Chapter Text
He’s not surprised when people stare at him in the halls.
He’s been getting these looks ever since that fateful visit with the school psychologist that everyone else deemed was a good enough reason to steer clear of Samuel James Witwicky lest they get infected with a brand of crazy too. Apparently that sort of thing is contagious.
Not that Sam is too bothered by it. Honestly, were he to cease existing in his own body and was instead standing across the hall, he would have whispered strange rumours about Samuel James Witwicky too. What a weirdo, that kid, he’d mutter beneath his breath to the friend’s he would no doubt have if he hadn’t been certified nuts, new in town with a family of five guys who don’t even look alike.
Sam would probably say he must be some sort of social experiment, the same comment he hears now as he walks down the hall toward the school’s main entrance, and he couldn’t even be too upset. It’s only fair. He’d have loved to gossip about the weird new kid too, had he not been the weird new kid.
Leaving the stuffy K-12 school building (eerily similar to the one he attended in Tranquility; there must be something about small towns and seaside neighbourhoods) Sam easily spots Bumblebee waiting by the curb of the school grounds, the hot afternoon sun making his paint shimmer like gold. He looks magnificent in this light, the way he’s supposed to instead of being cooped up in Sam’s garage all day. Sam walks up to the robot-in-disguise and runs a hand over the hood – not hot, even though a normal car would have been scorching – before sliding into the passenger's seat.
Bee the human is waiting behind the wheel, fingers tapping to the beat of the pop song blasting through his speakers. Sam wonders sometimes if all of these little quirks of his are just imitations meant to mimic a human, or if Bee truly expresses things while as a human.
“–it’s a package deal–” Bee explains Sam’s unspoken question.
“Right,” Sam rolls his eyes. “Real helpful.”
Bee ruffles his hair until he’s seeing in doubles before shooting off down the road.
Sam’s not allowed to walk home now, for reference as to why he’s even being picked up in a town that he could probably walk across in under an hour. Something about attacks and danger something something keeping him safe something. He’s not really too fussy about it, other than the embarrassment that comes with being stared at by everyone and their mom as he leaves the school in the flashiest sports car these people have probably ever seen. But it could be worse, honestly. Nothing will ever beat the mortification Sam had to face when climbing into Ratchet’s ambulance because everyone else was too busy to pick him up but refused to let him walk home alone. Nothing will beat that. Ever.
“What’s for dinner?” Sam asks conversationally, watching the streets roll by as Bee the car drives. Bee the human turns to Sam and tilts his head this way and that, probably filtering through all the snippets of entertainment he’s got in that (bloated, if you ask anyone that wasn’t Bumblebee himself) processor, before finally grinning down on him.
“Get the take-out set up, honey!”
“It’s been take-out for the past three days,” Sam deadpans, and if Bee were to have been a cartoon character he would have sweatdropped. “What’s going on that Ratchet can’t even cook?”
(Somewhere down the line the Autobots – plus Sam – stumbled upon the revelation that beyond being a stellar engineer and an incredible doctor, Ratchet also had the uncanny ability to cook human meals with little to no problem.
The information hadn’t been taken well by anyone but Ironhide, who burst out laughing and continued laughing well into the half-an-hour argument that ended up taking place right after Ratchet had placed home-made soup in front of Sam for dinner that night. Jazz and Bumblebee were beyond upset, seeing as they’ve been practising for a while now and still can’t get food off the stove uncharred. Sam had thus far been living off of take-out and sandwiches before Orion decided – enforced being another word to describe the sentence that was imposed upon Ratchet – that Ratchet was to be responsible for Sam’s meals until he could learn how to cook for himself.
It was funny for the first two days, but now on top of hours of Cybertronian lessons being jammed into his head right after eight hours of school, Sam also has to learn how to cook ‘as fast as fraggin’ possible’ so that Ratchet can be relinquished from his self-proclaimed punishment sooner rather than later.
Still, Sam is eleven-years-old and knows how to make tuna-melt sandwiches from scratch; that is about as far and extensive as his cooking skills get. So Ratchet is still a slave to the kitchen an hour everyday – an hour too much for some, apparently – and Sam hasn’t had to eat take-out since.
Well, until now.)
“At ease, soldier,” the radio plays, when Bee shakes his head a second later at the audio, like it was the wrong choice of words. The dial on the radio goes crazy a bit as Bee goes through the probably millions of files worth of dialogue and music before picking out something. When the radio plays next, it’s a man whispering, “well, sweetheart, we’re about to find out.”
“You’re no help.”
Bee shrugs.
Bee parks beside Jazz on the driveway, and Sam automatically searches for Ironhide stationed in front of the house by the curb and Orion sitting silently beneath the swooping branches of the half-dried trees planted near the end of the street by the single streetlamp. It’s a full house tonight.
“Seriously, if something happened–”
“Tha’ boy lives!”
He’s being manhandled the moment he steps foot into the house, shoes barely hitting the entrance rug before Jazz is yanking him up under the armpits and throwing him into the air like he weighed a little less than a paperweight.
“Ehhh, I like that one,” Jazz remarks, smirking as Sam tries (and fails in equal if not more measures) to free himself, but Jazz’s grip might as well have been made of metal (unironically) where he’s now captured Sam in a potato-bag hold at his side. “Paperweight. It matches ya’, Sammy. You’ve barely grown!”
Sam doesn’t mention how Jazz has an unfair perception of growth considering he was a double-digit tall alien robot that could fit Sam in the palm of his hands.
(Jazz laughs at his thoughts, and it effectively distracts Sam from catching the growing look of unease that passes over Bee’s face when Jazz comments on how at this rate, Sam will remain a sparkling forever.)
“So what’s for dinner?” Sam asks after semi-taming the mess Jazz made of his hair. “I really hope you let Ratchet cook.”
“I’m banned from attemptin’ ta’ mimic human fuel recipes, if that’s what ya’ mean,” Jazz rolls his eyes. Sam throws a glare at Bee over his shoulder, who raises his hands in mock surrender, as if saying “don’t look at me, I didn’t touch the kitchen either.”
Probably because he was also recently banned from mimicking human fuel recipes.
“Bon appetit!” The kitchen radio plays as they enter, and though Ratchet’s human form is nowhere in sight a plate of green curry and sticky rice lay on the table – it makes Sam smile that even though Ratchet has expressed on more than one occasion (and at bolstering volume each time) on the inefficiency of human fueling methods, he still ordered Sam’s favourite from the one Thai restaurant in this entire town.
Sam digs right in, and takes his time savouring the plethora of flavours from the curry, somehow bursting with taste despite the lack of spice. Jazz hums approvingly beside him, and Sam twists to scrutinise him with a furrow of his brow, seeing as his mouth was stuffed with food and unable to do much more than chew at the moment.
“Impressions, sweetspark,” Jazz explains, moving to sit across from him on the table while Bee wandered off into the house. “It’s… probably easier if I jus’ show ya’, actually.”
Sam ponders a moment before shrugging and finishing his bite. In his time with the Autobots he has found that it’s best to just go with Jazz’s whims instead of trying to swim against the current of his unyielding desires, especially once he puts his mind to something.
Jazz looks up and tilts his head this way and that, and in between one blink and the next he fizzles out of existence. Sam doesn’t react, mostly because he’s so used to it by now that the bots doing something as mundane as opening doors and using stairs is more strange then their laziness in keeping up appearances. He goes back to his rice, knowing Jazz will return when he wants, but his mouth is filled with a strange warmth before he can so much as take another bite.
