2. Anger

It should have hard to deny the absence of the larger jet, but Carrion could come up with thousands of reasons, little excuses that proved Starscream could still be alive and not be in the medical wing. One in particular rang true, and was much easier to swallow than the 'truth' Knock Out offered: that Starscream, being completely healthy, had no business in sick bay.

Mindset thus, he focused on the task of getting himself into condition to leave the medical wing. For quite a while, the snide medic wouldn't give him access to the equipment he needed for some of the more delicate repairs, including a mirror to work on his face. Hooked up to the various wires and trappings of the berth, he could hardly get to his feet, much less go tearing around for the tools he didn't have.

The first time he pulled himself free of the life support cables – which connected him to the pain-blocking signal – the agony that flashed through him was so intense, he was barely capable of reconnecting himself. Despite the fact that the medic truly had been working on him, so much of his inner workings were damaged that the pain was almost a literal override, sending his processor into a screaming whirlwind of burning circuits and shrieking servos.

It was impossible to get up without disconnecting himself, so for that day he made due making minor repairs on the armor around his joints. There was little enough point working anywhere else, as Knock Out would have to open much of his armor to repair the more delicate mechanisms below.

His second attempt, occurring several days later, went much better. Knock Out, with Breakdown's assistance, had done a massive overhaul on his wings and back, where he had taken a lot of damage from several different blasters. Sometime after they had both departed (Carrion tried very hard not to think about why or where to or what for), he tentatively disengaged the life support cable from his chest, tensing, waiting for the attack of agony.

There was pain, yes, but somehow nowhere near what he might have expected. Pretty much all of him was sore and stiff, but true pain lurked only in certain regions. He pushed past it, sliding from the berth and managing to hold his weight, so long as he had something to grip.

A self-absorbed narcissist like Knock Out was bound to keep something around to catch his reflection in, and it wasn't too long before Carrion found a well-polished piece of metal that would suit his needs perfectly.

Looking into it, he found himself turning his head this way and that, simultaneously numb to the shock of what he was seeing and incredibly disheartened. Where he had imagined some cracking and breaking, ugly but repairable, there was a mangled, twisted wreck. The upward swing of his enemy's fist showed clearly in the way the metal of his face was warped. The hinge of his jaw was actually visible, scratched where some other piece had dug in, though it must have been removed. Dazedly, he brought a claw up, brushing lightly over the sensitive cavity that claimed half his face. The whole optic had already been removed, leaving nothing but a derelict pit. He could only hope he'd left a mark half as bad on the other mech.

"It was a total loss," A voice purred from by the door, almost making him jump. As he often did, Knock Out had a way of making Carrion feel guilty. He watched in the reflection as the automobile sauntered up behind him. "It will be a while before I can finish such… intensive repairs."

He opened his mouth to speak and almost doubled over from the pain such a simple action caused. Bare wires and broken gears crunched, the whole left side of his face a sea of hurt. Clenching his claws, which added somewhat to the pain, he stumbled back to the berth struggling to lay back down. His trembling couldn't be helped, but that made him no less annoyed when the medic smoothly stepped to his side, reconnecting the cables that hooked him up to the medical equipment, saving the life-support for last.

After a moment to process the lack of pain, he cut a glare at the older mech. It surprised him somewhat that Knock Out wasn't laughing at him, or at least giving him one of his patronizing shushes that so perfectly characterized his sense of bedside manner.

"Why haven't you replaced my optic?" He demanded in his new, slurring tone. Somehow it managed to be appropriately accusatory.

Knock Out flicked a claw dismissively, as if to toss the question away. "I will soon. I've had some trouble finding one to fit your specs, is all."

"There are literally," Carrion growled, waving toward the repair trays, "dozens of optics in storage. I know. I've gone through them."

With a little sigh, the older mech merely rolled his eyes, speaking as if to a slow student. "There are none that will match your current one. Unless you'd like me to waste time blinding you, I cannot repair your single optic without mismatching your already unattractive face."

Though in the past anger had generally been a slow thing to build in him, Carrion felt his temper flare, and looking up at the smug grin on the other's face did not help him reign it in. "I don't give a scrap if it matches, Knock Out," He snapped. "They're optics, not rims on your slagging tires."

Once again the automobile's optics narrowed, claws clutching at the life support cable running into Carrion's chest, providing the jet with relief from his pain and stability to maintain clear thought. "You know, Carrion, this attitude may have been cute when you first let someone try to knock you offline and we could pretend that your processor was addled. But it's been days, and I must say, I'm getting rather sick of listening to you whine. It is beyond time for you to get over yourself and stop behaving like a sparkling who's been knocked down and had his toys stolen."

"The only thing I'm behaving like," Carrion growled, forcing ire into his voice to make up for the squealing and screeching of the bared joints and wires, "is a patient who is being poorly taken care of. I, I… Starscream will have work for me to do and I'm wasting my slagging time here."

In a swift, pitiless motion, Knock Out's claws latched onto his shoulder and gave him a little shake. "You know, I've tried being nice to you, Carrion. I'm getting very bored of it. Starscream is dead, and you're not. Get over it and grow up."

For a moment, all Carrion could do was stare at the automobile. Every part of him fought to deny what he was being told; it simply was impossible to accept his own life when Starscream was gone. It wasn't right, it wasn't fair, it couldn't happen… but Starscream himself had told him that life was many things, but rarely if ever was it fair. Starscream had always tried to shove such awareness at him, and he'd mostly tried to ignore it, preferring to keep his focus on just being around the older jet. Even when the Air Commander had hardly acknowledged his existence, he had been happy just to catch a glare from him. It was for Starscream that he'd ever even bothered coming to Earth, before he'd ever seen the infamous Seeker.

