Chapter Text
“Please.”
Bumblebee rolled his eyes, staring resolutely at the monitor in front of him. “I already said no.”
“Oh, c’mon! I used manners! Not even my trinemates have heard me use that glyph before.”
“I don’t care.” Bee claimed, scrolling through his mecha’s code. “I won’t do it.”
“You have to! You promised-”
“I promised nothing!” Bee raged, finally whirling around to face Starscream proper. The Seeker was just as mad. Bee was sure if he was in his mecha, he’d feel the intensity of Starscream’s EMF right now. The looming Cybertronian might have made Bee quake a few months ago, but now that he knew what a big baby Starscream really was, he wasn’t going to back down from an argument with him. “I said I might be inclined to go through with some of your experimentation. But what you’re asking me to do right now is too rich for my blood.”
“Oh, please. You’re being dramatic.” Starscream scoffed, folding his arms over his chassis.
“Easy for you to say. It’s not your body!”
“Well, I’d still be dealing with the consequences of you whining if the procedure didn’t-”
“Oh my god, no! Starscream, you are not getting my arm.” Bee said sternly, glaring sharply up at the Cybertronian.
“By the Allspark, I don’t want your arm! Were you even listening?!”
“You said you were going to cut off my arm!”
“ No , I said I wanted to surgically remove your limb from the annular ligament down. You’d still have most of your elbow and up.”
“Oh, geez, well, when you put it like that .” Bee snarked, making sure his tone was dripping with sarcasm, so Starscream knew he wasn’t serious. Shaking his head, the human turned back to his mecha’s readouts, done with the situation.
Starscream’s engine growled briefly. “You’re acting like I’m not planning on giving it back to you.”
“Starscream,” Bee said, fingers freezing on the keyboard, “I understand you’re trying to be helpful. But you seem to forget that organics can’t just replace limbs all willy nilly like Cybertronians can.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily call strut integration a ‘willy nilly’ process.” Starscream muttered.
“My point is!” Bee said loudly, turning to look back before deciding better of it, “Humans can’t do that stuff. If you take my arm- even just half of it, like you claim- I won’t be integrating it back. It’ll be gone forever, and I’ll become an amputee for the rest of my life.”
“Of course you can reintegrate your own appendage!” Starscream said, scoffing. “Perhaps your species wasn’t yet at the point where they could perform the procedure, but I assure you that it is child’s play for me.”
“Insulting my species isn’t earning you any points.” Bee sneered.
“Ugh, insufferable little organic.”
“Insulting me isn’t earning you any-”
“I promise ,” Starscream said, slowly pronouncing the word, “that you will only have to endure a few of your late world’s solar cycles without the better half of your arm. By then, you will have it surgically replaced back in its correct alignment, likely better off than it had been before. Do we have a deal?”
Bee’s face twitched, but other than that he said nothing. He didn’t turn toward Starscream, just glared at the monitor screen.
Starscream waited for the organic’s inferior processor to work over his glyphs, but he quickly lost patience when Bee continued to do nothing. “C’mon, Bumblebee.” Starscream tried to say as sweetly as possible. “You must trust me. I fixed your neural link, didn’t I? It operates faster and smoother than before, thoroughly integrated with your brain. And that procedure had much more at stake than the one I wish to perform on you now.”
The human wilted at that a little. “That’s true.” He muttered, sitting back in his chair. He had been in chronic pain for years without realizing it. The neural link had slowly been killing him, his brain trying to reject the foreign metal. Starscream was able to not only take the tremendous pain away but actually get his brain tissue to accept and sync with the metal. The link now feels like an integral part of Bee’s mind. It seemed impossible that he lived without it.
Bee knew Starscream could probably pull off some other miracle with his arm. Even if he ended up fucking it up, Starscream wouldn’t leave him hanging. He’d get some replacement. Although the surgeries and recovery time would be annoying, Bee would likely be better off in the end.
You must trust me.
The thing was, Bee really didn’t. At least, he hadn’t. He trusted Starscream to have his back in battle, but when the Seeker had asked to perform the neural link surgery in the first place? Bee hadn’t trusted him. He was just… done. He told Star that he wanted to die. He was ready to join his family, friends, and teammates. He got their justice; it was time to go home.
Starscream wasn’t having that. Bee wasn’t entirely sure what Starscream wanted him for. “To bring justice to more tyrants” was kinda vague. He knew Starscream thought he could be useful, that he had more life to give (nevermind that it was probably to further his whole agenda).
Bee had just been convinced when Starscream asked to do the surgery. Starscream had stoically gone over all possibilities. There was a good chance Bee could have died from Starscream meddling with his neural link. If Bee had been at a better mental health standpoint, he probably would have second guessed his decision to go through with it.
Then again, he was in an insurmountable kind of pain with a constant nosebleed. If he had hesitated any longer, he’d probably be dripping blood from his eyes right now.
When Starscream put him under, Bee wasn’t expecting to wake up again. Although Bee understood Starscream wasn’t going to intentionally kill him, the Cybertronian had admitted that he had little to no experience actually operating on organics. Bee had been shocked to wake up and actually feel good . After the recovery time, he actually felt normal again.
It left Bee staying awake at night overthinking his existence. He came to the conclusion that, yeah, living was pretty cool. Even though he’d never see another human in the flesh again, at least he could annoy the hell out of Starscream.
Now fully (well, mostly, some cycles got dark) committed to living, Bee wasn’t so sure he wanted to gamble half his arm to Starscream’s eccentrics.
Starscream waited for the human to say something else, yet Bee remained silent. The seconds ticked by agonizingly. Finally, Starscream groaned, throwing his servos up. “Fine! It doesn’t even have to be your dominant hand. I’ll take your off one.”
Bee startled, whirling back around. “You were going to take my dominant hand?!”
“Well, obviously.” Starscream said. “The whole point of the experiment is to start the nanite integration process. I need you to become reliant on the bionics. Only then will you reach symbiosis with them. By taking the hand that you favor, it will force you to-”
“Oh, hell, no.” Bee said, standing up from his chair. He pointed his tiny finger up at Starscream. “Fuck you! God, I can’t believe I was actually thinking about it for a moment. Absolutely not, Starscream!”
“It’ll only be for a month!”
“I said no .”
“In a couple years, you won’t even remember this!”
“Ha! I doubt that.”
“It’ll barely affect you. You said you don’t really need your hands to pilot.”
“You are so full of-”
“Don’t make me say it again.”
“Say what?”
“ Pah…lease.”
“Wow, that sounded like it hurt.”
Starscream made a strangled sound. Bee just shook his head. This time he wasn’t going to turn back around. It didn’t matter what Starscream said or if he started throwing things like a toddler. Bee wasn’t going to go through with it. Starscream was just going to have to learn that he couldn’t get everything he wanted.
…
…
It wasn’t happening.