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Megatron had learned long ago that the thought of containing a rumour is one of fantasy. He's spent his life working towards a position of complete control, which puts him in the unique position of knowing that rumours are one of the truly uncontrollable things in life. Stopping one, well, it's a daydream even with Soundwave's skillset at your disposal.
As a gladiator, Megatron had been a frequent star of Cybertron's rumour mill. At the time, this consisted mostly of gossip rags turning a grainy photo of him and some noble customer into a thousand words of drivel. He was a celebrity, it was par for the course to wake in the morning and see an article forwarded by Soundwave claiming he was having an affair with the son of a Tritium industry king. Even more common was waking next to the son of a Tritium industry king, only to open the news and see he was in Iacon, whoring himself out to Sentinel Prime. He'd joined the Primal harem seventeen times before the war started.
Of course, the rumours grew in power alongside him, reaching incredible heights at the beginning of the war. Notably, it made its way around the populace that Megatron was secretly high-caste. Of course, this was most likely Functionalist propaganda. Miners and gladiators don't have the processors to start a revolution, never mind a successful one, so of course he must be a high-caste power-seeker. Soundwave led a massive campaign against that one, finding it as offensive as Megatron did, and the propaganda did wonders to quell its popularity.
Then, of course, he appointed Starscream to the position of Second in Command, setting off a whirlwind of affair rumours. Those were so strong most Autobots still believe it, according to Soundwave. It would be utterly illogical for Megatron to have an affair with such a treasonous snake, so Megatron tended to write this one off as envy, either of Starscream or of him.
There were on and off rumours that he and Soundwave were conjuxed, too, which Megatron did absolutely nothing to disprove. It was a compliment, really, and one that only served to make the two more frightening. The ultimate all-knowing power couple, Starscream called it. Soundwave just rolled his optics (Megatron could tell, even if they were hidden. He can always tell when Soundwave rolls his optics, and it's quite often.)
And now, millions of years into his war, millions of years after he ripped Sentinal's head off his slimy shoulders, Megatron has once again joined a Prime's harem, albeit, thankfully, that of a more attractive Prime.
"I want to begin this meeting with a clarification to end the atrocious rumours making the rounds on my ship," Megatron begins the weekly staff meeting. "I am not in a relationship nor am I secretly spark bonded to Optimus Prime."
"So he hasn't locked it down?" Starscream says, "ha. Whore."
The meeting gets cut short, after that, so that the Constructicons have time to restore the table, walls, and several chairs before the next week.
Starscream's derision had been expected- Megatron is quite certain he was the one who started this particular piece of gossip. Soundwave is less sure, however, and Soundwave tends to be smarter about these sorts of things. Megatron can admit that, which is why he hasn't threatened to tear Starscream's head off.
Of course, it's not the first time people have implied something sexual between him and Optimus Prime. And this particular rumour wouldn't have been a problem, if not for Megatron's annoyingly insubordinate subordinates. High Command, the glory of the Decepticon empire his aft.
"It's quite illogical for the leaders of opposing factions to entangle themselves romantically," Shockwave informs him, when they end up stuck together on a blessingly short elevator ride.
"I know," Megatron grits out, "which is precisely why I have not done that." The opening elevator doors save him from the rest of that conversation, at least.
Later, after Megatron's shift finally ends and he's pulling himself to his quarters, Skywarp ambushes him, teleporting into the otherwise empty corridor.
"I would like to join the Primal Harem too!" Skywarp announces, zapping himself off before Megatron can get a hand around his throat. He pops back, a little farther away, only to say-
"I'm being serious. Come on, my liege, I've always wanted to conjux rich." Megatron only glares, biting his glossa.
All this serves to send Megatron down a bit of a -as the humans might say- rabbit hole. The problem is, for all the thousands of rumours Megatron has played key roles in, there's never been one that makes so much...sense.
Not the subservience or harem-positioning, of course, but the sexual tension. There's a lot of sexual tension. Megatron is self-aware, he knows he has a problem. The rumour runs wild on his ship, and everytime it reaches him it drives him a little bit more mad.
But all that would have been fine, really, if it had contained itself to just the Decepticon army. But of course, of course, that was a fantasy. And of course, Starscream would be the one to ruin it.
"Hey! That's no way to treat a Primal Consort!" Starscream shouts mid-battle, after Optimus nearly tears Megatron's arm off. Megatron is going to tear Starscream’s own arm off, to see how he likes it..
On the plus side, at least, Optimus freezes in place for a full thirty seconds, enabling Megatron to struggle back to his pedes. He takes a moment to stretch out his aching shoulder, enjoying Optimus wide optics and senseless stammering. The rest of the battlefield is similarly slowed, a mix of stunned Autobots and snickering Decepticons. Optimus's mouth opens and closes, until he realizes he's opened his battlemask and slams it shut.
