No Regrets

"Fifty years from now, when you're looking back on your life, don't you want to be able to say you had the guts to get in the car?"

"Sorry we can't do this more publically," Secretary of Defense Keller said, looking at the mismatched collection of people in front of him: they were all formally dressed, but had little in common beyond that.

"Actually, I think that's the only reason I'm not hyperventilating," Sam said, nervously fiddling with his tie, earning several snickers. Mikaela, who was holding his other hand, squeezed it, giving silent support.

Keller chuckled. "Whether you're nervous or not, you deserve what you've earned, Sam. Everyone here does, but you especially. We're proud of you."

Sam was looking distinctly green. "I don't think that's helping, sir—er, Mr. Secretary. Risking my life to save the world—sure, fine, whatever. But being on stage, in front of people…! I threw up in the wings when my eight-grade class put on a play. And all I had to do was run across the stage!"

Maggie, trying to hold back laughter, couldn't keep but let out a loud, unladylike snort. She dissolved into helpless giggles.

"You'll do fine, Sam," said William Lennox confidently, laying a hand on his shoulder. "After Mission City—I'd believe you're capable of almost anything."

"Thank you," Sam said, not quite able to muster a smile but looking slightly more relaxed.

"I think you'll do great, too," Mikaela said, pressing against him and smiling. "A kiss for good luck?"

"I… Could do that, yeah—"

They were interrupted a second later. "Excuse me," Keller said dryly; the two teens jumped apart, mortified. "I've just been informed that, ah, Bumblebee, yes, Bumblebee—security seems to have trouble with using actual names for the Autobots—didn't show up at the secure location we've arranged for this meeting, but here instead. He wants to drive you two there."

Sam visibly perked up. "Great!" He was echoed by Mikaela, clearly just as happily surprised.

"Good for you, maybe, but it's putting my security staff on edge."

"Oh. Sorry about that—"

"Oh, don't worry too much. They'll need to learn how to deal with it eventually." He paused. "Well, what are you waiting for? Go on and meet with him!"

"So, what's it like being a high school graduate?" Judy asked her son, beaming at him. He was driving—or Bee was; Judy wasn't sure—them home from the ceremony, his diploma in her lap.

"Kind of a non-event," he said honestly. "It's just… It's not Mission City, right? Or the Autobots. It doesn't say much about me. Or what I'm capable of—it's not some big sign that I'm all grown up now…"

Judy smiled, a little sad, and shook her head. He'd grown up, her baby boy—diploma or not.

"—But it does mean I don't have to go to school anymore! Well, college, but that's different."

She couldn't help but laugh. Grown up or not, he was still her Sam. Her son.

"So what happens next?" Sam asked, flopping down onto their bed.

"Sam, I don't want to think about anything that's not graduating until the end of the month."

"Mikaela! We're done with school in forty days—thirty-nine, now! And what then?"

"We take the diplomatic position the government offers us, move as close to the Autobot base as we can and start working. We're not exactly being cast adrift in the shoreless seas of unemployment, here."

"But—"

"Bee! Back me up here!"

"Relax! Take it easy—"

"You always take her side."

"He does not!"

"And aren't you supposed to be my car? I would appreciate a little solidarity here—"

"I absolutely am not your car! And I agree with whomever I think happens to be right."

"Hmph. Favoritism, that's what it is—"

"Yeah," drawled Bumblebee. "It's only okay when it's in your favor, right?"

"Right—hey, wait! No, it is not like that—"

"Sam—as your long-term girlfriend and one of your two best friends, the other also being on my side of this argument, listen to me when I tell you that you need to calm down. It'll all work out. Even if we have to move into my mom's basement—and that's just about as bad as it can get—we've got each other. Geeze, that sounds kind of… Trite, but it's true."

"…Alright. I'll try to relax. Let you work, and all that."

"Good—and thank you. I'll think about it too, okay? …Just, not right now. I really do need to study."

"So we're hired!"

"It's really not all that big a surprise, Sam."

"Mikaela—"

"You do worry too much," Bumblebee said, sounding fairly wicked underneath the good-natured humor and familiarity. "You don't even let me speed when there's no one else nearby!"

"Bee! Just because you can break the rules doesn't mean you should…"

"You are kind of boring, sometimes, Sam."

"Mikaela."

