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The loneliness was the hardest part.
Obviously a lot of things sucked about being dead, pretty much everything to be honest, but for Bumblebee, being unable to talk to anyone, or even just be acknowledged by anyone, was the worst thing about it. Still, at least he could still watch and listen to people now, which was a big improvement over the utter solitude he had found himself in for the first couple weeks (at least it had felt like a couple of weeks, but given he hadn’t had any way of measuring time, he wasn’t sure). A life spent as a spy and saboteur had left him with a habit for snooping, and suddenly being invisible, inaudible and incorporeal proved very helpful to that end. He watched Blurr and Ironhide carry on with their lives without him; he watched Iacon steadily rebuild from the latest in the endless string of disasters to befall it; he watched the tension between the Autobots, Decepticons, and neutrals continue to simmer.
Bumblebee tried not to be too voyeuristic, although his past vocation as a spy together with the lack of consequences afforded by death left his respect for people’s privacy perhaps a little bit more lax than maybe it should have been. Partly out of habit he was particularly nosy when checking in on what the Decepticons, as well as certain former Decepticons, were up to. Bumblebee sometimes thought to himself that he shouldn’t look into whatever inevitably horrible things the likes of Starscream were getting up to, because it would just frustrate and upset him that he knew but could do absolutely nothing about it. However Bee was also an optimist at spark and thought that maybe, maybe there would be some way for him to return to the land of the living at some point, and when he did, he’d know everything he needed to in order to shut these schemes down.
Starscream unsurprisingly had a whole trove of dirty secrets and wicked machinations under wraps; Bumblebee wasn’t especially shocked to discover that Starscream had killed Metalhawk, and he then chided himself for thinking that Metalhawk should have seen that coming too. He had plans to create a secret police force to do his dirty work, ploys to harvest the death ore from Metroplex for who knows what awful end, and schemes to put an end to democracy on Cybertron to ensure he would remain an absolute autocrat. As enraging and repellent as it was to watch Starscream plotting his horrible schemes, Bumblebee had to admit it was very satisfying to see that he was starting to be ground down by the very leadership that he had committed so much evil to attain. Many of the same pressures that had made the job hellish for Bumblebee were now tormenting Starscream, and the schadenfreude was delicious.
Bumblebee found that Starscream had a tendency to mumble and mutter about his frustrations to himself when he was alone, which was sometimes pretty entertaining. He was doing so one night in his office after getting a report from Rattrap that a gang of Decepticons had torn down his statue, “They whinge about my rule but I don’t see them doing anything productive the ungrateful little slaggers, some of us actually have something to contribute to the world but apparently a little bit of recognition is too much to ask.”
“I’d hardly call a 500ft gold statue a little bit of recognition,” Bumblebee muttered in response.
Much to Bumblebee’s shock Starscream’s head snapped up and his optics widened as he stared directly at him. Before Bee could react he found himself receiving a face full of null-rays, which phased directly through him and scorched the wall at his rear.
“Wh-? H-? Buh-?” Starscream spluttered before screeching, “Where did you come from?!”
Starscream leapt up from his desk and sprinted over to Bumblebee, grabbing for his face, but his hand just passed right through him. They stared at each other dumbfounded for a moment before Bee said, “Would you believe me if I told you I’m just as confused by this as you are?”
Bee then followed Starscream to the medic, trying to get him to answer a bunch of questions he hoped would help him figure out why Starscream could suddenly see him, but Starscream pointedly ignored him. At the medic’s office Starscream had them scan him for every conceivable type of hidden bug or insidious frequency, and when their lengthy tests returned nada he screeched at them to forget it and stormed out.
From that point on Starscream had apparently decided that Bumblebee was some kind of stress-induced hallucination, and refused to acknowledge his presence. Bumblebee could tell that he could still see and hear him however, thanks to little twitches of his wings and face whenever he spoke or appeared in Starscream’s field of vision. Bumblebee hoped that if Starscream could suddenly see him, other people would start to be able to see him as well, but no matter how much he yelled in the audials or danced around in front of the faces of pretty much everyone else in Iacon, nobody else acknowledged his existence. So that’s how Bumblebee ended up spending most of his time with Starscream; Bee figured that if Starscream was the only means by which he could possibly have any positive impact on the world, then he had to at least try, no matter how much Starscream ignored him. Also, after the time he’d spent alone, Bumblebee had decided that even the worst company was better than no company at all.
