OK, so this is the final chapter of what was once the "Single Chapter from Hell." I dragged myself away from the whomping-huge, fanged, rabid bunny that one Jalaperilo sicced on me and fiddled with this some more. And then switched it back to first person; it just "felt better" that way. Don't ask me why. In any case, this whole story is going to need a complete rewrite when I'm done to get the narrative voice under control. *laughs* Ah well. ;)

Also, it's my birthday today (April 5), but apparently you get the "present."If you can consider this a present, that is. ;) I consider it enough of a present that this chapter-that-turned-into-three-chapters is done. Finally.

Also also, my apologies if with this chapter you find yourself feeling cheated of a "birth scene." It occurs to me that readers might be expecting one, given how I ended the last chapter…but I really had no intention of writing such a thing in this story. Partly because, honestly, I haven't figured out how it would happen but mostly because, overall, such a thing would actually be irrelevant to the plot, such as it is, of the story. That's kind of odd, I guess, but…there it is. I am curious, myself, as to how such a thing would go, but I didn't want to get bogged down in thinking about that. Maybe once this story is done, I'll go back and write a little side fic that details the process – If only for my own purposes – once I figure it all out. But for now, to quote Megatron: "Use your imagination!" ;) So, this chapter takes place after all the "birthing" is done.

NOTE: This chapter was updated 1/5/10, mostly as part of the effort to fix this story's overall narrative voice to make it consistently third-person throughout. There may be other minor changes from the original, as well, but nothing plot-significant.

12: Resolve

Ratchet made a beeline for Swoop as soon as she walked into the medbay, a look of both worry and resolve on his face.

"You were right," he said quietly, without preamble, as he handed her a datapad. "As usual."

Swoop frowned down at the pad, for a moment having no idea what Ratchet was talking about. Her thoughts were scattered and distracted. Even after two days of enforced rest, she still felt disoriented and somewhat…empty. She'd gotten rather used to the presence of the offspring sparks, and now that they were gone, all fifteen of them perfect and beautiful and safely in stasis, it was almost as if she was missing them. No, not "almost." She did miss them. Being "alone" again was going to take some getting used to, and she was certain that going back to work would help. Staring at the walls of her quarters for two days certainly hadn't helped one iota.

Ratchet, meanwhile, was continuing to talk to Swoop, while she half-listened to him, selectively picking out the important things that he was telling her. He told her that they'd run some further tests on Starscream during her downtime, the results of which were on the pad that she now held. The tests and scans confirmed to Ratchet's satisfaction what Swoop already knew all too well: that the imprint between she and Starscream still existed. Swoop resisted the urge to laugh and spit an "I told you so" at him, and then her snippiness faded altogether as Ratchet further explained that he'd devised something of a temporary, stopgap solution, completely bypassing certain of Starscream's systems while suppressing others. The "treatment" seemed to make him a little less desperately crazy and much more consistently lucid, but Ratchet acknowledged that the treatment, such as it was, wasn't really good for Starscream in the long term. Really, it was merely buying them some time to come up with a more permanent solution to the problem at hand.

She'd given that particular problem an awful lot of thought during her downtime, since she hadn't had much else to do, and since it had become something of a…concern during those two days. She had come up with an idea, but she wasn't about to let Ratchet know what it was…yet. It would, as the saying went, freak him out. And first, she needed to have a talk with Starscream.

Thanking Ratchet absently, Swoop pulled her own datapad out of its storage compartment in the side of her hip. It still contained the data from the scans that she'd performed on Starscream herself, the ones that had confirmed the unusual nature of Starscream's spark. She appended the data from Ratchet's pad to it, handed the empty pad back to Ratchet, and then headed toward the room where Starscream was now being kept.

They'd moved him to a larger room in her absence, one that was more secure but that had a window. If she were in Starscream's position, she knew that being able to see outside would at least offer some measure of comfort. She was surprised that Ratchet had thought of it…but it didn't even occur to her to be surprised that she knew exactly where Starscream was without asking.

"Where are you going?" Ratchet called after Swoop as she moved purposefully toward Starscream's location.

She paused, turned back to him.

"I need to talk to Starscream," she answered simply, before turning away again to resume her journey.

"Wait!" Ratchet called out. "Not by yourself. I'll—"

She stopped in her tracks again, turned back to face him, glowered at him.

"By. Myself," Swoop insisted, brooking no argument. "What I need to say to him no one else needs to hear. Not even you." At Ratchet's troubled look, she waved her datapad at him meaningfully and added, "He won't hurt me." And then she crossed her arms over her chest defiantly, staring Ratchet down. And he wasn't happy about doing so, but he subsided. "We just need to settle this between us, Ratchet," Swoop said then, far more softly, attempting to mollify him. "That's all."

