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Over the course of his ancient life Bumblebee had lost so many people he cared for deeply to death’s greedy maw, and he had become intimately acquainted with grief. This time, death’s maw had taken on a literal form, and he’d lost friends who had been with him since what felt like the beginning to its bottomless hunger. Optimus, Wheeljack, Blurr, Ironhide, Cliffjumper – they'd endured by Bumblebee’s side for so long that some part of him had almost dared to hope that they were constants in his life more constant than even death itself, but death had proven what a deeply foolish hope this was. And yet, it wasn’t as foolish as Bumblebee had first thought, because after death took them from him, one thing did prove to be more constant than even the entropic certainty of death, and that was the connection that he and Starscream shared.
When death had finally come for Bumblebee after so many close encounters over so many millennia, Starscream had kept him tethered to the world of the living, and had acted as his sole companion to save him from loneliness that promised to consume him. When Bee had found his way from the shadows of his spectral prison back into life’s light, death had snatched Starscream away in exchange, but it still couldn’t keep them from each other. Just as Bumblebee had remained tethered to Starscream in death as his shadow companion, Starscream remained with Bee, the one thing death couldn’t truly take from him.
Bumblebee had already wasted too much time with Starscream in conflict over petty slights, and he refused to waste a moment more – when he found that Starscream had transcended death to return to him, he realised that every moment they shared was a singular gift to treasure. He deeply relished every fond glance they exchanged, and every playful word between them, and he found a joy unlike any he’d ever known before in the intimate understanding they shared that was so very much theirs and theirs alone.
Many of the people Bumblebee now found himself surrounded with were more or less strangers – the bots he had once been close to had either been stolen away by death or had set out to find new paths for themselves in the new world that had been left in the wake of Cybertron’s destruction. While prior to his death he had been known for his gregariousness, the resurrected Bumblebee did not fall into easy friendships with the people that cluttered his life. They viewed him as a strange bot who liked to keep his own company most of the time, who would whisper to and laugh along with shadows, and would smile like he knew a secret he had no intention of sharing. To them he was an irreparably damaged bot who had known war all his life, who had then been tormented while trapped in a living death, only to emerge from it just as his world and his friends were swallowed by a monstrous incarnation of ancient vengeance. Clearly his mind had finally given in to the millions of years of trauma and he’d allowed the comforting tide of madness to wash over him and shield him from the cruel realities that had tormented him for so long. Even some of the remaining bots who had been Bumblebee’s old friends shook their heads sadly at the sight of him, sorry to see him seemingly succumb to insanity.
The opinions these other people had of him mattered very little to Bumblebee; the relationships he could ever hope to share with them were ultimately evanescent, while the connection he had with Starscream was a constant greater than death itself. Whatever understanding he could ever cultivate with them would always pale next to the way he and Starscream now understood each other. Why should he waste his time stressing so much over the quality of relationships that would never measure up to the transcendent bond he already possessed?
One of the few other bots with whom Bumblebee did come to feel any sort of meaningful affinity was Windblade – she saw his strange behaviours not as signs of insanity, but rather she recognised them for what they really were, as they were nothing she hadn’t seen before. Knowing that most bots didn’t understand Starscream as she and Bee did, and so knowing that they’d see his continued existence as a threat or an opportunity to enact punishment, she promised to keep their secret. She also promised to find a way to return Starscream to the world of the living when the time was right and she could protect him. Bumblebee had always liked Windblade, and Starscream was finally willing to admit that he felt much the same.
In the meantime, Windblade employed Bumblebee as her diplomat, a role he excelled in part thanks to Starscream acting as his spectral spy, feeding him vital pieces of information that his phantom form made it easy for him to gather, and warning Bee of any threats that might arise. Together, Bumblebee and Starscream became a cornerstone in the peace and prosperity that Windblade was able to cultivate. For once Starscream didn’t care that the masses were oblivious to all he did to help them – Windblade understood that Bee’s achievements were a joint effort, and she extended her thanks to both of them, which he appreciated, but it was Bumblebee’s sincere praise that fuelled him where energon no longer did. He’d spent so long trying to earn validation and approval from Megatron, who had instead offered him nothing but hate and pain, and from the masses, who could never hope to understand him, and would never try to. But now Bumblebee had given him an endless wellspring of true understanding, and earnest gratitude in exchange for every act, large or small, that Starscream did for him, and for once Starscream found what he had thought to be his insatiable need for praise satisfied.
