AIR COMMANDER STARSCREAM, EMPEROR OF DESTRUCTION (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
loltraitorlol) wrote2010-08-10 09:43 am
loltraitorlol) wrote2010-08-10 09:43 am
Entry tags:
I cried for what was not meant to be,
Disbelief.
Disbelief, and pain.
These are the last things he remembers. Time seemed to slow down as the shard of energon punctured his spark. His body burned from the inside out as his spark destabilized catastrophically; warning klaxons screamed in his audials and red text flashed across his vision.
warning: spark chamber breach warning warning sparkkkkkkkkkkkkk ch-ch-gkhn
And then still more anguish as his body died but his spark took a few moments to catch up, a feeling he could not even properly describe, as if all his sensors were electrified or dropped in acid or both at once, and then a feeling of being crushed as the very energy sink he intended for Waspinator's spark began to consume him.
He needed to scream.
He could not scream.
He was beyond comprehension. This was worse than what Galvatron did; this was prolonged, extended. It was what being flung down a black hole must feel like, the warping of time extending one's death and torment seemingly without end as one's body is torn apart atom by atom, quark by quark; as one is undone.
He needed to scream.
He could not scream.
Awareness was fragmented and yet continuity of consciousness remained. He could not remember but he experienced, time separated into its individual moments, an infinity of instants. Oblivion seemed to take eternity to come.
But even through that, even with the promise of oblivion, there was one, last coherent thought.
I'm not done yet!
He cannot be sure if he's awoken or fallen asleep.
He was laying face-down, but he could not feel any sort of surface. There was gravity, and he was not falling, but there was nothing tactile about the ground. There was no air, either, which instantly made him suspicious, nervous, angry. Seekers needed air like a penguin needs water; it is how they move. They could live without it, but not happily, no. Not comfortably.
Yet the lack of air made no sense, either. He could feel that his face was flesh; he knew he had lungs, and yet... no, not right either. He touched his shoulders and gingerly touched the yawning openings in them – a pair of intakes. He reached back and ran a finger down the angled lines of the tops of his wings. He could feel the nubs of engines in his feet, and he had no ears – just audial inputs, in his own distinctive style.
If he had organic parts, though, how was he alive in a place with no air?
The simple answer came as he looked down at the gaping hole in his chest.
Oh. No lungs after all, eh?
This thought seemed so absurd that he started giggling, which alternated with hysterical crying.
Where am I? What am I? This is unacceptable.
Why is it unacceptable?
He knew that this wasn't right. Yes, he'd start there. This was wrong. He wasn't... wasn't this, whatever this was. And he should be elsewhere. Should be...
He didn't notice the other at first, because it cast no shadow. It did tower over him though.
“Tch! You're awfully small.”
He whirled around, the shout already on his lips. “I'M NOT – what?”
He could only stare. He knew this other. The lines, the shapes were familiar.
“What – no! That's my body!”
“It's mine, you bolt. And yours. Assuming you are one of us.”
The question, who are us? died on his lips as he looked around. More and more of him seemed to be arriving, all in various states of disrepair. The one before him, for instance, had a massive hole through his chest, just like he did. Another was ashen grey and seemed to drop bits of ash; still another seemed to be some sort of zombie.
“What is this place?”
“I think the humans would call it purgatory,” said the first with a familiar smirk. “I think we'd call it the Pit.”
“It's not the pit,” whispered the ashen one. “I've seen the pit. It's not the pit. Pit's near. Not here. Can't walk, can't leave...”
“I think it seems like some sort of hideous overwrought metaphor,” he said. “And I want out!”
They all snorted. “You think we haven't tried? Believe us, it's not easy. And each new one of us who comes here tries.”
“There was the one,” whispered the ashen one. The first snorted derisively, and the subject was dropped.
“Point is, welcome. We're going to be here for a very long time.”
Slowly, he got to know the others. There wasn't much else to do, after all.
He got the impression that he did know them all. The first who spoke, it turned out, wasn't completely dead – very close, but he's actually in a state of limbo. The ash-grey one, however, was, and he was shaken greatly. Apparently, he touched some great font of knowledge and it burned through him, leaving him a shattered husk. Yet the zombie-like one told the same story.
They all had stories.
Eventually, a steel-grey one arrived in a cape and crown, screaming in agony, the color of a corpse. He started, because he recognized this. He remembered.
“But that's impossible!” he shouted. “I'd remember this specifically! I'd remember meeting me!”
The one in the crown swatted him away like a bug.
“Shut up! You're... you're nothing! A processor error. All of you are! I have to get back, I must have vengeance.”
He didn't remember meeting himself as a human, but he did remember being in this place now. The agony of waiting. The arguments. The three-dimensional chess games. The debates. He became bored and sullen, and sat in the corner with the one that had a hole in his head.
