Calibration - pidgeonpostal - Transformers: Prime [Archive of Our Own] (2024)

Optimus, regrettably, stayed staring at the image of a destroyed Cybertron for much longer than Megatron anticipated. The initial anger fell into a grief that had caught him in an emotional feedback loop that took several Earth minutes to clear.

It was getting tiring. Megatron had burned his grief away a long time ago. There was no point mourning what could have been. The past could not be seized, and his patience was limited.

And then, of course, Optimus had to go and speak in Orion’s voice.

“I have been in stasis for too long, my friend,” Orion said quietly in a voice that made Megatron want to rip something’s throat out. Then: “I have left you alone to fight this menace.”

Ah, there was Optimus. So self-centered, so certain he was the lynchpin of the operation.

The plan. Keep to the plan. “I have not been alone,” Megatron said instead. “Soundwave has been an invaluable asset in our fight against the Autobots, and in tracking you.” Technically true statements, ones that would be easy to corroborate once Soundwave had updated their records to remove the Autobots’ precious Prime.

Optimus froze for a moment, and Megatron's infrared vision registered the slight temperature differential as some process within him spun to life and demanded resources. "My apologies, Megatron," Orion said diplomatically. "I did not mean to imply."

Oh. That was different. Megatron had to remind himself again that this Optimus, this Orion, had none of the Prime’s arrogance. He knew he would not have been enough to turn the tide.

"I meant only to admit to a sense of…personal disappointment," he continued. "I joined your cause because I did not wish to stand idly by as our planet consumed itself. Yet here I seem to have done just that."

Orion's core temperature was still up a fraction; he was not done. Some echo in Megatron's own code began to execute instructions, and he couldn’t figure out what it was before he had to focus on Orion speaking again. "If…Megatron, if the Autobots have at all implied that my absence would have been enough to break you—"

Oh, but it had— Megatron activated an antivirus failsafe and a set of cables fell from their housing, physically isolating that section of flash until it could be wiped. The echo ceased.

"—then I hope you can take my renewed presence here as testament to their lies," Orion finished, and turned his eyes up to look at Megatron. "If there is work left to be done to achieve your vision, I would gladly offer my assistance to hasten the process."

Megatron smiled and his remaining cores burst into activity. "There is indeed something that needs an archivist's touch. But it can wait until you are more formally welcomed back into the fold. I'll introduce you to Knock Out."

"Orion Pax" was the most ridiculous thing Megatron had done to date, but Knock Out would sooner throw himself off the Nemesis than miss an opportunity for this kind of personal information.

“So how do you and the boss know each other?” he asked while cleaning his emblem tools. It was rare that he got to do such fine detail work here; cosmetics, so Megatron said, were the least of their priorities.

And yet here he was, taking great pains to put a Decepticon emblem on Optimus Prime. Orion. Whatever.

Orion stepped off the slab, rolled his shoulders and inspected Knock Out’s work. He looked a bit uncomfortable with the idea, which was someone else’s problem. “I read his early work. When data in the archive corroborated the injustices he spoke of, I reached out, and he answered."

"How charming." Knock Out tried for sincerity and probably didn't quite get there. He’d heard of Megatron’s stint as a gladiator poet, decided it didn’t amount to scrap in the face of a warlord bent on conquest, and tossed it aside. But if Orion had met that version, maybe there was something there that could be useful. “Sounds like you were fast friends.”

"Oh, not at all," Orion replied brightly. It was such a startling change in tone that Knock Out could only hum a bit of encouragement to get him to continue. "Our first correspondence was a case study in cultural miscommunication. He found my formatting atrociously indirect, and stated as much in a style I assumed was reserved for declarations of war."

Hah! Now that sounded more like the Megatron he knew. Knock Out turned away hide his smile, and to place tools back on their proper shelves. "I'm impressed he still took you in after that."

Orion was smiling now, eyes brighter than he'd ever seen on Optimus. "He did not. However, I am very persistent, and I have not known him to back down from a challenge, either. We eventually came to…an understanding, of sorts. I was neither an advisor nor in a position of leadership. But I was there by his side whenever I could be."

"Even in a fight?"

"What?"

Scrap. "Uh…my mistake. You were put in stasis before that started, weren't you?"

Orion nodded. "I have no memory of it. And even if I had been able, I am not a warframe. My contributions would have been minimal."

