GroundFraming
Jun. 27th, 2012 06:02 pm![[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_vectorBayverse AU
Barricade, Starscream
Refers back to Barricade as a Combat Controller, a very, very old idea I dredged up again.
one of my May requests....dreadfully late ;;-;;
He missed the CC chamber. He missed the confining helmet, the strange shift of gravity from the harness. He missed the sure sensation of a deck of processors above him, the boosted reflexes.
The power, if he was honest. The power.
He was small without it, frail, light. He didn’t even have the basic armor of a combat drone, just open framing.
In a ship where he was outmassed by every other mech.
Yet, that didn’t frighten him, as much as the awareness of his own obsolescence. The Combat Control program had been terminated, and he found himself possessed of skills no one wanted.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. All mechs started as hatchlings, carefully monitored, exposed to safe input. Dronelings were handled by batch, already assigned to purposes, moved into subframes. And they learned. And learned. And grew more sentient, more self-aware, gaining histories and memories and the ability to learn, until they were fully formed, fully sentient, ready for their final armoring.
He’d…surpassed them. Barricade was different, when different shouldn’t happen. But the CC program, shoving him into the memory cortices of so many mechs, running him through battles in realtime, over and over again, hundreds, thousands…he grew in ways his small frame couldn’t hold. In a way, he was more combat hardened than most of the mechs here: he fought each battle through at least ten different perspectives, ten different histories. Ten different battles, he’d realized.
But in all the other ways, he was still a droneling. Until now. Or soon, at any rate. The slim cable in the access port now was scanning his coding, deciding his alt. It was a joke no one found funny that the program was called Destiny.
“Stop thinking.” The bronze jet dropped to one knee before him, red optics embers in the dark. “Allow the scanning program to work.”
“Not stopping it,” Barricade muttered, hunching lower, feeling the too-light cable shift in its socket. He was so much more used to the heavier cables of CC, the ones that networked him with a bank of processing power. This was just…a simple scan.
“You are, however, still thinking.” An admonishing plink of one of the jet’s long talons on his unarmored chassis.
“Can’t not.” His hands, all four of them, tangled together.
“Are you afraid?”
“No.” He felt his face scrunch into an expression of denial. “Not afraid.”
Starscream tipped his head, pointedly.
“Just…want to get it over with.” Maybe that was fear? He didn’t know. He knew the feeling in others: the fluttering grip around your midchassis, under the spark chamber, the rush of fuel through the lines. Funny how he could recognize it in them, but not himself.
Not that funny, really. And at least when he noted it in others, he could do something about it: adjust their levels, cycle out their ventilations. Why was he so helpless when it came to himself?
“It will happen. Patience.” The calipers of the mouth spread into an amused grin. “A good lesson for a warrior.”
Barricade looked down at his four spindly arms, the extra fingers tangled together. “Not a warrior.” He couldn’t withstand a backhand, with his current framing.
“You will be,” Starscream said, tipping the chin up toward him with one long talon, so that Barricade’s four optics whirred to focus on his face. “Soon.”
[***]
Barricade onlined, slowly feeling his systems prickle to life, the HUD screen reading out against the black before his vid resolved: preliminary processing, auditory, visual, olfactory, mobility.
His optics flared to life, resolving on the shadow-gridded ceiling of a repair bay, his tactile array noting the webbing of a repair cradle underneath him. He tried to move, panicking, but his limbs felt dense and heavy and wrong. Fear burst from his thorax, as unfamiliar claws raked the air.
And movement, beside him, that turned out to be Starscream, rising on his legs. Barricade tried to say something, but his vocalizer hadn’t come back online yet: he gave a burst of static.
Starscream caught the clawed hand, easily, wrapping it with one of his larger ones. Barricade felt the movement jolt to a stop, only then realizing that that hand? Was his. “This will not be the last time you awake in a medbay, Barricade.”
Barricade flexed the clawed hand in Starscream’s, watching, curious, unsettled, as the hand obeyed: long silver talons, gleaming new—not hazed with a thousand scratches like Starscream’s to a rich sort of patina. “New,” he said.
“I imagine many things are,” Starscream said, releasing his grip, lifting one finger at a time.
“What am I?” A dumb question, stupid. But Starscream knew what he meant.
“A light ground vehicle.”
“Not a—?” He hadn’t realized it till now, how much he wanted to be a flightframe. And why: Starscream was a jet. It felt like another wall thrown between them.
Starscream shook his head. “It suits you, though. Small, quick.”
“Ground.” Barricade frowned, feeling the new mouthplates shift to the movement. “All those grounders I CC’d.” It was their fault that all he knew was ground-based. Their fault.
“Likely.” Starscream, not one to mince words. And Barricade found himself appreciating that. The jet leaned over, plucking a restraining lead off Barricade’s chassis, sending one last repairbot scurrying. “Would you like to stand?”
He didn’t, but he didn’t want to lie flopped on a repair berth like some…sick thing. He struggled up, his new armor catching in the meshes. It was almost a relief to tear free, feeling his new, broad footplates hit the gridded decking.
He came up to Starscream’s ribstruts. No more. Another disappointment, even though that was twice his former height. Barricade took another step forward, feeling the new actuators respond. It felt…it felt like CC. Like he was controlling another body, firewalls down. It was strangely comforting. He stood, for a moment, inventorying.
“Transformation programming,” he said, his voice a little sharp with surprise. “Have transformation programming.”
A snort of laughter from the jet.
Barricade chewed on his frown. Of course he did. This was his final upframe. He was going to have an alt. A ground alt. “Sorry, dumb.”
“Not ‘dumb’,” Starscream said.”But it does bring back…long dead memories.”
Barricade took another step forward, feeling the strange weight of kibble on his back, throwing his balance. He lurched. “Never get the hang of this!”
A hand, still large, but smaller seeming than before, caught his chassis, long talons hooking under his armor. It felt strange, the tactile feedback of the armor: distant and yet close. “You will, in time. You controlled a hundred mechs before. Surely you can manage just…one.” One talon tweaked his chassis.
It was a goad, but somehow exactly what Barricade needed. “Yeah. Can get it.”
“I do wonder,” Starscream murmured, head tilting. “It must feel, in its own way, limited.”
“Yeah,” Barricade nodded. Exactly that. He was so used to controlling so many, the power, the processing, the control. And this? One, tiny, and…yeah. Limited.
“We shall work on that,” Starscream said, the crimson of his optics gleaming above him, glowing with promise.
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Date: 2012-06-28 01:07 am (UTC)The technology and mechanics of how the final form is decided just makes so much sense!
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Date: 2012-06-28 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-01 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-01 02:12 am (UTC)