or what had to be the zillionth time, a huge wave reared up and towered menacingly over me, and for the zillionth time I wondered what the hell I thought I was doing out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But then the wave crested, and I wasn’t left with a whole lot of time to ponder the latter question while it was threatening to crush and/or drown me and my cargo. It took quite a bit of effort to keep myself upright while at the same time keeping my magnetic hold on the large trailer that was tagging along behind me, pulling me down with its unwieldy weight. All I could say was that it was a damned good thing that magnetic tractor beams were waterproof or else the waves would have broken my hold on the thing long time ago, and then this whole voyage of the damned would have been for nothing…and then I would have been really pissed off. And besides that…Well, I was just amazed that I’d made it this far without sinking to the bottom of the ocean faster than the Titanic had sunk after making first contact with an iceberg.
Of course, Skyfire had to pick the middle of cyclone season to ask this bizarre favor that he’d asked of me. He just had to. Skyfire needed someone to drive clear across the Pacific Ocean to bring him a bunch of stuff, so naturally he’d wait until cyclone season in the South Pacific to do the asking… And of course he’d ask me to be the one to do a bit of impromptu water-skiing. I was such a good sport and all, always willing to do anything for a laugh.
Yeah, right.
So there I was, out in the middle of a Primus-forsaken ocean in the middle of the freakin’ cyclone season. It sucked. In particular, the weather I’d encountered during this particular trans-Pacific journey sucked. Mind you, I tend to like Earth and its vast differences – climatological and otherwise – from Cybertron, but this trip was seriously making me start to rethink that whole pro-Earth opinion of mine… Sure, Cybertron was…well, kinda creepy and mostly-dead and seriously banged-up and stuff, but at least it didn’t have cyclones…and homicidal palm trees…and crabs…and all the other things that had so far made this trip of mine a true waking nightmare.
Well, OK, so the first day and night of the trip had been just peachy-keen, featuring clear blue skies, warm, pleasant tropical breezes, and a placid blue ocean that wasn’t doing its damnedest to kill me. Of course, I realized now that that calm and peace should have been a blaring warning to me, lulling me into a false sense of security. You’re familiar with the phrase “the calm before the storm,” yes? Well, so am I. That is, I’m intimately familiar with it now, thank you very much, having experienced the phenomenon first-hand. Because after a quite pleasant day and a half of relatively peaceful and even enjoyable travel, there was last night…
Like I said, Skyfire had to pick cyclone season to ask this little favor of me. And I had needed a recharge last night, after about thirty-six straight hours of difficult ocean-surface travel. I had hoped to make the trip out to Indonesia in a single non-stop stretch of driving…or surfing…or whatever you want to call it. But…Well, no such luck, as Optimus Prime might say. Last night, the evening of my second day out, I’d been exhausted, on the brink of energon-depleted shutdown, and I knew that I could go no farther until I recharged a bit. Fortunately – or so I’d thought, at least – I’d happened upon a nice little atoll in the middle of literally nowhere. It looked like the quintessential little “shipwreck” island, complete with warm white sand, blue-green water, sparse, scrubby vegetation, and a single little coconut tree poking up almost exactly in the middle of it. Charming, I’d thought. It was a great, atmospheric place to spend the night, I’d thought.
As it turned out, “atmospheric” was quite an apt description, though not in the way I might have hoped. After I’d devoured one of the half-dozen cubes of energon I’d brought with me, I’d laid there on the beach, contentedly full and safely out of reach of the ocean waves that lapped gently against the shoreline. I was just staring up at the sky as it slowly darkened above me and the stars slowly began to appear. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the sky wasn’t darkening only because night was approaching. No, it was darkening because the mother of all cyclones was approaching. And sure enough, slowly, over the course of the next half-hour or so, the wind picked up, going from a gentle, pleasant tropical breeze to an angry and decidedly unpleasant gale in the space of maybe a half-hour, and eventually it blew with the force of an out-of-control freight train. Thunder rumbled and lightning struck so close-by that it seemed to be touching down mere inches from my body. And then the rain started, eventually coming down in what were virtually solid – and cold – sheets. And then a coconut bonked me on the head…and then the entire tree fell on top of me, easily broken in half by the wind…and then…
Oh, then there were my “visitors,” the little creeps…
But, I survived the night. I don’t know how I managed to survive it without getting blown entirely off the island, but I did it somehow. In the end, I even managed to get in about an hour of recharge, once the storm passed after about ten hours of sheer hell. But I had not woken up from that blessed bit of recharge in the best of moods. For one thing, I wasn’t fully recharged after only an hour of “sleep,” despite the energon I’d consumed. For another thing, my head was still aching where the coconut had bonked me. The damn thing must have been moving as quickly as it would have moved if it had been shot from Megatron’s fusion cannon or something. For another thing, there was a huge dent in the roof of my car mode because the whole palm tree had fallen right across my back, pinning me to the sand and nicely crunching the car roof that lived on my back when it wasn’t busy being a car roof. So Ratchet was therefore going to murder me when I got home. Joy. For another thing, my little “visitors” had decided to take up residence in my armor joints, wedging themselves into them and eventually inside of my body, and so whenever I moved now, I crushed one of their smelly little crustacean bodies into an even smellier pulp. For yet another thing, Prowl had been frantically screaming at me over the comm when I woke up – In fact, his yelling was the only reason that I’d woken up in the first place – because, due to the storm, I’d missed more than a few of our agreed-upon every-other-hourly check-ins. He’d been alternately cursing at me and illogically promising me that if I was dead he was going to kill me…all the while simultaneously praying to any available deity that I was still alive.
