Warning: Read this fic at your own risk.
Dark!Fic
Size Kink
Medical(Mechanical) Gore
Body Fluids
Involuntary/Nonconsensual/Rape
Fear
Mind Games/Manipulation
BDSM

Also, some bad science.

There is no Shattered Glass Metroplex or his minions, so I'm doing a lot of research and making it up as I go.

Rating: R

Continuity: G1 (Footnotes AU) / Shattered Glass

It is not necessary to read the Footnotes series to understand this fic, but it is set in the same universe. Some of the world-building is involved.

[* * * * *]

From TFWiki –
joor = 6 hours
cycle = 1.25 hours
breem = 8.3 minutes
klik = 1.2 minutes

[* * * * *]

Starscream had once debated theology with Shockwave.

Not intentionally, but these things kind of…happened in war. Soldiers had these kinds of discussions. Even the least intellectual flyer speculated on a life underground, and footsoldiers had philosophical discussions about perspectives on life from the sky. Crammed together in overfull barracks and fortresses, under siege or just plain bored between training runs, the rank and file developed vast, glittering theories of warfare and civilian life alike. They verbally shredded commanding officers in both factions, reorganized Cybertron according to a grunt's priorities, and generally solved the universe's problems in the course of seventeen consecutive duty shifts. Getting shot at or preparing to shoot at other people was a mindset conducive to musings that would never cross the minds of normal mechs in peacetime.

Good officers ignored their soldiers' grandiose plans, knowing it was just hot air filling time between orders. Rarely did the big mouths lead to big actions. Really good officers averted their optics but kept their audios open, noting who talked the talk and walked the walk. Those grunts got marked as subversive, or intelligent. Or both, in which case the Decepticons promoted them.

Who knows what the Autobots did with their intelligent, back-stabbing plotters. Common theory held that they were send to the front ranks to die (or switch sides, depending on how smart they really were). Another popular theory was that they were reprogrammed to kiss Optimus Prime's aft like a proper peace-loving, blindly-obedient recruit should. Everyone knew a meritocracy couldn't be tolerated by the faction that had supported, of all things, the Senate. If ability and motivation were recognized properly on Cybertron, the fragging civil war wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

See how these discussions just happened?

Things happened in war that, theoretically, weren't proper. Grunts dissed their officers. Officers ignored impudence. Really good officers gave as good as they got, which might explain how some officers got rushed to the repair bay and some never made it that far. It wasn't standard operating procedure, but it happened.

Put one of Lord Megatron's generals into an overcrowded repair bay in Helios Base 4, damaged but not critical, and he'd get bypassed by the medics. That wasn't SOP in the Decepticon faction as a whole, but it was How Slag Gets Done Around Here in HB4. This general hadn't been one for demanding premium treatment, a private room, and a personal medic dancing attendance on him. Logic dictated that triage shunt him aside into one of the sidebays to be repaired after the emergency cases were taken care of, and Shockwave was a quieter, more reasonable mech than the other six generals. He knew better than to demand from Decepticon medics what Decepticon medics didn't have time or inclination to give. Repair attendants could be ordered around, and there had been several who did their sniveling, ingratiating best to numb and prep his melted feet for actual medical attention, but Decepticon medics were specialists. They could make a mech regret surviving the battlefield just by turning around and hefting a simple bolt-cutter.

Oh, yeah. That was all kinds of special.

One of things that got discussed at length among the grunts was the Unwritten Rules. The Unwritten Rules were those orders that were never actually given. They were entered into no duty logs, and no officer ever said them out loud. They were passed by word-of-mouth through the rank and file, and smart officers kept up with any changes that occurred from base to base, because the Unwritten Rules applied to everyone. Officers were just supposed to pretend that they were above them even as they obeyed them. Smart mechs survived to continue being smart mechs by obeying these rules. A good half of the Unwritten Rules circulating focused on repair bay etiquette(1).

