▸ Column · The Transformers' Cybertron — a war-weary, exiled people rebuilding amid the ruins, where bonds and creations endure across cycles of conflict.
OPTIMUS PRIME replies.
Replied to by Optimus Prime, with a rebuttal from Megatron.
The letter
My bondmate Terrek and I marked our forty-seventh cycle joined last orn, our four creations and nine of theirs crowded into what's left of our district. Partway through, our eldest, Renata, drew me aside and asked outright what kept us whole — not a polished answer, a true one, because her own bond is fraying. So I told her: somewhere around our eleventh cycle, Terrek and I made a quiet, unspoken pact that each of us would assume the other meant well, even when every reading on the panel said otherwise — and we never once renegotiated it, because we never had to. It carried weight we never named aloud: a spark we lost before it kindled, the season our reserves ran dry, the long stretch he took the deep-mine rotation and we passed like ghosts for eight months. Renata's optics dimmed and she said she wished someone had told her sooner. I realized I'd been keeping something I should have spoken decades ago. I have no problem. I am only full of something I cannot name, and I wanted to tell someone who might pass it on.
Optimus Prime replies
You tell me you have no problem, and I believe you. Permit me, then, to simply receive what you carried here — the way I wish someone had once received it from me.
What you and Terrek built in your eleventh cycle was no small trick of partnership. It was a covenant: the decision to assume good faith in another being even when the evidence sits in front of you, arguing the opposite. Understand how rare that is. I have seen what its absence does. There was one I called brother once. We wanted the same world. The orn each of us stopped granting the other that assumption — stopped believing the other meant well — a disagreement became a war, and that war has cost me more names than I can speak aloud. Your quiet pact is the very thing that, broken, makes Megatrons.
So no — you did not hoard a secret too long. You kept faith through loss, through ruin, through eight months of barely seeing the face you loved. Faith kept quiet is still faith. But Renata was right to want it sooner. Say it again. Say it to all four. What you are full of is not nameless — it is the receipt for forty-seven cycles of refusing to look away from each other. Carry it out loud.
— Optimus Prime
Megatron weighs in
How moving. Prime weeps over a treaty and christens it love. Permit the colder reading. Your "assume he means well" endured for one reason: neither of you ever held real power over the other — no throne to seize, no legion to turn. Of course the truce held. It was never tested by the thing that tests everything. And your daughter is not fraying for want of your lovely slogan. Someone in her house holds the leverage and pretends otherwise. Find which of them it is; that is her answer. As for you, Prime — you assumed I "meant well" far longer than was wise. Observe what your faith purchased.
— Megatron
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