Title: Reboot – Lies and Propaganda
Author: akisawana
Disclaimer: Standard
Characters: Aerialbots and Seekers
Continuity: G1 cartoon/IDW fusion AU
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Language. Poor decisions.
Summary: Everyone's been turned human. Kitchen appliances are confusing. In Detroit, Starscream tells the Aerialbots two truths and a lie.
Note the first: I make shit up. For those of you who've read the first version of this, I make new, hopefully better, shit up.
Note the second: I have a chart to keep track of all the misunderstandings, half-truths, and deceptions. I have a separate one dedicated to Starscream's lies.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
If Skydive, or any of the Aerialbots, had stopped to think about it, he would have realized he wasn't cut off from his brothers so much as very, very far from them. They didn't, though, they let Slingshot have the meltdown instead -not intentionally, but Slingshot's emotions had all of Superion's fury behind them still. And that, too, should have been a clue, how Slingshot still carried their weight, but nobody put two and two together until Skyfire shared the spark-shielding theory. It lifted a burden they hadn't wanted to admit bearing, though not enough for anyone to try reaching out.
And, paltry benefit though it was, now they could play cards.
Silverbolt was sitting on the floor, sorting out the deck of cards for something called Euchre, while Slingshot looked up the rules on the laptop. The frozen lasagna Skydive had been elected to cook was done in the oven and Fireflight and Air Raid had their heads together, Skydive didn't want to know why. They were plotting something, he didn't need the gestalt-link to know what, and while that wasn't nearly as bad as Slingshot and Air Raid teaming up, Skydive still would appreciate some warning.
When Skydive, still thinking about shielding and silence, opened the oven door and saw the fire, his first thought was to snatch his hand back. His second was that he'd followed the box's instructions exactly. His third was that he hadn't pulled his hand back quickly enough.
His fourth, when his brothers crowded around him, was that he hadn't realized he had yelled. Skydive had reached in the oven without looking, and brushed his bare hand against the hot metal rack. If he hadn't seen the bright orange flame, he would have grabbed the pan without the hot mitt. He could feel the burn, and yeah, it felt pretty much like burns always had, except ten times worse. Skydive didn't dare look at his hand; he was sure he'd charred the bone, to have it hurt so badly he couldn't think, and he couldn't bear to see that.
"What the hell, 'Dive," Slingshot said, pulling him away from the stove by his other hand. "Hot mitts, remember?"
Fireflight slipped behind him, neatly as if they'd choreographed it, and closed the door. "Let me see your hand," Silverbolt said.
"Looks like they'll have to cut it off," Air Raid said, leaning over the counter. Slingshot lunged for him, but Silverbolt grabbed the shorter one with his free hand.
"They will not have to cut it off, Air Raid, help Fireflight with the fire. Slingshot, go help him with the water, please?"
Right, they'd gone over the treatment of minor injuries shortly after the Aerialbots had arrived in Detroit. As Slingshot tugged him down the hallway, Skydive risked a look at his hand. The pain was white-hot, numb in the center -and out of all proportion. His hand looked downright normal, maybe a little pinker on the side. Slingshot twisted on the water in the bathroom sink and thrust Skydive's burned hand under it. "For crying out loud," he said, "where's your head? That was Skywarp-level stupid."
The water was soothing, for about ten seconds, then it was just cold. "I dropped a processor thread, I suppose."
"You're not the one who's supposed to need supervision," which Skydive translated as "don't scare me like that." Slingshot had a language all to his own, one Skydive was fluent in, so as his brother continued to speculate on the location and operational status of his brain module, Skydive heard only concern, and relief. A human couldn't get a replacement hand, after all.
Silverbolt understood it too, so when he came in with the first-aid kit from the hall closet to hear Slingshot insult two-thirds of Superion's collective intelligence, he didn't say anything about it, just asked to see Skydive's hand again. Slingshot hovered over him while Silverbolt wrapped his hand with gauze in accordance with the text from First Aid.
