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A rhythmic clicking filled the silence of his room as his systems failed to start. Physically, his starter hadn't gone bad yet—no blown fuses, power received and technically operational. Not to mention his battery never failed to reach the proper volts necessary to have him propelling off of the recharge slab and right out of his berthing.
His engine cranked. Weakly at that.
Bumblebee hadn't slept well.
Yet, he wasn't tired. At least, not in the metric sense of actually being low energy. He had that in spades. And if he could do anything other than stare at the wall across from him, he'd lift the corners of his lips and huff out a laugh at that fact.
Ratchet hated that he could run on such little stasis time, unabashedly jealous in a way that all older bots got when younger models danced circles around them. Bumblebee didn't need nearly as many naps as he partook in. Personally, he thought Ratchet merely liked the excuse of napping but hated that Bumblebee considered himself a morning person on a mere three hours of stasis after staying up all night listening to soft music and playing games on silent.
There wasn't a smile on his face, but it wiped off his facial sculpt anyway. His frame felt heavy, weighing him down.
More useless clicking.
Realistically, Bumblebee knew that he should force himself to get up. After all, it was only a matter of time before Prime came around wanting to ask something of him. Chores, patrol, whatever menial task he came up with on a whim and deemed fit to command him to do. And if Optimus came looking around for Bee and saw him like this, he would know why–
And promptly leave him alone to his misery.
Bulkhead and Prowl would avoid his corner of the power plant, either staying in their rooms or avoiding going down this hall altogether. Ratchet might sneak a glance inside, confirm he hadn't done something monumentally stupid, but ultimately move on. They'd leave his frame here to rot, in this room, because it wasn't the Autobot way to address social taboos… even tangentially. It just wasn't done.
Bumblebee hated the way they looked at him whenever they found him in this state. The sideways glance as they balked, finding any reason to excuse themselves and let him handle this… funk, he supposed, all on his own.
Clinically, Ratchet offered to delete all the related lines of code from that incident. He knew about it, because he had to. A permanent mark in his record, marring his extensive personal files that warned of potential persona degradation. Optimus knew, because he had to know everything about every mechanism under his command. Bulkhead knew, because he told him.
Prowl didn't know, because it felt like swallowing nails every time he had to divulge his past and he determined that in this case he didn't have to.
At the start of their technician service, Ratchet told him quietly there wasn't any shame found in opting out of carrying his factory days with him for the rest of his run cycle, but that wouldn't change the way Bumblebee felt in his body. He'd already tried that. Soonest he could, he swapped body cons to the cheapest, most basic design that would let him slip through the crowded roads of Cybertron absolutely unnoticed. Another day, another mini-vehicle barely obeying the laws of the road. Nothing of note, nothing of interest.
It hadn't changed anything. Because the damage wasn't superficial, it wasn't even technical.
It went spark deep.
And Ratchet—war veteran, belligerent medic that he was—couldn't change that even if he wanted to. Ratchet could rewrite every line of code in his computer and his spark would still know. So… No sense in trying an impossible procedure.
Easier to write him off, clean the slate, and ignore the walking blot of corrupted files lingering amongst Optimus Prime's crew.
After the nth failed attempt to get his ignition rolling, Bumblebee gave up. He let compressed air escape his tightly wound neck cabling—a sigh, courtesy of humans—and continued staring without seeing. His helm thunked against the cement block he used to prop up his helm and alleviate the strain on his cerebral strut.
Cybertronians slept in one of three ways: comfortably in alt mode, at an incline, or standing right up. They could lie down on their backs, but not for long without actively flattening their plates and the strain wasn't worth it for casual stasis. Medically, it didn't matter, not when the rest of your damaged frame hurt far more than a crick in the neck.
After crashing on Earth, however, Bumblebee found himself mimicking humans. He slept on his side, poleyn curled tight to his abdominal plating as one arm curled over the other. He liked having all of his limbs brought close like this, it felt like getting into alt mode without actually transforming.