Bumblebee had known Starscream for four million years, but given that they had been enemies on opposite sides of planet-rending, genocidal, war crime filled clash of ideologies for the vast majority of that time, they weren’t exactly close. Now that Bumblebee was getting a view of Starscream that wasn’t framed by a battlefield however, he was starting to notice some new details. Sure, Starscream was indeed the selfish, ruthless, manipulative, lying, murderous, traitorous narcissist that Bumblebee had always known him to be, but Bee didn’t realise he was so lonely. Well, given that Starscream had betrayed and/or murdered anyone that got close to him, and made pretty much everyone else hate him, it was hardly surprising he was alone, but Bumblebee hadn’t thought that someone who treated all people as pawns to be used and disposed of would crave companionship.
Bumblebee supposed that this was why Starscream eventually started acknowledging and talking to him, though he still insisted that Bee was just a figment of his imagination. Since he already had the habit of talking to himself he seemed to have decided that talking to Bee was effectively the same thing, so Bumblebee found himself the audience to all of Starscream’s private monologues. Every now and then he brought up Metalhawk, usually along with some kind of insistent reasoning as to why it was necessary for him to have died, and Bumblebee realised that Starscream was trying to reason away the guilt he felt over killing the only bot who had called him a friend. Honestly Bee had thought that if Starscream had ever been capable to guilt, he had destroyed that part of him a long time ago, and even Starscream himself seemed confused by his own feelings.
The person he brought up the most in his private ramblings was Megatron, which was unsurprising given that it was no secret on either side of the war that the two mechs had some kind of twisted obsession with each other that everyone was aware of but nobody really totally understood. Starscream frequently brought up how he was doing for Cybertron what Megatron had always failed to do, praising himself for not using the same methods of extreme violence, and if Bumblebee hadn’t know better he would have thought that Starscream was actually exhibiting principles. He was also clearly terrified of Megatron, and absolutely convinced that his return was only a matter of time. His plans for Cybertron invariably involved brainstorming defences to prepare for what he thought was Megatron’s inevitable attack. In all fairness, Bumblebee wasn’t really sure if he was wrong.
Outwardly Starscream was all snark and cockiness, and he exhibited those same traits in private, but when he was alone they had a desperate quality to them, like he was trying to convince himself that he was as capable as he presented himself to be. He would bring up his many past failures and insist to himself that this time was different, that things were finally going to change, and from here on out he was finally going to have the life he’d always dreamed for himself. At times it seemed like he actually believed it, but usually Bumblebee could detect undertones of self-doubt indicating a deep-seated fear of failure.
Basically, Starscream was a mess.
Bumblebee might have actually had sympathy for him if he wasn’t always watching him take his issues out on the bots he had power over, like the newcomer Windblade, who he had become convinced was plotting against him when she failed to repair Metroplex on Starscream’s schedule. Bumblebee tried to tell him he was just being paranoid, but he refused to listen, and well, maybe he right in doing so, because it turned out he was half right; Windblade hadn’t been plotting against him, but the problems with Metroplex did turn out to due to the scheming of her bodyguard, Chromia. Windblade had been as much in the dark about it as Starscream had, but when they both discovered what was actually going on she took measures to deal with it; wanting to protect Chromia, she cut a deal with Starscream – in exchange for his secrecy, she would deliver the lost Cybertronian colonies to him, so that he could turn his autocracy into a full-blown empire.
Bumblebee was horrified; Starscream being in control of one planet was bad enough, but Windblade was offering him the chance to create the very Decepticon Empire Bumblebee had spent the last four million years fighting against. Starscream on the other hand was very excited; as soon as he had accepted Windblade’s offer he retreated back to his office to start drawing up plans while still only knowing the barest details of what was actually out there for him to take. As he brainstormed the possibilities for his brave new tomorrow, he considered Windblade’s place in it, the events of the night having caused him to revaluate the Cityspeaker, “That one could be useful…or trouble, probably both. She has a mind of her own, that’s for sure, and that could be a problem, but she’s clearly willing to make deals, and that’s what I need right now: more people ready to negotiate and less who try to tear down everything I’ve been building up as soon as they don’t get their way.”
As soon as the first colony was within his reach Starscream made it clear exactly what a huge threat he was to them. Bumblebee was disgusted by his schemes, and did everything he could to try and talk Starscream out of what he had planned, “This is completely unnecessary! Windblade’s already told you her colony is in desperate need of resources; they’ll want your help anyway! Do you really think that if you unleash a raging combiner on Caminus people aren’t going to get hurt? Or killed?!”
