Chapter 9
Barricade
The female was drinking herself to ruin.
Barricade watched as she drowned herself two days in a row, noting the effects on her body and brain functions as she tipped back one glass after another. She made herself sick more than once, and spent the time she wasn't consuming poison sleeping. At one point she ended up on the floor, and thats where she stayed. The well of energy inside her was in absolute turmoil, pulsing and dimming. Unable to settle into a single shape or place inside her body.
A pitiful waste, an ending he had seen too often among his kind before he arrived on this dirt ball of a planet. It was unsettling to see such similarities here. In her. Watching her ruin the well of energy within her for a second time was even more so.
Barricade set it firmly aside from his concern. He was not about to spend anymore time on a human that clearly wanted to die. He wasn't going to watch it either, so he powered down into a deep recharge that would hopefully carry him past the process and allow more energy to be placed into repairs.
He awoke, many times into the night at the sound of her anguish and sickness. A few times he sensed the female's housemate pace through the house, giving off signals of being deeply concerned, but the meatbag did not do more than knock on the door, listen for her to call back, then leave. Barricade knew the male had a familial bond with her, and how he could so easily let her fade away was a mystery he wasn't about to delve into.
Until finally, in the middle of heaving her guts out of her fragile frame, the other human opened the door and came to guide her out. Barricade diverted his attention to monitoring the house then, watching as she was taken care of.
Soft flesh passed over his armor, bringing him to awareness. He tensed to maim or kill, pausing only when he smelled the female's scent. She was sitting on his hood again, dressed in fresh coverings and only carrying a lingering ghost of the putrid alcohol and the sickness it caused.
Checking the planet's date and their location's time, Barricade found that roughly forty-eight hours had passed since she was pulled from the garage. A scan told him that her body was recovering, though minor damage had been inflicted to multiple parts of her organic frame that may prevent her from normally functioning for a while, if ever.
She settled, sitting somewhat straight with her legs crossed and hands clasped between them. Completely quiet, outside of her breathing.
The dim spark brightened and bloomed at her core. Barricade focused on her and saw it fill her body before breaching it. It surrounded her in a chaotic cloud at first, reaching out in several curling wisps. He could sense her attempting to corral it into one space. One of the streams of vivid energy brushed across his EM field-
His entire system lit up like he'd been hit by a hundred live wires. It jolted through his armor, traveled his lines straight to his spark. Barricade went rigid, armor clamping down on his frame. He forced a shuddering exhale through his vents, jerking when it happened again. He fought the sudden impulse to transform, concerned about damaging her.
The female pulled her energy into the serene pool he had first sensed it in, safely away from his armor. Barricade monitored her closely, the aftershocks of the contact vibrating in his energon and dancing in small arcs throughout his frame. Something that had been off-kilter snapped back into place somewhere in his undercarriage.
Barricade scanned through the progress of self repairs and discovered he had more energy to delegate to each task. His processor stumbled over the notion. A transfer of energy, as powerful as if it happened between another of his kind. Interest peaked, he pushed his field outward in an attempt to make contact with her again.
Enveloping her body sent an almost pleasant static crackling through the space between them, but nothing like the surges from before. He expected this since both times had happened because of her displaced energy, not physical contact. Barricade braced himself, and willed his field to breach the pool suspended above her.
A vast pathway ripped opened between them, funneling the human's pure energy straight into his body. He felt his own flood toward her in an almost violent exchange. Vaguely, he was aware of both of their bodies going stiff, but could hardly react as raw, colored emotions ransacked his spark. Anger, fear, pain, loneliness, hope, desperation, need and so much more. The weight of it all could have put him through the floor, but at the same time it threw him into a multi-faceted high like none he'd ever known. How. How. How did something so small and insignificant carry so much within itself?
Her spirit, spark or whatever the word for it was, was within him and ever changing. Colors that flashed and melded into others, some he couldn't even name, and others so familiar with their corresponding feelings or thoughts that they could have been mistaken for his own. Old emotions she'd once had, current ones and some that she had carried inside long enough to completely reshape her existence around them. Flashes of her memories filtered through, sharing glimpses of the most important points in her short life.
He tried to grasp it, to get some kind of control on what was happening, but her life force was one to be reckoned with, and by the time the exchange ended, he was left with his spark wide open and his engines hot and revving.
Barricade sat like that for several minutes, spark still hiccuping from the assault and his frame recovering from a heavy overload of energy. His processor was thoroughly scrambled, but he managed to direct his attention to the human laid flat on his hood, heart pounding against her fragile ribs and hair a static mess.
