A/N: "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
Times like these, we learn what's really important to us, no matter how damaging that information may be.
Characters: Starscream, Skyfire, Megatron-centric
Pairings: StarscreamxSkyfire
Warnings: language, trauma, sadness, lessons
Ultimate Measure
The following Monday, Starscream only got as far as his desk.
He drove into the garage, scaled the front steps, and stepped into the elevator without a change in expression, but the moment he opened his office door and saw his empty chair and desk, he broke into a full-on run to the elevator, wretchedly reliving every time he had picked up the phone on Sunday and put it back down with a shaking hand, unable to even think about what had happened the previous night.
Rationalizing things to himself. Telling himself that Megatron had never mentioned Skyfire, and that things might be fine. A passing storm, an intimidating flash of tooth but nothing more. The man could be completely unaware; bluffing like the idiot he was.
Such thoughts were hollow, and their gaudy Faberge egg shells broke and dug into Starscream's skin as he ran into his car and screeched out onto the street, mocking him for being so stupid, so frightened, so insipid. The power and rage he had felt from the President was incapable of being underestimated. There was a chance Skyfire was dead already.
Starscream had never felt such roiling hatred for himself when he realized that, if that were the case, the thing that kept him from picking up the phone was the fear of explaining everything to Skyfire. His secrets were so knotted, even he couldn't make sense of them. For risk of revealing them, for risk of revealing himself, he may have caused his friend's death.
The Seeker pulled into the laboratory garage and manically slashed his keycard through the door five times until it beeped and let the doors hiss back, the sound split by the desperate staccato of his heels. He sprinted down the familiar empty halls, knowing with horrible certainty that Skyfire was there, but whether he was at his counter or beneath it was the question.
Sucking in air, Starscream shoved the door to his and Skyfire's lab open. He saw bottles, he saw an empty stool and a water bath. The lab was silent, empty of the usual bounce and guitar of classic rock. Many different kinds of empty. His hand slapped to his heart and clenched into his suit jacket; a bare exhalation of the man's name took half the strength from his knees.
He staggered to the nearest counter and barely saved himself from collapsing outright when a big blond man came out from behind a partition, one gloved hand to his glasses.
Starscream's hand went jerking into a rack of test-tubes and he didn't even hear the sharp crashes as they hit the floor: all he could hear was his breath rasping in and out of his open mouth and his heart in his ears. Suddenly burning up, he ripped at his clingy suit jacket and threw it to the floor.
"Fuck. Fuck," he grit out, scraping his hand over his numb face. Blocking up the hole in his chest. "Oh Christ, you're here."
Starscream didn't see his face, didn't see Skyfire's expression: all he saw was big, blond, lab-coat and glasses and pink skin, implied breath. Still alive. All that mattered was Skyfire was still alive.
"We need to move. You have to get out of here," the Seeker choked out, the guttural words as immediate and vital as his next breath. He pushed his hair from his face and looked around for a jacket and a wallet, already planning three steps ahead: hitting the chemist's apartment for bare essentials and rerouting his bank account. "Gather your things."
"What's going on?"
"Megatron has been watching us. I can't explain right now, but it's very likely he could come barging in here at any minute and I guarantee you neither of us will survive it," he muttered through his teeth, ripping Skyfire's log-in papers from the wall-cache by the door and halving them twice with vicious whips of his wrists. "If you value your life, you will move."
"But I can't just leave. Don't you want me to finish what you paid me for?"
He heard Skyfire's steady, deep voice as if from very far away. His ears were still bursting with his own heartbeat, but something told him the chemist's voice should have been sharper. Louder. More real.
"Forget about the stupid compound!" the Seeker yelled, voice cracking as he turned and pointed to the door. "I am D-Con's Second in Command and I officially release you from my service!"
"As if I would stay on a second longer, after this."
The impenetrable chill in Skyfire's deep voice made the Seeker look up. Actually seeing Skyfire for the first time stilled every molecule of panic in his scrawny, nerve-wracked body. The flat expression on the big man's face and the clench of his fists dropped him into an entirely different level of shock. One that made it hard to breathe.
Starscream's dark eyes narrowed, expression both stunned and uncomprehending, but Skyfire didn't give him a chance to speak.
"I have to wonder why you took so long to give me this," Skyfire said too softly, his lip curling up over his teeth.
Starscream fought the urge to back away; the tension rising off of Skyfire's huge shoulders was palpable. Never had Starscream seen any part of the big, gentle man curl or stiffen or sharpen. It was only when the chemist raised his hand that D-Con's Second saw the manilla file half-crumpled in Skyfire's bloodless fist.
"Did you think I wasn't going to look closely at it? Or did you think I was just going to… go along with whatever you wanted? Not only did you lie to me about the experimental petroleum product, I know this gas, Starscream. This gas has been classified as illegal by the ACS and all nations in the chemical coalition."
Starscream couldn't tear himself from his friend's face and the slow-spreading hatred he saw there. The heat suffocating his body had turned into a skin-cracking chill, leaving him shaking.
