▸ Column · Autobot exile after the fall of Cybertron — a bonded pair among the war's survivors, marking forty-seven cycles together.
OPTIMUS PRIME replies.
Replied to by Optimus Prime, with a rebuttal from Megatron.
The letter
I'm not writing for counsel — only to set something down where it might matter. My bondmate Roland and I marked our forty-seventh cycle together this past rest-day, surrounded by the three we raised and the seven small ones who came after, all crowded around one battered table in what passes for a yard out here. One of the young ones — eleven cycles old and grave about everything — drew me aside and asked me, straight out, what the secret was. So I told her the truth: that Roland and I made one rule and never broke it — we never let a disagreement become about winning, because the bond will always matter more than the argument. And that every single morning, before either of us answers a summons or steps through the door into the day's work, we say one genuinely kind thing to each other. She wrote it in the little notebook she carries everywhere. I cried into my drink. It felt too good to keep entirely to myself.
Optimus Prime replies
You did not write for counsel, and I will not insult you by inventing some. I write back only because you handed an eleven-cycle-old, over a glass of lemonade, the lesson it cost me a war to learn.
Never let the disagreement become about winning. Say that to me again. There was someone I once called brother. We wanted the same thing — an end to a cruelty that ground beings like us into the dirt. And the day our argument became about who would stand and who would fall, we lost everything the argument had been meant to protect. He is Megatron now. I am the one who buried the friends that quarrel killed. "One shall stand. One shall fall." I have spoken those words on a battlefield. I would trade every utterance of them for forty-seven cycles at a battered table.
So understand what you hold. You and Roland refused, every single morning, the exact bargain that turned my brother into my enemy. The kind word before the door is not a small thing — it is the whole of it. Keep weeping into your drink. Your granddaughter wrote down the only victory I have ever believed was worth the winning.
— Optimus Prime
Megatron weighs in
Optimus weeps into a stranger's lemonade. Predictable. Let me tell the child what her grandmother omitted. Forty-seven cycles, and not one disagreement permitted to be "about winning" — which means that in every disagreement, someone had already agreed, in advance, to lose, and trained themselves to call the losing devotion. The kind word before the door is a tax, little one. It purchases quiet. One of that pair is the strong one, and the bond endures precisely because the other never once tested it. That is not a secret. It is a settlement. My brother calls it the only victory worth winning because, in all his grieving, he has never managed to win anything else.
— Megatron
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