[One.]

He couldn’t recall collapsing into recharge, but the onslaught of forced memory was still fresh in his helm, the audio as clear as if it had happened yesterday. He’d never seen that particular day from an outside perspective before, and now the exchange roiled in his tanks. The pain was fresh too, but dull compared to when he’d crashed, writhing, to the floor. 

At some point after his fit, Rex had come and lain his massive head on Megatron’s chest and the warlord lacked the energy to scold him for it. He scratched the old hound’s neck as he sat up, frame protesting from last night’s activity… No. If his chronometer was right, three days- cycles had passed since the dream. He should be much more sore, but moving almost seems easier now. Admittedly, he had been neglecting his rest. Rex rose with him and chuffed at the door’s keypad, asking to be let out.

With what he thought was a parting pat on the head, the warlord unlocked the door, but Rex merely plodded through and stopped, turning to stare at Megatron. He barked, the boom echoing through the halls. He barked again, taking a step down the hallway before barking a third time. 

“Stop that racket!” he barked back at Rex, making to grab at the canine’s haunch. Surprisingly quick, Rex dodged his master’s grip and barked again after running down the hallway. Megatron growled at the animal, infuriated by his sudden disobedience. Before he could disrupt work on the entire ship, the warlord ran after him. 

He chased the enormous hound through room after room and only after the third did he notice something stranger than Rex’s behavior. None of his soldiers were paying him any mind. Either of them: the barking beast or their mighty leader stomping after it. No one was even looking up. Finally he commanded their attention, pointing toward his unruly pet and shouting “Seal the doors, catch him!”

Nothing. The vehicons kept running their calculations, sipping energon or talking among themselves, unconcerned with the presence of their Lord. He unsheathed his sword, glaring as it drew no reaction from the vehicon he pointed it towards. Now suspicious, Megatron pointed it instead at Rex. “What have you done to me?”

Rex panted happily as he looked back up at Megatron, no different than he had ever appeared. He received no answer apart from another bark as the hound made his way through another door. Seeing no point to an alternative, Megatron followed, calmly this time.

The door he came out of was not the one he’d gone through. They were outside now, on the fringes of New Iacon, where Rex plodded through the sparsely populated streets. Every so often, he would pause and look into a window, and so Megatron felt this meant he should do the same. Each building out here was newly occupied, the residents of all factions taking time to make the meager apartments feel more like home. Posters and religious statues, foreign treasures collected on their time off-world.

Rex sat before the sixth house on the street, staring in on the first solitary mech they’d come across. “Datastream… why have you brought me here? She was the desperate Autobot who played at being my assassin. Is she not adjusting well?” His question dripped with obligatory interest. Of course she hated her situation, she had attempted violence to change it merely a year ago. The yellow Praxian had crudely removed her false Decepticon brands, but hadn’t replaced them with Autobot ones either. She sat in the bare room, weary optics closed, her servo resting on the old nameplate off of her ship.

Megatron sneered, unsurprised. “Am I supposed to pity her for being alone, for regretting her mistakes? She undermined my cause, attempted to-” A vehicon walked through him, unaffected by the presence of his invisible Lord. A golden mech accompanied him, and the warlord then recognized them as the medics that had traveled on the Black Halo with their former captain. Datastream leaped up when they knocked, obviously expecting them… and Megatron watched, dumbfounded, as they laughed together and helped her hang the nameplate from her ceiling. A visored helomech, still wearing his badges emerged from further within the home and wrapped his arms around her. 

Despite her treachery, despite her betrayal to not only the Decepticons but to her crew, they had accepted her back with open arms. They had moved on. Rex was staring at him, and Megatron did not need to guess why. Holding onto the pain of his hatred for so long had done nothing but cause more of it. Megatron glared down at his dog. “What is the point of this lesson? I cannot reconcile with my past as they have, not when the Autobots are scattered to the winds, not when Optimus is rusting in his grave! Thank you, for showing me what I could have had!” 

The warlord turned to leave, but once again found himself somewhere he hadn’t been a moment ago. He was atop a recently reconstructed tower, where Starscream stood, looking, for the first time in Megatron’s memory, peaceful. Megatron turned away and found himself facing a hallway on familiar ship, where a young femme, stripped of his paint, stomped in the opposite direction. With a frustrated growl, he exited to find a dim room where Soundwave stood at a console, though going by his many symbiotes, this one was not his own. In another whirl, he stood in a cavernous room, where a warm, blue light flickered at the center of a massive sphere that Megatron had to shield his optics from. When he looked back up, he was at an Earth roadstop, standing beside a familiar parked semi, looking as if it had been sitting there for quite some time.

Rex sat in front of him, tilting his helm. “… I understand.” There were still those he had wronged, those who had wronged him that could benefit from the release of the toxic hold of past grudges. He didn’t have to make the same mistake again. 

At his words, Rex stood on his hind legs, bracing himself on Megatron’s frame to lick at his face, much to the warlord’s chagrin. When he was finally able to push the beast away, they were back in his quarters, and his hound circled the berth for recharge. Megatron himself leaned heavily on his desk, feeling like he had when he’d set down his mining equipment for the last time:

Leaving a familiar world behind in favor of one much larger.