Well, OK, so the Prowl part was so cute that it almost made me melt into a big, quivering blob of goo right there on the beach, but the rest…? The rest was just completely and utterly… “annoying,” was much too light of a word, but it gets the point across, I guess. Annoying or not, though, I still had a job to do, no matter how grouchy I was about having to do it. So, after contacting Prowl and reassuring him that I was still alive and then vowing to him that I was going to murder Skyfire in the slowest and most painful way possible when I finally saw him, I started out on my “merry” way again.
And so now there I was, somewhere in the middle of the Primus-forsaken South Pacific, with strains of the song Bali’hai floating annoyingly through my mind every now and then and with a lingering stench of dead crab wafting after me, probably attracting large herds or schools or whatever-you-call-them of sharks. Nevertheless, I was steadily closing in – or so I hoped, at least – on the little uninhabited island that Skyfire had chosen to call home in the wake of his leaving Autobot Headquarters.
And I was still amazed that I was there, that I was doing what I was doing. It seemed kind of…surreal to me. Sure, I’d told Skyfire when he’d left Autobot Headquarters that if he needed anything at all to just give me a yell. I had even given him my private comm frequency so that he could do just that, without having to go through any official Autobot channels. But I hadn’t really expected him to use it. It was just one of those offers you make to someone who’s going away, you know? But I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised that he’d called. I mean, this was Skyfire that we were talking about here, and lately that boy had become the King of Unexpected.
So Skyfire had called. And he’d informed me that he needed jet parts – Parts for an F-15 jet fighter, specifically. He’d recited to me a long and very bizarre shopping list, and then he’d wondered if there was any way that I could possibly get my hands on all the items on his list and somehow bring them to him in Indonesia, of all the Primus-forsaken places he could have picked, as soon as I possibly could. My initial reaction? A flippant, “Sure, let me just dash on down to AutoZone and see what I can dig up for ya!” But then… Then I’d realized that Skyfire was utterly serious…
And I’m a pretty smart guy, you know. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out who Skyfire needed those parts for. Starscream, of course. The very same guy that, just last week, I’d just spent a nice chunk of my time fighting with on Titan. And he’d seemed perfectly hale and hearty at the time, or at least healthy enough that he was perfectly willing and able to rip my head off. So I couldn’t fathom why on Earth Skyfire would need all of the stuff that I was toting along in the converted U-Haul trailer behind me. I mean, eight pairs of wings? What the hell?
And it had taken me a few days to decide to help Skyfire, too. To help Skyfire in this case was to help Starscream, and my poor little brain just doesn’t generally go there. In fact, I still wasn’t deliriously happy about the prospect of indirectly helping Starscream. My experiences on Titan were still painfully fresh in my mind. I could still hear Starscream’s screechy, mocking voice in my head, even. But in the end, I convinced myself that maybe if I did as Skyfire wished, he might actually accomplish his goal of reaching Starscream and somehow resurrecting in him the Starscream that he had known so long ago. And if that happened… Well, it’d be one less Decepticon to deal with, at least. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, soooo…
So, off I went. First, I had steal – I mean, borrow! – a large U-Haul trailer from the local depot, and I also had to con Trailbreaker into coming along with me on my nefarious adventure so that he could tow the thing back to Headquarters for me, him having that convenient trailer hitch and all. And I had to do all that without telling Trailbreaker exactly why I wanted the stupid thing in the first place, of course. Thank goodness that Trailbreaker, bless his bright little spark, is always up for a devious, covert adventure and that he’s smart enough not to ask too many inconvenient questions about it either beforehand or afterward. Then, once that was accomplished, I had to convince Wheeljack to convert the trailer for surface ocean travel with me towing it magnetically, all without telling him anything about where I was going and what I was doing with the thing. Thank goodness that Wheeljack and Trailbreaker seem to be cut from the same uninquisitive-when-prudent cloth… And then…Primus, then I had to wheedle the Air Force into…uh, lending me the required jet parts. And I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate the Air Force. And carrying out this entire messy scheme only reinforced that dislike.
In fact, the more I thought about it now, the crazier the whole thing seemed. And so, when another huge wave reared up in front of me again, my first impulse was to just turn around and go home. The whole scheme here was crazy…and I was seriously putting myself out for a guy that I hated. How stupid was that? But then…Then I realized that I couldn’t do that, that I couldn’t just leave Skyfire hanging. I’d made a promise to him, however unwise that had been at the time, and I couldn’t in good conscience back down from it. Still, the temptation was there, and it remained there in the back of my mind, taunting me more loudly with every hard-won meter that I traveled…
Which is why it was probably a very good thing that, only a couple hours of difficult forward progress later, Skyfire’s island finally came into view in front of me. It just suddenly appeared on the horizon as if wandering invisible aliens had suddenly decided to drop it right there in front of me. And I could, I thought, just make out Skyfire on the beach, too, standing there with his arms folded across his chest, just staring out over the ocean, motionless. Perhaps he was looking for me. Or perhaps he was looking for…er, someone else… But, putting that thought aside, I instead concentrated on speeding up and getting to that damned island as quickly as possible. I was longing to be on terra firma once again… Of course, as with just about everything else concerning this trip of mine, getting to that blessed spot of dry land was easier said than done. Navigating through occasionally large breakers while still hauling the trailer behind me was no easy feat. But, just when I thought I was about to be sucked under for good, a wave unceremoniously deposited me and my cargo in an undignified heap on the sandy white beach. Skyfire, who’d no doubt been avidly watching my progress toward shore, was there to meet me.
Without a word to Skyfire, I disengaged the magnetic tractor beam that still yoked me to the U-Haul, transformed, and proceeded to yank the U-Haul away from the waves breaking on the shoreline. Skyfire just stared at me for a moment, no doubt reading my unhappy vibes and not knowing quite what to do about them. Belatedly, he moved to help me, though, and together we pushed and shoved the trailer to safer, dry ground. It was only when we had completed that task that Skyfire decided to speak to me.
