"What did you do to me, fleshling!"
If Will had been saner, more stable, less Seeker, he would have worried about the Gatling gun and the Air Commander that watched him with a murderous, red glow in his optics and he wouldn't have laughed in the face of Starscream's anger. Then again, if Will had been any saner and any less unstable, he probably would have cracked long before it ever could have come to that point and possibly, that would have been okay as well.
As it was, though, when it all came down to it he matched his Seeker side trait-by-trait in impulsiveness, instability, and the strong defiance that had brought them to that point in the first place and however much they were trine-mates and two parts of a whole now, it was the first time Will hadn't dreaded meeting Starscream in person. His Seeker half could have caved and submitted but it hadn't - it had been terrified and in way over its metallic little head, but it had still snapped out of it and backed him when it counted. It had been its true trial by fire but it had passed with flying colours and the very un-Seekerish, toothy smirk they offered Starscream was as much Will as it was the Seeker.
The rough part was over, the fear and uncertainty and the bone-deep dread. They might still end up dead, Will knew, but at least it wouldn't be under Starscream's command and forced to fight on the Decepticons' side and everything considered, that was okay, too.
"We didn't do a fragging thing. We didn't ask for this. You forced the bond and you get to deal with what goes with it."
Starscream's fingers twitched compulsively again but the pain of bullets piercing armour that Will had expected never came. The fragger honestly couldn't kill him, then – Will had had his doubts, still did even now, but the proof was right in front of him and going by the rage in Starscream's optics, Will would have been a dead Seeker if the fragger had in any way been able to pull that trigger.
"You did something to me, fleshling. What did you do?"
Will wasn't sure if Starscream believed that repeating the words enough would somehow magically make the knowledge appear. Rational thought didn't seem to be high on the list of a Seeker's strengths when it got sufficiently pissed off.
Whatever Starscream's reasons, it wouldn't work and if the fragger had given it actual thought, he would know that, too. Even his own Seeker part was honestly bewildered by it. They were bonded now. Not trine-mates but close enough that it wouldn't make that much different in a bond. What they knew, Starscream knew, and their most esteemed Air Commander should know that, too. Even Will and his Seeker-part did.
"You went through my head," Will bit back. "Through our head. Did you see anything in there to explain it? You forced that bond. If that gave you performance issues when it comes to us, that's nobody's fault but your own."
And maybe they had pushed it too far again because the Gatling gun vanished again and clawed fingers locked around vulnerable lines and wires in their throat once more, and the glow in Starscream's optics became a glacial red between one moment and the next as he pulled Will to his feet.
"I will offline you," Starscream promised in a low, deadly voice. "I will destroy you and send you to the Pit as nothing more than worthless ashes."
"Then do it," Will mocked right back, against every bit of common sense and objection from his Seeker half. "And if you can't offline one unarmed Autobot, then tell your trine-mates to do it. We didn't ask for this any more than you did. Do you think that Seeker in my head was happy waking up to find itself sharing its existence with a human? Do you think I wanted to come back like this? That either of us wanted to be the rope in the little game of tug-of-war you slags and the 'Bots have going on?"
Something obviously hit right with that because Starscream's optics flared and the grip on his throat tightened... but his trine-mates remained where they were and something nagged in the back of Will's processors as it tried to make everything that had happened make sense.
"You were blessed by Primus, you pathetic waste of Energon!" Starscream hissed. "You should have been crushed beneath our might like the pitiful organic you were and you were brought back like this. We are the true heirs of Primus. We did not fall mercy to the whims of the Allspark. We did not need to beg permission for the creation of a new spark. The ground-pounders will fall with none to replace their numbers but when the last one of them is gone, we will still remain. We have the freedom of flight and the gift of Primus to give spark to our own heirs. Out of all on Cybertron, we alone were deemed worthy of life."
