Title: Tyrant of the Seraglio, Pt. 7: Realist

Warning: READ THE WARNINGS, PLEASE
Slavery
Coercion
Depression
Torture (psychological)

Compromise

Rating: PG-13

Continuity: IDW/G1 (AU)

Characters: Optimus, Megatron, Soundwave

Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

Motivation (Prompt): A moment's weakness.

[* * * * *]
Part 7: Realist
[* * * * *]

He didn't seriously believe he'd get free.

And that was the problem, wasn't it? Strength of conviction. With it, he would forever strive to be free. Without it, he would surrender and fade, becoming less himself every time the harem door opened. Slavery was intended to wear him down until he was an empty body gutted of who he'd been. He was currently a harem slave, that was his reality, but slave bands and chains couldn't erase his past. Megatron was everything he had been and still was. Accepting slavery would take that away from him.

"I'm still whom I was," Optimus said. "I've simply accepted how the present and future define me going forward."

Megatron frowned. "You're not who you once were. You're less."

"I'm a slave," Optimus replied. It was a fact and an answer. Plain, unadorned, undeniable fact. Of course he was less: he was no longer a free mech. He no longer considered himself anyone's equal. He had no rights. He'd been stripped of the Primacy. Instead of leading, he served.

His argument lay in his sense of self despite being a slave. He argued that becoming a slave didn't deny him his history, but it took him as he'd been to make him into what he must be. It had been vorns, but he still claimed to be Optimus, if not Optimus Prime. A slave couldn't be Optimus Prime, but Optimus could be a slave. Megatron's argument was the opposite, that Optimus Prime was no more. He'd completely changed upon accepting slavery. There was no point to keeping even part of the designation, since he was no longer truly Optimus.

He didn't yet have an answer to satisfy Optimus' question over whether or not a slave could be Megatron, or did Megatron cease to exist when he became a slave. Their argument tended to circle at that point, as the ex-tyrant staunchly asserted that it was a purely hypothetical question. He hadn't accepted slavery. He never would.

His fingers picked idly at the wide, ornate bands of armor around his wrist and forearm, checking the welds. The habit earned him a frown from the ex-Prime, but they were talking about something else at the moment. Chiding him for bad habits would happen later on in the day if they weren't interrupted. Their lives cycled. The harem had a routine to it, repeating the same conversations every time around.

Megatron huffed. It held more irritation than the old, tired argument usually carried. Curious, Optimus cocked his head to the side, which was more emotion than the former Prime normally showed anymore. In such a controlled environment, introducing a new element affected everything.

Something was different. Optimus gave him an interested look, clearly noticing the change. Was Megatron breaking the routine?

One end of Megatron's mouth twisted in a small grimace, less a sneer at the Autobot than disgust at himself, and he looked away. Was he breaking the routine? Good question. A better one would be whether or not he was capable of doing so. He'd thought he could, but doubt had had a long time to undermine him.

The chair scraped across the floor as he violently shoved back from the table, and he rose to stalk across the room. Optimus' aft tempted him to grab it in passing, but Megatron regarded the urge almost clinically. Did he want to touch the ex-Prime because he craved touch, any touch, or because it was a show of resistance to a master who indulgently allowed him his small defiances? Ratbat had effectively broken him to heel. Resisting was a show he put on for no one but his own pride.

The slave-bands would sting him if he got too close to anyone. The welds were secure. Testing either wouldn't change the outcome of prior attempts. He kept pushing the boundaries set on him despite knowing he couldn't escape them. At the moment, he couldn't recall why it was important to keep trying.

Any other time, he would dart a hand toward Optimus and tell himself it was part of a lifetime of harassing the Autobot leader. It seemed like a separate lifetime. Megatron the tyrant was over and done with. Megatron the slave did these things from habit.

It didn't matter if he tried to grab Optimus or not. The former Prime gave him the same reaction every time. His expression would stay unchanged by surprise or consternation as he stepped away. He moved counter to Megatron with the worn, weary patience of a dancer following his oldest partner's lead. There was no deviation, no variation, just repetitive action-reaction.

It didn't seem worth the effort, right now. He wanted a real reaction, an honest knee-jerk flash of combat metal-memory showing through the tedium. He wanted a moment of no thought, just action. He wanted Optimus to smack his hand aside and do more than look at him through a veil of apathy as the slave-bands shocked him for attempting to grab for what he couldn't have. He wanted to destroy furniture and have Brawl barrel through the door to tackle him, really throw himself into a grappling, rolling, cursing and struggling fightto subdue him. He wanted to feel. He wanted the excitement of the unknown instead of the ground-down bitter leftovers of old pride and anger.