“Thank you for coming, Jazz,” he said with all sorts of innocent, unsuspecting sincerity as he peered guilelessly across the roof of the U-Haul at me.
In reply, I just grumbled something rather impolite under my breath, went around to the back of the U-Haul, and hauled open the tailgate with quite a bit more force than was really necessary, continuing to mutter various complaints and curses under my breath as I did so. Skyfire, of course, had obviously picked up on my surly mood, and he no doubt knew that it was a strange one for me. Still, he foolishly followed me part of the way around the trailer and watched me curiously as I began to unload it. For my part, I did my best not to aim glares of death in Skyfire’s general direction, instead attempting to lose myself in the mundane and repetitive task of unloading the trailer. But then…Then Skyfire unwisely chose to break the silence between us again.
“Is something wrong, Jazz?” Skyfire asked of me in that quiet, sincere, supremely calm, and compassionately-concerned tone of voice that was so very characteristic of him.
Of course, it was exactly the wrong question to ask of me, and it was exactly the wrong tone of voice to ask it in. Had Skyfire asked any question other than that one, I might have gotten through the day without a major rant. But, unfortunately, he chose to ask that particular question of me. And he was so damned…innocently concerned when he asked it, too.
Poor guy…
“Wrong?” I repeated quietly as I dropped a dull grey F-15 wing, which landed with a correspondingly dull thud on the sand in front of me. Of course, my voice became louder and angrier as I ranted on…and on… “What on Earth could possibly be wrong, Skyfire? I mean, I just drove like six thousand miles across an ocean, dragging behind me a very heavy and unstable trailer full of parts meant for a guy that I hate! Hell, Skyfire, I do that all the time! I love it! I live for it, even! And then there was the weather. Primus, it was beautiful. If you’re a duck, that is. Wind. Rain. Waves. Lots of really big waves that seemed determined to suck me and your precious parts down to the bottom of the ocean and keep us down there for the rest of eternity. I swear to Primus that it’ll take me a decade to get all the salt out of my moving parts. Not to mention the crabs. Oh, did I tell you about the crabs? No? Well, let me just tell you about the crabs, then, Skyfire. They apparently don’t like cyclones, you see. They apparently come out of the ocean en masse when one of them happens by. And apparently, I crashed for the night on one of their absolute favorite cyclone hangouts, and they mistook me for a nice, dry, comfy shelter from the big bad storm. So now I’ve got little bits of mangled crustacean in places I don’t even want to think about. So I ask you, Skyfire, what the hell could possibly be wrong?! What reason could I possibly have to be in a very bad mood?!”
By the time I ended the rant, I was toe-to-toe with Skyfire, glaring daggers up at him as if I thought that I might intimidate him despite the fact that he was half again as tall as me. Skyfire, for his part, at least had the grace to flinch as I finished my rant. And then he looked down at me for a very long moment. Just looked at me. The expression on his face was a curious mix of remorse and gratitude, and it did not waver or wander from my face until, silently, he stepped politely around me. He knelt by the open back end of the trailer and pulled an armload of cargo out of it before standing up again. Hugging the jet parts to his chest as if they were a security blanket, Skyfire looked down at me with that odd expression on his face again.
“I am very grateful,” Skyfire said solemnly, after looking at me that way for so long that I had to fight the urge to nervously fidget in response to his gaze, “that you were willing to do this for me, Jazz. But I also apologize for having to ask you to do it. I…just didn’t know what else to do. I was simply not prepared for…” His voice trailed off and he stared out over the ocean for a few long moments before he finally finished his thought. “I was not prepared for…all that has happened since I left the Autobots,” he said quietly, his voice barely audible above the crashing waves behind us.
It was then that I noticed just how…haggard Skyfire looked. I had figured that he’d be in less-than-pristine condition, after months spent away from Autobot Headquarters and associated luxuries like recharge berths and a fully-equipped medbay…but it wasn’t just his living conditions, I suspected, that had caused his condition. No, Skyfire looked…haunted. Depressed. Drained of both energy and spirit. It vaguely occurred to me that my grouchy mood probably wasn’t helping matters and then, naturally, guilt kicked in, which effectively quashed my anger. Briefly, I reflected that I really wasn’t good at maintaining a pique for very long and wondered whether or not that was a good quality. Whatever the case, though, I found that I suddenly needed to find out what was eating away at Skyfire. I picked the most likely cause that occurred to me.
“Things not going so great with Starscream?” I asked quietly, suddenly folding my legs underneath myself and plopping down on the sand. My legs, after all, weren’t all that enthusiastic about having to support my weight after the long and completely draining voyage I’d just completed.
Skyfire looked down at me as I sat there, with an expression on his face that I couldn’t readily identify except to say that he looked like he’d lost his last friend in the universe. Unceremoniously, he, too, plopped himself down on the sand an arm’s length away from me, heaving a long and weary sigh as he did so.
“Not really, no,” he murmured, his voice sounding…distant, as if his body and his mind were millions of miles apart from each other. And, after a long moment spent staring at the stylized racehorse emblazoned on the side of the U-Haul although I sensed that he wasn’t seeing the trailer at all, Skyfire elaborated, “Though probably not in the way that you’re thinking…”
For a moment, I didn’t respond to that. I just let Skyfire’s voice trail off uncertainly as I pushed myself over onto my hands and knees with a grunt of effort, crawled toward the U-Haul, and pulled out two of the energon cubes that were stashed in there. Backing to my former spot, I sat back on my heels and tossed one of the cubes to Skyfire. He caught it and then looked at it as if he had no clue what he was supposed to do with it. He just sat there staring at it, contemplating its swirling, iridescent contents. I waited for him to say something else, to explain what he meant, but it seemed that explanations weren’t forthcoming. Which, of course, meant that I had to do the talking. Again.
