Ep1 – Stalling – Closed

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Optimus was stalling.

He knew he was stalling and whenever his thoughts coalesced long enough for him to acknowledge that he was doing it and needed to stop… then a kind of anxious nausea would rise fast through the centre of him and he would think ‘I need a minute and then he would lose five minutes. This went on for entirely too long, frankly, the Prime finding himself increasingly unready. He kept coming upon this hitch, you see, where part of him urgently wanted to go forward and speak to what appeared to be the ghost of a long dead, long gone, (long insane) friend with whom he had once shared everything up to and including the bond of brotherhood.

And then part of him kept thinking, To what end? How long before Soundwave comes looking for him and this ghost is, again, gone? What is the point of putting yourself through it for what? For his sake? And the last part of him: I have to at least try. So he paced slowly from one side of the corridor to the next, looking down the long steep incline down into the lower tunnels where Megatron was waiting for him to explain… literally everything. The thought, again, nauseated and exhausted him and he turned away again and was disgusted with his self-centered concerns.

He had not taken down his battlemask even.


((OOC: For Cleaver.))

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Cleaver... wasn't certain why she'd followed.

After Megatronus had left the Atrium, swallowed again by the dim lights of the tunnel and then wholly by the sharp descent and darkness below, she'd stayed rooted to the spot. Surveyed the scene as the Autobot Commander, with slow and methodical steps, followed the other mech out after a pause. They hadn't communicated in the passing - though a conversation would need to be had. Optimus's optics had held such intense focus as he walked, though, and she'd kept her field clamped tight to her plates, wary to disturb him.

After speaking briefly with Ironhide (primarily to tell him to look after Shadowrunner and that they could talk later), she moved to the tunnel opening and flicked a sensor inside to see if both faction leaders had descended. She was not altogether surprised that Optimus had only gone part of the way - the revelation moments ago was a lot to absorb.

That her pedes carried her inside did make one portion of her processor query the rest.

The old femme told herself that she was partially responsible for this mess, and thus for doing what she could to mend it.

When she'd rounded the corner, seeing Optimus Prime so entirely out of sorts sent a faint jolt through her spark.
She knew from observing what a combat arrangement of plates looked like, the angles that covered over joints, the turning over of certain parts to protect vulnerable points. Rather more obviously, the mech’s battle mask was in place and his field, though tight, was a broiling mess.

After a klik, she touched a bladetip to the bare rock floor and broached: "Hestitating, Prime?"

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“I... No.” Optimus ex-vented slightly, the tense plates across his chest visibly rising and falling with the shift of armor at the ventilation. He consciously unfurled his fingers from the perpetual fist into which he’d curled them, feeling the ache as his hydraulics eased out of the clench. He had to physically force his engines to cycle down a bit, kicking them down from the instinctive rev he had them running at - that battle-ready heat telltale and uncomfortable. “I'm not hesitating, just... clearing my head before I speak with him.”

He knew, for politeness sake he should retract the mask but like for so many eons during the war - where conflict had been so ongoing he’d almost never fully cycled down - he found himself unable to do so. It was mildly eerie, this gutted sense of unrest - a viral heat crawling through subcutaneous neural-circuitry and infecting him at the core of himself, breeding anxiety in him to the point of physical reaction. He looked up from the tunnel, where is gaze had fallen to look at Cleaver.

"How long has he been here, Cleaver? What, medically, is his condition?"

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“Two days." The reply came without hesitation, holding that clear blue gaze. "Comm.ed me from China."

Cleaver moved to the wall of the tunnel just opposite where Optimus had stiffly positioned himself, leaning her weight into it with a hiss of hydraulics and one blade bracing into the ground. She projected an aura of staying put and co-operating, wanting the mech to go down to Megatronus in the best frame of mind possible.

"What he said was right - there's been some massive processor damage, errors compounded into a cascading mess. He is, in processor, Megatronus. I've, tried not to tell him too much." The confession came on a long exvent, forcibly easing pressure out of an already over-clocking frame. Her gaze had wandered to regard the darkening tunnel, and she forced her optics back up to Optimus.

“Didn't feel right to tell him, like it weren't my place. Wasn't going to help with his repairs, anyway,” she went on, watching the minute twitches and flares of his optics as she spoke. Likely they were more expressive than he cared for. “He stopped pinging me with questions this morning. Reckon he just got sick of me telling him I can't give him anymore. Been mining out the sublevel pretty quietly since - keeping to what he does know, I suppose.”