Ratchet sighed resignedly, silently acquiescing, and Swoop turned away from him again to resume her course.

But as she turned away from him, she heard him murmur, bemusedly, "Sure. That's all. Settle it. Just like that."

Just like that, indeed. Or so she hoped, anyway…

When Swoop walked into the room, Starscream was sitting on the berth, leaning back against the raised head of it and staring expressionlessly at the opposite wall, deep in thought. Or psychosis. Or something. He wasn't restrained anymore, and while that was somewhat surprising, Swoop supposed that the monitors and feed lines and myriad system bypasses that were attached to him were tethering him almost as well as actual restraints would. And, as she had reminded Ratchet, she knew that he would not hurt her because he would have to be utterly stupid to do so. He needed her.

And Swoop needed him, too. Wanted him.

This was what she had discovered during her two days of enforced rest. During that time, the want had started to consume her, no doubt strengthened by Starscream's proximity, the fact that he was conscious again, and the fact that she was alone again, that she no longer had offspring sparks to protect. Ironically, she hadn't been able to rest much during her days of rest because of the burning, aching want. The need. Swoop realized now that carrying the offspring sparks had suppressed the effects of the imprint on her. Now, it picked at her, poked at her, made her itch and fidget. And it was strengthening quickly, almost by the minute, whispering urgently at her to just go to Starscream, to take him. Have him. It would be so easy, and they both needed it, wanted it.

It was very hard not to heed the call, and Swoop knew – from experience now – that it would only become harder to resist as time passed, until she could no longer resist it at all.

In the meantime, distraction helped. She had engaged in a few games of chess and a spate of fairly intense arguing with Slag over the fact that he had taken to snidely referring to her as "Her Majesty." She had watched a few movies while snuggled up with Sludge and Grimlock. Even just listening while Snarl had read to her something out of some "fascinating" ancient Cybertronian text about the exploits of some distant ancestor of hers had been a welcome distraction. But the distraction was only temporary. The cloud of needful want was always hovering close at hand, simply waiting for the distraction to end so that it could settle over her again and begin to consume her.

It had occurred to Swoop only the day before that this was what had been clawing relentlessly at Starscream for nigh on six weeks now. Her level of sympathy had skyrocketed.

Really, she had to admire Starscream's restraint, his level of self-control. Because hers began to fray as soon as Starscream's full attention settled on her as she walked into his room. His gaze was dull and seemed somewhat unfocused, but it nonetheless sent shivers through her that took effort to suppress. It occurred to her to wonder exactly what Ratchet had done to him. Later, she would ask Ratchet exactly that question. For now, she just had to hope that whatever Ratchet had done could be easily undone. But first…

"You are something of scientist, yes?" Swoop asked quietly of Starscream.

Starscream eyed her warily, no doubt wondering if it was safe to answer her innocuous but odd question. He expected to be interrogated, and he was probably not expecting anything civilized in that regard, given who he was. Certain Autobots were indeed chomping at the bit to get their hands on him, and Swoop knew that they had no intention of being gentle with him. But she was equally determined that no one was going to touch him, at least not until she understood what had happened, what was obviously still happening, between them.

So far, her will had prevailed. It was not entirely surprising; Swoop had discovered that her new-found status had some unexpected benefits, all of them conveniently hard-wired into those around her. No one had ever felt a need to pay attention to her, a lowly Dinobot, before, much less to heed her. Now, many of those around her reflexively snapped to obey whenever she asked them to do even small things. It was a heady thing, and she could easily see how such power could become overwhelming with time. She could easily envision even now the long road of temptation and corruption that her mother had traveled, which had ultimately led to her destruction. The very same road lay before Swoop now, and the same curious desire to see exactly how far she could push her fledgling authority nagged at her, but her mother's destruction was a powerful incentive to keep such childish impulses in check.

"Sometimes," Starscream decided to answer Swoop's question then, bringing her back to the here-and-now. His manner was guarded, suspicious, his voice quiet. His attention was focused on her yet somehow detached at the same time, as if he wasn't quite all there. This was, no doubt, the intended effect of Ratchet's cobbled-together treatment of Starscream's condition. "When the situation calls for it," Starscream was adding, "I am probably one of the closest things we have to a scientist. Why?"

