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When the war ended, Optimus and Megatron got conjunxed and bought a house together.
It was a charming historical house that had somehow survived the war, on the edge of the massive wilderness area formed by the Praxian Plateau where it met the plains of Polyhex and Iacon, right near the edge of the massive cliffs where the elevation changed from Rust Sea-level to ten thousand feet. The house was perched, charmingly, a little back from the cliff, but just so one could look off over the plains to the faint glitter of cities on the horizon.
It had its own energon well and pump, and a little natural pool where wildlife came to drink, and an orchard of crystal-trees which concentrated that energon into great pendulous golden-pink fruit, which were too sweet for Optimus’s tastes and outright addictive to Megatron’s. There was a road that went up to it off the highway connecting the plains cities to Praxus, but it wasn’t so remote that they couldn’t set up a satellite link so they could advise the new government forming in Iacon.
It was perfect.
Half the walls needed replacing, but they’d spent enough time making this work with far less during the war, and it was nice to do something with his servos next to Megatron. Time for working together, for gentle banter, for all the things they’d never had before in their lives. The work went well and quickly, and soon they were moving in furnishings. Megatron had this tendency to look at things and pass them by as too frivolous, but with a longing glance over his shoulder at them. Optimus found that if he were the one to buy them, Megatron would allow himself to enjoy them.
The trouble was, the house was very old.
It had a big oil bath in the old Primal style, filled with jets and capable of heating enough oil to immerse a shuttleformer. This was sunk deep into the floor with a set of windows just opposite, taking up the whole wall with a beautiful view of the plains. The mechanisms were old but functional. It was when they tried pumping the oil in (from the burbling little stream that fed the pond) that the problems began.
“Megatron,” said Optimus, looking up from where he was working in the basement, “have you by any chance attempted to fill the oil bath?”
Megatron’s head poked into the basement. “Perhaps.”
“Interesting. I had suspected as much,” said Optimus, and stepped back. The bath itself wasn’t above the basement, but the pipes for it were, and evidently the pipe for used oil had not been up to the strain.
Megatron took one look at the slowly spreading puddle and bolted back upstairs.
When they’d finished bailing out the half-filled tub, they had a look at the tub plumbing and the groundmetal around the tub itself.
“I feel that I ought to be proud of the mecha who did this,” said Megatron. “Striking a blow against the unequal Functionist system and the upper classes through extremely shoddy craftsmechship.”
“But?” prompted Optimus, instead of pointing out that in their post-war world, they were the upper classes.
“I want to kill them,” Megatron said bluntly. “Look at it, it’s completely saturated. Because of that leak, it’s been seeping into the ground for the last two million years at least. These pipes should be rated to ten million years.”
Optimus knew Megatron prided himself on knowing these things, on hanging out with the Constructicons and being one of them, a manual laborer down at spark, so he didn’t point out that Decepticon shelling of the area probably wasn’t in the pipes’ original specs, or that just possibly they shouldn’t try to fix this themselves.
He would regret this, later.
While they were making the necessary modifications to ensure that the oil bath wouldn’t just gently subside into the topsoil and keep on going halfway down the cliff, dragging the house with it, the energon filtration unit went out.
Optimus dealt with calling the nearest supplier, in Iacon. They weren’t able to deliver it for the better part of the week, during which time both he and Megatron were subsisting on the commercially filtered and packaged cubes. They’d had worse—much worse—but there was something frustrating about having their own well right there and not being able to use it because who knew what had been venting its tanks in there.
The night before the delivery was scheduled, Optimus got a call. The person on the other end of the line did so much apologizing he almost missed what they were apologizing for, but it turned out the entire delivery crew—(what, said Megatron, the entire crew, sounds false)—had gotten fuel poisoning and weren’t able to do the delivery the next day.
“Fine,” said Optimus, “cancel the delivery and refund it; I’ll come to get it myself.”
The next morning, he left Megatron still dealing with the bath situation and was in a bad enough mood to rope in Bulkhead, Ultra Magnus, and a few of the Constructicons to help him haul the damn thing up the hill and get it installed, where it promptly shorted all the house’s electrical systems and fatally overloaded one of the batteries for the solar conversion array.
That was fortunately easy to fix, with Bulkhead and the Constructicons on site (Ultra Magnus just looked horrified and held whatever was handed to him), but in the middle of it, Scrapper said, “Hey, mind if I try something?” and dropped a ball bearing on the floor by the front entrance.
It trundled off rapidly across the receiving room, down the hall, into the oil bath lounge, into the tub itself, and ensconced itself in the drain with a chiming thwip-thwip-thwip as it circled its way down.
