Cold Flame

"My beloved, my bright moon,
My torch, my sunshine, my sun in heaven,
My heart is filled with sorrow, my eyes with tears."

Sultan Suleiman I (1494 - 1566) to his wife Roxelana

xxx

The planet had lost nothing of its diversity.

This landscape, for example. A few joors ago, the air temperature had amounted to 100 degrees Celsius (or was it Fahrenheit? He was still getting acquainted with the native measuring units). But when the sun disappeared behind the horizon, the heat had dissipated within kliks, and the wind that now skimmed over his wings was cold, almost chilling. As cold as -

Stop it, Skyfire told himself firmly.

His navigation system signaled that he was nearing the target coordinates, and he saw that it was a small plateau among a range of cliffs, a flat surface unlimited by trees or stray boulders. A place, Skyfire thought, chosen by someone who was familiar with the requirements for an easy landing.

He began his descent, scanning the area. For a split astrosecond, there was a tiny blip on his radar, but it was gone the moment he looked closer.

He shifted into root mode as he touched down and activated his night vision, waiting.

"You're late," someone snapped.

A winged figure materialized - there really was no other description for it - out of the nearest wall of rock. Skyfire managed to barely flinch.

"And a good evening to you, too," he answered.

Streaks of light rippled across the stone wall like waves on the ocean. Skyfire raised his hand instinctively and smiled when the hologram evaporated into thin air before him. This, at least, hadn't changed. His Seeker had always been a sneaky one.

Starscream's optics smoldered in the dark like burning rubies. "What kept you? Busy saving flesh creatures again?"

Skyfire fought the impulse to surge forward and crush his mate to his chest. He imagined it vividly; the scene had become a regular sensor flux whenever he powered down to recharge. But interwoven with the urgent need was the memory of laser fire swamping his senses in searing pain. He realized with a jolt that he hadn't even thought about activating his defense systems, and wondered if that had been a mistake.

"This would be subject to the 'no questions' rule, I believe," he said. Oh yes, Starscream had been very clear about the rules for this meeting: absolute secrecy, no questions, no tricks.

Starscream smirked. "Very good," he purred.

A gentle vibration shook the ground. Before Skyfire could activate his vocalizer, Starscream turned, jumped, and was 300 feet above ground within astroseconds. He flew off without bothering to look behind.

xxx

"We're cleared for take-off!" Starscream announces as he bursts into the spaceport's waiting area and waves two holo-passes before Skyfire's faceplates. Skyfire winces and instinctively takes a step back.

"That's… great," he says.

Starscream drops his arm and frowns at him. "Wow," he says. "Careful. Don't get too excited, you might blow a fuse."

Skyfire smiles and reaches for his hand. "I'm sorry, love. All this," he makes a gesture to encompass both them and their surroundings, "still seems a bit surreal. We've worked so long and hard to get this expedition approved. It's hard to believe it's finally happening."

Starscream hums in agreement, his fingers intertwining with Skyfire's, and the overexcited swirl that is his field smooths out a little. "And the hardest part was to refrain from assassinating some bureaucratic halfwits along the way. I'd say the real miracle is that there haven't been any casualties."

Skyfire laughs, and that laughter breaks the dam. He draws Starscream into his arms and allows all the emotions he's been trying to reign in to flood his field as he hugs the Seeker close. "I'm about to go on the adventure of my life together with my mated lover," he murmurs. "Give me a moment to cherish the thought."

Starscream melts into his embrace like quicksilver, engine purring. His churning field relaxes a bit more as he presses his cheek against Skyfire's chest plates. "Those spawns of a rusted trash compactor made us wait for four megavorns," he murmurs. "They won't drop dead if you have your moment." A sliver of malicious joy worms its way across their bond. "Or perhaps they will."

"Star," Skyfire admonishes gently, but he doesn't bother to hide his smile, and Starscream snorts. Without breaking their embrace, he turns them so they can look out of the waiting room's panorama window. Behind the dura-glass, Cybertron's stars glow bright and silver, and below them, sentient and non-sentient aircrafts alike lift off to begin their various journeys. There are vanishingly few these days. But while they watch, Starscream's field finally calms enough to connect with Skyfire's own, and Skyfire feels all his earlier emotions reflected back at him: excitement, happiness, apprehension. Wonder.

Starscream's hand comes up to gently cup Skyfire's cheek and guide him down until they are face to face. "Well?" he says, smirking. "Are you going to start cherishing, or what?"

xxx

Starscream circled and doubled back, transformed into jet mode without missing a beat and spiraled through the night sky. Skyfire watched, transfixed, as the light of Earth's single moon caressed the Seeker's sleek form, making him look like a silver flame that flashed its brightness through the night. He felt sad, then, and jealous; jealous of the light and the wind that were allowed to touch where he no longer could.

Rule number four: absolutely no touching.

