Ep.1 - Functional - Closed

[Deleted]

Another medical bay.

This time, at least, he had walked into it under his own power.

Like the rest of the base it seemed worn, sparsely cobbled together, but functional. Ratchet kept his few precious medical supplies organised and his working space tidy. The medic had greeted him with surprise at first, but had accepted his presence with the brisk manner he was famous for. Offered him a greeting. And then pointed him towards an empty berth.

For five years he had lain upon one in a stupor, so dead to the universe that the Delphi medics had not bothered to keep lights activated around his monitoring station. This time, Fortress Maximus had taken his seat with a spark laden with apprehension.

As far as evaluations went, it had been mild. He was no stranger to the tests, scans, and systems checks that came with every possible level of medical inspection. This one had been no worse than anything he had undergone at Delphi. And yet Maximus had sat through it tensely, his hands clenched over the edge of the berth. At one point Ratchet had approached his left optic with a sensor-tap and a handheld scanner; there had been a splintering crack, and the medic had looked around himself in confusion while Maximus quickly let go of the berth before he did any more damage to it.

Caught Ratchet by the wrist before he could get near his face with that damn tap. Nobody was touching his optics. Not now. Not ever.

They had spoken for a while. All business, their voices filling the medical bay with low echoes. Maximus had answered Ratchet's questions stiffly. If the medic had been suspicious of his evasive manner he had not shown it, and had eventually switched from the topic of Maximus' medical history to a calm and steady conversation about light, harmless subjects. That had relaxed him, a little. Small talk, something he had once disliked. Now he welcomed it with strained relief.

Finally, a pass. Cleared for duty. Maximus had been aware of Ratchet's gaze upon him the entire time he'd left the medbay.

Now, he walked down the corridor outside it with slow, heavy footsteps. Watched his shadow stride ahead of him, huge and dark. Around him the walls rumbled quietly, with electricity churned by unseen generators somewhere deeper in the base. The sound of his own footfalls sounded unnaturally loud in his audials. Meanwhile the cool, ventilated air brought with it the faint scent of rust and mildew stirred up from the lower levels. He could hear the fans rattling somewhere high above him.

No one else seemed to be nearby. Thank Primus. Maximus did not want company right now.

He had attacked an Autobot. Shut down and gone straight for the kill. The thought paced restlessly in his mind, back and forth. This wasn't like the official he had nearly throttled on Delphi. He wasn't disoriented this time, his neural net still overwhelmed with ghostly images from his final conscious hours in the prison. He had been clear-minded and rational. No, not rational. Rational mechs did not attack fellow soldiers.

Ex-Decepticon!

Maximus' fuel pump gave a lurch. He reached up and wearily clasped the bridge of his nose, a gesture he allowed only because he was alone in the dim, rattly hall. Closed his optics. How was he going to explain this to Optimus? Explaining it meant explaining other things as well, things he had fought out of his memory since his return to active duty. Fought hard. Beaten back until they no longer seethed up when he was tired, or distracted. No. He was going to have to find some other way of getting this past his old friend.

Somehow.

[Deleted]

::You need to talk to him, Optimus.::

This seemed to be the line Ratchet was closing with. Fortress Maximus had just been dismissed from medical and, almost exactly on cue, Ratchet had relayed to Optimus through inter-bot comm that there had been some minor irregularities with Fort Max’s behavior and by ‘minor’ he meant ‘big jumpy mechs are not good for my health or anyone else’s health and Sniper had better being in a closet somewhere. He’s already smackable without having a deep uncontrollable hatred for the Decepticons.’ Which, the Prime had to concede, was true of the ex-Decepticon. Even if talking with the young hacker had revealed more of the lambo-bot’s character than Optimus had been prepared to expect, Sniper was unlikely to foster any sympathies and he’d earned his place with the Autobots through sheer torment and inability to go back.

The Autobots were the last refuge of traitors, and Optimus supposed that while the DJD was not so close to Earth, they were never far from a ‘signia-switcher’s thoughts.

::I will talk to him.::

::I understand you and he have a history.:: Ratchet’s voice hedged a bit at ‘history’ like he’d just realized that he’d said a similar line not long ago about another mechanoid. Optimus ignored it and waited. ::So I’m going to caution you once out of medical obligation – do not let that affect your judgement.::

::Understood. Prime, out.::

Fortress Maximus was in the back halls by the time Optimuc caught up to him, though he took his time about it, not just to give Max a chance to organize his thoughts but likewise to give himself a chance to organize his. Their position on earth was not such that they could turn away soldiers to the Autobot cause, but it was also not such that they could risk… a mechnoid with a chink in their armor. This wasn’t the first time Optimus had dealt with fallout like this – the post-traumatics from Simanzi and the Endless Retaliation had been more horror and broken minds in one battle than had been seen in centuries.

