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The dawn is hazy; the smoke of the mobile smelters dissipates wearily against a colorless sky. It is the fifth day of stalemate.
Megatron pushes away his ration-cube. The air is cloying; he tastes engine-grease and burning rubber.
In Kaon, goes the old miners’ rhyme, where the smelter’s hot--
He has no appetite for war this morning. His tanks are sour, and every few kliks his chemoreceptors alert. Half-blind with weariness, blinking at the horizon, he dismisses the alerts from his HUD.
In Kaon, where the smelter’s hot--
Condensation beads on his ration-cube, dripping onto his desk. His quarters are suffocating in their silence. The skyship hums; the air is filtered, sterile, and iron plating thick as a Titan’s and bulletproof glass separate him from the world; yet the smell of bodies smelting clings to his throat, his mouth. The smell of death seeps under his plating, and Megatron leans against the unseasonably warm window and watches the fat black smelters scurrying like Insecticons to pick the battlefield clean.
“I want,” says Soundwave in Optimus Prime’s voice, “an end to this as much as you do. As you must.”
Megatron chokes on his laugh. “This is how a Prime begs?”
Soundwave’s faceplate reflects, dimly, the blasted plateau far below them. His arms hang slack at his sides. There is black soot in his seams, Megatron notices; he smells of incinerated rubber and molten plastic. “Megatron.”
He cannot hear Orion Pax’s voiceprint in it. The signal is tinny. Megatron’s tanks churn.
“Megatron,” says Soundwave-as-Optimus-Prime again, as if taunting him. “It is not as a Prime I ask you, but as a Cybertronian--”
Megatron watches the horizon. The wind is picking up, stirring the smoke. Bodies are heaped in trenches and hanging in ragged chunks from barricades; where the missiles fell, Autobot and Decepticon are fused together in blackened phalanxes forty deep, all splintered glass and metal melted and reformed into shapes that bulge and twist under Megatron’s gaze. The Autobot fortifications squat in the foothills, bare and ugly.
“Fifteen thousand dead, Megatron,” says Optimus Prime. Soundwave stands at attention stiffly, like a corpse. “Fifteen thousand at a blow. Autobot and Decepticon alike. Does that mean nothing to you?”
.It is an incomprehensible number.
Megatron tastes the residue of explosives on the morning breeze. His gaze lingers on the Autobot fortress; he imagines the Prime in his war room, moving sanitized black dots around a bloodless battlefield. “What were their designations, Prime?”
In Kaon, where the smelter’s hot--
“We can end this,” says the Prime. “No more deaths. No more war.”
“Their designations,” says Megatron.
Optimus Prime hesitates. Soundwave tilts his head, and the watery sunlight blazes on his faceplate.
“Spare me the piety,” says Megatron, and his tanks churn with such disgust it dizzies him, even now. “You once said to me that the death of a single Cybertronian is a tragedy--”
“Megatron,” says Optimus Prime. “This is not a game.”
Megatron spits black oil onto the deck of the skyship. The wind whistles through his seams. “Listen to yourself, Prime. The champion of the common mech. So noble and glorious you make me purge. Appealing to my better nature. What were their names?”
His laugh is as bitter as cordite.
“Megatron,” says Optimus Prime, and the falseness in it is sickening. “Megatronus. My old friend. If there is anything left of him in you--”
“That’s one,” says Megatron, feeling his smile twist until his faceplate aches. “Who else?”
And the Prime says another designation.
They descend through the smoke in tight formation, their engines humming like the war cries of Insecticons. The plateau is pocked and blackened; in gullies and half-collapsed trenches stray Energon-fires still burn, corpses blazing brighter than the dismal sun.
“Makes your sensors tingle,” observes Skyquake as their wheels bite into the soft earth and they transform as one. “Reeks like an Air Command mess hall.”
“Or the Pits,” says Starscream, not to be outdone. “Sticking around to, ah, smell the aftermath--”
They are in no-mech’s land; the bodies fell in their dozens several paces back, and here the ground is almost clear. Megatron glances round for an Autobot welcoming party, for proximity mines and plastic explosives, and he listens for the squeal of inbound photon missiles, for the treachery of Autobots--
“Optimus Prime told me once,” he says, “that all would be one.”
His gaze flicks up at the Con skyship, motionless against a sour-colored horizon; he half-turns to the Autobot compound, to the fat black smelters moving in their swarms like mindless beetles.
