Convoy

"Hey," he says as he eases up behind Jetfire, careful not to startle him. The shuttle has a soldier's instincts and would pull a gun on Optimus as soon as on a Decepticon if his leader made the mistake of surprising him. Optimus lays a hand on his shoulder. "Are you okay?"

"Course I am." Brisk, brash response, hint of laughter, as if he can't believe Optimus is even asking the question. It's a good act. It fools most people. "That was a great fight, huh? Ol' Megs'll be licking his wounds for the next couple of days."

"Hmm." Optimus keeps his hand on Jetfire's shoulder, exerting the faintest pressure with his fingertips. "I suppose so. And Red Alert tells me that Starscream's injuries were minor."

Jetfire stiffens only fractionally, his voice still light when he replies.

"Yeah? I guess that's good to know."

Optimus sighs, lets his hand drop away, sits down next to Jetfire on the edge of the rocky outcropping. Together they contemplate the starry sky before them. Optimus idly compares it to Cybertron's starscape, wonders when he will see his home again, how many more battles they will enact before that time. Inexorably, his thoughts return to the fight earlier today, and he braces himself for the conversation he doesn't want to have.

"Jetfire--"

"Don't." Jetfire doesn't look around. Only his voice gives him away: it's serious, pleading, not a tone he normally uses. "I don't wanna talk about it."

Optimus studies his second-in-command's profile, face tilted up to the stars, optics gleaming, expression unreadable behind the mask. He wishes Jetfire wouldn't wear the damn thing, even though he feels like a hypocrite for it. Jetfire's always had the kind of face that can't hide a thing, all his emotions blazing across it with star-bright, uninhibited honesty, and Optimus misses the time when he could read his friend like a datapad, misses the time before Jetfire learned, painfully, that he couldn't afford to be that transparent.

"I need to know," Optimus says, quiet, compassionate, insistent. "Before we powerlink again. How deep does this go?"

Jetfire laughs, but the sound has no joy in it. If it were Hot Shot, Optimus would sling an arm around his shoulders; if it were Red Alert, he'd lay a hand on his arm. But for all that combining into Jet Convoy brings them into closer intimacy than anything save bonding, he and Jetfire have never been particularly tactile with each other.

"If I knew, I'd tell you," Jetfire says after a moment, grabbing a handful of pebbles and sending them clatter-skipping down the side of the canyon. "I really don't wanna talk about this, Optimus."

There is silence. Optimus watches Jetfire, who avoids his gaze, and shifts in his place, and twitches his wings, and finally casts a helpless, desperate glance sideways at him.

"I think I... I think..."

Jetfire falters and ducks his head, fists clenching in the dust, and Optimus aches for him, fears for him, for the first time bitterly regrets the decision to take a Decepticon traitor into their ranks.

"It's not... it's not a good idea to get too attached to him," he says, hating himself – wasn't he the one saying they should give the mech a chance? "I'm worried about you, Jetfire."

More silence, uncharacteristic of Jetfire, who should by all rights be snapping at Optimus for interfering in his business.

"Yeah," Jetfire says finally. "I'm worried about me too."

Optimus does turn to him, then, and does stretch out a hand, but Jetfire flinches away, and Optimus draws back, and thinks back to the battle, and the things they can't hide from each other – it's not mind reading, not exactly, but emotions and instincts come through clearly – and the way Jetfire cried out in his mind when Starscream fell out of the sky.

"I'm sorry."

At that, Jetfire looks at him at last, optics narrow and questioning.

"For what?"

"I don't know." Optimus tilts his head back and watches a satellite drift across the heavens. "For calling you to Earth. For letting him join us. For the war. For everything."

Jetfire laughs again, then, a short bark that is, mercifully, full of raw amusement and friendly scorn.

"You wanna take responsibility for a few more things while you're at it? I've got a bunch of speeding tickets back on Cybertron you can have if you like."

Optimus chuckles softly, and he thinks Jetfire is smiling behind the mask – it's something about his optics that gives it away.

"Besides," Jetfire goes on, "it might work out. He's an Autobot now..."

