Shadows Without Light, 1/?

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

NC-17
Sticky
Dubcon/Noncon/Torture
Bayverse AU
Vortex X Barricade

This began as a kink meme request.  This is just ugly, and later we start getting into the actual interrogation parts.  Posted on my DW with Interrogation Wank Notes.  This is just the fic.  

 

“Well, this is interesting pedagogical technique,” Barricade said, lifting his head from the tilt-table. He’d just onlined a few kliks ago, and was still trying to piece together what the frag had happened. But ‘hapless victim strapped to table’ was cliché. And he hated clichés. So, first order of business, step away from the cliché.


Vortex stood up from where he had been sitting, skimming a datapad. “So glad you approve,” Vortex said, dryly. “And the lessons haven’t even started yet.”

This did not sound good. Still, it was a little…cornball sinister, really. His orders had him report to Vortex for training in his new Tactical Specialty: Interrogations. And somehow that added up to…so here he was, bound to an old, Autobot-style tilt-table repair frame. Not quite sure how that all went together just yet. Work in progress. “Kinda hard to take notes with my arms bound and all,” Barricade said.

“You don’t need notes. What I’m about to teach you, little mech? You’ll remember.”

Really? Oh, that didn’t sound over-the-top at all. Still, Barricade did have just enough self-preservation to know better than to mouth off to the mech who had him more or less immobilized. Snark, but inwardly, he told himself. Consider it character building.

Who needed this much character?!

Vortex continued, “We’re waiting right now for my teammates to secure us a proper test subject, but, til then, I thought I could drive home a few of the…fundamentals.” He came around the side of the tilt-frame, behind Barricade’s head. Barricade craned his neck, trying to keep Vortex in his line of sight. “Such as, reminding the prisoner of his own powerlessness.”

Right. Like now. Barricade straightened his gaze to straight ahead. Not going to let Vortex win this one so easily. Barricade’s cog-apt scores were nearly off the charts—he held himself able to out-match any strategy. He forced his ventilation to be slow and even, relaxing his wrists against their bonds, feeling the gel in his tires decompress against the chains. Relax. Don’t let him win. You’re not powerless. Try your best, rotor-breath.

BAM! Vortex slammed his larger hands down against the berth, on both sides of Barricade’s head. The sound deafened him for a few kliks—metal on metal, high volume, so close that the sound waves themselves hit his audio with physical force. He jumped against his bonds.

Vortex laughed. Not an evil kind of laugh either, but that really lighthearted funny kind of laugh. Which made it seem, somehow, even more disturbing. “Not so relaxed now, are you?” It was almost…a giggle. Then the laugh cut off, abruptly, like someone switching off a tape. Barricade sensed Vortex swing down, his mouth close to Barricade’s audio pickup. “Don’t think you know where this is going, you little fuck,” he snarled.

Barricade’s optics widened, his smaller set flaring out in alarm. No, wait. Just a game. He’s fucking with you. He wants you to be scared. Which means you have two choices: act scared, or act like..well, yourself. One way was guaranteed to suck. “O-okay,” he said, allowing his voice to get a little thready. Think, Barricade, after all, what can he actually do? Everyone knows your orders: everyone knows you were last seen heading to his workcube. He couldn’t offline you can get away unpunished. Someone would notice. Someone would care. If only because they had to pick up his duty shifts. Meantime, lesson. Play along. Be nice. “So, I’m not in control,” he said. “That’s the first lesson.”

“First and last,” Vortex said, pushing back. “But there’s a hell of a lot of ground in the middle.”

**

Barricade writhed on the tilt-table. Vortex stood over him, dripping hot oil into one of his elbow joints. Just at the thermal point that sent alarms into red, but not systems into shutdown. “Huuuurts,” Barricade whined, feeling pathetic. So much for his act. So much for pretend to give Vortex what he wanted. He’d kept his meek and afraid little act up until somewhere, a cycle or two ago, it had stopped being an act. He’d do anything to stop that next drop of oil falling into his joints. Frag his pride. Frag everything.

