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In the end, it’s Starscream who ends up as the only one that’s left.
Thundercracker and Skywarp had warned him to stay far away from the politics of Cybertron. That it would corrupt him, ruin him, make him sad and lonely.
Starscream knows he should have listened to what they had to say. They were trine after all. They would know best. Connected and bonded to his very own spark, it would be foolish to assume they didn’t know best.
In the end, Starscream had gotten himself involved anyway. And just as they had said, it corrupted him. Starscream began to think differently about the people. The science he loved, and worked on to save Cybertron, no longer served its purpose.
It started with a fusion cannon. A weapon, deadly and lethal to any bot that happens to stumble into its line of fire. He hadn’t exactly been told who would receive it, and he had made it anyway. A sense of responsibility is what urged him on to do it. Responsible for what? He didn’t know.
A weapon that ended up becoming a part of Megatron’s frame. A reformat, but the parts aren’t exactly Cybertronian alloy. They are simple metals, strong and reinforced, but just neutral enough to make sure that rejection wouldn’t be a matter of worry.
Starscream still calibrates this weapon sometimes, working through it with precision while kneeling at his master’s pedes. The first step he had ever taken towards violence was walking down the road with him.
Perhaps it had been the fusion cannon that had inspired Megatron to give Shockwave’s ideas permission. Because his own, well thought-out reformatting had been done with precision and care, he allowed for Starscream to go through them too.
If only the reformats of his own frame had been just as thought-out and careful.
In the end, it has to be Starscream to carry this burden in the shape of his own body. His frame is a bit more slender now, since they couldn't salvage all parts of his trinemates’ frames. Assembled like a puzzle, he knows that the parts don’t quite fit. Thundercracker and Skywarp live with him— they are a part of him, just like they always were, but the heavy tug on his spark, the dead weight in his soul and the shattered connection of their bond reminds him that they are long gone.
He's heard of it before. Dying from scattered bonds. When a part of the spark bond dies, the other follows not soon after. He feels a bit like this.
Realistically, Starscream knows that this bit of spark pain couldn’t have killed him back then. It can’t kill him now, but every time he is reminded that parts of his original frame are lying somewhere in a waste bin, or probably already have been recycled into other parts, it just makes him ache a bit more.
Shockwave is going on about another reformat. Some part he was hesitant to install once but is now sure would result in a successful increase of speed. Something about Thundercracker’s thrusters, the way it would boost his performance, make Lord Megatron more powerful.
In the end, he doesn’t think he cares.
There is nothing left of him anyway. The once colourful shades of purple and blue have greyed out with time and death. Whatever colour remains on his frame isn’t real. Brilliant reds and cobalt blues have been stripped away, and he is left with whatever remains.
If he thinks about what remains, he can’t think of anything. Perhaps the structure of his face, but even that has changed with grief and age. They say grief turns a mech ugly, and it really does.
It must have started with Skyfire. After his disappearance, Skywarp had joked that his face had turned into a mess because of all his bad emotions. When Skywarp died, Thundercracker said he didn’t look good, and that he should probably rest, not knowing he looked equally as bad. When they delivered him the remains of Thundercracker’s frame, his face must have dripped off in shame and tears.
In the end, there must be nothing left of him after all. Ulchtar died when Skyfire did. Starscream had never been alive in the first place.