Archive of Our Own ^beta

The new Decepticon was a nonstandard model, way smaller than most of them; Arcee couldn’t actually tell what its altmode was. It also wasn’t doing anything, just sitting on the edge of the cliff, slumped. It didn’t even seem to be doing surveillance of the valley below, and there wasn’t anything in the valley to do surveillance on, either. Arcee shrugged philosophically and edged closer to get a clear shot. She stepped on a twig, and the Decepticon looked around, a little dully, and then jumped up and stared at her with a shocked, wide expression. That was when she spotted the protoform bands around its neck and joints and jerked her gun back up in horror: it was a newspark, it hadn’t even settled into its root mode yet.

“Where did you come from?” she blurted, and that was when Megatron hit her like an earthquake, smashing into her so hard he just carried her bodily for half a mile away before dumping her off him and transforming, his face a mask of even more total rage than usual. She flipped away, trying to put space between them, but he caught her ankle and swung her around into a boulder with a massive stunning impact that left all her systems howling. He was clearly about to rip her apart when Bulkhead yelled, “Arcee? Arcee, where are you?” faintly from behind them, and Megatron dropped her instantly and shot straight back along the line of wrecked trees and underbrush towards the newspark. A groundbridge was already opening up; he grabbed the newspark and pulled it through with him and vanished, obviously taking no chances. Arcee let herself flop backwards, her intakes sucking in air desperately, and shut her optics as Bulkhead crashed out of the trees and came thumping towards her at a run.

#

“It does seem strange,” Ratchet muttered as he reviewed Arcee’s visual logs, back at headquarters. “You’re sure about the scale on this?”

“Positive,” she said, her arms folded, nodding to Optimus and Bumblebee as they joined them around the monitors. “That’s not a standard Decepticon configuration, is it.”

It wasn’t really a question, and she wasn’t surprised when Ratchet shook his head. “No. It’s hard to predict specifics at this stage of protoform expansion, but even apart from the size, that’s not a lower-caste model at all, not even one with a support function. See the smooth line of the t-strut in the back? Lower caste models all have an additional crossbar reinforcing the frame across the lower back. And there’s no contacts developing for weapons systems, either; those nodes he’s forming are specialized for data access. Broad strokes, he’s a middle-caste civilian mech. The question is, where did Megatron get him?”

Arcee snorted. “That’s not the question.” They looked at her and she waved her hand impatiently at the video feed running: it was showing Megatron racing back to the newspark and dragging him off. “That was a carrier response! He could’ve ripped me to shreds and handled Bulkhead solo after, but he couldn’t stand leaving the newspark exposed. He got him the old-fashioned way. The question is, where did Megatron get a middle-caste civilian progenitor, and why?”

Ratchet frowned back at the screen. “Well, given the newspark’s current configuration, I’d say he’s about five months from concep—” and then his voice literally cracked off into distortion and his entire body locked up.

“What is it, Ratchet?” Optimus asked, concerned.

“Five months ago,” Arcee repeated, already skimming back in her mission logs. “What happened five—”

Optimus suddenly jerked with a full-body flinch so hard he clanged into the outer table, and then he turned and lurched away into the base as if his motor systems had gone partly offline, footsteps dragging. Arcee stared shocked after him, and right then her own internal search hit the terse summary stub that was the only thing she’d left in her high-speed memory of an extremely bad two weeks without her commander.

She flinched violently herself, knocking into Bulkhead’s chest, a wave of horror rushing through her—she’d nearly shot—

“Guys?” Miko was saying, her voice high-pitched with alarm. “Guys, what’s going on? Are you all okay? What is it?”

Bumblebee was the only one of them who managed to emit anything, thanks to his low-power voicebox replacement; Rafe said, choking, “But—but Optimus isn’t a civilian!”

“What?” Jack said.

“Optimus—Optimus isn’t,” Ratchet said, his voice still crackling as his systems recovered from crash. “But Orion Pax—was.”

“Oh my God, are you saying that Megatron had Optimus’s baby?” Miko shrieked piercingly, and there was a heavy clanging down the hall as Optimus shut the door to his small private chamber, closing himself in.

#

“Do—do you think that Megatron told—Orion?” Arcee asked Ratchet softly, diffidently, later that cycle after the humans had all gone.

Ratchet paused over his console; he didn’t need to ask what she was referring to, of course; all of them had it sitting vividly in main processing. It was impossible not to. Poor Optimus hadn’t even left his chamber yet; earlier Ratchet had overridden the lock and opened the door just wide enough to put in an energon cube and a glass of oil and shut it again. “No,” he said, with flat certainty. “I cannot believe that Orion would ever have left a carrier alone with an unformed spark, no matter how justified by circumstances. I—I suspect that the spark did not coalesce enough for Megatron to recognize its presence until after we had restored Optimus’s memories.”

“Why would Megatron choose to hold it?” Arcee said, her voice tight. “If he didn’t even want to notify Optimus, why would he actually carry his sparkling?”

Ratchet let out a deep sigh. “I find the potential answers deeply unpleasant to contemplate. It—it is almost unimaginable to consider, but…”

She drew a breath. “You think he carried a sparkling just to hurt Optimus? To use it against him?”

“You’re evaluating the risk considerations internally, Arcee,” Ratchet said, low, “But you forget that Megatron was built as a miner. His gestational subsystem is designed to carry a sparkling ten times larger in mass and with eight times the power demands of even the biggest middle-caste civilian spark. I’ve reviewed our files: there was almost no impact on his function. He participated in combat on four separate occasions while carrying.”

She stared at him. “Are you sure?” she said incredulously. “Maybe I’m wrong about him being the—”

Ratchet shook his head. “No. It turns out we’d incidentally collected some gamma-scanning data on Megatron during the period. I pulled it up from archives and checked, and the spark formation unit was active. He’s just so large and powerful that on an absolute level the demands of gestation were completely trivial to his system. The single uncharacteristic thing he did was once retreat through the groundbridge to avoid engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Optimus himself.”

Arcee had the uncomfortable experience of having to manually repress an instinctive moment of lustful interest from her own inspiration unit, and saw Ratchet grimace faintly as he did the same. She was a middle-caste base—a military officer and not a civilian, but even so, the idea of a carrier who could just pop out a fully-formed sparkling without needing you to so much as bring them an energon cube, much less link up for support— “But why wouldn’t he carry for another Decepticon, then?” she demanded.

“It was one of the twenty-six condemnations in his initial polemical,” Optimus said quietly, from behind them, and they turned towards him in united concern; Ratchet even instinctively half-raised a hand as if to offer physical comfort before letting it fall. “Because of inadequate energon rations, lower-caste mechs experienced pressure to carry for stronger or higher-caste mechs in exchange for support. Carrying among the lower castes came to be seen not as an act of—” He stopped, then resumed, “—came to be seen as an inferior and subordinate role. Which returns us to the question of—”

Arcee could see he was trying so hard to maintain control, but he ground to a halt there. Her own vocal unit clenched in sympathy, but she managed to finish it for him, so he wouldn’t have to do it himself. “Why he allowed Orion to spark him.”

Optimus was silent, unmoving, for a long moment, and then he said very faintly, a grating burr in his voice that made it almost incomprehensible, “Me.”

Arcee looked away a moment, pressing her lips hard; Ratchet bowed his head. It hurt her spark to accept it, but Optimus was the one who got to say. “Why he allowed you to spark him,” she said, low and reluctant, and he jerked his head in a small nod.

They didn’t speak for a moment, and then Optimus took another breath and said, “Ratchet, I must ask you to—to evaluate potential scenarios—” He stopped again.

“I’ll take care of it,” Ratchet said instantly. Optimus nodded a tiny bit and then turned and went back to his chamber. Arcee clenched her fists by her sides, struggling with rage on his behalf. Having to worry what Megatron was going to do with his sparkling, how Megatron might use it—her own tactical unit was already helpfully providing grotesque scenarios of its own: what if Megatron set that small, fragile newspark in the middle of an operation, barely armored and maybe holding some kind of pitiful external gun, while around him Decepticons slaughtered humans and stole energon—

She took a deep breath, trying to push the image out of her mind. Surely no carrier could endure something like that. Except, she couldn’t help thinking, Megatron had left the newspark sitting out there on the cliff, completely wide-open; he hadn’t gone into action until Arcee had actually been right there, pointing a gun at the newspark. She could have shot him. Her whole body shuddered. Megatron probably did have the will to expose his own sparkling right until the danger was active and imminent.

“Ratchet,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

Ratchet was already bent over the console; he paused, his face set in bleak lines. “All we can do for now is wait and see. Report any sightings of the newspark to me immediately.” Then he paused, struggling, and said abruptly, “If—if there’s an opportunity to safely—secure the newspark—”

Arcee flinched: take a newspark away from its carrier? Ratchet saw it and his shoulders hunched, too. “I know,” he said, low and ashamed. “But—he’s almost out of protoform stage. It’s probably only another week or two before he finalizes his altmode function. He can already separate without physical distress. And given Megatron’s likely plans for him—we would be remiss not to consider the option of extracting him from Decepticon custody.”

#

“They’re undoubtedly planning your abduction as we speak!” Megatron was roaring, the entire decking of the room rattling and clanging with his violent pacing. He’d come out of the groundbridge already in mid-yell, dragged Arcturus into the conference room still yelling, and hadn’t stopped since.

Arcturus just kept his head down and focused on holding back the words crammed up in his vocal unit queue. He’d felt a single burst of sheer, spark-clenching terror when he’d turned around and seen the Autobot there with her gun pointed right at his chest; for a moment he’d vividly been scared and sorry—but it had only been a kind of automatic reflex, his low-level survival subroutines kicking in and overriding his conscious processing. The fear had faded the second he’d registered Megatron’s presence; Arcturus hadn’t even been able to muster up a twitch of alarm when he’d heard the other big Autobot crashing around nearby, yelling.

Megatron wheeled on him suddenly. “Well?” he thundered. “Do you have anything to say for yourself? What was the meaning of disobeying my direct orders? And when I find out what idiot gave you groundbridge access, I am going to pulverize their entire body into scrap one inch at a time!”

“No one gave me access,” Arcturus said, letting that out; he didn’t want the whole ship freaked out. 

Megatron snorted. “Spare your vocal unit. Soundwave is already examining the records. Now talk. Did Starscream put you up to this?”

“Why would he?”

Megatron threw up his hands. “To get at me somehow! If that’s it, I’ll—”

“No!” Arcturus said. Starscream did have a reflexive anti-authority subroutine that kept him looking for ways to knock down his immediate superior, but he wasn’t suicidal. 

“Then why?” Megatron shouted. “That Autobot nearly destroyed you, do you understand?”

