Rung's Reports: Megatron, Session One

[bumblemusprime]

Rung's Reports

Megatron, Session One

“And when did you first decide that the universe needed dominating?”

Megatron didn’t stir. From outward appearances, one might imagine him to be relaxed, a bot on his back, tank-sized boots up, preparing for a good long excision of the brain module at the hands of his psychiatrist. Rung had seen close to a million Transformers on their backs, discoursing thus, through every emotion in their banks. He’d run a gamut of emotions himself—the most prevalent for a psychiatrist were sadness, shock, boredom and confusion.

Megatron was not relaxed. He lay like a slab of dead metal. The comparison was even more apt when one realized he was utterly silent. Perhaps it was his newly rifled interdimensional nature. No hum of servos. No faint whir as his brain module refreshed. No creaking joints or groaning pistons.

And Rung felt one of the rarer emotions of his profession—despite himself, a crouching fear.

“Megatron.”

The voice broke into the silence, deep and raspy and musical. “Are you truly asking such an asinine question? Or is this your way of acknowledging that Swerve is recording us from three locations?”

“I… I thought it best to start with a broad question.” Rung looked around the room. “This room is soundproofed.”

“Your naiveté is charming.”

“Recording a psychiatrist is unethical in the extreme! Swerve knows this.”

“I have this peculiar effect on Autobots.” The slight, silent slip of metal along Megatron’s jaw might have been a smile. “I lower their standards. ‘Recording a psychiatrist is unethical? Give me a break, we’re talking about Megatron here.’ ‘Shoot a prisoner outright? Come on, this is Megatron.’”

“Has that happened?” Rung asked. “I mean, I know it’s not in any official records. Were you actually shot in prison?”

Megatron flicked a switch on his chest, sending a painful screech into Rung’s audio sensors. He seized his head, pushed against his audio sensors. And then it was gone.

He could hear Megatron now. Just the faint whir of servos and the creak of his gears, but it was like being close to an actual bot. “What was that?”

“Among the many delights of my new body, I can extend a kind of disruption field. Think of it as a small piece of the interdimensional flux always raging in my heart. It’s useful for small, low-power devices, like recorders. You’re welcome.”

“Are there any effects I should know about?”

“No one can hear you scream.”

Rung actually jumped in his seat before Megatron laughed. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

Rung sat again, rearranging himself until he had his legs comfortably crossed, his pad in hand, and his servos had slowed from the shock. “I suppose I’m not immune to your, um, your legend.”

“I’ll answer your question. I was shot in prison,” Megatron said. “At the time, I was tired of listening to my guard rant, so I turned around, pressed my aching head against the wall, and next thing I knew I was on the ground. Twisted mainframe and burnt wire, within pinching distance of my spark. It was the Wreckers, so I should have expected such things.”

“You were captured by the Wreckers? When?”

“A long time ago.” Megatron’s face slipped into that half-smile again. “I don’t keep track of all the times an Autobot black ops team decided to discard me, without permission from Prime.”

“Who shot you in the back?”

“Kup,” Megatron said.

“I can see that.”

“Impactor was displeased with the choice. They argued over ethical treatment of prisoners. Given Impactor’s future, it was a shining moment in irony.”

“Did they let you go?”

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“I reached through the bars, tore Kup’s arm off, and used it to short-circuit their dampener field. Then I beat Kup with his own arm until he couldn’t walk, and I shot Impactor in the back when he went for help.” Megatron paused. “Aren’t you going to ask how that made me feel?”

“I imagine it made you feel exhilarated.”

Megatron went silent again.

Rung’s best sessions had been all talk from the patient; he offered only a few words of clarity or guidance, usually at the end, when a patient had discovered the solution to their problems on their own. His worst sessions were those where he spoke the most; he had learned that silence was a necessary teacher. He had been afraid that, given Megatron’s reticence to talk about his past, that this would be a session he filled with his own words.

But no. It seemed that even the great tyrant of Cybertron felt the need to fill dead air. “I never decided. That the universe needed dominating, that is. You know about my history with Impactor?”

“I do.”

“Then you can imagine how difficult it was to shoot him.”

“I assume you shot to wound.”

“In battle, I never shoot to wound.”

“Your record says otherwise.”

“All soldiers miss, Rung. Our hands shake. Our vision blurs. In those Autobot bar standard stories of my great misses, they don’t tell you how I was on the front line, with my Decepticons, wounded, firing blind through the smoke. Or having just broken out of a cell, with a hole nearly through my middle.”

“You said it was difficult to shoot Impactor. Is that what you mean? Your hands were shaking?”

“It was difficult philosophically.”

This was unexpected.

“I had been struggling over a particular point of moral conduct. I was not sure, at that point, whether I wanted to rule the Autobot race, or just kill them all. I have thought long on this, and I am sure you must have too. Killing is fundamentally an act of control. It is a terrible, addicting power to end a life. Have you ever killed anyone?”

“No,” Rung said.

“Have you ever had your brain module shut off?”

“Yes.” This time Megatron waited, but Rung didn’t elaborate.

“I’ve been gone, save my spark, a good two dozen times. Usually at the hands of Prime. Once at the hands of Ultra Magnus—the first one. Each time, when I returned to life, I thought—how crippling. How an emasculation. I, who wanted to decide the fate of the galaxy—my own fate was decided by stray blaster discharges.” He shifted, let out a long and groaning whirr of age that Rung finally recognized as a normal Transformer gesture. “Here’s a secret you’ve no doubt craved, from your soon-to-be legendary sessions with Megatron. I’ll even release this one for publication.”

