We're Not in Dover Anymore
Apr. 29th, 2011 08:45 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
niyazi-a.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
shadow_vectorPG
Bayverse
Barricade/OC
ref to xeno
The poem they're snarking about is Arnold's Dover Beach, which, actually, I rather like. You might, in the interests of National Poetry Month's waning hours, like to read a bit of a response to that slightly stuffy Victorian (Arnold's prose is...sodden.), the Dover Bitch.
First of my auction fics. /flop
Barricade had to admit that the sound—the soft, repetitive schuss-shuss of the waves against the shore behind him was fairly soothing. As was the cool rocking shift of the water against his armor, pushing through his systems as he sat in the shoals of the ocean. June floated between his knees, leaning against his chassis, soaking in the water warmed by Barricade's systems, as they watched the sunset and the night stretch fingers toward each other in some sort of tantalized, hopeless attempt at an embrace.
It made Barricade want to scoop June against him more firmly, especially the slow, languorous bobbing of her lighter flesh. In the growing darkness, her pale limbs seemed to almost glow underwater. The ocean stretched before them shifting to opaque, the setting sun casting pink sequins on the dark surface. “Why'd you want to come out here again?”
“Break,” June said. “Just wanted to do...something different. Break routine.”
Barricade snorted. Yeah, routine. Not his favorite thing, either. “Hey,” he said. “Some routines aren't bad.” He slipped a hand under the water, stroking down her floating body. The way her flesh responded was...fascinating, buoyant, bobbing away from him, teasing, taunting him.
“That's a good routine,” June laughed. The ends of her hair were curled into wet dark ringlets water trembling from their length, but above that, the cloud of red seemed aflame with the setting sun. “But there are routines we develop simply to make things easier, like going to bed at a certain time, and...those should get thrown out the window sometimes.”
Well, that part Barricade was down with.
“Besides,” June said, twisting to look up at him, the skinny straps of her bathing suit top sharp, dark lines over her pale shoulders, “admit it: The ocean is awesome..”
“Salty,” Barricade corrected.
“Is that bad?” She frowned. “I know in our cars salt corrodes—you're not going to rust, are you?”
He grunted. “Rust.” He rolled his lower optics. “Please. Going to have to do better than salinated water. Great Decepticon army, done in by saltwater.”
“Hey, there's precedent for it.”
He shot her a withering look. “Really.”
“Yes! War of the Worlds. The alien invaders were defeated by the common cold virus or something.”
Barricade paused, calling this thing up on his database. “That's fake!” he blurted, half-outraged. “Some stupid human propaganda or something.”
“Well, true, but the point still holds. It's plausible.”
He snorted. “Right. A race of interstellar conquerors haven't yet managed to overcome organic monocellular organisms. Fraggin' ironic as the pit; but irony doesn't make it true.” Seriously? If it did, Barricade would be crawling with protozoan death from this place. “We can repel laser fire, June. Think we got this salt oxidation thing under control.”
She laughed. “Well, good. Because you'd be pretty dumb to soak in something corrosive without saying anything about it.”
Barricade grumbled. “Don't know what you humans are all stupid about fraggin' saltwater. Can make the stuff in your garage.” Now that he thought about it, didn't humans have 'bath salts'? Huh. Maybe he should buy her some or something since she was apparently so fraggin' crazy about the chemical solution. Or...just crazy. .
“It's not really the salt water that's the big deal though,” June said. She boosted up out of the water onto the top of Barricade's knee as it jutted from the surface. “It's the whole,” she gestured with a hand. “this.”
“This,” Barricade mocked. “Water. Silicate grit. Planetary rotation. Fraggin' awesome.”
“It's called a gestalt. The sort of...everything put together thing.” June grinned, the fading sunlight rosegold on her cheek, catching her grey eye, turning it almost silver.
“Whatever.” Barricade stared at the water, a sleek glossy expanse, stretching to bisect the disk of the setting sun. The waves rippled like a sheet of satin, cool and smooth, throwing gleams of light back at the sky. Gestalt. Right. Water, grit, sunlight. Nature.
Be better paved over.
