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Ancient hinges groaned as Starscream leaned five point nine degrees further back in his chair. All the chairs on the Senate floor were hoary, moldering things that hadn’t been changed out since the rule of Nova Prime.
Starscream’s Official Senatorial Seat was named Grindsocket, appropriately. They’d never exchanged a single word in all the years Starscream had suffered through his threadbare, pinchy fauld support. It was gauche to talk to the furniture. The senior senators had needed to tell bright-opticked, newly elected Starscream firmly that no, he wasn’t allowed to simply hire a younger chair due to blah blah blah tradition, but they hadn’t needed to tell him that.
Young mechs, they’d tutted, never understood the value of a good tradition. And what was he, barely a million years old? He’d learn, in time. Plus, this was Iacon, jewel of Cybertron. Whatever dilettante nonsense the nobility of Vos got up to just wouldn’t fly—a wink, a nudge, did he get it?—here.
Of course, Starscream wasn’t really from Vos. He was from here.
From the now defunct Better Build Weapons Factory located eighty klicks downwind from the city center so the denizens of Cybertron’s jewel wouldn’t have to smell the construction fumes.
He was young, though. Fifty or sixty-thousand. Probably. There were a few fuzzy millennia in there from when he’d been a mercenary in Vos and spent every spare shanix getting massively high with his loser trine. Not that it mattered. He was more than half after-market parts these days, impossible to tell he’d rolled off an assembly line.
Perhaps another cold-con could have clocked him, but his noble, senatorial colleagues never would. They didn’t talk to the furniture.
“—if that’s all, we can move on to Junior Senator Starscream’s proposal.”
Starscream focused his optics on the sea of carefully painted faces in front of him. He smiled the same dazzling, slightly dangerous smile that had propelled him from charmingly foreign businessmech to Senator Starscream of Vos.
“My very esteemed colleagues, I believe with all my spark that you are going to be extremely interested in the proposal I have prepared for you today.”
-
They never even fought the war Starscream had been constructed for. Some last minute diplomatic brilliance from some politician who’d been hailed as a hero for it had saved them all the trouble, and left Starscream and his two thousand batchmates as expensive, fuel-guzzling surplus.
Starscream didn’t know what had become of the rest of them, but they hadn’t run, like he did. They’d been good little corpses. There was something inherent in his bright and wobbly mass-produced spark that had known from second one when it was time to cut and run. Knew better than to look back.
“You can’t be serious about all this,” said Junior Senator Screwturn. He said this very pompously, which was how he said everything.
It was six agonizing hours of debate later. Starscream was exhausted. Screwturn, who fueled on sanctimony instead of energon, had a fire burning in his optics, and was obviously eager to continue the debate even though the debate should have been over hours ago.
“As I believe I’ve more than adequately explained,” Starscream said acidly, “I am deadly serious about freeing the business community of this great city from the shackles of overregulation.” His vocalizer was starting to crackle from overuse. He had to wrap this up before it really started to fizz. You could never let your voice fizz, it sounded cheap.
“Perhaps we ought to table this for now,” said Senior Senator Prism, sounding as exhausted and annoyed as Starscream felt. He held up a hand, cutting Starscream’s obligatory protest off. “For now. I believe there is real potential in Junior Senator Starscream’s proposal, but it is, perhaps, a little raw, a little unfinished at this time. If the Junior Senator could collect some additional data on the potential economic consequences of allowing new construction in the historical sector, and present it to this committee during next week’s session?”
Prism’s voice lilted up at the end, but it wasn’t a question. He was the one Starscream needed to convince, not Screwturn.
Potential. Okay, Starscream knew what that meant. Prism just wanted to know how he, personally, would benefit from letting real estate developers bulldoze a couple of those crumbling old buildings that no one was even using. He wasn’t on the hook just yet, but he was thinking about biting.
Starscream invented slowly, swallowing down his irritation. Politicians were marks like any other. It was about patience. All you needed to do was convince mechs that you could make them money. Most everyone wanted money, and if you convinced them you were their best bet at getting just a little bit richer, they’d do anything you said. Just so long as it was nothing too obviously embarrassing or illegal of course. That was all you needed to do, and you couldn’t look too slagging eager.
“Of course,” Starscream said pleasantly. “Thank you, Senators, for your time.”
-
“Bzzzt—Starscream?” came the grainy voice over the comm.
“Warpy,” Starscream cooed over the uplink. It was the small hours of the morning, when the sky was at its darkest and you still couldn’t see a single star over the self-enchanted glitter of the city. From up here, Starscream’s top floor penthouse, you couldn’t even see the garbage blowing through the alleyways, just the endless skyline.
Iacon glowed like an energon candy. Ever since he’d first laid optics on it, shining off in the distance, Starscream had wanted to pop it in his mouth and chew.
He was pretty overenergized. That greedy retrorat fucker Prism was stalling him again, wanting the kind of concessions Starscream couldn’t give. Greedy. Short-sighted. Too fucking rich already to see what an opportunity Starscream was trying to hand him on a silver platter.
Idiots. Every other politician in Iacon was so stupid. Didn’t they understand they were all just here to make money?
So, yeah, he was pretty slagging overenergized about it.
“Screamer, what the slag?” Skywarp said. “You don’t call for five years then in the middle of the night—“
“I told you it might be a little while, until I could bring you and TC with me,” Starscream said, kicking his legs back and forth idly where they dangled over the edge of his balcony slash launchpad, “but I’m close, Skywarp. So close. I just need a little push.”
Skywarp paused. Then sighed. “What do you need?”
“I need you to get in touch with Swindle. He blocked my number.”
“I’m not enabling you again.”
“For business, Warp. I need to talk to him about business.”
“Yeah? What kind of business?”
“The kind you don’t need to know about.”
Another pause. “Okay.”
Starscream and his trine weren’t from the same batch—the rest of his batch was probably all dead—but they looked it. Tax law in Vos was a twisting, easily exploitable mess, and in the end, it hadn’t taken that much to convince Skywarp and Thundercracker to get a few minor cosmetic adjustments for the sake of an extra hundred-thousand shanix a year. Trines got decalled together all the time, it was practically required. Matching decals, matching faces, what was the difference?
