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The war ends on a random Tuesday. Bumblebee hadn’t bothered to pay attention to dates in those last months. But he spots it on the waiting screen of a Nemesis hall monitor hours later and suddenly the world crashes down around his audials, bringing with it the surreality that is Tuesday.
"Actually," Raf says when he tells him, "You were way over the Pacific when it happened. So it was probably Wednesday. It will be Wednesday here too, soon. If you wanted to celebrate.”
Inexplicably, Bumblebee begins to cry.
They’ll leave in a day, they decide. Or rather, the others decide. Bumblebee doesn’t say much of anything at all when it's being discussed, other than a half-hearted (and it shouldn’t be, he is happy) enthusiasm for returning home. Only, when he’d said it, he’d realized he isn’t quite sure where home is.
He onlined in Praxus, he is sure of that. Except there hadn’t been much of Praxus left. He remembers rubble and Autobot training camps and some of the older soldiers stationed there upon request, so as to stay home for as long as the war would allow.
There was one mech, Slider or Slide-something, who had taught Bumblebee the Praxian names of all the landmarks, but Bumblebee had never been very good at it. The landmarks were all bits and pieces of rubble, and it's hard to tell a library from a courthouse when all that’s left are the walls.
The older mechs had stayed in Praxus to avoid being homesick, only they complained about being homesick every night anyway. At the time Bumblebee had thought it kind of bizarre. They were home, as home as anyone could be, and a thousand years later they would either be dead or lost in space but for now they were there among their burned out apartments and broken landmarks. And still they were homesick.
There were sparks floating up from the Praxan fields still, back then, and there were medics stationed there to harvest them up between bombardments and shove them into bodies. Not Proper Newspark bodies, they’d complain, because Proper Newspark bodies would crumple like organic paper - Bumblebee had not known what paper was - during any sort of altercation. So the sparks and Bumblebee along with them got brand new frames made from melted down old frames, which the medics had insisted was just the cycle of life and not something he should think about.
Anyway, he’d floated up and gotten a blank body and stared oddly at the grumpy medic above him - the medic had been green, a relaxing color, but the lines around his optics were not relaxing at all. And Bumblebee had stared up at him with the bewilderment of being alive, and then a mech over the medic’s shoulder had said:
“I’m so slagging homesick, mech. Don’t you have anything for me? I’m walking in a carcass.”
Bumblebee feels that way now, when he thinks about going back to Cybertron. But the feeling sits in the backseat and does little more than kick the driver’s seat, where some other emotion is sitting and driving him towards saying nothing at all.
So Bumblebee hasn’t said much. He’s talked a lot - and isn’t that something, a voice - but he hasn’t said anything. Which is a shame, because there is a lot he needs to say.
Like “I’m sorry,” and “I love you,” and “I don’t know how often I can visit,” and “I don’t really know what I’ll do.”
And Like “Maybe we should slow down,” and “what about my stuff?” and “I don’t feel comfortable in this room,” and “Slow Down.”
He has a room on the Nemesis now, which is sudden. He’ll need to use it soon. He’s supposed to be carrying his stuff from the Base to the Nemesis, not that he has any stuff. It got blown to bits a month previous. He has Raf, and the Star Saber (which he gives back to Optimus, so not really), and he has a functioning voicebox and a cool rock Raf had found. So moving in doesn’t take long. Raf can’t come, his voicebox goes wherever he does, and the rock takes a single trip.
“You could take some videogames?” Raf suggests. “And download lots of music and movies so you don’t get bored.”
It is 11am on a random Wednesday, the very same random Wednesday when Bumblebee pushed a sword through Megatron’s chest. He tells Raf to download the whole internet and his own consciousness to a datachip, like in The Outer Limits. Raf laughs at that, but sets about designing the perfect Earth Entertainment set. Bumblebee goes off to the Nemesis.
He deposits the boulder in an empty room that had not been empty a few hours prior. He knows it had not been, because there is stuff in his room. There are bunk beds in the room. He has bunk beds. He’s always wanted bunk beds, ever since he saw them in an Earth infomercial. Only $299.99! He does not want some pair of vehicons’ bunk beds. They are out of his budget, he thinks rather hysterically.
