The fact of the matter was this: Barricade was not built to ingest solids.

Nearly there. The blue and black mechanoid made a horrific sound and heaved again, doubling over with his shoulder pressed against the wall for support. Six megacycles to go.

Two hours ago he'd gone insane. The agony had reached the point where he needed to put something in his body, and so, with very little cognitive decision involved, Barricade had begun consuming the only thing available:

Himself.

Cybertronian construction and design did little when it came to devouring solids. Their matter-to-energy conversion capabilities were for the most part limited to liquids and demi-solids – gels and the like. So when he began to rip off and swallow bits of his armor in his wild attempts at ending the burning misery, it should have come as no surprise that it began to come back up almost immediately. Barricade wasn't sure which was worse; the pain of starving, the sharp ache of tearing himself apart, or the sensation of his body violently rejecting the bits after he'd gotten them down.

Won't be trying that again.

Brutal retching did nothing to help or relieve his current situation. Barricade slid down the length of the wall, shaking, his legs folding up beneath him as he sat. Death could not grace him with its presence any sooner, could it? Detached, the Decepticon tuned inwards as he looked over the chewed up and destroyed armor plating covering his arms. His cooling system was gone. Soon, the fluid pump and nerve distribution arrangement would begin to wane and Barricade would be left with but a brain. He'd have just enough nerve activity to feel the suffocating, spiking throb of being housed inside a body without a beating heart. That thought scared him infinitesimally; the Decepticon would be aware of every second that passed as his spark wailed and thrashed in its death throes before finally collapsing on itself and ceasing to utterly exist.

All for the sake of his people, his race, his leader, and his cause.

Such pain. Barricade had not fallen into recharge for the better part of five solar rotations and the lack of suitable rest was wreaking as much havoc on his psyche as the lack of energon was to his body. Six more megacycles.

In an isolated fashion, the captive found it horrifying that he was the living countdown clock to his own death. Barricade knew enough about starvation to understand how it was going to go and usually in what order. He possessed a basic idea of what it would feel like, though personal accounts on the experience were hard to come by and everything else was mere speculation. Oh, but the articles he had read on the subject just didn't word it right! They stated that the incident of starvation was uniquely painful; Barricade felt an undeniable urge to hunt down whoever it was that was responsible for that article and beat them over the head with something heavy. "Uniquely painful" was a terribly dulled down way of stating what he felt like. It was more like…rip-your-own-spark-out-and-eat-it. It was like screaming until your vocal processes shorted out and your voicebox exploded. It was like white-hot smoldering stabbing bits of metal rendering torment and crying and the psychological wretchedness of knowing when and how I AM GOING TO DIE!

Panic grappled his mind and refused to let go; the comparatively small Decepticon launched to his feet and gripped the sides of his helm, howling in absolute despair. The sound itself was not a scream, it was not a yell, but instead a shriek of pain and destitution, a high-pitched mechanical wail that made the surviving cellmates wince and shrink away.

Willbreaker just laughed.

Barricade jerked backwards and felt his back connect violently with the cold unforgiving wall behind him. That sound. Such a jovial and triumphant sound! It was forever imprinted on the carnal, bestial side of the offroaders processor, never to be forgotten. Four optics gleamed and glowed with unbridled and unadulterated revulsion as he let off a whistling squeal at the indignation. Barricade was suffering one of the worst deaths imaginable, and this mech was standing there watching with sadistic glee and laughing about it!

"Still alive, I see," the Autobot general drawled. "Barely. Have you considered my offer? It still stands."

Barricade snarled and withered back against the wall. "Smite you and all who you may love!"

Willbreaker shook his helm slowly, clucking his voicebox. "Tsk-tsk, such animosity. I am being very generous, here, Barricade. Talk for me, and you'll get everything you need."

Six more megacycles. "To the smelter with the lot of…with the lot of..."

A shiver of cruel pleasure ran up the length of Willbreaker's main neuro-network cable as Barricade found himself suddenly weakened. The prisoner's defensive posture sank in exhaustion, and little more than a plaintive whine escaped from his vocal processes to finish the sentence. His Decepticon prisoner was at the breaking point, so many others would have given up by now, but not him. Barricade's training was extensive, or perhaps his will was that resilient.

That thought had never occurred to Willbreaker; what if Barricade's spirit could not be destroyed? Even now so very close to death the captive remained portentously defiant. Every other Decepticon who stepped through the facility door had given up something. Barricade had only vomited up his name, rank, and identification numbers, all three of which were trivial and otherwise fairly simple to find out once a name was acquired. Failure was not an option in the Autobot commander's case, but it seemed that perhaps he had finally found someone worthwhile.

The hiss that escaped his metal lip-plating was soft. "You have proven resilient and defiant, loyal to your leader and cause," murmured Willbreaker, just softly. "Everyone else whom I have dealt with here had broken long before now; impressive, Barricade. Very impressive." Barricade only glared at him from his slumped position against the wall as the psuedo-Autobot continued: "A regrettable waste for you to die here, it would be. What if I gave to you my word that if you tell me everything you know, not only will you get the energon you so desperately need, but on my word of honor I will let you go."