"—Aww, I didn't mean it. C'mon, kiss me—"

"You're lucky I'm driving," Bumblebee informed them, but he sounded fond, happy. "You shouldn't take that for granted, you know."

None of the soldiers had seen their so-called diplomatic representatives before, so Private Tsurugi was kind of shocked to see the newly-arrived woman, someone who looked like a model making bedroom eyes, run determinedly towards the battle after jumping out of a car: it turned into one of the robots. Presumably a robot on their side—his officer greeted it, friendly.

He saw her later, too, determinedly firing at their opponents: she didn't so much as flinch as one of the Decepticons—one of the smaller ones, it was just the size of a bear—came barreling down towards her. He flinched for her, but one of their robots—how the hell was he supposed to keep them all apart?—took out their opponent just feet away from her.

She didn't even look ruffled.

He saw her once more, once the battle was over, making out with a very ordinary looking guy about his age in a reasonably shadowed corner.

He wondered how he'd gotten her, and didn't even bother pretending he wasn't jealous.

It was the weirdest wedding Robert Smithing had ever presided over.

Small military weddings—those happened all the time. The couple, their immediate families, and then a few close friends. This pair's friends had been a mixed bag, true, but that happened. It was fairly normal, even.

The odd bit was how they'd insisted it take place in the parking lot, with their cars. Or at least, he assumed they were their cars, but he had no idea why one of them—let alone which one—was driving a red and blue semi with flames. Or who'd brought the chartreuse rescue Hummer. And why.

He was also pretty sure that one of the cars had been serving as best man. That would explain why they'd had the rings on its hood, waiting to be passed over by the young man with the long blond hair.

…Come to think of it, some of the guests been giving the cars weird glances, too.

Maybe they were all crazy. That made more sense than any other answer he could come up with.

"Mikaela?"

"Mmm?"

Sam smiled over at his girlfriend, laying beside him. It was a warm and they were both sticky with sweat and sleepy with after-orgasm exhaustion.

"Have you ever thought about having kids?"

That seemed to shake her out of it. She leaned on her elbows, frowning over at him. "…Not really. I mean, not right now, right? We don't have time. And then what'd we do about the Autobots? We couldn't get a five-year-old to keep a secret like that—"

"No, no, I meant it kind of in a—hypothetical way?"

She was silent.

"Mikaela?"

"Sam… I don't know, I guess. You had good parents, but I… My dad—"

"…I understand. We can talk about it later, though, right?"

"Right. We've got years, after all!"

"Think your mom's ever going to forgive us for not spending the holidays with her?" Sam asked, not even pretending to drive: the roads were dark, anyways, and not much happened, ever, in rural Alaska.

"Probably not," Mikaela said, but she didn't sound particularly repentant.

There were a few minutes of peaceful silence. Snow was falling outside the windows.

"Technically, it's for work," she added. "I mean, we are investigating Decepticon activities."

"But we know and she knows that we could get out of it if we really tried. …Or tried at all."

"Well, yeah…"

Bumblebee spoke after a few silent minutes. "Merry Christmas!"

"Huh?" Sam said, glancing at the clock set into the dashboard. "Oh! It's tomorrow—it's past midnight. Merry Christmas, Bee, Mikaela!"

"Merry Christmas," she said in return, slipping one hand into Sam's and squeezing it and patting Bee—it wasn't like she was going to leave him out. He couldn't do much in return, but they—got around that.

She kissed her husband, softly, and they broke apart after a few seconds. Sam, she saw, was holding Bee's door handle, gripping it.

The radio started playing an instrumental version of Silent Night, softly, and they continued speeding through the night, the snow falling around them. They were silent, and it was warm inside the car, and Mikaela thought that everything was so perfect that she was going to cry.

Mikaela wasn't crying. It hurt too much.

It wasn't the first funeral for someone close to her she'd been to. It Her grandmother's had happened a year ago. Her father's had been three years before that. She'd cried at all of them.

But this was different.

It was Sam's funeral.

Sam, who hadn't been her first boyfriend but had been the only boy—man—she'd dated for longer than eight months. Sam, who'd made her life an adventure. Sam, the boy she never would have dated if not for coincidence, heroics and the Autobots. Sam, the man she married, the man she'd thought she was going to grow old with.

Thirty-two years old. That was how old she was. Sam had been a year younger.

And now she was a widow.

