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The servo that was placed gently over his, where he’d placed it on Optimus Prime’s middle, suddenly tightened.
Megatron blinked his optics and lifted his helm from the mesh pillow, feeling groggy, trying to blink away the deep-seated exhaustion he felt in his systems after having been up for most of the past Earth day, going on missions with GHOST that he refused to let Optimus go on.
Optimus was close to emergence. There was no hard deadline that they knew of, as they didn’t have Ratchet nearby to do a thorough monitoring of Optimus’s delicate condition. The best they had was Wheeljack, and even though he’d gone through more than his fair share of crash-courses with Ratchet on the topic of field medicine and quick fixes - mostly on the battlefield as someone was about to deactivate - not even he was well-versed in what to do when a bot was carrying, as it was something that hadn’t happened in quite some time. The best guess that Wheeljack had been able to give them was that it would be sometime in the snowy time at the start of another human calendar year.
Bumblebee had been the last one, to their knowledge. Well, at least prior to the appearance of the Terrans.
“I felt something,” Optimus said in a voice soft, stricken, tinged with fear that was unlike the image he tried to project as the Prime. “Like something was pulling at my forge.”
Pulling . That had been one of the things to look out for, they’d been told through Wheeljack finding some old literature about the process of carrying. A pulling sensation.
“Were you in recharge?” Megatron managed to ask, resetting his vocalizer.
“I was,” Optimus replied, shifting how he lay in the berth so he was on his back instead of on his side with his back to Megatron’s front. “And it woke me up.”
That wasn’t saying too much, as Optimus was a light sleeper, but Megatron didn’t say that to his mate. He sat up and held his servo out to Optimus, letting the Prime grab onto it as an anchor. “Have you done a scan on your systems?”
Optimus’s optics blinked and he nodded. “It’s only fifty-percent completed. It will be a few more moments.”
Megatron faintly hoped that it was a false alarm. Maybe it was some other muscle cable near Optimus’s forge that had twisted itself or gotten pulled, and perhaps Optimus had mistaken it for the start of emergence.
Yes. That had to be it. Megatron hoped it was. He couldn’t believe he was even entertaining the thought, but he would have felt so much better about their - Optimus’s - delicate situation if Ratchet was there with them. What he wouldn’t give to have Ratchet throw a wrench at his helm and yell at him for getting close enough to Optimus to spark him up.
He then heard the sound of Optimus’s intakes hitching. Megatron immediately went to his mate’s side and held his servo as Optimus gasped through the pain he was feeling.
The look on Optimus’s face made Megatron’s spark twinge. How he hated to see his mate in such pain.
“It’s done,” Optimus grit out. “It’s emergence. That’s what my scans are saying.”
“It wasn’t a pulled cable?”
The Prime gave him a strange look and shook his helm. Then he gasped, leaning forward and pressing his palms against his side. He grit his dentae, breathing out slowly as Megatron held onto him. After a few moments, Optimus then said, “It happened again.” He straightened his posture, and then a look of fear dawned on his faceplates as he said, softly, “I think we should contact Wheeljack.”
.-.-.
“Looking at this stuff,” Wheeljack drawled as the exam finished up, after he snuck into the hangar with a kit of rudimentary medical supplies, smacking the scanning instrument in one servo against the palm of his other servo, “couldn’t be more confusing if it tried. Would be nice if it just gave me a solid yes or no.”
“But you were able to decipher what it’s trying to say, were you?” Megatron asked, his voice tinged with the twin emotions of worry and reproach.
Wheeljack gave a scoff. “Eventually. After cross-checking old notes Ratchet left with me. Optimus is about twenty percent dilated, and the bit’s at least in the right position. If they were in the wrong position, that would be another problem to deal with. I don’t exactly have the proper tools to cut him open and extract the bitlet right from the forge.”
Megatron thanked Primus for that. He and Optimus already had enough on their plate without their sparkling adding even further to it.
On the berth, Optimus made an audible wincing noise and drew his optical ridges together in concern. “Thank Primus that she’s not making this even more difficult.”
“You’re only twenty percent dilated. There’s more time for her to make it hard in the next eighty percent you have until you can start pushing.”
Megatron’s plating flared out a little bit to expel hot air from his vents and he fixed a stern glare on the engineer. “Don’t jinx it, Wheeljack.”
“Well then,” came Elita’s voice, her form sneaking into the private hangar as if she were on a mission; it was only by the grace of government bureaucracy that footprints in the heavy snow wouldn’t give her away, as the base cleared the fallen snow every night. “I had to duck a lot of security cameras on the way here. Lucky for us that they don’t record audio so they shouldn’t have caught my footfalls. So is it happening, finally?”
