Chapter Text
Megatron doesn’t know what compels him to do it.
It’s only after a very long and agonizing bit of introspection that he comes to this conclusion: it must be that same foolish, useless thing that had made him do terrible, gut-wrenching things. It must be that thing that made him into a monster in Kaon, the monster from Tarn-
There is– and he knows it’s there, that restless, violent, endlessly turning part of him. It’s there, and he knows it, because he had given birth to it in a cell with a ceiling the color of blood, born of a blue face and black and white hands, and it’s the only honest part of him. Perhaps it has always been the motivator– and not just for him, but with anyone– to commit acts deemed unspeakable.
The first day of the hundredth year since the Lost Light stumbled into that little pocket in space– that perfect, empty universe, almost created just for their taking– that day, today, is the first time in a hundred years that Megatron picks up a pen, and puts it to pad.
Megatron is writing a letter.
It’s late. Too late. It’s dark. It has to be dark, because this is space, and space is black and cold and empty except for the pockets where it’s not, but on the Lost Light, it’s the night cycle, and so the darkness stops being space and starts being sleep.
Megatron does not sleep. Megatron cannot sleep. He’s writing a letter, and he scratches out words and scribbles down lines and he is trying to do what Rung had too-frequently advised and conceptualize, but it is going nowhere, and so neither is he.
Things had been easier when life had been harder, and he’s sure that that’s because he had more to write about. Perhaps he had written because he had hoped that someone would read–
He had hoped. Foolishly. Yearningly. Like he had needed it, as if it were a matter of life and death– and it was life and death, but just death, now, because that someone was always Optimus, but Optimus Prime has been dead for weeks and months and years and years, and Megatron is alone. More than that– even worse, really!–Megatron is lonely, and that loneliness is something no one can fix.
“I believe there are demons aboard this ship,” Rodimus mutters, stomping into the bridge and sitting down in the co-captain's chair with a heavy thud. “Or ghosts. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe we should’ve stayed. Maybe we should have sold it. You think they would have taken it? How much Shanix did they offer? Are you listening to me, Megs?”
“Personally, I believe if you’re saying words with no actual intent behind them, Rodimus, then it would be better not to speak at all.” Megatron scratches his stylus over his datapad, listless. “And Shanix are worthless anyway.”
Rodimus has the audacity to grin at him. The action is positively infuriating. “Not in this universe, baby!”
“In every universe, Rodimus, currency is only valuable if you actually possess some. What are you awake for? Are you having doubts about your decisions?”
“No! What makes you think that?!”
“Idle speculation.” He flickers his optics over Rodimus’ scorned face, and decides to go for comfort. “If it’s any consolation, co-captain, even if you were evil, I don’t believe you would have gone that far.”
“Oh– well, first of all, doubt can catch this!” Rodimus pounds his fist on the console, his engine a defiant growl, carbon monoxide and childish, primal fury. “And second, I never doubt! I’m the captain of this ship! I’m not afraid of shit!”
“I see. Then why did you come in here smoking?”
“I’m just angry,” Rodimus bites, and Megatron does not want to tell him that he knows, because Rodimus is always angry with everything. “Because we’ve been drifting. For deca-cycles. We haven’t found anything even remotely interesting, half of my crew is going stir-crazy, and I want to run my wheels over solid ground!”
Megatron glances at the scuffed durasteel under his feet.
Rodimus rolls his eyes. “I want my wheels to spin on a fraggin’ planet.”
“Well, drifting tends to happen in uncharted space fields.” Staring out the windshield of the ship, Megatron draws lines between faint stars with his eyes. “And, if you recall, we stumbled across a viable system several cycles ago. You were the one who threw it out.”
“It was an organic planet.”
“What, were you looking for a monolith of metal?” Megatron’s thoughts stray to Cybertron, and he has to administer a shock to his elbow. “Oh, was that serious?”
Rodimus’ lip curls. “You never fail to irritate me.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t okay me, Megs! Nothing about this is okay!”
“Pardon my confusion, Rodimus. You act like you want to be lost.”
“I don’t!”
Megatron gives him a confused look. “Then what do you want?”
“When I said we were going to explore the universe.” Rodimus runs a hand over his faceplates, ignoring his question. “When I SAID we were going to explore the universe! I intended to find–”
“You and I both know,” Megatron drawls, “that almost nothing ever works out as intended.”
Rodimus goes quiet, nibbling at his derma. “Well,” he grumbles, finally conceding after a klick or two. “That doesn’t make it any less disappointing.”
And Megatron does not want Rodimus to spiral, so he decides to change the subject to lighter things. More see-through things. Things that cannot exist, and never will, unless you really want them to, unless you really try. “What were you saying about ghosts?”
Rodimus jumps to it like a switch. “Oh, right,” he nods eagerly, and he swivels around in his hair and leans in like he’s conspiring to lead a revolution, or something along those lines. “Yes. Okay. Ghosts. Megatron, you really need to hear me out with this one, mech–”
And actually, Megatron does not want to hear about this because he’s never been one to believe in spirituality, so he pulls up a line of code for white noise and runs it through his audials, and then he sets the struts in his neck to nod occasionally and his glossa to disagree quite often as he closes his datapad, and thus spins on the night cycle.
They wander, when Rodimus is done with his whining and babble and ghost stories and decides to summon an inkling up of the Prime he had once been– if not for a day.
They wander, and they don’t stop wandering, and nobody complains, ever, because Rodimus doesn’t do anything mildly bullshit related and Megatron doesn’t say things unless they’re important, and Ultra Magnus speaks way too much sense for all of them.
Nobody complains about the leadership on the Lost Light. Ratchet is also a nobody, but he’s not very important except for when he has to be, which is almost never when he’s at his rarely-occupied chair at the Command Rotunda, which is almost perfectly aligned to be opposite Megatron’s, except for when it’s not, which conveniently happens to be most of the time.
“I save people,” Ratchet sneered, when Megatron had offered him the chair, even as he'd taken it. “Not shepherd them.”
Space is vast and empty and black and cold, and the nanos turn into clicks, and the clicks turn into cycles, and those to solar cycles and those to megacycles, those to vorns and so on, and a year goes by on the Lost Light before Megatron manages to write a single thing.
