My take on what Megatron was thinking after Predacon's Rising. It's only the beginning of his true change from evil to good but at least (I think) it's a believable start. I'm not even sure I'm going end up continuing this, so I'm just going to post it now.
-Som
He had done this.
His once beautiful home-world of gold and silver had transformed over the years into one of grey and purple, its scarred metal laced with towering shards of crystallized dark energy and skeletal bodies of the long dead. The exoskeleton of the planet, its towers and hexagonal hive like surface layer, had all but collapsed under both the onslaught of millions of years of war and the encroaching armies of surviving scraplets and rust seeds. Among the scattered ashes of his home-world and the few places where most the surface remained intact, he could almost pick out the devastating results of some of his own weapons of war. But the wanton destruction he indirectly caused his planet and his direct hand in the slow decay of what remained was only the first of a few realizations he made in his self-imposed exile as he gazed at the dark purple crystals that were still being eaten away by Primus.
Millions of years of war and struggle seemed to wither in importance as he gazed first hand at the disaster that was his home-world. Without his trusted and intelligent lieutenants at his side and his remaining forces scattered, especially now that he had declared the Great War over, Megatron found any hope that he might have had for his home-world's restoration dwindling as the hours slipped through his digits and whatever remaining light sources on the planet faded and flickered, mimicking the change from day into night. The grey warlord found himself puzzling over things, especially in regards to the enormous failure that was his mission in life.
How could one oppressed gladiator forget after centuries of fighting his own hardships underneath cruel and unjust masters? He knew the moment when something had broken in the old laws that it needed to be fixed, and with Orion Pax's help from so long ago, Megatronus had learned very quickly exactly what had caused the world to descend into a corrupted system of laws and Council members. He couldn't figure out how everything had changed after that, when his quest for recognition and representation in the Council turned into an all out blood feud against Optimus Prime and his weak and pathetic soldiers. Megatron might have sneer at the thought of them, if a part of him hadn't begun to conclude they were right. It made him furious - the energon in his veins almost turned to vapor as he thought about it - that all that struggle with the Autobots, all those years of fighting and conquering and beating the Autobots back at every turn, and a small part of him was starting to sympathize with them. He couldn't fathom it!
His growing internal struggle and his venomous hatred for both the Autobots and the site stretched out before him, caused him to turn his nose away from the horizon and dip his wings in an attempt to search for spot to land. Dark mouths opened up beneath crumbling towers, broken remains of fences and golden crystals scattered around the bases of old apartment complexes and an entire hexagonal support beam had fallen from the layers above, looking for all the world like the lopsided surface of an old garden, pitted long ago by less modern weaponry. A familiarity rang about the place, reminding Megatron uncomfortably about a neutral city which had been unfortunate enough to stand between him and the gates of Iacon. His conscious pricked for the first time in hundreds of stellar cycles, causing the ex-Decepticon Leader to pause in the sky and drop down onto the tilted segment of ground, where he could see for himself what remained of Praxian crystal sculptures.
A cold wind blew from behind him, striking the uneven ground on its path upward and causing the black crystal bases to vibrate and hum, not unlike the welcoming sound of human wind chimes welcoming him home. Once, the great golden crystals of Praxus sang with the voices of intelligent mechs and femmes who had tended to it in stellar cycles past, a fragment of their culture which had died long ago in one of Megatron's own bids for power. The grey warlord didn't have the spark energy to feel disgusted at this obvious similarity to humanity, welcoming the simple fact that a small sound from his old home still sang every once in a while in this dead world and struggling not to accept the overwhelming but simple fact that he had done this.
He had done this.
The grey leader snarled, tearing up the crystal roots into his claws and crushing it all in his massive hands, shards of black crystals digging into his thick metal armor and flickering with golden light as they met his energon lines. Roaring in rage, he flung the shards aside in anger, watching them scatter over the lip of the platform's surface, carried momentarily by unseen winds before gravity took it back to the surface. He ignored the pain in his palm as he pulled himself to his pedes, stomping moodily across the platform and pausing at the top of the slope, standing precariously over a sharp drop and unconsciously posing heroically for no one to see. He could see everything he needed to see from his vantage point and it all amounted to almost nothing. Though he was beginning to see some small return of energy to the Cybernetic world, some sparks of life that had continued to cling even as the war raged onward around them, it was still nothing compared to the memory of the beauty he had witness on his first visit to Iacon with Orion Pax.
