Chapter Text
"They’re coming, and I can’t keep them out much longer!!"
Doctor Strange’s voice crackled through the chaotic rift in reality. It was urgent, desperate, but all Peter could focus on was the weight of his own failure.
His world had come crashing down. His guilt was suffocating. It was all his fault.
Aunt May was gone, and now everything he knew—everything he loved—was being torn apart.
"Isn’t there anything we can do?"
Peter's voice wavered, the words nearly choking him as his chest tightened with panic. He could feel the end coming. The world was unraveling. He had failed.
Doctor Strange’s eyes locked with his, filled with something like pity, but it quickly turned to a resolute grimness.
"There is a way… but it will come at a great cost."
Peter’s heart hammered, but he didn’t hesitate.
"What do I need to do? I’ll do anything!"
He would fix this. He had to fix it.
For Aunt May. For everyone.
Without hesitation, he rushed toward Strange, hope igniting in his chest.
"I’ll do it! Just tell me what I need to do!"
"I’m sorry…"
Doctor Strange’s voice was quiet, full of regret, as his eyes shut briefly.
"But it’s the only way…."
"What?"
Peter’s heart skipped a beat. His body screamed with warning, and his spider-senses overloaded.
A crushing pain gripped him like an iron vise.
"Farewell, Pete…"
Strange’s voice was choked, but before Peter could process anything further—
Darkness engulfed him.
_ _ _
Pain.
It was all Peter could feel. The agony of his new form surged through him as his systems powered up. His head throbbed with confusion and fear.
Where was he?
What was this place?
Slowly, he opened his optics, and the harsh, cold light of a sterile, metallic room greeted him.
The pain—both physical and mental—was overwhelming.
But worse than that was the horrifying realization.
This wasn’t his body.
It was massive. His hands, once familiar, were now cold and mechanical. His limbs felt heavy, awkward—uncontrolled. His new body was a towering structure of cold, feeling machinery, completely foreign to him.
What am I?
Peter scanned the room. The walls were metallic and dim, the space like something out of a sci-fi nightmare. His processors buzzed with confusion, numbers and data flooding in, but they didn’t make sense. His reflection on the screen staring back at him only deepened the disbelief.
I’m not human anymore.
His spider-senses flared, overloaded by the chaos. The room, the body—it all felt like a dream. But it was real. This was him. This was Peter Parker. A mechanical monster.
He clutched his chest, feeling the faint pulse of his Spark beneath the thin armor. His breath—or what was left of it—came in ragged bursts.
What the hell am I?!
The door slammed open.
Soldiers stormed in, their boots heavy on the metallic floor.
Guns raised, their eyes cold and calculating.
Peter froze. Panic surged. He tried to speak, but his voice—his ability to communicate—was broken.
Only sharp, metallic screeches escaped him, like a bird calling out for its mother.
A woman in a lab coat stepped forward, inspecting him with a cold, clinical eye.
"So the thing is alive?" she murmured, mostly to herself. "And here I thought it was just useless scrap..." she added under her breath, her eyes lighting up slightly before narrowing again as she noticed a distinctly absent cube in the room.
"This is the thing that destroyed the cube?" she asked, rage flashing in her eyes, her finger twitching like she was one thought away from dissecting him with her stare. It made Peter instinctively curl in on himself.
The captain, still aiming his gun directly at Peter, sneered and replied in a cold, commanding tone:
"Yes, ma’am," never taking his eyes off him.
Peter’s stomach twisted at the words.
The woman turned, her eyes glinting.
“Restrain it. Follow me.”
Before Peter could react, restraints shot out, snapping around his limbs.
The weight of them crushed him down, and he struggled futilely as he was hauled up onto a moving truck.
The pain from his new form was unbearable, his movements slow and awkward.
They dragged him away, and fear set in.
i can’t stop this. Trapped.
As they moved him, a transmission broke through his pain-addled thoughts.
//Sparkling, state your status and designation.//
Peter’s optics widened as he felt something he hadn’t expected—
Comfort.
