Idk, I just got here

" She said: when will we meet? I said: A year after the war ends. She said: When will the war end? I said: When we meet" — Mahmoud Darwish

01. After Trepan — after everything — Megatron doesn't dream. He can feel his processor spin and think during recharge, but he never dreams. And so when he dreamt for the first time, he almost forgot it was possible. Almost. 

His dream was a kaleidoscope of images, a flurry, a blur. His body was moving, but he remained still, watching a memory that didn't belong to him. And he knew this because he could hear the sea.

The universal translator is too gentle. There wasn't a word to describe the great ‘seas’ of Cybertron. Back when he toiled under Nova Point, he assumed — like everybody else —that liquid water was a rumour. And then he saw it, deep, silver mercury, unlike anything, roaring beneath the horizon. Yet he dreams of a sea he never saw, dark and vacuum, sealed under a storm.

Rodimus banged on his door. He was forcibly woken. Even when they were talking by his doorway, Megatron could taste salt in his denta: so foreign his intake nearly rejects it. 

02. It started with the humming. It was so quiet that Megatron wouldn't have registered it if it wasn't for how foreign it sounded: non-mechanical and soft. Too soft. A glitch in his audials was likely, with the fool's energon slowing his processor. Yet he remained sharp, vigilant the moment the sound rang from down the hall. As he tried to listen to the silence, the ship thrummed underneath his pedes. Everything else was in the right place: electric, electronic, the usual clicks from the coolers, the vents drumming above. And yet the tune remains, faint if not fading. Drift was soundless. And he was trying to focus. So when the mech asked him what was wrong, Megatron blamed the startle on the fool's energon.

03. She watches him from the corner of his peripheral. Playful. Shy. His optics drifted from the PADD — carefully, to not alarm Minimus — to make sense of her. Ratchet said internal hemorrhaging of the wires could lead to hallucinations, where the cyberium that lined his cables would inflate and leak; poisoning the Energon.

Behind him, she waved, wrist and elbow sharp and jutting, in contrast to the smooth, metal backdrop of the office. He diverted his attention to the conversation just in time. And when Megatron raised his helm again, she was gone.

Ratchet gave him the clear; he wasn't in any way incapacitated. And when he tells the CMO about tasting salt in the back of his intake, all he gets is a funny look. 

04. Cybertronians don't have taste receptors for sodium chloride: ‘salty’ doesn't exist in their vernacular, only recently introduced through the translator. The closest word they have to describing Energon is that it burns. Just a little bit. Alkali and acid dissolving against the dentae: bubbling like sea foam against the sand.

05. She is the name of the unknown. She died in Cybertron many, many years ago — in a time before him, in a time before the war. So those who walked after her used the pronoun to describe the unfounded. Those without dichotomy, those without truth. The Lost Light is she, and so is the vastness of space. Nautica — who is she, herself — refers to her unsolved equations as her, and so does Perceptor. She is the graveyard of hypotheses, waiting to be kissed alive.

So it’s only natural for Megatron to think she 's lab-made. An experiment went wrong, a failed refraction of light. Brainstorm did say he was experimenting with holoforms. And yet the scientist never recharges in his room down the hallway: always too busy and never wanting to be alone. So Megatron observes her like she is a creature out of a petri dish.

The ghost blinks. Once. Twice — eyelashes, batting against her rotting cheeks. 

It's rude to stare. She laughed. The sound was an airy, feathered thing. 

She doesn't seem perturbed by the fact that the left side of her jaw is hanging by the threads of a torn muscle. With the epidermis of her chin loose and gorged, he could inside her anatomy.

Dark red and wet, not even Brainstorm would replicate something like this.

Forgive me.

She held the wilted bouquet in her hands a little bit tighter.

It's usually bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding. Do you believe in that?

Megatron doesn't know what he believes. He lies on his slab with her sitting by his window, and he thinks of the question as recharge swallows him whole. He was on a ship, lightyears away, and all he could think of was the texture of her throat as it flakes and cracks.

He doesn't believe in bad luck, yet humans have many names for it: karma, kismet. Megatron wonders by which name he should call her.

06. It takes him milliseconds to learn. Everything he needed to know about humans was handed to him on a silver platter, convenient and superior. Is this why he had thought of himself so high compared to them? Self-fulfilling prophecies who were so Darwinian and slow and stuck in their ways.

 (Yet, in the end, weren't they like that as well? Eons to live for, and yet they waste it on killing one another. He wasted it.)

He has lived through the birth of her first rivers, the christening of her people, and the rise and fall of empires as they pile atop one another. The passing of thousands of eclipses that humans can only dream of witnessing once within their finite lifespans — and yet here he was.

The humans would call him Icarian; held together by wax and pretending it was metal, plunging to his hypocrisy as he strays further from the sun.

07. Why a thing so innocuous? So naive and so docile.

A girl in a wedding gown. 

