Work Text:
When a mech dies, there is a big ceremony. The greyed out husk of your former comrade is sent off with a crowd of onlookers talking about the grand life they lived. They talk about their impact, or maybe their accomplishments, their personality.
When a dog dies, there is no one. Part of it is because most Cybertronians don’t know what a dog is. The ones that do, don’t care. It’s hard enough teaching them to value human life. A human to a Cybertronian is a dog to a human. A dog to a Cybertronian is infinitesimally small, almost beyond comprehension.
The dog did not live a grand life. The dog lived eleven years. Eleven years is how much time healing from a particularly nasty incident can take. A violent injury, something most mecha see thousands of throughout their long lives, is one dog, maybe even two.
The dog’s body starts to break down within a few days, quickly beginning its return to bare substances. By the time the last Cybertronian has left Earth, it is likely there will be nothing distinguishable left, just bare elements of organic material.
Thundercracker blames the movies. He was first introduced to the human perspective via movies. Humans were really very good at telling compelling stories in a short amount of time. In conveying meaning and emotion in compact punches.
Time wise, the history of humans was not impressive. Keeping records from nearly two thousand years ago was an easy feat for Cybertronians. Thundercracker had datapads older than the entirety of human existence. But from the human level, generationally, it was fantastic. Terrible to comprehend.
Cybertronians were often careless with their own history and stories. With the legacies of others. They lived long lives and there was a sort of arrogance about them. They assumed no knowledge was greater than their own lifespan and the idea of hereditary knowledge was near foreign to them.
So there’s a sort of unease to the knowledge that there will be no mythologizing Buster. It haunts him, stalks through his idle recharge. Whispers foul truths in moments of absent thought.
Marissa sees it eat him, oddly perceptive in that human way of hers. They’re on the beach and have been so long that the tide is coming in, starting to lap at the bottom edges of Thundercracker’s wings as he sits with his knees pulled up to his chest.
Marissa is on his shoulder watching the sky turn vibrant shades as the sun slips below the hard line of the horizon. The wind picks up and plays with her fiery hair, the fading light outlining it in gold.
“Thundercracker I know it’s hard,” she said gently after the sun had gone and the creeping dark of night was rapidly encroaching.
Belligerently, arrogantly, he asked, “What do you know?”
There’s a sad tremulous downturn to her mouth as she says, “This is all I know.”
Guilt flashed through him, raw and hot and uneasy. It was an oddly foreign feeling. Cybertronians weren’t as soft, as emotive, they had time to hide and bury their emotions. Digging them up was akin to exhuming ancient mysteries.
“It’s okay to be sad, I understand,” Marissa said. That made him feel worse. Because in another flash, she too would be gone, and so would the understanding and sympathy she had for him. He’d be down in the same pit once again, twice as deep.
Thundercracker’s frame shuddered under Marissa.
“Comeon, you should talk about it,” she suggested. “Get it all out.”
Thundercracker remained stubbornly silent, wings slowly dipping down so that the cold salt water encased them more. The feeling was unpleasant and most likely bad for his frame, but Thundercracker was so deep in dwelling on his own misery, he didn’t care.
“Why don’t you make a movie about it?” Marissa said again after a long silence where Thundercracker did nothing but stare dismally into the swirling eddies of the oncoming tide. It was getting dark, closer to night time than sunset now.
“A movie,” Thundercracker snorted disdainfully.
“Or sit here and rust,” Marissa said sarcastically. “That’s equally as productive.”
Thundercracker sighed and stood up, salt water rushing off him in streams. Marissa swung her legs idly off his shoulder.
“Should we go home?” she asked.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
—
Thundercracker ends up making the movie.
He didn’t want to at first, because dwelling on an emotion that wasn’t anger was very un-Decepticon-like and went against all his internalized lessons from his former faction. But he wasn’t a Decepticon anymore. Considering he didn’t necessarily want to end up like Starscream, he figured he may as well give the whole creative expression thing a shot.
So he makes the movie. He begrudgingly asked Marissa to help shoot it because he is thirty feet tall and a dog is a very hard thing to film steadily from that height, excepting some rather creative aerial shots.
The whole thing isn’t very long and there isn’t much dialogue.
Marissa helps him make flyers to hand out to people in the small town in which they reside. A mix of bots and humans show up to his premiere. They hold it in a grass field on a calm summer night. The set up is a simple projector and a large tarp hung between two trees.
