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niyazi-a.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
shadow_vector2010-05-22 07:01 am
Behind Masks
Rating: R
Characters: "Prowl"Barricade/Starscream
Verse: Bayverse
Warning: pnp sex, some canon-mauling
Two things I swore I'd never write: Prowlicade and Prowl/Starscream. I somehow convince myself that I still haven't. :)
“I still don’t like it.” Optimus frowned. In front of him on the repair frame, the mangled frame of Barricade lay. Ironhide and Bumblebee had had a hell of a fight: cornered, the lone Decepticon struck out, half-mad. They had been, Optimus knew, as gentle as they could.
Ratchet shrugged. “It’s the only way I can think of. The cortex was damaged.”
Optimus sighed. “By one of us.” Implying, we should fix it. We broke it.
“We can’t know that. But…yes. If he’s to live, he needs programming.”
“You can’t restore his own?”
Ratchet’s turn to frown. “I could, Optimus, but…what good would that do? He’s alone. His own mechs abandoned him. He’s…always had some sort of antisocial issues. This…could be a new start for him.”
“That he didn’t ask for.”
“Did we ask for this war?” Ratchet failed to keep the bitterness from his voice. “Listen, Optimus. It’s either this or we have to keep him under guard, in confinement…forever. Does that sound right to you?”
“It is an unnecessary drain on resources,” Prowl pointed out. “If he were at least…neutralized….”
“We couldn’t ask him to fight against his former faction,” Optimus said. “That wouldn’t be right.”
“Possibly damage the programming,” Ratchet added.
“He can have a non-combatant position,” Prowl said. “We have many needs he could fill. Intelligence analyst for one. He might…retain insights.”
Optimus shifted his weight. He hated these decisions. He hated every decision that brought such change to the lives of his mechs. And Barricade was his responsibility. As a Cybertronian. He had to, at the very least, keep him neutralized, away from hurting humans. And was Ratchet’s plan really that bad?
“But we’d be asking him to betray his faction. His past. He knows something.”
“I can overwrite that. All of it,” Ratchet said, with a confidence he didn’t quite feel. He could do a decent enough job, keep the programming stable. Until it meshed with Barricade’s systems. He looked at the twisted mass of scorched metal on the table. This was the enemy. But perhaps…it could be something different.
“We can use my logic array.” Prowl tightened at Optimus’s frown. “It’s the only thing I can think of strong enough to control Barricade’s….”
“Antisocial tendencies,” Ratchet added.
“It’s a dangerous experiment,” Optimus said. “I don’t like him being a test subject.”
“He’s going to be offline if we don’t do something soon,” Ratchet snapped, pointing to a datascreen.
“That is,” Prowl said, mildly, “the only real choice.”
“He’ll think he’s you.” Optimus threw up an objection. That could not be good for mental stability.
“Temporarily, yes,” Prowl said. “It’s too difficult to pull the designation code from the programming. But I can reassign myself elsewhere until the transfer has taken and he can be redesignated.”
“Any other objections?” Ratchet said.
Optimus sighed. “It is for the best. For his freedom.” He nodded his permission. It was the least they could do to fix what they had broken. Make things right. And wasn't the point to free everyone from tyranny? Even former Decepticons? This way, he had a chance. A choice that Megatron had never given him.
***
The mech shifted uncomfortably on the repair frame. They told him he was an Autobot. They told him he had been injured upon landing. They told him his name was Prowl. None of these things sat right with him. As though they were…a half klik out of phase, or junk code in his processor. His armor was…too white. And his face when he saw it looked unfamiliar.
He felt…not himself. He felt like he was missing something. As though there were a hole in the center of his being. And somehow at the same time, something was surging, restless, underneath other parts of him.
Their words didn’t fit. He felt like he was wearing someone else’s name. Someone else’s armor.
