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Light flickers off the walls, wreathing him in bright, pale blue.
“Come on, Dee, It’ll be fun! What’s life without a little adventure?”
Megatron hears his own voice through the hologram, recharge-rough and semi-annoyed. “You say that every damn time, idiot, and—”
“Do you trust me or not?” Optimus turns back, optics soft around the edges, servo outstretched as he smiles.
Megatron takes it. He always does.
The hologram disperses as he lets his arm fall, helm clunking against the wall as he lets it drop back.
His bunker is cold and empty, and there’s a scratch of blue paint on the berth.
It’s going to be a long night.
*
There is something to be said, Optimus thinks, about the way he’s just spent the last few groons with the mech who’s supposed to be his mortal enemy.
He’d left Megatron’s bunker long after the sun had dipped beneath the horizon; he hadn’t just slipped out, of course. He’d said goodbye.
It hadn’t felt like enough.
He doesn’t know when they’ll see each other again. Doesn’t know if they should.
(…Who is he kidding. They will. He’ll make it happen.)
(Unless, of course, Megatron doesn’t want to see him again. That’s fine too. Rip his spark out of his chassis, why don’t you?)
Now, as he slips through the deserted streets of Iacon City as discreetly as he can, Optimus feels tired. It’s late enough that most of the city’s fallen into recharge, and it’s too quiet for him to escape… whatever it is he’s been trying to escape. Dee isn’t with him. The sociopolitical state of the nation is in shambles. He has tons of unread messages on comms that he’s ignoring and he needs to sneak into his berthroom in the control tower without getting caught—
He pushes one of the massive double doors of said berthroom open and freezes.
Well, that’s one less thing to do.
“Prime,” Elita says, voice deceptively light from where she’s facing away. “Nice of you to step in.”
“Commander Elita! Good, uh. Good evening?” Optimus resets his vocaliser.
Silence. He fights the urge to whistle or tap his pedes.
“Don’t mind me,” he says after a few tense nano-kliks. “Just gonna, um—”
Blue optics snap to him, colder than ice. “Don’t you dare.”
“Okay,” he hurries out.
“Get in here.”
“Okay.”
“Close the door.”
“Closing.”
Said door swings shut with a soft click, and as soon as he turns back around she is going off.
“Where have you been?” She whisper-yells, servos flying up in exasperation. “You can’t just disappear like that, you complete bucket-helmed idiot—”
Optimus winces as she keeps going, taking a deep in-vent through his grimace. “I can explain.”
“Can you?” she fires back, rounding on him.
“…I was with Dee.”
“You were with—”
The door opens.
“Hey, guys!” Bee grins as he slips into the room, oblivious to the damn spark-attacks he’s nearly caused. “Whatcha talking about?”
“Our great and wise leader here,” Elita begins with a vicious side-optic after a pause, “is fraternising with the enemy.”
“I am not fraternising,” Optimus protests lowly, rubbing two digits into his optical ridge.
“Fornicating, then.”
“I am not— Elita!” Oh, this is hopeless.
“What! You’re telling me you spent that much time, alone with him, in a bunker, and you didn’t—”
“The last time we met before that, he tried to kill me,” Optimus says flatly, eyeing her with a pointed look. “Twice. And then I banished him from his home. There is no fornication going on.”
“So you admit you’re fraternising, then,” she shoots back without missing a beat.
“Sorry again, but,” Bee tilts his helm to the side and waves a confused servo, “who are we talking about?”
Elita turns to him with the driest expression Optimus has ever seen on her face. “I’ll give you one guess.”
Bee purses his lipplates. “…Megatron…?”
“Congratulations. Your prize is shut up and sit down.”
The yellow mech bobs on his peds, entirely uncowed, and pads over to the berth before sitting on the floor against its side.
Optimus follows and sinks down onto the berth itself, hunching over to rest his elbows on his legs when something hits him. “Wait, how’d you know about the bunker?”
