Work Text:
SYSTEMS DIAGNOSTIC CHECKING…
OPTIC_L: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE, DISENGAGED
OPTIC_R: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE, DISENGAGED
AUDIAL_L: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE, ENGAGED
AUDIAL_R: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE, ENGAGED
VOCALIZER: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE, DISENGAGED
FUEL_PUMP: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE
FUEL_TANK_1: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE
FUEL_TANK_2: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE
TRANSFORMATION_COG: FUNCTIONAL, ROOT_MODE
SPARK: STABLE
FUEL LEVEL: 32%
CHARGE LEVEL: 67%
SYSTEMS STATUS: FUNCTIONAL
POWERING ON.
It’s been some time since Bumblebee’s drank enough to black out, but then again, he hadn’t really had a body for the past few orns, either. A strange thing to miss about being alive? Maybe so. Had he missed it anyways? Absolutely.
Experiencing it now, however, he is reminded of why most mechs tend to avoid the whole ordeal. Wonderful as the getting drunk part may be, the consequences of disengaging your FIM chip are always prompt and ready to reckon before one can even engage their optics. He’s been awake for less than a klik, and already his processor aches, pulsing dully behind his shutters. His neck creaks when he turns it and his vocalizer crackles as he mutters out a soft, “Frag.”
“Well,” a voice drawls, low enough that it doesn’t pierce his already sensitive audials. “Looks like somebody’s decided to join the land of the living.”
It’s a courtesy on Starscream’s part, honestly, to lower his voice to such an extent. On some level, he must be aware that his normal pitch can be enough to make a bot wince without a hangover. “Mm,” Bumblebee hums, refusing to open his optics just yet, but letting a smile quirk at the corners of his lips. “Five more kliks.”
“Absolutely not,” Starscream deadpans. “That is my berth you’re recharging in, and now that you’re awake, I can kick you out of it.”
Charge flickers to life under Bumblebee’s thigh paneling. Lifting his shutters just about halfway, he grins, “Your berth, huh?”
Has it finally happened? Primus, he hopes so. As much as he’d prefer to remember their first time, just the fact of it occurring is enough for Bumblebee. Making memories can come later; right now, what matters is finding out if somewhere amidst all that engex, Starscream had managed to get his head out of his aft and pick up what Bumblebee’s been putting down for deca-cycles.
Looks like he’s going to be disappointed, though, because Starscream sneers, folding his arms tightly across his chassis and turning away. “Processor out of the gutter,” he snaps. “Unlike some bots out there, I have class.”
That’s not disinterest. A good sign?
It had not been an easy realization, to put it mildly, once he’d recognized that he wanted to frag Starscream. Well— fragging Starscream isn’t the problem. Nearly every Autobot has overcome their pride at least once over the past four million orns to admit that they found Starscream attractive, usually in an environment much like the one the two of them had been in last night, late bar gatherings with friends, loosened lips and heightened emotions. Finding Starscream attractive was not the core issue. Wanting to frag him was not the core issue. It was all the—the other stuff.
Like wanting to frag him more than once. Like wanting to share a berth with him afterwards. Like wanting to get energon together in the morning, and sit in each other’s company.
Yeah. No. That had…that had not been a calm discovery. Nevermind the fact that they’ve basically been in each other’s pockets for orns now, that was different, that was circumstances, that was—there hadn’t been anything like this. Domesticity, or whatever. Bumblebee’s never wanted that with anyone, much less Starscream.
And yet, here he is, wanting.
“So we didn’t frag?” he asks, just for clarity’s sake, and tries not to sound too annoyed, or, Primus forbid, disappointed.
Starscream stares at him. “You were drunk,” he says. Then, when Bumblebee stays quiet, he exclaims, “No!”
Damn. He lets his shutters close again and throws his forearm across his face for good measure.
Guess it’s not like he could’ve hoped for Starscream to also have any impaired judgment; since regaining a body himself, he’s been trying his best to avoid engex entirely. At Bumblebee’s insistence, actually—he’d offered to skip the outing last night, have the two of them chill at home (at home, they shared a home, and the damn jet still can’t take a hint), but Starscream had insisted that he could handle it. Based on how it’s Bumblebee waking up with a helmache and Starscream with clear optics, looks like he’d meant it.
