Ep0 - Nemesis - Equinox - Closed
Nov 13, 2011 14:39:58 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Nov 13, 2011 14:39:58 GMT -5
Nemesis – Corridor/Megatron’s quarters – Thursday late evening
Barricade felt like he’d been hit by a very massive, angry, Ironhide shaped freight train… twice. His systems were merrily fritzing with a hazy charge of lingering panic, coalescing around the heat of his spark like an ion cloud. But that had nothing to do with Ironhide. Shockwave… that son of a glitch, piece of slag. Smelt him! Primus damned… The infiltrator stopped for a moment in the hall, closed his optic. Then he slammed his fist into the wall with a snarl and a sound like a gunshot. He didn’t register the damage to his knuckles, too busy replaying the attack in Hanger 13, the burn of hate, of fear, humiliation. The fragger hacked him. Hacked him! On their own fragging ship and Barricade was so furious he couldn’t even coherently frame the nature of his rage into words – his mind a seethe of murderous lightening and dark. Shockwave knew about the failsafe. Knew he had it. Knew he was keeping it. Knew he was hiding it from even Megatron himself.
Fraggit! He fist dented the wall this time and he stood humming and revving quietly for a moment… Barricade bypassed medical to report in to Megatron, disregarding his injuries as a secondary annoyance to informing the warlord that the Autobots no longer had his infiltrator, because apparently Prime had tried to use him like a bargaining chip. Cade smirked through his pain at that, wishing he’d been present to hear Megatron laughimself in two at the absurdity.
“Hey, Windy.” The cassette was perched outside the warlord’s quarters, kind of curled up into the support struts over the door. She didn’t look very happy so he said, brightly, despite his obvious injuries, “Wanna hear something funny?”
Fairwinds looked up a little at that, but her near-black optics barely lightened. She hung her head for another moment before dropping down from her perch to land on Barricade’s shoulder, far from her usual spot on his automatically-offered arm. The tightness of her miserable field to her frame didn’t matter in this kind of proximity, and the cassette pressed herself firmly into the underside of the big mech’s jaw. “Welcome back, ‘Cade,” she murmured from against his throat, closing her optics into the proxy hug. “Megatron’s waiting for you.” A pause and she sat back a little, frowning though her tone didn’t change. “Autobots slagged you up good, huh?”
Cade froze at the small press of Fairwinds’ body to the small slope where his chin met his throat, not at the contact or the sudden small weight of her on his shoulder, but at the shiver of high frequency despair off her EM field. Fairwinds was by no means a very nice Cybertronian, she was often mean and greedy and spoiled – but she was always, always cheerful and always fun. So this pitch perfect misery... he turned turned over slightly, his optics roving to the door of Megatron’s chambers.
“Yeah... the Autobots,” said Cade softly. He lifted the cassette gently back to her perch, a pulse of warm promise coming across his plating to her. He moved toward the door, stopping to look up at her, give her a grin. “I’ll be back soon, Windy.”
The door unlocked for him at his approach and he moved to stand inside the room as they hissed shut behind him and sealed. The dark familiar mass of Megatron’s back was to him while the warlord’s attention remained on his desk, the data packs and small devices lying there. Barricade could not read his carefully controlled EM field… but his body language seemed tense. Cade, after a moment, launched in an animated intro; trying to gauge the situation here.
“So,” he said, loudly, cockily, all careless EM wavelengths and sideways smirks, “guess where I was.”
There was a pause before Megatron turned to face his Lieutenant, giving nothing away other than his attention. His expression was a controlled mask, his EM field hard to his plates, and his voice dry. “Making a nuisance of yourself in the Autobot’s brig.” His optics narrowed, a flicker passing through the broiling lights. “Am I close?”
Cade’s first thought: I could possibly be in some slag here. After a moment the infiltrator warily eased his posture and replied still smugly, “Prime told me you talked... I wasn’t sure if he was bluffing though. Don’t worry, they didn’t get any data out of me and from what I can tell, they’re desperate. In fact, I had a pretty extended conversation with Prime…” A smirk. “He’s got some <i>interesting</i> ideas about you-”
Anything further was cut off by the sharp crack of metal meeting metal without any restraint, Megatron having aimed the force of his blow at a point inside Barricade’s helm and shadowed his staggered steps back into the bulkhead. With the same hand that had just realigned the dark mech’s jaw, he seized Barricade’s throat and lifted him bodily, putting his weight into pressing his body into the wall. There was no suppressing his field now, and it roared on Barricade like an animal in itself, all tooth and claw and fury.
“You asinine pile of <i>scrap</i>!” Megatron bellowed, so close to Barricade’s face that he could see the micro-parts shifting within the light of his flared optics. “You possess all knowledge of the Fallen ship, <i>including the deactivation codes</i>, and you allow yourself to get captured, held by the very Autobots who condoned hacking into my processor whilst I was in fragging stasis, and now you have the bearings to come here and <i>laugh</i> about it? You’ve outdone yourself, Barricade, truly.”
Barricade jammed his arm as a block between himself and the warlord’s chest on instinct, grabbed pointlessly at Megatron’s wrist, his other hand jammed back against the wall behind him, optics flown wide with shock. The pain of the initial attack had evaporated in an energon-hot haze of panic, the crush around his throat too similar and too soon to Shockwave’s attack. His weapon systems were still offline, his blades broken in their sheathes from the fight with the Bots.
He hadn’t thought he’d need them. He’d assumed safety and that just went to show how long he’d been out of the ranks - 200 years to forget Decepticon tendencies.
“I… didn’t tell them… anything,” Cade managed, red optics flickering with a mix of pain and error code. “Why the...frag do I have to keep saying that?” His EM feild burned. “I kept this secret 200 years and less than a fragging week on the Nemesis and Prime himself knows about it!” He could feel the give in his throat, threatening to collapse his intake, the blazing black holocaust of rage that was Megatron’s electromagnetics. Barricade thought, suddenly, he could die right now and be unable to stop it. Third time today. Huh.
“There is a fragging correlation!” snapped Cade. “You have a leak and it’s not me!”
Megatron growled anew as that awfully accurate statement rang through his audios, shoulders tightening and denta clenching so hard as to truly hurt. His field, more raw and exposed than it had been in for eons, flashed with complexities: frustration, anxiety and unfettered pain against the familiar palette of rage and its cohort. It was too much feeling, finally culminating now in this too-small room with the wrong mech to see it. Megatron simply didn’t know what to do with the maelstrom, so used to acting on the hottest feeling in his spark and exorcising it in battle. The mess in his spark, radiating outwards like hot poison, felt larger than himself and impossible to coalesce. And he was so tired. In every sense.
He wanted to hit Barricade until he no longer functioned. Terminate the mech and the damning truth of the leak with him. Tear him to pieces just to get back onto familiar ground, with energon on his claws and battle protocols singing revitalising simplicity in place of this current chaos. Anything to push this clusterfrag of a disaster aside for even a moment just so he could think logically again.
‘Anything’, when murdering Barricade was subtracted as an option, seemed to boil down to lowering the mech sharply back onto his pedes before grasping his helm in both hands and bowing into him. Their helms touched together as little more than a formality to Megatron’s field tangling into the infiltrator’s - needily hungry for warmth, for a sense of life and purpose and that irritating self-confidence that Barricade always carried around and that he wanted to sink into now. The warlord was at the absolute end of his tether and it could go either way now. Either way, it would be over.
