Archive of Our Own ^beta

If Wheeljack had known he was the sixteenth person Optimus had asked, he would probably have said no. But Optimus hadn’t mentioned that – he’d knocked on the door of Wheeljack’s lab and proposed that Wheeljack be the representative from the Autobot faction to enter into a conjunx relationship to support a peace agreement.

“Sure,” Wheeljack had said, not looking up from the sample he was analyzing. “Why not?” Such a thing probably wouldn’t conflict with his work too much, he’d reasoned. And there wasn’t anyone he was on especially horrid terms with, in the scheme of things.

To Optimus’s credit, he’d offered to call the whole thing off when he found out that the representative from the Decepticon side would be Starscream.

But Wheeljack knew as well as anyone that calling it off would mean reigniting the war, which would almost definitely mean the irreversible completion of Cybertron’s destruction. He’d agreed, and with stakes like that, it was worth trying, even if it ended with Wheeljack’s death.

They did the ceremony the day after both representatives had been confirmed. There were about fifty people in the room, an even split between Autobots and Decepticons. The Acts were scripted, painfully, obviously so. Tyrest presided, and when Starscream extended his hand for Wheeljack to hold – a formality of the conjunx ceremony – Wheeljack took it. It wasn’t coated with poison, but Wheeljack was careful not to let that display of restraint heighten his expectations.

After the ceremony, Megatron was taken away in chains and Optimus was escorted to the ship he’d be taking to leave the planet. A year, was the agreement. A year with Megatron in a cell and Optimus anywhere but here, and then Optimus could come back and Megatron would be tried for his crimes and on a probationary basis, the two of them might be allowed to join whatever society the rest of them managed to cobble together.

It’s worth a try, Wheeljack said to himself. He saw what could have been a trick of the light or a flicker of a smile on Megatron’s face as he was marched out of the room. It’s worth a try, he repeated to himself, over and over again, less convinced every time.

**

They were put in a house in Cocatria, which had been informally designated as the new capitol due to being the only city that hadn’t been a flagship city for either faction and remained more than halfway habitable. The house had an open main area with an energon dispenser and a vidscreen, a room off the main area with a double-sized berth, and, Wheeljack was relieved to discover, a basement, with the necessary wiring for Wheeljack to move in the necessities from his lab over in Kimia along with a portable recharge setup.

Starscream had made a great show of rolling his optics when they’d been shown to the house, but hadn’t offered his opinion to Wheeljack before disappearing into the washrack off the berthroom. He’d stayed shut in the berthroom while Wheeljack’s friends had helped him move his stuff in.

Now it was time for Ironhide and Bumblebee to go, and Wheeljack was about to be alone with Starscream, in their house. Ironhide put a heavy hand on Wheeljack’s shoulder when he stepped outside to see them off. “If you feel like you’re in danger, call me right away,” he said.

No way he’ll give me the chance, Wheeljack thought, but in the interest of getting Ironhide to leave, he nodded.

Wheeljack watched Ironhide and Bumblebee transform and drive away and let himself back into the house. There were plenty of distractions available – most of his research equipment wasn’t set up yet, and he had some soil samples that he’d been hoping to analyze before this whole peace process had interrupted his work, but those were just excuses.

He marched himself up to the bedroom door and knocked. Starscream opened the door within seconds – he couldn’t have been doing anything but sitting on the berth, listening to Wheeljack convince his friends to leave.

“I thought we should talk,” Wheeljack began.

Starscream didn’t move from the doorway. “Now I see why everyone says you’re so brilliant.”

Wheeljack resisted rolling his optics. “I set up a recharge slab in the basement. I won’t bother you in here.”

Starscream regarded him for a few seconds, and then out of nowhere, he struck a provocative pose, leaning up against the doorway with a hand on his hip and the other over his head, holding onto a wingtip. “And if I want to be bothered?”

It’s this or total destruction. “Goodnight, Starscream.” Wheeljack turned to go, and after a few too many seconds, he heard Starscream’s door shut behind him.

**

When Starscream opened his door the next morning, Wheeljack braced himself for a tirade about letting his science stuff spill out into the common areas, like he’d gotten from every roommate since…forever. It had only been a day, which was a new record, or something, but the radiation from the sediment sample he’d been working on had changed and if the difference was the lack of sunlight in his new lab space, he could be on the verge of a breakthrough.

“What are you doing?” Starscream, who, Wheeljack reminded himself, wouldn’t care about any of that, asked.

“Science,” Wheeljack said. “I’ll be out of here in just a couple cycles, I promise.”

Starscream seemed to be waiting for something more and Wheeljack finally looked up at him. Starscream wasn’t sneering, which Wheeljack was starting to realize he might have to get used to. He wasn’t even looking at Wheeljack. His optics were on the equipment on the table in front of Wheeljack and he looked…contemplative. Curious.

Wheeljack waited a moment for him to ask whatever question he obviously wanted to. Starscream just kept staring, though, and Wheeljack couldn’t resist starting to speak. “What I’ve got here is mass spectrometry stuff, and a few kinds of radiation detectors. I was getting some weird readings this morning and thought it might be because the lab’s down in the basement and the samples haven’t been exposed to sun since I packed them up. Another half hour or so and I’ll know if that’s really the case or if something just got cross-contaminated in transit.”

“Why mass spec?” Starscream asked.

Wheeljack was so surprised at his use of the jargon and so preoccupied with trying to hide it that he almost forgot to answer the question. “My theory is that the UV radiation from the sun is enough to get one of the components of the surface material to jump to a higher energy state,” he said after too long a pause. “That could cause a series of reactions that could change the conformation of another one of the molecules in it, and that ability to shift composition could be the thing I’ve been looking for.”

“Conformation? Isn’t that organic chemistry?”

“Sure is,” Wheeljack said, turning back to arranging the samples on plates. “These samples are from different parts of a planet that started to produce life again after nuclear war wiped it all out. If excitable molecules are the answer, it wouldn’t be helpful, but it sure would be neat.”

“Why wouldn’t it be helpful?”

Wheeljack snuck another glance at Starscream. Thousands of years of interactions with soldiers were giving him the instinctive sense that he was being made fun of, but Starscream still looked curious, and anyway, what could he possibly have to gain here? “We can’t replicate that,” he said in response. “If we want to get Cybertron to produce energon and maybe even hot spots again, we need to figure out what it’s lost that allowed it to do that in the first place.” Starscream just nodded, and Wheeljack couldn’t resist commenting, “Didn’t expect you to care about this stuff.”

Now Starscream put on a more familiar expression – a dangerous smirk. It could have been flirtatious if it weren’t for his narrowed optics. “And why’s that?”

That was. A good question. Wheeljack shrugged his shoulders to loosen the tension in them. “Well first off, most people don’t care,” he said. “Yeah, we all want the planet to heal, in theory, but most folks’ optics glaze over fast when I start talking about it. And…your side’s got scientists. Shockwave. Scorponok. Never heard about you.”

“I’m not a scientist,” Starscream said. “I went to the Academy and quit right before I had to pick a specialty.”

“Why’d you quit?”

Now Starscream sneered, but he was looking off into the distance, not at Wheeljack. “To follow Megatron.”

**

There were eight people sitting around the conference table. They were in a building that had once belonged to the old Cocatria Academy, which had been taken over as the Cocatria City Hall once the actual government building had been bombed to bits. There was Tyrest seated at the head of the table, neat stack of datapads in front of him, expression impassive. There were Ratbat and Soundwave, the elected representatives of the Decepticons; Bumblebee and Ultra Magnus, the elected representatives of the Autobots; Metalhawk, who was representing the smattering of Neutrals who had returned to the planet when they’d heard about the peace agreement, and Wheeljack and Starscream.

Wheeljack was naturally drawn to go to the Autobots around the too-large table, but he paused when Starscream nonchalantly walked up to the table and took a seat in an empty section. That couldn’t – he couldn’t mean that Wheeljack was supposed to sit with him. Could he? Decepticon infighting was famous. Maybe Starscream just couldn’t stand Ratbat or Soundwave and would prefer to sit alone.

Wheeljack went to take a step toward the Autobots, then paused. Whatever else may be true, Starscream was his conjunx now. Sitting on the other side of the table would be impolite.

Wheeljack sat in the chair immediately next to Starscream. It looked like everyone around the table was watching them – Tyrest thoughtfully, Bumblebee skeptically, Soundwave with great intensity and no discernable emotion.

“Updates?” Tyrest asked without fanfare. He nodded at Bumblebee, sitting immediately to his right, to speak first.

“No problems with Megatron so far,” Bumblebee said. “I would go so far as to say he’s been suspiciously complacent. I want to increase the guard on the prison.”

“If he’s behaving, why bother?” Metalhawk asked. “We have bigger problems.”

“We won’t have bigger problems than Megatron if Megatron escapes,” Bumblebee said.

“Ultra Magnus?” Tyrest was scribbling on a datapad, not looking at any of them as he spoke.

“I believe Bumblebee’s concern to have sound cause,” Ultra Magnus said. “Additionally, the prison is run through the treaty fund and the Neutrals have been voicing concerns regarding uneven distribution of the fund to their population. Employing more guards, with a preference for neutrals, will be a step toward eliminating that disparity.”

Tyrest turned to Metalhawk, who nodded, and then continued his way around the table. “Wheeljack and Starscream. You’ve not killed each other yet.”

“Where’s our gold star?” Starscream asked.

“It’s been four days,” Metalhawk interjected. Starscream turned a glare on him, and Wheeljack had to squash a nonsensical urge to put a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“Part of the agreement you entered into involves regular public appearances as a couple,” Tyrest continued. “The first such event is in six weeks, in Kaon. I trust you’ll be prepared?”

Without looking at Starscream, Wheeljack nodded. “Will we have to kiss or anything?”

