Starscream hadn't been gone very long – just long enough to see Skyfire off at the spacebridge, and grab an early-morning pick-me-up and flaky blue treat on the way home – but when he returned to his home office, it was to find Skywarp doing… something… with his current lab setup. The dark wings were facing him and their owner apparently hadn't noticed his arrival yet.

"What are you doing." It wasn't even really a question. More an accusation.

Skywarp glanced back over his shoulder. "Oh, hey. I thought you'd ended going to Earth after all." He tucked the last loop of wire round behind the glowing central column and gestured at the setup. "I was just having a look at what you were doing."

"You're supposed to be getting your gate serviced." Starscream shooed him away, aggressively. "Not… fiddling with what doesn't concern you." He got as close as he could to his intricate equipment setup and examined it, minutely.

"Yeah, and I am? Sepp took the bit out that needed looking at. Said she could replace components without me there and kicked me out."

Amazingly – and highly suspiciously – the column looked fine? A few wires had moved a little and an extra diode or two glowed in the background, but the core of it was untouched. Skywarp hadn't even eaten any of the contents.

Starscream narrowed his optics at him. "What have you sabotaged this time."

"Nothing?" The teleport shrugged one lazy shoulder. "I was just having a look. Figured I'd come back and see what you were working on while I didn't have anything else better to do?"

"Really. When have you ever cared about this."

"Hey, I was bored-?"

"You being bored usually involves you picking fights with people, or-or… rigging up exploding paint cans. Is that what you've done with this?"

"No-o?" Skywarp leaned closer and watched the continued examination. "You spend all your time in here twiddling around with this old slag, so it's gotta be interesting, right?" He put his hands up at the mistrustful glare that sliced his way and backed up a step or two. "I promise I didn't break it. I know you don't like me in here but you weren't around and I figured I'd educate myself."

Starscream just snorted.

And then Skywarp dropped his bombshell. "I wasn't even gonna touch it but I spotted a coupla things that weren't configured so well and thought maybe I could tweak them a bit. It's running a bit smoother now. Right?"

Starscream cast a glance at the readouts- and almost choked.

All the values had gone up, right across the board.

He'd been babying this column for orns, adjusting connections and energy flux and intermix, squeezing a half a percent efficiency here, a little bit of extra output there.

Twenty-whole-Primus-fragging-be-damned-percent improved efficiency. In the handful of breems he'd been away from his lab. By the village idiot.

Starscream turned to stare at him.

Skywarp helped himself to the treat. "What?"

00000

It wasn't entirely unexpected when the whirl of flustered silver wings appeared in her office, but Forceps had set up a proximity alert anyway, just to give her an astro-second or two of warning should anyone come blundering through her door (and reduce the likelihood of her snipping clean through one of Skywarp's quantum arrays).

"What have you done to him?!"

The surgeon reapplied her optics to the microscope. "Disconnected his gate and removed his compiler for maintenance. Didn't we go through this yesterday?"

"That can't be the whole thing! He's, he-he… he's got clever. He's telling me how to do things! My own experimental setup and he's telling me how to improve it! I can't-… this isn't him!"

She glanced back up and watched Starscream pace out big agitated circles, hands on his helm, and shrugged. "You forget Skywarp has one of the biggest processors of your frametype. It usually just goes on teleporting him safely from A to B. I imagine he's found a temporary new outlet for it."

Starscream threw up his hands. "Well un-temporary it!"

"You're surely not feeling threatened, are you, Scarlet?"

He made a… noise, which couldn't decide if it was outraged or traumatised. "Absolutely not. I just I can't concentrate and it, it's-…"

A small smile pulled one side of her face, but she didn't look up, getting back to trimming off the stray corroded connectors. "I thought you'd have enjoyed the opportunity to have an assistant until Skyfire gets back."

To be fair, she was familiar enough with the seeker's histrionics that she didn't have to look up to imagine the filthy glare directed her way.

"Help from Skywarp? You're surely joking. I would never live it down. I'd be a laughing stock if it got out that he was improving my labwork!"

"Would it help if I promised not to tell anyone?"

"You shouldn't be enjoying this, madame surgeon!"

"You're the one who brought your melodrama to my workbench."

"Melodrama! I don't know what-… You have to fix him now. Please." Starscream covered his face with both hands and collapsed onto his elbows on her table. "He keeps correcting me. And I can't tell him to shut up because he's always right."

"You can't give the mech even an orn to enjoy his temporary genius status?" She patted his helm. "Ever the drama queen." She leaned down closer to his audios. "You realise that while you try to spend all your time here asking me to sympathise with how hard done by you are, it's taking me longer to finish these repairs."

He jerked backwards as though stung. "I don't know who you learned this sort of treachery from, but it certainly wasn't me…!"

He backed all the way up to her door, glaring and gesturing, but finally vanished through it.

She watched him disappear, and with a smile and fond shake of the head got back to work.

(Starscream gets home to find Skywarp talking to the "house maple" because he's figured out it's not a tree at all but a shapeshifter that's been pretending to be a maple for so long it's forgotten how to be anything else. Cue more "what?"-s.)

((Yes, in draft 1 it was a latte and a croissant.))