Archive of Our Own ^beta

i. 

Megatron is pissed.

It’s been orbital cycles since he was banished from Iacon. Since Optimus cast him out. He hasn’t gotten any less pissed. Not when he’s blasting Quintessons apart in a desperate bid to reclaim the surface, not when he’s working out targeted strikes to get more energon, and certainly not now as he punches a bot in the face. Someone he used to know.

It’s effortless, almost mindless, the way he’s shredding Autobot ranks into absolute disarray— Not that they could really be called ranks to begin with. The mecha with experience had clearly left with Megatron and as good as Elita is, she does not know how to handle war.

And that’s what they’re in, isn’t it. A war. Over resources and formalities and freedom that by all means has already been attained because Megatron killed Sentinel. 

So, yeah. He’s pissed. 

He doesn’t bother hiding it as he tears his way through the battlefield, knocking bots away with heavy swings of his cannon until he has a wide enough berth to fire a shot straight up into the air. “Prime!”

Silence ripples outwards along with the shockwave of purple light above them. Megatron can spot several bots visibly shuddering, a twisted sort of satisfaction settling in his tanks as he finds Optimus in the fray, watches him straighten.

The Prime is magnificent. Resplendent in blue and red and silver, a gleaming beacon even from this far a distance. 

Megatron’s faceplate splits in a vicious grin as he starts moving closer. 

It isn’t long before the mech is in front of him. Nobody had dared to get in his way; at some point, the fighting had started again. Probably a Decepticon who’d taken advantage of the standstill. Good. 

“Megatron.” There is something sad in Optimus’s optics as he stops, close enough for Megatron to see. It makes him sick. “I don’t want to fight.” 

“I don’t care what you want.” His cannon charges up with a slow, subsonic thrum. “I could have given you everything, and you still would have saved him.”

“Is that what this is about? When will you stop taking that as a personal slight?” Optimus says heavily, optics narrowing above his battle mask, and Megatron sneers. 

“What, you think you’re too good for it?” The laugh that wrenches itself from his chassis is ice-cold. “Think you’ve above killing? We’re in a war, Prime. It would serve you best to get with the times.”

They are an arm’s length apart. Two, at most. Close enough to touch. Close enough to kill. 

The last time they’d been like this, Megatron had turned his back and left. Before that, he’d shot his best friend through the chest and dropped him into oblivion. Before that, a thousand other things. Touches. Servos on servos on pauldrons on faceplates, gentle glyphs whispered between them, softness and warmth and late nights, fists bumping, I did this for us, I’ve got your back.

False promises. 

Sunlight glints off Optimus armour as his faceplate screws up like he’s tasted something bitter. “Your hatred was stronger than anything else you could have felt. It doesn’t matter what—”

“It doesn’t matter?” The words feel like a cold knife straight to the spark and Megatron roars, moving before he can process, lunging forward to slam his fist into Optimus’s cheek with a horrible screech of metal on metal. “I loved you!” 

“You think I didn’t?” Optimus screams back in an instant, optics blazing, pitched too-sharp and jarring and wilder than Megatron’s ever seen him as he rams into Megatron with his pauldron and transforms his axe with a reckless fling of his arm. “You think I didn’t fragging love you? I would have died for you!”

The sudden hostility has alerts pinging all across Megatron’s HUD, but he dismisses them as outrage boils through his fuel lines. “You didn’t back me for the one thing I wanted! After I spent my life getting punished because of you!” 

Megatron does not wince, no matter how harsh the words come out. He will not take them back.

(He cannot take them back.)

He sees Optimus flinch, feels it when the mech’s field swells with sudden sparkache before it snaps tight to him like a vacuum. It’s the absolute, perfect stillness that comes before an explosion, and Megatron braces himself—

And it still catches him off-guard when Optimus swings his axe straight for his neck, frag, he barely gets his armguard up in time before it collides and he feels the impact in his fragging teeth. His pedes push through the dirt as Optimus drives him back, ruthless and unrelenting. 

“You could have hurt people!” Optimus yells, punctuating the last two words with rough shoves, the handle of his axe braced across Megatron’s pauldrons. “Innocent people!” 

“And now they’re getting hurt anyway!” A mech hits the ground next to them, covered in his own energon like a sick example, and Megatron uses the distraction to sink his fist into Optimus’s gut. “Are you happy now, Prime? Huh?!”

They’re screaming in each other’s faces like sparklings, and Megatron has had enough of this stupidity. 

His servo closes nicely around Optimus’s throat.

The Prime struggles, legs flailing as Megatron slams him to the ground, vents flared as the impact knocks the air out of him. Megatron doesn’t talk about how he would have let Optimus rip the spark from his chest, would have made him a pretty little box to carry it out of his own frame. He would have flayed himself open and left the rest for Optimus to decide. Would he kill him? Save him? Crawl inside him and make a home? D-16 would have liked that. 

Megatron has forfeited that choice. 

He squeezes, optics blurry, tight against the yell building in his chassis, drops when Optimus kicks his knee out, and he falls onto his elbow with a grunt before they’re flipped. 

Optimus tucks a blade under his chin. Their heavy ex-vents fill his audials, and the razor-sharp edge of it scrapes against Megatron’s throat cabling as he chokes out a laugh. 

The sky is blue. Optimus’s optics are blue. Megatron looks up and wishes he could forget. He doesn’t think he ever will. 

“Their energon is on your servos. Their great leader, their chosen one,” he snarls finally, mockingly, and he puts so much quiet vitriol into it that it makes his own spark twist as he strains against the axe pressed against him like a brand. His optics burn. “How does it feel, Prime, to be blessed by a god?” 

“It is no blessing,” Optimus spits, a holy reckoning wreathed in light from above, and they both ignore how it sounds like half a sob. “I had no choice.”