“You ascribe a great deal of motives to my work,” Rung said.

Megatron said, “I’ll tell you why I kept Starscream around for so long.”

“I would like to hear that,” Rung said. “Not for any reason but for your well-being.”

Rung wished for a moment that Megatron shared his own capacity for expression. A pair of eyebrows would have helped discern something from that cool, unreadable face that looked him up and down.

“Even you won’t remember him now, but there was a first Scorponok, back before that bizarre maniac who’s got the title now. Showed great valor, loyalty, and was quite merciless in the field. I gave him command of one of my first infiltration units. The planet Davos. Ever heard of it?”

“No.”

“Smuggler’s world. Just about every kind of contraband passed through its ports. Our cause was running low on metal, wire, parts, and didn’t even have fossil crude to convert to energon. The Transformers had just been blacklisted from the Congress of Worlds, but the merchants’ guilds had blacklisted us long before, you see. Davos presented itself. A perfect case study for infiltration. Scorponok’s job was to destabilize a world that ran on the art of the bribe and the hidden corpse.”

“I imagine he fulfilled it.”

“Quite ably. Made it possible for us to repair several hundred troops and return them to the field. In Decepticon histories, Scorponok I’s infiltration is still that perfect case study. But afterward… Had you been there, you would think, from the way Scorponok crowed, that he had brought about the fall of Iacon. I made a point, publicly, of explaining just how easy his job had been. I said that I would make it more difficult next time. A good soldier takes that sort of thing to heart. He did not—he seethed.

“I saw what was coming. He was going to challenge me. He had enjoyed leadership too much. So I caught him outside the barracks, blew a hole right through his spark, tossed his body into the pile of spare parts he had brought from Davos, and called that the end.

“More fool me. Over the next week, I had to put down his entire infiltration unit.”

The silence waited, until Megatron spoke, softer this time, just as matter-of-fact.

“Killing isn’t control. It is an acknowledgment of loss of control. To kill, in war, when you could wound, could coerce, could intimidate, is burning the city to save it.”

“This is why you’ve never killed Starscream.”

“When he went rogue on Earth, I shot him just like I had shot Scorponok the first—but I missed his spark on purpose. Coercion is punishment. Crippling is punishment. Death is loss of control. I would have hated to see Impactor die in that prison, for the same reason. I wanted to conquer Impactor, not kill him.”

“Do you regret, after your trial, sparing Starscream?”

Again, that faint smile. “Starscream and I have always played the long game. He made a good move.”

“So you are saying,” Rung answered, “that you decided the universe needed control.”

Megatron looked at the clock. “In a moment, I’ll drop the field, and we’ll pretend that you and I have been talking about some asinine subject for hours, and Swerve will curse his faulty equipment.”

“I wouldn’t mind more time to talk,” Rung said. “I want to ask you—”

“The Wreckers never captured me, Rung,” Megatron said. “Impactor would shoot me on sight, even now.”

Rung spluttered. It was not one of his usual mannerisms. “Megatron, why?”

“I do owe Prime a few things,” Megatron said. “Good captainship, dedication, and greater self-realization.” He leaned over, and Rung felt, again, crouching, skittering fear. “But we will talk on my terms. We will answer my questions, not yours.”

Rung’s ears screeched again as Megatron withdrew the field.

“Two hours of you telling me why I used to wear a giant weapon on my arm!”

After he left, Rung looked at his notes, considered the report he would write. Reports. He’d written a few trillion words in reports since the beginning of his practice. Nobody read them, until now.

Optimus Prime would read these. Rodimus had somehow permitted himself access, out of concern for the crew. Ratchet, who had only a rudimentary knowledge of psychiatry, demanded access for medical records. Prowl would probably find a way to hack Prime’s records and access these. And then there was Swerve…

Megatron probably knew that, too.

Rung’s hands hovered above the keys. He thought of Megatron’s trial. Massive theatrics, for days at a time. All undone by a technicality, a technicality that Optimus had been convinced that Megatron knew about and planned from the beginning. Even Starscream’s speech was undone. Actions like that, those long, calculated routes, led many to believe Megatron hadn’t changed at all.

Rung believed he had. Megatron had changed his goal, and his outlook. He had done what most patients did eventually. He had learned to see the world a different way, but never bothered to modify his own habits.

Megatron’s single-minded devotion to his new goal of redemption rivaled his previous goals of overthrow and domination. And in pursuing his new goal, Rung had no doubt that, as before, Megatron’s morality would be entirely self-defined. He would use his visibility to make his legend known. He would define ‘redemption’ in the same way he’d defined ‘tyranny,’ or ‘control.’

Rung could say this, perhaps, at the next session, and see what happened.

But a good psychiatrist had to let the patient figure out his own problems.

He began to type. “Megatron said little today…”

End of Session One

[Computron]

I really enjoyed that, and it slots quite nicely into the MTMTE-verse. The only thing missing was Ravage hiding under the couch.

[bumblemusprime]

Ah gahdammit the whole time I was writing it I kept thinking, "Ravage is under the couch... work that in."

The Ratchet one is done, and in rewrites. Soon to be up. Drift is half-done. Kind of hit a wall there.

I'm enjoying this. Thanks for reading, buddy.

[Best First]

"Rung had seen close to a million Transformers on their backs" made me giggle like a child. The slut.

But other than that i thought it was Robertesque in it's brilliance.

hoo ha.