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shadow_vector2010-07-02 10:41 am
Drowning
Bayverse
Starscream/Barricade
fluffy angst and also, a h/c prompt
A/N written for
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hc_bingo prompt "drowning". Barricade twitched in his recharge. He knew it was just a purge, nothing more, but nothing could pull him from the overwhelming reality of it.
Because, it had been real. It had really happened. Even this far away in time, it hit him, enough to cycle his warning systems in terror.
[…]
Darkness. Darkness so vast his processor could not encompass it, measure it, calculate any end to it. Space so big and deep and empty it felt like being swallowed, crushed. It felt like…disappearing. Being so inconsequential and small that the weight of his own insignificance threatened implosion.
Panic. Don’t panic. Stop panicking. Barricade looked around, frantic, trying to find any directional marker, trying to keep himself from thrashing helplessly, losing all chance of finding the others. A lucky shot had damaged the fuel tank on his pro-pack’s thruster, jetting him from the main hub of the battle. Cast aside. Cast away. Useless and now…helpless. And lost.
He tried to turn, slowly, to find the battle. The vacuum of space swallowed up the sound, filling his audio with the intermittent singsong hiss of stellar winds. He scoured in vain for the lightflashes or movement of combat. Around him, only darkness, the stars dim distant lights that didn’t glitter through the vacuum.
He couldn’t find them. At all.
Stay…calm.
His capacitor’s current fluctuated wildly, sending erratic overbursts of current through his systems. He cut power to the propack. He’d need it to get back. He’d need it…once he found them. IF he found them.
What if...?
He pushed the thought aside, with a growl that barely registered in his audio, drowned out by the stellar hiss.
The coldness, unrelieved by the thruster engine’s heat, seemed to press against him, remind him over and over again of his smallness. The cold ate into his joints, sending signals almost like burning across his net.
I…am going to die out here, Barricade thought. I am going to be a bit of debris, useless, unnoticed space junk floating here, until the universe itself contracts again, and I’m rushed, limp and helpless, toward one last, inevitable collision, gravity tearing at me, ripping off my armor, stripping me down.
Will I still be alive when it happens? Will I still be aware, at any level? Will I feel anything beyond the sharp stabbing pain of cold, or will that have become my whole world? Will I feel the shift? Feel the movement at all, or will it start so slightly that it will not even register? Will I know I am dead?
Terror seized him, utterly, like cold fingers squeezing around his spark chamber. His equilibrium faltered, vid feed flickering. No, he told himself. Not failing. Not failing yet. You are not dying. Yet. You aren’t. Stop panicking. Calm down. Not helping. Burning fuel. Burning charge. Burn too much too fast and you’ll lose charge to your actuators, race headlong to that time where you’re nothing but an awareness, a consciousness, helpless, paralyzed, trapped. Will without mobility. Sensation without agency.
He heard a whimper. His own vocalizer giving note to his terror, his hands shaking as he popped a signal charge.
No one will find me.
He looked at the blinking green node, watching it flash, trying to feel the databurst it sent out. This…will not save me. This is useless, a toy, a sick gesture of hope. It probably doesn’t even work. Just a placebo. A joke. Do not fall for it. Do not believe in it. They will not find you. They aren’t even looking for you.
He curled forward around the node, sobs choking in his vocalizer, as if trying to contain all the hurt and fear and terror and loneliness in one ball, push it into his core, coalesce around it. Try to keep himself from flying apart by walling himself in, trying to hide from the yawning dark emptiness of space by binding himself in with sensation and emotion. By trying to feel as much as possible, so that he didn’t give in, too soon, to the terrible numbness around him.
Even so, he felt himself give. Yield. Shatter. He felt the terror suck him in and explode him simultaneously, in a strange non-physical agony. And the coldness and the darkness and the emptiness took him utterly. And he screamed without screaming, his own fear swallowing the sound, before the hugeness of his isolation.
[…]
“Barricade,” the voice was soft in his audio, a gentle hand on his upper arm. “Barricade.” More insistent this time.
Barricade jerked awake, realizing with instant mortification that he’d curled into the same tight ball as in his memory purge, arms clutched over an invisible signal node in front of his chassis. His optics whirred online slowly, almost afraid to cycle on, to see nothing but the empty darkness of space in front of him.
