Fic: Harmonic Progression [Megatron/Orion Pax, M/NC-17]
Once upon a time...long, long ago...lady_oneiros wrote me an absolutely lovely trade fic that you can find here, if you haven't read it. The agreement was Ironhide/Ratchet for me and Megatron/Optimus for her. Astonishingly, I have finally lived up to my half of the bargain six months late AUGH.
For YOU, lady_oneiros! Yours yours yours. ♥
Title: Harmonic Progression
Rating: M/NC-17
Disclaimer: Not mine, but can I have them for my birthday? I've been good.
Pairing: Megatron/Orion Pax, pre-war
Summary: In the aftermath of Sentinel Prime's assassination, Megatron receives a revelation that shatters all his foundations.
Author’s Note: This fic asserts that Megatron and Optimus are twins from a single spark. As such, warnings for twincest.
“Well a Process Man am I, and I'm tellin' you no lie
I work and breathe among the fumes that trail across the sky...”
-Great Big Sea, 'Process Man (The Chemical Worker's Song)'
Nothing had hurt so much as the loss of his greatest mentor. Or so he had believed.
“Whatever are you doing here, Lord High Protector?”
Startled though he was, Megatron kept his back turned for a moment or two more, still facing the console. Passcodes and firewalls were broken, their warnings ignored but sounding progressively louder throughout Iacon's security net, and he wondered with a little anticipation how the Council would spin this to the media-how they could capitalize on a breach of the assassinated Prime's personal files. Rising to his feet, he turned to face the Chief Liaison. The Council had chosen Alpha Trion with great care, or so he imagined, for so sensitive a situation.
Resolve it. Quietly.
Megatron chose his own response with care while watching the elder mech with narrowed optics. “Research.”
Something in Alpha Trion's posture stiffened with unaccustomed tension that melted abruptly into weighted acceptance. He lowered his head. “I assume you have found some measure of...enlightenment, then.”
“If you would care to call it that,” Megatron said. The components of his jaw clenched and all the self-sharpening edges of his dental plates scraped lightly together. What he had discovered in the dim recesses of Sentinel Prime's meticulous records was catastrophic, spark-shattering, foundation-demolishing truth at last, and the Council plainly knew and had known every unbearable detail.
Alpha Trion took a few measured steps deeper into the vaulted room, a whirr of strain sounding in the million mechanical components of his legs. He had a narrow frame, built for aristocracy but diminished by megavorns of political machinations without physical compensation. Megatron thought idly of exerting the force of his own warrior build-of tearing the politician in two.
The Councilor raised a fragile hand and tried to touch him. “Lord Megatron--”
Megatron's slammed fist left a jagged impression in the tabletop. “Tell me, at least, why it was done.”
To his credit, the Chief Liaison never flinched. “Separation is traditional,” he murmured, speaking in tones still smoothly calm even as Megatron loomed above him and radiated fury on wavelengths of unexpected pain. “So that each spark may grow without reliance on the other.”
“Without knowledge of the other?” Megatron returned. He turned his hand so that his claws gripped into the dented metal.
Alpha Trion paused, perhaps to judge his phrasing. Perhaps to consider his final words, or so Megatron would love to believe: the venerable eldest of the Council of Ancients ripping his processors apart to satisfactorily explain the uncountable threads of dishonesty that strung straight from Sentinel Prime and wove downward through every crumbling echelon of Cybertronian government. Alpha Trion shook his head. “That is traditional, as well.”
Megatron could not prevent his own snarl. It echoed along the decorative metallic plates of the chamber ceiling, acoustics catching it and twisting it and returning it in a thousand diminishing echoes of promised violence. “You are responsible. For this unrest, for this insanity, for this...” He dared not say this pain, my pain, how dare your sanctimony and self-righteousness cause me so much pain? When the Matrix had rejected him, it had done so with such vehemence that his reliance on himself had shaken down to its previously solid foundations. “Your reliance on tradition has brought this empire to its knees,” he said instead, low but hateful. “And Sentinel's mad insistence upon controlling his own succession may grind Cybertron into dust.”
His gaze lowering, Alpha Trion simply shook his head again, and the futility etched into every contour of his frame made Megatron gather his own tension into pure strength. He was all leashed force; his joints wound tight as if preparing for battle. The sigh of interior vents in the Chief Liaison's voice grated across the last threads of Megatron's patience. “What would you have us do?”
“Find him,” Megatron growled, and Alpha Trion snapped his head up in surprise.
“Lord Megatron. The chances of his survival are simply...”
“He lives.” The hollowness at the center of his truest self, so long misunderstood, cried out now in desperate affirmation. He realized only belatedly that he had lifted a clawed hand and pressed it against the plating of his chest and over the disharmonious rhythm of his spark. “Take me to my twin. And the two of us will repair your calamitous idiocy.”
*****
The creaking shift of massive weight translated to unbalance deep within a hundred thousand stacked sheets of unpolished tribrinium. At the far end of the dock, the outward slide began, the movement of so much metal made nearly incomprehensible, somehow unreal in its mass, but Orion had witnessed too many tragedies to waste time on hesitation. A cable snapped like floss. The recoil whipped it across the slats of the dock with cleanly lethal force, severing a load-bearing mech's legs at the upper thighs, slicing off the outflung arm of a transport supervisor, and rendering a drone into so much sharp-edged scrap. Another snap. A buzzing scream.
“Hold the line!” Orion shouted.
He scrambled across the loading platform. His joints scraped sparks off the rough steel and his struts groaned in protest, but he caught the dangling cable in both hands and braced his feet to pull backward with all of his considerable weight.
The pressure along his arms and through his chest sent static jittering through his vocal processors. “Catch hold!”
Propelled into motion by Orion's desperation, Sharpshim and Traction flung themselves onto the length of cable behind him, but they were still small, so much smaller than Orion was, and the overbalancing weight of the cargo dragged the three of them painfully across the platform. Orion heard a shrill scream and dared a backward glance. One of Sharpshim's broad feet had caught under a platform edge, and before he could do more than uselessly scrabble to free it, the cable dragged them inexorably forward again and stretched the ankle apart with an electrically grinding snap.
Sharpshim released his grip on the cable. Orion could hear his friend crawling back along the platform with the broken joint spitting sparks, and he allowed himself a single shudder and a murmur of horrified sympathy before the cable yanked him nearly into the wall of stacked cargo.
Wailing and beeping in distress, drones massed around him. They meant well, but they were built heavy and horizontal for bearing loads, and their broad limbs could barely grasp something so slender as binding cable. One particularly large model flung itself against the base of the stacked sheets, and under the chatter of the drones and the beginning klaxons of the warning alarms, Orion heard an ominous groan and felt a shudder underfoot.
Since Orion's ascension to third-level Dock Master, accidents had tended toward the occasional shipping disruption or photon fire. They were overdue for a catastrophe.
High above his head, the top layer of sheets began to slide in the opposite direction-directly toward Orion, toward Traction, toward the cargo bay below. The first sheet hit the platform on Orion's left. The second followed to his right. Another groan vibrated through the cargo bay, and the stack visibly quivered.
Sixteen tons of loose tribrinium teetered and overbalanced to spill over the side of the stack. Always brittle in low temperatures, the sheets struck the cable mooring rings at the edge of the anchoring scaffold and splintered into dozens of shards. Orion gasped a strangled curse in the instant before shrapnel struck him like a rain of needles. He felt a shoulder strut bow and break at its center, and a white-hot starburst of agony briefly offlined his optics. Behind him, Traction made a grinding shriek, and the cable wrenched out of Orion's faltering grasp.
Orion fell backward a step and twisted to force Traction to the platform floor. He braced for impact.
Instead, a blow of incredible heat washed over the plating of his back, caught him beneath the joints of his arms, and sent him tumbling out of the way. He lost his hold on Traction as they skidded over the platform edge. Tribrinium shattered just behind them and covered them in jagged metal plates; Orion's systems stuttered and sent him to the narrow edge of stasis as the world flashed bright and then dark.
Everything stilled. Alarms continued to shriek in the distance, and Orion watched the flashing of his system warnings until his equilibrium settled. He was on his back, heavy weight against his chest plates, and then the world suddenly brightened as powerful claws lifted the sheet on top of him and flung it aside.
Orion flickered his optics and stared upward with exhausted bewilderment.
The figure leaning over him possessed the red optics of the military elite and the sweeping wings of an alt-mode jet. His face was familiar. So was his voice, when he spoke in an urgent growl. “How badly are you damaged?”
“Let me determine that.” Kneeling at Orion's side, the younger mech who had spoken lightly jerked his head and summoned up an examination lens over one blue optic. The engraved symbol at the center of his chest marked him as a medical officer. Orion could not look at him for long-the first mech arrested his attention like a sharpened blade.
“Are you processors intact?” demanded Megatron, Lord High Protector of Cybertron. His optics flamed into Orion's. “Do you remember who you are?”
“My name is Orion Pax,” Orion said. His vocal components had twisted out of place in the fall; static grated over each word.
The angled features familiar from a dozen public-view holographic reels regarded him with a strange hunger that Orion felt rather than observed. Clawed hands did not quite touch him. “No,” said the Lord High Protector. “It is not.”
