So why'd you really do it?

by Dreamingsinger

The last thing the Autobots expected was that Knockout would ever switch sides to join them. But why'd he do it? It's out of character. There are bound to be a few trust issues. But when he is badly injured, saving his team without even thinking about it, the 'bots begin to discover that their suspicious defector is far less confidant than they thought, and far more broken.

42. Chapter 42

Notes/ Oh my goodness! Its been ages since my last update. And I do truly apologize for that. I've had some health issues, almost immediately followed by an out of town move, which of course meant a need to hunt for a place to live and then unpack in said place,and a new city to learn my way around... None of this is a good enough excuse for not updating :( And worse, this chapter is not too long of one... plus it's a sad chapter.

Yeah, I'm on a roll of perhaps the wrong kind, haha. Next update will be quicker now

Arcee had assumed that Ratchet might just be waiting to meet her somewhere close to the main outer doors, as soon as she had returned to base. But he wasn't, and indeed she walked quickly, all the way to the common room, still pushing her youngling recharging in her stroller, without running into anyone.

"Anyone home?" she called out jokingly, and keeping her voice quiet so as not to wake Cybershock, as she walked into the common room and looked around quickly. The only one in there turned out to be Bulkhead, who sat comfortable on a bench close to the furthest wall, with a worktable close by, intently reading and writing on a datapad with the pen he held on his hand.

"Looks like everyone's away tonight," Arcee commented. A sense of strange dread and mixed emotions had began to well up in her fuel tank and all the way to her spark. And she chatted ideally for a moment, while she tried to force her tank to settle. "I don't even see any of the kids anywhere." Cybershock, suddenly finished with what turned out to be a very short nap, fussed just enough to get her carrier's attention. And Arcee lifted her from the stroller and into her arms, smiling slightly when the little one giggled happily.

"The kids went off exploring," Bulkhead answered. He stopped writing and looked up from the datapad. "Of course I told 'em to be careful, and don't go past the fence if they get outside. Jack will keep Miko out of trouble."

"Have you seen Ratchet?" Arcee asked, finally daring to do so. When the youngling squirmed in her arms, she bounced her little one holding her against the side of her frame with both her arms. "He comm'd me while I was shopping…. Said to come back as soon as I could..."

"He's waiting for you in the medbay. Oh, and Knockout is with him too. He comm'd me to help him, not long after you left. Of course I helped him..." The big green bot stood up from the bench, and stepped closer to her, still carrying the pad. He placed it, with a shrug of his shoulders, into his storage compartment. Notes on probably still current construction, Arcee saw as he did so.

"Thanks Bulk'" Arcee mumbled, distracted, uneasy and far from liking it. "Sounds like I had better hurry." Pausing a second, uncertain of exactly what to do with her youngling, who she still carried resting happily in her arms, she turned quickly and held her out to her teammate. "Take the baby for a few minutes, please?"

"Got 'er," Bulkhead answered quickly, and he grinned nodding as he quickly – if not somewhat more awkwardly than might just have been ideal – took the youngling from her. "Alright you, come here." He chuckled a little, and with his confidence clearly growing steadily, he settled the little one against his frame, supporting her on his hip joint just as he so often saw others do. "What do ya say we hit the gym for a while, Kid? You're never too young to learn to throw a nice right hook!"

The little one just laughed, happy as ever as her carrier turned to hurry from the room. And for that Arcee was relieved.

Ratchet, sure enough, was waiting for her standing in the hallway right outside the closed doors of the medbay. And he stepped toward her fast as soon as Arcee practically power walking, rounded the bend in the hallway. The old bot, Arcee saw at once with a falling spark, did not exactly look so good. He was so clearly tired, and shook his head slightly with an almost blank look in his optics. And beside him, sitting still in his mobility cart, Knockout stared down at his knees.

"So what's this Starscream situation?" Arcee questioned, as she joined them by the door. And she wondered to herself just why it was that her processor was screaming at her by now that she just didn't want to know the answer.

