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tfic_contestTitle: A Mirror Darkly
Rating: MA
Universe: Shattered Glass/IDW Timelines
Pairing: Optimus Prime x Starscream
Word Count: 3,380
Author's Note: This is set in the Shattered Glass universe, as introduced at Botcon 2008. For anyone unfamiliar with Shattered Glass, the basics are as follows: Decepticons are brave, loyal, honorable and protective; Autobots are doublecrossing, vicious, imperialistic and destructive. The tyrannical Autobots hold Iacon as their stronghold, and the Decepticon rebels attack from Polyhex. In this universe, a spark is known as an ember.
The sky was void of stars.
Soot and the heavier poisons of industrial pollution blotted blackness from horizon to horizon, the spires of Iacon blurred and broken between the patches of smog. Starscream wrapped his arms around his own waist, vents sputtering as they worked to filter the air. Overcast, the sky turned unforgiving, impenetrable, and claustrophobia crawled over his armor plating to settle damp in his circuitry. No wonder Cybertron was falling apart, losing its grip. It had lost its primary mea ns of navigation.
Something lurched out of the darkness, weaving between transmission towers, its black paint scratched with violet, with violence—Powerglide, to judge by the other flyer’s joyous recklessness. Starscream eased a step backwards, and then another, folding the white planes of his wings behind the red shielding of his upper arms, shuttering his optics to hide their shade.
Megatron would never forgive him for coming here again.
Hands settled on his forearms, heavy and hot, and he offlined his vocalizer to silence a shout. Optics slitting open, he watched Powerglide dissolve into the smog and felt one massive arm slide over his chest, pulling metal against metal with gradual inexorability. Magnetism that had nothing to do with mineral properties kept him still. “Do you want someone to see you?” that voice of razored velvet murmured.
Tension started in the tips of his wings, moved deep into his neural cabling. “I’m not a fool.”
“No,” Prime agreed, and Starscream watched the dark fingers against his waist slide upward, gliding along the glass cockpit of his alt mode with a faintly shearing sound. “And yet…you have so little common sense when your own survival is in question.”
Starscream hissed. “You’re one to talk.”
“Come inside.” Amusement had fled Prime’s voice, and the fingers against Starscream tightened to the edge of pain, a reminder that obedience was compulsory…or at least highly recommended. He flirted with defiance for a moment or more, his fingers clenching over Prime’s, but he intended to choose his battles with care. When Prime pulled him back off the balcony, he let himself be dragged, catching a wingtip against the arch of the doorway for the trouble.
He pulled back against Prime’s grip, his body twisting. “Afraid what they would see?” he said, expression tightening along with Prime’s fingers. “Afraid the glorified criminals you call soldiers would question your judgment?”
“You should be.” A low chuckle moved through Prime’s frame. He loomed over Starscream, darker than the shadows of the room, his optics barely casting light despite their narrowed brilliance.
Despite himself, Starscream stopped his resistance. Prime's grasp tightened around his wrist, twisting him again, returning them to their previous position with unnecessary force. The plating over Starscream's neural cabling scratched against the center of Prime's chest.
Prime gave out a stuttering purr from his engine in response. “You've come a long way to do nothing but resist me,” he noted.
He slid the two of them backwards, his hand pushing against the upper plane of Starscream's cockpit, driving downward just shy of cracking the glass, forcing Starscream to his knees. This was the position Megatron regarded so warily; it offended his precarious sense of equality. One step down the path of dominance, and the way back crumbled under each footstep. Just one step before an endless fall.
This was the position that made something sing through Starscream's wiring. He lifted both arms over his head and fastened both hands into the ridges between Prime's frontal plating, pulling, fingers sliding deeper to tug at wiring and drag them closer together. Prime rasped out a groan, electrical tremors passing over Starscream's fingertips as one weighted hand scraped up from his chest to tilt back his head. One fingertip traced his faceplates, parted his lip components, slipped into his mouth. Starscream bit back, unwilling to admit the weakness any simpler way, and Prime rumbled against him with bittersweet laughter.
Something ached between Prime's words, terrible and raw. “Sometimes, I think you want this as much as I.”
“Would it matter if I didn't?” Starscream turned his face away to speak.
Prime's laughter flaked away, dark and brittle as bleeding fluid. “I kill the unwilling, afterward,” he murmured, disturbing gentleness in his voice. “So yes. It matters. To us both.” The hand against Starscream's cockpit clenched, painful, then agonizing for a moment or two, but Starscream failed to relent, and the grip eventually eased again. Hairline cracks had erupted through the glass—collateral damage. “Are you never frightened?” Prime slid down behind him; they knelt together. Fingers so much larger than his own traced the fissures, pressed with agonizing care, and lifted out a single shard of glass with a devastating crack.
