Conceptions - 10
Title: Conceptions of the Self - Home - Mei's Fanfic Master List
FIC Summary: [2007, AU] Sore throats, nightmares, and the differences between organics and Cybertronians - something is terribly wrong with Sam. To live is to evolve, and shape alone is not enough; think of it as a mutual learning experience. (Bot!Sam, PTSD, Mech/mech)
1, 2, 2.b, 3, 4, 4.b, 5, 6, 7, 7.b, 8, 8.b, 9, 9.b, 10, 10.b
Chapter Ten: We All Fall Down
plz 2 b raedign primes intermession. Just in case you wanted some prep for the utter bull ahead.
-+-
Sam came to himself abruptly, without any sort of softening -- a lapse of awareness like the world hiccupped. He stumbled, having been in the middle of walking and froze, looking around. For one desperate instant, he wasn't sure if he was dreaming or not -- it was dark deep nighttime, the stars above and the orange and blue lights highlighted the street ... then he noted that houses were still lighted, he definitely wasn't holding the All Spark, and Bumblebee was in the driveway. He was outside his house, and tremendously upset without having much of an idea of why.
He remembered quite clearly the decision to go home and try to tell his parents about what was happening to him. (A person would think it would have filled him with dread, but he'd only been able ... to feel numb. That remembered dissonance, that out of jointness that he'd been feeling when the government finally let him go home ... that feeling of disconnect, of wading through liquid dreams was what encouraged him to make such a decision.) He even remembered getting out of Bumblebee, and walking into his house ... sitting his parents down while he tried not to sway from vertigo --
And nothing. It was like a tape recorded over. And while a part of him thought with bewilderment of that Men in Black movie and the memory erasing pen-thing, that nuera-whatsit, he knew there was probably a better explanation. After all, he and Bumblebee had discussed Cybertronian dreams.
So, feeling a pounding sickness in his chest while his stomach tied itself in knots, he continued over to Bumblebee and slid into the seat. Nearly immediately, stifling comfort smothered him, and he stared out the window as Bumblebee pulled away. Pins and needles prickled across his body and his limbs were tense, and he was forced into stillness.
"Did you know," Sam said conversationally to Bumblebee, "That I can apparently lock my own memories?"
The Autobot rumbled worriedly under his hands, silent but for the expressive Cybertronian vibration. (Sam silently struggled against the choking calm and nearly tangible worry, but he couldn't struggle hard enough, and everything he might have felt, wanted to feel about what he could only assume happened in that house was strangled into submission by emotions much louder than his own.)
"I mean," he added (and sounded plastic, fluorescent, fake and too bright), "It's really weird. I know what the memory is about. I'm still upset. But I don't actually remember what it was my parents said to me."
"Give them some time, Sam," Bumblebee said soothingly. "You're not taking it well, and you understand a lot more about what you're becoming than they do."
The breath went out of him slowly, and ever-so-delicately, he sagged back against the seat, letting his useless hands slip from the wheel. "I guess," he said noncommittally. He certainly couldn't blame his parents for not reacting well. After all, he had -- alien technology taking over his brain. He could loc his own memories as if it were nothing but a filing cabinet! He didn't even know he could do that until he wanted to forget it so badly that he'd physically hurt.
"You should have waited a few days."
He probably should have, but it wasn't what he needed to be told. A drive hadn't cheered him up, but it had brought some measure of calm to him. Then he'd focused on who else knew, and figured that he could really do with a hug from his mother. Sam might not remember what happen at the moment, but he definitely knew that there hadn't been any hugging going on.
The night pressed in against the outside of the window -- which was odd, considering that night wasn't real, just an extension of the vacuum overhead. Shouldn't it be pulling on the windows? Maybe the laws of physics had changed without him knowing (because he definitely felt as though here was being compressed from all sides and it had nothing to do with a mood-changing drug named Bumblebee). "Today's been a busy day," he said mildly, thinking about it -- he had just found out that he was going to ... turn freaking metal this afternoon. What was wrong with him, thinking that by any measure it was a good idea to go tell his parents!
(He had two weeks, approximately, before it was over. Then he'd slip into a coma and be unaware until the change was complete but he wasn't stupid enough to believe that it'd be him waking up.)
Looking down at his hands, they'd never seemed more frail (more breakable) but they weren't. Chernobyl flickered uselessly in his chest, feebly trying to power up but failing under the suffocating heft of calm. And he was tired (exhausted, thwarted and yanked around and powerless) and he just wanted to sleep ... but he was a little afraid to, at the same time, because what if he didn't wake up?
Sam sort of thought that he'd probably be trying to restrain himself from throwing an epic fit if it weren't for the fact that he simply couldn't muster the outrage and anger (that he knew was inside him, but it couldn't escape) required. Considering how 'well' his parents took it, he couldn't wait to see how Mikaela took it. "What am I going to do about Miles?" he asked numbly, staring blankly at the yellow reflectors snapping by. It was kind of hypnotizing.
"You could tell him you're moving away. Then you could still email him or take calls from him," Bumblebee suggested.
"That sounds good," he said. "I just hope he doesn't want to visit. And why would I move? No, it's a good idea, I just ... well, anyway."
After a moment of silence, the radio turned on and scanned through some channels, finally landing on a song that sounded a lot like something some kid would cut his arms to. " ... that everyone was waiting on a cue to turn and run when all I needed was the truth," the pop music whined.
"Hey, Bumblebee," he murmured, "Do you think I'd bleed blue?"
-+-
Things were looking better in the morning, despite the lack of sleep. (As a matter of fact, that probably helped him to dismiss the events of yesterday.) He was actually in a decent mood. Then he got to talk to Optimus Prime, which was of course exactly what he wanted to do seven hours after being disowned by his parents. Every time he tried to touch the memory, he always discovered that three seconds had passed, and he'd apparently locked the memory of remembering the memory he'd locked.
Yeah, it was kinda like one of those 'I know you know I know you know' things.
"Sam," Optimus said when he saw him, bending down to come closer to eye level ... as if fifteen feet up was eye level. "There is something I need you to do for me."
Which, was, like ... not the way a person gets talked into things. "Last time I did something for you, I got kidnapped, you destroyed my parent's garden, and then I got knocked off a building. And now look where I am!" he finished, a little hysterically, waving his arms and gesturing and all. He was calm, dammit!
"It's Jazz," he said.
"Oh," he said stupidly. "Wait, what? What about Jazz? I thought Jazz was dead?"
"It will take more than being pulled to pieces to kill us," Optimus said. Even with Sam's new understanding of the expressions and the sounds that were Cybertronian equivalents, Optimus seemed just as distant and ... well, he reminded Sam of this story he read for English class, in which the father was just as distant and ... uncaring wasn't exactly the right word, but it was disturbingly close. "But when damaged severely enough, we go into a sort of stasis ... a coma, if you will. I believe that with your help, we may be able to bring Jazz online."
Sam stared. "How in the hell am I supposed to be able to help?"
"The program, Sam," Optimus said, then extended his hand. "Climb on."
It seemed like a really bad idea. He didn't know what was expected of him, but he was certain nothing good came of it. Yet he still felt compelled to try, because ... well, it was bad enough when a human was in a coma, but how must these long-lived sentients feel when one of their own was alive but unresponsive? An eternity of that ...
So he climbed onto Optimus Prime's hand.
Inertia was amazing, as was being grasped in the hand of a being large enough to step on a human without even noticing. Sam felt a bit like Jack and the Beanstalk. He held onto one of Optimus' giant fingers just for security as the huge robot began walking, presumably taking him where Jazz's slumbering body was.
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" he asked, looking up at the face far above him. Unlike Ratchet, Optimus was carrying him at waist level.
"What is your concern, Sam?" Optimus inquired.
Sam had a feeling that he wasn't used to having people like Sam question his decisions, but the fact remained that Sam hadn't been compliant, and even if he was going to be ... basically one of Optimus' soldiers, Sam didn't plan on stopping anytime soon. Any military leader who thought suicide was the answer deserved to be questioned, frequently and often.
"I mean, he got ripped apart. That's going to do things to a guy's mind, you know. I doubt he'll be thrilled."
"Jazz is an Autobot," Optimus said. "We have been fighting for a very long time. Not we as a people, though this is also true, but we as in ourselves, Ironhide and Bumblebee and myself."
"Maybe there's a reason he hasn't woken up yet," Sam said darkly.
"Perhaps that is true. However, we need Jazz."
Which was the end of that argument. Optimus took him to a section of the base that Sam hadn't been into previously, and into a room that was disturbingly similar to the med bay. "Shouldn't Ratchet be here?" Sam questioned as he was sat on the table by the bulky bot. Jazz loomed pale in the darkness, oddly ... like a silver skeleton, or a solid ghost. He seemed strangely smaller than Bumblebee, if much, much wider, especially in the chest area. Sam bit his lip as he cautiously moved across the table (it was some twelve feet high, but of course it was sturdy). He reached out tentatively and set his hand against the alloy armor, almost expecting it to be cold -- but it wasn't. It wasn't warm either, but strangely a middling temperature, as if it didn't exist under his hands if it weren't solid to keep him from falling through the illusion.
And under that solidness, just barely, he thought he might be able to sense that the metal wasn't what Bumblebee called 'dead metal'. Earth-metal had no life to it, but he could feel the difference ... Jazz was in there, somewhere.
It must be very disturbing to be among lumbered dead monsters.
"What do you expect me to do?" he asked, dropping his hand and turning to Optimus. "I mean, I ... fe-- ... well, I don't know why you think I'll be able to do anything."
A great deal of air moved inside Optimus Prime. It wasn't a sigh, but it was strangely like saying he'd come to a decision. Optimus extended his arm again, and Sam was a little confused until he saw what was on the Autobot's palm.
"All Spark," Sam breathed. He wordlessly reached out and picked the shard up with both hands, curling his fingers around it. This wasn't like the Earth-metal at all, or even the Autobots. It was -- it was living-notliving. It tickled through his palms and his arms and connected through his chest from one shoulder to the other. It wasn't living-but-it-was. (It was his, he knew it. Hishishishishim.)
He wobbled slightly sideways, dazed as he felt it flicker by and through and over and in his bodyawarenessmindself (because it was a part of him, a piece of his body). He settled, finally, against Jazz's unmoving body, hip and elbow resting against alloy armor.
Sam would never be sure what Optimus Prime's intention was when his large mechanical hand came in contact with his opposite shoulder. His brain did inform him that he lost nearly five minutes of time, and by the time he became aware of what was going on, there was a lot of clanking metal, his head was ringing, and it felt like he had cotton in his ears. He groaned a little, stirring, slowly coming back around to his body ... he was on his stomach, the partial shard of the All Spark grasped in hand and trapped under hip. Finally, he began to make sense of the moving colors in what he realized were his eyes, and analyzed the very strange image he was looking at, withdrawing one arm out from under him to begin the struggle to an upright position.
"Hey, little man," a gentle and vaguely familiar voice said as he twitched and moved. "Wait there, don't move. I called Ratchet, okay?" Optimus Prime was collapsed on the ground like a puppet, and the comparatively tiny bot Jazz was hovering over him but looking at Sam. During the time he had -- blacked out (another power surge? It made sense that an influx of energy would make his electronic brain hiccup, wouldn't it ...), Jazz must have sat up and been alarmed to find his leader offline and sprawled on the ground. He got props for moving without injuring Sam, who must have collapsed right next to him.
"Ratchet's gonna be so pissed," Sam groaned, but insisted on moving. Clutching the fragment of All Spark to his chest with one possessive arm, he used the other to lever him up, even though he felt sparks of almost-pain flare up his arm from the palm bracing him up. His head hurt so badly.
"Listen, if you're gonna insist on being up and 'bout," Jazz said roughly, clearly disoriented, "then you can fill me in on what the hell is going on here!"
A panicking robot well over ten feet tall was not something Sam cared to be around. "Snafu, Jazz," he said groggily. "That's what's going on. You were in a coma."
An irritated clicking. "The battle? The All Spark?"
"Three months ago," he said, wrapping his jacket covered arms around the fragment. "Destroyed. Megatron and I think everyone but for Starscream, Barricade, and Frenzy have been dumped at the bottom of one of our trenches."
"Man," Jazz said, creating a soft song of surprise, sorrow, and victory. He was the most musical bot with his 'expressions' that Sam had the 'pleasure' of hearing. It wasn't just ... musical, it was harmonic, half a song without words.
"You're telling me," he said, still a little disoriented himself, but empathizing with suddenly waking up to having found that everything changed.