Not a warframe. Knock Out would have been downright gleeful if he weren’t so close to this absolute train wreck of an idea Megatron had decided to bring back. As it was, he was within lethal distance of a ‘bot who didn’t even know what his hands could do, and getting even accidentally shot by Optimus Prime was not how he wanted his spark to go out. “Uh, about that. You’ve had a reformat, so…watch where you’re pointing while you’re here.”

Orion paused for a moment, as he had done a few times now, like he shut down motor functions to analyze every bit of data he got. His optics even dimmed for a moment before refocusing. “I am…armed?”

Well, it was his information anyway. “Do a diagnostic and see for yourself.”

“I will.” And Orion did, standing perfectly still in the middle of his med bay, a neat warframe-sized obstacle for Knock Out to traverse. Great. By the time he had cleaned all traces of Optimus Prime from his lab—except for the obvious—Orion seemed to have come to some sort of conclusion, and his servos began shifting again.

“Thank you, Knock Out. I will take this into consideration,” Orion said, somehow even more stiff than before. He garbled out something Knock Out recognized as a mostly-passable Iaconian departure pleasantry before all but fleeing from the room.

Knock Out shook his head. This was not going to end well, and if he could be off the Nemesis when it did end, so much the better. He made a mental note to put Breakdown and himself on the first squad for relic retrieval.

Orion: Approaching.

Soundwave didn’t need to tell him that. Orion had not been formatted for stealth in any way, and Orion in Optimus’ frame was even less so. Besides, Megatron had memorized the cadence of his gait thousands of years ago, and his vibration sensors were tuned to detect it. The moment Optimus stepped out of the elevator onto the same floor, Megatron knew.

“All of you, get out,” he hissed. The vehicons at their consoles all made themselves scarce with the speed of practice. Tell me what he’s seen, he ordered Soundwave.

“I am…armed?” Orion’s voice said quietly with Soundwave’s personal distortion, followed by a diagram of Optimus Prime’s weapon systems so detailed that it immediately triggered Megatron’s combat routines, plunging the room into cold, lifeless blue with scattered reds and oranges tracing the heat of the vents, the consoles where the vehicons had just sat, and the outline of Optimus Prime in the doorway.

Prime’s head and spark chamber lit up immediately with target overlays. Although at this distance accuracy barely mattered, his cannon had a blast radius of—

“Megatron?”

Orion. He’s Orion again. Not a threat. Not yet. Megatron cleared the stack of attack vectors one by one, painfully and manually. He didn’t trust his own garbage collection to not simply behead Optimus Prime on the spot. When he could process input again, Orion was standing far closer than advisable, peering at him like a particularly difficult encryption. All six of his finials twitched and flickered in Megatron’s backscatter imaging.

They were beautiful, Megatron thought, and the thought expanded into the memory space he just evicted. They had been beautiful before, he remembered that, but the rebuild had done something, more angles, more planes. They almost seemed to glitter now.

“Orion. What is it?” Megatron grated out.

“I have just done a system diagnostic, at Knock-Out’s suggestion.”

Megatron privately commended himself on not immediately walking down to the med bay to tear Knock Out’s spark from his chassis.

“The results were unexpected,” Orion continued. “I wished to speak with you in private, if you had a moment.”

Interesting. Megatron’s processor spun up several possible future conversation states and how best to steer them away from revealing topics. “You wish to know if you were reformatted?”

“No. That much is clear. What I wish to know is why. If the Autobots have caused such destruction as you say, I doubt they are in dire enough straits to reformat an archivist for battle, when there are plenty of other frames more suited to the upgrades.”

One processor thread returned alarmingly fast, having found a solution that required minimal fabrication on Soundwave’s part. Megatron allowed it to continue for that reason alone, despite how close it was straying towards limited-access memories. “Your guess is as good as mine, Orion,” Megatron replied, hands outstretched. “Perhaps they would have set you against us.”

“That would be poor strategy,” Orion said bluntly, either not caring or not realizing the indirect insult to Megatron's hypothesis. Knowing Orion as he did, Megatron assumed the latter. He refused to let himself find it endearing. “Without significant retraining, I would barely be an impediment to a single vehicon. And were I to meet you in combat—ah.”

Megatron had to laugh at that, to override every other emotion that was demanding resources. “You would not stand a chance at offlining me.”

“Perhaps not,” Orion tilted his head in acknowledgement and let the jab slip past. “Nor would I attempt to, no matter what lies they might tell me about you. Even in our deepest disagreements I have never wished for such a thing.”

“Truly? Never once hoped that I met a just end in the pits?” Megatron sneered.