Orion knew his own designation, but he had neither the strength nor the time to say so. The medic's hands touched him where Megatron's hands would not, and Orion felt only the uncomfortable deactivation of sensory nodes before an EMT pulse rendered him summarily offline and into stasis lock.
*****
He woke again to blinding, brilliant light and a dully pervasive pain.
“Be still,” said an unfamiliar voice, and Orion obeyed it until the glare eased and the blunt features of the same medic swam into focus. A thousand tiny limbs touched along Orion's flanks, and he almost shuddered in disoriented revulsion before he recognized the distinctively harmonic clicks of medical drones. “You suffered a ridiculous amount of damage. Fortunately for you, most of it seems to be superficial.” The medic extended a slim welding tool, and Orion hissed atmosphere through his intakes as heat stabbed needles through the broken strut of his shoulder.
When the heat finally disengaged, he trembled against the heavy metal of the examination table. The medic rested slender, graceful fingers against Orion's helm until the twinges slipped away into numbness. Orion tried to remember the last time someone had touched him in kindness, and he could not.
“Sharpshim,” he managed. “And Traction...?”
The medic made another minor weld that caused only an instant of discomfort. “Under the care of medical emergency unit 617-Beta. Traction suffer minor exoskeletal trauma-you probably saved his life. Sharpshim did not survive.”
Orion shuttered his optics, caught for a moment in the grip of an old, familiar ache of loss. After a moment of silence, the medic's fingers touched his helm again in silent apology.
“That will do for the moment,” the medic said. Orion reactivated his optics to watch the complicated examination lens fold back into itself and align narrowly along one angle of the medic's cheek. “Stay here, and stay still until the drones release you. Don't dare get up before then.” One optic ridge arched in a sardonic frown. “I assure you, I will know.”
“Thank you,” Orion murmured, but the other mech had already walked out of his limited visual range.
Would he be free to leave, then? That made no sense at all. Orion had saved Traction, but the mech who had pushed him out of the main path of the tribrinium... He flipped through the jumbled images of his visual feed before his period of stasis, recalling the edges of metal gleaming in his shoulder, the screaming of the alarms, and the face of Cybertron's Lord High Protector. What had Megatron been doing at the Iaconian lower docks?
Where was Megatron now?
Frustratingly enough, the drones were of too limited a capacity to answer his questions, and in any case, they were otherwise engaged. Orion felt the unmaintained machinery of his frame manipulated, cleaned, and often replaced as the many workers of Iacon's palatial medical center restored his plating and the components beneath it. Despite the vulnerability and violation implied by his circumstances, however, he felt a certain familiarity in losing control. A benediction, perhaps, in someone's removal of his control, when he had spent his existence laboring under the whims of so many other individuals.
Released at last, the mech in the mirrored walls shining despite the tattered paint and rendered unrecognizable even to himself, Orion followed a chirping drone down the center of a branching hallway and left the medical center behind.
The halls around them stretched so high that he could barely glimpse the ceilings. Columns made their own horizon line. Once he heard a dim rumble and looked up, up, up to watch an alt-mode interstellar jet slide by beneath the distant globes of the overhead lights. It left a sparkling trail in the thin oxygen of the upper levels. At last, the drone brought Orion into a side corridor and halted before a slim set of doors with a seam at the center. The drone beeped out a complicated series of command codes and the seam split open to reveal an unexpectedly tiny chrome chamber.
Chirping at Orion, the drone swung aside, and he suddenly understood: an elevator. Orion stepped inside and watched the doors shut with increasing uneasiness. Alone now, he felt the elevator shudder and detected the subtle change in chemical atmospheric composition as it rose floor by endless floor; weary beyond belief, he experienced the motion like the pull of a powerful sedative. The abrupt stop brought him back to awareness, and the opening of the doors to reveal Megatron standing beyond them ended any notion of slipping back into stasis.
“Come in,” Megatron said at some length, when Orion stood simply staring for far longer than a polite interval.
Orion's legs moved of their own volition, but he could never consider disobedience in any case.
“Take a seat.” Waving a hand at the benches arranged in the center of the room, Megatron moved to collect something off a table by the near wall.
With an effort, Orion focused his gaze on the room itself, trying to interpret the sight, managing only a scattered impression of spaciousness and gleaming white chrome. At the far wall stood a fountain of liquid mercury, and its programmed pattern cascaded in a calligraphic script of sacred glyphs. Stunned by so much elegant simplicity, Orion wrenched his optics back to Megatron again, and he found some distant comfort in the complicated angles of those silver exoskeletal plates.
What is this place, he meant to ask, but Megatron spoke before he could form his confusion into reliable words.
“You require better repair,” the Lord High Protector said with an unpleasant twist of his lip components. “But I wish to have you to myself, before Ratchet gets his servos into your shoulder joints. He can wait.” Megatron turned his back on Orion to pour something viscous and silver into an angled cup. “Which is to say that he is capable of waiting. Not that he will handle it graciously.”
Bewildered-and growing increasingly comfortable with the feeling-Orion took a belated seat on the very edge of the articulated bench. Layers of metal shifted and adjusted beneath him to balance his weight and take pressure off his joints, and the end result was a sort of immeasurable relief that left him speechless, mindless. Turning, Megatron held out the cup in one hand, and Orion stared at him for a dazed cycle before recognizing the implied offer of sustenance. He took the cup with all the care he possessed. In his grip, it was light as filtered atmosphere. All the weight was in the liquid, rather than the vessel itself, and he thought momentarily of the clumsy consumption cubes he had always known.
Whatever Megatron had offered him, it tasted like the blazing seed of a newborn star. The immediate spike in Orion's fuel levels sent his sensors reeling. His systems devoured the surfeit of energy with drunken glee and an audible hum of sudden self-repair.
He asked when he could speak. “What is this?”
Pausing in the midst of pouring himself a cup, Megatron gave him a long and level look, and Orion felt himself uncomfortably exposed. The Lord High Protector finished with the cup and settled with regal unconcern into the seat across from Orion's. “High-grade,” he said.
Orion did not want to argue, though they had called something high-grade down in the depths of the docks, and they had hoarded it as closely as any Towers-derived treasure. It had been slippery, oily, noxious and intoxicating. In retrospect, it had been revolting-no better sustenance than the indigo dregs of energon ladled out for basic consumption. Even so, it had numbed the aching in his limbs and in his chest. Silent, Orion drained the cup, and with wordless consideration, Megatron offered him the second cup as well.
When Megatron spoke, he did so without inflection, simply stating a fact. “You starved.”
Intensely uncomfortable, Orion shrugged his stronger shoulder. “Sometimes.” He wondered again why Megatron should care, or if he did care, about the orn-to-orn discomforts of an individual mech working at the slag-strewn edge of Cybertron's greater machinery. If Orion had ever questioned his place in their planet's diminished universe...he had not done so publicly. He could not be a political prisoner. But he certainly could not be a guest.
When he focused on Megatron again, the Lord High Protector was watching him with an expression as impenetrable as brushed steel. “They painted you, down there,” Megatron muttered at last. A poisonous note of disgust threaded through each word.
“Red,” Orion murmured. He felt strangely exposed without the layers of it.
“You were never meant to be painted.”
Orion held Megatron's emptied cup between both hands, his fingertips interlacing along the narrow stem. He had so many questions, but asking them seemed like a terrible disturbance to this strange, uneasy peace. “What is it,” he tried at last. “...What is it that you know about me?” He was programmed for patience in his basic subroutines, but he could not bear too much emotional uncertainty.
For a long cycle, Megatron studied him. “Are you...comfortable?” he asked at last, and Orion flickered his optics in surprise. “Are you comfortable with me.”
“I...” He almost followed his immediate impulse: to speak the most politically acceptable truth. Instead, something in the shadows of Megatron's expression made him pause before answering honestly. “Yes.” His vents hissed in a nervous, unnecessary cycle. “Not with the situation, but with you... Yes.” The realization shook him somehow to the core; his spark skipped and only gradually settled again. With something less than surprise, he saw Megatron raise a hand to the silver angles of his own chest plates and rest the tips of his claws there.
Their optics met, and Megatron rose suddenly to his feet and began to pace. His long strides bisected the room. “I will tell you something,” he said. His voice made Orion ache, as it always had when filtered through the speakers of media screens and holographic projections-it was perfectly accented Basic. In High Cybertronian, he would sound like music. “It is about Sentinel Prime.” Orion tried his best to focus, but the subject seemed meaningless to him, when he had no particular reference point. Sentinel Prime was dead. Megatron was meant to replace him as soon as the Council could extract the Matrix. “Vorns ago,” Megatron murmured in a strange, strained tone, “Sentinel courted the Allspark for a particular purpose. To do so was not his choice. The Council of Ancients exerted its influence.”
Orion thought of the single time he had glimpsed the Allspark-only from a distance, at the end of the Creation Celebration orn, over six vorns ago. “For...the creation of a particular spark?” he ventured, trying his best to understand.
Megatron nodded with an unpleasant intensity behind the lenses of his optics. “The Allspark acquiesced. It offered up a spark of such power that the energy could not balance itself, and it split into two.”
“Sentinel commissioned twins?” The absolute rarity of the event captured Orion's imagination.
“No.” Megatron's facial components settled into a scowl. “Sentinel wanted only one. When he received two instead, he chose the protoformed spark that he considered the strongest of the pair. He ordered the other destroyed, but the Council Liaison balked and argued for traditional separation rather than deactivation. The weaker spark was stripped of its identifying components and relocated for menial reassignment.”