Starscream complained about the things his phantom form denied him, and pressed Bee to nag at Windblade for a way to restore him to life, but when Windblade informed them that a means of resurrection may have been found, Starscream gave them pause. He told them that he was uncomfortable with the current state of his legacy – fearing that his post-mortem reputation was still poor enough that if he was to return now he could be met with enough hostility to kill him all over again. He pointed out that in the current political climate he was still needed as a spy who could phase through walls unseen and unheard. He insisted that the scientists who were needed to bring him back were currently needed for more vital and immediate projects. He gave reasons to postpone his resurrection that were dressed up with all the techniques known to a politician to sound rational, but Bumblebee saw right through Starscream’s misdirection to his true motivations – Starscream was not ready to give up on the liberty of death.
Bumblebee asked Starscream why he would try to lie to him after everything, and Starscream’s fortress of deception finally crumbled, and he confessed that as a phantom he was safe from pain and judgement – and safe from Megatron. In death the only people he could disappoint were Bumblebee and Windblade, and while they were the most painful people to disappoint, they were also the most likely to forgive him, and they wouldn’t beat him for his failures, even if they could. As a spectre he didn’t need to masquerade behind a veil of lies and secrecy – now that he was dead he was more real than he had ever been.
Bumblebee tenderly reached for a face he couldn’t touch and solemnly promised to protect Starscream from any pain or judgement life may threaten him with. He told him that even when returned to life Starscream wouldn’t have to play any part but the role of who he truly was, because they had each other, and no one else’s opinions mattered – after all, Bumblebee knew who Starscream was deep inside, and he loved him dearly for it. It was only then that Bumblebee realised that he’d never actually confessed his love to Starscream, because after Starscream had returned to him from death it had felt so obvious that he’d forgotten to actually say it. Yet when Bumblebee mentioned love, Starscream looked shocked, so Bee realised it was time to make his feelings entirely clear: he told him that since he himself had been a spectre he had harboured profound and tender feelings of love for Starscream, feelings that had only grown fiercer and deeper as time had gone on. It was then that Starscream demanded that he be resurrected immediately so that Bee could kiss him.
But life cared little for Starscream’s demands, just as it cared little for their efforts to create peace and prosperity, because if there was anything as constant as their bond, it was their people’s call to war. Conflict was their natural state, while peace was always a fragile and fleeting abnormality, quickly and easily shattered. This time the shattering that marked the return to war was the shattering of Windblade’s cockpit glass as it was pierced by an assassin’s shot, tearing through her frame to penetrate her spark, igniting her innermost energon . Windblade fell from the sky in flames, a burning beacon signifying the end of an all-too-short era of peace, before her frame shattered on the unforgiving ground, her bright blue energon flowing from her broken body in rivulets.
Starscream demanded bloody vengeance, both for Windblade and himself, and after years of steering Starscream away from violence, Bumblebee could now find no reason to deny him. Together it wasn’t hard for them to track down the people who had orchestrated Windblade’s demise, and while painting the walls with their energon didn’t halt the tide of war they had set into motion, it did bring both Starscream and Bumblebee satisfaction. As Bumblebee gazed down at the twisted and broken bodies left in their wake, expressions of agonised shock frozen on their lifeless faces at their sudden and painful demise, he pondered how being with Starscream had changed him, and how the certainty of Starscream’s companionship made any change worthwhile.
Bee watched war consume them all once more with despair but also with resignation – it seemed clearer than ever that there was no true escape from the inevitability and endlessness of war. Once he had been so sure about his allegiance as an Autobot and the moral righteousness for which he’d fought, but in this new cycle of conflict he felt no such strong allegiance to any of the factions that arose. He sided with the people who claimed to represent what Windblade had stood for, because of his lingering loyalty to her and a sense of obligation to try and fight for what was right, but in truth he had little faith that they understood what was right or what Windblade truly wanted. Still, he felt he had to try to take a stand.
Starscream saw the war as the vindication of his cynicism, but it didn’t matter that the universe was exactly as dark as he’d always thought, because he had Bumblebee now, and that was more than he’d ever dreamt he’d have. Starscream had always fought for his own survival first, but now he fought for Bee’s; while people were massacred in droves as the atrocities of war piled up once more, Bumblebee moved through the conflict almost unscathed as his ethereal guardian watched over him. As the people around him perished while he endured, Bumblebee grew ever more detached from other people and their ephemeral existences. What was the point in growing close to them when they would most likely die abruptly and meaninglessly at any given moment? Once he would have scoffed at such an attitude, but that was before he had the certainty and constancy of what he had with Starscream. As everyone and everything turned to slag and rust around them, he and Starscream, and the love they shared, continued on.