Red lights glowed in front of him—not distant stars, but near, present, wide spiraled optics. “Sorry,” he muttered, uncoiling himself from his tense ball, sensation rushing back to him, as though the red optics were a key that had flung open a door to his sensornet. He felt the deck cool and solid underneath him, his own mass a solid anchor. He felt the wall bumping his doorwings. He felt the soft stir of air from his own cooling system on his chassis, heard the series of hums, buzzes, and muted clicks of the shuttle’s cargo bay. Not in space. Not dead. Here. Alive. On the shuttle back to the Nemesis from planetside. Safe.
He gave a slow, deep vent cycle.
“Do you require assistance?” Starscream asked, crouched down in front of him, the Air Commander so much outstripping Barricade in size that his knee jutted above Barricade’s head level. Crouched down, bent down, stooped down…all to check on him and his pitiful fear.
“’M fine,” he muttered.
“You are here, and unharmed,” Starscream replied, with his strange form of logic. “That is not the same, I find, as ‘fine’.”
Barricade glared at him, but felt his systems settling down. He was not there. He was here, and unharmed. Yes.
“That was an awful experience,” Starscream murmured. Of course he would remember: probably recognized the posture from when he had flown out on the signal vector, found a tiny ball of once-proud interceptor gibbering into a signal node, desperate with fear.
Barricade shrugged. “Over it. Worse slag happens every day.” He jerked his chin at the humming CR chamber, filled from their recent planetside contact with the enemy.
“There is no measure, Barricade. Save what the spark knows.” Starscream risked a touch inward, tapping one long, elegant talon on Barricade’s grille. It was an intimate touch, unsettling, stirring up confusing and contradictory emotions in the grounder. He clutched at them, still shaken and thin from his bad purge, desperate to feel. Emotion, sensation, anything filled the swirling emptiness, voided by fear.
“Just…doesn’t affect my capabilities.”
“No. It does not. Is that the only reason you can imagine I might have concern?” A soft challenge in the tone.
Yes, Barricade wanted to say. No, he didn’t want it to be true. “Better things to do.”
“Do I?”
This, Barricade thought tightly, was just his way of getting to you. Just his way of controlling you: feeding upon your weakness. He’s seen it, and he has wrapped his hands around it and is beginning to squeeze. Do not. Do not. “Should have better things to do.”
The head tilted, optics amused. “Our priorities differ, apparently, Barricade. We still have several cycles before docking. You shall have a lot of data to scan then. You should endeavor to rest now, while you can.”
“Fine without sleeping,” Barricade said.
Starscream dropped himself onto the floor, kicking his legs out. “Well, perhaps you are, but I am not.” He turned, in the cramped confines of the cargo bay, and dropped his shoulders onto Barricade, his turbines bumping on Barricade’s chassis, head resting next to Barricade’s upper arm tire. “I shall need to recharge myself. Here.” He wriggled down onto Barricade.
“Not a pillow,” Barricade muttered, but he didn’t shove the jet away.
“As your commander,” Starscream said, slyly, “I order you to support me while I recharge.” His optics glinted.
“Don’t mean that kind of support.” The hum of the jet’s electrical systems against him was soothing; the scent of warmed airframe grade and fired weapons filling his olfactory sensors; the large mass, pressing down on him, pushing him into the floor, would not let him forget he was here, grounded. Solid. Safe. Not in space, drifting alone and terrified. And he knew, suddenly, in a burst of realization, that this was Starscream’s way of reaching out, of trying to help, by at least reminding him, moment by moment, across his sensor span, that he was here and safe and not alone.
“Pillows,” Starscream said, pointedly, “do not argue.”
Barricade grunted, sourly. He shifted his shoulders, pulling his arms out from under the jet’s weight, risking draping them around Starscream’s shoulder and helm, pulling the jet against him till their audios bumped. The jet’s chassis armor felt smooth and warm and alive under his palms. He felt his spinal struts yield, releasing fear.
“Fraggin’ hate you,” Barricade mumbled.
Starscream sighed, happily against him. “Yes, Barricade,” the jet said, tartly. “I know.”
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Thanks for sharing!
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Behind Masks (http://community.livejournal.com/shadow_vector/30599.html)
Last One Standing (http://community.livejournal.com/shadow_vector/32019.html)
Decon (http://community.livejournal.com/shadow_vector/37607.html)
A couple of more I've written with this pairing. I suck at posting to comms. :C
Glad you liked!
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Can't get enough. More, please? :D