Title: I Think It's Going to Rain Today 11/OMGWTFBBQ
Author: akisawana
Genre: Melodrama/Family, with guest appearances by Romance, Angst, Crack, and Oh God, Didn't I Swear I'd Never Speculate On The Reproductive Methods Of Giant Alien Robots?
Disclaimer: There's an argument to be made this is legal under "fair use." I'd probably lose, but the argument could be made.
Warnings: I was an English major in my misspent : Somewhere, my high school English teacher is getting ready to lecture me on pacing. Also, I can no longer pretend this isn't G1/IDW fusion.
Summary: It takes a Decepticon, on average, seventeen days to grasp the full ramifications of organic reproduction. That's too long for Starscream.
Starscream had known a mech once, Bitstream, who had a passing interest in sociology.
Bitstream's creator, wanting a family, had sought out another mech to help him differentiate a portion of his own spark enough to create an entirely new being. Once the frequency was stable, Bitstream's spark simply budded off his father's into a waiting protoform. When Starscream's creator, on the other hand, had wanted to expand his family, he had taken the protoform to Vector Sigma to be sparked. Families had started out as a fad during one of Cybertron's more organophillic phases, but it had survived so long that few mechs remembered they weren't part of Cybertronian design or that spark frequency synchronization had been artificially developed to attempt budding, not to make interfacing more exciting.
Families, especially ones with only one or two creators were expensive, though, and under Nova Prime an increasing number of mechs (like Skywarp) were being raised in batches. Unlike most organic races, for whom family was encoded in their DNA, such orphans of Vector Sigma thrived just as well raised in large groups as they did with singular attention (except Skywarp.) The slow erosion of the family unit was seen by most as a result of the war.
Bitstream had held a different theory. He would expound, when overcharged, how Cybertronians were social creatures who needed some sort of tribe. Without the financial means to create or adopt a sparkling, mechs would instead build tight-knit networks of friends. While that was a perfectly acceptable state of affairs on the individual level, as less and less Cybertronians were distracted by guiding young mechs through everyday life, more and more had the energy to become involved in the sciences, the arts, the military...and politics. Then the batch mechs starting coming of age, bringing to pub discussions a sharp desire for individual recognition, plenty of practice at self-advocacy, and an ever-so-slightly increased ability to play well with others.
And so, said Bitstream, the revolution was sparked.
Starscream was thinking more of Bitstream's conception than his theory of war as he flipped through the book Fireflight had abandoned on the couch. While "pregnant" was close enough in meaning to the now-unpronounceable word to describe the budding process, "sparked" was much closer, and yet only Skywarp was using that word. Starscream knew that humans, like all organics, maintained a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism -that they grew, and that they reproduced sexually, which put him two up on, apparently, everyone else in the damn room. That was all he had known, but he was a scientist still, and that came with a certain amount of curiosity.
"Pregnant" was not close enough, he discovered, it was a terrible process, and just from this very basic book he knew he would have to shelve his reverse-transmorgrifier for quite possibly the next twelve months and try to find some way to delete the entire experience of watching someone go through that from his memory banks.
Still, while this would set back one of his plans, it would certainly boost the timeline of another. Starscream spent half the night at his computer researching, alternately fascinated and nauseated by the whole organic process. Then he closed the laptop and thought, about his plans and his allies still with Megatron and his wingmates and what he had to work with in front of him. Only when Skywarp sat next to him and waved coffee under his nose did he realize the sun had risen.
"You have no idea what you volunteered yourself for," he told his poor, innocent, stupid wingmate.
"It's like budding, isn't it?" Skywarp asked. "Only accidental. And apparently takes a lot longer."
"No," Starscream said. "It's more like a parasite, and there are a lot more side effects than with budding. I don't want to scare you," Which was a lie; he wanted Skywarp very scared. The more afraid Skywarp was, the more seriously he would take it, the less likely he would upset Starscream's plans. "But from what I've read from people who went through it, it's absolutely terrible. There is swelling and vomiting and all sorts of pain" Whatever else was wrong with Skywarp's processor, he had a boundless and vivid imagination, so Starscream let him fill in the details. "He'll probably hate you by the end for causing this. As for the end itself..." Words very rarely failed Starscream, but parturition would have been hard enough to describe to anyone, much less someone who needed as many monosyllabic words as possible. He opened the laptop and played the video he had saved for just this discussion. "This is the good outcome."
Skywarp paled, swallowed, and swore. "That's disgusting," he said.
"Yes, it is." His point made, Starscream closed the laptop. "And it doesn't end there."
"How could it be worse -that looks fatal!"
"Are you familiar with the concept of infancy?"