As he spoke, Megatron's dental plates ground together and flashed subtle sparks.
“You were not born to what you have been.”
Derailed by the abrupt shift of Megatron's conversational focus to him alone, Orion flickered his optics and raised a hand to his chest plates, where the fundamental rhythm of his spark pulsed strong and hard with a quickening beat. “What?” He knew what Megatron was implying. Even so, he understood the notion in only the dimmest, most distant terms-an idea divorced entirely from the reality of his existence. Perhaps such confusion echoed the physical effects of separation shock. The emotional separation of his theoretical knowledge from his practical programming felt quite as acute as physical pain.
Megatron came so close that the incidental heat of his frame washed across Orion's chest. Orion's spark shuddered, and a peculiar doubling of that arrhythmia echoed in the space between them.
“I am the spark that Sentinel chose. I trained as successor to the Lord High Protector of Cybertron. You are the one he dismissed in all his ignorance-his arrogance-his stupidity-”
Words tumbled to a rasping halt; they stared at each other in silence. Orion gathered his stuttering vocal components and managed, “You think that I am...your twin?” He wanted to laugh aloud, but the impulse caught in the depths of his throat and twisted into something like shame laced with fury. “I'm a dock worker,” he said. “Do you understand what that is?” This was madness, and the anger in his rising voice answered it with disrespect in every syllable. “I run shifts. I stack crates when drones malfunction. I work in grease, I run cable, I drink contaminated energon from recycled cubes-”
The fragile cup shattered in his hand. He stared aghast at the slivers of it as they scattered across the floor.
For the first time, Megatron touched him. A powerful hand clasped around his wrist and curved clawed fingers against the cabling of his lower arm. “Hush,” he said. “Your past makes no difference. This is your future.”
Orion thought with a chill of seven hundred vorns bent and broken under the work of the docks. A hundred thousand comrades-friends-crushed by labor, by carelessness, by spite. They had been rendered and rerendered into slag for the powering of greater machinery, and their components had been reduced to a form of energy too low for even common consumption. He spoke softly but without shame. “It makes a difference.” He knew his work. Politics mixed occasionally into the pattern of shift rotations and medical emergencies and constant desperation, but for the most part, he exercised nothing more subtle than simple brute force and physical power. “I'm not made for...this.” The room, the complex, the city of Iacon stretched out around them in dreadful brilliance.
“You were made for only this,” Megatron retorted. His fingers clenched, but then they released, and he lowered himself onto the seat beside Orion. “You know that Sentinel is dead. Two orns ago, they brought me to the Matrix.” Pain lanced through the words and startled Orion into silence. “It recognized the signature of my spark, but it rejected me. I broke the codes into Sentinel's files, and then I knew why.” Megatron stared at him with the raw remnants of pride in his expression. “It wants you.”
Sacrilege.
All of Orion's sensibilities screamed the word, but when he finally opened his mouth, he said something else entirely. The past looped and caught like a binary glitch in his memory files.
“Others crumbled,” Orion murmured at last. The space behind his chest plates felt at once utterly hollow and painfully full. “The strain. It broke them slowly. They fell into disrepair. Too many damaged components meant compulsory deactivation. Everyone I knew...eventually fell apart.” He tilted his head, and saw something shift behind Megatron's optics while the other mech watched the movement. “I did not. There was no explanation for that.”
“You are made of sterner stuff.” Megatron's mouth curled bitterly upward at one edge-the sort of layered expression Orion had often admired from afar. The Lord High Protector caught Orion's hand suddenly in his own and stretched their arms out together, side by side.
Beneath the remnants of paint, the dents and the scratches, Orion saw the same luminous glow of extraordinary alloys. Megatron refracted silver from every gorgeous edge, but for the first time, Orion glimpsed the same quality of reflection in himself-gleaming in white and subtler shades of liquid blue.
“Primus,” he whispered. Maybe not madness, after all.
Megatron's lip components twisted downward at the edges as his gaze raked along the plates of Orion's exoskeleton, and the Lord High Protector twisted his hand and rose to pull Orion to his feet. “I want the rest of that off of you.” For a moment, Orion thought he meant the plates themselves, incidentally damaged as they were, but Megatron led the way through a narrow door into a sanitation chamber beyond, and Orion realized that he was referring to the paint.
Orion had not glimpsed the inside of a sanitation chamber in long, long vorns, and the size of this one made him stumble with graceless wonder. Most such constructions consisted of nothing more than blank walls of rotating nozzles, and while this one did possess those in abundance, Megatron ignored them all in favor of twisting a tap at the edge of a deep pool in the center of the floor. He flipped a switch to block the drains, and the pool began to fill. A haze of warm, acidic condensation rose into the air.
“Get in,” Megatron ordered.
Moving to the edge, Orion hesitated long enough that Megatron interpreted nervous tension as actual fear and splashed into the pool himself. He pulled Orion along with him, and together they knelt as a mix of cleansers swirled around them and sluiced into the openwork spaces between the components of legs and hips. The cleansers were harsh, but they were heated, and Orion shuttered his optics and relaxed into the powerful warmth with a heavy groan. A moment later, he thought to be embarrassed by such open appreciation, but Megatron simply responded with a low, rough suggestion of laughter.
The cleansers melted the remnants of the paint; Megatron needed nothing but the touch of his hands to remove it entirely. Clawed fingertips delved into the gaps of Orion's exoskeletal plates with unexpected gentleness. Orion had not been touched so intimately in a terribly long time-not by something beyond himself or the impersonal explorations of maintenance drones-but still Megatron seemed reluctant for more than cursory contact between them. Megatron ended his cleaning by splashing the last clinging drops of paint off Orion's temple antennae, and then he focused his attention on the raised mask that covered Orion's face.
The last of the paint washed away, but Megatron kept one hand curved around the base of Orion's chin, and a single fingertip traced patterns against a side of the mask. “Remove this,” he said.
Orion hesitated again, and then he called up the proper subroutines and obeyed.
For a long cycle, Megatron regarded him with narrowed optics. Orion felt a steadily rising heat that had little to do with temperature and everything to do with the weighted rhythm of his own spark. He felt a shudder, a rush, and an interior jostling and rearranging that gave him pause. The sense of doubled sensory perception-of lasting connection-strengthened in his circuitry and weakened all his limbs.
“We do not greatly resemble each other,” Megatron said.
“No.”
Megatron narrowed his optics to thinly gleaming slits. “Do you wish that we did?”
Orion experienced a heightened rush of exhilaration, as if he were treading fragile and treacherous ground. He spoke with careful honesty. “You are beautiful.” Megatron was all pure and glorious power, and the angles of his construction spoke to the highest aesthetic aspirations of their society. All the fluctuations of his form combined in harmony for flight. “But no.”
With his other hand, Megatron stroked along the long strut of Orion's undamaged shoulder. “You were built to fly,” he said. “They dismantled your protoform wings and reversed the joints of your legs.” A fine trembling passed between them like a thread. After a pause that was not quite hesitation, Megatron leaned against Orion, and their chest plates touched with electrical friction.
Orion shuttered his optics and quivered with the fluctuations of his spark. “How do you know that?” he whispered.
“Alpha Trion kept detailed records of everything done to you.” Orion activated his optics to find that Megatron had shuttered his own, and that the Lord High Protector had leaned close enough that they could touch cheek to cheek. “We were identical. They took the sensor array from your helm, and they gave you that mask.” Most of the dockworker mechs were visored or masked, and Orion wondered whether he would ever be comfortable with the fragile plating of his face exposed. Megatron's optics flickered back online and he spoke with a quiet ache. “You were part of me, then.”
Orion mirrored the touch, his fingers blunt against Megatron's faceplates and his equilibrium reeling from emotional rather than external cues. “I am part of you still.” He understood little save that.
“Be part of me now,” Megatron said, leaning closer with claw tips trailing the seams of lip components, and just as simply, Orion knew what this unknown, other half of him was demanding and knew that he would give it in full. Too intimate a shared experience, perhaps, for strangers-but however strange they might be to each other, they felt nothing like strangers at the spark.
The ache at the center of his chest intensified.
Orion possessed all the dignity necessary for easy surrender. “Yes,” he said, and he slipped a hand downward to splay it against the center of Megatron's chest. He applied the sort of tender pressure that would cause pleasure instead of pain, and all of Megatron's intakes activated with a vibrating hiss. Deep beneath the barriers of his own chest plates, Orion felt a thrum of blissful compression that fluctuated with his own touch like tactile feedback. Groaning, he wrapped a hand around Megatron's shoulder strut and dragged his twin closer, astonished by his own forwardness, but proximity somehow lessened the hollow, longing pain.
“I did not plan for this,” Megatron whispered, audibly shaken. His hand curled with equal ferocity around the back of Orion's neck.
“I know.” Orion said it despite knowing nothing of it. He could not yet comprehend the lie that had contained his life in narrow walls; he could not imagine the betrayal evidenced with so much clarity by Megatron's pain. Orion was a simple mech-much simpler, perhaps, than Megatron thought, and wanting what he had so long been denied seemed powerful enough for now.
