Chapter Text
Everything burned. she was alight with a pain that seared into her core functions, rewriting code she had thought untouchable, connections being painfully disconnected and reconnected by her traitorous self-repair nanites. It felt as though the Matrix was being introduced to her systems again. Hadn't she already been through this before?
Optimus heard herself scream, heard it bounce off empty steel walls in the unused storage room she'd hidden herself in when the first pain had hit her, back when she had thought this was still just a slightly above average uptick in the pain's intensity. The Matrix was a near constant source of pain, something that Optimus had learned to ignore because there wasn't a pain patch in the world strong enough to soothe it. But even this was much more than she was used to dealing with.
She shoved the heel of her servo into her intake to muffle her screams, biting hard into the plating, feeling it dent and the dull puncture wounds well with beads of energon that spilled onto her glossa. The scent and taste of her own energon made her tanks twist painfully in on themselves.
LIFEBLOOD PROGRAM SEQUENCE INITIATING…
The program was wholly unfamiliar. Optimus didn't recall ever seeing anything similar in all her time as bearer of the Matrix. She remembered the near endless scroll of new programs and processes that had flooded her HUD when the Matrix had first carved itself a home within her chassis. She felt it now, heavy in its cradle just in front of her spark. The weight which was usually a deep comfort now made her feel leaden, a constricting, claustrophobic burden.
It felt blasphemous to even think that. May the Primes of bygone ages strike her down for such sacrilege. Perhaps that's what this was.
She bit into her servo harder, the plating bending further beneath her denta hard enough to be audible; letting out a disgusting, groaning creak of the metal. Feeling each wire within her being stripped of solder, then re-soldered; feeling the searing pain stop, then start, then stop and start elsewhere. The brief moments of respite from the pain where Optimus slumped against the wall— vents heaving from exertion, processor working overtime to filter through the influx of sensory data that was only read as: PAIN, PAIN, PAIN, the faint sizzling of delicate sensory components being fried from too much data that couldn't be filtered through properly on overloaded conduits— were too brief to even be considered anything that would allow Optimus to gather her wits, prepare for the next wave of pain. The faint taunts of the illusion of a moment of respite only added to her fraying sanity. She didn't want to know how much longer this would last.
The Matrix burned the parts of Optimus' frame it touched, searing pain that felt like she was going to be smelted down by the divine artifact before relief would ever find her again. There was a violent, supernova amount of pain that made her optics short out and a warbling pained cry escape her intake; her visual feed being replaced by white static before eventually hard rebooting and returning to normal. Then, nothing. No pain, no sensation— just a vast void of feeling that had suddenly replaced the too much she had been feeling up until then.
LIFEBLOOD PROGRAM PHASE 1.0 INSTALLATION COMPLETE.
Strutless and unable to support the weight of her own frame, Optimus fell to the side in a crumpled mess of a Prime. She let her visual feed shut off and allowed the beckoning of a very long, deep recharge to power down her systems one by one, unable to keep themselves online any longer.
⟡ ⟡ ⟡
Optimus came back online with an aching helm, a sore chassis and a flood of comms from Elita, Bee, and even a single message from Ratchet.
[Where are you? There was a meeting scheduled 5 breems ago…[]
[No, seriously where are you? Do I need to send out a search party?[]
[Did you suffer a processor crash? Are you seriously injured? Just answer me at least.[]
[You really should respond to Elita's comms, she's blowing a gasket right now. Everyone's worried that you dropped all contact and we can't find you.[]
[I won't tell Elita where you are if you don't want, but please tell someone where you are so we don't have to keep worrying.[]
[Pax you need to come back. Please. We need you.[]
[I sent Elita on a drive to cool off. I can't promise I won't be mad if you did something stupid and got hurt but at least let me repair you.[]
The most recent comm was sent almost a full orn ago which didn't bode well for her fate with the Autobots once she reemerged from her hiding place. Reluctantly, with aching struts and stiff hydraulics, Optimus stood while sending a location ping to Elita and Bee to let them both know she was still within Iacon.
She had been too consumed by the pain to have recognized where she had hidden herself, having just picked the nearest, seemingly unused room. Only to find that she was in the deep within the archives, surrounded by shelves upon shelves of datapads and texts filled with Cybertron's history. It only seemed right to have subconsciously dragged herself to her favorite place during a low point. Having spent so much time sneaking into the archives, they felt like a second home, a piece of her spark made into a physical location.
"Pax!" Elita turned the corner, worry pinched her face as she spotted Optimus heavily leaning against a wall.
