Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Megatron wakes up early. He pretty much always does, even though he doesn’t necessarily have to. He’s the leader of the whole Decepticon army, but the base itself runs on auto-pilot most days, so if he actually wanted to be a joor late in the command center, he could. He doesn’t because, well, rolling around in the metal sheets just doesn’t happen in the mind of tyrant powerhouses.

His systems power up relatively fast, so by the time he is in the wash racks, he is fully awake. He turns on the tap and lets the solvent wash over him as he picks up a cloth to scrub between his armor plates. He generally starts at the upper portion of his chassis so the solvent with sediments doesn’t flow over already cleaned areas. Helm, shoulders, arms, torso and legs. Not always in perfect order, but the routine is so automatic he wouldn’t have noticed if someone pointed this fact out (nor cared, most likely).

His wash rack is quite simple, like the rest of his personal quarters. No fancy polishes or waxes lining the ledges, nor cleaning drones to do the work for him, just maintenance products and a stack of clean cloths. It is quite a bit bigger than the one he had used once in Kaon, but the austerity of the room had followed him to the Victory. Even as hypocrisy has tainted most of his speech, he never demanded luxury when he could have, something he takes a strangely fierce pride in.

Still, in spite of his usual impatience, he takes some time to finish. Not only because his frame is rather big (every mech has those hard to reach plates. Probably, even Unicron would, if he ever tried bathing), but also because vorns do take their toll.

Hook makes sure Megatron’s maintenance sessions are textbook perfect in every sense, but no matter how many replacements and calibrations are made, the truth is that Megatron is old, and old comes with rubber cable-joints wearing down, and having scars and little crannies where dust settles in and facilitates rust formation.

So the mighty leader of half the Cybertronian population scrubs down thoroughly, because rust is rust.

Also, because it is a moment to think.

The rest of his day is spent listening to other mecha, and acting upon it. He must hear Starscream endless list of complaints, the Construction’s progress in their current project, Soundwave’s reports on Autobot activity (and on what every other Decepticon in-base has been doing), Motormaster’s latest apology for failing yet again.... On top of that, there are datapads with reports from half the base that need to be sorted out, more projects to be approved, more treason plots to be squashed, rinse and repeat, times infinite.

There is no time to ponder and, as much as Megatron makes use of a practical ‘solving problems with a cannon’ attitude, he still needs at least some time to think on his own.

Sometimes he uses the precious kliks to tweak the last details on the next Autobot-mauling strategy. Sometimes he reflects on how things will become once the Prime is defeated. Sometimes he plays a memory file in his hud, just to enjoy the instant of calm before the storm that is ruling over head quarters the size of a small city.

Then there is nothing else to do but turn the faucets off, and stand under the dryer until all the moisture is gone.

He subspaces a gun (always handy, cannon or no cannon) and a few other items he never uses but he still keeps about him (Emergency medi-kit. Also always handy, cannon or no cannon). He exits his room, locking it swiftly behind him, and walks away towards the Command Center.

His day begins.

Chapter Text

The Cassetticons knew the whole vent-system of the Decepticon base perfectly. Even Ratbat did, whose work implied being outside of the HQ much more often. It was a matter of pride. Soundwave was the optics and audio relays of the whole base, but the innards of the structures themselves belonged to his tapes.

The war had eventually driven most Decepticons into reformatting their frames into war-builds, which were usually quite large. In a ship-turned-base, that meant that there were many places too small for most of them. Those places eventually became unnoticed by most mecha until the symbionts had made use of them.

Either as stashes, hide-holes, or even as small refuges of tranquility, those places were available in almost every building and section of the Head Quarters. Some were used by all of them, some belonged privately to a particular cassette, but all those in-between places were a source of pride and delight to the symbionts. After all, they were the only mecha in the whole Decepticon army who could truly have privacy, if they wanted it.

Soundwave approved of all this, of course, and he had been pleased when his subordinates had begun colonizing the interior of the ship.

When it was clear the Victory would stay earthbound for an indeterminate period of time, the army of Decepticons living in it found something they hadn’t had in vorns: stability. The base started adding structures and expanding, and every soldier began to feel that now they owned their personal quarters. Not in the literal I-pay-the-rent ownership kind of thing, but in the more vague sense which implied that if the mech entering through that door was not MechA, then it was trespassing. They weren’t merely rooms where they recharged anymore, but permanent places. That brought in a series of changes.

For starters, everyone started to make each room more to their liking.

Scavengers’s storage units began filling up with random items he found interesting.

Breakdown acquired several light tubes to post in every corner, and nothing made shadows anymore.

Thundercracker had begun amassing the ship’s largest datapad collection and had had the Constructicons make his walls almost soundproof (which was quite useless when dealing with Skywarp, who just teleported into the room, but a definite improvement against Strarscream’s screeching).

Soundwave had used his private quarters to elevate tidiness to a form of art. It was always painstakingly clean, and every datapad and object had an assigned place which never ever changed. Also, he had an impressive audio system and an even more impressive collection of old Cybertronian music. Everyone had always assumed the cassettes recharged there as well, docked into Soundwave.

The first time he had heard about it, the carrier had been so amused he had actually made an effort not to chuckle. Apparently, it had never occurred to anybody that something like that would mean he would have to go out of recharge every time one of them needed to go in or out, bothering not only Soundwave, but every other cassette who had docked afterwards.

Recharging all at the same time defeated the purpose of having several spies, and it was literally impossible for any of the symbionts to recharge while Soundwave was on duty. Audial arrays fine-tuned to catching secrets in the silence of the night simply couldn’t deal with Megatron VS Starscream daily shouting matches AND recharge.

