The inside of the Victory was full of shadowy corners and dim passages, in contrast to the few rooms where its boxy purple lines were thrown into unforgiving illumination by the fierce overhead lights. It was left this way to conserve power. Power was always at a premium for the decepticons, especially now that their ship had been shot down and sunk to the bottom of this strange, alien ocean.
Inside the ship, in the quietest parts where the thrum of mechanics was distant and the walls were dimly lit and cold, a mech could hear the sounds of the ocean outside and the unhappy creak of the hull under constant pressure. It was in one of these quiet rooms, away from the noise of the rec room and the activity of the command centre, where no curious soldier was likely to stumble upon them, that Starscream and Megatron ran into a logistical problem.
Starscream stared at the enormous cable where it was lewdly unspooled from its hidden space beneath Megatron's plating. It was thick with fibres and made of dark metal, warm and alive and heavily reinforced. It was sheathed in a non-conductive outer safety coating, like maybe someone involved in its construction had assessed it to carry such a power flow that touching it could hurt.
Looking at that thing made Starscream's own ports and cables, tucked demurely away inside his panelling, heat up and throb pleasantly with rerouted energy.
Even if it was, unfortunately, attached to Megatron, it was a nice cable. One of several, if the mysterious hints of coiled shapes buried in Megatron's chassis were as promising as they looked.
And it was completely useless to him.
He stared some more. Through the hushed hiss of his own vents blasting warm air and the humming daze of his processor, he thought: I am Commander Starscream, this cannot be happening to me.
"What is it, Starscream?" Megatron asked, in a tone that communicated more of a warning than a question. In a second, it became biting and smug, vibrating in the speakers set low behind the cabling of his throat, "Too much for you? I thought you could, what was it you said, 'take anything I was capable of'?"
It was there, in the buzz of his voice - the speakers were old, like the rest of Megatron. His frame had been rebuilt and repaired so many times that it was hard to judge his actual age just looking at him, but his design was old. He could hear it, if he listened: where Starscream's internals thrummed and pulsed softly with beautifully balanced, streamlined power lines, Megatron's thumped and growled; where Starscream's fans hissed with moving air, Megatron's roared.
Starscream had always known Megatron was a little overclocked ...to put it diplomatically. His ancient hardware had to run at dangerous speeds to compensate for Megatron's plots and schemes and... little excesses of personality. He had even pointed out, repeatedly, sometimes right to Megatron's face, how Megatron was outmoded, obsolete.
But... he hadn't actually thought about it in context before.
"Have you," Starscream's voice broke into a shrill whine somewhere in the middle, and he bit it off, resetting his vocal components with a click. Too much for him? He glanced at the exposed length of the cable again, ignoring the absolute catastrophe at its end. Thick, heavy, loaded with charge. A single pulse from that thing would probably crash a minicon and send it shaking into a blackout overload. Starscream could feel the involuntary thrum of his own systems in response to that tantalising thought, and -
Never mind that.
He yanked his gaze back up to Megatron's smug, stupid face and held onto his sneer with a will. "Have you actually interfaced with any mech younger than the Amarri moon base in, oh, ever?"
Megatron's dumb, brutish face turned from smug and faintly hostile to angry and confused - and still hostile - in less than a second. "What?" he barked.
Starscream felt his wing twitch, but he rolled his shoulder and, keeping an optic on Megatron for any sudden movements, snapped open his own port covers to show him 'what'. "It's not compatible," he hissed. "I'd be surprised if it was compatible with anyone developed in the last six million years! That cable is worthless."
Megatron stared at Starscream's - sleek, elegant, modern - ports, which were indeed worth a stare or two, or three, yes, thank you. His face finally began to reflect the same dismay and consternation that was written all over Starscream's.
There was a long, unhappy pause. The sound of Megatron's vents didn't slow, even in the face of their problem. Not that he was about to volunteer the information, exactly, what with Megatron's ego being as it was, but faced with the huge rumbling warmth of his frame and the obscene display of that charge-heavy cable just out in the open like that, Starscream's cooling systems were not feeling any less stressed either.
