Notes/ Wow, thanks for the reviews. I'm always grateful for them, and I'm glad to see it seems like someone likes and is reading this. Thanks for the advice so far. Its good food for thought. I had hoped to have this chapter up a couple of days ago. Clearly I'm running late. Been busy. Gotta love life stopping you from writing, lol. This one is a bit longer, or at least I think it is. That should make up for my lateness. As always, please, read review, etc, etc….

Bumblebee knew full well as he drove fast across the flat lands, that he was racing right into a dangerous situation. He knew he should question his judgement. He knew he should have asked himself, before he even left home base, exactly what it was he was thinking. But he hadn't questioned himself and he wasn't about to. He wandered, as he left the road, and let his tires bounce along on less than stable, barely suitable terrain, if perhaps some back up might have been wise. The thought was dismissed as fast as it came. He tilted his side mirror up slightly and then from side to side a little, trying to get a look around and behind him, while he traveled in vehicle mode. No one had followed him.

He double checked the set of co-ordinates he had been supplied with, and kept right on driving, even as the path grew more impassable. For a split second his tires lost all traction, and he slid across a slick metal surface that covered at least half a mile. He braked in time to miss the sheer face of a great cliff before him Unable to travel further in vehicle form, the Autobot transformed back to bot-mode, and walked fast around to the side of the cliff. He looked overhead at the sound of a flying vehicle in a fast approach and, watched a small jet-mode as it circled twice, flipped in midair, and circled again. The flyer was clearly showing off, while at the same time probably surveying for traps.

"Starscream," Bumblebee yelled at the sky, as the small jet came lower. He recognized

him at once, even with a new bright paintjob. "Get down here and talk face to face." He had his weapons at the ready, but still inactive. He was not looking for a firefight, but was more than ready to shoot if things went bad. The 'con flipped his alt-mode over again, transformed in the air a short way from the ground, and landed gracefully on his feet. He stared the 'bot down for almost too long, a look of clear disgust and hate across his faceplates.

"It's Lord Starscream now!" he finally hollowed, pacing toward the black and yellow 'bot.

"We don't need titles," Bumblebee answered calmly. He held his hands casually at his sides, making his lack of threatening intent perfectly clear. "I thank you for answering my call to come out here and meet with me. Even if the co-ordinates you were good enough to supply led me somewhere so impassible."

He glanced around at the surrounding cliffs and the ground that was either too slick or littered with huge steel and copper bricks.

'Scream only laughed and then frowned at him in mockery. "Well I suppose such a trip would be somewhat of a problem for a ground based vehicle. Shall I apologize for my indesgesion?"

His contempt for anyone that favored a ground based mode had never been a secret. His comment went ignored. His dislike or being ignored was just as well known, and he went right on talking, determined to be heard. To get a reaction.

"So I suppose then that of all that pathetic bunch, you are the leader of the Autobots now. I would only guess the 'bots settled that matter by democratic vote. Your bunch always did love that fair and democratic nonsense. Now I tend to prefer a good old dictatorship myself. My troops will never doubt who their great Lord is and I cannot simply be voted out…"

"We have no leader," 'Bee interrupted his rambling on. "We are a family. We have no need for one sworn leader. We all have our strengths. Maybe if you tried it a little differently on your side, you could put a stop to the constant infighting your ranks are known far."

Starscream stared Bumblebee down again, for at a minute at least. He gave a silent snarl once, and let his eyes narrow in rage. But he got no real reaction. Finally, he kicked at a small bit of metal on the ground, muttering quietly, "stupid Autobot."

"They'll never follow you, you know," Bumblebee said after the second it took to hide his disbelief at the ridiculous outburst. "They will for a while. But it'll all fall apart. You have no end goal but to be in command. Do you know even what you are leading them too? You are not a leader 'Scream. It looks to me, like you want the title for the sake of the title, and that can never last long."

"What is it that you want with me, Autobot? A lot of nerve you've got, calling me up on a public comms channel."

"This war we're all fighting; it's been centuries now. So long that younglings were born, grew up and have never known peace in their whole lives. It's destroyed an entire planet and we only took it to the stars to keep right on fighting. We were given a second chance, Starscream. Another shot at building good lives on our own world. New lives could grow up in peace, could have ambitions, and amount to something wonderful. Those are the new lives that the last of the Primes gave himself up for. This war should have been over. I say let's end it today."

"I knew that you finally getting your voice back, would end badly for me," Starscream bickered, scowling again. "Now you don't seem to ever know how to shut up."

"I Mean it 'Scream." Bumblebee pressed on with determination, looking the unpredictable 'con straight in the optics. "You and I could let it end here and now, for both of our factions. An agreed and sworn ceasefire. No more innocent neutrals, who have never chosen a side or taken part, need to die. You could have a future yourself…"

"No!"

