Chapter Text
Morning arrived long before the sun. It came cold and terrified, sweaty, with ion cannons charging and a seeker's scream echoing; faintly accompanied by the cry of a small human in a dark bedroom in the middle of nowhere.
The cannons charging and the seeker's screams were luckily only the nightmare of them, but they were real enough to the small, sweaty man in the bed. He sat up like a bolt, hands over his ears, fingers knotted in his hair, thin ribs heaving as he worked through the panic of the night terror like he had so many others. Control your breathing. Categorize the visuals. Look around and catalogue where he actually was.
Sam looked around his bedroom, the same bedroom he'd had for almost 20 years. It was pretty spartan, as if he had just moved in rather than having spent a third of his life for the last 20 years in. He was familiar with every nook and cranny from doing this same exercise countless times since the first night he'd moved in. The bed, the dresser, the window, the closet. A picture that had hung in his mother's living room since before he was born; it was the only really humanizing touch to the room. He couldn't help but wrap his arms around his knobby knees and rest his head there while he fought back the moisture in his eyes and the air in his lungs.
Just another nightmare. It wasn’t real. It wasn't even something he remembered, maybe a new horror that his brain had constructed, maybe not.
The old wooden clock next to his bed was almost unreadable, but if he opened his eyes very wide Sam could see that it was just after 5 am. More sleep than he'd been expecting. Summer’s were the worst for the night terrors, the heat triggering memories he desperately wanted to forget even while he slept, but the other seasons weren’t much better. For a while he’d mostly had them under control but they’d gotten far worse over the last few decades to Sam's chagrin and confusion. Sleeping pills, even the spicy kind, hadn’t helped, just locked him in to the nightmare with no way of escaping until it’d run its course.
Knowing that he’d see no further rest that morning, Sam groaned as he climbed out of the bed and popped his back and then his neck. The cold of the outdoors had seeped into his house overnight, leaving what felt like its own leaded weights in his bones as he unsteadily made his way to the bathroom. Turning on the water to warm as he used the toilet and then stripped out of his fear sweat slick clothes, he gingerly (because he was sore and so stiff) climbed into the small shower. The water was nice and hot, even if it did take a minute to get there, and he could slowly relax as the pain of the cold was exercised out of him slowly like a preacher with a devil.
Once he could move easier, he washed the stink of fear sweat off of himself and did his morning ablutions, including brushing his teeth. Why be cold and wet while brushing your teeth when you could be nice and warm? He was done too quickly; there wasn't a whole lot to wash or lollygag about. He turned off the water and hastily dried himself off before quickly going to his closet. He pulled on a thick pair of wool socks and boxer briefs, a pair of thick jeans, and three layers of shirts. He debated a cardigan on top but figured that would be overkill.
Leaving the bedroom he stepped into the great room of the cabin. Turning to the wood-burning stove he knelt down and shoved a couple chords of wood into its fat, black belly and got the fire going first. The biting cold soon to be banished by the happily curling flames. It wasn’t his favorite task but there wasn’t any alternative to it.
Still, task accomplished, Sam could get his percolating coffee pot on the stove alongside his copper one. It would take a little while for the heat of the stove to transfer, but that was fine; Sam would be gone while the house heated up. Sam pulled his jacket on, grabbed his rifle from its place by the door, and set out on a walk around the property to get some physical exercise in.
He wasn’t in exactly running-for-your-life shape anymore, he was about as skinny as he had ever been, but it helped the anxiety and the paranoia to walk the perimeter after a bad episode and assure himself that there weren’t red optics hiding in the trees. He’d only hallucinated it once and he was such a shit shot that he’d merely scared the deer who's eyes he'd seen nearly as much as it had spooked him. His walk had him halfway around the lake that was the border of his property before his anxiety was settled back down to its baseline and he headed back, the sun now releasing crepuscular rays across the sky.
The cabin was nice and warm when he returned. He slung his jacket over the end of the couch, stepping towards the stove and grabbed his coffee cup from where it had been abandoned on the counter the day prior. Pouring himself a hot cup of mediocre coffee before raising his hands to catch some of the heat from the stove to force the stiffness out of them and prepare them for the day of work ahead of him.