But Starscream wouldn’t listen, “In any grand scheme there is going to be some collateral damage, but in the long term it’s worth it; my empire will be a better place for Cybertronians and colonists alike, I just have to build it first. And don’t be naïve, you know what Chromia did; she didn’t care that her world is starving to death. People are good at ignoring the problems they’ve grown used to until it’s too late, so if you want to get their attention you’ve gotta introduce a new problem. Offer to fix that for them, and you’ll have them eating out of your hand.”
So Starscream went ahead with his scheme, and it appeared to work out as he had planned (at the cost of lives, just as Bumblebee had feared), but then something neither of them had expected happened: Windblade found a way to undermine him. Starscream was livid, “What does she think she’s playing at? She knows what I have on her! I could take her down – take her entire pathetic planet down – with a word! On a whim!”
“Starscream, you ultimately got what you wanted; Caminus has joined Cybertron,” Bumblebee sighed.
“What I’ve got is a world full of religious fanatics who worship Optimus Prime ready to launch a crusade against me the second he gives the order and a little gear-grinder on my council helping herself to my power!” Starscream screeched. “Well, if this is the game she wants to play, fine. I just hope she knows what kind of opponent she’s up against; I won’t be going easy on her just because she’s a beginner.”
While Bumblebee was relieved that Windblade was wilier and more willing to stand up to Starscream than he’d first thought, he found himself worried for her safety. She was clearly a good person who was doing everything she could to make the best of a bad situation, but Starscream was the kind of guy who was willing to kill his friends if it got him what he wanted, so Primus help anyone who made themselves his enemy.
Bumblebee was therefore a little surprised when Starscream saved her life, “Why did you really save Windblade from Chela?” he asked him.
Starscream shrugged, “She still has her uses; she got Velocitron on-board after all. Might as well use her to rope in all the colonies before I think about whether I need to get rid of her.”
It sort of made sense – well, as far as Starscream’s definition of “sense” went – but Bumblebee still got the feeling that this wasn’t the whole story, “Why do you surround yourself with people you think are working against you? Windblade. Rattrap. Are you afraid you’re going to fail, so you keep them around so that if something goes wrong you can blame them instead of yourself?”
Starscream’s wings flicked with annoyance, “I’m not going to fail!” he hissed.
Bumblebee continued to speculate, “Or are you trying to be like Megatron? He always kept you around for some reason.”
Starscream suddenly spun around and leaned down, getting his face right up close to Bumblebee’s, “I am NOT trying to be like Megatron!” he spat.
Bumblebee decided not to bring that one up again for a while.
Starscream saving Windblade’s life proved to be a wise move on his part, as she returned the favour shortly afterwards. Bumblebee was…strangely relieved that Starscream hadn’t died. After all, if Starscream died, he’d have no one to talk to again. Well, unless Starscream became a ghost too, he supposed. Starscream was more confused than anything; he was still having trouble wrapping his head around the whole ‘people helping other people even if there’s nothing in it for them because they’re not pathologically self-centred glitchheads’ thing, “Windblade’s one of those sorts who thinks that most people are ultimately decent, so she believes the world can run on things like honouring promises and helping people for no reason. You know, that sort of stuff,” said Starscream ponderously. “But the reality is that the world runs on decent people who think like that being used by other people who realise that they can get ahead if they play others to their advantage, rather than being restricted by the rules that stop decent people from doing that sort of thing.”
“What if the decent people worked together to stop others from using them?” asked Bumblebee.
“That might work,” replied Starscream, “if there were that many decent people.”
Once traffic was opened up to the colonies, things on Cybertron started to take an uncharacteristically positive turn. The colonies were bringing in new faces, experiences and opportunities, and while Cybertron was still the ball of violent civil unrest that it had always been, it was a somewhat happier ball of violent civil unrest. If Bumblebee was more like Starscream he probably would have been jealous of the fact that things were looking better under Starscream’s rule than they ever were under his, but because he was Bumblebee, he was just happy that things were looking better. Starscream, however, was upset that he wasn’t getting enough recognition for it; while Bumblebee thought that Starscream’s constant need for effusive praise was ridiculous, he could understand his loneliness.
Starscream’s solution to this problem was to announce a holiday dedicated to celebrating himself, but luckily Bumblebee’s second-hand embarrassment was mitigated when the populous misinterpreted the meaning of the holiday as a celebration of one another. Starscream, on the other hand, did not take this well; he sulked and raged and carried on, bemoaning that the populous were “wasting” the love and attention he thought that they owed him on each other, and making some rather dark and foreboding references to retribution. Bumblebee was getting a bit alarmed.
“Er…I like you,” he offered.
“Shut up Bumblebee,” Starscream muttered.