Tyrest looked at Wheeljack as if he was a protoform. “Not unless you want to.”

Wheeljack nodded, still not daring to look to his side. Despite his efforts, he could feel Starscream’s gaze on the side of his helm as Tyrest’s attention moved to Ratbat.

**

Wheeljack cursed and yanked himself away from his work when he heard footsteps on the stairs. He lunged instinctively for the gun he’d hidden under his berth, but it was an awkward scramble to get it and left him in a terrible defensive position when Starscream finally emerged from the stairwell –

Oh. Starscream.

Wheeljack set the gun down on the berth, trusting Starscream to not have come here to kill him but not yet trusting him to know where he kept the firearm. He turned back to Starscream and noticed, for the first time, that he was holding a sealed energon cube.

“What’s going on?” Wheeljack asked.

“You’ve been down here since the meeting yesterday,” Starscream said. “Just checking in to make sure you haven’t blown yourself up.”

“You coulda commed,” Wheeljack said, taking a seat, again, at his lab bench.

“I also know you don’t have a dispenser down here,” Starscream said, holding the cube out to Wheeljack. “You seem the type to get…absorbed, in your work.”

Warily, Wheeljack accepted the proffered cube.

Starscream rolled his eyes. “It’s sealed. I haven’t poisoned it. I’m sure you could test it with some of this stuff if you were so inclined.” He gestured to Wheeljack’s lab equipment.

Wheeljack considered it. If Starscream wanted to hurt or kill him, there existed a breadth of less obvious ways to do it. And beyond that, what would be his motive? Anyone as smart as Wheeljack was coming to suspect Starscream was would wait until the Autobots let down their guard, at least a little, before taking an offensive move.

Screw it. Wheeljack uncapped the energon and took a sip. It tasted perfectly fine. “What’s the price?” he asked, once he’d determined that it wasn’t going to kill him. 

Starscream rolled his eyes. “Your continued survival and the upholding of the treaty?” he said with a completely unnecessary level of obnoxiousness.

Okay, so asking out loud wasn’t going to work. Wheeljack assessed him, taking note of how stiffly he was holding his wings. Flightframes didn’t much like enclosed spaces, he knew, and that only convinced him more that Starscream was down here for a reason other than checking on Wheeljack’s health and safety. It wasn’t until Wheeljack noticed the direction of Starscream’s gaze – at the mess he’d left behind on the lab bench to go for his gun – that it clicked. “I’m looking at energy transfer in those same organic soil samples,” he said, setting his energon down and sliding the sample he’d just finished analyzing back under the microscope. Starscream had already leaned just perceptibly closer. “Take a look.”

**

By the time the trip to Kaon came around, Wheeljack and Starscream had what felt like an understanding. Starscream was keener on trying to get in on the new Cocatria-based government than he’d let on initially, and Wheeljack had been cautiously supporting him in it. It wasn’t like Starscream’s ideas were even bad ones – he was able to think through what the population would want and what they would complain about more accurately than Tyrest and even Bumblebee. Wheeljack hadn’t let his guard down entirely, of course. Starscream even on his best days was a mashup of dangerous ambitions and obfuscations. None of the Decepticons seemed to trust him, much less the Autobots and the Neutrals.

But impossibly, it seemed like they were making it work. Starscream at home was a fraction more relaxed than he was at government meetings or in public, and his curiosity about Wheeljack’s projects had spilled over to Wheeljack letting him assist with them. Starscream really didn’t like the basement, so Wheeljack tended to assign him stuff that he could bring upstairs. The whole thing was uncomfortable, still, but Wheeljack counted his continued survival as a win.

The Kaon appearance consisted mostly of meetings with various groups of citizens. One contingent of Decepticons was apparently arrested outside the town hall doors armed with cluster bombs, which made Starscream roll his eyes when he heard about it. His nonchalance made Wheeljack feel, strangely, a little safer.

The day had been long already when Wheeljack and Starscream were shuffled outside for the finale – a photo op with Kaon’s new city symbol. The city symbols would be a feature of this tour, as the cities rebranded as Neutral after centuries behind faction lines – the Decepticon and Autobots crests had to be replaced with something, and the Matrix was unfortunately similarly divisive. Wheeljack’s suggestion of adopting the chemical structure of sentio metallico hadn’t gone over well with the cold-constructed crowd, and the shape of Cybertron was too fraught – the chunks missing out of its surface near Simanzi could be seen from orbit, and neither that reality nor using a representation of the planet in its glory days seemed appropriate for a universal symbol.

Kaon had chosen an image of an inside-out mineshaft, rendered by an artist who’d signed up as a Decepticon before fleeing the planet once the war had begun in earnest and then had earned her living doing artistic metalcraft. Wheeljack had met her this morning, and she’d been cool and cordial about the whole thing, even though Wheeljack had heard that the city had hundreds of submissions.

The newly elected mayor of Kaon, a neutral whose name Wheeljack hadn’t managed to catch, gave a brief speech and then gestured to Starscream and Wheeljack. Someone handed Wheeljack the placard that the two of them would be attaching to the front of the statue of the new symbol, and he stepped forward to get started, Starscream beside him.

As soon as he touched the placard to the base of the statue, it exploded in his face.

Wheeljack went flying, and he felt a hand hit his back, slowing his arc. The stall in his momentum made him land on the sidewalk instead of in the crowd, and, he noticed a moment later, in a heap with Starscream. That had been his hand, Wheeljack belatedly realized as his vision wavered and his audials fritzed from the intensity of the explosion.

For a long moment, nothing seemed to happen. The crowd, the statue, and the bomb may as well have ceased to exist. What he did still see was Starscream, crouched over him, optics blazing with an emotion more intense than anything Wheeljack had seen from him before. It wasn’t gloating – far from it. It looked almost like raw fear.

Then Starscream was yanked away and time seemed to restart. Wheeljack reset his optics and coughed, the pain from the explosion and subsequent crash hitting him all at once. One of the enforcers was crouching above him, yelling something Wheeljack couldn’t hear through his damaged audials, and then a medic appeared next to him. The medic put their hands on Wheeljack’s shoulders and said something he couldn’t hear.

Some flicker of movement in the corner of Wheeljack’s field of vision compelled him to turn his head to the left. Next to him, now, was Starscream, snarling as an enforcer ground his face into the sidewalk and another snapped cuffs onto his hands.

“What?” Wheeljack tried to say, but he suspected that his vocalizer was as shot as his audials. The effort was enough to make the scene around him finally go dark.

**

Wheeljack awoke in a Medibay. His limbs felt heavy, like there were sensation blockers on them. He had to reset his optics a few times before he could make out anything but white static.

“Wheeljack. It’s good to see you awake,” Ratchet’s voice boomed. Wheeljack winced and toned down his audial sensitivity as he carefully turned his head toward Ratchet.

“’S good to be awake,” Wheeljack said. Then the pounding in his helm he’d been ignoring kicked up a notch and he reconsidered the sentiment. There were more pressing problems, though. “What happened out there?”

Ratchet picked up a datapad that was connected to Wheeljack’s berth and typed something into it. “Your sweetspark took umbrage with the new monument.”

“Starscream?” Wheeljack could hear the disbelief in his own voice.

Ratchet rolled his eyes. “Do I need to check you over again for processor damage? Yes, Starscream.”

“He didn’t.” Wheeljack thought about the shock and fear on Starscream’s face, after. He thought about Starscream complaining about the new Kaon mayor’s casual uppity elitism, privately into Wheeljack’s audial. And he thought about Starscream with his wings held tense in Wheeljack’s basement, accepting the discomfort for the sake of Wheeljack’s project. “He didn’t do it.”

“Wheeljack, you impressed us all by going through with this. You impressed me, and that’s hard to do. But I know you’re smarter than this.”

“Think about it,” Wheeljack said. “What would have been the point? We were surrounded by neutrals and Enforcers. Someone was obviously going to subdue him. If he wanted to kill me, he’s already had plenty of chances.” Ratchet looked unimpressed. “Think about it, Ratchet. He’s smarter than this.”

“Either way,” Ratchet said, “You don’t have to live with him anymore if you don’t want to. An attempt on your life – whether it was really an attempt to kill you or not – is beyond grounds to annul the arrangement. You’ll never have to see him again.”

“I want to see him,” Wheeljack said. Ratchet rolled his eyes. “I’m serious. I want to see him now.”

“Give it a few days,” Ratchet said. “Wait til you’re healed up enough to walk, at least. Maybe by then you’ll have come to your senses.”

**

 “Knock knock,” Wheeljack said, walking up to the designated cell. He was still slow on his feet from the explosion, but he could get around passably.

“Tell me this isn’t one of those awful Earth sayings.” Starscream’s tone was biting, which Wheeljack found oddly reassuring. It was a hint of normalcy amidst all the uncertainty in the situation.

“Just trying to announce my presence without scaring ya,” Wheeljack said, finally reaching the point where he could see through the energy bars into the cell. Starscream was standing, arms crossed in front of him and wings threaded through with tension.

“Good.” Starscream didn’t move as Wheeljack stopped in front of him. The cell had a window, Wheeljack noticed, but it was tiny and the lighting in the cell was dim and dreary. This couldn’t be much better for him than the basement in their house.

Wheeljack sat gingerly on the hallway floor. He was tired, and the patch on his chest was already protesting from the effort it had taken to walk down here. He leaned back on his hands and looked at Starscream, whose posture hadn’t changed one bit. “What happened in Kaon, Starscream?”

