capitalh | no one mourns the wicked

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no one mourns the wicked

Who: Optimus Prime and AUTOBOTS
Where: The Autobot campground.
When: The evening/night after the dance off.
What: Orion Pax has been restored to his past and future self. Optimus Prime is NOT HAPPY. Also, very very tired.
Warnings: Injuries, intense robot ass devastation. Angry dad. Angry mom.

Optimus Prime, unlike Orion Pax, leaves no time for argument or complaint. After he's finished dealing with Megatron, he orders the Autobots to roll out, provided assistance to injured comrades where necessary. He takes no assistance for himself.

Which is stupid, because after days of starvation and torture and minus the burst of power from the Matrix he was utilizing just before, he is extremely fucked up. It's less obvious that he's on his last legs than it might be with some bots, but he is very injured and trying hard to pretend that he isn't. He drives back to base by his own means, and doesn't speak but to give the occasional order until they are there.

He wants everyone safe and tended to and organized, and he needs to have a talk with just about everyone on the team, and besides that he needs to catch up with everything he hadn't been paying attention to as Orion Pax...he doesn't see how he could possibly take a rest quite yet, there is too much stuff to do, and if he made it this far he can make it a little bit father.

More than tired, though, he is angry. He's angry at Megatron, angry at some of his team, and angry at himself. He doesn't pause to talk to anyone once they get back to camp, and immediately starts to ineffectually try to organize things with as few words as possible.

[Feel free to tag in as someone at any point in this, including later in the night or the next day. He will probably pass out in the medibay within the hour, though. Either that or Ratchet will get him.]

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"Megatron," he says, not easily exactly, but with some conviction. "Myself. It has felt like seeing my life - the history of this war - through an unfamiliar gaze. To see what was done to him. What was done to me."

He never knows how to refer to himself without the Matrix. Before it seemed so simple, but now he keeps switching back and forth. Sometimes it feels so close and so real, other times like something he is completely disconnected from.

"It's easy," Ratchet says slowly, "to take a step back and look at the choices you've made and not know if they're the right ones. I've done it every single time I've lost a patient, for thousands of years. But whatever mistakes you're seeing now, you made them in good faith." He does look up at Optimus now, his optics bright and piercing.

"And if I thought anyone else would have done better, I wouldn't be standing here right now."

Optimus looks down to him as well, and though there is less vigor in his eyes, there is a familiarity and understanding. It is the kind of reassurances he is accustomed to receiving from his friend. The sort of thing that, no matter how many times you tell yourself, you need to hear from someone else occasionally.

But, for once, it is not all his own mistakes he can't look away from. In some ways, that feels like a selfish weakness in of itself. His eyebrows furrow sadly, the faintest trace of a smile on his lips but never quite making it there.

"For once...it is not all my own actions that I doubt. Though it may be difficult to believe, old friend."

The smile leaves entirely.

"I feel truly wounded by what I have experienced for the first time. Or perhaps it is a resurgence of emotions I have since forgotten." He looks down at his hands. "For the first time, I see who and what I am, and I feel regret."

That throws Ratchet, and he looks briefly at a loss before he reaches out, his fingers snagging against Optimus' for a moment before he cycles his vents in a sigh and just lets his hand drop.

"What do you regret, exactly?" he says, looking up into Optimus' face again--he certainly has a few guesses, but he'd rather hear it from Optimus.

Optimus can't make himself looks back. Part of this whole issue is that everything about it feels foolish and unnecessary by his own standards of personal conduct. He didn't make things about himself. He just didn't.

So much of this pain, though, and so much of this anger...it's all his, and he doesn't have a place for it anymore. Due to circumstances, he was never given the opportunity to cope as he would have, like he has to many times before.

"I...have barely been able to identify it. I have been so...so lost, and even trying to identify what has gone wrong has felt too daunting of a task."

He really hates this. He almost can't make himself do it. He wants to, for Ratchet, and out of some small hope for himself. But every word feels like a grinder to the plating.

"So many things that were so easy for him...for Orion...for myself, before all of this. I do not feel capable of them any longer. In ways I had not fully realized."

Ratchet... slumps slightly, pressing his lips together for a long moment as he regards Optimus.

