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Megatron never really stopped writing poetry.
He tried. But if he refused the words, the emotions came out in other, far less appropriate ways. So he stopped trying to hold the words in. And hadn’t this been part of what he’d fought for - the right for individuals to do as they chose regardless of their form or function? To refuse to be so tightly confined?
Still, he kept the poems to himself.
There had been a time when he’d had an audience.
Impactor, first. His first friend in the mines, and for a long time his only friend anywhere. There was more to Impactor than others realized; appearing smarter than your bosses could only ever hurt a miner, and Impactor had learned this lesson well. Megatron's political poetry had often driven Impactor into a rage. But once, deep under the rock, and utterly alone, Megatron had recited a verse that had moved Impactor to tears. And Megatron had realized then the value of words and of writing them.
Orion, next. Orion, who wore a mask at all times to hide the intensity of his expressions, the beautiful vulnerability in his naked face. Orion, whose depth of feeling showed anyway, in his optics. He had read Megatron’s poetry like someone starving, while Megatron watched his optics shift and widen and overheat. His best audience. His most sorely missed.
For a short while, Soundwave - before the war started in earnest. Before Megatron had shut himself away entirely, for the good of the cause.
Megatron didn't share them any more. He hadn’t read a poem aloud to anyone but an empty room in millions of years.
(Not entirely true. He’d read a few war poems to Tarn - the latest Tarn, the one with the high-caste accent and the poetry obsession. The one who worshipped Megatron slavishly to the point that it was almost fetishistic. But those had been war poems, all violence and bloodlust and joy. Honest, in their own way, but far from his best work. Far from the poetry he wrote that laid his spark bare.)
Megatron imagined sometimes that the poems would survive the war - would outlive him. That they would be read widely, in some distant, difficult-to-imagine future. Read at some point in time when he was either too untouchable or simply dead, and so they could no longer harm him.
He wrote poems about all of them. About everyone that mattered.
Prime of course. Prime, still. Prime, always. If anything, the war had only served to make Prime more beautiful - transformed him from law-keeper to magnificent bloody gladiator. And if anything, Megatron had only come to know Prime more deeply through the violence they shared. Verses rattled through Megatron’s head even as they fought. He composed poems as he lay among the wreckage, edited lines while his medics welded him back together. He had written Prime hundreds of death-poems, standing over him and preparing to end him.
His poems about Prime were his best work. If Megatron was remembered for any of his poetry, it would be for these. And they were the ones he most badly wanted to send to their subject. But that was foolish. Maybe, if this war was ever over - maybe whenever Megatron won, or even if he lost -
Starscream. His shivering and beautiful second, all delicate wings and sharp words and hard angles. Cruel and beautiful, with his high-caste accent and elegance - everything Megatron never should have been able to have, and always falling in one barely-subservient step behind him anyway. The knife at his back that kept him moving forward.
Megatron didn’t write about Starscream often - the words came easily between them, just as the violence did, and they had other ways to work out the tension and emotions that built inevitably and explosively. Poetry was rarely necessary.
The few verses he did write were all things too tender to ever speak aloud or to be expressed with violence. Megatron kept the poems locked down deep, heavily encoded.
Shockwave. As reliable in his own way as Starscream, which was to say that Megatron could rely on both of them to always be exactly who and what they were. And like Starscream, a mech who should have been eternally out of Megatron’s reach - an ex-Senator obeying the commands of a miner. The corrupt government of the past had broken Shockwave, but Megatron had claimed what was left and found the value in it.
Megatron wrote of Shockwave in precise language that took hundreds of editing passes to perfect, or sometimes in outdated and archaic clinical binary. Poems with long first drafts and final drafts of fewer than a dozen perfect words.
Because Shockwave was poetic in his efficiency. Because there was something to be admired in him - in what had been stripped from him, and in what had been left behind. Megatron strove for the same. He stripped words away, relentlessly, repeatedly, leaving nothing on the page but the logical and limited truth.
Soundwave. The lieutenant he wrote about most frequently.
Soundwave and his endless reliability, his even, constant temperament. Soundwave, like the hum of Megatron's own engine, like the unchanging eternal glimmer of the stars. Loyal Soundwave, his dedication outlasting even the life of their own planet.
Soundwave, the one Megatron most wanted to trust. The one Megatron most wanted to share his burdens with. The one who had - as of yet, at least - never betrayed him.
Megatron’s desire was foolish. He could never trust anyone to be anything but what they were. Prime had taught him that and Megatron had learned that lesson well and painfully.
His poems to Soundwave were varied in their styles. Ballads, sometimes. War verses, too - they had spent much time together on the battlefield, soaked in the fuel of their enemies. He praised Soundwave’s beauty - a rough, low-caste beauty, a beauty Megatron was far more familiar with than Starscream’s elegant lines. He tried to understand Soundwave’s love for his cassettes, and his baffling loyalty.
Whatever their style, his poems about Soundwave were always lyrical and rhythmic. Beautiful even when they were ugly, with rhythms like music. The type of poetry that Megatron had written when he had been young, when his head had still been full of the rhythms and the echoes of the mines. The kind that he had once written about Orion, back when--
Megatron never showed any of them to Soundwave, of course. But sometimes he thought that Soundwave read them anyway.
It wasn’t a far-fetched idea. The mech’s obsession with information and surveilence was well-known, and Megatron was sure that he wasn’t spared from Soundwave’s spying.
Soundwave was far from expressive. But sometimes after writing something especially painful about him, particularly foolish or overly emotional - the type of poetry that would have made Impactor scoff, or would have made Orion look at him fondly with sad blue optics - Megatron thought he noticed a faint softening of Soundwave’s expressions behind the mask. A gentle fluctuation to his vocalizer. A tenderness to his infrequent touch.
If Soundwave did read the poems, he never spoke of them. And maybe that was a kind of loyalty too.