Arcee/Ironhide interactions - Chasing Barricade
Jan 31, 2012 18:16:41 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Jan 31, 2012 18:16:41 GMT -5
Ironhide
Monitor duty. What the slag. However necessary it was, it had to be the single most boring job in the universe and given the small size of their current unit,everyone had to take a turn. Sharing it with Arcee wasn’t so bad either. She was a cute little thing and feisty as they came, but rather focused on her duties. That was when the distress signal started pinging.
The dark warrior nudged the two-wheeler with a hand to her elbow. “Check this out. Distress beacon outside’a town. Call someone t’cover these damn monitors and we go check it out?” Ironhide was dying to get out of the base and away from desk duty. This provided a perfectly legit opportunity, provided his impromptu partner was ready to go. Given what he’d read in her personnel file, the warrior didn’t think that she would say “no.”
Arcee
Arcee teetered sideways from the non-to-gentle hand of the massive Autobot grabbing for her attention to the source of the pinging, sending a glare towards the old warrior. Turning her gaze, the blue femme scanned over the beacon’s signal while temporarily ignoring the warrior’s obvious impatience.
“Odd, the beacon is Autobot in origin, but doesn’t match any of our individual beacon signatures,” Arcee said, optic ridges furrowed deeply in her analysis. She summoned up a topographical map briefly to determine the nearest safe insertion point for the ground bridge. “Well, only one way to find out, I suppose,” she smirked in response to Ironhide’s half question/statement.
Opening a comlink channel, Arcee called out, “Hey, Bulkhead! Get your wide aft over to the control room for monitor duty. Ironhide and I are heading out for recon.”
The motorcycle cringed as she accidentally slipped out the affectionate, if derogative, nickname for her old partner and the bittersweet memories of the mech who pinned the name on Tailgate. Arcee shook the memory off, refusing to dwell on history at the present time.
Arcee’s spark thrummed with an underlying eagerness. She didn’t know Ironhide well, considering they had never served on the same the unit together before. Only the stories preceding Ironhide through the Autobot ranks provided any hint at what she might expect in this outing.
Activating the ground bridge, she primed her left arm blaster with a whining charge and turned to face Ironhide, “What do you say, old timer, ready to blow this popsicle stand?”
Ironhide
The glare Arcee shot his way bounced right off the big warrior, but he did enjoy her reaction. It could only have been better if it had been accompanied by some kind of smartass remark. Ironhide always enjoyed those. “Tha’s why we need t’go and check it out,” he replied with a completely straight face, unable to hold it steady when the little femme smirked back.
There was a tiny flare of curiosity over just what the tiny femme was shaking off, but that was for another time and place. Every soldier had their history, their traumas, and their secrets. The two of them didn’t know each other well enough yet to even consider divulging such intel like that.
An eager grin stretched his faceplating as he followed the blue femme to the groundbridge that she was already cranking up. “Let’s roll, baby.” And they were off.
Arcee
Racing through the swirling vortex of the ground bridge, the two Autobots hustled towards the miniscule opening visible at the end of the stretched out tunnel way. The scene growing before them showed little other than vague silhouettes of towering illogical constructs. The darkness of night covered their intended destination like a blanket preventing a clear view of what awaited them ahead.
Arcee and Ironhide halted to an abrupt stop upon touching down on hard earth, the groundbridge slurping shut behind them. Arcee immediately transformed, sensors alert for trouble as she surveyed their surroundings. The now obvious piles of scrap rose around her, continuing to obstruct her view. Arcee huffed. Sometimes it simply did not pay to be small.
Old habits die hard, Arcee rushed ahead of Ironhide to take the point to scout the situation without a word. She stretched her pedes over the uneven ground and bounded up the nearest trash heap. Scanning from her bird’s eye view, the femme surveyed the sprawling junkyard before her, not ready for the sight meeting her optics.
Arcee froze. She knew it would have to happen eventually. Especially, since her revealing conversation with Bumblebee the day before.
Knowing did not help in the least.
Six.
Time slowed down for Arcee, her optics widen, limbs stabilizing her body on her precarious perch.
Countless centuries passed and her Six stood less then two hundred yards away from her current position. Her old teammate Six now poised on ending the human life now in his claws.
Old habitats died hard once again as Arcee proceeded to bellow out the snark-lecturing tone she always reserved for her SCAT Unit’s wayward infiltrator. Only no humor echoed in her strained vocals this time.
“BARRICADE!”
Barricade
It should have worried the infiltrator that the first thing he felt when Arcee yelled his name – sub-sonics striated with rage, with disbelief, with familiar honorifics for horror – was anticipation. Barricade decided after a split second to examine the emotion that it was the same anticipation you felt coming home to someplace you loved and it occurred to him he’d forgotten that feeling during the course of several million years of war; leave it to the two-wheeler to survive the war and carry their shared history half-way round the verse to some junk yard in Jasper, Nevada.
“Arcee?”