He’s been trying. He has been trying. And oh, he has written. He’s written so much and he’s destroyed nearly all of it, and all he has is fragments and glyphs and a Prime-sized hole in his spark he’s not sure should be there– but a year has gone by, and there is no poetry– and there is no Optimus Prime, either.
Sometime during the year, Megatron had gone through his subspace. He found a picture, something small. Optimus, alone, standing in front of a crumbling white building somewhere on some planet no one lived on, somewhere beautiful on the outskirts of the galaxy now destroyed by the horror of their war, glass and lunar marble. Sunlight strikes his frame and turns his blue and red armor bright as energon, the faintly glowing biolights in the shape of his namesake constellation smattered across his faceplates. A genuine smile graces his lips, but most of it lives in his eyes, gleaming and blue and happy, despite it all.
Megatron knows all of this, because he was the one who had been on the other side of the camera.
Megatron remembers, because it had been the worst day of his life.
It was a senseless excursion to a planet in a system long abandoned, futile and fruitless, but Optimus had wanted to go, and so he cajoled his officers to let Megatron go with him, somehow; had used his power to sign the papers, impossible. Had told Prowl to cool off, had told Bee to be good.
He might as well have told them to shoot themselves in the head. That reaction would have been far more civil.
They weren’t really doing anything on Idris– Idris, that planet was called, that mass of marble and life. Megatron remembers, looking down at the glittering card in his hand, that Optimus had wanted to see the ruins he was responsible for, and Megatron had figured that he was just doing that as a form of self-harm, so he went along.
It wasn’t necessarily fun, but they had gone just to see if anything could be saved, and they had taken cubes of energon and a ship for two, and they had wandered along broken, shattered pillars and through fields of soft weeds and red flowers and seen part of their history that had come to life– and then been removed from it– by their war, their war.
And Optimus Prime had stood there, fingers brushed up against the warm stone, and he had rambled on and on about war and tragedy and ruin and when he was done, he had turned to Megatron and said, quite simply, “I am terribly sorry that I made you come with me to see this place as it is broken when it was once beautiful,” and Megatron had replied, “I believe the fault must lie in your optics, Prime, because I am looking right at it, and I can assure you that it still is,” and Optimus had beamed at him– and so he had taken the picture.
The worst day of his life, he had decided, because the moment it had begun it was over, and he had known that he was never going to get anything like it again. The day Optimus had died was the second worst, because he could live with that grief. He could carry it that way, and he wouldn’t have minded.
The photo had gone back into his subspace and then emerged a few solar cycles earlier, and it made its way onto his desk next to a stack of datapads he has been trying to fill, and then he decided the datapads weren’t worthy of being in his presence, so he moved them into a drawer– and that drawer had stayed closed for nearly a hundred years.
A whole universe, Megatron thought, day after day after day, night after night after night, one hundred years in a row. You have a whole universe to live for. The past does not define you, but rather the steps you take to move towards the future. Think of that. Think of your capacity to change, and do so. Move forward. Move on.
He is free. He does not need to write to live. The DJD are gone. The matrix is gone. His people are gone. Cybertron does not exist here. Necroworld does not exist here. Optimus has never existed here. His sins do not exist here, and Megatron ponders about the fact that if so many parts of his past have disappeared, then maybe he might not exist, either.
He is still living, of course, and his spark is still spinning, so he is still something, although he is still trying to find out what that is.
It is the first year of many. Megatron thinks he will mourn forever.
I was born in a mine
My sire terminated, a carrier unnecessary
My fingers built for breaking, not building
My brain built for being, not thinking.
I was born in a mine, and on the first day of my life, the day before I begun work, they told me
“If the world caves in on someone’s head, you cannot help them; You can only save yourself.”
And at the time I did not know the(re was a) difference between
Cannot and should not,
Wouldn’t and could’ve,
And so when the ceiling came down on us, when premonition became the present,
I helped, because I thought it was the right thing to do
and no one had taught me, even though they told
What it meant otherwise
I was born in a mine and as they dug us out, there I lay venting
Stone pressed to my nose, gasping
Not sure if I was really breathing
Metal overheating, gasping for life
life
life
Some part of me was thinking
And maybe I was screaming–
Please, Primus, Please
Don’t let me die
I’ll give you my life
I’ll give you my spark
I’ll give you my will, and if I ever understand love,
I’ll give you my heart
But the world was empty; all the devils were out there
and in that cave I realized my god,
My God didn’t care
“Breathe, will you, kid? Frag, will you Breathe?”
I thought it would end,
And it did, in a way: I lived, more or less.
So what more is there to speak of than that?
What more is there to say?
When he hears it, he thinks it might be a dream.
A fragment of defrag, unfragmented from unreality. A chip off his shoulder, chiseled into an axe, with all the gall in the world stored up to chop at his head.
It’s the night cycle. It’s a knock on his door. Megatron blinks up at the ceiling and thinks of a million ways that he could fling Rodimus Prime into deep space without Magnus noticing- or if it is Magnus, then how he could work at the near microscopic gaps in his armor and irritate him so much he wouldn’t dream of doing it again– but the knock sounds the second time and all the process chains in his brain module screech to a stop– because of the sheer nerve, not even the knock itself.
Autobots!
Getting out of bed is slow and agonizing. Every creak of his joints tells him very kindly how nice it would be to lay down and not have to do this. Then Megatron is a man of pride before anything else someone had the nerve to wake him up.
Megatron sticks his head out his habsuite-door. No one is there– not even a twitch. He turns his head to the left, then the right, then the left again.
It could have been Whirl. A horrifying possibility, but not completely implausible. Whirl hates him enough to do that.
What more can he do now but sigh, though? Nothing. Megatron cycles his optics, shaking his head a tad as he begins his retreat– and that’s when he sees it.
Blue. Something gleaming, in the corner, at the intersection down the corridor.
A foot.
And Megatron remembers when he had been rebuilt for war; to fight, not just to mine, and he’s so righteously upset that he surges forward before he knows it, and he’s ten, twenty, thirty step-leaps down the hallway and where who-knows once was, and he really wants to give it to whoever that was and he is duly aware he swore of harming living things, but tonight he might just make an exception.
