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Starscream had learned the acoustics of his own silence.
The council chamber, once a theater of speeches and schemed alliances, had been reduced, in practice, to a room that reflected him back at impossible angles. Light from the shattered skylight slashed across the marble-floor like a blade; the gilded throne he’d claimed sat cold and disproportionate behind him. He should have felt power. Oftentimes he felt like a fraud.
Not that he’d admit that to anyone though.
He paced with careful, measured steps, the hydraulic hiss of his joints louder than the applause that used to follow his promises. Ruling Cybertron had taught him a thousand small cruelties: how to bend laws, how to read fear in servo-tones, how to turn loyalty into leverage. It had not taught him how to be anyone who could stand inside his own face.
“You will never be free,” Megatron’s words had sounded, then and in memory, not as prophecy but as a rhythm he could not stop stepping to. Not that Megatron ever explicitly said that, but he had always made sure to beat that truth into his plating and into the soft places beneath it. Starscream had changed the chrome, painted new sigils, rearranged the angles of his jaw until the reflections pleased strangers. He had even convinced several of his ministers and a parade of diplomats that he was decisive now. That veneer had weight. It also had edges that cut.
Windblade’s visits were the quietest kind of accusation: the way she would study him as if cataloguing which pieces still belonged to him and which were stolen from his past selves. She asked fewer questions than he deserved. Her silence had the firmness of a commander who could see the map of his wreckage and chose not to redraw it for him.
Wheeljack’s laugh, brittle and careless, kept arriving uninvited. The memory of their reunion, clinging to his processor and more importantly, his words.
“You’re a red guy trying to talk like Starscream.”
He brushed it off then, showing off his new body, the shiny red plating and his distinguished new appearance. That comment should’ve been nothing; but the idea of him being unrecognizable? Even to Wheeljack? It lodged, like a loose circuit. Something about being reduced to a color and a dialect gnawed at him. What remained of Starscream if you stripped the paint away?
The mirror was an indulgence he’d allowed himself. It sat in the private antechamber he used when he needed to practice speeches that had to sound inevitable. Today the glass did not lie or flatter; it only returned the constellation of scars and modifications: new plating over old bruises, a jawline redraw that still trembled with the memory of a fist. His reflection stared with familiar insolence, the same sly curl of an optic, the same sharp angles meant to intimidate and somehow, once again, he could not trust it.
He pressed his fingertips to a seam along his shoulder plating because his hands needed a task. Under his touch memory unfurled; his metal getting dent, scratched beyond recognition, the directive tones that taught obedience. Each recollection was a small theft, proof that escape had not been clean. He could not blame Megatron for everything; he had been faithful at being betrayed, expert at self-sabotage. Every accomplishment tasted like borrowed authority if he imagined the ghost of the tyrant smirking from the edge of it.
Starscream inhaled; the breath a small, mechanical whine, and for the first time in days the mirth that usually lubricated his lines failed to surface. The room felt too big for one body and too small for the particular kind of loneliness he harbored: a pride that would not forgive weakness, and a fear that clung to the bones of his chassis like rust.
He caught himself in the mirror, really looked. There was a question there that had nothing to do with success or conquest. It was quieter and more dangerous: who are you when no one else is watching you hold it together?
Hands trembled, not from fear of the act but from the conviction that if he dismantled enough of himself, he might at last find a shape that fit. The seam under his wing plate glinted like an invitation. He had trimmed wings for speeches and painted them for parades; he had never, until this hour, considered what it might mean to be unable to fly even when the skies were clear.
Starscream’s fingers found the lip of the plating. The metal was cool against his touch. The hall’s silence leaned close, and in it the memory of Wheeljack’s words sounded absurd and inevitable both — the reductive line that left him flayed, not by enemies, but by his own private verdict.
He chose then, with the deliberate cruelty of someone practiced at verdicts, to stop pretending a mirror could make him whole.
The first tear wasn’t clean.
Metal does not peel like fabric; it screams, protesting with every fraction of a joint wrenched beyond its tolerance. His claws scraped along the seam, desperate, furious. The plating gave way reluctantly, then jaggedly, shrieking through the chamber as though his body itself was outraged at the indignity.
