Sky and Ground 6 Damaged
Mar. 7th, 2010 08:05 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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shadow_vectorSkywarp/Barricade: sticky
A/N: In real life, humans will always, in an argument, choose their own familiar defenses and walls, rather than letting them down and opening themselves up to the other person’s enormous capacity to hurt them. But this is fantasy. Things can be different here.
Skywarp was having another bad memory purge. Barricade had wordlessly, without even dreaming of a complaint, gotten accustomed to being woken from his recharge two or three times a recharge cycle as the larger mech clutched at him, sometimes whimpering and twitching. He hadn’t complained—his workstation had online-recharge plugs, and it was no big thing to plug himself into that while he was working. The only thing that bothered him was his growing feeling of helplessness. At first it had been enough that Skywarp took comfort in his presence, but that had faded, and he was left feeling impotent and helpless that he couldn’t do more.
And the purges were getting worse.
Barricade felt Skywarp’s long forearms tug him closer, scraping his hip against the larger mech’s chassis. This time the jet was also hyperventing—forcing his exhaust in short hot bursts.
Barricade brushed one of the upper arms that encircled him gently with one talon. If his presence soothed the jet, maybe touching him would help?
Skywarp whimpered. Against his ankle servos, Barricade felt the mech’s legs twitching. The arm over him shifted, stretching overhead as if reaching for something. Barricade pushed himself upright, stroking his small talonpoints gently around the heavy armor plates. It seemed to help: the twitching slowed, the whimpers faded. Even the ventilation steadied. Emboldened, Barricade reached to stroke the wingflaps folded behind Skywarp’s shoulder.
And that’s when it all went wrong.
Skywarp howled, the upraised arm bludgeoning down against the smaller mech’s shoulders, the other hand tearing at his armor, throwing him off the recharge berth entirely, crashing head-down against the far wall with a snapping sound as one of his arm fairings gave, and cracked a heel-plate.
Barricade lay crumpled, helplessly, stupidly, feeling energon and joint fluid trickle down his arm, the blasts of pain redlighting his optical screen, making reality seem dense and far away.
He saw Skywarp lunge off the recharge for him. His optics failed as his capacitor raced in fear.
*****
“Oh.” The arms caught him up again, lifting him off the floor, crushing him against the large chassis. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He felt Skywarp’s mouth against the top of his head, his exventing hot on the prongs of his facial armor. Skywarp’s whole body seemed to be trembling, but that could be a false read through Barricade’s damaged systems.
Barricade twisted until the pain from his injured arm left him gasping. “Let me go!” he managed to push into the larger mech’s chest. He was feeling—he couldn’t even describe how he was feeling. Helplessness and pathetic and shame and pain and anger and fear and why did this happen and I was only trying to help and I fuck everything up everything you see it’s only a matter of time until I go too far and this is what happens I deserve this this is all my fault should have known better. All at once.
“No, little spike,” Skywarp murmured. “I’m sorry. It was a bad dream, and oh I hurt you!” Despair was live and raw in his voice as he lifted one arm away to examine the injury.
“’M fine. Be fine.” He winced as he tried to use his arm to push away from the jet. Just leave me alone. Go back, recharge, and maybe you can wake up and think this was just a bad purge too. I wish it was. I wish I could wake up and this not have happened. Why did I do that? Why did I think I could help?
“You’ll be fine when we get you to repair bay.”
“Don’t need to go.” Please, just leave me alone. I deserve this. I went too far. I am sorry. Not you. Me.
“Nonsense.” It was nonsense—power was down 30% in that arm, even though his self-repair systems were doing their best to reroute and contain the fluid leaks. And it irritated Barricade to be reminded that it was nonsense. “You’re going, because I’m taking you there.” Skywarp stood up, Barricade’s legs dangling helplessly above the floor.
“Put me DOWN! Stop treating me like a fucking sparkling!”
Skywarp pulled away, hurt. “Little sp—Barricade, is—is that how you really feel?” He didn’t seem to notice, or mind, that he was getting Barricade’s energon on his arms and chest.
“You treat me like a sparkling just because I’m smaller.”
