Chapter Text
If you were the sort of insufferable mech who always looked on the bright side, you might suggest that death was peaceful. Imagine it! No more scrabbling for power; no more Predacons using him as their personal chew-toy; no more Autobots scuppering his plots…
No more Megatron.
Just oneness, stillness. Spiritual serenity. Why, when you described it like that, death almost sounded relaxing.
Unfortunately, melding with the Allspark would also result in the disintegration of his winning personality. While Starscream admitted a minor bias, he had grown quite attached to it, over the millennia. Plus, there was the small issue that while death itself might be painless, the actual process of dying was anything but.
“Come now,” whined the traitor. “Could you stop screeching? Honestly. Such ingratitude! I save your sorry spark, and what do I get for it? One hell of a mechgraine.”
A mechgraine? A mechgraine? How dare he complain of such trivial twinges when Starscream was spread across the Darkmount throne room, a study in tragedy!
His legs had snapped clean across the thigh; his cockpit was singed and blackened. And, most egregious of all, the Predacons (cretaceous cretins!) had clawed his wings to shreds, which – in a twist of cruel cosmic irony – now looked remarkably similar to the feathers of avians, back on that filthy little mudball they called Earth. It was a Primus-blessed miracle he continued to function!
There was only one way to express his offence. Starscream howled louder.
“Argh!” Knock Out would’ve clapped both servos over his audials if they weren’t buried in Starscream’s innards. “I’m trying to help you, here!”
“Scrap! Would you cut his vocals already?” Of all the Autobots who’d stormed the Predacons’ keep, Arcee had been most reluctant to do the mechly thing and save an old foe from his disembowelment, ravishment, and devouring. Even now, as she helped restrain Starscream on the energon-spattered floor, she sneered at him as if he was a piece of old shareware.
Starscream did his best to return the sentiment. As he was currently short one optic, he feared his glare didn’t have the desired effect.
Knock Out wriggled both servos deeper into Starscream’s chassis. Arcee, in charge of pinning his mangled leg-struts, cringed from the shrillness of the resultant wail.
“Yes, yes,” said Knock Out, tetchily. “It hurts. What do you expect me to do about it?”
Starscream didn’t know. He was the doctor.
His mangled faceplate must’ve conveyed his frustrations, for Knock Out shook his head.
“It’s not as easy as it seems! We didn’t exactly expect to find you here, much less alive. I’ve given you as many painkillers from my field kit as I can risk without overloading your processing cortex, but I don’t have the equipment to put you into stasis and you’re too much of a paranoid clanger to activate your own stasis-lock, and frankly, I'm baffled you haven't off-lined already! Now - Scrap!“
He pulled one servo from Starscream's slashed tubing. The other stayed wedged inside him. It pressed to a point of raw, pure agony, as if a fire burned in Starscream’s guts.
Starscream’s processer bleated, warnings popping up one after another across his cracked HUD.
Danger, danger. Rupture in the tanks.
Ah – that fool! That thrice-rusted plugport of an Autobot convert had injured him further!
Starscream knew it! This was no rescue mission!
Knock Out made impatient come-hither motions to the green Wrecker, the third fool in this jolly band. “Cauteriser! Now!”
“Huh?”
The big lug nursed a roasted leg joint, courtesy of Darksteel. His metal had warped in the heat. Starscream could see his own reflection through his glitching, fraying vision; his screaming mouth, stretched around Bulkhead's half-melted pede, looked ready to swallow him whole.
Knock Out shook his helm. “Blowtorch!”
Dammit, he didn't want to make that fire in his fuel-tanks literal! Obviously, these Autobots intended to torture him out here, far from the restraining frowns of their teammates, before deactivating him themselves.
“No, no – Knock Out! If you have any – argh! – any compassion left in your spark!”
Knock Out paused. A bead of Starscream’s energon clung to his chin. For once, his finish didn’t seem to be his chief concern.
He looked down at Starscream. Battered, broken, pathetic. And, for the fleetest of moments, he looked sad.
“Do you want to live?”
Bulkhead tensed. “Not sure Magnus'd be happy with you offing him, Doc.”
“I’m sure he’d handle the grief,” came Arcee’s deadpan reply. Knock Out ignored them both.
“Do you want to live?” he repeated.
And Starscream…
Starscream swallowed, his glossa working thickly in his throat.
Wasn’t that the question?
No master. No wings. No trine.
Oh, he'd argued with those idiots, back in the olden, golden days of Decepticon dominance over the skies. But Starscream was, as TC so eloquently put it, naturally abrasive. Like a mechfoliation stone. He snapped at everyone. The only true measure of his affections was whether he tried to offline them afterwards.
He'd only done that once, to TC and Warp. But even then, he hadn't been able to strike the finishing blows.