“Finally?” Optimus asked incredulously, laughing before his intakes hitched and he had to tighten his grip on Megatron’s servo, breathing out as the contraction ebbed away. “What do you mean by finally? I believe I only hit the minimum required carriage timeline for a healthy sparkling just a few solar cycles ago, but there was no definitive date mentioned.”
“Yeah and do you know how long it feels to us too?” Wheeljack asked, trying to hide a mischievous smirk as he showed Elita, his assistant for the night, the results of the scans he’d just finished doing on Optimus. “We could use a sparkling for some excitement around here.”
Optimus dropped the back of his helm down to the mesh pillow and looked right up at the ceiling, the very dim lights of the hangar creating little stars in his visual field. Then Megatron’s face loomed in view, and Optimus gave his mate a smile and leaned up to kiss him.
“Have you two thought about how to break this news to, well, everyone?” Elita asked, noticing the silence that had fallen over them. She and Wheeljack were the only ones that knew, and as of the last time she’d asked them - which had been only last week - they hadn’t figured something out.
“I’m afraid to.”
“Optimus, you can’t keep a sparkling hidden forever,” Elita said, coming over to the side of the berth and crouching down next to him and to Megatron, who was standing over both of them now. “Say this goes on for longer than tonight. Megatron can’t cover for you for long. And even if it ends tonight and no one hears a sparkling cry, you can’t keep her here all her life.”
“We know this well, Elita,” Optimus sighed. “We know. It’s just… it’s never been the right time to say something.”
There was a pitying look on his second-in-command’s face as her shoulder struts drooped, and she hung her head for a moment to stare at the floor, and then she stood up, resuming her full height. “I know. I’m just not looking forward to the fallout you and Megatron will have to deal with, when it comes.”
This time Megatron spoke up. “We will be the ones to deal with it, Elita. Let us handle it when the moment comes.”
Her faceplates were pulled into an expression of doubt, but she sighed and raised her servos. “Fine. I’ll drop it.”
“Please do,” Optimus said as he turned over onto his front on the berth, on his servos and knees, and gave a shaky breath. “Right now my priority is getting this one out. I can’t spare a thought for GHOST and how they might react.”
Truthfully, he’d thought of it before, and he was afraid of how they would react. His relationship with the higher ups within the organization, with Agent Croft in particular, was on thin ice at its best. Whenever he spoke with her, it was like he needed to traverse a tightrope, never knowing what might set her off and make her yank the rope out from under him, sending him tumbling. The arrival of a sparkling would undoubtedly send her over the edge.
A small part of his processor fed him a terrible thought - that Agent Croft would find a way to hold him and Megatron down and deactivate them, but not before forcing them to watch as GHOST agents took their sparkling away, to have experiments done on her.
The thought of it made his spark churn and his spark flare with fury. He shook it off and reached out for Megatron’s servo, holding it tightly in his and squeezing it.
Megatron sat on the ground next to the berth that he was lying down on, gently caressing the back of Optimus’s servo with his thumb.
In Megatron’s red optics, he could see the same fear. For them, for their little one.
.-.-.
There were tears in Optimus’s stunning blue optics as he reached with one servo for him, holding the other one over his chassis, over his spark.
“Megatron. I’ve… I think our spark merge was successful.”
Megatron blinked optics he hadn’t been aware that he’d closed, shaking him out of the memory of Optimus telling him that he was sparked, carrying, and the fear in his beautiful blue optics. He checked his internal chronometer, and saw that it was getting close to five AM.
Wheeljack was curled up in an opposite corner, succumbing to the urge to sleep. Optimus had told Megatron to leave him be, right before Optimus had given into his own need for sleep. Every so often Optimus gave a groan and stirred, no doubt the result of more intense contractions.
Elita, ever vigilant, was at the front door. There was a soft whirring noise emanating from her, which Megatron knew meant that she was doing a proximity scan. She seemed to notice that one of the three other bots in the room was awake, and she stretched her arms skyward. “I could be lifting trucks right now,” she mused.
Megatron gave her a smile. “Thank you for keeping watch this time, Elita.”
“Hmm. Don’t mention it. Someone had to, anyway.” She crossed her arms over her chassis and turned to face him. “Let’s hope she comes soon, before six and the humans start rising.”
“Optimus was at sixty-percent before I closed my optics,” Megatron said, passing a servo over his optics and getting to his pedes. “I doubt he’s-”
Right before Megatron could say something that would cause him to put his pedes in his mouth, Optimus jerked awake with a harsh cry that he then stifled by putting his servos over his mouth, biting down on his digits. Wheeljack immediately woke as well and Megatron rushed to his mate’s side, trying to calm him down, taking him into his arms and stroking up and down his sides as Optimus leaned into his chassis and clung to him for dear life.
