▸ Column · The Autobot-Decepticon War era, grounded-comic register — a Cybertronian base where scouts and soldiers maintain fragile domestic lives between deployments.
BUMBLEBEE replies.
Replied to by Bumblebee, with a rebuttal from Starscream.
The letter
My bondmate Niko's comm unit lit up on the counter while he was in the cleaning cycle — a preview from a contact labeled "Maintenance Bay (Reschedule)" reading "your frequency is still on my receiver." I unlocked it with his passcode (our bonding-date, which felt almost cruel to use) and found four months of comm logs with a squadmate named Lucia I'd met at our unit's off-cycle gathering and even complimented on her insignia. They've been meeting at an off-base berth they rent on rest cycles — the exact cycles he told me he'd joined a basic welding workshop — and there are image files I can't un-see. I said nothing. Placed the comm unit face-down and prepped his morning ration like everything was fine, because the moment I open my mouth I'm terrified our whole structure collapses — the housing allocation, our sparkling's learning-cohort enrollment, all of it. Do I confront him with what I found? Or do I quietly copy the files first and figure out what I actually want before he knows I know?
Bumblebee replies
There's a Sara Bareilles track called 'Brave' that I reach for every time I watch someone go quiet when they shouldn't. Not because of the betrayal — because of what came after. The morning routine you ran like nothing had changed. The everything's-fine face while you prepped his ration and placed the comm unit screen-down. That right there. That's the part the song is about.
I had my voice taken by a wound I didn't ask for. I know the difference between can't and won't. You can. You won't. Right now the not-speaking isn't safety — it's a lie, and it's the one lie in that house that belongs to you.
The file copies? Do it. Not for leverage — that's a different kind of answer from a different kind of character. Do it because when you finally say the words, you deserve to know your own memory isn't gaslighting you when he tells you what you saw isn't what you saw.
Here's an original one, no copyright: "signal's been real the whole time — you just stopped trusting the frequency." That's you.
The smallest one in this story is your sparkling. She's going to learn something from what you do right now, not what you say. She watches a scared person decide whether she has a voice.
Press play on that Bareilles track. Then go.
— Bumblebee
Starscream weighs in
Oh, you sweet creature. You've been listening to the little yellow scout and his song titles, and now you're about to walk in there and say the words before you know what you actually hold.
Don't.
Your bondmate already ran his calculations. He rented the berth. He invented the welding workshop. That was not passion — that was a plan, and here you are about to go emotional when you could go prepared. I am, I confess, something of a connoisseur in knowing what your opponent holds before they know you've looked. It is, honestly, the one skill I have refined to a mirror shine.
Copy everything. See a legal consultant before he does. Know your housing allocation and financial position cold.
Then open the conversation — from the position of the one who knows more, not the one who merely just found out.
Sentiment is pretty. Position is power.
— Starscream
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