Chapter Text
An uninhabited planet, frozen to its core, hung in a wide orbit around the dying sun of a small galaxy Arcee had never heard of and never wanted to return to. In the Autobot map database, the planet's registered designation was a long series of numbers. It held no importance or value. The only reason Arcee and her Autobot team were there in the first place was bad luck; a space skirmish with a Decepticon ship forced the Autobots to crash-land onto the nearest hospitable planet. Bumblebee was hardly able to glean any information about the one they chose before the ship's systems shut down and the Autobots were forced the evacuate, fleeing a Decepticon pursuit. Bee only said that there was an intricately connected series of ice tunnels underneath the planet's surface that would provide "good enough" cover.
There certainly were a lot of tunnels. Arcee and her team had been stuck inside them for scarcely an hour and she hated them already. She hated ice. Her wheels, trustworthy under any other circumstance, were made unsteady by the frozen terrain.
With Hot Rod and Bumblebee at her side, Arcee split off from the main group to scout the area. The slippery ice, the looming threat of Decepticons, and the recent crash experience worked together to form one steady processor ache that had her trigger-servo twitchy.
So Arcee did not have her usual professional cool when, behind her, Bumblebee let out a started beep!
Arcee whipped around, gun ready, but there were no Decepticons waiting to blow their helms off. There was a sight much more disturbing, instead—a tall mech frozen deep into a wall of ice, the light in his optics extinguished into empty glass.
"Oh no," Bumblebee vented.
The edges of the silhouette were made blurry by the bubbles in the ice, but Arcee could zoom in her optics and make out the poor mech's grotesque expression. He was caught mid-run and mid-scream. A black faceplate and helm contrasted against the rest of the frame's red, blue, and silver. Triangular wings stretched out from behind the mech's shoulders and a domed cockpit of yellow glass protruded slightly from his chassis. The mech was tall, almost as tall as Optimus, and looked like he could pack a punch, but for all the height he didn't have much mass. He was built with aerodynamics a priority, like a racer. Like Hot Rod or Arcee, except this mech was built for the skies.
"A seeker," Arcee said, letting the barrel of her gun fall. "You don't see many of those anymore."
Hot Rod revved his engines, forcing as much heat as he could radiating off of his frame. "Well, let's help the guy out!"
Arcee pursed her lips, but didn't stop Hot Rod from charging forward. The air erupted with cloudy steam as the ice wall steadily melted away. Hot Rod ran, well, hot to begin with.
Bumblebee said, "Uh, careful you don't melt everything."
Arcee hummed in agreement, but she wanted Hot Rod to finish the job as quickly as possible. It wasn't the healthiest thing for a mech to force heat from their frame, and if Ratchet was here he would've had some choice words about Hot Rod's methods. "We should call this in," Arcee said.
"What do we even say?"
"I don't know, but comms are down!" Hot Rod called, lost in the steam.
Arcee tried to ping Ironhide and then Optimus without success. "You're right," she sighed. It was that damn ice. "We shouldn't have gone so far from the rest of the group."
"They'll find us," Hot Rod said. "But Primus, do you think this guy will be able to walk right away? He's huge! Me and Arcee could carry him, but we'd have to put our weapons down."
"I don't know if he'll be alive," Arcee said. "He must've been stranded here for a long time."
"But his paint's even better than mine. It's gleaming."
"That's the melted ice, Hot Rod."
"No, I mean there's not a scratch on him. It looks perfect!"
Bumblebee shrugged with a teasing grin. "Then he was either pretty rich or pretty vain, like someone else here."
That didn't sit right with Arcee, but she couldn't quite put a finger on why. It certainly wasn't the teasing she had a problem with. Arcee frowned, blinded by steam, and thought of the frozen mech's cut-off scream. Freezing and starving on an uninhabited and barely charted planet would have taken a long time, and a mech would have deteriorated horribly before the end. The paint would've been first to go. Come to think of it, the seeker had seemed rather whole and healthy before Hot Rod covered everything up with the steam.
"I'm not much for science," Arcee said. "But do you think this mech must have been frozen all at once?"
"We'll have to ask him," Hot Rod said excitedly. He was undoubtedly concerned with the prospect of a living time capsule instead of the horror of being trapped and then displaced in time. "I think I'm almost done—aaand there!"
