Christobel Starsky / Commander Starscream (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
reapsthewind) wrote2013-05-19 10:28 pm
reapsthewind) wrote2013-05-19 10:28 pm
draft
ignore me
related to previous body horror post, kinda
just a thought for a What If
She didn't want to stay awake. The pain had mounted and grown until it seemed that pain was all there was. At least in the pain, she didn't have to think, didn't have to worry.
I am a monster.
But it was becoming harder and harder to think. She couldn't see right anymore; first it was fine, then it was fuzzy and then it was random colors and shapes and madness, and her ears, too, were hearing strange, and her thoughts weren't sticking together right, but all that was moot because this
fucking
pain
And yet she had to stay awake, because if she blacked out she wasn't sure who she'd wake up as. She wasn't...
Wasn't...
...
*****
Chris woke with a gasp as she tumbled over the side of her bed and landed on the floor with a thump. She thrashed around in her sheets for a few seconds, before giving up and laying on the floor, just breathing. Just... breathing.
No pain. No nothing, in fact. This was... home? Her parents house. Just as she'd left it. There was that goofy Top Gun poster, the model airplanes hung from the ceiling, the science fair prizes, the stacks of textbooks... she slowly detangled herself from her sheets, then sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her hands.
Human. Totally human. No steel hiding underneath that skin. She looked up to the mirror hanging on the back of her door... brown eyes. She stood up and walked over, pulling down her shirt near her shoulder... no symbols, either.
In fact, it all seemed so very far away. All those memories... the Academy of Sciences, Skyfire, the war, slowly going mad, killing his way up through the ranks, Megatron, all of it. Megatron... no, he was just Matt, just Matt, her slightly antagonistic rich asshat friend. Which in turn meant that Elian was just Elian and that everything was just fine. There was no new war, no new threat to Earth. She was just Christobel, starving PHD student, soon to be not starving, soon to be a roboticist in Matt's company, soon to change the world, she swore she would. And Matt was fine! Matt was not losing his mind and soon to become a monster that in her broken (FALSE) memories had been a scourge upon her existence. His existence. Whatever, it didn't matter. It was all a lie.
She closed her eyes and put a hand to her face and cried, just cried. It had been a long and vivid and nonsensical dream, a hallucination, of course. Just an extended madness. She was home for a short summer vacation, with her parents, and surely Elian would be over to visit soon, or grandma Laurel, and she'd catch up with her high school friends and go thrift shopping, and maybe stop at the Air and Space Museum for old times sake...
Yeah.
"Fuck, I'm hungry," she said. She rolled out of bed and stretched, smiling. God, it was a beautiful day. God, life was fantastic. She started down the stairs.
"Mom? Dad?" she asked. "What's in the fridge, do we have any..."
She stopped in the living room. And stared.
"No... no, dammit!"
Half of the living room wasn't the living room. Instead of her mother's collection of strange curios from distant lands and her father's watercolor paintings were walls of welded metal and steel, dark and cold. A huge picture window at the far end looked out on an alien sky. Worse, the edges of the metal seemed to be creeping into her normal part of the house, slowly but surely. Inevitably.
At the far end of the room on the metal side there was what must have once been an elegant throne of steel but was now a rusted, broken wreck.
He was missing half his chest, and the garish crown he wore was broken as well. The purple cloak on his back was tattered and burned. He flickered, slightly, as though he wasn't entirely there.
"You're persistent," he hissed, glowering at her. "Here I'd believed you a mere error, a vestige of what this world has done to me in taking me as her soldier and her slave, and that you'd surely vanish when I remembered what I was."
"And yet," he said, standing slowly, pulling the cloak off his shoulders and letting it fall to the ground, "Here you are. Even in your last hour, as that final Echo consumes your organic matter, you remain."
He looked up at the encroaching steel and smirked. "Though not for long."
"Hey, you shut the fuck up," she snapped, wincing at how they sounded exactly the same, her voice simply lacking that machine modulation. "It's bad enough that the Enemy is trying to murder us all, and worse that it turns out that you'd be on their side. You're doing the same fucking thing here! I was just trying to live my goddamn life!"
"Oh, stop that," he said. "You are me. We were born this way. Look at your life! What would have happened if you'd joined the Air Force? You were a scientist, you balked at the fact that no one listened to your ideas, you sought a way out. And even your so-called friendship with that fool... I idolized him at first! Until I saw his true nature. And so would you have."
"I'm not a murderer!"
"Ah yes, and what you've done in the name of this war, that's self defense, yes? That's just war, right?" he said. He took a step closer to the edge of the steel, but did not cross.
