Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Poor fool, sad anthropomorph, give up this notion
Centrifugal; perpend awhile, instead,
The world centripetal, and see yourself
As the last comer in this world of shapes.

-Conrad Aiken, Preludes for Memnon, Verse XII

”—shouldn’t still be a problem!”

Megatron had arrived for this particular strategy meeting early and angry. Orion had been paying more attention to his datapad of troop reports than Megatron’s latest frustration, assuming that the rebellion leader would calm down by the time the meeting was actually supposed to start. At the crash that followed the latest exclamation, though, he looked up in time to see Prowl slide the door open, take in the situation, and immediately turn around and walk away. 

<Coward,> Orion sent him over a short-range direct comm.

Prowl sent back a glyph representation of a shrug, followed by a pointed list of the ten tasks that would be a better use of his time than waiting for Megatron to calm down. 

Orion sighed and, taking the hint, set down the datapad and leaned forward. “Megatron. From the beginning?”

Starscream huffed, uncoiling his arms from where they’d been crossed so he could examine the tips of his fingers. “It wouldn’t make any more sense even if you had been paying attention, Pax. Our great and glorious general has decided to be completely unreasonable—“

“I’m being rational here, the situation is unreasonable!”

“You’re not exactly making it better,” Orion pointed out, using his most reasonable tone of voice. “And your armor stand really shouldn’t stay on the floor."

Megatron made a sort of grumbling noise and bent down to restore the fallen electro-armor stand—thankfully empty—to a standing position. “It’s the damned throne.”

Orion had spent his first few weeks out of the palace desperately missing his ceremonial helmet and the way it automatically hid his expression. He had gotten some practice with masking his reactions in the years since, so he hoped that his blank expression looked more ‘confused’ than ‘panicked.’ 

It seemed to work. Starscream was clearly happy to launch into an explanation. 

“Most of the direct administration is handled directly by the noble skyscrapers. We can’t possibly oust all of them, especially after the trouble I have personally taken to get some of them on our side.”

Orion had been avoiding the noble negotiations as much as he could, but he was still pretty sure Soundwave had been handling at least half the work there. Stopping Starscream on a roll was a foolish effort, though, so he just nodded along. 

“Unfortunately, some of our more recent….alliances….have begun to get rather tetchy about preserving the legitimacy of the monarchy. They are extremely reluctant to simply…” he trailed off, eyeing Megatron. 

“Hand the throne to a grunting gladiator?” Megatron asked. His tone could etch metal plating. 

“Oh, no, they’d be happy to do that if they thought they could manipulate you.” Starscream waved one languid hand. 

“But they can’t.” Megatron’s tone was viciously satisfied for a moment, and then it became just vicious. “And now they’ve decided to make a stink about their missing prince.”

Something deeply unfortunate twanged through Optimus’s chest as Megatron threw up his arms. “We are within the capital. We’re about to charge the palace itself. I have no time to go chase data ghosts!”

“Oh, please. The slight concession of a single squad will hardly turn the tide of any battles.”

“I will not waste my troops on some man who’s probably long dead anyways. He’s been gone for years. No one seriously expects him to be capable of ruling this city.”

“Fine. Ignore my advice. Do what you want. I’ll be here to take up the charge from your cooling corpse.” The door hissed open and then shut, presumably as Starscream stalked out. 

“I hate him. I really do hate him.”

Orion was just staring at the rivets of the wall, processing nothing. Or everything. This wasn’t supposed to happen, not here, not now. 

“Orion?”

He looked up automatically, too well trained into responding. Megatron had dropped into a chair, clearly winding down his temper. He was staring at Orion with concern. 

“Is something wrong?”

“Ah.” Orion cleared his throat. “I. That is. Not exactly.”

“What is it, then?” Megatron frowned at him. “You looked like you were a million miles away.”

Orion looked down at the datapad and turned it on to see a long list of casualties. He could change the subject. Get to the point of the meeting they were supposed to be having. Keep moving forward and hope that someone else would find a way to resolve this situation. Megatron was good at impossible tasks. 

But they were about to make a charge on the palace. This life they had all been living, gathering forces from the under-city and in abandoned warehouses and out of the slums to strike out for a better tomorrow, had almost run its course. One way or another, this would have to come to an end. 

“Megatron.” Orion deactivated the datapad and looked at his general, the revolutionary who, a lifetime ago, he had seen rising up and left everything behind to follow. “There is something I have to tell you.” He added quickly, before Megatron could respond, “But first, you have to promise not to get mad.”

Megatron’s face softened, his frown fading to a wry twist of his mouth. “Of course. What could possibly be terrible enough to put that look on your face?”

The rest of the rebellion was familiar with Megatron’s losses of temper by now. At the signs that it was passing, normal activity started to creep back towards the command office’s corner of the latest warehouse. A handful of troops settled around the fire barrel to play cards. Data scribes dropped the latest drives filled with reports off with the guards. Prowl returned, judging it an appropriate time to make a second attempt at an actual meeting.

He nodded to Drift, on guard, and was just reaching for the door plate when Megatron’s voice boomed out again, loud enough to vibrate the walls.

”You WHAT?”

Prowl promptly dropped his hand and went to go take care of the next-most-urgent item on his list. 

“I’m the prince,” Orion repeated, keeping his voice as level as if he was facing Sentinel and his gaze fixed on Megatron’s face. “My name is—was—is—Optimus Prime.”

Megatron made a noise of frustration and leaned forward, running his hands against his scalp. His hair was starting to grow out from where he had shaved it. It looked like it would be bristly to the touch. “You—what—“ He dropped his hands and sat bolt upright. “Who else knows?”

“Jazz. He knew me in the palace. I’ve told no one.” Orion paused. “You did promise."

“Slag your promises.” But his voice had dropped, no longer shouting, just low and intense as a laser beam. “Why tell me now?” 

“The…” Orion—Optimus—took a breath. “The nobles have reason to be concerned. There are certain city systems that are DNA-locked to the royal line.” He paused. “They include parts of the city’s power grid.” The rest of the details would…probably be better explained another time. With hard evidence. “I can build you in administrator access, but…"

“You—” Optimus had never seen Megatron too angry to speak before. “So this—was this your grand scheme to manipulate me, then? Is this why you waited so long to play your hand, until the eve of ou—my triumph? Did you mean for me to have no chance to refuse you? Did you hide yourself in my ranks because power wasn’t coming fast enough for your tastes?”

“No!” Optimus blurted, horrified. “No, never, I—this—“ He clenched one fist. “How could you think that of me?"

“It seems I don’t know you at all,” Megatron snapped. “You still haven’t answered my question. Why.”

“I thought you were right,” Optimus snapped back, determined to get his point through that sometimes incredibly dense skull. “I thought you were right and I wanted to help you. You have always been my choice for this city, Megatron.” It was too hard to hold his anger. He let it fall away. “I never lied about that.”

The silence boiled between them. Megatron released the pressure with a whoosh of a sigh. “Did you even have a plan.”

“Help you win.” Optimus let his gaze fall to the floor. “I thought—I hoped, if we made it that far, I could sneak you into administrator permissions. Stay where I was. Help you rule. But with the nobles—“ He shook his head. “If they know enough, they’ll know something’s up. They need to know the transfer of power has taken place. That I’m not going to pop up out of nowhere and destroy everything."

“What do you propose.” It was the same tone he took with Starscream after Starscream called him an idiot, but at least it meant he was listening. 

Optimus took a deep breath. He had taken years of political strategy classes, but he could only think of two options. And one of them—no. If Megatron already suspected manipulation…and with that look on his face…no. “Well. One option is I transfer the credentials, and then you publicly execute me.”

”No.”

Optimus kept talking. “I always wore a helmet, as the prince. You can disconnect me from Orion Pax entirely—preserve the revolution's reputation. We can stage it so it looks like you flushed me from hiding, or that I was in the palace the whole time. No one else really knows exactly how the credentials work, they would believe—“

“I said no.” Megatron jolted to his feet, the chair crashing over. “You can’t seriously be willing to die for this.”

Optimus spread his hands helplessly, bumping against the wall. He hadn’t realized he’d backed up. “I’m not—I was raised knowing I might have to die for this city. I’m not afraid of it.”

“No,” Megatron repeated, voice low. Optimus’s gaze drew back to him like a magnet to a lock. His shoulders were shaking. “Not an option. Option two.”

“Ah.” Optimus cleared his throat and looked over Megatron’s shoulder, unable to meet his gaze for this. “Option two is you marry me and publicly claim legitimacy to the throne.”

The silence was so long that he let his gaze creep back to Megatron. Megatron was staring at him with an absolutely unreadable expression.

“Are you telling me that you would rather die than marry me.”

“Wh—no!” Optimus couldn’t keep his hands from flailing. “No, that’s not, I didn’t want to make you feel like you had to!”

Megatron kept staring at him. 

“You’re definitely not the worst person I could have married?” Optimus tried, because he couldn’t make himself shut up. 

Megatron stared for another ten seconds before dropping his face into his hands. “Orion. Optimus. Get out.”

Optimus got out.

Optimus spent the next little while idly wandering around, not so much trying to find something as to get away from his own restless thoughts. Eventually, he ended up outside the medbay by dint of reflex, something in him desperately wanting Ratchet’s advice. Or maybe a painkiller, since his head was going numb in that way that usually preceded a migraine. 

There hadn’t been many recent missions lately, as more of the rebellion converged for this strike on the capital. Mostly, Ratchet had been handling intake procedures and sensor recalibrations, tuning up prosthetics and synchronizing network access points. Steady, busy work that meant Optimus hadn’t seen him in a while. 

But the ‘busy’ light over the medbay’s outer office was set to yellow, which meant that patient privacy wasn’t an immediate concern but Ratchet might yell at anyone who came in. Optimus pinged a request and the door immediately slid open. There were some muffled crashing noises.

Ratchet turned out to be digging in a box of projects behind his desk/workbench/barricade, sitting up with some kind of foot and dropping it on his work surface. “Haven’t seen you around much lately. It’s been such a struggle, filling my copious free time without your charming face.”

“Ah, yes. Your copious, relaxing free time,” Optimus said, dryly. He dropped into his seat, watching Ratchet work. 

The hallway door had slid shut again. The connection to the medbay was likewise closed, though Optimus knew Ratchet had a flood of information constantly scrolling across the back of his brain, keeping track of his patients. He had seen how quickly Ratchet could move when he wanted. 

“So what brings you, with your equally copious free time, here to my humble abode?” Ratchet loosened a wrench from the tool band strapped around his upper arm and set to tightening something in the ankle before him. “I would have thought you’d be locked up with Megatron till late tonight.”

“Ah. Well.” Optimus shrugged. “He had to deal with something else.”