He falters just enough for Megatron to grab the eye of his axe and shove before they’re rolling, rolling, crashing into the side of an outcropping in a painful clash of limbs, and he lifts his fist and drives it into the ground next to Optimus’s helm. He does it again and again until the stone cracks and there is energon smeared across his knuckles. He pretends the words do not rend him in half. He pretends he does not care. 

It feels like there are fragging claws around his spark, squeezing and squeezing and he hates it. Hates this weakness, hates this Prime, hates all of the Pit-damned Primes. 

Optimus vents heavily beneath him, blue eyes painfully, beautifully familiar, and Megatron wants to drive that damn axe right through Optimus’s throat. 

He does not.

He gets up, turns, and runs. 

There is a vague registry of Soundwave calling a monotone, “Decepticons, retreat!” in the back of his processor. Megatron pays it no mind; he transforms to alt-mode and drives, as fast as he can. He sends out a quick order to his lieutenants to return to base and drives.

*

It’s a while before he stops. 

Dust drifts in the air as his engine quiets to a tired rumble, tracks stretching off into the distance. Megatron doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t really care, either; all he sees are empty stretches of vast wasteland. His processor is pounding, HUD filled with warnings about overheating and low fuel. 

He swipes them away as he shifts back to root mode. Not much to be done about them now. 

There is… an ache in the center of his chassis that he doesn’t quite know how to put a name to. It’s been there for a while despite his best efforts to get rid of it. Loss, perhaps, or grief.

(Megatron cannot go back, no matter how much he may want to, not to where it truly matters— So he does not entertain the thought at all.)

He is self-aware enough to admit that he’d made a mistake. He should’ve— listened, maybe. Waited. But the dismissal of his pain, of his righteous anger, had been just enough to push him over the edge into not caring and past redemption.

He’d made a mistake. He is still angry enough that he will see it through to the bitter end. 

(He doesn’t have to wait for the end. It’s already bitter. Megatron laughs.)

Maybe he’s losing his mind. 

The sun’s setting now, and it darkens the sky to a deeper wash of blue. It’s the same shade Pax’s optics had been when he’d just woke from recharge, soft and bleary, a little huh? mumbled as D-16 dragged him out of his pod so they wouldn’t be late for morning roll call again. 

Megatron forces himself to stop thinking, easing down to sit against a rock. 

The stars are out. 

His optics go right to the only constellation he remembers, traitors that they are. Orion glints brightly, his bow drawn tight, arrow poised to fly straight and true as his individual points of light twinkle.

Megatron, ridiculously, has the sudden impression that he is being laughed at. 

He gets to his pedes, grabbing a pebble and flinging it as hard as he can. If he imagines it bouncing off Optimus’s helm, that’s nobody’s business but his. 

It still stings to think about anything related to Optimus, and now his words are circling in Megatron’s helm. Not a blessing? No choice? He hadn’t been making any sense. He’d been… erratic. Off-kilter. Megatron supposes he can’t blame him. 

(He might hate the Primes just a bit more than he did before, even if he doesn’t fully understand. He hates that fact, too.)

But still. 

Megatron had martyred himself with the forfeit of what he held most dear, all for the sake of a future that needed to be paid for with death. Optimus had been too weak to see that. The Primes’s ideals would never work out and Megatron had killed him and paid the price, and Primus had said no. Frag that. We’re gonna make a new society where the individuals will still never matter more than the whole. 

And now Optimus Prime, the sacrificial lamb-turned-saviour of Cybertron, has everything he could ever need. Prestige, respect, a name, bestowed upon him like a golden crown by their benevolent god himself. He is fine. 

(The words claw at Megatron like ghosts. I had no choice.)

Transforming back to alt-mode silences the disquiet in his spark, and he sets the coordinates for their base. His lieutenants will have handled things. His Decepticons will assume that he’d gone off to lick his wounds in private. 

Megatron returns to where he’d come from, and he mourns who he was supposed to be. His anger tastes like poison at the back of his throat. 

He had dropped D-16 right off that ledge with the rest of everything he’d loved. 

He should have tossed his spark down along with it.

(It does not matter how much he aches or mourns. He cannot go back now.)

ii.

The grate Megatron’s standing on creaks.

A pair of bots pass by, chatting idly, and Megatron lets his pauldrons drop with an inaudible sigh before he ducks out from his corner and darts across the corridor. He lets his processor run idle besides his net of awareness, following familiar routes on autopilot as he makes his way down to the mines. 

He’d hopped a waste disposal train on its loop back to Iacon. Their energon reserves are running low; his soldiers are hungry, which means they are distracted and weak. Dissatisfied. Infighting is the last thing he needs right now. 

Besides, with the Matrix returned and sitting pretty in their precious Prime’s chest, Iacon has plenty of energon to spare— Seemingly still not enough to share, though, seeing as Megatron's stuck here scrounging through the abandoned mines for remains. It makes him so mad he could spit; he is bigger, and stronger, and deadly, and he’s still right back where he’d started.

Megatron in-vents and squashes the feeling down viciously. All of their direct attacks so far have failed, and his forces are starving. He is responsible for them whether he wants to be or not. He will see this through. 

He’s down deep enough that he’s gotten to the tracks and found scattered carts full of crystals, taking a mental approximation of how many there are as he goes. This is just supposed to be a scouting mission. There’s no way Megatron can subspace enough energon for everyone; after he’s confirmed that Optimus has, in fact, left the what had remained in the mines untouched (complacent slagger), he’ll lead a proper—

“Megatron,” someone says, loud and clear and low, and he scrunches up his faceplate and spits a vehement frag! under his breath. 

He turns around, and Optimus is there. 

…It throws him for a moment, he won’t lie. Why is Optimus here?

“Interesting,” he mutters, before raising his voice. “What’s a Prime like you doing in a place like this?” 

The utter horror-confusion-disgust hits as soon as the slagging words leave his intake. Is he glitched? Is he glitched? That’s— That’s a pickup line. Why the frag would he say that? 