His 20th novel was coming along. He’d fallen into writing as a coping mechanism after…well, after. As far as vocations went, it had been the most forgiving of the ones that he’d attempted. As long as there was product to publish, and he was communicative, he was left to his own creative devices. There was even an element of encouragement to being as weird as he was, playing into the mystique of the reclusive writer like Thoreau, Dickinson, Harper Lee to name a few.
It suited him fine.
He didn't even really need to be writing anymore; his publishers were thrilled but didn't expect him to keep at it given his advancing years. He was sure that they found his idiosyncrasies curious and confusing, not to mention occasionally frustrating, but wrote it off as the eccentricities of an old hermit. As long as he got money deposited in his account every month, he didn't really mind what they thought. He sent in his chapters regular as clockwork and responded to all correspondence from his agent and editor. That he only communicated through the mail and refused all in-person contact had been a point of contention over the years with different agents, different editors, but his books sold well so they ultimately let it go.
Now, though, they offered to let deadlines slide further on account of his age and health, which was a blessing in its own right.
Sam wasn't doing so well.
Sam hadn't been doing well for a pretty long time, actually. Sipping his coffee, he looked out over the property like he did every morning and tried not to think about anything. It worked better some days than others; most days, he was too exhausted from nightmares to have the wherewithal to do much more than look out the window, let alone contemplate anything. Contemplating tended to lead him down paths better left unwandered. He'd been pretty poorly, even by his own standards, for the last couple years in specific; but maybe that was just part of getting older - he was almost 80 after all.
Still, it was a nice day, for a Tuesday. The air was crisp, shaking off the last vestiges of winter in preparation for true Spring and the water of the lake had a soft mist that reflected almost adularescently in the early morning sun. It was perfect. It was more than he had ever thought he'd get in the hot deserts of Egypt, running for his life.
Shaking his head to cast aside that thought, he tried to ignore the churning memory as he finally turned from the window. The stove was hot in the corner, and he could hear the soft bubbling of the coffee pot as it percolated there. It would make the brew like sludge in an hour or two, but for now, it filled the small cabin with the aroma of coffee, and he certainly didn't mind that.
Standing in front of his desk for a second, he set his cup down on the old wood and sat in front of the typewriter. He reread the page he’d been making progress on the day before and then he began typing like he did every morning. Honestly, without the calendar in the kitchen he wouldn't even know what day it was. It wasn't like it really mattered out here; almost every day was the same. It was exactly what he needed after his last major episode. The bustle, the people, the noise...No, far better to put as much distance as he was able to between himself and people, cities, the modern world as he could possibly get. It only made sense.
He was six pages into his morning's work when a visitor arrived.
Sam, as a rule, didn't have guests. The groceries were delivered to his porch on Thursdays at three every week. Other than the occasional mail delivery of new ribbons for the typewriter or other incidentals, those were his only outside interactions.
His keen ears picked up the sounds of gravel crunching under tires and tilting his head to angle it better to be able to see up the long and winding driveway showed that there was a car coming up the narrow lane, the colors causing his eyebrows to angle upwards in surprise.
A black and white, in the middle of unincorporated Washington? The closest town wasn't for another 30 miles in any direction and the sheriff's department, the only one with jurisdiction out here, only employed vehicles with a rather unsightly tan color. Sam had checked.
Concerned, Sam stood up and donned his jacket but didn't go for the front door. Instead, he backed into the kitchen which had its own small door that would allow him out the back and into the woods which, even now, were thick and dense enough that if he didn't want to be found, he wouldn't be. Not by humans at least.
He could still see the car through the window as it parked and the driver's side door swung open. The officer was a thin, white man with washed-out brown hair and a prominent mustache, a face that Sam remembered a bit too well from nightmares that he'd had for decades. The police car itself looked close enough to real that if he hadn't specifically spent time researching what made a police car legitimate and what were clues it wasn't, he'd never have noticed that this one was… well, more than meets the eye.
