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Once, a long time ago, Thundercracker’s home was Rodion. In the grease-stained dormitories of the Jhiaxian University, in the crowded streets and skies (mostly the skies), the haggling vendors, the run-down bars, the whisper-shouts of rallies, the laughter of a still-young prankster.
That home was gone, literally and emotionally, whatever Bumblebee and the colonists were trying. Maybe it could have become home, maybe he could have made it so, if he was as desperate to escape as other cybertronians stuck on alien planets. But he wasn’t.
Somehow, Thundercracker’s home was Earth. In the nitrogen/ozone/carbon whooshing past him in the air, in the tiny organics either trying to boot him off or to defend him, in a thousand intricate model-like cityscapes, in hours upon hours of incomprehensible stories, in a once-warehouse that always had something on the monitor and a pile of mattress on the catwalk, in existential fear that was, again and again, overcome by love.
He didn’t belong. In the day, or in stasis, that never mattered. The impassable distance between him and his new (and it was a sign of how much he’d learnt that that he used the word, and how much couldn’t be learnt, that he hesitated) family could easily be forgotten.
It mattered at night. It mattered in the moments he was unable to not think. It mattered, when he thought of all the history of humankind, of this beautiful vast world that he wanted so badly to be his own, and measured his single lifetime against it.
It was one of the main arguments of technoism.
It mattered little until Buster died.
She’d been unwell for ages (for no time at all), and his famous stubbornness crumbled like feldspar under a pede when he saw her staggering around, not drinking or eating as she should, fading. He begged whoever he could find for help. There weren’t many EDC personnel left around these days, and not many who wanted to help a pet seeker with his pet. But humans could do more than he ever could, and he begged and begged and begged. He didn’t want to hurt her.
He didn’t want to hurt.
It hurt so much.
And Marissa was gentler than he’d ever known her to be, and friends both human and not offered their regards, but they didn’t understand. Cybertronians had no offspring. They didn’t really keep pets. Turbofoxes and retrorats were dangerous vermin, to be exterminated, not loved.
When he’d first crashed on Earth, he’d all but forgotten what innocence meant, what youth meant, what simple affection could even be.
And Buster had taught him.
Humanity hated him, a ‘hero’ if that word meant anything, barely less than they did those actively aiming to destroy them. And he could understand. Just like he could understand Skywarp shooting him, the autobots distrusting him, he could, he could. Buster had never asked him for his understanding. Buster had never asked him for anything but his love. She was something… something new. Something really, truly worth protecting.
And she was gone, and he would never feel that soft discovery of innocence again.
He didn’t get a new dog. Marissa got one instead.
It was sweet, loud and big and scatter-brained, black fur, and it died, too.
Once, Marissa screamed at him to get over himself and move on from grieving Buster, but he could see her fear for him. She knew.
The human world was changing.
It was small changes, one after another, with big ones in between. Bumblebee said that it had something to do with humans’ rate of information creep, that they left behind things of the past, and adopted new ones, then repeated the cycle all over again, in mere years or decades.
Decades.
It had been two decades since he’d met them. Most of the EDC retired. Dr. Bharwaney and Ayana both got married, though not to each other, and had kids. He met them often, called them whenever he thought of it, gave the little ones, who seemed less little every time he looked at them, joyrides.
“Hey. Let’s go on a roadtrip again.”
“Hah! I’m not as young as I used to be, T.C.”
Marissa had changed too. She had age-markings on her skin, silver streaks in her hair. She was well past fifty, that day when they alighted on a mountainside. He asked. She wavered. She wouldn’t live forever. They never knew when they’d be torn apart. He’d already lost so much, I didn’t have anything to lose until I found you, she knew he still ached for Buster. Was he sure? Was he…? And he couldn’t lie, so he spoke the truth, “I’ve never wanted anything so much in my life.”
She was standing further up the slope, while he knelt. He reached out and she took his index finger in both hands, pressing her face to it.
“Okay.” She sounded like she might cry. He was crying, light jumping from his over-bright optics. His insides felt so warm from love, it hurt; it was wonderful.
They had already basically been living together. Little Cybertron was her pride and joy, and over the years his house had accumulated more of her things than her own government apartment. Still, they both pretended that this was new ground, him ‘showing her around’, shifting all their things, planning out new human-size stairs and loft-paths, laughing and smiling at each other as he lifted her so she wouldn’t have to take the ladders.
She lived a good life; a long life; the cracks started to appear around her sixth decade. She forgot what had happened, she remembered what hadn’t; she took longer and longer to wake up and greet him. Sometimes, he feared calling her name in the morning and simply not hearing a response. It didn’t end that way, of course. One day, while she was out meeting some human friends, someone else’s voice called over her comms, hurriedly telling him: she’d had a stroke and was being rushed to the hospital.
The hospital staff ogled at him, and after much pleading arranged a camera system so he could watch his conjux lie tiny and frail, unmoving.
After that…
Well, the forgetting got worse. Once she stopped talking to stare at him for minutes on end, mouth open as she tried to remember his name. His partner, who he loved with every pulse of his spark, and she couldn’t remember his name.
Another decade. Her nineties, and everything got worse, somehow. Her breathing, her memory, her voice.
Dr. Bharwaney had passed away, almost blind, at ninety-two, years before; someone, one of them, had joked of how he wouldn’t be seeing any more of the movies he’d liked hearing Thundercracker babble on about. It shook him to the core, that ‘joke’, but Marissa and Sanjay had only smiled softly. That softness, of understanding or acceptance or something human, had crossed her face more and more these years. She’d always been thoughtful: she had to be, with all her job entailed; but in those last decades thinking became all she did; Thundercracker would lie on his side near her chair and wish he could see every thought spooling through her head.
They’d met when Marissa was twenty-eight – oh, he wished he’d come to Earth sooner, had left the ‘Cons sooner, that he could have known her since she was twenty, ten, the moment she was born!
He felt himself loving her more with every ending day; trying to fit all those waiting millennia of love into a lover who was changing every minute.
Another decade – not to be.
She called out to him, that night. She slept with Thundercracker at her bedside always – that night, she called for him, wordless, quiet, and he gathered her and her coverings up and pressed them against his cheek, like he always did when she called for him; he closed his optics so the light wouldn’t bother her. He held her. All through the night. And, at first light, when he turned them on again, she was cold, breathless, and still.
Time isn’t subjective. An Earth year for a transformer is as long as it is for a human. The difference was in the memory.
A ten-year-old cannot conceive of a sentence lasting a decade. A ninety-eight-year-old has already lived the better part of a century. And a mech who was at war for four million years could have peace for as long as an organic species rises and falls, and still not feel it enough.
After Marissa passed, all Thundercracker did was wander. He saw and he tried to write. Sanjay’s and Ayana’s grandchildren were adults now, their lives similar but different from Thundercracker’s humans’. Talking to them, he was reminded that he was as bad with organic people as he was with his own, just more of a novelty. And the novelty had, well, passed.
Another hundred years went by. Cities built up and up and up, wars were fought between one earthly nation and all the others. Humans from every corner of the galaxy looked on as nuclear war wiped their planet out.
No trace remained of the human and the dog and the half-trashed house that was his home. Not once, not had been, but was and would forever be.
A million years would pass with all of Earth forgotten, and still Thundercracker’s spark would love on.