Seekers needed to interface, Seekers had excess energy, Seekers needed that excess energy to be able to create the spark of their future sparklings, and Seekers were proud of that, and if that was the case then-
"-Where are the sparklings?" Will asked as something clicked. There was still something he couldn't grasp, something important, but at least there was something now he could put words to and they made sense as well in a way that he would never be able to really explain. "How many of you are left? Twenty? Thirty? By the time Optimus and Megatron have settled the war, there won't be enough of you left to do anything other than roll over and wait to die."
Starscream made a disgusted sound and then let go of Will.
"Would you knowingly create a sparkling in a time of war, Autobot? Is that how far you have fallen?"
Images of Annabelle flickered through Will's mind; small and fragile but with so much life, and he tried to imagine what it could have been like in a different world, with burned cities and crushed armies and a life of war and battle, and a small part of his spark twisted painfully in acknowledgement of his newest bond-mate's point.
An hour ago they wouldn't have talked like that. An hour ago Will wouldn't have made an honest attempt to see it from Starscream's point of view. An hour ago the fragger would have taken that shot and Will would have been dead.
An hour ago they hadn't been bond-mates and Will wasn't sure if he should feel sick or fascinated by the thought of it all.
Air Commander, the Seeker part of his murmured in response and for once, Will actually understood.
Whatever else Starscream was, whatever the long list of atrocities he had committed, he was still the Air Commander and his first and foremost duty had always been to the Seekers... even if it sometimes ended up looking like anything but.
Will was a Seeker and for now seen as... a confused youngling, probably, by Starscream's programming. Whatever tests they had been put through they had apparently passed, and that put Will under the handy little category of something to be protected. It also explained why Skywarp and Thundercracker had yet to make any move towards them. They were trine-mates. They knew what was going on in Starscream's head. If Starscream had been capable of genuinely wishing him dead, he would have been.
As it was, he was still standing. That, at least, was a start.
Starscream took his silence for the agreement that it was – had probably even seen the images in Will's mind, even if that was something Will really didn't want to think about – and clawed hands flexed compulsively again. At least they weren't doing that around Will's neck anymore and to be fair, it seemed like more of an instinctive response than anything. Starscream-issues and Decepticon-morals told him to kill the worthless Autobot while Seeker programming told him to protect a bond-mate and youngling and whatever Will had thought about his brand new programming in the past, right there and then it was worth every second of the headache.
"You were blessed by Primus, youngling. Do not throw away that gift on the Prime's words."
"And what's the alternative? Roll over and play fetch for Megatron?" Will snorted. "Seekers bow to no one, isn't that what everyone says? That you're stubborn pain-in-the-afts but you'd fight to the death to protect a trine-mate and your young? Maybe you used to be but you sure as frag aren't now."
Starscream's responding snort of derision was echoed clearly through their still-uneasy bond.
"Autobot delusions of glory and honour. Let Prime have them. We permit the Lord High Protector's little delusions as well. When they have fallen, when Optimus Prime is destroyed and Megatron is forgotten as nothing but an aside in history, we still remain. The Air Commander ensures the survival of our kind, whatever the means. What do we care of the ground-pounders' fate? Seeker-kin comes above all else. We chose the victorious side."
"Then why was I brought back as an Autobot?" Will asked and continued before Starscream could speak. "If you're all so blessed by Primus and if staying at Megatron's side is supposed to keep your kind alive, then why was I brought back as an Autobot? If the programming you fragged with is so damn perfect now then why was I brought back with the human personality still a part of me? If you were so right about it all, we could have been brought back as a Decepticon and with none of those worthless little organic thoughts left."
Starscream clearly had a well-developed ability to ignore what he didn't care for because he offered a strong burst of dark satisfaction through their bond. "It gave us Ironhide and the Hatchet. You spark-merged with that walking cannon. I will claim them as I claimed you and deny Prime of both his weapons specialist and his medic. Without those at his side, how long do you think the war will last? Days? Hours? Megatron should praise the name of Primus and his heirs on his knees and beg forgiveness for assuming himself superior to us."
It was an unwanted reminder of the empty parts of their spark where their bonds should be, of the painful liability he still was despite of everything and the Seeker's temper flared before Will could even think of reining it in.
