[Transformers] Ghosts of Cybertron (2/11) - written with raisedbymoogles
Title: Ghosts of Cybertron (2/11)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: What with exorcisms, possession, and the occasional kidnapping, it's a wonder Rodimus Prime gets any work done. Especially with a ghostly Starscream making trouble around the base. But when the stirring of Cybertron's restless dead isn't limited to sarcastic ex-Seekers... Who you gonna call?

Contains an assortment of pairings, general bot-sluttery, crack, humour, and Decepticon/Autobot... 'alliances'. And Starscream. Lots and lots of Starscream.

*

"Out."

"But-"

"Out."

Starscream actually went so far as to lower himself so that his optic level was below Rodimus's. "Please, Prime? I promise I won't do anything."

"You've done enough," Rodimus snapped.

"It's not my fault Skyfire installed that personal shield-"

"It's your fault he had to use it when you threw half the rec room at him!" Rodimus loomed over him, incandescent with rage. "You swore to me that if I took you in you wouldn't hurt anyone. Those were our terms and if you can't adhere to them, then I can't protect you."

Starscream shrank back to the wall, even sinking into it in misery. "You wouldn't give me to Galvatron, would you?"

The Prime gave him a frosty smile. "No, Starscream. I'd just give you to Optimus for a few hours. He hasn't lectured anybody in a long time."

"You wouldn't!" the ghost whispered.

"Try me."

Without a word, Starscream sank back into the wall and disappeared from view. Satisfied, Rodimus re-entered the medbay, acknowledging First Aid's quiet greeting with a grim nod.

Skyfire lay near motionless on his berth, an energon drip hooked into his near-dry systems. He averted his gaze when the Prime approached, and didn't seem to notice when he knelt by the spacejet's side.

"Skyfire, this has to change," Rodimus murmured to him.

"Don't, Prime," Skyfire muttered. "Don't ask me to."

"Please. I know I have no right, but - please." Rodimus gripped his hand. "I'm not asking you to kiss and make up. Just acknowledge him every once in a while."

Skyfire darkened his optics and turned his head to one side. "He won't be satisfied. He never is."

"I think he'll surprise you." Rodimus offered a smile. "He'll never not be a pain in the aft, Skyfire, but - wasn't he like that before he was a Decepticon, too?"

Skyfire sighed deeply, toyed with the tube in his chest. "I'll think about it," he said at last, and Rodimus's tensed-up shoulders relaxed a fraction.

*

"Silverbolt--"

"Get off me!"

"C'mon, 'Bolt, quit it already, it's not like you can do anything to him--"

"I said, get off me!"

It was the tone more than anything that did it, because Silverbolt never spoke to them like that, not even when Air Raid took on five Decepticons in one go or Slingshot got into another stupid fight with one of his (numerous) rivals or Fireflight himself got distracted and forgot his mission and had to be rescued from yet another unlikely corner of the globe (and he hadn't even done that at all recently, he'd been getting better, really!), and it was scary. At least, that was why Fireflight let go. Maybe Air Raid had a different reason. Skydive hung on for a few more seconds, but by then Starscream was already putting in his two microchips.

"Yes, what are you going to do, 'Bolt?" he asked sweetly, sitting in midair up near the ceiling of the hangar. "Shout at me? Fly through me? I have to tell you, it doesn't have much effect..."

"Oh, shut up!" shouted Silverbolt, shaking Skydive off and striding across the hangar floor, wings twitching in fury. Fireflight exchanged a worried look with the others and scuttled after him. "He didn't want me to get involved so I wasn't going to but now you've almost killed him--"

"It's not my fault he was stupid enough to try to run a gestalt-shield on his personal systems!" retorted Starscream. "He pulls that sort of idiotic stunt all by himself!"

"He's got a point," remarked Slingshot from his post as lookout on the door.

"Shut up, Slingshot," snapped Silverbolt, still moving towards Starscream, who showed no inclination to move away. "You're deliberately baiting him," he went on to Starscream, "you're deliberately trying to get him to make a mistake and get hurt--"

"I am not!" And the weird thing, Fireflight thought, as he caught up to Silverbolt and tentatively tried to grab an arm, was that Starscream actually sounded like he meant it that time. "I just... don't like being ignored."

