Chapter Two: Delusion
"Mom, will you please just put the baby-slippers away?" Samantha cried out to her lightly sobbing mother as she finished packing up her 'snack' bag.
The morning had consisted of seemingly endless trips down memory lane, many of them forced onto her by her mother, and bone-crushing hugs where both of her parents had exclaimed how proud of her they were. Having a daughter attending Princeton, a major bragging-right in their circle of friends, was almost as amazing to them as getting their second honeymoon paid entirely by their daughter.
Working for the government and saving Mission City so long ago had certainly ratcheted up her savings account enough to afford her a few luxuries.
"Don't pack all chocolate, Samantha," her father scolded as he passed through the kitchen to the backyard to load his suitcase into their van. "You need healthier things, too. You're still a growing girl after all."
"I know, Daddy," she chuckled at Ronald Witwicky's back.
"When is Bumblebee supposed to get here?" Her mother, Judy, asked in a rare moment of calm. Glancing up from the small stockpile of goodies in the bag before her she could see the elder woman wiping the excess tears from her rosy cheeks.
"About half an hour…" she responded softly, testing the bond she shared with her youngest Guardian to find that yes, he was fairly close to her home now. "Ironhide and Knockout are coming with him. 'Hide's gonna be my pack-mule." Both women chuckled at the idea of the Autobot's Weapon's Specialist even being referred as such a lowly thing. Rounds would be revolving in and out of his blasters like clockwork if he caught so much as a hint of their teasing.
Big baby, she thought with affection.
"How much left do you have to pack, honey?" Her mom asked kindly as she sorrowfully put away the long-since-abandoned ballet slippers of her youth.
"Just the computer, Mom. Everything else is all set." She pulled the drawstring to the duffel holding her goodies tightly shut before swinging the bag out the open doorway. Two boxes loaded with her main 'techie' things were wrapped securely in ratty old sheets out front. They were quite deceptive. No one would think that the dirty, holey old things hid over twenty-seven thousand dollars' worth of high-tech machinery afforded to her by the government. Alien-upgrades not included. Beside those boxes, too, were three duffel bags worth of clothing and two plastic tubs filled with sheets and brick-a-brack for her room.
"You promise to call, right?" Sam stood tall and rolled her eyes heavenward. Her mother sometimes drove her to the very brink of madness with her motherly instincts. She got coddled to death by her Autobot protectors. Adding her mother into the equation only served to make her the single most untouchable female in the Universe.
"We've been through this, Momma." Sam whirled towards her mother, her white skirt billowing out around her knees from the momentum. She reached her arms out to bring her mother into a tight embrace. The elder woman latched onto her immediately. "I'll call every Friday night, excluding this week since you'll be on your second Honeymoon in Paris, and I'll be home every holiday. No questions asked." She pulled back enough to kiss her mother's smooth forehead. "I love you, Momma. You've done so much for me and I'll never be able to thank you enough. But it's time to let me go. Can you let me go, Momma?"
Judy looked her daughter in the eye, something burning brightly in her blue eyes for only a moment before they were both embracing each other again. The elder woman braced her hands to either side of her child's face and placed an equally loving kiss to the younger's forehead.
"I love you, too, Samantha." Sam tilted her face into the hand that stroked along her right cheek. "As your mother I'll never fully let you go…you'll always be my baby girl…but you're right. It's time for you to stand completely on your own."
They stared at each other for longer than a moment, seemingly memorizing each other's faces. Sam knew it wasn't that, however, that kept her eyes riveted to her mother. It was a deep-seated ache in her chest that urged her to enjoy what time she had left with the woman that had birthed and raised her. She needed to savor each and every moment she could with both of her parents before their end came – hopefully some many years off. As a normal human, unpredictable and tragic circumstances barred, she would outlive her progenitors for at least twenty years. As she was now…well, she would have a far longer wait to be reunited with her parents in the afterlife, if there was one.
"Awe…it's a Kodak moment!" A semi-deep voice called from fairly close by. Sam groaned, knowing the one altered voice instantly and recognizing and accepting the fact that another equally familiar voice similar to the first was not far off.