“Haven’t you heard? I happened.” Starscream finally moved as he spoke, pacing across the cell and back. Three steps each way. “All part of my evil plan, you see. Step one: kill Wheeljack. Step Two? Three? Who knows. Step Four: Profit.” He lifted his arms from their position crossed across his chest to point a finger at Wheeljack. “It’s a load of slag. Anyone with sense can see it. But why would anyone out there bother to use their brains about a situation when the day is saved and the Decepticon is in jail?” He glared at Wheeljack through the bars, then took a step back, further away from him. “Just like you wanted.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about?” Starscream repeated in what, Wheeljack had to admit, wasn’t a half-bad imitation of Wheeljack’s voice. “Are all Autobots such wonderful actors, or is that why you were picked for this?”

Wheeljack prepared to argue that he had hardly been picked at all, really, but he capped the urge in favor of the more pressing issue. “You think I did this to myself?”

“A few days in the Medibay seems a small price to pay for setting up a violation of the treaty such that it ensures future generations of Cybertronians will regard the treaty as an Autobot victory, so yes,” Starscream snarled. He’d started pacing again. “The worst bit of it is that it’s not a bad plan. I could probably have figured out that you would do something like this if I hadn’t gone and trusted you.”

Wheeljack’s plating was growing more and more numb as he realized just how thoroughly Starscream had convinced himself of this. Starscream seemed content to keep talking, and Wheeljack was content to give him the time. The more Starscream talked, the better Wheeljack understood what it was, exactly, he was dealing with.

“Outschemed by an Autobot. Imagine the look on Megatron’s face.” Starscream laughed; a bitter, dangerous thing. He stepped as close as he could get to the bars of the cage to look Wheeljack in the optic. “You must be very proud.”

**

Two days after Wheeljack got home to an empty house, he moved his lab to the main floor. It was brighter, and there were more outlets, and, well. Why wouldn’t he?

After two more days, he finally acknowledged how illogical it was for him to still sleep in the basement and opened the door to what he’d come to think of as Starscream’s room.

There was almost no trace of Starscream in the space. The window had been adjusted so that it was open a crack, and there was a strip of metal mesh inside it that looked like it was meant to protect against intruders or bullets. But the walls, in the weeks they’d been living here, had remained bare.

Starscream hadn’t had any friends visit this entire time, Wheeljack realized as he surveyed the space. And he hadn’t gone out to spend time with anyone either, minus business meetings with Metalhawk, most of which he’d dragged Wheeljack to anyway. If this was supposed to be the big Decepticon plan that the provisional government was claiming…where were the other Decepticons?

Wheeljack sat heavily on the cold berth and finally let himself puzzle through what he knew. Ratchet (and later Bumblebee, and Ironhide, and Ultra Magnus) had been convinced that Starscream had done it. Starscream was convinced that Wheeljack had done it.

If he did it, wouldn’t it be easier to blame other Autobots? Like, Prowl?

Wheeljack wished Starscream were here to laugh at him as he directed a flat stare at the wall at the realization – the look definitely had some of Starscream in it.

Blaming Prowl would have been Starscream’s play if he’d wanted to get Wheeljack back on his side. There was merit to the possibility, much as Wheeljack hated it. But the first thing Starscream had done was assume he’d already lost Wheeljack.

It grated. They’d had…an understanding. A shared goal. Something.

‘went and trusted you.’

Well that was done with now.

Or was it? The whole speech when Wheeljack had visited him in the prison cell – it had been snarled and laced with vitriol, but Starscream had said it. He’d trusted Wheeljack with what he was thinking. He’d given Wheeljack the option to decide what to do with it. Maybe that was trust too.

An hour later, Wheeljack was knocking on the door to Prowl’s office. Prowl invited him in, and Wheeljack took a seat across from his piled-high desk. “Was it you?”

Prowl, to his credit, didn’t pretend to play dumb. “I’m sorry you were hurt. It was the only way.”

“The only way?” Wheeljack was over being hurt. It was interference in his and Starscream’s lives that he was angry about, not that Prowl would ever understand that.

“To get him out of the way and maintain the treaty,” Prowl said, as if speaking to a protoform. “I know you have a tendency to hyperfocus on work, but come on. You must have noticed how well things are going. The cities are integrating, governments are forming, people are creating business and jobs, and there’s hardly any polarizing activity. It worked.”

“I thought we couldn’t say that til the year was up.”

Prowl rolled his optics. “Now you care about following rules? You?”

“It’s not just any old rules, Prowl, it’s a treaty. It’s the treaty.”

“What exactly are you saying, Wheeljack?” Prowl’s optics blazed. “Would you prefer to have Starscream free, and you right in his crosshairs? I did all of this for you.”

“You’re right about one thing,” Wheeljack said. He stood up, making his way back to the door. “Peace? It’s working.” He grasped the door handle, and over Prowl’s protests, finished, “I’ll see you at the trial.”

**

Ultra Magnus had prepped Wheeljack officially, giving him careful pointers on what to say and how. Prowl had prepped him unofficially, whispering details of varying levels of truthfulness that Wheeljack should mention during his testimony. Wheeljack didn’t intend to heed the advice he’d received from either of them.

He’d written a statement for Ultra Magnus to approve, but he didn’t even open the file in his HUD as he stepped up to the podium. The stands at Cocatria’s former racing arena were packed, and Wheeljack must have looked like a speck to most of the mechs who filled them. He ignored the thousands of bodies and the EM fields pressing around him and looked over at Starscream. They had his wings bound, an unnecessary indignity when there were also enforcers lining the arena who would shoot him down if he tried to flee. He seemed to be pretending not to notice, though. He sat tall and proud, his expression frozen on a glower.

“We’re all here today to see justice done because someone aimed a bomb at me,” Wheeljack began, already off-script. Ultra Magnus’s perpetual frown deepened. “Specifically, we’re here to blame Starscream for it. He was there, he had the resources, he had, we can presume, motive.” Wheeljack took a deep, bracing vent – either this was going to work, or it’d backfire worse than he could imagine. “I don’t know who planted that bomb,” he lied, “but I know it wasn’t Starscream.”

The arena, which had been silent as he’d opened, exploded into noise. Wheeljack’s voice shook as he tried to continue over the cacophony.

“When I entered into this…arrangement,” he said, “I read that situation as all of you, yeah, all of you out there, trusting the two of us to represent our factions, to uphold the treaty, and, and to take care of each other.” The room had quieted, and it was almost worse, to be listened to, when he was already on such unsteady ground. What would Starscream even think about all this? “You trusted us. Autobots, you trusted me, and I’m telling you now that I trust him.” Was Wheeljack looking directly at Prowl when he said that? If he was, no one could prove it. “Starscream is guilty of many things. We all are, and that’s a different conversation entirely. But I know for certain that Starscream didn’t do this. Thanks.”

He stepped away from the podium without being dismissed, and Tyrest called for a recess as the sound of a thousand vocalizers blasted the stadium yet again. One of the enforcers herded Wheeljack to the makeshift chambers that had been set up for Tyrest beneath the stadium, and Wheeljack sat meekly on a bench as Tyrest glowered down at him.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” was all Tyrest said. Beneath his faceplate, Wheeljack smiled.

**

Wheeljack stepped into the house and froze. Oops. “I’ll get this all cleaned up,” he said. He’d left all the lab stuff he’d moved in the main area of the house in its new positions, not wanting to take any steps that he’d have to reverse if Starscream did indeed get out of this.

“Don’t worry about it,” Starscream said, taking a cautious step, then another, past Wheeljack into the house. He sat on the bench in the main room instead of walking into the berthroom, which Wheeljack took as invitation to join him.

Starscream was silent for several seconds, and Wheeljack braced himself for…something. Some obnoxious crack about what he’d said at the trial, some pointed question about how this all had happened…something.

What Starscream said was, “Thank you.”

His frame was torqued away from Wheeljack, arms crossed, and Wheeljack was convinced for a moment that he’d misheard. He’d never heard Starscream speak so quietly. “It was nothing,” he said, once he was certain he’d heard correctly. “What happened wasn’t fair.”

“Life isn’t fair,” Starscream said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Wheeljack took that in, having more difficulty than he expected coming up with what to say next. They hadn’t really done this before, he realized – they hadn’t really talked. Sure, they’d spoken to each other about Wheeljack’s project and the progress with the government, but – not like this. Not about themselves. “Maybe not,” Wheeljack said. “But…it wasn’t right, and I was the one person in a position to make it better, so I did.”

Starscream was looking at him with intensity, now, and Wheeljack did his best not to wither under the scrutiny. “For the first time, I’m glad they made me marry an Autobot.”

“The first time?” Wheeljack said, making sure to inject enough disappointment into his voice that Starscream would know it was a joke.

Starscream stood up and went over to examine the equipment on the table-turned-lab bench. “Well I’ve been happy to be married to you,” he said, flippantly enough that Wheeljack couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not from his voice.

He could tell from the set of Starscream’s wings, which tensed like wire as soon as he seemed to realize what he’d said. Starscream was facing away from Wheeljack, holding himself very, very still. “You’re not half-bad either,” Wheeljack said, and he could see the beginnings of a smile on Starscream’s face as he turned back towards Wheeljack.

**

The breakthrough happened in the middle of the night, with Wheeljack and Starscream sitting across from each other at the table that had been designated for lab equipment. (At some point Starscream had brought in another one for eating at.) Wheeljack was frowning at the spreadsheet of the latest readings from his research sites, which showed no significant change from the initial readings six months ago. Starscream had his hands busy preparing samples for analysis as he listened to Wheeljack rant.

“We need energon production to pick up if we’re going to survive here long-term, and that ain’t going to happen if the solar cells aren’t replicating,” Wheeljack said, the point he’d been meandering toward for probably a half hour or so. He’d expected to find some surface alloy component at least depleted, so he’d know what they needed to seed the ground with to encourage the repopulation of Cybertron’s most basic building block. But the cells appeared to be completely dormant, maybe from all the radiation that had flooded the planet during the war, and maybe from the fact that at the end of the war, the amount of debris in orbit had halved the amount of sunlight the surface was receiving. Once Cybertron had contained a complex network of energy production, with energon from the solar cells building up below the surface to be mined, and excess materials protruding from the ground, which Cybertronians had always used as the basis for buildings and roads. Now, all of it was unnervingly flat.