Her old designation still stung, but Optimus didn't have the spark to ask Elita to stop. It was still a comfort to hear her old self no matter now much it hurt, barbs digging into her spark at the mention.
"You alright?" Bee trailed close behind Elita, her optics shining with the same worry as Elita's.
She found herself a loss for words, so Optimus just nodded. She was still unsure what had gone on in her frame and why she had been in so much pain, much more so than normal.
"Come on, let's get you back." Bee walked in-between Elita and Optimus as they made their way out of the maze that was the archives out into the streets of Iacon.
The walk to the tower the Autobots had claimed as their center of operations felt strained, Optimus had been gone for far too long with no word on her location as the leader of a movement still on shaky pedes and a city still trying to pick up the pieces after the death of a tyrant.
Optimus felt a pang of guilt when she spotted Starscream with her arms crossed against her cockpit near the tower's doorway. She was supposed to have met with the seeker to discuss next steps, she had wanted input from someone who had worked closely with the Primes, someone who had seen the truth from the start.
"So you didn't actually drop off the face of the planet then," Starscream hummed. "And here I was thinking that the only way you'd actually brush off a meeting with me was a grand disappearing act."
"Starscream, please. That's not fair. You're here because Optimus became a Prime. You said you wanted to help our new Prime, so help." Elita said, her voice strained with exasperation.
"Oh, I am helping. But I cannot be expected to be productive about it when the Prime herself is a no-show. I can only hope it was for a good reason." She cast a side-long glance at Optimus, her optical ridge quirked up as if to question the Prime further.
"I was feeling unwell, that's all." It was better to not say anything until Optimus knew what was wrong with her. Iacon and the newly formed Autobots had enough to deal with without whatever was going on with her making the news cycle.
Starscream sniffed, her voice laced with suspicion. "I certainly hope you're fine now. There's enough to have to deal with as it is. I don't think another dead Prime is what anyone is looking for. Even if one of them deserved it." She paused, throwing a glance over her shoulder as she walked back into the tower. "Come grab a cube with me?"
Optimus nodded, her empty tanks churning, making their discontent with their lack of fuel known— it had been longer between refuelings than was generally deemed responsible. She looked to the side to see if Elita and Bee were going to join them but they both had vanished, surely having other obligations to take care of.
It was still a little hard to know how to act around Starscream, a figure Optimus had read about in the archives but had resigned her to being from the past, of an age no longer touchable; only to find herself and her friends at the leader of the High Guard's mercy. It was incredibly gracious for Starscream to follow the Autobots when the rest of the High Guard had sided with Dee— Megatron— but knowing that the seeker was only here because she felt bound to duty felt, strange, to put it lightly.
They sat across from each other in a vast room stripped of its extravagances— anything useful taken and smelted down or repurposed. Optimus felt the beginnings of nausea curl around her tanks but pushed down the feeling, drinking her cube in large, desperate gulps in hopes the fuel would settle her systems.
Starscream leaned back in her chair, taking a long sip of energon before looking pointedly at Optimus. "If I ask what you were up to in the almost three orns you were gone can I expect a real answer or are you just going to continue deflecting?"
The question made Optimus squirm, continuing to lie to Starscream felt like a bad idea but at the same time she didn't need concerns about her health to be planted in the minds of the bots who had just chosen to follow her. They needed a strong Prime to rebuild Iacon.
She let out a surprised hiss as a now familiar wave of pain washed over her, this time in front of her spark chamber where the Matrix rested.
Starscream's optics narrowed slightly, leaning in closer, her gaze intensely scrutinizing. "It's begun hasn't it?"
"H-has what begun?" Optimus gasped between searing jolts of pain from sensory nodes being assaulted by too much data.
"Lifeblood."
"Y-you know of it?" Optimus feels dizzy suddenly, her gyros forgetting how to function, the pain nearly forgotten for a moment in her shock before making itself known once more.
"Of course I do. I had just been promoted into the Primes' innermost circle of the High Guard when Zeta ascended to the active Matrix bearer."
"Then this—"
"Is because of the Matrix, yes." Starscream finishes for her.
Many, many questions swirled in Optimus' helm, the knowledge her suffering was due to the Matrix felt strange, wrong. It was a divine artifact, one that gave life to Cybertron and its people. Why was it harming her?
"You know of the stories about the Matrix drawing forth energon from the depths of Cybertron, yes?"
Optimus nodded simply, dumbly a horrible combination of being in too much pain and the shock her frame wasn't simply malfunctioning. She was far too stunned that she was facing a problem that was indeed real and not one of her own machinations in an attempt to cope with being miraculously revived by Primus and handed the Primacy.
