shadow_vector | Sky and Ground 18 Re-Berth

R
Bayverse AU
Barricade, Starscream
angst, robot snuggling

When had his recharge berth gotten so big? Barricade flopped around on it miserably, his armor clattering against the metal expanse, seeming to echo across the empty room. Sprawled out he could touch the rounded lip all around the berth, but…nothing else.

He missed Skywarp. In so many ways. But right now he just missed the physical contact—the staticy fuzz of their combined EM fields, the knowledge that someone was there, a hand’s-reach away. Just someone, something, touching him. He never thought he’d want, much less miss, being touched.

It was…so quiet, too. He missed the hum of Skywarp’s larger engines, the soft cycling of his cooling respiration.

He rattled around on the berth again, unable to find a comfortable position, sighing with frustration. Should he call him? He had the comm freq. He wanted to call him. But he’d only been gone for a few cycles. It would seem really desperate if Barricade contacted him now. Needy. Clingy. No. And besides, Skywarp might be recharging. After a flight he probably needed the rest more than he needed to comfort a clingy little grounder.

Barricade jumped as he heard his door code open. He sat up, cycling his optics. His capacitor picked up as his optics showed him a familiar wedge-shaped bulk in the doorway. Hope exploded across his cortex. “Skywarp?” he whispered, excitedly. Back so soon?

A soft tenor laugh. “One day,” Starscream said, “I shall become offended at how easily you confuse us.”

Barricade sagged back on the berth. But then, “What—why—how did you get my recharge door code?” Of the thousand questions tumbling in Barricade’s sleep-addled cortex, that was the one that rattled down to his vocalizer. Still, it was a place to start.

“Really, I imagine it should be obvious, Barricade. Skywarp gave it to me.”

“Why?”

Starscream held up one hand for silence, and picked his way through the scattered mess on the floor of the berth. “Skywarp has insisted that you not be alone for your first recharge.” He shrugged. “I gave my word.”

“That means I don’t get any say, doesn’t it?” Barricade muttered.

“You certainly do not.” Starscream settled himself on the berth next to Barricade, daintily. Just like Skywarp, he barely fit. Barricade scooted over, trying to give him room, but the berth was impossibly small for two. When it had been he and Skywarp, he hadn’t minded (at all) the enforced proximity. It was a little…different with Starscream. He didn’t think the bronze jet would attack him, but…it didn’t feel the same.

“You were supposed to,” Starscream murmured, “already be in recharge when I arrived.”

Barricade didn’t like the sound of that plan—waking up next to Starscream with no notion of how he’d gotten there? That didn’t sound fun at all. “Sorry,” Barricade muttered, “Guess I fragged that up.”

Starscream pulled Barricade down on his back by one arm tire. “It is no matter,” he said. “Now, what do you normally do?”

Ummmm, no. Not going to do that with Starscream. Yes, of course he’d interfaced with Skywarp’s Trine mate before, but that was different. Skywarp had been right there. Or near enough.

“Skywarp told me to tell you it would be fine with him,” Starscream continued, stroking his cool talons down Barricade’s arm.

“I-I can’t.”

Starscream gave a playful pout. “Your chastity is as endearing as it is irritating.”

“You can,..you can always go do that with someone else.” He winced, hoping the jet didn’t take it as an insult. He didn’t mean it like that.

“This may come as a complete surprise to you, Barricade,” Starscream said smugly, “but I am aware of that.” He wriggled against the berth. “But thank you for reminding me.”

Barricade floundered on the berth, trying to find a way to lay without touching Starscream. It was, he decided, finally, impossible. And made even worse by the soft motorized snicker from the jet. “I have,” Starscream eventually whispered, “a considerable history of making other mechs restless.”

That settled it. Barricade flopped on his back, shoulder in the jet’s chassis. “Don’t you miss him?” he mumbled.