Anyway, his trinemates were at one with the Allspark now, their cadavers floating through deepest space. The Decepticon faction had fragmented. Knock Out turned traitor, Airachnid was gone. Shockwave remained a fugitive, while Megatron kept spouting codswallop about losing his taste for tyranny, and Soundwave had vanished, as if sucked into another dimension.
The goals that had lured Starscream as a mechling, which once seemed so noble, had taken barely three millennia to devolve into mindless self-advancement. Hollow ambition. The magma-hot burst of victory, followed by the slow, sinking realisation it would never be enough; that even if he ruled the galaxy, he would still find himself casting his optics at the next sparkle of stars on the horizon…
Truthfully, what did Starscream have left?
And yet, life was returning to Cybertron. The Well of Allsparks glowed again.
Forget causes. Forget grudges, old feuds, the spilled energon and rust of battles past.
Wouldn’t it be worth something, anything, to fly through the rebuilt spires of Vos?
Starscream swallowed, tasting energon. He nodded.
Knock Out’s eyes blazed bright as the blowtorch in his fist. The blue bead gathered on his cheekplate, forming a viscous drip, and fell – plink! – onto Starscream’s optic, smearing his halved field of vision. Knock Out leaned in, almost close enough to bite.
“Put yourself into stasis,” he snarled. “Now. And for Primus's sake, stop being so dramatic.”
Starscream didn’t take orders from anyone.
Except Megatron. And the Predacons, when he had no other choice. And his enemies, of course, whenever he was captured – but then he was merely biding his time! And yes, before he became Winglord, he'd bent knee to Vos's sovereign queen... But regardless, the point persisted.
He didn’t take orders from Knock Out.
Thus, it was with no small irritation to come online to the blissful absence of flashing HUD pop-ups, and realize this was exactly what he’d done.
“Morning, sunshine. I’d say ‘good to see you up’, but I think we both know I’d be lying.”
Starscream made the monumental effort of turning his head. Knock Out had repaired his optics. He’d made a shoddy job of it – the colours seemed skewed to the blue end of the spectrum. Still, nothing some tinkering couldn’t fix.
As it was, the malfunction made the young bot before him – war-built, practically a newspark, for pit's sake! – merge all the better into the shadows. But then again, of course, merging was Smokescreen’s speciality.
(Not in that way. Primus, he was far too young.)
Starscream’s gaze trekked to the phase-shifter locked around the mech’s wrist. His lip mesh curled off his dentae.
If it hadn’t been for this whippersnapper, he might’ve kept the Apex Armour to himself. Oh, it was ghastly from an aesthetic perspective – that amount of bulk did his streamlined frame and fighting style no justice. But unlike a certain doctor, Starscream also prized things for their functionality. It was wearing that armour he had gotten his first lick of power in some time, and by Primus, had it tasted sweet.
Right now, he mostly tasted stale blow-back from his cycling ex-vents. How long had he been asleep?
“If you’re here to mock me,” he grated, “don’t bother. I doubt you could make me feel more pitiful.”
“Always the cheery one, aren’t you, Scream?”
Starscream’s wings did their utmost to hike up. This was difficult, in part because he was lying on his back, mostly because there was little of them left.
“What is your purpose here?" he demanded. "Are you going to assassinate me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. ‘Assassinate’ implies the bot you’re offlining is important." Smokescreen slouched on his chair, servos clasped behind his helm. Glitch had the audacity to look smug. "I’m on guard duty.”
“Guard –“ Starscream tried to sit. The electromagnetic band clamped over his chest made this difficult. “Grah! Why am I restrained?”
“Do you want the full list? Because I’ve got a long one. It starts with a bot called Cliffjumper, and…”
Starscream huffed. “You say that as if you knew him.”
The mechling stuck out his chest. “Just because I haven’t been part of this team for long, doesn’t mean I don’t belong here!”
“Which wasn’t what I said.” Starscream shook his head, mock-pitying. “Careful, mechling. If you broadcast your insecurities so openly, somebody might... take advantage of them.”
“There’ll be no taking advantage in my medbay."
Starscream grimaced. He knew that voice, that purr of oil-slick poured over velvet. It was the traitor.
“I was merely imparting a vital piece of life advice.”
“I don’t think the mech strapped to the table in the enemy base is qualified.” Knock Out sauntered in, nodding to Smokescreen. “Thank you for watching him. I hope he didn’t cause too much trouble.”
Smokescreen crossed his arms with a snort. “Whatever, doc. Still don’t think he needed a guard. How much damage can he do, tied up like this?”
“Oh, not much. The restraints are mostly for my own amusement. Now, scat. I need to examine him before I return to our other patients." Knock Out hit Smokescreen with that hip-cock, smirk combo he used to flaunt at Starscream. Starscream had thought he was looking to curry favour, at first - it took him embarrassingly long to realize that was just how Knock Out talked to everyone. "I’m sure there’ll be plenty to keep you occupied at the construction site.”