“Oceans mean a lot of things to humans,” June said, reaching down, gesturing for one of Barricade's hands. He brought it up, letting her run her hands over his, small fingers probing into the wrist tire, along his talons, curling around the palm. “Emotion, and the subconscious, cleaning, all that junk.”
“Junk's about right.” Cleaning? Frag, these humans obviously never did a proper contamination analysis of this ocean stuff . And who wanted to think about clean when dirty was so much more fun?.
“You're so romantic,” June teased.
“Plenty romantic,” Barricade muttered, defensive. All that gooshy romance stuff? Not his style. Flowers died. Stupid gift. “Just...the good kind of romantic.” The kind that went for the interfacing.
“I'm not complaining,” June said, sliding one bare foot down his leg, toes along the complicated track of his armor.
“Better not be.” His red optics glowed against the violet settling in from the East. June sighed, frustrated and for a long moment they watched the silent rolling of the sun over the water.
“'The sea is calm tonight'...,” June murmured, her eyes distant. “'The tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits; on the French coast the light gleams and--”
“Not in France,” Barricade cut her off, poking her shoulder with one talon.
She smiled. “I know. It's a poem.”
“Poem,” Barricade scoffed. “About France.”
She tilted her head, sea-wet ringlets brushing her neck. “Not about France, silly. It's about love.”
“Pretty obscure fraggin' poem, then.”
“Not really. I had to memorize it in school. And we don't work like you: we can't just upload to our memory. This took work!”
“Sounds...totally not worth it.”
She laughed. “It takes a while. I don't think anyone is ready for Arnold at fifteen.”
“Not sure I'm ready for him now.” Stupid poem about France. Oops, love. Whatever. How the moon and France and water added up to love? Poetry was apparently like bad chemistry. With words.
“We didn't even get to the good part!”
“That presupposes that there is a good part,” Barricade muttered.
“There is.”
“Huh. You're biased. You've been brainwashed by this human educational system.”
“And you've been brainwashed by your silly robot system.” She winked, pushing off his knee, trusting, somehow, his hand would come to stabilize her, brace her if she slipped, wrapping her arms around his neck. She rubbed her cheek against one of the long silver spires of his face.
“Got your silly robot system right here,” he muttered, his hands cradling her around the jut of his chassis. “And if you ever want any of it again...,” he smirked, lower optics focused on her face, feeling the still-strange yieldingness of her flesh against his, the way the contact warmed them both.
She grinned. “Are you threatening me?”
“Am I?” He flicked one hand by her face, the sharp talons glinting even in the fading light, casting the pink-violet glow of sunset like blades. His mouth quirked. “All right, human. Under severe penalty of deprivation,” he ran one of the talons along the back of her thigh for emphasis, “prove to me this poetry stuff doesn't entirely suck.”
“You...do realize I'm not a lit major, right?”
“Admitting you're brainwashed?”
She pursed her mouth at him. “All right. But only because the stakes are so high.” She winked. “Though, honestly, I think you'd suffer just as much from the penalty.”
Yeah, well, true. But he was a Decepticon. He could take it.
She thought for a moment, wriggling up onto his chassis, leaning against the tire's mounting rail. “Okay, well, why not. Here's the end of that poem.” She wrapped her arms around one knee, eyes going a little distant, as if accessing some old memory. “Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
She stopped, and for a long moment there was nothing between them but the soft slap of waves against Barricade's legs, the darkness settling in like a violet mist.
“What the...frag does that mean?”
“What do you think it means? It's a love poem.”
“About France.”
“It's not about France!”
Barricade snickered. From now on, he decided, France would be his default comment to irritate her about...everything. Whatever France had done to her it apparently still rankled. Still, he replayed the part again in his cortex. “Nope. Still don't get it.”
June gave a fake-exasperated sigh. “Heathen.”
“Probably.” He tipped his head, cheek spires against her body. “So, you defaulting?”
She snorted. “No. I just have to explain it in very small words to the genius robot.” She tweaked one of the finials on his audio. “Whyn't you tell me where you get confused, there, robot boy.”