That was about when Bumblebee and Ratchet showed up, bursting into the hanger like two rabid hell hounds. Ratchet paused by the door to take in the scene while Bumblebee made a straight line for Sam, making an agitated grinding-humming combination. Before he'd even finished the journey, Ratchet added his expression to the already noisy room -- and was by far the loudest, more furious mech in the room. Sam definitively didn't need to be fluent in Giant Alien Robot to know that the greenish-yellow mech was pissed off. Amusingly, everyone in the room immediately cowered, Bumblebee hesitating before deciding that retreat was the best decision and finishing the journey to Sam's side posthaste, snatching him up a little too quickly and clutching him to the bumper as he began to edge away to put the table between them and Ratchet. The medic paid them no real mind, storming toward Jazz and Prime while remarkably resembling a Decepticon. If Sam hadn't been currently clinging to his guardian who didn't seem to have any plans to let him go, he might have tried a repeat of Mission City, All Spark clutched to his chest just the same.
Jazz decided that survival was more important than valor, saw that Bumblebee had a plan, and threw in his lot with them ... abandoning his unconscious leader to the 'tender' mercies of their resident medic. Satisfied with this costly and personal sacrifice, the angry steel god stop to evaluate his offering ... okay, that might have been rather melodramatic, but it was several tons and twenty feet of angry robot. It was pretty damn scary, even if he was on the good side.
Ratchet made furious grumbling noises as he checked over Prime, and Bumblebee and Jazz decided to try to make a sneaky break for it. They might have succeeded if not for Sam, because as soon as Ratchet was sure that Prime was fine, he immediately came looking for Sam. While still sounding like a very angry, very big chainsaw.
"No! No, no-no-no-no!" Sam yelped, and hugging the All Spark shard close to his chest, he began trying to climb over Bumblebee to escape. This was unfortunately like a cat when faced with a dog, and he distracted Bumblebee from any escape route and ended up getting plucked off the smaller yellow mech. "Help!" he cried mournfully, clinging to his piece of All Spark. Past Ratchet's fingers, he saw Bumblebee shrug helplessly. Jerk.
"Now," Ratchet said, setting him back down on the table only to whip around and point threateningly at Jazz, who started and slunk sheepishly away from the door and back to the table. "What just happened here?"
"Er," Sam said, looking at Jazz.
"Ah," Jazz added helpfully.
"Hmm."
"Yeah."
"Ask him," they told the medic, pointing at each other. Noticing this, they quickly redirected their fingers toward the unconscious Prime.
Ratchet made a very loud, very intimidating noise. It was about that time that he noticed what Sam was clutching and reached out -- only for Sam to jerk back, gripping the shard tightly. Ratchet gave up on that quickly enough, but turned around to give Prime a very poisonous look. Shaking his head, he turned back and began scanning Sam -- made some more furious noises, and lapsed into unintelligible spit-cracklings. Sam was very certain that this was their spoken language, because only moments into his rant, both Jazz and Bumblebee reacted, almost protestingly, making the exact same noises.
Sam took this moment to tuck the shard of All Spark into the waistband of his pants. It was his, dammit -- he'd earned it. It was dead, anyway (dead-notdead). Living metal but not in the way that the Autobots were, not in the way that the All Spark should be (he knew, even though he hadn't known how to feel that life when he'd held it months ago ... but his dreams told him well enough). It was an All Spark fragment, made of some strange metal that wasn't even like what the Cybertronians were made of, but the power of the All Spark was gone. Extinguished.
(Or hiding.)
Ratchet made another dissatisfied noise, calling Sam's attention back to him. "Off with the shirts," he demanded.
"What!" Sam squawked, looking around at the aliens surrounding him. The table was about just the right height for Bumblebee and Jazz to lean against it comfortably, while Ratchet's head was still about eight feet above it. He got a bad flashback to some of the more questionable alien movies and got very nervous.
"I think you will want to see this," Ratchet said grimly. "Take off your shirts."
Reluctantly, Sam unzipped his sweater and shucked it off before grasping the bottom of his shirts and pulling them off. It was when he was moving to set them aside that he realized ... that something ... was very wrong with him. His stomach began to do jumping jacks as he slowly brought his face around to look at his right side, which was most prominently affected. Streaking up and down in starbursts and jagged random branches, from his shoulder to half way down his forearm, were malleable streaks of metal, like wires melted perfectly to his skin. It branched up his waist from his right hip, and out of the corner of his eye, he could see how it broke out across his left shoulder, reaching for his neck. With a violent shudder, he jerked his head away and stared fixedly at the wall, like a child afraid of a shot.
(Breathe, he reminded himself -- in, out, in out.)
Ratchet made a resigned noise. "I know what Prime was trying to do ... with a dose of All Spark radiation, like that you were producing, Jazz would wake up from his 'coma'. When we disconnected the All Spark from our world, Cybertron ... we lost out immediate connection with it. But it's still built into our codes that the All Spark means that everything is working fine. Unfortunately, while you had the necessary radiation, you didn't have the power. It appears that you actually ... took power from Prime. These structures," he said, using one finger to trace a line from his shoulder to his other arm and down to his hips in the air, "are not part of Cybertronian physiology. They're like ... cancerous growths -- completely benign, however. Yes, these grew because of the excess of power, but they saved your life ... alloy conduits that prevented your other organs from being overloaded."
Sam swallowed, his mouth dry. "I ... um, okay?"
"I'm sure Prime didn't mean for that to happen," Ratchet snorted. "But you've knocked him out real good ... it'll take a few hours for his Spark to recover and build up enough of a charge to bring him out of it. However, this has significantly altered the timeline I drew up for you. While benign, and having saved your organs from being incinerated, these structures also inhibit your functions." Ratchet shook his head again. "You only used to have two weeks, Sam. Now you only have one."
"Wait-- wait," Jazz said. "You mean the little guy is going to become one of us?"
"You did read the information I sent you, didn't you?" Ratchet snapped, glowering at the silver mech.
Jazz held up his hands, spinning them slightly in a bastardized version of a warding gesture. "Of course I did, Ratch. It's just -- what?"
"That's what I'd like to know," Sam croaked. "Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a real good answer."
Except that he had his suspicions. First that -- that energy, that program, that thought played hide-and-seek with S7, then oh-so-cleverly began to change his body -- he had the sneaking suspicion, now, that his dreams hadn't been psychosomatic. He reached down and touched the shard of All Spark, getting a relay tang of it was him, and looked down to stare at his hands. At first glance, they looked merely shiny ... but closer inspection revealed that they were riddled with hair-fine silver wires, identical to the jagged lines and starburst patterns on his limbs. For something that could download a crude base program and information into a biological along the nerves from fingertips to spine and imprint it onto the brain as if it belonged, like instincts ... for something like that, creating wires to preserve it's new oh so accommodating vessel was hardly amazing.
Because Sam didn't believe that what was in him was only a program written in an ancient language. Clutching the All Spark fragment in hand, he knew that it was more than just a stupid program working blindly. The All Spark was inside him, in a way. A part of it was, not the whole part. What the All Spark was ... that was a question that he didn't have an answer for, yet. But something of it remained within him, and it was changing him.
It must be a little sentient, if not sapient. Or maybe it was -- or maybe it was alien, without human words to explain it's level of intelligence and wisdom. It certainly had known how to change him while preserving his intelligence, and he wasn't sure if he could blame his silence on denial or if it was a self-defense move on the program's part.
(And the All Spark fragment was his. Simply because it was him. )
Oh, God. Even if he woke up, he already wasn't Sam Witwicky.
"Can I put a shirt on?" he asked thinly, tugging restlessly with the tape stretched across his chest. Just like the socket, those millions of fine wires registered the vibration of the rough medical tape under his fingertips, sending little ricocheting signals to his brain.
Once Sam was clothed and back within Bumblebee's grip, Ratchet called Ironhide in and the three unhampered mechs got Prime up on the table that Jazz once occupied. He couldn't pay much attention to that, because the exposed metal was exactly like the socket, and Bumblebee had to be utterly silent (no calming reassurance, no subsonic humming) because otherwise Sam felt like something was splitting his head in half. But without that empathetic puddle to drown in, Sam could set his metal riddled hands on yellow armor and take comfort anyway, without the repulsive feeling of being stifled.
He sincerely hoped that Prime never asked him for a favor. Ever again.
-+-
Reviving mechs out of a coma was hard work, and it didn't help Sam's always-ravenous appetite at all. He was wolfing down lunch at the speed only a savage would use, but it was damned satisfying. It was -- it was weird to have those stupid rubber surgical gloves on his hands (but as long as he couldn't see it ...). Well, the surgical gloves were honestly not the strangest part of his attire. The strangest part was the strange harness-like thing that Peturi had rigged up to protect the socket still hanging from his back by the wires actually in contact with his spine -- urgh.
But, at least he got to keep the All Spark shard. It was only a vessel, and empty and useless. They had bled out the All Spark radiation from Sam through it and the power surge, but the fragment was nothing more than an alien hunk of living-notliving metal, and apparently they were prepared to let Sam keep it. Which he did, whether they were humoring him or not (because it was a part of him, of the thing inside him). The only thing in the harness's favor was that the way it latched in front allowed him to strap in the shard and keep it close. (It gave him something to focus on.)
In between that, though, he had noticed that it was nearly painful to touch the 'dead' Earth metal. When he expressed his disbelief to the Autobots that they continued to use it, he found out that it was another side effect of his hypersensitivity. While it was so easy to lock his memories that he could do it unintentionally, that was because humans did something similar when they forced themselves to forget about or ignore something. However, there was no analogous function dealing with adjusting skin sensitivity except to become desensitized, so his alloy was blaring everything at full blast until that point. Luckily, according to Ratchet, when he woke up from his ... metamorphosis ... type thing, he'd have a chance to start over. In other words, he wouldn't go through an adjustment stage.
Well. That was one thing he didn't have to worry about -- sarcasm, sarcasm. Excuse Sam for wandering off to sulk.
At least the Autobots had seemed pleased enough with Jazz being up and running ... though how Jazz felt was a question that went unasked and unanswered. The moment that Bumblebee had been distracted with greeting Jazz back to the land of the living, Sam had made a break for it, just wanting to be a lone for a while. He had gone to the effort of locating the Blackberry again, but the main thing he had been focused on was lunch. Food was great. He loved food. It didn't hurt that he was looking forward to an absolute lack of food soon, in the future.
He irritably thought that just about the time he'd like to experience the things he wouldn't be able to as a robot, he couldn't -- the hypersensitive metal barraged his brain with sensations that he had to train himself to reject (it's too hot, it's too cold, the scritch-scratch of his softest tee shirt like steel wool). Not to mention, it was obvious, as if someone had spat silver paint at him (but not even like that, it was too obvious from looking that it had surfaced from beneath his skin, because when he looked too closely, he could see dark lines under his skin, like veins of poison lead).
"I'm going to die a virgin," he said flatly, just to hear it out loud, and tilted his head back to 'drown his sorrows' in bottled water. His voice fell strangely flat in the air, but it had vibrated nicely in his throat.
The absolutely only bright side of this was that the moment Optimus was online, Ratchet was all over him, performing 'routine maintenance' rather roughly. Even Sam was wincing by the end of it, and he hadn't even been there. Jazz had been helpful enough to bring him a copy of the interaction, having learned from Bumblebee that Sam was too accommodating to invoke Hatchet-ful rage. He even informed Sam that this was how the Hatchet operated when it came to Optimus, since he couldn't knock him over the head a few times in retaliation. Of all of the Autobots, only Ratchet seemed to realize that maybe turning into a Cybertronian wasn't 'happy fun times' for Sam. Or maybe he was just upset because changing what appeared to be the natural progression was potentially dangerous. In either case, he was furious that Optimus had manipulated Sam into waking up Jazz, even though Sam protested that he would have helped if he had been aware of the situation earlier.
And while this was perfectly true and not a lie, thank you very much -- he was still pretty pissed about the results.
"Sam?"
He looked up to see Bumblebee approaching. The Autobots could be amazingly quiet when they wanted to be, so long as no one stepped on fountains. "Yeah, Bumblebee?"
"I thought I would join you."
"Thanks." He folded his arms over his knees while Bumblebee found a comfortable position to put himself lower on the ground.
"You've been carrying that around," Bumblebee said, pointing out the Blackberry sitting on the ground next to him.
"Hm? Oh -- when Ratchet hooked me up, he got actual specific schematics and loaded it onto this. I still haven't figured out which one I want ... you know, to either be little Swiss-army bot, or a Chasebot. On one hand -- well, it's big enough to be a car. Who doesn't want to be a car? And it's got weapons. I don't plan on doing a lot of fighting, but I don't want to be helpless. Being a six-foot tall robot is scary to people, but guys like the Decepticons would probably laugh. Actually, they probably wouldn't bother laughing, they'd just step on me. Ratchet isn't sure that the small version will be able to make up for the mass difference to take the shape of a motorcycle, and then I'll still have to learn to balance. If something goes wrong, I think that the larger bot will be able to hit the ground running. I know how to drive a car, after all."
"Driving yourself is much different from what I understand driving a car would be," Bumblebee said dryly. "... but overall, you might be right. May I see?"
He regarded the mech suspiciously. "Last time I let you see something, I ended up ... taking a nose dive."