“Noooooo,” Skywarp breathed. “That’s not it at all. I’ll explain. In repair bay.” He effectively cut off Barricade’s complaints by kissing him. In spite of it all, his kiss left Barricade breathless.
*****
“Fine. We’re here,” Barricade growled from the repair cradle. Three repairbots clustered around his injured shoulder. “Now explain how you don’t treat me like I’m an idiot.” He gritted his jaw in satisfaction as Skywarp flinched. Why did he want to hurt him suddenly? Because he’d been hurt? Part of Barricade wanted to shut up, to keep silent. But there was no way to pull those words back out of the air.
“I’m just trying to be careful.”
“Don’t need it.”
“It makes me happy to treat you decently. I know you’ve been through…bad things.”
The repair bots whined in protest as Barricade squirmed under them. A thousand angry protests raced through his processor. He’d been talking to Starscream. Starscream: the Jet Who Couldn’t Keep a Secret. Not that it was all that secret, really. “None of his business to say anything,” Barricade snapped, only realizing a moment later he was responding to his own train of thought and not Skywarp. Somehow the jet followed him.
“If I waited for you to say something…?”
“Wouldn’t.” To his own audio he sounded sullen.
“My point. His point.”
“Don’t need to know.”
“I don’t? Why not?”
Barricade snarled again. “Don’t want you to know,” he corrected, grudgingly. “Weak, pathetic. Helpless.” Those three words. Again.
“If I didn’t know, I’d’ve messed things up so badly for you, little spike.”
“How?” he said, tasting anger in his own words. Anger at whom?
Skywarp sighed, leaning back against one of the cradle’s support posts. “Barricade. I know what happens to the little guys. Especially the little smart ones. Not something I want to picture happening to you, even though I know it has. Least I can do is not contribute to that.”
Barricade turned his head away, getting an opticful of repair bot aft for his gesture. Probably symbolic of something, he thought. They had patched the ruptured lines, and were clicking away specs for the replacement fairing they would have to make. The upper tire lay next to him on the cradle, disconnected, the tire burst from its rim, flaccid and sad.
“I’d tell you if anything bothered me,” he muttered.
“No. You wouldn’t, little spike. You’re too tough and too proud for that.”
Proud? Was he delusional? More like desperate. More like do anything, take anything, for this not to end. Barricade continued to stare at his burst tire.
“I guess,” Skywarp’s voice was so small that in spite of himself, Barricade turned his head to hear. “I guess you won’t want to recharge with me anymore.”
Primus, no. No no no. That was all wrong. Barricade clutched at one of Skywarp’s black barbed hands, his silver talons weaving between the dark armor, not even caring that the barbs cut into chinks in his armor. He probably had desperation scrawled across his face. “Do. Want to. Yes. Still.” He frowned, frustrated at the chopped telegraphy of his thoughts. It was either that or overflow a mass of words, begging, pleading, apologizing, self-blaming…. Maybe he was proud, if he refused to open himself to that.
Or maybe he was just afraid.
“I hurt you, little spike.” Skywarp’s red optics were sad, his sockets tilting down at the corners.
“Been hurt worse.” Proud. Yes. Skywarp knew him better than he knew himself. He tightened his grip on the larger mech. “Don’t know,” he said, forcing the words out of his mouth, over that knot in his vocalizer, “what I did wrong. Don’t know what not to do again.”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Skywarp said, gently.
“Talk about it now.”
“Why?”
“Want to know how not to upset you again.”
Skywarp smiled, the dim light of the repair bay cradle lamps glittering off the shifting of his facial plates. The effect was dazzling. He probably knew it. Barricade didn’t care if he did or not. “That’s the point, little spike. You don’t want to hurt me: I don’t want to hurt you. Doesn’t stop it from happening, though.” His eyes flickered over to the repair bots, who were prepping the new armor for installation.
“Accept that,” Barricade said, bluntly. “Don’t want you upset when it happens that you hurt me.”
A long silence. Skywarp traced a line down Barricade’s uninjured shoulder, his optics on the progress of his talon. “Why I like you, Barricade. We’re both damaged.”