“Just take them apart and push them into one big bed,” Arcee instructs, showing him her own massive berth. It takes up nearly the entire room. Bumblebee does not want to do this, so he puts the boulder on the bottom bunk and removes the datapad and pillow from the top bunk - he doesn’t want some other mech’s pillow - and tells himself that reality is usually a lot less charming than an infomercial. Anyway, he doesn’t need to sleep on it for another night.
Random Wednesdays pass quickly. Bumblebee had never noticed that before. It’s odd, because he’s filled it so completely that it should feel like eons. And it does feel like eons too. If the Tuesday that was Wednesday is a split in time, then he’d shoved a sword through Megatron’s spark eons ago, and today was a second ago.
Bumblebee doesn't know how he's feeling, or why. It's not something he's ever learned how to know. Except for guilt, he had lots of training on guilt. And fear, too, but it's neither of those. Anger is as close as he can get, but he has nothing to be angry about. So instead he tries to apply the training he’d learned on whatever mysterious emotion this is. The issue is that the pamphlets and group meetings and the scout team mandated discussion sessions always seemed to start with identifying your emotions before you can put them in the nice little box in the corner. So Bumblebee settles for rounding everything clouding his processor up with a lasso like a rodeo cowboy and then shoving it all down into a box, but the box is too small and the lid won’t fit and he feels as though perhaps he’s taken too much - his processor is left dull for the quick moment before the fog slips back out from the the box’s seams.
It almost feels like it had when Megatron had invaded his mind. That thought is terrifying enough that he’s made it all the way to the Medbay before he realizes it can’t be true, and another four minutes or so for his plating to fall back in place and his battle systems to relax. His spark aches in his chest in an uncomfortable way. He finds Ratchet in his lab deep in the Base and almost tells him, but Ratchet has his servos on his hips and is surveying the space with a look of deep contemplation, and Bumblebee suddenly feels terribly overwhelmed.
They’ll be gone tomorrow.
Raf stays with him when the sun goes down. They play games that Bumblebee allows himself to be sucked into and then regrets afterwards, when reality bubbles up and over his shoulders once more. Time has passed, and passed, and passed, quick like a dirt devil.
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” admits Raf, clutching the side of Bumblebee’s helm. They are moving to Bee’s berthroom. The last night in his berthroom. Raf yawns. “We’ve been up for over a day, and I won’t remember the night even if I stay awake.”
Bumblebee can hardly remember anything at all. “We can wake up early tomorrow,” he suggests. “Before the others.”
Raf agrees to this plan, so Bumblebee sets him on the tiny cot the government had provided in the room’s corner. Raf falls asleep soon after, but not before murmuring “you’re going home” in a tired and awed voice. “Me too. We’re going home”.
Bumblebee is returning to Cybertron. He’s suddenly aware that that may not be home.
The medics in Praxus had ‘medicine’ for the homesickness. At the time, Bumblebee hadn’t thought much about it. After he’d come to Earth and gained access to the beautiful art that is PrimeTime television, he’d realized that ‘medicine’ was probably a mix of chemical relaxants and painkillers, of which half the mechs on Praxus were addicted. Or not addicted, but in desperate need of.
In the medic’s defense, 50,000 soldiers meandering about the remains of their long-lost homes and forced to fight a brutal and endless war are not the ideal patient base. They had needed the soldiers alive. Bumblebee can see the harm reduction, the thought process behind supplying something to ease reality. Reality is acting up on him now. He can see the need.
In that way, it might have been better to be born when he had. The Newsparks had known nothing but war, and therefore were not intimidated by it. The Newsparks had bodies originally designed for war, and therefore were prepared for it. The Newsparks had only known a broken Praxus, and therefore had their own, standing landmarks.
Bumblebee knows the names of these landmarks, and could identify them too. Maybe that is home, he thinks. The RustMaker (a mangled warehouse teeming with infectious rust where the army stored excess energon), Lullabye Ridge (where there had not been a ravine before, now was one, down the center of Yellowhelm lane), the Sharkticon (a big shark-shaped rock on the edge of the city, where one of the crystal gardens had used to be). He had played in those places and trained in those places. That could be home, and he calms himself with that thought enough to sleep.
