Author's Note: This is a sequel to my story Under His Wing, which is not archived here for ratings reasons, but can be found by searching for Grayseeker at Archive of Our Own, or by following the link from my profile page. I have tried to write "Beckoning" in such a way that it stands alone, but there are still things that will probably make more sense if you read the stories in order.


The Beckoning Silence
by Grayseeker

"Just fly!" Starscream yells. He is clinging to Skyfire's back, and ordinarily he would give some thought to how ridiculous this must look, but right now he's more concerned with the fact that the roof is caving in.

A falling chunk of concrete hits Skyfire's shoulder and glances off, leaving a deep, ugly dent, and Starscream feels Skyfire shudder as a falling beam punches through his thigh. A heavy spray of energon erupts from the wound, indicating a severed artery. Slag it, Starscream thinks, but then something heavy falls on him and crunches his wing like tinfoil. The damage probably shouldn't matter at this point considering what a mess he is, but the pain wrenches a cry from him anyway, and it's only belatedly that he realizes Skyfire is shouting at him, shouting his name.

"Starscream!" His voice is lost in the noise of the world ending, but his words, carried through their bond, inject themselves directly into Starscream's stream of awareness. "You shoot!" Skyfire orders. "I'll fly."

Shoot. Right, he can probably manage that. He unclamps an arm from around Skyfire's neck and fires upward, vaporizing steel and concrete before it has a chance to crush them, while Skyfire rockets up, dodging the pieces of debris that Starscream can't hit. They soar through the crumbling roof and up, into the veiled blue of Earth's sky.

"Keep going!" The wind rips Starscream's words away, but Skyfire seems to understand. His engines roar, and Starscream feels the rush of acceleration. It's almost enough—but not quite. When he looks down, he understands why. That severed artery is spurting like a geyser. He re-aims his weapon, adjusts it to the lowest power setting, and fires. It's an old trick for a reason. The heat seals the severed fuel line and they zoom up again, but it's too late.

The shockwave hits before he even hears the explosion, and it's like riding on a thunderclap. Skyfire angles his wings to catch the blast, letting it drive them higher and faster, and all Starscream can do is hang on. He laughs because this is so crazy, and he imagines how he must look right now—like a baby bat clinging to its mother's back—and also because he has entirely forgotten where he is, when he is, where they are.

Gravity falls away and they're alone among the stars, with nothing between them but the vibrant warmth of Skyfire's back and the rhythm of his life, like a song, beneath Starscream's hands, his cheek, his spark. They're tumbling through the darkness, together and free.

"Keep going," he says again. There's no atmosphere to carry the sound of his voice, yet Skyfire seems to hear. He turns and catches Starscream to his chest, spark to spark, powerful arms holding him in the starry silence, and he smiles. His optics are a blue pilot flame, and Starscream feels as if he's falling up, into that bottomless ocean, that deep summer sky that is home to his spark. When Skyfire speaks, his voice sounds from the depths of Starscream's own mind.

Find me.

Starscream came awake with a jolt, and sat up so fast he nearly smashed his head on the roof of his crib. His alarm subroutine kicked in, bringing his weapons systems and flight engines online with brutal abruptness while his addled mind grappled with the question of whether it would be better to fight or to flee. The realization that he was alone sank in a moment later. His quarters were quiet, dark, and almost peaceful—or as peaceful as they ever could be, considering they were next door to Megatron's. He swung his pedes to the floor and staggered up.

The silence was back.

He could feel it like a physical pull on his spark, commanding him into flight. He stomped across his quarters, making noise just for the sake of hearing it, though of course that made no difference. This was a silence that had nothing to do with sound. It was more like an absence, a dead spot at the core of his being, and it had become a regular, increasingly frequent part of his life over the past three and a half orns. In other words, ever since Skyfire had, once again, managed to get himself captured by the Decepticons, and Starscream had—again—helped him to escape.