The adjuncting walkway is empty and doorless and mech-free for a thousand feet. Megatron peers down it and squints and none show any faces, even when he focuses his optics. He suddenly feels very foolish standing there, though, so he uncurls his fists and drops his pauldrons from his ears and walks away, although he thinks he shouldn’t, and he’s just got one pede across his threshold when he hears a sound, and it makes him freeze.
He doesn’t stop because it’s a noise in the dark. He stops because it’s a beautiful noise in the dark, and that’s the real shock.
Black never bleeds beauty, not unless you were Invictus– but Megatron isn’t Invictus, he’s just Megatron, and something about this makes his fuel tanks turn.
Gears whirr and machinery clicks, and it’s a faint, tinkling noise, like the wind through the crystal gardens or the spinners atop the spires in Iacon, and Megatron moves his helm just enough to see out of the corner of one optic and hear better out of one audial, but it’s gone, and has been since the moment he realized it was there.
Megatron will not return to recharge until much later, and in the time it takes for him to decide he will plug in the drive and run the code that takes him offline for a minimum of eighteen spans, he swears that strange, glittering ripple on the surface of reality had sounded just like laughter.
On the fifteenth day of the hundredth and first year, Megatron finds something.
He thinks it’s a dream, so he yells for Rodimus and Magnus to come and pinch him.
They do not. Pinch him, that is. They do come, eventually.
They have found things before. Green planets, white moons, golden suns. There was a time they stayed amongst an asteroid field for a while– it had been decently close to the sun, so they had perpetual fuel, and they carved out neat foxholes in some of the rocks and set up shop, and then Rodimus got bored, so after another decade, they left. The gas giant after that had energon pools close to its core, so they had jumped in its orbit for a few years. They have had no contact with any other species, and they have looked for none.
Maybe it’s the hundred years they spent floating. Maybe he’s just homesick. Maybe it’s something else entirely, but Rodimus, when he sees his home, crumbles.
“I can’t believe it.” Rodimus, staring at the holographic projection floating above the console, reflecting a system a million astromiles away– one planet, one sun, two moons– looks like he’s just been shot in the spark. “Are you both seeing this– I can’t fragging believe it–”
Megatron can, but he can’t say that, because his vocalizer won’t work– every time he tries to open his mouth, it simply resets, and the lines processing speech drop out of his processor. He stares.
“It’s Cybertron.” Rodimus’ jaw clicks shut, and he flings his finger out at the map and he lights up like a live wire with a whoop that sounds altogether too much like Prowl. “Primus, Megs, we found it! We found Cybertron!”
“We’re doomed,” Ultra Magnus says, and Megatron has never longed for the ability to speak more.
They don’t tell the rest of the crew. They can’t tell them. How could they? How cruel would it be, to come so dangerously close to home, to offer them the scent of familiarity without the taste? Energon on one’s tongue, motor oil on your servos, silicon chips under your pedes, the constant hum of engines in your audials. Steel, warmed by the sun, cooled under the shadow of the moon. Megatron dreams of it, just the same as Rodimus and Magnus. He can see it in their optics, as they gaze at the map, staring in wonder at the familiar fragments of home.
It’s tragic. It hurts. It hurts.
Optimus. Optimus. Was he alive here? Would he be there?
Night after night for a megacycle, Megatron stares at the map. From what he can tell, this Cybertron has not been broken by war. There are no canyon-wide welds over its surface, no devastated pockmarks filled with. When Megatron zooms in on the scans of the moons, there are no mines. There is nothing, as far as he can tell– no cities, no starships, no outposts. No primes, no war, no flowers. There is nothing, and so there is no point in going back. Optimus does not exist here because Megatron did not, and Orion did not because he never will. Cybertron has no children, and Megatron has felt an orphan for so long he no longer harbors desires for Primus to understand him.
Maybe God doesn’t change, but people do, and that makes all the difference.
(And anyway, it’s just not necessary. It’s a waste of energon. And it’s probably not healthy.)
They will not be returning to Cybertron, Megatron says, and it’s the first words he’s spoken in a week and Rodimus and Magnus both freeze in the middle of crooning over the map, and Megatron says it again– they will not, over his smelted frame, return to Cybertron.
He will not be returning to Optimus. Not if he can help it.
Rodimus begs. Rodimus begs, and he pleads, and he yells and he screams and he curses him in three different language, and the guttural clicks and furious engine roars drip over his tongue like high-grade, bitter and sharp and Megatron does not break eye contact and he says, very calmly, that if Rodimus tries to maneuver the Lost Light in the general direction of their former home, he will get Ultra Magnus to override any decisions made by either of them– as they are clearly too emotional to be rational– and they will leave this galaxy and never return.
And he hates to do that to Magnus, hates to put him in that position, really, but he is right there and the spark is already dimming in his eyes, and this makes it easier for him, too.
Rodimus visibly resets. His optics blink and his balled-up sevros fall open, and his chassis stops mid-heave as the optical lubricant glittering in his eyes vaporizes in a rush of heat.
“What?” he asks, voice deathly quiet, and for a small mech, he has so much anger in him. He’s always been so angry, even after the war was over. So angry. “Never– MAGNUS! Ultra Magnus–”
“Rodimus, this exodus was something you wanted to undergo,” Magnus starts, and Megatron hates the fact he’s making Magnus say this, because they have talked, in the past week, and Rodimus is Rodimus, and certain things cannot be left untold. “More than anyone, you were the first of us who stood against the demolition of the Lost Light. You were the one who refused to give your crew up; the quantum jumping to this universe was your idea. We would have been happy on Cybertron too, or maybe somewhere far away from it, stranded on some planet no one would have been able to reach, but you stoked in us the coals of freedom, and you convinced us that Megatron deserved that much. You brought us this far–”
“Ultra Magnus–”
Magnus raises his chin. “–and I will not forgive you if you make us go back.”
Silence fills the room. Rodimus is still venting too hard. Megatron feels as if all his gears have been locked. All his transformation seams, frozen.