He startles, lapping his tongue over the roof of his mouth to get a better taste of the weird thing, but is met with nothing. That doesn’t change the fact that his teeth unclench on instinct, how his tongue relaxes like when he’s drinking water, how his throat bobs even though there’s nothing in his mouth. It’s like he’s drinking the air, a thick potent scent that washes down his throat the same way a warm breeze would feel were it to liquify.
It feels… natural. Strange, new, but it's like he knows this. Just like how he knows colours, Sam muses distantly, drinking at nothing. Like how he knows sounds that he can’t make properly in his throat. Like Bee’s eyes. He’s experienced this before in a thousand lifetimes and a million little files stored away in his thundering subconscious.
The feeling dissipates as fast as it comes, but it still leaves Sam’s mouth buzzing, static skittering between his charged teeth and down into his stomach. Jazz appears a moment later, right where he had been sitting, and looking entirely too pleased with himself. The air around is still thick, Sam notes, and he realises it’s Jazz’s EM field, something that shrouded around Sam without him noticing, and something that has yet to recede. Subconsciously he leans into it, and feels reminiscent longing pride mingling with his skin, settling the static.
“Primus, kid,” Jazz huffs, holding Sam’s forehead with a large palm and pushing him upright, and it’s only then that Sam realises that he had leaned into Jazz quite literally too, and that he was a few inches from toppling to the floor. “We’ve really gotta’ teach ya’ some decent firewalls..”
“What was that?” He asks softly, sitting upright and dislodging the man’s arm.
“Well, that would be energon refuellin’,” Jazz explains with a grin. “Specifically what it would be like if, well, you drank it with tha’ human glossa of yur’s.”
“That’s what energon tastes like?” Sam asks, licking his lips for any last vestige of the beverage despite inherently knowing there would be nothing left.
“For you,” Jazz shrugs a shoulder. “It’s different ‘cause we don’ got the same intake parts, but I like it the way you liked it.”
“Can I have come?” Sam asks.
“Absolutely not.”
“Why not?” Sam pouts.
“‘Corddin’ ta’ Hatchet, it’ll burn ya’ like boilin’ water,” Jazz explains, though he does look put out by the notion too, which makes Sam feel slightly better that he’s not the only one disappointed. “Woulda’ loved ta’ give ya’ the little treats some bots make sometimes. Sparklin’s love ‘em like a lifeline.”
“Stop calling me that,” he cuts in suddenly, chest heavy.
Jazz turns to him, confused.
“What?”
“That.”
“What is it, sparklin’?”
“That!”
“Oh,” Jazz does something funny with his face, like he’s chewing on a piece of tough meat that just stays stuck between his teeth no matter how much work he puts in. It’s the same face his father would make when Sam asked what his prior designation was.
(It was a conversation Sam learned not to repeat.)
It’s the same look Bee gives him sometimes, when he chirps something just right and he knows it’s right in some form that Bee recognises, and it makes him give Sam that look. Hard meat chewing. Pondering. Looking at Sam like he was maybe the piece of meat stuck between his teeth, a puzzle to solve, something that needed to be taken apart by the same action as puzzles and tough meat. Grinding through tendons and pieces until you swallowed and moved on or found the bigger picture.
Looking at Sam like he wasn’t Sam (adoration mine mine) and more like Sam (recognition foreign guard).
“You’re looking at me like that,” Sam murmurs, and moves curry around with his spoon, appetite forgotten, “like Bee does. I don’t like it.”
Jazz blinks at him, once, twice, even though he doesn’t need to, before sighing.
“Yur’ a complicated case, kid,” he starts slowly, as if choosing his words carefully before saying anything, which was very much not like Jazz, unless he’s been pretending this whole time and was actually super cunning. Sam wouldn’t even be able to get mad if that were the case, because Jazz was a very good pretender and would have had Sam fooled until the end if that were true.
“Because of my dreams?” Sam tries.
“Tha’s… part of it, yeah.”
Jazz’s hesitance speaks for itself.
“… you’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”
“More like I can’t, Sammy,” he sighs again, the resignation in his tone doing its part to make Sam believe him. “Trust me, I think honesty is the best policy an’ all that, but the Big O makes tha’ rules, not me.”
“Big… O? You mean Orion?”
“Ah, yur’ so lucky it matches.”
Again, Sam doesn’t understand the joke that goes over his head. This time though, he’s less concerned about it.
“When will you be able to tell me?”
“Tell you what?” Jazz asks.
Tell me why you all look at me like that, Sam doesn’t say, like I’m a ghost that you’ve seen before even though I’m right here. I’m still alive.
Jazz gets it. His thoughts are a public broadcast to these pesky bots.
“Soon, hopefully, to answer yur’ question first, kiddo’,” Jazz explains, leaning casually against the counter and not-so-subtly pushing Sam’s bowl back toward him. He begins eating again without complaint, less because of Jazz though, and more because he doesn’t want to waste good Thai food. “And as for your stellar observation regardin’ public broadcastin’ an’ pesky bots – which, rude, I’ll have you doin’ laps around the house for hours if yur’ not careful – there’s a reason why we all wanted ta’ talk to ya’ tonight.”
“Why?” Sam asks, taking the bait when Jazz wiggles his eyebrows for dramatic effect. He is met with Sam’s scrutinising squint-slash-glare.
“Well, my dear Sam, ‘ol Hatchet intercepted a transmission the other day,” Jazz smooths a hand over his silver braids, grinning with pearly white teeth that were just a tad bit too sharp. When he gets no response from Sam he leans forward and peers at him closely, continuing, “a transmission from outa’ space.”
It takes a second for the information to process before Sam’s eyes are blown wide.
He knows exactly what Jazz is explaining around.
“There’s more of you.”
“Exactly,” Jazz reaches over to ruffle Sam’s hair. “An’ we got a’lot o’ preparation to do before they get ‘ere. Preparation bein’ you, baby boy.”
Sam gapes for a few more seconds before shaking his head clear of both racing thoughts and Jazz’s hand. When he looks back down at his food to ground himself, a single realisation peers over the rest of the chaos in Sam’s mind.
“So that’s why there was take-out today.”
A week later Sam sits through what could possibly count as F1-racing-slash-congress-meeting for alien robots.
It’s well past his standard bedtime, but tomorrow’s a weekend and nobody (key person being Ratchet) has said otherwise, so he sits inside Bee’s cab while the bots drive off into the desert near midnight. They must make a strange sight to anyone awake, five vehicles speeding down the one-way highway at speeds that would make any regular driver vomit at just the sight of the speedometer. Bee himself is pushing triple digits, with Jazz not too far behind. Sam screams in delight at every burst of speed, clinging to the seat belt wrapped tightly around him as he laughs and tries not to throw up while Bee attempts to break the sound barrier.
“There are three mechs I can think of in less than an astrosecond at least that would make this situation ten times worse,” Ratchet grumbles through Bee’s radio. “And I pray to Primus that none of them are among the docking pods.”
“Aww, don’t be like that, doc,” Jazz croons, cackling. From their left Sam sees Jazz shoot past them and straight off the road, kicking up an enormous plume of dust as he spun in hazardous donuts before placing himself back on the road at the head of the line. Bee’s engine roars in outrage, but no matter how he manoeuvres Jazz stays in front.
“I’ve got the cargo!” Bee’s radio plays, but Jazz only laughs at his expense.
“That’s what you get for saddlin’ yourself with a sparklin’!” Then, as an afterthought, Jazz tacks on, “no offence, Sammy.”
Sam takes full offence.
“I don’t care what you have to do,” Sam tells the dashboard, fully serious. “Do whatever it takes to beat him.”