They were sweetsparks, his trine. They grumbled, but in the end they bent. Like hot metal.
“If you’ll promise to comm more often. Thundercracker has been so slagging moody,” Skywarp finished.
“Hmm, no. But I’ll send you and Thundercracker something nice. By next year, we’ll all be here together, and I won’t need to comm at all. Bye, Skywarp.”
“Bye, afthead.”
-
Money was always enough to lure Swindle out of his burrow, no matter how emphatically he was “never talking” to Starscream “ever again.”
Greedy retrorat.
He knew the perfect mech for the job, of course, who he was sure Starscream would be extremely happy with. And if he wasn’t, Swindle’s consulting fee was nonrefundable.
The picture Swindle painted of the hitmech he recommended was one of flawless, rosy professionalism. No questions asked, next day delivery, service with a smile.
It was all slag, of course. You never could trust Swindle to give you a straight answer when there was money on the line, but the sad fact was he always knew how to get you exactly what you wanted, on short notice for only a mildly unreasonable price. That was the only reason Starscream hadn’t ripped his annoying little head off years ago.
“Drift, huh? Isn’t he a siphoner?” Starscream said, flicking through the messy rumor-filled dossier that Thundercracker had cobbled together for him. “Into some nasty drugs too, I hear. What was it? Grind? Nuke?”
He could practically hear Swindle’s smile going brittle over the comm.
“You don’t need to worry about that,” Swindle said. “He’ll get the job done, you have my absolute guarantee.”
“And you’ll be taking a cut of his fee, I suppose.”
“Hey, a mech’s got to refuel. I have people to take care of. He wants to talk to you direct.”
“Ugh, why on Cybertron would he want to talk to me? What am I paying you for?”
He could hear Swindle’s shrug almost as well as the brittle smile. “It’s a big job. It’s a big enough job that you don’t have that many options. Mechs get nervous around politics, you understand.”
Starscream did understand, but he sighed, very loud and long into the commlink.
Swindle hung up on him.
that’s a lot of shanix you’re throwing around, said the message that popped up on his pad from a scrambled comm number, six hours later.
Starscream’s fingers hovered in the air for a moment—a bad habit. It was something only mechs who’d learned to type on old-fashioned manual pads did. He had all the proper neural hookups now, of course, the latest and best—before he replied.
I know what a job’s worth. If you don’t want it, you can slag off now and stop wasting my time. There. Hardball. That was the kind of thing swaggering street mechs with thick plugs liked. Starscream didn’t actually know if Drift was a swaggering street mech with thick plugs, but he certainly texted like it.
whoa there, i didn’t say that. i was just curious. don’t get many mechs from your side of town looking for my kind of services.
That couldn’t be true. That can’t be true.
it is. i want to meet.
Ugh, WHY? I was told you specialized in QUICK and QUIET.
no one will see you, i know what i’m doing. it’s a risky job. i need to know you’re not gonna shove me in the slag pit. no meet, no deal.
Starscream hesitated for a long moment before replying, FINE, tossing his pad on the couch and going to pour himself a drink.
-
Drift set the meeting for the next morning. Starscream deliberately took his time getting there. Stopping for a cup of hot midgrade with enough additives that it was basically mineral sludge, more brown than pink. He found it bracing.
The address he’d been given was of a detailer he’d never heard of before. It was a nice shop, though, some place he’d go on his own. Drift hadn’t been lying, then. No one would look twice seeing Senator Starscream walk in here.
A sporty red car greeted him at the front and took him to a very lux waiting room.
There was a little bowl of energon treats on the table. Starscream helped himself to one.
Drift slipped into the room quietly enough that a civilian build wouldn’t have senses a thing. But Starscream wasn’t a civilian build. The change in the air currents pinged on his already on alert sensors, even though Drift had entered in his blind spot.
Starscream leaned further back into the couch, letting his head loll sideways to look Drift right in the optics.
“I hope you’re sneakier than this when you’re working,” Starscream said snidely.
Drift was white and black and gold. A good, quality sheen to him. A speedster of some kind, judging from the lines, and forged too. The kind of mech Starscream would expect to see hanging off one of his colleagues arms at some gala, simpering.
But there was a cold glint in his yellow optics, he was a little too heavily armored. Aftermarket mods subtle, but obvious to someone who knew to look. This mech wasn’t anyone’s pet.
Drift didn’t respond right away. Instead he studied Starscream. Starscream couldn’t hear the hum of his engine at all, even as the silence stretched.
“Drift, I assume,” he said to break it. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yeah.” Drift had a pleasant voice. Mid-range, a little speedster rumble. Definitely forged, that wasn’t an off-the-shelf vocalizer. “Everyone knows you, Senator.”
Starscream smirked. “Always nice to meet a constituent. I’m sure I can count on your vote.”
“I’m not in your district.”
“No,” Starscream let his optics flick up and down Drift, as if he were the one off the assembly line, “I don’t suppose you would be. To business, then?”
“Sure,” Drift agreed. He sat down across from Starscream—sprawled, really. Limbs loose, arranged to show off the armored curve of his thighs in a way Starscream could not tell was intentional or not.
Starscream let his wings hinge out, widening himself like he did in front of a crowd, claiming the space. Drift might have dragged him all the way downtown, but it was Starscream’s show. He spread his hands, palms out.
“As you can see, I’m the real deal. Are you satisfied? Surely Swindle’s already told you I’m good for the money.”
“You can’t trust anything Swindle says about money.”
Starscream grinned, nasty and smug, letting Drift see his fangs. Not that he’d be impressed. People looked at Starscream’s shiny, aftermarket root mode and assumed the fangs and claws were just cosmetic. That he was some kind of low orbit cruiser trying to look like a warbuild, instead of a warbuild trying to look like a low orbit cruiser trying to look like a warbuild.
It was like clicking a kinetic puzzle together. A dance of body parts. All you really needed was money, and you could keep changing yourself forever.
Drift probably understood that. He’d got enough work done. Then again, maybe he didn’t. The forged didn’t, usually. They all got it right the first time.
“How about my personal guarantee that I don’t plan to, how did you put it? Shove you in the slag pit. Satisfied?”
