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D-16 had a large tank.
This was not a metaphor. It was an engineering fact, documented in his frame schematics, observable in his fuel consumption curves, and confirmed — repeatedly, with increasing exasperation — by Ratchet during routine maintenance scans.
His frame was denser than standard. His cable mass was heavier. The strength that pulled carts one-handed came from somewhere, and that somewhere was a metabolic architecture that ran hotter and demanded more than an average miner’s.
The mines did not care about his metabolic architecture.
The mines issued rations by frame class, and D-16’s frame class said standard miner, and so D-16 received a standard miner’s allotment, and the difference between what his tank wanted and what his tray held was a gap that he had stopped thinking about somewhere in his first cycle underground.
Most bots in the lower levels ran somewhere in the mid-nineties on a normal rotation. Full tanks were rare — the rations weren’t generous enough for that, and nobot expected them to be — but the mid-nineties was fine. The mid-nineties got you through your shift, and left something over afterward: enough to linger at the bench a while, enough to take the long way back, enough to be decent company for a joor rather than no company at all. It wasn’t much of a margin. But it was a margin, and everybot down here spent theirs on something.
D-16 ran at seventy-ish.
It is what it is. That was the whole philosophy. A bot couldn’t requisition a bigger tank’s worth of fuel any more than they could requisition a sunrise. So he consumed his allotment, ran hot and hungry, and coped.
Recharge helped. Deep recharge let his frame consolidate what it had and stretch the fuel further, and he had gotten very good at deep recharge, in the way a bot gets good at anything they cannot afford to be bad at.
The bad rotations were harder. The long-shift rotations. The double-shifts, worst of all — by the end of those his HUD would start flagging him, a small insistent glyph in the lower corner of his vision that he had long since stopped reading. He knew what it said. It had never once told him anything he could do something about.
So he ignored it, and coped with that too.
He was punctual about refueling. Almost religious about it — first in the queue, never skipped, never traded. Jazz teased him about it once, the clockwork way D-16 appeared at the dispensers. D-16 had shrugged. When you ran at a deficit, you didn’t waste the deposits.
And there was not much more to be done than that.
They were miners. They didn’t have much to begin with, and everybot down here knew how hunger felt to one degree or another. Whether it came from missing a refuel, or from a quota unmet and a ration withheld as consequence, or — in his case — from an abnormally large tank and a form that said otherwise, the result was the same. Hunger was just another condition of the lower levels, like the heat, like the dark, like the dust that got into everything.
It didn’t need talking about.
So he never talked about it, and nobot ever asked, and it stayed where he had put it — filed somewhere below the quotas and the shift lists and all the other things that were bigger than him.
He figured nobot needed to know.
The scratch was not serious.
Orion Pax knew it wasn’t serious. It was a shallow gouge along his forearm from a bad angle on a support strut in shaft five, barely through the paint, and under normal circumstances he’d have ignored it entirely. But barely through the paint was how rust started.
Orion had read enough maintenance logs to know exactly what happened to a mech who ignored a scratch for six rotations and then couldn’t rotate his elbow joint — and he’d come close enough himself, once, after a particularly trying trip to the archives, to take it seriously.
So: Ratchet. Which meant the queue.
The queue outside the mine’s medical bay was a permanent institution, a line of bots waiting on a bench for a medic who had four servos’ worth of work and two servos to do it with, and the wait for something minor could run two joors. Orion had been in that queue before. He had opinions about that queue.
He also had the specific and dangerous quality of being an extremely curious mech who had spent cycles learning which doors in the lower levels didn’t lock properly.
The side entrance to the medical bay — the one the supply crews used — didn’t lock properly.
Orion slipped through it with his most innocent expression already in place, the one that had gotten him out of three quota infractions and into one restricted archive. He was not, in his own estimation, doing anything wrong.
He was going to wait quietly inside instead of loudly outside, and when Ratchet was free he’d wave, and Ratchet would grumble about him being an entitled little glitch, and then Ratchet would patch the scratch in a click and a half and it would take less of everybot’s time than the alternative.
Everybot wins. Efficiency.
