Redeem 15: Enemy Assault

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
Bayverse
Prowl, Flareup, Starscream
Warning: violence

 

15. Enemy Assault

 Diego Garcia

 

Prowl sighed at the empty hangar. Everyone rushing off to greet Cliffjumper on his release from CR—as if Cliffjumper would even be able to remember any of it beyond a sensor-blocked blur of light and noise.  Still, these silly rituals. He supposed it helped them cope. 

But it did mean that an awful lot of tasks would not going to get done today. 

Not only had Optimus not yet made any definitive decision about where they would be moving—as if the few short weeks they had left on Diego Garcia would somehow last forever—but they had yet to even sort through the materials in the hangars and decide what they could take and what they should leave. 

So, while everyone else was soothing their consciences about Cliffjumper’s well-being—as though he were somehow more alive today than yesterday—he, at least, would get something done.  Prowl picked up a datapad and headed to Hangar F. As good a place to start as any, and away from the noise at Delta. 

He froze at the entrance to F1. There was noise from the other end of the hangar, the side facing the runway.  A loud noise of tearing metal.  He raced around the side of the building, as fast as he could while staying quiet against the hard pavement. 

The hangar’s door had been heaved off its track, one side crumpled in. And inside, noise and movement.  He froze.

Starscream.  And Prowl was unarmed.   

He crouched around the edge of the door, watching. If he could figure out what Starscream was doing here, he could come up with something.  His processor raced for possibilities, for motive:  sabotage of course.  Starscream could be setting a bomb.  How had he gotten through security? Oh, right, they had no security any more—the humans’ monitoring had proved easily jammable by the Decepticons and all of the Autobots were in Delta with Cliffjumper.   

If Prowl had been any other mech, he’d’ve launched into a series of obscenities.  Either blind luck or careful planning had discovered this gap in their security.   

Inside, Starscream howled in frustration, his long arms swinging wide, tumbling a pile of carefully stacked crates. 

No. Couldn’t be sabotage.  The sound echoed around the hangar, just as a burst of applause and happy noise came from Delta, several hundred yards away.  Should he comm Optimus?  No.  See if you can figure out what this is all about.  Still, the tactical paranoia he was known for made him test his comm. Dead. Someone was jamming all comms. This was bad. 

“Starscream,” he planted himself in the doorway, with a confidence he did not feel.  The jet whirled to him, his irises spiralling to pinpricks, blazing red like targeting lasers.   

“Where is he?!” Starscream snarled, bearing down upon Prowl, claws curved to attack. 

“Where is who?”   

The jet gave another frustrated screech. “Barricade! What have you done with him?!”  He dashed aside, furiously, another pile of boxes.  “Where!?”   

Barricade? Although it did explain why he was here, in F3.  This was where they had kept him—he had no doubt presumed that Barricade would be kept in the same place.   

“He’s not here,” Prowl said, blandly.  Give nothing away.  No tactical advantage to the enemy.   

“I can see that, Autobot,” Starscream spat. “What have you done with him?” 

“Me? I haven’t done anything.” 

“Do not play foolish semantic games with me, Prowl,” Starscream hissed, swiping his talons in a warning gesture a few inches from Prowl's visage.  The smaller ‘bot braced himself, unflinching.   

“Prowl?” A voice from Prowl’s right shoulder.  Flareup, rolling up innocently to what looked to her merely like Prowl examining some sudden damage.  “Is everything all right?” He tried to gesture her away with one hand.  Starscream caught the gesture, and its meaning. He lunged forward, tearing the door the remainder of the way off its tracks, covering Prowl with one of his chain guns.

Flareup and Starscream stared at each other for a long moment, each one’s face unreadable.   

“Flareup,” Prowl said quietly, “Go get the others.”   

“Where is Barricade?” Starscream asked, his voice strange. 

“I’ve told yo—“ The jet struck at Prowl, dashing him against the steel side of the doorway. Prowl crumpled to the floor, sparking from his left shoulder. 

“I was not asking you.” Starscream lowered his body closer to the ground, nearly folding his legs flat.  “They did not come looking for you, Autobot female. Your friends betrayed you, choosing peace over your safety. I am not making the same choice.” His eyes spiralled in and out, as if struggling to focus.   

