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The stands beneath them resonated, drum-hollow, with the thunder of a hundred thousand pairs of stamping feet, the crowd heaving in abandon as a single entity. Somewhere above the stratosphere the stars were shining, but Tarn’s toxic smog blanketed the sky tonight and reflected back the city’s lights in a hazy orange smelter-glow; beneath the clouds, the vast parabolic dish of the Arena lay open to the sky like an antenna, a construct of pure mortal hubris broadcasting battle rage and blood thirst to the heavens, a warning beacon to the civilized worlds.
Sodium-vapor lights ringed the circumference, and the harsh yellow light flattened the shapes and colors of the mechs below it, rendering them two-dimensional and unreal. They jostled roughly, shoulder to shoulder in the stands, the press of bodies swirling and eddying like flotsam in a flooded river.
Above the stands rose tier upon tier of boxes, each level more palatial than the last. High above the arena floor, Senators murmured to each other behind smoked glass panels; the Emirate of Vos looked down from their lofty perch on the rabble far below. Between the nobility and the stands were the ranks of corporate boxes, less elevated but – in many cases – no less luxuriously appointed, and in one such box stood two mechs with hands and faces pressed to the window, staring in wonder at the great arena and its teeming night life.
The box itself was relatively modest for its kind, but even so it was obvious to the casual observer that the two mechs within, now cautiously exploring the array of high-grade on tap and the selection of accompanying snacks, could never have afforded such luxury on their own. Orion was acutely aware of all this even as he gazed in appreciation at the plush seating, the slightly garish appointments that all pointed to both immoderate wealth and a need to impress; the back of his neck prickled with the feeling that he was being observed, judged, and found wanting.
Ariel, bless her ebullient spirit, was either not plagued by the same discomfort or was better at suppressing it; she handed Orion a fluted glass filled with sparkling high-grade, and gently tapped it with a matching glass of her own.
“Congratulations, Supervisor.” She grinned. “You earned this; now unkink and enjoy it.”
Orion smiled back, sampled the high-grade, and attempted to unkink. He didn’t entirely succeed, but Ariel was clearly willing to give him a pass based on effort, and she towed him briskly toward the seats overlooking the arena floor.
The matches would not begin for a few more minutes, but Orion made himself comfortable and then stared blankly at the view before him. If he unfocused his optics, the shifting crush of mechs in the stands below looked almost like the wakes and eddies and turbulence on Iacon’s Grand Canal when the barges came through with their loads, pulling up to the dock as the great cranes swung into action, unloading cargo and reloading the barges as fast as possible, the captains fidgeting with the pressing need to be underway again. It was a carefully orchestrated madness there on the docks to begin with, every step in the dance crucial in its placement to avoid both delay and disaster, and yet Orion had taken up the gauntlet thrown down by the dockyard corporation to improve efficiency. A weekend in Tarn, with seats in the corporation’s box at the Arena; five other teams all fighting for the prize, three of them with leads more senior than Orion by a significant margin, but here he was – in the box, at the Arena, in Tarn, Ariel at his side. A brutal ten month slog of minutiae and analysis and grudging implementation, but he’d done it, and here they were.
Ariel at his side – but only Ariel. Dion was still hard at work at the dockyard; with both Orion and Ariel gone, someone had to keep the lights on and the shop running smoothly, as it were, and Dion had offered to stay behind.
“That’s not really my thing anyway,” he had pointed out when they protested. “Besides, the dockyard is only sending two of us, not three; and do you really want all that hard work of yours to be tossed over the side while you’re gone?” he had asked Orion pointedly.
“All our hard work,” Orion had rejoined, but in the end Dion saw them off at the shuttle with a wave and a smile and a cheerful admonishment to enjoy themselves – he’d know if they didn’t, after all, being trinary bonded as they were – but even the distant warm glow of Dion’s presence in Orion’s spark didn’t make the hollow absence of his physical presence ache any less.
Ariel joined him in the seats before he could get a really solid mope going. Orion turned to her, but a knock at the door interrupted him before he could speak.
“Orion Pax?”
Orion looked around, startled, to find a bored-looking mech with officious kibble and a clipboard scowling at him from the doorway in a moderately disinterested fashion, and jumped to his feet in a flurry of panic that he’d somehow managed to screw things up after all.
“Yes?”
