Chapter Text
Starscream drags himself into a vacant human warehouse littered with scraps of creatures that look like him, like his people, and he scrambles for a place to lay that doesn’t remind him of one grave among many. Megatron had left him once again, this time with a message firmly scrawled across his wings, and without his flight he might as well be dead already. He just doesn’t want it to be true.
He picks up an energy signature from nearby. He lifts his helm, hoping it’s Megatron, but he’s been left for spare parts and he knows it. The signature isn’t even Decepticon. He shifts his gaze to the entrance in time to see a smaller bot lurch past, expression sharp. The coloring unmistakably belongs to the one called Bumblebee. What is he doing without his keepers?
“Hey,” Starscream calls out. The yellow bot continues on as if he didn’t hear. “Autobot, I’m talking to you!”
Bumblebee hesitates, optics flashing as he looks over his shoulder. “Who’s there?” he demands.
Starscream grumbles. “What, have you forgotten me?” He reluctantly pushes himself to his mid-stabilizer seams and crawls the few paces necessary to allow daylight to illuminate his frame.
Bumblebee jumps back. “Starscream!” he exclaims. He doesn’t try to run, or to draw his weapon. Actually, he doesn’t do much of anything.
The Decepticon feels a twinge of hurt that his state is so dismal he can’t inspire wariness in the mech half his size. “Right you are. Where’s your family?” He spits the word like it disgusts him.
He sneers. “Where’s yours?”
Starscream sits with his wings against a crate. He hisses from the sting. Refraining from dismissing the hostile question entirely, he says, “They left me.”
Bumblebee looks like he’s about to make some snarky remark, but something pains him, and he clutches the side of his helm. “Mine…I was left behind, too,” he mutters.
“Oh?” Starscream senses opportunity. “But I thought you were their best scout.”
The yellow bot snarls at him like a caged animal. “And you’re supposed to be the Decepticon second in command, though from the looks of it, you’re nothing but a mangled, flightless bird!” His pistol appears in a trembling servo in the blink of an optic.
“It’s true,” Starscream whispers. He assures himself that honesty doesn’t count when it’s told with the intent to deceive. “I can’t fly. I don’t have the energy to transform. Really, Autobot, you could kill me now and go back home a hero.”
He doesn’t want to rile the other up too far, lest he actually shoots Starscream. He only wants to push Bumblebee to the edge and not an inch over it. Through his energon-depleted haze in the dark of the warehouse, all he can see is radiant blue light. Angry, righteous.
“Unless home isn’t an option for you anymore.”
Bumblebee falters. The scrap of vulnerability worked just as Starscream intended—inviting a mirror extension of it from the opposing side. “I…I messed up.” His vocalizer garbles with static for a moment. “Comms went offline, couldn’t warn them, couldn’t—”
His sentence drops off into more animalistic noises, servos returning to his helm. The sight almost disturbs Starscream. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with the little bot. “Couldn’t do your job?”
“I let him get hurt.”
“Who?” Starscream asks.
Bumblebee tightens his grip on the pistol and aims it at Starscream’s cockpit, inspecting its already cracked glass. “Don’t get too comfortable,” he growls. “I may have failed as a scout, broken their trust in me, but I am not a traitor!”
Starscream lowers himself enough to expose the full extent of the damage to his wings. “What am I reasonably going to do with any sensitive information you give to me? Will I drag myself, broken, to lie in Megatron’s shadow and profess another’s weaknesses, when he is the cause of my own?”
The Autobot lowers his weapon. This time, seemingly, for good. “Why did he do that to you?”
He gestures to a spot clear of metallic debris by his side. “Come, let’s commiserate.” When Bumblebee hesitates, Starscream smiles amiably. He’s good at playing the part when he has to. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Bumblebee sits where he was beckoned to. He looks worse up close. A spiderweb of shredded metal spans a concerning area of the golden helm, and a concentration of energon turns irritated patches of his face pink, notably under the optics. He’s no medic, but Starscream remembers similar cases of ailments back on Cybertron. The little mech is suffering from a psychogenic fever, inflicted by significant emotional distress. Approaching delirium from hunger, Starscream wonders if biting into the ridge of Bumblebee’s flushed face would yield enough energon to sate him.