“Huh,” said Scrapper. “I think you’ve got a problem.”
From the basement, there was a thunk, and then a roar of rage.
“Yes,” said Optimus. “I believe we now also have a problem; I think Megatron had that pipe disconnected.”
It emerged from the basement wall at roughly eye level, after all.
“Cool,” said Scrapper. “Cool. We’ll get going. Uh. Give us a call for the whole your house is trying to sink into the swamp thing, would you?”
It stung Optimus’s pride a little. He and Megatron had led crumbling armies through the bloodiest conflict in Cybertronian history. Surely a crumbling house would be well within the realm of their capabilities. “Of course,” he assured them, not entirely truthfully.
Megatron had braced the section of the house in some terribly ingenious way he’d learned in the mines (Optimus tried not to think of the accident rates he’d heard about them, down in the dark), and was really pleased with himself. “Now we can deal with the attic,” he said proudly the next morning, and went stomping up the access ladder, adding over his shoulder, “This will be a perfect playroom for our sparkling, and perhaps warm enough to keep you comfortable while you’re carrying.”
Optimus’s optic ridges went up. “That rather depends on which of us will spark first, Megatron.”
Megatron huffed and shrugged a shoulder. “You’re the one with a divine artifact in his chest; I’m pretty sure that’ll affect the odds.”
Optimus made a purely human noise at that, the ummhum sound he’d heard deployed in times of great skepticism. It flew right over Megatron’s head as he opened the door; unfortunately, the massive antroid colony in the attic did not.
It turned out there were also beryllium bats up there, eating the antroids, but not nearly enough beryllium bats to temper the resultant invasion. There were antroids in the bedroom, antroids marching in columns down the hall, antroids in the living room and sitting contentedly on their nice new purple metalmesh couch, having drunk themselves into a stupor in the pantry, antroids in the outdoor washracks plopping down like fat fruit from the ceiling. And while the energon refinery was working just fine, your own home-filtered energon lost a lot of appeal with the addition of several dozen waggling mechanical legs protruding from its surface as antroids literally drank themselves to death in your morning midgrade.
The contribution the beryllium bats actually made was venting their tanks copiously in terror all over the hallway and the attic and Megatron when he gathered the courage to stick his head back up there; the roof was, apparently, full of holes they and the antroids had chewed, and only a thin asbestos layer put down by the previous owners had kept the acid rains from soaking through and eating the ceiling. There were standing puddles in places, steaming gently where bat and ant corpses or effluent had fallen into them.
Optimus stuck his head up with Megatron. “I think I would like to find the plans for this place,” he said.
“Get back down, Optimus, this is no place for a mech who’s trying to carry,” said Megatron, and Optimus, at the end of his patience, said, “On this, Megatron, we are agreed,” and stuffed his insufferable conjunx bodily down the ladder, grabbed the brush and absorbent pads and bucket, and went to work.
That night, the remaining beryllium bat in the house spent all night flying around in the berthroom, echolocating antroids by screaming like a malfunctioning cyberbiohazard alarm. Megatron chased it out with a broom but got bit in the process, and they had to go into town to get him the appropriate inoculations.
It was not a restful night.
They had Tailgate and Cyclonus by a few days later. Tailgate had been a maintenance bot back in the day, and had some useful information on cleaning the various stains and getting rid of the antroids, but he also looked up in the attic and went, “Well, you’ll want to replace the asbestos, it’s not good for you,” which turned out, when Ratchet was consulted, to be something of an understatement; asbestos fibers were about as good for Cybertronian ventilation systems as for human lungs. On the plus side, in sheet form, it was decently inert. On the minus side, getting rid of it would be terrible.
On the heels of this revelation, the pump in the basement that had, up until now, been doing stellar service in keeping it reasonably dry, gave up the ghost. The basement slowly filled with an unappetizing mixture of raw liquid energon and oil.
Shortly after this, Optimus was thoughtfully poking at a ceiling beam in the receiving room and his blunt finger sank easily into it up to the second knuckle. He got onto the datanet and went looking for the house plans.
They didn’t exist.
“I bet the place was built as a tax dodge, somehow,” said Bulkhead. “Guess they could have just gotten lost. Or it could have been squatters, but that oil bath… and the type of shoddiness says crooked contractor to me. I mean, I knew a few back in the day, and Primus, they were a real piece of work. Like, pretty sure all of them went ‘con pieces of work—not that that matters these days, sorry boss. Look if it were up to me, I’d seriously consider razing the damn thing and building a new one a bit further from that pond—I bet that’s the source of your problems. Tell you what, me and the ‘structies can get out there and take a look.”
