Starscream's Memories, Location - Trypticon's Processor
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Cortical psychic patch - Confirmed - Processing
Access Granted - Starscream's Memories
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Cybertron, Location - Undisclosed
With every passing scavenging of new wreckage, Starscream finds another sparkling, and another, and another, each doomed to die if they don't follow his protective shadow.
Things went well, for a while, until energon ran scarce and Starscream looked in the wrong place.
Something bit him in a dark corridor and ran away before he figured out what. At first he thought it'd been a sparkling, but then his shoulder wouldn't stop bleeding...
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He and the tiny mouths think nothing of the slaughter they start to commit.
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There's just a hunger.
A strange ever-burning.
Endless and rolling, like the war on Cybertron.
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They are alive.
The universal-mantra repeated throughout the swarm like the broken rhythm of clattering joints and broken sternums, their necks twisted left and right - much too high - the connective rubber and wires always stretched to a breaking point.
Energon.
It ran blue.
And much too sweet.
Starscream hissed as a sparkling got too close, nipping small fangs against the meat of his hand as he battered it away.
He hadn't always been so mean.
So snappy.
So thirsty.
So hungry.
But he needed the energon more than a defiant, fat sparkling. The one that had dared to bite him was black and white, and its thin sparkling-metal held an excessive glow underneath its soft plating. It was more well-fed than its siblings.
It bit him often.
"You've all had enough," Starscream said plainly, but it did nothing to sway the begging, mewling masses of sparklings against his talons, buried gruesomely into the latest kill.
He called them his "bleederlets," the unfortunate seekerlets of Vos that had become consumed with whatever horrible disease that had been inflicted upon Starscream.
He had felt guilty at first, for causing such pain and infection against his innocent ones, but he hardly remembered what had been considered normal before.
They bit him.
They bit him, starving, desperate for fuel - affection.
Things Starscream struggled to give them.
He bit them back - it was only fair.
Perhaps they'd learn a lesson.
Their optics grew dim and dark, their sparks empty.
Just like him.
His seekerlets were fine in the end, perfect to him, and that was enough.
So what if they ate bleeding wires and burning, pulsating spark chambers?
It was good enough.
It had to be.
There was nothing else. The body had been consumed in a matter of minutes and Starscream had watched, darkly amused.
His bleederlets always asked for more, always hungry. He could only roll his optics at their bold little demands.
He loved them, still.
They bit him, still.
His armor and flesh was always bleeding.
Starscream felt another bite against his hand, and he tisked as he held up a clamped down, growling baby. It was the black and white seekerlet again, whom loved to bite him more than anyone else.
Starscream had named the little menace, Quasar, after the brightest objects recorded in the universe; but it wasn't a name to suggest she was smart - the opposite really - Quasar was going to projectile-vomit precious energon everywhere if she was allowed to eat during the next meal.
It was a quirk of the sparkling Starscream had learned the hard way.
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He had to make sure the swarm nipping his legs got enough to eat.
Least they turned on him like a pack of scraplets.
Already he woke up once from recharge, his legs half-eaten and chewed.
Unceremoniously he stepped forward, the bleederlets in front scattered like rats. Starscream kept his head on a swivel as he searched for where to go to next.
"Bleederlets, shhhhhhhhhhhh-shush shush," he grumbled, barely above a whisper, almost cooing with a mouthful of blood. The baby-swarm complied, creepily-so, as they stiffened like a living mass of insects. They crawled silently, in fast little bursts on four-legs as they kept up with Starscream's shadow - his red-rusty corroded-blue wings fanned out like a guiding sail, a poor promising omen - to any stranger who saw him.
They never dared to wander.
The babies.
To be left behind.
Except Seaspray,he always lagged behind at the edge of his brother-herd, his attention constantly captured by anything remotely shiny.
Which was unfortunately everything on Cybertron.
But he was also the oldest, - the "big brother" to the rest, so to speak. Seaspray was a mechling standing up to Starscream's waist and it was his responsibility to keep lookout for any potential trouble.
Or prey.
As was the norm.
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Jetfire.
Was the golden child.
Literally.
Starscream couldn't look away from the little fire. It was confusing to his processor - to see a sparkling so full of life.
Despite his senses telling him it was a sparkeater.
A sticky, chittering dead-thing.
He had a favorite - oh yes.
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Jetstorm.
The name had no meaning to Starscream.
Shockwave had taken the sparkling away from him at the moment of its emergence.
It was a corpse, it was bleeding and broken, it was born dead.
He knew that.
But then Shockwave handed it back to him.
Starscream wanted to throw up in disgust.
The spark was Little Shock - Little Shock - Shockwave's pet dog.
Starscream looked down at the abomination - the sin against his very person and CNA.
The sparkling with a spark that wasn't his.
The one who dared to live.