“It’s scary in here,” the scout says like a confession.
The seeker nods in agreement. “Sick, isn’t it? Humans build things that look like us and think we’re just as lifeless.”
“No. Not all humans.” Bumblebee picks up a screw to examine from the dusty floor. “Some are kind. Some love us.”
“As pets, if anything at all,” he remarks.
“Do the best of us see them any differently?” Bumblebee asks.
Starscream laughs. “How should I know? What love do I have to give, least of all to something so weak, so liable to harm?”
Bumblebee opens his mouth to respond when another splitting wave of pain crashes over him and he curls in on himself. “Make it stop!” he cries.
At first, Starscream freezes, entirely unsure of what to do. Then he decides that staring at the wailing bot won’t fix anything, so he cups the side of Bumblebee’s helm, pressing firmly on the splinters of metal until they lie flat under his servo. The scout settles soon after that, agonized panic melting into residual sniffles.
“What happened to you?” Starscream questions.
Bumblebee smiles through gritted teeth. “I asked you first.”
He brings the smaller mech closer, though he faces some resistance. “Stop squirming. The hole in your helm will keep irritating your circuits if you don’t let me soothe it, and my energon stores are too low for me to contort myself in all sorts of—”
“Okay, okay,” Bumblebee grumbles, adjusting himself between Starscream’s stabilizers. This way, they can rest against each other while the seeker acts as a bandage. Both of them are tense, but the Decepticon doesn’t have the energy to keep himself rigid. He lets his frame fall slack except for the arm he’s using as a shield for Bumblebee from the bot’s own injury.
Starscream cycles air through his vents dramatically. A beginning to the tale of his latest disownment. “While we were in this last battle, I was leading the other jets on a course set for Prime, but an aerial warrior of yours intercepted us, and I flew into Megatron’s path,” he says. Electricity from exposed wiring tickles at his digits. “He was headed for Prime as well. I suppose I ruined his shot. He took me by the wing and threw me to the earth.”
Bumblebee looks up at him. “That can’t have been all of it. Crashing alone doesn’t do that much damage.”
“Well, you were there, weren’t you? Prime got away, Megatron got angry,” he replies flatly.
“He almost didn’t get away, thanks to me,” Bumblebee mutters.
“Ah, yes,” Starscream hums. “Now it’s your turn to spin a tale.”
The Autobot narrows his optics. “You hardly told me yours. I already knew that he beat you, and it goes without saying that he was mad at you. There’s more, and you’re purposefully hiding it.”
Starscream presses his servo into Bumblebee’s helm a little harder and he yelps. “I didn’t realize you were such a sadist. How many details do you want? Or would you just like a recording?”
Bumblebee snaps his jaws near Starscream’s wrist. “If I were a sadist, I’d just recreate it.”
They glare at each other coldly. Flaring blue optics drown out the dim red of Starscream’s own. He doesn’t know how much longer he can stay online, and the closest thing he has to someone in his corner is the enemy soldier practically sitting on his lap. Maybe he can charm his way into a serving of mercy. He bows his helm in a show of submission.
“You have no reason to trust me. I understand that.” He softens his grip on Bumblebee’s wound, the pressure only enough to keep all his pieces stable. “Ask me what you really want to know, and I’ll answer.”
Bumblebee’s expression softens. “Why did he take away your flight?”
“Because that’s…” he trails off, sight blurring until anything at all could take the place of the warehouse around them. “It’s all I have left.”
If he went offline right now, the blue glow of Bumblebee’s optics would fill the gray of Starscream’s own, and for an instant—just before the plating of his body became dull—he’d look as he did when he had a different name, in a different world. He doesn’t want to die, but if he had to, there’d be some consolation in it happening now, with him.
