"We were gods, once."
Optimus Prime had had more years than he cared to remember to learn not to give a hint of reaction—not to let anything of feeling show that sensors could teek, that the eye could see.
Let the enemy know what you thought, give him anything to latch onto, and his claws would be past your armor and digging in your mainlines before you knew it. Control—that was the vital thing one learned in the course of keeping the Autobots alive and fighting.
So he did not react outwardly, and kept the dismay shuttered tightly within, masked it by standing up so that the audible clenching he couldn't prevent didn't stand out.
We were gods once. Visions of a destroyed landscape, of shattered docks and fire one could see from orbit swam past the mind's eye, and thought raced even as he said something (anything) placating. He had hoped that the wounds Sentinel had sustained, that his closeness to death might have purged those ideas and left him once again what he should always have been—one of Cybertron's guardians, made to serve.
But deity was a dangerous enterprise, and there were, after all, gods and gods.
By some accounts, Optimus was a deicide, but he could live with that. The question was whether Cybertronians could again afford to live with the gods he had been willing to kill once.
Or if indeed they were alive again, in Sentinel. Should he have tested him differently—foregone the trappings of the old reverence and simply let Sentinel react to the example of one who did not bow, unless to help? Had he misjudged, and played into that horrifying fantasy that had ripped the old religion free of its moorings and helped feed the fires of Cybertron's destruction, as Primes and the ambitious vied for Primacy—for deification? Did Sentinel mean to say he wished to resume that status? Did he mean to say he regretted the adulation lost in the holocaust that had been Cybertron's civil war?
Or did he mean only that he regretted the responsibility and the task that once had been his to share with the other Primes? What did he mean?
But Sentinel said no more, seeming only a weary traveler, worn out and lost here. And so Optimus decided to wait, to bide his time.
Ironhide, he sent, however, keep close to Sentinel—I want you on him at all times.
What's wrong? his weapons' specialist demanded instantly.
Perhaps nothing. We'll see. But keep Sentinel safe—and listen to him. You know what to watch for.
There was a slight pause, and Optimus could imagine the gravity and darkness in Ironhide's tones in the words that scrolled down the side of his HUD.
Affirmative. Primus help us!
Or pass us by, Optimus could not forebear to add. We are too small for such attentions!
Time reveals the truth of all things, was an old Cybertronian saying.
And indeed, sometimes truth came in short order. He got one garbled, incomplete message from Ironhide, and then his signal had simply dropped from the HUD, and no amount of searching the team tac net could recover it.
And so Prime knew, then, what Sentinel had meant. And that was why he had foregone mourning to go on the hunt. That was why, when he had traced him to the Lincoln Memorial, and had burned into his memory the image of Megatron and Sentinel together, he did not announce himself. He simply waited, watching Megatron, whom he knew so well after all their time warring, pause from time to time, as if brought up short by something jarring—as if he, too, heard something in Sentinel he did not like. Well—Megatron had never been a proponent of the religion some had made of the old ways. He had always been entirely too free for such things, unless to use them when he had to.
As for Optimus—let others call him 'deicide', if they would. For himself, he endured and kept his faith on the trust that if god were, then god was in all beings, and would survive the death of one twisted incarnation.
And so he waited until Sentinel crossed his sights, until the 'bot was dead in his cross-hairs, back fully toward him, totally exposed—
—and pulled the trigger.
Author's Notes: Thou shalt not participate in megalomania. Shouldst thou do so, thou shalt rectify this situation pronto, or thy name be not Optimus Prime.