The amusement drains from Optimus like energon from a severed fuel line. Something inside him clenches painfully.

"And I hope he stays one," Optimus says, very quietly, and he would never, never voice these doubts to anyone, were he not so very afraid of what he has felt churning in Jetfire's spark the last few times they've powerlinked. "But you must remember... that he was created a Decepticon and... that it is all he has ever known..."

Jetfire hunches in on himself, wings drooping forward as if to shelter him.

"I don't want to see you hurt, Jetfire."

The words are too honest, breaking down all pretence that they are no more than comrades in arms, commander and lieutenant, and they are a step too far, and Optimus knows it when Jetfire snaps his head up and glares at him, defensive and defiant and as brilliant as the sun.

"I'm not a sparkling, Optimus. I can deal."

"Just try not to get in too deep with someone we're not sure we can trust-- with a Decepticon--"

"Oh, you'd know all about that, wouldn't you?"

Optimus looks away, and hears Jetfire's intakes judder and spit, and then his voice, ragged, "Aw, Primus, I'm sorry, Optimus, that was low."

"But accurate," replies Optimus, because although they never talk about this – the shame he has shared with no other, the roiling, biting emotions that take over his spark when he looks on his ages-long enemy in battle, the secret that only Jetfire knows – it gives him some comfort that he need not hide the truth from at least one mech. "I do know, if not all, at least something about it. And I don't... want to see you consumed by this."

Jetfire doesn't answer for a moment, and then when he does, it's not an answer at all, nor really a question, just a quiet sort-of-apology, tinged with his own worry for Optimus.

"It's getting worse for you, isn't it."

Optimus dims his optics and wishes himself across the galaxy, back on Cybertron, or some other place where there is no Matrix and no conflict, no Autobots looking to him for guidance.

"This planet makes me question..."

He stops, instinct demanding that he show no uncertainty, maintain the façade of flawless leadership – but Jetfire knows his doubts by touch and taste and sparkbeat, and this conversation is only giving shape to formless things they both already know.

"It makes me wonder if there is truly any point to this war. If we are not just fighting because we have forgotten how to do anything else. If he and I could..."

But even here, even with Jetfire, there are some things he dares not speak aloud, and he falls silent, feeling the same desperate hate-want-fury devour his spark as takes him sometimes in battle, face to face with his equal and opposite. He presses his hand to his chest, imagining it can somehow ease the ache.

"Megatron's not gonna stop 'til he's got the universe arranged to his liking," says Jetfire quietly. "Which means he's not ever gonna stop. Unless you stop him. That's the point of it."

The pain seems to expand out from Optimus's spark like debris from an explosion in space, but Jetfire's words have given him back his direction, and he forces the despair out of himself with little more than a sigh and a shudder.

"Yes," he says, and no more.

The sit in silence for a time, as the night deepens around them and the stars crawl slowly – too slowly for human eyes to perceive – across the sprawling heavens. Finally, Jetfire sighs, scrambles to his feet, and stretches as if shaking something from his shoulders.

"I'm gonna go get some recharge in. You comin'?"

"No. I think I'll stay here a while longer."

Jetfire claps him on the shoulder with quick, rough affection, then turns to leave. Optimus thinks about the fact that Jetfire is probably going to stop by the medbay on the way to his quarters, shutters his optics briefly, half-turns.

"Jetfire."

"Yeah?"

"Don't fall in love with him."

Jetfire freezes mid-step, then laughs easily, carelessly.

"Me? Come on, Optimus, you know me. I like it quick and easy, no complications."

Optimus does not reply, watching his second disappear into the darkness, white wings tilting a little this way and that as if testing the air. He tries to let himself be reassured: Jetfire, after all, knows his own spark better than anyone else. Except, perhaps, in those moments in battle when Optimus catches brief, bright glimpses of his deepest-hidden desires.

And Optimus knows all too well that Decepticons have a way of creating complications whether you like it or not.

Don't fall in love with him, Jetfire, Optimus repeats bleakly in his mind, as if his friend could somehow hear him through the darkness and the silence.

That is, if you haven't already.