Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers. I am only borrowing it.
Bold Cybertronian
Italics Radio Transmission
I think the first time I noticed that anything was off was about a week after the battle at Mission City. Bumblebee took Mikaela and I to the lookout where we met Optimus, Ratchet, and Ironhide. Ratchet looked over Bumblebee's legs to make sure the welds and new wiring was knitting into properly and Ironhide went over Bee's weapons to make sure they were fully loaded and functioning okay. The Autobots talked for a bit about Cybertronian stuff that I didn't really pay attention to, and then all of them except Optimus folded back into their car forms. Optimus stayed in robot mode for a while to transmit some sort of beacon message off into deep space, so Mikaela and I sat on Bumblebee's hood and cuddled to pass the time.
Well, you know what happens with teenagers. Cuddling turned into a heavy MO session pretty fast, but it ended pretty fast too, when I just started coughing and tasted blood in my mouth. Ratchet scanned me immediately 'cause he was worried that I had a previously undetected cracked rib that had punctured my lung, but no such luck. He told me that I was showing some pretty severe cellular deterioration all over my body.
That got me thinking. Since the battle I had been nauseous and couldn't eat much. I was sleeping a lot, too. I thought it was nerves or PTSD. Something like that. Ratchet was convinced that I had radiation poisoning, probably from the Cube. He told me to go to the hospital immediately, so Bumblebee carted me off to the emergency room while Ratchet took Mikaela home.
Mom was so scared when I called her from the hospital payphone. Dad swore that he'd sue the pants off whatever was left of Sector 7. The doctor that looked me over had me admitted straight off. The nurses set me up with an IV drip with some glucose and sedatives, and I fell deeply asleep. The next morning, Lennox and Epps arrived to transfer me to a military hospital in Ratchet. Mikaela rode along with me and held my hand. The trip wore me out pretty thoroughly, and I dropped off again as soon as I was in my new room.
The next thing I remember really clearly was getting up to go to the bathroom. My legs would barely support me. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror because I didn't recognize my reflection. It was like the muscles were just melting off my face and all that was left was the skin and bones. My eyes just had no life in them. The worst part was when I ran my hand through my dry, flaky, hair. It just fell out. Not my hand, the hair. I struggled back to the bed and collapsed back to sleep.
For a while, life just blurred together. Wake up, try to eat, puke half of it up, fall asleep, repeat. Add coughing or puking up blood for entertainment every second time I woke up. The only good thing was that every time I woke up, Mikaela was there. Sometimes Mom popped in, but mostly she was too broken up to spend much time with me. They told me later that I was in and out like that for almost two weeks.
Then I started to get better. Nobody could explain why until they took a blood sample and found these little tetrahedron-shaped things with an extendable claw at each corner. Each one was about twice as big as a red blood cell and my blood was swarming with the little things. Mikaela told me that Ratchet said the little things were the Cybertronian equivalent of cells, so we called them cybercells. Nobody could figure out how they got into me, but they were multiplying. The doctors did an X-ray and found out that the cybercells had colonized my bone marrow and were showing up in patches of my muscles, too. I didn't complain much, since the little buggers seemed dead set on fixing up the damage the radiation did to me.
But then Mikaela got sick. I demanded to see her, and the doctors wouldn't let me until I threatened to walk there myself, no matter how many times I had to fall trying. Lennox took me over in a wheelchair. Mikaela looked as crappy as I did that time in the bathroom. She was gaunt and pale. I quietly called her name, and she looked at me and smiled weakly. She said that she wished she had some cybercells to fix her up before she fell back to sleep. All I could do was sit there, hold her hand, and stroke her head. Her hair fell out in my hand.
About a day later, the doctors pronounced that I was on the mend and they couldn't do any better than the cybercells already were, so they let me out. Then they wouldn't let me visit Mikaela. The theory they had was that I had been radioactive enough to poison Mikaela and that visiting her would only make it worse. I had a good shouting match with the doctors, but they posted a guard at her door. All I could do was look in the window of her room.
One day, on the way out of the hospital, I picked up a can of cola. I swear, it was the best tasting cola I had ever had, so when I got home, I poured myself a glass of the same brand out of the bottle. I figured the cybercells had actually found a way to make cola good, but the cola from the bottle still tasted normal. That gave me a weird, stupid, idea and I licked the can to test it. Yup, it was the can that tasted good, so I shrugged and ate it. For the first few bites, the metal tore up my mouth and made me bleed, but after that, the pain and bleeding just stopped. Don't ask me how. And don't ask me how I could suddenly chew aluminum either, because I don't know how the cybercells did it.