“Why can't we remember our names?” he asked of one that seemed nearly transparent, his body barely held together. He, too, was touched by some horrible power; he could see it in the other's eyes.
“It's punishment,” whispered the other. “Surely you know that.”
“But by who?” he shouted. “By what right does he punish us? By Primus? To what end?”
And yet another arrived. This one, though, had a plan. He whispered and spoke to them all, and together they pooled their unique knowledge to create it.
He had to laugh. It was basically a light bee. A device to give a wayward immortal spark a physical presence.
And he should have seen it coming, but the other took that device and rose, cackling, through the empty void, as they all tried to grab at him, to snatch his ankles.
“Frag you! Give it to us! We worked on that too!”
“Slag you glitches!” snapped the other as the device's dark energy generator let him float upwards and outwards.
“We should have known,” he snarled. “You're all idiots! Don't you know yourselves?!”
The fragmented, wispy one shrugged. “Why do you think we can't remember our names?”
“I'm leaving.”
The others stared at him. “You can't leave,” one said.
“I can! I am!” he snapped. “I'll find some way out of here! And I don't need anything fancy like that one idiot! I'll just... go!”
Another shook his head.
“You don't know what's out there. You won't like it. You'll wish you'd stayed...”
“Anything's better than you screechy lot!” he snapped, turning away. And then he walked.
He walked for what felt like eons. There was nothing but that blank emptiness, but the lack of air and the unchanging endlessness.
Eventually, he sat down. Eventually, he frowned.
He concentrated. He willed. And then...
And then all was aflame.
He burned. Everything burned. His vision swam with heat and he screamed with pain, yet he did not die. The air was distorted and filled with the sounds of screaming. Finally he could see, at last, that he wended his way between two rivers of molten steel at the bottom of a huge factory.
No, not a factory. A slaughterhouse.
Far above him, Cybertronians fell from a distant ceiling, caught by machinery and torn to pieces before being sent along conveyor belts and dumped into the fires that even then he stood between.
He couldn't help but laugh, despite the pain. He burned as he crawled through the furnace, his organic parts peeling and boiling and blistering but he laughed all the same.
“Absurd! This is the Pit? This?”
He pulled himself up on top of a burning hot grate as he watched still more bodies of other Cybertronians fall from the ceiling into the swill of molten steel below.
“Fire and death? This?! Foolishness! At least the Limbo was creative!” he shouts. “A fire and brimstone place? Please! It's trite! It's obscene! Don't make me laugh!”
He climbed still higher, firing his jets and flying to another part of the horrific machine, sure that at any moment a guardian would pluck him and hurl him down into his unmaking. But it was in his nature. He wouldn't shut up. Refused to stop. At last, he stood on top of the supports for the conveyor belt carrying the squirming, agonized masses (he recognizes some of them. Names still elude him, but he knows that triple-changer, knows that spider and the crab, too...), stood proud and burned and broken but tall.
“DO BETTER, CHAOSBRINGER! TO THINK THAT THIS IS THE BEST YOU CAN - “
At that moment something gripped him around his waist, nearly crushing him, something that returned him to the same burning agony as before in the pit. He was lifted into the air to face a burning face.
The eyes of that face narrowed, and he heard something like a sigh.
“There is a reason Starscreams are forbidden to enter both the Pit and the Well.”
With a single motion, he was hurled into the air, thrown so hard that he impacted the ceiling and left a series of holes until at last he was out in the dark cold of... somewhere. Elsewhere. And he kept falling...
Which of course meant that he did not hear the reason.
“They talk too much.”
He fell through the void. Or perhaps he rose. You can't fall without gravity, and after a while he broke free from its grip entirely. Of course, another part of him considered that the Pit is supposed to be at the bottom of a black hole, but that was just plain stupid.
He rose through the void. He fell through the void. Eventually, it lost all meaning.
He woke slowly, his optics focusing on his surroundings. At first, he had no context – trees, grass; steel, concrete, and glass beyond.
He could feel his body breathing, now. He really did have lungs, and the hole in his chest was gone.
On the other servo, he still had wings and engines and oddly placed intakes.
Steel, concrete, and glass. Trees. Grass. Hmm. And at those sizes, those proportions, everything was much too tall for...
He sat bolt upright. The City. The City, he was back! Why was he so relieved? This wasn't home; this wasn't Cybertron, and the towers were... wrong. Well, no, they were right, which meant to him they were wrong.
One way to check, yes...
He jumped into the air and flew, streaking up into the sky, and looked around. There was Times Square; there was Stark Tower, there was the Empire State Building. The top still held the remains of his platform, a grotesque steel and crystal blossom sprouting from the concrete.
