t the beginning of the end, there were words.
It should not have been surprising to me. Words had an interesting way of defining my life. They tended to delineate the highs and the lows and, especially, the turning points of my existence. It was just that I hadn’t had any idea that such a turning point was imminently upon me on this particular day, didn’t know that my life was about to change dramatically because it was otherwise, all things considered, a completely unremarkable day.
I was walking down one of the crisscrossing corridors that threaded their way in a haphazard and disorganized fashion through the erstwhile space cruiser that had become Autobot Headquarters. As I walked along, minding my own business, I was as usual feeling a bit claustrophobic. The corridors were designed for Autobots who were, on average, half my size, so I always walked through them with my shoulders slightly hunched, always harboring the feeling that I was about to bang my head on something. It was an unnerving feeling at times, one that certainly made me feel quite out of place, and I really did not need that.
I knew, after all, that I was already out of place…but I stopped that train of thought in its tracks, before it could start to careen out of control.
At that moment, though, I had a mission of sorts, a reason to be striding purposefully through the cramped corridors of Autobot Headquarters. I had been away, sent halfway around the planet on yet another fruitless reconnaissance mission. Busywork, it had been, or so I deeply suspected, at least. Optimus Prime was very good at handing out such busywork. And of course it always seemed to be the case that once I was away and inconveniently on the other side of the planet, all hell broke loose at Autobot Headquarters. This occasion had been no exception to that general rule, and there had been a confrontation between the Autobots and the Decepticons in my absence, one that had involved, so I had heard, a human-made robot and a stolen computer chip.
Whenever such a confrontation happened – especially when I had not been directly involved in it – a few nagging questions always tended to leap immediately to the forefront of my thoughts: Had Starscream been involved? Had he been damaged? Or worse?
I tried not to have such thoughts. Starscream had once been – and still was, actually, although no one else but Starscream himself knew that – my bondmate. But now he was also the Autobots’ enemy, which, since I had chosen to ally myself with the Autobots, had made Starscream technically my enemy as well. Technically. So it was, of course, exceedingly bad form to ask after Starscream in the wake of a battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons. To do so would have earned me, I was sure, some odd looks at the very least, and more likely a good deal of outright hostility. So, I had to be subtle. I had to ask around the subject of Starscream in order to get the answers that I really wanted and needed. The problem, of course, was that I was not very good at being subtle. Rather, if I wanted to know something, I generally just asked direct questions, bluntly and forthrightly, sometimes even unthinkingly. In this case, of course, I couldn’t do that, at least, not without fielding some very awkward questions in return.
The technique I had developed to ask about Starscream without really asking about him was to listen intently to the Autobots whenever they recounted conflicts that I had managed to miss, to see if I could glean any unspoken details from what they said. Sometimes it was easy. If one of the Autobots would, for instance, crow about having shot down Starscream, then I knew that he had been involved. Of course, I then had to suppress the impulse to wince or give any outward appearance of alarm if someone had done that. I had to be content with continuing to listen, to see if any further details were relayed in the discussion that followed. Sometimes they were, but more often they were not, and then I would have to live in a constant state of worry – worry that that I could not express to anyone, of course – until I could perhaps catch a glimpse of Starscream again across a battlefield.
I hated that. I hated the fact that the only time I could see Starscream now was when we were ostensibly trying to kill each other. And I hated uncertainty, too. I hated worry. But they had become my lot in life, along with tolerating the Autobots’ obligatory, derogatory comments about Starscream.
It seemed as if there was some unwritten law in the Official Autobot Rule Book that rude comments had to be made whenever someone said the word “Starscream.” I had learned to tolerate – more or less – the almost constant assassination of Starscream’s character that I heard so casually bandied about Autobot Headquarters. It was an activity in which a certain select few of the Autobots seemed to delight, so if I had not learned to tolerate it, I might have done something regrettable long ago. But it helped that, on some level, I understood the tendency; to the Autobots, after all, Starscream was merely The Enemy, nothing more. To a fault, they were quite comfortable with demonizing him because, to them, he was not a real person. They did not know him like I knew him. This, I understood. At least, I understood it intellectually.
But even I had limits to my patience, and I had gotten to the point, after a year or so of living amongst the Autobots, that the insults and crude remarks were now steadily, quietly eating away at me like a cancer. I was at the point where, usually, I did not want to be around anyone in Autobot Headquarters, save for a select few. I even welcomed Optimus Prime’s busywork if it meant that I had a valid reason to stay far away from everyone. The only time I deliberately stayed at Autobot Headquarters for any length of time was when I needed to know what had happened during battles that occurred in my absence.