That invoked a discomforted murmur from inside Bumblebee somewhere, and he had the grace to look sheepish. "I am sorry about that, Sam. However, downloading information should have no ill effect on you."
Well, probably not. "Sure," he said, picking it up and holding it out. Bumblebee waved it away, and Sam stared in bemusement before the screen flickered. He looked at it in alarm, then realized that Bumblebee had connected to it wirelessly. After a moment, the hidden parts of Bumblebee whirled thoughtfully. Sam cradled the Blackberry between his hands and began to flip through the pictures again. "What do you think I should do?"
Bumblebee whirled for a moment longer before he stopped and reached out, curling one of his giant metal hands loosely around Sam's shoulders. He must be controlling himself, or ... doing the best he could to be neutral, because Sam couldn't' feel anything other than the touch ... no enforced emotions at all. "I can't make this decision for you," he said. "You're going to become one of us, and we live for a very long time. Make sure it isn't a decision you regret."
"Oh, like you've never made a decision you regret," Sam said. "You know what? I wanna know if you were irreversibly turning into one of us, and you had the decision between a guy like me, or a girl like Mikaela, which would you become?"
Bumblebee whirled and clicked and made a few distressed noises, then ten minutes later, said: "I'll get back to you on that."
"Welcome to my world, buddy."
-+-
"Ratchet, can I ask some questions?"
"If they are about your pending choice, of course."
"You know how humans have things like ... racism, and sexism and xenophobia? Do ... Cybertronians have things like that? Like ... are particular models stereotyped or looked down on?"
A mechanical noise. "You shouldn't let our perceptions of ourselves affect your decision."
"But I have to deal with it, right? I mean, like we think of Arcee as a woman ... I should look at it from all angles, right? And I'm going to be living this for a long time ..."
" ... well, alright. Hmm. Well, I've already given you the history of Chasebots, so I guess I should start with the model history of minibots ..."
"How do you know this stuff?"
"It's part of a culture download, Sam. Now, if you're finished? Good. Minibots were originally created to take care of our planet. Much like us, Cybertron is a sort of living machine ... though if there is any Spark or awareness to it, it has withdrawn and is in stasis. Because of everything being complex machinery that can't be replaced completely by self repair systems, we had to craft smaller workers. That's why I made that comparison with army knife. Sometimes minibots aren't seen for many of our days, inside some small space inside our cities and towers, or the planet itself, repairing it. Obviously, this requires a wide array of tools.
"Of course, just because we were built for a purpose and fitted with programing doesn't always mean a lot. That slagger Starscream, for one, is doing what he was built to do, but he also has a strong interest in science. That's not too unusual, since flyers were made to be adventurous and to surpass obstacles ... but he's into lab work, which really isn't. There's too much patience and sitting around in lab work for your average flyer. There are medics who don't want to weld and warriors who would rather reflect on philosophy. It takes all kinds. Programming is only in the hardware, which is suited for the model we are -- but software is made by us, automatically, when we're first activated. Sometimes there are conflicts, of course ... someone built to be a medic but with the spark of a warrior is going to have a hard time.
"So it's not unexpected when you run across a model that seems odd to their job. The only problem is that minibots are made so self-sufficient and their hardwiring is so bare-bones that they're a bit like people -- they do whatever they particularly feel like it. As our culture grew, so did the feeling that anyone could do anything ... and minibots leapt at it. So these days, minibots have a reputation for being opportunistic, flighty, wishy-washy flip floppers."
" ... wow."
"Hmn. It's not a particularly true sentiment, and when it is, it's usually because of that point of view. They're suspicious and unwilling to commit to much because they know that they're seen as disposable."
"And I should want to become this ... why?"
"Because you would retain a more familiar shape, and even possibly still pass as human, with a lot of dedicated practice. Plus, it would make it easier for you to hide -- that is, you're accustomed to hiding a body under six feet of height in a world made for beings of that size, while the Decepticons can only do a passable impression of 'Godzilla'. Besides, we'll know who you are, so your shape won't mean much."
"Ah. And, um, these chasebots?"
"Notoriously high-strung, highly competitive, and prone to overreacting."
"Well, that doesn't sound like me at all. ... what? Why are you -- no. No, you are not trying to say that I'm 'high-strung', o-or competitive, or prone to overreacting!"
A rumbling noise and a 'who, me?' expression. "Anyway, that's mostly bad press in both cases, and due to hardware as well ... naturally, someone hardwired to do many things will, and someone hardwired to move at high speeds is going to be prone to snap-decisions and quick reactions that would save their afts during a chase." An inelegant shrug. "You've met Arcee -- and Elita-One is a very even tempered mech, and just as protective as any."
"A -- okay ..." A long pause, then: "What are we going to tell the other Autobots? When one of you just shows up out of nowhere? I mean, I'm not going to be able to act like one of you, anyway?"
"It wouldn't be entirely inconceivable that no one had met you, Sam. I've already considered it, and I think that if you play the 'memory wipe' card, we can say that you've been crashed on Earth for several years without knowing who or what you were, until Bumblebee stumbled across you. Having your only memories be of Earth should explain any strange habits."
" ... I just happened to be on the planet that Megatron and the All Spark were on?"
"Life is stranger than fiction. Besides, many mechs were jettisoned inactivated into space. It's happened before."
"Oh. Wow, okay."
"Since you've brought that up, I would like to discuss with you some firewalls I would like to put in place now, so that when you wake up, you won't be overwhelmed or hurt yourself -- or others."
"Yeah, okay. Sure."
"I would also like to install them."
" ... goddamn it."
-+-
Sam leaned heavily on Bumblebee's horn, smirking slightly at the tingle of exasperated annoyance that danced across his skin. Apparently, Bumblebee had been making a hobby of studying him again, and had learned how much charge to put off. Sam hadn't yet gotten around to asking about the science behind that, but that was mostly because ... he didn't care. Well, he'd probably care later, but for now he was satisfied with the idea that it was probably vibrations, especially if metal made it more obvious.
(Wait, weren't human cells made of water which was more conductive? Eh? Argh -- science had never been his strong point ...)
But he did figure that it must be another one of their communications thing. It was notably stronger the closer he was to Bumblebee's chest, and it definitely worked as well as a facial expression did, with the plus point of not straining his neck. Oh, sure, Ratchet and Ironhide had done a good job mimicking a recognizable human face, but it was obvious from Bumblebee and that ... headless glitch, Frenzy, and his evil cop buddy that they didn't necessarily come with the correct components.
No wonder they felt the need to design those moving metal masks so that they were more recognizable to humans. The more Sam found out about them, the more completely alien they were! Their language sounded like static, sometimes they clicked or chirped, and sometimes those clicks or chirps were part of an expression of mood along with a dozen other noises. Humans, who ... growled, laughed, or screamed, must seem particularly limited in expressions.
Finally, Miles appeared, shouting, "Alright, already! Sam, stop with the freakin' horn!"
He sat back, grinning at the blond as he approached the Camaro, flip-flops snapping with every step. "Hey," he said as Miles set the surf board against Bumblebee and shoved the body board and other things into the back seat. "You're the one that suggested we go to the beach when I wanted to do something."
"Dude, get off my back," Miles grumbled. "It was the only thing I could think of that'd get my mom to let me go. She's always saying I should get more sun --" he bent down and grinned, all bright white teeth and slightly predatory, "and I got to turn her words against her. Dude, what's up with the ... sleeves and gloves?"
"And she didn't whack you one?" Sam asked mildly.
"No. So?"
"Skin. I have a rash, like ... poison oak, you know? It gets worse with sun. Where in the hell are you going to put that board?"
Miles straightened until Sam could only see the front of his luridly colored Hawaiian shirt, but the thoughtful pose was impossible to mistake. "Well ... we could tie it to the back like a spoiler!"
"No!" Sam gasped out in horrified shock, imagining poor Bumblebee looking at the surf board tied to his aft with horrified bemusement. Okay, that was actually a little hilarious, but Sam knew better than to laugh at his best (non human) friend. Sam got to have two best friends on the virtue that they didn't share a species. And he was possibly inappropriately attached to one of them but he wasn't thinking-about-that-right-now-okayshuttingup.
"Well, then I'm out of ideas."
After a quick look at the Autobot symbol on Bumblebee's steering wheel, Sam opened the door and slid out, leaning against the car and eyeing the surf board with dissatisfaction. He was not going to let some ovaloid piece of fiberglass and wax disrupt a day at the California beach with the only spot of normality in his life. As a matter of fact, he refused to let anything ruin this reminder of simpler days.
"Dude, if you break my board, I will kill you. You're not allowed to eat it, either," Miles warned him.
Sam wiped the evil look off his face and blinked blankly at his best (human) friend for a moment. "The roof," he said.
"... is on fire? Do we need water?"
"No, I mean, we tie it --" gesturing uselessly for a moment as he tried to remember the word, "-- we tie it length-wise to the roof. With the windows open."
" ... I like my spoiler idea better."
"The roof, Miles," he insisted. "I will sooner sideswipe a van or something and snap it in half."
"If you insist?"
"I do."
Miles sighed, flopping over the top of the car in a way that Sam was too short to mimic, "you, my friend, are not fun."
" ... I have a fifth-gen concept-body Camaro, and I am taking you to the beach, no gas money required. And I'm not fun?"
"Sorry, bud. Not fun at all."
Sam mulled over that. Then he boosted himself up by stepping on the inside of the door just so that he could lean across the car and whap Miles on the head. "Shut up, Miles. Before I change my mind and leave you to wash the dog in your little kiddie pool."
"Right. So, the roof."
"The roof indeed."
Thirty minutes, plenty of cussing, yelling, laughing, and tugging violently on those little bungee-cord tie-downs with metal hooks, the two teenaged boys then realized they had a problem. They both stared at the Camaro for a very long moment. Sam's socket (and his spine, and his brain, and his bones and the whole length of metal running through him and wow) tingled with the vast amount of amusement the yellow mech in disguise was emitting like it was going out of style.
"What now, genius?" Miles demanded, looking across the car at Sam with his eyebrow arched in that ridiculously high way only old gray men tended to be able to do.
Sam squeeze his forefinger in between the bungee-cord and the roof of the car. While he couldn't see it, wearing gloves as he was, he was sure it was turning red to attest to how tightly they had strapped the surf board to the roof. He pulled his hand out and shook it vigorously, frowning deeply at the cord that came in through the open window and very effectively keeping the door shut with the two of them on the outside. Then, refusing to look at Miles, he contorted his body uncomfortably and began to climb in through the window.
His friend was laughing hard enough to be in tears by the time Sam got himself situated. It probably had something to do with the way he had tumbled in and tangled in the various things inside the car, getting his leg caught around the steering wheel and ending up face-first in the passenger floorboard at some point. Even Bumblebee would have been laughing if he wasn't pretending to be an inanimate car at the time.
Once Sam was safely behind the steering wheel, Miles slid in with a lot less flailing around. Sam glared impetuously at his friend, who shrugged with a stupid grin and said, "That's what you get for giving up climbing trees in fifth grade."
"Miles. You have ADHD. I had to give up climbing trees because by the time we were in fifth grade, I couldn't keep up."
"All I hear is 'blah blah excuses blah'."
"Would you like to walk to the beach?"
" ... so, maps, huh?"
"That's what I thought."
-+-
At least once a year, during summer break, Miles and Sam hit the beach. Of course, during the summer, the beaches were horrendously crowded, so they had become accustomed to hunting down the most abandoned stretch of beach they could. Generally, this meant that they usually ended up with the rougher, more torn up beaches, with more silt in the water, less waves, and debris ridden sand.
Being some of the lowest of the low in school cliques for as long as they could remember, Sam and Miles hardly cared. What did it matter what their 'play ground' looked like, if it gave them free reign and permission to do whatever silly thing they wanted? They just cleared off the beach drift wood and stray nets and the like so that they had plenty of room to 'camp out'.
Bumblebee was intensely interested in this strange human custom. Or at least that's the impression that Sam got when they unloaded his back seat and trooped down to the water-side. He didn't want to get salt and sand all in his gears, after all.
The cold sand-and-silt full water rushed around Sam's ankles as he wandered aimlessly along the edge, making sure not to go too far and getting his guardian or friend worked up. Miles was enjoying himself out in the waves with the foam body board, apparently getting into something of a nasty argument with the ocean. Only poor, crazy, ADHD Miles would try to argue with the ocean.
... maybe some of his weird craziness had rubbed off on Sam. He certainly tried to argue with Megatron, which was sort of like that.
A small round disc caught Sam's attention, and he bent down to fish it out of the sand, using the salty water to rinse it off. Turning the part of a sand dollar over in his fingers he studied it for a moment and tucked it into his shorts pocket.
"Ow! Ow! Dammit, something bit me!"
"What?" Sam asked with mild interest, watching Miles flop around in the water, body board restricting his movements with that black vinyl tether around his wrist. "Is it a shark? That would be awesome."
