This is a sequel to "Rebirth", and a response to a fic meme request for antepathy: "I'm going to be blazingly lame and ask for...(prepare yourself for no surprise at all) Barricade. I'd really like you to do something like, after that fic you wrote, as he adapts to his new body/existence." Which I didn't think was a "lame" request at all. Just that this isn't exactly quite what I bet either of us intended by that request, and it's certainly not a 500-1000 word ficlet, but the idea seized the bit in its teeth and wouldn't say no. So, here it is. Antepathy? I'll work on writing what I think you were actually aiming for once I catch up with the other prompts a bit. Hopefully this will tide you over until then.
I recommend that folks go read her "Echoes", the Barricade stories - "Control" - and then my "Rebirth" before reading this, or else you're going to be pretty lost.
Looking up at the door as he awaited for someone to respond to the chime, the quiet mech mused to himself that he could have simply hacked the security systems and broken in. It wasn't courtesy, however, that had prompted him to flick one silver talon tip against that pad, activating the chime for the occupant within the private quarters. No, it was simply that one would be wise not to so quickly make an enemy of the Air Commander of the Decepticons.
As if summoned by that thought, the door slid open, revealing an all too familiar bronze form staring down at him with confidence bordering on haughty suspicion.
"Hello, Commander," he intoned calmly, not allowing Starscream's looming presence to cow him one bit. He couldn't afford to; they needed this. They needed each other. "I'm here to see your guest."
Crimson optics narrowed, but before Starscream could voice the refusal that his scowl heralded so obviously, there was a blur of motion, a thin screech, and the quiet visitor quite suddenly found himself with arms full of whirling silver blades and spindly limbs whose owner squealed, "'Cade! 'Cade! 'Cade! 'Cade! 'Cade!" over and over.
Barricade relaxed, releasing tension that he hadn't even realized that he'd been laboring under until that moment, ducking his head over Frenzy's form as he returned the frantic embrace. "Hello, little one. I've come, just like I promised."
"What is the meaning of this?" Starscream hissed, torn between protecting the twisted little being he had rescued from deactivation, and relief at possibly being released from the obligation. Whatever dregs of fondness he had developed for the droneling, there was always that brief shiver of revulsion, even after the few modifications that Frenzy had had done to his body.
Especially since that cycle when Starscream had returned to find the dead Hound drone, when "Frenzy" had inexplicably... changed. Become almost more childlike, rather than less, with odd memory lapses. There were moments when Starscream would catch Frenzy staring at him with almost innocent curiosity, and the Air Commander wondered if the tiny mech even remembered that first night, remembered what he had done, what they had done together. If so, he was in no mood to remind the smaller mech of the episode of weakness and risk encouraging a repeat, risk hurting him again.
"Quiet. Inside. Now," Frenzy demanded in his short, clipped syntax - another thing that had seemed to become more exacerbated since that cycle.
Starscream quirked one supraorbital ridge at the demand. It wasn't hard and sharp, not a Meta demand, more like that of a petulant child. Or a frightened one.
"Please." Added as an afterthought, an attempt to remember the lessons Starscream had been teaching, though Frenzy refused to remove his head from where he had tucked it against... "'Cade"'s shoulder. "'Cade"? Starscream's other supraorbital ridge joined the first as he stepped to one side and waved one hand in sardonic welcome.
"Thank you, Commander," Barricade offered as he stepped within. It was as he remembered it, in that odd way of recalling things that were there, but not. Memories of another, memories of his own. They blurred, melding, meshing, dimming, becoming less real with every day as he felt little bits of himself fracture off like shattered crystal. Until now. Until this moment when he could feel everything becoming solid, more real again. Real, but different, and his optics struggled to focus on things which were so much smaller now than his memories said they should be.
He stepped through the space as if he knew it, finding a place to sit down with his burden still clinging tremblingly to his chest. From the calculating expression upon Starscream's features, that familiarity had not gone unnoticed.
