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The global average life expectancy for a human is around 70 years, being a bit longer in the United States.
Even so, a life full of stress and sleepless nights certainly doesn’t do one any favors, and even the longest-living humans are far from immortal.
83 years is a fairly long life, by general standards. A full life, long enough to achieve many of one’s goals. Yet, still far too short, in the minds of mourning loved ones.
No human is immortal, and this is something everyone knows. It is not, however, something everyone is prepared for, even if the death of a loved one has been long anticipated.
Anticipating something doesn’t make it hurt less.
It hadn’t been long since Professor Isaac Sumdac passed away. His death came as little surprise to anyone, as he’d been sick for the past two or so years. Every so often he’d get a bit better, sometimes even enough to return home for a few days, but it never lasted. He’d always get worse again, and have to be driven back to the hospital.
It was excruciating for everyone who cared about him. Worry turned to hope, only to turn to worry again. And of course, it hurt the most for two people in particular: his daughter, Sari, and his romantic partner, Bulkhead.
When Isaac had originally fallen ill, Sari was on Cybertron. The news was delivered to her by a distraught Bulkhead, who’d stayed on Earth the previous few years, and after hearing it she’d immediately demanded to be sent back.
Earth was where she remained for the two years until her father’s death, taking care of Sumdac Systems with Bulkhead when her father was unable to. As Bulkhead couldn’t fit inside the hospital Isaac had been admitted into, Sari would give him regular updates.
Despite knowing in the back of their minds otherwise, they held out hope for those two years that he really would recover.
He didn’t.
The day he passed was almost just like any other. It was sunny, warm but not unpleasantly hot, and Sari, now 29 years old, was drafting a blueprint for a new invention. She almost felt content, for the first time in a while… or at least, she did, until she got a call from the hospital.
Her heart sank immediately. With the way her father had been doing recently, she knew there was no way it was good news, and she was right. She shakily accepted the call.
“Hi, is this Sari Sumdac?” the nurse on the other end asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, this is Sari,” she responded.
The nurse sighed. “We’re sorry to inform you of this, Sari, but your father passed away in his sleep earlier. We would’ve called you earlier, preferably beforehand so you’d be able to say goodbye, but we didn’t see it coming.”
Sari felt sick. Honestly, she almost threw up, right then and there, but she pushed through to respond to the woman on the other end. “Th- thank you for letting me know. I… I’ll start arranging the funeral as soon as I can.”
With that, she hung up, and immediately started sobbing.
Tears smudged her blueprints, no matter how much she tried to contain them within her hands. She could barely form a full thought, much less properly process any of the information she’d just recieved, but she knew she needed to tell Bulkhead. Her brain was basically screaming it, amidst everything else going on up there.
After about five minutes of full-on sobbing, she was certain she had no tears left to cry, and took the elevator to a lower floor. Looking at herself in the reflective walls of the elevator, she noticed that the fact that she’d been crying was very visible on her face. Tear streaks, albeit dried, ran down her face, and her eyes were red and puffy. Bulkhead would know something had happened even before she told him, of that she was sure.
When she made it to her intended floor and stepped out of the elevator, she noticed Bulkhead was painting again. Stress-painting, clearly, as his brush strokes were messy and several other canvases, whatever was supposed to be painted on them practically unintelligible, laid at his feet. He’d been doing that a lot lately.
She used her jetpack to fly up to his shoulder, and he stepped back slightly in surprise. “Sari? I thought you were worki-” he cut himself off, noticing the state his daughter was in. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head, clutching herself tightly. Although there were a hundred ways she could explain what happened floating around in her head, the option her lips settled on was:
“He’s dead. My dad. My dad is dead.”
Bulkhead stumbled backwards slightly, but caught his balance so Sari wouldn’t fall. What did fall, however, was the paintbrush he held, smacking against the floor and leaving a blot of dark purple paint below it.
“I… I need to sit down.”
The bot sat down, his back against the wall, while Sari desperately clutched the side of his helm as she began to sob again. It seems that earlier she’d been mistaken when she believed she’d had no tears left to cry.
Bulkhead had no idea what he felt. Or, well, that’s not true. He felt an overwhelming sense that something important had been taken from him and he’d never get it back. A feeling he hadn’t felt since Prowl died 21 years prior.
21 years. That’s how long he’d had with Isaac. While it could be considered a fair amount of time for a human, it was horribly short for a cybertronian. It practically went by in the blink of an eye, and that made this feeling so much worse. This horrible emptiness that he knew would stick with him for far too long, if it ever left.
He hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye. Neither had Sari. He knew that was just how some things went, but it didn’t make him any less sad, or any less angry. No amount of rational thinking could calm the ache inside of him.
Tapping back into his surroundings, he noticed that Sari had stopped sobbing, and was now just weakly sniffling. It reminded Bulkhead of when she was still a kid, and although she was so much different now, seeing her like this conjured the image of that little 7 year old girl he’d met over 20 years ago.
“I… I think I’m gonna call Bumblebee,” she said. “Do you wanna talk to him too?”
Bulkhead nodded, unable to conjure the “yes” he so desperately wanted to say aloud. It felt like his throat was closing up, even though he knew that wasn’t possible.
“This is gonna be awkward, since I… never told him my dad was sick.” Sari sounded almost guilty. “He was so busy with his duties on Cybertron, and I knew he’d want to come back to Earth if he knew something like this was happening. I couldn’t take him away from his responsibilities like that.”
Bulkhead nodded again, wanting so badly to reassure her, to tell her that Bumblebee wouldn’t be mad at her for not telling him, but again he was unable to make a single noise.
Sari called Bumblebee, projecting his image onto a giant screen. She waved awkwardly, still on Bulkhead’s shoulder.
“Sari! It’s been so long since we’ve talked!” Bumblebee started talking almost immediately. “Oh! And Bulkhead’s there too! Hey, dude! How’ve you been? How’s Earth?”
Finally seeming to notice the somber atmosphere shared by his friends, Bumblebee cleared his throat. “Uh, you two alright?”
Sari shook her head, eliciting a concerned look from Bumblebee. “No, Bumblebee, um. My dad died. I… thought you’d want to know.”
For the first time, potentially ever, Bumblebee went silent. Didn’t last long, though, because a few moments later he spoke up again. “Oh. I’m… sorry. I can come visit if you want? And I can bring Ratchet too? Maybe us all being together just like old times will make you feel better..?”
“I dunno, but… I definitely would prefer having you back here, for a little while.” Sari sniffed, tears threatening to return to her eyes. Bulkhead stayed silent, but gave Bumblebee yet another nod.
“Okay, I’ll make plans. I’ll come back to Earth. Just you wait, I’ll make you both feel better in no time!” And with that, Bumblebee hung up.
Bulkhead sat back up against the wall, blankly staring off into nothing. Sari once again pressed herself tightly up against the side of his head, but no tears came to her this time.
“Hey, Bulkhead?” she asked, her voice a hoarse whisper.
“Yeah?” he croaked out, finally managing to say something.
“Can… can I call you ‘dad’, now?”
“Of course,” he responded. “You always could.”
Bumblebee arrived on Earth a few days afterwards, and as promised, he really had brought Ratchet, who was immediately focused on making sure Bulkhead and Sari didn’t grieve themselves to death. He was no therapist, not by any measure, but he was good at knocking sense into people when they needed it.
Throughout the weeks afterwards, Bumblebee would repeatedly try to cheer the other two up, with fun ideas or jokes or anything he thought would work, but nothing stuck. After failure upon failure upon failure, he wasn’t even sure what he could do for them anymore, and it made him feel useless.
On one particularly bad day, the day after the group had attended Isaac’s funeral, he didn’t have an elaborate plan to finally make the other two smile again. All he did was sit next to Bulkhead, Sari in her usual place on the larger bot’s shoulder, and stay there, quietly. He wasn’t good at sitting still, and he was worse at staying quiet, but since he was doing it for the other two… it was easier.
The three would sit like that, all together, quiet and unmoving, fairly regularly. Occasionally, Ratchet would join in, as he understood the feeling all too well.
As time passed, things slowly began to go back to normal. At least for Sari. It’s not that she stopped mourning, or that her grief had left her, but that she finally felt comfortable enough to try to resume her life as it was before. She started operating Sumdac Systems again, started gaming with Bumblebee again, started inventing again.
Bulkhead, on the other hand, was still stuck in that same depressive stupor. A few months to a human is far longer than a few months to a cybertronian, and he wasn’t ready to try to move on yet.
As Sari became more comfortable living life again, he retreated further and further into himself, with the only thing he really did anymore being painting. Most of his paintings were abstract, messy representations of his equally messy feelings, but he also painted Isaac’s face a lot. He wanted permanent reminders of what his partner had looked like so he’s never able to forget.
There were points where he didn’t leave the dark room he painted in for days at a time, and everyone else was growing concerned.
