Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.
"All Of This Is Yours, Orion" by Abraxas 2009-10-23
"Are they shadows that we see?
And can shadows pleasures give?
Pleasures only shadows be,
Cast by bodies we conceive,
And are made the things we deem,
In those figures which they seem."
-Samuel Daniel
The base, in the heart of the Mojave, was a relic of the Cold War era that a new and alien conflict resurrected. Carved out of a mountain, its shelter was shielded by the thickness of its rock, its depths were built to survive what humans called Armageddon. It was well-stocked with supplies too. The Cybertronians were at a loss about what to do with the food and other, dehydrated fluids; the reactor, though, was a very welcomed addition. It was not Energon but, given what that state of technology allowed, it was like manna.
The complex was, by its nature, rather shadowy and dark. The lights were murky, dusky as if to mask the grime accumulated through years of abandonment. Where the fixtures were radiant, usually about the passages within the mountain, the glow revealed vast and inexhaustible caverns - chambers braced by a network of steel.
Oddly, that mixture of synthetic and organic architecture reminded the Autobots of their Cybertron.
And to think, it was build by humans, Optimus Prime wondered as he slunked through the corridors. That his allies would be capable of such grandeur filled him with a kind of pride. Maybe his faith was not all together ill-founded - despite everything Sam warned about.
At night, while the rest settled into recharge, Optimus Prime took advantage of the quiet to leave his quarters and roam about the facilities. He needed to be alone with his thoughts and as time passed it seemed he required it more and more. It had been a hectic couple of years - far too eventful - given that he was of a race unaccustomed to rapid, frenzied change.
He felt another kind of recharge was due - a 'breather' to use a colloquialism - or risk insanity.
He explained it to Sam, who wondered why he preferred to be alone that way, by calling it dreaming. The solitude was like a canvas. Atop of its void, spurred by suggestion, flashed images out of the past. It was breathtaking - and, so, was it not dreaming?
That night the leader discovered a passage that had been overlooked half a century. It revealed a chamber obscured by onyx except at a splatter of light across its floor below. Above its ceiling appeared to spiral into a shaft out of which emerged that blaze, bright and blue, the illumination of upper, distant areas of the complex.
He ambled into that alcove with the elegance of a dancer in spite of his stature.
Chains, that dangled off of the ceiling, rustled as though caught by a breeze. The chime of their links, as they brushed side to side, competed with the sounds of droplets falling onto the floor. It was the watertable spilling into the bowels of the constructions.
Optimus Prime stood at the center of the radiance and faced upward. The water hit his face like rain. It was so alien, that effect, yet he supposed it should be natural given that the planet itself was water. On Cybertron is was different - dirty?
The Autobots often hid inside caverns and out of the way, forgotten areas. They moved like rats through a maze of tunnel within the territories of the Decepticons. Of course they were drenched by waste and oil. Water, despite its prickly cool texture, was clean.
At the end of the chamber was a passage carved through granite. He could not say if it was natural of the work of man. It was, again, rendered unreal by its umber. The void itself was revealed only by his optics - and its image invited him closer and closer.
The deep. The abyss. He was not afraid of its shelter. No, it lured with its mystery, it soothed with its embrace - like strong, heavy arms whose touch revealed dimensions of adoration unknown to minds of flesh and blood. A universe of possibilities seemed suggested by its outlines. There was something about the dark that the light only extinguished. Was it wonder? Was it awe?
He held a hand against his chest below his spark. All of a sudden he was aware of the way the dream converged that specter of the past with the shadow and darkness of the moment. It was reality turned into abstraction.
The Autobot melted into the passage while still rubbing that zone between armor plates - where the cabling urged the touch of a mate.
The void - it accepted and did not judge but its loyalty was tainted by its want. And again it returned, like a sleeper aware of his dream, he realized he was not thinking about light and dark but the struggles between a pair of individuals. It was just a moment of clarity, passing and fleeting, and in the wake of it, while his waking and slumbering minds warred, his body felt showered by the echoes of the touches of that stranger who worshiped his perfection.
He stirred beneath his chest. His soul begged release. He wondered if it was still that way with the other - or - if rancor wiped away devotion.
What a wonder dreaming was though it often startled the leader with its revelations.
Walking. Stumbling. Crawling. Into the shelter offered by the abyss. He contemplated the connections he was drawing. The consciousness was a mask, it tempered his thoughts and actions, it shaped him the way society and its ethics demanded. Beneath that lurked the subconsciousness and it was free of scrutiny - it saw the truth - as it weaved together its own conclusions unchained by morality. Through his treks, amidst that sketchy, formless webwork, the stimulation provided by outlines of shapes elicited those visions, those recollections, that were what he utterly and completely denied.
Denied - but not regretted. It had to be stifled because of its personal and intimate nature. That was why Sam could not join; it would have been too awkward to discuss the truth of it. Although he knew the boy was capable of understanding what he endured.
It was, of course, about the forbidden flavor of love.
Sam spent a lot of time with Bumblebee and soon it seemed Mikaela was but a memory too. They always looked forward to their visits and the roadtrips the followed. There was a tenderness revealed between the lines of their interactions. The others were oblivious; perhaps, if they suspected, they dismissed it as friendship. But Optimus Prime knew.
Subconsciousness revealed it.