But something was still wrong here. He couldn't place it. He flew across the city until he reached the roof of StarWave INC, landing and looking out at the horizon.
The sky was... it wasn't grey, it was white. Still, he could put that down to someone's power. It was...
Too quiet.
No cars on the roads. No pedestrians. And not his glorious vision, either – no robots striding through the streets like they'd once done in Iacon. Not even corpses. Nothing.
And then it occurred to him that he still could not remember his name.
“Frag you! What is this!?” he screamed. “Some kind of joke?”
This wasn't acceptable. He could still remember everything, but no names. The bucket-headed fool who he'd once respected and admired. The purple loyalist, or maybe he was a defector, either way clever and dangerous and yet a respected mentor now; the blue loyalist who was ultimately a loyalist and then
Someone else. Someone white and red who he couldn't remember either. Whose memory was just as important as his own memory.
There had to be some way out.
For the first hundred years, he flew. A hundred years is not particularly long to a Cybertronian. They are not patient, but they are long-lived, and on a grand scale a hundred years is not so very long. The distances between the stars are still longer – before Transwarp it was considered a short trip to take a few thousand years to reach the nearest star. A hundred is nothing.
He flew straight up into the sky until he could no longer see the ground, into endless white. It took him fifty years to do it. At last, he could see a speck in the distance, a tiny dot of something. Something different.
He put on speed. It took him another fifty years to reach it, and when he landed on the ground he realized that he was exactly where he'd left.
The next thousand were spent exploring his prison. It was fragmented and incomplete. Some areas – StarWave, his apartment, Dancitron – were complete, exquisite in their detail. Others were not. The insides of houses. Buildings he'd never been in. The area around outside seemed fine from the air, but when he landed on the ground everything was distorted. Foggy. Incomplete. Some of the areas in New Jersey were fine, and if he flew out to Lake Placid parts of Raven's house were complete, but then the upstairs rooms and other areas of the house were bare. Plain white walls. Nothing inside.
He took notes. He made maps. He found that some areas of other places he'd been had details. One coffee shop in Portland where he and -
And...
Once, he flew all the way around the world, or tried. He watched as everything faded to a truly generic green and white. Parts of the Portland area were fine, but they took on aspects from a time a very long time ago. Mount St. Hilary was intact, but the scale was all wrong. He'd never seen it as a human, and so he walked along it as a giant. It felt right and wrong at the same time, disorienting to have a tiny mountain next to a city that was scaled as though he was a human. The same was true of so many areas: England, the Middle East, the USSR, all absurd in their details and all dated to 1985, but scaled as though he was sixty feet tall; the rest as though he were merely 5'8”.
He flew on, over oceans that he knew would have nothing beneath them (well, save for the city of Sub-Atlantica, but he wouldn't bother with that) until he reached the shores of Antartica and paused.
He could go no further. Nothing physical stopped him, no; and Antarctica was there, full and complete, but a cold wind howled. It was the only place the temperature was appreciably different – everywhere else had been steadily twenty degrees Celsius. It isn't truly Antarctic cold, but it is chill. He took a step further, but then stopped as the wind grew colder and something stirred in his spark.
He was afraid.
Afraid of what?
What he might find. What he might not find. What he might gain. What he might lose. Something was there, or something wasn't there, and he couldn't...
With a cry, he took to the air and flew back north, back towards the City.
He lost track of time.
At first, he tried to read, but he discovered that though there was text in all the books it was in some mysterious language that he could not decipher. He spent nearly a thousand years taking notes and trying to resolve the words into something with meaning only to find that there was no meaning, no pattern, no rhyme, no reason.
Then he burned all the libraries, the bookstores, the warehouses and was done with it.
He painted and drew – at first inexpertly, but then more and more deftly as he drew out landscapes. Dreams. Memories. Cybertron blossomed on heavy paper; the spires of Iacon grew in sculptures in the park; in paintings he created Saturn rising over Europa's surface and the Pillars of Creation from the opposite angle that the Hubble had seen them.
He wrote. He raged. At first he did so by speaking but eventually even that lost its charm and he lapsed into a sullen silence, the scratching of pens or the ticking of keys the only break. He wrote theories about his confinement; he wrote scientific papers; he wrote philosophy; he wrote short fiction and long fiction and essays and story cycles and self-centered whining and bad poetry. His papers and his drawings multiplied, and the paper seemed endless, and eventually he'd written so much and drawn so much that paper outnumbered fallen leaves, outnumbered the blank newspapers that blew around the city streets. They piled like snow in drifts, buried cars and clogged drains. It never rained, though sometimes a cold wind blew, and things did not decay, so for a million years the papers gathered, so deep in places that you could reach the second stories of buildings.
