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“D’ya ever think about death?”
The question was innocent enough, but it made Bumblebee almost start laughing on the spot, turning his helm to stare at Bulkhead. “I’m the wrong bot to ask there, Bulk.”
Bulkhead murmured something to himself, not moving his optics away from the character death screen on the video game he was playing. He didn’t make any efforts to revive himself, simply watching the words fade in and out of focus.
Bumblebee kind of knew why he was asking. Between Lockdown, Blackarachnia, and the multiple Decepticons, his new team was quickly finding out that Earth wasn’t nearly as peaceful as they first thought it would be.
Technically, this was Bumblebee’s third time on Earth, so he knew better, but for them? This was all something novel. Especially for Bulkhead, a bot who only wanted to be on space bridge repair and never cared about seeing “real action”.
“I know,” Bulkhead said after a few more kliks of silence. “It’s just… never thought I’d be actually fighting bots, you know? The dinobots were scary enough on their own, and they weren’t anything big.”
Seeing as how they were sent by Megatron himself, but equally seeing that Bulkhead didn’t know that, nor even needed to know that, Bumblebee settled for a quiet nod. He thought of this world’s Grimlock out for energon, and then of his own who probably missed Bumblebee as much as he missed Grimlock.
“Yeah, well.” Bumblebee shrugged. “That’s just the way life goes, I guess. Everyone dies one day.”
“Except you.”
“Just because I got revived and sent here doesn’t mean I didn’t die.” Bumblebee groused, hiding his intake into the heel of his servo, turning halfway away from Bulkhead. “It just means… okay, so I don’t know what it means. But I experienced it. I went through the whole “bleeding out” thing and the “follow the light” thing and the… “everything else” thing.”
“Right…” Bulkhead said, frowning. “Still dunno if it counts.”
“Of course it…!” Cutting himself off, Bumblebee shook his helm. “It counts. Trust me, Bulkhead, it counts. You don’t want to live through what I did. I mean, I didn’t live through it, and I’m still upset about it.”
Bulkhead was silent, finally pressing the revive button and starting to navigate through the stage again.
Bumblebee watched him quietly. It was weird, to know how close together in this world they sparked, but while his previous Bulkhead was so much older, due to the Allspark’s revive-beam Bumblebee was older than this one.
He hoped Bulkhead would never have to experience war and pain the way he did. It was a very big reason he had killed Megatron, and he knew he’d do it again in a sparkpulse if he had to. He valued everyone here far too much to let himself falter.
“Do you think when the rest of us die, we’ll get a new frame?” Bulkhead asked after another nano-klik, and Bumblebee slowly turned his attention to him.
“No,” Bumblebee reassured. “You shouldn’t. The Allspark–” isn’t that cruel, “doesn’t typically do that. I don’t even know why it did it with me, but trust me, if this was a normal thing you’d be hearing a lot more bots complain.”
“You think it’s going to do it to you again?” Bulkhead wondered aloud.
Bumblebee startled, looking up at him. “What? What do you mean?”
“You die again,” Bulkhead murmured, not quite looking at him again. “You wake up a couple millennia later in a new body, and it’s just… a cycle.”
“A cycle.” Bumblebee echoed.
“Yeah! Like, has this happened before, but you just don’t remember? Dying and waking up and…?”
Bumblebee thought of falling into Cybermatter. Of feeling his spark diminish. Only to awaken and see Megatron towering over Optimus, teasing the killing blow. Wading to the edge of the pool, he hadn’t dared let himself dwell on the fact that he had just felt himself die before he stabbed Megatron through.
He thought of waking up after Tyger Pax to an ache in his spark and Ratchet quietly telling him he almost didn’t make it. He thought of Optimus holding his servo and not daring to speak of whatever had nearly happened to Bumblebee. They didn’t speak of his voice.
He kept dying and waking up just fine. It was just that this time it was with the caveat of being in a new universe.
Miraculous was, apparently, his middle name.
“Well,” he said, finding a wry smile that he weaponized into something falsely pleasant as he reached out to pat Bulkhead’s arm. “Let’s just hope, for the sake of my mental sanity, it doesn’t keep happening.”
If he woke up somewhere else, isolated and alone, needing to scrounge together the rough remainders of his former team, over and over, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep up. He was slowly getting used to this world, but that didn’t mean he wanted to live through the confusion again.
Bulkhead’s expression was pinched in sympathy, but he didn’t know how deeply Bumblebee meant it.
“I’m sure it won’t, Bee.” Bulkhead reassured, lifting a faulty servo to rest on his shoulder. “I was just curious.”
“As long as we’re on Earth, Sari’s key will put me in the right body.” Bumblebee reassured, even though deep uncertainty washed through him the longer he thought about it. “No matter how many times it takes. I’ll be alright, Bulkhead. None of us are going anywhere.”
“I hope you’re right…” Bulkhead mumbled, quietly looking back up at his video game, eternally paused.
Bumblebee hoped he was right, too. How nice it was that this world had a revive token. But he was seriously done with using it. If he never felt his spark fade, energon leaking out of his lines, sharp agony cascading through this whole frame…
He remembered Jack saying something about having such a long life seemed like a curse.
At the time, he had laughed.
Now, he was inclined to agree.