That is, until he wakes up early and takes Raf over to the roof of the main meeting hall and overhears that Optimus and Ratchet had both awoken early too, and they are discussing plans to use Shockwave’s Cyberforming technology.
“With the recharge rates and time required to restock the materials, how long would you estimate it will take to repair all of Cybertron?” Optimus asks.
And there goes Bumblebee’s Praxus. It’s too bad the med-addicted homesick soldiers are all dead. Probably. They’d have loved this.
The unnamed something in the driver’s seat hits his horn, and to his great mortification the metaphor slips its leash and bursts into reality in the form of a loud honk. Raf, previously distracted by the sunrise and unconcerned with whatever Optimus and Ratchet might be discussing, blinks up at him in stunned silence. Bumblebee apologizes.
“Oi, Bumblebee, get off the roof!” shouts Ratchet. “What have I told you about playing the monkey? The roof’ll cave in and I’m not paying for it.”
“You don’t pay for anything!” Raf shouts back. “You don’t have money.” Bumblebee always lets Raf handle these situations, since Ratchet has no wrenches small enough to chuck at a human. And Raf is always there to jump in front of the Ratchet bullet for him. For another six hours, anyway.
The sun has risen. It is a random Thursday sun and it makes the clouds pink like energon. Raf and Ratchet argue until Raf begins the slow climb down - the human route, which Bumblebee carefully monitors. Raf has no qualms with missing another sunrise, but Bumblebee does. He doesn’t know what sunrises look like on Cybertron.
In Praxus they had been hard to see. The continuous bombardments kicked up dust that blocked the light, and the days when neither force cared enough to bomb the fights in the cities upwind and in the Sea of Rust created storms of dirt that covered the skies. Other days would be raid warnings, when the older Lieutenants would round everyone up and take them downstairs and they’d spend a week at a time training underground while seekers rained hell from above. On the rare clear and free day, there was always training, or mission prep, or even the occasional mission.
Bumblebee loved missions. They were a chance to escape Praxus. They were also a chance to meet Megatron, and your maker, and the inside of a med-bay, and then even Optimus Prime, hovering over your med-berth.
Bumblebee had stared up at him with the bewilderment of being alive, and then a medic had peered over from the other side and said:
“Well, kid, you’re alive. That’s the best I can get ya.”
And it was, in the end, the best he could get.
Ratchet and Raf fall into some discussion Bumblebee can’t quite understand, though he knows it pertains to space travel and interplanetary communication. Neither seem particularly anxious or upset, so he assumes it isn’t something he needs to be worried about. They aren’t excited, either, so Bumblebee also assumes that communication will be as limited tomorrow as it was yesterday. Bumblebee leaves them to it.
There are no chairs in the main meeting room. It isn’t the medbay, either, so there are no berths. It is just tarmac with the landing lines erased. Optimus stands by the monitor they’d hap-hazardly attached to the silo wall and does nothing. Bumblebee knows he is doing nothing because the screen is black, and because Bumblebee has been trained in the practice of nothingness.
Scouting is not spywork. A scout is sent to understand a battlefield, to determine the extent of the enemy’s holdings, or to identify a trap. There are few instances when Bumblebee has had to remain still and silent. But there have been instances.
Once, out of Praxus, he and six other scouts were dropped in a circle around the Decepticon holding of Trypticon. The assignment had been straight forward enough - locate an entrance for a ground assault. Bumblebee had found an entrance, but not one suitable for more than a mech his size, crawling about in the crystal shards that used to be the Fields Park. Immediately after his discovery had been made, the Fields Park was invaded by three seekers who jumped on each other and tussled and took turns flying about and catching eachother. It looked like fun, a lot more fun than Bumblebee was having in the entrance to the waste vent.
So stillness is a skill every scout is taught. And Optimus is being still. Too still for a mech about to go home in victory.
Bumblebee goes to the blank monitor and leans against the side and waits for Optimus to acknowledge him. It doesn’t take long.
“You two are up early,” Optimus comments. “Is something wrong?”
Bumblebee shrugs, still unable to identify the beast in the driver’s seat. It’s not him; he’s not sure it's even his. It is a something that belongs to someone else, and he does not want to talk about it.
