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shadow_vector2010-09-30 07:53 am
Missing
Bayverse, after the movie prequel but before the movie.
Starscream, Blackout
Barricade doesn’t turn up for a rendezvous, and something else comes to light.
“Where is he?” Starscream’s voice was querulous, masking his real concern. They’d come together as a unit, the vanguard, the reconnaissance team, while the rest of the Nemesis crew waited in orbit behind Jupiter, carefully keeping the planet between them and any astronomical sensors from Earth. “Where is he?” His optics glowed in the darkness. Overhead the dark vault of the sky was mottled with thin, clawlike clouds, blocking out the stars. After so long in space, it was disquieting not to see them. Like a bad omen.
“He’ll be here,” Blackout said, flatly. “Grounder.” Slower transit time. And it was Barricade. But the little grounder was tough, and loyal enough. Blackout remembered how he’d stayed the frag OUT of the fight between he and Starscream. It had felt like betrayal at the time, but was, Blackout finally realized, just staying the frag out of the way so things could get settled and they could get ON with it. That had earned the copter’s grudging respect. And Starscream’s concern was…interesting. Something he hadn’t noticed before. Huh.
“He knew the rendezvous time,” Starscream said, sourly. He stalked along the rim of the crater, optics whirring to farscan. “He should know this is important.”
“He’ll be here,” Blackout repeated. If nothing else, Barricade wouldn’t miss a rendezvous because there was a chance he’d miss something else to leverage against someone. “Probably just trying to make a point.”
The jet’s optics whizzed to focus on him. “Make a point.” Calling Blackout out on it.
“You know. Little power play.” Blackout shrugged, his rotors shifting uneasily. He didn’t really believe that. Barricade had his…issues, but not where a mission was concerned. Even Blackout would admit that much.
The glare hardened. Stascream’s mouthplates thinned, the inverted v of his mouth flattening. “I shall discover the cause.” A subtle click, as Starscream activated comm. Blackout shifted, moving to watch the distant roadway. One or two pairs of headlamps drifted across, seemingly crawling from this distance. Neither of them Barricade.
An unhappy sound behind him. “No response. Is this part of the ‘power play’ as well?” Starscream, channeling his worry to aggression.
“Shut it,” Blackout said. It occurred to him that it was probably only the grounder’s presence that had prevented him from starting another round with Starscream. And equally clear that the jet had neither forgiven, nor forgotten, his earlier insurrection. “If he’s not on comm, we have bigger concerns.” Starscream never saw the big picture, unless he himself was in the middle of it. This wasn’t about him. This was about the mission. This was about finding Megatron.
“I am aware of all of our concerns,” Starscream snapped. “One of them is team security.” Right. Starscream was a little too agitated about this. It wasn’t about him.
But it was—a little—about Barricade’s disappearance. “Fragger’d have the sense to contact us if he ran into trouble,” Blackout said, but uncertainty tinged his voice. Would he? Or would his stupid grounder pride have prevented him?
“He…would,” Starscream said. “He would find a way to let us know something.” He moved uneasily, wingflaps shifting. “Unless he could not.”
“Cis-alpha,” Blackout said. “We can track him.”
“That will give away that we are here.”
“If they have him, they already know we’re here.” No need to specify who the ‘they’ was. The they who had ripped out the Allspark from its shrine in the Temple of Simfur, and launched it haphazardly across the stars.
Starscream wavered. “It would be worth…knowing…if they knew that.” Torn between trying to avoid picturing that threat and that strange hesitance, almost a reluctance to admit to curiosity, to take that step beyond ordinary protocol and up a level of risk.
Fear? Cowardice? Afraid to face the enemy? Blackout didn’t know. He’d make it simple. “We need to know if he’s been compromised, and our mission along with it. You are the Air Commander,” he balked at giving Starscream any other rank than the one he had held under Megatron, “You can authorize a cis-alpha.” Let’s hear your reasoning, jet.
“I…yes. You are correct. I suppose it makes tactical sense.” Starscream seemed relieved.
Blackout knew he was no good at any of this. Politics. Suspicion. Reading between lines. And he was frustrated with his inability almost as much as with Starscream’s hedging. He rounded on the jet, staring him down. “What’s the issue, really?”
Starscream flinched, startled. “Nothing is the issue,” he retorted, but the pop of his hydraulics belied him. Blackout knew he didn’t have verbal skill, but he did have one weapon, which he deployed without mercy. He glared, steadily, applying his optics like a drill, boring through the jet.
“I am merely…concerned for Barricade,” Starscream faltered.
“How concerned?”
The optics narrowed. “None of your concern.”
The hiss told Blackout everything. “You—and a grounder?”
“We have been…intimate.” Starscream turned his face abruptly away, staring across the gulf of the crater. “You have no place to judge.”
Blackout seethed. “Abuse of power. Fraternization.”
“You and Megatron,” Starscream spat back. “Speak not to me of power.”
Blackout blinked, stung. He and Megatron had been different. Hadn’t it? Had it? “Shut it.”
“No.” Starscream’slegs straightened further, boosting his height. “You think that I did not know? You think that I did not watch, and notice, as he took you, twisted you, shaped you into a single, solitary, loyal, dense, blunt, stupid weapon? He took your admiration, your honor, and…crippled you. Bound you so tightly to himself that you cannot breathe.”
He stuttered on a response, the venom of his anger incapable of holding against the sudden shock. The insults simply rattled off him like chaff. Had his relationship with Megatron been…wrong? After all these ages, all his fidelity, had it been something twisted?
Starscream’s mouthplates ground. One talon stabbed at Blackout’s chassis. “So do not judge me. Do not take from me the only solace I have had. I have not twisted Barricade to me. I have not used what should be joy and pleasure as a weapon.” The jet’s optics were wide, earnest, almost on the brink of too much emotion.
Blackout stood, numb, the words hurting more than the pang of the jet’s talon. Too much pouring over him, too much confession, for him to make sense of any of it, much less absorb it. This was not the Starscream he knew, not the one he had hated so avidly for so many megacycles. And Starscream was making him doubt how well he knew himself as well.
He was not a mech of words. They were too fine and delicate for him. He was for action. And he hoped the action would do something to patch the cold shock he was feeling about his own past as well as the hot, fresh, gaping pain on Starscream’s face. He hated the jet, and yet…this somehow transcended that, this side of Starscream he’d never seen before. He would have hated, he could have hated the jet, he could have mocked Starscream, promised blackmail, if the jet hadn’t refracted that light onto his connection with Megatron. That…disarmed his hostility, made him unstable, weak. Megatron’s hound, yes; Megatron’s warped tool, led around by his desire…? He did not know if that was what he wanted to be.
“Gonna do the cis-alpha,” he said, brusquely. “With or without your authorization.” He tried to fling the words, like pebbles, to clatter on the jet’s agonized face. Then, more gently, the pronoun chosen with the greatest care he could, “We’ll get him back.”
It was the jet’s turn to look unsteady, flummoxed by a surfeit of emotion. Aware that Blackout just had a powerful weapon to use against himself, against Barricade. Just as aware that Blackout was not wielding it. “Yes,” he said, quietly, the pain in his face shifting to a feeble, broken-hearted smile. “Thank you,” he added, the words unexpected, a surprise to both of them.
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...You make me wanna go back and look at the franchise with new optics. ♥
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... *wibble* That was a lot of emotion and tension between them. Could cut it with a knife.