Author's Notes: Lancelot_luv05, Lyric, Logosh, and Swipeatronspark, thank you guys so much for bouncing around ideas with me, answering my stupid questions, reading through my drafts, and teaching me more about Transformers than I ever thought I'd need to know! It's always kind of scary to step into a new fandom, but you guys have definitely helped to ease the transition for me. Thanks also to my long-suffering husband, who hates Transformers, but doesn't tease me (too much) when I disappear into my office to write about them.

In the Wake, prologue

When Sam called his house, the answering machine picked up. That threw him, for a second. It was one thing to tell your parents that you'd fucked up over the phone; it was another thing to do it in an answering machine message. Still, one lesson Sam had learned as a child was to get to his parents first when he got in trouble. Any minute now, his resident director would be making her own call to his parents. Sam wanted them to hear his side first.

"Hi, Mom. Dad."

That was the easy part. Sam racked his brain, but he couldn't think of a way to make the next part any better. He decided an appeal for mercy wouldn't hurt.

"You aren't going to want to hear this," he said, "but please don't kill me. I made a mistake. I know that. Murder is really overrated, though. I . . . I got kicked out of school. Out of the dorms, at least. And I'm failing all of my classes, so I guess it's pretty much the same thing."

Sam heard the hysterical note in his voice before he felt it, and he closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. When he opened them, the gleam of sunlight on sharp metal limbs flashed in his peripheral vision, and he turned his head in time to see something resembling a mechanical spider sidle into his closet.

It's not real, Sam reminded himself, and he made himself keep talking. As long as he was talking, he wouldn't be tempted to do anything stupid, like scream.

"They're giving me twenty-four hours to pack my stuff and get out," he said. "I'm not sure what to do. I was hoping you guys could maybe pay for a bus ride home. I know it's really shitty to be asking for money right now, but, well, I'm broke, and I just --"

A metallic noise came over the line, like a knife-edge of static, interrupting him. Sam tapped his cell phone against his palm, wondering if he didn't have a good enough signal. The reception in the dorms sucked at the best of times. But then the static cleared, and the last voice in the world that Sam was expecting to hear spoke to him.

"Sam."

"B -- Bumblebee?" Sam's knees gave out, and he sank onto the edge of his mattress. "What are you -- how did you get on the line?" Even as Sam's head swam with confusion, he felt his heart lifting a little. For the first time since the dorm hearing that morning, he didn't feel quite so alone.

"That's not important now," Bumblebee said. His voice was calm where Sam's was panicked, and despite his fear and confusion, Sam felt himself starting to breathe easier. "We need to get you out of your dormitory," Bumblebee continued. "Can you pack your things tonight?"

"Yeah," Sam said. "I didn't bring much."

"I'll be there tomorrow morning," Bumblebee said. "Be ready to go."

"But you're on the other side of the country!" Sam protested. "How can you be here by --"

"I'll be there," Bumblebee said, interrupting him, and then the line clicked dead. Sam wondered if the Autobot was already speeding down the freeway towards him. The thought comforted him more than he thought possible.

"All right, pack," he muttered, glancing around his messy dorm room. "I can do that."

* * *

Once he'd brought Optimus Prime back to life and helped to stop the Deceptions from blowing up the sun, Sam had thought his life could get back to normal. The seed of the All Spark nested in Sam had gone all but dormant, leaving him with only a dorm room covered in alien symbols and a disturbingly photographic memory of his astronomy textbook to show for it. Granted, Sam wasn't entirely sure how "normal" his life could be with the Autobots in it, but wasn't college the perfect opportunity to find out?

Sam still felt bad about turning his back on Optimus Prime and Bumblebee when they'd needed him, but he'd done his best to make it up to them. The next time they came asking for his help, he'd be there. He'd decided that much at least. Until then, Sam's reasons for going away to college seemed more valid than ever. He needed a chance to step away from his life and examine it at a distance, to find out how much of him was left once you took away his amazing transforming Camaro. He'd been the boy who knew the Autobots for so long that he'd forgotten how it felt to just be himself. He wanted to remind himself what normal felt like.