“Y’know what’s really eating at me about all this?” I said, waving vaguely at the trailer in front of us before taking a long sip from the energon cube I held. Skyfire aimed a brief curious glance in my direction, but then lowered his gaze back to the energon cube he held, so I continued, “What’s really eating me is that I brought you stuff to fix damage that I probably did to Starscream…”
At that, Skyfire jerked his head up, away from his contemplation of the energon cube, and gave me a briefly startled look.
“How so?” he asked mildly.
I heaved a long, weary sigh, drained the energon cube, tossed it aside, and then leaned back casually on my elbows.
“He and I just spent some quality time together up on Titan,” I explained, jerking my chin up at the sky above us. “We…weren’t exactly friendly with each other, if ya know what I mean.”
“I see,” Skyfire replied, quirking a sadly-amused half-smile at me. He took a moment to finally take a sip out of his own cube before continuing. “But I think you’re misunderstanding something, Jazz. This,” he said, gesturing expansively at the collection of various jet parts that were in the trailer as well as scattered haphazardly around us, “is not meant to repair battle damage. I would not have asked that of you or of any other Autobot.”
Frowning, and without thinking all that much about what I was about to say, I asked, “But…What other kind of damage is there, Skyfire?”
And for a long time, Skyfire said nothing to me in reply to that. He just looked at me, his lips compressed into a tight, thoughtful, and slightly down-turned line. I gathered that he was trying to decide whether or not to tell me something, since it was almost the same look that he’d given me the last time I’d had a face-to-face discussion with him, when he’d dropped the bombshell on me that he and Starscream were bondmates. I suspected that he was now debating whether or not to tell me something equally paradigm-shaking, and I was trying to brace myself for the impact of whatever it was that he was about to tell me. I’d thought that nothing could be freakier than the fact that someone like Skyfire and someone like Starscream were bondmates…but apparently this whatever-it-was was equally difficult for Skyfire to confess. In fact, it wasn’t until after Skyfire had risen to his feet, paced around the U-Haul a couple of times, and then sat himself down in precisely the same spot he’d vacated in the first place that he finally decided to tell me just what was on his mind.
And when he did, I was forced to conclude that sometimes I really should just keep my big mouth shut… Because what Skyfire told me, of course, was that Starscream and Megatron were also bondmates, and that was news that thoroughly floored me. I mean, I really couldn’t fathom such a connection. If nothing else, all I’d ever seen the two of them do was trade insults and, occasionally, physical blows with each other. That wasn’t exactly normal behavior for a pair of bondmates. I mean, I teased Prowl, sure. I teased him often and sometimes mercilessly, even. But there was a huge difference between that and what I’d seen Starscream and Megatron do and say to one another… All I knew was that I was glad I hadn’t been trying to swallow some energon when Skyfire had told me that little tidbit of gossip or else it would have ended up spewed all over the place…
“Bondmates?” I finally echoed weakly as I scrabbled to control the reactions careening around in my mind. I wanted to be sure, after all, that I’d heard Skyfire right, that the ever-strengthening stench of dead, decaying crab wasn’t making me hallucinate or something.
“Yes,” Skyfire said succinctly, offering no further details. Which was probably a good thing because I was quite certain that my poor brain wasn’t up to absorbing any more details at that moment. That didn’t, of course, stop me from asking more questions, however. Asking questions even though I didn’t want to hear the answers to them was a dubious habit of mine, after all…
“So…if Starscream and Megatron are bonded, does…does that mean that…?” I stammered. “Does that mean that you and Megatron are…?”
My voice trailed off, the thought too horrible to complete. Skyfire, thankfully, shook his head vigorously in response.
“No,” he emphatically assured me. “I don’t know how he’s managed it, but apparently, Starscream has blocked out the existence of the bond between him and me, and he’s kept all knowledge of it away from Megatron for all of these years. I don’t think that he wishes to think about it, and of course I know that he doesn’t want Megatron to know about it. So, it appears that he’s been able to build some kind of barrier around it. Somehow. The result appears to be that I am in no way connected to Megatron, even though he and Starscream are most certainly connected to each other.”
“Well, thank Primus,” I said. “I mean, being stuck with Megatron would…suck.” It wasn’t the best, most accurately descriptive word to use, I was sure, but it was the best word I could think of on the fly. Skyfire, for his part, looked at me expressionlessly for a long moment before quirking that enigmatic half-smile of his at me again.
“Indeed,” he said solemnly. “’Suck’ would be a good word, as I understand its usage.”
I chuckled ruefully at that and then retreated into silence for a while, thinking, trying to understand the incomprehensible without much success.
“I don’t get it,” I announced. Skyfire, who’d taken to staring out over the ocean while I had been thinking, jerked his gaze back toward me as I elaborated, “I mean, I don’t understand what he…what they…why they…how they could be…”
“How they could be a pair?” Skyfire easily finished for me when the thoughts and words floundered around in my brain, refusing to be processed and expressed. He was smiling slightly, amused by my lack of coherence.
“Yeah,” I said weakly. “Yeah…that.”
The smile draining from his face, Skyfire sighed and was silent for a good long time. During that time, I fidgeted, sitting upright and then slouching back down onto my elbows several times before Skyfire finally put what he wanted to say into words.
“The Starscream that you know now, Jazz, is…a shadow of the Starscream I knew before the war,” Skyfire eventually said, his voice level and calm, as if he was telling me about someone who had no particular connection to himself. “You don’t understand him and what he does or does not do because you don’t really know him. Not the real individual that he is, at least. I know it will be hard for you to believe, but when I knew him, before the war, Starscream was not a warrior bent on conquest, nor would he ever have thought to be that. He was simply one of our research station’s brightest intellects, and his only interest at the time was imagining and creating technology that would improve space exploration, make it easier, safer, and more…convenient. And he was sharp and witty and…compassionate. He wouldn’t, as the humans might say, have hurt a fly.”
