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"Are you sure you want to see him?" the stumpy little organic guard asked, all bright yellow eyes and green-gray skin. Some polished brown textile—"leather," he thought it was called—emblazoned with the insignia of the Galactic Council, was wrapped too tightly around the guard's body. He only came up to Starscream's waist while sitting on the stool behind the table.
Tiny.
Soft.
That's what Starscream thought while looking down at the security desk and the guard manning it. Soft and weak.
Sometimes it was hard to deprogram millions of years of spiteful ideology, but something didn't seem right with everything ending this way, with Megatron being defeated at the hands of an organic legal system. He deserved it, of course, and the irony was not lost on Starscream, but it still felt… strange.
Starscream frowned, narrowing his optics.
It almost sounded like the guard thought the he was trying to help Starscream, doing him a favor by checking if this is really what he wanted. The look seemed earnest, but, frankly, there hadn't been help for him in quite a long time and very shortly there simply would be none ever again.
The guard didn't realize the gravity of the situation. Things hadn't always been so bad. Even when things became terrible, there had still been a terrible need to be nearby, even if just to know. It had been years, far too long.
And Megatron was just beyond that door. Well, several doors.
"Of course, I'm sure!" he snapped, slapping an impatient palm on the guard's desk. A crack in the wooden surface formed under his hand. A crack he would not be paying for. This useless prison ship should have had a budget for that.
"Let me in! I didn't sit through all of the red tape and paperwork to get the specific visitation permissions necessary just because it sounded like a fun way to waste my newfound copious free time."
The guard sat there, stunned and dull.
"Megatron still owes me," he hissed.
Though not anything tangible and not anything Megatron had a chance in hell of paying back.
"Right, of course. Right this way."
Starscream had been right about it being several doors.
Reinforced titanium and plasteel doors. Electronic and physical locks. Cameras arranged so that not one millimeter of floor or wall was unseen by their insensate optics.
Every lock was unlocked by the guard, every door in this unadorned, cold, utilitarian passage pushed open for Starscream as he passed through. He knew exactly what Megatron had done to end up here, behind all this security, behind all of these physical manifestations of fear and paranoia. It was almost warranted.
And if the stars had aligned a bit differently, Starscream would have been somewhere like this too, just waiting for the end.
Probably on the opposite end of the prison from his "leader." No one would want two destructive forces housed in proximity to each other. A sensible security feature, especially if they riled each other up enough over something asinine and petty for either of them to somehow slip their bonds for the express purpose of shutting the other one up.
When the last door opened, Starscream stopped on the threshold, not having been prepared for what he saw.
He had expected Megatron to be sitting and sulking on a little bench behind energy bars, elbows on his knees like the unmannered thug he was behind poetic verbosity.
What greeted him instead was an enormous, cabled contraption behind glass. A large, boxy machine covered with blinking lights and data readouts covered the back wall. A pair of massive cables led from the machine to a heavy crate in the middle of the “cell” where they seemed to be feeding power to whatever was inside.
It was hard to discern the materials of the crate, but it looked, at first, to be some sort of reinforced stone or concrete. How primitive. Surely, if Megatron had wanted to, he could have destroyed some pitiful rock.
It looked solid though, no obvious seam save for wherever those power cables fed through.
It looked like something—or someone—was locked inside… like a corpse in a coffin prior to smelting.
Starscream was, at first, so confused by the crate and the machine in the back that it took him several attempts to cycle his optics before he saw a familiar black hand hanging out of the box, as though the cement had been poured over him. Did they simply miss his hand or… there was some sort of tag tied to his wrist, the sort one might use in a morgue for the physician to identify who was who. Probably used to identify whomever was in a crate like this.
Not that there would be any mistaking this one.
So this was how they were restraining him, a claustrophobic hold that wouldn't permit even the twitch of a pneumatic fiber.
Wise.
But a personal hell for Megatron, who never cared for being confined. The narrow dark spaces of the mines and bloodworks in the temporary arenas had left their enduring marks.
Starscream could, despite what people said to the contrary about his emotional capacity, empathize. He too preferred the open space of the skies to any hole in the ground.
Was he conscious in there? Was he in stasis? Or was he already a corpse in there and Starscream would be having just another one-way conversation with an unresponsive Megatron? Comas. Wheeljack’s restraining field. Being a cold frame in a box would just be the newest incarnation of something that had been a recurring theme.
Perhaps Starscream ought to have felt some sense of vindication, maybe some Schadenfreude at the sight of Megatron being encased in something sure to be tormenting him. Assuming he functioned.
Instead, Starscream’s spark ached.
The guard coughed quietly. Wetly. Organics were so damp inside, full of water. It permeated everything about them, water did.