All in all, Sam had only missed a few weeks of school, but he'd been dismayed to discover how much more school his college professors could cram into those two weeks than his high school teachers had. He'd coasted through high school with a B average, and had naively assumed that college would be the same way. But after missing two weeks of the quarter, Sam had needed to work his ass off just to pass all of his classes. No matter how many times he tried, he couldn't repeat his trick with the astronomy textbook, so he'd had to do all of his reading the hard way. In a way, it had been a blessing. His long hours in the library had saved him from some of Leo's constant questions about the Autobots, at least, and it gave him an excuse to avoid the frat parties everyone kept trying to drag him to. Sam wasn't sure if he'd reached normal yet, but his life seemed to be inching towards it.

By the time Christmas break came around, Sam had honestly looked forward to going home. It had been great to see Mikaela again, and to Sam's surprise, Bumblebee had slipped away from the other Autobots to spend the break with him. Sam hadn't even realized how much he'd missed his friend until he searched for his parents' car in the airport parking lot and spotted the yellow Camaro there instead.

"I thought you'd be on the base!" Sam had exclaimed, sliding into the driver's seat.

"Baby, what a big surprise!" Bee played, and Sam burst out laughing, wrapping an arm around the passenger seat to pat it, the closest he could come to giving his car a manly hug.

Even Sam's parents seemed less annoying than they were in high school. His dad ceremoniously offered Sam a beer at dinner, and they didn't put up more than a token protest when he spent the night at Mikaila's house.

Christmas break gave Sam hope that a normal life might be able to include Bumblebee, and Mikaila, and maybe even his parents. He'd gone back to school feeling confidant that everything would work out for the best.

Then the nightmares started.

* * *

Sam never used to think much about the process of falling asleep. Turn off the lights and climb into bed. An idiot could do it. In high school, Sam had been an quite accomplished sleeper -- Bumblebee certainly used to complain about his habit of sleeping in until noon on Saturday mornings. But the nightmares made falling asleep feel something like stepping off a cliff and into a lake of molten lava, and even though Sam didn't have much of a sense of self-preservation (he had, after all, been stupid enough to take on Megatron), some part of him must have known better than to take that step. No matter how much he tossed and turned in bed, he couldn't drift to sleep for more than a few minutes before he heard the sharp, fast click of Scalpel's feet on the floor and woke up gasping, his mind jolting him awake before the Decepticon could slide into Sam's nose and make him relive that certain, horrifying certainty that he was seconds away from saying goodbye to his brain.

Last week, Leo had accused Sam of taking things for granted. He'd been talking about Mikaila at the time. While Sam maintained that Leo didn't know what he was talking about when it came to Mikaila, he did have to admit that his roommate had a point. Sam had certainly been taking sleep for granted all these years. Why hadn't someone told him that sleep was precious? That one day, sleep would just abandon him?

At first, Sam thought it was an even trade-off. No sleep, no nightmares. Sure, it sucked being tired all the time, but that's what coffee was for, and besides, this was college. Everyone was stumbling through their classes in a daze. After a few weeks, he didn't even mind the exhaustion anymore. He'd grown used to it, like a pair of pinching shoes that he'd finally managed to break in. To his surprise, there were even some perks to it. Bee had told him once, with an air of incredulity, that the average human spent a third of his life sleeping. Sam believed it. Now that he wasn't sleeping anymore, Sam found time to do hundreds of things he'd never managed before. He finished his homework every night, and started looking ahead in his syllabi to work on assignments before his professors assigned them. He downloaded TV shows from the internet and finished whole seasons in a week. He wrote snail mail letters to his parents, to Mikaela, even to Bee. He learned how to solve a Rubik's cube. He even helped Leo mail off those stupid kitten calendars.

He hated it.

What Bumblebee didn't realize was that humans spent a third of their lives sleeping so they could spend the other two-thirds awake. Sometimes, Sam felt tempted to explain that in one of his letters, but he held off, knowing that Bee would only worry about him if he realized that Sam no longer slept or woke, but now spent his whole life Not-Sleeping. Not-Sleeping wasn't the same as being awake. If being awake were a sunny field, then Not-Sleeping was a foggy forest full of quicksand, with vines snaking around Sam's feet and giant spiders dropping onto him from the branches.

