Looky here! This one doesn't have the usual crew, isn't it amazing?!

Prompt: Bumblebee/Starscream/bitter


They were both bitter, in a way.

They were opposites in almost every regard. The most obvious was their faction; one was an Autobot, the other a Decepticon. But there were other things, too, that were different about them. The way their comrades saw them, and their personalities, for example. The younger was seemingly carefree and innocent, eager to make friends with anyone and everyone; he was a close friend to many. The elder, on the other hand, was far from innocent, or even seeming innocent. He was abrasive, sarcastic; a loner with no friends.

If there was anyone that was acquainted with both of them, they would have been able to know immediately that there was no way, barring a miracle, that the two could have ever feasibly made friends. Even before the war.

Miracles, however, have the oddest habit of cropping up in unexpected places.

They met on accident. It was pure, horrible, luck. They had both been part of their respective factions' attacking squads in a small skirmish on the edge of Neutral territory. And, unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on how one looked at it - they had both been badly injured and accidentally left behind. Or perhaps not-so-accidentally left behind on the Decepticon's part. Either way, that was how they first met.

The Autobot was far less injured than the Decepticon, and he had been trying to find his way back to his own side when he stumbled upon the ravaged frame of the Seeker. He was a kind-sparked bot; it was something he couldn't help. And thus, he could not bring himself to kill the defenseless Decepticon, despite all his needling, and he could not bring himself to abandon him to his fate, either. So he had stayed, and repaired what damage he could, and talked to his own worst enemy in order to keep him online.

He found himself telling things about himself to the Decepticon that he'd never told anyone else, and he didn't know why. It just felt - right, somehow. He told of his friends, his enemies, his hopes and dreams, his bitter rejection by the one bot he thought he was hopelessly in love with.

And to both of their surprise, the Seeker told him things back. About his life before the war, about his two wingmates and Megatron, about his bitter despair over the bondmate that he'd lost millennia ago to a tragic accident on a frigid ball of rock far from Cybertron.

So, in a way, they became friends. They both survived the skirmish that brought them together, of course, and for a time they kept their thoughts away from one another. But, almost a vorn later, they met again on the battlefield, and instead of fighting... they caught up with each other; told tales of their more recent escapades. Somehow, when it was over, they found they wanted to meet again; and so they did. For several vorns they met regularly in secret, telling each other more about their lives, their hopes, and their dreams.

Somehow, along the way, they fell in love.

And then everything changed.

The Allspark was launched into space by Optimus Prime in order to keep it out of Megatron's clutches... and Bumblebee had nearly died protecting its whereabouts. In a rage, Megatron had nearly permanently offlined the yellow mech. Would have offlined him, if not for the last-minute intervention of Starscream. He'd managed to distract his leader enough to save Bumblebee's life, but only barely.

There were no medics in the immediate vicinity, no Decepticon medics at least. For Starscream, saving Bumblebee's life took priority over allegiance to any faction; and so, he threw caution to the wind and brought the scout back to the Autobots, barely avoiding getting himself offlined in the process.

But Bumblebee survived, and that was what mattered.

They continued to meet, and while the loss of Bumblebee's vocal capacitor threw them both off for a little while, they quickly went back to their usual routine of talking about the things that really mattered. Their lives, their former loves... and their new one.

Now, they weren't bitter. Not anymore, not even with the loss of comrades, old loves and the Allspark. Because they could finally be together, and that was all that mattered.