Title: Backstage: Just Act Natural
Warnings: Drunken Stunticons, implied violence, mental torture; looking "behind the scenes" of G1's funny Decepticon villains.
Rating: G
Continuity: G1
Characters: Thrust, Dirge, Ramjet, Stunticons, Thundercracker, Skywarp, Starscream
Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.
Motivation (Prompt): Envy
[* * * * *]
They stared at the Stunticons.
The Stunticons had been created with the kind of madness the Decepticons feared. The fact that the ground-pounder gestalt didn't even notice it was a privatized horror to the rest of the Decepticons. They all watched the Stunticons like visitors at a zoo watching the caged monsters. Or, perhaps more accurately, they were freed prisoners on the outside looking back in at the inmates. It was kind of funny, a little sad, and it brought an itchy, wild feeling to their sparks. The Stunticons were a car crash, and they were observers.
That's what we were, the Decepticons thought, even if they didn't think it. We didn't know any better, either.
That was the crux of the matter. The Stunticons embodied the Earth-mad sickness they'd endured, but at the time, none of the Decepticons had been aware of their own madness. Only afterward, looking back, had they seen what total crazy idiots they'd become.
Sometimes, idling in the common room between duty shifts and missions, they speculated on what the Stunticons would be like after Earth. Popular opinion among the flyers was that Motormaster would make an excellent soldier. Starscream and Soundwave had unofficially-officially agreed to transfer him over to Shockwave's ranks to be trained up as a real Decepticon fighter. It'd take some doing, but eventually the other Stunticons might make it in the normal ranks as well.
Because, seriously, the Stunticons weren't really Decepticon Elite material. At least, not off Earth where the other Elite Decepticons didn't have to pretend to be incompetently insane. Unless the Decepticons' youngest combiner team mysteriously gained a few million years' fighting experience when their minds were sorted out, they'd be booted off the Elite as soon as the Earth mission was finished. Which meant that the Elite flyers probably wouldn't get a chance to confirm their speculations, but what the frag. It gave them something to argue about good-naturedly between shifts.
It also led to these long, awkward pauses whenever the other Decepticons were confronted by the Stunticons' complete lack of understanding. Reality - on or off Cybertron, Megatron's deception notwithstanding - passed the Stunticons by on a daily basis. It made speculation on their base personalities an endless activity, as nobody actually knew what they were like underneath the scrambled circuitry. At the same time, it also made it impossible to explain certain fundamental basics of the universe to the poor ground-pounders.
So it wasn't like the Coneheads could explain to the Stunticons why they stared. It was the distance between grounder-pounders and flyers multiplied by a vast amount of missing information. They stared because they saw a pathetic ignorance staring back at them with nervous unhappiness and apathy and fireworks and drunken incomprehension. Until their Earth-mad broken minds were repaired, the Stunticons had to be kept in the dark on Megatron's master plan.
Starscream was not dead, and they could not tell the Stunticons that fact. If they did, the insane combiner team still wouldn't understand what that really meant. They couldn't explain the politics playing quietly behind the scenes, because the Stunticons lived and fought onstage with no inkling that the other Decepticons were only acting. Offstage didn't exist for these four mechs, yet.
Offstage, the important things happened. The Stunticons just didn't know that. So the Coneheads stared because they couldn't speak.
But that question…
The three Seekers had heard what Drag Strip asked, and in his words they saw their own Hell looking back at them. And that, with all its heavy implications, could not be tolerated. They knew all too well what Starscream's absence could mean, and 'envy' did not enter into their minds.
Using only two fingers, Thrust gently picked Drag Strip's hand up off his arm, swung it slowly into open air, and let it go as cautiously as an armed explosive. He looked at the yellow stunt car for a moment more, optics dimly pondering unknown thoughts. He turned his head and nodded slightly to Ramjet, who shrugged back. Dirge flicked an intentionally disinterested glance over the other three Stunticons, who gaped back. Even Dead End's notorious apathy had hitched, his expression changing enough to hint at the question openly painted across his gestaltmate's faces: What just happened?
The three Coneheads chose not to answer the unvoiced question. They turned on their turbines and left they way they'd come. They weren't hurrying, and they were not retreating. They just…left.
The Stunticons looked at each other. "Do you ever get the feeling we're not being told something?" Breakdown asked, a little hesitant to break the silence.
Dead End blinked. Drag Strip nodded, staring at his discarded hand as he used to the other to bring the energon cube back to his lips. He felt the need for more high grade, suddenly.
"Ding dong?" Wildride suggested uncertainly.
The wicked witch, the wicked witch, is dead, is dead, is dead.
…isn't he?