Chapter Text
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
It had been a long day and Rattrap wasn’t excited to end the whole slagstorm with a visit to his boss’s penthouse office, after getting chased up half the alleys in town and nearly having his head bitten off by some Decepticon creep with a mouth like a trash compactor. But when the boss called, you went dragging your sorry aft to the throne like a good minion.
Night had fallen over the town. No lights were burning in Starscream’s offices.
Slumped in his heavy, antique chair, a pair of red eyes gleaming in the gloom of his office, the waiting figure sent a chill down the back of Rattrap’s spinal cable. Something was on Starscream’s mind, and that something seemed like it might be Rattrap. Not a place he wanted to be hanging around in, if he could help it.
“Come here,” Starscream said, his raspy voice falling low in the throat like a fire dying back to coals.
“Ehh, you okay boss?” Rattrap asked. He edged into the office like he was poking his little bronze toes at the floor looking for landmines. With His Royal Shrillness, who knew, there could be.
The nest of important documents buried in the lining of his berth cover flashed at the back of his mind, like the red alarm light of a hull breach.
Rattrap didn’t hold out a lot of hope that Starscream would let him live if he knew about that, though. Rattrap had made himself useful, but not indispensable. And Starscream wasn’t particularly merciful even to his friends.
“I’ve been doing some thinking,” Starscream said.
“Hoo boy,” Rattrap muttered.
Starscream pointed one finger imperiously at the floor in front of him. To his right, the long window overlooked the evening over their ramshackle empire, the stars lost among wisps of pink and crimson cloud.
Rattrap came reluctantly. When he was standing right at the foot of Starscream’s chair, the jet reached out and caught Rattrap’s chin between two formidable claws. The kibble on Rattrap’s frame all fluffed up with anxiety.
Was he gonna rip Rattrap’s whole head off? It’d be a hell of a thing, but Starscream was stronger than most people remembered he was, and just ruthless enough to do it.
Although a guy could hope for a monologue first. There was a lot a guy could do over the course of a good monologue...
“I have enemies,” Starscream said.
“Yeah, I know,” Rattrap said. “One’a yer old colleagues tried to put a pipe through my processor module this afternoon.”
“That’s what has me thinking,” Starscream replied. His voice was thoughtful, full of ominous intent, unrattled by Rattrap’s irreverence. “Autobots and neutrals won’t care, but when it comes to Decepticons…”
He turned Rattrap’s face this way and that, scrutinizing the metal. “It occurs to me that your being an autobot probably makes you look disposable to someone from my side of the war,” he said. “A fink, a fall guy if you will, a replaceable cog in my ambitious machine.”
He let go abruptly.
Rattrap rubbed uneasily at the sort of tingly spot on his chin. “Ain’t I?” he said.
Starscream narrowed his eyes. For a moment he said nothing. And then he said, “Where do you want it?”
“Pardon-eh moi?” Rattrap responded.
“The mark,” Starscream said, impatiently. “Shoulder? Throat? If you want it somewhere obvious, face maybe, I can oblige. You do understand it’ll make me look like a sparkless tyrant, as far as the neutrals are concerned, I’m sure.”
“Boss, all due respect, but you’re not puttin that pointy purple badge on me. I know I’m a rat, but even a rat’s got to have principles.”
“Badge,” Starscream repeated, brows furrowing like he had no idea what in the world Rattrap meant. “I don’t have to make you a Decepticon, idiot, I just have to give you the mark. My claim is in good standing. The matter of factions aside, I have more than enough firepower to back it up.”
Oh, here were the fragging landmines. Rattrap furiously mapped the steps of this conversation so far, trying to chart where the hell it was going. “You wanna… claim… me.”
“Yes, obviously.” Starscream wrinkled his lip.
“But, uh, ain’t that kinda… ” He skittered around the crumbling edge of this conversational pit trap. “Boss, you can’t mean you want nookie from me. Not that I wouldn’t be, uh, flattered-”
Starscream dug two fingertips into his scrunched forehead. “Rattrap, I know it’s difficult for you but please don’t be an imbecile? This is a protection offer, not a seduction attempt.”
Rattrap gave a sideways glance to the grand dark window. Well excuse him for getting some wires crossed, somehow.
Starscream pushed himself up from his seat and swept past him, possessed with some restless anxiety. “Once you have my mark, no one will dare touch you without invoking my vengeance. Whatever else you may think of me, I’ve only ever had a very few pact subordinates, and I’ve never left one unavenged.”
Finally, that rang a bell. He’d heard rumors that Decepticons went in for some kind of… well, ‘barbaric bloodpact ritual’ was probably the nicest way he’d ever heard it said. He hadn’t thought about that since Zverei, not since the last time he opened up his comm suite and scrolled down to stare at the dead line that he’d never bothered to scrub.
That planet had been a hell hole, a mess from the first landing, with every officer on either side determined to prove why Rattrap made it a point never to trust anyone higher than sergeant. Nonsense orders, strategic command structure that might as well have been held together with twigs and glue, dead equipment, pissed off locals - And there had been Him.
