Ep0.5 - Megatron's quarters - 'Persist' - Closed

[Deleted]

Eighteen hours had passed. Eighteen hours since the obliteration of the Fallen ship. Eighteen hours since Fairwinds had gone off-radar with a scream. Eighteen hours since Prime's clawed-for victory.

Eighteen hours, and the wounds still felt raw.

After Knockout had seen to the life-threatening injuries to his chassis in the repair bay, Megatron had retreated still-leaking and with a HUD full of error messages to his chambers. The doctor had made a house call after a generous bracket of time fpr the Decepticon commander's temper to cool, finishing the significant patch and weld work before taking his leave before he was thrown out.

Exhausted and drained in spark and body, Megatron had fallen into a fitful recharge that saw his self-repair systems running at full. When he'd onlined the following day, the gored tears and holes in his chassis, upper arms and thighs were still deep and sharp, but no longer bright with exposed Dark Energon. His processor was pounding, his spark feeling as though it were cracked in two and soaked in bad oil, and surely that femural strut had been welded backwards and at an angle.

And Barricade was stood leaning against the wall, arms crossed and as if he'd just been patiently waiting for his alligned to online his optics all along.

Megatron frowned at the apparition, rumbling a low, dismissive sound that turned sharply into words. "You are not here."

When the glitch didn't obediently blink out, Megatron rolled with a hiss onto his side to give it his back.

[Deleted]

“No, I’m not,” drawled the not-infiltrator from his place apparently against the wall.

Despite this assertion however the hum of his frequency persisted in the room, a waver of electromagnetics in the sensor array that could have been real… or a glitch in the neural-net, sensors feeding false signals, just a ghost in a damaged machine. His voice didn’t match the acoustics of the room, seeming to come from all sides and everywhere instead of from the warlord’s back. As if to correct this there was a flicker, like static on a bad TV, and the dark armored Saleen was standing at the head of the berth, arms braced against the edge of the padded platform.

“Which, personally, is the more disturbing aspect of this whole thing,” he went on, utterly lazily. Red optics glowed in the semi-dark, looking down at the wounded commander before splintering violently and shattering… then they were whole and smirking. A flicker. “But it comforts me that you’re at least aware I’m else wise occupied.” A pause. “And by the way, lest I fade before I get to chance to say it: I did tell you so.”

[Deleted]

With Barricade making an apparent effort to loom over the head of the berth, Megatron couldn't truly avoid looking at him. He didn't do anything as foolish as to reach up and try to touch him, whether to swipe him away or to hold with the ridiculous hope that Barricade was here and real and safe and alive. Instead he felt the lack of heat from the Saleen, the absence where reflected air from his own vents should have been, and the inescapable flicker in his form.

Dryly, wearily, Megatron decided to go along with it for now. Because it was good to hear him again, even if it was just a potent figment. The fact that they were also bickering was perfect. "Alligning was your idea, glitchscrap."

[Deleted]

“No, originally it was your idea,” said Barricade laconically. “Back on Cybertron, remember? But semantics. I still told you it was bad idea, even while I was doing it so as the saying goes – as I say and not as I do.” There was a smug little silence for a moment, the subtle hum of engines that echoed a touch too long or the sync of gears and hydraulics did not quite align. A blitz of static erased him, then replaced him, his armor split open, energon running in corroded rivulets down his abdominal plating – fistfuls of metal ripped from his chest. He tilted his ruined head, still smiling. “Do you regret it?”

He flickered, ripped apart, was whole again but no longer his earth-alt Saleen frame, but the blue-opticed racer bot from Cybertron’s law cohorts. His smirk, however, was identical. “If you had just kept me as your infiltrator and nothing else, you’d be in a less perilous position. You chinked your armor. Prime applied the pressure.” A flicker and he was red-eyed again. “Was it really worth all this?”

[Deleted]

Megatron's processor, in an act of malicious treachery inspired by those horrific flickers, carried on.

Your fault. You got me slagged. Tortured. Ruined. I'd be alive and happy if you hadn't been so weak as to need me.

The warlord sat, legs swinging over the side of the berth, and the pain wasn't as real in his world as Barricade's form was. His voice was a hiss of static and a possessive growl in one. "Who did this to you?"

[Deleted]

“I can’t tell you what you don’t know,” said Barricade, quietly. “I’m not here, remember?” Cade vanished and reappeared directly in front of the warlord, his height level with his while the mech was seated. He leaned forward and for a moment the sensation of heat of his plating was real, the wave of EMF, the sound of engines perfectly in sync… then gone like a sense memory and he flickered violently again. His optics were calm and somewhat wry. “You know that.”

[Deleted]

This glitch had happened a handful of times already, but this was the most intrusive it had ever been. And the most disturbing. Trust his unconscious perception of the Infiltrator to kick him when he was down...

At first it hadn't overly bothered the warlord. Dark Energon had done more than a few unusual things to his perception during the experimental stages, and side effects from introducing the blood of Unicron into his systems were unavoidable. It had strengthened his spark, and as this apparition was of a damaged and missing sparkmate, then it stood to reason that the lost/searching/absent part of his spark would have a stronger manifestation as well.

