Work Text:
The first morning they spent on Cybertron it rained.
Megatron had been ready to walk into it and curse the sleeping Creator-god beneath his pedes. A righteous snarl to the tune of: 'Your feeble protests are useless! I have reclaimed this place! I have driven out your Chosen and his pitiful handful of loyalists! Hear me, Primus! Like as not, it is you who are are in my domain now!' had been building in the back of his throat cables and then, when he swept outside onto the Nemesis' flight deck to deliver it, there was only harmless solvent plinking anticlimactically against his helm.
Ah.
Yes. That.
The memory of turning the Keys in the Lock was already growing hazy in his processor, doubtless an insipid side effect of meddling with divine forces beyond his ken or comprehension.
(For a nano, when the metal was heaving and buckling beneath his pedes and everything was eldritch blue light that blinded him surely as optics burning out in the deepest tunnel he had a moment of re-considering the plan that had brought him here. Maybe he should have let Optimus do this part, as he had literally been formatted for that kind of thing.)
His battle with Unicron had grown indistinct too, in hindsight. He had lost the key details of it, besides the fact that the old slagger had tried to subsume his will and how he wouldn’t have minded having a few more chances to rip at his rock-entombed underbelly. If crystallized dark energon had been potent, why then had fate robbed him of the chance to drink directly from the Chaos God’s sliced-open cabling?
Tch. A waste.
The only memories that stood out clearly anymore was the journey down into the core, fighting off the defenders side by side with his enemy.
How strange it had been. And how easily they had fallen in together. He had never had a partner in the Arena, never even done the more popular two-against-all matches, how then-
Megatron killed off the processor thread.
Anyway, what had happened afterward was much more important. But it wouldn’t do to dwell on that now either.
His domain was before him! A bit damp at the moment, and dark, (while the atmosphere was much improved and the rain no longer lethal, ancient mechanisms of Prophecy apparently didn’t extend to repairing the city power grid) but standing.
Iacon, that last stubborn Autobot outpost, was his at last.
They had never formally surrendered, even during the last days of the planet’s occupation.
As it stood now, the place had been so altered by war that it resembled the murals and mosaics of ancient ruins rather than any familiar city of the painful past.
Oddly enough, this eased some of Megatron’s inherent hatred for the landscape.
Yes, it was hardly recognizable as the seat of corrupt power. Though just to make sure of it, he had taken great satisfaction in parking the Nemesis atop the remnants of the old Council hall.
There hadn't been much of it anyway. After the last wave of bombings. (And Prime certainly hadn’t prioritized it over evacuating useless civilians (who mostly turned Neutral and fled for the nearest spaceport anyway))
Now he landed in the main square below, shattering a thrice-broken patch of tiles anew with his pedes and set about knocking over the last surviving columns. A few shots of the fusion cannon and they made an acceptable ramp down for the Vehicons.
With that task accomplished to his satisfaction he stopped short, pacing like a stray mechanimal around the remnants of a once-beautiful fountain. Somewhere beyond the next few blocks of abandoned administration buildings were the offices of law, the villas of the conservative councilmembers who had branded Megatronus of Kaon a terrorist for daring to express anger at his own pathetically predestined existence. Ohhhh and when he got over there, there wouldn’t be anything left. Properly, this time.
Megatron stalked forward with new purpose. They had fuel enough for him to run the cannon all day if he wanted and he itchhed to begin immediately, whatever the new plan was, itched to destroy something, to stamp his own will further across the landscape.
At the edge of the square something brought him up short.
He had only visited Iacon a few times, drawn out of his lair in Kaon by an admirer’s shy invitation, never lived here, but now, even eons later, the old warlord recognized this street. Once upon a time it had been a wide avenue with even, blue-tinted pavement, intricate street lamps hanging in a latticework between the buildings. Insidiously, the memory overlaid itself atop his optical input - the way the lights had reflected in his companion’s optics, tilted trustingly up at his even-then craggy faceplate like two fields of captured stars.
A gentle wind swept across the top of his helm, following the wave of the broken concrete. Here and there, torn cabling swayed, willowy and wreathed in crystal growths.