Bee revs his engine, and before Ratchet can get a full complaint through the Camaro takes a swerving left right off the road. He races off, a yellow bullet against the backdrop of an endless Nevada desert as he drives over the terrain. The speedometer stopped climbing long ago, tapping erratically at the edge of the red zone even though Sam knew that Bumblebee wasn’t limited to this world’s speed. He was fast, fast enough that Sam got dizzy trying to make out the shapes of the canyons zipping by. He’s sure that Bumblebee would appear like a yellow blur along the horizon.
They take a long turn around a large canyon face, hazardously close to the point that if Sam were to stick his hand out, he’s sure he’d be able to touch the rock. Like a slingshot, Bee uses the turn to go even faster, if that was even possible, and makes a mad dash back for the road. There was no way Jazz didn’t notice them, and judging by his growing speed he wasn’t going to make it easy, but Bee was the fastest among them, and Sam had faith.
“–he’s the fastest man alive!” The radio announces.
“Leave his aft in the dust!” Sam shrieks in delight.
Jazz has a colourful array of complaints firing off through the radio when Bee cuts him off at such a short distance that, to avoid a direct collision, Jazz is forced to veer off the road and settle behind them after straightening out. Ratchet compliments Jazz’s cursing with an adequate amount of admonishing insults as well, and though there were no words exchanged from him, Sam could feel Orion’s exasperation from inside Bee’s cab.
“Are you glitched, Bumblebee?!” Ratchet damn near screams. Sam winces, giving Bee’s dashboard a sympathetic pat while the bot whines. “I’ll tear your tires out one by one and force you to drive on studs, mark my words.”
“Ruh-roh,” Bee plays out.
“That’ll put ya’ in yur’ place, fraggin’ cheater.”
“Don’t be jealous Jazz,” Sam sniffs, knowing Bee will send the transmission through. “Bee is Orion’s fastest scout.”
“Who’s tellin’ ya’ that?”
“Orion told me.”
“With mild ramifications, in hindsight,” Orion sighs in resignation.
“Honeybee’s already got a' bloated processor, no need ta’ feed it, Sam.”
“Shut yur trap son!”
“Yeah, what Bee said!”
The black jeep bringing up the rear of the convoy sags against its tires, resigned to its fate as witness to the concept of youthful idiocy portrayed across species.
Human or not, the mesa that climb up the earth would make anyone feel like an insect in comparison.
Sam cranes his neck as far back as he could to try and glimpse the top ridge of the rock formation, but standing where he is at the very edge of the stone wall it was like trying to see the edge of a rainbow. It is a small consolation that, as towering as the Autobots are in their bipedal forms, they are equally as dwarfed by mother nature as Sam.
He takes the time spent waiting to watch them, seeing as nowadays, with the summer-school he needs to attend to catch up with whatever he missed in the last month of classes, he doesn’t get to see the bots in their original forms. He kind of misses it, even more so now that he can appreciate the glint of shining armour in the silvery moonlight. And though he’s gotten fairly used to being able to see in the dark by now, it still catches him a bit off guard at all the detail he’s able to collect. As if the Sun were out and about.
The reason for all this waiting to begin with happened to be for the convoy that was supposed to land near this very desert. Sam doesn’t know how it works, but Ratchet had briskly described, when asked and prodded until he couldn’t ignore him, how their communication signals could second as navigation systems as well. All Ratchet had to do was adjust Orion’s broadcast so the signal was specifically tied to their current location instead of blanketing most of the world and voila, robots land in vast empty desert instead of busy Manhattan downtown freeway.
“It’s only practical for when the broadcast is already answered,” Ratchet has explained, tapping away at his little arm monitor without sparing Sam so much as a glance. “Once the pods land and we dispose of the remnants I shall re-broaden the signal to encompass the globe once more. It is simply more secure this way.”
Sam doesn’t have to guess what Ratchet means by that. He’s already died once just to prove it.
“When will they get here?” He asks, swinging his legs from where he’s sitting on Bee’s shoulder.
“Anywhere between a few groons to a half a cycle,” Ironhide provides without infliction. He’s been inspecting his weapons for the better part of an hour, and has yet to contribute anything meaningful (read: fun and entertaining) to the conversation besides sniping at Bumblebee to up the voltage of his “stingers”, whatever that means.
“Between a what to a what?”
“He means it could take all night,” Jazz interprets wyrly. “You really shoulda’ stayed home, kiddo’.”
“–sleep is very important for growing boys and girls.”
“Well sorry for wanting to see an alien spaceship crashland on Earth instead of sleeping,” Sam rolls his eyes with a grumble directed at both Jazz and Bumblebee.
“Oi, I ain’t likin’ all this attitude, young man,” Jazz prods Sam’s side with an unforgiving digit, causing him to squirm. “Where’d the sweet little sparklin’ I met stellar-cycles ago go?”
“Attitude! ‘S some f*cking attitude, I can’t believe what you say to me–!” Guns N’ Roses belts out.
“I told you to stop calling me that,” Sam grumbles, ignoring Bee’s hippy shuffling dance moves in favour of batting at Jazz’s offending digit.
“An’ I said that you can give me orders when you’ve reached yur’ first deca-vorn.”
“Unfair,” he whines.
“Totally fair,” Jazz nods.
“–that man is a cheater!” Bee points at Jazz, the antennae on his head ramrod straight in shock. Sam laughs and points too, and then Jazz’s plating puffs up as he starts spewing out threats of bodily harm.
“I find myself pondering on a frequent basis who is the newspark, who is the scout, and who is the second-in-command,” Ratchet mutters to Orion, who lets out a long puff of air from his vents.
Two hours later, what wakes Sam up from his dozing is the spike of excitement that electrifies the air around him. It makes his skin crawl, like a static current racing over his body and lighting every nerve on fire. He jolts up from his perch on Bee’s shoulder, a large mechanical hand the only thing stopping Sam from tumbling down a sixteen foot drop and probably cracking his skull open. He blearily looks around, eyeing the rigid postures of the bots around him for a brief few seconds before his attention is snatched away by the sky.
It is the bright glow of several shooting stars that enraptures his gaze, and he’s unable to look away from the blazing glory up above. He can’t count how many there are, but they’re coming down fast, and coming down in their direction. A gasp gets choked in his chest as he watches the fires burn brightly, illuminating the sky like miniature suns.
“Scout pods,” Ratchet’s voice breaks through the thick atmosphere, and understanding excitement yearning dances between them all like a scent. Sam’s heart thunders in his chest at a bruising speed that leaves his ribs aching, the pace of his breathing accelerating with each word Ratchet relays. “Five of them, though I’m getting six signals,” then Ratchet’s face plates shift and even though it’s sometimes difficult to understand their expressions with how differently they’re built, it didn’t take a genius for Sam to figure out he was annoyed at whatever he found.
“It could be either set,” Ironhide tries to console the medic, then shutters his optics for a second before backtracking with something that could only be considered a grimace. “Then again, ‘aint any better whichever pair we get.”
“Primus tests me at every turn.”
“What’s wrong?” Sam turns to ask Bumblebee, accepting the offered digit and using it to jump into Bumblebee’s servo. He feels more than sees the scout curl his hand around him. A titan holding a little bird. He’s as safe as can be surrounded by these giants of his.
“There’s no reason to be scared, be scared now–” Gomez trickles from Bee’s speakers.
“There’s nothin’... wrong, per say,” Jazz continues, though the hesitancy in Jazz’s usual confidence does nothing to ease Sam’s nervousness.
“I would beg to differ,” Ratchet scoffs, glaring daggers into his datapad. “I can feel my processor corroding already.”