It was unnerving.
"How am I supposed to talk to him like this?" He turned to face the guard, pointing accusingly at the “coffin” behind the glass.
"I'll just… wake him up for you." The guard turned and starting to enter commands into a console on the wall. "The warden demanded that he's left offline until his disassembly date."
The displays on the machines in the back changed in response, shifting colors. Glyphs in a language Starscream didn't recognize flashed and danced.
“Except, of course, for visitors,” the guard continued. “You’d be the first one.”
“The first one? Surely his Autobot friends came to—“
The guard shook his head.
“They couldn’t get permission from the Council. I remember the orange one came by and tried to break down the door anyway, but the big blue one stopped him.”
Of course, they did, but at least they had tried.
Starscream, however, had had a bonus they could never have hoped to achieve even with Ultra Magnus’s admirable skill with legalese: a legal bond.
The machine in the back of the cell hissed loudly, cables retracting from the crate.
Their bond was poorly defined, but he had it: documentation stating that Starscream was Megatron’s legal next of kin. It did not specify the type, gave no clues as to the nature of their relationship. That was how they both preferred it. It mostly had existed, early in the war, to ensure a smooth transition of power and resources should Megatron have died.
Now it granted Starscream the right of visitation to see a dying mech before the end.
Not that Megatron had much by way of personal items to bequest. Except that surgical kit. Starscream didn’t need it, but he knew after the execution, Ultra Magnus would bring it by. It was a mockery of the cannon Starscream had gifted Megatron so long ago, a cannon destroyed years ago as part of the fool’s remand.
The hand outside twitched, like Megatron was waking up, definitely conscious now of his claustrophobic confinement. Were they expected to converse through the concrete?
At least, inside the box behind the glass, Megatron couldn’t do anything. It was always safer when he was far away… but Starscream hated it, no matter how much he knew it was better to keep his distance.
The machine in the back emitted a loud noise, almost like a klaxon, as suddenly the solid material of the crate liquefied, pulling back into an orb, floating on its own. As the material retreated, Megatron dropped to the floor with a sickening thud, discarded by the restraints with little care, like spitting out poorly flavored fuel.
Starscream jumped back out of reflex. With wider optics than he would have admitted to, he looked over at the guard, who kept their hands on the console, as though willing to contain the monster again if needed.
“Did you change your mind—“
“No!” he snapped, now waving that pointing finger back towards the door they had come through. “Just go! I need to speak to him privately!”
“I can’t—“
“Conjugal privilege!” Not strictly true, but close enough.
The guard looked briefly terrified before beating a hasty retreat. Starscream didn’t care what potentially horrific thing the organic imagined but that hardly mattered.
What mattered was that this was a conversation that no one needed to overhear.
As soon as the door slammed shut, Starscream turned back around to see Megatron still picking himself up off the floor, a bit like his age was finally catching up to him. He wasn’t even that old. They were of similar ages, practically in the middle of their lifespans, but Megatron had always been hard on his frames.
The bastard seemed a little confused as well, but he’d allegedly been in stasis ever since his conviction, ever since he’d been confined to death row.
Best get started while Megatron was still on his back foot.
Starscream approached the glass. It was probably shatterproof, but all that meant was it would take Megatron a little longer to break it if he decided to lash out. Though that sort of outburst didn’t happen anymore the way the Autobots told it. The red badge pressed into Megatron’s chest still looked comically out of place.
"You ran away."
“Starscream?” Yes, still confused, a little too confused. “Is it… time already?”
“No, unfortunately, not for another month.” He snapped his fingers impatiently. “You ran away.”
Megatron looked at his hands and then back at Starscream, optics uncharacteristically wide while still getting his bearings. It was unsettling, like he’d been woken from some terrible dream. What dream could be worse than a brief foray into consciousness before being disassembled like some inanimate machine. A brutal way to go, but probably not undeserved.
Starscream waited only a few moments more, his patience for Megatron’s returning awareness running thin.
“You ran away!” he repeated, stamping his foot against the metal floor. “You ran off into space with those Autobot clowns!”
"And you didn't do a thing about it except pout in your palace."
At least Megatron still seemed to have some bite left after making nice to those Autobots for a few years. It was hardly any bite at all though, a shadow of what had once been.
Starscream knew now he had nothing to fear anymore. The retort, a pretense, had come from a shell of the tyrant that was probably long dead. The condemned moron behind the glass was no threat to him.
He jabbed the glass with his finger in accusation, the tapping noise echoing in the cell.
"Don't you dare turn this around and make me out to be the coward. I had to live with the consequences of your failed war, your defection, and—"
Apparently Megatron, even functionally on his deathbed, still knew how to interrupt.