They touched forehead to forehead, their differing constructions disallowing perfect symmetry. Their hands clung, nevertheless, and Megatron pushed forward to scrape their chest plates together-but concentrated cleansers could damage an exposed spark, and they could get no closer to each other inside this pool. Orion urged Megatron up and heaved himself over the metal lip of the pool, the effort pulling at the weld on his shoulder just a bit. Standing together, they rained a shower of translucent chemicals across the patterned floor.
“Where?” Orion asked in a strangled tone.
Megatron hesitated, shaking cleanser from one foot and then the other. “Back into the receiving room. Through the other door.”
Stumbling over and against each other, they made for the exit, and though Orion felt clumsier and more awkward than ever before in his long life of absolute inelegance, he found himself leading as they left the sanitation chamber and dripped across the seating of the main room.
The second door panel slid open, and Orion stared into a broad, rounded room dominated by an immense berth. The size left him reeling. “Yours?” he managed to ask.
Megatron buzzed out a mechanical snort, but Orion imagined a certain fondness in the sound. “Reserved for visiting dignitaries. It will serve.” Clinging to Orion's wrist, Megatron pulled him through the open panel of the door and remembered to lock it soundly shut behind them. “Like this,” he growled, pushing Orion down against the length of the berth and holding him still against it with both arms outstretched. Megatron stared at him in silence until Orion arched with the plaintive chirp of a protoform.
Movement had loosened Megatron's grip. They tussled back and forth for a few moments, and a cool shock of surprise washed over them both when Orion won the upper hand.
Not so long ago, Orion had still needed-had still wanted-to fight for extra rations in the darker shadows of the docks. He had been built for hand-to-hand.
In contrast, Megatron required distance and velocity to exert his maximum force. Orion hovered over him, straddling him with both legs and sliding his hands inward from the very edges of those formidable wings. Never before had he touched a winged mech, and he exploited the opportunity for all it was worth while Megatron laid mostly pliant beneath him.
Illustrious surroundings aside, Orion knew every step of this particular dance. Even in the Towers of Iacon, mechs could only interface in the same familiar ways.
Despite all of Megatron's sleek and silent confidence-despite what must be their identical ages-Megatron trembled faintly against the surface of the berth, and those clawed fingers traced restlessly over Orion's chest. He could not have much experience; the hypersensitivity of his cabling had him arching against Orion's hands. Slowly, slowly, Orion mapped the dimensions of that massive chest and urged the plates apart with nudges of his fingertips. The spark beneath exerted its incredible influence upon his own, and Orion's exoskeleton cracked open in response. Blue light spilled from Orion's chest and pooled over them both, its brilliance streaked with the white strands of Megatron's emerging spark.
Captivated, Orion made a low, coaxing note in the most basic of all their languages. With a sudden ferocity that forced Orion's head back in a shout, Megatron's spark spread forth a thousand blunt-edged hooks and latched into him, pulling them so deeply into each other that Orion immediately lost sense of himself. Blissful satiation flared and burst through them both. No relief followed. Instead, the sensation built again before cresting into a wave of astonishing awareness.
They were a single construction of mind and material. Their fingers interlocked, their plating rearranged, and the comfort was so surreal in its completeness that they sobbed as one.
Orion flailed for the escaping strands of himself. He caught and clung. They could lose the boundaries of each other entirely in this, and he felt the vague discomfort of Megatron realizing the same disturbing truth and struggling for some measure of separation. For a moment, the link between them eased, and then they shifted and steadied and settled somehow fully into themselves and into each other like a completed connection. Shuddering, Orion experienced Megatron's perceptions as thoroughly his own: the Council of Ancients quarreling against his every notion, the beauty of Cybertron stretching around him, and the extraordinary vision of Iacon bowing helm to foot beneath the power of his will... Megatron's practicality caught him and grounded him like errant lightning. The Lord High Protector tempered wonder with familiarity and astonishment with contempt.
This system is broken. It lied to me. It lied to us.
Now Orion understood Megatron's emotions as intimately as his own: the ache of Sentinel's sudden death, the horror of discovered deception, the fury of perpetual manipulation. The loss of this-the extraordinary union between them, and all it represented for the government of Cybertron. The burden of so much knowledge hurt, but Orion bore it as easily as he had always carried weight.
They had remade him specifically to carry weight.
Megatron flexed the unfurling power of their shared consciousness, and Orion yielded to the elegant probing of his curiosity. Exercising a peculiar sort of emotional distance, Megatron sifted through the repetitive images of Orion's immediate memories. He passed over the worst moments of deprivation and depravation, allowing only a flicker of interest for the deaths of Orion's dearest companions, but he paused on the image of himself as projected by a holographic feed. Remembered admiration and the dim illumination of hope shivered through the bond of their sparks and wound into their emotional and physical connection.
Orion flinched, honest embarrassment following the revelation. Dion had always teased him over his fascination with Cybertron's young Lord High Protector. Perhaps his obsession had not been so ridiculous, after all.
You knew of my existence. Megatron's hands slipped upward along Orion's back, the sensation so intensely doubled that Orion flickered his optics and shouted his astonishment. I did not know of yours. The crimson of his brother's optics went blurred and starry-edged as the shared light of their sparks increased. In the soft, shallow places where their thoughts touched, Orion tasted bitterness and something sweeter-a note of regret. All along, their lives should have been this, this connection, this completion, this certainty.
With a grating, static sob, Orion buried the sensitive plates of his face against the powerful cables of Megatron's neck, and when he crushed their sparks together again, he held nothing back. The surge of emotion and electricity wiped the pain of enforced solitude away.
In the aftermath, they laid tangled together in the strands of Cybertron's perpetual night.
Orion spoke only at length. Reluctance made him hesitate, especially given his illustrious company, but he valued honesty above all else. Megatron valued expediency, so blunt fact should please him. “You lack compassion. Even for yourself.” The way Megatron had examined his most precious of memories had left him with a lingering chill.
Vibrations traveled through the strut of his weaker shoulder as Megatron chuckled, and indulgence mingled with respect made lazy waves through his thoughts. “You lack practicality. Consistency. Especially for yourself.”
“Mm.” Orion could not deny it; he had heard such accusations in the past. After a moment, he dared a chuckle of his own. Their force of their coupling had strained the weld in his shoulder, and the sound hurt him just a bit, but Megatron's weight against the plating made for a satisfying ache. Nothing else had ever felt quite so purely right.
“We must never allow this to happen to anyone else,” Orion murmured at length.
Their sparks had separated, but Megatron's deep agreement pulsed between them without the need for physical connection. Orion felt the curve of his brother's mouth against the cabling below his chin. “Make that your first decree.”
Impossible idea, uneasy thought, that he could wield meaningful influence in this world. Orion tried to comprehend the magnitude of it, but his history of poor consumption had overcome the extraordinary quality of Megatron's high grade, and his body protested at so much sustained activity after a nearly catastrophic injury. He drifted into light stasis, soothed by the rhythm of his twin's systems and their shared sparks.
*****
Orion woke unexpectedly from a regular recharge cycle, and he felt whole.
The sensation was singular enough that he activated his optics and took in the vaulted ceiling, the berth that stretched nearly wall to wall, and the Lord High Protector of Cybertron at rest beside him. Those slanted optics glowed dimly crimson in the shadows. Watching him. Part of him.
Without a word, he reached out a hand, and his fingers hovered at Megatron's shoulder strut before gripping and pulling and bringing them together again with no protest.
Fully together, sparks entwined, they shattered the remaining spaces between them. Orion felt pressure build and ebb and build again on waves of crackling heat. The metal beneath and between his fingers held fast, its alloys as sturdy as his own, and the spark that sought alternately to consume him and to capitulate to him was just as obstinately steadfast. Nothing could break except the will. In their instantaneous or preexisting bond, Orion had sensed the deep stability of balance in their joining, an interior harmony, and he groaned aloud as that sensation built like climax through all his systems.
True overload followed with wrenching force. Relief seared through his circuitry, and Megatron surrendered a high, keening sound that touched Orion deeply enough to send them surging yet again.
Flickers of dissipating electric charge traced across Megatron's plating, and Orion slipped his fingertips through their residual glow. His strength ebbed with the fading shocks of completion. With a heavy sigh, he rested fully against the berth with Megatron mirroring his position-the two of them curled together, side by side.
At some length, Orion recalled what Megatron had said to him back in the darkness of the docks.
“What is my name, then?” he asked, his voice quiet as his energy flow slowed and redirected in preparation for continued recharge.
For a cycle, Megatron said nothing, but Orion knew from the faint hissing of his vents that he was fully aware. One hand lifted and ran clawtips along the cables of Orion's throat with all the swift grace of quicksilver. “Your designation is Optimus,” he said. “When all the necessary pomposity is said and done...you will be Optimus Prime.”
Surreality overshadowed the tangle of Orion's thoughts. He would be Prime. The meaning of it eluded him; it slipped out of his grasp again and again. “What if it rejects me, as well?” he whispered.
Megatron chuckled like velvet steel. “It will not.” He turned over, the planes of his wings rearranging as his arms settled around Orion's shoulders. Bitterness touched his words, but Orion sensed something mild and undoubtedly affectionate in the shadows of emotion between them. “You are everything that it did not find in me.”
Oddly comforted, Orion let his twin urge him back into the powerful warmth of a protective embrace. Security surrounded them both. “Brother,” Orion murmured, pleased with the shape of the word-with its sound and with its weight, and with all the levels of unexpected intimacy that it implied.
