A/N Yeah. Dreamwave. Don't get me wrong, but there is something to be said for the Iron Hand of Pat Lee: he gave all of the stories in DW a solid direction, and there were very few of the internal canon contradictions that abound in IDW/G1 and IDW/Bayverse.
If you can find it: War Within is an awesome read. This connects more with War Within The Dark Ages, also excellent. MAYBE some minor spoilers for Dark Ages here, but, I'm hoping they act more as a teaser for people unfamiliar with this continuity to get them to want to read more!
And yeah, it's epistolary. That's your Word of the Day! It's a genre that was big in the 18th Century (Pamela, Clarissa, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, etc) that I thought would be fun to try. Hope you like!
File Recipient/Starscream/
File Origination/Jetfire/
I do not know how you might ever come by this file. I cannot think of a way to deliver it to you, after or before my offlining, but I feel strangely compelled to write it anyway. It is…illogical, and though I have told myself that repeatedly, it has given me no peace. I can only hope that by writing this file, the matter will finally rest.
Though in reality, as we both know, nothing rests. Even our atoms are restless, constantly shifting, moving, electrons whirling around their orbits, quarks spinning off in charges. We are all so constantly in motion that it is a marvel that we manage the illusion of solidness, of stability.
You have been that, for me. I suppose that is what I am trying to say. Always. My strangely moving center, my stability.
Everything I have ever thought and done, I have always asked myself what you would think or do.. In a way, I know—or think I know—you better than I know myself. The you I have created, at least. The you I have projected from what I remember.
I remember…oh...
I remember so many things. Little things. Inconsequential things like the way sunlight would sometimes illuminate your cockpit, so that it seemed you held an amber sun blazing in your chassis. I remember how you'd stiffen then soften as I leaned over you to examine some experiment, some object in the microscope, my hands resting, I hoped affectionately, on your shoulders. I remember so many late nights, arguing science, politics, philosophy, ourselves, until we were half convinced we did not exist and that the solution to every problem in the universe was within our reach. And everything seemed simply to be arbitrary determinations, little, erasable scratches or penetrable boundaries that had no meaning and no purpose save to be erased by the scientific imagination. You and me—arbitrary boundary. Politics—a spiderweb of random lines, each squatting on their side presuming some great difference. Escalating those differences until the others became…Others, things, not really real, their disagreements somehow becoming rights and wrongs and thus the wrongnesses expanding to become sins.
That was the kind of argument we had, our painfully convoluted process and syntax. Do you remember? And…are those memories precious to you, too?
And I wonder…do you remember these things as well? Are you sitting, on your side of the arbitrary line, with the cold dull burn of regret, remembering those small details, those familiar long nights as well?
And I try to wonder what other memories you might have of me. What I might have forgotten. What I might never have known.
Light is…both a wave and a particle. The observer changes the result. We know this as surely as we breathe. And perhaps we are like that as well—I am different depending on who is observing me. As are you. To these Autobots, I am an outsider, though a faithfully useful one. To the Decepticons I am doubtless a traitor. But to you? What am I?
It bothers me to think that you might hate me, though I imagine you might have reason. Certainly, at times, I have come close to hating myself, doubting myself, wondering and questioning my decisions.
Questioning, I can almost hear you say, is always the hallmark of a good scientist. A scientist must ask questions. Uncomfortable questions. I imagine you still put this into practice, questioning your cause, your leadership, yourself. I imagine you have not had an easy time of it.
But I have never hated you. Cannot. Like a law of nature. I can ache at your decisions. I can suffer under your judgments. I can even rage at circumstance, knowing the futility. But I cannot bring myself to hate you. In a way…and this is a horrid confession, one probably best suited to this file, which you will see only after my passing, if at all…in a way it would be easier if I could hate you.
I do not want it to be easy. Nothing about you ever was.
And this you I think I have internalized over all these ages. This you with a mocking smile, sharp, but somehow gentle, asks me…well now, Jetfire. Was it worth it, after all?
You—this ghost of you—have asked me this many times. And always, the answer is…I do not know. I have waited, and waited, presuming simply that I didn't yet have enough data. I waited confident that the answer would reveal itself, in time. Science requires patience—you remember that? You remember how many times I said those very words to you? The phrase is almost like an endearment to me now, something familiar, a key that unlocks…something, everything between us.
And so, because it will not let me rest, I will answer for now, with the data that I have now. With the world crumbling apart around us. Not your side winning, not my side winning—both of us probably bitterly aware of how meaningless, at last, 'sides' are, how small what we once deemed to be insurmountable differences between Autobot and Decepticon really are. We are all, every one of us, losing.
When it was me, simply me, sacrificing my petty wants to the larger good of what I truly, truly believed in (and you, I imagine, did the same), it was worth it. The loss was worth the gain. But now? Where are we? What happened to the Autobot vision? What happened to the Decepticon goals? What happened to our sacrifices? They burned, giving heat and light and energy…and left us dry and charred, holding the ashes of both our dreams and our visions, standing in a circle of cinders as the world burns around us.
It turns out…neither of us were right.
And now that it doesn't matter anymore, somehow, I find myself compelled to write to you, to reach out to you, even through this futile gesture, this forlorn hope that will not launch until I die. We cannot, no matter what, recapture what was lost. And we cannot live solely nourished by our memories. I don't know what I want you to know, then. Other than you were right, and I have suffered and learned regret and followed my path numbly, blindly, because it was all, in the end, I knew how to do.
And that I dearly wished that you, the real you, and not the phantasm recreation, the facsimile I have created, had been here, to laugh, to mock, to goad, to spite, to encourage. Just…been here. Beyond faction or philosophy. Selfishness. I confess to such pitiful selfishness.
And I wish that…from the deepest place that I can formulate something as fond as a wish…you have not been, through it all, as unhappy as I.