Sky and Ground 22: Desire Betrayal

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

NC-17
Bayverse AU
Barricade, Onslaught, Starscream
Sticky, angst, threesome, dom/sub a little humil.... O_O

 

Barricade finally admitted he was a little worried. He hadn’t heard from Skywarp in over a solar—not since the comm had died after Skywarp had said…that. Barricade had floated for cycles in stunned, blissful silence, clutching the words to him, replaying them over and over in his processor. If Starscream hadn’t reacted, he would almost have doubted he’d actually heard them.

But now…silence. And it was such an awkward cut-off. Barricade didn’t know what to do. He wanted to talk to Skywarp—even about random nothings: what he was up to, if he met anyone he knew from before, maybe tell him about Brawl getting overcharged and yelling at a bulkhead. But he didn’t want to be pushy. if he commed him, would it look too much like he wanted to hear those words again? (And he had to confess oh, how badly he did want to hear them. Again and again and again. But he didn’t want Skywarp to feel pressured to say them.) He agonized, and finally decided that the smart thing, the tactical thing, would be to talk to Starscream about it. Maybe he had spoken to him. Maybe he could, if necessary, speak to Skywarp for him, explain that he just…really missed him and wanted to talk. 

And maybe…interface through the link. Barricade felt kind of guilty about that desire, too, like it wasn’t right to miss that part of him. But, he told himself, I miss everything. Listening to his stories, being squished under him during recharge, getting teased by him…all that as well. It wasn’t wrong to miss that, as a part of the whole, was it? 

Starscream had told him he could just show up…whenever, so when his shift finished, Barricade logged out of his console and headed to the A-level recharge corridor, to Starscream’s recharge. 

The door was coded unlocked. Barricade chimed him anyway, and got a green enter-light.  Good. He wasn’t busy, or recharging. Maybe he’d be open to the idea….

He stepped through the door and froze: Starscream lay sprawled, belly-first, on the berth, one arm twisted up behind his back to the point where the servos whined audibly. Onslaught lay over him, pounding into his valve, growling. 

Oh this was like a bad flashback. “S-sorry,” he stuttered. “I’ll—uhhh, come back some other time.”

“Don’t go,” Onslaught said. His cool voice sent absolute shivers of memory through Barricade’s sensor net, that picked up on the tingles from walking in on such an…interesting scene. “Starscream wants you to stay. Don’t you?” He twisted the jet’s wrist. Starscream winced. 

“Yes,” the jet gasped. “Stay. Ahhhhh!”  Onslaught raked his hand down one of the bulging engines. 

“Why do you want him to stay?”

Barricade inched back to the door. No, this felt weird. He didn’t want to stay. 

“Because you want him to,” Starscream whimpered. “I want…what you want.”

Onslaught stopped, his spike nearly out of the Seeker’s valve. “Wrong answer.” 

“Uh…I really don’t want to stay,” Barricade said. “Really.” This felt beyond wrong. Like something he shouldn’t be witnessing. 

“Please,” Starscream said. “Stay.” Barricade hesitated. 

“See?” Onslaught said. “He wants you to stay. And he wants you to stay,” he paused, beginning to slide his spike slowly in and out of the jet’s valve, causing Starscream to shudder and moan, “because he gets off on being watched. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” Starscream sighed, rocking his hips against the berth in time to Onslaught’s slow movement. 

It was pretty hard to not want to watch, Barricade thought: Starscream’s optics, half-lidded, his entire frame shifting sinuously to Onslaught’s pace, his one free hand kneading at the bare metal of the berth.   Onslaught, leaning over him, braced his weight on the pinned wrist, knees pushing the jet’s thighs apart, optics glowing with lust. Is that—is that what he looked like when he was with me? Barricade thought.  

“You do, don’t you,” Onslaught purred. “You so get off on it. Thinking about how you make everyone around you feel.” Starscream moaned again. Barricade felt his spike tingle, releasing lubricant. This felt awkward but…so hot. He would swear he felt his spike throb in time to Onslaught’s slow thrusts. 

“Pity,” Onslaught said, leaning closer, his winch banging against the jet’s engines, “No one wants you for you. Just what you can do for them. Political advance. Protection. Favors. Just plain fucking. It’s never you they really want.” 

Starscream’s optics shuttered closed, hard, and his moan changed to a high, thin keening sound, almost like he was crying. Barricade felt his talons clench together, his core heat rising in embarrassment and sympathy. Why would Starscream let Onslaught talk to him that way? 

“True?”

“Yes,” the jet sobbed. His hips squirmed backward, grinding against Onslaught’s pelvis. 