Starscream looked away from both Megatron's face and his equipment - not without a last lingering look, and, oh, it looked perfectly capable of overloading Starscream's systems until he ran out of coolant and fried, and he wanted it in him, and he wanted to stomp his foot petulantly now because if there was one thing he could have said Megatron might reasonably be good for - since it certainly wasn't leading their army - but of course - he wasn't even good for that-
Starscream looked away, determined not to stare. More. Determined not to stare more. Yes.
Not that he was staring. It was just that the cable was so huge it was taking up -
Wait. No. Not that, either.
That hardware was ancient, anyway, and likely didn't carry near as much charge as it looked like it did. Yes. That was it. They probably just used to make them thicker like that, out of materials that had been made obsolete before the war.
He crossed his arms, closed off, disengaged. But his wings were still splayed wide, shifting in subtle, welcoming wiggles, a demanding 'me, me, me' of body language. He stopped it when he thought about it, but as soon as the thought dropped into background processing again the inviting little wiggles recommenced. Terminating the routine responsible for it would result in a painful core dump, and might affect his ventilation. Right now, he needed his ventilation.
"What... about an adaptor?" he asked, even though clearly Megatron did not have one - it was written all across his face. Interface adaptor was not a thought Starscream had contemplated either, back on Cybertron, when he was shoving things into subspace, clattering around in a rush to take off and chase an ancient enemy through an asteroid field.
He glanced at the cable again.
...although, Starscream never had to think about whether or not his partners' backwards compatibility stretched to the dawn of frelling time.
He blew air out through his mouth, hoping to circulate it faster, since it seemed painfully obvious that this wasn't going anywhere. It, too, was hot and staticky. Ugh. The faster he cooled off, the better.
Maybe he could get an adaptor on Cybertron somewhere. They had the spacebridge now...
"Hm," said Megatron, in a tone that rarely meant anything good, on or off the battlefield, and eyed him with a critical glower. "Come here," he commanded. Then, "I'll make it fit."
"You'll what," squawked Starscream. His cover snapped shut before he even finished the sentence, and his awful, awful visions of sneaking this mission past Shockwave on the next spacebridge call so he could search the ruins of their planet for a cable adaptor like some kind of wild, savage degenerate were abruptly washed away by a fresh, icy flood of horror.
"What kind of -" Starscream's voice cracked and rose to so shrill a pitch that even Megatron winced to hear it. "You'll 'make it fit'? We'll - you'll -" He sputtered, and his speakers gave an ugly, grinding mechanical cough. "We certainly will not."
He took a precautionary step back, determined to be out of reach in case Megatron got any more bright ideas. Visions of cracked casing and burnt out connections danced through his processor. The hot daze of need his processor had been marinating in cleared out more rapidly than he could have imagined. There was nothing like the anticipation of complete agony and a mortifying trip to the repair bay to make a mech's charge plummet.
Megatron leaned back, crossing his own thick arms across the huge, burnished breadth of his chest plates, and looked down upon Starscream with mounting disgust. His optics, which had been banked to the soft glow indicative of power being routed away from his processor - to his interfacing cables, probably - began to gleam with a terrible brightness. "Starscream," he rumbled. "I should have known you would be spineless in this, too - your cowardice is legendary on the battlefield, but, I admit, I had not expected it to extend-"
The whine of a rapidly spinning turbine drowned him out, spilling up out of Starscream's body and echoing off the walls, until Starscream got his sudden urge to take off - at maximum thrust and supersonic speed - back under conscious control. Megatron looked as though this manifestation of Starscream's (very literal) flight response also disgusted him. His face twisted into a sneer
"It's not my fault," he snapped, "that you're so ancient and decrepit that modern mechs can't even interface with your hardware-"
Megatron's optics lit to the brightness of red-hot iron, and he advanced one heavy step forward with a clang that Starscream could feel in the floor beneath his own feet.
Starscream took two more steps back, and then he was alerted to the proximity of the Victory's wall by the sensors in his wings, which picked up the heat signature bouncing back from his own frame. He changed his tone accordingly the second he realised how cornered he actually was, "- but I'm, that is, of course, I'm certain a suitable adaptor can be found, or, or made-"
Made. Definitely made. Starscream wasn't about to go asking for one. Who would he ask? Shockwave? The constructicons? For an adaptor that could fit his 'lord's' cables into his ports? He could already feel a grotesque, phantom humiliation in his fuel tank at the very thought. No. Absolutely not. And scrambling around the lightless, crumbling remains of Cybertron for one would be degrading in a whole new way - not to mention the cost in units of time.
