A/N: These two make me squee and make sadface at the exact same time. My nose was caught in the middle and it exploded. Now: extra-sadface with added disfiguration. Awww.

Characters: Skyfire, Starscream

Pairings: Starscream learning to control his feeeeeeelings

Warnings: none. Bonding moment with some funny highlights and sad undertones.


Nice


The last thing Skyfire expected to see on his doorstep that Friday night was a pair of glossy purple boots.

More awkward yet was the fact he had just spent over half an hour staring at his phone, trying to get up the nerves or the simple intelligence (or the sneaky deflecting verbage he had never been very good at) to call Starscream and somehow communicate to him that he really wasn't too freaked out by the whole thing in the lab and he didn't need to apologize or anything, not that an apology was needed like being gay was a bad thing, and honestly he was more than willing to have him back to the lab on Wednesday because he was a little helpless without help and really valued his assistance but if Starscream thought he couldn't handle it or was uncomfortable he could back out and Skyfire still wouldn't judge or anything because he really did still think of him as a friend and he'd hate to lose that friend over something as transient as a mistake unless it hadn't been a mistake for Starscream in which case they should really talk about it unless Starscream didn't want to talk about it.

All at once. Without making an idiot of himself. Without being offensive to a man very, very prone to offense. All in less than three minutes, which he was moderately certain was the cut-off point for answering machine messages, and that was even assuming he got the Seeker's answering machine. The idea of sputtering that out into the Seeker heir's sardonic or possibly hurt silence sounded like too daunting a task. It left him sighing grimly and pushing at his hair and absently flipping through his phone's memory, staring unseeingly at wallpapers and old text messages.

Then his dilemma saved him the trouble and knocked on his door, leaving him wide-eyed and rumpled in his doorway.

"Starscream?"

The slight Seeker heir was standing an uncomfortable distance from his door with a dark bottle tucked under his arm, back barely pushing the outer circle of his porch light. The combination of the yellow light and the descending evening threw his already sharp features into gaunt relief, exacerbating shadowed eyes and a hard mouth. It wasn't helped by his angular body posture, which fairly screamed that he had a thousand other better things to be doing. He looked like some kind of grim specter of the upper class, still trussed up in his D-Con uniform even if his tie was bare.

Skyfire swallowed audibly; he couldn't keep the nervousness out of his voice, which must have sounded like reluctance, which made him feel like he had to scrabble to be welcoming even if he didn't know why Starscream was there.

"What are you—"

Starscream took the bottle from under his arm and thrust it at Skyfire like a standoffish three-year-old being forced to give a toy back, pale face cocked just a millimeter to the side.

Skyfire's mouth fell open. After a moment of standing and staring, he took the dark, glossy bottle. His eyes widened when he read the label.

"This is a two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine!" he fairly croaked, holding it up to the buzzing light.

"I didn't have time to go to a proper store," Starscream snapped, surly. He had pushed past Skyfire and into his drab but functional living room by the time the chemist realized they had completely misunderstood each other — and he hadn't invited the other man in.

"Wait, Starscream," he blustered, his hand out. He wasn't sure he had anything to say, really, he was just trying to stop the knife's path the Seeker was cutting into his living room with his shoes. He only stopped at his old couch, hip cocked imperiously to the side.

"We're going to dinner," Starscream said without turning around. He reached into his pocket and emerged with his talons wrapped around his tiny cellphone. Skyfire stared at Starscream's back uncomprehendingly, heard what he said, then shook his head.

"What — no. Is that what you—"

"And why not? Whatever other plans you have, I guarantee you mine are in better taste. We're going." Starscream looked over his shoulder, one slender brow arching as he looked over the chemist's rumpled khakis and button-down. "And put on a suit. Not a jacket, but a whole suit. Assuming you have one."

"My god, why – how the hell are you so pushy all the time?"

It was all he could stand. Skyfire's voice came out loud and incredulous, strangely satisfying after so many half-statements and bleeding reluctance, not just of that night but the weeks beforehand and even Iacon. Any and all cautiousness with which he was going to treat Starscream was finally pushed aside by the sheer aneurism of dealing with him. Regardless of whether it had taken several months for Skyfire to accept that this part of the Seeker bothered him, and deeply, his frustration literally had his hands shoved against his temples, his face twisted in sheer disbelief.

"I don't understand you!" he exclaimed, gesturing at the sharp silhouette of the Seeker's back. "Do you always function like the people around you are soldiers or something? Why can't you ask me if I want to go someplace before just… ordering me to do it?"

"I would think being kidnapped and forced to go to a fine restaurant would be the least of your problems," Starscream retorted as he turned around, offense creeping into his voice and posture.

