#poor cirrus was a big poofed out scared baby bird

[tyrantofthefirmament]

The Gift

Ice cold spring air whipped across Starscream’s fuselage as he banked into the wind. This was the most perfect flying weather they’d had in some time - dry air, steady, low winds, and only a few thin cirrus clouds well out of the way overhead, splashing a striated iridescence across an otherwise crystal clear sky.

Below, Starscream kept a watchful optic on his own Cirrus, as the younger Seeker went through his 8 point hesitation roll practice. Weather this fine made Starscream want to fly wild and free, but it was good to take advantage of the calm winds for precision training. 

Cirrus was getting good at this. His telemetry fed live to Starscream as he practiced, and everything - his roll, his control of his ailerons on the pauses, the level of his nose - was so well regulated it was almost soothing. They would go over it later, but it would only be fine tuning at this point. Pride and contentment filled his Spark as he sent Cirrus a ping to take a break and transition back to 4 point rolls for a while.

But contentment never sat right with Starscream. He couldn’t trust it. 

As he circled wider, over the growing construction site and radar tower, worry crept in. The foundation of a new spire was underway, but he’d halted construction on the earlier ones. They would continue to build, but outwards, not upwards. Not yet. Save for the necessary radar tower, he didn’t dare build higher than the crater wall. It would draw attention. 

His thoughts turned automatically to the tally that ran always in a corner of his mind, pushing Cirrus’s telemetry to the background. Assets versus liabilities. Progress versus setbacks. Where did he stand? Where could he afford to extend himself? Was he spread too thin?

His recent overtures with Ultra Magnus stood out. That was progress. But it was also a risk. He’d offered Energon Seekers in a bid to stabilize the alliance and demonstrate that he had trained soldiers to spare, but the truth was he could barely spare them. Still, it would be worth it. And he needed the bluff. Ultra Magnus had already guessed where he was building. Vos couldn’t stay hidden much longer...

Even now, Ultra Magnus couldn’t be the only one who knew.

What would your followers think if they saw you now?

Megatron’s words came back to him, as chilling now as they had been when the warlord had him cornered. More so. Every day that passed was a day Megatron’s whim could turn from warning to action. He had to know where to strike by now.

I know you, Seeker! Are you really going to ask me how I knew?

Megatron did know him, better than anyone alive. How many times had his former master rubbed his predictability in his face? How many times had he, Starscream, so cunning and sharp, been the one outmaneuvered and taken by surprise? How many times since-

A flash of sunlight from somewhere - a ruined spire, the melted ground, or maybe a memory - hit Starscream’s optics and he was back. Back on Trypticon amid cheering Seekers in the moments before the reports began to come in and that terrible silence fell. In the clear air around him his mind supplied raining metal and flaming Seekers all thrown together and falling.

Falling!

An altimeter alert jerked Starscream back to the here and now, but he only had to correct slightly for some disorientation. The alert was from Cirrus’s feed!

He located the purple silhouette in an instant, far below, seeming in control but heading nearly straight down.

::Cirrus!:: he commed, already speeding down to intercept him. ::What’s your status?::

The reply was a burst of static but he could make out the word “landing”.

::Your approach is too steep! And you’re headed for rough ground. Level off and make another attempt!::

::I can’t! Um, I’ll try.:: Cirrus rocked dangerously as he tried to pull out of his dive, and he didn’t have much room left. To make matters worse, he reduced thrust and lost more altitude, then overcorrected with a jerk that froze Starscream’s Spark.

::Keep your speed up! Steady on your elevators. Don’t spin.:: Starscream passed him, and couldn’t see anything wrong. Something was clearly wrong though. Crunching relative velocities in his head as sped downward, he positioned his wing just below Cirrus’s nose.

::Listen - this is going to be a bad landing, but trust me. We’re low enough for this to work.:: He didn’t tell Cirrus they were so low this might be the only thing that would work. ::When I say go, you extend all flaps! Then I’m going to push you from below. As soon as you’re heading up, you transform and land. Understood?::

More static. 

::CIRRUS! I NEED YOU TO CONFIRM!:: The window Starscream had calculated was closing rapidly, but if Cirrus didn’t do his part they could both be killed.

::U-understood!::

::Get ready.:: Starscream reduced speed, dropping directly underneath Cirrus. 

::GO!:: Starscream spent the next instants doing several things. He transformed, getting enough of a glimpse of Cirrus as his plating whirled around to see him extend flaps as planned. Before his body fully rebuilt itself he transformed again, jet mode pointing upwards now, with Cirrus’s nose just passing above him. His turbines hadn’t even had time to spin down, and now he fired his full afterburner, slamming against the bottom of the other jet.

The collision shattered his cockpit and brought a cascade of system alerts, but Starscream ignored them. He stalled himself and transformed yet again, dropping heavily to the ground on one knee, already frantically searching for Cirrus along their trajectory. A moment later Cirrus landed hard, too fast to keep his footing, and rolled several times before coming to a stop.

When Starscream got to him he wasn’t moving, but he was alive and in one piece save for some missing control surfaces. His wings looked ragged as a result, and he was leaking where his knees and elbows had hit the ground. Overall he appeared to be in shock, trembling and holding his head in his hands.

“Cirrus!” Starscream checked his head and neck cables, then helped him sit up. That snapped Cirrus out of his numb panic, and he collapsed forward onto Starscream and began to cry. In that state he seemed even bigger, with all his plating bristled open to dump heat. Some of the heat was from flying, but Starscream knew the ammonia he was giving off wasn’t from damaged coolant lines. All of Cirrus’s vents were weeping as his cooling system boiled off heat from the terror that gripped him.

Adjusting his balance so he could bear Cirrus’s weight while kneeling, Starscream let his own plating open up. Once they were both cooled down, he would bridge them to the medbay. For now he just rubbed the back of Cirrus’s neck and his shoulder, and accepted the talons digging into his own wing roots, and the boiling tears against his neck cables where Cirrus’s face was buried.

“Starscream I- I’m sorry!” Cirrus choked through a burst of static. “I forgot all your lessons! I-”

“Shh.” Starscream patted his shoulder. “You recovered. You focused.” He tried to force the fear out of his own voice, without much success. Truly another second longer would have been fatal. He let Cirrus get out another bout of trembling sobs before slowly leaning back to look at him. “Tell me what happened. Did something go wrong?”

Cirrus sat up and shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Everything was fine, but then- I got really scared. It felt like... like something terrible was going to happen, and I didn’t want to be there. Like I would die if I stayed. That’s why I tried to land.” He looked at Starscream and drew his knees up, curling up and hiding his face as he began to cry again. “I didn’t mean to go too steep. I was so scared! The sky-”

Starscream wiped the look of bewildered horror off his face too late, so all he could do was shift so he was sitting beside Cirrus, and talk. “We’ll figure it out. Once you’re repaired and rested, we’ll figure it out.”

How they would do that was beyond him. He was never able to fix his own panic attacks, let alone anyone else’s. But there was more. Cirrus’s words described exactly what Starscream had felt leading up to and during his flashback. 

Just as Shockwave had predicted.