Chapter XIV

Truth

By: The Feesh

This holiday fuckin' sucks.

There would be no denying the fact that Michael James Romano was lonely. In but the company of David Letterman on Mike's pathetic 32 inch television set, the mechanic sat at his dining room table over a dingy cigarette tray and a bottle. The whiskey gleamed amber as the dim light from the kitchen caught it just right, making it look like molten honey; quite pretty, really. Glancing at the window, Romano threw the shot glass at the wall and listened to it clatter to the floor.

Somewhere outside, a cat howled.

A car alarm went off.

One of his neighbors was screaming at the kids.

"Merry fuckin' Christmas."

Beverly had Nicholas for Christmas, naturally; she never allowed the young boy to spend the holidays with his father. Juss wit' that asshole who thinks he can raise my kid. Worn fingers threaded through dark, tangled hair and he winced as his shoulder throbbed. The gunshot wound had healed nicely since the heavy summer night it was administered, but the cold was not kind to it. Snow was falling by the foot and Romano new that by tomorrow morning, it would be a beautiful white Christmas.

"I'm… dreamin' ovva white…"

"—get that fuckin' kid ta shut up --"

"…Christmas.."

"—it isn't his fault, Aaron!"

"Juss like th' ones I used ta…. Wouldja assholes pipe down?" Romano hollered at the wall to his left. "It's fuckin' Christmas Eve, for Christ's sake! Man, screw this shit."

Not caring in the least that he'd had a few drinks, the greasemonkey got up and grabbed his coat, keys, a fresh pack of cigarettes and headed out the door. Behind dingy doors and walls, songs of holiday cheer rose despite the late hour, and Michael scowled at the sound of happy people inside; people with their families. Romano's parents were dead and his sister hadn't spoken to him in ten years, there was really very little for the New York man to be jolly about. Braving the snow, ice, wind, and holiday drivers, he turned the way he always went and began to walk down the sidewalk.

If he were any more inebriated, he would have broken his tailbone, if not his skull, on the icy path. Luckily for him, Romano had only swallowed enough of the whiskey to give him a warm feeling and to make him forget about the cold, if not his woes. Looking around, the New Yorker realized how dreary his town usually was, and how winter tended to spruce it up; the salt trucks had yet to run, so the street glittered with pristine white. Ice hung from metal balconies and glistened in the sallow glow of yellow street lamps while fragile flakes, no two the same, fell lazily from the darkened sky. The normal drag gray of New York City was banished in a single season if one looked out of their window at the right time.

In just a few hours, the trucks would come and dump salt. Cars would drive over it and smash the snow into partly melted mud and everything would become wet and brown with half frozen city filth. It would look like New York again, ugly and full of hard character, come the Christmas dawn.

Part of him wished he could take a picture, to capture the beauty as it stood just in that moment, but he held no camera within his possession and had always been a poor photographer to boot. Romano supposed there would be other wintry nights he could emerge from his little apartment when the snow was freshly fallen to see it all over again.

It happened every year.

Why had he not noticed it before?

His knees struck something ice cold and solid, and this time, Michael hit the ground with a muted grunt and all the grace of a sack of potatoes in a coat. With mild annoyance, he realized that not only had he spaced out long enough to wind up standing in front of Greasemonkey's Garage, he had also meandered off of the sidewalk and into the parking zone in the street. He had run knees-first into a snow-covered car.

Glowering at the car as if the inanimate thing had leapt out in front of him, Mike Romano grumbled and slipped back onto the sidewalk, brushing his coat off as he continued on his way. Something caught his attention, and he stopped to turn partially to get a second look at the vehicle he had walked into. It was completely shrouded in snow, aside from the rocker panels. He thought the doors looked white.

Curiosity getting the better of him, Romano walked back over to it and brushed the snow off of the passenger side door.

The word 'POLICE' glared back at him in reflective lettering.

"I was recharging, you know."

With a less than dignified cry, the mechanic stumbled backwards over the curb and wound up on his derriere in the snow. "What th' shit, yer an asshole, man. Leavin' town without word then scarin' a man like dat. Where ya been?" Decidedly in good nature, he clapped a hand against the snow-covered fender as one might do to the shoulder of an old friend.

"Do not touch me."

Ehehe.. "Right, right, no problem." Uncomfortable silence. ".. So, ah, you like it under all that snow, 'r somethin'?"

"No."

"Then why not get it off?"

"Does it appear to you, fleshbag, that I possess hands?"

"No?"

"Well then."

Helluva reunion.

Barricade had always been an… odd one. Then again, if one had any right to judge the oddity of a being, Mike was certain he'd wind up in the loony bin for telling people he had a car for a friend. Or a car that was kind of a friend. A friend that liked to insult him a lot?

"Ya wanna…ya wanna come in 'r something?" the greasemonkey tried tentatively, motioning to the garage. "Fuckin' freezin' out here, 'n it's Christmas 'n shit."

Barricade shift on his shocks; snow fell out of where it had collected in the depression below his taillights. "What standing does the current greed-spouted holiday have in your question?"

That was awkward. "I dunno. Jus' figured no one ought ta have to be out on the curb covered in snow on Christmas Eve."