Right now, however, more battered than he'd been from an encounter with Prime in many vorns, Megatron was not in a fit mood to deal with it.

Claws curled into the edges of the berth, and optics not quite backing the intensity he wanted to look upon Barricade with, Megatron fought to keep his voice level. "I regret nothing. And you will not slip into the Well, because I will not allow it. My spark will not allow it." Then softly, solomnly, the greater promise: "Just as it will not allow anything but your recovery from this."

[Deleted]

“Do you regret it yet?” Barricade asked, optics flickering this time not with static but real inquiry, laced with cold.

He leaned forward, false EMF sliding into Megatron’s, linking and syncing easily to the warlord’s unfathomable wavelengths, braiding into the rhythm of his systems like a line of basecoding. He smiled slowly, his sub-sonics a chord of feedback and broken engine noise – the hideous machine death grind of damaged vital systems. His optics pulsed blue before igniting red again in a snap of static.

“Was it worth it, all of it, to have me completely for less than a cycle?” From his tone he did not seem to think so. “Was I worth it?”

[Deleted]

Megatron hissed at the feel of damage through the spectre's EMF, physically recoiling from it as much as his own field hungrily pulled and caressed. He was all too familiar with the noxious twist of a sparkbound's wounded field, with shared pain and the further agony of utter helplessness. Worse than the feeling of this lover's field which was not there were the words prickling against his audios

How much of this was an unconscious projection, and how much of it was an echo of the imprint on Barricade's personality woven into the ether of his spark? Were these suppressed thoughts that he was refusing to acknowledge and thus were being highlighted by his fracturing mind, or did he know that Barricade would think this? Would be asking the unspoken but painfully obvious question: after whatever horrors had been inflicted upon the Inflitrator, had Megatron been worth it?

As a creature rooted in emotion - fueled and motivated by obsessions, needs, wants and loathings - Megatron knew the answer for himself without a fleck of doubt. He leant forward on the berth, crowding straight into Barricade's intangible faceplates. "I knelt for you." A simple fact, carrying with it all the complexities that had been wrapped into that simple, staggering gesture, demonstrated to no other living Cybertronian and never to happen again.

It had been worth it to him, yet the belief he carried that Barricade had alligned with the same 'all or nothing' intent was shaken. Foolishness, he knew, because this was not Barricade. Only a figment, an irritating glitch thrown up from his own bond-wounded processor.

Megatron slid down from the berth despite his system's insistence that it would really rather not walk yet, making to step clean through the non-mech's form. His voice was flat and decided, an order of a decision. "And I will not indulge in this ridiculousness any more."

[Deleted]

The spectre flickered and flashed from where it stood at the berth, edges gone hazy, EMF coming in and out like a bad radio station in Megatron’s sensor array. At Megatron’s passing, he vanished completely. The warm imprint of the infultrator faded from the airwaves but his voice lingered on as a murmur in the room, coming from… no where, from the warlord’s own plates. He hummed though the Decepticon commander as a bad vibrato, shaking the mech to the struts and sliding into his audios with a slow drag of static so thick it was painful.

“Be specific about ridiculous,” he drawled, half cruel, half agonized. “Because I told you, once, that bonding to me was ridiculous indulgence… or do you mean this?” A low laugh. “The bit where you’re talking to yourself?”

[Deleted]

An enraged snarl and Megatron twisted on the spot to cast his optics about his chambers, seeking out the smirking mech and finding nothing but the same walls. The same berth, desk and chair. Fairwind's cupboard and the frivilous apparatus in front of it. No cassette. No sparkmate. Just Barricade's lurking voice, clawing against his processor and sparkchamber, deep and cold and nauseating.

Another drawled laugh, shredded with static and some high whine of damage. Megatron whirled again, optics flashing purple as the Dark Energon in his lines seared.

"Enough!"

He hadn't intended to fire the cannon, let alone take out the entirity of one wall. Stunned, he stood with his arm still raised from the blast, watching the debris settle and the acrid smoke steadily begin to clear. The rupture opened out into a back corridor, infrequently used as visitors to his private quarters were select and rare. Drones to repair this, came the absent thought as combat subroutines cycled down. Wipe them afterwards if needed.

Dentals gritted and optics shuttered, Megatron dragged a hand down his face, as if the pressure of his talons could stabalise his processor. Warning stats. were beginning to accumulate again, niggling ruptures in Knockout's repairs that would eventually need to be seen to. Certainly the doctor couldn't make a house call now...

[Deleted]

Barricade was laughing. The sound bounced off the walls of the warlord’s room and down the finials of his helm and into the cranial case… or maybe the other way around. “Shoot up the ship I love while I’m gone. Okay. Thanks much. I’m honored.” More laughter, the sound lingered before fading. “Sleep well, commander.” Then it was gone and nothing but the wreckage remained.



((fin?))