Disclaimer: do not own Transformers.


Becoming

8

Past

It was a beautiful sunny day, the kind of day where Annabelle Lennox would beg her mother or Andrew to take her to the local amusement park. But she didn't. Today, she just held her mother's hand as they set flowers atop a gravestone. Andrew wasn't there; he knew that this was something that Annabelle and Sarah needed to do alone.

Annabelle didn't remember this man who her mother missed so much. She had barely been a year old when her father passed away. To her, her mother had been enough, and later Andrew, who had met her mother when Annabelle was two and had married the widow a few years later, had filled the role.

If she felt any sorrow, it was for her mother's sake.

They stayed there for a long time, and then Sarah and Annabelle went home.

As Annabelle clambered into their car (in the backseat, as to her chagrin she was still too small to ride up front), she spotted a small black car around the corner. She thought it looked familiar…but then her mother started the car, and they were gone before Annabelle could figure out whether or not she had seen it before.

The Lexus stayed park beside the curb for a very long time, and in the middle of the night, a black truck pulled alongside it, its driver looking blankly ahead.

They didn't say anything. Will didn't want anything to be said. He just stayed there, looking at the small gathering of tombstones.

It had been a small, private funeral, and there had been no body. It was such a strange feeling, all those years ago, attending his own funeral, and now looking down upon his own grave.

And though the grave bore his name only, he could only see the names of his wife and daughter engraved there.

Things had changed so much. It wasn't fair that he left them; wasn't fair that his girl had grown up without a father and that his wife had cried endless tears for a man who was still very much alive. But it was so dangerous. He couldn't approach them again. The Decepticons were already suspicious as to the origin of the New-bots, the Autobot's own little baby boom, and they would stop at nothing at getting additions to their own ranks.

He loved his family, and he had to stay away from them. It was the only thing he could do for them.

And so he watched them. He watched his little girl grow up and his wife grow older. He watched as another man came into their lives. He watched as they, slowly but surely, started to move on again.

There was still some pain, and there would always be pain, but despite all things life moved on, and Will didn't know what to feel about that.

And when his wife and daughter were gone, he thought in a brief moment of bitterness, then the fates have what they wanted, for all that remained of William Lennox would die with them.

"Come on, Will," Ironhide said, as softly as a mech like himself was able. "Let's go home."

For some odd reason, still looking at that graveyard, Will thought, I am home. It was a chilling, morbid thought, and he shook it away quickly. He quietly assented with his guardian-slash-friend-slash-comrade, and they drove back to the Autobot base.

Present

Bumblebee approached the little shelter where Mikaela had managed to isolate Sam. The snow was still falling heavily, so even his obvious yellow paintjob was barely seen in this world of white and grey. The winds blew and howled, but he barely heard them. The sound of silence overrode all else. He hovered around the entrance, uncertain. So much time spent grieving him, spent missing him, spent worried about him…unknowingly spent attacking him…and he chose now to have what humans called cold feet? Now, when his goal was barely five human-sized feet from him?

His hand came to his temple, unconsciously rubbing against the halo there. Mikaela had gone through alright; her shifting frequencies had masked her presence, as they predicted, and the halo that discreetly blended in with her helm had provided her with extra protection, but the sooner they got out of the unfriendly zone, the better.

"Bumblebee?" Mikaela asked quietly, her gaze never leaving a still-sleeping Sam. "What are you doing? Come on in."

Bumblebee said, without meaning to, "What if he doesn't remember me?"

"Of course he'll remember you, 'Bee," Mikaela said, finally turning towards him and giving him her shaky New-bot smile. "You're his best friend."

Bumblebee felt some reassurance, and he ducked inside, maneuvering himself so that his back touched the wall of the crevice. He felt that it was important that when Sam woke up, he didn't find himself cornered by a sixteen-foot tall Autobot. When Sam had still been…When Soundwave hadn't…well, Sam had often told him that his face wasn't a pleasant one to wake up to.

"Look, 'Bee," Mikaela said softly, sadly, almost to herself. She gently caressed a side of Sam's cheek. "Look what they did to him."

Bumblebee did look, and for Mikaela's sake repressed a shudder. They had caught a fleeting glimpse of him that day, so long ago, when he had been tricked to come to Ravage's aid, but to see him now, up-close and so still…

"What are we going to tell him?" he asked quietly, going down on one knee, his scans memorizing the new face of an old friend. "So much time has passed…his parents…"

"There'll be time, 'Bee," Mikaela said forcefully, clearly dreading having to tell Sam the truth as much as Bumblebee did. "The most important thing is that we have him now."

Bumblebee had so many things to tell Sam. He was so close, so very, very close. But the questions, the promises, the reassurances, the explanations, that simple string of three words too often taken for granted…Bumblebee's processor went blank as Sam finally opened his eyes.