One drop by itself didn’t hurt that much, but there had been…hundreds. A pool of oil spread from underneath the joint, dripping through his servos and cables slowly, cooling, slowly, his entire elbow feeling as though it were swollen and scorched. He kept looking over at it, dully, surprised that it simply looked glossy wet from the oil. The heat was bad enough, but then there was the slow weight of the oil as it dripped through his cabling.

“Yes,” Vortex said. “Hurts. Have you learned this lesson?”

Barricade blinked, trying to trawl his cortex to coherence. What lesson? What? What had been the lesson of the last several cycles? Come on. Pull yourself together. “Yes,” he bluffed, hoping it would be good enough.

Vortex shook his head, smiling. Not a smirk or a leer, but a happy smile, as if Barricade had just given him a marvelous present. “Oh? And what’s this lesson?”

Barricade twisted his arm, hoping to bring some relief to his burning joint. “Pain.” All right? Got it. Got your fraggin’ point. 

“That,” Vortex said, swatting him almost playfully, “is a noun. What is the lesson?”

Barricade felt himself start to shake. No, he told himself. This is ridiculous. The pain is already fading, see? He looked up at Vortex’s bland red visor, feeling himself, hating himself for the last cycle’s sniveling, shrinking back against the repair frame. 

Vortex sighed, frustrated, the playful mood evaporated. He held up the heating cruet over Barricade’s arm again. Barricade felt his entire body tense. “Right now,” Vortex said, as though he were forcing himself to sound reasonable, “where is your entire concentration?”

“A-arm.” 

“Present, or future?”

“Future?” Barricade’s eyes darted nervously to Vortex’s impassive face. Vortex hung there, a drop of oil teetering on the lip of the cruet. Barricade’s optics fixed upon the quivering yellow droplet, almost flinching with anticipation of the scalding pain awaiting. 

Vortex tilted the cruet back. “Yes,” he said, blandly. “That’s the lesson about small, repeated pain. It removes focus from the here and the now.” 

Barricade untensed his arm. Another thing he had survived. Another obstacle passed. He let his eyes drift to the ceiling in relief. Get out of this yet, Vortex. I don’t lose.

And bolted against his restraints in sudden agony as Vortex brought one of his heavy fists down on Barricade’s upper arm, denting the white armor plate into the power cabling. Barricade shrieked, twisting in his restraints to try to curl around his injured arm. Vortex pushed his shoulders flat.

“Lesson there?”

“Don’t know!” Barricade gasped, then swore. Vortex reached his fingers into the joint, squeezing against the already compressed cables. Barricade thrashed, his sensor alarms blaring red, his tactile-feedback array in that arm slipping into failure. 

“You,” Vortex said, leaning in again, his red visor filling all of Barricade’s visual field, his ex-vents hot on Barricade’s chassis, “think your intelligence will save you. That’s your flaw. In this business, we exploit flaws.” He shoved himself away. “Lesson. Try again.” 

Barricade shivered as his heat sinks kicked on, overloaded from trying to cope with the increased processing load. Only lesson he’d figured out was the Vortex was a psychopath.  “Lesson,” he parroted. His mind cast around, frantic, trying to figure something out. If the other lesson was that pain kept you narrow focused and on the future…. “Here and now,” he echoed Vortex’s words. “Subject loses that.”

“Correction: YOU lost that,” Vortex said, flatly. “YOU lost focus.” He paused, expectantly. Waiting. Waiting for what? He sighed, noisily. “Say it,” he prompted. 

“Say…?”

Vortex’s huge hand closed around his throat. “SAY IT. YOU lost focus.” Two of his fingers dug under the protective armor, compressing the main energon lines in Barricade’s neck. 

“I-I lost fo-focus,” Barricade gasped. Even though they were bound, and he knew it, his hands tried to claw for his throat. 

“You let your focus slip for a klik, little mech, and you’re done. Remember that.” His hand released Barricade’s throat, stroking gently against his audio. “Remember it, little mech, or you won’t survive.” 