And now, as I approached the open doorway to the Rec Room, I heard a burst of laughter coming from several of the Autobots who had gathered within, and I stopped to listen to them, leaning against the wall out of sight of the room’s occupants. Bluestreak…or was it Cliffjumper? Their voices were so similar that sometimes it was hard for me to tell them apart…Well, Bluestreak, I decided, had said something, and everyone else present – maybe five or six Autobots, judging by the decibel level of their laughter – was laughing in response to whatever he’d said. Instinctively, my hands clenched into fists at my sides. I couldn’t help it. I was fairly certain, after all, as to the identity of the object of their mirth. It was a dubious sort of sixth sense. Not for the first time, I silently demanded of an unsympathetic universe to know why certain Autobots always had to make Starscream the butt of their offensive jokes. It seemed that no other Decepticon aroused so much amusement amongst the Autobots even though, from everything that I knew, he had not done anything that just about any other Decepticon had not also done.
It was while I was contemplating that issue that one of the Autobots chose to offer up a very bad imitation of Starscream’s voice, in a screeching, earsplitting voice. I winced as whoever it was continued his loud impersonation. “I am invincible!” was all I could make out as everyone in the room burst into laughter. In response, rage flooded me, a protective rage that I had to repress, something that was getting harder and harder to do. I knew, after all, that the Starscream that the Autobots saw was not Starscream, at least not the Starscream that I knew. I knew him not as a power hungry warrior bent on universal domination, but as a brilliant scientist and a bold explorer and, deep down, as a loving, empathetic person. Oh, he had changed, of course, but I knew that somewhere deep down, he was still the person that I knew. I only wished that I understood what had happened to him while I had spent millions of years in stasis and buried under tons of Arctic ice…
At the thought, I lifted a hand in order to rub wearily at my forehead, which was now faintly throbbing at me. It was a tiresomely familiar sensation; my head began to hurt every time I fell into this self-defeating cycle of uncertainty and confusion over what stand to take regarding Starscream and the Autobots.
Starscream had changed, indeed. This was not the first time I’d reminded myself of that fact, but, no matter how many times I reminded myself, it had never seemed to sink in although I knew that I needed to come to terms with it. Starscream had made it abundantly clear on more than one occasion that we were no longer mates but enemies, and I knew that I could not have two allegiances, that I had to fully commit myself to one cause or the other and then live that commitment, without any second thoughts. The Autobots needed me, and they had accepted me for who and what I was, without demands. Starscream, on the other hand, had rejected me. More importantly, he had rejected us.
As another round of laughter filled the rec room, the hand that had been rubbing at my forehead moved instinctively to my shoulder, to the spot where I had once been injured by a blast from Starscream’s laser rifle. Although the physical pain of the injury had long since faded, the psychological and emotional wounds that it had wrought were still weighing heavily upon me. His rejection of me hurt more than I had been allowing myself to feel. At the thought, I breathed a heavy, resigned sigh as I felt something shift and give way in my mind. It was a realization that I had not really wanted to make.
I stood there, listening to the Autobots enjoying themselves at the Decepticons’ expense, feeling Starscream’s rejection of me wash through my consciousness, and I began to allow that perhaps I was meant to be an Autobot after all, that perhaps it was time that I finally let go of the past and took up the Autobot cause without reservation. I determinedly straightened my shoulders and, although the throbbing in my head had not at all subsided, I decided to join my chattering comrades. But then, before I could take that first fateful step toward the open doorway, a few words suddenly and inexplicably echoed through my mind, and those words utterly destroyed my fledgling, newfound resolve, preventing me from taking a single step toward the open doorway to the Rec Room.
You never quit on the people you love.
Spike's words. I realized that they had been more of those pivotal, turning-point sorts of words. Oh, at the time, they hadn’t been directed toward me any more than the words I was now hearing from the Autobots in the other room were meant for me. But I had heard them. I could not help but hear them.
And at the time… At the time, those words had hit home. From the moment I had heard Spike say them to his father shortly after Spike, a few other Autobots, and I had rescued the human mechanic from captivity and mind-controlled slavery at the hands of the Decepticons, I had known that the words had actually been, in some fateful, cosmic way that I had not entirely understood, meant for me. They were a reminder to me of something that I had forgotten, of something that I had, perhaps, been trying to forget, even as recently as just a few moments ago. The words, at the time, had been a wake-up call, so to speak, and they had sparked the beginnings of the disaffection that I now felt with the Autobots, a disaffection that, as time went on, was only growing steadily and stealthily within me, gnawing at my conscience despite my occasional efforts to fit in with the Autobots.
