The mine went quiet at shift’s end. Megatron stayed behind, hands blackened, a datapad balanced on a crate. Dust drifted like stars in the lamplight.

He didn’t watch the feeds for politics. He watched for you. His favorite Senator.

Your voice filled the cavern—steady, measured, carrying conviction without raising volume. Megatron knew the speech already. He mouthed the lines anyway, timing them with the echo of drills long shut down.

“Justice,” Your voice called out in the chamber, “is not a gift from the powerful. It is a duty we owe the powerless.”

He exhaled, something like a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. A miner, listening to a senator speak of burdens you chose to carry knowing there were so many you may never even comprehend.

He had never seen you in person. Yet he knew your pauses, the way you let silence do half the work. He’d etched a line from your first address into the wall above his berth, letters careful, almost reverent.

Megatron powered down the datapad when the applause swelled. In the sudden quiet, he whispered the final line alone—and went back to work.

Maybe it was fate. Maybe it was vector sigma's benevolent hand. but not even 4 rotations later, megatron's very own mine got its annual visit from senators. And you were there.