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The Autobots led Megatron to the council chamber in chains, an inhibitor clamp around the back of his neck and the stasis cuffs turned up to maximum power, and they were still afraid of him.
They should be.
Megatron looked around at the cowardly faces of the councilors and let them see every bit of the force of his contempt. He'd only learned of their plan this morning. He shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d known there was nothing they wouldn't stoop to. And yet…
“You have to see that this is wrong,” Optimus said, in the tired tones of someone who’d already repeated himself many times.
“And as I've told you, Optimus, my friend, you're free to step down. Someone else can easily be found to take your place,” Sentinel replied.
Optimus turned to Megatron. Of all the mechs in the council chamber, he was the only one who'd meet Megatron's glare. “I’m sorry.”
The motor in the hinges of Optimus's battlemask vibrated with a low whine, as if he was fighting the urge to slam it shut, right here in the council chamber, in the middle of the Autobot stronghold.
“You see now what kind of regime you’re lending yourself to,” Megatron said, and Optimus, who'd never cringed from him before, flinched. But all he said was,
“I thought you might prefer if it was me. But if you’d rather someone else –“
Optimus's expression said he was well aware of what a paltry choice he was offering. Behind him, Sentinel was smirking. Certainly he’d have another candidate all picked out and ready to go. Someone more tractable than the troublesome Prime. The silence stretched on, interminable, as Optimus waited for him to make his decision. Any alternative would be worse, and yet. To make this choice, to cooperate even in that minute way—
Sentinel’s smirk spread. Yes, certainly he'd have a candidate he'd prefer.
“Go ahead then, if you're going to do it,” Megatron ground out gracelessly. Optimus breathed out, fans clicking faintly.
The medic wheeled over the machine and unspooled the cords. Optimus plugged himself in, and then hesitated, second cord in hand. Unlike an Autobot, Megatron’s armored build did not leave any vulnerable ports uncovered. Optimus looked at his chest plate, the thick layer of durasteel covering Megatron's array.
“You’re going to make us force the port, aren’t you,” he said, sounding resigned. “You do realize they’re just going to drill it open, and it’s going to be excruciating?”
“Did you expect cooperation, Prime?” Megatron sneered.
Optimus sighed.
The drilling, as Optimus had predicted, was agonizingly painful, and tediously slow. It helped that Optimus looked more pained than Megatron did, a comforting remainder that, as pathetic as Megatron’s current position might be, it wasn’t yet anywhere near as pathetic as the general state of Autobot sensibilities. To pretend at squeamishness, when Optimus could have put a stop to this at any point. The guards were heavily armed, to be fair, but he’d seen Optimus take on more dangerous foes with worse odds, and that before his frame had been reforged into the weapon it was now. The rest of the council was unarmed, easy prey for the slaughter.
Finally the medic managed to pry away the last armored plate and lever open the inner cover. Megatron stared straight ahead as the medic attached the plug, not giving them the satisfaction of a visible reaction even as every firewall he had boosted to maximum.
The Autobot programmers had done impressive work. The virus invaded through the tiniest of cracks in his defenses, twining itself along every neural pathway: a slithering, unclean touch he couldn’t evade for all his best efforts. It barely slowed down as Megatron fought it with everything he had.
A status bar popped up in his HUD, slowly shading from green to red as it filled. The virus turned his head for him, controlling his movements as if he were a drone. Every sensor locked onto Optimus, and then the bar blinked once and disappeared. The pain stopped. His neck servos unlocked. It was done.
“Upload's complete,” the medic said dispassionately.
“Well? Did it take?” Sentinel barked.
“Give him an order. I’m monitoring the neural response." The medic didn't take his eyes from his screens.
“Kneel down,” Optimus said gently.
As first orders went, it wasn’t promising. Megatron had to fight an irrational sense of betrayal even as he fought the command all the way down to his knees, crashing to the polished floor with a clang.
“The coding’s taken,” the medic said without looking up from his readings.
Megatron snarled.
Optimus put a hand on the inhibitor clamp on the back of Megatron’s neck, conveniently within his reach now that Megatron was on his knees—in fact, he couldn't have easily accessed it any other way. The command made somewhat more sense now, except for how Optimus must've known what it would mean to make him kneel in front of the council.
"You might have asked, if you couldn't reach," Megatron snapped.
