Immortales Memoriae
This is Shockwave calling Optimus Prime. Come in, Optimus Prime!
As if his nasal, tightly wound-up vocals haven't given his identity away already. The purple Decepticon always talks as if the world is coming to an end. I sigh. Yes, Shockwave; this is Prime. What is it?
Do you know the location of Lord Megatron?
He was on his way to Vos when I last saw him. His travel plans were covered in this morning's Captains' meeting, I remind him.
I resent this needless interruption. I'm deep in a shaft down to the planet's core, helping to build a new white-energon pipeline. And as always. we're running behind schedule.
Yes, I remember. Shockwave's exaggerated patience mirrors my own ill-masked irritation. But he has not answered any of my hails for the last 3.5 breems. And I can no longer detect his locator pulse. He-
Has anyone else tried to hail him?
Yes. Skywarp and Sixshot and Prowl and Astrotrain and even-
While he's still running down the list, I reach out through the bond. I feel my way down the static-muddled line between us, and feel nothing but a muffled black regret.
I'm on my way, I tell him. "Scoop, I'm afraid I'll need you and the others to carry on without me for a while. I'll ask Huffer to come take over the remainder of my shift." The yellow Autobot front-loader puffs a gout of black smoke from his stack, but otherwise keeps silent. I drop the load of pipes I've carried down here in my trailer, transform into my upright form, and ride the creaky elevator to the surface.
Vos is practically on the other side of the planet; so I take a shuttle. I'm so used to hoarding energon and counting every microliter I consume, that using even this little cloud-hopper for a personal trip still feels extravagant to me; almost prodigal. But I'm worried now. It's not like Megatron to ignore so many hails – even those from the sometimes ping-happy Shockwave. So I throttle forward, thankful for our new-formed homeworld's bounteous energy; and I make it to Vos in just under a joor.
I'm following the tenuous lead of the bond – nothing more than a hazy line of silver in my mind – and hoping it will guide me to my Brother. It's touch-and-go – since the start of the Great War Vos has been destroyed and partly rebuilt more than once; and in the Cataclysm fully half the city was destroyed. I watch my step.
I'm starting to grumble a little as I stumble between burnt-out husks of buildings, along debris-clogged streets, and carefully across a couple makeshift bridges over chasms that go deeper than I want to think about. I come to a third crack in the planet – one too wide for me to cross – and curse when I notice a thin line of climbing cable fastened with a grappling hook onto the side-beam of a nearby tower. "This had better not just be another of your temporary sulks, Brother," I mutter.
Because I refuse to carry him back up this thing after I finally find him (and because I'm not sure that the cord could carry both of us), I get my own grappling hook out of the worker's toolkit which I and most of the other bots of Cybertron now carry in our subspace, and attach it to a nearby pillar. Then, with a last exasperated look into the bottomless black breach, I swing over the side and start the long, long rappel down.
After what feels like an orn or two, my feet come to rest upon a jutting shelf of shorn-off metal; and I disconnect the climbing line. I'm hoping this is where my Brother stopped as well. There is a kind of tunnel cutting into the sheer wall here, something that looks like an abandoned hallway in a deeply-sunken building. Along its sides there are a few fresh streaks of bright-scraped metal showing through the dust and grime. As good a sign as any that the Mighty Megatron was here. Shaking my head, I hunch my shoulders in, and follow him.
It's going to take something like forever for us all to get our new-formed planet up and running again. Slag, there are still whole quadrants unexplored, since the Cataclysm made a tangle out of all of the old tunnels and throughways. But this place, where I'm hoping to find Megatron before it collapses on my head, is old. It's been buried underneath two siege's worth of rubble, and sliced open afterward; but nonetheless I know it. And I'm betting Megatron remembers it far better than I do.
I might have given up and left him here to sulk alone, had it not been for the beckoning scratches along the walls, the piles of debris flung aside, and underneath it all the throbbing certainty within my spark that all is not well with my Brother. I am compelled by our union, by my own code of ethics, and by the love I've come to have for the obnoxious slagger, to make certain that no harm comes to Megatron.
I find him, in the end, by the red glow of his optics. It is dim, but it is the brightest thing in here besides my own yellow running lights. He is sitting, all hunched over with his elbows on his knees, in an alcove at the end of a long hallway choked with scrap. I make my way toward him, and stop in the leaning doorway to observe.
"What happened?" I inquire.
He says nothing, not that I expected anything; but he does let one hand fall slack in front of him. And as it turns, I get a better view of what he's holding.
"Oh," I whisper.
I don't know how it managed to survive. It's old – dating from the last conflict between Vos and Tarn, at least. The city has been battered by civil war. The planet has been altered almost beyond recognition. But somehow, this small scrap of dented metal has remained.
It's vaguely triangular in shape, the once-white paint nearly all scraped off in the intervening vorns. There's just a hint of the red stripe that once ran along its top edge. And although right now he's musing over it like it's some forgotten memento – or perhaps a long-lost treasure – I know that it was more than likely Megatron who first tore this wing from its owner.
"I miss him," Megatron admits.
I sit down beside him then; and in the dark all of the words that he's been keeping tamped down in the darkest hollows of his spark finally force their way between the nodes of his gravelly vocoder. Starscream's name is almost never spoken between us, but he is always there, a hole that will never quite be filled. I only listen, for there's nothing more that I can do. Sometimes, I miss him too.