Reunions And Other Little Surprises Part 8

With a bar bill that kept growing by the klick to look forward to, Starscream forced himself to make the rest of his drink horde last. The spaces left by Skywarp and Thundercracker's absences quickly filled with other drunken strangers, frames bloated and bulging off their creaking seats. The night was dragging on, and the collective buzz of community was starting to wear off, fizzling out with every glass of high-grade drained to dregs.

He grimaced as his wing tips scraped along the filthy floor, the wide plates lacking the strength to stay erect. Pride meant nothing to the rusted masses pressing in on him- all bots were the same when they were purging their tanks in a gutter.

Strange, how easily melancholy seized him with no trine to distract him from it. Starscream was taking in the last of his current Hypernovae when a sudden rally of cheers almost made him choke on it. Static prickled harshly in his vocaliser, the thudding ache in his processor increasing tenfold as applause thundered down on his audios, creating a crushing pressure on his helm. He licked his grimace free of spilled high-grade, shoved his empty glass aside and almost shattering it on the ground as he wrenched himself around in his seat, wings notching the shoulder of some surly giant on his left. He could feel a glare drilling into his helm, giving the pressure a sharp point right into his processor, but the mech seemed too enthralled in the clapping erupting all over the bar to accost him, thank Primus.

It took a few nanoklicks for Starscream's optics to stop swimming, but when they gained focus he still had to squint to dissect the scene over by the femmes' table.

Chromia, the Cityspeaker's bodyguard, practically melting in the servos of a mech twice her size. The cherry-red plating made it most likely that it was Ironhide.

'As if I needed any help with wanting to throw up,' he thought murkily, with memories of lingering looks and touches that always lasted a nanoklick longer than necessary between them starting to stew in his processor. As cringe-inducing as the attraction between them was, if it was as obvious to a mech as unromantic as him how could they have ever hoped to keep it their little secret from a whole planet of nosy bots desperate for some joy after a galaxy-wide war?

Windblade seemed happy about the new development at least, wings fluttering like a lilleth's against the wind. His own dorsal joints twitched slightly, fighting against the weight of the alcohol sludging in his fuel lines. Either out of some kind of reach for joy himself or a drunken whim, he raised his servos to clap as well-

Only to force his elbow into the same mech who took a wing to the shoulder towering over him. Blue armour with a stark orange faceplate and a black patch where his left optic should have been, gestalt size from where Starscream was sitting. And just as drunk as him, from the amount of high-grade dripping down his chest.  

"Watch where you're flailing those things, flyboy!" he snapped, pointing an empty glass at him while the other shifted into a tarnished hammer. Under usual circumstances, Starscream's diplomacy training or centuries of experience begging forgiveness from bots bigger than him (whichever kicked in first) would have saved him from having it slam into his face.

Hypernovae-soaked glossas never held themselves back, though.

"Oh, sorry, I wouldn't want to dent your dime-store paint job, would I?" he scoffed, promptly forgetting the gestalt and turning back to his drinks.

"Breakdown, baby, are you really going to just let him insult you like that?" a femme's voice asked with tinged disbelief, the sculpted tone of a master manipulator. Only after hearing it, knowing she was no doubt better than him at the exploitation game, Starscream began to worry.

There was a sound like a hammer smacking against a hand. "Like the damn Pit I am- HEY!" The mech called Breakdown clamoured in Starscream's audio, reaching for one of his lazy wings when he didn't respond. "I'm talking to you, slag head!"

Starscream somehow only spilled the top froth of his drink from being wrenched around, still gulping from it as Breakdown bared down on him.

"You owe me another drink," he said, placing his empty glass upside down on the bartop with a hard thump that somehow didn't break the glass. "And one for the lady, while you're at it." The glint of his hammer pointed just behind him, towards a peculiar looking femme with black armour and spindly rods stretching out her back, some of them draped over the mech's shoulders. Never before did a puppet metaphor fit so well.

