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lyricalityTitle: Belonging 6/6
Rating: M/NC-17, Slash
Universe: Transformers: Animated
Pairing: Megatron/Optimus Prime
Author's Note: Spoilers for A Bridge Too Close, follows an alternate ending into a new continuity. Dear Lord, it's the final part at long last.
As usual, all my worshipful gratitude goes to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lady_oneiros, who has betaed this monster from beginning to end. ♥ Of course, thank you again to all of you who have read and appreciated this fic--I hope the ending lives up to your expectations.
Part VI
“He can't be kept a prisoner.” Optimus curled his hands into fists and stared down into Ultra Magnus' optics. He kept his battlemask raised. “That solution isn't any more acceptable than execution.”
Magnus lowered his head for a moment, his hands clasping behind him in a reversion to military protocol. “I understand your objection, so well as I am able. But I am sympathetic to the position of the Council, as well. You must understand that the connection between you is all that is saving him from public execution in any case.”
Sighing through all his vents, Optimus worked to modulate his tone. “Does the Council have any intention at all of listening to me?”
Magnus rested a hand on his shoulder. “You are Prime, and the Matrix chose you for more than one purpose. But I think that your connection to him clouds your judgment.”
“Of course it does.” Optimus had no intention of denying his necessary bias, but admitting the truth still made him ache. Beneath Magnus' fingers, the servos bunched and tensed and strained, pulling with tiny twinges of deeper discomfort. “Why wouldn't it?” Optimus whispered, his expression bleak. “His misery is mine.”
Expression caught between displeasure and concern, Magnus withdrew his hand, and Optimus watched as the commander linked both hands behind him again. “Patience with bureaucracy was never something you possessed in abundance.”
Optimus stared at him for a moment. “Did you expect that to change?” he asked softly.
“No.” Magnus spoke too quickly and knew it, and he raised his head to meet Optimus' gaze. “I hardly know what I expected,” Magnus admitted. Awkward silence hung heavily between them and swelled to fill the office, pushing hard against the walls. “This is an adjustment. For all of us.”
Not quite daring to press Magnus further, Optimus shuttered his optics and slumped into the chair behind the desk. Both were too large—remnants of Prime Nova's rule—but complaint seemed petty under the shadow of so many greater difficulties. “I don't think that patience is the answer,” he said at length. Thus far, patience had earned him little save an uncomfortable examination by the Autobot Council and a reluctant acceptance of his status as true Prime.
He had seen Megatron just once since their battle in the Matrix chamber. A single glimpse through the unfocused gray of a security system lens was hardly classifiable as real contact during a stretch of sixty-two megacycles, and something in Optimus ached with unanswered longing.
“You have your next opportunity to speak before the Council in less than seventeen megacycles,” Magnus sighed. “They will not willingly risk your displeasure, not at so unstable a time.” Optimus understood the precariousness of their circumstances. Preliminary reports suggested that the remaining Decepticons were massing again at the galaxy edges, but their forces remained splintered. Without Megatron, they might simply scatter again, but the threat of Starscream kept the situation tense. Moving to the side of the desk, Magnus touched Optimus' shoulder again with awkward affection. “Even so, you should choose your message with care.”
“I know.” Optimus touched Ultra Magnus' hand with his own for barely a moment. Then they drew away from each other again. “I will.”
Despite the unspoken dismissal, Magnus hovered in the open doorway for a nanoklik or two. “If you require my assistance...” The words trailed off into silence. Optimus appreciated the offer of help without having to ask for it.
“I'm sure I will,” he murmured. “I'll let you know.”
Magnus nodded, offered him a formal salute, and disappeared down the corridor.
The relief of solitude blended uneasily with the discomfort of responsibility, and Optimus let himself slump forward for a long moment to rest his forehead against the top of the desk. The new corrugations marking the shield of Primus scraped along the metal in faintly sharp notes. Finally, he raised his head again, running his fingertips along the smooth planes of his battlemask and thinking hard and fast about nothing in particular.
Everything depended on Megatron. Megatron was not dependable.
Thoughts elsewhere, Optimus barely heard the hiss of the door panel as it opened for Prowl. The cyberninja brought Optimus' ax—not the trophy stolen for him and now a part of him, but his old one—and laid it on the desk between them with one slender hand. He seemed ready to slip away again without a word, but Optimus reached out and covered Prowl's hand with his own before the other bot could retreat. “Thank you.”
For a moment, Prowl made no reply. He tilted his head very slightly to one side and regarded Optimus' hand, his expression inscrutable behind the lean angles of his visor. “You always were the most finely-constructed of us all,” he said at last. His mouth curved upward at one edge, and Optimus loved both the familiarity and the rarity of a smile long missed. “Someone so...powerful is not usually so graceful.”
“I don't know why it chose me.” Optimus tightened his grip for a moment and then released him. “I wish it hadn't.”
“I don't think that's true.” Prowl clasped both hands at his back as if he no longer knew what to do with them. “Not entirely, in any case. There is...so much honor in it...here, with...that you are carrying it... I don't know quite what to say.”
Optimus stood, equally awkward, his optics drawn to the windows past Prowl's shoulders. “I'd rather you didn't say it.”
Prowl dipped his head once in assent.
Through the windows, the authoritative angles of Iacon's skyline gleamed in a dozen shades of manufactured light. Optimus wondered with quiet unrest what he really knew of this city, of this planet, despite vorns of relative leadership in the Autobot army. The Matrix made a low thrum in the spaces around his spark and offered its own peculiar comfort. Until all are one.
“It hasn't changed you,” Prowl said, suddenly and softly fierce. Optimus flickered his optics and focused on the cyberninja again. “You're still Optimus Prime. We still recognize you.” Prowl fell silent again for a moment. “And we know you can't come back with us, to Earth.”
“Of course I'm coming back to Earth.” Optimus frowned, wondering what was behind this—if his former team had planned some sort of gentle rejection. “The Allspark shards are there. And what's left of Starscream's clones—”
Prowl lowered his head. “I meant coming back to stay.”
Optimus opened his mouth, and then he closed it again. No. Of course he could not, because he was no longer just Optimus Prime. Now he was Prime, and Earth might or might not remain a pivotal battleground depending upon Starscream's plans. Moreover, Cybertron required his presence: the Autobots wanted him grounded here on familiar metal as a visible symbol of change. The planet thrummed with plenty of internal unrest, as always, but the turmoil would only increase as the scattered Decepticons responded to Megatron's presence.
Megatron, of course, was a different problem altogether.
As if in answer, the Matrix hummed through his spark, its resonance shifting according to errant thought, asking the simplest of all his questions. Where is the other half of you?
Nearby, he told it and asked it to wait. One complication at a time.
Prowl must have seen the sorrow in his expression and spoke now to ease it. “We value your...I value your leadership. All of us do. But you're more important now than the sum of your parts. What you are now is...” Prowl paused, settling finally on a word that Optimus profoundly disliked. “Untouchable. Sacred.”
Hurt, Optimus rested both hands on the desk, leaning forward over it with his optics locked on Prowl's, visor or not. “Do you think that's how Megatron thinks of me?” he asked, aching.
Prowl stared back at him, startled, off-balance, and a little appalled. “I don't know.”
Guilt slipped its fingers around Optimus' neural cabling and squeezed. In their brief service together, he and the others had very rarely intruded on personal boundaries, even when doing so might have been best. He guessed that now they would never have the chance; he had crossed a line that the others could barely perceive. His personal business was no longer just his own.
“If Megatron thinks less of you, because you were one of us...”
Optimus doubted the period he had spent as a repair bot had anything to do with Megatron's current dissatisfaction. “He thinks less of me because I exist,” Optimus quipped, his smile weary. His bondmate cared more for efficacy than anything else, and Optimus served only to balance Megatron in ways the Decepticon did not want.