"I assumed we weren't getting out of here without a convincing demonstration of something you wouldn't have chosen to do on your own." Optimus pulled off the clamp and dropped it to the floor with a clang.
“What are you doing?” the medic squawked.
“The coding has taken. You just confirmed it yourself. That concludes this sham of a trial. We’ll be leaving now,” Optimus said. He reached for the stasis cuffs that locked Megatron’s wrists behind his back.
“You may leave once you’ve completed the spark bond,” Sentinel said.
Megatron's entire body jerked. Optimus froze. “What? You can’t possibly demand that.”
Sentinel sighed. “Oh, for pity’s sake. Which of you cowards failed to properly brief him? Well, no matter. Command of the slave coding can still be transferred to someone else, if you won't cooperate. Megatron has broken the coding once before. I'm not about to bet the safety of the entire planet on a few dubious software improvements when a more permanent solution can be had. If you're too squeamish to do what needs to be done, Optimus, there's plenty of mechs who will. Someone fetch the replacement candidate, and let’s please have an end to this tedious discussion.”
Megatron was straining against the cuffs so hard they whined, but even without the inhibitor clamp, they held. Even if he could've broken them, his body wouldn’t move from its knees, inescapably held by Optimus's last command.
“Wait,” he ground out. Everything had gone curiously distant. His limbs felt brittle with cold, ready to shatter, as if he'd been frozen in liquid nitrogen. He'd lived through slave coding before. He knew he could live through it again. And coding, as Sentinel had said, could be broken. But a sparkbond, even if it could be severed, would leave an imprint of the other mech on his spark forever.
His jaw servos clicked and ground as he spoke. “Optimus. If that's what they're going to do, I'd still prefer if it was you.”
Optimus was sagging, shoulder slumped, optics dim. His antennae had folded flat to his helm. “This isn’t what I wanted.”
“And yet, this is the side you chose,” Megatron said mercilessly. He strained against the cuffs one last time, until his HUD flashed bright red with warnings; every motor in his arms was overheating, and the cuffs hadn't budged. There'd be no escape. He blew out a long, slow breath, venting the excess heat, and made sure his vocalizer was fully calibrated to an authoritative tone before he spoke.
“Go on. I’d prefer to have it over with.”
Optimus stared at him helplessly. Beside him, the medic was reaching for his tools again.
Megatron hesitated. They could drill down to his spark, just as they’d drilled down to that port, but it would take a long time. He doubted they'd bother when they could simply have Optimus order him to open up.
Optimus wouldn't enjoy giving the command. Not that it should've mattered what Optimus wanted at this point. But there was no pleasure in making this harder on him when he already looked so utterly defeated, either. And the thought of feeling the virus taking control of his body again made his tanks churn.
Megatron triggered his chest plates open. It seemed he was to discover the limits of his courage today, after all.
It took two tries to get the innermost layer of armor to open, exposing his spark before the watching eyes of the council. The stasis cuffs sparked with sharp stings of electricity as his arms tensed again in futile fight.
Optimus face glowed with heat to Megatron's infrared vision as he exposed his own spark. He stole an unhappy glance at the council from the corner of his eyes, and some part of Megatron wanted to snarl at the gawking councilors. Megatron was their prisoner, they owed him nothing, and he cared little for what his enemies thought of him; but they might have given Optimus the dignity of averting their eyes. Optimus had been a friend once, and always a worthy adversary, and although in the end he hadn’t had the courage to stand up to the council, it offended Megatron to see him stared at like a buymech in the seedier districts of Kaon.
Optimus took an unsteady step closer. With Megatron on his knees, he had to duck down to bring their sparks level.
"Forgi—" he began, then shook his head. "No. I don't suppose this is the sort of thing that can be forgiven. But I'm sorry nonetheless."
He stepped forward and pressed their chest plates together. His spark met Megatron's in a wild pulse of energy.
Spark merging was an Autobot custom. Decepticons didn't generally choose to trust anyone that much. Megatron had no frame of reference for what it was supposed to feel like even under ordinary conditions, never mind like this. He'd expected something like the slimy intrusion of the slave coding, magnified a thousandfold: the most intimate violation imaginable.
Instead, it felt like stepping from a dark room into a blaze of light. Optimus burned bright like a beacon in his mind, white-hot fire all the way down to his core: courage and determination and a clean burn of rage hot enough to match Megatron's. Optimus saw just as clearly as Megatron did the injustice of this regime, the horrors of the things the council had done. And there wasn't a trace of the cringing cowardice Megatron had expected to find, despite all the courage Optimus had shown in battle; and yet it must be there, or—
Why did you not join me?
