Work Text:
Hold your head high, Autobot .
Hot Rod's instinct tells him to not answer. He does not want to. Orion's-- or, that is to say, Optimus'-- words echo in his mind like a bad poem. A horrible mock rap, the sort he'd have heard from the newest recruits attempting to make fun of one another.
The kind he'd laugh at.
Hold your head high, Autobot .
The rebel's-- once Insurgent-- mind tells him this is utterly, horribly, wrong. He had not done all this to be called an Autobot. He had not blown up a city to spare people from pain to be called someone who inflicts it.
Yet he had saved the very same group of 'bots who called themselves so-- who chased him down, hunted him like an animal, refused to listen even when he'd shown Zeta's malice; the result to their blind obedience.
It could be you that carries this Matrix one day, after all.
A curse implanted on him-- a thought that makes the energon flowing through his circuits boil, makes his tanks churn. Hot Rod looks away from Optimus then (disguises it as simply turning his head to look at the hole Metroplex left in his wake) to swallow his disgust. Optimus Prime, the wielder of the Matrix, the one who rose from the ashes of his home despite not deserving it, has planted a curse on him beyond a doubt-- a burden he does not wish to carry, not within a faction which has hunted down his brothers more than once, who stormed into their sacred grounds and tore apart prayer mats.
Deep within, a hidden thought forces its way out. It flashes in deep reds and boiling oranges.
You should have let Megatron kill them all.
That would have been something, wouldn't it? More energon spilling from his hands, more bodies added to the pile. He wonders, briefly, if Megatron would have done the same as Optimus. Maybe he would have said what good work he did, helping him get rid of those pesky Autobots-- maybe, predictably so, he would have hinted at giving Hot Rod a place of importance within the Decepticons.
That thought, too, makes him swallow sickness.
The mech beside him does not realize, but the Matrix has a song. It sings, tauntingly so, music heard within the prayers of the mechs who'd stop their meals to pray to it. It hums in tunes often sung by the desperate. Songs he'd heard a million times within the walls of the Acroplex, on the streets of Nyon, within the boats by the bay.
Optimus does not hear it, for he has never known suffering the way Nyon had known it.
His escape plan is simple, and easy. The Autobots have many ships. The guilt that Optimus hides behind his faceplate will not allow him to deny Hot Rod this one act of cowardice.
" Well, that'd be something, wouldn't it? "
He does not attempt to hide the sarcasm and disdain in his voice.