shadow_vector | Sky and Ground 19: Calling

NC-17
Bayverse AU
Skywarp, Barricade, Starscream, others
Sticky, 'phonesex' dirty talk.

Barricade keyed the number to its very last digit, then hesitated. Was it too soon? It had been a whole solar. A bit more. Halfway through shiftcycle so Skywarp probably wasn’t recharging: he’d hate it if he commed Skywarp and woke him out of recharge. Especially not to deal with his stupid clingy needy pathetic grounder who missed him terribly.

Still, Skywarp had more or less ordered him to use it. Right: he’d comm, and find out when would be good to comm next. Nothing wrong with a little check-in. That didn’t sound too fretty. Or clingy.

He keyed the last digit.

“On,” he heard a brisk voice reply. His tanks chilled. Had he input the wrong freq?

“Uh, Skywarp?” he said, hesitantly. He cursed himself: nice going, idiot. You comm him right when he’s in the middle of something important. He doesn’t have time to talk to you.

“Oh,” warmth flooded back into the voice on the far end of the freq. “Little spike. Sorry, didn’t check the incoming freq.”

Barricade relaxed. A little. “Yeah, it’s me. Just wanted to, you know,” (hear your voice) “check in and stuff.”

He could hear Skywarp’s smile. “Still flying. Bored. Why didn’t you call earlier?”

“I…uh, didn’t want to wake you out of recharge.”

“Wake me out of—oh I guess you don’t know. Sorry, I forget sometimes.” He sounded amused. Barricade felt…stung somehow. Yeah, another thing he didn’t know. “We fly straight. I’ll get there…hmmmm, next solar? Then I’ll recharge.”

That didn’t seem possible. Or healthy. “You…really? You go that long without recharge?”

“High grade energon, little spike. Plus, we shut down nonessential systems to conserve.” Well, that made sense, but Barricade still felt…a little stupid. “Sooooooo,” Skywarp said, his voice turning sly, “How’d it go last night?”

Was this a trick of some sort? Honesty, Barricade decided. He hadn’t done anything wrong. “Ummm, Starscream said you ordered him to stay with me, so he did. Did you?” Not like he didn’t trust Starscream. Okay, he didn’t, but the bronze jet hadn’t done anything wrong that would justify why he’d make up a lie, and Barricade knew he wasn’t hot enough that Starscream would suddenly just…invite himself over for cuddling.

“Oh good. He kept his word,” Skywarp said. “Did you sleep well?”

Honesty? Time to put that to the test. No matter how mortifying. “Had a bad memory purge, but that’s all.” And…I dreamed you were being torn away from me. Nothing special. His capacitor stuttered.

“Ooohhhhhh, you okay?”

Barricade squirmed at his console at the concern in Skywarp’s voice. Right. He was getting sympathy from Skywarp about a bad dream. With Skywarp’s own history of them. “Yeah, fine.”

“Did you tell Starscream what it was about?”

“No!” he said, a little too quickly, too late revealing he’d more or less given away what the purge had to be about.

He expected Skywarp to press the issue. Instead, the voice said, warmly, seductively, pouring like honey into his audio, “Did you interface with him?”

“No!” he barked, alarmed. He hadn’t! And he’d been half asleep when his hands, and other parts, had…wandered.

Skywarp grunted, mumbling something about ‘at least he didn’t let me down.’

“I didn’t, and I won’t,” Barricade said, hotly. Was Skywarp questioning his faithfulness, already? He almost felt like crying. He wanted to end the call, pretend he’d never been stupid enough to initiate it in the first place, but ending it right now…bad.

To his surprise, Skywarp laughed, that warm rumble he loved to hear. Loved even better to feel vibrating against him. “Not you, little spike. Starscream. He had orders.”

Honesty. “Ummm, he did keep asking. Was he supposed to?” He didn’t want to get Starscream in trouble, but he didn’t want anything that happened while Skywarp was away to poison things. He’d rather Skywarp knew EVERYTHING and up front.

“That was up to him, but if you agreed, he was supposed to open a Trinelink to me.”

“Ummm, why?” He knew this was some kind of link between them, but…?

“Silly spike! So I could play too. Feel everything he feels, that sort of thing.”