Judith Witwicky sighed in deep frustration.
"You two boys are incorrigible!" She complained half-heartedly, her manicured hands lifting from her daughter's lightly tanned face seamlessly. It was no wonder to anyone who knew the middle-aged woman that she was the mother of Samantha Witwicky. The younger female's grace obviously was not inherited from her father. "What are you two doing here, anyway? I don't recall hearing about having to host you both from Optimus or my daughter…"
"Uh," Mudflap ducked behind his brother, Skids, and rubbed the back of his head with his hand. "It was a surprise?" It was more a question than an answer which caused Judy to roll her eyes theatrically.
"Come on in you two. Samantha's nearly done with her packing, but I could certainly use help with mine." She reached through the doorway to snag both 'bots' shirts by the sleeve and drag them through the open doorway. They, in turn, shot her pleading looks as if she was permitting them to be walked to their deaths.
"Go on and help her you blat-babies. I only have my computer left and everything else has to wait to be loaded for when Ironhide gets here." She firmly ignored the pout they directed her way as they were dragged mercilessly towards her parent's bedroom. Inwardly she was shoving her humor at them like a battering-ram through the bond.
"You're Mom's kinda scary when she gets on the warpath," Michael whispered in her ear, startling her. Sam eeped loudly, spinning on her toes to glare at the jock. She smacked his arm semi-playfully earning her a fit of chuckling. "I'll never understand you! You chill with the big boys on a nearly daily basis and chew out the political giants of our age like they were only toddlers and yet you still jump like a scared cat when someone sneaks up on you."
"Yeah, well, that wouldn't happen if Ratchet would just listen to me and put that tracker in you so that I could feel you coming." It was a lie of course and Mike knew that. Still, it was a tempting idea.
"You're just too used to being able to know whenever the 'bots make a move that you seem to forget that your human counterparts can't give out those same signals." Mike threw his arm over her shoulder and shook lightly. Sam cringed away from him jokingly. "Guess you'll just have to suck it up and relearn how to be a normal girl again, Sammy."
"Don't call me Sammy," she snapped, a little peeved now. She hated it whenever someone, knowingly or not, rubbed the fact into her face that she wasn't normal. That she could never be normal.
"Oh come on," he whined as she jerked out of his one-armed embrace. He lifted his hand to his face and scrubbed vigorously. "I didn't mean it, Sam."
Stopping abruptly, Sam released a gusty sigh. She knew that. She knew he wasn't trying to upset her. He wasn't even fully in the loop to the fact that she wouldn't age like him…that she wasn't even a full-human anymore. He wouldn't be able to understand her despair over her future, at least part of it, without explaining it to him. Even then it was a long-shot that he'd truly sympathize with her.
"I know Mike. I'm sorry." Shaking off her sudden bout with self-pity as well as the comfort and support being funneled to her through the bonds she moved back towards her room. "I'm just sensitive I guess."
"Hey," he hushed, snatching at her upper arm to keep her from walking away. She turned back to the jock and stared up into his blue eyes. Apology glittered in them. "I know I can't really understand what's going on, but I do know a bit of it. I'm sorry, Sam, I really am. We've all been through a shit-storm since they came looking for the glasses; you more so than any of us. Just know that if you ever need to talk about something I'll be listening. I'll try my best not to put my foot in my mouth, either."
She snorted with half-hearted mirth. "You? Not put your foot in your mouth? And I'm the Easter Bunny!"
Mike summoned a smile for her, half-forced. Not wanting to continue the conversation and lead it into more dangerous waters, Sam gestured to the stairs. "You wanna grab my Dad's suitcase from the study? I just need to grab a couple things outa my room."
"Yeah, sure."
The mounted the stairs in silence. At the top, Mike parted to the left while she went right.
"You got the Webcam shit, right?" The dark-haired male called from the other room as Sam did a final sweep through her closet. The sound was muffled through the walls, but she could hear him well enough.
"Of course. Best friends with giant alien robots, remember?" She chuckled distractedly, her hand ghosting over the beat up old hoodie she'd worn not so long ago during Mission City.
