Aftermath

Actually had a pretty happy day today, so NO idea where THIS depress-fest came from. Barricade/June. No sex. Just depressing. Sorry. After "Punishment."


June heard the garage door rattle open outside her window. Barricade was back. She threw the covers off her legs. Where the hell had he been for so long? Normally he contacted her every few days. She’d gone from worried to furious and back to a certain kind of hollowness. Maybe he was gone. Maybe dead. Uncertainty, she decided, in the words of her students, sucked. She was going to find out.

She tugged on a pair of jeans, flipping her short nightgown over the waistband, and grabbed her spare garage door opener. She headed out the door, hitting the opener. The door rose a few inches. Stopped. Rattled back down its track.

She hit the door opener again. It squealed, rolled up. Stopped. Rolled back down.

A third time.

“I can do this all night,” June called, through the noise.

“No, you can’t. Low tolerance for frustration.” Barricade said, rolling the door back down.

Dammit. He was right. But she’d show him what ‘low tolerance for frustration’ could do. She marched into the house, grabbing her keys. She unlocked the long-neglected side entrance to the garage, flipping on the blazing incandescent light. “What’s the deal?” she said. “Where have you been?” She tried to keep the tension out of her voice.

He sat like a block. She waited. “Not going to talk to me?”

“No.”

“Ha! You just did.”

Silence.

“Can I at least sit down?”

“Your garage.”

She waited for him to open one of his doors, like usual. He didn’t. Shit. This was bad. What was going on? Her annoyance melted into concern. How to break through to him? “Okey-doke,” she said. She hopped up onto his trunk. “Here okay?” She leaned back against the rear window. No response. She rolled over running her hands along the number on his roof. “Barricade,” she said, her voice unusually soft, “please talk to me.”

“Nothing to say.”

“Why are you here?”

He started to say something—cut himself off. After a moment, he asked, hesitantly, “Okay if I stay here?”

“Of course it’s okay. I just want to know…you’re obviously upset.”

“Nothing you can help with. Trust me.”

“I do trust you. Do you trust me?”

Another hesitation. “Yes.”

“It might help. Just to get it out.”

“Don’t think so.”

“Try me. What have you got to lose?”

You, he thought. Me. Myself. He didn’t realize he’d said them aloud.

June lay her cheek against the cool surface of his roof. “You won’t lose me. I promise.”

“Don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“Fine. We’ll try it your way. You’ll be wrong.” The roof bucked under her, slowly, giving her time to jump off as he transformed. He settled himself gingerly against the side wall as if he were in pain. June noticed it, but said nothing. She sat down between his legs, looking up at him. “You okay?”

“Fine,” he bluffed. Then, more slowly. “Got in some trouble.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.” His hand closed involuntarily over his interface access hatch. Another motion June noticed but kept to herself.

“Big consequences?”

“Worst of those are over. Long as…no one finds out about it.”

June’s eyebrows quirked together at this clue. Big mystery. Interfacing, bad, and a secret. This wasn’t adding up well. “Someone know about us? Is that what it is?”

Barricade ran a hand over his face. His other picked at some grime on his shinplate. “One knows about you. In general. No specifics.”

“That’s not what this is about?”

“Not you.”

“I’d hate to be the cause of this,” she said. “Of anything bad.”

“I can handle it,” he said, tightly.

“Not sure I could,” she retorted. The response seemed to hit him like a revelation. “Please tell me?” She rose to her feet, placing what she hoped was a comforting hand on his thigh armor. This had to do something with sex—she didn’t want to appear to be interested only in that right now. She wasn’t interested only in that.

“Not much to tell,” he said, staring at the floor behind her. “Pissed someone off. Got paid back for it. End of story.”

“Obviously NOT end of story if you’re here and this upset.”

“I’m not upset!” he said, his voice on the edge of breaking. June said nothing. Let it sink in how obvious he was.

“Tell me who you pissed off, or how you did it,” she said. “Who or how. You don’t have to tell both. Just one. A word. A phrase.” He looked down at her for a long moment, studying her face for…something. She couldn’t tell what he was looking for, or if he found it.

“Megatron,” he said, quietly. His elbow tucked against his interface hatch again.

She reached for the hatch. He drew back. “Show me,” she said, still gently.

“Not tonight,” he said. “Really. For once. Not interested.”

A ghost of a smile. “That’s not the Barricade I know—that’s how I KNOW there’s something wrong.” He echoed back her faint smile for an instant. “Show me,” she repeated, more like a command.

He removed his hand. “Nothing to see,” he said, letting her open the hatch. She spotted the shiny sealing collar immediately. The paint around it was scratched in long arcs, down to the silvery base metal.