Something nudges at the hand next to his face. Cool, slightly wet with condensation. “Drink,” Starscream orders. “You need coolant. Energon’s on the side table.”
“Frag,” Bumblebee hisses under his breath. Can’t a mech just make it easy for him?
With Starscream, there’s a constant push and pull, a hot and cold pattern of behavior that Bumblebee’s gotten a lot better at predicting, but has not gotten better at handling since his unfortunate realization of wanting to frag the guy. Repeatedly. Date him, whatever. Dear Primus, he wants to date Starscream.
Anyways.
It’s the big things, like going out to a bar with him even though he can’t drink anything, but it’s really the little things, like getting him coolant and energon to help nurse his hangover, even though he clearly said only a few kliks earlier that he wanted Bumblebee out of his berth.
Huh. “Why your berth, anyways?”
Starscream’s optics brighten, and one of them twitches. “Because,” he grinds out, refusing, still, to look directly at him as his optics burn even brighter. “Apparently, when you’re drunk, you’re as clingy as a turbofox. I literally couldn’t extract you without injury.”
Yeah, that sounds like him. A puff of laughter escapes his vocalizer at the image his processor conjures—Starscream, carrying a flailing Bumblebee to his own berth, only for Bumblebee to dig his hands into Starscream’s cables and refuse to let go. Maybe he even asked for Starscream’s berth. Considering how much the topic’s been on his mind as of late, he wouldn’t doubt it.
Starscream’s optics are still bright, nearly pink with what must be embarrassment. Embarrassment, but not disgust. Still no rejections. He let him sleep in his berth.
…
Ah, what the hell.
“You could’ve, y’know,” Bumblebee breathes, dragging his forearm back down over his optics. “Fragged me last night.”
There’s an audible snap as Starscream turns towards him. “I—” His vocalizer sounds strangled. “Excuse me?”
“I wouldn’t have said no, s’all I’m saying.”
“You—you wouldn’t have said anything, because you were drunk.”
“Okay.” He shrugs, trying, and failing, to ignore the nervous clench of his fuel tanks. “I’ve been wanting to, though. Did I ask you last night?”
A beat of silence, then another. That’s more than enough of an answer.
“Starscream,” Bumblebee groans, dragging his hands down his face, “are you telling me we had the chance to frag, and you didn’t take it?” He’s not even going to bother to pretend that Starscream isn’t interested in him too—for Starscream, letting a mech who drunkenly propositioned him sleep in his berth might as well be a love confession. Confidence strengthens his words in equal measure to the frustration that sharpens them. “You’re telling me I have to ask you sober?”
Starscream’s faceplate is doing something very odd. It’s sort of slack, optics wide, and his mouth keeps opening and closing in aborted little hiccups as his brow furrows deeper. Deeper, deeper, into— anger. “I don’t know what you’ve heard,” Starscream says, vocalizer set to a growl, “but I am not the kind of mech to interface with someone who can’t say no.”
Oh. Oh, shit. “No, no, Star, that’s not—” He’s floundering. Think, think, stupid! “I don’t—obviously you’re not, I’d never—”
“Well that’s what you’re saying—”
“It’s just that I—”
“I’m not going to violate you—”
“I didn’t say that!”
“You did!”
“But I want it!” Bumblebee cries, nearly pulling at his horns before catching himself. “Pits, Star, I’m not—it’s not like you drugged me or something, I just want to frag! And don’t pretend you’re not interested, I know you are. You’ve got your spark on your sleeve, Screamer.”
Petty way to shut him up it may be, it works, and Starscream finally stops yelling. Even during this—was it a fight? It feels too soon to call this a fight. Even during this…discussion, Starscream hadn’t gotten up from the edge of the berth, never leaving Bumblebee’s side. The simple act is intoxicating; that, along with the way that Starscream still hasn’t denied him, is proof enough that Bumblebee was right, on the interest being reciprocated, at least.
“I,” Starscream starts, muttering as his fingers fidget against his thighs. “It doesn’t matter how I feel. You were drunk.”
“So I wanted to frag, and you wanted to frag, but you said no ‘cause I was a little drunk.”
