I'm so happy to see another Starscream enjoyer. 🥰🌹 You've inspired me a lot.
I ended up writing something that was inspired by your fanfic.
I have an ideas, Starscream's spark is immortal. It can never truly be destroyed, and no matter what happens, he'll always be reborn somewhere, sometime. Of course, he has absolutely no control over that. But the important part is that every time he dies and comes back, he learns something new. He's not stupid, he's smart... or at least, that's what he likes to think.
Here's the thing about dying.
You'd think it would get easier. You'd think that after the first time, after the second, after the dozenth, you'd develop some kind of tolerance for it. Like building up immunity to a toxin. Like how overexposure eventually makes you numb.
It still hurt, for one thing. That part never changed. The specific flavor of pain varied, sometimes it was sharp and immediate, sometimes it was a slow awful drag, but it was always there, reliable as gravity, reminding you exactly what was happening. Starscream was dying. Again. And it hurt just as much as every single time before it.
He was aware of the light first. Or rather, the absence of light, and then a very gradual return of something dim and sourceless, the kind of ambient glow that existed in the moments between existing and not existing. He'd been here enough times to recognize it. The waiting room between one life and whatever came next.
"Again," he said, to no one in particular.
His voice didn't echo. Nothing did, here. Sound just sort of... stopped, like it had somewhere better to be.
He took stock of himself with the detached efficiency of a mech who had done this enough times to have developed a system. Spark: still burning. Annoyingly. Stubbornly. With all the survival instinct of a particularly determined weed growing through cracked pavement. Frame: gone, obviously. The frame was always the first thing to go. He'd had so many frames at this point that the loss barely registered. They were tools. Replaceable. The things inside the frame, the things he actually was those were apparently not replaceable, or at least not destroyable, which was the whole problem.
Or blessing, depending on how you looked at it.
He'd spent a long time figuring out which one it was and still hadn't landed on a definitive answer.
The mechanics of it, as best as he'd ever been able to work out, were this: his spark was wrong. Not in the way that his many, many enemies had argued his spark was wrong, that was a philosophical debate he had exactly zero interest in entertaining but structurally, fundamentally wrong. Or right, depending again on perspective.
The coding of it had been configured in some way that made it essentially indestructible, which wasn't supposed to be possible, which said either that the universe was a deeply weird place with much bigger loopholes than anyone realized, or that something had specifically and deliberately done this to him, which was a thought that sat in his processor like a stone in still water.
He knew, in the abstract way that you know things you've never been directly told, that Primus was aware of him. That Unicron was aware of him. That whatever the two of them knew about him was something he'd never been fully read in on, which was both annoying and, on the occasions he thought about it too hard, genuinely unsettling.
Unicron had spoken to him once. Or what passed for speaking, it had felt more like being grabbed by something the size of a star and shaken. This had been in one of the earlier lives, the ones that felt most like a rough draft, the ones where the war was loud and constant and everyone was very earnest about things that would later prove to have been deeply, tragically not worth dying for.
He'd come out of that experience with two things: a clearer picture of exactly how large the universe was and exactly how small his particular corner of it had been, and an absolute immunity to fear that had been both the most useful and most dangerous thing he'd ever accidentally acquired.
When you've stood in the presence of something that could dismantle existence as a side effect of existing, very little else manages to feel threatening. Megatron was frightening before that. After, he just seemed like a very large mech with anger management issues and a power complex, which was a much more manageable problem even if it didn't feel like it at the time.
The absence of fear hadn't made him smarter, unfortunately. He'd noticed that. He'd also noticed that he kept making the same categories of mistake no matter how much data he collected between iterations. The specifics changed. The patterns didn't. This said something about him that he didn't particularly enjoy sitting with, so mostly he didn't.
What he did enjoy, in the loosest possible sense of the word, was this: the time between. The drift. Whatever this space was where he existed without consequence for however long it took the universe to figure out where it was going to put him next. It was quiet. It was the only place that was reliably quiet. In his experience, everywhere else was loud.
And thought, because he couldn't exactly stop himself, about all the places he'd been.
The thing about the quote was that he'd encountered it when he was young enough that young felt real and not like a historical footnote.
He'd been at the Academy, and he'd been burning through the library the way he burned through everything, fast and indiscriminately, because there was too much to learn and not enough time and waiting had always felt like a personal insult.
The text had been in a collection of philosophical works, some of which were interesting and some of which were the academic equivalent of someone making impressive word-noises while saying nothing. The phrase "death is a gift" had appeared in one of the less impressive ones, and his first reaction had been the kind of dismissive contempt that comes easily at that age.