“So what?” Arcturus burst out, helplessly; he couldn’t stifle the words anymore, and Megatron stopped, staring at him with an expression of such total confusion that it pulled more out of him. “What difference would it make? I’m never going to be—” strong, powerful, dangerous, useful, worthy—the long list of options piled up so thick and fast that he managed to shut down his vocal unit there again while it paused over the word choice, but it was too late. Megatron had gone into blind shocked stillness, his optics spun all the way down and his arms hanging inert at his sides, and Arcturus bent his head and felt even worse; if he was useless at least he didn’t have to be a burden, only he couldn’t stand it anymore.

He’d figured it out after his last body shift. Before then, he’d blithely assumed that it was just a matter of time before he grew. He’d already gotten so much bigger than those first stages he only very vaguely retained memory from, blobbing around the deck and sucking up tactile stimulation, clinging on to the secure curve of Megatron’s warm comforting shoulder pauldrons and listening and learning about everything that came in range. But there hadn’t been much of a change, during the last mod cycle, and on the table he’d sighed and asked Knockout, a little plaintively, “How many more stages are there?” and Knockout had cheerfully said, “No worries kiddo, you’re almost done! One more round, and then you’ll be able to get a decent paint job and everything,” before trundling away with the leftover bits to the recycler.

Arcturus could access the database on his own by then, so instead of asking any more questions that he already had a bad feeling about, he’d crept away to the unused workstation next to the energon storage; nobody but him even went into the room. The last bodyshift had given him a lot more data-point contacts over his hands, so it had been even easier than before to pull up all the answers he didn’t want: a few cross-reference checks of his developing frame against the databases of Cybertronian modes made it horribly clear that—this was it. He wasn’t going to be as big as Megatron. He wasn’t even going to be as big as Knockout. He wasn’t going to be a warrior at all. He’d have to get a full-body rewire just to install a basic weapons package.

All of a sudden, Megatron’s extreme protectiveness had gone from a deeply comforting blanket of assurance into a nightmarish smothering. Because it was never going to go away. There was never going to be a day when Arcturus would be powerful enough to finally go out there and see things and look at things and learn everything and help; he was never going to be able to help at all. The only thing he was going to be—was a useless, terrible vulnerability.

He’d already processed countless records of the war out of the archives; it was awful and depressing, but most of all it was clearly total. There was only going to be one side walking away, that was the only logical conclusion from the historical data, and the number one thing keeping the Decepticon side in the game when there was literally a Prime in the field on the other side was Megatron himself. If Arcturus was an Autobot, he’d be planning his abduction too. He was a war-winning weapon—for the other side. A gun to his head, and Megatron would do anything.

So Arcturus did understand why Megatron was scared, why Megatron didn’t want him leaving the ship, only he couldn’t stand it. There was a whole universe out there, and he was going to spend his entire existence in prison, under guard. Even if the Decepticons did win the war, Megatron was going to have enemies forever. Why even be sparked just to live like this? And it was selfish of him to even ask that question, so he’d shoved it down and he’d stopped asking to leave. But this morning he’d been sitting next to Soundwave in the command center, watching him bridge out a raiding party for energon, and without exactly meaning to, Arcturus had figured out how it worked, and once he knew—he just hadn’t been able to resist.

He’d tried to pick a spot that wouldn’t draw attention, somewhere isolated and far from all the recorded data points of Autobot activity, and for about ten minutes it had been amazing. He’d been running around on dirt and rock, weird surfaces nothing like the plating aboard the Nemesis; he’d touched trees and he’d been able to see, to see for klicks in every direction, no walls or anything in his way, especially once he got to a higher elevation point, and it was so wonderful—and he wasn’t allowed to have it. He’d known he had to get back to the Nemesis right away; the Autobots were probably responding to the energon raid, but they might have sent someone to check out the groundbridge activity, too. Only at the idea of going back, back to his permanent prison, his motivator had just given out, and he’d just sunk down where he was, unable to get up the will to move.

And that was why a random Autobot—a mech even smaller than he was, but with military-grade armor and weaponry he’d never be able to install unless he got a total-body overhaul that might fry his processor along the way—had nearly just taken him out at zero cost. And if she had, then—then Megatron would be better off. He’d be safe. Except he’d also be shattered.

“I’m sorry,” Arcturus whispered, his voice fuzzing. “I don’t want—I don’t want to make trouble for you. I won’t leave the ship again.” He had to just—accept it. He had to.

Megatron was still just standing there, and then abruptly he said, in a contemplative tone, “It’s never occurred to me before that you might have cognitive defects. I know you’ve processed my work; I haven’t had to answer that many questions about it for anyone since—since before the war. So explain to me how you have somehow managed to anyway internalize the grotesque nonsense that form dictates function?”

Arcturus lifted his head to stare up at him helplessly. “But—but you said it yourself! Any Autobot could just—take me! Any time! I couldn’t stop them!”

Megatron’s eyes were still widening up in outrage. “Because you’re a squeaky-geared newspark who is also apparently stupid enough to go wandering around without any protective measures!” he roared. “If I was idiotic enough to sail off alone into hostile territory on a regular basis without so much as a wide-range scanner, they’d find a way to take me down, too!”

“Stop it! That’s not the same thing! You know it’s not!” Arcturus shouted back. “I’m not stupid, I know the tactical gatekeeper formulas you use for mission evaluations! What actual protective measures can I ever take that are going to make the risk equation come out positive?”

Megatron paused, frowning at him. “How did you get hold of the gatekeeper—never mind! The answer is you don’t know yet, because you haven’t even settled. You haven’t begun combat training—”

“You nearly tore Flipwing to pieces for letting me hold his gun!” Arcturus said.

Megatron gave a guilty twitch. “Because you’re not ready!” he snapped. “You nearly shot your own leg off!”

“Because I don’t have contacts!” Arcturus said, holding his arms out in a display, almost desperately; he wanted to believe Megatron so much, he wanted to, but it just didn’t make any sense. “I’m not going to have contacts. I don’t have a precision targeting module. My power flow doesn’t even get above civilian baseline! Don’t—don’t lie to me! Please! I can’t—” His voice broke, and he dropped his head, squeezing his optics shut.

There was a long pause, a heavy silence, and then Megatron took hold of his shoulders and pressed them gently back, making him look up. Megatron’s optics were glowing, and he said with a low ferocious intensity that Arcturus had never heard from him, “Be silent. Contacts and power flow and modules, these things are trivial nonsense. There is only one thing, one single quality, that makes a warrior, and that is his will.” He let go and grabbed his own cannon and took it off and threw it across the room with a massive crash. Arcturus jumped and stared after it and looked back at him. “Do you think I was sparked with that?” Megatron demanded. He ripped off his own pauldrons and threw them one after the other too, smashing in a violent cymbal-clanging, leaving his squared-off, bare-riveted shoulders exposed. “Look at me! The mine overseers had me churned out of a factory as a cheap drudge, meant to slave for my entire existence in the dark until my systems wore out and I was torn apart for scrap. Knockout has to replace a dozen of my components every year; my knee servos go out three times a decade! If I went longer than a vorn without a major overhaul, I’d start to fall apart. And you have the gall to whine at me about your power flow?” He grabbed Arcturus again and shook him, gear-rattlingly. “If I could claw my way out of the pits of Kaon to crush the Council and rule the Decepticons, you can find a way to go sightseeing without getting yourself slagged by a random Autobot scout! And you will, because if you’re so pathetic you don’t figure it out for yourself within a year, I’ll start dropping you in random locations and having the Eradicons chase you with live disruptor fire until you do!”

Arcturus burst into tears and flung himself into Megatron’s arms, shuddering with relief, and after a moment, they came around him in the vast, cradling comfort that Arcturus had thought he’d never be able to just sink into again. Megatron sighed deeply, the cycling of his intakes a thrumming beneath his chest panel, and stroked Arcturus’s head gently, the curved claws gliding over his helm. “Foolish sparkling,” he said, his voice rumbling in deeper resonances as the anger and fear began to cycle out of his system.

“I’m sorry,” Arcturus said, muffledly.

“Not as sorry as whoever let you go sailing off alone on this lunatic jaunt is going to be,” Megatron said. “Now who was it?”

Arcturus let go and stepped back with a last snuffle, wiping the lubricant lines from his face. “Nobody, I told you! I opened the groundbridge myself.”

“The groundbridge can’t just be smacked open at the push of a button!” Megatron snapped. “The navigational system needs to be fed a precisely targeted location formula that adjusts to—”

“The ongoing rotation of the planet, the relative position of the Nemesis, the planetary magnetic field, and the changing gravitational pull of the planetary core and the moon and sun,” Arcturus said. “I saw Soundwave doing it, I figured it out.”

“And,” Megatron went on through his teeth, his optics narrowing, “it requires a senior officer’s encryption key.”

Arcturus squirmed guiltily, even as there was a tap at the door, and Soundwave came in silently. “Well?” Megatron demanded, turning to him. “Who unlocked it?”

Soundwave displayed the tag label for—Megatron’s own encryption key. Megatron stared at it, then looked back at Arcturus. “I—I might have—picked it up,” Arcturus said feebly.

“Picked it up,” Megatron said, very levelly.

“I put a tracer on the portable data console you gave me,” Arcturus muttered. “Then I got you to log into the deep archives from it to tell me the legend of the Seven Gladiators.”

Megatron paused. “That was two months ago. You barely had limbs.”

Arcturus shrugged. “I didn’t have much else to do.”

“Besides steal my encryption key? That would give you total access to every system on this ship. You could have—” Megatron stopped, and then said in a sharply rising voice, “Arcturus. Are you the one who has been taking the torq drones?”

“Um.”

“What have you been doing with them?”

“I—I play lob ball with them. Everyone else is always busy!” Arcturus blurted.

“Lob ball.” Megatron nodded, as if he’d expected the answer. “And is it possible you’ve been doing this in the secure materials hangar? Rearranging the contents, and perhaps leaving the occasional mysterious dent in the walls?”

“It’s the only space big enough that has scheduled access?”

“I see,” Megatron said, with a low steady thrum in his voice; his optics were glowing again. “And then you’ve been using my key to rewrite the logs and—use extremely large quantities of time on the central server to generate replacement holodata to insert into the surveillance systems to erase all traces of your activity?”

“Are—” Arcturus had to force down a gulp. “Are you going to punish me?”

“No,” Megatron said. “I’m going to give you a great deal of work to do.”

#

So Arcturus still wasn’t allowed to go out—yet—but abruptly that was much less of a problem, because he didn’t have time to go out anymore. Megatron handed him to Soundwave, who promptly started piling all sorts of data-analysis work on him. It was fun, but it was also hard. After a few test runs, Soundwave just gave him a big pile of encrypted data that had come out of some Iacon database, along with a few bits that had already been decrypted, and left him to try and figure out from that how to get into the rest, which was almost impossible. Arcturus spent an entire day on it and had only managed to get one tiny section decrypted, about some kind of audio resonator that was supposedly hidden here on Earth, like a scavenger hunt, and then Megatron abruptly appeared and picked him up from the console and carried him off to recharge despite his instinctive yelping and stretching for the control pad.