It was then that the party brigade arrived. Apparently the members of the closest thing that Starscream had to an inner circle (in other words, the people who were forced to work with him) had decided that in exchange for declaring such a joyful holiday, Starscream deserved a little celebration. Starscream was initially dumbstruck, but then he started beaming. He didn’t have the entire planet singing his praises as he had wanted, but he might as well have from the way he was acting – he was about as close to being giddy as Bumblebee had ever seen. It was…adorable, to be honest. For once Bumblebee was able to stand back and watch Starscream make causal conversation with other people, and found that he could be genuinely affable around others if he was in a good enough mood. Sure, he still had that smugness and snarkiness about him, but it wasn’t as malicious and pronounced as it normally was. Starscream managed to have reasonably congenial conversations with each member of the party without grossly insulting any of them, and Bee felt weirdly proud. When he got round to talking to Windblade he even managed to tell a joke that wasn’t about anybody getting brutally killed, which looked as though it took Windblade by surprise; she then looked even more surprised that she was laughing at it. Starscream beamed even more.
Because Cybertron was unable to go more than four weeks without a mandatory dose of more-major-than-usual drama, a whole thing involving rumours about Swindle’s body, the secret mnemosurgeon Starscream had in his employ (much to Bumblebee’s despair), and the reformation of Starscream’s police force by Ironhide somehow culminated in the Combaticons combining and going on an insane rampage through Cybertron. This all then led to Chromia confessing what she had done on a live broadcast, without mentioning Windblade’s knowledge of it, or the deal she had cut with Starscream. Starscream’s blackmail material was gone. Naturally, Starscream was enraged, but also confused, “What in The Pit was Chromia hoping to achieve by confessing? What did it get her? It doesn’t make any sense!”
“It frees Windblade from your blackmail; it means she doesn’t have to do those things you made her do,” Bumblebee told him, referring to the increasingly morally ambiguous tasks Starscream had been coercing Windblade into doing lately.
“I didn’t make her do anything that horrible!” Starscream protested. “If anything, I gave her opportunities to develop her talents. Anyway, that doesn’t explain why Chromia did what she did. Chromia didn’t get anything out of it.”
“She got freedom for Windblade, can’t you understand that? She did something because it benefitted someone else, not herself,” Bumblebee said, doing his best.
Starscream stared at him for a moment, “But she’s in jail!” he then exclaimed.
“Yes Starscream, she’s in jail. She’s in jail because she decided to sacrifice her own wellbeing for the wellbeing of another. Is this making sense?” Bumblebee tried.
Starscream just stared at him again; Bee could have sworn he heard gears in his head grinding. Finally he said, “Chromia cares about Windblade that much?”
“Yes!” Bumblebee exclaimed, almost ecstatic. “Chromia cares about Windblade, so she sacrificed herself for Windblade.”
“I wonder what that feels like,” said Starscream quietly.
The incident with the combiner was quickly followed by an incident involving Sentinel Prime, of all people, and this incident very nearly proved Starscream’s demise, but once again Windblade came to his rescue, this time at great personal risk to herself. Starscream seemed a bit shell-shocked by this – not so much by the near-death experience, he’d been miraculously coming out the other side of those for the last four million years – but by the fact that someone had risked their own life to save his. He already brought Windblade up a fair bit in his private conversations with Bee, but after that he started to find excuses to mention her a lot, even if it was just to talk about how the things she did annoyed him, only now when he spoke about those things his tone was closer to fond amusement than resentment.
A thought occurred to Bumblebee: was…was Starscream actually developing feelings for her? That boggled Bee’s mind a bit, but it was certainly how things were starting to appear. The idea was…strangely moving, that after aeons of absolute selfishness, Starscream had learnt to care about someone other than himself. But it was also sad, because how could anything happy ever come of it? After everything Starscream had done to Windblade, and to others, how could she ever return his feelings? Perhaps the saddest part, Bee thought on reflection, was that if things had been a bit different, it might have actually worked. Bumblebee wasn’t going to deny that Starscream was a horrible person, he’d seen up close exactly how horrible he could be, but he had also come to see that he wasn’t just a horrible person; there were other parts to him that someone could love if they weren’t so overshadowed by all his evil deeds. And those parts would have worked well with Windblade; they were both driven, tenacious, intelligent, they both had a certain way with people (although Windblade’s was generally much friendlier than Starscream’s), and they both, ultimately, wanted to see Cybertron and its colonies thrive. If Starscream hadn’t made her his enemy, the two of them could have achieved a lot together.