"What… gas?" Starscream rasped, hands drifting close to his chest.
"The toxic nerve gas," Skyfire said through his teeth, "whose dry-start activation ingredient you've had me synthesizing for the past four months."
Skyfire's face was white, his eyes hyper-blue and burning with righteous rage. His fist was shaking around the file, tension knotting further and further up his arm. Starscream swallowed against the upsurge of pure dread, unable to keep the fear from his expression. His mind pushed against an incomprehensible barrier, crippled by the hatred he saw on Skyfire's face.
He was never supposed to find out. How did he find out?
When Starscream carefully put his hands out and took a step forward, the chemist flung the twisted manilla file on the ground, sending papers flaring into the air between them.
"You never told me what my research was being used for!" Skyfire bellowed, and just the sharp slap of his voice made Starscream's own jump to the back of his throat and out, to protect him from what Skyfire could do to him.
"It isn't your place to ask," the Seeker snapped, hardly feeling the words leave his lips. "You do the work we assign you and that is where your concern ends."
"Weapons? Illegal biological weapons? It all makes sense. I knew looking at it, I knew something was off. The structure, the reactivity and the projected application. But how — how could you think —"
"I think the blame ends when you didn't think enough to reason what a weapons company would want with your skills," Starscream said coldly, but the second it was out, he nearly slapped his hands over his mouth to stop the stream of Mother, work, defense, automatic. He stifled a curse and looked up, but the betrayed, helplessly enraged look on Skyfire's face told him he had already done enough. More than enough.
Skyfire turned and yanked off his lab-coat, flinging it to the ground. Starscream stooped for it with a pained exclamation, clawed into the white cotton as if claiming or containing some part of the big, once-gentle chemist. His friend.
"Skyfire, stay."
The desperate crack in his voice was enough to make Skyfire – soft even when hard, empathetic even when betrayed – look back, even if the expression on his face was anything but understanding. Starscream bundled the coat to his chest and grasped for words, finally gesturing at the spotless lab around them.
"It was a company project, I didn't know about the gas! All of this is from Megatron!"
"You're head of this project." Before the Seeker could speak, Skyfire jabbed his finger at the pile on the ground, neck red. "Don't lie to me! It's right here in the file, in the header!"
If there was one thing Starscream knew it was impossible to argue with, yet easiest to change, it was the big print. He didn't waste time being shocked.
"I can – I can put you on another project, it doesn't matter!"
"How the hell can you say that?" Skyfire demanded incredulously, voice raw. "You expect me to just — to just leave you to trick someone else? How?"
"Whatever helps your conscience!" Starscream snapped, then choked out in the same breath, "You can't leave."
"You just said I had to!"
All Starscream could do was stare blankly at Skyfire, standing across from him in the empty lab, until it all caught up with him. Everything. What he was doing; what he should have been doing. He grit his teeth until it hurt, realizing where he had made a left turn.
He had been mindlessly pushing through the plea he always knew he would have to make, momentarily blind to the fact he had to get Skyfire out and away as fast as possible. Always, some part of him had been preparing for the moment he would have to fight Skyfire's searing virtue in order to stay by his side. The moment the gap between them would be revealed and answering gaps were gouged into his flesh.
"You do. You have to leave, if you want to live," Starscream made himself say, hoarse. He put out his hand. "Come with me."
"No. You come with me," Skyfire said stonily. Starscream looked up, painfully perplexed and almost dry heaving from the unsolved crush of failing to move the chemist's stocky figure from such a dangerous place. He needed to do it.
When Skyfire spoke again, deep and unrelenting, all Starscream heard was too late.
"I know that this doesn't start or end with you and I'm not the first scientist you've ever tricked. Megatron has been doing this for a long time. But you can end it."
"End what?" Starscream asked hysterically, throwing his lab coat to the floor. His voice shot up and cracked, dripping fear too thick for his skinny frame and bent back. His hands clutched helplessly at the air. "What is there to end?"
"You can come with me to Sumdac. Expose this, testify against Megatron." Skyfire's face, if possible, became even harder as he looked at the wrecked man in front of him. "You can get amnesty for your own involvement, or a lessened sentence, but they can't deny a direct testimony from a Second. With you, he can be brought to trial."
Starscream felt his reality misting upwards, worsened by staring at Skyfire's unchanging expression. The seriousness in his eyes – no, the conviction in his eyes, the belief. And then the idea of simply walking into a courtroom and blurting all of it out? Starscream was ripped in half by an urge to laugh and cry; what stuttered out of his mouth was a stunted cough, crunched by a faint moan as he bent and clutched at his face.
"You don't understand how this works," Starscream moaned, hardly recognizing the voice as his own. He looked up, begging Skyfire to understand with his eyes. "No one — no one — goes against Megatron and lives."
If he testified, Megatron would find him. That wouldn't be the end of it. He would hunt down every last one of his brothers, his sister, his family. Anyone who had ever thought about caring for him. And if he tried to run, he would follow him to the ends of the earth for the sole pleasure of choking the last of the life out of him.