"You're the same person," he says finally, picking his words carefully. "I know you're suffering right now, with two sets of memories, but that should stabilize in time. But however strange it is at the moment, you are that person, still. Or you can be. ...I meant the things I told you, before you got your memory back, about why I followed you into a war. It's never been because you're a Prime."

He shakes his head a little. "Just--whatever you feel like you're losing, you don't have to. Whatever coping methods you had, you can relearn them. It might not be easy, but none of that is lost Optimus. If there's something you're missing, you can get it back."

Edited 2014-08-28 04:54 (UTC)

Something about that actually sinks in, through it all. He has been thinking about all of this in terms of irrevocable changes, and though he still doesn't know that they're not...he doesn't know that they are, either.

Though he still doesn't know how practical any of that would be. Orion Pax hadn't been what they needed, even if it had been what some of them wanted. The war isn't over. Unicron is still out there. There is still so much to do.

How could he ever focus on becoming more vulnerable? He made himself like this for a reason.

Optimus takes a while to muster a reply. For a significant pause he finds himself staring at the ground and the horizon.

"The question I keep asking myself," he says, eventually. "Is if I should. I feel...so many things in my spark that I no longer have a place for. It isn't over. So much is still at risk. I...I cannot allow myself to feel like this. I carry so much more than myself."

"It doesn't have to be over for you to have a life that's your own, Optimus. There's nothing in the Autobot Code that says you're not allowed to be happy sometimes. Literally the last thing I'm worried about is you being irresponsible about relaxing a little sometimes, and considering everything that's happened, it's better for you to bend a little than break. You've been through something unique, and you need to cope with it any way you can, even if that's letting yourself be a little more like you were from now on."

"And--" Ratchet pauses, his throat working for a moment before he rubs the base of his helm at the back of his neck. He does look tired now, and a little unsure, staring down at the ground outside like he's not positive he should continue. He does anyway. "Just as your friend. ...it was good to see you smile again."

For so much of his life, these things had just fallen away in a natural feeling disinterest. He was so focused on everything else, on leading the Autobots, on stopping Megatron, on protecting other species, that most of his personal life had been tossed to the wayside, and he never regretted it. It didn't feel like a sacrifice at the time. He didn't consciously think of losing those aspect of himself as any sort of price - just a natural evolution of who he was going to be.

It had just felt reasonable and practical, and he was okay being the way he was because it got the job done. He would start thinking about that later, when the war was over.

But even though he's now been given this terrible shock, he finds himself thinking of it as something that should be natural, and that there must be something wrong with him for it to not feel that way anymore. Before now, he has never imagined himself as being a person who had those things, because he didn't even want it, really.

But now. But now...

Ratchet's last words hurt in a way, and it shows in his optics. Not the hurt of a slight or an insult, but of a truth that he's been ignoring. He's never thought of himself in terms of whether or not he was happy, or sad. Only how prepared he was to move forward. To the younger aspect of him, the intensity of his disconnect is chilling.

"I have been who I am for so long, I forgot the existance of other possibilities," he says softly, his optics dull and lingering in the ground. "I had no need for it, before. I had no desire."

'No personal desires' sums up a lot of it really.

Ratchet does reach out then, wrapping thin, steady fingers around Optimus' much larger ones, his grip tightening slightly.

"You became the person you thought you needed to be to protect as many people as possible and to best do the job you needed to do, because there was no one else to do it," Ratchet says slowly, watching Optimus' face. "You made the best decision you could make at the time, in good faith. You put others above yourself and that's--it's admirable, but you can do it in moderation." He pauses briefly, then continues as though unaware of what a raging hypocrite he's being. "You can take some time for yourself without the whole war effort falling to pieces. And there's things you don't have to do alone."

Some of this is familiar, some of it isn't. Optimus grasps Ratchet's finger in return, looking at their intertwined hands in sorrowful contemplative. He knows that Ratchet could use some of his own medicine, but turning the conversation away from himself now would likely be missing the point. He makes a note to save that acknowledgment of that reality for a future situation, though.

"I did not fully realize the degree to which my aversion had become compulsions until today," he says, and there is a new hesitation to his words, like this is something especially sensitive. "When questioned or challenged on some recent events...it took a greater emotional toll to acknowledge than I thought."

Ratchet nods, but his optics narrow slowly.

"What do you mean, 'questioned or challenged'?" he asks. "Questioned or challenged by who?"

