Chapter Text
Orion Pax was procrastinating, for good reason. One doesn’t just fly a spaceship and not offline. He thinks…
He could be wrong…
He could also offline…
But he’s done that before… And it wasn’t too bad. Or it was, and he just couldn’t remember. Either way, there was still uncertainty. Yep… The doubt was heavy.
But what was he going to do? He just bought a ship; he wasn’t just going to not fly it.
Employing little concern for his own safety, Orion Pax poked a button. The engines slowly whirled to life. He let them warm up for a little bit… In case they needed to. As a little precaution.
Then he did the thing he was dreading (a little): Pressing the fat ‘autopilot’ button.
He closed his optics. Yelped when he realised he forgot to strap in, did that quickly, and closed his optics again… bracing himself.
Nothing happened.
Orion squinted an optic back open. Yep, nothing was happening. He flipped the manual back open, going back to the ‘autopilot’ section. He found his problem soon enough.
Oh, so now he had to program that damn thing?
He looked back at the console, which was blinking a programming request at him. He leaned forward slightly, looking at some pre-programmed options before him. He couldn’t find ‘go up’ anywhere, so he selected ‘break orbit’.
Then he was asked to enter the gravitational pull of the planet he was on.
He had to search the grid for that one, typed that in, and double-checked his input. Yep, great, he confirmed that.
Now the monitor was asking him for any other desired inputs. Right, that would probably be good. What does Orion have now? Go up? Sit in orbit. He needed to add a ‘fly away’ function.
Of course, it wasn’t written as ‘fly away’. ‘Trek course’ seemed the closest option, so he pressed that and was greeted with a map.
A map! Something familiar! He knew how to read those!
Then he instantly entered into decision paralysis as he stared at it. Okay? Okay. Where would Megatronus go?
Someplace with stars? Megatronus likes stars.
…
Someplace with stars… In space…
Well, what a great idea that was! That narrowed Orion's options down from everywhere to everywhere!
He let out a huff and picked someplace around Orion’s belt. Yep, sure. Why not? He didn’t have any other bright ideas. He confirmed the pathing and hoped he wouldn’t fly through any stars to get there. If that was even a thing to be concerned about, he had no idea.
He re-read his inputs on the monitor, which roughly translated to up and away. He hesitantly pressed confirm again, nothing happened, so he dumbly pushed the ‘autopilot’ button again.
Then something happened; the engines rumbled louder.
Oh, he wasn’t ready. He closed his optics again and waited.
…
He wasn’t going up…
He looked back at the monitor. ‘Error’, it read, ‘close door’.
Orion swivelled his helm around, sure enough, the door was open. Well, thank Primus for that safety feature! He undid the straps and quickly closed it, noting how the sign above shifted from ‘open’ to ‘sealed’.
Alright. He headed back to the seat, sat down, did the straps real tight and pressed the button, expecting there to be some other issue for him to resolve.
There wasn’t.
The ship rose.
Orion squeaked.
He was probably fifty or so meters up when another button started blinking blue. It wasn’t red, so Orion didn’t panic too much. Regardless, he pushed the blinking button and hoped it wasn’t hooked up to the ‘weapon dispenser’ mentioned in the manual.
A voice sprang forth. For some reason, he assumed it was Ratchet. “T-29, what the frag are you doing? You’re not clear for take off!” It wasn’t Ratchet.
“Sorry?” Orion tried, assuming they’d hear him. He saw on the monitor that the channel was ‘open’. He assumed ‘channel’ referred to a communications channel.
“Who is this?” The voice demanded.
“Ah, Orion Pax.”
…
“Oh well… Go right ahead, sir.”
And suddenly Orion was pushed back into the seat as the ship rapidly shot forward and up.
***
Orion was shaking when he was finally out of orbit. The ship was sitting somewhere around the planet, facing outwards and still, and he hadn’t yet made a move to figure out why. That was terrifying. He was terrified.
He resumed his petrified shaking as he stared out the window and at the stars. He thought space exploration would be more fun. It was usually told as fun in the stories he read.
But those stories were also fiction, and they didn’t really describe how a ship shakes and creaks, how the small seam lines seem to widen and narrow as if the ship were breathing, or the sudden inability to vent under extreme g-forces.
They were terribly deceptive, really.
Orion let out a vent since he could vent now. “Okay.” He was still shakily staring at the stars. “Okay… That wasn’t too bad.” He lied, “I’m being dramatic.” He didn’t really believe that.
He leaned forward slightly, checking the monitor. The ship wasn’t doing anything, so perhaps that would tell him why…
‘Confirm course.’