“What’s going on?” Barricade demanded.
The infiltrator reached up, gripped his commander at the back of the neck and leaned hard against his helm, so inured to violence the attack was summarily dismissed, interpreted as what it was – frustration. As one of Megatron’s mouthiest officers, he’d weathered similar outbursts before and like before he ease his EMF open, frequencies syncing up and locking into Megatron’s. These were electromagnetic waves as familiar as his own and he read them with the fluency of a longtime speaker of this dark language and when he recognized their complex configuration -- coming together in his mind and revealing their shape –- he jerked back, optics flaring bright. One servo jammed against the other mech’s chest.
“You knew,” he said, field humming. “You already fragging knew.” A beat. “You… it was you?”
Not releasing his framing hold of the smaller mech’s helm, Megatron felt more than heard the relieved rumble of air through his vents at having the truth out there. At last. And Barricade was as angry about it he’d hoped he would be. Indeed, needed him to be.
Meeting Barricade’s optics without apology, Megatron’s voice was soft but rough from the outburst. His systems felt cold and hollow at the same time, a thousand different things simultaneously coming to a head. “The Psychic Patch left a spark bond, of sorts. The scout and I have been sharing fluxes, memories, for the last week. He saw us meeting about the Phantom after you got back.”
Barricade’s optics flickered. His first instinct was to seal the leak – like any recon bot from any faction you don’t tolerate breaches in security and the combat subroutines in his forearms flared immediately to bring his plasma blades out… but they were broken in his wrists, unresponsive and he couldn’t do anything but examine the turn of his own thought as they revolved though his mind like weighty math, shaking out the variables of this… thing Megatron had just revealed. He’d killed friends before, shelled comrades for their sparks because they were a security risk. It was his function and Megatron knew this...
“Why didn’t you...” What? Say something? To whom? Barricade was uncertain how to address his leader and long-time commander and ally. His spark had developed a kind of dread-induced ache, the drag of his function class (eons of pitiless, vicious, extermination) running against the treacherous relief that leapt through his spark when he realized that his fragged weapon systems couldn’t do the deed. “Frag.” He cycled his vents and shook head. “Well, what now? That can’t stand. We gotta fix it. How do I fix it?”
Like he could and that, not the other thing, was his function.
One hand moving to cup Barricade’s shoulder, Megatron slid the other down the mech’s jaw, throat and chassis to rest splayed over his central seam. His systems were cooling now, the worst of the moment finally passed. “I believe I’ve found a way to break it, or at least block it,” he began, lifting his optics to Barricade’s should he online his own again. “If not, you’re going to do your job.”
“My weapons systems are offline,” said Barricade flatly, leveling a sardonic look at the warlord. “So I guess I <i>can’t</i> do my job.” There was a beat in which more than several eons of rough Decepticon camaraderie hovered... underscored by the restless undefined tension still between them, shivering like a lightning strike interrupted. The infiltrator’s voice was quiet, sobered by what he’d read - dark and unyielding - in the other mech’s EMF.
“The Scout. Does he need to die? Will that solve this?” <i>Tell me I can kill someone else to make this stop, tell me who I can rip apart, tell me how to save myself this act at least…</i> “Tell me,” said Barricade, and there may have been trace of desperation in his voice, “tell me what I need to do.”
Megatron held his stare for a small eternity before simply stepping away, withdrawing in every sense and leaving the dark mech against the wall whilst he returned to the desk. And the equipment left on top of it. He spoke without looking back, because for everything he’d done and all that he was, this was still hard, and like Pit was he going to waste energy making out otherwise in his own quarters in front of Barricade.
“When the space bridge detonated I was at point blank range,” he began without preamble. “IThe Dark Energon I carry kept me alive, despite how long I was left drifting amongst the debris without any kind of medical aid. It’s become a fully integrated part of my systems now.” Suicide isn’t a reliable option.
Picking up the modified phase shifter, Megatron turned back to face Barricade with the utmost seriousness. “You need to be my failsafe should this solution fail. Terminating the Scout may only cripple me, and this needs to end. Now. If this does not work, Fairwinds will dispose of my processor and disseminate my last orders, but you need to do what you do best.” A glimmer of feeling through his EM, foreign tangles mingled with a familiar pulse of pride in the other mech. “I have faith that you will see it through, no matter how... challenging.”
“I won’t hesitate,” said the infiltrator, coldly enough to mean it, quietly enough to regret it. Barricade’s EM field opened, simplified, synced up to the frequency of the spark he was going to put out. He would do it. Kill that light. And then he’d carry that void in his chest for the rest of his life, bear that emptiness into the eons and he’d find that scout and he’d make that Bot live until death obsessed him… then he’d kill him while Prime looked on.
It would not be enough and this would not be enough either. Barricade reached up with his free hand to pull his leader down to him, press the fore of his helm against his and for a moment he just stood there willing the universe to bend just once for him. When it didn’t he just let the seals around his spark chamber release and charge every inch of his armor with a raw current, still blue, sending a very specific pulse across his own chassis and across the commander’s -- that low electrical current that set every sensor alight.
“But first things first,” he said raggedly and pulled Megatron forward.
Megatron fell into him with a relieved sound that carried across like a groan, subspacing the small piece of tech to bring both hands on to Barricade’s body. His own chassis split against the eagerness of the other mech’s, his field dragging Barricade’s own into him like never before. Everything in his processor was running in stark ‘all or nothing’ mode, and he intended to give and take all now. Because frag everything else for these precious minutes.
Cade surged up against the other Decepticon, both hands locked behind the mech’s neck. A lightening blue arc of light leapt between their chambers, flashing off metal, charging the air with the scent of ozone and alloy. It coiled through every millimeter, through protoform, arched the infiltrator shuddering. He groaned, couldn’t help it, didn’t want to, let that rising frequency of electrical pleasure course across every sensor panel. Thoughts slid away, collapsing into static, arousal, and that crackle of dread.
Cade bowed his head, EMF shivering off his frame like heat, tangling and syncing desperately, optics flickering with impending overload. “I lied before,” he said, mouth against Megaton’s audio, claws digging into mesh. His EM field shifted, changed, deactivating the isolation subroutines in his spark chamber. <i>Now, do it now.</i> He smirked as his firewalls dropped. “Things have changed.”
Then the infiltrator’s bonding protocols made a supernova of his soul and Barricade forgot how to think. He synced so deeply, pressed so hard against the warlord, that his systems unraveled to the shivering core. Every line of code ignited, unwound, and rearranged. He vaguely heard himself scream, but by then he was gone completely.
It was like being run through the spark with a shock stick to pull even an inch away, and Megatron’s claws sunk into the armour at Barricade’s hip and back as he did so with a startled, agonized shout. Holding the slighter mech up as much as away, his voice was a rasp that conveyed as much pain, bewilderment and <i>want</i> as his optics. “‘Cade... Frag, you can’t.”
From the flashed gaze of Barricade’s optics, he didn’t know if the infiltrator could even hear him.
“Shut up,” growled Barricade, a smirk audible behind gritted dentals. “And don’t let me stop.”
The infiltrator’s optics flickered then burned an impossible Autobot blue, spark energy rushing through and inhabiting his systems fully for the partial-bond reformat, his code changing and shifting, flipping and twisting inside him and rewriting itself – rewriting him – with the Decepticon leader as an integral piece of the program. It was stupid. A first-class bad idea... and he didn’t care. It felt like coming apart, like dying, like coming online for the first time.
