For Calger – may she excuse the clumsiness.
Delphanalogicon
It was May in the desert, and in the eastern distance, thunderheads piled high and dark, trailing rain and the occasional flash of lightning. To the west, the sun was a fast-fading gleam. Street lamps began to flicker to life – one, two, three, in evenly spaced rows... until one got to Fort Street. Then gaps opened, and light snaked along a path that curved and swerved, rose and fell, sometimes flickering, while the low whine of strained power lines filled the air. The street was filled with rubble and worse than rubble – men and women in fatigues hauled broken figures from the wreckage, laid the dead out in neat rows for still others to come and lift into the backs of open-topped trucks for transport to the morgue.
And then there were the other bodies that no one was really sure what to do with other than to ask to have them moved so that human drivers could get around them.
Ironhide and Optimus had seen to that, had helped clear the streets enough for use, though both of them could feel their fair share of shorts and breaks and cracked gears and armor. It wasn't as bad as it could be – as both of them knew quite well from entirely too much experience – but it was bad enough.
"Be feelin' this for weeks," Ironhide had grunted, his engine turning over in a pained groan. But then: "Can't complain though – we got it done."
"Yes," Optimus agreed. "Yes, we did." He fell silent a few moments, as the two of them stood, leaning against a more or less intact skyscraper, watching the humans going about their business. It was striking, the activity – or perhaps it was simply that there were so many of them. Optimus tried to remember the last time he had had half as many 'bots under his direct command.
After Tyger Pax, there had been the strike on Kolkular, and the battles for control of several lunar bases and power plants. The southern colony worlds – Swana!ataar, Panakor, Coltax – had involved millions and been heavily contested, to say nothing of messy, what with so many refugees having fled to them in the hopes of waiting out the war there. There had been the blockades at Amparzene and at !Xaxk; the border raids along the Srrrii frontier, on the fringes of G'hai space, and all around Chyun!or territory.
But over the centuries, as worlds fell and Cybertronians dispersed all along the space lanes and beyond, battles had involved fewer and fewer 'bots, 'til they were down to squad actions, to special teams operating alone against pairs and triads, or even singletons like 'Bee and Jazz and Barricade. They were spread too thin for heavy action, mostly: Neutrals and civilians clustered defensively behind picket forces in little pockets of backburn systems, while the rest of them, Autobot and Decepticon alike, scattered like dust looking for the Allspark in all the vastness of galactic space.
And of course, all the while, they'd been dying – without the Allspark, gaps opened in the ranks, and after awhile, you just couldn't fill them, even if you had an Ironhide able to step up. For even Ironhide had his limits, and he could not do the work of ten or a hundred or a thousand, no matter how willing he might be. His old friend might not complain, but Optimus knew that Ironhide was tired – they were all tired, just core-weary. Optimus contemplated this a moment, then said, without looking, "Ironhide, you're off-duty. Take the next two shifts and power down. Give your systems time to repair the basics."
"What about you?" Ironhide demanded, and Optimus could feel the other's concerned scan.
"I've got another day in me. Besides which," he said, smiling slightly, "if I go in now, there's the chance Ratchet won't have forgotten about that bit of jet judo earlier."
Ironhide's vents cycled hard as he gave a harrumph! "No fear of that, we'll remember for him!" He shook his head. "What were you thinking?"
"That I had to get him out of the air. That he was flying low and that his systems were likely still partially iced." A pause. "That it seemed like a good idea at the time."
"The twins are never gonna let you live this down, you realize."
"I'm painfully aware of that, Ironhide."
His weapons specialist's engine purred with smug amusement, but then shook his head and pushed away from the building. "All right, I'll relieve you in twenty-four solar hours. Call if you need me, though."
Optimus flashed him an affirmative, and a silent thanks, which Ironhide, in his usual graceful manner, growled over and then pointedly ignored. He transformed and Optimus watched as he made his way out towards the garage where Ratchet and Bumblebee and the girl, Mikaela, had gone earlier, then returned his attention to the scene before him. But his thoughts were elsewhere than these streets.
We got it done. Vents flared, and Optimus winced slightly as an antenna tingled. He reached a hand up and rubbed at it, let the static hiss through his mind – comforting white noise. The aftermath of battle was always hard – harder, in many ways, than the battle itself. Usually, he had duties to see to, 'bots to keep watch on, morale to tend to, a next step to plan – things to occupy his attention until he could afford to shut down and take the awful rest that followed inevitably.
