And the Moon

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
Bayverse
Barricade, Blackout
warnings: death(ish), kind of angsty or h/c y
for tf_speedwriting  prompt 'end of days' but...I couldn't end it where it should end for the prompt, so enjoy a bonus, free, part 2! :D 

It didn’t hurt. And in a way, that’s what scared Barricade more than anything. It should hurt, right?  Missing this much?  He couldn’t tear his optics away from the stump of what had been his leg, sparking and spurting wildly.  As if staring at it long enough would make it regrow.  The thin moonlight of this alien planet limned his damaged body in pale silver, the sparks flashing almost blindingly bright.

The world had shrunk to him and his damage.  The battle roared on around him, but it seemed muffled somehow, distant.  Shots pocked the dirt around him, but he didn’t even flinch, engrossed in his own damage, somehow terrified of his own lack of pain.  The war got tired of being ignored by him and turned to ignoring him back, feet and treads churning the ground near him, planes blasting over him, but his own little pocket of shock was left eerily undisturbed.

And the moon rode high in the sky, a face half turned away. As if he wasn’t—quite—worth looking at.

The battle roared onward, the great machine rolling in some other direction, leaving Barricade behind, the noise and heat fading, leaving him surrounded by emptiness, silence smothering him. Around him were only the dead and dying. Faction irrelevant, bonded only by their fading, each fighting a new battle now, an individual combat with death itself.  But these battles were silent and inward; outside was only grim, intense stillness.

I’m dying, he thought, eventually, as an actuator failed and his truncated leg flopped to the ground.  I’m dying. 

It was the worst thought ever. That he would die here, alone. One among countless others. Irrelevant. Disregarded, discarded.  He’d figured death was, well, not surprising. War was a rough game.  But still, he felt cheated. At this last moment, he felt that he had been swindled—it was one thing to die a  hero in combat, one thing for your death to mean something, for your death to nudge the scale at least one iota closer to victory. It was another to die for nothing, just one more pathetic, forgotten wreck in the middle of some inconsequential battlefield.

The moon sailed serene, lower in the sky, until the twisted iron of some blown infrastructure seemed to catch it in its ragged claws, its light white and pure like ice. It was his only measure of time, the only sign that he was fighting against death and fighting well, holding off his opponent for real, measurable amounts of time.

A foreign planet. An alien battlefield, a place he’d never dreamed of, even when he was young and unshaped by war and his cortex was still open enough to imagine. And the ground beneath him was cold and hard, and he could feel himself succumbing, as if some genius or native spirit of the planet were reaching through him, pulling him down into an alien morass, feeding on his fading life.  

Barricade raised one hand, weakly, feeling still no pain, STILL no pain, but filled with a trembling, icy dread, clutching at the sky above him, talons curling as if to tear the sky, to grip something, to pull himself from the sucking cold of death. 

And the moon turned away, unimpressed. 

[***]

“Barricade.” 

The word seemed to penetrate slowly, as if traveling through some dense air or liquid, the syllables rippling, wavering, unsteady.  Barricade’s blind head turned in the direction of the sound, tracking, even without the ability to see, to do.  Barely knowing his own name, but clutching at it, as though it were a central kernel around which he could coalesce. His vocalizer crackled. 

“Don’t talk.  Gonna be all right.”  Barricade felt a pressure on his damaged leg, a pushing and then some sort of tight twisting, and then a strange rush of warmth, as though someone had kindled an engine inside him.  It flooded through his systems, up and down his limbs, bursting through blockades that felt like sheets of ice placed between himself and his body.

He came achingly, painfully, to life. He welcomed the pain. Anything was better than that numb deadness.  Even pain. 

His optics online, slowly, and went white, then black, as a shadow moved over him.

Daytime, he thought. It must be daytime, and that is the solar light and that darkness isn’t the darkness of the night with its cold, aloof moon, but the darkness of someone bending over me. Someone…remembering me. 

“One klik,” the voice said, distracted, and then with another rush Barricade’s secondary systems came online, welcoming the rush of energon. “Better?” The voice was deep, familiar. 

Barricade blinked, his optics slowly pixellating in to focus, his vocalizer humming through its systems check. “Yeah,” he croaked. Blackout, kneeling beside him, repair kit spread open on the torn up ground. 

“Almost didn’t find you,” Blackout said.  “But only you would do this.”  He tapped at Barricade’s hand, frozen, joints locked, poking into the daylit sky. 

Barricade found the actuator codes and fed them in, energon and electricity rushing to the frozen joint.  The gesture made no sense now—what had he been thinking? Trying to do? It seemed ages ago. Another…lifetime ago.  He whined as it came back to life, wincing, flexing the talons slowly. “Hurts,” he gasped. “Didn’t before.” 

“Yeah,” Blackout said. “Life hurts.  Death doesn’t.  Weird, huh?”  His optics glinted, ancient and with a hard-won wisdom, a shared look, knowing that Barricade knew now what he had learned himself, once, ages ago.  And that it hadn’t weakened him, this knowledge, but hardened him, made him tougher, stronger, braver. “Why it’s harder to live than die.” 

 

Comments

[wishseeker.livejournal.com]

Wow...really beautiful piece! I could really picture it, Barricade left all alone to offline *sniffle*

I am glad someone came back for him.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

I can kill off characters! I swear it! I just....don't wanna. >:(

[linnet-melody.livejournal.com]

♥__♥

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

I'm such a softie. :c

[mewsing.livejournal.com]

♥

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :D

[ithilgwath.livejournal.com]

...wow. just wow. That was beautiful.

and somehow... it makes me think of Neil Gaiman's Death: The High Cost of Living.

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

The first part of the story was actually based on the time I broke my back and was pretty much just sort of...out there in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. ;_;

[ithilgwath.livejournal.com]

...meep! I want to ask what happened, but I don't want to be nosy... though just typing that it committing to being nosy, isn't it? ^_^;

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

I can't bear to kill off the poor little jerk. :C

[aughoti (from livejournal.com)]

I kinda adore your Barricade (all the different versions!). He's so messed up in some ways (some?!?) but his tenacity is endearing. And go Blackout!

Really enjoyed this.