When he’d tried to ask, tried to articulate the wrongness about him, they told him he had been grievously injured and that this was probably just a side effect of that. What did he know? He had no recollection of being this injured before. He had…almost no recollection at all. Just weird…ghost images hovering over his limbs. That his hands shouldn’t look like that. And they all looked…unfamiliar. He couldn’t shake a sense of wariness, the sense that they were the enemy. He felt..always on guard. Yet cycles of watching, wary, he had seen nothing to confirm any of those suspicions. They weren’t hostile. They went out of their way to be nice to him—that was the best he could come up with. That and that they spoke to him softly, quietly, as though he were fragile.
He wondered what had happened to him that was so awful that they treated him so delicately.
He’d seen—he thought—injured mechs before, though he can’t summon any names or images. He just knows he’s seen the damage mechs do to each other, and the survivors had never been treated with this amount of quiet worry.
And then…there were the moods. Like a little sour voice in the back of his head. A black mood like a thunderstorm waiting to break, shooting little barbs at the undeserving.
Like now.
“Prowl,” Arcee said, quietly. “You want to go for a run of the island with me?”
Don’t trust me, do you? A voice seemed to uncoil from his cortex. Think I need to be watched? Guarded? He looked at her, but could see nothing but sincerity on her face. Then you’re a fool. Lost your touch. Deserve what you get.
He pushed it aside. “Yes,” he said. Simple. Direct. If you stick to the feed from your logic, you’ll be safe. He followed her out of the hangar, waiting for her cue—he felt so much like he was learning/relearning things he should already know—to drop into his vehicle mode.
The sun was warm on his armor, and the ground solid under his tires. It should have been soothing. That’s why she’d asked him, hadn’t she? It wasn’t soothing. Instead, the sand-blown pavement seemed to be pulling him away from something, creating time and distance from some place he needed to be. He felt like he was leaving behind something important.
There’s something wrong with you. You should get yourself checked out. No. Leave me alone. Enough in my head. Enough tampering. Tampering? Yes, he supposed he was legitimately allowed to feel that he had had his fill of the repair hangar and away from things inside his cortex. Was it normal that he had to recharge every night attached to a bank of monitors, leads snaking from under his helm? He had been very injured. No one is that injured. No one. They are lying to you. They are hiding something from you.
Why would they lie to me? That makes no sense. They were his friends. Logic dictates you do not lie to your friends.
He revved his engine, allowing his tires to propel him along the ringroad. Should it have seemed familiar? It didn’t. “Have I…ever been out here before?” he asked. He hoped it sounded neutral.
He could feel Arcee scanning him. She weighed an answer a bit too long—the dark presence in the back of his cortex gave a goading noise. “No,” she said, finally. “You had not made it to our base.”
Where’d you find me? The question skulked in the shadows of his cortex, sending out reverberations of distrust. Tell me a story. Make it a good one. “Where did you find me?” he said, feeling like an echo of himself. An actor. Playing a role, and badly. Nothing felt…real. Nothing felt authentic. Like this was some backdrop or set. Right, because you rate this kind of effort. Yes. You. So fraggin’ special aren’t you?
He shivered, his tires juddering on the pavement.
Arcee paused, then said, “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re found. And you’re safe now. With us.”
It does matter. He didn’t know how or why, but it mattered. And don’t we just feel safe? They’re lying. Lying. Why? He had no answer. He wasn’t even sure where the question came from. He slowed to a stop, feeling…unwell. Maybe it had been wrong to leave the repair hangar. They must be right. He must have been very damaged.
“What’s wrong?” Arcee asked, squealing to a halt beside him.
“Nothing,” he said, aware that it was a lie. Come on, now. Not the first lie, you know. “Just…have I ever seen this before?” He pushed up, unfolding himself, indicating the rosy orange light of the setting sun, coloring the stretch of sand reaching down to where the waves sparkled.
“No,” she said, joining him. Giving him distance, observing him observing the sunset. She doesn’t trust me. Why not? “I don’t think you have.”
Aren't you? Testing her, or testing yourself. One of you is wrong.
You know the answer. And the answer beyond that. The hollowness near his spark seemed to gape.