Swoop nodded at that, not answering right away. Instead, she toyed with the datapad that she held in her hands, staring down at it, suddenly reconsidering the wisdom of revealing to Starscream the information that it contained. The medic in her knew that he had a right to know everything about himself; the Autobot in her thought that the less he, as a Decepticon, knew about this particular aspect of himself, the better. But then, she argued back with herself, Starscream was quick. Smart. Probably much smarter than they gave him credit for. She was quite certain that he would figure it all out for himself soon enough, especially given recent evidence. And it occurred to Swoop, too, that revealing the information to him would perhaps begin to establish a level of trust between them. She had a strong feeling that they would need mutual trust, among many other things, going forward.

"I thought you might be interested in this," Swoop said simply, approaching Starscream's berth more closely, watching his body stiffen in response to her closer proximity, and then offering him the datapad without any further explanation. "But it's a little technical, so..."

Starscream frowned at her and then at the device that she was offering to him, his gaze flicking between it and her. His eyes were narrowed suspiciously, as if he thought that she might be offering him a ticking bomb, and it was only reluctantly that he reached out and took the pad from her. His fingers brushed hers lightly and incidentally as he did so, and Swoop had to fight to suppress a gasp at the contact, at the sensation almost of electric shock that knifed through her like a lightning bolt. He wasn't able to suppress his similar reaction entirely, and after he snatched the datapad roughly out of her hand, she stepped a few paces back from him. As if that would make some huge difference. As if she hadn't been driving him crazy from thousands of kilometers away, much less a mere meter or two away.

Swoop watched as Starscream began to read the information that the pad displayed. She watched his expression shift rapidly between suspicion, shock, disbelief, and then something like satisfaction as he read and absorbed the information. She knew how he felt, knew well the feeling of satisfaction that arose when all of the confused, scattered, and seemingly unrelated pieces of a puzzle started to come together to make a coherent picture. After he had finished reading, after he'd taken a few moments to digest and assimilate what he'd read, Starscream let out a breath that he'd seemed to be holding for years, if the length and the force of it were any indication.

"This…" he said faintly a moment later, shaking the datapad meaningfully and then tilting his head back to stare up at the ceiling, "explains much." After a considered and somewhat awkward pause, he added, still without looking at Swoop, "Thank you for sharing this with me. I know that you didn't have to do that."

"You're welcome," Swoop answered quietly. She couldn't think of anything else to say to him.

"But there's still one thing that's not quite clear to me," Starscream added then, as if he hadn't heard her. He turned his head to look at her then, his penetrating gaze resting heavily on her. She blinked curiously at him, and when she didn't say anything, he added intensely, leaning toward her, "Why are you, of all people, a queen? Why did any of this happen in the first place?"

Swoop swallowed uncertainly, took another step back from him, and deliberated for a long moment about telling him the truth. But then, after realizing that there was nothing to be either gained or lost by doing so, she answered quietly, "Because I am apparently my mother's daughter."

"Your…what?" Starscream sputtered, after a few seconds spent gawking at the Dinobot.

Drawing in a steadying breath, she repeated more loudly, more confidently, "My mother's daughter. You once knew me as Eclipse."

Starscream blinked harder at her, disbelievingly now.

"Eclipse," he repeated dully after a long moment of speechlessness. "The infant. But she was…"

"She…I wasn't killed," Swoop said. "Obviously. My spark ended up in stasis somehow, and then the Autobots brought it with them when they left Cybertron. And then when it was time to create me…Well, here I am."

Starscream was still sputtering, though.

"That's…impossible," he protested weakly, staring at Swoop as if he was incapable of looking away from her, as if someone had riveted his gaze to her face. "Royal sparks can't be transplanted, so you can't be..."

"And yet, here I am," Swoop repeated, flippantly this time, when his voice trailed off. Despite herself, a grin was tugging at her; Starscream's stunned expression, his eyes wide and his mouth cycling from open to closed like a landed fish, was greatly amusing.

"Are you…certain?" Starscream asked dazedly – more so than the revelation warranted, Swoop thought, and she wondered why – once he'd found his voice again.

"As certain as we can be," Swoop answered with a shrug. "There are great similarities between my spark and Mirage's, at the very least. And nothing else really makes sense. I suppose I might not be Eclipse, maybe one of the others, but—"

A bark of humorless laughter escaped Starscream then, interrupting what had devolved into babbling. And Swoop realized that maybe the interruption was a good thing; she'd been blithely telling him things that perhaps she shouldn't have been saying at all. She stared at Starscream, wondering at his reaction.
"Oh, you are most certainly Eclipse!" Starscream declared with utter certainty, his face twisted into a smirk that Swoop couldn't quite interpret. "And I must say that the irony of that is absolutely delicious."