Now that he thought about it, Ratchet wasn’t the worst choice for his next disclosure. He couldn’t talk to Jazz about any of this right now, because Jazz wasn’t here. Ratchet had kept a lot of secrets in his time. He and Orion were best friends.

Optimus didn’t want to lose that. 

“Ratchet. I have to tell—“

“Hold that thought, Orion.” Ratchet set down the wrench and wheeled himself back to a dinged-up filing cabinet, pulling it open to dig through a drawer full of screws. “Now, where did I put those three-sixteenths…”

“Ratchet, I’m—”

“Ah, here it is.” Ratchet propelled himself forward again, swinging the arm of a light down over his workspace and bending his head. “Now, let’s see, if you go here—“ He cursed at the bits. “No, that’s not—who does that…” He reached into the back pouch of his wheelchair and dragged out a metal canister, pointing it directly at the foot.

It turned out to be an air horn, not a can of compressed air. Optimus leaned back and rubbed at his ears. The input components shut off after sound crossed a certain decibel threshold, but his organic drums were still ringing.

Ratchet scowled furiously at the can and tossed it away. “When I find the idiot who—sorry about that, Orion. You were saying?” His voice was a little too loud, which meant his ears must have been ringing too. Come to think of it, Optimus wasn’t sure Ratchet had audial tech. 

“Never mind,” Optimus said, opening a short-wave channel to make sure it went directly to Ratchet’s cortex implants. “I’ll tell you later.”

“Right, of course. See you, Pax.” Ratchet waved him out, already bent over his work again. 

Optimus’s next stop on his wanderings was the armory, where Ironhide seemed to be in the middle of some kind of inventory. He waved as Optimus came in. “Orion. Looking for something?”

“Just someone to talk to, actually.” Optimus leaned against the wall, watching Ironhide sort mag-knives. “I, Ironhide, something’s come up that you should know.”

“Really?” Ironhide sounded extremely casual as he dropped the last knife and pulled out a box of cartridges, but Optimus had fought with him for a long time and could see his back tense. Strange. 

“My name is—“

Ironhide turned a little too quickly, sending the box of freshly-sorted knives clattering to the floor, loud enough to cut Optimus’s confession off. If that hadn’t done the trick, his swears at volume certainly would have. “Ah, scrap, watch your step.” He knelt down and started scooping them back into the box. 

“Ironhide, I—“

The box slipped and hit the floor again with a clatter. “Damnit, looks like a clumsy day for me.” Ironhide looked up at Optimus and shrugged.

Optimus met his gaze head on, and took a deep breath. “I’m the—“

Without breaking eye contact, Ironhide reached out and shoved over a rack of energy guns, thankfully all in resting mode. The crashing noise was loud enough to make Optimus’s audial inputs close off again. 

“You better come back, Orion, it looks like I have a lotta work to do,” Ironhide said through a forced smile. Optimus took the hint. He was a little afraid of what Ironhide would resort to next. 

Once was chance, twice was coincidence, but when Bumblebee saw Optimus coming and immediately turned off his hearing aids, Optimus knew there was a conspiracy here. 

“Oh no!” Bumblebee signed, before Optimus could even say anything. “Looks like my ears are broken. I better go talk to Ratchet about it! Sorry, Orion.” His sign for Orion’s name was something Optimus treasured, but seeing it now just made his heart sink. 

“Bumblebee,” he signed back, feeling exhausted. “What’s going on?”

“Can’t tell you, sorry.” His grin was much less obviously forced than Ironhide’s. 

Optimus made one more valiant attempt, trying to sign “I am the prince” but Bumblebee shut his eyes and covered them with his hands before Optimus could get to the noun. 

“Really?” Optimus asked, exasperated.

”Ask Prowl!” Bumblebee signed, emphasizing with his pinky, and scooted off down the hallway. 

Optimus cornered Prowl in his office, giving up on subtlety entirely in favor of just closing the door and demanding “Why won’t Bumblebee let me talk to him?”

Prowl paused. He had three holo-screens open in front of him, and another set of datapads spread on his desk, and he looked at all of them in the time it took him to respond to Optimus. “I am not responsible for resolving your interpersonal conflicts."

For the sheer sadistic pleasure of it, Optimus leaned over Prowl’s desk and said quickly, “I have to confess to you that I am—“

One of the holo-screens and two of the datapads began screeching alerts in concert at the word ‘confess.’ Optimus, who hadn’t even tried to finish the sentence, watched as Prowl deactivated them with a twitch of his fingers. 

“How long have you had that set up?” Optimus asked, genuinely curious.

“Since—that is irrelevant.” Prowl shook his head. “Orion. You have to stop.”

“Does everyone know?” Optimus demanded, taking the chair for visitors. “Everyone except Megatron, that is.”

Prowl didn’t look up from his screen. “If, hypothetically I knew what you could be referring to, I would say that only a few people have drawn certain conclusions and most of them have already messaged me in the past ten minutes to say that you seem to have lost your mind.”

“Prowl.” Optimus leaned forward, massaging his temples. “This can’t last forever.”

Prowl let out a short, sharp sigh. “I—and others—remember what this rebellion had the potential to be before Orion Pax joined it.” He looked up from his screen finally, locking eyes with Optimus. “We cannot lose you, Orion. Megatron listens to you. Megatron has also sworn to tear down the line of the Primes with his bare hands.” Prowl flexed his fingers. “if there was something to be understood, it would be fair to say I drew the first conclusion. Jazz has often emphasized the basic precept of intelligence work, that what one does not know one cannot have committed conspiracy over."

Optimus, still baffled by this entire conversation, said “That doesn’t seem very basic.”

“I may be paraphrasing.”

Before Optimus could respond further, a priority medium-range ping flicked up in his HUD. 

It was a message from Megatron, announcing simply ”I accept your proposal. Meeting to discuss tomorrow 0700.”

“Ah,” Optimus said. He dismissed the alert to regard Prowl again. “I see your reasoning. And I appreciate your loyalty, but the situation has been resolved. Megatron knows.”

He could see Prowl jolt up into alert mode, his face dropping to blank as his body redirected energy and attention to his extensive cortex simulation implants. “I see. This was the cause of the earlier shouting.”

“Yes. As you can see, I’m not dead.” Optimus hesitated, realizing this was the first time he was about to say this out loud. “Actually, Megatron and I will be getting married.”

Prowl promptly crashed.

Optimus thought he had arrived on time, but clearly the meeting had been going on for a while by the time he opened Megatron’s door. Jazz had come back from his mission at some point, and he was staring down Soundwave’s chest while Soundwave stared over his head and Ravage sat on the map table, tail twitching. 

“Glad to see you’ve finally arrived,” Starscream said, somehow managing to be disdainful while clutching a steaming shot of coffee. “I need you to make it clear to your intended that if we botch this propaganda coup, we won’t even live long enough for me to kill him in his sleep.”

“We have an actual coup to accomplish here, Starscream,” Megatron snapped. He had several empty coffee shot cups resting next to one arm and a scribbled-on paper pad under the other—both signs that he probably hadn’t slept at all since their meeting. 

Optimus could sympathize. A cold shower had helped, but his thoughts were still wandering enough that he got caught up in wondering what must be written on that pad, and if he could ask to see it, before he grabbed that impulse and stomped on it. He’d be lucky if Megatron ever asked his opinion on a public speech again, much less shared the thoughts he felt too strongly about to even commit to digital format. 

“Which will go much smoother if we have something like a marriage to get public opinion on our side!” Starscream flung the arm that wasn’t holding a hot drink out dramatically. “Picture it. The courtship of the second-handsomest rebel leader and the prince in exile. The noble but deluded prince, laboring under the misapprehensions of the fallen king, seduced to the side of righteousness—“

“No seducing.” Megatron jabbed a finger at Starscream, and then swung it to point at Optimus. “Or—Optimus. You. Sit.”

Optimus sat, feeling out of place. The silent argument between Jazz and Soundwave abruptly came to an end, with Soundwave dropping into a seat and Jazz spinning on one heel and striding over to stand next to Optimus. He leaned back against the wall, almost too casually, close enough to the back of Optimus’s chair he could have easily rested one hand on Optimus’s shoulder in support. “So. How are we gonna play this." Over a cortical connection on a short enough wave not even Soundwave’s sensors could pick it up, he asked <You couldn’t have picked a better time, maybe?>

<I definitely could have picked a worse one,> Optimus offered. Externally, he looked to Megatron, waiting for direction. 

Megatron was already looking at him, gaze steadily holding Optimus’s own. There was a long moment of nothing before he looked away. 

Starscream was happy to fill it. “We make some sort of announcement, start disseminating information now—“

“No,” Megatron said, shortly. Soundwave raised his head to back him up, voicebox humming faintly with what Optimus knew was overuse.

“Situation: not materially improved by public announcement.” Soundwave addressed the room at large, but Ravage had zeroed his gaze in directly on Optimus. “Information: best utilized strategically.”

“Fine,” Starscream said, and chugged his shot. “I can accept defeat gracefully. But if you think that when the time comes to make it public that I’m going to let you squander this chance….” The claw extensions on his finger guards tapped pointedly against his cup. 

“I don’t think you’re going to let us do anything, Starscream,” Optimus murmured. He was hoping, a little, that he could still make Megatron laugh. 

Starscream puffed up for a whole ten seconds before realizing he’d been insulted and glaring, but Megatron’s face didn’t even twitch as he announced, “Fine. So, to sum up several hours of pointless arguing—in the short term, our strategy is unaltered. We begin the strikes in three days’ time.” He swiveled to face the map table, shooing Ravage off a particular projector and onto the floor. “Soundwave, I’ll leave it to you to distribute the information to the nobles that the prince has been located. Optimus—“ He didn’t even look up. “You will continue to act as Orion until we are inside the palace itself.”

Optimus caught just a hint of the glee of inspiration dancing across the short-wave connection before Jazz cut it off and leaned forward to speak. “Unless..."

“No,” Optimus said, automatically. An inspired Jazz was worrying in the middle of a mission and potentially devastating in planning stages. “Whatever it is, Jazz, no.”

“Shh, OP, you gotta trust me on this one.” Jazz waved off his concerns. "So, you all remember how the Primal Vanguard still thinks I’m a double agent for them?”

Everyone else straightened. “Are you suggesting burning this cover?” Megatron asked. 

Optimus didn’t dare argue out loud, but he did grab the implant on Jazz’s arm to direct-route an urgent cortex connection. <Jazz, you cannot sacrifice yourself. We need you too badly here.>

“More of a last-minute strategic use.” Jazz’s grin could be heard in his voice, as sharp as a knife. “The plan works best if we get hands on deck inside the palace itself, yeah? Not to mention setting off as many distractions as we can. Can’t think of a much bigger distraction—or a better reason for an agent to burn cover—than pulling a presumed-dead prince outta a merry band of rebels.” Jazz bounced on his feet, clearly pleased with himself. “There’s a lotta doors we could get to from the inside."