“Well I’ll… hang on, let me scan again.”
“What is it, Wheeljack?” Megatron asked, fear in his spark.
“This thing is saying he’s at ninety percent. Hang on.”
.-.-.
His armor rattled on his frame as he tried to steady his breathing. His systems were pinging him, telling him that the sparkling was also in distress, which he could already tell by the way she was furiously kicking at his intakes. Wheeljack assured him it was just the stress of his frame trying to eject her, especially since he’d shot to ninety percent in what was probably record time, and nothing medically wrong with her.
Prior to tonight, his frame had shown barely any trace of his carriage. Only those in the know knew what to look for, especially Megatron as he liked to put his servos on the miniscule curve of his midsection. But now, as his frame prepped for birth, his forge had shifted to make the process just a bit easier - probably more for the sparkling than for him - and his midsection was now protruding. Megatron placed a gentle servo on the curvature and pressed his forehelm against Optimus’s own.
Locking his optics with Megatron’s red ones served to calm him slightly, and the sparkling seemed to pick up on it, as she settled a little bit.
“I’m so scared,” Optimus whispered, so low that he almost didn’t hear himself. He felt rushes of both heat and cold as his body struggled to regulate itself among the terrible protocols going on that were demanding that he push, that he get this sparkling out as soon as possible.
Megatron rubbed his other servo on Optimus’s shoulder and then moved it to his faceplates, gently stroking along the line of Optimus’s jaw and cheek.
“It’ll be fine,” Megatron murmured. “You will be fine, and we will get to hold her soon.”
Then they heard Elita shush them. All three turned to face her.
“I heard a noise and did a scan. Someone’s about to pass by,” Elita whispered sharply from the doors to the hangar, ducking down so she wouldn’t be seen through the windows. “Quick, get the lights.”
The room immediately went dark, save for the light from all of their optics and biolights. Optimus steeled himself for whatever contractions or other pains could come and overtake his frame while they had to be as quiet as possible.
It seemed an eternity before Elita relaxed and turned to them. “They’re gone. They shouldn’t be able to see us or hear us anymore if we keep it down.”
“Was it the night guards?” Wheeljack asked.
Elita shook her head. “No. It was probably someone who was out late and getting back to their barracks to sleep.”
Megatron nodded, the motion barely noticeable in the near-total darkness. “Alert us if someone else is coming. I’ll get the lights.”
“No,” Optimus said a little bit more firmly than he’d intended. He closed his optics, sighed, and then reopened his optics and looked up at his sparkmate. “No. I like the lights off right now. That is, if Wheeljack can still function without them,” he inquired, remembering that not everyone could see that well without the presence of light. He often had to remind himself that even other bots didn’t have quite as heightened senses as he did, where in pitch-black with only his own optics to light the way, he could maneuver well enough by listening to the vibrations and sounds around him.
Thankfully Wheeljack simply increased the intensity of his biolights. “If you can deal with this, I’ll be fine.”
.-.-.
Optimus cursed at Primus, at Megatron, at himself for getting into this situation. He felt like his frame was being split apart, piece by piece, starting at his middle and pelvic region. Everything hurt, everything screamed at him that he was in pain, and it needed to stop. He needed to find relief.
But to find relief, he had to power through this. There was nothing else he could do. He was too far gone for a surgical removal, even if Ratchet and his expertise in all things medical were there on Earth. He could just imagine the seasoned medic chastising him in a loving manner throughout his carrying cycle.
“Optimus,” he felt Megatron’s servos on his waist, felt the other mech draw him close and stroke his digits over one of his antennae. “Do you know how you want to do this?”
The Prime shook his helm furiously, gasping for relief. “I don’t know. I just. I want her out . Please,” he pleaded. His processor was focused solely on trying to make sure that he got through this and that his sparkling would be fine.
There was a look exchanged among the other three, Megatron and Wheeljack and Elita, and then before Optimus knew it, he was being gently maneuvered.
Wheeljack spoke. “For the sake of using gravity to help speed things up, Elita, get behind him and hold him up. Megatron, you want to catch your bitlet, so get up here with me.”
“What time is it?” Optimus groaned out as he squatted, Megatron kneeling in front of him along with Wheeljack.
“It’s almost five in the morning,” Elita whispered as she settled in behind Optimus, helping hold him up with her smaller but much sturdier frame. “You have an hour until that damn trumpet goes off.”
Optimus nodded weakly and summoned his strength, moaning as he felt the sparkling shift further towards the entrance-exit of his valve.
Wheeljack and Megatron were there in front of him, and Optimus focused on Megatron specifically, using the visage of his sparkmate there with him, helping guide their little one into the world, into the embrace of the universe, to anchor him.