The mech sighed as though Orion’s mere existence was an incomprehensible burden. “Fantastic.” He looked down to his clipboard and began reading in the fastest, most apathetic monotone that Orion had ever heard. “’As bearer of ticket designation Epsilon-2381b, you have been randomly selected from a pool of season box holders to visit the Arena Champion’s quarters after the conclusion of tonight’s entertainment. Be advised that this drawing bears no intrinsic value and cannot be exchanged for a monetary prize; be advised also that, in the event of the Champion’s death, this offer will be null pending negotiations with the new Champion. Report to the residential corridor on Gamma level following the conclusion of tonight’s match and queue politely with the other winners. Failure to follow posted rules and basic etiquette will result in removal from the venue with extreme prejudice.’” He turned and walked away before anyone could respond.
“Um,” said Orion, feeling as though he’d just taken a fully-loaded equipment sled to the back of his cranium. “What?”
Beside him, Ariel bit back a sound that she would forever deny was a squeal. “You won? You won the drawing? You lucky bastard, I can’t believe you!”
“I,” said Orion numbly. “What?”
Ariel looked him over critically, and then pushed him firmly down into his seat and began fanning him briskly with a datapad. “Maybe we should take this slowly. Orion,” and for all that her voice was impressively loaded with sarcasm, it was also gentle, “you won a contest.”
“Okay,” said Orion.
“You get to meet the Champion after his match.”
“Okay,” said Orion.
“Do you remember who the Champion is?”
“Megatron,” said Orion promptly, and his eyes brightened. “I get to meet Megatron!”
“That’s right,” Ariel replied soothingly, and patted his hand.
“Maybe he’ll be willing to sign a copy of the poster or something!”
“Or something,” Ariel agreed dryly.
Her tone finally registered, the fog beginning to lift from Orion’s processor. “… hang on, are you implying …?”
“Orion, sweetspark,” said Ariel, patting his hand again in a slightly condescending manner. Orion glared at her for it. She ignored the glare and continued blithely, “Do you really think that there’s a lottery for box holders to meet Megatron and get his autograph?”
Orion looked at her warily. “… yes?” he ventured.
Ariel stared at him for a moment, and then grinned hugely. “Well,” she said, and patted his hand one last time before snuggling down into her cushy seat and picking up her commemorative box of rust sticks. “I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we?”
Orion fully intended to pursue the matter further, but then a klaxon rang out to signal the start of the first match, and all other thoughts were quickly driven from his head.
Megatron, as the headliner, was up last; there were twelve matches scheduled before his as a sort of grisly amuse-bouche. None of them lasted very long.
Orion and Ariel watched in mute horror as mechs tore each other apart on the arena floor; as energon sprayed in neon-bright arcs from wounds inflicted by sword and mace and hammer and axe and, often, by war-build talons when all else was lost. They listened in sickened grief to the screams and cheers from the stands as the gladiators died for the crowd’s entertainment. What sort of desperation could drive a mech to the fighting pits, Orion wondered, and then wondered again when exactly he had offlined his optics; how far down did life have to drive someone, how far down did the system have to let them fall, to reach the point where dying in the wet sand under the grotesque, leering eye of the seething crowd seemed like the better option?
Most of them were ex-military, that much was obvious, and maybe for them the idea of going out in a single brilliant flash, like a curl of magnesium ignited and burning to nothing in an eye-blink of time, was preferable to … to what? To a long, slow, grinding death of starvation and decay? What did it feel like to be so hungry, to feel the gradual, crumbling breakdown of your body counting down the seconds to your death?
The cheering had faded to a rumbling murmur before Orion reset his optics and looked around. The arena was empty for the moment. All the bodies and discarded weapons and various pieces thereof had been collected for reuse or for the smelting pits, depending on their condition, and a huge construction-frame was spreading a new layer of clinker and slag, finely crushed, across the arena floor. The substrate glittered black under the lights, yet another product of Tarn’s relentless industry – the spoil from the vast factories and smelting plants that choked the sky with their exhaust and the ground with their waste and the people with their ceaseless, churning hunger for cheap labor.
… a hunger, Orion realized dimly, that was not Tarn’s alone but that of Cybertron in her entirely. There was a new overlayer being planned in central Iacon; where else did he think the raw materials came from? Cybertron hungered, and so the military secured new outposts and new colonies for mining, and the offworld mining companies commissioned new workers and sent them to those outposts and colonies, most of them never to see daylight to say nothing of the planet that was ostensibly their home; and then the output of those mines and colonies came here to Tarn, to be processed into durasteel and tungsten carbide and the structure holding Cybertron’s gleaming cities high above the underlayers. And the miners came here, too, if they survived long enough, and so did the soldiers when they were decommissioned. It all came here to Tarn.
Ariel reached over and patted his arm. She was still shaking from the visceral impact of those opening bouts, and her field was a roil of disgust and pity and horror, but she reached out to comfort him nonetheless.