How quickly it had become unfamiliar to him. The silence had been his constant, only real, companion for, literally, aeons. Less than a single year had passed since he'd finally found Skyfire, buried in the strange zone of silence he'd discovered in Earth's arctic. The irony was that he'd only needed his trine there with him to help him figure it out. Those obscure Seeker traditions that he'd spent most of his life avoiding had turned out to have some uses, after all. The zone muffled the bond he shared with Skywarp and Thundercracker just as effectively as it did his deeper, more intense bond with Skyfire.

Starscream didn't even want to think about the probabilities. Somehow, Skyfire had crashed in the one place—not just on Earth but, as far as Starscream knew, the entire universe—where their bond couldn't reach. Find me, Skyfire had said to him, at the time of their last parting. What a joke that was; Starscream knew precisely where Skyfire was, give or take a square kilometer or two, and he'd become so used to sensing Skyfire's presence, however faintly, through their bond that his absence felt like a blow. Even now, his traitorous body was quivering with the need to fly, to seek, the need for—

"Slag it!" he shouted, this time at the top of his voice, and aimed a savage kick at his desk chair. It fell sideways and struck the edge of his worktable on its way down, and a small metal object rolled from the edge of the table. He kicked that, too, sending it flying into a corner. It struck hard, raising sparks from the wall, just as Starscream's sluggish cortex recognized the thing for what it was.

He dove after it with a curse and scooped it up, his hands automatically checking for damage. The object was crushed, blackened and had never actually worked in the first place, but all that was beside the point. He glided his fingers over contours that were worn smooth from a thousand, thousand touches like the one he was giving it now, and vented a sigh of relief.

It was a phase-shifter, or had been. Or, at least, the prototype for one, though he and Skyfire had eventually given up trying to make it work. It was the one thing he'd managed to hang on to from that long-ago time before the war, and its solid weight in his hand served as proof that that world, the one in which he and Skyfire had labored over it, had actually existed. It was the one thing that made him believe that his life before hadn't been some kind of dream, as fleeting and ephemeral as his defrag imagery had been just now.

He set the phase shifter, carefully, on the edge of the porthole that looked out on the inky depths of the Pacific. It took a moment for him to realize that something outside was looking back. Actually, a bunch of somethings. They hovered in the murk, blank gazes trained upon him as if they expected him to throw a handful of breadcrumbs, or… whatever fishes ate. Chinook salmon, his memory banks supplied, as if there was the slightest chance of his not recognizing them. By now he'd seen enough of the Chinook, as well as its buddies the sockeye, chum, pink and coho—to last him several lifetimes.

"Go away!" he snarled. "Scat, shoo!"

The fishes stared at him. There was zero chance they could have heard him through the starship's thick hull, but he couldn't shake the distinct, unnerving impression that they were pondering, and choosing to ignore, his request.

Watch for the salmon, Starscream, the cracking voice of Sigil Nightspark, left-hand Speaker of Illuminus Trine, echoed mockingly from the back of his mind. Their journey of return shall parallel yours.

Those had been her parting words to him, nine million years ago. Back then, there'd been no such thing as salmon, and the Earth, from which he'd just recently returned after his last, fateful trip with Skyfire, had not yet evolved a form of life capable of naming them as such. It was a coincidence, obviously, that the humans had chosen that particular name for that particular species of fish, with its particularly odd migratory habits, and it was only to be expected that he now saw them, constantly, peering at him through the portholes. That's just what happened when you lived in a tin can at the bottom of the ocean.

It was also, quite clearly, coincidental that he couldn't scan human television or radio frequencies without arriving at some fishing show or an in-depth analysis of the salmon-colored drapes in someone's living room. Humans were both predatory and obsessed with trivialities; that wasn't news. So why couldn't he escape the feeling that that wretched old harpy, Nightspark, was watching him from some obscure pocket of space-time and having a grand old cackle at his expense?

"I'm not returning!" he barked, to the salmon and the memory of Nightspark and—most of all—the silence. "Anywhere!"

He spun on a heel-thruster and stalked to the door, which snapped open at his approach with prudent alacrity. The off-shift was well underway, which left the corridors silent and deserted. He headed for the rec room, hoping to find some means of distraction. Every cable in his body was strung tight, aching for the sky, and he needed something that would keep him grounded. Thundercracker was usually good for a fight whenever Starscream might choose to pick one, as were Thrust or Astrotrain.