He could feel himself glitching, his non-vitals going haywire, too much processing power diverted to feeling this and letting all conscious thought burn away in the vanguard of it. Barricade shuddered, arched forward until his helm pressed hard against his partner’s shoulder and he couldn’t remember… anything… He just held onto Megatron as another pulsing crash of reformatting rushed through him so hard he wasn’t sure he could stand it.
A full spark bond couldn’t be achieved in one go, and both sparks had to open themselves wholly to it and surrender to the maelstrom that came with it to complete the connection. Megatron now clutched Barricade to him more than held him, head bowed and optics shuttered hard and tight as his own systems burned and sang with everything that Barricade was, everything that he was suddenly, finally, foolishly offering. And much as he wanted it, he knew that the dark mech simply did not fully comprehend what he was starting here. The pain, not just the joy.
Nos seared as a tangle of memories through his processor completely unbidden, his spark howling with the sparkling bond’s loss even as it seized hungrily onto Barricade’s spark. Never again, he’d sworn to himself whilst releasing the tiny mech’s crimson body. Knowing that it was going to be taken away and scrapped for parts. Because that’s what happened in the lowest tier on Cybertron. He wouldn’t expose himself to that again. And he sure as slag wasn’t going to let Barricade do so either just because he was young and stupid. There was still every chance he was going to be dead within the orn, let alone not last the war. Not that much had changed.
He took what he could bring himself to back from Barricade’s spark, feeling his code jostle and adapt but on nothing close to the scale the other mech was experiencing. The start of a spark bond - enough to mean something significant, but not so much that it would end up slagging them both. Curling his hand over Barricade’s helm in a hold that was as protective as it was possessive, he pressed his jaw close to the mech’s audio and opened his chassis further. “Enough, ‘Cade. Enough,” he gasped, overload following so fast and strong that it dragged the last command into a moan.
Cade stopped.
The universe snapped back into place, ramrod straight and the overload <i>seared</i> through the infiltrator on a level that seemed to system-strip him from pede to helm, rushing through him so deep he didn’t have any iota of himself not pulsing and hot with the electrical-mental rush. Then it was over and Barricade’s spark chamber snapped shut instantly, deadlocking and sealing in a way that he didn’t quite understand in his dizzy state of being but even separated now, his armor shut and the room dark again… Barricade could feel the other Decepticon.
Like a tone or a frequency in the universe that he was attuned to – he could parse Megatron’s life signal from the air like a line of fishing wire, like a radio channel in the airwaves and he’d never been aware of another being like that before. Barricade hadn’t moved from where he stood, gripping onto the warlord, trying to stay upright in the wake of a full system rewrite. He couldn’t… comprehend what just happened. Not yet. He shuddered again, his chassis rattling he shook so hard at the echo of what he’d seen/felt/been when Megatron opened that link between them – the screaming howling void of a severed spark bond, a full one.
“That…” said Barricade, “is the only extremely stupid thing you get to see me do all war.” He shivered, then said, darkly, “So what now?”
Somehow, despite what had just happened, Megatron rumbled a soft laugh. It was still Barricade. Still the same insufferably smug, merciless glitch he’d always been - just deeper under his plates. He ran the new thread of the mech through his field, tasting and testing, before forcibly turning his processor back to the matter at hand.
His own pedes numb beneath him, Megatron cradled Barricade’s forearms and took a step back to meet his gaze levelly. The question could be left a moment - the reality of what was to happen was still unavoidable, even this with unexpected ‘development’. “This won’t change things, even if your recklessness does wound you for it. You are still to be my executioner if this fails.”
“Trust me, as a mech who regularly obliterates the spark bonded I have a very clear picture of what’s waiting for me,” said Barricade utterly darkly. “But if I’m the one to do this, then I plan to bear that scar. Now, how are you going to blind the Bee-Bot?”
Megatron gave a curt nod at the infiltrator’s tone, firmly drawing a line under the spark-changing event that had just taken place and returning the device to his upturned palm from subspace. It would take an hour and several models to explain it exactly, but Barricade didn’t want or need anything more than the summary. “Phase shift the afflicted metaphysical thread so that the connection cannot be maintained,” he ultimately replied.
Essentially, he was going to displace an isolated fragment of his spark into a slightly different dimension - just enough to remove his end of the gestalt bond and thus leave Bumblebee connected to nothing. It would have to be forcibly maintained as his spark would naturally try to realign itself, but according to the literature, it was wholly doable. It would also hurt like the Pit to set into place, and didn’t guarantee that the bond wouldn’t follow the thread the increment he was planning to move it. Too much of a separation and his spark would gutter and fail; too little and it wouldn’t change a thing.
He’d kept the indicator of success or failure deliberately simple as he wasn’t going to be of much use as this took place. Moving back to the desk, he picked up and held out a scanner that he’d already modified and set the display for. “Orange means that the displacement is occurring. The indicator will turn green if the bond has been broken, and red if the scanner still detects the Autobot’s spark signature after the move has taken place. If that’s the case, you take out my spark and put Fairwinds to work.”
He arched a brow just enough to be condescending, but there was no real malice in it. The facade of normality had to be in this somewhere. “Do you think you can handle that, Barricade?”
“I can handle it,” said Barricade, not quite able to rise to that level of normalcy yet, not with his systems still shivering with the after-buzz of what he’d done. He was distracted by the strangeness of it, his own thoughts gone alien in his head, the code rearranged, altered, everything slightly rewritten like the universe had moved two inches to the left and got stuck there. He glanced at the back of his own hand, flexing his claws slightly, feeling the pull and shift of his hydraulic lines as if for the first time, like this was a ghost arm but still wholly his… changed. It was bizarre. He liked it and it occurred to him that he was going to like it a lot less if terminating a partial bond was anything even remotely close to losing a full bond.
Barricade had felt, for just an instant, the processor-stripping insanity that came with the bond break. He had seen it happen before, caused it over and over in the battle field, but understanding it was different. It made each kill mean more now. And if this kill was going to be his… he planned to make it cost him something as it would cost the Decepticons everything.
“You realize,” said Barricade, tonelessly, “that the war is going to be over with you gone. There will be a power vacuum. We’ll tear ourselves apart. Shockwave, Starscream... they will tear us apart.”
Megatron frowned outright at that, faint bemusement trickling into his field and, now, down the tenuous connection between them. “Your faith in my being able to do this without terminating myself is spark warming,” he replied with equal dryness, though he knew perfectly well that it didn’t pay to be an optimist. Prepare and expect for the worse - anything more is a pleasant surprise.
“You know me,” said Barricade, accepting the scanner from Megatron as he offered it. He ignored the uncomfortable pulse of apprehension in his own spark, an echo of Megatron’s or his own he could no longer tell. “I’m just fragging <i>full</i> of silver linings and sunshine.”
Megatron turned the phase shifter in his hands and made final scans of it as he led them both into the berth room. Without preamble he sat up across the berth with his back against the bulkhead, drawing one knee up to act as a brace against the slab’s lipped edge. “Whatever happens now, don’t interfere until the indicator has changed from orange,” he instructed, his optics lowered as he set up the device. “Then your course of action is decided for you, and you will act accordingly.”