He started to destroy buildings. It was slow work, chipping away at things, stealing (was it stealing if he was dreaming? If there was no one else in the dream?) bulldozers and wrecking balls, plowing through Central Park. He stole an F-16 from a nearby Air Force base, fully fueled, and managed to crash it into a small barn not five miles away. It made a spectacular fireball. He survived. Everything was back to normal within a short while.
That was what maddened him. His paintings and writings remained, but his larger acts of petulance and destruction simply restructured themselves. Nothing lasted.
“Why not home?!” he snarled. “Where is Cybertron!”
He spent a great deal of time trying to bend things. Trying to force this dream to his will. The best he did was to get paper to turn itself into little paper airplanes that followed him around in a cloud.
At least it was something in motion.
He began sitting and doing nothing for longer and longer periods of time – staring into space at walls. Staring at the floor. Staring. He'd sit on rooftops. He'd drift on the seas. He'd stare at the blank white sky. But he did not sleep.
He could not sleep.
Once, he fell through.
It was an edge in the ocean, a blank spot he couldn't quite look at, and he flew for it. It looked like the maw of a black hole, and instinct told him to stay away.
Curiosity overtook him.
He plunged in.
And he awoke to nothing.
No stars.
No light.
No feeling.
He wanted to scream, but there was no way to scream. He tried anyway, to no avail. In a few frighting instants he remembered his name and his calling and the name of what he'd lost and he couldn't scream louder and then finally he found the way back down and he fell through the blank white sky to leave an impact crater near the pond in Central Park.
He did not try to leave again.
Eventually, he came to a place he'd known of and seen a few times, a place which disconcerted him but which in his imagination had been completely intact.
A graveyard.
Not for humans. It was a graveyard for passenger planes, where they would be flown, landed for a last time, and stripped for parts. They lay across the field in various states of disrepair. He could only surmise that this place, at least, had been filled in by his imagination. Parts of the planes did not look like Earth ships, but Cybertronian.
Some of them even looked like they'd been alive.
He walked across the dry, dead grass, running his hands along rusted fuselages, just walking, until he came to a dilapidated 777, its wings bent and sagging, the engines already stripped off. He walked underneath it and came to its front wheel, before sitting himself down in front of it.
He did not get up.
[[If people want to tag into this and treat it as a log, go ahead, I suppose? Or just... idk. Man, this was long.]]
Disbelief, and pain.
These are the last things he remembers. Time seemed to slow down as the shard of energon punctured his spark. His body burned from the inside out as his spark destabilized catastrophically; warning klaxons screamed in his audials and red text flashed across his vision.
warning: spark chamber breach warning warning sparkkkkkkkkkkkkk ch-ch-gkhn
And then still more anguish as his body died but his spark took a few moments to catch up, a feeling he could not even properly describe, as if all his sensors were electrified or dropped in acid or both at once, and then a feeling of being crushed as the very energy sink he intended for Waspinator's spark began to consume him.
He needed to scream.
He could not scream.
He was beyond comprehension. This was worse than what Galvatron did; this was prolonged, extended. It was what being flung down a black hole must feel like, the warping of time extending one's death and torment seemingly without end as one's body is torn apart atom by atom, quark by quark; as one is undone.
He needed to scream.
He could not scream.
Awareness was fragmented and yet continuity of consciousness remained. He could not remember but he experienced, time separated into its individual moments, an infinity of instants. Oblivion seemed to take eternity to come.
But even through that, even with the promise of oblivion, there was one, last coherent thought.
I'm not done yet!
He cannot be sure if he's awoken or fallen asleep.
He was laying face-down, but he could not feel any sort of surface. There was gravity, and he was not falling, but there was nothing tactile about the ground. There was no air, either, which instantly made him suspicious, nervous, angry. Seekers needed air like a penguin needs water; it is how they move. They could live without it, but not happily, no. Not comfortably.
Yet the lack of air made no sense, either. He could feel that his face was flesh; he knew he had lungs, and yet... no, not right either. He touched his shoulders and gingerly touched the yawning openings in them – a pair of intakes. He reached back and ran a finger down the angled lines of the tops of his wings. He could feel the nubs of engines in his feet, and he had no ears – just audial inputs, in his own distinctive style.
If he had organic parts, though, how was he alive in a place with no air?
The simple answer came as he looked down at the gaping hole in his chest.
Oh. No lungs after all, eh?
This thought seemed so absurd that he started giggling, which alternated with hysterical crying.
Where am I? What am I? This is unacceptable.
Why is it unacceptable?
He knew that this wasn't right. Yes, he'd start there. This was wrong. He wasn't... wasn't this, whatever this was. And he should be elsewhere. Should be...
He didn't notice the other at first, because it cast no shadow. It did tower over him though.
“Tch! You're awfully small.”
He whirled around, the shout already on his lips. “I'M NOT – what?”