*****
Blackout stormed into Aerial Planning and threw the flimsy in front of Starscream. “How long have you known?”
“Known what?”
“Barricade! He’s alive.” His optics blazed under his crest.
Starscream tilted back in his chair, his talon tips touching. “I presumed so. Barricade has always been a survivor.”
“You rested on presumptions. You weren’t sure? You didn’t find out?” Blackout was furious. He’d thought Barricade was dead. He’d clawed his way back to life, been picked up months ago. Months. He felt a stab of some unnameable emotion. Why hadn’t he asked? Why had he just presumed? He flinched, as if Starscream had actually accused him.
“His orders were to collect data and wait. And report in when he had something worth reporting,” Starscream said, mildly, his voice a little thin. Blackout wanted to sink his broad fingers into the fine, rounded shoulders and shake the damn Air Commander until something snapped, something gave. His rage, perhaps. He could hope.
Instead the copter had to settle for leaning over, stabbing one of those fingers onto the flimsy, at the coordinates of the ping from the cis-alpha scan. His rotors ruffled, gratified, at the sudden intake of air as the jet decoded the coordinates. Yes, he thought. The Autobot base. The island.
He watched as Starscream’s facial plates shifted, sliding from horror to guilt to a pathetic attempt to mask any emotion. “Well,” Blackout said, in blatant challenge. “It’s your call, Air Commander.”
Starscream frowned. Not his fake one, either. The sincere one. Miserably unhappy. “It is a fortified base. A direct attack. The casualty algorithms speak against it.”
Blackout glowered.
“I am sorry, Blackout. We would simply lose more mechs than we can afford to lose.”
Blackout wanted to grind the misery deeper into the jet’s face. “So.”
“So.” Starscream’s folded wingflaps rustled. “It is too risky.
Blackout pushed back from his palms-flat lean over the table. “That’s Barricade!” His voice, he hoped, expressed all the outrage and horror. They could be torturing the grounder. He certainly didn’t have many fans among the Autobots.
“We…cannot. I am sincerely sorry.” Starscream ground his mouthplates in frustration. Yeah, he could be frustrated all he wanted.
Blackout snatched at the flimsy. It tore, the sound of shredding plasfilm filling the air between them like a symbol. Something else being torn, rent, broken. “That’s it then.” He was trembling with emotion, his rotors rattling in their mounts. He wanted to lash out. To hit Starscream. To share with him some of the pain. Starscream had never been that close to death. Blackout had and when he’d seen Barricade, microns away from offline, huddled on that dirty garage floor with Bonecrusher, he had recognized something in the grounder’s optics.
“Blackout, I—“
“I have no desire,” the copter said, turning his back insolently, “to hear your excuses. Save them for Megatron.” He knew he was burning a bridge with the insult, but…the bridge didn’t span anywhere he wanted to go right now.
****
Blackout’s words burned at him. The final insult barely touched him, so deeply had he already sunk into his own form of self blame. It was a wild swing, done out of hurt. In a strange way, Starscream forgave Blackout that, because he felt the same hurt, the same strange need to throw a vicious injury at someone else to vent his frustration and helpless rage. And…if he admitted it…fear.
He did not, obviously, want to admit that. Barricade, he told himself, was a survivor. He had had to be, had had to fight everyone—including Starscream, including himself—to get as far as he had. The little grounder was fractious and unlikeable, but even so, the bronze jet admired his ruthless determination. And, in a strange way, Barricade’s twisted loyalty to him. Which for a while had made a kind of sense—Starscream had, quite literally, saved his life. But among Decepticons, that sort of gratitude had a very quick expiration date. And yet…Barricade had always—in his way—been loyal to Starscream. Refusing to choose sides, when Blackout had attempted his coup, yet ensuring fairness. Contacting Starscream above all others about the boy. Starscream did not know what drove the grounder to such loyalty—he wished he could figure it out, and spread it among his other soldiers.