The bay was quiet inside. Dim, in the way the mine was always dim, the equipment humming its low tired hum. Orion eased the door shut behind him and heard voices from the scanning alcove at the far end — Ratchet’s, unmistakable, because Ratchet’s voice carried the way a dropped wrench carried.
And under it, low and even, another voice.
Orion’s spark did the thing it always did.
Oh, he thought, delighted, D’s here.
What a coincidence. What a fantastic, entirely unremarkable coincidence, his bestfriend and his favourite medic in the same room at the same time, and Orion just happening to be here as well, which was luck and nothing else, and definitely not because he had checked D’s shift rotation that morning the way he checked it every morning for no reason he had ever examined closely.
He was three steps from rounding the corner and announcing himself when Ratchet said:
“Your fuel levels are at twenty-six.”
Orion stopped.
“It was a long shift.”
“It was a long shift last scan too. And the scan before that. Your tank capacity is fourteen percent above your ration class, D-16, and the math doesn’t stop being math because you’re stoic about it.”
A pause.
“Is there a fix?”
Ratchet sighed. Orion could picture the exact expression on the medic’s faceplate through the wall — the annoyed one. Some of it was real annoyance. Most of it was the tiredness of a mech who could name a problem and do nothing about it.
“...No,” Ratchet said. Quieter. “Not one I can requisition. Just — recharge deep. Don’t skip. And don’t crank any more drill heads by hand.”
“No promises.”
“D-16—”
“The line had to move, Ratchet.”
Orion stood very still against the wall, optics fixed on nothing, then dropping slowly to the floor.
He did not make a sound. His spark tightened.
Twenty-six percent.
Bots went unconscious at fifteen.
That was not a number Orion had to look up. It was in the safety postings on every level, printed beside the evacuation routes and the seal-breach protocols: fuel below fifteen percent may result in involuntary shutdown. Report immediately to medical. He’d walked past it ten thousand times without reading it, the way you walk past a wall.
D had finished a shift at twenty-six.
D had finished a shift at twenty-six, and then walked to the medical bay under his own power, and then said it was a long shift in the flat unbothered voice he used for weather and quotas and things that were not worth discussing, and then — Orion knew, because Orion knew D’s rotation, because Orion always knew — he would go stand in the refuel queue, first in line, and take his allotment, and come back up to something that would get him through the next shift and no further.
And do it again tomorrow.
And had been doing it, presumably, every single rotation, for as long as Orion had known him.
His processor — the one that catalogued everything about D, every smirk and shoulder-shift and rare chest-deep chuckle, the one that had opinions about the difference between D’s fine and D’s I’m fine — pulled threads together with terrible speed.
The crabbiness lately. The way D’s patience got shorter as a rotation wore on, the flat monosyllables, snapping at Wheeljack over nothing. Growling at Orion, once, over a misplaced pickaxe — and then looking immediately, privately, miserable about it, the way he did when he’d been sharper than he meant.
Orion had filed all of it under tired.
Everybot was tired. Tired was the ambient condition of the lower levels. You could file anything under tired down here and nobot would ever check your work.
It wasn’t tired.
It was hunger. It had been hunger the whole time — and not the ordinary kind, not the everybot-knows-how-it-feels kind that came and went with the quotas.
His bestfriend, the strongest mech in the mines. The one who took the heavy end without being asked and covered shifts he didn’t owe and outworked every mech on the level, and who had never once, in all the cycles Orion had known him, asked for anything. Not for himself, anyway.
Plenty of requests had come in Orion’s direction over the cycles — don’t, Pax. Put that back, Pax. Get down from there before you break something, ideally yourself — but not one of them had ever been for D.
D had been walking around at the bottom end of his own margin, every rotation, and had never said a word about it.
But of course he hadn’t. What would saying it accomplish? The rations were the rations.
From the alcove, the scanner powered down. Ratchet started saying something about strut density.
Orion turned and went quietly back out the side door. The scratch could wait; he’d deal with it another rotation.
By the time he reached the corridor, Orion Pax had a plan.
It was, by his standards, an extremely quiet plan.
The plan deployed two rotations later, at evening rations.