"It's the principle of the thing!" Skyfire insisted, jabbing the winebottle into his palm. Then he realized Starscream was staring at him blankly and he was still yelling. Abruptly, all the fight went out of him. He went back to his nice, safe chemist's hunch, one hand coming up to scrub nervously at his hair. "I'd object to being ordered to, I don't know, take a million dollars. It's just not… nice."

"I am attempting to be nice to you!" Starscream said indignantly, striding over and relieving him of the wine bottle with a snotty tug. Skyfire, startled, let go and looked away from the Seeker's accusing look. He bit his lip.

"Okay, then. I can understand going to dinner, but why? Why the sudden urge to… be nice?" Skyfire asked, exasperation bleeding into his hoarse voice. He hated to be so simple, but he was bowled over by this strange encounter. He had never expected to see Starscream in his house and didn't know how to deal with the sudden change in behavior from the normally snappy, demanding but thoroughly unconcerned man he had worked with for so many weeks.

Then he realized Starscream was looking at the wall, expression both inscrutable and definitively uncomfortable — and it clicked.

He was trying to make up for what he'd done. That last Wednesday in the lab. When he had kissed him, after that awful revelation that still nauseated Skyfire when he thought about it.

Skyfire felt all the confusion and resentment leave him in a near-audible woosh — as it always did whenever Starscream's true colors peeked through his manicured exterior and startled him. He forgot sometimes that the other man was human and not some robot mindlessly bent on domination of the nearest object.

Skyfire sighed and scrubbed at his hair as a wave of exhaustion rolled through his big body, the low boil of discomfort returning. Starscream ignored him (or waited for him to say something) as he searched around for and grabbed a nearby de-corker and set to the bottle in his hands. The chemist's prospective phone-message lurked in his head, cut up into a million jagged pieces and hopelessly scattered around, leaving him rubbing at his chin, the picture of lame reluctance. Finally, he took a deep, hesitant breath.

"Starscream, I... I don't need an apology for — "

"And I don't need your pity," Starscream said sharply, twisting hard then jerking upwards at the bottle until it opened with a wet pop. He set the impaled cork aside on the table, pausing only to pass it beneath his nose, which wrinkled in distaste. "Dinner or not."

"Dinner, yes," Skyfire managed after a moment, blinking as if struck. He gestured to his cluttered counter. "But not out. I've… already cooked."

"You can put it away for tomorrow or something."

"Starscream," Skyfire grit out before he could stop himself. He was glad he hadn't bitten his tongue: he was rewarded for his honesty when Starscream looked over his shoulder, his claw-like hands frozen on the neck of the wine bottle.

"You cook?" the other man asked incredulously, like he had just told him he practiced nude trapeze arts.

"Yes." Skyfire studied Starscream's crinkled, uncomprehending face, then continued slowly, "It's what the poor folk do when we get tired of Chinese food."

"You aren't poor anymore!" Starscream exclaimed, offense back full force and curling his lip clear up to his nose.

"I was never — god, that doesn't mean I can't be normal! I have patterns, I have things I like to do, and parading around in one of your weird gentlemen's clubs would only make me uncomfortable. Look, I just want to eat dinner here, without suits and ties!" Skyfire exclaimed, voice surprisingly heated again. Once he let Starscream underneath his skin, it was hard to stop reacting even if he didn't know whether he was purging something buried or acting out of character, but then the big man looked at Starscream's surprised face and immediately deflated some. He cleared his throat and gestured lamely at the Seeker's mauve ensemble. "Well, you can keep yours on, I guess."

After staring accusingly at Skyfire for a moment more (as if it were his fault for being one of those poor folk when Starscream himself hadn't sent him his new salary yet), Starscream flicked his hand dismissively

"Fine. I'll just cancel our reservations at the Coach Plaza," he said as he whipped out his phone again. Just from his lofty tone, Skyfire could tell the Seeker obviously expected a last-minute change of heart from his accomplice. Not likely.

He actually pouted when Skyfire smiled reluctantly and said that would be nice. As he watched the big blond man go back to attentively stirring his dinner, the Seeker finally seemed to realize, somewhere deep inside his over-indulged shell, that an evening was only fun if both people were enjoying themselves — and one couldn't be ordered to enjoy oneself. Starscream slumped, still wondering why he hadn't gotten his way (a rather shameful question to arrive at after nearly thirty years of life). His last surrender was re-holstering his cell-phone and trudging over to sniff unhappily at whatever Skyfire had on the stove.

The ravioli seemed to pass his inspection, but he looked in absolute horror at the contents of the chemist's cabinet, unable to find even a single wineglass. Shaking his head with something close to affection, Skyfire forcibly relieved him of the rich wine and poured it into two plastic cups before Starscream could shriek oh dear god stop what are you doing as he so obviously was dying to do. It took a few sips before he realized that it tasted just the same in red plastic, even if he still held it with his pinky out, which went magnificently with his surly expression.

