The Conduit

[heliopauseentertainments]

Continuity: IDW1

Rating: General

Relationships: Megatron/Trypticon

Characters: Megatron & Trypticon

Warnings: Canon Blending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous Relationships, Pre-Relationship, One-Sided Relationships, Vignette, Migraines

Summary: In which Trypticon and Megatron both seek to use the other to their own ends.

Notes: Canon compliant with Course of Treatment, but not explicitly canonical. May contain spoilers.

Crossposting: AO3 | Tumblr

Fic under cut. See AO3 for complete notes.

In this shape, the stars drifting lazily around him, he might as well have been asleep as they orbited a small, unremarkable, rocky world. Navigation, propulsion, and weaponry all functioned without his need to get involved, unless he decided to.

The door for one of his shuttle bays opened automatically when a ping came in from a returning shuttle. Perhaps it bore resources extracted from the gray surface below. That didn’t matter to him.

The shuttle bore something all the more precious to him personally. He refused to leave his post without its contents. He had even shut down his engines, on the off chance the crew tried to move him before the shuttle returned.

Some of his kind might have gotten bored with the passive role of vessel.

Trypticon would have disagreed with them… were any of them yet around to disagree with. It had been so long since he had seen one of them; perhaps he was the last. Perhaps it didn’t matter.

Since he had been dug out of his stone blanket, his coffin where his more diminutively-sized kin had forgotten him… Trypticon had taken a new approach, observing and learning the alien universe he had awoken into. Until such a time as he could use that knowledge for his own benefit and take his rightful place as a warlord of their people, poised to conquer the stars.

The vastness of space was cold, punctuated by small points of heat scurrying around inside his metal frame. Crew. Residents. Only marginally his responsibility, yet each of which he recognized by weight and gait alone. The one he was interested in was missing. All of the others remaining were pointless.

The shuttle flew close, ready to cross the threshold into the bay.

He had no sensation from the inside of the shuttles when they were outside of his frame. They weren’t part of his body, accessories at most. Yet crossing the atmospheric retention forcefield of the shuttle bay provided more of a connection.

As the approaching shuttle pushed through, Trypticon’s sensors found the heat signature he had been missing, that he had been waiting for. The most precious cargo of all.

He had never had a cityspeaker. They had been in short supply in his relative youth. And with the changes in language since he had gone to sleep under the rock, he understood only some of the speech of his new crew. Even if his long-corroded vocalizer still functioned, they wouldn’t understand each other.

Perhaps he could… coax one into taking up the role somehow. He didn’t quite understand how it worked, but if he wanted to eventually accomplish anything from his long-term goals of conquest to even short-term needs like intimacy, he would need a functional link to the ant-like mechs who dwellt within his hull.

And he knew just the one. The one whose hand had first touched his hull, gracing it with the first warmth he had known ever since he had sunk into what had seemed like an endless slumber.

The familiar point of heat returned, a heavy and sure gait as the crew’s commander stepped off the shuttle.

Trypticon bombarded him with radio transmissions, demanding his attention. A flood of fervent, urgent signals.

The commander shouted, perhaps at Trypticon, perhaps at the crew. It was difficult to tell. The words were meaningless to him, ghosts of familiar sound shapes that didn’t quite match to anything he knew.

It hadn’t worked. Again. For whatever reason.

He would have to keep trying. He had all the time in the world.

 

---

 

As soon as he was alone in his quarters, Megatron turned the lights off and removed his helmet. The removal of a few sensations only marginally relieved the pounding in his processor. It did little for the nausea writhing in his fuel tank, but a small improvement was still an improvement.

Shuttering his optics against the pain, he eased himself to the floor where he sprawled out, supine on the cold metal.

He had only just returned to the ship.

The uninhabited world below the Nemesis had yielded some energon deposits, along with minerals that could be refined into energon. His shuttle had just brought back some samples for analysis, yet as soon as he had stepped off the vessel, his processor had decided to implode into yet another migraine.

The medics aboard, the hacks that they tended to be, had yet to find a cause for these recurring episodes of pain. Megatron had refused medication. He would not be weakened by something as petty and banal as physical pain.

He had experienced pain in some capacity his entire life; pain meant he was still alive. Pain meant he could still fight.

This pain—that came on occasionally in the past few thousand years—was just newer ; that was all.

It meant nothing ; it was nothing.

Rather than considering lying on the floor to be succumbing to the pain, Megatron had determined the most appropriate description was that he was taking the opportunity to consider available strategies from a novel position. He was using this posture to isolate his thoughts and consider new possibilities, yes.

This was not weakness. He was not weak.

The ache pulsed through his circuits in waves like the pain itself was somehow echoing off the inside of his cranium.

At least this raggedy vessel, a comatose titan they had serendipitously happened across, had the space to allow him a measure of privacy to sort through these sensations. It was far more difficult to bear when forced to sit on the bridge with Starscream complaining in one ear and Soundwave attempting to propose reasonable alternatives in the other.

He cast his arm over his face, a further barrier in the dark.

The wall next to him shuddered, an aggravating habit resulting from this ship’s construction.

Tremors and trembling appearing suddenly where there oughtn’t have been any movement were common enough. Perhaps stemming from the titan’s dreams. Nightmares, maybe. If the distinction even mattered.

Megatron reached out with his unoccupied arm and smacked his fist against the vibrating wall, not hard enough to dent.

“Stop.” The trembling remained, amplifying the ache in his head. He wondered at times why they didn’t just scrap the old titan for parts and leave what they couldn’t use then buried as a resource cache for later. “That’s enough!”

He smacked the wall again, the juddering halting abruptly.

The pressure in his head grew, like tiny hammers pounding against each nanometer of delicate wiring with the ire of a scorned a lover seeking to exact as much suffering as possible.

With the increased pain, his thoughts became a haze. The sensation of pain itself blurred and blossomed out into a fuzzy halo, distant and separate from his body. Almost bearable. As though he had accumulated enough agony to enter some sort of trance.

A voice he didn’t recognize whispered incoherently, words he didn’t understand.

Megatron must have been imagining it, a hallucination brought forth by his failure to ignore the ache.

The voice, deep and old, continued to murmur in a language he didn’t recognize. Occasionally what almost sounded like a familiar word cropped up.

And the cloud of pain collapsed, crushing the whispers, and ringing his processor like a temple’s bell once more. The ringing summoned a rising wave of nausea that he only just barely managed to suppress.

The wall shook again, the floor underneath his back joining in. The jostling only made him feel like his internal components were rattling around inside his frame.

Would not one thing aboard this ship obey him? He smacked the floor with his palm, once more demanding stillness from the Nemesis .

The metal beneath him ceased trembling but seemed to begin to warm, soothing the pain, a strange comfort.

Megatron must have been imagining it.

It, like everything else, was all in his head.