"So." Taking a seat nearby, Starscream studied them both closely. "To what do... we... owe this pleasure?"
"We need to fix us," Barricade replied, looking up to meet Starscream's gaze. Not so far as before, even if he was still smaller. Not so hard to focus on as before, but that could be as much the fact that this body had never been forced to adapt to the 270 degree vision of the CC helmets. Had never been designed with more than one set of optics intended, though now it sported two, one larger, one smaller, just like the mech in his arms. Two arms, not four. Something near his elbows twitched in a half-memory, like a phantom ache, but one that did not hurt. An itch, perhaps.
"The drone and I were sent to kill Meta," he continued evenly. No need to prevaricate here. Starscream knew, and what he did not yet truly know, he must surely suspect.
Starscream's shoulders twitched, his wings flaring so subtly, claws tensing, optics pinning with a predator's sharp focus, though he said nothing. He waited for further explanation; Frenzy, after all, had still not released his death grip upon the stranger bearing at least a portion of his own former name.
"Tracker..." It still hurt a little to even say the name, like acid etching his spark chamber, or vapor-lock in his fuel lines. Frenzy lifted one small hand to rest along his jaw, soothing. "The drone made entry through the maintenance ducts while I secured the protective systems. Barricade woke up, though, and retaliated."
"Hacked. Stopped them," Frenzy agreed, nodding against Barricade's shoulder.
"So I'd assumed," Starscream replied, waving one hand in a silent command to continue.
"Tracker was not a drone. Was my partner. Bonded." Simply saying the name had hurt, but explaining that, remembering, hurt infinitely worse. Only for a moment, though, until he felt something gently touch that place inside with warmth. Barricade sighed, shuttering his optics for a moment.
"Impossible. Even if you were the right configuration to be a Hound Master, they do not survive the deactivation of the other, unless the bond is severed first."
"Yes," Barricade agreed. He didn't bother explaining that the bond had been an accident. That it had never been intended, nor that it had remained a secret until the day Tracker was deactivated. He merely shrugged, and Frenzy took advantage of the shift of his arms to finally release his own hold, climbing his way up and around Barricade's shoulder to perch there.
"Told you. Hacked," he chirped with a nasty little grin.
"Barricade had hacked through the hound's master, to the drone, to me. He was riding me when Tracker died. We... merged."
Frenzy grinned, running his four hands over Barricade's helm curiously as Barricade met Starscream's suspicious gaze. "I *am* Barricade."
"We."
He nodded in agreement to Frenzy's interjection. "We are Barricade. But it isn't working. There isn't enough of either one of us in either one of us. Need to fix it."
Starscream's optics narrowed with disbelief. "An interesting tale. How--"
"It wasn't supposed to hurt. But it did," Barricade interrupted softly, his gaze just a little haunted. Starscream sucked in a quick ventilation of surprise; there was no flicker of recognition in Frenzy's gaze, unlike the other's.
"Meta?" he asked, attention darting to Frenzy for a long moment, wondering if this was some trick of the tiny mech's, some last ditch effort to cling to that illusion of power he had once held.
"Meta is dead. There's only Barricade. There's only us."
Looking into those eight serious optics, all but identical save for color - four blue, four red - Starscream suddenly found that he could not disbelieve.
----------
Starscream paused from reading the report forwarded to his datapad to glance over at the pair seated together in the corner across the room. Cables strung between them, from cortex to cortex, from spark casing to spark casing, even the spikes imbedded in Frenzy's hand buried deep into... Barricade's chassis. They had been like that for nearly a cycle, locked in a curious embrace, optics dark, systems whirring, ventilation fans kicking on now and then the only proof of their continued function. The Air Commander wasn't entirely certain what was going on within their silence, only that both had been adamant that "it" was what needed to be done.
And so, he waited.
----------
Golden lines of code flashed past Barricade's view like thin, directed sparks of lightning. Beside him, within the curiously empty space they had come to, the other presence, Frenzy, bobbed, as much a part of him, as apart from him. Somehow, the curious juxtaposition did not seem to bother him here, nor did it confuse him. It jus... was. As if it always had been.