The question hung between them, a heavy weight filling the space between their chests.
With Optimus's knowledge of the council's strategy, with the power the matrix had given him, there'd be no limit to what they could achieve together. They could have this city laid waste before them in a day.
Megatron felt Optimus recoil from the thought. For a moment, even seeing Optimus as clearly as he now did, he didn't understand. It wasn't cowardice. The horror Optimus felt at the thought of battle stemmed from someplace else entirely.
Megatron traced the feeling from a bright knot of worry over Optimus's friends in the city—who could easily be evacuated, an almost annoyingly trivial objection—and from there to a spidering web of concern for friends of friends and remote acquaintances. Megatron paused. Optimus's concern should have ended there. It was understandable enough that he worried about his allies. Except that wasn't where it ended. Megatron returned his focus to the network of concern and care, tracing it out to its end—to where it should have ended—and found the same care stretching out to every mech in the city and beyond.
It wasn't even limited to the sentient mechs. Optimus, it seemed, worried about everyone. The crystal foxes in their fragile spire of glass, which would certainly not survive an aerial bombing run. The drones working the docks of Iacon, which could barely be called sentient—a violent flash of disagreement—and beyond that, every single mech on the whole pit-spawned planet. Even the sniveling cowards on the council, who, apart from a few bad sparks, for all their flaws, were trying—no, they were not—yes, they were—
Megatron prodded at the feeling, appalled. He had to have gotten it wrong. You couldn't go through life caring for every mech you met—and, for that matter, ones you hadn't even met—as if they were one of your own. You'd spend your whole life in emotional agony on behalf of perfect strangers, who wouldn't thank you for the concern and certainly wouldn't care to reciprocate it.
"Ah. Reciprocation is not at all the point," Optimus said gently, while Megatron stared at him in horror. It had to be some form of processor damage, or possibly a series of broken fuses in the emotion management subsystem. And an image of this madness had now imprinted itself indelibly on Megatron's spark, which did not bear thinking about in the least.
"I'm sorry," Optimus said again, and Megatron felt the flare of his spark-deep misery at what had been done to Megatron. He was speaking quietly enough that not even the guards would be able to hear him. "We can—we'll figure out some way to fix this."
He reached around Megatron's sides to deactivate the stasis cuffs, ignoring the nervous twitches from the guards surrounding them. Megatron pointedly raised an eyebrow ridge at him.
"Uh, right. You can get up, of course," Optimus said.
Megatron stood up slowly, separating their chest plates. The merge faded out as their sparks drew away from each other, but a connection remained. He could feel Optimus beside him, the same way he could feel his internal compass pointing north; he could feel Optimus's sorrow like an almost physical pain. This really was hurting Optimus as much as it was hurting him.
"You must know I never wanted this," Optimus said.
"I know now," Megatron said, holding on to the certainty of it as he gently reached out and pushed Optimus's chest plates closed for him. Optimus gave him a shaky, hopeful smile as Megatron reached out to set his hand on Optimus's shoulder. The guards twitched again, but no one tried to stop him. In fact, no one seemed to realize what he was doing even as he stroked his thumb against the side of Optimus neck—Sentinel even smirked at him, as if maybe he thought this was something Megatron was picking up from Optimus through the link. Optimus only radiated confusion, right up until Megatron put out a probe and slid it carefully through a narrow gap in his armor to the neuro-cortical strand.
There was a moment of startled betrayal from Optimus, coming through their link bright and clear, and then a single painless zap sent him right into emergency shut-down. Pain ripped through the slave coding like a neural lance, instant punishment, but Megatron bulled through it while he lowered Optimus's limp frame gently down to the floor: Optimus had wanted this fixed. He was fixing it.
The coding reluctantly settled down; the pain faded enough to let him move. Shock had bought him half a second's worth of time, all he needed; the guards were only just reaching for their blasters by the time he started moving.
The guards had been there for the looks of the thing more than anything. The Autobots had relied on the inhibitor clamp and the stasis cuffs, and then the strength of the coding. They must've known that four guards weren't even a proper work-out for Megatron.