“Brother,” Megatron echoed. The dark silk of his voice lured Orion back into recharge.
~End~
For YOU, lady_oneiros! Yours yours yours. ♥
Title: Harmonic Progression
Rating: M/NC-17
Disclaimer: Not mine, but can I have them for my birthday? I've been good.
Pairing: Megatron/Orion Pax, pre-war
Summary: In the aftermath of Sentinel Prime's assassination, Megatron receives a revelation that shatters all his foundations.
Author’s Note: This fic asserts that Megatron and Optimus are twins from a single spark. As such, warnings for twincest.
“Well a Process Man am I, and I'm tellin' you no lie
I work and breathe among the fumes that trail across the sky...”
-Great Big Sea, 'Process Man (The Chemical Worker's Song)'
Nothing had hurt so much as the loss of his greatest mentor. Or so he had believed.
“Whatever are you doing here, Lord High Protector?”
Startled though he was, Megatron kept his back turned for a moment or two more, still facing the console. Passcodes and firewalls were broken, their warnings ignored but sounding progressively louder throughout Iacon's security net, and he wondered with a little anticipation how the Council would spin this to the media-how they could capitalize on a breach of the assassinated Prime's personal files. Rising to his feet, he turned to face the Chief Liaison. The Council had chosen Alpha Trion with great care, or so he imagined, for so sensitive a situation.
Resolve it. Quietly.
Megatron chose his own response with care while watching the elder mech with narrowed optics. “Research.”
Something in Alpha Trion's posture stiffened with unaccustomed tension that melted abruptly into weighted acceptance. He lowered his head. “I assume you have found some measure of...enlightenment, then.”
“If you would care to call it that,” Megatron said. The components of his jaw clenched and all the self-sharpening edges of his dental plates scraped lightly together. What he had discovered in the dim recesses of Sentinel Prime's meticulous records was catastrophic, spark-shattering, foundation-demolishing truth at last, and the Council plainly knew and had known every unbearable detail.
Alpha Trion took a few measured steps deeper into the vaulted room, a whirr of strain sounding in the million mechanical components of his legs. He had a narrow frame, built for aristocracy but diminished by megavorns of political machinations without physical compensation. Megatron thought idly of exerting the force of his own warrior build-of tearing the politician in two.
The Councilor raised a fragile hand and tried to touch him. “Lord Megatron--”
Megatron's slammed fist left a jagged impression in the tabletop. “Tell me, at least, why it was done.”
To his credit, the Chief Liaison never flinched. “Separation is traditional,” he murmured, speaking in tones still smoothly calm even as Megatron loomed above him and radiated fury on wavelengths of unexpected pain. “So that each spark may grow without reliance on the other.”
“Without knowledge of the other?” Megatron returned. He turned his hand so that his claws gripped into the dented metal.
Alpha Trion paused, perhaps to judge his phrasing. Perhaps to consider his final words, or so Megatron would love to believe: the venerable eldest of the Council of Ancients ripping his processors apart to satisfactorily explain the uncountable threads of dishonesty that strung straight from Sentinel Prime and wove downward through every crumbling echelon of Cybertronian government. Alpha Trion shook his head. “That is traditional, as well.”
Megatron could not prevent his own snarl. It echoed along the decorative metallic plates of the chamber ceiling, acoustics catching it and twisting it and returning it in a thousand diminishing echoes of promised violence. “You are responsible. For this unrest, for this insanity, for this...” He dared not say this pain, my pain, how dare your sanctimony and self-righteousness cause me so much pain? When the Matrix had rejected him, it had done so with such vehemence that his reliance on himself had shaken down to its previously solid foundations. “Your reliance on tradition has brought this empire to its knees,” he said instead, low but hateful. “And Sentinel's mad insistence upon controlling his own succession may grind Cybertron into dust.”
His gaze lowering, Alpha Trion simply shook his head again, and the futility etched into every contour of his frame made Megatron gather his own tension into pure strength. He was all leashed force; his joints wound tight as if preparing for battle. The sigh of interior vents in the Chief Liaison's voice grated across the last threads of Megatron's patience. “What would you have us do?”
“Find him,” Megatron growled, and Alpha Trion snapped his head up in surprise.
“Lord Megatron. The chances of his survival are simply...”
“He lives.” The hollowness at the center of his truest self, so long misunderstood, cried out now in desperate affirmation. He realized only belatedly that he had lifted a clawed hand and pressed it against the plating of his chest and over the disharmonious rhythm of his spark. “Take me to my twin. And the two of us will repair your calamitous idiocy.”
*****
The creaking shift of massive weight translated to unbalance deep within a hundred thousand stacked sheets of unpolished tribrinium. At the far end of the dock, the outward slide began, the movement of so much metal made nearly incomprehensible, somehow unreal in its mass, but Orion had witnessed too many tragedies to waste time on hesitation. A cable snapped like floss. The recoil whipped it across the slats of the dock with cleanly lethal force, severing a load-bearing mech's legs at the upper thighs, slicing off the outflung arm of a transport supervisor, and rendering a drone into so much sharp-edged scrap. Another snap. A buzzing scream.
“Hold the line!” Orion shouted.
He scrambled across the loading platform. His joints scraped sparks off the rough steel and his struts groaned in protest, but he caught the dangling cable in both hands and braced his feet to pull backward with all of his considerable weight.
The pressure along his arms and through his chest sent static jittering through his vocal processors. “Catch hold!”
Propelled into motion by Orion's desperation, Sharpshim and Traction flung themselves onto the length of cable behind him, but they were still small, so much smaller than Orion was, and the overbalancing weight of the cargo dragged the three of them painfully across the platform. Orion heard a shrill scream and dared a backward glance. One of Sharpshim's broad feet had caught under a platform edge, and before he could do more than uselessly scrabble to free it, the cable dragged them inexorably forward again and stretched the ankle apart with an electrically grinding snap.
Sharpshim released his grip on the cable. Orion could hear his friend crawling back along the platform with the broken joint spitting sparks, and he allowed himself a single shudder and a murmur of horrified sympathy before the cable yanked him nearly into the wall of stacked cargo.
Wailing and beeping in distress, drones massed around him. They meant well, but they were built heavy and horizontal for bearing loads, and their broad limbs could barely grasp something so slender as binding cable. One particularly large model flung itself against the base of the stacked sheets, and under the chatter of the drones and the beginning klaxons of the warning alarms, Orion heard an ominous groan and felt a shudder underfoot.
Since Orion's ascension to third-level Dock Master, accidents had tended toward the occasional shipping disruption or photon fire. They were overdue for a catastrophe.
High above his head, the top layer of sheets began to slide in the opposite direction-directly toward Orion, toward Traction, toward the cargo bay below. The first sheet hit the platform on Orion's left. The second followed to his right. Another groan vibrated through the cargo bay, and the stack visibly quivered.
Sixteen tons of loose tribrinium teetered and overbalanced to spill over the side of the stack. Always brittle in low temperatures, the sheets struck the cable mooring rings at the edge of the anchoring scaffold and splintered into dozens of shards. Orion gasped a strangled curse in the instant before shrapnel struck him like a rain of needles. He felt a shoulder strut bow and break at its center, and a white-hot starburst of agony briefly offlined his optics. Behind him, Traction made a grinding shriek, and the cable wrenched out of Orion's faltering grasp.
Orion fell backward a step and twisted to force Traction to the platform floor. He braced for impact.
Instead, a blow of incredible heat washed over the plating of his back, caught him beneath the joints of his arms, and sent him tumbling out of the way. He lost his hold on Traction as they skidded over the platform edge. Tribrinium shattered just behind them and covered them in jagged metal plates; Orion's systems stuttered and sent him to the narrow edge of stasis as the world flashed bright and then dark.
Everything stilled. Alarms continued to shriek in the distance, and Orion watched the flashing of his system warnings until his equilibrium settled. He was on his back, heavy weight against his chest plates, and then the world suddenly brightened as powerful claws lifted the sheet on top of him and flung it aside.
Orion flickered his optics and stared upward with exhausted bewilderment.
The figure leaning over him possessed the red optics of the military elite and the sweeping wings of an alt-mode jet. His face was familiar. So was his voice, when he spoke in an urgent growl. “How badly are you damaged?”
“Let me determine that.” Kneeling at Orion's side, the younger mech who had spoken lightly jerked his head and summoned up an examination lens over one blue optic. The engraved symbol at the center of his chest marked him as a medical officer. Orion could not look at him for long-the first mech arrested his attention like a sharpened blade.
“Are you processors intact?” demanded Megatron, Lord High Protector of Cybertron. His optics flamed into Orion's. “Do you remember who you are?”
“My name is Orion Pax,” Orion said. His vocal components had twisted out of place in the fall; static grated over each word.
The angled features familiar from a dozen public-view holographic reels regarded him with a strange hunger that Orion felt rather than observed. Clawed hands did not quite touch him. “No,” said the Lord High Protector. “It is not.”
Orion knew his own designation, but he had neither the strength nor the time to say so. The medic's hands touched him where Megatron's hands would not, and Orion felt only the uncomfortable deactivation of sensory nodes before an EMT pulse rendered him summarily offline and into stasis lock.
*****
He woke again to blinding, brilliant light and a dully pervasive pain.
