Kiruya's Author Note: Hello all. With Raining Ink's permission I am posting the story they wrote called "A New Beginning" as a prologue chapter to my story "A Journey in the Dark" so you can enjoy her fic and understand where mine is coming from. You can find Raining Ink's profile here: .net/u/1944343/Raining_Ink and their story here if you'd like to comment directly to Raining Ink: .net/s/6020460/1/A_New_Beginning

IMPORTANT: I have developed a truly embarrassing degree of obsession with Transformers fan fiction lately. Unfortunately, there are not nearly enough Sam-centric stories out there to satisfy my craving. With that in mind, I have got to get this little piece out of my head. It's a complete one-shot, but it would also work quite well as the prologue/ first chapter of a multi-chapter fic. I will not be writing said fic. Consider this a challenge to anyone out there who has at least seen the movies to continue the story. Take this piece, and use it as a jumping off point for your own work! Just give me a heads up to let me know, so I can read it. See challenge details at end.

A New Beginning

[] Sixty Years after Egypt []

I had known this day would come. Six decades is a long time, almost a lifetime for the average person, and though I had tried to forget, tried to force the inevitable to the back of my mind, I had never quite been able to escape from the truth. Mikaela, my wife, had grown old, gotten sick, and she had died. She was seventy-nine years old, and I had known it was coming; but that didn't spare me from the pain of the reality. As I sat by her bedside in the room we had shared for so many years, my grief was overshadowed only by my guilt. Mikaela had not had the life she had wanted, no matter what she said, and it was all my fault.

Sixty years ago, a boy named Sam Witwicky died to save the leader of an alien race from death, but he didn't stay dead. Sam was given another chance, a chance no human had ever had before. He was touched, blessed, fated; he was beloved by some of the noblest beings in the universe. It was the chance of a lifetime, the chance to change the world. I am Sam, and I'm very much afraid that I have wasted my second life. The Primes should have resurrected someone else. I've screwed things up royally so far.

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My story starts with fear. Terrible, gut-churning, mind blotting fear. It is the kind of emotion that settles into your bones, into the darkest parts of your heart, and no matter how hard you fight it, you can't win. The fear becomes a part of you, and it's very hard to fight against yourself. After the events in Egypt, things were great for awhile. Life settled down. I went for long drives with Bumblebee, took a few college classes, and got drunk at a wild party or two. The most massive government orchestrated cover-up in the history of human civilization managed to convince most of humanity that the giant alien robots they had seen on TV were part of an elaborate terrorist hoax. (My roommate, Leo, was outraged when they wiped all the footage from his website.) All in all, things were looking up, and one day, not long after everything had calmed down just a little, I asked Mikaela to marry me. She said yes.

We had a small ceremony at the Lookout. An indoor wedding was kind of out of the question considering some of the people on our guest list; Mikaela's dad, out on parole, couldn't figure out why we wanted to have a lot of cars parked so nearby. I think he worried that his daughter had gotten a little too far into the whole grease monkey persona. That was pretty much the best time of my life. Too bad it was so short-lived. Mikaela and I were crazy in love like only newlyweds can be, and I was spending every day in a more or less constant state of euphoria at my good luck, but then the Decepticons decided to rain on our parade.

It wasn't much of a battle compared to some of the others I had been in. Barricade and the Seekers made an appearance one day just after our honeymoon while Mikaela and I were out for a drive with Bumblebee. Optimus and Ironhide weren't far away. Mikaela and I ran for cover while Bee held the 'cons off until help arrived. The Decepticons had been looking for easy pickings, not a full-blown battle, and they disappeared when Optimus showed up. The fight was short, but somehow Mikalea got hurt. Debris, probably from a canon blast impacting one of the 'cons, had torn through her shoulder like a knife cleaving soft butter. I held her to me all of the long ride to get to Ratchet. Her screams rang in my ears the whole way, and by the time we got to the medic I was covered in her blood. After a few weeks, Mikaela was fine except for soreness and some extensive scarring. I wasn't fine. Seeing my wife like that had let the fear in, and the need to cut ties with my life and start over, somewhere safer where she wouldn't be hurt, began to override even my love for my Autobot friends.