“In the bellies of the smelters, I suppose, he was right.”
Starscream laughs too feebly and too late, clearly unsure if it’s a joke. Megatron’s smile is so broad it aches.
“Remember that, Decepticons. Remember equality. Remember Seekers and gladiators commingled in the trenches, melted down into the same anonymous scrap--”
And how he’d believed, in those first punch-drunk days when freedom seemed a breath away. How he’d looked into Orion Pax’s cold blue eyes and believed.
“Remember how Optimus Prime filled the bellies of the smelters,” he says. “Remember your first whiff of hot fuel today. This is how the Autobots feed their armies: bodies, free for any wretch to siphon.”
In Kaon--
On the Hydrax Plateau, supplies his hungry mind, where the smelter’s hot/the dead are slagged before they rot.
“When you hear an Autobot promise,” says Megatron, “remember: however sweet it sounds, this is where it ends.”
The Autobot fortress’s gates have opened; a war-party is trundling out, in mismatched formation. He searches among them for familiar silhouettes, for old friends. His gaze is fixed upon them, but again and again he picks through his memories, worrying at the absence as if at the space left by a knocked-out tooth or freshly ripped-away armor. As if Orion Pax will be among them, and Ratchet at his side. As if at any moment Orion Pax will embrace him, and into his audials whisper like a penitent, “Megatron--”
“We are not,” rumbles Skyquake, “so easily deceived.”
A flash on his HUD; a nauseous surge of recognition.
“We were all deceived,” says Megatron, and he watches the silhouette of Optimus Prime draw closer.
At ten paces, the Prime transforms. Taller now, and broader; beside him his lieutenants seem like toys. His shadow is long on the fractured ground, long and crooked, and it is his shadow that Megatron watches rather than his face.
“I hoped, Megatron, to meet you in happier circumstances.” His voice is sober, as Orion Pax’s voice was sober. He stinks of power.
“Always the politician.” Megatron’s tanks turn; he tastes thin purge. “Mounting deceptions upon deceptions, until the weight of them crushes truth into dust. You hoped for my Spark chamber in a box.”
“No.” The Prime lowers his head. His shadow oozes like oil across the stained earth. “Megatron, old friend--”
“In a box,” Megatron snarls, and his words gush as if from a slashed fuel line, as if from the wound that surely must have pierced him, “to parade in front of the High Council. To show your keepers, thus dies a rebel--”
Whispers from the Prime’s lieutenants, and here and there a curse or an outraged hiss.
“Strike me down, Prime.” The sun is clammy on the back of Megatron’s neck. He feels every rivet in him aching. “You summoned; I came, like a fool. I have two guards to your twenty.”
Behind him, he hears the agitated flutter of Starscream’s wings. “Lord Megatron--” A grunt as Skyquake cuts him off.
“And Ratchet on his deathbed,” says Megatron, carried by the sickness welling up in him, by the poison ache in his belly, “and Soundwave left behind on my ship, well out of my grasp. So neither of them will see Orion Pax snuff out Megatronus--”
The Prime’s shoulders jerk.
“Ratchet may recover,” he says, as if it is an answer.
The sun hangs uncertain and white in the sulfurous sky. The day is warming; the stink of the bodies is growing unbearable.
“I’ll send Ratchet to the junkyard myself,” says Megatron, “if it will knock the stick out of your Primal tailpipe and the lies out of your mouth, Optimus.”
From the Prime’s tone, Megatron knows he is not averting his dead blue optics; he thinks perhaps the Prime is beyond shame. “Ratchet always spoke highly of you. There was--”
“Good in me?” spits Megatron.
“Possibility,” says the Prime simply. “As there is in every one of us.”
The laugh erupts from Megatron’s voicebox as if an infection has been lanced. He is shaking with rage, he realizes. “I came here in Ratchet’s honor, old friend. To give my condolences to Orion Pax. Not to hear the stinking gusts you call Primal wisdom--”
“Megatron.”
Even now, Megatron hears--or tells himself he hears--regret in it. Regret, or the dry ashes of the warmth between them. His fingers curl, digging fine gouges into his palms; the dirty sting is grounding.
“Megatron,” says Optimus Prime again. “Ratchet was wounded during a recovery operation--”
“Your scum dropped a bioweapon on medics,” spits one of Prime’s lieutenants. “Unarmed medics.”