“You’re not. And I’m fine.” He struggled to sit up, tired of lying down, literally and figuratively. His arm felt…weird without the extra weight of the upper tire assembly. The repair bots protested, trying to draw him back down onto the cradle with their delicate forearms.
“You are not ‘fine’,” Skywarp argued. “Starscream told me.”
What had been a dull anger, like a pool of gasoline, burst into white-hot flame. “What does he know? And he’s wrong!” The anger took off, tearing away any sense of control. “And what the frag was that about having him spike me? Like that’s not going to bother me? Not worth doing yourself?” Underneath the hot anger he felt an icy fear at the words he was saying. He did not feel like this. He didn’t. Where was this coming from?
“Little spike—“ Skywarp looked stricken. “I-I thought it would help.”
“Wrong. You thought it would protect you if anything went wrong. At least—at least I was trying to make you feel better.” Trying and failing. If only I hadn’t have tried, we wouldn’t be here. Having this argument. The argument seemed somehow inevitable once he’d started the whole thing rolling by his overreach.
Skywarp physically staggered back at the accusation. Something, Barricade thought grimly, struck home.
“Barri….” His voice trailed off, giving up, Barricade thought. His downswept wings shifted, the wingflaps quivering with some suppressed emotion. He turned away and took three slow, agonized steps to the door.
All Barricade could see was the bright silver of the jet’s engine mounts receding, like a dream torn away by morning. He ached all over with his misery, as if someone had stripped off all of his armor and abraded him against unyielding stone. Don’t go! He wanted to shout. But it was probably the right decision. It certainly was not Barricade’s decision to make.
Skywarp hesitated at the door, resting one arm against the frame, and his head against his arm. Barricade could hear the raggedness of his ventilation from across the room. Leave, he thought. Leave and get it over with. Just…don’t hurt yourself any longer. Not over me. Not about me. And suddenly his ugly rage made perfect sense—an attempt to lance the ties between them, to cut Skywarp cleanly free of the neverending fuckup that is Barricade.
Skywarp turned, suddenly, and strode back to the repair cradle. Barricade felt every micron of the mech’s larger height, broad wingspan, every iota of difference in even their non-battle-modded weaponry. Barricade braced himself for the angry torrent he deserved. He could take it. He would take anything if it would help Skywarp be free of him. Free to find someone undamaged. He felt…strangely calm underneath a torrent of misery. This is, that calm told him, for the best. This is a pure and unselfish act. It just feels awful because it’s the first pure and unselfish act you’ve ever done. Of course it feels weird. Alien. Unfamiliar.
But still. Still. He would do anything to erase his stupid attempt to help. He should have known he was useless. Powerless. He had known. He had just been deluded, seduced, into thinking otherwise.
Skywarp loomed over him, some fierce and terrible expression on his face, his eyes dark with emotion. The repair bots quailed back, abandoning Barricade.
The black jet fell to his knees in front of the cradle, pressing his armored face against Barricade’s uninjured side, one hand clutching hard at the smaller mech’s hip. Barricade could see his large engines over his bowed back. “Starscream,” his voice grated. He paused. Began again. “The hold I have over Starscream. Many, many ages ago, he injured me.” He unfolded his right wing. “If you look closely, you can see the scars. They never healed right.” His voice was soft, the words pressing warm air into Barricade’s grille.
A pause. Barricade’s turn to say something. After a long study, he could see a slight discoloration in the metal, a long jagged streak, almost as if someone had streaked paint. “Can barely see them.”
“I know. But he can. And every time he looks at me? That’s all he can see.” He raised his head from Barricade’s side. “Sometimes,” he whispered, “I wish I’d injured him. So we’d be even. Not in a payback way, you know? But so he’d have learned, he’d know, that just hurting someone isn’t enough to destroy everything.” He lay his head back down, one of his barbed, wicked looking talons extending to trace a slow line over the contour of Barricade’s hand.