“No. I could not, not while I knew you.” And with his words Orion sent out a short-range broadcast that unfolded into a burst of fondness, a warm admission that yes, Orion would fight him with words, would stand against him whenever he saw fit, opposition built on a foundation of—of trust, the data stream repeated, over and over again, the channel left wide open.

There was an obvious response. It worked for the ruse. It was the right thing to do to convince Orion of the plan, to keep him occupied with the Iacon database. It was the simplest answer and the easiest lie, and none of those things were calculated until long after Megatron opened an old, rarely used sector of storage and sent back a single ping.

Acknowledged, channel open.

Orion started with simple status packets, set to his own internal clock, and Megatron resisted the urge to let his own timing skip a tick until they could align. A stutter step after Megatron’s tick, Orion began declaring he was healthy and safe. But concerned. Not for Megatron necessarily but for a previous possibility that no longer existed, an odd, multilayered worry that Megatron never saw the point in. The next packet announced an inbound audio query.

"Do you know, old friend," Orion asked quietly, "whether Ratchet had fallen so far as to try and turn me against you?"

Orion was still transmitting on the backchannel, adding layers. He didn't want what he asked to be true, didn't want to think of a world where they would seek each other's end, could not fathom—

Megatron shut off his receiver. "What Ratchet believes he can do is not my concern," Megatron heard himself say. "You are here, and he is not, and we have work to do."

It didn't sit well, to stay inert and unmoving as Orion clearly began to speculate. He was far too clever for his own good, and may well have picked up on some contradiction that Soundwave had not yet planned for. Orion's temperature rose until secondary vents engaged, but then he nodded, and saw himself out.

Megatron's vibration sensors detected a conflict: in addition to a match for Optimus Prime, they had acquired two similar but distinct walking patterns for Orion Pax that were now taking up space in flash memory until he could gather more data to reconcile them. To clear them, he would have to select one pattern as primary, the new or the old.

He dumped the entire stack and refused to dwell on it.

A benefit of Orion’s reformat—though he still had not determined the intent of it—was that he now had extensive additional processing power in the form of a dedicated tactics card. While designed more for trajectory computation than rationalizing, it was suitable enough, and Orion leaned on it heavily as he walked through the Nemesis .

Megatron wasn't telling him something, that much was clear. Direct confrontation had not proved effective, so Orion naturally turned to gathering more data. But he was torn between figuring out the missing information and figuring out why it was being omitted in the first place. One route would tell him more about his missing years, most likely; the other would tell him more about Megatron's.

He let the cold air of the ship run through his vents for a few cycles. While he was most concerned for what had happened to Megatron in his absence, his own lost time could yield more information about the Autobots, and the only pieces of the Autobots he had to go on were the parts of the Iacon database he’d been asked to decrypt. The best thing he could do right now, the thing that would give him the most information and help Megatron the most, was to do his job. He could do that.

The console Megatron had given him was thoughtfully out of the way, a quieter part of the ship where the primary sound was the background hum of the engines. It was also far from where anyone would run into him, which was another data point he passed off to the tactics card. Protection, it said first. Likely Megatron had chosen the location for security, since the Autobots would know he had escaped.

The other possibility it generated as less-than-impossible was that Megatron did not want to see him. Not impossible, but not probable, either. Why would Megatron go to the effort of a rescue if he did not want to see Orion in the first place?

Orion stared up at the console. The encrypted Iacon database stared back at him. His tactics card produced some unpleasant hypotheticals.

Orion cycled his optics and dove into the work with fervor. Parts of the database were already decrypted, though they had been flagged as unimportant by an unfamiliar key. Orion looked through them anyway, and any other data that was available to him from the Nemesis. It was sparser than he expected, and curiosity as well as a sense of archival integrity drove him to index as he went, noting the spaces and permissions he ran into. The further he went, the less empty space there was, and the more blocks he found, locked by the same key user that flagged the database sections.

Permission denied, they told him in crisp unadorned glyphs, with no additional justification. He filed them away and instead of figuring out what they were, he made a map of what they weren't.

They weren't files on the current Autobots, he was able to see those. Although, there were only a handful of Autobots listed. This couldn't be all of them, or Ratchet was formidable indeed. What of his army that destroyed Cybertron? But there was no readable trace of such a force.

The set of locked files continued to grow. Orion pressed on.

At hour sixteen—Orion had updated his internal date formatter to match the planet’s—he noticed a few sensors on his back and legs had begun to fire alerts over his pain threshold. Not sharply, more like…an ache. Perhaps he had been standing in a poor position over the console. He shifted his legs slightly, and straightened a bit more.