Starscream wasn't cursed by unnecessary honesty, but in this case he spoke the truth. “Often. But not of what you do to me, Prime.”
Lifting the shard between finger and thumb, Prime turned it to glitter in the dim light. “Of what I could do to you?” He discarded the bit of glass, and it shattered across the distant floor.
“I'll admit that gives me pause.”
Prime slid one fingertip along the razor edges of the gap left in the glass before delving deeper, ghosting over superficial components to touch the machinery disguised by Starscream's alternate form. The trembling started in Starscream's chest and spread outward, centered in the minuscule space between two wires, where Prime's fingers moved between them in steady strokes. Outwardly innocuous, those wires led directly to the chamber beneath all his plating, directly to the ember that chamber housed.
So powerful, Prime's arms settled him closer as he quivered, his body betraying him. “Harder?” Prime murmured, gentleness heavy and rough in his voice, and these were the moments that shattered Starscream's composure and made him moan. No one so casually cruel should show such consideration. “Harder,” Prime chuckled, fingers slipping into gaps too small to contain them, forcing metal to part with a pleasantly painful edge. Arching against him, Starscream cried out again, the sound muffled by the sudden pressure of Prime's hand against his mouth. Silent. Silenced. No one could hear this except the two of them, and Starscream hated to be beholden to anyone for keeping his secrets. Prime spoke against the side of Starscream's head, raw with breaking desire. “Open for me.” Prime managed to keep his voice soft, invitation wrapped in obscuring layers around the promise of demand, of force.
Wordless, Starscream shook his head.
“You will.” Prime's growl sent inaudible vibrations through them both, its tremors tingling in Starscream's circuitry. He would, all protests aside. But not yet.
Since the moment they'd first met face to face, since the capture where Prime had originally taken his measure and then tried to shatter him from the inside out and—less successfully—from the outside in, Starscream had done his best to follow those subtle currents of Optimus Prime's consideration, seeking... What? Seeking truth, he supposed. Justification, he guessed. Something besides insanity...he wouldn't dare to admit. Prime hurt him and hurt him willingly, without remorse. That pain was never more than he could bear, but then, he was peculiarly made, eager to endure until discovering to what, or to whom, he belonged.
He feared death, but he doubted now that Prime would kill him, so long as they went on like this, meeting in broken fragments of cycles, an affair more illicit than any simpler betrayal of a lover—when they touched, they betrayed ideals, and forgiveness was impossible. They kept each other's secrets with a bittersweet sort of loyalty.
After that initial capture, he'd escaped the Autobots' grasp with a little ingenuity and a little luck. The Constructicons had repaired him, Megatron had held him, and Starscream had felt himself restlessly home again at last.
Sometimes he had woken from recharge still in the midst of one nightmare or another. He had dreamed of hands taking him apart, of repairs more agonizing than any injury. Worse, however, were the remembered moments when Prime had touched him without overtly hurting him, stroked him in full darkness with a word or two of real—not imagined or affected—gentleness. Starscream had accepted the rest, allowed the wounds of torture to heal, but he shied away from confronting those more complicated memories.
Then he had received a pointed message on a private channel.
Simple words, tangled meaning. Meet me. A set of coordinates. An implied commitment and an express disloyalty that had sent Starscream reeling. He had weighed the risks and filed through the untrustworthy images of his memory.
He'd gone.
In greater and lesser ways, he had been falling ever since, a slow and surreal tumble through sense and into nonsense. He knew what he was doing, and when Prime wasn't touching him, he even remembered why he had started doing it.
An inexorable pull against his lower plating made him moan. Prime adjusted his grip; a brief struggle forced Starscream's back to the floor. He kept fighting, even with Prime's hands locked over his wrists, his movements grinding them together until Prime's engine stuttered and roared. A rougher sound erupted from Prime's vocal components as he settled over Starscream with his full weight, flattening him against the floor and breaking something superficial in one wrist.
The game was done, and Starscream tossed his head with a groan, apprehension overriding anticipation for a moment of delicate fear.
“Be still,” Prime said, and Starscream's plating creaked under the weight.
With a laugh comprised largely of static, Starscream shook his head again, just once, back and forth. “Oh, you would hate it if I did.”
Fingers grappled with his paneling, Prime's silence an answer in itself as Starscream felt protective plates slide open to expose the sensitive cabling within, lengths of cord spooled neatly in place, port connections faintly sparking already. He jolted with a series of electric discharges as Prime's fingers traced their edges. Still shaking, he lifted twitching servos to the loose catches of Prime's panels, unlocking and unwinding wires by unspoken invitation.
Heat rippled beneath his fingertips, moving with a powerful but understated current. “You're always ready,” he muttered in the moment before Prime connected them, plugs into ports followed by a mirrored rush of data, a thick stream of sensation.