Skywarp, as Starscream had guessed, was not familiar with that particular concept. He was used to mechs sparked fully-grown, who needed only a relatively short period of guidance before they could be loosed into general society. Hearing that someone near him was expecting a child, Skywarp assumed that meant soon there would be another Aerialbot around, a bit naive but nowhere near as dependent as an actual infant. Starscream knew this, and long experience had taught him how to lead Skywarp gently down the halls of understanding.
That didn't mean he was the least bit gentle about describing Skywarp's impending fatherhood. "It won't be so bad," he said at the end, patting Skywarp's arm as condescendingly as he could manage. "Not with seven of you together."
Skywarp snagged Starscream's coffee and drank it to give his hands something to do. "Aren't you going to help?"
"Of course not." Starscream took his coffee back. "I have more important things to do than clean up your mess."
"My mess?" Skywarp asked, jumping up. "How is this my mess? You didn't slagsucking tell me this could happen, your idiot wingmate was the one who thought it was a genius idea, and I certainly was not consulted at any point for any of this rusted pile of scraps so why is it my Primus-damned problem?"
Starscream was somewhat amused to recognize that as nearly word-for-word what he had said to Megatron the first time he had been called to task for not preventing one of Skywarp's no-nearly-rare-enough flashes of brilliance that had ended in three broken windows, a mock dogfight in hanger bay seven, and a missing corpse (except that had been cheeky and fun shenanigans, and back then Starscream was telling the truth so on at least two counts the exact opposite of now.) He couldn't help smiling, even after Skywarp punched him.
And that was just so predictably Skywarp that Starscream laughed.
"What, by shiny Cybertron," Skywarp punched him again, "is so funny?"
Starscream kept laughing and didn't answer. By his calculations this was at least a four-punch breakdown, and Skywarp punched him twice more.
"Fix it," he said, peeling the paint off the walls with descriptions of Starscream's helpfulness, ancestry, sexual predilections and current state of hygiene. Once his creativity had been exhausted, far earlier than Starscream expected, he hit the Air Commander one last time and sat down heavily. "Fix it. I don't care how, just fix it."
"I'm flattered by your confidence, but I can't," Starscream said. He probably could make it all go away, but he had a plan and standards lying around somewhere."It won't be so bad."
Skywarp buried his head in his hands. "How can you say that? It can't get worse."
"The Aerialbots, they're not actually expecting you to help. They're expecting you to run away." He didn't want Skywarp to think about that too hard, lest his wingmate question his sudden psychic abilities. "So anything you do to help, they'll appreciate. The more you help them, the more they'll like you." Half the Aerialbots always had half a crush on Skywarp, and everyone knew Skywarp had always loved attention regardless of the source. What most mechs (including Thundercracker and Skywarp himself) didn't know was that the only thing Skywarp liked more than attention was respect.
It had been long observation, the careful assembling of countless clues, and the Aerialbots themselves that lead Starscream to discover that little quirk, effort few would put into any single mech. Among the Decepticons, though Skywarp never lacked for attention and his battle record kept anyone from losing respect for him, few people thought about him unless he was actually standing in front of them. Even fewer thought he had anything to contribute to the cause but teleporting and a steady shot. Most of the Nemesis, when they thought about him at all, saw him as useful but ultimately replaceable. It wasn't until the Aerialbots came around, thinking Skywarp was Primus on two wings, that the last piece of a millennial-old puzzle slipped into place in the back of Starscream's processor.
When they crossed paths again, reeling from betrayal and ruin, and the Aerialbots had (almost) as one shrugged and offered him ice cream, the teleporter was lost.
"So what am I going to do?"
"Go over there, play cards or whatever it is you do all day, and be disturbingly cheerful like you always are. They've been stewing for a week and probably need some cheering up before they start blaming you. I'll take care of the rest of the details, including telling Thundercracker."
"And that's all? Pretend like everything's normal?"
"Have I ever led you wrong before?"
Skywarp was forced to admit that no, there was not a single instance he could recall. Which just proved that Skywarp didn't have a very good memory. Still, for a long time now Starscream had tried to keep Skywarp in one piece; Skywarp was the only one who had never let him down.
In three words, Starscream could sum up everything he's learned about life: it goes on.
He couldn't afford to waste too much time on situations he couldn't control, so he moved to one that he could. In Dallas, there was a man who for fifty dollars would mail letters to wherever Swindle was in the world. Starscream sat at the table with pencil and paper and wrote an absolutely uncrackable message to the Combaticon.
Truck broke down. Have buyer with sudden need. How fast can you get in touch w/ supplier? DHS update coming by end of month.