“Dormant isn’t dead, though, correct?” Starscream asked, not looking up from his own work.

“In theory, no,” Wheeljack said. “These things don’t die. The parts that aren’t working are cannibalized by the rest. The ones at the surface have just…stopped. If the only issue was light, or base materials, they should be producing energon again, even a little bit. It’s got to be that they’re just broken somehow.” Wheeljack sighed and directed his optics away from the screen for a much-needed moment. “What I wouldn’t give to just blow a crater somewhere and see how the ones dormant below the surface are doing.”

“Why can’t you?” Starscream asked.

“It’s not exactly a conservation-minded thing to do,” Wheeljack responded. He could feel Starscream’s optics on him and he returned the gaze across the table. “What?”

“Why can’t you?” Starscream asked again, and, well. There it was.

**

Permission wasn’t easy to get, and Wheeljack had to force himself to laugh at several jokes about how he “just missed blowing things up” that were just barely on the wrong side of mean, but eventually he managed it. He picked a field outside of Cocatria, on the opposite side of the city from his local research site, and picked a simple combustion explosive that would dig as deep as he wanted but not leave any lingering radiation.

He pressed the detonation button himself, and grinned at the sight and sound of the mushroom cloud in the distance. Beside him, Starscream was grinning too.  

**

Wheeljack had never much liked parties. There were too many people and no chance to have a real conversation without someone crowding in and interrupting. He always felt like he was being stared at and these days, more than ever before, it was probably true.

He’d lost Starscream’s attention to a discussion of the extent to which the government should financially support businesses whose primary client base was extraplanetary, which Wheeljack couldn’t find it in himself to care about. He’d wandered away to the snack table, and was thinking in turns about how he could analyze the first set of samples he’d just collected from the crater, how much he’d rather be at home than at this thing right now, and who would be the first person to stop sneaking glances and just come talk to him already when Arcee appeared at his side, suddenly enough that he almost spilled his drink in his haste to back away from the intrusion on his space.

“Hello to you too,” he said. She was grinning.

“Just checking in,” she said.

“Were you even invited here?” Wheeljack had to ask. After he’d told Tyrest that he “suspected” Prowl was behind the bomb in Kaon, Prowl had been quietly excluded from most government functions and the like. Wheeljack thought that was a mistake – keeping him close would give them a better chance to reign him in – but Tyrest didn’t take constructive criticism.

Arcee looked around, optics flickering as if she were sizing up the whole room at once. “Who’s going to ask me to leave? The Enforcers?” She laughed.  

“Great point.” Wheeljack sipped at his drink, something light and interestingly flavored that Starscream had ordered for him, and waited to find out exactly what she’d come here for.

“You know that he wants you to be safe,” she began. She didn’t have to specify who she was talking about.

“I know.” Wheeljack did consider Prowl a friend, even though he doubted that Prowl would ever self-describe as such. One day, Prowl was going to have to learn that he couldn’t control everything in the universe to his specifications, and on that day, Wheeljack would consider speaking to him again.

“Do you feel safe?” Arcee asked, and that one Wheeljack fumbled with answering.

Did he still keep a handgun under his berth? Absolutely. But he also let Starscream have access to lab materials they both knew were dangerous, turned his back to Starscream without thinking anything of it anymore, let Starscream order drinks for him…the handgun under the berth was an outlier, left over from a different time. “Yeah, I do.”

“You don’t have to lie to me,” Arcee said. “You know what I can do. If he’s hurt you, or threatened you–”

“He hasn’t,” Wheeljack said. “And you can tell Prowl that I’m getting tired of my so-called allies not trusting me on this.” He caught movement in his direction and waved to Starscream, who was, bizarrely, yanking his wrist out of Bumblebee’s grip as the two of them made their way over to Wheeljack and Arcee. “Look, here he is now. I’ll introduce you.”

Arcee and Starscream were clearly sizing each other up as Starscream walked over, Bumblebee close behind him. Wheeljack stepped up to put an arm around Starscream’s waist. They didn’t touch too much, and only ever in public, but Wheeljack knew that Starscream would agree that it was worth it to get to see Arcee’s expression. “I’m sure you’ve heard all about each other, but I don’t think you’ve formally met,” he said. “Arcee, this is my conjunx, Starscream. Starscream, my dear friend,” an exaggeration, “Arcee.”

“Charmed,” Starscream said, his voice flatter than Wheeljack had ever heard it.

Arcee just looked at him, her face perfectly pleasant. The silence stretched.

“How did you get in here?” Starscream asked.

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to,” Arcee said mildly. “The atmosphere’s a bit political for my tastes, though. I suppose I’ll be going.” She turned back to Wheeljack and said, more seriously, “You have my frequency,” before disappearing.

“Step One,” Bumblebee said, looking up at Starscream. “Don’t antagonize your conjunx’s friends.”

Wheeljack reset his audials, slipping away from Starscream. “What?”

“Never mind that,” Starscream said. “Did she just imply that she murdered someone?”

“She was joking,” Wheeljack said, hoping it was true. “And wait, going back to what he said: what?”

“Your conjunx is getting a series of lessons in treating one’s partner nicely,” Bumblebee said. “Like, when your conjunx is having a conversation across the room that’s clearly making him uncomfortable, you go over there and interrupt.”

“Wheeljack can handle himself,” Starscream insisted.

Bumblebee rolled his eyes. “That’s not the point.”

“You don’t even have a conjunx,” Wheeljack said, then he internally cringed. That wasn’t the kind of thing he said. He was clearly spending too much time with Starscream.

Bumblebee put a hand over his spark, as if deeply hurt by Wheeljack’s comment, but he was laughing. “You’ll admit he needs it, at least,” he said.

“Absolute drivel,” Starscream said, too deadpan to mean it.

“What do you think?” Bumblebee asked Wheeljack.

Wheeljack put his hands up in half-surrender and half-shrug. “We didn’t exactly fall in love, Bee, it’s a political –”

“Sure, but you’re still conjunxes,” Bumblebee interrupted. “You have to spend nearly all your time together, and Wheeljack deserves a partner that cares about him.” Bumblebee was looking at Starscream for the last bit, but Starscream was looking at Wheeljack, and probably noticed his optics flare a bit at – at something about that.

“Wheeljack, would you like to step outside for a minute?” Starscream asked, his voice dripping with so much sweetness that it managed to circle right back to obnoxious.

But still, honestly? “Yes, I would like that.”

Starscream threaded his arm through Wheeljack’s and pulled him out to one of the balconies surrounding the room. He let Wheeljack go once they were outside, where the air was cooler. Starscream leaned against the railing so he could have optics on the party inside, and automatically Wheeljack took up the watch position opposite him, hands on the railing with his optics facing out so that he could scan the skies.

“I know he’s right,” Starscream said. “I’ve been self-involved. It’s my nature.”

“I haven’t been any different,” Wheeljack argued into the night sky surrounding them.

“Yes you have,” Starscream said, as if what Wheeljack had said had offended him personally. “This whole time, you’ve insisted on giving me space, you’ve tagged along to all the government things even though you’d rather be working on science, you let me in on your work the minute I showed interest, and of course Kaon–”

“All that is just…what you do,” Wheeljack protested feebly.

“I never learned that,” Starscream said. “Or if I did, I spent a long time unlearning it after. I think.” He paused long enough that Wheeljack couldn’t resist glancing over to him, just to make sure he was okay. “I think…I want…to try,” he finished, stuttering as though the words were being yanked from his vocalizer.

“Alright, then,” Wheeljack said. “If that’s so, then I’d say this is a pretty good start.” He stayed where he was and felt Starscream relax little by little beside him. His optics kept gravitating to Starscream’s hand, and Wheeljack clamped down on the desire to thread his fingers into the spaces between Starscream’s, over and over until he finally felt ready to go back inside.

**

Wheeljack never should have agreed to this.

Starscream wasn’t bad at being nice, which, Wheeljack considered as he thought back to Starscream schmoozing through groups of Decepticons and neutrals and even Autobots at the city visits, shouldn’t have surprised him. Starscream, when he put his mind to it, was capable of being thoughtful.

Wheeljack also should have suspected that Starscream wasn’t capable of being thoughtful without an ulterior motive.

He didn’t realize what was going on until Ironhide pulled him aside, frowning, outside the Cocatria City Hall after a meeting. “You can tell he’s buttering you up for something, right?” Ironhide asked, his voice low and concerned.

Wheeljack sighed. The first year of the treaty was almost up, things had been going nothing but smooth for months, and still, somehow, he was back to not being trusted by his friends to handle his own life. “He’s not.”

“He held the door for you when you walked in and out today. He doesn’t do that.”

Wheeljack suspected that trying to explain would only dig him in deeper. Ironhide wouldn’t understand how important it was that Starscream had told him his intentions, or how earnest his fumbling speech that evening on the balcony had been. Ironhide wouldn’t understand or like the fact that Starscream, at this point, would have no reason to ‘butter him up’. He wouldn’t need to. “I appreciate it, Ironhide, really,” he said. “But I’ve got this.”

**

That night, for the third night in a row, Starscream set out energon for both of them around the time they usually ate. It had the probably unintentional side effect of giving Wheeljack an opening to talk to Starscream about what he’d been doing.

“Ironhide noticed how carefully you’re following Bumblebee’s suggestions,” Wheeljack said, giving Starscream a moment to parse what he’d said. His expression stayed neutral over his energon. “He’s terrified.”