He laid listlessly in a similar pose now, knees almost to his chest but not quite. Overlapping limbs from a lack of effort to straighten them instead of comfort.
He didn't even have the energy to offline his optical network and return back to recharge. At least in stasis, he didn't have to suffer alone with his thoughts or the phantom replays of sensations he endured thousands of years ago–
"Beeeee? You in here?"
A surge of emotion flooded his computer, his optics shuttering in a quick squeeze.
Sari. He had nearly forgotten about her. That she had moved in with them because the Professor–
Right. Right.
His shutters opened, half-lidded as his vision narrowed in on Sari who wandered by the entryway to his room, grabbing the sides and peaking in.
A wide grin spread across her face, as she exclaimed, "There you are!" Bounding into the room, not noticing his despondent and uncharacteristic lack of response to her presence.
Sari raced over to his berthing and began her climb. Long ago—when Sari had first helped design his room for him—she suggested using stacked tires to create steps for her to use whenever she wanted to sit on his bed. Bumblebee had agreed, like an idiot, because he had felt good about himself for such a long time that he had forgotten all the times when he didn't.
If he had remembered, he might have voted in favor of their rooms having locked gates or doors instead of the open invite set up the rest of the team landed on.
She hauled herself up onto the cold metal slab, arms shaking slightly from the strain of doing it all on her lonesome. He usually pinched the back of her dress and helped her with that last step. His digits barely twitched, ignoring the prompted command he sent their way.
Quickly, Sari climbed over his holstered stingers and made herself at home in the gap created by his arms. He could see now that she was holding a tiny digital camera, the screen staring back at him as she snuggled her back against the crook of his neck. The top of her head hit his chin guard, her hair brushing against his lips. He made sure to keep them pressed closed, not wanting to trap the thin strands in between the metal.
"Guess what I found in a bargain bin at a thrift store nearby? An old-timey camera—like the ones from before my dad put newer, better ones on the market!" Pressing her thumb against the power button, Sari started to play with the settings of the camera. Using the d-pad, Sari manipulated the timer and then turned the metallic rose gold camera around. The lens cover pulled back and with a cheeky smile, Sari said from behind closed teeth, "Cheeseee!"
It clicked, the flash went off, and his own optics readjusted to the light.
"I showed it to Bulkhead first and he got super excited about it. Apparently, you guys have something similar on Cybertron, but not quite like this because everything gets filtered into monotones or whatever." Pulling back the camera, Sari stared excitedly at the screen before realizing that she hadn't held it up at an angle that would get both her and Bee in the picture. Pouting, she opted to twist her body around and look through the viewfinder up at him with her tongue sticking out of her mouth.
Sari held the pose, staring and staring at Bee. Her finger didn't press down, no photo was taken, and eventually her tongue retreated back into her mouth as her smile fell entirely. Lowering the camera to her lap, her hands slack when before they were primed with joy Sari stared at him in confusion—finally noticing the almost greyed-out listless behavior ensnaring him.
Concern floods her tone, as she all but abandons the camera. "Bee, are you ok? What's wrong?"
He can't answer that. Not because his vocoder wound itself into knots or because he didn't have the words for it. Simply, there's no universe between this one or the next where Bumblebee could ever tell her the truth. Not as a fib or brushing it off as an excuse that she would have to wait until she was older. Bumblebee would rather send his spark to the Well of the Allspark with express shipping before she ever learned how broken he was.
Sari, if she even understood the nature of… it, would try to use her key on him. He could see it clearly and thought that her earnest efforts to help would hurt worse than anything he's felt in decades.
"Bee?" Her small hands pressed against his face. Her even tinier fingers pressed and smudged up against the glass of his optics, covering up the dead pixel in his lower right eye. Whether she had finally gotten over her aversion of poking their 'eyes' when touching their facial sculpts or alternatively she had forgotten, Sari clearly wanted him to respond.