“That’s new,” she said, blandly.

“Yeah.”

She stepped back, closing the hatch gently, and tugging on his free arm. “What?” he asked, irritated. “Told you, not interested.”

“Shut up and lay down,” she barked.

“I’m not going to—“

“I won’t even try. Just lay the fuck down.”

He didn’t protest any further, but allowed her to tug him til he was lying on his side in her garage. She hit the lights, plunging the room into near dark. “Little light, at least?” she said. He hit his headlamps. He watched her, dully, approach him in the circles of light, the gauzy black of her top floating over the shape of her body. Her bare feet padded silently on the cement floor. Her toenails, he noticed, had been colored some metallic white. Pretty, part of his brain cataloged, idly. I wonder how they do that.

She tossed an old sleeping bag on the floor next to his head, and flopped down on it. “Don’t need the light any more.” He obediently switched off.

For a long moment he heard nothing but her breathing, against the slow heave of his own ventilation. She rustled against the sleeping bag. He felt a warm hand brush his face. “I’ve been there,” she said, quietly. “I know what it’s like.”

“Don’t think you do.”

“Oh, not the mechanics of it. That’s just…gymnastics, really. But I know. It’s happened to me.”

“Because you took some lib—“ She silenced him with her hand on his mouth.

“Reason why doesn’t matter. Empty justification. What matters is….What matters is your will. That’s been violated.”

“Powerless,” he said. “I feel so…powerless.”

“I know,” she said. “You’re not.”

He rose up, shoving her hard against the ground. He heard the skidding sound of her skinning her leg on the concrete. “Shut up,” he hissed. “I don’t need your empty words.”
“They’re not.”

He struck her, hard enough to throw her into a pile of boxes. The crunch of crumpling cardboard. She pulled herself out, holding her head. In the dark, she was almost blind. With his lowlight, he could see everything. He rushed at her, pinning her to the wall. One claw grazing the side of her throat.

“I am not powerless,” he hissed at her, his red eyes blazing with such intensity that she blinked.

“I know that.”

“Not. Powerless.” He leaned closer. His free hand tore away at her clothes, shredding them around her, leaving long shallow scores in the white of her skin. “Take you if I want.”

“Yes,” she said, looking him straight on. Her eyes were almost sad. “Do you want to?”

“Shut up,” he said, again. He snatched at his interface module, pressing it hard between her legs, bruising the crest of the bone, and the tender delta of her thighs. “I can hurt you,” he said. “So badly. So easily.”

She raised one hand up and traced it along the talon around her throat. “Do you want to hurt my body? Or something else?” Her voice dropped. He glared at her, tightening his hand around her body, feeling her flesh give. He shoved the module hard against her alien access port, feeling it grate against unlubricated skin. Despite herself, pain flared in her eyes. “Is this what you want?” she whispered.

He dropped her, his module clattering to the hard floor as he collapsed back into a ball. His hands covered his face, scraping at his facial plates deep enough to chip the paint. He huddled there for what felt like hours, his chassis shaking with emotion, vibrating hard enough to rattle the smaller fairings behind his neck like scared wings.

He felt some heat on his module, and looked up. June, carrying it back to him, carefully in soft palms. In the lowlight, he could see trails of blood down her legs, her abdomen. One trickle from behind her ear. Bruises bloomed already on her inner thigh. “Here,” she said, stowing the module in its catchment, and closing the hatch. She moved to step back.

He caught her up in his arms, feeling her stiffen in surprise as he lifted her off the ground. He pressed his face against her, feeling her usual warmth and the heat of the fresh blood, tangy and metallic to his sensors. “I hurt you,” he said. “I am sorry. I am so sorry.”

“I’ve been hurt worse.”

“Not by me.”

“You needed to do that.”

“I did not need to hurt you. Nothing justifies that.”

“Justification is reason. What happened to you is…not reason. Reason cannot explain forcing someone against their will.”

“I almost did--!”

“Almost.”

“What if I didn’t stop? I would have done the same to you as was done to me.”

“No,” she breathed. “Because I would have allowed you to do it.”

“Why?”

“Because. Because you needed to prove something to yourself. Because you wanted to do it. Because…because I…I care about you. And it’s a small thing to give, if I can give it.”

He stared at her, something like horror on his face. “June, do not.” She smiled, sadly. “June, I am not…I am…you are more valuable.”

“Am I?” He saw tears catch in the light from his lowlight sensor.

“June,” he said, his voice like agony, pulling her against him. He felt her body soft against his face, his throat. Yielding to his harder armor. White and pure against his black. Except where he had ripped her open with his hands. Except where he had damaged her.