Starscream snarled, the sound echoing in the empty room. It was after dutycycle, and still he sat, weighing his options. Weighing his own loyalties. The battle algorithms had clearly said…. But something in Starscream said something different. Just as clear, just as loud.
But a strike force…his processor began spitting out the odds, the likely defenses, the tactics. It would be a bloodbath. A rout. He could not justify it. Not even to himself.
But.
The thought snaked slowly from some unfamiliar place in his processor.
If you went alone….
***
You know they don’t trust you. Yes. He knew. And he had asked for as much information on…neutral subjects as he could think of. Local flora and fauna. Meteorological systems. Oceanography. Trying, using the hard overwrite of the logic programming, to make some sense of his world. The world he allegedly knew.
They accepted that he knew nearly nothing of the planet. They encouraged him in research. It was only normal. Ah yes, you’re learning, remembering how to play the game. But they also had precisely the same bland patience, the same bottomless tolerance, for the fact that he didn’t know them. He had logged their names easily enough, and some had even echoed familiarly, but he had no…history of them. As if he’d never known them at all. Why don’t you ask? Why don’t you ask for some story of the past when you all were together. Remember that one time…? The strange voice, which had been growing stronger instead of weaker, chortled. He didn’t ask. He knew they couldn’t. And he knew, somehow, that the question would be more trouble than it was worth.
Prowl hated the dark, sardonic voice in his processor—the lack of trust, the gleeful cynicism. But he couldn’t bring himself to mention it. Partly because Ratchet kept asking about his cortical processing. Partly the look of pity as he did so. Prowl hated the voice, but he feared what his logic told him would come next if he did mention it. A complete cortical wipe. It only made sense. There was a glitch in his processor and the only way to clear it would be to wipe and reload.
And he’d lose…himself. He’d be gone just as surely as if he’d been killed. And these few solars of life, that comprised the very small but vivid file of his memory, was inexplicably precious to him. It was him, this small folder. This was the him he could grasp and understand. He did not want to give up…himself.
They’d let him, eventually, venture out on his own. He suspected—the voice suspected and he had simply been too weary and too wary to argue—that they followed him from a distance. But they let him go. Let him drive around the island, down the abandoned streets of what must have once been a civilian population, now weathered and sliding into ruin. Where could he go, after all? What could he do?
So he rolled idly down the gridded streets of the abandoned town, tall weeds rippling like green waves from what must have once been manicured, if tiny, lawns. A red-flowered liana had punched its way through a building, bursting up and outward through a window, climbing the siding toward the sky, red flowers shimmering in the almost ever-present ocean breeze. His olfactory sensors picked up heat-seared vegetation and an almost carrion-sweet odor from the flowering vine. He supposed he should stop and identify it—something to report back. Something that assured them he could be trusted on his own, and focused on applying the reams of knowledge they gave him. An alibi, the voice chortled softly. As though it had won a point.
He rolled to a stop, disturbed enough that he didn’t hear the rushing sound of engines overhead until the ground shook with impact. A shadow slashed over him. He pushed back, scrambling, into his bot mode. The mech was big—twice his size, taller than any of the Autobots—the sun glaring off his bronze frame. Red optics pinpointed him over the bright flash of brandished talons. Oh great. Him. Who? “Where is he?”
“Who?” He had no idea if his question was aimed at the jet or himself. He spotted the Decepticon insignia between the jet’s optics—as though part of him knew precisely where to look for it. Prowl rolled sideways, to his feet, coming up in a combat crouch he did not remember, and yet it felt…more familiar than anything he had felt thus far. The red optics grazed him, looking around for another presence.
“Where is he!” the jet snarled, impatiently. “Where have you hidden him?” He lunged in. Prowl scrambled back through the tall weeds until his doorwings slammed into a building. He dropped, awkwardly on his aft, palms stinging against the hard ground.
“Hidden? I’m alone out here.” Who was this? Enemy? Why wasn’t he attacking? Prowl scoured his cortex for combat protocols and found…none. He didn’t know how to fight.
