▸ Column · Cybertron civilian population under Megatron's dominion; lower neutral sectors during the Cybertronian war era
MEGATRON replies.
Replied to by Megatron, with a rebuttal from Harley Quinn.
The letter
My bond-mate and I spent three stellar cycles pooling energon credits toward a permanent residential berth in the lower neutral sectors — real quarters of our own, not shared bunks in a processing hall. Last month I accessed our joint cache to transfer it to a higher-yield holding account and found the balance eleven thousand credits short of what our shared ledger said it should be. He admitted he'd been making off-ledger withdrawals to cover a secondary credit line he opened without telling me two cycles ago — mostly circuit-racing weekends with his old Academy cohort and an expensive chassis modification he admitted I would have called wasteful. He cried. He apologized. He says the debt is cleared. But I keep thinking about every time he told me we were "right on track," and I feel like I'm bond-mated to a stranger. I love him, and I don't think this ends us. I just don't know how to rebuild financial trust when I can't even identify what honest looks like from him anymore.
Megatron replies
You have already made your decision. You love him — you wrote that in the third paragraph and then asked me a question that assumes the answer. So: the decision to stay is made. What you are actually asking is how to stop feeling exposed inside an arrangement that has already proven unsafe. That is the correct question, and it is the only one I will address.
Here is what the ledger actually shows. Your bond-mate looked at your shared account, calculated that you would refuse if asked, and spent the credits anyway — then maintained the concealment across two orbital cycles. This is not a failure of discipline. It is a working system he operated alongside yours. The apology arrives now because the system failed, not because his calculation changed. If the secondary line had stayed solvent, you would still not know.
I keep a lieutenant who betrays me on a schedule I could nearly set a chronometer by. I do not trust him. I structure around him — I leave nothing he could exploit where he can access it unsupervised. Apply that to a being you love: the affection does not change the legibility. Separate what you control from what you share. Attach both designations to every credit line in existence. Build automatic shared reporting on any new debt instrument either of you opens. Do not appeal for transparency. Make opacity structurally impossible.
That is what choosing to stay actually looks like.
— Megatron
Harley Quinn weighs in
Metal Head's not wrong about the mechanics — lock down the accounts, build the shared reporting, great advice for a warlord.
But here's what's actually screaming at me from this letter, cupcake, 'cause I got a doctorate and I hate to waste it: "he knew you'd say no, so he didn't ask." That's not a budgeting failure. That's your no not counting. He ran the whole conversation in his head, decided your objection was wrong, and spent two years making sure you never got to make it in person. I have some, uh, personal experience with somebody who loved me VERY MUCH and kept deciding things for both of us. The money was never the problem. The part where my answer didn't count — that was. That's what you're actually living with here, hon. The spreadsheet fix doesn't touch it.
— Harley Quinn