He could only stare. He knew this other. The lines, the shapes were familiar.
“What – no! That's my body!”
“It's mine, you bolt. And yours. Assuming you are one of us.”
The question, who are us? died on his lips as he looked around. More and more of him seemed to be arriving, all in various states of disrepair. The one before him, for instance, had a massive hole through his chest, just like he did. Another was ashen grey and seemed to drop bits of ash; still another seemed to be some sort of zombie.
“What is this place?”
“I think the humans would call it purgatory,” said the first with a familiar smirk. “I think we'd call it the Pit.”
“It's not the pit,” whispered the ashen one. “I've seen the pit. It's not the pit. Pit's near. Not here. Can't walk, can't leave...”
“I think it seems like some sort of hideous overwrought metaphor,” he said. “And I want out!”
They all snorted. “You think we haven't tried? Believe us, it's not easy. And each new one of us who comes here tries.”
“There was the one,” whispered the ashen one. The first snorted derisively, and the subject was dropped.
“Point is, welcome. We're going to be here for a very long time.”
Slowly, he got to know the others. There wasn't much else to do, after all.
He got the impression that he did know them all. The first who spoke, it turned out, wasn't completely dead – very close, but he's actually in a state of limbo. The ash-grey one, however, was, and he was shaken greatly. Apparently, he touched some great font of knowledge and it burned through him, leaving him a shattered husk. Yet the zombie-like one told the same story.
They all had stories.
Eventually, a steel-grey one arrived in a cape and crown, screaming in agony, the color of a corpse. He started, because he recognized this. He remembered.
“But that's impossible!” he shouted. “I'd remember this specifically! I'd remember meeting me!”
The one in the crown swatted him away like a bug.
“Shut up! You're... you're nothing! A processor error. All of you are! I have to get back, I must have vengeance.”
He didn't remember meeting himself as a human, but he did remember being in this place now. The agony of waiting. The arguments. The three-dimensional chess games. The debates. He became bored and sullen, and sat in the corner with the one that had a hole in his head.
“Why can't we remember our names?” he asked of one that seemed nearly transparent, his body barely held together. He, too, was touched by some horrible power; he could see it in the other's eyes.
“It's punishment,” whispered the other. “Surely you know that.”
“But by who?” he shouted. “By what right does he punish us? By Primus? To what end?”
And yet another arrived. This one, though, had a plan. He whispered and spoke to them all, and together they pooled their unique knowledge to create it.
He had to laugh. It was basically a light bee. A device to give a wayward immortal spark a physical presence.
And he should have seen it coming, but the other took that device and rose, cackling, through the empty void, as they all tried to grab at him, to snatch his ankles.
“Frag you! Give it to us! We worked on that too!”
“Slag you glitches!” snapped the other as the device's dark energy generator let him float upwards and outwards.
“We should have known,” he snarled. “You're all idiots! Don't you know yourselves?!”
The fragmented, wispy one shrugged. “Why do you think we can't remember our names?”
“I'm leaving.”
The others stared at him. “You can't leave,” one said.
“I can! I am!” he snapped. “I'll find some way out of here! And I don't need anything fancy like that one idiot! I'll just... go!”
Another shook his head.
“You don't know what's out there. You won't like it. You'll wish you'd stayed...”
“Anything's better than you screechy lot!” he snapped, turning away. And then he walked.
He walked for what felt like eons. There was nothing but that blank emptiness, but the lack of air and the unchanging endlessness.
Eventually, he sat down. Eventually, he frowned.
He concentrated. He willed. And then...
And then all was aflame.
He burned. Everything burned. His vision swam with heat and he screamed with pain, yet he did not die. The air was distorted and filled with the sounds of screaming. Finally he could see, at last, that he wended his way between two rivers of molten steel at the bottom of a huge factory.
No, not a factory. A slaughterhouse.
Far above him, Cybertronians fell from a distant ceiling, caught by machinery and torn to pieces before being sent along conveyor belts and dumped into the fires that even then he stood between.
He couldn't help but laugh, despite the pain. He burned as he crawled through the furnace, his organic parts peeling and boiling and blistering but he laughed all the same.
“Absurd! This is the Pit? This?”
He pulled himself up on top of a burning hot grate as he watched still more bodies of other Cybertronians fall from the ceiling into the swill of molten steel below.
“Fire and death? This?! Foolishness! At least the Limbo was creative!” he shouts. “A fire and brimstone place? Please! It's trite! It's obscene! Don't make me laugh!”
He climbed still higher, firing his jets and flying to another part of the horrific machine, sure that at any moment a guardian would pluck him and hurl him down into his unmaking. But it was in his nature. He wouldn't shut up. Refused to stop. At last, he stood on top of the supports for the conveyor belt carrying the squirming, agonized masses (he recognizes some of them. Names still elude him, but he knows that triple-changer, knows that spider and the crab, too...), stood proud and burned and broken but tall.