Not so this time. It had taken millennia, but they'd done what they set out to do and at the moment, he could not for the long life of him see his way to a next step. They were stranded, strangers among an alien people who might well not want them among them. At best, he could send up a signal, but it might be more than a solar year before it reached anyone, and longer still before anyone could make his way to this place. There was no guarantee that whoever came would have a transport, either. Even if it were Prowl who answered, and they could return to Cybertronian space, or what was left of it, there remained a rather urgent question: would anyone care to follow him after this?
The Allspark was destroyed, after all – and though it hadn't been his hand, he'd been willing. They had all been willing – Jazz and Ironhide, Ratchet and Bumblebee. They'd at least been willing to follow him to that end, though he'd never discussed the possibility of one of them destroying it. Everyone had something he couldn't know, and that he knew he couldn't know, if will was not to fail.
And so Optimus couldn't know just how far he could trust those closest to him – he couldn't know whether they had it in them to see it through in his stead or not. He had to believe that they could have. Likewise, the Autobots as a whole could not know the nature of their mission – if that knowledge had been widespread in the ranks, they'd have had their own people as well as Decepticons gunning for them. That wasn't the unification he had been aiming for, but he couldn't have blamed them for it, either – he and his squad had gone forth knowingly to extinguish the one thing that gave their people a future, and the worst of it was that they had succeeded. Almost by accident, but that did not change the fundamental fact: he hadn't asked for this sacrifice, he'd simply imposed it.
When he had become Prime, his people had demanded leadership; by the time Tyger Pax had reached the stage of planning, the odds against the Decepticons had been such that they'd been demanding a miracle. And they'd gotten one: what were the odds of a Decepticon warhead hitting the space bridge's command center just as the Allspark was ready for transport? What were the odds that the bridge should still have functioned, even if haphazardly, rather than simply destroying whatever and whoever was within the warp field? But miracles and mechs were fickle – in the absence of the Allspark, the violence had but spread with the search for it. After Tyger Pax had come a long, slow slide to a sort of numbed and numbing silence as the war dragged on and no one knew anymore what to hope for. To find the Allspark might give some lives, yet to hold it was to bring down a war that could not be won; but to surrender it would no more bring about peace than holding on. On the horns of dilemma, even Cybertronians could not endure: they had sought a third way – Let it stay forever lost!
But the third way was a false exit. Of all of them, Prowl had been the first to say it aloud – which was perhaps the only reason that Prowl, devotee of logic that he was, had acceded to his Prime's decision that if duty would not allow him not to look in earnest for the Allspark, neither did it permit him – or anyone – to reclaim what had been lost once it was recovered. That the only way to force the Decepticons to a truce, even, was to present them with an ultimatum that would bind them to their enemies as to themselves –Destroy us, and destroy yourselves.
Perhaps even Prowl, however, had not quite been able to follow his own logic all the way through to unreserved commitment. And perhaps that is the only reason we are here today, Optimus thought. Because perhaps that was what his second in command could not know – that there had been a chance of success.
But we got it done, as Ironhide said, he thought. They had their victory – the sort that in English passed under the name of Pyrrhus. It was up to the Decepticons now. Again. Still – and whatever happened next, the Autobots had nothing more to stake. This was their last gamble – the final fate of their kind was in the hands of a faction that had proved willing to devastate entire worlds.
And he'd been the one to give it to them.
He kept tripping over that fact. And numb with shocked exhaustion as he was, his thoughts didn't choke on it – they just couldn't process it either. If he were honest, he probably never would be able to, and there was no one he could share this with, either. Ratchet, Ironhide, Bumblebee – they too would suffer from this guilt, and Optimus intended to be there when they needed him, but there was a limit on reciprocity. They were his dearest friends, his brothers in this thrown-together cohort, and he could not name a 'bot he trusted more than them... but they had never been Prime. They had never had a flicker of desire to be Prime.
There was only one other 'bot he knew who might have wanted it, and who, though he had never borne the Matrix, had ever stood in a place like his. Delphanalogicon – a brother not by spark or by make, nor by cohort, chosen or unchosen, but a brother nonetheless, and the one among all the others in the vast and varied net of fraternity that Cybertronians cast for themselves who understood implicitly, though the two of them tore each other to shreds on that very understanding. Unthinkingly, he reached for that com-line and the spark and mind behind it – for tear each other though they might, still, beyond every battle, function made of them brothers who could not quite leave each other be.
But Megatron did not answer him, and this time it was not for spite or distance or even contempt. And so after a few moments listening to the silence, he closed the channel, straightened up and crossed the (for him) short distance to the dusty white-silver form lying still and broken just out of the way of human comings and goings. There he knelt and stared down at a face too familiar, thinking.
