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The sun was hot.
Well, yes, that was obvious. With a core temperature of 15,000,000 Celsius, it was bound to be hot. But Cybertron had no sun, nothing this close like the one Planet Dirt orbited, and Sol’s presence was certainly felt in the heat it radiated that seemed to wholly culminate in this strip of latitude, near the equator. Make that Planet Hot Dirt. Or dry dirt. Or cracked dusty dry dirt that was hot and got stuck in cracks and Starscream was starting to feel homesick.
A tarp was thrown up for shade, but that shade was currently occupied; besides that, the trees around were devoid of leaves and so the sunlight bore down on him, unforgiving, as he squatted somewhere in Africa. Silver rippled sluggishly in the distance, a mirage of sweltering air. Once or twice Starscream had to physically wipe the dust off his optics, and he’d taken to moving very little if he was on the ground lest he risk overheating. If he had time, he might take to the air and climb up to an altitude where the natural gases of Earth’s atmosphere stopped trapping the heat, and it was cold. Relievingly so.
But not now. He’d already had his midday flight, and had duties: looking after his commander, but also his hatchlings. They squeaked and wriggled in the containers he’d put them in to hold them, because their curiosity drove them to crawl around without caution, to explore, to trudge through that hot dirt and put their little claws on anything they stumbled upon. He didn’t want them getting hurt. There were precious few Cybertronians left; to see the young get hurt, it wounded Starscream in a way he couldn’t put into words.
They weren’t really his, but he’d vowed to care for them anyway. And he’d take care of Megatron too, who seemed half-dead still, the plates of metal of his exterior cracked and peeled away in some areas to reveal whirring mechanics underneath. And the little Scalpel drones, damn them. Useful and necessary they may be, but they were too reminiscent of metal pests that wormed between wires and skittered across his damaged parts.
Starscream picked up one of the young that had tipped itself onto the ground, wiping that awful dirt off it, cradling it for a selfish second as instinct momentarily overpowered his processors, before he put the hatchling back with the rest of his clutch. It cried out petulantly.
“Why do you do that?” Megatron rasped.
“Do what, my lord?” Starscream turned to face his leader.
The canvas hood Megatron wore—either out of shame for his wounds or want for protection from the elements—kept most of the sunlight off him, but it still found him at certain angles. Yellow-white reflected brilliantly on the sharp edges of his features. “Every time one of them falls, you pick it up and put it back with the rest of the lot.”
“Their survival is important.”
“If it’s stupid enough to fall and get hurt or starve, it shouldn’t live. It will be a burden on the rest of us if it relies on others for its survival.”
“Their survival is important,” he repeated bluntly. And Starscream thought of all the casualties of a war so terrible its survivors made up a minority, that the dead outnumbered the living, and felt a paralyzing fear like he’d never felt before. A fear as cold as space, empty and vast and all-consuming. “The survival of all of them is important.”
Megatron turned and stared at a mountain range in the far distance, red optics glowing—incensed by something. And Starscream hadn’t even been overtly contemptuous this time. The Decepticon leader was likely just in one of those moods.
“Do you need help with that?” The Air Commander spoke up to fill the silence, changing the topic of conversation in a maneuver that really wasn’t subtle at all.
Megatron scratched at his face-plates, scowling. “No.”
Undeterred, Starscream crossed the desert ground, already reaching out to assist. Megatron harshly swatted his hand away, but he reached out again, gently pinching the frayed hood to unveil Megatron’s scarred helm. This time Megatron let him. His electromagnetic field was pulled in close, defensive.
“You can relax around me,” Starscream muttered. “If I wanted to kill you I would have done it already. Do you think the Decepticons would accept my leadership now, in such a period of uncertainty? They need you.”
“For now.”
“For now,” Starscream agreed. “And when they no longer do…” He trailed off for dramatic effect.
Somehow, Starscream’s traitorous threat seemed to lift Megatron’s spirits. It was familiar, reminiscent of old times. Back before Cybertron became uninhabitable.
He vented hot air, tilting his helm to let Starscream clean the dust from the cracks in the metal and occasionally flick the repair drones out of the way.
They remained like that, in silence, for a while. Megatron, sitting on the rocks, helm inclined as he got lost in old memory files. Starscream, standing before him, helm bowed and bright red optics focused on the task as he obsessively cleaned his leader. It felt good to work with his hands. He started with the face and helmet, then moved to the neck and shoulders, and then to everywhere else because Megatron was not shy, not with Starscream, not anymore. What could he hide now, after millions of years of them knowing each other? What did either of them have left to conceal?
When he finished, Starscream stepped back and looked Megatron over. His battle-worn body gleamed now that the layer of dust and grime was removed; Starscream could almost see the same powerful figure he’d sworn 'loyalty' to all those years ago. Finding no faults which could be fixed here without a proper medical bay, he turned around and went to his hatchlings, and checked them carefully. In an hour of non-attendance, one had grown too still, too lethargic, so he pulled it out and held it close. His inner workings clicked anxiously, but he ignored the rising space-cold fear and transformed a circulatory tube in his forelimb to peek out from the exterior casing. Opening the line stung a bit, but the hatchling needed extra fuel and its body was too fragile to process Earth’s crude oil. The only tool he could use to convert oil into Energon were his own systems. So he’d share.
It would have to do. The hatchling drank a bit, and Starscream let himself feel hope that it would be enough to save it.
“There’s no point,” Megatron spoke up, ever the optimist. “If not today, it’ll go offline tomorrow. You waste Energon, attending to the weak like this.”
Starscream set the little body back with its clutchmates. They all sleepily regarded him, waiting for something he couldn’t give. “I need them to survive,” he hissed. The abject terror he felt suddenly sharpened itself into a needlelike vertice of fury. “You say there’s no point? What is the point? What else are we fighting this war for? A victory with no one left alive to claim it?”
The hot air settled in around them, silent, and the orange afternoon sun slumped down to the horizon.