“DO BETTER, CHAOSBRINGER! TO THINK THAT THIS IS THE BEST YOU CAN - “
At that moment something gripped him around his waist, nearly crushing him, something that returned him to the same burning agony as before in the pit. He was lifted into the air to face a burning face.
The eyes of that face narrowed, and he heard something like a sigh.
“There is a reason Starscreams are forbidden to enter both the Pit and the Well.”
With a single motion, he was hurled into the air, thrown so hard that he impacted the ceiling and left a series of holes until at last he was out in the dark cold of... somewhere. Elsewhere. And he kept falling...
Which of course meant that he did not hear the reason.
“They talk too much.”
He fell through the void. Or perhaps he rose. You can't fall without gravity, and after a while he broke free from its grip entirely. Of course, another part of him considered that the Pit is supposed to be at the bottom of a black hole, but that was just plain stupid.
He rose through the void. He fell through the void. Eventually, it lost all meaning.
He woke slowly, his optics focusing on his surroundings. At first, he had no context – trees, grass; steel, concrete, and glass beyond.
He could feel his body breathing, now. He really did have lungs, and the hole in his chest was gone.
On the other servo, he still had wings and engines and oddly placed intakes.
Steel, concrete, and glass. Trees. Grass. Hmm. And at those sizes, those proportions, everything was much too tall for...
He sat bolt upright. The City. The City, he was back! Why was he so relieved? This wasn't home; this wasn't Cybertron, and the towers were... wrong. Well, no, they were right, which meant to him they were wrong.
One way to check, yes...
He jumped into the air and flew, streaking up into the sky, and looked around. There was Times Square; there was Stark Tower, there was the Empire State Building. The top still held the remains of his platform, a grotesque steel and crystal blossom sprouting from the concrete.
But something was still wrong here. He couldn't place it. He flew across the city until he reached the roof of StarWave INC, landing and looking out at the horizon.
The sky was... it wasn't grey, it was white. Still, he could put that down to someone's power. It was...
Too quiet.
No cars on the roads. No pedestrians. And not his glorious vision, either – no robots striding through the streets like they'd once done in Iacon. Not even corpses. Nothing.
And then it occurred to him that he still could not remember his name.
“Frag you! What is this!?” he screamed. “Some kind of joke?”
This wasn't acceptable. He could still remember everything, but no names. The bucket-headed fool who he'd once respected and admired. The purple loyalist, or maybe he was a defector, either way clever and dangerous and yet a respected mentor now; the blue loyalist who was ultimately a loyalist and then
Someone else. Someone white and red who he couldn't remember either. Whose memory was just as important as his own memory.
There had to be some way out.
For the first hundred years, he flew. A hundred years is not particularly long to a Cybertronian. They are not patient, but they are long-lived, and on a grand scale a hundred years is not so very long. The distances between the stars are still longer – before Transwarp it was considered a short trip to take a few thousand years to reach the nearest star. A hundred is nothing.
He flew straight up into the sky until he could no longer see the ground, into endless white. It took him fifty years to do it. At last, he could see a speck in the distance, a tiny dot of something. Something different.
He put on speed. It took him another fifty years to reach it, and when he landed on the ground he realized that he was exactly where he'd left.
The next thousand were spent exploring his prison. It was fragmented and incomplete. Some areas – StarWave, his apartment, Dancitron – were complete, exquisite in their detail. Others were not. The insides of houses. Buildings he'd never been in. The area around outside seemed fine from the air, but when he landed on the ground everything was distorted. Foggy. Incomplete. Some of the areas in New Jersey were fine, and if he flew out to Lake Placid parts of Raven's house were complete, but then the upstairs rooms and other areas of the house were bare. Plain white walls. Nothing inside.
He took notes. He made maps. He found that some areas of other places he'd been had details. One coffee shop in Portland where he and -
And...
Once, he flew all the way around the world, or tried. He watched as everything faded to a truly generic green and white. Parts of the Portland area were fine, but they took on aspects from a time a very long time ago. Mount St. Hilary was intact, but the scale was all wrong. He'd never seen it as a human, and so he walked along it as a giant. It felt right and wrong at the same time, disorienting to have a tiny mountain next to a city that was scaled as though he was a human. The same was true of so many areas: England, the Middle East, the USSR, all absurd in their details and all dated to 1985, but scaled as though he was sixty feet tall; the rest as though he were merely 5'8”.
He flew on, over oceans that he knew would have nothing beneath them (well, save for the city of Sub-Atlantica, but he wouldn't bother with that) until he reached the shores of Antartica and paused.