After that, I started swallowing any loose change I got like pills to keep the cravings for metal down. I mentioned it to Ratchet and he said that the cybercells had completely taken over my bone marrow and most of my muscles and were starting on my internal organs. I was scared out of my mind. My body was being taken over by tiny alien robots! I ran home from the lookout where Ratchet and I had been talking. Bumblebee followed me back home and said that I had run faster and longer than a human ought to be able to. I told him that was because I wasn't human anymore and he and his entire species could go to hell. At the time, I meant it, too.
I locked myself in my room and stayed there until the next evening. (It was about 10am when I locked myself in, by the way.) I did a lot of thinking while I was alone. I thought about how I never would have gotten to be with Mikaela without Bumblebee. I thought about how I had poisoned her, and how they had poisoned me. I thought about just ending it all, but I had to laugh when I realized that the stupid cybercells wouldn't let me die. I thought about how my hair still hadn't grown back.
Eventually, my thoughts came back to the family motto. No sacrifice, no victory. I came to the conclusion that a bigger victory needed a bigger sacrifice. It just sucked being the one making the sacrifice. I still didn't want to talk to anyone, though.
The thing that got me out of my room was Mom shouting that I had a phone call from Mikaela. I think I jumped down the whole flight of stairs in one leap. Mikaela said she had been released from hospital. Turns out she had developed some cybercells of her own. I asked her if the Autobots told her what was happening to me. I told her that the cybercells were taking over my body, and it would probably happen to her, too. She was silent for a while after that, but eventually said that meant we were stuck with each other. The point did make me smile. My first smile in days.
Things got back to sort of normal for a couple of weeks. I apologized to Bumblebee. I tried to shrug off my absence to Miles, but he accused me of being brainwashed by aliens. If only he knew. Mikaela wore a wig to school, since her hair hadn't grown back either. I wore a baseball cap in the classed where the teachers would let me get away with it. Apparently, hair was not a high on the cybercells' list of priorities.
Then I didn't wake up for five days. I was totally comatose, but my body was working fine. Mom freaked out, of course, and I woke up in the military hospital when it was over. Another X-ray and a scan from Ratchet agreed that while I was asleep, the cybercells had converted my brain and nerves. Yay (please note the sarcastic lack of enthusiasm there).
About two weeks after that came the last surprise. I woke up feeling like I was wearing a layer of rubber over my whole body, so I started to scratch at my face to get the mask off. Big mistake. The skin came off my fingers and face, first in flakes, then in chunks. The shock was so bad that I began to sob. Mom heard me and I warned her not to come in, but she did anyway. Big mistake. She ran screaming to her room and barricaded the door. I didn't blame her. I pulled on a balaclava and some gloves (which looked pretty stupid in the summer) and had Bumblebee drive me out to the Autobot base.
When we got there, Ratchet scanned me and confirmed my gut feeling. My entire body had been converted to cybercells. He helped me strip off my dead, useless, skin. Underneath my former scalp was a layer of triangular plates that pointed backwards toward my neck and lifted slightly off my robotic skull. So it turned out that the cybercells did care about my hair. Hah hah.
Then Ratchet and Bumblebee taught me the basics of being a Cybertronian. Things like how to activate my internal heads-up display and status readouts, what to eat (like what energon was), and how to go into recharge. I never thought that I would have to learn how to sleep.
Then I phoned Mikaela. She said I sounded different and I told her that was because I was calling on my internal comm. system. She was really quiet after that because she knew that meant I had turned completely into a Cybertronian. She knew that was going to be her soon, too. She went into her nerve-conversion coma that night.
After my change, I stayed at the base. There was no point in going home because I looked like a gunmetal grey mannequin, and I didn't want to freak out Mom or get shot at by Dad. I helped out where I could and took some military training from Lennox and Epps, who had some trouble getting used to my new look. To be honest, I had some trouble getting used to it, too. There were several times that I jumped when I looked in a mirror.
Mikaela didn't come to visit the base, but about two weeks after she got out of her coma, she called Ratchet, freaking out that her skin was falling off. I pulled on some pants, a jacked, gloves, shoes, and that stupid balaclava and sped off in Bumblebee to pick her up. I found her in the shed behind her house, huddled in a ball and trying to hide the spots where she had scratched off the dead skin. I carried her back to Bumblebee and we took her back to the base. Ratchet ordered me out of the med bay and wouldn't let me back in until Mikaela was 'adjusted' to her new appearance.
It took days. But when she was finally ready to let me see her, it was worth the wait. Somehow, despite being the same dull, unadorned, metal colour that I was, she was gorgeous. Her hair had been replaced by black wires that moved on command. She was really shy and fragile about it, but I told her really quietly that I thought she was more beautiful than ever. She said thank you. I kissed her lightly on the cheek and she smiled weakly back. Then I just sat, holding her, for a long time.