She should have burned it. Destroyed it. It made no sense as to why she would keep the damned thing. It was burned and ripped in multiple places. About the only thing it held was sentimental value and even that was a pitiful reason. The fabric was coarse now, the excursion it'd been forced through permanently roughening the cotton. It was almost a comfort to feel it, to remember that time on the building before falling.
With a shuddering sigh, Sam moved to put the hoodie back on its hanger in the closet. When her parents remodeled her room, something her father attempted to convince her he had no intention of doing, they would find it and do whatever they wished with it. Box it away or throw it away, it didn't really matter any longer. The past was the past. Good memories or bad she was moving on into her future.
The soft click of something metal connecting with her floor drew her attention away from the hoodie she'd returned to its rightful spot.
"What?" She wondered aloud as she looked down.
Sam felt her heartbeat quicken and her stomach drop down to her toes at what she saw lying at her feet. There, plain for anyone to see, was a sliver of metal no bigger than her pinky finger.
N-no, she stuttered inwardly. I-it was gone. In that 'dream' back when I warped…I knew it was gone! It can't be here!
She felt the 'bots responding to her distress. Their concern touched her through the bond and she made herself relax if only minutely. She pushed reassurances back to them in the same manner before closing the bonds down as much as possible without cutting them off completely.
Samantha kneeled slowly, cautiously, staring with horror at the shard. Bits and pieces of Cybertronian runes winked back at her over the battered edges of the metal. Shaking with nerves, tremors and twitches she so despised, she reached out her hand slowly. With only the tips of her pointer finger and thumb she plucked the shard from her floor.
"You're not supposed to be here," she spoke to the hellish thing.
Staring at the item in abject horror, Samantha yowled as heat flared through her fingers and into the cursed sliver of metal. The half-formed runes glowed an electric blue as the energy conducted through her via the Allspark funneled and collected in its once emptied shell. The pain became so intense that she had to drop the shard or else risk sustaining substantial burns to her fingers.
"Shit," she hissed out and clutched her hand to her chest.
The smell of burning wood tickled her nose as the shard struck the floor, bounced once, and then began burning its way through to the room below. Without thinking she shot her hand back outwards to stop its descent. As soon as her hand touched the thing she screamed once in agony.
"Sam!" Came several frightful shouts, two more prominent than any of the others.
"It's burning through the floor!" She cried back before racing for the door of her bedroom to hightail it downstairs.
"What the fuck?!" Mike shouted as she plowed by him, catapulting him into the wall nearby. She felt a momentary pang of guilt for the pain she knew he had to be feeling – she'd heard his back crack against the plaster – and would apologize profusely later. At that moment, though, there were more important matters at hand.
Running as fast as her legs could carry her, Sam dashed downstairs and into the kitchen below. Eyes wide, she gaped as the shard came tumbling down through the open air from the freshly-burnt hole in the floor and ceiling.
"No!" She shouted as if that alone had the power to reverse gravity and stop the shard from hitting anything in the room. Hands outstretched, heedless of another burn and uncaring of the fact that she had no chance of snatching the offending object out of open air, Samantha gritted her teeth as the shard struck the granite countertops of the center island.
A pulse-burst shuddered outward from the impact. The resulting shock of power made every light-socket in the room spark and burst, the electric wires above which had been burned through by the shard catching flame.
Skids and Mudflap crashed into her back just as the kitchen began to come to life.
It's alike a twisted sci-fi version of 'Night at the Museum'!
Had they lived anywhere less civilized or been back in a time when the greatest advancement for the home was only indoor plumbing the kitchen may have stayed entirely the same. There may never have been any affect whatsoever. As it was, the appliances, big and small, had been zapped into chaotic life by the surge of Allspark energy.
"Down!" She cried as the espresso machine, a device she'd never cared for to begin with, began to fire off cups worth of scalding coffee towards anything it saw move, including its other awakened machines. The toaster, standing on legs which had sprouted from the underside of its frame, whipped fiery-red coils from the single slot in its chest towards Mudflap as the mech's holoform attempted to retreat from the charging garbage disposal which boasted a terrifying maw of jagged 'teeth'.