Prime hunched over him, shuddering deep in his internals. Starscream lifted a hand and clutched at the dark angles of the other mech's shoulder, a steadying hold as they looked into each other, outward and inward at once.
Something in the visible facets of Prime's face softened. Longing threaded through the connection between them.
“You are beautiful,” Prime said.
Starscream turned his head away, panting through his vents, optics shuttering for an unbearable instant or two. He couldn't stand what he couldn't understand, and he wondered how he could bear the wanting of it. “Do you tell anything but lies?”
With a snarl, Prime forced his arm flat, the spell broken, one hand against the white plane of a wing with his fingertips splayed against red detail, everything groaning under the shift of weight. Plating cracked beneath the pressure, a jagged pattern along one wing. The pain was horrible, and the pleasure swallowed it whole.
This was insanity. Falling, falling, through the looking-glass and out the other side, where the world twisted back on itself and everything was better, brighter, terrible and wonderful.
Scientist that he had been, sometimes Starscream imagined the rutting of organic creatures like this, instinct warring with base sentience, bestial force united with sensuality in an act of tantalizing brutality. At his worst, Prime was feral, more beast than the Predacons or even the dangerous Grimlock could ever be. Prime's favorite forms of torture required a certain elasticity, a flexibility that metal and machinery adopted less easily than did flesh and bone. Despite the punishment, Starscream found a certain glorious joy in the submission of his intractable plating, in the way Prime crushed him just to keep him close.
They fit together, all angles aside. Pressure mounted, heat built in his joints and seethed behind his chest plates, light arcing and lashing against its confinement. Starscream felt the surge begin in buried circuitry, working its way outward until he whimpered behind the barrier of his lip components.
“Not yet,” Prime snarled, ripping into him. The pain put off his pleasure, made him wait, gasping through his vents, and then with a rush that pleasure grew, purified by white-hot agony. A conflagration of melting, sizzling heat swept through him, its edges rimmed by electric shocks and ripples of inconsequential but tangible data. Starscream offlined his vocal components and shrieked, the sudden brilliance of his optics reflecting along the walls, casting tangled and grasping limbs in shadow against the vaulted ceiling. The light refracted pain in black and pleasure in red. Prime wrenched his hands into the tatters of Starscream's wings and stifled his own bellow in static silence, the reverberation plain in the heavy shudder of his frame, in the way overload sparked overload with a flurry of shared aftershocks. The pleasure ebbed only gradually, darkness spidering its way through Starscream's visual fields, and he heard something sparking, something dripping against the metallic expanse of the floor, in the moments before his systems slipped offline.
When his awareness returned, he flickered his optics at the same ceiling, watching the image focus and refocus. Prime made a looming shadow at his left, but the leader of the Autobots was kneeling at his side. Deft fingers worked at one of Starscream's wings. Prime always repaired the damage they had done.
Starscream focused more than his optics, and decided to ask. “Why?”
“Be silent.” Prime twisted something back into place and then stripped out a bit of destroyed wiring. Starscream pressed his dental plates together without making a sound until the stinging eased.
His vents hissed to life, gasping. He spoke despite locked lip components. “What if I didn't?”
“I could leave you in pieces, if you prefer.”
Prime could, and he might, but Starscream doubted that he actually would. Even so, Starscream waited until basic welds stitched together both wings before pushing the issue any further. “You do this even when I'm not too damaged to fly.” Starscream noted with idle discomfiture that he had left a great deal of white paint streaked along the floor, most of it scraped in long swathes from his wings. The metal beneath the paintwork gleamed white as well, but that wouldn't hide the scratches from a practiced optic.
Despite his current occupation, Prime missed not a beat. His hand stroked along Starscream's shoulder and then clamped over his neck. Pressure threatened to crack the fragile plating; fuel lines protested and sent warnings skittering behind Starscream's optics. Prime spoke in a calm and calculating rumble. “Do you want to waste your existence on rhetorical questions? I would advise you to remember your peculiar position.”
Vents heaving, Starscream scowled at him in spite of the pain, rasping against his hold, “Our position. Equally...dangerous.” The warnings doubled. “Release me.”
Prime let him go.
Starscream struggled upright, one hand rising to his neck, but Prime kept him from standing with a powerful but painless hand against the upper edge of a wing. They maintained an uneasy silence as Prime pressed him back again, leaning over him to wrench the plates of his chest back into place. Pressure against sensory nodes deadened the pain. Without discomfort to balance him, Starscream felt the probing movements of those mighty hands as another sort of caress, and he might have allowed himself to fall into the sensation, to let it build and then overload again. They almost never had that sort of time.
He shuttered his optics. For long cycles, Prime occupied himself with reconnecting wiring. When Starscream could move all his fingers again, and no longer felt more than minor twinges of pain even without his sensory nodes offline, Prime sat back, withdrawing. One hand lingered against a mended wing, proprietary.
