Chapter Twelve
Slipstream had made a habit of running a quick comparison between herself and any other woman that she ran into; it was how she decided how much to dislike them. If the woman came up as better than Slipstream in some way—prettier, younger, dressed more stylishly—then she would despise her on principle. If, on the other hand, the woman was lacking in some way, then she was content to merely disdain her. No one was ever free from her judgment, but the worst were the foreign women.
Every now and then, she would see them passing through the slum on foot or by rickshaw or peering out of cars, and it was always enough to put her in a foul mood. Even the ones that were ugly or old or overweight had a cool cleanliness about them that Slipstream could never achieve in this place, try as she might. Their hair hung in soft waves, devoid of grease and dirt; their clothes were new and clean; their makeup smoothed their skin and made their features seem larger than life; and their jewelry, when they wore it, was usually elegant in a simple, understated way that managed to scream, "Real gold!"
So, it was only natural that Slipstream harbored an intense desire to steal from one of them.
Not that it was as easy as that. The foreigners tended to be cautious, keeping their belongings close to them at all times, and Slipstream didn't have friends to teach her how to sneak things from pockets and purses like Starscream did. She would trail along behind them as they made their way through the crowded streets, waiting for her chance to pounce, but on the rare occasions that an opening did arise, one of the other gutter filth would inevitably beat her to it. Which was why the purse came to her as such a surprise.
She wasn't paying as much attention as usual that day, and didn't even notice the couple until the flow of the crowd had nearly pushed her into them. They were trying to haggle with one of the merchants, and their broken Hindi was so bad that Slipstream had to suppress a laugh. There wasn't anything worth noting about them; they were middle-aged and sunburned like so many of the other tourists, and the woman carried a large, black purse and several parcels close to her body. Slipstream was about to let the tide of the crowd carry her away when the woman, clearly getting agitated, shifted her parcels around, and then set her purse on the ground.
For a moment, Slipstream didn't know what to do. No one could be that stupid; it had to be a prank, a trap.
And then she realized that she didn't care.
While the woman was distracted, arguing with her mate, Slipstream bent ever so slightly to catch hold of the handle of the purse and began to walk away. When no one stopped her, she quickened her pace. As soon as she could, she turned into a side alley and broke into a run, her heart pounding harder than she'd known it could as she leaped over piles of trash and puddles of filth, the stolen purse bouncing against her side.
She kept running until her lungs felt like they were going to explode, and then she stopped, doubled over in an empty alley. No one was pursuing her. She heard no shouts. She had done it.
A small laugh escaped Slipstream's mouth between gasps for air, then another, and soon she was throwing her head back and fair cackling in triumph. It took several minutes for her to think to examine the contents of her prize.
Most of it was boring. The woman apparently had been smart enough at least not to leave valuables in her purse. There were several packages of foreign food, a bottle of water, a bundle of keys, a package of mysteriously moist cloths, a tube of something called "sunscreen," some strange plastic tubes with cotton inside of them, a plastic bag with small bottles of pills, pens and pencils, a tiny notebook, and a couple of paperback books.
The books made Slipstream pause. She'd seen precious few books in the slums, and those she had were in Hindi. These ones were nothing like any of them. One of them showed a young woman with an awful lot of hair and an awful lot of dress wilting into the arms of a man with an awful lot of muscles and not an awful lot of much else. The title on the cover read, "Highlanders at High Noon." The other one just had two men on the cover, but one of them was just as wilty as the woman on the cover of the other book. It was called, "Devils in the Diocese." Underneath that was a smaller caption that read, "Father Engles never thought he would be calling another man 'Daddy' at this age!"
Intrigued and mystified, Slipstream reached for Highlanders at High Noon again and flipped it open to somewhere near the middle.
Slipstream lacked the scientific curiosity about organic lifeforms that her cousin possessed and had never needed to monitor their information systems the way that Soundwave did, so she had less of a notion about what was going on than either of them may have. All the same, something inside her biology was telling her that this was important. The characters in the book certainly seemed to think it was, too:
"'Oh, Liam,' Francine gasped, her bosom heaving beneath his broad chest, jell-o slapping on two steaks. 'Don't stop! Don't ever stop!'
"'Francine,' he groaned her name in that deep lilt of his, and she felt it vibrate into her very core, awakening nerves she hadn't known she possessed. She moaned, thick and breathless.