Barricade’s other hand moved to stroke the back of Skywarp’s helm, the four points of his talons feeling blindly at the intricate overlapping plates so lightly Skywarp might not have felt them at all. He couldn’t think of the right thing to say. And words…words had caused all of this. He didn’t trust them any more. Not that his actions had done much better, but he couldn’t resist. He wanted Skywarp so badly, his hand seemed almost magnetized to touch the jet. He really wanted to curl onto that side, wrap both of his arms around Skywarp’s shoulders, and lay there until he’d convinced the jet that all this emotion, all this worry, about HIM, was so much nonsense. But that, he thought, that would be too far. Too much. Just take this. Take what is offered. Don’t reach for more. Ever.
“We’re both damaged,” Barricade said, thinly, echoing Skywarp’s words. He didn’t trust his own anymore.
Skywarp lifted his head again, his optics casting warmth over Barricade’s grille. “We’re even like that. You understand what Starscream doesn’t.”
“Yeah,” Barricade said, warily. “And?” The sick calm took over again. Pure. Unselfish. Do not speak your opinion. You have no right to one. You caused this—it is up to him to respond. How he wants to. He felt a mad desire to stare over at his ruined tire again, but the repair bots had snatched it away and were remounting it to a new rim. No distraction. Nothing he could blame the emotion crackling his voice on. That, he could not help either. But he did his best to stay out of Skywarp’s way.
It struck Barricade suddenly that the scarred wing was the same one he had touched that had started this. It was more than metal that had not healed. The thought made him tighten his hands—one around Skywarp’s hand, the other over his shoulder. Skywarp bowed his head at the touches.
“And, little spike, Barricade,” he breathed, “What can I do to make it better?” The question cost the normally-cocky Seeker more than he let on.
“Spike me.” Barricade clenched his hands around Skywarp, resisting his pull away.
“You can’t—“
“Do it. Please.” A hesitation while he swallowed down on something like a sob. “I want you to.” Want YOU to, his processor echoed. Take me. Take from me. It is all I have to offer. All I can to do try to prove to you…something I cannot even put into words.
Skywarp read his face, and nodded, slowly. “Yes,” he said, leaning forward to kiss Barricade, his hand skirting the missing part of Barricade’s arm. He clicked open his interface panel, releasing his spike cover as Barricade did the same. He paused, as if bracing himself, looking down at Barricade’s glossy black armored body, laid open for him. His optics half shuttered, the irises spiralling wide in pleasure. When he pushed his spike into Barricade, it was thick with lubricant. Barricade shifted his hips, raising them to meet Skywarp’s pelvic frame. The jet reached his arms under the smaller mech, so that Barricade lay along the stretch of his forearms. He bent low.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
Skywarp began sliding his spike in the valve, slowly, carefully, his hands stroking at Barricade’s shoulders, the wing-fairings behind his neck. Barricade’s own hands clutched into the jet’s upper arms. Barricade felt acutely his openness, his vulnerability. How easily Skywarp could hurt him. How carefully, more important, Skywarp was working not to hurt him. The thought sent a surge of pure desire, a whitish rose colored kind he’d never felt before, shimmering through his sensornet. He moaned, softly.
The sound enflamed Skywarp—his slides became more like thrusts, his ventilation deeper and shorter. The sight of Skywarp, optics shuttering in desire, bent over him, radiating desire, sent a shock through his valve. Barricade had seen hate, and anger, and rage, and revenge and just blank raw power in the faces of those who had spiked him before, but never this. Even Starscream had been…carefully neutral. Skywarp made a feral sound in response to Barricade’s moan, and thrust harder against the valve.
Barricade sucked in a deep in-vent and held it, forcibly, as he overloaded, the rosy desire bursting across his sensornet like a supernova, his valve clutching onto Skywarp with all of the force and neediness that Barricade could not show.
Skywarp overloaded, hard, gasping in ragged pants that sounded like sobs. Barricade could feel the hot seep of his transfluid. He wrapped his shorter arms fiercely around the Seeker’s midsection, pulling the jet’s entire weight on top of him. His talons dug into the support beam of the engine mounts, as if he were trying somehow to pull the jet into him, meld their bodies.
And it struck him what he was doing. Again overreaching. Again, grabbing for more than was offered. He released his grip, suddenly. “Sorry,” he muttered, the word echoing back at him from the Seeker’s chest armor.
“No,” Skywarp said, pulling Barricade against him with the same force. “Don’t let go, little spike. Never let go.”
