Work Text:
The thing about late night shows was that you didn't get to pick what you watched. Of course four pm. could be considered very early morning instead, but that made for even worse shows. Between the college, Sam's new official job as the non-threatening human Autobot liaison and the people who kept calling from different time zones altogether, wholly disregarding the existence of said difference because screw you, when you're a head of this state or secretary of that department you get to do that to other people, well...
He sort of lost the train of thought somewhere slipping down that sentence, but the point probably was that even now that he could have gotten a good night's sleep he was too wired to fall asleep. So kept clicking from one channel to the next, feeling his brain rotting as a rerun of Real Housewives of X changed into the worst sort of voyeuristic real crime show.
"Somebody save me," he muttered, clicking the button again and again before pausing. It was this one weird movie that kept pulling him back like a rubber band and he was almost certain it had been made on some serious drugs. The titular Yellow Submarine was travelling through the Sea of Time where time flew both forwards and backwards to the tune of "When I'm Sixty-Four".
It was probably the last vestiges of the All Spark's energy within that he found himself considering what that kind of time undulation would do to space and gravity. There was the briefest of flickers at the edge of his consciousness, almost but not quite an equation, that he definitely ignored.
"Operation! Operation rescue," Bee sang through the window, the clip unfamiliar to him. One of the pros of the government coming clean about the Cybertronians was that Bee didn't have to pretend to be a car anymore, didn't have to stay away.
Of course the corresponding con was that because Bee was still highly likely to send people who mistook him for a Decepticon into blind panic, attract religious fundamentalists who tried in vain to set him on fire (two occurrences so far) and the tinfoil hat crowd who wanted to learn more about the pyramids and some Mayan lines, plus that Sam didn't get to go into the college in a real college. It was all online courses for him in Diego Garcia now and while the Sam two months prior might have thrown a fit, this Sam had witnessed Optimus die for him. He had tried to run away, gotten Optimus dead, died himself and after all that throwing a tantrum because he couldn't go to parties and have normal college fun just felt so immature, even if he desperately wanted to do all that.
"I don't know how sleep deprived I must be if I find this funny, and I know, I should sleep. I just can't," he complained to his best friend and guardian.
"Really sleep deprived, and maybe you should ask Ratchet for some medicine solution, this can't be healthy anymore. And this is clearly high art," Bumblebee said and Sam cracked. He couldn't help it, he bent in half like a Swiss Army knife, clutching his ribs. He was distantly aware that this probably counted as hysteria, but was too busy laughing his lungs out to care. On the screen the candy bright rescue party made it's way to the Sea of Science, aka. the Sea of Deafening Irony.
"Don't laugh, this reminds me of some classical Cybertronian cinematic pieces," Bee said, sounding affronted. "Every time they sing the whole thing snaps into shape and becomes something fiercer and more mature, a good contrast to the clumsy, blocky animation. The escapism from the rational to surreal flight of fancy isn't perhaps to all tastes, but I didn't think humans had any problems with fantasy as a genre, and I really liked the eerie juxtaposition of Liverpool and Everton players in red and blue, the way they jittered phantasmagorically."
And that was enough to yank Sam from his fit of sleep-deprived hilarity to sheer, blank bafflement in a second. Classical Cybertronian cinematic pieces? Well, of course they would also have had movies, he felt stupid now that he hadn't thought about that before, it was just...
"Cybertronian movies were made on drugs?"