Elita leans against the wall with a scoff. “I’ve redirected government-sanctioned trains, Pax. You really think I couldn’t get through those signal blockers? Tell your junxie to up his security.”
“Ah, he’s not…”
It sting, that. The ache that suffuses his chassis is just on the edge of too sharp.
She must see something in his faceplate, because she softens just the slightest bit. “Well. Tell him anyway.”
“It wasn’t a Decepticon bunker, it was one of his own,” he ex-vents, uncurling his spine to flop back onto his very new, very big berth. There’s an ache building behind his optics. “They don’t know about it.”
About us, he doesn’t say, because, well. Is there an us?
(He wants there to be. Primus. He wants.)
There’s moonlight streaming in from the windows now, pale and fresh and highlighting the dust motes dancing in the air.
“We were supposed to… It was supposed to work out,” Optimus doesn’t know where he’s going with this, but he needs to talk. He’s feeling a little more lost right now than he likes. “He was right,” he continues, shrugging a pauldron. “We do our jobs and earn enough and we live comfortably, both of us, that was all he wanted. And then we realised how we were all getting fragged over, and when Dee found out that everything he’d been working for, everything he believed was a lie, it…”
“It broke something in him,” Elita finishes.
Optimus frowns at the ceiling, optics shuttering. “He’s not broken.”
“I didn’t say that.”
He can hear her moving closer, the soft scraping as she sits down and crosses her legs. Bee has started tracing out senseless patterns on his pede, digits wrapping around his heel strut, and he doesn’t move away when the yellow bot rests his helm on Optimus’s knee.
“I miss Dee,” he says, slowly hugging Optimus’s calf to his chest, and Optimus reaches out. His servo floats, hesitant, for a nano-klik before it settles to rest on Bee’s crest.
It’s… strange, trying to separate D-16 from himself. He’s got a shiny new frame, yeah, but inside? Orion still feels far too young some days, circuits frayed with the weight of unexpected responsibility as much as he’s taken it in stride, and it had always been Pax-and-Dee. Dee-and-Pax.
There’s a hole in his life now, one he doesn’t know how to fill. He knows Bee feels it, no matter how little time they’d spent together; knows Elita feels it, too, no matter how much she tries to pretend she doesn’t. He turns to say something to his best friend and is met with empty space instead.
“What did you do in that bunker, then,” Elita asks after a while.
“We… talked,” Optimus hedges. “Kind of.”
“About?”
“Him trying to kill me, mainly.” The laugh that ekes its way out of him is more of a reflex than anything. “He hasn’t been recharging, either.”
“Primus, you two…”
Optimus hears the exasperation in her voice and ex-vents heavily.
“…Do you think he misses us?” Bee asks quietly, and Optimus has to press his lipplates together.
“I know he does, Bee. Life can’t be all that interesting without Badassatron.” He feels the yellow bot chuckle against him and saves the feeling deep in his memory core.
Elita watches him, pensive. “Do you miss him, Pax?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you love him?”
“…Yeah.”
“Does he love you?”
Optimus furrows his optical ridges, his spark aching mildly. “He hasn’t… done anything about it. He knows I love him, though.” Does he? “I think.”
“…You’re useless.”
He laughs soundlessly. “Thanks, Elita.”
“Go.”
His optics shutter in pure shock before he shoves himself upright.
She’s eyeing him wearily as he waits, vents stilled. “He’s still there, last I checked. We already told everyone you were running recon,” she allows, setting her jaw. “Might as well tell them it’s lasting longer than expected.”
Optimus blinks twice more before he’s up on his pedes, peering out the window to check if there are any mechs still awake yet, grabbing a threadbare old cloak to try and use as some form of disguise—
A slender servo on his pauldron makes him pause.
“Pax?”
“Yeah?”
Elita’s optics are solemn as they search his faceplate, chassis sinking as she ex-vents. “Don’t get yourself killed.”
He wouldn’t, Optimus wants to say.
