Chapter Text
The edge of Starscream’s berth presses against the back of his legs, his pedes not quite touching the floor. It’s dark, since he’s either turned the lights off or forgotten to turn them on in the first place--he can’t quite recall which.
Starscream’s hand is wrapped loosely around his spike, though he doesn’t remember putting it there, or opening his panels. In his other hand, grasped rather more firmly, is a nearly-empty bottle of engex. He doesn’t remember where that came from, either, since it doesn’t look like something from his personal supply, but at least it explains the hazy state of his processor.
Drunk or not, he thinks wryly, his mind hasn’t exactly been reliable lately. As if on cue, he catches sight of Bumblebee out of the corner of his optic. His delusion looks almost...guilty? And, when it catches Starscream’s gaze, it seems to startle, shrinking in on itself a bit.
Starscream sketches a jaunty half-wave with the hand holding the engex, inadvertently sloshing most of its remaining contents across his thighs. He glares at the offending bottle for a moment before setting it down, pointedly ignoring the soft chuckle from somewhere behind him. Hadn’t he been doing something else?
Right. Jerking off. He should get back to that.
It would be easier if he hadn’t suddenly become aware of Bumblebee watching him. Not that it’s actually Bumblebee, and not that this hasn’t happened dozens of times before, but that knowledge doesn’t stop his plating from prickling uncomfortably under the gaze that he can feel resting on him.
t’s been longer than he cares to remember since anyone’s watched him get himself off. Unless you counted the time Rattrap had walked in on him, which had been equal parts awkward and hilarious; it’d been months before the mech would look him in the eye again. Before that, though? It’d been millennia since Megatron’d had the time for frivolities like foreplay, even before things went…sideways. There had been a war to run, after all, and there wasn’t a pair of mechs alive who wouldn’t have fractured under the strain of that.
He gives his spike a lazy stroke. Megatron. That’s easy enough, isn’t it? Surely, fragging someone for millions of years gave you the right to fantasize about them.
His fogged processor, however, doesn’t seem to be in a particularly cooperative mood. Instead of conjuring memories of the good old days (there had been good old days, hadn’t there?), all he gets is a catalog of injuries. He’s granted to front-row seating in a rendition of all the times his component parts have been variously crushed, dented, or rent in two.
Sometimes, he can still feel the scars lingering beneath his plating like persistent ghosts, even though he’s had several full-frame reformats since they’d been inflicted.
And none of this, of course, is doing anything for his waning arousal. In point of fact, a faint tremor seems to have taken up residence in the struts of his arm. He ex-vents heavily, grinding his dentae in frustration. It’s shaping up to be one of those nights, then; the kind where engex doesn’t so much take off the edge as smother him under the weight of things he’d do better to forget.
He falls back against the crumpled sheets of his berth, a wave of fatigue washing over him. A hand strokes absent across his chest plating, mostly just for something to do. His optics half-shutter, seemingly of their own accord, and he feels recharge tugging at him.
“What, giving up already?” A voice says, and Starscream jumps, clenched fingers drawing a thin line of sparks where they drag across his armor. Bumblebee. He’d almost forgotten.
“Interested, hm?” He mumbles, engex and fatigue softening his words so much that they border on unintelligibility.
“No,” the voice says, and Starscream can almost hear the frown in it. “But you’re usually more...persistent.”
“I suppose you’d know.” He means to sound bitter, or maybe salacious, but he thinks he probably just sounds tired.
“When are you going to get it through that thick processor of yours that I’m not a hallucination?”
“Oh, forgive me. I suppose it’s much more likely that you're a ghost, and you've chosen to haunt me, of all people.” He chuckles softly. “Think what you want, but I’m not that self-centered.”
Bumblebee makes an irritated sound, and when the delusion speaks again its voice is closer. “I didn't choose this. You honestly think, if I had my pick, I'd spend eternity stuck with someone who was my enemy for millions of years, and an annoyance besides? You’re more self-absorbed than you think.”
Starscream puts a pillow over his face. It won’t help to block out the little autobot, and they both know it. But the pettiness will be an annoyance, and that makes Starscream feel better.
“You’re an aft.”
“Guilty as charged,” Starscream slurs through the pillow.
“Primus, you’re insufferable.”
“‘S rich, coming from myself.”
“I’m not-- Y’know what? I’m done with this conversation. I’m getting a headache, and I don’t even properly have a head any more. Go to sleep, Starscream.”