“You know what else? What do you think Barricade came here for. Not about you, either, is it? Does it get you hot that he’s watching you? Does it get you off that he’d rather you were Skywarp? It’s not you he wants. You know that.” Barricade was frozen in shock. It sounded so brutal. And so true. And so…awful. 

Starscream’s chassis started shivering, as if he were restraining vicious tears. Barricade couldn’t take any more.

He launched himself at Onslaught, catching him around the shoulders and driving him back, away from the Seeker, riding the larger mech’s falling body until Onslaught’s shoulders hit the metal of the berth. “Don’t talk to him like that!” Barricade screamed. “Don’t you dare!” He found his talons balled into fists, striking furiously at the Combaticon’s face, his knee on Onslaught’s pelvic frame.

A mass shifted behind him. Long bronze arms wrapped around his body, pulling him away, gently, backwards, until his central dorsal rested against a familiar feeling mound of a cockpit. He swung his talons in vicious claws in the growing distance between him and Onslaught. “Barricade,” Starscream said, soothingly, “It is all right. Do not hurt Onslaught.” 

“Huh,” Onslaught scoffed, pushing up to his knees and rubbing his face. “Hurt me? Not a chance.” 

“Don’t you talk that way to him!” Barricade snarled. Starscream rocked him back and forth, ignoring Barricade’s talons scrabbling against his forearms. 

“Barricade,” Starscream repeated, “There is no need for this. No need.” 

“How can—“ Barricade hiccupped with emotion, “How can you let him talk to you like that?”

Onslaught snorted. “He wants me to, Barricade.”

Starscream sighed, the vent of air warm against Barricade’s shoulders. “It is true.”

“But…?” Barricade squirmed in the jet’s arms. Starscream squeezed him tighter, for a klik, nuzzling against his wing fairings, before releasing him. 

“But,” Onslaught mocked, “You like the idea of playing with powerlessness, Barricade. Some mechs need it.” Barricade thought back to the time Onslaught had taken him in the shower and…it did seem like it was just a game. He felt doubly mortified—that he’d been playing at something he didn’t understand and that he’d just…humiliated himself and ruined what Starscream wanted. 

He stood, awkwardly, on the berth, looking at his hands. He could hear the thrum of the jet’s main power core behind him; he could feel Onslaught’s optics on him through his visor. He raised his own gaze and saw only Onslaught’s still extended, glossy spike. A palpable sign of what he had intruded on. “Sorry,” he mumbled. Fuck everything up, even when you’re trying to help, he told himself. Really, like the jet would even want your help? “Just go now,” he said, picking his way over the jet’s long thigh. 

“I do not think so,” Starscream said, raising his leg between Barricade’s as he tried to climb over.  Beside him, Onslaught settled down on the berth, watching, amused. Barricade looked up. The jet’s face was unreadable—as if it had half-frozen into despair and was only slowly thawing. “You fought for me,” Starscream said, softly. 

“Stupid. Sorry. Ruined it for you.”

“No.” The jet ran his long talons lightly over Barricade’s upper arm. “You fought. For me.” 

“Y-yeah?” Barricade felt nervous. He couldn’t read the jet’s expression. Starscream scooped him up against him, pulling him into a gentle, yet needy kiss. His sensornet fired signals at him—confusion, desire, a lingering awareness of Onslaught watching him. What was he thinking? Probably what a fool Barricade was.

But Starscream’s mouth was insistent, and his hands stroked expertly along Barricade’s back and shoulders. Barricade squirmed to free his arms, grazing over the familiar contours of the jet’s chest armor. So much like Skywarp, he thought. And then, rejected that thought. No. If he thought of Starscream as Skywarp or as a stand in for him…he’d be doing just what Onslaught had said. This was either about Starscream, or he ended it right here. 

Starscream broke the kiss, gently, his optics warm and close to Barricade’s. He tipped his chin in and nipped Barricade’s mouth. “Thank you, Barricade,” he murmured. “No one has ever….” He shook his head, as if unable to find the words. His long fingers teased their way down Barricade’s back, sending glittering sensations through Barricade’s dermal sensors, through his secondary systems. He shuddered, a soft moan of desire bubbling in his throat. 

Well, Barricade, he asked himself, what do you do now? His sensornet was not feeding him unbiased information. It knew what it wanted. But…. Skywarp, he thought. 

“I shall open a link to Skywarp,” Starscream offered. “I want to please you.” Barricade shuddered at the words, partially revulsed—he had no right to claim this sort of submission from the jet—and more than a little aroused. All of Starscream—his body, his emotions, his desires—laid out before him. It was…dizzying. 