“Be still,” said an unfamiliar voice, and Orion obeyed it until the glare eased and the blunt features of the same medic swam into focus. A thousand tiny limbs touched along Orion's flanks, and he almost shuddered in disoriented revulsion before he recognized the distinctively harmonic clicks of medical drones. “You suffered a ridiculous amount of damage. Fortunately for you, most of it seems to be superficial.” The medic extended a slim welding tool, and Orion hissed atmosphere through his intakes as heat stabbed needles through the broken strut of his shoulder.
When the heat finally disengaged, he trembled against the heavy metal of the examination table. The medic rested slender, graceful fingers against Orion's helm until the twinges slipped away into numbness. Orion tried to remember the last time someone had touched him in kindness, and he could not.
“Sharpshim,” he managed. “And Traction...?”
The medic made another minor weld that caused only an instant of discomfort. “Under the care of medical emergency unit 617-Beta. Traction suffer minor exoskeletal trauma-you probably saved his life. Sharpshim did not survive.”
Orion shuttered his optics, caught for a moment in the grip of an old, familiar ache of loss. After a moment of silence, the medic's fingers touched his helm again in silent apology.
“That will do for the moment,” the medic said. Orion reactivated his optics to watch the complicated examination lens fold back into itself and align narrowly along one angle of the medic's cheek. “Stay here, and stay still until the drones release you. Don't dare get up before then.” One optic ridge arched in a sardonic frown. “I assure you, I will know.”
“Thank you,” Orion murmured, but the other mech had already walked out of his limited visual range.
Would he be free to leave, then? That made no sense at all. Orion had saved Traction, but the mech who had pushed him out of the main path of the tribrinium... He flipped through the jumbled images of his visual feed before his period of stasis, recalling the edges of metal gleaming in his shoulder, the screaming of the alarms, and the face of Cybertron's Lord High Protector. What had Megatron been doing at the Iaconian lower docks?
Where was Megatron now?
Frustratingly enough, the drones were of too limited a capacity to answer his questions, and in any case, they were otherwise engaged. Orion felt the unmaintained machinery of his frame manipulated, cleaned, and often replaced as the many workers of Iacon's palatial medical center restored his plating and the components beneath it. Despite the vulnerability and violation implied by his circumstances, however, he felt a certain familiarity in losing control. A benediction, perhaps, in someone's removal of his control, when he had spent his existence laboring under the whims of so many other individuals.
Released at last, the mech in the mirrored walls shining despite the tattered paint and rendered unrecognizable even to himself, Orion followed a chirping drone down the center of a branching hallway and left the medical center behind.
The halls around them stretched so high that he could barely glimpse the ceilings. Columns made their own horizon line. Once he heard a dim rumble and looked up, up, up to watch an alt-mode interstellar jet slide by beneath the distant globes of the overhead lights. It left a sparkling trail in the thin oxygen of the upper levels. At last, the drone brought Orion into a side corridor and halted before a slim set of doors with a seam at the center. The drone beeped out a complicated series of command codes and the seam split open to reveal an unexpectedly tiny chrome chamber.
Chirping at Orion, the drone swung aside, and he suddenly understood: an elevator. Orion stepped inside and watched the doors shut with increasing uneasiness. Alone now, he felt the elevator shudder and detected the subtle change in chemical atmospheric composition as it rose floor by endless floor; weary beyond belief, he experienced the motion like the pull of a powerful sedative. The abrupt stop brought him back to awareness, and the opening of the doors to reveal Megatron standing beyond them ended any notion of slipping back into stasis.
“Come in,” Megatron said at some length, when Orion stood simply staring for far longer than a polite interval.
Orion's legs moved of their own volition, but he could never consider disobedience in any case.
“Take a seat.” Waving a hand at the benches arranged in the center of the room, Megatron moved to collect something off a table by the near wall.
With an effort, Orion focused his gaze on the room itself, trying to interpret the sight, managing only a scattered impression of spaciousness and gleaming white chrome. At the far wall stood a fountain of liquid mercury, and its programmed pattern cascaded in a calligraphic script of sacred glyphs. Stunned by so much elegant simplicity, Orion wrenched his optics back to Megatron again, and he found some distant comfort in the complicated angles of those silver exoskeletal plates.
What is this place, he meant to ask, but Megatron spoke before he could form his confusion into reliable words.
“You require better repair,” the Lord High Protector said with an unpleasant twist of his lip components. “But I wish to have you to myself, before Ratchet gets his servos into your shoulder joints. He can wait.” Megatron turned his back on Orion to pour something viscous and silver into an angled cup. “Which is to say that he is capable of waiting. Not that he will handle it graciously.”
Bewildered-and growing increasingly comfortable with the feeling-Orion took a belated seat on the very edge of the articulated bench. Layers of metal shifted and adjusted beneath him to balance his weight and take pressure off his joints, and the end result was a sort of immeasurable relief that left him speechless, mindless. Turning, Megatron held out the cup in one hand, and Orion stared at him for a dazed cycle before recognizing the implied offer of sustenance. He took the cup with all the care he possessed. In his grip, it was light as filtered atmosphere. All the weight was in the liquid, rather than the vessel itself, and he thought momentarily of the clumsy consumption cubes he had always known.
Whatever Megatron had offered him, it tasted like the blazing seed of a newborn star. The immediate spike in Orion's fuel levels sent his sensors reeling. His systems devoured the surfeit of energy with drunken glee and an audible hum of sudden self-repair.
He asked when he could speak. “What is this?”
Pausing in the midst of pouring himself a cup, Megatron gave him a long and level look, and Orion felt himself uncomfortably exposed. The Lord High Protector finished with the cup and settled with regal unconcern into the seat across from Orion's. “High-grade,” he said.
Orion did not want to argue, though they had called something high-grade down in the depths of the docks, and they had hoarded it as closely as any Towers-derived treasure. It had been slippery, oily, noxious and intoxicating. In retrospect, it had been revolting-no better sustenance than the indigo dregs of energon ladled out for basic consumption. Even so, it had numbed the aching in his limbs and in his chest. Silent, Orion drained the cup, and with wordless consideration, Megatron offered him the second cup as well.
When Megatron spoke, he did so without inflection, simply stating a fact. “You starved.”
Intensely uncomfortable, Orion shrugged his stronger shoulder. “Sometimes.” He wondered again why Megatron should care, or if he did care, about the orn-to-orn discomforts of an individual mech working at the slag-strewn edge of Cybertron's greater machinery. If Orion had ever questioned his place in their planet's diminished universe...he had not done so publicly. He could not be a political prisoner. But he certainly could not be a guest.
When he focused on Megatron again, the Lord High Protector was watching him with an expression as impenetrable as brushed steel. “They painted you, down there,” Megatron muttered at last. A poisonous note of disgust threaded through each word.
“Red,” Orion murmured. He felt strangely exposed without the layers of it.
“You were never meant to be painted.”
Orion held Megatron's emptied cup between both hands, his fingertips interlacing along the narrow stem. He had so many questions, but asking them seemed like a terrible disturbance to this strange, uneasy peace. “What is it,” he tried at last. “...What is it that you know about me?” He was programmed for patience in his basic subroutines, but he could not bear too much emotional uncertainty.
For a long cycle, Megatron studied him. “Are you...comfortable?” he asked at last, and Orion flickered his optics in surprise. “Are you comfortable with me.”
“I...” He almost followed his immediate impulse: to speak the most politically acceptable truth. Instead, something in the shadows of Megatron's expression made him pause before answering honestly. “Yes.” His vents hissed in a nervous, unnecessary cycle. “Not with the situation, but with you... Yes.” The realization shook him somehow to the core; his spark skipped and only gradually settled again. With something less than surprise, he saw Megatron raise a hand to the silver angles of his own chest plates and rest the tips of his claws there.
Their optics met, and Megatron rose suddenly to his feet and began to pace. His long strides bisected the room. “I will tell you something,” he said. His voice made Orion ache, as it always had when filtered through the speakers of media screens and holographic projections-it was perfectly accented Basic. In High Cybertronian, he would sound like music. “It is about Sentinel Prime.” Orion tried his best to focus, but the subject seemed meaningless to him, when he had no particular reference point. Sentinel Prime was dead. Megatron was meant to replace him as soon as the Council could extract the Matrix. “Vorns ago,” Megatron murmured in a strange, strained tone, “Sentinel courted the Allspark for a particular purpose. To do so was not his choice. The Council of Ancients exerted its influence.”
Orion thought of the single time he had glimpsed the Allspark-only from a distance, at the end of the Creation Celebration orn, over six vorns ago. “For...the creation of a particular spark?” he ventured, trying his best to understand.
Megatron nodded with an unpleasant intensity behind the lenses of his optics. “The Allspark acquiesced. It offered up a spark of such power that the energy could not balance itself, and it split into two.”
“Sentinel commissioned twins?” The absolute rarity of the event captured Orion's imagination.
“No.” Megatron's facial components settled into a scowl. “Sentinel wanted only one. When he received two instead, he chose the protoformed spark that he considered the strongest of the pair. He ordered the other destroyed, but the Council Liaison balked and argued for traditional separation rather than deactivation. The weaker spark was stripped of its identifying components and relocated for menial reassignment.”
As he spoke, Megatron's dental plates ground together and flashed subtle sparks.
