Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Council Tower was quiet at night.

Even the endless hum of Iacon’s energy grid seemed muted after dusk, the pulse of the city reduced to a faint mechanical heartbeat beneath the glass floors. Cybertron did not sleep, not truly, but its ruler did not allow himself rest either.

Starscream sat alone in his private office, the high windows stretching into the smoke-choked sky. The planet’s metallic horizon was reflected in the gleam of his armor, polished to perfection, as always — though the light did little to soften the weariness around his optics. A ruler’s posture. A soldier’s paranoia.

His talons danced over the console in front of him.
A few lines of code, a bypass through Metroplex’s security partitions, a whisper of data decrypted.

Private: Cityspeaker Logs.

That was what they were called. Windblade’s private recordings, the Camien Cityspeaker’s reflections, her official observations, her personal thoughts. Tidy little sound files tucked away in the Titan’s memory core. She must have believed they were safe there, locked behind the trust of a living city. Foolish.

He told himself this was procedure.
A precaution.
The ruler of Cybertron could not afford secrets festering in his own capital.

But when the first log began to play, Starscream didn’t lean forward out of suspicion; he leaned forward because it was her voice.

“Starscream believes he’s in control,” Windblade said. Her voice was soft, even measured, but with that undertone of quiet intensity that always seemed to carry conviction. “He’s trying, I think. He wants to do good...in his way. But every time he reaches for something pure, he twists it to armor himself. He doesn’t know how to be vulnerable without feeling weak.”

A long silence followed. The faint buzz of the recording line filled the room like static rain.

Then, softer:

“I don’t know if I pity him… or if I’m just waiting for him to fall.”

There’s something intoxicating about it; the way she says pity, as if it’s almost affection. As if somewhere, beneath all her sanctimonious Camien restraint, she might see him. The way no one else does. The way he’s been waiting for someone to, since the war ended and the silence began.

There was something in her tone, not sympathy, but not cruelty either. A precision of thought. Windblade spoke of him like he was an equation she could almost solve. Like she wanted to. She was dissecting him with her words.

He told himself it was insulting. He told himself he would delete the file.
He told himself many things.

Instead, he pressed play again. And again. And again.

Starscream’s hand hovered above the controls. His wings, faintly trembling, folded tighter against his back. Beneath all his pride and steel, there was an ache — deep and unacknowledged — for someone to see him and not immediately recoil. To believe there was something beneath the smirk and the schemes worth saving.

And she did see him.
Not the way he wanted. But enough to keep him listening.

Every night afterward, he returned to those recordings; at first out of curiosity, then out of habit, and finally out of something much darker.

He memorized the cadence of her voice. The pauses when she searched for words. The subtle shift of tone when she said his name. He began to anticipate her judgments, her hesitations, her merciful attempts to understand.

It was almost like a game to him. Every few nights there was something new, something different.

The ruler of Cybertron, the Voice of the New Age, sat alone in his tower, surrounded by the ghosts of his own empire and the only voice he semi-trusted was one that didn’t even know he was listening.

He told himself it was intelligence-gathering. But the truth was simpler, and far more dangerous:

Starscream was lonely; her voice? Absolution.

And that drove him mad.

He told himself he wasn’t going to listen again.
He told himself that every night.

And every night, he failed.

The tower was dark, save for the faint red glow of the monitor and the wash of citylight filtering through the high windows. Outside, Iacon shimmered with distant movement — the illusion of life in a world rebuilt from ruin. Starscream didn’t look at it. His optics were fixed on the console, on the pulsing indicator of a new file.

A new log.

He hesitated.
Just long enough to pretend he had a choice.

He clicked on it like an addict.

“Starscream doesn’t understand trust,” Windblade’s voice began, calm and sharp as a scalpel. “He demands loyalty, but he can’t give it. Every alliance is a transaction to him. I think that’s why he hates me...because I refuse to buy in.”

The words hit him like static through his wings.

He stood too quickly, talons scraping the desk, metal ringing off metal. His vents cycled fast, sharp, angry.

He hates me.

He wanted to laugh but the sound caught in his throat. Hate was easy. Hate was safe. Hate was the thing he’d built entire empires from.

But hearing her say it—
he couldn’t stand it.

He paced the length of the room, claws flexing, wings twitching in restless agitation. The console kept playing, her voice following him like a ghost.

“Sometimes I think he could have been great if someone had reached him sooner. But now…he’s so used to being feared that he doesn’t know how to exist without it.”

He slammed his fist into the wall. The sound echoed down the empty corridor outside. A panel cracked; a hairline fracture in the pristine surface of his rule.

“Shut up,” he hissed under his breath — but he didn’t stop the playback. He couldn’t.

Because beneath the anger, there was something else. A tremor of recognition. The worst kind of truth. The kind that felt too accurate to be coincidence.

Starscream pressed both palms to the desk, leaning over the console. His reflection stared back from the darkened glass, red optics, strained mouth, the faint tremor in his shoulders he couldn’t quite control.

She shouldn’t know him like this.
She shouldn’t see this deeply.

He had spent eons perfecting his masks; arrogance, venom, charm, control. Yet here she was, dissecting him in the dark, speaking his unspoken fears into reality.

And he kept listening.

He replayed the line — again and again, until the sound warped slightly, until the tone in her voice began to feel like affection.

He doesn’t know how to exist without it.

Her words wrapped around him like wire, tight and suffocating.

He told himself it was fury that kept him rooted there. That he was collecting evidence, preparing to use her arrogance against her later.

But it wasn’t fury.

It was hunger.

The raw, gnawing hunger to hear her say his name again.

For once, not in council chambers. Not as an adversary. Just his name.

Starscream dropped back into his chair, hands trembling slightly, optics burning red in the reflected light.

“You don’t know me,” he muttered, voice fraying. “You think you do, but you don’t. You can’t.”

He almost convinced himself; until he played the recording again.

By the third night, the routine had a rhythm. He would finish the day’s meetings, exchange the usual threats dressed as diplomacy, retreat to his office and pretend to review reports.
And then he would call up her voice.

Windblade’s new log played with the same clean precision as the others.

“He’s restless,” she said. “Every decision feels like a test he’s already decided he’ll fail. I think he wants someone to believe in him, but he’s built a world that won’t allow it.”

He stopped breathing for a moment. The words sounded different tonight; closer, almost tender. His talons scraped faint trails across the metal of the desk as he replayed them.

A rational mech would have deleted the archive. Starscream rewrote the access permissions instead: all incoming logs now routed through his personal network before they reached Metroplex’s core. A harmless precaution, he told himself. Just oversight.

When the next log arrived, he opened it before she even finished recording.

“Sometimes,” Windblade whispered, the faint hum of Metroplex audible behind her, “I wonder what he would be without the throne.”

Her exhaustion carried a kind of gentleness that tore through him. For a heartbeat he imagined she was speaking to him, not about him.

He pressed his mouth close to the speaker grille, as if proximity could make the illusion real. “You’d understand if you looked harder,” he murmured. “You’d see I could be everything you want me to be.”

But even as he said it, he opened a new file and began to type: falsified fragments, subtle changes in her audio tags—adjustments small enough that she would never notice. If he could shape what she said, perhaps he could make her see him the way he wanted to be seen.

That thought frightened him, and yet it thrilled him.
Control, intimacy and confession, all braided together until he could no longer tell them apart.

The fatigue in her voice, the faint crack in her control. It made his spark stutter.
He bent toward the console until his reflection blurred on the dark screen.

“Say my name,” he breathed. “Just once like you mean it.”

Outside, the lights of Iacon pulsed in slow rhythm with the hum of Metroplex’s systems. Inside, Starscream sat perfectly still, listening to her voice whisper through the static, each syllable another hook sunk a little deeper.

He told himself he was only protecting Cybertron.
But the city wasn’t what he was guarding anymore.

It was the sound of her saying his name.

And he made sure to cling onto every single piece of static that came out of her vocalizer.

Until the Council Tower had begun to mirror him.

Dust collected in the corners of the great hall where once every surface gleamed. The overhead lights dimmed a fraction each night as he put off maintenance orders, unable to stand anyone else inside his space. Even the air felt thin, static-heavy, dry with disuse.

Starscream hadn’t recharged properly in days.

When he did collapse into his berth, Windblade’s voice followed him there, echoing from the console at his bedside. He would lie perfectly still, listening until the sound of her breathing on the recording seemed to sync with the pulse of his spark. Every flicker of power through the tower’s conduits became the rhythm of her voice.

He started to feel her in everything: in the hum of Metroplex’s powerlines, in the whir of cooling fans, in the high metallic keening that sometimes built in his audials when the tower grew too quiet.

“He’s unraveling,” Windblade said on one of the later logs. “I can see it. He wants so much to be trusted that he’s becoming the very thing he fears. Every time I try to reach him, he flinches as if it burns.”

His wings twitched at that. They always did now, small, involuntary spasms that set his joints aching. The cables beneath his plating buzzed restlessly; his vents struggled to keep up with his overclocked systems.

He told himself it was the strain of leadership. It was easier than admitting the truth: that her words had carved themselves into him so deeply that his body couldn’t forget them.

He stopped attending Council sessions in person, claiming the data feeds were sufficient. He adjusted her security clearances daily, sometimes three or four times in the same hour, convinced she was trying to hide something from him. He could feel her slipping through his grasp even when she wasn’t there.

