Work Text:
You deserve better than this. You’ve been more loyal than anyone could have possibly expected you to be. You fought for millions of years by his side, always returning even when his bumbling leadership left the Decepticon’s strongholds in ruins. You advised and engineered, you led your seekers for him, you saw the opportunities he refused to take and you took them on his behalf. Yes, you spoke up against him. Yes, you believe his time has long come and passed, and yes you may have tried to shoot him once or twice, but still! Even after your attempted coups, you’ve obeyed his orders! What more could he want?
And now, he’s killed you for it! He’s offlined you a dozen times over. The first time you saw it coming a second too late. Megatron had sent an innocuous call for you to meet with him. A typical enough event, he often requested help from his High Command. You arrived at the nearly empty room. He had his back turned, you complained about him wasting your precious time. He turned, cannon already powered on, and shot you full force in the helm.
Stupidly, you’d thought it a dream. The second time it hurt more. You dodged the clean headshot and died bleeding profusely from a hole torn in your chassis, unable to call for help as he glared down at you.
The third time you tried to run for it. That’s when you found out he had plans in place in case you caught on to what he’d decided to do. That time, you went out clawing at his leg as the pressure of his pede on your helm slowly crushed your processor. Your optics bulged under the weight, their sturdy lenses leaking energon as they popped and crumpled.
The fourth time, he found you hiding. That was one of your more humiliating deaths. He dug his fingers into the side of one of your abdomen’s seams, and pulled. Your panels crumpled, slowly, under the assault. Once the protective plating was roughly stripped, he cut through the cords, pistons, wires, and whatever else held you together, leaving your lower half limp and irresponsive. That alone would have been enough. He could have just left you there to bleed out, his servos coated in your leaking energon. But no, instead, you were dragged, in front of a group of nearby Decepticons. He kicked you until you tried to crawl away, your cold, messily divorced lower half dragging behind you. It was hanging on by a few wires he’d missed, but it was still just dead weight.
There, in front of a jeering crowd, he reached down and simply closed a servo around your neck until his digits met in a tight fist, and your processor and spark were completely severed.
Since then, choking has been his preferred method. You don’t know why, it’s not like he knows he’s done it before. You’ve gotten pretty close to escape a few times, but you haven’t made it yet. His plans for if you ran were thorough and well executed. He must really despise you, to have put so much preparation into this.
Not even your trine comes to your rescue. You think you see Thundercracker at some point, watching Megatron drag you out of a ship you’d almost managed to steal. Thundercracker just stared, head tilted a little, stance casual and unbothered. Did he know? Who else knew? From your past attempts, you knew that at least Shockwave and Soundwave were in on it, but who else had been told? Did everyone but you see this coming?
But, maybe it wasn’t really Thundercracker. Energon had flooded your optics when you thought you saw him, and errors were clouding your vision, and he was standing so far away. Too far to know for sure. Maybe it was someone else. Yes, it was probably someone else.
You’re certain you’ve almost got it. You’ve almost made it out a few times, and you have forever to keep trying, but that doesn’t make each attempt any less frantic.
It would be so much easier to pull off an escape if you could just get used to the fear and pain. The way your spark thuds at the thought of a hand around your neck cabling, the pain of that steadily tightening grip. You should be used to it by now, but your frame doesn’t remember. So you thrash, convulse, plead, and scrape at your assailant. And as the pressure builds and wires pop, you flail, and your screams turn into static filled, garbled nonsense.
You gurgle on the lubricant and energon that seep into your intake as his digits compress you. You choke on the hard metal, the sharp bits of plating that have been ground down and now find themselves lodged inside the cabling they were meant to encase and protect.
Every time Megatron’s digits meet each other inside the mangled mess of your throat is the first time it has ever happened. The first time your body has to deal with it. Fresh, over and over and over. You can’t escape yet, you haven’t found a way that will work. You know you will, it’s inevitable when you have so many second chances. But you will never get used to the brief blink near the end when, just for a moment, you do not exist.