Absence

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG-13
Bayverse, Sky and Ground AU
Barricade, Starscream, Thundercracker, Skywarp, some Autobots
none

Barricade woke from recharge, disquieted.  Something was wrong.  Like a burning strange hollowness in his chassis.  It took him a long time to figure out what felt so…wrong.

Skywarp.  He couldn’t feel Skywarp. He could still feel Thundercracker—slightly prickly, even in recharge—and Starscream—sleek and glossy—as presences in his cortex. But Skywarp, the immense, ancient, beautiful star-speckled darkness, was missing. Gone.  He’d felt Skywarp get taken, felt an agonizing mash of emotions and sensation, when he and Starscream had confronted Thundercracker about the mission. He’d thought that was awful enough.

It was nothing compared to feeling…nothing.

Oh Primus. He was…was he?  Barricade couldn’t even make himself think the words.  It was too horrible.

Made even worse by the fact that it had happened sometime when he was in recharge. 

Or…had it happened before? Had it happened earlier in the night, the bond just slipping away when he was distracted? Even the thought felt like betrayal—that he hadn’t been paying enough attention.  It felt…like the worst feeling in the universe. 

He lay for a long time, between the two jets, Starscream’s arm thrown over his chassis, Thundercracker’s thigh wedged between his feet, as a ball of misery that seemed to pulse and swell, throbbing with emotion. I don’t deserve this. Never did. Don’t deserve Skywarp.  It’s like the universe knew that, and let Barricade have something so beautiful and rare and precious just so he could feel its value, and ripped it away, just so he could feel every thread’s weight of what he had lost. 

Finally, he could stand it no longer. He sent a low-priority ping to Starscream, so if the jet were, you know, really needing his recharge, he could just ignore it.  A compromise between his despair and the bond.

The hand squeezed over his white upper arm armor.  //Yes, Barricade?//

//Sorry to bother you.// He felt a warm, solicitous push against his bond, cool against his stirred-up warmness.

//You are disturbed?//

//I…Skywarp. I can’t feel him.//

The hand clenched, one talon slipping accidentally between the armor, gouging into Barricade’s arm cable. 

“Thundercracker,” Starscream said, urgently. 

Thundercracker grunted, red optics warming online slowly. “What?”  He caught some of Barricade’s tension over the bond. “What’s wrong?  Grounder have a bad purge?”

Starscream turned to Barricade. “He says he cannot feel Skywarp.” 

A moment’s hesitation, Thundercracker reaching along the bond himself.  He stiffened.

“He’s dead?” Barricade mumbled.  His talons clutched at whatever he could grab for support, as though he expected the world to crumble and collapse around him, just for daring to have said the words.

“No.” Thundercracker shook his head firmly, and Barricade found himself clinging onto the blue jet’s confidence.  Thundercracker might lie to him, but not about this.  “But he has closed off his end of the bond.”

“Or he is injured,” Starscream whispered, his optics widening fearfully.  Barricade felt his tank drop.

“Not helpful,” Thundercracker said, his voice hard. 

Starscream nodded, his face creased with worry, taking it as a rebuke, but the damage was done.  Barricade clutched at the arm over his chassis.

“He’s still alive,” Thundercracker said, optics boring holes into Starscream.  “Remember that.”

Barricade remembered Starscream’s strange limpness  when Thundercracker had been imprisoned before.  And that Starscream was the only one unbonded to Skywarp, who couldn’t feel for himself.  He seconded Thundercracker. “He’s alive.  That’s what matters.” He didn’t believe the words, more than half, himself. He twined his bond around Starscream’s presence, trying to let him feel through Barricade’s own bond.  “Not dead.” 

He felt a tremulous tendril extending along his bond, probing carefully, gently.  Feeling the hollow emptiness that was where Skywarp’s bond was, but deeper, and then loosening. “Not dead,” Starscream murmured. 

Thundercracker nodded, satisfied. “Now.  What do we do?”

“His comm?”

“Doesn’t work,” Barricade said.  “Kinda been trying that for…since the mission went bad.” 

“Private freq?”

Barricade dropped his optics, shaking his head.

“Jammed,” Starscream said.  "Or interceptable. He may know this and not be responding."  His voice was unsure, wavery, but Barricade could hear the effort to pull himself together.  “Prisoner.  Autobots,” he added, cautiously, “do not kill prisoners.”  A key difference between their cultures—Starscream clutched at it. 

Barricade nodded.  Autobots didn’t do that sort of thing.  He hoped nothing had changed that.

“Rescue, then,” Thundercracker said, firmly.

“I’m in,” Barricade said, defiant. “Not going to cut me out of this one.”

Thundercracker ground his mouthplates.

“The Autobots,” Starscream said, “Will likely be keeping him in a grounder base.”

“True,” Thundercracker said, his face compressing as though the word itself tasted bad. “First priority, we locate him.” 

“If he has shut down the bond—or is injured…?”

