Summary- Skywarp hears advice, though he's not sure he can enact it.

This would have happened in a war. Starscream's memories were full of fallen enemies and allies and those that got in the way between those two. He was made with all those memories, even if his severe personality component smothered them. Things like deaths and getting trapped and losing battles all happened in war. Bad situations and lost safe havens and dead allies all happened. If he'd stayed on Earth fighting Starscream's war against Megatron and the autobots, he would have faced all this too.

It didn't make it easier. Apparently, the knowledge didn't help the others much either.

Rodimus hadn't stayed locked in his room for long. He was the commander in this situation. He- as he said (it wasn't like Skywarp understood any of it without his own ranting over it)- had been the one to go through the academy. He was the leader of this 'Team Athenia' business. (There was more to it too -something about the pressure put on a joked about 'chosen one', a failed battle, the rank he held contradicting with that pressure and failure- but how was that Skywarp's to distinguish and bother with?) He wasn't going to hide from responsibility.

Skywarp was glad he hadn't. Rodimus kept a clear head. He was a steady sort of guy and it made his lead steady. There was something comforting in that, at least.

He was nervous.

That wasn't anything new, but he felt like bursting at the seams of his plating. He couldn't keep going like this, couldn't swallow back this nervousness- he had to get out, had to leave, had to find something comforting in that steady presence, and those weren't very compatible options.

Compatible or not, Tailgate had supported his muttered desire to go see Rodimus. Somehow, having his idea propped up with assurances made it seem less...impossible to enact.

So he'd found Rodimus where the Prime was cataloging mines and asked to 'talk'. Maybe? He didn't really remember what he'd said. It was too stressful to remember details like that. All that mattered was that now he was seated in a private room with the Prime and he was pretty sure that had been his goal.

Tailgate had been so proud to see him go off in search of this confrontation.

The pride seen there kept him cemented to his seat even as Rodimus started trying to pry the reason for his conversation out of him.

He was in one seat. A nice seat, all things considered. Certainly too nice to be seen on most decepticon ships outside those regal ones that hovered over Chaar. Nice things could so easily be traps. Skywarp kept his claws from intertwining into the mess of metal rings that wove the seat of the chair and instead wound them up into each other.

Rodimus was in the other. He hadn't had the reservations that the clone had about comfort, apparently. Not likely, seeing as he'd found another weaving metal ring mesh and wrapped it around himself. For someone so stoically a leader, the mech undoubtedly liked pampered comfort. It was something Starscream could very much understand. Skywarp had too much fear for comfortable things and the motives behind pampering to understand it completely.

"What did you need?" Rodimus finally broke the awkward silence. "I've got to keep cataloging our supplies. We need to build this barricade as fast as we can."

Oh yes. Their 'plan'. A sardonic voice in his head grumbled at the word. It wasn't much of a plan. (They didn't have much in the way of options, though) They'd fled to the edge of the system. Star systems sounded small on maps and in travel guides, but they were huge. The scouting drones were huge up close, but evidently were not all that fast. They'd had cycles out here without even a sign of the scouts being more than a half planet's orbit away from the location that they'd landed on not long before.

The autobot reinforcements were even further away.

So the commander had decided that the system edge needed to be barricaded as best it could be before the scouts reached it. Since the 'edge' of a star system was a sphere, this amount of work had been time consuming and still was far from done. Still, so long as they came in this direction, the drones would be caught in the explosives rigged up before they could reach the cybertronians retreating behind its border. Eventually, the nearest spacebridge would have let the refugees through and admitted the reinforcements capable of taking on scouts.

Only scouts.

No army had figured out how to take on the main ships themselves.

"Oh."

That wasn't an intelligent answer. Rodimus wouldn't know what to make of it. He could just make the autobot mad or something-

The Prime interrupted his claw fiddling momentarily when he spoke up. "'Oh' what? What do you need?"

He didn't sound mad at least. The decepticon waited a moment longer before deciding to bite the bullet and just say it all.

"I want to go," Skywarp whimpered. His claws continued their fiddling helplessly. They had the habit of doing that, didn't they? Habits were hard to catch and harder to stop. It was a frightening helplessness. "I want somewhere sa-safe."

Still not angry looking, Rodimus just gave him a somber expression. It told him what the reply would be before he even said it.

"There are a few locations safe for the moment, but I can't say they will be for long."

In other words, there isn't anywhere safe.

"I'm sorry," the rusted mech shrugged. "I wish I had a better answer for you, but there just aren't any locations that are going to be safe in the long run. Not from what we've seen here."

It wasn't the answer Skywarp wanted.

"Maybe so, but I w-want one," the clone frowned in petty frustration.

Rodimus stared at him before his vents let out a sigh.

"Kup was right. You're just a kid."

That felt like an insult. When Tailgate called him young, he accepted it. When anyone else did, his somehow-existent pride bristled.

"And?" Skywarp tried to sit up a little straighter. "You don't want to be safe? The old guy died-"

Probably not the best thing to say if he didn't want to enrage the autobot, but it was too late to bite the words back now.

"Any of you- of us could be next. All of us could be. How am I supposed to- how do I feel alright with that?"

The strength of his statement was surprising to himself, but it had faded by the end into little more than a moan. Skywarp wanted a clear answer. He wanted something, anything, that wouldn't feel like what happened to Kup was going to happen to him.

Rodimus had made another sighing sound before he perked himself up enough to lean forward.

