Chapter Text
Cybertron had never been fair — not in the glittering towers of Iacon, not in the smog-choked underlevels of Kaon, and certainly not in the mines where sparks burned dim beneath centuries of oppression. The laws were written in polished halls by polished mechs, their frames plated in gold alloys and their optics never once adjusting to the dark. Those laws were elegant, balanced, and utterly useless to the bots who hauled ore until their servos locked and their joints screamed for maintenance they could not afford. Justice, like energon, flowed upward.
But belief? Belief flowed differently.
D-16 and Orion Pax were miners — young, broad-shouldered, dented from labor but unbowed in spark. They took any shift offered, any transport job, any hazardous excavation contract that promised a few extra Shanix or a ration of energon cubes that didn’t taste recycled twice over. They laughed when they could, shared fuel when one ran low, and called each other brother not because of forged lineage but because in the mines, brotherhood was survival. When the shift horns went silent and the cavern lights dimmed to maintenance glow, they would sit atop half-processed ore and imagine a different Cybertron — one where your chassis did not determine your worth, where a miner could rise without shedding plating in the process, where the Senate chambers did not echo only with the voices of nobles.
It was Orion who first said, softly, “What if the system isn’t broken… but designed this way?”
And D-16, optics narrowing in thought, replied, “Then we redesign it.”
The opportunity — or perhaps the fracture — came in the form of a speech.
In the central plaza of Kaon, beneath banners that bore a new sigil not yet feared, stood Megatronus Prime. Once a respected military commander and close ally of Alpha Trion, he no longer spoke as a mere general. He spoke as a reformer, as a visionary, as a mech whose patience with the Senate had burned out. His voice carried like a forge-hammer strike: Cybertron must be rebuilt. Laws must protect all chassis types — miners, seekers, laborers, data clerks — not merely the gilded few. The working class must stand united. Corrupt senators and nobles who hoarded Shanix and dictated fate from crystalline spires would no longer go unchallenged.
D-16 felt the words like ignition in his spark chamber. Orion felt it too — that dangerous, luminous hope.
They joined him that solar cycle.
Megatronus Prime was not alone. At his right side stood a tricolor Seeker, frame sleek and aerodynamic, wings edged in red and white, armor a striking blend that marked him as Vosian nobility — though there was nothing indulgent in the way he held himself. His optics were sharp, calculating, observant. He did not cheer. He assessed. Where Megatronus inspired, the Seeker measured.
Starscream.
Second-in-command. Strategist. The one who translated Megatronus’s ideals into actionable structure.
If Megatronus was the spark of revolution, Starscream was its blade.
It was Starscream who oversaw the training of the new recruits — and he did not soften the process for idealistic miners. The first time D-16 stepped into the training arena, he was met not with praise for his passion but with a staff strike that sent him skidding across the floor.
“Again,” Starscream ordered coolly, wings twitching behind him. “Hope does not block a blow.”
Orion fared little better, though he adapted faster, analyzing footwork, predicting movement. Starscream noticed. He noticed everything.
“You think like a strategist,” the Seeker told Orion once, circling him after a sparring round. “Good. You will need that when speeches fail.”
To D-16, he said something different.
“You fight like you’re already angry.”
D-16 stiffened. “Shouldn’t I be?”
Starscream’s gaze lingered, unreadable. “Anger is a tool. Uncontrolled, it is a liability. Decide which you intend to be.”
Training was relentless. Blades, blasters, aerial maneuvers for those with flight capability, ground tactics for the rest. Megatronus Prime had been clear: Cybertron would not change politely. The Senate would not abdicate with a signature. There would be resistance. There would be casualties. Reform, if it came, would come at cost.
Slowly, the faction took shape.
They called themselves Decepticons — not as villains, but as a declaration. They would no longer accept deception from those in power. They would expose it. Confront it. Tear it down if necessary. Their emblem was not yet feared; it was a promise. Equal rights for all bots. Representation beyond noble lineage. Opportunity not bound by frame type.
In the training yards, under Starscream’s watchful optics, two miners became soldiers. Not conquerors — not yet — but protectors of an idea. Orion Pax learned to temper force with restraint. D-16 learned to channel fury into precision. And above them, Megatronus Prime and Alpha Trion’s ideological rift widened into something more dangerous than disagreement.