Reaching out, Prowl hesitated, then finally touched him, the cyberninja's fingers slim against the angled curve of Optimus' forearm. “He can't only be a monster,” Prowl whispered. “The universe would not waste a Prime bonding on only that.”
Megatron was the monster they had all feared, and yet he was the Lord High Protector of Cybertron. At least he had unshakable convictions and authoritative reasons for both. The strange duality no longer struck so deeply into Optimus' own perceptions of right and wrong and the gray smears of morality in between, but he could not imagine explaining that to Prowl. One of them, at least, should be able to keep faith in the clarity of the universe.
Optimus covered that delicate hand with his own and summoned up a smile. “Thank you.”
Careful, Prowl smiled in return, and they let each other go. Prowl crossed his arms behind his back. “No need to say goodbye, yet,” he said. “You'll be leaving for Earth with us in a matter of orns.”
“It'll be a better trip than the one that brought me here.” Optimus felt as though he had already said goodbye, the poignancy worse yet when Prowl gave him a swift but genuine bow and stepped toward the door.
The cyberninja turned back just as the panel slid open. “I believe foremost in balance,” he said, softly enough that Optimus' audio receptors attuned toward him. “This must be a step on that path.” Then he was gone, leaving Optimus with a high-frequency buzzing in his sensors and a lingering ache somewhere in the vicinity of his spark. Everything eventually changed, and he thought he felt the minor pain of that inevitability more keenly, now.
Even so, some of Prowl's faith must have touched him after all, because his internal burden seemed to lessen once he stepped free of the office and took to the halls. He followed his spark, in the way of which common expression spoke but few Cybertronians had ever literally experienced. It led him through quiet hallways where his steps echoed over detailed floor panels, and it forced him to navigate an intersection of passageways where high-rank aristocrats and service drones alike made way for him in ringing silence. The Matrix spoke to him softly of poise and privilege, but he still found public fascination difficult to ignore.
The halls emptied again. These rooms had seen no habitation in vorns, and their gleaming surfaces spoke subtly of abandonment and solitude. Optimus sensed an awakening heat within them, nevertheless.
Faceted double doors marked the entrance to the private rooms of the Lord High Protector. In front of them posed a youngish member of the Elite Guard, his arms crossed over his chest and his exoskeletal plates gleaming a brilliant nanite red. Optimus recognized him vaguely from scattered comm reports of Decepticon activity.
The Guardsman snapped into formal attention as Optimus approached. “Sir,” he saluted.
“At ease.” Optimus halted in front of him before reaching out to touch one shining door. The panels stayed shut. “He's in here,” Optimus murmured, asking a question that needed no verbal answer. Megatron reached outward through the bond, his sullen distrust putting painful pressure on Optimus' spark despite the physical barriers between them.
The Guardsman nodded. He spoke with the heavy drawl of Cybertronian rural miners and gladiatorial recruits. “I'd advise anyone against goin' in there,” he said, with oddly open concern. “Sir.”
“He's unlikely to hurt me.” That was a lie, but only in part—Megatron might hurt him, but the Decepticon's unreasoning, reactionary terror had disappeared with a brief surge of violence just after his awakening from stasis lock. Fury had replaced it, but Optimus no longer expected another potentially lethal attack. “I'm afraid I don't remember your name,” Optimus said to the Guardsman, keeping one hand flat against the metal of the door.
“Ironhide, sir. It's only fair ta warn ya—I'm told ta call for backup if anyone goes through these doors.”
“Don't do that,” Optimus said. He thought of pulling rank—one of the many voices of the Matrix suggested the notion with vehemence—but considered his other options, instead. “Have you ever dealt with anyone unreasonable, Ironhide?” he asked at length.
The other mech looked a little uneasy, and then he gave Optimus half a smile. “Served under Sentinel Prime. Back when 'e was Sentinel Minor.”
Common ground. “Don't let anyone know that I gave you my condolences,” Optimus smiled. “You know, then, that unreasonable mechs usually react less unpleasantly to mechs they trust. Or at least to mechs they know well. And confronting them in a group usually goes badly.” Looking at Ironhide again, Optimus willed all of his sincerity into his expression, hoping his desperation did not leach through as well. “I need to talk to him,” Optimus murmured, lowering his voice by several decibels. “And I need no one else to be listening, and no one else to interrupt.”
Ironhide arched an optic ridge. “Don't know that I can promise that,” he said, and Optimus wondered whether he had misjudged the Guardsman's goodwill, his age, or both. “Can't say I particularly want ta be the mech on guard when Megatron kills the Prime.”
Sighing, Optimus rested both hands against the door panels, splaying his fingers. “He can't do that.”
A little surge of disquieted sympathy softened the line of Ironhide's mouth, and he lowered his voice. “It's true, then? You're bonded? To him?”
Rumors spread quickly, and while Ultra Magnus had tried to contain them, Optimus had made no similar attempts of his own. Better that all of Cybertron know the truth. Better still that Optimus be allowed to announce it himself, rather than hearing the information distorted and exaggerated through a million vocal processors—but he hadn't yet established that sort of control.
“Yes,” he said only. He glanced sideways at Ironhide, and he detected some glimmer of empathy behind the optics of the other mech. “I need to talk to him.”
Staring at Optimus for a moment or two, Ironhide briefly shuttered his optics, then reactivated them to look up at the vaulted ceiling. “Make it a direct order,” he said out of the side of his mouth, lowering the decibel count of his own vocal processor even further.
Startled, Optimus flickered his optics. “What?”
“Make it a direct order, and keep a comm line open,” Ironhide said, uncrossing his arms and reaching one hand toward the command panel. “And I'll do it. Willingly, I mean.”
Optimus straightened and brought the full command of his new frame to bear. “I order you to open these doors,” he intoned. “And to say nothing, if anyone asks where I've gone.” Ironhide punched in a two-part code and stood warily back as the panels began to part.
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you.” Optimus looked at him with deep gratitude, hesitant to ask why, but Ironhide explained without prompting.
“Knew Sunstreaker and Sideswipe back in the Academy.” Ironhide's mouth curved into a sorrowful sort of smile. “They're glitchheads when they're together, but they're a solid million times worse when they're apart.” The Guardsman shrugged and settled back into his previous position in front of the doors. “Call me sentimental, if ya like.”
Optimus slipped through the doors. “Thank you,” he repeated before they closed behind him.
Inside, all was silence. Someone had deactivated the hydrogen illumination, and only the dim blue glow of electrical lights interrupted the darkness. Optimus too-easily recalled the deep shadows of Megatron's throne room on the Tidal Wave, and he cycled atmosphere slowly through his intakes, hearing a stutter in the sound. This room was empty—just a receiving hall of shining floors and bare walls—and Optimus barely remembered to activate the promised comm channel before continuing into the next chamber. Wider and far taller, this room stretched upward into darkness. Optimus glimpsed a faint shimmer high above, as of embedded gems or shining frescoes in constellation patterns.
Megatron was a looming shadow against the greater darkness. The blue light barely broke up his form, resolving him into pure geometric shapes: the heavy angle of a shoulder, the soft sheen off a chest plate, the narrow polygons of burning optics.
“You could be gone from here,” Optimus murmured at length. He stepped close enough to map the angles of Megatron's faceplates.
Megatron cast him a smoldering glance and did not deny it.
That the Decepticon had not directed all his considerable power toward making his escape meant something too complicated for simple words. Optimus almost dared to touch him, but kept himself carefully in check. “I'm not glad,” Optimus said at length, holding his hands at his sides and feeling the strange, inward groan of his own spark. “But I'm not disappointed, either.”
“How reassuring, since I live to ensure your satisfaction,” Megatron growled.
Distrust gnawed at Optimus through the strands of the bond, and he pushed away his own uncertainties, projecting surety in return. Megatron reacted badly. The blunt pressure of his banked fury sank fangs into Optimus again.
Optimus forced a long, searching stare between the two of them. “Do you think I planned this?”
