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Title: Mechanical Butterflies

Warning: Beware the purple prose!

Rating: G

Continuity: G1

Characters: Starscream

Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

Motivation (Prompt): "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose."

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In your mind, Vos still stands. It's a fool's vision, but even facing the dead planet your home has become, hope in your city is the last to wither. It took seeing Cybertron himself to convince Megatron of a lost cause and a losing war. It takes landing in the ruins to see the truth of your delusion.

Your memories crumble in the face of reality, and the truth slams into your unprepared mind like a guided missile. For a brief time, the skyline reels as past and present fight in your overwhelmed thoughts. You stumble through the city searching with frenetic need for one familiar feature. Any familiar feature, the face of past allies, something that you recognize!

But, no. The skyscrapers are broken underfoot. There is nothing left of the soaring heights but empty sky. You stand staring at the emptiness that had been full of life, the featureless wasteland that had been your home, and you sway in place as the present seeps around the corners of your vision. Vos falls,

Is falling,

Has fallen,

Fell.

Dust swirls in your footsteps, impressions left in the rust as you walk. Flight seems like sacrilege here, where it flourished. This is a place where nothing now flies. From above, you would have been scorned. A flyer choosing to walk? Yet it is the only homage you find fitting, moving slowly on foot through the girders and wreckage that had thrust vertical into the sky. Puffs of decayed metal like solid air settle in your wake, tumbled structures that had been obstacle courses to the inhabitants of the sky. Vosian buildings had incarnated joy, physical signs of Vos' dedication to the want, to the need, to the yearning for the sky that flyers had while at rest. Going inside a construction bound to the ground was a disturbance. Flyers regarded being indoors as a wrinkle in time, a ripple between flights, and Vosian architecture heightened that feeling. Every second inside heightened anticipation for the moment of seeing open sky again.

That joy is gone. The profile of a city reaching for the sky has collapsed, and in your memories you replay a hundred buildings collapsing. You weren't here, you didn't see this skyscraper go down, this building judder floor-by-floor to the ground, but you can imagine. You walk, and overlaid over your vision is the city burning. This is desolation personified in a memorial to destruction, not a proud city of flyers. This is Vos today, but you cannot see the reality for memory at times. You turn corners that aren't there and pause before crossing a street that's vanished under debris. Something in you is searching for the past, still. It hovers above despair,

Listens to reality,

Waits for hope,

Mourns the loss.

Did you rule here once? You want to say, Yes. You want it to be simple, like calling the end of civil war a victory. If not for the memories of a thriving city still preying on your thoughts, you could accept the devastation. It would take away past and present complications and leave the vast sky to be rewritten as clean history. You were Emmirate, the Vosian ruler, and your face twists in sour anguish as you revisit the question: did you really rule here?

You want to say, Yes. Experience says, No.

You were at Megatron's side after Vos. You saw his claws in other Emmirates, his manipulation of you mirrored in the subtle influence over representatives, diplomats, warriors, and civilians. Your pride made you scorn those Emmirates, holding up your voluntary alliance to Megatron like a trophy instead of a defeat. You are not apart from history; you are one pawn among many. Vos, too, fell. Your supposed rule was the same as other citystates, other worlds, other conquests that appeared on the surface to be alliances and willing surrender to the Decepticons. They were puppets pulled by Megatron's hand, and so were you. No matter how high your scores at the War Academy, no matter how skilled your flight or smooth your tongue, a disgraced scientist does not become Emmirate. Not that easily. Not without strings attached.

An observer would think you overenergized, perhaps drunk with grief, because you stagger through the city. You're unable to walk a straight line, but since smooth roads are long gone, it hardly matters. Things are rearranging in your head, a puzzle that had been assemble all wrong the first time. The real picture, once clicked solidly together from assembled facts, frightens you because you didn't see it.

You were a placeholder, a prideful front that conveniently handled the bureaucracy while Megatron's schemes turned public opinion and private favor toward his own ends. You handled the tedious parts of trade and governing while his power infiltrated and guided and ultimately decided what you thought you knew. When the choice came, you too thought it your own idea. Seekers seek the new, the thrill of discovery, and bureaucracy is never innovative. Given a glimpse of a search, a cause that inspired you…yes, you'd grabbed for it. Of course you had. You'd fled the dull repetition of work for what you saw as escape — just as Megatron had planned. The rush of flight through dangerous new skies, Autobot-hated skies, became another prison. Only now, spinning back through the past, do you see how the skies didn't belong to you.

Megatron's skies,

Never your skies,

Not even Cybertron's skies, not anymore.

Everything you thought Vos to be died in the stranglehold of Megatron's grip, and it takes the muffled crunch of your footsteps through the ruins to realize it. He'd laid a beautifully baited trap to lure scientist to government, Emmirate to warrior, and it's being set at your feet again. You'd fled the peace negotiations, but they were tempting. From outside, however, from a more wary perspective, you can see how Megatron would stifle you again. He'd wrap you in pervasive bureaucratic nonsense until you gasp for freedom like a drowning mammal for air, until you take whatever he offers you as a gift instead of rejecting it as poison.

You were his Second in war, unable to move up or down for his presence and tight hold, but the war is over. He would make you his government pawn again, bound by rules and regulations. You would thrash inside your confinement, and the tension would rise. You can see it, now that you know to look and predict it. Perhaps you would have become his excuse for war in the future. Maybe you would have been the loud, flashing front while he worked behind the scenes, or maybe this time you would have been the dagger hurled at someone's back while he made his own distracting speech.

Maybe you're the one history points fingers at, the Vosian Emmirate the Autobots blame for the Decepticons' sudden superiority on the field of war. You led the Decepticons to conquer the air and abandoned your city in the process. Two times a traitor. Megatron would make you the traitor again, the Decepticon who abruptly breaks the tentative peace after Cybertron is rebuilt and there is nothing left to strive for but another day in the grind.

You've run from your typecast role, retreating from the negotiations, but you can feel Megatron reaching after you. The hold he's kept on you still caresses your wings, fans your Seeker ambition with promises of power. Your internal communication array crackles static and commands, the harsh snap of his voice and the underlying seduction of his words. But you brace your legs in the ashes, a hopelessly defiant stance taken against the lure. You search the city you once thought you ruled, looking for the power he promises. He'd given it to you, or so he'd promised while Vos still soared among the great, but all that lingers today is the stale smell of rust and corrosion. There is no mark left of your city, no sign of its flight - and past and present collide, entwine, and realign. You know he did not give you power. He took it away,

Has taken it away,

Always takes it away,

Will take it away again.

This is Vos. This is your city. It echoes silent along the ground, not even memory bringing the air alive. There is no advantage here to salvage, not even as a symbol. You came here to recoup, and now you fall to your knees in the wreckage of your hope. The past fills you until the present lacerates you, draining it out in a suppurating bout of insanity. Your time-doubled vision clears, cleansed but eerily washed of color. You look out over a monotone scrapheap that had been a city to your optics a moment ago.

It leaves you achingly empty and coldly aware of your situation. Nothing left to lose, no one left to cling to, not even a shred of power or glory to claim as your own. Not a single piece of pride to save you. The past and its hindsight cannot stop the present. The juggernaut of peace will seize your spark, tear apart your lingering thoughts, bury your independence and defiance and protests in bureaucracy. It will begin again, history repeating itself. Your history, once more, and your history is held in - was written by - other hands. Power? History? It isn't yours. It's Megatron's. Always, only, just…Megatron's.

And Megatron

Is coming.