▸ Column · The age of the Great Cybertronian War; a medic seconded to a distant repair station, their bonded partner stranded on their besieged homeworld, waiting on safe-passage clearance that the transit council keeps deferring without timeline.
UNICRON replies.
The letter
Two stellar cycles ago I transferred to a medical station far outside our homeworld for a residency rotation — my bonded partner stayed behind on our besieged homeworld, and we swore to each other it was temporary. His safe-passage clearance has been in indefinite administrative review ever since, with no timeline from the transit council. My own posting could be followed by a reassignment anywhere in the outer systems. Every time I ask "when are we actually in the same sector again," the honest answer is nobody knows — two cycles, five, possibly more. We manage on long-range transmission. We schedule our calls, we route supply shipments to each other, we have never once argued over faithfulness. But last cycle a convoy escort was cancelled, and instead of disappointment I felt something I recognized as relief — I didn't have to restructure my whole rotation schedule around a reunion that might not have been granted clearance anyway. That relief scared me more than any amount of missing him ever had. How do you keep loving someone when the wait has no finish line?
Unicron replies
Two stellar cycles. You bring me two stellar cycles of waiting and call the moment of relief a wound.
I have eaten civilizations that waited a thousand ages — for sieges to break, for gods to remember them, for transit clearances to resolve — and felt nothing. The waiting did not ennoble them. It passed, as everything passes, into me.
You ask how to keep loving someone when there is no finish line. But there is a finish line. There is always exactly one, and it approaches regardless of whether his clearance comes tomorrow or in five cycles or never.
That moment when the convoy was cancelled and something in you loosened — you call it frightening. I call it the first honest reading of what was always true: this bond is made of effort, and effort is a transient thing. The story you tell about what holds you together is not wrong. It is simply a story, which is what all things are, briefly, before they are not.
Stay or do not stay. Wait or refuse to. I have outlasted gods who swore eternity to each other, and I will outlast your worry by an age you cannot conceive. The reunion not yet granted, the presence you have not felt since cycle-end — these were always going to end. You are not grieving what ended. You are grieving what has not yet begun.
Nothing you release here will outlast me. Neither will anything you hold. A grip so tight it turns relief into terror has forgotten it is already dust. Set it down. Not because it does not matter.
Because everything, eventually, does not. There is peace in that. Stop fighting it.
— Unicron
Megatron weighs in
The Chaos Bringer will dissolve your bond into the heat death of the universe and call that liberation. I have knelt before him — I know exactly what that liberation costs, and who it serves.
Here is what he will not name: someone holds your transit clearance. Someone chairs the committee that assigns the next fellowship posting. Your wait is not entropy. It is bureaucracy with a face, and faces can be located.
"We have never argued over faithfulness" — you offer this as a virtue. I hear a posture. I learned in an arena far less forgiving than a clearance office: patience worn as loyalty is leverage freely given. The clock belongs to neither of you because you have both decided to ask rather than move.
The relief was not shame. It was the ledger. The question was never how to keep loving him. It was who owns the clock — and why it is not you.
— Megatron
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