The steam started to fizzle out. There was a low creeeeak as struts that hadn't been able to flex for a long, long time were suddenly freed.
"Whoa!" Hot rod cried. "He's falling! Back up! Back up!"
Arcee scooted back on her wheeled pedes instantly, but Bumblebee hesitated as Hot Rod shot out of the dwindling fog and then passed him to join Arcee at a distance.
"We shouldn't just let him fall!" protested Bumblebee, but he was a minibot and Arcee darted forward to pull him away before he could get himself crushed for attempting courtesy.
The frozen mech's knee joints gave a painful-sounding screech. The dead optics were still gray. He tipped forward, emerging from the cloud of steam like a golden age Cybertronian noble until he tipped too far and fell flat on his face, clattering like a suit of abandoned armor.
The three winced in unison. Arcee looked around warily in case the noise had attracted the wrong attention.
"Come on, we can't just go around disrespecting the dead!" Bumblebee complained.
Hot Rod said, "I don't think he's dead!"
"I don't know. . ." Arcee trailed off.
The seeker's arm twitched. The elbows bent, joints creaking. The Autobots could only watch in astounded silence as the seeker's servos scrabbled at the slippery ground, but he was able to get his arms underneath him and prop himself up. His wings fluttered and shivered. Laboriously, he rose to his knees and then found his footing, vents wheezing frozen air. He raised his helm.
Shocked, Arcee realized that for someone who had just been melted out of a block of ice and also may or may not have been on the verge of death, the seeker looked great. Arcee's processor finally latched onto a line of logic clarifying that off feeling she had—someone had probably frozen this mech on purpose, in one fell swoop. Someone had put him here and then left him.
The seeker's dead optics flickered wildly to life, and then with a great amount of effort, settled into a steadily glowing red. All systems were online, even if they ran with a grueling stutter that felt like gears grinding on sand. The seeker was Starscream, an up and coming figure in an up and coming Decepticon movement, but at the moment this fact was known only to himself.
Arcee, Bumblebee, and Hot Rod honed in on the matching Decepticon sigils adorning Starscream's wings. With no words necessary, there was a shared, chilling realization between the three: We just freed a terrorist.
Starscream's groggy, blurry vision focused on the red Autobot badges placed front and center on each chassis before him. His processor wasn't up to full sentences yet, but a reaction to that badge was hardwired into instinct. Police! he thought, and then he raised his arm and took a shot at Hot Rod's head.
It missed. Hot Rod ducked wildly, but it was Bumblebee's quick shove that saved him. Arcee raised her gun at Starscream in retaliation, but he was able to shoot it out of her grasp by pure luck—he couldn't quite see where he was aiming, and fired a lot of shots to compensate. The rest of them missed.
Arcee shouted wordlessly in anger, scrambling for her weapon and hoping against the odds that it was still usable.
Starscream made a run for it, as was his way. He threw himself behind a wide pillar of ice, Bumblebee's blaster fire scorching the frozen ground at his heels. Starscream became a little more awake, a little more aware, and a little more angrily terrified with each pounding, skidding step putting distance between him and the three Autobots. Ducking and weaving through random tunnels of ice, Starscream ran until the path before him opened up into a huge ice cavern.
The area was swarming with Autobots—where was he?—and Starscream, hiding, searched desperately for a familiar face. He tugged on the trine bond, but no one tugged back. The connection felt dead.
There! In the distance, Starscream spotted a familiar boxy frame, the red and blue paintjob shining bright against dull, faded glacier.
Primus, that's Megatronus's mech! Starscream thought. Orion Pax was little else—he wasn't even a Decepticon, only some wishy-washy affiliate, and he couldn't fight because he didn't believe in harming so much as a scraplet. What is he doing here?
Pax was not the backup Starscream had hoped for, but a scattering of Autobots were making their way towards Pax and Starscream knew better than to simply let him get carried away for empurata. Starscream transformed, jet mode blasting by glacier formations and enemy soldiers alike. With the element of surprise he was faster than the Autobots could shoot, but he might as well have stood still and let them light him up because his frame buckled in agony from the transformation.