“Of course, little Barricade. He is my Trine mate.” Barricade couldn’t tell how cutting the comment was supposed to be—we have something more than you will ever know: our Trine bond. Barricade had…no one. “Now, you are wasting all of this perfectly good worry. You should save it for the hot mission window. Mere transit is nothing worrisome at all. You do not want me to tell Skywarp you doubted his ability to fly, do you?”

Barricade writhed on the berth at the comment. Of course not. He trusted Skywarp. It was…just everything else in the universe he didn’t trust. “You’re right,” he muttered, slowly dimming his optics.

“As you have yet to acknowledge,” Starscream said, teasingly, “I always am.”

*****
Barricade woke up several cycles later, his face buried below the jet’s cockpit, both of his legs thrown around one of Starscream’s thighs. More than slightly compromising. The EM field was similar enough that he must have…gotten confused. Not quite the same, but similar. He tried to move slowly, hoping to disentangle himself without awaking Starscream, but one of his armor plates snagged against the jet’s inner thigh armor.

“Mmmmmmm,” Starscream purred, half awake. He smooshed Barricade back against his belly, sliding his interface hatch against Barricade’s lower torso. “Are you certain you do not want to…?”

Barricade squirmed, freezing when his actions made Starscream sigh happily. “Just…trying to…not bother you.”

“You are not bothering me,” Starscream said, drowsily. “Well, not MUCH.” He stroked one idle hand across the wing fairings on Barricade’s back, before pulling the shoulders closer to his body.

“Don’t want to bother you at all.” The jet even smelled like his Trine mate. High grade external joint lubricant, heated by the same sort of engine. It was a little too close for Barricade’s comfort. “Know you don’t have to do this.”

“I know that as well, Barricade,” Starscream murmured, with the sense of a mech dragging himself unwillingly out of recharge. “Of course, I serve my own self interest. Believe me.”

“How does this…?”

Starscream rolled onto his back, his spinal cables arcing over the rise of his engines. “Do you think I often get this myself? Someone who is not with me merely for an interface? It is sad that I have to borrow you from my own Trine mate, but that is what I am, pathetically, reduced to. Now,” he moved, hauling Barricade up onto his torso, “You stay there, and recharge.” He plopped a possessive arm over Barricade’s shoulders, pinning him against the cockpit.

This was also different. Skywarp liked to be on top, his heavy weight a comforting crushing sensation on top of Barricade’s frame, like a blanket made of trust and safety. He felt more exposed, draped over Skywarp’s Trine mate like this, but the difference was good. It shouldn’t be the same. If it was the same, they were really indistinguishable, and Skywarp was really nothing special at all.

Every cable in Barricade’s body resisted that thought with howling outrage. Skywarp was special. There was no one like him. No one. Not even his Trine mate. Feeling a fuzzy sense of gratitude toward Starscream for pointing this out to him, Barricade dropped into another doze, his talons curving around a chest plate possessively.

*****
He knew it was a dream, even as he dreamed it. Even as real as it felt, he knew it wasn’t real. Because in the dream Skywarp said everything he wanted him to say.

“I love you,” Skywarp murmurs in his audio, his baritone voice sending delicious tremors across Barricade’s sensornet, resonating in his knee stabilizers. “So much. You have no idea.”

Barricade squirms, wishing his arms were long enough to wrap around the jet’s torso. (He knows this is a dream, but even his dream will not violate certain realities). He nuzzles his face into Skywarp’s shoulder armor. He feels Skywarp sigh as heat against his wing fairings, the jet’s hands solid and sure on his back. “Love you too,” he murmurs, grinning against a sweep of collar armor as the arms tighten in response around him.

“I want to show you,” Skywarp says, after a brief kiss on the top of Barricade’s head. Somehow he avoids grating against any of the facial spires. (Another sign this is a dream). Barricade looks up, worriedly (aware that this is a dream, and like all dreams of his, destined to turn, abruptly, to horror). He half expects the face smiling down at him to be decayed, or half blasted away, smeared with barnacles or peels of long-dried energon. But it is merely Skywarp’s face, smiling down at him, as he actually has done. “Can I show you something?”

