Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first time D-16 meets him, he is trying to unhook his drill bit from the loading pack the wrong way, and the jetpack is strapped across his back upside down, and his armour doesn’t have the dents and scrapes and flaked paint that D-16 has come to associate with mining bots.  

He is new. 

“Stupid metal tooth thing,” D-16 hears as he nears his locker, holding his own rusted gear under one arm. “I swear the mech said it was supposed to come out easy…”

He looks pathetic, D-16 surmises, sticking his whole servo in his loading pack to try and wrench the massive drill piece out of the welded pocket that was literally made to hold the contents of the pack together through a ground quake, let alone survive some meddling idiotic mining bot-wanna-be. His glossa peeks past his lips, and his brow plating is furrowed, and he looks like a fool with his upside-down jetpack. 

“Flip it around, mech,” D-16 decides to cut the poor bot some slack. He’s already garnering enough irritated glares from the tired miners around him as is. “The bit slides through the welding latch on the other side, when you flip the pack over.”

The new bot’s head snaps up to look at him, optics cycling wide before glancing back down at his pack. 

“Oh,” he says, slowly retracting his servo and flipping the pack around, “yeah, uh, duh, I knew that.”

“Obviously,” D-16 snorts. 

“Obviously,” the new bot nods. 

D-16 rolls his eyes and turns to his locker, stuffing his gear inside before turning his attention to the real prize at hand; the limited edition Megatronous Prime enamel poster with magnetised backings. Only in his servos thanks to some idiot cog bot that lost a round of betting. He grins as he plasters it against the rusty metal of his locker, using gentle digits to smooth over the flimsy sheath until it sat perfect and proud. 

“Megatronous Prime?” New Bot perks up, taking in the poster. 

“Yeah,” D-16 nods, admiring his locker, spark thrumming. “He’s my…” hero sounds stupid, so he’s obviously not going to say that, but… “favourite Prime. The–”

“–greatest Prime to ever live,” New Bot echoes, his words layering over D-16’s like smooth oil. D-16 chuckles, turning to appreciate New Bot with a clearer view. “He’s pretty cool.”

“The best,” D-16 grins, taking a few steps forward. New Bot tracks him with his optics, but there isn’t any weary tension in his frame, so D-16 doesn’t think twice about reaching over and unclasping the jetpack still hung upside down on the mech’s back, tugging it up and over the bright blue helm of his before flipping it around. “Unless you’re planning on offlining on your first day, I suggest you wear this properly.”

“Heh, that obvious?” New Bot scratches his cheek, smile a teetering thing. 

“Take a guess.”

D-16 yanks the jetpack over New Bot’s helm and secures the straps properly, snug over square shoulders and silver bracings. 

“D-16,” he introduces himself, a little unbecoming of him considering he’s not really known for his camaraderie or willingness to talk to strangers, but Megatronous Prime had this way of opening up his spark and making it dance within his chassis, so he’s feeling generous now. He gives the pack an experimental tug before stepping back and offering a servo. 

New Bot shutters his optics, running his digits over the intricate straps crossing over his chassis before turning to grin at D-16, optics flashing a bright blue.

“Orion Pax,” he answers, taking D-16’s servo and giving it a firm shake. D-16 ignores how his servo feels cool and foreign in his, not like the other factory built frames in this mining sector. But this Orion Pax fails to mention D-16’s assigned designation number, so D-16 doesn’t mention how Orion’s servo feels a bit delicate, like a medic’s servo. 

“So, you ever mine energon before?” Orion Pax asks, and it’s a stupid thing to ask, considering he’s here, in a mining facility, surrounded by miners, here to mine energon. D-16’s frame is caked with debris that grates uncomfortably in his joints, and he knows it shows across his scraped body. The mech can’t be that stupid.

“Yeah,” he answers anyway, because apparently Orion Pax was just that stupid, and he nods along to D-16’s words like they were fascinating tidbits on interstellar travel and not, in fact, if a clearly-built-for-mining bot has ever mined before. 

“Cool,” Orion Pax grins, hoisting his prepared loading pack and magnetising his drill to his chassis. “That means you can show me the works.”

“I don’t show the works to bots, I mine energon,” D-16 rolls his optics, but Orion Pax is undeterred. 

“Sounds like a lonely way to spend your mining shifts,” Orion Pax goads, his teeth flashing as his smile grows. “I personally hate being alone.”

“That’s not too surprising, given what I’ve figured about you in the three astroseconds we’ve been talking.”

“Two lonely mechs make for great company,” Orion Pax ignores him. 

“Do they now?”

“Whaddya’ say?”

“Regarding?”

“Watching my back,” Orion Pax grins, and his smile is an easy thing, light and airy and unbothered. Maybe it was the fact that his frame was clean, that there was still paint on his armour that wasn’t flaked or peeling, that there was a shine to silver coating, a shine to his optics. Nobody smiles down in the mines. There’s nothing to smile about down there, just like there was nothing to smile about up here, in these decrepit locker rooms. 

D-16 thinks this bot is a fool. A fool who will not last long here, with that dainty smile of his. 

D-16 hears himself huff and say “I’ll watch your back” and watches as his words brighten the light behind Orion Pax’s facial plating like a fusion bulb. 

D-16 watches as Orion Pax hikes his loading pack onto one shoulder and extends the opposite arm out, fist clenched and facing the ground as he says, “and I’ll watch yours too!”

D-16 thinks Orion Pax is a Primus-promised fool. He will not survive long. D-16 doesn’t need any mech at his back.

“Sounds like a plan,” D-16 says, and his fist connects with Orion’s, and his spark thrums with a frequency almost foreign to him. 

“You know how to fight?”

D-16 thinks Orion Pax is an idiot. 

“Who wants to know?”

“Me, Orion Pax.”

D-16 rolls his optics. Idiot bolt-head. 

“Maybe,” D-16 turns his unimpressed stare to Orion, who dangles upside down from the rafters above. 

“I want to learn,” Orion chatters, swinging by the waist. “It’ll be good, to know how to defend yourself. Or punch a self-entitled jerk in the face.”

“Who’d you punch, huh?”

“Nobot,” Orion grins ominously. D-16 drops the issue, not wanting to induce a processor ache. 

“So…” Orion breaks the silence after a few kliks. “You do know how to fight.”

“Barely,” D-16 scoffs, leaning further into the steel beam behind him and watching Orion flip off from the rafter like some over-energized bitlet. 

“How’d you learn?”

“Petty fights here and there,” D-16 waves a servo around. “Pod placement, rations, best drill equipment.”

“Did you win?”

D-16 lets a smirk grow over his lips plates. 

“Every time.”

Orion grins wide, straightening up from a crouch and tugging on D-16’s servo to the little clearing of the common room. Few bots are here, most going off to recharge like the two of them should be doing, if only Orion Pax was any semblance of a normal mech. 

“Show me,” he demands. 

“Mmm… no.”

“Oh come on Dee!” Orion whines, waving their conjoined servos together. “Just one move. Or two. Or three.”

“One,” D-16 warns, taking his servo back and backing up a few paces. “Just one. And then I’m knocking you out and going for recharge.”

“Deal!” 

D-16 honestly doesn’t know where he’d learned the moves he knows. When brawls break out among miners they usually look messy, and D-16’s participated in his fair share of fights, but he’s learned from them. There’s a certain thrill in being able to see a mech’s tightening frame and knowing exactly how he’ll move. How she’ll duck. How to throw him over his shoulder. How to win. 

He doesn’t tell any of this to Orion, who would likely take this information and exploit it somehow, maybe plead for fights like he was doing right now. 

D-16 strikes, and what he assumed was an obvious move struck Orion right in the middle and sent him sprawling. 

“Sweet Solus Prime,” Orion wheezes, struggling back to his pedes and holding where D-16 kicked him. “That was epic!”

“You’re so glitched, Pax,” D-16 huffs, relaxing his stance. 

“Do it again!”

“No!”

“Come on Dee, just until I don’t fall on my aft again,” D-16 absolutely does not budge. “Pleease.”

Damn those blue optics. Damn that smile. 

“I’m going to beat you.”

“Deal!”

Orion Pax is a terrible miner. 

He’s got the spirit, sure. If anything, he’s got a bit too much spirit, too much energy, too much space in his chassis for his spark to whirl around like a rapid little misaligned cog feeding into Orion’s endless thrumming need to move. 

Mining is delicate work despite the harsh environment. Energon bonds stacked to form solid crystals are highly volatile in comparison to its tempered liquid counterpart, and thus store high potential energy just begging to spike into huge explosions and massive cave-ins. There’s a reason there were so many protocols within the mining industry. One of the very first lessons practically ingrained into everybot’s processor down here was to cut with the grain; against it will only add friction, and an unnecessary risk for a spark to trigger an untimely demise. 

Orion impatience results in him cutting so against the grain with such disastrous speed that the shower of sparks he creates within the energon crystal he’s cutting into actually reaches far enough to catch against the open canister of the drill oil he also happened to forget about. 

The following explosion is almost beautiful, if viewed from several hundred hics away. 

Thankfully, like most newly assigned mining bots in this sector, Orion was put to work in a vein furthest from the main energon cavern, so the team had adequate time to shout down the mine that there was an explosion coming up and to evacuate. 

That is how Orion meets the acquaintance of their supervisor. 

D-16 doesn’t get the chance to warn the bot about the punishment he’s likely to receive. Probably decreased rations or something. Every new bot ends up in some sort of trouble for a mistake or another, and a collapsed mine wasn’t too uncommon. Honestly, considering the potential consequences, they came out relatively unscathed. In fact, they had even managed to spare a good portion of the full energon carts in the hasty escape alongside only two casualties. It could have been worse. 

So D-16 watches from the sidelines with everyone else as Elita-1 chews Orion out a good one, and then turns around to properly address the arriving presence of Darkwing. 

“Announcement of this squad’s failure to reach energon threshold was reported two kliks ago. What is your excuse, scrap-heap?” Darkwing seethes, voice muffled and thick behind his mask. D-16 shoves his way to Orion’s side fast enough to pat him on the shoulder and offer him a wane smile. 

“Just keep your mouth shut,” he warns, and that’s all he manages to get out before Darkwing sees through Elita-1’s hastily contracted excuses and locks his visor on Orion. 

It seems that Darkwing and Orion are actually already well acquainted. D-16 has seen their supervisor get angry before, but this? This was a whole new level of fury that he’s never encountered. Every miner in the vicinity stumbles back against the onslaught of Darkwing’s snarling frame as he thunders forward, all but Orion cowering in the face of such a towering mech. 

“You,” he practically growls, vocaliser glitching in his anger. “I thought I’d left you for scrap.”

“Yeahhh,” Orion drawls, posture much too relaxed in the face of the potent promise of deactivation. D-16 prays to Primus that Orion will heed his words and shut the fuck up.

Orion Pax does not shut up. In fact, he does the opposite of shutting up. 

“Well, you know how slow mining bot production’s been, so I got dumped here! All ‘cause you were the lucky spark to report me. How does it feel being a dumbaft, Darkwing?”

And all D-16 can do is gape at that. Was this mech glitched? Did he have a deathwish or something? Talking back to a cogged mech with the physical power to rip his helm right out of its joint? And laughing! Laughing under his breath at his own joke like it wasn’t a one-way trip back to the Allspark. 

Darkwing seethes, visor flashing an angry red while his vents puff out visible steam from between his joints. Without uttering anything above a snarl, Darkwing snatches Orion form around the neck and flies off up away from the rest of them. 

Orion doesn’t even bother screaming. His laughter echoes against the stone walls like the words of a ghost. 

Silence reigns among the group, stunned into submission by the presence of something as… as… as insane as what just transpired. 

Finally, bots start murmuring to one another as Elita-1 breaks out of her stupor and starts barking orders about clean-up. D-16 forces himself to move, forces himself to stop replaying the ringing sound of Orion Pax’s laughter as it circles almost unbidden within his audio compartment. Forces himself to ignore how his spark clenches when he thinks about how Orion smiled with his whole face, his neck in between clawed digits as doom flew him away. He doesn’t think about that smile. 

“Holy shit,” Jazz mutters next to him, ducking his helm to whisper to Red Alert. “That mech is seriously glitched.”

“He’s going to die today,” Red Alert sighs, hefting his drill over his shoulder. 

“Sucks,” Jazz shrugs, following after the red mech, “He seemed fun.”

“Fun to die with, sure.”

D-16 watches the two bots leave, spark spinning painfully, and refuses to think about Orion’s smile. 

Orion’s recharge berth remains empty from across D-16 for the rest of the rest cycle. He doesn’t turn up for rations, and misses a whole shift before D-16 sees him again for recharge the following cycle. 

He’s… he looks worse for wear. He’s got dents all over his armour, paint scraped and fresh welds shining in the lowlight of the recharge station. One optic is glitching, a particularly fat weld hugging the cavity of his cheek ridge right beneath probably being the cause of that. 

He gets more than a handful of looks, ranging from mortified to curious, some even disdainful, as he limps through the rows of berths until he reaches his. 

D-16 doesn’t say anything and doesn’t stare, because staring is rude, obviously, and instead leans on his own vertical recharge slab as he waits for Orion to see him. 

It’s telling that within the short timespan that D-16 has known Orion Pax, he can already pick out the subtle tells of the bot. He’s an open pad for D-16 to read, never able to hide emotions well, but it’s the little things, like the uneven tilt of his grin when he spots D-16, the way his remaining intact optic lights up like an energon explosion, the way he hobbles a bit faster, his left leg lagging, though it doesn’t stop him from stumbling forward anyway. 

“Dee!” Orion calls out, and without needing to think about it, D-16 leans forward to catch Orion when he inevitably trips, servos splayed over those red shoulders to keep the idiot steady. 

“One cycle,” D-16 starts without a greeting, helping Orion to the recharge slab, “you couldn’t stay out of trouble for one cycle.”

“That’s no fair, really,” Orion pouts, “it’s not like I blew the mine up on purpose.”

“Insulting Darkwing?” D-16 raises an optic ridge, unimpressed. “Really?”

“He was asking for it,” Orion huffs, but complies when D-16 nudges him to the slab and accepts the help when lifting his bad leg up the scant incline of the slab from the floor. 

“You’re glitched, Pax,” D-16 snorts, the arm not supporting Orion’s shoulders moving to lift Orion’s slagged leg up. 

“He’s had it out for me for ages,” Orion complains with an optic roll. 

“He demote you or something?”

“Kinda’?” Orion shrugs. “I used to work in the Archives.”

D-16 bawks at that, backing away a step to look Orion head on. 

“The Archives? Like, the Iacon Hall of Records?”

“It wasn’t an impressive position, trust me,” Orion laughs at D-16 incredulity. “I was a cleaner bot. No cog, no Archive access.” Then his grin turns sharp and D-16 can sense his frame prickle with unease at the careless taunt of the other mech’s shoulders. “Well, legal access anyway.”

D-16 stares. This time he can’t help it. So Orion stole things from the Archives? No wonder he ended up in the lowest caste Iacon had to offer. Honestly, D-16’s surprised the mech is still functioning. Orion hadn’t been wrong about the slower production of mining bots, but still.

“I can’t be friends with you,” D-16 says, fully serious. “You’re gonna’ get us both killed one day.”

Orion laughs. 

“I’ll get you something next time–”

“Next time?!”

“–maybe some legends of the Primes? There’s a whole bunch of stuff in there, I’m telling you!”

