Key

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

G
Bayverse
Barricade, Frenzy
angst, ref chara death
45 minutes
590 words (whut? I was IMing at the same time!)

For tf_speedwriting  prompt.

It was one of those days when the hours of sunlight seemed to drag themselves slowly, gratingly, over Barricade’s armor.  Long, and tedious and too bright. After the darkness of Cybertron, after ages in space, the white-gold sunlight of earth was hard to adjust to, made everything stand out in stark, cutting highlights, shadows razor-edged.  This time of day was worst, Barricade thought, for the memories, the heat and light creating almost a somnolence, summoning forth the past to fill the long stretch of saw-edged hours.

And he should have done this long ago. Two years ago? No, that would have been too soon. Too immediate.  He couldn’t remember when he’d lost hope—there hadn’t been a defining moment, a time when he’d felt the tenuous thread snap, or even really been aware that it had been ebbing away.  Just…for a long time, a numberless stretch of these hot, yellow-sheened hours, he’d had to struggle harder and harder to summon the desire to search. Perhaps not so much a loss of hope as a growth of despair.

It didn’t feel like the right time, but he suspected it never did.  He’d never truly lost anything before. Not like this. 

So he sat, on the ground in the clearing behind the sagging-roofed abandoned country store, the rust-blotted Coca-Cola sign swinging squeakily in the stir of air.  Not a breeze so much as the heat made into motion.  And in front of him, Frenzy’s…things. All the little things the techling had collected, chittering, excited, fascinated. 

The objects were random: a green glass bottle, a battered water-warped paperback of a book called Rebecca, two staple removers, a doll without a head, and a rusted key.  They made no sense to Barricade. Not Barricade-sense, of course.  Frenzy-sense, possibly, but…the time had passed when Barricade could remember how to do that.  Frenzy was a closed book to him, now.  Hanging on to these mementos did no good. They did not bring him back, and, looking at them, they seemed more to serve to remind him of what he’d lost: Frenzy, and above all, the connection with another being. 

He stared at them as if they were a code that would solve everything, bring Frenzy back, cure this ache...if only he could read it.

Junk, he told himself. Get rid of it. Garbage, the humans call it.  Trivial detritus of pointless lives: a bottle containing nothing, a key with no lock. 

Barricade remembered when Frenzy brought him the key. The techling had sat in the back seat for an entire cycle—a rarity that he could be absorbed in anything for so long— chittering excitedly, turning the bit of metal over and over in his small hands, staring, wondering aloud, question after question tumbling out so fast Barricade couldn’t even manage to start an answer before the next question flooded out: what did it open, where was the lock, was it lost or thrown away? Who would throw it away?  Was there a reward for its return?  Would it be sad to have lost a key? Why would you throw it away: because you’d already opened the door that never needed to be locked or because you wanted it locked forever?

Nostalgia.  Inertia dragging him down—not the physical weight of this junk but the emotional.  Even now, he still had no answers, not even for Frenzy’s ghost.  Why would you throw away a key?

He didn’t know.  But he threw it away anyway, hoping it would take some of its terrible weight with it. 

Comments

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked!

[playswithworms.livejournal.com]

;_; So sad, poor little chittery Frenzy. Very short and neat - I like how the key wrapped it together. (Nice title, too ^_~)

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Yeah I so rock with those titles, don't I? :P

I'm still not sure I've gotten my brain around Barricade and Frenzy as a pairing, hence the cleverly substituted angst.

Thanks for reading!

[playswithworms.livejournal.com]

I honestly do like the title, lol, maybe because it resembles my own tending-to-the-one-word title style ^^

Hmm, I can't quite picture them as a pairing, myself - more along the lines of "Barricade's little twerpy buddy."