“No,” he heard himself say. “No link. Want you.”

The bronze jet pulled away for a moment, looking down, curious. “Yes,” he said, simply. He pulled Barricade on top of him, rolling onto his back, his entire body moving, twisting and arching and shifting under Barricade. Barricade’s small talons curved themselves around and along edges of the bronze jet’s armor, his mouth placing hot kisses down the chassis as he squirmed his way down, feeling Starscream’s thighs parting for him.  

What are you doing?! Part of his processor screamed at him. Have you forgotten about Skywarp? This is betrayal. Still, he kept thinking to the needy, desperate look in the jet’s optics, the strange, dark arousal it stirred in him. He unsheathed his spike and slid it into the jet’s valve, moaning as the Starscream writhed around it, his vents already ragged. The valve was slick from Onslaught’s lubricant, and that thought, which should have disturbed him, somehow only excited him more. He leaned forward to plant a kiss on the jet’s cockpit and found himself biting at the intersection of glass and metal.

Starscream hissed, his hands clutching at Barricade’s shoulders. He writhed as Barricade began working his spike in the valve, propping up on one elbow, his other hand squeezing at the arm tire, down Barricade’s side, his optics hot on Barricade’s straining body. Barricade felt lubricant, heated by friction, slick his pelvic frame, metal sliding over metal. 

Barricade heard a feral growl from some place, but only when he saw his talons sink between the joins in the armor into the cables below did he realize the growling was his own. Above him, Starscream’s breath was uneven, panting, his chassis rising and falling, quivering with pent up energy begging for release. 

The overload hit Barricade like a physical blow, arching his spinal line, throwing his head back, his claws grabbing into metal hard enough to scratch. Starscream made a strangled sound as his valve clutched at Barricade’s spike, his hand frozen in the air for a long moment. He fell back, panting, Barricade collapsing on top of him. Barricade slowly released his grip on the jet’s body, his talons almost stiff from the built up pressure. “Sorry,” he mumbled into the jet’s cockpit. 

“Would you please,” Starscream said, lazily, one hand coming to stroke Barricade’s face, “stop apologizing?”

“Sorry,” Barricade said, reflexively. He caught himself, looked abashed. Starscream laughed, throwing his head back. Barricade wriggled his hips back, easing his spike from the jet’s valve. He found his movement arrested by a hand grabbing the mounts of his wing fairings.

“You,” Onslaught said, his voice husky, “almost have potential.” Barricade’s head was jerked back, Onslaught’s mouth, battlemask retracted, hard on his throat. He whimpered. Onslaught pulled him further off –balance, shifting around, sliding one thigh between Barricade’s, rubbing against the valve cover.  The cover released. 

“Cute little game, isn’t it?” Onslaught murmured, “Playing at control. Easy with him because he wants it. Not so easy with me.” His hand squeezed hard at Barricade’s still pressurized spike, causing him to yelp. “Fight me.’

“No,”Barricade said, helplessly. He’d been here before, a mech forcing himself on him violently. Rule one: never give them what they want. He tried to squirm out of Onslaught’s grip. The Combaticon twisted the mount of one door wing, sending signals too intense to be properly sorted into pleasure or pain. 

Barricade’s fist lashed out, striking Onslaught’s face, weakened by the gravity he was working against. Onslaught grabbed his wrist with his free hand, squeezing the tire until Barricade winced. “You can do better than that,” he said mildly. “Heard you can put up a hell of a fight. I have to threaten that to get any fight out of you?”

Barricade struggled, pushing all of his limbs against Onslaught, trying to buck the large mech off his hips. He felt panic mixed with arousal, boiling together into confusion. Onslaught laughed, shoving his legs apart and sinking his spike into Barricade’s valve, a cool intruding presence.

Barricade screamed, his frame arching up, rigid, a thousand bad memories flooding over him. “Stop!” he begged. Onslaught froze. Barricade lay trembling for a long moment. Onslaught didn’t move. Starscream moved behind him, bending over to plant a gentle kiss on Barricade’s mouth, his hand catching at Barricade’s free one, interlacing their talons. “It is all right, Barricade. He will discontinue if you wish.”

“But….” 

“He is unsure of your intent—do you simply need more time to adjust or is this disturbing to you?” Starscream rubbed his cheekplates against Barricade’s. “I will not let him harm you.” 

Barricade’s chassis trembled. What would Onslaught think of him? Playing with power again. No. He could handle it. He wasn’t afraid.  He had been through the worst of this and survived. He was not afraid, even of this. Of himself, though….“Yeah,” he said, unsteadily. “He can continue.” 