Strange though it might seem, Megatron likely was as much responsible for his becoming Prime as Optronix ever had been. Before the war had truly begun, when Megatron was reputed merely a young, ambitious, arrogantly competent wing commander, without quite the respect for his place that made a good soldier, they'd met. Even then, there had been signs – rumors more troubling than mere arrogance were beginning to surface, and Megatron had left his home cohort in Tarn for Kaon, for reasons no one was quite willing to speak of.
At the time, it hadn't made sense, in many ways – despite his aggression, despite the strained relations with his makers and superiors, and even his brothers, Megatron had been one step from being made Sub-perator for the Third Air Defense cohort. Why leave to take up what could only be described as a civilian post under one of the least well-loved Perators on Cybertron? Yet he had done it, and it had been in that capacity that Optronix had first encountered him – Kaon's Perator had wanted freighting rules waived for certain of their shipments through Saanakaar Orbital Docks, but rather than speak himself with Saanakaar cohort's Perator Voltarax, he had sent his newest emissary, Megatron. Voltarax in turn had sent Optronix, who was junior enough to be both match to Megatron and answer to Kaon.
Voltarax hadn't counted on Megatron, however. "Optronix," he had said coolly, when Optronix had introduced himself. "Named for vision – whose, I wonder?" Then, without allowing him the time to respond, he had gone on briskly, "So they've sent you to balance Kaon's arrogance, have they? And have you the pride to do it?"
"Pride has little to do with duty – " he had tried to say, but had gotten only a shake of the head and a laugh.
"If it has not, then why are you here?" Megatron had demanded. And when Optronix had said nothing, the other had pinned him with an unnervingly intense stare, and said quietly, "You were sent to deal with me because your Perator's pride knows a slight when it's offered. So does yours – or else your name means nothing. And you're too silent for it to mean nothing. But," he had said, with pointed deliberation, "silence is complicit still. You are yet content with your lot, I guess. We may have been made to serve a similar function, but you have yet to assume it, and until you do, you are not my brother, for you cannot match me." Megatron had stepped back, distance made manifest as he had dismissed Optronix: "Go back to your Perator and tell him that if he will deal with us, he should come himself. I will not deal with you as you are."
There had been nothing he could say to that, and so Optronix had turned without a word to leave. But he had only just gained the door, when Megatron had spoken again. "Optronix." He had turned, silent still, and cocked his head at the other.
"You could be more than you are. But you will have to want it, and that will cost you – you will not find the means to match me in Saanakaar Station with the void-venters. But if you've the spark to cut yourself free, you'll know where to look to discover just what you have in you to become."
It had been a long time ago, that meeting, and since then, he had found he had it in him to be many things – Prime not least of them. Yet the question Megatron had given him, the question of what he could be, remained open – and today he could not avoid it. What had he become, that he would bet the lives of all his people on the chance that if there could be no new life, then that which existed already would be allowed to continue?
Optimus's vents flared, long and slow. Megatron in his youth had been many things, none of them safe – but there was a reason he had gone on to be such a scourge to his people and to whole sectors and civilizations. He'd had that spark of something more, before war and wickedness had hardened him and hollowed him out. Abrasive, restive, intense, at once off-putting and dangerously seductive, he spoke a certain truth, always, and so brought a choice before his listener. A lethal choice for a dangerous truth – that not everything that was given could simply be received. That complacency could eat a civilization from within – that life required a certain daring, because it was a risk, and he could make a 'bot feel that for the first time. That had been his virtue; whatever awful else must be said of him, that had been his greatness. One wanted to match him, challenge for challenge. Optronix, troubled though he had been, seeing too clearly what Megatron could become, had wanted nevertheless to earn for the first time what should (as Cybertronians saw it) be given – that title, 'brother.'
For Megatron had been right at that first meeting to say that he was not equal to the task that function had given them. There had been some subsequent encounters when he would still have been right to take a distance, refuse that bond. But there had come a point when fraternity could no longer be denied, whether or not the claim was acknowledged.
Such was the case today. This day, if no other, he had earned the right to claim his brother as a brother – a Prime had a power of life and death, and he'd been using it all along. One couldn't fight a war otherwise. Hitherto there had always been Megatron to rail against – he could always fall back on the claim, not without honor, of defense of his people against a predator. It was not untrue. But it did not say the truth of what 'Prime' meant. 'Prime' was not only service or benevolent governance. To be Prime was to live with a certain lethal power of choice always before one: the one who could decide for all his people was the one who could end them, and there were no guarantees that such a decision could be wisely made. There was no hiding from that any longer, nor from the fact that when he had taken up the Matrix, he had wanted that power – and so he must also have wanted to be here today. To be able to be here, as much as anywhere else.
