shadow_vector | Fic: Missing You 1/2

PG-13
TFA: Inamorato AU
Barricade, Blackout, and a mess of others.
none

Written for the May 'missing you' challenge for

tf_rare_pairing . Yes, this IS how much I suck. It's...late June. It was ready by deadline, too. I can write to deadline...just can't motivate myself to post. :C

Barricade flipped through the newsfeeds impatiently. How did mechs function, only getting their information from authorized and 'legitimate' sources? Frag, it was maddening! Not only the painfully obvious fact that one was getting only part of the story, but the way the anchorbots would smile blandly and nod no matter how horrific the story—oh a botched salvage homicide in Quadrant 7, how horrible, cue chuckle and vapid comment—made Barricade doubt his sanity.

Okay, doubt it more than usual.

He had to forcibly restrain himself from comming Vortex to get the real deal behind this whole shindig was. Starting with…why Megatron had to have Blackout with him.

He wasn’t worried. He wasn’t worried. He wasn’t worried. He kept telling himself this, hoping that sooner or later he’d start to believe it. Blackout in Iacon. Without him. Last time the copter’d been in Iacon, those slagging Neuts had tried to chopperize him.

Look, Barricade, he tried to reason with himself. You hate it when the copter worries about you. So…don’t worry about the copter. Otherwise, you’re nothing but a fraggin’ hypocrite. An irresistibly hot little hypocrite, but a hypocrite nonetheless. And the copter would surely point that out to him, being all like…decent and honorable and stuff.

It’s not that Barricade didn’t trust Blackout; he just didn’t trust anyone inside the city limits of Iacon. Especially not after his last run in. Seriously: Three times he’d been in Iacon—trying to unheist Skywarp’s heistiness; on the abortive date; and on his recent little…endeavor. Three out of three experiences rated as ‘sucky’. So…he had like 100% probability to worry.

Change of scenery, that’s what he needed. Sitting around here, flopped on the repair-cradle that doubled as their couch (it was pretty awesome for snuggling, which he really didn’t want to think about right now, you know, being NOT snuggled against the large warm frame), flipping from newsfeed chan to chan, frankly, was spinning him up. In the bad way. In the Barricade’s-got-to-stab-something way.

Right. Change of scenery.

Unfortunately, Barricade was more or less on autopilot so he found himself…at Inamorato. Because, yeah, going to where Blackout normally works is really going to shake the lonelies. Barricade, you are low-wattage when it comes to relationships. Seriously. Still he was here, and they served high grade and the two might come together in some way that would blank his processor.

He stomped through the door, glaring at the Autobot bouncer on duty. Fraggin’ Autobot. Fraggin’ Iacon.

“Ohhh, hello, handsome,” Sunstorm simpered, leaning against the newel post of the banister leading to the upstairs rooms. “You’re looking a little lonel—aach!” Sunstorm’s hands grabbed at his throat, as Barricade pinned him against the wall.

“NOT in the mood,” Barricade snapped. He dropped the saffron-colored jet.

“Uhhh, maybe later?” Sunstorm gasped, dropping to the floor. “You’re hot when you’re angry.”

Barricade glared at him before turning and storming under the curtained arch into the bar.

Barricade tapped his talons impatiently until Arcee took his order. She placed the high grade down in front of him, precisely in the center of a little frilly circular mat. When the frag did they get those? He stared at the mat. Getting mad at a frilly coaster made no sense, but at least it beat missing the copter. Which ached. Painfully.

“Are you all right?” Arcee’s voice cut into his contemplation of exactly how many ways he could turn the frilly little coaster thingie into a weapon.

He looked up. “Me? Yeah. Fine.” Right. Not even you believe that, Barricade.

“He’ll be fine,” Arcee said, pretending to casually wipe down some glasses.

“What? Oh, him? Yeah. Whatever.” Barricade slugged his high grade.

“Whatever?” Her blue optics glinted with amusement. Barricade had not yet gotten used to looking at blue optics and not wanting to stab them. Ooops. Readjustment issues. “You miss him.”

“I trust him,” he said, hotly. Yeah, the last worry on his mind was Blackout interfacing with another mech.

“Of course you do,” Arcee said, blandly. “I simply said you missed him.”

Oh. Barricade placed his cube down, deliberately off center of the coaster. He couldn’t think of anything to say. And stabbing was starting to seem viable. Not sensible, but...meh. Sensible cause and effect was way overrated.

“He missed you terribly when you disappeared.” A nice, neutral verb. What she meant was ‘ran out on’ or ‘bailed on’.

OH the urge to stab just spiked. Yeah, all Barricade needed was for her to travel agent a guilt trip for him. “I…I know.” He didn’t want to think about that. He really didn’t want to think about the copter feeling, well, the way he was feeling right now. Funny how in combat he’d never worried about Blackout. In combat, the copter could take care of himself. But in Iacon…. “Just don’t get why Megatron needed him for this. Copter’s got a good job. With you.” The closest he’d come to complimenting this place, and that only because Blackout loved his job here.

