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Soundwave was never a big fan of silence. He was used to the loud streets of Cybertron, the bustle of the crowds or the music blasting from whatever gathering place he happened to pass by. He liked the noise.
The Nemesis was just too darn quiet.
There was hardly ever any sound on the warship. Sure, there was the hum of the engines, or the pedfalls of vehicons traveling through the halls, or the… rather depressing sound of Megatron disciplining Starscream, but he missed strangers cheerfully talking with each other and the upbeat tunes that played through the cities back home.
That was why he started taking to downloading human music and listening to it whenever he had the chance. It wasn’t quite the same as Cybertronian music, but he still enjoyed it. At least these fleshy creatures weren’t all bad.
Soundwave was stuck managing surveillance again. Nothing but watching and waiting, letting Megatron know if something of note happened. It was boring, but Soundwave had a role to fulfil, and he wasn’t about to disobey Megatron anytime soon, especially for such a simple task. So he just stood there on the command deck, staring at the security cameras, watching as practically nothing happened.
It was too darn quiet.
Soundwave lightly tapped his digits against the control panel in irritation. He felt like he was going crazy. This seemed like a good time to turn on some music. He shuffled through his files and chose one of his favorite songs, something called “dubstep”. He didn’t really know why the humans named it that, but he still liked it. The song started playing, and Soundwave felt a bit more at ease now that it wasn’t so quiet. Primus he hated silence.
After a moment or two, he started to get a bit more into the music, lightly nodding his helm and tapping his ped in time with the music. Another few moments and he started moving his chassis along with the beat. Soon he was full on dancing, having completely forgotten about surveillance duty.
A fact which he suddenly remembered when he suddenly turned and met the confused stares of both Starscream and Knockout. He’d been playing the music entirely in his helm, so he must’ve looked ridiculous when the two of them walked in.
Well wasn’t that just great.
Soundwave could feel himself blushing out of embarrassment under his visor. The three bots stared at each other for a whole minute of terrible, terrible silence before Soundwave broke it by playing a recording of Starscream saying ‘You saw nothing’. Knockout and Starscream shared a quick glance before Knockout cleared his throat.
“Er, right.”
Starscream walked over to one of the other control panels and grabbed a data pad off of it. “I just needed to retrieve this. Sorry to intrude. We’ll, uh, make our leave now…” Soundwave gave Knockout and Starscream a nod as they quickly made their exit, then turned back to the security cameras. He witnessed the two previous intruders turn to each other out in the hallway and promptly burst into laughter. Cue the internal screaming.
He knew nobody would believe the two of them, but they had still walked in on him dancing.
Alone.
In complete silence.
Yeah, that was incredibly embarrassing.
He started playing his music again, but this time made sure to keep himself from moving along with it. The last thing he needed was a repeat scenario with the vehicons or, Primus forbid, Megatron.