“You were not born to what you have been.”
Derailed by the abrupt shift of Megatron's conversational focus to him alone, Orion flickered his optics and raised a hand to his chest plates, where the fundamental rhythm of his spark pulsed strong and hard with a quickening beat. “What?” He knew what Megatron was implying. Even so, he understood the notion in only the dimmest, most distant terms-an idea divorced entirely from the reality of his existence. Perhaps such confusion echoed the physical effects of separation shock. The emotional separation of his theoretical knowledge from his practical programming felt quite as acute as physical pain.
Megatron came so close that the incidental heat of his frame washed across Orion's chest. Orion's spark shuddered, and a peculiar doubling of that arrhythmia echoed in the space between them.
“I am the spark that Sentinel chose. I trained as successor to the Lord High Protector of Cybertron. You are the one he dismissed in all his ignorance-his arrogance-his stupidity-”
Words tumbled to a rasping halt; they stared at each other in silence. Orion gathered his stuttering vocal components and managed, “You think that I am...your twin?” He wanted to laugh aloud, but the impulse caught in the depths of his throat and twisted into something like shame laced with fury. “I'm a dock worker,” he said. “Do you understand what that is?” This was madness, and the anger in his rising voice answered it with disrespect in every syllable. “I run shifts. I stack crates when drones malfunction. I work in grease, I run cable, I drink contaminated energon from recycled cubes-”
The fragile cup shattered in his hand. He stared aghast at the slivers of it as they scattered across the floor.
For the first time, Megatron touched him. A powerful hand clasped around his wrist and curved clawed fingers against the cabling of his lower arm. “Hush,” he said. “Your past makes no difference. This is your future.”
Orion thought with a chill of seven hundred vorns bent and broken under the work of the docks. A hundred thousand comrades-friends-crushed by labor, by carelessness, by spite. They had been rendered and rerendered into slag for the powering of greater machinery, and their components had been reduced to a form of energy too low for even common consumption. He spoke softly but without shame. “It makes a difference.” He knew his work. Politics mixed occasionally into the pattern of shift rotations and medical emergencies and constant desperation, but for the most part, he exercised nothing more subtle than simple brute force and physical power. “I'm not made for...this.” The room, the complex, the city of Iacon stretched out around them in dreadful brilliance.
“You were made for only this,” Megatron retorted. His fingers clenched, but then they released, and he lowered himself onto the seat beside Orion. “You know that Sentinel is dead. Two orns ago, they brought me to the Matrix.” Pain lanced through the words and startled Orion into silence. “It recognized the signature of my spark, but it rejected me. I broke the codes into Sentinel's files, and then I knew why.” Megatron stared at him with the raw remnants of pride in his expression. “It wants you.”
Sacrilege.
All of Orion's sensibilities screamed the word, but when he finally opened his mouth, he said something else entirely. The past looped and caught like a binary glitch in his memory files.
“Others crumbled,” Orion murmured at last. The space behind his chest plates felt at once utterly hollow and painfully full. “The strain. It broke them slowly. They fell into disrepair. Too many damaged components meant compulsory deactivation. Everyone I knew...eventually fell apart.” He tilted his head, and saw something shift behind Megatron's optics while the other mech watched the movement. “I did not. There was no explanation for that.”
“You are made of sterner stuff.” Megatron's mouth curled bitterly upward at one edge-the sort of layered expression Orion had often admired from afar. The Lord High Protector caught Orion's hand suddenly in his own and stretched their arms out together, side by side.
Beneath the remnants of paint, the dents and the scratches, Orion saw the same luminous glow of extraordinary alloys. Megatron refracted silver from every gorgeous edge, but for the first time, Orion glimpsed the same quality of reflection in himself-gleaming in white and subtler shades of liquid blue.
“Primus,” he whispered. Maybe not madness, after all.
Megatron's lip components twisted downward at the edges as his gaze raked along the plates of Orion's exoskeleton, and the Lord High Protector twisted his hand and rose to pull Orion to his feet. “I want the rest of that off of you.” For a moment, Orion thought he meant the plates themselves, incidentally damaged as they were, but Megatron led the way through a narrow door into a sanitation chamber beyond, and Orion realized that he was referring to the paint.
Orion had not glimpsed the inside of a sanitation chamber in long, long vorns, and the size of this one made him stumble with graceless wonder. Most such constructions consisted of nothing more than blank walls of rotating nozzles, and while this one did possess those in abundance, Megatron ignored them all in favor of twisting a tap at the edge of a deep pool in the center of the floor. He flipped a switch to block the drains, and the pool began to fill. A haze of warm, acidic condensation rose into the air.
“Get in,” Megatron ordered.
Moving to the edge, Orion hesitated long enough that Megatron interpreted nervous tension as actual fear and splashed into the pool himself. He pulled Orion along with him, and together they knelt as a mix of cleansers swirled around them and sluiced into the openwork spaces between the components of legs and hips. The cleansers were harsh, but they were heated, and Orion shuttered his optics and relaxed into the powerful warmth with a heavy groan. A moment later, he thought to be embarrassed by such open appreciation, but Megatron simply responded with a low, rough suggestion of laughter.
The cleansers melted the remnants of the paint; Megatron needed nothing but the touch of his hands to remove it entirely. Clawed fingertips delved into the gaps of Orion's exoskeletal plates with unexpected gentleness. Orion had not been touched so intimately in a terribly long time-not by something beyond himself or the impersonal explorations of maintenance drones-but still Megatron seemed reluctant for more than cursory contact between them. Megatron ended his cleaning by splashing the last clinging drops of paint off Orion's temple antennae, and then he focused his attention on the raised mask that covered Orion's face.
The last of the paint washed away, but Megatron kept one hand curved around the base of Orion's chin, and a single fingertip traced patterns against a side of the mask. “Remove this,” he said.
Orion hesitated again, and then he called up the proper subroutines and obeyed.
For a long cycle, Megatron regarded him with narrowed optics. Orion felt a steadily rising heat that had little to do with temperature and everything to do with the weighted rhythm of his own spark. He felt a shudder, a rush, and an interior jostling and rearranging that gave him pause. The sense of doubled sensory perception-of lasting connection-strengthened in his circuitry and weakened all his limbs.
“We do not greatly resemble each other,” Megatron said.
“No.”
Megatron narrowed his optics to thinly gleaming slits. “Do you wish that we did?”
Orion experienced a heightened rush of exhilaration, as if he were treading fragile and treacherous ground. He spoke with careful honesty. “You are beautiful.” Megatron was all pure and glorious power, and the angles of his construction spoke to the highest aesthetic aspirations of their society. All the fluctuations of his form combined in harmony for flight. “But no.”
With his other hand, Megatron stroked along the long strut of Orion's undamaged shoulder. “You were built to fly,” he said. “They dismantled your protoform wings and reversed the joints of your legs.” A fine trembling passed between them like a thread. After a pause that was not quite hesitation, Megatron leaned against Orion, and their chest plates touched with electrical friction.
Orion shuttered his optics and quivered with the fluctuations of his spark. “How do you know that?” he whispered.
“Alpha Trion kept detailed records of everything done to you.” Orion activated his optics to find that Megatron had shuttered his own, and that the Lord High Protector had leaned close enough that they could touch cheek to cheek. “We were identical. They took the sensor array from your helm, and they gave you that mask.” Most of the dockworker mechs were visored or masked, and Orion wondered whether he would ever be comfortable with the fragile plating of his face exposed. Megatron's optics flickered back online and he spoke with a quiet ache. “You were part of me, then.”
Orion mirrored the touch, his fingers blunt against Megatron's faceplates and his equilibrium reeling from emotional rather than external cues. “I am part of you still.” He understood little save that.
“Be part of me now,” Megatron said, leaning closer with claw tips trailing the seams of lip components, and just as simply, Orion knew what this unknown, other half of him was demanding and knew that he would give it in full. Too intimate a shared experience, perhaps, for strangers-but however strange they might be to each other, they felt nothing like strangers at the spark.
The ache at the center of his chest intensified.
Orion possessed all the dignity necessary for easy surrender. “Yes,” he said, and he slipped a hand downward to splay it against the center of Megatron's chest. He applied the sort of tender pressure that would cause pleasure instead of pain, and all of Megatron's intakes activated with a vibrating hiss. Deep beneath the barriers of his own chest plates, Orion felt a thrum of blissful compression that fluctuated with his own touch like tactile feedback. Groaning, he wrapped a hand around Megatron's shoulder strut and dragged his twin closer, astonished by his own forwardness, but proximity somehow lessened the hollow, longing pain.
“I did not plan for this,” Megatron whispered, audibly shaken. His hand curled with equal ferocity around the back of Orion's neck.
“I know.” Orion said it despite knowing nothing of it. He could not yet comprehend the lie that had contained his life in narrow walls; he could not imagine the betrayal evidenced with so much clarity by Megatron's pain. Orion was a simple mech-much simpler, perhaps, than Megatron thought, and wanting what he had so long been denied seemed powerful enough for now.
They touched forehead to forehead, their differing constructions disallowing perfect symmetry. Their hands clung, nevertheless, and Megatron pushed forward to scrape their chest plates together-but concentrated cleansers could damage an exposed spark, and they could get no closer to each other inside this pool. Orion urged Megatron up and heaved himself over the metal lip of the pool, the effort pulling at the weld on his shoulder just a bit. Standing together, they rained a shower of translucent chemicals across the patterned floor.
