AN:
Hoorah! Ten chapters in!
I just want to make an important note before you read this chapter, so I hope you all don't mind. I recently discovered the 2007 movie comic sequel called the Reign of Starscream and discovered that there are a lot of similarities between it and what I plan for my story. That being said, I do not plan on following its events directly. At most there will be several places where the plots coincide simply to keep my story as canon as possible while still being AU.
To SunnySides: Congrats! You're officially the only reviewer I had last chapter! Thanks for sticking it out! And yes, Starscream unconsciously being so tender towards Alexis is definitely my favorite part of writing him. Don't you worry though; he's coming around slowly.
So I only got one review last chapter and am just a little down. I really do appreciate you guys when you comment on my story and I hope it shows when I write my responses. Heck, thats the only reason I write responses. I want my reviewers to know that they are just as much of an inspiration to me as anything else.
Anyways, thanks for all the fav's and follows! I dearly appreciate all of you! Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I do not and never have or will own The Transformers or any of the transformers characters and franchise. I only own my OC Alexis and the plot.
Beta read by my amazing sister, subterraneangem!
Always
"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking."
~Friedrich Nietzsche
Chapter Ten
Starscream was only gone for several breems before he returned, his spark haunting him with urges to remain close to the human sparkling.
The insect seemed to plague his every thought and his spark drove him mad with foreign emotions that a high ranking Decepticon seeker such as himself should never have been able to feel. He had fought against it so hard he could hardly process anything with the two conflicting drives between his spark and processors.
It was wearing.
His relays were beyond frayed at this point.
Starscream winced when his spark sent a particularly desperate pulse rippling through his spark chamber and into his frame. It was nearly a constant throb at this point, pulsing alongside his injuries in time with the helm-ache that had slowly been building over the past few cycles.
It was time to leave.
Before his own spark killed him.
His repairs were hardly enough to be considered anything even remotely close to the true meaning of the word, but with the energon from his subspace rations and what little he had been able to do to boost his self-repair systems, Starscream felt he might just make it.
If it were up to him he would leave right then and there.
But he didn't.
Starscream smirked darkly, his crimson optics glinting dangerously. He had to pick up a few things. After all, how was he supposed to get back into Megatron's good graces unless he had a peace offering of some sort?
Alexis had barely woken up when she heard the familiar, but alien sounds of metal against metal and the whirring of gears that she had come to recognize as Starscream.
She didn't understand how someone as big as he was could be so quiet, but had come to accept it as simply another curiosity when it came to the massive metal being.
The next thing she noticed was the dull throbbing in her right hand, not really painful but she knew it didn't feel good. It was almost a numb feeling.
She was also covered in a bunch clear slimy stuff that smelled like oil but felt like slimy water.
It was almost like drool.
The girl's nose wrinkled up and Alexis made a face. Whatever it was, it was gross.
Alexis groaned, trying to remember what had happened. Oh yeah. She had fallen off of Starscream's back. Other than not really being able to feel her hand, she didn't feel any worse than before. That was not to say that she felt very great. Everything hurt just a little bit at this point and her back still felt like it was on fire.
Tentatively, Alexis reached behind her to feel the worst of the cuts of the back of her neck.
She hissed when her fingers came back coated in red. That was not good. She must have broken the cuts on her back open again when she had fallen.
She was honestly surprised that she wasn't a puddle on the floor. Starscream's back and shoulders were a long way up, even when sitting down. It didn't make sense.
Unless Starscream had caught her, or stopped her from falling somehow.
Alexis decided that it didn't really matter.
Even if she asked Starscream about it, from what she had experienced so far he was less than likely to admit anything to her.
Speaking of the metal being, he was acting rather strange as he went about whatever it was that he was doing. It looked to her like he was systematically arranging things and then he would do a weird flicking motion with his hands...
And then the barrel he had been holding disappeared!
Like gone, poof, into thin air! It was just gone!
Alexis gasped, unable to hide her awe.
That was so cool!
"How do you do that?" The question was out of her mouth before she even realized she had said it.
Starscream's attention snapped over to the human sparkling in the corner where she was watching him with widened optics.
"What?"
"How do you do the disappearing thing?" Alexis asked, wobbling unsteadily as she stood up and tried her best not to start crying because it hurt so much. "Is it a magic trick?"
Starscream snorted at that. The humans must have no concept of the sciences that Cybertronians took for granted, for the organic sparkling to view his subspacing as a meager trick. "The science is far beyond your race's comprehension, fleshling."
The seeker paused as the curiosity died in her strange brown optics and his spark pushed against its chamber, reminding him of a time when a young seeker sparkling's curiosities had been turned down simply because of his frame type.