That Starscream laughed at, and internally, Wheeljack cringed. “Was that the point?” he asked. Might as well tear the patch off.

Starscream’s expression snapped to serious. “What does that mean?”

“Are you just doing all this – this niceness stuff, so that people think you’re up to something?”

Starscream appraised Wheeljack. “The short answer is no,” he said carefully.

Wheeljack couldn’t contain a sigh. “And the long answer?”

Starscream looked accusingly at Wheeljack, like he did every time Wheeljack made him have a conversation that might come close to touching on actual feelings. “No,” he said, with a long enough pause after that Wheeljack almost protested, then, “I meant what I said that night. However, keeping the grounders on their toes is a secondary benefit.”

Wheeljack rolled his eyes. “Starscream.”

“What?” His voice was brusque.

“It’s dishonest and it’s pointless,” Wheeljack said.

“I built my life on being dishonest.” Starscream pushed himself up and away from the table to start pacing. “You understand that you’re the exception, don’t you?”

Wheeljack’s processor went blank. Starscream’s tone was scathing, and for a moment Wheeljack wasn’t sure he’d heard the words correctly.

Wheeljack didn’t give him time to pull himself together or come up with a response before Starscream threw him one last baleful glare and marched into the habsuite, closing the door behind him.

Was that. Had they just had a fight? They’d managed to avoid the like until now, which was, on reflection, nothing short of miraculous. They stepped carefully enough around each other that any annoyance was resolved quickly, both of them willing to compromise for the sake of keeping the peace between them, and the peace for the planet that it represented.

This felt like a step forward.

Wheeljack washed and put away the cubes they’d drank out of and paused at Starscream’s door before making his way downstairs. “I’m glad I’m the exception,” he said, loudly enough that Starscream, which his hypervigilance-tuned sensors, could surely hear him. He didn’t wait for an answer before walking away.

**

When Wheeljack went out to collect the third month’s samples from the crater, he almost crashed down into it when he saw what was at the bottom.

He managed to transform and stumble down to the bottom, then he stopped and sank to his knees.

There were tiny needles just starting to poke out of the craggy surface, fragile enough that Wheeljack didn’t risk stepping any further into the crater, gathering his samples from the edge.

It wouldn’t necessarily go any farther than this, and whatever had happened here wasn’t necessarily generalizable. But it had worked.

**

Somehow, improbably, eleven months were up. By now, Wheeljack didn’t even think before taking his seat next to Starscream at the table the Provisional Council met at. The Council was the same people who had started out on it, plus an additional neutral who sat next to Metalhawk, a necessary addition for how much the neutral population had been growing as Cybertronians returned home from further and further away.

Wheeljack knew that this meeting was going to be about more than trade negotiations and housing codes. Megatron’s trial was set to begin in a little over a month, and elections were the month after that. If those two milestones were successful, Wheeljack and Starscream would be permitted to annul their marriage if they wished to do so.

Wheeljack shoved away the thought. It was bad luck to think that far ahead.

And Wheeljack had zoned out of an important conversation to ruminate on it, so he refocused.

“Why should we bother to hold a trial when it’s so obvious that he should be executed?” Metalhawk’s companion, a minibot named Surger, was asking. “Won’t it just stir things up, make it more likely for people to get violent?”

“That’s exactly why we need to have it,” Bumblebee said. “To prove that we can maintain peace despite events that might incite people to violence. And to prove that if that happens, we can handle it.”

“One day, the Decepticons are going to make a play,” Tyrest said, as if he were commenting on the weather. “Our job is to make peace look so appealing that most of them won’t want to join in.”

Surger was looking between Tyrest and Bumblebee as if the two of them were speaking a foreign language.

“Though all of us are sure to have opinions on the matter, the decision is ultimately under the jurisdiction of Megatron’s assigned signatory to the treaty,” Ultra Magnus said.

Wheeljack, along with everyone else in the room, turned to Starscream. He looked surprised by the attention for a moment – this was probably the biggest decision that had ever been given to either of them in this process.

Then his expression shifted to contemplation, and he seemed to genuinely consider the question for several seconds. “Quietly executing him will have the Decepticons rightly up in arms,” Starscream said. Across the table, Soundwave’s head dipped in a serious nod. “Much as I personally would rejoice to see his head removed from his body as soon as possible, we need to have the trial.”

**

 Another day, another meeting. Planning the trial was the main project on what seemed like fifty people’s schedules at the moment, and all of it was meetings. Wheeljack didn’t even need to be at most of them, but it seemed like every morning Starscream was telling him “We’re expected to be at City Hall” or “Tyrest wants to see us” and Wheeljack was about to finally protest the “we” and “us” when those meetings were clearly only relevant to Starscream when he figured out the reason – Starscream, with the trial bearing down on all of them, was perpetually on the verge of losing it.

They were in another council meeting, which had become weekly instead of monthly with the onset of the end of the treaty’s first year and all it entailed. “If we let just anyone submit a victim impact statement, the trial could go on for weeks,” Metalhawk said.

Bumblebee snorted. “Then we let it go on for weeks. Amassing evidence. That’s the point.”

“It’s disruptive,” Metalhawk argued. “And it’s pointless. We all know what the verdict is going to be.”

“It’s important that we do this right,” Bumblebee argued. “People need closure.”

“It could go on for months if you didn’t force the people affected to describe themselves as ‘victims’,” Starscream interrupted unhelpfully, only uncrossing his arms to do the air quotes.

Bumblebee rested his face on one hand. “We’ve talked about this.”

“Yes. And I still think I’m right and the rest of you are wrong.”

Half the room seemed to sigh at once. The last round of this argument had ended with Tyrest ordering Starscream to “desist” when he’d climbed up on the table to make his point. “Maybe we should take a break?” Wheeljack suggested. They’d only been at it for two hours, but all of it had been tense, and Wheeljack didn’t want this to turn into another Situation.

“Ten minutes,” Tyrest said, with a long-suffering air. He stood up and made his way to the door. Wheeljack put a hand on Starscream’s arm and led him out the other door, toward Starscream’s office. He didn’t let go until they were inside, with the door closed and locked.

Starscream made his way to the window, arms still tightly crossed. “That pointy-faced coward shouldn’t even have a say. He’s the one being disruptive. He’s keeping us from getting things done with his insistence that it doesn’t matter. We’re not going to get anywhere if we all stick our heads into the ground and pretend the war didn’t happen.”

“I dunno,” said Wheeljack, and he effortfully didn’t laugh at the betrayed flare Starscream turned away from the window to send him. “Maybe it’d help. The ground makes it pretty clear that the war did, in fact, happen. I happen to know of a paper just published on the subject.”

Starscream’s glare softened, and then he burst into laughter. Wheeljack had rightfully listed him as a co-author on the paper he was referring to. “You agree with me, though, right?”

“It’ll get resolved,” Wheeljack said. “Most folks on the Council are on your side. Making Metalhawk and Surger understand is gonna take some doing, but when we accomplish that, they’ll be the ones making the rest of the neutrals understand. I know it feels like it’s taking away from planning time, but arguing with them is important work too.”

“Something’s going to happen.” Starscream turned back to the window, grip tight on the sill. “Soundwave’s probably planning something, Onslaught is probably planning something else. Nobody has been able to apprehend Shockwave but we all know he’s been plotting this whole time.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder why we even bother. Megatron’s going to win.”

“Nobody’s going to win,” Wheeljack said. “We aren’t at war.”

Starscream sighed and released the windowsill, stalking back toward the door. “I just wish everyone else believed that.”

“Hey.” Wheeljack caught Starscream’s arm as he passed by, and Starscream met his eyes. Underneath the haughty self-righteousness and anger was fear, fear Wheeljack recognized well by now. “You and me? We’re gonna be okay.”

“You can’t know that,” Starscream said, probably trying to sound authoritative but barely achieving neutral.

“But I can believe it anyway,” Wheeljack said. “You trust me, right?”

Starscream shut off his optics for the briefest of seconds, leaned into Wheeljack’s grip on his arm, and nodded.

“We’re gonna be okay.”

**

Optimus came back two weeks before the one-year mark.

Technically, that was a treaty violation, but it was close enough to following the rules that no one was affronted enough to bring it up. Wheeljack suspected he’d done it deliberately, to quietly oversee the preparations for the trial even though according to the treaty, he had no business doing so.

His suspicion was confirmed when Optimus commed him, inviting him to get a drink and catch up. Despite the obvious ulterior motive in play, Wheeljack couldn’t refuse. It was Optimus.

He would have brought Starscream, just to be contrary, but with how Starscream’s barbed defensiveness had been acting up lately he suspected it wouldn’t go well.

Wheeljack met Optimus at the new Macaddams, where Optimus had to talk to about five hundred excited and overcharged Autobots before Blurr finally let the two of them into an empty party room so that they could talk in private.

Wheeljack sipped his drink and waited. According to the gossip chain, Optimus had been unusually reticent about what he’d been up to on his travels, so Wheeljack didn’t bother to ask. He knew that wasn’t what Optimus had asked him here for.

“It’s good to see you,” Optimus said, warm and sincere.

“You too,” Wheeljack said, taking a seat at the long table.

Optimus took the seat cattycorner to him. “I must admit I was…concerned.”

“I know. You gave me the out, when we found out who it was gonna be, and I didn’t take it. I’m just glad I’m still here, too.”

“It’s just a few more weeks,” Optimus said. “We’ve all but won.”

Wheeljack was glad that his faceplate didn’t do a great job of showing emotions. Not Optimus too. Obviously he had a stake in it, but…the truce was working. Peace was working. Why couldn’t the war just be over?

“Thought the point was nobody won,” Wheeljack said. We all won. The planet won. Everyone but you two won.