"No, it's not a shark -- ow, ow, ow! -- it's on my toe -- ow, motherfucker!"
"Miles, honestly."
"I'd like to see you get your toe bit off and use soft language!"
When Sam saw what was hanging off of Miles' foot and causing him to use one of the words that he really objected to, he couldn't quite help but to laugh his ass off, eventually going to his knees and rolling around in the sand for a while. Miles continued to curse out the crab vehemently, shaking his foot while the poor palm-sized thing waved its other claw threateningly. Eventually, Sam managed to crawl over to save Miles from the Dreadful Claw.
"Hold still, Abominable Snowman," he instructed, then gave Miles a stern look as he promptly went into bad hospital show dramatics, flopping around in the sand as if he had seizures. In retaliation, he bent Miles' free toes in uncomfortable directions until he yelped for Uncle. "Tonight is not the night you go on someone's dinner plate," he said to the crab, using his thumbnail to force the claw open until it fell onto the sand. With a girly shriek, Miles rolled away and leapt to his feet, least the crab somehow find itself on his lap.
Sam, who so clearly wore the pants in their friendship, had to distract the crab with one hand, which it eagerly reached for, both claws wide open. In amusement, Miles started making kung-fu attack noises, like all the really bad martial arts movies had. "Mine?" Sam inquired obligingly before he grabbed the crab from behind and flung it into the ocean. "Go find Nemo!"
"No!" Miles wailed dramatically, charging into the water -- though no where near enough to find it again -- and reached dramatically for it. "I was going to take it home and name it George!"
He had to laugh at that, at least a little. But he was mostly exasperated, and so he did the only thing he could think of: he grabbed up a handful of wet sand and chunked it at the back of Miles' head. With an outraged squawk, the blond ruffled his hair, trying to get the sand out before he bent down and scooped up some really wet sand and flung it back at Sam.
Of course, being really wet sand, even though he ducked, it still splattered him. "You're going down, Miles! Down!"
When it grew dark, they started a bonfire on the beach, and hosed off all the salt and sand that had accumulated in various unmentionable places. That and neither Sam nor Miles were terribly interested in getting sand or salt inside the Camaro.
"Next time we go to the beach, let's take my Mom's jalopy," Miles said.
Sam hesitated for a split second. In a week, he'd be comatose, being turned into a robot. Suddenly, the beach wasn't fun -- he wondered why he was here, on this beach with his very ignorant friend with a giant space robot, while his spine was made of metal and he had a socket hanging out of his back. After a second, he realized that Miles was staring at him awkwardly, and he quickly turned away, hauling the bucket of water toward the bonfire just to have something to do.
He sat down heavily on the driftwood that they'd dragged closer to the fire, staring at the yellow-orange flames, just to get the after image so he couldn't see anything. As soon as Miles finished filling his bucket and lugged it over, he sat on another piece of drift wood, and for a long while it was quiet except for the sound of water and the crackle of the flames. Sam moodily jabbed the fire a few times with a driftwood stick, but Miles just sat there, staring at the blackened wood with a slightly puzzled frown on his face.
"There isn't going to be a next time, is there?" he said. It was a statement, phrased like a question. His inflection even rose on the 'is', as if he was asking, but it wasn't a question.
"No, Miles," Sam said soberly. "There isn't."
After another quiet moment, he asked, "are you sick? Is that why you're --" he waved his hands "--wearing sleeves and gloves and shit to the beach?"
"Not -- not exactly," he said carefully. "But ..."
"But what, dude?" Miles demanded. "You're not-exactly-sick but what?"
"But ... it's sort of ... terminal."
"You're dying."
Not exactly. Sam sighed and brushed a hand through his hair. "I just -- I found out a week ago, okay? I've got a week to go."
"Fuck! Fuck, man," Miles swore, going from sitting to standing before Sam could blink. "What the fuck, are you serious?"
This was possibly the worst idea Sam had ever had. But what was he supposed to do? In a matter of days, Sam Witwicky would disappear off the face of the Earth. His parents wanted nothing to do with it, Sam would ... try to tell Mikaela tomorrow sometime, because at least she would know what was really going on with him, and maybe (just maybe) she'd still talk to him when he woke up. If he woke up. "Seriously, Miles," he sighed, rubbing at his neck and drawing his knees close. "I don't have a lot of choice, you know? So ... this is it."
"Were you even going to tell me?" Miles demanded, standing. He might have been glaring. Sam wasn't checking.
"Jesus Christ, Miles!" Sam burst out loudly. "You act like its your life that's over!"
The ocean hissed, breeze and embers, the quiet crackle of the wood.
Uneasily, Sam shifted on the feet he hadn't even realize he'd risen to stand on. "I know this can't be great for you, okay?" he said, softly now. "I mean -- my parents are in total denial, I haven't even told Mikaela yet ..."
Tense and silent, Miles' face is as unreadable as Sam had ever seen it. Finally, he looked away, shaking his head like he'd never stop, backing away from Sam and waving his arms. "Listen, I -- I have to think about this ... Jesus."
"I'll be here," Sam said.
Long after he lost sight of Miles' pale hair in the gloom, Sam stood there -- and finally, snapped. Violently, he slung the bucket of water into the flickering flame, hot wood sizzling and smoke billowing up from the charred driftwood. In a vague continuation of the movement, he flung the bucket at the ocean and kicked at the sand.
For what was supposed to be a fun night out at the beach, one last time (don't think about it), it had sure ended in a really messed up way.
Turning away from the rushing sounds of the ocean, turning his back on the steady inward going wind, he stumbled and struggled through the sand and up the grassy reedy incline to the road, where Bumblebee was still sitting after all those hours, sparkling innocently under the cool moon light as if he were just an inanimate car. He sat down hard on the pavement, ignoring how the gravel bit into his skin and leaning his back against the bumper.
Please make it better, please make it stop.
After a while, the biting cold and darkness began to get to him, and he drew up his legs again, wrapping his arms around his knees. The alloy was warm against his back, vibrating slightly, and the socket that exposed him for a lie was warm (his spine was warm, and so was his brain, and a whole network of metal things he probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise: bones became struts and a warm burning center in his chest). Slowly, the tension bled from his frame, and he was blessedly numb.
It was only then that he caught the whisper of a song, and canted his head to turn an ear to it, exhaustedly curious what Bumblebee was up to now. Bumblebee was swift to note his attention, turning it up just a little higher. "I feel the weight of the world, sometimes ... hanging on my head, whoa ... look for the light of this tunnel once again. I'm taking 'bout the right state of -- the right state of -- the right state of your mind ..."
"Not helping," he grumbled quietly, wiping his face against his shoulder.
After a small silence, another song started with a sharp pop of drums. It was a sort of strange jazzy almost playful tune. Then the lyrics started. Sam listened with increasing befuddlement as the fairly depressing words snapped and rolled around the tune. " -- I'm going out of my head, I feel like I'm dead; I'm feeling Lo-Fi. I'm bottled up -- and explode. My engine has gone; some things I can't hide: I'm feelin' Lo-Fi!"
When it finally drew to a close, Sam craned his head around to give the Camaro an incredulous look. "Is that supposed to help?"
" -- and all the girlies say I'm pretty fly for a white guy!"
Sam scowled mulishly for a while longer before he grudgingly accepted that Bumblebee had succeeded in cheering him up a little. After a while, he wandered around, gathering up everything that they'd brought to the beach. They hadn't even gotten around to getting the surfboard off of Bumblebee, since they had done a little too good of a job tying it down. When Sam was sure that he had as much of the sand and salt off as humanly possible, he slid into the front seat and relaxed back against the familiar faux-leather, reaching up to pull the seat belt across his chest in a pseudo-hug (not that he'd ever, ever admit it).
Bumblebee turned on some weird retro or ... or indie ... okay, Sam didn't know what it was, but it wasn't rock or pop, so it must be something like retro or indie (retro was a music genre, right?). It was something playful and quirky, and sounded like it had been cut together out of a lot of sound clips, anyway. In a way, it was soothing, too.
-+-
The ride home was silent and tense, and neither fell asleep while the yellow lines slipped by. Wordlessly, Sam helped Miles unload the stuff and Miles disappeared back into the house without a goodbye. Sam watched the house go dark, then climbed back into Bumblebee and blew both his ego and pride to hell, curling up in the front seat and falling asleep within seconds.
-+-
The next morning, Sam woke up to a really ... really annoy vibration in his chest. He spent the next hour or so poking his own chest and grimacing. If he felt very carefully, he could feel the useless beating of his heart, but he had no pulse. His ... did he even have blood?
That was enough to get him up and moving and searching (embarrassingly hysterical) for Ratchet. It was only after speaking to the uncomfortable mech that Sam discovered that it was likely that the pump was the second thing that had begun to form, after his central nervous system was safely biometal. No one bothered to tell him that he didn't really have ... blood as humans thought it, or that the pump would turn on randomly. Ratchet assured him that once the fluid the pump was working with became the proper consistency, it would stop vibrating.
Sam spent the next thirty minutes hanging over a sink and splashing water on his face.
For some reason, Sam seemed to have a masochistic streak, and whenever he was faced with terrible things, he went looking for more terrible things. That must have been why he asked Bumblebee to talk Arcee and Mikaela into going racing. He'd suddenly gotten the guts (or maybe he convinced himself it couldn't get any worse) to tell Mikaela that he was ... being ... invaded, being taken over, that he wasn't human, that he'd end up being one of the robot aliens they were friends with.
At least, that was what he intended. How were they supposed to know that the Decepticon power struggle was ready to spill upon the Autobots?
It happened too quick for humans to react. All Sam knew was that he was with Bumblebee, then he and Mikaela had gotten out to talk while Arcee and Bumblebee gave him some space ... Then both Autobots, both still in their alt modes, came racing toward them, commanding them to run and hide. There was something not unlike a sonic boom, a shadow overhead.
Then rushing air and the crackle of ribs and agony and white and wind, and when he finally got some sense of self, he grabbed ahold of what had him and hated. Then fire (cold fire) all through him (through his bones) and down. Down. No air, too fast, burning and (cold fire) and hot terror.
Then nothing. Nothing, and pain, and black.-- To Be Continued --
- DO YOU HATE ME NOW/YET? (I don't know how many of you were paying attention and how much I said, but this has been coming since chapter one, lolz. But feel free to murder me -- just be aware that then you'll get no chapter eleven with Bot!Sam.)
- OMG FORESHADOWING BLINGBLING!
- Was Miles a bit of a jerk? Yes. Oh the other hand, all Miles knows is that he's been letting Sam slid without explaining stuff, and since Summer, both of his friends (Sam and Mikaela) have been drifting away, and then Sam LET'S SLIP that he's 'dying', and it sounds a lot like he wasn't even going to TELL Miles. Miles is in shock. He will feel like an ass and a DOUBLE ass when he finally processes what's going on.
- Songs, lolz ("State of Mind" - Mad Caddies), ("Lofi" - The Exies), ("Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)" - Offspring), and while there were no words or even a specific song intended, the weird music is the Wiseguys. (If you're familiar with any of their songs, it's probably "Start the Commotion")
- Out Take -
He regarded the mech suspiciously. "Last time I let you see something, I ended up ... taking a nose dive."
That invoked a discomforted murmur from inside Bumblebee somewhere, and he had the grace to look sheepish. "I am sorry about that, Sam. However, downloading information should have no ill effect on you."
Well, probably not. "Sure," he said, picking it up and holding it out. Bumblebee waved it away, and Sam stared in bemusement before the screen flickered. He looked at it in alarm, then realized that Bumblebee had connected to it wirelessly. After a moment, the hidden parts of Bumblebee whirled thoughtfully. Sam cradled the Blackberry between his hands and began to flip through the pictures again. "What do you think I should do?"
Bumblebee whirled for a moment longer before he stopped and reached out, curling one of his giant metal hands loosely around Sam's shoulders. For a moment, he only studied Sam intently, the brought around his other hand to grip him tightly. With an almost desperate, hopeful look, he said, "Sam, you must choose the femmebot. I've run out of racers to chase! Please!"
"What the fuck!"
-+-
Ratchet hesitated in the middle of putting away the tools that he used to waken Optimus Prime from his Sam-inflicted, power-drained state. "I ..." he said, causing the other three mechs present to look at him curiously.
"You what?" Prime asked with clear befuddlement.
"Is someone making planetfall?" Ironhide mused, at a loss. When the unfortunate sun wasn't interfering with their main communications, arriving mechs could send out a pulse on the medic's channel. Ever since Ratchet had welded up Shockwave, no Decepticon had dared to abuse this custom for fear of what the logic worshipping mech would do to them. According to him, it simply made good sense not to alienate a medic who was technically Neutral and therefore not adverse to welding anyone who needed it.
Slowly, he withdrew the tool he had been about to put away and set it delicately on the table. With a strong air of confusion, he said, "I have a feeling I'll ... need these."
Jazz slowly raised his hand. "I'll go look for Bumblebee. Damn, man, I told you to keep him away from the kid!"
