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Starscream had never felt like this before. Ever. Entire species had come into existence, built intergalactic empires, and transcended to other planes of being within the span of his ancient lifetime, and yet in the time it took for multiple alien races to evolve from pond scum to ascendant energy, Starscream had never felt what he was feeling now. He knew why – in all the millions of years that had come before, he hadn’t had Bumblebee. He’d had other lovers over the course of his ancient life, sometimes even in more than just the physical sense, but none of them had been quite like Bee, and the bonds he’d had with them hadn’t been like what he and Bumblebee now shared.
Starscream had existed for so very, very long, and he’d spent such an overwhelming portion of that immense existence in one type of misery or another. He’d almost always known on some level that his life was mostly wretchedness, but it was only when he could contrast the abject torment he had lived in for most of his existence with what he was experiencing now that he truly understood how terrible his life had been up till this point. All that time he had been mired in so much sadness and suffering, when it was possible to feel like this. Starscream hadn’t realised that he was even capable of feeling this way before now. Once he would have been filled with bitterness after coming to understand exactly how much of his time had been wasted being so dramatically denied, but now he was too consumed with joy over what he finally had to be upset over how long he had gone without.
A drastic change in his circumstances had certainly helped Starscream’s emotional state improve, but the things that had trapped him in a state of suffering had almost always been as much internal as they were external. Changing his extrinsic situation alone hadn’t been enough to free Starscream from his misery, it was only when he had changed aspects of how he was inside that he was able to be free to feel what he was so joyfully feeling now. It wasn’t that Starscream had completely exorcised the parts of himself that had contributed to his miserable life – those manifold aspects of who he was still lurked within. Some were traits that had been there at beginning, which had nudged him down a path that lead towards his life so full of suffering. Then there were those traits that compounded the miserable state he had ended up in, working in concert with the external sources of his suffering to push him further and further down into the mire of his misery. Then there were the parts of himself that had been born and nurtured in that mire; he’d evolved to become a creature that survived in its murky depths, but in the process it had become harder and harder to live in the light.
All of that was still within him, but it no longer controlled him. Whereas once he had been surrounded by people who had enabled, encouraged and exploited the worst parts of the himself, now he had Bumblebee by his side to help him overcome them. When his paranoia got the better of him, Bumblebee reminded him that there were people in this universe that he could trust. When his pessimism made the world seem hopelessly dark, Bumblebee was his smiling, optimistic beacon of light. When his self-doubt consumed him, Bumblebee’s honest belief in him buoyed him with confidence more intoxicating than that ever granted by his arrogance. On the days that ground him down, Bumblebee would lift him back up, and in those times that everything was too much and Starscream felt himself coming apart, Bumblebee held his broken pieces and helped him put them back together.
The poisonous voices that lived in his head still whispered to him, giving him petty, cruel, depressing and painful thoughts, but now he had Bumblebee’s voice in his audial to challenge them and plant kinder, fairer, more hopeful and far happier notions in his mind. Even when Bee wasn’t actually by his side, Starscream had come to know him so well that he knew what he would say if he were present, so whenever he had some dark thought he still heard the refutation Bee would give to it. Once Starscream had thought Bumblebee was some delirious manifestation of a conscience that he had been shocked to find he still possessed; now that he knew Bumblebee was a real, separate person, he found that he did indeed have an independent conscience of his own, but it had come to model itself after Bumblebee all the same.
The more Bee helped him fight the darker parts of himself, the weaker they became, and the easier it was for Starscream to stand up to them on his own. Whereas they had once dominated and defined him, Starscream now mastered them the vast majority of the time, with Bee by his side to still help him overcome them when it became hard to do it alone. The smaller and feebler those parts of him became, the more room the better aspects of himself were given to grow. There were parts to himself that had begun to blossom in his youth only to then be stomped on and suppressed by his harsh circumstances, that were now finally free to flourish. There were other traits that had been twisted by bitterness and necessity throughout the hardships of his life that were now able to take on much lovelier forms and be used towards much better ends. Despite the self-doubt and loathing that had plagued him throughout his life, Starscream had always held onto the idea that there were aspects of himself that were worth being proud of and fighting for, and now that those parts of himself were finally allowed to thrive he had been vindicated. And in his new-found freedom there were fresh facets to his character that were now coming into being – new positive traits that were being forged in the furnace of the renewed joyous passion he had for life and love.
Life remained hard, but now Starscream and Bumblebee worked together to navigate its obstacles and figure out its riddles, enabling them to find solutions they had never been able to reach alone. Starscream still believed that it was sometimes necessary to make hard choices and do bad things in the name of survival and the greater good, but with Bee on his side he found that it wasn’t necessary nearly as often as it used to be. Starscream had spent so long lost in darkness that he had become blind to brighter possibilities, but Bumblebee had taken his hand and helped him find his way, and Starscream’s optics had been opened to better means to greater ends. Bumblebee often saw better options, but sometimes he lacked the ability to take those options by himself. However, he wasn’t by himself anymore either, and together with Starscream he was able to do the things he couldn’t do alone. With Bumblebee’s help Starscream could do better, and be better, and so he became someone who could better help and support Bumblebee in turn. For the first time in perhaps his entire life, Starscream was content with himself.
The crushing, leaden burden of Starscream’s miserable life had been transformed by the alchemy of Bee’s love into a resplendent golden crown of contentment, joy and self-actualisation, which released Starscream from the shackles of his neurosis by making him the monarch who steered his own destiny. The crown jewel was Bee himself, the most precious treasure Starscream had ever possessed. Starscream had spent the vast majority of his life chasing after physical crowns in the belief that they would satisfy the deep and desperate yearning for greatness he had felt since his earliest centuries on the streets of Cybertron, a yearning that had fed so many grandiose dreams. But none of those dreams had been as sweet as the reality he was now living, with his life-long yearning finally satisfied in a way he had never foreseen.
Starscream still wished he could conquer the universe, if only to present it to Bee as a token of his love, gratitude and devotion, and yet he still felt that it would be insufficient to fully express what Bumblebee meant to him. So instead he offered Bee the thing he kept guarded most closely: his emotional vulnerability and sincerity.
“I love you,” he whispered in Bee’s audial as they wrapped their arms around one another on their recharge slab.
Bumblebee’s adoring optics glowed blue in the darkness as they gazed at Starscream with an expression of the most complete and understanding love he had ever received.
“I know,” he whispered back.