"Let me tell you something," he started and it was a demand enough that Skywarp just stayed quiet waiting to be 'told' that 'something'. "Not every situation is going to feel safe, let alone be safe. Sometimes, you make a sacrifice to give others that safety and it means sacrificing your own. I'm a Prime. That's my job."

Sounded like a slag job, in the clone's opinion.

"Do you know- No, you wouldn't. Um." Rodimus brushed a servo down his face before gesturing at his arms and chassis. "See all the leftover rust?"

Of course he did. That scrap ("rust infection", he'd called it on the planetside when explaining how he couldn't transform with the rest of them) had almost gotten three of them killed. It had almost gotten Rodimus killed (and Skywarp was surprised at how much he didn't want that). It had gotten one of them killed (and the unhappiness therein was odd as well for him).

And there was still the subdued fear that it was contagious.

All in all, he wasn't about to forget the dark marring Rodimus's frame.

"W-where'd you get it?" Skywarp asked.

Maybe- in the least- he could find confirmation that it wasn't going to spread over to him.

"On one of our first missions as a team," the Prime leaned back again with an air of causality. "I'd been in some scuffles and trained for combat more than the others. Partially because I went through the academy, of course, but also because I had Kup as my mentor. He's- he was- very pushy with me. Didn't like me at first, but we both grew on each other, I guess."

This didn't sound like it had anything to do with rust.

He let it get blabbed on about anyways. If Kup was going to hijack the conversation, then that was that. Skywarp couldn't exactly tell the autobot to get on with it (some of the other clones would, of course; the liar would probably be gushing right now about how interested he was in this distracted story, rather than an answer to his fears over a lack of safe places).

"But my team got assigned to spacebridge 687-030 in an emergency mission and Kup didn't get to go with us. That was-"

Rodimus sighed again.

"That was why he made you take me. He felt so responsible for what happened in the Magnokor asteroid belt, what happened when he wasn't around and it was just me. It kinda frags me, actually. What happened there was on me. I wasn't a good enough commander to win that battle, that's it."

It was an admission that seemed rather alien to him. Starscream would never say it. Most decepticons wouldn't, from his inherited memory files.

"A battle?" Skywarp muttered. "How are you alive if you lost it?"

The autobot made another shrug.

"It was a fight at a spacebridge outpost in that belt. We were supposed to defend it, but the decepticon squadron that attacked far outmatched us. Team Chaar. You heard of them?"

They were in the memory files too. The clone gave a little gesture of affirmation. He admittingly didn't know much about them.

"They were far more intuned to fighting than us," Rodimus said plainly. "I may have had experience, but my team was made of rookies. We didn't really stand a chance against Strika and her goons."

Then, he must reiterate, how was he still standing?

"You know what happened in the aftermath?" the autobot continued. "I had emergency care to cull the infection, but it left me with consequences I'm never getting rid of. Kup was distraught. He never got over it, never stopped obsessing over how he felt he should have been there instead of me. Hot Shot had to be hospitalized too. Red Alert got even more overprotective than before. It changed everything. Get it? It changed us all and we couldn't go back."

Change often was irreversible. Skywarp hated that.

"I don't like it," the clone growled. "It's not- it isn't- there's no-...What do you do? H-how do you get safe again when change makes your safety go away? Like y-your transformation?"

The infection, the deaths, the alien threat- all of it. It upheaved safety and that was already so rare to find. He hated this all so much, if just for the terror it caused.

Despite not saying it, something in the autobot's demeanor seemed to hint he too was thinking about their recent botched battle.

"There's only two options in a situation like this," Rodimus said. "You go on or you give up. And in a situation like this, there's no point in giving up."

It just meant laying down and getting fried by the scouts. Or maybe by situation, he was referring to the entire new struggle against this alien force. Ignoring it just meant getting burned away.

Still-

What was the point?

"I don't see a point in going on, when we can't do anything-" he started, though his own words ran short of putting voice to his thoughts and he garbled into silence. Rodimus frowned.

"Sorry you see it that way," the autobot replied.

And somehow, he did sound disappointed over it. How? He was a con, he was a clone, he was useless in a fight, how would his opinion matter to the other?

The fact that it did undeniably affected him, though it lay subdued under the stressors of the conversation.

"I just- I don't-..."

With a small heave, the Prime lost his blanket and stood from his chair. He was near Skywarp in a moment, servos laying lightly on the bigger mech's shoulders. He was very glad that rust wasn't contagious after all.

"Give it a try," Rodimus asked of him. "There's nothing to lose with that. There's nothing to win by giving up, though. So give going on a try. I did it after 687-030, even though I wanted to give up after failing my team and mentor and planet there. And moving on meant that I got to get a place defending this galaxy against these slagheads now, instead of rotting in destitution on Cybertron waiting for the lumen purgatio to kill us all just because I didn't think I could handle combat again."

Give it a try.

Skywarp nodded through the sickly distress around him.

He had a chance to practice the unhappy advice later that orn, when Hot Shot's life signal disappeared while he was out placing more explosives in the slowly building barricade.

Rodimus, though. Rodimus had gone steely and ordered all explosives be triggered distantly while they flew further away from the system to wait for reinforcements. It'd taken a good number of enemy signals out, though many more remained on distant scans. That was enough for the Prime, apparently.

He'd be moving on. Protecting the rest of them. Trying to at least get some to survive.

Skywarp may have gotten the chance to practice that same advice, but he was far from achieving the rationality that Rodimus had in the moment.