Megatron said nothing.
Stung, Optimus fisted his hands, tightening his fingers until the servos creaked and stung. Megatron twitched his fingers in response. That evidence of their synchronization made Optimus pause long enough to recall his purpose here, and he dragged himself willfully back into serenity. The balance between them had shifted, and for the first time, Optimus held the advantage. He had no idea how to accomplish his desires, but he knew the outcome he wanted, and perhaps that would be enough.
“I didn't plan this,” Optimus said, suppressing an uneasy tremor. “It isn't what I wanted. But I want you here.”
“And what do you intend to do?” Megatron narrowed his optics, blazing slits of light in the shadows. “Try to keep me in a cage?”
Megatron had tried that at first; both of them knew better now. “I can't say I know of any material strong enough for that.” Stepping forward, Optimus moved consciously to corner Megatron, both hands lifting to his own chest. “You'd chew through the bars. No. I want to show you something, instead.”
Megatron actually flinched, a subtle shift that started in his chest and spread outward through his limbs. He did not retreat, of course, but his optics narrowed further. “I have seen it.”
“I know. I want you to feel it, instead.”
“I have felt it.” Megatron bared his dental plates and showed all their sharpened edges.
“Attached to him,” Optimus reminded, unhooking his chest plates and spreading them open with his hands, too nervous to trust his own systems with the task. The second barrier of armor parted of its own accord because Megatron was close—close enough that Optimus could sense the shivering pull of the Decepticon's powerful spark. “Feel it attached to me, instead. To me and to you.” The third barrier pulled silently open. Bare, his spark glittered off the smooth surfaces of Megatron's chest. The Matrix shone brighter, blinding, before dimming again.
With a rippling growl, Megatron grabbed Optimus by both shoulders and wrenched him around to shove his back up against a wall. “Do you think this is a solution?” His optics seared a path of physical heat along Optimus' neck and down to the bright glow between them before jerking upward again. “As if this will forestall punishment or prevent execution. I have done things that no Autobot would ever understand or forgive.” He leaned closer, speaking with a soft chill against Optimus' audio receptor. “Only you would have ordered me placed in these rooms, instead of a triply-secured containment cell.”
Optimus lifted a hand and dared to rest it against Megatron's chest, his fingers covering the unforgiving angles of the Decepticon insignia. Megatron shifted backward half a step to put space between them. “I know.” Optimus had memories of these rooms, and those memories were not his own. “But you are the Lord High Protector of Cybertron.”
“I am a monster, Prime,” Megatron said, his voice lowering, his mouth pulling downward at both edges with familiar disdain. “You said so yourself.”
Optimus would not deny any part of it. “Yes.”
They were so nearly of a height, and that still startled him. His spark jolted with a sudden, steady thrill in response.
Briefly offlining his optics, Optimus spoke from his lowest vocal register, each word emerging with a husky vibration. “And yet here I am.”
“Because you have no choice,” Megatron growled. Despite the fact, his fingers scraped an upward path along Optimus' side and shoulder, the paint flaking away under the pressure in flecks of red and blue. That hand curled over Optimus' battlemask and hooked fingers over its upper edge. “Dispense with this.”
Optimus complied, a little startled that he had forgotten to lower it. Leaning close, Megatron bit at Optimus' lip components, trailing a gradual line of nicked plating and sparking friction downward over Optimus' chin and along his neck. “Is this what you want?” Megatron demanded in a steelwool purr.
“Yes,” Optimus said, lip components parting as he circled Megatron's waist with both arms and curled his hands against the Decepticon's shoulder plating.
For just a moment, Megatron splayed a hand over the center of Optimus' chest. No pressure, no pain—he only blocked the thrumming light of both power sources with silent protection and proprietary grace. Then Megatron abruptly sank that hand deep inside, dragging sharp-edged fingers along the surfaces, clutching and grasping and clenching in a way that ensured discomfort for both of them. Shuttering his optics, Optimus made low clicks of pain but refused to withdraw. After a terrible cycle, the roughness gentled into something like a caress, and Megatron's fingers wound into the delicate lattice of the Matrix to slowly, slowly pull. Optimus tilted his head back and made a trilling groan as an utterly new sensation swept outward through his chest.
Jolting from head to foot, Megatron hissed out an exclamation as his optics flickered. His fingers flexed again, setting off deep flickers of pleasure in Optimus' interior components. Something tensed, pulled taut, and snapped on a wake of silver-laced shuddering.
Optimus tipped back his head, his antennae brushing against the wall behind him. “That,” he said as his hands fisted against Megatron's back. “Again.”
Megatron obliged him; both their intake systems hitched.
Internal fans activating, Optimus shivered as heat suffused his components and made feedback loops in his neural pathways. “Come before the Council with me,” he moaned. He refused to surrender Megatron's authority, and he could never succeed without Megatron's ambition—not when he had so little of his own. They would rise or fall together. Megatron could serve as Cybertron's sword, so long as Optimus served as Cybertron's shield. If they confronted the Council, no one could ever doubt the extraordinary balance in their bond.
“Insanity.” Megatron paused to scowl, but his fingers trembled, an illustration of the difficulty in any reluctance between the two of them.
Optimus gasped through all his intakes at the hint of friction. “Necessity,” he whispered. “Just say yes.”
“No.” Megatron bit at the cabling of Optimus' neck.
Threading determination through the bond, Optimus shook his head without disrupting Megatron's rough hold. “They won't risk the Matrix. They'll have no choice but to hear us out.” Megatron slowed to a grudging halt, his lip components brushing against Optimus' cabling. Distrust, unease, and a deeply longing suspicion tangled into the emotional pathways between them.
“When?” Megatron said at length.
“Sixteen megacycles. At the Tower.” Optimus kept himself very still. Megatron's thoughts ran in bleeding edges over his own, all the boundaries between bitterness and hope blurring. Doubting he could or should attempt any subtle machinations at the moment, Optimus withdrew all his conscious influence from their connection.
Megatron growled, but the sound lacked its usual threat. “Very well.”
Passion surged between them—a sort of liquid fire without a discernible origin. Unwilling to be entirely overcome, Optimus splayed his hands against Megatron's chest and shoved the Decepticon back a full step. Frowning, Megatron pushed close and kissed him, all dental plates and heated steel, and for just a moment, Optimus surrendered to it. He arched his neck and bit gently in return before shoving himself out of Megatron's hold once more. “Berth,” Optimus said. He might be accused of sentimentality, but he had the opportunity to do something right—and thoroughly—and he meant to take proper advantage.
Keeping silent, Megatron grasped him by the wrist and pulled him into an adjoining room. They passed through double sets of archways and down a brief corridor, where Optimus caught haunting glimpses of quality furnishings and a purely indulgent sort of cleansing pool. While he did not feel lost, he did feel off-balance, as if something had stolen his center of gravity and left him reeling. Lifting his free hand, he ran his fingers down the enticing seams of Megatron's back, and he sensed the quivering of the plating in reply.
Megatron palmed open a double-panel door. The room behind it was dark, but Optimus had his own spark and the luminance of the Matrix for light.
He turned on Megatron and pushed him down against the welcoming length of the berth.
“Still just me,” Optimus murmured when Megatron fought him, components straining and jerking as Optimus straddled the Decepticon's hips and trapped both his arms against the memory foam of the berth. Bending low, Optimus risked his faceplates for a gradual and unusually gentle kiss. Megatron bit him hard enough to make them both cry out, and then his glossa slipped along Optimus' lower lip component as the struggling slowly eased into a deeper, less quantifiable tension.
Outwardly placid, Megatron stared into Optimus with narrowed optics. Optimus knew better than to speak. Instead, he grazed his own dental plates along the joint of Megatron's jaw, dedicating his entire sensory network to the interpretation of each minute shift in the frame beneath his own.