"Listen. You spent centuries in some crazy conquest to become Lord of the Decepticons. You've made it. Your end goal filled. Now why not lead your people to peace. Be the great leader that chose a better way. You could be remembered forever. Your name would live on in the records of Cybertron."

"I'll be remembered anyway, Autobot. They fear me. Fear makes history remember."

"They laugh and mock you."

"I will never sign some peace treaty with a worthless Autobot! You pile of scrap metal."

"Think about this…"

Starscream advanced forward a couple more paces. His blasters were ready to fire at any point. 'Bee felt his slight, but ever present sense of fear, well up through his body and he made ready to shoot back if needed. Still though his mind was made up. He would not shoot first.

He stepped back, stumbling over metal chunks, and sliding on the slick ground. He stopped himself fast and looked up at his opponent from his new position half sprawled on his back on the ground. He cursed his mistake of letting his guard down even slightly. Starscream was clearly far more unhinged than usual, and Bubmlebee knew he might well do anything by this point.

"I could organize my team," he said. He was talking fast but his tone was entirely serious. "We could well find and storm your camp, and place you under arrest as a war criminal. We know it was you that bombed that construction zone due south of here. The perfect match to your new paintjob proves it. That site was at the edge of neutral territory. It was occupied only by Autobots at the time, yes. But those 'Bots were serving at the moment in time simply as builders. An unprovoked attack was completely uncalled for."

He got himself to his feet again, and Starscream went on scowling. The 'Con eventually turned his expression to a fearsome grin. He placed his hands together and clicked his fingers against each other menacingly.

"Unprovoked attack?" He snarled. "Oh please, you ridiculous insect. I was simply trying to rescue a Decepticon officer, whom you seem to have taken prisoner."

"Rescue him? You think for a second I'd buy that story? You tried to blow him up, along with half my team. Knockout made his choice. He's hardly a prisoner, and you surely know it. Hence the attack of vengeance."

Starscream had no space to take off flying right from there, but he rudely turned his back and stomped off a ways muttering. Finally, he transformed and flew fast back up the sky.

"He'll only betray you, you know," he yelled from the air, his voice coming from somewhere inside the fighter jet. He circled a few times, taunting." What exactly do you plan to do with him anyway, make him a medic for your side? You'll never keep control of that one. He's only ever been insubordinate."

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Knockout woke up slowly, and with a strange amount of trouble orienting himself. He wondered at first when exactly he had dropped into recharge. He didn't remember doing so. He closed his optics and instantly reopened them again, trying to make his vision focus. Slowly images began to make sense. He could see bright lights overhead, and high white shelving to one side. There was a cabinet and a couple of rolling carts… the sliding door across the room, just visible in the corner of his vision, seemed to be closed. He understood that he was in a medbay of some sort. It reminded him a little of one he had worked in for decades, and for a second the thought of that caused a wave of strangely mixed emotions.

No, it was not the same one he remembered at all. This one was small. A lot smaller than the huge workspace he had once occupied. He blinked again, and remembered he had seen this one before, more than once. The Autobots had shown him around it at some great length. Various members of the small team, strongly hinted that he would be inheriting this work space sooner than later. The Autobots? He remembered that he was one of them now, or at least trying hard to be. The idea of it seemed as strange and shocking and somehow still amazing, as it did so many other times he had woken up to remember that.

One of the 'bots sat lightly recharging on a too narrow bench near the door. He saw him when he turned his head to look around a bit more. The blue and yellow one. The overconfident rookie that was so well known for acting first and considering the fallout later. The kid had been the first of them to actually try to be nice to him, to actually seem to believe his intentions were true. Knockout remembered that they had very recently shared a somewhat awkward chuckle about some mishaps involving the kid's phase shifter. Could it still be called a mishap, he wondered if clearly it had been deliberate? They had been enemies then. He considered calling to the kid, but decided not to bother. Instead he stayed still and set about trying to assess his own situation and make some initial self-diagnosis.

There was so much, and it all just hurt everywhere, and so badly that he could not think straight about it. He tried to focus a bit, to determine where the greatest amount of terrible burning and grinding pain was coming from and he simply couldn't tell. One thing seemed to hurt as much as the next. He had never considered himself strong, or built for survival. Mostly he got by on pure dumb luck. He was certain that many others on Cyberton, likely one either side of the war, would have hidden such pain all too well, but he felt like screaming. Behind him he heard the steady beeps and buzzing pulses of a couple of monitors connected to his body. At least four lines had been attached to his main coolant and energon systems.

Knockout had been barely conscious the last time he had been awake. Everything had been a mess of pain and terror, of confusion and wondering if he was truly awake at all. He could just vaguely recall trying to grab hold of one of his teammates, while screaming horribly, and he didn't know now which of them it had actually been. There were bits and pieces involving barely feeling his left foot and begging to please avoid a power down. Mostly he just remembered looking around in an almost detached sense of amazement at seemingly endless pools of lightly glowing blue energon that seemed to be leaking onto the floor from somewhere, of thinking he should care about the sheer amount of it and somehow not cluing in.