D-16 stares. Orion chatters on, earning several annoyed looks from neighbouring mechs settling in for recharge. Rest cycle was unfortunately short, and every klik was precious, but D-16 wastes his time to stare. Stare at chipping red and blue paint, bright optics, a crooked smile. 

Nobody smiles. It was taxing. Took energy. There wasn’t much to smile about down here. 

His spark spins like it wants to drill right out of its casing, maybe smack some sense into this dimwit mech before him promising to steal legends of the Primes for D-16 like it wasn’t a risk to his life. Like it wouldn’t go against every single protocol embedded within the makings of every miner bot constructed.

Reaching up, D-16 knocks his knuckles across Orion’s helm. Gently, of course. The stupid bot was damaged enough. 

“Go to sleep, Pax.”

“But you have to listen to this! There’s this whole section–”

D-16 sighs. Goes to lean against a slab that wasn’t his own. His spark spins, painful. Daresay calls it something like fond. 

D-16 finds stolen datapads stuffed in his locker – how the slagger got into his locker when it was keyed for his personal signature… he doesn’t even want to know – and a tiny cube of energon sitting innocently behind them. 

Orion is still working his third shift in a row; punishment for getting caught sneaking through the Archives. 

Darkwing likes picking on Orion. 

It’s probably because of the fact that during his hours of guarding the Hall of Records, he’s mostly spending that time chasing Orion from within the endless archival shelves. Most of the time he fails to catch him; miner bots are small and less colourful, less shiny, and blend in with the rest of their low caste brethren, especially during rush hour. Lately Orion’s escapades have increased in success, and it definitely has nothing to do with how D-16’s been meddling just a bit. Just a tiny bit. 

“Go left Pax!” D-16 shouts to the distant crowd, earning several strange glances from the cogged bots around him. Orion is actually hiding in the cart full of waste that he’s transporting, but Darkwing and his brother fall for it, and race forward, barrelling through the crowd like bots with a rabid virus. 

“I owe you,” Orion grins from underneath a pile of scrap metal and torn mesh sheets. 

“Yeah, you do. How much is that now?”

“Uh…” Orion ducks down to count something on his digits before looking back up at him. “Nine fueling dates?”

D-16 shoves Orion’s head further into the mesh sheets with an optic roll. 

“You really gotta’ stop sticking up to Darkwing,” D-16 mumbles as the subtrain speeds through the tall spires of Iacon. It’s packed, with bots jostling from the train’s movement despite the antigravity function. He keeps close to his hover cart and subtly peers back into it. It wouldn’t be the first time he was caught talking to a cart, afterall. 

“Someone has to,” Orion argues, a frown marring his face. “His processor will bloat otherwise.”

“I think your worries about his health are the least of his concerns.”

“Dee, he bullies cogless bots. It’s not fair. He didn’t choose to have a cog. I didn’t choose to be cogless. Did you?”

Orion Pax did this a lot. Think dangerously. Offer dangerous ideas. Protocols flashed red in his face and what did he do? He waved them away without a care in the world and kept striding forward with this… this… this blatant foolish optimism that everything will work out so long as he sticks his servos over it and doesn’t let go. 

D-16 is sure that one of these days Orion’s going to lose his arm over something like this, because he refused to simply give in and comply. Stubborn. Hopeful. And when the inevitable comes and Orion is pulled away and his grip doesn’t waver and he is torn apart, D-16 can only hope he will be there to catch him when he falls. 

Because the thing is, D-16 doesn’t get strange ideas. He follows protocol, he mines energon, and he complains about aches and pains and dreams of meeting Sentinel Prime and buying as many Megatronous merch as he can get his hands on, and he’s normal. He’s a normal cogless bot built in a forging facility without a cog because his spark wasn’t bred for one. Simple as that. 

And then Orion comes and opens his stupid mouth and starts spouting things like this isn’t fair and I didn’t choose to be cogless and did you? and D-16’s processor, to his own horror, starts taking these tidbits of Orion’s foolish hope and spinning them through scenario module after scenario module. What life would be like if he were born with a cog, with the ability to transform. To choose his function. He’d have strength. Size. Apparel. He would be able to fight. Maybe join the Prime’s Guard. All these foolish foolish hopes and dreams conjured by a fevered processor now popping up in his module panel like buzzing notifications that he just couldn’t keep at bay. 

He pictures Darkwing, in the depths of his processor, and he pictures the bot moving to strike Orion, and he pictures himself, tall, broad, thick-armoured and strong. He pictures himself interfering like he usually does, but this time Darkwing’s fist in his hand twists as he twists it, and he sends their supervisor rolling through the wall with a well delivered punch. 

He’s able to protect what is precious to him. 

“Did you?”

Of course not. Who would choose a life like this?

And that. That is a dangerous thought. 

“No,” he replies, softly, and with an air of defeat that makes his spark ache. “No I didn’t.”

Orion’s optics soften minutely, and he dares to reach out past the folds of torn mesh to brush against D-16’s digits. 

“This is why. For you. For us.”

D-16 will never pretend to understand Orion. Because he doesn’t need to. He never will. His conviction is branded right over his spark casing. 

Orion gets his rations cut more often than not. Mostly it’s for egging Darkwing, among other higher-ups in the mines, but because energon production is becoming taxing enough that new bots are difficult to spare energon to build, Orion stays within the same mining unit, unable to get demoted. He makes up for his stupidity by catching up on the most efficient ways to mine energon. He’s good at stuff when he puts his processor to it. Like stealing from the Archives. Like pissing cogged bots off. Like keeping D-16 company.

He’s an easy mech to get along with. Sometimes D-16 doesn’t know why Orion bothers hanging out with him when he can go chat up with anybot he’d like. Not that D-16 is complaining. He’s usually not one for friends, but he’s got enough space in his spark for a seat or two. Orion takes up two seats himself, sprawling over them with his pedes kicked up, acting like he owned the space inside D-16’s spark casing. 

“–and it hurt like slag, let me tell you! And he wouldn’t even loosen up the pressure! Kept muttering about how it needs to be pressed on the torn metal if I wanted to keep from bleeding out. But Ratchet’s bedside manners are something to behold because, I mean, come on–”

“Maybe if you weren’t so fraggin’ stupid, you wouldn’t be a regular and he wouldn’t be pissed off,” Ironhide mutters, drawing up another card from the pile with a grumble. 

“Seriously? Nothing?” Jazz cuts in, giving Ironhide a quizzical look, which was impressive given the visor on his face. 

“I woulda’ put it down if I had it,” Ironhide bites back. 

“Mech, you have half the deck in your servos right now.”

Orion snorts, ducking behind his own impressive collection of cards when Ironhide glares his way. 

A few turns pass, cards are pawned off and placed down, and then when D-16’s turn comes up he trades three cards for one with Sideswipe because the bot thinks he’s struck a deal, and then watches as everybot protests when D-16 places down four matchings sets and claims one final card. 

“Single,” he announces, holding his one card in triumph. 

“You cheater!” Sideswipe cries. 

“You literally traded with him, mech,” Jazz points out. 

“And he cheated!” 

“…are you stupid?”

“Someone add to his holding!”

“He’s a whole turnover away!”

Orion snickers again. 

“Shouldn’t you be plotting on my downfall,” D-16 snorts, “you’re the one player before me.”

“Nah,” Orion shrugs, taking in his cards with a lazy helm tilt, “I’m cooked this round anyway.” Then his optics light up like they usually do when he has a particularly bad idea that just needs to get done. “Tell you what. I’ll help you win this round.”

“I don’t need your help,” D-16 rolls his optics and gestures to his one card. “I’m a single placement away from winning already.”

“Ironhide is plotting to double stack with Jazz and skip my turn so you have to pick up their decks,” Orion explains, and D-16 humours him. “I can totally tell. It’s why he’s picking up so many cards. I’ll place this down, see,” he gestures to his own cards, angling them so D-16 can see them, and points to two turbo-skip cards he possesses. “I put this down on my next turn, and then you pick one up and give a fake that you’ve got nothing. The double stack will land on next playing bot, which will probably be Moonracer, and then–”

(He explains his plan, and it’s a good plan, honestly, considering the fact that he’s been cheating this entire round by using the reflection of the glass panes behind everyone to see their cards. D-16 can totally ignore him, hope Jazz and Ironhide don’t actually double stack and land him in the trenches, and win this game in a matter of kliks by placing down his final card.)

He feints a lack of match and picks up a card upon his turn. Jazz and Ironhide groan loudly and Moonracer wails at the several new cards being added to her deck. 

(Or he could drag this game out another countless rounds and get to watch Orion laugh for most of it. 

What can he say? He likes the company.)

Orion gets restless a whole bunch.

D-16 can’t really judge him. If anything he can relate. Having to spend most of your life underground working with your spark on the line is taxing, and leaves want pulsing through your energon lines like a nanite gone bad. 

Orion taps his digits against D-16’s helm, restless, and D-16 onlines his optics.

“What do you want?”

“Let’s go outside.”

“I will beat you.”

“Can you do it outside?”

D-16 climbs out and follows after his idiot best friend. 

There are several hidden alleys that lead out of the recharge stations just outside the main entrance to the mines. D-16 knows them all by spark, can walk these twists and turns from rest cycles spent in the same restless energy that consumes Orion’s every waking moment. Despite this he follows Orion, letting the mech lead the way to a single lone rooftop directly above the miners’ common area. It’s not the tallest building, but it’s tall enough that the cityscape is visible for countless hics. Vibrant holograms light the night sky and illuminate the golden spires of the city in flashes of every colour known to bot. Refractions of light litter the streets below, bounce along building walls, and dance upon Orion’s frame like a painter's expert servo. He looks good in colours, D-16 thinks, definitely belongs to the outside. Not in those dungeons, not in the mines with stone and an axe. He belongs up here. In the air. An archivist, maybe. 

In another life. Perhaps. 

“What’re you thinking?” Orion asks, voice quiet. They sit side-by-side, legs dangling out past the edge of the rooftop overlooking the massive expanse of Iacon city below. His frame edge is blurred with gold, a splash of blue along his nasal ridge, a mix of orange and stark yellow by his mouth, purple in his optics; he is an incandescent swirl of life even in the dead of night. 

“How I’m going to kill you for waking me up.”

Orion laughs. D-16 is but a bot addicted to bad energon. He wonders what it tastes like. 

“Darkwing is going to demote me to waste management.”

The confession leaves D-16’s processor lagging for several kliks before he gathers enough of himself to reply–

“What?”

“I’m not meeting his quota,” Orion continues, facing the cityscape beyond them. He looks small like this, bathed in colours that soften his edges, soften his face and make his optics glitter. He’s sitting, shoulders hunched up to fight off an invisible chill, one that D-16 feels deep within his spark chamber. 

“Yes you are,” D-16 counters, “you and I brought in the same amount last shift.”

“My quota is…” Orion winces, and purses his lips before continuing. “He doubled my quota two cycles ago. For the next few shifts. I can’t… I won’t be able to complete them, and he knows. He’s going to demote me.”

“That’s…” D-16 resets his vocaliser. “That’s not fair!”

“It’s my fault, I guess, for being a smartaft” Orion shrugs, his smile a faint thing. He turns his helm to look at D-16 when he says, “I’ll miss you. A lot.”

D-16’s spark spins so fast that the drop he feels when it sinks into his tanks leaves him reeling. His energon lines rush with anger, a sudden, spark-splitting heat that makes his circuits burn when he watches Orion look back to the city, probably the last time he’ll be able to look at a sight like this before being dumped so far below the surface of the world that the glowing lights of Iacon will only ever be illuminated through energon blue optics. 

D-16 tastes iron on his tongue. 

“You’re not going anywhere.”

Orion snaps his helm up, optics wide and mouth open in shock. 

“I… what?”

“You’re not going,” D-16 repeats, stubborn, heat licking up his tanks. “I won’t let you.”

Orion huffs, his smile widening. It looks painful on his face plates. 

“What’ll you do, beat Darkwing up for me?”

“Even better,” D-16 mutters, and shuffles close to press his shoulder against Orion’s. “I’ll help you meet your quota.”

This time Orion’s laugh is one born from disbelief. He scoots back, D-16 mourning the loss of his warmth only a little, to look his friend in the optic properly. 

“You can’t,” Orion starts, and barrels onward before D-16 can reiterate that yes, he absolutely can. “You can’t. It’s impossible. We barely meet the single quota every shift. If he finds out you’re helping me he’ll cut your rations. You’ll tire yourself out. Please, Dee, think before you–”

“You’re my best friend.”

Orion’s vocaliser audibly fritzes. 

D-16 doesn’t wait for it to settle. 

“You are my best friend,” he says again, like rubbing an etching into hot molten metal. A brand. A claim. No… no, a brand sounds better. Friends. Brand. D-16 shakes his helm. 

“You’re my best friend, and I’m not letting you get demoted. Either we fill your quota, or I get demoted with you.”

“Dee…” Orion’s vocaliser wobbles. 

“I’m not losing you,” D-16 presses on, and, unable to look into the watery depths of Orion’s gaze, stares back to the city. “I’ve… I’ve got your back, remember?”

There is a thick quiet that settles once his words stop echoing in his own audials. D-16 doesn’t dare look at his friend – best friend, because that’s what they were, and now that Orion has wormed himself this close to his spark he would be damned if D-16 would let him get any further away – and only barely starts when Orion shuffles back to mould into his side. Pressed together like this, D-16 can feel the steady thrum of Orion’s engine, the warmth of his living metal against his own. The little twitches of his finials that displace the air around them in minute differences D-16 can only pick up this close to him. 

He looks good in colours, he had thought before. 

He feels good like this, he thinks now, letting his helm hit Orion’s in a gentle bump. 

“I’ve got your back too,” Orion whispers, and D-16 ignores how glitched his voice is, how sparks dance at the corner of his vision, at the corners of Orion’s optics. 

D-16 works twice as hard for twice as much energon and ends up emptying some from his cart to Orion’s right before inspection. Orion doesn’t notice, too busy trying to keep his servos from shaking after such an intensive mining shift. His digits are flatter than D-16’s, more delicate, like digits that belong to a cleaning bot in the Archives. D-16 has tightened the bolts and secured bracing over his joints, but Orion’s servos weren’t built for the mines like D-16’s were. 

So D-16 doesn’t mention the shaking. He doesn’t mention the crystals he “misplaces” from his cart. Doesn’t say anything as Orion shakily pushes his cart, too exhausted to make any snarky comments as a superintendent weighs out their produce. 

Orion passes his quota. Barely. D-16 isn’t so lucky and his rations are cut for the next cycle. He gets let off easy, honestly, considering this was his first failure in his career. 

Orion doesn’t think so. It’s kind of funny. For a bot who regularly got beat to scrap, having that same bot panic about his reduced rations was kind of sweet. 

“I’ll give you mine.”

“Absolutely not.”

“D-16,” Orion uses his full designation number, uh oh, “I saw you mine enough to fill your cart. Why didn’t you?”

“What did I say about having your back?”

“That doesn’t mean you go and get yourself hurt for my sake!” Orion shouts, shaking digits curled into shaking fists. He gets a few looks, but most bots are tired from work and ignore them. 

D-16 is glad for the lack of audience. It makes lifting his servo and easing it down Orion’s arm that much less embarrassing.

“Pax,” he starts slowly, carefully, like explaining the concept of life to a newspark, “that’s what best friends are for.”

“If that’s the case then I’m not your best friend,” Orion sniffs, glaring at D-16’s collar. 

D-16 huffs a laugh. 

“You’re so stupid,” he states, and then eases Orion’s creaking fist until his digits fall away and fit seamlessly between his own. “And I hope you remember this. It’s how I feel everytime you go and get yourself in trouble.”

