Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Wheeljack didn’t really get out that much.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, it was just— no, Wheeljack realized, slumping, it was because he didn’t want to.

The club’s music blared around them, making the floor vibrate. The scent of the various tonics clogged the air. Wheeljack could see Ironhide’s mouthpiece moving, but he couldn’t make out a word he said from across the table. Well, half-table. This was more of a dance club than a drinking club, much to Wheeljack’s chagrin. That had been the one hope he’d kept alive for tonight.

Ironhide zipped around the table far too quickly – or maybe Wheeljack was already getting overcharged – and clapped a servo down hard on Wheeljack’s shoulder. “Come on, Jackie!” he yelled into Wheeljack’s audial. “Have a little fun! Live a bit! War’s over, and Screamer ain’t gonna kill ya for one night of letting loose.”

“Starscream,” Wheeljack corrected, for the umpteenth time that evening.

Ironhide just laughed, and a pushing crowd swept him from Wheeljack’s side before the engineer could say anything more. Despite being somewhere near the corner of this place, the crowd of mechs and femmes never stopped flowing. He stood close enough to the wall to feel the vibrations from the music pulsing back, uncomfortably and persistently, against his left fin.

Wheeljack stared down at the purple engex in his servo, watching the liquid swirl. Ironhide had been trying to get Wheeljack out of his lab for cycles now, turning to enlisting Windblade when he couldn’t personally do it. Wheeljack had felt bad for shoving his friend aside in favor of his work, and Starscream, but secretly dating the paranoid Emperor of Cybertron didn’t leave much time for date nights. He’d much rather have spent one of Starscream’s few quiet nights alone with him, in his hab.

Tonight was supposed to be a date night. Metroplex was in fine health, the government wasn’t under threat of collapsing at any moment, the rumor mill had been quiet lately. Starscream was in an uncharacteristically good mood, and Wheeljack had been looking forward to a peaceful night at his side with no distractions to steal either of their attentions away.

Windblade, now missing her Chromia-shaped shadow, nearly crashed into Wheeljack’s side. “You look like someone shot your turbo-puppy,” she said.

“He’s mourning the fact we’re making him have fun!” Ironhide hollered, from somewhere in the crowd.

Wheeljack was not having fun.

“Try this!” Windblade swapped her bright pink drink for Wheeljack’s purple one.

Wheeljack observed it skeptically, but before he could protest, Ironhide was back behind him. “One drink!” Ironhide said. “You gotta have a little fun!”

It would be acceptable to leave after one and a half drinks, right? Wheeljack thought, looking between his stolen engex and Windblade’s abandoned one. Starscream didn’t follow anything close to a normal recharge schedule, so Wheeljack could probably still find him awake in his hab. The night didn’t have to be lost yet.

Wheeljack swiped the engex up. “One drink,” he swore to Ironhide, and downed it.

‘One drink’ turned into two (because Windblade looked sad about drinking alone) which turned into three (because that green one looked really good), which turned into four (because why the Pit not?), which turned into five (because it was right there), which turned into… Wheeljack didn’t remember. But there had been more. Definitely. It definitely took more than four drinks to get him wasted. Probably. Maybe. He hoped.

Wheeljack’s chronometer had shut off by the time they stumbled out of the bar… club… dance-thingy… the building they had been in. Wheeljack stumbled over his own pedes; the cobbled ground seemed to shift between each reset of his optics.

“Metroplex,” Wheeljack muttered, “go to sleep.”

Windblade snickered under her ex-vents.

Ironhide patted his back sympathetically. “It’s all good, my friend,” he said. “We’ll get you back to your berth.”

“My berth…” Wheeljack echoed. His berth was in Starscream’s hab, with Starscream. Oh scrap. Was he in recharge? What time was it? The night air had a biting chill, and Wheeljack couldn’t wait to feel Starscream’s frame against his. The seeker’s jet engines practically functioned as a heater. Very nice to curl up against.

