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shadow_vector2012-03-10 09:20 pm
How to Start a War in Five Easy Steps
Fandom: Transformers, IDW
Rating: PG
Length: 1206
Content notes: Spoilers for Chaos Theory, Autocracy, Megatron Origin
Author notes: IDW does the weirdest job with Megatron. It's really, really hard to see him as the bad guy after the canon cited above.
Summary: Megatron's advancement from a miner to...Megatron.
First Stage: Rodion Police Holding Cell
“Impactor. Where is Impactor.” It seemed a valid question, though he was losing hope—swiftly—for an answer.
“Deltaran,” the mech before him said, straightening on his legs. The name was synonymous with pain: Deltaran Medical Facility. “Apparently he got in over his head.” The tone of voice said, ‘so did you’.
It sounded like Impactor. And his last clear memory was the other mech pushing up from their booth at the bar, intent on teaching the cadets some manners. It had been ironic, and every inch Impactor, too. “Unfair odds,” he said. Not that Impactor ever cared about odds. That was him, too.
“Know what?” Whirl said, his voice clicking with laughter. “I’m gonna do you a favor, Megaton.” He shifted his weight, moving from side to side, as if impatient. “Gonna let you go pay him a little visit.” If he had a face, it would be, Megatron thought, curved in a sneer. “Even odds. You and me.”
Before Megatron could retort that his wrists were clamped, the other mech struck, one of his weighted forearms slamming into Megatron’s face. It was only the heavy mining helmet that saved him from the worst of the blow. Even so, it flung him from the bench onto the ground.
“You realize,” Whirl said, planting his broad feet, looking down at Megatron. “That you’ve verbally connected the two of you. That’s a confession to the charges. Criminal.”
Megatron was no brawler, but even he recognized the blunt strike for what it was: designed to maim, or at least shock. And the words rang, all too true. He thought of his datapad, the long treatises he’d written. They had all been abstractions, idealizations. Peace through honesty, openness. He’d taken the light of aboveground as a symbol, clarity and cleanness, compared to the dark isolation of the mines. He’d taken it too literally.
“I confess nothing.”
“…yet.” A tone of glee in the other’s voice as he bent down, arm already poised for another strike.
Second Stage: Mining Platform C-12
No.
Senator Decimus’s words had poured over his disbelieving, unbelieving audio, blocking them like wax. His arrest had changed him, taken that fire of idealism and crushed it to a cinder. The whole system was corrupt. And he’d cast aside those ideals for what they were: youthful folly, the words of the innocent. No, the ignorant, the willfully made and willingly kept ignorant.
And he had put his head down, snarling, as if he could ignore the corruption and injustice if he turned his optics away.
It wasn’t working: C-12 was closing and though Senator Decimus gouted oily words of promise, of new jobs, of gratitude for their contribution, they smelled rancid: empty promises, false gratitude.
The axe had flown from his hand, almost as if sentient, almost as if a channel for the rage that had been burning, yellow-green and hot, in place of the banked idealism. He watched it fly, a grim, satisfied horror building in him as it landed in Decimus’s shoulder.
This is why the law requires you to make these announcements on site, he thought, bitterly. To see our faces, to see the lives you are ruining. And to face our response: anger, betrayal, frustration.
But what Megatron hadn’t counted on, as he stared at his energon splattered fingers, the cooling body of the Elite Guard grey and dead beneath him, was that he’d have to face his own.
Stage Three: Clench’s Arena, Kaon
Ironic, he thought, bringing a fist backhanded to smash against the mech’s face. The crunch of metal was buried in the roaring approval from the crowd. Ironic that violence, the beast that had lurked in the shadows around him should have become so intimate an ally, a friend. It had needed mastering, of course, the wild anger of the mine riot. Too wild, too unfocused.
A snarl, as another mech circled around him, stabbing him with a lance. A crude weapon, and a nervous strike. Megatron whirled, bringing his hand down on the impromptu weapon, snapping it in jagged halves.
The roar ebbed, then surged. Another lesson, another thing he’d had to learn—the crowd had no side, at any moment, the favorite’s downfall would be cheered just as loudly as his victory. The lesson had been well taken: Do not lose.
But embedded in that, another lesson: the fame of victory. They listened to him, now, as they’d never listened in the mines, as though his ability to kill made him wise.
Another irony.
And he thought, tearing the lance-half out of his body, driving it in a smooth strike into the first mech’s face, the splintered end stabbing into the throat like a rabid rage, a final, dark irony: Whirl had been right all along.
Stage Four: Rally, one of many
He mounted the steps to the dais, feeling the crowd’s energy wash over him. He was a hero now, the audience won over, or willing to be. He’d learned that lesson in the Arena. Give them a winner, give them a leader, and they will line up to follow.
He was a winner. He had made his mark, had cracked open the corruption of the Senate. One mech, against the world.
Money could not buy that kind of influence, that kind of acclaim. Nor, he thought, surveying the rapt, eager faces that subsided into silence as he let his gaze scan over the crowd, this kind of loyalty. These mechs would die for him, at word. Kill for him, at a mere thought. All they needed was that word, that thought. Their desire to be part of something larger than they, to be a part in the routing of corruption, the tearing down of the ossified prejudice, shining on their faces, brighter than the sun that used to blind him on the threshold of the mine.
Stage Five: Jump Joint, Nyon
“You’ll see.” Megatron felt the patient smile on his face with something almost like nostalgia. Deadlock was a new recruit, a zealous one.
“Don’t like it,” Deadlock said. “They’re going to try something. Make us the bad guys.”
“But that’s precisely where we want to be, Deadlock.” It was an indulgence, a luxury, to explain himself, as though making his mastery over events real. He had been so powerless in the mines, in the police station. Powerless even in the arena.
No longer. The world would be his to control. Even if it defied him, it defined itself around his actions. And that was more than enough. “Their slander works better than praise for our cause. Beside,” he said, settling himself in the chair, setting the stage carefully, omitting no detail, “when they resort to violence, as they will inevitably do, they will show their true colors.” A smirk. “The only matter up for debate is if they will grasp the hypocrisy.”
“They won’t,” Deadlock said, his mouth a tight, flat line of one who knew.
“Perhaps not yet,” Megatron conceded. “But I know that seeds planted will often grow, even untended.” Oh, how he knew that, how the seed of Whirl’s violence, the lesson he’d learned in Rodion, had grown to this. He tipped his chin. “Let in Orion Pax.”
And let the war begin on this new battlefield.
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