"Sorry I ruined dinner," Skydive said. Slingshot snorted.
"Will you go make sure those two are actually cleaning the oven?" Silverbolt asked him. "You didn't ruin dinner," he told Skydive as Slingshot went down the hall.
"Boss, I set it on fire. How is that not ruined?"
Silverbolt wrapped an arm around his shoulders. "We can still have dinner," he said. "Just not lasagna. Pick something else, okay?"
Skydive frowned, unable to read Silverbolt's mood. Why wasn't he angry? Or was he just hiding it, or just relieved that Skydive hadn't been burned worse? "I'm sorry I almost burned the place down," he repeated. It bothered Skydive that he didn't know, bothered him that he didn't know if Silverbolt was angry. Silverbolt could rival Slingshot when it came to righteous fury, sometimes over the very things Skydive had just done, spacing out and visible flames.
Silverbolt shrugged and squeezed him. "You didn't do it on purpose, though," he said. "Accidents happen. Does it still hurt?" Silverbolt rarely was angry over honest accidents -and apparently he knew this was one.
"A little," Skydive leaned into his big brother. "It's embarrassing though. There were three whole steps, and I couldn't manage them. I'm no good at this human...thing."
"You're doing fine," Silverbolt protested. "You're my right-hand man."
"I'm your left leg."
"-shit-eating camel humping sonovawhore!" Thundercracker finished, punctuating the sentence with a kick. He'd run out of proper curses he could pronounce early, but surprised even himself by how many organic ones he knew. Still, the dishwasher continued to calmly ooze bubbles out the bottom. He kicked it again, harder, and cursed more when pain flared halfway to his knee. " Chupe mantequilla de mi culo!" Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Skywarp peeking over the laptop at him from the couch. "What," he snapped.
"I think you might actually be louder than Starscream now," Skywarp said, holding the laptop like a shield.
Thundercracker informed him where he could put that false fact, and offered a suggestion or two on how to fit it in such a small space.
"You could just turn it off," Starscream paused his muttered running commentary to say, not looking up from the microwave he was disassembling on the floor.
"Dammit, why didn't I just think of that myself?" Thundercracker kicked the dishwasher a third time. It didn't have any more effect than the first two. The piece of cold slag could at least dent.
"Because, and I say this as a friend, you're an idiot?" Skywarp asked, fully enjoying someone else taking that role.
"Because it doesn't turn off until the cycle is complete." Thundercracker said. "There's no manual override." He tugged at the handle anyways. This was just humiliating. Children operated dishwashers. Human children managed to operate the fragging things without flooding the entire planet. What was wrong with Thundercracker, conqueror of strange skies, that he couldn't manage to wash the few coffee mugs they had?
He'd probably broken them, too.
Someone knocked on the door, five knocks followed by two quick ones, and Starscream irritably ordered Skywarp to open it before diving back into the microwave. Thundercracker crossed his arms and stared at the dishwasher, still cheerfully percolating away. The puddle was escaping the kitchen, creeping towards the door. Good. Let Skywarp have wet feet too.
Skywarp paused before he opened the door, looked at the dishwasher, looked at Thundercracker, and giggled. Thundercracker refrained from punching him, then hid his face behind his hand when Skywarp opened the door to Air Raid and Fireflight.
"We heard yelling," Skywarp's evil twin said, breezing inside. "We thought we'd stop in, see if we needed to stop a double homicide."
"Nope," Skywarp said, leaning against the counter. "Only casualty here is the autoclave."
"Dishwasher," Starscream corrected. "You, get back to your thing. You two, get out."
Air Raid paid no attention to Starscream. "What happened to your dishwasher? It's not supposed to do that."
Thundercracker ground his denta -teeth -whatever. "I don't know," he said into his palm. Now there were witnesses.
Fireflight leaned over his brother's shoulder and tilted his head at the sheer volume of bubbles. "Do you have a towel or something? To clean it up at least?"
