Their wedding was hampered somewhat with the orchestra of bombs and gunfire surrounding them, dampening their soft vows and rattling them to their spark cores as their lips joined. A wartime wedding- unheard of, but certain to be more popular among young Autobot couples now that their leaders had one.
Optimus knew it was traditional to shed all formal armour in the berthchamber, protoform and sparks laid bare to each other in the twilight. But he could only fiddle with the clasps of his chest's base plating as he awaited his new wife's presence.
Maybe she was just as nervous as him; trying to slip her dress armour off without it clattering to the floor in the next room. He couldn't hear anything through the door, only his own vents and the dull thud of his spark as it anticipated the heat of another.
It dampened his audios, making him miss the gentle click of the door opening. There was a cough from the doorway, and he turned to face it.
It was the first time he'd seen her down to her protoform, and it hit him like a hammer to his backstrut. Silver skin, blending into the moonlight softly pooling from the windows, magenta and rose biolights trailing across her thighs and framing her hips. Her servos hung low, digits twisting together, and her helm was kept low to hide her faceplate. Awe spread through his frame in subtle vibrations, in tune with the thrum of his spark as it started to flare impatiently in its chamber.
"And here I thought you could never be more beautiful."
His hushed praise finally brought her helm up, with a smile that could have shamed Crystal City with its brightness. Her optics were tiny cyan smolders in the gloom, flicking curiously over his still-covered frame.
"Having trouble with your armour?" She meant it as a quip as she gestured over him, but nerves ended up cracking it in half and filling the latter one with a tremor. She kept smiling anyway.
Optimus gave a half-smile attempt back, barely holding himself back from running to her. He couldn't do with just staring at her like a lovesick turbofox- he needed to feel her, hold her spark and look into her optics as love fused them together...
"Twitchy digits," he confessed in a low, scratch-filled voice. "You know... how nervous I-"
She'd already reached him, placing her digits under the huge span of his hands and slipping further underneath, to where his armour still clung to his body and kept him separated from her. He felt her in his protoform, pressing in only for a nanoklick and leaving him begging for a centuries more worth of her touch as his plates finally fell to the ground.
War had painted his protoform with a tapestry of scars and still-healing rust bruises, the real reasons he'd been reluctant to expose himself. His warped skin against her smooth, it was like slices of day and night laid beside each other.
Elita didn't back away, staring up at him with creased eyeridges. Instead she hovered her digits over his thickest scars, the side of his chest torn in half and the gutting cut from Megatron himself pitting his abdomen. Only the smaller stitches felt the relief of her touch, shivering underneath her digits despite their warmth. He watched her as she watched him, seeing her optics tracing every groove. She was fascinated by him.
Her peds carried her closer, bringing her lips to the scar at his side. "You're gorgeous, Optimus," she whispered against him, flicking her angel's gaze up as her vents caressed him.
He wasn't, but he would have believed Kaon was made of gold if she'd said so in that moment.
Somehow Optimus made himself stop staring at her, bringing his hands away from holding her faceplate. One trailed down her spinal strut, dipping into the glass biolights lining it, while the other threw itself out in the direction of the waiting berth. "Shall we?"
He led her towards it, but she was the one who pulled him down on top of her, smothering his mouth with a kiss that burst fireworks along his glossa. They melted into each other, like mercury spilling over the sheets, moans only breaking the silence if they manage to slip past the seal of their lips. Iacon could have collapsed around them both and Optimus wouldn't have noticed, because Iacon wasn't Elita.
Pleasure-swamped klicks later, Elita was the first to break their kiss, venting hard against his lips. "You don't have to be gentle with me, Optimus," she told him, trailing one hand off his faceplate and down his chest, in a straight path for his interface panel. "I'm ready for anything..."
"I know. I'm more worried about myself," Optimus admitted, his voice devolving into a growl when her digits found a place at home in his codpiece seams.
"Why's that?" She purred against his lips in a teasing smile.
"I might not be able to leave you after this," he warned, burying his face in her neck as a long moan ripped through his vocaliser. She always was good with her hands...
He grazed it up her protoform, through the center of her chestplates and in a circle where her spark chamber would be. The interface and spark bond was always combined, simultaneous as mech and femme gave each other entirely to themselves.
His spark was already starting to beam out as his chest plates slid apart, the pure brilliance of it only being released when his chamber spread open.
The blue-veined light floating in the darkness almost looked like her optics.
The glaze of fascination returned as she watched his soul bared to her, waiting for her trust to show itself. Her digits ran between the razor-thin seams that would pull her chestplates apart, bringing her own spark out in offering.
All the playfulness of their foreplay had dissolved in her, but she let the plates part and kept herself firmly planted on the berth as a white glow, tinged slightly in pink, started to bleed from her. Even through the supernova, Optimus could make out the curled letters imprinted on her chamber, the same name that trembled past her lips.
"I love you, Orion," she whispered, tugging him back down with her servo entwined in his.
"And I love you, Ariel." His soft promise went somewhere against her throat as their sparks reached for each other, tendrils of energy grasping like hands and pulling one into the other.
Optimus awoke before his spark could live through the agony of losing her light again. The coolant that soaked his frame during recharge had long since dried into a thin, uncomfortable crust over his armour, and the usual thudding echo in his helm was accompanied by a piercing, impatient beep from his comm unit.
"About damn time, you fraggin'-!" Wheeljack's voice was a tornado of curses that Optimus could barely decipher in his sluggish state. He groaned as the chorus of aches in his processor spiked into a painful crescendo.
"Calm down, Wheeljack," he managed to groan, forcing himself upright on his berth. "Are you with Airachnid?" As much as he didn't want to admit it, if there was anything wrong she was most likely to be the cause of it.
"Yeah, and... we've got a problem," Wheeljack said, his rumbling vocaliser coming across as crackling static.
Optimus inhaled, almost scared to ask, "What kind of problem?"
There was a pause, as if Wheeljack was just as wary of answering, before he finally revealed, "A very small and pissed one called Miko."
xx
The flashback here is actually a censored version of a standalone fic I put up on AO3, so if you want to see it uncensored just look for Promise: The Wedding Night.
And to answer a question from a review of the previous chapter (the only one I can answer without spoilers being involved): I currently don't have any plans for Smokescreen or Ultra Magnus to be showing up, though that might change as I try to figure out how to get to the ending I want (Magnus making an appearance is very unlikely though, as I only want to span the second season of TFP).