Give Me

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG
Bayverse
Barricade/Starscream
no warnings.
written for 10_orders  "give me another chance" and follows on from the last two (go to hell and come/back)

 

Barricade writhed with memory every time he saw Starscream. What he’d thrown away. No, he told himself. He’d been right to do it.  The interfacing, the emotion, was hollow, empty.  That was the worst part—that he’d lost so much. Like all the color and light in his world, all the richness, had been bleached, withered, sapped.  And every time he saw the jet it was like…a re-infliction of a too-new wound, tearing open a scab, abrading a raw scar. 

Starscream wasn’t doing it on purpose. He could say that with some confidence.  He had been…so careful, always, to keep any public interaction cool and professional and even a little rigid, that it was impossible to notice any difference in his demeanor. 

M-maybe that hadn’t been an act. Maybe Starscream’s public act was the truth. Maybe the real acting was the sweet words, the gentle touches, the tenderness.  Maybe that was the act, designed to have him fall in love, lose himself.

And he had fallen for it. And lost himself.

It…hurt.  Hurt in ways he couldn’t describe. A bodily pain, a burning heaviness, a spark-heavy torpor, making it difficult to move, as though the air were thick, or the gravity altered.

And just when he thought it couldn’t get worse…it did.

Starscream and Soundwave. He wasn’t supposed to see it. He’d given up on presuming any malice. It was just…Starscream moving on. Unlike Barricade. 

It HURT.  Seeing them together, Soundwave’s hands skittering over Starscream’s armor in ways Barricade never could, able to embrace him, equal to equal, their bodies twining together in pure fluid desire that he imagined looked so much different from his awkward lust-addled fumbling.

And that led somehow, to this. 

“May I join you?” Starscream hesitated by the table he had claimed in the refectory, his wings pressed flat. 

Barricade made a churlish gesture with his talons. Couldn’t stop him, after all.  Starscream smiled (the old smile, still so beautiful, still able to twist Barricade’s spark in its chamber) and perched himself on the seat across from him.

“Are you well?” Starscream asked, with that strange sincerity. No. That was an act. Only an act.

Barricade stared at Starscream for a while as though the question was some sort of insult. Was he well. You shattered my spark, stole…everything from me.  And you dare ask…? “Enough,” he managed. 

“I miss you.”  

The words seemed like javelins, stabbing straight into Barricade’s frame.  Everything he wanted to hear. Everything he didn’t dare allow himself to trust.  “Yeah,” he choked. 

“Give me another chance.”

“Chance for what?” The words spat out of him like gunfire, blunt, designed to hurt.  Hurt me again? Finish the job? Not done enjoying how pathetically I pine after you?  How desperate I am?

“To make up for what I had to do.”

“What you had to do.” More blunt force.  His cortex fed him the memory of the two of them—Soundwave and Starscream, twining together in a flash of limbs.  Yeah. He HAD to do that. Barricade clung desperately onto that ember of anger. Burn, he begged it, purify me of this terrible, fluid pain.

“Barricade. He was close.  He could have discovered you—us.  I had to do what I could.” Starscream spread a palm on the table between them. An invitation.

“’M I supposed to be buying this?”

The jet faltered.  “It is the truth.”

“Oh. And interfacing with him?  That was, what?  More of your attempts to ‘protect’ me?”  The words boiled out of him. 

Starscream flinched, his mouth gaping. “Barricade, I….”  He stopped himself. As if aware, Barricade thought, of how flimsy his excuse would be. “I am sorry you saw that.”

“I’ll bet.”  He was sorry, too.  More sorry that it happened, that he had been so easily replaced, but the visual image that both aroused and repelled him at once, haunted his cortex. 

“Please.”  Raw importuning in the jet’s voice, a note that, in spite of himself, drew Barricade’s optics up to Starscream’s face.  “Give me another chance.”

“Why?”  He fought down hope. 

“You are the only one I can be this…honest with.  I need you to balance myself.”

A bitter smile. “So it’s all about you, and what you need.” 

A shell of a laugh.  “Is it not always?  Perhaps that is how you can tell that I am telling the truth.”  Starscream flipped his hand over onto the table. Open. Inviting but not pushing.  Leaving the decision up to Barricade, giving him power, ceding control. 

“Y-yeah,” Barricade said unsteadily, aware it made almost no sense, hoping that the real meaning, something too fragile and tentative to say out loud, carried through his palm as he laid it in Starscream’s.

 

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/__wilderness__/]

*happy sigh*

[kamiraptor.livejournal.com]

*melts to goo*

DON'T SCREW THIS UP, STARSCREAM!!! *points finger threateningly*

[yukiko-angel.livejournal.com]

Awwww

[ithilgwath.livejournal.com]

i has a happy! :D