He couldn’t have done it if he wanted to, transforming. That fact doesn't make him feel any less old.
Rodimus is trembling with fury, plates wavering with heat. “Ultra Magnus, as your captain, I command you to tell Megatron to––”
“Megatron is my captain,” Magnus says, and he does it in Old Cybertronian for the sting of it, and the words ring like a bell in Megatron’s ears. He stands straight, struts of his spine so rigid that Megatron wonders wether he would fall apart, if he were to touch him Wonders if he should. “As long as I am alive, I will keep my oath to him.”
“I am your captain, Ultra Magnus, and you have an obligation to keep your oath to me!” Rodimus hisses furiously, and then he whirls around to jab his finger at Megatron. “And you, Megatron, are a coward, and you have the right to remind yourself of that forever.”
And, well. Megatron will be damned to the pits if that doesn’t sting a little.
Megatron doesn’t flinch; Megatron says nothing. Magnus closes his eyes, exhausted. Rodimus drags his burning optics from one mech to another, and when he gets no response, he doesn’t say anything more, just spits on the dented durasteel floor and storms out.
Magnus buries his face in his hands, Meagtron touches his shoulder, and, all at once, the conversation of their home is put to rest.
Rodimus Prime, in his turn, does not speak to him for a year.
It is one of his shorter silences.
They go elsewhere. Here, there, it doesn’t matter. Ultra Magnus gets sick of Rodimus’ one-sided bickering with Megatron, too-loud after so many months of silence and finds a moon to crash on, and that’s where the Lost Light stays for a year’s worth of repair.
Brainstorm suggests naming the moon. Perceptor pushes his conjunx out of the way and suggests, Cyclonus sticks his finger up in the air and suggests, Nautica says something that might be a suggestion and he’s had it, and Megatron vetoes and vetoes and vetoes and then he tells them all to frag off and think harder, and he gets pelted with fuel pellets for a week.
Rung is the winner. “Eragon,” he says, at their weekly session. “For the years we left behind.”
Megatron is the co-captain of this ship, and so he does co-captainly things. Like sending Rodimus and a small coalition out in the RodPod to do absolutely nothing, or maybe go warm their metal in the sun for a while.
They’ve been adrift for a hundred years. The rest of them, if not Rodimus, deserve a break. The Pyrobots need one.
Megatron, admittedly, needs Rodimus to take one. Rodimus, very loudly, says he would like to have one, because there was something about insufferable bots and bitching faces and a bunch of earthen words to describe various human genitalia parts Megatron does not and WILL not possess, and so Megatron gives Rodimus and Bluestreak and Mirage a list of metals and rocks and gases he’d like to analyze for possible foodstuffs, and he sends them away. Very far. In the opposite direction of Cybertron.
Far.
“You can see it from here,” Minimus says wistfully, standing at the window of Megatron’s habsuite. “It’s that star, over there.”
Megatron is thumbing the datapad on and off, on and off. He cannot see Cybertron; he doesn’t think he ever truly has. “I thought I had gotten us far enough away from it.”
“You have.”
“But you can still see it.”
“I could find Cybertron from halfway across the universe with my optics shut and my sensors offline,” Minimus replies, and Megatron does not know what to say to that.
He tries to joke. “Don’t go near Rodimus, then. That’s an order.”
“I wouldn’t have done it even if you were being serious. He is still angry at us for telling him no.”
“It’s been more than a year, Minimus. I think he’ll live.”
“And do you live, as well?” Minimus Ambus turns to him, face half hidden by shadow, yet his optics gleam. “Does the loss of our universe not weigh on you, Megatron? Does it not age you, too?”
Like nothing ever before. “There was nothing for me where we once were, Minimus,” he echoes, and it is the truth. Nothing remained for him, in that life. “I am happy where I am.”
“So,” Rung says, adjusting his glasses atop his nasal ridge. “Now you feel guilty?”
“I don’t see why this is a surprise for you.” Megatron idles, they were talking about Rodimus, but so far, it’s not been pleasant, mostly because Megatron actually feels bad, and partially because he knows Rodimus feels worse. “I have been guilty for almost as long as I’ve been alive. This is nothing new.”
“Well.” Rung clears his vocalizer. “It’s great that you’re openly admitting it. That is character growth!”
Megatron glares. “What happened to therapists not judging?”
“I am not,” Rung insists. “I was sincere in my congratulations.”
“You are never sincere.”
“I am always sincere.” Rung scribbles down something on his datapad, a word that looks a lot like trust. “May I ask you a question?”
“Go right ahead.”
“Do you feel more guilt about Optimus' death or Rodimus’ reaction?”
Megatron's processor stalls. “What?”
“Do you feel more guilt about Optimus' death or Rodimus’ reaction?” Rung asks him again, and every word stabs him in the spark. “You and Optimus have a complicated history, but throughout this session, you only really mentioned him as a catalyst to Rodimus, rather than something that directly influences your behavior.”
Megatron blinks. “What does that mean for me?”
“Well, to cut a long bar shorter, It means you feel sorry for him,” Rung explains. “Rodimus. You weren’t the one who sentenced Optimus to die, he made that choice himself– but you are a reminder to Rodimus of his own flaws, and that affects you as well. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” Megatron says, and then he is quiet.
Rung waits.
“I feel… bad that Optimus died,” he manages, eventually, and it is a cruel understatement. When the shock of his death had finally hit him, he had not left his habsuite for days. “And I am sorry that Rodimus feels distressed about it too, but there isn't much I can do to change it, not really. All I can do, I think, is regret.”
“Regret that Optimus passed?” Rung asks, but Megatron shakes his head.
“Regret that I could not have gone with him in all my forms, or at the very least, taken his place,” he says. “It should have been me. That would have been justice.”
“Hm. Well.” Rung adjusts his glasses again, and Megatron concludes that it must be a repeat bar of coding, popped into his processor whenever he was caught in a corner. “Alright, let’s do this. Why don’t you try to compartmentalize this physically? Take some time to yourself, and look over your own code. Find the things that bother you and trace back to their source, and then note those down and brainstorm some solutions.”
Megatron makes a face. It is short of disgusted. “You want me to write my feelings down?”
