Starscream resettled his gleaming wings as he landed in the courtyard of the Cynegetic University of Vos. Other seekers, from those as young as him to those so old their paintjobs were covered in military accolades, wandered the campus, and he scanned the courtyard for a nervous mass of seekers that would be his tour group. The facility was an enclave from Vos’ past — a historic centre of learning and ancient architecture, where the towers were stouter, built before engineering discovered how to manufacture the modern needle-like spires that defined the modern Vosnian skyline.

And the mass of new students he’d just spotted, likely his tour group, was getting further away, how dare they leave early— To the east as he ran after them, Vos’ boundary wall was clearly visible, half a hic high and an eighth as thick, it separated the seeker city from what lay beyond it: Tarn. The grounder city sat dark and low like spilled oil in its omnipresent cloak of smog, a hundred hics away at the base of the same mountain the peak of which Vos occupied. The valley was filled with the sickly, engine-clogging smoke. On the worst storm-season days, hot wind from the Rust Sea blew it all up the mountainside, filling Vos with a humid, rancid haze.

Starscream was not looking forward to being on the eastern edge of the city when that happened, especially seeing how the students in this tour group (and hence his residential block) didn’t look particularly bright, and likely susceptible to crusty Vosnian propaganda — especially not with tensions between the two city states at a fever pitch. Anti-Tarnish sentiment always festered then.

This day, however, was a beautiful one; it was the first day of the cold season and likewise the first day of residence for new seekers. None of the other new students could seem to decide where to look as they traced their way along the meandering paths. Cybertron’s distant sun bright in the thin, mountaintop atmosphere, almost clinically intense light, with a uniform haze of dark, desaturated blue from their thin, high-nitrogen atmosphere scattering the rays. Other parts of the galaxy, distant and full of scientific wonders, were visible in the clear sky.

They weren’t reflected in the building, as though the campus’ construction was largely metallic, it was in the old style: all practical buffed metallic greys and blues to minimise glare, reminding Starscream of the icy planets he’d seen on his supervised flights outside their solar system. The sturdy towers and broad buildings so different from the rest of ultra-modern Vos that he had to force himself not to gawp like a grounder tourist as he split off from his tour group. He kept being distracted from noting the locations of his classes by the familiar-alienation of the landscape. Seekers below their age of majority weren’t allowed on campus — or even on unsupervised flights outside their planet’s atmosphere, so he’d just never gotten the chance to see anything like it.

The pathways were cut rectangular stones in a matching grey-blue, some porphyritic rock, warped by the millions and millions of thrusters that had set foot on them. Students were forced to walk in an age-old anathema to the heart of Vos’ ennobling power of flight, as the military university couldn’t train soldiers that couldn’t — or wouldn’t — get over themselves to walk. Most had never travelled any great distance by pede before they came here. Now, of course, the institution had expanded from solely the military arts, but the spark and rule remained. This was evidenced as Starscream took a detour to walk by the wide swell of the Chemistry building, eyeing it with envy and excitement, where it sat along a path it shared with the Silicon Biology department with its isolation labs and the Organic Biology department with its glass greenhouses, but every seeker, even a sigma-less enigma like Starscream, took five vorns of military courses. Upon graduation one gained both a military rank and full citizenship, and with that the ability to vote and fly without supervision. They could be called upon for any reason, especially in times of war. Vos’ entire people were its armada. It was something that filled the other city states with fear, and pride into the sparks of Vosnians.

Starscream finally passed the last of the faculty buildings, edging closer to Vos’ eastern border wall, against which was the broad, empty, and flat swathe of land reserved for flight training. He saw groundskeepers did final prep for the field as he took a right to the back corner of the campus where the first vorn residences sat. As he passed back onto the main tour path and rejoined the tour group he’d skipped, something, just a little echo, fluttered his spark, until he was pushed by the crowd of nervous firstvorns out of its range.

For the first time in his functioning he let himself be led by the mass of people, as the vibration in his spark echoed through the hollows of his struts. For a moment, his spark had known something it hadn’t even conceived of having: he’d been kin with another.