“Wait, wait,” Wheeljack said, trying to halt their party and succeeding only in falling back against Ironhide. He could feel the big mech’s laugh. “I gotta call… I gotta comm. Starscream.”

Windblade’s optics went from amused to stretched wide. She reached out a servo to stop Wheeljack from pressing his comm, saying, “Wait, no!” but missed.

Starscream picked up on the second ring. “Wheeljack?” His vocalizer crackled with static as he emerged from recharge.

“Starscream!” Wheeljack exclaimed. “Starscream— Star, I’m on my way home. Now. It’s—” Oh, right, his chronometer. “I dunno what time it is.” He glanced around. “Or where I am.”

“You’re drunk,” Starscream deadpanned.

“I’m drunk,” Wheeljack confirmed happily. “But I’m on my way home. Ironside—no, Iron… run… er, the red one is bringing me home.” Then he remembered Windblade, but drew a blank on her glyphs as well. “And the one, with the wings, and the marks, and the angry bodyguard.”

“Oh, joy,” Starscream said.

“They said they’d take me home,” Wheeljack informed him seriously, “but I don’t remember where your hab-suite is.”

Ironhide choked on something.

Wheeljack heard Starscream open his mouth, then stop, and finally start to say something again. “Can you connect me to Ironhide, please?”

Wheeljack felt his spark drop. “No.”

“Why, pray tell, not?”

“Because I love you,” Wheeljack said, like it was the most obvious thing in the universe. “I thought you liked talking to me. I like talking to you. About science. Science stuff. You’re real smart, Star. Could listen to you talk about science all day.”

“Thank you, sweet-spark.”

“You’re hot too.”

“Apt observation, dear.”

“Apt. Aft. You have a nice aft.”

“Such a gentle-mech. How did I get so lucky?”

“I’m so lucky,” Wheeljack echoed. “I love you, Star. I’m gonna come home and… and tell you how much I love you.”

“Can’t you do that over the comm?”

“It’s not the same,” Wheeljack whined.

“Oh, my apologies.”

“I’m sorry I missed our date,” he continued. “I can make it up to you! I’ll make you a great thingy of energon, from scratch.”

“Lovely sentiment, but I’m not letting you anywhere near a stove. You’re bad enough when you’re sober.”

“You don’t like my cooking?” Wheeljack sulked, and Ironhide’s grip behind his back kept his from crashing onto the road. “I thought you liked me.”

His vocalizer must have crackled convincingly, because Starscream immediately relented, “I do like you.”

Wheeljack perked back up. “Really? You like me.”

“I’m as shocked as you are,” Starscream said dryly.

Wheeljack practically beamed. “I like you too!”

“Wonderful! But, you know, if you really liked me, you’d give me Ironhide’s comm. frequency.”

Wheeljack sent it without a second thought.

“Thank you, dear,” Starscream said. “Your handler knows which doorstep to drop you at now.”

“Is it yours?” Wheeljack asked.

“Unfortunately.”

“I can’t wait to see you. I miss you!”

“We had lunch together.”

“We did?” Wheeljack swayed, Ironhide once more keeping him on his pedes. “I’m so happy I got to spend time with you.”

Starscream was quiet for a long moment, and Wheeljack started to worry their connection had fizzled after. But after a klik, Starscream said, “It makes me happy to spend time with you as well.”

Wheeljack must have blacked out after that, because the next thing he knew, he was shoved against a wall by a door as Ironhide pressed the buzzer insistently. Windblade looked at him like he’d grown a second helm, averting her gaze the moment the door began to slide open.

Ironhide took Wheeljack’s shoulder and directed him through the door. “Off you go. His problem now. Bye!”

The door fell shut again, leaving Wheeljack in the darkness of the hab-suite. A hot frame at his side kept him upright, directing his pedes toward a large berth. Wheeljack sighed as he was dropped down at the edge.

The berth was cool, especially compared to Starscream’s frame. “Come to berth,” Wheeljack muttered against the covers.

