Deleted Scene II
Settling of Scores

A/N: This scene depicts the actual death of Sideways at the hand of Barricade, which was cut from Chapter 28 of ‘The Day We Hailed the Heavens’ due to the length of the chapter as it was. Some dialogue will be the same as in the original (from Ratchet’s perspective), as the first part takes place in the same time frame.

Requested by: SkyHighFan and Icarian Angel Wings

It was raw.

It was burning.

It was hatred – hatred in its deepest, darkest, most hellfire-crimson form. And he was feeling it – feeling it loud and clear and violent, and deeper than he had ever felt it before.

Barricade felt his faceplates contorting into a stiff, disgusted grimace as he looked upon the body of Rosa Lee Connelly. In the cold stillness of what the organics called death, the creature looked more pathetic than ever as she lay unmoving in the protective arms of the medic’s holoform, all chalk-white flesh and blood-red hair, the colour so very close to the hue of the life fluid that had drained from her body through the open wound in her abdomen.

The girl’s half-spark had gone out. He could no longer feel its potent pull on his chest; the strange buzzing sensation that would prick at his spark was nonexistent. Gone into the Matrix… where he could never get to it. The potential power that he could have had with a full, completed spark… by Primus, Megatron himself was unlikely to have had such a power, for Barricade was certain that he had never found his spark mate. Finally, he could have had respect… a chance of a higher position, and the chance to be something more than a mere hunter.

You wretched little whelp.

Disgusting, weak, stupid meatbag… well, she had certainly got hers for what she had done. If she had stayed with him, she wouldn’t be dead. The medic would be dead, and the situation would have been a far more simple, straightforward one. Simple and straightforward being that she would be his spark partner alone; he could take the half-spark and leave her, and that would have been that. But no.

Fortune did not favour the brave… only the corrupt, the evil, and the twisted.

Like… Sideways.

“I hope you are happy now, Barricade,” Ratchet suddenly said, and he glared down at the holoform angrily. “Rose is dead… you will never have to waste your precious time on her again.”

“Don’t be sentimental, you old fool,” he snarled at the humanised medical officer, glad that he was above the slagger for a change. “The senseless girl was playing the hero, and now she has paid the due price for it. All I am concerned about is the fact that it is now impossible for my spark to reach full potential, thanks to her utter stupidity.”

“Fuck you, Barricade!” came the girl’s choked voice. “You bastard… you bastard…”

Oh, so she was calling him those crude human names, was she? Had he been the one to spear the girl on the end of a seven-foot-long horn and then rip it out of her again without so much as a split second of remorse? Had he been the one to leave her bleeding on the floor like a slaughtered animal? Slag it all to the Pit, this was hardly his fault! He wouldn’t have minded the medic dying at all, but he hadn’t exactly been racing to secure the death of the foolish girl that could have been the key to his true power.

Seeing red with outrage at the female’s claim, he smashed his fist against the marble surface of the plaza. “This is not my fault, you obscenely dim-witted little insect!” he snapped. “You expected me to stop her throwing herself in front of a Cybertronian weapon?!”

That got a rise out of her.

“YOU WERE HER FUCKING GUARDIAN! You selfish fucker – you were supposed to look after her! If you had been with her from the beginning, you would have saved her!”

What a load of slag. He had been with Rose at the beginning of the battle – the Cybertronians and the human military personnel had lined up to face the approaching drones, and she had been right there at his feet upon his insistence. It had been her fault for running off without him when there was no way that he could have followed her – he had been accosted by an entire squadron of drones within minutes, and it wasn’t as if he could fight them all and keep an optic on the disobedient female.

He hated her. He hated her for being so stupid, and so pathetic, and so utterly slagging noble. Autobot values were worthless, and she had learnt that lesson the hard way. If he hadn’t been so furious over the fact that she had taken the half-spark with her, then he wouldn’t have given a damn about the fact that she was dead.

Slowly, his fist uncurled and he straightened himself, glowering into Mikaela Banes’s saline-filled eyes. He was so disgusted with her obtuse attitude to the situation that he decided not to honour her with even the shortest response to her outburst.

What, after all, did she know of such things?

Deciding that he had better not look at the brainless organic for any longer lest he crush her out of revulsion, he turned his glowing set of quadoptics back to analyse the form of Ratchet’s holomatter representation of himself. Evidently the girl – she was too inadequate to deserve him so much as thinking that innocent, floral name of hers – had seen something in the pretentious slagger to find him worthy of her kamikaze race to the plaza, and he found himself dimly interested in what it might have been.

The Autobot had taken the form of a middle-aged human male, with eyes the colour of copper sulphate and russet-brown hair. He could see Ratchet’s face cast onto the human image, now shadowed with dark resentment and bleakness as he looked down at the limp human that lay in his muscled arms, useless to anyone in death.

Mine, his spark seemed to growl. Mine, not yours.

Even though she was dead, and the spark was no longer pulling him magnetically towards her, he still found himself seething in bitter ire at the fact that his spark partner was in that hopeless idiot’s embrace.

Ratchet suddenly looked up, his features tense with fury.

“Go,” he ordered with quiet authority, holding the human closer to him.