Orion and D sat at their bench — their geometry, same as always — and Orion ate most of his cube and then set it down with roughly a fifth remaining, stretched his arms over his helm, and announced:
“I’m beat.” A yawn. “Gonna head to berth early.”
D looked at the cube. “You’re not done eating.”
“Eh.” Orion shrugged. “Tank’s full enough. C’mon, walk back with me?”
“Don’t waste fuel, Pax," D frowned.
“Well, I’m not gonna force it down. I’m heading to the habsuites.” Orion was already standing, half-turned.
A pause behind him. The sound of a cube being picked up.
“If you’re not going to eat it,” D said, flat as the bench, “I will.”
“Suit yourself.”
Orion walked toward the corridor, and did not look back, and did not smile where anybot could see it.
Internally, he was incandescent.
The plan worked because it was camouflaged as D’s own virtue.
That was the genius of it, and Orion would have felt smug if the whole thing didn’t make his spark ache. A direct offer — here, take my energon — would have hit the wall of D’s pride at full speed and shattered. D would have refused. Would have lectured. Would have stood over Orion until every drop was consumed, out of care, out of stubbornness, out of the iron law that said D looked after Pax like he always did.
But waste — waste was a vice. Finishing an abandoned cube wasn’t accepting charity. It was fuel discipline. It was responsibility. D could do it with a flat voice and an unbothered face and never once have to know what it was.
So Orion built the routine, careful and methodical, and let the cyber-weeks do the rest.
Not every meal — he wasn’t reckless about it; he had his own frame to fuel, and a mech couldn’t outrun enforcers and security details on an empty tank. But two rotations out of five, three on the long-shift weeks, Orion’s cube would end up not-quite-finished.
The excuses rotated like a duty roster. I’m beat. Wanna hit the roof before lights-down? Ate too fast, tank’s complaining. C’mon, D, the light’s good tonight. And the cube would migrate, and D would mutter something about waste, and finish it, and that was that.
After enough repetitions, the excuses stopped being necessary. The routine wore itself into habit the way pede-traffic wore paths into tunnel floors. Orion would simply reach over, set his remainder on D’s tray, and keep talking about whatever he was talking about. And D — flat-faced, unbothered, mid-conversation — would finish it.
Neither of them ever said anything about it.
But Orion watched — because Orion always watched — and catalogued the difference. It wasn’t dramatic. It was a hundred small things. D a half-step quicker at the end of long shifts. The crabbiness thinning out, the snap at the end of his patience arriving later or not at all. His golden optics a shade brighter in the last joor before lights-down, when they used to go dull. The way he started staying at the bench after his tray was empty, or drifting into the communal areas. Listening to Jazz talk slag, Arcee sharing bits of gossip, Prowl offering a dry one-liner, Orion bouncing ideas off all of them. Instead of peeling off to recharge the moment his shift debt was paid.
The way D moved — less like a mech rationing his reserves, more like a mech who had reserves.
Confirmation came by eavesdropping again, a few quartexes later. Purposeful, this time. Orion did not regret it at all.
Another entry through the side door of the medical bay — unscratched, on this occasion. Ratchet had still given him an earful the last time, the rotation after he’d found out about D’s predicament, though it had been a tamer earful than usual.
A good sign. In all fairness, Orion hadn’t let that one rust nearly as badly as the last few.
He flattened himself against the wall outside the scanning alcove, silent as before, and pressed an audial to the rough metal.
“Huh. Thirty-nine percent.” A pause, the sound of Ratchet scrolling. “That’s post-shift. You’d have started the rotation somewhere near eighty.” A longer pause. “You been raiding a dispenser I don’t know about?”
“No.” A pause from D. “Just... eating what’s there.”
“Well, whatever’s there, keep at it. Your stress markers are down. You’re consolidating better in recharge. This is the best maintenance scan you’ve had since I’ve known you.”
Orion leaned against the wall and pressed his dermas together against the smile, and failed.
Eighty percent.
Orion ran at eighty himself now, most rotations. He’d gotten used to it. Barely felt it anymore.
And if his eighty bought D’s eighty — if the strongest, most stubborn, most quietly hungry mech in the lower levels got to feel what fuelled felt like —
Well. Nobot had to know. Nobot had to say anything.
Just knowing was enough.