He grabbed the two closest ones by the back of the neck and clanked their helms together hard enough to temporarily unseat their processors. They slumped limply from his grasp while he whirled around and kicked a third guard in the hip joint hard enough to stun the motor and drop his legs out from under him. The fourth one had a pathetically thin layer of shielding over the major power relay at the base of his neck. Megatron punched a finger through and ripped out the whole tangle of cords, dropping him unconscious to the floor.
One of the guards had dropped his stun gun when he fell. Megatron picked it up and fired off a triple-strength blast at Sentinel, who'd only just finished mounting his own weapon, too slow; Sentinel had a war-frame's arsenal but none of the training.
He blew out a single whoosh of air to clear what little excess heat he'd built up during that pathetic fight. Looking down at the limp bodies at his feet, he realized belatedly that he'd automatically gone for disabling strikes when a kill would've been half as much effort. He shook off the momentary disorientation; he could wonder at his sudden attack of scruples later.
The whole fight hadn't taken five astroseconds altogether. The councilors were still busy flinching away, half of them falling over each other trying to get out, the rest shrinking in on themselves in their seats. One of the guards had a plasma weapon, ludicrously oversized for his frame. When Megatron clicked it into the still-bared connectors on his arm, it powered up with a satisfying hum. Not as good as his fusion cannon, but a serviceable weapon none the less. None of the councilors were armed with anything beyond maybe a personal knife or the occasional ceremonial weapon; nothing that wouldn't just slide off Megatron's armor. Helpless prey for the slaughter.
The cannon finished charging, humming with power on his arm. The first of the councilors were crowding around the exit, shoving and trampling each other in their panic. Megatron fired a full-strength blast at the ceiling above the door, which came down in a shower of debris and slagged metal. The councilors had scattered away as soon as he'd raised the cannon, but the shockwave still blasted several of them off their feet, and others went down beneath the heavy chunks of concrete, armor cracked and dented. The door had warped in the heat of the blast. No one was getting out that way.
Megatron took aim again. The councilors cringed. One of them, straining uselessly beneath the piece of rubble pinning him to the floor, was crying, streaks of coolant smearing messily down his face.
Megatron snarled, annoyed at himself. An unwelcome, creeping feeling of pity was rising up in him, dragging on him like the touch of a hand on his weapon arm. They were nothing, scared glitchmice scrabbling for power and safety amongst themselves, not a single mech of vision among them. In their fear they'd followed the only leader they had, letting Sentinel's rotten, selfish plans doom them all. Now they were facing the consequences. They ought to be terrified. Megatron had never cared before, and he didn't care now, Primus damn them all; they'd been happy enough to rise to power on the corpses of mechs like him, leaving the lower class bots to starve and die in the dark. Why shouldn't he kill them all now, when he had the chance?
He dropped his arm down with a growl and bent to Optimus's unconscious form, giving him a hard shove to the shoulder. "You've infected me with your slagging glitch," he snapped, staring into Optimus's unsatisfyingly still and unresponsive face. To add insult to injury, the slave coding didn't like that. It sent a warning twinge of pain down his spinal strut. Megatron snarled again. He picked Optimus up and slung him over his shoulder. He was appallingly heavy, and Megatron's neural net was still recovering from his recent encounter with the inhibitor clamp. His knees almost buckled when he got to his feet.
The councilors were still mostly frozen into terrified stillness, but they'd certainly have radioed for assistance by now. Megatron likely had only seconds left before reinforcements showed up. He needed to get moving.
He looked down at Sentinel's unconscious form. He badly wanted to stomp down and feel Sentinel's processor splinter into shards beneath his heel. Amazingly enough, his newly acquired glitch wasn't even raising any objections. Unfortunately, as satisfying as it would be, his tac net had already flagged the fact that Sentinel would be more valuable as a living hostage.
Megatron picked him up by the back of the neck, jumped, transformed, and launched himself through the council chamber's glass front with his living cargo safely magnetized to his wings just as the first guards burst into the council chamber behind him.
***
Soundwave was already waiting for him by the time he got to the safe house. He'd come without his minicons, knowing Megatron wouldn't want to be seen like this by anyone; Megatron gave him a wordless nod of appreciation. He'd sent Soundwave a situation report from the road, using a transmitter he'd taken off a guard, so they didn't even need to exchange any words. Megatron got himself up on the table and Soundwave immediately got on with the work of slicing the Autobots' trackers out of him. One of them was inside his spark chamber, clearly designed to be impossible to remove, but of course Autobots always underestimated what could be done if you didn't mind a bit of risk and pain.