In those early cycles, beneath the clang of metal and the echo of shouted commands, there was still whimsy. Still belief. Still the quiet, foolish hope of young bots who thought that if they fought hard enough and stood together, Cybertron would finally, finally become fair.
It was the beginning of the Decepticons.
And none of them yet understood how fragile beginnings could be.
Starscream watched them when they did not realize they were being watched.
He stood at the edge of the training platform, wings half-furled, arms crossed loosely behind his back in a posture that suggested indifference — but his optics never missed a movement. The Kaon training yard rang with the sharp crack of metal striking metal, with the hiss of venting energon, with the distant murmur of recruits arguing philosophy as loudly as they sparred. And in the middle of it all were his two most unlikely students.
Orion Pax glowed when he listened. His optics — a clear, earnest blue — brightened at every new concept as if knowledge itself were a sunrise. He hated violence; that much was obvious from the way he flinched when the clang of heavier bots colliding reverberated too close. Whenever a particularly large mech strode past — armor scarred, voice booming — Orion instinctively stepped closer to Starscream, sometimes even positioning himself half behind the Seeker’s legs as if seeking unconscious shelter. It would have been amusing if it weren’t so painfully sincere.
Once, after a sparring session left Orion flat on his back, vents sputtering, Starscream extended a servo to pull him up.
“You hesitated,” Starscream said calmly.
Orion’s optics lowered. “He looked… frightened.”
“He was attempting to disarm you.”
“Yes, but—” Orion pushed himself upright, dusting grit from his forearms. “If he’s frightened, then perhaps he doesn’t truly want to fight.”
Starscream tilted his helm, studying him. “And if he strikes while you offer him reassurance?”
Orion’s brow furrowed, as though the concept pained him. “Then I suppose I learn from that.”
Starscream huffed — not quite a laugh. “You are either dangerously naive… or dangerously revolutionary.”
Orion smiled at that, as if it were praise.
D-16 was different.
Where Orion shone like morning light, D-16 burned like a forge. His golden optics did not brighten at ideals; they sharpened. Anger coiled beneath his plating, not wild but steady, fed by memories of miners crushed under quotas, of overseers who never descended into the dust they profited from. He did not shrink from larger bots. He squared his shoulders. He stepped forward. He asked for heavier weapons, for longer training cycles, for harsher opponents.
“You rely too much on brute force,” Starscream informed him after watching D-16 drive a sparring partner to the ground with sheer power.
“It works,” D-16 replied bluntly.
“It works until you face someone stronger.”
D-16’s jaw tightened. “Then I’ll become stronger.”
Starscream stepped closer, lowering his voice so only D-16 could hear. “Strength without restraint is predictable. Predictability gets you dismantled.”
For a moment, the anger in D-16’s gaze flickered — not extinguished, but redirected into focus. He nodded once. He listened. That was the crucial difference. He lacked patience, yes, and his temper could flare like an overheated engine, but when Starscream spoke with that precise, cutting clarity, D-16 absorbed every word.
Starscream tended their wounds personally.
He claimed it was efficiency — that medics were occupied, that field leaders should understand the limits of their soldiers’ frames. But the truth revealed itself in small gestures: the careful way he sealed a fracture in Orion’s forearm plating, the steady pressure he applied to stabilize D-16’s leaking energon line, the quiet “hold still” murmured in Vosian dialect when either of them shifted too abruptly.
“You do not win wars by destroying your own,” he told them once as he worked, optics dimmed in concentration. “Maintenance is strategy.”
Training extended beyond blades and blasters.
In the quieter cycles, when the arena emptied and the smog above Kaon glowed faintly from distant factories, Starscream would sit with them in the abandoned hangar that served as temporary quarters. He produced datapads filled with ancient texts — historical archives, cultural treatises, star charts.
“If you intend to reshape Cybertron,” he said, passing a stylus to Orion, “you should first understand what it has been.”
He taught them to read High Cybertronian script, not merely the simplified trade glyphs used in the mines. He corrected D-16’s sharp, blocky handwriting with surprising patience. He encouraged Orion to question historical narratives.
“History,” Starscream explained, projecting a holographic star map between them, “is often written by those who never felt its consequences.”
