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niyazi-a.livejournal.com) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
shadow_vector2010-07-22 07:33 am
Cyst
Cyst
Bayverse
Barricade, Soundwave
R
Character deaths. A LOT of them. Darkfic. Canontweaking, which is probably a standard Bayverse thang.
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tf_rare_pairing weekly request barricade/soundwave forced tempers and tensions, also, my attempt to explain why there's no Race Track Patrol mechs other than Barricade in Bayverse.
It took a long time, by human reckoning. But Cybertronians were a long-lived race and Barricade could afford to wait. The only concern he had was that combat would claim him before he could claim his revenge. But Soundwave being who he was, and Barricade being who he was, there really was no other way. So he waited, and the memory of Greffin-4 stewed in his processor, in some back bit of RAM, enclosed in its own shell like an egg, a cyst. He had no worries he’d forget the reason.
And finally, it happened: an open shift, and one of the rare occasions Soundwave had to return to the ship to refuel. Oftentimes his supplies were shuttled to him, so as not to interrupt his performance, but occasionally, even the aloof satellite mech himself needed to touch down among the lesser mechs.
Barricade waited, even then. Knowing that Soundwave’s first priority was to report to Megatron. Knowing Megatron would notice if he didn’t show. So he sat in the hangar, cracking open that old shell, letting the memories wash over him, the edges vivid and sharp, the sound hard and resonant, as though all those ages in his RAM had merely fermented the memory somehow, until it was hyperreal, overtaking his senses. He relived it, in realtime and then through tacdat, klik by klik playing through the ambush. He bathed in the memories, the muzzleflashes flickering over his sensors, audio keying the thin zap of pulse rifles, the ionized scorch of plasma arc weapons, the hum of vibroblades. The screams of the dying all around him, echoing again.
He looked around the hangar, seeing it, and yet…not seeing it. Seeing the dry canal, the members of his squad spread out. They did everything right. Kept their intervals, kept optics focused outward, fingers in triggerwells, advancing with all the tense alertness of professional soldiers. None of them had liked it.
It reeked of danger: half their distance to the first objective was along a narrow, sunken canal. Textbook fatal funnel. Barricade didn’t like it either, but orders were orders and orders said they needed that canal clear for materiel movement. “So,” he had snapped, “we go optics wide and fast and ready for it.”
“Bad feeling, this one,” Ground Hog had muttered, in the dropship. Roller Force had tried to snort it off, rolling his wrist to let the loading bots speedload additional ammunition into his reservoirs. Even Motorhead had snapped at Ground Hog, calling him a yellow-glazed coward. As if you could ward off fate with enough cynicism and bluster.
It hadn’t worked for any of them.
Superstition twisted on itself, and Motorhead had gone down first, a clean shot sizzling through his cortex. His vocalizer had glitched from the fall of hot plasma, filling the rest of the encounter (it was blasphemy to call it ‘battle’) with a soundtrack of a high shriek, punctuated by his death-flailing limbs.
Roller Force had spun, bolting for cover, making the tactical mistake of turning his back on the direction of enemy fire, that, after Motorhead fell, exploded upon them with the force of a typhoon, as if the air itself suddenly turned lethal. Roller had taken a shot to the leg that toppled him forward, the weapon clattering to the dusty concrete of the old canal as he fell, just out of reach. Barricade had backed up the ‘right’ way, running backwards spewing a fan of covering fire, his steel heelplates pistoning hard off the ground, stumbling up the canal’s ridged sides, tumbling him into the thick vegetation at the rim as a handful of rounds punched through him. By the time he’d righted himself, Ground Hog , the one Motorhead had called a coward, was going down blazing, picked apart like a jigsaw puzzle in reverse by the enemy fire.
It was not about combat, or the objective, Ground Hog’s blaze of weaponry: it was life’s desperate need gone incandescent, life’s ragged talons clutching onto existence with all the ferocity of a star gone nova.
And then the sky seemed to split, as if the air tore itself apart, and plasma bolts rained down upon the Autobot positions with surgical accuracy. Just…too late to do any good.
But by then Barricade’s vid had crackled out from power loss and he saw, and felt, nothing but pain, as though engulfed in it, swallowed up.