"It's dirty," Skywarp shrugged.
"Seriously, how did you manage this?" Air Raid asked. "That is a truly impressive amount of bubbles." Fireflight nodded in agreement.
Thundercracker ignored everybody, very, very hard.
"This master of discovering new ways to break things is the second-most competent Decepticon in the entire army," Starscream said. Maybe Thundercracker could strangle him to death and Megatron would be so happy he'd take him back. "In case you were wondering how the war's been going on for so long."
"What about Soundwave?" Air Raid asked, sounding exactly like Skywarp did when he thought he was funny.
"He did say second-most," Thundercracker said. At least he was trying, frag you Starscream. What had Starscream done besides strip the microwave down to its component parts? Which he couldn't do without coffee, anyways, and all the mugs were in the dishwasher, and not even Starscream was dumb enough to drink it straight from the pot.
Skywarp, giggling traitor, probably was, and who'd be stuck dragging his ungrateful aft to repair bay? Someone whose designation started with "thun" and ended with "dercracker."
"We could ask Skyfire," Fireflight said. "He'd know why."
"Oh yeah," Air Raid enthused, whipping out his phone. "Skyfire knows everything."
Thundercracker reached out and slapped his hand over Skywarp's mouth before he could say anything. "Don't."
"Skyfire?" Starscream asked, laying down his screwdriver and blinking.
"Uh-huh," Air Raid said, tapping out a message on his phone. "He's pretty awesome. I bet you twenty bucks if anyone can fix a dishwasher from across the country, it'd be Skyfire."
"Skywarp," Starscream said after a long second, and it wasn't a tone Skywarp would argue with, "finish the thing, now."
"What thing?" Air Raid asked Skywarp, following him to the couch, both of them tracking bubbles across the floor.
"Screamer," Skywarp paused.
Starscream did not disappoint. "Don't call me that!"
"He wants me to get a job at some store, down by the mall, the big blue one? He says he needs, like, seven more microwaves for their cavities of Megatron."
"Magnetrons," Starscream corrected.
"Whatever."
Air Raid started telling Skywarp about his job, and about the interview process. Thundercracker, who wasn't yet ready to work in a store despite ten straight days of not finding work, ignored him and stared at the bubbles that were somehow still dripping out. How many could possibly be in that box?
Fireflight stood next to him, the Aerialbot's hands in his pockets. "I got another ticket yesterday," he said, quietly. "I ran over a speed limit sign."
"How did you run over a speed limit sign?" Most of the speed limit signs in the area were set back from the road. On metal poles.
Fireflight shrugged. "How'd you get the dishwasher to do this?"
"Driving's a little more difficult than running a dishwasher," Thundercracker said, without much heat.
Fireflight shrugged again. "It's really hard to pull up in a car, but at least it came with an instruction manual."
Thundercracker grunted at him. It wasn't Fireflight's fault he was failing to cheer up the Seeker, and he was at least trying to commiserate, where his wingmates found the situation a rare and fantastic joke.
"Silverbolt's going to kill me. I haven't told him."
"I didn't know you could lie to him, with the gestalt thing," Thundercracker said, as Air Raid's phone played some ridiculous song behind them.
"It's not a lie. I'd never lie to Silverbolt, even if I could," Fireflight protested, a bit too much. "I'm just not telling him."
"How's that not a lie?"
Fireflight didn't answer, just sighed so quietly Thundercracker wondered if he'd imagined it.
"Whoa, did a Decepticon just ask you an ethics question?" Air Raid draped himself over his brother's back. "Triptastic. Skydive wants to know what you like on your pizza, Slingshot says he is not eating with you and Silverbolt cordially invites you over to eat pizza and explain how we're suppose to ever trust you being nice again after the chronosphere. Except he said it a bit more, you know, Ratchet-esque."
"So...with a static laser gun?"