There was a painful shift within his systems, his forge. The helm began to crown. Optimus held in a scream, letting it out in short, rapid-fire gasps of agony as his frame split open around the frame of the sparkling.
Through the fog of pain, he heard Megatron ask if something was normal. Before he could reply in a panic and ask what it was that Megatron was seeing that was so concerning, he heard Wheeljack assure him that whatever was going on was perfectly normal.
It was close. They were close to holding her. They would only need to wait a little while longer.
Time passed too slowly and too quickly at the same time. Optimus breathed out, bracing himself against Elita. “How much more?” he choked out after riding through this contraction that, thankfully, served to help their daughter further out.
“One last push, Optimus,” Wheeljack said in an encouraging voice. “Give us one more and we can get her the rest of the way.”
Megatron looked up at him, red optics awed and scared.
Another contraction hit. Optimus gasped and bore down with all the might of the Primes that were there within the Matrix, helping guide him to this finish line.
Everything passed by in a blur. He was faintly aware of Elita and Wheeljack helping him steady himself as his body began to quake in the aftermath of pushing, but then his world came back into full focus when Megatron pressed a small, wet, squirming form against his chassis.
Optimus gave a quiet gasp as he took the little being into his arms, just barely big enough to fit in his embrace.
She was here.
She was absolutely perfect.
Brilliant blue optics came online and her vocalizer fired up as she began curiously beeping at him, melodic warbles echoing and bouncing off the walls of the hangar.
Wheeljack began gently wiping her little faceplates, chuckling as she chirped and clicked at him. She blinked up at all the bots around her, confusion in her face.
Optimus gently brushed his electromagnetic field against hers to calm her, and she focused on him again, the little gears in her optics shifting and cycling as she met his gaze. In her optics, he could read a question that she didn’t know how to vocalize, that perhaps not even she knew she was asking: are you my carrier?
“Hello,” he whispered softly, watching as her antennae twitched much like his whenever he heard a noise he wanted to fully process. “Hello, sweet one, our Andromeda. I’m your carrier.” Then he looked up at Megatron and met his sparkmate’s wide smile with his own wide one, tears streaking down his faceplates. “And this is your sire.”
Megatron leaned down to kiss the little one’s silver helm crest. “You gave us quite a surprise when you showed up,” he said in a choked voice full of pride. “We wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Optimus felt a gentle servo on his shoulder, patting him, and then Elita’s voice reached his audio receptors. “She’s beautiful,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice.
At that moment, the trumpet went off. That blasted trumpet that always told the humans to get up and move about the base.
A look crossed over Megatron’s faceplates as he looked up and out the windows. Normally the trumpet meant that either he or Optimus, or both, would have to report to Agent Croft for the day’s assignments.
Optimus reached out and touched Megatron’s arm, prompting his mate to look back down at him.
Their daughter stirred and cooed against Optimus’s chassis, her tiny digits tapping against his chestplates as the Prime looked Megatron in his optics and murmured a single word. “Stay.”
Wheeljack and Elita took Andromeda, Wheeljack going over notes in old script and Elita keeping the sparkling secure as they followed the instructions that Ratchet had written eons ago. The little one beeped sharply at them as she was cleaned and her reflexes tested.
Megatron pressed his forehelm against Optimus’s and sighed. Lifting both of his servos to his beloved’s face, Optimus kissed him. “GHOST can wait,” he continued. “Agent Croft can reprimand us later. Just…stay.”
Optimus heard the soft footfalls of Elita coming close again. She smiled at both of them as she handed Optimus a swaddled, chirping newspark. “She won’t be able to regulate her temperature for a bit.”
Andromeda’s bright blue optics blinked up at them and she reached her one exposed servo out to her carrier.
Large, dark servos rested on Optimus’s arm, close to the little one. Megatron had held their daughter in her first moments in this world, guided her to her new life along with Optimus, and yet in this moment he seemed so apprehensive, as if touching her would shatter her into pieces too small to ever put back together.
Smiling at his mate, Optimus held her out to him. “She’s your sparkling too.”
Megatron stalled for a moment, and then took the chirping sparkling into his arms, kissing her on her blue-armored helm.
A pinging noise echoed in both of their neural nets, letting them know that there was a message waiting in both their inboxes, undoubtedly sent to both of them at the same time from the same person.
They locked optics, and then opened their respective messages.
Megatron, Optimus Prime, where are you both? I need you two here for this debriefing, now.
Optimus pursed his lipplates, and Megatron’s inbuilt engine noise rose a little higher than normal in frustration.
“Is Agent Croft bugging you both?” Elita asked.
“Yes she is,” Optimus said. “But, she can wait.”
He and Megatron both marked the messages as read, and then turned back to their lives.