So when Shockwave had ended up in a sidebay after the battle at HB4, made as comfortable as possible by the repair attendants but otherwise ignored for the time being, he'd settled in for the wait as per HB4's Unwritten Rules. At least he'd gotten a berth instead of the floor unlike the unfortunate three mechs sharing the sidebay with him. Even medics weren't entirely above Unwritten Rule #13: Higher rank means getting the good stuff. Two of the other mechs had been offline, showing similar melt damage on their feet from the Autobots' mobile gunnery unit in this battle. The third mech, however, had been a junior flight officer trying to distract himself from the pain. He'd soared through the outer fringes of the laserblast instead of taking a glancing hit like the other survivors. The heat had literally fused his wing armor into a solid mass.

Starscream had been laid out on his front, arms folded under his chin and jury-rigged supports propping his wings off the floor. He hadn't been able to see the general on the berth. He'd been facing away from the door. It'd been a particularly vulnerable position, but his paranoia hadn't been as fully developed yet. At that phase of the war, he'd just graduated from the War Academy and had been working his way up through the ranks with the total confidence, sheer ability, and disturbingly clever mind that would eventually earn him the rank of Air Commander. But that would be the future, and this was then.

Damaged and in severe pain, dealing with a rattled processor from the crash, Starscream had fallen back on old habits. Seekers had fiery natures, tempests of emotion contained in bodies designed for warfare. Starscream the scientist had spent a lifetime cultivating intellectual response over emotion. The first third of his time in the War Academy had been the most difficult, requiring the breakdown of millennia of study habits and the building of a whole new set of reactions. He'd coldly throttled any hint of leftover shame at how easy the new warrior habits had come to him. They erased a past life that he didn't want to remember any longer.

The balance of emotion to logic in aerial battles tended toward the quickest thinker, but flashes of intuition weren't guided by thought. Wing-level reflexes saved a Seeker's neck, buying time for the thought. It was why a good half of them were high-strung to the point of giggling, unhinged emotional surges. It was why a remaining third of them were armored more heavily, flew more slowly, and tended toward the other side of the spectrum: brooding thought instead of quicksilver emotion. It was why they flew in trines, finding external balance where their internal programming fell short. It was why Lord Megatron had an Air Commander, someone who could ride and read the faster-than-thought shifts among the air ranks and forge order from their chaos.

Starscream excelled at walking that tightrope between emotion and thought. He'd graduated at the top of the Academy because of a prenatural inclination toward thought over reaction, rare in high-strung flyers, but his emotional instability gave him a distinctive razorsharp edge in that combat-tumble of mood and change. His instructors had been fiercely proud. His classmates had been sullenly jealous. His wingmates feared him, and his superior officers watched his skyrocketing career closely. But nobody asked about what background had produced this spectacular flyer, or what loss had produced such a passionately hateful junior officer.

Unwritten Rule #3 centered on personal history: Don't ask, don't tell.(2)

Injured and rattled, his firework emotions had sputtered down into white noise. Laid out helplessly like this, waiting for repairs, Starscream had returned as ever to past habits. He'd drawn inward, examining his own programming in an effort at self-repair and distraction. So close to his internal processor, more machine than autonomous being, he'd offhandedly rejected the overheated spuh spuh of his thwarted emotional core. His personality component became less important than his system modules at this range.

Given time, Starscream reasoned himself out of panic and into thought. Past habits always surfaced.

One of the other mechs in the sidebay had woken shouting nonsense and calling on Primus for mercy as his melted body parts spewed sparks. A repair attendant had rushed in to immobilize him and knock him offline again, but Starscream had absently commented on Primus being unlikely to help someone so weak. The flyer's attention had been elsewhere. Shockwave had, however, been in enough pain himself to latch onto the provocative comment as a momentary diversion.

Shockwave, follower of logic and protocol, did not believe in Primus. He knew the history of the cult, though, and had pointed out the flaw in Starscream's comment: the priests of the main temple were great believers in the power of faith overcoming that of the body. The junior officer kicking his heels on the floor had stilled, unaware until then that anyone else was awake in the sidebay. He hadn't known who the speaker was. In truth, Starscream hadn't much cared. Too much thought was as painful as physical damage. Drawn back from his code-writing, still separated from his emotions by the nature of the topic, he'd paused just long enough to gather together his argument.

Then he'd attacked.

It had been a peculiar attack for a flyer, fought with words instead of weaponry. Shockwave had actually deigned to take notice and retaliate. Neither had had much initial interest in the topic, but even high-ranking soldiers were soldiers. Bored and pained, these discussions just happened. And among bored mechs, the longer the discussion about an inane topic lasted, the more complicated their reasoning and involvement became(3).

