Chapter Text
Shockwave kept his word. Skyfire was granted sanctuary in his academy, met with frequent visits from Starscream to his new chambers. On his first day there, Starscream had dropped a subspace full of supplies on Skyfire’s berth, all of which Skyfire realized were taken from his dorms back at the academy. Artifacts, trinkets, whatever possessions Skyfire still had, ones he thought were gone, now here, decorating the shelves.
It could not fill the hole left in his spark, but it was a start.
When Starscream wasn’t around, Skyfire often idled in Shockwave’s public labs or spent time with the only other empuratee around. He felt out of place in an academy packed full of outliers, while he was just a rescue, no one actually special.
They barely spoke to him or even acknowledged his presence. Glitch had told him not to take it to spark, they were nice people underneath.
They had to be, Glitch muttered. Skyfire envied his naivety sometimes.
“They think of us as criminals,” Glitch had said. “Murderers, thieves, traffickers…”
Skyfire had scoffed. “Are you?” he asked, turning to look at Glitch.
Glitch shook his helm. “No,” he said quietly. “I… spoke out of line. Nothing more.”
Skyfire sympathized. “So did I,” he admitted. Glitch finally looked up at him, his optic bright. Skyfire thought he might’ve smiled, and he would’ve reached out to squeeze the orange bot’s shoulder, but remembered Glitch’s reasonable fear of physical touch. “I wanted to be a scientist. I was a shuttle. Those things don’t match, huh.”
Unless you’re a senator, Skyfire thought bitterly. He shook the thought--Shockwave had shown him nothing but hospitality during his stay, regardless of the suspicions Skyfire still held. He’d even stood up for him, urged Skyfire to come to him if anyone was being particularly nasty.
Skyfire did not want to think about it. So instead, he asked Glitch something else. “Forgive my assumptions, but your name isn’t truly Glitch, is it?”
“No,” Glitch answered in earnest. “It’s Damus.”
“Damus,” Skyfire repeated. “It’s a nice name.”
“Please just call me Glitch around others,” Damus muttered. “Not everyone knows. I don’t want them to know.”
Skyfire didn’t press the issue.
All this to say, Skyfire spent most of his time alone to wander and explore the facility that laid beneath the guise of an Academy. He preferred to do so undisturbed and deliberately synched his explorations up with times he knew the outliers kept Shockwave busy and vice versa.
Skyfire’s balance saw significant improvement the more he used his new frame to walk. Though his pace was uncoordinated and sloppy he no longer lost his balance when he subconsciously tried to rely on wings that were no longer on his back. He adopted a casual stroll as his gait when he trudged through the corridors, making for the public labs.
The doors slid open upon registering his presence. Skyfire attempted to flick on the lights using the physical switches but they didn’t respond. Skyfire sent the command through a channel link instead. “Damus must’ve been in here,” he mused aloud as the lights flicked on one by one.
The labs were nothing to scoff at, though Shockwave often boasted--unconsciously--about how they paled in comparison to his own private labs. The senator promised Skyfire he’d show him around sometime when his schedule cleared up a little.
Skyfire sighed. That must have been about a week ago if his chronometer was up to speed. A week where Starscream’s visits grew less frequent, though the jet had at least explained why. Starscream was busy with the favors Shockwave owed him; a pair of outliers that went by the designations of Skywarp and Thundercracker. He informed Skyfire they were to trine soon and from what little Skyfire knew about their culture, the process was quite private, not to mention intimate, and any outside interference would call for a re-do.
He wondered whether he would have trined if the senate hadn’t caught him.
Skyfire shook his helm. It wouldn’t do him good to dwell on thoughts like that, especially not alone. The lab barely brought him any distraction anymore; the past week he spent loitering around, familiarizing himself with every nook and cranny but never touching anything. His claws were useless. All he could do was look, though Shockwave had offered him replacements for his servos when…
“His schedule clears up a little,” Skyfire muttered aloud.
Desperately looking around for a distraction, Skyfire’s optic fell on a set of sheets. He hadn’t paid them much heed before, but now they lay in disarray as if they were concealing something.
Skyfire’s processor sounded the alarm. If he were a rational bot, he might’ve listened to it. Unfortunately, Skyfire was a scientist, and his curiosity won out over his common sense more often than not. He pushed the sheets aside, uncovering a hidden set of doors.
Skyfire reached out to touch them. They felt startlingly cold to touch. He flinched back, but his curiosity stood at the forefront of his processor now, overriding all of his higher logic processes.
This was a bad idea, Skyfire thought as he dipped a claw in the gap between doors. They weren’t mechanical; perhaps they required a special access code to open?
Nevertheless, brute force was just as reliable as ever, and the doors were open after a few minutes of strenuous effort. Skyfire grunted, flexing his arms. He wasn’t built for this; not in this frame, or his old one.
He didn’t have time to calculate an estimate on how long he’d feel the strain of his little stunt as a gust of bitingly cold air cut against his frame. Skyfire’s internal systems redirect heat to his vital fuel lines alone, making his movements somewhat sluggish.
“A freezer?” He mused, stepping into the dark space. He couldn’t see anything. He ran a quick scan of his surroundings, pulling up the results on his HUD. Despite how small it appeared from the outside, the space stretched on beyond the public labs. Skyfire’s optic furrowed in a frown. He pulled up the map of the academy as well, and sure enough, there was nothing there for the space where he currently stood.
He took another step forward. His processor screamed at him to turn back, but even if Skyfire had considered it, the doors suddenly slammed shut behind him, blocking his exit.
Skyfire’s spark sank.
This is what you get for listening to curiosity over reason, a snide voice in his processor that sounded oddly like Starscream said. Skyfire huffed a shaky laugh; now that was a thought, Starscream playing the role of his consciousness.