When he did catch sight of her—passing in the corridor, helm tilted toward some report—the world narrowed. His optics adjusted too fast; his balance faltered. The sound of her voice in real space didn’t match the one in his recordings. It was rougher, too alive.

It left him shaking long after she walked away.

That night, he tried to replay the logs to smooth the difference, but they no longer matched the cadence of her speech in person. He edited them, splicing syllables together until the voice in his archive said his name the way it had in his imagination.

He knew it was madness.
But madness felt easier than silence.

Starscream sat with the lights off. The glow of the console washed his armor in pale blue; the rest of him was shadow.

He played one of the early logs again. Windblade’s voice filled the room, calm as ever.

“He believes control will save him. I think it’s fear—he doesn’t know what he’ll be if he stops fighting everything.”

He answered without thinking.

“Wrong,” he said quietly. “It’s not fear. It’s—” He stopped, realizing what he was doing.
The silence hummed in response.

He started the file over.

“He believes control will save him—”
“Of course it will,” he snapped. “Someone has to keep this planet standing. Someone has to make the hard choices.”

“—he doesn’t know what he’ll be if he stops fighting everything.”
“I’ll be gone!” He slammed a palm against the desk; the glass quivered. “I’ll be another voice you bury in your reports!”

The playback ended with a soft click. The quiet that followed clawed at him worse than the words had. The console waited for a command. His wings trembled from the tension in his frame.

Another log.

“I can’t decide if I’m angry with him or sorry for him.”

He laughed, a rough, static-choked sound. “Don’t you dare,” he hissed.

“Don’t you pity me.”

He replayed the line again and again, each repetition grinding deeper, his voice breaking between fury and something close to pleading. “Say something else. Anything else. Tell me I’m right. Tell me you understand.”

The room felt smaller with every cycle. His vents struggled to pull air; his wings twitched with the effort of holding themselves still.

“He could still change.”

“I’m trying!” He was on his feet now, leaning over the console as if he could force her to hear. “You think I don’t bleed for this place? You think I don’t—”

His words dissolved into a harsh exhale. The monitor reflected a face he barely recognized; optics too bright, lines of stress fracturing the enamel around his mouth.

“But he doesn’t know how to trust.”

“I want to trust you!” he shouted. The admission rang off the metal walls and came back smaller, emptier.

Silence answered.

He sank into the chair, trembling, whispering into the dead air. “You wanted honesty. There. You have it. So talk to me. Please.”

Only the low hum of the storm replied, and somewhere inside the console, her recorded breath filled the static like a heartbeat that wasn’t his.

Thin lines of light slipped through the tower’s windows, glinting off the shards of fractured glass scattered across the floor. Starscream didn’t move. The console still hummed softly, waiting for another command, for another confession to dissect.

He stared at it, optics dim, vents dragging uneven breaths through the silence. Then, slowly, he reached for the controls again.

“Play next file,” he whispered.

The system obeyed. Windblade’s voice filled the room once more.

And somewhere far below, Metroplex stirred; awake, listening.

Chapter Text

Windblade had always thought the hum of Metroplex was a comfort.

Even before Cybertron’s skies cleared, before the Council Tower rose like a wound stitched in chrome, that deep, rhythmic pulse beneath the city was her constant companion; a reminder that the great Titan still lived, that the planet itself still had a heartbeat.

Lately, the sound had changed. It wasn’t weaker, exactly, just uneven, like the great machine was holding its breath.

She blamed the council meetings at first. Endless hours of protocol and compromise, of pretending the planet was at peace simply because its ruler insisted it must be. Starscream’s rule meant order by exhaustion: no war, but no rest either. Every edict felt like a blade balanced on her own outstretched hands.

Windblade spent her days crossing between the Tower and Metroplex’s chambers, mediating disputes, translating the Titan’s wordless messages. She told herself she was too busy to notice the smaller things, how the council aides avoided Starscream’s wing of the building, how his reports came later and later, how his signature had begun to shake in the datafeeds.

And yet, there was a weight in the air around his name now.

When she accessed the Metroplex logs that morning, she found a string of corrupted files—audio entries tagged to her own Cityspeaker account. The metadata was off by mere seconds, almost invisible unless you looked closely.

She frowned, checking the encryption. The system returned an error: Insufficient clearance.

That shouldn’t have been possible.

Windblade sat back, the Titan’s low vibration thrumming through her chair. She told herself it was a glitch, a routine oversight. But the hollow feeling in her core said otherwise.

Something in the Tower had shifted. And for the first time in a long while, she wasn’t sure if Metroplex was warning her about the city…or about its ruler.

There were always system errors, always files misaligned or corrupted during energy surges. The Council’s networks were still half-stitched together from post-war debris, and Metroplex himself was far from stable.

But the irregularities multiplied.

The first time, it was a missing timestamp. The second, an altered encryption key that matched Starscream’s personal access chain. By the third, she knew it wasn’t coincidence.

She stopped sleeping in her quarters at the Tower, preferring the quiet sanctuary within Metroplex’s sparkchamber. His pulse was steady there, grounding. When she closed her optics, she could feel his concern—wordless, but insistent, like a hand pressing gently against her spark.

“Something watches,” the Titan murmured through the network one night, his voice a deep vibration that rippled through her systems.

Windblade paused mid-calibration, fingers frozen above the console. “Watches? Who?”

“The Crown.”

She didn’t need him to explain.

The next morning, she walked the long corridors toward the Council Tower’s upper floors. The halls were immaculate as ever, but wrong in ways that only she seemed to sense. The air smelled faintly of burnt circuitry. The polished metal reflected light too sharply, as though the building itself were tense.

Aide mechs lowered their voices when she passed. Doors sealed too quickly behind her. Somewhere above, she thought she heard the echo of a recording—voices caught in endless repetition—but when she turned, the sound vanished.

She told herself she was imagining it. That Starscream hadn’t changed anything since their last conversation, that he was simply busy, paranoid as always.

But even in session breaks, the space murmured—air circulators whispering, data screens pulsing faintly with unread messages, mechs talking in low, calculated voices. It was the sound of a city trying to remember how to be civil.

Windblade sat halfway down the long arc of the table, stylus poised over her datapad. On the far end, Starscream spoke.

He was in rare form today; words clipped, gestures deliberate, wings framing him like a crown of steel. He used his voice like a weapon: not to strike, but to cut the air clean. Every decree came out polished, efficient, final.

“We can’t afford sentiment,” he was saying. “Not while half the outer sectors are still unstable. You want freedom? Earn stability first.”

Ironhide bristled. “You mean your kind of stability?”

Starscream smiled, the faintest curve of the mouth. “The functional kind.”

The argument went on. Windblade only half-listened. She was watching the light instead; the way the Tower’s illumination flickered, too subtly for anyone else to notice. Every few seconds, the glow shifted toward a cooler tone, as if reacting to Starscream’s mood.

When the session adjourned, he passed her on the way out. “Cityspeaker,” he greeted, voice smooth. “Still keeping the world from falling apart?”

“Trying,” she said, matching his tone.

He lingered for a moment too long, optics flicking over her face as if searching for something. “Good. Don’t stop.” Then he was gone, wings slicing the light as the doors sealed behind him.

For a few seconds, she simply stood there, the echo of his words hanging in the air.

Later, in Metroplex’s chambers, the silence returned—vast, steady, safe.
She sat cross-legged near the core conduits, running calibration scans through her wrist comm.

“He spoke today,” the Titan said, voice low and resonant, threading through her system interface.

Windblade glanced up. “Starscream? He always speaks.”

“Not to the Council. To me.”

Her hand froze. “When?”

“During the early of the evening. He said—” A pause, as if the Titan were searching his memory banks. “He said, you will understand one day.”

She frowned. “He shouldn’t even have access to your comm channels.”

“He found a way.”

She didn’t answer. Her optics traced the slow pulse of light through Metroplex’s walls, the faint rhythm that had comforted her for so long. Now, for the first time, it felt uncertain.

Her private reports kept glitching. Half-finished sentences, missing timestamps. Once, she reopened a file to find a fragment of static shaped into faint words—barely audible, but there: her own voice, played back with a soft distortion.

“You said he’s watching...” she recalled the Titan’s warning.

She sat down hard, vents stuttering. The glow from her console cast a pale sheen over her hands, and in the glass reflection she saw the Council Tower behind her, a monolith of black light, watching.

Windblade began with small things. Routine diagnostics. Simple commands that shouldn’t have drawn attention. She logged her access times carefully, rerouted through secondary circuits Metroplex helped her mask.

It was work she’d done a hundred times before—checking for corrupt nodes, cleaning redundant caches—but now she moved like a thief inside her own city. Every flicker of light, every soft static pop, made her pause and listen.

The deeper she traced the network, the more she saw the same signature. Not quite a name; Starscream was too careful for that, but a pattern. A rhythm. A fingerprint written in precision.

He had been here. Often.

And not just in the Tower’s council archives. He’d threaded himself into Metroplex’s systems, into communications, into her personal files. The most recent trace was only half a cycle old.

“He hides in plain sight,” Metroplex murmured, voice low as tectonic movement.

“I know,” Windblade said quietly. “But why? What is he looking for?”

The Titan didn’t answer. Or maybe he couldn’t.

The next time she saw Starscream, he was waiting for her outside the central lift.
He smiled—too quickly.

“Cityspeaker,” he said, inclining his head just enough to mock courtesy. “I was hoping to catch you.”