To Starscream, belief and history fell before science. If it couldn't be tested, it wasn't real. If Cybertron had a god in these turbulent times, it was obviously a being of great bodily strength. Spiritual power had no practical use on the battlefield. If he were to pray to anyone, it would be the proven aids of guns and missiles. All hail the many-armed Primus of warfare: Megatron and the Constructicon combiner and orbital artillery platforms. Primus could manifest in many forms, but all were armed and dangerous. Primus wasn't a frail invention of peace and all-encompassing love. That Primus didn't rush to aid warriors. Believers in that Primus fled and fluttered and died, and it wasn't the sacred death of a martyr. It was the stinking, screaming death of a useless idiot wandering onto a battlefield inadequately prepared for combat.

Shockwave had countered this idea of Primus with the Primus of the holy texts. He quoted the books preached by the cult, citing that believers claimed to find their strength within because all strength without could be taken away. What use a gun if overwhelming forces faced the one who held it? Primus gave his followers opportunities and openings, not precision-targeted strike teams.

Fate and destiny? Trusting in an omnipotent being because there was no individual will? Please. Starscream had snorted, flipping one hand in dismissal and loudly pushing aside the cult of recent history as weak, tithe-taking fools who had forgotten the lessons of Cybertron's past. If Primus had been a mystical being prone to passive-aggressively prodding his vapid followers, the violence of a slave revolution would have never happened. Miracles were how stupid mechs explained luck, and a well-thrown grenade did far more for the Decepticons than any follower crying out to his deity on the battlefield.

Shockwave had quoted a well-known priest whose primary message had been that Primus helped those who helped themselves. Starscream had said something pithy and acidic back about people who were famous for stating the blindingly obvious. Asking for divine aid was a trite piece of tradition, but practicing one's aim at the same time seemed self-evident. Religion made a nice garnish on top, but it was no substitute for actual effort. Praise Primus and pass the ammunition.

Curious faces had peered around the sidebay's doorway as ambulatory patients in the main repairbay overheard the junior officer's irritated tirade. More faces had gathered as Shockwave was recognized. The general's level head wasn't admired by the rank and file, but it was respected. The contrast between Starscream's passion and Shockwave's cool logic had been fascinating. The repair bay watched the debate, somewhat dumbfounded and, yes, bored spectators. Soldiers made - or found - their own fun. Injured soldiers took bets on who'd still be conscious afterward.

Shockwave had dispassionately pulled apart Starscream's arguments with the aid of history and past theological research. He had logic, the perspective of an administrator over a city-state, and the experience of a general. Starscream had social science, experimental hypothesis, and enthusiasm. Violence as a religion, Shockwave had reasoned, would be self-destructive at best; suicidal to the cult as a whole if not individually for its believers. Starscream had run off a litany of assassinations and alliances that brought citystates across Cybertron under Megatron's reign; where exactly was Primus' hand in that if not brute, threatened violence?

Which had, of course, introduced the topic of whether the cult was monotheist through history, or was it the conglomerate of past, multiple beliefs in different gods? Had the cult, as time passed, simple congealed all worship into a single god for convenience' sake? Shockwave had pointed out evidence of different citystates' cults holding to different origin stories for Cybertronians and Cybertron itself depending on the socio-economic level of each citystate's inhabitants. For example, the asteroid miners held to different mythology than the autocrats in the Iacon Towers. Different gods entirely, perhaps, instead of one cult throughout history.

Starscream had scoffed that current history illustrated the truth of the cult better: just the difference between the Autobots' version of Primus and the Decepticons' showed it to be a choice of faction and personal philosophy. Instead of an overarching god, therefore, the concept of a god became a highly individualized - or at least faction-oriented - fragment of personal perspective. There hadn't been multiple gods. The cult of individual citystates had a facet of the religion, and each 'bot in the cult carried a set of beliefs assigned the one designation: Primus.

The entire discussion remained somewhat hazy in Starscream's pain-addled mind, but what he remembered most clearly was shouting down Shockwave's calm assertion of the cult's fervent belief in calling on Primus' favor when under trying circumstances.

