Legacy

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Fandom: Transformers, bayverse, pre-DOTM
Title: Legacy
Characters:  Barricade, hatchlings
Rating: G
Contains: fluff? 
Word Count: 1175
Notes: For fan_flashworks Challenge #3 "anywhere but here".  It involves some headcanon about Barricade, and also an idea I'd been toying with for a long time. In the first movie, we 'hear' the Decepticons--we hear sounds, but we also see the Cybertronian glyphs as they speak.  I thought it might be interesting to imagine that their communication was all like that--not just sound but shape and color.  I took this opportunity to try to write it.
Summary: Barricade cares for the hatchlings

Barricade rolled in, gravel popping under his tires on the cracked, sunbleached macadam.  Before him, the baked white stucco walls, and a battered, pressed-wood garage door, shedding celadon chips of paint onto the pavement.  Above the garage bay, painted in foot-high letters, Cray’s Garage, the once bright blood-red paint chipped and weathered, beside a rusted, bubbled sign on which good optics could barely make out ‘Inspections’.

He rolled around the outside of the bay, tires tipping onto the hard-packed ground, baked like clay, as he rounded into the abandoned garage’s yard, slowing his speed. He’d told the hatchlings to be careful but…well…fraggin’ hatchlings. 

The yard was deserted, rusted hulks of old cars, mangled bumpers, doors, engine blocks, littering the perimeter before it led to a low, scrub-pine tree line.  Barricade transformed, rising up, beyond sight of the pale ribbon of yellow-line road behind him, giving a clickwhistle, an old drone master’s signal, with a slight bronze tint of approval. He’d ordered them to stay out of sight if they heard anything: they had.

A soft rustle of movement, one or two heads peeping out of the rusted rubble, optics wide and red and curious. 

“Me,” Barricade said, sending the signal: sound and color and shape. They knew him by now, his signature, timbre and base color.

More shapes detached themselves from the shadows, rolling into the packed earth of the yard, bumping over rare tufts of tough, weedy grass. He squatted down, the warm sun slanting off the roof, casting a sharp-edged shadow on the ground, turning so the shadow was behind him. He gave a click signal and the hatchlings uncurled, spreading their tiny solar charge panels. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and done small benefit of this planet. 

Barricade reached into his hip storage. “Energon.” They knew this word; this was their favorite word. The first word any hatchling learned, the word they learned the modalities of voice on—he could hear some few of them chirping, ‘energon’, ‘energon’, in bright colors of happiness and excitement. His own word was dark-tinged and muddy, cynical. He wondered when the last time he’d ever used that bright, sparkling red, or that one’s shimmering gold. 

“Dumb place for it,” he muttered, holding out the pouch of energon.  The converter he’d set up over in the forest couldn’t produce much, but it was better than they’d had before.  He felt a dim surge of gratitude at Starscream, for bringing the thing down from the wreck of the Nemesis. “No place to be happy.  Nothing to be happy about.”  His electrum mouthplates twitched into something like a snarl, even as he bent, absently, to right one hatchling that had fallen on its chin, scrambling too eagerly for the pouch. 

It gave a mechanical whine, and Barricade scooped it up, resting it on a projection of his knee armor, pulling out one of the feeder hoses from the pouch, and snapping it home into the hatchling’s fuel port. The whine cut short, replaced by a happy series of beeps and bleats. 

“Yeah, don’t thank me,” he muttered, reaching for the other pouch.  He could have eaten on the ridge, alone but he always brought it back here.  He told himself that it was more efficient this way: he could fuel and keep an optic on them at the same time.

He knew that was a rationalization. There was a part of him, small and buried deep, that remembered his own droneling-hood, artificially kept from full evolution for ages, in service of the war. A small part of him that ate with them because, well…a warrior ate with his comrades. 

Pitiful comrades, all of them.

Not that these hatchlings had a much better future ahead of them. Die now, or die later, in service of a war they didn’t willingly join, a war that had devoured millions before them.

And so far from home. 