Rung looks him over. “If you prefer to, yes. You still do that, don’t you?”
“Poetry, not paragraphs. And I haven’t done either of those things in a long while.”
“Then make it a poem,” Rung says. “And when you’re done writing, recite it. The answers might be closer than you think.”
“Okay,” he lies, because he is tired and the couch is soft against his plating and it’s been one hundred years, and Rung is usually right about this sort of thing. “I can manage that.”
Rung lets him go. Megatron is grateful for it, but he leaves his office with a strange, hollow feeling in his chest, as if he still had a transformation cog and it had just been ripped out.
Of course, he doesn’t have a cog or a spark or any of the things that would make him a Cybertronian besides his brain and his frame, because the galactic entity a certain someone had decided to trap in his body had eaten both of them from the moment he came online, and there were nothing but dust in another universe, shattered electrons across an event horizon he could never reach. The hole in his chest is not white but black, instead, and so nothing will ever come out of it, because he is the point at which all matter and energy and light itself get sucked in and utterly destroyed.
Nothing comes out of nothing. Megatron knows that well, all too well.
He wanders through the Lost Light, feeling so much so himself. Mechs float by him as if he were in a dream– he brushes past people he hasn’t seen in upwards of a month; the benefit and downside of a ship fifteen hics long and two-thirds of that distance wide. They say things to him and he must interact with them back in an acceptable way, because they do not leave him looking like they want to kill him, even though they don’t love him.
Only one mech could do that. Only one mech ever had.
Megatron banishes the thought from his processor; he has better things to worry about. Like Rodimus, and why he seemed so distant, even having months to get over Cybertron. Like Magnus, and why he was acting so strangely. Like Ratchet, and how he was going to keep avoiding him. Like the other two hundred odd members of his crew, and their feelings– which he probably shouldn’t care that much about, but he’s weak, so he does.
Cybertron. Optimus. Everything. Nothingness. Megatron cannot go back. He won't.
Rodimus continues to complain about the ghosts. Under normal circumstances, this would have been fine, but Rodimus is a mech that has a mouth as wide as a truck, and Rodimus does not ever shut up.
“Is it true?” Whirl asks, blue-haired avatar sliding up to his seat as smoothly as possible, which is not slick at all. His braids brush the back of his ankles. “Is there a ghost on this ship?”
Megatron swaps the control of the map from one hand to another, then back when he finds that position uncomfortable. “I wouldn’t listen to Rodimus,” he reprimands. “We left all that behind in the previous universe– don’t worry yourself with such things.”
Whirl crosses his arms over his apt chest– a move that shows a lot of human skin– and eyes him. “Who says I’m worried?”
“You speak to me once every vorn, Whirl,” Megatron laughs, swiveling in his chair with the shake of his head. “And it’s usually about something exceptionally important. Or a complaint.”
“But it is important!” Whirl cries, and Megatron has to actually swallow a snicker as the other mech stomps his foot. “There’s weird slag going on, Megatron! Can’t you see that?”
Megatron purses his lips. “You are here, yes.”
“GAH!” Whirl throws his hands up. “You’re such a–”
“Good captain,” he finishes. “But Rodimus is a better one, and the better listener. Be a pleasure, Whirl– go connive with him, won’t you?”
Whirl is the first. Then Bluestreak. Chromedome comes marching into his studio and says that someone messed with his energon. Megatron checks the cameras and finds no one, so he gives him a couple cubes of high-grade from his personal storage and expects to hear no more of it. He is wrong, because Hound comes sniffing around and says that someone frazzed his guns, and now they won’t fire– and Megatron has experience with barrels, so he offers to clean them, and Hound’s face flushes blue with energon and he tells him that maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea, and so Megatron lets him go.
Nautica and Velocity stop by and said someone stole their conjunx bands– there’s not much Megatron can do to find them on a ship as large as this, but he gives them thrice-refined platinum strips and a carver, and lets the use his workshop when he’s not in. Someone cracks Perceptor’s spectacle and he’s absolutely fragging furious, and he tells everyone about it and the ship is in uproar at the outrage for nearly two days, Brainstorm somehow even more livid than his conjunx. It’s an astronomically massive disaster.
“So, do you believe me now, co-captain?” The metal of Rodimus’ pauldrons dings against the doorframe as he leans against it. “Don’t you think here’s something on this ship?”
“I need you,” Megatron vents, carefully using hus ion laser cutter to engrave another notch into the outer ring of the monocle, “to frag off. I am trying to remake this spectacle before Brainstorm kills me, so I am very clearly busy–”
“Nope!” Rodimus practically leaps forward with enthusiasm, and Megatron’s reflexes are the only thing that make his digits freeze the power before his arm jerks and the beam fires into the glass.
He whirls around with a snarl. “You little–”
“Don’t finish that,” Rodimus, voice death-quiet, fingers digging into the back of his chair. “Listen to me, Megatron. There is something on this ship. We need to figure out what it is.”
“I’ll tell you now what it is,” Megatron says flatly. “We are. You and me, Rodimus. All of us.”
“I know what horrors space possesses,” Rodimus grits out. “They have come to us before, if your processor cannot recall it. For you to dismiss my claims because you say my judgement is clouded by homesickness–”
“I think you’re seeing things,” Megatron replies, trying to keep his processor calm and empty, like Optimus would have. “This universe is not dead, just empty. Nothing is here, nothing has been here, and nothing will be here that is not us. There are no ghosts on this ship– just us.” He thinks. “Perhaps you should visit First Aid?”
“I don’t need to SEE ANYONE!” Rodimus explodes. “Stop offering solutions like there’s something wrong with ME!”
“Rodimus, I think you are being unreasonable,” he says, and he tries to put some gentleness in it, because Rodimus has been online, at the end of the day, for not nearly enough time. “Maybe I can help–”
Rodimus laughs at him, stepping back. “You speak to me as if I am millions of years younger than you, and we are no more than a few thousand apart! You always condescend, Megatron,” he snarls. “That’s how you function. That’s why Optimus couldn’t stand you– you look down on everything that breathes.”
