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If Orion Pax got an hour to himself a day, he was the luckiest archivist alive.
It felt like every day was the busiest day of the year. Ever since he had created Iacon’s latest classification system for the Archives, he had been swarmed by bots four castes higher than him who were either trying to learn how to use it or to get him to do their work in his system. He felt like he was being driven mad, and now that he was officially Alpha Trion’s protégé, his workload wasn’t going to lighten up anytime soon.
He loved being an archivist. It was his dream—and he was fortunate enough to be in the intelligence sector caste. He could spend the rest of his life doing what he loved. He’d never get a minute to himself, sure, but wasn’t that worth it? Running himself ragged in the pursuit of understanding, cataloging the history of the entire world with the Master Archivist himself, able to touch and read the most delicate of Cybertron’s artifacts—if he died and went to the Allspark, he imagined he’d be doing the same thing there.
It wasn’t just the work he loved. He met the most interesting mechs in his day-to-day life. Half of his friends were either archivists or visitors to the Archives. He travelled across Cybertron and its colonies to retrieve items for appraisal and collection, learning everything he could from Primus’ citizens. Cultures he didn’t get, frames that made no sense to him—he lived to commit them all to memory, and then to understand them.
His work as an archivist was the reason he’d met the two most important mechs in his life.
The medical student, party goer, and love of Orion’s life, Ratchet
And the “Voice of Kaon”: the poet, essayist, and assumed gladiator.
Ratchet and Orion’s meeting had been a happenstance. Ratchet was studying for a challenging exam (though he made everything look easy), and Orion happened to be the archivist to assist him. If Ratchet had come in one hour later, they likely would never have met. It was strange how drawn together they were. Ratchet was a loud-mouthed extrovert who thought sleep was for the dead and spent every second not being a studying medical student partying like there was no tomorrow. He was brilliant, sharp-tongued, and took nothing from no one. Not to mention his flagrant distaste for the caste system, and his disgust over how it stopped him from treating patients who needed it most. Orion was a shy bookworm with no social life. His idea of a night out was a relic hunt, and he’s cheery conversation starters all began with philosophers that no normal bot had ever heard of. Sure, he had a few friends here and there. Ariel and Dion, and Alpha Trion, if he counted. But beyond that, he was content to spend his days in the poetry section of any library rather than in any bar.
Maybe Ratchet was drawn to his intelligence, his looks, or something else Orion couldn’t identify. But instead of studying, they had spent that first night talking it away. Ratchet knew those philosophers' names. Orion read anti-caste literature and was more than happy to recommend some more underground names.
Ratchet told him once that Orion was one of the most genuine people he’d ever met. From Ratchet, that was the highest compliment you could receive. That was the first night they had sex. That was the first night Orion woke up to something that wouldn’t be in the history books—that was his and his alone.
He found it intoxicating.
It wasn’t long after they had been in a relationship that Orion had found this new essayist. He was anonymous, as most anti-caste authors were, to protect himself. To say he was a genius would be a disgrace to him. His prose, Primus, just his words, shook Pax to his very spark.
Orion was blind before he read the Voice of Kaon’s works. And in but a few essays, all he could see was injustice. It was like he had opened his optics for the first time in his life.
Ratchet noticed. He read them as well and found them intriguing. But Ratchet was more realistic than the archivist was. Orion had learned that Ratchet was not one to listen to what the Council had decreed was law. He had treated low-caste citizens who were forbidden to be treated by doctors. “Disposables”, the truly sparkless called them. The medical student had already been present at many of the atrocities that Orion was just beginning to understand.
Orion had reached out to him. Over and over again, desperate for a conversation, a sentence, anything. He felt like he was starving, and the Voice had the last drop of energon on Cybertron. When he answered, Orion had literally jumped from his desk in the Archives.
They spoke for hours. Days, if Orion could find the time.
“Do you hear it too?” the Voice had messaged one night when Luna 1 was at its peak, and Ratchet was in deep recharge beside him, and Orion had no more tears to cry for the Voice’s anguish.
“Do you also hear the whisper in the back of your mind, begging you to rise up?”
Orion did not hear it. He wanted to.
The Voice wanted to meet. So did Pax, but he knew what doing so would mean. That would make it real. Their whispers in the dark of rebellion and change would no longer be just glyphs on a screen. They would be spoken aloud between allies, and suddenly they would be plans: essays and speeches and debates. Alpha Trion knew everything; he must have known about Orion’s less-than-legal conversations with this young dreamer. But who, after hearing his words, could deny his desire? His yearning for freedom and equality?
“The first time I saw the sun, I reached my servos high, thinking I could touch it,” his first essay began.
“It was always just out of reach for me. I could not wrap my servos around it and drag it back down underground for my brothers and sisters down in the mines to feel.