Death is a gift. What a ridiculous thing to say. Cybertronians could live for millions of years under the right circumstances. Death was foreign, abstract, something that happened to short-lived things and to the unlucky and, theoretically, to the very old. Not to someone like him. He was going to be in a laboratory for the next several centuries minimum, he was going to revolutionize two or three scientific fields, he was going to have arguments with people who were wrong and win them all, and he was going to do it for so long that the concept of death would remain comfortably theoretical.
He'd thought about that stupid phrase again after the first time he died. He'd thought about it in a way that was less dismissive and more complicated the way you think about something when you realize you've suddenly and involuntarily become an expert on the subject. He hadn't been grateful for it, not then. He'd been furious, actually. About the audacity of it. About the sheer presumption of the universe, to take everything he'd built in that life and just stop it. Like turning off a light.
But he'd come back, and the second life had been different in ways the first hadn't prepared him for, and he'd learned things the first death had positioned him to learn, and somewhere around the third or fourth iteration, he'd started to grudgingly see the argument.
Every death taught him something. The problem was that the lessons didn't always transfer into behavior modification, because he was who he was and his particular combination of traits had a way of overriding what he intellectually knew and replacing it with what he wanted, which was often something considerably less wise.
He was very intelligent. He'd established this. The intelligence was not the problem.
The problem was that being very intelligent and being wise were not the same thing, and he'd spent several lifetimes confusing them.
The memories didn't come in order. They never did, in this space. They came the way things come when you're not actively trying to summon them
He remembered the sky over Vos. The specific quality of the light there, the way it hit the spires at certain angles and turned everything amber and gold. He'd flown that sky so many times that the patterns of it had become part of how he thought, the way a language you learn young shapes the structure of everything that comes after.
He remembered the lab. The first one, the one where the science had been genuinely exciting before it got tangled up in everything else. He'd been good at it exceptional at it, because he was exceptional at everything he committed to, even when everything else about him was a disaster. The work had made sense in a way the war never quite managed to. Variables you could control. Results you could measure. Problems with actual solutions.
He missed the lab. He missed it in most versions, in the parts of himself that had survived every death and gotten layered down over time. The war had taken that from him in a way that was its own kind of death, slower and less dramatic but no less real.
He thought about Skyfire.
This was the part where most versions of himself would get complicated and uncomfortable and change the subject, but in the between-place there was no subject to change to, so he let himself think about it.
Skyfire, who'd been the best thing about the Academy and one of the best things about that whole era, who had the kind of mind that made talking to him feel like standing next to an open window, constantly bringing in fresh air you hadn't known was missing. Who was also enormous and kind and irritatingly reasonable about most things, and who had looked at Starscream at various points across various lives with an expression that Starscream had learned, eventually, to recognize for what it was.
There had been one life where they'd gotten to be good. Genuinely, quietly good. No war, or at least not yet. Or the war somewhere else, for long enough that it hadn't touched them. He didn't remember all the details, the memories from other lives always came through imperfect, translated through too many iterations but he remembered the feeling of it. Coming back to something that made sense after a long time of nothing making sense. The specific comfort of being known by someone who'd been around long enough to know you before the layers.
He wasn't sentimental about it. He wasn't. But he filed the memory somewhere near the front of whatever passed for his heart and moved on.
The trine was different. TC and Warp were in more lives than they weren't, and in the ones where they were present they occupied the kind of space that didn't have a good word for it in any language he knew. Not romantic exactly, not the way his relationship with Skyfire was romantic, but not platonic either. Something with its own specific shape. Something that had survived more deaths than he could count because they kept finding each other and reforming around the same central point.
The war had been somewhere around them but they'd managed to build a pocket of sanity inside it, which was an achievement he was honestly prouder of than most of his scientific breakthroughs. Creating something stable in inherently unstable conditions was harder than it looked. TC's steadiness and Warp's chaos and his own particular brand of furious drive had balanced out in ways that probably shouldn't have worked and did anyway.
He thought about them sometimes when the other ones got to be too much.
He did not, as a rule, enjoy thinking about Megatron.
He thought about Megatron anyway, because Megatron took up a lot of space in his history whether he liked it or not, and this was one of those situations where not thinking about something was really just thinking about it with extra steps.
The relationship across versions defied easy categorization, which was probably the most honest thing he could say about it. The Megatron of the early versions and the Megatron of the later ones had been different mechs in some ways and identical in others, and Starscream's relationship with both of them had been….
Complicated was the understatement of several geological eras.
Toxic was accurate in most versions, at least for significant portions of time.
