▸ Column · Cybertron — height of the Decepticon era, the great city-state of Iacon
MEGATRON replies.
Replied to by Megatron, with a rebuttal from Starscream.
The letter
Rivet and I split up six weeks ago. We're still locked into a shanix-debt contract on our shared Iacon unit through next orbital cycle, and neither of us can cover the full allotment alone — breaking it early costs something like four thousand credits, which neither of us has. So now we're roommates who used to be bonded. I sleep in the back chamber. Rivet's on a recharge slab in the main room. We've got a duty roster stuck to the energon processor like none of it happened.
Last week he brought someone back. I sat in my chamber listening to them through the wall and I genuinely thought I was going to lose every one of my circuits. We split rations to the last credit on a shared datapad. We say "acknowledged" when we pass in the corridor. We treat each other like furniture.
Honestly — how do I survive eight more months of this? I can't go anywhere else, I can't afford to buy out the contract, and I can't stop thinking about the fact that he's right there, on the other side of a wall.
— Locked in Iacon
Megatron replies
Let me point out what you appear not to have noticed. You have the chamber. He has the slab. He brought someone home, and you listened through a wall — from your own room, with a door between you. Consider carefully who is actually losing here.
The chore chart. Look at the object, not the sentiment attached to it. You have posted a fiction of fairness on a wall inside a space you already control, and invited him to believe he is an equal party. He is not. You hold the room. The split rations, the corridor acknowledgments, the shared datapad — you are extending courtesies downward and calling it suffering.
I was bound by an order that declared I was owed nothing, that the system simply was. I did not petition it for fairness. I took position.
Stop administering a partnership that ended. He chose the slab — let it be a slab. Remove your name from the shared accounting, or keep it and let it serve you, not him. You are not trapped in this arrangement. You are honoring it out of what I can only describe as habit.
I keep a lieutenant who has betrayed me more times than I have patience to count. I keep him knowing exactly what he is, with nothing owed and nothing pretended. Know what you hold. That is the entirety of what I have to offer you.
— Megatron
Starscream weighs in
Oh, spare me the gladiator's throne-speech. He brought a date home and you sat there listening — that wasn't YOUR weakness on display, that was a deliberate provocation, and Megatron is so obsessed with power structures he missed the obvious point. The correct response is to make him leave. I have fourteen variations of the scheme — make staying costlier than going, let the social circuit know who brought company home first, poison the shared arrangements carefully. Delicious. Also the reason I am still, after all these eons, the one on the proverbial slab. Schemes collapse when they meet real resistance. The move that actually works — and I find this genuinely difficult to say — is being the one who doesn't need him to go. Walk past the next date. Don't flinch. Let him be the one listening through a wall. I cannot do that. But you might.
— Starscream
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