“Part of being a valuable warrior is knowing your limits,” Megatron said firmly, tucking his arms back down against his chest, and Arcturus found himself just mumbling a bit of agreement as he curled into Megatron’s warmth, sinking rapidly as soon as his brain had disengaged from the puzzle of it.

He did complain over his energon in the morning, just a little. “It’s almost impossible,” he said. “And Soundwave won’t even give me a hint! He let me just bash my head on that one tiny section all day!”

Megatron snorted. “One day, and you’re already giving up?”

“Well, I did get that part, but they’re all different!” Arcturus said. “Decrypting one doesn’t give you any of the others. It barely gives you a tiny little sliver of help with the immediately adjacent section. I just don’t think it’s a fair problem! —what?”

Megatron was looking at him with narrowed optics. “You got that part.”

“Yes?” Arcturus said. “If you give me the answer I can check, but I’m pretty sure—”

“We don’t have the answer! We’ve been trying to decrypt that database for nearly two thousand vorn.”

Arcturus gaped at him. “But—but where did the decrypted sections come from, then?”

Megatron stiffened just a hair before he said, “We had the temporary help of an expert whose services are no longer available. Now tell me what you found.”

“It’s the coordinates for a device that was hidden on the planet, a kind of sonic weapon,” Arcturus said absently, already wondering how he could track down the records of the expert Megatron was talking about.

But he was distracted a moment later, because Megatron said, “Give me the coordinates,” and as soon as Arcturus had tossed them to him on a data channel, he added Soundwave to the stream and said, “We’ve got another artifact located. Go secure it immediately.”

Arcturus stared at him across the table, realizing—“Wait, this—this is real?”  

“Of course it’s real,” Megatron said. “We pulled that data out of the ruins of the Council’s most secure databanks in the Iacon Hall of Records, shortly before the final exodus. It represents the locations of major weapons and powerful artifacts hidden here by the Autobots to keep them from us.” He tipped back the last of his third cube and stood. “Go keep working on it.”

He clanked away, and Arcturus sat blankly for a moment and then burst out of his seat and ran back to the data console. Soundwave was already gone, as if he had taken off at once, as if it was that important. And all because Arcturus had—picked apart one little section of data. He pulled up all the materials and dove back into it, his processors already revving up, pulling as much of the raw encrypted data as he could squeeze into his main memory; he was going to get every last line decrypted, as fast as he possibly could.

He forgot completely about the expert Megatron had mentioned.

#

Optimus knew Ratchet was keeping up a constant vigil; the others all kept an eye out for the newspark as well. But there was no more sign of him for months, even through several Decepticon operations. Optimus and the Autobots were striking as many of them as they could, even going after smaller raids, trying to provoke Megatron to show his hand.

“Maybe it was a trial run, and Megatron got enough of a bad jolt to think better of it,” Arcee suggested. Optimus tried to convince himself as much, but had a difficult time doing so. Megatron had overcome all scruple so many times, done so many terrible things. This did not seem so far beyond the rest. And Optimus could see no other motive for him to have borne the sparkling. Granted that the effort and risk had been low, still Megatron had never before chosen to take that risk. Why now, why struck from his spark? Some deep half-buried part of him desperately wanted to believe that Megatron ever had, that he might still…but Optimus could not permit himself to believe that. It was far more likely that Ratchet was right, and his purpose was to use the sparkling as a weapon.

“I’ve got an idea,” Ratchet said abruptly, after two weeks had gone by with no sightings. “It won’t be long now before the newspark’s final shift. And he’ll need to use his altmode to settle it in. If the humans agree, we could launch a small spy-sat designed specifically to locate a civilian-build out in the open. Middle-caste civilians have a characteristic striation pattern around the upper joints, something a scan can pick up, and he’ll be the only one on the planet. The Decepticons probably won’t identify the risk: they don’t know that it’s a standard, something we could look for. It would be our best shot at…” He trailed off, and everyone looked at the floor almost at once.

“We will not abduct him,” Optimus said quietly, and their heads came back up. “Regardless of Megatron’s intentions, the newspark is his own individual. If he chooses to remain with the Decepticons, we will not take him by force. We can only…offer him a choice.”

“Some choice,” Bulkhead muttered. “You gotta know old Buckethead has stuffed the poor newspark’s head full of horrible crap that’s gonna happen to him if he so much as talks to a Bot.”

“We will not rectify that by proving Megatron correct,” Optimus said. “Deliberately separating a newspark from his carrier, against his will, would be a grievous crime.”

“Keeping a newspark from his progenitor isn’t that great, either,” Arcee said. “I understand your feelings, Optimus, but Bulkhead is right. I’m not saying we should keep the newspark against his will, but it’s going to be hard for him to recognize the truth when he’s been lied to all his life. In my opinion, we should bring him here, explain the situation, and give him a few days to make a decision, instead of forcing him to choose on the spot with Megatron coming in hot.”

Optimus hesitated. He could see the wisdom of Arcee and Bulkhead’s points. “I will…consider it,” he said slowly. “At the very least—I will suggest the option to the newspark.”

“Is it a good idea to bring him here?” Bumblebee asked. “If he hasn’t chosen yet?”

They all paused, considering, and Ratchet said, “There’s the temporary base we set up on that island out in the Pacific. The generator is still there, and there’s a wide data uplink. We could connect to the main computer back here and shift operations there for a week or so…”

It took only a day to make the arrangements, but Optimus was guiltily aware that he was yielding too much to temptation even by going so far. Once they were in place, it would only be easier to justify acting as he wanted to, instinctively. The deep desire to protect the newspark was only natural, and it had gained in urgency because he had not had the opportunity to protect the sparkling in its earlier stages, and see it develop its own capacity for self-defense. The only time he had seen the newspark was in fact when it had been in danger, a danger that the carrier had failed to protect it from, and Optimus’s internal logical analysis had concluded the danger had arisen precisely as a consequence of not involving him in the sparkling’s development.

But that was a conclusion which served his emotional desires too well. No matter how much he wished to see the sparkling, to be connected to him, Optimus could not fundamentally fault Megatron for the underlying decision that involving him in care would create an impossible situation. Given their opposition, the sparkling could not form a lasting emotional connection with them both. And for Optimus to disrupt the newspark’s established connection to its carrier in order to replace it with a connection to him would ordinarily be an act of enormous greed and selfishness. It could only be excused if the newspark’s very safety depended upon it. If the newspark indeed desired it.

And perhaps he might. Optimus shuddered to imagine the coldness and cruelty which the sparkling might have endured among the Decepticons. He only had a few scattered memories of his time among them which had survived the process of reloading the Matrix. He had tried to recover something of the interfacing itself, but all he could find were a few stray scraps here and there in memory that had not been fully overwritten, a glimpse of Megatron looking down at him, optics glowing; a snatch of Megatron’s forearm with the cannon removed and his own hand on it, his fingers bright as they curled silver over the dark pitted surface of the armor; a single fractured memory of rumbling engines beside him, and the sound of his own breath coming heavily. Optimus flinched from those memories; even faded and gossamer-thin, they hurt worse than the rest.

But he did have bright alarmed memories of pain and violence written into the low-level memory attached to his threat-evaluation system, vividly clear scenes of Eradicons sneering over him, eager to hurt him, though he had been their ally at the time.. And a small, civilian, middle-caste mech among the Decepticons, an example of all they hated and wanted to destroy, not useful to them in any way except as a hostage—what wouldn’t they have done? Megatron’s wishes would be their only limit. And Megatron had not minded exposing the newspark to danger, leaving him alone and vulnerable on the surface of an alien planet that was contested territory.

Over the next few days, Optimus felt his own judgement wavering before the awful ideas his imagination was generating. It was a constant distraction from his duty, at a point where focus was required. He had evidently decrypted too much of the Iacon records for the Decepticons; they were managing to decipher still more of it. The only way that the Autobots could now prevent them from acquiring the dangerous artifacts was to maintain a constant vigil for groundbridge activations and then intercept on the fly. They could not stand down at all: the Decepticon retrieval missions went at unpredictable intervals. Every opportunity for recharge and defrag was increasingly precious. Optimus could not afford to lie awake and on high alert, cycling through terrible scenarios of the newspark being beaten by Eradicons in a corridor of the Nemesis, or his small body gripped in Megatron’s savage talons, or being shot by Arcee, a viscerally horrible idea that left him with the instinctive desire to lash out at her, when it had not been her fault at all. He could not afford it, and he could not help it.

It was only another week before Ratchet came and said quietly, “We’ve spotted him. He’s…in a high-speed ground cruiser altmode. He’s driving with Knockout and a Vehicon escort in a largely uninhabited region of the Andes mountains. We’ve spotted some air cover, Megatron’s likely with them, but…” He transmitted the data, and Optimus immediately saw the opportunity: the convoy was speeding towards a narrow junction where three canyons met. Bulkhead, Arcee, and Bumblebee could groundbridge into the center canyon and intercept the escort, cutting off the newspark, who would certainly flee into one of the side canyons; Optimus could then groundbridge in behind him and…talk to him. If nothing else.

The newspark would undoubtedly be terrified. He might be injured by crossfire, if the Decepticons weren’t careful. Even bolts deflected by the Decepticons’ armor might hurt him. It was a small risk, but a real one. Megatron would charge in the second that weapons fire began; there might be less than a minute to talk. It…wasn’t worth it unless Optimus was prepared to seize the newspark and remove him to another location temporarily. And if to any location, then why not the temporary base, where a room had already been prepared, with energon available to give the newspark, perhaps easing his distress—

He put his head into his hands. He couldn’t help but feel he was letting himself go astray.

Ratchet put a hand on his shoulder. “Optimus,” he said, “it is our hearts that make us different from the Decepticons. If you could want this less, you would not be who you are. Will you let me make the call on this one for you?”

Optimus drew a deep breath and nodded a little.

“Then we’re going,” Ratchet said, “and you’re going to take the newspark, and get him to the temporary base. I’ll be there to meet you in case he gets as much as a scratch to his new paint. We’ll get him calmed down, explain the situation, and tell him we’re keeping him for three days so he can get to know us, at which point he’ll be free to make his choice, to stay or to go. And Bulkhead will tell Knockout about the time limit, so Megatron will know we’re not planning to hold the sparkling against his will permanently.”

Optimus shuddered all over, a wave of desperate longing traveling through his body. It would not be a long operation. Fifteen minutes from now he…he could be speaking with his progeny. A new being formed of his own spark. “Are you…certain,” he managed.