He hated being hobbled by the behavioral controls. They dialed up or down depending on how his owner approved of his attitude. The wristlets zapped him if he disobeyed the strict tactile limitations on him, punishing for his presumption, but the shocks were less painful than just surprising. They were training shocks used to direct a technimal instead of the punishing jolts means to floor a prisoner. He wasn't treated as a prisoner. He was treated as a valued, dangerous treasure wrapped carefully for display, all pretty and polished inside a locked box.

He was a fighter and always had been. The enforced inactivity of the harem grated on his nerves nearly as much as the inhibitors chaining him from accessing his full strength. There was nothing to do, and no outlet for his frustrations. His rage spent itself against the harem walls, and they didn't react. Anything that would give him fuel to burn, something to anticipate or feed his rebellious nature with had been stripped away. He had nothing but hands-off restraint, guards who activated the slave-bands and gingerly held him down until he stopped cursing and fighting against the floor, and a former enemy who didn't care.

It infuriated him.

But it was an old rage, sapped of its burn. It felt the way he felt lately.

So he crossed the room, ignoring Optimus for once, because he'd been burnt out.

The ex-Prime noticed the difference. When Megatron stopped as close to the window as he was allowed, not even toeing the line, he heard the other harem slave turning to give him a long look. The slight movement was more than he'd expected. Megatron didn't think he'd get even that much of a reaction, much less something as extreme as inquiring as to what was wrong. He was right. Optimus went back to reading after a moment of silence that should have been expectant but wasn't.

The lack of interest probably said more about Optimus' state of mind than his own. Optimus should have cared enough to ask, but he didn't. Megatron should have kept enough stubborn denial to believe his old rival wanted to know, but he knew better. They both knew exactly how the cycle went inside the harem, and nothing truly changed.

The scenery outside the window had stopped being worth looking at once construction had finished. Up until then, the workers had sometimes tried to peer into the harem. Afterward, all that could be seen from the windows was the assembly square in one direction and the parade grounds in the other. Security kept anyone from approaching this wing, even from the outside.

A small formation of palace guards was doing a drill on the parade ground, but Megatron couldn't say that he found them fascinating. He stared out the window anyway, optics blank as he brooded. This wasn't the first time he'd felt claustrophobic. The sense of being tightly confined came every time he paced the harem, but the creeping sense that he'd gotten used to restraints typically triggered a renewed burst of defiance. It did nothing but trigger resignation this time.

He didn't want to lash out in wild rebellion like he had a thousand times before. Struggling got him nowhere. At most, he'd receive a placid scolding from Optimus. Starscream tended to be amused, or perhaps irritated depending on if Megatron had lashed out at him. His former Air Commander's wellspring of patience hadn't grown, but Ratbat kept the Seeker on a short leash when it came to the harem. Megatron and Optimus never saw any conflict between them, if it happened, and Starscream stuck to their lord and Master's plan.

Lashing out would earn Megatron stellar cycles of weakness until he behaved enough to earn forgiveness. It seemed entirely pointless. Even talking to Optimus took too much effort at the moment. Megatron kept his back turned and let the recycled conversation lapse. Optimus made no attempt to restart it. He cared less than the former tyrant did.

The silence between them wasn't the comfortable silence of shared quiet. They were two mechs wrapped in separate worlds, completely uninterested in an existence outside their own heads.

Megatron kept his measured distance from the window and wondered why this orn felt worse than the last. Perhaps he was depressed, or maybe he was merely adjusting to reality, slowly losing his deep-seated need to hold onto the past. He'd clung fiercely to the idea of the two of them someday returning to normal.

War was normal, to him. He'd prefer it to his current circumstances. That definitely said something about him, and he didn't like to think about what.

Optimus had surrendered as a willing slave to end the war. The ex-Prime was apathetic now, but he'd once cared deeply about the peace. He'd done everything in his power to promote it. He did still, although his enthusiasm had guttered. Losing the Primacy meant he had no political power, but he did have influence. It came from being a symbol, a glittering gem on display. Graceful acceptance of slavery gave him a sort of backward power. He used that power as much as he could to preserve, uphold, and obey.

Megatron had no power whatsoever, but if he had, he would use it to destroy the peace. His freedom hinged on war. The ex-Prime held no sympathy for his anger, and he definitely didn't support Megatron's attempts to struggle free. Enslavement had ended the war, so Optimus agreed with it.

What power Megatron scraped up wasn't real. He had petty dregs, taking what he could get away with. In the back of his mind where he didn't usually acknowledge it, he knew that he acted above his station. The minor plots to escape or disrupt the harem were attempts to forget his place. In the end, his rebellions were dismissed, and he'd be forced to remember that his place was in the harem, inside the rooms that never changed, never granted permission to touch anyone. He'd be put down as the slave he was.

He fought, but it was the fight of a gearspider scrabbling against a vacuum. He wasn't going to win, but he stubbornly refused to concede.