Huh. Orion looked it over. It was the same location he had entered in, a rocky planet (he was pretty sure), so it seemed that every executable needed confirmation. Orion wasn’t sure if he was fond of the idea.
It gave him more control, but he also needed to build up the courage to press the button.
Without thinking much or at all, he pressed a button, and the ship slowly moved forward. At least that was what the monitor stated. He couldn’t tell if the ship was moving, the stars still looked like they were far away, and Cybertron was behind him, so he didn’t have a relational model to gauge his location.
He leaned back in the chair, his venting now steady, and slowly undid the straps. They were rather tight, and the ship wasn’t engaging in any acrobatics.
Orion Pax stared at the console for another joor before deciding he didn’t need to micro-manage a ship designed to fly itself. Slowly, he started looking through the ship's settings, eventually landing on ‘treked course’.
His estimated arrival time was… Many, many vorns from now.
He stared at it for a moment, letting some mild panic catch up to his frame.
Space was big… Yes. But maybe this estimation was based on his current speed? He had a peek at some of the many dials. He spotted one, it stated 90.
So he was travelling 90 Astronomical Units per joor? What unit does one use to measure speed in space? He was sure the ship would be going a bit faster if that was the case.
He opened up the manual again; he still had no idea how to manually make the ship go forward, and he felt an overreliance on the autopilot was not going to do him many favours.
It took him an embarrassingly long time to realise he wasn’t looking for a pedal to control the speed, or some kind of way to increase power to the engines. The thing he was looking for was the two very centred, large and obvious thrust levers located directly in front of him.
He stared out at the stars for a little bit, frustrated with himself.
He also discovered that these two levers were also responsible for the steering.
How?
Well, each of them was connected with one of the ship's engines, the left connecting to the left, and the right connecting to the right. Push one forward more than the other, and one engine overpowers the other, turning the ship.
If the thrust levers weren’t locked to one another, that was. The lock, Orion found, was a rather hidden little button located nowhere near the levers it was supposed to work with. A poor design decision. Locking the levers would mean they always share the same thrust, and one could not overpower the other, meaning a straight course for the ship.
Why the ship didn’t just use a steering wheel, Orion had no idea. It was a needlessly complicated system.
Regardless, he checked if the lock was engaged; it was, and he moved both levers up, watching the speed dial as he did so.
It remained at 90.
He pushed it a little more. Still 90.
Then he noted a small symbol next to the ‘90’. A symbol that was so small that it was hardly visible.
‘°’
…
‘90°.’
‘°’ as in degrees.
He had been staring at the ship's angle in relation to who-knows-what, thinking it was speed.
Orion gave up, not because he was lost, but because if he kept at it, he might smash the console with what little strength he possessed. Irritated and muttering angrily to himself, he browsed through the autopilot settings, looking for anything remotely related to speed.
He found hyperspeed, hyper-focusing on the word ‘speed’ within it, and selected that before hitting ‘confirm.’
It was then that Orion Pax found himself flung to the back of the ship in half a nanoklik as the ship suddenly lurched forward.
***
Once the ship had stopped accelerating and found a steady speed of ‘very fast’, Orion Pax was finally able to stand up, no longer being pushed up against the back wall. Curiously, he walked back to the console, wondering if the ship were to suddenly stop, would he go flying out the windshield?
He decided he’d be strapped in for that.
Slowly, Orion navigated back to the arrival estimation. He was pleasantly surprised when it only stated a mere deca-cycle worth of waiting. He looked out the window, the stars were strips, a blur passing the ship's view.
Oh wow.
He was going really fast. He sat back down in the chair and, for a while, just stared out. Did he do this all the time as a Prime? Did he fly the ships or did others do it for him? The mech that yelled at him when he was lifting off seemed to think he knew what he was doing. So Orion concluded Optimus Prime probably knew how to fly. At least a little bit.
Just how much did he forget? He for sure forgot a lot of the bad and ugly, but what of the good? Did he make any more friends (other than Ratchet and Bumblebee)? Did he hold access to banned datapads that he could then read at leisure?
Did he have a personal library?
He’d have wanted a personal library. He probably would have gotten a personal library. There was no one who could have told him no.
Did he ever interface as a Prime?
Well, that was a random thought Orion had to immaturely snicker at. Weren’t Primes often described as chaste? Putting the people's needs above their own desires?
Regardless of cultural expectations, Orion assumed he didn’t. At least not frequently.
He would have been too busy reading. Or doing war stuff. How time-intensive would the war business have been? Would Optimus Prime have had much personal time?
The more Orion thought about it, the less glamorous the life seemed.