"Prayer? How is calling a name going to help you? Prayer won't save you when my rifle's at your head! If you want to pray to someone, pray to me. When I'm holding your life in my hands, I am your god! Calling on Primus won't stop me from killing you, but if you beg me for your life, I might at least make your death quick. When I say, 'For Primus' sake,' Primus is whomever has a targetlock on me, not the ineffable, fragging, feel-good, worthless god of rankless sparks who don't know the value of bowing to a higher power - the one with power, not a fictional being who may or may not exist!" There had been a repair attendant at his side, holding him down and saying something in a tiny, slightly awed voice that Starscream hadn't heard in his feverish indignation. "Megatron is Primus to the Decepticons! The Autobot loser with his foot on your neck is Primus for whatever Pit-damned eternity you have left before he shoots you, and you'll pray to that loser like a cultist at his most debased because it's who has the power to save or execute you that is a god!"

There had been a long, slow minute of consideration from the mech on the berth just out of his sight. The room had filled with the soft sounds of an interested audience, an ocean of ebbing and flowing murmurs from somewhere behind him, and the static-jumping white noise of riled emotion had scoured his thoughts raw. The repair attendant had held him down, and there had been a medic, too, doing something click chck chck between shoulder and the burning slab that hung where his wings should have been.

Starscream had huffed hot air from his vents, gladly clinging to heightened emotion over the waves of searing pain. The other mech had only been debating from the perspective of history and theory, but Starscream always chose personal belief over others' reason. It had led what could have been a rational, if heated, theological discussion into the choppy storm of private thought. It had exposed far more of himself than he'd usually be comfortable revealing. He hadn't even known this mech. But it had been a good distraction, which is what both of them had really wanted from the start. He'd barely even felt it when the medic uplinked into a port on his back and overrode his defense protocols to force him offline.

He'd found out later who the mech on the berth had been. His wingmates had taken a positively sadistic joy in informing him, in fact. The whole debate had been hideously embarrassing in hindsight, but Shockwave had been recovered and gone by the time Starscream had been brought back online. He couldn't even have claimed damage-induced amnesia, since half the base had had audio clips to replay at length if he tried. His choices had consisted of A: acting like nothing had happened, or B: hoping for a quick death in battle with some dignity left intact.

Starscream had invented and gone with option C: feeling no shame whatsoever.

That was a choice that would do him well through promotions to come.

It had helped that an entire subset of Unwritten Rules in Helios Base 4 had been created by the eavesdropping Decepticons listening to the debate from the main repairbay. Rule #116 had seemed to be, "Footsoldiers should pray to the Primus-god-manifestation Starscream who rules the air above during battle, for he is of more use to footsoldiers than any imaginary-Primus-mystical being when there's an Autobot taking potshots in their direction." Starscream had been rather charmed by that.

Wingmates had fallen and been replaced, promotions had been awarded, the base commander had been shot, and still Starscream had shrieked like a weaponized wargod of rage through the skies above HB4. The footsoldiers had worshiped him even as they'd hated him. The flyers had openly loathed and closely followed him. In two stellar cycles, Starscream had ruthlessly torn his way through the base command structure like shrapnel through armor. A better comparison, as made by one of his unmourned wingmates, had been that of a meteor impact: causing collateral damage in passing but doing the most damage where he landed.

HB4 had hugged his contrails, tagging onto reflected glory like disciples following their savior as he'd risen to power. In that corner of the war, at that base, he'd been the Primus of close air support, a god of dogfights, and the Unwritten Rules had continued to be written about him. By the third stellar cycle, Helios Base 4 had grown to a fortress, and everyone had known that, no matter the base commander's name signed to base orders, Wing Commander Starscream had called the shots inside its walls.

Shockwave had never spoken of it again, not even after continued promotions had brought Starscream out of HB4 and into contact with the general again. Starscream had always sort of thought their debate had contributed to the personal interest Lord Megatron bestowed upon his career, however. Or perhaps Megatron had only known that when physical force created a minor god, the ruler of the pantheon had best keep the upstarts firmly in place. Starscream had admitted, after all, to refusing to bow to anything but superior military hardware.