Orion groped blindly for her hand and squeezed it in a semblance of reassurance. It was an utter sham and they both knew it, though perhaps Ariel was not fully aware of the extend of the yawning chasm that had opened before Orion’s feet, the sense of the foundations of his world crumbling as they were exposed to scrutiny in a manner utterly new …
And then all his attention was diverted to the arena once more, the huge gate at one end beginning to rise, heralded by ecstatic screaming from the crowd; and something huge exploded through the opening, the serrated fins on its back taking the bottom half of the durasteel gate with it in its haste to be free. Orion had never seen anything like it; had never, in all his worst nightmares, even imagined anything like it – some vast, worm-like creature, its body seemingly an endless progression of massive segments and gripping claws and barbed protrusions and, at one end, concentric gleaming rings of teeth surrounding a ravening maw. It looked like the impossible bastard offspring of a garbage disposal and Unicron himself, and it was obscenely, eye-searingly purple.
“Behold!” roared the announcer with macabre enthusiasm, as the thing shrieked and slavered and thrashed about the arena floor, “behold the deadliest creature ever to enter the Arena – Goremaw the Destroyer!”
Orion had a sneaking suspicion that Goremaw had neither chosen its own name nor entered the ring voluntarily, both actions seemingly requiring a much higher degree of sentience than it probably possessed.
Beside him, Ariel began to bounce in her seat and her grip on his hand tightened almost painfully: the gate at the other end of the arena had begun to rise as well, and then there was a glint of light reflecting off war-grade armor, and Megatron was standing in the doorway, sword in one hand and a flail in the other, and on his face an expression of …
Orion squinted, and then zoomed in his optics to their greatest extent. He had been expecting steely determination, perhaps, or pride, or even a bloodthirsty snarl; instead, Megatron looked almost … resigned. A little weary, even, and then, as he watched Goremaw the Destroyer rampage noisily around the arena floor, tearing great gouges into the walls and great trenches into the ground, an expression of vague disgust settled in.
Orion didn’t really have time to ponder that for long, since Goremaw had apparently detected Megatron’s presence with whatever improbable sensory organs it was sporting, and it went for him with a screech like a forklift running afoul of an oil slick.
Megatron darted out of the way much faster than a mech his size should be able to move, the gate through which he’d entered snapping shut nearly on his heels as Goremaw plunged through the now-empty space he’d occupied and then slammed face-first into the gate itself.
Goremaw shook off the impact and a couple of broken tusks and turned, its vast bulk coiling over itself in its haste to pursue him; and the fight that followed seemed both to last interminably and to be over faster than thought – Megatron dodging and twisting, Goremaw’s endless body wrapping around him for a chilling, spark-stopping moment, the barbs on each body segment gouging into Megatron’s armor to hold him in place as it crushed the life out of him; and then in a terrifying burst of strength Megatron twisted free, breaking the barbs and Goremaw’s hold and the thing shrieked in rage and agony.
There were weapons and shields scattered about the walls of the arena; Megatron had lost the flail early on and had grabbed a shield instead, though he’d not lost his grip on the sword – Orion got the impression that Megatron rather liked that sword – and had broken away from Goremaw only for a moment when it flicked the last few segments of its body like a whip, catching him full in the chest – luckily Megatron had the shield up in time and the barbs lodged in it rather than in his armor. The shield was ripped away in the same motion that tossed Megatron across the arena; he hit the ground and skidded, tearing a furrow through the black clinker with his shoulder before standing back up, sword in hand and teeth bared. Ariel screamed as Goremaw reared up above Megatron and plunged downward in a lethal, killing strike, the massive spines ringing its mouth fanned open to catch and skewer and pull him in –
And Megatron moved in, sword upraised, and as the whole vast extent of the purple worm came down on him he cut, unseaming it along its entire length under the unstoppable power of its own weight.
Purple gore splattered down in an unsavory torrent, and then Megatron was standing triumphant, sword still raised and dripping ichor, and Goremaw was piled to either side of him in two squashy coils of steaming glop.
There was a vast silence in the arena, so quiet that Orion swore he could hear the slime dripping off Megatron’s sword, and then the crowd screamed as a single voice; mechs applauding, slapping each other triumphantly, cheering and chanting and shouting the Champion’s name. Down below in the arena, Megatron lowered his sword and flicked it, sending purple goo flying in an arc, and then trudged stoically back to the gate through which he had entered. It slammed shut behind him, and the match was over.