Max’s shadow on the wall seemed to eclipse all the light in the hall somehow and Optimus moved, quietly, to stand nearby, just inside general EMF range.

“Can we talk?” he asked, the question holding a double meaning for two Simanzi survivors. That used to be code for whether there was something ugly that needed talking, or if a soldier was on the edge of their ‘break’. Breaking was common as dirt back then and everyone seemed to break as sometime. Those that didn’t break… they did, but just not visually, rather, microscopically, invisibly, a fracture running through them. Optimus folded his arms, gaze steady. “Because I am listening.”

[Deleted]

Maximus spooked and whirled at the sound of the quiet voice in the hall behind him. He had spun to face it before he had recognised its owner, and when he did it he felt his spark sink low.

Optimus Prime. Standing back a little ways, looking as patient and calm as he remembered.

Cold dread swept through him. Maximus steadied himself with one hand against the wall, at a loss for words. He met his old friend's gaze for a moment before looking away, unsettled and ill. He had not expected to walk away from the incident in the rec room without being confronted for his actions... but he had not known when Optimus would come seeking him. Or where. He'd had no time to prepare a stony defense to retreat within. And now Optimus was here in the hall, quietly waiting for him to speak, and Maximus had no idea what to tell him.

'Can we talk.' It was a loaded question, one that went far back, all the way to Simanzi. Back then, it meant a sobering conversation about a problem, a mess, perhaps another Autobot in danger of cracking under the weight of the war. How do we handle this. How do we fix it. Maximus had been a field commander once. He knew well the task of critically evaluating the soldiers under his authority. He did not harbour any illusions about just who that soldier was this time. Just a soldier, with cracks. He had lost his authority the instant the prison had fallen.

He groped for something to say. The lights flickered in the hall, the old bulbs humming gently.

"I'm sorry," he said. The words stuck in his vocalizer. Apologies had not come easily to him after he had been made warden. The job made you stern. Not quite proud, but distant. He spoke stiffly, with difficulty, his optics still averted. "I don't- know what happened. I don't know what to tell you."

[Deleted]

Optimus followed Max’s gaze to the region where the floor met the wall, as though there might be something there. When the shadows in the corners of the hall did not give up anything of interest, the Prime looked back to the other mech, expression blank of anything that could have been judgment or anger. He had neither available to him at the moment though, only that anxious press in the back of the spark, like drop of liquid nitrogen bleeding cold through the nova heat of their history, cold that felt like necrosis on an ionic level. He moved a step closer, EM field opening up a little bit, syncing easily to the other bot’s – centuries of working together making a reflex out of it.

“I told you before,” said Optimus. “That I received the report on Garrus-9. However distracted I may have been at the time… I am aware what happened.” The Prime shifted his weight slightly, arms folded still across his chest moving alittle like he meant to drop his arms but thought better of it. He looked toward the ceiling a moment, as if the words he wanted to say might be scratched into the cement ceiling of this missile silo. “Prowl may not embellish, but there is little need when a phase sixer and the latest Wrecker iteration is involved. Overlord’s reputation being what it is, you cannot expect that I do not have some inkling of what happened. I know what happened and I do not know what happened. Overlord happened, as he always does, but never will again.”

Optimus looked at Fort Max, optics brightening slightly, refocusing with a narrow intensity on the other mechanoid.

“He is done. You are not.” He blinked once, a question in the silence. "At least not in my estimation of you. But that is my perception based upon the mech I knew and the mech I think you are. But that is me, so this question I leave to you to answer." Held steady. “Are you functional, Max?”

[Deleted]

It felt like the floor had been cut out from underneath him.

Maximus stood stock-still, his optics fixed downwards. Optimus' voice was calm and quiet, with barely an echo in the high, drafty hall. He could sense the Prime's field approaching, brushing near, as steady as a shield. His own felt like a mess.

Only his hand upon the wall kept him rooted in place. He wanted to turn. He wanted to put his back to every word and walk away. He wanted to put his head in his hands and sink to the floor. Anger tangled with despair as his thoughts ran wildly out of control. He knew. Optimus knew. He knew what had happened at the prison. No! No, he only suspected. He had read the report and drawn his own conclusions. There was a difference. Maximus had been the only staff member of the penitentiary to survive the massacre. The reports spoke of all of his officers, all of the Autobot prisoners- all dead. Butchered. Proof enough of how miserable his failure at defending his post had been.

