shadow_vector | Stepping Through Stones

PG
IDW
Megatron, super brief cameo by Springarm (shameless)
no warnings, except spoilers for Megatron Origin, Ongoing 22, etc. The first line of dialogue in section two is from canon.
first Advent fic for 2 Dec 2011

tf_speedwriting

I. The Mines

The sudden darkness was always a shock, like a leap into cold water, vid field a blank darkness that almost hissed until his optics cycled to lowlight. It felt like being swallowed in the maw of Cybertron itself, devoured by the planet, taken in, absorbed.

Twin Twist had once joked that it was as close as any lowly miner would ever get to the Well of Sparks. No one had laughed, not beyond the typical almost reflexive chortle that might as well have been a cough, but it had struck Megatron as containing truth, the same way the rough stone they hewed held energon locked in its lattices.

And then sound would begin again, as though they all held their breath until their optics adjusted, as though the mine itself held its breath with them. Megatron could feel the exhalation of the mine, soured vapors of stressed equipment, waft past, as they began their slow trudge to the ramps, already carefully conserving strength, wattage of their headlamps, their core temp. Soft sounds of pistons firing, murmured words, hushed as though in the presence of something sacred.

Day after day, year after year, he’d crossed this threshold, the limiter from surface to mine, letting the darkness take him, wrap around him like a hiss of velvet, wrap him in the confines of his body, his cortex, like a cocoon.

A mine entrance he passed, like dozens of others, a threshold. And one thing he thought, every time he surfaced, was how much the light hurt.

II.Rodion

“Enjoy the rest of your life, citizen,” the cyclebot said, handing over the datapad. The Rodion Police tower stretched above them, like a pillar supporting the sky. For a moment Megatron missed the cell—the darkness, the sense of confinement. And it struck him how that appalling that was, that he should want walls, want containment. He made a noncommittal grunt at the small officer, tamping down a flare of anger.

It wasn’t this…Springarm’s fault. He’d been almost nice, more polite than most of the mine-bosses Megatron had dealt with. And that itself, he realized, as he turned to walk down the steps, had been disarming, more than the badge, the authority of the Rodion Police brassard. Simple manners, simple respect. And he had been docile and obedient in the face of it.

He paused, at the top of the steps that debouched downward onto the plaza, his fingers numb around his pad. The Captain had read his words, approved.

The Captain, however, had not stopped Whirl. And even Springarm had done nothing more than stop the moment. He hadn’t taken a stand against the system. He hadn’t done enough.

The sunlight poured down on Megatron, picking out every flaw and dent and scrape in his armor, the new dents, the shatters of paint from Whirl’s beating, a ring of scratches around each wrist from the restraints, his shoulder panel dented from where had slammed into the cell door.

A cell door, a threshold, and the sunlight warmed him with a fire that would never be sated.

III.The Arena

The roar of the expectant crowd seeped through the corridor, as though carried on the stench of mech fluid. Megatron’s reputation preceded him, now. There was no mistaking his name, not anymore.

He heard the echo of his name from the loudspeakers, Clench’s voice, tight and excited. A rhetorician’s trick, Clench had told him, to bleed the emotion in your voice you wanted your audience to feel. One he didn’t need to use, with Megatron, but Clench always did believe in overkill .

Thunder, sound like a wave, rolling down the corridor, battering against his armor, his audials, as the excited crowd stamped their footplates, rattling the stands.

The sound reached a crescendo, crashing over him as he stepped from the darkness of the fighter’s entrance onto the broken ground of the arena floor. White-hot lights blasted down upon him, another assault, light and sound and optics, all gazes turned to him, hungrier than the mines had ever been, wanting his mech-fluid, his work, his energy and pain. Everything here was a weapon: sound, light, attention. And the fight hadn’t even begun yet.

Megatron stood, for a long moment, basking in the tumult, the storm, the fire that had been kindled that day in Rodion blazing brighter, hotter, more powerful even than the lights that blasted down upon him.

He looked down, and the scouring lights picked up old stains of energon, hydraulic fluid—the stains of other mechs: their injuries, their pain. He looked up, refusing to let himself be dazzled by the lights, the noise, as his feet crunched over the twisted metal and bits of broken glass, popping underfoot like stars.

It was a threshold, indeed, one that had shown him the road he needed to follow: out of the embracing darkness, the soft, womb-comfort of the mines, into a light that did not ignore him.