“I decided that day I would never go back down into the dark. No one would ever take this light away from me again. If I must trade my old chains for new ones, so be it. But this warmth would be mine for the rest of my days.
“I could not bring the sun down for them. So I will bring them up to the sun.”
And then it was we will, rather than I will.
“What the two of us together could do,” the Voice whispered in disbelief, while Orion sat at a pay-per-minute comm link and heard his voice for the first time.
“Why, Orion, we might just be able to save the world.”
What could one say to that, other than, “I’ll meet you in Kaon next week”?
And the day before that meeting, on the first day off Orion had ever asked for in his hundreds of years working for the Archives, Pax lay in the garden and let his mind wander to the problems of the ancients.
Orion liked the Iacon Gardens. They were beautiful and quiet, and they made it seem like all the world’s injustices didn’t exist. Even while Orion read about the cruelest of Cybertron’s histories, the Gardens kept his mind at ease. Under a crystal weeping tree, where jagged petals of translucent gemstones shielded him from the rest of the world.
The sun had begun to set against the horizon. Rays of light from the reflections of the crystals scattered against the archivist, casting him in a swash of pink that he did not attempt to cower from, no matter how harsh the sun on his optics was.
Primus, what am I about to do?
“Thought I’d find you here.”
Orion was not ashamed to admit how he bolted upright, startled, before turning to catch Ratchet’s amused eye.
“You didn’t go to work today?” he asked while sitting next to Pax, resting his head on his shoulder.
“N-no.”
Ratchet hummed at that, turning his gaze to the setting sun. Orion relaxed, allowing Ratchet to settle in. They sat in silence for a long while, content to live in a brief moment of peace before their lives busied again. Ratchet was set to be a doctor by the start of the next year. He would be the best, Orion already knew.
“Don’t think you’ve ever taken a day off before. Could’ve called me,” Ratchet said, intertwining his digits with Pax’s. “I would’ve taken the day too.”
“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” Orion said, clutching Ratchet’s servo just a little tighter, “and—I needed a bit of time to think.”
“What were you thinking about before I so rudely interrupted your beautiful processor at work?”
Pax snorted with a smile at that, fixing Ratchet with a glare. He did nothing to wipe the smirk off his face.
“Solus Prime.”
That did the job. The student’s brow furrowed as he tilted his gaze to look Pax in the eye.
“What about her?”
“I was wondering if she knew what would happen. When she refused Liege Maximo’s request.”
“Don’t you think that if she knew, she would have created the armor anyway? No matter what he might have done with it? I mean, if I could prevent my own death that’d sort of be my top priority,” Ratchet said.
“But she wasn’t you. Or me,” he said, staring out at Hadean as it began its final descent, “maybe she was willing to do anything to save beasts she didn’t even know had minds. Even die.”
Orion felt Ratchet pulling away from him before he saw it.
“What’s going on, Orion?”
He couldn’t meet his love’s gaze.
“What if she did it knowing her love would kill her in the end?”
“Orion, you’re scaring me.”
He did look at him then, watching as Ratchet’s optics shook with uncertainty.
“I’m about to do something I know is right,” he said, “but I–I don’t know how it will end.”
Ratchet put his other servo over their interlaced digits. “Is it dangerous?”
“... Very,” he whispered.
He felt it. The almost imperceptible flinch that had Ratchet’s servo shake for just a moment. He hid it, but the archivist felt it.
“But it’s the right thing?”
For the first time in Orion’s life, he couldn’t find the words. He nodded.
“Okay, then.”
Ratchet looked down at their servos, both tense and tight.
“Will it—” he took a servo away to gesture between the two bots, “change us?”
“No,” Orion said without hesitation. “I won’t let it.”
After a moment of hesitation, Ratchet nodded stiffly. He seemed unconvinced, but Orion knew that the fact that he wasn’t screaming his auditory receptors off by now was a sign of Ratchet’s immense trust. A trust that was hard-earned and easily broken.
Orion kissed him then, gentle and promising. Ratchet kissed him back like he thought the world was ending.
Ratchet was brilliant. He understood.
Orion was wrong.
Orion was wrong about a lot of things, Optimus knew now.
They had planned to be sparkbonded one day, when their lives settled into a better routine. When Ratchet finished his studies and was just another doctor, and Orion was just Alpha Trion’s assistant archivist, and had fewer jobs to do. They never got that chance.
Making their relationship public was too risky. Because of Ratchet’s early reputation, Orion was careful to mention it to only his closest friends. And while Megatronous was that, by some miracle, romance had just never come up between them. They were so focused on “saving the world” that the few personal conversations they had had were just about them, never the mechs around them. Thank the Allspark, because if Megatron knew what Ratchet meant to the Prime, the doctor would be the Decepticon’s number one target for all of his life.