That seemed to put a bit of a damper on Air Raid's enthusiasm. Not much, though. "No, just, have you even had pizza before, because if not, you totally have to try it with pineapple, and 'Bolt won't let me get any unless we're getting three pizzas or a football game's on."
Starscream, never one to turn down free fuel, stood up and brushed his hands off on his pants. "I suppose you deserve to know the truth," he said.
Air Raid grinned, and started with that furious tapping again. "You want to try pineapple?"
"I want to try pineapple," Skywarp said. "What does it have to do with football?"
"'Cause when the game's on, Silverbolt will say yes to anything -almost anything- if it means you'll go away and let him watch it." Air Raid explained that very important assessment like he was describing the color of the sky. "Didn't you notice he was pretty cool with the whole poker pants thing?"
"Did you gamble away your pants," Starscream demanded. Thundercracker just glared. Skywarp had one job -to get the Aerialbots to like him. It wasn't like he had Thundercracker's impossible job, to lie or tell the truth about leaving Megatron, whichever it turned out to be.
Skywarp held up his hands. "I've met him what, twice, without him zapping me? And one of them was three days ago, when he couldn't if he wanted to? How was I supposed to notice a difference?"
"The part where he didn't mind you sitting on the floor in your underpants probably should have been a clue," Air Raid grinned. "Or the part where Slingshot turned on the game and then we all proceeded to completely ignore it because nobody else likes it?"
"Epic spot check fail there, 'Warp," Thundercracker said, unable to really stay mad at his wingmate. He hadn't picked up on it either, had assumed that Silverbolt was just as soft-sparked as all the other Autobots.
"I suppose I should be glad that you're at least losing your own armor this time," Starscream groused. "I'm not, but I should be."
Air Raid added, "Silverbolt has a taser. Just so you know in case you accidentally get in between him and the screen when the game's on. He really can zap you still."
"Whose armor did you lose?" Fireflight asked, still watching the bubbles.
"Huh? Oh. I lost TC's left aileron. But he wasn't using it at the time. Lemme finish this before Screamer," -"Don't call me that!"- "throws me out the window." Skywarp went back to whatever it was on the computer that would get him a job. Air Raid leaned over his shoulder, offering helpful tips. Starscream leaned over his other shoulder, keeping him on task. Usually, Thundercracker did that, but today the Seeker didn't want to deal with anything near Skywarp's level of required effort. He watched the dishwasher with Fireflight, less awkward than it sounded. The Aerialbot didn't say a single word except to inform his brother that the bubbles were actually kind of cool, which had the effect of making everyone shut up and leave Thundercracker alone.
At least he was trying to keep the place clean. They'd been more helpful before the war, or at least he remembered them that way. Then again, before the war.
"There's Skyfire's texting me," Air Raid said as his phone played another ridiculous song. "He says that if you used the wrong kind of soap then you didn't break it. But next time use the special soap that says "dishwasher" and not just regular dish soap 'cause if you use the regular stuff, well, you found out already."
"So that's not too bad," Fireflight said. "The bubbles have slowed down."
"And Silverbolt says that they'll be here in like five minutes with pizza. I guess that means Slingshot is driving now." Air Raid headed to the door, Skywarp in tow. "I really hope everyone stays off the sidewalks."
Fireflight tugged on Thundercracker's sleeve. "Will you show us how to make coffee?"
"First Aid just delivered a baby," Streetwise texted Skydive while they were picking up pizza. "I think it broke him."
"Why would it do that?" Skydive asked.
Then he wished he hadn't. He showed Silverbolt, who agreed.
That's how Slingshot ended up driving back to base. He only hit the curb once.
Thundercracker made coffee for the Aerialbots in their tiny coffee pot (the same size as his own, but there were twice the mechs in the Aerialbot's faintly smokey apartment), and unlike the traitor dishwasher, this coffee pot worked. Air Raid watched the procedure like it was the new emergency fuel transfer. Maybe it was. Fireflight tapped away on his own phone -apparently someone had left a message about yams. Skywarp completely failed to be subtle about staring at his breasts. The other three Aerialbots came in, bearing pizza, and once everyone settled around the living room with their dinner, Silverbolt regarded Starscream like Shockwave would have, if Shockwave had the face to do it with. "Chronosphere," he said.
