#i'm 100% committed to the headcanon that megatron only ever has one friend at a time

[megatron-fucks]

This is part an epilogue for Repayment in Kind that might actually get posted on AO3 sometime, but in case it doesn't I want it to exist somewhere. It has a bunch of little details that I'm obsessed with.

Law of the Peacemakers universe but the only thing you really need to know are Megatron/Optimus/Starscream live together and that Megatron's one friend is Rung.

Post-war Cybertron; TFP with IDW influences. Megatron & Impactor's complicated relationship post-war, some public humiliation singing.

He heard Impactor's voice raise from the room behind them - "know the one! It's like... uh, there's a part about Wheeljack. No, that's not right, we made that version up. Megatron! How does the song go?"

Rung snorted, despite an admirable attempt to hide his laughter.

"You know the song! da-da da da-da da daaaaa and something else, and then it's like-" he slid the balcony door open with some struggle and leaned heavily on the frame. The room behind him was a bright haze of light and warmth compared to Iacon's cold skyline. Past Impactor's limbs, Megatron could see Optimus watching from the couch, and Starscream strewn lewdly in his lap half in recharge. "Something about arsenic."

Megatron did indeed know the song, although he hadn't thought of it in aeons. Even when the two of them had actually been friends, they rarely got overcharged enough to sing together. "What could possibly have brought this up?"

"Your Prime," oh he liked that: your prime, "wants to know what we did when we were- we weren't- y'know. Back in the day."

Ah. "Mostly we worked," Megatron told Optimus, past Impactor's shoulder. "The rest of the time, we drank."

"I hear there was occasional revelry," Optimus said. From this distance, Megatron couldn't quite read his expression.

Impactor smacked his hands together, as if trying to wake himself up. "How does it go? Working in the dark or uh..."

Pinned under the gaze of the room, Megatron had a rare moment of weakness. "When you're working your way in the darkness-" a heavy hand grabbed him, startling his battle systems online, but Impactor was only leaning on him for balance as he stumbled out onto the balcony. "If you vent your tanks on me, you're going over the railing," Megatron warned him.

"in the darkness," Impactor repeated, and for a moment Megatron remembered him as he was. As they both were. "Deep in the spark of the seam..." One off-cycle after a cave-in, stumbling out of a bar together after drowning all their anger and grief and fear, how the words had just poured of them. How dark a time that must have been, if even Impactor felt the need for poetry to describe it. "Where there's a..."

Megatron couldn't help but continue with him. "Where there's a mine or a hole in the ground," with Impactor's gravelly voice joining his, it was easier to let the melody carry him along, "that's what I'm heading for, that's where I'm bound. Look for me under the lode and inside the vein..." and then he looked away from Impactor, and saw the room full of mechs watching him.

"The copper, the clay, the arsenic, and," Impactor stumbled along for a few more seconds, "and uh, tin, isn't it?" He lurched suddenly for the railing, but didn't quite vent once he was leaning over it. Megatron stayed safely out of reach until Impactor pushed himself back up with a sheen of coolant on his helm and glazed optics. "Who was I with that night?" he asked, still staring down the side of the building. He waved a hand somewhere around his helm, and tilted another few degrees. "Good with a drill, never smiled. What was his name?"

Optimus took blessed mercy on him and came to extract Impactor before he made Megatron do anything more foolish. "I'd offer to put you up," Optimus said as he pried Impactor loose, "but Thundercracker and Skywarp have already claimed the spare berth." He gave Megatron a warm glance over his shoulder as he led Impactor away, closing the door as he asked, "Do you remember your address?"

The world went quiet and dark once more. Megatron could feel his face flushed with energon, as if he'd been the one drinking all night. "I have a friend like that," Rung said softly. "Or not a friend, I suppose. Someone who used to be." Megatron slid the balcony door closed once more, but lingered a moment where he was. Behind Rung, giving him a fraction of privacy in which to speak. "It's a strange feeling, isn't it? To be tied to someone you so fundamentally disagree with; no longer loving them, but unable to act as though they mean nothing."

Megatron returned to leaning beside him on the balcony, looking out over the view once more. "It is." He wondered if he should comfort Rung but the doctor didn't seem overly upset. Just pensive, as always. "There was a time when we endured a great deal together. Bonds forged in adversity do not easily break."

"I suppose that's one thing to be said for war," Rung said. "There's no shortage of adversity." Megatron froze, not knowing whether he should laugh, and Rung looked up at him with a wry smile. "Without the war, how many of us here would know one and other?"

He would certainly have never lived with Starscream and a Prime if not for the war. Orion Pax, maybe. In a better world.

---

(Megatron and Impactor are singing Cousin Jack.

I didn't include it here, but I've also got a draft of a scene where Optimus says that the Wreckers are very fond of singing The Chemical Worker’s Song, specifically the part about "every day you're in this place, you're two days nearer death.")