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When they cannot find him the first time, it causes a ship-wide lockdown. The klaxons are what finds him in the end, more than the angry and frantic mob.
“I’m the captain,” he growls from inside his cell. He stays silent afterwards, even when Rung (ever the mediator and, he thinks, the sole reasonable person on this damned voyage) comes and gently, calmly, pries their fingers one at a time from the proverbial trigger.
They’d wanted to throw him out the airlock. They, meaning Rodimus - and Whirl, who wanted to shoot at him with the shipboard cannons as he cartwheeled in space.
He’d gazed at them, optics half-lidded, from inside his cell. As if he couldn’t destroy them all from outside as well as in. As if he hadn’t done it a thousand times before. He toyed a while with the meanings of outside, inside, and perspective until Ultra Magnus reluctantly released him.
He couldn’t blame them. Not entirely. It was his own fault they feared him to the point of irrationality, after all. His own reputation staggered him at times - for all that he spoke of wading through seas of Autobot corpses, he still felt as if his pinnacle had been in the mines, writing seditious tracts and defiantly stamping his name on them. A labor of the mind is worth twice the labor of the body, he’d thought then. He’d been proud of his work, then.
No. In the end, if they lashed out at him for being a monster, it was because he’d written himself into a corner and did not have the courage to wipe clean the slate before it was too late. His early speeches were purposeful - purposefully inflammatory. Each word flew from his mouth like another hot ember, and he had seen the fires they lit in the (increasingly, smelter-red) optics of the crowd, and grown careless. He sowed where he ought not to have, let those words drop where they may, blinded by the glow of passions ignited after a lifetime in the darkness of the mines. Each time he stoked the fire it grew, and in his foolishness he’d become addicted to the roar of it, dazzled by the praise and acceptance of a starved audience. He’d brought them words - and they snatched at them in desperation and began crafting words of their own, and in his own selfish, narcissistic fervor he’d failed to see that they were derivative.
If the Autobots saw an abomination in him, it was because he’d lost control of the prose, and it had grown like rust around him, making a tyrant and murderer out of a revolutionary.
It takes a long time for the crew to calm down after that. He decides to stay in sight, not for their sake, but for his own. (Everything he’s ever done has been for himself, a nasty voice whispers, and he crushes it as ruthlessly as any Autobot’s head under his foot.) It is only a handful of days before he feels the pull again.
Two galaxies are colliding above the ship, and half the crew are crawling around the hull in shifts to see it. Megatron is goaded into joining in - Rodimus considers everything a contest, and despite how little the crew respects their “co-captain” they do like him better than Megatron. It won’t hurt, he thinks, to show interests like any other mech. Perhaps if they see the ex-warlord standing with them rather than apart, gazing at the same stars, they will warm up.
He doesn’t care if he’s liked, he tells himself. It’s just that he’s had enough frightened suspicion to last him a lifetime.
But as he stands there looking across the hull, he forgets his purpose. There are two galaxies, so far away, but close enough to see their arms are entangled. The halo of their respective systems, all the suns glittering around them, is enchanting.
“The two galaxies are approximately equal in size,” Perceptor was saying, somewhere to Megatron’s left. “Eventually the two will merge into a single galaxy.”
“With all the stars and planets?” Tailgate asked him.
“No,” Perceptor said, sympathetically succinct.
“They look like sparks,” Chromedome murmured. In his peripheral vision, Megatron could see both Chromedome and his small partner. They’d been outside every chance they could get, and now Megatron could see the red light of Rewind’s recording device online, blinking out of view as Rewind turned away from Chromedome’s warm gaze to look again at the slowly colliding galaxies.
The next shift Megatron spent in the engine room, hidden away and small amongst the machinery. It was far away from the small (and large) dramas that washed over the rest of the ship. It was noisy, and hot - and crammed amongst the humming organs of the ship in his smallest form and with his systems weak from the watered-down fuel, he felt most at home.
Here, he could write.
He wrote about galaxies,
Meeting, brushing arms,
Spinning off again
Into vast, lonely emptiness.
He wrote of sparks colliding.
Massive, singular lives pulled
Inexorably
Toward each other
And the beings towed along with them
Not fated to destroy each other,
But ordered to
As inescapable as gravity.
When it was as finished as he could make it he decided on a title, set the datapad on his knees, covered his face, and wept. He couldn’t bear to read it over one more time. It had poured from him, unedited, and to change it felt like a crime.
Finally, he lifted his head up again, and there were the words to confront him. They glowed on the screen, a superheated blue, and he tasted the ashes of defeat in his mouth.
He huddled closer to the hot, sparkless machines beside him, suddenly chilled, and wondered when his words would finally run dry.