Optimus removes his attention from the useless monitor and turns it onto Bumblebee. The intensity of it makes Bumblebee want to squirm, and the urge worsens when Optimus brings his servo up to rest on his shoulder..
“This is a difficult time,” Optimus says, voice sorrowful like it had been when he’d stood over Bumblebee’s med-berth and told him his voice had been taken. “We must give ourselves time to grieve-”
Anger reaches from the passenger seat, wrests control away from the something, and sets him head first into a wall “Grieve,” he repeats. “Is that what this is? Is this why we are running away? You never wanted to let him go.”
“We are not running away,” Optimus says. “We are running home.”
“I’m not,” Bumblebee says, anger boiling down into some sadder thing. The something else has the wheel again. “No-one’s going home.”
Optimus looks at him for a long time, long enough that Bumblebee considers turning around and leaving. And then he says “No, I suppose we are not. We are going on to the next thing."
“I didn’t even want to kill him,” Bumblebee admits. “You were supposed to do it. Why didn’t you just do it?”
“It happened quickly,” Optimus says.
“Longer than my lifetime,” Bumblebee replies. “Longer than my whole lifetime.” And now it is Optimus’s turn not to have anything to say.
There is a fusion cannon hole in Bumblebee’s chest and he doesn’t know how to fill it. That’s what he is thinking, when the groundbridge swirls around him. Raf had failed at downloading his consciousness to a datachip, so instead Bumblebee carries around a drive filled with an assortment of Earth entertainment. No amount of Hollywood big action movies will make a friend.
Before he’d left, Raf had sat on his shoulder and whispered in his audial. “I have to admit something to you,” he’d said. “I hope you don’t get mad.”
Bumblebee hadn’t been able to nod with Raf so close. But Raf had gotten the message anyway. He’d continued:
“I am glad the war ended and you are going back to Cybertron. I’d thought maybe it would go on forever, and then I would die, and you would have to go to my funeral. So I’m glad you are leaving. It would have been better if you’d stayed a little longer, but I’m glad you’ll be gone.”
“I’ll come back,” Bumblebee tells him.
“Before the funeral or after,” Raf orders. “Don’t come during. I don’t want you to grieve.”
Grief, Bumblebee had thought. That’s what the something is. It will fade away like all grief eventually does. Except now, following Optimus through a bridge and onto a ship he’d almost single handedly commandeered, he doesn’t think that’s it. Grief and anger, anger and grief. And the something else.
"So," Arcee says with a grand smile. Bumblebee, childishly, hates it. "To the space bridge controls?"
"Yes, take Bulkhead and Wheeljack, they can work the controls" replies Optimus. The three of them head off to the command center. "Ultra Magnus," Optimus says. "Will you visit the prisoners and inform them of our movement?"
"Yes sir." Ultra Magnus departs. And then there were three.
"Should I go back for interrogations, sir?" Asks Smokescreen, as enthusiastic as ever. "Or pilot the Nemesis through the bridge - I've been learning."
Optimus shakes his helm. "I want you and Bumblebee to come with me," he says. So they do.
The ship begins to move as they walk. Bumblebee almost doesn't notice it behind Smokescreen's chatter. It accelerates slowly, as any ship of this size must, but the engines vibrate the floors almost imperceptibly, and Bumblebee's processor informs him of an approximate speed. By the time they make it up to the frontal flight decks, the Nemesis has pushed steadily up and on to the spacebridge. It swirls to life in front of them.
Optimus sits down in the center of the deck. "Magnetize your hands," he tells them. With hands and pedes magnetized, Bumblebee can keep himself in the awkward sit that Optimus has decided upon. The trick, he learns, is to keep his servos near his aft to prevent floating.
The trip through the spacebridge is impressive and completely routine all at once. It is the same as any groundbridge, only tinged with the sort of expected greatness of any event of such importance. Bumblebee supposes that a trip down a metal slide could become this momentous if accompanied by the understanding that the slide down would be documented for millions of years in history textbooks. Bumblebee takes a photograph, just in case.
"The last time either of you could have seen Cybertron from above would have been while fleeing," Optimus says as the Nemesis breaches the other side. "I thought that you may want to see it now."