The Matrix flickered out its message, whispering its broken memories of how to please Megatron best, but the Decepticon's new frame possessed different components and different sensitivities. It demanded an entirely new method and means of willing exploration—and perhaps that was for the best. Prime Nova's spectral demands had no place in this bond or in this berth, and Optimus wanted the experience for himself alone.
Releasing one wrist, he skidded his open palm over the rise of Megatron's chest plates and then outward to the shoulder joint. Optimus paused to stroke at the exposed cabling, and since patience was so rarely a characteristic of Megatron's programming, the Decepticon arched up and bit at the open edges of Optimus' chest. Hissing in surprise, Optimus shuddered with physical sensation as the Matrix flashed out its own reaction in binary, forming a message too swift and too complex for translation. Optimus let go of Megatron's other wrist to run fingers along the barrel of the fusion cannon, tracing the angles and pressing into the seams; he rubbed wiring between his fingertips, feeling the surge of power and the swelling of adjoining cables. Touching attached weaponry was intimate by any measure, and Optimus experienced a dizzying pulse of strangely thrilling panic. While Megatron was clearly the source, the emotion was not his alone.
“You cannot take the fight out of me,” Megatron growled. His fingers forced between the articulated plates at Optimus' back. “No matter how you try.”
Optimus pushed his chest close, grinding them together, and their connected sparks surged faintly in sympathy despite the barrier of armor. “Good.” He wanted Megatron to fight. He wanted to end this verbal exchange and communicate in simpler and more sophisticated ways. “I can't help but prefer you as you are. But maybe you can funnel all your hating of me down a...more productive path.”
Sensation had silenced Megatron briefly. His optics had shuttered, his mouth contorting in a wordless groan, but he wrenched himself back from the precipice they had discovered in each other, and his optics reactivated in narrow, gleaming slits. For a moment, Optimus expected more violence, but after a strained pause, Megatron merely gave him a faintly ironic, purely Decepticon sort of smile.
“For Cybertron,” Megatron said. The irony remained in his voice, each word nuanced. He understood the subtleties of manipulation, after all.
Optimus nodded, shameless in his bid for trust between them, speaking as he rubbed them together again. “For Cybertron.” The pressure hurt, their sparks flaring and seeking better resonance. “For you. For me.” Moaning, Optimus pushed his face up against the cables of Megatron's neck and bit sharply enough to make the frame below his shudder from head to foot. “Open,” he said. He begged, and he was not particularly ashamed of wanting so badly what was made for only him. “Open.”
“You're a sentimental glitchwit.” Megatron spoke with his customary derision, but panic fluttered between them again. Nevertheless, his chest plates parted thinly down the center—surrender at last, or something like it. “This is not victory.”
Their sparks laced together like fine wiring joining in a thousand perfectly spliced strands. Crying out, Optimus felt the same trembling awareness spread through Megatron's frame, flowing outward from the spark. Anticipation, relief, anxiety, expectation and ecstasy threaded between them, a construction so complicated that Optimus could not imagine charting it and did not want to try. If this was not victory, it still felt like the edge of rapture. If something so glorious could not bring glory to Cybertron in return, then he doubted he understood anything at all about the universe.
Beneath him and within him, Megatron thrashed unexpectedly. His chest plates retracted fully as he tried to push deeper.
I am open. The snarl was subsensory, the essence one of pure authority, and the Matrix responded with an upwelling of affirmation that made Optimus curl his fingers into Megatron's shoulders and mark the metal. Vibrating, fully interior passion rippled through him, as physical a sensation as fingertips raking along his neural cabling. Give it to me, Prime.
Optimus could hardly do otherwise.
He pressed himself inward, deeper, arching back his neck with a shout when the Matrix reacted with a throb of reassuring joy. Detached for vorns, worshipped for purity and mounted in holy solitude, it had wanted nothing more or less than this—the connection of one spark to another. All such connections, no matter how temporary, represented the most fundamental force of Cybertronian existence. To find two sparks so suitable for each other was absolute and unforgiving rapture. Optimus could not contain it, so he released it willfully into the bond in the truest act of sharing he had ever known.
Megatron's mouth fell open, his optics flickered and offlined, and he gasped. The sound was deep and sharp; it had a ragged edge. Optimus was unprepared for the rush of white-hot desire that wracked his frame and caught like blissful pain in his spark.
Optimus had seen Megatron undone at all the heights of pleasure, but he had never so much as imagined Megatron entirely overwhelmed and shockingly vulnerable as a result. With a mechanical whimper, Optimus buried his face against the cabling of Megatron's neck and rubbed them together, spark against spark, sharing thoughts as deeply as sensations. The specter of Prime Nova circled through the spaces between them. Optimus hooked into the memory and tore away the facade, revealing the familiar darkness of components and cabling beneath the veneer. Optimus possessed that basic construction, but he would never resurrect that spark, and the power of the image faded at the edges before crumbling into rust. In return, Megatron showed him all the mental constructions of a lock. Optimus searched himself for the key.
He found it in the tangle of new emotions and rising hope. On a slow build toward overload, he and Megatron constructed a tenuous future better than anything of the past—with solid foundations in a balance of gentleness and justice. Optimus shouted his pleasure aloud and showed Megatron not just an ending to war, but something far more spectacular than any mere peace.
They overloaded together, wound too deeply for any level of separation. Optimus sobbed. Megatron screamed.
Then the frantic joy of the Matrix tumbled them over an invisible edge and into an unbearable surge of wrenching, wailing satisfaction. This was the same sort of destructive power that had united them once before, but now it sang its notes through all their shared pathways with easy harmony, as if discovering its perfect instrument at last. Its music felt less like climax and more like death, more like rebirth—and Optimus had experienced all three in the short span of his life.
When the ecstasy gradually faded, it left them clutching at each other with far more than hands. For long cycles, Optimus made no attempt to move, concentrating instead on the languid untangling of their sparks. A sense of individuality only slowly returned.
At some length, he felt Megatron's fingers curl over the lighting array on his back.
“This will never work,” his bondmate muttered, once their balance had reestablished itself. Megatron sounded weary, exhaustion filling the gaps left by destructive desire and dulling the possibilities of shared joy. “Not as you hope.”
Optimus made an enormous effort and rolled off of him, wary of his own unfamiliar weight. Undeterred, he rested heavily against the right half of the berth, and then he pulled Megatron over with one hand at the Decepticon's elbow joint to bring them together again, face to face and side by side. “We can argue about that,” Optimus allowed, sliding one unrelenting arm around Megatron's back to bind them together.
Megatron raised a hand and pushed with it momentarily against Optimus' withdrawn chest plating. Then he moved it over Optimus' shoulder and restlessly down his back, grasping and clutching at articulations and protrusions, anywhere that the Matrix transformation had left Optimus less than sleekly smooth.
“I suppose I have no choice,” Megatron said at length.
“We can argue about that, too.” Optimus regarded him for a long, quiet cycle before shuttering his optics. “I'm willing to compromise.”
Relaxing against the berth, Megatron granted him a snort in return. “We have no choice but compromise.”
That was true. Even so, Optimus was not particularly discouraged. “This is what you wanted, once. When you began the war. Revolution, a shift in leadership and in society.” He lowered his voice in response to Megatron's flat silence. “A Prime who couldn't help but listen to you.” He activated his optics to discover that Megatron had turned his head away, his gaze focused elsewhere and his expression speculative. Optimus tilted his head, eager for a better view. “I can't help but hear you,” he murmured.
Megatron glanced at him sideways. He made a low sound of familiar, if affected amusement at Optimus' expense. “You are such a fool.”
“Pity you're a part of me,” Optimus agreed, his mouth curving into a slow smile.
“Pity you are mine.” Megatron scoffed, but a moment later he turned to Optimus again, pressing heavy weight against Optimus' chest—heavy demands on his spirit and on his spark. Optimus opened wide again and received him with a murmur of welcome.