Surprisingly, things seemed to even out after that. With a little wine on-board, Skyfire was surprised how quickly the awkward kitchen stand-off turned into one of their older conversations. Like nothing had ever happened, they picked up right where they left off, and soon Skyfire was babbling so passionately that he sent pasta sauce slopping over the side of his pot and had to do a brief clean-up. Starscream didn't offer to help with dinner in the slightest and instead remained idly draped over the kitchen counter, toying with whatever was in reach. Still, his posture finally seemed relaxed, and something in the older man warmed to see that.

"All ready."

He set the plate in front of him on the counter with a small, awkward and completely unintentional flourish of his pot-holder. Starscream's look was downright dour, thinking perhaps of the snow-crab and kobe steak he could be having on a fiftieth floor somewhere. An annoyed look from Skyfire prompted a muffled sigh and a roll of his eyes, but after that, he behaved. Sort of. He still sent a sardonic look over to the canned sauce the chemist used, and Skyfire blurted out I add stuff, you know before he realized that proving himself to Starscream was the biggest exercise in futility since Sisyphus. Besides that, the Seeker heir actively seemed to enjoy tormenting him in small ways; they had reached such a strange, honest yet surreal plane that Skyfire realized Starscream was smirking at him for rising to the bait, then laughed and dug into his dinner without another word or lopsided attempt to verify his worthiness as a human being through ravioli.

They ate and talked. Everything was going so well that Skyfire should have been prepared for a fall-out, but he was a fatal combination of optimistic and absent-minded. When Starscream opened the wrong door to get to his bathroom, all four bags of posh clothing from the recent shopping trip fell out, spilling their overpriced contents all over Starscream's over-priced boots. Skyfire jogged out to see what the clatter and the shriek was, then stepped back with a mildly horrified look on his face.

"You haven't even unpacked them?" Starscream demanded when he found his voice, pointing at the still-folded foppery and glaring daggers at the other man, who suddenly found his dirty dishes very, very interesting.

"They intimidate me," Skyfire muttered somewhat miserably as he grabbed his plate and slouched to the sink with it, dreading whatever rash of hell Starscream was going to force on him after so cruelly disrespecting his gift.

It wasn't through any cruel urge, but rather just what he said: he just didn't know what to do with the clothes. Where to wear them, how to act in them. He had politely moved them around his living room for days and days, from the coffee table to the TV to the hallway, before succumbing to his fear of the high-priced cloth bags and shoving them into his hallway coat-closet just to get them out of his mind. He had actually cringed upon doing so, knowing Starscream would eventually notice that his supposed new clothing looked a hell of a lot like his old floppy polos, but he never expected the Seeker to find out about his treachery so directly and honestly expected to have his face scratched off in the next five minutes. What would happen after was anybody's guess, but he did know no one would ever find his body, no matter how well-garbed.

To his great surprise, however, Starscream merely looked down at the pile of rich fabrics slumping over his boots, all over the cheap carpetting, then actually smiled and shook his head. He chuckled hoarsely, one hand to his mouth, which looked weirdly stressed from the small action of turning up at the corners in such a soft, benign way.

"You can lead a horse to water," he said at last, with a hopeless, accepting shrug of his shoulders.

"Last I checked, I was drinking," Skyfire said somewhat nervously, raising his glass with a half-smile. Starscream returned that smile, then extricated himself from the clothing pile with a few offended kicks of his boots. He walked to the kitchen counter, grabbed his plastic cup up like a man and gulped down half its contents, leaving his old lab partner blinking at him almost worriedly.

"We're going to need something harder," he muttered at the cup, finger to his chin.

Surprisingly, Skyfire was the one to lead him to the liquor cabinet.

The older man wasn't a drinker, but he had enough vodka and bourbon to get four people comfortably soused, which translated to two people getting unforgivably blitzed. And blitzed they got. Maybe it was because they were on a roll, maybe it was all the stress built up over this whole encounter that was actually turning out fine, but getting drunk simply sounded like something that Skyfire wanted to do at that moment, and the clink of a metal measuring cup sealed the deal.

Talking over synthesizing techniques became a rousing challenge with ounces of hard liquor weighing his tongue down and at one point Skyfire regretted teaching Starscream all or most of what he knew: full of chemist fire and ever-so-inspired, he bumbled a word that no pedestrian would know and Starscream literally fell over laughing and screamed it at him at least five times before Skyfire sullenly chucked a pillow at him. Drinking already made him flush something horrible so he really didn't need the help with his red cheeks. He rebelled by staring at the TV for a good five minutes as the Seeker snickered beside him, then the conversation painlessly drifted off to something else as Starscream tired of torturing him.