But that was only part of it. Just how deep his defeat and humiliation ran was known only to two mechs- and one of them was dead. The old terror welled up. He couldn't say the name. Couldn't think it. He was dead. He was dead. Killed by the Wreckers. He was gone. The orgy of pain and death in the bowels of the prison was over. Time to get over it.

Get over it!

His own voice rang harshly in his head, and Maximus resisted the urge to claw his optics shut. He inhaled deeply instead, dragging air through shaky vents. Leaned off the wall and closed his hands into fists. Stripped the fear and loathing from his neural net and forced it inwards, leaving his own field as bare and hollow as he could make it. He was Fortress Maximus, the warden of Garrus-9. He was still alive. He was...

"Yes," he said, in a voice so low it was nearly inaudible. "Yes, I am... I swear, I'm functional."

[Deleted]

“Fort Max.”

Optimus cycled his vents a bit and moved to lean back against the wall, moving the weight of his stare off Max to the opposite wall instead. For a moment he didn’t say anything, just left the honorifics in the name hang there – still the same as they were when they’d last parted ways at the end of the last battle.

“I have known you a long time, fought with you through some of the worst times in our history, though the horror and desolation. You have seen me at our lowest times and were there, as a brother, to pull me to my feet when I needed more than my own strength could offer. You were that strength in time of obliteration, for many, not just for me at the Crucible but all the mechanoid who served under and with you. I have never known you to be a mech who gives up on another and in that spirit, I am not yet ready to concede victory to the monster who murdered and tortured his way through that prison. Call me selfish, but I have reasons for needing to be able to take you at your word. Namely: I do need you here Fortress Maximus.”

The Prime closed his eyes.

“I just need to know you’re…here. Instead of back there. Because I know… what it is to get caught in what was. And I also know that sometimes the past is simply something we carry and not something we can talk about. Just know that you are not carrying anything alone.” He glanced at the other mech. “You are with us.”

[Deleted]

Though Maximus flinched at the mention of murder and torture, he lapsed into silence when Optimus continued to speak.

And listened.

His bleak demeanour faltered, reflected by an uncertain flicker in his field. He stood quietly, his hands clasping and unclasping at his sides and his brow furrowed as he tried to take in all that had been said - spoken not as a commander to his officer, but as a friend. An old friend.

The words touched a memory. For just an instant, it was as if the last eight miserable years had fallen away. He was back, not on Elba, not at the ruins of some seared and smoking battlefield, but on a high aerodeck overlooking the city of Iacon, still white and brilliant beneath the soot - a younger, freshly commissioned mech with an eye for architecture and a photon rifle at his back. And beside him stood the Prime, unburdened by thousands of years of war, watching in agreeable silence as the Autobot dropships lifted off their pads, buoyed on currents of anti-grav while their engines swirled with energy and the sun shone gold on their port windows.

He couldn't remember what they'd been talking about before the ships had taken off. Plans, maybe. Strategy. But it had been companionably, without the usual military formality. That was what stuck in his mind.

Maximus closed his eyes and shook his head. The scene faded. He let go of it reluctantly, and the past seeped away.

He was not much of a speaker. The past thousand years or so had put even more iron into his bearing. But something clearly needed to be said now.

Raw joints in a big, newly forged body creaked as Maximus slowly turned and set his back against the wall next to Optimus. He couldn't quite meet the other Autobot's gaze, but a little of the terseness in his manner was gone as he stared ahead of himself and said, "You can trust my word. I'm here. Not- always easy. But I'm here."

[Deleted]

“I will hold you to that,” said Optimus.

He may have intended to say more, but in the wake of the other mech’s promise there was nothing else to broach. Optimus owed Max many things. His life a few times over, the lives of others who would be otherwise lost, and at the least he owed Fort Max this one chance at regaining the course of his life his own way. In four million years of war, Optimus had grown familiar enough with violence to know that no bot carried their history the same way and no bot deserved to be treated as though their unique and terrible experience was just casualty in the history of their long war. To say that was to say every dead mech, every aborted history, and lost life were stories that warranted losing. The archivist in him ached specifically and intimately at the totality of stories lost.

The dead taking their lives into the Well and leaving the post-mortars silence in the air after. Who kept their stories alive now that the Halls were shelled out and gutted, that the archivist and witnesses were long dead? This is why part of the Prime believed in the Necrobot – that off-duty barracks legend of the mechanoid who tirelessly and irrefutably went from battle-ground to battle-ground to endless battle-ground to say last rites over the dead of Cybertron, and chronicle their name. The record of the dead... he didn't know why it bothered him so.