Behind Megatron, Skyquake tenses with a clang of plating. Megatron raises a hand; he hears Starscream’s wingbeats too clearly in the still air.
“How--” Megatron raises his head; for the first time he meets the Prime’s optics, as cold now as he remembers them. He tastes the air, tastes the salty-earthiness of spilled Energon and the acridness of smoke. His words die on his vocoder. “Regrettable.”
“Megatron,” says the Prime, and his voice is heavy with years and with Primal dignity, and he is despicable. “This is not between us. This is not our battle anymore. Hate me--you may be right to hate me, after the circumstances of our parting--”
Muttering rises from Prime’s lieutenants like steam from freshly-sundered bodies.
Megatron does not flinch, but it is a near thing.
In Iacon, where the Council rules/Where love turns rebels into fools--
“--but work with me now, Megatron, toward peace.”
In the Prime’s faceplate he sees, for an instant, Orion Pax. He was a fool, he thinks, to come here--
It is not the first time Orion Pax has made a fool of him. He remembers the dead air of the Council chambers; he remembers the name Optimus Prime on Halogen’s carping vocoder; he remembers the disbelief on Orion Pax’s face. The wrenching thought that there had been some mistake.
He’d trusted Orion Pax.
“Toward a Pax Cybertronia,” Megatron spits. “Or a Pax Orion, is that it?” He raises a hand, reaching helplessly for the Prime’s. “Strike me down, Prime. Face me like a gladiator, one on one. Or I swear to you, the Decepticon might will render you and your sycophants one in the rubble--”
The Prime’s brows rise in a perfect--a Spark-wrenching--simulation of grief.
“Megatron,” he says. “Please.”
And Megatron turns on his heel. “Give my regards to Ratchet. He would have made a fine Decepticon.”
He strides away without looking back, and the Prime’s next words are lost in the cacophony as he transforms and takes off. Behind him, Skyquake is shouting; the first blaster-shots are stark-clear, and those that follow are too closely-spaced to pick apart; and Megatron cares nothing for them--
Soundwave is waiting on the deck of the warship.
“There will be no Pax,” says Megatron, and the word has a cadaver tang on his vocoder. “We resume bombing in a breem.”
Soundwave’s faceplate is insinuatingly blank--and Megatron wonders, not for the first time, how much he suspects about the sick emptiness in Megatron’s belly. About the grief so thick he thinks it may choke him.
Day fades into night, punctuated by the distant rattle of cannon-fire. Megatron paces in his war room, watching points of light dance across the projected map of the Hydrax Plateau; skirmishes flash like gun-muzzles.
War is abstract, he thinks, from five kilometers up. Bloodless.
The skyship hums. Across the room, Skyquake and Dreadwing are debating some strategic point, their voices rising in ugly synchrony. Skyquake’s cheek is bleeding; as he shakes his head, fresh Energon trickles down his jaw. Dreadwing’s wing is freshly splinted, his gestures stiff. Yet the twins move in tandem.
Megatron turns away. Starscream’s armada floats across the projection like ghosts, wheeling and banking; as the wind rises on the map, an echoing real wind bears the skyship up, and the room cants gently, gently, as if in response.
The world seems choreographed. The neatness of it is obscene. Far below, he knows, mechs are being blown apart; their bodies are mingling with shrapnel, with the burnt-out hulks of their tanks; far below, the Autobots are rolling out their cannons.
On Hydrax Plain, the dead pile high/Megatron broods in the empty sky--
It doesn’t scan. He feels the corner of his mouth tighten in a half-smile.
“Soundwave.”
In an instant Soundwave is at his side (has been at his side all along, perhaps). The tiny click as he inclines his head is greeting enough.
“You know the name and Spark signature of every wretch on the battlefield.” In the days before the fall, it was whispered that Soundwave was omniscient. Propaganda, and bad propaganda. It’d served his purposes then--but the untruth nagged at him then, nags at him still--
Yet Soundwave inclines his head again.
“Is Optimus Prime fighting his own battles tonight?”
A moment’s pause, as if Soundwave is listening for the familiar signature of Optimus Prime’s Spark. And truth be told, Megatron thinks he could pick that Spark out of the mad rattle of war; he thinks he will remember until his dying day the pulse of that Spark, its steady wearying rhythm, against his frame; some part of him still pulsates with the force of Orion Pax’s will--
Since the Council meeting he has not stood within an arm’s reach of the Prime.
