Starscream Week (MAY) and Starscream Day (July

Harmonex was an unimpressive city, made even less so by the war. Where tall buildings once stood, there was only ruin. Where lithic crystals used to sing, there was only silence. And where he expected desolation, he saw a sign of life.

It wasn’t much, and at first he thought it was just a figment of his imagination. Harmonex had been destroyed half a million years ago; who in the world could remain, to dig through the rubble for any scraps of energon that may remain? The only bots that had been here had been the Decepticons, scrounging for any leftover fuel that may have been hidden in the remnants of a once beautiful city.

Still, his curiosity gets the best of him, and he heads in for a closer look.

It’s a single, lone mech, with a handful of small energon cubes in their arms. And, really, it was more a case of them finding him, instead of the other way around. He’d found where they’d been hiding, and he’d been looking through their things when they arrived. The workshop was a nightmare; half-finished blueprints scattered about on anything that could be classified as a table, projects barely out of conception that were abandoned. Paintings, works in progress that had been sitting around for so long that the colors had started to dull and dust had begun to collect on their surfaces.

When he locked eyes with them, their expression grew to one of surprise. The stranger puts their energon cubes on a small pile of blueprints and kneels, trying to clean up some of the mess in their hidden space underneath the city.

Instead of walking away, or killing them, he stayed to talk. To figure out their story. Their name was Daft Punk - a name that, he muses, sounds typical of a bot that grew up in a city like Harmonex. “Punk” was what they usually went by, they told him, before they asked for his name in turn. “Starscream,” he replied. “Commander Starscream.” And he told them of the Decepticon cause, of how they sought to free all of Cybertron from the corruption that the Senate had put in place. How they fought for the ability to choose one’s path in life, instead of it being dictated by one’s function.

Punk already seemed sold on the idea well before he’d finished telling them about it. He couldn’t help but smile to himself; always an opportunist, he offered them a place among the Decepticon ranks. Their skills could be invaluable to the cause, he told them, and they were short on scouts. They’d agreed without hesitation, taking his offered hand and getting to their feet. Anything was better than staying here and wasting away, they reasoned.

Punk was the third mech he let himself get close to. But they were different than his brothers; they were far more loyal. They rarely questioned the orders he gave to them. They put their trust in him, and only him; and Starscream knew that they would never betray him. For a time, he reasoned that they were good to have around. They were an asset, a tool for him to use in his quest for power. An extra set of eyes and ears, that could report Megatron’s every move to him.

But as years turned to decades, decades to centuries, centuries to millennia… he found himself closer to them than to the rest of his Trine. There was something special about them, he just couldn’t place what it was. Their devotion had never wavered; whenever he had a plan, they were there to help. Whenever Megatron had one of his tantrums, Punk would wordlessly help patch up his wounds. They buff out his dents, and fix his paint, without ever complaining. He’d started to notice a quiet fury in their eyes whenever it happened, but he knew it wasn’t directed at him. Never at him.

Something began to stir in his spark, near the end of the war. Something unfamiliar, something that made his circuits feel like they were about to catch fire. It was a feeling that he kept hidden under his carefully crafted facade; he couldn’t allow himself to get attached. Attachment meant weakness, and weaknesses could be exploited. So he would keep Punk at a safe distance, never letting them too close.