He could go no further. Nothing physical stopped him, no; and Antarctica was there, full and complete, but a cold wind howled. It was the only place the temperature was appreciably different – everywhere else had been steadily twenty degrees Celsius. It isn't truly Antarctic cold, but it is chill. He took a step further, but then stopped as the wind grew colder and something stirred in his spark.
He was afraid.
Afraid of what?
What he might find. What he might not find. What he might gain. What he might lose. Something was there, or something wasn't there, and he couldn't...
With a cry, he took to the air and flew back north, back towards the City.
He lost track of time.
At first, he tried to read, but he discovered that though there was text in all the books it was in some mysterious language that he could not decipher. He spent nearly a thousand years taking notes and trying to resolve the words into something with meaning only to find that there was no meaning, no pattern, no rhyme, no reason.
Then he burned all the libraries, the bookstores, the warehouses and was done with it.
He painted and drew – at first inexpertly, but then more and more deftly as he drew out landscapes. Dreams. Memories. Cybertron blossomed on heavy paper; the spires of Iacon grew in sculptures in the park; in paintings he created Saturn rising over Europa's surface and the Pillars of Creation from the opposite angle that the Hubble had seen them.
He wrote. He raged. At first he did so by speaking but eventually even that lost its charm and he lapsed into a sullen silence, the scratching of pens or the ticking of keys the only break. He wrote theories about his confinement; he wrote scientific papers; he wrote philosophy; he wrote short fiction and long fiction and essays and story cycles and self-centered whining and bad poetry. His papers and his drawings multiplied, and the paper seemed endless, and eventually he'd written so much and drawn so much that paper outnumbered fallen leaves, outnumbered the blank newspapers that blew around the city streets. They piled like snow in drifts, buried cars and clogged drains. It never rained, though sometimes a cold wind blew, and things did not decay, so for a million years the papers gathered, so deep in places that you could reach the second stories of buildings.
He started to destroy buildings. It was slow work, chipping away at things, stealing (was it stealing if he was dreaming? If there was no one else in the dream?) bulldozers and wrecking balls, plowing through Central Park. He stole an F-16 from a nearby Air Force base, fully fueled, and managed to crash it into a small barn not five miles away. It made a spectacular fireball. He survived. Everything was back to normal within a short while.
That was what maddened him. His paintings and writings remained, but his larger acts of petulance and destruction simply restructured themselves. Nothing lasted.
“Why not home?!” he snarled. “Where is Cybertron!”
He spent a great deal of time trying to bend things. Trying to force this dream to his will. The best he did was to get paper to turn itself into little paper airplanes that followed him around in a cloud.
At least it was something in motion.
He began sitting and doing nothing for longer and longer periods of time – staring into space at walls. Staring at the floor. Staring. He'd sit on rooftops. He'd drift on the seas. He'd stare at the blank white sky. But he did not sleep.
He could not sleep.
Once, he fell through.
It was an edge in the ocean, a blank spot he couldn't quite look at, and he flew for it. It looked like the maw of a black hole, and instinct told him to stay away.
Curiosity overtook him.
He plunged in.
And he awoke to nothing.
No stars.
No light.
No feeling.
He wanted to scream, but there was no way to scream. He tried anyway, to no avail. In a few frighting instants he remembered his name and his calling and the name of what he'd lost and he couldn't scream louder and then finally he found the way back down and he fell through the blank white sky to leave an impact crater near the pond in Central Park.
He did not try to leave again.
Eventually, he came to a place he'd known of and seen a few times, a place which disconcerted him but which in his imagination had been completely intact.
A graveyard.
Not for humans. It was a graveyard for passenger planes, where they would be flown, landed for a last time, and stripped for parts. They lay across the field in various states of disrepair. He could only surmise that this place, at least, had been filled in by his imagination. Parts of the planes did not look like Earth ships, but Cybertronian.
Some of them even looked like they'd been alive.
He walked across the dry, dead grass, running his hands along rusted fuselages, just walking, until he came to a dilapidated 777, its wings bent and sagging, the engines already stripped off. He walked underneath it and came to its front wheel, before sitting himself down in front of it.
He did not get up.
[[If people want to tag into this and treat it as a log, go ahead, I suppose? Or just... idk. Man, this was long.]]
no subject
Time...passed.
It refused to stop, or slow, or succumb to any constant but its own, weaving in and out of a reality that could not be a reality.
Grass grew.
Grass died.
Grass slid past human shoes as he walked, bent, crunched, and endured even after he had moved on. And he...barely recognized the figure growing out of the tangled mess of green until his feet came to rest before it.
He stopped.
In front of him was metal, and flesh, and colors, and wings.
Behind him was grass, and fields, and broken runways.
He looked down.
"Who....are you?"
Jetfire is always good
White...