~End~
Rating: M/NC-17, Slash
Universe: Transformers: Animated
Pairing: Megatron/Optimus Prime
Author's Note: Spoilers for A Bridge Too Close, follows an alternate ending into a new continuity. Dear Lord, it's the final part at long last.
As usual, all my worshipful gratitude goes to
lady_oneiros, who has betaed this monster from beginning to end. ♥ Of course, thank you again to all of you who have read and appreciated this fic--I hope the ending lives up to your expectations.Part VI
“He can't be kept a prisoner.” Optimus curled his hands into fists and stared down into Ultra Magnus' optics. He kept his battlemask raised. “That solution isn't any more acceptable than execution.”
Magnus lowered his head for a moment, his hands clasping behind him in a reversion to military protocol. “I understand your objection, so well as I am able. But I am sympathetic to the position of the Council, as well. You must understand that the connection between you is all that is saving him from public execution in any case.”
Sighing through all his vents, Optimus worked to modulate his tone. “Does the Council have any intention at all of listening to me?”
Magnus rested a hand on his shoulder. “You are Prime, and the Matrix chose you for more than one purpose. But I think that your connection to him clouds your judgment.”
“Of course it does.” Optimus had no intention of denying his necessary bias, but admitting the truth still made him ache. Beneath Magnus' fingers, the servos bunched and tensed and strained, pulling with tiny twinges of deeper discomfort. “Why wouldn't it?” Optimus whispered, his expression bleak. “His misery is mine.”
Expression caught between displeasure and concern, Magnus withdrew his hand, and Optimus watched as the commander linked both hands behind him again. “Patience with bureaucracy was never something you possessed in abundance.”
Optimus stared at him for a moment. “Did you expect that to change?” he asked softly.
“No.” Magnus spoke too quickly and knew it, and he raised his head to meet Optimus' gaze. “I hardly know what I expected,” Magnus admitted. Awkward silence hung heavily between them and swelled to fill the office, pushing hard against the walls. “This is an adjustment. For all of us.”
Not quite daring to press Magnus further, Optimus shuttered his optics and slumped into the chair behind the desk. Both were too large—remnants of Prime Nova's rule—but complaint seemed petty under the shadow of so many greater difficulties. “I don't think that patience is the answer,” he said at length. Thus far, patience had earned him little save an uncomfortable examination by the Autobot Council and a reluctant acceptance of his status as true Prime.
He had seen Megatron just once since their battle in the Matrix chamber. A single glimpse through the unfocused gray of a security system lens was hardly classifiable as real contact during a stretch of sixty-two megacycles, and something in Optimus ached with unanswered longing.
“You have your next opportunity to speak before the Council in less than seventeen megacycles,” Magnus sighed. “They will not willingly risk your displeasure, not at so unstable a time.” Optimus understood the precariousness of their circumstances. Preliminary reports suggested that the remaining Decepticons were massing again at the galaxy edges, but their forces remained splintered. Without Megatron, they might simply scatter again, but the threat of Starscream kept the situation tense. Moving to the side of the desk, Magnus touched Optimus' shoulder again with awkward affection. “Even so, you should choose your message with care.”
“I know.” Optimus touched Ultra Magnus' hand with his own for barely a moment. Then they drew away from each other again. “I will.”
Despite the unspoken dismissal, Magnus hovered in the open doorway for a nanoklik or two. “If you require my assistance...” The words trailed off into silence. Optimus appreciated the offer of help without having to ask for it.
“I'm sure I will,” he murmured. “I'll let you know.”
Magnus nodded, offered him a formal salute, and disappeared down the corridor.
The relief of solitude blended uneasily with the discomfort of responsibility, and Optimus let himself slump forward for a long moment to rest his forehead against the top of the desk. The new corrugations marking the shield of Primus scraped along the metal in faintly sharp notes. Finally, he raised his head again, running his fingertips along the smooth planes of his battlemask and thinking hard and fast about nothing in particular.
Everything depended on Megatron. Megatron was not dependable.
Thoughts elsewhere, Optimus barely heard the hiss of the door panel as it opened for Prowl. The cyberninja brought Optimus' ax—not the trophy stolen for him and now a part of him, but his old one—and laid it on the desk between them with one slender hand. He seemed ready to slip away again without a word, but Optimus reached out and covered Prowl's hand with his own before the other bot could retreat. “Thank you.”
For a moment, Prowl made no reply. He tilted his head very slightly to one side and regarded Optimus' hand, his expression inscrutable behind the lean angles of his visor. “You always were the most finely-constructed of us all,” he said at last. His mouth curved upward at one edge, and Optimus loved both the familiarity and the rarity of a smile long missed. “Someone so...powerful is not usually so graceful.”
“I don't know why it chose me.” Optimus tightened his grip for a moment and then released him. “I wish it hadn't.”
“I don't think that's true.” Prowl clasped both hands at his back as if he no longer knew what to do with them. “Not entirely, in any case. There is...so much honor in it...here, with...that you are carrying it... I don't know quite what to say.”
Optimus stood, equally awkward, his optics drawn to the windows past Prowl's shoulders. “I'd rather you didn't say it.”
Prowl dipped his head once in assent.
Through the windows, the authoritative angles of Iacon's skyline gleamed in a dozen shades of manufactured light. Optimus wondered with quiet unrest what he really knew of this city, of this planet, despite vorns of relative leadership in the Autobot army. The Matrix made a low thrum in the spaces around his spark and offered its own peculiar comfort. Until all are one.
“It hasn't changed you,” Prowl said, suddenly and softly fierce. Optimus flickered his optics and focused on the cyberninja again. “You're still Optimus Prime. We still recognize you.” Prowl fell silent again for a moment. “And we know you can't come back with us, to Earth.”
“Of course I'm coming back to Earth.” Optimus frowned, wondering what was behind this—if his former team had planned some sort of gentle rejection. “The Allspark shards are there. And what's left of Starscream's clones—”
Prowl lowered his head. “I meant coming back to stay.”
Optimus opened his mouth, and then he closed it again. No. Of course he could not, because he was no longer just Optimus Prime. Now he was Prime, and Earth might or might not remain a pivotal battleground depending upon Starscream's plans. Moreover, Cybertron required his presence: the Autobots wanted him grounded here on familiar metal as a visible symbol of change. The planet thrummed with plenty of internal unrest, as always, but the turmoil would only increase as the scattered Decepticons responded to Megatron's presence.
Megatron, of course, was a different problem altogether.
As if in answer, the Matrix hummed through his spark, its resonance shifting according to errant thought, asking the simplest of all his questions. Where is the other half of you?
Nearby, he told it and asked it to wait. One complication at a time.
Prowl must have seen the sorrow in his expression and spoke now to ease it. “We value your...I value your leadership. All of us do. But you're more important now than the sum of your parts. What you are now is...” Prowl paused, settling finally on a word that Optimus profoundly disliked. “Untouchable. Sacred.”
Hurt, Optimus rested both hands on the desk, leaning forward over it with his optics locked on Prowl's, visor or not. “Do you think that's how Megatron thinks of me?” he asked, aching.
Prowl stared back at him, startled, off-balance, and a little appalled. “I don't know.”
Guilt slipped its fingers around Optimus' neural cabling and squeezed. In their brief service together, he and the others had very rarely intruded on personal boundaries, even when doing so might have been best. He guessed that now they would never have the chance; he had crossed a line that the others could barely perceive. His personal business was no longer just his own.
“If Megatron thinks less of you, because you were one of us...”
Optimus doubted the period he had spent as a repair bot had anything to do with Megatron's current dissatisfaction. “He thinks less of me because I exist,” Optimus quipped, his smile weary. His bondmate cared more for efficacy than anything else, and Optimus served only to balance Megatron in ways the Decepticon did not want.