"He's taken a dive," Ratchet said, speaking slowly in low tones. "I know we all saw it coming. But this was fast even for his condition. Arcee, if he lives through the night I'd be amazed. He's been somewhat coherent today, or at least some of it…. Though it's very on and off. He's been asking specifically for you. Insisting, during the moments he can speak sensibly and the world clearly makes some amount of sense to him, that he needs to talk to you."

"Yeah, well what makes anyone think I wanna talk to him?" Arcee's reply was far too snappy and she knew it. But dread and confusion was welling up again in her frame. And the worse the feeling got the less she liked it.

"Arcee..." Ratchet's tone was one of warning. But hardly one that lacked compassion. And without another word he simply lowered his optics and shook his head again just a little.

With a sigh, intended to clear her intakes, Arcee looked at the old bot, forcing herself to speak properly again. "Did… did he say what he wanted?"

"I have no idea. He only said again and again that he needed to talk to you."

"Of course I would get so lucky."

"Arcee… please. Have some compassion..."

"Starscream never showed the slightest hint of compassion for any one of us," Arcee grumbled, with a defiant scowl on her face-plate. She held her frame rigid, and resisted a fast growing urge to turn around and stomp off. "He never showed even a hint of compassion for Cybertron itself. Willfully choosing to continue a pointless war, when everyone around him said no more… And let's not forget about how he used to bomb our field hospitals full of already mortally wounded, just to prove he was bad enough to do it! Give me a moment and I'll list at least two dozen of his war crimes! A list nearly as long as that of Megatron himself..."

"The situation… his condition. It's bad," Knockout said quietly, interrupting her grumbling rant. He mumbled toward his knees, and still not looking up. And the tone of obvious near horrified shock, that he tried seemingly almost too hard to hide from his voice, made Arcee's air of defiance crumble at once. She stepped closer to him at once and listened while he went on speaking. "His awareness is surprisingly good for the most part… That's not uncommon I suppose, with bots as they come closer to gradually off-lining. The color is fading out and the paint is chipping. And he just doesn't seem to ever stop shaking. A mix I suppose of his illness itself in this late stage, and enough high dose pain medication that he should probably not still be conscious...

Leaning' forward, Arcee placed her arms around her bondmate's upper frame. And for a moment she just hugged him silently with her head against one of his shoulder panels, while he sat still on his cart. Though their shared connection she strongly sensed his emotions, so mixed and varied and contradictory to each other that it barely made sense at all. And she sensed just how little sense it made to him on top of it all. Without much of a thought at all about it, she sent back feelings of her own understanding, love and respect. After a moment, he slowly lifted his stronger and functional arm, so that he could hug her back, and for only another second or so they just stayed exactly like that.

"Where's Cybershock?" Knockout asked her, finally snapping out of his state of dismay.

"She's with Bulkhead." Arcee reluctantly let him go and stepped back. "He took her to the gym of all possible places." She forced a tiny laugh, before her face-plate turned serious and she gestured vaguely toward the medbay doors, "I've gotta go and deal with this..."

"I'd better go and get that youngling of ours," Knockout muttered, probably thinking out loud more than anything. He slowly turned the a little and rolled quickly away.

Arcee turned to follow Ratchet as he walked quickly back into the medbay. The doors slid shut behind them, and he lead her around to the back of an otherwise empty and quiet room. And she followed him right to a recharge station set up into an almost flat position, where Starscream lay unmoving, dull in color, and connected to a terrifying number of monitors and machines meant obviously to carry out functions his own systems no longer could. His red optics were open just slightly, and that was enough to show that he was still awake, though it might not have looked like it all until Arcee slowly stepped close enough to notice. And sure enough his body shook slightly yet constantly and it was clear in under a second of watching, that it would not just simply stop.

Bumblebee sat in a chair beside the recharge station, not doing much of anything at all, but simply sitting. At this point there was clearly so little left that anyone could do. But his hand, strangely, brushed steadily against one of Starscream's wingtips – an action that was obviously purposeful and deliberate. The young bot looked up when his teammates approached. And look on his faceplate, however uncertain it may have been, was also a mix of the usual compassion and determination he'd shown from the very first of his training days.