"What?" Optimus finally asks, when his glossa starts working again. Megatron sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose so hard it almost hurts. Starscream cackles somewhere off to his left.
"What? What?" Megatron finally retorts. Optimus, visibly taken aback, narrows his optics.
"Well, I just. Are you? Actually?" Ratchet face palms from the sidelines. Audibly.
"Actually what?" By now, the whole battlefield has frozen, watching them with curious optics. Megatron stands a bit straighter.
"A primal consort." Optimus scratches his nose and looks down.
"What? No!" Megatron is tempted to shoot him through the forehead. He's preparing to, actually, when Optimus speaks up again.
"It's just.." Optimus shifts from pede to pede, casually shrugging. "The Matrix…."
"The tin can? What does it want?" This is getting ridiculous. Megatron knows this is getting ridiculous. But he's also curious, and it's not like he's ever succeeded in stopping Prime from speaking his mind.
"Yeah...it's..nevermind." Well, except for today, it seems. But now Megatron's invested and Optimus's shifting isn't going to stop the utter derailing train that is this embarrassingly public conversation.
"What do you mean nevermind?!" Sometime during this whole fiasco, Starscream had joined his trinemates on top of a large boulder. Their heads snap back and forth, following the conversation. Their wide eyes are reminiscent of meerkats. Soundwave is silently recording.
"I don't know." Optimus looks at his pedes, then side-eyes Ratchet, who is laughing so hard he's doubled over. "It just..seemed to respond." Primus, this is like pulling dentae, Megatron thinks.
"What do you mean it responded?"
"It just agreed!" Optimus is visibly flustered now, waving his servos around in a calming gesture. It doesn’t work.
"Agreed?! That I'm Prime's shareware???" Starscream is a dead mech, and Optimus is a dead mech, and so is Primus himself.
"No, a consort. I mean, it just seemed to..like the concept." Ratchet is sitting on the ground now, right in the middle of the battlefield, face in his hands. Megatron thinks he might be crying.
"That I'm your mistress?" This time, Megatron repeats it slowly, just in case Optimus is having processor difficulties.
"No. No. A primal consort. You know, the Lord High Protector." They stare at each other for a while. Optimus squints. Megatron just..dies a little inside. To the side, Starscream starts laughing so hard his vents screech. "Well," Optimus says, finally, "that's what the Matrix thinks."
"I," Megatron says, fusion cannon whirring to life, "am going to kill you."
The battle doesn't actually last long, after that. No one seems very interested in violence. Ratchet doesn't stop laughing, the seekers don't leave the rock, no matter how loudly Megatron yells. Eventually everyone just...disperses.
Megatron locks himself in his quarters until Soundwave physically drags him to a command meeting. Megatron's not proud of that, but he's also not proud that he's spent the last day or so stuck in his berth reading romances while his (easily treated if he had seen a medic) arm got slowly repaired by nanites. He's even less proud that he'd managed to consistently choose Primal Harem romances. He didn't realize how much of a problem indulging in that little fantasy would be, he admits, a tactical error on his part.
The rumour, now adopted wholeheartedly by both camps, spends the next several weeks ricocheting between the two factions, growing in detail in a frenzied, uncontainable snowball. Megatron, having just consumed six different stories containing fairy tales of a Prime's berthoom habits, finds himself quite stuck.
"It's written in the Matrix. It has to happen. Fate-like," Jazz tells Soundwave in what is clearly an attempt at a taunt and what comes off more as an excited conspiracy theory. Sohndwave hits him over the head with a steel column from the oil plant the Decepticons are attacking this week, and Jazz hushes up after that. Megatron spends the night staring at the corner of the room trying very hard not to think about it.
The next battle, all three Coneheads get caught in an intricate web designed by the Autobot twins. In lieu of actual fighting, they spend the skirmish happily informing every Autobot they see that Megatron is their Lord High Protector and therefore the leader of all of Cybertron's armies, so who is betraying Cybertron now, huh? Ironhide doesn't take kindly to this, but his act of revenge only succeeds in freeing the Coneheads, who promptly get stuck in a second Twin trap.
Megatron has no idea how Optimus is surviving- the poor mech can't even threaten his army into silence. Not that Megatron has succeeded in doing that either. But at least no Decepticon has had the gall take the gossip too seriously. Primus knows the Autobots take everything seriously.
"It would create incentive to not break the peace treaty," Prowl says, as if they have a peace treaty in place. He says it while Soundwave hits him repeatedly over the head, too, which makes Megatron want to scream.
