Remember

[antepathy.livejournal.com]

Title: Remember
Fandom/Verse: Transformers, G1
Author: antepathy
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: none, maybe angst.
Wordcount: 1300 ish
Prompt:

29 Mar G1 Skyfire/Starscream longing I still remember the way you used to be.

A/N: So halfway through "Fire on the Mountain" Starscream kinda/sorta accidentally shoots Skyfire, knocking him out.  Next time we see them, he and TC are carrying Skyfire into the Incan temple and Megatron is saying that if they can reprogram Skyfire’s logic circuits, maybe he’ll be a ‘con and a better one than TC or SS.  This fits in between those two scenes.  More or less.

“So much for the Autobot intruder….”  Starscream thought he’d covered himself well when he saw Thundercracker (blast him!) duck under his shot, the null ray’s purple beam driving straight into Skyfire’s white chest plating.  Skyfire wasn’t armored—he wasn’t a warrior—and the null ray TORE through the thin civilian grade metal, shredding the circuitry underneath. 

Thundercracker would pay, and pay dearly, for his cowardice. More for what his cowardice had made Starscream do.  His capacitor had entirely dropped current, his laser core almost guttering in terror as the large white mech toppled to the stone paving at the top of the Incan pyramid. Skyfire! his cortex had yelled.  The last time he’d seen his former lover he’d been buried under a mountain of ice, ice colder than the horror Starscream had felt at Skyfire’s betrayal. 

Then they’d had to, of course, retreat.  Megatron’s favorite word.  Everyone blamed Starscream for his seemingly wild notion that he’d be a better leader than Megatron. Truth?  A human Trinitron would be a better leader than Megatron.  How can you LEAD when you’re always running AWAY?! 

And that time, the retreat had torn Starscream away from the only thing like hope he’d felt in ages. 

He knelt over Skyfire’s prone form.  “Skyfire,” he said, desperately. “I didn’t mean…you....”

Skyfire moaned, softly, his optics flickering dimly.  “Sta-Starscream?” 

Starscream felt relief wash through him like a warm wave.  “Skyfire!”  He felt the weight of Skyfire’s gaze. “It was an accident,” he blurted. “I didn’t mean to hit you! I was aiming at Thundercracker!” 

“Starscream,” Skyfire murmured. “Aiming weapons at any living mech is wrong.”

“It was Thundercracker,” Starscream said. The answer made perfect sense to him.  Thundercracker, it was proven through long data tracking, did not respond to anything other than brute force. He claimed it was doubt as to the Decepticon cause. That was slag: his issue was with Starscream and Starscream alone.  From the instant he’d joined Megatron and been bonded to the others as a Trine, Starscream had felt Thundercracker’s envy like a sluggish blue pulse in his sensors.  To go every day feeling the contempt and envy in your systems, like a nanovirus you couldn’t purge….

“You’ve changed…so much,” Skyfire said, sadly.  It seemed he was always sad talking to Starscream.  The jet remembered all too well a time when the larger shuttle hadn’t sounded so depressed talking to him.  A time when Skyfire had been shy, and hopeful and earnest. 

“I have not,” Starscream said, stiffly. “I was trying to get you to understand that in the Arctic.”

“You have…weapons now.”

Starscream pointed to the gun that had fallen from Skyfire’s fingers. “As do you.” 

“It’s not the same.” 

“Is it not?” 

“I can put mine down.” 

“You can lose it. It is much more secure, and accurate, when integrated into your primary systems grids.” Skyfire just looked sadder, his red optics softening.  “It is basic scientific efficiency,” Starscream said, irked.  “You remember that.” He winced, hearing the acid in his voice. 

“I still remember,” Skyfire said, slowly, struggling to sit up.  Starscream moved to help him, his blue fingers strong and almost radiating longing as they gripped the white armor.  “I still remember the way you used to be, Starscream.”

“I am telling you, I have not changed! It’s you who have changed!”

“I…have been frozen under ice. If anything I am closer to what you once were.”

“You have changed! You betrayed me.”

“I—betrayed you?” Skyfire looked hurt. 