Their time was up. Starscream would barely return in time for an assigned shift. He lingered nevertheless, uncomfortable in the thick silence between them, his optics locked with Prime's.
Prime shifted at last, standing in a single fluid motion, dragging Starscream up to his feet. “You're a fool for coming here,” Prime said, and Starscream stiffened, more than ready to argue. Instead, he heard the subtle click-whirr-click of the other mech's faceplate unlocking, withdrawing. The fluttering ache deep in Starscream's chest had less to do with the aesthetics of the face exposed than the fact of its exposure, and he tipped his head upward without prompting. The rare kiss was heated, brief, and sharp-edged with vicious hunger. Starscream felt himself respond, ferociously, and then felt himself pull away again.
“So long,” he said to Prime, then leaped into the air and folded his alternate form around the ache at his center. No response. No answer, either, and no reasons given.
Starscream activated his jamming frequencies and his navigational systems, dipping his wingtips before fading into the smog wreathing the Cybertronian capital.
*****
Polyhex spread out below him, shadowed against the deeper dark below clearer skies. Starscream messaged Soundwave, masking all his deeper thoughts below a shield of exhaustion, and received an affirmative—if characteristically neutral—response.
He touched down on the interior landing platform to find everything quiet, lighting dimmed to conserve energy. Megatron's chosen base wasn't quite home, but he felt security enveloping him with a light touch, nevertheless. Connecting cables that had wound too tightly in the last several megacycles began to ease.
A blue-edged shadow extracted itself from its brethren and stepped forward to meet him, solid in a shifting reality. Starscream flinched, guilt striking deep from within to cripple his sensory intakes.
Megatron said nothing, but the shifting of emotion behind his optics made a familiar ocean, one with tides of endless and abiding sorrow. Uncharacteristically, Starscream had nothing to say for himself, and met those optics with quiet dismay in his own. They shared a long look, uncomfortable less for its intensity and more for its familiarity. Tension started in Starscream's wingtips again, spreading through his limbs and skipping unpleasantly through the beat of his core, and finally he dropped his gaze, turning for the passageways. Megatron caught his wrist, a gentle but inexorable grip.
“Are you a danger to our mission, Starscream?” he murmured. His fingers loosened, their tips sliding against the palm of Starscream's hand. “Do you lack objectivity? Are your perceptions warped?”
Wordless, Starscream shook his head.
The timbre of Megatron's voice shifted, turned to unwilling steel, every syllable a leaded weight of sorrow. “Because if you are, and if you do, I cannot allow it.” They both knew the truth of that: what Megatron would do to protect those who entrusted their lives to him, to them, first and second in command. Some things were truly unforgivable, or unforgettable at the very least. Megatron's other hand touched Starscream's face, tilting his head, letting their optics lock again. “Can I trust you?” Megatron whispered. “Despite what you have done? And will do.”
“Yes.” The truth was involuntary, an exhalation and an exclamation. He wrapped his hand around Megatron's, fingers threading together. “There's something in him. Something more than—” Starscream grimaced, disliking his own desperation. “There's something else in there, Megatron,” he finished, low.
Somehow, he had given the only right answer. Megatron shuttered his optics, pain marked through the powerful plates of his face. “I know.”
They shared some strange and terrible secret, and Starscream could hardly guess the depth or breadth of it. That they shared it comforted him, nevertheless. Starscream wasn't always eager for touch, but Megatron made for a compelling exception, so he allowed himself the first tentative movement, arms sliding loosely around the commander's waist. The answer came easily, warm pressure around his back, avoiding the fragile angles of his wings, one hand rising to anchor against the back of his head.
“Promise me you will be careful.” Megatron spoke in darkly velvet tones, respect instead of possession in the touch of his hands. “Promise me you will take care.”
“I promise,” Starscream said, and he knew that was not enough.
Rating: MA
Universe: Shattered Glass/IDW Timelines
Pairing: Optimus Prime x Starscream
Word Count: 3,380
Author's Note: This is set in the Shattered Glass universe, as introduced at Botcon 2008. For anyone unfamiliar with Shattered Glass, the basics are as follows: Decepticons are brave, loyal, honorable and protective; Autobots are doublecrossing, vicious, imperialistic and destructive. The tyrannical Autobots hold Iacon as their stronghold, and the Decepticon rebels attack from Polyhex. In this universe, a spark is known as an ember.
The sky was void of stars.
Soot and the heavier poisons of industrial pollution blotted blackness from horizon to horizon, the spires of Iacon blurred and broken between the patches of smog. Starscream wrapped his arms around his own waist, vents sputtering as they worked to filter the air. Overcast, the sky turned unforgiving, impenetrable, and claustrophobia crawled over his armor plating to settle damp in his circuitry. No wonder Cybertron was falling apart, losing its grip. It had lost its primary mea ns of navigation.