Robot...boy? Oh this was something to be settled at another time. “I don't know. Sounds like he's telling some other squishy not to lie to him. Because everything sucks, even if it looks like it doesn't. Especially because it looks like it doesn't.” Which made as much sense as any human logic he'd run into. Everything sucks so tell me the truth? Yyyyyeah. Here's a truth, poet, from authority. Squishy females don't want to hear about how much things suck. This Arnold must not have gotten laid very much.
June paused, tilting her head. “That's...pretty much it. Except it's not 'don't lie' but, you know, be true. Like...romantically.”
“... the frag that mean?” Romantically true: Not lying about sappy stuff. Yeah? In that case, count Barricade out.
“Well. That's the thing, really. Like faithful to him. And honest. And everything. Just...true. I guess that's what makes it poetry.”
Barricade stared moodily out over the water. The sun had set, only the faintest fading orange glow over the horizon fighting an indigo ocean, violet sky, the water, even to the distance, lapping gently, as if licking the margins of the world just as it rollingly caressed his armor.
“Do you squishy females fall for this? I mean, this actually get him results? You know. Romantic results.”
June laughed. “Probably not. But that's not the point he was trying to make.” She paused. “Though a lot of other poets have used poems to try to get in the sack.”
“So...everything sucks, and Arnold sucks and no squishy female's getting naked because of this poem, which is about how much things suck—and France—but not at all about interfacing.”
June shook her head. “You,” she said, “are being deliberately obtuse.”
“Poetry,” heretorted, his voice heavy with wisdom, into the darkness, “is stupid.”
June snorted. “So, guess that means you win. Poetry sucks, and,” she leaned closer, her breath hot on his facial armor, small fingers probing between the cables and servos of his throat as she nuzzled against him, “no more interfacing. Ever.”
Frag. “Maybe you should try with a less sucky poem. You know, no France.”
June laughed, the sound rippling like the soft waves, ducking in to run her mouth over his, her tongue a warm little dart over his armor, “Oh no. You won. Poetry sucks.” She pulled away, just far enough to tilt her head up, meeting his optics. “This? Is going to be fuuuuuuuuun.”
Bayverse
Barricade/OC
ref to xeno
The poem they're snarking about is Arnold's Dover Beach, which, actually, I rather like. You might, in the interests of National Poetry Month's waning hours, like to read a bit of a response to that slightly stuffy Victorian (Arnold's prose is...sodden.), the Dover Bitch.
First of my auction fics. /flop
Barricade had to admit that the sound—the soft, repetitive schuss-shuss of the waves against the shore behind him was fairly soothing. As was the cool rocking shift of the water against his armor, pushing through his systems as he sat in the shoals of the ocean. June floated between his knees, leaning against his chassis, soaking in the water warmed by Barricade's systems, as they watched the sunset and the night stretch fingers toward each other in some sort of tantalized, hopeless attempt at an embrace.
It made Barricade want to scoop June against him more firmly, especially the slow, languorous bobbing of her lighter flesh. In the growing darkness, her pale limbs seemed to almost glow underwater. The ocean stretched before them shifting to opaque, the setting sun casting pink sequins on the dark surface. “Why'd you want to come out here again?”
“Break,” June said. “Just wanted to do...something different. Break routine.”
Barricade snorted. Yeah, routine. Not his favorite thing, either. “Hey,” he said. “Some routines aren't bad.” He slipped a hand under the water, stroking down her floating body. The way her flesh responded was...fascinating, buoyant, bobbing away from him, teasing, taunting him.
“That's a good routine,” June laughed. The ends of her hair were curled into wet dark ringlets water trembling from their length, but above that, the cloud of red seemed aflame with the setting sun. “But there are routines we develop simply to make things easier, like going to bed at a certain time, and...those should get thrown out the window sometimes.”
Well, that part Barricade was down with.
“Besides,” June said, twisting to look up at him, the skinny straps of her bathing suit top sharp, dark lines over her pale shoulders, “admit it: The ocean is awesome..”
“Salty,” Barricade corrected.
“Is that bad?” She frowned. “I know in our cars salt corrodes—you're not going to rust, are you?”