I was, of course, skeptical. I didn’t think of it as being particularly unfair of me because any Autobot who’d known Starscream over the past few million years or so would have been skeptical, too. Even downright disbelieving, in fact. For my part, I’d never seen anything like what Skyfire was describing in Starscream, and I found that it was hard to argue with the evidence of my own senses.
“You’re right,” I said firmly, crossing my arms over my chest as I sat doubtfully regarding Skyfire. “That is hard to believe.”
Skyfire gave me another of those long, indecipherable looks before he reiterated firmly, his tone of voice tinged now with a slight hint of impatient irritation, “As I said, that is because who and what Starscream was back when I knew him is quite different than who and what he is now. People do change with time, you know, Jazz.”
I gave Skyfire a reproving look and retorted, more harshly and accusingly than I might have liked, “I know that, Skyfire. I’m not stupid. But you’ll forgive me for not automatically thinking the best of a guy who’s been trying to kill me and mine for the better part of ten million years now.”
For a moment, just after those words flew out of my mouth without thinking on my part, Skyfire just took a deep, calming breath. His very first impulse, I’d noticed, had been to open his mouth and, no doubt, he had thought to counter my retort with a stinging one of his own. But he’d caught himself at the last minute, and he’d apparently decided to take a moment to calm himself before he answered me.
“My apologies, Jazz,” he eventually said, his voice level and unemotional, after opening his eyes. “It is…difficult for me to discuss Starscream objectively with anyone, particularly an Autobot, particularly after a year spent listening to the Autobots denigrate him on a daily basis.”
I had been one of the most vocal of those denigrators, too. I hadn’t really thought about it until that moment, when Skyfire mentioned it, and an interesting mix of emotions flitted through my mind. My feelings toward Starscream hadn’t really changed, and I didn’t feel like they needed to change, either. My instinctive dislike of him, to my mind, was quite justified. Even so, I did still feel a bit of remorse, for Skyfire’s sake, over some of the things I’d said about Starscream in Skyfire’s presence. I imagined for a moment what it had to have been like to be in his place, hearing all kinds of nastiness day in and day out, and I rather sheepishly realized that I probably wouldn’t have taken that sort of thing half as well as Skyfire had taken it for over a year… So I realized, rather unwillingly, that an apology of my own was in order.
“No, my apologies, Skyfire,” I said, swallowing my pride. “That was…insensitive of me. I mean, what I just said was insensitive…and many of the things I probably said before I knew about you and Starscream were insensitive, too. I apologize.”
Skyfire shrugged his massive shoulders dismissively.
“You didn’t know, Jazz,” he said calmly. “None of you knew. I could hardly expect you to be sensitive toward a situation about which you knew nothing. What’s done is done. Now we must simply…deal with the present.”
“Oh, the horror,” I said lightly. The conversation was turning serious, after all. I felt a need to make it more…comfortable. “So…go on,” I prompted.
“Go on,” Skyfire said with a decisive nod. He paused, deliberated for a moment, and then asked, “What was I saying?”
“You were saying,” I answered around a wide, amused grin, “that Starscream wouldn’t have hurt a fly back when you knew him.”
“Oh yes!” Skyfire responded before lapsing into a thoughtful silence for a few moments. After gathering his thoughts, he continued, “Back then, Starscream couldn’t have cared less about being the leader or ruler of anything. He had always been a bit of a social outcast amongst his peers, true, but it wasn’t because he went into crazy screaming fits about being the ruler of the universe or whatever, as he does now, from what I’ve heard. That sort of mentality, that…fixation with power and control is something that he learned, I think, from an outside source. It’s like someone has drilled it into him, forcing a change in his thoughts and behavior and his entire outlook on…well, everything.”
“Megatron,” I guessed. It was, after all, a logical conclusion, given that Starscream was bonded to a guy who esteemed power and control above everything else. And, to him, it was probably fun to twist wide-eyed, trusting innocents around his finger, turning them into little idolizing puppets. It was admittedly hard to imagine Starscream as a wide-eyed innocent…but it was also true that everyone was innocent at some point in his life.
“Mm-hmm,” Skyfire was agreeing, meanwhile. “At least, that’s the only conclusion that I can draw from the little I’ve been able to glean from Starscream. It seems that Megatron uses the bond between him and Starscream to get what he needs from Starscream, that he evokes the darker, more powerful emotions in Starscream and then feeds off of them. As if they somehow strengthen him. Empower him.”
“Like a vampire,” I muttered disgustedly. I still wasn’t feeling much pity for Starscream, but I had to acknowledge that his wasn’t the best place to be. If Skyfire had things figured correctly, of course. I still wasn’t sure that he had, though…
“A…what?” Skyfire was asking meanwhile, blinking at me in blank confusion, obviously not familiar with the concept of vampires.
“Earth legend, Skyfire,” I explained with a shrug. “A vampire is a dead creature who maintains the appearance of life by sucking the blood out of people who actually are alive.”
For a moment, Skyfire just blinked at me again before commenting, “Humans certainly do have…er, colorful legends, but the reference would seem quite apt, regardless… It’s still worse than that, though. It seems that over the years that need of Megatron’s has required him to subject Starscream to increasingly severe beatings, in order to evoke those stronger emotions in him that Megatron seems to crave. I suppose that Starscream slowly became used to Megatron’s older, less damaging, techniques, so periodically he has had to come up with new ones. Hence, the physical damage that Starscream suffers now, and that I am now occasionally called upon to repair. Hence, my need for these components that you’ve brought here. The damage that I repair is that which Megatron does to Starscream, not that which any Autobot does to him. The differences are quite distinct and, as I said, I would not ask you to help me to…”
Skyfire’s voice trailed off when he happened to look over at me during his explanation. My expression, I imagine, was speaking volumes.