<Oh. Oh, that could work.>

”Oh,” Starscream breathed, irises lighting up with tactical data. “Oh, yes.” Soundwave was already on his feet again, toggling the map table to switch over to the palace complex, running his hands over the simulated surface and tagging certain new key points by changing their color and texture.

And then Megatron announced “Absolutely not.”

Optimus was saved from having to politely ask for clarification by Starscream throwing his cup at the wall. “You’re kidding me!”

The argument that followed involved more shouting than Optimus would have preferred. Especially since most of it was from Megatron, who was refusing to be reasonable about this. 

The King’s forces had no way of knowing it was a trap, especially since Optimus had managed to remain completely undetected by the palace since his departure. It would be a more effective way of proving Optimus’s legitimacy than anything the rebellion could manage themselves, short of a full-fledged announcement. If Optimus managed to fight his way free to open the gates, it would be a powerful symbol of a change in regime—if he ended up in over his head, he just had to stall until Jazz and the revolution forces could get through the gates, and then he’d be proof of Megatron’s "power over the throne or something,” according to Starscream.

“And if Sentinel just decides to tie off loose ends and kill you?” Megatron snapped, at the end of that particular thread. 

“Then the rebellion gets a martyr and the nobles get a wake-up call,” Optimus shot back. “He probably won’t, though. He hasn’t been able to find another heir in six years. There’s…” He paused. “There are extenuating circumstances.”

“Of course there are,” Megatron grumbled. “Fine. Fine. Assuming you’re capable of pulling all of this off—“ And that hurt, Megatron hadn’t questioned Optimus’s capabilities since the first year they’d worked together. “—how do we know we can trust you to, Orion?”

They were all on their feet by this point. The armor stand hadn’t gone over again, but it was a near thing, especially considering that half of the datapads from the map table had fallen onto the floor. Ravage had gone out the door a while ago. Megatron had been keeping the table between himself and the rest of them, but at this last question, he stepped forward to confront Optimus. 

In the palace, Optimus had worn armor on a regular basis, boosting his height and reflexes and allowing him to spread neural processing over a greater area than could ever be accomplished with purely internal tech. Sentinel had disapproved of prosthetics. Disapproved of anything that would weaken the ‘gifts’ he told Optimus he had been born with, disapproved of anything that couldn’t be easily stripped at Sentinel’s will. More than that, Optimus had come to understand, Sentinel disapproved of anything that put what he saw as potential vulnerabilities on display. Optimus had spent years of his life in armor built with the highest technology possible, but it hadn’t been until the rebellion that he’d gotten his first network implant. His first taste of connection on a level of cortex and nerve and pulse.

All of this flashed though his head, rapid-fire-sequence, to go with the ridiculous realization that if Optimus was still in the armor he’d been raised to, he and Megatron would be at eye-level. 

But given that the armor always involved a helmet…their eyes would never have met. 

Optimus looked up at Megatron, met his gaze squarely, and flung out a short-wave loop, not requiring reciprocation, just a way to transmit memories moving too fast to be spoken. Missions watching each other’s backs, training matches on rooftops and on back-alley catwalks and under grates with neon shining through, late nights trading snatches of poetry in between visions of what could be. The city on electric fire. Copper and circuits and hands clasping, helping each other up when they fell. 

“There is no guarantee I can make you,” Optimus said, quietly. “I won’t lie to you. Not about that, not ever again. I can’t say anything that will undo the things I’ve done. All I can ask you to do is trust me.”

Megatron’s eyes flickered, rapid-fire movements as he accepted the loop and the memories played out inside his own head, in a fraction of an instant. 

He closed his eyelids, sighed, and drew one hand down over his forehead. Optimus never looked away.

“All right.” 

Getting into the palace was a lot easier than Optimus had expected, and he hadn’t expected it to be very hard. Two nights after the strategy meeting, he and Jazz made their way as close as they dared, Orion Pax following a fellow rebel into a little minor treason like it was any other night. Eventually, Jazz slowed and waved Optimus ahead. The two of them launched into a carefully choreographed and messily executed fight that ended with Optimus pinned against a wall, bound and slumping and ostensibly drugged, listening to Jazz argue with whatever poor soul had picked up the other end of the line.

Eventually he cut it off, snorting “Well, thank you,” and hauling Optimus off the wall to prod him down the street. 

Optimus stumbled along, drawing on his own experience being drugged to keep his head lolling forward and his limbs limp and flopping. He still had a vague sense of where they were moving—not so much from pinging off of street signs, since Jazz had used a pair of Faraday cuffs just far enough from shorting out to cut off ambient signals, but from the shape of the streets and quality of the streetlights. The light was better here, closer to the palace’s back entrances, better than a lot of places in the lower city’s undergrid. The catwalks and connectors thinned out to make more space for noble skyscrapers to have their views, and the lamps were in better repair. 

Optimus registered all of this absently, focusing more on his acting job, until they passed through the archway that signaled the edge of the palace’s property line. He stumbled, and then went limp without meaning to as an enormous presence overwhelmed his cortex implants with queries and updates. He knew the palace had an extensive internal network, he’d tapped it when he was still the crown prince, but this was—these—

He couldn’t even understand all of them—something about the status of the security through the walls—something else about supply orders—the information hit in as item after item after item, like acting as coordination for a mission but orders of magnitude more intense—his eyescreens filled with windows, security videos and—were those Jazz’s vitals?—access permission confirmations and the code for the doors he was passing through—one after the other—he didn’t even think he was walking now, he was conscious of his body only as dead weight slumped between ID chips θ1889 and I1788—neither of them Jazz, where was Jazz—another window in the center of his vision—somewhere outside of it he heard shouting as the cuffs shorted and died in a shower of sparks, they were interfering with his request for information on ID ƒ2739 and things would be simpler with them out of the way—the sparks hit his skin but pain was negligible because the information was pouring in even faster now—the shouting went away as his audials dialed off—too much to process, he didn’t need them anyways—

There was an explosion of pain across his upper back. The alerts faded out of his vision, giving way to the demands of organic nerves and the cortex implant’s failsafe overrides. Optimus was left gasping for air, staring at the dizzying pattern of a horribly familiar jewel-toned rug, slowly bringing his physical processing channels back online now that he wasn’t being overwhelmed with code. 

He turned his audial inputs back up just in time to hear the King’s voice order, imperious and bored, “Hit him again.”

A white-hot line of pain came down again, crossing his spine. Optimus let out a strangled cry through gritted teeth as the physical sensations of his body shocked back into prominence in his head. Someone had taken his chest armor. His hands were still bound, but the cuffs fizzled as he flexed his hands, testing his limbs. Optimus raised his head to see Sentinel regarding him from behind his desk, face unreadable. 

“Ah, there you are.” His voice was annoyed. “You know, my expectations of you were already low, so it’s really rather impressive how quickly you sunk below them. A cortex implant, Optimus?”

“Whacalrd—“ Hm. His mouth was full of blood. Must’ve bitten through his cheek at some point. He spit it out before trying to speak again. “What can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time.” He was adjusting to the pain, now, pushing it away to get space to think. The Palace network filtered into his awareness, putting a map up in his vision for some reason. ID ƒ2739 located room D17, he only got a moment to read it before more windows started appearing, the flood of information all over again—

“Again.”

Another crack, another line of pain that made him choke off a scream, another manual shutoff of the cortex implant triggered.

“You will pay attention when I am talking to you, Optimus. I hope you haven’t completely rotted your brain with your youthful indiscretions.” Sentinel wasn’t even looking at him anymore, his visor flickering as he worked some invisible interface with his hand. “I must admit, as far as getting my attention goes, your attempts have been a little excessive.”

“Oh, please.” Optimus aimed for a laugh, fought a cough, and ended up wheezing. “I’ve spent years enjoying not having your attention.” He tried to lean into the pain, instead of pushing it away this time. 

“Don’t delude yourself, it’s unbecoming. I’ve let this go on long enough. All I had to do was let it be known I wanted to see you and here you are.” Sentinel paused and swept a judgmental eye over him. “I suppose I should be grateful you’re still presentable. At least you haven’t been foolish enough to visibly taint yourself.”

Optimus gritted his teeth, and with the rage to distract him from the pain, the network alert windows started popping back up. He somewhat frantically tried to order them clear, and was so relieved when it worked that the next strike of the electric prod knocked him all the way to the floor.

“I was listening!” he snapped out, unwisely adjusted to arguing with Megatron, who played fair. He only realized his mistake when the next blow came. 

Optimus waited to make sure it was only one hit, and then he exhaled shakily into the carpet before pushing off with his left shoulder to force himself back up onto his knees. The motion tugged painfully on his back, making him hiss. Something wet flowed where at least one of the blows had broken skin.

“Are you done?” Sentinel asked, coolly. 

“Yes, your Majesty." The more time he wasted here on Sentinel, the longer it would take to help with the infiltration. Optimus was done. He stared at the steel face of the desk, determined to show no reaction, keeping his voice level.

“We’ll discuss your penance further when you’ve recovered from surgery.” Sentinel lifted his head, addressing the guard. “Take him to Pharma and assist his preparations however he requires. Administer another blow every thirty seconds. Bring me the data from the implant as soon as it is removed.”

Optimus’s breath hitched in panic. He went limp as deadweight as the two guards hauled him out of Sentinel’s office, and then proceeded to thrash and fight them the whole way there, attempting every dirty trick Megatron had ever taught him. None of them worked.

Optimus didn’t stop fighting, though. Megatron had taught him that, too. 

In between blows, he tried to contact Jazz. His usual channels were inaccessible—they were wired to revert to proximity pings in the presence of government networks, which meant that they were completely non-functional inside the palace, why had he done that—and the pain of the guards following Sentinel’s instructions meant he couldn’t concentrate or keep his cortex implant working long enough to figure out how to use the palace network to his advantage. 

They went down, into the basements, into the heavily-armored area used as a bunker. Optimus was leaving a trail of blood now, and in between hits, he had the dizzy thought that it would be a mess for the poor staff to clean up. He didn’t have enough focus to even try to act on the alerts that appeared briefly on his vision whenever his cortex implant override timed out, and was losing track of events, along with the blood. At some point, a blow cleared his vision and he saw that he was in a surgery room, the kind of long chair and partial iso chamber used for brain operations laid out.

He tried to fight one more time, and the guards moved as if they were going to hit him again, early, before a condescending voice cut in.

“Stop giving me more work to do. Just bring him over here so I can administer the anesthetic patch.”

He couldn’t stop fighting. He couldn’t go down here, people were counting on him. Megatron was counting on him.

While they moved him again, Optimus frantically read the alerts slowly reappearing on his eyescreens, hoping something might help. The top one read Extensive integration necessary. Enable immersion [Y]/[N].

