Ice. Darkness. Terror.
For five million years, I hung suspended, unable to see, unable to make a sound, unable to breathe. I was terrified for the first hundred or so years, then grief-stricken for a good number after that, finally settling into a period of resigned hopelessness. There was no one coming. Of course, I did not feel time pass as such. There was no chronometer for me to check against. This planet was not Cybertron, so the rotations meant almost nothing to my sensors.
I thanked Primus I wasn't a full Seeker. As a flyer, I was instinctively claustrophobic, but I was not so foolish as to try to escape a full glacier of ice by myself. I wanted to preserve the undamaged circuitry as long as possible.
I had hoped that Starscream would send help, or look for himself, but it was impossible in this kind of ice storm. We both knew that. I had no way of sending or receiving comms, so he may have looked for me and I would not have known. We had not become close enough to feel comfortable sharing a spark; mine pulsed in its casing, hoping even when my logical processors predicted a survival rate of below ten percent.
My thoughts often revolved around the smaller scientist, a brilliant engineer in his own right, a mech determined to be the best in his field, or to be fair, multiple fields. He was an excellent weapons designer, and some of his blueprints had already been adopted by the Enforcers to quell the rising tensions on Cybertron.
Starscream. I missed him, desperately. I had no expectation of seeing him again.
Warmth. Light. Confusion.
Stasis had descended at some point, I couldn't remember when. Not that it mattered. When I onlined, I heard voices muttering, minor conversations I couldn't make out. Then my optics cycled on; there were two mechs in the room. One was a large gray mech, probably a Kaonite, if I remembered my history, and the other was-
Starscream, typing away on a datapad, not even looking at me.
The emotional turmoil tore through my systems. Starscream had survived the entire ordeal? Had he looked for me? Had he tried to rescue me?
The thought rose in the back of my processor: he may have engineered my crash. I immediately dismissed it, horrified at myself.