The first time Megatron had transformed and hurled himself into the jet's palm, the Seeker god of HB4 had been humbled. The fusion cannon Megatron wielded outclassed him physically, and he knew it. He'd been promoted, then promoted again, and as Air Commander he had been part of his own theological logic. Shockwave was, perhaps, the only one of the Elite ranks who didn't mock him for his cowardice before Megatron's threats. The general had caught him in a moment of vulnerability, way back in Helios Base 4, and he…understood. He didn't agree, but as Starscream begged and wheedled at Megaton's feet, there was a kind of understanding in the general's distant, watchful regard.

The first time Starscream had defied the Supreme Commander, he'd gone to his knees with no shame to beg abjectly for his life. In his executioner he saw Primus, and he challenged that god's status constantly because his deity, like himself, was merely mortal. Starscream chose his own god, but in the end, he had faith only in himself. In the religion of war, the strong destroyed each other for the throne of heaven. At the ever-unstable altar of violence did Decepticons worship. As Shockwave has noted, it was a self-destructive practice.

Shaking with weakness, Starscream looked up into the face of an Autobot wider than the sky, and his hands rose in surrender. This 'bot, right here and right now, ruled the pantheon. He might not speak and create mountains, but he could crush the three Seekers like tin cans, and that was the very definition of Primus in Starscream's book.

He'd panic, but he was half-inside his own internal computer at the moment. Being overexposed to fear and his reeling body had blown him through the panicking stage and into actual thought. Give him a couple more kliks, and he'd pull out of his head and recover emotional equilibrium. In a distant way, he wasn't looking forward to that.

The massive blue visor band slowly descended. It stopped close enough that Starscream could see the optical lenses' bright circles of light behind the thick protective visor. What would normally be pinpricks of lights in a mech's optical configuration were as large as Starscream's entire head. They shifted and narrowed, projecting a blue tint onto the ground and the three Seekers cowering there. Something quivered behind Starscream's spark, and his thoughts cleared a little more. Skywarp's knees vibrated against his wings, the inner edges of the black-and-purple jet's feet clamping tightly into the crack where Starscream's hip joints met pelvic armor. His wingmate's systems fluxed wildly. From further back, throbbing low through Skywarp's higher frequency cycling, Starscream could feel Thundercracker's own joint-popping grip on fear falter. Their emotions dragged on his own body, pulling him out of his studied calm as they fell out of sync with each other: puhchunk birr birr tunk.

Terror fed on terror.

He dove through internal vertigo and forced open the encrypted wing channel. Oh, this wasn't going to feel good at all.

*"Look down,"* he snapped through the channel, and his tanks surged. He'd already diagnosed half his coding errors, but internal commlinks had been low on his priority list. Now he regretted that as his own words echoed back in a nauseating stream of loud number lines through his glitching optics and audios. He heard color and saw sound. It was internal communication, but he curled in on himself as if physically assaulted. Skywarp mewled at his back, twisting. They both felt Thundercracker gag and hiccup again. Starscream called up eons of engrained grit and continued torturing them all with instructions: *"Put your heads down, stay quiet, and stop panicking. I'll handle this. It's huge, but it's an Autobot. Autobots don't kill prisoners."* No matter how large and intimidating the Autobot.

*"Autobot prisoners get medical attention,"* Thundercracked added, more than a bit hopeful.

Starscream could actually feel when the blue Seeker lost control and clutched at Skywarp's sides with frantic hands, overwhelmed by randomly sputtering conductors filling his torso and midsection with flares of electric heat. The air reeked of the burnt-copper stench from fried wires. Skywarp flinched and coughed, fighting back half-processed fuel. The spacebridge hadn't killed them outright, but panic redlined self-repairs in the worst possible way. Things were not looking good.

*"Shut up!"* Starscream screeched furiously, and with an almost audible shunk reality washed over him. His field of vision wobbled, colors suddenly glaring, and his systems thrust every ignored malfunction up into the front of his mind as if in revenge for being tuned out. His tanks registered as overfull and signaled an urgent need to release pressure before the gaskets burst. And he was looking up into the face of an Autobot that - that -

His hand shook hard enough that he had difficulty keeping them in the air. It wasn't weakness making him shake, now.

