A/N: Based on a bunny one of my friends gave me after we watched ROTF for the first time (thanks, Hachi). Set pre-movie, pre-War, pre-Defiance... pre-everything! Besides, it's been too long since I've written anything with these two, really, and this hardly counts anyway...

Smoke billowed from the wreckage of crashed starships and destroyed structures, obscuring the sky completely. Chaotic battle raged all around, mechs and organics roaring and screaming as they fought to the death. Laser fire lit the battleground more effectively than the blotted-out star of the mechanical world.

A tremendous explosion rocked the ground as a flier streaked overhead. One less alien mobile unit to worry about, he reflected, transforming in midair to drag harder-than-diamond claws through an alien ship. The heap of scrap metal they called a fighter wobbled, smoke trailing from its laboring engines. Onboard they would be scrambling to right their craft, no doubt.

Megatron didn’t allow them to panic for long. A single blast from his fusion cannon sent the ship careening into Cybertron’s surface, where it vanished in a ball of flame.

He landed among his stationary command team, who busily perused live hologrids of the battlefield.

“Lord Megatron, sir. There are too many of them,” reported his chief logistics officer, still hunched over a map showing the movements of the troops. Despite his words, his voice held no urgency – he was programmed for logic, not emotion. “We’re hitting them with everything we’ve got and they’re still coming.”

“I don’t need to stress the importance of victory, Prowl,” Megatron growled. “This is Cybertron, not some expendable lump of rock. We cannot retreat… we cannot falter.”

“Sir, this is impossible. We’ve stalled them for as long as we can.”

Surveying the hologrids, Megatron took in the situation. They were vastly outnumbered – rust these organics, they bred like turborabbits – and slowly being driven back. They had not underestimated the significance of this battle: If the Protector’s army fell, Cybertron would be overrun. So they had spared no expense… and yet the alien army advanced still.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” he said. “Maintain watch here, Prowl.”

“And you, sir?”

Megatron’s smile made Prowl nervous. “Armageddon.”

“But sir, you— with all due respect, Lord Protector, you can’t execute Armageddon without the approval of the Council.”

“Slag the Council! In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have time to wait for those outdated models to reach a consensus!”

“The collateral damage involved—”

“—will be taken care of,” Megatron finished. “Let the bureaucrats sort it out later. Right now, I’m going to do my job.”

He sent out a bellow over his comm. //STARSCREAM!//

The sky was filled with enemies and their projectiles; nevertheless, when something streaked for their command post at dizzying speed, none of them so much as flinched. The something turned into Starscream’s altmode; he transformed and landed gracefully, already crouching before Megatron in a show of submission.

“What is your command, my lord?”

Megatron’s words made Starscream look up, frame jittery with excitement.

“Initiate Armageddon.”

Unlike Prowl, Starscream didn’t hesitate. “Acknowledged. Beginning transformation now.”

Even Prowl, a seasoned veteran, had only seen this twice before: once in the final stage of testing, once on the battlefield. The other strategists hadn’t, however, and they forgot their duties, staring in awe as their commanders changed.

Normally, a Cybertronian could easily follow the contortions of transformation, especially if one knew the altmode that was forming. But Megatron and Starscream weren’t converting to anything that looked remotely like their usual flight modes. They shifted and warped into an unrecognizable mass of moving parts… and then they combined, plating meshing, wires and cables connecting, fusing two bodies into one so effectively that it was nearly impossible to tell who was who except for slight differences in the color and shape of the visible plating.

The creature rose to a colossal height, still shaped mainly as a standard bipedal Cybertronian. Its segmented torso and many-jointed limbs allowed a full range of motion; its wings and powerful engines granted it the power of flight; its armament made it an army of one. The head flipped up from where it had been buried during transformation, the optics coming online in a burst of red.

As the final gears clicked into place, the creature’s internal functions came online automatically as two central processors merged.

//Motor systems online,// one half reported, the only vestige of a separate consciousness left.

//Weapons systems online,// the other half reported simultaneously, before both fell into the same shared consciousness.

Any difference in opinion or modus operandi vanished as two became one; while Megatron and Starscream might have gone about their business in two different ways, their combined form – codenamed Armageddon – had only one purpose, one all-encompassing directive: to protect Cybertron by completely eliminating the threat.

The signal went out for Cybertronians to clear the area. Gazing up in awe and terror, the soldiers beat a quick retreat to a safe zone as Armageddon’s massive steps carried them/it/him into the thickest concentration of alien ships. His arms raised, came together, and he fired. The blast was vastly more powerful than Megatron’s normal fusion cannon, perhaps because the entire energy of the mech was devoted solely to the weapon. Those who tried to run didn’t get far.

Faced with the Cybertronian weapon of mass destruction, the aliens made a hasty retreat, fleeing to their starships. Even these failed to make a clean getaway as powerful thrusters on his back drove Armageddon into the air, chasing them down and wreaking destruction as only Cybertron’s top aerial warrior could. The decimated fleet limped into space, where the rest of Cybertron’s aerospace fleet waited to speed them on their way.

“By the Primes,” one of Prowl’s underlings whispered. “I’d hate to be on the wrong side of that.”

Prowl sighed, taking in the ruin left in Armageddon’s wake. “Thank the Allspark we’ll never have to.”