***

Cycles had passed. Solars, it could be, for all he knew. Vortex hand waved some sort of magnet over him and his internal chrono was fragged. He hovered on the edge of shutdown, barely enough charge to keep online. Keep. Moving. He told himself that over and over again. Don’t succumb. Don’t give in. 

No one seemed to have noticed the sudden absence of Barricade. The thought was one of many depressing ones crowding for attention in his cortex. He’d’ve thought that at least his own personal flavor of charm might have been missed. More depressing thought: maybe they actually liked him gone. 

Vortex loomed over him again. “Awake?” he asked, courteously. 

“Optics online,” Barricade muttered. Figure it out for yourself, dolt. He might be teetering on shutdown, but he wasn’t going to go out mewling like a sparkling. He wasn’t going to repeat his pathetic whining with the oil. This was more his turf anyway: will power. He was Meta: if he could control 100 mechs through sustained combat, he had the will to survive this.

The tilt table hitched up, abruptly. Barricade’s view went from the stark grey beams of the ceiling to the opposite wall. Also an unimpressive shade of depressing. The table snapped to its upright stop, jarring him against his restraints. Vortex stepped around the table, a cube of energon in his hands. Barricade grunted, forcing his optics away. That’s what he wants, you moron. Show no interest. 

“Got this for you,” Vortex said, sweetly. 

Barricade had learned to mistrust the nice-sweet version of Vortex more than any of the others. It always went bad. Fast. “Don’t need it,” he said.

Vortex sighed, looking at the cube a little sadly. “Oh, Barricade,” he said, shaking his head. “Lying to me or lying to yourself?”

Another entirely hateable thing about Vortex, Barricade had learned, was this way he had of boiling everything down into such simple-seeming choices. Case in point: either way, he admitted he was lying. He set his face, staring at the far wall. 

“You need the energon,” Vortex said. Though the voice sounded reasonable, he could already hear the fraying.   

Say nothing. Don’t give into this ridiculous game. Barricade kept his optics locked on the far wall, determinedly.

“Not even going to look at me, are you?” A pause. “Fine. Seems you forgot the first lesson, Barricade. Shows how smart you are.” Barricade heard a shuffling, saw something move in front of him. He braced himself for a blow. 

Vortex’s visor filled his entire visual field, the larger mech stooping down. For a long moment, he simply stood there, optic-to-optic with Barricade. Despite himself, the smaller mech tried to read something in that blank visor, tearing his focus away from the wall. 

Barricade’s head struck the back of the berth as Vortex lunged in. The battle mask retracted against Barricade’s dermal plating, and he felt a glossa invade his mouth, ramming past his labial plating. He thrashed against his bonds, trying desperately to turn his head away. Vortex held him under the chin, growling in his mouth, before finally releasing him. The mask snapped closed again. 

“I love how fraggin’ stupid you are, Barricade,” he whispered, menacingly. Barricade ducked his head, avoiding Vortex’s gaze, humiliated at the intrusion. “Now, are you going to be good and drink your energon?”

“Don’t want it.”

“Oh, now,” and the deep voice got seductive, Vortex laughing softly as Barricade recoiled from the digit stroking his chin. “Lying, still?”

“Not lying.” He didn’t want it. He could shut down supplemental systems—get more cycles before shutdown, figure something out.  He could do it. He did not want to obey. He didn’t want to owe anything to Vortex—that had to be what Vortex wanted, of course. Some sort of learned-obedience. He wasn’t going to fall for it. 

“Hrm,” Vortex grunted. He turned away, to pick up the energon cube again. He toyed with it between his hands for a moment. “Think I might have pushed you too hard, too fast.”

Ya think? Barricade bit down before he said anything stupid. He waited. Good, he prompted, mentally. Pushed me too hard, now you feel bad, now…let me go. Untie me. Primus, figure it out! He felt his core temp inch up as he suspended his air venting, as if breathing too hard would derail the process. 

Vortex turned the cube over in his hands, watching the pink pearlescent liquid swirl slowly. “See. It’s always the smart ones you have to worry about. Always think they can figure a way out of it. Always think they can gut it through. And you push them too hard, and…snap.” He looked up, his red visor scanning Barricade regretfully. “You don’t want energon, even though your systems are close to auto-shutdown. The only logical reason is that you can’t be trusted to take care of yourself anymore. You’re denying your own body’s needs, Barricade.” He shook his head. Looked up. “But you can trust me.” 