“What?” he asked curiously of me.
“You’re talking,” I said, when I finally found my voice, “about torture.”
My voice squeaked as I practically choked on the words. What Skyfire was suggesting was unheard of on Cybertron. The general idea of sadism, even of torture, wasn’t entirely unknown. One could easily say that Megatron himself enjoyed seeing others suffering, and in times of desperation, of war, some might even feel that torturing a captive for information was justified. The needs of the many weighed against the needs of one hostile prisoner often caused otherwise well-meaning folks to take a stroll on the dark side. But to put your bondmate in pain meant, plain and simple, that you would also be putting yourself in pain. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why anyone would want to – much less need to – do that… That was what had me gaping at Skyfire like a landed fish.
Skyfire, meanwhile, was merely nodding calmly at me. Having been exposed for a while now to the whole…thing, he’d apparently had the time to become used to the idea. Which, when I thought about it, was a bit scary. No one should just get used to the idea of other people being tortured. Even if those “other people” included Starscream. Skyfire, though, seemed to take it all in stride. Outwardly, at least. His legs were crossed, his elbows were resting on his knees, and his chin was resting on top of his interlaced fingers. He was just sitting there, talking to me calmly but not expressionlessly.
Primus only knew what was eating away at Skyfire beneath that calm exterior of his, though…
“I suspect,” Skyfire was saying, meanwhile, as if he was just offering up a hypothetical theory that had no emotional weight whatsoever, “that they have a one-way bond that Megatron alone controls. He can take whatever he wants from Starscream, perhaps even filtering out any…unpleasantness he might feel, but he is not required to give anything in return. I have no idea how such a thing is possible, but I do know that all Starscream gets from their…encounters…is pain. Confusion. Even insanity.”
“Yeah, he’d have to be crazy to put up with that crap,” I muttered, not quite far enough under my breath. I shot a guilty look at Skyfire as I realized that I’d said the words a bit too loudly. Skyfire stiffened at my words, but then relaxed again half a breath later. Deliberately. As if he wanted to take issue with me but cooler thoughts had overruled the impulse and forced his body into submission.
“Perhaps,” Skyfire eventually agreed. His voice was a bit on the chilly side, though, and he was looking at me through eyes that were narrowed in equal measures of thoughtfulness and irritation. “Then again,” he added, “I am certain that there are many things that you do not understand about the situation, Jazz. Just as there are many things that I do not yet understand about it, either.”
“Well, whether I understand it all or not, Skyfire,” I pointed out, “it’s still damned crazy.”
“It’s easy for you to believe that, I know,” Skyfire answered noncommittally, shrugging at me almost…dismissively. I didn’t know quite how to respond to that. Was he agreeing with me or not? And should I care? Whatever the case, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was getting good at speechlessness, apparently. Not that that was a good thing…
“So…” I finally ventured after a long moment of uncomfortable silence between us. I was still trying to wrap my mind around all that Skyfire had told me, after all. “Starscream comes here after these uh…encounters with Megatron?” When Skyfire only nodded wordlessly, I further guessed, “And then you thoughtfully fix up all of his…injuries, which is why you need all this stuff I brought?” After another wordless nod, I concluded, “But then after all that, he still runs off back to Megatron…so that he can be beaten up all over again?”
Skyfire winced at that. It was a wince so small it was almost imperceptible…but I noticed it. And I sympathized with him, too. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be living his life right at the moment. And for a moment, as Skyfire collected his thoughts, I thought about what I would do if I ever found myself in a situation similar to Skyfire’s, if I had been separated from Prowl for millions of years, only to return and find him caught up in some insane, self-destructive situation. I wondered what I would do… Would I give up everything, as Skyfire had done, to try to help Prowl, to bring him back to sanity, back to me? Or would I abandon him to the path that he had freely chosen to follow? After a few minutes spent in honest contemplation of those questions, it disturbed me greatly that I didn’t really know what I’d do. Self-sacrifice wasn’t in my basic nature, that much I knew. And I wasn’t proud of that.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Skyfire was answering, meanwhile, “but yes, to date he has left and gone back to Decepticon Headquarters every time, once I have repaired him sufficiently.”
“That’s crazy!” I asserted again.
“Perhaps,” Skyfire agreed, nodding thoughtfully. “It is quite possible that Starscream is crazy. It would be logical to assume that he is crazy, given what he has endured over the last ten million years and that he continues to tolerate it. But I don’t believe he’s beyond help. Yet.”
“But I don’t get it!” I plaintively confessed. “Why doesn’t Starscream want to stay with you? You obviously love him because you’ve given up everything for him. And you’re not going to beat him up or nothin’. So why the hell does he go back to Megatron? If he has the ability to leave in the first place, why the hell can’t he just stay away?”
For a long time, Skyfire just looked at me, his expression one of uncomprehending sorrow.
“I wish that I knew the answer to that question, Jazz. It is one that I ask myself all the time. I wish that I could understand Starscream as he is now, but… I don’t.“ Sighing sadly, staring out over the ocean, he added, “So much time has gone by. So much has changed. I didn’t really understand how much until just recently. But I try, Jazz, I try so hard to talk to him, asking him to help me understand what’s going through his mind. But as well as I used to know him, as completely as I used to know him, there are entire sections of his being that are closed to me now. Barricaded. I believe that if I could just reach those closed-off parts, even for just a few moments, then…then I might understand. And if I understood, then I know that I could help him. As it is…” His voice trailed off sadly, and he gestured dismally at the parts scattered around us. “As it is,” he finished desolately, miserably, “this is all that I have. This is all that has been left to me. This…this is my life.”