“I am not having this conversation with you,” Megatron decides, dropping lines of anger and fury and curses and sorrow from his code. “We are not going back to Cybertron come the Allhell or high water. There are no ghosts. Stop scaring your crew. Be a captain. Go talk to Ultra Magnus, and form your own option of what he thinks about you. Go see Rung if you need to, and leave Ultra Magnus be.” He leans in closer, closer. “Now, please get the frag out of my office before I do something we'll both regret.”
“This ship is haunted,” Rodimus insists, a last, futile attempt at convincing him he is in the wrong. “By the dead.”
“Yes, this ship is haunted,” Megatron nods, and he does not think for footsteps in the night, of laughter whenever he begins to write. “Haven't you heard? We are the ghosts.”
The metal is cool under his fingers as he rests his forehead against the door. Megatron is willing to admit it now that he’s out of the sight of everyone– maybe it has been too long since he’s written. A hundred years? Megatron had forgotten how easily time slipped away.
Once, when he was much younger and living hurt less than dying, he’d entertained himself with the future. What things could have been, if he had been built different. If he had been made better. And he hadn’t changed to be that way, only gotten worse, but after so many years of war and infighting and deception and betrayal, he had thought none of that would ever matter. Only one thing was important– not losing.
Not even winning. Simply not losing would be enough.
That was the utterly ridiculous thing about conflict, he’d found out, even after Optimus had told him the truth a million times. One could bark and bite all they wanted, and you could wrest and rend and give and take and never lose, but never win, and by the time you realize you don’t even remember what you were angry at, you don’t know why you were fighting at all.
But what would Optimus know? Wasn’t he the reason for it all, the cause for everything? Megatron had two constants in his life– hate, and Optimus. Hate and its opposite. Hate, and whatever Optimus Prime decided he was. That was the real war– and even though Optimus isn’t here, everything he’d ever touched bore the burden of being ripped apart.
What was it Orion had told him once? The weight of your sins…
Well. Orion Pax didn’t know much about anything.
It is late. Optimus is dead, Orion even more so. Megatron is tired. Tired of wishing. Tired of hoping. Tired of mourning, and sorry for it.
Sorry, because Optimus deserved better than that. Sorry, because he doesn’t.
A hundred years. Megatron, as far as he knows, has until the rest of eternity to remember that.
“I believe you will haunt me forever,” he whispers, and it is the truest thing he’s ever said.
“I believe I will haunt you forever,” a voice from behind him echoes, and Megaton’s vocalizer gives out.
When Optimus Prime died, everything had ended.
It was an eternity ago, the day after they’d left Cybertron for the last time. Megatron had been lying down on his berth when he felt it, the loss.
Of course, Optimus had been dead for a long time- but that’s the thing about grief, he discovers, although he supposes he already knew. It sneaks up on you on a random evening, waits patiently until your guard is down, then holds a knife to your neck cabling and tells you that you will mourn your loss, and you will do it by force.
Rodimus had stormed in a cycle earlier, bursting at his transformation seams with exuberance and excitement and everything that Megatron was decidedly not, and so he’d sat there as Rodimus had spun in his chair and floated plans of what he was intending to do now that they were free, and he’d laid down as Rodimus had gestured and articulated the vastness of the universe and all the things they were going to do with it, and he closed his eyes as Rodimus had said, and said, and said so many things, and then it really hit him– Optimus Prime is dead.
And he’d said that out loud, cycled open his optics and said to the ceiling and Rodimus, “Optimus Prime is dead,” and Rodimus’ words had fallen out of his mouth and clattered on the floor with the dull tinkle of metal, and there was nothing but the humming of their engines for what felt like forever.
“I know,” Rodimus said, eventually, his vocalizer clicking, and Megatron laid on that bed and he couldn’t move, and he hated that that was the only thing that he could offer– nothing. “We all miss– everyone aboard this ship grieves his loss deeply, but as we are, we’ll do our best to move forward.” A pause. Rodimus clasped his servos together, dragged his eyes away from Megatron. “It's what he would have wanted us to do. You should want it for yourself, too.”
You know nothing about what Optimus Prime wanted, Megatron thought, closing his optics once more so no heat could escape, no trickle of cleaner slide down his faceplates. You know nothing, Rodimus Prime.
“No,” he had said instead, quietly, and half his spark had disappeared from his chest. “No, I don’t believe I ever will.”
Mourn. Grief. Moving on. Such small words for such big things. Such foolish, flimsy ways of compacting it all into three stages. Like his weekly sessions with Rung changed things, like his crew needing him made him feel wanted like Megatron could put all of that into a motherboard the size of his palms and eat it.
Mourn. Grief. Moving on. Like it was easy, like the loss of Optimus Prime isn’t the biggest, most spark-wrenching blow Megatron has ever been dealt, and it wasn’t even done so with a single finger.
Mourn. Grief. Moving on. Until Optimus Prime returns to him, or until he goes first, it doesn’t matter– until then, Megatron will tear himself apart over what could have been, forever.
All that life, wasted. All that time, gone.
But now, now he must be dreaming; he must have fallen into his berth and gone into stasis; he must be dying; he might be dead
Optimus Prime is dead.
His processor pings, once. Faint recognition bursts across his sensors, and then it explodes into his field. He is dizzy. He is sick. He is going to be sick.
Optimus. Optimus. Optimus, Optimus, Optimus. Optimus Prime.
The voice takes on a lilt, echoes itself, but swims, like it’s coming from deep underwater. “I believe I will haunt you forever,” Optimus Prime repeats. “Turn around, Megatron.”
His vocalizer resets. It resets and resets and keeps resetting, and every time Megatron opens his mouth, nothing but distorted clicks of static pours out.
Optimus says his name again, says it like a poem. “Megatron?” he asks, in that soft, gentle voice of his, and Megatron cracks open and he bleeds all over his own feet.
“Megatron,” Optimus murmurs, and it’s almost condescending with how soft it is. “Your audials aren’t damaged, are they? You can hear me, can’t you? Won’t you turn around?”
“You’re not real,” he replies, and he does not turn around.
“I am real.”
“You’re not real.”
“Am I not here with you, Megatron?”
“No. You’re not.”
“Yes, I am.”
