Killswitch
Major AU
The rapid fire click-tap, tap-tap-click was the only sound to be heard from this terminal at the end of the hallway. The corridors of the ship looked like the interior of a backstrut. Multiple fibre optics, power cables and fuel leads formed a thick conduit on the ceiling of the arched hallway that spanned around the ship. Perpendicular formations arched downward from the main conduit and from the floor panels, snaked out to all the rooms behind the central hallways. It was all burnished metal and black lacquer with the occasional cerulean glow every time the Nemesis' engine pulsed. The bass vibration and pressure change in the atmoshpere was imperceptible to most of the crew, what with their multiple layers of armoured plating.
The Archivist at the terminal had no such armoured plating. His damaged frame couldn't support it, so he looked mostly like he did when the war with the Senate had begun. Though there was one thing the Lord of all Decepticons would not abide; and that was anyone among their ranks looking anything like a Prime.
Orion Pax's paint had been stripped away, the bright primary colour against a silver backdrop no longer a representation of his former caste, but the insignia of Megatron's toughest and most hated foe; Optimus Prime.
It had been the Senate's doing. Long before Megatron first sewed the seeds of civil unrest, there had been much of it already. The Senate and the Councillors of Cybertron had long hidden their atrocities from greater public knowledge, and in their secrecy, they were monstrous. Overpopulation, segregation, crime, drug abuse, prostitution, slave labour. And borne from all that bloated rot was Kaon, and pit-fighting, and civil unrest, and Megatron. He brought excitement to the ring, he brought chaos to the system and hope to his Kaonites. But one could not rule with force alone, and that was where a meek Archivist from the Iacon Hall of Records came in.
Some mechs were too used up, too beaten down, too far deep in the depths of their despair to be of any use to Megatron. Orion Pax would counsel them, make a place for them to recover. Under his watch, and often with his own hands, Orion had built hostels for them to recover, temples for them to pray, built conference rooms for them to discuss. Megatron inspired fear and encouraged malice, but it was Orion Pax who truly won their sparks. Between the two of them, Kaon had been in the palms of their hands in a matter of decades.
They were originally co-workers, co-conspirators. At one point during the rioting, Orion had been co-habitating with Megatron. When they became lovers it was a surprise for both of them. There were many incompatibilities to be worked through, and cultural differences more often than not caused them to put their ideas of companionship aside. But they never strayed far from each other. Not even when Megatron stormed the Senate.
Despite many interpersonal issues, their common goal remained the same. Get to the Senate, get to the Councillors. And the two of them would do what they'd always done. Megatron would inspire the strong and petrify the rest. And then he would storm out, disgusted and angry. And then Orion would deliver his side and assuage the sparks and minds of those who did not like Megatron or the new order he was proposing. The end goal was essentially the same; Megatron and Orion simply had different ways of approaching it. Whether or not the Councillors saw that was not their worry. Distracted by the threat of Megatron's fury and eased by the seemingly meek Orion Pax, pertinent issues were delivered directly to the Councillors. They would know soon if their message was heard or if they'd simply been taken in by their theatrics.
And the bastard Senators who always had something up their coattails derailed the meeting completely when instead of discussing civillian matters, they nudged the goal of the meeting toward a different end altogether.
Orion Pax, the new bearer of the Matrix of Leadership.
It was a terrible turn of events for Megatron and Orion, whose original goal had simply been to bring pertinent matters to the Councillors. Being Senators who were closely tied to Government and Religious matters, of course their duties would also include being on the look out for a new Bearer. Both feared they'd set something entirely different into motion. And they couldn't have been more right.
In a quick succession of tragic events, certain Senators were murdered, Councillors went missing and explosions took out a quarter of the Iacon Hall of Records. Media stories flew out of control. In a matter of hours there was chaos. Orion and Megatron had left the Senate, afraid their arrival might be blamed for the attack. They were right, of course, and the retribution, when it came, was fast and vicious and it went on and on, as scores of the Senate's personal guards chased Megatron and his Archivist out of Iacon, across the borders and into the Badlands, where the fighting took on an entirely different flavour.
There, Megatron's Kaonites met the Autobot forces in a vicious wall of cover fire, meant to give Megatron and Orion time to escape. Time and time again the Gladiator was maimed as he tried to protect Orion, keep him out of the line of fire. Orion, who couldn't even stomach a Kaon pit-fight, had no fight instinct whatsoever. He'd become a terrible liability and he knew it, as he watched, helplessly, as incindiary rounds and ricochet bullets tore at Megatron. Then, a terrific blast of white light and a high frequency percussive blastwave blinded optics, disrupted balancing hydraulics and ruptured audio receptors. Megatron fell and fell. In the fray, the Archivist was lost.
Find Orion Pax! You leave this field dead or with him in tow!
That was the only order Megatron gave as his Kaonites battled the Autobots for the return of their Archivist.