The knot that was developing in his throat ached painfully; it was a combination of vindication and stupefying terror. He'd been waiting for a sign, any sign of a Cybertronian for over 60 years, and suddenly it was here. He was here.
Barricade was here.
60 years was a long time, most of his life, and so much of it had been spent not living for fear of what might happen if he was right, that his memories weren't hallucinations. If he went out the kitchen door, he might never know if they were real or not.
He didn't look back as he went to the door, the front door, and opened it. The loaded rifle sat in its normal spot next to the door but he didn't grab it when he pulled the heavy door open. It wouldn't do a lick of good against a holoform or a Decepticon that size anyway. It'd put a major dent in Frenzy though if that little bastard was still kicking it with Barricade, so Sam didn't move out of range of it…just in case.
"Morning, Officer," he announced into the mid-morning air. It was warming but not by much, the little puff of mist from his breath clearly visible in the air as he spoke.
The police officer smiled up at him, the expression a bit stilted, but a reasonable facsimile. "Good morning, son. Is this the Witwicky property?"
The man's words released no mist. While that increased his excitement, the man’s statement was a kick in the gut.
Oh, he'd completely forgotten.
One of the first things Sam had done upon moving into the small lakeside cabin he now called home was to remove the mirror from the bathroom and anywhere else on the property. He'd removed or compromised every mirror he'd had constant access to for the last 50 years for one very important reason.
Sam hadn't aged a day since he’d woken up in his bed at 17 with the memory of buying an alien car and then saving the world a couple of times from Decepticon warlords. It was the only visible evidence that something had changed in him, that something was wrong with him. It was the reason he’d been so certain over his later years that it hadn’t all been a hallucination or a fit. It was also one of the many reasons he lived the life of a hermit in the woods in the middle of nowhere.
His pause was only fractional, but for a being who could parse petabytes of data in a second, it must have seemed like a long time. Still, Sam nodded. "Yeah, this is the Witwicky property."
The officer's eyes widened before he smiled again. "Great. It's so far out in the middle of nowhere I almost couldn't find it." He laughed, running his hand through his hair. It was great acting, Sam had to admit. "I was hoping to see if your…Grandfather was in?" The officer asked.
Sam smirked shakily, even as his chest tightened. "Got a warrant?"
The officer's face froze for too long of a moment before he frowned. "Hold on just a second there, son, I was just hoping to have a friendly conversation. Can you grab your grandfather for me, please? I don't want to have to escalate this without reason."
It was weird to see Barricade acting so restrained; the Decepticon wasn't well known for his patience, and while this cop wasn't exactly being the most magnanimous that Sam had seen in a human, he definitely was by the standard that Sam knew Baricade's normally would take.
Sam folded his arms and rested against the door frame. "What do you want with him?" He asked curiously. At this point, he would have expected to be under Barricade's servo with a charged blaster cannon pointed into his face and that the mech hadn't made any moves to do so yet was making Sam bolder than he should be.
The officer gritted his teeth in a smile, and props to the mech - it looked genuinely annoyed. "I had some questions for him about an incident in town a couple days ago. Seems someone caught him backing his car into a sedan at the grocery store."
Sam glanced at the 1930 Lincoln Zephyr under cover at the back of the house, kept in good condition and runnable with only an engine and lights, nothing else, as the battery was removed after every use and stored on a cement block either under the house or inside if it was particularly cold, and raised a brow at the officer. "Car hasn't moved in over two months, wanna try again, officer…?"
The officer scowled. "Where is your grandpa, kid?” He asked, clearly losing patience.
Sam was almost having fun, the adrenaline pumping through his veins like a sirens call, even if his heart felt like it was going to burst out of his chest. "Are we cutting the crap then, Officer Barricade?" he asked curiously and the 'man' went utterly still, his eyes locked on Sam.
It felt like an eternity but it was only about five seconds before the officer leaned back on his heels and took in the full presence of Sam with a penetrating gaze. But Sam wasn't looking at him anymore; he was looking at the car up the incline that was watching him in return, he was sure. "How do you know that name, son?" The officer responded, hands loose at his sides but eyes almost tight with tension.