Yet he knows that Spark. Knows it has not changed. Knows it with the intimacy of hatred.
Soundwave nods, barely. A frequency passes across his faceplate like a black ghost; Megatron tastes a coppery surge on his chemoreceptors, a flash of emotion he cannot name.
“Then bridge me down.”
The first kliks of the battle pass in a howl that defies memory.
And then he is charging through the confused tangle of bodies, through the dark lit by cannon-flashes, and the trenches and wire are sliding away underneath him. The world stinks of burnt rubber and cordite. His cannon blazes like a torch. There are bodies falling, underfoot. Something sprays his lip. He tastes Energon--
“The Prime is cornered.”
Starscream’s shriek cuts through the whirl. Coordinates flash on his HUD. Megatron runs, half-transforming, falling forward into flight--
Someone shoots at him as he takes off, a burst of light almost clipping his wing. He tumbles through the dark, while Starscream spits into his comms, “Optimus Prime is cornered--repeat--”
“I thought you’d become a strategist, Optimus.”
He lands unsteadily, staggering a little as he transforms. His voice echoes off wreckage, off tank and cannon and the breached armor of the dead around them.
Optimus Prime is pinned against the fortress wall, in a pool of light: the beams of six Seekers’ torches converge on his position, and as they shift their weight and edge closer, the light dances and grows sickeningly bright. He is pinned like a specimen, looking strikingly small; with his bulky Primal frame he shields a wounded mech--
“You disappoint me,” says Megatron, and it is true.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” says Ratchet. His synthesizer coughs. There is Energon on his white lips. “Stay back. I may be contagious. Wouldn’t want to bleed on you--”
“The Matrix didn’t give you wisdom?” says Megatron, as if Ratchet hadn’t spoken, as if there is no one in the world but Megatron and the mech who was Orion Pax. “Just a sense of self-importance and that gaudy reformatting?”
“Megatron.” Optimus Prime’s optics flicker. For an instant he closes them, as if in pain. “Please.”
“You’ve become noble,” says Megatron, as if it’s an accusation. “Foolish. You’ll get yourself captured to save a rusty old medic when he sneaks out of the medbay to fight--”
Ratchet’s optics flash. And Megatron knows he is correct; he knows them as old friends know each other. He knows the Prime as lovers do--
“But you won’t risk yourself hand-to-hand to save fifteen thousand.”
“Megatron,” says Optimus Prime, a raw rough note in his voice. A plea. “I don’t want to hurt you--”
The Seekers move forward, uneasily. A hundred meters away, blaster fire echoes and rebounds upon itself; searingly bright lights streak the greasy sky. Optimus Prime pulls Ratchet against his chest; then, as if his strength is failing, he lets him slip a millimeter.
“Shoot him, Optimus,” rasps Ratchet. Energon bubbles from his mouth as he wheezes. “Don’t worry about me. What’s one doc-bot against--”
And in Optimus Prime’s optics Megatron sees a flash of fear. “I cannot, Ratchet. I--do not force me to--”
“Against fifteen thousand?” says Megatron, and he licks his own lips, and he tastes Energon there too. He wonders for an instant whose. “Against all your noble talk, Optimus Prime--against the lives of fifteen thousand whose designations you never bothered to know--”
“Please,” says Orion Pax-who-is-Optimus Prime, and Megatron’s Spark blazes so brightly he can feel it in his throat. “I didn’t want this, Megatron. I do not want this war.”
Megatron’s claws dig into his palms. “The first honest thing you ever said to me.”
Optimus Prime’s face twists with naked fear. He seems, Megatron thinks sharply, so young.
“It was not,” says Optimus Prime, “supposed to be this way, Megatron.”
In his arms, Ratchet vents acrid steam; his optics are screwed up, and he jerks like broken machinery. “Stop flirting and shoot.”
On Optimus Prime’s lips he sees the words form: “I love you.”
But the smelters are roaring, and the scream of broken metal fills the whole world. Above, Megatron hears the shriek of Starscream descending; below, Ratchet is reaching with twitching hands for his own weapon; and Megatron tastes a love as rank as the smoke from the dead--
And Optimus Prime raises his cannon at last, and they dance.