She didn't have any tears. It… Cut too deep. She didn't know what the people surrounding her thought, human and Autobot alike: everybody else sitting in the front row was crying. And the Autobots couldn't, physically.

It felt like she'd been torn open. That she was about to burst, filled beyond her capacity with sorrow and pain and burning rage. That she was hollow, with nothing left inside her at all.

Captain Lennox was speaking. His eyes were suspiciously damp.

"Sam Witwicky was a hero. Not many people can claim to have saved the world.

"And Sam—he lived his life like the hero he was. He was never pretentious; if anything, he never got used to the attention. He was always friendly and ready to smile, whatever happened. He worked hard, to do his job well and to live up to his morals. Sam never was one to give something lip service.

"And Sam died like a hero.

"He was a soldier: I told him that, when we first met, in Mission City. It… To be honest, I hadn't meant for it to be much than a momentary inspiration, but I've never said anything more true in my life. He never ran away, not when he was protecting our country—and our friends." Briefly, Will's eyes flicked to the vehicles ringing the people: Autobots, all of them. "It's a tragedy that he died so young, but… But he knew that his death was something that could happen. And he never let that stop him. He wasn't fearless on the battlefield, but he was brave. That means being terrified but doing it anyway, because you need to. That is the man Sam Witwicky was."

Mikaela's hands were shaking. She forced them to still.

"I could have saved him," Bumblebee said, voice rough, laced with static. "I was right there. If I'd been paying attention… If I'd been paying better attention, I could have saved him."

Mikaela's breath hitched, but she didn't say a word. Her grip on the steering wheel tightened, even though the two of them were pulled over by the side of the dark road, Bee's engine idling gently.

"Don't say that," she said finally, and she had to force the words out. It felt like her throat had closed. "Don't say that. If I had been there— There's always the damned what-ifs. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't my fault. We just need to—accept that Sam… That Sam's…"

And now she found her tears. It was the first time since before she'd heard the news—Bumblebee had told her—that she'd cried. The first time in almost three weeks, now.

Sam Witwicky, the man she loved, had been dead for three weeks. Almost three weeks. It felt like an eternity, gaping behind her, real for the first time. She couldn't imagine the future. Not right now.

Bumblebee was silent. Mikaela didn't think she'd convinced him, but she couldn't do anything about that. She didn't know how, and she hurt too much to think clearly, and right now she couldn't even speak through her tears, largely silent, except for the almost-soundless high-pitched keen of her breathing, of the air pressing out of her.

Bumblebee transformed when they went back home, stopping her. She turned to face him, eyes puffy and swollen and doubtlessly bloodshot, and face blotchy and red, swollen with salt. She didn't have anything to say.

He knelt, wrapping one hand around her in something that was almost a hug. She pressed herself closer.

It had to hurt him as much as it hurt her. They'd been the three of them: Sam was the one she'd married, but they'd both been her boys. And Sam and Bee—they'd been such close friends. She hadn't understood it, sometimes. But it had been alright: they'd balanced out. The three of them.

Just two, now, though.

He had to feel the way she did. She knew that getting used to death, that seeing the amount of war he'd seen, wouldn't make it any easier. More familiar, but it would cut as deep. She knew that.

He hadn't said a word.

"I'm sorry," she said, and she tried to hug him back, even though they were built all wrong for it to work. And for the second time that day her eyes filled and spilled over, and she cried. This time, it was for both of them, just as much as it was for Sam.

At least they didn't have children. The faces of his parents were burnt into her mind, though. 'No parent should have to bury a child.' Her mother had said that, once. Children had to bury parents, but it shouldn't have to happen the other way around.

Mikaela supposed that war—and they were fighting a war—didn't change that.

"Mikaela," Epps said, sounding slightly hesitant. "I—uh, we weren't expecting you."

She smiled, tightly. "I should have called ahead."

"—Maybe. That would have been a surprise, too. It's been six months since you talked to any of us!"

"Sorry," she said, sheepish, but then she relaxed, and Bobby—a desk jockey now, really, and one of guys in charge; he stayed out of the heat of things, he was slowing down—could see the girl she'd been when they'd met, seventeen years old and too pretty for her own good and determined.

That last one hadn't changed.

"You still got my gun?"

"Wait, you're going out?"

"Every last body you can get, right? …Anyways. Sam—he wasn't the sort to sit and do nothing."

The man eyed her carefully. "Alright, then. Watch yourself."