Sam shrugged. "You can dismiss it now. It was a good attempt, but the devils really in the details and yours are 🎵wrong🎵." He called, waving at the holoform. "What are you doing here, Barricade?"
There was a moment when he thought he'd read the situation wrong, that he was hallucinating or, heaven forbid, had finally lost it. Then there was a noise, familiar like a childhood nursery rhyme, as a transformation cog engaged and the police car moved and changed like only a Cybertronian could, the holoform disappearing entirely in a moment of blue electrical static.
Sam could die happy now knowing he was right. He probably would too; Barricade had nearly succeeded in killing him when he was still an actual kid and he certainly didn't have a huge Autobot defender this time around.
The 18’ mech rose to his full height between the sleepy pine trees on either side of the drive, pushing them out of his face as he walked down and into the clearing around the house, his red (and blue?) optics trained on Sam as he slid a little bit down the embankment as steadily as his tonnage would allow.
He had to crouch a little to keep Sam in view as he navigated the terrain before stopping about 20 feet from the porch steps. "You know my designation--" he said thoughtfully, "--and yet you do not run from me screaming."
Sam laughed a little. "Done enough of that in this lifetime and the last," he said cryptically. "You planning on chasing me through the woods if I did?"
Barricade's facial plates gave a better impression of a frown than his holoform had. "We are not permitted wanton destruction," he said in clear exasperation.
It was Sam's turn to stare at the big mech in bafflement. "Permitted? Since when does a Decepticon need permission to commit gross acts of property damage?" He asked incredulously with a laugh.
The mech, if anything, became even more confused, puffing up his chest plates in a display of disquiet or discomfort. "How do you know that term?" He demanded. Sam, who was enjoying this more than he'd ever imagined in his most desperate daydreams, smiled.
"I know a few things," he chuckled before looking up at the big mech soberly. "How is the Great War going?" He finally had to ask, a silently screaming part of his mind that had been persistently demanding answers for 60 years finally having an outlet to simply ask.
Barricade’s armor settled down, and then the mech himself settled on a large boulder on the side of the incline that was simply too big be moved, resting his forearms on his knee joints. "If I tell you, will you tell me something?" He asked, and Sam was taken aback by his reasonable tone. Barricade wasn't supposed to be reasonable; it was hard for his already delicate sense of reality to even comprehend.
Sam wrapped his arms around his middle. "If I can." he finally settled on.
The mech's optics narrowed, but he nodded. "The Great War is over. It has been over for thousands of your planet's cycles," he vented, "Our leader--" he cut to look at Sam, and Sam responded with a quiet ‘Megatron’ at the silent invitation, "--Megatron, fell into this system's star after leaving a black hole in pursuit of…an artifact.” He vented a sigh at that. “He'd been too injured before the approach to avoid the star’s gravity and was drawn in over a million earth cycles ago. With Megatron officially gone, the factions fought amongst themselves for a couple hundred thousand years before an armistice was reached. We are one Cybertron once more." He waved his hands in a strange way as he said that with the air of someone who had read the company tagline enough times to be sick of it.
Sam though. For Sam, the Great War had been raging on since he was a teenager waking in terror in the middle of the night to red optics and shattered spark chambers. The knowledge that it was over, that it had been over longer than he'd been alive by such a magnitude, was incomprehensible.
He sat down, his heart in his chest beating like a drum solo, his eyes watering. "It's…it's really over?" He asked. Though he knew he shouldn't believe Barricade on principle, a part of him was so desperate for any information that if he'd been lied to, which was likely, he almost didn’t want to know. The mech was watching him, his face plates weary but definitely curious. "Megatron is really…” He licked his chapped lips. “He's gone?"
In his nightmares he'd seen Megatron so many times, so many ways. Some from memories of his own…some not. The idea that his larger than life villain, the boogeyman, the being of nightmares rendered into smelt by falling into the gravity well of a star was almost unfathomable.
