Work Text:
Dia de los muertos
El calacas vio
—Aurelio Voltaire “Day of the Dead”
.
.
“Calm down Starscream,” Megatron rumbled. His giant warframe, aggressive voice, razor sharp claws and fragging huge fusion cannon were not conducive to ‘comforting’ and he knew it. Instead he seemed to have settled for ‘marginally non-threatening’ in his efforts to calm the seeker. “It was just the lights going out. It happens all the time. The security system never went down.”
“There was something there!” Starscream felt his wings go from twitching madly to flaring up in outrage, then go back to twitching as he waited for Megatron’s response to his outburst. It was a very bad mannerism for one of his rank. Bad for morale for the troops to see when the Second In Command was scared, especially since it often seemed like he was afraid all the time. A minor confrontation in the hall could set them spasming rapidly. He usually managed to control them fairly well but right now…they were so beyond ‘minor confrontation’ levels of agitation.
Megatron was not moved. “All the Decepticons have been accounted for, the security system shows no breach. Soundwave is continuing the investigation, of course, but it looks like nothing was there.”
It was the Grey Render, Starscream nearly snarled, but held his vocalizer. Megatron fed the gladiator ghosts, he said, out of respect for the fallen rather than the fear of their echoes, though the seeker knew he harbored a private belief but only because he had first hand experience with those echoes. He had not appreciated his (thankfully private, or he would have been demoted back then) ranting about his supposed hallucinations of the Grey Render last time. Well this time Cliffjumper had seen—heard it too and no visits to whatever still passed for a mental health professional among the Decepticons would convince him it wasn’t real this time.
What death or destruction was the creature an omen of now? Starscream shivered.
“Starscream?” And oh…oh Primus. Megatron was trying for comforting again. “Are you alright?”
“No,” he snapped. “Something was in that hallway with us and even with another corroborating it you refuse to acknowledge my concerns simply because I’m being superstitious.”
Megatron drew back a bit, golden helm tilting curiously. “Alright. I’m listening.”
Could he really—? Wings slowed their twitching some. “It was the Grey Render. You can’t keep it out and you can’t detect it because it is an omen of death, destruction… something catastrophic. We need to prepare accordingly.”
“Fine. I’ll instruct Soundwave to make some preparations. Any chance your haunting can provide any specific military intelligence?”
“It doesn’t work like that!” Starscream shrieked. He’d known it was too good to be true.
Megatron’s optics narrowed. “That’s quite enough Commander. I’m authorizing an extra ration for you and your trine so you can go flying as long as you can come back calm.”
That was a dismissal. “Yes Sir.” He spun on his heel-thruster and left the warlord’s presence.
A joor later he found Cliffjumper in the dimensional traveller’s assigned quarters. This was the only room outside the officer’s wing that didn’t have more than one assigned to it. It also locked, though they hadn’t been forced to lock their guest in since he’d been released from that first brig-stay.
He hadn’t taken the privilege to lock it either, so when “Yeah. Come in Scr—Starscream,” was the answer to an entry request the Air Commander was able to simply open the door.
Parts were spread out neatly over the floor and at first the seeker simply thought Knock Out had wrangled him into sorting and cleaning parts for medbay. Then he realized these were dismantled weapons he was cleaning.
Dismantled weapons.
Cliffjumper’s weapons.
Weapons he had access to!
He let out what he could admit in the privacy of his own mind was an alarmed shriek and the Autobot gave him a peeved look. “You screeching’s what pushes all my ‘shoot the Decepticon’ buttons you know. Rest of the time I can remember not to, with you at least.”
As if he needed another reason to keep his more expressive mannerisms under control. “Are you threatening me?” he hissed, trying for a tone that was more demanding than evil.
The Autobot picked up the firing control mechanism to the weapon. “With this?” He weighed it thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t make much a projectile. Maybe later, once I put it back in, I’ll think about it.” He took a brush to it and crud started flaking away.
He had a point. Cleaning wasn’t exactly a threatening activity. “How?”
“My partner,” The Autobot was pretty good at feigning nonchalance but Starscream was perhaps better than many at reading others’ nervous tics, having so many of his own. That scratch at his broken horn was anything but nonchalant, “was intelligence-caste. Decent hacker, though not phenomenal. She taught me a few tricks. Left the blocks alone ‘cause as much as you didn’t want me shooting you, I didn’t want it either. But…last night.”
“Yes, of course. Last night.” Just like that, they’d reestablished a rapport. As Cliffjumper was on the floor for his cleaning, Starscream gingerly took a seat on the berth. “I have just returned from my meeting with Lord Megatron on this very subject. Of course he doesn’t believe us.”
“No reason to believe me.”
The seeker huffed. “He should believe me.”
The Autobot only shrugged and picked up the next piece to clean. Starscream valiantly refrained from asking if his Megatron actually listened to his Starscream. He’d read the reports; he knew the answer to that. Instead…
“Why—!” he cut off the screech at Cliffjumper’s flinch. He lowered his voice. “Why aren’t you freaking out?”
“Right,” he drawled. “I hacked your weapon blocks,” a gesture with the brush to the dismantled guns, “because I really miss the brig.”
