Sense comes back to him bit by bit. There’s no particular order, no time where his vision or hearing or electromagnetic sense comes back with any sort of specificity. One moment, he’s floating formless and thoughtless through a void and the next, he’s sitting hunched forward on some soft surface and Wheeljack is holding his hands. There’s something… cold? Wheeljack is rubbing a cube of dry ice back and forth over the upturned palms of Starscream’s hands. His vision’s still staticky around the edges, and sound is muffled, distant. He wonders where he is. Wheeljack seems calm, so Starscream decides they’re probably safe enough for the time being.
The ice cube stops. “Starscream?” Wheeljack squeezes his hands. Their pedes and knees knock together, and Starscream realizes Wheeljack is sitting very close to him. “Hey, you with me?”
Starscream tries to squeeze Wheeljack’s hands in return, but all he manages is a weak twitch. He’s still frozen, all higher motor function shut down in the face of what must have been incomprehensible terror. He can still feel the aftereffects of it, the fear skipping through his circuits and making every bit of his frame feel weak.
“That’s okay,” Wheeljack says. He sounds so calm, so lovingly patient. “Take your time. No rush. You’re safe.” Starscream believes him. Wheeljack squeezes his hands again, and then the ice cube resumes its rhythmic movement.
Starscream lets his consciousness drift back and forth over the palms of his hands in time with the ice cube. For some indeterminate time, he lingers in this half-conscious, half-sensible state, holding Wheeljack’s hands and waiting for the world to come back to him.
When Wheeljack next speaks, Starscream can see his face, maskless and faintly worried. He can see all of Wheeljack, actually, and some of his own body, too. Wheeljack’s sitting on a table. Starscream thinks he might be sitting on a couch. He blinks and Wheeljack blinks back, smiling softly. “Hi, sweetheart.”
“Hi.” Primus, his back hurts. He straightens with some difficulty, stretching his wings until they hit the back of what he now recognizes as Wheeljack’s couch. Right. He’s in Wheeljack’s apartment. Wheeljack is sitting on the cluttered table in front of him. The lights are on low. The ice cube that Wheeljack had been running over his hands is sitting half-melted in the bottom of an empty cube to Wheeljack’s left. No one else is in the room with them, at least not that he can tell. He can’t remember how he got here or what precipitated this episode, but both he and Wheeljack are unharmed and he knows where he is. The situation is more than salvageable.
Wheeljack watches him closely, audial fins pulsing a soft blue. “Do you know where you are?”
Starscream finishes stretching his wings and settles them against the back of the couch. “Your apartment,” he answers, then gives the time and date as his HUD reports them. “How long…?”
Wheeljack grimaces. “Two breems plus a few klicks. You remember where we were?”
Starscream holds a hand up, signalling Wheeljack to give him a moment as he tries to pull up the data.
They’d been… They’d been out for drinks with Chromia and Windblade. Not Blurr’s, some new place they’d never been to before. Chromia had been shockingly civil, evidently under some sort of threat from Windblade to behave herself in Starscream’s presence if the glaring was anything to go by. Wheeljack, bless his socially oblivious spark, hadn’t seemed to notice. Starscream remembers having a round, Chromia going up to order them a second one, and then nothing more than some foggy idea of Wheeljack making their excuses before hailing a shuttle home. He tells Wheeljack as much, and gets a nod in response.
“Pretty much, yeah. Seemed like something freaked you out. You got pretty quiet and I figured it was time to go. By the time we got back here, ya’weren’t really responding anymore, so. This.” He gestures to their current position. It’s their typical Starscream-freak-out arrangement. Primus knows they’ve had enough practice with it.
Starscream sighs. “I’m sure Chromia and Windblade were thrilled about that.”
Wheeljack shrugs. “They understood. I think they’re still out, anyway.”
“Mm.” Suddenly, he feels very tired. He slumps against the back of the couch, scrubbing a hand down his face. Despite not having had more than a drink or two, he’s dizzy, headachy like he’ll be hungover in the morning.
Wheeljack’s still watching him. “Want me to leave you alone?” He shifts awkwardly. “I can head to bed and you can stay out here, if you want. Or, you know, vice-versa.”
Starscream considers. He’s tired. He’s unbalanced. Even though he doesn’t remember what had set him off, he feels shaken. Maybe a few months ago, he’d want to be left alone. When their relationship was newer, when Wheeljack was less of a known quantity, Pit, even if it had been a different sort of episode, the answer would be different. Now, though…
“No, you can—I want you to stay.”
Wheeljack cycles his optics and gives him a startled smile. Starscream can’t help but smile back.