Work Text:
She sipped at her energon as the big grey mech across from her folded his hands on the table. Beside her, Orion was introducing the two of them. "This is Aerial, Megatronus. She works in the cubicle across from mine. Aerial, this is Megatronus, I've told you about him."
"The gladiator-turned-revolutionary," Aerial said, raising her eyes to look at him and lacing her fingers on top of her drink.
Megatronus laughed. "Nothing so dramatic as that. I'm just a labourer from Kaon, first and foremost."
They exchanged small talk, and when Orion excused himself from the table to get them more drinks, both Megatronus and Aerial watched him make his way to the bar.
"He really likes you," Aerial said to him with a smirk. "I've worked with him for seventeen cycles and I've never seen him so excited. He's usually so quiet."
"Is that so? Coming from a good friend like you, it must be true," he responded and Aerial laughed.
"If I could ask-" he continued after a moment's pause. "Your post wasn't always archivist, was it?"
"Yeah. You could tell, huh? My frame's too big to be a data clerk's." she propped her head up with an elbow, telling a story she's told many times before. "My alt form's a jet. Sixth division of the Iacon flight corps. I applied to switch jobs, not expecting much, and they let me. That's all there is, really."
"That explains the name," he said.
"Yeah. The paint, too. Too garish for a desk job. It was uniform."
"Can I ask why you decided to change your profession? Not suited to fighting?"
"No, it wasn't that." she looked aside, outside one of the tinted windows of the pub, in thought. "I was good at it. It even felt good. But- It wasn't who I am, you know. I didn't want to someday have to take someone else's life because my higher-ups said so."
"Yeah," he laughed. "I can relate."
She looked back at him, at his dull silvery plating, covered with old scars. "I'm sorry. It's not that easy in Kaon, is it?"
He looked at her and grinned despite the past that had brought him here. "I look forward to a day when every mech can choose to never take another's life - just like you did."
She nodded and thought that she was starting to see a hint of why Orion admired him so much.
--
"I'm not sure why I haven't changed the paint yet," she told him at another time, when they were alone in the Hall of Records - against regulation, as the Archives were closed to the public, but she and Orion didn't care. "Nostalgia, I can only guess. I want to change it, but I don't."
"Your history is a part of you too," he said without looking up from his datapad. "You want to become someone new, but you don't want to lose what made you yourself, to begin with. You can do both. Reinvent yourself, be whatever you want! But keep as many parts of the old you as you like. It will not make the new you any less genuine, or any less new."
She laughed and leaned back against the railing. "Maybe I should change my name, just like you did. Aerial is so... specific."
He was looking over the top of the datapad at her now, his eyes glowing bright with excitement over this revolutionary act that they could share. "What would you change it to?"
She crossed her arms. "I don't know. Just a thought."
--
The day Optimus Prime asked her, with her military experience, to be his second-in-command, and march against the same friend that they had shared energon cubes with in a small smoky bar mere months ago- she told him she wouldn't fight as Aerial. This time, she wanted to fight for herself, to use the skills she was forged with of her own accord, for something she believed in. Optimus looked at her with those solemn understanding optics as he always had, as her friend, and asked her, "What would you like me to introduce you as?"
She looked forward and it burned with irony that the mech who had taught her the value of remaking oneself would be the one they raised arms against on this day, and that he would be the one to fall so far.
"Tell the soldiers that my name is Elita One."