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No More
(or "The Entry That Will Never Be Read")

"Come to me now!
O, come! benignest sleep!
And fold me up, as evening doth a flower,
From my vain self, and vain things which have power
Upon my soul to make me smile or weep.
And when thou comest, oh, like
Death be deep."
- Patrick Proctor Alexander

The universe was breaking down all around them. Particle by particle, every star, every planet, every bit of nothingness was being stretched like a rubber band and snapped to useless pieces. They were aware, and yet unaware, of the resulting destruction, even as the asteroid they stood on was slowly folding in on itself and the rock beneath their feet disintegrated.

Regardless of the circumstances, there was one last issue which needed to be resolved, one final battle to fight before gravity caught up with them.

If the situation had been different, Optimus Prime would have obliged his bitter old enemy. Their rivalry could be traced back to the early millennia when Cybertron was young, when Prime was once Orion Pax the security guard and Galvatron was Megatron the famous underground gladiator; when they had clashed in the coliseum and out on the streets long before a Fallen Prime emerged from the shadows and seduced those unlucky few with visions of grandeur and power the likes which they had never thought to possess.

In those days, one had to fight against overwhelming odds in order to survive.

Now those days were gone, and this day was the day that would end all days. There would be nothing left of this vast, infinite frontier. No stars, no light, no life. What would become of the universe, then? Would there even be another universe after this one was fully consumed?

…What about the Matrix? Would there be a Matrix waiting for him? What of the Pit? What would await Galvatron? Both Transformers had been destroyed and rebuilt on more than one occasion, but did it really matter? Was the thought of life after death – after universal deconstruction – worth considering at all?

Optimus was knocked to the ground, feeling Galvatron's hard angular fist dent the center of his mouth guard inward, tasting cold steel and greasy coolant.

Galvatron towered above him, his blaster cannon pointed at his head. "Get up! I will not have this dying universe steal you away from me! Not until one of us falls by the other's hand!"

But Optimus Prime did not get up; instead, he turned his head away from the Decepticon and stared out into the encroaching darkness. Almost all the stars he had familiarized throughout their senseless war were gone, the moon bases that had brought to life during Unicron's Second Coming now reduced to floating debris slowly being eaten away by invisible, inevitable jaws. One by one, without break, everything was fading to impenetrable black.

Nothing could stop it. There was always an end to every beginning. Once the end was coming, that was it. One could live through planetary destruction by an intergalactic invasion or the crumbling of an existing government body devolving into anarchy, but one could not fight extinction on such an unthinkable scale.

No more war. No more death. No more, no more, no more.

"No, Galvatron," Optimus told the Decepticon. "I will not stand up. I'm tired of being on my feet. I think I'll stay right here."

"Get up!" Galvatron snarled, kicking a foot at the Autobot's prostrate form. "I expect this kind of behavior from a lesser being, but not from you! The universe is not dead! We are not dead! So long as you maintain the basic atomic structure, you are still alive!" He reached down and raised Optimus from the ground, red optics bleeding disdain in world-weary blue. "Fight me, Optimus! Fight for your brothers and sisters! Fight for the fallen and the lost! Fight yourself, until there is nothing left of the greatest Transformer to have ever existed!"

But Optimus shook his head, ignoring the painful grip round his neck. "No, Galvatron, I will not. There's no point to it, not anymore. Just let me be."

"I refuse!" bellowed Galvatron, sticking the cannon's barrel right beneath Prime's chin. "I will not have you submit to cowardice so easily!"

"This isn't cowardice, Galvatron."

"Then what is it?"

"It's acceptance."

Suddenly the remaining pillars of the world crashed, and the world lost its balance.

"No!" Galvatron dropped Optimus and stared at his hands with a look of wild disbelief. This could not be happening; his hands – his hands, the hands that helped carve his infamous name in oil and in honor of emblazing revolution and supremacy in his fellow bots, were dissolving before his very eyes! Every rivet, every wire, every cable, every filament of metal distilling to its purest element and vanishing into the nothingness encompassing his peripheries! "NO! I can't die! I can't! I have yet to conquer the enemy!"

"Let it go, Galvatron," said Optimus Prime, closing his eyes and relaxing his body as it came apart. "It's over. Just let it go."

Galvatron howled, but gravity cut him short and engulfed his cold steel-wrought body forever in its embrace. Soon his atoms and Spark were swallowed whole, and in a matter of seconds it was as if there had never been a Galvatron in the first place.

But there was silence, an utter notion of life in still motion if Optimus Prime had ever witnessed. There he lay on the loneliest asteroid, gazing detachedly at the deep dark abyss growing ever fuller, ever hungering for sustenance already digested and sitting in oceans of sulfuric acid. All the while his body, the physical shell that produced the technical heartbeat and sentient motherboard, was stripped away from the massive bulk which housed his vehicular mode to the intricate skeleton locked in layers of corrugated metal and articulation points.

Optimus Prime sighed, freed his mind of the metaphysical restraints anchoring to a forgotten ages-old past, alternate forms, countless riots needed to quelled and the few hours spent in relative peace….

No more stars.

No more life.

No more light.

…No more death.

No more spilled coolant on walls pockmarked with plasma burns and bullet holes; no more stepping on body parts or welding together body parts; no more air raid sirens; no more piercing klaxons; no more suicide bombings; no more mourning; no more attending funerals; no more worrying about the future of younglings; no more holding onto the hands of dying loved ones; no more locking blades and gun barrels to a rowdy gladiator; no more nightmares of ancient evils and ancient battles; no more planet-eating gods; no more nightmares; no more Fallen Primes whispering promises in the hollow recesses of the dark; no more staring up at the faces of deceased heroes, trying to find answers or methods to end a perpetually drawn out war.

No more, thought the last Transformer. No more.

Then he closed his eyes and felt no more.