Barricade cut Starscream off,  almost sitting up in eagerness. “We can run a cis-alpha scan.  Can pick up his spark resonance frequency.”

“It’s short range.”

“Only a small amount of places they could’ve taken him,” Barricade countered. 

“It is something to try, something to do,” Starscream added. He half sat-up as well, still keeping the one arm curled around Barricade. Less for protection than for his own comfort. 

“What about Soundwave?”   Thundercracker’s optics blinked, insolently.  He still lay on his side on the berth, as though there were no reason to get upright. 

Barricade stifled the urge to snarl or to smack Thundercracker. Maybe both.  Was he trying to be helpful or be a problem? It was like all he ever did was throw up obstacles.  But Skywarp was at stake, so Barricade ground down his anger.  “Seem kind of strange, wouldn’t it, if we didn’t try to find him?” 

“Barrricade is correct,” Starscream said.  “It would look like we do not care.”

“Maybe we should let it look like that,” Thundercracker mused.  Just, Barricade thought, to be contrary.  “In fact, I’ll handle Soundwave.”

Why did Barricade suddenly have a very bad feeling about this?

[***]

Skywarp glared down at the smaller mechs as one fussed with some stasis cuffs on his wrists.  They weren’t made for a mech of his scale, so the bands cut into his wrist cables.  Which hurt, of course, but…he was used to pain. Warriors withstood pain and he had withstood worse. 

And he’d be damned before he showed anything like weakness in front of these Autobots. 

The one to his rear-right hefted his weapon. As if Skywarp might forget, somehow, that the guard was there, or armed.  He wasn’t likely to forget.  He just refused to look like he cared. 

A tightness wound around his cortex and somewhere inside his chassis, like a constricting band. This wasn’t like the tension he usually felt—keen, alert, bubblingly alive, waiting for the perfect moment for the attack.  That was a thoughtless, heedless aliveness, perfectly pure and in the moment.  This felt like some heavy weight had been attached between his turbines, slowing him down, dragging him into a net of obligations.  If he died…the others would follow.  The very same thing that he had warned Barricade about for the first mission taunted him with whip-stinging lashes of truth. Awful responsibility, and he found he wasn’t ready for it.

Too late, of course.

The one fiddling with the stasis cuffs stepped back, satisfied.  They didn’t feel any looser on his wrists, but Skywarp guessed that that wasn’t really the intent. Autobots might hold themselves as a superior society—that didn’t equate to treating their enemies like princes.  Which was fine with Skywarp—it was still better than what any of them would have faced in Decepticon captivity.  Huh. Sort of an oxymoron: his side didn’t have the resources to waste on feeding useless mechs.

“Right.” The guard stepped forward. “Let’s go.”

Skywarp thought about resisting, part of him heedless and wild, not caring what they might do. Beat him? Kill him?  But that other part worried, knowing what that would do to the bond.  The bond he clamped down on harder than he’d had since his Tempering.  He stepped forward, but refused to be…all that compliant. “Where are you taking me?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Well, yes, he would. Which would be why he’d asked the question.  He shuttered his optics, wearily. He didn’t have the energy to keep up any façade. He kept imagining Thundercracker here.  Thundercracker would stand, haughtily, optics blazing defiance.  Contempt would roil from him like the smell of burning fuel, surrounding him in an aura of distant dignity.

Or Starscream.  Starscream only revealed himself in front of mechs he trusted implicitly. In front of others, strangers, enemies, he was sleek and arrogant, cool and caustic by turns. 

And Barricade.  Who had been through so much with him, and by him, and for him. He had no idea how Barricade would act if captured by the enemy. But Barricade would do them proud.

Skywarp felt a surge of pure love for them well through his systems.  His Quaterne, who had known him before he knew himself.  More than that, had grown with him, seen him, been hurt by him and yet still, still loved him.  There was nothing that could match that.  No power in the universe.

But in the end, he couldn’t act like them; he could only act like…Skywarp. He didn’t have Thundercracker’s high contempt, or Starscream’s smooth arrogance.  Or Barricade’s stability.

He swung his stasis-cuffed wrists at the guard, knocking aside the weapon barrel, throwing the mech to the floor.  “I asked,” he snarled, “a civil question.” When they treated him civilly, he would be a…tolerable prisoner. Until then, though? He would be Skywarp. He would indulge in every bit of darkness he could, be every bit as hostile as he wanted.  They wouldn’t execute him—the time for that had passed the instant they left the battlefield. His position with IG had made him intimately familiar with Autobot rules of engagement.  They could not kill him, as long as he stopped short of killing one of them.  He could, he decided, he hoped, control himself that much.

And as long as he kept the bond shut down.

 

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/__wilderness__/]

I squee every time I see another installment in this fic.

And this one... wow... I just want to hug Starscream. And Barricade. And Skywarp. And probably Thundercracker aswell. What has he got planned for Soundwave?!

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

Oh, Soundwave gets to think he's winning for a while. :D