Barricade shuddered. 

“Now. Would you like to have some energon?”

Barricade ground his jaw, trying to push aside the hatred he felt for Vortex right now. It was…overwhelming how the bastard managed to choose just the right words. Make every statement an admission of something. 

“No,” he replied, finally. “I would not like. But I will.” 

Vortex nodded. “It’s a start.” 

***

The lesson this time, apparently, was that anything was torture. And Barricade had learned, thus far, that he hated his interface systems. Vortex had shifted his position, raising his arms up over his head, bracing his legs apart knee and ankle joint with metal rods. Vortex had threatened to pry open the covers, but in the end had simply teased the sensors on the rims until the covers autoreleased. A lesson, Barricade thought, in shame. 

“Are you enjoying this?” Vortex asked, tracing one finger just on the inside lip of Barricade’s valve. 

“No.” He hated this. Hated how his body responded, how the sensor nodes tingled, hated the leak of valve protectant fluid that Vortex could obviously feel against his fingers. Vortex dipped his finger into the valve. Barricade gritted his jaw against the sensation—the metal cool in his valve, pushing open the valve lining, rubbing against the sensor nodes. Vortex stepped closer, his visor fixed on Barricade’s face as he rubbed his finger against the nodes in the front of the valve. Barricade squirmed his hips, determined to resist. 

“Part of you is enjoying this, Barricade,” Vortex said, quietly. 

“Mechanical response,” Barricade muttered. You will not trap me with another accusation of a lie. He could hear Vortex say it already, hear the silky, supercilious tone. ‘You’re lying and your body tells the truth.’ Yet another level of control stripped away. No. He’d remember the first lesson this time. And his own first lesson: Shut your damn mouth. 

“Mechanical response, up to a point. Then you have a choice, don’t you? Give in or resist.” Barricade gasped as Vortex forced another finger into his valve. And then cursed himself inwardly. Vortex had come up with another of his binary choices. “Which do you think is the wiser course, Barricade?”

“Give in.” The response itself was a ‘giving in’. Being pulled into the game in spite of himself.

“Can you?” Vortex leaned closer, running his other hand over Barricade’s grille. “Can you give in?”

“Choose not to.” 

“Why?” The head tilted, the very picture of curious. If Barricade hadn’t been here for…how many cycles already, he might have bought it as that.

“Don’t want it.” 

Vortex rubbed his fingers together, creating an impossibly complex play of friction in Barricade’s valve. Barricade gasped. It hurt…and then it didn’t. His sensor net fired of signals of arousal, the charge just warming now. Still tolerable. Not demanding an overload. Still, enough to make him try to force his thighs against the metal bar that separated them. Vortex continued rubbing his fingers, the charge slowly rising across the nodes. Barricade felt another hot wash of liner protectant fluid. “Why would you choose what you’ve already told me is the less wise course?”

“Free fraggin’ will,” Barricade snarled. “Not going to condone it by pretending to like it.” 

The fingers stopped in his valve. “I’m not asking you to condone. I’m asking you to enjoy. To let go. What’s a little dignity, after all?”

“Not about dignity.” Barricade tried to shift his hips—Vortex’s fingers in his valve caused a residual ache. This was some ridiculous power game and he was Not. Fragging. Playing.

“Sure.” Vortex drove his hand against Barricade’s pelvic plating, his fingers shoving deeper into Barricade’s valve. Barricade hissed, pulling against the bond around his wrist tires, trying to pull himself away. “Gonna tell you something, Barricade,” Vortex said, and his voice had gone flat and dead. “I get off on this. I get off hard on making you overload. Which I will.” 

Oh, really, that was just too much. Barricade squeezed down, forcing his valve mechanisms to tighten around Vortex’s intruding fingers. “Frag, is that supposed to scare me?”