Starscream pulled back out of the way, but kept his hand interlaced with Barricade’s.

“Talk or not?” Onslaught asked, calmly. As if he hadn’t been hanging over Barricade, spike in valve, for a handful of kliks. 

“No.” Too much like the other times. The taunting humiliation. Too many memories clawing their way out of the shadows: as though words gave them footholds in the real world. 

Onslaught nodded, gruffly, and propping himself up on his arms, began thrusting into Barricade’s valve. Barricade felt his valve respond, eagerly, the charge beginning to prickle up against the nodes. Onslaught’s face was impassive, blank, hovering over his. Starscream squeezed his hand for a klik, as if to remind him this was not real. This was not against his will. This would not go too far. Barricade squeezed back. Desire and fear and trust and doubt swirled together in his processor, a complex and dizzying cocktail of sensation. And at the bottom of it all, like a foundation, was Skywarp. His ex-lover. His Trine mate. The fact that Skywarp would find this hot. And that he wouldn’t let anything happen, bad. He had stopped Onslaught before from going too far. But Skywarp isn’t here, he thought.

Onslaught held one of his wrists, the jet the other: between the two of them he was pinned, helpless. He shuttered his optics, feeling the pressure on one wrist tire, long, almost-familiar talons in the other hand, the spike pushing into his valve insistently, forcefully. He surrendered. Not just to what Onslaught was doing but to himself. That there was something about this he enjoyed. Something about the powerlessness, the helplessness, that he had always enjoyed with Skywarp. 

Onslaught grunted in time to his thrusts, his hand closing on the tire, his other hand resting across Barricade’s throat, applying pressure to the exposed energon line. Barricade’s optics flashed wide open, his vents coming in panicked heaves as the pressure on the line blurred his vision. 

Onslaught snarled, his hand tightening over Barricade’s throat, his entire body bucking upward to drive his spike hard and with finality against the upper wall of Barricade’s valve, his overload bursting hot and wet into the valve, which sent Barricade into a helpless, spinning overload of his own, almost like a release, a burst of freedom. “Hot when you overload,” Onslaught commented in his audio. “Know that, right?” Barricade quivered, both from his words and the sensation of his valve still spasming around the spike. “Starscream wants you again, by the way.” 

Barricade tilted his head back. Starscream’s optics were hot on him. Starscream read something like assent in his face and hauled him back using the hand he held, dragging his valve off of Onslaught’s spike. Barricade whined with regret at the missing spike. 

“May I?” Starscream murmured in his audio, wrapping his arms around Barricade’s body. Barricade nodded. Starscream shifted his hips, and pushed his own spike slowly into Barricade’s valve. Barricade shivered, wrapping his arms over Starscream’s, almost as if hugging the massive forearms to his chest. Starscream rocked his hips, slowly, agonizingly slowly. Barricade found shudders rippling through his frame, his vents uneven. His throat still ached from where Onslaught had pressed his hand. The gentle motion was maddeningly erotic, and Onslaught’s steady gaze on him made him tingle with something like shame, even as he heard Onslaught’s last words re-echo in his processor. He heard himself moaning, his head dropping back against the jet’s chassis. 

“I,” Starscream said quietly, “disobeyed you, Barricade.” 

Barricade stiffened. “H-how?” 

“I opened a link to Skywarp.”

Barricade’s breath caught. Then he…knows. Barricade writhed, the rising charge in his valve distracting him, feeling somehow wrong. Undeniable, marching inexorably toward overload, but…wrong. Desire betrayal. “I’m sorry!” he blurted. He should have seen this coming—and he’d cheated on Skywarp. Yes, Skywarp had told him he could any time, but…. He felt his optics prick with loss. He’d fucked up. Again. Trying to do something nice for Starscream. No, he told himself. You wanted to. It felt good. Powerful. You liked it. Doing it, and having it done to you.

“There is nothing for which to apologize, Barricade,” Starscream murmured. “Skywarp wants you to know that.”

“But he….” He’s not talking to me. He’s avoiding me. 

Starscream ran one hand down Barricade’s ventral line, the back of his wrist deliberately grazing Barricade’s lubricant-wet spike. “He didn’t want to intrude.” The jet’s spike kept its even tempo in his valve, building up a charge that sent iridescent tremors through his sensornet that did not at all agree with the sudden confusion and worry in his processor. 

“He’s not….” Even Barricade didn’t know how to finish that sentence: Mad? Jealous? Hurt? Betrayed?