"Shit!" Skids hollered as the only remaining land-line phone in the house dove onto his head and attempted to strangle him with its power-cord. Growling in a feral manner, the green mech catapulted the phone into the attacking disposal's mouth. Sam shook with poorly suppressed disgust and sickness as the dying phone screeched in pain from being bodily dismantled by its kitchen-mate. Like the phone so long ago in the Hoover Dam this one had no real sentience, but it didn't deserve a death such as this. Unfazed, the disposal crawled forward toward the red twin in an attempt to destroy him as well.
Deciding that now would be a good time to get the heck out of dodge, the blonde propelled herself forward, neatly avoiding the crap-shots of nuts and bolts fired at her by the converted Dyson vacuum. With shaking hands she snatched up the now innocent-looking archaic sliver from where it had toppled onto the floor after starting this mess and ran full-tilt from Hell's Kitchen.
The blender, having seen her escape, screeched and spat, leftover fruit-smoothie ejecting itself from the inverted glass top in its aggression. The blender's processors, not functioning on any level that could be discerned as sane, leapt from the counter it had served most of its previous existence on to chase after its human prey. The microwave, satisfied now that it'd sufficiently destroyed the stereo remote preceding its fiery death in its cooker, pulled up behind its fellow machine to hunt down Samantha Witwicky. The others of the ghastly army of kitchen appliances that weren't preoccupied with destroying the two Autobot twins followed as well, their optics flashing sinisterly.
Clueless to their daughter's plight, Ron and Judy Witwicky fought playfully out front. They'd, of course, seen the twins run off in a hurry towards wherever their daughter was in the house. They were well aware of the fact that the Autobots tended to worry needlessly over their prodigy, though. If the girl so much as got a paper cut the mechs would become proverbial mother-hens.
"What else do we need, Dearest? Or are you going to be too busy crying over your precious bundle of joy finally hiking up her skirts and leaving you with her first pair of baby-booties to worry about the necessities of our Honeymoon?"
"It's our second Honeymoon, you old grouch." Judy tossed her carry-on haphazardly into the back seat. When the twins came back out they'd need to finish dragging the elliptical bike she'd bought for herself into the house where it'd be safe until they returned home. Her husband may have thought they were converting Sam's bedroom into a Rec Room, but she'd have her way in the end. She'd been waiting for years to finally have an exercise room for herself. Now was finally her chance.
"You didn't answer, Punkin'," Ron chided with her most hated pet-name.
"Don't call me Punkin'!" Judy snapped, making the man laugh heartily. She watched him turn his back to her to make his way into the back yard where he had left the last of their suitcases. Her cheeks flamed red to see him literally wave her off like a pest. "Ronald!"
Meanwhile, Sam hissed in pain as an errant shot from the vacuum struck the backs of her legs. There would be bruises, she knew. She tore up the steps, her hands clawing at the floorboard in an effort to get more leverage and go faster.
"What the Hell?!" Michael shouted as she managed to cut up over the top of the stairs and straight into his legs. Even as she crawled over his fallen body she snatched up the front of his shirt to drag him along with her. She wasn't leaving him to the mercy of the brigade of killer kitchen appliances.
Tumbling into her room, Mike slammed the door behind them as soon as they'd cleared the portal. The toaster, its optics flashing red, was the last face she saw before the door was closed on them and the unmistakable sound of metal colliding with wood reached her ears.
Sam winced to hear the 'bots shouting at her through the 'bluetooth' she habitually put in her ear every morning after her shower. She couldn't concentrate on their words enough to respond appropriately. She was too over-concerned with upending her desk to create an impromptu shield since the appliances from Hell were firing off compact-size pot-shots. They weren't nearly as massive or intimidating as a plasma blast from a larger Cybertronian, but they were strong enough to make splintering holes in her door.
"Jump off the balcony! Come on!" She heard Skids' voice shouting from outside. Most likely the twins had disengaged their holoforms as soon as she'd escaped the kitchen, the necessity of their carefully constructed disguises falling away with their distraction tactics. Their holoforms could only protect her so much…miniaturized or not, gunfire would break through anything other than their true forms.