Starscream transformed back into root-mode midair and tackled Orion Pax, dragging him behind a wall of clouded ice. A narrow tunnel of ice stretched out behind them, empty. Good enough, Starscream thought, bullying Pax inside. The Autobots were panicked, shouting and cursing as they rushed towards Starscream and Pax.
"Get behind me!" Starscream shouted. His arm-cannons fired at the ceiling, walls and floor in front of the Autobot charge. Huge cracks shot through the ice. Icicles came raining down, followed by chunks of the ceiling. The noise was incredible, but Starscream still heard Pax unsheathe a weapon behind him.
"Put it away, Pax!" he called over his shoulder.
"I—what?" Pax shouted.
"Unless you've got a gun, do nothing!"
"You'll bury us!"
I hope not, Starscream thought, but out loud he said, "Of course not!"
With an aching groan, a huge swath of ceiling in the greater cavern collapsed. Tons of ice buried the tunnel entrance, cutting Starscream and Pax off from enemy fire and plunging them into quiet dimness. Starscream's cannons powered off with a low hum, glowing red hot at the tips of the barrels. It was quiet, but not silent. Starscream could hear distant, muffled shouting behind the rubble.
"With our luck, one of those big lugs will have a drill," Starscream said. "We should get going."
"Where?" Pax asked haltingly.
"Anywhere! I don't know. Where are we?"
"It's. . . an uninhabited ice planet a few galaxies away from Earth."
"I've never heard of it."
"This place is also a few galaxies away from Cybertron."
"Hm! You should have just said. This is a long ways to go for a prison planet. They should've just stuck to Trypticon—ice is no good for prisons, you know. You can break through too easily."
". . . Starscream?"
"What?" Starscream came to the startled realization that he was looking up at Pax, where he very clearly remembered Pax standing somewhere around chin-height. "Did you get a frame change?" he demanded, and then his optics drifted to the Autobot insignia on Pax's pauldron.
"I—"
"Ah. Megatronus won't be happy about that." Starscream squinted up at Pax's faceplate, inspecting the new battle-grade mask that replaced his old gilded and purely ornamental one. "I'm sure you aren't too happy about that, eh? They made you enlist? Well, at least you got some fair upgrades out of it."
"They did not make me enlist."
Starscream jabbed a claw at the Autobot insignia. "What is this, then?"
"I—I'm a prison guard. I chose to be here."
"This is a cover? What about your archives, aren't they missing you in Iacon?"
". . . I won't be going back."
"Oh." Starscream was suddenly extremely uncomfortable (Pax had loved his function), but he couldn't deny the flutter of pride that made his spark spin. Starscream had been deemed important enough to the Decepticon cause for a jailbreak, a jailbreak that went so far as to put Megatronus's beloved Orion on the line. "Well, cheer up. You busted me out, so it's not like you have to stay here any longer. We just need to get out of this place and then you'll be with Megatronus again in no time. He'll probably make you take the 'con badge, though."
"It's Megatron now."
"Damn. I thought he wasn't serious about that." Starscream had laughed and said something like, "I'll call myself Starscree," when Thundercracker had passed on the news about Megatron's new designation. He'd been cocky enough to place a bet against the claim's validity with Skywarp.
Thundercracker. Skywarp.
"Pax, have you seen my trine?" Starscream asked urgently.
"No, I have not," Pax said apologetically. His optics darted to the ice rubble at Starscream's back.
Starscream jolted at the low, grinding startup sound of heavy machinery. "Slag, let's go! Go, go, go!"
The tunnel was just barely big enough for Starscream and Pax to walk side-by-side, with Starscream's wingspan and Pax's new shoulder width. Starscream had to goad Pax into picking up the pace: poking his shoulder, putting a hand on his back, and eventually linking arms with Pax to drag him along. This was probably the most strenuous physical activity Pax had ever experienced in his soft life—the job of an archivist seemed a sedentary one.
"Didn't they send your aft to bootcamp to make the cover story work?" Starscream complained. "Come on, Orion, work with me!"
"No training was necessary. Soundwave forged my documents," Pax said, but he stopped dragging his pedes so much.
"Ah, of course." Starscream gritted his dentae. "About my trine—you had to see something."