His optics narrow. “Have you fragged a drunk mech?” he demands, fidgety hands balling into tight fists. “I didn’t think you a rapist, but looks like any mech can surprise you—”
“Whoa!” Bumblebee reels back, flinching against both the snarl and the accusation. “That is not— okay, first of all, I have, but only when they were also drunk, but second—I’m not—do you think I’m calling you a rapist?”
“What, exactly, do you call fragging a mech that can’t say no?”
“But I wasn’t gonna—Primus,” Bumblebee groans, “this is so not how I wanted to ask you out.”
He wishes Starscream had just fragged him. Everything would be so much easier if he had. No yelling, no confusing talking in circles, and certainly no accusations of—of that. Holy slag. Way, way too deep and heavy for a hangover.
At least Starscream looks taken off-kilter by the asking out comment, and in a good way this time. Doesn’t erase the rest of the expression on his face, not to mention how ridiculously tight his plating is against his protoform, but it’s a better reaction than he’d hoped for with a mood like this.
“I don’t think you’d do anything like that,” he says, gentler this time. “I just wish that you’d let me do all the brave parts while I was drunk, y’know?”
“Not really,” Starscream mutters. Again, his optics refuse to meet Bumblebee’s, but he doesn’t resist when Bumblebee tentatively reaches over and uncurls one of his fists. “I think you have a very strange idea of what is and is not acceptable.”
“Come on,” Bumblebee sighs, “if I hadn’t been blackout drunk like this, I’d have never gotten with my first boyfriend either. Apparently I’m a lot better at seduction when I can’t remember it.”
It’s a funny story, one that Bumblebee thinks back on sometimes and wishes that he could remember, if only so that he could laugh at whatever it had been that he’d said that had finally convinced Spotlight to go to berth with him. He fully intends to tell the parts of it that he can remember, muddy as they may be, when—
When—
Starscream is staring at him. Hard.
“Um,” Bumblebee says, before cracking a grin. “Yeah?”
“Your first boyfriend,” he says, each word said carefully, deliberately slow and enunciated. “He fragged you when you were blackout drunk?”
“Yeah…? He wasn’t…” the only one, he doesn’t say, as something downright murderous and awful clouds over Starscream’s expression.
It’s utterly silent for a couple more nano-kliks until Starscream finally picks back up the cube of coolant Bumblebee hadn’t taken and shoves it towards him again. “Drink,” he orders, both voice and tone far too robotic. “Both of them.” A sharp intake of breath as he squeezes his optics shut. “I will be right back.”
With that, he gets up and. Leaves.
Okay.
So—so that’s not how this was supposed to go. At all. He sits up against the headboard and nurses the coolant in his hands, circling the conversation around in his helm and trying to pin down where, exactly, it all went wrong. It wasn’t at the first joke, was it? Starscream was embarrassed, but not upset. He had gotten defensive pretty fast, though. Was it at Bumblebee’s confession?
His tanks feel sticky and awkward as he grimaces, turning each word over until he, quite literally, gets a warning ping on his HUD for an overheated processor. Had he been wrong? Is Starscream actually totally not into him at all? Except—no. He hadn’t said that he wasn’t interested. What he’d said was that it ‘doesn’t matter’ how he feels. Which is ridiculous, because that’s the only thing that matters here. Also Bumblebee’s feelings, probably, but he was explicitly clear about those, both during this conversation and, apparently, last night. So the ball was in Starscream’s court.
And he dropped it.
Bumblebee’s barely finished half the coolant by the time that Starscream comes back, not because it was only a few kliks, but because Bumblebee’s tanks are churning too hard to keep anything down. He feels like he’s ruined this before it’s even started. Did he ruin it? Primus, he’s totally ruined it, Starscream looks pissed.
When he sits back down on the edge of the berth, though, he doesn’t immediately start tearing Bumblebee a new one, nor does he simply throw him out of the room. Instead, he sits down, back far too straight and faceplate far too tight, and he says, “Tell me exactly what happened with your boyfriend.”