He knows this face and he doesn't. And that makes his spark twist up inside him. The pain is clear on his face - he's still waking up, he has no chance to hide it.
He doesn't speak at first, he simply gapes and he wrestles with the not-knowing as he tries to move. He feels... decayed. Rusted. Misused, out of date. He tries to speak, and at first he can't. He coughs, a harsh sound that shakes his whole body, and tries again. The sound is like a rusted hinge, a grating screech from disuse.
"I don't remember."
It hurts him to admit this. It hurts him every time he remembers that he doesn't remember. He is himself, or he should be. Why isn't he here?
So many questions. He's almost entirely certain this is his dream. Or a dream. Or a between place. Why now, after more than a million years of being alone, why here?
He closes his eyes and hangs his head.
He will pretend he did not hear that, so he does not have to pretend to not blush.
And he's familiar with the concept. Familiar, enough, to recognize it when he sees it on the barely-recognizable half-mech before him. Familiar enough to crouch...to reach out, and touch the odd texture of Starscream's face.
The answer seems to satisfy him, though, even if his own eyes well up briefly with sadness, and he just nods.
It's all that he can do.
"They...are...all broken, here."
He's looking up, now, to the nose of the plane that's dwarfing the sky, to the rust eating away at the bolts and edges that constantly ebbed and flowed but never seemed to make its way through. Perpetual death, unending.
And one lost spark--surrendered but unyielding.
Conflict.
Balance.
Despair.
"...even you."
He shook his head, letting those blue eyes fall back down to red ones.
"But I remember."
"Some things."
Cities, skies, filled with jets and empty. Worlds like this one. Worlds not like this one.
Bright red, and white, and blue.
His hand came to rest on Starscream's cheek, and stayed there, and he rested on his knees at last.
Re: He will pretend he did not hear that, so he does not have to pretend to not blush.
When was the last time he cried? And how simple an action. He doesn't remember the first time, but he does remember not understanding what his body was doing at the time, and being enraged. His optics were leaking, slaggit, and he was in distress and this was not the time for this sort of thing to be happening.
But here and now, it came somehow as a relief.
"Don't leave again," he says. "Not again, please."
Ice. Ice, and calling. Calling, calling; and the darker changes afterward. Standing alone in the halls of Crystal City and knowing. And then everything changing.
There are things he wants to remember. That... isn't one of them. Or, he's not sure, now. It's part of who he is.
And yet with this one here, this pale skyship, he's... not sure what he wants to remember, anymore. And what he wants to forget.
For now he clings to that hand, and he asks.
"What do you remember?"
[*pretends this is G1 Skyfire. Uh. Even though I call him Jetfire.*]
Something was wrong with Starscream--some product of this construct and these bodies, of the reality within the surreality...and he did not know what to do. It was discordant. It was wrong.
And so he wiped away the tears as they came, unaware as he did so of how his own eyes glossed over in the unfairness of it all.
It was...not...supposed to be this way.
But just remembering himself here was hard. Just keeping aware that this was not how the world was...was hard. It did not have to be fair--it just had to be logical, and memory was logical...
But memory was fleeting, and here there were winds that whipped through even the mind.
Even so.
Starscream should not cry.
"I came here for you. I will not leave. Not without you."
His hand moves from the cheek, both of them wrapping under the grass around the other's arms and tugging, gently, until Starscream was resting in his lap. He didn't have to tug hard--the jet still felt light, to him.
He still felt smaller.
"I remember the University. I remember countless hours of pouring over galactic charts, arguing the best routes to take, the best planets for collecting samples...the utter cold of deep space and years of drifting, surrounded by the beauty of the stars. I remember the ice...and I remember who woke me from it, in the end..."
His own eyes closed, his hand finding rest on top of Starscream's hand.
"I remember how you changed."
[*makes this some kind of hybrid G1 continuity whatever*]
He rested, laying there.
"I did. I... remember."
Ice, and thawing ice, and screaming at - who? Megatron. He remembers that name. He remembers hate. and wanting. And then betrayal and despair. And he remembers.
And I hurt you because I did not know better, because I thought you'd betrayed me and I was so wrapped up in me, all the time me and in my goal. So single minded I pursued it; this glorious vision of Cybertron with thousands worshipping at my feet...
"I forgot you."
I forgot me. What I was. Ambitious, but not... not like that. I'm sorry. Can't say it, but I am. won't admit it to myself, but I am.
"I can't change back."
There's too much broken. And too much hate. He lays there, his eyes closed, but at least he is not alone. He smiles, because here and now, he feels... not lost. Comfortable.
But then again...
Cannot change my nature. Have to fight. Have to go. Have to keep going. But perhaps.
He opens his eyes again. Right now, they are red, and shine like dying suns.
"Tell me your name."