“With Megatron out of the way for good, in whatever manner the court decides is best, and me running Cybertron, I think we can safely say that our side won,” Optimus said. His smile was gentle, at odds with how uncomfortably his words landed.

“You can’t guarantee the population will pick you in the election,” Wheeljack said, as gently as he could manage. “You haven’t been here. There’s people who have been, who the people have already been running things.”

Optimus frowned but didn’t look particularly concerned. “Who do you think my opponents will be?”

…Wheeljack should have planned for this. “Metalhawk, for one,” he said. “I dunno if you’ve heard about him, he’s sorta become the leader of the neutrals. And…” Starscream. “Other people, I guess.”

Optimus didn’t push on that, to Wheeljack’s immense gratitude. “Regardless, you must be relieved that you’ve nearly made it through the year.”

Wheeljack went to agree and then…stopped. Was he relieved? He was happy not to be dead, which had felt like a concrete possibility at the beginning.

But since Starscream’s trial, since he’d stopped being afraid, he had universally avoided all thoughts of after. It wasn’t that he didn’t expect to survive, at this point, just…if he was honest with himself, he didn’t want it to end. He wanted to wake up in the mornings to Starscream already talking, he wanted to keep living in the house and keeping up their routine and…and. He could do without the probationary Council seats but the rest of it…he didn’t want it to end.

That was entirely too much to try and process in front of Optimus, though, so Wheeljack managed a noncommittal nod. Anyway, Optimus had said nearly. No matter what, it wasn’t over yet.

**

“How was His Majesty?” Starscream asked when Wheeljack walked in the door to their house. Starscream was at the lab bench, seemingly staining for components on one of the latest crater samples.

Authoritative. Obsessed with winning. “Same as ever,” said Wheeljack. “You’re up late.”

Starscream turned to Wheeljack and Wheeljack suspected that he could read some of the inner turmoil that the conversation with Optimus had brought up on Wheeljack’s face. He turned back to the samples, though, and thankfully didn’t press on it. “Mixed up the secondaries the first round, didn’t realize how late it was when I restarted,” Starscream said. “Also, recharging when it’s the eleventh hour for Megatron and probably the best time for him to make a play is. Well. Not appealing.”

“Would it help if I recharged with you?” Wheeljack asked, because he was tired and maybe a little overcharged and the sappy thoughts that he’d bottled up at the bar were now protesting the treatment and practically bursting from his seams.

Starscream halted, pipette frozen in his hand, for a barely perceptible second. “No. Megatron would crush you in an instant,” he said, going back to pipetting as he did.

“I know,” said Wheeljack, because he did. “But would it help?”

Starscream put the pipette down. “I don’t know.”

“Then it sounds like it might be worth a try. Tell me to frag off if I’m being too pushy.”

“Okay.” Starscream’s voice was quiet, and his gaze was determinedly directed at what he was working on.

“I can help you finish up?” Wheeljack offered, as the silence stretched after that.

Starscream made an incredulous noise. “No, you can’t. I can smell the engex on you. Besides, I’ll just be a minute.”

True to Starscream’s word, it wasn’t long before Wheeljack was following Starscream into the berthroom that he’d only ever used when Starscream had been in jail. The berth was nice, with smoother paneling and better temperature control than the portable one Wheeljack had been using, and between that and the intensity of the last few weeks, nothing could get between Wheeljack and recharge.

Starscream was obviously restless next to him, and it had been long enough since Wheeljack had recharged next to anyone that it felt a little strange, having him so close, but soon enough the sound of Starscream’s vents was soothing rather than odd, and Wheeljack quickly fell asleep.

**

Wheeljack woke up disoriented but relaxed and refreshed. His limbs felt like all the tension they normally held had seeped out overnight, and he wanted to stay in the berth as long as he could manage, from contentment rather than exhaustion.

Some of his faculties returned to him after a minute of this, and he remembered that he’d fallen asleep next to Starscream. He could still hear Starscream next to him, vents quiet and frame motionless.

Wheeljack turned just as head, as slowly and quietly as he could manage, toward Starscream.

He was still in recharge, which shouldn’t have been surprising from the sounds of his frame, but a tide of emotion flooded Wheeljack anyway to see it. Starscream’s face was slack and relaxed, and the stillness looked strange on him. Wheeljack had never really noticed what a perpetual motion machine he was, not until now, in its absence. Starscream’s leg, Wheeljack belatedly noticed, was pressed up against Wheeljack’s. Wheeljack’s plating had become so accustomed to the contact that he hadn’t even registered it upon waking.

Wheeljack traced Starscream’s features with his optics, mesmerized. Starscream’s optics were a dark ruby without the backlighting that indicated they were in use, and Wheeljack wondered why he was so fascinated as he stared, until he realized that he had never seen optics that color off and up close before. Starscream’s plating was smooth and well-kept, the colors of his frame complementary and still interesting to look at. The softness and vulnerability of recharge looked good on him.

Wheeljack was careful not to move, not to wake him up. The fact that Starscream was trusting Wheeljack enough to be here, their frames touching so casually– it summoned back in a wave all of the feelings that Optimus’s question last night had brought to the fore. Wheeljack wanted to wake up next to Starscream in the soft light of morning and he wanted Starscream’s to be the last face he saw at night. He wanted a lifetime of arguing noncommittally about doing dishes and laughing at Starscream’s hilarious tirades about his Council work. He wanted the honor of being trusted by Starscream. He wanted to keep Starscream safe and nearby and…and happy, if that would ever be achievable.

It was possible that Wheeljack was a tiny bit, hopelessly, inescapably in love with Starscream.

Distantly, he knew that this was probably bad. That this was, if nothing else, a mess. That if they continued this, he would have to support Starscream in the elections which would ruin Optimus’s plans and – and maybe Starscream wouldn’t even want it. Maybe he would push Wheeljack away as soon as he could.

But all of that was faraway. Close enough for Wheeljack to feel his soft vents on his plating was Starscream, frame still slack with recharge, present, here.

When Starscream awoke, he didn’t scramble away immediately like Wheeljack had half-expected. Instead, he looked at Wheeljack for a long moment, long enough that Wheeljack almost expected – something – and then flashed him a private, mercurial smile before slipping away to prepare energon for both of them.

**

Even with all the time Wheeljack had spent talking about it and thinking about it, the trial still came on sudden. One day it was business as usual, and the next, Wheeljack and Starscream were boarding a transport to Luna 2 along with what seemed like half of Cybertron’s population.

Starscream was practically vibrating with tension from the start. Their transport only held the other Council members, but Starscream made a point of standing as far from the other Decepticons as was physically possible. Wheeljack hovered next to him, still unsure, after all this time, what he could do to help. Touch would surely be unwelcome, as would unmasked supportive words. A well-timed joke was usually a good bet, but Wheeljack was failing to find anything funny about the situation, not with all the uncertainty it contained. So he just stood there, and hoped that it helped.

The first day was the reading of the charges. The entire day. It was rote for the first ten minutes or so, fascinating from then to the end of the first hour, and then somehow horrifying and boring all at once.

Megatron sat resolute and expressionless, his gaze set on what Wheeljack first assumed was Prowl, reading the charges, and then gradually realized was Optimus, who was seated next to Prowl. He didn’t look over at Wheeljack, or Starscream, once.

Tension visibly slipped out of Starscream’s frame when they got home, and when Wheeljack brought up the bottle of engex he’d purchased a few weeks ago for the occasion, Starscream graced him with an exhausted but real smile.

By the end of the fourth day, Wheeljack was starting to settle into a routine: wake up early, go to the transport lot, take the transport to Luna 2, sit in the stands and listen to the trial of the millennia, go home. On the fifth day, the Decepticons made their move.

Starscream was slated to speak, that day, but he didn’t seem any more nervous than he had for any of the other days. Probably the opportunity to be at the center of attention in front of that many people was gratifying enough that it overshadowed some of the anxiety. They made awkward conversation on the transport with Metalhawk and Surger, all of them pretending that things were about to go back to normal and carefully avoiding the topic of elections.

Wheeljack didn’t have time to say anything to Starscream before he left his seat to testify, and he was thinking about how he should have – how he should have figured out something to say that wasn’t ‘good luck’ or maybe squeezed his hand, or if maybe that would have been too much – when the distinctive choom of a blaster rang out from the other side of the stands.

Deep-seated instincts had Wheeljack dropping to the floor before he registered that no other shots were being fired, and that he was unharmed. He climbed back to his feet in time to see Starscream, who was holding on to his own chest plating and glaring at something on the other side of the stands, stumble once, twice, and then fall, disappearing from Wheeljack’s line of sight.

Everything after that seemed to happen at once. The stands descended into chaos, with some people pulling out blasters and running towards Megatron, whose seat was in the center of the arena. Enforcers tried to contain them and were quickly overrun. Civilians tripped over each other trying to flee at the sight of guns. Wheeljack barely registered the fact that there were dozens of Decepticons, armed and coordinated, rushing the field. He had one priority: Starscream.

Wheeljack plotted a path from his position to Starscream’s and hopped the barrier, transforming before he hit the ground and accelerating from there along the side of the stadium. He did his best to navigate through the thinning crowd of ‘cons rushing the field, and barely maintained his balance as someone about three times his size tripped over him. He eyed the stairs that led to the platform Starscream was on as he approached and decided he could take them on wheels. That went great until he practically ran into one of the cons, who kicked him off the stairs with one enormous foot before continuing on his own way up.

Wheeljack transformed and took the fall a little less hard than he would have in alt. He landed on the arena floor and sprang to his feet. Ignoring damage warnings was a well-honed skill after years of war. He tried the stairs again, this time on foot, and was almost surprised when he made it to the top, stumbling as he ran toward the part of the platform where Starscream had fallen.