Cade nodded fractionally. He didn’t need weapons to kill a Cybertronian, not at this range, not like this…
Helm bowed, the big mech shuttered his optics for a moment to feel again the residual tingles and surges from the bonding. It seemed almost cruel of Barricade to do it now, though it had certainly given him a greater incentive to succeed. Resolved to this since he’d confirmed that there was no alternative, Megatron relaxed his frame as best he could and began unlatching and opening his chassis. Layer after interlocking layer unlocked and unsealed, spiralling outwards and shunting back out of the way to expose a clear expanse of his bare protoform around the spark chamber itself. He took the altered energy readings into account and recalculated the shifter’s positioning to compensate for the new bond and recent overload, finally pressing it hard into the protomatter beneath his chamber. A flick of his thumb, an acrid hiss as the bottom of the device welded itself, and it was in place.
He paused at actually activating it, suddenly potently aware that Barricade was watching him. It shouldn’t have affected him. A side effect of this new bond, perhaps. It didn’t matter. Megatron met the stalwart gaze, held it without comment or change, before finally bracing himself and flicking the switch across.
What happened next was bad.
As bad as Cade had anticipated it would be but somehow worse in that he hadn’t been prepared to feel it as well – like a fist closing around his own spark chamber he became aware suddenly of what Megatron was doing to himself. He was sectioning off a part of his own spark, extracting from it the influence of the scout, Bumblebee, the Autobot youngling that no one wanted to point out might be the last of the Final Sparked of Cybertron in this fragging galaxy. Megatron was <i>dissecting his own soul</i> for Bumblebee’s signature and Cade didn’t have to do it to know that cutting off your arm from the elbow down , pulling your own optics from your skull, could not be as horrific as this.
“Frag!”
Barricade lunged forward as the warlord began to seize. He had no weight to pin down a mech Megatron’s size but the warlord’s armor was partially retracted and Cade had no problem darting around him, grabbing the bigger mech from behind and punching a charged fist directly into a sensory cluster at the back of his neck, stun-locking extremities and stopping the reactive thrashing before it became too much for Cade to handle. He looped an arm around the Decepticon leader, putting him in an immobilizing grip, arm locked around his neck. Cade’s face ducked against the other Cybertronian’s helm, near his audio, whispering. “Not this way, you son of glitch. Don’t you fragging dare…”
There was a high whine and then a silent flash as the partition slammed into place, and then the phase shifter was only maintaining the divide - not wrenching it further. Megatron was acutely aware of Barricade’s iron grip on him, his helm pressing against his, and it was distracting enough to draw his mind away from the residual-shock trembling that rattled his plates despite his efforts to still it. His spark ached with pressure, but it was a feeling he could adjust to. He would have to.
He tried to lift a hand to take Barricade’s wrist, still tight against him, and found that the stunning blow was still in effect. His vents were still firing rapid and out of sync, which was having minor cascade effects throughout his systems as they struggled to get back into normal parameters. Not trusting his vocaliser just yet, and not willing to see if the spark bond was capable of speaking through right now, Megatron settled for his internal comm. ::<i>The scanner?</i>::
Barricade’s optics flicked to scanner, gripped in the fist locked into his elbow. “Orange,” he hissed, trying to ignore the thready pulse of panic in his own spark, unfamiliar with this kind of slag. This wasn’t a soldier’s work. This wasn’t part of his function and Barricade hated that feeling. “It’s still orange, how long does this thing take?”
Megatron shuttered his optics with a harsh ex-vent, trying to force the system back into a proper rhythm. It wasn’t entirely successful, though he felt less like he was dangerously overheating now. ::<i>Not long. Spark has to settle enough to get a reading, then it’s quick. Frag, move your arm.</i>
Cade loosened his grip to a one-armed kind of hold, not a restraint any longer so much as proximity and tactile presence. His other servo, the one not holding the scanner, shifted to the back of Megatron’s neck, directly at a seam where the armor gapped. At this range Cade could put his fist through the breach, rip out the motor function relays there and paralyze the other mech. If that scanner went red he would do it, cripple the warlord so he could not move when Barricade proceeded, directly after, to put his fist through his chest and rip his spark into ether.
That would be quick. He’d make it quick then allow himself to go some measure of insane. “Still orange,” whispered Barricade, EM field flaring desperate. “C’mon…”
The device was pulsing slightly, faster and faster in rhythm with the frequency of the energy field it was scanning, reaching a hummingbird hum before, finally, it fell into perfect synchronicity with the large mech’s systems. With the phase displacement device integrated and the spark it held a splinter of soul away from settled, the scanner’s display went dark. A beat. Cade waited for the verse to end and thought suddenly about a Bot he’d seen once after Barricade killed his partner – standing there on the field with hollow optics. He’d watched that mech unseal his own spark and purge himself right there on the field, the flash and burst of a soul going super nova of its own accord, shredded to dust by despair with no description…
And then the scanner turned green.
Megatron couldn’t see the scanner, which made the already long wait for it to change colour and the result be fed to him by Barricade drag out into its own kind of eternity. He knew the result from the feel of the infiltrator’s hand on the back of his neck, however: fingers ready to crush and tear withdrawing from where his armour had left him deliberately exposed and vulnerable.
The tremors had largely subsided now, and his systems were compensating quickly to overcome the immobilising strike. Megatron knew better than to try to sit up and away from Barricade, though, and remained where he was semi-held against the warm, reassuring physical body of his semi-sparkmate. It figured: one complicated mess resolved and immediately another one begins to threaten on the horizon.
He had no solid notion of how Barricade would take this bond in the face of his termination being avoided. Not after it had always been Barricade of the two of them who had pushed the hardest to ‘wait’. Though he largely agreed with Barricade’s vehement concerns, Megatron still felt at times that the infiltrator was being uncharacteristically cautious. And now he’d been the one to initiate a bond. Though perhaps, Megatron conceded with an odd contraction in his newly-mutilated spark, it may have only been because, deep down, Barricade was expecting this to fail; that the bonding would be a final gesture rather than the restricted level of commitment they were capable of having.
Exhaustion swamped into his systems suddenly and unbridled, as if his every fibre knew that it was now, finally, safe to recharge. The scout wouldn’t see anything that would jeopardise the Decepticons, and his mind would be his own again. Rather than say any of this aloud, though, he rested his hand over Barricade’s on his chassis as soon as he had the ability to move the limb again. “Well then,” he uttered, voice underscored with static. There was nothing else he could say; not when confronted with the curious desire to lie down properly and drag Barricade against his aching chassis before he slipped into a direly needed and repeated recharge cycle.
“Crisis averted,” muttered Barricade in a would-be cavalier tone of voice. He shifted his position from crouching behind the other mech and slid off the berth, pedes not making a sound as he hit the floor and moved to dim the lights in the room. He very carefully did not look up until he’d finished and settling in leaning against Megatron’s desk as if for a very long wait. His optics glowed red in the darkness, dim and unreadable. “Recharge and recover.” The infiltrator’s EM field flickered and though the shadows hid the nature of his facial expression, he doubted that the warlord needed to see him anymore to know what he was thinking. “I’ll be here.”
Before he could respond, Megatron felt himself succumbing to the numerous protocols filling his systems with the need to rest, finally, and recover. Barricade’s field/spark/being was... too much to deal with when his processor was already halfway shut down for recharge without his control. It could wait until later, because now there would be a later. Though what Barricade felt about there being a future for him was treacherously beyond his guess. Ultimately, he fell still and silent on the berth within seconds, falling into undisturbed oblivion.