"You thought me a coward?"
"Yes!” It was impossible for Starscream to restrain the snap in his voice. “All that nonsense about changing? You should have fallen on your sword! It’s what you expected of the rest of us. And yet you ran a—"
"Is that not what I'm preparing to do?"
The thick glass was all that was keeping him from reaching through and throttling the bastard. Disassembly day could come a little early—
"No, you're preparing to die like an animal. A farmed mechanimal, livestock, being scrapped for parts. No dignity, no fight. You're just letting it happen. No effort!”
And Starscream was just getting started. He lifted his wings high, to make their full breadth visible.
“You're leaving me with nothing! I put up with your slag, sub-par interfacing skills, and violent temper for millions of years and this is all I get out of it? A garbage retirement on a perfect clone of our homeworld after it and my government got eaten and your stupid surgical kit!"
“So, this is only about your material means. Typical—”
Starscream slammed his fists against the glass with a shout. The barrier didn’t even shudder under the assault.
“Shut up! You’re not listening to me! You’ve never listened to me!”
He leaned his weight forward on his fists, still pressed to the glass. Starscream forced himself to take a few slow ventilations to bring himself back down. This was how their conversations so often went over the years, winding each other up until they either fought or fragged or both. They both knew just where to poke and prod to hurt… and yet they kept doing it anyway. No one else knew Starscream quite so well… and probably never would.
Even Megatron’s death would mean his safety and the end of millions of years of pain, it would also mean the loss of a uniquely unhealthy intimacy. There were times when Starscream had been so sure that Megatron dead was exactly what he had wanted, that it would fix everything, but it wouldn’t. It would leave a hole in his spark, no matter how much he wished otherwise.
The worst part of all of this was that the person he would miss was already gone, even if his frame was still walking around.
Megatron stood there quietly, waiting for Starscream to continue, something he would never have done before.
Who was this?
“You’re right.” No. “I’m sorry.”
This was a stranger.
Starscream sighed, leaning back and letting his fists slide down the glass. The glass, carefully engineered, didn’t even scratch.
Megatron was already dead. He’d been dead for years now.
Starscream had no idea who this Autobot was, all “active listening” and self-flagellating guilt.
He shook his head.
There was no point.
“It doesn’t matter.” The words came out softly. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
A palm, cautious and ginger, settled on the glass on the other side, over the spot where one of his fists still contacted it.
“I—“
Starscream yanked his hand away as though burned, not willing to suffer even the suggestion, the idea of touch. The person he wanted to touch, no matter how much he hated the notion, no longer existed. This stranger was all that was a left.
“I said, it doesn’t matter anymore!”
The palm on the other side of the glass retreated. Politely. Politely.
“I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have—“
“I’m glad you did.”
Did he mean that or was it because he’d seen no one else?
Starscream sighed again.
“Shut up. Just… shut up. For once in your life, shut up.” He cradled the hand that had almost come into faux contact with Megatron with his other one, rubbing the palm as though that would clear away any remnant, imaginary contamination. “Those ‘friends’ of yours tried to visit, but they couldn’t get permission.”
Megatron opened his mouth to say something but Starscream just waved a hand.
“No, no, it’s because I have something they don’t. You know exactly what it is.”
A nod of understanding. Good. He hadn’t forgotten.
If he had forgotten their legal bond, no force on this prison ship would have stopped him from breaking through the glass to murder Megatron in his damn cell.
“They tried to see you. They did. I don’t know what they wanted to say to you.” He paused to ventilate. “And, frankly, I don’t know that I have anything more to say to you either.”
“I see.” Remorse was an unnatural expression to be on Megatron’s face and Starscream knew that the wrongness of it would be burned into his memory for the rest of his own life. “I would ask for your forgiveness, but—“
“Yes, you don’t deserve it. That’s right.” That didn’t mean he didn’t consider giving it. “Don’t… don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter anymore. The person who needs my forgiveness is already dead. It won’t do him any good and you don’t need it….”
What a waste.
“Will you be there then?”
The execution itself would be semi-public.
Starscream had all the rights and permissions to be present in the “audience,” but others would be as well. The organics who put him here, certainly. Perhaps Ultra Magnus as Megatron’s legal defense, to ensure what few “rights” he had remaining were upheld and respected. Maybe that drunk roadster “friend” of his; he’d been an absolute mess in the tabloids since his ship was seized.
Did he really want to watch Megatron, not anesthetized as the Galactic Council “determined” that mechanicals do not feel “pain,” be methodically disassembled by organic engineers like a disobedient appliance with poor wiring?
And, standing there, looking at the empty, uncaring floor, Starscream didn’t know how to answer.