They got along just as well drunk as they did sober. Even better, perhaps, when it was still a shocking revelation that they got along at all. Eventually, the evening quieted down to sips of water and long periods of staring at the hectic middle of a B-movie they interrupted, which probably would have been indecipherable whether they'd caught it from the beginning or not. Both men were sitting on the floor, fairly surprised with their circumstances and occasionally pausing to shake the feeling back into their sprawled legs. Their conversation drifted, interrupted by intermittent explosions and natural ellipses alike; before Skyfire knew it, Starscream was talking disconnectedly about his family.

"I saw her going down the hall. Followed her because… a bit of her hair fell on the floor, a curl of it. She cut her hair. All of it, just cut it off down so some dykey lopsided bob when she knew that Mother loved it long. Then she went into the, uh, the… room where our maids lived — they had their own wing, but it was horribly small — and she just started kissing the one who took care of us. I was… I didn't know. How could I have known? I was thirteen or… something equally stupid.

"I went and ran and told Mother because I didn't know what else to do. It's what I always did. So Mother came back and I heard things from inside the room. Heard her yelling, then slaps, several of them, then she came out and… left. Disappeared for three years. Didn't see her. Without her, Mother… I was the only one she had."

Skyfire tried to pin himself back to the couch and process all of what he'd heard, still trying to recognize that slow, dull tone as Starscream. The content alone was staggering, but the voice itself just kept sending him for a loop. The Seeker was still sprawled next to him at the base of the couch. The man had long since abandoned his mauve jacket and his button-down had dissolved down to the middlemost button, his glaringly pale chest glowing in the blue, shifting light from the TV. Skyfire made a sound to show he was listening, drifting and sending his whole warm world lurching pleasantly for a moment when he turned his head on the couch-cushion, opening his eyes carefully.

"How could someone just walk out like that?" Starscream asked hoarsely, staring at the ceiling. It took the chemist a moment to figure out he was probably asking him instead of the ceiling. Skyfire swallowed the dryness in his throat and took another sip of water with difficulty.

"Depends. Are you talking about the courage to escape or the… selfishness she had, to leave all of you there with your, uh, mother?"

"A little bit of both, I suppose," Starscream said dully. "It worked, obviously. I'm starting to think she's the only one out of the whole family who has any sense left in her. The rest of us… Mother slapped it all out. Father first and foremost. Someone should shoot that man in the head and put him out of his misery. At this point, after all he failed to do, it's the only favor I would afford him."

Skyfire might have made a sound, but he forgot. The heavy subject hung between them like a pendulum in the thick air, then waved itself into nothingness with another distracting round of noises from the fizzling speakers. Both men quieted to watch the perfectly sensible end of the B-movie, which left them both rather unsatisfied that the poor quality hadn't been consistent, at the least. In the silence and the serene crawl of the credits, Skyfire's head dipped, sleep threatening after this violation of his ridiculously wholesome sleeping schedule.

He made a noise when Starscream's cheek pressed against his big shoulder and he was drunk enough that it didn't matter. It was just a little pressure and it didn't bother him. Then Starscream's hand found his chest and a sudden anxiety stole the older man, tension clashing with the drunken soup of his muscles. He remembered the last Wednesday in a sudden, vivid, almost physical flash: when Starscream kissed him. Ironic, as that's what he was there to apologize for, and now they were drunk. How stupid was he, to get Starscream drunk after that?

Skyfire tensed noticeably, not even realizing he had pulled away only to be slapped sharply on the arm.

"Oh calm down," Starscream grit out. The smaller man was suddenly bundled against his wide chest, absolutely reeking of irritation in a way that allowed for no further questions. "You smell like cheap wine and marinara sauce — who the hell would jump you?"

Skyfire still held his breath for a little while, then realized, as his old lab partner simply sat beside him with his eyes shut, that Starscream's intentions truly weren't seductive. Soothed, he settled back and, in the syrupy haze of his fading drunkenness, somehow ended up flat on the floor with the other man lying against his side, head on his shoulder. It was odd, but not bad. Skyfire fell asleep immediately, weighed with an uncommon amount of alcohol and the normal stress of dealing with a demanding rich brat, even one who got considerably more tractable when intoxicated.

Pressed against his side, Starscream was struggling to stay awake. Roping his scattered nerve-endings and liquid limbs into the act of remembering, he tried to feel every inch of the strong arm that had fallen against his back, the heavy almost-snore in the half-dark above his head, even the cheap grainy carpet scratching him through his shirt. The smell of Skyfire. His good thing.

Pausing to plunge the room into comforting darkness with a click of the tv remote, Starscream wrapped his arms around the other man — his friend — and felt truly safe for the first time in years.


Outside, the watery blue light went out in the living room window; a nondescript car, parked a safe distance away, waited ten more minutes before pulling away and beginning its journey into the cold metal city, where there was a report to be made.