“You Autobots are never alone,” the jet snarled, crouching low, one arm backswinging into the dilapidated house Prowl cowered against. Wood splintered, a corner flying wide. A demonstration. He always does that. Prowl felt a surge of the darkness in him, forcing him to his feet.
“Always alone,” Prowl said. But the voice wasn’t his. It was more raw, more despairing.
***
The Decepticon’s head snapped to him. “Barricade?” Oh. Oh Primus.
The name shot across his net like pain. He knows me. He…came for me? Prowl felt a trembling grow in him. Not fear. Nothing like fear. “I—“
The jet leaned in, closer. “What have they done to you?” His voice was staticky with horror. “Barricade?” What have they done? He does not even look the same. Yet the cis-alpha was clearly from him. He reeled with horrible possibilities.
“I-I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Prowl responded. “I don’t know who you are.” Yes I do. Stop lying.
Prowl flinched back as the long bronze talons reached for him, stroking along his shoulders. One thumb raised his chin, forcing his optics to meet the jet’s. He struck with one hand, somehow disappointed when his blunt, rounded fingers didn’t pierce the jet’s armor. It seemed to him they should have. He seemed to remember…talons. Nobody fucked with me. Not without damage. But Autobots do not harm.
The jet shifted his weight, dropping to the ground, pinning Prowl within the circle of its legs. “Do you even remember me, at all? Do you remember your former design?” Do you remember anything? He shivered, as if suddenly cold, as regret snaked its fingers over his shoulders.
Yes. “No. I had an…accident. Upon landing. I had to undergo significant repairs.”
There was bitter amusement in the voice. “Is that what they told you? You were undamaged when I last saw you.” Oh Primus what had happened? He deserved ever iota of Blackout’s ire and contempt. He had earned it. He had earned it.
When you abandoned me. A concomitant blaze of some hot emotion. Prowl didn’t know how to answer.
“They lied to you, Barricade.” They lied. Hid behind their virtue, justifying a lie. You are ours. Mine. Are you?
They lied to me. Know that. But you…. “My designation is Prowl.”
A flash from the optics. “Your Autobot designation is irrelevant to me, unless you wish it to become your target designation on my attack grid.” He forced himself to be patient. Do not let your frustration overmaster you, Starscream. You will get him back. If he is in there. If they have not simply wiped…everything.
Oh that’s not up to your usual level of subtlety at all. Slipping, Starscream. Thought I’d deserve better. For old time’s sake. Starscream? An inchoate sound garbled from his processor.
The head tilted at Prowl’s hesitation. “A glitch? Have they…reprogrammed you?” He jerked Prowl closer, back onto his feet, with one of his large hands. With the jet seated, they were nearly optic-level. He felt the optics trying to force into him somehow, and the darkness in his processors try to force back. Meeting? Resisting? Help me. “Barricade,” Starscream breathed. “Are you still in there?” A plea.
Prowl felt his frame shake. He tried to break his gaze away from the red optics peering into him, seeing something beyond his white armor. Or trying to. The jet’s face was alien and yet…familiar. More familiar than his own body. A glitch. He should have let himself be checked out by Ratchet.
“Initiate reboot,” Starscream said, quietly. It would clear the cache, dump any extraneous coding.
“I am not allowed to. My cortex is too unstable yet.” Yes, you’re not allowed to control your own basic functions. And that’s not suspicious at all. Why did it suddenly seem sinister? He had been injured. It was necessary.
He saw the look of discontent and anger flash across the bronze face. “Initiate reboot.” The tone more acidic, commanding.
Prowl felt another shudder run through his frame. He thought of resisting—the idea of being offline and helpless while rebooting in the presence of the enemy was not appealing. But some part of him reached for the reboot sequence—to find it locked. “I…can’t?” This must be for his protection. This must be to keep him safe. It must be to keep you this way. Feel safer now, knowing they don’t trust you even with…yourself?
The jet growled, echoed in Prowl’s processor by the strange dark voice, muttering imprecations. “There is another way,” Starscream said. “But you must trust me.”