Flareup balanced on her tire, frozen.  At first all her processor fed to her was a terrifying series of memories—the jet’s hands, huge and sharp, dragging her into the hangar; his awful silence as he locked his hands around her shoulders; before that, his cold brutality at Bourzey.  The gash across Barricade’s chassis—so clearly Starscream’s claws.  They’d fought, she knew, over her.  They were enemies. Weren’t they?  Then again, they had both been at Tunguska. 

“Why—why do you want him back?” 

“Because a warrior does not abandon his own.”   

Her eyes went hard.  “I don’t know where he is.”  She rolled closer to Prowl, activating her energon blade, moving to intercept if Starscream attacked the downed Prowl again. Starscream hissed at the act of aggression, withdrawing into a battle crouch.   

“You know, don’t you?” Starscream murmured, coaxingly. It was almost, almost absurd, such a mild voice coming from such a heavily-weaponized mech.  “Tell me. Tell me and I leave. Think, female.  I could have damaged so much. I could have killed your Prowl just now. All I want…,” a hitch in his ventilation, “All I want is Barricade’s location.”   

“Starscream,” Prowl said. If he could just keep the jet talking, long enough, someone would come investigate.  He allowed himself to flop a bit pathetically on the ground, so anyone looking down this way would see a downed mech.  “We don’t have Barricade. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”   

Flareup bent low over Prowl, lifting his shoulders. “Are you all right, Prowl?” 

“Fine,” he muttered, “Stall him.  Until the others….”   

“I,” Starscream said, quietly. “I am the one who hurt you. On the Nemesis. It was all my idea. Not his.  Do not blame him for that.”   

A lie. She could hear it in his voice, even as she knew the truth. But he was willing to lie to her to save his friend.  What were her friends willing to do for her? They weren’t even willing to hear her out. 

The jet’s head shifted from side to side, like an approaching serpent’s. “He risked himself to warn you,” Starscream continued, feeling desperation.  He had to get out of here.  And soon.  And he could push by the two small Autobots to escape if he needed to.  But he felt that the purple one was just at the point of giving him something.  “He saved you all, did he not?” 

“Starscream,” Prowl repeated, but now his tone was warning. 

Starscream edged closer, flexing his hands.  Even in the half-light of the hangar, light glittered off the sharp barbs.  “He risked, and he lost.  And how—how have you treated him? Some manner you are too ashamed to even speak!” 

Prowl’s optics blanked with a sudden pain.  He slumped forward, off Flareup’s knees.  She rose, her hands trembling, the energon blade now slick with power-core fluid.  Her voice shook as well. “The humans have him. He’s alive.  In some aircraft carrier.” She pointed in the direction she’d seen the lift helicopter take. “Somewhere that way.  That’s all I know.”  The words poured out of her, as if anxious to get this frank betrayal over with.  What was she doing?  She didn’t even know. Just…something unendurable about Starscream’s frustration. And that he had come looking. And no one had tried to rescue her.  And…Barricade at the mercy of the humans. 

Starscream nodded.   

She added, hurriedly, “That makes us even, Decepticon.  You tell him that.  Even.  Do you hear me?” Her voice grated on anger.   

“Yes,” Starscream said.  He stepped forward, leaning over Prowl’s inert form, and while she watched, he dragged two of his talons, one on either side of the cut she had made in Prowl’s neck-cable. The move sliced away, cleanly, any evidence of the energon blade causing the injury.  So everyone would blame him, not her.  He lifted his optics. “And now we are not.” 

He pushed past her and into the sky.   

Far to her right, she heard a burst of applause from Delta.  She looked down at Prowl, prone, beside her foot tire.  His circuit’s idiosyncrasies would ensure that Starscream’s story, her story, made better sense than the truth. 

She didn’t know how that made her feel.  She didn’t know if she could still be an Autobot with such a lie between them.

 



Comments

[katsuko]

I wish I could leave a coherent response to this, but I suppose my idiotic glee will have to suffice.

I blame you for making me partially ship Cade/Scream, you realize.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Honestly, me too. Just wait. It gets even more shippy.... *hates self*.

Glad you liked!

[scarredbutalive.livejournal.com]

Oooh! Starscream I love you sooo much! His lie that he only wants to save Barricade because thats what a warrior would do, when the only reason he wants to is because he wants his friend back. Woa! GigglecriesO_o And Flareup? Starting to feel she would make a good pair with the screaming one;)