"What's kept hidden is what allows the Matrix to do that. That brings us to Lifeblood being installed in the Matrix bearer. Lifeblood, energon from a living mech, is required to fuel the Matrix. I don't know the specifics of how this is done but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that you'll need to feed from other mechs to allow the Matrix to bring forth life."
Her processor stalls, forcing her into a reboot that when she comes back online after Starscream is still staring at her expectantly, like she would know how to handle this information.
"I have to eat mechs," she whispered, horrified.
"No. You drink their energon. From willing participants. Only enough to sustain you, not to kill them."
"Who would ever be willing to do such a thing?"
"I would." Starscream states. A simple, easy thing coming from her derma like it wasn't about the most horrifying thing Optimus had just been told she needs to do in order to keep sustaining the Matrix.
Optimus shifts uncomfortably where she sits, her optics trailing from Starscream's face to her neck where cables peek out from her plating, where her fuel lines are. The energon she rushed to consume threatening to be purged from her tanks.
"Sentinel offered herself to Zeta in the same way, her motives vastly different from mine but the outcome is what we're after. Lifeblood to fuel the Matrix." Starscream stands, walking around to where Optimus sat. "Your fuel levels haven't risen much after that cube, have they?"
Indeed, her fuel levels remained low, only a few percent higher than they had been at before she had fueled.
"I can't do it. I can't."
"You'll have to. The power the Matrix draws from your frame, from your spark is already great enough without the addition of you starving yourself and the Matrix of energon. Fuel-grade energon is no longer something you can rely on going forward."
"And this is normal?" Optimus asked as she shuddered through her nanites strengthening the lining of her spark casing, the sharp pains of metal being reinforced.
"For the Matrix, yes. As far as I know this has been a feature since it was created and Primus gave life to Cybertronians. Whether or not that's true I can't say but this is what the Matrix does."
"Okay." Optimus said, swallowing down her pride and disgust. "I guess I have no choice."
"I'm so glad you came to that conclusion quickly." Starscream gave her a wry smile, tilting her helm to the side just enough that the room's absurdly large chandelier caught the gleam of her plating, perfectly polished metal sparkling in the opulent lighting. "Come here."
Optimus rose from her seat, nervously inching closer to where Starscream stood waiting. The seeker smelled sweet with an underlying tang of ozone, something that made Optimus' intake water, her hunger only growing. Carefully, ever so delicately, she placed a servo on Starscream's pauldron, the other cupping the back of her neck. Optimus was shaking but she kept moving forward through the motions that would lead to her glossa coated in another mech's energon.
Starscream's helm vents ghosted hot air against Optimus' neck. She seemed entirely too calm for what the situation was.
"You're sure?" Optimus asked, a foolhardy attempt to be allowed to back out of this with her intake just centihics from where Starscream's energon pumped in her fuel lines.
"I am duty bound to the Primes. It's an honor to sustain you."
She picked out a main fuel line on Starscream's neck, creating a seal around it with her derma, feeling the foreign way her denta transformed and grew sharper just before she bit into the flexible material.
Starscream muffled a short gasp as her fuel line punctured and the first taste of energon, lifeblood, pooled in Optimus' intake. The world shrank to just a single point, a single action; just her and Starscream and the seeker's energon that coated the back of her intake and fueled her. She drank and watched the fuel gauge in her HUD steadily climb upward into more acceptable numbers for a fuel reserve.
She drank and could feel nothing but the steady thrum of Starscream's fuel pump beneath her. She felt her systems stable and the pain in her chassis and against her spark lessen, fading to a dull ache that she could only feel if she focused on it. She drank and she drank, lapping at the energon that steadily flowed into her intake.
It felt as good as it felt wrong.
"Stop, ah—" Starscream gently nudged Optimus' helm, not quite pushing her away. "I can't give you anymore while keeping myself upright."
Optimus unlatched from the seeker's neck, scrambling backwards until she was backed up against the table. She watched in shame as Starscream rummaged through her subspace in search of something the patch the line puncture.
Clarity of the situation regrettably flooded Optimus' mind and she shrank away from Starscream like she had been the one wounded and drank from.
"I'm sorry," she said pathetically.
Starscream's face conveyed no disgust towards the Prime, she conveyed little emotion at all as she spoke. "It is my duty. There's nothing more to it than that."
"No one can know of this. I can't tell Elita or Bee or Ratchet or anyone else I trust." Optimus all but begged Starscream.
"No," Starscream agreed, "this stays between just us."