This place, when they had started, had been a swirling wash of blue and gold and green, like a roiling nebula encircling them both in a mesmerizing dance as lines of code wove in and out and erupted through the rainbow fog in brilliant flashes. It was just a little like swimming amidst the datastream, like slipping into the networks to bob among the data like a blurb of errant code. And yet, it was nothing like that, because he already knew, intimately, every character of this code. Every flicker-flash of current. It was his. It was *him*.
It was *them*.
Or it had been.
Byte by byte, they began to pick apart the characters streaming by, snatching them up like drops of fuel to starved systems. A bit of brilliant blue there, a tint of bright gold there. Beside him, within him, he could feel the Other doing the same. A drop of red, a flash of orange.
Line by line, the code slowly began to compile, snatched up by greedy hands, though none ever tried to reach for the same tiny bits. Somehow, that seemed both odd, and yet not. Even here, there was a distinction. Even where their edges blurred into one another.
He could feel the hollow places within, though, begin to slowly fill. To grow. To become whole. The satisfied, soundless hum of satisfaction beside him told him that the Other felt the same. From the broken, mixed shards, they could rebuild something new, piece by piece, until the fog finally cleared.
The nebula remained, but there was a boundary now. A border between the bright, scintillating blue-green shell of code and the dimmer, fainter red, and where once They hovered as one, now hung two, with faint, so very faint, tendrils that reached out between them, exploring with a curiosity born of utter innocence. Of newness.
Their work, however, was not done. Somehow, they knew this, though they knew not how, for they knew nothing, except that their work was not yet done. The brighter spark reached into the code shell, beyond it, into the roiling darkness beyond. Into memory. It began to spin threads, spooling the memories into the code, mostly into the brighter shell of code, though now and then, it would flick a shining tendril, and a few threads would drift free and settle over the dimmer spark. The Other. Still other threads, though, were spun off, back into the darkness, abandoned.
He came to those memories. Beside him, the Other watched, curious, as he turned the threads over and over, tangling them, studying them. The temptation was strong to spin these off into the ether, to lose these as well, to let them drift away with the other memories of death and cold calculation. Those memories, however, had been someone else's. The skills... had been shared with the Other, but the memories of energon stained hands and the padding of silent feet down darkened corridors, of a companionable scritch behind an audio cluster, of a sharp blade from a shadow, those had been spun back into the darkness.
These memories, though, they were His. His failure. His shame. He'd lost them. Lost them all. He'd failed. He hurt. He did not want this shame, did not want to remember.
But it was His. He had no right to forget. He owed it to them to never forget. To never again become that which he'd been. The Other quirked the illusion of a head to one side, still simply curious, simply watching. He could not risk the Other being inflicted with this. The threads slowly unraveled from their tangle and spun into the shell of bright code, anchoring into the blue green like the crash of a blaster bolt.
And still the threads came, spooling through the bright tendrils, into one shell, the other, or back into the darkness beyond, until there were none left that had not been sifted through, had not been seen and touched and watched and felt. Sorted. Commpleted. Reclaimed or rejected as no longer applicable, though there were fewer of that last than he had expected. Too much was simply too useful to discard if the Other was to thrive, though he struggled hard to cleanse them from the least shadow of taint. Except for the ones he kept for himself.
That was only right.
----------
Across the room, a pair of thin squeals of static erupted from rebooting vocal processors; Starscream's quiet vigil looked to be nearing an end. First red, then blue optics slowly powered up, and with a quiet *snickt*, Frenzy's hand spikes retracted, releasing his hold upon the larger mech.
"Urg," Barricade groaned, reaching up behind his head to carefully pull free the cables connecting him to Frenzy before the smaller mech bounced himself off his lap. "Sit still," he grumbled, wincing when Frenzy shifted to the end of the wires tethering him to Barricade's spark chamber. One large hand came down to settle upon Frenzy's frame, holding him in place with a thin growl as Barricade pulled those wires free as well. "There, you little glitch."
