Chapter Text
I have been a fool, made mistakes -- monumental ones. But I have gained a clear understanding of my place in this universe, of who I am: Starscream, aligned with no side, servant to no one.
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As dented and battered as he was, the Seeker did not get far before he finally had to land. The dust sprang up around him as his pedes hit the dirt, and he shuddered, half curling in on himself. He could hardly believe this. All the information he’d had, all he was willing to trade, and the two-wheeler had thrown it away over a fallen comrade -- as if she was the only one to have lost comrades. As if he was the only one in this war to have killed. If the Autobots even looked at half the things they had done over the course of the war, they would have realized they weren’t nearly as innocent as they liked to pretend. If Arcee hadn’t...
The snarl escaped Starscream before he could stop himself. Long arms wrapped around his torso, claws curling around each upper arm in some sad resemblance of a hug. He’d finally, finally had an out… He had finally been given the chance to escape Megatron and the lost cause the Decepticons stood for, and it had been ruined for him over a grudge the femme hadn’t even known she’d had.
But no matter. He could make his own way.
He walked for hours to find some sort of shelter, each step he took more wobbly than the last. It wasn’t until he thought he was going to collapse that he came upon a cave, scooped out of the side of the canyon, and his shoulders slumped in relief. He took refuge there, choosing to sit with his back against the cave wall and his optics turned towards the mouth, just in case anyone stumbled upon his new hideout. If anyone approached, he would see them, and he would run.
Starscream didn’t want to recharge. It was far, far too risky. But even knowing that, he could feel his optics flicker, could feel his frame sinking to the ground. A few minutes wouldn’t hurt him. It would get his self-repair nanites in gear. And then he could…
Then he could…
A soft snore escaped him, and he began to drift.
----
Another day, another decent haul.
After scrounging around the desert for hours, the back of Leah’s little pink jeep was filled with discarded scraps, all of which were ripe to be sold. The collection wouldn’t rope her much, but there was a small pile of copper buried beneath all the steel and iron that would get her a decent amount. There was, if she was halfway decent at guesstimation, about two hundred pounds of scrap metal and another twenty or so of copper. All together, the collection wasn’t worth more than eighty bucks, but that would pay for gas for the week-- maybe even a meal or two if she was careful.
Hell, maybe more, so long as she avoided security.
Taking one last loop around a plateau, Leah was about to pack it in and head back towards good old Pahrump, Nevada, when the glint of something against the sunset caught the corner of her eye. It was hidden, tucked away in a cave, but it seemed to almost be metallic. She weighed her options quickly, then decided to just say Fuck It and drive inside. It wouldn’t take more than half an hour to explore and determine if there was anything worth salvaging. And even if she only found another few pounds worth of junk, that was still a few extra dollars she could use for the next week.
She would have to be doing this more often, if the shop’s business kept dwindling. As much as she tried to be there and tried to help, her dad’s customers just weren’t happy trusting their “precious trucks” and their “valuable tractors” to a nineteen-year-old girl. Oh, sure, if her Dad happened to be in the shop that day, there were more than willing to turn over their vehicles to him, despite the fact that she was the one that did most of the work. Hell, she had been doing most of the work since Jonathan first refound the bottle when she was only sixteen. But did that matter to them?
It didn’t matter to her, either. Not really. She just needed to keep food in her belly one way or another, and that was what she was going to do. At least this way her mother couldn’t force her father to take rent directly out of whatever she earned.
She drove into the mouth of the cave, relieved to find that it was wide enough to allow her to turn around when she left, instead of her having to risk backing out. The absolute last thing she needed was to somehow run over a cactus or something and get stranded in the middle of the desert simply because she couldn’t see.
The wind whistled through the entrance of the cave, and for once Leah was glad she kept her natural hair short; it wouldn’t do to be wandering through dangerous corridors partially blinded by her own head decoration. She turned the jeep off, rustled under her seat for a second, and then emerged victorious with a flashlight in hand. With how fast the sun could set when aided by mountains, she knew it wouldn’t be long before the flashlight was her only source of light.
But even with the light in hand, Leah still wasn’t able to venture far into the cave. Not because of light or even because of how cold and damp the air was. No, she was stopped from going any further by a fuckin’ giant robot just lounging about a hundred yards or so from the entrance. It was bigger than anything she had seen before, at least outside of the Internet. It had to be at least twenty feet tall, although she was sure the wings-- were those wings?-- added a few extra feet to its height. It was thin, obviously not meant for fighting, so that was a bust, with sharp angles that reminded her of a porcupine, or some sort of bird of prey. Its glass eyes were dark, which meant it was either dead or in sleep mode.
For a moment, the girl could only stare, black eyes searching its form. Then, she simply said, to no one in particular, “Score,” before moving towards it. Whether it was dead or not was of no consequence to her. She wanted-- needed-- that scrap metal. Holding the flashlight between her teeth, Leah set herself to climbing up the metallic monster’s leg. As terrified as she may have been of heights, the creature’s thigh couldn’t have been more than five feet tall; not too terrible of a Jump And Scramble, and one she had made before.
One she was firmly on the leg, she began her climb upwards, using the little gaps and seams in its armor to move. The whole time she moved, she kept her eyes upwards, refusing to look down. Dark hand passed dark hand, trying to find whatever she could use to move upwards. She was so focused on continuing her climb that she didn’t notice when her hand found something that wasn’t a crease or crevice. Instead, it seemed to be, by all intents and purposes, a gash in the metal being’s form, complete with something dribbling from it. And it was only when her fingers touched the blue liquid that she realized that might not have been the best place to grab.
Another clue was when the creature screeched.