"I think it's a cute matchup. I can get why Primus thinks that," Bumblebee says. Megatron can't tell what Bumblebee's doing at that moment, because Optimus is shooting him into a wall. Cute is not the word Megatron would use, although one word comes to mind. Two words- slagging hot. The phaser burns his shoulder but he can barely feel it because Optimus has replaced his gun with his fist and is pinning Megatron to a wall and slag, oh slag.
So yeah. The rumour mill has gotten out of hand. It's affecting things. Megatron decides that night that if he can't contain it, he'll have to let it die out. That, of course, means he can't react to it, can't feed the fire, and certainly can't let it continue to affect the war. A resolution that he immediately breaks by answering Optimus Prime's private comm not two clicks later.
"Megatron," Optimus greets. Megatron rolls his optics.
"Prime."
"Listen," Optimus says, and then stops, waiting for Megatron's interruption which, rude. Megatron is tempted to actually interrupt, except he's quite curious.
"I didn't mean to offend you, the other day. Or start anything," Optimus finally continues. Megatron sits down in his berth with a loud thud.
"You didn't mean to offend me?!" Megatron kind of wants to kill him and also kind of wants to take a nap. It's been an emotionally confusing time. "You stopped the entire battlefield, implied I was your Primus-given lover, and directly said that the Matrix wanted me to be your mistress, and you didn't mean to offend me?" Surprisingly, Megatron finds that he is not, in fact, offended. But he quite enjoys imagining the look on Optimus's face.
"...yeah" Optimus says. Megatron loves him.
"Well," Megatron says "I suppose I wouldn't mind being the Lord High Protector." The line goes dark.
Optimus Prime's abrupt hangup lasts approximately 30 seconds before Megatron, now stress-eating some jellies, receives another comm.
"Lord High Protectors need a unified populace," Optimus says.
"Well then, I suggest you surrender," Megatron replies, and the line disconnects again.
"The Matrix believes the proper route would be peace talks," Optimus says, once he's called for a third time. Megatron has moved on from stress-eating and is now attempting a nap. He groans into a pillow.
"Good for it. Buy me dinner first, then we can talk about commitment." Surprisingly, Optimus does not hang up. Unsurprisingly, he goes silent for two minutes. Megatron nearly falls asleep to the sounds of muffled breathing over the comm.
"Well, how am I supposed to do that? We don't have restaurants." Optimus asks. Megatron hangs up.
Megatron successfully ignores Optimus Prime and the blasted Matrix-endorsed rumours for long enough to take a nap and do some paperwork, which is nice. And then, of course, Optimus ruins it with a comm. It's just a set of coordinates, and Megatron has the sinking feeling he's going to end up breaking his "no feeding the fire" rule again.
Sure enough, Optimus has 4 cubes of energon, 2 clearly highgrade, decked out on a make-shift table. Megatron punches him in the face.
"You said you wanted dinner!" Optimus splutters, wiping the energon off his lip.
"Don't be a slag-aft," Megatron replies, scooping up one of the high grades. He pulls off the cap and inspects it. It's probably not poisoned-that's not Optimus's thing.
"Fine. We'll just go back to war, then," Optimus says.
"Well I never said that." Megatron sits gently in a make-shift chair. It creaks, but holds.
He and Optimus stare at each other for a bit. Optimus signs, rubbing his optics. Megatron smirks. It's a serene little cliffside location, and the highgrade is good, for a wartime mixture. Optimus sits. "Ok," he says.
They eat in silence for a while, and then talk about the weather for a little while more, and then by the time both highgrades are gone they've been arguing about Edgar Allen Poe, for some slagging reason, because Optimus is upset that Megatron thinks Poe is a better poet than Neruda, to which Megatron tells him to suck spike. It's very nice, for a make-shift date. They part once it gets too dark to argue properly, with the angry agreement to never do it again.
Megatron wakes up hungover, just in time to witness Soundwave barge into his berthroom and bodily drag him to the high-command meeting, ranting about how if Megatron was going to have an affair he ought to tell his communications officer first, before it hits the rumour mill, which Megatron protests because he's not having an affair with someone who thinks Neruda has ever written something as good as Annabel Lee, thank you very much.
Soundwave has pretty much beat the hangover out of his head by the time they reach the meeting room. He shoves a datapad with a little speech in Megatron's hand and pushes him to the front of the room, which quickly puts an end to the loud gossip circle occurring over the high-command strategy table.
Megatron glances down at Soundwave's speech, stares at his insubordinate group of subordinates, and starts-
"So, to clear up the outlandish rumours making their way through my ship, I would like to clarify with a brief statement. I am very possibly having an affair with Optimus Prime."
"Haha," Starscream laughs. "Whore."