Something lurched out of the darkness, weaving between transmission towers, its black paint scratched with violet, with violence—Powerglide, to judge by the other flyer’s joyous recklessness. Starscream eased a step backwards, and then another, folding the white planes of his wings behind the red shielding of his upper arms, shuttering his optics to hide their shade.
Megatron would never forgive him for coming here again.
Hands settled on his forearms, heavy and hot, and he offlined his vocalizer to silence a shout. Optics slitting open, he watched Powerglide dissolve into the smog and felt one massive arm slide over his chest, pulling metal against metal with gradual inexorability. Magnetism that had nothing to do with mineral properties kept him still. “Do you want someone to see you?” that voice of razored velvet murmured.
Tension started in the tips of his wings, moved deep into his neural cabling. “I’m not a fool.”
“No,” Prime agreed, and Starscream watched the dark fingers against his waist slide upward, gliding along the glass cockpit of his alt mode with a faintly shearing sound. “And yet…you have so little common sense when your own survival is in question.”
Starscream hissed. “You’re one to talk.”
“Come inside.” Amusement had fled Prime’s voice, and the fingers against Starscream tightened to the edge of pain, a reminder that obedience was compulsory…or at least highly recommended. He flirted with defiance for a moment or more, his fingers clenching over Prime’s, but he intended to choose his battles with care. When Prime pulled him back off the balcony, he let himself be dragged, catching a wingtip against the arch of the doorway for the trouble.
He pulled back against Prime’s grip, his body twisting. “Afraid what they would see?” he said, expression tightening along with Prime’s fingers. “Afraid the glorified criminals you call soldiers would question your judgment?”
“You should be.” A low chuckle moved through Prime’s frame. He loomed over Starscream, darker than the shadows of the room, his optics barely casting light despite their narrowed brilliance.
Despite himself, Starscream stopped his resistance. Prime's grasp tightened around his wrist, twisting him again, returning them to their previous position with unnecessary force. The plating over Starscream's neural cabling scratched against the center of Prime's chest.
Prime gave out a stuttering purr from his engine in response. “You've come a long way to do nothing but resist me,” he noted.
He slid the two of them backwards, his hand pushing against the upper plane of Starscream's cockpit, driving downward just shy of cracking the glass, forcing Starscream to his knees. This was the position Megatron regarded so warily; it offended his precarious sense of equality. One step down the path of dominance, and the way back crumbled under each footstep. Just one step before an endless fall.
This was the position that made something sing through Starscream's wiring. He lifted both arms over his head and fastened both hands into the ridges between Prime's frontal plating, pulling, fingers sliding deeper to tug at wiring and drag them closer together. Prime rasped out a groan, electrical tremors passing over Starscream's fingertips as one weighted hand scraped up from his chest to tilt back his head. One fingertip traced his faceplates, parted his lip components, slipped into his mouth. Starscream bit back, unwilling to admit the weakness any simpler way, and Prime rumbled against him with bittersweet laughter.
Something ached between Prime's words, terrible and raw. “Sometimes, I think you want this as much as I.”
“Would it matter if I didn't?” Starscream turned his face away to speak.
Prime's laughter flaked away, dark and brittle as bleeding fluid. “I kill the unwilling, afterward,” he murmured, disturbing gentleness in his voice. “So yes. It matters. To us both.” The hand against Starscream's cockpit clenched, painful, then agonizing for a moment or two, but Starscream failed to relent, and the grip eventually eased again. Hairline cracks had erupted through the glass—collateral damage. “Are you never frightened?” Prime slid down behind him; they knelt together. Fingers so much larger than his own traced the fissures, pressed with agonizing care, and lifted out a single shard of glass with a devastating crack.
Starscream wasn't cursed by unnecessary honesty, but in this case he spoke the truth. “Often. But not of what you do to me, Prime.”
Lifting the shard between finger and thumb, Prime turned it to glitter in the dim light. “Of what I could do to you?” He discarded the bit of glass, and it shattered across the distant floor.
“I'll admit that gives me pause.”
Prime slid one fingertip along the razor edges of the gap left in the glass before delving deeper, ghosting over superficial components to touch the machinery disguised by Starscream's alternate form. The trembling started in Starscream's chest and spread outward, centered in the minuscule space between two wires, where Prime's fingers moved between them in steady strokes. Outwardly innocuous, those wires led directly to the chamber beneath all his plating, directly to the ember that chamber housed.
So powerful, Prime's arms settled him closer as he quivered, his body betraying him. “Harder?” Prime murmured, gentleness heavy and rough in his voice, and these were the moments that shattered Starscream's composure and made him moan. No one so casually cruel should show such consideration. “Harder,” Prime chuckled, fingers slipping into gaps too small to contain them, forcing metal to part with a pleasantly painful edge. Arching against him, Starscream cried out again, the sound muffled by the sudden pressure of Prime's hand against his mouth. Silent. Silenced. No one could hear this except the two of them, and Starscream hated to be beholden to anyone for keeping his secrets. Prime spoke against the side of Starscream's head, raw with breaking desire. “Open for me.” Prime managed to keep his voice soft, invitation wrapped in obscuring layers around the promise of demand, of force.