"I'm truly sorry, Starscream, but I was a new guard. They didn't trust me with some of the higher-profile prisoners, and Skywarp and Thundercracker are under greater lock and key."
"Why were they higher-profile prisoners than me? I'm the one on all the wanted posters!"
"Oh, is that what you're concerned with?" Pax asked wryly.
Starscream ignored that. "Skywarp is slippery. He's probably already freed Thundercracker and taken off without us."
"What's the last thing you remember?"
A good question. Starscream wracked his processor, wincing at the error codes that popped up to block his HUD. "My memory files are corrupted. I'll have to sort them out during my next recharge. But the Autobots must have nabbed me during a mission."
"Ah, I should've expected some side-effects. You were gone for a long time, Starscream. . . But Shockwave will help you."
"I woke up frozen in ice, can you believe it? Don't answer that—I'm sure it's old news to you, but I've been unconscious. Frozen! In ice! That's a lot of work to put into holding someone, and it wasn't enough to hold me. I bet the Autobots wish they just killed me, hahaha!"
The joke was wasted on Pax, but they usually were. "I'm sorry," he said solemnly.
"You could've been more useful, but you also could've been less useful. So it doesn't matter." Abruptly, Starscream remembered that Pax had probably given up his entire life to follow Starscream's trine to a remote ice prison planet and attempt to free them (even if Pax's execution of said plan was rather mediocre). Starscream faced resolutely ahead, but peeked at Pax's optics out of the corner of his vision. Pax held himself rather stiffly, which was normal, except his optics were a little dim. And he was silent.
If Pax goes crying to Megatron about his hurt feelings I'll never see the spotlight again, Starscream thought grimly. With a smile that was really more of a grimace, he lightly punched Pax's shoulder with his free arm. Punched him in a comradely way.
"I'll hook you up with Knockout and he could see about making you small again," Starscream said. "And, er, you probably won't be able to go back to the archives, but we can set you up with a new civilian identity if you wanted. A dockworker or something. Honestly, Megatron would be happy to keep you in his habsuite full-time and let you edit his speeches."
"My options are hard labor or being Megatron's prisoner?"
Starscream shrugged. "I was getting at productive member of society or bed slave, but your ambitions are safe with me, Pax. I want to be WingLord."
"It's—what—So?" Pax sputtered.
"So we won't get in each other's way!"
Pax could be so expressive, even with just his optics. Starscream laughed and laughed. When Pax grew a touch distressed, Starscream cycled air through his vents, petted his integrated arm cannons, and tried to move on (but Primus, just looking at Pax's face threatened to send Starscream into another hysterical spiral).
"They were fools not to disarm me, but it's our gain," Starscream said, "You just let me do the shooting. And the talking. And the planning. We'll grab Skywarp, Thundercracker, and a ship to get us out of here."
"And how do you plan on navigating?"
"How hard could it be?" Pax gave him an unimpressed look. "Oh, fine. If my lifetime of flying experience isn't enough for you, we can kidnap a pilot."
"I'd imagine flying yourself through an atmosphere is a different experience than flying a ship through space."
"Oh, rust, are the ships here sentient? If we get into a shuttle, he'll just transform with us inside and that'll be the end of it."
"There are no shuttles here. We aren't nearly important enough." With an amusing hesitance, Pax nudged Starscream's pauldron in a softer imitation of Starscream's comradely punch. "They didn't know a future WingLord would be needing transport."
Starscream grinned, all sharp dentae. "You're funny! I thought you were a piece of slag!"
"Oh. I suppose I'm glad," Pax said, and in spite of his own surprise he seemed to mean every word. "That you think I'm funny, I mean."
"I do not think you are a piece of slag now. But Pax, are you digging for compliments? Megatron will have something to say to me."
Pax coughed static.
"Oh, alright, I'll go easy on you. It's no fun if you don't have anything to say."
"You laugh at me the most when I have nothing to say."
"Hahaha! That doesn't happen so often, you know. You know all these big words."
"Don't be coy. You were raised in almost nobility. You can talk circles around me or anyone."
"And the way I do it is an artform. But, well. . . That polite talk I was raised on was more froth and less substance, I suppose."
"Now who between us is actually digging for compliments?"
"I shouldn't have to dig. Go ahead and just give them to me."