Bumblebee blinks. “...Okay,” he says, because there’s nothing else he really can say, is there? Bit awkward to talk about it with the guy he wants to date now, but if it’ll fix whatever happened here… “Uh, before the war really started, there was this bar I’d go to sometimes. I’d, uh, see this mech there that I thought was really hot, but I didn’t have the ball-bearings to talk to him.” It hadn’t taken too long for Bumblebee to learn the art of one-night stands, but actually asking mechs out was harder. Spotlight had been such a presence that Bumblebee hadn’t felt as if he could do either. “But one night, I went to the bar, drank way too much, and woke up in his apartment the next day.”
Starscream’s expression remains tight and pained. “That’s all you remember.”
“I mean, I remember the stuff after that.” Waking up in a stranger’s berth hadn’t exactly been a new experience, but it had been the first time that he’d woken up in a stranger’s berth without even knowing the face of the stranger it belonged to. Then he’d rolled over to see fragging Spotlight, made the most embarrassing noise in his entire functioning, and woken him up.
Spotlight had told him what happened the night before. How Bumblebee had gotten tipsy, making eyes at him from across the bar, then he’d gotten drunk, and the eyes turned into an approach, and then he’d gotten drunk, and the approach had turned into Bumblebee spilling all about how hot he thought Spotlight was, and how he saw him all the time in there, and how he’d wanted to talk to him for ages but could never muster up the nerve.
Somehow, Spotlight had found that charming instead of annoying, and had taken him back to his place so that they could talk more; also, it’s not like Bumblebee could drive, nor could he give his address coherently. It hadn’t been important. The important thing was that Spotlight had liked what he’d seen, and decided to take Bumblebee up on the whole fragging idea. Apparently, he’d liked that well enough too, even though Bumblebee’s performance must have been awful, with how drunk he’d been, and they’d started seeing each other.
“The after isn’t important,” Starscream snaps, plating flaring, before he grimaces and settles back down with an almost practiced patience. “Before. All you know is what he told you?”
“I—I guess, but—”
“What about your memory files? Did you ever try and decode them?”
“No? Why would I—Star, I wanted to frag him. He said I was basically sitting on his lap begging to.”
“You. Were. Drunk,” Starscream stresses, for what feels like the hundredth time this morning. “And that’s all on his word. What about after that? Did he ever do that again?”
“Primus,” Bumblebee mutters. “Yeah, sometimes. We liked to drink together, it was gonna happen more than once.”
“Together.”
“Yeah, together.”
Though—Spotlight was always the one who seemed to remember what actually happened. He was a big mech, had a higher tolerance. It was to be expected that he’d have a better retention of things.
Something that Bumblebee desperately hopes isn’t unease begins to crawl across his plating. “What is this?” he asks, setting the coolant down before he can do something stupid like throw it. His fingers feel alight with discomforting energy. “My ex didn’t—whatever you’re thinking, it wasn’t like that, okay? It’s never been like that.” The urge to explain himself bubbles up in his chassis, swollen and unbidden. “I’ve never woken up to anything I don’t wanna see.”
“Pits,” Starscream whispers, “you’re actually serious.”
“Of course I’m serious!”
“How many times has this happened to you? With him, with—did it happen with others—?”
“You,” Bumblebee breathes, doing his very best to control his temper, “are blowing this way out of proportion.”
Which was definitely the wrong thing to say, because Starscream stands up, turns around, and punches the wall so hard that it tears beneath his fist like wet paper. “You idiot!” he screeches, clawing at the hole he’d left with his other hand. “You fool! At least I know what happened to me, but you— either you’re too stupid or so deep in denial that your helm’s on backwards!”
“Great, another thing I’m gonna have to pay for,” Bumblebee sneers, pinching his nasal ridge at the thought of having to explain to his landlord again why he’s hiring repair services for the place. It’s a good thing he’s got a lot of good will stocked up with the guy, because it’s depleting nearly as fast as Bumblebee’s bank account will if Starscream keeps this sort of slag up.
Then the actual words Starscream had said hit his processor, and he freezes.
“What happened to you,” he echoes, then asks, “What happened to you?”
Not like he can’t guess, based on the context. Primus.
He’s suspected the possibility of this before, of course. Being Starscream’s shadow for so many years gave him a certain insight on the mech that few others—maybe no others, really—had. Of those insights, one of them had been rather glaringly obvious; Starscream is not a mech that trusts people. Not with his safety, not with his plans, not with his life, and most certainly not with his frame. He’s seen the way that Starscream stiffens at unwanted touch or mechs approaching him from behind. He’s seen the snapping at others to leave him alone after certain discussions, and he most certainly remembers the way he’d made absolutely sure that nobody else, not even the designer himself, had been in the room when Starscream made the alterations and specifications to his new frame’s ports and cables.