“This is not the same,” Orion’s mouth trembles, but he follows after D-16 anyway, just as tired, exhausted by the work of millions. 

“I’d say so.”

“You don’t get to say so.”

“You’re my best friend,” D-16 tries to explain. 

“And that’s why it’s not the same,” Pax says, and squeezes D-16’s servo in his. “Because you’re my best friend. Please, take my rations.”

Orion is a terrible liar. D-16 is not. He can lie easily; bots say it’s because of his scowling face. Whatever works in the end. 

“Okay,” D-16 agrees, lying between his teeth. 

“Why Orion Pax?”

“What?”

There is a holofilm playing on a massive projector right out in one of Iacon’s many open squares. It’s late into their free shift, and they will need to return to the barracks for a proper recharge, but for now most of their squad is here, sitting among other cogless and cogged bots alike, watching in rapt attention to the film playing out in loud volume and three-dimensional colours. It’s the one time D-16 can look around and think to himself, this is nice. This is the future. The future Sentinel Prime is fighting for. The future Orion Pax needs. 

Said bot is looking at him strange, little finials that D-16 has endless fun poking at perked straight up in confusion. 

“Orion Pax,” D-16 repeats slowly, voice low so as to not disturb anyone else. Not that they were going to. They’re sitting up on a rooftop, a habsuite building that wasn’t very tall and relatively wide so others could sit around the edge too. “Who gave you that designation?”

“Oh,” Orion deflates, relieved, finials twitching as he considers his answer. “I… I don’t know, honestly. I came online to it.”

“Must be nice,” D-16 mutters. 

“Who gave you yours?” Orion, poor naive little Orion, asks, and he doesn't even know how cruel his question is. 

“Nobot. I’m a cold construct like most miners. They number us off.”

“But… but almost everyone in our squad’s got a designation…” Orion frowns. 

“That’s just what they call themselves. To the higher-ups we’re all just numbers.”

“So… why didn’t you pick a name for yourself?”

D-16 pauses at that, turning away from the holofilm to watch Orion carefully. 

“It didn’t seem worth the false hope.”

Orion’s frown deepens, and his optics look so watery and hurt that D-16’s vents hitch. 

“Dee…”

“Besides,” D-16 cuts in quickly, snapping his gaze back to the film and ignoring his whirring spark. “I’ll get a designation when the Matrix is found and we don’t have to mine anymore.”

Orion doesn’t say anything, but D-16 has words in his chassis, words that he’s been harbouring for so long now, ever since the other miners started giving each other nicknames and faux designations to make their lives a little bit warmer. A little bit more like life t o live to love with warmth with kindness to want and give and take and breath and live and less like life to serve function. 

“My designation won’t belong to a miner,” D-16 says, and his resolution burns his spark like an inferno. “It will belong to me.”

Orion nods along, and when D-16 turns back to look at him he’s smiling. A fool’s spark lurches at the sight. D-16 is the fool.

“Okay,” Orion nods, smiles. “Okay Dee. D-16. D-16 will die the day the Matrix returns and you’ll be reborn and I’ll be waiting for it.” Orion’s smile is an aching thing that D-26 wants to taste, to hold, to cherish forever. His energon runs warm within him, content and dizzy. Contradictory. “I’ll be waiting to meet you all over again.”

I’ll meet you all over again; Orion Pax, the free.

“Alright,” D-16 grins, connecting his fist to Orion’s. 

A mine collapses. 

It’s no bot’s fault this time around. The underground of Cybertron is known to be volatile and ever-changing. Somebot just happens to dig into a triggering spot, and boom, the whole mine begins closing in on itself. 

D-16 immediately drops his drill and fires his jetpack, emergency evacuation codes firing through his reaction unit and forcing him to move. He grabs Orion by the upper arm and pushes him forward, already hearing the grinding of the cave-in behind them approaching fast. They fly as fast as they can, dodging crystals and exploding stone and Jazz is suddenly there, getting knocked to the ground with a loud series of clangs. 

Orion immediately dives down, trying to pry the large boulder off Jazz’s leg. D-16 knows it's futile; the two of them aren’t strong enough to lift just a massive stone, and Jazz will surely die here. And they will too, if they don’t get out of here right this very klik. 

“Just leave me and go!” Jazz wails. 

“Alright,” D-16 agrees. Orion, surprisingly, lets go and runs back, and D-16 stays clutching at the boulder, confused, because this isn’t like him, Orion would never leave a bot behind, and sure enough he’s proven right when Orion returns with Jazz’s jetpack. One thruster is broken, but he stuffs it through the tiny sliver between the floor and the boulder and lights it up to full throttle anyway. Between the two of them and the jetpack they are able to lift the boulder just enough for Jazz’s joint to be released and for D-16 to swoop down and tear the mech free of his leg. Jazz screams, guttural and hysteric, thrashing wildly in D-16’s arms and the cave-in finally reaches them. 

“Pax!” D-16 shouts. “We need to go now!”

“Go GO GO!”

Orion shoots toward them, jetpack glitching from the fallen debris clattering against him. He takes hold of the other side of Jazz, supporting the delirious mech as the two of them race to the tunnel entrance. 

Elita-1 comes to view, throwing support beams to try and prolong the inevitable. D-16’s spark races, fuel pumping so fast it rushes through his audials and leaves them ringing. He doesn’t dare look back, practically feeling the stone bite as his pedes. He sees the tunnel entrance get smaller, and without thinking throws Orion and Jazz forward with all his might. 

He doesn’t think he’ll make it. 

He sees Orion’s optics widen, and time slows, and shock paints Orion’s face in a way that leaves D-16 aching. 

His audials ring.

Orion opens his mouth and screams something, but D-16 can’t really hear what he’s saying. 

Biting stone snags at his pedes, ripping at the metal tip of his armour. 

One moment, he is being closed within the jaws of Cybertron. 

The next? He’s being crushed by Orion Pax’s trembling arms. 

“Holy Primus,” he breathes, gasps out, little mindless nuances. Thanking, begging, thanking. D-16 doesn’t say a word. To be honest, he hasn’t been convinced that he’s not some ghost. He’s alive. “You’re alive.”

D-16 peaks over Orion’s shoulder, blearily able to make out Jazz being carried off, his high-pitched complaints echoing along the walls. He closes his optics and lets his vents cool his system, bringing an arm up to hug Orion around the waist and simply exist for a moment, in his arms, feeling his spark spasm beneath red armour only a few metal layers away from his own. 

“Don’t you–” Orion’s voice glitches, and his vocaliser audibly restarts, “don’t you ever fuckin’ do that again, you hear me?”

D-16 doesn't even bother lying. Just sinks further, if possible, and lets himself believe that there will be a time when D-16 will be able to appease Orion’s worry. 

That day is not today. 

Orion is a terrible liar. 

It shows with every little tell he has. He approaches D-16 with a curved grin, something sparking in his blue optics. Tells him “hey, I have something to show you” and leads them away from where the crowd is filing into the massive arena to witness the Iacon 5000 race. D-16 grumbles but complies, following his friend’s lead and knowing deep in his spark that Orion was definitely up to something. 

His processor briefly brings up the video files from last night, when Orion Pax had conjured the insane idea of participating in the Iacon 5000. 

No… no, Pax was stupid, but not that stupid. He wouldn’t do that without at least warning D-16.

Right?

…oh boy. 

Turns out his worries are for naught. Orion leads them up a small shaft and they finally make it to a little warm area that overlooks the racers as if they are floating right above them. D-16 gapes, pressing both servos to the glass and peering down, optics roving over the racers and instantly cataloguing who he recognises. 

“Sweet Solus Prime,” D-16 vents, pressing close to the warm glass. “That’s Hotrod!  And Deadend! Oh, and that’s Mirage! He’s so close you can see his new wax job! Pax, are you seeing this? These are the best seats in the entire arena! We’re practically part of the race!” He turns suddenly, optics wide as he takes in Orion beside him. Soft smile, optics cycled wide, the red of the glass making him soft and warm. “You did this… for me?”

Orion Pax smiles, and it’s a beautiful thing, wide and unrestrained and dangerously close to the same emotion that runs rampant within D-16’s own spark. 

“Everything I do is for you,” Orion whispers, leaning close enough to bump pauldrons. “For you. For us.”

“Pax,” D-16 says, slowly, carefully, terribly fond and terribly endeared, and tears himself away from the glass to trace a servo over that stupid little glowing face. “You’re a terrible liar. Just give me the jetpack already.”

Sheepishly, Orion reaches into his subspace and hands one of the stolen jetpacks to D-16, who wordlessly magnetises it to his back. Orion does the same, and as D-16 helps him adjust the thrusters for high-power use and deactivating the automatic cool-down feature, Orion whispers, “I wasn’t lying, you know.”

“Lying by omission, Pax,” D-16 huffs. “You’re still terrible at it.”

“Not that,” Orion rolls his optics. “About doing this for you. For us.”

Oh, Primus, was he a fool for this mech. 

“I know,” D-16 placates gently, running a servo over Orion’s shoulder. 

“It was supposed to be a surprise. Shock factor so you wouldn’t immediately kill me.”

“Don’t worry, I promise that if we survive this stunt of yours, I’m going to kill you.”

Orion laughs.

“I accept those terms! You can kill me when we beat a cogged bot in a race and make history.”

“History pads will laminate about how one miner bot beat another miner bot to a pulp,” D-16 deadpans. Above them the announcers brace the audience for the beginning of the race. Sentinel Prime flies overhead, a beacon of light in the form of deep royal blue paint and golden metal. D-16 turns back to the glass and watches him, optics shining. Orion really did manage to find the best seats in the arena. 

“He’s going to be watching,” D-16 starts, optics tracing the graceful loops Sentinel Prime makes with his golden wings, a massive bot that towers above the rest of them like the true Prime he was, shining in the light of Iacon. “He’s going to witness your most stupid stunt yet.”

“You said it yourself,” Orion comes to his side, helm tilted to get a better look at the Prime. “He’s watching. He sees us for who we are, how important we are.”

D-16 feels his traitorous spark twist and spin faster. 

“He’s looking for the Matrix every chance he gets,” D-16 turns to Orion, conviction and adoration heavy on his glossa like molten lava. “Fighting for us. He’s going to restore Cybertron so we can…. so we can…”

The dangerous words refuse to leave his vocal components. 

Orion says them for him. 

“So we can choose.”

D-16 nods. 

“He’s doing this for us.”

Orion grins. 

It’s a beautiful thing. It almost blinds him from the panic he feels when the referee starts screaming a countdown and the floors beneath them slide open, dropping them into a fray of chaos. 

They get dropped down to Sublevel 50. 

One day he’s going to rip Darkwing’s spark out with his bare servos. He doesn’t know how, and doesn’t know when, but one day he will. And right after that he’s going to feed that still beating spark to Orion so he knows exactly what regret tastes like. 

D-16 has seen anger. He knows it intimately. Most of his colleagues stay clear of him because of his short fuse, and he’s fine with that. Less fires to light that fuse up, less energy spent grinding his dentae together and plotting an impossible revenge. 

Orion is a blazing inferno and D-16 is a candle that’s already gone up in flames. 

It is not uncommon for D-16 to lose his temper. It’s not rare for him to chew out a poor bot for crossing him on an off cycle. 

It’s less common for that bot to be Orion. 

It’s rare for him to muster up that anger towards him, because usually there is a meddling softness that blows his fuse out. 

Tonight, there is nothing but an incinerator that rumbles and sparks and burns, and there is a small bot who won’t stop talking, and there is Orion, who does not regret anything, and who a small treacherous part of D-16 whispers of ways to make sure that stupid bot understands exactly what regret should taste like. Spark in mouth. Energon on tongue. 

“I just can’t believe you!” He snarls, loud and vicious, and B-127 snaps his mouth shut so fast it clangs, and Orion whips around to face him, optics at their widest setting. He doesn’t take a step back as D-16 stalks forward, doesn’t flinch when D-16 thrusts a digit into his chassis and knocks against the dented metal there. “I can’t fucking believe you Pax!”

“What’s wrong?”

“What’s wro–I’ll tell you what’s slagging wrong! I knew this would happen. I knew that something like this, something like one of your stupid stupid ideas would go up and get up in trouble, and now look at us! We’re in a Sublevel I didn’t even know existed and you know what? You know what?! We are going to rot in here. Sentinel Prime isn’t going to go looking for two mining bots. He’s got better things to do. Things that are going to actually help Cybertron and not just sabotage the lives of everyone around them!”

“Dee–”

“I’m usually okay with running along with your delusions, Pax,” D-16 cuts him off, a hysterical laugh bubbling up his vocal components. “Oh, Pax is running from authorities again! Oh, Pax’s rations were cut! Oh, Pax needs to fill a double quota! Oh look, Pax this, Pax that! Did you even mean it?” Orion flinches, optics impossibly wide, but D-16 can’t stop now. He’s on a roll, burning inferno, and an incinerator does not stop for anyone. “For us. Dee this is for us. You say that to my face, and I believe you. Is this for us, Pax?”

It’s unfair. He knows this. When Sentinel Prime had come in and congratulated them D-16 had been over the moons. He shook hands with the future saviour of Cybertron! He was going to work for a greater cause! And then Darkwing shows up, because Orion always presses Darkwing’s buttons and during the race Orion had thrown insults over his shoulder after tripping their supervisor up and it had gotten the cogged bot so angry he ignored his injuries to hunt them down. 

And now they are here. In Sublevel 50. 

D-16 scoffs, and he moves back from where he’d been punctuating his words with shoves to Orion’s chest, and turns to stare into the flaming incinerator. 

There is a ringing silence after his words, and he’s half glad for it. B-127 has been alone for a long while, but even he seems to realise the need for silence. Orion opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again, thick conflict simmering in those optics that always draw D-16 back, like a damned virus needling away at his spark. And D-16 is the fool who always lets himself cave. To look. 

“I–...” Orion’s vocaliser resets with several clicks before he continues. “I… I’m…”

D-16 is expecting a lot of things. Maybe an excuse, that Orion didn’t know Darkwing would come for them. Maybe a reminder of what they just did. The two of them did just make history with that little failure of a race back there. Maybe a plan to escape, because knowing Orion, he wasn’t going to let himself get stuck in here for the rest of his functioning. He’d convince D-16 too, somehow, just like he always does. Dee, let’s get out of here. Nothing can stop us. And D-16 would believe him. Like a fool. Like a hopeless magnet drawn to something greater than he’ll ever be. 

He was expecting a lot of things, but–

“I’m sorry.”

–wasn’t one of them.

His voice is crackling, like his vocaliser just never reset properly. He’s looking at D-16 with those big damnable optics of his, pools of liquid energon so bright they highlight the dim space around his face plates. He doesn’t look away, doesn’t so much as twitch; just keeps looking at D-16, conveying a message in lost code, and then he opens his mouth and says those words again–

“I’m… I’m sorry.”

–and just like that, D-16 burns out.

He is left feeling oddly cold. Who knew? D-16 had always thought to himself that finally getting Orion to admit a mistake would feel liberating, full of satisfaction that he could rub in the other’s face for a few cycles to get Orion to calm down for a bit, stay grounded and normal. 

He wasn’t expecting for it to feel so wrong.  

“I…” D-16 wonders if Orion will elaborate, maybe talk, maybe make this apology a bit better so D-16 can feel better, but it seems words evade him. He ducks his head, shoulders shaking, and says it again. With so much feeling. The inflection of sorry coated with so many additives that it was almost a different language. D-16 didn’t even think it was possible for one to twist the base into so many wicked shapes. A million different words in just one.

