Title: Shattered

By: Ceris Malfoy

Summary: "Rumor has it that he discovered something so terrible that it destroyed his very sanity." It wasn't so much what he discovered, so much as a great and terrible abyss that forced its way into his very ember.

Inspiration: Piole generously sent me a link to download Shattered Glass, and I practically devoured it. This is only one of the ideas that hit me while I was reading, but it is my favorite. This particular fic deals primarily with Optronix before the events of Shattered Glass, and how he became the Autobot Tyrant Optimus Prime. And guess what? It's all 'Screamer's fault. XD

Continuity: TF Crossover. G1 and Shattered Glass, with events and situations from both the 1986 animated movie and Bay-verse.

Status: Epilogue

The madness comes slowly; poison born from his now-tainted ember and carried leisurely through his circuits and wires to infect and twist and hurt. Optimus Prime does not understand what has happened between him and Starscream – only knows that one moment the numbness is wearing off and he is ready to hurt the seeker (and, oh, how he imagines making the seeker scream), and the next, the seeker is silent and still, dead or dying, he doesn't know. And his ember … he works up the nerve one day to look in a mirror, and though he is expecting it, nothing can prepare him for the sight of his ember fragmenting before his very optics.

Between battles, he researches and researches, searching frantically for anything and everything that will halt this progressive deterioration of both ember and thought-process. He is loosing himself; loosing control. His army whispers of madness: they are right to. He is becoming madness incarnate, he is becoming everything Starscream was and is going so far beyond that, because Starscream was nothing if not a study of contradictions, and despite the seeker's madness, he'd been an old hand at concealing it. Optronix was cold and logical and perfectly without desire or ambition; Optronix had been his own mech. Optimus Prime, however, is very much Starscream's creation – a cheap knockoff of a leader Starscream had respected and loved even as the seeker had loathed and desired to kill him – and as Starscream's creation, was brilliant but blind; strong but so damn weak; insane but not in any way that can be hidden or fixed or shared or talked-through.

There is a great void within his ember, deep and dark and violently silent; a great chasm within him that is growing stronger and darker and deeper still.

A void that is ever-hungry.

The Void-maker stirred as yet another universe's key-stone became infected by his only creation's insanity. The Void-maker was pleased, and he decided, on a whim, to reward his creation. He fashioned a new body, slim and sleek and ever-deadly, then reached across the span of countless dimensions and pulled his only creation's spark to him. Carefully, ever so carefully, he nursed his creation's tattered spark back into some semblance of wholeness, then just as carefully allowed the semi-healed spark to migrate to its new home.

With a thought, his newly re-hatched creation disappeared. Where, he didn't know, but he knew his creation would do what it was designed to do, and bring chaos, ruin, and death.

The Void-maker smiled.

Megatron, Lord High Protector and Supreme Commander of all of Cybertron's military, and only brother to the Lord Prime, stared at the seekerlet. He didn't understand how the far-too-tiny hatchling came to exist on a battlefield completely devoid of seekers, but he wasn't one to really care about the particulars of things, just the results. He considered the seekerlet for a long moment. Then, with a tired sigh, he picked it up.

He'd let his Air Commander deal with it. Windspinner needed something besides stalking him to occupy her time with.

Tiny crimson optics stared up at him from an utterly relaxed frame; content as it was with the heat from Megatron's spark. Megatron never noticed. Nor did he notice the tiny, fanged smirk that crossed the hatchling's face.

Now that the story is officially finished, I thought I might bore you with a few thoughts about both this story in general and the epilogue in question.

A few months back, I wrote a small story called "Negotiations" and stuck it under my catch-all section called "It's a Screamer's World". The story was my first attempt at a Shattered Glass/G1 crossover between G1!Starscream and SG!Optimus Prime, and sadly, epically failed due to the simple fact that I had never read Shattered Glass. Piole generously offered to fix this oversight, a fact for which I've been grateful for from the bottom of my TF!Fangirl heart. *huggles*I immediately sought to do another one, done correctly this time.

I may, or may not have, failed on this point. Please keep in mind that this is all Pre-Shattered Glass, the prequel events, if you will, of the comic itself. The portion in quotes in the summary is a direct quote from the comic/graphic novel and is part of Optimus Prime's background story as told by the Decepticons. Naturally, my mind went, "but what if they were wrong?" And then my mental Screamer totally went, "I'd tap that", and this fic was born. Lolz.

I'm sure that more than a few people out there went WTF? with where I took this, and I'm not surprised. See, before I even started contemplating TF fanfiction on my own, and shortly after I started stalking various writers here on (they know who they are), I started wondering why Starscream, of all the mechs in the various TF universes, was the only one who was truly immortal - so immortal his spark can float around without a body through time and space and various alternate realities. My theory? He's the spawn of the Unmaker, literally. XD (And thank god, TF has a similar world-view as Eva does - it's all canon, everything's canon, even your most sickest fandoms. Makes me a very happy little Fangirl.) But, of course, such a thing would have to have consequences, yes? Because a spark/ember is supposedly a part of Primus (I think. I may have gotten that bit wrong. If so, feel free to correct me!) and all mechs are considered Primus' children. I would think that having a spark/ember infected/infested with whatever it is that keeps Unicron alive (which, in this story, is the Void/Abyss/Chasm - a sort of sentient black-hole), would have some rather extreme consequences. And then I realized I needed a reason on why Unicron would want to have spawn, especially spawn as annoyingly hard to kill as Starscream regularly turns out to be. (Does this mean that my Starscream is a demi-god? If you ask him, he's the God, so I wouldn't go there. You'll just get lectured at.)

Answer? To corrupt the very souls of those around him; to cause mischief and insanity and death and chaos; to help destroy and unmake the world(s) Primus has created. I'm in the process of writing the "creation" tale around that very theory. It'll be called "Origins".

Also, I'm sorry almost all of the other SG characters didn't really get a turn to shine. I'll eventually be posting various other little one-shots focusing on them, but probably not until after Christmas. This fic was primarily meant to focus on Optimus and Starscream, and I didn't want to mess something up by adding even more characters in it.

On "key-stones": I'm not sure where I first came across this concept - I think it might have been either a Sailor Moon or a Harry Potter fanfic - but a key-stone is a person/place, or thing which exists no matter how many dimensions there are, and are completely, 100 percent, unabashedly impossible to do without. For example, there will always be a Megatron and an Optimus Prime to oppose him (or inverse). We are of course, talking about fate and destiny and the cosmic equivalent of "Guess what? You're drafted! Get your ass in the car, bitch" all rolled into one. Starscream was "created" to infect these key-stones with his madness, or to remove them. Either works fine for Unicron.

And as for poor Megs in Bay-verse, yes, he IS being stalked by his femme!Seeker Air Commander. He will continue to be stalked by her for the rest of her life, right up until Starscream tires of her "interference" and kills her himself.

Any other questions? Don't hesitate to ask. I'll answer, I promise.