He really doesn’t want to know what his faceplate is doing as Optimus laughs softly. “Structural tacnet sensed a disturbance in the sublevels.”

Megatron gets a grip on himself and narrows his optics with intention. “That’s new.”

Optimus shrugs. “Wheeljack’s always been good.”

The steel-sharp hum of metal against metal rings through the air as Megatron drags his digits along the cart next to him, reaching in to heft a crystal in his palm and tossing it up. A mild blue glow pulses faintly from the fissures as he hears Optimus step closer. 

“You know I can’t let you do this,” Optimus says, quiet.

Megatron scoffs. “You gonna stop me?” he challenges, turning just enough to look over his shoulder, and the metallic buzz of Optimus’s blaster is all the answer he gets. 

He rolls left as the first shot hits over his shoulder, ducking to run low and tackle Optimus around the middle. They go crashing to the ground and Megatron grits his dentae against the impact, choking when a sharp elbow comes down in the space between his neck and pauldron. 

The clang of him punching Optimus’s hip into the floor ricochets through the cavern like a bullet. The Prime knees him hard in the side and he goes with it, gasping, letting momentum shift him, looping his arm under Optimus’s helm and pulling back—

Something rumbles underneath them, and they both freeze. Optimus’s optics snap to him, stock-still with his knees locked around Megatron’s other elbow, and Megatron’s spark gives a sudden, vicious twist. 

The last time they’d been frozen like this on the ground had been the moment after they’d absolutely eaten slag in the Iacon 5000, lying next to each other in the gloriously intoxicating moments where victory had been within arm’s reach. Half of Optimus’s faceplate shines, soft solder-bright.

There’s a loud, sharp crack. Another. 

And then they’re both yelling as the fragging ground gives way beneath them and they’re falling, falling, smashing through bedrock and falling some more until Megatron hits ground-beneath-ground-beneath-ground and Optimus slams into him two nano-kliks later with a nasty crunch.

“…Ungh,” Optimus groans, eloquent as ever. Megatron can’t even squeak. 

His vents wheeze as the other mech eases off him, coughing out little puffs of dust and dirt as he shoves himself up and his optics adjust to the low light. They’re in what has to be one of the oldest mining shafts, the ones that had been long deemed too dangerous; too much pressure and too much heat, the supervisors had said. All of the tunnels carried some level of risk, but the lowest ones hadn’t been dubbed gates to Primus for nothing. 

And, frag, if it doesn’t feel like they’re in the Pit itself. Megatron’s cooling systems come online to regulate his temperature as his plating heats, a warning popping up on his HUD. He hears Optimus transform his blaster away and follows suit with his cannon; they both know that their surroundings are way too unstable to try anything with those weapons unless they actually have a death wish. 

Dirt scrapes beneath Megatron’s servos as he pushes himself to his pedes and starts looking around for a way out. Heat creeps up the back of his neck in a slow boil the more he realises that there isn’t one. The hole they’d fallen through is partially obscured by rock, dust sifting down as it settles into place, and everything around them is far too volatile to consider trying anything. The slightest misstep could cause a complete cave-in— Megatron might not even have enough armour to shield himself, let alone Optimus. The stupid Prime’s probably built to look pretty, not withstand heavy loads—

Hang on. 

His processor feels fuzzy, like he’s overheating, but his fans aren’t even on full blast. Optimus Prime is his enemy. Megatron should let him get crushed like a bug and rejoice. 

(The thought makes him feel a bit like he’s being stepped on.)

Said Prime is studying a holoscan of their surroundings as Megatron rounds on him with a growl. “You just had to come and frag this up!” he snaps, hot air seething through his vents before he stalks off as far as he can, which… isn’t far.

“Comms are down,” the Prime mutters in reply. “Diverting power to signal boosters.”

Stewing in his own corner while coolant beads on his armour proves less satisfying than Megatron had hoped; they end up sitting against opposite walls in silence within kliks, and it’s somehow charged and empty at the same time. Megatron is fully aware that this is the first time since he’d left Iacon that they have been in this kind of proximity and aren’t actively beating the slag out of each other. He offlines his optics and tries to ignore the quiet, repetitive tink, tink, tink of Optimus tapping a digit against his knee. 

“Hey.” 

Megatron grits his dentae and keeps his optics resolutely off, even as he hears Optimus shuffle around. 

“You know what would be really good right now?”

He takes a slow, pacifying in-vent. “If I pay you, will you shut up?”

“A shovel.”

The pause that follows is pregnant. 

“…Are you serious?” Megatron says, faceplate blank as onlines his optical band and turns to Optimus. He doesn’t even know how to feel. “Are you fragging kidding me.” 

He resets his intake and Optimus stares and he stares and, Primus smelt him down, he feels his lipplates twitch without his permission. And Optimus catches it and snickers, and that makes him fight down a chuckle, soft and helpless and slag it, he’d forgotten how good this feels. It’s like deadweight lifted off his spark. Optimus laughs, really laughs, helm pressed back against the wall and pauldrons jerking with it, and it brings Megatron to life. 

This is dangerous. This— This. Everything. Maybe the heat’s getting to him. Shorted a wire in his logical processing centre, because this is something that Megatron can’t have, and he feels his face fall.

He’d had it, once. He gave it up. And now he chases every scrap he gets like a starving cyberdog, barking and yipping at its master’s heels. Pathetic. 

Optimus quiets, laughter petering off into a soft sigh as he hugs his legs to his chassis. Making himself small doesn’t suit him, Megatron thinks faintly. “If it’s energon you need…” His pause is punctuated by the whirr or their fans in the empty space between them. “We could work out… a deal, of sorts.”

It’s a shock that pierces through the fuzzy blanket of calm and shatters it to pieces. Megatron stares at him, incredulous. “You’re glitched. A deal? Like Sentinel with the Quintessons?”