The words stick in his throat.
He nods instead as he slips out the door.
*
The journey back to the bunker is uneventful. He only trips on wires twice, nearly falls off a roof trying to be sneaky, and ends up having to avoid a particularly rowdy group of sparklings doing Primus-knows-what by ducking into a far-too-tiny alcove.
He isn’t made for stealth, damn it— Orion Pax had never been all that good at inconspicuousness to begin with, and now Optimus is bright and red and blue and big. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just… different.
So much is different it makes his processor spin.
Cybertron’s surface is cold and unyielding as ever as he follows the pings on his HUD, retracing his steps and picking his way over the adaptive landscape. It’s a little better now that he’s going towards Megatron; motivation, perhaps. The tug at his spark is keen and insistent and Optimus is fairly sure that letting it go unchecked is a bad idea, but frankly there isn’t much he can do.
(There’s a part of him that wonders when and how exactly he’d fallen so fast and so far, but he’s way too far off that ledge to go back now.)
(He doesn’t think he wants to, anyway.)
The door to the bunker hisses open easily with the code Elita had given him. Down a short hallway and one right turn later, he’s—
Optimus goes very, very still.
Megatron sits on the floor, back against the wall, half of his expressionless faceplate shadowed and the other half thrown into brilliant relief by the hologram dancing above his forearm.
They’re on the roof where they’d always gone. Their roof. Orion’s legs dangle over the edge, kicking his pedes idly as D-16 sits down. “Did you get it?” the blue bot asks, soft and tinny, and Optimus’s in-vent nearly catches when the point-of-view tsks— and pulls out the energon they’d filched anyway.
“Niiiiiice,” Orion chuckles, optic ridges waggling as he grabs a cube.
“One day, when your stupid plans get us in deep slag, I’m not gonna be there to save your aft,” D-16 grouches, reluctantly taking a sip from his own.
“Nah.” Orion grins, effervescent and ever-confident. “You will.”
Optimus remembers that roof.
(He goes there more often than he should. Sits alone and stares up at the same stars. Is Megatron looking at them too, he wonders? Do they look down to see the two of them, no longer a pair?)
Movement draws his attention, and he focuses his optics to find Megatron standing up far too quickly.
The mech’s vocaliser jams, clearly caught off-guard and fumbling with what designation to call before he just chokes out a tight, “Yes?”
“Megatron.”
“Did you leave something?”
“No,” Optimus says, rocking back on his heel struts. “…Yes, actually.”
They both know damn well he hasn’t. Megatron’s humouring him when he asks, “Well?”
Optimus bites his lipplate. “…We need to talk.”
Megatron stands there. “We talked.”
Pit, Optimus stands there too. He knows that if Megatron doesn’t give, if he doesn’t push, they will talk each other in circles and get absolutely fragging nowhere.
He decides that he’s gotta bite the bullet two nano-kliks before he blurts, “Do you still hate yourself?”
“Excuse me?” Megatron growls after a moment of stunned silence, the small bunker filled with the buzz of his weapons system coming online.
Optimus stands his ground. “You heard me.”
A scoff, acidic. “The frag kind of question is that, Prime?”
“The kind that I need you to answer.”
Their last goodbye just this morning had been one long, long look without words or weapons, and that had been it.
Optimus isn’t satisfied with that anymore. He cannot, in good conscience, let the mech he loves wallow in self-loathing for the rest of Primus knows how long. His own anger has dissipated, something else simmering in its wake— Not pity, no. He will not do Megatron that disservice. A sense of empathy, perhaps. Grief.
He’s done waiting to be pulled up from the ledge.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he begins, raising his servos when a handgun from Megatron’s wrist is levelled at his chassis. Okay, not the cannon. That’s a good sign.
The other mech opens his mouth to retort and then cuts himself off, ex-venting roughly. “If you have a point, Prime, make it,” he grits, taking a step closer.