Both he and Mikaela tensed, wanting so badly to just welcome him back with arms wide open and laughs and tears and—but they would have to be careful. There was a high chance that some residues would remain—some vague personality quirks that would have been Sonar's would still be present in Sam. A persistent virus, so to speak. These residues would fade as time went on and as Sam recovered and his own frequencies—his own, true, uncorrupted frequencies—were established. But for now…for now, Sam was going to be one very confused human.

He was probably already in a lot of trauma. They'd have to take things slowly.

He yawned and stretched, and rubbed his eyes before realizing that he had a rapt audience. Bumblebee and Mikaela backed away from him, wanting to give him the space to get a look at their faces, to get the old memories going…

He looked up, and behind all the wires and implants they could still recognize his sorely-missed eyes. If they had been physically human, there would have been a sharp intake of breath. But as it was, Mikaela and Bumblebee didn't dare move, as if this moment were too fragile to withstand even the slightest twitch.

"Uh…hi," Sam said, getting up and giving a tentative wave directed somewhere over Bumblebee's shoulder. He spoke in English, and didn't seem to notice the butchered quality of his voice. They didn't know if that was a good sign or not.

"Sam?" Bumblebee asked quietly, hopefully. Sam didn't respond to the name, but instead continuing to blankly look at a place over Bumblebee's right shoulder. Dread started creeping into Bumblebee's spark, but he forcefully pushed it away. He decided to try another approach.

"Do you know who we are?" he asked, gesturing to himself and to Mikaela.

"Yeah," Sam said after a pause, finally looking Bumblebee in the optics. "Yeah. You're Autobots."

Well. They weren't expecting that. Bumblebee and Mikaela gave each other an uncertain glance.

"Yes," Bumblebee said after a pause, a little apprehensively. It was far from the response that he was hoping for.

Then Sam gave them a loopy half-smile, and for a precious moment they almost recognized him. "You're Bumblebee…and you're Mikaela." They felt a sense of relief wash over them.

"Yes." Mikaela began to smile.

"And…we're…friends," he said that last word with conviction, and with affection. Bumblebee began to hope.

"Yes," Mikaela said. "And your name is?" She leaned forward, on the verge of throwing her arms around him and Bumblebee did too, wanting so badly to make sure that his friend was real and was here, but he couldn't help but feel that something was slightly off. Maybe it was because of the strange quality in Sam's calm, almost serene tone, or maybe because, after all this time, this just felt too easy, and what in the world was that awful sound—

But that last question seemed to trouble Sam. And then his quiet smile gave way to a look of pure horror. He bolted away from them, his back meeting a wall of the crevice, face in his hands. The noise, which had started out so quietly that they hadn't noticed it, became unbearable. And then it hit them: Sam was screaming.

They started towards him, but suddenly found themselves confronted by wings and talons, their screeches overriding the howling winds. Sam had activated the drones. He scrambled further away from them, stumbling in the ice and snow. "Who are you?" he demanded, this time in Cybertronian, his butchered voice barely heard over the screeches and caws. He gave an agonized cry, keeling over and picking himself up with difficulty, staggering to regain his balance. "Who are you? What do you want? What have you done to me?!"

They shocked, they were being attacked, they couldn't reach him…and the noise…And was Sam trying to hack into their processors?! Bumblebee could feel it, invaders trying to cross the threshold, a pressure being applied to the shields drawn by the halos that Blaster gave them, a desperate hammering against his shields…

Bumblebee quickly fortified his firewalls, ordering Mikaela to do the same. Sam…Sam's attackingus, Bumblebee thought almost numbly, trying to shield Mikaela from the drones, both of them trying to shield their minds from…from Sam. "Sam! We're not going to hurt you! It's us, Sam!" Bumblebee said, almost begging, trying to keep the drone at bay.

"Sam! Wait!" Mikaela called desperately, trying to see him past the attacking drones. Sam limped his way towards the exit, the agonized look of one betrayed writ all over his small, pale, mutilated face.

Then he screeched, voice breaking, "I'm not Sam!"

And then the noise stopped, and he was gone.

Past

After his meeting with Optimus, Blaster returned to his quarters, the thoughts of his cassettes absently playing in one part of his processor, a local radio channel playing discreetly in another part, another part maintaining the external firewalls around the Autobot base in addition to the insentient firewalls, and still another part watching out for invading frequencies.

What is Sam to him? What was the purpose? Optimus' question had caught Blaster off-guard. He had spent so long finding out exactly what had happened that he never really gave a thought as to why. Still, he stood by his answer: that Sam was a useful little tool, too useful to be kept in Autobot hands but too weak to pose any threat to the Decepticons, and that was why Soundwave had taken him.