She matched his pace as they walked. “You usually do.”

He chuckled, not missing a beat. “I’ve noticed you working late. Diligent as always. Metroplex must be…demanding.”

The tone was light, almost casual, but something under it rang wrong.

“Only when someone interrupts his rest,” she said.

He tilted his head, wings flicking in faint amusement. “You make it sound like he resents me.”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

He laughed—too sharp—and for a moment his optics dimmed in a way that looked almost like pain. Then it was gone, masked by another smirk. “If you ever feel overwhelmed, you could simply ask for help. I know more about these systems than anyone gives me credit for.”

“I know exactly how much you know,” Windblade replied, soft but steady.

He froze mid-step. Only for a second, but it was enough. The wings flexed behind him, feathers twitching like metal blades under pressure. Then the smile returned; cool, perfect, and utterly false.

“Then we understand each other.”

The lift doors opened. He stepped inside first, glancing back at her. “You’ll drive yourself mad, Windblade. The city’s full of ghosts.”

“I find it highly unlikely that I’ll end up like you, Lord Starscream.” She didn’t follow him.

The doors closed, and for a long moment she stood there, staring at her own reflection on the polished surface. Her sparkbeat had quickened. The air felt colder than before.

That night, when she returned to Metroplex, the lights dimmed automatically at her presence. She sank down beside the central interface, exhaustion heavy in her limbs.

“Metroplex,” she whispered, connecting her commline. “He knows.”

“Yes.”

“Can you hide my private archives?”

“I can shield. Not erase. He will notice.”

Windblade stared into the dim pulse of the Titan’s core, its rhythm uneven. “Then we’ll let him notice. Just not too soon.”

She opened a new log; encrypted, hidden behind three layers of code even Metroplex struggled to follow. For a long time, she didn’t record anything.

When she finally spoke, her voice trembled between fatigue and resolve.

“Personal entry. For my own record. Starscream’s presence in the network grows stronger. Watching, listening. If I disappear, someone needs to know where to start looking.”

She paused, then added softly, almost as if to herself:

“And if he’s listening right now…then let him.”

-

To anyone watching, nothing had changed.

But beneath the surface, her search narrowed to a single thread—a sequence buried under redundant code, disguised as routine Tower diagnostics. It pulsed faintly, like a second heartbeat beneath the main network.

When she traced it to its source, she found a familiar designation.

Her spark thudded once, hard.

She isolated the file. It wasn’t a report or a protocol log. It was audio. A collection of recordings; her voice, catalogued and dated across months. Her private reflections, her quiet doubts, every late-night confession she’d thought belonged to her alone.

One of them began to play before she could stop it.

“He doesn’t realize how much he’s already lost.”

“Wh...What?” she stammered in disbelief. I wasn’t information on Metroplex, anything technical or something he could twist in his wicked mind to dress as betrayal.

Her own voice filled the chamber, but another voice layered beneath it, faint and distorted—Starscream’s. Laughing. Whispering the words with her, matching her cadence.

Windblade’s vents hitched. She slammed the stop command. The console flickered, ignored her, replayed the same snippet again, quieter this time, as if to taunt her.

He was listening to her.

Her opinions, her reflections, the way she saw him. That was what he wanted.

Her processor struggled to make sense of it. Of all the things he could have stolen—data, access codes, secrets—he had chosen this. Her thoughts. Her voice. She stared at the screen as though it might explain itself. This wasn’t about Metroplex. It wasn’t about council intel, troop movements, or power networks, nothing he could twist in that cunning mind of his to accuse her of treachery.

Why?

Was it arrogance—some grotesque curiosity to know how deeply he’d gotten under her plating? Was he looking for weakness in her perceptions, or chasing proof that she still saw something redeemable in him?

Was it vanity? Some cruel fascination with the only person who dared to question him? Or something else entirely, something deeper, hungrier?

The console went dark.

Windblade’s vents seized; for an instant she couldn’t draw air. The silence that followed wasn’t peaceful, it was pressure, thick and intimate, as if the Tower itself were listening to her panic.

She stood there for a long time, staring at the dead console. The room was too quiet—no hum, no whir of cooling fans, just the faint sound of her own vents stuttering against the weight in her chest.

Her sparkbeat steadied, then slowed. Once the panic dulled, thought returned, sharp and surgical.

Starscream could have read anything. Every classified record, every private council archive, every piece of data the Tower processed ran through his authority key. He didn’t need to steal hers.

So why go after these? Why her voice, her opinions of him?

She replayed his patterns in her head; the way he used to look at her during council debates, optics sharp, searching her face after every sentence like he was trying to see himself reflected there. He always asked what she “really thought.” Always baited her into honesty, even when it cut him.

He fed on it.

Understanding, she realized, wasn’t a threat to him, it was an addiction.

He wanted to hear what she saw when she looked at him. Not because he trusted her judgment, but because he couldn’t stop needing it.

He couldn’t see himself clearly anymore—not after everything he’d done, not through the lies he’d built around himself. So he borrowed her eyes. He watched her thoughts the way a starving mech watches a spark flare in the dark.

The thought made her shiver.

He didn’t want control this time. He wanted validation.

But what kind? Did he want her hatred, to confirm the role he’d built as villain, tyrant, survivor of endless betrayal? Or did he want her belief that there might still be something inside him worth saving?

He wanted both, she realized. That was the cruelest truth.

He wanted to be seen as irredeemable; and still forgiven.

The contradiction of it made her ache with a strange, reluctant pity. He was spiraling, and she was the mirror he used to measure how far he’d fallen.

Her optics dropped to the console again.

“So this is what you wanted,” she murmured to the empty air. “Someone to hear the things you can’t say.”

Her voice was almost a whisper, but in the stillness of the room it sounded too loud.

“But you don’t listen, Starscream. You consume.”

The longer she stared at the console, the more the fear began to change shape. It didn’t vanish, it settled. Hardened. Became something sharper.

He wanted to hear her. Fine.

If Starscream’s vanity demanded her voice, then her silence would starve him—or better yet, her words could become weapons.

Windblade lowered herself into the chair again, hands poised over the interface. The system’s glow painted her face in cold light. She could almost feel him, somewhere beyond the data stream, watching, listening, waiting.

“Why me?” she whispered, almost to herself. Because she was the only one who told him the truth. The only one who didn’t worship or fear him enough to lie.

Because her judgment of him mattered more than all the council decrees combined. Because in the absence of faith, he needed someone to see him—to name him, even if the name hurt.

That realization pressed against her spark like a weight.

He’d made her his conscience. And in doing so, he’d given her power.

Windblade drew a long, slow breath and reconnected the console. His words flashed through her processor, his tone sounding more and more like a plea.

“Then we understand each other.”

She huffed in surrender.
Her hand moved fast, she opened a new recording file, one she knew he would find, because she wanted him to.

“Personal log,” she said quietly. “For the record. If the Ruler of Cybertron insists on listening, then perhaps he should hear this.”

She paused, letting the hum of the system fill the air.

“Starscream. I don’t know what it is you’re looking for in me. Reflection? Judgment? Salvation? You won’t find it by stealing my voice.”

Her tone stayed calm, measured, even as her spark hammered inside her chest.

“If you need to be seen so badly, then stop hiding behind my words. Stand in front of them.”

She ended the recording and saved it without encryption, deliberately leaving it open in the system.  For a moment, she just sat there in the dim light, her hands trembling faintly.

“Let’s see if you’re brave enough to answer,” she murmured.

And indeed.

High above the city, in his private spire, Starscream sat in the dark.

The console before him glowed faintly with residual code—her encryption sequence, elegant even in resistance. He’d felt her touch on the system hours ago, her intrusion tracing the path of his own.

She knew. He should have felt cornered. Exposed. But instead, his spark pulsed with a strange, burning exhilaration.

Across the monitors, her voice flickered through fragments of corrupted data—half-sentences, broken syntax, static between words. It was enough. He knew every intonation by heart now.

The system pinged softly, a new file waiting in the shadowed directories. Routine, he told himself. A misplaced report, perhaps.

He opened it. Her voice filled the dark spire. Calm. Measured. Beautifully defiant.

“Starscream. I don’t know what it is you’re looking for in me. Reflection? Judgment? Salvation? You won’t find it by stealing my voice.”

He froze, optics narrowing, wings flexing almost imperceptibly. The words weren’t like the logs he had memorized, or the fractured reflections of her thoughts he’d so carefully curated. They were alive.

“If you need to be seen so badly, then stop hiding behind my words. Stand in front of them.”

The faintest tremor ran through his frame. His claws clenched the edge of the console. His systems hissed and whined as if protesting the tension in his spark.

She had… answered him. Not by running. Not by begging. By taking control.

The realization struck him harder than any insult. Her audials, her phrasing, her rhythm; it wasn’t just her voice anymore. It was a challenge. A hand held out in the dark.

Starscream leaned closer to the console. He played the recording again, frame by frame, syllable by syllable. Every note she stressed, every pause between words, he dissected.

“Why…” he whispered, voice rough with something between anger and longing. “Why do you speak to me like that? Why do you dare?”

The spire’s silence swallowed him, leaving only her voice and the faint echo of his own obsession. He ran a simulation of her tone, overlaid it with his memorized versions, and still it slipped through him, too alive, too…real.

For the first time in cycles, Starscream’s compulsion faltered. He wanted to possess, to consume, to hear and memorize—but now she had turned herself into something he couldn’t fully grasp.

