#Termagax didn't meet Megatron until he was found by Soundwave and co

[sparkleresthold]

Not quite a family

Instead of having "good" characters be evil and vice versa, I like the idea of SG stories where characters retain their baseline personalities, they're just placed under different circumstances, if that makes sense. That's what I tried to do here

>Termagax was a brilliant scholar during the Golden Age of Cybertron. She also had a chronic inability to handle criticism, no matter how constructive. She used to be very inflexible in her views, almost comically unforgiving. However, she enjoyed a good challenge, if anything, to prove her own intellectual superiority over her opponents on a public stage.

>One day, long before the War, an anonymous rebuttal to one of her manifestos made its way to her. She would have dismissed it immediately, as she tended to do. It was written in such a blunt, unrefined manner, by someone who clearly was foreign to academia, and yet it lingered in her processor. It gnawed at her circuitry how this nobody had the metal bearings to not only poke holes in her arguments, but to be right about it.

>After some prolonged back and forth with this "Nobody from Tarn," she had grown to both despise and begrudgingly respect the mech behind the glyphs. Soon enough, she even found herself looking forward to his messages, to his dry wit, to his extraordinary ability to provoke her.

>After much insistence on her part, they agreed to meet at Maccadam's so she could fight him debate him in person. She had never expected her "rival" to be a grimy miner who took up philosophy as a hobby.

>It was hardly a meet-cute, but they did fall in love.

>They are both old af and really petty. It's sort of a miracle they even had Megs on the first place.