He’s never watched a movie quite this way but Marissa tells him this is how they used to do it just a few decades ago. He feels a small swell of kinship, sitting in the grass field with a smattering of Cybertronians and humans, all of them waiting patiently for the movie to start.
Most of the mechs there to see the movie are friends or acquaintances of some kind. Thundercracker is surprised to see the small angry looking mech that looked a lot like Bumblebee arrive. He doesn’t exactly look thrilled to be there but he shows up, sits down.
Thundercracker feels something like pride fill him as he watches the movie play out. He steps through the lines and shots and listens to the sounds and music they added in. Some of the sound mixing is a little off. It’s a bit too soft in some places, a bit too loud in others. Thundercracker makes mental notes of the timestamps.
There’s a small murmur when the film ends. A loud whisper of “That’s it?” from somewhere in the crowd.
“Put on Shrek!” Another voice heckled.
Thundercracker feels his spark go heavy and he thinks back to the kind of easy, wordless communication he used to have with Buster.
“I think it came out well,” Marissa said from her usual perch on his shoulder.
“I don’t think anyone really liked it,” Thundercracker grumbled petulantly, staring at the ground as he listened to the sound of retreating footsteps.
“Maybe it didn’t speak to everyone, but it was important to you,” Marissa comforted, leaning bodily into Thundercracker’s helm. It was the closest thing they’d ever get to a hug, and although Thundercracker still felt dismally miserable, it made the disappointment ease just slightly.
“I think you’re wrong though, looks like you do have a fan,” Marissa said, spying a mech lingering a couple yards away from them, staring at them intently.
“Hi Cliff, you want to talk to Thundercracker about his movie?” she called. She tapped the side of Thundercracker’s head to the tune of “Shave and a Haircut”, her signal to be let down. He offered her his hand as a platform to step onto, lowering her gently down onto the ground, before standing up to approach Cliffjumper.
“I liked your movie,” the squat mech said. Everyone who had come to see the movie was gone now. The lot was empty and the screen was just a blank white sheet again.
“Thank you,” Thundercracker said with mild surprise. He glanced behind him to check on where Marissa had gone, and saw that she had idled over towards the parking lot, out of earshot. Thundercracker leaned in a bit closer to Cliffjumper, eyes narrowing in curiosity as he asked, “If I might ask, why did you like it?”
The mech shifted uncomfortably, rubbing the back of his helm.
“Please,” Thundercracker pressed and there’s a note of desperation to his voice he’s a bit ashamed of.
“I had a friend once. Like the dog. Not quite though. She was smarter. Not a dog,” Cliffjumper struggled through his sentences like speaking them brought him physical pain, and his face reeked of discomfort and distress. A part of Thundercracker regretted asking.
“But she died. And watching this movie, I remembered how that felt. And it hurt. But it felt good in a way. To know it’s not just me.”
“Not just you?”
“To hurt so much. Because you lost something so small.”
Thundercracker thinks for a moment he should be offended at Cliffjumper’s comparison of his friend to Buster. That the comparison is audacious and ill-made. He looks at Cliffjumper’s face, contorted in a grim mask of shame and grief and those feelings ebb away.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Thundercracker says finally.
“It’s’kay,” Cliffjumper mumbles. “Sorry about your dog.” He lingers on a moment longer, but Thundercracker is bereft of anything meaningful to say and a moment later Cliffjumper shuffles off.
Marissa came back up to him after a bit.
“We should probably start heading back,” she said. The walk back is fifteen minutes for Thundercracker. He lifts Marissa back up onto his shoulder.
“Why do humans make so many movies about dogs dying? This did not make me feel better,” Thundercracker grumbled as he trudged through the parking lot, carefully stepping around cars and the odd bike tied to a light pole. The night sky was clear of clouds, riddled with stars and the reminder of how far Thundercracker was from his homeworld.
“I think someday you might appreciate that you made it,” Marissa responded, leaning against his helm again. “I’m glad you made it. Something to remember your time on Earth by.”
Thundercracker felt an odd mix of joy and pain at the thought. Someday the Earth would likely not be anything recognizable to what he once remembered it as, and returning would hold nothing for him but a reminder of what the little dirtball now lacked.
But he would have his movie.
“Perhaps.”