Sam had only been Not-Sleeping for about a month when the nightmares found a way to follow him. It started innocently enough. He'd start to nod off in class and hear the click-click-click of Scalpel's feet before Sam jerked awake and realized he was only hearing his professor's yardstick tapping against the chalk board. He'd open a textbook and see a mess of alien symbols before he blinked and the print resolved itself. But the more Sam tried to push the nightmares away, the more insistent they got. Through the corners of his eyes, he started to glimpse Scalpel scuttling into Sam's pile of dirty laundry or waving his sharp legs from behind a telephone pole.

Once the Decepticon got bold enough to lower himself down over a professor's lectern on a silver wire, just like the spider he resembled. Sam had spent the next hour of his political science class trying not to hyperventilate while Scalpel hung above the professor's head, sharpening his knife-like forceps to a gleaming edge. Sam escaped the lecture hall during the five-minute break the professor gave the class, and skipped the rest of lecture to call Bee.

"What is it, Sam?" Bumblebee had asked, without even saying hello. For a frantic moment, Sam wondered if the Decepticons were acting up again and Bumblebee had somehow guessed that Sam might be in danger. Then he realized that, of course, Bee knew he was supposed to be in class right now.

In the most nonchalant voice he could manage, Sam said, "Hey. Um . . . I know this sounds kind of stupid, but Scalpel's dead, right?"

"Optimus Prime destroyed him when we rescued you," Bumblebee said, and Sam ran his fingers through his hair.

"That's what I thought. But . . . he's dead, dead, right? The Decepticons can't rebuild him?"

"His spark chamber was destroyed in the cannon blast, Sam. There's no way he could be rebuilt."

"Okay. Good."

"Sam, is everything all right?" Bee asked, sounding worried.

"I had kind of a long night," Sam said. "Leo dragged me to another frat party. I guess I drifted off in class and had a nightmare."

Sam held his breath for a moment, worrying that Bumblebee had some kind of a built-in lie detector that could sense his bullshit even over the phone. But Bee accepted his excuse and let him go, with nothing more than a reminder that humans needed at least eight hours of sleep a night to function at optimum level.

You're telling me, Sam thought, hanging up the phone. It had taken everything he had not to tell Bee that he couldn't even remember what sleep felt like. But it wasn't like Bumblebee could level Sam's insomnia as efficiently as he'd dealt with the monstrosities that the All Spark shard had created in Sam's kitchen. Bumblebee would only worry if he knew that Sam was starting to see things. Everyone would worry.

So Bee didn't know. Mikaela didn't know. His parents didn't know, thank God, or else his mom would have shown up at the dorms to do something horribly embarrassing, like make Sam warm milk or rock him to sleep in front of all of Leo's friends. Sam thought he'd even managed to keep Leo in the dark. He climbed into bed every night, like usual, and didn't bother getting up until his roommate started snoring. Fortunately, Leo was a heavy sleeper, and after a few nights of practice, Sam had learned how to navigate their dorm room in the dark.

A couple of Google searches reassured Sam that hallucinations were a natural side effect of insomnia. The next time he spotted Scalpel peeking out at Sam from behind his stereo, he tried to ignore him. But Sam's nerves were already strung out from a month of Not-Sleeping, and having an imaginary Decepticon following him around didn't help.

Things that Sam wouldn't have blinked at a month ago started spinning him into a rage. He practically bit Leo's head off when his roommate dropped a sweater on Sam's half of the room. When some rugby player cut in front of Sam in the dining hall lunch line, he'd thrown the guy against a wall, before his brain caught up to warn him that the jock was a hell of a lot bigger than Sam. After he'd recovered from the shock, the rugby player had been very quick to remind him. Sam's RD gave him his first official write-up for the fight that followed, and he had to spend the next few weeks ducking out of web-cam dates with Mikaila so that she wouldn't see his black eye.

Sam promised himself he'd cool down, after that. But it kept happening. He started cutting his phone calls short so that he wouldn't say anything stupid to his parents or Mikaela.

Sometimes, Sam caught himself zoning off in the middle of whatever he was doing. He'd look up from his dinner tray and realize that an hour had passed while he'd been staring at the wall. The other guys in the hall became convinced that Sam was taking something, and got testy when he wouldn't share. Sam started forgetting little things like homework and big things like web-cam dates with Mikaila.