Barricade stood up, leaving the human as forgotten and moving toward the familiar blue-armored femme, combat systems non-reactive within him as optical sensors preoccupied themselves with the long-lost task of looking at his former teammate. She still had that tiny frame-type that got her in and out of so much slag in combat – built so slender she became a paradox in combat. How anything that delicate could destroy so thoroughly on the field: skeptics on this account had held her back in the enforcer ranks for centuries. Barricade knew better.
He hit her with an old SCAT frequency, long dead with disuse, but still there. ::I thought you were…::
And then Cade saw Ironhide come around the junkpile and his thinking reversed instantaneously to fight or flight, deduced that his getting even with Bluestreak would have to wait and seeing how Shadowrunner hadn’t designed to show for this outing there was nothing but a ghost of camaraderie keeping him here. Not enough to hold him. Barricade cut his comm with Arcee and promptly collapsed into his alt mode and ripped out of the parking lot toward the warehousing section of the junkyards, looking to lose the Bots among the buildings.
Ironhide
“Impetuous” had been the word most liberally scattered through Arcee’s file, and she lived up to every syllable of it. Before he could even protest, the small femme had transformed and raced up a trash pile and then bellowed the name of the exact mech that had been the focus of the skeleton plans that had been drawn up in the wake of Bumblebee’s reveal. Using the distraction she provided, the big warrior transformed and cycled his cannons up, sticking hard to the piles of scrapped vehicles to use what cover they would grant a mech of his size. ::I’m comin’ up on yer left Arcee, an’ gimme a heads up…::
Ironhide’s comm cut itself short as he rounded the pile and saw Barricade just standing there staring at Arcee as a human took off running, yelling for Bluestreak. A chill speared through the old warrior’s spark(because if Bluestreak wasn’t already shooting at a Decepticon, something had to have happened to hir) and he fired off a pair of plasma shots at the Decepticon who’d actually pulled a smart move and hightailed it out of there upon sight of him. He continued to fire on Barricade as long as he had line of sight, the superheated plasma melting through the junk and discarded wrecks.
::Arcee, we may have a bot down, I’mma comm Blue and get the sitch. Can you track Barricade?::,finally ceasing fire when the ‘Con had rounded a corner out of range. He was loathe to let the femme out of his sight, especially with a dangerous ‘Con in the area, but there was no way around the fact that they would need to handle both problems simultaneously. Arcee obviously knew the mech previously so she had tactical advantage there, and her smaller size would give her an easier time of navigating the tight corridors of the junkyard. He waited a few beats for the femme’s reply before opening a comm-link on Bluestreak’s personal frequency.
::Blue, what’s doin’, bit?::, rough voice calm, but the gravel of it a shade or two thicker for his worry.
Arcee
The old channel hung open between them briefly until Barricade finally spoke as she willed her pulsating spark to a calmer pace. Arcee focused her concentration to the present, letting go of the past was always difficult. Her Prime needed her. Her teammates needed her.
::I thought you were…:: Same here you, sneak, thought Arcee. Certainly would have made things easier for one of them if that had been the case. The eternity hanging between their optics snapped as Arcee heard Ironhide’s radioed approach and Barricade dropped into his alt. mode, scurrying away from the black warrior’s cannon blasts.
“Scrap!,” Snarled Arcee, optics following Barricade’s exhaust and quickly calculating the infiltrator’s probable route. The femme surfed down the trash pile and leaped gracefully to the ground to transform fluidly to motorcycle.
::Arcee, we may have a bot down, I’mma comm Blue and get the sitch. Can you track Barricade?::
::Copy that, Ironhide, I can and will. Just hurry up and back me as soon as you can, old timer. ‘Cade’s too much of an oil-slick hydro-weasel for one bot to bring in.:: Data bits filtering through the Autobot channel transferred the steely edge and bitterness of Arcee’s words.
Leaving behind her Autobot companion, Arcee considered hard and fast the inner workings of the devious ‘con’s processor and remembering the direction Barricade was heading. Arcee knew immediately ‘Cade was attempting to lose all pursuit in the complex labyrinths of warehouse buildings.
“The deepest, darkest corner with the best view.” Arcee recalled Barricade mentioning once when she casually asked how he always managed to sneak up or evade targets stealthily. The blue femme decided to do the same in order to out flank him.
Entering the warehouse zone, Arcee burst out of vehicle mode, grabbed a roof ledge, and arched her light body onto the warehouse roof creating little noise for a being made of metal. With impossible agility, Arcee clambered across the decaying structure to the opposite end, skidding to an abrupt, but quiet halt. Listening, the femme audios traced the approximate location of an engine in over drive and head lights bouncing off building walls. Ahead, the motorcycle discerned a busy highway which Barricade could very well blend into.
Pushing up onto her pedes, the femme hustled across the uneven surface with impeccable balance, remaining in the shadows away from the street lamps. Arcee somersaulted and sailed over numerous gaps between buildings in order to catch up and cut off the escaping Barricade. The grace carrying her lithe form was reminiscent of a human gymnast and her limberness displayed in her low crouching landings was almost unheard of among Cybertronians.