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“You suppose it would be my place then, to tell him what has happened.”

It wasn't a question If Megatron had indeed lost his memory of the Great War... then it would be his responsibility as Autobot Commander to deal with him. Megatron, in so many ways, was his responsibility and at the core of not just the war - the genocidal holocaust of their violence - but everything that Orion Pax had become. Face to face with it now, outside the black and white haze of battle... it seemed staggering, somehow.

“He does not know me, Cleaver. It is of some debate to me in these last eons if he ever knew me, even as I was before the war.” The Prime’s tone had become frosty, restrained as his EM field - tight to his frame. “The truth from a stranger will... not sit well. And my duty as Autobot commander complicates what I am expected to say to him. This is not a meeting of peers for the exchange of ideas this is... something else. Outside of precedent.” Another pause. “I am not sure how to begin.”

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Little wonder he was uncertain, Cleaver expanded privately, given that his duty as the Autobot commander was to go down there and put out the mech’s spark. At this point it was more than duty - it was expected of him. In recompence for the holocaust, for the destruction of their homeworld, for the extinction of dozens of organic races their war had trampled as it had swept ever-savage across the universe.

It was the DMZ and her intervening presence that was staying his hand, now - nothing more. Not mercy for an unarmed, ignorant mech who, in processor at least if not in some facet of his spark, was innocent of the monstrous crimes being laid at his pedes. It was only from talking to Megatronus herself - in China, the Medbay and down in the tunnels he’d taken to occupying to provoke as little hostility as possible - that she’d come to see past his nightmarish frame and scars.

“I’d suggest you’d begin by talking to him,” she ultimately replied, optics softening a little as she felt a mere fraction what he was likely feeling in anticipation of such a conversation. “And not just to tell him the facts, the horrors. You can’t... see, that it’s not Megatron that’s here until you do. I knew Megatronus, and I can pick out exactly what point in time and memory he’s reverted to. It’s him, and he’s voluntarily unarmed, passive, and surrounded by survivors of our kind who hate him for things the mech he became has committed.”

Quietly, and not quite meeting the tall mech’s optics, she added: “Go so far as to say he was scared. Every reason he ought to be.”

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“His fear, though understandable, changes nothing,” said Optimus, his tone perfectly controlled. “Nor does it excuse anything that has happened or what is expected of me and I remain at square one: How do I tell a mechanoid who has no recollection of the past that he is responsible not only for the deaths of millions of his own people, war crimes that doom him a thousand times over, and ultimately had a hand in the destruction of our planet? Talk to him? He looks at me and sees Orion Pax who has long since been subsumed beneath the eons that are this war.”

Optimus managed to hold his gaze steady, through some miracle of habit. He had faced worse than this is what he reminded himself whenever the dread seemed to reach out and take hold of his spark. He’d faced far worse (the Exodus, the Skies of Fire, the fireboming of Iacon, Babu Yar, the Crucible, the Matrix) and, however personal this may seem, none of this was about him. It was about his Autobots, the war, and the consequence of what is beyond forgiveness...

“He is right to be scared,” said Optimus quietly. He looked down the dark curve of the tunnel again, optics flickering. “Because I think he knows... that what I owe him is not a conversation. It's a war hearing before the Intergalactic Court at most... a bullet at the least.”

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“Not a bullet. Not here you won’t,” Cleaver bit back, resolute and solid as a mountain. She’d stepped forward without realising it, though stopped short with enough presence of mind that the blade tip she raised to his chassis didn’t come close to making contact.

He was a weary mech, their Prime and religious figurehead, but right then he was just the Autobot Commander standing in her DMZ talking about executing another within her walls, and like scrap was she letting that fly.

“In a DMZ that both Megatron and you sanctioned, that’d be straight murder that’ll bring down the Decepticons’ vengeance like nothing else,” she went on, optics narrow and blazing with a surge of outrage. Dropping her arm, Cleaver shook her head with a ragged ex-vent. “And who’s to say how long it would take you to defeat the rest of them past the point of being a threat? Their figurehead gone would cripple them, maybe, but there are mechs waiting to fill that gap, ready to carry on the war, and they’ll lay waste to this world and everyone on it and call it their right for your breach.”

