Work Text:
Drifting’ (drifting’) off to sleep!
Let the joy of dream land find you!
— My Little Pony “Hush Now Lullaby”
.
.
.
Part One: Literal - Starscream
.
The transition from offline to online was pain.
This twisted, half-aware state could not be called online, but neither was it the timeless dark of unconsciousness so that’s what Starscream’s HUD called it. Online.
Damages scrolled across his HUD, too numerous to keep up with. They blended together into a sharp suffering and a stark knowledge. He was dying.
His chronometer was one of the thing broken by the crash so he did not know how long he lived with that knowledge. He had fallen, been shot down by Autobot warp cannons and now — an endless now that stretched forever without his chronometer to tell him otherwise — he was dying.
Desperate not to go quietly into death he struggled to listen. He could not move, not speak, nor even transmit so much as a simple distress call. Listening was all he had but even that failed him, There were no sounds of battle. Not the high shriek of combat ready engines and weapons’ fire. Not the deep percussive boom of artillery and warp cannons. Not even the static of his own broken comm suite receiving encrypted messages he could no longer understand. Just the sounds of one seeker dying in the dark.
Was he already dead? Was this darkness all there was for an extinguished ember?
He teetered on the edge of belief when something — something new, something else — intruded on his silent death.
It started with a skitter, a couple scraps of metal tumbling from somewhere above to bounce with the tiny pinging sounds of metal on metal across his frame and away deeper into Cybertron. He onlined his optics — when had he turned them off? — and saw in their reflected glow something looming out of the dark above him, its own gold optics dim and weak.
He couldn’t shriek, or scramble away. He couldn’t target it with his null rays or cluster bombs. He couldn’t even whimper in fear as the mech-shape crawled closer down the wall.
Hmm Hmm Hm-mm Hm Hm Hm Hmmm-hm. Hmm Hm Hm-mm Hm Hm Hmm.
The cadence of an alien song, it vibrated across the metal and into his frame.
His optics did not produce enough light to see many details and one was cracked, both it’s light and the data gleaned from it were intermittent. But his failing processor tried to catalogue the specifics of this apparition. Was it a dark mad Autobot or a stumbling lost Decepticon? Or more likely, was it something else entirely? Were those wings, or did the primer-grey metal simply fade away into the dark? Was that a splash of red above yellow optics or just a glitch of his dying mind?
Were those words, or just the hallucination of an ember that didn’t want to die alone.
“What is this? Has the Star fallen? Gamma song.. a tortured death shriek… the banshee wail of a far-distant sun?” The mech-thing crept onto Starscream’s form, an apparition with tangible weight that pressed him against the sharp metal of the crevasse where he’d fallen.
Hm Hm Hm Hm-m, Hm Hm Hmm-m Hm Hm Hmm Hmm Hm Hm Hmmm… vibrations, more felt than heard, resumed as the mech-thing licked away a dirty streak of energon. Hm…lick…Hm Hm…lick… Hm Hm HmHmr Hmkmm…
Starscream wanted to protest becoming prey to some scavenger of the deep but only a thin stream of static emerged from the effort. The creature only nuzzled him in a parody of affection, some sharp edge on its helm making scratches in already damaged metal. “Hush now, quiet now. It’s time to lay your sleepy head…” a different song, a different melody, no more suited to the Cybertronian language than the humming which resumed along with the feeding a moment later.
Was this real? Or a dream?
The apparition drank from the nearest wound and as though the greater access to its victim’s energon gave it strength, the humming finally resolved into words: “I will always do my duty, no mater what the price…”
.
.
.
Part Two: Metaphoric - Prowl
.
No light shone in the veins of a forgotten god, but the thunder of distant battle, the promise of blood spilled, was a siren’s call to a starving fire. The banshee wail of a star falling to earth was the promise of another orn's survival. The comet-tail across a sky it couldn’t see was a beacon.
What was that song? It was important, it knew. A message across forever, the beginning of a tale. A Call… but who was the call for? For this one? The prey? Or another? Some future thread not yet woven.
The prey was already close to death when it found it. God’s blood spilled across bloody metal, flickering with the cadence of a dying fire. Around them, silence was a heavy stone. Silence it shattered with the questions and answers it already knew as well as it knew the pathways of the Other’s ever shifting form. It tried the names, but they didn’t fit the thread that wound through the shards of rust before him “…Gamma-song…?” No that wasn’t right.
It didn’t matter. Food was food. God’s blood spilled, wasted as it always was after the killing field was abandoned.
It crept closer, listening to the violin-shriek of the Other across the strings of reality. The Other always had something to say about each death. Each thread ripped from the tapestry of mathematics that had become its reality was a redefinition of self, so tied up was it in alien perspective of its own creator. The shriek was louder now; this one was a vital structure of the weave, as much a lure as the promise of blue light spilled from its veins. Quietly it sang along, alien melodies that reached across time and space, through the void to the Call it knew was coming.
It touched too-cool plating and a life fanned out before it, a flutter of ambition and betrayal, there and gone in the snap of a courtesan’s wrist, leaving behind the twisted form of a loyal soldier. A reflection, shattered, given its chance to prostrate before the judgement seat, wings twitching before the eyes of a thousand observers beyond the veil of story and myth.
Which one was this? It was all jumbled up, a story that had been told again and again but shattered into shards of glass by the death flailing of a mortal and a god.
Which one was this? Hero or dragon? Ally, enemy, trickster, betrayer…? It didn’t matter. Life spilled from its veins and the pondering of higher thought was a lost cause compared to the needs of a form that was all it had left of before. Metal tasted of sunlight and dying wishes. It starved for the sunlight, so long has it been since it tasted it on its own metal, but the stars sang on the surface. The sun screamed. Dense mathematics plucked out a tune that drove it from the light of the endless depths above and deeper into the womb of its race, closer to the fire that birthed them all. The food stirred, a weak whine of feeble protest, but it did not hurt its prey and it the violin-shriek across the strings of stardust changed long enough to sooth away pain and protest. “Hush now…”
It knew the body of the Other. It was a sleeping sword, a slumbering shield, against the dangers of the void. Somewhere up there, in the sunlight it starved for, the Enemy waited for the moment of its own awakening.
What was that song? It hasn’t been written yet, never been heard, but the Call was coming. It was the call, an echo of memory spurring the stranger… who is he? who is he?… the hero to take the first step down the path to eternity. Come. Come. I await you in the belly of the whale.
What was this? Yes… food. The song agreed. Strings of stardust connect every point of a spider’s web, but it is only a parasite living off the aftermath of battle, corpses building cathedrals to the lengths mortals and gods would go to to preserve their own self-centered existence, blood dripping into the metal for scavengers. Filthy, dirty scavengers that crawled through the veins of the Other and burrowed up from the depths to challenge mortal heroes. Except it wasn’t the monster, not a challenge to be slain, but a trickster-guide. It was its duty to deliver the Call.
What was that song again?
.
.
.
End