It honestly sounded like a heap of work, duty and problems. Especially if he was out on the battlefield.
Orion couldn’t imagine killing. He couldn’t imagine ordering others to kill. He could hardly imagine how a Prime, the representative of the people, could become a war general. A war general fighting against an ex-slave, ex-gladiator-turned-warlord and his lover.
If that’s what Optimus Prime was, he sounded like a terrible mech. How Orion became him, he had no idea.
And everyone spoke of Optimus Prime as a hero?
How could someone who rose to stop an uprising of systematically disadvantaged Cybertronians ever be the hero?
Wow, Ratchet sure was crazy.
***
Three solar cycles later, Orion was getting bored with reading, something he had never experienced before. Instead, he went back to mulling over his reality. Something he didn’t even want to do, and frankly, made him rather upset.
So instead of internalising it, he tried to humour himself with conversation. He took a stylus, drew a grinning (but slightly morbid) faceplate onto a datapad, called it Shiney, and initiated conversation.
Why?
Because he wasn’t going to hold a conversation with a wall. He wasn’t crazy.
“Alright so…” Orion started before realising this might be more difficult than anticipated. He sat down on the floor, crossing his legs, and leaned Shiney against the wall. “I was a Prime, I fought a war, and died…” He tested the words. Yep, they still sounded absurd.
“But I wasn’t killed.” Orion let out a vent, “I fell down to Primus and gave him back the Allspark.” Orion paused; something didn’t quite match up. “How did that kill me?”
Shiney smiled.
“Did I hit a few walls on the way down?” Orion tried not to imagine that process. Nor did he particularly want to imagine going ‘splat’ once he reached the bottom. Wasn’t the planet's core Primus? That was at the centre of the world… Would that not have neutral gravity?
“Did Primus kill me?” Orion blurted out, “Or I got sucked back into the Allspark? And that was why I came back out from the well?”
Shiny smiled.
“This is silly.” Orion Pax grumbled, “And why come back amnesic? To live a normal life?” Orion shrugged; he could still hardly comprehend the fact that he was a Prime. Much less than he spent that time at war.
Optimus Prime might as well have been a personality reset programmed by the Matrix. Did that relic even grant the wisdom of the Primes? Optimus Prime didn’t seem to be wise. Was the ‘wisdom’ just tales from the council served on a pretty platter?
Gosh, when he found Megatronus, he was going to apologise. He, as Optimus Prime, tried to take the poor mech offline. On many occasions! Maybe Megatronus might forgive him, seeing that Orion Pax clearly wasn’t in the right helm-space at the time.
Orion had no idea why he accepted the mantle, though he knew he probably thought he could have done some good with it.
And Megatronus, trying to kill Orion? Pff, no. The only reason Orion could think to explain such actions was that Megatronus was trying to save him. Optimus had some relic in his chassis that turned him into something else entirely, and Megatronus was trying to find a way to get that out.
By cutting, clawing, and shooting it out. And Optimus Prime made it awfully difficult for Megatronus to do so.
Yep. The apology Orion was going to deliver was a real fat and juicy one.
Orion could figure out the rest, though. Why would his Megatronus blow up cities, create a deadly plague and commit a few genocides? It just didn’t sound right.
Sure, Orion knew Megatronus was leaning maybe a little towards more drastic measures. His and many more mech situations called for it. And Orion did have an inkling at the time that Megatronus was importing a few illegal weapons.
But those weapons were for pit fights. That’s what Megatronus alluded to.
Unless he was lying.
And Megatronus did do all those things. Most of Cybertron seemed to think so, maybe…
No. If there was a tiny, slim little chance, Orion Pax was going to ask himself. He would give the mech in question a chance to defend himself. For all he knew, the stories about Megatron were made up, because the mech they featured couldn’t correct the narrative.
He looked back at Shiney, realising most of their conversation wasn’t even spoken.
“I think we’re terrible conversationalists.” Orion decided, picking up the datapad and turning it off.
He decided he would go recharge for a while, walking towards the back end of the ship and passing the sliding door he had been pinned to when the ship had entered ‘hyperspeed’. The ship had two living quarters; Orion used the largest of the two for storage (since the storage hold was already full), and the smaller one he claimed for himself.
The berth was still too large for him, which reminded him of something else he had noted after his return. The average size of Cybertronians seemed to have increased, or all the smaller Cybertronians kicked the bucket during the war. Some crude form of natural selection, where only the stronger, larger, and faster mechs survived.
It had made Orion feel even smaller.
Orion stretched out his arms as he lay on it, his digits only barely cleared the edge on either side. He didn’t mind being small, it was everything else being big that was the problem.