I didn't want to be a hero anymore. I didn't want the responsibility when it came with so much heartache and pain. I wanted normal, ordinary, unspectacular. I wanted a house with a dog and some kids, and I didn't want to wake up one morning to find that my family had been murdered in the night by a vengeful alien robot. Mikaela argued with me, but eventually she agreed to leave and set out for a new life away from the dangers of the Cybertronians' war. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings. Once I convinced Bumblebee and Optimus that it was what I truly wanted, the Autobots did everything in their power to help me get away from them, though I know it hurt them deeply to do so. Records were wiped and changed, a large sum of cash was delivered to me in two suitcases, we were given fake identifications, and even government databases no longer recorded the existence of Sam and Mikaela Witwicky.

On a prearranged date, Mikaela and I got in a new car (one an almost tearful Bumblebee had picked based on safety ratings) and drove away. And we drove and drove and drove…out of the United States up into Canada and then to a small town in the middle of nowhere. We passed a cozy-looking house, just right for two, with a FOR SALE sign out front. It was surrounded by woods, a couple of miles away from the little town. Mikaela's eyes brightened at the sight of it. "That looks like a nice place," she said wistfully.

I paid for it in cash the next day. We tipped the realtor heavily to fill out the paperwork with fabricated contact information. It was supposed to be a temporary place. We were just going to stay there a couple of years until news of our disappearance quieted down and we could figure out what to do with ourselves. We ended up staying for six decades. The Autobots didn't know where we were; they had agreed not to track us, to erase knowledge of our whereabouts from their processors, and they had promised to prevent our enemies and our government from becoming aware of our disappearance until it was much too late to do anything about it.

The first few years were wonderful, almost magical. After all we had been through together, Mikaela and I were strong enough to weather the disagreements and difficulties that all marriages are prone to in the early years. We loved each other more and more each day, and even though we both missed our old life on occasion, we never talked about it. We started trying for a baby. I felt much too young to be a father, but Mikaela only laughed. "You'll get used to the idea, Sam," she said. I did. Before long I was almost giddy with excitement at the prospect of having a child, someone to care for that was a part of both of us. But a year passed and then another, and Mikaela didn't get pregnant.

Mikaela went to see a specialist, and they ran about a million tests. To our relief, nothing was wrong with her. I went to see a specialist, only I never actually made it in to talk to the doctor. I remember it as though it happened yesterday. All of my surroundings were the sterile, blinding white that I associate with hospitals. A plump nurse who spoke strongly accented English took me to a back room to do some preliminary blood work. The room smelled strongly of alcohol and bleach. She told me to roll up my sleeve, and then she pressed the needle against the flesh of my inner arm. It bent. The needle touched my skin, she pressed, then she pressed harder, and then the needle bent as though she had been trying to shove it into an iron bar instead of the tender skin over my veins. I stared at the nurse; the nurse stared at me. Neither of us said anything for several long seconds. "It must be a bad needle, sir," she said at last. She smiled. "Just let me grab another."

The nurse was flustered; it took her longer than it should have to get the next needle. Her confusion gave me enough time to come to my senses. I wasn't sure what had just happened, but I was almost positive that if she tried to stick another needle in my arm and it bent too, I wouldn't be able to explain it away. I shoved down my sleeve and stood up so hastily that I knocked over the little box of alcohol wipes on the table. "Sorry," I said. "I've got to go. Family emergency."

I walked back to the waiting room, grabbed a startled Mikaela by the arm, and then I ran out of the Doctor's office as though I were being chased by Megatron himself. I explained what had happened as we drove back to our house. It took Mikaela more than an hour to help me calm down. When we got home, we did a little experimenting in the kitchen.