*
Orion released the vents he hadn’t known he’d been holding in a shimmering rush of heated exhaust, and collapsed back into the plush seat like a gantry crane with a broken spar. His spark was throbbing in its casing and he felt light-headed, as though he had been the one facing death at the teeth of Goremaw the Destroyer rather than sitting high above in a luxury box, safe and remote; like it was a show, no more real than any play or opera or holo-drama, rather than a down-and-dirty fight to survive against terrible odds while all around you other people screamed for your death …
“Are you ready?” said Ariel beside him, and Orion jumped and turned to face her, bewildered.
“Ready?”
“For your autograph,” said Ariel, waggling her eyebrows in a thoroughly disturbing fashion, and then prodded him until he stood, still half dazed. “Go on, already! And remember to take plenty of image captures!”
That, at least, was outrageous enough to snap him out of his stupor.
“I will not …!”
“Of course you won’t,” said Ariel.
Orion huffed in vindication. “It would be rude –“
“—to do so without asking first, I quite agree.” She looked thoughtful. “Maybe he’d be into it, though …”
“Ariel …”
“Well, whatever – just make sure he frags you blind so we can enjoy it, too.”
“Ariel!”
Ariel grinned, unrepentant and shameless. “So are you going, or shall I?”
Orion scrambled for the door before she could make good on the threat, and tried to pretend he didn’t hear her laughing.
*
By the time Orion found his way down to the residential corridor on Gamma level, the supposed queue had cleared completely, although there was some extremely loud moaning echoing faintly through the massive security door to which he’d been directed by a series of variously apathetic security personnel.
Orion paused in the corridor, uncertain and uncomfortable, and kept himself from fidgeting only through extreme force of will. A placard on the wall beside the door caught his attention; beneath a veneer of graffiti and what might have been assorted bodily fluids – he shied away from thinking too much about which specific fluids they might be – he could make out a neatly-stenciled list of injunctions. Presumably the “posted rules” he’d been told about?
For lack of anything better to do, he stepped closer and read the placard.
“Attention Guests,” it read. “Failure to comply with the following directives will result in immediate expulsion from Arena property. Repeated failures will result in a permanent ban from the grounds.” Below that, in a neat legible hand, someone had penned the addition, “Failure to comply with Rule 5 will result in immediate dismemberment.”
Orion, in the grip of a horrified fascination, skimmed down the list to the aforementioned number five, which read, “Consent is non-negotiable. Ask first. No means no.”
That was actually kind of promising, he thought, assuming that it went both ways.
It also thoroughly put paid to any lingering idea that he had won an opportunity to get Megatron’s autograph, unless perhaps he decided to ask Megatron to sign his interface panel …
Orion strongly suspected that that precise scenario was the so-called premise of a significant number of films of the sort that he would never admit to having any familiarity with whatsoever, and dismissed it firmly as being so lame and clichéd that Megatron would have every right to eject him bodily from the premises, probably by picking him up by the head with one massive hand and throwing him through a wall.
… the realization that being thrown roughly – hopefully not too roughly? – against a wall by Megatron and then ravished within an inch of his desperately sheltered, boring life had the chance of becoming significantly more than a daydream, and quite soon at that, dropped itself into the forefront of Orion’s mental processes like the hulk of a communications satellite plummeting out of orbit to catastrophically disrupt rush hour traffic in downtown Iacon on the eve of a holiday weekend.
The proverbial cognitive pile-up was spectacular.
Before Orion had time to work up a really good panic, though, the background moaning reached a sudden crescendo and then cut off; and a moment later, the massive locks on the security door rotated into position and the door swung ponderously on its hinges.
A mech tottered out. His delicate, gold-filigreed armor was scuffed in significant locations, tarnished with fluids, and dented in the unmistakable patterns of both fingers and teeth. He looked simultaneously shell-shocked and giddily satiated, and overlooked Orion completely as he staggered down the corridor, bumping gently off the walls every so often.
The door remained open. Orion took up his courage (and libido) in both hands, and peeked in.
Someone else with any sort of expectation of what they were walking into might have been disappointed; Orion, however, had no preconceptions to be shaken and moreover was in a state of mild shock. The bare walls therefore did not faze him; nor did the lack of floor space or corresponding lack of furniture. There was an energon dispenser built into one wall – a cheap, basic model that a low-caste city college might be embarrassed to install in its dormitories – and a neat row of datapads and flimsies on a high shelf, and a large berth.
There was a large mech sprawled comfortably across the large berth, eyes closed and systems humming in a low contented idle. Beneath the war paint and weld scars and assorted scuffs and dents, the remains of high-viz striping were still identifiable on his helm and vambraces.
