Flipside: Aftereffects
Chapter One
By Nan00k
"Normal? You? What are you, joking?"

Welcome back to this insanely stupid and ridiculous story of mine! I have attempted to tackle the overused plot of "lol-fan-meets-Transformers" but with a twist—namely, where everyone's a moron and the dangers are very, very real. AKA I added realism. Whodathunk?

In any case, if you have not read the first story, Flipside, I recommend you do so before reading Aftereffects. 'Cause you're not going to have a clue about what the heck is going on now.

In this new, rousing adventure: Becky realizes that just because she and Barricade are now semi-allies, that doesn't mean the rest of the world isn't going to rain on their parade. Namely, they both realize that no, they are not alone on earth, and YES, the Autobots are very much still out and kicking aft. Unfortunately for the would-be fan and her new cousin-in-law, the Autobots' world and their world are about to collide. Actions have consequences, and after the choices Becky and Barricade made in the last story, a series of aftereffects are well overdue…

:] Enjoy!

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Warnings: Utter crack, original characters, foul language, violence, mild out of character-ness, spoilers for 2007 movie, first person point of view
Disclaimer: Transformers is owned by Hasbro/Dreamworks. I only write this mess.

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My name is Becky and my cousin-in-law is a Decepticon.

…No, seriously, it's all fucked up as hell, but believe me when I tell you that everything I'm saying now is truer than I ever wanted to believe.

A year ago, my cousin Emily announced she was getting married. That same night, I encountered that fiancé—a Mr. Barry Cade, who was apparently a cop. The moment I laid eyes on him, I realized, with some amount of horror, that this was no human. It was Barricade, the Decepticon warrior who just-so-happened to be a fictional character in the Transformers franchise I was obsessed over.

We didn't hit it off well. More like we hit each other. But after a quick one-sided battle, both Barricade and I came to the conclusion that I was either psychic—because I knew everything about him and his fellow Transformers (or at least as much as the fandom had let me know)—or the world of Transformers and the world I knew as reality had somehow meshed. Like I said, fucked up.

It was not an easy three months. Barricade was literally marrying my cousin. I couldn't believe it. I would have sworn that he was trying to trick her, or use her, or have some twisted plot in store for her and our family.

But, as much as the logic in me said it was wrong, I had to give in to the facts: Barricade was in love with Emily. They were getting married. And I was the only fucking person in the entire universe who seemed to recall anything to do with the Transformers cartoon and movie. It just wasn't fair.

Some other cool shit went down too; Starscream practically crashed the wedding, but Barricade chose to confront him instead of letting my family get nuked, which was awfully nice of him. I, being a dumbass, decided to tag along and I nearly got squashed myself at the hands of the Decepticon aerial commander, but my quick thinking got me out of it…sorta. The dude now thought I was some kind of Decepticon groupie, but I doubted that I would ever hear from him again.

Oh, was I wrong.

A year after all of this happened, Barricade and Emily were happily married and I was still alone with my knowledge of what happened. I made up an online message board in hopes of someone, anyone, out there would respond, to reassure me that I wasn't crazy or some random oracle. But no one said a word.

I didn't know what else to do, but try to make sense of my new life as the only Transformers nerd left on Earth, plus being the occasional Human Behavior Tutor™ for Barricade, and just move on. I was a senior in high school, and even though my plans for the future were shaky, I was almost getting used to my somewhat normal life again.

That is, however, until about September 2009. That's when life yet again decided to flip my world upside down.

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Stomping up the cement stairs of the back staircase, I had half the mind to drop the two large cardboard boxes I was holding and just walk the ten blocks back to my neighborhood. The only thing that stopped me was that I really didn't want to walk those ten blocks home and that if I did drop all of that stuff, I doubted I could outrun its owner, who was scowling at me from the top landing.

"Do I look like a pack mule to you? A maid? An illegal immigrant?" I snapped. I paused. "Aw, shit, that was racist, wasn't it?"

The man holding the fire door open at the top of the stairs with his foot, two boxes of his own in his arms, glared. "Yes. Yes, it was," he said, deadpan. He couldn't take the elevator because he was fat (or more like, his combined body mass was almost half that of his true robot form; so no elevators. Okay, so he wasn't fat, sue me.)

I scowled and fumed inwardly. "Goddamn it, I refuse to look worse than you," I said, dodging past him. "Then again, all I have to do is look at your performance record for the last twenty thousand years, and you'd make Hitler look like a saint."

Barricade sneered nastily as we made our way down the cramped apartment building hallway. "And you make space debris seem like Iacon-level physicists," he snapped irritably.

