shadow_vector | Bridges Burn

PG-13
Bayverse post-'07/RoS, pre-Veiled Threat
Barricade, Starscream
spoilers for Reign of Starscream?
For

“TWO orbitals!” Barricade knew he didn’t have a pleasant voice in the best of circumstances, and this was…not even close to anything like that. “Two slaggin’ orbitals! No contact. Not a word. Not even a fraggin’ comm ping!”

“Barricade,” Starscream said, patiently. “You are being emotional.”

“Emotional?!” Barricade’s voice crackled. “Damn fraggin’ right I’m being emotional! How else you expect me to be?” He stomped, his feet flattening into the wet spring ground.

“I had expected…,” Starscream paused, tilting his head. Considering. What had he wanted? “I had expected that you would be happy to see me.”

Flat, open. Completely and entirely Starscream, Barricade thought: vain, narcissistic, unaware of anything beyond himself. He hated it, hated Starscream with a white hot furious passion.

Except, of course, he didn’t. Starscream was who he was, and Barricade remembered, even through his rage, that it was that same headlong self-assurance that had steamrollered through all of Barricade’s objections.

And then had abandoned him, for two orbital cycles, off to pursue some other self-serving scheme.

It sure put Barricade in his place, and it wasn’t any place particularly special.

“Shows how much you know,” Barricade snapped. His window-wings were rigid and high with outrage and injury.

“You are not happy to see me?” Starscream squatted lower, one long hand stretching toward him. “Perhaps you have forgotten.” His voice was light, teasing. As if flirting would solve everything. “I can remind you….”

“Don’t touch me, jet.” Barricade jerked back, out of reach. One of his shoulder tires bumped a tree branch, scattering down white dogwood petals like heartbroken snow.

Starscream blinked, confused. The hand that had been reaching for Barricade dropped instead to the ground, talons curling into the grass. “But,” he said, quietly, floundering. “You have always enjoyed it in the past.”

“The past,” Barricade echoed, sourly. When he’d been deluded into thinking that he actually mattered. Before he’d been tossed aside the klik that something better came along. Whatever that was.

“Yes, the past. Formerly. You and I, interfacing.” Starscream’s voice was sharp. “Or have you forgotten?”

“Have I forgotten? Have I forgotten?” Barricade heard himself shriek with insult. He had ached, night after night, for it, trying to conjure together something from shreds of memory—the warm hum of the larger jet’s EM, the satin-sleek finish of the metal armor under his palms, the smell of warm lubricant and hose-mesh. He could not forget, and sometimes, he wished he could not remember, because those fragments seemed torments, ways of taunting him with what he no longer had.

Starscream’s toes curled, frustrated. “What has happened to you?” The meaning was clear—this was Barricade’s fault. Something was wrong with him. So perfectly Starscream, and so completely and utterly wrong.

“What’s happened?” Barricade raged. His talons flexed, drivetrain tires spinning in fury. “What happened? You left! Some slag about ‘saving us all’ and gone!” His optics flashed, franticly. “How’d that go, huh? You saved us all? Or did that fraggin’ fail, too, like everything, and then suddenly you remember me?” The words were brutal, wild, borne of despair and the hurt one only knows from having been shunted aside without a thought.

He quivered at his own audacity, the words tearing themselves from some dark place inside him. He glared at the jet, fists balled so tightly his hand servos shook. He could hear the bridges between them burning, could feel his hard words puncture—at last—Starscream’s ego. He felt a sudden surge of feral joy at the look of sudden, undescribable hurt that crossed the jet’s face, that caused the wing flaps to smack together rigidly, cutting Starscream to the core. Everything between them immolating in the hot fury of his emotions.

This was what you wanted, wasn’t it, Barricade? To see the hurt you’ve felt repaid in kind?

Yes, but…no. Another paradox, the kind the jet seemed to have eddying in his contrails. He’d wanted Starscream to know but…not to hurt. Not this much. He’d thought he’d wanted it, thought it would feel good. But Starscream looked…more than hurt. Deflated.

No. You hurt enough. It’s about time he learns, he insisted. About time he fraggin’ feels something other than self-assured and smug.

But, then…why did it hurt to watch him curl inward, optics fluttering as if trying to dispel some awful emotion?

“Yes,” Starscream whispered, as though the words scraped raw on his vocalizer. He seemed to want to say more, but lack of words, or lack of courage, prevented him. Barricade couldn’t decide which was worse; but this was a crushed submission. This was not what he wanted.

He didn’t know what he’d wanted, but…not this.

Barricade felt awkward, standing there, watching Starscream curl into some ball of hidden hurt, hurt Barricade had never seen before, would never have guessed at. He stepped closer, clumsily, knowing the gesture was unwanted, but unballing one of his tight fists, stretching it out as an offering. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Was unfair.”

“No. It was not unfair.” A long, shaky exvent. The mouth quirked in irony; his optics stayed dully on the ground between Barricade’s feet. “I always did rely on you to strip me of illusions.”

That…was not anything Barricade had ever expected to hear. He didn’t know how to process it. “Didn’t mean it,” he said and repeated, as though he could erase the hurtful words. “Wasn’t fair.”

“You did mean it,” Starscream corrected, trying, and failing, to throw his characteristic haughtiness into his voice. “And it was entirely fair.” His lower mouth plates compressed, mandibles pushing in. It struck Barricade abruptly that Starscream had no idea what to do, either. Each had come with their own expectation of how their reunion would turn out, unprepared for any other.

Barricade reached his hand further, running the talon points over the back of Starscream’s barbed hand, not daring anything more intimate. Trying to comfort after he’d inflicted the injury. Hypocrite, he thought. But still. Something, not him, was crushing down the jet, something he maybe, maybe, could help at. If he hadn’t already ruined everything.

The hand rolled under his, and his talons were caught in Starscream’s. Their optics met, hesitantly on both sides. “I came to you,” Starscream murmured, “because I need allies.” The question trembled unspoken between them.

“Am one.” Barricade tightened his hand in Starscream’s. If that was all he could be, if that was as close as the jet would let him get…it was enough.

Starscream dropped forward onto one knee, coming closer, his wings rustling uneasily. “I do not think I can be what you want me to be,” he said, quietly. A shamed admission. Starscream never failed at anything…well, not that he ever took blame for. “I did miss you,” he added. “More than you know.”

The words sent a shiver through Barricade’s sensor net, his window-wings trembling. Starscream was everything he had accused—a selfish, vain, greedy, grasping, arrogant pile of narcissism that was never, ever wrong. Even now.

And Barricade loved him for it.