Claustrophobia.
Summary: Sequel to "Drone." After Ratchet "accidentally" lets the Twins know that the drone that almost killed Bumblebee was Starscream's invention, they set out to punish him. But have they gone too far this time?
Rating: M for safety
Warnings: mild torment, cussing, mech insanity, smut.
Pairings: Ratchet/Starscream.
Disclaimer: Transformers does not belong to me, unfortunately. It is the property of Hasbro and Dreamworks/Paramount.
A/N: thanks to KDZeal's insights into the effect of incarceration on Seekers.
Claustrophobia.
Prologue.
"You sure we got all the slagger's bombs?" Sunstreaker asked Sideswipe as they played the last boulder in the barrier they were building.
"Anything he hadn't subspaced, we got, Bro." Sideswipe said as they stood back to inspect their handiwork. "We disabled his arm cannons and all the other weapons possessed by either his mech or alt form."
"Okay, let's finish this off," said Sunstreaker, and the two raised their arm lasers and played them over the mass of rocks they had piled in the cave mouth. They glowed red, then white, then lost their definition as the heat increased. By the time the twins had finished, the rocks had slagged and slid into each other, not enough to open the mouth of the cave, but enough to make them flow together to produce a knobbly plug of rock.
"He'll be awake soon." Sideswipe said. "When do you plan to let him out?"
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe in a few vorns, if I'm in a good mood." Sunstreaker stated.
Together they turned and began heading back to the Autobot base.
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Starscream woke slowly. He could remember those slagging Twins jumping him, forcing him to land, remembered them sitting on his back and pulling painfully at his wings.
"You created that slagging drone that almost killed Bumblebee, didn't you?" Sunstreaker had said, grasping his tail fin and pushing it so hard it had began to bend.
"Yes! It was just an experiment, get off me!" Starscream had cried.
"Oh no, you don't get away that easy." Sideswipe had told him, and then, all had gone black.
He could tell from the residual energy pattern and the fuzziness of his processors that he had been shot on heavy stun. Unshuttering his optics, he was at first confused, because it was still dark. Thinking his optics may still be rebooted, he levered himself up from the uneven surface he lay on, activating his scanners. He did not want to be blind and vulnerable.
His optics shuttered wide open with a shocked snap as his scans returned back information. He was in a small, enclosed rocky space which was not even high enough for him to stand straight up in, and no immediately obvious way to exit. A small whine escaped his vocal processor before he clamped down on his rising panic as he managed to get himself into a crouch and began to shuffle about, hoping to find an exit.
All Seekers were as varied in their personalities as the colour-patterns on their wings, but there was one thing they all shared - a dread of small, enclosed spaces. Starscream had a few times been punished by Megatron by being shut in a small room on his own, only ever for a few days, but each time had been enough to stop him from repeating his transgression. However Megatron had never been so angry as to leave him in the dark, and not underground, as Starscream's scans revealed that he was indeed fifteen feet below the planet's surface.
Then he found the cave mouth - or where it had been. It was now blocked by a plug of recently-melted rock. Starscream switched to his infra-red vision, could see that the plug was still hot, but not hot enough to damage him. He tried to push it aside or find cracks, but to no avail. There were one or two cracks that seemed to be letting air in, but there was no more than that.
He backed up and raised his arm weapon, planning to blast it to atoms, but it was then he found his gun didn't work. He checked for his bombs, found they had all been removed, and then checked his weapons with a rising sense of panic, which he clamped down on. He had none in his subspace, supplies were low, and he went back over to the rocky plug.
"Is there anyone out there? Let me out, you slaggers! You've had your fun, you made your point, now let me go!" he cried. He continued in this vein for half an hour, until he realised that there was either nobody out there, or that if anyone was, they were not listening. Scanning, he found that the situation was the former. He was totally alone.
Starscream sat down, concentrating on fighting his instinctive fear of being permanently trapped. They'd come back and release him in a few days, they would, they'd HAVE to, they wouldn't leave him there like that,…would they?
Every few hours he ran a scan, and even when he found nobody, he repeated his angry comments. Once a few days had gone by, they changed to apologies, and over a weak later, the apologies became begging cries.
However, there was nobody there to hear them.