So no, the idea of Starscream having gone through something like that isn’t new to Bumblebee. It’s just—he hadn’t thought it would come up like this.
Starscream’s lips screw up into something deeply unhappy. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’m sure you can guess. Use your processor, figure it out.” Then, the frown turns crueler, and he bites out, “Maybe you can’t, though! Apparently, yours is malfunctioning.”
“Hey.” Bumblebee frowns, trying not to take any of this personally. “Don’t take it out on me. I’m really sorry for reminding you of…I didn’t mean to make you think about—”
A long, low groan from Starscream, punctuated by the way he drags his fingers down his faceplate so hard that it actually tugs at the soft metal a bit, making his red optics look huge and exasperated. “You are impossible,” he says.
“I’m trying to apologize.”
“And I’m saying don’t. That’s not what—we aren’t talking about me. We’re talking about you and your complete lack of sense.”
“Hey.”
“How many times?” Starscream asks, steering the topic back so quickly that Bumblebee gets whiplash. “Did he ply you with alcohol? Did he coax you to drink? Who else did this to you?”
“Star.” It’s sweet of him to be worried—because that’s what this is, it’s worry, Starscream is worried about him—but he’s obviously projecting, and Bumblebee’s getting tired of this conversational rut. Especially when, as previously revealed by Starscream’s little ‘doesn’t matter how I feel’ earlier, they clearly have much more important things to be talking about. “We liked to drink. It was just something that we did together. And after we broke up, I’d hook up with guys sometimes at the bar. If I was blackout, I never woke up to a face I didn’t like.”
“So you,” Starscream says, vocalizer strained, “you think it’s fine, you think it’s all fine because you got raped by mechs who were hot?”
By the Allspark, holy Primus slag. “I was not—”
“So if I told you,” Starscream interrupts, an urgency to his tone that’s been present since the beginning but never so pronounced, “that I woke up in a stranger’s berth, with no memory of how I got there, dried insulant fluid in my port. You’d think that was fine?”
“No!” Well— “I, I mean, what are the circumstances here? Did you want to interface the night before, do you think you’d frag the mech anyways once you see them, were they also drunk? Are you hurt? There’s a lot of things here that are kind of important to know!”
“That!” Starscream cries, pointing vindictively at his face. His finger’s so close that Bumblebee’s optics cross on autopilot. “That is exactly what I’m talking about here. This situation is completely unjustifiable no matter the circumstances. Primus, Bumblebee, you’re an Autobot, didn’t they teach you all this slag at, I don’t know, Prime’s morality school, or whatever?”
“Prime’s what?” Not the time. “I know what rape is, Starscream, I’m not stupid. For what you said, it’s assault, because you obviously wouldn’t want something like that to happen. But I don’t—”
“So, then, it’s different based on feelings?” he sneers, curling his lip. “We both go into the bar, one of us looking for a frag, the other one not. We both get slagfaced as the Pits and nobody can tell which is which. One mech, mostly sober, decides he wants an easy lay, and sees two mechs so drunk that they can barely keep their optics open, much less their panels. Does it matter to him which one he picks?”
“I—that’s—obviously, that’s different, that guy’s just looking to rape someone—”
“Ah, but he’s not, is he?” Standing up now, Starscream begins to pace, gesticulating wildly as if he’s giving a lecture. “I said he’s looking for an easy lay. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, he’s not that kind of mech, he’d never do something as heinous as,” he puts a hand to his chassis dramatically and gasps, “that. But he does want to frag, and those two bots just look so helpless, they really could use someone to help them on their feet, maybe give them a nice place to rest, and in exchange, they could have a good time, yes?”
“Stop.”
“So he looks between the mechs, and says eeny, meeny, miny, mo,” Starscream snarls, bending down so as to bare his teeth in Bumblebee’s face, pointing his finger back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. “After all, to him there’s no real difference! He lands on one and strikes up a conversation. He’s stopped drinking at this point, you see, too worried that if he gets as slagfaced as them, he won’t be able to get the sweet reward he oh so desires.”