"They've said the same thing, 'we were here first, this is ours, you're weeds,' well, fuck you, I was here first! Fuck you, and fuck your life leaking into mine, get out."
She almost picked up an iron rose her mother took from a castle to throw it at him, but stopped. No, she couldn't. She had to keep everything that was still her.
"And yet you pretend you didn't want this. You were absolutely fine with what was happening to us right up until you found out about the war, and then, all at once, oh no, I can't be him. You reveled in the knowledge you gained, you relished the day when you'd get 'your' body back. Yours. You wouldn't even know how to use it."
He crossed the threshhold. She backed up against the wall. Nowhere to run. No, even if there was, this... was...
She was unconscious and this parasite was changing her.
"And you speak of this war, tell me, Christobel Starsky, tell me... human, without me, how would you fight this war? With your petty, ignorant Earth science? With your paddling about with your algorithms and code, your pathetic, weak understanding of physics? With your books on military strategy? What chance do you have?"
He was close enough now that she could smell the ozone and metal, the faint reek of engine oil and something else alien, and he grabbed her chin and pointed her face towards his.
It was like looking in a twisted mirror. Despite the pronouns, he didn't look particularly masculine at all, and the structures were all there. Not cheekbones, maybe, but the shapes, the planes... her own face, bent from steel and glass.
No, dammit.
There had to be a way out of this.
I need to...
She closed her eyes.
"Yes, that's it, accept your fate, human; indeed, you never really existed. You were nothing more than an error, a twisted, incomplete reflection of me..."
She grabbed his hand and twisted it away from her face, pinching the cables between the thumb and forefinger. He cried out in pain.
"H-how!? You're only human, you're not..."
"Strong enough?" she hissed. "You listen to me, you overgrown bag of bolts. I'm not a twisted reflection of you; I'm corrected code. I'm commented, refined, upgraded, the new system, bugfixed and patched. I'm version-fucking-two-point-oh."
She let go, then kicked him hard in the chest, sending him flying backwards. He landed in a heap on the border, now stable in the center of the room, warping and shifting. She walked forward and put a boot on his chest, pinning him to the ground.
"I am what you wish you still were. I am that memory of those halcyon Academy days, before it all went to hell, when you still thought you could change the world. When the Decepticons were not tyrants but an ideal of revolution. I still have ideas, I have hope. And more than that..."
There it was. There it was, right there, all along.
"I have people who believe in me. Who trust me. Who take me at my word and who say I have talent; my power was gained not through fear but trust. Matthew! Matthew trusts me, believes in me, and I trust him. I trust, I believe that he will do what I have done and he will reconcile what is happening. You never had that! Not once. And too, Vector Prime, Lord of Time is with me, and can you say that? No, for you were lost. And Matthew and I, we will fight this beast as equals, and we will conquer the beast as equals, and when it is over we will leave Earth as it is and turn our gaze to the stars and we will bring forth Cybertron anew."
And as she said it it all rang true in her heart -- her spark. I want this.
She took her boot off his chest and let him get to his feet.
He laughed. "You think he'll let you rule jointly? You think we'll be satisfied with that? He craves only power, and he'll take it. And how do you know he'll 'reconcile'? Or even that you will? You walk a knife's edge and you always will. What if he becomes Megatron, wholly and completely?"
"Then we'll be traitors once again, and then the cycle will continue but this time we'll know better and we will not do it for ourselves, but for a higher cause."
"We will never be heroes," he said.
"No," she said. "But this time -- this time -- we might not be villains."
"Do you want a second chance? To put the war behind you, to put your sins behind you? They will sing our name in the streets and we will be known."
He looked up at her and in his eyes she saw and felt all the weight of war and madness and...
"I was happy," he said. "For all that I was frustrated with your idiotic, backwards society, your wars were shorter and your world was still here..."
He put his face in his hands. "I just wanted some fragging acknowledgement, I wanted to stop failing, I wanted to win, for once, just once, to do something that someone looked upon and said yes, Starscream, you've done well. And even if each of your victories sometimes felt hollow at other times, the small things were right."
"I was happy. Before all this started, I was happy not remembering what I was, and though I longed for the sky and for steel, I was still... happy."
"We can be happy," she said. "But you have to accept that I will never leave."
"And you have to accept that we did those things. We cannot escape them."
She reached out for his hand. He took it. They stood, for a moment.
"I know... because--"
Everything went white.
They?
He -- no. No, no, still...
She?
Why not?
The house was gone, but so was Cybertron. She stood and for a moment flesh WAS steel, heart WAS spark and mind WAS code, at once, quantum superposition, and...
"I am Starscream."