“Really?” Barricade frowned. Maybe he shouldn’t have turned Starscream down. It would have been…weird, but, well, it wouldn’t be the first time interfacing with either of them had been weird. “That somehow seems…unsafe if you’re flying?” Images of a linked-overloading Skywarp colliding with an asteroid filled his processor with worry and his tanks with guilt.

Skywarp roared with laughter. “No, it’s safe. We do have autonav features, you know.” He purred, “Primus, you’re so sweet for worrying.”

“Does—would he still do that? If I, uh…in the future?” Oh he was a little alarmed at the thoughts racing through his head. Would Starscream agree? Hi, you weren’t good enough for me last night, but let’s do it and by the way is Skywarp listening in? Still, his spike tingled with rising pressure just at the thought. And the missed opportunity.

“He’d better,” Skywarp groused. “He didn’t explain it to you, did he? Greedy little bastard.”

No. In Starscream’s defense though, “I, uh, really didn’t give him a chance to.” And even if Starscream had explained it, it sounded so weird and farfetched, would he have believed it? “So,” he asked, very, very small, “You want me to?”

“Yes. Plain enough for all of your adorable little objections, little spike?” Skywarp teased. “You can also interface with anyone else you want. No sense you not having any fun while I’m gone. Onslaught’s always up for some more, you know.”

Barricade sat back, more than a little stung. If…Skywarp said he could sleep around on him…did that mean Skywarp intended to do the same? He felt his systems pulse in something like panic—Skywarp would replace him. Forget all about him. Just like he’d feared. Oh, you knew this would happen. You got your hopes up, you stupid, stupid mech. He can do so much better than you.

“Barricade?”

“Yeah.” He swallowed the bitter taste in his intakes. Surest way to make that happen, he told himself, surest way to drive Skywarp away, is to act as pathetically desperate as you are feeling.

“Just saying, little spike: you don’t have to suffer or anything because I’m not there.” Oh, but I want to. Please. “Besides. Someone’s got to keep your engines warmed for me when I get back.”

“Okay,” Barricade tried to inject a brightness he didn’t feel at all into his voice. “Miss you, though.”

“Oh, little spike. Miss you too. You have no idea.” The last phrase filled him with an almost icy terror—the words from his memory purge. They seemed to ring in his cortex like an omen. He heard a distant bing. “Oh, slag. Got some astrogation I have to do now: can I comm back later? Now that I,” he teased, “have your private freq?”

“Yeah,” Barricade said. His processor already translated this for him: I’ll call you back, don’t call me again. Just wait. And wait. And then…never. His ventilation hitched. Still, don’t act desperate. Don’t. “Be looking forward to it.” Oh, if he did. If only.

****

Barricade scrolled his datapad to the newest presentation awaiting them in yet another of Soundwave’s interminable meetings. How Soundwave found the time to whip out multimedia bullet statement slides by the gross for every briefing was…either horrifying or impressive. He couldn’t really decide. And he had other things he’d rather waste his processor space with. He opened the file. Whoa. This was going to be a marathon. He was glad he’d topped off his energon ration . Brawl, sitting next to him, groaned as his own datapad opened the file: he probably hadn’t.

Bombshock cursed, eyes on his own datapad, scrolling to the section for his division. Last meeting had been Soundwave disseminating changes he wanted to see enacted: he was already (Barricade raced to find his section) expecting reports on results. Barricade decided that ‘incremental’ was going to be his preferred response. To be honest, he hadn’t implemented ANY of them. Because they were stupid.

But Barricade wasn’t stupid enough to tell Soundwave his ideas were stupid. He hoped Brawl would do that for him. Oh slag, how hard and how quickly boring reality came crashing back in on him.

He sighed, straightening himself in his chair as Soundwave swept into the room, his reflector panels spread behind him like he was some picture of magnificence. Barricade tried not to hate him: it’s not his fault Skywarp left, he told himself. Still. It was a fight.

Soundwave droned through the preliminaries—and honestly, had he always had such a tedious voice? Barricade was digging his talons (already!) into his thigh cabling to stay awake when his private comm chimed.

“Hey little spike,” Skywarp’s voice purred in his ear. “Catch you at a bad time?”

There’s never a bad time for you. “Soundwave just started the meeting.”

“ANOTHER one? Primus, how you mechs ever actually get any work done, I’ll never know.”