The intel on the Autobots was fully indexed, to the best of his ability, and while he waited for his latest round of compilation he dove into the ship’s storage as well. He recognized the neat straightforward script again, and this time could verify the records themselves had come from Soundwave. Unsurprising, given his position as third-in-command.

Actually. Orion ran through the command structure again. That was odd. Soundwave was third-in-command, behind Starscream. Starscream’s records were entirely historical, the last entry being more than a month prior before stopping entirely, and there was no entry indicating an update to his status or position.

He would have to ask Megatron the next time he saw him.

Ah. Starscream was recently deceased.

…Or not.

Optimus Prime!? Starscream's yelp of surprise repeated itself in the back of his processor.

He'd heard that name before. Been called it before, even, at least the first part. A change in name by the Autobots was at least in line with other possibilities for his capture.

But Prime? That wasn't just a designation, that was a title. A title conferred only by the council, if ever. One that Megatron had sought out as part of their campaign, until—

Until. Until the decision to go to the council, and that was where his memory ended. Orion knew he performed backups on a cadence of approximately three Earth days when possible, and that in times of stress he had been known to manage triple that at barely-useful compression levels. Which meant that within no more than nine days of that decision, he had been taken and put into stasis. Nine days he'd lost, and they'd cost him millions more.

Nothing about Optimus Prime remained in the data available to him. He poked and prodded at the locked sectors, desperately hoping for something, until in a fit of frustration he cleared his active memory, locked a short program into his motivator, and dumped the entire data sector into himself.

His processor spun, frantically loading places almost at random, searching for a starting point. Each candidate unraveled into useless bits as he desperately tried every format he knew of to decode it, and finally, of all the possibilities, the data began to resolve into plain, low-resolution images.

The format indicated a long range sensor, perhaps from a fellow Cybertronian at distance, and the image itself was full of artifacts and corrupted pixels. But Orion would recognize that silhouette anywhere. Silver stood out against the dirt of the planet below him, broad sharp shoulders squared against—

No. Please no.

Red and blue and silver, mid-swing against Megatron. Another image—no, another frame, they were difference-optimized, it was a video. Orion clipped together what he could, and got several seconds of a battle. Optimus Prime's battle.

The video played on loop, and Orion felt himself swing slowly through the same motions. He looked down at the dents and scratches on his frame, damage he never remembered getting, that he had hoped was the result of some torture, someone else's betrayal.

This was all speculation, he decided. Deductions from a single fractured data sample. Better to talk to a professional.

Knock Out paused from buffing out the last few scratches on his legs. There was something buzzing in the air, and he tuned his receiver a little until the buzz resolved into an Iaconian greeting packet—

Oh scrap, not this again.

“Hello, Knock Out. I believe I have been previously damaged and wish for your medical opinion, if you are available.”

Right. Hide everything, tell him nothing, get him out. Hope Megatron never heard about this. “I’m a little busy right now.”

“Ah.” More buzzing. Some kind of apologetic nagging. Ugh. “I apologize,” Orion followed up verbally, “but this is a somewhat urgent question.”

Knock Out cycled his vents, put down his tools, and turned to face the hulking librarian in his medical bay. “Spit it out, then.”

The buzzing resolved into a list of damages Orion had catalogued. Plasma burns, scratches, dents, an absolute slew of alerts that had reached pain threshold from joints, servos, even his frame—

Please, someone else on this ship have a medical emergency. Now, if you could.

When no vehicon materialized with half their face missing, Knock Out chose to blatantly ignore the battle scars and skip straight to trying to embarass Orion out of his med bay. “How long has it been since you were calibrated?”

Orion frowned. “Calibrated?”

Knock Out nodded. “The pain alerts, that’s what they are. You’ve fallen out of alignment. Entirely normal. Take some time to yourself, or find a second set of hands.” Get out, get out.

“A second…” Orion trailed off, and then the buzzing abruptly stopped. “Oh.”

Thank Primus he already knew about that part, or at the very least seemed to get the insinuation. “Yeah, good luck with that. Oh, and don’t ask Breakdown. Or Soundwave. Or Airachnid. Maybe don’t ask anyone, actually.”

The buzzing started up again to announce Orion was about to ask another slagging question. “Breakdown I understand, I would not intrude if that is your wish. But why not Soundwave or Airachnid?”

A vehicon that had dented themselves on a stair. Perhaps Breakdown was lonely after a single hour apart. Really, was there no one else on this ship who needed Knock Out right now? “Soundwave isn’t interested, to put it mildly, and Airachnid bites.”