FIC Summary: [2007, AU] Sore throats, nightmares, and the differences between organics and Cybertronians - something is terribly wrong with Sam. To live is to evolve, and shape alone is not enough; think of it as a mutual learning experience. (Bot!Sam, PTSD, Mech/mech)
1, 2, 2.b, 3, 4, 4.b, 5, 6, 7, 7.b, 8, 8.b, 9, 9.b, 10, 10.b
Chapter Ten: We All Fall Down
plz 2 b raedign primes intermession. Just in case you wanted some prep for the utter bull ahead.
-+-
Sam came to himself abruptly, without any sort of softening -- a lapse of awareness like the world hiccupped. He stumbled, having been in the middle of walking and froze, looking around. For one desperate instant, he wasn't sure if he was dreaming or not -- it was dark deep nighttime, the stars above and the orange and blue lights highlighted the street ... then he noted that houses were still lighted, he definitely wasn't holding the All Spark, and Bumblebee was in the driveway. He was outside his house, and tremendously upset without having much of an idea of why.
He remembered quite clearly the decision to go home and try to tell his parents about what was happening to him. (A person would think it would have filled him with dread, but he'd only been able ... to feel numb. That remembered dissonance, that out of jointness that he'd been feeling when the government finally let him go home ... that feeling of disconnect, of wading through liquid dreams was what encouraged him to make such a decision.) He even remembered getting out of Bumblebee, and walking into his house ... sitting his parents down while he tried not to sway from vertigo --
And nothing. It was like a tape recorded over. And while a part of him thought with bewilderment of that Men in Black movie and the memory erasing pen-thing, that nuera-whatsit, he knew there was probably a better explanation. After all, he and Bumblebee had discussed Cybertronian dreams.
So, feeling a pounding sickness in his chest while his stomach tied itself in knots, he continued over to Bumblebee and slid into the seat. Nearly immediately, stifling comfort smothered him, and he stared out the window as Bumblebee pulled away. Pins and needles prickled across his body and his limbs were tense, and he was forced into stillness.
"Did you know," Sam said conversationally to Bumblebee, "That I can apparently lock my own memories?"
The Autobot rumbled worriedly under his hands, silent but for the expressive Cybertronian vibration. (Sam silently struggled against the choking calm and nearly tangible worry, but he couldn't struggle hard enough, and everything he might have felt, wanted to feel about what he could only assume happened in that house was strangled into submission by emotions much louder than his own.)
"I mean," he added (and sounded plastic, fluorescent, fake and too bright), "It's really weird. I know what the memory is about. I'm still upset. But I don't actually remember what it was my parents said to me."
"Give them some time, Sam," Bumblebee said soothingly. "You're not taking it well, and you understand a lot more about what you're becoming than they do."
The breath went out of him slowly, and ever-so-delicately, he sagged back against the seat, letting his useless hands slip from the wheel. "I guess," he said noncommittally. He certainly couldn't blame his parents for not reacting well. After all, he had -- alien technology taking over his brain. He could loc his own memories as if it were nothing but a filing cabinet! He didn't even know he could do that until he wanted to forget it so badly that he'd physically hurt.
"You should have waited a few days."
He probably should have, but it wasn't what he needed to be told. A drive hadn't cheered him up, but it had brought some measure of calm to him. Then he'd focused on who else knew, and figured that he could really do with a hug from his mother. Sam might not remember what happen at the moment, but he definitely knew that there hadn't been any hugging going on.
The night pressed in against the outside of the window -- which was odd, considering that night wasn't real, just an extension of the vacuum overhead. Shouldn't it be pulling on the windows? Maybe the laws of physics had changed without him knowing (because he definitely felt as though here was being compressed from all sides and it had nothing to do with a mood-changing drug named Bumblebee). "Today's been a busy day," he said mildly, thinking about it -- he had just found out that he was going to ... turn freaking metal this afternoon. What was wrong with him, thinking that by any measure it was a good idea to go tell his parents!
(He had two weeks, approximately, before it was over. Then he'd slip into a coma and be unaware until the change was complete but he wasn't stupid enough to believe that it'd be him waking up.)
Looking down at his hands, they'd never seemed more frail (more breakable) but they weren't. Chernobyl flickered uselessly in his chest, feebly trying to power up but failing under the suffocating heft of calm. And he was tired (exhausted, thwarted and yanked around and powerless) and he just wanted to sleep ... but he was a little afraid to, at the same time, because what if he didn't wake up?
Sam sort of thought that he'd probably be trying to restrain himself from throwing an epic fit if it weren't for the fact that he simply couldn't muster the outrage and anger (that he knew was inside him, but it couldn't escape) required. Considering how 'well' his parents took it, he couldn't wait to see how Mikaela took it. "What am I going to do about Miles?" he asked numbly, staring blankly at the yellow reflectors snapping by. It was kind of hypnotizing.
"You could tell him you're moving away. Then you could still email him or take calls from him," Bumblebee suggested.
"That sounds good," he said. "I just hope he doesn't want to visit. And why would I move? No, it's a good idea, I just ... well, anyway."
After a moment of silence, the radio turned on and scanned through some channels, finally landing on a song that sounded a lot like something some kid would cut his arms to. " ... that everyone was waiting on a cue to turn and run when all I needed was the truth," the pop music whined.
"Hey, Bumblebee," he murmured, "Do you think I'd bleed blue?"
-+-
Things were looking better in the morning, despite the lack of sleep. (As a matter of fact, that probably helped him to dismiss the events of yesterday.) He was actually in a decent mood. Then he got to talk to Optimus Prime, which was of course exactly what he wanted to do seven hours after being disowned by his parents. Every time he tried to touch the memory, he always discovered that three seconds had passed, and he'd apparently locked the memory of remembering the memory he'd locked.
Yeah, it was kinda like one of those 'I know you know I know you know' things.
"Sam," Optimus said when he saw him, bending down to come closer to eye level ... as if fifteen feet up was eye level. "There is something I need you to do for me."
Which, was, like ... not the way a person gets talked into things. "Last time I did something for you, I got kidnapped, you destroyed my parent's garden, and then I got knocked off a building. And now look where I am!" he finished, a little hysterically, waving his arms and gesturing and all. He was calm, dammit!
"It's Jazz," he said.
"Oh," he said stupidly. "Wait, what? What about Jazz? I thought Jazz was dead?"
"It will take more than being pulled to pieces to kill us," Optimus said. Even with Sam's new understanding of the expressions and the sounds that were Cybertronian equivalents, Optimus seemed just as distant and ... well, he reminded Sam of this story he read for English class, in which the father was just as distant and ... uncaring wasn't exactly the right word, but it was disturbingly close. "But when damaged severely enough, we go into a sort of stasis ... a coma, if you will. I believe that with your help, we may be able to bring Jazz online."
Sam stared. "How in the hell am I supposed to be able to help?"
"The program, Sam," Optimus said, then extended his hand. "Climb on."
It seemed like a really bad idea. He didn't know what was expected of him, but he was certain nothing good came of it. Yet he still felt compelled to try, because ... well, it was bad enough when a human was in a coma, but how must these long-lived sentients feel when one of their own was alive but unresponsive? An eternity of that ...
So he climbed onto Optimus Prime's hand.
Inertia was amazing, as was being grasped in the hand of a being large enough to step on a human without even noticing. Sam felt a bit like Jack and the Beanstalk. He held onto one of Optimus' giant fingers just for security as the huge robot began walking, presumably taking him where Jazz's slumbering body was.
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" he asked, looking up at the face far above him. Unlike Ratchet, Optimus was carrying him at waist level.
"What is your concern, Sam?" Optimus inquired.
Sam had a feeling that he wasn't used to having people like Sam question his decisions, but the fact remained that Sam hadn't been compliant, and even if he was going to be ... basically one of Optimus' soldiers, Sam didn't plan on stopping anytime soon. Any military leader who thought suicide was the answer deserved to be questioned, frequently and often.
"I mean, he got ripped apart. That's going to do things to a guy's mind, you know. I doubt he'll be thrilled."
"Jazz is an Autobot," Optimus said. "We have been fighting for a very long time. Not we as a people, though this is also true, but we as in ourselves, Ironhide and Bumblebee and myself."
"Maybe there's a reason he hasn't woken up yet," Sam said darkly.
"Perhaps that is true. However, we need Jazz."
Which was the end of that argument. Optimus took him to a section of the base that Sam hadn't been into previously, and into a room that was disturbingly similar to the med bay. "Shouldn't Ratchet be here?" Sam questioned as he was sat on the table by the bulky bot. Jazz loomed pale in the darkness, oddly ... like a silver skeleton, or a solid ghost. He seemed strangely smaller than Bumblebee, if much, much wider, especially in the chest area. Sam bit his lip as he cautiously moved across the table (it was some twelve feet high, but of course it was sturdy). He reached out tentatively and set his hand against the alloy armor, almost expecting it to be cold -- but it wasn't. It wasn't warm either, but strangely a middling temperature, as if it didn't exist under his hands if it weren't solid to keep him from falling through the illusion.
And under that solidness, just barely, he thought he might be able to sense that the metal wasn't what Bumblebee called 'dead metal'. Earth-metal had no life to it, but he could feel the difference ... Jazz was in there, somewhere.
It must be very disturbing to be among lumbered dead monsters.
"What do you expect me to do?" he asked, dropping his hand and turning to Optimus. "I mean, I ... fe-- ... well, I don't know why you think I'll be able to do anything."
A great deal of air moved inside Optimus Prime. It wasn't a sigh, but it was strangely like saying he'd come to a decision. Optimus extended his arm again, and Sam was a little confused until he saw what was on the Autobot's palm.
"All Spark," Sam breathed. He wordlessly reached out and picked the shard up with both hands, curling his fingers around it. This wasn't like the Earth-metal at all, or even the Autobots. It was -- it was living-notliving. It tickled through his palms and his arms and connected through his chest from one shoulder to the other. It wasn't living-but-it-was. (It was his, he knew it. Hishishishishim.)
He wobbled slightly sideways, dazed as he felt it flicker by and through and over and in his bodyawarenessmindself (because it was a part of him, a piece of his body). He settled, finally, against Jazz's unmoving body, hip and elbow resting against alloy armor.
Sam would never be sure what Optimus Prime's intention was when his large mechanical hand came in contact with his opposite shoulder. His brain did inform him that he lost nearly five minutes of time, and by the time he became aware of what was going on, there was a lot of clanking metal, his head was ringing, and it felt like he had cotton in his ears. He groaned a little, stirring, slowly coming back around to his body ... he was on his stomach, the partial shard of the All Spark grasped in hand and trapped under hip. Finally, he began to make sense of the moving colors in what he realized were his eyes, and analyzed the very strange image he was looking at, withdrawing one arm out from under him to begin the struggle to an upright position.
"Hey, little man," a gentle and vaguely familiar voice said as he twitched and moved. "Wait there, don't move. I called Ratchet, okay?" Optimus Prime was collapsed on the ground like a puppet, and the comparatively tiny bot Jazz was hovering over him but looking at Sam. During the time he had -- blacked out (another power surge? It made sense that an influx of energy would make his electronic brain hiccup, wouldn't it ...), Jazz must have sat up and been alarmed to find his leader offline and sprawled on the ground. He got props for moving without injuring Sam, who must have collapsed right next to him.
"Ratchet's gonna be so pissed," Sam groaned, but insisted on moving. Clutching the fragment of All Spark to his chest with one possessive arm, he used the other to lever him up, even though he felt sparks of almost-pain flare up his arm from the palm bracing him up. His head hurt so badly.
"Listen, if you're gonna insist on being up and 'bout," Jazz said roughly, clearly disoriented, "then you can fill me in on what the hell is going on here!"
A panicking robot well over ten feet tall was not something Sam cared to be around. "Snafu, Jazz," he said groggily. "That's what's going on. You were in a coma."
An irritated clicking. "The battle? The All Spark?"
"Three months ago," he said, wrapping his jacket covered arms around the fragment. "Destroyed. Megatron and I think everyone but for Starscream, Barricade, and Frenzy have been dumped at the bottom of one of our trenches."
"Man," Jazz said, creating a soft song of surprise, sorrow, and victory. He was the most musical bot with his 'expressions' that Sam had the 'pleasure' of hearing. It wasn't just ... musical, it was harmonic, half a song without words.
"You're telling me," he said, still a little disoriented himself, but empathizing with suddenly waking up to having found that everything changed.