“Still flying?”

“Sure am. And bored. You have no idea how bored.”

“Want to compare?” Barricade felt himself smile.

“Ugh. No, you win. At least I’m going some place.”

Barricade’s grin grew until he was aware that Brawl was staring at him like he’d lost his higher processing capabilities. “Uh-oh,” he said.

“What’s up?”

“Uhhh, nothing. Just…Brawl’s looking at me funny.”

“Oh, you’ll get better at not leaking emotion at subvoc. Starscream and I can nearly overload each other without the other batting an eye.”

“Really?” Barricade said. He looked over at Starscream, who was idly rolling an input rod between his long talons. He wondered if he’d ever been in the same room when it had happened.

“Oh yeah. Apparently he has a thing for my voice.” Don’t blame him, Barricade thought. Hard not to notice his voice. Skywarp continued, “So, what’s everyone up to?”

“We-ell,” Barricade looked around. “Starscream looks bored. Bombshock looks pissed but that’s pretty usual. Brawl looks…stupid. Bonecrusher keeps making stabby gestures with his tail at Soundwave when his back is turned…, Blackout is trying to stack the input rods into a pyramid. The usual.”

“Usual sounds boring.”

“Is boring.”

“Remember that one time?” Like he could forget.

“Yeah, I think we made that dent in the table.”

“MMmmmmm, wish we could make more,” Skywarp purred. “Miss you.”

Barricade squirmed, earning him another odd look from Brawl. But he couldn’t help it. Skywarp’s voice and the memory and the invitation…his spike cycled online just thinking about it. He didn’t think language had a more erotic sentence than ‘miss you.’ “Miss you too,” he whispered, as if anyone else could overhear.

“Want to know what I’d do if I were there, little spike?”

Barricade squeaked. He could figure it out. And it struck him there was no good answer to this. Answer yes and the rest of this meeting would be phenomenally uncomfortable. Answer no and…well, he didn’t really mean ‘no.’ “Uhhhhh….?”

“That’s not a no.” No, it wasn’t. “Well, first off, have I ever told you what my favorite part of your body was?”

“Think I can figure that one out,” Barricade smirked. “Right?”

“Wrong. Though I like your spike, too.” What? There was something attractive about him other than his spike? “You know that spot on your grille, center front, right where the fenders break. And you have a little air intake? So fraggin’ hot.”

“Really?” he squeaked. He felt his chest armor twitch.

“Ohhhh, really.” A deep rumble. “Every time I have you on your back I just want to lick that air intake.”

Barricade sucked in a gasp. Starscream shot him a curious look, raising one supraorbital ridge. Barricade quivered, almost feeling the warm soft moving pressure of Skywarp’s glossa on his intake. He looked down his chassis, trying to even see it. He felt glowy and a little proud: he didn’t think there was anything about him attractive. Much less ‘hot’.

“And me, little spike? What’s your favorite part.” Oh Primus everything. From the barbed hands to the delicate rib struts to the way his more solid wingstruts folded against his back…the cockpit, the double jointed legs…. “Well?” Skywarp prompted.

“I’m thinking!” he said. “I, uhhh, I like…best? I like the feel of your armor.” His breath left in a whoosh. True. Skywarp’s armor felt completely different from anyone he’d ever felt—the matte black finish different from Starscream’s sleek bronze metal. He could almost feel it under his talons. And the best part: there was so much of it. He sat up, feeling smug. This way he could like ALL of Skywarp without having to decide. Smart, Barricade. Finally.

Skywarp purred. Barricade could feel the vibration even through the comm freq. After a moment, he murmured, so softly that Barricade had to strain to hear it, “Primus I want you so badly.”

Barricade’s spike leapt to full pressure, oozing lubricant. All right, so there was a more erotic sentence than ‘miss you.’ “Me too,” he replied, dreamily.

“Barricade!” Soundwave’s voice snapped him out of his reverie. Barricade jumped.

“Incremental!” he blurted. “Progress has been incremental!”

“Oh,” Soundwave subsided. “I am glad to see that you, at least, have put our improvements into practice.”

“O—of course.”

“You are a model to others,” Soundwave praised.

