shadow_vector

Title: Alone
Continuity: Bayverse
Character: Barricade
Rating: PG
Warnings: depressing stuff and apparently I'm channeling a bad HP Lovecraft fanwriter today. It's a bit...dense. Good luck diagramming some of those sentences.

Two years. It had been two years of cowering, hiding. Two years of running, without a mission, without even knowing he had a mission. Running without purpose beyond just…moving. Two years of nothing but blank survival.

Survival was beginning to feel pointless. It felt hollow and dry. It tasted like the road dirt of a thousand miles of asphalt. It looked like the flickering of lines of phosphorescent lane paint picked out of the dark of night by Barricade’s headlamps. And it sounded like the numbing roll of his engine propelling him forward, blindly forward, onward towards…something. Just…not being here.

The present existed only as a stretch toward the future. A feint. A trick, and he knew it, nothing but a feeble attempt to convince himself it would all work out. That it was happening for a reason. A weak ploy to avoid breakdown. I am not losing it now. I need it for then. When they return. When the war picks up. When I am no longer forgotten. When. When. When. A driving rhythm, like the flickering of the lane markers.

Forgotten by them, forgotten by myself.

He was running away, presuming pursuit, though he hadn’t heard so much as a blip from Autobot channels in his area for over an orbital. He fled along blank, indiscriminate roads, rolling in all weather—the cloying heat of midsummer baking his armor, the drenching rains of autumn sluicing filthily at his undercarriage, the pallid cold of winter, leaching color from the sky, reducing the world to whites and greys and treacherous ice. Other cars, trucks, blurred into a series of smudges in his memory cache.

He ran, running away from himself. Because it was easier to feed upon paranoia, upon a delusion of enemy pursuit, his cortex spinning out for him elaborate scenarios of torture and retribution that would follow if he were captured by the Autobots. It was easier to face that than the horrid realization, the unspeakable possibility, that they had forgotten about him.

No. Starscream had said he would return. But, a voice, a rough-textured wire of dissent, whispered, he has broken his word before. Or, another voice said, this one purple and murky, perhaps he has died. The only one who remembered, the only one who knew you’d survived, has perished, and that memory along with him.

The voices were getting bolder, louder, more numerous, like some virus or plant taking root in his darkest fears, feeding on his terrors. They chirped like a chorus of frogs whenever he let his mind slip, whenever he took his focus off whatever waypoint he had decided upon to measure that day’s progress, to while the long, too long hours of empty running life.

One day, he knew, he would not be able to silence them, and they would overwhelm his senses and he would succumb, would drown in his own terror. And he would die on this alien planet. And the voices would swallow him with their silence, and the sun would fade his paint and the winter cold would corrode even his metal, in time, and plants would grow through him, push through his undercarriage, root along the treads of his tires. And field mice would nest in his engine, or tear through the padding of his seats, feeding and mating and dying and defecating through his systems.

It shouldn’t matter, because he’d be dead by then. But still, the image horrified him, singed his sensor net, fired a burst of energy from fear, hurtling him headlong away from the thought, even though every panicked mile probably brought him closer to when and where that would happen.

He hoped, when he dared to hope, that they would find him, they would come back for him. Or, when his hope was dry and dusty, he hoped he would have the courage that when he felt those ragged claws, driven by that mad wild chorus of voices, he would turn and face the Autobots, pick a fight over nothing, over air, over a falling leaf, just so he could die with some pride. Death in combat, fast and brutal; rather than slow dissolution, breakdown from within.

Just so…someone would remember. Someone would know he died. And with that, that he'd lived.