“Y’know, you could just shoot me if it’ll make you feel better,” Optimus offers as he shrugs his pauldrons, and the answering snarl is, uh— “Okay, don’t shoot me. That’s fine.”
It’s all a mess. Even Optimus isn’t blind enough to not realise that. But Dee isn’t recharging and neither had he been, up until just a couple of groons ago, and Optimus knows exactly why he’d been able to fall asleep.
He’d been offered that mercy, and Megatron is still without.
He sees the effects of it now, the wear and tear on the mech frame, the pallour of his faceplate and the way the light from his spark wavers.
“It’s eating you up,” Optimus realises, optics cycling. His chassis feels two sizes too small. “Dee, you need to let it go.”
“Let what,” Megatron spits, and frag, it’s so obvious now— He just sounds tired.
Like if Optimus asked him to lay down and let him slit his throat he’d do it.
The soft whirr of their engines is a soothing hum in the background. “You said you were paying your dues, you were going places, and you were.”
Megatron’s optics plead don’t, even as they both draw closer.
“It should have all worked out the way you planned it. And yet you still backed me when it went against what you wanted, and the one time you wanted to do something—”
Optimus reaches out.
“I wasn’t there. I wasn’t against killing Sentinel,” he murmurs, optics wide as his servo cups Megatron’s cheek, and the mech lets him. “Please understand that. I just wanted it done a different way, but what happened— I’m sorry I wasn’t there, and know I’ve already said it, but it wasn’t your fault.”
“I know that,” Megatron snips, sniffing as he turns his helm to the side.
“Do you?” Optimus counters, as softly as he can bear. “Do you really?”
At some point, the gun between them had been lowered. Megatron’s arms hang limply at his sides.
“…A part of me was scared that it wasn’t, y’know.” Megatron shrugs half-heartedly. “You. When you came back up.”
“And you still called me Pax.”
The mech scoffs, a harsh grate of his vocaliser as his optics stay downcast. “Optimism.”
The irony isn’t lost to either of them. Orion Pax had always been the optimist, the idealist, the dreamer; D-16 had been much more of a play-by-the-rules-and-you’ll-succeed kind of mech.
Optimus supposes that’s why he’d lost it when the whole system had turned out to be a lie.
“Look at me,” he coaxes, tucking a curled digit beneath Megatron’s chin. Those perfect hexagonal irises slowly shift up as his free servo comes up to rest on Megatron’s arm, where the Megatronus decal had been a lifetime ago, and Optimus rubs circles into cool, battle-worn metal.
Their EM fields are tightly wound right now, but Optimus had felt everything on that fateful day after Sentinel had died, D-16 struggling to hide everything he had let spill into Orion’s open palms for as long as they could remember. Regret, flooding down like fresh rain as he’d fallen, cool and sharp around his spark as his optics had closed. A dart of relief when he’d been reborn, torn apart and forged anew, swallowed by unyielding, bitter grief and sorrow and rage.
Megatron’s optics are wide now, darting across his face and shuttering briefly before Optimus says frag it, throws a quick prayer to Primus, and goes all in.
The first touch of their lips is gentle like a bolt of electricity, his circuits igniting at every single point they touch. He feels Megatron freeze, feels every joint in his system lock up, and Optimus has a nano-klik to wonder if he’s made a terrible, horrible mistake before there are servos around his faceplate and oh, okay, they’re kissing.
It’s glorious.
Megatron leans into it with his whole frame, servos sliding from Optimus’s helm to his pauldrons to his chassis and back up to trace a digit over the length of his finials, light enough that it makes Optimus shiver. He is dizzy with the rush of it, fighting a grin when he hears Megatron’s internal fans kick on with an enthusiastic whirr, and energon spreads hot in his cheeks when his own system starts up.
“Oh,” Megatron mutters when they finally pull apart, looking slightly dazed. “I— Oh.”
“Yeah,” Optimus stresses, venting heavily.
