The Devil's Advocate

Chapter 2

A constant, slow muffled drip of liquid hitting liquid was what finally woke her up. She groaned past a heavy, gummed up glossa, and slowly opened her optics lest a sudden flood of brightness blind her.

She was right to be cautious- the previous metallic dusk had been replaced with the blue glow of monitors and screens throwing neon across the Harbinger's husk. From her viewpoint, she seemed to be chained at the very front of the ship where the command center lay, looking down through a corridor into the main laboratory where Starscream was working and muttering away.

"Damn crystals take so long to refine, I might as well wait for Megatron to perish by himself..." His wings pinched together at the central joint, his ped struts and claws made sharp scratching sounds as he scuffed them impatiently against the floor and his hips respectively. Though her sensor nodes were mostly numb now, the sound pierced Arcee's already sensitive audios so that she hissed past the sticky remains of energon in her denta. Starscream angled his helm towards her, almost looking surprised that she was still there.

"Ah, Sleeping Beauty awakens again," he simpered as his wings fluttered up. "I was beginning to think you'd just recharge through all the fun of our little venture."

Arcee shook herself as much as her restraints would allow, still trying to get her mouth and processor working properly. "What are you doing?" she eventually asked, noticing the primitive energon processing rig next to him. Starscream followed her stare with a smug twitch of his slag-eating grin.

"Refining some of that lovely red energon you let me steal right from under you," he answered, tapping the glass container and the shallow red fluid pooling inside. "You know, I hear Knockout was quite fond of the stuff during the war... racing mechs are notoriously easy to hook onto all sorts of additives."

Arcee wasn't paying much attention to the gossip, as she just noticed the lack of energon both processed and bled out on her armour. She rubbed at her chestplates to make sure they really were as polished as they looked. "Did you... did you clean me while I was-?!"

"I saved you the job of doing it yourself, didn't I?" Starscream cut in, almost sounding hurt by her objection. "Besides, stale energon attracts all sorts of ghastly creatures, even off Cybertron."

Arcee grimaced more at the thought of those murderous claws being anywhere near her armour, now rubbing at the healing wounds on her shackled wrists. "I'd rather have woken up with an Insecticon nibbling on me anyway..."

Starscream threw another offended look at her, knitting his eyeridges together as he approached the command center and the brace strut she was chained to. "Why all the hostility, Arcee? I give you fuel, some motivation, a free wash... I'm even thinking of loosening those cuffs somewhat."

Arcee's tanks almost boiled from the nuclear furnace of her spark. "You. Killed. My partner." Again the snarl singed her throat, but it was the only way to vent the heat of her anger before it burned her alive from the inside.

While she made the air shimmer with furious vents, Starscream let one of his ridiculously large eyeridges shoot upwards. "You're still going on about that?" he said in disbelief. "Primus, I know I bragged a lot about it, but you put even me to shame." He came a few steps closer, still just out of reach of her itchy digits and her urge to scratch them against his spark. "You said it yourself, Arcee; you've lost a partner before and, I assume, countless teammates. Everyone has. I thought you'd be used to death by now- we are in a war, after all."

Arcee would have spat at him, but her glossa was too dry, like an ingot of iron in her mouth. "We were in a war, all because of that fragging sadist you sucked up orders from for the past seven millennia." Her optics started to sting, though the coolant leaking from them almost evaporated as soon as it touched the heat of her faceplate. The drops started to fall on the floor as her neck cables went limp in a defiant refusal to let Starscream see her weep like a sparkling. "Three years of peace... that's all you allowed us before you started the whole damn thing over again. Before you killed Cliffjumper in cold energon."