"That's what I've got him for," Mikaela said, gesturing behind her, at Bumblebee.

Even the regular grunts—and they were never really comfortable with the Autobots, not when they were fighting the too-similar Decepticons—weren't avoiding him, much. He was chatting with Ironhide and Sarah Lennox, gesturing cheerily.

Bobby Epps had always had trouble reconciling the easy-going, friendly Autobot Bumblebee was off the battlefield with the competent, focused and most of all dangerous mech he was on it. He was surprised how happy he was to see that that hadn't changed. He didn't want to see the mech grim and war-torn. He hadn't even realized that, but he'd been worried that that might happen.

Mikaela was forty-six years old when she was ordered to stay out of the actual fighting. Bee had called Will who'd called the current commander of the Transformers-related troops, and he'd pulled rank.

She sat at home, instead, whenever there was a battle, because it was easier than being so close to where she should have been. Bumblebee always had to go, of course, but she got used to that. She kept herself busy, with little things: dishes, weeding and, once, clearing out the gutters. Then she'd sit and listen to her radio, hearing how the battle was going.

After all, she always knew Bumblebee was coming back. It just wasn't a question. He'd always been a fiercely competent fighter, and he'd gotten more cautious, over the years. And Ratchet, she'd come to realize, could fix almost anything, if given enough time.

And if, one day, he didn't come back, Mikaela would deal with that. She was strong. She always had been. It would be very hard, but she would do it anyways.

And she would never, never regret a minute of it. Of any of it.

The woman calling her started speaking almost before Mikaela had the phone held to her ear. "Mikaela! You're fifty!"

"Sarah? Why—How did you find that out?"

"Bumblebee told me, of course! He should be ready to leave, too—we're having a party for you!"

"But—"

"But nothing. It'll be fun!"

"—I wasn't going to protest! Not much…"

"Right."

"—Anyways, a party sounds wonderful. I'll be there as soon as I can. Even if you shouldn't have gone to that much trouble…"

"It'll do you good. And you're not the only one who's going to enjoy yourself—"

"Bumblebee?" Mikaela said, ducking into the driver's seat out of long habit.

"Yes?"

"It's—It's cancer. The doctor says I have a year to live."

He flinched, even though he wasn't supposed to move so much, in car form. "I— I'm sorry, Mikaela. I'll be here for you."

"I know," she whispered, wiping at a few stray tears. "Thank you."

"…Do you want me to call the others?"

"Right now? No… I need a little time for myself. Just the afternoon. Can we… Can we go for a drive?"

"Yes," he said, immediately, engine rumbling to life.

It was mid-afternoon and the sun was low and golden, the light permeating everything with a fierce glow.

"Sam would never forgive us for speeding like this," she sniffed, at last.

Bumblebee didn't laugh, but his voice was fierce and loving and warm when he spoke. "He wouldn't. –He always liked the speed itself, though. He just didn't like breaking the law..."

Mikaela laughed through her tears. "That's him!"

"It's alright, really. I've lived a good life, huh?"

Bumblebee had always known that he'd outlive his two human companions. What he hadn't realized was how quickly the time would pass. Sam had only lived half of the life of an average male citizen of the United States; Mikaela had fallen twenty years short of that for a female.

But he'd known that they'd live for a fraction of his life. He'd known what he was doing, when he let himself get so close to them. He'd known, and he'd done it anyway.

He'd known it was going to hurt. In a way, it hurt both more and less than he'd expected it to.

He wasn't sorry.

Bumblebee didn't die alone, but he died without anyone with him.

It was an unlucky hit on the battlefield, a one-in-a-million shot, rupturing his primary energon system. The resulting explosion blew him apart from the inside. Fast, immediate, irreversible.

There was nothing to be done. Even if Ratchet had been there—and he hadn't; he was on Earth, training new Autobot medics for the first time in millennia—he couldn't have done a thing. The trainee stationed to the planet they were defending from the Decepticons didn't have a chance.

It had been seven hundred years since he'd been to Earth. He'd known other humans, while he'd still been there, before the war had expanded outwards again; he'd been friends with certain members of other species in the centuries afterward.

His last thoughts were of Sam, and Mikaela. They'd fit, the three of them: his two best friends, his charges. Sam and his girlfriend, then wife, and his car. Mikaela and her boys.

Just the three of them. That had always been enough.

He regretted nothing.

-End-