“It’s not like that!” Optimus blurts, looking rather scandalised, and Megatron wants to laugh again. 

“What, you’re telling me everyone with you doesn’t essentially see us the same as those slaggers?” Don’t be like Sentinel. The memory burns. “What is it like, then?”

“It’s— You—” Optimus sputters for a few moments before punching the ground in frustration. “I don’t want you to—”

“To what,” Megatron deadpans. “Starve?”

He watches with dim optics as Optimus holds, shakes, before sagging against the wall. Megatron has a lot of things he could say, ranging from we don’t have morals stopping us from doing whatever it takes to survive and we’re fine, the former being frankly untrue considering they do. They’re not evil. And the latter being… He doesn’t know. 

Steam lifts off his plating. Maybe it would be best to just stop thinking. His processor’s giving him nonsense, clearly, just proven by the way it locks in on Optimus’s faceplate and refuses to move. Even down here in the low light, surrounded by dust and rocks and covered in grime, the mech glows with something otherworldly; he looks like a star sent down from the heavens. A sparkling, silver diamond in the rough. 

Megatron looks down at his own servos, dirty and battle-worn, and allows himself a dry laugh. 

“Something’s happening,” Optimus murmurs, softly enough that it could almost be to himself, helm tilted down as a wistful smile tugs at his mouth. “And it isn’t good.”

The mech’s field is filled with something melancholy, something like crystal flowers and rot. Megatron doesn’t know what to make of that. Maybe it would be best to just stop thinking. 

So there they stay, a mining bot and a deity, Megatron’s legs sprawled out as Optimus rests his cheekplate on his kneeguards. They are on opposite sides. There is a chasm between them.

Maybe it would be best to just stop thinking. 

*

They are found, eventually. Starscream’s crowing is loud enough that Megatron can hear him from the bottom of the pit they’re in, wiping coolant off his throat with the back of his servo as they’re hauled up. The crowing turns into the near-immediate sound of his null ray transforming when he catches sight of Optimus, and then a vindictive swear as the proximity alarms go off. 

They had sat there in silence long enough that Megatron feels strangely calm as he makes his escape. Optimus stands, unmoving. 

Megatron does not look back. 

(A large shipment of energon arrives a deca-cycle later.)

(He quashes the impulse to both not take any and hoard it all for himself.)

iii. 

They are fighting again. 

Something’s different this time. Optimus is sloppy, hits skewing sideways and shots going wide, reminiscent of that day where they’d screamed at each other while trading blows back and forth. 

“Is he drunk?” Megatron mutters to himself, incredulous. He can’t be. Even Orion Pax wouldn’t have been stupid enough to show up to a fight high on engex. 

He fires a blast that Optimus catches with his forearm, the force of it blowing them apart. There’s a wide berth around them; nobody else wants to get between what is shaping up to be a progressively stranger battle as Optimus rushes him, gets punched in the chassis, and falls to his knees. 

Megatron fights the swell of nausea that pools in his tanks. This isn’t right. The only reason Optimus would be this weak was if he was sick— A virus? Some kind of malware? He hasn’t done anything, this isn’t his fault, and that’s what makes him nervous. He doesn’t know what this is, and Ratchet should have been able to fix it. The simple fact that it hasn’t been fixed does not bode well. “Tired, Prime?” he roars, and there’s so much less bite to it than he wants, and still he bares his dentae and reloads his cannon with a pump of his arm. The weapon snarls with roiling electricity. “Stand up and fight me properly like a mech!”

Optimus stumbles to his pedes, lifting his axe and they’re falling into step again, dust swirling around them as they trade blows. Megatron lets his combat protocols pull him through the motions— Shoot, evade, evade, punch, duck, a sweep of his leg. He sees an opening and swings. Some part of him knows Optimus will dodge. 

Optimus does not. 

The hit connects magnificently, and neither of them move. The world narrows into a point as metal separates and clatters to the ground.

Optimus gazes up at him, the remaining half of his battle mask jagged along the fresh, new edge that Megatron has torn into it, and Megatron resets his vocaliser against the violent urge to cradle the Prime’s face in his servos. To soothe. To fix this mistake. 

A dull buzz builds in his audials, in his chassis and his helm. Finish the job. “You,” he seethes, “will not deny me my vengeance.” He tries to feel triumphant as brings Optimus to his knees, tries to feel victorious at the growl of that powerful engine sputtering as Optimus hits the dirt. 

The mech doesn’t even fight him. He just— goes, like an animal being led to slaughter, and Megatron wants to scream. “You were chosen to fight!” Damn it all, he grabs Optimus by the pauldrons and shakes. Shoves him into the ground and pins him with a knee against his sternum, desperate, unspooling at the edges with his own ragged in-vents— “What’s wrong with you?! Fight me!”

Let me hate you. Let me hate you.

Maybe Megatron had been wrong.

If Optimus had been his sacrifice, why does it feel like he’s being led to an altar?

Optimus reaches up, hooks his digits into the top of Megatron’s chest plating to drag him down. Coolant drips from his pretty blue optics when he hisses, honest-to-Primus hisses at Megatron, blunt little fangs bared and finials pinned back like the ears of a pissed-off cybercat, and his field is a mess. Megatron can barely parse any of it, grief, when had he started crying, loss, pain, pain, why is there pain, why is he in pain, longing, yearning so strong it hurts. 

Megatron looks down, chassis heaving as he hangs his helm, and Optimus turns his face so what’s left of his battle mask hides it from everyone else. “I don’t care if they chose me,” he presses out, voice hoarse, and it’s still only half as loud as the wet wheeze of his vents. “I don’t care. I need you to choose me.”

They are close. Far too close. Megatron can see every crack and dent and scratch in Optimus’s lovely faceplate, regret worn into the planes of his cheek, chapped across his lips. 