The coded phrases would alert Swindle that the reverse-transmogrifier project was put on hold but the other thing he was working on was now accelerated. It would also ask the Combaticon if he could still count on half of Cybertron back home to support him with a minimum of questions and for Megatron's current location. He trusted Swindle (within very specific limits,) but even if the message was discovered and the code broken, all Swindle would be able to leak was that Starscream was building his own reverse-transmogrifier and plotting to bring troops from Cybertron to support his next bid for control of the Decepticons. Starscream didn't think the ruse of the Dallas postmark would fool even the dumbest of Decepticons, but without an electronic trail to follow, they wouldn't be able to track them past Texas.
Swindle didn't know Starscream's end game. Nobody would ever guess Starscream's end game, the hole card that he had held in reserve since Dabola. It was a desperate gamble, only half because of the riskiness inherent. Not only would he have just the single opportunity, he couldn't hedge his bets but had to go all-in. If he failed, he wouldn't merely remain as Air Commander, or be demoted, or face exile. His punishment would be worse than any he'd ever survived before, so bad he scarcely dared contemplate it. If he succeeded, though, he'd rule all of Cybertron outright, not simply the right to continue the war with the Autobots on his terms and finish with an empire of dead mechs and ashes.
It was so much easier to overthrow Megatron when Soundwave couldn't warn him.
Skywarp was best led gently down the halls of understanding. Thundercracker was best handed the bomb and shoved out the airlock.
So when his other idiot wingmate came in the door, Starscream opened his laptop and said, "This is what is going to happen to the Aerialbot you're in love with."
"I'm not in love with any Aerialbot," Thundercracker said. He may have even believed it. "I need money for cigarettes."
Starscream didn't say anything, just pressed play.
Thundercracker, much like Skywarp, utterly failed to conceal his disgust. Unlike Skywarp, he caught on to the implications without needing Starscream to explain in small words. "So when I volunteered to help," he said. "they're going to think I meant it."
"Did you think this was just a poorly written episode of To Reach A Star?"
"He never said he was going to keep it around," Thundercracker pointed out calmly.
"He never said he wasn't, and then you volunteered the both of you to help. You encouraged him."
"I need a cigarette," Thundercracker said. Starscream looked at him, surprised. He hadn't expected to have to go into quite as much detail as with Skywarp, but his idiot wingmate was more quixotical than anyone with his sense of self-preservation had a right to be. Starscream had expected at least a token protest that Thundercracker had meant what he said, or that he wasn't going to back down just because he lacked vital information, or some sort of reaction at all.
But mind-altering chemicals weren't really things Thundercracker used to indulge in all that often before. "My wallet's on the table," Starscream said. "And Thundercracker? When humans are born, they're infants."
Thundercracker shrugged, took two bills from Starscream's wallet, and left.
Starscream locked the door behind him. Thundercracker would be back in a few days, once he had finished stewing, or so Starscream hoped. Since the day Starscream met him, Thundercracker had been prone to fits of idealism, brooding, and over-reacting, but something about their current situation had elevated his usual tendency towards melodrama to quiet near-insanity. Whatever it was, Starscream was half-flailing without Thundercracker quietly acting as the trine's collective voice of reason. Not that he did a very good job at the best of times, but mechs Starscream trusted unequivocally were in short supply.
He closed out that horrible video that he had now watched three times too many, and purged it from his history just to make sure. He tried to work on his reverse-transmogrifier, but something kept nagging at the back of his brain. Thundercracker hadn't wanted money for cigarettes because of what Starscream told him. He hadn't even acknowledged that Starscream had told him directly when they hadn't been on speaking terms for three months now. Thundercracker had come in for cigarette money and though he had registered, even participated in the conversation, he hadn't reacted towards anything but the cigarette money. No, Thundercracker was fixating. Two days ago, he had fixated on the sudden quiet a lack of Aerialbots had fomented. Last night he had fixated on keeping that one Aerialbot around. Now he was fixating on cigarette money. It wasn't about the cigarette money or the quiet or even the Aerialbot that he had too fallen in love with (of course he had, it was part of the plan, and the fact that he didn't know it was part of the plan just meant he wasn't going to screw it up.) It was about predicting correctly. Anyone who flew learned to predict things correctly or they ended up so much smashed metal.
Starscream started working on a totally unrelated plan, letting his fingers do the work while he considered some more. Skywarp hadn't understood and punched him. Thundercracker had been flat wrong and barely twitched a wing. Skywarp was more volatile than Thundercracker, always, but surely the situation called for something more than a shrug and a cigarette? An ad on his computer screen caught his eye, and made him realize the apartment had been music free for a week. He hadn't really noticed since his wingmates were out so often now, and he hadn't really been paying as much attention to his clingy, idiotic, strangely useful wingmates nearly as closely as he usually did, not when there were five Aerialbots around to do it for him. No music, fixating, ambushes in the stairwells was almost normal but not as a first line of attack, Starscream added them all up and did not like the results.
