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The castle was silent.
No footsteps echoed down its vast halls, just a heavy stillness, as if the whole place was holding its breath.
Only I could be heard breathing, frantically looking for him.
Somewhere deep within the past forgotten portraits and dust-covered chandeliers, a soft, irregular whirring broke the silence.
Faint at first.
Then sharper. Like static caught in an old radio. And beneath it, a voice. Glitching. Looping. Whispering something fractured and unreadable.
And that’s when I found him in the library’s ruins.
Cogman sat slumped against the far wall. His optics twitched erratically…
dim, then bright.
Sparks skipped across the side of his neck where exposed wires and cogs rested. One servo twitched with no rhythm, jerking in its own strings like a puppet.
I heard him mumbling, static filling every other word.
“I should have… I should have… They said… they said… I don’t, I don’t…”
His voice caught, glitched, restarted… each word scraping out of his speaker like it hurt to say. Books were scattered around him, pages torn, ink smeared with oil.
And clutched in his trembling hand was a single item: a teacup. Cracked. Empty. Beyond repair.
He didn’t notice anyone had entered.
Or maybe he did and just didn’t have the strength to pretend he was fine anymore.
“Oh, Cogman… I’ve been looking for you.”
My words echoed softly through the wreckage of the library, gentle against the cold air. For a moment, nothing happened. He didn’t lift his head. Didn’t speak. The only response was the sharp, uneven whir of his failing servos.
Then, slowly, he turned his head, like the motion itself was painful. His optics flickered, struggling to focus.
One bright. One dim.
Both hollow.
He opened his mouth to speak, but the sound that came out first was broken.
“I… didn’t mean to disappear.”
His voice was wrong for the Cogman I knew… quiet and cracked, like something worn thin by time and grief. He stared at the cup for a long moment, as if remembering something that no longer existed.
“I was going to make tea for them… but I don’t remember how to.”
And for once, he didn’t cover it up with a joke.
No sarcasm. No pride.
Just a voice like a relic who didn’t know how to carry the weight anymore.
“Cogman… what do you mean you don’t remember?” I asked with panic, not expecting his condition to worsen.
Not too long ago, he had forgotten my name but quickly covered it with a joke and shortly remembered after. I didn’t think too much of it.
He doesn’t look at me at first. He just stares at the porcelain in his hands like it’s a relic from a life he no longer belongs to. His optics flicker… another dim pulse, then a hard blink like he’s trying to force clarity into a mind that’s slipping.
When he finally speaks, his voice is fragile.
“I used to make it every evening… precisely three minutes steeped, one sugar, no milk…
For her.
Then, for him.
Then… for no one at all.”
He clenched his metal hands but even failed to do that because his hands were so jerky.
“I know the ceremony. I’ve practiced it for centuries. But tonight… I stood in front of the kettle and I just…”
His voice glitches.
“…you just couldn’t remember it.” I whisper.
It’s the look in his optics that cuts deepest.
It’s not fear. It’s not confusion. It’s shame.
“I was built to serve. To remember. To preserve what’s been lost. And I can’t even make a cup of tea.”
His voice breaks on that last word. A laugh wants to surface-dry, bitter, self-mocking- but it dies before it escapes. His hands release the teacup, letting it fall in pieces to the stone floor.
“Maybe… maybe there’s nothing left of me to remember.”
And in that moment, throughout all his metal and gears and centuries of programming…
Cogman looks heartbreakingly human.
Without a word, I gently took his hands into mine… cold, jerky, metal fingers quivering in a rhythm that didn’t match anything normal.
“Cogman… do you remember me?”
There was silence.
His optics flickered, one still brighter than the other, scanning my face with uncertainty. Then, finally, his head tilted just slightly, and a familiar laugh came out weakly.
“Hmm… short… warm-blooded… distressingly sentimental… prone to hugging ancient machines in any emotional crisis…”
I wanted to retort and joke about my apparent description, but it wasn’t appropriate to do so.
“Yes, y/n. Unfortunately, I do.”
But there was only exhaustion in his sarcasm, no venom.
“I-I’m so glad, Cogman. I can’t have you not remembering me.”
And in that moment, he gripped my hands just a little tighter, as if anchoring himself to the last thing he hadn’t yet lost.
“Do you even… remember Sir Edmund?” I asked, bracing myself for a ‘no’.
Cogman went still.
The sarcasm evaporates from his face in an instant.
“Of course I do,” he says, voice low.
“I remember the way he walked- always just a bit too proud, like his bones hadn’t realized how old and human he was.”