“No. This is a hallucination.”
“No, this is reality.”
Those words cement everything into the present. Megatron runs the code– runs it, runs it again when it fails– moves his pede a half step clockwise, rotates his body, turns his head–
And there he is, Optimus Prime, red and blue and glorious, metal gleaming, eyes tourmaline and crystal, faceplates polished to a crisp shine. Everything about him is the same as Megatron remembers– tall, but not taller than him, gleaming transformation cog, glittering biolights across his face, the dead ones in the shape of that constellation the same as they always have been.
Optimus is the same as he’s always been, and he’s beautiful.
His spark cracks. Over and over and over again. “Prime,” he said, words floating, himself turning away. “Optimus.”
“Hello, Megatron,” Optimus says, and the way his name rolls off his glossa is nothing short of divine. “I think you and I know each other so well I don’t believe we need formalities. Optimus is fine– and please, will you look at me?”
“I can’t,” he says weakly, his spark spinning wildly out of control, faster and faster until Megatron thinks he might be getting torn apart from the inside out. “You don’t exist. You’re dead.”
“I apologize, but I would have to disagree,” Lightly, Optimus taps at his chinplate, and Megatron hears the sound of clinking metal. “I’m as alive as you, Megatron. As much as alive as you.”
“You’re dead.”
“I wish to speak to you.”
“Why? You’re dead.”
“Cogito.” Optimus taps the side of his helm. “Ergo sum, Megatron. I think so, therefore I am.”
“Don’t quote ancient literature to me, Prime,” Megatron hisses, and he’s suddenly very angry and his frame no longer feels like it’s being crushed, but rather like it’s exploding out of the space it occupies. “I saw you die! I watched you go! You didn’t see me, but I was there! I saw you–”
“I know exactly where you were, Megatron. I felt you there.” Optimus places a hand over his once-blue spark, now glittering white in his chassis, the perfect inversion of the black hole churning in Megatron’s. “You were a great comfort to me, at the end.”
“Comfort,” he spits, and he doesn’t care whether this is spirit or soul or data point, but who was Optimus to come to him in any form and speak to him like that? “Is that all I am to you, Prime? Is that my only purpose. Comfort?!”
That makes Optimus’ faceplates twitch. “Now,” he starts, voice dangerously low, “why ever would you think that?”
“Because you left me there, Prime!” he explodes, and he doesn’t miss the way Optimus’ lips twist– good. He can be agonizing, too. “You left me behind the second you found the newest moral quandary to tear yourself up over and throw yourself into! If I meant something other than temporary pleasure– if I was something more than a way for you to absolve your sin”
It’s a needle, he knows, a stab into the most tender mesh of Optimus’ frame. It’s cruelty, but Megatron is angry, and he doesn’t know how to stop.
Optimus’ optics lock on his own. “Like you haven’t done the same.”
And that is funny, because he cannot tell whether he’s referring to the sex or the tragedy. “We were at war!”
“A war you started.”
“And finished,” he snaps. “You could have lived! You could have thrown something else into the fire, but you offered yourself! You sacrificed everything completely unnecessarily when we were practically at peace!”
“It was the end of the world,” Optimus says calmly. “And I never blamed you for it.”
“Well, I was going to die,” Megatron spits, and he remembers, night after night, the feeling of his original self in the moments before the sword had swung down upon his neck, the seconds he had felt so horribly alive before everything came to an end. “I could not choose.”
“Then you do understand! You should know I, too, had no choice!”
“You always had a choice!”
“An impossible one!
“It still would have been a decision,” he stabs, and he knows what he’s doing is unfail, but he can’t help it, even if none of this is real. He’s going to kill whoever had fed this into his system when he wakes up. Hopefully it’s Ratchet. “It would have been the better option.”
Optimus fixes him with a steely blue glare. “And what do you suggest I should have done, knowing now what I knew then?”
“The only right thing,” he growls, feeling desperately as if he could punch Optimus– shimmering, half-translucent, glittering beautiful Optimus– through the nearest wall. “I would have chosen you. You should have chosen me.”
Optimus stares at him for an endlessly long moment. “I think,” he tries, “that your hypocrisy really is failing you, Megatron.”
Well, he can be a stubborn mule, too. “Like so many other things.”
Optimus’ lips press into a thin, bitter line. “You are angry at me.”
“I am angry with your JUDGEMENT on nearly EVERYTHING, you usless– whatever you are!” Megatron explodes. “And there is a difference, but you have your helm so far up your exhaust pipe that you wouldn’t fragging know!”
“Megatron.” Optimus, admonishing, tilts his head at him. “Do you believe that I would have chosen you over the future of Cybertron?”
That hurts. That hurts like no other weld. “Not for a second,” he replies, shaking his head. “But you could have let me die with you.”
“Then you are a fool,” Optimus sighs. “And an even bigger one than I thought.”
“For what?” he bites. “Wanting to be chosen? Wanting to be loved?”
Optimus’ eyes narrow into even more squintier slits. “Believing I did not. I have chosen you.”
“Is that so?!” He wants to laugh, but when he does, it comes out a broken, terrible thing, and so he stops it nearly as soon as it starts. The combined result is something that sounds like a choke. “You never chose me a day you were online, Optimus. Everything I have received from you I have taken by force.”
The light in Optimus’ optics dims just slightly, then flares just as quick, and that’s when Megatron is awash with his field, a billion buzzing, sparks against his plating, each one telling him he was wrong in every way. “You would never have been able to take had I not offered, Megatron. Whenever I gave myself up– that was me choosing you.”
Bitter energon fills Megatron’s intake, even as his spark begins to spin faster. “You know what? I think you’re a liar. You’re a figment of my imagination. You’re just saying what you believe I want to hear.”
Optimus is puzzled by that. “You want to hear lies?”
“You’re either lying,” Megatron repeats, not for the first time. “Or you’re stupid.”
A sigh. “If I was, wouldn’t things be much simpler?”
“You were never known for being easy.”
“That was something you quite enjoyed, if I recall correctly.”
Of course I did, Megatron bites back. “Why would that matter? Are you not dead?”