“You’re…testing me,” he murmured. Almost admiring. Almost…fearful.

A storm had started outside, tapping against the windows, matching the pulse in his spark. The darkness in the spire deepened. And somewhere, somewhere beyond the hum of the city and the reach of his monitors, Windblade waited.

Starscream’s fingers hovered over the controls, indecision splitting him. She had given him a choice: chase blindly, or step into her frame, reveal himself fully, and face what he had made of his obsession.

The longer he hesitated, the tighter the spiral in his spark grew. He replayed the file again, each repetition feeding a need he didn’t even want to name aloud.

The longer he hesitated, the tighter the spiral in his spark grew. He replayed the file again, each repetition feeding a need he didn’t even want to name aloud. And yet, through it all, a part of him—small, fragile—wondered if she had seen him already. If she understood the hunger behind his obsession, the way he consumed her words to fill a void he had created himself.

He leaned closer, pressing his face to the console, almost like he could enter the recording, become part of her voice.

“Very well, Cityspeaker,” he whispered. “Let us see what you’ve made me into.”

Outside, the storm’s pulse echoed in time with the rhythm of his compulsion.

And the game — dangerous, fragile, obsessive — had only just begun.

Chapter Text

Starscream did not sleep.

He told himself he was reviewing reports, attending to routine oversight, doing what rulers did. But the console’s light had burned into his optics for hours, and every report he scrolled past turned into her words.

“If you need to be seen so badly, then stop hiding behind my words.”

He had replayed the file until its waveform etched itself into his HUD display—every peak, every fall of her tone an electrical pulse across his neural net.

He shut his optics. The sound persisted.

By the time dawn’s light filtered through the spire’s high windows, his systems were running twenty-two percent above normal output. His wings ached from tension. The reflection in the glass looked wrong: optics too bright, plating drawn tight across his frame like armor he’d forgotten how to remove.

He pushed away from the console, pacing.

She had done this on purpose. She wanted him to hear it. Not an accident, not some encrypted mistake; this was bait. A challenge.

He should have been angry. Outraged.

Instead, he was…hungry.

Longing for more.

Every phrase of that recording was a vein of energy running straight into his spark. The way she said his name; not as insult or title, but with weary, cutting precision, like a truth she couldn’t ignore.

He felt it every time he heard it.

He opened another window, cross-referencing Tower security feeds. No footage of her leaving Metroplex’s chambers for hours after the file upload. No sign of distress. She’d done it calmly. Deliberately.

Starscream’s claws tapped against the console. His optics flicked to her logs again, now quarantined in his private database. He should delete them, he thought. Burn the evidence, lock the system down, prove he was in control. But he didn’t. Couldn’t.

He only added another folder. Inside, he began to build simulations—her voice patterns, response latency, tonal inflection mapping. An imitation.

It was pathetic, and he knew it.

Still, when he played back the first model, his spark thrummed painfully.

“Starscream,” the simulation said, her tone flattened by algorithm.

He crushed the playback with a snarl. “No. Not like that.”

Starscream sank into the chair, pressing his palms to his optics until static swam behind them. He’d ruled Cybertron through manipulation, fear, precision, everything predictable, measurable. But this—this obsession...was chaos.

And she’d planted it perfectly.

If he confronted her, she’d know exactly how deep it had cut. But if he stayed silent, she’d keep speaking, keep feeding him more pieces of herself.

It was unbearable.

By the time the first council alert pinged, calling him to the Tower’s chamber, he hadn’t moved. Only when the doors hissed open and Ironhide’s voice crackled through the comm did he straighten, adjusting his posture, forcing the smirk back into place.

“Lord Starscream, the Council’s waiting.”

“Of course they are.”

He rose smoothly, ignoring the tremor that ran through his frame. The recordings flickered one last time on the screen.

“Then stop hiding behind my words.”

He hesitated. Then whispered—barely audible, a confession to no one:

“I’m trying.”

The Council Chamber shimmered with morning light — filtered through fractured glass and the swirling dust of the city below. Cybertron’s skyline was still half a corpse, half a dream. Its ruler stood at the head of the table like a ghost pretending to be a god.

Starscream’s plating gleamed in the pale light, polished to perfection. The smirk on his face was textbook; arrogant, dismissive, reassuringly venomous. The Council liked that. They found comfort in his cruelty. It was familiar. Predictable.

Windblade sat two seats down, her frame composed, wings folded in a graceful arch. Her optics flicked to him once, unreadable. She didn’t speak, but he heard her anyway.

The echo of her voice rang in his processor like an auditory glitch. He blinked it away, focusing on the droning of the others; Ironhide reporting supply chain failures, Chromia relaying city defense statuses, bureaucratic noise.

Words slipped past him like static.

Every time Windblade spoke, the air sharpened. Her tone carried through the chamber, soft but deliberate, and each inflection sank under his armor. She wasn’t speaking to him directly, but she knew he was listening. Every phrase was a line thrown into the dark between them.

“The energon routes through Kaon are unstable again,” she said, glancing toward him. “If the distribution remains uneven, we’ll lose three sectors by next cycle.”

He should have replied with a cutting retort, a snide remark about her pessimism. That’s what they expected. Instead, his mouth opened, and no words came. His optics fixed on the curve of her mouth as she spoke, the way her tone shifted when she addressed him.

Her words seemed to distort, becoming the echo from the recording.

“Stop hiding behind my words.”

He blinked, the illusion snapping, Ironhide was looking at him, waiting for a response.

“Lord Starscream?”

He coughed, forced a laugh. “Yes, yes, I heard. Kaon’s always unstable — hardly breaking news.”

A ripple of uneasy chuckles went around the table.

Windblade’s optics lingered on him for half a beat too long. He could feel her dissecting him in return; the way his tone faltered, the fraction of a second where his smirk slipped.

He hated how aware she made him of his own body. The way his wings tremored, the faint pulse of heat building behind his optics, the tight, erratic rhythm of his spark.

Starscream looked away first.

Ironhide droned on again, but Starscream couldn’t hear him. His processor picked up another sound, soft, layered beneath the ambient hum of the room. A whisper.

“Starscream.”

He froze.

The voice wasn’t in the room. It was in his headset feed. His private channel. Windblade wasn’t speaking, but he could hear her, her voice threading through the static, perfectly calm.

“If you need to be seen…”

His vents stuttered. His claws curled against the tabletop, metal creaking beneath his grip.

“—Lord Starscream?” someone said again.

He turned sharply. Too sharply. His optics flared, sharp crimson cutting through the chamber’s light.

“What?” he snapped.

Silence fell. The councilors stared, startled.

He realized too late how loud he’d been.

Windblade didn’t flinch — she only tilted her head slightly, her face unreadable.

The voice in his headset cut out. He knew it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Yet his entire frame was trembling, systems registering phantom vibrations in the audio feed.

He straightened, forcing his composure back like a mask sliding over cracked glass. “I said,” he drawled, with a forced smirk, “continue.”

But the moment had already shifted.

The others exchanged looks; small, cautious. Ironhide cleared his throat and continued speaking, though his optics lingered on Starscream’s wings, still trembling faintly.

Windblade leaned back in her seat. Her expression was serene, diplomatic. But when she spoke next, her tone was deliberate. Controlled. Almost gentle.

“You look tired, Starscream.”

He froze.

The words were innocuous, perfectly acceptable, even polite. But the cadence… he way she said his name — soft, like the recording — exactly like the recording.

Something fractured behind his optics.

“I’m fine,” he said, too quickly. “I don’t need concern from you.”

“Of course,” she replied, voice smooth as silk. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

The chamber’s air thickened. Everyone could feel it; the strange current running between the two of them, invisible but unmistakable.

He could feel her watching him, and it made his spark pulse erratically, half fury, half longing.

The rest of the meeting blurred. He didn’t remember what decisions were made, only the way her optics kept finding his in brief, surgical glances. Not lingering — probing. Measuring.

By the time the chamber emptied, he was alone again. Almost.

She stayed behind, pretending to review datapads. He could feel her presence like static against his plating.

He should have left.

Instead, he lingered.

“You enjoy making me look unstable,” he said at last, his voice low.

She didn’t look up. “You do that on your own.”

His wings flared — a reflex. “Careful.”

Windblade finally met his gaze. Her optics glowed faintly, calm, unflinching. “I am. You should try it sometime.”

The words hit harder than they should have. For a second, he actually forgot to breathe.

When she passed him to leave, her shoulder brushed his arm.

A brief contact — nothing, and everything. His systems lit up like fire.

And as the doors hissed closed behind her, Starscream realized he could still hear her voice. Not in the room, not through comms, but inside his head. A phantom imprint. A resonance he couldn’t erase.

He touched the side of his helm, venting shakily. The faint echo of her words replayed, quieter, more insistent.

“If you need to be seen…”

He shut his optics, trembling.

He could still feel her, the phantom echo of her voice vibrating through his plating, the faint trace of her scent in the recycled air. Every sensory input screamed her presence even though she was gone.

Starscream’s wings twitched involuntarily, drawn toward the empty doorway. His claws flexed at his sides, catching faint glints of light from the console’s reflection.

He didn’t move at first. Didn’t breathe. Just stood there, staring at the space where she had been.

Then, as if against his own command, his hand lifted.

Slowly.

Like his body had betrayed him.

His talons reached for the air, trembling toward that vanishing trace of warmth she’d left behind.