“Pit no, I’m not satisfied,” Drift scoffed. “The client is pretty slagging entrenched, as you know.”
“Practically welded to his seat, you could say.”
“Sure, yeah, you could say that. Lots of history is what I’m saying. Lots of friends. Lots of ripples. I want to make sure you understand how big.”
Starscream tilted his head. “Awfully plugged into politics, for a thug.”
Drift’s cheek twitched. “Awfully willing to get your hands dirty, for a high caste.”
“Don’t try to tell me rich mechs never hire you to smooth things over for them,” Starscream scoffed. “I know what I’m doing, which is why I’m trying to hire you, because I’ve been assured that you also know what you’re doing.”
”Right,” Drift said, crossing his arms, leaning back on the couch in a way that drew attention to the dramatic swoop where the curve of his armored hips met the more lightly armored pinch of his waist. Flexibility, strength—not speed, though. This speedster wasn’t doing what he was made to do, and he’d rebuilt his aftermarket body around his aftermarket career.
It almost made Starscream like him, a little. That tiny commonality. Not that he’d ever, ever admit to it.
”Right,” Starscream said, not mirroring, but inverting Drift’s body language. Leaning forward with his hands hanging loose between his thighs. Back curved to conceal how much bigger, how much heavier, he was than Drift. Friendly, open, trustworthy, casual. “I can assure you I’m not looking for a mech to take a fall for me. I don’t want there to be any fall at all. It’s just that, as you said, Prism’s been around a long time. Sometimes old engines just. Stop. It’s sad. It’s no one’s fault. And maybe some stalled out legislation gets a little traction again after the corpse has been rolled off to the recyclers. Maybe some street mechs with habits get themselves a nice little bonus to snort up their cute little noses—“ Drift invented sharply through his cute little nose “—Or maybe, if there are any more questions, I walk out of here instead and not a single fucking mech gets what they fucking want and Swindle bitches us both out for wasting his time.”
Drift’s lips pressed together, one last show of reluctance, before he nodded.
-
Buzzed after the funereal afterparty—there was a specific world for the parties they had after funerals, but Starscream couldn’t remember it—Starscream accepted somber handshake after somber handshake from rusting old Senators who quietly told him that they had always appreciated his youthful gumption, and looked forward to seeing more from him.
“Prime of his life, so sad to see him taken so suddenly,” they all repeated to each other like holo recordings. Like saying it enough times would imbibe the words with some new meaning.
Ripples. Waves, and Starscream was going to ride them right to victory. He even got a nice little photo-op of him looking patriotically sad at the very well-attended funeral. And afterwards, everyone wanted to shake his hand. It was almost as if they all understood that this wasn’t a wake—that was the word, a wake, like the trail a ship left gliding across the Rust Sea—but a victory party.
He went home feeling twitchy. Too much energy zapping up and down his arms. His weapons systems kept trying to online. He desperately wanted to fly, but there had been too many idiots crashing into each other in the upper city and now flight was restricted to commuting hours. Every useless lump of scrap in the Senate was a car, so they didn’t understand why anyone would need—really, really need—to just hop off their balcony at 1am and fly until the air ripped.
Instead, Starscream did a zap of something too weak for him to really feel and paced in unsteady lines across the polished floor.
There was an impulse worming its way up from his motivator to frontal processing. It was a deeply stupid impulse.
Good work, Starscream messaged Drift, who had such nice thighs and such a dangerous smile and doubtless some kind of entertainingly tragic backstory and had thoroughly endeared himself to Starscream by killing for him. Let me to buy you a drink, and express my appreciation.
Stupid. Unprofessional. Suicidal. But correct at the same time. That the kind of subtly sleazy thing Senators were supposed to text cute little race cars who had done them favors. When they wanted other, less deadly, favors.
He didn’t expect Drift to text him back. He expected Drift to have already scrapped this comm number.
An hour later, he got an, okay. Then an address.
Perhaps the night wouldn’t be a wash after all.
-
The address was downtown. Very downtown. Not quite in Dead End, but a little too close to it for comfort. The fun part of the bad part of town, where you could still buy syk that wasn’t laced with neutrinos, and the buymechs mostly wouldn’t mug you. You did see high caste mechs slumming in here, sometimes. Starscream stood out, but not enough for it to matter.
It smelled terrible. Starscream let the funk of exhaust and garbage and waste fluid coat his chemoreceptors, familiar in its utter revoltingness.
The high towers of upper Iacon still loomed in the distance. Starscream glanced back at them before ducking into the bar the coordinates Drift had sent him had led to.
The inside was about as neon as the outside—almost tasteful in the play of colored lights over the faces of the patrons.
What kept it from being tasteful was mostly the patrons themselves. The right mix of builds for Starscream to blend into without too much trouble. Half of them with black light decals, which were trendy this decade, all of them overenergized and buzzed out on whatever mix of boosters the kids were into these days.
No one looked at Starscream twice. Busy drinking, dancing, ogling the dancers on the raised stage in the back. The dancer on the far left had his port covers painted glow-in-the-dark purple. They flashed on and off as he rippled his armor in hypnotic patterns. Thundercracker had tried to teach Starscream how to do that once, a long time ago. Carefully controlled partial transformations in time with the music. Thundercracker had been stripping when Starscream first met him. He had a confidence on stage that vanished the moment he stepped off, and started hunching over on himself again like he wished he’d been framed smaller.
He’d never managed to teach Starscream how to dance, but Starscream had taught him how to kill. He had the same confidence booming through the sky, in a dogfight, when he was ripping some poor slagger to shreds. He was better in the air, Starscream had told him. That was where he was meant to be.
Drift had slipped silently into the bar stool next to Starscream while his optics had been on the stage. Starscream slid the cube he’d been sheltering in the crook of his elbow over, and ordered a second one for himself.
Drift said something Starscream couldn’t quite catch over the music.
“What?” he said.
“Not your usual kind of place, is it?” Drift said, louder, flicking his finials to indicate the whole of the bar, in its tacky glory.
That definitely hadn’t been what he’d said before, but Starscream took a cursory glance around, just to indulge him. “No, not really.” Not anymore.
“I imagine senators drink better engex.”