"Starscream…" Skywarp whispered between his wings, and an unpleasantly wet drip of liquid plopped down his back as his wingmate pushed out tremulous words. "I can't teleport. I can't balance my model projection equations. I can't even find my fragging activation sequence. Do something!"

Things were really bad if Skywarp was pleading for reassurance from him. Thundercracker wrapped an unstable arm under Skywarp's wings and gurgled, "Shhh," through a froth of coolant at his lips. Which was fortunate, because Starscream's version of soothing Skywarp probably would have left him knocked senseless.

Oh, Pit, none of this was distracting him from the Autobot still staring down at them. He'd been hoping for an army of more reasonably-sized Autobots to come around the insanely huge robot's leg to arrest them, or even a word said to clue him into what the giant wanted him to do or say. Or divine intervention, but he had the sinking feeling that this was someone else's deity intervening, and not on Starscream's behalf.

Those gigantic optical lenses focused, bathing them in blue light. Skywarp and Thundercracker moaned softly and kept their heads down, but Starscream had to squint against the intense rush. His vision spun and settled as his optics chirped through reboot and filed rewritten code into place abruptly: pop ting. Power flushed and returned, and then he could see clearly.

That wasn't as good a repair priority as he'd thought it would be.

The blurred motion over there turned out to be a hand, and the side of it settled on the ground in front of Starscream's feet light and quick as a bird coming to rest. The palm faced him. His legs drew up defensively - as if he could mount a defense against this? - before he even registered how fast the movement had been. The Decepticon combiners Starscream knew had so much bulk that they traded agility for force. Their conjoined minds never quite had the integration with the gestalt body that a singular mech had. That this mech had.

This Autobot bent over them, perfectly balanced, and moved nothing like a gestalt. The other hand swept over, and Starscream's mind tracked its speed despite his terror. Sheer size made every movement look ponderous, but this monster wasn't slow. Air whistled over that arm, pushed through armor gaps like narrow canyons. Starscream could fly through those crevasses, and flexing joints opened and closed them so quickly that wind whooshed loudly. The side of this hand set down gently enough to barely dent the soil right behind Thundercracker, and that was a spark-sinking level of precision. This was not a slow-minded, clumsy combiner team. This was a regular mech in an unbelievable body able to process even the tiny details of surface pressure.

The hands framed the trio of Seekers, palms inward, and their shivering bodies registered vast system resonance before their minds could fully comprehend the situation. It was so unreal Starscream couldn't immediately take it in. Pistons could be heard working behind red armor, smaller joints chtick chticking an underbeat to larger mechanisms' TRM TRM. It caused dust to ripple in layers above the heavier soil. The air literally jiggled around and through the three Seekers, visibly wavering to the rhythm of the enormous machinery behind the huge palms. They could feel the echo of the arm pistons, clanging through support structure and armor alike.

The rivets in the red armor before him were the fist-sized, meaning that the armor itself had to be as thick as a Seeker's forearm. The fingers alone were longer than Megatron was tall. Blast Off's shuttle mode could park on the palm. The Autobot's hands were bigger than all of them put together.

Starscream shook hard enough that only Skywarp's grip kept him from falling over. Thundercracker's reassuring arm around Skywarp became a desperate seize, and he wasn't even looking up. Skywarp simply froze. He locked up between them as if paralyzed by what he felt. Starscream couldn't look away, but Skywarp and Thundercrack didn't dare look at all.

They were on Earth. Starscream's glitching sensor suite had taken an air composition analysis and spat out that conclusion to a .003% guarantee of accuracy. But with the Autobot's hands cupped around the Decepticons, the dirt world disappeared. This Autobot became their world.

Starscream quailed before the god of this world, their world, his world. "We su-surrender," he got out, too frightened to care about the stammer his shaking caused.

The massive head tilted, a tiny motion overall and a cosmic-altering one up close, and bent closer. The blue visor blocked out the sky entirely. "Starscream," the Autobot said.

