re_alignment | [Broadcasting from the tallest peak he can find in the junk pile.]

[Someone has been through this before. Someone knows this drill. Someone has worked very, very hard to finally make it back to his Cybertron, only to find it all wrong. Again.

Someone probably has destroyed a few piles of junk in their anger.

However, someone also has paid attention to the communications on the network, and has ventured to the 'temples' that were mentioned, and has found them locked against him.

This someone is not surprised.]

Listen closely, and listen well.

[It is time to act. The feed opens with a closeup on Megatron's faceplates, optics blazing red, the scant remnants of gladiator paint still burned onto the metal.]

This is not where we belong, and I am done with this.

I am done with waking up to see an unfamiliar sun obscuring all-too-familiar stars. I am done with strangers being cast from world to world. I am done with mechs-who-would-be-gods so graciously patronizing us by allowing us to remain while simultaneously enforcing unethical segregation and I am done, finally, with the thwarting of destinies that I and my allies have slaved, toiled, and died to create.

You can listen to those who make the rules here if you desire to. I have heard a song like theirs, before.

Or.

[He flashes, briefly, a datapad that seems to have some sort of schematic on it--a schematic that looks (to those who are familiar with them) like a complicated space bridge.]

If you are 'done' as I am, you can help me.

I am Megatron, and I will deliver anyone that joins me to their rightful homes.

[A single, pointed tooth is visible in the smirk that finally dawns on his face. His interdimensional portal had only worked, once, but with the right mechs he would see it to completion again. Immediately.]

I guarantee it.

~~~~~

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Then we stopped them, as was needed. I do not regret doing that.

Even if Sentinel did not die by my hands the night that we burned Kaon. I held back, then. [To make a point, but still.]

You put aside your bitterness, though, Drift. You put it aside enough to join up with the very mechs who hurt us. Who demeaned us.

Do you have any cleaner solution? Shall I not return to Cybertron, and leave it to Sentinel Prime?

That was probably the only time you held back, Megatron. Why then? Why not again?

[He sighs.] Because I saw what we let ourselves become. And I saw what the Autobots were becoming. And I couldn't do anything on my own.

[He sounds...dissatisfied.]

I can't answer that question, Drift. Sparring him was the last action I performed before I was pulled from my world.

[He doesn't know why he does what he does in the future. There must be circumstances. Sentinel must not have learned.]

You wanted to, though, didn't you. You wanted to be able to make a difference somewhere.

[He sees your dissatisfaction, and he factors in the helplessness that Decepticons had felt--the action that had been so easy to spur in them because they needed something to do to better their lives.]

Then you don't know you merely made an even bigger monster.

[It had been easy to feel right and justified fighting against Zeta Prime.]

I want no one to have to do what I've done. Any of it.

No. I don't. Tell me.

[He wants to know.]

I find it difficult to believe that, Drift. I believe that you hate what we become, but I can't believe that you think we weren't justified to begin with.

The Clampdown. The Decepticon Registration Act. There were rumors about the Institute.

[Just for a start.]

We paid too high a price...for a hand full of cinders, Megatron. Tell me that's worth it.

I remember those...

But they had been present before me.

[He doesn't know what he could have done to prevent them.]

What do you think I'm trying to prevent?

What else would you have me do?

Some of them, yes. But they were all, in short order, turned against us.

And then Zeta Prime decided to sacrifice an entire city to his weapons. Thousands of innocent civilians, not like you or me who chose the badge, who willingly took the danger, killed.

Leaders view their soldiers as numbers, statistics, force multipliers. Anything but actual lives. Zeta did. And you as well.

Find another means than killing, than terrorism. Use your power to break away, not merely break. Maybe do what the Circle of Light did, and just...leave.

[He listens, soaking this information about his potential future in. So Zeta would be Prime, before Optimus...not that it mattered. It changed nothing who was Prime, except that he knew who he'd have to dispose of and when.

And Drift...isn't telling him anything new, in a way, but also is.]

Cybertron...is my home. [He says it carefully, after a bit.] It is our home.

We don't exactly have the resources to leave it for elsewhere.

[They'd need energon, for one.]

A home that we--all of us--spent more time destroying than trying to fix.

We let hate blind us, let our old hurts make us selfish.

Yet we had resources for a war. [Skeptical? Yes.]

[Broadcasting from the tallest peak he can find in the junk pile.]

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