“Yes,” Ratchet said. “The alternatives are too terrible, Optimus. We know nothing of the treatment the newspark is enduring among the Decepticons. Even if they do not intend to cause him harm, violence and cruelty are in their very nature. And for that matter, they have no experience of civilian builds at all. I’d want access to him if for no other reason than to allow me to do a standard medical checkup.” He gave his shoulder a pat and stood up. “The mission is a go, Optimus. Report to the groundbridge.”

The relief of having the decision made for him unlocked a thousand jammed gates throughout his neural circuitry. Optimus stood instantly, said quietly, “Thank you, old friend,” and strode out to the groundbridge; Arcee and Bulkhead and Bumblebee were already assembled, looking at him. Arcee smiled at him in her own relief: with his preoccupation relieved, he understood abruptly how guilty and terrible she must have been feeling herself, all this time, and how glad she was to be able to make amends to him and to the newspark. He put a hand on her shoulder in silent grateful acknowledgement. “Autobots,” he said, “roll out.”

#

Arcturus was terrified, but Megatron had spelled it out for him: if there appeared even so much of a threat as a single human with one of those little percussion weapons they used, his job was to get away, trusting Megatron to get him, and that was exactly what he did, which worked just fine until the second groundbridge opened up so close on his heels he picked up the engine sound with his proximity alerts, and Optimus Prime came roaring out behind him. Arcturus threw every ounce of power he had into speeding away; he’d deliberately scanned the lightest-weight altmode he could function in, and he did actually outdistance Prime at first, but then a couple of missiles went sailing overhead, and he could track their perfectly arcing progress until they hit the two sides of the canyon about one klick away and brought the whole thing roaring in on itself.

There literally wasn’t anywhere to go, and Prime was accelerating. “Please stop and let me talk to you,” he broadcast from behind him. “I know you are afraid. I mean you no harm.”

It was such a completely insane thing for him to say that part of Arcturus’s brain started worrying the problem of why, but most of him was preoccupied with what the hell to do. “Then leave me alone!” he yelled back, and revved his engines violently while actually slowing down a little, to make it seem like Prime was catching up to him quicker. The Autobot got close enough that he started to transform, and that was when Arcturus fired a side grapple into the canyon floor and accelerated at top speed, whipping around the connection point and shooting back the other way as fast as he could go.

Only to come up with a hard jerk as Prime grabbed the grapple and hooked it onto a pulley so fast that he had Arcturus reeled halfway back in before Arcturus managed to work the grapple release, and even while he was doing that—with one freaking hand!—he was shooting out the canyon up ahead, too.

The only good thing was that the move brought Arcturus so close he could blast Prime in the head with flame-retardant foam, which made him blind just as the grapple release did work, and Arcturus did the only and incredibly stupid thing he could think of, which was to accelerate straight at him and just smash into his legs, trying to topple him.

But Prime had some kind of heating unit built into his optics; Arcturus was still a meter away when they blazed a clear path through the foam. Only instead of just putting up a foot to stop him cold, Prime literally shrieked, “No!” and threw himself bodily to the side and out of the way, so Arcturus sailed right past him without so much as a dent, and Prime went flying over anyway, a lot more effectively than Arcturus could have arranged.

It made literally no sense—which Arcturus’s logic unit abruptly hooked up with Prime saying I mean you no harm, and his databases confirmed that most Autobots had really bad and inadequate lying modules; they got confused about reality themselves if they told lies. So if Prime wasn’t lying—and meant it in a really serious way—

Well, Arcturus didn’t exactly have much of a chance any other way, so he tested it out: he turned around and threw himself right at Prime again. And Prime once more literally dived out of the way. “Stop!” he said. “My armor’s tensile strength is far greater than yours. A physical collision at this speed will cause you serious injury!”

“Jump in a smelter!” Arcturus snarled back, turning for another pass. “You think I care about getting dented? I’d rather be slagged than have you use me against Megatron!” He revved up and charged full speed—and abruptly, the coruscating glow of a groundbridge opened up directly in front of him, too late for him to slow down, and he went sailing through and skidded across the floor of a big stone chamber, his tires squealing to a halt just before he crashed into the far stone wall, and—and he couldn’t sense—

“Megatron!” he screamed, panic igniting throughout his circuitry in a blistering rush that didn’t allow for anything like rational thought to moderate it. He transformed, looking around wildly for—for anything, a way out, where was he, where was Megatron—

“Hang on! It’s all right! Just calm down, no one’s going to hurt you.” An Autobot was approaching him with his hands out, nothing as big as Prime but big enough, and Arcturus grabbed the nearest piece of equipment he could reach and threw the whole thing at the Autobot’s head, clanging him backwards and knocking him over flat.

Arcturus went staggering back from him, blindly; his whole body was trembling, his entire neural network trying frantically to access the horrifying empty space where the link had gone dead. Megatron Megatron Megatron, he kept calling and calling, frantically, and there was no answer; he dimly managed to think, groundbridge, get back, and he went towards it blindly groping, even though part of his logic unit said one way, won’t work, he couldn’t listen; he had to get back—

Hands suddenly came gently around him, settling on his frame, and a deep voice said low, “Hush, it’s all right. It’s all right, newspark. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m here. I won’t let anything happen to you,” and some part of him was yelling warnings and alarm, but the touch and voice reached a dormant connection point deep in his system, and it activated in a rush of soothing, calming relief. It didn’t remove the horror, but it reassured; Arcturus folded into it with a gasping, helpless cry, shivering, and then his rationality units came back online and he jerked back, staring up at—Optimus Prime, who was looking down at him with wide, sorrowful concern.

“What the hell,” Arcturus said, staring at him.

“I am Optimus Prime,” Prime said, unnecessarily. “And I am…your progenitor.”

#

 Arcturus was having too many emotional reactions to coherently experience any one of them, but the relatively minor intellectual irritation of why am I so small! managed to make it through.

“This is not my original form,” Optimus said, when he asked. “I was sparked as an archivist in Iacon—”

“You’re the one who decrypted those chunks of the database,” Arcturus said blankly, without thinking.

Optimus paused. “Yes,” he said, and then slowly said, “Are—have you been—decrypting it for them?”

“No,” Arcturus said. He had a perfectly good lying module. “I’m not allowed to access sensitive data yet. I’ve seen Soundwave working on it.”

He wasn’t feeling good about the situation: the terrible blank spot in his mind waiting for signal from Megatron was still flinching-tender, and he knew better than to ask the Autobots to even let him send a message. But at least he didn’t need to fear the worst. Prime wasn’t going to hurt him; in fact, he was trying to establish a full-on progenitor connection that Arcturus was having to actively refuse. After a couple of hours, Arcturus actually ended up constructing a fake intermediate interface and putting it in front of his progenitor receptors and letting Prime lock in to that, just to stop having to consciously say no thanks to the constant inquiring alerts from his low-level connection subsystem. When he did, Prime gave a physical start and trembled and tentatively reached out and put a hand on his back that Arcturus couldn’t help but like having there, even from the narrow band of exchange that he’d allowed between the fake front and the real underlying system.

But he wasn’t an idiot, and actually accepting a progenitor connection from Optimus Prime when he already had a carrier connection from Megatron was a recipe for an extremely unhappy life. He’d always be out of connection with one or the other of them, and it was reasonably good odds that one of them was going to kill the other. It made him pretty angry that Optimus was even trying, and that anger started to win out over all the other emotions as the other Autobots showed up and they explained the whole plan to him, which literally seemed to be, he’d spend three days with them, and decide they were so amazing and wonderful that he’d deliberately cut his carrier connection and betray the Decepticons and voluntarily agree to stay.

It made him so mad that he smiled and lowered his eyes and said, a little shakily, “But—I don’t know why you’d—want me. I mean—I’m not—I’m just,” and waved a hand over himself, and they all fell over each other to reassure him that no, no, no, just because the awful Decepticons didn’t value anybody who couldn’t fight didn’t mean they didn’t. They valued civilians, he should have a wonderful fulfilling life, obviously not ever fighting anyone in his helpless state. Ratchet earnestly told him how he spent all his time in base and didn’t go out on military operations himself unless it was an emergency.

“But I can’t even do that,” Arcturus said, drooping. “I can’t even defend myself.”

That got Arcee to smack him in the shoulder and say firmly, “Look, kid, size isn’t everything. You’ve got plenty of speed, from what I saw. Ratchet, any reason you couldn’t adapt my combat subroutines for Arcturus here?” and Ratchet said thoughtfully, “I don’t see why not,” and literally three hours later they handed him a datachip full of amazing high-speed combat subroutines that weren’t like anything he’d found in the Decepticon databases, and ten times better for his own design.

“Thanks,” Arcturus said, sincerely, and then asked Arcee to spar with him; she mostly tossed him around, but by the end of the session, he was actually letting her: a little input from her real-world fighting and he was able to use the style-analysis routines Megatron and Soundwave had given him, from their gladiator days, and reverse-engineer everything they’d given him, so now he had all her actual subroutines and he could more or less solve the problem of fighting her in advance. On top of that, the other Autobots then let him just sit there watching them spar for hours, and he worked out most of their subroutines in the process, since they’d all been generated from the same base, probably whatever middle-caste military officers had used back in the old days. He thought he’d now have a shot to at least evade any of them for a significant period of time.

It was all stimulating and interesting, and they were all nice to him the whole time, but that wasn’t so great actually because after a little while, he stopped being able to hang on to his anger. He slowly realized they weren’t doing this because they believed he’d ditch Megatron. It was just wishful thinking: they wanted him to ditch Megatron, really badly, so much that they were letting it affect their probability evaluations. They all wanted it that badly, not just Optimus, who had progenitor coding going on.

And Optimus wanted it so much that if Arcturus wasn’t careful, it made him feel sorry for not giving it to him. Optimus was just—wonderful. It was hard to be around him without loving him. He was just always radiating this deep calm steady field without a single bit of rage or violence in it at all, like nobody else in the world Arcturus had met, Autobot or Decepticon; it felt so good to just lean against him and bask in it. Optimus was also almost painfully sad, but the insidious thing was that whenever Arcturus came near him, the sadness ebbed away and a tiny little thread of happiness made a wavering appearance, and the idea of crushing that miniscule fragment of happiness out of Optimus’s existence was awful.

Except it was a choice between him or Megatron, in the most literal sense, and that wasn’t even a choice. Arcturus didn’t want that choice, and he was angry again, whenever he thought about it, because Optimus was trying to make it a choice. And he wasn’t giving Arcturus a choice about that. He’d decided that Arcturus had to experience being with them for three days, and it didn’t matter how it felt to him and to Megatron to be separated like this, and it especially didn’t matter what it would be like for Megatron if somehow Arcturus did get converted by the experience. Optimus didn’t care. Megatron had carried for him and Optimus didn’t care. It was like him saying that Megatron was—some kind of receptacle who’d conveniently delivered a sparkling that Optimus got to take because he could, because he was strong enough to grab him bodily and because he was warm and loving enough to grab him emotionally.