Skyfire looked at me piercingly after that, seeking…something. A reaction, maybe. Help, maybe.
I didn’t know what to say to him. What comfort could I offer? I had no idea where to begin. I couldn’t relate to him at the moment. I couldn’t comprehend what he was going through, mostly because I didn’t want to. My mind couldn’t, wouldn’t, go there. At all. Mostly because his situation…Starscream’s situation…it was all horrible, empty, desperate, and all absolutely repulsive to any sane person.
More than that, though, I was deeply disturbed. The fact that Megatron and Starscream were bonded was disturbing. The nature of their relationship was even more disturbing. And, for some reason, Skyfire’s steadfast, devoted support of Starscream, his desire to help him and to save him no matter the personal cost, was disturbing, too. It made me painfully realize that I was perhaps not capable of that kind of unswerving devotion and loyalty. Worse than that, his obvious loyalty and devotion prompted me to peer hesitantly into the darker corners of my own psyche, the ones that I liked to pretend couldn’t possibly exist because I was an Exceedingly Good Guy. And I saw that, deep down, Exceedingly Good Guy Jazz couldn’t understand how or why anyone would willingly be that unselfish. And I didn’t like that about myself. Not at all. So what did I do? Well, Noble And Exceedingly Good Guy Jazz tried to deflect that irritation with himself by pawning it off on poor Skyfire.
“So…you’re just gonna sit here, then,” I said rather indignantly, if not accusingly, “and wait for him. And then you’re gonna fix him up. And then you’re gonna calmly watch him leave only to have him return all bashed up again someday somewhere down the road. Or else you’ll never see him again at all. How long are you going to let that be your life?”
To that question, Skyfire’s answer was immediate, his conviction obviously rock-solid.
“As long as it takes,” he vowed calmly, looking me straight in the eye, his voice unwavering, his expression still sorrowful but also quite determined. When I just stared back at him dubiously, he elaborated, “There are many things I don’t understand, Jazz, but one thing, at least, is eminently clear to me. And that is that I need to be here for Starscream, and that I will be here for him…no matter what happens and no matter what he does or says or…anything. Would you do any less for Prowl?”
I had to force myself not to flinch at that, quite taken aback that Skyfire had seen fit to ask that question of me in the first place, as if he could read my mind… Talk about your bull’s-eyes… In the end, though, it didn’t matter what my reaction to Skyfire’s words was because he continued to speak anyway, completely heedless of my startlement.
“I have simply found,” he was saying softly, “that I cannot lead a productive life without Starscream. I need him, perhaps just as much as he needs me right now. Perhaps even more so. I simply need to be involved in his life, Jazz. I need to be looking after him, even if that only involves, for now, repairing his damage so that he can live another day. To be doing anything else right now…particularly pretending that he is my enemy…would drive me insane.”
“But…what if he never comes back?” I asked quietly. “What if you fix him all up one day and he goes on his way and then you never see him again? Or worse, what if one day he brings along ol’ Megs and the gang?”
Skyfire shrugged dismissively.
“It doesn’t matter,” he answered firmly. “None of that matters to me, Jazz. What matters is that I made a promise to Starscream eons ago that I would never leave him, no matter what happened to us. I have broken that promise twice already, once when I was lost in the ice storm here on Earth so long ago, and then again when I left the Decepticons and joined the Autobots. But I am determined to keep that promise from now on, even if it costs me my own life. I owe it to him, Jazz. You don’t understand, I know, but you don’t have to. I understand…and I will keep that promise for the rest of my days, however many days that might be. That’s what I’ve vowed, both to myself and to Starscream.”
The more I listened to Skyfire, the more chastened I felt. The guiltier I felt, actually. What Skyfire was saying, I knew, was what being bonded truly meant. It meant that you gave up yourself for the “combined” person that both of you became. But I was still hanging on to me. I was still clinging to my own selfish interests, my own idea of what I should be doing with my life, as if my choices still only affected me. I still wanted to do my own thing. Like, for instance, I’d agreed to do as Skyfire asked without consulting Prowl, without even thinking of consulting him, really. Why? Because I had wanted to do it. Because some weird part of me thought it would be fun to steal a U-Haul and con the Air Force out of jet parts and then haul them across the ocean to Indonesia. And I wanted to have fun. I didn’t care, really, what anyone else thought about it. Most damningly, I didn’t even think about how Prowl would feel about it, even though I knew I should be thinking about him at least as much as I thought about myself. But it wasn’t that way. It was all me, me, me. I’d always been all about me.
Skyfire, on the other hand, had freely given up everything that he was and everything that he could have been in the future as an Autobot in order to live a hard, draining existence alone on a deserted island, surviving on desperate hope as he waited for his bondmate to come to his senses and return to him. I didn’t know that I could do that. I strongly suspected that I would simply have given up and moved on. Some friend – much less mate! – I was, huh?
But I resolved, then and there, to be a better one. I was inspired, you might say, even though that inspiration was completely against my will. I didn’t know if I could really follow through with my resolution…but I knew that I could at least give it the old college try.
And there was one other thing that I knew for certain that I could do. If I couldn’t face up to my own inadequacies as a bondmate, then I could at least try to make Skyfire’s life a little more bearable. And I could continue to do my little part to bring him and Starscream back together, however indirectly. And I knew that I could do it without complaint and without drama, too. It would mean that I’d have to sacrifice some free time, sure. It probably meant that in the coming months or even years I’d have to do lots of things that I didn’t really want to do…but in the grand scheme of things, comparing my life to Skyfire’s, I realized that that was the very least that I could do.