Optimus flicked the fingers of his right hand to select [Y] just before the prickle of a patch brushed his neck.

“I don’t suppose you’ll count down for me, your highness?”

But Optimus was already gone.

Wherever Optimus was, it was a mess. 

Threads tangled over and within each other, shining spools of data reeling down, racing from one place to the next. Silver drops of code like dew dripped off broken connections into oblivion. A matrix of a network, falling apart at the seams. He could see where things fit together. It was just a matter of making them go there.

He set to work, patching holes, binding circuits, filling in gaps, replacing connections The mending was nothing he hadn't done with the rebellion, though it would go easier with another set of hands—

The rebellion. Megatron. Jazz. He wanted Jazz, he had been trying to contact Jazz. 

With a thought, he drifted down the matrix of data, picking out Jazz—ƒ2739—and tugging on the contact point. An extant command tried to interfere. Some kind of unfulfilled time release with a much lower priority authorization. Optimus decided he didn’t care and yanked on the contact again. This time it went through and Jazz’s ID began to move. Optimus tagged it to update him, submitted a request for urgency, and went back to work. 

Fixing this, he had to fix this. 

He got an update ping fairly quickly as the ID requested unauthorized access to a lock. Optimus retroactively granted it to wipe the alert and then provided unlimited access to avoid any more. He worked steadily after that, receiving no more alerts until Jazz began pinging him directly.

Optimus shifted his focus, and found himself looking down at a room he recognized simultaneously as sub-basement room L12, the designated neurosurgery room, and the room the guards had taken him to earlier. He had a view from an upper corner of the room, and he could see Jazz, with a pair of electroknives, standing over a limp body (θ1889, pulse zero) in a pool of blood. Two more bodies (I1788 and ∆0104, both pulse zero) lay on the floor as well. One (no ID chip) lay on the surgery bed, head in an isolation chamber, face down. Optimus hooked into Jazz’s communicator and sent him a direct ping. 

“Hello?” Jazz blurted. “Very helpful AI? That you?”

“Jazz—“ Oh, he had an intercom speaker. That was nice. “—this is Optimus.”

“Um,” Jazz’s voice went slightly squeaky. “Where?”

“I believe I am in the system.” The system thought he was not enough in the system and kept tugging on him, trying to make him come back in. He gave it part of his attention, trying to leave his focus with Jazz. “Thank you for handling this situation. You should proceed with the plan.”

“The plan?” Jazz laughed, slightly hysterical. Optimus tracked his pulse, already high, rising another 15%. “OP, they cut into your skull. I can see your brain. I’m not leaving you here alone until I know you’re safe. The doors can wait.”

Ah. That was his body in the chair. 

Optimus discarded that as irrelevant for the moment, reminded of the doors. It was the work of a moment to trigger all external and internal doors to open, another moment to lock them into place. People immediately started trying to override him, so Optimus deleted the command functions of the doors and turned his attention back to Jazz. “I disagree, but I can open the doors myself, so it doesn’t seem relevant.”

“You…can do that. That’s great.” Jazz lowered his knives and walked over to the operating chair. “Slag. They really did a number on you.”

“Yes.” Optimus could feel the system building up pressure—more things to fix, especially now that he had broken all the doors and caused a wave of override and update pings. That was obnoxious, but at the edges of the connection matrix motion sensors were picking up approaching people. A lot of approaching people. It seemed Megatron was seizing the opportunity to bring the fight directly to the palace.

There were also requests for weapons systems building up. Optimus killed the parts of those processes that he could, but there were many more moving parts and many more places to override, and ID Ω02 was using administrator access to exert an entirely separate pressure on raising defense systems. This could not be allowed. Optimus would not allow Megatron—or anyone in the rebellion—to be hurt, if he could help it.

Optimus couldn’t afford any more attention for Jazz and the surgery room. He knew getting Jazz to follow orders was, more than anything else, a matter of making sure they were orders Jazz agreed with, but he could at least express his wishes. “Jazz. The mission is of highest priority. Don’t let Megatron know how or where I am."

If Jazz replied, Optimus didn’t listen. He had work to do. 

Chapter Text

You dreamed the world? Alas, the world dreamed you.
And you but give it back, distorted much
By the poor brain-digestion, which you call
Intelligence, or vision, or the truth.

-Conrad Aiken, Preludes for Memnon, Verse XII

Megatron had often imagined—in long dark nights of trying to make sure everyone would make it to morning, in strategy sessions that were as much about finding everyone enough to eat as they were about finding enough ammunition, in days when he stared up through the cracks of the catwalks that filled forty overbuilt stories above his head—that storming the palace would be his greatest triumph. That he would savor every moment, every shot, every step into a place that should be the provenance of the people and instead rejoiced in locking them out.

Of course, for the past six years, he had also often imagined that Orion would be with him when the time came. Many things were different. 

Megatron came to a stop at a defensible corner to catch his breath and tried to send a proximity ping to Orion. To Optimus. To his friend. 

It didn’t go through. Megatron cursed and spun around the corner to go on the attack again, pouring his fury and fear into motion. 

In a city of skyscrapers, the palace grounds sprawled in a casual display of power, forcing the rebellion fighters into tactics they were more used to using in alleyways than buildings. They had maps of the palace, thanks to Jazz—and probably to Optimus as well, Megatron had realized—so they had been able to plan their attack in advance, but the chaos of open doors had sent things into improvised territory fairly quickly. At first when the outer gates had opened, he had hesitated to press into the building, suspecting a trap. Watching one of the doors explode while the techs tried frantically to get it closed had gone a long way towards reassuring him, though, that whatever else the virus that had opened literally every door in the palace was it was firmly on the side of the revolution. 

Preliminary reports from Soundwave’s drones indicated that the throne room was empty, so Megatron was moving towards the king’s office. His pulse was up and roaring in his ears, almost loud enough to drown out the experience telling him he knew better than to let his excitement master him. The king was famously paranoid. He wore a visor to disrupt cameras at all times, gave audience in a full-helmed suit of armor. Not even Jazz had been able to tell them what he looked like, since he’d never been important enough to join the Kingsguard. There were rumors in the undercity that there was no king, just an old and poisonous and mad AI. 

Megatron put no stock in those. The king was a man like any other, and he would die by Megatron’s hand. 

The last of the guards went down in a rush and wave of red mist, one that cleared only when the last few turned and ran rather than defend the first closed door Megatron had seen. He advanced on it with teeth bared, ready to tear the locking mechanism apart with blades and lasers to get to his goal. 

As he came within a foot, the door swung open and Megatron launched forward, on the attack. 

He was brought to a halt by shock as much as by the shimmering forcefield that surrounded the desk inside. The face that sneered up at him from behind it, cool and condescending with only a clenched jaw to betray severe annoyance, was one Megatron was familiar with. He had caused that exact jaw clench before. 

That was Orion’s face.

The gold-rimmed visor obscured some of it, and the wrinkles of age had changed it, but the largest difference was in the sheer hate in the king’s eyes as he cleared his screen to stare Megatron down.

“So,” Sentinel Prime said, his voice dripping with disdain. “You’re the twisted little cog my clone’s wasted years distracting himself with." 

Megatron was staring. He knew he was staring. The forcefield blinked and he didn’t even shoot through it because he was too busy staring, but at least realizing that made him brace his gun in a ready position and drag his head back into the fight. 

“I would say I’m the lever that moved your heir against you.” 

Sentinel let out a short laugh, his visor already flickering again with blurred windows and his hands directing the action of a network Megatron couldn’t see. “Please. He only left the palace on my orders. I’ve been having him drag your little group out as long as possible, bringing all the tarnish to the surface to be scrubbed.”

“No.” Megatron said it automatically, refusing to give in to the tiny screaming ‘what-ifs’ popping up in his head. What if Orion had been reporting, what if this was just one in a long line of betrayals, what if Megatron would have to fight him next— “I don’t believe you.”

“What, you’ve spent so long deluding yourself about your own importance that you can’t accept you’ve been part of my system the whole time?” Sentinel smirked at him, but Megatron could see the twist of his mouth, the pinch of his eyes—could remember Orion, years ago, telling Megatron he’d grown up in the docks district. And later, admitting he didn’t want to think about his past, it didn’t matter anymore. 

“Because I know what that face looks like when it’s lying to me.”

Sentinel’s scowl was ugly and unfamiliar. The door slammed shut behind Megatron, but he didn’t flinch. His temper was running cold, turning his veins to ice. Something was interfering with the systems. He just had to wait for his opportunity. 

“One of Optimus’s many unfortunate indiscretions, I see.” Sentinel sighed. “At least the liaison was useful. Biological reward feedback. Pillow talk. Moments of vulnerability.”

Megatron took too long to process that statement, and when he did make sense of it, he choked and his grip on his rifle slipped, for just a minute. “That—never happened.” Just a play to try to rattle him. Part of his brain pointed out the time he had spent wanting a liaison to happen.

Megatron firmly told that part of his brain to shut up. Sentinel was lying, grasping at straws, trying to rattle him. Just because Megatron knew he was doing it didn’t mean, sooner or later, he wouldn’t succeed. Time to cut this off. “Orion meant nothing to me. I haven’t made it this far by getting connected to people.” The lights all flickered, but the force field, frustratingly, stayed steady.

“Mmm.” Sentinel’s visor blinked and the field grew, shoving Megatron back with a smack that set the nerves in his exposed skin on fire. “I see I really should have put more effort into killing you sooner.”

“I could say the same to you.” Megatron re-braced his grip—a larger field required more energy, implied a shorter lifespan, he needed to be ready. 

“I suppose you still think you’ll get out of this. Be the conquering hero. Save the poor prince in distress and win the kingdom.” The door creaked ominously open and shut again. Megatron didn’t bother looking. “How long do you think you’ll have before someone decides to follow the precedent you’ve set? Optimus can be a treacherous little worm when he wants to be.” The expression that crept over his face was one Megatron didn’t know—somewhere between a snarl and a twisted smile. 

Megatron took a kind of peace in that lack of recognition, and slid his finger over the trigger. “I think I’ll die long before I let myself become anything like you.”

“Yes, you will—“ Sentinel growled, and something in the wall whined and hissed but Megatron didn’t hear it because the force field was trembling, shrinking, down—

Megatron fired the shot with his eyes closed. When he opened them again, the office was empty, a turret falling out of the wall with a sparking whine. 

He walked behind the desk, looked down at Sentinel’s body, and made himself memorize the sight of an older Orion’s dead face. The visor had shattered in the fall, leaving his eyes clear, staring at nothing. Megatron’s shot had gone in through Sentinel’s neck, turning it into a black and smoking ruin.

Megatron fired one more shot, delivering the same treatment to Sentinel’s head and sending the visor’s remnants up in smoke. That done, he opened a comm to Soundwave. Network access was an option, now—there must have been a breakthrough with Sentinel’s death.