He grunted. “Rust.” He rolled his lower optics. “Please. Going to have to do better than salinated water. Great Decepticon army, done in by saltwater.”
“Hey, there's precedent for it.”
He shot her a withering look. “Really.”
“Yes! War of the Worlds. The alien invaders were defeated by the common cold virus or something.”
Barricade paused, calling this thing up on his database. “That's fake!” he blurted, half-outraged. “Some stupid human propaganda or something.”
“Well, true, but the point still holds. It's plausible.”
He snorted. “Right. A race of interstellar conquerors haven't yet managed to overcome organic monocellular organisms. Fraggin' ironic as the pit; but irony doesn't make it true.” Seriously? If it did, Barricade would be crawling with protozoan death from this place. “We can repel laser fire, June. Think we got this salt oxidation thing under control.”
She laughed. “Well, good. Because you'd be pretty dumb to soak in something corrosive without saying anything about it.”
Barricade grumbled. “Don't know what you humans are all stupid about fraggin' saltwater. Can make the stuff in your garage.” Now that he thought about it, didn't humans have 'bath salts'? Huh. Maybe he should buy her some or something since she was apparently so fraggin' crazy about the chemical solution. Or...just crazy. .
“It's not really the salt water that's the big deal though,” June said. She boosted up out of the water onto the top of Barricade's knee as it jutted from the surface. “It's the whole,” she gestured with a hand. “this.”
“This,” Barricade mocked. “Water. Silicate grit. Planetary rotation. Fraggin' awesome.”
“It's called a gestalt. The sort of...everything put together thing.” June grinned, the fading sunlight rosegold on her cheek, catching her grey eye, turning it almost silver.
“Whatever.” Barricade stared at the water, a sleek glossy expanse, stretching to bisect the disk of the setting sun. The waves rippled like a sheet of satin, cool and smooth, throwing gleams of light back at the sky. Gestalt. Right. Water, grit, sunlight. Nature.
Be better paved over.
“Oceans mean a lot of things to humans,” June said, reaching down, gesturing for one of Barricade's hands. He brought it up, letting her run her hands over his, small fingers probing into the wrist tire, along his talons, curling around the palm. “Emotion, and the subconscious, cleaning, all that junk.”
“Junk's about right.” Cleaning? Frag, these humans obviously never did a proper contamination analysis of this ocean stuff . And who wanted to think about clean when dirty was so much more fun?.
“You're so romantic,” June teased.
“Plenty romantic,” Barricade muttered, defensive. All that gooshy romance stuff? Not his style. Flowers died. Stupid gift. “Just...the good kind of romantic.” The kind that went for the interfacing.
“I'm not complaining,” June said, sliding one bare foot down his leg, toes along the complicated track of his armor.
“Better not be.” His red optics glowed against the violet settling in from the East. June sighed, frustrated and for a long moment they watched the silent rolling of the sun over the water.
“'The sea is calm tonight'...,” June murmured, her eyes distant. “'The tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits; on the French coast the light gleams and--”
“Not in France,” Barricade cut her off, poking her shoulder with one talon.
She smiled. “I know. It's a poem.”
“Poem,” Barricade scoffed. “About France.”
She tilted her head, sea-wet ringlets brushing her neck. “Not about France, silly. It's about love.”
“Pretty obscure fraggin' poem, then.”
“Not really. I had to memorize it in school. And we don't work like you: we can't just upload to our memory. This took work!”
“Sounds...totally not worth it.”
She laughed. “It takes a while. I don't think anyone is ready for Arnold at fifteen.”
“Not sure I'm ready for him now.” Stupid poem about France. Oops, love. Whatever. How the moon and France and water added up to love? Poetry was apparently like bad chemistry. With words.
“We didn't even get to the good part!”
“That presupposes that there is a good part,” Barricade muttered.
“There is.”
“Huh. You're biased. You've been brainwashed by this human educational system.”
“And you've been brainwashed by your silly robot system.” She winked, pushing off his knee, trusting, somehow, his hand would come to stabilize her, brace her if she slipped, wrapping her arms around his neck. She rubbed her cheek against one of the long silver spires of his face.