"Soundwave, give me the status update for Starscream. He's been in that tunnel for cycles." Megatron was lounging against his throne, his head propped up by his own fist.
Soundwave stepped out of the shadows of the room, rolling in the tentacles he used to communicate and to pilot the ship. Wordlessly he nodded his visor, acknowledging Megatron's command. His chassis clicked and whirled, until opening to reveal an impatient and frazzled laserbeak.
The little creature seemed eager to fly and she flew around the room at high speeds, practically bouncing off the walls. Megatron's optics followed the minicon as she shot out of the room, her EM field exploded in joy, and he almost smiled from the sight, before fixating the projection screen Soundwave was preparing with all of his grim attention. He stood up from his throne, hands clasped behind his back as he paced back and forth - waiting, patiently - to see what he wanted to see.
Starscream.
That wrecked, vile thing was plotting something again.
But this time, Megatron wouldn't let him pull off his crime.
Not this time, not again.
The screen flashed to life in front of him. 'Starscream's luck has ended.' He thought, with a bitter finality.
Fortunately, Soundwave had had the foresight to place a camera into the ventilation tunnel the Autobot-prisoner had first tried to escape the Nemesis from. It was a security oversight Soundwave had neglected to upkept - the monitoring of the inner-tunnels of Trypticon. Both Megatron and Soundwave loathed to refer to the ship as the titan it once was - there was a sort of superstition involved with messing with the innards of an ancient cybertronian machine.
And if the Nemesis ship continued to fly without issue and to serve the Decepticon-cause, Megatron had no reason to make unnecessary changes or modifications that might upset such intricate, unknown systems - and surprisingly, Soundwave had agreed with him - eventually - the Security Officer had seen the wisdom in his decision.
'If it isn't broken, don't break it by messing with it." Thought Megatron, gritting his teeth as he looked over the screen.
And that's exactly what Starscream was doing.
'Who knows what he's tampering with in there.'
Laserbeak had created a livestream of her flightpath down the Nemesis hallways, ducking and weaving past vehicons and countless Decepticon-soldiers who scrambled to get out of her way - as if they were doing activities Megatron had strictly forbidden upon his ship.
In a supply closet Laserbeak got distracted - landing onto a table illegally placed there by slacking sanitation workers, but whatever mechs had been there had smartly vacated the area before Laserbeak could get a good look at them. A cube of spilled energon had splattered across the room, ruining a gambling game of tablets and stacks of shanix, now strewn nonsensically across the tablet.
Laserbeak fiddled with a golden chip of shanix within her beak, tapping it along the table's metal, as if the noise could summon back the perpetrators of such a crime.
Soundwave sighed, and Megatron looked him over with curiosity as he silently commlinked Laserbeak back to attention - it was ironically rare to hear any "real sound" from the likes of Soundwave.
Laserbeak was in the air again, her shanix coin still clasped within her beak as she flew, faster this time, as if Soundwave had reminded her that she was on a mission.
With ease her beak transformed into a drill, and her shanix coin fell into the folds of her chest-feathers, hooking into place like a piece of jewelry. She undid the fastenings of the ventilation entrance - the very same one the Autobot-prisoner had tried to escape through, and the very same one Starscream had disappeared cycles earlier into.
She flew down the tunnel at an elegant speed, only pausing to take note of a greasy black-stain burnt into the metal - Jetfire's energon - before flying into a wall - she didn't crash as she commanded Trypticon's systems to open at the very last moment, before the metal closed again behind her like a gnashing storm of teeth.
Now in the inner-systems she flew upwards, a pleasant warm draft of air propelled her upwards in record's time.
Then she came to the door of Trypticon's processor room.
Both Soundwave and Megatron stood silently besides one another, curiosity across their optics as they stared at the livefeed.
It took considerably more time for Laserbeak to crack the entrance to get into one of Trypticon's most sensitive chambers, but eventually she did so, squawking a pearl of laugher in her success before flying through.
There she found Starscream in stasis-lock, seated in a chair like a deceased, long-forgotten pilot. Already one of Soundwave's camera-drones had already captured footage of this location and scene, but back then, some cycles ago, Megatron had been curious as to what Starscream had been doing.
But now his patience had run out.
He wasn't going to wait for him to wake up to punish him.
Laserbeak evaluated Soundwave's commands with a drop in her tanks, a hitch in her spark.
She hadn't killed a mech before.
At least, not in a manner so up close and personal before.
:"Unplug him. Kill him.": Soundwave barked, the message dreadful to Laserbeak.
The cord connected to Starscream's helm was thick with hot glowing bands of purple - she didn't know what it was, but she knew enough that unplugging it would've been a very bad, evil idea.
She did it anyway.
It took a moment of struggle for her beak to find enough leverage to pull it out - the cord and port hissed with icy sparks, zapping her wings, engulfing her in an angry current of electricity - the connection broke apart.
A shanix coin clattered to the ground, forgotten.