Sorry as in forgive me, please, I seek, look out for, need, you are high, higher than me, forgiveness if yours to give, I cannot take–

Sorry as in I was wrong, wrongness, mistake, retribution is needed, wrong wrong wrong, not right, you were right, I was so so wrong, hurt, hurt hurt wrong it hurt and it’s wrong–

Sorry as in you deserve better, better than I, you shouldn’t be hurt, I hurt you, hurt does not belong to you, give it to me, leave me, better yourself, leave me and be free–

“I’m sorry.”

D-16 doesn’t know what to say. So he doesn’t say anything at all. 

He turns his back, chassis cold and frame beyond exhausted, and stalks to the darkest corner of this Primus-forsaken pit. No one bothers him, no one talks at all, and D-16 forces power down with his optics lighting the wall before him in vivid amber. 

A few groons later, D-16 rises from the ground, walks to where Orion is curled up as close as he could possibly get without triggering D-16’s proximity sensors, and simply stares for a moment. 

His back is to him, and he’s deep in recharge. 

I’m sorry is written down his spinal struts, with every uneven vent, with every shift of plating.

D-16 settles down, moulded to those words so close they imprint of his spark.

Silence is thick, with the incinerator humming like a lullaby, and so it is easy to hear when Orion whispers into his palms;

“It was only ever for us.”

They spend cycles following through with their new job. There was little else to do, and if someone didn’t inspect the trash coming down, it would pile up and make the already crowded space tight with mess. 

So D-16 stands from across Orion, B-127 chattering between them, and the three of them do a spectacular job of watching garbage burn cycle after cycle. 

Still, it tires a bot out, standing around and watching garbage. B-127 receives rations enough to fill one tank, because no one actually knows that there are three bots down here now, and so he generously splits it because his tank is small and the supervisors above don’t know that and he’s constantly storing energon for when the inevitable happens and they forget about him for good. 

“I feel bad for him,” Orion whispers in what could be considered a rest cycle, when the garbage chute stops producing scrap as a signal for the end of shift. B-127 had offered his little coveted berth room, but D-16 felt bad enough drinking the poor bot’s fuel, and Orion absolutely refused to make B-127 sleep on the floor. 

“He’s probably been in here longer than we’ve been active,” D-16 muses, optics roving over the walls of this tiny room. There was tally marks for cycles on the wall, etched in with some sharp edge, but D-16 can take a guess that the cycles recorded were the cycles used for the rise and fall of Cybertron’s sun, and not the cycles that constitute as the fifty cycles since the freedom of Cybertronians from Quintesson rule. Still those were a lot of ticks, and even though they taper off and stop somewhere near the floor, there are enough to make up for D-16’s entire working life. Orion’s been built way later than he was, practically a newspark in terms of mining bot production, and to see their life worth of cycles scratched into the walls here, where he can picture his functioning in just a single sweep of his optics, is something to behold. 

“We can’t leave him.”

“Who said we were leaving?”

Orion glares up at D-16, swatting at his chest with his digits. D-16 absent-mindedly notes on how he won’t need to recalibrate Orion’s joints for mining anytime soon. Down here his frame would be however it was fitted to and it wouldn’t hurt anyone. It would be as it should be. 

“We are going to get out of here.”

“Sure,” D-16 rolls his optics, adjusting from where he was lying on the floor with Orion to lift his helm on his hand, his shadow stretching over Orion’s face as he tilts down to watch him from his new vantage. “We can fly out. You got another jetpack in that subspace of yours you conveniently forgot to mention.”

Orion hits him again, gently, and D-16 chuckles under his breath. 

“I’m being serious, Dee.”

“So am I.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

“I’m being realistic, Pax,” D-16 huffs. “How are we going to escape? Unless a scrap jetpack gets sent down, we’re stuck.”

“There’s gotta’ be a way,” Orion repeats anyway, brow ridges drawn down in something D-16 daresay resembles something contemplative in nature. “Bee would know. He’s been in here so long.”

“If he does know something, why wouldn’t he just leave?” D-16 rolls his optics. 

Orion pauses at that, and it’s only then does D-16 realise that the other bot is tracing small patterns over his forearm, the one resting on Orion’s frame for support. He’s tracing patterns, gently rubbing the seams of his armour, tickling the ridges where plating gives way to the barest hints of his protoform. Sensitive wiring. Brush. Caress. Rinse. Repeat.

“I think…” Orion starts, slowly, optics on the meeting of metal on metal. “That he’s so lonely he’s forgotten what it means to live.”

D-16’s vents hitch, and his spark spins painfully. 

“What’s it mean to live, Pax?” D-16 dares to ask, his voice as soft as an ex-vent, the faintest of whispers against Orion’s face. When had he gotten so close?

Orion doesn’t respond. Not verbally. Not with words. He reaches up, slowly, painfully slow, with his servos, digits brushing the lines along D-16’s faceplates. Over his helm, around his optics, to which his shutters closed, tracing invisible seams before his whole servo cups one side of his face, followed by another. Bracketed among precious hands that might as well hold his spark. 

When he opens his optics, Orion is so close he can taste hope on his tongue.

“Wanna’ see?” 

Orion doesn’t wait for an answer. Impulsive aft, D-16 thinks, and then he stops thinking all together.

It isn’t the first time D-16 has kissed. It isn’t even the first time D-16’s interfaced. 

It is, however, the first time D-16 learns what it means to love. 

Chapter Text

(He thinks it’s poetic. It must be, for it to have meaning. If not poetic with meaning, then his life succumbs to a cosmic joke, and that’s just sad.)

Megatron has envisioned this moment for eons. Cycles of battle after battle, of loss and victory, or imminent death and near resolution; all of it boils down to this single moment where the whole universe seems to hold her breath, existence comes to a standstill and even the smallest particle of dust awaits orders for life. 

Megatron exists in this moment like this: one arm up, fist raised to the sky, while the other is drawn down, plasma cannon humming to life and purple energy swirling in the triple barrel. His chest is out, proud, his spark spinning so fast it felt like a supernova about to combust within his chassis. His fangs are bared, and he’s yelling. Something incoherent and nonsensical and full of feeling. Full of triumph. Victory. 

Optimus Prime exists in this moment too. He seems to exist in every single one of Megatron’s moments, like a virus, like a leaching corrosion sucking away at Megatron’s spark. He exists, and he exists within Megatron’s world, but he exists now in a way that Megatron finally, finally deems enough. Because he’s had enough. 

Optimus Prime exists in this moment like this: on the ground, laying still but for the flickering of his intact optic. His body is battered, eons of scars overlapping with the countless wounds afflicting him, that Megatron has inflicted. He doesn’t move, motionless, still, silent as he watches through sparking blue as Megatron levels his cannon with his helm, unwavering and confident and sure. 

He doesn’t look afraid. Curse the Prime, but he has never been afraid. It’s always anger, it’s always fury, it’s always this stupid forsaken sadness, but never fear. Never the tantalising taste that Megatron craves to lick up, to drown himself in and revel in the victory. Because this was victory, but victory is nothing without the Prime, and true victory would be the potent syrup of afraid afraid I am afraid that would make Prime’s air sticky and thick. Addicting. 

(He’s only ever tasted it once. Spontaneous infatuation. He thinks he’s cursed.)

The situation is this: the remaining Autobot forces on this planet are rounded up, all on their knees, all bowing, all prickly and hissing and spitting and living the reality of defeat. His Decepticons scream and cheer and shoot blazing rounds into the sky and even the warships hovering above light up beams and destroy nearby formations of land in excitement. The air is thick – not thick with what he wants – with smoke, red and blistering, and through it all Megatron stares down at Prime laying on the ground, his left optic gouged out and the socket sparking, his shoulder torn to pieces and his left arm missing. He’s bleeding out, blue staining dull jewel colors and leaking over the ground. Megatron has the strangest urge to lick it up. He refrains from doing so. 

(The sight makes his tanks roll. Optic missing. Glitching. Arm gone. Hole in chest, a chest with a hole, a hole that’s sparking and leaking and burnt at the edges because plasma is hot, hot enough to burn anything and it burns right through him. And D-16 did that. D-16 did that.)

Truly, Primus must have a sick sense of humour. As if a prophecy were fulfilled, the war ends much like it started, all those millions of cycles ago. Broken metal, twisted spark. 

There is a strange disparity that makes up the existence of Megatron. 

He’s been like this for millions of cycles. Perhaps a break in coding from when he had onlined, or maybe a nasty bump on the helm that damaged something in his processor. Whatever it is, it haunts him, this contrasting dilemma that is the battle between his mind and his spark. 

As Shockwave would no doubt say, it is highly illogical to harbour such conflictions, but alas, there is only one piece of the Cybertronian being that cannot be programmed, and it is that very sliver of glowing spirit spark that warps Megatron’s into a twisted little game of wants and never-will-have’s. 

He is staring at Optimus Prime, and he wonders if it would ease the pain in his spark to know that the bot was dead. 

That is a want. 

He wonders if a servo over Prime’s chassis will reveal warm live metal, a welcoming spark, an unopened bond. 

Never-will-have. 

“Decepticons!” Megatron yells, voice booming through the chaos, and the haze of red settles on him; the mob. His mob. “Today marks the end of the Autobot tyranny! No longer will we fight across worlds and plunder ourselves for resources! Today marks the end of the Great War, and the dawn of a victory that will go down in history for millenia!”

Cheers so loud they leave his audials ringing shakes the very air around them, and Megatron can’t help it; he grins, pride swelling beneath his chassis, hot air steaming out from between his joints. Steam escapes through his dentea, and he’s sure he looks mad. He’s tempted to ask Prime, what do I look like to you, with you beneath my pede; what do you see, dear one?

He doesn’t say that. 

He can’t. 

His spark hurts. It burns. Blazes like an incinerator. Like a supernova.

This is the beginning of the end. 

“Rise up Decepticons, for we. Have. Won!”

(Victory tastes like rotten oil on his tongue. He tries to love the flavour of decay.)

There was a time when Megatron believed that he knew what it meant to lose everything. 

He’s been losing things for eons. Friends. Allies. Soldiers. Cities. His world. 

But there was a time, before any of that, before he even knew what loss was, that Megatron believed he knew what the true meaning of empty living was. 

There is this story about two bots. It’s not a very nice one. 

(He’s dead. He’s sure of it. And he’s kneeling here before the usurper while his spark runs torturous circles in his chest, loneliness driving it mad because he can’t feel him, he can’t feel him and he’s dead and he’s kneeling before the tyrant the liar the deceiver and he wants to kill him. He’ll kill Sentinel. Even if it kills him. Never again will he be deceived. 

Sentinel is bigger. Obviously. He is bound and barely standing, spark blazing and empty, and he does not feel fear. He should. He doesn’t. 

“You wanna’ know why?”

You killed him. 

I’ll kill you. 

“I’ve got nothing left to lose. You took it from me.”)

Turns out you really can fall further than rock bottom. 

And here he stands, like looking into a mirror, except this mirror is transparent and reflects the past, it must, because there is no other way to explain what he’s seeing. Missing optic. Missing arm. Hole in chest. Plasma burns through even the thickest of metal, and it burns right through him.

He’s alive. Somehow. Always. He’s impossible to kill, this Prime, this forsaken puppet of a god that thinks Megatron makes a great aft-end of a cosmic joke. It must be poetic to have meaning, but right now Megatron thinks there is very little he could say to convince even himself that everything that has happened to this point has had meaning. 

“Why couldn’t you just stay dead,” he growls to the living corpse, but it sounds pathetic to his own audials. Like a broken whisper. Like begging. Megatron does not beg. And yet. 

Prime doesn’t respond. He’s on spark support afterall, and offline, his spark a pitiful thing to watch as it spins desperately, like it knows it's out of time. 

“I hate you,” Megatron tells the spark, and it sputters. Megatron feels it in his chest, and ignores its cries. “I hate you.”

There was a time when Megatron thought he lost everything. Then everything came crawling back to him, but everything had blue optics and red plating and Megatron’s spark imprinted on his own, and there was a time, brief as it was, where Megatron had allowed himself to hope. 

(He’s alive. He’s alive and he’s fighting alongside him and his spark soars and begs to open up and relive connection, become whole again, to feel Orion and be sure, be so sure that this was no deception, that he was real and alive.  

And then he turns D-16’s cannon away, and the shot misses, the usurper the liar the deceiver lives and looks at him and mocks him, with that gaze of his, mocks him that Orion isn’t his anymore. Just look at him, Sentinel seems to say, he’s not yours. You don’t know him. He stops you. He fights you. He’d rather die than stand with you. He’s already dead. You could lay the world at his feet but he’d still save me. 

D-16 realised at that moment that he had never truly understood loss. Not until now.

Orion Pax died twice that day. 

Once, when he looked D-16 in the optics and lied, in words unspoken. 

Twice, when Megatron killed him.)

Hope is fickle, but hate, as he has come to learn, is real. There is no deception in hate, and there is no lie in what he feels so deeply in his shattered spark. He looks at Prime, at the puppet Primus created out of a ghost’s frame, and he hates him. He hates him so much it hurts. 

“I surrender.”

These are the first glyphs that come out of Prime’s mouth the moment he onlines. His one remaining arm is chained to the medical berth. Not that he could realistically go anywhere in his state. Half his body is blown to bits, one optic barely managing to flicker to life under Knockout’s care, and yet seeing the Prime in chains eases something in his mind. No surprises. No second chances. 

(His spark disagrees. Megatron ignores it.)

Regardless of his condition, Prime is awake now, gingerly sitting up against the inclined headrest of the medical berth, and he is looking Megatron straight in the optic as he repeats, voice glitching out in several off-key notes and static-laden, “I surrender.”

Megatron stares for all of three astroseconds before snorting. 

“Sure.”

Megatron can’t see his mouth – that stupid mask is in the way, as always, as it has been for four million cycles – but Prime’s brow ridges furrow and his remaining optic dims slightly; he’s definitely frowning. 

“I surrender.”

“How many times are you going to repeat yourself?”

“As many times as it takes for you to understand.”

“I understand just fine, Prime,” Megatron scoffs, and he can feel the smirk growing over scarred lip plates. “I understand that you are glitched and in need of serious processor replacement, because clearly yours is damaged beyond repair.”

“I’m surrendering,” if Prime wasn’t frowning before, he’s definitely frowning now. “You win.”

“I’ve already won!” Megatron shouts, a hysteric thing of a laugh bubbling up his throat that has Knockout give him a quick worried glance. But he can’t help it. This was just ridiculous. “I’ve defeated you, once and for all, and your Autobots dropped arms the moment you went down. No surrender needed, Prime; the war is over and I’ve won.”

He doesn’t know who he’s trying to convince, but clearly he’s doing a poor job of articulating the facts because between the two of them, Optimus Prime looks like he’s just been told that his energon has been replaced with organic slime mould. 

“I know it’s over,” he states, like an idiot. “I’m surrendering. It’s over.”

“You don’t get to just decide that!”

“I’m not,” Primus, Megatron hadn’t even realised Prime could frown any harder with just one damn optic. “I’m not deciding on anything. I’m surrendering.”

“Are you glitched?!” Megatron roars, and then turns to Knockout. “Is he glitched?”

“He’s got some pretty nasty denting in his cranial unit, m’lord,” Knockout points out. “And he’s severely energon deprived.”

“From the battle, of course.”