He spoke of the Golden Age, of the Primes’ philosophies, of how caste systems had calcified over millennia until aerial frames — especially Seekers — were dismissed as ornamental or volatile. He did not hide the bitterness in his voice when he described Vosian academies that barred grounders, or Iaconian councils that dismissed aerials as lesser strategists.
“I was a scientist,” he told them one evening, wings drooping slightly as he adjusted the hologram to display a distant nebula. “Before I stood beside Megatronus Prime, I charted stellar anomalies. I studied gravitational distortions. I believed discovery alone could elevate perception.”
Orion’s optics widened. “You mapped the outer spiral?”
“A fragment of it.” A faint, almost wistful note entered Starscream’s tone. “I proposed joint research between aerial and grounder divisions. It was declined. ‘Improper collaboration,’ they called it.”
D-16’s fists clenched. “Because you’re a Seeker.”
“Because I am inconvenient,” Starscream corrected coolly. “Equality is disruptive to those who benefit from hierarchy.”
He had joined Megatronus not for conquest, but for correction. For a Cybertron where aerials were not dismissed as volatile lower class, where miners were not expendable, where scholarship was not confined by chassis type.
Under his instruction, Orion learned to wield a blade without losing his compassion. D-16 learned to calculate before striking. They debated ethics as fiercely as they sparred. They laughed — yes, even D-16 — when Orion mispronounced ancient Vosian terms and Starscream corrected him with theatrical exasperation.
“You cannot inspire a revolution while butchering its language,” Starscream scolded lightly.
“And you cannot expect miners to speak like nobles overnight,” Orion countered, smiling.
Starscream’s wings fluttered in mock offense. “I expect excellence.”
In truth, he expected more than that.
He expected them to survive.
Because beneath the speeches and the banners and the careful construction of a faction built on fairness, Starscream understood something they did not yet fully grasp: ideals were fragile things. They required guardians as much as believers.
He taught them how to fight.
He taught them how to think.
He taught them how to question.
He taught them how to look up at the stars and remember that Cybertron was not the center of the universe — merely one world among many, capable of change.
Starscream taught far more than survival.
He taught them how to become something greater than what the system had designed them to be.
And in doing so, he bound himself to them more deeply than he ever intended.
The day they left did not feel like the end of an era.
It felt ordinary.
Starscream stood at the edge of the launch platform, the wind from the lower atmosphere tugging faintly at his wings. Megatronus Prime was beside him, helm lifted, optics distant in thought as he reviewed tactical projections. The mission was meant to be routine — negotiations, reconnaissance, a show of presence near contested energon routes. Nothing grand. Nothing apocalyptic.
Orion Pax and D-16 had come to see them off anyway.
“You are not authorized beyond the outer platform,” Starscream reminded them, though there was no sharpness in his tone. Only habit.
“We’re not crossing the line,” Orion replied quickly, hands raised in surrender. “We just— wanted to wish you a safe return.”
D-16 stood straighter than usual, arms crossed, trying and failing to appear unaffected. “We’ll keep training.”
“You will do more than that,” Starscream said, stepping closer. His gaze moved between them, lingering for half a click longer than necessary. “You will not seek trouble in my absence.”
Orion gave a soft laugh. “I don’t seek trouble.”
Starscream arched a brow ridge. “Trouble has a tendency to seek you.”
D-16 huffed faintly. “If anyone causes a problem—”
“You will de-escalate,” Starscream cut in smoothly, optics flashing. “You will observe. You will survive. This is not a proving ground for your pride.”
Megatronus Prime finally turned toward them, and even in that simple motion there was gravity. “You are the future of this cause,” he said, voice resonant. “Do not squander it in impulsive gestures.”
Orion bowed his helm slightly. D-16 nodded once, firm.
Starscream hesitated — then reached out, briefly resting his servo against Orion’s shoulder, then D-16’s. A small gesture. Easily dismissed.
“We will return before you can miss us,” he said.
They boarded the aircraft together.
It vanished into the clouds.
They never saw it again.
The first reports were confused — disrupted transmissions, fragments of distress signals, mention of an ambush mid-route. Then silence. The wreckage was never officially recovered. The rumor spread that the craft had been intercepted, overwhelmed by unknown assailants. No survivors.
No one believed it.
Not at first.
“Starscream wouldn’t fall to a simple ambush,” D-16 insisted, pacing like a caged engine. “He’s faster than anyone. He can anticipate aerial patterns before they form.”
