shadow_vector

PG-13
Bayverse
Barricade, Blackout
Angst, ref Character Death
Wordcount:841

This is a hurt/comfort prompt. Please do not read if it will offend or trigger.

Blackout didn’t worry until he saw Barricade break down. It happened suddenly, in the middle of an operational planning. Thinking back on it, Blackout would swore he remembered a sound, like the ringing snap of a fine wire. Barricade collapsed, folded over, clutching at the intake under his grille. Optics, hostile, judging, turned on the grounder. Blackout lunged in, scooping Barricade off the ground, feeling the frame go rigid, too rigid. Almost vibrating with tension.

Blackout’s optics challenged Rampage’s as he straightened, lifting Barricade. “Repair bay,” he said, curtly. The Constructicon thought better of whatever remark was gestating in his vocalizer, glaring balefully at Blackout as he walked by, carrying the stiff frame, the awkward weight, as gently as he could. He knew what it was: it could be only the one thing.

Only one thing felt like that. Only one thing could cause that high thin whine, almost ultrasonic, almost a keening, to emit from a failing system. Only one thing could stagger a mech to this level of catatonia, systems locked to external stimuli, shutting the cortex off, walling it in with the raging ache of devastation.

Barricade’s symbiont was dead.

[***]

Barricade re-onlined in repair bay, the white optics of repair bots cutting through the dim light in wild arcs. He felt…nothing. It felt wrong that he should feel nothing.

He tried to move, but his limbs felt heavy, as if he’d been stasis rheo’d. He could manage, however, to turn his optics. They clicked in their range sockets, landing on Blackout, who stood, joints locked, by the repair cradle. The first thing he felt: A dim hatred of the pity in the shadows of the copter’s optics.

He struggled with activating his vocalizer, knowing Blackout would want an explanation. His sudden collapse…how long had he been offline?

“Frenzy.” Blackout said. Trying to spare Barricade the effort of speech. The shuttering of the optics was more than enough answer. He could hear the vocalizer crackling on, Barricade struggling for something to say.

Blackout struggled too. He wasn’t…good with words. That was one of the things he’d liked best about Scorponok: the droneling had no use for verbal language. Colors, emotions, sounds, sensations—that was how Scorponok and he had communicated. Simple. Pure. Direct. No ambiguity, no struggle. Nothing like the secondary torment of watching someone else struggle to find some way to gird themselves in fragmentary dignity, to pretend that the hurt isn’t that deep, the wound that raw.

“Dead,” Barricade finally choked. He needed to say it. Needed to hear it, for it to be real. Re-inflict the wound, as if he could harden himself to it, go numb.

Blackout nodded. “Thought so.”

“Locked up, didn’t I?” Barricade said, optics moving from the copter’s broad, impassive face.

“That’s how it happens.”

“Frag.” One hand came up, servos unsteady, actuators microfiring, causing the digits to twitch. “Middle of Op, wasn’t it?”

“There’s no good time for it to happen.” Blackout winced as he heard his own words.

“Like you’d know.” Rejecting his sympathy as false. As…condescending.

“Yeah, I would. Kind of.” Worse, actually, Blackout thought. Barricade’s optics on him were harsh and yet pleading. Asking for connection, for his brittle thin wall to be shattered. Blackout hesitated, aching.

“I remember,” he said, quietly, so quietly that the repair bots, even, stilled, and turned to listen. “Calling out to him.” He still couldn’t, after all this time, bring himself to speak the name aloud. It was night in the desert and the sand was bleeding out the very last of the day’s heat, and the air was cold and drier than despair. Like an omen. He remembered it all too well. “And I stood on that dune. And at first, it was a command, on all channels, symb link on out. RETURN. And then it faded to Come back. And then…please. Until dawn was breaking behind me in thin lines of yellow and all I had the strength to send out over the bond was…just let me know you’re alive.”

He looked away, busying his optics with reading the warning label over a tank of inflammables. To him, the isolation had made it worse--nothing for him to do but circle the area, and stew, and let his worry fester and sicken, a malignant unfinality.

The glyphs ran meaninglessly under his optics, as if twisting away from him. Eluding him. Leaving him as Scorponok had. He steeled himself to focus, to tame those writhing shapes, because otherwise he’d be back there at that night, feeling a loss worse than anything he had ever known. He had lost companions in the war. Death was inevitable. But this was worse: indecision and rejection and an isolation deeper than he knew how to feel.

He felt four small pressures on his wrist—Barricade’s talons, closing in a mute gesture of comfort. He pinched his mouth. “Sorry. At least there’s a chance he’s still alive out there,” he said, admitting that Barricade’s loss was worse, more final.

“Not a competition,” Barricade said, quietly.

Loss

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