"That tends to be the simplest way of calming a panicking flier," Ratchet told Arcee, distracted while he nodded approval in his young student's direction. "Of course Knockout needed to teach him that only once." The old bot's face turned far more serious than it had been already, and he continued on, speaking quickly now, but in a near whisper and standing close to her.. "Arcee, I'm leaving you my med scanner, in case you should need one quickly. Call me in seconds, if he suddenly crashes. And I won't lie. That could easily happen. The machines are pretty much the only reason he's still online, and even that is barely sustainable now."

Before she knew it, Both Ratchet and Bumblebee had left together, conversing in hushed tones under their intakes. And as the medbay doors, far across the room closed again, Arcee stood a second doubtful and dumbfounded, with a med scanner in a nearly trembling hand, and staring down at a dying bot who had once been a sworn enemy. With a slow deliberate intake to clear her processor and collect herself, she quickly set the scanner down onto a nearby worktable still in reach. And just as quickly, she hurried around to the other side of the recharge station in order to pick up the chair that her teammate had left for her, carry it back around to the other side and hesitantly sit down on it.

"Hi," she said simply, keeping her tone quiet. and keeping the greeting so simple because she had not a clue what else she could or should possibly say.

Starscream's optics were so close to being closed. The remaining slits of red still visible were so hopelessly clouded and dim, that it looked as though he may have had no awareness left at all, of her presence or of much else. But slowly, with obvious difficulty, and blinking against the bright lights above, he opened his optics much wider again. And it was obvious he could see and recognize her, because he turned his head just slightly so that he could stare at her in pain and uncertainly of his own.

"Hi," he said back. His voice was just as shaky as his body, and so uncharacteristically quiet. But he spoke in obvious coherence. Arcee wondered to herself how long that might just last, before he lapsed again into rambling delusions.

"Ratchet called me," Arcee said, speaking calmly and with an assumption that he could indeed still understand her. She hoped she'd know if suddenly he couldn't. "He insisted I hurry back. Said you needed to talk."

"One day last year, my blaster nearly blew your foot off..." Starscream said. His optics blinked and he appeared to struggle a second to keep them open and looking at her. And she cringed slightly, remembering, while she wondered why he would remind her of that. And so much had happened since that day, so much of it wonderful.

"I didn't mean to," he continued slowly, and after he'd taken a moment to just lay strangely smiling at her. "You fought with honour. I would have too… loss of weapon control… a first sign I was failing and I knew it. Though I tried hard to hide it..."

"I'd wondered that when I knew..." Arcee answered honestly. "That very same night was the night me and Knockout knew we loved each other," She wondered for only a second why she would bother to tell him that. But then what did it matter now? And starscream, oddly appeared to almost try to smile at that – something so unlike his usual hate filled and angry, ever-vengeful smile of twisted rage.

"I never understood why anyone would devote themselves and give their spark to a broken bot, until I saw the look on your face when you said that. It would truly have broken your poor spark if I had managed to kill him. And what did you ever do that I could possibly hate you that much?" Starscream went on smiling while he talked, however slowly. "You have his youngling. That day on the battlefield, I… I didn't know that then. I only wondered what it could possibly be that the crazy fragger would so willingly have died in order to protect. That baby… he could not possibly deserve to lose his creator..."

"She," Arcee answered, with a hint of a smile of her own. "The younging is a girl."

"I wish I could have met her."

"I think you know full well why I couldn't possibly have my child anywhere near you..."

Starscream gave one slight and silent nod at that, and Arcee knew quickly that he did indeed understand exactly why. The look on his face-plate though, given a second after that with his optics still closed, shocked and surprised her enough that she felt her speak pulse speed up beneath her chest panel. He was, she saw, genuinely disappointed and probably truly saddened. And Arcee had barely a moment to wonder why it was he so truly wanted to see her baby, before she had made a strange decision, and opened her storage compartment in order to reach inside. Hesitating just a moment, and almost but not quite second guessing herself, she found a small photo-file in its digital mini-frame that she usually carried.

"Would you like to see her picture?" she invited, with slight hesitation. And Starscream nodded once with a strange almost joy-filled look on his face-plate.

He could not hold the frame himself. That much was clear without even needing to see him try, which he did not. Both of his arm and hands stayed still by the sides of his body, while Arcee held the photo near his optics. And he blinked a couple of times, trying obviously to make his vision focus itself on the digital image. And finally he smiled again.

