Chapter Text
Will wasn't sure if he'd drawn the short stick or was just a sucker, but somehow, someone (coughPrime) thought it would be best for another human to be the one to "explain matters" to the newly awakened Sam Witwicky, the young man who seemed to have all the luck, whether it was good or bad. Given that Mikaela was so very otherwise occupied, Sarah was sequestered with Annabelle in a secret location, and Bobby was still doing his damnedest to stay as blissfully ignorant as possible, it put Will in the unenviable position of being that human.
"No," Sam said. "No. No. No. No!"
"Yes," Will replied helpfully. He had opted for the no nonsense approach.
Sam buried his face in his hands, still pink from the skin that had regrown on them so quickly. "Could this be any more fucked up?" he mumbled.
"I can think of some ways. Megatron could decide he wants to..."
"...Please don't say it. I still have nightmares about him having me in a jeweled collar and leading me around by a leash. Do you know what happens to a guy when an intergalactic tyrant offers to make you his pet? And then comes back from the dead, kidnaps you and sends things up your nose to scan your brain? It does things, Major."
"It's Lieutenant Colonel now," Will offered helpfully. It wasn't that he wasn't patient with Sam. Really, the kid (and when would he stop thinking of him as a kid?) had reasons to be upset. Very legitimate reasons. It was just that Will was someone who believed in dealing with reality head on. Sam spent so much of his time trying to escape from it, at least, that was, until reality caught up with him and running became the practical response rather than the escapist one.
"You got promoted again? Wow, that was fast."
Will's answer to that was a grunt and a shrug. He was damn sure Optimus was to blame for his bump in the pay scale so quickly after his previous promotion, regardless of whether NEST was now battalion-sized. The Autobots took care of their own, and Will had accepted early on that "their own" included him, and had very quickly grown to include Sarah and Annabelle.
It was the same reason Sam had ended up at Stanford, all expenses paid, despite not having anything close to the academic record required for that. From a Cybertronian perspective, Sam was the equivalent of a new spark without a preprogrammed function, who needed his downloads and integration. It was his cohort's responsibility to make sure he got the training he needed. It was the same reason Mikaela apprenticed with Ratchet.
(Word was that Jazz was making moves to expand her training, and that there had been heated glyphs exchanged between the current mentor and the potential one on the matter. Really, having Ironhide as a source of cohort gossip left Will with far too much information.)
"So, you get a promotion, and I get some sort of freakish bond with Megatron. But we both can make baby robot sparks and possibly feed them, but that part would kill us. Guess that's cool."
"Sam--"
"--No, really, it's all good. I'm fine. I'm livin' the dream. Oh, and to top it off, Megatron might want me to make Decepticon babies, so I need to stay here, drop out of college, and let Ratchet and those freaky science bots continue to do whatever freakish stuff they do to figure out how to help me break that connection. Maybe they should get Professor Snape to help. Next thing you know, I'll find out that I'm Megatron's horcrux. Maybe you all should just kill me now. No sacrifice, no victory, right?"
Will tried really hard not to roll his eyes. He hadn't read those particular books. He'd been just a little bit busy. "Sam, I think Optimus would rather tear out his own spark than have anything like what happened to you happen again. Any of it, but especially the newspark. Ratchet, Wheeljack and Perceptor need to study all of us further, to make sure that more things don't happen that we don't want. These mechs care about you."
The comment about Optimus seemed to stall whatever Sam was going to say next. Instead, he looked down at his hands. Hands that, Will recalled so vividly, only 11 months before had held the Matrix that now lay in the same chest Sam had plunged it into. Will watched a myriad of different emotions flicker across Sam's face, and suddenly his annoyance and impatience was replaced with that same energy he'd felt in the bunker with Mikaela, pulsing far too persistently for him to imagine away. Sam was cohort, yet he was so utterly alone. It was wrong in a way that felt visceral and instinctive to the older man.
Suddenly, the thought of some energy imprint from Megatron making Sam think and feel certain things was more than just a strange and alien concept. It was a dire threat, and Will felt as strongly about it as he would if the threat were to Annabelle or Sarah.
