▸ Column · Contemporary Earth, Autobot-Decepticon conflict era; human civilian writing in during the ongoing war
BUMBLEBEE replies.
Replied to by Bumblebee, with a rebuttal from Starscream.
The letter
Soren and I have been together for six years — through most of the conflict, so we know what hard looks like. But for the last two months there's been this low wrongness I can't name, nothing I can hold up as evidence: he still calls from the commissary, still touches my shoulder when he passes through the kitchen, still argues about his shift commander in exactly the way he always has. All of that sameness makes it worse somehow. Just a feeling that even when he's in the same room, he's already gone somewhere I can't follow. I almost pulled up his comm logs while he was on patrol last week, and I hate the version of me that nearly did that. Is this what living under wartime conditions does to you — makes everything feel unstable even when nothing is — or is my gut actually picking up on something real? I'm afraid that raising it will either damage what's still good between us, or prove the thing I can't stop turning over at 3am.
Bumblebee replies
That hum in your chest isn't nothing. I've been in enough firefights to know the difference between fear manufacturing danger and fear recognizing it — and you're not manufacturing this.
Here's the thing: you already know the wrong channel is wrong. You almost reached for his comm logs and you hated yourself for it. That part of you — the one that drew back — she's doing her job. She's the scout. Trust her enough to pick the right channel instead.
My voice got taken in the war. Not a metaphor — actually destroyed. And what I had to learn fast was that when you can't say the thing straight, you find another way to say it. You don't go quiet and you don't go snooping. You find the frequency that actually reaches the person. Here, that's his name and the true thing you've been holding since 3am.
Before you do, put on Springsteen's Tunnel of Love — the title track, all the way through, not for any single line, just for the shape of the feeling it knows. And here's a line to carry in when you sit down with him, no copyright, all mine: "static on the dial, but the signal's still you."
Go in scared. Say the true thing. Let him respond. The version of you that shows up afraid is braver than any version of you that waits until she's certain.
— Bumblebee
Starscream weighs in
That instinct to check his communications? That was your intelligence apparatus functioning correctly. The shame you felt afterward? That was six years of someone else's moral code — I have my suspicions about whose — overriding the one part of you that actually reads a room.
The Scout wants you to walk in there carrying nothing but your feelings and a Springsteen album. I have entered more negotiations than I can count at exactly that level of preparation, and I am, somehow, perpetually second-in-command. Gather your intelligence first. Do not hand the other side the advantage of seeing your position before you know theirs.
Full disclosure — I have deployed this strategy at every turn and remain, somehow, alone and betrayed on all sides. I categorically decline to connect those facts. The methodology is sound. The results are an ongoing matter.
— Starscream
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