Barricade felt like he’d been hit by a very massive, angry, Ironhide shaped freight train… twice. His systems were merrily fritzing with a hazy charge of lingering panic, coalescing around the heat of his spark like an ion cloud. But that had nothing to do with Ironhide. Shockwave… that son of a glitch, piece of slag. Smelt him! Primus damned… The infiltrator stopped for a moment in the hall, closed his optic. Then he slammed his fist into the wall with a snarl and a sound like a gunshot. He didn’t register the damage to his knuckles, too busy replaying the attack in Hanger 13, the burn of hate, of fear, humiliation. The fragger hacked him. Hacked him! On their own fragging ship and Barricade was so furious he couldn’t even coherently frame the nature of his rage into words – his mind a seethe of murderous lightening and dark. Shockwave knew about the failsafe. Knew he had it. Knew he was keeping it. Knew he was hiding it from even Megatron himself.
Fraggit! He fist dented the wall this time and he stood humming and revving quietly for a moment… Barricade bypassed medical to report in to Megatron, disregarding his injuries as a secondary annoyance to informing the warlord that the Autobots no longer had his infiltrator, because apparently Prime had tried to use him like a bargaining chip. Cade smirked through his pain at that, wishing he’d been present to hear Megatron laughimself in two at the absurdity.
“Hey, Windy.” The cassette was perched outside the warlord’s quarters, kind of curled up into the support struts over the door. She didn’t look very happy so he said, brightly, despite his obvious injuries, “Wanna hear something funny?”
Fairwinds looked up a little at that, but her near-black optics barely lightened. She hung her head for another moment before dropping down from her perch to land on Barricade’s shoulder, far from her usual spot on his automatically-offered arm. The tightness of her miserable field to her frame didn’t matter in this kind of proximity, and the cassette pressed herself firmly into the underside of the big mech’s jaw. “Welcome back, ‘Cade,” she murmured from against his throat, closing her optics into the proxy hug. “Megatron’s waiting for you.” A pause and she sat back a little, frowning though her tone didn’t change. “Autobots slagged you up good, huh?”
Cade froze at the small press of Fairwinds’ body to the small slope where his chin met his throat, not at the contact or the sudden small weight of her on his shoulder, but at the shiver of high frequency despair off her EM field. Fairwinds was by no means a very nice Cybertronian, she was often mean and greedy and spoiled – but she was always, always cheerful and always fun. So this pitch perfect misery... he turned turned over slightly, his optics roving to the door of Megatron’s chambers.
“Yeah... the Autobots,” said Cade softly. He lifted the cassette gently back to her perch, a pulse of warm promise coming across his plating to her. He moved toward the door, stopping to look up at her, give her a grin. “I’ll be back soon, Windy.”
The door unlocked for him at his approach and he moved to stand inside the room as they hissed shut behind him and sealed. The dark familiar mass of Megatron’s back was to him while the warlord’s attention remained on his desk, the data packs and small devices lying there. Barricade could not read his carefully controlled EM field… but his body language seemed tense. Cade, after a moment, launched in an animated intro; trying to gauge the situation here.
“So,” he said, loudly, cockily, all careless EM wavelengths and sideways smirks, “guess where I was.”
There was a pause before Megatron turned to face his Lieutenant, giving nothing away other than his attention. His expression was a controlled mask, his EM field hard to his plates, and his voice dry. “Making a nuisance of yourself in the Autobot’s brig.” His optics narrowed, a flicker passing through the broiling lights. “Am I close?”
Cade’s first thought: I could possibly be in some slag here. After a moment the infiltrator warily eased his posture and replied still smugly, “Prime told me you talked... I wasn’t sure if he was bluffing though. Don’t worry, they didn’t get any data out of me and from what I can tell, they’re desperate. In fact, I had a pretty extended conversation with Prime…” A smirk. “He’s got some <i>interesting</i> ideas about you-”
Anything further was cut off by the sharp crack of metal meeting metal without any restraint, Megatron having aimed the force of his blow at a point inside Barricade’s helm and shadowed his staggered steps back into the bulkhead. With the same hand that had just realigned the dark mech’s jaw, he seized Barricade’s throat and lifted him bodily, putting his weight into pressing his body into the wall. There was no suppressing his field now, and it roared on Barricade like an animal in itself, all tooth and claw and fury.
“You asinine pile of <i>scrap</i>!” Megatron bellowed, so close to Barricade’s face that he could see the micro-parts shifting within the light of his flared optics. “You possess all knowledge of the Fallen ship, <i>including the deactivation codes</i>, and you allow yourself to get captured, held by the very Autobots who condoned hacking into my processor whilst I was in fragging stasis, and now you have the bearings to come here and <i>laugh</i> about it? You’ve outdone yourself, Barricade, truly.”
Barricade jammed his arm as a block between himself and the warlord’s chest on instinct, grabbed pointlessly at Megatron’s wrist, his other hand jammed back against the wall behind him, optics flown wide with shock. The pain of the initial attack had evaporated in an energon-hot haze of panic, the crush around his throat too similar and too soon to Shockwave’s attack. His weapon systems were still offline, his blades broken in their sheathes from the fight with the Bots.
He hadn’t thought he’d need them. He’d assumed safety and that just went to show how long he’d been out of the ranks - 200 years to forget Decepticon tendencies.
“I… didn’t tell them… anything,” Cade managed, red optics flickering with a mix of pain and error code. “Why the...frag do I have to keep saying that?” His EM feild burned. “I kept this secret 200 years and less than a fragging week on the Nemesis and Prime himself knows about it!” He could feel the give in his throat, threatening to collapse his intake, the blazing black holocaust of rage that was Megatron’s electromagnetics. Barricade thought, suddenly, he could die right now and be unable to stop it. Third time today. Huh.
“There is a fragging correlation!” snapped Cade. “You have a leak and it’s not me!”
Megatron growled anew as that awfully accurate statement rang through his audios, shoulders tightening and denta clenching so hard as to truly hurt. His field, more raw and exposed than it had been in for eons, flashed with complexities: frustration, anxiety and unfettered pain against the familiar palette of rage and its cohort. It was too much feeling, finally culminating now in this too-small room with the wrong mech to see it. Megatron simply didn’t know what to do with the maelstrom, so used to acting on the hottest feeling in his spark and exorcising it in battle. The mess in his spark, radiating outwards like hot poison, felt larger than himself and impossible to coalesce. And he was so tired. In every sense.
He wanted to hit Barricade until he no longer functioned. Terminate the mech and the damning truth of the leak with him. Tear him to pieces just to get back onto familiar ground, with energon on his claws and battle protocols singing revitalising simplicity in place of this current chaos. Anything to push this clusterfrag of a disaster aside for even a moment just so he could think logically again.
‘Anything’, when murdering Barricade was subtracted as an option, seemed to boil down to lowering the mech sharply back onto his pedes before grasping his helm in both hands and bowing into him. Their helms touched together as little more than a formality to Megatron’s field tangling into the infiltrator’s - needily hungry for warmth, for a sense of life and purpose and that irritating self-confidence that Barricade always carried around and that he wanted to sink into now. The warlord was at the absolute end of his tether and it could go either way now. Either way, it would be over.
“What’s going on?” Barricade demanded.