"Go!" She shouted to her friend, her head jerking towards the open balcony doors. As it had been when she'd first met the Autobots, the doors were left wide open. She doubted her father would ever break her of the habit of doing so. It came in handy too often to have an instant exit.
Regarding her worriedly for only an instant, Mike nodded once. His eyes hardened over in that last instant before he bolted for the doorway. That look told her that he expected her outside and safe with him on the ground sooner rather than later.
He's such a good guy, was the stray thought that passed through her head.
Grunting as her desk, solid mahogany wood in its entirety, jerked against her back from a concentrated concussion blast that managed to blow her door off its hinges, Samantha looked around wildly for her computer bag. She spotted it lying innocently on her bed.
Fuck, she thought inwardly, already preparing herself for the mad-dash to come.
The second barrage of screw-sized cannon blasts that impacted into the now-top-side of her desk rocketed her forward with their force. She hadn't expected such little things to have such powerful weapons. But then again the Allspark had been known to have created obscenely powerful and illogical things before.
Gritting her teeth, Sam reached in front of her and grabbed the accent table she kept beside her door. It was a tiny thing, not even a foot tall, and held atop of it a skillfully cultivated bonsai tree. It was one she had had for years, one her mother got her when she was only ten years old. That tree, meticulously taken care of over the past eight years, dropped like a lead weight from the tabletop, the ceramic dish it came in upending and spilling tree, soil, and all onto her floor. The sound of a single of its branches snapping from the impact was lost in the raucous cannon fire of the manic appliances behind her.
Heaving muscle into it, she tossed the light table above her in the air while simultaneously catapulting herself in the direction of her bed for her bag. The table, as she had hoped it would be, served as an excellent decoy. The screeching appliances, unable to form a cognitive thought – let alone strategize and plot an enemy's maneuvers – began to open fire on the bit of aerial plywood.
The table erupted like fireworks on the fourth of July with the combined destructive power of the household machinery.
Computer bag firmly in hand, Sam spared one final look at the attacking, low-powered hoard before plunging herself headlong for the balcony. She didn't stop to think, even when the advancing mixer morphed its blades into turrets for the mini-est of mini-guns and fired upon her, and vaulted over the railing.
She had the barest of moments to think that she should have thought-out her landing beforehand before she was snatched mid-air. Her breath caught in her throat as Mudflap, his highly-rounded optics focused intently on the charging army of munchkin-mayhem, tucked her firmly into his chassis. His peds struck the ground with a fair amount of force…enough to destroy some of her mother's fastidiously pruned shrubs.
Mom's gonna dismantle Mudflap, was the wayward thought that passed through her mind. She'd nearly done the same to the others that first night when her prized flowers had been annihilated.
Mudflap turned his body just as he landed so that he could better shield her from the refrigerator's icy barrage. Somewhere between when the other machines had become animated she'd retreated upstairs the fridge and dishwasher had decided to try out their own legs. And cannons. They were being detained, if only barely, by a harried Skids at the downstairs patio by the newly present hole of a doorway.
Mike and her father had taken up defensive positions behind the water fountain in the center of the back yard. She didn't know where her father had come from, but she winced to see the horror so clearly written across his face. His yard was receiving a rather abrupt makeover right in front of his eyes and there was quite literally nothing he could do to save it or himself.
"Bumblebee!" She screamed loudly upon sensing him very near. The cry was barely loud enough to be heard over the general destruction of her childhood home, but any mech within a mile radius of her would have been able to hear it. Moreover the Autobots would have felt it.
Her guardian and best of friends, the yellow-and-black Autobot scout, blasted full-speed through the back fence. Planks of wood were both uprooted from the earth and shattered into pieces by the force of his entry. His transformation from his terrestrial disguise, a new Chevrolet Camaro with black racing stripes, to his bipedal form was already half complete when he hit the fence. By the time his peds had hit the yard he was fully himself, a sixteen-foot tall Cybertronian with blasters fully drawn.