“Got your silly robot system right here,” he muttered, his hands cradling her around the jut of his chassis. “And if you ever want any of it again...,” he smirked, lower optics focused on her face, feeling the still-strange yieldingness of her flesh against his, the way the contact warmed them both.
She grinned. “Are you threatening me?”
“Am I?” He flicked one hand by her face, the sharp talons glinting even in the fading light, casting the pink-violet glow of sunset like blades. His mouth quirked. “All right, human. Under severe penalty of deprivation,” he ran one of the talons along the back of her thigh for emphasis, “prove to me this poetry stuff doesn't entirely suck.”
“You...do realize I'm not a lit major, right?”
“Admitting you're brainwashed?”
She pursed her mouth at him. “All right. But only because the stakes are so high.” She winked. “Though, honestly, I think you'd suffer just as much from the penalty.”
Yeah, well, true. But he was a Decepticon. He could take it.
She thought for a moment, wriggling up onto his chassis, leaning against the tire's mounting rail. “Okay, well, why not. Here's the end of that poem.” She wrapped her arms around one knee, eyes going a little distant, as if accessing some old memory. “Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
She stopped, and for a long moment there was nothing between them but the soft slap of waves against Barricade's legs, the darkness settling in like a violet mist.
“What the...frag does that mean?”
“What do you think it means? It's a love poem.”
“About France.”
“It's not about France!”
Barricade snickered. From now on, he decided, France would be his default comment to irritate her about...everything. Whatever France had done to her it apparently still rankled. Still, he replayed the part again in his cortex. “Nope. Still don't get it.”
June gave a fake-exasperated sigh. “Heathen.”
“Probably.” He tipped his head, cheek spires against her body. “So, you defaulting?”
She snorted. “No. I just have to explain it in very small words to the genius robot.” She tweaked one of the finials on his audio. “Whyn't you tell me where you get confused, there, robot boy.”
Robot...boy? Oh this was something to be settled at another time. “I don't know. Sounds like he's telling some other squishy not to lie to him. Because everything sucks, even if it looks like it doesn't. Especially because it looks like it doesn't.” Which made as much sense as any human logic he'd run into. Everything sucks so tell me the truth? Yyyyyeah. Here's a truth, poet, from authority. Squishy females don't want to hear about how much things suck. This Arnold must not have gotten laid very much.
June paused, tilting her head. “That's...pretty much it. Except it's not 'don't lie' but, you know, be true. Like...romantically.”
“... the frag that mean?” Romantically true: Not lying about sappy stuff. Yeah? In that case, count Barricade out.
“Well. That's the thing, really. Like faithful to him. And honest. And everything. Just...true. I guess that's what makes it poetry.”
Barricade stared moodily out over the water. The sun had set, only the faintest fading orange glow over the horizon fighting an indigo ocean, violet sky, the water, even to the distance, lapping gently, as if licking the margins of the world just as it rollingly caressed his armor.
“Do you squishy females fall for this? I mean, this actually get him results? You know. Romantic results.”
June laughed. “Probably not. But that's not the point he was trying to make.” She paused. “Though a lot of other poets have used poems to try to get in the sack.”
“So...everything sucks, and Arnold sucks and no squishy female's getting naked because of this poem, which is about how much things suck—and France—but not at all about interfacing.”
June shook her head. “You,” she said, “are being deliberately obtuse.”
“Poetry,” heretorted, his voice heavy with wisdom, into the darkness, “is stupid.”
June snorted. “So, guess that means you win. Poetry sucks, and,” she leaned closer, her breath hot on his facial armor, small fingers probing between the cables and servos of his throat as she nuzzled against him, “no more interfacing. Ever.”
Frag. “Maybe you should try with a less sucky poem. You know, no France.”
June laughed, the sound rippling like the soft waves, ducking in to run her mouth over his, her tongue a warm little dart over his armor, “Oh no. You won. Poetry sucks.” She pulled away, just far enough to tilt her head up, meeting his optics. “This? Is going to be fuuuuuuuuun.”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-04-29 08:36 pm (UTC)