Hidden below the debris of the fallen Hall of Records was a reinforced, doomsday military bunker where they'd hidden the Archivist. The surgery was fast and efficient and for Orion Pax, brutal. When he woke, his audio receptors were completely shot. He was lying on a table, but without his ability to balance he couldn't even flop around on it. To his horror, his spark chamber was lying open, having been sawed into and pulled up. Inner most energon leaked everywhere. His spark spun before his very optics. The awareness brought pain and panic and more pain and more panic. He couldn't hear his own screaming.
The Matrix of Leadership had only ever been illustrated on intricate temple walls. It was always shown resting on silk pillows, being polished by gorgeous slaves, being venerated by naked Priests. The real thing was now suspended directly above him, its handles pulling the orb wide and revealing the dark matter that pulsed thickly inside it. It stared at Orion and into Orion with malicious, perverted interest. And Orion was powerless to stop the suctioning force that sampled his innermost energon and the power from his spark. It was torture beyond words and meaning, the very worst event any Autobot, who had been trained since their inception to keep their spark private, could endure.
Orion had not even dared to hope. When Megatron's forces broke through the reinforced temple, Orion's spark had guttered out, having had its lifeblood mostly taken in by the terrible relic of conquering Primes.
Orion's retrieval had been ugly... Scores of Iaconian and Kaonite frames lay everywhere in varying states of deactivation. Those who were on the wrong side were left to die. Those who were on the right side and couldn't be saved were given a quick death. Every single one of them asked, do we have him? 'Yes.' Came Megatron's answer before his sword arm deployed a blade into a guttering spark chamber, severing the pain circuits and allowing innermost energon to spill free.
From that point forward, Megatron was finished with things like forgiveness, and patience, and civility, and discussions and blasted politics. His trusted advisor lay in stasis, his frame ruptured and broken, his spark guttering out and starving for innermost energon he himself couldn't provide, because they hadn't sparkshared often enough, cultural differences, damn them. Damn them.
Oh, but the Senators. Those Senators had to be admired for their viciousness, their awful cruelty, and the depths of their hatred. It was proof positive of how the Matrix worked, part of a great secret that had to be sacrificed in order to set the war in motion. When Optimus Prime came to the battle field looking like a souped-up version of Orion Pax, it was known then that the delicate parts of a mech was scraped clean and allowed to merge with the Matrix. To lose Orion Pax and at the same time have to deal with this bloated abomination was almost too much for Megatron to bear.
In a strange act of ... whatever it was, Optimus Prime spared Megatron's life when the Gladiator had thrown himself at the Prime. They were alone on the borders of Kaon. Optimus Prime had come out here, seeking parley. Megatron found out later that Optimus Prime had sent him requests via official channels often. He hadn't known, because by then he'd already amassed a huge force of the cruelest Kaonites he could find, as well as Vosians whose beautiful city had been reduced to ash. Three of the best Seekers would become his closest Officers, but one of them had become a bane very, very early on. It was by this Trine-leader's order that the Prime's messages had not been delivered. Megatron hadn't recharged in whole solar cycles, and he was starved of energon and reason. But Optimus Prime knew, and understood. 'You are not the only one who cares, Megatron.' He'd said, and dropped 4 vials of glowing blue fluid in front of Megatron, and walked away.
The vials were of innermost energon and the close enough to the original bearer that Orion's wounded spark fed on them hungrily. Very, very gradually, Orion Pax recovered, though he was never fully recovered again. From that point on during the war he stayed the hell away from any battle fields or political discussions. Instead, Orion returned to duties he assigned for himself. He kept meticulous records and he took care of Megatron's Vehicons, the most looked down on in his army. He'd done this for centuries while Megatron chased the Autobots all over known and unknown space. Megatron was pure chaos and Orion couldn't help but try to order it. It was how they functioned together; a tense balancing act, and neither dared approach the tipping point.
When Orion recovered, Megatron had declared the Autobots enemies. The officers agreed, but the lower ranking soldiers vehemently agreed, and even took to self-mutilation of the spark chamber as their own sign of loyatly; to remind themselves of whom they belonged to and what had happened to their beloved Advisor. Megatron was beyond pleased, and underwent the procedure himself, and eventually, his Officers underwent it, too. The Decepticon insignia was cut from one's spark chamber in a symbolic re-enactment of a horrible crime committed against the most noble of Decepticons. And so it was for a millennia.
The fighting was a constant thing. The Nemesis was now orbiting this planet's dark side, having had its stores packed with newly mined energon. Megatron had returned from deep space travel, bringing with him a terrible substance, and no one was sure how he planned to use it. It was only certain it would be atrocious.
And Orion Pax remained hidden away, tending to his duties, in the protective, and sometimes oppressive shadow of his Warlord, Megatron.
It was a tough day to stay focused, for Orion Pax. For Megatron too, if his current moodiness was anything to go by. This was a significant day for both of them. Centuries turned to millennia, suns died out, black holes swallowed solar systems, species rose and fell with the ebb and flow of tides and still, after all this time, neither of them could forget this turn in seasons, this single day in their intertwined lives when their very sanity rested on a pin-point.
This was the anniversary of the birth of Optimus Prime and the near-death of Orion Pax. The beginning of Megatron's madness and Orion Pax's fears. The start of a war that raged on and on and on.