That was about when Bumblebee and Ratchet showed up, bursting into the hanger like two rabid hell hounds. Ratchet paused by the door to take in the scene while Bumblebee made a straight line for Sam, making an agitated grinding-humming combination. Before he'd even finished the journey, Ratchet added his expression to the already noisy room -- and was by far the loudest, more furious mech in the room. Sam definitively didn't need to be fluent in Giant Alien Robot to know that the greenish-yellow mech was pissed off. Amusingly, everyone in the room immediately cowered, Bumblebee hesitating before deciding that retreat was the best decision and finishing the journey to Sam's side posthaste, snatching him up a little too quickly and clutching him to the bumper as he began to edge away to put the table between them and Ratchet. The medic paid them no real mind, storming toward Jazz and Prime while remarkably resembling a Decepticon. If Sam hadn't been currently clinging to his guardian who didn't seem to have any plans to let him go, he might have tried a repeat of Mission City, All Spark clutched to his chest just the same.
Jazz decided that survival was more important than valor, saw that Bumblebee had a plan, and threw in his lot with them ... abandoning his unconscious leader to the 'tender' mercies of their resident medic. Satisfied with this costly and personal sacrifice, the angry steel god stop to evaluate his offering ... okay, that might have been rather melodramatic, but it was several tons and twenty feet of angry robot. It was pretty damn scary, even if he was on the good side.
Ratchet made furious grumbling noises as he checked over Prime, and Bumblebee and Jazz decided to try to make a sneaky break for it. They might have succeeded if not for Sam, because as soon as Ratchet was sure that Prime was fine, he immediately came looking for Sam. While still sounding like a very angry, very big chainsaw.
"No! No, no-no-no-no!" Sam yelped, and hugging the All Spark shard close to his chest, he began trying to climb over Bumblebee to escape. This was unfortunately like a cat when faced with a dog, and he distracted Bumblebee from any escape route and ended up getting plucked off the smaller yellow mech. "Help!" he cried mournfully, clinging to his piece of All Spark. Past Ratchet's fingers, he saw Bumblebee shrug helplessly. Jerk.
"Now," Ratchet said, setting him back down on the table only to whip around and point threateningly at Jazz, who started and slunk sheepishly away from the door and back to the table. "What just happened here?"
"Er," Sam said, looking at Jazz.
"Ah," Jazz added helpfully.
"Hmm."
"Yeah."
"Ask him," they told the medic, pointing at each other. Noticing this, they quickly redirected their fingers toward the unconscious Prime.
Ratchet made a very loud, very intimidating noise. It was about that time that he noticed what Sam was clutching and reached out -- only for Sam to jerk back, gripping the shard tightly. Ratchet gave up on that quickly enough, but turned around to give Prime a very poisonous look. Shaking his head, he turned back and began scanning Sam -- made some more furious noises, and lapsed into unintelligible spit-cracklings. Sam was very certain that this was their spoken language, because only moments into his rant, both Jazz and Bumblebee reacted, almost protestingly, making the exact same noises.
Sam took this moment to tuck the shard of All Spark into the waistband of his pants. It was his, dammit -- he'd earned it. It was dead, anyway (dead-notdead). Living metal but not in the way that the Autobots were, not in the way that the All Spark should be (he knew, even though he hadn't known how to feel that life when he'd held it months ago ... but his dreams told him well enough). It was an All Spark fragment, made of some strange metal that wasn't even like what the Cybertronians were made of, but the power of the All Spark was gone. Extinguished.
(Or hiding.)
Ratchet made another dissatisfied noise, calling Sam's attention back to him. "Off with the shirts," he demanded.
"What!" Sam squawked, looking around at the aliens surrounding him. The table was about just the right height for Bumblebee and Jazz to lean against it comfortably, while Ratchet's head was still about eight feet above it. He got a bad flashback to some of the more questionable alien movies and got very nervous.
"I think you will want to see this," Ratchet said grimly. "Take off your shirts."
Reluctantly, Sam unzipped his sweater and shucked it off before grasping the bottom of his shirts and pulling them off. It was when he was moving to set them aside that he realized ... that something ... was very wrong with him. His stomach began to do jumping jacks as he slowly brought his face around to look at his right side, which was most prominently affected. Streaking up and down in starbursts and jagged random branches, from his shoulder to half way down his forearm, were malleable streaks of metal, like wires melted perfectly to his skin. It branched up his waist from his right hip, and out of the corner of his eye, he could see how it broke out across his left shoulder, reaching for his neck. With a violent shudder, he jerked his head away and stared fixedly at the wall, like a child afraid of a shot.
(Breathe, he reminded himself -- in, out, in out.)
Ratchet made a resigned noise. "I know what Prime was trying to do ... with a dose of All Spark radiation, like that you were producing, Jazz would wake up from his 'coma'. When we disconnected the All Spark from our world, Cybertron ... we lost out immediate connection with it. But it's still built into our codes that the All Spark means that everything is working fine. Unfortunately, while you had the necessary radiation, you didn't have the power. It appears that you actually ... took power from Prime. These structures," he said, using one finger to trace a line from his shoulder to his other arm and down to his hips in the air, "are not part of Cybertronian physiology. They're like ... cancerous growths -- completely benign, however. Yes, these grew because of the excess of power, but they saved your life ... alloy conduits that prevented your other organs from being overloaded."
Sam swallowed, his mouth dry. "I ... um, okay?"
"I'm sure Prime didn't mean for that to happen," Ratchet snorted. "But you've knocked him out real good ... it'll take a few hours for his Spark to recover and build up enough of a charge to bring him out of it. However, this has significantly altered the timeline I drew up for you. While benign, and having saved your organs from being incinerated, these structures also inhibit your functions." Ratchet shook his head again. "You only used to have two weeks, Sam. Now you only have one."
"Wait-- wait," Jazz said. "You mean the little guy is going to become one of us?"
"You did read the information I sent you, didn't you?" Ratchet snapped, glowering at the silver mech.
Jazz held up his hands, spinning them slightly in a bastardized version of a warding gesture. "Of course I did, Ratch. It's just -- what?"
"That's what I'd like to know," Sam croaked. "Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a real good answer."
Except that he had his suspicions. First that -- that energy, that program, that thought played hide-and-seek with S7, then oh-so-cleverly began to change his body -- he had the sneaking suspicion, now, that his dreams hadn't been psychosomatic. He reached down and touched the shard of All Spark, getting a relay tang of it was him, and looked down to stare at his hands. At first glance, they looked merely shiny ... but closer inspection revealed that they were riddled with hair-fine silver wires, identical to the jagged lines and starburst patterns on his limbs. For something that could download a crude base program and information into a biological along the nerves from fingertips to spine and imprint it onto the brain as if it belonged, like instincts ... for something like that, creating wires to preserve it's new oh so accommodating vessel was hardly amazing.
Because Sam didn't believe that what was in him was only a program written in an ancient language. Clutching the All Spark fragment in hand, he knew that it was more than just a stupid program working blindly. The All Spark was inside him, in a way. A part of it was, not the whole part. What the All Spark was ... that was a question that he didn't have an answer for, yet. But something of it remained within him, and it was changing him.
It must be a little sentient, if not sapient. Or maybe it was -- or maybe it was alien, without human words to explain it's level of intelligence and wisdom. It certainly had known how to change him while preserving his intelligence, and he wasn't sure if he could blame his silence on denial or if it was a self-defense move on the program's part.
(And the All Spark fragment was his. Simply because it was him. )
Oh, God. Even if he woke up, he already wasn't Sam Witwicky.
"Can I put a shirt on?" he asked thinly, tugging restlessly with the tape stretched across his chest. Just like the socket, those millions of fine wires registered the vibration of the rough medical tape under his fingertips, sending little ricocheting signals to his brain.
Once Sam was clothed and back within Bumblebee's grip, Ratchet called Ironhide in and the three unhampered mechs got Prime up on the table that Jazz once occupied. He couldn't pay much attention to that, because the exposed metal was exactly like the socket, and Bumblebee had to be utterly silent (no calming reassurance, no subsonic humming) because otherwise Sam felt like something was splitting his head in half. But without that empathetic puddle to drown in, Sam could set his metal riddled hands on yellow armor and take comfort anyway, without the repulsive feeling of being stifled.
He sincerely hoped that Prime never asked him for a favor. Ever again.
-+-
Reviving mechs out of a coma was hard work, and it didn't help Sam's always-ravenous appetite at all. He was wolfing down lunch at the speed only a savage would use, but it was damned satisfying. It was -- it was weird to have those stupid rubber surgical gloves on his hands (but as long as he couldn't see it ...). Well, the surgical gloves were honestly not the strangest part of his attire. The strangest part was the strange harness-like thing that Peturi had rigged up to protect the socket still hanging from his back by the wires actually in contact with his spine -- urgh.
But, at least he got to keep the All Spark shard. It was only a vessel, and empty and useless. They had bled out the All Spark radiation from Sam through it and the power surge, but the fragment was nothing more than an alien hunk of living-notliving metal, and apparently they were prepared to let Sam keep it. Which he did, whether they were humoring him or not (because it was a part of him, of the thing inside him). The only thing in the harness's favor was that the way it latched in front allowed him to strap in the shard and keep it close. (It gave him something to focus on.)
In between that, though, he had noticed that it was nearly painful to touch the 'dead' Earth metal. When he expressed his disbelief to the Autobots that they continued to use it, he found out that it was another side effect of his hypersensitivity. While it was so easy to lock his memories that he could do it unintentionally, that was because humans did something similar when they forced themselves to forget about or ignore something. However, there was no analogous function dealing with adjusting skin sensitivity except to become desensitized, so his alloy was blaring everything at full blast until that point. Luckily, according to Ratchet, when he woke up from his ... metamorphosis ... type thing, he'd have a chance to start over. In other words, he wouldn't go through an adjustment stage.
Well. That was one thing he didn't have to worry about -- sarcasm, sarcasm. Excuse Sam for wandering off to sulk.
At least the Autobots had seemed pleased enough with Jazz being up and running ... though how Jazz felt was a question that went unasked and unanswered. The moment that Bumblebee had been distracted with greeting Jazz back to the land of the living, Sam had made a break for it, just wanting to be a lone for a while. He had gone to the effort of locating the Blackberry again, but the main thing he had been focused on was lunch. Food was great. He loved food. It didn't hurt that he was looking forward to an absolute lack of food soon, in the future.
He irritably thought that just about the time he'd like to experience the things he wouldn't be able to as a robot, he couldn't -- the hypersensitive metal barraged his brain with sensations that he had to train himself to reject (it's too hot, it's too cold, the scritch-scratch of his softest tee shirt like steel wool). Not to mention, it was obvious, as if someone had spat silver paint at him (but not even like that, it was too obvious from looking that it had surfaced from beneath his skin, because when he looked too closely, he could see dark lines under his skin, like veins of poison lead).
"I'm going to die a virgin," he said flatly, just to hear it out loud, and tilted his head back to 'drown his sorrows' in bottled water. His voice fell strangely flat in the air, but it had vibrated nicely in his throat.
The absolutely only bright side of this was that the moment Optimus was online, Ratchet was all over him, performing 'routine maintenance' rather roughly. Even Sam was wincing by the end of it, and he hadn't even been there. Jazz had been helpful enough to bring him a copy of the interaction, having learned from Bumblebee that Sam was too accommodating to invoke Hatchet-ful rage. He even informed Sam that this was how the Hatchet operated when it came to Optimus, since he couldn't knock him over the head a few times in retaliation. Of all of the Autobots, only Ratchet seemed to realize that maybe turning into a Cybertronian wasn't 'happy fun times' for Sam. Or maybe he was just upset because changing what appeared to be the natural progression was potentially dangerous. In either case, he was furious that Optimus had manipulated Sam into waking up Jazz, even though Sam protested that he would have helped if he had been aware of the situation earlier.
And while this was perfectly true and not a lie, thank you very much -- he was still pretty pissed about the results.
"Sam?"
He looked up to see Bumblebee approaching. The Autobots could be amazingly quiet when they wanted to be, so long as no one stepped on fountains. "Yeah, Bumblebee?"
"I thought I would join you."
"Thanks." He folded his arms over his knees while Bumblebee found a comfortable position to put himself lower on the ground.
"You've been carrying that around," Bumblebee said, pointing out the Blackberry sitting on the ground next to him.
"Hm? Oh -- when Ratchet hooked me up, he got actual specific schematics and loaded it onto this. I still haven't figured out which one I want ... you know, to either be little Swiss-army bot, or a Chasebot. On one hand -- well, it's big enough to be a car. Who doesn't want to be a car? And it's got weapons. I don't plan on doing a lot of fighting, but I don't want to be helpless. Being a six-foot tall robot is scary to people, but guys like the Decepticons would probably laugh. Actually, they probably wouldn't bother laughing, they'd just step on me. Ratchet isn't sure that the small version will be able to make up for the mass difference to take the shape of a motorcycle, and then I'll still have to learn to balance. If something goes wrong, I think that the larger bot will be able to hit the ground running. I know how to drive a car, after all."
"Driving yourself is much different from what I understand driving a car would be," Bumblebee said dryly. "... but overall, you might be right. May I see?"
He regarded the mech suspiciously. "Last time I let you see something, I ended up ... taking a nose dive."
That invoked a discomforted murmur from inside Bumblebee somewhere, and he had the grace to look sheepish. "I am sorry about that, Sam. However, downloading information should have no ill effect on you."