“Erm, well, his tank capacity is actually quite small compared to a standard model for a bot his size; looks like they transformed and adjusted to some precursor level, probably a manual shift to compensate for low energy refuelling.”

“…he’s starving?” Megatron asks, puzzled, and turns back to Prime. “You’re starving?”

“I’m not starving,” Prime grits out, glaring with his one optic. “I’m surrendering. Stay on topic.”

“If it’s any consolation, most of the Autobots have been recorded to have similar functional changes,” Knockout continues as if neither of them had spoken. He flips a lithe servo in the air, claw glinting as he relays, “Based on the scratching from interior transformation plates it’s been quite some time.”

“The war is over,” Megatron announces suddenly, turning to grin at Prime, who glowers back. “You’ve been starving. Pathetic. I won this war cycles ago and we all knew it.”

“It’s over now,” Prime states, “I’m–”

“Oh, for the love of Primus,” Megatron seethes, irritation rolling over his struts in waves he was sure were palpable in his field. Prime remains undeterred, probably because he has processor damage. “If you say you surrender one more blasted time, I’ll rip your voice box out!”

“So you accept?”

“Accept what?” Megatron hisses. 

“The Autobot surrender.”

“I don’t need to!” He screeches. “I don’t need to! I’ve won! In battle! Your lousy surrender means nothing! It’s too late for that slag; you’re my prisoner just like the rest of your pathetic faction.”

“You cannot execute them,” Prime presses on, glitched and stupid. “You cannot. I’m surrendering. I will kneel before you, Cybertron’s rightful ruler, and you may execute me to seal this, but my Autobots are protected under my unconditional surrender.”

“I don’t need your lousy surrender,” Megatron scoffs, crossing his arms. “I will do as I please. You can grovel at my pedes while I rip off the helms of every Autobot High Commanding Officer.”

Prime’s optic hardens into something bright and blistering, and his field, usually kept close and tight and unfeeling, flares with determination. It’s a bit startling; Megatron doesn’t allow himself the luxury of thinking about how this is the first time in a very long time that he’s felt Prime’s field like this. With something that wasn’t nothing.  

“Then the war is not over.”

“You’re glitched,” Megatron waves him off, sneering. 

“I’ll contact my High Command and order full force retaliation.”

“Your comm link is disabled,” Megatron rolls his optics.

“Erm…” Knockout peeps out, nervous, “actually, I forgot to do that, m’lord. I was busy, ah, getting Prime on spark support.”

Prime seems just as startled about this revelation as Megatron feels. He looks around, his optic finally settling on the machine hooking over his spark in a secondary casing, pumping energy and energon into his interior lines. Did the moron not even notice the life support? Megatron huffs, then stills, reeling over the fact that–

“You forgot to disable his comms?!” Megatron seethes. “Are you stupid?

“Just forgetful at times,” Knockout replies, meek and fluttery. 

“I have solidified connection with my High Command,” Prime announces, who apparently had full access to his comm links, as did his High Command, unless he was lying and trying to one-up Megatron somehow. No, that wasn’t likely. Prime wasn’t a schemer like that. He was actually quite dull in the art of schemes, as Megatron has become aware of in the last few millennia of war. 

“Accept my surrender, and I will inform them of such.”

“They are in prison cells, Prime.”

“Not all of them.”

“How many slaggin’ Autobots are there?” This was from Knockout, though Megatron wonders the same thing. 

“Enough to keep fighting,” Prime’s optic stays seared on Megatron, and his tanks roll. His spark clenches. “Deactivate me if you like, but this war will not be over.”

Megatron mulls this over with gritted teeth, but then thinks to himself, so what? There is imminent victory now, and there is imminent victory who-knows-how-long from now. Because no doubt the Decepticon cause has won; offlining the Autobot leader will slow the pace of war gradually, but it will slow, and eventually Megatron will have his victory.

A victory he could have now. He’s a patient mech, has been for his entire existence since the moment he onlined with fully-functional mining capabilities, but for some reason the idea of going back, of returning to a field that he has already convinced himself of as a relic of the past; it’s the most revolting idea, so stark and intense in his dislike that the very notion of continuing down that path made him grimace. 

Surrender was just defeat spelled in failing words, nothing more. Maybe a few million cycles ago Megatron would have cared, but he’s tired, and weary, and he wants to refuel in the quiet of his chambers with a warmed cup of energon and a heating mesh at his pedes. He finds himself uncaring. It doesn’t matter. Everybot knows who won. Everybot saw. 

He is tired, he decides, and not nearly petty enough to risk the brink of his sanity any longer. 

“Sure,” Megatron shrugs. “Whatever.”

“…you accept?” It was Prime’s stupid surrender, why was he so surprised by this?

“Yes yes, I accept. I don’t care. I won.”

“You won,” Prime nods. 

There is silence. Several kliks of it. Megatron doesn’t dare move or look away, and neither does Prime, and the two of them just kind of stare at each other for a solid few kliks before Knockout awkwardly clears his vocaliser. 

“Right, well, should I patch him up then?” Knockout inquires, optics darting between the two. “For the execution, I mean. Those things are ceremonial.”

“What execution?” Megatron asks, genuinely puzzled. Then pauses, recognises the look on Knockout’s face, and readjusts. “Right. That execution.”

He lets his optics rove over Prime’s battered form. 

“Repair him, but do not replace his arm,” Megatron decides, and Prime jolts again, seemingly surprised. “Deactivate all weapon systems and defence protocols, and remove his weapon transformation plates for his blaster as well. And Knockout?”

Knockout turns to him with a hum, already jotting down several notes on a datapad. 

“Disable his comms.”

“What? Oh, yes, of course, m’lord!”

“Why?”

Prime’s voice is barely heard over Knockout’s shuffling, and by then Megatron is already stepping through the threshold of the medical bay. He pauses when he hears Prime, spark spinning so fast he’s sure that if he looks down, the metal of his chassis would be red hot. 

“Why what?” He replies dumbly. 

“You’re going to execute me,” Prime murmurs, and Megatron can feel the heat of his stare on the back of his helm. “Why go through all this effort?”

“Execution isn’t good enough for you,” is what Megatron says through gritted dentae, and he doesn’t mention how those glyphs are false, and how his spark howls when he lets the doors to the medbay swish shut behind him. 

“You are a soft-sparked fool that will plunder this whole damned faction to the Pits!” is how the Decepticon High Command meeting for the post-victory rehabilitation of Cybertron operations begins. There is no surprise here, considering it is Starscream who shrieks out his accusations before the kliks for the meeting have even begun to be recorded. Every meeting analog starts off pretty much the same, in tone and frequency. The consistency is regal. It’s actually mildly impressive. 

“Thank you for your incredibly detailed insight,” Megatron mutters into his servo. “Who’s next?”

“I demand an execution!” Starscream continues to scream, true to his namesake, like Megatron had never even spoken. “I demand every ceremonial practice be pulled by the dentae for this! Prime has dragged this war on long enough that he deserves to suffer for every micro klik of it. It’s only fair. Justice must be served by steel servos! That’s part of the ceremony actually, to clamp the offenders servos with steel bindings and–”

“That will be a waste of resources,” Shockwave cuts in, and though he only has one massive red optic and zero emotional infliction, he still sounds accusatory and unimpressed.

Starscream has no problem making up for the lack of dramatics. 

“Fine, doom us all to withering embarrassment, but not me! I want to switch sides.”

“The Autobots have been defeated.”

“I’ll make my own side!”

“The war is over.”

“Irrelevant!”

“Save us all the processor ache and get it done already,” Megatron hisses. “I tire of you and we haven’t even begun the meeting kliks.”

“Heathen!” Starscream shrieks, outraged. “Not even a formal ceremony? A beheading? Nothing?”

“Soundwave: has been recording meeting kliks,” Soundwave unhelpfully supplies. He is ignored by all parties except for Thundercracker – who is only here to stand behind Starscrean’s chair and make his trinemate feel important. 

“Starscream, nothing in this galaxy could warrant enough value for me to get up and execute you for treason. It simply won’t be worth it,” Megatron drones. 

“I deserve the most grand ceremonial execution this side of the galaxy!” Starscream bellows, wings hitched up in irritation. Behind him Thundercracker pretends that his claws need inspecting. Either that or he’s counting how many astroseconds it will take for Starscream’s emotional subunit to overheat and explode. “Every single bot within the three million light-year radius should attend per mandatory overseeing! Ribbons! Silks! Jewels! Everything!”

“Are we still talking about the beheading?” Thundercracker asks hesitantly. 

“Of course I’m talking about the beheading!” Starscream practically, well, screams. “I need to be executed at the cusp of a supernova to commemorate my glory! No, that’s not enough. I need whole solar systems blown up in my name.”

“But… you’ll be dead…”

“Dying, you moron,” Starscream rolls his optics. “Dying, not dead. I want my optics to burn with the most glorious–”

“Dismissed, Starscream,” Megatron growls, “before I choose to go through with an execution in my meeting room.”

Starscream looks around, taking in the commanding officers watching the spectacle go down with mild interest, to the advisors standing behind the desk and finally to the faint trickle of a nebula visible in the long ceiling-to-floor window.

“Eh,” he shrugs, sliding off his chair to kneel on one knee, “good enough I guess.”

“May I suggest a clean cut two digits from the central horizontal decorative plating near his jugular lines?” Shockwave offers, nonexistent excitement making his single looming optic gleam. Starscream sneers at him, but he is undeterred. “Your sword will sever his head with an additional twelve percent efficiency this way, as you avoid the hard double-jointed support pilling of the–”

“Soundwave,” Megatron sighs into his fist. “Delete the last two arcs of this sham meeting from the analogs.”

The Decepticon Armada is a sight to behold, and not only because it is the first time in centuries that the whole fleet congregates to Cybertron’s atmosphere in all its formidable glory. Megatron has several commanders to thank for that, the main ones being the ever-loyal Strika followed closely by the ever-slag-eating Scorponok. Rallying his forces for one final assault hadn’t even been needed; the preliminary attack on the Autobot outpost as a warning to the faction while Megatron awaited his commanders’ arrival had turned into a bloody fistfight with the main force of the Autobot empire exploding from the underground tunnel system they had been hiding in for cycles. 

Energon deprivation really made even the most level-headed bots fools. 

And so victory was swift, and Scorponok and Strika closed in on a post-victory Cybertron that looked very much like mid-war Cybertron because it’s only been about fifteen lunar shifts since Optimus Prime fell in battle, and thirteen luna shifts since he presented his outdated surrender for naught, and twelve lunar shifts since Megatron publicly broadcasted Cybertron’s new state of leadership to the cosmos.

Optimus Prime has thus far spent his time post-surrender in the loneliest holding cell the Nemesis has to offer, far far away from any of his meddling High Command that sit in dungeons that can’t really count as dungeons because they are too nice and actually used to house the Vehicons at some point because Decepticons didn’t really do prisoners – they were more of a shoot-now-ask-questions-never kind of faction, if you get the drift. So the Autobots sit in miniature habsuites with whole slagging energon dispensers in each one and they aren’t even being humble about accommodations. 

Megatron has received reports about major energon reserve consumption. He ponders about blocking off access to the energon deposit from the lower levels of the prisoner ship and moving his bots to higher floors. 

He ends up not doing that, or anything else on the matter. The Autobots have lost, and Optimus Prime surrendered. Let them drink to their shrunken tanks content; there is no more war. 

(The thought tastes like sweetened oil, but it leaves a bitter aftertaste.)

“Soundwave: requests Megatron’s presence in the brig.”

Nothing good ever came from being summoned to the brig. 

Megatron knew that he couldn’t avoid the Autobots forever. He wasn’t even ignoring most of them; he has Ratchet working alongside Hook in the med bay and he has those blasted Wreckers carrying loads of materials down in the construction zones and he even has the rest of the slagging bots on clean-up duty because most of the Decepticon forces are busy with the rebuilding efforts on the surface. 

So he wasn’t really avoiding the Autobots. He’s only really avoiding one. 

Of course Soundwave is forcing him to face his issues. 

Soundwave greets him like he always greets him; with a stony expressionless visor and a single incline of his helm that shows he has stooped low enough to acknowledge Megatron’s presence. He is standing in front of Optimus Prime’s cell, and he has left space by his side for Megatron to join him in standing and facing the imprisoned Prime. 

This is the first time Megatron is seeing Prime out of the medbay. He isn’t shiny and waxed, far from it, but his plating is plastered with solder patches to cover all the deep gouges and there are numerous welds littering his frame. His broken optic has been cleaned out and covered up by a patch, but it doesn’t hide the deep crack in his faceplate that extends down past the rim of his mask. 

Prime sits on the floor, legs splayed out before him, battered and bruised but welded up. He’s still missing an arm. His forearm guards are thinner, from where Knockout likely extracted the weapon plates. 

Megatron does his best to pretend that the sight doesn’t bother him. 

(He does his best to ignore the ghost of an image that thrashes in his memory banks like a rampant virus.)

Prime is less than impressed. 

“Tell your third-in-command to stop staring at me.”

“Soundwave does as he pleases,” Megatron waves him off before turning to said third-in-command. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Autobots: demand to see Optimus Prime.”

Megatron doesn’t groan into his servos, but it's a near thing. 

“I’m not parading him around on the streets.”

“Soundwave: said nothing of the sort.”

“You implied it.”

“Soundwave: did not.”

“I’m not having this argument. He stays here.”

“Ill-advised.”

Megatron glares to the best of his ability, but Soundwave is, as always, unperturbed. 

“Autobots: threaten volatile backlash. Autobots: demand the appearance of Optimus Prime.”

“My comm links are disabled,” Prime offers, as if Megatron has asked, which mind you, he had not. 

“I’m not walking him around the Nemesis or the holding cells,” Megatron hisses, “send a broadcast or something.”

“Autobot Chief Medical Officer: Ratchet; will not continue work. Ratchet: demands to see Optimus Prime.”

“They surrendered!” Megatron yells. “In case anybot forgot! They cannot be demanding anything because they lost. Tell that blasted medic that if he doesn’t get to work I’ll send him Prime’s remaining servo.”

Optimus looks mildly uncomfortable about this notion. 

Soundwave pauses for a moment, then nods slightly. 

“Message: relayed. Ratchet: agrees to temporary conditions.”

“Nothing like a bit of fear mongering.”

“You could execute me,” Optimus Prime suggests, and Megatron turns to glare at him instead. “I heard Starscream yelling about it.”

Megatron opens his intake to reply, pauses, and then spins around and stomps back out of the cell. 

(He doesn’t mention that the thought of executing Prime leaves his spark spinning so wildly and out of control that it physically hurts, and his HUD flashes with a small warning for an overheating core, and Megatron also doesn’t mention how there’s a smaller window drawn tightly closed that pings for a neglected bond that’s begging for attention.

I hate him, he reminds himself. Oil to a fire.)

No matter how much he tries, he cannot stay away from him. 

Cybertron’s rebuilding efforts are anything but easy, and most of his time post-victory are spent in meeting after meeting because apparently simply winning a war wasn’t enough to get the planet kicking again. He arrives for his recharge cycles exhausted, so he doesn’t understand what urges him to forgo precious rest in favour of lumbering through the halls of the Nemesis 

It’s not logical, it’s not beneficial, it’s not the slightest bit helpful to anybot. And yet here he is, stalking through the halls of the one warship with still-functional prison cells, where one prisoner sits in silence, in waiting, in stasis most of the time because he is the only prisoner Megatron can’t bring himself to move to better quarters. 