“Ye-ees,” Barricade says, haltingly. Perhaps the turn to horror would happen next. Perhaps all of this perfection is just a ratcheting up so he had that much farther to fall. He braces himself, or tries to, against whatever was coming next.

Even so, he isn’t ready.

Skywarp, in the dream, pushes Barricade gently away. The smaller mech watches as the heavy armor protecting the spark chamber retracts. The dodecahedron of the spark chamber reveals itself, almost glowing, against the dark of the dream. And Barricade sees his chamber cover, set atop Skywarp’s, shimmering back at him. He can feel the dark swirl of energy he felt before, but stronger now; can hear the hum of Skywarp’s engines.

“Touch me,” Skywarp says, laying back. “Touch it. It is us, do you understand?”

Barricade’s talons tremble. Violet light seems to pour from around the edges of the chamber cover, a thick liquid, like purple honey. His smaller hands brush the edges of the chamber cover. It feels smooth, almost slippery, except where it has some ridges or grooves. Barricade leans closer. The grooves are writing: some script he does not know how to read. But he feels an ache in the back of his own spark chamber, a painful desperation to be able to read it. So much, so much he doesn’t know. He feels pitiful. As though all of the secrets of the world are contained on that disk of metal. And his ignorance stands between him and all he ever wanted.

“Touch me,” Skywarp repeats, in the dream.

“I am,” Barricade says, almost startling himself out of the dream. (He has spoken aloud, his voice catches in his audio like a mournful echo.) But he feels his fingers pass through the metal of the spark chamber, and pass through Skywarp. Skywarp has become immaterial. A phantasm. A tissue-dream shredding away from him as he reaches.

“Please? I love you.” A hint of panic in the voice. Pleading. Oh, Barricade thinks, and here is where it goes wrong. Here. He claws desperately, his talons clattering, locking around something, but it is not Skywarp. He knows it is not Skywarp. And his capacitor is racing the energon through its circuit at a speed that pounds in his audio.

*****
“Shhhhhh,” he heard a voice, soft, in his audio, arms strong around his frame. “It was just a purge. That is all, little one.” He lifted his head, numbly, weakly. Starscream, one anxious hand stroking down his back. “A bad purge,” Starscream repeated.

“Couldn’t touch him,” Barricade said, wincing at how pathetic he sounded. “Couldn’t reach him.”

“It was a purge,” Starscream said, again, patiently, rocking Barricade against him. “He will be back, soon, and you can touch him all you wish.”

Barricade struggled to get his ventilation under control, embarrassed at the spectacle he was clearly making of himself. In front of the Air Commander, no less. It was easy to forget Starscream’s rank—sometimes a little too easy—but it was always there, that fact, whenever Barricade needed to think less of himself. He pushed away. “Yeah,” he mumbled, “M fine.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yeah.”

Starscream looked at him, dubious. Then pushed himself upright. “Skywarp,” he said, with the tone of someone who knew exactly how manipulative he was being, “will be very upset if he hears you lied about being all right.”

“Not lying. Stupid dream, that’s all.” Stupid dream of all my wants and fears, that’s all.

Starscream pushed himself off the berth. “Unfortunately, I have a recon mission I need to fly in half a cycle. If you wish to co-recharge again, I suggest we do it in my recharge station? The berth is slightly larger.”

“You don’t have to. Only promised him one recharge cycle, right?”

Starscream sighed, picking his way over to Barricade’s maintenance facility. “Yes, that is true. But that does not mean I cannot offer more if I wish to.”

“I—I can’t.”

Starscream shrugged. “The offer is there.”

“It’s…not the same.”

“Yes,” Starscream said, poking through the bin for a cleansing rag. “That is, I believe, the point. Close enough that you did not feel utterly alone, but not so close that you did not suffer a little bit.” There was something unutterably sad in Starscream’s voice. “It is the way we have been forced to think.”

Next: Calling