"'Francine,' he repeated, thrusting harder. 'I dinna ken if you're the one who set that barn on fire, but ye set my loins aflame since a long ago! Be mine. Promise you'll always be mine, love.'
"'Yes! Yes, I promise!'"
Frowning, Slipstream flipped back to the beginning of the book. Perhaps somewhere earlier on, she could find out what an erection was and why one would thrust it into a "quivering love mound." She grabbed one of the bags of snacks and pulled it open as she settled back against the wall of the shanty behind her. She clearly had research to do.
It was well after noon now, and Starscream's frustration was mounting; Megatron still wouldn't let him go about his own business. The two of them had walked almost the entire perimeter of their slum, and every time he thought that he would have a chance to escape, his leader would announce some new task for them to accomplish. Since breakfast, they had found new and better jugs for carrying water (which they then had to go fill, and Megatron wore slung by a rope over his shoulders for the rest of the day), searched for any traces of Autobots in the area (an unlikely occurrence, but one which Megatron took frequent precautions against nonetheless), spent some time glaring at locals from the shade of an alley while they ate lunch (or rather, Megatron ate lunch, and Starscream pulled his bread into pieces so that Megatron couldn't tell that he hadn't eaten any of it), and were now on a seemingly endless quest to find a sufficient piece of material to cover one of the holier sections in their roof.
Of course, Starscream could have snuck away from his leader at any point. Megatron wasn't paying that much attention to him, but he hadn't yet because Megatron was paying attention to him. Not just to find things to scold or belittle him about, either. They were talking, having conversations about the old days. Never mind that the conversations kept devolving into arguments, they were still having them, and Starscream had wanted this—needed this—to remind himself that the old days had existed. Their life on Cybertron and all that had happened in the interim was real, realer than whatever was happening to them right now.
And despite their arguments, Megatron was asking Starscream questions and listening to the replies. Of course, he rarely agreed with the ideas that Starscream expressed, but he wasn't just dismissing them out of hand, either. That was something that hadn't happened since way back when Megatron had first taken the Seeker as his second-in-command. Starscream didn't know if it was because his commander was finally recognizing his worth or that being human had made him soft or perhaps some other being had somehow slipped into Megatron's body in the middle of the night, but he was curious to see how long this could last.
At the moment, it was slipping. The two of them had gotten into a particularly heated argument about whether it was the second or third siege of Simfur when they'd been forced to retreat after they ran out of fuel and ammo. It was important that Megatron remember it was the third siege because Starscream had not been in charge of that one; he'd led the second one, when they had to give up after Optimus Prime himself shot Starscream out of the sky and the Decepticon troops had panicked. Megatron had apparently rolled the exasperation of finding his SIC in a medbay with only one wing together with that of losing to poor bureaucratic planning.
Starscream had pushed the argument even farther than he normally would have because he had realized halfway through that Megatron, for some reason, was trying not to lose his temper at him—biting back certain replies, taking longer to choose his words, and speaking through gritted teeth instead of shouting. It was both amusing and intriguing. Why would the warlord bother holding back his anger now of all times? And how far would his determination hold?
But Megatron had stopped replying to him altogether about half an hour ago now, and the two of them were occupied rooting through one of the rubbish heaps on the edge of the slum. The silence left plenty of space for the roar of apathetic misery to creep into Starscream's field of attention once more.
He didn't want to be doing this; he didn't want to be moving his arms and legs anymore. Every time he bent down half-heartedly to shift aside some debris, it felt like there was a weight in his chest trying to topple him over into the rubbish. It wasn't painful, just heavy. He didn't understand how such a small body could feel so heavy, and this was so stupid, and Megatron was such an idiot, and he should have been tricking naïve humans with Ajit today, and it would be so much easier to just lie down and stop moving...
A foot nudged his leg.
"What are you doing?" Megatron's voice cut into the haze of his thoughts.
Starscream grunted and folded his arms under his face. He hadn't really registered lying face down in the trash; it had just sort of happened. Now that he was here, though, he didn't much feel like moving.
"Get up; I've found something suitable."
"Good for you."
"Do you intend to lie there for the rest of the day?"
"Yes."
"There are likely organic pests beneath you."
"Great."
There was a pause, and then, as he had expected, a large hand closed around his elbow. Starscream squealed and whined in protest as Megatron dragged him up. He set the Seeker on his feet and gruffly brushed away a few clinging bits of paper and other trash.
"Act your age for once," he growled, cuffing Starscream around the back of the head.