"You are more impossible than I remembered," Pax said, but there was a smile in his optics that his mask couldn't hide.
Pax and Starscream ended up hurrying through the escape route with their arms linked for practically the entire way, even when they both fell silent and contemplative. With the reality of their situation, the banter was a distraction that couldn't last. Pax would tense at every far-off echo, forcing Starscream to stop and wait until the noise faded. Starscream clenched at an empty space in his chassis, searching for the spark-beats of trine mates that had gone deathly silent. He couldn't even comm Thundercracker and Skywarp the usual way because the ice blocked all signal.
Finally, Starscream felt a change in the atmospheric pressure—open air was nearby. "Pax, we're close!"
Pax's caution tried to slow them both down, but Starscream was sick of the tunnels. His wings fluttered in anticipation. Cautious as Pax was, he wouldn't untangle his arm from Starscream's, so it was easy to drag him along despite the new heft to his frame.
The final stretch of tunnel ended in a small cave nestled at the foot of a tall, snowy hill. Starscream saw a sliver of open sky ahead. It was gray, cloudless and freezing, but his wings twitched and his engines purred in joy.
There were voices ahead. Snow and ice crunched loudly under the careless pedes of bots milling at the top of the hill and not making any effort to hide themselves. Starscream couldn't take a peek at who was there without risking his own cover, but he wasn't worried. He could fight anyone, run anywhere or do anything if it meant he could go for a fly immediately afterwards.
Pax huddled next to him at the lip of the cave. "Starscream, wait."
"Oh, right," Starscream muttered, "You should stay behind for a klik while I take care of who's out there."
"No, wait. You were in the ice a lot longer than I led you to believe. I'm truly sorry for that. You still believe in the Decepticons as they were, but their cause has changed. Megatron only lives for violence now."
"What the frag?" Starscream went very still. "If you have a problem with Megatron, you take it up with him. I am not the one."
"I have to tell you now. Things have changed since you've been gone. Please."
"You've been undercover for too long. A lot of mechs just aren't cut out for that kind of work."
"Megatron is different now! I am different. Starscream, it's been three million years since you and your trine disappeared. I haven't been covering as a prison guard at all. I've been fighting on the side of the Autobots—wait!" Starscream had lifted a cannon at Pax's face. "Listen! Cybertron as we knew it has fallen! There's a war. It's destroyed everything and taken us to space and other planets. Megatron has lost his way."
Starscream tried to get his internal clock working again. Every time he tried to access it, it sent a pang of hurt straight into his neural net. Error. Error. Error.
"Pax," Starscream said, very slowly, very sharply. "Where is my trine?"
"I honestly do not know. I'm sorry. You've been kind to me. Go back to the Decepticons, find your trine, learn the truth. Just know you don't have to stay there."
With all of Pax's battle-worthy upgrades, Starscream wasn't sure if a single shot to the helm would kill him anymore. A single shot would certainly alert the prison guards at the top of the hill—except—
"If this isn't a prison, where are we?"
Pax was calm even while facing down the business end of Starscream's cannon. It only made Starscream angrier. "It truly is an uninhabited planet a few galaxies away from Cybertron. Unnoteworthy, or so we thought. I never expected to find you here, or I would have come for you sooner."
"To bring me into the welcoming fold of the Autobots, huh?"
"My team and I crash-landed here after a skirmish with the Decepticons."
"Are there Decepticons here now?"
Pax nodded his helm towards the top of the hill.
Starscream didn't follow Pax's gaze. This was a trap if he had ever heard of one. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't kill you."
"Megatron wouldn't thank you. He wants to do it himself."
Starscream hissed wordless fury, glaring at Pax for one long moment. "Three million years!" he spat, and then he took off up the hill.
Starscream didn't get the courtesy of a warning shot. He knew the instant he was spotted because the hillside in front of him erupted with blaster-fire and even the detonation of a few small grenades. It cleared the snow away, leaving ugly bald patches of frozen dirt.
Starscream ducked, rolled, and pushed off of the ground into a zig-zagging glide, flaring his wings. The proud purple Decepticon badges stood out darkly against silver.
"Hey!" he shrieked over the noise. "Friendly fire!"
