AN: I've been thinking about writing this story for months and finally got around to it. Basically, I liked the idea that Starscream and Megatron were not always so horrible, both on their own and to each other. Perhaps, once upon a time, Megatron was honestly trying to make a change for the better, and Starscream honestly fell in love with him. If that was the case, then how did it happen, and what caused the change over the millennia? Keep that in mind because the characters are going to seem different in this story. They have yet to become what they are throughout most of the official Transformers continuum.

Also, I did this as a humanformers story because I wanted it to be part of the same AU as my other fic, Midnight Run, but it wouldn't make a huge difference to the story if you wanna think of them as 'bots. Since my version of humanformers is basically androids made of nanobots who can change size and transform, most things are still the same. I'll do my best to explain how exactly they work without bogging the story down in unnecessary exposition (especially since there will be plenty of that in my other story), but if there's anything that doesn't make sense, drop me a line so I can check it out and try to fix it. Some of it might be stuff that I'll explain later in the story.

Enjoy, and please review!

It was the book of poems that started it. Even millions of years later, Starscream could never figure how the volume ended up in a rusty used book shop to begin with, but there it was: small and slim and mysterious. There was no author's name on its simple, green cover; just the words About Life. Starscream had frowned at it and flipped the delicate metal pages curiously. He would have read a poem or two before buying it, but Skywarp was tugging on his arm impatiently, and he needed something to read on the trip to Altihex (Skywarp was still several years from scanning his first alt mode at that point in time, so transport ships it was).

He bought the book, and somehow managed to finish it before the end of the flight, even with his brother jumping around in the seat beside him, demanding various forms of attention.

As the title said, the poems were simply about life, but each one was a perfectly woven tapestry of words, focusing in on brief flashes of moments. A pair of mechs haggling in the marketplace, the musings of a gladiator before a match, a femme humming to her sparkling—each was depicted with precise care and infused with meaning. Starscream had spent most of his life searching the galaxy for beauty as an explorer, but it felt as if whoever had written these poems had seen more beauty in a collection of moles on an old mech's face than he had in all the cosmos.

Starscream spent the next few days trying to prevent Skywarp from breaking anything while he navigated the bureaucracy involved in resigning from the deep space exploration corps, and he forgot about the book for a while.

In a way, it was bureaucratic inefficiency that had led him to leave the corps to begin with. There was a fuel line underneath a side street in Vos that hadn't been serviced in millennia. Several experts noticed the potential for disaster and put in ordinances with the city council. Small groups of concerned citizens tried petitioning and raising awareness, but there was a good deal of bureaucratic red tape that had to be cut through. Most didn't care. It was Vos, after all. Nearly everyone flew. When the fuel line finally did blow, it was a catastrophe that killed thirty unfortunate low-caste grounders, but the papers mostly talked about the pair of Seekers who got caught in the explosion and the three sons they'd left behind.

Starscream was in the middle of a 20-year mission when it happened, and got news of his parents' death through a transmission from his other brother, Thundercracker. He thought it was a prank at first, and it wasn't until his co-captain and best friend, Skyfire, showed him the newspaper article that he would believe it wasn't. After that, he finally read the rest of the transmission Thundercracker had sent him, and found the all-important question, "What are we going to do with Skywarp?"

Skywarp, who was only five at the time, was born a couple of years after Starscream had left on his mission, so the two brothers had never even met. All things considered, Starscream's first thought was that it would be best if Thundercracker took care of him. Skywarp knew him, and his steady, unassuming personality seemed perfect for sparklingcare. However, Thundercracker was an Air Command officer, a position that he could not resign from, and which hardly provided him time to take care of a five-year-old. So, Starscream had realized that the task would have fall to him. He'd had quite a row about it with Skyfire, though.

"Why do you have to be the one to do it? He'll be just as happy in foster care," the hulking mech had insisted.

Skyfire had been protoformed rather than born, so Starscream couldn't explain to him the concept of family obligation and knew that his friend felt betrayed. He convinced him to set the warp drives for home, but he could never find a way to make him understand his choice. When they landed on Cybertron, Skyfire had simply pulled him into a bone-crushing hug and then left without a word. Losing his best friend so soon after losing his parents stung deep, but Starscream did his best to push it from his mind by focusing on Skywarp.