Raising a ridge on what would be a brow to a human, the mech shrugged. "Seems that way. He left a distress beacon near Mercury's orbit, but the solar radiation negated the long-range effects, so no one discovered it until around 800,000 years ago. Then all hell broke loose for a while, but over time we realized at some point we were exterminating ourselves for no comprehensible, let alone sane, reason." He gazed out over the lake. "We went from billions to only a few hundred thousand during the War. The Well of Sparks--" he gazed at Sam again, to see if Sam knew what he was talking about and Sam nodded, “--has been dry since before the war. No sparklings meant no new mechs meant no more soldiers. The reserves ran out. It became a true war of attrition. Factions completely wiped out because there were no soldiers left to fill their ranks anymore.”
Sam stared at Barricade, the brutal reality described so… logically, so sensibly making his cold bones chill. "So many just gone." He shuddered.
Barricade regarded him for a time while he had his existential crisis.
Sam, as a human, couldn't understand the reality of that kind of extinction. Humans bred so prolifically that the idea that one day it could just stop, and they'd have to deal with that realization, didn't even compute. The idea that even a race that was functionally immortal could no longer repopulate itself after such a long and bloody war…
But what about the AllSpark? If Barricade was real, then surely the AllSpark was real too. Megatron had come to his solar system before looking for it, it couldn't be a coincidence, could it?
He'd been looking for an artifact Barricade had said. What more important artifact could there be than the AllSpark?
Sam had tried to find the AllSpark and Megatron when he had come awake in this world. It had been the first reason he was committed by his parents when all he could do was try to explain to his mundane, completely normal parents who had no memory of anything to do with the Autobots or Decepticons that he needed to go to the Hoover Dam to look for an extraterrestrial metal cube and a giant frozen robot man.
That had been the beginning of the rough times; the commitments, the drugs, the therapy. He had no way of proving anything. History had changed minutely to make it more difficult; Grandpa Witwicky had fallen into a crevasse and died exploring the Arctic, so no glasses to fall back on, no notebooks of Cybertronian glyphs to reference.
If his parents didn't remember either the circumstances that brought the Autobots to him or the giant mechanoids themselves, a younger, dumber Sam knew that something was definitely different, wrong, about where he found himself and that he needed more discretion in his future pursuits.
With that realization, he’d said nothing to anyone else about the Autobots or Decepticons at the facilities he’d been forced into. To a point that hadn’t really mattered because he wasn’t just dealing with being the only one who remembered giant alien robots and strange alien life giving cubes; he was also suffering from the worst parts of PTSD from Egypt with no way to conceivably explain to anyone that he'd been through. Being transported back in time to right before he'd made contact with aliens? Died and been resurrected by long dead Primes to shove another ancient artifact into his dead friend’s chest? Not a story a head doctor was going to hear and think 'You’re fine to rejoin society'.
After months of inpatient stays and nearly bankrupting his parents, he'd finally been released to his parents relief before 'liberating' his fathers 1967 green Austin-Healey convertible and driving to Nevada in the dead of night. He made it to the Hoover Dam but was arrested after breaking in looking for the AllSpark and to a lesser degree Megatron.
He'd barely made it to the outer level before he was detained and then arrested, the security more heavy-duty than he'd imagine a facility, even a national landmark and energy station having. If they didn't also have a Sector 7 in residence it was a surprising amount of protection.
He'd kind of hoped that he might run into Agent Simmons at least, but when he'd tentatively asked the interviewer if he could see Agent Simmons he'd been told there was no such person at the facility. He didn't fight it though it seemed ludicrous there wasn't one, but none of his leads on the man had ever panned out. Nothing panned out. Everyone he remembered was either dead or had no idea what he was talking about. It was his first arrest, but as a minor with a history of mental health issues, he'd been gifted a light sentence in a mental health hospital.
Those were really dark times. He'd spent years in the hospitals. His life inside his head and his reality outside at such odds that he really had gone crazy for a while.
