Recharge Deferred
Pairings: Starscream/Reader (Y/N)
Summary: Working late in her dimly lit quarters, (Y/N) barely looks up when Starscream storms in to vent about Megatron. But when his rant dies mid-sentence and his servos find her hips, neither of them can explain why this feels different from anything they've known before. He runs before he can explain. She's left wondering if there'll be a next time.
Warnings: None / General audiences. Suggestive tension, mild intimacy (hand on hip). No explicit content. Slow-burn.
The glow of the neon screen painted (Y/N)'s faceplate in shifting hues of cyan and violet, the only light source in her quarters save for the dim strip of illumination running along the floor's edge. Her (e/c) optic flickered—just once, a barely perceptible stutter in its brightness—as it darted across line after line of data scrolling down the monitor. Evidence, plain as polished chrome, that she was long overdue for recharge. The kind of recharge that came with a locked door, a darkened berth, and absolutely no further obligations to anyone wearing a Decepticon badge.
Three more files. Just three more and I can power down.
Her pointed digits moved across the keypad with practiced efficiency, each press accompanied by the soft click of mechanisms engaging beneath the tips. Click. Click-click. Click. A rhythm as steady as a sparkbeat, the only orderly thing in an otherwise chaotic evening. The overhead lighting was off by choice; the screen's luminescence was enough to work by, and it kept the headache behind her optic sensors from sharpening into something truly unbearable.
"—and does Megatron listen? No. Does Megatron even pretend to consider an alternative strategy? No. It's 'Starscream, your aerial assault lacks vision' this, and 'Starscream, I do not require your input on troop deployment' that, as though I haven't been leading seekers since before half this army was forged—"
Starscream's voice cut through the relative quiet of her quarters like a null-ray through rusted plating. He was pacing. She could hear it in the way his pedes struck the floor—three steps one direction, sharp pivot, three steps back—the cadence of a mech who had been stewing in his own frustration for the better part of an orn and needed somewhere, someone, to pour it into. She'd become that someone without quite meaning to.
"Megatron this and Megatron that," Starscream went on, his tone climbing into that particular register that earned him his name, "as though his every word were gospel etched into the walls of Kaon itself! I could run this faction twice as efficiently with half the casualties, but no—no—because he has that voice, doesn't he, that voice and that fusion cannon and that—"
"yeah?" (Y/N) said, not looking up from her screen. Her digit hovered over the next key. "tell me more."
She typed another response into the communications log, replying to a query Starscream hadn't even realized he'd asked her to file earlier. The Decepticon network required constant maintenance, and someone had to handle the busywork that the Second in Command couldn't be bothered to track. That someone, apparently, was her. She didn't mind. It was quiet work. It kept her out of the corridors when the higher ranks were at each other's throats.
Though 'out of the corridors' clearly doesn't mean 'out of my own quarters,' she thought wryly.
"Just once," Starscream continued, his pacing growing more agitated, "just once I'd like Megatron to do as I say. But no. He gets everyone to listen to him without a second thought. One word from him and the entire ranks fall into line like freshly minted vehicons off an assembly line. And me? The one mech in this miserable ship with an actual tactical education? I might as well be a background prop in his glorious war—"
He threw his servos up into the non-existent air in exasperation, the joints in his shoulders whirring with the force of the gesture, and let them drop back to his sides with a hollow clang of plating meeting plating. The sound echoed briefly off the bare walls of her quarters.
"are you even listening to me!"
The sharp spike in his voice—pitched higher than it had been even a moment ago—made (Y/N) jump in her seat. Her wings twitched hard behind her, the mechanisms in their joints snapping taut in an involuntary startle response, the tips lifting several inches before she caught herself. Her digits slipped on the keypad, producing an errant clack that broke her rhythm entirely.
Primus, he's loud.
She swiveled in her chair to face him, and the motion brought her faceplate directly inline with—
Oh.
—Starscream, who had closed the distance between them without her noticing. He stood directly in front of her chair, close enough that she could see the fine etching along the edges of his nasal ridge, close enough that the heat radiating from his vents brushed against her chest plating in faint waves. The S.I.C. of the entire Decepticon army, inches from her. Her spark gave a single, hard thump against its housing.
"o-of course I was, commander," she managed, her voice climbing an octave against her will. She cleared her intake, trying to bring it back down. "and I understand what you mean."
Understand. Sure. Understand that he's a clicks away from combusting and you're the closest thing to a sympathetic audio receptor in three sectors.