So they were never sparkbonded. Something else that was too risky. They both agreed that both of them were too important for the war effort—that the risk of death due to the other's death made the sparkbond too dangerous a gamble.
If one died, the other had to live on. For the Autobots' sake.
A few Autobots knew. Either because they had known the pair from before the war, or because some leaders needed to know in case one or both were captured. They knew they couldn’t be unbiased. Someone would have to be.
Orion had no power over what would change or who would change it. His dream of recording history rather than writing it was long dead. He was long dead.
Optimus lay in his place, against fields of organic grass.
The Decepticons had been silent for almost two weeks now. Most of the team was taking this as a much-needed relaxation period. Last he had heard, Bumblebee and Ratchet were with Rafael, teaching him more Cybertronian code, Bulkhead had taken Miko to some racing event, and Arcee and Jack were just driving wherever the road took them.
Optimus was reading.
He’d never admit it, but Optimus wasn’t in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in South Africa to patrol. He was there to take a second.
This world would never be his, but he loved it nonetheless. The younger him adored travelling to other worlds, learning cultures and environments far dissimilar from his own. Earth was no different. An organic world, unlike his own in almost every way, yet beautiful.
His home did not have grass. He ran his digits over it gingerly. It did not have soft-petaled flowers or leaves. He couldn’t see the stars even in the darkest of nights because of Cybertron’s light pollution, but here he could see almost galaxies away with nothing but his optics.
He missed Cybertron achingly, with every vent he took.
In an attempt to ease the ache, the Prime had turned to another comfort, poetry. Orion consumed every sonnet he could get his servos on while on Cybertron. Optimus didn’t have time for much, but Nurse June’s recent introduction to the team had brought with it some recommendations. Dickinson, Homer, Wilde, Angelou. Their words brought him solace in a way that another’s words once had. He found himself acting like a young archivist again, reading well into the night—the only time he had to himself.
Then, he had read Berry.
He found a garden soon after that.
One that was large enough to hide him from human eyes, with trees and flowers and grass that stretched for miles. Then he just went. He couldn’t remember the last time he had done something without making a report about it.
He’d been lying there for about four hours now. Soon, he would have to return. But, for the brief time he had, he read in a garden again.
He couldn’t close his optics and imagine he was home. The grass was too soft to remind him of the cold, smooth metal of Cybertron’s surface. But it was home in its own way, so Optimus did close his optics on occasion.
He dared not imagine peace. It was too much to dream of.
The tell-tale sound of a ground bridge springing to life just feet from him caused him to tense, but as soon as he heard the footfall, he relaxed again.
“How did you even find this place?” Ratchet asked while sitting next to the Prime, brushing his digits against his.
“I looked it up. Rafael helped,” Optimus closed his optics again.
Ratchet must have spotted the datapad he was holding, because he asked, “What are you reading?”
The Prime didn’t open his optics, just shifting the pad in his lover’s direction. He knew what was on it—one of his favorite pieces by Berry.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
“Think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen you read something happy,” he said after a beat.
“Yes,” the Prime said, opening his optics and turning to him, “perhaps I was in need of—a little solace.”
Ratchet nodded with a hum, his optics flicking to Optimus’ face. He ran his digits against his cheek, and Optimus turned into them, planting a soft kiss on the metal.
“You and your gardens,” he grumbled, turning back to the setting sun.
“Do I need to return?”
“No, no. We’ve got the night.”
A rare gift.
“You look tired, old friend.”
“You’re the one lying down.”
Optimus raised one eyebrow in amusement. The doctor glanced back at him, then forward, then back once more with a groan before reclining into the Prime’s left arm.
They stayed like that for a while, watching the sun in silence, in a bubble of peace that was waiting to burst at any moment.
“Don’t you dare tell me you’re thinking about Solus Prime,” he said suddenly.
“Certainly not.”
He couldn’t think about her anymore. It would drive him mad. Ratchet turned to face Optimus’ body, knees curling as he tucked himself into the Prime like a missing piece of kibble.
“When it’s over,” Ratchet smiled into the Prime’s shoulder, resting his optics, blissfully ignorant for one of the first times in his life, “we’ll go off to some garden together. Live amongst those trees you love so much.”
Ratchet yawned. He felt the doctor’s frame slacken as it finally rested.
Optimus had no preconceptions about his fate. He was a machine of war. He doubted he would survive to peace time. It was the hardest battle he’d ever faced, keeping that knowledge from Ratchet.
But if he did, he would like that. To be amongst the trees, on whichever planet Ratchet wanted to call home.
So Optimus smiled and laid his helm against the fields.
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.