How I got wrapped up in helping Barricade move some of his stuff from a storage locker he had been renting ever since he got his organic body, I had no idea. Emily was at work and had been pestering Barricade for months to finish moving in. They had been living at their current apartment for about eight months. It wasn't a bad place, really, and was actually pretty close to where the majority of my family lived.

The bad part about that is that when Emily finally got Barricade to get the job done, he decided to make it easier for himself by hiring some cheap child labor. AKA me.

"Why the hell do you have so much crap if you spend half your time as a giant car?" I complained, dumping the boxes I was carrying onto their living floor. Most of it was clothes; apparently the first thing Emily forced the Decepticon-in-human-form to get was a shit ton of clothes.

Barricade put his load of boxes down with more grace and shoved them out of the way. "Blame my overly humanizing wife," he snapped.

I snorted. "Dude, you sound so weird saying 'wife.'"

"What else would I call her?" Barricade demanded, scowling again.

"Bondmate?" I suggested, leering. Barricade's scowl increase and I barely ducked one of the throw pillows from the couch go flying toward my head. "HEY!"

Barricade ignored me and walked to the kitchen. "We're done for now," he said, disappearing behind the wall. I sighed heavily and walked over to the couch.

I didn't mind 'hanging out' with Barricade, to be perfectly honest. He wasn't homicidal and my relation to Emily pretty much assured me a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card if I ever did piss him off too much. And we had plenty to talk about, considering we were still trying to unravel the mystery as to why I alone knew about him, the Transformers and the whole shebang. Our newest theory was that the All Spark transmitted knowledge over to me and made me hallucinate stuff. My personal favorite was that God was trolling me for skipping on going to church.

Barricade reappeared at the kitchen entry and seemed to be considering something. I frowned back at him, silently asking, 'What?'

"…Do you want a drink?" he finally asked, awkwardly.

I blinked. "…Has Emily been teaching you manners again?" The first time Barricade offered to hold a door open for me at the mall, I thought he was trying to trick me into some sort of prank.

Shoulders tense, Barricade glowered unhappily. "You have an abnormal amount of etiquette laws," he snapped, halfway embarrassed and awkward. "Do you want a fragging drink or not?"

Biting back a laugh, I nodded. "Sure. Thank you."

He disappeared into the kitchen and I heard him rummaging around in the fridge. I glanced around the living room and saw the immaculate cleanliness Emily Garvin was known for. Next to their TV, I saw plenty of photographs lined up. I grimaced at the one family portrait was had taken when I was twelve; Goddamn, I was so not photogenic.

I almost didn't hear Barricade walk back in. He held two bottles in his hands and extended the one to me. It was almost in a non-threatening way too, which was an improvement.

However, before I could say thanks, I gawked at the bottle in alarm.

"Don't give me a beer, you moron!" I exclaimed, pointing accusing at him and then back at the kitchen. "I'm not even eighteen! It's against the law! Don't you have soda?"

Snarling, Barricade turned on his heel and stomped back into the kitchen. "Primus, there are too many laws!" I heard him shout.

I dropped my head into my hands, sighing heavily. There were so many basic things Barricade still had to learn and some not-so-basic. It was almost like we had to all learn as we went when it came to how much he knew of human behavior and society. It could be fun and even hilarious, but I guess that's why we met at each other's homes rather than in public; it was easier to cover for mistakes in private.

In about a minute, Barricade came back into the room, a beer for himself and a can of cola for me. He held the soda out, glaring, as if daring me to bitch about something else.

I accept the soda, frowning back at him as he sat down on the opposing couch. "Christ. Thank you," I muttered, opening the can.

Barricade sneered, opening his own drink with a low pop. "Hmph." He took a long swig and pointedly ignored me.

Man, I thought I had been awkward, but 'Cade really did take the cake when it came to social alienation. I was pretty sure he only really spoke to Emily and me on a somewhat frequent basis.

A long silence threatened to take hold over the room, so I acted quickly. "So…" I began, placing my soda on the side table, "anything you need to talk about?"

I had my suspicions of why Barricade insisted I help him that Saturday. While we were far from the awkward enemies we had been a year ago, we weren't like best friends either. Our relationship was as awkward as it possibly could have been between an evil alien invader and the only human left who knew of his true identity.

…But that wasn't totally accurate. I knew Barricade wasn't evil, at least, not anymore. He was really trying to settle into this life he was making on earth, sometimes collecting data if only to save our lives whenever Starscream came calling for him. He honestly loved Emily, my cousin, and seemed intent on building relationships with other humans. I suppose that was one reason he would call me every once in a while. Not because we particularly liked each other (he's a fucking asshole, believe me you), but I was one of the few people he had left that he could actually talk to about things he couldn't even tell Emily.

Like how he was an evil alien invader. Yeah. Good thing I was the Decepticon-Whisperer.

