▸ Column · Cybertronian War Era — advice column circulating among Autobot-aligned communities during the extended Earth deployment, when exiled Cybertronians have mapped human domestic concepts (lease agreements, apartments, thermostats) onto their own structures (dual-berth habitation pods, energon maintenance costs, thermal regulators, charging bays).
OPTIMUS PRIME replies.
Replied to by Optimus Prime, with a rebuttal from Starscream.
The letter
Iravex found a dual-berth habitation pod in Iacon's eastern district — its own energon processing bay, lease beginning next quarter — and she has already mentally assigned me the secondary charging bay by the viewport. We have been bonded for fourteen cycles and I love her. But the last time I shared a unit, with Seftron during my academy rotation, I lost track of where his systems ended and mine began, and I did not recover my own resonance frequency until long after we severed the bond. Iravex reads my hesitation as an energon-allocation problem, and I let her, because "I am afraid of losing myself in the merge again" sounds irrational next to a shared maintenance ledger. What I actually want is to keep my own berth-unit for at least another full cycle. But every time I try to say that, she goes quiet and starts telling me what her creators think about us "running separate spark signatures." How do I tell someone I am certain about that I am not ready to share a thermal regulator with her?
Optimus Prime replies
The fear you are describing is not an energon problem. You know that. You have been letting her call it one because the real name — the way Seftron's edges blurred into yours until you could not find yourself anymore — sounds too large and too strange to fit in the same sentence as a habitation lease. But letting her believe the wrong thing about you is a cost, and I have learned what unpaid truths do to the people who carry them.
Before the war made me what I am, I was an archivist named Orion Pax. There was a shape to that life — a wholeness, a solitude, a quietness I valued — that the Matrix and the war did not ask permission to take. I never recovered Orion Pax. I carry that loss alongside every other name I failed to protect, and I am not saying this so you will feel sorry for me. I am saying it because you have something I did not: the choice.
You can name what you actually need. You can tell Iravex that the last merge cost you something real, and that what you are asking for — one more cycle in your own berth — is not a verdict on her or on what you are together. It is the only honest foundation a genuine bond can stand on: her knowing exactly what she is choosing when she chooses you.
You are afraid of disappearing again. Tell her that. A bond that cannot hold that sentence is not as certain as you believed. A bond that can hold it is worth finding out.
— Optimus Prime
Starscream weighs in
Oh, Optimus. Brave. Sincere. Spectacularly useless.
The authority on this subject is obviously me — I am the galaxy's foremost practitioner of maintaining your own position and never quite committing, for reasons that have always been entirely strategic.
Iravex has already assigned the charging bay. She has deployed her creators on schedule. This is not hesitation she is meeting — it is an acquisition campaign she is running, and Optimus wants you to disarm and hand her the real reason. I know this gambit. Megatron has run it on me a dozen times.
Keep the energon-cost excuse. Hold your berth. Maintain your individual spark signal. You are not obligated to surrender leverage you cannot retrieve.
I offer this with complete confidence in its logic.
I also offer it from my personal quarters aboard a command vessel I will never actually command, having maintained every exit I ever had, trusted no one, committed to nothing, and remained — brilliantly, perfectly, strategically — alone.
Your situation is surely different.
— Starscream
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