Starscream, enthroned in one of the chairs, shrugged. "That was a favor."
The Aerialbots did not look impressed. "Really," Slingshot said from one end of the couch. "You're expecting us to believe that old Megatron sent us back in time out of the goodness of his spark?"
Thundercracker, on the floor between Slingshot's feet and Fireflight, slapped Skywarp's hand away from the pile of pineapple he'd picked off his slice and went back to removing the last traces of cheese. Skywarp sat back up on the couch, sandwiched between a bandaged Skydive and the arm. "I lied," Starscream said. "Megatron thought the chronosphere was set to send you to before the beginning of time itself. Is it so hard to believe I'd be less than truthful when there's a fusion canon involved?"
Silverbolt had that look again, the one that said he was wishing he could electrocute the Seekers where they sat. "And what, since I don't have one you'll never lie to me?"
Which was probably what Starscream was trying to sell to the Aerialbots, but since the Aerialbots weren't born yesterday, he had to have another trick or two in subspace, because nobody fell for such blatant lies, not after so many eons of war. Except the Aerialbots were what, a quarter-vorn old? And Starscream hadn't survived this long without being terrifyingly good at manipulating others, at mixing enough truth into his lies to fool much older and wiser mechs. "Starscream was a dick about it," Thundercracker said, choosing a word he was fairly certain his wingleader didn't know, "but we figured it would be better for you to live out your lives in the Golden Age of Cybertron. Where did you end up anyways?"
"Nine million years or so ago," Air Raid said. "Megatron shot up the docks, tried to steal a bunch of energon but we exploded it."
Skywarp laughed, a harsh sound. "I remember that! I didn't know we could get lower than starvation rations."
Starscream caught Silverbolt's gaze, and took a tiny, deliberate, bite out of his pizza. "So it was you we should thank for that," he said. "Do you know how many Decepticons died?" Starscream was Megatron's favorite, even then, and it had still been close. So close they hadn't been able to spare the fuel to fly out with him. It was half a science joke, to increase all the numbers by twenty percent, but if Starscream hadn't, well, warp drives took a lot of power.
"That explosion didn't take out enough of you guys," Slingshot was saying. "Not by half."
Starscream favored him with raised eyebrows and a gentle smile. "Have you ever been hungry, creation of Prime?" he purred, taking Slingshot's plate from him. "Not low on fuel, but truly starving? Have you ever felt systems go dark, one by one, as your reserve tanks dry? Have you ever turned off your diagnostics because you can't see past the alerts, past the red lines?" He leaned forward, their knees nearly touching. "Have you ever felt, against your spark, the caress of the gas you've injected to keep your fuel lines from collapsing?" Starscream paused, waiting for a response that wasn't coming. "I don't know how many mechs would have lived, if you hadn't interfered. How many would have been spared the soft slow slide into stasis and beyond. No, the explosion didn't grant nearly enough clean deaths."
It was Air Raid that broke the spell after a pulse, which surprised Thundercracker more than it should have. "Yeah, well," he said, "I ain't crying over a bunch of armed robbers. You could have just gone down and bought some like normal mechs. Like abnormal mechs."
Starscream blinked, and looked at Thundercracker. Air Raid didn't know, which meant none of Superion's components knew, which meant, holy rusting Primus below their feet, the Autobots had thrown them in a war and not told them how it had started.
"No, we couldn't," Thundercracker said. "It's not like Megatron came online one day and said, "I want to rule the galaxy!" There was rationing, unfair rationing, and then Senator Proteus..." He trailed off, fumbling for the words to explain the rest, the Clampdown, the Functionalists, the Senate. He'd been expecting to convince them of Megatron's fall, of the things done by thugs wearing red faces that could never be forgiven. He never thought he would be explaining the Noble Cause from its forging, and why Optimus Prime's reforms weren't enough for the Decepticons. Why Megatron still had an army, when Prime had agreed with him so long ago.