Her Six in sight and now approaching her position, Arcee vaulted high into the air with a tight flip and fired two successive shots to blow out Barricade’s front wheels. The two-wheeler landed with a head-over-pede roll to the side of the swerving ‘con, Arcee exchanged for her forearm blades as the infiltrator transformed to root mode.
Holding her ground and refusing to flinch at the sudden close proximity with him, Arcee met his glowing red optics and taunted dangerously, “Been a while since we last dance, eh, ‘cade?”
Barricade
Barricade came into bipedal mode at speed and stopped up short, backing up and circling the two-wheeler. She moved to precisely block the only path that would not force him to loop back toward Ironhide’s energon cannons. He was aware that he’d ditched his close combat plasma blades – left them punched through Bluestreak’s chassis, nailing the mechling to the fragging slagpile far behind him. As he paced slowly to her left, Barricade knew that she must not know yet (that Ironhide had not yet found their teammate brutally broken) if she still had the good-will for gallows humor.
“As I recall, I was better at it,” said Barricade quietly, his Con-red optics flickering across Arcee’s face – cold rage and sleek lines. Exactly as he recalled his Maverick Two, but colder. He should cut and run before the other Bot blew the lid off what he’d done and made the pair of them dangerous in their rage. Ironhide was obviously deadly when enraged but Arcee’s fury tended to hone like a fine blade on a mainline from what he recalled, though he suspected the eons of war may have frayed that fine focus somewhat. That said, he wasn’t willing to gamble.
His battle mask snapped on over the lower half of his face. “Get out of my way, Arcee.”
He didn’t preface further. His right arm reconfigured into a blaster and he opened fire as he darted at her, feinting hard left, he blurred at her, deactivated his blaster and lunged, swinging a lightening fast a blow at her helm. He tried to ignore the sharp hazy sense of familiarity as he engaged his former teammate - trying to remember this was not a sparring match between bored enforcers, the infiltrator vs the melee bot... he needed to intend to kill her.
Arcee
“Get out of my way, Arcee.”
Arcee swayed quickly away from the lunging infiltrator; bring up a bladed arm up from underneath the nearing fist. She barely diverted the blow in time, dampening the impact with a glancing hit rather than direct. Instead, the blue femme stumbled to the side, but quickly regained her solid footing beneath her.
She mentally berated herself for dropping her guard; the verbal sparring the two of them used to share had come to the fore front of her processor and thrown off her battle focus.
Alert. Ready. Never show weakness. Not to Barricade.
Her Six thrived on unpredictability and capitalizing on the slightest possible advantage in a moment’s notice. Arcee narrowed her optics and her small frame tight with tension, waiting for the moment to pounce on the enemy she once called Six.
Normally in the past, Arcee would have tag-teamed with her partner against a dangerous target, but Tailgate wasn’t around to watch her anymore. Instead, Arcee harden herself and pushed her light frame to extremes in order operate sole.
Forward. Never stop. Keep moving. Never let up.
‘Don’t let your opponent see your back’ was the mantra Arcee engrained into her motor functions.
Arcee dashed to Barricade’s right and pulled into a tight tumble to hopefully outmaneuvered him and get to his back side.
“Sorry, ‘cade, I can’t let you go,” Arcee said intently, strained uncertainly leaked through despite her best efforts. The two-wheeler quickly formed her left arm blaster and she fired at his pedes for distraction, while aiming for the back of Barricade’s knee joints with her right arm blade.
‘Not this time.”
Barricade
Forgot how fast she was. Cade was built for speed, a racer model offshoot adapted for law enforcement, programed to protect and serve (though perhaps not as well as his cohort had hoped). But Arcee’s speed wasn’t physical hardware speed it was efficiency of motion. She just knew how to move and as he engaged her, Barricade found himself struggling to keep track of her, just like back on Cybertron. Damn. Cade twisted, dove left as she fired on him, trying to cripple his speed and stop him dead. He evaded the ground shots, but missed her attack on his left leg-strut, took a hit to the back of his knee, felt something sever. Frag!
He hit the ground rolled, spun up fast and lashed at the Autobot’s face, felt her EMF tangle with his in a mess of mixed frequencies, determination, regret, desperation, and he could never get away from that hardline of determination in her EMF. Bright and unrelenting as starshine. She really would not let him go, the same as he really would kill her if he could. Barricade slashed at her again, pushing the attack, ducking and blocking her bladed attacks. She was small enough, if he hit her in the abdominals or unarmored neck cabling, he could sever alloy to energon lines.
He could feel heat and transfluid running down the back of his leg, into the wheel rotor for his pedes. It hurt. He ignored it. “Move!” The infiltrator back handed her shoulder, knocking her down, but fast as she was down, she was back up and blocking him again. He attacked, launching a lightning fast volley of body strikes. His optic flashed furious red. “I swear to Primus, I will kill you, Arcee. I told you I would!”