On second glance.... Iacon was still Iacon. Ruined, it was still somehow dignified and remote, staring at him accusingly with its empty sockets.
Somewhere in his processor the association was etched into living silicon and could not be altered. Iacon was… him.
Almost without Megatron’s conscious input, the canon powered on. He aimed. There, in the distance, a solitary lighpost had remained. Bent, but standing. Still trailing a broken string of lights.
How dare it.
Just as he was about to fire Megatron saw a shadow overhead, a sleek black edge cutting through the rain-laden clouds.
Soundwave.
He sent a binary ping of acknowledgement. They had known each other for so long that even glyphs were often unnecessary. But now he was curious, and gratifyingly distracted from what had promised to be a mighty fit of brooding.
--//Well. You’re up early//-- he sent over, on the heels of the ping.
Last night, it would have behooved them to have a great celebration. But in all honesty the entire ragged army had piled back onto the Nemesis and fallen into recharge, some in Knockout’s medbay and some simply stacked up in the hallways, knocked offline from the adrenaline of battle and radiation exposure from the Lock. He would take care to have that tastefully omitted from official records of Decepticon victory-
--//Request: Follow//-- Soundwave sent back.
Now this was unfamiliar. Perhaps he had awoken to perform his usual diligent scans and had found something of strategic value.
Intriguing.
Soundwave so rarely requested anything personal of him these days, so rarely acted in any sort of way that was individual and not as the well-oiled engine of the Cause, keeping everything running despite Starscream’s cavalcades of failure and treachery.
Perhaps he had depended on him a little too much of late. Then again, he always had.
Megatron let himself fall upward, into the wide open sky that had once terrified a simple miner, and when Soundwave pinged him the destination vector he understood everything.
They flew together in formation, saying nothing.
There was something soothing in the fading storm on the outskirts of the city. It had been too long since he'd had the luxury of a wide-angle wash in alt-mode. Well, maybe that one planet which had obligingly rained watered-down mercury...
In a show of trust he simply followed Soundwave’s flightpath. Rather overbearingly, his TIC had calculated Megatron’s own optimal flight vector and sent it to his HUD at regular intervals. Then again, caution was called for. They were both rather under-fueled. Prolonged use of Dark Energon had left Megatron’s fuel-processing systems worryingly delicate, rejecting anything but the hated med-grade.
In that sense, the essence of the Unmaker was no different than the cheap pits-brewed circuit boosters he had once disdained as a champion. Back when he could naively trust that his own forged strength was enough. Before he had to fight a thrice-damned demigod with joints long past their replacement date.
Feeling his processor about to slip back into a well-worn groove, Megatron wrenched it away and back to the landscape. Back, to his triumphant conquest.
They were passing over what had once been the Rust Sea, alchemized apparently into a lush grassland surrounding clear solvent meadows. Megatron was tempted to take some scans of his own, all the better to greedily revel in their future resources, but his primitive inbuilt scanning modules had been calibrated for far underground and reacted with appropriate bewilderment when he turned them on during flight.
Maybe now that there was a ceasefire he could get them upgraded.
Then again, Knockout was entirely too flighty to be trusted with that level of frame access. Shockwave, perhaps. He was insane, but dependably insane along a certain vector.
Halfway to their destination, the storm fizzled out completely. Rays of corpuscular light splashed early-morning fire over the rolling hills.
A robust bismuth forest seemed to have swallowed up the old border wall, perhaps over millions of years, or perhaps just last night. Good. It had been a symbol of oppression and during the war Megatron had savored blowing large swathes of it to rubble.
Kaon lay before them.
Kaon, empty of overseers. Empty of anyone except for them and possibly the odd hive of half-starved Insecticons down below the mines. Well, why not? They had come late to bend the knee to the Cause but he could be generous. They might as well remain.
Soundwave and he both took a sharp bank, heading down past a thin cloud layer into the cavernous hole of the undercity as if led by some ancient homing beacon.
This was not their place of assembly; Megatron having come from some factory line here or further towards the wellpoint, and Soundwave had once mentioned that he had lived in a series of cave systems north of Vos with his small ethnic subgroup before ending up in the Pits. But it was their place of forging.