He looked up, letting the bright Southern sun shine on his face, gloss over his facial armor. “Used to be like this,” he said, and he felt a melancholic blue creep into his voice, the edges silvered with the ‘listen’ tone. “On Cybertron, before the war.”  He’d had modules about it, as a droneling, on Cybertron, what the golden age under Sentinel had looked like: bright and sunny and bustling with life.  And he’d thought—one of his first conscious thoughts that was his, and his alone, not simple iteration of previous shells of knowledge—looking around him at the ash-dark Cybertron of his dronelinghood, that it was a world he wanted, a world they’d lost to the Autobots. And to get the sunlight back, the golden warmth of light and life, the Autobots had to be defeated. It had been the core of his resolve, all along. 

“Used to have a sun like this.  And peace.” A tinge of yellow, but it looked sickly. “Whatever that looks like.” 

A series of backchanneled pings: they were listening, paying attention.  “Guess they knew what to do with it back then.” A shrug, his shoulder tire cutting a shadow in the sunlight.  “Or maybe not, since they started a war.”

One of the hatchlings looked up, optics it had yet to grow into blinking, curious, and it reached up one spindly claw, pawing at the air between them. It gave a chirp, rosy-gold with sympathy—a warm colorcode hatchlings used for each other. 

It should have been an insult, mistaken for a barely-sentient hatchling. Barricade grunted, the sound brown-black and simmering, like heat dancing on the sunbaked road. “Yeah,” he croaked. “So, that’s your legacy.”  He squeezed the energon pouch, pushing the dregs through the feeder hoses.  Little hums of contentment as their tiny tanks tapped to full.  So easy to please, the simple creatures: a full tank and the sunlight on their charging wings and they were glowing with contentment, several of them already giving the drowsy chirps of satiation, curling into nap-balls.

He grunted, blunted claws working with a swift, practiced expertise, unhooking the cluster of hatchlings from the feeder hoses, mouth quirking as one or two reached to meet his hand with light, experimental pats. The one on his knee clung to his fingers, wrapping its wiry legs around his wrist, hooking its tiny toes into his wrist tire, refusing to let go.  “Listen,” he said, but the command-color had faded from his voice, replaced with the copper of emotion, “My war.  It’s going to kill you. Here. In this…stupid place.  Parsecs from home, fighting over something you can’t even understand.” 

The hatchling clutched tighter, giving rose-pink bleats, rubbing its flat face against the fingers.

“Frag,” Barricade muttered. “Don’t think any of us understand any better.”

Another pink purr, and Barricade dropped back onto his aft, the other hatchlings clambering around him, blurting rose-gold and copper, little hands clinging with sympathy.  And he wished he could take them some place where they could have a future: back to Cybertron, or the base on the moon, or the Nemesis in orbit, or…anywhere but here.  

Comments

[playswithworms.livejournal.com]

*pounces on and adores* Now THIS just totally made my night, hee! ^_^ I love the color-communication, and Barricade, the recipient of rosy-gold hatchie sympathies, awwwwwwwwwwwwww <33333333333

Nap balls! :D

[femme4jack.livejournal.com]

Color communication and nap balls and cynical Barricade still caring so very much and *wibbles* This was lovely, with such awesome head canon.

[zomgitsalaura.livejournal.com]

The adorableness! hngh!
Cute little gold chirping noises xD

[mewsing.livejournal.com]

Nice use of colors for emotions, really great. :)

[hopeofdawn.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. Wow--I got to read this last night, and Barricade+hatchlings? Best present evar! <333 Poor Barricade--he's trying so hard to be a tough guy, even when he doesn't have anything good to hope for, really ... and the hatchlings are adorable! Loved the solar/feeding adaptations, and the warning click-calls, and the chromatic communication ... it really adds a wonderfully interesting layer of alien-ness to their interactions.

I've also kicked around the idea of a chromatic-based language (though mine didn't have a verbal component, really), so it's really neat to see someone else do it too, and do it well, to boot. I hope your Barricade-muse allows us to see more of this story ... I love how the world expands with each new installment. :D