Reaching out, Prowl hesitated, then finally touched him, the cyberninja's fingers slim against the angled curve of Optimus' forearm. “He can't only be a monster,” Prowl whispered. “The universe would not waste a Prime bonding on only that.”
Megatron was the monster they had all feared, and yet he was the Lord High Protector of Cybertron. At least he had unshakable convictions and authoritative reasons for both. The strange duality no longer struck so deeply into Optimus' own perceptions of right and wrong and the gray smears of morality in between, but he could not imagine explaining that to Prowl. One of them, at least, should be able to keep faith in the clarity of the universe.
Optimus covered that delicate hand with his own and summoned up a smile. “Thank you.”
Careful, Prowl smiled in return, and they let each other go. Prowl crossed his arms behind his back. “No need to say goodbye, yet,” he said. “You'll be leaving for Earth with us in a matter of orns.”
“It'll be a better trip than the one that brought me here.” Optimus felt as though he had already said goodbye, the poignancy worse yet when Prowl gave him a swift but genuine bow and stepped toward the door.
The cyberninja turned back just as the panel slid open. “I believe foremost in balance,” he said, softly enough that Optimus' audio receptors attuned toward him. “This must be a step on that path.” Then he was gone, leaving Optimus with a high-frequency buzzing in his sensors and a lingering ache somewhere in the vicinity of his spark. Everything eventually changed, and he thought he felt the minor pain of that inevitability more keenly, now.
Even so, some of Prowl's faith must have touched him after all, because his internal burden seemed to lessen once he stepped free of the office and took to the halls. He followed his spark, in the way of which common expression spoke but few Cybertronians had ever literally experienced. It led him through quiet hallways where his steps echoed over detailed floor panels, and it forced him to navigate an intersection of passageways where high-rank aristocrats and service drones alike made way for him in ringing silence. The Matrix spoke to him softly of poise and privilege, but he still found public fascination difficult to ignore.
The halls emptied again. These rooms had seen no habitation in vorns, and their gleaming surfaces spoke subtly of abandonment and solitude. Optimus sensed an awakening heat within them, nevertheless.
Faceted double doors marked the entrance to the private rooms of the Lord High Protector. In front of them posed a youngish member of the Elite Guard, his arms crossed over his chest and his exoskeletal plates gleaming a brilliant nanite red. Optimus recognized him vaguely from scattered comm reports of Decepticon activity.
The Guardsman snapped into formal attention as Optimus approached. “Sir,” he saluted.
“At ease.” Optimus halted in front of him before reaching out to touch one shining door. The panels stayed shut. “He's in here,” Optimus murmured, asking a question that needed no verbal answer. Megatron reached outward through the bond, his sullen distrust putting painful pressure on Optimus' spark despite the physical barriers between them.
The Guardsman nodded. He spoke with the heavy drawl of Cybertronian rural miners and gladiatorial recruits. “I'd advise anyone against goin' in there,” he said, with oddly open concern. “Sir.”
“He's unlikely to hurt me.” That was a lie, but only in part—Megatron might hurt him, but the Decepticon's unreasoning, reactionary terror had disappeared with a brief surge of violence just after his awakening from stasis lock. Fury had replaced it, but Optimus no longer expected another potentially lethal attack. “I'm afraid I don't remember your name,” Optimus said to the Guardsman, keeping one hand flat against the metal of the door.
“Ironhide, sir. It's only fair ta warn ya—I'm told ta call for backup if anyone goes through these doors.”
“Don't do that,” Optimus said. He thought of pulling rank—one of the many voices of the Matrix suggested the notion with vehemence—but considered his other options, instead. “Have you ever dealt with anyone unreasonable, Ironhide?” he asked at length.
The other mech looked a little uneasy, and then he gave Optimus half a smile. “Served under Sentinel Prime. Back when 'e was Sentinel Minor.”
Common ground. “Don't let anyone know that I gave you my condolences,” Optimus smiled. “You know, then, that unreasonable mechs usually react less unpleasantly to mechs they trust. Or at least to mechs they know well. And confronting them in a group usually goes badly.” Looking at Ironhide again, Optimus willed all of his sincerity into his expression, hoping his desperation did not leach through as well. “I need to talk to him,” Optimus murmured, lowering his voice by several decibels. “And I need no one else to be listening, and no one else to interrupt.”
Ironhide arched an optic ridge. “Don't know that I can promise that,” he said, and Optimus wondered whether he had misjudged the Guardsman's goodwill, his age, or both. “Can't say I particularly want ta be the mech on guard when Megatron kills the Prime.”
Sighing, Optimus rested both hands against the door panels, splaying his fingers. “He can't do that.”
A little surge of disquieted sympathy softened the line of Ironhide's mouth, and he lowered his voice. “It's true, then? You're bonded? To him?”
Rumors spread quickly, and while Ultra Magnus had tried to contain them, Optimus had made no similar attempts of his own. Better that all of Cybertron know the truth. Better still that Optimus be allowed to announce it himself, rather than hearing the information distorted and exaggerated through a million vocal processors—but he hadn't yet established that sort of control.
“Yes,” he said only. He glanced sideways at Ironhide, and he detected some glimmer of empathy behind the optics of the other mech. “I need to talk to him.”
Staring at Optimus for a moment or two, Ironhide briefly shuttered his optics, then reactivated them to look up at the vaulted ceiling. “Make it a direct order,” he said out of the side of his mouth, lowering the decibel count of his own vocal processor even further.
Startled, Optimus flickered his optics. “What?”
“Make it a direct order, and keep a comm line open,” Ironhide said, uncrossing his arms and reaching one hand toward the command panel. “And I'll do it. Willingly, I mean.”
Optimus straightened and brought the full command of his new frame to bear. “I order you to open these doors,” he intoned. “And to say nothing, if anyone asks where I've gone.” Ironhide punched in a two-part code and stood warily back as the panels began to part.
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you.” Optimus looked at him with deep gratitude, hesitant to ask why, but Ironhide explained without prompting.
“Knew Sunstreaker and Sideswipe back in the Academy.” Ironhide's mouth curved into a sorrowful sort of smile. “They're glitchheads when they're together, but they're a solid million times worse when they're apart.” The Guardsman shrugged and settled back into his previous position in front of the doors. “Call me sentimental, if ya like.”
Optimus slipped through the doors. “Thank you,” he repeated before they closed behind him.
Inside, all was silence. Someone had deactivated the hydrogen illumination, and only the dim blue glow of electrical lights interrupted the darkness. Optimus too-easily recalled the deep shadows of Megatron's throne room on the Tidal Wave, and he cycled atmosphere slowly through his intakes, hearing a stutter in the sound. This room was empty—just a receiving hall of shining floors and bare walls—and Optimus barely remembered to activate the promised comm channel before continuing into the next chamber. Wider and far taller, this room stretched upward into darkness. Optimus glimpsed a faint shimmer high above, as of embedded gems or shining frescoes in constellation patterns.
Megatron was a looming shadow against the greater darkness. The blue light barely broke up his form, resolving him into pure geometric shapes: the heavy angle of a shoulder, the soft sheen off a chest plate, the narrow polygons of burning optics.
“You could be gone from here,” Optimus murmured at length. He stepped close enough to map the angles of Megatron's faceplates.
Megatron cast him a smoldering glance and did not deny it.
That the Decepticon had not directed all his considerable power toward making his escape meant something too complicated for simple words. Optimus almost dared to touch him, but kept himself carefully in check. “I'm not glad,” Optimus said at length, holding his hands at his sides and feeling the strange, inward groan of his own spark. “But I'm not disappointed, either.”
“How reassuring, since I live to ensure your satisfaction,” Megatron growled.
Distrust gnawed at Optimus through the strands of the bond, and he pushed away his own uncertainties, projecting surety in return. Megatron reacted badly. The blunt pressure of his banked fury sank fangs into Optimus again.
Optimus forced a long, searching stare between the two of them. “Do you think I planned this?”