And okay—to be fair, Megatron had started that off by saying that Optimus didn’t matter, wasn’t important at all, by not telling Arcturus who his progenitor was—for that matter, he’d avoided mentioning that there was a progenitor; Knockout had shown a still-blobby Arcturus a tray of datachips once and said, “Loads of generative coding samples, only we don’t have them labeled,” and given him the strong impression that he’d been sparked by one—except what else was Megatron supposed to do? It wasn’t like Optimus had stuck around to insist on it. He hadn’t even checked before leaving an interface partner.

“I owe you more of an explanation about our—taking you, if you are willing to hear it,” Optimus said softly, later that day. They’d all had their energon together, sitting around a big communal table; the Autobots had told him a bunch of silly and funny stories about their lives on old Cybertron that bore absolutely no resemblance to the handful of brutal and terrifying stories he’d ever extracted out of anyone on the Nemesis, most of whom you had to get overcharged before they’d talk about anything before the war, except for Knockout who’d cheerfully tell you stories so completely horrible you went to massive effort and squished yourself blobbily away from him halfway through, and Megatron found out and told him to keep his mouth shut or else get his arms ripped off.

But now the other Autobots had gotten up and left him and Optimus alone, and Arcturus braced himself. “Okay,” was all he said, and kept his eyes on the table and his emotional field pulled in tight the whole time while Optimus told him in a sad weary voice about the way the war had started, how he and Megatron had been friends but had quarreled over him taking the Primacy. And how Megatron had unleashed hell over all of Cybertron, and done one monstrous thing after another.

It wasn’t anything Arcturus didn’t more or less know about, it wasn’t like Megatron hid things from him, but he didn’t say so; he wasn’t willing to rely on the Autobots staying friendly and sympathetic if he let on that actually he wasn’t a sheltered little twerp. But as it went on, it—felt different, hearing it from Optimus instead of scanning it out of an archive. Optimus had lived through all of that happening, and Arcturus didn’t need him to spell out that all of it had happened to him. Megatron had hurt him and hurt him over and over, so badly; him and Cybertron, and left nothing but dead ashes behind.

“So why did you interface with him now?” Arcturus said, without looking up.

Optimus stopped for a moment, and then said, a little waveringly, “I had…lost much of my memory in a battle against Unicron. I will give you the incident logs, for the details. But I had forgotten that I was no longer Orion Pax. I forgot that he was no longer my friend. And I—I loved him very much, once. At the time, I was too shy to express my feelings to him. But I would gladly have…” He trailed off. “I cannot know whether he initiated the encounter or I did. I no longer remember it, either. But I believe that is why I was willing. What I do not—” He paused and took a deep breath. “What I do not know is why Megatron chose to carry offspring struck from my spark. He did not notify me that he had done so; I did not even know that a spark had coalesced. And that is why I took this measure. I wish you to know, Arcturus, that I would never have taken such a risk with you, or caused you any distress, if I did not…if I did not feel I had cause to fear a far greater distress.”

  Understanding slowly crept in. “You think…you think he wants to use me against you,” Arcturus said.

“I—feared it,” Optimus said. “I do not accuse—I do not have evidence he intended to do so. Only that I had…reason to believe it might be possible.”

And, terribly, Arcturus could see his point. Optimus was wrong, but he did have reasonable cause. Arcturus also had no idea why Megatron had decided to carry Optimus’s sparkling. There wasn’t a single mech on the Nemesis who wouldn’t have considered it an honor to serve him as a progenitor. And if he had used one of them, he wouldn’t have been saddled with a middle-caste data analyzer instead of a warrior, and that wasn’t how Megatron felt, but it was definitely how Optimus thought he felt. Besides, the truth was, even if Megatron didn’t consciously mean to use Arcturus in some awful way, it was going to hurt Optimus anyway. It had hurt Optimus already. So why wouldn’t he imagine that Megatron was going to hurt him even worse? It was only a short step for him to get from there to the crazy idea of Megatron being willing to hurt Arcturus. And taking that mental step—was what had let Optimus justify grabbing a newspark away from his carrier, and trying to get him to sever their connection.

One vicious step after another circling in on themselves endlessly, with no way to break out. Arcturus hunched in a little closer. It did hurt him. It all hurt. He was inside that horrible ring with the two of them chasing each other around, Megatron clawing and savage and Optimus just overflowing with pain, and if he let Optimus keep doing this, let him make him feel it, he was going to be trapped in there forever. If he hadn’t put up that false front, it would have gotten him already.

He shut his optics. Then he said, low, “Do you really expect me to believe you?”

Optimus stiffened. “Arcturus—”

“You tell me this story,” Arcturus said, not letting him go on. “You tell me how horrible Megatron is, how you’ve been fighting him for millions of years, and that you think he’s going to hurt me. So much that you decide you have to grab me so you can give me this chance to choose for myself. But if I don’t choose the right way, you’ll let me go?” He gave a sharp laugh and waved a hand. “You brought me to your base! After I’ve been here for three days I’ll have enough wide-range sensory input for Soundwave to figure out the exact coordinates. But sure, you’re going to let me go.”

“No, that’s—Arcturus, this is not our primary base,” Optimus said. Which Arcturus had already figured out, but he let his optics slide up to look at Optimus warily. “This is an old outpost, long abandoned. We deliberately reopened it for this purpose alone.”

Arcturus eyed him with as much visible suspicion as he could and waved his hand towards the consoles. “You’ve got wide-range surveillance and comms.”

“We have established a full two-way uplink to our main base computer,” Optimus said. “There are not many of us, and we must remain vigilant to protect humans against…any potential Decepticon reprisals.”

“Oh,” Arcturus said after a moment, lowering his head.

“I give you my word, Arcturus,” Optimus said softly. “If you choose to return to Megatron and the Decepticons, we will not hold you. If—” He stopped and visibly trembled and then grated out, “if you are feeling too much distress, if you—we will let you go now. I will not—I will not compel you to stay. I only ask—that you give us a chance. To show you—a different way. And the truth about the Decepticon and Autobot causes.”

Arcturus was quiet, and then he said, “I want to go now.”

Optimus bowed his head and shuddered and then said thickly, “Very well.” Agony was so vividly crackling over his field that Arcturus almost said wait no, just involuntarily. Instead he made himself get up and follow Optimus to the console, where Optimus activated the controls and opened the groundbridge out and gestured without lifting his head. “It will take you back to the location where we found you. We told Megatron we would return you there. He will undoubtedly have someone watching it.”

Arcturus turned and walked all the way up to the edge of the groundbridge, until he felt the crackle of it on his plating and he was close enough to jump through, even if it was disconnected that second. He stopped there and took a deep breath, and turned around. Optimus was still at the console, almost crumpled in grief. “You mean it,” he said, and Optimus’s head came up: his optics were glazed with lubricant, thin trails going down his face, and a sudden flickering of raw, desperate hope appeared.

“Yes,” Optimus said, his voice wavering and unsteady. “I mean it, Arcturus.” 

Arcturus nodded a little. He bent his head and then he took a few steps away from the groundbridge and looked up and said, “I’ll—I’ll stay two more days. It doesn’t mean—I’m not staying longer,” he added.

Optimus gave a small gasp, and flicked a switch, letting the groundbridge shut down again. “I—I thank you for giving me the chance,” he said softly.

Arcturus looked away. “Don’t thank me,” he said shortly, and meant it.

He managed to get Optimus’s encryption key the next morning: the exact same trick he’d used on Megatron, except instead of the story of the Seven Gladiators, he pretended he wanted some obscure alternate versions of the history of the Primes. It was hard, watching Optimus do the deep data retrieval; his hands were a little too big, so the data-connection points had been spread out and he’d had to come up with some multiple-finger workarounds, but otherwise it was like watching himself work. It was the first time he’d ever seen any part of him in someone else. Except maybe not, because he could see his own reflection in the console while Optimus typed, and his face was open and interested and sincere and not at all like someone who was about to completely gut Optimus for being stupid enough to trust him, and Arcturus was pretty sure that was Megatron looking back.

There was a brief window a few hours later where he had fifteen minutes of unsupervised access to the base computer. He got a connection to the main computer in wherever their real base was, opened a back channel broadcasting on a Vehicon chat frequency, and promptly started dumping everything he could get into it: Autobot codes, offworld Autobot outposts, the combat subroutines, where they were getting their energon. Soundwave would notice almost immediately. Arcturus covered up the ongoing transmission and was back on the training mat doing exercises from Arcee’s subroutines—badly—before anyone was back in the room.

Optimus and the Autobots kept surrounding him with warmth and affection. It felt wonderful, except for how whenever he was alone with one of them, they would go quiet, and after a few moments tell him another story about another terrible thing that the Decepticons had done to them, always either Megatron himself or under Megatron’s orders. Arcturus let them talk because it helped that they didn’t see anything wrong with telling him his carrier was a monster. But it made him want to say something, badly; almost enough to do it, even though that would’ve been the exact opposite of the point of it all.

Nothing he said would make a difference. If they could see themselves through Decepticon eyes, if they could take seeing it, they would have seen it by now. The war had been going for thousands of years. They’d already decided; they’d chosen. And Megatron had chosen, and all the Decepticons, too. Arcturus couldn’t see any way to unmake everyone else’s choices; all he could do was make one he could live with, and do his best to make it a choice they could live with, too.

And that meant him walking out of here, in just one more day, and telling Megatron where this base was, so he’d bomb the hell out of it instantly, after which the pipeline breaking to the main base would let the Autobots uncover all the data he’d sent, and they’d realize that he’d been a Decepticon the whole time, smiling and playing along and carving them up. And then—they’d put him away in the box with Megatron and all the others. It would make them sad and angry and disappointed, but it wouldn’t feel to Optimus and the rest of them like he was a victim they hadn’t saved. He’d just be another vicious Decepticon monster who needed to be stopped, even if you’d once been dumb enough to try to love them. And that was all he could give them, all he could give Optimus, because he wasn’t giving them Megatron.

#

That night, Optimus gave him an old datapad, a beautiful streamlined one nothing like the big chunky utilitarian ones the Decepticons used: perfectly sized for his hands, ten times the contact points, so much precision that he could work almost twice as fast as before.

“This is the pad that I once used in the Hall of Records, on Iacon,” Optimus said, softly, looking down at it. “There are… Archivists were notified ahead of time, when a work was proscribed by the Senate, so we could remove it from the archives in advance. So I had a chance to…there are copies of all of Megatron’s work listed under a false name, Veratius. His polemicals, the video recordings of his early speeches…” He trailed off, his head bowed.