Orion slipped back out through the same side door, still smiling.
The new medical bay had windows.
This was Optimus Prime’s favourite thing about it, and he said so every visit, and every visit Ratchet told him to stop admiring the windows and sit on the berth.
The bay was bright and clean and stocked with equipment Ratchet had requisitioned hundreds of times in the mines, and had subsequently been denied the same hundreds of times — full-resonance scanners, diagnostic arrays, an autoberth that didn’t squeak.
The rebuilding of Iacon, the rebuilding of Cybertron, had put its medicine first.
Optimus had insisted. Megatron had made the budget happen. Ratchet had pretended not to be moved and then named the pediatric wing without telling either of them.
Optimus sat on the scanning berth, plating open to the diagnostic array, while Ratchet ran the full-frame workup — more frequent now, with the carrying, but this part was routine. Fuel systems. Baseline metabolics.
Ratchet looked at the readout. Made a small sound. Not a bad sound — a noting sound.
“Huh. You know,” he said, scrolling, “this is the first stretch in — honestly, since I’ve been scanning you — that I’ve had you at full tank consistently. Hundred percent, every scan, three quartexes running.”
Ratchet tilted the readout, dermas pursed and optic ridges furrowed at good news he hadn’t ordered. “You know what you used to run? Eighty. Like clockwork. Mines, war-scare, most of the rebuild — eighty, eighty, seventy-nine, eighty.”
Optimus nodded. Ratchet went on.
“I asked you about it once, you know. Down in the mines. You told me you were a light fueller with a small tank and could I please look at Firestar’s pede instead, it was more urgent.”
“Firestar did have a twisted—”
“I know.” Ratchet set the stylus down with a huff. “I know. That was the problem with that place. I had bots coming through that door with dents, split cables, misaligned pistons, whole sections of frame missing. And then there was you. Eighty percent, never complained, cheerful as anything, still a nuisance for that matter—” He rolled his optics. “—and passing every routine scan I put you through.”
Ratchet shrugged, gruff, not looking up. “So I wrote it as a set point in your file and moved on.”
“That’s an entirely reasonable conclusion to make,” Optimus said, smiling.
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not.” Optimus chuckled.
The medic rolled his optics, mumbled something about Optimus still being insufferable, and went back to the readout.
“Anyways, you’re finally at a healthy hundred percent fuel. But if I see it at eighty again—”
"You won't." Optimus put a servo over his spark, solemn as a vow. "Eighty percent was mines-exclusive."
Across the city, in a budget session, a presence in the back of Optimus’s spark went very still.
What?
The pulse came through the bond — confusion, Megatron’s attention swinging away from infrastructure allocations like a turret.
You weren’t at ninety percent? You weren’t in the average range IN THE MINES?
…I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Orion.
Optimus sighed. He supposed the catbot was out of the bag now. He smiled at the ceiling of the medical bay.
Okay, no, I wasn’t, he sent back, easy, a shrug folded into the feeling. Eighty, most days. I was used to it. Barely even noticed by the end.
A pause. He could feel Megatron’s processor working — the great tactical engine turning over old data, re-running cycles of evidence with a new variable. And Optimus knew, could feel, the exact moment the pieces began to align, because the bond went taut with something between disbelief and dawning—
But you always left fuel over. Slowly. Carefully. A mech walking up on a conclusion he was afraid of. You left energon on your tray for— you did it for CYCLES, you’d say you were tired, or full, or you wanted the roof, and I’d— I finished it. I always finished it. Pax.
Optimus said nothing. Sent nothing. Just let the warmth in his spark sit there, open, where his conjux could feel its shape.
The bond went very quiet.
Pax. Megatron’s voice through the bond had dropped to something raw. I... why?
Because you needed it more than I did, D. Gentle. No drama in it; the tone of a mech stating tunnel geology. Your tank ran fourteen percent over your ration class. I heard Ratchet’s scan — you finished that rotation at twenty-six. A beat. I had a standard tank and ninety percent in it. I could give you ten and still be fine. The math wasn’t complicated.