“And Megatronus carries the Matrix,” Orion added, voice thinner than usual. “A Prime does not fall quietly.”
But when the Matrix of Leadership returned to the Temple — rising from the ether in a glow that dimmed every light in the chamber — there was no room left for denial. The artifact did not lie. It did not abandon a living bearer.
It waited.
Megatronus Prime was dead.
The news fractured Cybertron like a tectonic shift. Riots ignited in the lower districts. Senators blamed extremists. Extremists blamed corruption. Conspiracies multiplied faster than facts. Some claimed Alpha Trion had orchestrated it. Others whispered of noble retaliation. The truth dissolved beneath rage.
And something irreversible shifted inside Orion Pax and D-16.
Grief did not settle gently in either of them.
In Orion, it hollowed and reshaped. He sought answers — and found himself in longer and longer conversations with Alpha Trion. Where once he had dismissed the elder’s caution as complacency, he now listened. Alpha Trion spoke not of uprising, but of preservation. Of safeguarding culture, knowledge, and freedom without descending into annihilation.
“Megatronus believed in justice,” Alpha Trion told him one night, hands folded over ancient datapads. “But justice enforced by endless retaliation becomes indistinguishable from tyranny.”
Orion’s optics dimmed. “He was trying to show you something.”
“Yes,” Alpha Trion replied softly. “And perhaps I was trying to show him something in return.”
When the Decepticon command fractured without its leader — captains arguing, strategies diverging — Orion stepped back. He did not abandon the ideals. He reinterpreted them. When Alpha Trion formally founded the Autobots as guardians rather than revolutionaries, Orion joined him.
D-16 did not.
Where Orion sought reflection, D-16 sought certainty. The absence of Megatronus felt less like tragedy and more like theft. Their leader had been taken. Their mentor destroyed. The cause left leaderless and vulnerable. He watched as former Decepticons bickered and diluted purpose.
Weakness, he decided, was the true enemy.
When Orion and D-16 met again cycles later, it was not in a training yard but in a council chamber thick with tension.
“You left,” D-16 said flatly.
“I adapted,” Orion answered.
“You surrendered.”
“I chose another path.”
D-16’s golden optics burned brighter. “You chose Alpha Trion.”
“I chose survival,” Orion insisted. “I chose a way forward that doesn’t drown Cybertron in its own energon.”
“And what did our leader die for?” D-16 demanded.
Silence stretched between them like a fracture line.
Time widened it.
D-16 rose within the fractured Decepticons not through diplomacy but through force of will. He reorganized. He rearmed. He reshaped the faction’s identity — no longer simply reformists, but conquerors determined to impose fairness if it would not be granted. He took a new name to honor the Prime who had inspired him: Megatron.
The Matrix of Leadership did not choose him.
It chose Orion Pax.
When the artifact flared and renamed Orion as Optimus Prime, the divide became irreversible. Megatron did not see destiny. He saw betrayal. He saw proof that the system remained rigged — that even in death, the Primes favored the cautious over the bold.
War followed.
Alpha Trion fell only days after Optimus received his new designation, struck down in the chaos of escalating conflict. Another mentor gone. Another wound carved into history.
Eons passed. Cities crumbled. New generations were forged knowing only battle. The sky over Cybertron grew dimmer, choked by debris and smoke. Both sides forgot pieces of what they had once intended to protect.
Until, on a distant frozen world far from Cybertron’s scarred surface, a small Autobot scout team transmitted an unusual report.
“We detected an energy fluctuation beneath glacial rock formations,” the scout relayed. “Faint but consistent. Not natural.”
Optimus Prime listened in silence as coordinates streamed across the tactical display.
“It appeared only after a snowfall shift,” another scout added. “One of us noticed a glow beneath the ice. Subtle. Pulsing.”
An old aircraft lay buried there — ancient Decepticon design, insignia long weathered by time. Its hull was cracked, its engines silent.
But something inside still burned.
When the ice was cut away and the interior breached, the scouts found a stasis chamber embedded deep within the wreckage. Its systems were ancient but intact. Its occupant preserved.
Tricolor plating dulled by frost. Wings folded. Expression frozen in suspended time.
Alive.
The war, which had ground on for eons fueled by memory and loss, shifted in that moment.
Because the past — long buried under rumor and grief — had just been found breathing.