"Press it harder," I urged her frantically. Mikaela held the steak knife against my arm with an expression of intense concentration.

"I don't want to hurt you, Sam," she said.

"But that's the whole point!" I argued. I looked to her, and I know she saw my silent pleas. Please cut me, I was begging. Prove that I bleed. Prove that I'm human. She pressed harder and harder, until her hands were shaking with the effort. After more than a minute, she dropped the knife and stared at my unmarked skin.

"Sam…" she began gently.

"No!" I said fiercely. "It's just a skin disorder or…or something. Ratchet scanned me a hundred times after Egypt, a thousand times. He said everything was normal!" This was true. The medic had done thorough scans of all of us, but he had focused on me in particular. I was free of Cube radiation, free of influence from the Matrix, free to live a normal human life. He had poked and prodded me with needles, and I had bled just like any other person.

"I think Ratchet missed something," she said calmly, and then she walked upstairs to the bathroom. I heard her turn on the shower, and she stayed in there for hours, long after the hot water ran out.

Things were different after that day; they were harder. Mikaela and I kept trying for children, but it was pretty clear that it wasn't going to happen for us. I tentatively suggested adoption or artificial insemination. She refused. She suggested we go back home to our old friends and pick up our old life. I refused.

"I just miss the feeling that I was making a difference," she said. "We did something really amazing once, Sam. Don't you remember?" I remembered, but I also remembered holding her broken body in my arms and fearing that I would lose her forever; and I was too afraid to take that risk again.

Mikaela started a small auto repair business in town. She did a fantastic job of course, and working with cars seemed to help her take her mind off things. When I wasn't hanging around the shop with her, I started taking courses by computer using my fake identity. That was when I started to notice other unusual side effects. Facts stuck in my head as though they had been super glued there. Mathematics became ridiculously simple, almost intuitive. My literature essays still sucked, but other than that, school had become much easier than I remembered it being before. When I watched Mikaela around the shop, I started to notice things about the machines she worked on. I had never had great skills as a mechanic, but suddenly I understood how all the parts ought to fit together.

Weeks turned into months, months into years, and seemingly before I had time to blink Mikaela was icing the cake for my 40th birthday. She was never really into those domestic tasks like baking; I actually did most of the cooking, but every year for our birthdays she insisted on making cakes. They usually tasted awful, but I loved them anyway. It was tradition. That year, however, everything fell apart.

We finished the cake and coffee, and after a short conversation about the shop and our plans for it, Mikaela sat down next to me on the couch and took my hand. "Sam, we need to discuss something," she said. She was rubbing small circles into my palm, a gesture of comfort that I didn't yet understand the need for.

"What about, bunny?" I shot her an impish grin. We still laughed about Trent's nickname for her sometimes.

She sighed. "Have you looked in the mirror lately?" she asked.

"I shaved this morning!" I protested. Mikaela had laughed herself silly the first time I tried to grow a beard. I'm just not one of those guys who's naturally hairy, and it didn't turn out well at all.

"No, Sam," she said in exasperation. "This isn't about the eight measly hairs you can grow on your chin. This is serious! Have you really not noticed?"

I stared at my wife, nonplussed. "I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary," I said. "Am I getting really hideous in my old age or something? You about to leave me for some hot young biker guy?"

She started rubbing the comforting circles into my palm again. "Sam," she said in a tightly controlled voice. "You're not getting any older."

"Alright, alright, I'll be serious," I said, smiling. I thought she was commenting on my maturity. "What did you want to tell me?"

She looked stricken. "No, Sam!" she said. "I was being serious! You are not getting any older."

I heard her, but I still didn't understand. "What?"

She grabbed my face between her hands and stared into my eyes. "Sam Witwicky," she said. "You are forty years old today. Forty! The same age as me. But you don't look a day over twenty-five. Sam, you're not aging. You're the same physically as you were fifteen years ago."