Next: Overex
A/N: In real life, humans will always, in an argument, choose their own familiar defenses and walls, rather than letting them down and opening themselves up to the other person’s enormous capacity to hurt them. But this is fantasy. Things can be different here.
Skywarp was having another bad memory purge. Barricade had wordlessly, without even dreaming of a complaint, gotten accustomed to being woken from his recharge two or three times a recharge cycle as the larger mech clutched at him, sometimes whimpering and twitching. He hadn’t complained—his workstation had online-recharge plugs, and it was no big thing to plug himself into that while he was working. The only thing that bothered him was his growing feeling of helplessness. At first it had been enough that Skywarp took comfort in his presence, but that had faded, and he was left feeling impotent and helpless that he couldn’t do more.
And the purges were getting worse.
Barricade felt Skywarp’s long forearms tug him closer, scraping his hip against the larger mech’s chassis. This time the jet was also hyperventing—forcing his exhaust in short hot bursts.
Barricade brushed one of the upper arms that encircled him gently with one talon. If his presence soothed the jet, maybe touching him would help?
Skywarp whimpered. Against his ankle servos, Barricade felt the mech’s legs twitching. The arm over him shifted, stretching overhead as if reaching for something. Barricade pushed himself upright, stroking his small talonpoints gently around the heavy armor plates. It seemed to help: the twitching slowed, the whimpers faded. Even the ventilation steadied. Emboldened, Barricade reached to stroke the wingflaps folded behind Skywarp’s shoulder.
And that’s when it all went wrong.
Skywarp howled, the upraised arm bludgeoning down against the smaller mech’s shoulders, the other hand tearing at his armor, throwing him off the recharge berth entirely, crashing head-down against the far wall with a snapping sound as one of his arm fairings gave, and cracked a heel-plate.
Barricade lay crumpled, helplessly, stupidly, feeling energon and joint fluid trickle down his arm, the blasts of pain redlighting his optical screen, making reality seem dense and far away.
He saw Skywarp lunge off the recharge for him. His optics failed as his capacitor raced in fear.
*****
“Oh.” The arms caught him up again, lifting him off the floor, crushing him against the large chassis. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He felt Skywarp’s mouth against the top of his head, his exventing hot on the prongs of his facial armor. Skywarp’s whole body seemed to be trembling, but that could be a false read through Barricade’s damaged systems.
Barricade twisted until the pain from his injured arm left him gasping. “Let me go!” he managed to push into the larger mech’s chest. He was feeling—he couldn’t even describe how he was feeling. Helplessness and pathetic and shame and pain and anger and fear and why did this happen and I was only trying to help and I fuck everything up everything you see it’s only a matter of time until I go too far and this is what happens I deserve this this is all my fault should have known better. All at once.
“No, little spike,” Skywarp murmured. “I’m sorry. It was a bad dream, and oh I hurt you!” Despair was live and raw in his voice as he lifted one arm away to examine the injury.
“’M fine. Be fine.” He winced as he tried to use his arm to push away from the jet. Just leave me alone. Go back, recharge, and maybe you can wake up and think this was just a bad purge too. I wish it was. I wish I could wake up and this not have happened. Why did I do that? Why did I think I could help?
“You’ll be fine when we get you to repair bay.”
“Don’t need to go.” Please, just leave me alone. I deserve this. I went too far. I am sorry. Not you. Me.
“Nonsense.” It was nonsense—power was down 30% in that arm, even though his self-repair systems were doing their best to reroute and contain the fluid leaks. And it irritated Barricade to be reminded that it was nonsense. “You’re going, because I’m taking you there.” Skywarp stood up, Barricade’s legs dangling helplessly above the floor.
“Put me DOWN! Stop treating me like a fucking sparkling!”
Skywarp pulled away, hurt. “Little sp—Barricade, is—is that how you really feel?” He didn’t seem to notice, or mind, that he was getting Barricade’s energon on his arms and chest.
“You treat me like a sparkling just because I’m smaller.”
“Noooooo,” Skywarp breathed. “That’s not it at all. I’ll explain. In repair bay.” He effectively cut off Barricade’s complaints by kissing him. In spite of it all, his kiss left Barricade breathless.