"It also bonded you to a human by proxy. Not just to us, but to an actual, genuine human. Was that part of Primus' grand plan, too?"
Sarah, small and fierce and relentless, who had managed to earn his Seeker's side's loyalty and protective instincts to a degree that only Ironhide rivalled, and then it didn't matter if part of it was born from Will's own feelings for her or not. Either way Starscream had caught part of that same affection through their bond, too. Whether or not it had been enough to become something permanent Will had no idea but whatever the outcome, even the feelings or images from Will should have been enough to rattle someone like Starscream. Will felt a strange, distant... tolerance for Starscream's trine-mates, too, an unwillingness to see them harmed, and if he had managed to pick up something like that from the fragger, there was a damn good chance that it had gone both ways to at least some degree.
If nothing else, Will noticed as Starscream's optics burned brighter again, it did a great job fragging off the Air Commander.
"Short-lived, organic pests!" Starscream snarled back. "Their lifespans are insignificant. Your organic will be gone before it ever matters."
"Still longer than your life expectancy when 'Hide gets his hands on you." And then something else clicked and Will gave a short, harsh bark of laughter. "Or Megatron. That's the problem, isn't it? You can't kill me. What good is an Air Commander when he can't even take down the one little Seeker the enemy has? If you could tell your trine-mates to do it, I would be dead. Could you even kill 'Hide? Ratchet? Sarah? Megatron might have you offlined for that before Ironhide ever gets the chance to. And all because you fragging well insisted on bonding with me. Didn't your creators ever teach you that no means no?"
And there was the hand again as Starscream's non-existent patience snapped and clawed fingers dug into Will's throat again – enough to hurt, enough to threaten, but not enough to cause actual damage, and this time Will wasn't even surprised.
"That bond should not have caused that. You know something, fleshling. You will tell me or I will pry the knowledge from your unsalvageable processors."
"No," Will corrected, growing increasingly frustrated by the whole thing, "you'll try. Even if you could, when you can't even offline me, there is nothing there to find! You went through every Primus-damned memory we have! Ask Ratchet, ask Prime, frag, ask Ironhide for all we care – they know you flying bits of slag, we don't! I was human, Starscream. I was human and the Seeker spark I'm sharing with isn't even an adult in your terms. If you think we know a damn thing about what we're doing, you rattled your processors more than we thought."
Another item on the long list of slag to take up with Primus whenever they got the chance and-
- And there it was, Will realised a moment later and felt his connection with Starscream pick up on that knowledge as fast as it appeared. That was it.
You know I can't order you to do this. All I can ask you to do is trust me.
They knew the cause. All they needed was to figure out what had actually been done.
The hard grip on his throat vanished, a confusing mix of disgust-anger-annoyance-wariness flooding their bond before the emotions retreated again and Starscream offered a patented sneer.
"Hearing voices you are not bonded to is not the sign of a well-functioning processor. Do you claim to hear the voice of Primus, fleshling? Did your human influence glitch your processors beyond repair? I am surprised the Hatchet failed to notice but perhaps you were judged to be... easier to control without your full capabilities to command."
"I don't claim a fragging thing," Will bit back, halfway offended in an echo of what his Seeker-part felt. The human had its doubts, had always had its doubts and continued to do so even now, but the Seeker didn't care. It had made up its mind and not a force on the planet would be able to convince it that the voice had been anything but its creator and ultimately the hand behind the situation they found themselves in. "And more importantly, I never claimed to be sane, Starscream. I'm a Seeker. I think a little mental instability is pretty much par for the course."
"A worthless, glitched youngling, then," Starscream threw back. "Little wonder that the Prime chose to keep you without destroying your bond with me. What danger could a glitched youngling possibly pose to anyone but himself?"
There was something more in his voice, though, a ghost of hesitation that could almost be seen in his optics as well for a brief moment, and Will latched on to it before any kind of common sense could get a word in sideways; right or wrong or impulsive or not, it was a weakness and Starscream had precious few of those... and something, somewhere, kept nagging, kept pushing, kept whispering that it was important and had to be done even if they didn't yet understand why.