Arcee
Arcee lunged to side-step Barricade’s volley, only to have a clenched fist impact her left shoulder and send her flying into the warehouse siding. Momentarily dazed and disoriented the two-wheeler staggered to her feet. A single thought penetrated through the hazy fog of her processor. Move. The femme knew Barricade would kill her. The infiltrator never made threats idly, not when he was serious and backed into a corner.
Swaying, the blue femme flexed the shoulder with a wince, not moving her optics away from Barricade. She made another pass at her Six to try and throw him off balance, skirting the outside of his reach.
“What makes you think I’d doubt that for one second, ‘cade?” Arcee retorted, swerving around the ‘con, instigating a game of cat-and-mouse tag. Darting forward and fading back just as quickly with hand springs and leaps, the two-wheeler pushed harder, never taking a moment to favor the stressed shoulder. “Why would I doubt your word when I once trusted you with my back,” Arcee gave with an angered outcry at last.
Barricade
“Because you’re a Bot and you chose it!” Barricade snarled, twisting and ducking away from those razor sharp blades, built silver and deadly into her forearms. He knew her reach precisely, eons of working with her having made him intimately familiar with her style of close combat. He was really missing his plasma blades right now to match her. The infiltrator met her hand-to-hand, juked and swerved, parrying and deflecting her shots at unarmored mainline and hydraulic cables as they attacked each other. He was unarmed but he was bigger than her and almost as fast and brutal in close.
He took a slice to the armor across his chest, slammed an elbow into her chassis, got a kick in the abdominals for it, countered with a backhand so vicious the contact cracked alike a gunshot between them and she cut his upper right arm so deep it hit protoform beneath his armor. He lunged back, a burst of heat and sudden rage terminating through his systems, super-heating already hot mechanisms.
“Don’t pretend I had the option of being open with you and the others. Back then, on Cyberton.” Red optics flashed angrily. “The moment I told you where my loyalties laid I knew what you and Tailgate would have done. Don’t pretend otherwise!”
Arcee
“Pretend!” Arcee shrieked. “Was Maverick just a gig for you played along with, eh , Six?”
Arcee slashed her blade with an upper cut, cracking his chin with her trembling fist, and drawing a long thin cut in the wake of her blade. Barricade uttered a grunt of pain, but not slowly down a bit and slammed his fist together into the small of her back, sending Arcee sprawling to the ground.
The down melee fighter rounded away, escaping the impact zone of the Barricade’s power legs, and lifting her upper body up with straining limbs. She released a barrage of laser fire across his chest to buy precious seconds to recover. The stressed joints groaned in their forced movement as Arcee drove herself harder as her own anger and restraint finally gave completely.
“You were a ‘Con long before ‘Gate or I ever joined the Autobots,” she forced out, old emotions and thoughts long buried, slipped out unintentionally. “Why did you always come back or stay with Maverick for so long? Was anything that was between the team real or was that just an act you put on for the rest of us slaggin’ glitches? I actually denied you having connections with the increasing riots, when I was questioned by our superiors.”
“Besides what else did you expect Tailgate and me to do, when you finally did tell us?” Arcee roared painfully. Her engine whining with keening pitch as the blue femme surged with lethal trajectory towards the spot Barricade’s spark laid hidden underneath his armor. “After <i>he</i> died in the riot bombings on the Towers!”
Barricade
“Shut up!” Barricade snarled, giving himself happily over to his rage, pure and honest and nothing like his usual approach to emotion. Cade was sideways, was crooked, was double-talk and backhanded but with Arcee there wasn’t any need for that because the semantics of their conflict were laid out in shivering black and red. “I’ve done a lot of fragging slag for the Decepticons.” He hissed, jerking back as Arcee’s servo glanced off a seam in his flank., A spark-strike. Cade narrowed his optics. “I don’t regret a single action. I chose every slaggin’ path, I’ve done some hideous things, and I’d do them again but I never did that!”
The infiltrator punctuated his shout with a vicious elbow strike to the femme’s helm. He followed her, lunged at her, tackled her to the floor, grabbed her wrists and pinned her. “I didn’t kill K-9!” You have no idea how true that is. His voice crackled with static and rage. “Frag you, Arcee!”
Arcee
“Frag you, Arcee!”
More then the physical hit was making her processor reeling. She somehow knew Barricade couldn’t speak truer then he did in that he didn’t kill K-9. A piece of closure granted Arcee some peace to the past between her and Barricade, but did little to circumvent her hatred towards the Decepticon cause and its leader.
She thrashed under the iron-clad grip, optics fritzing from the latest blow. Arcee bit down on the panic starting to rise and threatening to overwhelm her senses. She could not break free.
If the back up didn’t get their skidplates in high-gear, the femme knew she would be seeing Tailgate and Cliffjumper in the Well of the All-Spark soon enough.
“You’re right, ‘Cade. I am a fraggin’ idiot.” She grunted strainly, putting forth a desperate final measure to delay the infiltrator. “But I don’t have any regrets for being an Autobot, either!”