As soon as the settlement had begun, the symbionts had fled from the TiC’s quarters.

An abandoned and walled-out storage unit had begun filling with posters of human action movies and eye-searing colorful holograms of whatever struck the twins’ fancy that orn. Rumble and Frenzy’s quarters was ample; it held a small storage unit for high-grade and energon treats and their own multimedia system, which they often left on, making random Decepticons wonder where in the Pit was the music coming from.

Ratbat’s place was small, and the closest one to the surface. It was almost as tidy as Soundwave’s, and he kept only a few datapads in it along with his recharging perch. The real perk of the place was that it was surrounded by the old engines of the Victory, so it was completely silent, except for the sounds of the ocean outside. Ratbat spent most of his in-base time there rather than working in the Communications workstation with Soundwave and the rest.

Laserbeak and Buzzsaw also had decided to share their recharging chambers but only because they had found a really good place which only the both of them could use (well, Ratbat could too, but the pink cassette wasn’t a social mech). It was a narrow rift between two sectors of the ship. They didn’t actually know what it had been before, but they suspected it was some kind of ventilation distributor. It was relatively thin, five mechanometers or so, but extremely high, reaching past eight levels of the ship. It ended in a few large fans that rotated slowly, making the air circulate in lazy ascending drafts. There were multiple ventilation ducts in every wall, and several thick cables and pipes criss-crossed it at different altitudes.

Both bird-framed tapes had taken an instant liking to it and made themselves at home there, Laserbeak taking the lower portion, and Buzzsaw the higher one.

Ravage had taken an entire engine room, also abandoned when the Victory became earthbound. The large machines had rendered the place uninhabitable for the general ‘con population, but the cybercat’s four legged frame was perfectly adapted to slide between pipes all orn. In time, the symbiont had managed to snatch an incredibly large amount of pillows from different places which he had then scattered across the whole place. Rumble had mentioned once that he would like to see the expression of the first engineer who got in there, if the time to use the room again ever came.

They had other secret places only they knew about but, in truth, they could claim every pipe. They owned every one of those places more than Megatron himself.

Chapter Text

Sometimes, when he was alone and there was little to do, Ambulon thought of the little sounds.

The med-bay was slowly returning to quietness. Now that most mech had been discharged, the ruckus of the visitors was going away with them, and the few patients that would still require attention were being kept in stasis to aid self-repair protocols.

I was a place that never reached true silence, though. There would always be beeping machinery that monitored the status of those that were recovering from Rodimus’ last brilliant idea, the soft engine noises that came from the port-most wall of the bay, and Ratchet, of course. Ratchet and the med-bay were a package deal. Not that the CMO was a particularly loud mech when he worked…. Well, maybe he was, but that was just when cussing and grumbling, and not really background noise, not exactly.

The sound that appeared when things went quiet, and which Ambulon would forever associate with this room, was a tiny occasional click. That was the sound of an elderly mech trying to go about his day without letting his joints openly creak. 

There were variations of this. A sharp squeak, clinks of parts aligning and brushing each other, where there once had been better insulation, and a younger self-repair system that took care of it faster.

Ambulon didn’t know if the head medic was actively trying to keep the noises of age at bay (Ratchet didn’t look like the type of mech prone to worrying about that sort of thing), or if it was just an unconscious reflex, but, either way, the fleetly sounds were so much part of the med-bay as the whirr of the machines.

As he coiled and put away a few left over tubes from an earlier maintenance session, the ex-guard-manager reflected on the little noises and felt a bit lost. He was familiar with this place by now. He knew the crew members’ names, the ship and the obligations of his not-that-new-anymore job.

It still felt like he was treading on uneven ground. This was still the Ratchet med-bay, with the Ratchet sounds, and people coming in and storming all over the place. People who knew each other and who sometimes looked at the peeling paint and scoffed, not because it was sloppy like Pharma used to do, but because there was purple underneath.

 And he would scoff too, because sometimes they talked of things only he seemed to not know about. They laughed at things that were not funny and became angry for nothing, and sometimes he didn’t understand what was happening at all.

Sometimes Ambulon wondered if he’d ever stop being a stranger wherever he went. When he did, a tiny voice, barely the whisper of static in the air, wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off being part of a greater being. Just a leg, but still part of a whole. A place with a defined Ambulon-shaped empty space.

The background noises of a familiar working station would be replaced by the living sounds of a few sparks, shoved all together by the strange comings and goings of war. Humming of fans, the clinking of cubes at the end of the day, the zapping of static as conversations buzzed through the comm. lines, all of them multiplied by five, (Four? Six? He couldn’t remember anymore. He wasn’t sure he’d ever known). And maybe there’d be another subtle background noise. The slumbering murmurs of another being that was broken up in pieces, waiting to reassemble and exist again.

Sometimes, when he was alone and there was little to do, Ambulon thought of the little sounds.

Chapter Text

Rung liked to visit Swerve’s bar pretty often.

A careful witness would realize it wasn’t the drinks that called him. He usually asked for tall mixed drinks, the sort that tended to swirl colorfully more than kick. He’d stir the engex slowly, looking at it intently, paying careful attention to the colors and the bubbles, but only to have something to do with his eyes.

Truth be told, what Rung liked was the noise. Simply the murmur of people gathered in one place. Everyone talked about different things, arguing and sometimes even singing happily, overcharged or maybe sad.

If he paid enough attention to the slowly moving colors, the voices became background sound, speakers and words erased until only the low hub-bub of a crowd remained.

It sounded exactly like so many other places. So many other times.