How long ago had it been? Megatron was loath to admit that he actually missed being with Orion Pax back before the war. They were brothers in their struggle against oppression, brothers in arms against the evil and tainted forces of the Senate and the Primes from before, until everything changed when Orion's smooth talking had elected him the leader of the World and the bearer of the Matrix. Everything had come crashing down around Megatronus' audios, as the prize he thought he was ready for, that he was destined for, slipped away from his servos and left him feeling more than a little hurt. It only served to make things worse, that the tainted Council which he had been petitioning against had the nerve to select Orion Pax and, in Megatron's optics, it had tainted the Librarian beyond all reasonable recognition. That day, he had lost more than the future position of Prime, but also his closest and dearest brother. He had sworn his revenge against the Council for their arrogant appointment of the successor of Sentinal Prime, without even first consulting the Matrix.
Megatron knew that that wasn't the reason why he had truly been furious beyond all belief on that day. His pride had been damaged and he had justified his own desire for petty revenge in order to begin the war - he did begin it, there was no point to denying it now. That small part of him, that old conscious which had long ago gone dormant, made sure that the fact hovered at the edge of his mind. He didn't want to believe it, but he also didn't want to believe that he had wasted four million years of his life in a war for something he had forgotten the meaning to long ago. He wanted to know why - why had he abandon his old goals and how did he forgot something which had been an integral part of his life up until the war began? Contemplating it made his helm ache in far too many places and he resisted the instinctive urge to squint his optics against the pain and raise a digit to rub his helm. Let the helm ache come, he told himself. If it gave him answers than it was more than worth the pain. That's how the old gladiator Megatronus had done things, and it was high time that the ex-leader took a few pointers from his past self.
After all, he had done this.
He had always been in the right, hadn't he? He didn't like to contemplate just how much in the wrong he had been, but visions of forcing people into his service danced across his optics with all the stinging familiarity of a slap to the faceplate. His semi-luxurious life-style at the top of the food chain had often blinded him of what his troops tended to do under his command, all in his name. At the time, he had found perfectly reasonable justifications but, in the light of recent events, they all seemed to fall flat. He had oppressed people into his service and many of his countless troops had brainwashed and subjugated more of the population into his services. Many battleships, like the Nemesis, had been filled with his most loyal troops and those subjugated into his rule. Exactly how many countless battleships still wandered the farthest reaches of space, Megatron himself didn't exactly know.
He hadn't realized there were so many questions about his life that he had forgotten to ask. Why did he let his own troops enlist the unwilling services of so many? For the greater glory of Cybertron and whatever other twisted schemes Megatron and Starscream had concocted around the time. All around him, that greater glory turned out to be a shame, and Megatron was still no further to achieving that goal as he was to answering the biggest question of his life. What had compelled him to go so far?
As leader of the Decepticons, he shouldn't be questioning himself so much, bringing so much doubt on who he was and what he had done... but he wasn't the leader of the Decepticons anymore. That life was behind him, and the recent events concerning Unicron had caused him to question all his motives and enter into unknown territory. A large part of him was shying away from this question, afraid of whatever answers he might uncover, which only serves to make Megatron stubborn pursue his goal to the very end. He wanted to know, he wanted answers, and when Megatron wanted something he generally got it. Even as he entered into this mental war with himself, one which was only causing his helm-ache to increase ten-fold into intolerable levels, Megatron knew he would stop until he finally had some satisfactory answer, something that made his past self forget the important definition of Oppression.
Oppression... he rolled the world around on his tongue, not caring if anyone heard him or not. The definition of oppression had been the cause of all this helm-ache and change in his old life. If his time with Unicron had taught him anything, it was the more extreme forms of oppression. Oppression of, literally, the mind and spirit, where no one has control over their own well-being, that they are subject to the whims and mercies of others, and nothing they can do or will do can change any of that for the better. Even the Council and the Primes with their caste system had only hinted at true meaning back when, and they couldn't even come close to the blatant disregard for life and freedom which had caused Unicron to go to such an extreme. Even his old self, Megatronus, could never put to words the subtle atrocity that Nova Prime and his ilk had wrought against the unsuspecting and compliant citizens back in the day. It wasn't just the total disregard for someone else's own wants and desires which made oppression what it was, and it wasn't just someone with great power and of high position forcing someone into a position which would define their life without considering what they might want it to do with it.
