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It had started with laughter
Sometimes Orion thought he heard laughter, laughter that held many voices. Voices that he thought he knew from somewhere, but he was sure that that couldn’t be right.
None of the other Decepticons seemed to smile let alone laugh so he had no clue where it was coming from and just decided to ignore them as he got back to work decoding the files that his oldest friend needed his help with.
His oldest friend who no longer looked familiar to him.
Then the voices began to stretch past laughter and into a few words even sentences as well.
He would hear them as he sat at the control panel, typing away.
“It’s been an honor serving with you, Optimus Prime,”
“Check out the monster truck rally I went to last week.”
“Optimus, If you leave me stranded on a planet teeming with humans, I will never forgive you.”
“I couldn’t let him hurt you so I improvised a little,”
“We Autobots take strength in the bonds we have forged,”
That last voice always made him gasp, it sounded so close to his own voice, but at the same time it sounded nothing like him at all.
After the voices came the flashes of color when he let his mind wander.
Royal blue and pink.
Bright red and white.
Army green and gray.
Golden yellow and black.
Just fleeting flashes of them out of the corner of his eyes but every time he turned his head no one was there he was alone in the room that they guarded him in.
The dreams started not long after the colors, though he couldn’t remember them, when he woke up after he always felt like they were happy but he didn’t know why.
If he could remember them Orion would have seen family dinners with a coffee table covered in take-out food.
Training sessions with two of his oldest friends.
Teaching a blond and black striped-haired young man the Cybertronian language while sharing stories with him since he never got to see anything other than war for the few years he was there.
He would have seen himself and the three others talking about the good old days on Cybertron before the war and what they had all been doing at that time; after the youngest had gone to bed, beers in their hands as they spoke.
As time passed Orion found himself longing for the memories that he believed his mind was making up to try and fill in what he couldn’t remember.
Unknown to Archivist that the things he was seeing were not dreams or made up fairytales but simply distant memories that had been hidden away trying to come back to the surface to remind him of who he really was.