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Ping!
Optimus’s bleary, still very happily sleeping, processor was vaguely aware of the noise that sounded almost like a message ping on his hud. Surely, that was a ridiculous idea. No one would be pinging him in the middle of the night. He let his mind drift back off into a pleasant, relaxing nothingness.
Ping!
Maybe someone could be pinging him in the middle of the night. But it was probably for nothing serious. Ratchet had the tendency to ping any poor spark that happened to be on top of his messages whenever he got ragingly overcharged. Optimus probably just so happened to be that poor spark. He forced his mind away from the thought and shifted in his berth, a little less comfortable than before, but he could manage.
Ping!
Optimus groaned, covering his head with the pillow from his berth. It wouldn’t do anything for his internal hud, but a mech could dream. In fact, he would quite rather be dreaming right now than worrying about a mysterious ping in the smack middle of his recharge cycle. He had an early shift at the Archives tomorrow, he couldn’t spare the luxury of being up at this ungodly hour.
Ping! Ping! PING!
“Maker be fragged.”
Optimus rolled over and sat up at his berth. Six. Six pings. Six pings was probably important. Maybe urgent. It would negligent, if not dangerous, to ignore six pings in the middle of the night. That’s the excuse he gave himself as he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and brought up his messages on the data terminal next to his bed.
“...the afthead.”
Megatron. It was Megatron. Not Ratchet, with a hurried plea to pick him up from whatever ditch he found himself hungover in. Not Wheeljack, asking for a ride to the nearest clinic after an experiment gone wrong blew his arms off. Not his boss, changing his shift the next day, not Bumblebee, sobbing about the nightmare he just had, not anyone of any remote importance. Just Megatron.
Optimus stood up and walked around his dark room a bit, gathering his thoughts. If he didn’t, he’d probably respond with scathing sarcasm to whatever Megatron pulled out of his aft this time. He deserved it. He really did. Unless the mech was dying, he deserved every bit of sass Optimus had to give and some of Ratchet’s too. But cussing out the best gladiator on Cybertron would not do him any good.
No, not at all.
To be fair, Megatron was important. To most mechs. To all of Cybertron. But not to Optimus. To Optimus, he was just the hopped up, stressed out afthead that pinged him in the middle of recharge cycles about… What was he pinging about?
The data terminal glowed brightly, mocking him in the otherwise dark room.
>optiimud.
>optimua, wake uo.
>optimus, i need youu,
>optiimudd, i wanna frag
>opti, r u awake
>huh, guess not
If a frustrated groan rang through the apartment complex Optimus lived in, no one else was awake to notice. No one else was awake to hear Optimus, half delirious from lack of sleep and half painfully awake, shout “Primus, slaggit!” No one was awake, because no one in their sound minds would be awake in the middle of the night on a weekday.
Optimus sat on his couch in the tiny living room of his apartment, where Megatron would so often sit by him and rave about something or other. He stared at the glowing moon outside and it stared, smiling back. Any previous hope of recharge was long gone, lost to the pings of an unsilenced message hud.
He pulled out a datapad with a rough draft of Megatron’s next speech. Might as well use the time for something useful. After all, when he was sober, Megatron would start pinging him about that too.