"This stops when you do."
Megatronus crouched beside the crumpled form on the floor of the training ring, watching as the mech struggled to sit himself upright.
Orion coughs to expel the dirt and substrate jammed in his vents, grits his teeth as he lifts himself up on shaking arms, and snaps back "I stop when you stop avoiding my questions like a coward.”
Megatronus growls deep and angry and, instead of pulling Orion to his feet for another round of ‘sparring’, claps a hand around his neck and snatches him clear off the ground by it.
"You dare call me a fucking coward?" Megatronus snarls and tightens his grip, making Orion’s vocorder fritz, “I do not have to, and will never have to, explain myself to you,” he shakes the mech like he weighs nothing, “some naive midcaste who thinks he’s going to save me from my ‘barbaric inclinations’ with his superior Iaconite intellect.”
The slagger rolls his optics, “Y-you make too-oo many assumptions, champion.” Orion’s hands scramble to grab at Megatronus’s wrist as he tightens his grip on his neck, not too far from cutting off the energon supply to his processor, blunt claws scrape his armor as Orion’s intake vent chokes. Yet he does not take the goddamn hint and his mouth keeps running, “I h-aven’t been naive in a long time a-nd-zzt“ his voice goes static, Megatronus can’t make out anything else he’s saying before it totally devolves into clicking and he has to reset his vocorder. His hopes that it would finally refuse to come back online are dashed as Orion looks him dead in his optic and speaks again, “Do you really not see your own hypocrisy?”
Megatronus sees red and Orion is choking again, he can hear cables creak, metal groan, and electronic components whine as he crushes them in his grip. The mech’s optics roll back and his vents heave desperately. He wants to kill him, he would kill him, it would be easy to keep squeezing until his spinal strut snapped under the pressure, until his head came off.
But Orion finds himself dropped to the floor again in the next moment, processor spinning. They aren’t allowed to kill each other outside of the actual arena.
“You are lucky that I can’t crush your spark here."
Orion doesn’t move, only turns his head to look up at him, with those dim, tired optics, “I know.” His voice is hoarse from the damage, he can't get the rest of his limbs to respond, so he follows Megatronus with his optics as the large mech turns to leave, “It’s curious,” he continues, watching as the champion stalks towards the entrance, “y-you’ve spent your entire life having mechs look down on you, make ass-sss-umptions about you, and refuse to listen to you because they saw you as lesser. All because of the work you did and the arbitrary caste someone else put you into.”
“Yet he-ee-re you are, jumping at the chance to do it to someone els-sss.”
Megatronus pauses at the door, but does not turn around, “You honestly want to die, don’t you?”
“All I’ve sss-ee-n you do is look down on others- in your speeches you make assumptions about entire caste-zzt-, and now you refuse to listen to someone you clearly see as lesser. So tell me, what really makes you any better than them, Megatron-sss?”
He does not answer, only stands with his fists clenched, and then leaves.