*****
“Fine. We’re here,” Barricade growled from the repair cradle. Three repairbots clustered around his injured shoulder. “Now explain how you don’t treat me like I’m an idiot.” He gritted his jaw in satisfaction as Skywarp flinched. Why did he want to hurt him suddenly? Because he’d been hurt? Part of Barricade wanted to shut up, to keep silent. But there was no way to pull those words back out of the air.
“I’m just trying to be careful.”
“Don’t need it.”
“It makes me happy to treat you decently. I know you’ve been through…bad things.”
The repair bots whined in protest as Barricade squirmed under them. A thousand angry protests raced through his processor. He’d been talking to Starscream. Starscream: the Jet Who Couldn’t Keep a Secret. Not that it was all that secret, really. “None of his business to say anything,” Barricade snapped, only realizing a moment later he was responding to his own train of thought and not Skywarp. Somehow the jet followed him.
“If I waited for you to say something…?”
“Wouldn’t.” To his own audio he sounded sullen.
“My point. His point.”
“Don’t need to know.”
“I don’t? Why not?”
Barricade snarled again. “Don’t want you to know,” he corrected, grudgingly. “Weak, pathetic. Helpless.” Those three words. Again.
“If I didn’t know, I’d’ve messed things up so badly for you, little spike.”
“How?” he said, tasting anger in his own words. Anger at whom?
Skywarp sighed, leaning back against one of the cradle’s support posts. “Barricade. I know what happens to the little guys. Especially the little smart ones. Not something I want to picture happening to you, even though I know it has. Least I can do is not contribute to that.”
Barricade turned his head away, getting an opticful of repair bot aft for his gesture. Probably symbolic of something, he thought. They had patched the ruptured lines, and were clicking away specs for the replacement fairing they would have to make. The upper tire lay next to him on the cradle, disconnected, the tire burst from its rim, flaccid and sad.
“I’d tell you if anything bothered me,” he muttered.
“No. You wouldn’t, little spike. You’re too tough and too proud for that.”
Proud? Was he delusional? More like desperate. More like do anything, take anything, for this not to end. Barricade continued to stare at his burst tire.
“I guess,” Skywarp’s voice was so small that in spite of himself, Barricade turned his head to hear. “I guess you won’t want to recharge with me anymore.”
Primus, no. No no no. That was all wrong. Barricade clutched at one of Skywarp’s black barbed hands, his silver talons weaving between the dark armor, not even caring that the barbs cut into chinks in his armor. He probably had desperation scrawled across his face. “Do. Want to. Yes. Still.” He frowned, frustrated at the chopped telegraphy of his thoughts. It was either that or overflow a mass of words, begging, pleading, apologizing, self-blaming…. Maybe he was proud, if he refused to open himself to that.
Or maybe he was just afraid.
“I hurt you, little spike.” Skywarp’s red optics were sad, his sockets tilting down at the corners.
“Been hurt worse.” Proud. Yes. Skywarp knew him better than he knew himself. He tightened his grip on the larger mech. “Don’t know,” he said, forcing the words out of his mouth, over that knot in his vocalizer, “what I did wrong. Don’t know what not to do again.”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Skywarp said, gently.
“Talk about it now.”
“Why?”
“Want to know how not to upset you again.”
Skywarp smiled, the dim light of the repair bay cradle lamps glittering off the shifting of his facial plates. The effect was dazzling. He probably knew it. Barricade didn’t care if he did or not. “That’s the point, little spike. You don’t want to hurt me: I don’t want to hurt you. Doesn’t stop it from happening, though.” His eyes flickered over to the repair bots, who were prepping the new armor for installation.
“Accept that,” Barricade said, bluntly. “Don’t want you upset when it happens that you hurt me.”
A long silence. Skywarp traced a line down Barricade’s uninjured shoulder, his optics on the progress of his talon. “Why I like you, Barricade. We’re both damaged.”
“You’re not. And I’m fine.” He struggled to sit up, tired of lying down, literally and figuratively. His arm felt…weird without the extra weight of the upper tire assembly. The repair bots protested, trying to draw him back down onto the cradle with their delicate forearms.