Soundwave had pulled stunts like this before, as indicated by the fliers, Lazerbeak and Ratbat, who were not Cybertronian in origin but who had undergone so much under Soundwave's hands that they looked nearly indistinguishable from Cybertronian cassettes. To Soundwave, technopathy was a beautiful gift, and non-Cybertronian practitioners or sensitives were…well, they were something to him, maybe.

Blaster shook his head. There he was again, thinking like so many foolish mechs who thought that Soundwave had an Autobot spark with Decepticon programming. Fraggit, what idiots, he'd always think incredulously. What made mechs like that think that Soundwave was actually nice? It would be a stretch to call him a Megatron or a Starscream, but you'd think that by now, mechs would realize that less than half of his children were actually even "his." Lazerbeak and Ratbat had been kidnapped from their technorganic-based planet, brainwashed, and put through who knew what; Rumble and Frenzy just might not have been ill-gotten like the others; and Ravage's spark had been that of a reprogrammed youngling, a youngling who had been dragged kicking and screaming from the battlefields. And now, Sam…

And these things he did to what mechs regarded as his creations. Didn't they remember what he did to his enemies? He was a high-ranking officer for very good reasons, and, despite his loyalty to Megatron, was still retained by Starscream for those very same reasons.

Whoever did things like that was most certainly not nice.

And yet…even their own creators had always believed that Soundwave was soft.

Ultrasound and Wavelength would have said that Soundwave was very sentimental. To them, the Cybertronian race was the ultimate species, with body plan, processor, and society that all other beings strived towards. Soundwave had always had a fascination with beings from other planets. However, Blaster thought that his partial co-creation had too many screws loose and too many gears whirring to actually have sentimentality. Soundwave would see a creature, dismiss the importance of its existence, see what he viewed to be a slightly more interesting creature, and wonder how he could "improve" it.

Blaster had been a joint creation between Soundwave's creators and Jazz's creator. Soundwave's creators, the bondeds Ultrasound and Wavelength, had been highly regarded teachers at a "school for the technopathically inclined" in Iacon. Jazz's creator had been a rescue worker, a hero, often going right onto the highly unstable grounds on Cybertron in order to rescue fallen flyers and seekers and grounded mechs who had somehow ended up there. He had been a big, burly mech, his shadow alone easily swallowing the frames of Ultrasound and Wavelength together, taller than Optimus and more heavily built than Ironhide. His name was Jingles.

Jingles had designed Blaster's programming, which, Blaster often said, was the reason that he wasn't the stiff that Soundwave was. Jingles had had a falling out with Ultrasound and Wavelength after, and by that time Blaster was too old for reprogramming, which worked highly in Blaster's favour. He'd terminate before he became the stuck-up glitch that Ultrasound and Wavelength would have forced him to be, seeing as, for better or for worse, the governing authorities decided that Blaster should remain in Ultrasound and Wavelength's care. Some programming tended to reverberate more with the spark that it maintained, and he knew that his spark wanted no other mech's programming than Jingles.'

Soundwave was undoubtedly the favourite of their creators, and not only because he was free of Jingles' "taint." Soundwave was the perfect, talented, self-respecting technopath, able to communicate clearly a few clicks from being sparked. To his creators' delight, he grew up cold, tactical, emotionless, and logical, speaking in a strange, clipped manner because those who did not communicate telepathically was not worth speaking to. Still, to them, he had that pesky…sentimentality.

Blaster had always thought it was an obsession, a desire for control. Sentimentality meant affection, or…or love.

Blaster…wasn't sure if Soundwave even felt those.

But Blaster was sure that Soundwave had a strange fascination with technopathics, and the further from Cybertron their origins were, the better. It was an obsession that was matched only by loyalty to the Decepticons.

To Soundwave, a technopathic, organic creature such as Sam must have been a prize beyond measure, a toy that he just had to have.

So yes, Blaster was sure that his answer to Optimus was the correct one. He was sure.

Just what are you thinking, brother? Blaster thought absently, leaning back in his seat. There was a very brief moment of silence, and he only realized his mistake a click too late.

You leave yourself too open, little one, came an amused voice. Before he could react, Blaster could feel his cassettes, as one, cut the line that Blaster had wandered into. Blaster looked down at his hands, saw his metal trembling and his wires cackling alight, and forced himself to calm down. He was an idiot; a suicidal idiot. He frantically scrambled the lines to the protests of his unknowing comrades, hoping fervently that Soundwave hadn't gotten anything important.

Are we okay now? asked Rewind's small voice after a pause. Though they were far from him, in the rec room, on patrol, and places he'd rather not know about, Blaster could hear Steeljaw's low growls and Ramhorn's angry stamping, could hear Eject's rants and Rewind's patient questions. The frequencies of his cassettes swept over him, soothing, each in their own way, and Blaster's frequencies were calmed.

Yeah, he answered at length, checking and re-checking the firewalls. He enveloped their frequencies with his own, protective ones. We're okay now.