He almost took a step forward. Almost.

But then the motion stopped halfway. His joints locked, every servo fighting itself. The sound that tore from his throat wasn’t quite a laugh, wasn’t quite a snarl.

He held his hand there — reaching — until the ache in his arm turned sharp.

And then, with a sudden jerk, he pulled back, curling his claws into a fist so tight the metal creaked. His vents stuttered, dragging in uneven bursts of air.

He lowered his head, optics dimming to a dull crimson glow. The empty doorway stared back at him like an accusation.

And though he didn’t follow her, his spark did; reaching, clawing, burning quietly in the space she’d left behind.

-

The tower felt enormous when he returned — cavernous, empty.

Starscream’s reflection followed him in every surface: warped, stretched, silver-red smears across polished steel. His own shadow stalked him down the corridor. He didn’t remember turning the lights down, but they dimmed as he passed, the systems reacting to his mood through neural interface.

He hated that. Hated that the city responded to him like a living thing when he himself felt half-dead.

His claws dug into the console. The replay command blinked under his hand.

Her voice filled the chamber again; clean, untouched, hers. It washed through him, low and resonant, vibrating along his plating. He leaned closer without realizing it, optics half-lidded, wings curling tight around his frame like he was trying to trap the sound against himself.

He played it again.

And again.

He had every inflection memorized by now — the small hitch before she said his name, the careful flattening of tone she used when she wanted to hide emotion. But hearing it from the file was different. It felt real, like she was still there, standing beside him, close enough that he could almost imagine the faint pulse of her spark.

He’d never realized how alive her voice was until he stole it. He needed to hear her. Every few cycles, the ache built too much to bear, and he’d break, dragging up another log from the archives, feeding on it like energon.

When the files began to loop, when there was nothing left to replay, he started whispering his own words into the silence between hers. Answering questions she never asked. Finishing her sentences. Arguing with her ghosts.

“You won’t find it by stealing my voice,” she said.

“Then speak to me,” he hissed back. “Don’t leave me with silence!”

The sound came out too loud. His own voice echoed off the walls, ugly and raw. He flinched from it, startled by the violence of his need.

He tried to laugh it off — a brittle sound, hollow — but the noise cracked before it even left his throat.

He dropped into the command chair, hands shaking. The console flickered under his touch, unsteady, mirroring the tremor in his claws. The waveform of her voice glowed across the screen, red light tracing every syllable like a heartbeat.

He reached out and dragged one talon along the line, watching the data scatter.

“You’re in everything,” he muttered, half to her, half to himself. “You don’t even know it, do you? How much space you take up in my head?”

He laughed again, quiet this time, exhausted. “Of course you know. That’s why you left that file for me. You wanted me to hear it.”

He shifted closer to the monitor, pressing the side of his helm against the metal, letting the faint static hum through him. It almost felt like contact.

“Talk to me,” he whispered. “Please.”

No response; only the hum of the machinery, the low whine of the tower’s circulators. But the silence itself seemed to mock him now, filled with her absence.

The data feed pinged, a flicker across the lower diagnostic lines. Random static, meaningless code. But to him it looked like her phrasing, her syntax, the cadence of her speech pattern reimagined in numbers.

He scrolled through line after line, chasing meaning through nonsense. His vents whined softly, cooling systems struggling to keep pace with the intensity of his focus.

He didn’t sleep that night. He didn’t leave the console. The tower lights shifted from red to gray to the pale glow of dawn without him noticing.

When he finally dragged himself to the window, his optics burned with static. Cybertron’s surface stretched below him — silver, fractured, restless. Somewhere far beneath, Metroplex stirred.

And she was down there with him.

Talking to the Titan. Laughing maybe. Her voice filling someone else’s silence.

The thought tore through him. His hand slammed against the glass hard enough to leave a smear of energon.

“Say something to me,” he rasped. “You talk to everyone but me!”

His reflection glared back — optics fever-bright, plating trembling.

He pressed his palm to the window again, claws splayed, like the gesture could bridge the distance between them. His spark pounded against his chest, desperate and wild.

“Windblade,” he whispered, the name barely sound anymore, more like a plea.

For a long moment, he stayed that way; leaning against the glass, optics shut, vents shuddering.

The tower thrummed beneath him, alive with his madness. The city’s hum rose and fell like breath. Somewhere in that sound, he swore he heard her. A whisper of static, a tone, a syllable enough to make him believe she was listening.

And so he spoke to her.

All night.

All the next day.

Until the tower’s systems began logging his muttering as an audio feedback error.

-

Metroplex’s voice was faint that morning. Fainter than usual.

The Titan’s hum, once steady and rhythmic, pulsed unevenly through the walls — slow, faltering, as if even his vast frame was holding its breath.

Windblade sat before the central console, hands still hovering over the interface. She hadn’t spoken yet. Her optics followed the glow of the screen, scanning through lines of half-corrupted data. Every system ping, every glitch in the commline, carried the same pattern.

Starscream’s pattern.

He’d been in the Tower’s systems all night again. She could see the fingerprints of his intrusion like scars across the code. He didn’t even bother hiding them anymore.

Metroplex’s pulse dimmed, then rose again in a low tremor.

“He doesn’t sleep,” the Titan murmured through the network. His voice was tired — ancient metal speaking through the static.

Windblade frowned, brushing a hand along the conduit beside her. “I know,” she whispered. “He’s… unraveling.”

“Obsession.”

She didn’t answer. The word sat heavy in her spark.

In the beginning, she’d assumed he was trying to assert dominance again, another of his endless games of surveillance and control. But this was different. The more she traced his digital footprints, the more erratic they became; repeating sequences, overwritten files, fragments of her own voice inserted into system diagnostics like… like he wanted the Tower itself to echo her words back at him.

It wasn’t control. It was craving.

Windblade ex-vented slowly, shutting her optics. The hum of Metroplex was the only steady rhythm she had left. The Tower felt wrong now — not just corrupt, but haunted.

She rose, hands brushing against the smooth plating of the console. “He’ll be at the Council meeting today,” she said, more to herself than to the Titan. “I’ll see how bad it is.”

Metroplex didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. The silence said enough.

And so she dragged herself again, dreading to see what the fruits of her labor bore. Her heels clicked against the polished floor as she entered the chamber. The usual low murmur of conversation fell away too quickly. A few aides turned their heads as she passed; one looked like they wanted to speak but thought better of it.

Starscream was already there.

He stood at the head of the long obsidian table, posture perfect, wings lifted in a display of authority, but his optics gave him away. They were too bright. Too alert. A kind of manic sharpness that made the light around him seem to tremble.

Windblade slowed before taking her seat.

He looked like he hadn’t powered down in cycles. Fine tremors ran through his claws as he adjusted datapads that didn’t need adjusting. He greeted the council in clipped, efficient phrases, but every word came out like a twitch, brittle and precise.

She’d seen him angry before, seen him desperate for power, for validation — but this was different.

He didn’t look at her at first. But she felt him looking. Every time she spoke, every time her voice broke the silence, his wings gave the faintest twitch. His optics flicked her way for a fraction of a second too long, as if catching something invisible.

When she paused to take notes, his gaze lingered again. Not the calculating look of a schemer, something stranger. Searching. Unsteady.

He was listening for her. Not her reports, not her arguments — her.

Windblade’s vents slowed. She forced herself to keep her tone neutral as she addressed a logistics proposal. “Metroplex’s energy distribution is stable through the southern quadrants,” she said, scrolling through the datafeed. “If we adjust the relay output—”

Starscream interrupted. “And what does Metroplex think of that?”

The question was too sharp. The words cracked on the end.

Windblade blinked, caught off guard. “He agrees,” she said carefully.

Starscream leaned forward. His optics were locked on her now, narrow and burning. “He agrees, or you told him to agree?”

Something flickered across his face; not anger, not quite. Something closer to pain. “Of course,” he murmured, looking away too quickly. His claws scraped faintly against the tabletop. “He speaks. Everyone speaks to you.”

Windblade’s spark skipped a beat.

The rest of the session blurred into static. She heard herself respond, file reports, debate points of order, but her focus stayed locked on the mech at the head of the table — the way he didn’t stop watching her even when she wasn’t speaking.

By the time the meeting adjourned, she could feel the tension radiating from him like heat.

As she rose, she felt his optics trace her movement, not with authority, not with suspicion, but with a desperate, possessive focus that chilled her spark.

She didn’t look back, moving fast while clutching her datapad. Not until she reached the doorway.

Starscream lingered at the head of the table, unmoving, his optics fixed on her like he hadn’t even heard the dismissal. The last councilor hesitated at the door, glanced between them, and slipped out in silence.

The doors sealed. Only the two of them remained.

“Starscream.” Her voice cut through the empty chamber; low, even, deliberate.

His wings flinched, a visible tremor running through them. “Yes?”

“You’ve been accessing my channels,” she said. Not a question.

His claws twitched against the tabletop. She stepped closer, measured but unafraid. “You should stop.”

He laughed — too quickly, too quietly. “Should I?”

“Whatever you think you’re finding there,” she continued, “it isn’t going to help you. It isn’t going to change what you are.”

That made him look up. The air between them seemed to thin, heavy with the hum of static. His optics burned brighter — too bright — as he leaned forward over the table.

“What I am?” His voice cracked, raw on the edge of something like hysteria. “You think I don’t know what I am?”