Megatron’s servos are broader than before, he realises, as they slip down to his waist and stay there. Everything about him is broader than before, not that he wasn’t already broad before, just—
Optimus would be lying if he said he didn’t find it attractive.
And still the other mech curls into him, the top of his helm tucking under Optimus’s chin as he hides his faceplate in Optimus’s throat. He’s hunched over awkwardly considering he’s taller, he’d always been taller (which Optimus will never admit), but the purr of his engine is rumbling through Optimus’s own frame and he’s too selfish to rearrange them just yet.
There’s a heat he feels in Megatron’s cheeks that tell him the mech’s blushing, and he can’t help but laugh as he walks them backwards to the berth. Flipping them is easy, Megatron going willingly for once, and Optimus makes him sit before lying down and making a pillow of his lap.
(It’s a vulnerable position, he knows. But he also knows that with Dee he’ll have to give some before he takes, and he’s fine with that.)
(The look on his mech’s face gives him all the reassurance he needs.)
“You’d just found out that everything you’d ever worked for was for nothing,” Optimus begins, still slightly breathless. “I, personally, think that what you did was perhaps a slight overreaction, but—”
The laugh Megatron drops is disbelieving. “I ripped. A bot in half.”
He waves a servo with a psh. “Semantics.”
“Stop making excuses for me,” Megatron says. It comes out slightly strangled.
“Oh, absolutely not. Might not be very great unbiased leader of me but hey, who can blame a mech?”
“You’re infuriating.”
“And you still haven’t killed me,” Optimus hums, cheeky now as he arches an optical ridge.
Megatron gazes down at him, his faceplate shining silver in the dim light. Optimus reaches up and traces the tips of his digits over those strong features, ones he knows by spark even as he turns to rest his helm against Megatron’s stomach.
“You know I don’t blame you, now.” Megatron’s servo comes to rest over his spark, and Optimus welcomes it. “But you still blame yourself.”
The other mech shakes his helm slowly. “I know… I know what I’ve given up. We can have this or we can have everything else, Pax, but not both.”
“What’s this?” Optimus asks, just to be contrary, blinking innocently. “And why not?”
Megatron looks pained. “You think that just because Sentinel is gone, everything that’s left is fine?” he breathes, huffing out a mirthless laugh as he turns away. “You think it’s gonna work?”
“I think we’ll make it work.”
“There is no we.”
“There could be.”
Optimus feels Megatron’s field against his own, like a tightly controlled supernova just waiting to explode, and he lets his unspool just the slightest bit. Lets the hope he still carries next to his spark, in the sliver of space he’s saving, spill into the air around him.
He can see the moment the other mech softens ever so slightly, and Optimus wants to smooth all the guilt away from his face. “Stop thinking about all of it for a moment. I don’t want Megatron right now, I want D-16. You with me, Dee?”
If they were back in the mines, before Everything, he would have gotten an always.
As it is now, Megatron’s irises cycle as he in-vents, and says nothing. Optimus will take what he can get.
“What do you want?” he asks, as gently as he can, as he rises and sits on the berth.
Megatron works his jaw for a good long moment. “Peace,” he finally settles on, gruff and painfully raw. “Equality. Enough for everyone, a world where bots earn what they have and are given what they’re owed; where how you’re born doesn’t matter, just what you make of yourself.”
“A second chance,” Optimus prompts, and his spark aches when Megatron slowly shakes his helm.
“For them, yes. Not me. I don’t… I don’t think I deserve that.”
“Yes, you do. Look at me.” He pokes at Megatron’s cheek until the mech’s optics flash to him with a growl. “Yes, you do. Actually, I don’t care whether you do or not. I’m the one who decides that and I’m giving it to you anyway.”
“Why?” Megatron manages.
“Whatever you want, as long as I can give it… It’s yours.”
Megatron’s shoulders jerk with his rough ex-vent. “And if I wanted to kill everyone? Destroy everything?”
“You wouldn’t,” Optimus says simply.
