#with a bonus dash of writing megatron like he's right about everything

[thenamesblurrito]

Astrotrain/Spacewarp dude. Record, for the main four Decepticons finding their relics? Ask meme.

Record: give us an in-character blurb about x thing or event in this AU, from history, from the plot, etc!

Written as a fic excerpt instead of in-character, but hey I got it done. Bonus points to anybody who spots the furmanism!

Also the hellsite’s readmore is broken, I hate this.

Starscream shuffled closer to the meager shelter of the arch, folding his wings in tight against the wind. Skywarp huddled behind him, and Thundercracker hadn’t even left the doorway. Megatron, however, braced himself out on the tarmac of the Academy’s elevated landing strip. His fierce grin, turned towards the force of the tempest, was illuminated just enough by his optics to make out over the distance. Lightning writhed in the tangle of clouds that had swallowed the sky overhead, and the wind-driven rain splattered in buckets against every surface. A chunk of debris from a shattered outbuilding slammed into the side of the hangar and dropped into the pile of other detritus quickly accumulating not far from the trine’s position.

“Why is he even out here?” Skywarp shouted over the gale, difficult to hear even though he was right next to Starscream’s audial.

“How should I know?” Starscream yelled back. “Probably to get inspiration, or emotional power, or some other scrap that he prizes over surviving!”

Another tongue of lightning lashed the sky above them and the following whip-crack of thunder shook the hangar to its foundations. Starscream was half a second from marching back to the door and leaving the melodramatic idiot out there to die alone, but a powerful blow from the gale winds pinned him to the wall. Megatron, bereft of the support of the hangar arch, went sprawling, skidding backwards and rolling pedes over helm like just another piece of debris until he thwacked into the wall only a few meters from them.

“That’s it!” Starscream howled. He left Skywarp to give Megatron a hand, instead fumbling his way to the door and shoving in past Thundercracker.

“I’ve been dragged into hundreds of stupid plans in all my vorns stuck with you, but this one was the worst!” Droplets flew from his frame as he whipped around to jab a finger at a bedraggled Megatron, clinging to Skywarp. “You can stay here and ‘appreciate the fury of the storm’ all you’d like, dumbaft, but I am going back down into a proper building with solid walls and waiting this out like a sensible person with survival instincts!”

“Don’t you feel it, though? The gravitas?” He wore the same smile Starscream had seen over and over again: the one that appears when he sees something awful and immediately wants to emulate it. “It’s like the darkness is alive. This isn’t any ordinary storm! This is a calamity.”

“You’re a calamity!”

“Uh, guys?” Thundercracker muttered, unheard over the storm outside and the brewing argument.

“No, there is something out there,” Megatron said, shoving off of Skywarp. “Didn’t you see it, or were you too blinded by its terror? Could you not experience the majesty within the dread? Do you so cling to the light that you cannot bear the shadow for fear of drowning in it?” He paused. “I should write those lines down.”

“Guys?”

“Here’s a line for you, with small words so you can understand: You! Are! Stupid! We shouldn’t have flown you up here! What if the stairwell is locked? If we’re stuck in this hangar, I promise I will make sure you don’t enjoy it.”

“Guys, please!”

“WHAT?” The two turned to look at Thundercracker, who was still staring out the door. Skywarp had joined him, and they both seemed nervous.

“Was the thing you saw like that thing?” he squeaked and pointed up.

As all four of them clustered in the doorway, lightning illuminated an enormous square of sheet metal and durasteel, hovering in the wind like some predatory bird among a swarm of other fragments of buildings. It tumbled one way, soared another, mesmerizing in the way it spun, and they watched it for a long frozen moment before another gust slapped it directly at the hangar.

If asked about this later, Starscream will deny ever shrieking, instead insisting that he smoothly sprung away from the door towards the stairwell along with the other three. His siblings, however, would delight in detailing the way his voice broke in the middle of his terrified screech and how he had to scrabble for purchase against the puddles covering the floor. Each youngling made a mad dash for the other side of the hangar and the safety of the stairs. The howling gale covered their frantic pedesteps—that and the sound of the flying metal wall exploding through the roof.

The only thing Starscream could think, clutching in desperation at Thundercracker and clenching his plating against the sting of a rubble avalanche, was that this was so much worse than turbulence.

The enormous projectile went clean through the top of the hangar and slid through the back wall, crashing down into the library section of the main building below. Starscream only registered bits of it: a beam from the ceiling sweeping him and Thundercracker off the side, the sudden presence of the rain again, a flash of Megatron’s green paint in a rush of falling concrete, a great shattering thunder as the roof below them caved in. His grip on his sibling’s arm never faltered.

The sudden jolt of deceleration didn’t register to him as much as being pelted with datatrax instead of debris. Opening his optics—when had he closed them?—he found himself in a thoroughly ruined library. Records and datapads rained from splintered shelves along with the deluge coming through the hole in the ceiling. The flying wall stood embedded in the floor like a monument to its own destructive force. Starscream blinked away the fugue and looked—Thundercracker beside him, wincing but not obviously wounded, Megatron groaning atop a chunk of steel, and yes, there’s Skywarp, dazed but standing. He let his helm flop back down against Thundercracker’s thigh in relief.