Silverbolt yanked his arm free of Fireflight's grasp, turned to glare at him - Fireflight shrank back - and then snapped his head around to fix Starscream with an expression of such loathing that the ghostly Seeker looked taken aback. For all of about half a nano-klik, admittedly, but Fireflight was impressed all the same. Then the usual sneer was back.

"Oh, please," he said. "What, you're going to stare at me until I beg for mercy?"

He drifted down towards the deck, raking his optics over Silverbolt in an assessing, predatory way that made Fireflight kind of want to hit him - and if the way Air Raid was glowering and Slingshot had taken a half-step away from the door were any indication, he wasn't the only one.

"I have no idea what he sees in you," Starscream went on, voice scratchy with contempt. "What do you even talk about - the weather?"

The scary thing, they would agree later, was that Silverbolt did not respond. He didn't growl, or hurl back a retort, or shout something like "THAT'S IT, I'VE HAD ENOUGH!" the way people were supposed to when they suddenly snapped. He just went stock-still, optics flaring -

- and then about ten thousand volts crackled and leapt through Starscream's translucent form, making him shriek with surprised pain as he lit up like an Earth Christmas tree.

"Well," said Silverbolt, voice oddly flat. "Look at that. Apparently electricity can still affect your spark."

It was at that point that the other four Aerialbots piled onto Silverbolt and pinned him to the deck, but Fireflight thought, secretly, that even getting the fright of his life was worth seeing the look of shock on Starscream's face.

*

General consensus among the Autobots - and most of the Decepticons, although Blitzwing was still of the opinion that Starscream should just kidnap and ravish Skyfire and be done with it - was that Starscream deserved it, and if his comeuppance had come from an unexpected quarter, well, no one could fault Silverbolt under the circumstances.

Except perhaps Fireflight, who seemed unsure what to think of his gestalt leader now; and except Starscream, because of course nothing was ever his fault, as he petulantly told Perceptor.

Because he wasn't really making a nuisance of himself beyond the sulky chatter - which was an improvement over the norm - Perceptor listened indulgently as he repaired various microchips before offering his own opinion. "Certainly, I cannot approve of Silverbolt's reaction," he said. "It was rather childish of him, even if I do understand his motives."

"What motives?" Starscream snorted. "He's just afraid I'll take his boyfriend."

"That," Perceptor pointed out wryly, "doesn't seem to be in the realm of possibility."

"Skyfire's just being stubborn!" In his rage, Starscream lifted up a rack of drying beakers; at a pointed look from Perceptor, the ghost reluctantly set them down again. "If he would just talk to me." Then, in a tone Perceptor was probably not meant to hear, "It's been so long, and he's so close, and I miss him."

Perceptor sighed, leaned against the counter. "I cannot pretend to understand your feelings, since I do not share your circumstances," he said slowly, and Starscream shut up to listen. "But I have worked with Skyfire since he joined the Autobots, and I know he felt your loss deeply. If the events that drove you apart still weigh so heavily upon him, it can only be because he misses you too."

Starscream was silent for a long time. At length he faded into the wall, his colors dark as when he first died. Perceptor set his work aside and left the lab for someplace not so silent.

*

Dear Cyclonus,

Enclosed is your order - my latest and greatest acquisition, as requested. If this doesn't distract Galvatron, we may have to resort to dressing Roddy up in that slave-Leia getup and sending him over.

Just kidding (mostly),
Sideswipe

*

He probably should've expected to find Starscream lurking in his lab when he returned to it, but Skyfire almost turned and walked back out nonetheless. He just had no energy to deal with Starscream right now - in addition to his collapse (which was annoying as well as uncomfortable: he'd been sure he'd compensated adequately for the drain, and the fact that he apparently hadn't meant that he'd missed something crucial in the basic calculations) he'd spent most of his downtime reassuring Silverbolt, who in typical fashion had not been able to stay angry for long enough to avoid the inevitable guilt.

"What do you want?" he asked bluntly.

"Oh, so you're deigning to acknowledge my presence now?" The words were not nearly as acerbic as they were pretending to be, however, and Starscream seemed unusually subdued. "Are you... recovered?"

"For the most part." Skyfire decided there was no help for it, and crossed the lab to his workbench, careful not to look in Starscream's direction. "Apparently my adaptations to the shield generator were insufficient to counteract the systems drain."

A snort of disdain. "I could have told you that." -- but the rebuke was almost tentative, if such a word could ever be applied to Starscream. "Did you account for the reverse electron flow on the secondary capacitor loop?"