He grabbed me tighter.
“And the day he died, I stood beside him and told him I would keep going. For him. For the name. For the honor.”
His voice became static.
“What if one day I wake up, and I forget him, too?”
His optics meet mine again, hopeless.
“If I lose that… what am I?”
I struggled to answer that.
He was looking at me with that question- what am I?- and I didn’t know how to hold the weight of it.
But I held his hands tighter. I made sure he heard me.
“You’re… you’re still Cogman. Still my bestest friend I could’ve asked for.”
And that’s when he jerked again—his entire servo twitching, his shoulder convulsing with a violent spasm his body couldn’t hide anymore. His optics glitched.
It broke me.
Tears welled in my eyes. Not from fear, but from the unbearable sight of him breaking down. Him, who had survived so much. Protected so many. Outlived everyone.
Seeing him like this, so fragile, so worn, felt like watching him crumble piece by piece.
“Please don’t go,” I whispered, the words barely sound at all. “Not you. Not yet.”
I leaned forward, resting my forehead gently against his cold, glitching frame, as his twitching hands curled softly around mine, still jerky, still struggling.
…But holding on.
It hurt to see the beginnings of the Transformer dementia tearing at Cogman’s sanity.
“Not him.” I had always told myself.
Watching him twitch, lose words, forget things he once carried like sacred scripture…
All I could do was stay.
Hold his hands.
Whisper his name.
“You’re still here. You’re still Cogman. I’ve got you.”
But deep down, I knew he was slipping.
And it felt like watching the stars go out.
One by one.
…And suddenly, couldn’t help it.
The dam broke.
I pulled him into a hug; tight, desperate, like I could hold the pieces of him together just by being close enough. My arms wrapped around his trembling frame, and I sobbed.
Not softly. Not politely.
It was ugly. Raw.
“You’re slipping… you’re slipping, and I can’t stop it…”
Slowly, so slowly, his arms came up. Jerky.
And he held me.
His voice- when it finally came- was a static-laced whisper against my shoulder.
“I’m… sorry. I wanted to last longer. For you, y/n.”
Oh, that only made it worse.
Because somewhere inside that breaking machine was the same Cogman who made tea like it was a ritual, who quoted Shakespeare with too much dramatic flair, who pet dogs with more love than any human.
He was still in there.
He was still my Cogman.
And I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
And then it hit me, the guilt. That sick, crawling, unbearable thought that somehow… this was my fault.
That I should’ve noticed sooner. Should’ve done something. Should’ve protected him, the way he had always protected me.
“I should’ve gotten someone to fix it,” I whispered, broken, barely able to breathe between sobs.
I couldn’t look at him.
But then, he stopped twitching.
The erratic spasms ceased, like his systems had stilled themselves on command, not for his sake, but for mine.
He raised one trembling hand and, with surprising softness, placed it against the side of my face.
“No,” he said, firmly, but not unkind. “You did not do this to me.”
“If I knew it all then, I would’ve-“
“Time did. War did. Life did. And you… you gave me something to hold onto through it all.”
His optics steadied, just for a moment. As if just being near me brought the fractured pieces of him back into place, even briefly.
“Please… don’t carry my ending like it’s your fault.”
“…I just… thought you’d never end up like the other bots at this castle. You’re a collapsing star. And I hate it.”
The words hung between us, heavy as the silence that followed.
Cogman’s fingers tightened around mine; not with the jerky spasms of before, but steady, deliberate.
“I never wanted to be like them,” he murmured, voice low, cracked.
“Not rusted relics forgotten in shadow. Not ghosts of who we once were. I fought to last. To matter. To be remembered.”
He let out a bitter laugh.
“I hate this… robot dementia too.” He let out a dry chuckle.
And then, quietly, he whispered…
“But I hate the idea of losing you more.”
I realized that no matter how much he fought the darkness inside, some battles can’t be won. They can only be faced, together.
“I’ll be here for you no matter what,
even if you don’t remember my face or name… we’re in this together.
My voice cracked under the weight of those words, trembling with everything I felt but struggled to say.
“Together…” he echoed, without static. “Even if the years steal my memory, even if the spark dims beyond repair, you will still be here.”
He paused, and for a moment, old courage surfaced.
“I may forget names. I may forget faces. But I will never forget the feeling of not being alone.”
I hear a weary but gently hopeful chuckle coming from Cogman.
“You’re stuck with me, then. Good luck with that.”
“Happily, Cogman. Happily.”
“If I must fall apart… let it be in the arms of someone who remembers who I was.”