▸ Column · Autobot wartime exile — a field medic stationed on a remote forward post, separated from their partner by indefinite refugee-sector transfer clearance with no projected reunion date
OPTIMUS PRIME replies.
Replied to by Optimus Prime, with a rebuttal from Starscream.
The letter
Fourteen months ago I was assigned to a forward post far from home — essential work, both of us understood, and temporary, or so we told each other. My partner is still back in the refugee sector, waiting on a transfer clearance that has been "under review" with no projected date. My rotation could send me to any theater after this, and every time I ask when we'll actually share quarters again, nobody has a real answer. Could be a cycle, could be much longer. Our comm-windows are consistent. We've never had a loyalty problem. But last week I caught myself genuinely relieved when an escort mission got pulled off my schedule — because it meant I didn't have to reorganize my rotation around someone I haven't been physically near since before the last cease-fire. That feeling frightened me in a way the ordinary longing never had. How do you stay in love with someone when there's no end of the waiting to aim yourself at?
Optimus Prime replies
Before the war I was an archivist named Orion Pax. I had a life planned that the fighting remade without asking. I know what distance does to a person — what it looks like when you stop bracing for an absence and start living inside it instead. The relief you felt is not failure. It is what happens when a mind learns to function in the shape of a wound rather than against it.
Here is what needs to be named. Consider who your partner is organizing their life around right now. A version of you from fourteen months ago, before the adaptation. They are holding still for a shape you have quietly moved out of, and that is a cruelty without intention — the worst kind, because neither person names it until it has done its work in the dark.
Tell them. Not the polished version — the actual one. The relief. What the relief scared you into thinking. I won't pretend that telling them shortens the wait or moves the clearance. It won't. But they are owed the person who is actually on the other end of the line, not the one frozen in place for their benefit.
I have waited long enough to go home to know that "under review" sometimes means never. I will not sell you comfort I don't have. What I can tell you is that silence about a shift like this does more damage than the shift itself, and it always compounds further than anyone expects before they're willing to name it.
— Optimus Prime
Starscream weighs in
Oh, Prime. Always so convinced that suffering proves something.
The relief is not a confession to make. It is the diagnosis. Your mind has done the sensible thing and learned to belong to itself again, and now everyone expects you to feel guilty — extremely convenient for the absent party, very costly for you. I spent eons waiting for Megatron to recognize what I was worth. He never reorganized his priorities around my preferred schedule — staggering, I know — and I am, technically, still waiting, a fact I choose not to examine.
Prime says carry the weight honestly. I say: live in the life you have actually built, and see whether the relationship can meet you there when the clearance moves — if it moves.
I have severed every alliance that inconvenienced me. I am entirely alone, which does suggest my method carries certain costs I — look, it is still better counsel than his.
— Starscream
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