"Your transport is waiting outside the door," Soundwave played from his speakers, a recording Megatron vaguely recognized, with an unpleasant shiver: one of the arena managers, a blast from the bad old days.
Megatron turned his helm towards Optimus, who was lying, still unconscious, on the padded berth where Megatron had laid him out. "He cannot be hurt."
Soundwave nodded. Megatron tried to tell himself he was imagining the hint of pity in the gesture. Soundwave knew the effects of slave coding better than anyone, and he knew perfectly well that the code was going to fry Megatron's processor if he woke to find he'd delivered his master to his death.
Soundwave tilted his head towards Sentinel, who was in a heap on the floor where Megatron had dropped him, also still unconscious. Megatron gritted his teeth. "Take him along. We might still need him."
Soundwave was still plugged into his medical port. He tapped pointedly against a section of the firewalls Megatron's systems had automatically put up. Megatron wordlessly took down the wall, granting Soundwave access to the triggers for a medical reset. Just as well for him not to know where they went next. He couldn't trust his own processor right now. Soundwave inclined his head, even as he pushed in and took control of the medical protocols. The world went dark.
***
He rebooted on a different berth, in a different safe house, and sat up just as Soundwave was disconnecting the last of the diagnostic cables from his frame. The room they were in was small and dim. Megatron could see through an open doorway into another room, where Sentinel had been laid out on a berth, stasis cuffs on his wrists and ankles.
Optimus was similarly tied down on a berth beside Megatron's. Megatron ground his dental plates, painfully aware that he'd reached the limits of his tether. The code gave him a bit of leeway when it came to removing his master from danger; a minor amount of harm had been acceptable to get Optimus out of a situation that hurt him as badly as that scene at the council had. But keeping him tied up now, in the relative safety of their hide-out, was not.
An almost unbearable pressure was rising up from the lower levels of subconscious processing, the coding digging its claws into him. Megatron clenched his jaw against the words that wanted to emerge, every cable in his frame locking up tight. He refused to give in to the urge. He let the feeling ride him down until he was on his knees, optic feed fragmenting into static and sensors processing nothing but pain.
"Optimus: has been untied," Soundwave said. The pain abruptly dropped out to manageable levels, even as Megatron turned to snarl at him for the pity he could hear perfectly well in those words, synthesized from various voice samples as it was.
"Tell me you can remove it," he ground out.
"Slave coding: can only be removed with the master's permission."
So that was it. "You'll do what needs to be done, then." Megatron said. He slid aside the armor plates at the back of his neck, until only a thin layer of metal remained to cover the vulnerable cortical strands. He wasn't going to be a weapon for the Autobots, not even in Optimus's gentle hands.
He'd already transmitted what intel he'd been able to glean from his time in Autobot captivity. Soundwave had his command codes, and access to all other strategic and tactical data. The work would continue on without him.
"Thank you, old friend," Megatron said.
Soundwave nodded wordlessly. He extruded a wrist blade and reached out with his other hand to shift Megatron's helm a bit further forward, fully exposing the back of his neck. Megatron shuttered his optics and drew in one last deep draft of air; he was ready. Soundwave lifted the blade. He wouldn't hesitate, Megatron knew. A single clean stroke, and then oblivion. There were many worse ways to go.
"Stop!" Optimus's vocalizer crackled, but the command was perfectly clear.
Megatron just barely suppressed the snarl of frustration that wanted to emerge at the sound of it. It didn't matter now. Optimus could order him to turn on Soundwave, but he'd certainly be able to resist the command for the fraction of a second it would take Soundwave to sever the critical cortical strands, paralyzing him; after that, nothing Optimus said would matter at all.
Optimus himself, struggling to sit up, still visibly disoriented from the disruption of his motor relays, wasn't going to get to his feet in time to stop Soundwave from killing Megatron. Probably not even in time to save his own life. That thought had the coding driving another brutal punishing lance through his sensory net. Megatron suppressed a grunt of pain.
"Stop!" Optimus repeated. The coding lessened its grip on Megatron's mind as though he'd addressed it directly, which was a relief, although why Soundwave was still hesitating, Megatron certainly didn't know.
"Finish it, already!" Megatron snapped, gritting his jaw against the renewed stab of pain.