Vortex laughed, evenly. “No. Supposed to disgust you. Supposed to think that I know that because I’ve done it before.” He began working his fingers against the valve nodes again. “And,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “supposed to think about me calling up this memory whenever I see you ever again. In the refectory, the washrack…just imagining you spread out in front of me….”

Barricade shoved against the tilttable, torquing Vortex’s wrist. “This is supposed to be interrogation training,” he snarled, “not a fraggin’ porno.” 

Vortex stopped. Not just stopped moving against Barricade’s valve. Stopped as though frozen. And then shivered, or something a bit bigger than that—as though an electrical shock had run through him. “Questioning my method?”

“Questioning your fraggin’ SANITY.” Barricade struggled against his bound wrists. 

“Oh, there’s no question there,” Vortex said. “Now, let’s see if you can give in or if you insist on resisting.” He began moving his fingers in Barricade’s valve again, in a slow, even, rocking rhythm that dragged his fingers over and over across the nodes. “The easiest way,” he said, as Barricade tried to clamp his valve down against the motion, “is to give me what I want.” 

“What,” Barricade gasped, “is the fraggin’ lesson in this?” This was pointless humiliation. It had to be. Resist it. He tried override codes on his interface system, but Vortex’s insistent rubbing reset the programs, simply prolonging it by starting at zero again. Fine, he could outlast Vortex. 

“Lesson is that there’s an easy way, and a hard way. And you can learn a lot from which way the subject chooses to go.” The rubbing became more insistent. Barricade felt his head drop back against the tilttable, his valve quivering against Vortex’s fingers. He summoned up all the hatred he had, as if it were a solid mass, and flung it at the rising charge in his sensor net. “Come on, Barricade,” Vortex murmured. “Let go. You’re only hurting yourself.” 

Barricade writhed, pulling up on his wrist bindings, trying to twist himself away. 

“Show me you can let go,” Vortex coaxed, his hand continuing its maddening thrusting. 

Barricade moaned in pure frustration, hating his body, Vortex, whoever cut his orders sending him here. “Stop,” he said, wincing at how pitiful his voice sounded. He tried again. “Proved your fraggin’ point. Got it.”

“Oh, I know you do,” Vortex said. “Smart as you are and all. That’s why I’m doing this. You learned, and here’s your prize.” 

Barricade shuttered his eyes. He wasn’t thinking hard enough. There had to be a way. He had to be able to figure this out. Some way Vortex didn’t win. This was…pointless and sadism and had nothing to do with why he was sent here. Whatever rationalization or justification Vortex came up with, what he was doing had no point. The ‘lessons’ were impromptu, probably made up on the spot. At the same time, though, his valve systems were teetering on overload. He groaned, twisting, feeling the chain bite into his wrist tires, feeling heat vent from his frame against the metal table, feeling his valve quiver, the nodes tingling with the rising charge, with Vortex’s careful, methodical friction and pressure. 

Vortex leaned down, his vocalizer near Barricade’s audio as the smaller, bound mech thrashed on the berth. “So fraggin’ hot you are, right now, Barricade. Give in. Show me you can.”

Barricade screamed, his vocalizer scalding with sound, as his overload tore through him against every rational command he sent to his cortex. His hips bucked up the table, valve spiraling against Vortex’s fingers, his whole body quaking. He bit down on a sound like a sob, filled with self-loathing. No control. Vortex was right, even if this was all bullshit. He had no control, not even over his own body.

***

“I know how much you like clichés,” Vortex said, pushing Barricade onto his knees. “So…guess which one this is.” 

You, Barricade thought, have got to be kidding me. Vortex had untied him, letting him shuffle around the bay on what charge he had left to prevent his joints from freezing, and now, this. There had been no more energon forthcoming, proving that the last time had been a damn power play, and nothing more.

“No,” he said, his servos straining to push him to his feet. “Not going to do this one.”

“Do what?” Vortex held him in place with one heavy hand pinching just a bit too tightly around his door wing. 

Barricade sighed. “Going to make me say it? Fine. I’m not going to suck your spike to prove some idiotic non-point.” 

