Chapter Text
A purple haze lingers around Orion's frame, obscuring the chains linking him to his seat. In the distance, gold bars stand vertically, shooting upwards into oblivion. They are placed in a wide circle, forming a cage with bars distant enough to easily walk through. He lounges on a white chaise, staring blankly into the never-ending black expanse beyond the cage.
Optimus stands outside, one hand hovering on a gold bar. His pedes touch nothing, but he is held upright. He watches, frozen, as Orion stands. His counterpart's chains scrape gently across nothing. The sound rings through the air as if echoing off of nothing.
Orion plays with the foggy substance, twirls it around his fingers, forming shapes. Sometimes he flicks, and the fog solidifies and falls. He catches it in his servos, playing with it until he’s bored, when he throws it in the air and watches it disappear.
Sometimes Optimus recognizes the things. A toy he had when he was young. A pipe he swears he once fenced Ariel with, when they were sparklings. A figurine in the shape of a turbofox, which he just can’t place. Datapads.
Eventually, Orion bores of this. His creations grow in size, begin moving by themselves. And then he starts on something new, something even bigger. It begins on the ‘ground’ just below his pedes. It doesn't solidify, it is born solid. Up and up it grows, two pedes, two knees, two legs. Until, until. It dissipates, like the smoke it must be. Orion growls.
"Primus!'' Orion calls. "Use your words, you pride-sparked fool.” Delicately, as if one wrong twist could make him crumble, he steps forward. The fog shifts, morphing to meet Orion's pedefalls. It spreads outwards, creating a thin floor, solid and yet see-through. Orion walks to the center and stares directly upwards. His voice turns quiet, pleading in a self-assured sincerity that sends shivers down Optimus's back struts.
"Tell me, is this Primacy? Hmm? Your design? Do you, so weakened, deign to tell me what to do in my own cell?" Orion reaches upwards, grasping at nothing. Optimus reaches forward and grabs the bars. They shake in his palms, but are unyielding to his strength. His need to get inside is desperate and overpowering.
"Orion Pax." A voice echoes through the not-quite chamber. Optimus knows it, intimately. It emanates from the bars, surrounding the figure inside. "Resistance requires existence. Be at Peace."
"Peace? Resistance requires a great deal more than existence, my lord." Primus's title is snarled, an off-putting viciousness from such a fragile looking mech. "I would know just how much more is required, proof of it, aren't I?"
"Keep calm, Orion. Your place must remain here, for the betterment of Cybertron." It's haunting, the way his voice rings through the bars. It shakes Optimus to the core, to hear Him so candidly. Shakes him more that some deep part of him thinks the words are Wrong.
"Cybertron is dead," Orion spits bitterly. "And so will be you." Around him, the fog morphs into a picture of the dead world, video of war and disease. Optimus has seen these pictures before. His digits scratch at the bars.
"Be at Peace, Orion Pax." There is a finality in Primus's tone.
Orion swivels, catching Optimus's optics. His fists clench and plating flares, for a moment, and then he relaxes. His optics burn holes in Optimus's spark. His voice is a flitting, timid thing.
"Peace with who? Peace with who?"
Optimus wakes with his spark spinning in cold panic.
_______
The wind rips at Optimus's side mirrors, harsh and cold as he pushes past 85. The chill feels nice under the Central Valley sun. There's nothing here - nothing that would interest a Cybertronian, anyway. He's off the normal patrol path by a hundred miles or so, but one can't get up to these speeds on the coast. And truthfully, he finds it hard to care about whether Decepticons get another California cave system.
It seems odd that his sympathies could last four million years of war and end in a month. In a single July. Another minute closer to inevitable Decepticon domination. It should be a depressing thought, would have been a month ago, but now it glances off Optimus's plating, ripped away by the NorthEastern winds. He sends a ping to the Matrix and receives nothing back.
Ahead, the hundreds of miles of flat highway begin to twist into hills. He has 20 minutes at most before he'll have to turn around, or else be forced to slow. He doesn't want to slow. He's tempted, for a minute, by the idea of transforming to root mode and flipping, to avoid the half-mile of gradual slowdown needed for a semi. The outskirts of Los Baños are empty- he wouldn't be seen. And then, much later, he might not call for a groundbridge but instead take the 5 to the 210 to the 15 and drive back to base. He could comm Ratchet, tell him he was taking a longer patrol. He could, if he wanted to. He could get back past midnight. He'd miss out on dinner; Arcee couldn't convince him not to halve his fuel. The kids would be gone, the base silent. He might.