Starscream wasn’t there, and it was only years upon years of battle experience that kept Wheeljack’s processor from descending into pure panic. There were two entrances to the platform, and Wheeljack had come from one of them. He bolted towards the other, reaching with one hand into subspace to grab at the contingency plan he’d half-forgotten about in the chaos.

The con who had kicked Wheeljack was dragging Starscream off the platform by one foot, while Starscream struggled to shoot at what looked like heavily reinforced plating, leaving a grotesque trail of energon from the gunshot wound. The con who had him turned around when he heard Wheeljack’s running approach, and Wheeljack recognized him as Onslaught from a centuries-old briefing. Wheeljack wasted no time in triggering the grenade he’d snuck past security just in case something like this happened and throwing it at his face.

He didn’t wait to see if it hit before throwing himself over Starscream, who turned his mounted gun on Wheeljack, for a fraction of a second, before he seemed to realize who it was that was practically tackling him. The heat of the explosion was scorching on Wheeljack’s back, and the brightness was enough to make him reflexively reboot his optics. When the sensors reset, Starscream’s gun hand was trembling but at the ready in the air and his other hands was clutching Wheeljack’s hip. “Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice sounding high-pitched and quiet with the ringing in Wheeljack’s ears.

Wheeljack, despite everything, couldn’t help but chuckle. Somehow, here was Starscream, asking Wheeljack if he was hurt. “I’m fine,” he said. “You’re hurt.” He reached back into subspace to pull out his first aid kit. The shot had missed his spark, thank Primus, but he was still leaking energon.

“Duck,” Starscream said mildly, and then a shot rang out from his mounted gun, hitting something behind Wheeljack. Wheeljack turned around to see another one of the Combaticons – aside from Onslaught, he couldn’t tell any of them apart – fall backwards down the stairs.

“They’re going after Megatron down there,” Wheeljack said as soon as he remembered that that was, in fact, happening. All he’d cared about was getting to Starscream, and now that he’d done that, there was everything else to contend with.

“How many?” Starscream’s voice was sharp, battle-ready.

Wheeljack reviewed the visual footage, all the bodies he’d interpreted as nothing but obstacles as he’d raced toward Starscream. “At least fifty.”

“They might do it,” Starscream said. His gun arm was still hovering in the air, primed to defend Wheeljack’s back, but the rest of his frame was slack on the ground, not seeming to react to the assertion.

“Should we…I dunno, hide?” Wheeljack asked as he secured a field patch over the wound. It wouldn’t hold for long, but it ought to stop the leaking until the chaos had subsided.

“No point.” Starscream was holding his blaster steady but made no move to get up. “There’s no hiding, no running, not from him. You can go – you should go. He doesn’t care about you.”

Wheeljack clasped a hand on Starscream’s shoulder. “I’m not leaving.”

Starscream didn’t relax, but he leaned into the touch. Wheeljack kept watch opposite Starscream as he held on.

**

The Decepticons didn’t free Megatron. They didn’t shoot their way through the crowds to commandeer a transport shuttle and raze what was left of Cybertron.

Apparently, Megatron had refused to let them.

Wheeljack spent most of the three days Starscream was in the Cocatria hospital in the hospital building, only stopping home to check up on experiments and add a few extra layers to their already extensive security system. It didn’t feel right to sleep at home without Starscream there, and besides, he didn’t think he’d be able to sleep without Starscream at his side for a while. The memory of watching Starscream fall, hands ineffectively clutching at the gunshot wound in his chest, was seared too deep in Wheeljack’s processor.

The trial was halted for a week as the Decepticons who had stormed the field were apprehended and their leader (annoyingly but predictably, Ratbat) was identified. The Enforcers released a new set of rules regarding firearm presence at the trial that had a small group of Decepticons who hadn’t stormed the field protesting in the streets.

Exactly none of it, thankfully, was Wheeljack’s problem. Wheeljack sat with Starscream and napped in an uncomfortable chair next to him until Starscream woke him, up, insisting that Wheeljack bring him an extra pillow and then insisting that Wheeljack squeeze onto the berth with him instead of making Starscream look at him in “that awful chair.” Wheeljack weathered Ratchet’s long-suffering look when he walked in on the two of them practically on top of each other on the narrow hospital berth, and one time, hacked into the hospital’s security feed when Starscream woke up in the middle of the night, loopy with pain meds, certain that Megatron had somehow gotten out of his cell and was on his way to them.

The last thing had Wheeljack narrowing his optics in skepticism when Starscream said that the first thing he wanted to do when he was released from the hospital was see Megatron.

“Okay. Why?”

“If I can look him in the eye, I’ll be able to figure out why he refused to go with them.”

Wheeljack suspected, from the way Starscream was gripping the sides of the berth and practically digging in, that there was more to it. It wasn’t his place to intervene, though, and as soon as they walked out of the hospital building together, Wheeljack tried to peel away to buy some celebratory engex and then go home.

“Where are you going?”

Wheeljack stopped and turned around fully to face Starscream. “Figured you were about to have a private conversation.”

“I don’t want to have a private conversation.”

“Alright, then.” Wheeljack was one hundered percent acquiring engex after this.

Megatron’s cell was in the basement of the Cocatria police station, and it only took a short conversation with the guard at the main desk, and then another short conversation with her boss, to get Starscream, and by extension Wheeljack, in to see him.

“Wait here,” Starscream said, low in Wheeljack’s audial, when they were left in the hallway with just the guard standing by the elevator and the other guard seated outside Megatron’s cell.

“Thought you didn’t want to be alone with him?” Wheeljack said, just as quietly, irrespective of the guards.

“Well I don’t want him to know that.” With that, Starscream stalked off toward the cell. Wheeljack didn’t follow. Starscream stopped about fifty meters down the way, close enough for Wheeljack to hear a conversation if it was sufficiently loud, which Wheeljack was reasonably certain this would be.

“Megatron.” There was an edge to Starscream’s voice the likes of which Wheeljack hadn’t heard since the war.

“Starscream.” Megatron’s voice sounded equally cutting, but Wheeljack suspected that he could have used any tone and it still would have struck fear into the depths of Wheeljack’s spark. “After all this time, you finally come to me.”

“After all this time, you’ve become interesting,” Starscream said. “I’ve been running the numbers. It would have succeeded. Why didn’t you go?”

There was a long silence. Wheeljack saw Starscream open his mouth again before Megatron cut him off. “When it became clear that you had left me to rot, I began to dwell. I began to –”

Starscream stepped closer to the bars of the cell, close enough that Wheeljack took a half-step toward him before he realized that all he was doing was snarling at Megatron from as close as he could get. “Only you would be so blockheaded as to blame me for this.”

“I had a plan.” Megatron had raised his voice, now, and even with Megatron invisible to Wheeljack and behind bars, the words made him jump. “Only you would be single-minded enough not to see it. I was gloating when they took me away – we all knew you couldn’t last a month married to an Autobot. The Starscream who served under me for four million years would have soon enough murdered him, rallied the Decepticons under your own leadership, made some critical mistake, and used the last dregs of your power to break me out of jail in an effort to get back in my and the soldiers’ good graces. With the restraining order on Prime, we would have conquered the planet in days. I clearly overestimated your capacity for forward-thinking.”

“No. You underestimated Wheeljack.” Wheeljack jerked at the sound of his own name. “If he’d treated me like you always did – like an enemy instead of an ally – that’s exactly what would have happened. It’s fortunate that most people are better than you.”

“Starscream, you have a unique talent for bring back old habits,” Megatron said. His voice was…calm? Now? It felt like there was a lid on the eruption of anger that his last monologue had been, at least. “You asked me why I didn’t go with the remaining Decepticons” – there was the anger again – “when they freed me, and I was going to answer.”

Starscream made a sharp gesture for him to continue, frame locked tight with tension.

“You didn’t do any of those things,” Megatron continued. “I was ready to break out and hunt you down myself when I heard you had developed political ambitions, but I couldn’t rally a network. You were the only Decepticon permitted to speak with me, as per the treaty, and you didn’t. The world went on. I waited for it to fall apart, alone in this cell, and it didn’t occur to me until Ultra Magnus visited to prepare me for the trial that it had worked. Eleven months, and it hadn’t all fallen apart. If this was a peace that you of all people couldn’t manage to break – maybe it’s worth more than victory. I thought about a lot of other things during my time here, too. I dreamed night and day about victory, so much that I made myself sick of it, so much that I could no longer ignore that victory was no more anything more than an image, a feeling. Our goals had been warped to the point of intractability. That’s why I didn’t go.”

Starscream stared at him for a long moment. “I. Have been trying. To tell you that. For CENTURIES,” he shrieked, loudly enough that Wheeljack’s audials protested and he saw the guard next to the cell wince in kind. “I would say something just like that and you would turn it back on me in whatever way you could, and probably beat me to scrap, and I would listen. ‘Megatron is strong and articulate and capable of managing an army,’ I’d convince myself. ‘He must be right.’” Starscream had his face close to the bars again, his hands balled tight into fists at his sides, wings held high and threatening. “You were wrong.”

“I suppose you’re going to have to live with that.”

Starscream stepped back from the bars, posture barely relaxing. “Peace is working,” he said. “In spite of you, in spite of me. I want you to die mad about it.” With that, he stalked off from the cell. Megatron was silent behind it, gifting Starscream the last word.

The coiled tension in Starscream ceded to trembling as they took the elevator back to the surface, and Wheeljack looped his arm through Starscream’s to lead him through the lobby and out into the open air. From there, he guided them to the narrow alley between the Town Hall building and its neighbor, and waited for Starscream’s staggered ventilations to even out. “It’s not in spite of you,” Wheeljack said, when Starscream had calmed down enough that he seemed capable of holding conversation. “We would never have made it this far without you.”

“You don’t know that.” Starscream’s voice was quiet now, genuinely private.