The rec room, however, turned out to be as deserted as the officers deck had been—and why had he never noticed how unsettlingly large the windows were in here? They offered a panoramic view of the surrounding ocean-bed and of darting, silvery shapes among the towering kelp forest. He strode back into the corridor, slamming the rec room doors with a little more force than necessary, and considered his options.

He had two. Well three, if you wanted to get technical, but approaching Megatron would be a serious breach of protocol, and Starscream had long ago learned the wisdom of letting Megatron choose the time and the place and of not letting his own desires… interfere, in any way. That left either Dirge or Scavenger. Dirge was, by far, Starscream's preferred choice. What he lacked in personality he made up for with his understanding of, and more to the point respect, for protocol. He deferred to Starscream's rank without a quibble, and never attempted to turn their encounters into anything… more. Unfortunately he was in the repair bay recovering from a near-fatal encounter with a dinobot, which left Starscream with just one option.

He preferred to think it was a coincidence that his route to the lower crew decks took him past the brig. His steps barely slowed as he passed that one particular cell, the one where Skyfire had asked him to make love to him. As if that was a thing. As if anyone actually "made love," as opposed to merely fragging.

Yet Skyfire did, and Starscream had forgotten. He'd buried those memories deep, where nothing—no one—could ever reach them. Even himself, he'd thought, and yet Skyfire had brought them to life with just his touch, just his kisses and his easy, graceful surrender. He'd made it look so effortless, as if surrendering was the most natural thing and letting yourself be taken was a delight, not a humiliation. Starscream could almost remember when he'd thought that way, but that wasn't his world anymore. Wasn't him.

Scavenger was slow in responding to his knock, but when he finally did, his face lit with a ridiculous grin as if there was no one in the universe he'd rather find standing on his doorstep. "Starscream! Come inside," he invited, shifting one of his piles of junk to the side so that Starscream could fit his wings through the door more easily.

Come inside. Those words froze Starscream on the threshold as he recalled them being said to him, albeit in a very different context, just three and a half orns ago. That, itself, was almost enough to change his mind—but he needed this. He wouldn't be here if he didn't.

"It's been a while," Scavenger remarked as he bounced across the room, dodging stacks of crushed Volkswagens, threadbare couches and defunct refrigerators, somehow managing to avoid hitting anything with his scoop-tail, which he carried behind himself with improbable dexterity.

"It has," Starscream had to agree. He could tell it had been by the degree to which Scavenger's "collection" had grown since he'd last been here. Scavenger was always collecting things in hopes of discovering something that his gestalt team would find impressive or useful. Most of it was utter junk, but for some reason he hung on to a lot of it, to the point where his quarters now resembled a thrift shop.

"I've missed you," Scavenger added.

Uh-oh. This had been a bad idea, and Starscream had known that it was—and yet. If Scavenger could just be sensible enough to not regale him with poetry this time, he could cope. Probably.

"I've got some Visco," Scavenger said, scanning the contents of his ancient chill-unit. "Well, it's not really Visco," he amended, "but you can hardly even tell. Mixmaster distilled it, and—"

"No."

Scavenger's expression fell. He looked incredibly young without his battle-mask, though that, of course, was just an illusion. He and his fellow Constructicons had been around since well before the war, but his eagerness to please gave him an oddly youthful quality.

"How about some energon, then?" he offered. "I've got blue grade, yellow grade, and a tiny bit of—"

"I'm not here to drink," Starscream cut in, glancing around at the mess.

There were precious few horizontal surfaces—apart from the berth, which Starscream preferred to avoid, just on principle—over which Scavenger could be bent. He decided that Scavenger's workbench was probably the best candidate. It was around hip height, and wasn't covered with quite as many oddments as the rest of the furniture. He began clearing a space, moving aside boxes of tools, the skull of some kind of horned animal, and a fancy little cage of the type that humans used to entrap birds. Starscream paused over this latter object, morbidly fascinated in spite of himself.

"So how have you been?" Scavenger asked.

"Well enough," Starscream muttered.