A little bit of confidence and a lot of volume could get Starscream wherever he wanted, and this was no different. Someone threw their arm out and the gunfire petered to a stop. Zooming in his optics at the handful of bots ahead, Starscream was able to see matching purple sigils, so Pax hadn't lied about one thing.
At least it was easy to figure out what had happened to his trine: the Decepticons had excavated Thundercracker and Skywarp from the tunnels in blocks of ice. Thundercracker was caught falling backwards, suspended in his ice block with a blue wing dented and the optics in his stoic face widened. Skywarp snarled viciously and his cannons pointed forward with a promise of hurt, for all the good it did him in the end. Starscream had obviously interrupted nothing important, unless he counted the Decepticons standing around, scratching their helms and wondering what to do with the frozen seekers.
Starscream's thrusters carried him to the top of the hill and the Decepticons let him approach, shifting and glaring mistrustfully. They bristled with weapons, armor, and sharp edges, not one of them looking to be without a few battle-grade mods. He didn't recognize any of the ugly faceplates. As Starscream's heels touched down in the midst of the small troop, he spared a prayer to every false god that he wouldn't slip. He didn't, a victory sorely needed, and was able to stand strong surrounded by so many glares.
"Why didn't you use your comms, glitch? We should've just blown you out of the sky!" a femme said, leaning against the handle of a spiked war-hammer as tall as she was.
"Look before you aim!" Starscream shouted, "What kind of two-bit professionals are you? Don't you know who I am?"
"We haven't had an introduction yet," a soldier said pointedly, servos resting lightly on the twin swords sheathed at his sides. It was hard to tell because of all the frame changes and armor mods layered on top of his original frame, but he looked like a racer. Racers tended to be on the slender side, but this bot had put a lot of time, money, and effort into building himself up bigger, with stark black and white colors to paint him like a warning sign. Starscream couldn't be certain of anything anymore, but it all looked like Knockout's handiwork.
"Well, who are you?" Starscream snapped.
"Deadlock."
"Hello, Deadlock. I am Starscream." The name gave no reaction. Starscream pinched the bridge of his nose. "You've got my colleagues in ice over there, but I suppose we're all colleagues so why don't we get started on setting them free?"
Deadlock's red gaze narrowed. "I've never heard of a Starscream and I've definitely never seen you. Where did you crawl out from?"
"From a block of ice, apparently! Imagine my surprise when one moment I'm on Cybertron, and the next I'm waking up to some Autobot goons waving blasters in my faceplate. What's the date?"
Deadlock told him. Starscream gritted his dentae hard enough to make his jaw creak. There was a three million year difference between that time and Starscream's frozen internal clock.
The Decepticons looked at each other, most likely exchanging private comms. It was to Starscream's advantage that just by appearances, he looked like he belonged in a set with Thundercracker and Skywarp. The three of them looked practically the same, except Thundercracker was blue, Skywarp was purple, and Thundercracker's faceplate didn't move much even when it wasn't literally frozen.
Even through the silence, Starscream could tell from the other bots' irritated fields that the back-and forth over comms was heating up.
"This is another Autobot scheme!" one of the Decepticons snapped out loud.
Deadlock turned to Starscream. "How were you able to get out by yourself?"
"The Autobots melted me out. Someone heated up their engine."
"He's taking us for fools!" someone else muttered, a mouthful of misaligned fangs slurring his speech.
"Wait," Deadlock said, "We don't have time for this. Starscream, you're with us or you're not. We need to focus on finding those Autobots. The prime's here!"
Somewhere behind the crest of the next hill, the unmistakable startup noise of ship engines blasted through any protests that might have been made next. The Decepticons watched as a silver cruiser with a huge, frowning Autobot badge plastered underneath took to the sky and left the atmosphere. In the span of a vent, it became a dot on the horizon and then disappeared entirely.
"Ah," Starscream said. "There they go."
From the way the mood darkened, Starscream could have been reading the auras of corpses.
Deadlock's red stare was sullen. "Did you see the prime?"
"No. Why would he be slumming it with his soldiers out here when he's got a temple to sit in?"
Deadlock turned away. "You must've been frozen for a long time."
"So I've gathered. I must speak with Megatron!"
"Of course. You'll be the one to tell him why the hunt failed."