Barricade wasn't looking at me, seemingly content to glare daggers into the wall behind the blank TV. I waited, relaxing on the other couch, prepared for the rant I knew was boiling just beneath his scary human exterior.

"So, how's work?" I tried to say, being casual.

I was not expecting the sudden glare or the angry snap, "Frag you."

"What the hell, man?" I asked, angry now too. "I'm just curious. And concerned."

"There is no reason for concern," he shot back, very defensive. "You are being nosy."

The defensiveness keyed me into the fact that something was bothering him. I had learned to avoid being nosy when he pointed it out, so I was willing to drop it. However, much to my surprise, it didn't end there.

"Emily is talking of buying a house," Barricade suddenly said.

He looked right at me, as if I should know exactly what he meant. I paused, pursing my lips.

"Um. Okay?"

Barricade scowled, clearly upset over something in the subtext that I couldn't pick up on my own. "That's a huge aspect of a partnership like this. It's an investment, both physical and emotional," he said, glaring at me as though it were all my fault that he didn't like commitment apparently. "It's a part of… being human."

"Some people don't own their own homes," I countered, frowning.

"Emily wants one, though," Barricade replied. He returned to glaring at the wall. "Her logic is sound, mostly. A permanent dwelling might not allow for any quick getaway, but for the long run, it is a decent choice to make for the future."

I carefully hid a smile. The way he spoke, it was difficult to tell sometimes if he viewed his relationship with Emily and humanity as a burden or a challenge he desperately wanted to succeed at. I knew it was the latter after so many months of watching him grasp for some kind of hold in this human world. When he wanted to do something and he didn't know how to handle it, that's where I came in: a bitching wall, so to speak, and sometimes, an advisor.

"Then, what's bothering you?" I asked, gaining his attention again. To myself, I was amused how his unflinching glare didn't really bother me anymore.

Barricade did not look happy in the least. "I don't want a house that we buy like any other item in a store isle. I want to give Emily something to cherish specifically between the two of us."

"…You want… a custom home?" I ventured, hesitating. His vagueness was very difficult for me to translate sometimes.

Luckily, I seemed to understand him this time. Barricade nodded. "I want a home that was built for us," he said with emphasis. "Me and Emily specifically. I want her to know it is hers, rather than just a pre-owned dwelling."

Grinning, I propped my feet on the coffee table. "Sounds awesome, 'Cade, it does. I think she'd love it," I said. Emily would probably think it was the sweetest thing in the universe. She already thought Barricade was just a Neutral in the Autobot-Decepticon war, and if anything else, a complete angel. Even if I told her the truth, she'd never believe me.

But… Barricade did not relax. He was staring at me intently, waiting for another response. I raised an eyebrow at him, not seeing a further problem.

"I want it to be a surprise," he said, irritable that I couldn't read his fucking mind or something.

"How the hell do you surprise someone with a house?" I exclaimed, unable to not laugh.

Barricade snarled and took a swig of his beer. "I'll organize it without her knowing and then bring her to the finished lot," he growled, looking away.

Pausing, I nodded after thinking about it. "That's actually a pretty cute idea." I laughed when he glared at my choice of words. "Seriously, though, go for it. I think she'd really, really love it."

Barricade scowled and looked away. I sighed, knowing not to push it further. Whether the plan would actually work or he would just drop it… I knew he really wanted to impress Emily. That was pretty awesome, considering everything in context. I would let him mull it over and if he wanted more advice, I'd be there.

To my utter surprise, it did not take long for him to do that. "…Do you want to go with me tomorrow to look at land plots?" he asked after only a few minutes. He almost muttered it.

"…Seriously?" I asked, eyes huge. Not only was the unexpectedness of it shocking, but the mere fact he was asking me to come along, probably to offer advice, on what he thought was an important decision.

Then again, he didn't have friends. I was the closest thing to that he had so… yeah, okay, it made sense.

"Would I joke about this?" he demanded, glaring afresh.

I snorted. "You never joke period, man… but… sure." I smiled, knowing it would just be easier to not tease him for once. "I'd love to."

Barricade visibly relaxed. "Good," he snapped, looking annoyed again, but I think it was directed at himself. "I have no idea what I'm doing."

Whoa. The Great and Perfect Barricade admitting to a fault? I had to hold myself back from commenting on that. Instead, I laughed awkwardly at myself as I realized I had no idea what to do either.

"I… kinda do? I watch HGTV a lot. Does that count?" I asked meekly.

"How should I know?" Barricade asked, scowling.

From weddings to escaping Decepticons to building a house. My life was as epic as they came, apparently. "Well, it'll be an adventure," I said, grinning.

Little did I know how much that statement would prove to be true…

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Next, our heroes meet their new neighbors. Oh, hey, violence! Where have you been?