<The king is dead. Long live the revolution.>

He caught the edge of it being rebroadcast on long-wave, short-wave, direct pings, open network—word spreading as far and as fast as people could take it. He leaned against the desk, for a moment, letting the exhaustion of a post-battle comedown wash over him.

A soft, polite ping pricked at the edge of his senses. Request for open connection. Some ID code and the letters OP. 

Megatron jolted, opening it immediately.

“Optimus? Optimus, are you there?”

“Hello, Megatron. I am in the network.” The syllabus base of the computer’s voice was in Optimus’s tone, almost, but a little rougher—probably recorded by Sentinel. The voice of a ghost. Megatron forewent shivering or shooting Sentinel’s corpse again in favor of striding out of the office. 

“Where are you?”

“Please follow these directions.” 

A map flashed up onto Megatron’s vision, directing him to an elevator. Megatron followed them, expecting to have to dispatch a guard on the way, but he only encountered limp bodies. He stopped by the first one and knelt down to check for a pulse. 

“ID I1843. Pulse rate fifty-two. No intervention required, Megatron. Please continue your progress.”

“You’re sure it’s safe?” He reached for his gun anyway. 

“I am monitoring the situation.”

Megatron looked up at the groan of another guard beginning to stir, and watched a turret pop out of the wall and administer a neatly targeted stun pulse.

“Megatron. Please continue your progress.”

Megatron did, moving faster. “You’re alright, then? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you since we breached the palace. The doors were your doing, I assume.”

“Yes. Sentinel was reluctant to cede control of systems. I prioritized breaking his defenses over responding.” 

The force field. “Thank you. I couldn’t have gotten to him on my own.”

“It was nothing.”

Oh. Oh, scrap, if he had heard, if he thought—“Optimus. When I told Sentinel—”

“It is understandable.” Optimus cut him off. “This elevator. Descend to sublevel D.” 

Megatron got in the elevator and took some smug pleasure in being able to lean his sweaty, stained cloth armor against the shiny side wall. He tried again. “When I said I couldn’t afford connection—”

“It was a reasonable response, once you believed I had been reporting on you.”

“It was an obvious lie, Optimus. Especially if you had been reporting on me.” Megatron turned his head to the side and exhaled against the cool metal. The elevator was almost seamless in its motion. “Orion. Optimus. Whoever you are, you have never been nothing to me.”

Optimus was silent. The elevator doors opened with an incongruous chime. 

Megatron took three steps into the hall, following the route, before he received an urgent package message. Make that three urgent package messages. All proximity pings, all from Jazz.

<Fragger did somthing why won’t thesse go throug>

<Congrats on the kill now get down here slagger>

<remember the Gygax mission>

Megatron paused. The Gygax mission had involved Optimus hiding his injuries from all of them until he had collapsed from a makeshift patch job giving way. 

Optimus had never answered Megatron's questions. 

“Optimus. Where is this route taking me.”

There was a long pause before Optimus said, “The palace server rooms.”

“Are you there?”

“I’m in the network.”

The map said to proceed down the corridor to the left. Megatron turned down the corridor to the right and began to message Jazz.

<Status update>

There was a gap while the message traveled. Jazz’s response was less than encouraging. <I’m on guard duty>

<Where.> Megatron ignored the map pointedly getting larger on his left eyescreen, swiping it out of sight and moving faster.

There was a long pause. <It won’t go through>

<Is Optimus alive.>

A shorter pause, and then, <it wont go through!>

Another proximity ping, this one from…Prowl? <Sublevel B. Third surgery room.>

Megatron moved faster. 

Optimus was not happy Megatron was no longer following his route. He wasn’t shutting any of the doors again, but Megatron did have to look for the stairs instead of the elevator and switch to infrared after Optimus started turning off the lights. 

“Optimus, I’m trying to help you.” Megatron was no longer able to rely on helpful little highlights, so instead he had a copy of Soundwave’s map open in one eye and was trying to follow it through sublevel D. 

“I don’t need help. I need to patch you into the system.” 

“I disagree.” Something occurred to Megatron as he carefully navigated a rack of plumbing pipes. “Can you even patch me into the system, or is it locked to your exact DNA?”

“The system requires two administrators. I was registered as one a long time ago. Now that Sentinel is dead, I can fill you in as the other one. If you’ll just go to the server room.” What the computer-generated voice lacked in tone, it made up for in bass boosting. Megatron could hear it resonate even through his firefight earplugs. 

“You can do that later, with all kinds of pomp and circumstance. Starscream can choreograph it. It will be fun for him. I’m prioritizing your well-being.” Optimus was still turning off the lights ahead of him. Megatron marked the server room on his own map to make sure Optimus didn’t start trying reverse psychology and kept going. 

“You won’t need to prioritize my well-being once I put you into the system.” Optimus said this like it was a compelling argument. Megatron was in love with an idiot. 

Arguing only seemed to encourage the idiot, so Megatron kept his mouth shut and turned into the corridor that, according to the map, was supposed to lead to the stairs. 

“Oh, my goodness.” Megatron froze at the sound of a strange voice. “Did the lights just go out?”

“What do you think it means?” That was—there was a child down here? The walls had heating pipes running through them, infrared was blurring together. Megatron switched to night vision, revealing two shapes sitting on the floor. One of them was very small.

“I don’t know. The power’s still on. Hm.” There was the sound of tapping. “That’s very strange. It says I’m not allowed.”

“I thought you were allowed to do everything.”

“Yes, that’s why it’s very strange—oh. Hello.” The taller person looked up at him. “Are you here—”

The stranger must have had night vision enabled too. Megatron could see when he noticed the gun. 

“Oh.” The stranger stood up slowly, hands held out at his sides, palms down. “Rodimus. You need to be quiet for a minute, okay?”

“I don’t—” Megatron holstered his gun. “I don’t hurt children.”

“Children?” There didn’t seem to be speakers down here. Optimus’s voice played out of Megatron’s comm setup. “Megatron, what children?”

“There’s a child down here.” The child—Rodimus, apparently—had scrambled to his feet. His head didn’t even reach Megatron’s waist.

“I’m Rung,” the stranger said, still keeping his hands in a non-threatening position. “I work in information technology. Rodimus and I were just down here to look at the computers. You’re—Megatron? The speechwriter?”

“Among other things.” Megatron rubbed at the bridge of his nose. He wasn’t supposed to handle non-combatants. This was someone else’s job for a reason. “Optimus. Please turn the lights back on.”

The lights came back on, slowly. Megatron could see Rodimus reach up to tug at Rung’s shirt. He was wearing a tiny helmet with a large black visor that completely obscured his face. “’S been a minute. I thought I was Optimus.” 

“No, dear,” Rung murmured. “You’re you. Optimus is just someone who used to live here, who was a lot like you.”

“Really?” Rodimus seemed fascinated by this. “How much like me?”

Megatron had a feeling the answer, on a purely genetic level, was completely. He looked at Rung. “How old is he?”

“He’s only five,” Rung said, softly.

“I’m five and a half!” Rodimus complained. 

“Five and a half.” Optimus had apparently gotten access to Rung’s laptop, since his voice was coming out of the speakers there now. “Recommended caretaking framework: intense stimulation. Limited contact to avoid imprinting. Interactions targeted to focus on cognitive development. Social behaviors encouraged within defined parameters. Hello, Rung. I remember you. You had candy.”

“Hello, Op—” Rung paused and pulled off the thickest pair of spectacles Megatron had ever seen, cleaning them against his shirt. “Optimus. Are you in full immersion?”

"Rung.” Rodimus tugged on the back of Rung’s shirt again, tone creeping into a confused whine. “What’s happening?”

Megatron could sympathize.

At least the lights were on now. Megatron wasn’t squinting at the map, anymore, either, because Rung had listened to Optimus be evasive about his location for roughly five seconds before keying something in, saying “Ah, initial access point in room L12,” and setting off with a purpose that looked like he knew exactly where he was going. Rodimus had huffed and trotted off after him, and Megatron had followed because he didn’t know what else to do.

“Are you a guard?” Rodimus had given up pestering Rung for answers, and seemed to regard Megatron as his new watcher. “You don’t look like a guard.”

“I’m not a guard.” 

“Then why do you have a gun?”

“Because I know how to use it. Why do you have a helmet?”

“‘Cause Sentinel says I’m supposed to. Can I have a gun?”

Megatron answered Rodimus’s questions all the way up two flights of stairs (no guns until Rodimus was big enough to use them; Megatron was dirty because he’d been outside and it was raining; he was here to look for his friend) and into the hallway. 

“Optimus is your friend?” This sublevel was cleaner than the computer hallways, tile floors and scrubbed walls. Rodimus was trailing one hand along them, leaving dusty smudges at the height of Megatron’s knees.

“Yes. He is.” Megatron didn’t really want to get into the ‘engaged’ thing, especially with a five-year-old.

“I’m supposed to be a replacement for Optimus,” Rodimus informed him. Megatron’s fists clenched. 

“I was supposed to spend my entire life digging in the darkness so other people could be rich.” Megatron looked down at Rodimus's helmet, visor black and blank and tipped up like a solar panel. “What you are supposed to do means nothing. You must make your own choices.”

Rodimus fell behind for a moment. Megatron heard something clatter, and when he looked back, Rodimus was running on little legs to catch up, head bare. 

He looked like Optimus must have looked at his age, face round and eyes bright. Megatron stopped and waited for him.

Rodimus snuck a look up, and when Megatron just nodded at him, he beamed. They started walking together, following Rung around the next corner.

“What’s that stuff on the floor?”

“…That’s blood. Don’t touch it.” Megatron was struck by the thought that he should, possibly, have killed Sentinel slower. 

The trail of blood, once they found it, led directly to a room marked with a number 12. Rung was standing in the doorway, his hands up, using his calming voice again.

“—here to hurt anyone.”

“And I’m telling you that no one’s coming in here until we see a medic. One of ours.” Jazz. This was the right room, then. 

“Jazz—” Optimus’s voice was louder, now. He must have found a speaker.

“You be quiet. I ain’t talking to you until you fix whatever you did to my comms.”

“Jazz, stand down,” Megatron ordered, stepping up behind Rung. Jazz was standing on the other side of the doorway, knife raised and ready. The electric blade sizzled where it was burning off blood. “Rung’s an ally.”

“Oh, we’re making friends today,” Jazz grumbled.

“Optimus, to no one’s surprise, has done something stupid. Rung believes he can fix it. Stand down.”

Jazz scowled, but stepped back enough for Rung to duck into the room and mutter “Oh, my.”

“You took your time getting here. Who’s the—” Megatron could see the when the recognition clicked. “Uh. What’s with the kid?”

“I was delayed. Rodimus is…” Megatron hesitated. Explanations would take too much time. “Under my protection.”