“You are not ‘fine’,” Skywarp argued. “Starscream told me.”
What had been a dull anger, like a pool of gasoline, burst into white-hot flame. “What does he know? And he’s wrong!” The anger took off, tearing away any sense of control. “And what the frag was that about having him spike me? Like that’s not going to bother me? Not worth doing yourself?” Underneath the hot anger he felt an icy fear at the words he was saying. He did not feel like this. He didn’t. Where was this coming from?
“Little spike—“ Skywarp looked stricken. “I-I thought it would help.”
“Wrong. You thought it would protect you if anything went wrong. At least—at least I was trying to make you feel better.” Trying and failing. If only I hadn’t have tried, we wouldn’t be here. Having this argument. The argument seemed somehow inevitable once he’d started the whole thing rolling by his overreach.
Skywarp physically staggered back at the accusation. Something, Barricade thought grimly, struck home.
“Barri….” His voice trailed off, giving up, Barricade thought. His downswept wings shifted, the wingflaps quivering with some suppressed emotion. He turned away and took three slow, agonized steps to the door.
All Barricade could see was the bright silver of the jet’s engine mounts receding, like a dream torn away by morning. He ached all over with his misery, as if someone had stripped off all of his armor and abraded him against unyielding stone. Don’t go! He wanted to shout. But it was probably the right decision. It certainly was not Barricade’s decision to make.
Skywarp hesitated at the door, resting one arm against the frame, and his head against his arm. Barricade could hear the raggedness of his ventilation from across the room. Leave, he thought. Leave and get it over with. Just…don’t hurt yourself any longer. Not over me. Not about me. And suddenly his ugly rage made perfect sense—an attempt to lance the ties between them, to cut Skywarp cleanly free of the neverending fuckup that is Barricade.
Skywarp turned, suddenly, and strode back to the repair cradle. Barricade felt every micron of the mech’s larger height, broad wingspan, every iota of difference in even their non-battle-modded weaponry. Barricade braced himself for the angry torrent he deserved. He could take it. He would take anything if it would help Skywarp be free of him. Free to find someone undamaged. He felt…strangely calm underneath a torrent of misery. This is, that calm told him, for the best. This is a pure and unselfish act. It just feels awful because it’s the first pure and unselfish act you’ve ever done. Of course it feels weird. Alien. Unfamiliar.
But still. Still. He would do anything to erase his stupid attempt to help. He should have known he was useless. Powerless. He had known. He had just been deluded, seduced, into thinking otherwise.
Skywarp loomed over him, some fierce and terrible expression on his face, his eyes dark with emotion. The repair bots quailed back, abandoning Barricade.
The black jet fell to his knees in front of the cradle, pressing his armored face against Barricade’s uninjured side, one hand clutching hard at the smaller mech’s hip. Barricade could see his large engines over his bowed back. “Starscream,” his voice grated. He paused. Began again. “The hold I have over Starscream. Many, many ages ago, he injured me.” He unfolded his right wing. “If you look closely, you can see the scars. They never healed right.” His voice was soft, the words pressing warm air into Barricade’s grille.
A pause. Barricade’s turn to say something. After a long study, he could see a slight discoloration in the metal, a long jagged streak, almost as if someone had streaked paint. “Can barely see them.”
“I know. But he can. And every time he looks at me? That’s all he can see.” He raised his head from Barricade’s side. “Sometimes,” he whispered, “I wish I’d injured him. So we’d be even. Not in a payback way, you know? But so he’d have learned, he’d know, that just hurting someone isn’t enough to destroy everything.” He lay his head back down, one of his barbed, wicked looking talons extending to trace a slow line over the contour of Barricade’s hand.
Barricade’s other hand moved to stroke the back of Skywarp’s helm, the four points of his talons feeling blindly at the intricate overlapping plates so lightly Skywarp might not have felt them at all. He couldn’t think of the right thing to say. And words…words had caused all of this. He didn’t trust them any more. Not that his actions had done much better, but he couldn’t resist. He wanted Skywarp so badly, his hand seemed almost magnetized to touch the jet. He really wanted to curl onto that side, wrap both of his arms around Skywarp’s shoulders, and lay there until he’d convinced the jet that all this emotion, all this worry, about HIM, was so much nonsense. But that, he thought, that would be too far. Too much. Just take this. Take what is offered. Don’t reach for more. Ever.
