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This is Velocitron, where people will run you over and crush you into the ground with a smile on their faces if it means winning. This is Velocitron, where only the fastest and flashiest will make it anywhere. This is Velocitron, where the rest of us are left behind, broken and beaten—
—but not dead yet.
Stormrunner put down the writing tablet, his wrists creaking as he did so. He smiled at his broken body, made so by a racer whose name he didn’t even know, yet someone who had been so determined to send him spinning off the track. Swerving, flying, flipping over, crashing, catching fire—and then getting run over again and again. They wanted him dead. He never knew why, but they wanted him dead. He couldn’t think of a single thing he’d done, but they wanted him dead.
Sometimes there wasn’t a reason.
He picked up the tablet and kept writing.
Many times since the day of the accident, he wrote, the one that wasn’t really an accident, I have thought about jumping into the solar storms that chase the city. I have thought about putting a bullet in my brain module. I have thought about slicing my wrists over and over till all the vital Energon bleeds out. A couple times when Suncatcher wasn’t here I did try. I want to say she doesn’t know but she looks at me like she does.
We’ve never talked about it.
But she always says she loves me.
She’s seen hell herself. I know that look in her optics, the faraway one that remembers loved ones long lost, never to be found again. I never had anyone I loved before this. I can still imagine the pain. Now I have a couple people I love—my mother Suncatcher, who took me in when no one else would and when even I had given up on Stormrunner, was the first. I always want to say my baby brother was the first because he’s the only reason I’m alive today, but I was angry with him at first for rescuing me, doing whatever the doctors couldn’t and bringing me back from the verge of death. I didn’t want to be alive.
Knock Out brought me back to life, and for a while, though I promised myself I would protect him, I couldn’t forgive him for that. Suncatcher sometimes looks at him like she can’t forgive him either, and I have never asked why. I know it has something to do with that faraway look and the memorial outside the house. I think that perhaps Knock Out reminds her of someone she lost.
Someone she can never get back.
She suffers each day, and yet she still tells me life is worth living, and though we have never spoken of the things I’ve done to my body, there’s no way she doesn’t know. She looks for the new scars. She looks for the things I hastily patch up when I fail again. She looks for the empty look in my optics, and she cannot fix it, but she always hugs me close, the first person to ever do that.
The people on the streets tell me to die, but Suncatcher tells me to live. Everyone I meet is an enemy, but when I come home, friends are waiting for me. It is unfamiliar, but I’m okay with this kind of unfamiliar. Instead of kicking dirt in my face, they hold my hands, and instead of laughing at me, they laugh with me. We don’t have much, especially with the whole world hating us and doing everything to keep us down, but we have each other. It’s new. I like this new thing.
Suncatcher is my favorite of the new things. Though she hurts so deeply, she shines brighter than her name, and when she says “I love you,” it lights a little beacon for me. A very small beacon, but still a beacon, something to follow as I stumble through the dark.
She loves me and wants me to stay. That isn’t a fix. Nothing is a fix. But over time, as we both suffered, as the pain clawed at our insides, winding vines around our sparks, I discovered something.
“Things get better,” was always Suncatcher’s empty promise. Things did not get better. They got worse. But I got stronger. And as much as everything feels like it's going to shit all the time, I don't wanna kill myself anymore. That's something, ain't it?
Things do not magically get better. You make them better yourself. And if you don't have the tools to do that, if you drew such shitty cards from the deck of life, you can decide to turn “Fuck this, I'm done” into “Fuck you, I live.”
Oh yeah, there are people who wish I succeeded back then with jumping into the solar storms, putting a bullet through my brain module, slicing my wrists till the Energon bled out. Those people are everywhere, all around me the moment I step outside. But I don't care. I failed and I'm still here and no matter how much you wish I would, I'm not gonna try again. Fuck you. I'm here and I'm taking up space and I'm fighting hard.
I’m not getting back on the race track. I don’t need to. I’m not fast and I don’t need to be. I’m not flashy and I don’t need to be. My joints creak, my metal’s rusted, and I’m covered in dirt and burn marks and scratches, all thanks to you. I’m ugly, broken down, something to leave behind in the junkyard. But none of that matters, ‘cause I’ve decided I don’t give a shit and I’m gonna keep moving forward in this world that so badly doesn’t want me to.
“No, Stormrunner,” it says. “Lie down and die.”
I will not lie down and die.
I will live.
And I will live.
And.
I.
Will.
Live.
First it’s to spite you, then it’s to love those I found as I moved forward. They were not there with every step. I have walked alone sometimes. But the times our paths so wonderfully crossed, the times they could be there, those times meant everything, and suddenly it’s not about you anymore. It’s about family, forged in the fires of the dawn, bound together not by our metal but by our bright, unyielding sparks.
I AM STORMRUNNER OF DELTA, AND THIS BROKEN, BEAUTIFUL BODY WILL CARRY ME INTO THE FUTURE I FIGHT FOR WITH MY OWN RUSTY HANDS.