The infiltrator reached up, gripped his commander at the back of the neck and leaned hard against his helm, so inured to violence the attack was summarily dismissed, interpreted as what it was – frustration. As one of Megatron’s mouthiest officers, he’d weathered similar outbursts before and like before he ease his EMF open, frequencies syncing up and locking into Megatron’s. These were electromagnetic waves as familiar as his own and he read them with the fluency of a longtime speaker of this dark language and when he recognized their complex configuration -- coming together in his mind and revealing their shape –- he jerked back, optics flaring bright. One servo jammed against the other mech’s chest.
“You knew,” he said, field humming. “You already fragging knew.” A beat. “You… it was you?”
Not releasing his framing hold of the smaller mech’s helm, Megatron felt more than heard the relieved rumble of air through his vents at having the truth out there. At last. And Barricade was as angry about it he’d hoped he would be. Indeed, needed him to be.
Meeting Barricade’s optics without apology, Megatron’s voice was soft but rough from the outburst. His systems felt cold and hollow at the same time, a thousand different things simultaneously coming to a head. “The Psychic Patch left a spark bond, of sorts. The scout and I have been sharing fluxes, memories, for the last week. He saw us meeting about the Phantom after you got back.”
Barricade’s optics flickered. His first instinct was to seal the leak – like any recon bot from any faction you don’t tolerate breaches in security and the combat subroutines in his forearms flared immediately to bring his plasma blades out… but they were broken in his wrists, unresponsive and he couldn’t do anything but examine the turn of his own thought as they revolved though his mind like weighty math, shaking out the variables of this… thing Megatron had just revealed. He’d killed friends before, shelled comrades for their sparks because they were a security risk. It was his function and Megatron knew this...
“Why didn’t you...” What? Say something? To whom? Barricade was uncertain how to address his leader and long-time commander and ally. His spark had developed a kind of dread-induced ache, the drag of his function class (eons of pitiless, vicious, extermination) running against the treacherous relief that leapt through his spark when he realized that his fragged weapon systems couldn’t do the deed. “Frag.” He cycled his vents and shook head. “Well, what now? That can’t stand. We gotta fix it. How do I fix it?”
Like he could and that, not the other thing, was his function.
One hand moving to cup Barricade’s shoulder, Megatron slid the other down the mech’s jaw, throat and chassis to rest splayed over his central seam. His systems were cooling now, the worst of the moment finally passed. “I believe I’ve found a way to break it, or at least block it,” he began, lifting his optics to Barricade’s should he online his own again. “If not, you’re going to do your job.”
“My weapons systems are offline,” said Barricade flatly, leveling a sardonic look at the warlord. “So I guess I <i>can’t</i> do my job.” There was a beat in which more than several eons of rough Decepticon camaraderie hovered... underscored by the restless undefined tension still between them, shivering like a lightning strike interrupted. The infiltrator’s voice was quiet, sobered by what he’d read - dark and unyielding - in the other mech’s EMF.
“The Scout. Does he need to die? Will that solve this?” <i>Tell me I can kill someone else to make this stop, tell me who I can rip apart, tell me how to save myself this act at least…</i> “Tell me,” said Barricade, and there may have been trace of desperation in his voice, “tell me what I need to do.”
Megatron held his stare for a small eternity before simply stepping away, withdrawing in every sense and leaving the dark mech against the wall whilst he returned to the desk. And the equipment left on top of it. He spoke without looking back, because for everything he’d done and all that he was, this was still hard, and like Pit was he going to waste energy making out otherwise in his own quarters in front of Barricade.
“When the space bridge detonated I was at point blank range,” he began without preamble. “IThe Dark Energon I carry kept me alive, despite how long I was left drifting amongst the debris without any kind of medical aid. It’s become a fully integrated part of my systems now.” Suicide isn’t a reliable option.
Picking up the modified phase shifter, Megatron turned back to face Barricade with the utmost seriousness. “You need to be my failsafe should this solution fail. Terminating the Scout may only cripple me, and this needs to end. Now. If this does not work, Fairwinds will dispose of my processor and disseminate my last orders, but you need to do what you do best.” A glimmer of feeling through his EM, foreign tangles mingled with a familiar pulse of pride in the other mech. “I have faith that you will see it through, no matter how... challenging.”
“I won’t hesitate,” said the infiltrator, coldly enough to mean it, quietly enough to regret it. Barricade’s EM field opened, simplified, synced up to the frequency of the spark he was going to put out. He would do it. Kill that light. And then he’d carry that void in his chest for the rest of his life, bear that emptiness into the eons and he’d find that scout and he’d make that Bot live until death obsessed him… then he’d kill him while Prime looked on.
It would not be enough and this would not be enough either. Barricade reached up with his free hand to pull his leader down to him, press the fore of his helm against his and for a moment he just stood there willing the universe to bend just once for him. When it didn’t he just let the seals around his spark chamber release and charge every inch of his armor with a raw current, still blue, sending a very specific pulse across his own chassis and across the commander’s -- that low electrical current that set every sensor alight.
“But first things first,” he said raggedly and pulled Megatron forward.
Megatron fell into him with a relieved sound that carried across like a groan, subspacing the small piece of tech to bring both hands on to Barricade’s body. His own chassis split against the eagerness of the other mech’s, his field dragging Barricade’s own into him like never before. Everything in his processor was running in stark ‘all or nothing’ mode, and he intended to give and take all now. Because frag everything else for these precious minutes.
Cade surged up against the other Decepticon, both hands locked behind the mech’s neck. A lightening blue arc of light leapt between their chambers, flashing off metal, charging the air with the scent of ozone and alloy. It coiled through every millimeter, through protoform, arched the infiltrator shuddering. He groaned, couldn’t help it, didn’t want to, let that rising frequency of electrical pleasure course across every sensor panel. Thoughts slid away, collapsing into static, arousal, and that crackle of dread.
Cade bowed his head, EMF shivering off his frame like heat, tangling and syncing desperately, optics flickering with impending overload. “I lied before,” he said, mouth against Megaton’s audio, claws digging into mesh. His EM field shifted, changed, deactivating the isolation subroutines in his spark chamber. <i>Now, do it now.</i> He smirked as his firewalls dropped. “Things have changed.”
Then the infiltrator’s bonding protocols made a supernova of his soul and Barricade forgot how to think. He synced so deeply, pressed so hard against the warlord, that his systems unraveled to the shivering core. Every line of code ignited, unwound, and rearranged. He vaguely heard himself scream, but by then he was gone completely.
It was like being run through the spark with a shock stick to pull even an inch away, and Megatron’s claws sunk into the armour at Barricade’s hip and back as he did so with a startled, agonized shout. Holding the slighter mech up as much as away, his voice was a rasp that conveyed as much pain, bewilderment and <i>want</i> as his optics. “‘Cade... Frag, you can’t.”
From the flashed gaze of Barricade’s optics, he didn’t know if the infiltrator could even hear him.
“Shut up,” growled Barricade, a smirk audible behind gritted dentals. “And don’t let me stop.”
The infiltrator’s optics flickered then burned an impossible Autobot blue, spark energy rushing through and inhabiting his systems fully for the partial-bond reformat, his code changing and shifting, flipping and twisting inside him and rewriting itself – rewriting him – with the Decepticon leader as an integral piece of the program. It was stupid. A first-class bad idea... and he didn’t care. It felt like coming apart, like dying, like coming online for the first time.