Barricade slid down into a sitting position, letting his helm roll around his shoulders. "Willbreaker, still you try," he managed weakly. "Six megacycles left in his game. Maybe a little less, if I'm lucky."

"You will choose death over life, and for what?" The Autobot commander stepped closer to the bars. "For honor? For your race? For your leader? Why?"

"For loyalty. Something you know nothing about."

Satisfaction. And this time it wasn't Willbreaker who was feeling it, but Barricade. The faux Autobot snorted and stormed off down the hall, leaving him to his pains and fears and impending doom. Just seeing the snide and snobby brat get all in stitches over it was enough to make some grotesque version of a smile grace the Decepticon prisoners face. I'm going to win this fight. Not him. He knows it.

But yet again the offroader had been left alone to contemplate his misery. Barricade wasn't sure if it was good thing or not that he was getting used to the maddening agony that tore across his sensory grids with efficient ferocity. Maybe a bit less than six after all. That would be nice.

Thirty minutes clicked by, finding the captive staring off into space. He found the ceiling increasingly interesting, what with the constant bloom of color that spread like a kaleidoscope across the otherwise drab gray ceiling. In clinical detachment Barricade knew that he was hallucinating, but he didn't care; it was a small distraction from the misery his life had become. A bit of…color in his now dull and pointless existence. So the blue, black, and silver alien vehicle sat with his helm reclined to gape upwards, at the ceiling, and past it. The stars were just beyond that, weren't they? Millions of them. Some of which he'd even visited before or flown past among his numerous voyages amidst the dark and silent depths of space. The prisoner remembered, and remembered well the majority of his experiences, and as a final self-mercy, Barricade shuttered his optics and forced everything current from his mind, focusing on things past.

He thought of home. He mused on the politics he'd once been involved in. On things that had once interested him and still did. Barricade remembered things he'd never get to see again, simple things, most, such as watching a stars end in a violent cacophony of matter, energy, and light. Even things so simple as mathematical equations. To distract himself from the countdown, he brought up numbers and signs and symbols and went over them in his head, examining things he'd memorized; theorems and physics, ranging from simple math to highly advanced. He'd always enjoyed physics and mathematical science…

"Why, hello there!"

Barricade felt his fuelpump stop yet again, only to jump-start and begin to hammer inside his chest. The voice, it was oddly familiar. Blearily, the prisoner rested his hands on the floor and peered at the bars that held him in. Nobody was there. Odd. Hearing things now, Barricade? Well, that was slagging rude of his mind to trick him out of such nicely distracting things like –

Barricade blinked and looked to his left. A ragged, torn-up face greeting his own ugly mug with a smile. "Deadbolt?"

The mech in question nodded and shifted, crossing one battered leg over the other. He was sitting on the prison berth that Barricade never used. "Well, yeah. You know anyone else who looks like me?"

"Primus alive," Barricade marveled, shaking his head. "I haven't seen you in centuries!"

The jeep-like mech laughed. "Well, slag. Being dead kind of makes communing with the living a bit hard." The jovial grin disappeared from Deadbolt's broken face. "You look like the smelter, boyo."

"Can't really be helped," Barricade replied with a slow bob of his head. "I look like you."

"Yeah, and I look like a dead guy. Says a lot for you, 'Cade."

The captive nodded and bowed his head then in contemplation. "What..what is it like?"

Deadbolt tilted his head, focusing black and shattered optics on his long time friend. "What, being dead? Eh…it ain't so bad. Not really. Gets boring sometimes." The destroyed shell made a flippant gesture with his hand, ignoring the fact that he was missing fingers. "It ain't the horrid pits of molten rock and acid that the Autobots try to scare us with."

"So it isn't that bad?" Relief. Now all Barricade had to do was get through the actual dying part. That was going to be the tough element.

"Yeah. Ain't nothing to be afraid of, my friend."

A long silence set about the pair, the dead and the soon-to-be-such, as they both contemplated various subjects of diverse interests.

"Hey..'Cade?"

Barricade lifted his helm and focused on the dead Decepticon keeping him company. "Yeah?"

Deadbolt looked at him with a sorrowful stare, black optics weeping bereavement for his friend's predicament. "I want…I want you to have something of mine that I never shoulda taken with me."

Concerned, the blue and black offroader tilted his head. "What's that?" asked Barricade.

The robot corpse dug around in subspace for a second before taking Barricade's hand in his, dropping a small object into the dying Decepticon's palm. The captive opened his hand palm-up and studied the small black crystal that Deadbolt had given him. It was something that the former shock trooper had carried around with him everywhere…for luck. "My fortune ran out on it," Deadbolt lamented softly. "But you still got a chance."

Barricade shook his head, but closed his hand around the stone. "Not really. I'll be seeing you soon, Deadbolt."

The deceased one smiled again, though his grin was cheerless. "Yeah. Look me up, 'Cade."

Right before of his optics, Deadbolt vanished into thin air, no more than a memory.