He shakes his helm a little, frowning and furrowing his brow. He still felt angry, thinking about it. He didn't know how reasonable any of it was.

"...The conversation I had with Rodimus was unpleasant." He looks into the space in front of him. "He asserted that...I was more concerned with I and Megatron's 'relationship' than with the status of the war."

Ratchet seems to go completely still for a long, suspended moment, looking up at Optimus in something like disbelief.

"He told you he thought what?" he says, his voice deceptively mild.

"I do not know where he got the idea from," Optimus says, glancing away. It unsettled him, and still does, because he has no perspective on how true that is. And how angry he feels at Megatron makes him feel more vulnerable to that sway than he'd like. He still has memories of loving him too close to his spark.

"Perhaps...given the feelings I had still possessed without my memories..."

Maybe it had given Rodimus reason to believe that he no longer warranted his full respect, based on his past affections.

"He had no right--no right--to say something like that to you," Ratchet says, his voice harsh before he controls it carefully, his fingers squeezing tight on Optimus'. He forces himself to loosen his grip after a moment, cycling his vents slowly. Yelling at Optimus certainly wasn't going to help anyone.

"He's wrong," he says flatly. "He's wrong, and he did something incredibly stupid and reckless and irresponsible, and instead of accepting that and apologizing he's lashing out in a petty attempt to shift blame. It's pathetic, and quite frankly even after everything else I expected better of him. But that's not true, Optimus, and he should know it."

"He is still so angry," Optimus says, his voice still low and somber, "over events that no one has control over any longer. I had expected better of him, in my absence. I had expected that he would not make further trouble when things were already so dire. He was quick to show great remorse, but equally quick to turn on me when I did not consider that to be enough."

He vents, slowly.

"He was used to threaten me. Megatron threatened to tear him apart in front of me, when I had...no capability to withstand such threats."

"Optimus..."

Ratchet deflates a little, his optics dimming.

"I'm sorry. That that happened to you. But that doesn't mean Rodimus is right, or that his behavior prior wasn't completely unacceptable."

Optimus keeps hold of Ratchet's fingers, and his expression hardens somewhat, with the vestiges of determined anger. He would have done it, he thinks.

"I would have done what he asked, I think. I would have done it, and Rodimus would have blamed me for that as well."

He shakes his helm, though he is thinking a bit more analytically now. Much of Megatron's plans took a while to fully sink in - the entire thing had felt so out of nowhere, from his perspective at the time.

"Megatron had been intending on forging the Matrix into something he could use. I am not sure what would have happened, bringing such powerful artifacts together."

"...yeah."

Ratchet cycles his vents, looking tired.

"I know you would have. And I don't know what would have happened, and I'm glad it didn't come to that."

Optimus nods very slightly, feeling similarly exhausted. It's the ghost pain of a narrow escape. It was so close to the being the end, if anything had gone differently...more than him and Rodimus could have died.

"Even now, his jealousy haunts him," he says. "Not even...the chance to have it undone, to be seen with fresh optics, was enough to shake Megatron's delusions."

"I know that hurt you, when you couldn't remember," Ratchet says quietly, his lips crimping. "...but yeah. I didn't think you'd be able to convince him, one way or another."

He makes a weary sound, pressing a hand over his optics, allowing some of the thoughts to settle within his processor. All the while, his spark aches.

"And yet..."

And for once, his vocalizer wavers.

"And yet now, more than ever, I feel the pain of his loss. Even till the very end, I pleaded with him. I feel as if I have experienced his betrayal for a second time, but more cruelly than he would have been capable of in the beginning."

"Optimus."

But what is there to say? Ratchet hesitates for a long, pained moment, just staring as Optimus covers his face. Orion... that had been easy, almost. Easier. This... there were no words he could come up with to soothe this. There never had been.

He just reaches out instead, settling a hand on Optimus' shoulder and pressing his lips together, his optics dim and quiet.

Optimus shakes his head a little, finally unconvering his eyes. When he does, his optics are burning lowly. He doesn't look at Ratchet because he can't bring himself too, but he leans into his touch, accepting that wordless show of support.

He knows there isn't much to say. He doesn't have much to say, either. But why this point in their lives, him and Ratcher don't always need words to get by.

Thinks don't feel okay then, but for the first time that day, it feels like they might be eventually.

no one mourns the wicked

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