Barricade ducked his head into his neck stabilizers, trying to ignore Bonecrusher’s tail darting dangerously in his direction. “Just…ummm, part of my job,” he said, wincing as Bonecrusher’s tail tines fluttered in an unmistakable obscene gesture. He shrank back in his chair.

“I want you right now,” Skywarp said, a little growl edging into his voice. “I want to feel your spike in me, Barricade. I want to run my glossa over your drivetrain tires, no…bite them. Just a little. I want to throw you on your belly and lick that space between your door wings til you can’t stand it any more and beg to spike me.”

Ummm, already there. Barricade squirmed in his seat, feeling lubricant leak around his spike seal.

Brawl tapped him on the elbow. “Hey, you comin’ down with something? You’re actin’ kinda weird.”

Barricade was feeling kinda weird too. “Fine,” he mumbled back. Brawl gave him a suspicious squint, and edged away on his chair.

He could hear Skywarp laughing. “Sorry, little spike.”

“No you’re not,” Barricade said, petulant. And frisky. And with absolutely no hope of relief for his friskiness. “You’re not sorry at all.”

“You got me. But I’m feeling salacious and unfulfilled and you should too.”

“Salacious?”

“Are you making fun of me?”

“No…it’s…just a weird word.”

“Weird word,” Skywarp grumbled. “Maybe you want more of a demonstration? Huh? You less of a words guy than action? All right,” Skywarp didn’t let him get a syllable in. “Make fun of my vocabulary, will you? How’d you like my highly educated glossa against your spike, huh? How’d you like that?” Barricade whimpered over the comm. “How’d you like me breathing against your thighs, your spike in my mouth, my hands squeezing against those little wrist tires of yours, huh? Would you like that?”

Barricade’s backstruts bolted rigid, his door wings flattening against the chair’s back. His ventilation stalled. Entirely. His spike cover autoreleased, his wet spike thumping against his interface panel. He banged his wrist on the table to try to cover the noise.

“Barricade,” Soundwave admonished. All of the warm praise (he didn’t really want anyway) already evaporated. Easy come, easy go.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Maybe not feeling so good?”

Brawl edged away a bit farther. From the corner of Barricade’s eye, he saw Onslaught tapping a message on his datapad. He focused on that—a moment of complete and utter and boring normalcy—to try to bring his ventilation back under control. Soundwave shot him one last glare, his panels rippling in irritation, before turning back to slide number 136: waste management.

Barricade could hear Skywarp chuckling. “What a fritz-system he is! I can’t even imagine him getting off—much less any mech willing to do the job, can you?”

Barricade chuckled back, pushing himself upright, slicking his hands down his armor, reaching for his datapad. All business. Yes. Make it through this meeting, even with his raging spike throbbing against his interface hatch. He could take care of it later. Awkward and uncomfortable and not the same at all, but he could do it. He spread his thighs so that nothing brushed against the interface hatch. He nodded at Brawl, who held up his datapad between them like it was some protection against contagion. Right. Waste management. A very hard topic to get worked up around.

“I bet he delegates,” Skywarp murmured. “You, ‘face him for me. I’m too important.”

Barricade snickered. Brawl’s fingers tightened around the datapad. Barricade ducked his head to his own pad. Long silence.

“What are you thinking…?” Skywarp asked, voice silky in his audiochan.

“Business. Stupid meeting.”

Skywarp moued. “I have better things for you to think, little spike.” Gulp. Not again. His spike was already aching just at the tone of Skywarp’s voice. The jet continued, inexorable. “Like…how good you feel inside me. Like…did I ever show you the dents on my inner-thigh plates from your pelvic frame? Hard to see because we’re both black, but…you can feel them." Barricade squirmed in his seat.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he squeaked.

“Because I don’t like to suffer alone,” Skywarp purred. “And I want you to remember that you're mine. No one else’s.”

Barricade’s external coolant system cycled on noisily. He looked around, frantic: Onslaught was tapping another message, Starscream was looking at him as if trying to calculate his net mass. Brawl scooted over so far he fell off the chair, which thankfully diverted Soundwave’s wrath onto the tank, who got a vicious dressing down about his inability to manage the simple task of Sitting in a Chair. As Soundwave raged, Bonecrusher’s tale swipes became more agitated. Even Blackout, who normally stacked input rods into little towers or drew obscene cartoons on his datapad, was frowning.