“Forget about your revenge. Just— for a moment,” he pleads, quiet and weak and Megatron could kill him right now. Could snap the delicate fuel cabling at the side of his neck, rip out his spark, grind it into the fragging dirt. “I know it’s a lot to ask. I know. But I need you,” Optimus’s optics flicker, digits digging into Megatron’s armour as he says, “to choose me. Please.”

It’s whiplash when the words sink in. “What,” he says flatly, chassis tight. The mech is acting like they aren’t in the middle of trying to offline each other, and Megatron’s world tips on its axis. 

He thinks ripping his spark out would hurt less than this. He needs to kill Optimus and be done with it, spare them both. It would be a mercy. 

Optimus’s axe lays forgotten somewhere behind them. There is a phantom blade against Megatron’s throat as Optimus’s in-vent rattles. “You’re the only one who— Dee, I need you here, don’t let me go again, don’t leave—” 

It’s like there isn’t even a battle going on, the way the words ring around them. Optimus is all Megatron can see, big shiny blue optics, lip crumpling the way it always does when he’s upset and Megatron knows this, knows him, knows the servos that hold the ceremonial knife. 

“You were my best friend and you are the only one who can understand and I love you, and I don’t wanna fight you anymore. Enough fighting.” Optimus looks up, and frag. He looks way beyond his stellar cycles, worn down like a blade set too long to a whetstone.

Megatron aches. 

“...Okay.” It’s like he’s out of his own frame with his mouth moving as he watches. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, what he’s promising. Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t care, not anymore. But Optimus—

Optimus claws at him, arms squeezing tight as he wraps them across Megatron’s back and pulls him down, hauls himself up, buries his face in Megatron’s shoulderpad and starts crying like he can’t stop, a quiet, shredding, painful thing, every in-vent muffled and strained like it’s a crime even as they’re ripped out of him, even as his spark presses right up to the wrong end of Megatron’s gun. 

His cannon hums, primed and deadly. One blast, one critical hit, and this would all be over. Megatron would have his victory. 

Optimus cries and clings close, uncaring, unyielding as he breaks, and Megatron feels it pour over him like torrential rain, like starlight, like grief. It is too much for him to hold. Too heavy for him to carry.

It strikes him now that Optimus bears this weight of their new, fragile world on his back with no respite and no choice. 

(And what, really, is a martyr without free will?)

Megatron lets his cannon power down, lets his servo slide against the dirt, digits digging grooves into the soil until it tucks into the pocket of space just beneath the low curve of Optimus’s spinal strut.

His touch fits there like it was meant to all along.

iv.

The next time he finds Optimus, the mech is dying.

They haven’t fought since The Incident. Megatron could feel the unrest from his ‘Cons, the agitated confusion twining amongst his factions as they wonder why they aren’t fighting, why they haven’t been deployed for deca-cycles, until suddenly Megatron has called them to arms to fight a particularly voracious swarm of Quintessons.

Optimus had pinged him.

He hadn’t been able to bring himself to ignore it. 

Their last encounter had left him… shaken. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Prime is cracking under the responsibility he’d been bound to as a condition of being reborn; he’s more mature, battle-worn, and he’s splitting at the seams.

Megatron might not believe in Primus all that much, not anymore. Optimus, though—

He ex-vents and dips into his memory core, recalling flashes of bright optics and soft smiles and gentle servos on his face, of we’re gonna make it out of here, you and I. We’re gonna show everyone what mining bots can do. 

The battlefield is chaos, Quintessons are everywhere, and when Megatron watches Optimus take a massive blast for a fellow Autobot, something in his spark seizes.

The mech goes down like a shooting star, brilliant and burning bright and Megatron is moving, running, shoving mecha aside until he’s close enough grab the Quintesson who made the shot and rip its fragging head off, he knows what it looks like, he doesn’t even care as he drops to his knees and slag, Optimus and his stupid, stupid self-sacrificial— It looks bad. It shouldn’t be this bad. Megatron doesn’t know how it’s this bad.

“You idiot,” he hisses, panicked and trying not to show it. “Do you have a death wish?!”

Optimus chuckles weakly. “Haven’t heard that one in a while.” 

He’s right, but whatever nostalgic charm within it is killed by the way he chokes on the energon in his vents, Primus, Megatron can’t do this. They need a medic. He opens his mouth to yell for Ratchet, he can’t be far—

“No,” Optimus coughs, trying to struggle upright before Dee pushes him back to the ground with a servo on his pauldron. “M’okay. Promise.”

Megatron gapes at him. “Prime. Your chassis is split in half.”

“Yep.”

“Your insides aren’t insides right now.”

“I can see that.”

And neither of them are exaggerating; Optimus’s torso is cracked top to bottom, a blue glow pulsing weakly from the giant fissures in the metal. The port that hugs his T-cog has been fractured completely in two and there is a crevice running from the top of his left pauldron all the way down to his opposite thigh. The mech’s spark is right there.

Megatron might purge. 

He doesn’t know what to do. They need a medic, he’s not a medic, what if he makes this worse—

“Dee.” Optimus looks up at him, soft and sweet and cracked open on the ground, grasping his wrist. “Primus won’t let me die. It’s okay.”

Megatron’s vocaliser resets painfully as he looks from Optimus’s faceplate, down, and back up again. His servos are nearly trembling as he brings them closer, hovering as he tries to figure out what exactly to do.

Optimus’s spark is warm when he brushes against it by accident and it takes everything Megatron has in him to not jerk back. It tickles gently even as he whispers a shaky apology, gingerly pinching pieces of shattered plating with two digits and dragging them carefully back into place. 

“S-Sorry,” Optimus gasps, vocaliser glitching. “About the last time.”

“Shut up.”

“Needed to be close to you. Even— Even if it killed me.”

