Loom
Chapter Four
Optimus reached the start of the rise of the volcano a little after sunrise, and Ironhide had not contacted him across the bond since he'd left the campsite five hours ago. There had been a greater sense of presence then normal, a comforting and reassuring warmth that was always there after a flux. No words though, which Optimus was grateful to his sparkmate for. When memories of the 'treaty' burned, he needed to retreat into himself for a time.
He wasn't alone on the volcano today, he knew, and was surprised to find Starscream waiting for him at the end of the crudely cut road. The Seeker approached whilst he was transforming, and Optimus found himself handed a cube of energon beneath a cool, scrutinizing gaze. It wasn't the first time he'd felt like Starscream was seeing straight through him. The first time had been not far from where they now stood.
"Where's your entourage?" The Seeker's tone was even and unreadable, optics flickering past his shoulder demonstrably.
Optimus drained the cube in one draw, having not realised he'd needed it. The aftermath of the flux, he realized with a heavy exhale he hadn't intended. "I went on ahead. They'll arrive in a few hours."
A slow nod before Starscream folded his arms and began walking, leading them up towards the spacebridge. He let the silence draw out whilst he took stock of the heat from the taller mech's vents, too great from just a drive, and the telling twitches of the discs on his helm. "Looking to brood in solitude, were you?" he called back without a glance, flaring his plates minutely to better feel the wind chasing around the mountainside.
His first instinct ought to have been to bristle at the remark, but Optimus sensed the genuine inquiry beneath the tart words. Starscream often gave the impression of sneering ignorance, but he saw more than he ever gave away. The question was not loaded with barbs, but with an invitation to speak. Because he understood better than most.
"Did any of the other Decepticons ever know?" he found himself asking, forcing himself to look at the Seeker's face in profile. "About you and Megatron?"
The airbrake flaps on Starscream's wings flared in a kind of shrug though his pace didn't break. "Probably. But no one tried to blackmail me with it." A smirk, directed at something unseen in the distance. "Including Megatron."
Optimus nodded a little, absorbing the honest and unaffected reply. It was a strangeness to perceive Starscream as a source of advice and a confidant if he elected to speak. But he was the only other he knew who had experienced that particular kind of violence that had left a scar unlike any other in this war. At the whims of the same mech, no less. And Starscream didn't look at him any differently for knowing. No sympathy, guilt or even compassion. Everyone else who did know seemed to soften their optics and actions around him. It was a subtle and frustrating reminder that something about him had changed.
Around a curved thicket of pine trees they would come into sight of the 'bridge, and as Prime seemed trapped on the cusp of speaking, Starscream stopped before they were exposed. He stopped the taller mech with a touch to his arm as he went to pass. "Someone's found out?"
Optimus glanced back down the track to confirm with his optics what his sensors had told him – that they were alone. He found that he couldn't look back right away, not wishing to betray just how deeply last night had affected him. "No, just that something's wrong. I don't believe they know what."
Starscream frowned and dragged his claws across the bright armour as he withdrew his hand, summoning his azure gaze back. "How?"
Optimus shook his head a little as his processor saw fit to remind him, replaying the moments when coherency had returned. Ironhide holding him down and close, expression lined more with anxiety than normal after a flux. Bumblebee watching him with weapons ready, having obviously been attacked by him. Ratchet low and steady, warding the NEST soldiers back. Sam and Mikaela brightly pale against the trees from where he'd almost crushed them. He couldn't remember anything before – just tangled feelings and an urgent need to escape.
"Bad flux," he finally uttered, his spark tightening at how succinctly he could convey what had been tormenting him for hours.
"Ah," Starscream drawled with a flex of his wings, consciously looking past the mech to the horizon and the approaching convoy. The corners of his mouth eased up in a cruel smile. "And here I thought you'd swallowed enough of your pride to tell someone."
Optimus jerked his optics to the Seeker as if he'd been shot, bright and narrowed. "What does my pride have to do with anything?"