Windblade didn’t flinch. “Then stop proving it.”

For a second, he just stared at her; a long, taut silence that vibrated in the room’s stillness. Then he stood so abruptly his chair clattered backward, the sharp metallic clang echoing.

He was too close now. Not touching her, but close enough that the air between them seemed alive, charged, his vents running uneven.

“You think you can speak to me like that,” he said softly, claws flexing at his sides, “because you think you understand me. Because you think your little observations make you—”

“I don’t think, Starscream.” Her voice cut through his, calm and surgical. “I know what I see.”

He froze. Every line of his frame went rigid.

For a moment, the only sound was the low hum of the tower and the faint rasp of his breathing. Then, slower than before, his posture collapsed inward; not in defeat, but in exhaustion. His wings drooped, his optics dimming just a fraction.

“Then tell me,” he said, almost a whisper. “What do you see?”

Windblade studied him. The tremor in his hands. The dull scarring along his armor. The way his optics kept flickering to her mouth instead of her eyes.

“I see a ruler terrified that no one’s really listening,” she said quietly. “So he starts breaking into the walls just to hear himself echo back.”

His mouth twitched, not into a smile but something close — brittle and self-loathing.

“You always did have a way with words,” he murmured. “Even when they cut.”

She turned to leave, datapad still clutched against her chest.

“Windblade.”

The sound of her name from his vocalizer made her stop.

When she looked back, he was reaching for her — not quite touching, but the gesture hung there between them like a live wire. His claws shook mid-air, then curled back into a fist.

His voice cracked when he spoke again.

“I just wanted to hear you.”

Windblade stared at him for a long moment; the manic gleam in his optics, the way he seemed to be holding himself together by sheer force of will.

Then she said, quietly, “Then start listening.”

And she left him there — standing alone in the echo of her words, the Tower hum rising and falling around him like the rhythm of a spark about to break.

Chapter Text

It was… quiet.

Windblade sat alone in one of Iacon’s smaller Council briefing chambers, datapads scattered across the table like fragments of a puzzle she no longer had the energy to solve. Metroplex’s distant pulse thrummed softly through the city — a steady presence, grounding her even from far away.

She ex-vented and shifted another pad aside. War reparations. Energon deficits. Reconstruction delays.

Every document carried the same faint shadow: Starscream’s signature at the bottom. He was doing the work. Pushing legislation. Showing up. Making decisions that were—surprisingly—competent.

And yet.

Every time she saw him in the Council chambers, something about him vibrated wrong. Too sharp. Too brittle. A conductor with a wire about to snap. Ever since that final confrontation, he’s been looking more and more ragged.

She’d been trying to ignore it. Trying not to notice the way he lingered on her voice when she spoke. How he’d twitch when she addressed him directly, like her words traveled deeper than they should. How his wings would stiffen whenever she looked at him too long.

Starscream’s unraveling performance kept replaying itself in the back of her processor: the tremor in his wings, the slip in his composure, the way desperation seeped through the cracks of his arrogance.

Windblade didn’t flatter herself often, but she knew when someone was reacting to her.

Starscream reacted to her like a system under strain; like a circuit locked to her current.

The thought made something knot in her spark.

And that knot pulled tighter when she remembered the way he’d stared at her voice recorder — not for the information, but for her voice. The helpless way his vents stuttered. The panic blooming behind his optics when she refused to look away.

He wasn’t angry at her. He wasn’t offended.

He wasn’t planning revenge.

He was dependent.

On her voice. Her attention.

Her judgment.

Somewhere deep inside, some vulnerable component of him had latched onto her like a grounding wire — and now he couldn’t function without it.

“Why me…?” she whispered under her breath.

Because she saw him? Because she pushed him?

Because she listened? Because she didn’t fear him?

Or… because she was the only one, he couldn’t lie to? Windblade’s optics dimmed in reflection.

Others would call it a weakness in him. A flaw to exploit. But to Windblade, it was something more complex — almost tragic. People often forgot that being a Cityspeaker meant more than communing with giants. It meant stepping into others. Feeling the shape of their thoughts. Understanding where they broke.

With Metroplex, she was welcomed. Held. Trusted. With Starscream…

Whenever she even brushed against his mind — the edges of it — he recoiled like she was cutting into him. Like her very existence posed a threat to his defenses. He shut her out so violently that part of her couldn’t help but wonder what he was afraid she’d see.

She didn’t want to give it meaning. But the signs were getting hard to dismiss. A soft chime sounded. The door slid open. Windblade barely glanced up.

“Chromia. I’m not—”

“It’s not Chromia.”

Her helm lifted sharply.

Starscream stood in the doorway.

Windblade straightened immediately — not out of fear but instinct. He wasn’t supposed to be here. Not unannounced. And definitely not looking like this.

His posture was perfect, as always — he never let that slip — but everything else about him was frayed. His optics were too bright. His wings hovered in a painfully restrained angle, neither aggressive nor neutral. And his mouth… was set, but not in the usual sneer. His optics were too bright. His wings drooped like deadweight.

He looked like someone balancing an entire collapsing city inside his chest.

He stepped in, the door sliding shut behind him with a soft hiss that sounded almost conspiratorial.

Windblade set her datapad down in deliberate, visible calm.

“…Starscream.”

“Cityspeaker.” He inclined his head with a precision that looked painfully practiced. “Apologies for intruding.”

“You don’t intrude,” she said evenly. “You make appointments.”

His wings twitched violently at that — too quick to hide.

Windblade noted it. Added it to the invisible ledger building in her mind.

He approached the table but didn’t sit. Didn’t touch anything. He stood as if proximity to her was already a risk.

“I needed to speak with you,” he said.

Windblade leaned back in her chair, studying him. “Is the Council preparing another vote?”

“No.” His gaze flicked away. “This is not political.”

Interesting.

Starscream avoided non-political conversations like they were traps.

“So what is it?” she asked.

His optics flicked back to her — a little too fast, a little too sharp.

“It’s…” He paused. His vents stuttered once, barely perceptible. “You.”

Windblade went still.

Starscream seemed to catch himself and cursed under his breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Not— not like that. I mean—”

He was flustered. Actually flustered.

She’d seen him rage, scheme, lie, maneuver — but flustered? Never.

Windblade sat up straighter.

“Starscream,” she said carefully. “Start again.”

He hesitated. Then, slowly, he lowered his hand, fingers trembling faintly before he tucked them behind his back in a gesture so controlled it might as well have been a restraint.

“I require your… insight,” he said, voice pitched low. “Regarding Metroplex.”

Ah. Of course.

Windblade’s spark eased a fraction. “What about him?”

Starscream stared at her a beat too long. His voice lowered further, almost fragile in its restraint.

“You speak to him,” he said. “And he listens.”

Windblade tilted her head. “That’s what Cityspeakers do.”

“Yes,” he snapped — then looked instantly guilty for it. “Yes. I know that. But he listens to you with… trust.”

Metroplex trusted very few people. Starscream had never been one of them.

Windblade folded her hands on the table. “You came all the way here to ask me why Metroplex doesn’t trust you?”

Starscream’s wings shivered. “No.”

Another pause.

“Then what?”

He looked at her. Really looked. And suddenly, Windblade realized this wasn’t about Metroplex at all. He’s circling something. Can’t say it directly. Won’t. It reminded her of skittish Titans — vast minds with wounded nodes, unable to articulate the fracture but desperate for someone to see it.

Starscream wasn’t a Titan, but the resemblance was unsettling.

“I want to understand,” he said finally, his voice tight, strained. “How you do it.”

“Do what?”

“Connect.” The word cracked on his vocalizer. “How you breach those vast minds without fear. How you stand inside them and aren’t overwhelmed. How you… how you get them to let you in.”

Windblade’s throat tightened.

He wasn’t asking about Metroplex.

He was asking about himself.

He was asking why she couldn’t do that with him. Seems like that confrontation the other day shook something in him.

Her voice softened despite herself. “Starscream… you shut your mind like a locked vault. Cityspeakers don’t break locks. We only walk through open doors.”

He flinched so hard it looked painful.

Windblade regretted the phrasing instantly.

His wings drew in tight, a defensive curl. His optics looked suddenly far away, as if someone had scraped raw metal inside him.

“I see,” he whispered.

“Starscream—”

“No.” He raised a hand. “No. It’s fine. I understand perfectly.”

He didn’t. She could see it — the way his field constricted, the heat rising off him. His processor was screaming with conclusions she hadn’t meant to imply.

She stood. “I didn’t mean—”

“You meant exactly what you said.” His voice was thin, shaking at the edges. “I cannot be trusted. Not even with my own thoughts.”

“That’s not—”

“You don’t want to see them,” he continued, quieter now. “You don’t want to step into me.”

There it was.

The raw wound beneath every argument they’d ever had.

Windblade stepped closer. “Starscream… if you think my role is to violate minds, you misunderstand what a Cityspeaker is.”

He laughed — soft, bitter, empty.

“That’s easy for you to say when you’ve never had someone force their way past your defenses.”

Windblade froze. Her spark clenched tightly.

Force.

Past his defenses.

She had a sudden, disorienting flash of realization: Starscream wasn’t afraid of her power.

He was afraid of his past. He was afraid of what someone might do if they saw what was inside him. He took a step back, wings trembling.

“You have Metroplex,” he said quietly. “And he has you. I don’t want to interfere.”

“You’re not interfering.”