“I said shut up,” Megatron spits, tempering himself with a trembling in-vent, trying to hold it together through the terrified thought that he’s performing what equates to the battlefield equivalent of open-spark surgery. “Apologise when you’re—”

He cuts himself off. He doesn’t give a flying frag what Optimus says when Megatron’s servos are wet with his energon. His vision is going blurry, enough that he doesn’t realise Optimus’s spark has settled into the curve of his palm until he feels it, and then. 

It’s like a lightning strike as way his circuits flood with a lifeforce that isn’t his own. He feels, and so much of everything clicks into place. 

Optimus strains against the mantle of a pseudo-god, the weight of saviour pushing down on his shoulders, a burden dripping over him like molten gold and seeping into his seams until it cools and sets and he’s trapped, frozen, imprisoned under everything he has been chosen to bear. 

Let me go, he pleads. I am young. Let me live for myself. Do not take it from me before I know how and he knows, he knows, knows he should be grateful, that he should marvel at all that he has been given, strength and pride and time, but—

He is a messiah, his lifeforce bleeding into the ground. He is a fallen angel. He is beautiful and glorious and Megatron can see right through all the cracks where he’s trying to hold himself together. 

Megatron does not let go. 

He cradles Optimus’s spark in his servos, feels the warmth of its soft, steady pulse, wipes the tears from his own cheeks as Optimus’s lips against his palm soothes the frantic hum of his processor. Quiets the chaos. 

Someone comes, eventually. There’s a fuss, yelling (there’s Ratchet), a servo on his shoulder. Bee. Elita, too, her field brusque and worried and soft along the edges as she pats his back, as he preempts a hit that doesn’t come. 

They take Optimus away. 

Megatron sits on his knees in an empty battlefield, overflowing, and he lets it spill. Lets it pour out over the hard, barren ground and sits there and cries. 

Needed to be close to you. Even if it killed me.

(He understands. He understands.)

v.

Optimus draws closer from a distance, a gleaming figure limned in gold against the setting sun. Megatron pushes off the rock he’s been leaning against, uncrossing his arms as the landscape adapts and it sinks back into the shifting ground. 

The Prime stops, an arm’s length away. Close enough to touch. Close enough to kill. 

“How’s the…” He trails off, a little awkward as he gestures vaguely to Optimus’s chassis, and the other mech smiles. 

“Good,” Optimus says. The wind whispers around his frame. “Ratchet fixed me right up. Told you, Primus won’t let me die.”

How do you know? Megatron wants to ask, a defeated sort of despair clinging to his edges. Have you tried?

Something in him pangs at that, a gnawing, stinging twinge that he feeds until it burns like a little flame next to his spark. He is tired. 

His cannon hums to life, snarling in the dusty quiet, and they begin once again.

He lets Optimus draw first blood, axe slicing a thin line into his chassis before he aims for Optimus’s thigh. A hit to his wrist knocks his shot askew and Megatron steps into it as his arm is yanked forward, pressing into Optimus’s space to lift their arms and twist the mech’s servo behind his back. The Prime rolls out of it easily, one knee driving up to create space between them before he pulls Megatron back in.

Perhaps they are destined, Megatron thinks, to do this forever; endlessly biting at each other’s heels, chasing, incessant, persistent, because he knows neither of them will stop. Not while there is still some semblance of something left to fight for. 

He leans away from Optimus’s blaster, reaches under to land a hit on his sternum, a second, a third to his hip before Optimus spins and slams a heel into his ribplate, the butt of his axe shoved into his pauldron.

He hopes there is something left to fight for.

The ground rumbles beneath him. Megatron runs right off the edge of a sharp rock as it forms, and he swears he hears Optimus laugh when he lands on the Prime’s back. He clings on, elbow locking around Optimus’s throat before a servo grabs his collar plating and he’s being yanked, thrown right over Optimus’s head— He hits the ground and gets all the air knocked out of him in a rush. 

He thinks there is.

Déjà vu is funny when you know exactly what you’re remembering. Optimus’s axe sets to his throat, his gleaming avenger haloed in sunset orange, and Megatron lifts his cannon to Optimus’s face.

He knows he will not pull the trigger. There is only one other way this should go.

“You can’t do it, can you?”

The Prime’s pauldrons heave. The dust settles as they stay, shaking, waiting.

Optimus shakes his head, and damns them both. 

It sends a shiver up his backstrut when Optimus kneels, his axe falling to the ground in a heavy clatter. Megatron pushes up to his elbows, to his knees, and vents thought the way his spark is in his mouth. “This,” he says, digits trembling as he flattens his palm low on Optimus’s chassis, “will destroy us.” You will destroy me. 

Optimus shakes his head again, near imperceptible as his optics rove across Megatron’s faceplate, hungry hungry hungry. What does he see? Does he find what he wants? What he needs? Megatron hopes so. Optimus has been starving. Does he not deserve respite? 

“Never,” Optimus breathes. The servo he cups to Megatron’s jaw slides the ceremonial knife home. 

It blooms, slowly. They are both too scared to move. Optimus’s ex-vents brush across his faceplate, shallow, shaky huffs of air that have Megatron’s chassis constricting as they pull closer, closer, two planets in orbit, circling one another for what he is beginning to once again hope will be eternity. An ouroboros, an endless cycle; destruction and rebirth.

Megatron tilts his helm, pressing closer until the bridges of their nosestruts are pressed together. He is on his knees in the dirt and sand and he feels nothing but the two counterpoints of heat where Optimus holds him, one on his faceplate and one on his back. His spark yearns. Closer.

Optimus resets his vocaliser with a dry click, intake parted, blue optics starfire-bright as he looks at Megatron.

The world slows to a halt.

He presses their mouths together and seals their fate. 

A star explodes in him somewhere, Megatron is sure. Glows and swells and collapses in on itself in a burst of light, sends euphoria rushing through his fuel lines as he remembers that he has servos and frames Optimus’s face with them. It feels like something slotting into place, something he hadn’t even known was missing, an overwhelming sense of yes this this this, this is right, this is how it’s supposed to be, this is where I’m supposed to be— It warms him like a supernova burning in his chassis as Optimus leans into him, soft and warm and yearning, his field full of a tentative sort of joy. Radiant.

