shadow_vector | Hope that binds us

TItle: Hope That Binds Us
Continuity: Bayverse
Characters: Barricade, Backout
Rating: PG
Warnings: none
Wordcount: 918
Time: 1:06

Barricade followed the signal. He’d thought it was at first a figment of his imagination. A ghost of a signal, an echo, its very familiarity making him doubt, wonder if it was just some glitch borne of memory and hope.

Two years alone. Two years…without contact of his own kind. Two years on the run, popping open his comm on receive only, straining his freq receptors, hearing only the fitful random chatter of Autobots. Disgusting in their victory: relaxed, military discipline gone, filling the comm freqs with jokes and comments and blatant revelations of what would be actual military intelligence. If there were anyone for Barricade to report it to, or a way to exploit it.

Instead, he listened to make sure they were not onto him. He knew what would happen if they caught him. Death…would be preferable. He’d either live as a prisoner—because there was no way they would be able to wipe out his long history of personal brutalities against them—or be forced to betray everything he had sworn his life to. The cause that made all the sacrifices, all the pain, worthwhile.

No.

He had his doubts about Megatron. And Starscream. But never, never about the cause. He’d seen the Autobots rip the heart out of Cybertron, and doom them all. There was…no way he could ever side with them. They were the murderers, the genocides. That had been their choice then, it would be their choice now: kill him outright, crush his spirit, or destroy his honor. Tear out his spark—literal or metaphorical—as easily and viciously as they tore the Allspark from the temple at Simfur.

And then…this. A faint echo of a signal. An encrypted frequency, an old secure commnet channel. He had risked an answer back, a quick blurt of syllables, giving away nothing other than someone could listen and was friendly.

The commnet had simply, without pause or hesitation, repeated the signal.

Futile, he thought. Stupid. A glitch in your cortex, or in the comm freq. Nothing. A fantasy stitched together by despair and hope. But still, as astronomically small as the chance was, he had to check it out, compelled by a need deeper than he could name—loneliness and a feeble tendril of hope.

He rolled eastward and eastward, over miles of highway, rolling at night whenever possible, checking his comm whenever he dared, and always always hearing the tantalizing repetition of the coordinates.

Coming, he thought, praying as much as a mech could pray who had lost his faith in Primus, lost his faith in everything, even himself, that he got there before the Autobots. Coming. Hang on. Just…a little longer.

He’d been telling himself the same message for two Earth years. Just hold on a bit longer. Just a bit more.

Finally, he made it. He’d been watching his grid coordinates hone in, the numbers dialing down to match. The night was lit by a razor-edge of moon, that cast glittering reflections along the water that gently lapped the stony strand. He stood up, sand shifting under his footplates as he approached the water. Salt tanged the air, warmed from the ocean current. Waves caressed the shore, warm, and frothing faintly white in the moonlight.

Peaceful. Serene. This is what despair looked like. This sound was the sound of hope dying. Nothing. There was nothing here.

“Blackout,” he muttered, trying to morph the woe in his voice into anger, trying to blame he who wasn’t here rather than himself for having been so stupid as to have followed something as paltry and thin as hope. “Frag.”

He dropped down onto his aft, his talons digging into the soft sand, gritting into his joints. Where now? What now? He had no answers. He’d let this foolish thing fill his days, give him purpose, so eager and hungry to have any kind of purpose beyond flight and hiding that he had clutched it with both hands. His fault for having been so stupid.

This is where hope dies. Once and forever. And his foolishness deserved another foolish gesture: he opened the commnet freq and said, with the knowledge that he was speaking to a glitch, a ghost, a traitorous weakness, “Barricade. Here.”

The cycling of the coordinates cut off, abruptly. Barricade twitched, scrambling to his feet.

“…Barricade,” the voice—the familiar voice, familiar despite the silence of two years—was weak and rough. But unmistakable. And the surface of the water seemed to roil like a serpent’s skin, and suddenly ruptured, the copter—or what had once been the copter, but now missing rotors, one greave torn off, one arm stripped to bare cabling, the metal of the chassis rippled and blown out from heat. But the optics, though dim, were red and alive. “Barricade,” he repeated, water sputtering from his rust-pocked vocalizer. Water poured off him, catching in the moonlight like falling stars.

Barricade pushed forward, the still-warmed ocean water splashing around his legs, until he was close enough to touch the copter’s water-glossed frame. Not daring to believe, until his talons brushed the wet metal, that he was real and here. Blackout's battered body told a story more eloquently than any words could, and Barricade's faintly trembling frame spoke more of the suppressed fear and hopelessness he had suffered than he could, or would dare, articulate. And they stood for a long moment, leaning against each other, each weak with their own kind of weakness, each needing the other’s presence as a strength, taking hope and comfort simply from no longer being alone.