He heard Megatron wheeze as he clambered to the ground, then take a deep vent, before, “FRAAAG YOOOU TOOOO, YOU SLAG SUCKING STOOOORM!”

Starscream grunted in rare agreement.

“Why do you hate everything?” Thundercracker moaned.

“Because the world is broken,” Megatron roared. “and there’s nothing I can do to fix it!”

“What,” Starscream muttered and propped himself up to watch him stomp back and forth.

“I want to revel in the glory of the sky, not wonder if this was a manipulated event! I’d rather be terrified of Cybertron’s natural roiling power than at the possibility that the weather department whipped this up deliberately to destroy an institution that so openly defies functionism!” Fists clenched and dentae bared, Megatron paced in a fervent energy he usually only reached during a performance, sneering up into the rain. “The students accepted to this academy are the best and brightest younglings in all of Cybertron and the colonies! Why then must I suspect that the functionist regime was willing to wipe out the hundreds of us here to eliminate a potential threat?”

“Holy hand, does everything have to turn political for you?” Skywarp sprawled onto a pile of records and flung his arm over his face.

“YES!”

He made an impressive figure, Starscream had to admit to himself. Pedes planted, optics blazing, and fist raised defiant, Megatron looked less like the moody, melodramatic youngling rebel he knew and more like some commander out of the history books. A lyric from one of his songs filtered through his mind: To war, I’ll roar, until I rage no more.

“We are being deceived! Our government, the ones whose duty ought to be the protection and guidance of the people, have instead betrayed us by turning frametypes into a measurement of personhood! We are told to despise our fellows for simply having been forged in different shapes, and no one is aware enough to realize we all share the same suffering! We are directed to labor only in the manner dictated to us, when true quality is only attained by the dedication and skill of those who are not forced away from the work they want to do! What freedoms we have are a pittance, tossed to us as an afterthought by tyrants.

“The only solution to tyranny is anarchy! Every scrap of resistance is worth something!” Megatron spread his arms and yelled into the storm, “I’ll stand alone if I have to! Has Primus left me without support?”

“Yup,” Thundercracker grunted.

“Nooo…” Skywarp raised a limp servo before letting it flop back down.

“I’ll have to check my schedule,” Starscream said.

“It doesn’t matter!” He ignored them. “I accept it! I will have no function from my oppressors, but this I declare as my very PURPOSE!”

At first Starscream thought Megatron had been struck by lightning. The instant blinding light, the shockwave, the wash of charge and sound that whited out his every sensor, it all seemed to fit. He unwound slowly from his reflexive curled position, still blinking at a luminous afterimage of his friend burned into his optics. But the room wasn’t burnt. Megatron huddled on the floor, shuddering, but not a molten mess of slag.

“Wha-att,” voice breaking, he had to pause and reset his vocalizer. “What the frag was that?”

Thundercracker shuffled to a sitting position with a spooked expression. “Lightning? Power cables snapped?”

“Are you okay?” said Skywarp, the only one of the three who had rushed to check on him.

“Yeah,” croaked Megatron. “I… I think I’m the best I’ve ever been.”

“Holy slag, he’s actually gone insane now,” Starscream said.

He and Thundercracker jumped up to look for themselves. Megatron unfurled haltingly. His left arm he kept clutched to his chest until the end, revealing at last a glowing white hexagon. It was a plaque of some sort, with some stylized picture on one side that Starscream couldn’t make out. Only about a finger’s width thick but as wide as his face, it was not unlike a datatrax but for its shape and intricately etched surface. Also the fact that it began hovering a few spans above Megatron’s hand.

“What the pit-” Skywarp yelped, skittering backwards.

Megatron just stared, entranced. “It… speaks to me. It’s connected to me, I think.”

“Starscream, he’s actually-actually gone insane now,” Thundercracker hissed.

He didn’t bother replying. There was just, something, something there, maybe. If he looked a little harder, Starscream thought, he’d be able to see it. The thing pirouetted and pulsed like it was—like it was alive, and he found himself tingling all over with a knowledge that he was in the presence of something powerful beyond mortal measure. Or maybe the tingle was genuine waves of power it emitted, he didn’t know, but he wanted to know, and he wondered if Megatron would just be willing to share for a moment—

“Uhm? There’s more of them!”

Skywarp’s panic made him look, and there they were. Three more hexagons, scattered in an alcove made by piled debris a couple meters away, not yet glowing but certainly more shiny than the dust-turned-mud should allow. Thundercracker grabbed a piece of rebar and made to nudge them into the rubble, but Starscream snapped, “Wait.”

He and Skywarp turned to look at him incredulously. Starscream worked his jaw for a moment, gaze fixed on those three things, then dragged his helm back around to look at Megatron. He stared at him, orange optics glinting white with the thing’s glow. There was a challenge there, and encouragement, and maybe, just maybe, some hint of that power Starscream felt still filtering out across his frame.

“I—”

His siblings seemed scared. He was more scared of allowing the moment to pass than of the danger of this unknown.

“I want one.”