Something in my gut froze at her words. I hadn't seen. I hadn't known. The face I saw in the mirror every morning was my face; there wasn't any need to analyze its age. I looked just like I always had. Only that was the problem, wasn't it? I looked the same as I had for years…and Mikaela didn't. I studied my wife's face with a growing sense of dread. She was beautiful; she was my Mikaela. I hadn't noticed the faint lines around her eyes and her mouth, the lines that crinkled up when she smiled, but they were there all the same; and I knew, without needing to run check a mirror, that there were no lines on my own face.

"No," I whispered in denial. "No, this can't be right," I told her. "This isn't fair."

"It will be okay, Sam," she said.

"How will it be okay?" I asked, the panic I felt seeping into my voice. "How can this ever be okay?"

That was a dark period in my life. I began to check my face in the mirror almost obsessively. I wanted to see crow's feet, the beginning of wrinkles. Age spots would have been a blessing. But every morning I woke to the smooth face of a twenty-five year old, and the horror of it started to eat away at me. Twenty-five – the age at which the human brain becomes fully developed, the perfect age for whatever had taken hold of me to freeze my body in time. I would live to be all alone, to watch my wife grow old without me.

One morning I saw my reflection in the stainless steel toaster, and I couldn't take it anymore. All of the fear and anger at my situation that had been building inside me for months finally found an outlet. In an insane rage, I grabbed the toaster, fully intending to sling it to the floor and destroy it; but something else happened instead. All of the feelings that had been burning in my chest seemed to become a physical presence. Energy, a familiar energy I hadn't felt in years, leapt through my skin. The lights flickered crazily, and a spark of pure white energy leapt from my hands to the toaster. I dropped it back on the counter. Mikaela had jumped up from her seat at the kitchen table to calm me down, but we both froze to watch the toaster, which was vibrating so wildly it rattled the drying dishes from the previous night's supper.

"Sam?" said Mikaela in a worried tone, and even though I knew, on an intellectual level, what was happening, I still wasn't prepared when the toaster transformed.

Where the toaster had been, stood a trembling silver minibot protoform. I panicked. Thoughts of a killer Nokia cell phone filled my head, and I picked up the heavy iron skillet I usually used to scramble eggs in the morning and brought it crashing down on the bot. Once, twice, three times. "Sam, stop!" Mikaela screamed, and she pulled the pan out of my grip.

I looked down into the fading optics of the being I had created and killed in less than sixty seconds. The optics were a clear blue, and even as I watched, they flickered and died. "I killed it," I croaked. My mind couldn't encompass the truth. My anger had all been swept away only to be replaced with an all-consuming grief. "I killed it."

Mikaela was staring at me with wide eyes. "You didn't mean to," she said, but I could hear the grief in her voice as well. I looked at the dead bot until tears blurred my eyes, then I sank to the tile floor and wept.

I was terrified of electronics for weeks after that. It was pretty clear that the Allspark wasn't as gone as everyone had thought, and I didn't know what to do with the truth now that it was staring me in the face. The power to give life, the power to take it away. I never wanted this. I refused to touch even the coffeepot for a long time, afraid that it might spring to life. Eventually Mikaela reminded me that the toaster had been a gift, a wedding present from Wheeljack. "It lasted for twenty years," she pointed out. "And it's always looked a bit peculiar. He probably made it out of Cybertronian alloy or something. Maybe it was more sensitive to your…well, to you."

"So you think I can touch the fridge without it going all Decepticon on me?" I asked in a feeble attempt at humor. Neither of us ever mentioned what we both knew to be true; the toaster, with its innocent blue optics, had not been a Decepticon. I kept its remains in a shoebox in my dresser; I was pretty sure I would spend my whole life trying to fix it, even though I knew it wasn't just an appliance to be pieced back together again.