Starscream vented, "Subspace. It called subspace; it's where I can store things with no concern for the weight and size of an object." He explained tersely, resetting his optics to push back memories long forgotten.
"Oh." Alexis responded, "That's cool."
Starscream let out a noncommittal grunt and proceeded to continue placing the barrels of unsourced energon into his subspace. The sparkling seemed content enough after his less than explanatory answer and stayed relatively silent as she observed him.
It was a strange feeling for Starscream -being under such scrutiny from a human, a human sparkling no less.
It irritated him that he found it so distracting.
He would be leaving the planet in a matter of joors and he had no reason to even care what the scraplet was doing. He was above her; her pitifully primitive thoughts meant nothing to him.
Starscream stewed in the silence for several long klicks, pouring all his focus into placing the energon barrels into his somewhat stable subspace pockets. It was a futile exercise and the seeker's patience was wearing thin.
His wings ached, and Starscream had to consciously relax them –in the process sending a spasm of pain rippling down his struts. The sparkling just continued to watch him quietly all the while.
Starscream looked to the ceiling and vented, "What!" He snapped, finally breaking the silence.
The sparkling didn't look the least bit startled, instead her expression was reminiscent of intense observation.
"Where are you going?" Alexis asked suddenly, her brown eyes darting up to stare directly into Starscream's own crimson optics.
The seeker was completely thrown off-guard by such an astute question –observation- coming from the sparkling. He really shouldn't have been; the human insect had already proven multiple times to be very perceptive when it came to what went on around her. As such, he saw no point in telling her anything other than the truth.
"I am leaving this pitiful planet to rejoin my own kind." Starscream stated coldly as he finished subspacing the last of the containers.
Alexis's eyes widened.
He was leaving?! The planet?
So… Starscream was an alien then?
And there were more like him?
It was an awful lot for the young girl to take in all at once. She supposed it wasn't all that surprising though. Alexis had initially suspected that Starscream might have been an alien, but had disregarded the theory in favor of trying to keep up with everything that had been going on recently.
But now… Starscream, her guardian angel, Starscream…
He was an alien robot!
"Mech. I am a mech, not a robot. Not only that, I am a Seeker of the highest elite." Starscream hissed lowly, his tone taking on a much more offended whine then he would have liked.
It was only then that Alexis realized that she had said her thoughts aloud.
"Oh. Sorry." She apologized quietly.
Mech. It was a strange and new term to the young girl, but it did seem more fitting. She hadn't really thought of him as a robot, the word always made her think of some boxy and drone-like thing from the old tv shows she had seen.
Alexis's nose crinkled as she remembered something she couldn't really remember.
Starscream was certainly not that. She had known this from the start. Starscream was easily smarter than any other adult she had met and had emotions just like her. That meant he was not a robot to her.
Still... It was nice to have a word to describe him other than just 'Starscream'.
And that other word, he called himself a seeker. He seemed really proud of it, and it made Alexis wonder if it might be a title of some sort. Like Mr. or Sir.
The girl's face scrunched together as she contemplated this. That didn't really seem to fit either. She would have to ask him.
"What's a seeker?"
Starscream smiled enigmatically, that same beautiful and deadly smile that he always smiled when he was scheming. Alexis had quickly learned to be wary when he smiled like that and for good reason.
"Why don't you watch and find out, hmm?" The mech stated smoothly, his voice low and sweet.
Alexis swallowed nervously and watched Starscream fluidly duck out of the building. However, curiosity drove her forward and she followed him out through the rubble as quickly as she could without straining her back too much.
Starscream made no effort to slow his pace for her, so by the time he had walked to where he wanted to show her whatever it was that he meant her to see Alexis was wheezing from trying to keep up with the massive mech. The tiny girl clutched her sides painfully as she tried to catch her breath without collapsing from the renewed throbbing of her head and back.
Starscream just stood there watching her, a confused expression on his faceplates, but it was replaced with a sneer as soon as her brown orbs made contact with his blood red ones.
The seeker had chosen the biggest open area he could find in the ruined city and now stood in what appeared to be the shambled remains of a pavilion.
He had chosen this area because he only had one chance to transform. He couldn't afford the risk of damaging himself further by needlessly changing forms.
Starscream also only had enough fuel to take off once. Every last drop of his energon reserves would be used up by exiting Earth's atmosphere and breaking orbit. If he made a single error, miscalculated a single vector, he would be sent spiraling back down to the planet.
He only had once chance at this.
It was not a pleasant thought.
Glancing back down at the human sparkling, Starscream let himself have one last smirk. On the inside his spark was spinning in turmoil, already knowing what the seeker planned to do.