Then the hoard of zombie titans arrived, because of course it did, and Starscream’s four million years as a military leader put him into his element. He was doing well, things were going well, until they weren’t. When everything started to fall apart, it was Windblade who offered a solution; a crazy, almost certainly suicidal solution, which necessitated putting her life on the line. Starscream agreed to it. After Windblade left to enact her perilous scheme and they all waited to learn whether or not they were doomed, Starscream looked visibly troubled, but only Bumblebee knew the entire reason why. Amazingly, Windblade’s scheme worked, and as they watched her save them, Bumblebee saw Starscream’s smile and knew that if he wasn’t in love before, he was now.
This made Windblade’s death all the worse. Losing someone like her was in itself among the most terrible of tragedies, but watching Starscream struggle with his quiet, lonely misery over the subsequent weeks made it even more horrible. Bumblebee asked Starscream if he wanted to talk about it, but Starscream only replied that there was nothing to talk about. He’d seen Starscream miserable before, honestly Starscream was miserable more often than not, but this was an entirely different kind of sadness, one that Bee himself knew deeply, and it pained him to see it. But as painful as it was, it made him feel closer to Starscream than ever before, knowing that he was truly capable of the emotions that made them Cybertronian.
While Bee felt that he could relate to Starscream more now than ever, what he couldn’t relate to at all was Starscream’s enraged refusal to anything to save Windblade when he learnt that they might be able to bring her back. However, when Bumblebee confronted him about it, and Starscream screamed at him about how his life has constantly beat the lesson into him that he was alone, Bee thought that maybe he understood. Starscream had come to associate opening up to anyone with getting hurt, and when he had finally opened himself up enough to develop feelings for Windblade, she had hurt him by dying. Now that he was being presented with the possibility of having her back, Starscream thought that life was just taunting him with hope before taking another opportunity to hurt him for caring for someone.
But Bumblebee couldn’t allow Starscream be like that; he couldn’t allow it for Windblade’s sake, and he couldn’t allow it for Starscream’s as well. If Starscream wanted to be alone so that he couldn’t get hurt, Bumblebee would remind him exactly what being alone felt like. So Bee left him. From afar, he watched Starscream rapidly deteriorate into an even worse state as he all but begged him to return. It didn’t take long for Starscream to start investigating the means by which Windblade might be saved; unfortunately he learnt that saving her life would mean someone else risking theirs. Bumblebee couldn’t help but think what rotten luck it was that Chromia had just been sent away on her mission in exile, because surely she would have done it. However, when Starscream resolved to do it himself, Bumblebee was more shocked by the fact that he wasn’t that shocked.
Bumblebee was unable to follow Starscream on his plunge into Windblade’s mind, but his relief and joy was tremendous when they both remerged alive and sane. After that Starscream was…different. In public most people may not have noticed much of a change, but to Bumblebee in private it was plainly obvious. It was like the better parts of Starscream’s nature that usually only barely peaked through on rare occasions had all been dragged to the surface; Bumblebee had watched Starscream gradually changing for the better over their time spent together, but it was like that change had suddenly been accelerated. Bumblebee asked what happened in Windblade’s mind, but while Starscream offered some explanation, it was cryptic and hard to figure out.
It seemed as though things were getting so much better, but then of course, everything came crashing down. Windblade discovered every horrible crime Starscream had committed since becoming the leader of Cybertron, and she threatened to expose him. Starscream could find some way out of course – for one, he could have her killed – but Bumblebee knew he wasn’t going to do that. He could find a way to make her look like a liar, but then that would divide the populous between people who believed Windblade was a liar and people who believed Starscream was a criminal, opening the way for Elita and her warmongering philosophy to take Cybertron in the upcoming elections.
And so Starscream confessed to every one of his crimes in front of the entire population of his empire, guaranteeing that Windblade would take his place as leader and that he would end up in jail with a life sentence. Bumblebee didn’t fall in love with Starscream at that point, he just realised that he’d been in love with him for a while. As they sat in his cell and Bumblebee softly whispered to him about how proud he was of what he’d done and what he’d become, Windblade paid him a visit, and told him that whatever came next, she knew who he really was. Starscream had lost everything, all the power he’d schemed and struggled for, but now he had two people who knew him in a way that no one had ever known him before. Things looked bleak for him now, but Bumblebee never thought that the war would really end, or that Starscream would risk his life for another person, or give up his power for the sake of Cybertron, or fall in love, or that Bee himself would fall in love with Starscream. If these things could change, why assume that their current situation wouldn’t? Maybe things really were getting better.