Ep1 - 'Watershed' - Closed

[Deleted]

“Don’t you dare,” gritted Optimus, “presume to tell me about the moral corruption of sanctioned murder beneath the elite. Don’t you dare compare the apathy and the violence to what you went on to sanction during the war. They are not comparable so, yes, I will bring up the dead soldiers and civilians, the millions of them corroding in the Karashi Delta and Simanzi and Iacon and Polyhex and the mass grave that is our planet because it is not the same thing.”

Optimus closed the space between them again, speaking through the rev of his own engines in his chest, Megatron's field caught against his own, bleeding raw frequency off them both.

“They deserved to die. That does not give you the right to kill them. You decided you had that right. Maybe you always thought you had that right and I just didn’t ask. I should have asked, even if you would have just lied to me.”He did not stop advancing until he was close enough to hear the hydraulic shift in Megatron’s steps, catch the micro-shifts in his optics. “So stop deflecting and tell me, make me understand: What gave you the right.”

[Deleted]

Optimus was too close - in every sense of the word. Too close, too hot, too familiar and too strong. Megatronus had arrived in this horrific universe glitching with damage that preceded the helm shot that had apparently fragged his processor into corruption costing him 4 million years of his life. 4 million years of warfare that had driven their species to the brink of extinction, and blame was laid at this frame's pedes.

He'd somehow become a tyrant, a monster, and his brother was fairly screaming rage and fury at him over everything he had no memory of doing.

Megatronus bared his dente, Optimus so close that he could see the reflection of his faceplates in the other mech's own. Strange lines and scars framed his mouth, ugly and deep. Made the snarl look beastial.

He'd had enough.

"Frag you."

And then he stepped around Optimus and stalked away, giving the armed mech the broad plates of his back. He had been stripped of all weaponry anyway. Optimus (and a great many others) wanted him dead. Megatron would have been executed on war crimes if caught. And though Cleaver had professed this place to be a DMZ, the fact that she'd hidden him in the sublevels did not inspire faith in his safety, no matter how peaceful he acted.

Torqued off and strung out, Megatronus just wanted away from this mech wearing Orion's signature.

[Deleted]

“That is your answer then?” said Optimus, not moving from where he stood, optics fixed on the retreating plates of Megatron’s back. “Cleaver told you what happened. I have told you what happened. I am sorry that you do not remember and you do not want to face this, but I do not care. Our world is dead and I am asking you, Megtronus." because Megatron will never answer: "Why was it so important that you kill them?”

His voice rebounded off the cavern walls, reverbing again and again in the dark. He felt the metal in his palm buckle slightly, the heat off his own spark burning exothermic in his plates. Megatronus kept walking.

“They made peaceful change almost impossible, almost. Revolution would have been inevitable in the face of that and I would have stood with you, but there was a chance at change when they named me Prime, when we backed them into a corner, a chance and you chose not to take it and its clear now, you were never going to take it. If we were ever brothers, answer my question: Why?”

Megatronus kept walking.

“You are a coward, Megatronus.”

[Deleted]

Megatronus had been backed into the tunnel wall by Optimus's hounding, and walked away because for once he didn't want the fight. Not now, not with this mech who scanned as a twisted version of one of the few mechs he truly cared for. Trusted.

And Optimus still kept on, harrying him like quarry even though he had chosen the peaceful route. Abided by Cleaver's simple request to keep violence out of her home.

'If we were ever brothers' clenched his optics, dente clamped hard.

'Coward' stopped him cold in his tracks.

In the dark, the red crystals that had replaced clear blue smashed when a triple-former had put an axe into his face flashed bright. He turned back and advanced with lethal fluidity, seizing Optimus's collar guard with powerful talons a klik later.

Megatronus's vocaliser was a growling hiss right into the mech's faceplates, driven with the same spark-clenched, logic-blind intent of a blade being slowly pressed into exposed mesh. "A coward would have gone back to the mines and prayed for a tunnel collapse, or an energon explosion, or any of the hundred ways a mech could have died without anyone caring, after a Towerling medic told him that they wouldn't repair a sparkling with a damaged cranial unit because he wasn't the right tier." Their chassis screamed high notes of friction from where they were pressed so painfully close. "They took him apart before his sparkcasing had greyed. Courier Unit D16-N05 was just parts to them."

Horrendous to the part of Megatronus's processor that wasn't consumed by the moment, the words kept coming. As if they might drown the universe into blessed silence. "Nos was sparked glitched on the black market - permanently throttled. All I could afford, and he was everything I had, and he was murdered under standard procedure by the very ones I clawed energon out of the ground to feed with my bare servos."

Meagtronus grimaced with a sharp exvent at the impossibility of making anyone with roots like Orion's ever understand. "You cannot conceive that kind of rage. That hatred that subsumed despair and took me into the Arena, that fueled and sustained me so that I rose to a place where I could say 'enough' and be echoed by the roar of a crowd who were also done with being crushed under the pede of the High."

Megatronus felt sick to his tank, burning with the swelling want to tear something, anything apart, and horrified that the words had not stopped coming. Underneath, though was some cold kind of relief. Like a pressure valve that had spent millenia trembling in the red had finally snapped open and averted an explosion.

He released Optimus with a half-sparked shove, disgusted and weary and done. Megatronus took a single step back, angling himself to put his sword arm to the powerful mech. Straight and proud once again, he narrowed his optics with steely resolve.

"And that, my brother, is why they deserved to die if they would not yield."

[Deleted]

Optimus didn’t say anything. As Megatron’s fist closed on his collar guard, as he was shoved back, as the black-sun burn of Megatron’s field choked the air, bit electric against his frame, and brought his battle-net online so hard the world spun – he said nothing. The Prime let the other mech shove him, fell into the rhythm of the attack, one hand snapping up to grab the wrist attached to the fist on his shoulder guard. And Optimus didn’t say anything. While Megatronus described the atrocity behind his motivations, he didn’t say anything. While his fist tightened so powerfully it scored the finish of his armor, Optimus didn’t say anything at all.

He committed it to memory.

He memorized this. His every sense pulled into the words coming out of the other mechanoid’s vocoder because this was the conversation that should have happened four million years ago in a Kaon dive bar, or the basement in the halls of Iacon, or any place on their home before they turned it to so much ash in the name of it. It was toxic. He knew that the moment he heard it: pointless and lethal and he wanted to know anyway. Optimus let the reason – the one he never asked before, when it mattered – sink in like an energy blade, sliding slow and spreading like liquid thermite through every system. The archivist let the words code themselves into the core of his neural net and he thought: Too late now, Pax. Far too late now.

So he said, “Everything in his name then, Megatronus.”

He turned and walked away.

“All of it.”


fin