Yeager Chronicles: After Extinction

9: Optimus

Another (startlingly) peaceful sol of travelling through the system. It was starting to get to Optimus again, being in space... He did like the vastness of space but, even on the ship with friends, he felt kind of lonely. It didn't help him that he tried to stay in his HAB most of the time. The only times he seemed to leave were when Night or Sky or even Moondancer came in to either check on him (that was mostly Night's thing.), or to let him know that dinner was ready. He never really wanted to eat, it made him feel worse.

At times like these, he would try to think of something – anything – to get his processor clear. Every time, his thoughts travelled back to Cade, and wondering how is he? A large part of him hoped that he'd see him again but another part of him didn't want to see Cade again. He didn't want to have left only to have come back and completely dis the mission he had set out for himself those years ago.

Oh, and the years, they had never felt so long to him before. Optimus was millions of years old! Younger than Nightblade or Drift but nevertheless, these years have been the slowest and most painful of his life cycle.

He wanted to see him again. But, he wasn't going to say to Night or Sky, 'Hey let's go to Earth! I know we aren't going there but I have a friend I want to see.' – and might have a crush on. With that one thought, he blushed, for the first time in the longest of times. Did he really? Perhaps. He always did have a connection to Cade, albeit at first it was only because Cade brought him back online. But that time for him was special, intimate. Cade touched his sparks' chamber, only a few have ever touched him there.

He fixed him, Cade had healed him from mortal wounds. Optimus felt upset that he had left his newly made human friend and his daughter alone with his small Autobot squadron and never dared to say that he was coming back. He never said that he was, but then, he didn't know if could either. Optimus' processor froze.

He hadn't thought this much since before the war, before he was an archivist. Perhaps around the time he was just starting out being an enforcer, when he was still young, he used to download copious amounts of data... Since he was still young, and processor still forming, he filled it to the brim many times... often sending him to a medical facility in Iacon. That so happens to have been where he had met Night for the first time...

And the next time something like that happened, a direct system overhaul, he was redirected job wise. Fired, as normal people would say. And who came to the rescue in his hour of woe? His grandsire. Oh, how he missed the old mecha. He'd probably left this realm to join that of the Prime's! Long gone, until he met his death once again would he journey back to that realm of the Prime's. Until then, however, he would lay and over think his past and the future of his that won't even be controlled by him.

(It will be controlled by the odd author. The one who likes to break the fourth wall, perhaps more than is well for the reader. She, the author, weeps.)

Something's can never change, not without a little help. He could have done something with Jazz, Ironhide, and Ratchet... but he couldn't have saved Sentinel or done something different. He knew he could have done something – anything – else, perhaps he would still have a mentor.

No. Optimus chided himself for at least the hundredth time this sol. You can't save someone who chose to be corrupted and deceitful in their ways. He joined the enemy. He corrupted the caste system more so than it was before. Why it so hard to just let all of this go?

Because he's Prime, their leader, and he didn't manage to do that right either. Not in his optics, he wasn't good enough. He-

A knock at the door. Optimus almost didn't register that there was a sound made at all, that's how lost in thought he was. A small voice peeped, "Ey, you're still in there, right?" He didn't respond.