"Arcee," he said after he'd smiled at the image another long moment. And his voice was slightly louder now, stronger and urgent. With a clearly weak and now badly shaking left hand, he gestured toward the worktable she'd set the scanner down on. "My datapad. It's in the drawer..."

Reaching over and still seated Arcee pulled open the worktable drawer and easily found the pad, that sure enough had been left in there. But Starscream could not possiblly manage to take it from her when she offered it to him, and indeed it seemed he barely even tried to.

"Read it..." he said, quiet again. And his words died out as she powered up the datapad in her hands.

She settled back in the folding chair and when text appeared on the screen, following the very brief start up sequence, she stared blinking for a moment and barely comprehending exactly what it was she was reading. Starscream must have typed it, obviously, using a keyboard interface. His condition would never have allowed him to write with a pen in his hand. But he had signed it at the bottom, however close to entirely illegible the signature was.

"A peace agreement?" Arcee said after another moment of simply staring. It was meant to be a statement of her own understanding. But still it only came off as sounding too much like a question anyway.

"You are, it seems, the highest ranked of the Auotbots now," Starscream answered slowly, and with his voice almost impossibly quiet. "It only makes sense that would sign for your faction. This... this is what you wanted…?"

The agreement would never be official. Such a thing should have been signed formally by both of them in the presence of at least four other bots from each side of the war, two of which from each would then co-sign beneath them, with the rest acting as witnesses. There should have been no less than five bots of neutral status, two of which would sign as well. And Arcee knew that Starscream knew this just as well as she did. But then what did it really matter now? The war had ended when the would as whole decided it had, and perhaps it had truly ended centuries before, when most of both sides had grown fed up with fighting it.

With a pen she found after a quick moment of digging around in the drawer, Arcee signed the simple document, at the bottom of the page. It may not have been formal, and it would never matter. It made Starscream happy to see her sign her name beside his and suddenly the idea that he could perhaps pass on with some degree of happiness, felt right to her.

"Yeah," she said thoughtful and nodding a little. "It is what I wanted."

Starscream was both quiet and perfectly still for several moments, except of course for the endless trembling of his limbs. And Arcee could easily have assumed the bot had fallen into recharge, if not for his optics, which remained half way open.

"Your medic says I might have hours... a day and I'd be lucky," he said after several minutes. But he still didn't move again. Finally after what seemed like minutes he raised his right hand just a little, and his optics went to the monitoring band strapped around his wrist, with its wires tucked out of the way beside the recharge station. "Of anything I once thought I might just be at the end… this was not it. Wires and gadgets everywhere… alive only this long because of a dozen machines..."

"Starscream, I'm not sure I'm the best bot to be trying to talk to about..."

"Please..." Starscream interrupted suddenly, his voice so clearly pleading. And Arcee was taken aback entirely at the coolant that spilled without any warning from his optics. "No more interventions. Some system fails and there are always more and more wires and lines… a medical team trying to force my body to work when it wants to give up. And it all just makes it so much worse… I try to say no, please just stop but by then I can't say anything..So I scream and scream instead. And they only think I'm completely gone entirely… and they assume I don't even know I'm screaming like that..."

His body, which had trembled all along for reasons she knew he could certainly not control, was shaking almost violently by then, as his pleading explanation quickly turned to full on panic. His optics had, at some point opened wide so that he could look around the room in a too clearly confused kind of growing terror, and as soon as he'd stopped speaking abruptly, his words were replaced by sobs of panicked despair, unlike anything Arcee had ever thought in a million years she would witness from him of any bot.

"You have a right to refuse..." she said slowly. If any of her earlier anger still remained, it was now transformed fully into a new determination to help a fellow Cybertronian who she'd quickly come to see as now much more helpless than herself. "I'll gladly speak up for your feelings about all that should the situation arise..."

With some hesitation, Arcee reached out to place a hand gently against his wingtip. And with still greater hesitation she tried hard to copy the motion she had seen for just a second not long before. It took a moment, and probably several. But finally Starscream's helpless crying grew quiet and he half shut his optics again. For another few moments he only looked up at her, all the more tired now from the strain a display of such emotion had put on a weakened frame.