“Pathetic,” Starscream spat at his reflection as his claws dug into the seam of his shoulder plate. The word was for himself, not the mirror. “Can’t even do this right, can you?”
Starscream ground his denta together until static filled his mouth. He should have stopped there. But once a fracture begins, it begs to be completed. The pain was bright and punishing, sharp enough to feel almost righteous. The plating resisted, shrieking with every pull, until at last it ripped jaggedly from his frame. He staggered, venting in harsh, uneven bursts. The strip of red fell to the floor with a clang that rang louder than any applause he had ever earned.
The mirror mocked him with each motion: an actor in his own ruin. His optics flickered, his vents stuttered, but he did not stop. Every piece of red plating that clattered to the ground was supposed to be an answer, a shedding of something foreign. Yet underneath it, the pale inner alloys whispered that he had not gone far enough.
“Never free,” Megatron’s voice looped.
He slammed his servos against the frame of the mirror, cracking it into a web of distorted reflections. Some of them sneering, some pleading, none of them authentic. Dozens of them, all with that same mocking curl of lip. The broken glass made him infinite and meaningless all at once.
“You think this makes you strong?” he snarled at the shards. “Ruler of Cybertron—hah! You’re a joke! A coward dressing himself up in a tyrant’s cast-offs.”
The glass did not answer, but Megatron’s ghost did. You will never be free.
“Shut up!” he screamed, slamming a fist against the mirror’s frame. More cracks spread, splintering his face into smaller and smaller lies. “You’re gone, you slagging monster. GONE! And I—” His voice faltered, dropped to a growl. “And I’m worse. I’m worse because I’m still here.”
He clawed at another seam, peeling plating from his arm, chest, throat. Each piece fell like shed skin, but no liberation followed. Only more of himself staring back, raw and exposed, humming with pain.
“You wanted power, didn’t you? You got it! And what now?” His own voice rose and fell in a cruel mockery of speeches past. “You can’t lead, you can’t protect, you can’t even fly without chains rattling at your back.”
His optics locked onto the silhouette of his wings reflected in the fractured glass. The proud lines that once defined him now looked like shackles welded into place. His claws reached the base of his wings and there was no hesitation. Those proud spires had been his curse, his silhouette recognizable at a distance, his cage strapped to his back. They were supposed to mean freedom, flight, escape. Supposed to.
Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.
“They’ll never see anything else,” he hissed, gripping the root of the nearest wing. “Not the senate, not Windblade, not Wheeljack, NOBODY!” His claws sank deeper.
He braced, hissed through vents that stuttered like laughter strangled into sobs, and tore.
The joint gave with a thunderclap crack. Pain flared down his spinal strut, white and suffocating, the kind of agony that should have ended him. He screamed with it, pain twisting into something half triumphant, half hysterical. The wing clattered to the ground, a grotesque echo of his crumbling ego. He stared at it, horrified, transfixed.
“Is this what you wanted?” he shouted at the ghost of Megatron, at the chorus of sneering reflections, at the aching void of his own chest. “Look at me! LOOK!”
The second wing followed. This time he collapsed with it, knees striking the floor hard enough to rattle the scattered plating. His vents dragged in shallow, ragged gasps as the second ruin joined the first. The floor around him was scattered with shards of plating, pieces of himself he had dismantled in search of truth.
“Free,” he whispered, the word warped with static. “I’m free now. Free.”
But even as he said it, the laugh caught in his throat, bitter and strangled. For a moment, he thought the silence might congratulate him. That he had proven, in some small way, that he was not Megatron’s soldier, not the senate’s pawn, not Windblade’s case study. Just himself.
Alas, Starscream felt no closer to freedom. Only the ache of an empty sky he would never reach again.
He stayed on his knees as if the floor itself held him there by force. Around him, the chamber looked less like a throne room and more like the inside of a body he had dismantled, scattered plating like fallen scales, springs and servos glinting where light caught them, a faint scent of burnt circuitry and coolant that clung to the air. He did not move to collect anything. Movement felt like admitting the scene needed fixing, and he did not deserve fixes.