Her cheepplates tinted a faint, unmistakable blue—the Cybertronian equivalent of a blush, the thermals in her face plating spiking despite her best efforts to keep them regulated. She leaned back in her seat as far as the chair's backrest would allow, which wasn't nearly far enough. The distance between them had collapsed to something intimate, and every sensor in her frame was screaming about it at once.
What is wrong with me?
This was... new. Unsettlingly new. Back on Cybertron, before the war had scattered her across the stars and deposited her, eventually, aboard the Nemesis, she'd had plenty of mechs get close. Too close, usually. Most of them overcharged on high grade, their processors swimming in contaminated energon, their servos wandering where they weren't welcome. She'd learned to handle that. Handle them. A firm shove, a sharp word, sometimes an elbow to a sensitive joint if they were particularly persistent. She'd never felt this—this strange, fluttering heat in her spark chamber, this hyperawareness of another mech's proximity, this absurd impulse to not pull away.
Why is it different this time?
She'd only been aboard the Nemesis a few weeks. A transfer from a remote outpost, a seeker with a useful skill set in communications and data management, nothing remarkable. She'd expected to be ignored at best, mistreated at worst. She had not expected the Second in Command to take notice of her within her first cycle and proceed to seek her out, again and again, with increasingly thin excuses. I need these files cross-referenced. Lord Megatron requires a status report on the eastern relay—see to it. Your quarters were on the way.
Her quarters were never on the way.
He's just stressed. He's always stressed. This is what stressed mechs look like when they—
Her thoughts dissolved.
Starscream was staring at her. Not at her, exactly. Into her. His crimson optics had locked onto hers with an intensity that had nothing to do with annoyance or impatience or any of the emotions she'd learned to read on his faceplate over the past few weeks. His rant had trailed off mid-sentence. His mouth had parted slightly, the corners slack, and his dermas pressed together as though he'd just realized he'd been speaking and had forgotten what about.
He's not blinking.
Why wasn't he blinking?
The truth—and Starscream himself was only dimly aware of it, the way one is dimly aware of a fault line shifting beneath one's pedes—was that he was faring considerably worse than she was.
What am I doing.
He'd known, from the moment she'd spoken her first word to him—a calm, clipped "yes, commander, I'll have that sorted within the joor"—that she was a problem. A weakness. A vulnerability in his plating he hadn't asked for and couldn't afford. He was Starscream. He did not have weaknesses. He had ambitions, he had grudges, he had plans layered atop plans layered atop contingencies. He did not have feelings about femmes who typed efficiently and smelled faintly of ionized coolant and looked at him with those (e/c) optics like he was just another mech with a job to do rather than the most important mech aboard this wretched ship.
She didn't flinch when I raised my voice. She never flinches. Everyone flinches.
He'd told himself he was just checking in. Routine. The communications log needed verification; she was the one handling it; it was his responsibility as S.I.C. to ensure the work was done. Perfectly reasonable. The fact that he'd walked halfway across the Nemesis to do it in person, rather than simply pinging her over the comms, was—
Inefficient. It was inefficient. That's all.
Except now he was standing close enough to count the individual micro-etchings along the edges of her optic housings, and the reasonable, efficient, tactical part of his processor had gone very, very quiet, and a different part—a part he did not acknowledge in daylight hours—was supplying him with increasingly inappropriate observations about the curve of her waist plating and the way her wings angled when she was startled and the soft whir of her cooling fans cycling up behind her cheepplates and—
Stop.
He didn't stop.
His thoughts, unmoored from his better judgment, drifted. Her frame, so much slighter than his beneath the similar seeker architecture. The way the dim light caught the edges of her (s/c) plating and turned it almost luminous. What it would be like to press his palm flat against the plating of her back, between her wings, where the heat sink vents pulsed with her spark's rhythm. What it would be like to—
Stop. Stop. Stop.
"starscream?" she asked.
His name, in her voice, snapped him back like a rubber band stretched past its tolerance. He blinked—once, twice, rapidly—and the haze in his processor cleared enough for him to comprehend what he was seeing. Her faceplate, tilted up toward his. Her (e/c) optics, wide and searching and uncertain. The blue tint bleeding through her cheepplates, unmistakable.
Oh no.
Oh, no, no, no.
His own cheepplates burned in answer. He could feel the thermals spiking beneath his plating, his cooling fans kicking on with an audible whir that he desperately hoped she couldn't hear. He looked away. Looked at the wall. Looked at the floor. Looked at anything that wasn't her.
She coughed—a soft, deliberate sound, not the result of a faulty intake but a signal, the kind of polite, restrained indication of discomfort that a well-mannered femme used when she didn't want to outright say you're standing too close, back up.
She's uncomfortable. You've made her uncomfortable. Smooth. Excellent. Very tactical of you, Commander.