The halls are dark during the off-cycle. Cybertron may have been destroyed, but her orbit remains, and most welcome the natural rise and fall of their home star. Megatron would like to as well; enjoying a proper recharge without having to worry about getting blown to bits. And yet. And fraggin’ yet. 

Optimus Prime isn’t chained, but that’s about as far as his luxuries go. He’s slumped in the corner, helm tilted back to lean against the wall. His legs splay out before him, his arm resting motionless across his lap. He’s only got one. Megatron hasn’t had the spark to change anything about him. Logically giving Prime an arm would make him more dangerous, fitting him with an optic would give him better vantage, but it wasn’t that, was it? It was never simple. Seeing Prime like this burns something in his circuits, biting at a smarting wound and relishing in the pain, he sees Prime the same way he sees a ghost of four million cycles ago and the ache in his spark thrashes around almost pleasantly. It was strange. The sweetness of revenge, the bitter satisfaction of finality, Megatron suffers through this duality of images in his processor, the past and present clashing, and thinks dangerously close to the wicked glyphs of I deserve this. 

He shakes his helm. What a forbidden thought. 

Prime is offline, slumbering away while his nanites work through the extensive damage to his frame. Megatron must admit that he looks better; most of the welds have sunken into living metal now, and the gashes in his armour are well underway to closing fully. Even the shoddily-patched hole in his chassis is smoother than before, as if accepting the missing pieces of his frame and making due. 

Megatron watches Prime’s spark spin lazy circles through the near sheer material of his healing protoform, through the glass of his slowly healing chestplate. The sparkcasing is shattered, but healing. Everything about him is healing. 

Megatron hates that the thought makes his spark settle.

I hate him. 

“I hate you,” he mutters, and his voice echoes in the empty hallway. Prime is offline, deep in recharge, and only his spark listens. 

He has pictured this moment since the dawn of the war; what he would say with the last Prime at his pedes, bleeding and dying and at his mercy. He’s had speeches written out in his tactical unit from sleepless cycles simply dreaming about this moment, has had whole declarations wrung out into perfect verses of poetry meant to cut. 

Right now, he is empty. His processor whirs, useless, and his spark aches. 

There are many things he should say. You deserve this. I hate you. You did this to the both of us. Usurper. Liar. Sparkling of the Deceiver. Puppeting my love like a joke. I hate you. I hate you. 

What he ends up saying is–

“I should hate you.”

And isn’t that just sad. 

Complications begin arising when Autobots start demanding rights. 

As tiring as it is to deal with them, even Megatron can admit that to build an empire requires cooperation, and though his Decepticons are more than capable of handling everything, it would take twice as long to simply ignore the assists at Megatron’s servo. 

So he summons the Autobot High Command and has them monitored by one of his own High Command and now is at the head of a meeting table bristling to the brim with tension and thinly-veiled (if veiled at all) animosity.

“This is a terrible idea.”

“As you’ve made abundantly clear.”

“Clearly not abundant enough! This is a terrible idea!”

“We should kill them all!” Starscream seethes, red optics narrowed into dangerous slits. “You’d be a fool to pass up an opportunity like this!”

“The Autobot captors have valuable assets,” Megatron explains, although why he’s wasting exhaust on Starscream is beyond him. Maybe he should have paired the slagger with someone other than Prowl, who seems intent on doing nothing but stocking the flame that was Starscream’s indignation. The Autobot second-in-command’s silence was clearly not appreciated. 

“Valuable assets my aft,” Starscream snorts. “You’re just soft.”

“I will eviscerate you where you stand.”

“See?” Starscream turns to Soundwave, complaining over Megatron like he was some unruly sparkling. “Usually he’s more creative than that.”

“Soundwave: acknowledges.”

“If you two are done being imbeciles,” Megatron turns to Soundwave, and his glower must truly be waning in intensity, as Soundwave simply continues to stare at him with that impassive visor of his and somehow giving off an unimpressed aura that shouldn’t even be possible – he must not be the happiest being paired off with Jazz. All his commanding officers were so petty. 

 “We are being imbeciles,” Starscream rolls his optics and shares an incredulous look with Skywarp, who is standing by Starscream’s back for no other purpose beyond valiant decoration. 

“We demand to see Optimus,” Ironhide barks, slamming a fist on the table. 

“You don’t get to demand anything,” Starscream sneers, crossing his arms. “You pathetic lesions should be grateful we don’t rip off your helms.”

“Wasn’t that part of the agreement?”Jazz points out. “Y’know, the whole “we surrender” bit.”

“Not where I’m concerned.”

“You’re not concerned anywhere,” Prowl scoffs. “You didn’t even sign the surrender accords.”

“I did!” Starscream balks, and then turns to Skywarp. “I told you to sign it!”

“Skywarp: incapable of signing.”

“Why?” Skywarp pouts, leaning casually on Starscream’s chair and ignoring his trinemates gnashing teeth inches away from his arm. “I swear I signed it.”

“You cannot sign on Starscream’s behalf,” Prowl grinds out. “He’s not even incapacitated.”

“I can make him incapacitated,” Ironhide grins. Shockwave, who is supposed to keep the Weapons Specialist on a leash, is preoccupied with a datapad semi-hidden under the meeting table. Great. 

While Starscream sputters and demands an execution for the umpteenth time, Jazz – and of all mechs, wasn’t it embarrassing to be put back on track by Jazz – waves his servos around to get everybot’s attention. 

“I love the enthusiasm, really, I do,” he starts, interlocking his digits over the table. “You know where we can channel this enthusiasm?”

“Don’t say the release Optimus Prime.”

“The release of Optimus Prime!”

Prowl puts his helm in his hands. 

“We are not releasing Prime,” Megatron narrows his optics. “It is part of the surrender accord that he is to be under Decepticon–”

“Yeah yeah, under Decepticon hold, we know, Prowl ingrained the words of that accord into his long-term memory unit.”

“I did,” Prowl confirms.

“That’s kind of impressive,” Skywarp murmurs. 

“We want to see Optimus Prime,” Ironhide tries again with the same level of eloquence he had at the start of this meeting. 

“And I have said–”

“We don’t mean out of Decepticon holding,” Red Alert interjects, though his plating rattles when Megatron throws him a nasty glare. “We… uh… we just wanna’ see him.”

“Come on, mech, just a video call.”

“To assess Prime’s situation,” Prowl adds. 

“To make sure he’s even alive,” Ironhide mutters. 

“For security purposes,” Red Alert explains meekly, then eeps and ducks behind Prowl when everybot turns to him.

“Personal… security?” Red Alert tries.

“Personal… Red, are you glitching?”

“Perhaps,” he sighs, resigned. “I fear I may have left Blaster’s room window unlocked.”

“Thank you for that wonderfully useless insight,” Starscream drawls. 

“An open window can lead to several operational issues,” Shockwave inputs his unneeded opinion. “Of which include a wet draft–”

“See!” Red Alert shrieks, causing several bots in his vicinity (read, the entire room) to wince and adjust their audio receptors. “A draft! A draft! This is a disaster!”

“The release of Optimus Prime,” Prowl demands, and then in the face of several scowls (Starscream and Megatron) silent exasperation (Jazz) bewilderment (Skywarp – who probably has no idea what’s going on to begin with) silent regard (Soundwave and Shockwave, though the latter seems to exist in a higher plane of mental thought) unwavering support (Ironhide, who has thus far been of no help) and Red Alert on the edge of a power out, reiterates; “the check-up of Optimus Prime.”

“That’s more like it,” Starscream sniffs, then turns to Megatron. “I demand an execution!”

The table explodes into a cacophony of noise and flying limbs. 

Megatron doesn’t bang his head on the table, but it’s a near thing. A very very near thing. 

They settle for something that doesn’t really please anyone. The Autobots refuse to go through with any negotiations without their leader, despite their leader having surrendered his own custody but clearly everybot is adamant about reading inbetween the lines. Megatron refuses to let any Autobot near Prime, which most of his Decepticons agree as a potential security risk. The Decepticons may have won and settled for a surrender, but peace was shaky ground, and the blasted Autobot outpost groups were still out there and under no impression of their own surrender. 

So they settle for a partial agreement that leaves most unhappy, but satiated enough to allow peace to continue. Megatron will continue all negotiations and Autobot habilitation with Optimus Prime, and relay the previous faction leader’s agreements via Soundwave. 

This leaves Megatron with one large problem. 

Confrontation. 

Now, let it not be said that Megatron ran away from his problems. Avoidance wasn’t really his style, and leading half the Cybertronian population through a millenia long war will corrode any sense of shyness. Still, Megatron, for once, hesitates on his way to the brig. Optimus Prime has no power, he reminds himself uselessly. He has one arm and one optic and no battle protocols and above all, he surrendered himself. Completely. He is on a Decepticon ship surrounded by Decepticon troops and Megatron himself. 

It is not fear that weighs his pedes. Megatron is too self-aware to fool himself into thinking so. It is not fear, and it is no anger. 

(Inside his spark chamber, his spark aches, a whirling mass of pure energy that thrashes in its container. It feels incomplete. It begs. Megatron ignores it, but it hurts. By Primus, it hurts.)

Prime is already awake when Megatron gathers his fraying wits and enters the brig. He’s sitting on the ground, as usual, in a similar position to how he usually sits when Megatron sees him. He doesn’t look surprised to see him; Megatron vaguely wonders if that blithering idiot Knockout actually remembered to disable his comms. He shakes his helm. That’s impossible. Stop making excuses for your pitiful spark. 

“Prime,” he greets, and he’s surprised at how even his voice is despite the torrent of agony his spark is adamant on pursuing within his chassis. 

“Megatron,” Prime nods, watching him through his one optic. 

(The sight of him like this, alive but broken, half gone; it’s killing him slowly, this mental torment. This torture of the spark. Maybe he should tell Knockout to find a spare prosthetic. Find a replacement optic. Something. Anything to dissolve this shadow of a past that Megatron would rather forget.)

They stay like that for a while, awkward silence hanging thick in the air. With no gunshots and axes and cannons in between them, their meeting is devoid of firestarters. Peace lapses the distance between them, superficial and fragile like shards of glass against soft mesh lining. Megatron is tempted to lick his lips, a nervous tick, and forcefully keeps his mouth shut. 

“What do you want?” Prime ends up breaking the silence. His mask is still in place, but Megatron knows Prime better than perhaps himself. He can see the lines of his faceplates scrunch, the cycling of his optic; there is no malice, no fear, just pure curiosity. Like he hasn’t been rotting away in a Decepticon holding cell for cycles. Megatron hates the urge he feels thrumming through his lines that demand he rip that stupid battle mask off with his own claws so he can see just what face Prime is making beneath it. 

(He wonders if the metal there is soft, if there are ridges and scars, if it feels as he remembers it.)

“Millenia apart must have changed the definition of surrender in the Autobot language,” Megatron sneers with an embarrassing lack of heat. “Your High Command is needy.”

Prime huffs what could be considered a laugh. 

“I hold little control over them.”

“Some leader you turned out to be.”

“Free will exists, Megatron,” Prime’s optic glitters, and though Megatron feels like he should be offended, he can’t bring himself to wring out even a sliver of anger. “You will find it is quite difficult to dampen.”

“They demand your presence in office,” Megatron blurts, and then grits his teeth in a tight scowl, and though he knows he’s emitting fury, it is hatred aimed at his own spark for being so Primus-damned pitiful.

“And you agreed?” Prime sounds surprised.

“Agreed is a generous word for it,” Megatron bites. “Now you get to suffer the consequences of governance.”

“I think I might prefer the cell.”

“Rotting away is too good for you.”

“And you… you agreed? Just like that?”

Megatron doesn’t know what to say. There had been a time in his life when he had been obsessed with language, of tearing apart the additives of the base language and crafting up verses spun up by his creative unit. During the war the High Guard did more than catch him up with the dialects beyond the Iaconian diction. Kanonite was his favourite, for the harsh flavours and rough edges. A direct language for a direct cause. So he wrote a mix of hard Kanonite and soft Iaconian colors. His poetry was war poetry, but it was a craft, an art, and he enjoyed it. 

He thinks of all the verses he wrote, the hundreds upon thousands of poems out there that drift across the universe, echoing his conviction. He thinks of private datapads purged in plasma because he couldn’t bear to read over glyphs that ached with want, with lost love, spun together by a broken spark that just refused to heal. 

He thinks of those lost poems. Most of them were about the Prime. Most ended with a spark in his hands, his own, or more often than not, Prime’s, spinning in his hand, previous life blood dripping between his seams. He wants to do that now, reach between these bars and plunge his claws between those plates and dig into vulnerable protoform. He wants to clench his digits around Prime’s spark and feel it gutter into oblivion. 

He wonders if he can take the shattered remains of Prime’s spark and stick it into the missing gaps of his own to finally get it to stop hurting. 

He realises he’s been staring when Prime cycles his optics and angles his helm. It takes a moment for Megatron to realise still that it’s because Prime is… embarrassed? Was that even possible?

Megatron’s gaze hardens, and he tries to ignite a fire within his chassis when he focusses back on Prime’s face. 

“Soundwave will show you to my office.”

Megatron has never run from anything in his life, but there are always firsts. It was either that, or rip out a spark and eat it, and he doesn’t even know which one he’d reach for first; Prime’s, or his own. 

“These agreements are surprisingly… amiable.”

“It would do you well to remember that the topic of chaining the workers’ pedes together was tossed around numerous times.”

Prime doesn’t look too concerned over that fact, and continues to read through the agreements drawn up in his absence. 

It’s a strange sight, having Optimus Prime in his office reading over reports while Megatron draws up more. It isn’t as stifling as he had assumed it would be; if anything, it’s a bit nice having company while cycling through datapads with enough glyphs to make his processor spin. In the natural light of Cybertron’s sun, Prime looks much better than he did in the brig. His colors are brighter, though they don’t gleam as much as Megatron’s traitorous spark wishes they did, and his wounds seem to all but vanish in the golden hue of a setting star. If it weren’t for the obvious (missing optic, missing arm, hole in chassis) one could even look at the scene and assume that peace had come via a ceasefire turned truce. 

“Ah, this one is definitely Prowl’s work,” Prime muses, and Megatron flickers his vision so he catches on the datapad Prime has angled over to him. “You let him get away with having Autobot High Command oversee ration distribution?”

“Their moral high ground will inhibit any betrayal, seeing as there is a faction mix among the workers.”

“You must have a lot of faith in the Autobot moral high ground.”

“If I didn’t know it was a ruse, I may have allowed that writing to pass without a preliminary back-up.”

“…you drew a back-up for ration distribution?”

“Of course,” Megatron replies, incredulous that Prime wouldn’t think of doing that himself. “What, you think I’d actually believe that you wouldn’t take the opportunity to take advantage of the energon supply because of, what, your own good will?”

Prime pauses from where he had just been about to sign his name on said energon distribution contract, one optic cycled wide. 

“No…” he begins slowly, “I wouldn’t write up a whole ‘nother treaty just for… potential betrayal.”

“If the roles were reversed, you wouldn’t believe that I would double-cross you?”

“No?” Prime answers, looking sorely confused. “You would have signed a contract. Why would I think you’d break it?”

“Are you serious?” Megatron gapes, and then shutters his optics and gapes some more. “You can’t be serious.”

“What’s the point of signing contracts if you’re going to break them?”

“So, wait,” Megatron launches from his seat to pace around his office, processor whirling, a million lines of code fighting for dominance in his tactical unit. “You’re telling me that the ceasefire agreement you had sent on Platho’s moon during the Third Rust Epidemic wasn’t just a front to prematurely mine all the energon before we could settle our refineries?”