“Thank you old friend,” said Optimus, and was about to say but Megatron and I have it well in hand when A Noise echoed up from the basement.
“I think I need to check that,” he said, and hung up the call, joining Megatron hurrying downstairs.
Optimus flipped on his headlights and surveyed the damp and oozing basement; they’d managed to breathe life back into the pump via care and ingenuity and some very elaborate threats on Megatron’s part. But it wasn’t like the place would be getting much drier; it was sheened with oil, and in places it puddled. The pump wheezed like a dying thing.
The Noise recurred.
Optimus swung his headlight beams toward it. Two sets of lamplike eyes looked back.
Electrofrogs.
Electrofrogs fragging.
There were tadpoles the size of an optic sensor in that puddle, which was deeply confusing because how had it been there long enough to have tadpoles.
There was a plop from the far side of the basement, and another one dribbled out of the wall and landed in the puddle. One of the electrofrogs croaked. The sound echoed, twisting into a bizarre sound, the thing that had interrupted the call in the first place.
“I’m sure we could shoo them out,” said Megatron, but his spark wasn’t in it.
“It’s an old house,” Megatron said aloud, pressing the heels of his hands into his optic sockets. Optimus stared at the ceiling, watching the gradual little fall of dust from a corner, sparkling in the sunlight, as an antroid burrowed into the ceiling. He hoped that asbestos was as bad for antroids as everyone else.
“It’s an old house,” said Megatron, like a mantra, except he didn’t sound terribly convinced. “It’s an old house, and it has issues, and this is normal, and the two of us are absolutely equal to those issues. It’s an old house, and we knew what we were getting into. It’s an old house, and today we’re going to go down into the basement and shore it up again and add a good bracing and scaffolding system and use the new sensor to find where the frag the bedrock is so we can anchor the damn thing to it, even if we end up with a basement built like the Primal Basilica, and I will get up in five minutes to go get that started. It’s an old house and—eerugh.”
“Megatron?” said Optimus.
Megatron gulped a few times and then lurched upright and purged. “Frag it!”
“Don’t worry, the bats have done worse,” said Optimus, already reaching for the things they’d need to take to the medcenter.
“Yep, he’s sparked,” said Ratchet. “Don’t you dare go back to that deathtrap of a house.”
Megatron groaned. Optimus couldn’t quite tell if it was angry or just deeply oppressed.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said.
He rented them an apartment in the city, then went to find Bulkhead and the rest of the Constructicons. They didn’t listen to him very long.
“Look, boss,” said Bulkhead, “how about, you just give us the keys and slag, and we’ll go get it dealt with. Just…don’t ask exactly how we’re gonna deal with it.”
“If you’re going to burn it to the ground, I would like to help,” said Optimus.
“Yeah, but you gotta stop Megs from coming to help, sorry,” said Bulkhead, and got elbowed by one of the Constructicons. “You two stay down here, we’ll get it sorted, consult on any big purchases, that sort of thing. I owe you, the ‘structies like him enough—least we can do is get you and the bitlets settled, yeah?”
Optimus handed over the keys. “Just leave him some things to fix, so he feels useful.”
Bulkhead winked. “Yeah, we know how it goes. Seeya in a bit, boss.”
Optimus didn’t ask how they’d done it, and very carefully didn’t notice how the house had moved about twenty meters to the left, or how there was a new stream running through the sideyard; he did notice that there a little sheltered hut where the house had been, straddling the stream. “Megatron did such a good job with the shoring up, it was too much of a pity to take it down,” said Bulkhead by way of explanation.
The house was very much the same as the one they’d thought they’d been moving into, except things worked and the basement was dry and the roof not full of holes. There were a few other modern conveniences. And the foundations were a very great deal more sound.
“We deliberately messed up hanging the doors,” said Bulkhead, at the same time as a delighted roar of, “Scrapper, you imbecile,” came out of the house. “He’ll have plenty to keep him busy that’s not, you know, possible exposures to toxins, wildlife, and sinking into the ground.”
“Thank you, old friend,” said Optimus. “Really.”
“We had fun,” said Bulkhead. “Not often you see something that fragged up, right?”
There were still a few antroids around the place, and the electrofrogs were in the stream, where they were supposed to be, and in the middle of the night they woke up to the sound of a turbofox going through the garbage, but that was strictly ordinary.
Two nights later, the condenser on the house’s environmental systems died because a glitchmouse chewed through the electrical line, but, all things considered, it wasn’t the worst thing to have to fix.