"Then tell me how I ended up in a Seeker's body," Will bit back. "I died as a human and woke up as a Seeker. Tell me how that happened, then. Don't you think we would have used it against you already if we could just snap our fingers and make more Cybertronians? The Allspark is gone. Something brought us back. Draw your own conclusions, I'm not buying you a map."
A flare of something in Starscream's optics was all the warning Will got before the overwhelming presence of the Air Commander invaded their mind again – less violent than before without the shields to tear apart first but no less painful or nausea-inducing as mental claws tore through memories and picked them apart until they were nothing more than splintered pieces in their mind. He felt his Seeker half snarl its defiance and try to holds its ground, was proud beyond words even if it stood no chance at all, and Will stayed stubbornly silent even as their mind flared, blinding and painful and every part of his head felt like it was being torn apart.
Starscream knew what he was looking for this time, clearly knew what he wanted to find, and Will found himself remembering every word exchanged with Starscream from a distance, every connection however faint, and he got the strange, almost invisible echo of the same conversations from Starscream's point of view through the fragger's own mind – bonds worked both ways and even if it didn't do him a damn bit of good now there was still something weirdly comforting about it. They weren't helpless. There wasn't much they could do but it wasn't all a one-way connection and whatever else might happen, they could still pick up bits and pieces from Starscream's processors themselves.
He lingered on certain memories – of bonds, of recent talks, of the blinding pain of the moments before Will had yielded and accepted whatever would follow at Starscream's hands – and finally the presence retreated after an endless amount of time that Will didn't doubt was less than half a minute when it came down to it.
"A weapon. A virus."
"Someone obviously thought you needed it," Will snapped. And that someone was right, he didn't add although he didn't doubt Starscream would pick up on it, anyway. It was true, too - the fragger himself was probably too far gone to be anything but mental anymore but at least he was a leashed one of the kind now.
Emotions and impressions flickered across the bond, whispers of uncertainty even under the anger and the strong denial, and Will didn't want to know what kind of convulsive leaps of logic Starscream had used to turn that kind of information into something that resembled support of him.
"And when your purpose is served, virus?"
"I'm a soldier." It wasn't an answer, not really, and Starscream clearly knew it, too, as something dark and dangerous and sickeningly alluring made its way across their bond.
"And the Seeker you share your existence with? Has it had its say in those plans or did Autobot arrogance refuse to listen to what a mere Seeker youngling wished from life? Or perhaps they took the simple approach and refused to even acknowledge its rights in the first place, as if the war would have taught them the errors of their ways."
And if anything, that was a reminder of how dangerous Starscream still was. He didn't need to be able to kill them to be a danger. He had become - and stayed - Air Commander for a reason and he knew exactly what buttons to push to get the results he wanted.
It was flat-out manipulation but it also had enough of a core of truth in it to make the guilt take hold even if Will knew damn well that the well-being of his Seeker part was very low on Starscream's list of priorities. It was still the truth, whatever the motivation behind the words, and Will felt a wary nudge of hesitation-anger-confusion from that Seeker half.
What when their purpose was served, indeed. Will had never really expected to live long past meeting Starscream, and the Seeker...
He directed an unusually hesitant thought towards it in a soundless question and felt it fall silent for long moments before its presence flared back up.
Home-mates-safe was the firm response he got in return - him and Starscream, because the fragger snarled a moment later with another shift in his mercurial moods.
"Home? We have no home! Cybertron is a wasteland from groundling hands!"
"Home!" the Seeker snarled back and unleashed a torrent of memories with the words - of flight, of clouds, of oceans and deserts and mountains that only the human side had ever seen, and something else clicked in the back of their processors as the Seeker-part held its ground. "Mates! Home!"
Starscream made a disgusted sound.