Though he pulled back to stand over his patient, Knock Out seemed to take his silence as encouragement to continue. He didn't seem to be enjoying himself, for once, with his expression caught between exasperated and cruel. "You can't pretend you don't know it. Everyone knows why you got your aft shot to hell and back. If they weren't whispering about you and your precious Commander before, they certainly are now. Rather sad, actually, since I would have loved to see his reaction to your flagrant stupidity, but he's dead. You're alive. Get over it."

The words made him feel like someone were crushing his spark chamber, making his engine run faster and his mind feel numb and slow. "If someone killed Breakdown, would you just get over it?" Carrion asked, his voice snappish, sounding without processing what he was about to say. He almost regretted it for the way it made Knock Out's optics narrow, whole face tightening in reflexive rage as his claws came to once again clutch at the life support cable, tugging at it.

"You'd do well to remember which of us is wounded here, Carrion," the automobile ground out, his voice losing all traces of its normal smoothness as it sank toward outrage. "No one, and I mean no one will be taking Breakdown offline any time soon. He's entirely capable of picking his fights and winning them. And even if someone did manage to put him down, they would find themselves in a very similar position not long after at my hands. I'm funny that way. So it's not a good idea to posit hypotheticals on the subject." As he spoke, his claws clenched and pulled at the cable, alternating it's connection with Carrion's body, sending quick flashes of pain through him before finally disconnecting it entirely. "Say anything stupid like that again, and I'll take you apart. Do I make myself clear?"

In a rage, Knock Out could actually be quite terrifying, though nowhere near so much as Megatron or even Starscream had ever been. It was enough to signify that the conversation really ought to have ended there. Still, the small seeker couldn't help running his mouth, forcing a grimace of nasty pleasure despite his discomfort.

"S-so that's a no, then, huh?"

The claw not gripping the life support cable seized him by the face. Without the pain blocking signal, the contact was agonizing; bare wires and circuits crushed down against core metal. His engine revved as he choked back a sound of distress, trying to sink back into the berth without causing more friction against the wound. Knock Out only clenched a little harder for a moment, before releasing him and thrusting the life support cable back in place. "Eventually, yes, I would get over him," the medic hissed. "But I have an excuse to be attached to Breakdown, I have a reason to feel myself… indebted to him. What do you owe Starscream but an embarrassingly low sense of self preservation and the ability to act like a sparkling well past a mature age?"

A hypothetical question, Carrion would realize later, but in the moment it felt like another blithe, intentional attempt to get a rise out of him. The words cheapened the illogical emotions that got tangled in his spark and processor when Carrion thought about the older jet. They implied that Starscream had been some kind of one-sided infatuation. Starscream, who had stuck his neck out for him more times than he could process, who let him run away like a spoiled scrapling and then came after him and brought him home, who never let him get away with being stupid or clumsy and always forced him to strive for cunning, clever, brutal perfection.

"I owe him my life," Carrion muttered, his single optic narrowed in a fresh glare. "And since that's not worth a whole slagging lot, I owe him a lot more. You can belittle what I meant to Commander Starscream all you like, since you'd probably be right in saying it wasn't all that much, but you can quit pretending that you're the only one with… an attachment to another mech."

Knock Out met his glare with a surprisingly easy look, much of the malice gone out of his expression. He looked much less ready to peel Carrion into scrap, if a little disturbed by the younger mech's frankness. Finally he exhaled a little sigh, seeming to take a moment to recompose himself into his normal, infuriatingly cool self. "You want me to replace your optic, regardless of how well it matches the original?"

This was how it always was, Carrion knew, with arguments between Decepticons that didn't end in a fight or murder. They simply tried to pretend that the quarrel hadn't happened. It had always been easy before, but Carrion had never been in an argument about something that hurt so personally. That made it a little harder to swallow his bitterness and respond. "Yeah, well, preferably without dramatically unbalancing my head. Just get the size right, I don't give a scrap after that."

"Of course you don't." Knock Out intoned, smirking faintly. "All right, sit tight. I'm sure I can find something for you that won't make you look too much more unsightly." The medic sauntered off to retrieve the tools necessary for the job, laughing as his own wit. Watching him, Carrion tried to push past the heavy sinking feeling in his spark, to do as advised and move on. And yet, even as Knock Out set about finally replacing his optic, he remained uncharacteristically quiet, a bitter emotion encasing him and forcing his silence.

It would be so easy to stay angry at Knock Out, who was infuriating on principle and hovering right there where anger could be directed at him. But directing his anger at the automobile had done nothing but make him feel worse and getting into a fight had made him hurt and uneasy. The anger was for someone else, but it made no sense to direct it anywhere but inward. Being angry at the dead was illogical and impractical, even if they had hurt him in passing. Starscream had no more planned to die than Carrion had planned on getting half his face crushed.

But it was still there, that anger, and no matter how he wanted to aim it at himself or process it away, it lurked and bided, twisting inside him as Knock Out worked on his face. Starscream had never promised Carrion anything, had never been sentimental about the ways that he was around for the younger jet, but he had always been there and had always come when Carrion needed him, and that implied some sort of assurance. It was stupid and selfish and he knew it, but he couldn't help the fury that welled up in him at the way the Air Commander had suddenly, violently disappeared from his life.

"Slag him for dying," he growled softly as Knock Out put a final twist against the new optic, connecting it securely to Carrion's processor and finishing its installation.

Carrion was vaguely amused to see the other mech hesitate before letting his iciest smile slip onto his face, voice its usual silken purr in his response.

"That's the spirit."