Swoop blinked at him as he continued to snicker madly.

"I…don't understand," she confessed.

"Of course you don't!" Starscream answered flippantly, still chuckling. "But maybe someday you will. Maybe someday, if you're very good, I'll even tell you."

Swoop resisted the urge to demand that he tell her right now, resisting because, if nothing else, she wasn't entirely sure that she wanted to know. She'd had enough surprises and revelations over the course of the last couple of months. She really didn't think that she could handle too many more.

Swoop couldn't think of anything to say to Starscream, though, so a silence settled between them. It was a silence that wasn't necessarily comfortable, heavily charged as it was. Starscream was still staring at Swoop, sizing her up now as if he was a starving lion and she a gravely-wounded wildebeest. She tried to drag her gaze away from his but discovered that, for some reason, she couldn't. And as they stared at each other, Swoop felt a heat building in herself, and it was suddenly all she could do not to go to him, to touch him, to…

Vaguely, it occurred to her that she should leave because being so close to him for any extended period of time was probably not the best of all possible ideas, not for her and certainly not for him. She was just turning to make good her escape when Starscream finally decided to speak up, almost as if he didn't want her to leave.

"So!" he said. "You are the genuine article, then. Not some freak, miraculous mutation."

"Yes," Swoop answered faintly, halting her retreat and turning slowly back to him, inevitably but not completely willingly meeting his gaze. "I am who I am supposed to be. At least, that's what everyone tells me."

"Mmmm," Starscream murmured noncommittally, nodding. "And I am," he added after a moment, waving the datapad meaningfully in the air, "immortal."

"Not exactly immortal," Swoop qualified. "But definitely harder to kill than most, at least when it comes to energy input directly into the spark. You're like me that way, actually, since you seem to be enjoying irony so much today."

Starscream snorted, staring at her curiously and intently.

"Do you think it possible," he asked, "that this is why the imprint hasn't gone away? Because we have this…similarity?"

"Maybe," she answered diffidently, with an uncertain shrug. "That's one hypothesis, anyway," she added, smiling at him faintly.

"And if you're right," he said, tilting his head to the side as a thought occurred to him, "then it's not going to go away." His gaze drilled into her, demandingly, as he added, "I'll be stuck here, with you medics doing Primus-knows-what to my systems to keep me from…from…"

Swoop bit down hard on her lower lip as his voice trailed off, as he turned his face away from her to stare almost longingly out of the window.

She answered him honestly, "I don't know, Starscream. There's no precedent for this, so I can't know. It…might not go away, no. But…But I did have a thought on that."

He turned his gaze back to her then, leveling a penetrating and inquisitive look on her, and Swoop could have sworn that his eyes were suddenly glowing a brighter red as he narrowed them at her, his expression calculating.

"Do tell," he cooed.

Swoop swallowed nervously, hesitating, while Starscream just watched her, expectantly. The look on his face pulled at her, and she found herself taking a few involuntary steps toward him. Starscream, unmoving, simply continued to stare at her, and then words began to tumble out of her mouth, as if their own volition.

"When we were…together," she said, suddenly nervous, "there were…things that were wrong with me."

Starscream gave her a twisted, ironic smile as he answered, "There were things wrong with both of us that night, Swoop."

"Besides that," she said quietly, ducking her head in embarrassment. "My spark was…It was rejecting my body. As you said, royal sparks aren't supposed to be transplanted, and things started to go crazy. So when I came back here, my systems started crashing and…I almost died, would have died if..."

"Hence the new body?" Starscream concluded as her voice trailed off uncertainly, his expression curious, his head tilted slightly to the side as he regarded her. "Not just a vanity thing after all then, eh?"

Swoop blinked at him.

"No," she said. "No, not at all. I just…woke up with it. It was designed and built to be compatible with my spark and with my…my function. That it's prettier than my old one is just a fringe benefit," she added lightly, forcing a smile.

Starscream nodded, smiling faintly in return as he digested what she'd told him.

"So," he said a moment later, "you nearly died. And I went crazy because the imprint didn't go away. And you think that it happened that way because of your…troubles, combined with our odd…similarities."

Swoop nodded.

"That's my theory, yes," she said quietly.

"And your proposed solution?" Starscream asked after a moment of silence between them, his voice suddenly intense and his gaze burning into Swoop, heating her. "Assuming, of course, that it isn't the same one that Ratchet is subjecting me to."