"You must wonder why I choose to let my life end here… let my condition kill me when I was still promised a decent chance..." Starscream said, speaking slowly after short while in which he'd recovered a little from the exhaustion of his strange bout of crying panic.

"It certainly crossed my mind," Arcee admitted. Her hand remained on the wingtip, and she continued on with her gentle motions of her finger tips against it. "Any sentence you would have faced in an Autobot prison would certainly not have been forever. And I know you knew it."

"I was no one special. Just a young bot of science when the world went to war. I wasn't stupid… I wasn't brilliant. Just one more young bot that tried so hard to stand out in the field of many much better than me. I'll never know why it was me of any bot, that Megatron chose to train up for his cause. But... it was me. I learned to fear fro my life more with ever day that passed. And fear taught me to be underhanded, dirty… anything it took to survive. I forgot what I'd been. That little human friend of Bulkhead and Knockout… she made me remember where I started… that I had passion once for things far removed from waging endless war. I never deserved to be scrap… garbage to use at one sick bot's will. And a tiny human dared to tell me… You are rebuilding our world. A brand new Cybertron that will surely be somewhere worth living for the first time in centuries. And I could never have a place on it. I would only destroy it in my drive to rule, because that's what was made of me… I'm only a weapon of destruction, who by now could never be anything more..."

Arcee understood, in that moment exactly what it was Optimus Prime had tried so many times to tell her. And indeed he'd tried so hard to tell the very same to every one of his Autobots. She remembered battle after battle, watching him shoot at the sky so clearly hoping only to bring Starscrean down alive but never to kill him. She remembered that Starscream had almost defected once. And she wondered now if he might truly have meant it before she'd made her mind up that she should beat on him, when he'd chosen to taunt her in his own confused lost uncertainty.

"Soundwave," Starscream said, and for the next few seconds he appeared to search for words with which to voice a thought that might just have been important.

"What about Soundwave?" Arcee prompted gently, hoping such prompting might do some good and unsure entirely if it would.

"Don't think I didn't know for at least a century that the fragger is practically blind." Starscream smiled then, and even laughed slightly under his intakes, before his face-plate turned completely serious. "Megatron would only have scrapped the most loyal of his officers in a pool of his own energon, had he ever known. So who was I to tell him, when he just somehow never noticed."

"It was honourable of you to protect his secret..." Arcee said. It mattered to her in that moment that he pass soon assured that his spark still held some shred of goodness.

And in response he looked at her again, appearing to think harder than he should have once needed to, before he spoke again. "Tell him someday for me, that I was wrong to shoot him from the sky, and I know that. Centuries of jealousy and competition… unending resentment… it went too far..."

"I will speak with Soundwave," Arcee promised, knowing she would indeed certainly do so. And as an afterthought she quickly added, "shooting down a fellow member of your own faction while in flight was a spark-less thing to do. We thought he was dead at first. But then he defected. He got out of all the madness. Soundwave is becoming his own bot now. And Laserbeak too. In a way, you may have saved them both."

"Where… where is Skywarp?" Starscream's voice, both weaker and shakier than ever interrupted her before she could think of anything she might say next and she snapped to full alertness at once when she realized that his words were entirely out of context and had nothing at all to do with the discussion of only a brief moment before.

"Starscream," Arcee said firmly. And her free hand reached quickly for the scanner she'd left on the worktable beside her, as she wondered all the while what exactly what use scanning him might be at that point.

"Hmm?" he asked, mumbling. And she knew by that that he was at least partly still aware of the present. But his partly open optics were staring at nothing. He was still aside from his trembling for another moment. Suddenly though, and unexpectedly both of his arms flew up in front of him, elbows bend and hands in weakly clenched fists, just as though he was trying helplessly to protect himself from something only he could see.

"No, no. Please don't, please don't make me…." he cried, quickly far from coherent as his arms tucked in closer to his body. Then he gave out a couple of loud and wordless screams of unseen terror, before he mumbled, "Skywarp? Where are you? Please… help me!"