Even drunk off his aft, Starscream is hardly going to let a hallucination tell him what to do. Frag, he’d barely let Megatron do that. Uncovering his helm and onlining his optics, he props himself up against the headboard of his berth. His hands drift back to his array, so slowly that the motion might be mistaken for an unintentional one.
“Now you’re just being contrary for the sake of it.”
“Aren’t I always?” He says, a finger slipping down to trace around the rim of his valve.
“Looks like you’ve found your energy,” Bumblebee says, quirking an optic ridge.
He hasn’t, and Bumblebee’s looking at him with a knowing look, but he’s done stupider slag out of spite. Jerking off to annoy a hallucination hardly registers on that scale, really.
Lifting a hand, he drags it lightly across the edge of a wing. He shivers, hips bucking up slightly against the weight of the hand still pressed against his array. For a moment, he loses himself in the sensation of it all, the careful press of digits against sensor-laden plating and the low-level charge crackling across his protoform.
When Starscream looks up again, Bumblebee’s expression is a mix of irritation and something else that Starscream doesn’t have the mental capacity to decipher. Its gaze is fixed decidedly on his array, though, and that’s easy enough to interpret.
He thinks that if he were a bit more sober, he might feel a bit more ridiculous about this whole thing. But he isn’t, and he doesn’t. So, instead, he shifts his hand to give Bumblebee a better view of his valve, which is beginning to drip pink lubricants onto the berth. The hallucination’s fingers twitch at its side in a suppressed motion that it seems to think better of.
“You know,” Starscream says, letting his voice drop to what he hopes is a conspiratorial whisper, “since all this is annoying you, it’d be over faster if you helped.”
“Help?” The delusion quirks its helm, pulling its gaze up to Starscream’s face with a visible effort. “I don’t know what you expect me to do. I can’t exactly touch you.” It flexes its fingers as though to illustrate the point.
“Surely you can be more creative than that,” he says, spreading his thighs further apart, one hand still tracing along his wing. Like this, it’s frighteningly easy to forget that he’s the only mech in the room. It’s even easier not to care.
Bumblebee shudders almost imperceptibly, mouth opening as though to say something. When no words are forthcoming, Starscream shutters his optics and lets his helm loll back against the headboard.
He circles his node with a thumb, fingers teasing at the rim of his valve.
“Don’t.” The voice, when it finally speaks, is so quiet that he almost misses it. Starscream stills.
“Don’t what?” He hopes that the words come out on the proper side of coherence; the world is slipping about in a way that suggests he’s had more engex than he thought.
“Don’t put your fingers in your valve.”
“And why shouldn’t I?” Starscream cants his hips and, since he’s already committed himself to being as annoying as possible and definitely for no other reason, he slides two of his fingers into his valve. His vents stutter at the sudden sensation of fullness.
“Because,” Bumblebee says, in a voice that is far too sincere for the situation at hand, “I want to see you.”
Starscream onlines an optic. His hallucination is blushing, of all things, and suddenly this whole thing starts to feel pathetic again. Frag.
He supposes it was too much to ask for an uninterrupted good time. No rest for the wicked and all that.
“Yeah,” he says, shuttering his optic again, “you would say that.”
Nonetheless, he pulls his lubricant-slicked hand away from his valve and curls his fingers around his spike instead, giving it a firm stroke.
Quietly, he thinks he hears a breathy, “Yeah, just like that,” but he supposes he might have imagined it (as if this isn’t all imaginary to begin with, hah!) He hates the way his spinal strut arches at the words, finds himself hoping that Bumblebee won’t notice before he remembers that Bumblebee is some fragged-up part of his consciousness and, as such, knows everything he does (and, sometimes, things he doesn’t).
Time dissolves into a haze, his processor caught up in the slide of his hand against his spike set to the background hum of his cooling fans, and he forgets the rest of the night for a moment as he chases his overload.
His lines burn, and it doesn’t seem that important that he’s spent the better part of the evening talking to a hallucination (because nobody else wants to talk to him). His free hand clutches at the sheets of his berth, and it doesn’t matter that if he turns on the lights his sparsely-decorated room will be littered with empty engex bottles (because it’s not like there’s anyone else here to complain about them).
Starscream overloads with a shout that he instinctively muffles in the crook of his arm. He lies there for a moment, listening to his fans spin down. He can feel transfluid drying in stripes across his chest. The high doesn’t last more than a klik before he’s crashing again, and he expected that but that doesn’t mean he likes it any better.
When he onlines his optics, the room is empty.