Periods of peace dotted the enduring conflict, and some people were naïve enough to believe that they marked the end of war, but it never ended. It evolved, the factions changed, and people found new excuses to fight, but they never truly stopped fighting. Bumblebee did however, when it became clear to him that there was no hope of a lasting peace to fight for, and no side with which he truly belonged. He didn’t look at the others and see comrades to whom he had any kind of duty or loyalty, all he saw were people making the same mistakes that had been made so many times before, because the old forgot, the young were ignorant, and few who managed to hold onto their lessons were slaughtered in the crossfire (except for Bee – Starscream wouldn’t allow that to happen). The Maximals vs. the Predacons , the Children of Primus vs. Unicron’s Spawn, the Scarlet Transcendulas vs. Amaranthine Order, it was all the same. Bumblebee had no side to fight for now, but he had Starscream. He always had Starscream.
Time and war went on as their kind rained destruction down upon what little had survived the previous cycles of ruination. Every inch of Earth’s surface was choked by a technorganic superweapon that melted every lifeform present, organic and mechanical alike, into an agonised lattice of crystallised and immobilised life that encased the world like the shell of an egg. This entity endured its agony for over a million years before it and the planet it encompassed were both finally consumed in flames when their sun was detonated as it was used to test another superweapon, which would later go on to end another 200 billion lives. Luna 1 similarly became a testing ground, where the prisoners of war were made subjects for every manner of experiment that left so many of them twisted into unrecognisable monsters, with just enough memory of who they had once been to understand the horror of what had been done it them. Others were left in too much agony to remember anything at all, and the lucky ones were left as corpses. When the prisoners finally managed to overpower their jailers, they chose to turn the moon’s defence system inward to annihilate what it had been placed there to protect, rather than risk the moon falling back into hands of those that would resume its prior use.
New Cybertron was transformed back into the shape of a holy destroyer, and although it was no longer puppeted by the hateful and genocidal doctrine of Functionalism, the ideology that came to drive it was no less consumed by abhorrence, and it cut a bloody swathe though the universe. Its rampage of destruction was finally ended only when it was violently dismembered by the piranha fleets of the Galactic Consortia, which had resolved to subjugate or exterminate all mechanical life in the universe. The war became smaller and smaller as the strongholds of their kind were eliminated and their population continued to dwindle, but the fighting never truly stopped.
Some part of Bee still wanted to put a stop to the atrocities, but he was one bot against the indomitable drive towards death and entropy that consumed their species. At one point he had taken a risk in the hopes of making a difference, only to be captured and horrifically tortured. Bumblebee had suffered tremendously as Starscream had suffered alongside him to a comparable degree as he was overwhelmed with horror and helplessness at the spectacle unfolding before his optics. Bee had screamed in excruciating pain while Starscream had screamed in distress and rage as he’d desperately and uselessly tried to attack Bee’s torturers and prise them away from the only thing he cared about, feeling more unbearably tormented by his spectral state than he ever had before. It was only by chance that Starscream had found an opportunity for Bumblebee to escape; it was after this that Starscream made Bumblebee promise to leave the war behind completely, and the following day they did.
Bumblebee and Starscream journeyed further into the universe, away from the ceaseless violence of their species, but wherever they went they only encountered the same patterns of endless warfare. Mechanical life, organic life, energy life, it didn’t matter; all life was ultimately bent on spreading death. Bumblebee interacted with the species they encountered just enough to get from them what he needed to survive in comfort, but beyond that he didn’t form bonds or get involved, because he knew that they weren’t going to be around for long. For the vast majority of life, existence was a pointless parade of suffering with an absurd and abrupt end.
But Bumblebee and Starscream had accepted and moved on from this fact; they’d turned their focus away from the horrors of the universe, and inwards towards the rapturous love they shared. Despite the pain and atrocities that surrounded them, they spent the eons wandering the universe in contentment, because they were eons they spent together. They couldn’t touch each other, but it didn’t really matter, the understanding between them was infinitely deeper and more intimate than any touch could possibly ever be. As they wandered the universe they witnessed wonders as well as horrors – a world of impossibly complex crystal that cast rainbows out into the universe; an unthinkably tremendous ocean suspended in the middle of space hosting coral reefs lightyears wide; clusters of pulsars transmitting radio waves that in concert made hauntingly beautiful symphonies like nothing ever produced by any civilisation. But this all in itself seemed like just pretty little ephemera to Bumblebee and Starscream; what made it all truly wonderous was that they were witnessing it together. When they encountered the singing pulsars it didn’t matter that they couldn’t touch each other; they knew each other’s movements better than they knew their own, so they had no trouble falling into one another’s arm and swaying together to the celestial song.