The amassing appliances flocked out onto the balcony, some firing distractedly at debris scattering from shots taken by its fellow machines, others taking aim at her Autobot friends. Bumblebee returned fire, his shots far more accurate and deadly than theirs. One by one she watched and heard the appliances being demolished. The smaller they were, the more she was inclined to call their destruction 'death by vaporizing'. Overkill was a concept she was venturing to explain to her scout friend before the day was over with.
The blender, gutsy little maniac that it was, dared to fire back at Bumblebee. Vocalizing a growl, her guardian reciprocated. The sheer magnitude of the blast from his several ejected missiles was enough to not only deactivate the blender, but to completely rip apart her balcony and the room in which she grew up. Skids, following in the yellow mech's footsteps, body-checked the fridge back into the kitchen. There were several semi-small explosions from in her home before a bright, blindingly white light erupted across almost every downstairs window. Glass shattered outward. Planted fell off of several of the window sills.
When Skids emerged moments later, he was mimicking brushing dust off of his shoulders. His walk was all swagger.
Skids is gonna die, too, she told herself sagely. Mom'll kill them all for this.
"What in God's name is…" The three humans turned wide eyes onto the Witwicky matriarch, who had just made her way into the back yard. Ron advanced slowly towards her mother as though approaching a timid animal. Actually, Sam likened it to approaching a bank robber who had a loaded weapon pointed directly at you. Her mother, for all of her grace, poise, and charm, was as vicious as her daughter under certain circumstances. Judy Witwicky was in Sam's humble opinion, the scariest woman in Nevada when provoked.
Blue eyes spitting fire, Judy turned her attention from her destroyed house to the three aliens standing on her lawn. Under that scrutinizing stare Samantha felt the three stiffen internally. They retreated physically, Mudflap setting her onto her own feet so that he could better escape.
Perhaps I don't have to explain overkill to them after all.
"You have to the count of five to leave my sight before I melt you all down myself and use your metal for making sewer drainage pipes. One…"
As one the three folded down into their terrestrial forms and sped out the same way Bumblebee had come in. They rightfully ignored her father's indignant shout as tire-tracks were dug into the already decimated turf.
Hours behind schedule now, firefighters and police having come to survey the damage done to their home, Sam leaned heavily into the closed garage door. Her eyes stayed fixed on her guardian, who was presently pouting at having been summarily evicted from Judy's sight for the rest of eternity – or at least until her anger had cooled.
She had snuck back into the house, horrified to see that Skids had set off a series of low-level explosions that left the entire downstairs coated in ash and nothing looking as it should, and snatched the Allspark shard off of the island counter. She had slipped it into Mike's keeping, safely tucked into a newly emptied cylinder with Pringles emblazoned on the side, and told him to take it back to his father's shop where he worked part-time. There was a safe there that they could hide it in until someone from NEST could come to collect it. It would then go into safe-keeping with the only other shard in existence on Diego Garcia.
"You really did it this time, didn't you, 'Bee?" She received no vocal response, but she felt him sulk. She shook her head softly. "Have you been hanging 'round 'Hide lately? Seems to me his 'ready, fire, aim' tactics are getting to you."
Not getting a response, Sam sighed. Unknowing or not, he wasn't playing into her diversionary games. That meant that she was going to have to jump to the conversation she had been dreading having for months.
"About college, 'Bee."
That got a reaction out of the automaton. Bumblebee began to rock back and forth on his wheels as "I'm so excited" came blasting out of his speakers. She opened her mouth several times to quiet him, to ease him into docility so that she could continue speaking calmly, but he kept playing the music. Louder and louder it grew until she feared the sound would call back the authorities, this time with them looking into a noise ordinance complaint.
Snapping her eyes shut, Sam just let the words fall out of her mouth. She didn't want to see his reaction…it was bad enough that she would feel it.
"You're not coming with me, 'Bee!"
The music came to an abrupt and unnatural end. The lack of sound was loud in her ears. Hurt echoed through the bond for barely a moment before she was overwhelmed with vehement denial. Determination that she was wrong was sung in her head and heart so surely she thought she must be so.
She knew better than to be fooled by the shared emotions of her friends.