“Maybe don’t let him in here, then.” Jazz knelt down to look at Rodimus, moving loosely and speaking gently enough you could almost forget he was covered in blood. “Hey, Rodimus. I’m Jazz.”

“Hello-Jazz-nice-to-meet-you.” Rodimus rattled off the phrase like he had been trained to say it. “Can I look at your knife?”

“You used one before?” Jazz shifted out of the way and let Rodmius chatter at him about some kind of training he’d been doing. Megatron tried not to dive into the room, because he couldn’t hear Optimus in the background anymore.

It only took a few seconds to see why Jazz hadn’t wanted Rodimus in here. There was an excessive amount of blood on the floor and an arm dangling out from an opaque plastic sheet in one corner. Optimus’s body was lying very still on a neurosurgery operating chair, head in a box. Rung stood by the computer setup, laptop hooked up to the vitals monitors, while Prowl glared over his shoulder in supervision.

“Status report,” Megatron demanded.

“Optimus is alive," Prowl assured him, immediately. “Physically, he is stable. The decontaminant chamber has not been breached, but the surgeon got as far as cutting open the skull. It is safest to leave him until Ratchet can take a look. Jazz treated the other injuries before I got here."

Megatron looked at the bandages running down Optimus’s back. There was nothing in the room that would be an acceptable target for his sudden, molten anger. He let out a harsh exhale, and gestured for Prowl to continue.

“Mentally….” Prowl frowned at Rung’s screen. 

“Working on it,” Rung mumbled, shaking his head. “There’s…the system hasn’t had full administrator immersion since before Sentinel. He kept shoving off the diagnostic functions, forcing overrides—I’ve been patching things together for decades because I couldn’t fix them at the source. Optimus, if you prioritize the associative operations in the utility sectors, I can complete the follow-through for public access and get the grid back up.” 

“The grid is down?” Prowl and Megatron asked in unison.

“We’re working on it,” Rung said, mildly. 

Megatron checked the time and had a suspicious thought. “Is there a reason I haven’t received any check-ins from Soundwave in the last twenty minutes.” The timeline estimates from regicide to containing the rest of the palace had varied, but there should at least be a few more sectors locked down by now. Especially since Optimus had started zapping soldiers from the walls. 

Optimus’s voice sounded very far away. “Oh. I forgot I blocked those.”

Megatron was immediately overwhelmed with network pings, and had to take a minute to sit down and sort through  the general situation. Palace entirely clear, guard garrison had attempted a barricade but been negotiated to surrender by Ironhide, Shockwave had begun taking stock of general systems and connections—there was the notification about the grid being down, Soundwave had noted that Shockwave had sworn he had nothing to do with it and then expressed a personal opinion that Shockwave was lying—Starscream had tried to claim leadership after Megatron had been out of contact for fifteen minutes, and been zapped by a low-grade shock turret, oh, there was a picture of Starscream with all of his hair standing on end, yelling at a snickering Skywarp. 

Megatron responded with a brief summary of his own actions and reassured Soundwave he would remain available for communications. Soundwave replied quickly.

<Megatron: will return to upper levels?>

<Soon. We have plans for the palace. The situation here is still evolving.>

<Understood. Ratchet: Approaching Megatron’s location. ETA 7 minutes.>

Megatron sighed and leaned back against the wall. The sooner Ratchet was here, the sooner they could see to getting Optimus back in his body instead of having him drift through the palace systems. Not that it wasn’t convenient he could zap Starscream whenever he started getting uppity. 

The sound of shuffling alerted Megatron that he had company, before he looked down to see Rodimus creeping up next to him, staring at Optimus and the operating table with wide eyes. 

“Where’s Jazz?”

“I don’t know. He said to stay put. Who’s that?”

“That’s Optimus.”

“Oh.” Rodimus thankfully didn’t seem to be interested in the bodies on the floor. He also hadn’t stepped in any of the blood. He was just staring at Optimus’s bandaged back. “Sentinel must be really mad.” He shivered, drawing his arms in to hug himself.

Megatron definitely should have killed Sentinel slower. “Sentinel is dead.” He hadn’t gotten made it this far in life by not claiming his actions, so he added, “I killed him.”

“Oh.” Rodimus took this news very calmly. “Are you going to kill me too?”

”No.” Megatron’s fists clenched. “No.”

“Okay.” Rodimus looked up at him. “Can I have a flamethrower?”

“Why—no.”

“Sentinel said I couldn’t, but Kup said that I might be in charge after Sentinel died.”

“You’re not in charge.”

“Because I don’t have a flamethrower.”

“Because you’re five.” 

“I’m five and a half.”

Rung laughed, from his place by the computer, and Megatron realized that he and Optimus had stopped talking. 

“Were you like this, Optimus?” Megatron asked. Was this normal for children? The last time Megatron had interacted with a child, Soundwave had told him he wasn’t allowed to give Rumble and Frenzy guns until they were older. 

“No.” Optimus’s voice drifted out of the intercom in the corner. “I wanted an axe.”

Rodimus, bored with the conversation, was leaning over to look at the sheet over the bodies. “What’s that?”

Thankfully for Megatron, who wasn’t entirely sure Rodimus understood the concept of ‘dead’ yet, that was when Ratchet arrived with a screech of wheels and threw everyone except Rung out. 

Megatron spent the next hour sitting on a scavenged chair in the hallway, helping to coordinate the mopping-up and keeping an eye on Rodimus. Rodimus made that both easy and hard for the first twenty minutes by wrapping himself around Megatron’s legs and complaining.

“You’re boring. Being in charge is boring.”

“You sat with Rung while he was working,” Megatron pointed out, writing up a list of directives for Tarn. Tarn tended to need very specific directives. 

“Rung told me stuff.” Rodimus planted his elbows on Megatron’s right leg. “Can you tell me stuff?”

Megatron eyed the last entry in the list, which read Do not rip out any cybernetic implants or I will have Nickel disable your face. Without anesthetic. “….No.”

Rodimus groaned loudly and flopped back on the floor. “Boring.”

Megatron ended up giving him the smallest knife he had, which Rodimus proceeded to use to scratch designs into the walls. At least it kept him entertained. 

Ratchet’s stare of judgment when he came back out of the surgery room was both unwanted and unnecessary. 

“I showed him how to hold it,” Megatron defended. 

“You—you know what, sure, I’ll worry about it later.” He shook his head. “Cortex implant is clean of tampering, skull plate’s been replaced, and I’ve got the bone knitter running. Rung says there are only a few more processes before he can do something to disengage Optimus from the system.” Ratchet scowled, rubbing one hand over his face. “Unfortunately, one of those processes is talking Optimus into it, which means you’re up.”

Megatron sighed and pushed to his feet. “Fine. Keep an eye on Rodimus.”

Neither Ratchet nor Rodimus looked excited about this prospect, but Ratchet wheeled out into the hall and locked his brakes back against the wall, crossing his arms. Rodimus looked at Ratchet’s wheelchair, and then back down at his knife, and then back at the wheelchair.

“Kid, if you put that thing anywhere near my chair, we’re going to have a problem.”

“But I could make it look really cool.”

Megatron left them to it. 

Rung waved an absent hand at Megatron’s entry. “We’re almost done here. Just let me tie off a few lines of code and then I can give you two some privacy.”

“Thank you. Ratchet said you’re almost ready for disengagement?”

“Disengagement seems unwise,” Optimus said.

“Ratchet also said you were being recalcitrant,” Megatron told him. ”Rung?”

“The most urgent processes have been handled. The matrix is now stable enough we can bring Optimus out of immersion without the system latching on to his consciousness as a patch and destabilizing the transfer.” Rung lifted his spectacles to rub at his eyes. “In theory.”

“My body is currently under heavy sedation with a medication designed to be extended indefinitely. I can continue to operate within the system without needing to sleep. There are more repairs that need to be made. Even once they are complete, my response time as an active operator is faster than anything I can achieve with a cortex implant alone. I will be of more use to you here.”

“The immersion application of the system is designed to be brief.” This didn’t sound like the first time Rung had made this argument. Megatron could sympathize. “If the system starts to route processes around you and compensate for your presence, parts of it will have to be disabled to get you out.”

“Perhaps my removal is unnecessary.”

Megatron growled. “Optimus…”

Rung shook his head. “Don’t hold this against him. It might not even be intentional at this point. If the system has already registered Optimus's thought processes as vital to functioning, it’s going to arrange his conclusions to prioritize continued immersion.”

“I doubt it. Optimus just does this."

“This is an unprecedented situation,” Optimus protested. 

”Gygax, Optimus. I remember Gygax. You almost bled out at Gygax because you didn’t think you being injured was a relevant detail.”

“Oh dear,” Rung said. “This might be tricky, then. I can write a kick command to disconnect the network bits, but Optimus is currently the sole administrator, which means I can’t really make him do anything he doesn't want to do.”

“Fine. Optimus said he can add me as an administrator—”

Rung was shaking his head. “It would reboot the system, which I’d rather not force at this juncture. I don’t really know where Optimus is going to go.”

Megatron grabbed his temper with both hands and closed his eyes. “Rung. That privacy you mentioned…”

Rung ducked out remarkably quickly. The door slid closed behind him. 

Megatron rubbed at his head, exhaling harshly. “Optimus. You need to come out of the system.”

“I am of more use here.” Megatron glared at the camera in the corner, remembering arguments with Orion where he refused to look at Megatron like it would keep Megatron from noticing he was an idiot.

“Even if this was about you being of use to me, you’re still wrong. if only because I’m going to need Ratchet available to organize medical systems instead of down here yelling at you. Or—“ Megatron waved at the hallway. “Rodimus. You’re his legal next-of-kin, and more than that, you know what it’s like to grow up in the palace. You have a responsibility here.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before the next part, because he’d spent a very long time priding himself on not having to coerce people to follow him. He didn’t think this was all an elaborate plot by Optimus to break the engagement, but considering that Optimus had presented death as an option first…

Megatron would let him, if he asked, was the thing. If there had been another way out of this Optimus had preferred, Megatron would have agreed to it in a heartbeat. But not execution. Not this. 

Megatron had started this revolution—not alone, not when he had Soundwave and Terminus and Tarn and Starscream. But lonely. He had carried on that way for a while, too, until Orion had appeared from nowhere like he didn’t realize how miraculous he was, someone who could organize and convince people and have ideals and mean it when he told Megatron they could be better. Megatron had fought for a better world before he had Orion—before he had Optimus. He could fight for one after, if he had to.

He just didn’t want to. 

“Besides, it’s not about ‘of use.’ We had a deal, Optimus. Remember? You proposed and I accepted. You’re not backing out of it now.”

There was a silence. 

There was a long silence.

“Optimus?”

No response.

”Rung!” Megatron yelled.

Rung came back in at a run to access his computer, followed by Ratchet with Rodimus balanced on the back of his wheelchair. 