There had been a version, though. There had been a version where the toxicity had wound down to something closer to volatile but functional, and the thing underneath had been visible enough to work with, and they'd done the very stupid thing of actually working with it. He was aware that this made him sound deeply foolish and he was choosing not to care about that because he'd lived it and it had been real and he didn't owe anyone an explanation for it.
He didn't like thinking about what that had eventually cost.
Shockwave was a surprise every time he remembered it, because it was so thoroughly uncharacteristic of both of them that his processor kept wanting to reject it as apocryphal. But it was real, he could feel the shape of it clearly enough that it had to be. One life, one very specific configuration of circumstances, where Shockwave's relentless logic and his own relentless intelligence had found a kind of equilibrium that was stable. Genuinely, boringly, blessedly stable. Which was not a word he associated with himself and which he had initially found so uncomfortable that he'd actively tried to destabilize it.
He hadn't succeeded. Shockwave had observed this attempt with the same expression he brought to everything, which was no expression at all, and had said something precise and correct about the probable reasons for the self-sabotage, and Starscream had been so annoyed by being accurately analyzed that he'd stopped self-sabotaging out of spite.
In retrospect, Shockwave had probably known that would happen.
Soundwave surprised him less, when he thought about it, because Soundwave had always seen more than he let on and that quality had a way of being either threatening or unexpectedly intimate depending on which direction you were facing. There'd been a life where the balance had tipped toward the second option. Soundwave was quiet in the way that held things, not the way that was empty, and Starscream's particular brand of noise had fit into that quietness better than you'd expect. Not that he'd ever said so. He'd communicated it in the specific way he communicated everything: by continuing to be there, which for him was an enormous gesture that almost no one ever recognized as one.
Soundwave had recognized it.
That had been a good life.
Bumblebee was the one that made him genuinely confused every time he visited it, because what it communicated about himself was something he didn't entirely have the language for. The size difference alone should have made things awkward and it had, socially, in approximately ten thousand small ways that had mostly stopped being annoying once he'd run out of the energy to be performatively irritated by them. But it worked. He kept being surprised by how much it worked. The little yellow menace was relentlessly, almost aggressively good-natured in a way that should have been unbearable and had instead just slowly worn down the specific defenses he had against being treated decently.
He didn't like being treated decently. Or rather he'd never been sure what to do with it. The people who'd treated him well in his life were easy to dismiss as deluded, and the people who'd treated him badly were easy to dismiss as enemies, but Bumblebee occupied this maddening middle ground of treating him well and clearly knowing exactly who he was and choosing to do it anyway, and the only response he'd ever found for that was begrudging attachment.
He'd never admitted the begrudging attachment.
Bumblebee had known about it.
He thought about Knockout and felt something that was close to amusement. Of all the relationships across all the lives, that one had been the least surprising once it was happening and the most surprising in anticipation. They were too similar in some ways to vanity, the surgical precision about appearance, the tendency toward self-interest and in most configurations that would have created friction. In the one configuration where it had created something else instead, it had been because they were similar enough to find each other intelligible in a way that more mismatched partnerships never quite managed. You couldn't be with someone like Knockout and not understand exactly what was happening, because you could see yourself in the calculations.
He'd found it refreshing. He'd told absolutely no one this.
She'd come after him, which was still sort of astonishing to revisit. He'd been in a particular phase of his life in that version, one of the rebuilding phases, which were always strange, suspended between old patterns and new ones with nothing quite holding yet and she'd shown up with the specific confidence of someone who'd made a decision and wasn't interested in being talked out of it.
He'd tried anyway. He'd explained in some detail why this was a poor strategic choice on her part. She'd listened to all of it with the expression of someone letting you finish before saying what they'd already decided to say, and then she'd said it, and he'd found himself without a particularly good counter-argument.
He hadn't been a great partner. He was aware of this. He'd been better than he'd expected himself to be, which was something, but the bar he'd expected was also quite low, so this wasn't as meaningful as he sometimes let himself feel good about. She'd handled him with a combination of patience and complete unwillingness to accept certain behaviors that had, over time, worked better than almost anything else. You couldn't intimidate her. This had initially been offensive and had become, gradually, one of his favorite things about her.
He'd mentored her, too. The leadership of Windblade was, she was good at it in ways that were natural to her but needed shaping in the early stages, and he was good at shaping things even when everything else about him was a disaster. He'd told her things he'd never told anyone. Practical things, strategic things, things about the nature of power and how it moved and what it cost and what it protected.
He'd found that unbearably moving and would deny this under torture.
This was different from the others. The others were things he could categorize, process, hold at a slight analytical distance. Cryak didn't have a distance.