Frenzy's answering giggle was almost child-like, if a little feral, and he swiftly leaped free, skittering across the floor to investigate the room as if he had never seen it before. Barricade remained sitting where he was, talons idly flicking over the access hatches to close them up once more.
"Barricade?" Starscream sounded oddly hesitant, and his gaze bounced between the two of them, as if uncertain which of the pair would respond. Frenzy, still the smaller of the pair, continued his investigation, picking up a datapad from a shelf and investigating it thoroughly. Barricade's head slowly swung around toward Starscream, as if unwilling, and he grunted softly in reply.
"He's free," the former CC murmured quietly, two optics flicking toward Frenzy, who had since moved on to crawl his way over toward Starscream's knee. "He's his own mech now. New."
New, but with a diminished spark, from having been harvested from the leavings of another. It would never support a larger frame, a bigger build, but Barricade had winnowed out the skills from the haze of memories to give Frenzy what he would need; hackers came in all shapes and sizes, and Frenzy... would be one of the best. In time. A short time to understand the skills he already possessed, but more time to grow, to develop. To become.
"How?"
Barricade shrugged, not completely understanding it himself. Once there had been Meta and Stiletto and Tracker... And from that mashed, mixed melding of minds, now... now there was Frenzy, and Barricade. Stiletto was gone. Tracker as well. Passed on, filtered out. Perhaps Frenzy could have become either of them, if given the right memories, but Barricade had not thought that fair to burden the small mech with such a terrible weight, and had given him a blank slate to fill himself.
Only Barricade deserved to be burdened by what he'd been. What he'd done.
"Dunno. Just is." He shrugged again and turned his haunted gaze back toward his talons. It seemed strange not to see them coated in energon. Like something was missing.
"Are you..."
Barricade barked out a soft, rueful laugh, shaking his head at Starscream's interrupted query. "Bonded? No. He doesn't deserve that. I told you. His own mech now. He's free. Frenzy."
The small mech turned toward Barricade at hearing his name, and then started chattering at high speed about everything that caught his optics as he dashed across the floor to tackle Barricade, clinging with all four hands and both feet.
"Barricade." Starscream's tone held more than a hint of command, but something else buried in the tone. Something that Barricade could not name, because he could not believe that the Air Commander would feel concern for him. Not for him. He looked up anyway, meeting that faint scowl with a blank look of his own. Empty. Hollow.
"What do you mean that he does not deserve that?"
The hollowness ached. It echoed inside, threatening to swallow Barricade whole-- until Frenzy distracted him and bounced off again to fling himself at Starscream with a rebel yell, grabbing for the online datapad greedily. Barricade managed a stiff smirk. "He needs time. Not a drone, but... he needs time. And a new designation," he added, one hand drifting up from his lap to rub absently over his spark chamber and the alphanumeric code etched into the thick plating there. He'd have to get his changed. Tempting as it was to start anew, to leave even that name behind and begin fresh... he didn't deserve such a chance. He still had penance to serve."He'll be a good hacker. Give him time. Just don't let them do to him what..." No, that'd be shirking the responsibility for his own actions, for himself. Unacceptable. "Just... watch out for him."
"Barricade!"
He could hear the frustration in the growl that escaped Starscream, could hear the shifts of pistons and servos as Starscream prepared to rise to his considerable height. Barricade shook himself from his melancholy and pushed upright first.
Across the room, Frenzy had seized the datapad, and one spike extended from one hand which, with a gleeful giggle, he sank home into the datapad distracting Starscream for an instant as it bleeped with security alarms at the hack intrusion.
"I need time, too."
He didn't give Starscream a chance to stop him, but, instead, dove for the door.
"Barricade, wait!" Starscream ordered, but by the time he made it to the opened door, Frenzy clinging painfully to one engine, Barricade had vanished.