“Optimus stopped responding.” Megatron sent a ping through the palace systems, but it just told him the time and his location.

“Oh!” Rung sounded relieved. “He kicked himself, he’s out of the network.”

“I’m reading—don’t touch that—” Ratchet smacked Rodimus’s hand away from the isolation chamber. "I’m reading brain activity at normal sedation levels.” Ratchet sighed. “Finally.” 

“How long until he wakes up?” Megatron asked, pulling Rodimus away from the bed before he could try poking things and rousing Ratchet’s ire again. 

“Medical confidentiality, sorry.”

“I—“ Megatron spluttered. “We’re going to be married.”

“But you’re not yet. So out!”

Megatron made it out the door this time before Ratchet resorted to physical violence, still carrying Rodimus, who squirmed around to look up at him.

“What’s married?”

Megatron decided that yes, he did want revenge for this. “Ask Ratchet the next time you see him."

The next few days went by in a blur. 

Megatron did an excessive amount of paperwork, something that hadn’t been in his first few dreams of revolution but had become an unfortunate constant of his life in the past few years. To make for an exciting change, his problem was now too many resources instead of too few, especially after Mirage introduced him to a particularly devious sleight-of-hand with the royal protocol. 

(“Cancel taxes for the year? Mirage, why should I care about the noble sensibilities—“

“A gesture of generosity, to prove you harbor no ill-will against them—”

“—except I do harbor ill-will against them—”

“—and they can return that generosity by providing you with sizable gifts on the occasion of your wedding. Even greater than the taxes they would have otherwise paid.”

“…These people are insane.”

“There’s also a precedent for making them pay Optimus’s dowry.”

“He has a dowry?”)

Megatron would have liked to ask Optimus some of this himself—or at least to laugh at him about it. He could imagine Optimus staring over Megatron's shoulder, refusing to meet his eyes like Optimus's mouth wasn’t twitching because he had never mastered a poker face. And then he would come out with a dry, sarcastic remark that would surprise Megatron into laughing and—

Ratchet had yet to release Optimus from the medical wing. Megatron still wasn’t allowed in. 

He was doing an excessive amount of paperwork. 

He was also, initially, keeping an eye on Rodimus, because it took the combined adults of the rebellion two days to realize that all the people who were supposed to watch him had either been paid to stay home for a few days, arrested in the collective surrender of the guard, or killed in the takeover of the Palace. Instead of bringing this up, Rodimus just went where he wanted, and where he wanted to be was apparently right next to Megatron. The nice shiny desk Megatron had appropriated for all his excessive amounts of paperwork got a lot of new abstract etchings. At least until Ironhide came back from his third day interviewing the surrendered guards with a wiry old man chewing on a cigar, who took one look at Rodimus standing on the back of Megatron’s chair and barked “Rod! No climbing on the furniture.”

“Megatron said I could!” Rodimus protested.

“I didn’t, actually." Megatron, who had yet to successfully make Rodimus stop doing anything he wanted to do, watched in astonishment as he climbed down off the chair and trotted over to—an inquiry of the palace network identified him as I0132, Kup—talking a mile a minute. 

Kup listened to him, going "Hm," at regular intervals, and when Rodimus paused for breath mentioned “Rung’s in the library. Said he’d show you how to make racecars on the holotable.”

Rodimus went out the door like a shot. Kup folded his arms, stared at Megatron, and said “Heard a lot about you. You seem like you’ve got your head on straight. But if you hurt that kid, I’ll make sure it’s the last thing you ever do.”

Megatron thought of Rodimus instantly connecting Optimus’s bandaged back to Sentinel, looked at where Kup’s prosthetic fingers were clamped tight against his arm, and said, “I won’t.”

“Good.” Kup nodded once before following Rodimus out. 

Megatron assumed that when Optimus got out of the medbay, Ratchet would tell him. In retrospect, he didn’t know why he assumed that, since Ratchet seemed mad at him these days for reasons he couldn’t quite understand. So when the door opened during a late night of paperwork, he said, automatically, “Starscream, if you say one word about the wedding, I will throw you out a window.”

“Has he really been that bad?”

Megatron’s reflexes were dulled by a lack of sleep, so it took him a moment to process that yes, that was Optimus’s voice, warm and dry and steady. He jerked his head up, blinking at Optimus in the doorway. 

“You have…no idea,” he managed, finally. “I would tell him he could handle it all himself, except I think he’d make it all terrible just to spite me.”

“Hm.” Optimus was frowning. He looked wonderful. “Megatron, you haven’t been sleeping in that chair, have you?”

“No,” said Megatron, who had been taking catnaps on the floor behind his desk. 

Optimus sighed, and then flicked his fingers. The console Megatron had hooked his datapad into flickered in a ‘save’ pattern before going dark. 

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Megatron said, blinking at his blank screen. 

“I can do a lot of things now,” Optimus agreed. “Come on. You should go to bed.”

Befuddled, Megatron ended up following Optimus to the back hallway of the second floor of the palace, to a set of rooms with a large bed. “Is this—no one else is using this?” Megatron had ended up napping on the floor less because he especially wanted to, and more because by the time he had gotten around to actually looking for a bed most of them were occupied by already sleeping revolutionaries. 

“They aren’t really convenient to anything,” Optimus admitted. He grabbed Megatron’s upper arm and steered them both towards the bed. “And I found out in a repair sweep that the door code got deleted a few years ago, so they weren't open until I fixed it.”

“Ah.” Megatron sat down with a thump on neatly made blankets, reaching for his boot ties. it took a few tries, but he got both boots off, and collapsed onto his back, taking a deep breath. The bed smelled like safety. And dust. Safe dust. He’d smelled worse. Bed. Optimus. Far away from problems. Time for sleep.

“Get some sleep,” said Optimus, and his voice was unacceptably far away. Megatron tilted up his head and frowned in Optimus’s direction. 

“You’re leaving? Don’t you need to sleep?”

“I just got out of the medbay. I’ve had a lot of sleep.” Optimus sounded like he was trying to joke and not quite making it. “I’ll keep an eye on things while you’re out.”

Megatron trusted Optimus to do that. He closed his eyes and relaxed, letting sleep pull him away. “..alright.”

The late-night encounter was the most Megatron saw of Optimus for the next several days. There was a great deal of work to be done very quickly, and he and Optimus were suddenly handling opposing shifts. Half the time, when Megatron actually had a moment where he wasn’t doing anything else and wanted to see Optimus, Optimus was asleep somewhere. A quarter of the time they were somewhere public and other people quickly developed urgent concerns. A quarter of the time, Megatron opened up a message window, considered how best to reach out, and then grew disgusted with his own indecision and closed it. 

Most of the things that needed to be handled by the palace network were still being shunted to Optimus or Rung. Megatron had yet to be added as an administrator, since it was agreed that anything that would cause a reboot of the power grid was best handled publicly, with a great deal of ceremony and advance notice so people knew it was intentional, after all the backup generators had been checked.  

So, of course, they were adding it into the protocol of the wedding and holding the whole thing in a week. Because Megatron’s entire command staff had united to torture him about this one thing. 

The worst part was they didn’t even need to unite. They just all had to refuse to stop Starscream. 

“—approve the seating arrangements, I sent them to you six hours ago—”

Megatron groaned, thumping his head against his desk. “Approved, approved, approved. I don’t care, Starscream. As long as there’s enough food for everyone and enough alcohol to get me drunk off my feet—”

“There will be, you just can’t have any.” Starscream sounded a little too spiteful as he swiped through things on his pad.

“You’re….kidding me.”

“Rung said no neuralgesics for you for at least seventy-two hours after the integration. I would let you rot your brain and take the throne myself, but I don’t have the time to wait out the mourning period we would need to have while Optimus weeps over your body.” His tone went from smug to grudging. “I didn’t think you had it in you to actually do something, but now you’ve got half the city sighing over how romantic it is that you’ve been slipping into his quarters.”

“I’ve been what.”

“You…” Starscream paused. “You’ve been sleeping in his quarters. The ones on the second level? Back hallway?”

“Those are…his quarters.” Generally, by the time Megatron made it to bed, all he wanted to do was sleep. He’d hauled his clothes locker up out of the delivery from their last base and shoved it at the foot of the bed so he could change every other day. That was the extent of his moving in. He couldn’t have described anything else in the rooms if you held a gun to his head, but his traitorous brain was pulling up the reminder that every time he lay down in the bed the last thing he processed before sleeping was that it smelled…safe. 

“You didn’t. Know?”

“He found out I’d been sleeping in here and said they were available,” Megatron muttered, discreetly pulling the information up on his eyescreens to confirm, and yes, Optimus had registered that he was sleeping there in Ironhide and Drift’s security directory. “It’s not like he and I have had the chance to talk lately.”

There was an ominous cracking sound, and Megatron dismissed his screens to see that Starscream was clenching the datapad hard enough to crack it.

“How are you in charge of this?” Starscream yelled at him. “You’re an idiot!"

“Like you’re one to talk!” Megatron shouted back, sinking his teeth into his first real chance to raise his voice in days. 

They shouted at each other for several very relieving minutes, until finally Starscream hissed “I’m making you wear heels,” and stalked out.

Megatron threw a datapad at the door behind him and took a vicious satisfaction in its impact. 

The relief of having vented some anger got Megatron back to work until there was a knock at the door. 

Megatron waited for whoever it was to just walk in, as usual, but when there was no response he just said “Come in?”

The door swished open and Rodimus staggered in, working very hard to balance under the weight of a wide tray with a couple of plates of food on it. Kup stood behind him, looking amused and resigned.

Megatron stood, intending to help before the dishes could topple onto the floor, but Rodimus protested “I can do it!”

He almost toppled the tray jerking away, so Megatron just raised his hands and sat back. 

“Is this for me?” Megatron asked, after Rodimus had managed to successfully get the tray onto his desk. 

“This one’s for you, and this one’s for me, and Kup doesn’t get one because he doesn’t eat raisins,” Rodimus explained.

Kup just shrugged when Megatron looked at him. “I don’t. They’re all wrinkly.”

“Right.” It was about time for Megatron to be eating anyways, so he cleared away his reports and took the dish. “Thank you, Rodimus.”

Rodimus nodded, holding his own food and watching Megatron eat. 

“So, are you not mad anymore?” Rodimus asked when the bowl was half empty.

I…” Megatron paused. “I’m not mad, no.”

“Good.” Rodimus immediately started eating his own meal, so the rest of his words came out muffled. “I wash gonna come shee you, and then you were shouting, an’ Optimush shaid it wash prolly jusht—“

“Chew your food, Rod,” Kup admonished.

Rodimus swallowed his mouthful before going on. “—because you were hungry. So I got you some food.”

“He was….concerned,” Kup told Megatron. His tone was weighted with censure.