“We should be grateful for any allies that answer our call,” Orion cuts in, the baritone of his deep voice echoing loudly in the empty desert and rising above the collective chatter. The authority silences everyone at once, and settles something quivering and shaky in Sam’s heart. He knows these commands in his skin, Orion’s voice acting like an old song he’d heard from when he had been a baby. A powerful form of nostalgia. “It is imperative we extend welcome to any bot.”
This last comment is directed at Ratchet, who simply rolls his optics and goes back to muttering to his datapad for consolation.
“Why’s he upset? I thought these new guys were your friends?” Sam questions.
“Friends is stretchin’ it,” Jazz shrugs, turning his face back to the blazing pods descending from the sky. “If all goes well you’ll see for yourself.”
Bumblebee nods in agreement, using his unoccupied hand to choke his own neck in a faint grip before pointing up to the pods and then tracing his finger back to Ratchet. He then tilts his head this way and that before letting his radio play out, “oh, I hate that man. I hate that man!”
“Oh,” Understanding dawns on him as he turns to watch the pods. “He’s just being Ratchet.”
“I will dissect you both on an open berth.”
“Is a bit justified,” Jazz adds, ducking just in time to avoid Ratchet’s stray fist. “Afterall, the twins are a real pain.”
“Wait,” Sam’s head snaps to Jazz, mouth agape. “You guys have twins too?!”
“An’ triplet frames, but I’ve only eva’ met one o’ them in my life,” Jazz explains, “twins are rare still, but we’re…ah, fortunate enough to know two sets.”
“But how does that even work?” Sam then frowns, face reddening when he backtracks and tries to explain himself under Jazz’s growing grin. “You guys are, ya’ know, all metal and gears stuff… and don’t have babies… I think…”
“I’m sure ‘ol Hatchet would just love ta’ give ya’ a lesson on Cybertronian physiology,” Jazz trills, turning to Ratchet with a killer smirk, “‘ain’t that right doc?”
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” is Bee’s ominous nonsensical reply.
Ratchet’s probably scathing reply is cut off when several thunderous booms echo across the sky. Sam’s head immediately snaps up, eyes drawn back to the fiery balls of fire falling from the sky. They were so close now, close enough that Sam could see finer parts of the scout pods falling apart against the severity of their descent. Another crackling series of booms, imitating waves of ravaging thunder during a storm as the pods broke through layers and layers of open air.
“That fall is going to hurt,” Ironhide states without remorse.
“Oh, my, my, my, I have fallen for you,” Bee filters through Lauren Wood’s versus and earns several questioning stares for his choice of words.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Sam laments. “Dont pick another song. You’ve been picking weird ones lately,” he cuts in right after, just as Bee gets a thoughtful look on his face.
Echoing booms draw everyone’s attention. By now it sounds like there’s a thunderstorm raging above them despite the clear sky, and beneath the cacophony of noise Ratchet states the time until impact, counting down by kliks and breems rather than minutes. It only irks Sam a little bit that these timestamps actually mean something to him without any sort of explanation.
“They will fall fifteen-point-three-two-five kliks north seventy-three-degrees west from here,” Ratchet details, tapping away at his datapad. That gets everyone in motion, with Orion in the lead as he transformers first into his big red and blue semi truck. It gleams like a gem under the moonlight, his paint fresh and polished in preparation for the new bots’ arrival. Ironhide follows in suit, a shadow to Orion’s flashy colours. Their combined engines rumble as they kick off from the group’s waiting area and race down the desert.
“Why aren’t we going too?” Sam asks, watching as the two vehicles disappear in a cloud of dust.
“Would ya’ bring a baby to a meetin’ with foreign soldiers?” Jazz asks, tilting his helm so his visor glints in the bright half-moon. “Ratchet may have confirmation on their status, but it ‘ain’t gunna’ kill us ta’ be cautious.”
“I don’t need three bots to guard me,” Sam frowns.
“Who says I’m stayin’ for you?” Jazz counters smoothly, crossing his arms and inspecting his digits. “I hate drivin’ in the sand; I get pebbles stuck in ma’ gears for cycles.”
They both knew that was a lie. Well, not the pebble-stuck-in-gear part, but definitely the part about guarding Sam. Like Sam was some wanted fugitive or a member of the royal family that needed the extra protection. Beyond that one strange encounter with the police-car-turned-evil-robot that Bumblebee blasted to bits (suspiciously similar to the police car that hit Sam, now that he really thought about it), it’s not like Sam’s encountering constant danger on a daily basis. Even moving all the way to Jasper seems like overkill, but there wasn’t any arguing with Orion.
His thoughts permeate through the air like the smell of a candle in a small room, and he can tell this by the way Jazz turns his helm to watch the falling pods, the way Bee’s shoulders hitch upward the slightest bit, his antennae drooping, the way Ratchet closes himself off to Sam the way he usually does when he’s particularly upset.
He doesn’t understand, but then again, all he can really do is add the missing puzzle piece to his growing collection and hope that the image clears itself out eventually. Whenever eventually was going to be.
“Don’ be like that, Sammy,” Jazz sighs.
“Sorry,” Sam mumbles, crossing his arms tight to his chest and refusing to tear his eyes away from the pods.
“Ah, there ya’ go, makin’ a mech feel bad.”
“I hope it’s working,” Sam huffs, steadfast in his staring. “I hope you feel really bad right now.”
Bee whines something unintelligible, his whole body sagging, his door wings drooping like a sad bird or, Sam thinks with no small amount of mirth, a depressed bumblebee.
“‘Ain’t no valley low enough–”
“Honeybee, you ‘ain’t helpin’...”
He chitters something explosive, the air around Bee shifting to a spell out just what he thought about how helpful Jazz was being in real time. It was almost enough to mask the sound of the pods finally breaking past the final stretch of clouds and making a rapid dive for the ground. Ratchet’s call for “impact!” is barely heard over the deafening crash as the pods finally smash into the earth. Even from here Sam can make out the plumes of flame and dust shooting into the air, and all at once he understands why the bots decided to drive so far out into the desert.
“We have arrived, captain–!”
“Oh, yes they have!” Jazz laughs, and transforms in a flurry of movement and flying limbs before landing rather roughly on the ground. He doesn’t waste a second before revving his engine and shooting off in the direction that Orion and Ironhide went.
“His temperament will be one to behold the day his conjunx arrives,” Ratchet mutters to himself before following suit.
“Did you guys get the okay-signal or something?” Sam asks as Bee lowers him to the ground. Bumblebee gives him a double-thumbs up before clapping his hands together and getting down until he is on all fours before him, his face levelled with Sam’s.
“–got a signal from–communication lines are running–we are in the clear!”
“See, why couldn’t you make sense like this before?” Sam asks, reaching to grip Bee’s strange mask-thing over where his mouth should be. “I’m telling Orion to ban your internet access.”
“That’s so not fair,” some little boy whines from Bee’s speakers.
Sam rolls his eyes and lets go of Bee’s mouthpiece, backing up a few paces so that the yellow bot has enough room to transform in a whirlwind of moving parts of mechanical gears. Sitting in front of him in the next few seconds in Sam’s beloved alien Camaro that he happily hops into, climbing over the central console to get into the driver's seat.
They follow Ratchet’s tail, driving in what Sam assumes is a straight line toward the crash site. As they drive Bee’s radio relays the bots’ internal communication system so Sam can hear everything going on.
“Hey Ratchet, I don’t think it’s too late to turn back,” Ironhide laminates over the comms.
“Which set is it,” Sam can hear the medic’s grimace through his voice.