When he finally lifted his optics to the mirror, it was as if he were looking at a stranger whose face had been rearranged to mock him. The red paint that had once announced him from a distance was flaking, dulled by the violence of his own hands. Edges of plating were raw where he’d torn them away; the seams bled a dark, viscous lubricant that steamed in the chill of the room. His faceplate was torn in places, inner alloys showing like bone under worn metal. Small sparks winked where wiring was nicked, making constellations on the exposed struts of his neck.
One optic was dimmer than the other, a crescent of shadow running through the lens that made his face look permanently skeptical, permanently tired. Panels along his torso hung on by a thread of braided filaments; the mechanisms beneath clicked and groaned when he breathed, sounds that belonged on a battlefield, not in a private collapse. His wings lay like amputated flags behind him, each feathered vane a cruel reminder of motion he no longer trusted.
He talked aloud to the reflection, at first in a low, bitter cadence, then louder as the dam inside him broke.
“Look at you,” he said. The voice he used for crowds, bright, barbed, dangerous, had split into ragged pieces. “This is what you are. Hollow speeches, hollow promises. You carved yourself into a throne and you’re sitting on a chair of glass.” He spat the words like old oil.
He dragged a finger across the battered edge of his cheek plate. Sparks cracked where contact met the nicked wiring. He flinched from the tiny shock and cursed, a raw, animal sound that had little of the performative venom he wore in council chambers. “You always were good at bows and theatrics,” he sneered at himself. “But you can’t act your way out of being worthless.”
For a long time he did not speak. The room filled with his own breathing, mechanical, imperfect; a metronome counting down the fissures in him.
“You were made to obey,” he told the mirror, and the statement was less an accusation than an acceptance. “You were taught to believe the cage was inevitable. You learned to build new ones for yourself.” He laughed, a sound that had the brittle quality of old glass. “I chose this. I loved the taste of it.”
The confession itself felt like a punishment. He wrapped his arms around the stumps where his wings had been in a mimicry of protection and felt nothing but open, raw surfaces that cooled too quickly in the air. There was no warmth there, only the echo of motion that would not be.
“Maybe that’s the worst part,” he whispered. “It wasn’t just him. I kept choosing this.” The words scraped; they were cleaner than the flames of rhetoric he once used, quieter but sharper.
He studied the dim optic, searching for some core he could still trust. For a moment a childish image rose up – of a younger Starscream, all cleverness and swagger, sure that cunning could replace courage. He had been half-right. Cunning had given him status. It had not, however, given him safety from himself.
A tear, if it could be called that, for metal does not shed tears as organics do, trickled from the corner of his lesser optic. It steamed when it hit the floor, hissing softly, and he reached down to wipe it away with fingers that smelled faintly of burnt ozone. He did not reach for the parts at his feet. Sometimes the most honest work was not to rebuild. Sometimes it was only to name the ruin. The confession sat heavy in the air, and for a cracked second there was no rebuttal from ghosts, no roaring from the tyrant. Only the small, real sound of his breathing and the pulse of the exposed hydraulics.
“Windblade would…what would Windblade do?” he wondered aloud, hearing the question as both challenge and apology. He saw her face; composed, judgment withheld and felt nothing short of shame.
His voice dropped to something near a prayer. “I can’t lead if I can’t hold myself together,” he said. “And I don’t know how to not be everything I fear.” When at last he sank forward, forehead resting against the cold floor, the chamber swallowed the sound of his surrender. It was not dramatic; there was no music, no grand collapse that would make legends later. He did not try to promise himself anything. Promises required faith he no longer possessed. He only let the words come out like a tide, low and honest.
“I am tired,” he said, the confession hovered, simple and terrible.
And then, beneath the shame and the accusation and the brittle humor that refused to die, there was something that might be called a beginning: not a fix, not a salvation, but a small recognition that to name the wound was the first way to see where it bled. He did not know if recognition would be enough. He had never been very good at endings that led to anything other than more endings.
For now, he knelt, and he watched his reflection, and he let the silence hold him, not as a threat, but as the only honest company he thought he deserved.