He follows when Megatron pulls him to his pedes, stumbling blindly until his heel catches on a latch in the dust, and he breaks away to yank up the trap door and jump down. Optimus follows, laughing soft and low in disbelief when Megatron catches him by the waist and they make their way down the short corridor. 

Megatron fumbles for the pin pad, barely clearing his processor enough to punch in the code and stepping back as the door hisses open. It’s an abandoned High Guard bunker, loaded with signal blockers and satellite cloaked— Nobody will find them here. 

Optimus kisses him again, and Megatron forgets what he was thinking about. 

He cannot help it. Optimus is the sun and he is but a little star being dragged along in his orbit, unable to escape, not even trying. Optimus, the centre of his galaxy. He always has been— Megatron lets himself get swept up in warm servos and cautious digits, exploring, dipping under the edges of his armour just to touch and then flit away. He sinks into it with a heavy ex-vent when Optimus claws at his backstruts like he will disappear otherwise.

He cannot see. It does not matter. Megatron’s knees hit the edge of the sparse berth and he goes down willingly, baring his throat, the push-pull-give-take intoxicating and he laughs when Optimus finds his throat cabling and bites. His fangs are far too blunt to do any damage but Megatron feels his smile, and it’s enough. 

He’s enough.

(As if Optimus isn’t all he’s ever wanted, ever since the very start.)

+ i.

The aftermath is gentle.

Megatron aches, the good kind of ache, all over his frame and it warms him from the inside out. It’s good. He feels at peace with the world. 

It is a ridiculous notion. Is this all he’d needed? This, something so simple? 

He sits against the wall, drawing a soft servo over Optimus’s helm where it rests in the hinge between his hip and thigh, and he accepts his defeat. 

“Y’feel good,” Optimus mumbles, sleepy and soft, and Megatron’s processor whirrs quietly. 

“Hm?”

“Your field.” The other mech sinks into the berth as he ex-vents, extricating an arm from beneath himself to throw it over Megatron’s legs and fit a servo to his waist. “Feels good.” 

Megatron supposes it makes sense. He hasn’t been controlling his field at all, too loose-strutted and relaxed to care, and he likes the way Optimus’s envelopes his own. Soft, so soft, like a plushly-padded berth, with edges of glimmering golden joy so potent that it makes his vents hitch.

The twist of Optimus’s backstrut glows silver in the low light, long and sleek and entirely exposed. Megatron could slice through it right now, break it right in half. He could. 

He won’t. 

He traces his digits down the length of it, right down to where it ends above Optimus’s hips, smiling slightly at the rumble of that powerful engine muted to a soft purr. 

Megatron hesitates here. There is a lot they haven’t talked about. Truces to discuss. Peace treaties to draw up, if he’s lucky. But he’s loath to disturb this; all Optimus has had to deal with is war and battles and logistics as Iacon rebuilds herself after the uprising. He’s earned a break.

Perhaps Megatron deserves one, too, but.

He thinks back to the way Optimus had cried on that battlefield— Not that it’s been easy to forget. His words. His desperation and the way he had clung to something, anything, to keep himself from drifting away into the void of expectations tied to his name.

D-16 had kept his mouth shut. Maybe if he hadn’t, if he’d just asked, if he’d reached out, things could have been different. 

Megatron will not fumble his chance to make a different choice now. He lingers for a moment on his choice of designation, but it’s almost a no-brainer; Optimus is their ordained leader, tall and strong and proud as he helms the voyage into their future, but in here—

In here, in this quiet that the both of them have created, it is enough for him to not be. Megatron has loved Optimus since before he was a Prime. He’d never needed Orion to be anything more. 

“Pax,” he begins, tentative. “You okay?”

“Hm?” Optimus takes a quick in-vent before he settles back down. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”

Megatron draws little swirls with his digits, playing with Optimus’s finial. “It’s. It’s a lot, isn’t it.”

“What is?”

“Everything.”

It’s a loaded question, he knows. He won’t push.

“You’re here, right?” Optimus says finally, voice oddly even. “I’ll be just fine.”

The end of his statement hangs in the air like he has something left to say. It’s subtle, barely-there, but Megatron still catches the glimmer of coolant as it tracks its way down Optimus’s cheek. 

“Hey,” he starts, sitting up properly so he can cup Optimus’s faceplate in his hands. “Hey. Look at me.” 

Optimus does, slowly, all big wet optics and biting at his lower lipplate, and Megatron sighs. Somewhere at the back of his processor he feels mildly alarmed, actually; in all the orbital cycles they’ve spent together, this is only the third time he’s seen Optimus cry. The second, on the battlefield barely a deca-cycle ago.

The first had been when they were younger, fresh and inexperienced, and D-16 had gotten his helm clipped by a falling rock when Orion had fooled around a little too much and had to be shoved out of the way. It had left him with a nasty dent, a vehement scolding from Ratchet and a best friend with his optics all wide and worried and shimmery, trying to push his rations onto Dee’s tray, poking and prodding at him like a fussy mechahen until Dee had conked him with a fist and threatened to put a matching dent in his helm. 

(They’d sat up on the roof afterwards, Orion curled tight around his arm, an apology mumbled into his pauldron and nearly soft enough that it was lost to the wind.) 

(Dee hadn’t minded. Leave it to Orion to be shy when it came to things just between the two of them.)

Now, Megatron shushes him before he can even begin to apologise. “What’s wrong?” he asks, quiet and even, and Optimus resets his optics. 

“I don’t know?” It comes out like a question, punctuated with the shaky laugh that follows. “It’s just— I don’t know. What I’m doing.”

