The Adventures of the Chibi-Bumbles
Nurannoniel Amruniel
A/N: I'm out of the fic writing business now. I'm 27, working full time, engaged, and as I write this there are 12 days until my fiancé and I get the keys to our very own house… but someone went and favourite-d two of my old and best fics today, and seeing it's the anniversary of C.B.'s final salvaging… I think I owe the old laptop this finale.
Warning: I swear it was un-intentionally foreshadowed, but ironically, Byte was right; their system stability couldn't last…
To Any Autobots that Remain… Byte's Final Log
Terran date October 4, 2011
"'Bee? 'Bee?! Mike, Byte, something's wrong with 'Bee! Oh my God… Byte… he's…"
Terran Date November 2, 2014
It started with a game. The graphics of the game were not intense, and the concept of the play was a simple sand-box block building world that the two of them would run for an hour or so in the evening to pass the time. The human female's mate had introduced them to it a few months before, and both she and Chibi-Bumbles enjoyed the rhythmic "thunk" of placing blocks into new and complex patterns. It gave them something to work on together.
Then the twitch started.
A little light flashing. A quick hitch of his fan. I did not think the program so system-intensive to cause the damage it did. Why he didn't say anything, I will never know.
It may not have even been the game in the end. As I have recorded before, our alien biology has not adapted well to the limited fuel sources we have access to in this world. Either way, the result was the same.
As they played the game together, his display started to pixelate and freeze.
"I'm fine, I'm fine! Just dozing," he insisted.
He shook the anomaly off twice in as many days. They stopped playing that game just in case. The third time the glitch happened as he tried to run a game called "Bejeweled." He suffered a full seizure.
I did all I could, but I am no mechanic. It was two days before we found someone able to assist, but by then it was too late. The human technician held on to C.B.'s body for a month before releasing it to Kelsey with the diagnosis; while the youngling was intact enough to run basic systems, his motherboard had overheated in the seizure. He could not repair it.
Chibi-'Bee was gone.
The female saved his decals, and I salvaged his memory drive with the hope to one day return it to our home world of Cybertron. Chibi-Bumblebee's remains are now buried on a hill looking east over the river valley nearby where we spent our first three years in this world together.
I leave this log for any Autobot still functional in this reality so that they may know they are not alone. We found the peace and companionship we lost in our great war, and the humans we now share our lives with grieve for our loss as deeply as they would their own.
As I stand here on the hill watching the stars, in that realization, perhaps I do know why Chibi-'Bee kept his state of decay a secret.
'Till all are One.