There was a tiny, gray feather caught in the cage's door hinge. Had the bird died within its prison, or flown free? There was no way of telling, but Starscream suspected the former. Life was just like that. He shoved the cage aside and picked up a stack of moldering books. These were arranged in prismatic order according to color, which made Starscream wonder if Scavenger actually knew what books were for, or if he'd just collected them because he liked the way they looked.

A yellowing sheet of paper slipped from the pages of one book and landed on the worktop directly in front of him, as if an invisible hand had placed it there. It was a page from a magazine, and featured a full-bleed photo of a muscular, heavy-jowled fish with a speckled green back. Journey of the Salmon, read the explanatory text. Each year, an entire generation battles the current to find their way back to natal streams where they will mate, then die. Follow them on their mysterious—

"Enough!" Starscream crumpled the paper with a snarl of irritation.

"Sorry?"

"Not you," Starscream growled.

"Oh! Okay." Scavenger gave a relieved chuckle. "Well check out what I found at a dump the other day. It's an Earth music machine; can you even believe it?" He was bent over a small device which Starscream's memory banks identified as a record player. Scavenger had it set up on a metal crate with a portable power-supply and a stack of battered-looking records. Scavenger took one of these from its cardboard sleeve, set it on the turntable, and dropped the needle. The result was a high-pitched, chirruping caterwaul which, while not being as bad as Scavenger's poetry, was still fairly unpleasant.

This had been a mistake. Starscream knew he ought to just leave and find some other method of distraction, but— "You have it set to the wrong speed," he heard himself saying instead. He dodged between several tottering piles of junk to reach Scavenger's side, flipped the appropriate knob on the record player, and the music became, well… music. Of a sort.

"Hey! How did you know how to do that?"

"It's obvious," Starscream retorted, knowing full well that it wasn't. His mind, he suspected, was not unlike Scavenger's quarters; a vast repository of useless facts which he hoarded every bit as jealously as Scavenger did his trash-heap treasures.

"Now I get why humans call this stuff groovy!" Scavenger exclaimed, gyrating his hips to the beat.

"Groovy?" Starscream mentally filed the word away for later investigation. The song's lyrics, if he was understanding them correctly, had something to do with "stayin' alive"—which was ironic, considering the average length of the human lifespan.

"C'mon, dance with me!" Scavenger said, grabbing his arm.

Starscream tried to twist away but Scavenger tugged him closer and, before Starscream had a chance to react, looped an arm around his waist and leaned in. As if he wanted to—

"Get off me!"

Starscream pushed him away roughly. Scavenger stumbled and his shovel-tail knocked over the crate, sending the record player smashing to the deckplates. Silence fell; the terrible, maddening silence.

"We've been over this!" Starscream yelled, trying to drown it out. "We can't do this if you continually insist on pawing me, do you understand?"

Scavenger dragged his rueful gaze from the broken record player to Starscream's face. "I just thought…" he paused, shoulders rising in a half-shrug, "maybe things had changed?"

Starscream vented a sigh. "Why ever would you think that?"

Scavenger's gaze migrated back to the floor. "Well, I did come to your rescue."

Ah yes, the "rescue." Scavenger was talking about how he'd attempted to rescue Starscream from Skyfire, who had been pretending to hold him hostage. It had all been part of Starscream's plan to help Skyfire escape from the Decepticon base, a plan that would have gone much more smoothly if not for Scavenger's "help." Scavenger, of course, didn't know that.

"Look," Starscream said, with what he felt was a ridiculous amount of patience. "Do you want to do this, or not?"

Scavenger studied him, as if thinking about it. Finally he crossed to the bench and bent over it, as befitted their respective ranks. He set his pedes wide apart, folding his tail, scorpion-like, above his back. This was the one aspect of protocol that Scavenger never tried to argue about, though Starscream suspected that was only because Scavenger preferred the receptive role anyway.

It was a sensible choice, however, and Starscream rewarded him for it by reaching between his legs and squeezing the plating that covered his groin. A tremor ran through Scavenger's frame, and Starscream heard a small, wanting sound from him as he rocked against Starscream's hand. He tightened his grip, intensifying the stimulation while at the same time holding Scavenger's fore interface panel closed so that things wouldn't be over too quickly.