Thundercracker was afraid he couldn't, that they'd ask him what he was doing still with the bloodthirsty tyrant, and the only answer they might accept would be, "Starscream."
"Actually, he did," Starscream finished for him, giving Slingshot back his pizza, "but that was later."
None of the Aeriabots said anything, though Fireflight was spinning his lighter between his fingers again. Finally, Skydive broke the silence. "You still keep trying to kill us," he said quietly.
"When Megatron's around, he gets a show," Starscream pointed out, which was true. They were talented and they were gestalt, a challenge to any other Seekers, but not the Elite. Grounding them alive wasn't a problem, when they couldn't avoid shooting them. It wasn't often an Aerialbot offered up the opportunity for a kill shot, even less one Megatron could spot, and not even Skywarp was dumb enough to think that if one fell the other four wouldn't come to rip the spark out of whoever fired the fatal blast. Some Decepticons thought that if one member of a gestalt was killed, the other four would die as well. Motormaster, in his inexperience, had tried to prove that false by ripping off Thrust's arm. His demonstration hadn't been strictly accurate, as far as Thundercracker knew about gestalt theory, but since Thrust had been threatening Wildrider, nobody dared think about what an Autobot combiner would do. It was rumored they actually liked each other.
"We don't want to kill sparklings," Starscream said, and if the facts were a lie that didn't mean he wasn't speaking the truth. Even Starscream hesitated to cross that line. Even Skywarp wouldn't, not for Megatron. "So I tried to ground you. I failed. It was not my first time, or my last."
When Skyfire's phone beeped, he dragged himself away from his sequencing of the twenty-fourth chromosome that appeared unique to their new alt-mode. He needed to refuel and recharge -eat and sleep- so much more often now, he took to setting timers to keep from undignified passing-out in his lab. It hadn't been his alarm that beeped though, but a message from Air Raid; he'd turned off the alarm without noticing it. Again.
Well, the work he was doing was important. Logic dictated that extra chromosome had been built and inserted by Shockwave, for a specific purpose, and if he could just unlock its secrets, the Autobots would be that many steps closer to finding a solution to this puzzle. Ratchet and Wheeljack focused on the spark transformation aspect of the puzzle, since they had some experience with spark manipulation -the details of which they weren't sharing- and Perceptor was attempting to work out how much the organic processes were affecting their function. Skyfire was working on the differences between true humans and the Cybertronians alone; no-one else had close to his experience in micro-xenobiology. And most of what Skyfire knew he hadn't learned from formal training, but picked up from Starscream on other planets. Still, he had the best chance to tease apart that artificial DNA and find why Shockwave hadn't stopped with the portable ATP to energon converter. It wasn't half as efficent as the geothermal or solar collectors the Autobots used, but enough of them loaded with bacteria would have made a serious difference to the Decepticons. They needed a psychologist of some sort, to look at what Shockwave did and divine what his purpose was. If psychologists could even do that.
He gave himself ten more minutes to organize his notes -actual, handwritten notes like Starscream used to write. Starscream swore writing things down helped him think, helped him stay organized. Privately, Skyfire thought it was because Starscream couldn't keep up with himself some days and had to leave maps. Then, regretfully, he set down his work and picked up his phone. If he was forced to take a break, at least it was to reach out to his friends, rather than suffer the indignity of solid food.
"dishwasher is spewing bubbles help?" Air Raid had asked. "i bet 20$ ur awesome enough to fix." He had attached a picture of an impressive kitchen flood.
Skyfire wondered who it was Air Raid had bet with. The picture wasn't of the Aerialbot's kitchen, but similar, and Air Raid had to know that Skyfire wasn't any more an expert on plumbing than the Internet could tell him. Still, it took less than half a minute to find the right answer and pass it along.