“The complete set is the Wrecker defects,” Ironhide explains, something like mirth in his grilled voice. “But I think it may be your lucky day. ‘Sides is here too.”
“You’ve got to be fragging with me.”
“Well, ‘e’s only half the problem,” Jazz tries to reconcile, but not without failing to contain his laughter. “Sunny’s usually his enabler.”
“You’re lucky these bots aren’t calibrated to the communication’s yet, or Sideswipe would be at your aft right now.”
“My aft is for my conjunx’s optics only,” Jazz sniffs.
“Hey!” Sam squeaks, slapping his hand over his ears, though it does nothing to stop the waves of second-hand embarrassment from Bumblebee that heat up his skin, nor Jazz’s malicious humour want longing that just barely manages to grace Sam’s brain. His face heats up, and he throws the radio a vicious glare. “Stop talking about it!”
“It’s only natural, Sammy,” Jazz teases even as Bee’s resentment grows, ignoring the yellow scout’s indignant clicks and whines as he continues. “Love and such. It’s a universal thing. Ah, I can’t wait until you meet the beautiful hunk of metal.”
Sam shrieks something unintelligible, but his undertones carry enough that Jazz fizzles off his rambling with a burst of laughter.
“Jerk,” Sam grumbles, cheeks still hot.
“He’s even worse when Prowl is around,” Ironhide mutters.
“Nearing coordinates in three kliks,” Ratchet’s voice cuts through the mild conversation. “Have you detailed Samuel’s situation, Prime?”
“They know not to shoot on sight,” Ironhide cuts in. “That’s about it.”
“No harm will come to the boy,” Orion answers, “the new arrivals have been sent a data burst, but are advised to analyse the files further at later notice.”
Sam’s attention is stolen away from the radio to the several figures in the distance. At the speed they were driving at, it wasn’t too long before Jazz and Ratchet were pulling up directly behind Orion’s tall frame and transforming to flank him. Sam notes Ironhide standing a little ways to the left, talking with a frame slimmer and smaller than his own towering bulk of one.
The unknown mechs standing and addressing Orion all appear strange, much more alien in Sam’s eyes than Bumblebee or any of the Autobots he knows. They were slim, even the biggest of them, with dark chorded bodies that guard none of the vulnerable cables and wiring and workings of their internal systems. They don’t have armour plates, Sam realises as Bee comes to a silent stop beside Jazz.
“Protoforms, Sammy,” Jazz explains through the radio, though he doesn’t so much as twitch from his position beside Orion. “Our armour is too rigid for scoutin’ and dockin’ pods, so we shed ‘em and put ‘em in storage.”
“Won’t they get cold or something?” Sam asks, concerned, his own body covered in a thick sweater to keep him protected from Nevada’s near frigid desert temperate.
There’s a paused delay before Jazz says anything, which is significant considering he’s a being that can process information faster than the strongest supercomputer on Earth. When he finally speaks, his voice is soft and quiet.
“…yur’ just too cute, sweetspark.”
Sam’s face feels hot enough to spontaneously combust.
Fortunately for him, he’s effectively distracted from Jazz’s mortifying comments when sharp spikes of curiosity warning foreign dash through the air and none-too-gently poke at his mind. He grimaces, rubbing at the side of his head even as Bee croons lowly and wraps Sam even tighter within his mental presence, like a thick blanket shielding him from the elements.
“This is hopeless,” Sam grunts, surrendering the hold he had on the strange net of security Jazz taught him to conjure and collapsing back against the ground. “I can’t do it. My brain keeps getting itchy and it hurts.”
“It’s yur’ lack of focus, Sammy,” Jazz explains, his human form crouching down to rest on the balls of his feet. “You keep driftin’ on me.”
“I can’t help it,” Sam pouts, staring pointedly at the ground to avoid the look Jazz was giving him. He really couldn’t help it. Keeping a hold of his thoughts in a tight ball and covering himself up was like trying to hold water in his hands. Every small distraction, every bird chirp and swish of trees and even Jazz’s staring snapped him right out of any miniscule amount of concentration he managed to scramble together.
He can literally feel the way his thoughts filter through the space around him, Jazz’s nose wrinkling in thought letting Sam know that the silver-haired man caught practically every one of Sam’s feelings.
“It’s different ‘cause ya’ don’t got a processor, so it makes filin’ and detailin’’ difficult,” Jazz starts, rocking back so he could sit cross-legged across from him. He looks thoughtful as his eyes become distant, and Sam knows he’s cruising through his own files to find whatever he needs. After a moment he comes to, and gives Sam a crooked grin. “How ‘bout we try somethin’ a bit different.”
Sam shrugs, amenable. Anything will be better than his hopeless attempts at self-shielding.
Jazz instructs Sam to close his eyes, and he does, cascading his existence into the familiar blackness of his eyelids. He hums to himself quietly, waiting for whatever type of signal Jazz will give him. And Jazz follows through well enough a few seconds later.
Sam can’t help but jolt as he is all but bundled into an abruptly tight embrace, something that feels slightly familiar with the way Bumblebee would hold him close in his mind sometimes, to ease his headaches. Jazz feels completely different to Bumblebee, though not in a way Sam could describe well even if he tried. If Bumblebee was like the feeling of warm honey (not even to be ironic) sliding down his throat and settling into his belly, but, like, everywhere, then Jazz was the feeling of slipping into a calm water, a distant beat vibrating through the currents and thrumming softly against his body.
Sam opens his eyes with a jump, but Jazz is still there, unmoving, simply watching Sam expectantly.
“What… what is this?” He forces out his croaky throat. Feels his insides squirm as they try to make do with the confined space of something forced all around him even though Sam can’t see anything. His voice catches in his chest, where it fights to crawl up his neck and escape the clenched line of his teeth. “It’s tight.”
“Ah,” Jazz simply hums, and a moment later the water that had been pressing against Sam’s sides eases into calm lapping waves, and suddenly instead of drowning in an abyss Sam feels a sense of calm wash over him, his mind quieted for once, the impressions that usually float through the air strangely absent. It’s almost peaceful.
“What is this?” Sam asks again, but this time his voice is softer than before, less forced. Like he can finally breathe.
“I’m givin’ you a blanket,” Jazz explains, not tearing his eyes away from him. “You can’t keep one up on yur’ own, so I’m wrappin’ ya’ up. It makes practicin’ yur’ own firewalls easier.”
Sam gets the hint and closes his eyes again, relishing in the emptiness of his mind, how the sounds around him seem muted even though nothing’s really changed physically. Now when he withdraws himself as close as he can, it’s with an ease that astounds him. When he wraps himself up in the firewalls Jazz taught him to make, they don’t fall apart. They tremble and Sam’s already sweating with the effort, but just as he loses his will Jazz’s strange presence sticks around Sam like a second skin, reinforcing his firewalls like glue and tacky, like a helping hand keeping Sam upright.
When he opens his eyes again Jazz looks content.
“This’ll do.”
“Won’t it tire you out?” Sam asks, feeling the edges of where his firewalls end and where Jazz’s protection began. His blanket felt sturdy, definitely more solid than Sam’s own tattered attempt, and didn’t budge when Sam pressed his mind against it.
“Yur’ consideration is cute, sweetspark,” Jazz smirks, and Sam’s face grows warm. He pairs it with a scowl, but Jazz is unperturbed. “But I’ve been doin’ this for millennia. Is’ jus’ programmin’ for us.”