He stays serene even as Megatron scrutinises him, optics flickering furrowed like Optimus is a puzzle he can’t figure out. It’s blind trust. Part of his processor warns him that it’s a stupid idea.
It’s all rooted in the fact that he knows D-16 had been a good mech and that Megatron still is.
“…You’re a weakness,” Megatron whispers, voice grainy. His servo shakes where it lays palm-up on his thigh. “I should have killed you. Been done with you once and for all.”
“Then do it.” Optimus quirks his optical ridges as he reaches out and wraps digits around the mech’s wrist.
He plants Megatron’s cold, hard fist right under his chin, replays the bitter memory of staring down the barrel of a cannon, and meets Megatron right in the optics.
“If it’s what you want, I won’t stop you.”
Optimus watches hexagonal irises blow wide, a touch lighter than red, watches the cables in the other mech’s throat contract as his vocaliser resets.
“…It would kill me, too,” Megatron utters, mouth barely moving, like it’s a confession torn right from his spark. “It would kill the only part of me left that’s worth saving.”
“Would it have been to get rid of me?” Optimus hums gently. “Or to punish yourself?
“There is a price we have to pay to get what we want—”
The words are rough around the edge, devastated, and Optimus feels them thread into his chassis and take root there, blooming like a weeping ruby. “Don’t you think you’ve paid enough?” he asks, tender and as close to pleading as he’s ever been. “How long are you gonna torture yourself, Dee?”
Megatron’s digits fold open effortlessly as Optimus uncurls his fist, slowly setting his chin to the heel of Megatron’s palm and turning his cheek into cool metal, pressing his own servo on top.
The other mech’s face crumples a little. “I don’t wanna be evil.”
“And you’re not,” Optimus insists, feeling Megatron’s thumb brush over the corner of his lipplates. “You’re angry, but that isn’t an excuse to hurt people. It’s not easy to be good, y’know. But—”
The familiar hum of Megatron’s circuits, his processor and engine, they settle something in Optimus as their forehelms press together. This, he knows. This, he remembers; gentle touch, comfort, never crossing the line, never going too far—
They’re well over that line now. Optimus is intending to take full advantage. “But,” he continues, pressing a brief kiss to Megatron’s intake, “would you be able to live with yourself if you went the other way?”
Not easy to be good, Megatron scoffs under his breath. “It was never hard for you.”
“Because it hasn’t gotten hard yet,” he says quietly. “I’ll face my trials in time, but this— This is where you have to choose.”
He doesn’t stop Megatron as the mech pulls away, something panging in his spark at the loss of contact even as he keeps his servos to himself. The other mech paces, servos planted on his hips and helm bowed, and for a moment Optimus wonders if he should push.
(He does. Dee had always said he had a death wish.)
“You can’t build something new off a broken foundation,” Optimus says delicately, having half a mind to get up. “I get that. I’m working on it. Just— Don’t be cruel, Dee.”
“I won’t be." It comes out sharp as Megatron looks over with something like strained desperation. “I’m trying.”
“Okay,” Optimus says softly. “You do it your way and I’ll do it mine. Just don’t shut me out. You can have both.”
Megatron’s servos tremble. Optimus doesn’t know if he notices, but he keeps going anyway. He needs Dee to know this. "You deserve both.”
Megatron looks at him with dimmed optics. his faceplate leaden with something Optimus can’t quite place, before he’s striding over quickly and Optimus blinks in near-alarm, before he’s sinking down onto the berth and dropping his helm into his servos.
His optics are the colour of a forge, of smelted bronze, of the sun melting over the edge of the horizon. “I don’t want to be evil.”
It’s barely loud enough for Optimus’s audials to pick up. He will not require Megatron to be any louder.
“Then don’t be.” He rests gentle digits on the back of Megatron’s neck, runs them down the delicate length of spinal cord that melds into his back struts. “Your anger is not an evil thing. It never was. It was just trying to protect you.”