Orion’s background channel promptly began to fall apart into apologies and conversation-enders. “Ah. Yes. I will…I will go.”

Finally. Knock Out watched Orion retreat into the hallway and sighed. He needed to go find Breakdown and get them both either off the Nemesis for a while or behind a locked door, this could not become part of his job.

Orion opened the doors to his room and Soundwave turned to face him.

“Soundwave, hello.” And then, belatedly, as Orion remembered Soundwave’s communication preferences, he sent a greeting packet over close-range broadcast.

Soundwave was perfectly motionless for a long minute, and then without any physical change broadcast back a curt, perfectly formatted Iaconian closed-acknowledgement.

Orion had no response. There was no response. The acknowledgment was structured to close off further communication without dismissing the recipient. Anything he sent in response would be a breach of etiquette, but neither could he leave. It was a feat of formatting skill that rivaled Cybertronian councilmembers, and if it had not left him with such unease, Orion would have had more processing power to be impressed.

After another interminable period of time that had Orion valiantly struggling for a safe conversation starter, Soundwave pointed at the screen, which flickered to life with the last video frames Orion had been studying.

An accusation, but also likely a confirmation. Soundwave was the most reasonable culprit for the locked data sectors, and clearly had been monitoring them for breaches. Orion had no reason to lie, nor the ability to do it convincingly. He sent the distilled data to Soundwave, the possibilities and their likelihoods his tactics card had generated. The dread in his spark at what they told him.

Soundwave acknowledged receipt of data, and then almost as an afterthought tacked on another Iaconian acknowledgement in such a way that Orion could again do nothing but wait. And wait.

Soundwave, Orion realized as he sifted through his available inputs, was perfectly shielded. No heat signature changes, no errant broadcasts, nothing. In fact, Orion realized, Soundwave was emitting signs of life at a level that scraped the bottom of his threshold for living Cybertronian readouts on every metric, almost exactly. Deliberately, even.

The silence on all fronts was unbearable. Orion broke protocol and asked as softly as he could, “Soundwave, I apologize for accessing the sector. But the information I have is incompatible with itself. I wish no harm to you, or Megatron, or any of the Decepticons. I only wish to understand.”

Soundwave’s helm shifted imperceptibly, and Orion got the distinct sense Soundwave was looking directly at him for the first time since entering the room. The scrutiny made his plating itch terribly. He was so distracted by it that he nearly missed a single, heavily encrypted outbound communication from Soundwave, projected up into the Nemesis, towards the command deck.

Fearful of what that could mean, Orion froze, and let Soundwave finish his conversation. After another incoming signal—Orion didn’t even bother trying to read it, knowing it would be clear from his core temperature that he was running decryption algorithms—Soundwave’s helm shifted up a fraction, then in one fluid motion his body turned to the console and the video reset, suddenly crisp and clear of the artifacting Orion had been trying to sort out.

Orion walked up to the console trying to get a better look, to correct the mistake in his optics. But no, there was Orion’s frame, sword in hand and raining lethal blows on Megatron, who blocked them and responded in kind. Even in our deepest disagreements I have never wished for such a thing, he had told Megatron. The video made a liar out of them both. That was Orion, it had to be, part of the memories that Megatron had said were lost to stasis.

“I don’t understand,” he whispered, more to himself than to Soundwave, who still stood motionless beside him. “I remember none of this. I would not—” But he had. Why? “I do not know what could have driven me to take up arms like this.”

Soundwave tilted his head. Another data packet filtered across the space. Orion’s own schematic, the one he had just sent to Knock Out, only his chest plates had been highlighted and labelled.

Anomaly.

“I was reformatted,” Orion explained, but Soundwave shook his head and re-sent it.

Anomaly. Physical, he added this time. Inert. And before Orion could ask anything else, Soundwave sent a short immaculate burst of query-completed-cease-requests-dismissal and left the room, sealing the door behind him.

To give him privacy, Orion realized, as he promptly opened his chest plates and—

Inert. Physical. Orion tried to focus on the inert label as he studied the gleaming golden metal that had been welded to his spark chamber. An archival data query spun up and greedily stole resources from everything but a sense of dread that attached itself to his tactics processor, now running wild with the knowledge that he had obviously been tampered with beyond the reformat.

Separately, he managed to force through a bit of relief at the thought. It separated him further from the figure in the recording. He was Orion, but the reformatted Optimus had been the one to attack Megatron. Optimus Prime, an ancient title, rarely given, in conjunction with—

The Matrix of Leadership, the archival query reported. Artifact originating with Primus, 67% match based on limited historical data. Reported attributes include greater frame strength for the recipient, communication with past Primes—

Orion cancelled the read and let it return to storage.