“Well see if I ever care about you again,” Sam huffs, crossing his arms, and after quick consideration prods at Jazz’s unwavering presence. It’s like poking at a brick wall, and judging by Jazz’s unimpressed look, it probably feels like what a brick wall would feel if a flimsy little boy poked at it. “Whatever. I like Bee’s firewalls way better.”
“You little glitch.”
Sam hadn’t been lying when he had said he liked Bee’s firewalls better. There was something so familiar, so warm and welcoming, like walking through the threshold of his home away from a cold night. It’s not like the other’s felt bad, per say. If anything, Orion came as a close second with how secure and safe he felt.
(But Bee was Sam’s best friend. Obviously he got first place by default.
Adoration sinks into Sam like melting butter, and he feels his face grow hot.)
From behind Bee’s thick blanket of protection Sam can’t really feel much. He can only really feel Bee, and that was whatever the yellow scout chose to show Sam. So even though he knows impressions and thoughts and words are being exchanged in the strange pocket dimension of communication that existed for the bots, Sam wasn’t privy to anything. He was afloat within the confines of Bumblebee’s warm embrace, and if the alternative was being bombarded with the sharp impressions of the newcomers around him, he’d gladly stay tucked away.
Still, Bee’s firewalls can’t mute Sam’s physical senses. Though the Camaro was thick-walled and had tinted windows, Sam could still hear the conversation flitting about above them. Almost all of it was Cybertronian, and in a dialect that was slightly different from the ones Sam was being taught by Ratchet. Though Ratchet had started from the older languages, so Sam wasn’t really as knowledgeable in the newer ones. However, despite this, Sam still had strange dreams and stranger voices in his head and stranger still information stored away in his brain that didn’t really belong to him, so he leans as close as he can to Bee’s window as the seatbelt will allow and presses against the cool glass, listening.
Words are hard to make out, but meaning is easy, undertones and roots are understandable, if only slightly. There is much query, questioning, and then there is disbelief and understanding. Above all there is heavy undertones of respect and acknowledgement, mostly for Orion, Sam can gleam from the tidbits he hears.
Someone clicks something high and fast, chittering in urgent currents, but Sam can’t guess if it was good or bad. Orion answers with silence, but Sam isn’t a fool not to know that there is a wordless conversation going on via the comms. He keeps close to the window, but no more words are exchanged.
And just when Sam feels that everything has come to a stagnant standstill, Bee’s presence wraps tightly around him, almost like a squeezing hug, and then the door to Sam’s left swings open.
He jolts back, shocked, but Bumblebee unfastens the seatbelt and rocks the seat gently, much like he usually does when Sam makes a fuss of going to school. Urging him to leave the confines of his cabin, though Sam would rather not. There are alien robots out there! Alien robots he doesn’t know!
He glares at the steering wheel, but Bee just croons and warbles something unintelligible, and then the radio is flickering to life and moving at rapid speeds before settling on a woman with a quiet voice, “it’s alright sweetie. Everything will be okay.”
Heart hammering wildly in his chest, Sam scoots to the edge of his seat before hopping out and onto the ground. No sooner does he step away from Bee does the scout transform. Standing as one of the shortest members, Bee straightens out his doorwings, antenna high on his head as he chitters greetings to everyone. Sam, taking the opportunity Bee gave him by taking the attention, stumbles up to the bot and uses his leg as a shield.
His movements do not go unnoticed by anyone.
One of the newer bots jumps into motion, swooping down low into a crouch, excitement evident as they trill and chatter in fast spoken words, trying to get a good look at Sam from behind Bee’s leg. Sam tries not to let his fear show, and he’s so glad he’s got Bee’s firewalls around him, because even though he can’t feel it, he instinctively knows that these new bots are poking at whatever cocoon Bee’s made, curious, wanting to know what’s inside.
“Download the package Ratchet sent you, you morons,” Ironhide rumbles, making Sam jump, as this is the first time since the meeting started that someone spoke English. “The youngling can’t fully understand Cybertronian yet.”
The protoform crouching before him deflates, and then a few moments later its bright blue optics are back on Sam, something akin to a grin gracing its alien features. Sam doesn’t question why he’s so sure of this.
“Why are you hiding it?” The bot asks, head tilting to the side, and even though Sam’s brain is running a mile a minute and his heart rate is probably through the roof, it doesn’t escape his notice that even though they were alien, their mannerisms were so human it was almost uncanny. It also doesn’t escape his notice that the question wasn’t directed at him.
Bumblebee trills something, and then his leg moves a bit, just enough to show Sam off to the new bot. Under everyone’s scrutinising stare Sam feels his face grow hot, and tries to distract himself from going into a panic by glaring at Bee.
“Is every member of the species like this?” One feminine voice asks from beside Ironhide. “It is a wonder how they have survived to progression. They are…”
“Puny?” Another femme offers.
“Squishy?” The one in front of Sam adds.
“Fluid-filled?”
“Defenceless?”
“Fleshy?”
“Hey!” Sam shouts before he can stop himself. “I’m right here!”
“That you are,” the one closest to him states.
“We really need ta’ catch ya’ up on the lingo,” Jazz mumbles to himself.
“You have not answered my question, Bumblebee,” the one crouched down continues, stare an imploring thing that feels borderline invasive, but now that he’s spoken out he might as well stand his ground. He puffs his chest out and refuses to back away, staring right back into brilliant blue. He ignores the tingling across his skin, the pattering of his heart.
Bee warbles and clicks, pointing to Sam before continuing on for a few more beats. The bot hums, but doesn’t do much more to acknowledge whatever Bee had said.
“We have interacted with other species before,” one of the smaller robots states, voice a steely feminine that holds little infliction. “I do not understand the importance of an organic.”
This time, Orion steps up, and all the small chatter around them dies as he speaks, commanding the space as effortlessly as breathing.
“There are many things you may not understand, but we shall remedy this in time. For now, know that Samuel is under our strict protection,” he clicks something in Cybertronian, and Sam feels only slightly put off for not understanding a single word. Still, whatever he says has several of the bots freezing up, and the one closest to him goes back to stand almost jerkily, like a shockwave was going through his systems. The two smallest bots at the back of the group chitter endlessly at whatever Orion had explained.
“In time, Sammy,” Jazz offers him, and Sam only gives him the stink eye. He’s heard that particular line plenty, and he’s getting sick of it.
“The human doesn’t even know?” The one who was closest to them, the one who had jumped back a few seconds ago at whatever declaration Orion provided, exclaims in disbelief. Bee wraps so tightly around Sam that it feels like the air itself becomes thicker, and it’s only after the mech turns his sharp blue eyes to him that Sam realises why; these robots are trying to get into his mind. He can sense a distant prodding, one that has Bee’s irritation spiking by the minute. When the mech had asked why Bee had been hiding him, he hadn’t meant physically. And now, with whatever Orion told the group – and Sam has a feeling that the thing being passed around over his head is the very secret that’s been kept from him for years now – puts them in the know on whatever makes Sam’s skin tingle, what makes his heart beat odd and what makes him able to listen to thoughts like second nature.
They know he’s an other. And by the looks on their mechanical faces, they know more about it than he does.
“Careful, Jolt,” Ratchet warns suddenly, and the mech immediately shrinks in on himself, admonished. “It is a conversation to be had.”
“Soon, hopefully,” one of the female voices, the steely one, adds, hands perched on what Sam assumes is her hips. “I do not even understand why you are still stationed here if you found–” she cuts herself off quickly, but Sam doesn’t miss the sharp look Ratchet directs at her nor the rigid posture of Jazz’s shoulders. When the female speaks again, her tone is measured; “There is little logic behind delaying a return to Cybertron when the objective has been completed.”