"What?" Sam asked in a tone that was no longer petulant at all.
"Kid, we've got to figure out a way to get him out of you."
Sam met his eyes for a moment, and suddenly it was the same young man Will had, on instinct alone, trusted at Hoover Dam and again in Mission City. The same young man Will had pushed a civilian official out of a plane in order to get to in Egypt.
"I know," Sam replied softly, suddenly no longer a kid by any stretch of the imagination.
Optimus' spark literally expanded in its casing as the new, smaller door to his quarters slid open from the apartment he'd asked the build team to install. Real sunlight from the solar tubes silhouetted the tiny figure, even though they were deep underground. Optimus quickly adjusted the lighting in his own quarters to her specifications, solar tubes irising open, the reflections from his various surfaces making the light dance against the walls.
"Hey," she said, stepping in, then hesitating when he did not move toward her as he normally would. The small door slid shut behind her, and she leaned against the wall next to it, uncertain.
"Mikaela," Optimus said, digits twitching with the need to reach out, to hold, touch, and stroke in a manner that was deeply alien to him, yet profoundly right to his spark. It was a primary means of connection with the newest member of his cohort, and made her energies sing a song pulling at him like a gravity well.
He did not dare touch her until they had spoken, until he was certain that what they had all stumbled so blindly into was truly what she wanted. How could he have been so blind to the AllSpark's manipulations? He knew that bonds did not just form. They were intentional. Yet he had emerged from the haze of his grief after Mission City bonded with humans, and had never questioned it, because the AllSpark had not meant him to. Just like none of them had paused to consider the implications of completing the circuit with her. They had simply done so as soon as she had expressed her consent, exponentially accelerating the changes in her.
"You really need to get over the guilt complex," she finally said, shaking her head and giving him a weak smile.
"What I have done to you is inexcusable, Mikaela."
"Which part? Giving me a family I never had? Making me feel precious? Valuable? Loved? Part of something so much deeper than anything humans have to offer? What part do you feel the worst about?"
"You've been changed..."
"And you think I don't want that?"
"I think, Mikaela, that you had very little choice in wanting that. Our energies have manipulated you into desiring and needing this bond."
"You know, fuck that!" Mikaela's eyes flashed, and Optimus suddenly could see her as one of his smallest but fiercest frontliners, an explosion of armored fury powered by the spark he could not see but which was, nonetheless, a part of her every particle. "Don't tell me what I do and do not want. So yeah, the AllSpark made me evolve into someone who could carry its energy, made me...compatible or whatever. You know what? There's a lot of other crap in my evolutionary history that makes me want certain things, too. Big biceps and a glorified ape who can protect me and my young from even worse apes, even if he treats me like shit. I'm more than my fucking genetics, Optimus. I walked away from the big biceps when I chose Sam, but what I was really choosing was cohort - all of it. If you think my choices would have been any different if I'd known what we know now, then you don't know me very well."
Optimus felt relief well up in him, and it expressed itself in his rumbling laughter.
"What?" she snapped.
"Actually, Mikaela, my biceps, or at least the comparative portions of my frame, are quite large, and I am certain that I could protect you and your offspring from all manner of predators and rival males."
Optimus' optics focused in on her closely as she fought a smile. "Yeah, well, you don't treat me like shit, either. So there's that."
"It is a strange new journey we are embarking upon, Mikaela. I believe that it will change my kind, perhaps even more than it has changed your own. But if there is one constant in all of that change, I swear by my spark that it will be that you always feel precious, valued and loved."
Mikaela rolled her eyes. "And he feels guilty that I might not really want this, but then says shit like that," she muttered to the ceiling, the universe at large, or whatever deity she was calling on. Optimus found himself taking a step to close the distance between then, kneeling down to take her in his hands as he longed to. "What am I going to do with you?" she asked.
"I have an idea," Optimus replied, deliberately using the register and tone he knew made her pleasure centers become the most active.
"Mmmm, I bet you do." Optimus spark nearly surged into overload at the way her energies flared against his own with those words.
"I want to touch you again."
"Say what?" was the response, using Chris Rock's voice rather than his own.
