Bumblebee, how are you holding up? You lost your Sire, found out you had a second one, and got your first Sire back all in a pretty small timeframe. How have you handled that?
I want to make something very clear here. I did not gain another Sire. Orion Pax has not done a fragging thing for me my entire life. The only thing he gives a frag about is Megatron, and he’s shown me that over and over again. If I’m being honest, I really don’t want anything to do with him. He’s a selfish glitch and he’s gross. I mostly deal with him by not dealing with him.
That being said, Optimus was… Complicated. I didn’t understand why it had to be this way. It felt sudden and rash to me for him to just… give himself up like that. It felt like he just abandoned us all when we could have found some other way. I was stuck on this idea that if he’d just… given us some more time, we could have figured something out.
I spent a lot of time thinking about it when I was doing my ambassadorial work on Earth. I was angry at him for a long time, you know? I had so many questions and things I just didn’t understand. Why would he leave me so suddenly? Didn’t he know how much I needed him? Why didn’t he tell any of us the truth? Why did he think Orion Pax could be a substitute for him? Why did he have to die while that selfish aft gets to live out his happily ever after?
But being on Earth, watching my friends, Raf, Jack and Miko grow old and die… I started to kind of get it, at least some of it. Watching them grow old, their bodies slowly start to fail and the life slowly sinking out of their eyes, it reminded me a lot of Optimus towards the end of the war.
I guess I just didn’t notice how bad he was at the end, because there was just so much going on, and he always was… different. I can’t remember there ever being a time when Optimus wasn’t in pain in some way or another. It became routine, and in that, I failed to notice when his own frame began to fail him.
Optimus started to practically fall apart after I killed Megatron. He was lost to his pain more often than he was really with us. He was… dying. Slowly. Right before our optics and only Smokescreen really seemed to notice how bad it was. He tried to tell us. Anyway, seeing the kids go… It helped me understand that Optimus was ready to die, and had been for probably a long time.
He waited for the right time, when his death would mean something. He pushed through more pain than anyone can imagine so that he could use his life to restore our home, and that is a noble act. My anger faded into respect after I finally understood. It was hard. I still missed him, but that feeling kind of faded over time.
Honestly, it was easier back on Earth. Cybertron has his image plastered everywhere. You can’t get away from it. But on Earth, Optimus wasn’t… everywhere. In fact, after just a vorn or so, mentions of him by the humans had largely stopped at all, because all who knew him had simply died. Coming home… it was quite the shock to see him just… everywhere. That's been the hardest part, I think. It's easy to not notice what’s missing when you aren’t being reminded all the time of its absence.
And now, Optimus is back! I won’t lie and say that I’m not happy about it. I am. But now I miss him even more. He’s right there, but scheduling and politics stand in the way of us spending any meaningful time with each other. I still have questions left unanswered. But I also finally have hope that things will get better now. Hopefully my Sire can finally fix some of the problems going on here. I just hope he finds time for me too while he’s doing it.