“Stop.”
“Well, he doesn’t stop. He takes the mech to his place, and uh oh, they’ve started to question what they’re doing there! Don’t worry! He’s got his own engex, right at home! How perfect for a conversation. And since the atmosphere’s all cozy, might as well snuggle up on the couch, right? Which of us do you think he picked? You, small and compact, curled under his arm? Or me, large and warm as a furnace, hands tracing steady circles on my wings as I try to figure out which way is up and which way is down?”
“Star—”
“Oh, and they’re laughing now, him and the mech he chose, and they’re enjoying each other’s company, and he’s handsome, isn’t he? So when he reaches down between your thighs and flicks your panel open—”
“Star.” Bumblebee’s tanks give a painful lurch. “I’m gonna—”
His face goes slack. “Oh.”
I should throw up more often, he thinks, oddly calm as he hacks out all of the coolant he’d been trying to keep down. It’s the only thought that breaks through the haze; if it gets him to shut up like this, might as well.
He hasn’t shut up, though, not entirely. Instead, he’s whispering, meaningless phrases that Bumblebee can’t even begin to parse through the ringing in his audials. The hand on his back is nice, though. He’s rubbing circles into Bumblebee’s plating, fingers cool against the clammy heat that had begun to overtake him somewhere around the sweet reward part of Starscream’s monologue. Are his doorwings quivering? He feels like they’re quivering.
Coolant dribbles down his chin and a drop lands on his knee. Primus, he’s disgusting. His throat burns and his helm hurts and he’d really just like to go back to sleep now, thanks. Hah. Can’t do that, not his berth.
“M’sorry,” Bumblebee murmurs, clutching the waste receptacle to his chest.
“What? Why?” Starscream sounds genuinely baffled, and his hand stills on Bumblebee’s back.
“Made you feel bad.”
“You are literally purging right now. I think you might have this backwards.”
Well, sure, but purging is nothing compared to the sorts of spirals Starscream can get into when it comes to bad memories like this. “Just wanted to ask you out,” he rasps, “n’instead, made you think about—”
A light rap to his forehead. “Ask me out later,” Starscream says firmly, but not unkindly. A clamp around his spark Bumblebee hadn’t realized was there begins to lessen. “Remember what I said earlier?”
Bumblebee gives him the best flat look he can manage, saying, “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“I said,” Starscream replies, valiantly ignoring the embarrassment he clearly feels at having delivered such an impassioned story before, “that this is about you. Don’t think whatever it is you’re thinking about making me feel bad.”
“But I—” He swallows, cringing at the bitter taste of processed energon and coolant on his tongue. “I…”
There have been three times in which he’s woken up with a stranger and felt as if something might have been off. One of them, his thigh port panel had been broken off; the mech told him that they’d just been getting kinky. The second, the cables in his knee had been cut—an accident, the mech had said, tripping over barbed wire on their way back. The third was the one that had taken the longest to try and make sense of, when he’d woken up to his neck port burning and his thigh cable nearly ripped out. He’d actually had to go to Ratchet for that, and when he’d asked, the mech cried, saying that he hadn’t wanted to, but Bumblebee had begged him for it. Which. The cable tugging—sure. Bumblebee can get a little risky with his cable. But the neck port…he liked plugging into neck ports. He’d had a hard time imagining himself begging to get plugged into.
All of them had been accepted eventually. Bumblebee is just like this. He likes to drink, and he likes to frag. He’s never woken up to something he doesn’t like.
He had drunk an awful lot with Spotlight, hadn’t he. What had Spotlight even looked like when he was drunk?
“I don’t mean to alarm you,” Starscream says, sounding very much like he’s the one who’s alarmed, “but you’re shaking.”
So he is. Plating trembles against itself, clacking and clattering until Bumblebee can barely hear anything other than metal on metal. “Yeah,” he replies, because. Yeah.
“Are you, uhm…” Then Starscream mutters something under his breath, something that sounds suspiciously like, stupid piece of slag, before continuing with, “Do you want to lie back down?”
“I thought you wanted me out of your berth.”
“Well,” he coughs, “well.”