There had been that moment, in the sand, pinned and snarling and too indignant to remember to be afraid, when He had said- “Well, shall I cut you, vermin?”
Rattrap fought off a shiver. “If that’s what ya mean,” he said, “think somebody already beat ya to the punch.”
“What?” Starscream demanded. "Who?”
Rattrap scratched the back of his neck, uncomfortable and embarrassed and fighting off this heavy weight dragging him down toward memory.
“Some ‘con lieutenant,” he said, “wartime frenemies, you know how it is out on the front lines. Slit me gills to gullet in the middle of this big fraggin raid. Thought I was a goner, with him packin sand in the wound, but then he hit the blow torch and…”
And the wound had sealed up, fragile and clear, holding Rattrap together while the fight raged on around him. Twice, another ‘con had walked by him where he was shoved up in the scrag and sand, and with a glaring eye looked him over, then kept walking. Nobody ever explained, but Rattrap got an inkling.
“Couple years later I got slagged in an orbital shelling,” he finished, in a tone aiming for carelessness. “Medic re-molded my whole front piece, you can’t tell so much anymore. But he got me good when he had the chance, the old lizard.”
It had been a lightning bolt of murky glass, warped and inconsistent like the surface of a river beneath the testing claws. Straight through, the fanged mouth had said, grinning razor sharp. I can see straight through you to your wretched spark.
Against the window, Starscream was a black shape drawn up tight in himself. “And where is this noble protector of yours, hmm? While you’re crawling through dungeons and getting shot at by malcontents?”
“Dead,” Rattrap said, shortly.
Starscream paused, some further scathing commentary sitting on the tip of his tongue.
“Ah,” he said.
Rattrap blinked to clear his helm of memories. The sand, the burn of cooling glass, and then later, beneath a grey night sky, the sound of a blaster powering up to full charge as the figure standing tall above him looked away and said, “No, it’s dishonorable. I won’t do it.” And then he’d turned, and trained his gun on the Decepticon captain...
Officers. Always with the unnecessary heroics.
“No condolences necessary,” Rattrap breezed onward, rocking back and forth on his toe tips. “It was war. Waddaya gonna do.”
Starscream considered him a moment longer, and then drifted to the window, hands folded beneath the joint of his wings.
“Then you aren’t spoken for, are you?” he said.
“Er,” said Rattrap.
“Little good his promises of protection can do you now, from beyond the grave,” Starscream went on. “I’m here instead, and I have no intention of dying any time soon. So. Where do you want it?”
For the first time it occurred to Rattrap that he was on the cliff’s edge of actually having Starscream hold him down and cut him open, right here on the floor of this room, under the crimson-pink lights of the city. Starscream had twisted to look at him now, and glinting in the dark his clawtips flexed open.
“Whoa whoa, hey, come on now. Let’s not be hasty.” Rattrap put up his hands, skittering backward on the poured lacquer floor. “I’m doin just fine without any fancy scars, thank ya.”
Starscream’s clawed hand flexed at his side. Maybe he’d get tired of asking and he’d just do it. Rattrap sure hadn’t been asked if he wanted it the first time.
“You?” Starscream sneered. “Saying no to protection?”
Not that anyone had ever explained it, but - Rattrap got the feeling there had been more to it than protection. Or maybe it was just, with 'cons, protection was the most you could give.
“Thanks but no thanks, your chosen-ness,” he said. “I may be a coward, but I can take care of myself just fine.”
And Starscream might be a piece of scrap boss, but sometimes Rattrap almost liked him anyway. It’d be harder, he thought, to pull the trigger someday - if a trigger needed pulling - with someone who’d made him a promise on the other end.
After a moment, Starscream relaxed. He faced back to the window. It was a relief not to be in the searchlight of his gaze anymore. Rattrap realized the heel of his palm was rubbing at the armor over his spark.
“You Autobots,” Starscream said. “I’ll never understand the way your minds work. But if you insist you’re too good for my protection, far be it from me to grovel. Just tell me one thing. The Decepticon Lieutenant. After you killed him-”
“Killed him?"
“Naturally, you did kill him,” Starscream said, inspecting his clawtips. “You’re an Autobot after all, what does an abstraction of contract and claws mean to you? He would have trusted you, and then while he slept-”
“You’re jumpin to a lot of conclusions, mech!”
“You don’t have to lie to me,” Starscream said, a cruel and knowing gleam in his optic. “What do I care if you’ve murdered one suzerain before me? I knew what you were from the moment you opened your grubby little mouth and spat out that first piece of leverage.”
Rattrap grimaced. “Yeah? And what’s that, your lordship?”
“You’re me,” Starscream said simply, and looked away. “And one day if you’re unconscionably lucky, you’ll be the one standing over a city while some other grubby little monster waits at your back with a knife in his hand.”
Rattrap stood there, in the ensuing silence, stupefied. He thought about the documents, all the records, the blackmail, the incriminating conversations he'd been so careful about collecting, and realized that Starscream already knew. Or, at least, he thought that he already knew the important part, and the details of reality wouldn’t surprise him much. Starscream didn’t care, and what was more, he didn’t understand why he should.
