malfunction. Little by little his neural nets were being overwhelmed by the sheer fear of deactivating. It was not something natural for beings blessed with a supposedly eternal life. Everything faltered in front of the terrifying prospect of the ultimate end.
Starscream searched the never-ending blackness desperately for anything recognisable, but all stars looked foreign, as if mocking him. Sensory nodes on his wings still screamed from the recent brush with a flock of space rocks, but he did not dare to numb the throbbing pain. It was keeping his thoughts clear, and he needed it. Focus.
Affected by self-repair systems, the pain was already starting to subside, when Starscream's visual receptors registered the little yellow speck of a dying star, uncannily dim among its sisters - the ghostly centre of Cybertron's solar system. He thought it but a mirage, a hallucination spawned by his failing processor, but the image was genuine, almost indecently real. A decaying body of collapsing elements was stretching its spectral fingers towards him.
He felt relief seeping through the grooves of anxiety, filling his spark with warm gratefulness, as system, now firmly locked on the coordinates of Cybertron, confirmed the worryingly low levels of fuel would be just enough for covering the remaining distance and landing. At the moment his processor did not register anything beyond the familiar safe comfort home planet offered. Everything he had racked his neural circuits about whilst on the mission and during the lonely way back seemed to have lost all significance. Politics, ideals, even fear for Skyfire's well-being – nothing mattered when compared to an end in the threatening void of the cold interstellar space.
And then his visual sensors acknowledged it at last, the tiny metallic sphere that was Cybertron mirroring the ghostly shine of its sun. A diode blackened by soot, a reflection of the world built on millions of years of striving for industrial perfection. Smothered, pillaged for energy, long doomed by unattainable goals - for a sentient mechanical being it was home still.
Starscream felt all self-doubt fade until it was nothing more than a footnote in one of the folders locked away at remote sector of his memory banks. For the first time he was sure Skyfire would be all right. He could have fallen into stasis lock from a lack of energy, he could be covered by layers of the crystalline substance, circuits damaged by its tendency to expand when going into frozen state, but all right nevertheless. Their species wasn't of the kind that was terminated easily, and Starscream had never known anybody to end life in this unnatural way. Although the knowledge of such possibility existed as a part of his basic programming, he was still young and unpolluted by disillusionment tormenting those who had seen hundreds of centuries pass before their optics.
To himself he had proven to be the greatest of flyers yet again - returned as a hero, found the right way back through an uncharted territory of space with nothing but his optical receptors, won at impossible odds!
Oh, he was the best.
Nonetheless, he couldn't gloat over his strength and brilliance just yet, because entering Cybertron's atmosphere, however thin, and landing without ending up as scrap metal presented new problems and new, possibly sad, scenarios. Then again, he could calculate the necessary angles and trajectories even at less than a half of his processing speed. It was easy, as everything visualised in front of his optic sensors - all probabilities considered, all potential plans of action devised, simulations run, checked, and run again. After all, there was a great scientific mind safely hidden behind the deceptive veil of flamboyance.
The Cybertron's northern hemisphere bent in a great arc beneath his small form, skyscrapers glistening dangerously like energon needles in the sun. He could already tell the whereabouts of Iacon, the mapping grid locking on the tell-tale coordinates of the place he had spent many stellar cycles of his life at. The Iacon Institute of Science and Technology – they had left it together, he and Skyfire, to explore nine exoplanets as the basis for their final major project in xenoplanetary geography and biology. It seemed to have been only breems ago, as they had watched home shrinking to a little dot in the distance, both eager in anticipation to see the wonders of planets yet to be officially registered, yet to have a mark in the great chart database of outer space.
The last night on Cybertron was etched in his memory banks forever, now almost too clear for his liking. The hopes had been sky-high, the conversations had been flowing freely, as had the high-grade. He had never been able to stand the eternal babbling of Skyfire's friends, but at the time, with a little help from the particularly strong energon and the fact that many questions and half of the praise was addressed to him, Starscream had been uncharacteristically polite, kind even. He hadn't sent anybody to check for a possible loss of half a motherboard, he hadn't snapped about not being backwards-compatible when somebody couldn't grasp his explanations, full of science slang as they were. That had gone so well with Skyfire. He had looked as if he was thanking Primus for reformatting tetrajet's neural nets, even if for only one night.