Arcee threw open her comm. channel wide, “<i>IRONHIDE!</i>”
Monitor duty. What the slag. However necessary it was, it had to be the single most boring job in the universe and given the small size of their current unit,everyone had to take a turn. Sharing it with Arcee wasn’t so bad either. She was a cute little thing and feisty as they came, but rather focused on her duties. That was when the distress signal started pinging.
The dark warrior nudged the two-wheeler with a hand to her elbow. “Check this out. Distress beacon outside’a town. Call someone t’cover these damn monitors and we go check it out?” Ironhide was dying to get out of the base and away from desk duty. This provided a perfectly legit opportunity, provided his impromptu partner was ready to go. Given what he’d read in her personnel file, the warrior didn’t think that she would say “no.”
Arcee
Arcee teetered sideways from the non-to-gentle hand of the massive Autobot grabbing for her attention to the source of the pinging, sending a glare towards the old warrior. Turning her gaze, the blue femme scanned over the beacon’s signal while temporarily ignoring the warrior’s obvious impatience.
“Odd, the beacon is Autobot in origin, but doesn’t match any of our individual beacon signatures,” Arcee said, optic ridges furrowed deeply in her analysis. She summoned up a topographical map briefly to determine the nearest safe insertion point for the ground bridge. “Well, only one way to find out, I suppose,” she smirked in response to Ironhide’s half question/statement.
Opening a comlink channel, Arcee called out, “Hey, Bulkhead! Get your wide aft over to the control room for monitor duty. Ironhide and I are heading out for recon.”
The motorcycle cringed as she accidentally slipped out the affectionate, if derogative, nickname for her old partner and the bittersweet memories of the mech who pinned the name on Tailgate. Arcee shook the memory off, refusing to dwell on history at the present time.
Arcee’s spark thrummed with an underlying eagerness. She didn’t know Ironhide well, considering they had never served on the same the unit together before. Only the stories preceding Ironhide through the Autobot ranks provided any hint at what she might expect in this outing.
Activating the ground bridge, she primed her left arm blaster with a whining charge and turned to face Ironhide, “What do you say, old timer, ready to blow this popsicle stand?”
Ironhide
The glare Arcee shot his way bounced right off the big warrior, but he did enjoy her reaction. It could only have been better if it had been accompanied by some kind of smartass remark. Ironhide always enjoyed those. “Tha’s why we need t’go and check it out,” he replied with a completely straight face, unable to hold it steady when the little femme smirked back.
There was a tiny flare of curiosity over just what the tiny femme was shaking off, but that was for another time and place. Every soldier had their history, their traumas, and their secrets. The two of them didn’t know each other well enough yet to even consider divulging such intel like that.
An eager grin stretched his faceplating as he followed the blue femme to the groundbridge that she was already cranking up. “Let’s roll, baby.” And they were off.
Arcee
Racing through the swirling vortex of the ground bridge, the two Autobots hustled towards the miniscule opening visible at the end of the stretched out tunnel way. The scene growing before them showed little other than vague silhouettes of towering illogical constructs. The darkness of night covered their intended destination like a blanket preventing a clear view of what awaited them ahead.
Arcee and Ironhide halted to an abrupt stop upon touching down on hard earth, the groundbridge slurping shut behind them. Arcee immediately transformed, sensors alert for trouble as she surveyed their surroundings. The now obvious piles of scrap rose around her, continuing to obstruct her view. Arcee huffed. Sometimes it simply did not pay to be small.
Old habits die hard, Arcee rushed ahead of Ironhide to take the point to scout the situation without a word. She stretched her pedes over the uneven ground and bounded up the nearest trash heap. Scanning from her bird’s eye view, the femme surveyed the sprawling junkyard before her, not ready for the sight meeting her optics.
Arcee froze. She knew it would have to happen eventually. Especially, since her revealing conversation with Bumblebee the day before.
Knowing did not help in the least.
Six.
Time slowed down for Arcee, her optics widen, limbs stabilizing her body on her precarious perch.
Countless centuries passed and her Six stood less then two hundred yards away from her current position. Her old teammate Six now poised on ending the human life now in his claws.
Old habitats died hard once again as Arcee proceeded to bellow out the snark-lecturing tone she always reserved for her SCAT Unit’s wayward infiltrator. Only no humor echoed in her strained vocals this time.
“BARRICADE!”
Barricade
It should have worried the infiltrator that the first thing he felt when Arcee yelled his name – sub-sonics striated with rage, with disbelief, with familiar honorifics for horror – was anticipation. Barricade decided after a split second to examine the emotion that it was the same anticipation you felt coming home to someplace you loved and it occurred to him he’d forgotten that feeling during the course of several million years of war; leave it to the two-wheeler to survive the war and carry their shared history half-way round the verse to some junk yard in Jasper, Nevada.
“Arcee?”