Thundercracker, the reliable one, the key to the first stage of his Primus-damned plan, was out Primus-knew-where doing Primus-knows-what throwing Primus-alone-knew how many exceptions because Starscream hadn't bothered to factor in the obvious effects of months (and he wasn't thinking how many, or he'd be right in crazytown along with his wingmate) without flying. Starscream had no way to track him, no way to contact him, and less than no clue of what he was thinking. The whole plan was dropping like air pressure up a mountain and Starscream couldn't do a damn thing to save it.
(and that was Starscream's only concern, the plan, because he hated the brother he didn't have.)
"He's still not home," Skywarp whined. "It's been three days. Where is he?"
Starscream shrugged, not looking up from his laptop. "He'll be back soon. He can't have gone far on forty dollars."
"Why'd you have to chase him away anyways?"
"You were the one who failed to inform me he was two steps away from kernel panic." That wasn't really a fair burden to lay on Skywarp; Starscream had missed it too.
"Do you think he's sleeping in his car?" Skywarp threw himself on the couch and dropped his feet on Starscream's lap. "Your plan isn't working. I don't think they care"
Starscream picked up his wingmate's feet and pushed them to the floor. "It's only been three days. Have they even noticed?"
"But I want him back now."
"Tough."
"Can you make them care?"
Primus, did Thundercracker have to take Skywarp's initiative with him? "Go find that one Aerialbot and be miserable on his legs. That ought to make them care."
"Do you even care? Am I the only mech in the entire maldito universe who cares?"
And really, Starscream didn't. This was far from the first time Thundercracker had disappeared off in a snit, and Skywarp always worried, and Starscream never did. When no security officers showed up on his doormat in the first forty-eight hours, Starscream figured that Thundercracker was at least paying enough attention to the world at large to not drive into a tree. That still left Starscream worrying about Skywarp being so distracted he drove into a tree, but Skywarp had all the spatial perception one would expect from someone who could teleport instantaneously away from anything in his flight path who was also trapped in an unfamiliar form missing most of his senses. Starscream had maxed out worrying about Skywarp and trees all the way back in Dallas. "Busy, Skywarp. Go away."
Skywarp ignored him. "Can't you just make him come back?"
Starscream stood up. "Congratulations, you've successfully annoyed me into doing something." He was halfway across the hall before Skywarp had scrambled off the couch and caught up.
Slingshot was home, which gave Starscream an idea. He tapped a few keys on his laptop, opening a file, and deposited the computer in Slingshot's lap.
"I found you a job," he said.
The three Aerialbots in the living room and Skywarp gave him mixed looks of confusion and suspicion. "A job." Slingshot drew the word out like he'd never heard it before. "You found me a job."
"I found you a job," Starscream said, "that you will like." Until Thundercracker gathered the courage to show his slagging face, Starscream was going ahead with Plan B. He'd never had a Plan B before. It was surprisingly effective.
Slingshot skimmed the text on the screen, his progress measurable by the height of his eyebrows. "You think I'd like lying on the Internet for money?" The ungrateful little fragger's manifolds were almost as big as Starscream's, and he couldn't help liking the Aerialbot for it.
"It's not really lying now, is it? They could be right."
"Why?" Skydive -or possibly Air Raid, Starscream couldn't tell those two apart in proper form, asked.
Starscream huffed. "Did I or did I not make you Seekers? Am I or am I not responsible for the welfare of my Seekers?"
""S true," Skywarp put in from Fireflight's lap. "He's an obnoxious afthead but he takes care of his own. Except for TC." Starscream could have kissed him for helping, except one, kissing Skywarp wasn't ever going to happen and two, did Skywarp really have to drag the Aerialbots into round infinity plus one of Thundercracker Can Take Care Of Himself, When Did You Become The Mature One? Two of the Aerialbots started quizzing Skywarp on exactly what he meant by that, getting the story of the three-day cigarette road trip, and wondering when, exactly, Slingshot had become a Seeker.
Slingshot stared at Starscream like he'd never seen the Air Commander before, then very quietly said, "Thank you."
Starscream waved it off and poured himself some coffee. "You owe me half a bottle of tequila," he said.
Notes: Damn, I failed Heinleining 101 with the fury of a thousand suns. Starscream thinks five times faster than anyone else, seriously. You try describing reproduction to a giant alien robot. The phrase "Skywarp's impending fatherhood" is half the reason I write this fic. At one point, Starscream quotes Robert Frost. "Alcanzar una estrella" is a real telenovela that I have never seen and make no claims about having episodes with wanna-be deadbeat dads. Forty bucks will buy you a lot of cigarettes. Yes, that means you can basically take everything TC has ever told anyone in this fic and throw it out the window. Kernel panic is a real thing that I am really too proud about understanding. Thanks for reading.