And my reaction to Spike’s words even now as I lingered in the corridor and remembered them all unbidden only confirmed a stark and difficult truth, a truth that I knew to the very depths of my being but that I had not wanted to admit to myself: I had given up on Starscream. I had convinced myself – or I had been trying to convince myself, at least – that he was not and could never again be the Starscream that I loved, that he had been irrevocably corrupted, that he was now, for whatever reason, a completely different person than the one whom I had known. And I had almost managed to convince myself that I didn’t care what happened to him, too. Starscream had, after all, made it clear that he did not care what happened to me. He had, in fact, tried to kill or at least injure me on the few occasions that we had encountered one another since my revival a year ago. That wasn’t exactly a declaration of abiding affection on his part, was it?
But…despite all of that… Well, the simple truth of the matter – a truth that I could not deny – was that some part of me had not given up on the Starscream that I knew intimately well. Moreover, I knew that some part of me would never give up on him, no matter what happened between us. Indeed, that part of myself could not give up on Starscream even if I wanted it to. We were bondmates, after all, a step we’d taken not long before we had left Cybertron on that ill-fated exploratory mission that had ended in my crash and deactivation and in a mind-bogglingly long period of separation. Despite that separation, however, that bond was never going to go away, and that meant that, however uncomfortable the situation was for both of us now, and however unwilling each of us was to acknowledge it, our fates were forever intertwined. It did not matter in the least that we now found ourselves on opposite sides of an eons-long war. All that mattered was that I knew I was Starscream’s, and I knew that he was mine; that was simply all there was to it.
And, because of that bond between us, one that had once brought both of us a sublime and inexpressible joy, I was suddenly realizing that now, despite everything, despite the fact that he had changed in some rather drastic ways that I did not yet understand and that I certainly did not like , I simply could not in good conscience fight against Starscream. Ever. I could not even truthfully regard him as an enemy. He was not my enemy. In fact, he could not be my enemy, no matter what he had done in the past and no matter what he would do in the future. No, Starscream was too much a part of me – and I was too much a part of him – for us ever to be truly enemies. Therefore, I could never in good conscience fully pledge my allegiance to the Autobots, no matter how much I tried to convince myself that I could do so. In fact, I never should have attempted to do so in the first place, and I was surprised that I had stayed with them for as long as I had…
My head jerked up then as Cliffjumper’s voice suddenly broke into my wandering thoughts. I listened to the little red Autobot as he recounted the final events of the confrontation that had taken place in my absence, and as I listened, I could feel the anger and frustration that I had so carefully bottled up for the past several months start to give way to a dark and turbulent fury. The dam that was holding back my emotions had just developed some large cracks, and I suddenly feared the flood that would result when it inevitably burst.
And then it happened. In a shockingly vulgar and crude way, Cliffjumper graphically described a theoretical punishment that Megatron might inflict upon Starscream for whatever he had done during the course of the battle…and, listening to Cliffjumper, all that I could feel was a blinding, white-hot rage, one that, this time, I couldn’t repress. It needed an outlet, and the wall against which I had been leaning while listening to the Autobots’ banter suddenly volunteered. Using all the force my right arm could muster, I slammed my fist into the obliging wall.
I didn’t even notice the tingling zing of pain that shot up my arm after the impact as I growled in my mind, barely resisting the urge to scream the words aloud, Enough! I will not abide this place any longer!
And as I stalked past the open door of the suddenly dead-silent Rec Room, it dawned upon me that for the first time since I had been rescued from the Arctic ice, my head was completely clear, my thoughts focused and sharp, my life’s path clear and well-defined before me. Filled with righteous anger and a new determination that no one would stand in my way, I began to make my way purposefully towards Autobot Headquarters’ exit, feeling suddenly lighter than I had felt since awakening in the Arctic.
I vowed to myself as I stomped loudly down the corridor that I would not give up on Starscream, that my commitment and my promise had been to him first and to him alone, and that I had been denying that simple truth for far too long now. I knew now that I had to uphold that commitment, no matter what happened from that moment on. And as I stalked down the corridor, I swore to myself that, somehow, I would find a way to reach Starscream. I didn’t know how I would do it, didn’t have even the remotest idea. I only knew that I had to do it and, moreover, that I would do it.