Except that it didn't seem worth fighting anymore. Fighting the inevitable had gotten him nowhere. Breaking loose didn't seem realistic anymore. He was simply going through the motions. Rebellion had become a habit.

He rubbed his wrists, fingers working restlessly over the slaveband's weldmarks. His optics stared out the window, but he didn't see the guard formation in the distance. He kept refocusing, watching the reflections. He looked sullen. He dimmed his optics and shook his head a bit to banish the thought before looking beyond himself.

Behind him, Optimus paced at a casual stroll as he read. The ex-Prime missed action as much as he did, although it didn't manifest in the same way.

Beyond Optimus was the last slave in the harem, Megatron's last, most loyal follower. Soundwave's reward for service was a life sentence as the lowest rank a slave could be. There were times Megatron wondered if he should attempt to execute the mech for his own good. It would be a mercy Soundwave, and the last favor Megatron might be able to grant him if he could manage it.

Even as he thought it, Megatron knew that wasn't true. Soundwave was arguably the only one Megatron had power over anymore, and he used it to serve his own ends, pointless as they were. He could spare Soundwave punishment. He didn't. It would take bowing to Ratbat and Starscream as Optimus did, and he - he wouldn't. He could, but he wouldn't.

Soundwave currently knelt in the middle of the room, hands smoothing over the floor in frantic seeking. His trembling was visible even in the watery reflection in the window. He'd spent the past orn searching on hands and knees, the side of his helm pressed to the floor more often than not as he peered across it in vain hope of finding a single, tiny, lost needle. He couldn't walk, but he'd been inching along the floor of his own initiative the whole orn.

He had to find the needle. Death would indeed be a mercy if he didn't.

Optimus had noticed a couple tears in the decorative pillows from Earth, and he'd made one of his sweet, pretty pleas to Ratbat for the means to repair them. Ratbat had decided it was beneath Optimus to do such manual labor, which actually meant that he considered it to be a humiliation better suited to inflicting on his favorite whipping mech. Soundwave had been 'generously' been granted the use of a needle and thread to repair the pillows.

Objectively, Megatron understood that to mean Ratbat wanted his two slaves to languish about the harem like the pampered interface drones they were. Giving Soundwave all the manual labor elevated Optimus and Megatron as symbols that much more.

In reality, it pushed responsibility onto the harem eunuch. The carrier mech was deaf and mute, uncoordinated enough that he couldn't lift trays and could barely crawl. Tasking him with repairing Optimus' precious pillows was a trap. If he succeeded, the pillows were repaired. If he failed, Ratbat would punish him. Either way. Ratbat won.

Sewing was within Soundwave's abilities, however. Learning to mimic human craftmanship wasn't the most demeaning chore he'd ever done. He'd even told Megatron it was almost enjoyable, in a repetitive, hypnotic way. Or rather, Soundwave had mimed something to that effect to Optimus, who'd told Megatron later. Soundwave would never admit such a thing to his former leader. Despite 168.1 vorns enslaved together, there were still limits on how they interacted. Megatron would find it as strange as Soundwave if they dropped all the formalities of commander and subordinate.

That tweaked Megatron as completely ridiculous at the moment. They were prisoners clinging to the trappings of freedom. Holding on to their respective ranks felt like a weirdly desperate pretension.

It was a sort of comfort. They weren't friends, not precisely, but their relationship had always been more than military rank. Had that changed? Soundwave was broken in defeat, ground flat beneath their master's heel, and the ex-tyrant wondered if that made him any less Soundwave. He was the lowest of the low, a gelded eunuch, but they still understood each other.

Megatron scowled. Back to the repletion-smoothed argument he and Optimus had worn out. Nothing changed.

His reflection scowled back at him. It looked pensive and sulky. He'd begun his servitude with a towering wrath, and it had eroded down to this. The lost passion bothered him, but he couldn't muster more than a flash of annoyance at his own lack of energy.

He kept rubbing at the slavebands, but one fingertip teased over the tiny sliver of metal hidden in the seam between wristlet and forearm. It seemed stupidly inadequate. He didn't seriously believe a needle would set him free. It was sharp but utterly useless for anything beyond - maybe, in theory - picking loose one of the inhibitors locked into his major transformation joints. He couldn't even reach them all on his own. Unlocking the few he could reach would accomplish nothing in the long run, especially since he'd been stripped of major parts of his altmode anatomy.

Not that it mattered. Transforming would get him nowhere since someone would have to fire him. As loyal as Soundwave was, he'd be worse than useless in an escape attempt. The ex-officer had gone well past accepting his place. Soundwave might not actively betray Megatron to their owner, but demanding his help would reduce the broken mech to a conflicted wreck of ingrained obedience versus loyalty.