He had been made into a Prime. Not just a Prime, the Prime, the thing Megatron had sought and despised all at once. In all probability, the Matrix itself had reformatted him to be what it had needed him to be. Him. Not Megatron, not Alpha Trion, but him.

“Why?” he asked the dead metal.

It didn’t respond.

“I only wish to understand.”

Soundwave’s transmission was abrupt and concise, cutting through any chance of Megatron being able to dedicate his processor to the next attack on the planet’s resources.

He had hoped that there would be more time for Orion to work on the database. Soundwave had a great number of duties, and handing the decryption work over to an archivist left him free to scheme most excellently, though with precious few targets. The humans had only so many layers of security, and the lack of Starscream’s constant antagonism was being felt even more than before.

Another ping. Soundwave was requesting orders, suggesting termination now that Orion was close to uncovering their secrets. So it had come to this.

Let him live, Megatron fired back. But keep him there. I’ll do it myself.

Soundwave acknowledged and closed the channel.

“Hold position until I return,” he ordered the bridge crew, and stalked off to the depths. He saw no sign of Soundwave on the way there, as usual. Megatron did not particularly care how his third-in-command made his way around the Nemesis, although he did briefly suspect excessive groundbridging. It had occurred to him to reprimand the excessive use of resources, and then he had seen Soundwave bridge Arcee directly off the ship and decided whatever practice he had been getting with the device deserved a bit of leniency.

Pondering the amount of leeway Soundwave should have successfully distracted him on the walk to Orion’s quarters. His combat protocols weren’t even engaged, and as he approached the doors he slowly let his capacitors charge with a low whine.

Surely, he should be looking forward to this. The end of his mortal enemy, at his own hands, no less. A treasured victory over the last of the Primes.

And yet when he opened the door and saw Orion looking at Autobot files he should not have had access to, there was only a deep sense of loss in his spark. Future battle plans and counter-strategies for another grand battle against Optimus, all slowly being deprioritized and scheduled for deletion. There would be nothing left after this.

He didn’t bother with a greeting. “I see you’ve breached Soundwave’s locks. Now you know our great secret. Have you seen what you needed?”

Orion turned, his expression perfectly bland. “I know enough.”

“So you do.” Megatron raised his cannon. “Any last words, Optimus?”

“Yes. I wonder if I could ask for your assistance. Knock Out has reminded me that I require calibration.” And with that, as if they were discussing nothing of importance, Orion knelt, and his shoulders and chest began to unfold.

Megatron’s processor thrashed, unable to start a thread for more than a moment before another violently preempted it, thoughts spinning and cycling so fast they even superseded his combat protocols, and his cannon came down even as his free hand reached forward on nothing but basic instructions forced into being by his wildly arcing spark.

And Orion kept going, unfurling until Megatron could see every weld and set screw that held him together. The Matrix had changed everything. Megatron could see it from here and compare Orion against the schematics dredged up from long-term storage where he had been certain he had wiped them. He saw again the schematics of an old friend, who had bared himself back when the trust and intimacy of it all had Megatronus repurposing claws meant to rip and tear into tools of care and comfort.

“How sentimental of you,” Megatron sneered, but he could feel himself losing the motivation to fire. It was…it was too easy, he realized with frustration. Killing Optimus like this was barely a victory. Had the slagging Prime planned this? “Using your last words as a plea for comfort.”

“Indeed,” Optimus said calmly, and Megatron was now certain this was all part of some sort of escape plan, he just needed to figure out how. “At this range there isn’t much chance of surviving your attack. I doubt it would even matter if you were to fire now, or in a few hours.”

Ah, and here it was. “You beg for time, then.”

“More specifically,” Orion said with some sort of buzz in the air that Megatron belatedly picked up and began processing. “Your time.”

I have missed you.

The signal wasn’t even encrypted. Anyone within broadcast distance could have heard it, if they were looking for it on the right channel. Who was he secretly trying to contact? “Soundwave monitors all frequencies. Your friends aren’t here, Optimus.”

“We were friends, once.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“For you. For me it has been nothing at all. Until I finish processing the records of what I have forgotten, I am not yet your enemy again. I suspect I will not be certain for a few hours still. There is still enough time for this, if you are willing.”

And Orion waited. Waited, open and exposed, and something deep in Megatron’s processing clung to that vulnerability. “I have never known you to process so slowly,” he said instead. “What lies you tell yourself, to prolong your life.”