Not that quick was a bad thing. It was, in fact, Scavenger's main virtue. If Starscream wanted a quick frag, Scavenger was exactly that; quick. Starscream had it down to a science, and could get Scavenger off in seconds if he wanted, though he generally considered it a point of pride to make things last a bit longer. He glided his other hand along the flat plane Scavenger's aft, and the panel there opened even at this, merest suggestion of a touch. Scavenger arched, tilting his hips, and… Starscream never should have looked.

He knew it was a mistake the moment he glanced down, but it was already too late. Scavenger's submissive posture, the inviting tilt of his aft; Starscream suddenly couldn't fight off the memories of Skyfire doing just this. Not in some vanished time long ago, but just a few weeks earlier.

Come inside.

Starscream would have thought better of it if he'd allowed himself to, or if had seemed less like a dream. A dream made so real, so solid beneath his touch, so alive and warm and somehow, miraculously his, after all this time and in spite of everything. He took a step back.

Scavenger glanced up, surprised. "Starscream?"

"Can't." He didn't want just a quick frag. He wanted… he didn't want to want what he wanted. This used to be enough, and now it wasn't, and how could he have been such an idiot? Let himself imagine, even for a moment, that things could be any different?

Scavenger's expression clouded with disappointment, confusion, and then—infuriatingly—compassion. "Oh, don't worry," he said, turning and reaching for Starscream. "That happens to everyone. Here, maybe I can help—"

"Don't touch me!" Starscream slapped Scavenger's hand away and stared at him in disbelief. Did Scavenger actually think that he couldn't, in the physical sense? Starscream gave a moment's thought to denying it, then decided that it wasn't worth the effort. Scavenger could think what he liked so long as he didn't tell anyone, and even Scavenger had more sense than that.

He left without a word, escaping back into the corridor. The silence was waiting for him, muffling the ring of his steps as he walked in an all-too familiar direction. The cell had become his last refuge, and he'd been spending an inordinate amount of time in it lately, a habit which he kept carefully hidden from his fellow Decepticons. He had to pause for a moment, fighting a wave of claustrophobia as the door slipped shut behind him.

The silence was more intense in here, but so was the crushing sense of water bearing down on the starship's outer hull. He needed that weight to keep him grounded, and the fact that there were no portholes in here, and therefore, no glimpse of the salmon-haunted depths outside, came as an unexpected blessing. The cell felt intimate, and safe in a way that his quarters never could. No one, Megatron least of all, would think to look for him here.

He leaned against the wall. The bulkhead was cool against this back, but it gradually warmed. When he shuttered his optics, he could let it become a broad, solid frame supporting his, and the distant rumble of the base's tidal generators became the thrum of powerful flight engines. His arms, now wrapped around himself, became those of another.

He sank down to sit on the floor, pulling his knees up. He was sitting now where Skyfire had sat chained to the wall, a prisoner. How different were their situations, really? His engines revved, impatient to carry him skyward, back to the arctic and the heart of the silence. In moments like this, he understood perfectly what drove the salmon on their strange journey. But he wasn't a fish; he was a Decepticon, and second in command of the most powerful military force the universe had ever seen. One day, he would rule Cybertron. He'd chosen this life and had worked too hard for it, made too many sacrifices to just throw it away for…

A dream.

A dream that was consuming him from the inside, filling his recharge cycles with vistas of deep, endless blue. In his dreams he flew toward it, fearless. In his dreams, he was lifted into that open vastness and welcomed with soft murmurs, softer kisses.

He dropped his forehelm to rest on his knees, and waited. When the silence finally dropped away, it wasn't so much a return of Skyfire's presence but an ending of his absence, accompanied by an easing of the compelling pull on Starscream's spark. It should have been a relief, but wasn't. It was just a different kind of emptiness. Maybe this was the last time that Skyfire would wait for him. Maybe this time he would finally get the message and give up, leave for good.

It was that silence, Starscream knew, that would break him in the end.