"Autobot delusions," he said. "Do you think the fleshlings will permit you to live? When your mates have outlived their usefulness in this war, do you think the organics will settle for peaceful coexistence? The Prime is delusional. They would strike against us the moment they could. At the most fortunate, we would most mercifully be allowed to flee the planet before they struck."
Uncertainty from the Seeker, anger from Starscream, and then red optics narrowed at them and Will had the distinct, unwanted feeling that Starscream was looking at him. Not the Seeker, not their joined self, but him.
"Ask your human. I dare you, fleshling - tell me I am wrong."
Memories of meetings, politicians, arguments and debates and scientists, fighting hard to even get them to see the Cybertronians as temporary allies, much less actual beings – friends – with emotions and dreams and hopes, and Will's optics shuttered briefly in silent surrender.
He would fight it with everything he had, in whatever way he could, but in the end he was just one human – and not even that anymore – and NEST was just one small organisation against a behemoth of a nation – of nations – that was wary of the Autobots at best and tolerated them only for the sake of the planet's protection. They had allies in the political arena but there were precious few of them, and NEST itself had always been a front-line, military operation. They were highly-trained soldiers above all else. They had nothing to do in politics.
"I can't," Will said quietly. The admission hurt like only the truth could, and even more so for agreeing with a Decepticon, but he wasn't going to back down. He could show that much of a fragging backbone, at least.
And whatever Starscream had expected, that admission clearly wasn't it. Surprise flickered through their bond for a brief second and then Starscream took a step back with an expression Will couldn't read.
"I had plans. For all of their vaulted magnificence, Prime and the High Protector are predictable," Starscream said with a small sneer. "You ruined that, fleshling."
Flickers of things that had yet to happen, cautious plans and carefully monitored locations, and a few more pieces clicked into place as intent carried over as well through their bond.
"You were going to let them hammer it out and kill the victor."
"And your infectious coding wrecked that," Starscream agreed – too calm and too agreeable, like a predator waiting to strike and it put Will and the Seeker both on edge like few things ever had before – and then his optics dimmed slightly in silent, dark satisfaction. "An inconvenience at the most. I earned the place of Air Commander. If I am unable to offline you, Megatron will attempt do so and he will fall to your walking cannon and the Prime in the process. Perhaps I will even help them. The bond matters little. Megatron will be nothing but a smouldering shell at my feet and with your fleshling self bonded to me but still loyal to the Autoscum cause, Prime can do little against me or my trine-mates without causing him the loss of you in the process. You, and perhaps even your mates. As said, fleshling – an inconvenience at the most."
The words struck too close, too true, and Will felt both himself and the Seeker bristle. "And then what? You think we're just going to let you go after Optimus? You'll have to get past Ironhide to get through to him. Ironhide, Ratchet, and us."
The glow in Starscream's optics at that was anything but reassuring.
"There are other ways to control a Prime. They were always weak and pathetic; at the mercy of the whims of the ground-pounders they supposedly ruled. It took a war to make this Prime worthy of respect and he is every bit as predictable as the Primes that passed before him."
Starscream glanced past Will, made Will shift in response, but before he could turn to see what had caught the Air Commander's attention something snapped bright and joyously in his spark and flooded everything he was with the presence of mates and there and his.
The sound of his name, instant questions and concerns and feelings of reassurance offered by Will in return, promises that he was him and theirs and no one else's-
- And Starscream felt it, too, and got a dark glow in his optics as he watched Will, something primal and all-consuming in his presence in a silent reminder of his power as Air Commander.
It would have been so easy to yield, to surrender and fall into willing submission and obey his Air Commander as was only right-
- And then the moment passed as the Seeker snarled at Starscream and Will's own stubbornness pushed the last of those effects away.
He halfway expected Starscream to shift into raw fury again but instead the fragger looked nothing as much as amused by them, as if they were nothing more than a kid or a particularly talented pet that clearly didn't know any better.
"Your... allies are here," Starscream said after a moment and made himself quite clearly heard even over the heavy presence of two mates so sorely missed, voice fairly dripping with mock sincerity. "Let's introduce them to your new bond-mate, Will."