In that regard, he was not disappointed. He had already been nearly a million years old himself when Thundercracker was born. He remembered his first brother's early years quite well, and he was certain that Thundercracker had never been half so much trouble as Skywarp. Thundercracker agreed.

The sparkling was everywhere, in everything, all of the time. Furthermore, he refused to recognize Starscream as anything other than a mysterious interloper—possibly the cause of his true parents' disappearance. If Starscream tried to discipline him in any way, he would fall to the ground and start screaming his head off. If he didn't discipline him, he would still scream his head off, but while also running around at speeds that no one that small should ever have been able to reach.

"They should've named him Starscream!" the frustrated Seeker declared to his adult brother one day. "And why does he hate me so much? Didn't Mom and Dad bother to tell him about me?"

"Oh, sure they did," Thundercracker assured him. "Mom was worried he wouldn't know who you were when you came back, so she used to pull up old photos and video files all the time."

"Well, it clearly didn't work!"

"The kid just lost his parents, Star. If someone showed up and started acting like Mom to you right now, would you care who they were?"

Starscream huffed in irritation at that, but he could see Thundercracker's point. It didn't make dealing with Skywarp any easier, though.

On top of everything, his new job was also proving frustrating, to say the least. When he had applied to change to a more domestic function, the Vossian council had decided that his experience as an explorer would predispose him to work as a cultural investigator, and in some ways they had been right about that. There were certain similarities—both involved travel and observation, for instance—but there was a significant difference between observing the natural world and making inductions about the social patterns and behaviors of his fellow Cybertronians.

If he'd had a choice, he would have rather joined one of the science corps. Metallurgy, now that was something he could have gotten into. Even Thundercracker's post in the Air Command sounded better at times. But there was no need for more metallurgists at the moment, and his diminutive size (for a Seeker) meant that the military was out of the question. So, cultural investigation it was.

The one good thing about the job was that it allowed him to travel most anywhere he wanted without having to apply for extra visas or permits. Anywhere he could fly there and back while Skywarp was in school, at least.

While he did most of his investigations right at home in Vos, Starscream occasionally received assignments to neighboring city-states such as Tarn, Simfur, or—very rarely—Kaon. Assignments to Kaon were by far the worst as time in the industrial smog pit of a city-state always left his ventilation systems burning for several days afterward, and chasing after Skywarp was that much harder when he couldn't breathe properly to begin with. So, he was not at all pleased the day his boss approached him with a second Kaon assignment not a week after he'd come back from the last one.

"No. Make Longshot do it," he said flatly.

His boss, a Seeker even smaller than himself and named Glitterbug of all things, cleared her throat nervously and pushed the assignment holofile toward him once more.

"It's just that the 'bots up at the Hall of Records specifically requested you for this job," she said. "You're the best at making detached observations, and this is kind of a delicate matter, they said."

"Well, tell them to get down here and do it themselves, then," Starscream snapped. He knew all too well that "good at making detached observations" was simply another way of saying, "We think you're a sparkless wretch, but at least we can use you." It wasn't his fault that he didn't get emotionally invested in the affairs of total strangers. He was a scientist, not a nurse.

"Come on, Starscream. It won't be that bad, and they're counting on you," Glitterbug simpered.

"It will, and why don't you just tell them that I was already busy with something else?"

"You mean lie?" the femme asked, her red eyes suddenly wide with horror. "I guess I could try, but you know lying isn't in my programming, and… It's just… I don't…" Her lower lip was trembling now as moisture started welling up in her eyes.

"Okay, I'm sorry! I'll do it. Just stop that." Starscream snatched the holofile from her hand, cursing whoever had decided that Glitterbug was in any way suited to her position. He pulled up the introductory page for the assignment and glanced it over. "Gladiator fights?" he said.

"No, not the fights," Glitterbug corrected him, wiping at her eyes. "It's the rallies that the gladiators are holding once a week. No one's totally sure what's going on at them, but a surprising number of the workers have started attending them almost religiously. They're giving up their midday break time for it, so it's gotta be something big."