Aside from that, the room was almost impersonally empty, not even a window – of course no windows, thought Orion dazedly, not down here, not this far below the surface – or a viewscreen, or even any holos of friends or …
“You’re new.”
Orion nearly jumped out of his plating at the low rumble of that voice, and he snapped his gaze back with guilty speed to the big mech on the berth; the big mech who hadn’t bothered to sit up yet, but was watching him with red optics bright with curiosity.
“I,” said Orion eloquently. “… uh?”
“I’ve not seen you before,” said Megatron, because it was Megatron on that berth, unmistakably; and he propped himself up on one elbow to better review his visitor. “New box holder, I suppose, come to check the merchandise?”
Orion gaped, sputtered, gaped some more, and then finally began to pull himself together under the burgeoning amusement in Megatron’s even regard. “I, um, I … no, not a box holder, I mean …” So much for pulling himself together. Orion gulped air and tried again. “My friend and I won use of the dockyard corporation’s box for today – we, ah, we had the best …” He faltered under the weight of that unwavering carmine stare, but forged on. “The best increase in, in energy efficiency …”
Megatron blinked, nonplussed. “That explains your presence at the match; what are you doing here, though?”
“They, um. One of the, the ushers came and told me that my seat number had been drawn in a lottery, and the prize was a visit to … uh.” Orion could feel himself blushing. “A visit with you.”
Megatron blinked at him again, and then started to laugh – a deep, rolling purr that shuddered up Orion’s back struts and loosened his knees in new and alarming ways.
“Well, then,” and Megatron levered himself up off the berth to stand, and then prowled slowly toward Orion, “I suppose you’re doubly lucky today, aren’t you?” He stopped in front of Orion and gave him a slow, considering once-over; Orion, whose feet were as glued to the floor as his tongue was to the roof of his mouth, suffered a dizzying shift in perspective because that berth wasn’t just big – it was huge. Megatron was at least twice his height, easily five times his mass, could almost certainly rip his limbs off with minimal effort, and was staring down at him with an air of evaluation that seemed to suggest he actually rather liked what he was seeing; but that was patently ridiculous, wasn’t it?
… wasn’t it?
“What’s your name?” said Megatron.
Orion reset his vocalizer. “Orion Pax.”
Megatron smiled, slow and pleased, and if he wasn’t actually interested then he was doing a marvelous job of faking it. “My pleasure, Orion Pax,” and that deep gravelly voice purred sinfully over the second word.
Orion whimpered. Megatron’s smile broadened, and he put one huge hand on Orion’s upper back and directed him gently but inexorably toward the berth.
“I hope you don’t mind,” said Megatron, steering Orion before him like a dory in the bow wake of a super-tanker, “but I’m not really in the mood for rough and fast right now. Besides, I get the impression that slow and leisurely is more your speed anyway.”
“Uh, no,” Orion stammered, and then backpedaled hastily. “I mean yes, that’s fine, whatever you like is fine, I imagine you’re already tired after … um, after whoever that was that I saw when I came in …?”
Megatron laughed, low and warm and hungry, and Orion felt the sound in his rapidly-liquifying joints more than heard it. “Who, Panglossa? He’d be terribly flattered by your assumption, but in fact I’d been through four others before him, and he hadn’t anywhere near the stamina I was hoping for.”
“Four?” said Orion, and let himself be arranged carefully on the berth, too shocked and turned-on to do more than comply on a sort of lust-fueled autopilot. “You … uh. Four?” It was a squeak. Orion knew it was a squeak, but lacked the cogency to muster any sort of shame for the fact.
“Gladiator,” Megatron pointed out. From any other mech, it would have been obnoxiously smug; from him, it was a bare statement of fact. “And miner before that. Endurance is something of a prerequisite.”
“Yes, but –“ Orion lost the ability or will to discuss the subject further when Megatron moved onto the berth and loomed above him, huge and strong and radiating heat like a smelter, little arcs of plasma limning the plates of his arena-grade armor like boreal aurorae.
“You can tell me ‘no,’” and Megatron’s voice was a low rasp that burred over Orion’s audial sensors like velvet, “you can say ‘no’ and I’ll respect it.” He paused, and looked Orion in the eye, and then smiled – crooked and a little rueful, but genuine. “I must admit, though … I’d much rather you said ‘yes.’”
“Yes,” Orion gasped, and opened an access panel; and Megatron smirked, and opened a panel of his own, and with careful talons fished out Orion’s cables and then his own and made the connections, because Orion’s hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t manage it himself.