And one day, Ratchet decided to do something about it.
Out of nowhere, he opened the door to that room, and found Bulkhead sitting on the ground, knees to his chest, staring at a portrait he’d painted of Isaac. Ratchet closed the door behind him, and put a hand on Bulkhead’s shoulder.
“Hey, kid.”
Bulkhead turned his head towards the older bot. “Hey…”
“Listen, I know this has been hard on you. Trust me, I understand what it’s like to grieve just as well as you do, but-” Ratchet started.
“But what?” Bulkhead cut him off. “Please don’t tell me to just get over it. If you understand me so well, you should know I can’t do that. I can’t just… get over him. I barely got any time with him, and- and now he’s gone, and I didn’t even get to say goodbye!”
“We so rarely do,” Ratchet said, a sympathetic tone entering his voice.
“I just feel like… if I stop mourning him, if I go on with my life, it’ll be like I’m… betraying his memory. Leaving him behind. Like I didn’t love him enough to stick beside him even after he died,” Bulkhead continued. “I don’t want to get over him. I don’t want to forget him. I don’t want to act like he was just a tiny part of my life that after a few hundred years, I’ll just stop caring about.”
“I understand,” Ratchet responded. “But from my experience, moving on with your life doesn’t mean forgetting, and it most certainly doesn’t mean you no longer care about the people you’ve lost. Ask Sari! She’s going back to normal, but I know she isn’t over the loss of her father.”
Bulkhead retreated into himself ever so slightly, pushing his knees further up against his chest. “I know.”
“Listen to me, kid. There are people who are still alive that need you around, and Professor Sumdac wouldn’t have wanted you to waste away in here for his sake. He would’ve wanted you to continue with your life. You have millions of years ahead of you, and you can’t do this forever.” Ratchet’s tone became more firm.
“You didn’t even know him. Don’t talk about what he would’ve wanted.”
“You seriously think he’d want this?? For you to abandon everyone who cares about you in favour of rusting away in some dark room, staring at a painting of his face???” Ratchet abandoned his sympathetic tone in favour of his usual harsh one, raising his voice. “I may not have known him well, but you know damn well I’m right.”
Bulkhead was silent.
“Sari may be an adult now, but she still needs you. I know she can’t lose another parent. Not to mention, we don’t know how long techno-organics can live. How many years of her life are you willing to waste down here?”
This seemed to snap Bulkhead out of his stupor. “Sari…”
“It doesn’t have to be all at once. You can start slowly. But I want you to start trying to put your life back together. Doctor’s orders.”
“Thanks… Ratchet,” Bulkhead responded, standing up, before immediately clutching his back. “Uuugh. Wow. I definitely should not have sat on the floor that long.”
“Now you know what it feels like to be me!” Ratchet declared loudly, before softening his voice again. “You should go check on Sari. Show her that you’re alright— err, alive.”
Sari was up in her workshop, finishing up some blueprints, just like she was when everything began. She let out a confident exhale, looking down at the invention she’d thought up. “I hope you’re proud of me for this one, dad. Wherever you are.”
Bulkhead loudly entered the room, the way he always used to, and stood awkwardly in front of the door. “Uh… hi, Sari.”
“Bulkhea- ah, I mean, dad! You left that room!”
“Yeah… Ratchet gave me a talk, and I- I’m not over everything yet, not in the slightest, but I think…” his words faltered, as though he wasn’t really sure where his own sentence was going. “I think I want to do what you’re doing. Living my life, because it’s what he would’ve wanted.”
“Ratchet totally guilt-tripped you into getting out of your room, huh?” Sari said, lightheartedly.
“Well- no…” Bulkhead responded, avoiding Sari’s gaze. “Well, kind of, but he wasn’t wrong. He just reminded me that there are still people I need to live for.”
“Well, whatever he said, I’m glad it made you feel a little bit better,” Sari responded. “It’s hard at first, going back to living normally… nothing feels real. But you get used to it, and it becomes something you can live with, you know?”
Bulkhead nodded. “I hope so.”
“And I hope Bee goes back to normal soon, too,” Sari mused. “Seeing him as quiet as he’s been lately is unnatural. Scary, honestly.”
Bulkhead chuckled. “I know, right? Oh, are you working on a new invention? What’s it do?”
“Well, I’m glad you asked. You see…”
The two continued talking through the afternoon, and although the feeling that something was missing hadn’t left either of them, they had a feeling they’d be able to live with it. As long as they had each other, that was.
Loss is easier to deal with as a family, after all.