“No,” Starscream said, softly. Barricade flinched as Onslaught loomed over him suddenly. 

“He’s not,” Onslaught said, flatly. “And this is what he wants right now.” Onslaught wrapped his hand around Barricade’s spike.

 Barricade moaned, involuntarily, his hips rising off the jet’s pelvic frame, causing Starscream’s spike to stir in his valve. His entire frame convulsed. Onslaught’s hand pulled at the spike, squeezing harder at the spike’s end nodes, letting Starscream’s thrusts into Barricade’s valve set his pace. 

“He wants this,” Starscream echoed, his hands releasing their fierce grip on Barricade, talons dancing lightly over his body. The idea that Skywarp was watching, feeling along set his processor and sensor net ablaze. He heard Onslaught’s breath coming in deep, rough pants, though his hand was gentle on Barricade’s spike. Beneath him, Barricade felt Starscream’s body quiver with desire. Onslaught moved down by Barricade’s feet: Starscream gasped, his hips twitching up suddenly, and then began moaning, a low soft sound. The jet locked one arm around his midsection, abruptly, and his tempo picked up, driving fiercely into Barricade.   Onslaught braced one beside Barricade’s head, gripping the bronze jet’s shoulders,  while his other still worked along Barricade’s spike. His visor switched from Starscream’s face to Barricade’s, with something almost like eagerness. 

Starscream howled, his arms crushing Barricade against him, as his overload seized him. Barricade had only one thought—that through the Trine link, Skywarp was overloading. His head dropped back, his hands clutching into Starscream’s arms as both of his systems tripped into overload together, his spike spurting its silver fluid onto Onslaught’s chassis and his own. Onslaught growled, and gave on final shove with his pelvic plating that Barricade remembered from before, his hand tight enough to be painful against Barricade’s spike. 

Onslaught dropped his chassis on Barricade, pulling his sticky, fluid coated hand out from between them. Starscream reached up to stroke along Onslaught’s shoulders. Barricade felt…comfortably confined, the last ripples of the overload shimmering through his net. 

Onslaught groaned, pushing himself off the jet, almost as if to avoid Starscream’s light caresses. “Some of us around here have Ops training early in dutycycle.” He twisted out of Starscream’s reaching arms, carefully stowing his equipment as he climbed off the berth. Barricade winced as he saw the silvery trail of his own transfluid on Onslaught’s winch and upper chassis. 

“There are cleansing cloths in the maintenance facility,” Starscream said, transferring his stroking hands to Barricade, who found himself melting under the gentle touches. 

Onslaught snorted. “Nah. More fun to freak Blast Off out this way.” He gave a vague dismissing nod, and headed out the door. 

“Ah, that sense of humor Skywarp loves so much…that somewhat eludes me.” Starscream smiled.

Barricade shifted, uncomfortable. Skywarp didn’t love his sense of humor. Barricade honestly wasn’t even all that sure he had one. And—and why hadn’t Skywarp commed him? Was he still talking to Starscream? What were they saying about him?

He sat up, wriggling his way off Starscream’s spike. Starscream’s hands transferred their attention to his back kibble. “And you, Barricade? You are welcome to recharge here.”

Barricade ducked his head. Were they still talking? How much of that invitation was Starscream and how much was Skywarp? Was this a test? Was there a right answer? “No,” he mumbled, rolling off the jet, wincing in embarrassment as fluid dripped from his valve—Onslaught’s and Starscream’s. What had it mattered that he’d wanted it? He was filthy. Disgusting. No wonder Skywarp didn’t want to talk to him. “Bothered you enough.” 

Starscream’s optics narrowed, gauging something in Barricade’s expression. “You do not—Skywarp,” he said, restarting. “Will comm you later.”

Barricade hated how his spark leapt at the thought, even as his processor asked, querulously, why not now?



 

Comments

[linnet-melody.livejournal.com]

I'm bawling.

No no, this is a good thing. You've *nailed* the feelings of insecurity and hopelessness and despair and want and I haven't felt this painfully emotional since college. ...And boy wasn't that fun. I much prefer reading someone else going through it.

I do hope you continue this. Please please.

Linnet

[linnet-melody.livejournal.com]

...Hah. It's ... done. Epilogue and all. >.> Boy, I feel silly.

*cough*

You should do more stuff. Like this. Since this one's finished.

You're bribable, yes? :D

[ithilgwath.livejournal.com]

*body and heartstrings don't know what to do*

It was angsty... and it was hot... and... I don't know what to feeeeeel right now.

...guess I'll just have to read the next chapter. oh teh noes! So onerous! ;)