A new, strange, yet somehow familiar connection thrummed in his chest.
The feeling was different from anything he had felt as a human, but it made him feel... less alone.
Peter tried to respond, but the words wouldn’t come.
His systems were overloaded, his body unresponsive.
Who... Who is this?
Then, a wave of calm washed over him—unexpected and comforting.
//Safety//Protect//Sparkling//
It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
The voice wasn’t like the cold humans around him.
It felt different. Kind.
For the first time since awakening to this new form, Peter didn’t feel entirely alone as he was driven deeper into the facility.
_ _ _
Deep beneath a dam, in a cold, classified underground laboratory…
Lord Megatron lay imprisoned in stasis, his massive form encased in layers of ice.
His once-formidable armor—scratched and battered from countless battles—was now being chipped away by the humans who had captured him, extracting the precious materials he was made of.
Every cycle felt like an eternity, the humans treating him as little more than a resource to be mined, a giant slab of metal to be reduced to nothing.
Human scum…Megatron’s processor buzzed with disdain.
His anger grew with every passing moment, every flick of the humans’ tools as they scraped at his armor, slowly stripping him of his dignity and his might.
Their insignificance was nothing compared to his power, and yet, here he was—
Frozen in ice.
Unable to move.
Unable to strike back.
It felt like any other cycle.
The passage of time meant little to Megatron, who existed in a perpetual state of frozen limbo.
He had just emerged from a longer stasis—longer than usual, which was strange. His body felt slightly strained, though it was likely just the ice.
When he finally awoke from his sleep like statis to conserve his dwindling energon reserves, he heard it.
A transmission.
A sound shattered the eerie silence.
A cry.
A young cry.
At first, Megatron thought it was a trick of his processor, a fleeting glitch, but no…
His thoughts raced, conflicting with the reality around him.
The cries of Sparklings had been all but wiped out in the war.
They had been lost to the violence of the conflict, snuffed out by the chaos that had ravaged Cybertron.
He had not heard a cry like this in what felt like eons.
No… it can’t be…
Megatron’s processor hesitated, trying to make sense of the anomaly. His thoughts raced, conflicting with the reality around him.
The cries of Sparklings had been all but wiped out in the war. They had been lost to the violence of the conflict, snuffed out by the chaos that had ravaged Cybertron.
He had not heard a cry like this in what felt like eons.
The memory of those lost young ones—so full of potential, so innocent—tore at his processor.
It couldn't be. It must be something else…
....
......
But no. The cries continued. They were unmistakable. A Sparkling.
A fierce, protective instinct surged through him, overriding his programming and finding long-forgotten Guardianship Protocols..
He couldn’t move. He couldn’t reach out to the Sparkling. But he could feel it. Its fear. Its pain.
With every ounce of his remaining strength, Megatron sent a signal into the vast reaches of space—
//I have found the Allspark.//
His voice crackled across the cosmos. He didn’t care who heard it—not even Optimus Prime. The Allspark was his by right. But right now, he needed his army to free him—before it was too late for the young Spark.
With nothing else left to offer, Megatron sent the transmission, hoping the Sparkling could hear him, could feel his presence, even if he was powerless to act.
//Sparkling, state your status and designation.//
There was no response. Just a faint, confused echo.
But Megatron vowed this wouldn’t last forever.
He could feel his Decepticons receiving his signal.
Freedom was coming.
//Safety//Protect//Sparkling//
_ _ _
Why did he trust Mysterio?
The question haunted Peter, repeating over and over in his mind. Three days. It had been three days since everything fell apart—since he sought out Doctor Strange in desperation, since the world nearly collapsed, and since he woke up in this form, in this place.
He had lost everything. His old life, his old body. His humanity.
Peter lay still, staring up at the glass ceiling of his cell, where the dim, artificial light barely reached the cavernous space beyond. His optics flickered, scanning the unfamiliar world around him. It didn’t matter how many times he looked—nothing changed. He was still here. Still alone.
At first, the pain had been unbearable.
