Title: Unfortunate

Part 2: Deviate

Summary: One never knows just how far a mech is willing to go.

Characters: Starscream, Decepticons, Autobots

Warnings: bad mojo, character death

Continuity: G1

AN: And the next part. ^^ I hope it doesn't disappoint.

And my thanks to everyone who reviewed! You all have my love and thanks, though I know I haven't responded to anyone personally yet - you can blame my stupid internet for that one, as it doesn't like whatever line of code FF's using. .

He walks down the corridors of the Nemesis like a ghost, silent and unseen. He is insane. He knows it, embraces the madness completely and totally. He is insane, but he is as intelligent as ever, and do not the humans have a saying that there is a fine line between genius and insanity? He has crossed it, has bounded over that line eagerly and without regret, and in doing so has gained the means to unleash his vengeance.

He will see them all dead for what they've stolen from him. His brothers had deserved to live through this war; Skyfire deserved the honor of dying by his hand if he was to die at all – even now, after all that's happened, he cannot say for sure just what it is, exactly, he feels for the now-dead shuttle.

So he walks down the corridors of the Nemesis, smiling, smiling. He waves at the security cameras that fail to track his movement. And why not? He was once the Second in Command, might as well still be considering that Megatron has yet to name a replacement, and there is no security function that is stranger to him. Megatron has not even made a token effort to change the passwords, possibly believing his insanity has left him stupid as well. Well, he'd always claimed the Warlord was a fool, and now he has proof of it.

They would pay. They would all pay. He hums, pleased with the thought. He has thought long and hard on how he would kill them all, because he cannot allow himself to be caught at anything before he has the chance to also take out the Autobots and after them those pathetic insects that built the reactor that cost him his brothers. He has thought long and hard, and believes he has found a simple solution, a poetic one, all things considered.

So he walks down the corridors of the Nemesis, smiling, smiling, waving, and overriding each lock on each door he passes by. He resets each and every single lock so that they are only capable of being opened from the outside, and only then if they had a two-thousand character long code that was comprised of characters mainly imported from the long-dead Voxni, a language only three living mechs had known once upon a time, though that number now resided at one living mech.

Oh, they would pay. Yes, yes they would.

He hums and smiles and walks down the corridors of the Nemesis, security cameras blind to his presence as they never would have been before, because before he wouldn't have dared do what he's doing now. But now he dares much because he no longer has time or patience for those games he once played; now he is serious, deadly so, driven by his grief and anger, made great by his insanity.

Once he is sure that every door is locked, unable to be opened, trapping his fellow Decepticons in their respective rooms, he slips unnoticed into the small room off to the side of the control room. The room he slips into is where the vast majority of security is actually run, and as usual, no one mans it. This is hardly unusual – there are only three mechs with access to this room, and two of them were now trapped within the control room, though they didn't know that yet. He looks at all the monitors for several long moments, watching his fellow Decepticons as they continue on with life, not a one of them regretting the loss of valuable companions or veteran soldiers, not a one of them suspecting that every last one of them would die within a matter of human hours.

He smiles, gently, cruelly, as he slips a small disk into a data drive. Immediately the security monitors fizzle out, all except for one, which displays a simple command screen. He cocks his helm for a brief moment, and then gets to work. He has much coding to enter to reroute the Nemesis' systems in precisely the correct manner to do what he needs done and little time to do it in.

He hooks himself into the console and begins, watching the new coding fly by on the screen twice as fast as anything Soundwave could ever hope to keep up with. The joys of having a processor capable of such speeds were vast and varied, and this was one of them: a coding job that would take another specialist at least a full cycle to complete will only take him a breem, if not less. Not, of course, that another specialist would even dream of doing what he's doing. Subroutines were par for the course in times of war; hackers used them all the time to build themselves "back-doors" in systems so that they could easily get around things like firewalls and encryptions. But to actually go through the existing code and change it…

Well, suffice to say that the few who had tried it, especially on systems as advanced as those of the Nemesis', were driven mad if their processors weren't fried first. The code moved too fast, was built to be semi-sentient and capable of self-defense. But he is already mad. How could he become any more insane than he already is? Besides, it doesn't matter, not really. His mind is quick and his processor quicker. Despite the speed of the Nemesis' coding, he is able to keep up, changing the codes to his satisfaction quicker than the Nemesis can defend itself.

His changes are simplistic, really, which counts a great deal towards his success. A tweak here and there is really all he needs. Well, that and the complete and total overhaul of the command overrides – he doesn't want Soundwave or Megatron pulling some dues ex machina out of their afts and surviving this. Not only will Megatron's survivial completely ruin any element of surprise he has going for him – as there is no doubt in his mind that Megatron would turn to Optimus Prime if he survived this – but even as insane as he is, he knows that if Megatron gets ahold of him, the game is over. Starscream is cunning and smart and fast and insane, but he is not a physical powerhouse like Megatron is, and all it will take is one simple mistake on his part for the game to be up.

When he finishes, he chances a small break, shuttering his optics and cycling air for several long moments. His processors ache – which is normal considering what he's just done – but it is the sharp agony in his spark that truly wearies him. It will be there until the day he dies, he knows. That pain is the pain of his spark being sundered in a way no spark was meant to, and only his determination to live long enough to see justice done has prevented him from joining his bonded in death. He checks his chronometer, opens his optics, and goes back to work.

Thankfully the hard part is done. Now, all he has to do is clean up after himself, erase any and all signs that he has tampered with the Nemesis' codes, and get out of the Nemesis before everything goes to hell. No pressure. None at all.

He smiles.

And, yes, I am a tease. ^^