As the years passed, I learned something that the nearly immortal Autobots had never mentioned to me. When you yourself do not decay, the years become little more than numbers; and they move more swiftly than you can possibly imagine. It sometimes seemed as though I watched Mikaela age before my very eyes. Fifty, sixty, seventy…when we went into town together, she had to introduce me as her grandson. She thought it was hysterically funny; I felt like my heart was being ripped out of my chest.

After she became sick, she faded fairly quickly, as such things go, but that was the one time in our relationship that I felt dragged on agonizingly slowly. I begged her to go to the hospital, to a doctor. I even offered to take her to Ratchet, but she only chuckled wheezily. "No thanks, Sam," she said. "It's my time."

I moved a small table into our bedroom so that I could work on the dead toaster without being away from her. The toaster had become a long-term project, though I had known for many years that it was a lost cause. Whenever I was at a loss for something to do, I pulled out the toaster bot I had killed and worked on repairing it. It is almost an impossible thing to reassemble gears the size of grains of sand, but expiation is supposed to be nearly impossible in cases like this I'm sure.

On the night Mikaela died, she turned to look at me, and she smiled the smile I had fallen in love with so many years before. "I wish I could have seen them one last time," she murmured sleepily.

"Who?" I asked around the lump in my throat. I knew. Of course I knew. They should have been with us for everything; they were our dearest friends, but I had denied them the chance just like I had denied it to Mikaela.

"Bumblebee, Optimus, Ratchet," she whispered. "Ironhide. All of them."

"I'm sorry," I choked. "I'm so sorry, Mikalea. I was an idiot. We never should have left. I…"

She smiled again. "I love you, Sam," she said. "I always have. I have never regretted my choice to follow you out here."

I went to sit on the edge of her bed, and I leaned over to kiss her gently on the forehead. "I'll love you forever," I said. "Until the end of time."

"You'd better," she murmured. Her voice was growing fainter and fainter. "Listen, Sam," she said. "Promise me…"

"Anything."

"You'll go back to them," she said as firmly as she was able. "Go back to them. They need you as much as you need them. Don't give up on everything just because I'm gone. You've got to live."

"I will," I swore as tears began to stream down my cheeks.

"Do something great," she said. "Do something amazing." She sighed and turned her face away. "I think I need to rest for awhile," she said so quietly that I had to strain to hear her.

And then my wife of sixty years closed her eyes, and she died.

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My grief was like a hole in my chest, not emptiness but a presence that was ripping me apart from the inside. I don't know how long I sat by her side and cried, but I know it was hours. I decided to bury her in the back yard. Maybe it was untraditional, but it was beautiful in summer, and Mikaela wouldn't have cared either way. I carried the mangled toaster bot with me to bear silent witness to the funeral. It was good to dig, to lose myself in a physical task. As I sweated in the sun, my grief seemed to be forced from my body by happier memories. Mikaela and I had spent so many wonderful hours here, and love for her began to swell within me. It was a heartbreaking moment when I gently lowered her body, so light with age and sickness, into the grave; but there was also something peaceful about it. I had felt a certain peace in the presence of the Primes when I myself had died, perhaps Mikaela was in that same place now? She wasn't Cybertronian, but I could hope.

Hours later, as I stood up to head back inside, I realized that something had changed. The toaster bot…was standing up on spindly silver legs, peeking cautiously at me over the side of the shoebox I kept it in. I hadn't felt any release of energy from myself, so I couldn't understand how this could be possible. Perhaps when I had been digging the grave…?

I approached the tiny bot cautiously, not wanting to frighten it. The Canadian government definitely wouldn't appreciate this little addition to their native wildlife if it decided to take off into the woods. "Hi," I said.

It cowered down in the box, trembling. I flinched. Clearly it remembered it's death by frying pan all those years ago. "My name," I said, then, remembering the lingo from decades before I changed it to, "My designation is Sam." I hoped the bot had a decent processor on its shoulders, and that it had accessed the net to pick up some English. Some of the minibots didn't seem very bright. The smart-mouthed (and creepy) Wheelie had been the exception rather than the rule.

