Title: Cause and Effect

Disclaimer: I neither own Doctor Who nor Transformers. Both belong to all respective creators, producers, and distributors. I make no money from this work of fiction.

Rating: PG-13

Characters: Sam, 11th

Summary: Time is not a smooth Progression of Cause and Effect. It is actually a great big ball of Timey Whimey, Wibbly Wobbly... Stuff...

Note: Response to TFBunnyFarm on LJ: In Which Sam is the Doctor Under the influence of the Chameleon Arch.

Sam remembers Ratchet telling him how devastated Bumblebee had been when the concussion wave from Megatron's Fusion Cannon catapulted him into the air and the damage to his internals and the impact killed him. He remembers how before jerking wholly back into the land of the living, how he spoke to the Dynasty of Primes in that place of towering silica structures that hummed softly as the ground thrummed under his feet and the air smelled of ozone and warm metal and fresh turned earth and the pale mist was dry and cool against his skin.

He remembers drifting in warm darkness as his skin tingled and his limbs surged with strength and vitality, how he could smell hot sand and gunpowder and scorched ozone from the firing of energy weapons and the sickly sweet and sour of human sweat (Disgusting! How had he never noticed it before?), mingled with the copper tang of blood (His blood) and salt from tears (Who was crying?), and the air was filled with the thick, cloying sweetness of death (When had this started?).

Slowly, awareness seeped back, the tiny, tiny grains of sand beneath him, the shifting of air from natural winds, the helicopters or the movement of human and autobot alike, the heat that rose from the sand, the rumbling of the earth as tons and tons of sand shifted. He could feel it, a faint tha-thump of his heart, and a faint echo somewhere in the back of his mind, thump-thump-thump-thump, a twin heart beat that was missing,and that was wrong-wrong-wrong, but at the same time, right. His entire body was being tugged, a faint but powerful pulling, which he somehow knew was the planet moving, spinning beneath his body as it hurtled through empty space, round and round the Sun at thousands of kilometers per second, and he and all other life were there, clinging to the skin of this tiny little blue planet, and if that force, even for a single moment let go...

The simple thought of the consequences, a series of effects after effect after effect with branches of possible effects followed by possible effect, all preceded by causes and effects that had already passed, frightened him. He lunged for the tiny pinprick of light in the distance...

And jerked awake in the desert in the ruins of a village, the merciless Egyptian sun beating down upon them as gunshots echoed around them and explosives were launched and detonated. Warm arms were cradling his head, he could smell salt and citrus and motor oil, and golden-brown threads shifted around the woman holding him winding around his muzzy consciousness, and all around him, other glowing threads (the personal timelines of the Mechs and Humans on the particular stretch of desert) shifted, stretching into the distance, diverging and converging, and in the cases of the dead or soon to be dead, stopped abruptly.

And that was when he knew that he was no longer entirely human, because the gaping silence in his mind was raw, raw and terrible and just wrongand oh! Oh, there were memories that shouldn't be there, memories that, yes, they were his, but at the same time not, because there was an echo of a second heart in his mind, one that was and was not his, and drat it all, how could this have happened? The Chameleon Arch was supposed to have sealed the Time Lord essence in a fob watch, one which was left amongst his personal belongings back in the dormitory in Princeton...

And yet...

And yet here he was, his body and genetics were still intrinsically human, he had no doubt of that, but still, his senses and the information his mind was sorting through... He had memories from every incarnation to this point, though what particularly interested him was the memories from his Tenth incarnation and that brief time toward the end when he'd still had a fully functioning pyscho-kinetic link to his newly created two way Human-Time Lord Biological Metacrisis. Both of them. He remembered through them, the Human Doctor and the Doctor Donna, how it felt to be half human, and through Donna, how it felt to burn. It was eerily similar to when his Ninth Incarnation had drawn the Time Vortex energy out of Rose... And yet this moment, despite having those memories, he wasn't feeling it. He wasn't burning.

Not that he wanted to burn, mind, but considering his situation, it was strange.

Sam blinked and the glow of the threads that represented each individual timeline faded until he could just barely see them. He blinked as a silver glint from the corner of his eye did not fade like the rest, and realized that he was forgetting something. He clambered to his feet and his hand closed around a ribbed and curved metallic object, the Matrix, his most recent memories, his memories, Sam's memories, told him. AMatrix, the Time Lord memories insisted, one of a collection of depositories of knowledge, depositories of Gallifreyan knowledge; it's purpose warped and changed over the course of billions of years. But the markers in his human genetic structure left behind by the Chameleon Arch to identify to the fob watch where the essence was to be returned had been read by both AllSpark and Matrix, and both artifacts had begun the process of returning to the use to which they had been meant.

And all it had taken was a Metacrisis to do so.

But there was time to think on the Matrix and the knowledge contained therein later. First, he had a Mech to resurrect.

TBC