How big had he been as a Prime? A sudden reformat into a mech as big as Megatron would have been quite jarring. The transformation Alpha Trion had shown him on video seemed rather mystical, with how his frame had just extended itself.
Orion wondered if there was any frame dismorphia afterwards, or if he had to relearn how to walk in a semi-elegant way. Orion could have imagined being quite clumsy on longer limbs. He wouldn’t be surprised, however, if that transformation had some inbuilt magical shortcuts where the whole reformat didn’t feel any different from his previous body.
It would have benefited Optimus Prime, not having to re-coordinate himself.
But, in a way, it would have also alienated the Prime from Orion Pax very abruptly.
Orion knew he would have hated being that large. He imagined looking down at mechs would have felt strange compared to looking up at them. He probably would have developed a horrendous slouch in an effort to come down to their level.
Orion Pax rolled over, trying to ignore the fact that this berth had been used by another.
The floor would have felt just as comfortable.
***
More solar cycles passed, and Orion wondered if there was a different way of telling time in space. ‘Solar cycle’ referred to the period of time it took for a full rotation of Cybertron in relation to the sun, so what was used out here?
Perhaps space travel used the same units as a means of recreating the everyday routines one engaged in on Cybertron, to not upset internal rhythms. That was what Orion was going by, at least.
12 joors awake, and 12 joors of recharge. Or somewhere around that amount. He’d been recharging rather generously, with the exception of the last ‘night’.
He had cut the nap short in favour of reading some sappy romance novels he had reread a few times in the past already. It was the kind that made a mech feel all sappy and bubbly, at least in Orion's case. Megatronus would have called it ‘cliche’. Orion still tried reading it out loud to him, although the gladiator probably wasn’t listening (Orion had a feeling the mech just liked listening to him talk at times).
Partway through the ‘day’, the ship's monitor made some beeping noises. Orion was at the back of the ship at the time, and thoroughly confused by the distant beeping before entering a frantic panic. Something was beeping, and that meant something. And often enough, that meant a problem. Orion had practically sprinted down the ship's hallway and almost faceplanted into the monitor's screen to try and decode the problem.
Thankfully, the ‘problem’ was simply an alert that the ship would be leaving hyperspeed in a few kliks. Recalling being flung into the back of the ship the first time, and not wanting to fly through the windshield, Orion strapped himself in this time round.
Eventually, the ship jerked, pushing Orion's chassis into the straps and temporarily constricting his vents uncomfortably. The stars, which had been stretched into lines for some time now, slowly shortened their length and morphed back into the dots Orion recalled them to be.
As the panic of leaving hyperspeed faded, he began to grin.
He was arriving at the selected planet this solar cycle, and he was excited. Not necessarily because he expected to see Megtaronus, he knew the odds of that were astronomically low, but because this was all new.
New to Orion, at least. He had never been on a whole new planet. Or space. Or on a spaceship.
Slowly, he watched the orange orb come into view, illuminated by a nearby star. Given the planet's closeness to the star, he assumed it would be warmer than Cybertron, or at least Iacon.
It made him wonder how many planets were nowhere near a star and lived in eternal darkness.
The colour almost made Orion speculate if that planet was made of copper or bronze. Or some orange rock that Orion may have once seen in a museum. Cybertron had rocks, but those tended to fall upon it from space, and only arrived if they were large enough not to burn up on entry.
Was Cybertron unique in its mineral make-up? Orion recalled some of the early studies on planetary compounds suggesting so. Were most other planets rocky? He would find it quite plausible. Some were even made of water and ice! Technically the same thing, just in different states. Water bodies were always something of interest to Orion.
He stared back out at the planet with newfound fascination as it grew closer and closer. He was actually here, out in space! A privilege so few got to experience (before that war everyone talked about) and had to go through rigorous training for. And Orion was just here! He bought a ship without a license and flew it without any training!
He admitted there should probably still be some restrictions and training requirements put into place for safety reasons. Can’t have new-sparks flying a ship into the nearest building after all.
He continued to grin out the window, the planet now almost obscuring the whole window as the ship continued to approach it.
The ship wasn’t slowing down, was it?
Orion wanted for a moment, assuming the ship might slow down just before reaching the planet's gravitational pull.
…
Any moment now…
…
Orion gulped, the ship wasn’t slowing, and he was quite sure he was within the planet's pull now. If the ship speeding up slightly was any indication.
He blinked, and for a moment his processor was spectacularly blank before his faceplate took on the classic ‘oh scrap’ expression.
And Orion realised, with exponentially increasing dread, that he had neglected to program a landing function.