Title: Of Things That May Yet Be
Authors: Dellessa and Chi Shiro
Rating: T
Verse: Prime- Pre-war
Characters: Orion Pax/Ratchet, Ensemble.
Warnings: Implied Xeno, maybe. Squint and you miss it.
Other Notes: Written for TF Competition Fun
OoOoOo
The dream was so vivid it made Orion Pax doubt his sanity. He had had the dream increasingly over the vorn, until it was a nightly occurrence. It was hard for him not to think it was reality and the waking world just a dream. The pale, organic creatures that inhabited the dreamscape were not like anything listed in the halls of the Iacon archives. He did not believe his processor complex enough to invent such things. How could they not be reality?
Not that he wanted such a thing. A world in endless war, and Megatronus... Ratchet had never liked the bot, had warned Orion away from him more times than he could count. Orion was of the processor that Ratchet might be feeling teritorial there. Megatronus was not even himself in the dream. He was Megatron. Not his friend, surely not the bot that Orion had formed a tentative friendship with. No. He was something else entirely. They waged war nightly and it left Orion shaken. Shaken and scared. He could not understand why he would have such odd dreams. Why his subconscious would ever think he could rise up to be...Prime. He knew he was not, nor ever would be, worthy of such an honor. He was only an archivist.
Orion was still puzzled how he had ever gained Ratchet's attention. That at least was something that mirrored his real life. Ratchet was there in that dreamscape. An older Ratchet, one shaped by that warring world. It made his spark hurt to think about it.
He would wake and try to form the words. Try to make Ratchet understand why he tossed and turned in his recharge, but the words would not leave his vocal processor. He felt as if a swarm of scraplets had stolen his voice from him. Like he was the yellow mechlet, the one whose voice had been stolen from him by Megatronus...Megatron.
Worse still, what ate at him were the others in the dream. That he found himself looking for them in his real life. Sometimes he would see a blur of blue and look for the little femme. Her faceplates were so vivid to him. He wondered how she could be a figment of an overactive imagination. She seemed so very real. Her concern for one of the small organics was remarkable. The organic - Jack - cared for her in equal measure. Cybertronians were not known for their trust in easily squished species. How could he have come to this conclusion in his own fluxing processor? That a femme, the rarest frame-type among rare frame-types, had embraced an organic as her equal? It was absurd even for a dream.
And yet he knew if it were a true dreaming, if it was what was to come, she and the yellow mech would not even be framed yet. They felt so young in the dream. So young and so hurt. He mourned for them, and wished that he could make his own mate understand. Wished he could allay all of Ratchet's worries about his creeping sanity and reaction to these fluxes. He wished that he could tell the medic it was all going to be okay, that things were going to work out.
He thought, as he leaned over to run a digit over Ratchet's recharging form, that perhaps that false hope might be the true dream.