Starscream met his stare with arched optical ridges, his mouth still gently twisted. "The reason you've been so adamant on keeping this from them, whether or not it affected how you moved past it, is what they will think of you," he explained, as if to a child.
The Seeker was deliberately antagonising him now, Optimus was certain, and his frame stiffened. "How dare you-"
"Shame has its roots in pride, Prime," Starscream cut in lightly, folding his arms and jutting his chin up at the other mech. "And as much as you say you're not better than any other mech, you know that you are. That you have to be. That you're Prime the symbol first and Optimus the fragged second."
His fist had connected with Starscream's bare cheek before he realized he'd moved, sending the Seeker down where he was quickly pinned with one hand about his throat. The Decepticons that had stayed were all largely neutralised, certainly no significant threat to an Autobot, but Starscream didn't even put up that much resistance. He lay compliant and smiling thinly in Optimus's shadow, satisfied with the response. "Not so much the helpless victim, are you?"
The shameless expression on the mech's face alone excused Optimus from apologizing as he withdraw and stood, dentals gritted behind the mask and optics closed. He heard Starscream get to his feet with dry crunches from the earth and a mechanical whine, finally firing a blast through his vents to dispel the stones and dirt that had worked inside.
"They've seen you injured before." Optimus opened his optics and found crimson ones settled on him calmly, narrowed in thought. Starscream shook his head a little and turned, moving back towards the spacebridge at a slow pace. "Primus, they've seen your corpse."
Unseen, Optimus brushed a hand across his optics before straightening and falling back into step. "This wasn't like any other wound, Starscream." What had meant to sound irritated merely came out as tired.
A short snarl from his vents and Starscream stopped dead, not turning to face him. "Oh yes – because you aren't –supposed- to recover from it."
The sneer was audible, and Optimus glanced over the Seeker's face in profile. His expression was rigidly controlled, optics narrowed and mouth a thin line. It only took four seconds of silence for Starscream to continue on, though he didn't turn and didn't look back.
"There's no heroic nobility in it, no way to romanticise those wounds as just another part of the grand struggle. This was baser, simpler than throwing yourself into the path of a cannon to save an Autobot. This wasn't even about the war, Prime. This was about you and him, and you've kept it like that by keeping it from the very ones you did it –for-. Let them suffer with you!" he shouted, his voice taking on the shrieking quality that came from dark fervour. "If the agony is more in the secrecy than in the act, then pride be damned – let them know it. Make it about them because you did it for them."
He should have shot him at least eight times over during that speech, delivered with back turned and voice sharply unforgiving. As before, though, as during the last time they'd spoken this way, Optimus tempered himself. Starscream's experience privileged him to boldness. Though he was acerbic, he was also direct, and it was almost a refreshing change to have this topic spoken about without caution, but with outright disrespect and near-cruelty. There was none of the tentativeness he'd come to feel suffocated by, none of the anxious concerns. No fragility. They spoke like two soldiers who had been experiencing the horrors of war since before this planet bore life, unflinchingly and unapologetically.
And Starscream was right. Usually was on this topic. It was a difficult thing to admit, but something Optimus had come to accept, though he paused on the thought now. He considered the Seeker's turned back anew, taking in the prickling tension boiling beneath the authoritative righteousness. There was no way that Starscream cared about him or his situation enough to warrant such a potent emotional reaction. The other mech had been insightful on this topic, yes, but not detached – he was clearly still hurting, no matter how adamantly he'd deny it.
He was reliving his experience through him, Optimus realised with sudden and jarring clarity, likely to the detriment of them both. Whether the Seeker realized that or not was another matter. The revelation that Starscream's past was nowhere near as resolved as he liked to profess somehow lessened the knot around his spark. It was a worthwhile distraction, and a revealing one.
Feeling an expanding wave of sadness bordering on pity, he approached the shorter mech and went to place a hand on his shoulder. He froze when Starscream turned, withdrawing his hand.
Optics glowing darkly around crystalline pupils of crimson, Starscream cocked his head. "What is it you so fear from them?"