Well, probably not. "Sure," he said, picking it up and holding it out. Bumblebee waved it away, and Sam stared in bemusement before the screen flickered. He looked at it in alarm, then realized that Bumblebee had connected to it wirelessly. After a moment, the hidden parts of Bumblebee whirled thoughtfully. Sam cradled the Blackberry between his hands and began to flip through the pictures again. "What do you think I should do?"
Bumblebee whirled for a moment longer before he stopped and reached out, curling one of his giant metal hands loosely around Sam's shoulders. He must be controlling himself, or ... doing the best he could to be neutral, because Sam couldn't' feel anything other than the touch ... no enforced emotions at all. "I can't make this decision for you," he said. "You're going to become one of us, and we live for a very long time. Make sure it isn't a decision you regret."
"Oh, like you've never made a decision you regret," Sam said. "You know what? I wanna know if you were irreversibly turning into one of us, and you had the decision between a guy like me, or a girl like Mikaela, which would you become?"
Bumblebee whirled and clicked and made a few distressed noises, then ten minutes later, said: "I'll get back to you on that."
"Welcome to my world, buddy."
-+-
"Ratchet, can I ask some questions?"
"If they are about your pending choice, of course."
"You know how humans have things like ... racism, and sexism and xenophobia? Do ... Cybertronians have things like that? Like ... are particular models stereotyped or looked down on?"
A mechanical noise. "You shouldn't let our perceptions of ourselves affect your decision."
"But I have to deal with it, right? I mean, like we think of Arcee as a woman ... I should look at it from all angles, right? And I'm going to be living this for a long time ..."
" ... well, alright. Hmm. Well, I've already given you the history of Chasebots, so I guess I should start with the model history of minibots ..."
"How do you know this stuff?"
"It's part of a culture download, Sam. Now, if you're finished? Good. Minibots were originally created to take care of our planet. Much like us, Cybertron is a sort of living machine ... though if there is any Spark or awareness to it, it has withdrawn and is in stasis. Because of everything being complex machinery that can't be replaced completely by self repair systems, we had to craft smaller workers. That's why I made that comparison with army knife. Sometimes minibots aren't seen for many of our days, inside some small space inside our cities and towers, or the planet itself, repairing it. Obviously, this requires a wide array of tools.
"Of course, just because we were built for a purpose and fitted with programing doesn't always mean a lot. That slagger Starscream, for one, is doing what he was built to do, but he also has a strong interest in science. That's not too unusual, since flyers were made to be adventurous and to surpass obstacles ... but he's into lab work, which really isn't. There's too much patience and sitting around in lab work for your average flyer. There are medics who don't want to weld and warriors who would rather reflect on philosophy. It takes all kinds. Programming is only in the hardware, which is suited for the model we are -- but software is made by us, automatically, when we're first activated. Sometimes there are conflicts, of course ... someone built to be a medic but with the spark of a warrior is going to have a hard time.
"So it's not unexpected when you run across a model that seems odd to their job. The only problem is that minibots are made so self-sufficient and their hardwiring is so bare-bones that they're a bit like people -- they do whatever they particularly feel like it. As our culture grew, so did the feeling that anyone could do anything ... and minibots leapt at it. So these days, minibots have a reputation for being opportunistic, flighty, wishy-washy flip floppers."
" ... wow."
"Hmn. It's not a particularly true sentiment, and when it is, it's usually because of that point of view. They're suspicious and unwilling to commit to much because they know that they're seen as disposable."
"And I should want to become this ... why?"
"Because you would retain a more familiar shape, and even possibly still pass as human, with a lot of dedicated practice. Plus, it would make it easier for you to hide -- that is, you're accustomed to hiding a body under six feet of height in a world made for beings of that size, while the Decepticons can only do a passable impression of 'Godzilla'. Besides, we'll know who you are, so your shape won't mean much."
"Ah. And, um, these chasebots?"
"Notoriously high-strung, highly competitive, and prone to overreacting."
"Well, that doesn't sound like me at all. ... what? Why are you -- no. No, you are not trying to say that I'm 'high-strung', o-or competitive, or prone to overreacting!"
A rumbling noise and a 'who, me?' expression. "Anyway, that's mostly bad press in both cases, and due to hardware as well ... naturally, someone hardwired to do many things will, and someone hardwired to move at high speeds is going to be prone to snap-decisions and quick reactions that would save their afts during a chase." An inelegant shrug. "You've met Arcee -- and Elita-One is a very even tempered mech, and just as protective as any."
"A -- okay ..." A long pause, then: "What are we going to tell the other Autobots? When one of you just shows up out of nowhere? I mean, I'm not going to be able to act like one of you, anyway?"
"It wouldn't be entirely inconceivable that no one had met you, Sam. I've already considered it, and I think that if you play the 'memory wipe' card, we can say that you've been crashed on Earth for several years without knowing who or what you were, until Bumblebee stumbled across you. Having your only memories be of Earth should explain any strange habits."
" ... I just happened to be on the planet that Megatron and the All Spark were on?"
"Life is stranger than fiction. Besides, many mechs were jettisoned inactivated into space. It's happened before."
"Oh. Wow, okay."
"Since you've brought that up, I would like to discuss with you some firewalls I would like to put in place now, so that when you wake up, you won't be overwhelmed or hurt yourself -- or others."
"Yeah, okay. Sure."
"I would also like to install them."
" ... goddamn it."
-+-
Sam leaned heavily on Bumblebee's horn, smirking slightly at the tingle of exasperated annoyance that danced across his skin. Apparently, Bumblebee had been making a hobby of studying him again, and had learned how much charge to put off. Sam hadn't yet gotten around to asking about the science behind that, but that was mostly because ... he didn't care. Well, he'd probably care later, but for now he was satisfied with the idea that it was probably vibrations, especially if metal made it more obvious.
(Wait, weren't human cells made of water which was more conductive? Eh? Argh -- science had never been his strong point ...)
But he did figure that it must be another one of their communications thing. It was notably stronger the closer he was to Bumblebee's chest, and it definitely worked as well as a facial expression did, with the plus point of not straining his neck. Oh, sure, Ratchet and Ironhide had done a good job mimicking a recognizable human face, but it was obvious from Bumblebee and that ... headless glitch, Frenzy, and his evil cop buddy that they didn't necessarily come with the correct components.
No wonder they felt the need to design those moving metal masks so that they were more recognizable to humans. The more Sam found out about them, the more completely alien they were! Their language sounded like static, sometimes they clicked or chirped, and sometimes those clicks or chirps were part of an expression of mood along with a dozen other noises. Humans, who ... growled, laughed, or screamed, must seem particularly limited in expressions.
Finally, Miles appeared, shouting, "Alright, already! Sam, stop with the freakin' horn!"
He sat back, grinning at the blond as he approached the Camaro, flip-flops snapping with every step. "Hey," he said as Miles set the surf board against Bumblebee and shoved the body board and other things into the back seat. "You're the one that suggested we go to the beach when I wanted to do something."
"Dude, get off my back," Miles grumbled. "It was the only thing I could think of that'd get my mom to let me go. She's always saying I should get more sun --" he bent down and grinned, all bright white teeth and slightly predatory, "and I got to turn her words against her. Dude, what's up with the ... sleeves and gloves?"
"And she didn't whack you one?" Sam asked mildly.
"No. So?"
"Skin. I have a rash, like ... poison oak, you know? It gets worse with sun. Where in the hell are you going to put that board?"
Miles straightened until Sam could only see the front of his luridly colored Hawaiian shirt, but the thoughtful pose was impossible to mistake. "Well ... we could tie it to the back like a spoiler!"
"No!" Sam gasped out in horrified shock, imagining poor Bumblebee looking at the surf board tied to his aft with horrified bemusement. Okay, that was actually a little hilarious, but Sam knew better than to laugh at his best (non human) friend. Sam got to have two best friends on the virtue that they didn't share a species. And he was possibly inappropriately attached to one of them but he wasn't thinking-about-that-right-now-okayshuttingup.
"Well, then I'm out of ideas."
After a quick look at the Autobot symbol on Bumblebee's steering wheel, Sam opened the door and slid out, leaning against the car and eyeing the surf board with dissatisfaction. He was not going to let some ovaloid piece of fiberglass and wax disrupt a day at the California beach with the only spot of normality in his life. As a matter of fact, he refused to let anything ruin this reminder of simpler days.
"Dude, if you break my board, I will kill you. You're not allowed to eat it, either," Miles warned him.
Sam wiped the evil look off his face and blinked blankly at his best (human) friend for a moment. "The roof," he said.
"... is on fire? Do we need water?"
"No, I mean, we tie it --" gesturing uselessly for a moment as he tried to remember the word, "-- we tie it length-wise to the roof. With the windows open."
" ... I like my spoiler idea better."
"The roof, Miles," he insisted. "I will sooner sideswipe a van or something and snap it in half."
"If you insist?"
"I do."
Miles sighed, flopping over the top of the car in a way that Sam was too short to mimic, "you, my friend, are not fun."
" ... I have a fifth-gen concept-body Camaro, and I am taking you to the beach, no gas money required. And I'm not fun?"
"Sorry, bud. Not fun at all."
Sam mulled over that. Then he boosted himself up by stepping on the inside of the door just so that he could lean across the car and whap Miles on the head. "Shut up, Miles. Before I change my mind and leave you to wash the dog in your little kiddie pool."
"Right. So, the roof."
"The roof indeed."
Thirty minutes, plenty of cussing, yelling, laughing, and tugging violently on those little bungee-cord tie-downs with metal hooks, the two teenaged boys then realized they had a problem. They both stared at the Camaro for a very long moment. Sam's socket (and his spine, and his brain, and his bones and the whole length of metal running through him and wow) tingled with the vast amount of amusement the yellow mech in disguise was emitting like it was going out of style.
"What now, genius?" Miles demanded, looking across the car at Sam with his eyebrow arched in that ridiculously high way only old gray men tended to be able to do.
Sam squeeze his forefinger in between the bungee-cord and the roof of the car. While he couldn't see it, wearing gloves as he was, he was sure it was turning red to attest to how tightly they had strapped the surf board to the roof. He pulled his hand out and shook it vigorously, frowning deeply at the cord that came in through the open window and very effectively keeping the door shut with the two of them on the outside. Then, refusing to look at Miles, he contorted his body uncomfortably and began to climb in through the window.
His friend was laughing hard enough to be in tears by the time Sam got himself situated. It probably had something to do with the way he had tumbled in and tangled in the various things inside the car, getting his leg caught around the steering wheel and ending up face-first in the passenger floorboard at some point. Even Bumblebee would have been laughing if he wasn't pretending to be an inanimate car at the time.
Once Sam was safely behind the steering wheel, Miles slid in with a lot less flailing around. Sam glared impetuously at his friend, who shrugged with a stupid grin and said, "That's what you get for giving up climbing trees in fifth grade."
"Miles. You have ADHD. I had to give up climbing trees because by the time we were in fifth grade, I couldn't keep up."
"All I hear is 'blah blah excuses blah'."
"Would you like to walk to the beach?"
" ... so, maps, huh?"
"That's what I thought."
-+-
At least once a year, during summer break, Miles and Sam hit the beach. Of course, during the summer, the beaches were horrendously crowded, so they had become accustomed to hunting down the most abandoned stretch of beach they could. Generally, this meant that they usually ended up with the rougher, more torn up beaches, with more silt in the water, less waves, and debris ridden sand.
Being some of the lowest of the low in school cliques for as long as they could remember, Sam and Miles hardly cared. What did it matter what their 'play ground' looked like, if it gave them free reign and permission to do whatever silly thing they wanted? They just cleared off the beach drift wood and stray nets and the like so that they had plenty of room to 'camp out'.
Bumblebee was intensely interested in this strange human custom. Or at least that's the impression that Sam got when they unloaded his back seat and trooped down to the water-side. He didn't want to get salt and sand all in his gears, after all.
The cold sand-and-silt full water rushed around Sam's ankles as he wandered aimlessly along the edge, making sure not to go too far and getting his guardian or friend worked up. Miles was enjoying himself out in the waves with the foam body board, apparently getting into something of a nasty argument with the ocean. Only poor, crazy, ADHD Miles would try to argue with the ocean.
... maybe some of his weird craziness had rubbed off on Sam. He certainly tried to argue with Megatron, which was sort of like that.
A small round disc caught Sam's attention, and he bent down to fish it out of the sand, using the salty water to rinse it off. Turning the part of a sand dollar over in his fingers he studied it for a moment and tucked it into his shorts pocket.
"Ow! Ow! Dammit, something bit me!"
"What?" Sam asked with mild interest, watching Miles flop around in the water, body board restricting his movements with that black vinyl tether around his wrist. "Is it a shark? That would be awesome."
"No, it's not a shark -- ow, ow, ow! -- it's on my toe -- ow, motherfucker!"