She knew better than to believe that this conversation wasn't being monitored now by all of the rest of the Autobots, wherever their current missions found them.
"Don't be like that, Bumblebee." She reached forward to set her hand onto his hood, but he reversed as far as he could out of her reach without breaking through the wall. She let out a gust of air through her nose. "It's the rules. Freshmen aren't allowed to have cars on campus and I can't very well pay to have you stay in a parking complex for who knows how long."
"Well why not?" A stuffy, feminine, British accent barked at her from his speakers.
"Because, 'Bee, if you're needed by the Autobots you can't just drive out of a parking garage all on your own. There are monitors everywhere! When you drive away by yourself, since I can't always come to get you, questions are going to be asked of the owner – me. Not to mention that I know you can't sit tight for any length of time anyway." She felt the rebuttal coming on and stopped it in its tracks. "How many speeding tickets has the General had to have brushed under the rug, 'Bee? You want me to open that cupboard over there and pull out some of the slips? Maybe some of the parking tickets? You don't need to be trapped with me, Bumblebee. I don't want you trapped with me."
She crouched down, careful to adjust the skirt to fall over her legs well enough to keep from flashing her panties at her car. She looked into his headlights.
"Even if I got an apartment nearby I wouldn't be able to keep you there. You'd be stuck in your terrestrial form almost constantly. I can't do that to you. You know I can't ask that of any of you." Her head ducked, chin knocking down into her chest. "It's not like I'm not in constant contact with you guys anyway. I have the Comm, remember? And my nifty little tattoo in case anything goes wrong and you guys have to find me."
Tears prickled her eyes at the next thought. It was something she had to voice. It wasn't going to be something she was proud of saying. She would be taking a cheap shot at Bumblebee. At them all. Still, it needed to be said and she wasn't going to be dishonest.
"I want to pretend to be normal." A few tears tracked down from her eyes as she lifted her face back up to look at her guardian again. "I want to pretend like I'm just another kid that just graduated High School and get to go to college. I want to go to a few parties, get drunk, maybe even do something really stupid like fall into bed with someone for a one-night. I don't know! I just want to have a few years, just a few, short years of normalcy before I have to face the world again knowing that I have the responsibility of protecting the Cybertronian race from extinction on my shoulders."
Her voice hitched on the last, "please don't take that away from me."
It was silent for a long while. Sam forcefully blocked out their feelings, not wanting to deal with all of their emotions as well as hers. She couldn't stand to feel it this one time. She didn't want to feel their determination when they made the decision to keep her under their sensors instead of letting her go to school. She thought she had a right to be selfish just this once in the grand scheme of things.
After many minutes she felt reassurances push past her mental barriers. The Comm in her ear came to life, Optimus Prime's rumbling baritone caressing her audial senses.
"Ironhide is approaching your home now, Sweetspark. He will help you gather your things." She gasped, her heart clenching to hear the words being spoken to her. Her wide eyes focused onto Bumblebee. She allowed herself to open the bond to him alone and felt moroseness, but also acceptance.
They weren't going to stop her!
"Oh my God!" She jumped up to her feet again.
"We will keep in constant contact," the Big 'Bot told her authoritatively. "If you have need of us, for anything, you will contact us immediately. We will find a way to keep Bumblebee or another near in case of an emergency."
"Thank you!" She whispered, happy tears trailing down her cheeks.
"You are precious to us," he spoke very gently, "but you are also right. As long as we can afford to allow you to be human, to be a child, we will. You deserve whatever time we can make to be whom you want to be – to do what you want to do."
She lunged forward and hugged the hood of Bumblebee's alternate form. She also smacked a kiss right on the center, yellow stripe for good measure.
"Thank you! You won't regret it! I promise."
Whirling off to hurry her things, the ones she could salvage, into Ironhide's truck-bed, Samantha staunchly ignored the feeling in the very back of her mind that told her with certainty that they would all regret what was to come.
Delusion, after all, was the name of the game.
Disclaimer: I do NOT own Transformers.
Notes: I am sorry about some of the grammatical errors. I will be going back through this chapter to clean it up next week before I upload Chapter Three. Enjoy if you will.