A burst of white noise from his comm. system startled him. The channel was old, long predating the war, and for a jumble of random sounds, the transmission sounded remarkably impatient. Skyfire huffed a gentle laugh before he returned to shuttle mode and followed Starscream up into the air.

The day's heat seemed to linger in the upper atmospheric strata; once they had reached those, the resulting updraft made flying a wonderfully easy experience. Skyfire stayed close to Starscream's tailfin, trying to synchronize their flight paths, but the Seeker wouldn't have it. He shot ahead and drew close again, dove above and below his companion, dazzling Skyfire's sensors.

'Starscream? What are you -'

Starscream executed a perfect barrel roll right beneath Skyfire's nosecone, and Skyfire felt a surge of giddy excitement when he finally realized what was happening: He was - none too subtly - being coaxed into a specific and well-known maneuver.

He had never found out if this choreography had a special meaning in Seeker culture, or if Starscream was simply fond of it. But no amount of time spent in cryostasis could corrupt this memory file.

They tumbled through star-streaked darkness in a controlled freefall, orienting to each other as they had done countless times before. The silver flame flashed and burned, and Skyfire drew inexorably closer, driven by a deep-seated hunger that felt as right and natural as the pulse of his spark. Starscream adjusted his vector, and for the briefest of moments, their wingtips touched.

Skyfire felt the contact like living current on his plating and took a gasping intake. Had that been an accident? Starscream was too skilled a flyer to allow such an obvious blunder, but perhaps his own course had faltered? His navigation system went out of its way to replay and analyze his movements while his treacherous frame already leaning closer, desperate for another taste.

Starscream did an abrupt U-turn, fired his afterburners, and shot straight up into the sky, turbines screeching. Skyfire felt the loss of contact keenly, and the suddenness of it left him dizzy. He had to reset his flight sensors before he was able to change direction and give chase.

Starscream seemed set on breaking his speed record. Skyfire found himself burning a decent amount of fuel simply to not be outspeeded, and the number-glyphs on his altimeter were steadily rising.

'Star?'

The Seeker slowed down, and when Skyfire caught up with him, he maneuvered himself into a horizontal position and changed shape again. A bit surprised, Skyfire did the same and looked around.

Earth was a broad expanse of white-blue-green beneath them, the planet's curvature sloping against the black vacuum of space. His thermostat registered double-digit freezing temperatures, and when he pulled up his planetary charts on his HUD, their relative position was flagged 'lower thermosphere'.

"Sixty-two miles above sea level," Starscream said as if he'd read Skyfire's thoughts. "Edge of space for this planet. Your fleshling friends call it Kármán line, I believe."

Skyfire's ventilation stalled.

xxx

'I don't see anything of interest,' Starscream says.

Skyfire smiles. His companion has maneuvered them into an orbit which grazes the upper layers of the planet's oxygen-rich atmosphere, a position where the centrifugal forces of their thrusters are just strong enough to keep them in zero gravity. With the stars above them and the planet stretched out beneath them, they are literally floating between two worlds.

'Really? I count at least 500,000 different species that I personally find quite intriguing.'

'None of which are sentient, or even remotely useful to us.'

'Oh, we don't know that yet,' Skyfire says amicably. He glances towards the planet's northern pole region, where a geomagnetic storm is flaring in the ionosphere, creating curtains of multicolored auroras. 'And you're not telling me that you don't find the atmospheric activity worth mentioning. I'm quite sure you're already collecting data.' He extends his field in a playful nudge, trying his best to interweave his frequencies with an emulation of the scanning algorithms Starscream uses for such information.

The Seeker snorts. 'Well then, riddle me this: After I give you a dozen brilliant and irrefutable reasons why this excursion would be a waste of time and resources, will you then give a tedious speech that can be summarized as 'I know you're right, but let's have a look anyway', which will in turn lead to us digging through this mudball after all?'

Skyfire can't help but laugh. 'I might, yes.'

Starscream heaves the deep, exasperated sigh of a mech who feels unduly inconvenienced. 'Get a move on, then,' he orders. 'Might as well get some work done before my processors freeze with boredom.'

He guns his engines and plunges down into the atmosphere, his entrance angle sharp enough to make his armor plates spit sparks. Skyfire watches for a moment, smiling at this - admittedly impressive - display of bravado.

'Thank you,' he comms, and follows a bit more sedately.

xxx

Starscream rolled onto his back and stretched like a contented feline, obviously unimpressed by the fact that he was hovering in utter nothingness sixty miles above ground. His wings had gathered droplets of condensation on their way through the clouds, and those had formed a thin sheen of ice crystals reflecting the moonlight. They gleamed and sparkled with every movement, and Skyfire's spark ached.

"It suits you," he said. "Your new alt mode, I mean."

"Aren't you sweet," Starscream scoffed, but Skyfire saw the smile tugging at his mouth.