Starscream was no mean engineer. He was sure he could build one. Probably. He'd probably have to build one, anyway, Megatron was that old. Had he never seen a single upgrade?
He looked at Megatron's face, at the optics burning like hellish embers beneath the ridge of his heavy helm, and chose not to ask. Instead he waited, hunched and ready to recoil, and Megatron took one more menacing step forward. There wasn't much more space to back up, unless he wanted to try out a truly brutal takeoff and skim past Megatron's helm...
Starscream could still feel the soft hum of pent-up energy rolling off Megatron's heavy frame. He was in a worse state, in a way: those big, broad, powerful frames took longer and required more power to bring up to a really heavy charge, but they also took a lot longer to clear it out. Now, as he approached, Starscream could feel it, and even though Megatron was finally (finally!) putting his cable away, little licks of power still leapt from one body to the other, sizzling gently over Starscream's plating.
Megatron prowling closer, huge and heavy, with the charge leaping from the tiny dark gaps between his plates, gave a mixed but distinct impression. Starscream was either about to get slammed against the wall and loaded with gigawatts of pure, obliterative charge until his legs wouldn't hold him - or about to get beaten into a pile of twitching scrap parts.
Megatron loomed so close that his huge black hand thumped into the wall just beside Starscream's helm, which meant he was really, truly trapped now.
Starscreamfroze. His fuel pump began working overtime. His core temperature rose accordingly.
One of Starscream's fans made a sad, abortive click and started to whistle in its struggle to dump the heat he was suddenly generating all over again. He wasn't receiving any errors, but his knees felt abruptly like they were made of aluminium scrap and were, traitorously, about to unhinge completely on him.
And still Megatron leaned in closer.
His was an enormous, dark shadow, and it streamed huge and terrible over Starscream's frame. The clunky, ungraceful sounds of the mechanisms working under his plating were strangely hypnotic, and for a second all reasonable thoughts fell into the background and all the considerable power of Starscream's frontal processing unit could generate nothing but a heady, dizzying fantasy of that huge, thunderously loud body working hard over him, pinning him beneath its enormous bulk, all shadow and hard mechanical noise and waves of heat and static -
"See that one is, Starscream," Megatron said finally. He had a harsh voice, and he was leaning in so closely that the vibration of his vocal components could be picked up, however distantly, by the fine sensors of Starscream's wings. They twitched. One of them hit the wall with a soft clack, and then stayed right on softly rattling there when he shuddered helplessly. The Victory's walls seemed icy against his hot, hot plating.
Megatron withdrew, turning heavily on his heel to leave. The thunder of his footsteps shook the floors.
Starscream was smart enough to remain absolutely silent until Megatron was far enough away to put him out of casual swiping range. Then he reset his voice with a click and drawled, with exquisite sarcasm, "Of course, o mighty Megatron."
If Megatron heard his sneering, and he must have, he didn't turn to acknowledge it.
Starscream flexed his fingers. His own equipment throbbed insistently. Primed for use, it demanded something, crackling and craving below his laser core, unsettling his entire power distribution system.
Spitefully, Starscream kicked the subroutines controlling those systems out and reset the whole mess by choking the power supply for five astroseconds. It was sufficient to cease all function for a single thump of his fuel pump.
He regretted it the moment he released his stranglehold on the power flow and let his systems start up again. Being all hot and revved up had been an inconvenient but pleasant ache. Now he had to discard the resulting errors in batches and scowl through the twitching hypersensitive pain of the predictable core dump that followed such an ugly systems reset.
At least he was cooling rapidly now. He resettled his wings at a more comfortable angle.
"Unbelievable," he muttered into the echoing silence that remained.
In about two minutes when his brain cools off, Starscream is going to start wondering if you can mess with the power flow of an interface adaptor and "accidentally" kill someone. Just. Hypothetically.