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Being as it was a somewhat... clandestine relationship, Orion didn’t get to see Shockwave as often as he would’ve liked. He didn’t mind too much though, the stretches of time spent apart only made the nights they could spend together all the sweeter, his favourite Senator’s hands on his plating, lips chasing his after a cube or few of highgrade that Shockwave refused to name so Orion couldn’t protest the cost. It was a sweet thing, one which Shockwave sprinkled liberally with magnesium flakes and Orion cut with copper shavings. He’d let slip, just the once, that it wasn’t his favourite highgrade for its flavour or potency, but for where it was made. The same city he hailed from, before he became a Senator.
Orion had never managed to tease that information out of him, though the lilting drawl that eclipsed his crisp Iaconian accent when he was overcharged spoke to it being one of the old cities, something northern. Accents from the southern hemisphere tended to be harsher on the consonants, though the old torus cities down there had their own ancient dialectal quirks retained from the days of Primal Vernacular. If he put his processor to it he probably could figure it out, but it had always seemed like a violation of Shockwave’s privacy, somehow, to go digging in a past he’d never shared a word of.
Not that it mattered now, anyways. Orion sighed heavily and tapped the calendar alert projected from his forearm which had dragged him from recharge. They’d been supposed to meet today, a plan set before the Basilica. Before the false matrix. Before Shockwave gave himself up to save the rest of them and lost everything for it.
Delete Event?
His finger hovered over the button for one moment, two. The room he was sharing with Roller was silent, save for their vents and the quiet shift of gears as Roller shifted in recharge. Orion groaned softly and pushed himself upright, finials low as he shuffled out into the hall. The building was silent, so he bypassed the shabby little common room and headed outside. The hotspot glimmered in the moonlight, and when Orion looked up he found a scattering of stars which managed to peek through the light pollution. Shockwave had loved the stars, had confided once in him that there were times when his spark ached to be out in the black, away from the petty politics of Iacon, with no wind under his wings that Orion would recognise as such.
He hadn’t known, the last time he slipped into Shockwave’s pretty highrise habsuite, that it would be the last. That he would never again have a chance to hold that graceful waist close as Shockwave’s skilled glossa slipped between his lips. If he had known... he could have said goodbye. Could have said any of the hundred things he’d never found the strength to voice. Could have asked where Shockwave was from, so that he would know where to go to mourn him.
Orion pulled up the calendar alert, and archived it in his deepest databanks, the ones which he never overwrote or deleted. He hadn’t been able to say goodbye, but that didn’t mean he would forget. Some places on Cybertron, he recalled dimly from one of Shockwave’s overcharged tangents, held the belief that a mech only truly died when they were forgotten. Places like Nyon, which was probably the closest city to them right now. Shockwave, his Shockwave, had asked to be remembered as he was. Even if he was the only one who heeded those words, Orion would not let the kind-sparked Senator be forgotten.