"Don't," Optimus said. He'd abandoned his attempts to stand and was sitting with both hands braced on the edge of the berth, fans whirring with the effort, obviously struggling to stay upright. "You said the coding can be removed with the master's permission. Can you do it?"
Soundwave inclined his head.
Megatron snarled. It was not like Soundwave to fall for transparent stalling tactics like this.
"Do it, then," Optimus said.
Megatron looked at him incredulously. Optimus looked entirely sincere. He held Megatron's gaze without blinking.
He was, in fact, sincere, Megatron realized. It took a moment to compute. Certainly no one would ever just give up such an enormous advantage over an enemy as Optimus now had over him; the decision made no sense whatsoever.
It had to be that emotional co-processor glitch of his again. Well, in this case, Megatron was only too happy to take advantage. How Optimus had been fighting the war as well as he had with a processor that badly glitched, Megatron couldn't begin to imagine.
"Optimus: must order Megatron to hold still," Soundwave said. "Process: delicate and exceedingly unpleasant."
Optimus hesitated. "Isn't there something you can do? A pain suppression chip, or…"
"No. Do it now," Megatron ordered. He wasn't waiting around for the council to find them here, or for Optimus to change his mind.
"If that's what you want," Optimus said with a sigh. "Megatron, get into the position Soundwave needs, and then hold still."
One of Megatron's central ports was still bared where the Autobots had drilled through his armor. Soundwave plugged in with one of his two major data cables and then held up the other in silent question. He'd be able to work twice as fast if he used both cables and engaged his full processor, but that wouldn't leave him any capacity to monitor for outside threats, which was going to leave Megatron at Optimus's mercy if Optimus changed his mind.
If Megatron concentrated he could still feel Optimus through their new link, like seeing a ferocious blaze of light from the very corner of your optics. He thought of the first moment of the merge, of seeing Optimus down to his core, no trace of corruption or cowardice.
He silently opened a second port. If Optimus changed his mind, he'd deal with it then. But he found that he didn't believe it would happen. And he badly wanted this over with.
Soundwave plugged in the second cord, and then both his data cables lit up with pulsing purple biolights even as his visor went dark. Megatron felt the speed of his own processing slow as Soundwave tied up the lower levels of his processor. Soundwave had been right, it was exceedingly unpleasant, somewhat like the feel of a plasma knife sliding through plating, as Soundwave sliced the foreign coding out of him with surgical precision.
He braced himself against the nauseating feeling of having core coding overwritten. Knowing he could trust Soundwave with this didn't actually make it any more pleasant, especially right after his experience with the council's virus.
"What do I do?" Optimus asked. He'd let himself slump to one side, optics gone pale: low fuel pressure. Megatron had messed him up worse than he'd meant to with that zap to his cortical strand.
"He'll prompt you for access permission when it comes up," Megatron said. Optimus simply nodded, and Megatron didn't even doubt, anymore, what he was going to say when the moment came.
Of course, that was when he heard the steps behind him.
"You always were weak, but I didn't think you were a traitor," Sentinel said.
Optimus's entire body jerked at the sound of his voice. Megatron, kneeling with his back to the room's door, locked into immobility by Optimus's last command, could do nothing but watch as Optimus struggled slowly and painfully up to sit, clearly in no position whatsoever to do anything about the new threat. Sentinel had picked his moment well. Soundwave was still dead to the world, processor completely tied up.
Sentinel could've killed them where he stood, but he'd always had a penchant for grandstanding. Megatron clenched his jaw, about the only movement he could make within the grip of the coding, as Sentinel paced around to face him.
There was a spidery tracework of blackened lines running out from the center of Sentinel's chest, all the way down his arms and legs, somewhat like the aftermath of a lightning strike. There'd been rumors that the Autobots had developed a new surge weapon, powered directly by spark energy. Shockwave hadn't thought it was possible to actually deploy without the power surge doing an unacceptable level of damage to a mech's neural network, but judging by the stasis cuffs on Sentinel's arms, sparking and singed black, they'd gotten it working just fine, if not without doing some level of damage. Sentinel was limping heavily, and his left arm twitched in spastic jerks. None of which was going to stop him from overpowering Optimus in his current state, and of course Megatron still couldn't move at all. He pushed desperately against the coding's grip, teeth clenched, cables creaking, shuddering in agony as his own frame continued to betray him. He wasn't going anywhere.