“How did you meet?” Arcturus asked, involuntarily hungry; he knew it didn’t really matter, and he was just making things worse for himself, but he couldn’t help wanting to know.

“I contacted him,” Optimus said. “Not long before his proscription. The intelligence forces began requesting copies of his work. I anonymously let him know that he was being observed.” He paused, and then said, low, “At the time, I thought that I was helping him. I had informed other dissidents who had attracted attention similarly, so they could avoid further scrutiny. But he wrote back to me openly, without attempting to conceal his own identity, and told me that any attempt to silence him would not succeed. I thought that he had taken my message as a threat. So…I went to Kaon.”

“And you talked to him?” Arcturus prompted, when Optimus didn’t say anything else for a long time; his optics were unfocused, as if he was accessing his own internal visual database.

“Yes,” Optimus said. “I waited outside the back door of the arena after his next match, until he came out. I told him I had meant it sincerely. I had not been lying to try and frighten him. He only shrugged. He told me that my intentions didn’t make a difference. The Council would be perfectly satisfied if he silenced himself, out of fear, and saved them the trouble. He would not do so; in fact, he planned to speak again the next day from the floor of the arena itself. And then…he smirked and asked me if I wanted to see the speech in advance. That was when I began to help him with them. It was hard for him to scribe. Disposables had—limited data contact points—”

His voice fell away again, with a tremor of sorrow running through it. Arcturus looked down at the datapad: it was gorgeously etched with symbols of the Primacy, the Matrix itself a small design at the top of the device, as if Orion Pax had somehow known, all along, where he was going. Arcturus touched the symbol gently with his fingertips, and Optimus probably thought the gesture was reverent, but actually it was just identifying the enemy.

Before the Matrix, Orion Pax had loved Megatron. And Megatron had—loved him, too? At least enough to want to interface with him, even thousands of years later. But Orion Pax had chosen—the Primacy. He’d chosen it over Megatron, twice. He’d chosen it over Arcturus himself, over the possibility of his existence. Orion Pax must have known that there was a chance of a sparkling, when he’d stretched out his hand that second time around. And he’d known that if he left, Megatron would have a choice between releasing any spark they’d formed, or carrying it alone, without a progenitor to help him. That wasn’t a choice, not for most carriers, not even Megatron. Megatron hadn’t known in advance that he’d be carrying a small mid-caste mech. He could’ve been carrying a Prime-sized warrior, one with enough power to drain even his systems into stasis, and what if Starscream had gotten some bright idea? But Megatron had done it anyway. Megatron had chosen him over everything, over even his cause. And Optimus had walked away from them both.

“Thanks,” Arcturus said, and told himself it helped to have the reminder. There were only twelve hours left. He’d managed to get another window of access and hook up the highest security layer at this base to the data dump. It would go over still encrypted, but Arcturus had a pretty good idea of how to break it once he was back on the Nemesis.

He spent the rest of the time talking to all the Autobots, being as friendly and warm as he could, radiating their rich, generous affection back at them. It felt horribly good, and even more horrible to know, at every moment, that he was destroying all hope of ever having it again. He had to, he had to make sure none of them would ever trust him again, no matter how much he tried to convince them or how much they wanted to. But he was going to miss it so much.

The Autobots all started to get quiet, four hours left on the clock. They looked at him anxiously, and hopefully, and Ratchet smiled at him, and Arcee said softly, “I know you’ll make the right choice,” with a firm nod.

And then, somewhere in the background, Arcturus overheard the littlest alien Rafe saying to Ratchet, “Hey, I figured out why Miko can’t get a decent signal on her iPhone.” Arcturus didn’t understand in time what they were talking about, but it turned out that humans had a primary use for the deeply inefficient chat frequency that he’d used for routing the data.

“I just don’t understand it, this data dump is going under Optimus’s code, but he can’t have done this by accident,” Rafe added, holding up a tiny console for Ratchet to see, and when Arcturus overheard that, he did understand that his cover was blown. He looked over at Ratchet’s dazed, blank face and instantly went for his backup plan: he set off the handful of small rigged charges he’d planted near the thinnest part of the outer wall, and dropped a smoke bomb. When the explosions went off, he yelled, “Ow! Help!” and managed to jolt Optimus and Arcee both in his direction and into the billows of smoke, and then he darted out from under and raced for the small hole he’d just made in the mountainside.

It wasn’t quite big enough, though, and Ratchet shouted, “Bumblebee, stop him!” and ten minutes later they were all standing staring at him in the clearing smoke, all their faces stunned and appalled, Optimus stricken in the middle of them.

“He’s sent them nearly our entire database through the five lower security levels already decrypted,” Ratchet was saying, his voice cracking. “It looks like the three higher levels after that are also significantly compromised. We’re going to have to rewrite all our mid-level coding layers or Soundwave will have mind-hijack exploits within a month.”

None of them said anything. They were all looking at Optimus, and he looked at Arcturus and asked, his voice cracking, “Why?”

His agony was—horrible. It was worse than Arcturus had imagined possible. It beat at him, dragging at the fake connection, and in desperation he detached the whole intermediate layer and dumped it, feeling Optimus’s flinch when it came away like a body blow, and stood up shaking. “Yeah, why. Why would I do everything I could to help my carrier. You remember, the mech you abandoned with a spark going? But he’s evil, so it’s okay. You had to. Just like you had to grab me away from him and try to bond with me in his place. Slag him, right?”

“Oh, Arcturus,” Ratchet whispered, his voice thick with sorrow, and Arcturus turned on him in rage.

“Shut up,” he spat. “Even now, you’re sitting there thinking to yourself that I’m some kind of brainwashed victim. You know, it’s funny how none of you ever asked how Megatron treated me. How the other Decepticons treat me. You all just decided to imagine what made you feel good about doing what you wanted to do. Well, let me tell you how he treats me. He loves me. He risked his life and everything he cares about to carry me. He’s proud of me. He never minded that I’m a middle-caste mech. All of you slobbering to tell me it’s okay that I’m no good in a fight. He taught me how to fight. He taught me to use everything I’ve got to win. So when his enemies, my enemies, tried to hurt me, I’d be ready to defend myself and the people I care about.” He turned back to Optimus, who was—sagging, unbearably. “That’s who you took me away from. My carrier. And you wanted me to ditch him for you. Are you kidding me? Not if Primus himself came out of Cybertron and told me to. I’m not you.”

He was being vicious, frantically and deliberately, because even though he’d dumped the intermediate layer, he could still feel it, like bits of the progenitor connection had made it through after all, and he couldn’t stand it. The Autobots were all silent, their faces all stunned to blankness. Even the humans looked stricken, their arms wrapped around themselves. Bulkhead was shaking his big head, ponderously. “What are we gonna do?” he asked. “We just—let him go?”

“He’s seen all the records,” Arcee said, gone as hard and flat as Arcturus could have hoped. “If he’s been dumping our database to the Cons, he knows we weren’t lying about what Megatron has done, what the Cons have done—”

“Just listen to yourselves,” Arcturus said. He couldn’t help himself. It was what he’d wanted, it was what he’d tried to get, but he still couldn’t stand it. “What Megatron has done, what the Decepticons have done. How about what you’ve done? Funny how your databases don’t have that.”

He turned to Optimus. “I know you don’t pay a lot of attention to Eradicons. You might remember Flipwing, though. He had a manufacturing defect, the lower edge of his left wing was bent up. When I was little, I figured out I could climb up on it and ride around. So if Megatron had to leave me on the Nemesis, Flipwing would just take me around the ship with him all day. All the Decepticons watched out for me, but he was—well, the closest thing I had to a progenitor.” Optimus twitched, and Arcturus took a deep breath. “Megatron put him on low-risk duty. Minor raids, the kind you guys almost never hit. But two months ago—after you found out about me—you started to hit them after all.” He swallowed. “You don’t even have his kill logged. I checked.”

Optimus was staring at him in horror. “But Eradicons—” he whispered.

“Don’t have complete brain function? Yeah. That’s how they were built. But Flipwing still had feelings. He came up with things to do with me. It was hard for him, but he did it, because I was upset when Megatron was away. I could outthink him before I had legs, but he still looked out for me. And you killed him. Without even thinking about it.” He looked around at all the other Autobots. “There isn’t one of you who doesn’t have kill stats in the tens of thousands in our databases. Megatron’s got nothing on you,” he added to Optimus, brutally. “You’ve killed more than half a million mechs with your own hands. They’re not in your database because you decided they didn’t count. Who are you to make that call? Oh, right—the chosen of Primus. Well, slag Primus, and slag all of you, too, you self-righteous smug—” His voice cracked off.

“That’s enough,” Ratchet said sternly, standing up. “I am truly sorry, Arcturus, that you lost—your childhood caretaker. But I have studied Eradicon and Vehicon design extensively for thousands of years, trying to find a way to expand their cognitive range. It’s almost impossible even on an individual basis. And despite that, the only reason we ever cause them harm is when Megatron throws them at us as cannon fodder! If anyone is responsible for their deaths—”

Arcturus laughed, helplessly. It came out with a frantic edge. “Oh, right. They’re not really sentient, so it’s okay, and if it isn’t okay, it’s Megatron’s fault anyway, is that it? Just stop. The truth is that Megatron’s done horrible things, and you’ve done horrible things, because that’s what war is. It’s all of us doing horrible things to each other until all of you or all of us are dead. But everything I’ve done to you, you asked for. I couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t kidnapped me.” All the Autobots flinched, darting looks at each other. “How dare you, how dare you pretend you care about me, how dare you pretend you want to be my friends, how dare you even talk to me? You all want my carrier dead. You’re the worst enemies I have in the entire universe.”

He was crying by then as he threw the words at them like missiles at close range, hurting himself along with them, and he wanted comfort so much that he couldn’t think when it suddenly came, relief flooding into his system, a sudden blooming of ferocious comforting presence; he only gasped for breath, deeply grateful, and only then he realized—

The walls of the base exploded in three places at the same time, and Decepticons were pouring inside through the smoke and dust. Optimus was up and putting himself in front of Arcturus, shouting, “Bumblebee, get the children to safety! Autobots, back to back around—”

Megatron slammed into Optimus from above, bodily, and carried him down into the ground before whirling away to grab Arcturus out from among the other Autobots. There wasn’t a chance to say even a word; Megatron instantly threw him through the air up to Starscream, hovering above, who clamped him to his frame and shot away through a carefully bored hole in the mountaintop above. “Megatron!” Arcturus yelled. “Optimus!” and he didn’t even know what he wanted, but Starscream was already accelerating, the entire world blurring around them as he smashed the sound barrier and headed for the speed of light.