Megatron said nothing.
Stung, Optimus fisted his hands, tightening his fingers until the servos creaked and stung. Megatron twitched his fingers in response. That evidence of their synchronization made Optimus pause long enough to recall his purpose here, and he dragged himself willfully back into serenity. The balance between them had shifted, and for the first time, Optimus held the advantage. He had no idea how to accomplish his desires, but he knew the outcome he wanted, and perhaps that would be enough.
“I didn't plan this,” Optimus said, suppressing an uneasy tremor. “It isn't what I wanted. But I want you here.”
“And what do you intend to do?” Megatron narrowed his optics, blazing slits of light in the shadows. “Try to keep me in a cage?”
Megatron had tried that at first; both of them knew better now. “I can't say I know of any material strong enough for that.” Stepping forward, Optimus moved consciously to corner Megatron, both hands lifting to his own chest. “You'd chew through the bars. No. I want to show you something, instead.”
Megatron actually flinched, a subtle shift that started in his chest and spread outward through his limbs. He did not retreat, of course, but his optics narrowed further. “I have seen it.”
“I know. I want you to feel it, instead.”
“I have felt it.” Megatron bared his dental plates and showed all their sharpened edges.
“Attached to him,” Optimus reminded, unhooking his chest plates and spreading them open with his hands, too nervous to trust his own systems with the task. The second barrier of armor parted of its own accord because Megatron was close—close enough that Optimus could sense the shivering pull of the Decepticon's powerful spark. “Feel it attached to me, instead. To me and to you.” The third barrier pulled silently open. Bare, his spark glittered off the smooth surfaces of Megatron's chest. The Matrix shone brighter, blinding, before dimming again.
With a rippling growl, Megatron grabbed Optimus by both shoulders and wrenched him around to shove his back up against a wall. “Do you think this is a solution?” His optics seared a path of physical heat along Optimus' neck and down to the bright glow between them before jerking upward again. “As if this will forestall punishment or prevent execution. I have done things that no Autobot would ever understand or forgive.” He leaned closer, speaking with a soft chill against Optimus' audio receptor. “Only you would have ordered me placed in these rooms, instead of a triply-secured containment cell.”
Optimus lifted a hand and dared to rest it against Megatron's chest, his fingers covering the unforgiving angles of the Decepticon insignia. Megatron shifted backward half a step to put space between them. “I know.” Optimus had memories of these rooms, and those memories were not his own. “But you are the Lord High Protector of Cybertron.”
“I am a monster, Prime,” Megatron said, his voice lowering, his mouth pulling downward at both edges with familiar disdain. “You said so yourself.”
Optimus would not deny any part of it. “Yes.”
They were so nearly of a height, and that still startled him. His spark jolted with a sudden, steady thrill in response.
Briefly offlining his optics, Optimus spoke from his lowest vocal register, each word emerging with a husky vibration. “And yet here I am.”
“Because you have no choice,” Megatron growled. Despite the fact, his fingers scraped an upward path along Optimus' side and shoulder, the paint flaking away under the pressure in flecks of red and blue. That hand curled over Optimus' battlemask and hooked fingers over its upper edge. “Dispense with this.”
Optimus complied, a little startled that he had forgotten to lower it. Leaning close, Megatron bit at Optimus' lip components, trailing a gradual line of nicked plating and sparking friction downward over Optimus' chin and along his neck. “Is this what you want?” Megatron demanded in a steelwool purr.
“Yes,” Optimus said, lip components parting as he circled Megatron's waist with both arms and curled his hands against the Decepticon's shoulder plating.
For just a moment, Megatron splayed a hand over the center of Optimus' chest. No pressure, no pain—he only blocked the thrumming light of both power sources with silent protection and proprietary grace. Then Megatron abruptly sank that hand deep inside, dragging sharp-edged fingers along the surfaces, clutching and grasping and clenching in a way that ensured discomfort for both of them. Shuttering his optics, Optimus made low clicks of pain but refused to withdraw. After a terrible cycle, the roughness gentled into something like a caress, and Megatron's fingers wound into the delicate lattice of the Matrix to slowly, slowly pull. Optimus tilted his head back and made a trilling groan as an utterly new sensation swept outward through his chest.
Jolting from head to foot, Megatron hissed out an exclamation as his optics flickered. His fingers flexed again, setting off deep flickers of pleasure in Optimus' interior components. Something tensed, pulled taut, and snapped on a wake of silver-laced shuddering.
Optimus tipped back his head, his antennae brushing against the wall behind him. “That,” he said as his hands fisted against Megatron's back. “Again.”
Megatron obliged him; both their intake systems hitched.
Internal fans activating, Optimus shivered as heat suffused his components and made feedback loops in his neural pathways. “Come before the Council with me,” he moaned. He refused to surrender Megatron's authority, and he could never succeed without Megatron's ambition—not when he had so little of his own. They would rise or fall together. Megatron could serve as Cybertron's sword, so long as Optimus served as Cybertron's shield. If they confronted the Council, no one could ever doubt the extraordinary balance in their bond.
“Insanity.” Megatron paused to scowl, but his fingers trembled, an illustration of the difficulty in any reluctance between the two of them.
Optimus gasped through all his intakes at the hint of friction. “Necessity,” he whispered. “Just say yes.”
“No.” Megatron bit at the cabling of Optimus' neck.
Threading determination through the bond, Optimus shook his head without disrupting Megatron's rough hold. “They won't risk the Matrix. They'll have no choice but to hear us out.” Megatron slowed to a grudging halt, his lip components brushing against Optimus' cabling. Distrust, unease, and a deeply longing suspicion tangled into the emotional pathways between them.
“When?” Megatron said at length.
“Sixteen megacycles. At the Tower.” Optimus kept himself very still. Megatron's thoughts ran in bleeding edges over his own, all the boundaries between bitterness and hope blurring. Doubting he could or should attempt any subtle machinations at the moment, Optimus withdrew all his conscious influence from their connection.
Megatron growled, but the sound lacked its usual threat. “Very well.”
Passion surged between them—a sort of liquid fire without a discernible origin. Unwilling to be entirely overcome, Optimus splayed his hands against Megatron's chest and shoved the Decepticon back a full step. Frowning, Megatron pushed close and kissed him, all dental plates and heated steel, and for just a moment, Optimus surrendered to it. He arched his neck and bit gently in return before shoving himself out of Megatron's hold once more. “Berth,” Optimus said. He might be accused of sentimentality, but he had the opportunity to do something right—and thoroughly—and he meant to take proper advantage.
Keeping silent, Megatron grasped him by the wrist and pulled him into an adjoining room. They passed through double sets of archways and down a brief corridor, where Optimus caught haunting glimpses of quality furnishings and a purely indulgent sort of cleansing pool. While he did not feel lost, he did feel off-balance, as if something had stolen his center of gravity and left him reeling. Lifting his free hand, he ran his fingers down the enticing seams of Megatron's back, and he sensed the quivering of the plating in reply.
Megatron palmed open a double-panel door. The room behind it was dark, but Optimus had his own spark and the luminance of the Matrix for light.
He turned on Megatron and pushed him down against the welcoming length of the berth.
“Still just me,” Optimus murmured when Megatron fought him, components straining and jerking as Optimus straddled the Decepticon's hips and trapped both his arms against the memory foam of the berth. Bending low, Optimus risked his faceplates for a gradual and unusually gentle kiss. Megatron bit him hard enough to make them both cry out, and then his glossa slipped along Optimus' lower lip component as the struggling slowly eased into a deeper, less quantifiable tension.
Outwardly placid, Megatron stared into Optimus with narrowed optics. Optimus knew better than to speak. Instead, he grazed his own dental plates along the joint of Megatron's jaw, dedicating his entire sensory network to the interpretation of each minute shift in the frame beneath his own.
