Regeneration
Sep. 27th, 2010 06:16 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
niyazi-a.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
shadow_vectorBayverse post ROTF
Barricade, Ravage
overwritten prose
Because y'all know I can't leave dead mechs dead. There may be another part, depending. Thanks to
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wicked3659 for beta and encouragement.1. 1. At Midnight All Cats are Grey.
Calling it a long drive had been an understatement. Barricade had become thoroughly sick of scorching heat, sunlight flinging itself down like knives, cutting razor-sharp shadows on the hot ground, that had gone from macadam pavement, to sand-blown ashlar, to packed dirt. Even after two orbital cycles here, the heat and the light never felt anything but hostile.
Turkey had been the worst, the roads twisting along the edges of jagged mountains, one side rising almost vertically with scrub-strewn mountain, the other falling off vertiginously, the roads so narrow that his tires, at times, overhung the edges.
But he had pushed through, whimpering as gravel skidded his tires around the tight curves, or the baked white sand scorched the rubber, or stones bounced up from the road and scoured his undercarriage. He drove relentlessly, pushing himself, hard, far, recharging during the worst heat of the day, running through mornings and afternoons, and deep into the night, pausing only at the nadir of night, to run a quick comm check, to stretch out into his bot mode, his limbs stiff and tight and gritted with dust.
Night was the time he threatened to become homesick, when the sky was peppered with stars (though unfamiliar ones) and the ground was swathed in darkness. He’d find himself looking at the strange stars on the indigo vault of the sky and it would strike him, like a silver sharp pang, that this was like home. Cybertron had sacrificed its own star to a solar harvester, hanging itself in glittering darkness, using the energy of the star to fuel a hundred thousand live, a million lights scattered across the cityscapes, each mech claiming, in a way, that the power of a sun ran through his systems.
He tried not to think, in those times, about the silence over comm. He tried not to count the days and nights that slipped away, driving at the top safe speed, since he’d received the all-channels comm about the battle.
Megatron had told no one of his plans. Led them all on snippets of orders, fragments of missions. Not trusting his own troops. It felt like waking up to betrayal, coming home only to have doors shut in front of your face.
And one result had been Barricade driving through Greece, hunting for more Cybertronian petroglyphs, while others were dispatched across the globe, only a select handful summoned to the battle itself.
And out of the command loop. Again.
Two years. Two years alone, abandoned to a panicking, desperate silence, on the run, evading without purpose, searching without direction. And then, blessed response. And now, this. Silence again. The last door slammed, with a finality that shook him to his core.
He was racing, futilely, toward a lost battle. Toward another defeat. Another…abandonment. There was nothing good he could do there. He didn’t want to stop and think why he was still going there. He knew why, though: to be near even the mangled remains of his own kind. To find the odd scrap of armor, the random bit of optic lens, and sit, and hold them, and feel connected to something.
This place had not, for all the two orbital cycles he’d spent on it, ever come to feel any more familiar, any less alien. The blazing lights caught every flaw, every detail, casting them into high, stark relief. It left nothing to shadows, nothing to privacy. It wasn’t home. It wasn’t any place he could imagine being voluntarily. It wasn’t anywhere he wanted to live.
It wasn’t a place he wanted to die.
2. 2. Search
His tires, pitted by sand and grit, rolled to a stop. His scan had picked up a faint hit—a glimmer, an echo, probably an anomaly of piezoelectricity and the quartz in the sand—but he had been scouting for days and even a ghost or a trick was more solid than anything he’d had yet. He couldn’t find the battle. It was gone. As if some giant hand had erased everything, wiped it all off the map. All gone, again. Only last time, he’d been able to scout Mission City. He’d at least known what he’d missed.
Here, he couldn’t even find the battlefield. And he began to wonder—had there been one at all? Had the whole thing been nothing more than some sun-raddled hallucination? Was any of this real?
If he weren’t already mad, despair and stifling heat working in tandem to push him into questioning every process, following thoughts like that would surely drive him there.
But he couldn’t stop the serpent’s hiss in his cortex. That it had never been. It was like some heat-shimmer road mirage, something cooked up by his loneliness-starved processor to stave off the gradual slide into overt madness, to taunt him with the hope of not being alone. Only to snatch it away.
This place did not exist on any of the maps he had. It was a blank, no-name place. Abandoned, desolate, the only sound that of sand whistling against the age-softened edges of the stone walls, yellow upon yellow, soft looking sand blowing up against hard, time-pitted stone. Forgotten by everyone. Easy enough for some local anomaly to trick his sensors. Fool’s quest. There was nothing here.
Yet, he didn’t have anything else to do. Stopping right now, after days of motion would cause all the thinking he’d been avoiding, all the reality he’d been fleeing from, to crash into him like a wall as solid and hard as the yellow stones.
He pushed back into his bipedal mode as the sharp-eyed sun stretched the shadows long across the sand. No one was around, not even the random, rail-thin goat could find a blade of plant to eat out here. In the faint, far distance, where the blue sky gave way to an exhausted whiteness, a muezzin’s call to prayer drifted like the cry of a strange bird.