The Council had forced every new-spark into the caste system and defined their lives for them, but Unicron had taken it a step further and stripped away any self-control over one's own limbs and bodies and prevented Megatron himself from doing anything about it. Megatron's opinions about what happened with his own life had been shot down before it could be voiced, left for the darkness and dust to consider.
He had done this.
And he didn't want to believe it! He couldn't believe it! Everything he had done his entire life had been a lie! He had done it for a cause that had nothing to do with regaining Cybertron for the sake of restoring it, at least not into the once beautiful silver and gold world that every Cybertronian had been created to love. He had done it for himself. That revelation rolled around in his tanks and made him feel uncomfortably sick. It was only with this revelation that everything else was starting to make sense. He had often heard the Autobots call him similar things, though at the time had hardly cared much for their opinions about him. He had been doing it for a goal he had thought worth fighting for and had indeed fought for that goal for many millions of years. However, one word stood out from all of the Autobots name-calling; megalomaniac. Megatron knew he had an ego, but he wasn't aware that it had blinded him to anything, such as the real reason he had started the war.
It made sense, he reflected, feeling his own thoughts tearing into him once more, leaving him weak and vulnerable for all the world to see, though he couldn't honestly place what world he was standing in front of anymore. His own internal little world or the one which lay desolated before him, in all its increasingly silver and dying purple glorying.
It made sense when he chose to consider his plot to restore Cybertron with dark energon, reviving millions of the dead in order to bring about the end of the war. He brought them back, mindless zombies that bent over at his every whim, and he knew now that that in of itself was a form of oppression, whether or not the mechs' sparks themselves were there trapped within their own bodies and forced to bear witness to his cause.
He shook his helm, trying to shake away the alien feelings which pervaded his spark and, for the longest moment, he couldn't bring himself to name it. Guilt. It touched at the edges of his mind and seemed intent on drowning him. He shoved it away. He shoved it all away, every moment of reflection and revelation, hoping that pushing it all back would contain the dam that was the guilt, but that little emotion festered at the bottom his spark, waiting to creep up on him if he so much as flinched or thought wrong. His entire world, his strength and his confidence, were smashed to the rocks of an invisible shore of guilt, leaving him feeling more than a little broken down and less than himself. After all, who was Megatron without confidence and strength? Who was he without his Decepticon Armada and his close cadre of his loyal lieutenants?
Was he Megatron or was he something else? He was not who had thought he was, not a freedom-fighter or a revolutionary. No, leave those names for Optimus Prime, the great and valiant leader of the Autobots. Where was he right now? Gloating over his victory and Megatron's surrender? No, that wasn't Optimus Prime, not the one he knew. More than likely he would be making every effort to restore Cybertron, as Megatron would have likely done in his place if his own selfishness hadn't dominated everything he strove for. His cause was a lie.
But no, Megatron wasn't an Autobot. Every part of him agreed on that much. He wasn't sure what exactly he was becoming, what he was turning into right now as these thoughts danced at the edges of his processor, but he was certain it was much preferable to what he had been. He would be choosing who he would become now, with no Unicron or Council to get in his way and make those choices for him. Perhaps he should take a cue from his counterpart and become a librarian of whatever data remained at Iacon tower. Maybe that could help him figure what had made Optimus stick to his chosen path while Megatron butchered his. It seemed the closest he could come to answers for the biggest question he still couldn't grasp the answer to.
How could he have failed where Optimus succeeded? How could he have forgotten about what oppression meant? Did Optimus ever forget?
Megatron was inclined to think that Optimus had never forgotten, but he wasn't about to cash in all his chips on that bet. He knew he needed answered, though he wasn't sure what answers he sought, and seeking out the Iacon Records seemed the best course of action to take, if it was still standing.
EDIT: My sister and I are planning to continue this.