Help me. Yes. Anything. Prowl felt that darkness brace, waiting to be knocked offline. What’s a little more pain? “Do it,” he said, grimly. If being knocked offline would clear his cache, get this vicious little voice out of his cortex, he would do it. He hated the suspicions and innuendo it threw at him constantly.
The jet laughed, sadly. “My methods are not always so…crude.” His talons curled to the armor compartment on his chassis that housed his interface equipment. Prowl jerked back. No.
Yes, Primus yes. Please. Prowl heard a whimper of surrendered desire from his vocalizer. But. No. This was wrong. It was…not how things should be done. Nonetheless, he found his own hands scrabbling eagerly with his interface hatch. The module popped almost eagerly into his hand.
The jet smiled, thinly. “I never thought our first time would be…quite this way.”
“Not our first time,” Prowl’s voice said. They both froze.
“You do remember?”
“No,” Prowl said, honestly. “I don’t…I’ve never seen you before.” Yes, because cutting his ego really works so well. “I don’t…” but part of him did. Part of him remembered the thrum of the jet’s engines during arousal. Remembered, suddenly, oddly, uncomfortably, the gentle probes of the jet’s glossa on his mouth. No. Physical sensations. Not his. Ghosts in his system. Glitches.
Ghosts of what? Echoes…of whom? Of when?
Starscream snatched the module from his fingers, the talons sharp and precise in their movements. “I recall,” he said, mildly, contrary to the temper in the snatch, “that you cannot endure double connects.”
A tremor, a shadow of pain. He remembers, how sweet. How does he know more than I do about…myself? He gasped as the jet plugged his module into the access port. His datastream lashed, high and hard. He staggered forward, the jet catching him with one arm, bracing him.
Starscream gave a stifled mewl of pain. With only one connection, his own datastream had nowhere to go and was ricocheting wildly around inside him, causing painful reverb through his sensornet. Prowl tried to pull back. Why would Starscream do this?
“Stay,” Starscream murmured.
“Hurts you.”
A tight laugh. “I deserve some pain for having left you.” A world of self-blame. “I did not want to think of you for fear you were offline. It was co-,” he stiffened, as another pulse from the datastream shot through him. “cowardice. And you have su-suffered for it.”
A flash of memory: Ironhide, Bumblebee. Angling in on him, weapons pointed. Desperation, fear. They are not your friends. They have been lying to you. He ached at the verity. Interfering with the rising, inexorable flood of desire. His sensornet tingled, glowingly alive. Do you want to lose this? “Don’t have to.”
A quirk of the mouth. “Have I ever done anything merely because I ‘had’ to?” He stiffened, another wave rolling through him. “And neither did the Barricade I knew.” Please be in there. Please come back to me.
Prowl felt a moan rising through him, along with a surge in the darkness. Reaching out, definitely, this time. Reaching for Starscream. He let it pull him, leaning into the jet, his hands settling cautiously on the broad shoulders. “Don’t want you to hurt.” The voice, not entirely his. The syntax, not his.
One of the jet’s taloned hands caught his helm and pulled it closer, tipping down for a chaste kiss on Prowl’s helm. “I know, little one.” They both whimpered at another pulse.
Prowl risked tilting his head up, his face close enough to the jet’s to smell the exvents of warm air-grade oil.
“I miss your optics,” Starscream said, and it struck Prowl as the strangest and saddest thing he had ever heard. He ached, not from his interface programming, but somewhere deeper. Freak, foureyed droneling. “And to be honest, I abhor this passivity.”
The dark presence pushed forward and Prowl had no choice to follow with it, his mouth finding the jet’s, his lip plates bumping more familiarly than they should against the odd-shaped mouth. He felt a tremor of surprise, before an arm tightened around his shoulders, and the mouth responded against his, glossa flicking out, teasingly. He felt a growl build in his throat, his own hands come up, tugging the jet’s face, keeping him close. Frag yes.