You were HUNGRY. You made yourself hungry so that I—
I was at eighty, Orion corrected, mild and immovable. I know what hungry is. Eighty isn’t it. Sixty and lower is. A beat, and then, softer, the thing underneath: I couldn’t requisition you fuel, D. I couldn’t fix the rations or the lists or any of it, not then. That was the one small thing I could do. So I did it.
Silence in the bond. Long.
Megatron absorbing it — and Optimus could feel the shape of what he was absorbing, because the bond hid nothing: every leftover cube re-rendering in Megatron’s memory with its true name. Every I’m beat. Every tank’s full enough. Every casual slide of a tray. Cycles of them. Hundreds of them. The flat voice saying don’t waste fuel, Pax to the mech who was, at that exact moment, feeding him.
The wall, being fed by the flame, and never once knowing.
It wasn’t small, Orion.
I still wish I could have done more, Orion sent, wistful, before he could think better of it.
Megatron's disagreement came back immediate and absolute, but Orion did not address it.
I love you, D, Orion sent, soft, into the silence. I loved you then. Even when I couldn’t say it in words. That was me saying it.
Pax...
So now you know what the leftovers meant. A smile threaded through the bond, warm and a little wet at the edges. Anyway. We have more than enough now. We made sure of that — you and me, it’s in the actual BUDGET, I watched you fight the subcommittee for the ration reserves personally. So neither of us is ever going to be hungry again. Okay?
Another pause. And then Megatron, in the voice that came from the deepest part of him — the register he saved for things he meant absolutely:
Okay. But you— promise me. Promise you’ll eat YOUR share to a hundred. Every rotation. Especially now. A pulse of feeling brushed, deliberate and gentle, against the small fluttering second spark below his own. Both of you.
Optimus smiled. Ratchet shot him a glance, but continued to read out the findings from the scan out loud.
Optimus didn’t hear a word the medic was saying.
Yes, I promise, Orion sent. And if I don’t, he added, tapping the bond like a knuckle on glass, you’ll know. That’s rather the point of this thing.
And then it came.
The wave. Megatron didn’t send words — words would have been too small, and he knew it, so he didn’t try. He opened his side of the bond all the way and let it pour: gratitude with cycles of weight behind it, and grief for the hunger he’d never seen, and awe, and warmth, and a fierce protective tenderness, and love — love with the specific, dense, accumulated gravity of a mech who had just learned that he had been cared for, secretly, sustainedly, for YEARS, by the bot he thought he’d been protecting.
Things tangled in it that had no names. Optimus didn’t try to name them. He just leaned into the bond and let it break over him.
Thank you, my beloved, Megatron sent at last, formal as a vow. I love you, Orion Pax. My conjux endura.
I love you too, Orion sent, leaning, leaning. My D.
“—and your spark-resonance margins are within tolerance, your strut density is up two points, and the newspark’s draw is tracking exactly on curve, which you would KNOW,” Ratchet said, with rising volume, “if you were listening to a single word I am saying.”
Optimus blinked. The medical bay reassembled itself around him.
“Primus, Optimus. Some things do not change.” Ratchet gestured at the diagnostic array with his stylus, where a real-time render of Optimus’s processor activity was lit up like a festival. “You’re bond-talking. I can SEE it. Your processor lights up like a fragging beacon array when you two do this. I’m running a medical scan, not monitoring a comm relay. Stop sappy-talking through your bond for ONE click.”
“Sorry, Ratchet.” Optimus did not look remotely sorry. The smile on his faceplate was the soft one, the unguarded one.
Optimus pressed one servo lightly over his chassis — over both lights — and looked at his oldest medic, in the bright new bay, in the rebuilt city.
“I’m just glad,” he said, “that we’re all at a hundred percent now.”
Ratchet held the flat look for a full two nanoclicks.
Then it cracked — just at the corner, just enough — into something small and real.
“Same,” he said gruffly, turning back to his beautiful, squeakless equipment. “Plus the gear up here is a serious upgrade. For better or for worse — mostly better. Now LIE BACK, I’m not done, and tell your conjux if he sprints across the complex again I’m billing the Lord Protector’s office for the door.”
Optimus laughed, the sparkling in him humming with delight.
And from across the city, through the bond, faint and warm: Megatron’s amusement, and no promises at all.