Allegedly Written In The Stars

There was a crackling noise overhead, the public announcement system rousing Megatron from recharge.

However, he found that, oddly, he couldn’t see the ceiling, painted in a starscape. The quilted tarpaulins had been carelessly shoved over his face at some point in during the recharge cycle by Rodimus. While Rodimus was a restless sleeper, he tended to steal the covers, not forcibly distribute them.

That led him to the obvious conclusion that Rodimus had vacated the berth. Early.

Rodimus had gotten up early.

Before he could confirm his suspicions by reaching for abandoned recharge cables next to him, the voice over the PA did that for him.

Rodimus’s voice, eager and altogether too cheery for this hour of the morning, echoed from the ship’s speakers in the dark of their habsuite.

“Good morning, crew! This is your sun captain speaking—“ What? “—with your fortunes for the day.”

What?

No, Megatron thought as he yanked the tarpaulins down from his face, this was some bizarre dream, likely influenced by some innocuous thing he had heard but not actively recalled the other day.

He would simply turn his optics back off, ignore it, and wake up with this all blissfully forgotten, preferably with Rodimus recharging nearby as expected.

Unfortunately, as the universe, no matter which one he was in, seemed to delight in either proving Megatron wrong or otherwise aggravating him.

Rodimus’s voice continued over the speakers.

“Those who were forged or—sorry, created under the sign of Amalgamous will encounter difficulty today with… uh… immutable shapes, but it’s otherwise a good day for triple-changers.”

What utter nonsense.

There weren’t even any triple-changers onboard the Lost Light.

Megatron had never bothered to understand the pattern or associated meanings because, in his opinion, none of it mattered.

Astrology was a pointless exercise is finding patterns where they didn’t exist and trying to exert some measure of control and understanding over an uncaring multiverse. The “art” and its kin predated modern Cybertronian knowledge of how celestial bodies moved but had kept on in some religious sects and the popular imagination.

The only reason Megatron knew as little as he did about the dominant astrological tradition on their homeworld, which was admittedly very little, was that Starscream had a very blessedly brief phase midway through the war where he had become obsessed with the stars associated with the Thirteen.

These stars were allegedly the brightest that could be seen from Cybertron on a dark night without light pollution. One, amusingly enough, was their system’s sun, despite being obligatorily not seen at night.

Starscream, being Starscream, had refused to shut up about it for two entire months. He was lucky that he had lost interest in trying to predict the course of battle by the stars before Megatron had been fed up enough to seriously debate throttling him.

By that point, the war itself had already been flung amongst the stars, making it impossible to consistently “read” the familiar sky anyway.

“If you were created under the sign of Prima, maybe avoid seeking revenge on me today. That would be awesome.”

Who had Rodimus upset this time? That was a very pointed “prophetic” recommendation.

Over the course of the next ten minutes that could have been spent more productively, Rodimus continued giving vague and clearly lazily contrived pronouncements for the crew, going through each of the signs of the original thirteen Primes.

Of course, minus the two that were not talked about, functionally leaving only eleven. Starscream had taken to accusing him to being created under the auspices of one of the unspoken ones and that had been allegedly why he was so “naturally hostile.”

All the while Rodimus read out horoscopes for the crew, derived from Primus knew what, Megatron laid on the recharge slab, covered still in a tangle of neglected tarpaulins, silently letting the absurdity of the entire situation wash over him.

“If you were created under the sign of Solus—like me—then today is going to rock, because absolutely no one is going to get revenge on you today.”

This was just an asinine dream, his processor punishing him for something. Rodimus had never so much as mentioned astrology to him. His mind was just taking one of Starscream’s dreadful former hobbies and supplanting it onto his current partner to torment him.

Megatron rolled over on the recharge slab, checking that his cables were still securely plugged in. Going back to sleep was the only solution.

“Moon captain, if you can hear me, wake up and come to the bridge because I need you to prevent some revenge.”

Given there was only one other captain on the ship, he could only presume that this dream-based Rodimus meant him.

Megatron was not going to obey some disembodied dream voice. He didn’t even need to be up for hours yet. He grumbled meaningless noises of displeasure.

The commlink in his wrist began to ring, just to prove him wrong.

“Rodimus, it’s middle of the night.” As far as shifts and clocks went anyway, given that “day” and “night” were nebulous concepts of convenience when in space. “I’m going back to sleep—“

“Okay, but can you do that after you stop Ultra Magnus from lecturing me about reorganizing his files by color?”

With that missing piece to fill the gaps, the full situation became immediately clear to him.

Rodimus had pulled a prank on Ultra Magnus, realized afterward that would lead to a lecture because he couldn’t remember how to put the files back the way they had been before, and thus hastily devised a scheme to discourage Ultra Magnus from pursuing that lecture.

That would be explain the inexpertly and pointedly generated horoscopes, despite the fact they were in a different universe with vastly different stars.

Clever, if not for the fact that it wouldn’t work.

This was, unfortunately, not a dream, but the regularly scheduled fallout of a life with Rodimus.