“What?” Prime balks, “no! Are you kidding me? You’re the one who broke that treaty first!”

“Only because you–...there was no way you wouldn’t slip through that loophole within the agreement. It’s just what I would do! That’s why loopholes exist!”

“What loophole?!” Prime cries out. “I was in command of a half-corroding ship at the time; I didn’t have the processor capacity for loopholes!”

“So you’re telling me that the loophole in the agreement that had been a perfect advantage to take over the main energon deposit on Platho was just… a fluke?”

“Megatron,” Prime starts slowly, as if explaining the concept of transformation to a sparkling, “I have never drafted a legal loophole in any of our agreements.”

Megatron continues to gape. 

“Never?”

“I never thought to,” Prime admits. 

There is a silence that hangs in the air before Megatron turns around and slams his face into his hands and damn-near cries. 

“All this time,” he hisses between gritted dentae, “I’ve been giving you too much credit. How did I not win this war millenia ago? I was fighting an idiot!”

“Hey!” Prime bites out, but Megatron steams right over him. 

“I have been planning and plotting and building back-up after back-up for every single fragging interaction our factions had assuming that every single one of my moves would have a counter drawn up by you when all I needed to do was understand your simpleton processor was too stupid to do any of that. Do you know how much time I could have saved?!”

“…you’re mad that I didn’t double-cross and scheme?”

“Yes!” Megatron roars, throwing his fists above his helm. “May the Unmaker himself take my spark–I’m going to kill you!”

“That would break the Surrender Accords,” Prime points out meekly. 

Megatron picks up his desk chair and throws it through the window.

After discovering Prime was a tactical moron, the role of drafting up agreements was given to Prowl, and since it was deemed unfair that Prowl had to forge agreements with Megatron, a faction leader with a “rod up his aft” – he was going to find whoever said that and shove a rod up their aft – the responsibility of the Depecticon portion of writing was given to Starscream. 

And, by extension of spark bonds and trine dynamics, Starscream dragged Skywarp and Thundercracker to every. Single. Meeting. 

At least Prowl appeared as close to suicide as Megatron felt.

It seemed the only one having any fun watching the exchange go down was the slagging Prime himself. 

“Vos must be rebuilt, of course,” Starscream drones on, tapping at the flat map of Cybertronian states laid out on the table. He adjusts the hologram to show his plans, but Skywarp stumbles in his attempts to point something out and sends the holographic map spinning. 

“Idiot!”

“You were in the way!”

“Of course I was in the way, you rust-bucket, this is my seat!”

“Vos’s towers cannot be built without significant construction force,” Prowl rebukes. “And Vos’s terrain is too unstable. Plus, we need to focus efforts into housing areas–”

“Iacon this, Iacon that,” Starscream drawls, pushing Skywarp’s face away with one clawed hand while he pointed to the finally settling map with the other. “Seeker culture is almost extinct, and I finally have a chance at rebuilding it. I’m not letting go of those towers.”

“We can’t expedite Iacon’s repairs just for Seeker towers half-way across the world. We barely have enough space-bridges for the refugees.”

“Fuck the refugees!”

“We can build some towers in Iacon,” Prime offers amidst the growing chaos. Every optic turns to him, but he doesn’t cower and he reaches over Megatron to point out a large patch of Iacon that remains untouched as of yet. “I know Vos was built with the strong current and mountain-structure in mind, but Prowl is right; we can’t afford to move supplies and bots and spread ourselves thin. What about towers in Iacon.”

“Those would be slagged towers,” Starscream grumbles, but there is consideration in his tone. 

“The currents wouldn’t be strong enough, but we aren’t throwing any sparklings out any time soon–”

“Throw what out?”

“–so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal.”

“Say yes, Screamer!” Skywarp meddles, latching onto his trinemates arm and physically hanging off. “Say yes, say yes! I’ve been dying to dive-fly and even Slipstream’s been getting ansty–”

“Slipstream is a self-entitled scraplet who barely counts as a seeker,” Starscream sniffs. 

“Oh come on, her twirling manoeuvres are pretty cool.”

“It’s more of a loop-swirl,” Thundercracker cuts in with a hand-motion Megatron cannot for the life of him understand. 

“She’ll crash land one cycle and I’ll celebrate. Good riddance.”

“I think he’s still upset about when she had to act as Air Commander because Screamer knocked himself into stasis for a vorn,” Skywarp whispers with exactly zero tact. Thundercracker smacks his hand against his helm and Starscream sputters and launches out of his seat. 

“You imbecile! You said you would never mention that again–!

“Did I?” Skywarp chokes out a laugh. 

“Yes!”

Megatron can feel Prime’s optic on him, and when he gives into the urge and turns, he sees the Prime looking at him, optics cycles wide, liquid lifeblood lighting his optic to a cerulean blue that makes Megatron’s spark ache. It yearns to escape the metal chambers, the malleable protoform, and it wants to wither and die in Prime’s hand. And by Primus, does it hurt. 

Because despite not saying a word, Megatron understands exactly what Prime is saying. Not a glyph between them and Megatron’s processor is already conjuring up a memory from so long ago, in a train, with hope and love and warmth swimming through his energon lines. When he had been a fool. 

(“You promised you would never mention that again!”

“Did I?”

“Yes! You did!”

“I don’t really remember…”

‘“Oh, I’ll make you remember–”

He thinks they may have kissed, if they had fallen in love sooner. Maybe Orion pressed up to him, covering his mouth with his hands. No, this memory is clear. Orion Pax leaned up to him, they were outside, and they were leaning against each other, warm living metal against warm living metal, and D-16 let him. Let him get close, let his thin, flat cleaning digits clamp around his mouth, and he maybe thought of kissing him.)

“Seeker towers in Iacon,” Prowl interjects, and Megatron rips his gaze away and tries to remind his bleeding spark that he’s supposed to hate the Prime. “It can be done.”

“Acceptable,” Starscream huffs, Skywarp cackling under his arm, Thundercracker fixing out a dent in the blue seeker’s wing. Megatron looks at them, warm metal on warm metal, and dares to let his spark yearn. 

“We’ll get it done then. Half the Seeker force is dedicated to patrols, and twelve percent of construction effort to build the towers.”

“Fifteen percent.”

“Atmosphere patrols.”

“Move a ground bridge within the quadrant and we’ll talk.”

“We are talking right now.”

Megatron and Optimus Prime sign the contracts at the end of the cycle, one signature shakier than the other, and Megatron doesn’t note the difference in glyphs, in handwriting. He doesn’t. 

(I hate him, he tells his spark. 

Sure, his spark mocks back.)

Turns out your spark being in pain isn’t actually just in your head, thank you Ratchet, for informing half of Iacon with your yelling. 

Thankfully, it wasn’t Megatron on the medical berth, but rather Optimus Prime. It’s been a full vorn of operations, and Megatron is tired of fending off Prime’s insistent gaggle of High Commanding Officers, so Soundwave agrees to let Ratchet operate on Prime under the condition that the meeting be monitored by Megatron. 

“Purpose: security.”

“Told you it was for security,” Red Alert had muttered. 

So here he is, sitting on the side observing as Ratchet makes a fuss about a slight alteration of what should have been a regular spark reading from Prime’s open chassis. 

“How long?” Ratchet demands to know after busting at least three of Megatron’s audio receptors. 

“How long what?” Prime asks innocently. 

“How long have you been having spark pain, you imbecile.”

“Oh,” Prime shutters his optics and at least has the decency to look sheepish. “Uh, millenia?”

There is a heavy pause of life that lingers just long enough for Megatron to think maybe this was all some elaborate dream. That maybe Ratchet just scanned him instead, and is relaying Megatron’s symptoms to him, revealing his weakness to the world, to his greatest enemy. 

And then Ratchet blows a fuse and starts yelling again. It is mildly impressive. 

And throughout it all, all the accusations and questions and threats and diagnosis’, Prime turns to him, optic cycled open, and there is a ugly truth there that Megatron cannot deny. An ugly truth that pokes into his own chest, cold claws gripping at the edges of his armour, prying him apart, plucking his wires one and a time and tearing through his protoform, grabbing his sparkcasing with uncaring servos and ripping him apart, piece by piece until his guttural bleeding spark lay in its cruel hands. And then the truth would press warm lips to his and squeeze and Megatron would die and live and remain in oblivion for all of eternity. 

It seems like time freezes, the energon in his lines leaking right out of him and leaving him a cold husk. 

Optimus Prime looks at him, and there is finally something in his gaze that Megatron used to crave. He used to pry at Prime’s seams to be able to witness even a sliver. 

Prime’s optic drips with liquid desperation, and never before has Megatron felt so close to it, and never before has he hated it as he does now. He’s drowning in it.

Because there are several reasons why a bot can go through spark ache. Sparks are powerful things, unpredictable, and fragile. 

Megatron knows why Prime’s spark hurts. He’s known his whole life, he thinks, and the truth is what makes his own spark burn like an incinerator guttering out. 

His spark aches. Sparkache. 

“Spark break.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why didn’t you?”

It seems inappropriate to have this conversation now, in Megatron’s office, with datapads littering every surface of their conjoined desks and proof of their coexistence scattered about. Someone brought a little plotted crystal for Prime some time in the last vorn, a little pink thing that sits next to where Megatron hangs his cannon during long days filled with meetings. 

There is proof of the two of them. Millions of cycles have erased all proof of a life he used to live, as a miner chalk full of love, as a bot with no cog who had been satisfied with halves. His half. Red and blue and silver. 

Now it exists, Megatron and Optimus Prime. It exists everywhere. It exists in every crevice of his being, and there is no rigid line where Megatron begins and Optimus Prime ends. Millions of cycles will do that to two bots whose sparks have been entangled in a tight line of suffering. Yearning. Hurt and ache. 

“It is a weakness,” Megatron grits out, angry, afraid, lonely, maybe none and all of these things. “You are a weakness. I should kill you.”

“You should,” Prime whispers. 

“I’d rip your spark out,” Megatron growls, stalking closer until his shadow mingles with Prime’s, until his ragged ex-vent fogs up the steel battle mask that hides his face. That forsaken mask. He hates it. He hates him. 

“You should.”

“Tear you in half.”

“You should.”

“Rip you apart,” Megatron heaves, “piece by piece, and I’d rip your spark out and eat it and spit it out and bury it with the Unmaker so you may never rest.”

Prime looks up at him, optic wide, dripping blue. 

“You should.”

Megatron thinks his life might be poetic, if told by the glyphs of a poet known to make jokes. 

“I should hate you,” he whispers. 

“You should,” Prime admits. 

He ends up being correct, the metal beneath Prime’s mask is soft, cutting easily under Megatron’s claws as he rips that damnable face shield right out of the connection seams on either side Prime’s helm. Energon splurts out from the jagged wound, trickling down Prime’s cheeks, but Megatron doesn’t care, gouges his claws deeper until the transformation plates for the mask end and he curves his digits, digging into sensitive wiring before finally wrenching back. 

The mask comes off surprisingly easy. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t done this before, to be honest. Prime winces, mouth twisting into a grimace, but he doesn’t have time to react before Megatron’s gripping his face between a clawed servo, the other holding Prime’s arm at bay. He’s only got one now. It’s an unfair fight, and Megatron doesn’t care. 

The sight of Prime’s face does strange things to his spark; he bleeds freely, from the gouges where his mask was ripped off, the scratches where Megatron’s claws dug into sensitive metal plates. Energon, bright blue and nearly incandescent in the low light of gloom, holds nothing compared to the bright crystal blue of his optic. Cycled wide, peering into Megatron’s very spark and tearing him apart, piece by piece, despite being the one bleeding over their office floor. 

His … office floor. When did it become theirs?

Megatron feels vibrations ripple from his voicebox, a growl maybe, or a whimper, a cry for help or a cry for carnage. He can’t even begin to understand. Rage swells within his chest, hot and familiar, burning the fuel in his tank until it explodes and he curls his clawed digits, hard enough that they pierce the tender metal flesh of Prime’s face, pinpricks of dented metal that bleed into Prime’s mouth. 

“Why couldn’t you have just stayed dead?”

His voice cripples, pathetic, cracking the glyphs for dead in two. It’s not the additives he wanted either; as much as he’d adopted Kanonite, he was online in New Iacon, and the additives expose him as much. 

You as in close, comfort, familiarity, I know you, you belong to me, with me, forever at my side, you stay, you who I know, you who’s spark is my own, you who I would recognise even if we were specks of dust floating through the cosmos–

Dead as in gone, black, devoid of love and passion and a longing lives in your wake, dead you do not exist but I do but it barely counts as existing, without you life is dead, you died and I died too, dead gone forever dead is my love dead is you–

These glyphs were not the ones he had wanted to expose. They are vulnerable, weak and tear themselves out of his forsaken spark. Lurching to clasp at the Prime’s. 

I’m supposed to hate him, he yells to the void, bitter and angry. 

You are pathetic, the void says back. 

“Sometimes I wish I had,” Prime utters, glyphs painfully lonely and dripping with longing, dripping with energon that sinks past his dentae, stains his tongue. “I bet it would have hurt less.”

“You’re a coward,” Megatron hisses, digging his claws into that stupid face, that stupid stupid face with that long narrow nose and those thin lips and high cheek plates and round optics that look so damn young when exposed past the impassive plain of a battle mask. “I hate you, do you understand? I hate you so much my spark might burn right through my armour. And I’d make you eat it so it’d burn through yours so you can understand just how much I hate you.”

“I think I’d like the taste,” Prime whispers, and something dangerous lingers in those glyphs, in the admission neither of them is willing to make. “I’d make you eat mine, so you understand just how much I hate you too.”

They don’t talk for cycles after. Prime claims to have fallen down some stairs (Ratchet glares at Megatron every chance he gets, but it’s for naught; Prime is technically Decepticon-owned and if the prisoner Prime doesn’t complain, there is nothing anybot can do. Still, it makes him feel smug smirking in that stupid medic’s face, if only to feed his rather low-cresting ego) and the welds on his face are what he has to show for it. His stupid battle mask is back, seamed right up and deployed once more, hiding that cowardly face of his like he always does. 

Even though it seems like the end of something precious, Cybertron moves on without much regard for pathetic bots like them. The Seeker towers are well under construction, and it seems that with the promise of old Cybertronian tradition existing once more, morale has taken a high hit. There’s even several bars opening up near the construction zones, though Megatron could not, for the life of him, remember when bots started refining high-grade again. Rumours point to Swindle and Swerve combining efforts, which in and of itself is a terrifying prospect, especially considering the Cybertronian credit system was somewhat of a disaster at the moment. 

Things they don’t talk about as tragedies of war: your world’s currency dwindles to worthlessness. 

Megatron finds out that most of the payments made are really just favours being passed around, and he doesn’t have the spark nor the energy to warn bots that owing Swindle a favour is probably the second worst thing to live with, right next to a Bubonic Rust. 

Cybetron is in high spirit though, and Megatron watches, spark smarting with deep-seated wounds that one would think they would get used to after four million cycles. It seems victory meant satisfaction to everybot but the one who won it. 

And, apparently, the one who lost for it. 

It brings Megatron little reprieve knowing Prime is suffering the way is. To be honest, he’s still reeling about the fact that Prime is suffering from a broken spark bond. How is that even possible? He was reformatted, remade, spark a new and bright thing that has nothing to do with Megatron. Maybe he bonded during the war? Seems unlikely, but Megatron wouldn’t put it past the soft-sparked fool. Afterall, it’s not like he had to deal with a spark torn apart by death the way Megatron had. 