Wordless, Starscream shook his head.
“You will.” Prime's growl sent inaudible vibrations through them both, its tremors tingling in Starscream's circuitry. He would, all protests aside. But not yet.
Since the moment they'd first met face to face, since the capture where Prime had originally taken his measure and then tried to shatter him from the inside out and—less successfully—from the outside in, Starscream had done his best to follow those subtle currents of Optimus Prime's consideration, seeking... What? Seeking truth, he supposed. Justification, he guessed. Something besides insanity...he wouldn't dare to admit. Prime hurt him and hurt him willingly, without remorse. That pain was never more than he could bear, but then, he was peculiarly made, eager to endure until discovering to what, or to whom, he belonged.
He feared death, but he doubted now that Prime would kill him, so long as they went on like this, meeting in broken fragments of cycles, an affair more illicit than any simpler betrayal of a lover—when they touched, they betrayed ideals, and forgiveness was impossible. They kept each other's secrets with a bittersweet sort of loyalty.
After that initial capture, he'd escaped the Autobots' grasp with a little ingenuity and a little luck. The Constructicons had repaired him, Megatron had held him, and Starscream had felt himself restlessly home again at last.
Sometimes he had woken from recharge still in the midst of one nightmare or another. He had dreamed of hands taking him apart, of repairs more agonizing than any injury. Worse, however, were the remembered moments when Prime had touched him without overtly hurting him, stroked him in full darkness with a word or two of real—not imagined or affected—gentleness. Starscream had accepted the rest, allowed the wounds of torture to heal, but he shied away from confronting those more complicated memories.
Then he had received a pointed message on a private channel.
Simple words, tangled meaning. Meet me. A set of coordinates. An implied commitment and an express disloyalty that had sent Starscream reeling. He had weighed the risks and filed through the untrustworthy images of his memory.
He'd gone.
In greater and lesser ways, he had been falling ever since, a slow and surreal tumble through sense and into nonsense. He knew what he was doing, and when Prime wasn't touching him, he even remembered why he had started doing it.
An inexorable pull against his lower plating made him moan. Prime adjusted his grip; a brief struggle forced Starscream's back to the floor. He kept fighting, even with Prime's hands locked over his wrists, his movements grinding them together until Prime's engine stuttered and roared. A rougher sound erupted from Prime's vocal components as he settled over Starscream with his full weight, flattening him against the floor and breaking something superficial in one wrist.
The game was done, and Starscream tossed his head with a groan, apprehension overriding anticipation for a moment of delicate fear.
“Be still,” Prime said, and Starscream's plating creaked under the weight.
With a laugh comprised largely of static, Starscream shook his head again, just once, back and forth. “Oh, you would hate it if I did.”
Fingers grappled with his paneling, Prime's silence an answer in itself as Starscream felt protective plates slide open to expose the sensitive cabling within, lengths of cord spooled neatly in place, port connections faintly sparking already. He jolted with a series of electric discharges as Prime's fingers traced their edges. Still shaking, he lifted twitching servos to the loose catches of Prime's panels, unlocking and unwinding wires by unspoken invitation.
Heat rippled beneath his fingertips, moving with a powerful but understated current. “You're always ready,” he muttered in the moment before Prime connected them, plugs into ports followed by a mirrored rush of data, a thick stream of sensation.
Prime hunched over him, shuddering deep in his internals. Starscream lifted a hand and clutched at the dark angles of the other mech's shoulder, a steadying hold as they looked into each other, outward and inward at once.
Something in the visible facets of Prime's face softened. Longing threaded through the connection between them.
“You are beautiful,” Prime said.
Starscream turned his head away, panting through his vents, optics shuttering for an unbearable instant or two. He couldn't stand what he couldn't understand, and he wondered how he could bear the wanting of it. “Do you tell anything but lies?”
With a snarl, Prime forced his arm flat, the spell broken, one hand against the white plane of a wing with his fingertips splayed against red detail, everything groaning under the shift of weight. Plating cracked beneath the pressure, a jagged pattern along one wing. The pain was horrible, and the pleasure swallowed it whole.
This was insanity. Falling, falling, through the looking-glass and out the other side, where the world twisted back on itself and everything was better, brighter, terrible and wonderful.
