Gratitude
Gratitude. What is the copter grateful for? Not slaggin' much, honestly. What I got to be grateful for, huh? Being alive? Yeah, one gold star life I've got going here. My job is to get myself shot at.
Seems to me...I should have more. You know? Like...flying. Copter doesn't even remember flying without being loaded to the cargo roof with bombs or drones or missiles. I don't remember just...flying for the fun of it. It seems...weird to even think it, really. Just, what? How do you even do that? Just zip around, looping in the air, going wherever you want to go? It goes against everything I know--having a mission, directive, following orders, following vector, but it...sounds like...I don't even know. It gives me an ache near my spark to think about it. Like, what that would be like. The air. Free. Mine. My own decision what I want to do.
Not like I've got, you know, any great ambitions. Not really. I know what I'm good at, and leading others is not one of them. I don't think I could make really great decisions: left to my own devices I'd just...float around. You know? Explore stuff. Sit. Think. I mean, copter's not real smart and it's probably too late to change that, but sometimes I feel like I've got all this...stuff in my processor and it would mean something if it came out. Or more like it hurts when it doesn't come out, like it's filled up my cortex, clogged my processor.
Sometimes I wonder if that's why I'm so dumb: All that stuff I haven't thought about gets in the way of my processing.
What's all this got to do with gratitude? Slag if I know. Maybe if I got that stuff out, I could tell you.
Gratitude. Right. Okay...copter's got a story.
I got a gift, once. Wasn't much of a gift, really. We were low charged and we had a mission to run and I lifted this courier out from under fire. He was scared half to death, really. Really sad. So I zip in and pick him up and stuff and he's like...bawling in my cargo bay, not only because he's scared but because he thinks everyone will laugh at him for being scared. And so I told him it was like no big deal. I lied, really. I mean, I said that everyone's scared in battle. That's not true. I'm not. Not like I rush in all stupid-brave and roaring. I just...don't care. Noting to be 'grateful' for enough to really miss losing it.
Right. The story. So I lie my tailrotor off and tell him it's fine. Everyone's scared in combat, especially the small ones. And I don't think anything of it: honestly, I just talked to him at all to get him to shut up because the noise was interfering with my concentration.
So you know like a few daycycles later, I've like totally forgotten it, and I get back to my recharge and there's this cube of energon lying in my station with a note from him.
Here's the dumb thing: It wasn't airframe grade. Of course not. It was groundframe. The little slagger had taken his own ration for the day, and given it to me. He went hungry that whole day, low on fuel, because he wanted to give me something.
So it's not airframe grade. You know what that means, right? Tastes like slag, burns like bad lava. I drank it anyway, just thinking about him starving to give me something. And it burned the whole way down, and for like 5 whole cycles after that.
But I didn't mind that it burned, because it helped me remember.
So I guess, gratitude tastes like burning.