"Miles, honestly."
"I'd like to see you get your toe bit off and use soft language!"
When Sam saw what was hanging off of Miles' foot and causing him to use one of the words that he really objected to, he couldn't quite help but to laugh his ass off, eventually going to his knees and rolling around in the sand for a while. Miles continued to curse out the crab vehemently, shaking his foot while the poor palm-sized thing waved its other claw threateningly. Eventually, Sam managed to crawl over to save Miles from the Dreadful Claw.
"Hold still, Abominable Snowman," he instructed, then gave Miles a stern look as he promptly went into bad hospital show dramatics, flopping around in the sand as if he had seizures. In retaliation, he bent Miles' free toes in uncomfortable directions until he yelped for Uncle. "Tonight is not the night you go on someone's dinner plate," he said to the crab, using his thumbnail to force the claw open until it fell onto the sand. With a girly shriek, Miles rolled away and leapt to his feet, least the crab somehow find itself on his lap.
Sam, who so clearly wore the pants in their friendship, had to distract the crab with one hand, which it eagerly reached for, both claws wide open. In amusement, Miles started making kung-fu attack noises, like all the really bad martial arts movies had. "Mine?" Sam inquired obligingly before he grabbed the crab from behind and flung it into the ocean. "Go find Nemo!"
"No!" Miles wailed dramatically, charging into the water -- though no where near enough to find it again -- and reached dramatically for it. "I was going to take it home and name it George!"
He had to laugh at that, at least a little. But he was mostly exasperated, and so he did the only thing he could think of: he grabbed up a handful of wet sand and chunked it at the back of Miles' head. With an outraged squawk, the blond ruffled his hair, trying to get the sand out before he bent down and scooped up some really wet sand and flung it back at Sam.
Of course, being really wet sand, even though he ducked, it still splattered him. "You're going down, Miles! Down!"
When it grew dark, they started a bonfire on the beach, and hosed off all the salt and sand that had accumulated in various unmentionable places. That and neither Sam nor Miles were terribly interested in getting sand or salt inside the Camaro.
"Next time we go to the beach, let's take my Mom's jalopy," Miles said.
Sam hesitated for a split second. In a week, he'd be comatose, being turned into a robot. Suddenly, the beach wasn't fun -- he wondered why he was here, on this beach with his very ignorant friend with a giant space robot, while his spine was made of metal and he had a socket hanging out of his back. After a second, he realized that Miles was staring at him awkwardly, and he quickly turned away, hauling the bucket of water toward the bonfire just to have something to do.
He sat down heavily on the driftwood that they'd dragged closer to the fire, staring at the yellow-orange flames, just to get the after image so he couldn't see anything. As soon as Miles finished filling his bucket and lugged it over, he sat on another piece of drift wood, and for a long while it was quiet except for the sound of water and the crackle of the flames. Sam moodily jabbed the fire a few times with a driftwood stick, but Miles just sat there, staring at the blackened wood with a slightly puzzled frown on his face.
"There isn't going to be a next time, is there?" he said. It was a statement, phrased like a question. His inflection even rose on the 'is', as if he was asking, but it wasn't a question.
"No, Miles," Sam said soberly. "There isn't."
After another quiet moment, he asked, "are you sick? Is that why you're --" he waved his hands "--wearing sleeves and gloves and shit to the beach?"
"Not -- not exactly," he said carefully. "But ..."
"But what, dude?" Miles demanded. "You're not-exactly-sick but what?"
"But ... it's sort of ... terminal."
"You're dying."
Not exactly. Sam sighed and brushed a hand through his hair. "I just -- I found out a week ago, okay? I've got a week to go."
"Fuck! Fuck, man," Miles swore, going from sitting to standing before Sam could blink. "What the fuck, are you serious?"
This was possibly the worst idea Sam had ever had. But what was he supposed to do? In a matter of days, Sam Witwicky would disappear off the face of the Earth. His parents wanted nothing to do with it, Sam would ... try to tell Mikaela tomorrow sometime, because at least she would know what was really going on with him, and maybe (just maybe) she'd still talk to him when he woke up. If he woke up. "Seriously, Miles," he sighed, rubbing at his neck and drawing his knees close. "I don't have a lot of choice, you know? So ... this is it."
"Were you even going to tell me?" Miles demanded, standing. He might have been glaring. Sam wasn't checking.
"Jesus Christ, Miles!" Sam burst out loudly. "You act like its your life that's over!"
The ocean hissed, breeze and embers, the quiet crackle of the wood.
Uneasily, Sam shifted on the feet he hadn't even realize he'd risen to stand on. "I know this can't be great for you, okay?" he said, softly now. "I mean -- my parents are in total denial, I haven't even told Mikaela yet ..."
Tense and silent, Miles' face is as unreadable as Sam had ever seen it. Finally, he looked away, shaking his head like he'd never stop, backing away from Sam and waving his arms. "Listen, I -- I have to think about this ... Jesus."
"I'll be here," Sam said.
Long after he lost sight of Miles' pale hair in the gloom, Sam stood there -- and finally, snapped. Violently, he slung the bucket of water into the flickering flame, hot wood sizzling and smoke billowing up from the charred driftwood. In a vague continuation of the movement, he flung the bucket at the ocean and kicked at the sand.
For what was supposed to be a fun night out at the beach, one last time (don't think about it), it had sure ended in a really messed up way.
Turning away from the rushing sounds of the ocean, turning his back on the steady inward going wind, he stumbled and struggled through the sand and up the grassy reedy incline to the road, where Bumblebee was still sitting after all those hours, sparkling innocently under the cool moon light as if he were just an inanimate car. He sat down hard on the pavement, ignoring how the gravel bit into his skin and leaning his back against the bumper.
Please make it better, please make it stop.
After a while, the biting cold and darkness began to get to him, and he drew up his legs again, wrapping his arms around his knees. The alloy was warm against his back, vibrating slightly, and the socket that exposed him for a lie was warm (his spine was warm, and so was his brain, and a whole network of metal things he probably wouldn't have noticed otherwise: bones became struts and a warm burning center in his chest). Slowly, the tension bled from his frame, and he was blessedly numb.
It was only then that he caught the whisper of a song, and canted his head to turn an ear to it, exhaustedly curious what Bumblebee was up to now. Bumblebee was swift to note his attention, turning it up just a little higher. "I feel the weight of the world, sometimes ... hanging on my head, whoa ... look for the light of this tunnel once again. I'm taking 'bout the right state of -- the right state of -- the right state of your mind ..."
"Not helping," he grumbled quietly, wiping his face against his shoulder.
After a small silence, another song started with a sharp pop of drums. It was a sort of strange jazzy almost playful tune. Then the lyrics started. Sam listened with increasing befuddlement as the fairly depressing words snapped and rolled around the tune. " -- I'm going out of my head, I feel like I'm dead; I'm feeling Lo-Fi. I'm bottled up -- and explode. My engine has gone; some things I can't hide: I'm feelin' Lo-Fi!"
When it finally drew to a close, Sam craned his head around to give the Camaro an incredulous look. "Is that supposed to help?"
" -- and all the girlies say I'm pretty fly for a white guy!"
Sam scowled mulishly for a while longer before he grudgingly accepted that Bumblebee had succeeded in cheering him up a little. After a while, he wandered around, gathering up everything that they'd brought to the beach. They hadn't even gotten around to getting the surfboard off of Bumblebee, since they had done a little too good of a job tying it down. When Sam was sure that he had as much of the sand and salt off as humanly possible, he slid into the front seat and relaxed back against the familiar faux-leather, reaching up to pull the seat belt across his chest in a pseudo-hug (not that he'd ever, ever admit it).
Bumblebee turned on some weird retro or ... or indie ... okay, Sam didn't know what it was, but it wasn't rock or pop, so it must be something like retro or indie (retro was a music genre, right?). It was something playful and quirky, and sounded like it had been cut together out of a lot of sound clips, anyway. In a way, it was soothing, too.
-+-
The ride home was silent and tense, and neither fell asleep while the yellow lines slipped by. Wordlessly, Sam helped Miles unload the stuff and Miles disappeared back into the house without a goodbye. Sam watched the house go dark, then climbed back into Bumblebee and blew both his ego and pride to hell, curling up in the front seat and falling asleep within seconds.
-+-
The next morning, Sam woke up to a really ... really annoy vibration in his chest. He spent the next hour or so poking his own chest and grimacing. If he felt very carefully, he could feel the useless beating of his heart, but he had no pulse. His ... did he even have blood?
That was enough to get him up and moving and searching (embarrassingly hysterical) for Ratchet. It was only after speaking to the uncomfortable mech that Sam discovered that it was likely that the pump was the second thing that had begun to form, after his central nervous system was safely biometal. No one bothered to tell him that he didn't really have ... blood as humans thought it, or that the pump would turn on randomly. Ratchet assured him that once the fluid the pump was working with became the proper consistency, it would stop vibrating.
Sam spent the next thirty minutes hanging over a sink and splashing water on his face.
For some reason, Sam seemed to have a masochistic streak, and whenever he was faced with terrible things, he went looking for more terrible things. That must have been why he asked Bumblebee to talk Arcee and Mikaela into going racing. He'd suddenly gotten the guts (or maybe he convinced himself it couldn't get any worse) to tell Mikaela that he was ... being ... invaded, being taken over, that he wasn't human, that he'd end up being one of the robot aliens they were friends with.
At least, that was what he intended. How were they supposed to know that the Decepticon power struggle was ready to spill upon the Autobots?
It happened too quick for humans to react. All Sam knew was that he was with Bumblebee, then he and Mikaela had gotten out to talk while Arcee and Bumblebee gave him some space ... Then both Autobots, both still in their alt modes, came racing toward them, commanding them to run and hide. There was something not unlike a sonic boom, a shadow overhead.
Then rushing air and the crackle of ribs and agony and white and wind, and when he finally got some sense of self, he grabbed ahold of what had him and hated. Then fire (cold fire) all through him (through his bones) and down. Down. No air, too fast, burning and (cold fire) and hot terror.
Then nothing. Nothing, and pain, and black.-- To Be Continued --
- DO YOU HATE ME NOW/YET? (I don't know how many of you were paying attention and how much I said, but this has been coming since chapter one, lolz. But feel free to murder me -- just be aware that then you'll get no chapter eleven with Bot!Sam.)
- OMG FORESHADOWING BLINGBLING!
- Was Miles a bit of a jerk? Yes. Oh the other hand, all Miles knows is that he's been letting Sam slid without explaining stuff, and since Summer, both of his friends (Sam and Mikaela) have been drifting away, and then Sam LET'S SLIP that he's 'dying', and it sounds a lot like he wasn't even going to TELL Miles. Miles is in shock. He will feel like an ass and a DOUBLE ass when he finally processes what's going on.
- Songs, lolz ("State of Mind" - Mad Caddies), ("Lofi" - The Exies), ("Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)" - Offspring), and while there were no words or even a specific song intended, the weird music is the Wiseguys. (If you're familiar with any of their songs, it's probably "Start the Commotion")
- Out Take -
He regarded the mech suspiciously. "Last time I let you see something, I ended up ... taking a nose dive."
That invoked a discomforted murmur from inside Bumblebee somewhere, and he had the grace to look sheepish. "I am sorry about that, Sam. However, downloading information should have no ill effect on you."
Well, probably not. "Sure," he said, picking it up and holding it out. Bumblebee waved it away, and Sam stared in bemusement before the screen flickered. He looked at it in alarm, then realized that Bumblebee had connected to it wirelessly. After a moment, the hidden parts of Bumblebee whirled thoughtfully. Sam cradled the Blackberry between his hands and began to flip through the pictures again. "What do you think I should do?"
Bumblebee whirled for a moment longer before he stopped and reached out, curling one of his giant metal hands loosely around Sam's shoulders. For a moment, he only studied Sam intently, the brought around his other hand to grip him tightly. With an almost desperate, hopeful look, he said, "Sam, you must choose the femmebot. I've run out of racers to chase! Please!"
"What the fuck!"
-+-
Ratchet hesitated in the middle of putting away the tools that he used to waken Optimus Prime from his Sam-inflicted, power-drained state. "I ..." he said, causing the other three mechs present to look at him curiously.
"You what?" Prime asked with clear befuddlement.
"Is someone making planetfall?" Ironhide mused, at a loss. When the unfortunate sun wasn't interfering with their main communications, arriving mechs could send out a pulse on the medic's channel. Ever since Ratchet had welded up Shockwave, no Decepticon had dared to abuse this custom for fear of what the logic worshipping mech would do to them. According to him, it simply made good sense not to alienate a medic who was technically Neutral and therefore not adverse to welding anyone who needed it.
Slowly, he withdrew the tool he had been about to put away and set it delicately on the table. With a strong air of confusion, he said, "I have a feeling I'll ... need these."
Jazz slowly raised his hand. "I'll go look for Bumblebee. Damn, man, I told you to keep him away from the kid!"