Skyfire’s proximity alert suddenly alerted him of something to his left. He whirled around on his pedes, misjudging his balance, and stumbled forward, colliding with the object that caused his alarm in the first place. He tumbled over, reaching out to grasp at whatever it was in this space with him. His sensors hadn’t detected any spark signatures, so it wasn’t anything alive.
What the hell did Shockwave keep here?
Something clattered to the floor next to him. Skyfire had landed painfully on his aft, taking a few kliks to get his processor back in order.
He dared to turn his helm. His intake went dry and his spark hammered behind his chassis. He shouldn’t turn on night vision. He really shouldn’t.
Skyfire activated his infrared vision. What he saw defied all odds and his claws flew up to grasp at his helm. His tanks churned and he felt sick, but he had no intake to purge from.
It looked back at him. Gaping darkness where bright blue optics once sat burned holes through Skyfire’s optics. An expression twisted in a perpetual scream, the missing jaw…
He looked at himself.
Skyfire screamed.
Starscream aimlessly paced around Shockwave’s office. The scientist held his helm in his hands, elbows set down on his bruised desk. When Starscream barged in and demanded to know who was to blame for this Shockwave had flown into a rage, tossing the sizable piece of furniture against the wall and scattered datapads all over the room, cracking their screens. He’d put it back in place with a calmness that was almost scary, but Starscream had no time to entertain the senator’s outbursts.
“Well? When is he going to come through?” Starscream demanded, putting an end to his pacing to stare the senator down with narrowed optics. He did not even try to conceal his anger.
Shockwave did not look up to meet his gaze. “I don’t know,” he said. “Ratchet needs to assess the damage done to his processor before anything else. He was in stasis when we found him.”
“And how do we know this Ratchet isn’t some hack-job? He has a clinic in Dead End, doesn’t he? That doesn’t exactly paint him as trustworthy,” Starscream snapped.
“He is a friend,” Shockwave said. “Orion trusts him. So do I.”
“It takes very little for you to consider mechs a friend these days, doesn’t it?” Starscream’s lips twisted into a cruel smirk, baring his fangs. “Did he give you a good spike, Shockwave? Is it big? Or did your Orion --”
“ Enough! ” Shockwave bellowed. He slammed his hands down on his desk and finally deigned to look Starscream in the optics, fury blazing in his own. Starscream did not back off, hiking his wings up higher. “I know this is my fault, Starscream, so if you would stop trying to rub it in, perhaps we could come to a conclusion like reasonable mechs.”
Starscream scoffed. “That he’s going to die? You said it yourself, his spark shrunk. Last time I heard, you couldn’t magically pump one full of energon again.”
“Do you honestly think I don’t know that?” Shockwave retorted. He pushed himself up from his desk, approaching Starscream with heavy steps. Even with Starscream’s wings up high, Shockwave still towered over him. From up close, he saw how the senator’s paint was for once devoid of its usual excessive shine. It made something in Starscream’s spark sing with twisted delight; clearly, Shockwave’s fault affected him just as much as it did Starscream.
Shockwave continued. He reciprocated Starscream’s characteristic sneer with startling ease. “So perhaps, instead of trying to cover for your own insecurities and fears by rubbing the blame in further, you could help me think of him instead. You have a brilliant mind, Starscream, but I often fear that your selfishness overrides your senses.”
Starscream bristled. “You--!”
He didn’t have time to fire back at Shockwave. The doors to his office flew open and in walked the medic Shockwave had introduced as Ratchet, his expression annoyingly solemn.
Starscream crossed his arms. “Well?” He demanded, tapping a talon against his opposing arm. Ratchet’s optics flew to it, brow-ridges creased disapprovingly. Starscream stopped tapping.
“He is stable,” Ratchet grunted. Relief settled in Starscream’s processor, but he refused to show it outwardly save for the way his wings relaxed. He crossed the room over to Ratchet’s side, getting all up in the medic’s face.
“What happened to him, doctor ?”
Ratchet exchanged a look with Shockwave.
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
“Try me,” Starscream hissed, determined. If he had to pry the truth out of this mech, so be it.
Ratchet fetched a datapad from his subspace. “We’ve decided to speed up with the servo replacement,” he stated. “His claws pierced through his armor and nearly severed the connection between his spark and processor.”
“What?!” Starscream blurted in his alarm. “Is he trying to get himself killed?! ”
“I can’t rule that out, but I doubt that was his intention here,” Ratchet droned on. “I assume he tried to force a transplant between frames. Wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen this,” he sighed, finally showing some discernible emotion. “He got out lucky. If he hadn’t gone into stasis--”
“He would’ve been dead,” Starscream finished for him. Ratchet nodded. Starscream threw his hands up with a huff, a mix of hopelessness and anger flooding his processor. “The idiot! How could he?! He knows I’m waiting for him-- tell him I won’t allow that! No, I should tell him myself!”
Before he could be held back by either Ratchet, Shockwave, or their combined force, Starscream initiated his transformation sequence and sped down the halls to the Academy’s medbay. He transformed back to root mode upon arrival, landing with urgency rather than his usual grace.
Starscream was prepared to rant. Whether or not Skyfire was conscious was just an afterthought to him, he’d grab the stupid idiot’s helm and talk some sense into him. He stepped into the medbay with his resolve steeled.
“Skyfire, you--”
His resolve crumbled when he saw Skyfire on the slab. Starscream’s words died down on his glossa as he froze where he stood, optics glued to the sight in front of him.
“Sky…” He whispered, his wings lowering down further. “I swear, I’m going to make this right. I’m going to make them pay.”