Starscream finished his glass, replying in a hybrid of a burp and a bark of laughter. "I don't think so," he snorted out, shaking his helm despite how it made everything slam together in a blurry haze. "You should be thanking me, really. Just half of that drink would have knocked you into stasis, I bet."

There was a significant gap between his slurs and outrage flaring on Breakdown's face, turning the orange to bright red and making his optic pop out wide enough to make up for his missing one. "You calling me a fragging lightweight?!" he snarled, bracing one servo on the bartop while the other weaponised one hovered in a rough path to Starscream's chin. The femme leaned in with her date, betraying fangs over her plum lips as they smirked.

Starscream just laughed again. "Primus, I know your processor must be slow under there, but it shouldn't take that long to realise-"

That was round about when the hammer found a snug place in his faceplate.

Though Starscream couldn't take in an accurate assessment of the bar while flying backwards through the air (and not in any way he was used to), from how quickly chaos erupted and the dent he found in his spinal strut much later on, he concluded that Breakdown knocked him back into an even larger mech, who shoved him into a pack of Predacons, who slammed him in the way of a femme's ped as it kicked up at someone else's chin. However it went, he was somehow airborne again above what was now a full blown bar brawl.

Almost subconsciously, his thrusters spluttered to life in a desperate instinct to save himself from plummeting into the writhing mass of bots slamming into each other below. He stopped just short of a chainsaw blade ripping at the air, trying to tear its way through a barrier of servos, before his overcharged tanks lurched and he had to land before he purged all over the battlefield. Ramming into a stack of empty high-grade barrels, Starscream was at least on the edge of the brawl and its deafening soundtrack of roars, grunts and whining machinery while he tried to keep down his entire credit account's worth of drinks. Flying after just one drink was bad enough; flying while absolutely hammered (literally in his case) was an easy death sentence for any Seeker.  

The fact that he survived the emergency landing didn't mean his spark was safe, considering he'd landed in the middle of a very drunken warzone. And there was a familiar set of black plating swimming in the dizzy haze covering his optics.

"Oh, there you are."

He recognised the voice as Breakdown's date just before two knives stabbed into his wings, hauling him upwards by his screaming joints to properly face her with his back pinned to the wall. There was a sharp sting around his wrists and his servos failed to raise themselves up. The rods at her back glinted with even more knives hanging in front of his faceplate, but none of them were as sharp as the fangs that grinned a predator smile at him. Energon had filled his mouth already, starting to leak through his lips. Everything else, the acid pink of her optics melting into her dark armour, was a messy blur.

"Breakdown's a little occupied with rearranging a poor red medic's faceplate right now, but I'm sure he won't mind if I have a turn with you," she said, pulling him up even higher with his wings skidding against the wall. He was forced to look down at her, uselessly flailing the dead weight of his servos in a vain hope of connecting with one of those perilously thin legs- they should have at least buckled by now, straining under his weight, but they stayed solid even as he tried kicking out at her servos keeping his own held down.

"Usually I like taking time with the cute ones..." She sighed, hovering a leg-razor around his faceplate and almost dragging it through the soft stained metal. "But unfortunately for you I've never been one to cheat, so..."

She might have plunged the razor through one of his optics, to better match her boyfriend maybe, if not for a lump of grey metal and claws slamming into her side and sending her veering to the floor. Her legs released his wings just in time for him to avoid rolling along with her, using what little wits he had left to swerve to the other side. Now instead of a very sinister spider bearing down on him, he was only surrounded by a trio of cone-headed mechs that he would have called Seekers if they weren't so horrendously ugly (he couldn't dredge up many names in his whirlwind processor, but he did remember that the one Megatron once called "Squidhead" went by Thrust).

He might have actually managed to dredge up a strategy for escaping if it wasn't for a stray wing knocking him right back into the thick of the fight, smacking against bodies as if he was trapped in a violent pinball machine. It was at least a klick until he was spat out on the other side of the bar, sprawled on the floor with at least one of his wings almost hanging off its flight cables. He held a hand to the aching joint and coughed up a drizzle of energon, praying that he looked dead enough for no-one to bother with kicking him.