Starscream snorted at the memory, he never wished to see the bunch of dolts again. Only Skyfire could enjoy the company of such undereducated factory drones, unable to talk science or politics, or, as the case seemed to be, anything remotely intellectual. What did his friend see in these mindless gears anyway? He would never lower himself to such level, that's for sure. Closing the memory file and leaving the annoying contradictions of Skyfire to be reflected on later, he concentrated on the present situation once again.
He was quite certain of the way things would happen once back on Cybertron. He would return to the institute and tell them where and how the accident had happened, and they, in turn, would immediately put together a deep space rescue team. As it was somebody's life that was in danger, the team would, no doubt, be given one of the ships with an in-built space-shift acceleration drive, used only for special missions. He had seen one of them at work on a video wave transmission channel once, and was sure it would take the rescue team to the alien planet in no time. Skyfire, that big oaf of a shuttle, would be back and operating, and annoying as usual. Oh, and he surely wouldn't miss a chance to point out the dubious functionality of his white friend's weather simulations programme, just to make things nicely habitual again.
Starscream let his thoughts wander for a moment, now regained all the confidence the impromptu space trip had taken from him. He could already see the headlines: "Courageous scientist saves a team-mate", "You just have to do it for a friend – says the young hero", "Starscream, the fastest jet in the universe"…
His once-enemies would blow gaskets in envy.
With a particularly amusing mental image on his CPU, Starscream took a sharp dive towards the surface of the planet. Everything was going as planned – his turbo engines whined from the boost, his frame heated up, and vents jumped to life with a loud whirr to compensate for the rising temperature. Global positioning grid switched on, and the names of cities and highways spread out before his visual receptors. The marked place of Iacon was just few degrees to the left, but he could not alter the trajectory once the angle had been taken. Leaving all paint coating in the upper levels of atmosphere would not be a fitting arrival for 'the fastest jet in the universe'.
Oh well, Starscream thought, precision doesn't really matter that much. However, he couldn't quite suppress some annoyance at the fact he had made a mistake.
Wherever I land, I'll be able to get a shuttle to Iacon anyway, he tried to convince himself it had been the idea all along. They might be even waiting for me, I'm sure they have been informed, he imagined a crowd watching his touchdown, cheering. Yes, they are… oh… what the…
"Slag!" the tetrajet cried out, as he first heard a click, then a strange hum rising in volume, followed by an audios-piercing spatter, as his right booster gave out, the lost balance propelling him out of the angle and pushing downwards steeply. He was too shocked and surprised to react, whilst warnings of overheating, angle miscalculation, gyro malfunction and prognosis of imminent termination ringed in his audio receivers in a distorted, simultaneous clash. Having registered the overwhelming heat, the touch nodes under the armour plating were automatically shutting down one by one to save him the agony of a sensory overload.
Starscream fell faster and faster, the friction fire spreading from the nosecone to the tips of his wings, grazing at the polish and paintjob, threatening to melt the alloyed plating underneath. The jumble of buildings down beneath seemed to be rushing towards to greet him like a long lost friend, but he was not eager to meet the crushing embrace just yet. He had to find a way out, there was always a way out.
Think, think, think. Starscream tried to focus, whilst attempting to fight off the suddenly overwhelming weariness that made everything a blur. He was in a freefall, all systems destabilised by the heat, electrolytic liquid from cracked capacitors leaking in his systems, short-circuiting the vital connections. It could be only a matter of astroseconds until it got to his core processor, stopping all functions and forcing an involuntary stasis lock. He would not feel the devastating impact destroying his exostructure and distinguishing his spark as he hit the ground.
ooo
The falling form of the tetrajet, like a torch thrown into abyss, reflected in pink, naive optics of a sparkling standing on a passageway joining upper levels of two skyscrapers.
"Look, creator, a shooting star!" the sparkling squeaked with excitement, tugging on an older mech's wrist to get his attention, the other hand stretched towards the yellow sky, pointing at the glittering dot, now not so far from the spires of the higher buildings.
"Stars do not…" the creator started explaining in a surly tone, speaking volumes of how tired he was, but still raised optics to look at the sector of sky his offspring was pointing at.
"Oh… that," was all he was able to utter once the realisation struck him. "Don't look at it!" the mech hastily added, turning around to shield the sparkling from the sight of one's termination. "It will make your optics glitch."
"But it's pre-eee-ty" the sparkling whined in a pleading tone, visibly offended.
"I said 'no', and that's the end of it," the old mech scolded, pulling the sparkling towards the end of the passageway and to an entrance in the building, his processor at unease over the grim fate of the 'shooting star' he had just seen.
ooo
To be continued…