Fic: Aegri Somnia
Title: Aegri Somnia
Fandom: Transformers
Characters: Bumblebee, Sam, three seconds of Ratchet and .05 seconds of Mikaela.
Pairings: BeexSam
Word Count: 968
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None really, mentions of yummy images.
Summary: Before Sam, there were no dreams.
Author's Notes: I kinda threw this together at the last second in a desperate need to post something (because I said I'd post after I saw the movie a second time, which I did yesterday), so it's not organized very well and it didn't turn out quite like I wanted. I really like the end, though. The title, loosely translated, means 'a sick man's dreams'. (Horray for wikipedia in aiding me with a random title!)
Before Sam, there were no dreams.
In all of his years (and there were a lot of them), he couldn’t think of (and he never forgot anything) a single instance when he dreamed. Before, there were only hazy moments of inactivity between fighting, fleeing, and hating during Optimus and Megatron’s war. He never really thought of it as his war, though that is what motivated him and consumed most of his time. It was Optimus that was obsessed (definitely obsessed) with finding the Allspark and defeating Megatron. He followed Optimus loyally, but fighting a war wasn’t really existing - just drifting.
And for thousands of years, that was life.
So there was no dreaming. Just ‘sleeping,’ if you could call it that. Typically, when sleeping, one gets rest - but he never felt well rested. Like something was missing from his inner workings, a chunk of his Spark missing. Maybe it had always been gone.
Then he met Sam.
The boy’s grip on his steering wheel sent a bizarre jolt down the steering column and into the rest of his body. Something strange and enticing and not like anything from Cybertron. Suddenly what he was doing (sitting in a trashy used car lot) was more than just a mission - it was of desperate personal (personal, that was a no-no word when you were a soldier) importance and need. The boy would definitely leave with him (even if he blew out a few car windows in the process).
That first night (that very night) the dreams started.
He saw Cybertron at its peak - no war, no angry Megatron or heart-broken Optimus. Just beauty that could only be achieved with good and pure mechanized society. When he awoke, he was startled and confused - this was not Cybertron. It was a boy’s driveway on a planet thousands of miles away from Cybertron. There were no sparkling electric cities or the familiar faces of friends. It left him devastated and wondering why his brain (something always in his control) would be cruel enough to show him these sights and sounds that he couldn’t actually touch and feel? An imitation of reality with no purpose - that’s what the images were and it frustrated him to know that there was nothing he could do with something he didn’t understand.
For once, he was grateful for the rapid pace of battle. It kept him focused and wouldn’t allow him to think too much. Think about how he resented Sam’s diverted attention whenever Mikaela walked by or his fascination with autobots that were not he. Instead he protected Sam with a vicious rigor that no one could understand (least of all himself) to prove without thinking that he was the most important.
Before Sam, there were no nightmares.
But after he was captured and tortured mercilessly by the young fleshlings called human beings, he dreamt (he had to relent and call the images something other than images; and so they were the strange human word ‘dreams’) of the cruel burn of frost and electricity. He was weak by no means - but all transformers had a weakness to ice and lightning, and the pain was immeasurable by any human standard. And it only took Sam a few words to convince him to not kill everything, every fragile fleshy thing, in sight. Just a few words. But the pain stayed with him, and he learned the difference between dreams and nightmares.
He has both of them now, dreams and nightmares.
Mostly dreams, though. Mostly dreams that he shouldn’t be having. Then again, he shouldn’t be having dreams at all. But what he dreams of shouldn’t exist at all. It’s not like how his earlier dreams were - scattered memories he’d rather forget but secretly enjoy - but fantasies of a world with just him and Sam. Sam curled up inside his leather interior, Sam perched on his shoulder at the overlook, Sam laughing and leaning on the hood and grinning at jealous eyes. Sam, Sam, Sam. Fantasies of Sam. He knows how humans look in times of passion (head thrown back, lips parted, thank god for the internet) but he could never find the strength to spy on Sam during something so intimate - but he knows through endless processing exactly what it would look like, and these carefully sculptured fancies edge their ways into his dreams.
Dreams.
He asked Rachet about dreams, but he just couldn’t get the concept through to the other bot: “Images that play when you’re inactive? Like going through memory?” He tried to explain that yes sometimes they were memories, but no they were something not real, made up. Rachet just stared blankly and asked if he had a loose circuit.
He asked Sam what dreams were. But Sam himself really didn’t know: “I dunno. I think it’s just the brain’s dumping ground at the end of the day. But we need it to, like, survive.” When he asked Sam to elaborate further, he just shrugged and said he read it somewhere.
Need it to survive.
Autobots don’t dream. They aren’t meant to dream. But humans, the young race of mammals, needed it to survive. Engaging in REM sleep, when humans dreamed, kept them healthy. And strong. And sane.
Strange, because dreams were driving him nuts.
Maybe living on Earth was making him less of an autobot. Or maybe Sam, when he occasionally fell asleep in the backseat, was making him more human.
*~*
“Why all the weird questions, Bee?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Having weird dreams, are you?”
“Autobots don’t dream.”
“Really? Not at all?”
Sam, a slick film of sweat covering his body, lips swollen, smiling enticingly.
“Not at all.”
“Not even nightmares?”
So cold it burns, a crash of thunder, can’t harm those Spark-be-damned apes.
“Not even nightmares.”
“Weird.”
“What do you dream about, Sam?”
“Oh, you mostly.”