"It's just a med scanner," Arcee said, forcing her voice to stay low, and trying hard to speak slowly, when he tried in his now badly confused terror, to knock the scanner from her hand. "Please hold still for a second, so I can scan you quick."

But Starscream only screamed again, shrieking into the air around them at nothing, and she knew than he was not simply afraid of the scanner she held. And when a heavy stream of coolant tears poured from his optics while he shook harder and harder, she knew he may not have even been aware of the device at all, or even who it was that was holding it. She moved to set the device down again, sure it was mostly useless by then anyway, and simply sat by him in her folding chair letting him sense the presence of a fellow Cybertrionain as well as he could have, while he screamed for a few more long moments.

"Arcee…" he mumbled after a moment more and coming back from his delirium when she hadn't known if he would. "Everything… hurts..."

"I know," she said back, with compassion.

"I… I can do better," Starscream mumbled. He was barely coherent now, and through half closed optics, his focus was on anywhere but the madbay or on the Autobot beside him. "I'll get it right. I'll get it right. I know I'm stupid. I know I failed you." The once feared flyer raised his arms again, placing his hands in front of him with more desperation then before, as he gave another wordless scream."

"Hey," Arcee commanded firmly, taken action with barely a thought. Her free hand went right to his shoulder panel and she shook it gently. "Look at me a second."

She'd witnessed a bot, her own bondmate, caught up in flashbacks and terrors within his own processor for long enough that such things barely even scared her anymore. And she'd pulled him back successfully to the present often enough that she thought perhaps she could pull this bot back into reality too, even though this one was a very different bot. But she couldn't. And the incoherent screams of terror went right on undeterred, as all the while he continued to wage a futile battle with only his weakly blocking arms, against something certainly not present in the room.

'Ratchet,'Arcee remembered in under a second that surely he would know exactly what to do. And reason wisely told her that now was the time to call him back in. With a now shaky hand that she moved from the 'con commander's shoulder panel, she tapped a finger against her personal comm, and over it she almost shouted for the old medi-bot to get back there now. She turned her full attention back to Starscream, just in time to see the ever constant trembling of his body, turn abruptly into violent convulsions.

"Looks like we've got new problem now," she said, looking to the door as soon as it had slid open to let Ratchet in, with Bumblebee following close behind him. She lightly took hold of the bot's right arm before it could slam hard against the side railing of the recharge station, which a force that she knew could well be enough to badly hurt him.

"This isn't new," Ratchet answered without looking at her. "Just worse then I've seen before this. Arcee, back up."

"I was afraid this would happen," he muttered under his intakes, while he grabbed his scanner from the worktable. And quickly, with barely a glance in his direction, he snapped at his young student, "'Bee, get me his medication. Quickly. The blue container to your left. And get over here fast. I 'm gonna need your help."

The requested medication, which Ratchet injected quickly into an energon line already attached to the dying bot's body, did indeed put a stop to the terrible convulsion – though it did take far longer than the old medic clearly would have liked. And he mumbled that fact under his intakes, while he shook his head frowning.

"Ratchet," Bumblebee mumbled, helplessly. He stood nearby, holding the med scanner that he'd quickly retrieved,and staring its little view-screen. "Processor pressure is rising again."

"Clearly," the old medic snapped, almost too harshly, as he shook his head again. He opened his mouth too speak again, but he was interrupted before he could say another word, by a fully incoherent scream,as his patient went right back into violent convulsions again.

"Frag it," the old bot managed to mumble under his intakes. He held up a hand, clearly ready to give orders to his young student. But it was just as clear that he was not sure exactly what those orders should be.

Acree, standing back out of the way, and watching helpless with a sinking spark, remembered 'Bee's recent anxious words about leaking seals. Though she'd understood immediately that such a thing was obviously disastrous, it had been impossible to fully comprehend exactly what it was the young bot had meant. And she gave a gasp of horrified shock, at seeing first hand exactly what it was he'd been talking about, as the very same thing happened again with so little warning. The head,face-plate,and even part of the upper body of the rapidly failing bot, were covered with drenched with his leaking energon supply before anyone could even begin to determine exactly where it was leaking from.