Rattrap wondered if in some twisted way it was a relief for Starscream, to think he knew which hand was holding the knife.
“It doesn’t matter, really,” Starscream said, more quietly now. “You’ll live until you don’t, just like all the others. And I’ll keep you alive until I can’t, just like I always do. And you’ll kill me someday, if you’re clever enough, and maybe you’ll thank me for what I’ve done, but I doubt it. I’m not doing it for you. You’re just inevitable.”
Those fingers met the pane of glass with a quiet tck tck tck.
It was a kind of out of body experience, seeing himself the way that Starscream saw him; like a distorted copy, two feet to the left, mirroring Rattrap’s every creak and twitch. He fought to keep himself uninteresting, unobtrusive.
I don’t want your job, Rattrap thought, and I don’t wanna be your Starscream.
Starscream’s claws twitched against the glass with the slightest, pitchy scrape. “Besides,” he said, “you’re a horrible little rodent of a minion, but you’re mine.”
There were the finest white scrapes in the glass, above the points of Starscream’s claws. Rattrap didn’t have to imagine what those claws would feel like, because he’d felt it once before, struggling in the sand under someone else who meant to save him.
Oh hell. This whole messed up thing was Starscream’s way of caring about him. He never thought he'd see the day.
“I better… go,” he said, inching back across the lacquered floor. “Gutters ain’t gonna scavenge themselves…”
“Yes, fine,” Starscream said, absently.
Rattrap had inched himself back as far as the door, was almost free, when the horrible impulse finally bubbled up and popped on his tongue.
“I didn’t kill him,” Rattrap said, and then winced, and clenched his fingers in the air like he could grab the words and stuff them back into his mouth somehow.
Starscream turned his head just far enough to give Rattrap a sidelong look. Rattrap pulled in his fists, tucked them against his chest.
“I’da saved him,” Rattrap said. “If I could. Not for honor or nothin like that. I just liked the guy. And you don’t know me as well as you think you do, if you wanna tell me that’s a lie.”
Starscream narrowed his eyes. The rapid thumping of Rattrap’s fuel pump kicked up another level, because yeesh, but he held his ground as best he could. With some strategic support from the door-frame.
“I didn’t agree to it, and he wasn’t asking, but I reckon he was tryin to save me best as he could.” Rattrap kicked at a scuff on the floor. “And eventually he died for it."
"And I suppose you must bear him some scrap of affection," Starscream remarked. "Really Rattrap, I thought you were a little shrewder than that."
Just 'cause you'd rather kill a mech than owe him half a thank you, Rattrap didn't say. And I know it too, because I've seen it.
But. Here was the thing. Maybe not the most important thing, but the thing caught in the wheels all the same.
That night on Zverei, anyone in their right mind would have let Rattrap die. But he didn't. Because it mattered to him, maybe, more than his faction or his career or even, somehow, his life.
In the end it hadn't been shellings or enemies or even the damn creeping rust on that planet that had done the killing. It had been another Decepticon officer, with a pistol in his hand. And you want to know why Rattrap couldn't trust Starscream's winning utopian promises, but couldn't quite pull the trigger either, caught in the moment of judgement with a deadman's switch clutched tight in his hand. Well, there you go. There was no knowing which way the dice would fall, not even for Decepticons.
“Word to the wise? You put an awful lotta stock in your own bad press,” Rattrap said. “But not everything's about you."
"Isn't it?" Starscream asked, his mouth a mirthless smile.
Well, fair.
"If you ‘n me are anything alike," Rattrap said, "it’s ‘cause you’re just another fragged up coward like all the rest of us, looking for his own peace of mind. ‘Cause heroes don’t make it out the other side, and we do.”
Starscream flashed his fangs but didn’t deny it, which meant he knew he was caught - he’d made the connection first, and he didn’t know how to take it back now. He’d already cast Rattrap’s part in his twisted mythology, an endless ouroboros of Megatrons and Starscreams each swallowing the other up, and was fine with that much. He didn’t care.
But Starscream should care, because if Rattrap wanted anything more than power and privilege and capes and crowns, if he wanted anything in this world more than to protect his own hide, then nothing Starscream knew how to do to Starscream would stop Rattrap from taking them both down, together, when the time came.
He turned away, towards home - towards that tangle of evidence, the bed he’d made and now slept in, and waited even at this moment beneath them like a nest of wires at the heart of a landmine. One of these days, Starscream would take that step too far. But god help him, sometimes Rattrap wished that Starscream would prove him wrong.
"I ain't interested in any more claims, boss," he said. "I'm only lookin for a mech worth having a little faith in. And if that's you, hey, it’s never too late to turn on your target locks and do something that matters. Coward or not.”
In the polished metal of the door frame, twin red lights glared after him. There was a flicker of something else in that reflection, but just as quickly, it was gone.
“That’s what I’m doing,” he said, and left Starscream to his lurid vistas.