"Sequel": Hora Somni
Fandom: Transformers
Characters: Bumblebee, Sam, three seconds of Ratchet and .05 seconds of Mikaela.
Pairings: BeexSam
Word Count: 968
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None really, mentions of yummy images.
Summary: Before Sam, there were no dreams.
Author's Notes: I kinda threw this together at the last second in a desperate need to post something (because I said I'd post after I saw the movie a second time, which I did yesterday), so it's not organized very well and it didn't turn out quite like I wanted. I really like the end, though. The title, loosely translated, means 'a sick man's dreams'. (Horray for wikipedia in aiding me with a random title!)
Before Sam, there were no dreams.
In all of his years (and there were a lot of them), he couldn’t think of (and he never forgot anything) a single instance when he dreamed. Before, there were only hazy moments of inactivity between fighting, fleeing, and hating during Optimus and Megatron’s war. He never really thought of it as his war, though that is what motivated him and consumed most of his time. It was Optimus that was obsessed (definitely obsessed) with finding the Allspark and defeating Megatron. He followed Optimus loyally, but fighting a war wasn’t really existing - just drifting.
And for thousands of years, that was life.
So there was no dreaming. Just ‘sleeping,’ if you could call it that. Typically, when sleeping, one gets rest - but he never felt well rested. Like something was missing from his inner workings, a chunk of his Spark missing. Maybe it had always been gone.
Then he met Sam.
The boy’s grip on his steering wheel sent a bizarre jolt down the steering column and into the rest of his body. Something strange and enticing and not like anything from Cybertron. Suddenly what he was doing (sitting in a trashy used car lot) was more than just a mission - it was of desperate personal (personal, that was a no-no word when you were a soldier) importance and need. The boy would definitely leave with him (even if he blew out a few car windows in the process).
That first night (that very night) the dreams started.
He saw Cybertron at its peak - no war, no angry Megatron or heart-broken Optimus. Just beauty that could only be achieved with good and pure mechanized society. When he awoke, he was startled and confused - this was not Cybertron. It was a boy’s driveway on a planet thousands of miles away from Cybertron. There were no sparkling electric cities or the familiar faces of friends. It left him devastated and wondering why his brain (something always in his control) would be cruel enough to show him these sights and sounds that he couldn’t actually touch and feel? An imitation of reality with no purpose - that’s what the images were and it frustrated him to know that there was nothing he could do with something he didn’t understand.
For once, he was grateful for the rapid pace of battle. It kept him focused and wouldn’t allow him to think too much. Think about how he resented Sam’s diverted attention whenever Mikaela walked by or his fascination with autobots that were not he. Instead he protected Sam with a vicious rigor that no one could understand (least of all himself) to prove without thinking that he was the most important.
Before Sam, there were no nightmares.
But after he was captured and tortured mercilessly by the young fleshlings called human beings, he dreamt (he had to relent and call the images something other than images; and so they were the strange human word ‘dreams’) of the cruel burn of frost and electricity. He was weak by no means - but all transformers had a weakness to ice and lightning, and the pain was immeasurable by any human standard. And it only took Sam a few words to convince him to not kill everything, every fragile fleshy thing, in sight. Just a few words. But the pain stayed with him, and he learned the difference between dreams and nightmares.
He has both of them now, dreams and nightmares.
Mostly dreams, though. Mostly dreams that he shouldn’t be having. Then again, he shouldn’t be having dreams at all. But what he dreams of shouldn’t exist at all. It’s not like how his earlier dreams were - scattered memories he’d rather forget but secretly enjoy - but fantasies of a world with just him and Sam. Sam curled up inside his leather interior, Sam perched on his shoulder at the overlook, Sam laughing and leaning on the hood and grinning at jealous eyes. Sam, Sam, Sam. Fantasies of Sam. He knows how humans look in times of passion (head thrown back, lips parted, thank god for the internet) but he could never find the strength to spy on Sam during something so intimate - but he knows through endless processing exactly what it would look like, and these carefully sculptured fancies edge their ways into his dreams.
Dreams.
He asked Rachet about dreams, but he just couldn’t get the concept through to the other bot: “Images that play when you’re inactive? Like going through memory?” He tried to explain that yes sometimes they were memories, but no they were something not real, made up. Rachet just stared blankly and asked if he had a loose circuit.
He asked Sam what dreams were. But Sam himself really didn’t know: “I dunno. I think it’s just the brain’s dumping ground at the end of the day. But we need it to, like, survive.” When he asked Sam to elaborate further, he just shrugged and said he read it somewhere.
Need it to survive.
Autobots don’t dream. They aren’t meant to dream. But humans, the young race of mammals, needed it to survive. Engaging in REM sleep, when humans dreamed, kept them healthy. And strong. And sane.
Strange, because dreams were driving him nuts.
Maybe living on Earth was making him less of an autobot. Or maybe Sam, when he occasionally fell asleep in the backseat, was making him more human.
*~*
“Why all the weird questions, Bee?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Having weird dreams, are you?”
“Autobots don’t dream.”
“Really? Not at all?”
Sam, a slick film of sweat covering his body, lips swollen, smiling enticingly.
“Not at all.”
“Not even nightmares?”
So cold it burns, a crash of thunder, can’t harm those Spark-be-damned apes.
“Not even nightmares.”
“Weird.”
“What do you dream about, Sam?”
“Oh, you mostly.”
"Sequel": Hora Somni