Orion nods his helm in acknowledgement to whatever the female was talking about, crooning something in Cybertronian with undertones of strict instruction command mine, and with his deep baritone commanding any and all respect in the air, the female easily abides to whatever Orion explains to her with a deep bow of her head.
Sam suddenly feels very very put off. Lost in the thick depths of Bee’s blanket firewalls, and entirely out of field. His reality was shifting and he couldn’t even put his finger on why.
“I can understand, somewhat” the one Ratchet called Jolt starts back up, tilting his helm again to assess Sam with his vibrant blue eyes. “It makes sounds like a sparkling. Did you give it programming? Are humans able to download information through organic neural networking?”
Sam flushes to the roots of his hair (and he’s been doing that a lot tonight. He should get Ratchet to see if all the blood going to his brain is bad for him) when he realises that a) he has indeed been making small, barely detectable keening noises akin to the ones that never fail to get Bumblebee’s immediate attention. Barely detectable by human standard anyway. Sam has to remind himself that he’s surrounded by advanced alien robots who could probably hear his heartbeat from miles away. And the second point being that b) Jolt just referred to Sam as the same thing Jazz and Ironhide are always comparing him to; a sparkling, whatever that was. The name registers in his mind like tacky nostalgia, but he doesn’t dare pick at the not-memory. He’s afraid of it actually. Like he knows the information he’ll find will upset him.
“It’s been vorns since the last time I witnessed a sparkling,” the softer female spoke, approaching Sam until she stood by Jolt. This close Sam can see the minor differences in their build despite the near-identical protoforms. Jolt was taller, chorded slightly thicker, while the female was sharper and shorter, much like a comparison of skeletons, Sam realises. “His mannerisms are jarring, I must admit.”
“‘E’s more like a bag o’ pipin’ fluid than a sparklin’.” One of the smallest ones pipes up from the back of the group. Sam automatically turns to glare at him, fear and nervousness be damned.
“You’re, like, the smallest Autobot I’ve ever seen,” Sam shoots back, seething. “You’ll probably be a stupid scooter or something.”
There is a pregnant pause in which every mech stands still, and Sam recognises the distant looks on the bots’ face plates as the same look when the bots’ on Earth cruised through the Internet. Seconds later understanding floats through the air, and Jolt snorts while the two smallest bots’ both explode in rebuttal.
“He has humour akin to a mechling,” Jolt grins, bending back down to crouch. He holds out one long arm, and Sam stares at the limb questioningly. Did he want something? Sam looks around, but nothing comes up, so instead he turns to his guardian for advice. Bee’s blanket is tight with barely-concealed apprehension, but he doesn’t do much more than nod. A few moments later his radio hums to life, and replays a clip of a man saying, “–hold on to your hats, this is going to be a wild ride!”
It doesn’t take long for understanding to dawn on him.
Gulping back the stone lodged in his throat, Sam throws Bee one last look – and getting an encouraging nod in return – Sam steps up onto the new mech’s hand. Instantly Jolt is moving to stand, and Sam stumbles slightly, gripping at the long curved digit of the robot to keep himself steady. Bee trills something urgent behind him, to which Jolt hums, and before Sam can register much else he is being held close to the stranger’s face, inspected up and down like a lab rat by two giant blue optics the colour of a blue that didn’t exist on Earth.
This close, Sam’s blood sings with familiarity, and he doesn’t think about that either.
“Ah, these humans are all fluid,” Jolt states, holding Sam out a bit so the female beside him can look at Sam too. He tries his best to stand still under the scrutiny, voice all but turned to stone in his chest.
“Are you sure, Optimus, of the… of the–” she trails off in loose break Cybertronian.
Orion simply nods.
“Bumblebee has taken a liking to you,” Jolt confesses suddenly, drawing Sam back up to his own face. Sam jolts up, not expecting to be directly addressed any time soon, as evident by the way this meeting has been going so far. “Is it because of your status?”
Sam can at least kind of understand what Jolt is referring to. Dreams, colours, words in the air that don’t exist. Sam shrugs, glancing at Bee from the corner of his eye and taking relief in the slight rigid line of his arms, like he was ready to dive in and scoop Sam up the moment something felt off.
“I met him at a car dealership,” Sam states, like that explains anything.
“I refuse to believe Bumblebee managed to locate the Allspark through mere coincidence,” the steely female behind them says, and all at once the air goes still.
If Sam’s blood was singing before it was screaming on fire now.
His heart hammers like a battle drum inside his ribs.
His breath fogs up in his lungs like ice.
His vision stutters and zooms out of focus.
Allspark.
Something clicks a tad bit too right in his mind, and he tries desperately to stop himself from passing out.
Around him, it seems the bots are doing no better.
Suddenly, it is as if speaking will break the fragile-as-splintered-glass hesitancy in the atmosphere and wreak havoc.
Sam doesn’t dare breathe.
It feels like eternity before reality stutters back into motion.
“Armour up, younglings,” Ironhide shouts suddenly, clapping his servos together to create a loud clang so abrupt that Sam jumps in Jolt’s hold, barely rescued from tumbling to his death by Bee snatching him up and warbling some vicious clicks at everyone. The awkward air from the female’s words linger, but everyone is spurred into action as Ironhide’s booming voice. Either that, or everyone is too afraid to try and focus the conversation back to the treacherous territory it had entered. “We’ll deal with yur’ pods once yur’ done.”
“Hurry up slaggers,” Jazz adds on, smirk a wide thing on his face, his shoulders loose and posture lax. It is at odds with the strange gleam in his eyes. The tension in the blanket around his mind that Bee hides him in. The stillness of Ratchet’s form. Jazz glances at Sam from the corner of his eye as he says, almost like a distraction, “our precious little organic requires ten mega-cycles o’ recharge every planetary solar cycle.”
The two small bots in the back erupt into a shouting match.
“Ten fraggin’ mega-cycles, ‘e says!”
“These organics migh’ as well stay in recharge.”
“Save ‘em plen’y ‘o energy.”
It seems Jazz’s distraction works uncannily well. The change of pace leaves Sam’s head spinning.
“Yeh, yeh, like tha’ one time yur helm got so busted you had’s to be in stasis for a whole decacycle,” one of them cackles. “You can match tha’ organic!”
“Oh, shut yur’ trap, piece o’ scrap, it was yur’ fault my fraggin’ processor glitched.”
“You’re both glitched,” the mech that had thus far been standing off to the side finally spoke, tone pitched in irritation. Then he hisses something, and turns to glare at Jazz. “This native tongue is primitive.”
“We gotta’ do what we gotta’ do,” Jazz shrugs.
“Even protect little fleshlings?”
Sam feels his heart sink at the venom in his tone, and he doesn’t dare spend too much time wondering why.
“Stop it, Sideswipe,” Jolt warns softly, starting toward the mech, but Jazz’s icy words cut through the tension like a knife.
“Even protect the little human.”
“You’ve gotten soft,” the mech scoffs, ignoring the clear warning in Jazz's voice and instead crossing his arms over his chest. He opens his mouth, likely to spew something vile, but is briskly interrupted.
“And you’re still a pain in the aft,” Ratchet cuts in sharply, moving forward just enough to shove the seething mech toward the still kind-of-on-fire pods embedded in the ground. “Get your armour plates and stop wasting time acting like a little mechling, Sideswipe.”
The mech, presumably Sideswipe, clicks something that positively drips with contempt.
“This is what happens when you let younglings travel about without a superior officer,” Ironhide grunts, earning several offended looks from the protoforms making their way back to the pods.