“Sure.” He sipped his drink, crunching down on the silver and mica flakes. It was good, actually. The engex wasn’t top of the barrel, but one of the closest held secrets of the Cybertronian elite was that the expensive stuff didn’t actually taste that much different from what you could brew up in the basement.
“Actually,” said Starscream impulsively, pitched loud so Drift could hear him over the music, “the cocktails aren’t much better uptown. They’re just more expensive. It’s a scam.” He pierced one of the little balls of silicon from his drink on the tip of one claw, popping it into his mouth. “Most things are.”
Drift paused, frowning again, like Starscream was a puzzle he couldn’t quite figure out.
“Most clients don’t want to meet up after the job’s done,” he said, instead of whatever he was thinking.
“I’m very happy with your results.”
“So leave me a tip.”
“Maybe I have more work for you. Maybe I have an offer.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
Starscream traced the edge of his glass with the tip of his claw, making it screech. “I’m moving up in the world, you know. I’ll have use for a mech of your talents again, no doubt. I have money. Lots of money.”
Drift rested an elbow on the bar top. He was still frowning, but he wasn’t pulling away, he was leaning in closer. “I’m not hard up for money either, these days. And I don’t do retainer.”
He said retainer with a particular curl of contempt. He probably knew that high performance speedsters like him were basically forged to be richer mechs’ pets. How had he ended up a mercenary? The path from factory floor to violence for pay had been a straight and short one for Starscream—it was all in his programming after all, a war machine—but for a smithed racing car? That was strange. Something, at some point, had gone very wrong for Drift.
Drift’s idea of quieter was the alley out back. Blessedly empty of leakers.
”So,” Starscream said, voice ringing out crisp in the empty alleyway. “I see real potential in our continued collaboration.”
”Oh, you’re still pretending that’s what you want.”
Starscream stopped glaring down at an empty cube on the ground and turned his glare to Drift. “What else could I possibly want from you? As I said, I’m moving up in the world.”
The jab didn’t land. Or if it did, Drift didn’t flinch. Instead, he sneered.
“You act so unimpressed by everything. You act like there’s nothing any mech can tell you that you don’t already know.”
“Maybe there isn’t,” Starscream shot back. Snappish. He always hated hearing what other mechs thought of him, it was so rarely flattering.
“There must be something you really care about.”
“Why? So you can try to steal it from me?” Starscream bared his fangs, wings flaring, armor lifting, engines whining a high threat. Louder than he meant to. He was more charged than he’d thought, just a little out of control. He shouldn’t have started drinking at home.
Drift’s optics brightened, apertures widening in sudden interest. “You’re a real warframe,” he said, a little breathily, “not a cosmetic job. I fucking knew it. How in the pit did you become a senator?”
“None of your slagging business,” Starscream snapped, not bothering to deny it. “I suppose you’re going to try and blackmail me now?” he said, trying to modulate his tone back to casual, exasperated, while subtly shifting his weight. He wasn’t entirely sure he could beat Drift in a straight fight on the ground, and the buildings were close enough together here that taking off without shearing a wing off would be nearly impossible. But Drift was a sniper, a ranged fighter, and Starscream had a few meters and a lot of tons on him. They might be evenly matched, if it came down to it, in this disgusting alley.
“No,” Drift said, to Starscream’s great surprise. “Blackmail you for what? I already have all the money I need, and a nice chunk from you already.”
“I don’t know, political favors?” Starscream threw up his hands. “Any little leaker friends in jail you want out?”
Drift flinched a little at that. “No. I don’t want anything like that.”
”Uh-huh.”
”I don’t. And I don’t want to work for you, either. I just want—to get to know you, I guess.”
It was Starscream’s turn to look skeptical. “Why?”
Drift leaned back against the alley wall, not looking at Starscream, but up at the light-pollution hazed sky. Starscream mirrored him, resting his wings against the opposite wall.
“There aren’t many mechs out there who really go after what they want,” Drift said, after a long and weighted pause. “Life grinds them down. They stop trying. They just do what everyone else tells them they should.”
”What, are we kindred sparks, then? Popped out of the same mold?” Starscream said scathingly.
”No,” said Drift with a hint of a laugh, “you’d need lugnuts of solid titanium to pull a scam like you’re pulling.” He pushed off the wall, moving towards Starscream. “You’d need to be utterly and truly glitched to think you could get away with it.”
”I am getting away with it,” Starscream pointed out.
”I know,” Drift said. His clawed fingertips curled under Starscream’s chin. “Completely glitched.” He pressed his lips to Starscream’s.
Of course, Starscream kissed him back. Turned it wetter, dirtier, found one of the connection ports in Drift’s mouth and flicked it open with his tongue. Whatever he needed to get the upper hand back from this irritating, perceptive, unfairly handsome stranger who’d only a few days ago popped another mech’s spark like a soap bubble and made all Starscream’s dreams come true.
It was no small thing to hold over someone, but when Starscream let the cables curled up behind his dentae unspool, Drift practically unhinged his jaw to let him plug in.
Drift sighed, inaudible over the whirr of both their fans, but Starscream could feel the hot air ghosting over his chin, taste a hint of exhaust on the back of his tongue.
It ramped, it buzzed through Starscream’s teeth, making his jaw ache. Charge, and just the barest hint of thought. Just the tiniest taste of Drift’s mind slipping through. It would be so easy to open the connection further, to sink into him. To dig through his files and see that the fuck his problem was.
But Starscream wasn’t stupid, so he kept the connection superficial. No one got into anyone else’s spark-held secrets. Instead, he let himself sink into the feeling. Let Drift tip his jaw this way and that, unlatched the hinge when Drift wanted to go deeper, exposing a couple more ports for him to plug into. It was nice. He hadn’t just made out like this with anyone for a long time. Usually, he was trying to rush them both towards overload so he could go do something else.
The kiss ended on its own. The flow of charge slowing, then petering out. Oral cables unhooked and coiled back into resting positions, and finally Starscream leaned back, straightened his aching spinal strut.
They were still pressed front to front, Starscream’s cockpit squeaking against Drift’s windshield, not completely untangled yet. Starscream found that he didn’t mind. He felt calmer, with the clean electric taste of Drift still in his mouth. He felt like maybe there was nothing he needed to worry about ever again.
