Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 69th cycle. Now cycle 70!

GLEEKATHON FOURTH ANNIVERSARY CYCLE - It's October again, which means another year of Gleekathon is about to wrap up! At the end of the month it will have been four years since I've started doing my daily stories! As always, I will be celebrating this with a special cycle of stories to touch on my favorite stories I've done throughout the year. There will be two installments each on Thursdays, Saturdays, Mondays, and Wednesdays. The remaining days will feature, as they have in the last several months, new chapters of the latest story in my Doctor Who/Glee crossover series. As far as the anniversary stories go, it will be as I've done before, taking those past stories and either doing a prequel, sequel, POV swap, genre swap, alternate ending, or additional scenes.

This story is a GENRE SWAP on "A Stop on the Road" a Berry-St series story originally posted on October 5 2013.

(This is a shift day, which means there will be two stories posted today!)

"Born of Steel"
In Gen2!World: Gen2!Mike, Puck, Matt
GENRE SWAP: Sci-fi
Berry-St series extra
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)

If there was anything there to tell them what had been kept from them their whole lives, they had never seen it, not until that night on the road.

It was a day like any other, or it nearly was. They had a party to go to, the kind you needed to be at, if you considered yourself one of the popular kids and expected to remain one. All day, that was all the school seemed to have on its mind, whether they were going to this party or were only wishing they could. The one thing that was for sure was that Puck, Mike, and Matt would be going to this party. They were all driving there together, and Puck was driving.

The ride was all laughter and loud talking, whether it had to do with school, or the football team, or girls… Maybe for that, they hadn't seen the car coming their way until it was too late. Mike had seen it, and he'd warned Puck, who would turn as swiftly as he could. He'd miss the impact, but then in that same motion caused for the car to hit and flip before it crashed… that was what it felt like, before things went black.

When he awoke the first time, it didn't feel like waking, and this should have been his first clue that there was more to this situation than he believed. He had woken with a start before, many times, but this time felt different… Maybe it had been different all along and he hadn't felt it. But he'd not so much woken as he'd felt compelled to open his eyes and then he was conscious.

It should have been chaos around him, with how he felt, but it was almost the opposite to that. It was so quiet, and for that the rest of the sounds left to the world around him became stronger. The sounds were crisp, but then he'd always had remarkable hearing. Right now, he was hearing something like… sparks. He was barely emoting, stunned probably, so he didn't panic. He could see the car: it was on top of him, keeping him pinned to the ground. The sparks didn't come from it, they came from up the road. He only had to turn his head a little before he saw something more horrifying than anything he'd ever seen.

He saw Matt.

At least it was supposed to be Matt, and it looked like him, for what had stayed intact on his face. The part of his head which touched the road had scraped away to reveal neither bone nor blood: it revealed metal. Actually there was a lot of it, in other places, from his arms, down to the part of his chest where it looked like he'd split open… and there were the sparks.

The image stormed through Mike's head, and he wanted to scream, only there was something in him like a stopper to his ability to translate his inner emotions on to his face. He was shaking, or twitching, and he could feel a coolness on himself like his clothes had ripped, and with the one arm he could currently move, he reached down to touch, afraid he would find heavy amounts of bloods, or something much, much worse. As worse as he had envisioned it though, this surpassed all expectations: his skin had torn on his side, and underneath, his fingers registered what was without a doubt metal.

"Mike," he heard a voice and his head twitched upward.

"Puck?" he called, and the pair of feet came stumbling his way, holding on to the car for support. He was the only one of them who was able to get out on his own, but it didn't mean he had been released without injury. To Mike's horror, he saw the telltale gleam of metal peeking through the third boy's injuries. There was a nasty gash on his head, parting the flesh from the left side of his Mohawk. "What's happening?" he asked, still calmer on the outside than he was on the inside. "What… What are we?"

"I don't know," Puck looked more freaked out than he did, but at the same time he was keeping it together, which helped Mike.

"Matt… He's dead, he's… broken," Mike told him.

"I know, I saw him. We need to go. If people find us, who knows what they'll do to us."

"I can't, I'm stuck," he revealed. Puck started to crouch before stumbling down to his knees, and he looked inside the car.

"I can get you out. But you're not going to like it."

"Just get me out of here, please," Mike didn't care, so long as he wasn't under this car anymore. Puck had a hard time getting back on his feet at first, but he managed it, like a child who'd just learned to walk. He got hold of Mike's arms, and immediately the trapped boy knew what he intended to do: he was going to pull. Mike looked down and now he saw his leg. It was the only part of him that was trapped, the one thing that kept him trapped, and already it was looking near severed, giving off sparks. Puck was going to pull, and he would keep on pulling, until the leg was completely severed. "No, no, wait!"

He didn't even feel it, not like pain, not the way it should have felt. Had he ever felt pain? He knew he had, but all of this… It was impossible. When the leg detached, he didn't feel pain, only he knew the fact that his leg was gone was wrong, very wrong. Otherwise, he felt completely and much too normal.

"Are you okay?" Puck asked, staring back at him the same way Mike was staring at him. What did his face look like now, he wondered. Was there metal there, too?

"I don't understand…" he stared at Puck's mangled face. "What are we?"

"I don't know, but we can't stay here, we have to run," Puck looked around.

"Run? How can I?" Mike looked down at his leg, the ripped pants, bloodless, the transected metal limb… None of it was right at all.

"I'll help you. It's better than staying here for the cops to find us."

"What about him?" Mike turned to Matt, still on the road.

"It's too late for him, we have to…"

There was no in between, no slow or rapid fade. One second they were conscious, the next they weren't. They fell to the ground in a heap. They hadn't noticed the van pulling up, and now that they were down, a tall woman emerged, walking up to the boys with a pair of men in suits following her.

"Get these two back to the lab, patch them up, wipe their memories," the woman ordered,

"What about the third one?" one of the men asked.

"Too damaged for repair, an unfortunate loss. Doctor Figgins won't like this. Get a move a on."

When Mike Chang would come to, in the hospital, he would be reminded of the accident. He would be told about the death of his friend Matt and reunited with Puck, who'd gotten off with the least damage out of the three. And he would find out his leg had to be amputated. His life would never be the same again, and not for the reasons he knew.

THE END

A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.
In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are
always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!