Anderson's Split Pea Soup! A billboard ahead reads. Under it, a sign condemns Assembly Bill 19. Water is for Farmers! It yells.
He can't remember the last time it rained back at base. His spark flips and contracts, sending a sudden anxiety through his chassis. Cybertron's acid storms swept through Iacon sometimes, and he would work from home. In Kaon, the storms were worse and ever-present. The clouds would roll in, dark as the grimy city below. Megatronous, lucky enough to have an above-ground habsuite, once cut a window into the wall of his room. The rain would come sizzling down the pane, and he would sit and watch and write and Orion could work on the couch, huddled under a ratty blanket. The storms were massive and destructive and beautiful. Megatronus had loved them. He'd been overjoyed when it threatened to rain the day of the Council Meeting. He'd called it "good luck, a celebration of victory". Later, the rain ate through Orion's shoulder plating and burned Megatron's doorstep under his pedes.
The desert is dry as bone. He sends another ping.
Cows roam the rocky crop to his right. Some lift their heads to stare at him as he passes. Most ignore him. He scans the area. There are 23 cows. The Matrix doesn't respond.
The asphalt burns his digits when he transforms and flips. He still has data input sensors there, sensitive and vulnerable. Useful for data entry. Hidden, though, when he throws a punch. They remain hidden most days.
The cows don't react to the booming crack of his undercarriage hitting the ground when he transforms back. He forgets to comm Ratchet.
______
Ratchet says his memories of his time aboard the Nemesis aren't gone but have rather been saved someplace Optimus can't reach. That's his current theory, at least.
"I might be able to retrieve them, with time and some more of these sessions," Ratchet says, disconnecting wires from Optimus's cranial port. "Perhaps Megatron revealed something useful while you were in his custody. Or at least it might help us with cracking this slagging code."
Optimus has been..stalling..with decoding the Iacon Archives. It's not from a lack of trying, certainly. It's just that when he approaches the screen it blurs, as if his optics were being manually refocused. And when he tries to remember his archivist days and his training, that blurrs too, like there's a thick glass between him and the memories. Maybe he should ask Ratchet to fix that part of his head first.
"Maybe Megatron got caught up in the past and told you some military secrets. Or about a weakness." Ratchet plugs into a medical datapad and logs the data from Optimus's exam. "If we can get in there, we might learn a thing or two."
Optimus really, really hopes not.
Optimus has had a lot of time to think lately. Time spent staring at the database, time spent driving. The Decepticons have been uncharacteristically quiet. The other Autobots have avoided him more than usual. They sense something wrong, even if they can't acknowledge it, he knows. It must eat at the edge of their fields, the way he isn't the same. Maybe they sense the Matrix is broken, that he can't be their Prime. He's had a lot of time to think about that.
He thinks a lot about memories. He has memories, Orion Pax's memories. He knows where they are, in his processor. If Orion Pax made new memories during his stay on the Nemesis, why would they be stored anyplace else? Where would Ratchet find them?
He wants those memories, desperately. He wants to know them, save them, hide them. He wants to have them first, to file them somewhere hidden. So no one else can see them.
He's afraid of what Ratchet will find.
_____
The dreams don't stop.
Orion screams and pleads, plays with the fog and stares into the dark. One night he forms gray shapes out of the fog and spins them around the floor in the manner of an old war game. The next night a shape solidifies into Megatron -blue eyes, fewer scars- and Optimus forces himself to look away when Orion pushes the figure onto a newly formed couch. The next night Optimus watches Orion whack at the bars with a pickaxe, to no avail.
They stop being nightmares; instead they morph into a strange sense of reality. His awoken hours turn gray, his sleep vivid gold.
Those are the only times he can speak with the Matrix. It hums, through the bars. It is warped, but he feels relief when it runs through him. For a moment, in his dreams, he is still the Prime. If only it would tell him how to be.
Primus never speaks again. But he's there, in the way the cage vibrates, in the way it refuses to break, in the way it sends shivers down Optimus's back struts.
Some nights he shouts, screams the name of who he once was. Some nights he waits patiently, hoping Orion will have something to say. Some nights he hides his face and prays to wake up. Some nights he cries, transported into some previously lost memory of what was and could have been.
But Orion never looks at him again.