Bumblebee didn’t even realise when he became the last living member of his kind, and at that point he might not have cared. He and Starscream wandered the universe side by side for billions upon billions of years after the rest of their species finally ceased to be, watching countless other civilisations rising and falling as they wiped themselves and each other from the canvas of the cosmos. As time went on the life they’d each had on Cybertron and the conflict they’d fought became buried deeper and deeper in both Bumblebee and Starscream’s memory banks, until it was effectively forgotten, but the essence of the bond they had forged during that time remained constant. Stars were born and stars died; new species evolved from the muck only to be annihilated by the simulated life they themselves created, before that life eventually either annihilated itself or gave rise to some other entity that would in turn be its downfall. The cycle repeated itself an unfathomably number of times, while Bumblebee and Starscream continued to love each other.
For all the death life inflicted, it wasn’t war or hatred that brought about its final downfall, instead it was simply entropy in its rawest form. So very slowly the universe succumbed to heat death; the stars started going out and fewer and fewer new ones ignited to take their place; the universe grew steadily colder and the ever-dwindling number of stars grew further and further apart. It was an inevitability that many civilisations had tried to prevent over the course of history, and some had even come close, but on the verge of every breakthrough the science had instead been co-opted to make weapons of war, or been exterminated by an enemy faction on the eve of unveiling the findings. Now the end was here, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
As the lights went out, heat death starved what was left of the living, with Bumblebee among their number. He wandered the increasingly cold cosmos with Starscream at his side as ever, his dry tanks screaming out for fuel that was nowhere to be found, his ancient frame crumbling to dust as he walked the empty wasteland of the universe. Starscream watched him, thinking about how he had once so envied Bee’s tangible frame that could enjoy fuel and the other pleasures of the mesh, and how his own deprivation had felt like torment, only for Bee to now be tortured by the body he possessed, and Starscream to be tortured by the sight of his suffering.
Life ended and with it so finally did war, but now all that was left was haunting quiet, wrapped in freezing darkness. Bumblebee attempted to warm his frame – which was now more rust than anything else – around one of the few dim, remaining stars, and thought about how he didn’t know how much longer he could last as the universe died around him, but how he very much knew of the agony his continued life inflicted on him. The one thing he had to live for now was the one thing he’d spent for the vast majority of his ancient existence living for, and that was Starscream. The pain and hopelessness made death immensely seductive, but the chance that he might leave Starscream alone in the void for all eternity held him back.
Starscream watched Bumblebee – starving, freezing, rusting away into nothing – and knew what had to happen. If Bee didn’t act soon he would become paralysed by lack of fuel, condemning him to a much longer and more painful demise. The thought of losing Bee and being left alone forever in a dead universe terrified him beyond imagining, but he knew that if it was going to happen, it would happen either way, but that it was their choice how long Bee continued to suffer, and how long Starscream continued to watch him suffer. Starscream told Bumblebee what he wanted, and with that Bee used the last few drops of fuel he possessed to turn his orbit around the dim, dying star in to a collision course.
The heat of the star’s furnace was paltry on a cosmic scale, but it was enough to burn the rust from Bee’s frame and then melt what remained into slag as his spark exploded in a tiny nova. Bee’s brain and body burned away in the star, along with his suffering, and from the furnace an ephemeral form arose like a phoenix, free of hunger, exhaustion, cold or pain. The spectral figure ascended into the arms of Starscream, and finally gave him the kiss that he had demanded a trillion years ago, and in that moment the empty, dying universe was host to love and joy of an intensity that it had never known before.
A spectres of Bumblebee and Starscream wandered the universe as the last of the stars faded, but the cold was nothing to them; they burned in the darkness with the passion they had for each other. In the meagre light of the last dying star they finally danced with the feeling of their ghostly bodies pressed together and their hands held in each other’s. Time went on, but there was no way left to measure it, and it didn’t matter anyway – Bumblebee and Starscream were no longer subjects to the demands and ravages of time, they were eternal, and so was their love. As the universe and every point of reference within it faded into nothingness, Bumblebee and Starscream's senses of self disintegrated as well. The thought of themselves as individuals wasted away as the idea of being apart became impossible to conceive, and the boundaries between them became non-existent in the face of their intimacy and empathy for each other. They weren’t two people in love anymore, they were a pure, loving essence in the darkness, caught forever in the rapture of its existence.
Eventually there was nothing left in void that had once been the universe; no light, no warmth, no life, no war.
Only love.