The second time that happened, Sam came back to his dorm room to find his very pissed-off girlfriend bitching to his entirely too sympathetic roommate, on Sam's computer no less. In the argument that followed, Leo pulled out that line about Sam taking Mikaila for granted, and Sam snapped back that Leo was a fucking idiot who needed to mind his own business. Sam had stalked out of the dorm room, and sheepishly returned five minutes later, when he remembered that he'd left Mikaila online, waiting for him. She'd logged off by then.

A few days later, the long-distance relationship kit he'd made her showed up in the mail, along with the sweater Mikaila had borrowed and never returned, and the bracelet he'd given her for their one-year anniversary. Sam called to talk her out of breaking up with him again, but she wasn't taking his phone calls.

Looking back, Sam realized that Leo wasn't really to blame for Mikaela's breaking up with him, but when his roommate had come into the room and whistled at the break-up package on Sam's desk, Sam just snapped. His hands were around Leo's neck before he'd realized he'd moved, and if the tech guys hanging out in Leo's room hadn't heard the scuffle, Sam honestly wasn't sure what might have happened.

That's how Sam found himself in the RD's office one morning, learning that he'd earned himself a one-way ticket out of the residence halls.

* * *

"I'm coming in, don't kill me!" Leo yelled from the hallway.

Sam sighed, and looked up from the box he'd been packing. Leo edged into the room and sat down on his desk chair, eyeing Sam like he were a ticking bomb. Sam supposed he couldn't blame him. Really, he was lucky that Leo didn't want to press charges. In fact, once they'd both calmed down, Leo hadn't even seemed all that mad at him. Instead, he just seemed kind of befuddled.

"So you're leaving, huh?" Leo asked, taking in the boxes scattered on Sam's half of the room.

Sam nodded, trying to decide if his textbooks should go in the "keep" or "donate" pile. After a second, he tossed them into the latter.

"What did your parents say?" Leo asked.

"I didn't talk to them," Sam said. "Bumblebee answered the phone. He's coming to get me."

"Well, that's good," Leo said. "It's not like they can kill you with a giant robot around, right?"

Sam choked out something that wasn't quite a laugh, and rested his face on his hands.

After a second, Leo said, awkwardly, "Sam, I just want you to know that I don't have any hard feelings. Something's going on with you. I don't know what it is, but I just hope you get it figured out, man."

"Thanks," Sam said, unable to meet his roommate's eyes.

They sat in embarrassed silence for a few minutes, until Leo nudged Sam's Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar with the toe of his sneaker.

"Are you keeping that?" he asked.

Sam ended up giving the calendar to Leo. He figured it was the least he could do.

* * *

The next morning, Sam was sitting on the steps of his building, surrounded by boxes and duffle bags, when Bumblebee pulled up to the curb.

"Bee!" Sam exclaimed. He lunged off the steps, and was seconds away from hugging his car before he realized how ridiculous it would look. Instead he stroked Bumblebee's hood, blinking back an embarrassing onslaught of tears. "I am so glad to see you," he said.

The holographic driver in the cab, a young woman with a ponytail, managed a realistic-looking enough smile, but Bumblebee didn't bother to speak through her. Instead, the radio clicked on.

Just call on me brother, when you need a hand

We all need somebody to lean on . . .

"Well, I owe you," Sam said huskily. He glanced at the pile of boxes on the front steps. "Could you pop the trunk?" he asked.

Bumblebee did, and Sam busied himself with trying to cram the contents of his dorm room into it while "Lean on Me" played on. Bee's holoform got out to help him, much to Sam's relief. His muscles ached from hauling everything down the stairs to start with. When they stowed the last box inside the trunk, the holoform faded away, and the driver's door popped open for him. Sam slid inside. He'd barely closed the door behind him when Bumblebee started up and pealed out of the parking lot. Sam spared one glance back for the college that should have been his future, then he sighed and leaned back in the driver's seat, not even bothering to rest his hands on the steering wheel.

"Let's go home, Bee."

Author's Notes: Thank you so much for reading! Any comments or constructive criticism you have are always appreciated.