Even when his mind tries to conjure up something beautiful, he still finds a way to corrupt it. Maybe that's why she's undead, ribcages peeking out of the tear of her dress yet never heaving to breathe. He buried his guilt, and she decayed. It's perverse and he loathes himself for it.

Megatron tells himself that's why she's here. To make him answer for corrupting her soil, and even if his pillage on Earth felt like a lifetime ago, he remembers.

The only bride that he could think of was a dead one. What does that say about him?

Without Soundwave, at least not directly, he was safe in the knowledge that no one aboard the ship could spy into his thoughts. They would find him appalling — more than they already did.It was a good thing that she very rarely approaches him when he’s outside his quarters. And in the rare instances she did, no one would acknowledge her.

The end of her dress, dragging across the floor.

Ravage tries to convince him he’s been tampered with, that it’s shadowplay. He threatens to tell Soundwave and Megatron lets him. He tells him to do whatever he wants, as long as he leaves them alone — unless, of course, he’s content with listening to an invisible orator. And so the panther slinks back into the dark resentfully, muttering to himself about how the mighty Megatron’s gone mad.

He has, hasn’t he? 

08. She remembers nothing except the ocean, cold and majestic. Where she emerged from the tides — and he notes that her predecessor, their goddess of love, was also born out of foam — flush with the sheen of the sea. 

Then is grief born out of the sea? Megatron thinks. Did the Olympian create it at the same time she created love?

No. But people fight for love and love to fight. So love married war. She explained. The dyads then became synonymous.

And is that what we are? He asked her. A sequence of two, bind together to marry?

She smiled at him — bright enough to distract Megatron from the bone of her jaw that shifted from the movement. Until death do us part.

He wanted to laugh.

09. Terminus told him the ancient world was pitch black, and if anyone from today were to travel back in time to witness it, the emptiness would blind their optics if not drive them mad. A shadow so greedy that it crowds the air with its emptiness. That time, Megatron had briefly wondered if such nothingness existed. Yet, the same darkness had forged Solus: intelligent and beautiful, she was one of the first, flares of light. 

He thinks of the Prime as she offlines at the hilt of Megatronus' Star Saber. And even in her death, the last words she spoke were about love. Was that the start of the chain reactions that lit up Cybertron? Which of the two sparked the lucidity that charged life into the millions of dormant sparks? Her death or her love? 

(He has to remind himself that the same love killed her.)

10. The truth is symmetrical, cogs in the right places. Perceptor argued. 

Nautica rubs the side of her helm with both servos. Her tools, messy on top of the table.

Yes, but you see, we won’t be travelling in linear time. We’re planning to break free from that. If symmetry is your truth then where will that leave us once we go on a loop?

Something inside him hitched. Oh.

All optics were on him.

What? Rodimus urged.

Nothing. He lied. I didn't know we could get stuck in time.

That’s what happens when you don’t move on. Brainstorm shrugs. Time freezes you. So you have to learn how to melt it.

11. She says she feels cold. He assumed she felt nothing, numb as she fluttered her fingers experimentally on the shell of his armor. Numb with the same indifference she had with the lack of oxygen aboard the ship.

He didn’t stop her, trying to etch the feel of her curious touch. It felt like nothing, feather-like and ghosting across the surface like a stray draft of wind. He has to mentally fill in the gaps himself, and if Megatron thinks hard enough, he can pretend the warmth exists. That it lingers and clings to him.

Her fingers run along the ridge of his chin and the underside of his palm. Yet he's still not enough to chase away the cold. 

No matter how hard she tries, her kindness has no source in his stout and unyielding world. And so he is left to wonder what it would be like if she didn’t oscillate in and out of time and space. To feel her, whole and alive, would be mercy. That would be unfair.

Time and time again, he'd ask her: why are you here?

I'm waiting for my husband. She'd tell him, small against his open palms. We're going home.

Megatron feels as if the air compresses when she speaks.

Where is home? He'd ask her. Intake dry as he swallows salt.

The darkness of his habsuite doesn’t seem to touch her features, which appear bright, as if a private sun were hanging above her brow. She'd motion for him to come closer and brush her tiny lips against his. It felt like nothing. She was a shadow that had casted herself across his face.

The sea.

12. Megatron observes the little trinkets littered across Rung's office. They were tidy and upright, great big ships, each marking well-known voyages and exoduses. He imagines them cutting through the galaxy's undercurrent, great, metallic sails, reeling through the vortex of nothing.

Then he catches it, the small, black figure tucked away at the top-right corner of his shelf. 

Rung turns around in his chair to follow his line of vision.

The humans call it a raven. Of course, they don't come in the same size. They're small, as are all things Earth.

Laserbeak is sleek and sharp. Sentio-Metallico down to his core. Yet this bird — the real one — is a void with shadows. Slender beaks made of meat, and bone for claws.

Humans called them omens. 

And who would gift you a warning?