“You chose.  You chose them. Why not me? Why not even try?  You turned your back on me without a thought!”  The accusations tumbled out of Starscream’s vocalizer. 

“You know I do not fight. I am a scientist, Starscream.”

“I am a scientist as well!”  Starscream shifted so that his wingspan blocked the slagged weapon frame from Skyfire’s view.  That, he reminded himself, was all Thundercracker’s fault.  Forcing him into bad decisions. 

“Science does not choose sides.”

“Science always chooses sides,” Starscream said.  “Research is never neutral. Only the hopelessly naïve think so.” Like Skyfire, his processor added.  Had he ever been this naïve?  Oh yes.  When he had first met Megatron. Naïve. Dazzled. There was a neutral purity in science, but science was…cold.  And lonely.And open to exploitation.  And here his own optics flickered. “You chose against me.  ME!  You chose an ideal over a pulsing living laser core.” 

“All we have is ideals,” Skyfire said. “That is what makes our lives have value.”

Starscream pushed back on his thruster heels, frustrated.  Why couldn’t he get Skyfire to see? To understand?  Was he too abrasive?  Too hurt?  He could not keep the bitterness from his voice, no matter how hard he tried.  Skyfire had always pulled this sort of failure from him. “Watch your Autobot ideals,” he said, carefully.  “They left you there in the ice until they needed you.  They abandoned you, until you were useful to them.  THAT is the ideal you chose…over me.”

“Would you have done any differently?”

“Yes!” the word bubbled up through his vocalizer like magma, burning a path from his laser core.  “The memory of you….” No. He would not.  He could not. His voice hardened, “But you turned away.  You turned your back on me first.”  Skyfire would have been useful to the Decepticons, yes.  And second, an asset to deny the enemy.  Without Skyfire, they would not have made it down here this fast.  But third, and deepest and closest to the core, Skyfire would have been with him.  With HIM.  The one mech who had known him, all those vorns ago.  Who would perhaps—he admitted—call him back to himself. 

Was he begging for a rescue? Perhaps he was.  It hurt to admit.  Hurt to recognize, even silently, how much he hated what he had become. 

“And you turned your back as well and went back to your war.” Skyfire hated fighting of all sorts.  Even verbal.  He winced as he saw the statement strike home.  Oh, Starscream. I never meant… “I am sorry,” he said, quietly.  “That was unfair of me.” 

“No,” Starscream’s mouth twisted bitterly. “It was entirely fair.  But what you will not grant is even the possibility that you could come to see my side.  You have automatically, and forever, marked yourself as my enemy. Why?  Why did you have to make yourself my enemy?” His hand lashed out, leaving three trails of blue across the bright red Autobot insignia. 

“Just…just as you did what you had to do,” Skyfire began.  He thought, suddenly, of what it must have been like, all those long vorns,  for Starscream to endure his sudden disappearance.  Of course it changed him. It would change anyone.  Skyfire felt himself burn with regret for things he could not change: his failed mission all those ages ago, all the hurt he had inadvertently inflicted upon his best friend, his closest ally. His lover.  The one—the one mech who had gotten through his façade. How would the sudden disappearance of all his hopes, all his love, affect any mech?  Devastating.  No wonder Starscream had clung to the first thing that offered security and filled his days with something other than memories.  “I followed my core.” Skyfire wondered, suddenly, if he had done the same--reached for anything to numb the sharp cold ache of memory.

“And…your core led you away from me.”  Starscream was surfeited, sick with bitterness.  Every word Skyfire spoke was like a stone dropping on the cairn of who Starscream used to be.  Who he had once wanted to be, saw himself being.  He stood up.  “I know you this well,” he said, a green tendril of agonized anger in his voice. “That you will not change your mind.  I will not ask you again to change, out of respect for what both of us once were.” He struck out swiftly with one hand at Skyfire’s unguarded, unprotected head. The lights of his optics—Decepticon red, like a betrayal—flickered out.  Best this way, he told himself.  Better not to be seen, if the optics doing the seeing are only capable of measuring how far you have fallen.  “I only ask that you remember.”