"What do we do?" Bumblebee questioned. And through the obvious and growing panic he so clearly struggled to force back, Arcee could see a look of determination in his optics,she'd seen more than once from both Ratchet and Knockout, when faced with life or death emergencies.

"I'm not exactly overwhelmed with options," Ratchet mumbled while his head shook in clear dismay at the situation. But after no more than a second of this, his head snapped upright again and he looked at the younger bot with his own determination and a decisive look on his face-plate.

"Hurry and bring me the toolkit from the cabinet to your left and in the top corner," he ordered quickly. And he pointed vaguely right toward the one he meant, but there was little need, because the young bot was already running straight for it. "My last hope now is that if we can just manage to disconnect the processor from all four of the main connectors... we might just be able to stop..."

"Won't that leave him without processor function?" 'Bee questioned quickly. But he grabbed the kit even as he questioned.

"Not entirely."

"but... he'd be non-functional. We'd leave him without self awareness, without an ability to think..."

"Bleeding to death within minutes would be far worse," Ratchet snapped. He grabbed the toolkit his student had run back to him with,and he shook his head just a little, in obviously effort to gather his wits again. And with this far quiet and more considerate he hurriedly explained, "we leave him almost non-functional, yes. But only until I can think of something..."

"Ratchet," Arcee spoke up, finding her voice in the midst of chaos. And it was only when the old bot turned to look at her, startled,that she realized how close she had come to a snapping tone herself. With one fast intake to steady herself, she stepped toward him, with a hand outstretched. And with it, she gently grabbed the hand he used to hold his toolkit.

"Please, don't do that," she said softly. Her optics stared into his with compassion and determination. And with her free hand, she gestured toward the dying bot without turned away from the medic. "Something like this, an intervention that extreme, it's the very last thing Starscream would want. Ratchet... please, just let it end here..."

"Arcee... you're sure?" The old bot looked at her, startled,and shaken. But he stayed where he stood for a second more just to hear her out.

"Yes," Arcee nodded, confidant.. 'He told me so himself."

"So, what now?" Bumblebee questioned slowly. He stood still in his place, on the medic's other side, and a few paces away from him.

"We let him go," Ratchet answered. His tone was so final, and he nodded his head slowly in understanding. Considering for just a second more he gestured vaguely toward the dying bot in front of them. And slowly he mumbled thoughtfully, "I'm going to disconnect all primary life support measures. But we'll leave secondary systems running, as well as the connected energon lines. That'll be the best situation for him in his final minutes."

"It's really just minutes then?" Arcee questioned. She found herself close to being sad just saying those words, and inwardly she questioned why, after centuries at war, that feeling possibly made sense.

"Several minutes at most," Ratchet confirmed. "And that's for the best, I assure you."

Arcee, nodding her understanding, stepped closer again to the dying bot. And unsure exactly why, or even what it was she was looking for exactly, she studied him closely with her optics for a second. The violent convulsion had stopped again, this time without any intervention at all. But the energon, leaking from at least one seal and probably more of them now, burst and broken simply from rising pressure, had never stopped its steady dangerous flow. And his upper body was covered in it now. Starscream resembled a bot injured far worse then she had ever seen on any battlefield she'd been on standing among the dead and dying. The constant tremble of his limbs continued as ever. And yet somehow, his optics were open again, if only slightly. His face-plate, soaked though it was in damp glowing blue, showed a near hint of a peaceful smile of his understanding. And Arcee, stepping closer, smiled back for a second.

"Not... not good..." Starscream mumbled suddenly, with surprising coherence, and he lifted a hand a little, and appearing for the first time to notice the energon all over it as well as much of his frame. Arcee thought perhaps he might panic again. It would certainly not have been unreasonable, she supposed. But he didn't. Instead he simply lowered the slightly raised hand again and shut his optics with a look of acceptance.

"Everything is bright," he mumbled after another second. His voice was quiet than ever, but still he did not seem to panic in the least.

"I... I think it's supposed to be," Arcee answered, uncertain.

An alarm went off. Then another not a second after the first. The involuntary trembling stopped almost suddenly, and the third and last of the alarms rang before each of them stopped again.