Barricade heard it all, smelled it all, felt it all again, along with the bitterest taste of irony. He had survived. He had done the ‘right’ thing, and he had survived.
But still, he felt like a coward. Like he had failed his team by not dying alongside them. Greffin-4. No one remembered it anymore. Ancient and petty history. A skirmish that didn’t even make the annals. And his team had died there. And a part of him had died there as well. But another part had wrapped its claws around the memory, reaching into the intel systems database when he got back, got better, got reassigned off of combat patrols.
They’d said he was too damaged. Said his cortical injuries had made him unable to work in a team.
Possibly, Barricade thought. But definitely this: that those very injures, and the deaths of his mechs, rested squarely on the shoulders o f the mech who had knowingly sent them into that death trap. And that mech’s name was Soundwave.
He’d known. Barricade had read the records. Soundwave had known there was an Autobot guerilla unit in the area. Known that canal had been used for ambushes before. Known that one strategy to take the Autobot team down was to draw them out with such delightful bait as four grounders, and then tear into them with air support. It was perfectly, coldly logical. Barricade didn’t begrudge the strategy, just that they had gone in blind, underarmored, briefed for some false mission that had never really existed.
Soundwave had known and redacted it all from his report. Presented the mission as a D-3 priority. Low armor, low ammo. No big deal.
That, Barricade found, was unforgiveable. They had no chance. They’d never had a choice, of course. They were grounders, infantry. They had no say in their missions or objectives. But any infantryman knew you put all of the faith and hope you could into the datapackets from Intel. You had a right to know the truth: you paid for those packets with your pain, with your life. You had a right to know what you were betting on.
That was ages ago. Greffin-4 wasn’t even a footnote. Soundwave had probably purged the whole thing from his own memory. And Barricade, once an infantrymech, had gone through Intel, gone through Interrogation training. Traded his gun for other, more subtle weapons.
He slipped the vibroblade from his thigh storage as the shipside door opened, light from the corridor stretching like greedy fingers into the room. Greedy fingers of light clutching onto Soundwave, glittering over his solar collection panels.
Our little superstar, Barricade thought, letting the magnets hold the vibroblade against his palm. A mech who had built his career, founded his ambition, on the careful control and hoarding of knowledge. Who got to know what, and when? Disgusting. That was not how you fought a war at all, Barricade thought. At least not to your own mechs.
Soundwave moved heavily. He hated being gravity-bound, and the full load of supplies made him unbalanced, unwieldy, his slender feet sinking hard against the deckplating. Slow, sluggish. A target that has no idea what he’s walking into. Sometimes, Barricade thought, flicking the vibroblade on, irony cuts.
He waited until the satellite mech had crossed in front of the crate he had crouched behind, lunging out, wrapping one forearm under the throat, gritting his denta in satisfaction as he felt metal framing wrench, hauling Soundwave back against his grille. He flashed the vibroblade in front of Soundwave’s optics.
“Remember Greffin-4?” he growled.
“Unhand me,” Soundwave said, coldly. Barricade could already feel the cold trail of nanite tentacles creeping across his armor. Soundwave’s only defense.
Or so he thought. This time, Soundwave didn’t have all the information. And he only had himself to blame.
“Greffin-4!” Barricade repeated. He jammed the blade under Soundwave's chin, forcing the mandibled face to tilt upward, metal grinding against the blade.
“I do not know what you are talking about.”
The final insult. The one Barricade had secretly been hoping for. He felt the tentacles push under his armor, seeking his cortical relays, an attempt to hack, to take him down. Not this time. He called up the shell, the too-vivid memory program, slamming it into his frontal process array, setting it to loop.
“You will, Soundwave,” he whispered, as the memories crashed over both of them.
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(For that: I retaliate with jetcrotch)
Mmmm, pie.
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I really like your use of the pluperfect tense in this one, it really has a sense of flow—almost a dream-like (or nightmare-like in Barricade's case) quality. And your Soundwave? Utter win. Very cool and collected, yet not totally flat, especially when you give a bit of insight into his character, even if it is just his likes and dislikes.
And seriously, I'm hungering for a sequel. You totally set this up for one. ;)
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Very nice flow with the background story! I don't believe I've ever seen you portray Barricade's past that vividly and/or darkly. It really adds depth to his character!
**growls at Soundwave**!! >=3