It was Drift who took a step back, finally. One of his hands came up to nervously toy with his finial.
“I should—”
“Have you ever been flying?” Starscream asked.
Drift hesitated for a long moment before shaking his head.
Starscream smirked. “Would you like to?”
-
Starscream was soaring high, just like the bare metal skeletons of the new skyscrapers already going up in midtown that didn’t have his name on them, but were his all the same. The shanix for them in his subspace pocket, Scrapper’s grudging gratitude a favor to call in later. The memory of Junior Senator Screwturn’s ugly little optics popping out of their sockets when Starscream’s bill had skated through with a three-fourths majority.
“It really is all about making money, then,” Drift said, through a cloud of dross smoke. He was sprawled out on Starscream’s couch, steam drifting up lightly from between his relaxed plates.
“What else?” Starscream asked, plucking the stick from between his fingers.
“I don’t know. I guess it was stupid to think any of you believed in anything at all.”
Dross made Drift moody, sometimes. It made him opinionated, inclined to ramble on in long meandering sentences full of references to political treaties Starscream had never read, and didn’t care enough to read. He usually just let Drift ramble until he lost track of his own train of thought. He had a nice voice. It was nice to listen to.
“I’m sure one or two mechs out there believe in something,” Starscream said generously, the drugs making him feel mellow, inclined to indulge whatever fit of latent idealism Drift was suffering from.
“Yeah,” Drift said morosely, “but what can they do, when most mechs are just out to make credits. Even me. I’m just out here trying not to starve.”
Dross made himself say things like that too. Like he didn’t have half again as much blood money as Starscream. Death paid. If he hadn’t been constructed for better things, Starscream would still be in the business himself.
Starscream was getting bored of Drift’s vague, sulky mood, so he put his hand on Drift’s thigh, letting it slide upwards to tease at the port covers hiding in the join where the armor opened up around the hip joint.
Drift’s claws had nearly punctured a coolant tube in Starscream’s shoulder when they’d finally broken the smog layer over Iacon, he’d clung so tight. Starscream would have been insulted, if the smeary light of the city hadn’t reflected so prettily on his face. If his optics hadn’t been so wide and bright, taking it all in.
It had made Starscream think, for a moment, that maybe Drift saw the same city he saw. The glittering jeweled promise of it. A promise made to other people, but one you could steal for yourself if you were very, very clever.
Drift had kissed him again, up in the clouds. He hadn’t even needed that much convincing.
In the present, Drift hummed through a cloud of smoke as Starscream lay with his head in Drift’s lap, complained about how some idiots had smashed the windows of his favorite cafe the other day and he’d had to go seven blocks out of his way to go to his second favorite cafe and been nearly twenty minutes late to his meeting—but it had only been with another junior senator, so it’s not as if it had really mattered, but still—
“Did you hear what happened on Messatine?” Drift interrupted.
“What? No. The prison planet? What could possibly be happening there?”
“A prison break. Do you remember that miner a while back, the one with the polemics?”
“No,” Starscream said irritably. He put his mouth back on the banded wires that connected Drift’s overblown thigh armor to his hip, hoping that would distract him.
“Yes, you do. Megatron.”
Starscream did remember. Or rather, he remembered some shiny enforcer yelling that name on the Senate floor along with a bunch of other stuff about corruption or fairness or some other slag that a mid-caste nobody had no business at all yelling about in front of the Senate.
He’d expressed that same opinion later on, after the enforcer had left. Suggested that perhaps Sentinel had some questions to answer about the decorum of his officers. Perhaps that particular officer needed a reminder on the correct way to speak to his betters.
Screwturn, the annoying glitch, had had a whole speech. While he’d wafted hot air around, a few Senior Senators had told Starscream that unfortunately the shouty cop was Commissioner Sentinel’s pet or something to that effect, and he was allowed to do things like storm into a session and yell about stuff no one cared about. Starscream had still been newly elected back then, but he need not worry, he’d been told. Sometimes the little mechs needed to yell a bit and let off some steam. It would all go back to normal soon enough.
It had. Soon enough. Things never changed, until they did.
-
The worst part of flying was gravity. While you were in the air, nothing could touch you, but there was a limit to how long your engines and your fuel could hold out against the heavy drag of the planet below. Maybe that was why Starscream had always felt an odd, aching jealousy for shuttles. They spent weeks flying instead of hours. Long enough to forget what the ground even looked like.
But gravity always grabbed them in the end too.
“Why the glum look, Senator?” chortled Junior Senator Quickspin, who only did irritating things like chortling because that was what the seniors did. “You didn’t think you could win them all, did you?”
Starscream glared at him over the steaming rim of his cube.
They were sitting in the little cafe on the top floor of the Senate building where everyone grabbed a quick cube when they didn’t have time to leave between sessions. It was just before the mid-decade break, so they were all trying to smash through as many bills as possible before they all left for a year. It was a time anyone could get anything they pleased rubber stamped. Or so Starscream had thought. Turned out, in fact no one wanted to give Starscream anything he wanted, and everyone one of his colleagues was a rusting bastard.
“Your problem, Starscream,” Quickspin continued blithely. He was from some old House in Iacon, and had the thickest Towers accent Starscream had ever had the displeasure of hearing. They’d been elected the same year, and Quickspin thought that meant they were friends. “Is that you’re too eager. It’s a wonder you and Screwturn don’t get along better, because you’re just the same. You’re too hungry, too obvious about wanting things.”
“Oh, I should never want anything at all, is that it?”
Quickspin shot a lazy finger gun at him. “Exactly. If you already have everything you could ever want, mech’ll bend over backwards to give you more. Do they not teach you that in Vos? You’re a noble, aren’t you?”
“Too much time spent in academia,” Starscream said with a put upon sigh. “I accidentally picked up the habit of putting effort into things.”
Quickspin snorted. His actual laugh. Rough and undignified. “Made you funny at least, so I can almost forgive you for it. Do you want to go to the Turbofox Club after this?”
“No. I’m having a torrid affair with a lower caste mech and I’m meeting him tonight to clang in the filthy back room of some strip club in Near Edge.”