The student group unintentionally herded him along the path as his system dumped coolant and his processor raced. The logical part of his functioning and spark felt this was an unusual cruelty, one of many in his functioning. Most seekers didn’t begin to feel the trinepull until they were well into their majority, far past the age of graduation. You weren’t supposed to be able to. Starscream knew that he was, of course, precocious in many aspects, and that by his age bots were fully mentally and physically developed, but socially was another thing entirely. Laws strictly forbade underage trining before graduation — before one gained their military rank and were considered full citizens — and the punishments were steep, even though it featured in many a romance novel.

As he was pulled further and further away by the group, his triangulation software urgently pinged him that they, whoever they were, were in the flight field. So they were likely staff. An older — potentially vastly so — seeker. Had they felt it too? Did they already have a trinemate? Or was Starscream so unlucky as to feel a trinepull to a completed triad? He was already under enough scrutiny as a sigma-less enigma of a seeker, on top of being as fast as he was in spite of (and to spite) that, he didn’t want the inevitable mess that would ensue if it was revealed. He would just have to figure out who it was and ignore them.

Judiciously.

He was at least very capable of doing that.

The rest of his evening went by in blurs and streaks. He put his things away and lined up for the washracks like an automaton as his spark throbbed, and pleaded exhaustion when his caretakers called and asked about his day, finally falling into his berth like a slab of cold slag. He slept like he’d offlined.

Starscream awoke at some pit-like hour before the sun had even risen, his spark still throbbing, but just a little bit less now. He could do this.

He would not give those medical researchers more reason to treat him as a defect in their people.

Starscream only managed to run through his morning grooming routine from vorns of repetition. It wasn’t his best work, but it wouldn’t matter: juxtaposition was always the better part of perception, and half his agemates had never properly polished themselves before. He would be okay — for today.

He would have been okay, had those foul fools not managed to stick their nasal ridges into his first day.

Of course they could never let him be. "Rare abberations" were never allowed their dignity, not even to get to class on time. His first course gave him a false sense of hope for the rest of the day, thankful that at the very least the administrators had allowed him to skip several courses he’d done in his spare time during secondary, as the new material was at least interesting enough to distract him from his spark’s nervous wrenching.

His confidence rebuoyed, he tentatively made his way back to the same field from the day before.

How dearly Starscream wished to be able to deaden his spark.

The flat field, one of five and absolutely massive in size, contained a hundred students and a dozen teaching assistants milling about, but Starscream’s optic was caught by the professor. He — Thundercracker — looked pained. The massive navy seeker with his military markings was addressing several hopeful-looking proto-professor’s pets. His orange-yellow optics scanned the field, stopping on Starscream with no more focus than any other, even as Starscream’s spark lept in its casing.

The tricolour seeker was both horrified and thankful. Something was keeping the elder from acknowledging it. Thoughts flitted in Starscream’s processor. Was it propriety? Was he simply too stupid to recognise it? Did he already have a complete trine?

Each option filled Starscream with dread.

Assigned to a Teaching Assistant far from the professor, Starscream was put through manoeuvres he had been performing for dozens of vorns, and something desperate in him kept him from holding back to avoid the extra attention. He passed though goalposts with millimetres to spare. It was some sort of sick comfort that the professor hadn’t directly addressed him at all.

Starscream saw the bombs coming — they all did. Their software all told them it was coming right for the dormitories, and the students fled like scattering aves. They came in perfect, shrieking parabolae from Tarn to Vos, and before the city could even raise its shields, one had hit. In a moment, Starscream thought his speed had saved him, unlike his slower classmates still in the dormitories’ grounds somewhere behind him. He’d thought, when it hit, with the unearthly deep rumble and shrieks of rending steel where behind him, that he was free — until the shockwave hit a fraction of a second later.