Scientist that he had been, sometimes Starscream imagined the rutting of organic creatures like this, instinct warring with base sentience, bestial force united with sensuality in an act of tantalizing brutality. At his worst, Prime was feral, more beast than the Predacons or even the dangerous Grimlock could ever be. Prime's favorite forms of torture required a certain elasticity, a flexibility that metal and machinery adopted less easily than did flesh and bone. Despite the punishment, Starscream found a certain glorious joy in the submission of his intractable plating, in the way Prime crushed him just to keep him close.
They fit together, all angles aside. Pressure mounted, heat built in his joints and seethed behind his chest plates, light arcing and lashing against its confinement. Starscream felt the surge begin in buried circuitry, working its way outward until he whimpered behind the barrier of his lip components.
“Not yet,” Prime snarled, ripping into him. The pain put off his pleasure, made him wait, gasping through his vents, and then with a rush that pleasure grew, purified by white-hot agony. A conflagration of melting, sizzling heat swept through him, its edges rimmed by electric shocks and ripples of inconsequential but tangible data. Starscream offlined his vocal components and shrieked, the sudden brilliance of his optics reflecting along the walls, casting tangled and grasping limbs in shadow against the vaulted ceiling. The light refracted pain in black and pleasure in red. Prime wrenched his hands into the tatters of Starscream's wings and stifled his own bellow in static silence, the reverberation plain in the heavy shudder of his frame, in the way overload sparked overload with a flurry of shared aftershocks. The pleasure ebbed only gradually, darkness spidering its way through Starscream's visual fields, and he heard something sparking, something dripping against the metallic expanse of the floor, in the moments before his systems slipped offline.
When his awareness returned, he flickered his optics at the same ceiling, watching the image focus and refocus. Prime made a looming shadow at his left, but the leader of the Autobots was kneeling at his side. Deft fingers worked at one of Starscream's wings. Prime always repaired the damage they had done.
Starscream focused more than his optics, and decided to ask. “Why?”
“Be silent.” Prime twisted something back into place and then stripped out a bit of destroyed wiring. Starscream pressed his dental plates together without making a sound until the stinging eased.
His vents hissed to life, gasping. He spoke despite locked lip components. “What if I didn't?”
“I could leave you in pieces, if you prefer.”
Prime could, and he might, but Starscream doubted that he actually would. Even so, Starscream waited until basic welds stitched together both wings before pushing the issue any further. “You do this even when I'm not too damaged to fly.” Starscream noted with idle discomfiture that he had left a great deal of white paint streaked along the floor, most of it scraped in long swathes from his wings. The metal beneath the paintwork gleamed white as well, but that wouldn't hide the scratches from a practiced optic.
Despite his current occupation, Prime missed not a beat. His hand stroked along Starscream's shoulder and then clamped over his neck. Pressure threatened to crack the fragile plating; fuel lines protested and sent warnings skittering behind Starscream's optics. Prime spoke in a calm and calculating rumble. “Do you want to waste your existence on rhetorical questions? I would advise you to remember your peculiar position.”
Vents heaving, Starscream scowled at him in spite of the pain, rasping against his hold, “Our position. Equally...dangerous.” The warnings doubled. “Release me.”
Prime let him go.
Starscream struggled upright, one hand rising to his neck, but Prime kept him from standing with a powerful but painless hand against the upper edge of a wing. They maintained an uneasy silence as Prime pressed him back again, leaning over him to wrench the plates of his chest back into place. Pressure against sensory nodes deadened the pain. Without discomfort to balance him, Starscream felt the probing movements of those mighty hands as another sort of caress, and he might have allowed himself to fall into the sensation, to let it build and then overload again. They almost never had that sort of time.
He shuttered his optics. For long cycles, Prime occupied himself with reconnecting wiring. When Starscream could move all his fingers again, and no longer felt more than minor twinges of pain even without his sensory nodes offline, Prime sat back, withdrawing. One hand lingered against a mended wing, proprietary.
Their time was up. Starscream would barely return in time for an assigned shift. He lingered nevertheless, uncomfortable in the thick silence between them, his optics locked with Prime's.
Prime shifted at last, standing in a single fluid motion, dragging Starscream up to his feet. “You're a fool for coming here,” Prime said, and Starscream stiffened, more than ready to argue. Instead, he heard the subtle click-whirr-click of the other mech's faceplate unlocking, withdrawing. The fluttering ache deep in Starscream's chest had less to do with the aesthetics of the face exposed than the fact of its exposure, and he tipped his head upward without prompting. The rare kiss was heated, brief, and sharp-edged with vicious hunger. Starscream felt himself respond, ferociously, and then felt himself pull away again.
“So long,” he said to Prime, then leaped into the air and folded his alternate form around the ache at his center. No response. No answer, either, and no reasons given.
Starscream activated his jamming frequencies and his navigational systems, dipping his wingtips before fading into the smog wreathing the Cybertronian capital.