The simple power differential between their systems was enough to fling Orion immediately into overload with a crackling wail as his vocalizer fritzed; by the time he had reset, Megatron was looking simultaneously amused and a little bored. Horror lanced through Orion – amused was one thing, but bored?! Primus, please, not bored; he wasn’t ready for this to be over yet – and he lurched upward to throw his arms as far around Megatron’s massive shoulders and neck as he could reach, and pulled him into a desperate, messy kiss.
Orion would have been far more embarrassed about the desperation and messiness, except that, bright and clear across their link, Megatron was broadcasting pure confusion: what is this?
They only had a surface-level link established, but that was plenty for basic communication. Orion echoed the confusion back, and Megatron jostled him with a tightly packaged sense-impression of the kiss.
Orion broke contact to stare, dumbfounded, at the huge mech pinning him to the berth, and then blurted in honest bemusement, “How the Pit is that your first kiss?”
Megatron glared at him, offended, and Orion scrambled to push apology and confusion and a comprehensive sample of the full range of emotions currently churning through his processes. The prickly, hackled irritation faded from Megatron’s side and was replaced with grudging confirmation that yes, that was technically his first kiss, and what the hell was the point of mashing faces together anyway?
There was no way Orion was going to let that stand.
“Up,” he said authoritatively, and pushed on Megatron’s broad chestplate until he sat back on his heels. Amusement and irritation tingled through their link, but frank curiosity overpowered both, and so Megatron cooperated with Orion’s urging; Orion rose to stand, straddling a thigh thicker than his own waist, and Megatron reflexively gripped Orion’s hips to steady him. Like this, they were nearly of a height, and the ridiculousness of it all nearly swamped Orion completely before he shook it off and set about introducing Megatron to the vital and criminally neglected art of kissing.
There were scars on Megatron’s mouth, Orion discovered, too small and too well-healed to be particularly noticeable to the eye, but to lips and tongue they were obvious, and also sensitive – Megatron twitched slightly when Orion explored them, and the questioning hum that rumbled through his chest deepened slightly.
Megatron’s dental plates had been sharpened into fangs, Orion discovered, and they were just as sharp as they looked; he cut his tongue on one and the kiss was briefly flavored with the sharp tang of energon, and Megatron moaned at it.
Orion discovered that Megatron responded favorably to soft, sweet, lingering kisses, and that he learned quickly how to emulate and then to improvise, and did well enough at both to make Orion’s knees feel like they were made of a distinctly non-Newtonian fluid, and also to make Orion distinctly glad that he had a damn good grip on Megatron’s neck. He learned that Megatron responded even more favorably to having his lower lip sucked gently, and then bitten, and then sucked again before being released with a pop, and the feedback across their link from that little maneuver sent a glittering cascade of sparking pleasure throughout Orion’s entire sensory network, left him moaning helplessly against Megatron’s mouth; and Megatron laughed, gently triumphant, and laid him back down on the berth, and spread Orion’s thighs apart with huge warm hands.
Orion stared up at him, dizzy and confounded with lust, and Megatron gently strumming the cables strung between them did not improve his state in the slightest. Megatron unlatching his own interface panel and allowing his spike to pressurize with a resonant sigh of obvious relief did even less … or, to be fair, it did quite a bit more to quite a number of Orion’s systems, none of which had anything to do with rational thought or calming things down.
“Open this,” said Megatron, sounding positively delighted; and he tapped one claw against Orion’s own interface panel, which opened immediately and without requiring conscious thought to do so. Orion’s spike pressurized immediately, and his valve doubled down on the frankly excessive quantity of lubricant it was producing; and then Orion looked at the size of the spike that Megatron was lazily fisting and decided that no, in fact that quantity of lubricant might just be appropriate after all.
“Um,” said Orion.
“Relax,” said Megatron, leaning forward to plant one hand – the unoccupied one – beside Orion’s head. “I generally make a point of not injuring my berth partners. Unless they’re into that, of course.”
Orion looked at the claws and the fangs and the massive, overwhelming power of him, and then imagined what a little consensual pain might entail, and whimpered.
Megatron nipped gently at one of Orion’s audial spikes. “I’ll just keep that in mind for later, shall I.”
Orion whimpered again, and then Megatron was wrapping one huge, clawed hand around his own spike and Orion’s at the same time, and then he squeezed just so and twisted his wrist, and Orion went screaming into his second overload with the taste of Megatron’s amusement in the back of his mind, effervescent as high-grade and improbable as winning a lottery and finding oneself in a gladiator’s berth.
So maybe not all that improbable after all, really.