The medic kept going because if she stopped the fear would slide in and immobilise her. “You want him whilst he’s in my base, you’ll have to go through me. And I pray that Orion Pax hasn’t been so subsumed that you’d cut through an unarmed Neutral and the first sparkling for our kind in millennia to break your word.”

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Optimus, to that, only looked at her. He wondered, as Cleaver leveled that ancient stare at him and he wondered what he looked like to her. Prime, Optimus, Orion Pax - did she have the context for these things or did he appear to her as disjointed a being as he sometimes felt? All the pieces of himself trying to fit like a bad transformation sequence, his insides catching on themselves as they tried to find their shape and force a new and alien form. He wondered, as he had many times, what he was becoming.

He didn’t let any of this show in his face. The battle mask was, in that moment, unnecessary.

“You think exceptionally low of me, Cleaver,” said Optimus, his tone uninflected by any kind of readable judgement. Just a kind of observation, serene and untroubled. "Of me and my Autobots." He looked down the corridor again."In truth, maybe you aren't wrong in that."

Optimus wondered if he seemed so very willing...

“I will ask him to help us. If Megatron is, now, the mech I thought I knew, then perhaps... we have a chance at diplomacy. However, you may feel to to contrary about my intentions and those of my soldiers, killing him - despite everything he has done - would be the least service I could possible do our race.”

This was strategy... not mercy. He convinced himself of that. He would take this chance at some strange diplomacy. Because what traitor could feel grief at the notion of ending the monster who’d killed so many of his soldiers? It was selfish, utterly, to have promised himself that ‘At the very least, I will kill him in combat...’

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The enormity of what Prime had just said, the staggering notion of peace through diplomacy put into the air through his vocaliser and backed with that cloak of weary sadness that had been dogging him for days, left Cleaver mute and staring for a long moment. She felt relief in his sincerity, systems cycling back down, but she quashed hope before it could truly kindle.

After millennia of fighting, the holocaust of their kind, the death of their world, the mountains of atrocities committed by both sides... Peace could not be so easy to come by, her spark warned, but the longing for safety and quiet was undeterred.

She was unperturbed by his cool assessment of her trust in him and the Autobots. However whatever degree of betrayal his faction felt towards her for harboring the warlord as she had, hiding him from cohort as well as friends, could be dealt with another time.

"Megatron is a war criminal," the medic stated, flat and without any inflection of feeling. "Utterly consumed by hatred and perhaps even insane with it. He hates you, and would never allow peace if there were still some resisting him. Namely you. I don't think he could be left alive after all he's done. With what he's become."

She looked down the tunnel again, then at her pedes, then his, and finally, forcefully, back at the Prime's optics.

“But Megatronus, at the point he’s at now, isn’t that mech. There's... hate and demons, but it's not the horror of what Megatron has become. He's not angry with you. With Orion,” Cleaver went on, taking a step backwards from the tall mech to return some measure of his space without losing the touch of his field. “I think you can talk to him. I think... it’d be wise to try, at least.”

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Optimus didn’t say anything to that. He wasn’t listening to Cleaver anymore; he was mentally walking down that corridor. He wasn’t sure he had clarified anything, if talking to the medic for this moment had helped him, but something had certainly gone cold. Gone dark. Maybe it was the notion that she thought him a war criminal. She didn’t say it. She called Megatron the war criminal but in action… she didn’t trust him or Ironhide to hold, not just an inter-faction ceasefire, but his word as he’d given her that night in the desert, her energon on his hands – to not kill Megatron on this ground. Maybe that was how he was: this mechanoid forever saying kindnesses, the motor-oil and the energon thick in his palms.

He could be this cold, he told himself. He could be the one half of a world-destroying, species annihilating war, and he could walk down this tunnel and tell a long dead friend that he was dead and monster had replaced the revolutionary and there was no more archivist from Iacon. To what end? He didn’t know. What if Megatronus was sorry, was horrified, wanted to undo the wrongs. What if he joined them – that mad, almost agonizing possibility – and tried to undo his own legacy?

What could Megatronus do in the wake of Megatron? What was the revolutionary gladiator against the homicidal maniac that has stood in his stead for four million years, craving a path of industrial scale murder through the universe?

Nothing, Optimus thought as he turned his back on Cleaver and walked down the tunnel into the dark.

“I’ll talk to him,” he said.

Fin