Barricade stood up, leaving the human as forgotten and moving toward the familiar blue-armored femme, combat systems non-reactive within him as optical sensors preoccupied themselves with the long-lost task of looking at his former teammate. She still had that tiny frame-type that got her in and out of so much slag in combat – built so slender she became a paradox in combat. How anything that delicate could destroy so thoroughly on the field: skeptics on this account had held her back in the enforcer ranks for centuries. Barricade knew better.
He hit her with an old SCAT frequency, long dead with disuse, but still there. ::I thought you were…::
And then Cade saw Ironhide come around the junkpile and his thinking reversed instantaneously to fight or flight, deduced that his getting even with Bluestreak would have to wait and seeing how Shadowrunner hadn’t designed to show for this outing there was nothing but a ghost of camaraderie keeping him here. Not enough to hold him. Barricade cut his comm with Arcee and promptly collapsed into his alt mode and ripped out of the parking lot toward the warehousing section of the junkyards, looking to lose the Bots among the buildings.
Ironhide
“Impetuous” had been the word most liberally scattered through Arcee’s file, and she lived up to every syllable of it. Before he could even protest, the small femme had transformed and raced up a trash pile and then bellowed the name of the exact mech that had been the focus of the skeleton plans that had been drawn up in the wake of Bumblebee’s reveal. Using the distraction she provided, the big warrior transformed and cycled his cannons up, sticking hard to the piles of scrapped vehicles to use what cover they would grant a mech of his size. ::I’m comin’ up on yer left Arcee, an’ gimme a heads up…::
Ironhide’s comm cut itself short as he rounded the pile and saw Barricade just standing there staring at Arcee as a human took off running, yelling for Bluestreak. A chill speared through the old warrior’s spark(because if Bluestreak wasn’t already shooting at a Decepticon, something had to have happened to hir) and he fired off a pair of plasma shots at the Decepticon who’d actually pulled a smart move and hightailed it out of there upon sight of him. He continued to fire on Barricade as long as he had line of sight, the superheated plasma melting through the junk and discarded wrecks.
::Arcee, we may have a bot down, I’mma comm Blue and get the sitch. Can you track Barricade?::,finally ceasing fire when the ‘Con had rounded a corner out of range. He was loathe to let the femme out of his sight, especially with a dangerous ‘Con in the area, but there was no way around the fact that they would need to handle both problems simultaneously. Arcee obviously knew the mech previously so she had tactical advantage there, and her smaller size would give her an easier time of navigating the tight corridors of the junkyard. He waited a few beats for the femme’s reply before opening a comm-link on Bluestreak’s personal frequency.
::Blue, what’s doin’, bit?::, rough voice calm, but the gravel of it a shade or two thicker for his worry.
Arcee
The old channel hung open between them briefly until Barricade finally spoke as she willed her pulsating spark to a calmer pace. Arcee focused her concentration to the present, letting go of the past was always difficult. Her Prime needed her. Her teammates needed her.
::I thought you were…:: Same here you, sneak, thought Arcee. Certainly would have made things easier for one of them if that had been the case. The eternity hanging between their optics snapped as Arcee heard Ironhide’s radioed approach and Barricade dropped into his alt. mode, scurrying away from the black warrior’s cannon blasts.
“Scrap!,” Snarled Arcee, optics following Barricade’s exhaust and quickly calculating the infiltrator’s probable route. The femme surfed down the trash pile and leaped gracefully to the ground to transform fluidly to motorcycle.
::Arcee, we may have a bot down, I’mma comm Blue and get the sitch. Can you track Barricade?::
::Copy that, Ironhide, I can and will. Just hurry up and back me as soon as you can, old timer. ‘Cade’s too much of an oil-slick hydro-weasel for one bot to bring in.:: Data bits filtering through the Autobot channel transferred the steely edge and bitterness of Arcee’s words.
Leaving behind her Autobot companion, Arcee considered hard and fast the inner workings of the devious ‘con’s processor and remembering the direction Barricade was heading. Arcee knew immediately ‘Cade was attempting to lose all pursuit in the complex labyrinths of warehouse buildings.
“The deepest, darkest corner with the best view.” Arcee recalled Barricade mentioning once when she casually asked how he always managed to sneak up or evade targets stealthily. The blue femme decided to do the same in order to out flank him.
Entering the warehouse zone, Arcee burst out of vehicle mode, grabbed a roof ledge, and arched her light body onto the warehouse roof creating little noise for a being made of metal. With impossible agility, Arcee clambered across the decaying structure to the opposite end, skidding to an abrupt, but quiet halt. Listening, the femme audios traced the approximate location of an engine in over drive and head lights bouncing off building walls. Ahead, the motorcycle discerned a busy highway which Barricade could very well blend into.
Pushing up onto her pedes, the femme hustled across the uneven surface with impeccable balance, remaining in the shadows away from the street lamps. Arcee somersaulted and sailed over numerous gaps between buildings in order to catch up and cut off the escaping Barricade. The grace carrying her lithe form was reminiscent of a human gymnast and her limberness displayed in her low crouching landings was almost unheard of among Cybertronians.