“Right on the cliché, wrong on the reality.” Vortex snapped open his interface hatch. His spike released from its housing. Barricade turned his face away, swearing. His talons raked against Vortex’s legs, shrieking against his armor, pulling away fine curls of metal. 

“Gonna try and tell me one day I’m gonna have to spikesuck for information? Not buying it.”

“Oh no,” Vortex said, indulgently, as if Barricade were being an unreasonable little sparkling. “I’ll tell you the lesson even: when it comes to interrogation, Barricade, you have no ego. NONE. All that matters is getting the intel.” He shifted his pelvis, his lubricated spike sliding across one of Barricade’s facial spires. Barricade recoiled. “Come on,” he whispered.

Barricade pushed harder, his neck servos whining with strain. “No,” he gasped. He rerouted his remaining power into his resistance. 

“Barricade,” Vortex clucked, “If you do, I won’t make you say you like it. Or…I won’t just wait til you charge out and frag you while you’re out.” Barricade shivered at the truth he heard in those words. He hated himself, a grim roiling kind of hatred in his tanks as he shuttered his optics and opened his mouth. The lubricant tasted like humiliation. He waited for Vortex to gloat, to tell him he’d fouled up once again, walked into another of those choice-traps Vortex made. Vortex merely sighed. Frag, Barricade thought. Maybe he’s just a depraved pervert trying to get off. In which case, congratulations for falling for it, you moron. Go ahead and blame it on the undercharge or whatever you want. Truth is, you’re a coward. Taste that while you suck the bastard’s spike. 

Vortex’s hand cupped his head, and he really had no choice. Not that there was much difference between starting and finishing in this game. He’d already broken down. There was no dignity for him, no way to recoup anything like self-respect. Why not finish the thing. Why not really learn this lesson, feel exactly how bitter and humiliating it feels to be pushed to this. Remember this. Learn this. 

His glossa slid, trembling, along the underside of Vortex’s spike, the lubricant sickeningly sweet. He’d expected it to taste bitter. Projecting. He knew that’s what Vortex would call it. He gritted his optical shutters so hard together he felt a few actuators whine into failure. He did not want to see what he was doing. If he dared, he would offline his own audio so as to cut sound. 

“Good,” Vortex breathed. His hand cradled the back of Barricade’s head. “More.” He gently pulled Barricade’s mouth further along his spike, ex-vents gusting across Barricade’s humiliated face until the spike hit the back of Barricade’s intake. “You do it, or I do,” he said, calmly. Another of those awful choices. Humiliation or humiliation and pain. Choose between. The thought that he could fight Vortex off in his weakened state was…ludicrous. He was not so far gone as to have lost common sense. 

He began, slowly, knowing that Vortex was reveling in the unsteady motion, the physical sign of his repulsion—at Vortex, at himself—to work along the spike, his glossa rubbing awkwardly against the under-ridges. 

“Your technique,” Vortex breathed, “is awful. But the fact that you hate it so much is getting me off.”

Barricade felt his talons ball into impotent fists. Ignore him, he told himself. Get it over with. Only words. Only words. Do not let…modulations of frequency get to you. He can force you physically, remind you of the physical penalties. That matters. The others…do not. Do not let them get to you.

He moved the spike in his with his glossa, his head shifting back and forth, glossa flicking at the spike nodes. If you must do this, do it quickly. Get it over with. 

“Yes,” Vortex breathed. His grip released some of its tension on Barricade’s head. “Like that.” Barricade could feel the spike’s charge build, a small tingle against his glossa, his olfactory sensors picking up the ozone. Do it, he told himself. Finish it. Get it over with. Get through to the other side. 

He began sucking in earnest, working against the nodes. He could feel Vortex’s fingers shift, tensing, as the overload raced toward him. The copter grunted, once, bracing Barricade’s head suddenly, jerking his pelvic frame forward, pushing his spike hard against the back of Barricade’s intakes as he spilled his fluid in overload. 

He held Barricade there for a long moment, until the smaller mech got the hint, and began, tentatively, licking down the spike. The hand released from his head. He dropped back onto his knees, optics onlining to the sight of his useless hands limp on his black armored thighs. The taste of transfluid filled his entire input array. 