From a gestalt, the voice would have been pleasantly light. None of the Decepticon gestalts had apparently ever figured out the fine art of Not Shouting, so it was surprising to be addressed in less than a bellow. That didn't change the fact that a vocalizer in a Cybertronian this great had to be the size of Astrotrain. Combined with the regular empty chambers most mechs had in their necks and upper chests because of alternate modes - multiplied exponentially into extensive hollow spaces the size of entire rooms in this Autobot - and the voice emerged in a wing-rattling bass. At this range, gusting air sandblasted the hovering dust away hard enough to fleck paint off, and Starscream's name flooded through them in a tidal wave of sound.

Horrorstruck and reeling, Starscream could only imagine the destructive tsunami of noise a shout would be. This was bad enough.

Skywarp screamed, muffled but clear. From further back came rapid-fire hiccupped sobs of air and sound; Thundercracker's already-unstable systems had tripped into cascading failure, and his processor kickstarted everything in a frenzied attempt to save a whole body gone haywire. The fuel in Starscream's lines sloshed horribly into a foam, bubbles of exhaust back-charging from his thrusters and up into his engine, bumping rudely through his systems and into the energon processing tanks. Lubricant and coolant fluids whipped with air and leaked - no, exploded - out of their containment reservoirs, spraying from loose gaskets and split hoses. Bursts of fizzing fluids coated his internal cabling and combined into a noxious, gelled form. His mouth filled, sour and rank, as his pressure gauges cued an emergency purge of his tanks. He retched.

It only added to the shimmering puddle of revolting vital fluids already seeping from the ends of his thrusters. Clumps of transparent gel floated in it, lubricant and coolant oozing from some breech in his armor. Skywarp coughed out his own contribution to the repulsive chemical mix down his back. Thundercracker's circuitry tripped, and he fell offline, then bolted online again with a jolt that stabbed their lasercores with a painful, electric start.

Their systems could not deal with this right now!

Their tormentor repeated himself, and this time the trine fell like dominoes. Thundercracker flopped sideways, senseless, and Skywarp slipped down without his support. Starscream flailed with his arms and one leg but only succeeded in falling onto his back instead of falling face-first into the rejected fuel. But his flailing wasn't exactly controlled, and there was a clang as his foot stubbed into something very hard. Something hollow, but too thick to echo, like slamming against the side of a well-built vault wall. He'd kicked something exceedingly solid, and his wingmates didn't sound like that(4). That left an option of one, and that option he did not like.

Dread glugged into his tanks as if to refuel him, but instead it spread through his fuel lines in dead, lead-lined weight. Starscream refreshed his optical feed over and over, cursing his spinning gyroscope in a hysterical rasp, and somehow it was worse to stare up from flat on his back into the Autobot's face. Don't ask him how. He hadn't been any less helpless sitting upright. It just was. Maybe it was the sudden sympathy he felt for those insects the humans pinned to boards, their soft wings helplessly splayed for display.

The face withdrew a little, creasing thoughtfully. Starscream hated himself and yet still felt a pathetic sense of gratitude for that thoughtfulness. "Starscream," the giant repeated from the small distance, and - finally - the overpowering rattle of sound parsed into a kind of intonation.

A question. One that would get repeated until it was answered, evidentially. "Yes," Starscream whispered.

The lights behind the visor whirred tinnily, the only hint that focus had shifted. "Others."

Skywarp had burrowed his helm into the soggy dirt, blindly - and stupidly, to be honest - trying to bury his audio receptors in a protective layer. His arms crossed his lower torso, hands clamped onto the bottom edges of his own wings. He was trying to still them. Their thinner plating vibrated in time with the huge mech's voice, and the whole rhythm pounded through his body. Thundercracker had limply curled into himself, ending up half-wrapped around Skywarp's head as each word jarred his processor insensible. Neither Seeker registered that the Autobot's attention had apparently turned to them.

As always, saving their afts was up to Starscream. It took cable-straining effort, but the Air Commander managed to raise one trembling arm to point. "Thunder…cracker. Skywarp." His arm fell. He couldn't have made it stay up even if he'd wanted to.

Whiirr back to him. "Decepticon Air Commander."

State the obvious much? If he hadn't been so miserable and, well, terrified, Starscream might have snarked back at the giant. Sarcastic backbiting to cover fear was second nature at this point in his career. "Yes," he whispered instead.

Whirrrrr to his wingmates. "Mayhem Suppression Squad."