Starscream narrowed his eyes at her. "Is this investigation cultural or political?" he asked.

"I have no idea," she shrugged. "But the rally is at noon today, so you'd better get flying. There should be location details in the file."

As Starscream had feared, the rally was right in the heart of one of Kaon's most crowded and filthy industrial areas. He had to go through four different checkpoints to get there, and the the enforcers at the last one looked like they couldn't even read his visa—they just saw the stamp from the Hall of Records and waved him through.

Row after row of factory buildings towered on either side of him as he made his way down the cracked and pitted streets. Bulky mechs stared at him suspiciously from doorways and back stairwells. His instincts told him that he ought to mechanize to protect himself, but he knew better. The 'bots in these areas were not allowed alt modes, and flaunting his would only bring unnecessary trouble.

He knew better than to wear a mask, too, even though the whole place reeked of chemical wastes and his intakes were already starting to burn. Supposedly, the 'bots assigned to work in Kaon were created with stronger ventilation systems than regular Cybertronians, but even without counting deaths from suicide or drug overdose, the life expectancy for industrial workers was barely half a million. They did not take kindly to strangers who tried to protect themselves from the poisons they were forced to live with every day.

Lost in his musings on the working conditions of Kaonians, Starscream wasn't paying attention to where he was going. When he turned the next corner, he walked straight into a large mech who was standing in the middle of the road. The other mech was not much taller than Starscream, but a whole lot broader and more solid. Starscream bounced off of him rather unceremoniously.

"'tchoo think're doin'?" the stranger slurred, turning to stare down at his unsuspecting assailant with blurred yellow eyes.

Great, Starscream thought as he climbed gingerly back to his feet. This mech was clearly off his rocker on crystal slag, and he reeked of high-grade to boot. The Seeker muttered his apologies and made to walk off, hoping that if he was fast enough, the worker's impaired brain might not even notice that he had left. Unfortunately, this was not to be so.

"Yer a Seeker, ay?" the mech said, grabbing hold of Starscream's upper arm. "Got them rrrr...red eyes."

"Yes, I am," Starscream said cautiously. There were other mechs drifting out of the shadows of the doorways and narrow side streets now to see what was going on. He was equipped with a blaster, of course, but knew that it wouldn't do him much good if he was too far outnumbered. He couldn't transform and fly away either. The street was too narrow for one, and he would surely get caught in the tangle of thick power cables crisscrossing overhead before he could build up enough speed.

"Fraggin' Seeker in 'r town. Wha're 'oo he...here for?" the inebriated mech continued, giving Starscream a good shake.

The Seeker made a choking noise as his head snapped back and forth, and someone in the crowd laughed. The sound sent a shiver down Starscream's back.

"I'm a cultural investigator for the Hall of Records," he said quickly when the shaking stopped. "I came to observe a rally."

There was some murmuring in the surrounding crowd at this. Even low-caste mechs like these knew that cultural investigators held diplomatic immunity, and that attacking one was a jailable offense, or worse. However, the mech holding Starscream simply squinted at him suspiciously.

"You think're better'n us cuz'oo got a cushy assignment?" he demanded.

Yes, he did, actually. That was the whole point of form and function, after all, but he wasn't stupid enough to say it right now.

"That's certainly not for me to decide," he said, trying to be as oblique as possible.

"What's yer name?" the mech demanded, leaning in close and bathing Starscream in high-grade fumes.

"I'm not—"

"Ah'm LS417!" the mech cut him off. "See, you think're better'n us cuz'n you got a name 'n we just desss… desiggin…"

"Designations?" someone in the crowd supplied, and LS417 pointed at him gratefully.

"Look, I'm just here to perform my function, same as all of you," Starscream said, looking to the crowd for some form of sympathy. He found none. There were only the hard stares and cruel smirks on all sides.

"And what is your function?" another onlooker called out. "Spying on us for the Council?"

"We know your game! Remember last month when that Council glitch-rat came through? Said she was here to see what kind of medical care we need, but next thing we know she's hauling RF23's whole team off to the pyramid!"