At some point among the ensuing torrent of overloads, Orion found himself offering deeper access to Megatron, and Megatron accepted and reciprocated without hesitation, slipping into Orion’s brain like a plasma knife: merciless and deadly and cruel in the same fashion as the killing polar winds that swept down from the mountains bordering the Rust Sea; impersonal, without malice, and no less lethal for either lack. He riffled ungently through Orion’s memories, stirring them with sharp claws and tattering the edges a bit, and carefully examined Orion’s personality components – those fragile, unique little bits and pieces that made Orion who he was. Those Megatron handled with utmost care, and it was in that examination that he stumbled and paused, once again bewildered.
Orion felt him tug, infinitely gentle, to find the data streams and the memories at the ends of them which fed this one most vexing component, and then Megatron followed the streams to examine the memories, his confusion only growing. Looking over his metaphorical shoulder, Orion saw … his friends. Saw a warm golden afternoon spent entwined with Dion and Ariel on a shared berth, affection and pleasure passing back and forth like waves on a beach. Saw a thousand brief moments that added up to a life, of kindness and compassion and love—
“That,” said Megatron. “What is that?”
“What?” said Orion dazedly. “You mean love?” His disbelief was tangible, and Megatron promptly shrugged him into Megatron’s own memory banks and the bleak horror therein.
Orion reeled from it; he’d guessed, he’d expected intellectually what Megatron’s life must have been like, but he’d not tried to imagine it and had certainly never thought to experience it, but there it was and he was drowning. Memories of mines, of crushing darkness and endless rock and endless labor and endless hunger. Memories of the arena, of endless battles and pain and blood, of killing over and over until it ceased to mean anything, which was a horror of its own. Tens of thousands of years of existence, and all of it seemingly devoid of the least scrap of kindness or compassion or love, of the small simple things that Orion had managed to take for granted in his short existence. Tens of thousands of years of existing, of surviving – not living.
Orion was vaguely aware that he was crying with grief and horror, optical lubricant streaking his face and vents hiccupping with stress. More acutely he was aware of Megatron’s confusion and mounting irritation – why the dramatics, he was thinking; this is life, this is how it is, and how naïve was Orion to have thought differently – and then a great mounting swell of outrage and denial rushed through him, more powerful even than Orion’s alone; and Orion realized that it was Ariel and Dion from deep within their trinary bond, reaching out to him and through him to Megatron to add their own outcry to his.
Megatron shuddered, combat routines roaring to life because of course this was a threat, what else could it be but a threat; and Ariel and Dion were there in the link, reaching out with memories of their own to share; and Megatron sank back, bewildered at their insistence, and let them come.
They showed him their own lives, their own loves; bemused into compliance, Megatron showed them all he had in place of that – the growing implacable anger as every single day showed him more and more proof that the world was rotten to the core, beyond saving; that government and society were lies built upon lies, the sediment of seventeen million years calcified into immovable bedrock that crushed everyone under its weight eventually – that even optimistic little middle-caste mechs, dockyard supervisors and office workers and everyone, everyone was slated for the scrap heap eventually, buried in the dark as the overlayers rose above them. He showed them the glittering great house being built for him on just such an overlayer, a house he neither wanted nor needed; and then, almost inadvertently, he showed them how he had considered using that great useless edifice to break down the overlayers from the top – how he had considered just blowing the damn thing up in a single glorious burst of immolation that might or might not include him; because really, what was the damn point of it all? Their society’s corruption was endemic, the whole structure shot through and through with decay from bottom to top – he had seen the bottom himself, it wasn’t possible to start any lower than he had, and Orion and Ariel and Dion were helpless against the memories of crushing pressure and heat and darkness, never seeing light, never coming up, only toiling ever deeper and deeper into the planet’s crust with nothing ahead but his own destruction …
Megatron felt them panic, then, and pulled back the memories which were overwhelming them, and showed them something else instead: his vision of a society that was fair and just, and the steps he saw in the process of achieving it. Orion felt his entire body seize in rejection and horror, because Megatron’s vision – a nightmarishly brutal world not unlike the arena, in which there were no castes and no hierarchies and only an endless chaotic turmoil of frank, open violence in which anyone could have whatever they wanted, as long as they were strong enough and determined enough to take it and hold it – was clearly being offered up to them as a balm, as though this terrible future was supposed to be a comfort in the wake of the even worse nightmare that Megatron had lived and was still living.
The truly terrible part was that, in comparison to whatever hellish existence for which he’d originally been commissioned, that dystopian vision was better; and Orion still rejected it, viscerally, because there was no room in it at all for the sort of life he wanted – there was no room for companionship or friendship or love or gentle golden afternoons in a big shared bed.