Megatron knew that desire better than anyone – and he hadn't required the Matrix to act on it. Usurper? Undoubtedly. Monstrous? Unquestionably. But in this one matter, honest. More honest for long than Optimus. More mad, too – where it concerned that one thing one must not know to continue on, one paid for such honesty with sanity or with self: one went mad, or one changed, and Megatron, despite his rhetoric, was not one to change himself.
And so he had ended here, victim of inertia as much as of anything else.
"Delphanalogicon," Optimus murmured. They had been given that bond, been tied to each other before either of them knew anything of it, and since they'd become aware of it, they'd not had a day's peace, for all they'd grown more alike under the rule of war. Optimus shut his eyes a moment, feeling all through himself the burn and throb not just of wounds, but of woundedness. "Primus, just how close...?"
No doubt, Megatron would have laughed at him for that – laughed, and then twisted the blade. "How close? Wake up, Seer, you are,you're not 'close'. And what now will you do? Flinch, and I'll put you back to close – I'll cut you from me and not mourn the loss. Don't tell me your sorrows – unmake them, or I'll unmake you."
Optimus opened his eyes once more. Burned out, darkened optics stared back at him, and on impulse, he reached and ran fingers down Megatron's face, following the cool, sleek lines, feeling the clean cut of the glyphs that most 'bots graved on themselves somewhere, marking hopes –Strength. Power. Freedom.
Not vision, though. Perhaps that was telling, and perhaps that first time they had met, Megatron hadn't tried him only to unsettle him – perhaps he had made a bid because something in him had realized he needed what Optronix might – might possibly – have. Would things have unfolded differently if Optronix had gone with Megatron? Might something have changed, and for the better?
Or would he, in following the other, have lost the very thing that made him desirable?
There were no answers to such questions, and Optimus had been Prime and commander in war long enough to know not to dwell on them. "Hindsight is always surer in any case," he sighed, and straightened up painfully. Still, he lingered over Megatron, exhausted, ambivalent, grieved and grieving, and yet unable, quite, to leave. Why can I not? a part of him, the echo of Optronix, perhaps, demanded, and worried vexedly over the question.
But in the end, he knew the answer. "Because we are brothers," he said softly, and brothers surely owed each other something more than grief. And so he looked down upon the shell, and said, "Starscream and Soundwave, and all the others that you made – it is their choice now, to end this madness or play it to the end. But I will promise you this – I won't let them make that choice alone. I'll fight them all the way to the table if I have to, but this war will end, and they will go on, and we as well, and take what we can from what you gave us, whether we wanted it or not. You will be remembered when all are one – and if I have anything to say, there will be some at least who remember you for more than this disaster we've made, despite it all. That is what we owe each other, brother mine – to find the good in the ill, for come what may, it will always be true that what I am, what we are, in every aspect, we would not be that without you."
Author's Notes: In the spirit of Steve Miller Band's fine song, "Take the Money and Run," I've snatched elements from anything at hand to write this story, which follows no known timeline for the movie or any other continuity. The aim is to end up at the events (almost) onscreen in the movie, without having to deal with the backstory developed for it, which I don't find to be terribly well done.
Calger had asked me to explain the exchange from my story, Bridges, in which I had Ironhide claim that Megatron and Optimus Prime were brothers, but not brothers in the way that Ironhide was with his unnamed brothers.
While pondering how to present the idea that I had in terms that were not horribly pedantic and boring (and which, incidentally, did not have Prime appear at all in the narrative), my 'Objects in Mirror' muse suggested that I could kill two birds with one stone if I made everything revolve around that nagging logical question: just how does destroying the one means your species has to reproduce itself put an end to the war? The observatory scene makes it clear that the decision to destroy the Allspark was not a spur of the moment decision, and everyone had agreed it was necessary to end the war. But why?How does that help end the more than 10,000 year-old war? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?
Yeah, that's what I thought, too.
So here you go, Calger – hope you like it, and thanks for the artwork!
Delphanalogicon – from adelphos, Greek for "brother" + "analogy" with a jiggered ending to suggest a robotic noun, like Decepti-con.
Perator - I've tried keeping to the notion that there may be many leaders, but only one Prime. "Perator" was an effort to specify a civilian leader, and to reserve "commander" to military ranks. I figured some version of "Imperator" would work, given the fondness of TF fandom for Latin.