The prompt from LJ was:
[i]Sam, after Mission City, turns to cutting. Optimus finds out first![/i]
Because I couldn't resist, that's why. Title may change.
That thing about dying
The great engines of the extraterrestrial semi truck silenced as the red and blue vehicle rolled closer. The whole Mission City was in ruins, with metal pieces shattered all around, and human blood dried on the broken surfaces. But Optimus was following the trail of fresh human blood. He knew where exactly the drops had come from. The semi slowed down, and transformed as silently as he could. He didn't want to break in on Samuel, and he knew that even his most quiet transformation could be heard from miles away. Optimus Prime was a leader, not a spy, after all.
Once he was in robot mode, he started to climb the ruins until he got to the windy corner where Sam was sitting with severly cut left wrist and a knife in his other hand. He didn't want to outright rush down the young human, but his presence was enough to startle the disturbed boy.
"What, are you gonna talk me out of this?" Sam said in a bitter tone.
Optimus's careful, intelligent, sad blue optics turned towards the human's wary brown eyes.
„May I take a seat, Sam?"
"Do as you please" the boy murmured, raising his knife to cut into his wrist once again. The blade swiftly flew out of his hand, and clacked into a magnetic plate on the Prime's thumb. His red blood stained the finely built grey hand that held him only a day before, but Optimus didn't seem to care about that. He pretended not to even recognize what Sam had been doing to himself. In fact, he was reading the Internet for more information about human behavior, and as he eventually sat down next to the confused, bitter, shattered, bleeding boy, he finally murmured "Better than getting yourself killed over a lost video game." He turned away, watching as some human workers towed Brawl's remains to a military transport.
"Huh?"
"What you are doing, is compared to 'grabbing a chair' in human psychology" he explained. "You have an intention, Sam, but you know that you are not yet ready to cross that border."
Sam looked at him, looked at his dent metal, scratched-off paint, his many small wounds from the battle. "As if you knew?"
"I have been there, Sam. More often than I care to count. Some long-dead Autobots had told me I had a death wish, but only Primus knows whether they were right. Megatron had killed me before I even became a Prime."
There was a long silence. The two beings, so different in origin, age and size, shared their minutes of despair, pain, of torturing memories. It was Samuel's first battle to see. Optimus couldn't tell how many he participated in. They had both seen more deaths than what they could live with, Sam understood. He looked at the Prime's weary frame, but he couldn't tell that Optimus was thinking about exactly the same. They had seen lives expire, beautiful hopes and promises crumbled just out of their arms' reach. They were survivors, after seeing others being taken away by Death.
The silence slowly became awkward, and finally, Sam pulled out the most cliché sentence he could come up with:
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Optimus looked at him, organizing his thoughts. Where should he begin?
"The first time we had killed each other with Megatron was during a battle of Autobot City. He came in, he had to be stopped. We had beaten each other to death. Then, I was brought back online by the most sinister species in Cybertron's history, and they had turned me against those whom I loved in life. I managed to overcome the new programming just long enough to trigger the trap alone, but that was not how I wanted them to remember their hero. I was brought back again only to find both Autobots and Decepticons overrun by rage. I had to defeat my successor and friend, Rodimus Prime, to get the Matrix from him and to spread it out into the universe."
"The Matrix?" Sam asked with a dumb expression on his face. The Autobot leader suspected that at least half of this expression was due to the fuel loss he had caused to himself.
"The Matrix was the first and most important Autobot relic, more ancient than the Allspark Cube. It was the source and collection of wisdom of the Primes, and I had to witness it being torn away from my chest and be lost forever in the shape of dust."
"That sucks" Sam commented.
"It was a necessary loss, albeit a grievous and costly one" Optimus sighed. "And I was not done dying yet. I defeated the Swarm in a rage in Heaven, you don't want to know how that had felt. When I was given a new body, I believed that it was over. It wasn't. Next time I only survived because I could download my consciousness into my Combat Deck, which was hardly better than having a nicely written last will. Nova, the Prime of the Dead Universe, had outright asked me what I was doing there again."
Now Sam was staring at him, no longer interested in his bleeding wrist but paying attention to the alien robot who was talking about his too-near death experiences. For the young human's sake, and maybe for his own, Optimus had to keep talking.
"Of course, there was a near-death I wasn't really around for" he said in a lot more cheerful manner. "Once we crash-landed into a volcano, and while every mechanism on board was in forced offline status, I was nearly killed in a Maximal-Predacon fight. Don't ask how I know about that, but I do, and... it's still one of my most haunting deaths, if I may say."
"That... that sounds like a lot." Sam stared.
Already?
"The next occasion was when I had to block a blast from Megatron's Hydra Cannon. Perhaps why I feel worse about my almost-death in already limbo state is that I didn't have a choice then. There's a difference between being a victim, and being a dead hero. But, if it wasn't for the Mini-Cons, I would have possibly stayed dead forever."
"I'm glad that you're alive" the human boy said.
"Thank you, Samuel." The feeling was mutual.
"You died... quite a lot."
"And, what I told you, were only the highlights" Optimus mused. In fact, he no longer kept track of how many times he died, and he was uncertain whether the deaths of Orion Pax counted or not. He stood up and offered his hand to the still bleeding young human. "Come, I will take you home."
Yes, I know, I left out his Animated death, but this story is supposed to take place right after the battle of Mission City. His record-breaking 75 seconds death came AFTER this dialogue.
For the complete (?) list of Optimus Prime's deaths, please visit tfwiki wiki/The_many_deaths_of_Optimus_Prime