Primus, he was staring like an infatuated youngling. Embarrassed, Skyfire unglued his optics from Starscream's form and instead looked at the planet beneath him. Above its northern pole, blue and green auroras were dancing.

For a dizzying moment, Skyfire wondered where - or rather, when - he was. The flickering lights seemed like a mockery, a cruel reminder of everything he had lost and missed. And yet, wasn't his beautiful bondmate by his side? Wasn't that reason enough for the gentle warmth that pulsed through his spark?

He noticed that Starscream was watching too, and something deep inside him seemed to dislodge. "You knew," he said in wonder.

Starscream raised an optic ridge at him. "I beg your pardon?"

"You knew it would be there," Skyfire said, nodding to the auroras. "That's why you got angry when I was late. You didn't want us to miss it."

The Seeker gave a derisive laugh. "Don't get any stupid ideas. I'm passing time, that's all. Spending your solars stuck at the bottom of an ocean with nothing but Megatron's daily battle speech for entertainment gives a whole new meaning to the term 'boredom', I can tell you."

"I should think so," Skyfire said gently. "And yet, I don't believe you."

Starscream crossed his arms over his cockpit, and Skyfire thought, in dismay, that he should be able to identify the expression on his mate's faceplates. There had been a time when he could read Starscream like his own base coding. Now it felt like someone had gone and changed the decryption code.

"Suit yourself," Starscream said, and turned away again, and suddenly the distance between them became too much to bear.

Skyfire used the propulsion of his thrusters to edge a little closer. Starscream's head whipped around like a tightly wound spring, his gaze following every movement as Skyfire leaned close enough to touch. His field was drawn in so tight it was barely there, and his optics narrowed to pinpoints of red. "And what do you think you're playing at?" he hissed.

Skyfire shook his head. "Not playing," he said softly, and took Starscream's hand in his.

The next thing he knew was that Starscream was suddenly face to face with him, and that the muzzle of a null-ray gun was pressed against his throat; cold, hard, and unforgiving.

"Forgot the rules, haven't we?" Starscream purred. "Don't worry, I'm here to help. This is your one and only chance to think very hard about what you're going to do."

Oh, how Skyfire had thought about that. He had thought about little else as he struggled to reconcile the memory of his loving bondmate with that of the Decepticon who'd had no qualms about shooting at him. Somehow, that ruthless attacker was the same mech who had sought this clandestine meeting and gotten angry when Skyfire had been late.

The mech who, despite all his threats and bluster, had yet to withdraw his hand.

Slowly, so as not to provoke any rash actions, Skyfire brought his free hand up and gently cupped Starscream's cheek in his palm. The Seeker's frame stiffened. He bared his fangs and snarled in warning, and there was the tell-tale clicking noise of the null-ray's safety mechanism disengaging.

It struck Skyfire as profoundly wrong that his mate should react to his touch like this. Driven by the desperate need to erase whatever made his Seeker behave this way, he leaned forward and gently placed his lips on Starscream's mouth.

The universe stopped. Nothing to see, nothing to hear or feel except for the gentle press of their mouths and the warmth blooming in his spark. He let the sensation spill into his field like liquid light, wrapping them both in a protective web. Starscream wasn't kissing back, he realized, but neither was he resisting. Skyfire gathered all his courage. He swept his glossa lovingly over Starscream's lower lip and opened his side of the bond.

He realized too late that this was a mistake. He'd wanted Starscream to feel his love, his longing, but the decision was taken out of his hands the moment the bond scented its chance. It roared and twisted like a sudden firestorm, seared by the flashes of all the things that clawed at his spark like vicious, living beasts. Starscream's null-ray clattered against his plating and slipped away, and Skyfire sensed his frantic struggle to keep his firewalls up under the onslaught.

The small part of his processor still capable of rational thinking was horrified that he was forcing himself on his bondmate like this, and that thought broke the spell. With a monumental effort, Skyfire drew back, both mentally and physically. Starscream's hand, so delicate in his bigger one, slipped from his grasp. He drew a deep, shuddering intake and looked up.

Starscream's expression was eerily blank. His optics, wide and shimmering, never left Skyfire's faceplates. "You slagging fool," he said. His voice was soft and rough with static, and it made Skyfire want to crush him to his chest and shelter him from the universe.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. Sorry for losing control, sorry for crashing in the ice, sorry for everything that had gone so horribly wrong with them.

But Starscream turned away, fired his afterburners and left the orbit, diving earthwards. He became the silver flame again, sparkling brightly in the light of the stars until a blanket of clouds swallowed him whole.

Staring after him, Skyfire became aware for the first time how empty and deathly silent space was. Instinctively, he wrapped his arms around himself, but the silver flame was gone. It had taken light and warmth away with it, and the cold was closing in on him again.

*Fin*

Disclaimer: I do not own The Transformers, and I do not make any money with this story.