A few days had passed since you’d emerged from the long, dreamless grip of stasis. The Autobot base—once a quiet, almost lonely place—now carried a different hum. Conversations cut short when you walked into a room. Pedesteps echoing in the corridors where there’d once been silence. Relief was in the air, but so was something unspoken.

In one of the larger, more secluded chambers, the low thrum of the base’s power systems filled the space like a steady pulse. You sat at a console, optics tracing lines of tactical readouts and patrol logs, reports of recent Decepticon activity scrolling past in neat, sterile columns. You were trying to catch up. The war you remembered was gone; this one had shifted, evolved, reshaped itself into something unfamiliar. You weren’t just relearning the battlefield—you were piecing yourself back together, thought by thought, memory by memory.

The door slid open with a hiss, letting in the faint draft of cooler air from the hallway. Heavy pedesteps followed, slow and deliberate. You didn’t have to look up to know who it was—there was a certain weight to the way Optimus moved, a carefulness that could be felt before it was heard.

He stopped just inside the threshold, his tall frame casting a long shadow across the floor. His optics lingered on you for a moment longer than necessary, watching the way your focus didn’t waver from the scrolling data. He had imagined this reunion countless times, yet the reality was different—more fragile, more uncertain. You were here, alive, but still distant, as if the stasis had left part of you behind in the dark.

“You’ve been awake for days,” Optimus said at last, his deep voice carrying both concern and quiet command. “And you haven’t rested.”