He shook his head at his own stupidity, his own hopeful folly, as he activated a boosted scan. If anything here was alive—as Cybertronians measured it—it would show. Nothing could be alive here, he thought. Nothing could survive the emptiness, the blazing scrutiny of the equatorial sun. Even humans had given up the attempt to whip life into a froth here, letting their attempt be swallowed, slowly, by the patient, hungry desert. Breaking buildings down, then stone, infinitely patient. Breaking Barricade down, if he let it.
He couldn’t let it. Wouldn’t . Before he wanted to hold himself together for the mission, to prove himself, to further the cause. Now…he just wanted not to die. He wanted to live just to spite all the things that wanted him dead.
Ridiculous, of course. He didn’t even call the scan up on more than one optic’s HUD. Just enough to give him something to do, to stave off the dreaded question ‘what now?’, to take up time while at the same time systematically crushing out hope. Extinguishing any comfort, the way the dying day sucked the light with it.
He almost didn’t see it—the most minute little glint of a hit, a dot only a few pixels wide, easy to dismiss as glare from the sunset, or a glitch in his HUD screen.
He turned, following the faint trace, fighting down the shiver of excitement. It was too small to be anyone, to be anything real, he remonstrated. This is stupid.
Stupid was better than alone. Alive is better than dead. Moving is better than stillness.
He slowed his steps, moving up a pathway between two walls, ducking under an arch, his window-wings grating against the stone, the sand still sun-warmed beneath his footplates. A battered tree, barely up to his shoulder, rattled its leafless limbs as he passed like a specter of death.
He paused, the glimmer behind him. He’d overshot it somehow. How?
He turned, carefully, boosting the magnification, and walked back, slowly enough that the sand slid and shifted beneath his feet, optics doing a 180 sweep scan.
Over there: a mound of sand drifted up against a wall, with some irregular bumps. It was coming from there. Sand and desert cocooning something, devouring it, draining it of life and color and shape.
Barricade moved over, pushing the sand away ineffectually with his talons, scrabbling in the stuff, unearthing, slowly, a small mass of metal twisted and dented and torn beyond recognition. He turned it over in his hands, his optics locking on the battered purple insignia. Something real. Something Cybertronian. Something that had seen and felt and touched Cybertron; that knew home as he knew it. That might have seen the same buildings, the same districts. A paltry thing to cling to, but he did, his talons tightening around the warped armor. A Decepticon.
He dug for more, finding more splinters of metal, gummed and hard-dried globs of energon, before unearthing a small, battered dodecahedron. Small enough to cup in one hand, output cables severed, the ends ragged and charred from damaged circuitry.
And it struck him. Ravage.
The spark chamber seemed to pulse in his hand at the thought.
“Ravage?” he asked, quietly, aware of the darkness settling in around him like a carrion-crow’s glossy wings, watching him.
Another pulse, energy definitely throbbing through the damaged chamber. Alive. Trapped without a body for days, baking in the heat, in unutterable pain, unable to call for help, unable to call for extraction. Unable to even articulate its agony.
Abandoned, just as Barricade had been. No one to listen or witness, much less help.
But this time, this time, it would be different. Barricade clutched the spark chamber in both hands. He would not let Ravage stay like this: alone, trapped, feeling Primus knows what kind of torment and despair. He could relieve something. He could have a purpose, even if it was to share in another’s despair and pain.
Especially not when…he still missed Frenzy—a spark-sick ache, like a black acid etching into his own chamber, eating through his systems. Another pain he tried to avoid, tried to push away, an enemy too dangerous to engage.
But here, in his hands, a pain he could also push aside, but…at the same time couldn’t. Something needed him. More than that—he needed something to need him.
He activated his drone slot, rolling the bumpy ball of the spark chamber in the empty space behind his grille, where Frenzy used to be. He tried not to think of the parallels. He tried not to think what it meant. He was not replacing Frenzy. Nothing could replace the symbiont. He squelched the flutter of guilt in the notion that he was doing SOMETHING, finally.
The spark chamber warmed against him, its EM field beginning, cautiously, to expand. He could feel it reaching out, could feel a primitive symbiont protocol reaching—and then withdrawing quickly, realizing he wasn’t Soundwave.
His own systems put up a small protest, his symbiont protocols resisting the unfamiliar system. He overrode the objection, his will mastering the program. He pushed into Ravage’s field, probing out with his long-unused symbiont link, gently, but insistently, radiating help and comfort—as best he could. Pain hit him first, flashes of white-hot sunlight, the feel of sand shifting under four small feet, the sinuous slip of a long spine, bunching and springing into a powerful leap, and then…unimaginable agony and the hot hollow blue glare of optics, staring down, with a sneer of satisfaction, at what he’d done.
The pain became tremulous, the edges jagged and staticky, mixed with fear and self-loathing, Ravage hating that he feared.