"I'm really sorry about before," I said. Sorry I mercilessly slaughtered you right after you were born…yeah, way to make him feel better, Sam. "I was surprised and frightened."

The toaster bot didn't say anything, and I began to think that maybe it didn't speak English after all. I was just about to reach down to pick it up anyway when something flashed across my vision. I looked to the side, confused. Had something flown by? A…psycho glowing bird maybe? I blinked, and then the something flashed across my vision again. It was faster than thought, but somehow my brain caught it this time, and it was like I was seeing it in slow motion. Two glyphs, two Cybertronian words. Was my former toaster somehow sending me a message? Just as I opened my mouth to tell it I didn't speak Cybertronian, I realized that I did understand the glyphs. I shouldn't. I never had before. But, as the two words flashed across my vision again, I found that they were completely understandable.

Designation: Spindle.

I blinked in astonishment at the toaster bot. Spindle. I could read Cybertronian? That was…well, kind of cool actually, especially compared to everything else. Being indestructible and apparently immortal was painful for me emotionally; being able to understand alien, however, spoke to my deep inner geek. Leo, if he had been the teenager I remembered instead of the decrepit old man he likely was, would have been so jealous.

"It's nice to meet you, Spindle," I said. (Lame, right? But what else was I supposed to say?)

Another glyph. Intentions?

"Well, right now I'm going to go pack my things," I answered. "I've got a long drive in the morning. I'll be heading toward some more of your kind, and I think you should probably come with me."

The bot clambered cautiously out of the box, and blinked up at me. Purpose?

I wasn't quite sure what the bot was asking. "Errr…" I said. "They're old friends of mine, called the Autobots. They probably think I'm dead to be honest. I know I can find them though, and they've got a medic, Ratchet, he can fix your vocal processors. That's why you're not talking out loud right?" I didn't know how I was going to find the Autobots; no doubt they'd moved to a new base in the past few decades. Nevertheless, I felt a sort of internal pull in myself when I thought of them, and I had a distinct impression that Optimus Prime was toward the south. Where he was, the others were sure to be, and somehow I didn't think it was going to be at all difficult to find them.

Spindle shot me a look that was probably a glare, and a lot of glyphs flashed through my mind in rapid succession. The translation into English isn't perfect, but it was something along the lines of: Of course my vocal processors are malfunctioning. Upon my sparking I was smashed repeatedly in the head with a blunt object, you cretin. This Ratchet of yours had better be able to repair me.

"I really am sorry about that," I said. "Don't worry, though. Ratchet can totally fix anything." I winced as I remembered the medic's bedside manner. I had a feeling that as soon as I showed up, looking twenty-five years old and in perfect health, I would be subjected to the most thorough battery of tests Cybertronian medicine could devise.

Spindle, who had been analyzing the freshly turned earth of Mikalea's grave with an expression of great interest, spoke again. Your sparkmate has permanently offlined?

"Yes," I said, feeling pain wash through me anew.

You carry the Allspark? You cannot online her?

I shook my head. "I don't think it works like that for humans," I said. "I'm pretty sure we…well, they…only get one shot at it."

I will travel with you. It is not good for a torn spark to be alone.

"Thanks," I told the bot. I bent down and held out my hand to it. The spidery little bot clambered up my sleeve, much heavier than it looked, and clung to my shoulder. "I could really use some company for the trip."

The End (or is it?)

The Challenge: Feel free to use this chapter as a starting point for your own fics! If you don't think it feels complete enough, take a stab at writing the next chapter. My only request is that you credit me for this chapter, and that you PM me so I'll know to read your fic. I really hope some of you will give it a shot, because I'd love to see where this story goes from here. Take it anywhere you want. This is as far as the plot goes in my head.

By the way, what did you think of it?

PS – Don't worry Out of the Night fans! I'm still working on the next chapter of that!

Kiruya's Author Note: The following chapters will be my continuation of the above.