It was not breath but a whirring of coolant fans, and... it WAS right.
It was a second chance.
related to previous body horror post, kinda
just a thought for a What If
She didn't want to stay awake. The pain had mounted and grown until it seemed that pain was all there was. At least in the pain, she didn't have to think, didn't have to worry.
I am a monster.
But it was becoming harder and harder to think. She couldn't see right anymore; first it was fine, then it was fuzzy and then it was random colors and shapes and madness, and her ears, too, were hearing strange, and her thoughts weren't sticking together right, but all that was moot because this
fucking
pain
And yet she had to stay awake, because if she blacked out she wasn't sure who she'd wake up as. She wasn't...
Wasn't...
...
*****
Chris woke with a gasp as she tumbled over the side of her bed and landed on the floor with a thump. She thrashed around in her sheets for a few seconds, before giving up and laying on the floor, just breathing. Just... breathing.
No pain. No nothing, in fact. This was... home? Her parents house. Just as she'd left it. There was that goofy Top Gun poster, the model airplanes hung from the ceiling, the science fair prizes, the stacks of textbooks... she slowly detangled herself from her sheets, then sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her hands.
Human. Totally human. No steel hiding underneath that skin. She looked up to the mirror hanging on the back of her door... brown eyes. She stood up and walked over, pulling down her shirt near her shoulder... no symbols, either.
In fact, it all seemed so very far away. All those memories... the Academy of Sciences, Skyfire, the war, slowly going mad, killing his way up through the ranks, Megatron, all of it. Megatron... no, he was just Matt, just Matt, her slightly antagonistic rich asshat friend. Which in turn meant that Elian was just Elian and that everything was just fine. There was no new war, no new threat to Earth. She was just Christobel, starving PHD student, soon to be not starving, soon to be a roboticist in Matt's company, soon to change the world, she swore she would. And Matt was fine! Matt was not losing his mind and soon to become a monster that in her broken (FALSE) memories had been a scourge upon her existence. His existence. Whatever, it didn't matter. It was all a lie.
She closed her eyes and put a hand to her face and cried, just cried. It had been a long and vivid and nonsensical dream, a hallucination, of course. Just an extended madness. She was home for a short summer vacation, with her parents, and surely Elian would be over to visit soon, or grandma Laurel, and she'd catch up with her high school friends and go thrift shopping, and maybe stop at the Air and Space Museum for old times sake...
Yeah.
"Fuck, I'm hungry," she said. She rolled out of bed and stretched, smiling. God, it was a beautiful day. God, life was fantastic. She started down the stairs.
"Mom? Dad?" she asked. "What's in the fridge, do we have any..."
She stopped in the living room. And stared.
"No... no, dammit!"
Half of the living room wasn't the living room. Instead of her mother's collection of strange curios from distant lands and her father's watercolor paintings were walls of welded metal and steel, dark and cold. A huge picture window at the far end looked out on an alien sky. Worse, the edges of the metal seemed to be creeping into her normal part of the house, slowly but surely. Inevitably.
At the far end of the room on the metal side there was what must have once been an elegant throne of steel but was now a rusted, broken wreck.
He was missing half his chest, and the garish crown he wore was broken as well. The purple cloak on his back was tattered and burned. He flickered, slightly, as though he wasn't entirely there.
"You're persistent," he hissed, glowering at her. "Here I'd believed you a mere error, a vestige of what this world has done to me in taking me as her soldier and her slave, and that you'd surely vanish when I remembered what I was."
"And yet," he said, standing slowly, pulling the cloak off his shoulders and letting it fall to the ground, "Here you are. Even in your last hour, as that final Echo consumes your organic matter, you remain."
He looked up at the encroaching steel and smirked. "Though not for long."
"Hey, you shut the fuck up," she snapped, wincing at how they sounded exactly the same, her voice simply lacking that machine modulation. "It's bad enough that the Enemy is trying to murder us all, and worse that it turns out that you'd be on their side. You're doing the same fucking thing here! I was just trying to live my goddamn life!"
"Oh, stop that," he said. "You are me. We were born this way. Look at your life! What would have happened if you'd joined the Air Force? You were a scientist, you balked at the fact that no one listened to your ideas, you sought a way out. And even your so-called friendship with that fool... I idolized him at first! Until I saw his true nature. And so would you have."
"I'm not a murderer!"
"Ah yes, and what you've done in the name of this war, that's self defense, yes? That's just war, right?" he said. He took a step closer to the edge of the steel, but did not cross.
"They've said the same thing, 'we were here first, this is ours, you're weeds,' well, fuck you, I was here first! Fuck you, and fuck your life leaking into mine, get out."