The Arena stood. Still. Of course it stood.
Here and there the walls and roofs of the surrounding barracks, oilouses, and smelters had buckled and crumbled.
Around the top of the coliseum gaudy statues of popular gladiators (added on as the bloodsport gained legitimacy) had lost chunks and limbs as if they too had fought with their Decepticon comrades. The seats were warped and broken, sprayed with glyph-strings of revolutionary graffiti, given a sort of faded dignity with the passing of time. But the Arena itself was there. Whole. Waiting for her greatest creations to return.
A hardy translucent grass had grown over the sand of the main fighting stage. Choked by battlefield smoke and pollution it had doubtlessly survived by feeding from the old energon soaked into the ground.
They landed there, in the middle of it.
Megatron looked up. For a moment he felt that tank-pulling sense, and it was as if he could see hundreds of hologram-ghosts arrayed in the stands, toasting their victory.
What would happen now?
Soundwave stood in front of him, not behind and to the side as befitting a trusted lieutenant. Here, they were equals again.
Here, under the harsh morning light, his TIC lost the protective camouflage of the Nemesis’ dark hallways. He was revealed in truth - a creature of terrible grace. A predator, honed and starved over a million battlefields.
Megatron took a step forward. Soundwave mirrored him. They circled each other, in a long-familiar dance, known only to those wretched and honored enough to battle before the crowds.
Would they fight their fated final match? Settle the tie that had once cemented their temporary alliance for survival?
Would Soundwave finish him? Would the last casualty of the war be the only mech Megatron had ever trusted completely?
He was prepared for either outcome.
In fact, his life-essence sang in his lines. Though he was denied his most-desired prey, here was a fight worthy of his full prowess!
But.
Megatron had never entirely been the bloodthirsty beast of his reputation, and only one enemy had made him rush in blindly, forgetting all sense without first analyzing the match.
And it was obvious that Soundwave was at a disadvantage. He had long ago wrecked his original fighting shell beyond repair, and while he was still far more formidable than what anyone could expect from a communications officer, he simply didn’t have the armor to take Megatron’s blows anymore.
And, on second glance, there was no one in the stands. No one screaming out their misery, braying for another’s spilled energon, praying to feel something, anything before they were forced to return to their drudgery.
They were no one’s entertainment.
And in his spark Megatron knew it would be a shame to lose him now.
The Cause could hardly afford it. He couldn’t-
In that moment Megatron did something rare - he stopped himself. Across from him Soundwave also stopped his graceful, ever-tightening circle. For now, it seemed, he was still looking to him for cues.
Sensornet alight with warnings, the de-facto Lord of Cybertron willingly turned his back on his Third in Command and let his bulk fall down to make a crater in the grass.
A weighty klik later, Soundwave folded down beside him.
“Well?” Megatron’s voice echoed. “We’ve done it. Haven’t we?”
Soundwave’s visor, empty of any indicating lines, gazed around the stands.
"...yes.” A recording of Megatron’s old triumphant rasp came out of his speakers.
Then he tilted his helm and made a binary error chirp. EM field flickering with irritation, he motioned Megatron to scoot closer and then tapped the neatly plaited neck cabling under his chin in a rueful sort of way.
--//System: deprioritized significantly. Currently: requires manual realignment.//--
“Aha! Better not finish me yet!” Megatron joked. He was quite cheered, oddly enough, at the prospect of not having to kill anyone today, not flying back to Iacon alone. “I’d give you far better odds than Starscream anyway… Now, let's see if I can still manage this.”
All prior lethal intent seemingly forgotten, Soundwave arranged himself neatly in his larger companion’s lap and let Megatron root his claws around in one of his least armored parts - a shocking show of trust for a gladiator or a Decepticon.
Megatron felt compelled to fill the silence.
“Remember that time I picked a piece of that Autobot infiltrator out of your back vents?"
Soundwave’s neck assembly tilted the requisite 13.6 degrees that indicated amusement and let out a series of dry chuckling clicks.