The Nemesis turns, slow and wide, and Cybertron comes into view. It is below them and to the left with this orientation, and it is also difficult to see. It is dark, as of course it would be. But it reflects light from the star behind them and so is visible enough to inspect, a little like the moon from the Earth.
"Wow," whispers Smokescreen. "I didn't even get to see it from above before. I was already in stasis lock." then "What is that splotch?"
"That is the Sea of Rust," Optimus says.
Bumblebee has been in the Sea of Rust. He'd been sent there to find a Decepticon hideout and had instead discovered the DJD, who had covered three ex-Decepticons in different strains of the infectious rust found in the area and had hung them up by their pedes so they could watch their paint peel off and fall below them. That had been after he'd lost his voice, when Optimus had put him under Prowl's command.
"It's so big," Smokescreen exclaims. "I knew it was large, but slag, that's half the - is that the South and the West? It was in the South and Western Hemispheres, right."
"Iacon oriented itself in the North and in the center of the Western hemisphere," Optimus recites, like a lesson to sparklings. “The Sea of Rust extends throughout the South. Kaon would be over there-" he points, though they are still so far away it does little to effectively pinpoint the spot. "and Iacon is over there."
"Where is Praxus?" Bumblebee asks.
"Towards the left," Optimus replies. Bumblebee follows his fingers to see a vast and empty and mottled area big enough to house a dozen cities. He wonders where Praxus might have stood in that area, and if he'd be able to identify it by the Rustmaker and Lullabye Ridge and the Sharkticon.
"Would you like to go back to Praxus?" Optimus asks.
"Not really," says Bumblebee. He finds that he means it. "Rubble looks like rubble."
Rubble does look like rubble, Bumblebee discovers. He'd been correct. They land in what might have been any demolished city but Optimus identifies as Iacon, and within an hour Bumblebee has identified Iacon's own Rustmaker and Lullabye Ridge and the Sharkticon. Then he finds Optimus, still as the rubble around him.
He approaches Optimus as he had before, and Optimus greets him as he had before. “Is there something wrong?”
And this time Bumblebee does more than shrug. “I’m not sure the pamphlets and the training sessions covered everything,” he says. “I don’t think they ever mentioned what I might be feeling now.”
“It is not a positive emotion?” Optimus asks.
Bumblebee thinks about the thing in the driver’s seat, fingers skirting over the wheel. “No. Everyone else seems so happy.”
“Yes,” Optimus says. “Everyone else does. That does not mean you have to be.”
Bumblebee does not have a revelation. Neither is it a sneaking suspicion to be confirmed. Rather, what happens sits someplace in the middle. The best way he can think to describe it as like the leak in the old Base above Bumblebee's room. Water from decades-old piping had come out in a steady drip from the ceiling, rolling down the metal wall at a rate that can best be compared to that of a tired snail. Bumblebee hadn't paid much attention to it at first, since the drops had evaporated before any puddle could form. But then one day they had a minor earthquake. Bumblebee's mind hadn't gone to his quarters - in fact, he'd been rather excited to finally feel one of the many little earthquakes that Raf insisted the area experienced. Raf was in school, but Bumblebee showed up half an hour early just to sit outside and excitedly text his friend about how angry Ratchet was when his monitor had shifted. But then he'd returned to base and Raf had wanted to play with Bumblebee's old game-pad, so they'd walked into Bumblebee's room only to find the floor covered in a foot of water.
So this is not a revelation, because it should not be a surprise. It had been drip-dropping through Bumblebee's processor for long enough. But neither is it a suspicion, because Bumblebee had never predicted being a foot deep in water.
"Do you wish the end never happened?" he asks. "Do you wish you were back on Earth, fighting Megatron? Do you wish I never killed him?"
"Of course not," replies Optimus, with the sort of immediacy that can only come from repeated internal discussion.
"I wish I'd never killed him," Bumblebee says. "I wish I'd never had to. I was angry at you, because I had to do it."
"Are you still angry at me?" Optimus asks.
"I don't blame you." Bumblebee kicks half-heartedly at a rock, only to realize belatedly that such a rock is rather rare to find on this planet's surface. Maybe he should have kept it, given his boulder a friend. "For that, I mean."
"For that?"
"I don't know how I feel. I don't think I learned how to feel it."