Quickspin laughed again and clapped Starscream on the pauldron.
-
The mascot of the filthy strip club in Near Edge was, perhaps hilariously, a cartoonishly sexy turbofox holding a hunting rifle. It was called The Burrow, which was a ridiculous name for some place that by all rights should have been called Uncle Swindle’s Fun Palace. It was hideously neon. The back room he and Drift fragged in was actually quite clean.
Afterwards, they lay tangled on the singed couch while Starscream half-listened to Drift ramble, mostly lost in his own thoughts.
Quickspin was a self-centered slagger with bad taste in paint, and engex, and everything, but his words had been echoing through Starscream’s head all day. Not true, not quite, but something close to true. Close enough to make low fury bubble up in Starscream’s tank.
Drift mumbled something that caught Starscream’s attention.
“Decepticons?” he peered up at the underside of Drift’s chin. “Since when are Decepticons relevant?”
Drift frowned back at him, annoyed that Starscream hadn’t been listening. “You’ve seen the graffiti.”
Starscream had seen it. YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED in ten meter letters splashed across the wall of his third favorite cafe. In smaller letters tucked into a corner of the sidewalk. On a flier shoved under the front door. They are lying to you. Come learn the truth.
”No, I haven’t,” Starscream said.
Despite his resent setbacks, despite the rumblings of an inquiry or two into his conduct, despite Quickspin’s snide words, he was close. He knew he was.
There was a critical mass of power and influence and money past which nothing could touch you ever again, and he was so close.
He wasn’t stupid. There was something bubbling up through the city like poison gas bubbling up through the Rust Sea. He just needed a little more, then he’d take TC and Skywarp and maybe Drift too, and find some place off planet to hole up in luxury and comfort.
Drift, who Starscream already knew would never agree to hiding in a penthouse with him forever, gave him a look.
”Sure, fine, I’ve seen it,” Starscream admitted defensively. “Miscreants. It’ll blow over. Mech’re always complaining about something.”
Drift’s look turned stormy. Starscream ran one hand soothingly up his side.
”Fine, fine, yes I know all about them. It’s all everyone is talking about. What about it?”
”They’ve contacted me.”
Starscream’s frontal processing nearly crashed, his mind going utterly blank for a fraction of a nanosecond. “Why?”
Drift shrugged and didn’t answer, which was answer enough. It wasn’t hard to connect the line from political dissidents to hit mech to assassination. He’d drawn nearly the same line himself only a few years ago.
“You’d tell me if someone hired you to kill me, wouldn’t you?” Starscream said lightly.
Drift laughed. “You aren’t important enough for anyone to murder.”
Starscream managed not to flinch.
“I met a few of them,” Drift admitted, quietly. “Interesting mechs.” He paused for a long moment, like he was working up to something. “I think you’d like what they have to say.”
Starscream sat up, sliding out from under Drift’s arm. “I am a duly elected Senator of Cybertron,” he said. “What, exactly, would a bunch of violent malcontents have to say that would interest me?”
Drift gave him a look that said he saw right through him. “Yeah, violent malcontents. Not like you at all. Let me introduce you. What’s the harm.”
“My entire reputation?”
“Already not that stellar, from what I’ve heard. Heard people are starting to ask questions about how your political rivals keep turning up dead.”
“I pay you to keep that slag slagging subtle!”
“I do. I can’t disable the pattern recognition software of every mech in the city. You want that, you hire a mnemosurgeon.”
Starscream’s mouth clicked shut. He licked his lips. “I don’t want to get involved. It isn’t worth it.”
Drift’s fingers closed around one of the pointed tips of his helm. “You so sure you’re still on the winning side?”
-
It was always a terrible day at work when Screwturn tried to talk to him.
Starscream was already on edge. He was getting stonewalled at every turn—apparently some mild civil unrest was enough to make his idiot colleagues balk at any new investments at this time. Better to wait until the metal’s cooled a bit, don’t you agree?
And Starscream himself wasn’t such a sure bet these days, was he? With all those nasty, unfair questions still swirling about.
Starscream did not agree. That wasn’t even the correct saying. You struck while the metal was hot.
“Senator,” someone said, pompously. Starscream already knew who it was before he turned.
What?” Starscream snapped with so much acid that Screwturn took a step back. Starscream invented, modulated his tone. “Screwturn,” he said, trying to sound tired, harried, which was easy, and less like he wanted to rip Screwturn’s head off. Less easy. “You saw the—“ he waved vaguely towards the entrance of the Senate building, where some crazed idiot had painted FACE STEALERS across the steps “—I assume?”
Screwturn cycled his optics, obviously mentally recalibrating. Starscream hoped whatever he wanted wouldn’t take long. There was a helmache climbing its way up his nasal ridge.
“Yes, of course,” Screwturn said. He shook himself. “Mechs rightfully concerned about the overuse of empurata for crimes not worthy of such harsh—“
Starscream tuned him out. His optics drifted down to Screwturn’s hands. He was clutching a pad, fingers nervously playing with the edges. He had a large chip in the paint of his right middle finger. He hadn’t been detailed recently. Starscream had been having trouble finding the time too, especially since the detailer he usually used had gone on “vacation” rather suddenly. Perhaps he would actually try out that flashy red mech who owned that shop he’d first met Drift in, he was sure he’d still be open.
“—I have some concerns—“
“Oh, yes, we’re all very concerned,” Starscream interrupted. He wanted to go home. No, actually, he wanted to go to Drift’s apartment and put his processor in standby mode for a while. And he was going to do just that as soon as he extracted himself from this conversation. “All these dramatics. Quite concerning.”
“What? No, Starscream, I have concerns about what you are—”
“My new transport bill?” Starscream asked airily, irritated to be reminded of it. “Don’t worry about it, dead on arrival. Our esteemed colleagues have other concerns too.”
“Some alarming things,” Screwturn said, slowly and deliberately, “have been brought to my attention.” He tried to hand Starscream the pad he had a death grip on. Starscream did not take it. If Screwturn wanted to yell at him for taking bribes, it would have to wait.