“Then why—” His voice cracked suddenly, painfully. “Why can’t I hear anything except you?”

Windblade’s breath caught.

Starscream’s optics widened—realizing too late what he’d confessed.

He recoiled instantly, wings flaring in shame. “Forget I said that.”

“Starscream—”

He turned sharply, reaching for the door panel. “Forget it.”

The door hissed open—

—and he stumbled.

Just a fraction. A clipped misstep, too small for most to notice, but Windblade saw it. She saw the tremor in his knee joint. The way his vents hitched. The waver in his balance.

She opened her mouth to call after him—

—but he was already gone.

And the knot in her spark, the one she’d been trying to ignore for cycles, tightened until she could barely breathe. Something was breaking inside him. And Windblade was suddenly, painfully aware:

Whatever it was…

it had everything to do with her.

Windblade didn’t see Starscream for three days after that. Which was unusual. Starscream lived in the Council chambers. He haunted halls, stalked meetings, inserted himself into every conversation with the uncanny persistence of someone terrified of being forgotten.

But for three whole days, he was silent. Absent. And that… was its own alarm.

Windblade tried not to think about the moment he’d slipped — the tremor, the stuttered vent, the fractured confession he’d tried to swallow whole. She tried to convince herself it was stress, not collapse. That he’d simply overworked himself again.

There was no reason, she told herself, to feel uneasy. No reason to replay the words he’d whispered as if tearing them out of his own throat:

“Why can’t I hear anything except you?”

But she did. Constantly.

By the end of the fourth day, even Metroplex had noticed.

“He disturbs the air currents,” the Titan murmured through her link while she worked on a lower-level sensor relay. “His movements lack rhythm.”

Windblade frowned. “You’ve sensed him moving?”

“Erratic. Like a failing conduit.”

The metaphor hit too close to the image she’d been trying not to form. A failing conduit could spark. Collapse. Burn out.

She wiped her hands on her thighs and stood. “Where?”

Metroplex pulsed a location through her neural link — a distant echo deeper in his frame, near one of the abandoned maintenance spires that Starscream often used for privacy.

She shouldn’t have gone.

Starscream hadn’t asked for her. He hadn’t summoned her. The politically correct thing to do was ignore it, pretend she didn’t care, wait for him to reappear on his own terms.

But her spark clenched with a slow, uneasy dread. He had looked like he was unraveling.

And Cityspeakers were trained — deeply, instinctually — to go where the fracture was forming.

Windblade shot into the air.

She found him partway up the spire, alone, perched on a steel support beam high above the city like some broken ornament. He didn’t hear her approach. Didn’t even flinch when she touched down behind him.

That alone was terrifying. Starscream always reacted. Always performed. But now? He sat absolutely still, shoulders slumped, wings limp — a posture so unguarded she would’ve thought he was deactivated if not for the faint rise and fall of his vents.

His optics stared out over Iacon but didn’t seem to be seeing anything. Windblade stepped closer.

“Starscream?”

He didn’t move.

She tried again, louder this time. “Starscream.”

A small, involuntary tremor ran through his frame. He still didn’t turn. Didn’t speak.

She moved to stand beside him, close enough to read the microtwitches in his plating. His entire neural field was spiked with static, prickling erratically against her proximity. Not pushing her away — just frantic, chaotic, like an uncontrolled electrical storm.

Something was very wrong.

Windblade lowered her voice. “Why have you been hiding?”

His optics flickered once. And then, very quietly:

“…your voice is louder out here.”

Windblade’s spark stuttered. Starscream swallowed hard, wings twitching toward her before snapping back in some internal reflex of shame.

“I tried to stay away,” he whispered. “But it… it gets worse when I do.”

He closed his optics, vents shaking. Windblade stepped back a half-pace, processing. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t posturing. He wasn’t manipulating.

He was confessing. She stood there a long time, weighing her words carefully.

“What gets worse?” she finally asked.

He opened his optics slowly, like the light pained him. “The noise.”

“What noise?”

“Everything.” His claws flexed weakly against the beam. “All of it. Every thought. Every voice. Every memory. It’s all—” He broke off, vents hitching. “I thought shutting myself away would quiet it. But it didn’t. It only left your voice.”

Windblade’s spark jolted. “Starscream—”

“So I tried,” he said quickly, talking over her. “I tried to drown it out with work. With politics. With anything. But that made it worse too. I keep hearing you. Not the words. The tone. The way you sound. Like…” His vocals glitched. “…like a grounding point.”

Windblade stared at him, completely still.

He wasn’t obsessive in the dangerous, possessive way she’d prepared herself for. He was drowning. And she — her voice, her presence, her judgment — was the only thing he could latch onto while sinking. It was a brutal realization.

“Starscream,” she said quietly. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“Because you would think I was weak,” he said instantly. “And you’d be right.”

“I don’t—”

“Yes, you do.” His wings snapped in a sharp, pained angle. “And worse — you’d pity me.”

Windblade went still.

Because that? That fear she recognized intimately. Pity, to someone like Starscream, was annihilation. For a moment, neither spoke.

The wind whistled through the spire supports. Far below, Iacon lights flickered like distant embers. And Starscream, frame trembling, finally forced himself upright. He swayed. Almost fell. Windblade’s hand shot out on instinct — fingertips brushing his elbow.

Starscream reacted like she’d shocked him.

He jerked back, optics wide, wings flaring. “Don’t—”

But the movement cost him. His knees buckled. Vents seized. His optics flickered into static.

Windblade moved without thinking. She grabbed his arm, steadying him.

“Hey— Starscream—”

He sucked in a desperate ventilator pulse, collapsing back onto the beam with a hard clatter.

“I can’t—” his voice broke, shredding itself. “I can’t control it anymore.”

Windblade tightened her grip. “Tell me what’s happening.”

He shook his head, claws digging into the metal beneath him. “Your voice is the only thing I can hear clearly. And when you’re gone—” His frame convulsed in a violent tremor. “Everything else gets louder.”

Windblade’s spark twisted sharply — something between ache and alarm. Starscream was in neural overload. Prolonged. Serious. Possibly dangerous.

She could see the warning signs now that she was close enough: the micro-spasms in his hands, the irregular pulse stuttering in his chest plating, the flicker-glitch edging into his optics like static frost. His vents dragged too fast, too shallow, struggling to cycle cleanly.

He was right on the edge.

A few degrees from losing control completely.

Windblade stepped closer, careful, deliberate. “Starscream,” she said gently but firmly, “you need grounding. Right now.”

He flinched—visibly, violently—like her concern physically struck him.

“I don’t need—” His voice cracked. He swallowed hard, wings twitching up into a defensive crescent. “I don’t need your pity.”

“It is,” he spat, too quickly, optics flashing sharp with shame. “It always is. You look at me like I’m—broken circuitry. A malfunction you’re obligated to stabilize.”

Windblade stared at him, startled by the bitterness twisting his words. This wasn’t arrogance or spite. This was something painfully raw. Exposed.

And fragile.

“Starscream,” she said, lowering her voice, “I’m not treating you like a malfunction. I’m trying to help because you’re overwhelmed.”

Wrong thing to say.

His wings snapped flat against his back, trembling with an electric ripple. “Overwhelmed,” he echoed, as if tasting poison. “Yes. Of course. I can’t possibly— function— without someone to explain myself to— someone to— to hold my hand—”

His words tripped, glitched, fell apart.

He turned away abruptly, stumbling back a step as though needing distance to breathe. His talons dug into the metal beam, scraping deep grooves. Anything to ground himself.

“Starscream?” Windblade stepped forward. “Stop. Look at me.”

“No.” His voice was sharp. Hard. Panicked.

Not refusing her command.

Refusing her witness.

“If I look at you,” he said, voice trembling with strain, “I won’t be able to leave.”

Windblade froze.

His wings twitched violently, their angles jagged and uneven. His optics flickered in a dangerous rhythm. His vents were cycling too fast to be sustainable. But he was pulling himself together, piece by piece, holding himself upright through sheer fury and pride and terror.

She could feel the decision crystallizing inside him.

He was going to run.

“Starscream,” she said, quieter now, “this isn’t the time to push me away.”

“It’s the only time,” he rasped, backing up another step. “If I stay— If you speak to me again—”

His voice fractured. “I will fall apart.”

“Then let yourself—”

“No.” He uttered.

Hard. Final. Terrified.

He forced his posture straight, though his knees shook from the effort. It was an ugly imitation of command, brittle as old glass. He lifted his chin a fraction — the mask coming back on slowly, painfully.

“I cannot let you see me unshelled,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.

Windblade felt a coldness settle into her core.

Not offense.

Not hurt.

Understanding.

Because Starscream wasn’t fleeing her.

He was fleeing the version of himself that clawed toward her voice.

Windblade reached out — not touching, just offering her presence like a steadying hand.

“Don’t go,” she said quietly. “Not like this.”

Starscream’s optics flicked to her hand. Something in him lurched — yearning and terror at once — and he tore his gaze away before the conflict could break him open.

His voice strained as he forced out:

“If I stay in your presence— if I hear your voice— if I let myself rely on you— I will need you.”

His wings shuddered violently. “And you,” he whispered, “won’t stay.”

Windblade’s spark pinched sharply.

“Starscream—”

He stepped back. Then another.

His venting hitched into a harsh, uneven rhythm.

“I can’t fall apart in front of you,” he said, voice cracking down the middle. “Not when you’re the only thing holding me upright.”