And he would do all of this from atop his perfectly intact empire, re-awarded to him by the Supreme Court after a heart-felt apology for all the confusion.
"This isn't about Megatron anymore," Skyfire said fiercely, gesturing at the stocked walls and the company symbol on the door. "There are laws in place to prevent this kind of thing, Starscream, upheld by higher forces like the govern —"
"You don't fucking understand! The government is a bunch of money-laundering spooks who spend their Saturday evenings planning wars and price inflations and when they want horrible things done, they go to him! Megatron is employed by the government, he is the fucking government. They have too much to lose if he goes under so he will never go under."
Starscream's hand slapped down on a nearby counter and he sagged onto it, shoulders quivering as he fought, tooth and nail, not to cry. He crushed his other hand to his mouth and looked at Skyfire standing across from him, strong and tall with his blue eyes blazing and his fists clenched with absolute strength on his face. Absolute justification, vindication, want of justice.
"He's going to kill you." Starscream's voice came out as a whisper, nearly a whimper. Mechanical and faint, nothing more than the echo that drifted up from his hollow chest. "He's going to kill you and all you can do is just stand there and talk about justice like it still applies to you."
"You may be in a place where you can't imagine justice anymore, Starscream. Someplace where nerve gas is just a product and it leaves your mind as soon as it leaves the shelves. But I still can," Skyfire said quietly. His mouth thinned and he bent to pick up the papers he had spilled, turning them into evidence with every swipe of his hand. "And if I die for that idea, then I'm going to make as much noise as possible before I go."
"You say that. You say that but you're terrified. You're terrified of dying," the Seeker accused him shrilly, jabbing a finger down at him.
"Everyone is. But some people can see beyond themselves. Some people would never harm others to benefit themselves, and still other people would put themselves in harms way to prevent that kind of abuse from continuing."
His words were stupid. Canned. Skyfire was no hero. Starscream's mind almost threw the phrases and their sentiment aside, then Skyfire gave him a look so cold it was beyond accusing. It put a universe between them, an advancing ice block that nearly killed Starscream where he stood. The hardest part was, it had always existed… the light had simply never hit it right.
"No. No, Skyfire, no, please."
Senseless, now, just like with Megatron. His existence spiraled, reduced to irrationality after irrationality, all eked from a tight throat suspended above shaking knees.
"You can't leave."
He wasn't thinking about the lab, he wasn't thinking about the company, but it was as though the fabric of his being had become woven into D-Con and the labs like electrical wires. The fact of it was, after Skyfire went through the door, he would be gone and Starscream would be alone. He would leave him.
"That's where you're wrong, Starscream," Skyfire answered, straightening with a full folder. "I can leave, and I'm doing it. And I'm telling every ACS board member I know about what you're doing in here."
The chemist walked across the room to gather one thing – his laptop – then went straight for the door. Unable to move, Starscream watched, unraveling with every foot of distance between them. To see Skyfire's wide back turned against him made him incapable of thinking, talking, hoping or trying. The world beyond the lab door was unsafe, but the Seeker didn't even have the will to keep him from it.
To Starscream's mingled horror and hope, Skyfire stopped at the door to the lab. He turned around, expression wounded.
"How could you do this? How?" he asked, and Starscream heard him. The Skyfire he might have loved, the one he still wanted to be with. Stupidly. Hearing that gentle voice cracked with so much disappointment, so much pain, the Seeker heir couldn't find it in himself to lie.
"It's what we do," Starscream answered hoarsely.
"That's not an answer!" Skyfire roared, slamming the door shut. The sound made Starscream grab for the counter again, spine convulsing. "That's not a fucking answer and you know it!"
Even more caustic was the vibrating anger left in the air after his voice faded. Starscream couldn't do anything more than grip the side of the counter and keep breathing. Skyfire tensed as though he was going to say something else, then he simply shook his head and pulled the door open. And left.
It was then, standing alone (always alone) in the lab, that Starscream realized he didn't give a fuck about people.
He couldn't give a damn how many people died as a result of this gas – didn't care how many suffered from mines or bombs or null rays or shock-batons – but he almost felt as though he could start caring if it would take away the hatred in the other man's stare. Saturated with panic and fear, he was sure he could save himself or save Skyfire or both, if only he would turn around and walk back in. All of these pleading words were at the cusp of the Seeker's throat (and even if he said them he knew Skyfire wouldn't accept them) but then they met his fear and everything that had kept him safe for twenty years, and all of it hardened and something horribly different came out.
Something rotten. Something old.
"No one will believe you."
Halfway out the door, Skyfire paused. The calmness in the Seeker's voice was poisonous and unreal – and the echo made Skyfire shut his eyes and grit his teeth, a wave of nausea pushing through his body. It had been true, all those years ago. But back then he hadn't had the nerve to speak, and this time it would be different.
"I won't stop until they do."
The door clicked shut.