It’s a small realisation that sinks in as he says it, and it bites. Makes him ache along all his joints, the seams that hold him together. Optimus had worried, briefly, that the only thing he would have to remember D-16 by would be the phantom ache in his left side, the stark absence of a limb that haunted him on the bad days the same way the absence of his best friend had. He will not pretend that this isn’t a reminder of his failure to be there for D-16 the way Dee had always been there for him.
“It… did what I should have when I couldn’t,” he murmurs, a tight ache in his vents. When I didn’t.
“Oh, don’t you go getting guilty on me now,” Megatron drawls, turning his helm sideways so he can glower at the other mech with one optic. “Son of a glitch.”
Optimus laughs. It’s half scratchy static, and he doesn’t bother hiding it. “Does that mean we’re even?”
“…Yeah.” Megatron eyes him, weary and slow, and leans into the weight of Optimus’s servo. “It does.”
“Cool.”
They let the silence steep.
“Bee misses you,” Optimus says after a while, offhand. Super casual. “Maybe you should come back sometime.”
Megatron turns to look at him again with something sharp-shocked in his gaze before it softens. “Maybe,” he chuckles. “But not tonight.”
“Not tonight,” He agrees, and ex-vents in gentle surprise when Megatron lays back and reaches out a servo.
Optimus takes it. He always does.
*
He wakes from recharge with a pleasant warmth suffusing his frame, his internal chronometer informing him that it’s the next solar cycle, HUD blinking with updates as his processor starts up.
One look next to him is all it takes for Optimus to swipe them all aside.
Megatron had fallen into recharge right on top of him, and he must’ve rolled off in the night; his faceplate is smushed into Optimus’s pauldron and he’s snoring softly, servos curled up against his chassis.
He looks… young. He looks so young it makes Optimus’s spark ache, fierce and warm and fond. He knows they’re both barely full-grown by the smallest sense of the word, but seeing Megatron like this— His helm can’t hide his baby face, he’s always had it, and Optimus wants to hide him away, bring him back to Iacon City, maybe run away with him. They can be outlaws together.
Unfortunately, all three of those possibilities are unfeasible for three different reasons, and so Optimus, recharge-warm and self-satisfied, decides to think about them another solar cycle.
He peers down and smirks before knocking on Megatron’s helm. “Rise and shine, sweetspark.”
No response.
He knocks again, whistling jauntily. “Helloooo. Anybot home?”
“…What if I kill you for waking me up?”
“What? Come on. Who’ll take care of the sparklings?”
Megatron tsks and bats at him, clearly unwilling to be awake. “Primus, you’re so fragging annoying.”
“And you looooove me.”
Bold, he knows. It might be pushing it considering how a while ago they were quite firmly on opposite sides of a war, but Megatron levels him with a cutting yellow glare and nothing else before he rolls over to face the wall.
His field seeps over Optimus bit by bit, sweet and tentative, and Optimus drinks it down like a starving man, basks in it like pure golden sunlight on his frame.
It makes him want to wiggle. He does, very gleefully.
“Pax,” Megatron groans, tired and flat. “Leave me alone.”
“What’re you gonna do? Transform into a shovel and beat me? I don’t think so.” It’s an old joke, an old memory, but he sees Megatron’s pauldrons shake with a sleepy laugh when he remembers and that is more than enough for him.
The old memories are good, really. But maybe— Maybe it’s time they make some new ones.
(Optimus had feared that they wouldn’t have been able to, at a time.)
(He’s so damn glad he came back to this stupid bunker.)
“Good morning,” he murmurs, pressing a soft kiss to Megatron’s nape before resting his forehelm there.
“Good morning. You are a plague upon my existence.” Megatron reaches over blindly to tangle their digits where Optimus’s servo rests on his side.
Yes, he thinks, as he curves his frame to Megatron’s back and slings a leg over his hips against grumbled protests, shuttering his optics.
It’s a very good morning indeed.