Starscream mentally wrenched his thoughts away from the sparkling and focused on the fact that he would soon be rejoining the Decepticon fleet. He still hadn't planned far enough ahead to figure out how exactly he would get back into Megatron's good graces, but he was confident he would think of something by the time he reached the flagship. Mostly confident.
He wasn't really looking forward to the beating he would no doubt receive upon his arrival, especially as injured as he already was.
Nope. Not looking forward to that at all.
With that happy thought Starscream slowly activated his t-cog and started his transformation protocols.
Normally he would have started from off a rooftop, but he didn't trust his frame enough to risk face planting in the dirt mid-transformation.
The process was painful and seemed agonizingly slow as pieces of his frame lifted and folded down, each piece whirling and snapping together in its place despite the shrapnel still lodged in his back and the tears in his armor. In his processor, Starscream knew for a fact that he could transform even slower, but there was a point at which slowing down a transformation process would become painful and frankly Starscream was in enough pain as it was.
Eventually though, the seeker was fully transformed and he couldn't help feeling a smug pride at how the sparkling gasped at his alt mode despite the pain as his armor settled into its new form.
The human child couldn't wrap her mind around what she had just seen. He just... Starscream just turned into a jet!
"You turn into a jet!?" Alexis half asked and half squealed. Well, more like she just squealed. It was so cool!
If Starscream could have nodded in his alternate form he would have, "This, scraplet, is what makes me a seeker." The transformed mech stated smugly.
Alexis nodded, her face alight with awe and curiosity. Much to Starscream's surprise the human sparkling had approached him to get a closer look. Even in alt mode, his jet form towered above the tiny human - his wings spanning several meters above her head. Even so, Starscream was fairly certain that had he been any closer to the ground he would have found the sparkling's fleshy hands trailing down his form.
Humans, he had observed, seemed to have a strong desire to touch everything they came in contact with.
It was an aching reminder of a time when his trine mates, his brothers, were around and there was no concept of personal space. They were brothers -there never was a need for it.
Starscream was wretched from unwanted memories by a bombardment of questions from the human insect. And here he thought humans needed to breathe.
"How fast can you fly? Can you fly in rob-mech mode? What kind of jet are you? How can you still talk? Why aren't you turning back?" Alexis asked rapidly, her excitement getting the best of her until she had to stop and suck some air back into her lungs.
Starscream never answered her questions and stayed silent as he determinedly ran all his system diagnostics and prepped for the vacuum of space.
"Starscream?" Alexis asked, her excitement slowly draining away as the silence grew.
Still no response.
Starscream's spark writhed, urging him not to do what he was about to do. The seeker refused to give into it though, resolutely rerouting his energon reserves to his thrusters despite the buzzing of his spark.
Wrong.
His thrusters ignited with a roar and began stirring up the dust and debris coating everything in the pavilion. The sparkling jolted back with a short cry at the sudden noise and started backing away as the jet started inching forwards.
"Starscream!?"
The girl's shrieks sent his spark into a frenzy, burning and pressing wildly at the walls of his chamber. Starscream hissed sharply at the increased jolts of pain coming from his spark.
Wrong.
"My time here is finished, fleshling. I am leaving." Starscream stated tersely and if he had denta in this form he would be gritting them. He had the sudden urge to tell her that it would be alright, that he would be coming back.
Starscream swore and pushed his thrusters harder with a low hum of his engines.
Damn his spark for making him soft.
He would not have it.
With that he fully engaged his thrusters, pushing forward at full burn and picking up speed at an alarming rate. He had to if he expected to get airborne before hitting a building straight on. In a matter of astroseconds he was airborne and pulling up sharply, ascending at a rapid rate.
His spark burned.
WRONG.
Alexis shrieked once more and darted behind a slab of cement sticking up out of the ground, covering her ears and crying. The heat from his thrusters irritated the already burned skin on her back as dust swirled violently everywhere and got into her eyes.
He was leaving.
Just like that.
He didn't even care.
Tears streamed down Alexis's face, leaving grimy streaks of mud on her cheeks. Despite the dust, the girl turned around and looked over the protruding ledge she was hiding behind, hoping to catch a glimpse of the seeker before he was gone.
She could only just make out the grey tinged streaks trailing behind the blurry dark spot that was Starscream.
Alexis hiccoughed, her tears only increasing.
He was gone.
The girl curled up on the ground and wrapped her arm around her legs and buried her face in her knees. Alexis sobbed, not caring about the ugly sounds she made as she cried.
No goodbyes, no nothing. He was gone and she was alone again.
Her guardian angel was gone.