“Promises,” I murmured ruefully to myself, out of the blue. Skyfire fired a questioning glance in my direction, but I talked over him, saying, “Y’know, Skyfire, I admire you.” Skyfire’s expression changed to a startled one as I added, “No, really! I do! I mean, I listen to you and…and I can’t imagine going through what you’re going through. I don’t think I could do it. Not even for Prowl, and that… Well, that’s a real hard admission for me to make.”
Skyfire continued to just stare at me, his expression a bit perplexed, but he didn’t say anything. He was obviously waiting for me to continue, so…I continued.
“Look, when you asked me to do this favor for you, I really wasn’t thrilled about it. I knew who you needed these parts for, and I didn’t want to help him because of what I’d been through with him recently. And it was a rough trip out here, what with the cyclone and all. So I had a really bad attitude about the whole thing. Poor little Jazz, y’know? But now I listen to you, to what you’re saying and…and nothing in my life compares, Skyfire. My worst day would probably be better than your best one has been out here. And my very worst day ever would probably seem like heaven compared to Starscream’s best one, from what you’ve said, even though I can’t believe I’m sitting here saying that. But anyway… Suddenly, I feel very, very lucky to have the life that I have.”
Skyfire just blinked at me, still perplexed. No doubt, he was wondering what I was trying to say. Hell, I was trying to figure out what I was trying to say… It was only after a long moment spent staring at me that Skyfire finally spoke up.
“You are lucky, Jazz,” he asserted. And then he added apologetically, “But I’m still very sorry that I had to ask this of you. I…had nowhere else to turn. I would never have asked you other—”
“No, no, I think you’re misunderstanding me, Skyfire,” I interrupted, waving off his words. “What I want to say…I think…is that this was…nothing. Like, totally nothing. Bringing all of this stuff was no big deal, despite my bitching and moaning about it. Really, this was the very least I could do. And now I’m going to make a promise to you.”
“A promise,” Skyfire repeated questioningly.
“A promise,” I confirmed. “Here it is: I want you to keep in touch with me regularly, and I want you to tell me exactly what you need. Hell, even just what you want. And then, if it’s remotely in my power to bring it to you, I will bring it to you as quickly as I possibly can. Anything you need or want or whatever, you tell me and I’ll find it somehow and bring it here.”
“Jazz…Really, I appreciate the thought, but it’s really not necessary to—”
“Oh, I think it is necessary, Skyfire,” I contradicted. “In fact, I think it’s very necessary. And I’ll keep that promise, Skyfire.”
Skyfire just blinked at me again, was silent for what seemed like an hour while I waited impatiently for him to say something, and then finally said, “Well, in that case, I appreciate it, Jazz. That…will help. It will help a lot, actually. I accept your offer with my deepest thanks. And I’m sure that, if he could, Starscream would thank you, too.”
“Oh riiiiiiiight,” I spluttered after a moment spent laughing out loud. “He’d be kissing my feet, I bet.” Skyfire just smiled almost wistfully at me. Quietly, seriously, I added, “I…want to do what I can, s’all.” And then I shrugged diffidently, suddenly embarrassed by my general sappiness.
“Believe me, Jazz,” Skyfire replied sincerely, “you’re doing more than you could possibly know.”
“Well…good,” I said with a decisive nod, feeling better than I had in the past couple of days…even though I’d just promised Skyfire that I’d make more of these mind-numbing twelve thousand mile round trips to the South Pacific. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Skyfire, I’m going to have a nap. It’s been a long couple of days, and I’ve got a looooong trip back ahead of me.”
“Oh, not so long, I don’t think,” Skyfire countered with a sudden chuckle.
Besides wondering why in the world he was laughing at me, I wondered where Skyfire got off saying something like that.
“Oh yeah?” I responded indignantly. “Well, you try it, then, Skyfire.”
The expression on Skyfire’s face was, for a moment, puzzled. And then he laughed again, sounding in much better spirits than he’d been in the whole time I’d been with him.
“No, no,” Skyfire replied, “now you’re misunderstanding me. I just meant that I’ll fly you back, Jazz. It’ll save you a trip, at least.”
I stared at Skyfire for a long moment after he said that
“But isn’t that a little…oh, I don’t know…dangerous, maybe?”
“Perhaps,” Skyfire allowed with a one-shouldered shrug. “But in this case I think it’s worth it.”
“But what if Starscream comes while you’re gone?”
“I won’t be gone that long, Jazz.”
“But what if—?” I started to question before I interrupted myself. “Look at me!” I exclaimed. “Trying to talk myself out of a ride! What a moron!”
“Indeed,” Skyfire said gravely, but it was clear that he was amused.
“Shut up,” I grumbled good-naturedly, half-heartedly tossing a handful of sand in his direction.
Skyfire ducked good-naturedly as the sand flew by him, then straightened and said to me, “Rest for a while first. As you said, you’ve had a long trip that hasn’t been fun, and you do look terrible—“
“Thanks, “I interjected sourly, but Skyfire just talked over me, not missing a beat.
“—So rest for a while, and then when you have recovered sufficiently, I’ll fly you back and drop you off near Autobot Headquarters.”
And with that, he gathered up an armful of jet parts, stood, and began to walk away, probably toward wherever it was that he was going to store them, so that he’d be prepared for the next time that Starscream showed up and—
I couldn’t finish the thought, didn’t really want to think about it just now. Shuddering, I resolved that I would absorb it all…uh, later. This, I decided as I settled down to rest, as ordered.
“Thanks, Skyfire,” I called after him after him, while trying to find a comfortable position that didn’t automatically force a ton of sand into my armor joints.
Skyfire stopped, turned around, and looked at me oddly as I stilled and began to drift off into a completely exhausted recharge. The last thing I heard before sleep claimed me was Skyfire’s words.
“No, Jazz,” he said softly. “Thank you.”
And then I took off for a nice long vacation in Dreamland…