He remembered that for a while Arcee had been talking to him. Something ridiculous, about an insect nest and a fall over a cliff while someone yelled like a girl. He recalled that he had thought it slightly funny. There was a bit about racing too. The thought that he might actually be able to race again, to use his vehicle mode had made him calmer. He knew than that it must have been her who he had grabbed hold of and likely far too roughly in panic. At some point he could just barely recall, how sure he was that he had off-lined entirely, and wondering if he was supposed to be seeing a light."Hey. You awake? Can you hear me?" the kid on the bench was talking to him. He snapped out of his still confused recollections and looked at him slowly. He tried to move a bit, to find a more comfortable position, and to made eye contact with the kid. The sudden stabbing agony across his side panel, made him groan out loud and reconsider moving again.

"uhh… good morning… I think." The kid said, speaking with some obvious uncertainty. "Hey don't move. We've been taking turns sitting in here in case a monitor or something were to go off. The only way Ratchet would finally agree to go and recharge is if he knew he would not have a critical patent left alone for long. As it is, Bulkhead nearly needed to tie him up so he would sleep a bit and realize he had done all he could.

"How long… have I been asleep?"

The kid shrugged slightly and thought about it. "Maybe a day and a half. How do you feel? I can only imagine, like scrap."

"Pretty much. Apologies, which one are you?" Knockout had been trying but could not place that one's name, though he knew he should have remembered it. Against his better judgment he tried to move again, to do a better job of looking at the 'bot while talking with him. Again, moving only made his pain so much worse.

"Smokescreen," the kid supplied quickly. He seemed to be pressing a few buttons on a panel by the door, before he turned around again and went on speaking.

"I just sent an alert to Ratchet. He made me promise to comm and wake him up, if you woke up. He says he couldn't just keep your pain receptors off for too long, so he decided to risk reactivating the network… it seems that's the safer bet, even though…"

"He's right," Knockout said. He felt slightly bad for the young rookie. Obviously the kid did not do well at all, around anyone sick or injured.

"Right," Smokescreen rambled a bit. "You would know that. I… forget you were the medic for the other side… Hey, Ratchet said last night that you were pretty well scrapped, but once he started working on repairs… not quite as bad as it looked. I… I mean, still bad. He said best to be honest about that. but not so…"

A loud crashing bang nearby and somewhere out of sight, made Knockout look around the very little he could, searching for the source of the noise. For some reason he didn't quite understand, the sudden noise made him nervous. Another much louder crash followed in in seconds. By now he was trying to force back the growing wave of anxiety that was rising up though his body, while trying at the same time to hide his great unease. He didn't know why he was hiding it, any more than he knew why he was uneasy in the first place.

The kid didn't seem all too concerned about the crashing, and surely he would have known a threat if one truly existed… wouldn't he? As it was, Smokescreen was only standing by the door, which he must have just slid partly open, looking out into the next room and shaking his head. There was yet another bang, and then a hard metallic thud, which sounded like it came from the other side of the wall. No one seemed worried about it, in fact it should perhaps have even been funny, but Knockout could not stop his anxiety.

"Wh… what was that…" he tried to ask, scared by just how shaky he sounded even to himself and how he could not control that.

Smokescreen turned to face him. He was still shaking his head. "I think someone knocked over the… Hey, you okay? It was just…"

"Bulkhead!" Ratchet's voice demanded from outside the room. "Would you please be careful and tone down the noise! Do I need to remind you that I still have a seriously injured, resting patient!"

"…Er… Sorry."

"You had better be, you big clumsy…"

Knockout listened, to the conversation outside, hearing more and more though a growing fog of static in his processor.

"Would just go sit down, before… knock over…" He was not even making out every word by that point. The static fog grew worse and his vision faded to dull muted colors as the room began to slowly spin.

"That kind of noise… last thing we…" The old red and white Autobot medic was in the room by then, muttering about something and looking far too angry. He stood in one place shaking his head, before Knockout's vision fell entirely into swirling colors.

"Knockout! Come on. Look at me for a moment. Do you hear me?"

That got his attention. The room stopped spinning and he looked back at the medic. Clearly from his tone, he had been speaking for a while, entirely unheard.

"Ratchet," Knockout managed to mumble slowly. "Please don't hurt Bulkhead. He didn't mean to…"

"What?" The old medic was clearly confused. He looked at him for a long moment and spoke calmly. "I'm not going to hurt Bulkhead. I don't want to hurt anyone. He knocked over a shelf… and a worktable… and then pretty much himself tripping over the whole mess. It's far too much noise. He needs to watch his step and be more careful. But I'm not about to harm him for it."