“And at what price do your golden afternoons come?” Megatron demanded coldly. “Who pays for them, really? Not you, no matter how hard your labors may seem; that peace and serenity is bought with the misery and torment of millions of—“
Orion cut him off before he could really get going, though, by the simple expedient of sticking a finger into one of his own access ports and generating a small pulse of white noise against the terminal. Deeply linked as they were, Megatron jolted with him as data ports tried desperately to interpret the white noise as anything sensible and then shunted it straight to the pleasure centers of their neural systems.
Megatron glared at him ferociously. Orion would have found that glare even more intimidating had the jolt not reminded him that Megatron was, at the moment, buried in Orion’s valve all the way to the terminal node and therefore in as exquisitely vulnerable a position as Orion himself. He reminded Megatron of this fact with a little clever manipulation of certain internal components that made Megatron choke and then look distinctly glassy-eyed for a long moment.
“Very well,” said Megatron, once he’d recovered his equilibrium somewhat, “I see your point.”
“I don’t actually think you do,” said Orion, and clamped his thighs firmly around Megatron’s waist. “Why can’t there be more than two options, and why can’t at least one option be something other than completely terrible?”
Megatron was clearly of a mind to argue, but Ariel and Dion were equally clearly not going to let him – Dion by means of suggesting half a dozen labor-level organizational movements that Megatron had never considered possible, and Ariel by means of launching into one of her favorite self-servicing routines that never failed to leave Orion and Dion panting and seeing sparks; it appeared to work equally as well on Megatron.
“I know this seems like a crazy idea,” said Orion, “but maybe we could try working together on the problem rather than just going straight to the blowing things up and killing people option?”
Judging by the look on Megatron’s face, working together with anyone else on any sort of problem, ever, was completely outside the realm of his experience and therefore not even something he could really imagine. Orion and Ariel and Dion all helpfully bombarded him with their own sense-memories – quite a few of which were unashamedly erotic in nature – in order to provide some much-needed perspective on the issue.
They also conveniently launched Megatron into a spectacular overload in the process, which likewise provided some much-needed perspective, albeit on a different axis. It didn’t hurt that he took them all down with him.
*
Eventually, Ariel nudged Orion back into something approximating consciousness.
“Open your eyes for us, sweetspark?”
Groggily, Orion managed to find the commands to reboot his optical suite and restored himself to sufficient function to make out the looming figure of Megatron above him on the berth, dramatically backlit by the recessed ceiling lights.
Seeing proof of function, Megatron sat back on his heels and glowered balefully at Orion, but before he could kick up any sort of fuss about underhanded debate tactics or really much of anything at all, there was a giddy rush of pointed desire through the shared link from Dion. Megatron completely lost track of his half-formed rant and just sat there looking poleaxed.
“Oh my,” said Dion, equal parts gleeful and shy, “he is rather magnificent, isn’t he? I hadn’t quite gotten a good look earlier.”
“Told you so,” said Ariel, who was entirely and unrepentantly gleeful.
Orion sputtered at them, appalled; and then there was a low pulse of genuine pleasure from Megatron – Megatron, who had never experienced someone’s honest appreciation before, had never been looked at and found attractive for his own sake without malice or manipulation in mind, and who had decided he quite liked the sensation and would be perfectly willing to experience it some more, and as often as possible, and would they please get on with it.
“You mean you don’t want to continue arguing about constructive methods of destabilizing the current political regime?” Orion asked, managing to sound almost coy.
Megatron promptly took hold of Orion at the knee joints and bent him nearly in half. The change in angle did incredible things with the juxtaposition of their bodies and certain specific subsystems therein.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Megatron offered dryly, while Orion writhed beneath him and moaned faintly. “If you can maintain a cogent argument for the next – oh, let’s say twenty minutes? I’ll happily entertain it. Otherwise, we can talk about it in the morning, and in the meantime I’ll entertain all four of us until someone blows a fuse.”
“Let’s do that,” Ariel said, when it became obvious that Orion was not going to be able to respond with any degree of clarity. “Just don’t break him too much, we quite like him in one piece and mostly functional.”
“I shall be a model of restraint and decorum,” said Megatron.
Ariel spluttered out a laugh. “Oh please don’t – what fun would that be?”
Pinned under Megatron’s bulk and assailed from within by Ariel’s chirpy lust and Dion’s warm affection and the oncoming tsunami that was Megatron himself, Orion groaned in mingled joy and amused despair. It was the end of the line for everything he’d known, and there would be a great deal of time for regret … but maybe that, too, could wait for morning.