”I’m done for the day,” Starscream said with finality, “and going home. Call my secretary to schedule a meeting, if you want. I honestly could not give less of a scrap.”
He kicked off into the air before Screwturn could say anything else.
Screwturn watched him, a shrinking blue and green dot on the ground. Starscream set the coordinates for Drift’s apartment into his GPS and let the rush of air across his wings blow away the day.
There was some kind of disturbance going on at the intersection of three streets. A whole crowd of mechs packed in tight. Loud enough that Starscream could catch the faintest hint of what might have been gunfire as he flew over it. At least there would be some peace and quiet at Drift’s. He had surprisingly good soundproofing.
-
Starscream stopped short. There was a strange mech in Drift’s apartment. A very, very tall strange mech. Curious red optics met his. The strange mech cocked his distinctive, bell-like helm.
“Who the fuck are you,” Starscream said, even though he already knew.
“Is that Senator Starscream?” said Megatron, not bothering to introduce himself. His red red optics tracked up and down Starscream, sizing him up. He styled himself as some kind of gladiator-poet-prophet these days, Starscream remembered. Starscream hadn’t believed that the prize fighting was anything but ploy, not really. Some good spin. Attention grabbing. It was harder to doubt with Megatron right in front of him, looking so very much like a mech who knew what it felt like to have energon congealing in your knuckle joints. “Whatever could you be doing so far from your ivory tower, Senator?” he said like he already knew. Like Drift had told him about Starscream.
He and Drift would be having words.
“And whatever could you be doing out of your pit, gladiator? A little far uptown for your kind, isn’t it?” Starscream spit with as much hostility as he could muster. It was a lot.
“My kind,” Megatron repeated slowly. Amused, like he and Starscream were sharing a joke. He had the same underlying raspiness to his voice that Starscream worked so hard to conceal. The mark of a cheap vocalizer, mass produced.
Starscream licked his lips. He didn’t know why he hadn’t already turned around and walked away.
“Your kind and my kind might not be that far away, Senator,” Megatron said, and oh yeah he slagging knew.
Starscream was going to throw Drift off a building.
The soon to be dead mech in question interrupted their little staring contest by entering the room. He stopped up short, looking confused.
“Starscream,” he said, “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Can’t I stop by to see a friend?” Starscream said lightly, not taking his eyes off Megatron. “I didn’t know you had… different friends over. Why don’t you introduce us?”
“No need,” Megatron interrupted smoothly, “we’ve already gotten to know each other. Drift? Shall we?” He walked towards the door, the bulk of him such that Starscream could feel the displaced air.
Drift glanced at him, an unreadable expression on his face, then followed in Megatron’s wake.
Megatron paused right in front of the door. “A pleasure to meet you, Starscream. If you ever tire of playing word games with idiots while the real decisions are made in different rooms, come speak with me. We could have a longer conversation.”
Starscream waited until the footsteps had faded completely before he let himself exvent, harsh.
-
Starscream went home alone, to his expensive but not well soundproofed penthouse, and got massively overenergized, sitting out on his launchpad. Something was on fire on the other side of town. Ambulances and police cars zipped by on the road far, far, far below.
He ignored Drift’s comms for two days before Drift finally just broke in. Starscream went to use the washrack and when he got out, Drift was poking at the stunted crystals lining the living room sill.
“Don’t have a pink thumb?” commented Drift
Starscream crossed his arms. “I’m not here every day to drip silicate on them. What the slag do you think you’re doing?”
“You haven’t been answering—“
“With them.”
Drift paused. Licked his lips. “I thought you didn’t want to be involved.”
”I don’t.”
Drift exvented loudly. “Okay, well, I am.”
Starscream and Drift stared at each other for a long moment.
“Why?”
“You know why,” Drift said, exasperated. “You know. You know exactly what’s going on out there, Starscream, even if for some reason you don’t want to think about it. And I know you know, because you’re a slagging senator, and it’s your job to know.”
Starscream let out a flat blat of laughter. “You think my air-headed colleagues ever have a clue what’s going on? That’s hilarious.”
Drift glared at him silently.
“Well? Aren’t you going to try and give me the recruitment speech like your friend, Megatron?”
“If you’ve heard it from him, you don’t need it from me.”
“I don’t know him.”
“You don’t need it,” Drift insisted. “What am I going to tell you, anyway? That I think it’s the right thing to do? You don’t give a slag about that. I can tell you you’re never going to get what you want from the scam you’re pulling with the Senate. Maybe, if you’d done it a few hundred-thousand years ago—“
”I couldn’t have,” Starscream said. He hadn’t been constructed yet.
“—But you won’t be able to ride out what’s coming hiding behind an official desk. I know you’re not actually a coward—“
“A coward—?”
He let Drift talk him into coming back to his apartment, and spent forty-eight hours in a tangle of wires. They had another fight at the end of it, and Starscream stormed back home only to discover that while he’d been gone, someone else had broken into his penthouse.
They hadn’t even been subtle about it. Half his things were strewn on the floor. His ugly little crystals were all knocked over.
Whatever slagger had done this was long gone. Starscream searched every room in the penthouse, null rays first, and didn’t catch even a whiff of exhaust.
In the mess, it was impossible to tell what they’d taken. Starscream was too tired and too irritated to do a full inventory. He didn’t have the emotional stamina to wait on hold for five hours to file a police report, either, or to go see if any of the neighbors he steadfastly ignored had been burgled too.
In the end, he just went to recharge. He had no dreams.
-
He’d been away from the office for too long. Any more absences and he’d risk losing his seat on the urban planning committee. It seemed faintly ridiculous, to be worrying about that now, when he should probably be thinking about leaving the city, but he’d been Senator Starscream for enough centuries now that the habits were engrained.
Air traffic was a nightmare, even though he’d started out much earlier than normal. From what he could see, the ground traffic was just as bad. In contrast, when he landed, the Senate building seemed almost deserted. Apparently none of his colleagues shared his work ethic.
It was almost a relief to meet Screwturn also wandering the empty halls.
“Where is everyone?” Starscream asked.
“I don’t know,” Screwturn said, sounding lost. For a moment, the fear that there was a meeting somewhere that Starscream hadn’t been invited to—
Decisions made in different rooms.