Her Six in sight and now approaching her position, Arcee vaulted high into the air with a tight flip and fired two successive shots to blow out Barricade’s front wheels. The two-wheeler landed with a head-over-pede roll to the side of the swerving ‘con, Arcee exchanged for her forearm blades as the infiltrator transformed to root mode.
Holding her ground and refusing to flinch at the sudden close proximity with him, Arcee met his glowing red optics and taunted dangerously, “Been a while since we last dance, eh, ‘cade?”
Barricade
Barricade came into bipedal mode at speed and stopped up short, backing up and circling the two-wheeler. She moved to precisely block the only path that would not force him to loop back toward Ironhide’s energon cannons. He was aware that he’d ditched his close combat plasma blades – left them punched through Bluestreak’s chassis, nailing the mechling to the fragging slagpile far behind him. As he paced slowly to her left, Barricade knew that she must not know yet (that Ironhide had not yet found their teammate brutally broken) if she still had the good-will for gallows humor.
“As I recall, I was better at it,” said Barricade quietly, his Con-red optics flickering across Arcee’s face – cold rage and sleek lines. Exactly as he recalled his Maverick Two, but colder. He should cut and run before the other Bot blew the lid off what he’d done and made the pair of them dangerous in their rage. Ironhide was obviously deadly when enraged but Arcee’s fury tended to hone like a fine blade on a mainline from what he recalled, though he suspected the eons of war may have frayed that fine focus somewhat. That said, he wasn’t willing to gamble.
His battle mask snapped on over the lower half of his face. “Get out of my way, Arcee.”
He didn’t preface further. His right arm reconfigured into a blaster and he opened fire as he darted at her, feinting hard left, he blurred at her, deactivated his blaster and lunged, swinging a lightening fast a blow at her helm. He tried to ignore the sharp hazy sense of familiarity as he engaged his former teammate - trying to remember this was not a sparring match between bored enforcers, the infiltrator vs the melee bot... he needed to intend to kill her.
Arcee
“Get out of my way, Arcee.”
Arcee swayed quickly away from the lunging infiltrator; bring up a bladed arm up from underneath the nearing fist. She barely diverted the blow in time, dampening the impact with a glancing hit rather than direct. Instead, the blue femme stumbled to the side, but quickly regained her solid footing beneath her.
She mentally berated herself for dropping her guard; the verbal sparring the two of them used to share had come to the fore front of her processor and thrown off her battle focus.
Alert. Ready. Never show weakness. Not to Barricade.
Her Six thrived on unpredictability and capitalizing on the slightest possible advantage in a moment’s notice. Arcee narrowed her optics and her small frame tight with tension, waiting for the moment to pounce on the enemy she once called Six.
Normally in the past, Arcee would have tag-teamed with her partner against a dangerous target, but Tailgate wasn’t around to watch her anymore. Instead, Arcee harden herself and pushed her light frame to extremes in order operate sole.
Forward. Never stop. Keep moving. Never let up.
‘Don’t let your opponent see your back’ was the mantra Arcee engrained into her motor functions.
Arcee dashed to Barricade’s right and pulled into a tight tumble to hopefully outmaneuvered him and get to his back side.
“Sorry, ‘cade, I can’t let you go,” Arcee said intently, strained uncertainly leaked through despite her best efforts. The two-wheeler quickly formed her left arm blaster and she fired at his pedes for distraction, while aiming for the back of Barricade’s knee joints with her right arm blade.
‘Not this time.”
Barricade
Forgot how fast she was. Cade was built for speed, a racer model offshoot adapted for law enforcement, programed to protect and serve (though perhaps not as well as his cohort had hoped). But Arcee’s speed wasn’t physical hardware speed it was efficiency of motion. She just knew how to move and as he engaged her, Barricade found himself struggling to keep track of her, just like back on Cybertron. Damn. Cade twisted, dove left as she fired on him, trying to cripple his speed and stop him dead. He evaded the ground shots, but missed her attack on his left leg-strut, took a hit to the back of his knee, felt something sever. Frag!
He hit the ground rolled, spun up fast and lashed at the Autobot’s face, felt her EMF tangle with his in a mess of mixed frequencies, determination, regret, desperation, and he could never get away from that hardline of determination in her EMF. Bright and unrelenting as starshine. She really would not let him go, the same as he really would kill her if he could. Barricade slashed at her again, pushing the attack, ducking and blocking her bladed attacks. She was small enough, if he hit her in the abdominals or unarmored neck cabling, he could sever alloy to energon lines.
He could feel heat and transfluid running down the back of his leg, into the wheel rotor for his pedes. It hurt. He ignored it. “Move!” The infiltrator back handed her shoulder, knocking her down, but fast as she was down, she was back up and blocking him again. He attacked, launching a lightning fast volley of body strikes. His optic flashed furious red. “I swear to Primus, I will kill you, Arcee. I told you I would!”