Windblade took a step toward him. “Then let me—”

He recoiled, a sharp, panicked jerk.

“Don’t,” he hissed. “Don’t be kind.”

Windblade stilled.

Starscream turned slowly, like his joints were rusted, and began walking toward the far edge of the spire. Each step was unsteady. Each motion jittered with strain. But he kept moving.

He was leaving. Fleeing. Running from her voice like it was both salvation and doom. Windblade watched him go, her spark tight, her fingers curling helplessly at her sides.

Metroplex stirred faintly through her neural link.

“…He is unraveling.”

Windblade ex-vented shakily, optics dimming. “I know.”

Starscream’s silhouette grew smaller in the distance — a trembling shape against the golden skyline.

“He will come back,” Metroplex hummed.

Windblade’s voice was quiet.

“He won’t have a choice.”

Because once someone anchored themselves to a Cityspeaker; distance only tightened the tether.

And Starscream was pulling it taut. Too taut. Close to snapping.

Windblade’s spark twisted sharply, something between dread and certainty but followed him nonetheless.

He had made it only a dozen more paces down the spire walkway before his steps began to falter. She followed at a distance at first, giving him the space he’d begged for — but the tremors in his frame were growing worse by the klik. His wings jittered in uneven, uncontrolled arcs, their tips scraping metal as he tried to hold himself together through sheer tension.

“Starscream,” she called carefully.

He stiffened — not stopping, not turning, just pausing mid-step as though the sound of her voice had struck some overloaded node in his neural core. His talons curled against the walkway railing, scraping metal. His vents pulled in a ragged, shuddering cycle.

“…don’t,” he whispered without facing her.

But the word wasn’t sharp this time.

It was frayed.

Thin.

Afraid.

Windblade stepped forward despite it — slow, cautious, her field pulled tight so she didn’t overwhelm his already-splintering one. From this close, she could feel it: the static climbing off him in jagged, panicked pulses.

He was past the point of hiding it.

“Your voice—” he rasped. “It’s too close.”

“I’m not trying to overwhelm you.”

“You are,” he whispered, claws digging deeper into the railing. “You always are. You don’t mean to, but you— you cut through everything. And I can’t— I can’t keep myself sealed when you speak.”

He was shaking. Everywhere. Not dramatic— just an unbearable, quiet tremor like a mech whose frame couldn’t decide whether to hold itself up or shut itself down.

Windblade’s vents hitched softly.

“Starscream… you’re in overload.”

He gave a broken, breathless laugh that wasn’t amusement at all.

“Of course I am. Because of you.”

That stilled her.

Not the accusation — the pain under it.

“Turn around,” she said gently.

He took another step away.

His knee nearly buckled.

Windblade moved fast — but stopped just short of touching him. Her hand hovered inches from his arm, the warmth of her field brushing his, offering grounding without invading.

“Starscream. Stop running.”

He shook his head wildly, wings flaring, vents spiraling into panic.

“I can’t— if I stay— if you try to—” His voice fractured. “If you try to help me, I’ll break in front of you.”

“Then break,” she said, softer than the wind.

He made a sound — pained, strangled — like the sentence physically hurt him.

“You don’t understand,” he whispered. “If I break, I won’t stop. And you—” His voice dropped into something hollow, defeated. “You won’t stay. No one stays.”

“Starscream—”

But his frame lurched. His hand slipped from the railing. One moment Starscream was standing in front of her — too bright, too sharp, stretched thin like a wire pulled past its limit — and the next, something inside him simply gave way.

It was soundless, not a cry, not even a gasp; just a sudden buckling of his knees, a soft mechanical hitch of failing servos. His optics flickered hard, red strobing into dim pink. His entire frame swayed sideways as though the floor had tilted under him.

Windblade didn’t think — she reacted.

She caught him.

Her hands closed around his arms just as his legs gave out, his weight sagging into her with a startled, helpless shudder. His wings pressed against her by accident, trembling violently. For a moment, he fought it — tried to pull away — but his body wasn’t listening to him anymore.

Her fingers snapped out, catching the side of his helm — a small touch, precise, the kind a Cityspeaker uses to steady a Titan’s drifting attention. She expected it to be enough.

It wasn’t.

Starscream’s weight pitched forward, heavy and uncoordinated, his vents spiraling into a rapid, high-pitched whine. His wings jerked violently, scraping the air like he was trying to stay upright through sheer force of will.

Windblade stepped in. Her other hand came up, bracing his cheek plating, fingertips brushing along seams she’d never touched before.

“Starscream.” Her voice was low but unyielding. “Look at me.”

His optics tried. Failed. Flickered.

“I—” His vocalizer stuttered, caught between syllables. “I can’t—” The last of his balance vanished as he collapsed fully into her.

His armor was hot with overload. His optics flickered into painful stutter-light.

Windblade steadied him, bracing his frame against hers. “Easy— Starscream, easy. Breathe.”

He couldn’t.

Not properly.

His vents rasped in glitching bursts, each cycle sharper, faster, more irregular. His hands tightened weakly around her forearms, not gripping for dominance — gripping for anchor.

“I told you—” he gasped, voice shredding itself, “I told you not to—”

Windblade caught him with both arms, dragged him up against her frame with a forceful, practiced motion that came from centuries of handling Titans’ unstable neural feedback. This wasn’t careful anymore — this was full support, a near-embrace born not of affection but necessity.

Starscream’s helm dropped against her shoulder, the weight of it startlingly heavy. His vents hitched again, hot air ghosting across her neck cables.

For a second, he felt like dead weight.

For a second, she thought he’d blacked out.

Then his claws tightened on her forearm — desperate, shaking violently. His wings twitched violently — then sagged. Windblade held him upright as his frame trembled uncontrollably.

“Starscream,” she murmured, “you’re safe. I have you.”

He made a soft, fractured sound — somewhere between denial and relief. His vents shuddered again, cycling unevenly against her shoulder. The tremor in his hands grew worse — uncontrolled microseizures from processor strain. She dropped her forehead gently against his helm and spoke slowly, clearly, each word an anchor:

“Starscream. Listen to my voice.”

His claws dug deeper, but the trembling eased by a fraction. His optics, barely visible, glowed dimly against her shoulder joint.

“I can’t hear anything,” he whispered, a broken, glitching rasp. “Not you. Not me. Not—anything. It’s all noise. Everything is—wrong.”

Windblade ex-vented softly through her nose, adjusting her grip, letting him rest more of his weight on her.

“You’ve overloaded your processor,” she said quietly. “Your neural net is in feedback loop.”

He made a sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. A strangled little thing swallowed by metal.

“I needed—” His vocalizer frayed. “I needed to hear you.”

“You’re hearing me now,” she replied, steady, grounding him with her voice and the pressure of her hands. “You’re not alone.”

His frame jerked again; a full-body tremor and his wings clamped hard against his back, as if trying to hide themselves. She wrapped one arm fully around him now, the other rising to the side of his helm, fingers tracing gentle stabilizing lines just behind the audials.

He shuddered under the touch — violently, like the contact was both relief and agony.

Her tone softened.

“Why? Why didn’t you come to me before this?”

His helm pressed harder against her shoulder, as if he couldn’t bear to lift it.

“Because you don’t want me,” he whispered. “You never wanted to connect to me. Only Metroplex. Only the whole planet. Everyone but—”

His voice broke.

Windblade closed her optics for half a second.

There it was.

The heart of the storm.

“Starscream,” she said, quieter than before. “I didn’t shut you out. You shut yourself away.”

She felt him flinch, a deep, wounded recoil but her hold did not loosen. He didn’t pull away. Couldn’t. He was leaning fully into her now, body trembling, vents rasping hard in her audio range, processor still crackling with overload static she could almost feel through his plating.

She kept her voice level, low, an anchor dropped into turbulent water.

“You’re not dying,” she murmured as his vents spasmed again. “Your systems are overwhelmed. You pushed yourself too far.”

His claws tightened again.

“I thought… If I stopped listening to you… I would lose you.”

Windblade’s spark clenched.

So that was it. Not control.

Not manipulation. Not even obsession in the way she’d feared.

Fear of abandonment. Fear of silence.

Fear that her absence meant she’d chosen to abandon him completely.

She ex-vented once, slow and long, letting the breath warm his neck cables.

“Starscream,” she said, softer but firm.

“I am not Metroplex,” His entire frame tensed. “You cannot enter my mind the way you do his. I will not open myself to you like that. Not ever. I am not your Titan— you won’t like what you see.” He made a wounded, choked sound.

She continued, and her next words softened the blow:

“But I am speaking to you. I am right here. You do not need to break yourself open just to hear me.”

His vents hitched again, the beginning of another tremor, and she tightened her embrace, pressing her forehead more firmly to his helm.

“Breathe. With me.”

She matched her vents to his cycle — slow, steady, deliberate. A synchronizing rhythm.

A technique meant for calming massive, unstable neural networks.

He forced himself to sync. Haltingly. Sloppily. But he followed her.

His trembling began to slow. Windblade held him there, keeping him upright with her entire frame until the storm inside him began to ebb.

His helm rested against her shoulder, heavy, exhausted, his optics dimming to a softer red.

“…Windblade?” he whispered, voice thin as wire as it cracked against her shoulder. “…don’t leave.”

“I won’t.”

And she meant it.

Because for once, he stopped running. Instead he chose to fall.

Right into her arms.