—Gripped his spark. If he was getting excluded along with Screwturn, Starscream had fallen low indeed.
But it faded as soon as it came. Of course there was no meeting, there was no one here, and there was no one here because they’d all done sensible things like stay home or charter a private shuttle to Luna-2. What Starscream would have done if he’d been thinking straight.
“Whatever,” he muttered under his breath, and turned to leave. He was very annoyed to find Screwturn skipping to get in front of him, blocking his way.
He stared incredulously at Screwturn, who didn’t even have the decency to quail under the glare.
“I’m going home,” he said, very slowly so Screwturn’s rusted processor could keep up. “There’s no one here. There’s no work to do.”
Screwturn licked his lips. “Senator—“
“Senator,” Starscream interrupted him, voice dripping pure acid, “whatever dead-on-arrival pet project of yours you want me to vote for, the answer is no. You could tell me it would make me a million shanix overnight and the answer would still be no, because I hate you, and your stupid face. It has been my dearest wish for centuries to tell you this: I hope you trip and fall into a trash compactor. Slag the ever loving pit off. I am not in the mood today.”
Screwturn’s dentae clicked together. His optics cycled once. “Evidently,” he said. “Evidently you… you are not. But I still need to speak with you, and you will hear me.”
“Will I?” Starscream inspected the shine of his claws. His hands were trembling, just the tiniest bit. “And why is that?”
“Because I know who you are.”
“And what is that supposed to m—“
“I found the records of your construction. Fifty-thousand years ago. Right outside of Iacon.”
Every joint in Starscream’s body locked up, top to bottom. His fuel went cold. Every battle protocol hardwired into his frame roared to life.
Whatever he’d been expecting, it had sincerely not been that.
“I have proof of your fraud and your—your illegal flouting of altmode laws. As a warbuild.”
Starscream’s mouth dropped open in sudden, almost comedic outrage. Screwturn was always harping about how over strict he thought alt mode regulations were. He cringed under Starscream’s glare, as if perfectly aware of his own hypocrisy.
“Okay,” Starscream said, over the wailing of his own engines in his audials. “Okay. Let’s pretend for a moment that wasn’t all a load of libelous slag that I will be suing you for—in that alternate dimension, what exactly do you want from me?”
Screwturn actually relaxed, like he thought that meant he was in the clear.
“Nothing so untoward—I don’t want you to think of this as blackmail, merely as a little extra encouragement to consider the emergency powers orders that are going to be brought to the floor tomorrow a little more carefully—“
”Couldn’t you have just tried to bribe me?” Starscream said. Cautiously, one by one, his weapons systems were onlining. He needed to keep Screwturn distracted, so he wouldn’t hear the change in pitch in Starscream’s engines, as his onboard guns charged. “I’m very bribable.”
”I’m sure I couldn’t hope to offer you more money than your many friends in the business sector, Starscream,” Screwturn said, a hint of genuine dislike seeping into his voice. It was almost enough to make Starscream smile.
Starscream hummed. “You know, I’m surprised you decided to confront me like this. Especially since you know everything about me.”
Screwturn frowned. “What are you talking about?”
”Well, since you know so much, you must know I had Prism killed.”
Screwturn’s optics widened. “What?”
”And Flybolt, and Yaw, and if you’re wondering now why I never bothered with you, it’s because you’ve never been anything but a very mild annoyance. Like a software update notification on your HUD. Distracting, sure, but so very easy to flick away. I suppose congratulations are in order.”
”What?” Screwturn’s voice was ratcheting up higher. Squeaky, but perfectly clear even as he panicked. A well-tuned vocalizer. “Congratulations? What?”
”For becoming briefly relevant,” Starscream said, and shot him through the spark.
-
“How quick can you meet me in Kaon?” Starscream said as soon as the connection picked up.
“What? Kaon? What happened—“
“I slagged it,” Starscream said. He was back at his penthouse, tossing everything he could into his subspace. “It wasn’t my fault, obviously, but it’s slagged. Unsalvageable. But it’s fine, I’ve got something else, and I need you and Thundercracker to meet me in Kaon looking impressive. Like valuable military assets.”
“What?”
“There’s some kind of war or something coming, haven’t you heard?”
“No, I haven’t fucking heard!”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got us an in with the winning side. Probably.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?” said Drift.
Starscream whirled, his null rays, still primed from killing Screwturn, already out and humming. Drift raised a browridge, then both his hands. “On edge?” he asked mildly.
Starscream lowered his arm. “It’s been a stressful day.”
“Uh-huh.” Drift’s optics trailed over the wreck of Starscream’s penthouse, even worse now that he’d been tearing through it himself trying to pack. “I thought you might want to know there are enforcers downstairs.”
“Slag.” Starscream covered his optics with his hand. “That’s just great.”
“Do you—“ Drift paused. Starscream looked up to see him shifting his weight nervously. “Do you want help getting out of the city? They’ll be tracking flight paths. I don’t know what happened—“
“I got found out,” Starscream said. A high giggle got caught in the back of his intake. “Guess you were right about me not getting what I wanted. I killed him, but maybe he had a deadmech’s switch set up or something. I didn’t stop to ask. You think that offer’s still good from Megatron?”
“Uh. Yes?” Drift cycled his optics. “If you’re—“
“Do you know,” Starscream said, “how much seekers cost? However much you think it is, it’s twice that. I couldn’t even tell you where it all goes. It’s my own body, and I couldn’t tell you which parts cost what.” He grabbed one last pad and shoved it in his straining subspace before slamming it shut. “When I refused to let my makers kill me to use as a tax write off, I didn’t think I’d end up paying for it anyway. But sometimes that’s what it feels like. No matter how much I get, I steal, I earn, I’m just paying off the debt of my own construction.”
Drift was silent, every line of his body tense like he was watching someone diffuse a bomb. In the distance, Starscream’s audials could just pick up the sound of the elevator dinging.
“Anyway,” Starscream said, shaking himself off, “my trine will meet us in Kaon. Three for one is a deal no one can pass up.”
“You’re really coming?”
“Yeah,” said Starscream, “I’m sick of politics. Being a revolutionary sounds like much steadier work.”