Arcee
Arcee lunged to side-step Barricade’s volley, only to have a clenched fist impact her left shoulder and send her flying into the warehouse siding. Momentarily dazed and disoriented the two-wheeler staggered to her feet. A single thought penetrated through the hazy fog of her processor. Move. The femme knew Barricade would kill her. The infiltrator never made threats idly, not when he was serious and backed into a corner.
Swaying, the blue femme flexed the shoulder with a wince, not moving her optics away from Barricade. She made another pass at her Six to try and throw him off balance, skirting the outside of his reach.
“What makes you think I’d doubt that for one second, ‘cade?” Arcee retorted, swerving around the ‘con, instigating a game of cat-and-mouse tag. Darting forward and fading back just as quickly with hand springs and leaps, the two-wheeler pushed harder, never taking a moment to favor the stressed shoulder. “Why would I doubt your word when I once trusted you with my back,” Arcee gave with an angered outcry at last.
Barricade
“Because you’re a Bot and you chose it!” Barricade snarled, twisting and ducking away from those razor sharp blades, built silver and deadly into her forearms. He knew her reach precisely, eons of working with her having made him intimately familiar with her style of close combat. He was really missing his plasma blades right now to match her. The infiltrator met her hand-to-hand, juked and swerved, parrying and deflecting her shots at unarmored mainline and hydraulic cables as they attacked each other. He was unarmed but he was bigger than her and almost as fast and brutal in close.
He took a slice to the armor across his chest, slammed an elbow into her chassis, got a kick in the abdominals for it, countered with a backhand so vicious the contact cracked alike a gunshot between them and she cut his upper right arm so deep it hit protoform beneath his armor. He lunged back, a burst of heat and sudden rage terminating through his systems, super-heating already hot mechanisms.
“Don’t pretend I had the option of being open with you and the others. Back then, on Cyberton.” Red optics flashed angrily. “The moment I told you where my loyalties laid I knew what you and Tailgate would have done. Don’t pretend otherwise!”
Arcee
“Pretend!” Arcee shrieked. “Was Maverick just a gig for you played along with, eh , Six?”
Arcee slashed her blade with an upper cut, cracking his chin with her trembling fist, and drawing a long thin cut in the wake of her blade. Barricade uttered a grunt of pain, but not slowly down a bit and slammed his fist together into the small of her back, sending Arcee sprawling to the ground.
The down melee fighter rounded away, escaping the impact zone of the Barricade’s power legs, and lifting her upper body up with straining limbs. She released a barrage of laser fire across his chest to buy precious seconds to recover. The stressed joints groaned in their forced movement as Arcee drove herself harder as her own anger and restraint finally gave completely.
“You were a ‘Con long before ‘Gate or I ever joined the Autobots,” she forced out, old emotions and thoughts long buried, slipped out unintentionally. “Why did you always come back or stay with Maverick for so long? Was anything that was between the team real or was that just an act you put on for the rest of us slaggin’ glitches? I actually denied you having connections with the increasing riots, when I was questioned by our superiors.”
“Besides what else did you expect Tailgate and me to do, when you finally did tell us?” Arcee roared painfully. Her engine whining with keening pitch as the blue femme surged with lethal trajectory towards the spot Barricade’s spark laid hidden underneath his armor. “After <i>he</i> died in the riot bombings on the Towers!”
Barricade
“Shut up!” Barricade snarled, giving himself happily over to his rage, pure and honest and nothing like his usual approach to emotion. Cade was sideways, was crooked, was double-talk and backhanded but with Arcee there wasn’t any need for that because the semantics of their conflict were laid out in shivering black and red. “I’ve done a lot of fragging slag for the Decepticons.” He hissed, jerking back as Arcee’s servo glanced off a seam in his flank., A spark-strike. Cade narrowed his optics. “I don’t regret a single action. I chose every slaggin’ path, I’ve done some hideous things, and I’d do them again but I never did that!”
The infiltrator punctuated his shout with a vicious elbow strike to the femme’s helm. He followed her, lunged at her, tackled her to the floor, grabbed her wrists and pinned her. “I didn’t kill K-9!” You have no idea how true that is. His voice crackled with static and rage. “Frag you, Arcee!”
Arcee
“Frag you, Arcee!”
More then the physical hit was making her processor reeling. She somehow knew Barricade couldn’t speak truer then he did in that he didn’t kill K-9. A piece of closure granted Arcee some peace to the past between her and Barricade, but did little to circumvent her hatred towards the Decepticon cause and its leader.
She thrashed under the iron-clad grip, optics fritzing from the latest blow. Arcee bit down on the panic starting to rise and threatening to overwhelm her senses. She could not break free.
If the back up didn’t get their skidplates in high-gear, the femme knew she would be seeing Tailgate and Cliffjumper in the Well of the All-Spark soon enough.
“You’re right, ‘Cade. I am a fraggin’ idiot.” She grunted strainly, putting forth a desperate final measure to delay the infiltrator. “But I don’t have any regrets for being an Autobot, either!”
Arcee threw open her comm. channel wide, “<i>IRONHIDE!</i>”