Chapter Text
I walk a lonely road,
The only one that I have ever known,
Don’t know where it goes,
But it’s home to me and I walk alone.
-- Green Day, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
The ground was gritty with bits of crumbled metal and crushed ore, and it crunched with each slow pace he took. D-16 kept walking despite a growing weariness that made his limbs feel they weighed twice as much as they should have. The damage he had taken was beyond the capacity of his self-repairs to fix, even with the power they drew from his new T-cog, and his fuel levels were dangerously low as well.
But the glimmer of liquid energon—freely flowing energon, anyone’s for the taking!—in the distance drew him. And even without that welcome sight, he would have kept moving, because what other choice did he have?
He finally reached his destination. It was narrow, a mere runnel of fuel sliding through a gouge in the ground. A little energon had trickled off into a small craterlike depression in the ground to form a shallow pool, and he dropped to his knees beside that.
He bent over it and froze. The pool was so still that he saw a reflection in it, but he wasn’t sure whose image he was looking at. Was that him? D-16’s optics were golden, but the ones blazing up at him smoldered red as if they’d just been lifted from a furnace. And the expression on the face of the mech in the pool was set hard and bitter.
He stared at it, unable to move. The disorientation wasn’t only because he could barely recognize himself, but because he wasn’t even sure, for a moment, who he was. D-16 or Megatron? Which was the reality and which the reflection? Too much had changed too soon, and he’d been caught up in that rushing whirlwind, transformed in more ways than one.
Better to be caught up in it than left behind, he thought grimly. If change was a constant in their world, then he would adapt to that, and he’d do more. He would master it.
Leaving the pool, he crouched beside the runnel and scooped up as much as he could with his hands. Energon, the resource for which mechs had died in the mines, for which he’d worked all his life. Except he didn’t have to work for that any more, not if there was enough for everyone.
So he was out of a job too. Under any circumstances, that would be funny. Now, all he could think of was filling his empty fuel tank.
He drank and drank and had to restrain himself from licking his palms clean. Until then, he hadn’t realized he was so depleted. Probably because what drove him on wasn’t anywhere near as simple or easily dealt with as mere hunger. When the empty gnawing inside him faded at last, he sat back on his heels and stared at the little rill of energon, seeing nothing but the rippling reflection of light on its surface.
Now what? He’d only solved one problem, that of fuel for the immediate future, and that threw his other needs into sharp relief. His right arm hung down limply, the powerful fusion cannon nothing more than a deadweight after Optimus Prime had sliced cleanly through it, taking off a third of the circuitry. He was battered and dented from their battle, and his chestplate stung hotly where Sentinel had carved a crude, mocking image of Megatronus’s face into it.
Megatronus, he thought. The greatest of the Primes was dead. But he still lived, and he was Megatron. It didn’t matter that he was alone and badly damaged, it didn’t matter that he’d been defeated and exiled. He’d already lived through the worst possible losses in the world, when everything he’d admired and trusted and worked for had come crashing down around him. If I can survive that, I can survive anything.
There was a soft crunch of trodden-on metal crumbs behind him.
Megatron spun around. A dazzling burst of purple light all but blinded him, but he threw himself sideways, rolling to get away from this new threat. He fetched up against the side of a cliff and scrambled back up to his feet as his optics recovered from the flash of light.
No one was in sight at all. He stared around, because he knew he hadn't imagined what he'd both seen and heard, but he was alone. Keeping his back to the flat cliff-face, he looked around again, this time for any signs that someone had actually been there, but the hard ground showed neither prints nor treads. Nor was there anything he could use as a weapon.
He pressed back against the unyielding side of the cliff, in its shadow, and wondered if he should ignore whatever had just happened and keep moving. Where to, he didn't know yet, but he couldn't just stay—
"Up here," a voice said above him.
Megatron jolted to one side, twisting around to face the mech who had spoken. Caught off-balance, he staggered, but recovered swiftly and looked up. The mech perched on top of the eighty-foot-tall cliff was a flier whose black armor sported purple detailing. Megatron remembered seeing him among the High Guard, and his mouth went dry. He was in no condition to fight off any of them now.
"What do you want?" he asked.
The mech grinned as though very pleased with himself. "Starscream’s got us all out searching for you."
"To kill me?"
The mech shrugged.
Megatron calculated his chances of getting away before any more of the High Guard could find him, and quickly realized the answer was zero. Especially since they could track him from the air. This was it, then. But he still wouldn’t give up without a fight.
"What’s your name?" he asked instead.
The mech looked puzzled. "Why d’you want to know?"
"Some day I may want to thank whoever led the High Guard to me."
That earned him an amused smile. "I'm Skywarp. And just between you and me, I don’t think Starscream wants you dead."
"No?"
“Nah. I'm sure he’d settle for maimed, dismembered, that kind of thing.” Skywarp glanced up. "Oh, there they are."
Shading his optics, Megatron tilted his head back. The specks in the sky were so tiny he wouldn't have noticed them without Skywarp's pointing them out, but they were growing larger by the klik. The muted growl of their engines filled the sky like a distant thunder. And suddenly one of them overtook the pack, peeling ahead at a rate of speed Megatron could only imagine.
"That’s Starscream in the lead?" he said.
Skywarp nodded. "Yeah, no one’s faster than him in the air. Except me."
Megatron thought of how Skywarp had somehow moved faster than the optic could see. "Because you can teleport," he guessed.
"Yeah," Skywarp said happily. "Now you see me, now you..."
His gaze shifted abruptly away from the High Guard and Megatron followed his line of sight. More fliers were approaching from a different direction, their contrails drawing white streaks through the sky, and all converging on his position. Skywarp waved to them, probably wanting to make it very clear that he'd found Megatron first. Perhaps there was a reward involved. Or more likely, a body part as a trophy.
They were close enough now that he could tell individual planes apart. Their engines roared and light flashed off the flats of their wings as they swooped in to land. In the rear was a shuttle with a red and white paintjob, easily large enough to carry eight or ten more mechs. Starscream was well ahead, and in seconds he killed altitude, somersaulted into his root mode and dropped out of the sky. Megatron stood where he was, motionless, waiting. Starscream's feet hit the ground, crushing gravel to powder under his weight, and he straightened up in the same fluid graceful movement.
The look he gave Megatron was nothing short of intensely vindictive. The other planes cut their speed, transformed and landed, surrounding them both. For a moment Megatron wondered if this would be a duel to the death, or whether he would simply be torn apart by the growing crowd.
Well, let them try. They could take his life, if they chose to. But that was all they'd get.