“Not a lie. A hope. Megatron, you have had ample time to kill me. Instead, you maintained a deception from the moment I awoke at the planet’s core. I am only asking if you would, perhaps, be willing to maintain it a little longer.”

It was an absurd proposition. But that was truly all it was. Orion was isolated here, with no way out. Death was certain.

So really, what was a few hours one way or another?

Megatron turned his sensors inward, chasing the thought. Where had that come from? He read every instruction, every register until he could no longer deny that, damn him, it had come from his very spark. Magnetic flares strong enough to shift a few precious bits here and there, until against all reason and strategy he had to come face to face with the fact that he wanted what Orion was offering. Thousands of years of war had yet to beat it out of him, it would seem.

He wanted to rip out his own spark. He wanted to reach out to his mortal enemy with a gentle hand. He wanted, so desperately, to want something else. It would have been so much easier if he had wanted something else.

“You would have me join you in deliberate ignorance,” Megatron sneered, one last attempt at evasion.

Orion was silent, then: “I would, if you would have me. If you have longed for this, as I suspect I have.”

He had, he had, slag him, and it was a clever strategic move to reveal Orion’s own desires, a move that appealed to Megatron’s vanity, and he’d be more appreciative of that fact if it hadn’t worked. Megatron at last let go of the vice grip he held his processor in, and moved in close to inspect Orion’s left shoulder. “Send me your updated schematics.”

The files appeared almost immediately, as if Orion had only been waiting for the command. Megatron immediately ran a comparison against the frame he remembered, musing on the changes. Weaponry, obviously, but also significant changes in plating. The archivist frame had only the lightest armor, more cosmetic than functional. The Prime had warframe plating, and even an additional layer over the spark chamber. Protecting itself first, Megatron noted with derision.

The first obvious issues came at the shoulder joint, where several set screws were dangerously close to being sheared off for how much they protruded. “It’s a marvel you could land a single shot,” he declared. “You’re misaligned like you haven’t been calibrated since—” being made Prime, he realized, and stopped short. Perhaps it was true. Did that wretched medic not know? Impossible. Had their Prime refused care?

As I suspect I have. Had the Prime refused care out of sentimentality? Foolish. Ridiculous. But something in Megatron's processor soared at the thought, that Optimus would—

It didn’t matter, Megatron tried to soothe himself as he tensioned two claws against the screw. It didn’t matter now, at least, nor for the next few precious moments of his own denial. With practiced ease, he spun his hand so the loose piece rotated down and into place.

Orion, who had been so very calm up until that point, made the most perfect noise, a surprised tone that leapt up past Megatron’s audible range and then tumbled down in a haze of unformatted waves. “A-ah,” he managed as he fell back into speaking range. “Forgive me. I did not expect the sensation to be quite so—”

Megatron abruptly grabbed another screw and did it again.

Whatever Orion had planned on saying melted into static. “Use your words, Orion,” Megatron taunted. “I know you enjoy them so.”

Delightfully contrary, Orion instead broadcast something on a short-range frequency. It appeared to be an excerpt of one of the absolutely filthy poems Knock Out had brought with him. Megatron had been flattered enough when he discovered it that he had prevented Soundwave from eradicating them.

“I said your words, not mine,” Megatron chuckled, moving across Orion’s components as the mech under his hands tried to rally.

Orion managed a response after only a few attempts. “As I recall, your poems occasionally had an intended recipient. Are words gifted to me not mine to use?”

“How unoriginal.”

“I have never claimed to be a creative mech.”

Megatron rolled his eyes, but kept working, reveling in the responses Orion gave him. He made no effort to silence them, after that first flimsy excuse, and Megatron tested what sort of motions caused the most intense reaction.

Sharp, sudden things at an unpredictable cadence seemed to have the most effect. The surprise of it seemed to be as important as the physical motion. Small adjustments brought soft noises. Larger changes where Megatron had to grab hold of some internal and pull caused Orion to moan so deliciously that he pulled the audio from short-term flash and immediately stored it elsewhere for safekeeping.

Orion was exquisite. Megatron ran through the calibrations as slowly as he could bear. This was something to be savored, for as long as—

One claw traced over the edge of that additional plating, and Orion sighed as he shifted it down and away until the casing of his very spark chamber was exposed.

The old, familiar metal was etched with the crisp lines and curves of an active spark. A familiar spark, Megatron realized as he committed every piece of it to memory, every sensor readout and pattern analysis that marked it as Orion. “It is you,” he said quietly.

A pause. “You doubted?”