What? "…what?" Was that an introduction or another question? Starscream had enough trouble thinking under the barrage of sound that he wasn't sure of the inflection. It certainly seemed like an appropriate name for the mech.

A slow, thoughtful whirrrrrrr that left Starscream feeling like his every scratch was being cataloged. He stared, utterly cowed as that sky-spanning optic band focused in on him and him alone. The head descended, and Starscream shrank in himself. No, no, no. Not again! He went from shaking to braced for the worst.

The words came out softer than before, but it was still a sound bath that rattled Starscream against the ground. "Surrender."

His optical array claimed to have crossed sides, prompting a quick series of error-chases through his coding until they uncrossed. Oh, seriously. Why bother asking that question? Did they look like they could put up a fight? Or, more likely, flee? Because really, what could three relatively-tiny Decepticon flyers do against an Autobot - an Autobot - what the slag could he possibly transform into, anyway? "Yes."

One imposingly large hand lifted, and a finger extended toward him. Starscream's own fingers spastically flexed, digging into the sodden dirt. The finger came to rest over his cockpit, covering him from chin to nosecone with just the tip. His legs bent, trying to get leverage to scramble away, but all that accomplished was forcing a heap of now-flammable filth up his thrusters. There was no force; just concrete, immobile weight. It was like pinning a butterfly with a railroad spike. He was abruptly glad that Thundercracker and Skywarp were too lost in their damages to see this, as witnessing their wingleader getting compacted under a single finger was something even he would spare them.

"We surrender!" he panted, feeling flexible air intakes close first under the pressure. "What do you want of us?"

The sound bath returned, bass rumble channeling directly through that fingertip into his chest: into lasercore, fuel pump, and spark chamber alike. Starscream spasmed under the intensity. "You are my prisoners."

"Yes!" he cried, error messages and malfunction warning lights blinding him. His neural circuitry thrummed in its slots, threatening to come loose, and his spark writhed.

"My prisoners," repeated close enough to jump his pump and send bubbles through his fuel lines again. Kinks cramped his shoulders with shocking pain, and Starscream knew he was missing something. Some emphasis lurked inside the voice, covered by pure volume and vibrato, but he couldn't think.

"Yes," he whimpered. Through the static he could hear Thundercracker and Skywarp moaning faintly in renewed pain. "Your prisoners. Please. Primus, stop!"

A long pause stretched out, oddly self-satisfied, and then the finger pushed. A tiny, almost imperceptible pressure for a mech the size of a mountain, but armor plates buckled like tinfoil. Starscream's howl diminished to a wheeze, and the Air Commander's compressed lasercore fitzed. "Mine," sighed over him, a gale-force wind that pushed him over the edge and offline at last.

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Footnotes

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(1)These were the kind of Unwritten Rules that had drill sergeants smacking recruits around until they got it right, because everyone preferred the newbies die in battle instead of on base. That was just bad for morale. See, the drill sergeants patiently explained (read: waved fists threateningly to make sure the dumb recruits paid attention Are you listening, rustbreath?), Lord Megatron had once had ten general-allies. At least one of them had entered a repair bay unconscious but alive, and he hadn't come out again. Rumor had it that Megatron had wanted that troublesome general out of the picture, but nobody was stupid enough to gamble that the cause of death had been under orders. Posthumous orders, perhaps, but Lord Megatron made a habit of keeping the medics on his side. Yeah, I meant that to happen! orders were what wise commanders gave to look like they were in control instead of running scared from the tyranny of medical personnel.

(2)Unwritten Rule #15: Rumors have more power than the truth. Gossip was just more fun.

(3)Unwritten Rule #314: The other bases have better energon than us. It didn't matter if you'd just been transferred from another base; do not argue with the quartermaster about the quality of rations, for his conspiracy theory has had eons to develop. He is fully capable of calling up witnesses on energon taste and grading, drawing diagrams on whatever's handy, and using vocabulary caustic enough to verbally flay alive a veteran drill sergeant.

(4)He should know. He had too much experience doing it. Both of them were made with lighter alloys and thinner plating, so the sounds were higher-pitched overall. Plus, Skywarp always protested and Thundercracker kicked back.

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A/N: I will not be responding to reviews. Be warned of this if you choose to review! If you actually want to talk about something, contact me via the site.