Arcee shrugged. “I’m not one to have an opinion. Some Decepticon thing.”

“I haff opinion,” Strika muttered, rumbling up behind Barricade. “Ve haff to make show of ztrenkth. Ze Zentinel Prime is no fool.”

Actually, Barricade thought, he IS a fool. But that’s probably why Megatron needed a show of strength. His optics flicked back to the posh main door through the curtained archway, to where Brawn rocked back and forth on his pedes. A lightbulb went on. “Lugnut gone, too?”

“Yes,” Strika sighed. “You cannot ztop him vhen Megatron commands.”

Barricade grunted sympathetically, draining the last of his high grade. Nope. The stuff had barely made a dent in his bad mood. “Another,” he muttered at Arcee.

“You do not like not to know he is zafe.”

Barricade ducked his head, anticipating where this went next. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Been through a war and all.”

“Iz not vhat I mean at all.” Strika tilted her head at Arcee. “Iz on ze house.”

Great, it was official: Barricade was a loser. Getting charity-high grade. Frag. Only one way to fix the sting of that wound—get so overcharged he didn’t remember it. He moved to slug this cube, too, but Strika laid a heavy hand on his forearm.

“You vant to be overcharged vhen he returnz?”

Frag. No. He wanted ridiculously hot coptersex when Blackout returned. He grumbled. “Just don’t like not knowing what’s going on.”

“Iz uncomfortable, yes.” She hooked one of her fingers in his elbow joint. “You come vith me.” He snatched his cube—hey, pity or not, it was his—and stumbled alongside her longer strides back to her office. She plopped a chair next to hers behind the desk and called up a monitor. “Ve vatch secure channels,” she explained.

Not the public ones that were all he and Blackout could afford. Fine. He took it for what it was worth: charity, perhaps, but from someone who knew him. And what he needed. He needed to know. He lay the cube on the desk, leaning forward, optics studying the monitor.

Strika called up a panel, and input a code that Barricade caught only half of. Slag. He was losing his touch. Still it narrowed it down. You know, in case it ever became expedient to hack her office or something.

The screen flickered through a number of colors, before settling on a grayscale feed that looked like it was taken from a ceiling some place. It took Barricade a moment before it clicked. Frag, he hadn’t seen one of these in ages. Spybugs. Ancient stuff. And not ancient in that ‘creepy mysterious super advanced race’ kind of way: ancient in that 8-track player ‘how the hell did people live like this’ kind of way.

Is this what they were reduced to? Frag.

He was about to complain when into the viewfield of the little espionage device walked Megatron, flanked on either side, in perfect lockstep, by Lugnut and Blackout.

Barricade’s capacitor skipped. Frag. Blackout was HOT. He looked so different, olive crest scrunched low over his set optics, his stride evenly matched with Lugnut’s, long arms swinging. He looked…dangerous. Intimidating. A way he’d never looked at Barricade. Barricade felt his interface systems kick on with a wash of heat. He looked sheepishly over at Strika, to see if she’d heard the noise. If she had, she was being really subtle about it.

Still, he looked safe as he progressed down the hall. Barricade tried to force himself to feel reassured. He did feel reassured—he’d feel better if he could actually touch Blackout, but seeing him on the screen was close enough. But something…something kept niggling at the back of his cortex. Something wasn’t right. “Something’s going to go down,” he muttered, his talons clutching at the cube. Something is going to go down and I’m fraggin’ HERE.

“Zey are meeting vith Zentinel Magnus,” Strika said. “Ze entire Elite Guard is keeping vatch.”

Yeah, the entire Elite Guard, the Decepticons’ Friends. That made Barricade feel a whole lot better. Especially when he saw the white Autobot that had been with Sentinel Magnus at the museum. “Trust the Elite Guard even less than I trust Roller Force,” he muttered.

Whatever General Strika was going to respond got cut off as the screen suddenly went white, then black, then staticky. Barricade’s spark felt like it guttered, falling somewhere into his feet. Oh frag oh frag oh frag. Sometimes, he told himself, being right about this kind of thing really sucks.

He jumped up.

“Vere you go, Barricade?” Strika said. “The Elite Guard—“

“Can frag themselves sideways with Sentinel Magnus’s chin,” Barricade snapped. “Going to help Blackout.”

****

He probably—he wasn’t in the mood to do the slaggin’ math but he filed it away as a good math problem to throw on the copter’s next quiz—broke groundspeed records on his way to Iacon. Certainly his horn hadn’t gotten a workout like this in orbital cycles. Nor had his…ummm…saltier vocabulary. He was kinda glad Blackout wasn’t with him to hear it. Then again, he’d give anything to get a lecture from the copter right about now—even the perpetually perky public newschans were awkward and somber, reporting that a series of vehicle bombs had gone off in central Iacon and that traffic was blocked from accessing the central city.

Right. Try me. They could blockade all they wanted, but no one was going to keep Primus’s forgotten son from getting to his copter.