Starscream stalked along the far wall, drawing a curtain shut over the vast window. “In a moment,” he said. “Trust me, you’ll thank me in the morning.”

Starscream crawled onto the berth beside him as Wheeljack hauled himself the rest of the way up. He immediately latched onto Starscream’s trim waist, resting his helm at the side of the cockpit, where he could feel the faint vibrations from Starscream’s rumbling engine. He was so warm. Way better than any blanket, though Starscream had drawn one of those up around them as well.

“You’re going to hate yourself in the morning,” Starscream told him matter-of-factly.

Wheeljack hummed against his cockpit. “Are you going to hate me in the morning?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Starscream?”

The jet sighed. “No. Of course not.”

Wheeljack smiled. “Then I’ll be fine.”

Chapter Text

“Starscream.”

“No.”

“Star.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m angry with you.”

“Starrrr.”

With a wretched groan that would have made mechs Wheeljack had seen dying in Ratchet’s med-bay jealous, Starscream removed his data-pad from in front of his nasal ridge. He had on the optical correctors he had stolen from Thundercracker on his last visit. That, paired with the vicious pout of disappointment he leveled Wheeljack’s way, made Wheeljack feel like he had crossed an irate professor.

It was a pretty nice thought… He tucked that away for future reference.

“What?” Starscream said.

“I think I’m dying,” said Wheeljack. “I think I might actually die.” He thought about making a joke about potential poisoning – but knowing Starscream’s paranoia, that wouldn’t go over too well.

Starscream, his beautiful, loving (yes, really) partner, managed an impressive imitation of rolling his optics and picked the data-pad back up.

Wheeljack took that back. He was evil. Beautiful but evil.

“Are you really working right now?” Wheeljack asked. “I know I can’t be the one talking about overworking or anything, but seriously? This early?”

The look Starscream gave him was unimpressed. “It’s past the tenth joor of the morning.”

“Is it?” His chrono-meter was still shot, along with half the sub-processors of his cerebral unit. “Oh, wow. What did I do last night?”

Starscream scoffed. “You drank so much I think I have a sympathy hangover.”

Wheeljack couldn’t lay on his side, not with his finials, but he twisted his frame enough so that he faced Starscream. He looked like he had been awake for joors now; his optics were dim in concentration, the optical correctors having slipped down to the middle of his elegant nasal ridge, his wings twitching in a way that suggested he had been seated for quite some time. Wheeljack knew he was prone to pacing, to energetic demonstrations of his inner thoughts, so it was surprising to see him still tucked up in berth at this hour, albeit sitting up. There was a cooling cube of energon half-full on the table beside him; Wheeljack had a faint memory of a helm-ache rousing him from sleep and a warm cube being pressed into his shaking servo, guided gently to his mouth, and maneuvered carefully around the ruins of his jaw.

“How’d I get here?” Wheeljack asked.

“Evidently I’ve become known for adopting wayward Autobots. They just dropped you off here.”

He ignored Starscream’s snark. “Wasn’t last night supposed to be date night? What is in that Vosnian stuff you’ve got bottled?”

Starscream made an offended noise. “I would never allow you to get drunk on that; it’s meant to be sipped, not chugged like a common engex.”

“Whoops.”

“No, no,” Starscream said. “It really wasn’t me this time. You can thank your buddy Ironhide for your state right now.”

Well, that made a lot of sense. Ironhide had a habit of getting rid of Wheeljack’s few reasonable inhibitions, so if they had gone— “Wait,” Wheeljack said. “If I was getting sloshed with Ironhide, how did I end up in your berth?”

“Oh,” said Starscream. “Apparently you have me saved in your comm unit as a… hmm, it was some human term. Aft phone?”

“I would never—” Wheeljack started, spark spinning amok—

—until he saw the devilish twinge at the edge of Starscream’s lip-plates.