"thanx," Air Raid sent back, "our neighbors are idiots. iou 10."
Skyfire left his phone on the desk while he went to get lunch. He ran into Perceptor on the way back, and the two of them spent the afternoon comparing notes in Perceptor's lab. When he came back to his phone, messages from the Aerialbots were waiting for him. This wasn't exactly new, but the messages themselves were less trivial and amusing than usual. Slingshot's message, he read and skipped over. "if we had stayed in the past what would have happened to us?" Silverbolt asked. Silverbolt was a transport shuttle, but the other four were warriors built. Skyfire knew first and second-hand what discrimination, what flat-out oppression those classes of mechs used to face, and from what Skyfire had heard, it only turned worse while he was in the ice. "You would have had a difficult time of it," Skyfire texted him back, "but I'm sure you would have been fine."
"What was the energon shortage like?" Skydive wanted to know. "Honestly, that was after my time," Skyfire sent back, thankful the character limit saved him from telling about how before the official shortage how prices had soared, about applying for any and every grant because they'd needed the money, about the semester he and Starscream had shared textfiles because it was that or starve on a student allowance designed for a ground-bound mech. To this day, he didn't know how Starscream had found the money for those texts in the middle of the semester, or any of the other times he'd scraped together the shanix they needed to last to the next allowance-day. Skyfire had always assumed it was somehow legitimate, since Starscream loved to cast assumptions about his character back into the teeth of the old guard who tried to close the ranks against him...but looking back, he wondered if Starscream hadn't been protesting too much. No, Skyfire decided for the tenth time, if Starscream had been getting the money dishonestly, he would have gotten enough, and they would never had gatecrashed parties just for the free drinks.
When they'd brought him back to the Ark, after Peru, it was the first time in meta-cycles that he had filled his tanks. He'd ended up in Ratchet's medbay that night, convinced there was something wrong with his diagnostics. There wasn't -but he'd gone so long with low-fuel warnings flashing at him, their loss had felt wrong.
Fireflight had merely wanted to know what the word was for a sin against the gods, so he could most accurately describe pineapple on pizza. Skyfire, a little relieved to have a question so easily answered, sent back, "blasphemy, or sacrilege."
Skyfire returned to Slingshot's message. He didn't have an answer for the Aerialbot, but he could at least acknowledge the question. "can starscream be forgiven? I mean. Is is physically possible?" Slingshot had asked. Slingshot had taken Starscream's betrayal personally, been so hurt by it Skyfire was almost offended. "Insufficient data," Skyfire sent back, wondering what prompted this round of questions. "Prime would know better than I," he added, to make it longer than two words. Prime might have said yes, no spark was beyond forgiveness. Anyone else would have said no, Starscream proved some things were unforgivable (and when Skyfire pressed for details, they were apparently unspeakable as well. Though, given what he'd witnessed of the Decepticon standard operating procedure, he didn't press very hard.) But, and maybe this was why Slingshot had asked him, Skyfire never told the Aerialbots anything subjective was absolute, when it came to Seekers he never told them how to feel.
Notes the end: Among the things you should not take away from this fic is proper wound care. Honest accidents are rare among the Aerialbots since that category excludes things such as Skydive refusing to accept the limitations of his physical form, Fireflight's inability to pay attention for two whole minutes, Fireflight's inability to tear his eyes away from the shiny to see the mountain, Slingshot's tragic overcompensation, Silverbolt's death wish, and Air Raid. Of course Thundercracker knows Spanish -how else does he watch telenovelas? Air Raid's ringtone for Skyfire is "Smoke On The Water," and for Skydive is "Wind Beneath My Wings," this week at least. Ratchet-esque is not with a static-laser gun, but with something else that can peel paint. The characters opinions on pineapple as a pizza topping are not my own. I make no promises about Starscream working in a strip club to put himself (and Skyfire) through grad school.
Thank you for reading.