The Matrix flickered out its message, whispering its broken memories of how to please Megatron best, but the Decepticon's new frame possessed different components and different sensitivities. It demanded an entirely new method and means of willing exploration—and perhaps that was for the best. Prime Nova's spectral demands had no place in this bond or in this berth, and Optimus wanted the experience for himself alone.
Releasing one wrist, he skidded his open palm over the rise of Megatron's chest plates and then outward to the shoulder joint. Optimus paused to stroke at the exposed cabling, and since patience was so rarely a characteristic of Megatron's programming, the Decepticon arched up and bit at the open edges of Optimus' chest. Hissing in surprise, Optimus shuddered with physical sensation as the Matrix flashed out its own reaction in binary, forming a message too swift and too complex for translation. Optimus let go of Megatron's other wrist to run fingers along the barrel of the fusion cannon, tracing the angles and pressing into the seams; he rubbed wiring between his fingertips, feeling the surge of power and the swelling of adjoining cables. Touching attached weaponry was intimate by any measure, and Optimus experienced a dizzying pulse of strangely thrilling panic. While Megatron was clearly the source, the emotion was not his alone.
“You cannot take the fight out of me,” Megatron growled. His fingers forced between the articulated plates at Optimus' back. “No matter how you try.”
Optimus pushed his chest close, grinding them together, and their connected sparks surged faintly in sympathy despite the barrier of armor. “Good.” He wanted Megatron to fight. He wanted to end this verbal exchange and communicate in simpler and more sophisticated ways. “I can't help but prefer you as you are. But maybe you can funnel all your hating of me down a...more productive path.”
Sensation had silenced Megatron briefly. His optics had shuttered, his mouth contorting in a wordless groan, but he wrenched himself back from the precipice they had discovered in each other, and his optics reactivated in narrow, gleaming slits. For a moment, Optimus expected more violence, but after a strained pause, Megatron merely gave him a faintly ironic, purely Decepticon sort of smile.
“For Cybertron,” Megatron said. The irony remained in his voice, each word nuanced. He understood the subtleties of manipulation, after all.
Optimus nodded, shameless in his bid for trust between them, speaking as he rubbed them together again. “For Cybertron.” The pressure hurt, their sparks flaring and seeking better resonance. “For you. For me.” Moaning, Optimus pushed his face up against the cables of Megatron's neck and bit sharply enough to make the frame below his shudder from head to foot. “Open,” he said. He begged, and he was not particularly ashamed of wanting so badly what was made for only him. “Open.”
“You're a sentimental glitchwit.” Megatron spoke with his customary derision, but panic fluttered between them again. Nevertheless, his chest plates parted thinly down the center—surrender at last, or something like it. “This is not victory.”
Their sparks laced together like fine wiring joining in a thousand perfectly spliced strands. Crying out, Optimus felt the same trembling awareness spread through Megatron's frame, flowing outward from the spark. Anticipation, relief, anxiety, expectation and ecstasy threaded between them, a construction so complicated that Optimus could not imagine charting it and did not want to try. If this was not victory, it still felt like the edge of rapture. If something so glorious could not bring glory to Cybertron in return, then he doubted he understood anything at all about the universe.
Beneath him and within him, Megatron thrashed unexpectedly. His chest plates retracted fully as he tried to push deeper.
I am open. The snarl was subsensory, the essence one of pure authority, and the Matrix responded with an upwelling of affirmation that made Optimus curl his fingers into Megatron's shoulders and mark the metal. Vibrating, fully interior passion rippled through him, as physical a sensation as fingertips raking along his neural cabling. Give it to me, Prime.
Optimus could hardly do otherwise.
He pressed himself inward, deeper, arching back his neck with a shout when the Matrix reacted with a throb of reassuring joy. Detached for vorns, worshipped for purity and mounted in holy solitude, it had wanted nothing more or less than this—the connection of one spark to another. All such connections, no matter how temporary, represented the most fundamental force of Cybertronian existence. To find two sparks so suitable for each other was absolute and unforgiving rapture. Optimus could not contain it, so he released it willfully into the bond in the truest act of sharing he had ever known.
Megatron's mouth fell open, his optics flickered and offlined, and he gasped. The sound was deep and sharp; it had a ragged edge. Optimus was unprepared for the rush of white-hot desire that wracked his frame and caught like blissful pain in his spark.
Optimus had seen Megatron undone at all the heights of pleasure, but he had never so much as imagined Megatron entirely overwhelmed and shockingly vulnerable as a result. With a mechanical whimper, Optimus buried his face against the cabling of Megatron's neck and rubbed them together, spark against spark, sharing thoughts as deeply as sensations. The specter of Prime Nova circled through the spaces between them. Optimus hooked into the memory and tore away the facade, revealing the familiar darkness of components and cabling beneath the veneer. Optimus possessed that basic construction, but he would never resurrect that spark, and the power of the image faded at the edges before crumbling into rust. In return, Megatron showed him all the mental constructions of a lock. Optimus searched himself for the key.
He found it in the tangle of new emotions and rising hope. On a slow build toward overload, he and Megatron constructed a tenuous future better than anything of the past—with solid foundations in a balance of gentleness and justice. Optimus shouted his pleasure aloud and showed Megatron not just an ending to war, but something far more spectacular than any mere peace.
They overloaded together, wound too deeply for any level of separation. Optimus sobbed. Megatron screamed.
Then the frantic joy of the Matrix tumbled them over an invisible edge and into an unbearable surge of wrenching, wailing satisfaction. This was the same sort of destructive power that had united them once before, but now it sang its notes through all their shared pathways with easy harmony, as if discovering its perfect instrument at last. Its music felt less like climax and more like death, more like rebirth—and Optimus had experienced all three in the short span of his life.
When the ecstasy gradually faded, it left them clutching at each other with far more than hands. For long cycles, Optimus made no attempt to move, concentrating instead on the languid untangling of their sparks. A sense of individuality only slowly returned.
At some length, he felt Megatron's fingers curl over the lighting array on his back.
“This will never work,” his bondmate muttered, once their balance had reestablished itself. Megatron sounded weary, exhaustion filling the gaps left by destructive desire and dulling the possibilities of shared joy. “Not as you hope.”
Optimus made an enormous effort and rolled off of him, wary of his own unfamiliar weight. Undeterred, he rested heavily against the right half of the berth, and then he pulled Megatron over with one hand at the Decepticon's elbow joint to bring them together again, face to face and side by side. “We can argue about that,” Optimus allowed, sliding one unrelenting arm around Megatron's back to bind them together.
Megatron raised a hand and pushed with it momentarily against Optimus' withdrawn chest plating. Then he moved it over Optimus' shoulder and restlessly down his back, grasping and clutching at articulations and protrusions, anywhere that the Matrix transformation had left Optimus less than sleekly smooth.
“I suppose I have no choice,” Megatron said at length.
“We can argue about that, too.” Optimus regarded him for a long, quiet cycle before shuttering his optics. “I'm willing to compromise.”
Relaxing against the berth, Megatron granted him a snort in return. “We have no choice but compromise.”
That was true. Even so, Optimus was not particularly discouraged. “This is what you wanted, once. When you began the war. Revolution, a shift in leadership and in society.” He lowered his voice in response to Megatron's flat silence. “A Prime who couldn't help but listen to you.” He activated his optics to discover that Megatron had turned his head away, his gaze focused elsewhere and his expression speculative. Optimus tilted his head, eager for a better view. “I can't help but hear you,” he murmured.
Megatron glanced at him sideways. He made a low sound of familiar, if affected amusement at Optimus' expense. “You are such a fool.”
“Pity you're a part of me,” Optimus agreed, his mouth curving into a slow smile.
“Pity you are mine.” Megatron scoffed, but a moment later he turned to Optimus again, pressing heavy weight against Optimus' chest—heavy demands on his spirit and on his spark. Optimus opened wide again and received him with a murmur of welcome.
~End~