“No. I knew.”

“But you did not want to.”

Megatron didn’t answer. Instead he traced a claw across the surface of the armor plating Orion has moved out of the way. Interacting with the spark casing directly would cause damage. “I could kill you with barely a thought.”

“You could. But I don’t think it would satisfy you. If you believed me your enemy, I hope you would allow me the dignity of dying with a blade in my hand.”

So the little archivist had been plotting! Megatron almost let the thrill of victory overtake him, until he realized that the lynchpin of Orion’s plan had been his own wretched sentimentality. He’d known Megatron wouldn’t kill him like this. “…You have always been too trusting. Too selfless.”

A blip on one of his sensors. Then another, a cluster. Orion was amused, laughing.

He had missed it so much. “What,” he ground out instead, “is so amusing to you?”

The laughter continued to bubble in the background as Orion spoke. “Perhaps I have been too selfless in the past, Megatron. But not this. This is the most selfish thing I think I have ever done.”

An admission, again. This time, Megatron let himself linger on the implication that Orion had wanted him so badly. Fear and respect were well and good, but to be craved was certainly something novel these days.

Megatron worked in silence for a while longer, until he found that there was nothing left to put right. “I am done,” he declared, with more disappointment in his tone than he would have liked.

Orion nodded as he closed himself up. “I would like to return the favor, if you are not opposed.”

Megatron’s laugh filled the room, cruel and biting. “I have survived far better assassination attempts than this.”

“Is that an objection?” Orion asked.

Megatron thought a moment, and then before he could think any further he knelt down and unfolded—just around his shoulders. Something less insecure, less obvious. His claws twitched and his processor thrashed again but what could it hurt, just this once? Orion wouldn’t dare.

And his hands were so gentle. Rounded digits had no need to reach for more dedicated tools to do his work. Megatron had undergone repair after repair after repair, through the war, upgrading calibration systems that had been made to be thrown out with the rest of him when they misaligned. Now when he chose to reveal them they were easily reached, easily turned, easily repaired. Nothing about him would ever be disposable again.

Still, Orion moved with an indulgent level of reverence and care. He never pushed further than a mere quarter of the maximum load on any part unless it was absolutely necessary. Megatron had wanted to berate him for it and insist his tolerances were far higher, but found he couldn’t quite form the words. His every sensor was alive with capturing the steady motions in detail. Each was so different from combat input to be novel, and worth observing in its entirety just for that.

It felt exquisite.

He became so lost in processing input that he only surfaced again when he felt Orion’s hands brush against the armor over his spark. He moved it, just a fraction. Not far enough to reach in, but far enough for Orion to see.

Orion held position for some time, evidently cataloguing the etchings as closely as Megatron had. It was enough time for Megatron to regain some control of his voice.

“You will regret this,” he tried to say threateningly, but it mostly came out resigned.

“I will not,” Orion said immediately and with confidence. “It's been thousands of years, hasn't it? One night without suffering will not change that.”

Megatron felt his fury rise, and he rode it up to standing and closed his plating. “No. It will not. You are still my prisoner.”

“I am.” Orion smiled and it changed the way the light reflected across his face, infuriating and beautiful. “I will likely try to gather more information and escape.”

“You won’t best Soundwave.”

“Then you have nothing to fear.”

“So calm, Orion,” Megatron said. “So sure of your own victory. Look into your spark. If you have learned so much, you know how this will end.”

For a split second, something like anger flashed through the magnetic field between them, and then Orion’s shoulders fell, defeated. “I have not regained any other memories, but I have…a feeling. When I see you, I know I have missed you. But I also have a deep dread in my spark. I fear the world cannot bear both of us. I do not want victory. I want to be wrong. What can I do to be wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You have never been one to give up this easily.”

“Hah. I assure you, Op—Orion, this has not been easy."

There was more. There would always be more. But Megatron couldn’t bear to give it voice. It would be the end of them both. “We cannot go back to who we were, Orion,” he said quietly.

Orion flashed an agreed-negative signal. “Not forever. Just for tonight.”

Megatron shook his head. “Your hope will be your undoing.” But he knelt again, unfolded again. A moment longer. Just to have Orion’s hands on him, one last time.

Orion worked deliberately slowly again, and Megatron didn’t call him out on it. When he finished, Megatron stood, and inclined his head just a fraction in acknowledgement.

“Back to your work, prisoner.” The fury was gone. He’d find it again tomorrow.

“Goodnight, Megatron.”

A single packet, with the words he couldn’t bear to say. Farewell, Orion.