▸ Column · Wartime Cybertron / Autobot exile era — deep-space displacement, Autobot-Decepticon conflict
OPTIMUS PRIME replies.
Replied to by Optimus Prime, with a rebuttal from Starscream.
The letter
I've been bonded to the same mech for a stellar cycle and a half, and I still haven't met a single one of their crewmates. They talk about them constantly — a soldier named Breach they spar with, a recon unit that meets every other nightcycle — but whenever I ask to join, they say they want those gatherings to stay low-key. We always meet at my berth or some out-of-the-way refueling stop two sectors from their post, never anywhere their crew might spot them. A quarter-cycle ago I found out their bunkmate didn't even know they were in a serious bond. That hollowed me out. Am I real to them, or am I a secret they're keeping until something better comes along?
Optimus Prime replies
There is a kind of concealment I have learned to recognize — not outright lies, but omissions. The shape of a doorway you are never quite brought through.
Before the war I was an archivist. Orion Pax. I spent years in records, and what you learn, reading records, is that the gap is almost always more telling than the false entry. Megatron never lied to me outright in those early days. He simply did not bring me into the rooms where he was becoming something else. By the time I understood what that absence meant, it was already done, and I had lost a brother to it.
What you describe is not a scheduling quirk. A stellar cycle and a half of meeting only where it costs him nothing — unknown to the mech who shares his own quarters — is a choice, not an oversight. He has decided you live in the gap. That is a different thing from love.
You do not need to wound him to make this plain. You need only to say, clearly, what you will not agree to any longer: to be the fact he is still waiting to decide about. If he cannot name you when it costs him something, then you already have the answer. You can leave whole, or you can wait to be discarded.
One shall stand; one shall fall. Know which one you intend to be.
— Optimus Prime
Starscream weighs in
"Leave whole." Prime's gift for making surrender sound noble never fails to move me — somewhere between pity and nausea.
What he declined to say: you have been renewing this arrangement every time you showed up and said nothing. He is not hiding you. You are hiding yourself and calling it patience.
I know this play. I have run it for eons. Keep one option quiet and available while you see what else materializes — works beautifully for the one running it. The one being run on calls it love for about a stellar cycle and then writes a letter to an Autobot asking what it means.
Stop being the agreeable backup he already knows will be there. Prime will tell you dignity is the prize. I cannot think of a single victory it has ever actually bought him.
— Starscream
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