Yeah, Barricade thought. Me too. Symbiont protocol didn’t have codes for things like comfort and empathy. He could only send a message of ::safe::.
::Safe:: Ravage echoed, some of the fear dissolving. The EM field reached out again. ::Not master. Notmasterbutsafe?::
::Not master,:: Barricade confirmed. And you’re not my symbiont. But neither of us have much luxury of choice here other than rejection. ::Safe.::
A little more uncoiling. Then ::bodygonewhere?wherebodywhereravagebody?:: the words skirling up in panic. The link was tenuous, cutting in and out.
::Calm.:: He had the answer, but he had neither the will nor the language to explain it over the shaky link. Ravage’s body was…this twisted wreck he was prodding with one footplate, the metal mangled, gummed together with old, dried fluids. The metal was grey and brittle, whited at the stress points. Nothing salvageable there.
Ravage refused to be calmed, and not being his real master, Barricade couldn’t force the code to stick. He could just repeat it, ‘calm’ and ‘safe’, over and over in a loop, hoping they would penetrate. He could feel the energy thrash against it, depleting itself, wearing down energy that had been trapped, isolated, into a hot numbness.
Panic blazed through the link, refusing solace, dropping down below the level of words, down into inchoate feeling.
Barricade hesitated. That was…exactly where he didn’t want to go. Exactly what he’d been avoiding for all these solars. He cycled a shaky breath. Choice: Release the symbiont, abandon him to certain slow withering death, or push himself into that, wade through that murky morass of emotion.
It was no choice, really. He’d already come to think of Ravage as his. Ravage as something to hang onto. Something to do, something to keep him involved, keep him together.
He dropped into that level of programming: basic, instinctual. Uncomfortable, pulling him back too quickly, too easily to his own days as a droneling, where emotion, color and sensation were all he knew, where the language of his world had no words, only music and light and feeling.
He pulled himself through emotion, trying to call up a memory of safety, trying to capture a time of security so he could push the sensation at Ravage. He tried not to think too hard about the fact that so few came to hand, grasping instead at the memory of Frenzy’s first link. A borrowed, secondhand memory. Something he’d learned to appreciate, to miss, in the little techling—Frenzy felt everything with such pure intensity, riding from crest to valley of sensation, curious, insistent, restless.
He pushed it at Ravage, almost as much to get it away from him, to keep the wave of nostalgia at bay.
::Notmasternot:: came the response, truculent, before subsiding into a muddy green of disruption, spiked with the yellow of agitation. But the colors took the bright, vivid rosy-blue of Frenzy’s excitement down with them.
The shadows had swallowed the ruins by now, the blazing yellow damped to a flat, apathetic grey. A light breeze stirred dead branches to a sound like dry, dusty laughter, feather-skimming over the sand.
Barricade hated this place. Hated it for what it was almost as much as for what it recalled to him by contrast—its stark light and dark compared to Cybertron’s familiar, stable darkness; its heat compared to Cybertron’s coolness; its shifting sand compare to Cybertron’s stable pavements. It felt diseased, even here, where human traces had been almost entirely effaced.
He didn’t stop to think. Another in a long chain of moments he wasn’t ready to analyze, and possibly never would be. He activated coding, part of his armor melting down on one leg, pulling away, revealing the pewter grey of his protoform.
This…would hurt. But physical pain he was inured to. He’d taken his share (and more) of beatings. This was nothing compared to the injuries that had scarred and scratched his armor. As long as, of course, he didn’t consider the symbolism.
He dug his talons into the yielding metal of the protoform, biting down on an incoherent sound of pain, forcing himself to tear a handful of the living metal, feeling it protest and ooze around his talons, until he finally tore it free.
His entire frame was shaking from the blaze of pain whipping like a fire over his sensornet. Stupid. Ridiculous gesture. One that Ravage won’t recognize, much less be grateful for.
Shut it, he barked at himself, tipping the protoform metal into his symbiont slot, feeling it run, still vaguely linked to his net, his consciousness, along the slot, until it hit the bare metal of Ravage’s spark chamber. Then a flare of disconnection, as the protometal wrapped itself around the spark chamber, followed by a buzzing soothing sensation as Ravage’s programming finally eased.
The protometal would protect the spark chamber, would help it heal. Would store its physical memories, those stronger than the mind, born in the systems, core deep memories, prepare it for a new frame, a new future. Whatever that might be.
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Date: 2010-09-27 10:27 am (UTC)Love the way you put words together.
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Date: 2010-09-29 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-29 05:42 am (UTC):D
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Date: 2010-09-27 10:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-29 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 12:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-29 01:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-29 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-29 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 09:35 pm (UTC)I'm glad that Barricade has found something to live for, something to use to fight his depression. Lucky Ravage to find someone who will care.
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Date: 2010-09-29 01:27 am (UTC)I hope they get along, too!
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Date: 2010-10-18 04:58 pm (UTC)