“From before the war?”
“Before I joined the war,” he amends. “Megatron found me broken, and that’s how he’ll always leave me. He’ll destroy anything I’m desperate to keep for myself, even if he ruins my usefulness to him in the process.”
Bumblebee rests his helm against Starscream’s chassis, startling the larger mech, though he doesn’t seem to care. Or notice. “Jeez. All over a missed shot.”
“His wrath is like the tide,” Starscream remarks. “Unpredictable, sometimes abstruse. He can brush off an assassination attempt like it’s all in good fun, but Primus forbid I cause him mild annoyance.”
“I do wonder why you’ve been trying to kill him for so long,” Bumblebee comments thoughtfully.
“Maybe I’ll tell you later,” he says wearily. “I think it’s your turn at last.”
Starscream only recognizes that Bumblebee had been content when his tentative grin drops. “I got hurt doing my job. It’s the risk we all take, I get that, but I—I felt so betrayed,” he murmurs.
“By Optimus Prime?” Starscream asks. He notes the return of the Autobot’s stammer with some concern.
He nods. “We were planning on making a move. He wanted me to find the location of your underwater base, and I wanted someone to come with me.” Air audibly cycles through his vents. “He said no. Couldn’t expend anyone else, couldn’t take the chance of being seen. I was the only one qualified for the task.”
The seeker tilts his helm inquisitively. “He was able to expend you.”
“I’m the smallest. The weakest. Everyone else is too important,” he growls out sardonically. “I got into trouble near the shore. Laserbeak spotted me. I commed him, begging for backup, or at the very least for him to let me come home, but he told me to keep going. To stay low , as if that would do any good.”
“Evidently it didn’t.”
“No, it didn’t,” Bumblebee agrees. “Laserbeak shot me in the side of the helm, and I guess my processor’s been trying to fall out since then. Because of that, I reported all the wrong intel, and he suffered for it. Prime did send someone out to collect me when he realized I was injured, probably worrying I’d do more harm than good, but I couldn’t think straight. I ran away.” He meets Starscream’s optics and gives him a sparkbreaking smile. “You’re the only thing making me see reason right now.”
Starscream knows he should take the credit he’s being offered, but he feels odd about it. The helm under his servo is too warm and the gaze trained on him too sweet. “I wouldn’t be so sure. You’re feverish. Even without the physical damage to your processor, you could still be boiling it in your emotional turmoil.”
“What am I supposed to do? Just stop being upset?” Bumblebee asks rhetorically.
He looks past the scout to the dimming sky beyond the open warehouse doors. “I think you have to go home.”
Bumblebee laughs humorlessly. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am,” Starscream insists. “You need to get fixed up. Your logic circuits must be misfiring. Unless you want to get yourself killed, you have to consult your medic.”
“What about you? Do the Decepticons even have a medic?”
If only. “Every Con for themself.”
“These wounds could be fatal if left alone,” Bumblebee says urgently, turning around to face Starscream and removing the servo on his helm in the process. “Your self repair systems would hardly know where to start. You can’t do this on your own.”
Starscream looks away. “I don’t have enough energon inside of me to kickstart those systems in the first place.”
He sees the exact moment that the little soldier gives into the persuasion of Starscream’s vulnerability. “I do,” Bumblebee whispers.
“You’d waste precious energy on little old me?” Starscream asks coyly.
A flash of electricity dances on the jagged metal of Bumblebee’s helm. He winces, then smooths his features as the paneling of his chassis rearranges itself to expose his spark chamber. The light within shines like the sun on a delicate winter morning. Starscream flinches back, all pretense dismantled by the display of profference before him. He begins to speak, to berate the other for even thinking to do such a thing in front of him, but nothing comes of it. He can’t find the words.