"Not rejection, Starscream," he began slowly, feeling out the words as he spoke. It felt too much like arrogance on his glossa, but it was the distilled truth. "I fear for them. For their upset."
Nothing for a moment and then Starscream sneered, but the expression was so exaggerated and put upon that it looked more like a bad mask than an emotion. "For what? You not having done it centuries ago and saving half our race?"
Optimus gritted his dentals to temper down a reaction, his fist still warm from where he had made contact already. A frightened turbofox bites, but not because it is hungry, he reminded himself. "For doing such a crude and deplorable thing for them," he murmured, finding it a conscious effort to keep his optics up. When the parts around Stascream's optics shifted, tightened, he took a step forward to bring certainty to his words.
He cast his mind back to the many talks he'd had with Ratchet – some quiet, others less so. Vocalising was a means of taking ownership of words that would easily rule. "Though the, blame for this lies with Megatron, I would not wish to see them in the grief and anxiety I have brought upon those who already know. I do not wish to be treated differently."
Starscream folded his arms, mouth still curved. "You want them to act like nothing happened, and that you ended the Great War with something as innocuous as an arm wrestle?"
A beat and a sigh. Optimus made a point not to mutter his response. "Yes."
"Even though," the Seeker went on, optics narrowing even further, "'something' did happen."
Patience, Optimus reminded himself with a quiet exhale. There had to be a point to this pedantry. "Unfortunately."
Starscream made a small gesture with his hand, which was somehow condescending in itself. "But they're getting suspicious now because you can't act normal because something did happen and it does warrant concern from Ironhide and the medic." He held up his hand with a smirk when Optimus, obviously reaching the threshold of irritation, tried to interject. "Just getting the facts straight, Prime."
He didn't know what he had been expecting when he found Starscream waiting for him, but this wasn't it. Abandoning the notion of finding some kind of peace with what had happened last night for the time being, he nodded towards the hidden spacebridge and began walking. "Come on – we're wasting time."
The Seeker turned on the spot to track him with his optics, but didn't make any move to ascend the path. "They're still an hour away." When Optimus didn't stop, he folded his arms and tipped his helm back to put his face to the sky, optics shuttered. Autobots could be so stupid, sometimes. It was no wonder that the Prime was turning to a Decepticon for help with this ugly topic. He had a thorough and appreciative understanding of many ugly topics.
Starscream spoke to the wind, his voice strong and flat. "Insipid as the Autobots are, they're not sparklings. Every one of them has done something that could rival a Decepticon, kept them out of recharge sometimes. No one and nothing stays pristine in war."
Optimus stopped less than forty yards from the Seeker and turned fractionally, looking back with narrowed optics. Starscream had always been a challenge to understand, and impossible to predict. "What's your point?"
"They can handle it," Starscream replied, taking long strides to come alongside the taller mech and then another to put himself ahead on the track. "And if they can't it's their own fragging problem."
A grimace behind the mask, frustrated by Starscream insistence of making it all seem 'easy'. "Ironhide and Ratchet-"
"Saw the wounds, probably still leaking," Starscream jumped in quickly, his gaze steady. They held a shared silence for a few seconds, some unspoken communication, before the Seeker blinked and looked away. "That makes it too real." He started back along the road, leaving Optimus to follow.
"I can't announce it."
Starscream paused at the statement, the tone edged with a pained refusal around a more mocking tone at the absurdity of the idea. He continued walking when Optimus fell into step alongside him, optics raised towards the now-visible spacebridge and their means of getting off this planet for a time.
"Not all of it, obviously, but that it was… personal," Starscream uttered at last, sending a short comm. burst up to Wheeljack to inform him of their approach. Optimus remained pensively silent, the sounds of their footsteps on the gritty terrain unnaturally loud. He sighed a short sound to draw azure optics to him, and he met the questioning gaze without sympathy. "You need to figure something out soon, because this isn't working."
Like the last time Starscream and Optimus spoke, getting their conversation right has been like pulling teeth. Thanks for your patience, and I hope you enjoyed it now that it's finally up.