Optimus takes this in for a long moment. Then he lowers himself to a seat, criss-cross-applesauce, which looks hilariously awkward with his new frame. Bumblebee follows suit, leaning his weight back on his wrists.
"There...were many aspects to the education of new troops that slipped between the cracks, as the humans would say," Optimus tells him. "I remember when Ratchet first told me about the reports he was getting - if you call them reports, the medics' talk going around - about just how dangerous Autobots were to themselves. Prowl called it a crisis of willpower. They made a series of guidelines for assessing troop mental status."
Bumblebee nods along. None of this information is new. He had guessed the discussions had been orders from above, back when the group lessons had begun.
Optimus continues. "I paid little attention to the curriculum chosen. But I would assume that, perhaps, the priorities of medics who had lived in the pre-war era might not cover the needs of those who have not."
Bumblebee keeps his optics to the rubble-horizon. His throat tightens uncomfortably.
"The program was designed to be supplemental," Optimus says. "To support the changing needs of citizens now at war. I don't think you can be blamed for not knowing what you feel now that the war has ended, Bumblebee. We never imagined it was something we would ever need to teach."
Bumblebee rubs at his optics. "I wish I'd seen Praxus before it was rubble," he says. "And I wish I'd played in the crystal gardens before they were fields of litter to crawl through. I wish I had my voice for long enough to say something. I wish I knew what it was I feel so I can get rid of it."
"I wish those things too," Optimus says. "Describe it to me."
“There is a hole in my chest from a fusion cannon, and it took something that I will never get back,” Bumblebee says. “But I’m not feeling grief. I want to hurt something and have it not be hurt. I don’t blame you, but I am so, so angry at everyone. At everyone. At them for being happy and at you for being sad. That doesn’t make sense. I want to kill everyone and have them be alive again to appreciate it.”
Bumblebee's voice cracks while he speaks and breaks down as he finishes, half as painful as when it had been taken from him for good and twice as humiliating. Optimus doesn't act like he's noticed.
"These things do not have to make logical sense to make emotional sense," Optimus tells him, as if he hadn't just admitted to wanting to hurt him. "I cannot tell you what you are feeling, but I can tell you what I would feel, and you can tell me if it sounds correct."
Bumblebee nods, because that is all he can manage.
"I would feel betrayal," Optimus says. Bumblebee shakes his helm, but cannot voice why the word cannot fit. Optimus seems to understand anyway. "No, Bumblebee, not a battlefield betrayals by Starscream. I mean to say that I would feel a more base betrayal. The people who I have relied upon have failed me. That is what I would feel. I would grieve what was lost in that betrayal."
Bumblebee wipes at his optics again and thinks the thing in his driver's seat might be a little more opaque.
"And I would feel disillusioned," Optimus continues. "Growing up and understanding that the people around me who are older and wiser are the former but not the latter. And that would make me angry."
"And I would feel lost," Optimus continues. "I wouldn't know where I was or who I was or what was coming. I would be lost, and I would no longer have the experience, or the will to rely on others to tell me where to go or who to be."
Bumblebee's servos are not enough to keep the tears away. "I don't hate anyone," he says, voice staticky. "I love you all. And I wish everyone in Praxus was alive and not homesick, and the medics were still here putting new mechs in frames, and the DJD never killed anyone and I never had to be there at all, not in the Sea of Rust, not at Tyger Pax, not at Trypticon, not even in Praxus."
"You don't have to hate anyone to be angry at them," Optimus tells him. He shifts, moving from his awkward crossed-sit so as to sit with both knees to the ground. He is looking at Bumblebee now, fully. "You don't need permission to be betrayed and disillusioned and lost, Bumblebee. I'm sorry we failed you. I'm sorry I failed you. It is not ok, and it never will be, but you will be."
Optimus's arms are spread. Not wide, but wide enough. So Bumblebee half crawls and half falls into them, and hides his tears in Optimus's neck. Optimus doesn't say anything else, but he wraps his arms around Bumblebee and holds him close and that's good enough. They stay like that for a long, long time, and Bumblebee can't quite wrest any control back from everything in the driver's seat, but Optimus had said that was okay, and Bumblebee trusts him with that at least. Not with everything, but with that.