Barricade’s optics narrowed to mere slits of hatred as he flexed his digits into fists, inches from punching the medic’s true form and sending the old scrap heap to the Pit, but he said nothing further. He knew now what he was destined to do on this day – he would be wasting his time by slaughtering the Autobot. The minutes it would take were minutes that he could no longer afford to lose; as the humans said, he had bigger fish to fry today. As much as he despised him… Ratchet had not killed Rose.

Sideways had.

He transformed into the Mustang police interceptor at once, appendages and armoured body parts shifting and folding until he was in vehicle form again. The engine let out a furious snarl as he revved it with menacing intent, ignoring the looks of anger that he received from the medic and his charge for shattering the stillness of their grief.

/Go on, medic. Grieve like the pathetic slagheap you are./

/I will, Barricade/ was the reply, and the holoform’s eyes bored into his. /I will never stop grieving for her./

Barricade sneered to himself with silent disgust before he threw himself into reverse, tyres screaming as he spun one hundred and eighty degrees in a friction-ridden burnout. He launched himself down the steps that led back towards the battlefield, his hatred slowly twisting into a thunderstorm of black, angry, vengeful loathing as he hit solid ground again, speeding up at a rate that no ordinary police car should have been able to achieve as he homed in on his target.

There he was… the bastard that he had taken his power away was going to pay…

Ironhide seemed to be struggling against the agile mech where the two of them were fighting all the way down the other end of the long street, which might have dimly surprised Barricade if his logic circuitry hadn’t long since been fried by the hot rage pumping through his fuel lines. The warrior was enormous compared to Sideways, but he looked as if he barely had the strength to keep raising his plasma cannon.

Sideways sniggered evilly, and Barricade’s long-range auditory sensors picked up on his ensuing words over the sound of his own engine. “You cannot defeat me, Ironhide. You are too old… a part of a distant past that this day will see an end to.”

“We’ll see ‘bout that, slagger,” Ironhide grunted defiantly, but he looked shattered. “You piece of scum…”

“Oh, for spearing that human femme, you mean?” was the sneer in response. “Yes… I thought you might be angry on the medic’s behalf, Ironhide. But once I have dealt with you, I will return to the place where her filthy blood tells her sad story, and I will finish him. His suffering over his mate’s death will not be prolonged… but his death will be. I will make sure that he suffers for what he did to my mate… her death will require more than a mere life-for-life exchange, seeing as her life was so much more worthwhile…”

Hearing of the medic’s death was music to Barricade’s audio systems, but he was too livid to glory in it. Sideways’s sleek, charismatic baritone was enraging him – the slagger may have thought himself all-knowing, being Unicron’s servant, but he had never thought of who else might be losing out on power when he had run the girl through like that.

You’ll pay for this…

Several hundred yards away, he transformed.

It was as if the world had slowed down as limbs extended, gyratory spike batons pulling out from his wrist armour as he threw himself into a somersault that seemed unnaturally graceful for a mechanoid of such size and immensity. Metal shrieked agonisingly against the torn-up asphalt as he collided with Unicron’s right-hand mech at one hundred and twenty-two miles per hour, smashing into him with enough force to send an entire line of drones offline in one fell swoop.

Sideways bellowed out a cry of anger and pain as the immense impact force carried the two of them halfway down the street and into the side of a building, shattering the flimsy windows as the two of them struggled against each other violently. Human soldiers scattered at all angles, hollering to each other to move.

“Traitor!” the violet Cybertronian roared, his voice audibly strained beneath his battle mask. “You will pay dearly for your –”

“No,” Barricade snarled back vituperatively. “You will pay for slaughtering my spark partner…”

The other mech stopped struggling, his mauve optics narrowing very slightly, with evident suspicion. “What?” he snapped, looking revolted. “You pusillanimous fool… are you so desperate for the power you so obviously lack that you would stoop so low as to claim another’s spark mate – least of all that pathetic medic’s lifeless bitch?”

Barricade smirked bitterly, flexing the fingers of his right hand. “You may think yourself omniscient, Sideways,” he sneered, shoving his face right into Sideways’s. Purple burnt into crimson, hot colours clashing angrily in a mingled hue of violent magenta hatred. “But know this – there are some things that even Unicron does not understand. Some things that only the All Spark knows… and one of those things, you miserable excuse for a mech, is the threefold spark divide.”

“Your made-up words mean nothing,” Sideways growled. “Wait for the sunrise – Barricade – the dawn of the new day – the day when Unicron, Lord of Darkness, will rise to power in all His glory!”

“Then die in the knowledge that you will not live to see it.”

With that, he reached down – he plunged his powerful hand past two armoured plates, clamping rock-hard digits around the receptacle with enough force to crush a piece of iron into a twisted chunk of scrap metal – and ripped it free of the wires that held it in place before he smashed it hard against a jagged piece of rubble, creating a deep, irreparable crack.

And the light burnt out.

Barricade glanced up, gritting his teeth as he wrapped his hand around the broken spark chamber. It was still warm with the flare of life… but Sideways’s optic sensors were dead, their purple colour extinguished for whatever was left of eternity.

Good.

Now to show the medic that he… and only he… could have been worthy of the power that was lost to him forever.

Author’s Note: Well, Barricade never did mess around. It’s get the mission done and go with our favourite Decepticon interrogator. :) I hope you enjoyed seeing that little bit, and then it gave you some insight into how he felt when Rose died, and why he ended up murdering Sideways. More will be coming soon – in the meantime, keep an eye out for ‘When We Dared the Dawn’ updates!