“Where?” Orion asked in a strangled tone.
Megatron hesitated, shaking cleanser from one foot and then the other. “Back into the receiving room. Through the other door.”
Stumbling over and against each other, they made for the exit, and though Orion felt clumsier and more awkward than ever before in his long life of absolute inelegance, he found himself leading as they left the sanitation chamber and dripped across the seating of the main room.
The second door panel slid open, and Orion stared into a broad, rounded room dominated by an immense berth. The size left him reeling. “Yours?” he managed to ask.
Megatron buzzed out a mechanical snort, but Orion imagined a certain fondness in the sound. “Reserved for visiting dignitaries. It will serve.” Clinging to Orion's wrist, Megatron pulled him through the open panel of the door and remembered to lock it soundly shut behind them. “Like this,” he growled, pushing Orion down against the length of the berth and holding him still against it with both arms outstretched. Megatron stared at him in silence until Orion arched with the plaintive chirp of a protoform.
Movement had loosened Megatron's grip. They tussled back and forth for a few moments, and a cool shock of surprise washed over them both when Orion won the upper hand.
Not so long ago, Orion had still needed-had still wanted-to fight for extra rations in the darker shadows of the docks. He had been built for hand-to-hand.
In contrast, Megatron required distance and velocity to exert his maximum force. Orion hovered over him, straddling him with both legs and sliding his hands inward from the very edges of those formidable wings. Never before had he touched a winged mech, and he exploited the opportunity for all it was worth while Megatron laid mostly pliant beneath him.
Illustrious surroundings aside, Orion knew every step of this particular dance. Even in the Towers of Iacon, mechs could only interface in the same familiar ways.
Despite all of Megatron's sleek and silent confidence-despite what must be their identical ages-Megatron trembled faintly against the surface of the berth, and those clawed fingers traced restlessly over Orion's chest. He could not have much experience; the hypersensitivity of his cabling had him arching against Orion's hands. Slowly, slowly, Orion mapped the dimensions of that massive chest and urged the plates apart with nudges of his fingertips. The spark beneath exerted its incredible influence upon his own, and Orion's exoskeleton cracked open in response. Blue light spilled from Orion's chest and pooled over them both, its brilliance streaked with the white strands of Megatron's emerging spark.
Captivated, Orion made a low, coaxing note in the most basic of all their languages. With a sudden ferocity that forced Orion's head back in a shout, Megatron's spark spread forth a thousand blunt-edged hooks and latched into him, pulling them so deeply into each other that Orion immediately lost sense of himself. Blissful satiation flared and burst through them both. No relief followed. Instead, the sensation built again before cresting into a wave of astonishing awareness.
They were a single construction of mind and material. Their fingers interlocked, their plating rearranged, and the comfort was so surreal in its completeness that they sobbed as one.
Orion flailed for the escaping strands of himself. He caught and clung. They could lose the boundaries of each other entirely in this, and he felt the vague discomfort of Megatron realizing the same disturbing truth and struggling for some measure of separation. For a moment, the link between them eased, and then they shifted and steadied and settled somehow fully into themselves and into each other like a completed connection. Shuddering, Orion experienced Megatron's perceptions as thoroughly his own: the Council of Ancients quarreling against his every notion, the beauty of Cybertron stretching around him, and the extraordinary vision of Iacon bowing helm to foot beneath the power of his will... Megatron's practicality caught him and grounded him like errant lightning. The Lord High Protector tempered wonder with familiarity and astonishment with contempt.
This system is broken. It lied to me. It lied to us.
Now Orion understood Megatron's emotions as intimately as his own: the ache of Sentinel's sudden death, the horror of discovered deception, the fury of perpetual manipulation. The loss of this-the extraordinary union between them, and all it represented for the government of Cybertron. The burden of so much knowledge hurt, but Orion bore it as easily as he had always carried weight.
They had remade him specifically to carry weight.
Megatron flexed the unfurling power of their shared consciousness, and Orion yielded to the elegant probing of his curiosity. Exercising a peculiar sort of emotional distance, Megatron sifted through the repetitive images of Orion's immediate memories. He passed over the worst moments of deprivation and depravation, allowing only a flicker of interest for the deaths of Orion's dearest companions, but he paused on the image of himself as projected by a holographic feed. Remembered admiration and the dim illumination of hope shivered through the bond of their sparks and wound into their emotional and physical connection.
Orion flinched, honest embarrassment following the revelation. Dion had always teased him over his fascination with Cybertron's young Lord High Protector. Perhaps his obsession had not been so ridiculous, after all.
You knew of my existence. Megatron's hands slipped upward along Orion's back, the sensation so intensely doubled that Orion flickered his optics and shouted his astonishment. I did not know of yours. The crimson of his brother's optics went blurred and starry-edged as the shared light of their sparks increased. In the soft, shallow places where their thoughts touched, Orion tasted bitterness and something sweeter-a note of regret. All along, their lives should have been this, this connection, this completion, this certainty.
With a grating, static sob, Orion buried the sensitive plates of his face against the powerful cables of Megatron's neck, and when he crushed their sparks together again, he held nothing back. The surge of emotion and electricity wiped the pain of enforced solitude away.
In the aftermath, they laid tangled together in the strands of Cybertron's perpetual night.
Orion spoke only at length. Reluctance made him hesitate, especially given his illustrious company, but he valued honesty above all else. Megatron valued expediency, so blunt fact should please him. “You lack compassion. Even for yourself.” The way Megatron had examined his most precious of memories had left him with a lingering chill.
Vibrations traveled through the strut of his weaker shoulder as Megatron chuckled, and indulgence mingled with respect made lazy waves through his thoughts. “You lack practicality. Consistency. Especially for yourself.”
“Mm.” Orion could not deny it; he had heard such accusations in the past. After a moment, he dared a chuckle of his own. Their force of their coupling had strained the weld in his shoulder, and the sound hurt him just a bit, but Megatron's weight against the plating made for a satisfying ache. Nothing else had ever felt quite so purely right.
“We must never allow this to happen to anyone else,” Orion murmured at length.
Their sparks had separated, but Megatron's deep agreement pulsed between them without the need for physical connection. Orion felt the curve of his brother's mouth against the cabling below his chin. “Make that your first decree.”
Impossible idea, uneasy thought, that he could wield meaningful influence in this world. Orion tried to comprehend the magnitude of it, but his history of poor consumption had overcome the extraordinary quality of Megatron's high grade, and his body protested at so much sustained activity after a nearly catastrophic injury. He drifted into light stasis, soothed by the rhythm of his twin's systems and their shared sparks.
*****
Orion woke unexpectedly from a regular recharge cycle, and he felt whole.
The sensation was singular enough that he activated his optics and took in the vaulted ceiling, the berth that stretched nearly wall to wall, and the Lord High Protector of Cybertron at rest beside him. Those slanted optics glowed dimly crimson in the shadows. Watching him. Part of him.
Without a word, he reached out a hand, and his fingers hovered at Megatron's shoulder strut before gripping and pulling and bringing them together again with no protest.
Fully together, sparks entwined, they shattered the remaining spaces between them. Orion felt pressure build and ebb and build again on waves of crackling heat. The metal beneath and between his fingers held fast, its alloys as sturdy as his own, and the spark that sought alternately to consume him and to capitulate to him was just as obstinately steadfast. Nothing could break except the will. In their instantaneous or preexisting bond, Orion had sensed the deep stability of balance in their joining, an interior harmony, and he groaned aloud as that sensation built like climax through all his systems.
True overload followed with wrenching force. Relief seared through his circuitry, and Megatron surrendered a high, keening sound that touched Orion deeply enough to send them surging yet again.
Flickers of dissipating electric charge traced across Megatron's plating, and Orion slipped his fingertips through their residual glow. His strength ebbed with the fading shocks of completion. With a heavy sigh, he rested fully against the berth with Megatron mirroring his position-the two of them curled together, side by side.
At some length, Orion recalled what Megatron had said to him back in the darkness of the docks.
“What is my name, then?” he asked, his voice quiet as his energy flow slowed and redirected in preparation for continued recharge.
For a cycle, Megatron said nothing, but Orion knew from the faint hissing of his vents that he was fully aware. One hand lifted and ran clawtips along the cables of Orion's throat with all the swift grace of quicksilver. “Your designation is Optimus,” he said. “When all the necessary pomposity is said and done...you will be Optimus Prime.”
Surreality overshadowed the tangle of Orion's thoughts. He would be Prime. The meaning of it eluded him; it slipped out of his grasp again and again. “What if it rejects me, as well?” he whispered.
Megatron chuckled like velvet steel. “It will not.” He turned over, the planes of his wings rearranging as his arms settled around Orion's shoulders. Bitterness touched his words, but Orion sensed something mild and undoubtedly affectionate in the shadows of emotion between them. “You are everything that it did not find in me.”
Oddly comforted, Orion let his twin urge him back into the powerful warmth of a protective embrace. Security surrounded them both. “Brother,” Orion murmured, pleased with the shape of the word-with its sound and with its weight, and with all the levels of unexpected intimacy that it implied.
“Brother,” Megatron echoed. The dark silk of his voice lured Orion back into recharge.
~End~