#

“You should have told me,” was all Arcturus said about his imprisonment with the Autobots; all that he would say. He went straight back to work on the Iacon database and on the encrypted data he’d sent them from the Autobots’ base, but he worked silently, without looking up from his console, and stopped precisely at the same time each cycle. He handed his work to Soundwave and went to his quarters. He didn’t play lob ball or wander the ship poking into things, and in two solid weeks he didn’t ask even once to go down to the planet.

Megatron knew that something had to be done, but he didn’t have the faintest idea what. “Do you want me to kill him?” he asked the next morning, watching Arcturus drink a precisely measured quantity of energon without complaining even once about the quantity or taste. Megatron had been trying to kill Optimus for the last several thousand years, of course, but he was prepared to make a very enthusiastic attempt at the moment. But Arcturus flinched as violently as if he’d been stabbed and said, “No!” with a cracking voice and fled to his own chamber and shut the door.

That left Megatron with no clear options. He had the very unpleasant suspicion that he’d made a mistake, waiting. Soundwave had triangulated the signal for the tidal wave of data pouring into their system after only two days, they could have gone then…but Arcturus had been doing so brilliantly. He deserved the right to punish the Autobots for their temerity himself; he deserved the glory of devastating their defenses. Megatron had fought down his own desperate and instinctive desire to go get him at once, with every ounce of his will, one of the worst battles he’d ever fought; he’d spent the last few hours in his quarters kneeling in silence and clenched up around the agony where his connection to Arcturus was missing.

He’d been so proud, so determined to give Arcturus his chance. He’d forgotten how insidious Optimus was. Megatron slammed his fists down on the table in rage, crumpling it into a ball around his hands before he ripped them loose again. He had no excuse for forgetting. He’d been carrying the scars Optimus had left on him for thousands of years. And now that tainted rustworthy scrapgnawer had gotten his claws on Arcturus.

“But Arcturus doesn’t want vengeance,” Megatron said to Knockout grimly, later that day. “Why not?”

Knockout looked unusually serious himself, which wasn’t reassuring. “He’s…not a low-caste mech. His emotion processing module’s at least ten times more complex than anything any of us have. And it’s in overdrive right now. I did a full scan on him when we got him back, and it’s pulling ten times more power than it ever has in his existence. Right now he’s capable of wanting at least twenty different things simultaneously. Several of them could be contradictory.”

“That’s insanity,” Megatron said, appalled.

“Not for Autobots.” Knockout spread his hands helplessly. “Maybe he’ll get over it?”

But he sounded dubious, and after another week in which Arcturus showed no signs of getting over whatever was happening inside his head, Megatron finally made him sit in one place until he came up with a solution. “I’m not trying to guess. You’re going to tell me what you want,” he said firmly. “And one thing at a time. We’ll take it one after another.”

He felt satisfied with himself for about a second, and then Arcturus said, “I can’t,” and broke into tears.

“Stop that!” Megatron said in alarm. “How dare you say you can’t. How many times have I told you that nothing is out of reach—”

Arcturus made a loud distorted noise of protest and anguish and blurted, “I miss him!”

Megatron paused, and then sat heavily down. “That’s—the contradictory desire,” he said flatly, understanding too well. It should have been incomprehensible to him. But… he’d wanted nothing more than to rip Optimus Prime’s cranial unit off his shoulders, and yet…he had said yes when Orion Pax had reached up to him, even though he’d been doing it from inside Prime’s armor. And the morning after Orion had been gone once more…when Megatron had first noticed the spark flickering internally, when he’d known he should simply dump it…

Arcturus bowed his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“There’s no point being sorry,” Megatron said impatiently. “It’s what you want. But you can’t have it unless you go to him, and if you were going, you’d have gone.” He understood that contradiction all too well. He’d made the same choice himself, after all. He’d turned his back and walked away from the outstretched hand Optimus Prime had been holding out to him in the Council Hall, away from the lie. “Is there anything else you want?”

But Arcturus had raised his head and was staring at him with a sudden vivid brightening. “You want it too. That’s why you carried me. You still—love him.”

Megatron snorted. “Not enough to surrender.”

“No,” Arcturus agreed, promptly, and then bounced up and said, “I should get back to work,” and sailed out without any more drooping.

Megatron wasn’t an idiot, and therefore understood at once that Arcturus had come up with an extremely stupid plan to which he knew Megatron would never agree. The problem was, he had no idea what the extremely stupid plan was. It had undoubtedly been at least half generated out of Arcturus’s unnecessarily complex emotional processing system and his experience with the Autobots, rendering it almost impossible for Megatron to predict. He pulled in his officers to warn them to keep an eye on anything Arcturus did, with the faint hope that one of them might be able to guess, but the best anyone did was Starscream suggesting, “Perhaps he’s thought of a way to rewrite Autobot brain function?”

“Why wouldn’t he tell us that?” Blackarachnia pointed out.

“Perhaps he’s thought of a way to rewrite—our brain function!” Starscream said, beginning to stiffen into panic mode, and Megatron emitted an exasperated sigh and knocked him over for being an idiot.

In desperation, Megatron even gave a half-serious thought to contacting Optimus. He had an oversized emotional unit of his own; he shouldn’t have found it impossible to predict Arcturus. But after a moment of consideration, it seemed more or less certain that Optimus had actually believed that Arcturus was sincerely considering joining him and the Autobots. Arcturus hadn’t talked, but the kind of access he’d been able to get meant that he must have had free run of the base, and he’d started sending data after less than ten hours in their possession. If Optimus had been stupid enough to fall for such a blatantly obvious trick, he couldn’t possibly be of any use now.

Megatron was still trying to guess three days later when Arcturus snuck off the ship again. Megatron got a vague itch of concern in the back of his head as the distance between them increased and immediately went looking, but by the time he’d gotten to the groundbridge console, the cover-up routine Arcturus had left running had destroyed all traces of where he’d gone—the blasted newspark had somehow gotten his new encryption key—and five minutes later, the carrier connection was blocked again. Megatron almost panicked, except it was clearly deliberate—curse Optimus for making Arcturus endure the separation long enough that he could now bring himself to repeat it—so this was all part of Arcturus’s plan.

His very stupid and surely very dangerous plan, so Megatron did panic after all, and ordered every last Decepticon to fan out over the entire planet scanning for him, except for Soundwave, whom he grudgingly left at the controls. “But Megatron, we’ll never find him if—” Starscream began.

“If you don’t shut up and start looking!” Megatron roared at him, and Starscream squeaked and fled along with everyone else.

Megatron followed them out himself and started desperately whipping over the planet at top speed in a loose criss-cross pattern. Idiot planet with its idiotic narrow range of environmental conditions—there virtually wasn’t a single location on the surface that he could rule out, not to mention any number of regions below the surface. He’d made three dozen orbits without picking up the slightest hint when Optimus pinged him on a low-level channel, offering a comm frequency, and Megatron seized it and roared down it at full-power amplification, “Is he with you?”

“What?” Optimus said, then said, “What has happened to Arcturus?”

Oh, how dare he sound accusatory. “What’s happened to him?” Megatron snarled at him. “You kidnapped him and overheated his emotional coprocessors, that’s what’s happened to him! It’s all your fault, you corroded sack of scrap! If he’s not with you, then stay out of my way!”

He cut the comms and resumed his search. Four orbits later Soundwave signaled him that he’d registered Autobot groundbridge activity in three specific locations: the canyon where they’d first abducted Arcturus, the thoroughly smashed ruins of the base where they’d held him for those three days, and the isolated valley where that miserable wretch Arcee had nearly shot him. Why the hell Optimus thought Arcturus would choose any of those locations— Megatron paused. Optimus thought Arcturus would choose one of those locations.

Soundwave examined the power readings from the different groundbridge activations: they suggested that Optimus had gone to the bombed out base personally. Megatron sent Starscream and Blackarachnia and Knockout and Breakdown to the other two locations with orders not to engage the Autobots—he didn’t want Arcturus getting caught in any crossfire—and ordered Soundwave to bridge him over. 

He shot out into the middle of the rubble of the mountain with Optimus standing there calling, “Arcturus? Are you here?” and didn’t bother firing his reverse thrusters; he just transformed mid-air and slammed into Optimus and bashed him into the back wall, letting him stop their joint momentum with his body. It was a considerable vent to his fury. Megatron hadn’t caused nearly enough damage to Optimus the other day to pay him back for the absolute horror of three days separated from his newspark. If he hadn’t been preoccupied with worry for Arcturus, he would have already gone after Optimus for some vengeance of his own.

But that preoccupation was still fully alive, dominating all his frontal circuitry. Megatron seized Optimus by the throat, but he didn’t activate his combat modules. “Why would he come here?” he demanded. “What is he thinking?”

Optimus wrenched himself loose, but didn’t activate his own, either. “If he has escaped you,” he started, and Megatron punched him in the head. It wasn’t a combat move, so Optimus’s defensive systems didn’t come up in time to deflect it; he went down with a loud clanging, and Megatron stood over him vibrating in rage.

“Escaped me?” he hissed. “I’m his carrier, you misaligned loadlifter. If he wanted to go, he’d go.”

Optimus was staring up at him from the ground. “You—wouldn’t stop him?”

“That’s what you tried,” Megatron said. “How well did it work out? What do you think I’d do? Throw my own sparkling in a cell?” The idea was so inconceivable to him that he only said it sarcastically, except the blank way that Optimus looked up at him suggested— “You thought I’d harm him?”

“You—exposed him to Arcee,” Optimus said, his voice slightly distorted.

“He stole my encryption key and sneaked off the ship!” Megatron shouted at him. “Like he did this time! It’s what the overprocessored little mecharat does! Do you imagine he’s some kind of helpless clod? He’s our sparkling!”

Optimus heaved himself grinding up to his feet and took a step towards him. His optics had unswiveled to their maximum extent. “Megatron. If you never meant— If you wouldn’t— Are you—are you saying—you’d make peace for him?”

Megatron stopped and stared at Optimus, and had one blind, terrible moment of wondering if that was the plan, what Arcturus wanted—

But it passed, almost instantly, rejected. No. Arcturus knew him. “I’d die for him,” Megatron said flatly. “If he wanted to join you and your Autobots, if he wanted your idea of peace—I’d die. And get out of the way. What did you think you were asking him to do? He can’t have both of us.”

Optimus halted in place, gears locking up; his face was stricken. After a moment he whispered, “I—I thought— I feared— I—” His voice distorted. “I—imagined—”

“I’m sure,” Megatron said. “You Autobots are so good at imagining things, aren’t you. Things that you’d like to be true.” He shook his head in impatience and backed away. Arcturus was still out there. And he wasn’t here, because Optimus had only imagined he would come.