Sam deliberately climbed into his Guardian's lap, leaned his head against the thick chest armor that protected what was so precious within. A hand tentatively cupped his back with near breathtaking gentleness.
"The AllSpark was... it was just trying to get our attention, show us what was possible. It knew it could heal me from the aftermath. It won't happen again. Not unless I... we want it to."
"How do you know this, Sam?" Bumblebee asked, his vocalizer scratchy, spark spinning with anxiety for his ward and most vulnerable of cohort mates.
"The same way I knew that I could bring back Optimus," Sam said with quiet certainty, a tone that Bumblebee trusted as surely as he did the words of his Prime. "The knowledge is always here, if I listen to it," Sam pointed to his head. "I need to get him out of me, Bee. I need to be myself again, or at least whatever I've become. This thing we have," Sam's thumb traced the transformation seam on Bumblebee's chest. "It'll help do that. We've got to make it stronger."
"Doctor, doctor, please. Oh the mess I'm in."
"Yeah, you're right. Ratchet should be there to monitor."
Bumblebee was stunned that Sam agreed to that, but then again, it was Sam. Stunning Bumblebee was what Samuel Witwicky did.
Optimus' spark swirled with sated contentment, coronal fingers receding, leaving behind Mikaela's bare flesh. The glow of her energies were swirling in the same patterns as the spark that had so recently subsumed her. Ecstatic communion now complete, he turned his attention to more practical matters, unsubspacing a container of silvery nanite-rich gel that would assist her own self-healing of the slight dermal damage she took from his spark's UV radiation.
Though there was nothing that compared to the merging of their energies, so like, and yet so completely different from the merging of sparks, there was something oddly comforting about extending silicone-sheathed fine manipulators and rubbing the gel into her vulnerable skin in long, slow strokes she found pleasing. If sometimes those manipulators lingering and flicking against her nipples, the glans of her clitoris or penetrated her silken, slick folds, Optimus found himself well pleased to be able to remind her of the specific gifts her humanity gave her. He made sure to record her cries and the movement of the tiny muscles of her fingers as they grasped through the blankets to cling to his armor plates. He recorded, too, the expression on her face, so much like that of someone in great pain, yet anything but when she arched and gasped in a different sort of climax.
Through it all, he spoke her name and endearments that made her energy swell again.
After her third climax, she was panting, shaking, the sheen of her own sweat joining that of the nanite gel. "Would you care for more?" he asked, utterly polite.
"Oh, Christ, give me a little bit," she murmured breathlessly. He cupped his hand around her as she relaxed into the euphoria that followed such release.
"I can't believe you were feeling so guilty about this," she finally said when she was no longer panting for breath.
"I ordered and orchestrated the launch of the AllSpark into space, Mikaela. That our source of life so thoroughly manipulated your world and species without either one's consent is no small matter."
"No, it isn't. But, then again, there wouldn't even be a sentient species on Earth to care if it hadn't, right?"
"That is one of the paradoxes, true."
"But it's the other one that is tearing you up the most," she said with the kind of wisdom and insight cohort bonds brought.
"Mikaela, I will never ask you--"
"--You don't have to. I'm going to. Ratchet can study me to his spark's content until we figure this out."
Optimus found that he did not have a response. The new coding that demanded he protect humanity and preserve this world was twisting amidst and vying with older protocols that gave him the responsibility for nurturing his own species, both responding to the oldest code of all that created the pathways for cohort.
"Why?" he finally asked, his tone vulnerable to his own audials.
"Optimus, how many of you guys are there left?"
Optimus accessed the pathways of his Prime bond that allowed him to briefly touch on every spark that existed within this temporal reality.
"There are 762, Autobots, Decepticons, and neutrals," his words came with something like a growl.
"Optimus, there are almost seven billion humans. There were more humans in my high school than there are living sparks. Why do you even need to ask? How could I not want there to be more of these?" she deliberately moved herself close enough to his still open chest to reach toward the coronal fingers that were suddenly not content with their retracted state.
The conflicted code suddenly came into an alignment that sent a wave of purpose through Prime's whole being. He would be certain they made choices worthy of the second chance that was being given to them, of the trust his cohort sister was placing in him.