--//Agreed. Piece: was small. Task: analogous.//--
Amusingly enough, whenever he sent Megatron glyphs the warlord still heard them in Soundwave’s original voice. Was there anyone left beside him and Prime who even remembered it?
Megatron wrenched his helm back into position, though rather more gently than anyone would think he was capable of.
“Don’t move, I almost had it!”
Just then the very tips of his claws touched upon a series of switches, far at the back of Soundwave’s long-disconnected vocal assembly. As delicately as he could he flicked them all to ‘off’ then ‘on’ again.
There was a series of harsh recalibrating sounds.
"Oath: ful-filled.” Soundwave said, at last.
Megatron found himself smothering a laugh in his massive clawed fist.
"That sounds horrible! What in the Pit, did you do to it?!"
"Megatronus: also…. experien-ced substantial… vo-cal deg-rad-ation..." Soundwave hissed, his antennae bristling.
Soundwave. Soundwave’s voice. Soundwave’s impertinence.
Megatron felt his faceplate shift into a rare expression of fondness.
Honestly! Sassing the Lord of the Decepticons. Who else would dare?
"You really shouldn’t call me that anymore."
With the ease of long practice, Soundwave ignored him.
"Hostage plan: hastily prepared. However. Outcome: acceptable." He rose up and turned elegantly, gesturing to the empty stands, in obvious metaphor for the empty world beyond. “This: only beginning. Tear down old world: accomplished. New objectives: imminent."
"Is this what you’re going to be like from now on?” Megatron teased. “Talk, talk, talk all the time? I warn you, I will not tolerate competition for lengthy addresses to the troops!”
Soundwave’s visor lit up with a (ง'̀-'́)ง
“Rematch: still a possibility.”
Megatron grinned broadly. He would bet every shanix he’d ever won that somewhere under his visor Soundwave’s likewise-scarred lip plates were curved around an equally nightmarish smile.
“Anytime! I am at your disposal! Especially once we restore some glory to this place. I’m sure your Eradicons would thrill to see a proper demonstration of your skill, you’ve been in the shadows for far too long! Besides, the meeting place of the two founders of the Decepticon movement should never be allowed to slip into obscurity-”
He paused, for the required gravitas.
“-and, of course, I will never forget your loyal service to the Cause. Name any province, any reward, and I will make it yours."
Megatron narrowed his optics ruefully as he said it.
Realistically, Soundwave would probably outlive them all.
Meanwhile Soundwave had given weight to his rematch argument by slipping under Megatron’s guard as he was talking. One of his long, slender digits reverently traced the scarred and pitted emblem in the center of his old friend’s chest and then ruthlessly bore down to remove a speck of rust at its center.
“Maudlin sentiment: Unnecessary. We are: still functioning.”
That’s when Megatron finally realized that he’d won.
~
An Epilogue, a little while later.
“Surely: Megatron had action items in case of victory.”
Megatron stretched out his pedes, digging fresh raw furrows into the suffering grass as he contemplated the peaceful clouds overhead. They were on their backs again, their plating warmed by the intermittent light, playing truant, blocking Starscream’s increasingly irate queries as to their location. Soundwave had even pulled a very thin, very ancient sealed canister of high-grade out of his subspace.
To the future detriment of his tanks, it was now mostly empty.
Glorious.
Megatron would surely be toasting victory for centuries to come but it was only right that this first one was just the two of them.
“What were we going to do? Execute the High Council? Well they’re dead.” he flicked his glossa out over his teeth, tasting the wonderful truth of the words. ”So that’s done.”
“Occupation of Iacon: once high priority.” Soundwave prompted.
“Well it’s occupied, damn the place!” Megatron growled petulantly. “Iacon is… him. I don’t want to look at it!”
Soundwave tilted his helm in understanding. Moments like these Megatron was almost tempted into thanking Primus for sending him a telepath for an amica. It certainly cut down on awkward conversations.
“Iacon: heavily damaged. Historical significance: complicated.”
Megatron sat up.
“You know what Soundwave? You are perfectly correct, as always. It’s time for a new era! Call the ship, tell them to mobilize. We’re moving the capital here.”
~