Finally, after too long dawdling down memory lane, he looked up at Barricade. The mech was staring at him, the same way one does at a particularly interesting puzzle, and he leaned forward. “I came here to meet the author Samuel James Witwicky, who has written books that know startlingly accurate information about a mechanoid race of aliens during a war between two very recognizable factions.” He stated. “I was led to believe that Samuel James Witwicky was a reclusive old man who could not be contacted by any modern convenience and was of failing health.” He made a show of looking Sam over, “What I come to find instead is someone who is too physically immature to be the reclusive author but who himself knows far too much about my race of mechanoid aliens.”
There were no questions yet, but Sam realized that that was just a matter of time. He leaned against the door frame and hugged his middle tightly.
“Who are you, boy?” Came the rumbly voice through the large mech's vocalizer.
Sam shrugged, “Sam Witwicky.”
The mech's eyes narrowed. “The Author?”
Sam nodded.
Before Barricade could follow that rabbit, Sam had to ask. “Is Optimus still around?” Is Bumblebee still around? He wanted to ask, but Bee had told him that that was a name a human girl had given him, not what other Cybertronians knew him by during the Great War or back on Cybertron. Sam had never bothered to ask, like an idiot, what his best friend's name really was.
Barricade went utterly still. Optics widened, then narrowed. “Yes, Prime still lives.”
Sam nodded, glad for that. If this was an elaborate ruse, he didn't care, what would Barricade gain by lying to him, a small fleshling? He'd take this fiction any day to writing about the worse version from his memories. “Good, that's good.” he huffed.
Contemplative, the former(?) Decepticon frowned. “How do you know so much about us?” He cut to the chase.
That startled a chuckle out of Sam. “You wouldn't believe me even if I told you.” He laughed again, waving away the consternated look on his giant speaking companion's face. “I can't explain it in a way that makes sense to me, let alone anyone else. I'm glitched, basically. Totally crazy. You've read my wiki no doubt; I've spent years in asylums. I'm actually not even sure if you're really here and not some elaborate hallucination. I know that something happened, but I couldn't tell you what.” He explained though his delirious laughter.
Across from him Barricade looked, if nothing else, more intrigued. “You've been having visions of my kind.”
“Nightmares.” Sam corrected. “Enough that I’ve nearly ruined my life because of them.”
The mech nodded, almost sympathetically. “I have seen how most humans react to my kind, to know that we exist and have no one believe you would have been it's own kind of insanity.” He said thoughtfully.
Sam frowned, unnerved by the black and white mechs insight, but nodded. “Yeah. It's been…not great.”
The mech's eyes roved over him, “The change that happened to you, it stopped your age progression prematurely.” He stated so Sam didn't feel the need to confirm as one would a question. “I am going to need to report this.” Barricade said, thoughtfully.
Sam shrugged. He felt awful, more than his usual, like too little butter spread over too much bread, too much air in a too small of a balloon. “You do that.” He affirmed, standing back up. “I need to go lay down for a while.” He said, turning back into the house. “Careful on the turnout, the left is basically blind.” He said deliriously in parting.
Barricade’s plates shifted in affront, before he growled at the human, “Do not dismiss me, Samuel James Witwicky.” He demanded.
Sam turned back to Barricade and frowned. “You got what you came for.” He shrugged. “I'm sick, Barricade. I need to go rest. Unless you want me to puke in your general direction, this is where we part ways.” he said.
The mech looked him over with a gimlet optic. “You do not appear to be compromised.”
Sam laughed a weak chuckle, “I’m sick like rust, Barricade. You can’t see the damage until it’s too late.” He stated. He must have sounded crazy as he wheeled around, kicking the door shut to save what little warm air was left before stumbling to the couch and collapsing into it, his body feeling excited, exhausted, worn and yet spry all at once. It was a feeling that he was familiar with, a foreboding feeling, one that promised nothing good.
Laid on the couch, trying to get his body under control, he heard the mech stand but not immediately leave. He moved around the property but left Sam and his home in peace and after a few minutes Sam realized that Barricade was looking for signal.
“Good luck, slagger, no signal in the entire valley.” He muttered into the couch.
Just how he designed it.