He skidded around the first set of barriers, going up on his right side tires to dodge the surprised Autobot guard, but for the second, you know, what with the rolling and screaming fan club threatening to arrest him—for his own safety of course, because that’s how Autobots roll—he had to employ less obvious measures. Subtlety. The spice of life and bane of mission expediency.

He slipped into an alley, throwing himself bipedal and clambering up the wall at the back, dropping down heavily on the other side. Vaguely reassured that Iacon’s alleys were dirty, just like Kaon’s. See? You aren’t so much better than us.

Before the nearest pursuer could pop his head over, Barricade was down the alley and doubled back up the next street. Too easy. The closer he got, he knew, the better the guards would be. These mechadingos were simply civil patrol, toy soldiers. Up closer, he’d have some actual competition.

He slipped from shadow to shadow, his spark shifting uneasily as the shadows began to flicker, quivering and writhing from a massive conflagration ahead. If he could have put out a fire by force of bad language alone, the thing would have died to embers.

A block before the Magnus’s hall, Barricade headed for rooftops. As he’d suspected, he spotted more than one mech with an Elite Guard brassard, all pointing outward. Because, of course, no possible chance that an attack might come from within the Hall. Fraggin’ idiots.

He waited, hating the delay, hating not knowing what was going on inside the hall. He tried to convince himself the Guard had already secured the Hall itself, that Blackout was safe.

Yeah, right. Autobots. They couldn’t secure a leaky hose.

He leapt from roof to roof, coming in behind the unsightly backside all buildings, no matter how public, had, before dropping down onto a pile of bagged up trash waiting for pickup. Silky shiny Autobots probably couldn’t imagine a mech with ill intentions stooping to land on trash. Good thing Barricade had…good intentions. Well, where Blackout was concerned. Slag anyone else.

He clambered out of the pile of bags and…right into the muzzles of a handful of pulse rifles. The mechs who held them weren’t Elite Guard, but…one didn’t need Secret Ninjutsu Training to pull a trigger from an arm’s length away. Slag.

Guess things were going to have to get...fun. His optics spread wide into a wide vid field, his mouth spreading into a grin.

***

“This!” Sentinel raged. “Is obviously a set up! You set out to sabotage our meeting!”

“If I had set out,” Megatron said, coolly, “to sabotage a meeting, I assure you, my dear Autobot, that it would be well and truly sabotaged. This? This is the work of flailing amateurs.” As is everything you do, Megatron added silently. “And if I wanted this meeting not to have happened…I would have simply refused. I, for one,” he said, pointedly, “have better uses of my evening than this.”

“That’s precisely what I’d expect a guilty mech to say,” Sentinel retorted, “to try and build an alibi.”

Megatron rolled his optics, finding himself almost longing for the Good Old Days where the only egotism he had to contend with was Starscream’s. And at least Starscream was…diverting to look at. And a little more engaging mentally. This Sentinel had every symptom of a dullard and a bully. He could not believe he had had to ally with such a wretch. “My alibi is that I am here to have a discussion about Autobot intervention in Kaon affairs.” Behind him, his two bodyguards, handpicked for their enormous bulk and miniscule brains, shifted uneasily. He watched, amused, as Sentinel’s optics flicked nervously between the pair of them. Well, Megatron thought smugly, he should. Lugnut and Blackout literally embodied ‘loyalty to a fault.’ Something that, he had come to realize, Sentinel Magnus himself did not attract at all.

“Yes, well,” Sentinel puffed. “I see only necessary involvement.”

“I see meddling.”

“I am the Magnus! Nothing I do is meddling! Everything I do is for the greater peace of Cybertron.”

“The greater piece of Cybertron,” Megatron echoed. “Which is, of course, all property of The Magnus.”

Sentinel nodded officiously before his optics clouded, sensing the sheathed insult.

“And what,” Megatron asked, kicking one leg up to rest the ankle across the other knee, “do you intend to do for the greater peace. Considering you cannot even secure your paltry Iacon?”

“We have the Elite Guard,” Sentinel said, pointing to the immaculate white mech leaning, arms folded, in the corner, optics hidden behind a blue visor. Oh yes, thought Megatron. Jazz veritably seethes with competence. All…one of him.

“Indeed,” he said, smoothly. “However, I seem to recall that the Elite Guard’s numbers have been…,” he moued sympathetically, “severely diminished by the recent unpleasantness.” He raised his optics insolently to Sentinel.

Sentinel quivered, his gaudy chassis heaving as he tried to summon some suitably bloviating retort, when the doors behind him were flung open, a panicked mech bursting through, his armor stained and specked with rust from where he'd been bound with old chains.

“Sentinel Magnus, sir!” he gasped, doubled over. “We have an intruder!”

“Oh,” Megatron said, enjoying the openmouthed shock on Sentinel's face, “your Elite Guard. How I have missed their competence.”

****

Link to Part Two (yeah this was actually too long to post as one!)

Fic: Missing You 1/2

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