The psychiatrist looks out the window, round-rimmed glasses, clever under the light.

I don't remember. He lies, and the next time Megatron enters his office two days later, the bird is nowhere to be seen.

13. If she is born out of the sea, then that must make her a siren. She still hums a tune he’s never heard before. And it did lure him. And when Megatron tells her this, she shakes her head.

But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.

Cybertronians don’t cry either. He told her. And the look she gave him was withering as if he had trapped all the light and left her to sit in the dark. He was, after all, empty if not made of black holes. Is that why his spark feels heavy all the time, dense with the magnitude of his sins? And when the weight becomes unbearable, he tears himself apart, and with it he cuts through the fabric of space. The anti-matter was now leaking out of his optics, crawling past the sutures, wringing him iode by iode. 

Someone was calling him, but he couldn’t hear. The forcefield was cracking, shattering with him.

It was excruciating. Yet amidst the throes, he feels it, the light-headedness, the gradual rise and lull — in a way, he was crying. Maybe he was also made of oceans.

14. Megatron found a flaw in her story. Love didn’t marry War, and before they eloped, Love had married Creation; Solus has always been fond of metallurgy. That was her alchemy. And Venus used to seek refuge in the fire of her husband’s forge. Yet she was unhappy — why is that?

Why was he?

You could have been a creator. His corpse bride mused. That’s why you wrote.

I still do .

Do goddesses feel remorse? He thought maybe she didn't. War seduced her. And she had let him corrupt and penetrate and ravish. Megatron reminds himself it was symbiotic; she loved his wrath and his power. The Sun was their witness, and he claims she was unhappy because Creation was unkind to her. So she stared into the abyss.

And Megatron understood.

He thought of staying idle and evanesce under the mines, private and forgotten, without having dented the surface of his homeland. Now they tell stories of him, and his name is forever carved into the macrocosm. If not by words through wounds. And as the universe ages into senescence, will the pain — which echoes and expands like the gases under Croteus 12 — continue to bleed through generations to come? 

Outside, he could see the field of flowers. Ebullient blue, swaying gently with the wind. With the sun on the horizon and dusk to chase away the chaos of the night, Megatron stared at Terminus, worn and confused — and refused.

This won't be my legacy .

15. In another life, she promised, you could be a creator .

And what will I create ?

She was small, so small that he had to lift her up to his face, where she could make a motion to hug the side of his cheek with her body.

(Destiny had always made him feel small, she even more so.)

Love. You will love me.

He supposed that’s possible. He wanted, once a very long time ago, to be a medic. And maybe he could even be an explorer as he was aboard the Lost Light. Searching for lost things. Searching for her.

The blue, luminescent light above him flickered. And even higher above — two, three levels up in the sentencing chamber — the jury was deciding his fate. Footfalls chased away the sound of the sea. And so he pulled out his Rodimus star, crumpled and yellow, sitting in the middle of his palm. 

She smiled sadly at that.

And will I love you well ? He asked.

You know you will. 

16. It’s like falling asleep. She promises.

He was falling into recharge, but the word sounded garish, rough. Sleep sounded more like drifting. Sinking. She was there when he laid across the slab, where the monitors beeped and chirped as they pumped fluids into his cable — and he let them, drawing the curtains close.

She tells him to inhale, teaching him how to breathe. (The juxtaposition of it all made him smile inwards.) And when the air rushes past his intake, he could taste it again. The pull, the push, the hum of the great, big tides. They roll and crash into the sand, disappearing into froth. He dreams of standing across her, now at the same height, face to face.

No longer was he her resting ground to haunt. 

On the branch of a tree that appeared above him, a raven swooped down. The beating of her wings, tumbling through the mist.

My dear , the creature spoke.  He belongs to the gardens with the rest of my brother's creations . You belong to the sea. With me.

His bride was pleading, telling her that life has parted them, so it would only be right for them to be joined here.

And as if pausing to give her words a thought, the Raven turned to the west and crowed. Though you may not remember it, we have been here before. It will only be fair if I would send you both back. But know that the end stays the same. What is mine is mine, and what is my brother's is his.

Megatron doesn’t dream, but now he lives in one — where reality is no more than a distant memory, an echo from another, linear time. And so the ferryman lets Megatron guide his bride atop the boat, so they can sail out together, into the sea. 

17. De ja vu , she called it. A memory she had lived through before, even if it wasn't hers.

We are traveling in a loop. It's true. The quantum jump had worked, and now they all live in a forever dream, conjured up by Brainstorm and Perceptor's simpatico. The Earthling ran a nervous hand down the creases of her clothes, hesitant with her next question. Yet, Megatron was patient. (Waiting, it was as if they were both used to that.)

I think we met in a previous life. 

The glass atop the tabletop gleamed, and in the space of Swerve's bar — where the bartender was too far away to intrude — Megatron could hear the song of the ocean. There was no point in lying. He did come looking for her. And here she was, whole.

I think we did.