It was all just so fragging unfair. 

He’s about to do something stupid to vent out the burning anger in his system, maybe throw another chair out of the window, but he is rudely interrupted from his violent thoughts by the sound of his door whishing open. 

“If I turn around and you are standing there, Prime, I will throw you out of this window instead of the chair,” he huffs, steam pouring out of his mouth. 

“A pity,” Prime, the slagger, doesn’t sound pitying at all. “At least be sure to dig up the Matrix out of me when you do.”

Megatron turns around and stares, unable to form any coherent thought as he watches Prime enter their office, keying in the code to lock the door behind him before turning to Megatron, his single arm resting at his hip. He’s looking at Megatron, conviction burning in his single optic, but he stays still, and the two are left in an awkward limbo before Megatron resets his vocalizer to utter a confused, “what?”

“I’m surrendering, fully” Prime states, voice steady, and raises his arm to press it against his chassis, right over where his spark would be. “I…I’m willing to give this up, if it means you will come to the peace we have. No backstabbing, no Primacy to overthrow, you will have nothing stopping you.”

“What are you blathering about,” Megatron hisses, gaze darting between Prime’s chassis and his own burning blue optic. 

“I’m giving the Matrix up,” Prime states, despite the tension in his shoulders, the uneasy air surrounding his field. “I… I’m willing to part with it, for Cybertron.”

For you, he doesn’t say, but he doesn’t need to. Megatron hears him.

He’s still wearing that damned face mask. 

Megatron becomes enraged. 

He storms to the Prime, to the forsaken puppet turned something before him and slams into him, punching him right in his healing face and hissing when his claws scrape against the hard edges of Prime’s mask. They grapple, but with one arm Prime is at a disadvantage, and Megatron throws him to the floor before diving right after him. 

“You–” he punches Prime in the face, and his fist burns “–are–” another punch “–such–” punch “–a–” punch “–Primus–” punch “–damned–” punch “–FOOL!”

Prime’s mask snaps back before Megatron can reach for it, clearly remembering their previous altercation not even cycles ago. Still, Megatron punches him right across the face, breaking the healing welds with ease before grabbing Prime by the neck. He squeezes as much as he dares, brings the Prime up so that he can ghost his vents across energon-stained lips. 

“I would kill you if it meant I could rest in peace.”

“Then do it,” Prime bites back, baring his dentae. It’s not impressive, he doesn’t have fangs like Megatron, but it doesn’t matter. The energon on his dentae do the trick. 

“I…” Megatron hesitates, optics tracing over the energon leaking from a split in the soft metal of Prime’s mouth. “I wish I could.”

It’s an admission that burns right through all of Megatron’s flames. Suddenly he is empty and cold, and without the drive to keep the ache of his spark at bay. 

“I’ll give up the Matrix,” Prime states. 

“You don’t want to.”

“I…” Prime’s optic darts away before locking back to Megatron. “It doesn’t matter.”

Megatron heaves Prime up before slamming him into the ground. 

“You don’t want to!”

“It doesn’t matter!”

Megatron slams him again. Prime’s optic glitches out and his vents are laden with static, but all he does is glare right back at Megatron’s snarling face. 

“It. Doesn’t. Matter,” Prime seethes, and uses his one hand to close around Megatron’s own throat. “It doesn’t matter, because Cybertron is more important than some ancient relic.”

“Why would you give it up.”

“You don’t want a Prime to exist,” Prime says in between his hissing vents, and his digits close around Megatron’s throat. “No more false prophets. You won the war, and you won’t move on without it. You hate me, remember?”

And there is a lot to unpack there, a lot Megatron can spin and spit back, but all he can think about is–”

“I don’t hate you.”

Prime snarls then, something surprising on his faceplates, lips pulled back and optic narrowed and hatred dripping from every seam on his being.

“Oh you’re so full of slag,” Prime grits, shaking Megatron by the neck. “You’re so–you can’t say that! You’ve been repeating it for millenia and now you say something different and I don’t get you! You hate me! You hate me! Say it! Say it, you fragger, say it! You–”

“I loved you!”

The silence is so loud it rings in his audials. His vents roar in an effort to cool his heating frame; Prime is now better. He stares, optic wide, mouth agape and energon flecked over his face; he looks surreal, and Megatron hates him. He hates him so much because–

“I used to love you,” his voice is hoarse no matter how many times he resets his vocaliser, so he gives up and squeezes Prime’s throat tighter and gravel accentuates his sorrow. “I used to fucking love you. So much. And then I shot him. I killed him. I killed you.”

“Some love,” Prime croaks, but Megatron isn’t done. 

“You killed me first,” he whispers, gravel and broken glass and nothing but aching love long lost to him. “You–you came crawling back because death was too good for you because I loved you and you didn’t love me.”

“I loved you,” Prime whispers, static laden because Megatron is holding his neck tight, but also because of something else, something that stinks of pain. Glass in spark. “You have no idea how much. You killed me and I… I couldn’t even hate you for it because I loved you too much.”

“You are not Orion Pax,” Megatron growls. 

“You’re not D-16,” Prime whispers back.

“I hate you,” Megatron mourns, and ducks down until his face is hidden in the crevice of Prime’s shoulder. Prime’s arm is pliant between them, digits motionless against major fuel lines and his fritzing voice box. 

“You should.”

“I loved you.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“You’re dying.”

Prime looks at him, and his optic is nothing but watery truth. 

“I am.”

Because there is a truth about spark bonds, and there is a truth about two bots. It’s not a very pretty one. 

“Why would you give up the Matrix?”

“For…” Prime swallows, and then looks at him, conviction. “For you.”

Megatron leans up again, and his digits loosen until his touch is a pathetic attempt at a caress to the open wounds he’s caused with his claws. He faintly thinks of how Ratchet will have his helm for this. 

“I don’t want it.”

Prime’s optic widens. 

“But–”

“I never hated the Matrix,” Megatron admits. He’s busy staring at the dents and scratches adorning Prime’s neck to notice the way his optic widens further, mouth opening in shock. “I only ever hated you.”

“You used to love me.”

Megatron’s vents hot air over Prime’s exposed face.

“I think I still do.”

Energon tastes a bit different to everybot. Most find it bland and cool. Megatron has always thought it tasted a bit bitter. Right now, as Megatron sweeps his tongue over Prime’s lips, it’s the sweetest thing he’s ever tasted. 

The kiss is rough, doing no favours to the split in Prime’s lips. Megatron lapse the energon like a starved mech, tightening his hold on Prime’s neck and feeling blunt digits press into sensitive seams that spike in pain under his harsh touch. It hurts more than anything, but Megatron is addicted to it, addicted to the derma’s biting at his lips, his glossa, nipping at the dents in Megatron’s upper mouth from his fangs and drawing out his own energon to lick up. It hurts, but Megatron can’t get enough. 

“Keep you slagging Matrix,” he chokes out between sharp kisses, hot air and energon smearing over his mouth with every connection. “I don’t need it. I don’t want it.”

“I’ll be a Prime,” Prime heaves, voice shaky and full of static and heavy with need. “I’ll always be a Prime as long as I live.”

Megatron bites his lip hard, earning a breathy moan and a burst of sweet life blood. 

“My spark has been the bane of my existence for eons,” Megatron rasps into Prime’s mouth, “A Prime is nothing. You are nothing.”

“Optimus.”

Megatron pauses, lips brushing against Prime’s and wet with oil and energon. 

“Optimus,” Prime breathes into him, into his very spark that reaches through his fuel lines, through his intake and into Prime’s awaiting mouth. “Call me Optimus.”

Megatron smirks, ghosting a kiss over bleeding lips. 

“You were never worthy of anything else.”

If Prime… if Optimus had anything else to say, it’s lost in Megatron’s mouth. He takes Optimus like a battle, fighting without giving an inch. And oh does Optimus fight, pushing against his restraints and stretching at his plating and biting for every sliver of pain he can draw out. And Megatron loves it. The pain seems to soothe his spark, makes it sing, makes it expand and swell within its confines until Megatron is sure he’d burst into light energy and become dust. 

Megatron digs his fangs into the supple mesh of his lips, and Optimus moans, body wreathing beneath him. His armour is hot where Megatron takes one servo away from the death grip over Optimus’s throat to explore the rest of him, claws scratching at plating and digging into vulnerable seams, snagging at wires and digging into the soft protoform beneath. 

Optimus’s own hand roams, gliding over the edges of his armour that no bot knows as well as the Prime does. Deft digits dig into his armour, stretching it as far as the grey metal would give and ripping it further still, until energon leaked from torn cabling and Megatron was hissing into his mouth. 

Megatron’s hand comes to Optimus’s legs, his servo encircling those sinful silver thighs and gripping hard enough to dent the metal, breathing in Optimus’s throaty moan and swallowing it with another surging kiss, biting into him, devouring him.

“Fix my spark,” Optimus mumbles into him, “fix what you broke.”

Megatron doesn’t even have the time to curse him out before Optimus’s chest plates open up. He’s blinded by blue, by a cerulean wave of heat that encompasses him. He stares down, transfixed, and watches as Optimus’s spark spins wild within its chamber, the Matrix folded away in sight of such a rabid beast. Ratchet would have such a fit seeing this, watching the carnage of a spark that should exist as the most tranquil energy in existence. 

“What would your Autobots say,” Megatron mutters, claws dragging up Optimus’s quivering thighs to reach into the battered cavity of his chest. “To see their Prime’s spark in such chaos.”

“Fix it,” Optimus rasps. 

Megatron’s spark is a dying sun in his chest. It’s been killing him for four million cycles. Slowly, draining him, dragging him through oblivion one painful spin at a time. Spark bonds will do that, broken ones that nobot bothers to fix. There’s a medical solution, there are ways to heal, but deep in Megatron’s processor, as he folds his chest plates away and plunges Optimus in red, he has to wonder if it was the cruelty of fate that had Megatron believe that fixing his broken spark would have been worse than any sort of death his forsaken spark could give him. 

“This is quite possibly the best idea you’ve had in millenia.”

“I will eviscerate you.”

Starscream snorts, unimpressed, and Thundercracker – back to his original position of decorative piece behind his chair – sinks his head into his servos. 

“This is the most stupid idea I have ever had the displeasure of listening to,” Prowl scowls, and it’s a bit impressive considering the mech had the emotional capacity of a rusting scraplet. Jazz seems to think so, with the way he was gaping at the tactician with a look in his optics that was a bit inappropriate for an office meeting. 

“Unfortunately for you, the Autobots are in no position to be making demands,” Starscream sneers.

“Autobots: surrendered,” Soundwave supplies uselessly. 

“Giving Megatron complete authority over Cybertron's military? Are you glitched? Who would agree to that?”

“I did,” Optimus supplies, also uselessly.

“No one asked you,” literally every Autobot snaps. Optimus doesn’t even have the gall to seem sheepish. 

“We can’t just leave the military operations to someone less competent than a warlord,” Megatron rolls his optics. “We already have reports about incoming threats from the Galactic Council for ignoring the debts Sentinel conveniently forgot to pay eons ago.”

“You’re a competent warlord?” Starscream drawls. 

“Incoming threats?” Red Alert squeaks. 

“The Galactic Counsel's sendin’ us transmissions?” Jazz asks. 

“We’re in debt?” Prowl’s scowl intensified. 

“Sentinel: was in debt?” Soundwave inquired with, daresay Megatron assumed, incredulity. 

“We’ve been in debt for eons?!” Red Alert shrieks. 

“So any operation to disband the Decepticon military will have to be put on pause,” Prowl muses, and then the room explodes into chaos. 

Shockwave end up slamming his datapad into the table, and on accident since Red Alert knocks into him hard enough for him to trip and slam said data pad into the table, and the room descends into enough shocked silence that Optimus can finally stop being a useless lump of metal and begins speaking. 

“According to the historical archives,” he begins, ignoring the several groans that sound at that, “the role of Prime was purely religious. And societal, I guess, but to be fair, the data pads are pretty broken down–”

“Get to the point, Optimus,” Megatron hisses.

“Cybertron was ruled by two rulers; the Prime who was responsible for societal order and the Lord High Protector–”

“The slag-maker himself take us all if Megatron becomes the sole leader of all of Cybertron’s military power,” Ratchet mutters. How he even got into this meeting, Megatron doesn’t know. 

“If I had the entire Cybertronian military then I couldn’t very well fight Cybertron,” Megatron rolls his optics. Ratchet scoffs at him, but Megatron is too smug to care. 

“That is… actually very true,” Prowl frowns. 

“Lord High Protector sounds so pretentious,” Starscream sneers. 

“So does Supreme Sky Commander,” Jazz points out. 

“He’s got a point,” Thundercracker agrees, earning a scandalous look from Starscream that borders on betrayal. “You could have chosen something else! Like Air Commander!”

“That is because I am the commander of the skies, you moron! Not the fraggin’ air in your corroding vents.”

“And now I am Lord High Protector,” Megatron purrs, leaning into Optimus so he can whisper into that sensitive finial, “isn’t that right, my Prime.”

“You’re insatiable,” Optimus pushes his face away. 

“Worse than turbo rabbits,” Jazz agrees, as if he hadn’t been making optics at Prowls’ protruding chassis for cycles. 

“Prime and his Lord High Protector,” Red Alert mutters into his servos, and Soundwave offers a sympathetic pat on his helm. “We’re all gunna’ die.”

The first thing Megatron sees when Cybertron’s sun rises is this:

Optimus sleeps like a dead mech, his optic offline and helm turned towards Megatron, seeking him out even in recharge. He’s covered in dents and fraying paint and claw marks, looking for the life of his like he’d just walked through a scraplet nest. Megatron can still taste that warm living metal on his lips, the heat of Optimus around him, his moaning breath. 

And now here he recharges, curled on the side where his arm is missing. The arm he has admitted to not wanting to replace. I’m not Lord High Protector; what do I need it for? The idiot. 

For the first time in millenia, Megatron’s spark spins without pain. With a weight that’s been lifted, his spark casing full of light, for the first time since D-16 died Megatron feels alive. He bends down to where Optimus’s face is now tucked into his chest and he nips at those fragile finials, responsive even in Optimus’s unconscious state. His spark spins. Full. Alive. 

“What’re you doin’?” Optimus slurs, batting away at Megatron’s face with weak digits. 

(Thin and flat, like those that would belong to a cleaner bot. Or maybe a librarian. Someone who would sort through datapads, someone who belongs in the sun; an archivist, maybe. 

The Matrix changed much. Orion Pax died and left little of himself, in small things that exist in Optimus in the same way D-16 stains Megatron’s frame. His optics, his smile, his servos. 

Servos that belong to a cleaner bot. A Prime.)

“Stop it,” Optimus whines, honest to Primus whines, and nuzzles his nose into Megatron’s neck. 

Megatron doesn’t say anything. He is a poet, a warlord, a Lord High Protector, and yet it is his title as a lover that deems Megatron unworthy of words. So he remains quiet, in this lull of peace where his spark spins in beat with two and he is draped over a bot he used to call mine. 

Still. He is still mine. 

“Insatiable,” Optimus mutters, but his smile curves into the sensitive metal of the underside of Megatron’s chin. “I hate you.”

“You don’t.”

“I do.”

“You’d do anything for me,” Megatron grins, and it feels pathetically soft on his face. “Soft-spark.”

“You’re right,” Optimus murmurs, reaching up until he can whisper into his mouth. “I’d do anything for you.

“For you. For us.”