Yes. Right. Violating parole, which Starscream was ignoring. He huffed again.
They sat there for a few moments, somehow both comfortable and awkward all at once. The scritch scritch of the worn down brush and the whine of Starscream’s stressed engine were the only sounds and it should have been nerve wracking, and was, but also wasn’t.
“Nothing is going to make it less creepy but hearing that Earth song started me thinking,” this time the Autobot spoke first, “and I’ve got a couple of questions. Feel free to not answer if any of this is classified.” Starscream nodded. Gracious of him, but then he was military too and from Soundwave’s reports occasionally worked with his faction’s SpecOps contingent (just like our Cliffjumper his traitorous mind whispered and he shook the thought away; Soundwave’s reports also stressed that Cliffjumper considered himself much more of a melee fighter and didn’t have the mindset for a long-term infiltration) as a scout. “Did either faction try hiding energon off-planet, once it started running out?”
That wasn’t classified. Everyone knew about it. “Useless gesture,” Starscream dismissed their past desperate actions. “We just fought over it there, tore our ships to pieces and if anyone was left alive, they retrieved it to be used to further the war effort here. If there weren’t, the energon was just lost.”
Cliffjumper just nodded. “Same. Any ships left? The Ark or the Nemesis?”
That was classified. Intel leak via interdimentional timeline convergence obviously wasn’t something even Soundwave could keep from happening. “Ark’s not familiar but the Nemesis was an Autobot warship we brought down just before Jet—Autobot seekers managed to sabotage Trypticon station. We repaired it in secret to try and win back air superiority and got far enough to justify renaming it the Victory but there isn’t enough energon left on Cybertron for it to fly.”
“Not the same,” he answered, “but close enough. The ship exists in Decepticon hands at least. Gotta guess the Ark’s the same.”
Another Autobot warship? They had no intel for it, but if it was in the same dire straits as the Victory would they? Something to have Soundwave’s spies look for. “What’s this about?”
He sighed. “Energon. Right before everyone abandoned the planet for good, ‘Cons found a big deposit no one had known about before. Enough to fuel the last two evacuation ships, then enough to keep stragglers like me an Arcee fighting for a while. And if things keep being so similar, Earth’s got a lot of energon on it. I’ve got the coordinates.”
Starscream thought about it. He could see the steps of the plan Cliffjumper was proposing as clear as Praxan crystal. Retrieve the energon, take the Victory to this ‘Earth’ place, retrieve that energon, come back and win the war. Better than languishing in this eternal stalemate until they all starved. But there was a lot of ifs in that plan, so the first step was, “We need to determine if that first deposit actually exists here. Do you know the location?”
“Yeah. I was one of the two scouts sent to find Grimlock when he went AWOL with his team, which was how we found out about the mine.”
The idea of Grimlock going AWOL almost made him fritz. Sure the huge beast-former and Megatron fought, and not always recreationally, and he didn’t always respect Starscream’s authority because the seeker couldn’t go toe to toe with him in a brawl, but his outbursts had always come in the form of challenging Megatron. He’d never just up and disappeared.
He made a decision. “My trine and I have permission to be off-base for a flight. Reassemble your weapons while I requisition an extra ration for you as well and meet me at the southern launch pad,” which was the one least likely to have people watching their departure — not that this was a secret mission or anything. He was going to log it, but not until after it was too late to stop them from leaving. “You’ll show us this deposit.”
Cliffjumper blinked several times, as though trying to process that. Then shrugged. “You’re the Second In Command.”
Hearing that simple fact made him preen, even if the were the words of a grunt soldier acknowledging that he held a superior rank. The Autobot looked torn between amused and murderous, so he guessed that was also something that other Starscream had done as well. Frankly after the Autobot had gone absolutely berserk when he’d first shown up in the cell-block to question him after Grimlock had brought the him back, ranting about torture and hacking and how he was going to rip those pretty wings off as soon as he got free, Starscream had never thought they’d be able to hold a civil conversation. Amusement, even colored with rage they both knew and acknowledged wasn’t really directed at him, was a great improvement.
He forced himself to keep his wings absolutely still as he went to the commissary and commed Skywarp and Thundercracker. He was tempted to add a jibe about the Grey Render having provided viable military intelligence when he logged the mission in the base computers, but refrained and kept the wording neutral and professional. He logged it as an energon scouting mission — a common enough excuse to get squirrelly seekers off-base for a bit, and he made sure the wording reflected that assumption. Better security than actually classifying the mission, which drew Autobot hackers like circuit moths to open flames, though he debated how to log Cliffjumper’s accompaniment given that he was not a seeker. Finally he settled on “local scout” with a sub glyph that indicated that one of his trine might be interested in the nameless grounder romantically and he was giving them an opportunity for wooing. It was a common enough subterfuge that Soundwave would know what he meant if he ever actually read the entire mission proposal.
If this lead turned out to be true, even without the rest of it — Victory and Earth — it could be their salvation. He was excited, but also frightened again. The Grey Render did not provide aid unless there was a betrayal soon in the future. But what betrayal could be more personal, more devastating, than Jetfire’s?
He was afraid the answer to that might be Cliffjumper.
.
.
End