Buildings crumbled at their foundations, collapsing all around him, and he was plucked from the sky. Immense pressure changes ruptured lines and systems, filling his HUD with streaked scarlet warnings. His face felt wet as his optics burst, as the world turned to a haze of red and grey. A smelting wave of heat soon followed, blistering his paint and softening the metal of his systems, choking off his engines, and as he turned to avoid some afterimage in his vision, he crashed. Distant pain as his landing gear failed to absorb the damage, and he transformed, hearing only crackling fires and jagged, binary screams of agony. Energon and coolant pooled underneath him as his systems screamed, but he couldn’t bring it upon himself to care. Most of his sensors were fried. He felt little.

A violet flash overwhelmed what sense he had left as his systems began to shut down.

"—no, no—"

"— we never got to —"

"He was supposed to be <i>ours</i>—"

"<i>Starscream!</i>" Anguished hands cradled sticky wet faceplates, sending static across his fried sensors. His spark wrenched, hairline fractures in the casing burning as his lifeforce <i>strained</i>—

He phased through grey haze out of the deadened anguish of his body into numbness and blue rays of light. Something down far, far below wanted him. It didn’t see him as defective, an aberration. The rays that reached for him like welcoming arms warmed each spot they touched. It felt like he’d only just left it, but there was something whole and complete down there and he needed to return —

A force like steel chains hauled him out of the halo of light and through the grey, where his fried sensors fired deaden agony into his overclocking processor. Pain like a hot blade seared through what was left of his senses as what felt like a hairline crack in his sparkchamber healed, and more systems began to power on. His audials were fouled with static, but fragmentary voices eeked through, some achingly and some painfully familiar and sending his spark spinning.

"—better this way r̷̹̆̾c̵̪̈́ͅch̴̪̅̂͋z̷̟̖͑̑͝z̶̧̼̓z̸̧̛͊́t̷̞́ can both find a new c̷̝̑r̶̺͠rŗ̷͘z̷̪͌z̴͇͘tṯ̵͂ was below both your abilities, an aberration —"

"No, sir. It didn’t matter to us c̶͚̿r̸̼̊t̵̫̏t̴̜͛ —"

"He would’ve been ours — Starscream?!"

A monitor next to his helm <i>howled</i>.

"<i>Starscream!</i>"

It went black. Sometimes blindingly white. Light was pouring in through his broken optics.

Hands were on him. In him. Inside his body and cradling his face.

His chronometer glitched and spiralled, but it was only a joor later he resurfaced, the blinding, clinical light still everpresent and vents gasping for air he’d intook himself. Hands were intertwined with his.

"—Starscream, <i>please.</i>"

His optics, new lenses calibrating furtively, let the violet and navy forms filling his vision slowly realise.

"Stay with us this time, please." The violet faceplates lagged a second behind its words.

"We almost lost you. Never again." Starscream turned to the stern navy faceplate, where he could see it had cracked and been streaked with soot and tears.

"You did very much lose him."

As his vision cleared, he could see as both his guardians’ faces became pinched and indignant. Major-General Medevac stepped into the room.

"We did, and we won’t again," Skywarp spat.

"You won’t need to petition anyone. With that kind of sigma, there will be no opposition—"

"Shut up!"

Thundercracker’s engines rumbled a warning backdrop to his trinemate’s words, and the lights flickered.

"There is no need to threaten me. I will be no issue in registering your trining."

"There shouldn’t have ever been and there will not be if they know what’s good for them."

"You can’t afford to lose us," Skywarp said as the doctor left, the door left open, a gaping hole Starscream couldn’t process where a pillar of his life once was.

"You knew?" he said, aghast.

"Of course we knew. Skywarp has an organ entirely dedicated to triangulation, we were never going to lose you after we first felt it. You were obviously scared of us, between that and the regulations we felt it best to leave it be unless you brought it up." Starscream looked away, flushed and infuriated, and stared down at the floor of the dean’s office.

A general Starscream didn’t care to name spoke up. "If we did not need this, we would not have brought you here. We would have these two take on a temporary military trine member, but now that they’ve sensed you, their sparks won’t take. We — Vos — need them, and they need you."