This speech was followed by cries of anger from the other members of the crowd, which was getting quite large now.

"The Hall of Records operates outside of Council control, dimwits!" Starscream tried to shout over the crowd, but most didn't hear him and those who did just took affront at the insult.

"Go back to Vos, fragger!"

"We don't need you!"

"We take care of ourselves here!"

"Flyboy!"

"Spike sucker!"

Starscream's stomach clenched as the insults began flying back and forth. He was suddenly not so sure that diplomatic immunity was going to do him any good here. There was every chance that these mechs would assume they could be protected by the anonymity of a mob. He started clawing desperately at LS417's thick fingers, but his captor just watched him and laughed.

"Hey, whaddo we do wi'the spy!?" he called to the crowd.

"Throw him in the river!" someone shouted.

"Break his legs!" came another suggestion.

Starscream cursed whoever it was at Iacon that had sent him on this assignment. They certainly would not be getting a detached observation this time around if he got out of here.

A piece of metal from the crumbling street came sailing from somewhere in the crowd, and Starscream did not quite get his arm up in time to stop it glancing painfully off his forehead. There was more laughter, especially from LS417, as energon started trickling down the side of the Seeker's face. He saw a couple of other mechs in the crowd stoop to pry up bits of the paving slabs or search their pockets for something else to throw. This had gone far enough. He wasn't sure how much good it could do him, but decided he would be better off with his blaster than without it.

Just as he was about to mechanize his arm, a hush suddenly swept across the crowd. All around him, mechs were dropping various projectiles and looking sheepish or starting to hurry away altogether. Starscream felt the grip on his arm loosen slightly and looked around to see what could possibly have caught everyone's attention.

Behind him, the crowd had parted to allow a tall mech wearing a digital face mask to pass through. Starscream blinked at the newcomer in confusion. He had expected an Enforcer based on how quickly everyone had quieted down, but this mech, while he certainly didn't look like a pushover, lacked the massive frame of a Kaonian Enforcer. Something about that blank mask made him even more terrifying than an Enforcer, though..

"Ah, Soundwave, this is just a, uh..." LS417 stammered. It seemed that whatever part of his processor was dedicated to self-preservation was doing its best to sober him up.

"Release him," the mech called Soundwave ordered in an oddly synthesized voice. LS417 did so instantly.

"Function: cultural investigator?" Soundwave asked, coming closer to Starscream.

"Yes, I'm here to observe a rally," Starscream repeated, trying to stem the flow of energon from his forehead with a sleeve. Through the throbbing pain and mild dizziness, he found the processor power to wonder what a mech with a name instead of a designation was doing in this area.

Soundwave nodded and then turned to LS417, who now seemed to be shaking in fear. "Designation?" he asked.

The mech managed to squeak out a reply.

"Cultural investigators: diplomatic immunity and protection. Punishment for assault: possible termination."

"I don't think that's necessary," Starscream cut in as LS417 began to moan with terror. Sure, he had just about ended up as the victim of an angry mob because of this mech, but the idea of anyone getting terminated because of him was highly unpleasant. He could just imagine going home that evening:

"What did you do today Skywarp?"

"I learned how to write my name!"

"Awesome! I caused an international issue and got someone terminated!"

Not that he ever actually told Skywarp anything about what he did at work, but still.

"Opinions: noted," Soundwave said, turning his blank mask toward Starscream. He pointed to the injury on the Seeker's forehead with an incredibly long, thin finger. "More important issue: medical care required."

"Ah, I'll be fine," Starscream said quickly. He could only imagine what kind of hack shop passed for a medical facility around here.

"Opinions: noted once more," Soundwave said before placing one of those spindly hands on Starscream's back and starting to steer him away through the crowd.

"Is...is that all?" LS417 called after him.

"Designation: noted. Further discipline: at a later time," Soundwave returned.

P.S. If you want to follow me on deviantArt or Tumblr, I'm kanonkita on both of those sites, too. I do silly Transformers comics and other Transformers art. I did the cover art for both my stories on here.