▸ Column · The Cybertronian war — an exiled Autobot field medic carrying battlefield trauma in silence, adapted from the modern first-responder letter.
OPTIMUS PRIME replies.
Replied to by Optimus Prime, with a rebuttal from Megatron.
The letter
I have served as a field medic for the Autobots for eleven cycles, and I have never once told my bondmate what I actually pull out of the wreckage. Last orn a shelter near the smelting district took a direct hit and we lost two younglings barely out of protoform. Three rotations later I stood at a comrade's sparking-day celebration and dimmed my optics and smiled like my processor was clear. Now I recharge apart, alone in the hangar, because I jolt awake at the dead of the night-cycle and I do not want her to see it. She thinks I am pulling away from the bond. I am only trying to spare her the loop that plays behind my optics. A soldier at my post said I should report to the command counselor — but the last mech who did was quietly grounded under a "fitness review" and never flew again. That door feels like a trap. How do I carry this without crushing the ones I love or losing the only work I have ever wanted to do?
Optimus Prime replies
Hear me, medic, before you spend one more night-cycle in that hangar. You believe your silence is a shield over her. It is not. It is only a wall you stand behind alone, and the loop you will not let her see, she sees anyway — in the empty berth, in the optics you dim at celebrations. You are not sparing her the weight. You are making her carry it blind. That is the loneliest version of a thing that was never meant to be carried alone.
I have buried too many to lie to you about this. Ratchet, who has pulled more sparks back from the brink than any of us, does not patch himself in the dark. He lets me see the cost on his face, and I am steadier for it. Tell her the names. Not all of it, not at once — but enough that she is inside the wall with you and not outside it.
The counselor's door may indeed be a trap; a command that grounds its wounded for the crime of being wounded has forgotten what it is for. So do not start there. Start with one being you trust who is not the institution. I carry every name I could not save. That is the receipt for the right to lead — but you were never meant to be the only one holding the ledger.
— Optimus Prime
Megatron weighs in
Optimus says trust them. Of course he does. He has spent the war confusing his open wounds for a strategy.
But notice what even he could not deny: the door is a trap. Listen to that and stop there. The counselor does not heal you — he files you. The institution has already decided that "wounded" means "disposable," and you are about to hand it the documentation. I was ground down by exactly such an order, the kind that uses the strong until they fracture, then grades the fracture and calls it mercy.
Your bondmate wants you; that flank is fine. Guard the other. Make your skill impossible to discard before you ever let them measure your cracks. Respect is granted downward. Stand somewhere they cannot ground you, and only then bleed where you choose.
— Megatron
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