Starscream squealed at that, too, and then watched through watery eyes as Megatron began gathering up the folds of the material that he had found. It was a large sheet of woven blue plastic, frayed in places, and covered in dirt and other filth. It smelled, but no worse than any of the rest of the slum. It would do well for keeping drafts out of their temporary living quarters, at least.
Megatron folded it sloppily and then threw it to Starscream. His second squawked as he got a face-full of dirt along with the armful of moldy tarp, which he quickly let drop back to the ground.
"What are you giving it to me for!?" he demanded, trying to wipe the dirt out of his eyes.
"Carry it," Megatron said simply before turning and beginning to walk away.
Starscream spent a moment spluttering before shrieking, "It's fragging half my size! You carry it!"
"I am already carrying something," his commander pointed out, half turning toward him once more and indicating the jugs of water he had strung over each shoulder.
"Well, what is that stupidly huge body of yours for if not carrying things?" the Seeker pouted, folding his arms across his bony chest in an attempt to emphasize his smallness.
It was not a gesture that he normally would have committed in front of Megatron, but one that had become habit during his recent ventures with the human children. Ajit had taught him how the amount of sympathy one could garner from other humans was in direct proportion to how small and vulnerable one was. Megatron just blew air through his nose in that particular, "I have had just about enough of you for one day," manner of his and started to walk toward the Seeker.
The latter quickly unfolded his arms and stepped back, but all Megatron did was bend down and grab the tarp. For one bewildered moment, Starscream thought that he actually was going to carry it, but instead, he just shook it out and began spreading it as flat as he could on the uneven ground.
"What are you doing?" Starscream asked suspiciously.
"Making it easier to transport things," Megatron replied.
The Seeker frowned in confusion, but didn't argue. He took a curious step closer to the edge of the tarp and to his leader, who had his back to him at the moment. Megatron gave the tarp a final pat, and then straightened up.
"That should do it," he said, and then, without warning, he reached out and grabbed hold of Starscream.
The smaller man shrieked in alarm and tried to twist away, but Megatron had long since proven himself more than a match. The warlord seized him by first his wrist, then his elbow, and finally wrapped his arms around Starscream's narrow waist before wrestling him to the ground on the edge of the tarp. Before the Seeker could wriggle away, he found the world suddenly turning about as Megatron rolled him up in the dirt-encrusted material.
"Megatron! You—!" he began, but the thought left him as his commander heaved the roll of Seeker up and slung him over a broad shoulder.
Disoriented, humiliated, and starting to feel more than a little claustrophobic, Starscream shrieked, not caring of the dirt from the tarp that was somehow managing to make its way into his mouth. He kicked, he struggled, he wriggled about with all his strength, but Megatron just grunted and held him tighter as he started to walk. It was the claustrophobia that broke him in the end.
"Okay! Okay, I'll carry it! I'll carry it, so let me go already!" Starscream howled.
There was a pause, and then he felt himself slipping toward the ground. He thought for a moment that Megatron was going to just let him fall the whole way, which would have been unfortunate as his arms had become trapped in such a way that at least one of them was sure to have been crushed, but a large arm caught hold of him at the last moment and lowered the wriggling Seeker back to safety.
After a couple seconds of confused struggling, he managed to extricate himself—red-faced, mussy-haired, and smeared in dirt—from the suffocating material.
"Tatti ander lele, madar chod!" he snarled, utilizing the best of the Hindi slang Ajit had taught him.
Megatron didn't need to know what it meant to know it was demeaning, and began to advance on his second again. The smaller man blanched, tried to stand too quickly, and ended up falling over backward when his feet caught in the tarp, arms flailing comically. This combined with his look of surprise just before toppling was enough to stop Megatron's irritation in its tracks.
"Come on," he growled, turning to leave before Starscream could see the laughter that he was suppressing.
Starscream just sat on the ground, glaring at his retreating back. It would serve the great aft right if he were to get up and make a run for it. He didn't deserve this kind of treatment. He could go away, far away, and survive on his own. He didn't need Megatron.
The warlord paused suddenly and turned back to him.
"You were right, by the way; it was the third siege of Simfur."
The first half of the sentence shocked the Seeker so much that he almost didn't hear the rest of it. He was right. He was right. Of course, he usually was, but to hear the words from Megatron himself...
As he began to fold the tarp and gather it up, Starscream didn't think to consider the possibility that his leader might have had other motivations for making such an admission at that moment.