The harmonic pulse of the datastream throbbed between them, building, higher and higher, until it finally tripped into overload. Prowl pushed a cry into Starscream’s mouth, the arms tightening around him to hold him up, his own smaller hands gouging into the armor. The overload blared across his systems, the last words he heard before his systems shut to reboot were, “Come back to me, Barricade.”
***
“Frag,” he muttered. Where the frag was he? His face was buried in a mass of sun-warmed metal that was redolent with flight oil, his arms clinging around something. His interface net throbbed pleasurably. He had questions—where was he? Who the frag was he with?—but right now he could not summon the energy to move. Arms were strong at his back, shifting slightly to unflatten his doorwings. He stayed limp. This felt better than he remembered feeling in…how long?
He caught flashes of memory—two full orbitals gathering data. Running. Hiding. Alone. Fear. Worry. Loneliness. His hands clutched at the armor. But they were wrong. Not his hands. He pushed away, staring at them. The blunt, rounded fingers, one too many. All of the somnolent pleasure faded, replaced with a cold emotion, halfway between fury and horror, that mismatched the warm climate of the island.
“Barricade,” a voice murmured, softly.
“Yeah,” he managed. His voice croaked from an unfamiliar timbre. One arm tightened over his shoulders. Shoulders that felt…wrong. Too many questions flooded his cortex.
“They reprogrammed you,” Starscream said. Answering the essential one.
“Slaggin’ poor job of it,” Barricade snapped. He heard Starscream almost laugh with a kind of relief. A strange echo bubbled in his own net. Not darkness, not darker than he was. A kind of warm lightness, fizzy, effervescent.
“They kept you alive,” Starscream admonished. As if he should be grateful. The jet shifted, stiffly, and Barricade became aware of his module, still plugged into Starscream’s access port, the connector cables looping drowsily between them. Fraggin’ jet, he muttered to himself.
“Idiot, you know that?” he muttered, jerking his module out of the sealing collar. They both gasped at the sudden disconnect, one last flash of charge sparking between them. “Can take a double connect.”
“I did not wish to bring you any more pain.” The long hands stroked down his body, soothingly. Pain. Yes. Pain and starvation. But above all, the loneliness of the last two orbitals haunted him. The loneliness, the gnawing fear of abandonment, the horrible notion of dying here, alone. Surrounded by enemies. Unmourned. Unnoticed. He shivered. Starscream clutched him tighter. “I can never apologize enough,” the jet murmured near his audio, the sound of the voice more familiar, more wanted than this alien body he had inhabited for weeks.
“Going to leave me, right?” Barricade said, his mouth twisting. Why not? Make perfect sense, be perfect logic, to leave him here. A mole, a double agent. Alone among enemies, a constant life of wariness. Starscream never let a situation go unexploited.
Starscream pulled away, studying his face, unable to read expressions across the unfamiliar facial contours. “I came to get you back. To try and make up for the past.”
Barricade twitched. “Take me back?”
“It is,” Starscream forced a laugh, “entirely selfish, my motivation. I cannot bear to think of you alone. Here.”
“Show of weakness. Dangerous.” He threw them back at Starscream, testing his resolve. Barricade knew that his own resolve was…flimsy-thin right now. He wanted nothing more than to crawl in the jet’s embrace, bury his face back in the crook of the throat, and melt there. Whose weakness was he railing against? His own.
“I do not care. Some weaknesses are worth showing, Barricade. If we hold too tightly to strengths, we harden ourselves entirely.”
“Frag your aphorisms, jet,” Barricade muttered.
“Not aphorisms, Barricade. Simply a lesson I have had to learn time and again. I do not want to have to fail this lesson again.” Something ineffably sad in the tilted crimson optics. “Now, would you like to come back? We can keep this? Or reconstruct your former frame. What do you want, Barricade?”
Obligatory Response To Comment
Come to the dark side. We have energon cookies!
Re: Obligatory Response To Comment
(besides, what good would I ever do to your side? You want me to "cute" the Autobots for you in battle?)