And he knew, before Sam and Bumblebee realized and confessed it to each other, that they were bonded. It was pure. He knew that, too, and admitted a taste of jealousy that they could be public about it.
It might be considered impossible that beings of vastly separate worlds would be able to find a mate within each other's company yet that was the pull of love. It reveled in its ferocity, in its blindness. Its strike could not be predicted and it was vain to resist.
Once upon a time Optimus Prime knew of love but that was then and this was now and while the bond lingered it could not be consummated. It was a source of malice not of fidelity. A line had been crossed and the fall could not be undone - the gaze of betrayal, expressed through the face of that specter, could not be forgotten.
Enmity did not always divide them. It used to be that they were as unified as any two beings could be. Their differences, which were considerable, did not matter, Decepticon and Autobot, did not exist while they rested in the middle, not dark, not light. There, in each other's arms. There, as their sparks melded. There.
The tight, cramped corridor emptied into a juncture where a tremor shattered the bedrock. Filtered through sand, through the cracks along the walls, was the brilliance of the stars and the freshness of the air. It was a safe location to stop - but he was not finished yet.
The leader paused to meditate. He trekked farther and deeper than anyone. Still, it seemed like scratching a surface beneath which boiled oceans of torments. There were too many recollections buried under the corrosion of millions of years that awaited revival. His spark. His body. All of it yearned the reawakening. Because even if it were memory it would have been enough.
At the distance there was a sight that surprised his senses. Was it real? Was it imagined? Was there a difference? It was too perfect to be coincidence. Faint distant images, fragments of a world that time and space obliterated. What happened - was it before or after the war? He could not be certain anymore. The ages played with his mind and his notions of continuity. It could have happened yesterday, the flood of emotion was too great.
He fancied that he saw himself approaching that vista beyond as if again a youngling in Cybertron.
He would have been the size of Sam and about as well-armored.
The initiation came when he was brought into the chamber by a pair of soldiers. They were terse, stern figures who otherwise did not wish to interact with a youth. They showed him into that apartment and exited without a word. The doorway, that dwarfed and appeared to grow larger by the breath, clasped shut and would not budge.
A wave of fear coursed through his body - until that moment he did not know what it was to feel so vulnerable.
When he realized that the guards were not coming back and that, for better or worse, he was left to face the wraith alone, he looked about to find any kind of exit. His optics, like rest of his body, was immature and not yet strong enough to peer into the obscurity that enveloped the cavern. Instead he circled tentatively, slowly, always listening - watching.
He found a chair and explored its ornate, brassy fixtures - it was too large to be used by adults he knew of and that, coupled with the dimensions of the chamber, proved that its resident destroyed his concept of size.
He kept by the chair as if it were a guardian, clinging almost climbing onto its frame, as the outline of the beast swirled like a whirlwind. Its silhouette fell onto his body; it seemed to be insubstantial, that unfocused, fuzzy outline, though its shape exuded a strength that froze his motion. Tendril-like arms of onyx wrapped about his shoulder and waist and tugged him away from the sanity of the chair to the insanity of its vortex.
The world was a blur as the specter unfurled in front of his eyes.
Afeared, his chest rumbled while his lips gasped. The stranger replied with a sympathetic if amused vocalization that ebbed into a series of sounds designed to soothe and calm. The waves of its voice reverberated through his frame and that sensation was followed by a warmth that washed his own unarmored hide. It was then that he was aware of his spark glowing through his frame - it was dim to be sure but the chamber had been plunged into oblivion and it blazed like a sun.
At last he was aware of the reality of the shape - the shape of the shadow's hands, fingers as they stroked about his spark.
Lips pressed onto the top of his head - he relaxed. A word was uttered but he could not understand it. Then, as he reached and felt the hard, cold metal of the beast, its feelers returned to explore. They probed places along his body that he thought only he knew of, centers of pleasure, yet as they were rubbed he was too nervous still to reply properly.
The hands then fingers dug into that area below his spark where his only bit of armor was located. It was not a place he explored. The doctor, Ratchet, warned not to touch it until they talked about it later. He knew, though, that something lurked inside of that and while the monster's touch failed to elicit the reactions of his play within that realm of mystery he felt that something stir.
It wanted to be touched and he gasped with anticipation when the figure reached its tip - even with the creature's thin long fingers it was too tiny, undescended and underdeveloped, to be reached.
The feelers gently spread and parted the armor enough that object could be seen. It was the tip of a cable at the bottom of the spark. Thick. Short. Capped with a curious pair of male and female terminals.
"How can it be? How can anything be so beautiful?" the voice asked while eyes set into red and lips curled into smile. "There must be a god, indeed, to create something so perfect."
He reached out and felt the face that belonged to those features. Again, without resistance, his own hands and fingers probed and explored. Then, softly, they courses were tugged lower and lower until they were at the specter's glowing exposed spark. He reached in its chamber and stroked it.
"You waited a long, long time," sighed Optimus Prime as he recalled that introduction - his cable discharged oil while it twisted through his fingers. "You waited for me and I rejected you."
If the Autobot could have wept, he would have welled a tear as he relived the way that mysterious heart of the Decepticon idolized unconditionally.
"It is yours," the shadow said as it offered itself, "all of this is yours, Orion."
END