“Yeah,” he croaked. Brawl lumped himself back up on his chair, miserable.

“What do you wish I would do to you, more than anything?” Primus, Barricade found his entire body shivering. “I’ll do it when I get back. First thing. Just to remind you.”

“S-spike me?” Skywarp had only done it that once, in the repair bay, and even through the haze of pain and sensor block it had stuck with Barricade as somehow sweet and powerful and rare. And only the once—why?

Skywarp sucked in a breath, on his end of the line. When he spoke, his voice was shaking. “All right. It would have to be slow, though, okay? Not fast.” Barricade’s valve spiraled online.

“However you want it,” he breathed.

Some sort of sound Barricade couldn’t interpret. “For you, anything,” Skywarp said. “But slow.” Another pause, as though Skywarp were gathering himself up for something. “Nice and slow and gentle. No rush. Just my spike,” a hitch in his breath—well, maybe he was getting as worked up as Barricade was and about slaggin’ time, too!—“against your valve.” Barricade squirmed, his hands clutching over his datapad. “Where are we?” Skywarp whispered, “Doing this?”

Where? Barricade didn’t give half a motherboard where. He was beginning to not care that he was supposed to be paying attention to this meeting. “M-my recharge?”

Skywarp sighed, which seemed…weird but before Barricade could question, he spoke. “Okay, your recharge…and you’re on your berth, right? And I’ve got your legs braced apart with mine—the top of my left thigh armor sliding against the underside of your right leg as I slowly push into you. I’m leaning over, so I can watch the expression on your face, the glow of your optics open in perfect trust, and my cockpit scrapes against your grille—not hard, but enough to leave a little scratch in the canopy that we’ll both look at later and remember this time….”

Oh PRIMUS. Barricade’s talons dented the thin metal of the datapad. His head lolled back with a groan. His entire interface system trembled on the verge of an overload. “Please…stop,” he whispered over the audiochan. “I can’t take anymore.”

“Then you shouldn’t ask for it,” Skywarp muttered. Barricade flinched at the tone, as if he’d been struck, but when Skywarp continued, his voice was a soft and susurrous as before. “Your hands reach up against me, spreading out to my shoulders, your little talons working under the armor plates in my arms…do you remember that time I stripped off my armor for you?”

Barricade’s whole body jerked at the memory, his head clanging hard against the back of the chair. Brawl jumped up, squeaking about nanovi.

Starscream pushed to his feet. “Soundwave, this meeting has gone on so long that Barricade has undercharged and become ill, doubtless from the effort of putting your ‘improvements’ into practice in his section.” How smoothly the bronze jet lied was almost a beautiful thing to behold, Barricade thought, dimly, his entire sensornet taunting him with ghost sensations and memories.

Skywarp, in his audiochan, continued murmuring impossibly fine details about little nicks Barricade had in the front chevron of his grille, the sensitive spot in the mounting bracket of his wrist tires, the apparently ‘adorable’ sounds he made as he neared overload…. Barricade had the distinct sense he was making some of those sounds right now, as his entire frame quivered. The datapad slipped from his fngers. “Please,” he begged, and heard it over both internal and external audio, but even he wasn’t sure what he was asking for. He was hovering so close to an overload, so close…it was almost painful. Almost. He wanted it to stop. And he wanted it to continue.

He felt himself lifted and it took a few kliks before he realized that that was happening, actually, and not in his imagination—the same imagination that Skywarp was fueling with his sultry voice and irresistible images. The crossfeed on his sensornet dulled the rise of the interface signals enough that he could feel some sense of mortification.

“I,” Starscream’s voice vibrated against Barricade’s frame, “shall take care of a fellow warrior and take Barricade, who is ill,” he stressed, “to repair bay. The rest of you, please enjoy the rest of this incredibly, ahem, stimulating meeting.” Barricade felt Starscream carry him out into the hall. “You,” Starscream muttered, “Tell my idiot Trine mate that that was exceedingly unfair to you and he has much for which to apologize when he returns. And that I shall have to finish what he started here. Both about the meeting and,” his hands on Barricade’s frame became a little more…gropy, “you.”

Skywarp snickered, overhearing everything through Barricade's comm. “You tell MY idiot Trinemate he better open a link.”

Next: Over the Line