Megatron considers that. “Have you ever?” he offers, pursing his lips against a smile when Optimus chuckles again. “There we go,” he murmurs, gentle as he can. “There’s that laugh.”

“It felt like I was going crazy,” Optimus groans, wiggling around until he’s on his back and pressing his servos over his optics. “So much— Frag, so much was going on so fast and I kept turning around to talk to you and you weren’t there and it was my fault.”

“Hey.” Megatron lets his tone lean sharp and flicks at Optimus’s forehelm with a high tink. “Don’t do that.”

A petulant glare. “Do what.” 

“Be an idiot,” he shoots back, matter-of-fact, before he softens with a sigh. “You’ll figure it out. You always do.”

Their plating clinks together quietly as Optimus snags Megatron’s servo, lifting it above his faceplate to play with his digits. 

“I didn’t think I’d get you back,” he says, sounding suspiciously choked. “Thought I’d ruined everything.”

Megatron furrows his ridges at the suspicious burn in his optics as his spark squeezes, and leans down to kiss him. “You’re stupid.”

“I know,” is the answer, smudged against his mouth, and Megatron squeezes back against the pressure when Optimus interlinks their digits. “Stay?” Optimus asks. “Help me. I don’t know how to run a planet.”

“Yeah, no slag. You’ve probably got Elita running in circles.” Megatron feels Optimus’s laughter wash over him like a blessing. He doesn’t hide the smile in his voice. “Can’t imagine what kind of stupid slag you’ll get yourself into if I’m not there.”

Optimus shrugs, optics shining as he huffs. “Probably land myself in jail.”

“Exactly.” 

“Or get a hit put out on me by an intergalactic organisation.” 

“Mhm.”

“Or get a bounty on my head.” 

“You— Do you have a bucketlist?” 

Optimus laughs again, bright and soft and shoulders shaking with it, and Megatron’s intake is dry. 

Finish the job.

He can’t. He can’t. He will backtrack, bear the shame and apologise, sacrifice his pride if it means he can have this. He made a mistake. He will atone. Just please, please—

Optimus shifts closer, reaching up to press his free servo over Megatron’s spark, vents fanning warm, gentle air over Megatron’s plating. 

Let me have this.

He doesn’t know who he’s praying to, if he’s praying at all. His only god is here in his berth and he has already granted his absolution; Megatron will serve his penance, in due time. 

It seems he’d been the sacrificial lamb after all. 

He… doesn’t really mind, actually. Not when Optimus is grinning in his lap, sweet as he’s always been. 

Megatron has to reset his vocaliser twice before he’s confident the glyphs will come out clear. “If you’re just trying to cop a feel…”

Optimus lets out a noise of outrage and whacks him across the chassis. “False accusations! As if you haven’t already let me.”

“You,” Megatron says, with the mightiest look of disgust he can plaster across his faceplate, “are horrible.” 

“And you are an enabler,” Optimus replies cheerily, and well. There’s really nothing Megatron can say to that. 

He sits there for a while afterwards, drawing senseless patterns across Optimus’s face with one servo and holding the mech’s in his other. It’s comfortable, it’s safe, and he’s tired; Megatron’s nearly slipped into recharge before he hears Optimus speak again. 

“There’s something I’ve read about in the archives,” he murmurs, gently unfolding Megatron’s servo and pressing it between both of his. “Sort of a military general’s position. Lord High Protector.”

Megatron tilts his helm, smiling to himself. “S’got a ring to it.” 

“Yeah. It does.” 

He catches Optimus eyeing him with barely-veiled excitement, and he scoffs. “Stop it. You already know what I’m gonna say.” 

Optimus shoves himself upright and barely avoids knocking his helm into Megatron’s chin in his haste. “So you’ll stay?” 

Frag, if that smile isn’t dangerous. Megatron holds out for a few moments, just to say he tried, before he sighs. “…Yeah. I’ll stay.” 

He already sees himself getting dragged into all sorts of hijinks and shenanigans again. Possibly legal ones, now. Definitely political. Primus, this’ll be a helmache. 

(He really can’t bring himself to be mad about it, not with the pure elation blooming around him.)

“We should draft a peace treaty,” he mutters through his grin, already thinking even as Optimus drags him down to the berth. “If we’re doing this we’re gonna do it right.”

“Okay,” Optimus agrees.

Megatron pauses suspiciously. “And… We’ll need an anti-conflict clause.”

“Mhm.”

“…And if I said I wanted the biggest habsuite you had?”

“It’s yours.”

“You’re being suspiciously agreeable.”

“Well.” Optimus squints, lifting a servo to tilt it in a so-so motion. “I wrote up a peace treaty deca-cycles ago, I don’t want my bots and yours going at each other’s throats either, and… your hab is gonna be my hab.”

Megatron blinks. “…A peace treaty how long ago?”

“Long enough,” Optimus says, stretching until his joints pop. “It was horrible without you. And you’re the one who always said it,” he continues, low and amused. “I’m an optimist, no?” 

The laugh that escapes Megatron’s intake is grating, a little rough. They both know why. He blinks again and vents through it as Optimus lies down on top of him. 

“An opportunist, more like,” he argues weakly, adjusting so the mech can loop an arm beneath his waist. 

Optimus shrugs, sighing. “...You're back. You're back and you're mine again. Everything else can be anything you want."

It's sour-bitter-sweet, and Megatron swallows it down. I was never not yours. Not for a moment. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“Guess you’ll just have to stick around and see, then,” Optimus replies lightly, and Megatron curls around him a little tighter. 

“Yeah. Guess I will.”

(He supposes this means that Optimus has won the war.)

The last thing he knows before falling into recharge is Optimus finding his servo again, their digits interlocking tight. He squeezes, and Optimus squeezes back. Their fields meld into something sweet and warm and new. Hopeful. 

He hasn't felt hope in a very long time.

(This, Megatron decides, is a loss he’s happy to take.)