“I do, though,” Wheeljack said. “Trust me, I’m a scientist.”

The last of Starscream’s anger seemed to dissolve into the quiet air around them as he laughed. Wheeljack hadn’t let go of his arm.

**

Starscream was more or less fully recovered by the time the trial restarted. There were weld lines still apparent on his chest, only visible if you looked closely. He was tense, though, and even Wheeljack’s attempts to put him at ease with jokes were met with a distant expression.

Wheeljack laid off as they settled in their usual seats in the main box at the arena, today with an armed guard behind them – not that that would help, at all, if something like what had happened last week happened again. The crowds were no thinner today despite the protests over the new, stricter weapons rules, but Wheeljack suspected that if anything would deter a second Decepticon protest, it was Megatron’s open reluctance.

Still, Starscream was tense, and it was ricocheting back on Wheeljack. He was worried for Starscream, for himself, for the future of the truce after the trial and elections, for the outcome of the trial and how there would probably be some group that ended up rioting no matter how it turned out.

The one upside to all of it was that it pushed all his musings about his personal future clear out of the way.

Prowl started the day with a long speech, the glee in his voice indiscernible to anyone who didn’t know him well as he denounced the actions of the Decepticons who had interrupted the trial. Wheeljack thought some unkind things about how hypocritical his statements about how “we’ve all been dedicated to maintaining this ceasefire” were, and then tuned out the speech entirely, his processor unable to focus on anything but the fact that Starscream was going to have to leave his side again, was going to have to walk up to that platform and Wheeljack would have to sit here, alone, and watch him speak up there where he’d been shot, alone, for Primus knew how long.

Starscream’s hand landed on Wheeljack’s wrist. Wheeljack turned toward him as if by magnetism. He was playing it like it could have been accidental, was the thing. Wheeljack knew that Starscream didn’t do accidental touch, not ever. When he looked over at Starscream, Starscream was looking at him out of the corner of an optic.

Wheeljack wrapped their hands together and thought about trying to mask how much it helped, then didn’t bother. No one was looking at them anyway. He slumped back in his seat and only nominally focused his optics on Prowl, the rest of his processor focused on Starscream’s frame beside him, Starscream’s hand in his.

After Prowl wrapped up, Starscream was called to the platform. He stood, and Wheeljack felt his hand start to slip away, and all his anxieties about what might happen next roared to the front of his processor, overriding logic and propriety and encouraging him to tighten his hand around Starscream’s again.

“Wait,” he said, and when Starscream turned back toward Wheeljack, Wheeljack kissed him.

Starscream managed to quadruple the drama of it, spinning Wheeljack halfway around and dipping him as he deepened the kiss. Wheeljack went along with it, letting Starscream’s hands at his back hold him up, blindly grasping at Starscream’s plating to secure himself. Starscream kissed like only someone who had been imagining kissing Wheeljack for a long time would kiss him. His lips were firm on Wheeljack’s faceplate, and he moved with Wheeljack, none of the fumbling that Wheeljack had experienced in the past.

It wasn’t until the arena exploded with cheers that Wheeljack realized that for the first few seconds, everything had stopped. Uncomfortable with the scrutiny of thousands, Wheeljack broke the kiss, toggling his optics back on to stare up at Starscream. Starscream pulled Wheeljack properly back to his feet, his expression morphing from awe to something closer to neutral as he did. His hands slid off Wheeljack’s plating inch by inch as he pulled away to go give his testimony.

As Wheeljack watched him walk away, his optics caught on Prowl, horrified expression visible even from this far away. Wheeljack inclined his head in a grin and sat back down in his seat.

**

Starscream’s testimony was followed by half a dozen others, out of planned hundreds, and at the end of the day, Megatron asked for a recess to speak to his lawyer, after which the OD, Ultra Magnus, announced that Megatron would be invoking his right to be tried by the Knights of Cybertron. That led to a mass panic that turned into a forced evacuation of the arena which turned into an entire night full of meetings, and it was dawn in Cocatria by the time Wheeljack had a moment alone with Starscream. By then the trial had been postponed again, this time indefinitely, and the first priority was getting home in hopes of eventually getting some rest.

Starscream was at the table by the time Wheeljack got home, setting out energon.

“That didn’t exactly go as planned,” Wheeljack said as he took his usual seat.

“I’m sure he had a third contingency plan at the ready if that didn’t work,” Starscream said. Then, as he pushed a cube toward Wheeljack, “I don’t want to talk about Megatron.”

“Fair ‘nough.”

His tone implied that there was something he’d rather talk about, and Wheeljack waited as Starscream took a sip of energon, stared out the window for a few seconds, and took a bracing vent. “Why did you kiss me, this morning?”

“Think it was yesterday,” Wheeljack began, because the first sun was, in fact, already bright in the sky. “Not important. Anyway. Why I did it.” Now he had to take a sip of energon as a cover for needing a second to think. He decided on the truth. It was, after all, what had always worked best with Starscream. “I was so scared, knowing you were gonna go up there again, and – I know that there wasn’t much likelihood you’d get shot again, but I couldn’t get it out of my head and – I couldn’t let you go up there without kissing you first.”

Starscream was looking at Wheeljack with an uneasy expression. Hope? Doubt?

“Because I wanted to,” Wheeljack finished, which really had been the crux of it all along.

“I’ve wanted to kiss you for a very long time,” Starscream said. The beginnings of a smile played across his lips. It was a good look.

“Well, I am pretty irresistible,” Wheeljack said, and politely kept it at that, because Starscream had leaned forward and was kissing him again.

This? This was nice, much nicer than it had been with Wheeljack’s fuel pump pounding with anxiety and crowds screaming at them in the arena.  Now, he could relax into Starscream’s hand on the side of his faceplate, wrap his arms around Starscream’s waist lazily instead of clinging to keep his balance. It didn’t last very long, though, before Starscream pulled away.

“I don’t want this to end,” he said, and Wheeljack’s recharge-deprived processor almost blurted out ‘then get back over here’ before he realized that Starscream was probably thinking more long-term, and then his thoughts devolved into a mess of staticky gibberish.

“I don’t either,” he managed to say.

“I know everyone expects us to end things, now that the rest of the planet has had a chance to start to repair and for people to integrate, but –”

“Starscream. I already agreed with you.” Wheeljack gave into the urge to put a hand to Starscream’s face, and was rewarded with Starscream leaning into it. His tank did a little flip and he tried to ignore it, tried to come up with something useful to say.

“I know that being around me puts you in danger, especially if I win the election.”

“I can live with that.” He’d agreed to this in the first place, after all. He’d done so because peace was worth it and now…now, he knew that Starscream was worth it.

“I’m never going to get better about using an ‘indoor voice.’” His hands, which had been twisting anxiously around each other in his lap, reached up to do the air quotes. Wheeljack snorted. “And we’re – this – we can’t be dating and be conjunxes. That’s ridiculous.”

“So far we’ve been enemies and conjunxes and also friends and conjunxes,” Wheeljack said. He finally landed on the useful thing to say. “It sounds like you’re just trying to talk yourself out of something you already said you want.”

“You know me too well,” Starscream said, and Wheeljack pulled him into another kiss, soft and sweet and just for them.

**

Wheeljack woke up early on the morning of the election. Starscream wasn’t on the berth next to him – Wheeljack was certain he’d spent the night in his office. Wheeljack was going to have to get better about intervening in those kinds of habits – he suspected that their lives were, unlikely as it was, about to get even crazier.

Starscream was up in the polls, was the thing. Optimus had pulled ahead at the start, and then dropped out altogether when someone (to be fair, probably Starscream) had discovered that he’d brought a “rehabilitated” Shockwave back to the planet, keeping him hidden in his shuttle. The fact that it was Shockwave had caused the neutrals to become disillusioned with him, and the fact that he’d kept it a secret had lost him the favor of some of the Autobots. Optimus had wisely chosen to make a temporary retreat from public life, and the one time Wheeljack had visited their new house, he and Shockwave had seemed blissfully and somewhat unnervingly happy together.

That left Starscream and Metalhawk, and Bumblebee had entered the race late in Optimus’s place but never gained much traction. But anything could happen today.

It was early enough that Wheeljack followed his urge to go out to the crater instead of going directly to City Hall. He hadn’t had a chance to in the last few weeks of heavy campaigning, and well, if there was a time to do it, it was probably now.

The drive out was pleasant in the cool morning air, and he transformed before walking the last few steps to peer over the crater’s edge.

And there it was.

He hadn’t allowed himself to expect, or even hope for a change. The fact that the cell debris were growing, that the solar cells were dividing and spreading, ever so slowly, to the surrounding mantle, were amazing already. Beyond what Wheeljack had let himself imagine was a fragile plate of brand-new mantle, dotted with tiny drops of energon that the cells around it had produced, in the very center of the crater.

Wheeljack didn’t even think before coming Starscream. “Come out to the crater,” he said.

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not. Please?”

A short silence, then “If you insist.”

Starscream arrived quickly, transforming to root and then climbing down the side of the crater after Wheeljack, who was still staring at the plate and the first fresh energon that had been known to be produced on Cybertron in millennia. “What’s the emergency?” Starscream asked, his voice genuinely exasperated.

Wheeljack took his hand and with the other, pointed at the flower. “New Cocatria city symbol?”

“It’ll be my first action in office,” Starscream said, seemingly on autopilot. His optics were fixed on the plate, his hand tight on Wheeljack’s. Then he turned to face Wheeljack, clasping their other hands together. “You did it. It doesn’t even matter what happens today. We won.”

“Nobody w–”

“All of us,” Starscream said over him. “All of us won.”

Wheeljack could already tell that he’d do that bit over and over again for the voters throughout the day. All the same, as Wheeljack stepped forward to kiss Starscream, he let himself believe it.