He sighed again, helm inching back so that he wouldn't catch the soft pads of her fingers in his shutters. It was the closest that he could get to hiding away from her, not when she sat so close.
Resting back, Sari plopped down again. She didn't say anything for a moment and Bumblebee wanted so badly to hold her. Pull her close to him, apologize in actions instead of words. Sari fit in the palms of his hands, it would take nothing at all to scoop her up and against his spark chamber.
But he didn't want to touch her. He felt, irrationally, that if he tried to reach out to her now… one of the others would swoop in and take her away from him. Before he could ruin her the same way that he had been ruined.
And yet he knew, hidden deep somewhere in his submerged meta, that the others didn't think so poorly of him. That he was treating them just as unfairly as his computer convinced itself that they would treat him in a hypothetical scenario that wasn't real and would never be real because Bumblebee would never hurt Sari.
Would never allow her to be harmed. Not like this, not like…
"That's ok, Bee. Sometimes I don't want to get out of bed either. Not since my dad disappeared."
Carefully lowering herself down, Sari rested on her side too. Her hands folded against one another and cushioned her head. Bumblebee wanted to turn over and hide her from the world. Open up his subspace compartment and shove her in so that she could remain safe and protected. Nobody would be able to get her from in there, but she needed to breathe and squishy, fragile little humans needed comfortable beds to rest not… the nothingness of a space holed up outside of their plane of existence.
"Are you… upset? Did something or… somebody upset you?"
He's never… Bumblebee has never cared so deeply about another person, more than he cared about himself.
"Because if they did, tell me who and I'll set them right! Like if Prowl said something that hurt your feelings or… Or if you and Bulkhead got into a fight. I won't let him use my camera as punishment if it turns out he did."
But he couldn't deny the rising fear as the corrupted data set kept spitting out threads of thought that he smashed over and over and over again like a persistent bug nestling into his tactical network. The more thoughts sprung up, the more distressed his spark became, and the more convinced he was that he was falling helm first into persona degradation.
Sari would hate it if she knew, she would hate him, and if he told her the truth about why he couldn't seem to get out of his berthing today—about how disgusting and gross he was… she would hate him regardless.
Nothing he could say or do now or didn't do or say would reveal a win condition. Bumblebee would lose no matter what.
"Is… is it something I–"
"Sari, there you are kid." A slightly hurried Ratchet had appeared behind her and in his room from one moment to the next. Ratchet's brow ridge furrowed, emphasizing the creases under his optics. They flitted between Sari and Bumblebee, whose stagnant tank promptly dropped—spark sinking.
With more care than he probably would have afforded her on a normal day, Ratchet plucked Sari off of his recharge slab and lightly scolded her, "Don't they teach you humans some bedside manners? You don't bother sick bots, it's poor form."
"Bumblebee's sick?" Perking up at finally gleaning some information about his despondence, Sari scrambled in Ratchet's palms as she stared back at him. "How come he isn't in your medbay?"
"Not that kind of sick, kid," Ratchet grumbled. For a klik, Bumblebee tensed. Surely the medic wouldn't air Bumblebee's… issues to Sari. But if he had considered it, he clearly thought better. "And it's none of your business, anyhow! We need to leave him to his rest, not pester him with doodads or toys."
"But–"
"No buts!"
"Alright," Sari frowned, clearly disappointed and not satisfied by the dismissal. Glancing back at Bee one last time before she disappeared from view, she waved, "Feel better, Bumblebee."
Notably, Ratchet didn't share the sentiment. Not that he expected him too. That wasn't the Autobot way.
He really didn't mean for her to see him like this. He should have tried harder, pushed past the lethargy and just gotten up.
Optics flitting down, he saw Sari's abandoned camera. The screen faced up, still stuck on the most recent photo—her face taking up the whole screen.
Sari's smile burned itself into his HUD, prompting Bee to divert just enough energy to grab the device and pull it close.
He'd do better tomorrow. Today… Today he'd keep resting. Like Ratchet said he should.