“Oh, you’re horrible. Awful. My helm hurts twice as much now.” He threw a servo over his optics, at last blocking the blue light emanating from Starscream’s data-pad in the otherwise blackened room. “How do you know what a booty call is anyway? That’s earthling slang.”

“I edit Thundercracker’s writing.” There was the sound of tapping as Starscream typed.

“Why does Thundercracker— never mind, I don’t want to know.” He envisioned a horrific image of Thundercracker and Marissa sharing a comically large beach towel on a sunset coast while Buster drooled adorably nearby.

Make that three times the pain now.

Wheeljack let the silence grow as he tried to access his memory banks himself. Starscream kept himself entertained with whatever was on that data-pad of his. The rhythmic tap-tap-tap of his sharp digits making precise movements threatened to lull him back into recharge. It wasn’t often Wheeljack enjoyed time off – especially not when he had a lab all to himself and a direct line to the ruler of Cybertron for proposal approvals.

Starscream was an enabler, that was for sure. Then again, if Wheeljack was interpreting his wing movements correctly, he seemed just as happy to spend his evenings and late nights in the depths of Iacon, in Wheeljack’s cool and isolated lab. Oh, he nicked things from Wheeljack’s table, and rerouted his wiring when he thought Wheeljack was doing it wrong, and sometimes put Wheeljack’s untouched energon from lunch on a high shelf to prove a point about his absentmindedness, and—

“Wait,” Wheeljack said. “How did I get here?”

There was a pause. “You really don’t remember?” Starscream asked. “Anything?”

“Nothin’,” said Wheeljack. “A good number of my sub-processors are totally shot. Chrono-meter, short-term recall, comm systems, stabilizing systems. I’m fumbling around blind here.”

A sigh. He heard the data-pad rustle the berth as Starscream set it down. “I assumed. I almost considered comm-ing Flatline. You kept getting sick. I have no idea what you consumed, but don’t do it again.”

“Just comm Ratchet next time. I made him unblock your comm number.”

“Thanks, but I’m not unblocking his. I’d sooner comm Megatron – he’d probably be a better conversationalist.”

He was getting side-tracked again. He had to give it to Starscream; for a mech who spent the majority of his life at war, he had a politician’s knack for maneuvering conversations like he’d been doing it for deca-vorns. “I was with Ironhide, though?”

“And Windblade.” Starscream’s tone soured as he spoke her designation.

How had he managed to get this drunk with Windblade there? She was normally a good influence, Chromia aside. He supposed she had to let go and have fun every now and then, but he didn’t often—

Oh. Oh. They teamed up on him.

“I got played,” Wheeljack muttered.

“I keep trying to tell bots that that winged Camien menace is a hazard,” said Starscream. “And what do they call me? Paranoid! You’re lucky you didn’t get poisoned.”

Starscream’s one-sided rivalry with Windblade could be unpacked on a day when Wheeljack didn’t feel like melted cyber-metal. “Please keep your rant below thirteen deca-bels. My processor is trying to melt out of my cranial unit.”

“I’ll rant however loudly I like,” said Starscream. “I earned it! I practically saved your life last night. If it weren’t for my designation at the top of your comm unit, you would have died of engex poisoning within the joor.”

“I don’t think it was even good engex,” Wheeljack muttered.

Starscream tapped away on his data-pad with renewed vigor. “I’m never letting you touch my Vosnian wine.”

The repetitive noise, the dark room, and the warmth radiating from Starscream’s jet engines were threatening to lull Wheeljack back into another recharge cycle. “’S fine,” he said. “That stuff tastes like straight kerosene anyway.”

The tapping paused. Damn. “It what,” Starscream said.

The data-pad had tipped down in his servos, so he could better glare at Wheeljack, curled up as he was in the covers beside Starscream’s hip. It was hard to get his vision to focus, but he recognized the glyphs at the top. “Are you texting… Drift? The Wrecker, Drift?”

Starscream snatched the data-pad away again. “Well, I had to be certain you weren’t going to choke on your own glossa if I let you recharge on your back!”