The intensity of his stare pulled at her, and Swoop found herself approaching him yet more closely, this time going so far as to settle herself on the very edge of his berth, extremely close to him but still not touching him. Even so, Starscream's breath hitched and then quickened, and a noticeable shiver ran through his body, but he otherwise held himself in check, his hands balling into fists with the effort.

Lowering her voice, as if she was afraid that someone would overhear, Swoop leaned dangerously close to Starscream, so that they were eye-to-eye, faces mere inches apart, and murmured, "I think that we need to repeat the experiment. Maybe then things will reset as they're supposed to."

Starscream stared at her for a long moment, his gaze bright and locked with hers. His limbs twitched as he fought to keep them still.

"Except," he said, his voice shuddering as more shivers ran through him, "that we still have that similarity, so it might not—"

"But it might," she interrupted him insistently. "And it can hardly make things worse. At worst, it will give you – both of us – some peace for a little while."

"Until it starts all over again," Starscream retorted with a quiet snort. His voice was low, but the bitterness in it was obvious.

"Yes," Swoop answered matter-of-factly.

"And then what?"

"And then…Another treatment, so to speak," she said, running one finger delicately down the center of his canopy, her eyes following and absorbing its path as it went.

Starscream went utterly and unexpectedly still. Swoop looked up into his face again to see shocked curiosity reigning supreme there.

"You would do that?" he asked after a moment spent staring incredulously at her. "For me?"

"Yes," she said again. Solemnly. Without hesitation. "But not just for you. For me, too. At the questioning look he gave her, she explained, "You're not alone in this, Starscream. It's just been much worse for you. But now that the little ones are gone and you're here, it's getting worse for me, too. Very quickly."

"Oh," he breathed, blinking at her. Almost as if he was experimenting, he reached tentatively toward her and ran a hand lightly down her arm, barely making contact.

At the contact, Swoop gasped. His touch, light as it was, hesitant as it was, sent shocks firing through her. They tingled pleasantly along sensory pathways throughout her body, and she shuddered in their grip.

"I thought it was just me," Starscream was saying, his voice low as he watched her reactions to what he was doing to her.

"It was, mostly," she answered with a gasp, her voice shuddering as he continued to run his hand lightly up and down her arm and she fought back a strong urge to leap onto him and devour him. "Until about two days ago. But now…"

"Now?" he asked, his tone almost teasing.

"Now," Swoop said, lowering her voice further, growling out the words, "I want you. And I know that you want me."

Starscream blinked at her for a few lingering seconds, surprised by her bluntness, but he recovered quickly enough.

"Well, when you put it that way…" he said, just before closing the small distance between their faces in order to kiss her.

It was very, very difficult to pull away from him. For very long and somewhat blissful moments, Swoop didn't pull away. Instead, she melted fully against Starscream, put aside rational thought as if flipping an off-switch, and just…felt. Felt his lips against hers. Felt the warmth of his body against hers, strange and deliciously familiar at the same time. Felt his arms closing possessively around her, holding her tightly against him. Felt curious fingers begin to explore her back, her wings. She had him at a disadvantage; she had a new body, he didn't. Swoop dug her fingers into his chest as she broke the kiss with a groan in order to nibble at his lips, his jaw line. She heard him gasp and growl at that, felt her own control slipping away inch by inch as desire rose, pure scalding lust surfacing with breath-taking swiftness…

…And then she pulled away from him, scrambled off the berth, and backed away until she'd backed herself against a wall. It was eerily reminiscent of their first encounter. He didn't pursue, though. He stayed on the berth, panting just as she was, watching her hungrily.

"Not yet," she managed to say to him, panting out the words. "Have to reverse whatever Ratchet's done…or else it might not work."

He scowled at her, but he nodded his understanding all the same.

"Make it quick," he advised after he took a moment to collect himself. "I don't know how much longer I can…"

"Oh, yes," she interrupted him and then, before she decided to do something crazy, she spun toward the door and left. There were preparations to make, not the least of which was talking to Ratchet. She could already feel her audios burning, anticipating his reaction to what she wanted, needed, to do. What she was going to do, no matter what he had to say on the subject. The thought distracted her from the raging desire that was burning through her. Or at least it distracted her for now.

Soon, she knew, nothing on Earth or anywhere else would be able to distract her, much less to deter her.

Next time: As if you can't guess? Pseudo-smut ahoy! Batten down the hatches! *resists strong urge to title the next chapter "Sexual Healing"*

BUT! Besides the "smut," Starscream reveals a fairly big chunk of information that will rock poor Swoop's little world. You will be amazed. Well, OK, maybe not amazed, but you will be surprised. Probably. Maybe. Unless I've been utterly obvious, that is…