To his luck, only two very similar looking bots lingered here- a mech and a fellow Seeker femme being held back by her wings. She seemed familiar, in a distant way his drowned processor couldn't hope to decipher.

"Lyzack, for the last time, you are not getting involved!" the mech hissed, straining to keep the femme in his grasp despite her small frame.

"Let... go, Leo!" she yelled, digging her peds into the floor and leaving thin grooves with her heels. Realising she was getting nowhere by running, she resorted to trying to pry the mech's digits off her wings. "I'm not a Primus-damn baby anymore! I don't need you to-"

Starscream finally summoned the strength to pick himself up and, more importantly, interrupt. "Oi, you two!"

The two bots ceased struggling against each other; switching their attention over to him like he was an energon stain that spontaneously grew a mouth. Starscream kept himself upright with a firm grip on a pipe jutting out from the wall. But before he could get himself into his default state of bossing bots around, the femme spoke.

“Commander Starscream?"

As a glaze of confusion congealed over his pounding helm, recognition clouded the drunken arrogance of her expression. Even with all his faculties running smoothly Starscream would have had no idea what to say to her.

"Excuse me?" he asked, with reluctant humility.

The femme's faceplate curdled, and she looked a nanoklick away from scratching his optics out. The mech had joined her side, giving Starscream a cautious once-over as if he'd collapse at any klick.

"Starscream?” He repeated his sibling’s question with a wary look at her. ”Ly', don’t tell me he’s another one of your ex-boyfri-"

"Don't be an idiot, Leozack,“ she interrupted in a scoff as anger started to harden in her optics. Starscream's processor was practically overflowing as he tried to conjure even the barest memory of her.

Then a faint turquoise outline snuck in from somewhere and slapped him across the face.

"Oh. Ohhh, yes... I remember you, Lyzack,” he said, with a smirk like an oil stain. “That timid little medic-"

Then she exploded. “I am not timid!” Either drink or the years had given her vocaliser a whole new depth that made her rage rattle in Starscream’s frame. Out of all the enemies he'd ever made she wasn't one of the more obviously deadly ones, but even he knew better than to underestimate the wrath of a scorned femme.

That is, he knew better when he was sober.

“That’s not what I remember…” He couldn’t help a chuckle bubbling out. “But from the looks of things you really have grown out of your shell-“

Again Lyzack interrupted, as her optics twitched along with her digits. “You'll remember me a lot better when I drive my ped up your-"

Her servo was starting to climb, as if compelled to knock into his faceplate.

"Don't you dare raise your servo at me!" Starscream shrieked, almost slapping her arm aside as his shot up in defense. "I am the leader of Cyber-!"

“And I am a warrior!”

He earned a second dent in his faceplate as her fist crashed forward into it, sending him backwards on the floor. This time he didn’t try to get back up, watching the siblings through a veil of static covering his optics.

"I've been waiting so long to do that," Lyzack said in a proud laugh, shaking her wrist as if the punch hurt her just as much.

Leozack looked down on Starscream with a quirked eyeridge. "Not often you see a mech knocked out in the first round... but I guess not many mechs meet your fist,” he huffed proudly. “But we should probably make ourselves scarce. You did just deck the leader of Cybertron, after all.”

The victory painted on Lyzack’s face drained. “…Oh slag, really?”

“Well, he certainly isn’t on all the planet’s screens for his looks.” There was a thud as the mech’s ped tapped against Starscream’s helm. “Doesn’t look like he’ll be getting up any time soon, so chances are he won’t even remember us.”

Lyzack followed her brother’s gaze as she experimented with pinging a digit on the Seeker’s chest. “And if he does?”

Leo shrugged as he started to walk away. “Then you can get Father to bail you out of jail.”

“You aft!” Lyzack stood up to rush after him. Unconsciousness was merciful enough to hover at the edges of his awareness just for a few nanoklicks, long enough for his audios to catch the clang of metal as she leapt onto Leozack’s back before the silent static consumed him.