Sentinel transformed a blade from his forearm armor. Megatron threw all his willpower behind a single heaving push, and got nothing for his effort but a feeble twitch of his arm and a renewed spike of pain, like an ice pick through the cranial casing.
Sentinel took a step towards him, unhurried; he knew he held all the power. Soundwave was kneeling on the floor, unknowing, completely unprotected. Even working at a hundred percent, it was going to take him another few minutes to finish the work. Megatron's spark twisted. There'd been contingency plans for his own death, but losing Soundwave too was going to be a blow to the movement. But Megatron couldn't protect him any more than he could protect himself.
Sentinel took another step closer. For a moment, Megatron could only see his abdominal plating; he couldn't even move enough to lift his helm. Sentinel reached out to tilt his face back with a casual grip on his chin, peering into his optics. Megatron's plating crawled. Another monumental effort got him nothing but a twitch of his chin that Sentinel effortlessly subdued.
"It's a shame, Optimus, you know. He could've been useful." Sentinel sighed. "But I suppose it's not the first time I've been forced to clean up your messes."
He pulled his arm back, blade extended.
Optimus's vocalizer hitched, clicking, but his voice was perfectly clear. "Megatron. Move."
The smothering grip of the coding fell away all at once. Megatron didn't hesitate.
He pushed to his feet and launched himself forward in a single motion, pushing off against the floor, thrusters firing, and turned his outstretched fingers into a blade that he rammed right into the center seam of Sentinel's chest.
Sentinel's chest plates were heavily reinforced, corellium armor and an exorbitantly expensive vibranium mesh underlayer, but he was still an upper-class mech, and he'd clearly not wanted to sacrifice his elegant lines for the bulky look of true military-grade armor. Megatron's first lurching push forced him against the wall, and after that it was just a matter of brute force and persistence. Megatron pushed his hand inexorably into his chest through the cracking armor. Soundwave's cables had torn loose from his ports when he'd moved, forcing half his lower processing into a crash reboot, but his combat modules were shielded; it wasn't going to affect his reflex speed.
He raised his other arm to fend off Sentinel's blade, the edge carving a long slice into his upper arm before skittering off his vambrace. Megatron ignored the bite of it and leaned more of his weight into his hand, armor splintering under his fingers. And then the mesh gave completely, and Sentinel's spark crystal shattered within his clenching fist.
He let the lifeless body slide off his wrist and turned to Soundwave, who was in a limp heap on the floor. Megatron winced when he noticed one of his data cables sparking, the plug bent where it had torn loose from Megatron's port.
"Is he all right?" Optimus asked, while Megatron was still syncing up to Soundwave's medical port for his status; he raised a hand for silence, looking at the scrolling lines of code.
"Rebooting," he said finally, tanks still roiling; it had been a close thing. Soundwave was going to be out of it for a while. Megatron had scrambled him badly, disconnecting like that right in the middle of a high-bandwidth data transfer. Soundwave was going to need a complete defrag cycle to clean up the resulting mess before he'd come online again. Megatron's own lower-level processes were still a mess as well, but he wasn't a science mech; his resource management wouldn't let non-combat processes grab enough space on his CPU to lock him up that badly.
He rose creakily from his knees. Optimus was still on the berth, determinedly upright, but listing alarmingly. If he fell, he was going to strike his helm against the berth's metal supports on the way down. The coding twinged at Megatron. Help him.
Megatron automatically set his shoulders against the bite of it. Optimus must've seen him twitch. "It's all right. You don't have to do anything you don't want."
The coding's pressure eased up instantly. Optimus listed a little further. Megatron scowled. He took two large steps, grabbed Optimus under the aft and shoulders, and dumped him flat on the berth.
"…Thanks," Optimus said after a moment, sounding startled. He shuttered his optics for a moment, looking queasy, and then turned his head to look at Sentinel, slumped in an untidy heap where he'd fallen. Now that the rush of combat had worn off, Megatron could feel him again, that peculiar connection still throbbing between them like the tender stump of a new-grown neural line. But he didn't even need it to know what Optimus was feeling. There was naked pain on his too-open face.
"You knew I'd strike to kill," Megatron said.
"Yes." Optimus was still looking at the corpse, misery rising off him like an ashy cloud.
"His death hurt you," Megatron said, nudging at the feeling like probing the edges of a wound.
"Yes." Optimus didn't turn away from Sentinel. Megatron shifted, putting himself in his line of sight until Optimus was forced to look at him.