“This is what we get for leaving the Ark,” one of the female voices sighs wearily. Sam doesn’t know what the Ark is, doesn’t know the female robot, and has no idea who she is referring to, but he gets the feeling he agrees with her regardless.
As Bee puts him back on the ground, he finds himself suddenly very very tired.
Bee is instructed to take Sam home while the rest of the bots stay and dismantle the pods. Where they’ll store them, Sam has no idea, but he’s got a feeling that it’ll be wherever Orion and Jazz and Ironhide go off to when they’re not home. The drive back is filled with soft acoustic guitar and a sad boyish voice, not that it reflects anything other than the peace of the car’s cabin as they drive, solitary and just the two of them, along Nevada’s long lonely highway to a small lonely town. Sam hums along, an arm stuck out of the window to feel the cold air rush through his fingers. Beneath him Bee’s engine rumbles, as if trying to catch his attention.
“They’re… cool,” Sam finally answers Bee’s mental prodding. He feels Bee’s exasperation, even now when he’s not wrapped up in the scout’s protection. “I don’t know, they didn’t seem to like me very much.” Then Sam frowns softly. “Or humans in general.”
“Don’t worry, he’s just like that sometimes,” an exasperated female giggles through the radio.
“Whatever, I don’t care,” Sam states.
“Now I know, baby you’re a liar, you’re a liar–” is the accusation The Cross throws at him.
“I don’t,” Sam insists, glaring at the dashboard, then deflates at Bee’s silence. “Well, maybe a little. I don’t know, that whole meeting was weird, Bee.”
Since he’s been confined to the passengers seat for the duration of the ride back, Bee’s human form materialises behind the wheel, blue ocean eyes already locked on him in thinly veiled concern while Bee the car whines a long low note.
“It’s fine. I’m not, like… sad or anything,” Sam tries to rectify. Honestly, he wasn’t sure what he felt after that meeting. Those new robots were different, something Sam wasn’t used to. Alien. Unknowing of Earthly customs the way he’s been used to with the bots that have been here for who-knows-how-long before meeting Sam those fateful few years ago. It never left Sam feeling anything but content that he finally had some peace settled in his mind, that his otherness was answered with something familiar.
Maybe what scares him right now is how that otherness was answered with something not so familiar to him, Sam the human, but familiar to him, Sam the one who gets lost sometimes in the depths of his dreams and wakes up dying over and over again until he forgets what it's like to be alive.
The fact that his skin settled to aliens. Aliens that felt alien, and not just like everyone else.
Bee croons, and Sam absent-mindedly pats the seat below him.
“I’m not scared of them,” Sam confesses, staring off into the sky and wondering when he got used to the night not being so dark. “Not them. They feel… they feel like you guys. They feel like I know them. Like you guys.”
“Afterall, there’s nothing to be afraid of–”
“I know,” Sam sighs, sagging into his seat. “I’m just…” He worries his lips, gripping the seatbelt with his hands, the thick leather cutting into the tender flesh of his palms and giving him a slight reprieve from the torrent rushing through his head. “The lady said something.”
The air in Bumblebee’s cabin seems to freeze.
“She said Allspark.”
The clicks and strange notes of the foreign word, though it physically scrapes his throat raw, feels like clicking a puzzle piece right in place in his heart. The femme hadn’t actually said the word in English, or any other human language, but the dialect had been one Sam had studied, and the name nestled into his mind like it belonged there.
Allspark.
It’s the only word Sam can say, and it feels as though it isn’t actually his voice saying it.
Allspark.
Allspark Allspark Allspark.
AllsparkAllsparkAllsparkAllsparkAllsparkAllsparkAllsparkAllspark–
“–to upon these sparks, dear Life-giver, Life-giver of all over one in kind, do we request unto humility and honour, bound in abundance that hence have been provided, grant life, for another of fraction, grant life, beloved to all below dear and eternal Allspark–”
“SAM!”
He jumps, heart threatening to burst in his chest, as Ratchet damn-near screams through the radio.
“Wuh-what?” He wheezes, chest aching with the effort of breathing. Or maybe it was the constricted hold the seat belt had on him, tight around his body so much so that he could feel the sharp press of leather against his ribs. His thoughts are both numb and chaotic, bouncing against each other and creating a cacophony as his mind replays the not-memory. The static, the glow, the other-worldly nature of existence that he existed as, like a lucid dream in which he could simply float in an empty sky. The feel of millions of lives circling, but not just circling around him, but in him. He could feel each one, a hand over his heart multiplied with as many lives as there were stars in the sky.
I wasn’t human, Sam thought to himself, his breath panicky and short, and he distantly realises he’s hyperventilating, and that he’s getting lightheaded, black spots dancing in his vision that had nothing to do with not-memories and alien robots. I wasn’t human. I was something else.
“Samuel, you must breathe,” Ratchet commands, his voice once again breaking through his whirlwind of panic, just enough to shock his heart into a restart.
“I’m–” he gasps, barely able to speak over the pain in his chest. Around him Bee croons long, and Sam only now notices the heat of the seat beneath him, the frigid air blasting through the vents directly as his face, and the fact that they weren’t driving anymore. “I’m trying.”
“In and out, Sam,” Ratchet instructs, voice a gentle thing so unlike him that Sam follows along out of sheer shock. Ratchet counts off his time in beats, and Sam struggles to follow, falling short a few seconds and waiting for the inevitable reprimand that never actually comes. It takes an eternity until Sam feels his vision sharpen into something regular, for the ringing in his ears to cease into a dull throb that permeates around his mind. His breath is a ragged thing that sounds ugly and wet, but that does not deter Ratchet’s patient commands, nor Bumblebee’s silent support.
Eventually, Sam draws in a deep breath and lets his heart calm, eyes closed.
When he opens them again, he realises everything has gone strangely quiet.
“Ratchet?” he croaks out, voice a raspy thing.
“I am informing Optimus of the situation, Samuel,” Ratchet answers almost immediately. “I am to attend to the new arrivals, but Jolt is to regroup with you and Bumblebee.”
Sam’s heart, barely calmed, leaps into his throat.
As if sensing his apprehension (though Sam didn’t know how that would be possible considering they were miles away from the other Autobots) Ratchet continues to explain the change of events.
“Jolt is what you could consider a medical assistant. I have sent him several data files to decode and download during your return to the house, and he should have adequate enough information to assist you upon arrival,” then he adds in a softer tone, “he has trained for several vorns under my tutelage during the later stages of the war. I would not send you any harm, Sam,” he tacks on gently, unknowingly soothing a bit of Sam’s anxiety.
Sam nods, though he knows Ratchet can’t see it, and forces himself to relax. Ratchet would never hurt him. He wouldn’t.
“Okay,” he whispers, voice barely above a whisper. But Bee hears, and so does Ratchet. The medic bids them safe travels and explicit instructions for Bumblebee to report any other disturbances in Sam’s diagnostics. The scout agrees readily, his worry a tangible thing in the air that Sam can almost taste, like copper flooding his mouth when he bites his tongue.
“–and I just love you so much,” a woman cries from the radio suddenly, causing Sam to look up. “You haven’t got a clue. You mean so much to me.”
Sam gives a wet laugh.
“I know Bee,” he murmurs, wiping his face with the palms of his hands. He vaguely wonders what sort of noises he had to have made to get Bee all worked up like this, like when he cries and his mother comes to him in a panic. “I’m sorry.”
“–please don’t–”
“I’m sorry.”
“My sweet sweet summer child–”
“I love you too Bee. Can we… can we go home?”
“I’d do anything for you, don’t you know?”
“I know.”
That night is the first night in months that Sam dreams of nothing at all.