His new body felt like it was tearing itself apart, systems struggling to function, alien and unresponsive. The agony had dulled since then, but it never truly left. The humans made sure of that.
The experiments ensured he never forgot what he was now.
Energon—his Energon—stained the cold metal floor of his glass prison, glowing dimly in irregular puddles. His body felt sluggish, his systems on the verge of shutting down. If he were still human, he would have compared it to bleeding out.
But he wasn’t human. Not anymore.
He knew that much. He was Peter Parker, but calling himself human now felt... wrong. It wasn’t just his mechanical body or the unreadable data constantly running through his mind—it was something deeper, something he couldn’t explain.
Maybe… maybe he really was a Sparkling.
That’s what Megatron had called him.
Peter let out a shaky vent, curling in on himself as much as his shaking frame allowed.
Megatron. The name was strange, unfamiliar, but somehow the only thing anchoring him to reality.
The Decepticon Lord—if Peter understood correctly—was the only one who had spoken to him in a way that didn’t make him feel like nothing.
The connection between them had been there since his transformation, a presence pressing at the edges of his processor, offering something Peter couldn’t quite define.
Comfort.
Megatron sent comfort.
Peter didn’t know why, and he didn’t understand how, but he wasn’t about to question it. It was the only thing keeping him from spiraling into complete despair.
At first, he had been terrified. The transmission was deep, powerful, and commanding. But Megatron didn’t demand anything from him. He just... spoke.
Megatron called him Sparkling in that same steady voice, pulsing waves of reassurance through their connection. It was confusing, borderline patronizing, but... Peter didn’t hate it.
Sometimes, Megatron told him stories. About a planet called Cybertron, about the war that tore it apart. The longing, the grief in Megatron’s transmissions made Peter wonder if it was really just a story—or if it was his story.
Sometimes, Megatron told him stories. About a planet called Cybertron, about the war that tore it apart. The longing, the grief in Megatron’s transmissions made Peter wonder if it was really just a story—
Or if it was his story.
Peter would have asked, but that wasn’t an option. His transmitter was too young—untested and unfamiliar, like an unused muscle he didn’t know how to flex.
His voice module, unnatural and uncooperative, refused to obey him.
He had no idea how to transmit anything back.
So he just listened.
Megatron spoke, and Peter listened, clinging to the words like a lifeline.
But no story could distract him from this reality.
Peter shifted slightly, his servos brushing against the cold walls of his cell.
The isolation was crushing, but it wasn’t just the loneliness that made his Spark ache—
It was them.
The humans.
They were cruel.
The way they treated him.
Like he was nothing.
Like he wasn’t alive.
Like he was just another machine.
No matter how hard he tried to communicate, to show them that he understood, they never acknowledged him as anything more than a test subject.
A curiosity. A thing.
It reminded him too much of how the world had treated him when Mysterio leaked his identity.
The stares. The accusations. The way people suddenly decided they knew him, knew what he was, without ever actually knowing him.
Except this was worse.
This wasn’t the court of public opinion.
This wasn’t people screaming at him on the streets.
This was complete control.
They could do anything to him, and he was powerless to stop them.
He hated it.
He hated them.
He hated Mysterio.
If I never trusted him, none of this would have happened…
Peter let out a ragged vent, his Spark aching in his chest.
He wasn’t sure if it was supposed to do that.
Was this what exhaustion felt like now?
His optics dimmed as he hugged himself tighter, trying to pretend that it helped.
...
.......
He missed Ned.
He missed MJ.
He missed Aunt May.
He missed home.
Peter’s optics burned, and before he could stop them, droplets of fluid trickled down his faceplate.
It took him a moment to realize—
He was crying.
It felt wrong.
Everything felt wrong.
What he would give to just sit on the couch and watch Star Wars with Ned right now…
The thought hit like a punch to the Spark, knocking the air from his vents. A fresh wave of grief crashed over him, heavier than before.
For the first time since waking up in this cold, unfamiliar body,
Peter let himself break.
He was exhausted. Overwhelmed. Terrified.
And for the first time in his life,
He didn’t think he could fix this.
_ _ _