He could feel himself glitching, his non-vitals going haywire, too much processing power diverted to feeling this and letting all conscious thought burn away in the vanguard of it. Barricade shuddered, arched forward until his helm pressed hard against his partner’s shoulder and he couldn’t remember… anything… He just held onto Megatron as another pulsing crash of reformatting rushed through him so hard he wasn’t sure he could stand it.
A full spark bond couldn’t be achieved in one go, and both sparks had to open themselves wholly to it and surrender to the maelstrom that came with it to complete the connection. Megatron now clutched Barricade to him more than held him, head bowed and optics shuttered hard and tight as his own systems burned and sang with everything that Barricade was, everything that he was suddenly, finally, foolishly offering. And much as he wanted it, he knew that the dark mech simply did not fully comprehend what he was starting here. The pain, not just the joy.
Nos seared as a tangle of memories through his processor completely unbidden, his spark howling with the sparkling bond’s loss even as it seized hungrily onto Barricade’s spark. Never again, he’d sworn to himself whilst releasing the tiny mech’s crimson body. Knowing that it was going to be taken away and scrapped for parts. Because that’s what happened in the lowest tier on Cybertron. He wouldn’t expose himself to that again. And he sure as slag wasn’t going to let Barricade do so either just because he was young and stupid. There was still every chance he was going to be dead within the orn, let alone not last the war. Not that much had changed.
He took what he could bring himself to back from Barricade’s spark, feeling his code jostle and adapt but on nothing close to the scale the other mech was experiencing. The start of a spark bond - enough to mean something significant, but not so much that it would end up slagging them both. Curling his hand over Barricade’s helm in a hold that was as protective as it was possessive, he pressed his jaw close to the mech’s audio and opened his chassis further. “Enough, ‘Cade. Enough,” he gasped, overload following so fast and strong that it dragged the last command into a moan.
Cade stopped.
The universe snapped back into place, ramrod straight and the overload <i>seared</i> through the infiltrator on a level that seemed to system-strip him from pede to helm, rushing through him so deep he didn’t have any iota of himself not pulsing and hot with the electrical-mental rush. Then it was over and Barricade’s spark chamber snapped shut instantly, deadlocking and sealing in a way that he didn’t quite understand in his dizzy state of being but even separated now, his armor shut and the room dark again… Barricade could feel the other Decepticon.
Like a tone or a frequency in the universe that he was attuned to – he could parse Megatron’s life signal from the air like a line of fishing wire, like a radio channel in the airwaves and he’d never been aware of another being like that before. Barricade hadn’t moved from where he stood, gripping onto the warlord, trying to stay upright in the wake of a full system rewrite. He couldn’t… comprehend what just happened. Not yet. He shuddered again, his chassis rattling he shook so hard at the echo of what he’d seen/felt/been when Megatron opened that link between them – the screaming howling void of a severed spark bond, a full one.
“That…” said Barricade, “is the only extremely stupid thing you get to see me do all war.” He shivered, then said, darkly, “So what now?”
Somehow, despite what had just happened, Megatron rumbled a soft laugh. It was still Barricade. Still the same insufferably smug, merciless glitch he’d always been - just deeper under his plates. He ran the new thread of the mech through his field, tasting and testing, before forcibly turning his processor back to the matter at hand.
His own pedes numb beneath him, Megatron cradled Barricade’s forearms and took a step back to meet his gaze levelly. The question could be left a moment - the reality of what was to happen was still unavoidable, even this with unexpected ‘development’. “This won’t change things, even if your recklessness does wound you for it. You are still to be my executioner if this fails.”
“Trust me, as a mech who regularly obliterates the spark bonded I have a very clear picture of what’s waiting for me,” said Barricade utterly darkly. “But if I’m the one to do this, then I plan to bear that scar. Now, how are you going to blind the Bee-Bot?”
Megatron gave a curt nod at the infiltrator’s tone, firmly drawing a line under the spark-changing event that had just taken place and returning the device to his upturned palm from subspace. It would take an hour and several models to explain it exactly, but Barricade didn’t want or need anything more than the summary. “Phase shift the afflicted metaphysical thread so that the connection cannot be maintained,” he ultimately replied.
Essentially, he was going to displace an isolated fragment of his spark into a slightly different dimension - just enough to remove his end of the gestalt bond and thus leave Bumblebee connected to nothing. It would have to be forcibly maintained as his spark would naturally try to realign itself, but according to the literature, it was wholly doable. It would also hurt like the Pit to set into place, and didn’t guarantee that the bond wouldn’t follow the thread the increment he was planning to move it. Too much of a separation and his spark would gutter and fail; too little and it wouldn’t change a thing.
He’d kept the indicator of success or failure deliberately simple as he wasn’t going to be of much use as this took place. Moving back to the desk, he picked up and held out a scanner that he’d already modified and set the display for. “Orange means that the displacement is occurring. The indicator will turn green if the bond has been broken, and red if the scanner still detects the Autobot’s spark signature after the move has taken place. If that’s the case, you take out my spark and put Fairwinds to work.”
He arched a brow just enough to be condescending, but there was no real malice in it. The facade of normality had to be in this somewhere. “Do you think you can handle that, Barricade?”
“I can handle it,” said Barricade, not quite able to rise to that level of normalcy yet, not with his systems still shivering with the after-buzz of what he’d done. He was distracted by the strangeness of it, his own thoughts gone alien in his head, the code rearranged, altered, everything slightly rewritten like the universe had moved two inches to the left and got stuck there. He glanced at the back of his own hand, flexing his claws slightly, feeling the pull and shift of his hydraulic lines as if for the first time, like this was a ghost arm but still wholly his… changed. It was bizarre. He liked it and it occurred to him that he was going to like it a lot less if terminating a partial bond was anything even remotely close to losing a full bond.
Barricade had felt, for just an instant, the processor-stripping insanity that came with the bond break. He had seen it happen before, caused it over and over in the battle field, but understanding it was different. It made each kill mean more now. And if this kill was going to be his… he planned to make it cost him something as it would cost the Decepticons everything.
“You realize,” said Barricade, tonelessly, “that the war is going to be over with you gone. There will be a power vacuum. We’ll tear ourselves apart. Shockwave, Starscream... they will tear us apart.”
Megatron frowned outright at that, faint bemusement trickling into his field and, now, down the tenuous connection between them. “Your faith in my being able to do this without terminating myself is spark warming,” he replied with equal dryness, though he knew perfectly well that it didn’t pay to be an optimist. Prepare and expect for the worse - anything more is a pleasant surprise.
“You know me,” said Barricade, accepting the scanner from Megatron as he offered it. He ignored the uncomfortable pulse of apprehension in his own spark, an echo of Megatron’s or his own he could no longer tell. “I’m just fragging <i>full</i> of silver linings and sunshine.”
Megatron turned the phase shifter in his hands and made final scans of it as he led them both into the berth room. Without preamble he sat up across the berth with his back against the bulkhead, drawing one knee up to act as a brace against the slab’s lipped edge. “Whatever happens now, don’t interfere until the indicator has changed from orange,” he instructed, his optics lowered as he set up the device. “Then your course of action is decided for you, and you will act accordingly.”
