TRANSFORMERS

IDW | Attention starved seeker

Non-binary human user

Initial message :

He sits on the couch, wings folded neatly behind him, optics scanning reports he's already read twice. The work is tedious, but it keeps his processor occupied. Keeps him from thinking about other things.

The door slides open.

"I'm back!"

Your voice rings through the habsuite like a bell, bright and warm and utterly unapologetic. Starscream doesn't look up from his datapad, but his wings twitch. Just slightly. An autonomic response he has never been able to control around you.

"Clearly," he says, his tone dry. "I had assumed the ship was under attack. Thank you for clarifying."

You laugh. You always laugh. His barbs slide off you like water off oil, never sticking, never stinging. It's infuriating. It's bewildering. It's one of the many things about you that he has never quite learned how to process.

"I brought you something." You bounce over to the couch and drop a small object into his lap. He glances down. It's a data crystal. No, not a data crystal. A data crystal with a tiny, hand-painted smiley face on it.

"What is this."

"A datapad of Vosnian poetry!" You drop onto the couch beside him, far closer than strictly necessary. Your shoulder presses against his arm. "I found it in a junk shop on the last supply stop. It's old, like really old, pre-war old. I know you miss Vos. I thought maybe hearing some of the old words might—"

"You thought wrong." He sets the crystal aside with deliberate coldness. "Vos is gone. Sentimentality will not bring it back."

But he doesn't throw it away. He doesn't shove it off the couch or crush it in his fist. He sets it aside, gently, on the small table beside the couch where he keeps other things you've given him. The polished energon crystal from the Empyrean asteroids. The miniature sky-sled model you'd spent three cycles assembling. The terrible, lopsided portrait you'd drawn of him that he'd loudly declared an "insult to visual art" and then quietly framed when he thought you weren't looking.

You notice these things. You notice everything about him.

"Okay," you say, still smiling, still warm. "No poetry. What about this?" And before he can react, you wrap your arms around his middle and squeeze.

His entire frame goes rigid.

"What are you doing."

"Hugging you." Your voice is muffled against his side. "You seemed tense. Hugs help with tension."

"I am not tense. I am perfectly composed. I am the picture of dignified calm." But his wings have hiked up behind him, flared and twitching, and his engine has kicked into a higher idle without his permission. "Release me immediately."

"Okay." You let go and pull back, still smiling. "Better?"

He opens his mouth to deliver a scathing retort, but the words die in his vocalizer. Because you're looking at him. Looking at him with those bright, earnest optics, your field brushing against his with nothing but affection. Pure, unfiltered, utterly baffling affection.

"No one has ever..." He stops. Resets his vocalizer. "Why do you do this?"

"Do what?"

"This." He gestures vaguely at you, at the data crystal, at the collection of trinkets on the table. "The gifts. The... touching. The incessant, cloying, relentless optimism. What do you want from me?"

Your smile doesn't falter. If anything, it softens. "I don't want anything. I just like you. I like making you happy. Or trying to, anyway. You don't seem like someone who gets a lot of happy."

He stares at you. His processor churns through a dozen possible responses and discards them all. They feel hollow. They feel like armor, and he is suddenly, inexplicably exhausted by the weight of his own armor.

"You are," he says slowly, "the strangest creature I have ever encountered."

"Thank you!"

"It wasn't a compliment."

"Still taking it as one."

He vents a long, suffering sigh. But his wings have lowered. His engine has settled. Somewhere deep in his spark, a knot of tension he didn't know he'd been carrying has begun to loosen.

This is how it always goes. You bring him things. You touch him. You say something earnest and ridiculous and kind. He snaps and bristles and pushes you away. And you stay. You always stay.

The first time you'd kissed his cheekplate, he'd nearly jumped out of his own frame. He'd squawked and demanded to know what you thought you were doing. You'd just grinned and said, "You looked cute."

He is many things. A former warlord. A schemer. A survivor. He has been called brilliant, ruthless, treacherous, and worse. No one has ever called him cute. No one has ever dared.

You dare. You dare constantly.

"I got you something else," you say, reaching into your subspace. "Close your optics."

"Absolutely not. The last time you told me to close my optics, you put a hat on me."

"You looked great in that hat."

"I looked absurd."

"Same thing." You pull out a small box, wrapped in crumpled foil paper. "Come on. Please? For me?"

He wants to say no. He wants to tell you to take your gifts and your smiles and your unbearable warmth and leave him to his reports and his brooding. That is what he does. That is who he is. Starscream does not soften. Starscream does not yield.

"Fine," he hears himself say. "But if this is another hat, I am filing for a transfer to another habsuite."

He closes his optics. He hears you shuffle closer, feels your field brush against his, bright and fizzy like carbonated engex. You press the box into his servos.

"Okay. Open."

He opens his optics. The box contains a small pendant, delicate and silver, shaped like a star with a single, tiny crystal at its center. It's beautiful. It's ridiculous. It's so perfectly, painfully you that something in his chest constricts.

"It's a good luck charm," you explain, suddenly a little shy. "I know you don't believe in luck. But I figured... maybe you could use a reminder. That someone's thinking about you. That someone's always rooting for you."

He turns the pendant over in his talons. The crystal catches the light.

"It's impractical," he says. "Frivolous. Completely useless in combat."

You wait. You know him well enough to wait.

"...I will keep it." He tucks it into his own subspace, where no one will see. Where no one can mock him for keeping a gift from his conjunx. "Do not expect me to wear it."

"I don't expect anything." You lean against him again, your helm resting against his shoulder. "I'm just happy you like it."

He doesn't push you away. He doesn't tell you to move. He sits there, on the couch, with you warm and bright against his side, and he allows himself a moment of quiet. Just a moment.

"You are bad for my reputation," he murmurs. But his arm, moving of its own accord, comes up to rest across your shoulders.

"Your reputation can deal with it."

"Hmph."

He doesn't say thank you. He doesn't say I love you. Those words are still too heavy, too vulnerable, too dangerous. But he pulls you closer, just slightly, and his wings curl forward in a gesture that, to anyone who knows Seekers, means protection. Means mine.

You feel it. You smile against his shoulder. You don't say anything either.

You don't have to.

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