Oh. That’s nice of him.
Bumblebee does lie back down, gaze glassy and unseeing at the ceiling above him. How many times has he looked up at a ceiling he doesn’t know, not even questioning why? It’s in the double digits, at least. Oh, Primus, is that—does that mean he’s been— that many times— no, no, not him, he’s not like that, he’s—
“I can hear you thinking,” Starscream murmurs. “I’ll turn you off manually if I have to.”
A broken laugh escapes him. “Please don’t.”
“Fine. But I’m stealing your berth. Primus knows one of us hasn’t gotten to sleep yet.”
He’s leaving? No. No, he can’t leave, he’s—not when Bumblebee’s like this, not when—
Before he quite knows what he’s doing, his hand is caught on Starscream’s wrist, optics wide and breaths short. Starscream stops starkly where he stands and glances between the grip and Bumblebee himself. He doesn’t move.
“Stay?” Bumblebee asks. His voice comes out too small, and he kind of hates himself, just a bit. This is pathetic. Nothing is even wrong. Nothing is wrong. He’s just—off-footed, and confused, and feeling bad for Starscream. That’s what’s wrong. That’s why he wants him to stay. That’s got to be it.
Starscream still hasn’t moved, and Bumblebee’s spark constricts, air neither entering nor exiting his vents as his spark is gripped tighter and tighter the longer Starscream stands still. Stay or leave, Bumblebee thinks, a smidge impatient, a touch hysterical, don’t just leave me in limbo!
He can’t—he can’t really—
He can’t be alone right now.
Whatever it is that Starscream sees when he finally looks up again, it must be enough, because his optics cycle, and he sighs, “Clingy bug,” before shoving lightly at Bumblebee’s side. “Move.”
Relief crashes through him like a tidal wave, heady rush incomparable to any engex or drugs before this. Primus, he’s fragged up. There is something so seriously wrong with him. What is wrong with him?
Who cares, he argues with himself, complying with Starscream and shuffling over to the side. Starscream had been right—he is warm. Fliers run warm, he knows that, but it's one thing to know and another to feel. Even from across the berth, his plating heats from Starscream's engine. He really wishes that he could think about how nice and warm he his without thinking about the whole rest of what had been said there. At least he can appreciate it from a distance.
“For Pit’s sake,” Starscream groans, then lifts up an arm so the space on his wing is flat and unoccupied. “Just come here already.”
“Uh?”
His optics had burned quite bright a lot before this, but they’re nearly white now. “Come here,” he repeats. “Clearly, you need some sort of…physicality, or whatever.”
“Oh, wow,” Bumblebee says, allowing himself a faint grin as he eases himself atop Starscream’s wing. “Physicality.”
“Mind. Out of the gutter.”
“It wasn’t even in the gutter that time! You just sounded stupid!”
“Stupid?” Incredulous, he scoffs, “I let you cuddle up to my plating, and you call me stupid?”
“Well, I’m not dead yet, am I?”
It’s easy like this, gentle bickering, traded barbs and rolling optics. This is normal. This is routine. The cuddling is new, but that’s just a bonus. One that, should everything go well, Bumblebee will get to keep. Seriously, never in a million orns would he have guessed how much he’d want to share a berth with Starscream, but here they are. And, in all fairness, Starscream’s almost certainly in the same boat with that.
After a couple kliks of quiet, Starscream sobers, tracing his fingers along Bumblebee’s forearm where it rests thrown across his waist. “Far be it from me to suggest something like this,” he murmurs, “but I do think we should talk about this again. Properly.”
“I really don’t think we need to. Unless you need to talk—”
“You deflect so much that it’s actually absurd. You are absurd. Shut up.”
“I’m just saying, it’s not like you’re known for processing things in the healthiest ways…”
“Har har.” Another beat. “I’m serious.”
“...Yeah. I know. Just—not now.” If they talk about it any more, Bumblebee might do something horrendously awful, like throw the side table, or cry, and neither option sounds nearly as appealing as going back to sleep.
Thankfully, Starscream nods, shuttering his optics closed. “Not now.”
“Wait—one more thing?”
“What.”
“Can I ask you out when we wake up, or…?”
“Bumblebee. Go to sleep.”
That’s at least a maybe.