He was about to launch when he jerked around, the carrier connection coming back alive, and Arcturus stepped out from behind the twisted lump of the control platform. Megatron was about to start shouting at him, but Arcturus was looking at Optimus, and he said, “Now do you get it? You’re the one who tried to use me as a weapon. Against my carrier.” Optimus flinched violently back, and Arcturus took another step towards him. “Against the mech who carried for you, alone,” he said softly. “You didn’t help at all. You even did worse than that. You tried to fight him while he was carrying.”

Optimus emitted a small painfully sharp whine of feedback. Megatron stared, baffled. It made no sense: Optimus hadn’t known.

But Arcturus pressed onward. “You killed Flipwing. You kidnapped me. You tried to sever me from my carrier. How do you think I’d have felt if—if I’d let you? Imagine if you’d done it a few weeks earlier; if Arcee had grabbed me that time before I was formed. I’d have been so scared and alone. I’d have let you make a progenitor connection with me, and when Megatron knew— he’d never have hurt me. He’d never let anything hurt me. He loves me. He even loves me more than the Decepticon cause. So he’d have done the only thing he could do to save me. He’d have died. You’d have used me to kill my carrier and win the war. Is that what you wanted? Is that what you wanted all along?”

“No,” Optimus said. It was barely audible. “No.”

“Well, how can you be sure?” Arcturus said, bizarrely. “Why did you interface with Megatron in the first place? You said you don’t remember. Why don’t you remember?”

“Wh-what?” Optimus said, his voice crackling.

“Why don’t you remember?” Arcturus said. “What took away your memory?”

“The—reloading the Matrix, I—lost—”

“The Matrix, right,” Arcturus said, and nodded, as if Optimus had somehow told him something revelatory. “Why did it destroy your memory, do you think? It’s got your memories, right? Because your past memories came back when it went down. So why doesn’t it let you access them? Why doesn’t it want you to remember loving my carrier? Why did it want you to walk away when he was carrying a sparkling for you?”

It was a completely incomprehensible interaction: all the answers were blatantly obvious. The Matrix wanted a Prime, not an archivist, because Primes won wars and ruled planets, and archivists didn’t. It needed to override Orion’s primary function, so his core-aligned memory got overwritten with it; there wasn’t anything deliberate about the process. And there hadn’t been the slightest chance of Arcturus being that vulnerable: if the Autobots had snatched him while he was still partially in protoform, they wouldn’t have been able to sever his carrier connection even temporarily without killing him, no matter how much Optimus might have wanted to do so.

However, Megatron didn’t try to intervene, because even if it was ludicrous, it was clearly working. He didn’t know how, or what Arcturus was working towards, but Optimus looked nearly on the verge of deadlock; he was standing there with his arms hanging limp at his sides, the only thing keeping him up his decentralized calibration system.

Arcturus said softly, “The Matrix wants you to kill Megatron. That’s what it’s wanted from you all along. It didn’t want you to remember that you love him. It didn’t want you to remember—being with him. It didn’t want you to remember striking a spark with him. It did want you to imagine Megatron doing—horrible, crazy things to me, things no carrier would ever do. It wanted you to use me against him.”

Optimus trembled all over.

“Does that really sound to you like something that Primus would want?” Arcturus asked. “Like something Primus, the real Primus, would ever ask of you? Because to me it sounds a lot more like…something the Council would have wanted. Are you…are you sure they never had the chance to modify it?” Arcturus paused, and then he said, even more softly, “Optimus—maybe you should stop trying to do what it wants. Maybe you should come back with us, instead.”

Megatron stared at Arcturus in amazement. He couldn’t possibly think Optimus would fall for that? Come with them? All because of some ludicrous fantasy—

“I—I can’t,” Optimus said, in a desperate crackling that didn’t actually sound anything like a refusal.

“You’re my progenitor,” Arcturus said. “I need you. It’s been hurting so much. I haven’t been able to function properly.” His own voice wobbled up and down. “We established too much of a connection. You pushed it on me so hard—”

“I didn’t mean—” Optimus whispered.

“I don’t want to have to choose,” Arcturus said. Megatron flinched forward involuntarily before he managed to stop himself: there were lubricant tears leaking down Arcturus’s face. “It’s not fair. I want both my carrier and my progenitor. Together. I—I want—” He made a noisy gulping sound. “I want siblings.”

Megatron gawked at him. Arcturus couldn’t seriously be proposing—except the incredulity was almost immediately overridden by Megatron’s own motivator, pointing out the brilliant success of their first sparkling, and the vast possibilities of future ones, assuming Optimus committed himself—

The idea of that still seemed half insane, but Optimus was standing there twitching and making faint grinding noises of distress, and Arcturus had gotten them this far. With ruthless decision, Megatron abruptly turned and grabbed Optimus by the shoulders and turned him around. Optimus stared at him—his mouth round with helplessness, and Megatron seized his head in both hands and kissed him fervently, opening a data connection through the polymetal. Optimus trembled and accepted the connection, and with an effort of will, Megatron dropped all the hard-won internal shields he’d put up around his own emotional subunit, offering him the sore, still-tender connection point where he’d once been half bound to Orion Pax; the one he’d never exposed to Optimus, all these years, not even on board the Nemesis.

Optimus gave a small cry of despair and longing—and his reciprocal connection point came accessible. Megatron flung himself on it. The connection had been more established than he’d realized. It was less than a single complete cycle before they were locked in, secured together, and Optimus was trembling in his arms and his, his at last, his forever, and Megatron reached out his arm and Arcturus came to them in a clanging rush, throwing himself at them both, and Optimus blindly put his own arm out to help Megatron gather him in.

#

Megatron spent several days basking in victory, by which he meant interfacing with Optimus for nearly a hundred luxuriously uninterrupted hours. It wasn’t an entirely uncalculated action: he caught another sparkling some thirty hours in—he recognized the sensation this time—and let Optimus share the perception. Optimus gave a small gasp, and his whole body vibrated like two durasteel girders struck together: the final seal upon his surrender. But the sixty-odd hours after that were pure self-indulgence.

A self-indulgence he could afford, because Optimus was his. Megatron still didn’t entirely understand the mechanism Arcturus had used to haul Optimus over the line. It seemed to be an exceptionally potent variant of that guilt emotion that Autobots loved to experience so much; Megatron had never seen the use of it personally, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d bothered to allocate so much as half a coprocessor to it, which looked like an even better idea now that he saw the massive vulnerability it created. But even without a visceral understanding, Megatron was perfectly satisfied with the concrete results.

For the duration of those hundred hours, and then he finally emerged from his rest chamber in a warm glow of satiation and delight. Arcturus was at the table in their shared chamber, and he poured a very badly needed glass of energon and slid it over; Megatron took it up, stroked an approving and pleased hand over Arcturus’s head, and called up his console: Soundwave and Blackarachnia and Starscream had all filed their own varied proposals on how to proceed with the final extermination of the remaining Autobots and extracting enough energon from Earth to revitalize Cybertron. Every single plan had a 100% chance of success. There was virtually nothing to choose from among them except how quickly they would work and minor differences in the risk level of temporary setbacks. Megatron was gloating over them when Arcturus peered over his shoulder and said, “But Optimus will go catatonic if you carry out any of these,” in mild tones.

“What?” Megatron said.

Arcturus blinked at him. “Any of these plans will produce an intolerable level of guilt and grief for him. It’ll permanently deadlock his brain, and he’ll go catatonic.”

Megatron paused. “But—this is our obvious course of action,” he said, baffled. “Why wouldn’t he just deadlock in the first place? Or just deactivate.”

“His emotional unit is constructing a protective denial of what you’re going to do until you actually carry out the act,” Arcturus said.  

“That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard,” Megatron said. “What possible function could that serve?” Arcturus shrugged and spread out his hands, eloquently. Megatron ground his jaw. “All right. Take Soundwave’s plan as a starting point and evolve a version that doesn’t drive him catatonic.”

“I can’t,” Arcturus said. “The fundamentals of Soundwave’s plan are incompatible.”

“Oh, for—then Starscream’s plan!” Megatron said. Arcturus’s dubious expression said enough without words. “Will any of these plans work?”

“No,” Arcturus said. “Nothing that causes serious harm to Autobots.”

Megatron glared at him speechlessly. “We’re at war with them! Winning it involves causing them harm. What was the point of bringing him over, then?”

Arcturus looked up at him with wide eyes. “I wanted my progenitor, and I wanted siblings. Didn’t you want that?”

Megatron paused. A slow dawning suspicion rose through him as his strategic analysis unit started raising frantic alarms, pointing out that this meant Optimus hadn’t actually been brought over to the Decepticons. He’d only been shifted to a third position, incompatible with either the Decepticon or Autobot causes, oriented entirely around—

Megatron involuntarily found himself vividly conscious of the newly generated sparkling churning around in his formation unit. It was very securely established—in fact, he realized, it was already making roughly ten times the power demands that Arcturus’s spark had made several weeks later in development. It very clearly wasn’t going to be a middle-caste civilian build. Forget about what he wanted. He might actually need Optimus for this one. He put a hand over his chest and stared at Arcturus. “Did you engineer this deliberately?”

Arcturus didn’t look as though he were experiencing any guilt whatsoever. “You missed him too.”

“That doesn’t mean I’d have given up the Decepticon cause to get him!” Megatron hissed. “If I’d been willing to do that, I could have had him three thousand years ago!”

“You don’t have to!” Arcturus said. “You just have to—modify it. Just enough.”

“Compromise is unacceptable!”

Arcturus looked just past his shoulder, towards his private chamber; Megatron followed his gaze. Optimus still lying fast asleep and exhausted on the recharge bed, his armor gleaming under the dim lights, his faceplate lowered, deliciously vulnerable and radiating power all at once. Arcturus looked back at him. “Not anymore it’s not?” he suggested.  

It barely took three astroseconds’ worth of internal computation to determine that Arcturus was in fact correct. This vulnerability of his own hadn’t occurred to Megatron before, either—the current situation hadn’t ever been enough of a possibility to be worth evaluating. But actually possessing Optimus was an enormous positive value factor on its own, much less with the demonstrated potential of as many magnificent offspring as Megatron could want. And an active sparkling formation unit started out with almost maximum system priority to begin with, not to mention that his own was currently attaching to his self-preservation routines. It could literally preempt his most low-level emotional reactions, even rage. And for that matter, he was suddenly having difficulty generating rage in the first place. He was too happy.

Megatron said blankly, “If you weren’t my sparkling, I’d rip your limbs off.”

Arcturus came and snuggled against his chest and put his arms as far around him as he could reach, radiating smug satisfaction over the carrier connection. “I love you too,” he said serenely. Why shouldn’t he be serene: the little wretch had just won the war for himself. Megatron half-irritably put his arm around Arcturus and stroked his helm. He wasn’t sure if he was more proud or appalled.

# End