Megatron had stopped involving Soundwave in his plans soon after the first regression. Optimus had protested, even pleaded for the carrier mech as their lord and Master picked apart Soundwave's mind. Megatron had glared, unable to do more. Soundwave had managed to progress, cobbling together enough self-repair code to climb to his feet, stumbling but able to hold onto objects if they weren't too heavy. Ratbat had deleted those clumsy work-arounds, one by one. It had been painful to watch. He couldn't imagine what it had been like for Soundwave.

Megatron didn't handle helplessness well. Watching Optimus plead had embarrassed him, but being unable to do anything but stand by as Soundwave begged had enraged him. Later, when Starscream visited, he'd intentionally picked a screaming fight. He'd destroyed furniture and made a scene. It'd gotten the slavebands turned back until he was pathetically weak, but it'd prevented his former Air Commander from continuing Soundwave's torment.

It was the only protection he would offer. Anything else would open the situation to exploitation. Neither Ratbat nor Starscream would hesitate to use a moment of sympathy against him.

He wasn't emotionless, however. It stung him to see Soundwave reduced to groveling, and failure carried far more punishing consequences for him. Megatron knew that. Optimus sought to please their master, and Megatron sought to escape, but Soundwave sought only and ever to please. Freedom wasn't even a dream to the carrier mech anymore. It would send Soundwave into a nervous breakdown if Megatron forced his loyalist to participate in plans to rebel, resist, escape.

Involved or not, the consequences still fell on him. Megatron's defiance would punish Soundwave today, and the ex-tyrant scowled at their reflections in the window as he turned that over in his mind. Their Master relished summoning Soundwave to his presence. Soundwave would be forced to confess that he'd lost the needle, and then he'd pay for that mistake. The shaking mech Megatron watched in the window would silently shriek at Ratbat's feet for mercy that wouldn't be granted.

It wasn't a mistake. Soundwave hadn't lost the needle; Megatron had taken it, and for that, Soundwave would suffer.

If it bought Megatron half a chance at freedom, it was a fair trade. So he'd thought earlier, at least, back when he palmed the needle. Back before he started pondering habit and real feeling. Now he wasn't sure. He didn't know if he'd stopped using Soundwave in his plans because of a vague sense of pity or because he knew his plans would never succeed. Setting his last loyal follower up to be punished again and again was cruel even for the slave who'd ruled the Decepticons.

He turned and strode across the room, footsteps rattling the table as he passed. The vibrations startled Soundwave, and the boxy blue mech blinked up at him. Over half of his visor stayed offline. It fit in with the rest of his appearance.

Anger shot up Megatron's backstruts like fire, but even the fiery flash made the dull resignation he'd been feeling more obvious. The constant abuse of his former officer made anger simmer in his tanks, hot and raw, and the rest of his emotions were a stark contrast to it. The idea of using the needle he'd stolen felt strangely numb. The usual defiant determination felt subdued. He was going through the motions of rebellion without hope of success.

He resented what had been and was done to him, but he'd stopped hating at some point. Rebellion had become a cyclical habit, part of the harem routine, and his anger stretched so thin he couldn't even get angry over it. Coming up with a new escape plan was a way to break the monotony of slavery, not a proud stance against surrender.

Throwing himself on the bed, Megatron huffed a sound too harsh to be a sigh. "I want to spar." Demanding, always demanding, and never getting what he ordered.

"I won't fight you," Optimus said. He didn't look up from his reading. Of course the ex-Prime wouldn't fight. His combat-grade armor had been switched out vorns ago for civilian plating unfit for battle. Megatron still had his thick, heavy silver armor, but he'd wager it'd been left on him for appearance's sake. Optimus was the tame one, docile enough to be handled gently. He was the wild one who had to be handled with welder's gloves. Their contrast made the harem more exotic place: two legends in captivity.

Megatron grunted. After a moment of silence, he folded his arms and looked toward the door, away from the ex-Prime. Soundwave had crept to that end of the room to begin his search yet again, thin plating shivering in fear for what faced him if he didn't find the needle soon. Megatron's optics rested on him for a second before moving on.

The words came out slowly. "Not even if I ask?"

The slow pacing stopped. "You never ask."

Another grunt. Megatron turned his head toward the Autobot.

Optimus stood there looking at him, a bright touch of wonder in his optics. "Megatron? What's wrong?" Curiosity filled the question, emotion strong enough that Megatron could almost pretend this was the same mech he'd once fought in battlefields across the galaxy.

The interest would fade. Optimus didn't hold onto passion for very long anymore. Megatron saw his future before him, and he was just as faded. He would no longer be who he was. Who he'd once been, that was, because he didn't think he was who he'd been anymore.

He shut off his optics and laid back. "It's nothing." Recharge. He needed recharge. He'd regain his willpower and resist again. He would never accept slavery, and he would strive to be free. He'd be fine tomorrow, and the cycle would resume without a hitch.

Left behind by the window, the needle glittered on the floor. Soundwave would find it eventually.

[* * * * *]