"Right… of course you wouldn't…" Knockout mumbled quietly, confused and embarrassed by his misdirected accusation. Of course Ratchet would never hurt anyone.

At the edge of his field of vision, Knockout saw Arcee quickly come into the room. She talked for a moment with Smokescreen in low tones near the door. Something about a missing teammate, and a lost tracking signal. The yellow one, Bumblebee. He had taken off some time earlier and not left the slightest word. She said he had last appeared on the tracking board heading due southeast, before the tracker dropped.

"Southeast?" Smokescreen mumbled slowly, appearing to think hard. "What the scrap… There is nothing out that way. He'd end eventually dead-end at the cliffs…."

Ratchet, standing nearby and obviously trying to listen while watching a monitor, and searching through a drawer all at once appeared conflicted for a moment, torn between duty to his missing teammate and his patient.

"Wheeljack is heading out to search for 'Bee," Arcee was saying. "Smokescreen, go with him if you want. I'll stay here and help if Ratchet needs me."

Knockout may have been in a great deal of pain and emotional destress, but still the look of relief on the kid's face, at a reason to go running out of there fast, was almost enough to make him laugh slightly. He must have been given some good strong pain killers at some point without even noticing, because he was beginning to feel at least considerably better. He felt the sense of panic and confusion fading out too, and had to assume it was because the crashing noises outside had stopped.

For a while he only stayed still, which his optics shut, and allowed himself to be worked on and checked over, scanned and rescanned, because really he knew he had little choice in it. He could have fussed and complained, but so far he had never seen anybody successfully up a fight against the old 'bot medic anyway. He listened while Ratchet explained the damages as he rechecked everything. The intake and half the internal systems had been uttered trashes. He nodded slightly. If anything he had figured as much. His body had been scraped up and torn open to the frame, and bent dented and left leaking from too many broken lines. He confirmed a sense of that too. He opened his optics again, as he became aware of Arcee, working gently to clean him up a bit. He realized with some great embarrassment that his body was still quite fully covered in a dull mess of dried energon that must have once been literally everywhere.

"I can't use any strong cleaning solvent, because of too many new repairs," she said, still working away. "But warm soapy water, should do some good."

"My left leg," Knockout mumbled slowly, finally daring to face the questions he had been putting off. "I know that's pretty bad."

He saw Ratchet nod, as the old medic moved to work with his lower body. "It was basically crushed, probably under a great deal of weight. Apparently even the wreckers had trouble moving a steel beam to finally move you. It sounds like you were wedged in good between the beam and the newly laid floor."

"I don't remember any of that…"

"Probably for the best too. The left leg took the most damage. Broken into pieces, the body armor ripped to shreds… I've taken most of the armor paneling off for now. Still working on straighten it out and repairing its connection sensors. I'll put it back on soon enough. The frame is too damaged at this point anyway to hold any of the weight."

His leg had been wrapped up in long sheets of metal mesh wrappings. Beneath all that, thin rigid metal supports had been temporally welded in place against the limb to hold it all in place, and bound tightly with wires and clamps. He moved himself slightly, carefully and watched while the old medic slowly began the process of unwrapping, while saying something about clean-up and redoing it all. His leg was straighter than he had feared it would be. Indeed, it was nearly perfectly straightened. A fair bit of the armor was sure enough torn away terrible and more of it had clearly been carefully taken apart with medical tools. The way the frame had been welded, he knew it had been in at least a few pieces not long ago. But it was holding together. He looked back up again, to see Arcee visibly cringing. She had stopped moving and stood holding her cleaning rag in one hand, near his right arm.

"You might not want to look…" she cringed again, the disbelief clear in her voice. "We'll find something to talk about, okay?"

Busy still working away, Ratchet gave a slight laugh. He reached for a pair of wire cutters and in one quick move, cut through the wire the held the support together. "The medics usually end up being the ones that try watching. He probably finds it interesting, if anything. Arcee, please hand me that roll of mesh wrapping on the worktable."

"I do hope everything is alright," Knockout said after a few long moments of silence. "With Bumblebee I mean. Surely they will find him soon."

"Don't worry about that," Arcee answered. "You have enough to worry about with recovery now. The team will find him. Anyway, the best chance is still that he cut his own signal for some reason, so no one would follow him. He's good at taking care of himself… he always could hold his own…"

Her words died in the air, but Knockout saw the nervous worry on her faceplates.

Another note/ Hopefully no one is actually looking too OOC. I am aiming for realistic characterizations in this. Okay, I had way too much fun writing the first scene, if I'm honest. I've never really had any idea how to write Starscream and this is the first time I've actually tried… but it ended up being interesting. He's clearly insane, and always did seem about to go off at any second. The unstable, unpredictable ones are fun!