Wheeljack knew that the Wreckers knew how to party, but he didn’t think he ever saw Drift imbibe anything hard when they were stationed together. He noted this to Starscream.

“Oh, no,” Starscream agreed, “he’s some esoteric hippie now, and I wouldn’t take advice from him on how to care for a pet rock.”

“He’s got a lot of pet rocks, but he calls them his crystals.” Starscream had moved the screen away, preventing Wheeljack from seeing the details of the conversation, but it filled up the screen and must have been going on for some time. “So why’re you texting him then?”

Starscream waved a servo. “He’s shacked up with that medic friend of yours.”

Wheeljack wished he had optical ridges so he could properly display the absurdity he was feeling. “So you won’t comm Ratchet, who’s used to being woken up at Pits-damned hours of the night, but you’ll comm his boyfriend at half-past way-too-fraggin’-late to bother him for you?”

Starscream absorbed the statement for a moment, then answered, “Yes.”

“You’re less intimidated by an assassin than a medic?”

Starscream, somehow, managed to roll his optics; it was another human-ism he had picked up from Thundercracker – and Skywarp. “If you had to watch him moon over an enemy medic for nearly the entirety of a war, you wouldn’t find him ‘intimidating’ either. It was honestly pathetic. I felt bad for him.”

“So he’s your friend,” Wheeljack surmised.

“How dare you,” Starscream said, with no real heat.

“I’ll add him to the Christmas card list.”

He knew Starscream noted the human reference from the way he scowled; they had received cards from Thundercracker every human year, complete with holo-images of him and Buster and Marissa. Skywarp and his human buddies tried it too one year, but whatever they did just got the Joes investigated by the Postal Service and there hadn’t been another attempt since.

“I’m glad you have a friend,” said Wheeljack, partly because it was true and partly because it was hot when Starscream got pissed.

Sure enough, his plating began to flare out. The heat seeping from his engine intensified. It was nice. “He’s not my friend,” Starscream insisted. “I tried to have him killed multiple times. I tried to kill him myself.”

“’S a great way to get to know someone.”

“It is,” Starscream agreed, “which is how I know too much about him and that medic.”

“Ratchet.”

“I’m not saying his designation. What if it summons him?”

Starscream could hassle about the specifics all he wanted, but it didn’t mask the truth of the situation to Wheeljack: He had been concerned, and he chose of his volition to badger an old friend about it in the middle of the night-cycle. It was all bluff and bluster.

He cared about Wheeljack. He had answered his comm call in the middle of the night, after Wheeljack cancelled their plans at the last minute. He had opened his door to Wheeljack, overcharged to the point of delirium, facing two bots Wheeljack suspected he actually did hold some amount of dislike for. He tipped him into his plush berth, swathed him in expensive Vosnian-knit mesh blankets, and closed the curtains to the sky he loved so much in preparation for the helm-ache Wheeljack would be enduring. He pushed a cube into his half-awake servos and Wheeljack really, really wished he could remember more of the way he tipped it gently into his mouth.

He could snark and lie all he wanted – Wheeljack knew the truth.

“You have the worst friends,” Starscream was saying. “If I didn’t have Ironhide blocked on every frequency, I wouldn’t have had a single moment to myself this morning. He makes me long for the intelligent conversation of Skywarp.”

Ah, right. Unfortunately, Ironhide and Windblade now knew as well, but that was a problem for a more sober version of himself.

“My helm hurts,” said Wheeljack, “and your voice and your words and your you are annoying me.”

“Then suffer,” said Starscream.

“Oooor,” Wheeljack drawled, resting his chin on the crook where Starscream’s cockpit met his hips, “some nice bot could donate their thighs as earmuffs.”

Starscream, at last, tossed that cursed data-pad aside. “I am not,” he said, “nice.”

“Damn,” Wheeljack said, already inching beneath the sleep-warm mesh covers. “Guess I’ll have to find some other way to repay your kindness.”