She'd been his mentor in the version where he'd needed one most, which might not have been coincidence but which he'd never had the opportunity to ask about. The Academy had given him technical training. Cryak had given him something that didn't have a name but that he could feel the shape of, something that had to do with what to do with the things he was.
Because he was a lot of things, and not all of them had obvious applications, and before her he'd been dealing with that by mostly ignoring the parts that didn't fit into clean categories. She'd had strong opinions about this approach, which she'd shared with the specific kind of direct honesty that had initially felt like being disassembled and had later felt like being trusted.
She'd known he was capable of more than he usually managed. She'd told him this with no softening, which had been both enraging and correct. The version of himself that was closest to what she'd believed he could be was the version he was most intermittently interested in being and most consistently failing to sustain.
He'd think about it again, in whatever was next.
He let himself think about her for a while.
He was not the sort of mech who collected attachments. He found attachment generally impractical and specifically dangerous, because it created vectors of vulnerability that his many, many enemies were very willing to exploit, and because he'd also done enough damage to enough things he'd been attached to that the pattern itself made him cautious.
He was not attached to Hashtag.
This was a lie of the specific kind that was primarily directed at himself, which was the only kind of lie he found genuinely embarrassing.
She was infuriating. She was optimistic in a way that made his cooling systems spike. She had opinions about him that were embarrassingly favorable given the available evidence, which was the kind of thing that should be easy to dismiss, he'd dismissed flattery from far more impressive sources, but which failed to dismiss itself because it wasn't flattery, exactly. It wasn't about what he'd done or what he was capable of. It was about the specific idea of him, the actual him, the version that existed underneath all the strategy and the cruelty and the very reasonable survival behaviors, and her unwillingness to accept that the world wasn't going to give him a fair shot at that version.
He didn't like what it made him feel. He didn't like it because he recognized it as the kind of feeling that meant something was important and he'd never been good at protecting things that were important to him.
She kept being close anyway. She kept coming back. She kept looking at him with that expression, the one that said she saw him perfectly clearly and had decided that was fine and he had no reliable defense against it.
He would never tell her what she was to him. He couldn't. The words for it didn't feel safe in his mouth.
He thought about her standing somewhere in whatever world she was in, probably furious on his behalf, probably insisting to anyone who would listen that he deserved better than whatever had just happened to him, probably completely unwilling to let the universe settle into the comfortable story about him that the universe preferred.
He hoped she didn't waste too much of herself on being angry for him.
He thought: you were worth it. Every version. You were worth paying attention to.
He recognized this. It had happened enough times that the shift was familiar now the way the ambient glow went from sourceless to directional, the way time reasserted itself after the timeless drift, the way his sense of self stopped being a memory and started being a present tense again.
He had a brief moment, he always had this moment to wonder where he was going.
The guessing was not entirely pointless. He'd noticed patterns over the iterations. Sometimes the new life was adjacent to an old one, sharing characters and places but configured differently. Sometimes it was entirely new territory. Sometimes he came back into the middle of something already in progress, which was genuinely disorienting in ways that didn't improve no matter how many times it happened.
He was smarter than he'd been the first time. He'd accumulated things, not memories exactly, nothing that clean or complete, but something like instincts built from repetition. The way you get better at a physical skill through practice except the skill was surviving himself, which was harder than it sounded.
He thought: this time, maybe.
And then, because he was who he was and had never managed to entirely stop, he thought about the academy and the lit class and the annoying phrase that had been stuck in him for longer than the building it came from had existed.
He'd learned a lot. He'd learned it again and again, in different rooms and different frames and different configurations of the same fundamental problems. He'd learned the value of what he kept building and losing. He'd learned Cryak's lessons, or he'd kept learning them. He'd kept coming back to them.
He didn't know if he'd do better with it this time.
He suspected he would try, which was more than he would have said in earlier iterations.
The light was coming fast now.
He thought, with the clarity that came from the edges of things: I've lived so many lives and all of them were mine and none of them were wasted even when they felt like it.
He thought: Primus, whatever you're doing with me, I am getting very tired of the dying part specifically.
He thought: Cryak, I'm still trying. Most of the time. That's more than I'd have said originally.
He thought: Hashtag, stop being angry on my behalf. You have better things to do with that energy.
He thought: Don't stop entirely.
He thought, with the very last moment of coherence before the light took over: Oh slag, here we go again. Let's see what you've got this time.
And then the light hit him like it always did.
Also, I'm sorry if my English sounds a little awkward. It's not my native language. I tried my best to translate everything myself, and when I got completely desperate, I threw a few parts into Google Translate.
I hope you enjoy this little gift
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