“Ugh. Yeah.” Smokescreen rotated his shoulders, winglets drooping. “What with all this manual labour, I almost miss the war.”
Him and Starscream both. How had he fallen so far? Even when that squishy fool Silas stole his T-Cog, Starscream had not been so low. At least back then he could walk. Now…
He glanced down.
His legs were gone. One had snapped when Skylynx caught Starscream in his mouth, worried him like an old bone. The other was lost when his brother decided he wanted to share the treat, and the two engaged in a rousing game of tug-of-war.
Starscream shuddered. He was lucky the wires in his hip flexors had ripped, rather than the piping around his fuel tank. That had come later, when the so-called Predaking descended on him, mandibles snapping, claws rending, eyes alive with fire...
The door snicked closed. Starscream managed to disguise his jump. He hadn't noticed Smokescreen leave.
Knock-Out shifted to fill his vision. His pretty porcelain faceplate was unreadable. Realization trickled through Starscream, like ice-cold water dribbling under his plates. Scrap. He'd just been left alone with a galactically-renowned sadist.
Still, he couldn't resist a jibe.
“Enemy base? Thank you, Smokescreen? I knew you were a treacherous glitch of a turncoat, but I didn’t think you were so lily-livered as to go native.”
“Not a wise idea to insult the mech in charge of fixing you.” Knock-Out jerked his chin at the gap where Starscream’s legs used to be. “If I even can.”
Starscream suspected the Autobots had already smelted the spare legs, tipped with specialised Seeker-pedes, which were once stored in the Nemesis’s medical surplus, ready for the next time he got on Megatron's bad side. And as for his wings…
Tortured metal scraped the board beneath him. Starscream swallowed. Best not think about those.
“Of course,” he snapped, “I wouldn’t expect your new friends to keep limbs of such exquisite construction in your vaults. Typical grounders.”
“Exquisite? More like antique! Not to mention spindly.”
“Why you! I am not –“
“I wouldn’t use your legs to pick my dentae.”
Starscream strained against his bonds. “Mock my construction all you please! I am the fastest seeker to ever be sparked, Lord Megatron’s Second in Command –“
“Was,” said Knock-Out. “Was his Second in Command. The war’s over, Starscream."
Starscream remembered. The whack of a blunt instrument against his cranium, the floor speeding up to meet him. Blackness, oblivion.
“Yes,” he sneered. “No thanks to you.” Then – because while Knock-Out hid his vulnerabilities better than Smokescreen, Starscream had known him long enough to always hit where it hurt – “Whatever would Breakdown say?”
Knock Out showed no indication his words had struck home. “Breakdown would’ve come with me.”
“Then it’s a good thing he’s already dead. This way, when I escape, I only have one treacherous pede-licker to kill.”
He expected some reaction. He was ready for it, even, in a sick sort of way. He was tied down, defenceless, halfway to frame-death already. An easy target.
But Knock-Out just hooked a dangling line to the exposed medical ports on Starscream’s neck.
“I have other patients to worry about." His voice was brisker than the frigid wastes at the Earth's South Pole. “Our foray into the Predacons’ territory was not without casualties, and Bulkhead's leg requires replating. Quite simply, Starscream, I have neither the time nor patience to deal with you.”
Starscream bristled. If there was one thing he refused to be, it was ignored.
“So, what? You’re going to force me into stasis against my will? Call yourself an Autobot?” Knock Out stepped back. Starscream didn’t like the smile on his face. “Um. I hasten to remind you that dissecting me would also be against your new friends’ moral code, and –“
“I’m not going to dissect you. Or put you into involuntary stasis, tempting though it may be.”
Knock Out retreated towards the double-doors. Starscream took stock of his surroundings. He evidently wasn't worthy of a visit to the medbay-proper; they’d stashed him in the vestibular offshoot that Knock-Out used for surgeries. He was quite familiar with it, thanks to Megatron. It was a small room, by the Nemesis’s standards, scarcely enough room to swing a turbo-fox. It was also completely soundproofed.
Knock Out smacked the panel by the door. The locking system washed red.
“There. Now nobody can hear you complaining. Have fun alone here, Starscream. If you’re lucky, once I’ve finished attending to my new team, I’ll remember your existence.”
“Monster!” Starscream screeched after him. "Wicked fiend, you –“
The door hissed shut. Starscream kept hurling insults at it for the next five kliks. It wasn’t anywhere near as therapeutic as putting a scratch across that pristine faceplate would be – but all in good time.
Starscream’s plan had been, at least partially, successful. He was alone. And now, legs or otherwise, he could plot his escape.