"Holy canolie," The female rasped, "what the hell was that."
Barricade sank down on his wheels, shuddering. The last discharges of energy danced up and down their bodies. Moaning, she sat up with one hand pressed against her stomach and looked down at him. She blinked, "Did...did that really just happen?"
Venting loudly, Barricade rumbled back at her. "That," He said, "was an overload." He couldn't believe that it had actually happened, or that he was even admitting to it.
Confusion and terror filled her organic optics. He thought for a moment that it was because he had spoken to her outloud while she wasn't in a drug or alcohol induced haze. However, she didn't run away from him like he expected. Instead, she turned and braced both palms against his armor and leaned toward his now pristine windshield. Then she looked back down at his hood, smoothing a hand over the perfect subtle curve of it.
Barricade noted her attention to the changes and ran a quick diagnostic to see what else had happened. There was still a lot of cosmetic damage across his armor, but most of the internal issues had been or were being solved at that very moment. He felt...better. Stronger, with more energy than he'd had in what felt like ages.
"Overload." She repeated slowly, "does that mean that you got off too?"
"If thats how you fleshlings put it, yes."
"And it made you better? But you were- you were inside of me. Like a-a-a possession or a," She pulled at her hair, "and I saw things...felt them happen to you. Like memories?" Her voice had become hollow and pained. "What the hell is going on!"
"Overloads and energy transfers don't work like that. Not among my people. I'm just a grunt, so I'm the wrong mech to ask."
"But how! How did it even happen?! I was just meditating-"
"I sensed you draw your energy out into the air around you," Barricade cut in, "fleshlings-all organic life on this planet- can't do that. Or shouldn't be able to. How can you?"
"I don't know! I was just meditating! Finding some peace of mind. I didn't know I was going to get spirit-boned by a talking whatever-you-are! What are you?!"
"We exchanged memories and you saw into my spark and you don't know? Even my least interested partners paid more attention than you."
"I," Again with dragging her dull nails across her scalp. She curled into herself on him, the potent life force she'd exhibited shrinking back down to the tiny pinprick it had been when she was joining with the arrogant male. "There was so much. I...You've always been fighting. In a war?"
"The war is over."
"And this isn't your home. You're homesick."
"That should be obvious, even to you meatbags."
"Well excuse me. The only logical explanation I had for you was demon spawn-"
Barricade barked out a harsh laugh. The female ignored his outburst and continued, "Not that you were an alien."
He eyed her before pushing out his field once more to make contact. She visibly shuddered, still overly sensitive from their shared overload. Huffing, she sat up and started to slide towards the edge of his hood, "I need another shower. And a shot of whiskey."
Experimentally, Barricade passed his field against her body. He could sense veins of both of their energies, interwoven, so thin they were almost nonexistent. They worked like roots throughout her body, from the spark at her core to the surface of her flesh. Every one he touched lit up, like a switch was flipped. If he pressed hard enough...
She went rigid when his efforts coaxed a curl of her life force free from it's condensed state. Barricade closed off all other senses to divert his entire focus to what he was doing. He guided her up and back out of her frame. This time when they met, he clamped down on the connection to prevent another onslaught. He sensed her struggle to do the same. As fun as another massive overload sounded, he needed to build up a resistance and be sure of his ability to close her off in case she tried prodding where she didn't belong.
The female deliberately sent something through the connection, a strain of cautious but genuine trust. Then a thought, a peace offering; 'My name is Aloha.'
He would have rolled his optics. This female and her ridiculous antics. He did not need her trust, or to know her name. This, whatever it was, did not make them companions.
He almost channeled that rejection at her, but something stopped him. A twinge in his spark, a stall in his processing. Something that made him grind his dentals. He vented, loosening his vice on their transfer to allow more energy to be exchanged. Her life force drifted through with a pleased tint that immediately soothed the tension out of his frame. It had been an age since he had connected to someone so intimately. His spark ached for it, and it became his argument for accepting what she offered him.
Barricade reciprocated, his own muted pleasure projected back at her.
'Barricade.'
Oops.
Saw The Last Knight this past week. That was...interesting. Barricade, though. Like hot damn. There wasn't enough of him in it.
Alright, I would love to hear some feedback since this is my first time writing something like this (Human/Cybertronian interactions). I have written up to fourteen chapters for this story, so we're still going smoothly. I'm still working on the next part of the Cataclysm Arc in Reflections, and have rewritten several chapters for The Guardian, which will be up when I finish all thirty something chapters.
Love you guys, thanks for reading and reviewing.
Aloha, her family and the story belongs to me. Barricade and Transformers do not.