"You could've told me to take him down non-lethally. Why didn't you?"
Optimus gave him a bleak look. "He wouldn't have stopped. There'd never have been peace with him. The only thing that ever mattered to him was securing his own place in power. I didn't realize how far gone he was until I saw him through your processor." He looked down. "There wasn't any other way to stop him."
For a moment, something else shone through the misery still clogging their connection, something hard and durasteel-bright, something Megatron recognized; like looking in a mirror. So he'd left his own mark on Optimus's spark as well. Optimus was already pushing it back down again, looking unhappy. He'd seen what needed doing and he'd done it, but it had hurt him, still.
Megatron sighed. "You have a glitch, you know."
Optimus snorted. "It's not a glitch, Megatron. It's called compassion."
"A value function that insists on assigning noble motives to every mech on Cybertron in the face of all other evidence, and incidentally makes you feel responsible for every slagging lifeform on the planet, yes, perfectly rational," Megatron snapped.
He could feel the flinch in Optimus every time his optics passed over Sentinel's crumpled form on the floor. Megatron paused, annoyed at himself, but Optimus's misery was nagging at him, and somehow he couldn't quite bring himself to ignore the feeling, irrational as it was. He hauled Sentinel's body up onto the empty berth and arranged him neatly, legs straight, arms crossed over his chest to hide the jagged gash leading down to his spark chamber. He turned to Optimus, somehow even more annoyed when he felt some of the distress smoothing away.
"Why is this better? It's still just a corpse."
Optimus snorted. "You're not actually going to tell me that respect for the dead is another Autobot glitch. I know Decepticons have their own rituals for the smelting of their dead."
"They didn't when we still worked the mines," Megatron said. In the mines the dead had been thrown into the abandoned tunnels, left behind to be buried in the next cave in, while the rest of them continued fighting to survive another day. Just as it should be. Who cared about the dead? It was only the living that mattered.
Some of this must have made it across the strange connection somehow. Optimus was hurting again, for him, or maybe for those dead mechs who'd long ago become part of the rock. His concern was misplaced either way. They'd been dead for vorns, so there was no use wasting resources mourning them; and Megatron had survived. The only thing that mattered.
"That glitch of yours is a truly strange thing, you know," he said.
Optimus gave a shaky laugh. "I suppose it must seem so to you." He pushed himself upright, sitting a bit more steadily now. "How did you get out?"
"I didn't kill anyone, if that's what you're asking," Megatron snapped, which, damn him, it was, and worse than that, Megatron was getting an appallingly pleasant warm glow echoing out in answer to Optimus's relief at his answer.
Optimus fought his way to his feet again and this time managed to stand, wobbly but at least upright. "What happens now?" he asked.
Megatron pushed him towards the door, one bracing hand on his back when he staggered. "Can you transform? We need to move quickly. I'm going to take you back to headquarters."
The coding wasn't going anywhere until Soundwave came back online, and he didn't plan on leaving himself exposed until then; the Council might well have some way of tracking Sentinel's frame. He felt Optimus's shock at his answer, and then his tentative pleasure at what it implied. They'd been going to a lot of trouble to keep HQ hidden from the Autobots. Megatron ignored him. Not much point in secrecy now, was there, with that connection they'd foisted on him, and the worst of it was how he couldn't even hate it the way he should; he could still feel the blaze of Optimus's spark, like the heat of a fire on his plating on a cold night.
"Hurry it up," he growled.
Optimus did manage to transform, a little creakily, but at least he wasn't going to fall over on his wheels. Megatron slung Soundwave's limp form into his arms, letting Soundwave's helm rest against his shoulder for a moment; it was going to take a while yet for him to finish defragging the mess Megatron had made of his processor.
Optimus waited patiently while Megatron loaded Soundwave into his trailer, but Megatron could still feel him waiting for a real answer. He sighed, exasperated, and slapped his hand against Optimus's roof. "We have to get moving. There's work to do. We're going to need a whole new set of plans."
He could feel Optimus hearing the words he hadn't said, something lighting up warm and bright inside him: plans the two of them were going to make together. A new strategy. Plans that wouldn't set off Optimus's stupid glitch every five minutes.
Primus, what an inconvenient slagging mess this was going to be.
Megatron left his hand on Optimus's plating for a moment longer, feeling the content hum of his engine through his frame, and then pulled back, transforming, as the two of them set off side by side.
THE END