"Of course I--" Skyfire paused, considered the suggestion more carefully, remembering that Starscream had been in the middle of a tirade from the other side of the lab when he'd been working on that part. "Perhaps I didn't. I was... distracted at the time."

Another mech might have taken the opportunity to apologise. Starscream said nothing, which in itself spoke volumes. Skyfire pulled the wrecked generator out of subspace - it had overloaded when his systems abruptly terminated the connection in self-defence - and reached for his tools.

He was aware of Starscream hovering just behind his left shoulder, the same way he used to back before the war, when he wanted to see what Skyfire was doing but couldn't quite overcome his pride enough to ask to be shown.

"I've worked on the Stunticons' forcefields," Starscream commented in a neutral tone. "Not quite the same principle, and they were built around the technology, but..."

Rodimus was, perhaps, right - there was more of the Starscream he remembered from the old days here. Just as difficult, as proud, and as confrontational, perhaps, but lacking that obsessive sadism that had so repelled Skyfire when they had first met after the ice. Starscream had always had a streak of cruelty, of course, and doubtless always would, but his position as second-in-command of the Decepticons seemed to have turned it into the single most powerful driving force behind his actions.

"You take a look, then," said Skyfire, the words coming hard to him, but a relief at the same time. "See if you can tell me what went wrong."

*

"Hah! You call that a formation strike? I could fly more gracefully with a wing off!"

"Yeah, right, cow thrusters! Aerialbots, get him!"

Skyfire, fresh from an all-night lab session, emerged into the open air and found Silverbolt on the ground watching as his Aerialbots chased a laughing, flickering Starscream around in circles above. The lasers the Autobots fired could not harm the dead Seeker, of course, but they lit him up briefly, in flashes that left glowing trails behind. As Skyfire watched, Starscream spun in the grip of one of those flashes, simulating a downed enemy, before regaining his flightpath below Slingshot and attacking him with invective and ghost-tickles from below.

Without taking his attention from the spectacle, Silverbolt said, "I don't know what you said to him, but he's certainly returned to his old cheerful self."

"We didn't really say anything," Skyfire admitted. "Starscream's not the heartfelt confession type."

That earned him a smile. "No, he's more the 'tantrum, sulk, pretend nothing happened' type." Silverbolt tilted his head to look at Skyfire at last, a strange smile dancing at the edge of his mouth. "I'm... glad, anyway. I know it weighed on you."

Skyfire nodded, preferring to let his hand on Silverbolt's wing speak for him - commiseration, connection, mute apology - as overhead the Aerialbots shrieked and wheeled after their quarry.

"They are getting better," Silverbolt mused.

Skyfire laughed. "Don't worry. I won't tell Starscream you said that."

"Thank you. He's insufferable enough as it is."

"Yes, I know." Skyfire shook his head as Air Raid yelped in mock fury, transformed mid-turn, and set Starscream's form alight with lasers.

"I'm ten times prettier than you!" he declared, and Silverbolt and Skyfire broke down laughing.

*

Third letter to Rodimus in as many hours and still no response. Galvatron huffed at the screen - didn't the Prime know he was supposed to keep an optic on his mailbox at all times? He was Galvatron! His missives ought to be replied to promptly, with lots of flattery!

...oh, never mind. Galvatron muttered uncomplimentary things about his rival and slumped back, the Dis's command chair taking his weight with nary a creak. The problem with the Autobots these days, he found himself thinking, was that they didn't get in Galvatron's way as often as they used to. Maybe he ought to go conquer something, just to get their attention.

"My lord."

The salutation was given in the low tones Cyclonus used when he was sure he'd done something wrong - and, smart as his second was, he was usually right. "What is it?" Galvatron growled, not looking up.

"I've brought you something," Cyclonus answered, quickly coming forward to kneel just behind him. Galvatron waited just long enough to make him squirm before turning to look.

Cyclonus, his dark formal cloak draped over his shoulders, bore in his hands the largest, scariest sex toy Galvatron had ever seen. The thing looked like a small cannon having enthusiastic sex with an instrument of torture. ...which, of course, gave Galvatron ideas.

"Come here," he ordered, and didn't wait for Cyclonus to obey before yanking the spacejet up by a wing and kissing him senseless.



(TBC)