“You know,” Vortex said, amiably, tucking his spike away in its housing. “Transfluid contains energon. I’ve seriously considered making that your primary means of nutrition.” He paused letting the image play out in Barricade’s mind. Barricade showed no reaction beyond stiffening in revulsion. “No?” Vortex said, softly, bending down. “Then we won’t do it. But, little mech,” he lifted, and Barricade numbly let himself get pulled to his feet, “you really need to learn that defiance brings you nothing and obedience brings you reward.” 

Reward, Barricade scoffed. Right. Like not getting beaten was a reward. 

“Shhhhh,” Vortex pulled Barricade against him, pressing the smaller mech’s cheek to his cockpit. “It’s all right, Barricade. Don’t you see I’m trying to protect you?”

From what? Barricade wanted to scream, but he didn’t have the energy. He closed his optics, as if he could shut out the whole world, and be a small ball unto himself, made of rage and pain and humiliation. These were all he was, now.

***

“It’s time,” Vortex said, prodding Barricade with one foot. Making Barricade recharge folded up on the floor like this was, Barricade knew, just another little gimmick of his. Just a reminder of Barricade’s status as non-being. Just a trick, Barricade reminded himself. Just like Vortex’s little habit of standing close to him so the smaller mech would feel every bit of Vortex’s greater height. Reminder of your place. 

Your place. You don’t have a place. You don’t even have a ‘you’. 

Barricade pushed to his feet, clumsily, because Vortex stood, as usual, close enough for Barricade to bang into. He ended up sliding his back up the wall, wincing as it scraped the edges of his door wings. He did not bother to ask what it was time for: if Vortex wanted him to know, he’d tell him. 

Vortex nodded, his masked face giving away nothing. An advantage he had, he said, that he could cover any emotion—things Barricade had to consciously try to freeze, to tamp down, simply wouldn’t show on Vortex’s masked face.

“You ready?”

“Probably not.”  Vortex expected an answer. And Barricade knew if he’d said ‘yes’, it would have been the wrong answer. He’d been with Vortex that long that he could already start spinning out possibilities if he’d said yes—anything from a physical beating to more of Vortex’s special brand of surgical verbal belittlement. 

Vortex exhaled a laugh. “You’re even fun when you’re trying not to be fun.”

“So glad,” Barricade muttered.

Vortex grabbed him roughly by the narrow struts that held his arm tire. “You’d better be,” he snarled, all of the amused humor drained from his voice. “The minute you stop amusing me, Barricade…?” He let the sentence dangle in unspeakable possibility. It worked at the same time that it didn’t work. Barricade knew by now Vortex could fill in that blank in ways he didn’t want to think about. For all his ‘intelligence’, Vortex always sneered, Barricade was desperately limited in creativity.

The hand released his tire. “We’re going to your first interrogation.” Vortex said. 

Barricade wanted to protest. He hadn’t learned a damn thing. Except humiliation, and pain, and rage. And how not to show them.   Useless. He’d make a fool of himself. He bit down on his emotions, forcing his face still, aware of Vortex’s scrutiny.

“You look worried, Barricade,” Vortex said, his voice picking up just a hint of the condescending singsong tone he used to really goad Barricade. Barricade forced his systems down, setting the actuators on his facial expression routines to zero. “Better.”

Barricade followed him obediently. Vortex extended his stride just enough that the smaller mech had to scramble to keep up. Again, deliberate. You are small, and pitiful. Vortex drew up short outside a holding cube. “Ready?”

“No.” Fuck it. Let Vortex beat him down. He didn’t care. “I don’t know a fraggin’ thing what to do in there.” His hands balled into fists. Not aggressive, just…a channel for the energy he knew would otherwise leak across his body, his face.

Vortex turned. Took in the tight fists. He swept out with one hand, slamming Barricade’s head against the bulkhead. He waited with supreme patience as Barricade straightened up, his optics resetting. “Then you haven’t,” he hissed, “been paying attention.”

****