“Yes, well…” Megatron went back to eating, squashing a pang of guilt. “Optimus is often right.” And often fixing problems even before Megatron knew about them. Like this. He groped for a way to continue the conversation. “You’ve been talking to him, then?”

“Uh-huh. He tells me stuff about the palace. He’s nice. Ratchet says you’re getting married because you’re both idiots, but I think it’s smart.”

“….What did Ratchet say?”

Rodimus shrugged. “I asked him what married meant and he said it meant that you were both idiots who can’t talk about your feelings, so I asked Drift and he said it was about bonding in the eyes of the universe’s will, and then Ratchet started yelling so I left.” He paused to eat another bite. “Kup says people get married because they like each other and want someone to stick around. Can I marry you?"

“No.” Megatron had to suppress a laugh. “I can only handle one marriage right now.”

“But you’re gonna stay, right?”

“Yes. I told you, I’m in charge now, and when I marry Optimus, we’ll both be in charge.”

Kup snorted. “Ain’t that supposed to be the other way around?”

“Right of conquest,” Megatron grumbled. 

“I’ll say,” Kup muttered, and Megatron choked on his next bite. 

Megatron had known since the beginning what this wedding was going to entail. Even if he hadn’t, between Starscream’s grumbling and other people’s jokes, he would have gotten a clue by the time of the wedding itself. So there was absolutely no excuse for why he managed to get all the way through the day of the wedding, all the way up through the bulk of the ceremony, to the point where Optimus was offering him a DNA reader to lock in his neural connection to the network before he abruptly realized that he could suddenly think about absolutely nothing except how much he should not think about having sex with Optimus. 

Megatron hated his life. He really did. 

A soft ping on his eyescreen pulled him out of it. It was from Optimus, reading <It’s all right. You don’t have to be scared.>

Megatron swiped that out of the way, staring at Optimus’s face, which was soft in a way that made his insides clench. 

“I’m not,” he hissed, and then, realizing how harsh it sounded, tried to soften it by muttering, “I trust you.”

He made himself think about how much his feet hurt in these stupid shoes, instead, before jabbing his hand at the needle. 

The system tasted his blood and accepted it with a soft chime, slotting him into the open administrator position. Megatron had some warning about this, so he locked his knees and braced for the hit. 

None came. The system dropped over his body as natural as breathing—like waking up from a dream to remember he had a sense of smell. There were 489 people in this room, only 42 of them with Palace ID chips—getting those installed seemed a lot more urgent to Megatron now that he had the nagging sense of there being people his biological brain knew were his, but his new digital capacity had organized as ‘external personnel, to be monitored.’ An inquiring window asked if he wanted to neutralize the intruders with the shock turrets.

<No! Mine>

There was the faint sense of a laugh down a channel he hadn’t even realized was open. <Ours,> Optimus pointed out, gently.

<Ours,> Megatron conceded, drawing up the feed of the receiving hall’s security camera and taking a quick capture of the crowd. He highlighted Ratchet’s face and sent it over to Optimus. <You can keep him to yourself>

This time, the sense of a laugh was strong, and Megatron let it warm him while he ran through other system checks. Outer walls, security grid, power grid coming back online, weaknesses, requests—

Ah. Of highest priority in the queue was a ping from his fellow administrator, requesting his attention. 

Right. They were still in the middle of this lunatic ceremony. 

Megatron roughly cleared all the windows from his eyescreens to deal with later, and found himself looking down at Optimus—not too far down, since Optimus had earned enough of Starscream’s wrath to wind up in heels as well, but far enough down that Optimus had to hook a hand around the back of Megatron’s neck to pull him down into a light kiss. 

Because Megatron had forgotten that was happening. Because he was an idiot. His only redeeming action was that he managed not to trip over himself when he bent into it.

Everyone was so relieved to have an excuse to party that Megatron had to retain very little coherency as the crowd brought out tables and cleared a dance floor. He just held onto Optimus’s head, accepted various congratulations, and poked at the network unfolding in the back of his head like Soundwave with a fresh stream of data. Or like he would have chipped out a vein found at the beginning of his shift, as a miner, as quickly as he could without damaging the precious shiny stuff. There were so many new things to poke. 

He was vaguely aware that Optimus was watching the whole time, keeping an eye on things, so he felt more comfortable poking things for the sake of poking them. Like the thread of connection from user ∆0001, which didn’t feel like any of the other—

<An android?> It took him a moment to parse the strange format of that extension, including a moment of looking through the eyes of someone sitting at another table. It gave him a nice view of himself and Optimus, sitting next to each other—he looked more like he was staring out over the hall than spacing out, fortunately, but Optimus looked…

Optimus looked like he was in love. 

The owner of the eyes quickly and politely shunted him out, and Megatron messaged Optimus again, just a long string of question marks. 

<Ah, yes. Rung.>

<Rung is an android.>

<Older than the Palace. It’s why he manages the network. He’s sensitive about it, so don’t go spreading it around.>

Megatron decided that looking at the security camera views of the hall would be a better use of his time than dealing with that particular conundrum. 

If he just happened to choose a selection of cameras that let him look at Optimus’s face to try and figure out what was going on here, that was nobody’s business but his. 

And Optimus’s, apparently, because he accessed the security cameras not long after Megatron had spent a minute trying to analyze his facial expressions. Megatron got to watch him go through a journey from looking like…well, someone on his wedding day, to shocked, to blank. 

<…Optimus?>

The helmet Optimus had been wearing for the day—apparently a gift from Ratchet—had a mask that could be closed over Optimus’s lower face. It had been open since they had walked into the ceremony together, but as Megatron watched, the two halves of the mask slid together. Optimus’s expression was locked away. He was looking anywhere except at Megatron. 

Megatron drew himself out of the security cameras with conscious effort, remembering how it felt to have a body, and reached for Optimus’s hand under the table. 

Optimus didn’t pull away, but he still wasn’t looking at Megatron. 

<I think Starscream has….something planned, for a send-off.> Megatron sent. Everyone knew this party was as much or more for the rest of the revolutionaries than it was for the two of them. <I would prefer to leave before then, if you are amenable.>

<I am,> Optimus said, and that was all that passed between them as they waited for a loud enough song that they could slip out of the back door of the receiving hall without anyone stopping them. 

Their hands never let go. 

Moving through the palace felt different now. Megatron was aware, as they passed through the halls, of every connection point, every turret, every light switch. They flickered in his vision like seeing stars for the first time, understanding the wish of constellations. The whole thing felt like a poem, one long and glorious rhythm suggesting a picture of something too big and too real to be seen as anything except itself. 

It felt like a dream. It felt like waking up. It felt like Optimus’s hand against his own, leading him through the dark corridors lanced with invisible lights, was the only real thing in the universe. 

Well, that and the furious argument they were having over a private channel.

<I don’t understand. Do you not want me to look at you?>

<You can do what you want, it’s fine.>

<It’s not fine, Optimus, do you trust me or not?>

<I do.> Optimus’s response snapped like an electric shock. <Of course I trust you, I always trust you—> He paused, and then amended that to <I usually trust you> 

<Usually.> Megatron would love to dive into that tidbit, but Optimus changed the subject. 

<I trust you, I just—didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.>

<Uncomfortable.> Megatron’s fingers tightened around Optimus. <I was the one staring at you.>

A tinge of discomfort suffused down the connection, like fine sand slipping into Megatron’s boots. <You were. I thought it was because…I was doing something you didn’t like.>

<I.> Megatron made himself relax his grip as they reached the top of the stairs. <I just like looking at you, alright? I like your face. I like the expressions you make. I always have.> And then, because he couldn’t help himself, <Usually? You usually trust me? You put me in your bed.>

<Because I trust you to do everything except take care of yourself. I checked the security feeds. You were sleeping on the floor.>

<Was that the only reason?>

Optimus didn’t respond, and a few steps later they reached the room where they had been sharing a bed for two weeks without ever being in it at the same time. Megatron held back as Optimus reached for the door. 

“Optimus.”

Optimus paused as the door slid open. “I…” His voice was muffled by the mask. “I can find somewhere else to sleep. If you don’t want me here tonight.”

Megatron was suddenly so tired of this dance, this uneasy rhythm they had built where Optimus would rather die than talk about his feelings and Megatron would let him. “I didn’t say that. Optimus. I want to be with you. I want you to stand beside me, in everything I do. But I…” He drew Optimus’s hand closer, studying the living miracle of joint and bone and warmth. “I won’t go where you won’t have me.”

“Megatron?” Optimus sounded confused. Dammit.

Megatron exhaled, roughly, and made his best attempt at breaking down all of his enormous emotions into small words. “I love you, and you’re an idiot.”

Optimus’s hand abruptly tightened, and there was a soft clanking sound. Megatron opened his eyes—when had he closed them?—to see that Optimus’s mask was open again. His mouth was caught in an expression Megatron had never seen on Optimus’s face before, and he thought he knew all of them. 

“I love you, and I would follow you anywhere you take me,” Optimus said, quietly. “I just—spent a long time. Thinking kings couldn’t love people. I thought following you, even to here, would be enough, if I couldn’t have. That.”

Megatron took a step forward, bringing them together in the doorway and leaning down to press his forehead against Optimus’s. “I spent a long time thinking about how I would tear down the throne for all the harm it had done. I would do it again, for you. In an instant. Slag the consequences.” He put together a memory loop, in reverse, all the things that Optimus had given him to ask for his trust. And he added things he remembered—late nights doing work together, the way Optimus’s eyes crinkled up when he let himself laugh, hacking their way through a system together and holding up each other’s weak points, how it felt to feel like he was swaying towards lines because crossing them couldn’t really matter as much as he feared it did only to run up against the brilliant, furious bulwark of a demand he be better.

Megatron pressed his forehead against Optimus and let the file send, feeling the ripple of reactions in his facial muscles. When Optimus had been still and quiet for a long moment, Megatron asked, softly, “May I kiss you again? I don’t think I got it right, the first time.”

“Alright,” Optimus said, and there was something warm in it, so Megatron leaned in without fear. 

It took them both a long, glorious minute to realize that they probably shouldn’t be kissing in the doorway, so they stumbled in together, still holding hands and choking down laughs like they were trying to get away with something. The new sense at the back of Megatron’s mind flickered with the awareness that ƒ2739 and an unidentified person were moving into the corridor, taking up guard positions outside the door.

Megatron fell into a bed that smelled like safety with Optimus next to him, alive and laughing, and thought about the paper pad buried in his clothes locker, filled with scribblings from a frantic night where he tried to reconcile what any of this, all of this, could possibly mean. He wanted to show Optimus. He wanted to share all of this with him.

Except when he turned his head to the side to say so, Optimus was looking at him in the low light, face warm and open and entirely his own. 

Megatron reached for him, setting a reminder in the network to mention it tomorrow. They would have time. Right now, he wanted to be here.