Optimus tried, as he always did to keep sanity, to never think of the cenotaph in his head. The magnitude of it, the totality and the weight – thinking of it all at once was enough to drive a mech, a Prime, any demi-god titan to their knees.

So he didn’t think of it. He thought about Max being alive and functioning at his side, thought about the familiar certainty that in this space with this person there was an understanding and broken, unbroken, healing or not, Fort Max understood something about the Prime that others did not and that certainty was comforting. More comforting than the unease he felt, not knowing exactly what it saw he kept seeing in the back of his friend’s optics.

"I have your word now, Max. That is all I needed."

[Deleted]

Maximus said nothing for a moment. He rested his weight against the wall, against the tank tread on his back. His gaze remained downwards.

The dread was gone, the circuit-racing fear of the past being dug up and spilt into the open. But in its place a weary heaviness now dragged at his spark, guilt mingled with a lingering sense of unease. What he had told Optimus was not a lie. He was here now, standing in the hall with his old friend. He had given his word to that, and that was something that Maximus did not offer lightly. But it was a shaky truth, one he did not know he could keep up.

You're fine, he told himself irritably. There's nothing wrong. There is no here or there. It's all in your head. Stop worrying about it.

The tension was building again. Maximus slowly let out his breath to vent it, before it could tie his circuits into knots. Though he was not privvy to the unspoken thoughts going through Optimus' head, the other Autobot seemed to radiate calm through his field like heat. Maximus stood quietly within it, letting that steady sense of peace quell his apprehension about the future. Thank Primus his friend was here on Earth. It seemed one stroke of good fortune in a life that had seen nothing but eight years of hardship.

After a long pause he stirred. Lifted his hand to his face and rubbed his thumb and forefinger into his optics.

"I will apologise to your lieutenant," he said. He let his hand drop, his tone one of regret and chagrin. "He did not deserve... that. It won't happen again."

[Deleted]

“Jazz is a good friend. He has fought beside me for a long time and taken great personal risk to choose the Autobot cause over the side he once began in. Megatron’s cause was not always one of tyranny. It has only become so through time and ill begetting and not all Decepticons who joined his cause were even wrong in their intentions.” Optimus looked at Max, turning his head only slightly, not otherwise moving from where he leaned easy against the wall. “Megatron and I… we shared the same goals once. Our methods for achieving them, as it turned out, were irreconcilable, but there was a time that he and I stood together.”

Optimus looked away, the expression on Maximus’ face enough to warrant no longer meeting his gaze, leave the mech to process that. While it was true that his history was well known – Optimus Prime and Megatron literally having become historical figures in a four million year old conflict – it was also one of those things that not everyone read up on the details. And what was said in a history book did not cover, of course, the nuances. Unless one read between the lines, into the very essential faults of sentient beings, their personal struggles writ large into the world, it seemed so very clinical.

He’d read the historical logs by third parties, by alien species who chronicled the battles of their mechanical species, and it always struck him how very distantly they seemed to link Orion Pax and Megatronus (the ones who sussed out their previous names anyhow). Like they were business partners, or military allies only, briefly standing together before deciding to begin a war with one another. As though it were so clean.

“This isn’t the first time an Autobot has misdirected aggression at him. But someone apologizing to him… that is more rare, I am afraid. I imagine he might appreciate it though, if you made the gesture.”

[Deleted]

Maximus nodded absently as the words passed through his audials. A cold thought had struck him.

It was a bit stunning, actually.

Having been constructed shortly before the outbreak of the war, much of the history of Cybertron before that time was grey to him. The times before the war were all part of a past that he could only examine through data records, rather than relive through his own personal experiences. Before Maximus had become a part of the war, Optimus had been nothing more to him than a name in a long stream of information preserved in the Hall of Records - and Orion Pax a historical figure, as distant and immortal as a statue. Megatronus was similar, though cast beneath a much darker light.

Two statues, two figures locked in eternal confrontation, each representing the ideals of either side of the war. Impersonal. Great and cold. Maximus had quickly revised that opinion of Optimus once he had met the Autobot commander. And revised it again after each scorching battle he served beneath him, after Iacon shook under Decepticon fire and Simanzi burned. But it was hard, very hard, to stand now and find himself faced with the notion that he would need to rewrite his history again, to include a past where Optimus and Megatron had once stood together as colleagues.

He shook his head again, feeling ill.

"I will apologise," he said slowly, as his mind rose up from his thoughts. He looked over at Optimus and struggled to maintain his gravity. "I... can't forgive the Decepticons. I can't see them like you do. But if you say he can be trusted, that he chose to become an Autobot, then I believe you. I will apologise."