His servos, which he had not consciously commanded to do anything of the sort, had settled on her hips. Slim hips, beneath the curved plating of her seeker frame. His digits had curled against the metal—light pressure, barely there, but there—and he could feel the warmth of her chassis bleeding through the seams where his fingertips met her plating. The contact sent a shiver through his own struts, involuntary and damning.
She shivered beneath his touch. A fine tremor that ran through her wings and down her back struts, visible in the way the tips of her wings fluttered.
When did I—
He tightened his grip. Slightly. Just enough to feel the give of the plating beneath his digits, the subtle shift of underlying mechanisms.
Let go.
He didn't let go.
Let GO.
He let go.
His servos retreated to his sides as though burned, fingers curling into his palms hard enough that the joints creaked. He took a half-step back. Then another. The distance between them widened, and the air that filled the gap felt cold, somehow, despite the regulated temperature of the quarters.
"my apologies," he mumbled, the words coming out half-static through a vocalizer that had momentarily lost its composure. He cleared his intake. "I— that was— I didn't intend to—"
He didn't finish the sentence. Couldn't, really, because to finish it would require acknowledging what that was, and he was not prepared to do that in front of her, in front of anyone, in front of the silent walls of her quarters that were absolutely going to remember this and judge him for it forever.
He turned. Briskly. The kind of turn that said this conversation is over and we will never speak of it again. His wings hitched high on his back, rigid with tension, their tips nearly vibrating. He moved toward the exit of her quarters with long, clipped strides, pedes striking the floor with more force than strictly necessary.
(Y/N) opened her mouth to say something—she wasn't sure what, only that the words were forming somewhere in her vocal processor and wanted out—starscream, wait, it's——but the berthroom door slid shut with a soft pneumatic hiss before she could give them voice. The latch engaged with a click. Then silence. The kind of silence that pressed against the audio receptors and made the absence of another presence feel like a physical weight.
She sat there. Staring at the closed door.
He left.
The fluttering in her spark hadn't stopped. If anything, the absence of his proximity made it worse—the beat of her spark against its housing unsteady, irregular, chasing a rhythm it had almost synced to. She pressed a servo to her chest plating, over her spark chamber, as though she could physically still it.
What is wrong with me.
The answer, had she been honest with herself, was lurking somewhere in the back of her processor behind a barricade of I'll deal with that later. She'd felt it building for weeks. Every time he'd shown up at her quarters with another flimsy excuse. Every time his optics had lingered a klik too long. Every time he'd said her name in that particular tone—half-annoyed, half-something-else—and she'd had to pretend it didn't make her cooling fans kick on.
She leaned back against her desk, the edge of it pressing into the small of her back struts, her computer still humming softly behind her. The screen's glow had shifted to a screensaver—slowly rotating Decepticon insignias, purple on black—and she watched them spin without really seeing them.
Her wings shifted. Settled. Shifted again, restless, the mechanisms in their joints twitching in small involuntary adjustments. She couldn't get comfortable. Couldn't find the angle that would let her frame relax into its usual idle state. The ghost of his grip lingered on her hips, a phantom pressure that her sensors insisted on replaying.
He grabbed me.
Starscream grabbed me.
And then he ran.
She shook her helm, a sharp, definitive motion, as though she could physically dislodge the memory. It didn't work. The image of his face—cheepplates flushed blue, optics wide and startled and hungry in a way he clearly hadn't meant for her to see—stayed stubbornly fixed behind her own optics.
He looked at me like—
She didn't finish the thought.
A long vent of warm air escaped her intake, fogging briefly in the cool recycled atmosphere of her quarters before dissipating. Her wings finally settled, drooping slightly in a posture that, to anyone who knew seeker body language, read as something between disappointment and exhaustion.
Maybe next time he'll explain what happened.
The thought was small, tired, more hope than expectation. She reached back over her shoulder and flicked off the computer's main display. The room plunged into near-darkness, lit only by the thin strip of floor lighting and the faint, persistent glow of a status indicator on her console. Recharge. She needed recharge. Her optics were dragging, her frame heavy with the accumulated debt of too many late cycles spent hunched over a keyboard.
She pushed off from the desk and made her way toward her berth, pedes heavy, wings low.
Maybe next time.
The berth's surface was cool against her back plating as she lay down, and her optics dimmed, and the hum of the ship's systems filled the quiet with a sound almost like breathing, and somewhere—several corridors away, behind a door he'd locked twice for good measure—Starscream was leaning his helm against the wall with his servos pressed flat to his own spark chamber, wondering exactly the same thing.
What is wrong with me?