Cade nodded fractionally. He didn’t need weapons to kill a Cybertronian, not at this range, not like this…
Helm bowed, the big mech shuttered his optics for a moment to feel again the residual tingles and surges from the bonding. It seemed almost cruel of Barricade to do it now, though it had certainly given him a greater incentive to succeed. Resolved to this since he’d confirmed that there was no alternative, Megatron relaxed his frame as best he could and began unlatching and opening his chassis. Layer after interlocking layer unlocked and unsealed, spiralling outwards and shunting back out of the way to expose a clear expanse of his bare protoform around the spark chamber itself. He took the altered energy readings into account and recalculated the shifter’s positioning to compensate for the new bond and recent overload, finally pressing it hard into the protomatter beneath his chamber. A flick of his thumb, an acrid hiss as the bottom of the device welded itself, and it was in place.
He paused at actually activating it, suddenly potently aware that Barricade was watching him. It shouldn’t have affected him. A side effect of this new bond, perhaps. It didn’t matter. Megatron met the stalwart gaze, held it without comment or change, before finally bracing himself and flicking the switch across.
What happened next was bad.
As bad as Cade had anticipated it would be but somehow worse in that he hadn’t been prepared to feel it as well – like a fist closing around his own spark chamber he became aware suddenly of what Megatron was doing to himself. He was sectioning off a part of his own spark, extracting from it the influence of the scout, Bumblebee, the Autobot youngling that no one wanted to point out might be the last of the Final Sparked of Cybertron in this fragging galaxy. Megatron was <i>dissecting his own soul</i> for Bumblebee’s signature and Cade didn’t have to do it to know that cutting off your arm from the elbow down , pulling your own optics from your skull, could not be as horrific as this.
“Frag!”
Barricade lunged forward as the warlord began to seize. He had no weight to pin down a mech Megatron’s size but the warlord’s armor was partially retracted and Cade had no problem darting around him, grabbing the bigger mech from behind and punching a charged fist directly into a sensory cluster at the back of his neck, stun-locking extremities and stopping the reactive thrashing before it became too much for Cade to handle. He looped an arm around the Decepticon leader, putting him in an immobilizing grip, arm locked around his neck. Cade’s face ducked against the other Cybertronian’s helm, near his audio, whispering. “Not this way, you son of glitch. Don’t you fragging dare…”
There was a high whine and then a silent flash as the partition slammed into place, and then the phase shifter was only maintaining the divide - not wrenching it further. Megatron was acutely aware of Barricade’s iron grip on him, his helm pressing against his, and it was distracting enough to draw his mind away from the residual-shock trembling that rattled his plates despite his efforts to still it. His spark ached with pressure, but it was a feeling he could adjust to. He would have to.
He tried to lift a hand to take Barricade’s wrist, still tight against him, and found that the stunning blow was still in effect. His vents were still firing rapid and out of sync, which was having minor cascade effects throughout his systems as they struggled to get back into normal parameters. Not trusting his vocaliser just yet, and not willing to see if the spark bond was capable of speaking through right now, Megatron settled for his internal comm. ::<i>The scanner?</i>::
Barricade’s optics flicked to scanner, gripped in the fist locked into his elbow. “Orange,” he hissed, trying to ignore the thready pulse of panic in his own spark, unfamiliar with this kind of slag. This wasn’t a soldier’s work. This wasn’t part of his function and Barricade hated that feeling. “It’s still orange, how long does this thing take?”
Megatron shuttered his optics with a harsh ex-vent, trying to force the system back into a proper rhythm. It wasn’t entirely successful, though he felt less like he was dangerously overheating now. ::<i>Not long. Spark has to settle enough to get a reading, then it’s quick. Frag, move your arm.</i>
Cade loosened his grip to a one-armed kind of hold, not a restraint any longer so much as proximity and tactile presence. His other servo, the one not holding the scanner, shifted to the back of Megatron’s neck, directly at a seam where the armor gapped. At this range Cade could put his fist through the breach, rip out the motor function relays there and paralyze the other mech. If that scanner went red he would do it, cripple the warlord so he could not move when Barricade proceeded, directly after, to put his fist through his chest and rip his spark into ether.
That would be quick. He’d make it quick then allow himself to go some measure of insane. “Still orange,” whispered Barricade, EM field flaring desperate. “C’mon…”
The device was pulsing slightly, faster and faster in rhythm with the frequency of the energy field it was scanning, reaching a hummingbird hum before, finally, it fell into perfect synchronicity with the large mech’s systems. With the phase displacement device integrated and the spark it held a splinter of soul away from settled, the scanner’s display went dark. A beat. Cade waited for the verse to end and thought suddenly about a Bot he’d seen once after Barricade killed his partner – standing there on the field with hollow optics. He’d watched that mech unseal his own spark and purge himself right there on the field, the flash and burst of a soul going super nova of its own accord, shredded to dust by despair with no description…
And then the scanner turned green.
Megatron couldn’t see the scanner, which made the already long wait for it to change colour and the result be fed to him by Barricade drag out into its own kind of eternity. He knew the result from the feel of the infiltrator’s hand on the back of his neck, however: fingers ready to crush and tear withdrawing from where his armour had left him deliberately exposed and vulnerable.
The tremors had largely subsided now, and his systems were compensating quickly to overcome the immobilising strike. Megatron knew better than to try to sit up and away from Barricade, though, and remained where he was semi-held against the warm, reassuring physical body of his semi-sparkmate. It figured: one complicated mess resolved and immediately another one begins to threaten on the horizon.
He had no solid notion of how Barricade would take this bond in the face of his termination being avoided. Not after it had always been Barricade of the two of them who had pushed the hardest to ‘wait’. Though he largely agreed with Barricade’s vehement concerns, Megatron still felt at times that the infiltrator was being uncharacteristically cautious. And now he’d been the one to initiate a bond. Though perhaps, Megatron conceded with an odd contraction in his newly-mutilated spark, it may have only been because, deep down, Barricade was expecting this to fail; that the bonding would be a final gesture rather than the restricted level of commitment they were capable of having.
Exhaustion swamped into his systems suddenly and unbridled, as if his every fibre knew that it was now, finally, safe to recharge. The scout wouldn’t see anything that would jeopardise the Decepticons, and his mind would be his own again. Rather than say any of this aloud, though, he rested his hand over Barricade’s on his chassis as soon as he had the ability to move the limb again. “Well then,” he uttered, voice underscored with static. There was nothing else he could say; not when confronted with the curious desire to lie down properly and drag Barricade against his aching chassis before he slipped into a direly needed and repeated recharge cycle.
“Crisis averted,” muttered Barricade in a would-be cavalier tone of voice. He shifted his position from crouching behind the other mech and slid off the berth, pedes not making a sound as he hit the floor and moved to dim the lights in the room. He very carefully did not look up until he’d finished and settling in leaning against Megatron’s desk as if for a very long wait. His optics glowed red in the darkness, dim and unreadable. “Recharge and recover.” The infiltrator’s EM field flickered and though the shadows hid the nature of his facial expression, he doubted that the warlord needed to see him anymore to know what he was thinking. “I’ll be here.”
Before he could respond, Megatron felt himself succumbing to the numerous protocols filling his systems with the need to rest, finally, and recover. Barricade’s field/spark/being was... too much to deal with when his processor was already halfway shut down for recharge without his control. It could wait until later, because now there would be a later. Though what Barricade felt about there being a future for him was treacherously beyond his guess. Ultimately, he fell still and silent on the berth within seconds, falling into undisturbed oblivion.