[Deleted]

“I do not ask that anyone forgive anything,” said Optimus, his optics on the opposite wall still. A kind of unnatural stillness had come across the Prime, engine noise quieting in his chest, the natural plate shifts and fractal flickers in his optics seeming to slow and die as he said that. He was no longer seeing the wall in front of him, though he did appear to be looking at it, instead gazing very far beyond it indeed. “That is not something that I have the right to ask of others. Freedom of choice is why I fight and it is far from my authority to say when another should forgive what has been inflicted on them. That is assuming forgiveness is possible or deserved.”

His optics flickered momentarily, as if he were shaking himself from something and the engine noise returned, regular as before, his head turning so he could look at the other mech, a kind of tired expression crossing his face.

“It would be hypocrital of me, this deep into the war, to ask anything of others save that they survive.” He paused, expression going distant again. “Sometimes I think that is really the core of it… of choosing to forgive someone or not: whether or not you can survive it. Can I live with myself if I get even? Can I live with myself if I don’t?” He didn't break eye contact with his friend. “So I do not ask that others forgive, only that they survive and somehow live with the surviving afterward… which can be difficult, I understand.”

[Deleted]

This time, Maximus found it difficult to look away.

His brow creased as the words ran through his mind. Forgiving. Surviving. In the end, he had survived everything that had happened to him. He was here now, and he was alive. It was over. Could he choose to forgive? Could he live with himself if he did not seek revenge upon his tormentors?

And that small voice in the back of his mind, the one that needled him during his darkest moments, roared back, NO!

Maximus throttled back his rage before it could surge forward again. Kept his hands at his sides and his field neutral, while letting no sign of his internal struggle flicker across his face. It was easier this time, with his old friend here. Easier to keep in check. He didn't know if it was Optimus' calming influence, or some manner of suppressing field from the Matrix itself- or if he simply did not want to again lose his composure in front of the mech he respected.

He flattened his mouth into a hard line and kept his head. Cast about for something to say. He had little of Optimus' thoughtful eloquence; wisdom did not come easily to him. He found himself wondering just where the other Autobot had gone during that brief moment when his optics had dimmed and he had stared at the wall as if a projection of history was playing out upon it.

"Difficult," he said. And then, with a little of his old forthright manner returning to him he eyed Optimus and added bluntly, "You're wondering if you can choose to forgive Megatron."

[Deleted]

“I always wonder about that”.

He looked away when he answered the question though, blue optics casting down slightly to the floor, flickering and dimming a little. His arms crossed over his chest tensed slightly, a hum of hydraulic pressure in his arms. It was reflex, hardwired into a body four-million-years trained tense whenever he reviewed the totality of the war in his mind and tried to calculate, again, what he could reasonably mentally stand to forgive without killing himself in the process. How much chemical poison could he swallow without snuffing his spark? A purely personal question outside the realm of pragmatism, where he was a Prime and a military leader and ultimately any action he took with Megatron would be driven by tactics and not emotion.

The wrongness of it always ran through him, an ugly, sickening wave that crawled through every circuit up the back of this throat to the back of his mouth and he held it there, like a bead of nitroglycerin. Forgive Megatron. Forgive him. It made him literally sick and at the same time relieved, like a fist loosening its grip on his spark, a sheet of dark fracturing slightly. Today thought he could stand it. Tomorrow maybe he would want to do nothing but bite down, so hard, so fast, take oblivion before swallowing again. But today he could stand it.

“I could survive it some days,” he admitted. “Other times I do not have that kind of strength.”

[Deleted]

Oddly, something about Optimus' reply made a little more of the tension seep away from Maximus' frame.

He looked down to the floor as well, his own red optics dimmed as he processed the words. Something that was not quite a smile twisted up the corner of his mouth. The bitterness remained, but now it was tinged with relief. No. Satisfaction. His friend, it seemed, also had a foe that he could not simply bring himself to forgive. Would not. That it went deeper than that. Was more complex.

Felt good to know.

"Don't let anyone tell you that you have to," he said. He frowned, and after mulling it over he added in a voice that was both reluctant and hard, "I saw a lot of bad mechs come through the prison. We were supposed to rehabilitate some of them there, did you know that? Rehabilitate. Primus. Sometimes it made me sick. I just wanted to put a shot into a few of them. I didn't, of course. That wasn't my job, and I didn't want it to be. Don't know if I believe in Primus or not, or even in justice. But I hoped that something would get them in the end. Not me, not Tyrest or the High Justice counsel. Just something bigger. Something fitting. I don't know. I'm just talking now."

He trailed off uncomfortably, and rubbed his optics.