She almost picked up an iron rose her mother took from a castle to throw it at him, but stopped. No, she couldn't. She had to keep everything that was still her.
"And yet you pretend you didn't want this. You were absolutely fine with what was happening to us right up until you found out about the war, and then, all at once, oh no, I can't be him. You reveled in the knowledge you gained, you relished the day when you'd get 'your' body back. Yours. You wouldn't even know how to use it."
He crossed the threshhold. She backed up against the wall. Nowhere to run. No, even if there was, this... was...
She was unconscious and this parasite was changing her.
"And you speak of this war, tell me, Christobel Starsky, tell me... human, without me, how would you fight this war? With your petty, ignorant Earth science? With your paddling about with your algorithms and code, your pathetic, weak understanding of physics? With your books on military strategy? What chance do you have?"
He was close enough now that she could smell the ozone and metal, the faint reek of engine oil and something else alien, and he grabbed her chin and pointed her face towards his.
It was like looking in a twisted mirror. Despite the pronouns, he didn't look particularly masculine at all, and the structures were all there. Not cheekbones, maybe, but the shapes, the planes... her own face, bent from steel and glass.
No, dammit.
There had to be a way out of this.
I need to...
She closed her eyes.
"Yes, that's it, accept your fate, human; indeed, you never really existed. You were nothing more than an error, a twisted, incomplete reflection of me..."
She grabbed his hand and twisted it away from her face, pinching the cables between the thumb and forefinger. He cried out in pain.
"H-how!? You're only human, you're not..."
"Strong enough?" she hissed. "You listen to me, you overgrown bag of bolts. I'm not a twisted reflection of you; I'm corrected code. I'm commented, refined, upgraded, the new system, bugfixed and patched. I'm version-fucking-two-point-oh."
She let go, then kicked him hard in the chest, sending him flying backwards. He landed in a heap on the border, now stable in the center of the room, warping and shifting. She walked forward and put a boot on his chest, pinning him to the ground.
"I am what you wish you still were. I am that memory of those halcyon Academy days, before it all went to hell, when you still thought you could change the world. When the Decepticons were not tyrants but an ideal of revolution. I still have ideas, I have hope. And more than that..."
There it was. There it was, right there, all along.
"I have people who believe in me. Who trust me. Who take me at my word and who say I have talent; my power was gained not through fear but trust. Matthew! Matthew trusts me, believes in me, and I trust him. I trust, I believe that he will do what I have done and he will reconcile what is happening. You never had that! Not once. And too, Vector Prime, Lord of Time is with me, and can you say that? No, for you were lost. And Matthew and I, we will fight this beast as equals, and we will conquer the beast as equals, and when it is over we will leave Earth as it is and turn our gaze to the stars and we will bring forth Cybertron anew."
And as she said it it all rang true in her heart -- her spark. I want this.
She took her boot off his chest and let him get to his feet.
He laughed. "You think he'll let you rule jointly? You think we'll be satisfied with that? He craves only power, and he'll take it. And how do you know he'll 'reconcile'? Or even that you will? You walk a knife's edge and you always will. What if he becomes Megatron, wholly and completely?"
"Then we'll be traitors once again, and then the cycle will continue but this time we'll know better and we will not do it for ourselves, but for a higher cause."
"We will never be heroes," he said.
"No," she said. "But this time -- this time -- we might not be villains."
"Do you want a second chance? To put the war behind you, to put your sins behind you? They will sing our name in the streets and we will be known."
He looked up at her and in his eyes she saw and felt all the weight of war and madness and...
"I was happy," he said. "For all that I was frustrated with your idiotic, backwards society, your wars were shorter and your world was still here..."
He put his face in his hands. "I just wanted some fragging acknowledgement, I wanted to stop failing, I wanted to win, for once, just once, to do something that someone looked upon and said yes, Starscream, you've done well. And even if each of your victories sometimes felt hollow at other times, the small things were right."
"I was happy. Before all this started, I was happy not remembering what I was, and though I longed for the sky and for steel, I was still... happy."
"We can be happy," she said. "But you have to accept that I will never leave."
"And you have to accept that we did those things. We cannot escape them."
She reached out for his hand. He took it. They stood, for a moment.
"I know... because--"
Everything went white.
They?
He -- no. No, no, still...
She?
Why not?
The house was gone, but so was Cybertron. She stood and for a moment flesh WAS steel, heart WAS spark and mind WAS code, at once, quantum superposition, and...
"I am Starscream."
It was not breath but a whirring of coolant fans, and... it WAS right.
It was a second chance.