“We’re both damaged,” Barricade said, thinly, echoing Skywarp’s words. He didn’t trust his own anymore.
Skywarp lifted his head again, his optics casting warmth over Barricade’s grille. “We’re even like that. You understand what Starscream doesn’t.”
“Yeah,” Barricade said, warily. “And?” The sick calm took over again. Pure. Unselfish. Do not speak your opinion. You have no right to one. You caused this—it is up to him to respond. How he wants to. He felt a mad desire to stare over at his ruined tire again, but the repair bots had snatched it away and were remounting it to a new rim. No distraction. Nothing he could blame the emotion crackling his voice on. That, he could not help either. But he did his best to stay out of Skywarp’s way.
It struck Barricade suddenly that the scarred wing was the same one he had touched that had started this. It was more than metal that had not healed. The thought made him tighten his hands—one around Skywarp’s hand, the other over his shoulder. Skywarp bowed his head at the touches.
“And, little spike, Barricade,” he breathed, “What can I do to make it better?” The question cost the normally-cocky Seeker more than he let on.
“Spike me.” Barricade clenched his hands around Skywarp, resisting his pull away.
“You can’t—“
“Do it. Please.” A hesitation while he swallowed down on something like a sob. “I want you to.” Want YOU to, his processor echoed. Take me. Take from me. It is all I have to offer. All I can to do try to prove to you…something I cannot even put into words.
Skywarp read his face, and nodded, slowly. “Yes,” he said, leaning forward to kiss Barricade, his hand skirting the missing part of Barricade’s arm. He clicked open his interface panel, releasing his spike cover as Barricade did the same. He paused, as if bracing himself, looking down at Barricade’s glossy black armored body, laid open for him. His optics half shuttered, the irises spiralling wide in pleasure. When he pushed his spike into Barricade, it was thick with lubricant. Barricade shifted his hips, raising them to meet Skywarp’s pelvic frame. The jet reached his arms under the smaller mech, so that Barricade lay along the stretch of his forearms. He bent low.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
Skywarp began sliding his spike in the valve, slowly, carefully, his hands stroking at Barricade’s shoulders, the wing-fairings behind his neck. Barricade’s own hands clutched into the jet’s upper arms. Barricade felt acutely his openness, his vulnerability. How easily Skywarp could hurt him. How carefully, more important, Skywarp was working not to hurt him. The thought sent a surge of pure desire, a whitish rose colored kind he’d never felt before, shimmering through his sensornet. He moaned, softly.
The sound enflamed Skywarp—his slides became more like thrusts, his ventilation deeper and shorter. The sight of Skywarp, optics shuttering in desire, bent over him, radiating desire, sent a shock through his valve. Barricade had seen hate, and anger, and rage, and revenge and just blank raw power in the faces of those who had spiked him before, but never this. Even Starscream had been…carefully neutral. Skywarp made a feral sound in response to Barricade’s moan, and thrust harder against the valve.
Barricade sucked in a deep in-vent and held it, forcibly, as he overloaded, the rosy desire bursting across his sensornet like a supernova, his valve clutching onto Skywarp with all of the force and neediness that Barricade could not show.
Skywarp overloaded, hard, gasping in ragged pants that sounded like sobs. Barricade could feel the hot seep of his transfluid. He wrapped his shorter arms fiercely around the Seeker’s midsection, pulling the jet’s entire weight on top of him. His talons dug into the support beam of the engine mounts, as if he were trying somehow to pull the jet into him, meld their bodies.
And it struck him what he was doing. Again overreaching. Again, grabbing for more than was offered. He released his grip, suddenly. “Sorry,” he muttered, the word echoing back at him from the Seeker’s chest armor.
“No,” Skywarp said, pulling Barricade against him with the same force. “Don’t let go, little spike. Never let go.”
Next: Overex
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Date: 2010-11-28 10:26 am (UTC)