Optimus couldn't believe his eyes as it happened. Despite being told exactly what it was, it was like watching the impossible happen. The purple turning to white, the green highlights strikingly painted against it. It was Shockwave as he was, as everyone had wanted to remember him, standing before him as nothing but an illusion, but everything that Shockwave was behind the wall of Shadowplay.

His blue eyes soften at meeting the other's, knowing full well that this wasn't the past being corrected. It was sad, but a kind of sadness that Optimus would let into his spark. Ratchet would say that pain is necessary to feel happiness. Maybe this was what he meant by that.

Looking at a ghost, something so real that he could touch it. But the ghost touches him, instead, eyes slowly tracing down to where they connected, seeing the light. That ache in his spark slowly returning.

"I knew."

There's more to that. Optimus, for as well as he spoke, still had trouble finding words sometimes.

"I knew you could be who you were. This light show...it's certainly spectacular. But your efforts to make it....that's what proves that I'm right. That you've been here this whole time."

And there's the happiness in the pain.