“You still believe I do not exist.” Optimus heaves an empty laugh, opening his palms to him in defeat. “Fine. That is alright, I suppose. I do not know how you expect me to prove that to you when you have never been easy to convince.”
“You could disappear,” Megatron replies. “You can get out of my processor and leave me be–”
Optimus gives him a knowing glance. “You are aware that that would still be doing what you wanted.”
“No, it would be doing what I told you to.” Megatron contemplates for a moment, comes to a conclusion after a few agonizing nanoklicks, and has to physically cut the line to stop his engines from roaring in frustration. “Which…”
“–would only prove to you that I do not exist.” Optimus has the nerve to smile at him. “And so here, unfortunately, must I remain.”
Megatron reaches over to his desk, grabs his stylus and flings it at Optimus. Optimus, who easily sees it coming his way, and sidesteps the projectile as if it were nothing more than an afterthought.
“Why, Megatron,” Optimus pouts, giving Megatron a disappointed look as both of them watch the stylus clatter to the floor. “That was rather rude of you.”
“I don’t care,” he growls. “Get out of my head.”
“I am not in your head,” Optimus sighs. “I am in your spark. I am part of you. You couldn’t get rid of me with a million defrag cycles, even if you wanted to.”
“Why, what an excellent solution!” Megatron, marching over to his berth to sit– and Optimus steps back quickly, moving to the spot he once was– wrenches the panel on his left forearm open, revealing the row of data ports there. “Thank you for the idea, you meddling hallucination. You must be a patch I forgot to remove. I’ll just have to debug you manually–”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Optimus stammers, stepping forward into the side so that he enters Megatron’s line of view– and when Megatron looks up, he doesn’t miss the way that Optimus’s face is flushed, the slightest blue coloring his cheeks. “Megatron, please, don’t do that–”
“Even the made up version of you is such a prude,” he sneers, latching the tip of his pointer finger to reveal a three centimeter wide jack attached to a cable, and Optimus’s face grows ever darker. “If you want to leave now, you can do that. You’re going to disappear anyway– this will be the last time I ask.”
“But I can’t,” Optimus says quickly, sevros reaching out as if to stop Megatron from plugging into himself. “I am real, Megatron– can’t you see–”
“All I can see, Optimus, is my greatest mistake,” Megatron says, and it is a lot more angry than it should be, but all the same he means it, and with that, he stabs his digit into his arm– and Optimus cries out something that might have been a “no,” and the world disintegrates and floats into bubbles and burns away.
–and when he resurfaces from his own depths ten minutes later, after swimming through fields of memories and running so many laser-fire diagnostic scans over every inch of his fragging faulty coding and finding absolutely nothing, losing himself in scraps of poetry and whispers of love from a dead mechs voice– when he stands and watches one memory because it seems like it could be a source, maybe– when he sees him and Optimus laying together, legs and sevros and digits and sparks intertwined, when he tells Optimus “I won’t ever let you leave me” and Optimus says “If I do, then you have every right to kill me,” he–
“I told you so,” Optimus sighs, hand pressing into his chassis as the charge rolls though his frame, the feedback loop caused by his own probing intensified due to the fact that his search had found nothing. “I am part of you, Megatron. You can’t get rid of me.”
Prime,
It is not so bad on this ship. It is quite wonderful, actually.
(I should scratch out the first line of this because it feels quite an untruth, but I can only undo so many times, so it shall stay, and so shall I.)
It is not bad on this ship, and I will repeat it again so you and I can both understand it. It is not so bad on this ship.
I am well aware that the connotation of the line makes it appear as if I am a pessimist, but I am far from it. Far from it now, anyway. Of course, I am not like you, and I never will be, because that is not my nature. That doesn’t make me a pessimist, it just makes me your opposite. If that happens to be a depressing thing, well. You are my foil. It should hardly be considered solely my fault.
The Lost Light is nice. I wish you had spent more time aboard it. This empty universe is nice, as well, although I doubt it will stay that way forever. I do not mind it– the Lost Light is full of us wandering souls and I am one of them, and after millions of years of clamorous, deafening war, I can’t seem to get enough of the silence of tranquility. My only regret is that I am not able to share it with you.
I think about you quite frequently, as you likely well know, because I have always been partial to you. I see your face often, and you are never unhappy in my dreams. I take it to mean that I do not exist, wherever you are– but, on the off chance that I am with you– if I exist there, too– I hope that I am kinder to you. I hope I do not cause you pain.
I think about you too much for my good and your sake, and I think about something you said long ago, when I first joined you. I believe you were speaking to Ratchet, although my memory isn’t what it used to be. I do remember you standing there, on the bridge of the Ark, and Ratchet had his arms crossed in front of him, and you pointed at me, and you said, excitedly,“see, I told you–as Megatron himself has demonstrated today, every sentient being has the capacity to change.” And Ratchet did not look very happy with this, but you were, and so he had to be. Such was our relationship.
I do not remember what I had done to make you act this way. You were happy, so I doubt that I killed for you. It is more likely that I had refused to do so, instead, but whatever it was, I am certain that it was for you, because the moment I meant you, every one of my actions has been aligned to your star.
I never really believed what you said back then, because I couldn’t even believe in myself, but you believed me even when I didn't deserve it– which, I suppose, has always been– and that meant something to me.
You meant something to me, Optimus Prime. I should have told you that more often.
You once asked me what I was hoping to reach with my actions, during one of our phone calls before your peace. I think I went silent, because I did not know how to respond to you. When I was younger and more foolish and more naive, I would have said I was a machine built for death, to destroy what was left of the old and refine the ashes into something new, and I would not stop until everything burned or gleamed. At the time, if I had found the strength and the words to say what I intended and to tell you how I felt, I would have said something along the lines of justice served– justice, which I aptly deserved. Now, once again, I do not know.
You are gone, Optimus, and I am all alone, and where I desire to hear what you would think my reply to your question would be, I find nothing but the endless depths of space and infinite stretches of time.
I miss you, and yet I do not want you to return, because I want you to be at peace. I simply wish to hear your answer for me, and tell me what I should say to you– maybe then, I, too, will finally be satisfied; maybe then will I find peace.
Megatron