*****
Polyhex spread out below him, shadowed against the deeper dark below clearer skies. Starscream messaged Soundwave, masking all his deeper thoughts below a shield of exhaustion, and received an affirmative—if characteristically neutral—response.
He touched down on the interior landing platform to find everything quiet, lighting dimmed to conserve energy. Megatron's chosen base wasn't quite home, but he felt security enveloping him with a light touch, nevertheless. Connecting cables that had wound too tightly in the last several megacycles began to ease.
A blue-edged shadow extracted itself from its brethren and stepped forward to meet him, solid in a shifting reality. Starscream flinched, guilt striking deep from within to cripple his sensory intakes.
Megatron said nothing, but the shifting of emotion behind his optics made a familiar ocean, one with tides of endless and abiding sorrow. Uncharacteristically, Starscream had nothing to say for himself, and met those optics with quiet dismay in his own. They shared a long look, uncomfortable less for its intensity and more for its familiarity. Tension started in Starscream's wingtips again, spreading through his limbs and skipping unpleasantly through the beat of his core, and finally he dropped his gaze, turning for the passageways. Megatron caught his wrist, a gentle but inexorable grip.
“Are you a danger to our mission, Starscream?” he murmured. His fingers loosened, their tips sliding against the palm of Starscream's hand. “Do you lack objectivity? Are your perceptions warped?”
Wordless, Starscream shook his head.
The timbre of Megatron's voice shifted, turned to unwilling steel, every syllable a leaded weight of sorrow. “Because if you are, and if you do, I cannot allow it.” They both knew the truth of that: what Megatron would do to protect those who entrusted their lives to him, to them, first and second in command. Some things were truly unforgivable, or unforgettable at the very least. Megatron's other hand touched Starscream's face, tilting his head, letting their optics lock again. “Can I trust you?” Megatron whispered. “Despite what you have done? And will do.”
“Yes.” The truth was involuntary, an exhalation and an exclamation. He wrapped his hand around Megatron's, fingers threading together. “There's something in him. Something more than—” Starscream grimaced, disliking his own desperation. “There's something else in there, Megatron,” he finished, low.
Somehow, he had given the only right answer. Megatron shuttered his optics, pain marked through the powerful plates of his face. “I know.”
They shared some strange and terrible secret, and Starscream could hardly guess the depth or breadth of it. That they shared it comforted him, nevertheless. Starscream wasn't always eager for touch, but Megatron made for a compelling exception, so he allowed himself the first tentative movement, arms sliding loosely around the commander's waist. The answer came easily, warm pressure around his back, avoiding the fragile angles of his wings, one hand rising to anchor against the back of his head.
“Promise me you will be careful.” Megatron spoke in darkly velvet tones, respect instead of possession in the touch of his hands. “Promise me you will take care.”
“I promise,” Starscream said, and he knew that was not enough.
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Date: 2008-06-01 07:08 pm (UTC)I must say I adored the Megatron comfort at the end the most. Megatron most of all would be difficult to make 'good' without it seeming bizarre. But, again, he was captured very well. Excellent fic all around. <3 I'm left wanting more - the best sign of success. X3
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Date: 2008-06-10 01:56 am (UTC)There may be more, in fact. This universe is mightily addictive. ^-^;
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Date: 2008-06-02 07:38 am (UTC)Your SG!Optimus makes me want to shiver, your Megatron pulls at me like canon Optimus normally would, and I guess even SG!Starscream still asks for punishment.
Very nice. <3
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Date: 2008-06-10 02:01 am (UTC)They really are. I suppose the reversal of gentleness to extreme violence makes the Shattered Glass universe unusually compelling. The contrast gave me an interesting opportunity to explore the three characters in different ways, trying to work in just enough of their original personalities to keep them recognizable.
Thank you. ^^
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Date: 2008-06-02 04:38 pm (UTC)ARGH, I'm not making sense! But seriously, you did a fantastic job. Absolutely incredible.
I love how you give Prime these little moments of not-quite-decency, kindness--and it's all mixed up into a glorious mindfuck of the first order, on top of Starscream's need to be forced into submitting, and just--wow. Incredible!
(Dang, I'm really not managing anything like coherency, am I? But seriously: incredible. I think your fic blew out my mind.)
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Date: 2008-06-10 02:09 am (UTC)I'm thrilled that you liked this so much! *gathers your mind back up and puts it back together with glue*
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Date: 2008-06-02 08:14 pm (UTC)Zari
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Date: 2008-06-10 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-06 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-04 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-17 02:45 pm (UTC)Megatron's characterization in this is so.. so.. baww. D:
I'd like for him to meet G1 Prime, they'd totally swap sad stories over teaAnd, this might just be me, but... this reads to me like a sequel. I may be mistaken, but isn't there a fic about Prime and Starscream's previous encounter, when Screamer was captured or something?
I may just be imagining it, as I haven't managed to find that fic again. x.X;