Ratchet had just finished disconnecting the primary systems as he said he would. And before he could even let the last of the wires he held fall to the floor, he'd paused instead to stare in dismay at wall within his line of sight. Arcee reached out slowly, with some hesitation to take the bundle of too quickly gathered monitor wiring from him. The old bot did not like to ever lose a patient. Even when he knew it was inevitable. Even when that patient was an enemy. None of that mattered, and Arcee knew it all too well. Instead of further reaching for the wiring, she reached out instead to rest her hand a second on his shoulder panel. The old bot slowly moved then to look down at her and he smiled a somewhat shaken little smile in her direction before he stood up straighter again.

"Well that's that then," he said. Matter of fact as ever. His gaze went slowly to the clock hanging high on a wall to his left, and he made a careful mental note of the time. "We'd best call this one."

Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break

Several of the bots and all three of their young human friends all sat together in the common room. But still for all of its occupants, the room was strangely quiet. For a good while, only quiet bits of conversation, mostly in hushed tones between two or three of them here and there could be heard over the steady sound of the usual tapping of the monitoring computer's keyboard. Eventually though Miko seated lazily on Bulkhead's big green shoulder panel, shifted her position and settled back again, this time slumped over half laying, with enough of a sigh and thump against his frame that she accidentally got the entire group looking in the direction of her and her bot.

"It's hard to believe, Starscream is really dead," she muttered, as she looked out over the room from her vantage point on top of her bot partner.

"It is hard to really believe," Raf agreed with her slowly. He sat in 'Bee's hands, which sat folded in the bot's lap while he sat on a bench by the far wall of the room. The youngest of the humans, shrugged a little and looked idly around at the others. "'Bee said Starscream was around since the start of the war. I guess he's just kind of always just... been. Ratchet says he might just have found his own kind of redemption in the end... It almost sounds impossible..."

'No more impossible than you somehow forging some understanding with Soundwave of all bots, that might almost resemble friendship," Jack pointed out with confident if not still almost slightly concerned look on his face. He smiled then and from his place on a bench beside Arcee, who sat holding Cybershock on her lap, and added slowly, "or Miko with Knockout for that matter."

"Anyone is capable of redemption," Miko had said it before and surely she would say it again. "That's exactly what Optimus always said. I guess that even includes Starscream."

"You forgive him?" Knocked questioned, from across the room. His tone though was only part question.

Miko shrugged a little, and moved so that she could face the other way and look at him.

"I don't know," she answered hesitantly. "Is anyone supposed to? I mean, he was ruthless and terrible. They say he killed thousands on Cybertron, all in the name of proving himself so the the world would fear him. But then on the other hand, he died in the end, just like anyone. And he was sick, and broken, not always in his right mind..." The human paused a second before she looked right at the red defector's optics. "How about you?"

"I... I don't know if I could ever even think about it," Knockout answered. But it took him a good moment to answer at all.

"So what happens to his body?" Miko asked, once again breaking the silence that had started to descend on the room. "What happens to any of you guys when someone dies?"

"His spark will return to the well, where most bots believe any bot faces the final judgment of our god, Primus. His frame will be put into the smelting pit," Bulkhead answered, his tone uncharacteristically matter of fact. "It's the very same for anybot."

"'Bee," Speedbreaker said suddenly, speaking moments after all conversation really had died out that time. She'd been standing by the wall far across the room. But quickly she hurried over, crossing the room in steps that were certain quick, though small for a bot's. The little tinted visor that served as her windshield in vehicle form, had flipped down to cover her optics again, as it tended to do. And she flipped it up quickly with one hand, while she reached out to him with the other and smiled a second at the little human that still sat on him, before her face-plate turned serious. "Ratchet says you are learning so fast. He told me tonight he has high hopes for you. Then he told me he fears you might just quit... He's been around a while, 'Bee. He says he knows the signs..."

"I'm not quitting, Speedy." Bumblebee's answer was quick and well assured. And he nodded his head in confirmation of exactly what he said, while he shifted, in order to lean forward to let his human partner jump easily down to the floor. "I thought for a while I would, yeah. I wondered for a while what on Cybertron I was thinking, even considering the medical field. But Ratchet was right all along. This is what I was meant for. I realize that now."