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When he was young and lost, Soundwave had buried himself in noise.
He sat under bridges, letting the rumble of passing vehicle-modes embrace him as the support beams rattled against his plating. He lingering by construction projects, soothed by the white-noise of drills and demolition. He lurked in alleys outside factories, comforted by the whir of large machinery.
Any noise was better than none, but what Soundwave wanted most was music.
He sought it out, in rich neighborhoods and poor, at the edges of upper-class parties and the open backdoors of unlicensed bars and pushed up bodily against the cracked walls of condemned but not abandoned buildings.
Soundwave took what music he could find, but some music was better.
Loud music was better.
Loud enough, and it drowned out the noises of everyone else’s processors -- everyone else’s minds. It drowned out the electric hum of the streets and the city’s subterranean wiring and the thousands of intruding, unwanted electromagnetic fields of strangers. Loud enough, and it drowned out his own mind, soothed every ache in his frame and shook him down to his core. Loud enough, and Soundwave could submerge himself into the vibrations. Could relax and let himself simply be.
Soundwave learned where to find loud music. The loudest music, and the best.
Shady, dangerous places, where criminals gathered. Because the type of music Soundwave liked most - extremely high-volume and raucous, with heavy percussion and rough voices and building electronic beats and subversive lyrics - that type of music was illegal.
Soundwave didn’t care. He sought it out, at M3 meetings and impromptu gatherings of the Malware Brigade and at illegal bars where miners and construction-bots congregated on off-shifts and sang loud together even though their vocalizers hadn’t been built for music.
But it didn’t seem to matter. The noises they made were better than anything Soundwave had heard (or played) at the finest upper-caste parties, better than the sweet vocalizations of entire choruses of mechs whose alt-modes were instruments and whose vocalizers were tuned to making music.
Their music moved him. It mattered to him. It soothed him, more thoroughly and more reliably than the drugs and circuit boosters most other mechs turned to. Soundwave sought it out and lost himself in it.
Soundwave recorded the music, when he remembered to.
That was what he had been built for, after all. His function. The one he’d failed at. Recording and playback. Being one step above disposable class hadn’t saved him, not when his form could no longer properly serve its function.
But Soundwave could still record well enough to suit his own purposes. And his speakers still worked, even run-down from lack of maintenance.
Soundwave recorded. And he played the music back for himself later, whenever the noise of the the streets and of other peoples’ minds became overwhelming. Internally, if he was trying to go unnoticed. Out loud, if he was alone and if he felt safe enough -- volume turned up as high as he could go, until his own speakers rattled and the melody was half-lost in the distortion.
It was Ravage who taught Soundwave how to dance.
Soundwave wasn’t built for dancing. He had the wrong frametype -- entirely wrong, boxy and big and heavy. And anyway, mechs of his class didn’t dance. Dancing was art, and Soundwave was only authorized for recording and playback, not for creation.
But if Soundwave wasn’t built for dancing, Ravage really wasn’t built for it.
Ravage danced anyway.
Soundwave played recordings of music that he’d gathered, and Ravage danced to it, paws tapping on the street, tail twitching in time with the music. He danced, and Soundwave stared.
Laserbeak joined in -- more subdued, nodding his head and twitching his wings. Buzzsaw took flight, dipping and wheeling in time with the music.
They didn’t pressure him to join, but Soundwave followed their example. Subtly, at first -- tapping his foot, nodding his head. It felt good. Something in him started to uncoil. He let himself move to the music -- repetitive, meaningless motions. The kinds of self-soothing behavior that had helped to get Soundwave junked, but here, no one told him to stop. Ravage rumbled and purred, encouraging. Soundwave lost himself in the movement, in the pleasant repetition, his body following the movements of the music.
(It would take years for Soundwave to master dancing, although he would master it. Would take steps designed for lighter frames and shape them to suit his own. Mechs would stare on the rare occasions that Soundwave chose to dance where they could see him.)
Soundwave had no grace, back then. But it felt good to move to the music -- illegal dancing to illegal songs, forgetting that none of them had been built for it.
Soundwave came to love the gladiatorial pits of Kaon.
At first, he’d hated them. So many mechs, so densely packed together, overflowing with hate and frustration and fierce joy and lust for violence until Soundwave was drowning in it, buffeted from all sides in a way he hadn’t been since he’d first been discarded to the streets.
That all changed when Soundwave found his anchor.
Megatron was a rock in that stormy ocean. No, more than that: He was the calm around which storms spun and grew.
Standing next to him, sheltered from the swirling masses in the eye of that oncoming storm, Soundwave came to love the music of the pits.
Like the illegal music of the manual class, it was made with bodies and with vocalizers not built to produce sweet sounds. And like that music, it changed. But faster - the lyrics simpler, shifting with the desires of the crowd. Calls for victory or spilled fuel. Mocking or deifying. Shifting in tone and volume like the sounds of traffic under the Interstate bridge as rush hours came and went.
Soundwave recorded those songs. He played them back - layering one on top of another, shifting the volume and the tempo, combining them with the folk music of the labor classes to create songs that were cries for freedom through violent means. He layered the sounds of chanting, stomping crowds over recordings of Megatron’s poetry and played them back until his spark ached.
Soundwave saw Megatron’s neural net and came to know it. By then, he’d become good at reading the minds of other mechs - had come to understand that the supposed flaw that had gotten him junked as defective was in fact a gift.
Soundwave saw Megatron’s mind in broad strokes, and Megatron opened it to him and let him in without reservation. He opened himself up as if he wanted to be known.
Soundwave saw the violence that had formed Megatron’s abandoned pacifism. He saw Megatron’s poetry, composed in the enclosed and all-encompassing dark of the nucleon mines of Nova Point and Messatine. He saw the price that Megatron was willing to pay.
But more than anything - brighter, blindingly brilliant - Soundwave saw Megatron’s sincere dedication towards a grand and radiant future.
Soundwave saw a world where mechs like him would be valued for who they were, not discarded.
A world where a mech like Soundwave could compose music, and could dance to it.