“Half a gallon of innermost energon could power a whole ship, right?” Bumblebee takes one of Starscream’s servos and brings it close. “You wouldn’t have to take much to heal and sufficiently refuel. I’d barely notice.”
Starscream shakes his helm. “I can’t,” he murmurs. “You can’t give this to me.”
The scout sports a teasing smirk. “Don’t tell me the whole opportunistic thing is just a facade. You should be jumping at an opening like this.”
“Bumblebee, that’s your life force , why would you just give that away to the first damned Decepticon you stumble upon?”
He huffs. It’s never an easy fight with Starscream, even and especially when trying to give him what he wants. “My logic circuits are misfiring , or whatever it was you said. Now hurry up.”
Starscream can’t make out the details of his surroundings anymore. His vision is so blurry. He’d not hesitate if it weren’t for the deep, inescapable implication of consuming the vitality of a willing bot. He’d be tying himself to another living person, fostering a closeness that he’s never known. He tells himself it doesn’t mean anything if he wants it that way. And yet…the hardest part of deception is believing the lie yourself.
“Hold still,” he says in a hushed voice. Bumblebee fixes him with an agitated look that says, get on with it.
Starscream reaches into the glowing spark chamber, calling upon memories of a life where he knew how to use his servos with gentle precision. A life before he first wrapped a digit around Megatron’s trigger. The color seems to dissolve from him the closer he gets to the small star inside the golden body that houses it, like he’s giving it up as a sacrifice for the pardon of a god. He almost jolts away entirely when he first touches the energonic membrane. It finds its new source of gravity apart from Bumblebee’s spark, bleeding down his servo and into the seams of his digits. He ceases contact with it to avoid taking too much. He has plenty.
His frame shakes as he drips the substance into his mouth. The moment it seeps into his glossa and permeates the rest of his body, he feels the brilliant flare of his optics and sees the scarlet reflection on Bumblebee’s face. His vision is so sharp that he nearly finds himself overwhelmed. An elated laugh escapes him.
Bumblebee’s chassis seals itself once more. “Feeling better already?”
“I have only the faintest memory of pain,” he says cheerfully.
The Autobot looks pleased. Starscream doesn’t quite understand it. “Don’t get overzealous. You’re still injured, whether you feel like it or not.”
“I think I’ve earned a bit of zeal, thank you,” he quips. Then, he leans forward conspiratorially. “You know, together, we don’t make too bad of a team. Maybe we could solve your problems like we solved mine.”
Bumblebee instantly regards him suspiciously. “What angle are you pulling here, and will it get me killed?”
Starscream waves him off. “I have something in common with you Autobots. I want Megatron deposed. If you took the killing blow, you’d be revered as a hero, and I could ascend to the throne without being seen as a traitor.”
“So, it’s a power trip,” Bumblebee observes.
“What?”
“All the assassination attempts on Megatron.”
Starscream frowns. “It’s not about the power, it’s about what can be done with that power.” He folds his stabilizers between them. “This war will never end so long as Megatron is in charge. He’s lost sight of the Decepticon cause, and under his rule we’ll hunt each other to mutual extinction. I don’t want that. I know you don’t either.”
Bumblebee fidgets as he thinks this over. “Okay, that sounds great or whatever, but how am I supposed to kill Megatron? Not even Optimus has managed to.”
Starscream snickers. “Optimus doesn’t want to kill Megatron. Neither of them started this war to end the other’s life.”
“Then why—”
The seeker cuts him off. “Don’t think about it too hard. It’ll make you angry. Or…hopeless.”
Bumblebee sighs. “Then, back to my question. How am I supposed to kill Megatron?"
Starscream hasn’t thought that far yet. “We can discuss the specifics later. You still need medical attention. Once you’re in your right mind, you can decide if you want to partner with me.”
“How will I let you know?”
Starscream hasn’t thought of that, either. He taps a rhythm into the cement floor. “We can meet back here in three day’s time, when the light is fading. Surely we’ll both be in better shape by then.”