The answer, for all its honesty, seemed to appease the Saleen. Despite the fact that the temperatures were close to the zero mark, the gargantuan eight-cylinder engine beneath the precipitation-covered hood rumbled to life without a hitch and Barricade shook, vibrating on his tires hard enough for the majority of the snow to simply slide off. Michael never thought he would live to see a car talk, much less do…that, but he had long accepted that his life was no longer normal and was unconcerned as he unlocked the office door and went inside.

The heat had been turned off for the holidays, leaving the dark space chilly and not much warmer than the air outside. The New Yorker moved past brightly colored posters on gray painted brick walls, dimmed by the time, pushed open the 'employees only' entrance into the garage itself. There, it was bitingly cold, a condition exacerbated by the clean concrete flooring and relatively poor insulation. Romano moved to the last stall and keyed the door to slide upwards, then flipped the switch to the giant space heater nestled in the ceiling. The building the garage was settled in was old, and his employees never ceased their bitching about the morning cold when New York City's temperature began to drop.

The police interceptor pulled in, all lights dark, and parked.

Mike watched him as the rickety stall door closed. "Here, know what? Lemme.."

The Saleen watched the mechanic soundlessly as he dug through drawers, apparently looking for something. It wasn't that difficult to surmise why Romano seemed to want his company so bad; the weeks leading up to December 25th seemed to bring out the worst in the fleshbags, and unless the New York mechanic was alone for the holidays, it seemed less than logical for Romano to have been out walking in the middle of the night in below freezing conditions.

Fleshling holidays had no standing with him; come to think of it, neither did the old Cybertronian ones. Barricade did not celebrate anything, be it his creation day or any other such reason to be festive. He had no reason, and what with the war having annihilated most of the Cybertronian population with no hope of rebuilding their numbers –

Romano moved back over to him, holding something in his hands that upon closer inspection revealed itself to be an ice scraper. Using the stiff bristle-brush on the back of it, Mike began to sweep the remaining snow from the Mustang's form and Barricade, for once, neither complained nor let loose a snide remark. The human was unaware of the interceptor's dermo-sensors keening to micro sensitivity at the touch.

"So, ah," the greasemonkey started as he worked on removing the ice from the S281's windshield. "Where ya been? Ain't seen ya around since summertime."

Barricade seemed to shift again, and the crunch-snap of ice breaking sounded off as he opened his doors marginally to loose the crystals built up around the seams. "Situation dictated that I had to lay low, and stay away from New York City."

"Like what?"

Nosey little carbonmonkey. "Someone undesirable was wishing my company for objectionable things."

The tone of the police car's voice told Michael that he didn't want to go into it any further than that. "Ah. Well, uh, good ta see ya again."

"…Yes." After a short silence between the two, Barricade prompted, "The wound has healed nicely, I see."

"Yeah it has—wait, how'd you know that?" Even though the Saleen didn't move, the air around him seemed to make him smirk. "… Nevermind. But yeah, s'fine, after some physical therapy."

Romano tossed the ice scraper/snow brush aside and sat down, leaning back against Barricade's front left wheel once the interceptor was free of snow and back to his usual spotless self. Well, relatively spotless. The mechanic couldn't do anything about the half frozen salt/ice muck that was stuck inside Barricade's wheel wells and on his underside, testimony to the fact that he had been doing some extensive driving on salted roads. The dirty stalactites of filth would melt and fall off on their own, for the most part.

Still, Mike found himself bothering one that was frozen onto the underneath of Barricade's front fascia. "You rust, 'r anything?" he asked as he broke the icicle of city grime off and lobbed it away.

"No."

"…Salt uncomfortable 'r anything?"

"Yes."

Short as ever. At least it's warmin' up in this damn place. "Anythin' I can do 'bout it?"

"Anything you would do would be a fruitless and futile waste of time," Barricade rasped, his voice sharp and gravelly in Mike's human ears. "I am not one of your simplistic fleshbag vehicles and I do not require pampering to survive."

Romano's job had always been sort of a thankless one. "Yeah, so what th' hell are ya then?"

Despite the obvious fact that the Saleen had driven right into that one, Barricade was still caught off guard by the sudden question. The mechanic knew he was an alien, as was revealed the last time the query had come up, but evidently he was unsatisfied with the answer. The New Yorker and his spawn had proven to be trustworthy thus far with his secrets…

"Stand up, and move to the middle of the room."

This order puzzled the mechanic, but Romano got up and did as asked. He stood beneath the old-style space heater, looking up at the orange-hot coils for a moment before shedding his coat and focusing once more on the intelligent car that he had first laid eyes on some six months prior.

Barricade surmised that there was enough room. The ceiling was fourteen feet high, only two feet short of his full standing height (unless one counted his shouldermounts and doorwings, which gave him an extra three feet); plenty of room to unfold and hunch, if not stand.

It had been too long since he had spent any length of time in his natural form, anyway.

Like a flashback, the interceptor suddenly began to shift and change among a symphony riot of turning gears and clanking metal. Its metal back broke and twisted and produced claws, arms as Mike's shocked mind began to realize – this was what Barricade had tried to do before. As the Saleen took a shape wholly unlike the sleek, speed-oriented form, Mike stumbled back a step and watched with a slack jaw and wide eyes.

Barricade stood and folded his doorwings down; razor-talons catching the garage lights and making them gleam as he turned glowing eyes alight with fire, like dying embers smoldering in a pit, upon the steadfastly shocked and delightfully terrified human being.

I'm back. :)