Bumblebee nods in agreement. He makes to stand, but the movement must jostle him too much, and he falls back to the ground with his servos tightly sealed over his helm. He hisses strained swears, form quivering. Starscream rushes forward to aid him, replacing the smaller servos with his larger ones. They stare at each other, unspeaking, and Bumblebee leans into the seeker’s touch.
“Walk me home?”
Temporary madness , Starscream reasons. Bumblebee will likely despise himself for acting so…really, what words are there? After his logic circuits are fixed, this won’t be an issue anymore.
“Of course,” he says, apparently just as mad.
They stand together, moving slowly to reduce the risk of further irritation. It seems unfair that Starscream was hurt worse yet currently doesn’t feel a thing, yet Bumblebee’s surface wound causes him to keel over at the simplest of motions. Liable to harm echoes in his processor.
The first stars of evening have begun twinkling in the dusky pink sky. It’s all uniquely dazzling through Starscream’s overcharged optics, like diamonds swirling in a sea of pure energon.
“You know that you’re taking me directly to your base.”
Bumblebee hums. He feels it through the touch they share. “You know it’d be the entirety of the Autobots against one Decepticon. Plus, it’d be smarter to betray me after I help you overthrow Megatron.”
So, he already anticipates disloyalty. Starscream can’t envision how exactly it will happen—their goals align nicely, and unless something goes wrong that one of them has to take the fall for, everything will run smoothly if they remain faithful to each other. But it’s inevitable, isn’t it? It’s just who they are.
That’s something for him to worry about later. Here, by Bumblebee’s side, it’s easier to merely forget they ever have to break this sweet tranquility. There’s nothing to say now, so they can simply be.
They’re nearing the Autobot base when a cool breeze floats past. Starscream suddenly realizes that Bumblebee’s helm doesn’t feel nearly as warm anymore. He sneaks a glance at the scout’s face to confirm his suspicion—the fevered tints under his optics are returning to normal. His emotional duress all but resolved itself in the company of a foe.
“What are you looking at?”
Starscream quickly turns his helm away, staring up at the sky resolutely. “Nothing.” Bumblebee makes a disbelieving sound. “You just seem a little better.”
“So do you,” he says. “You were limping earlier. You aren’t anymore.”
Starscream’s surprise must be obvious, because Bumblebee laughs at him. He hadn’t noticed. His systems will probably acclimate to the rush of energy soon, but it’s a tad unnerving to think that he could be displaying signs of weakness while unaware.
The human creations get increasingly sparse the farther they go, and eventually they reach the barren valley of the Autobots’ new home. It’s quiet in a way that unsettles Starscream. The Decepticon base has a constant barrier protecting them from crushing silence. The roar of the ocean cuts through the tension, that way he isn’t as affected by Megatron’s calamitous yelling. It gives him something else to focus on. He can’t imagine retaining his sanity if they were to live here, where a whisper travels across the fields of dust and rock for miles. It’s less of a nuisance to never have peace than to have it and wait for it to be broken.
They approach the mountain with the ship embedded in its side, sharing a pensive look. Starscream doesn’t want to stop holding Bumblebee’s helm knowing that more pain is to come when he does. He itches to press a little harder and show the other that he can be trusted, at least for tonight. Before he can act on something as stupid as that fleeting desire, a loud voice rings out.
“Hey! Who’s out there?”
Starscream freezes. He knows how this looks, and he doesn’t yet have the strength to transform. If they think he’s attacking Bumblebee—
A blast sounds off and some overhanging rock tumbles noisily onto the ship, distracting whoever it was that spotted them. Starscream whips around to see Bumblebee with his smoking pistol in his clutches.
“Why did you do that?” he snaps.
Bumblebee shoves him away. “Go,” he orders. “Get out of here before they see you.”
Starscream doesn’t need further encouragement. He takes in the scout’s image one last time before turning on his struts and running.