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sakon76Fifth entry in the "Ghost Stories" series.
The Valley of the Shadow
by K. Stonham
prereleased 10th October 2007
The rain was cold and wet when the yellow car pulled up outside of the nursing facility. The young man who flickered into existence inside the vehicle looked out through the windshield at the miserable conditions outside, and sighed. At least, he thought, his partner had snagged a parking space near the room the patient they were visiting was in. He opened the car door and listened to the rain hiss down on the pavement, the grass, the leaves of the trees outside, for a minute before he actually exited the vehicle.
Sam adjusted his hologram to be intangible so that the rain went through him rather than soaking in to him, pulled his jacket over his head in case anyone from inside was watching, and jogged for the front door at a reasonable pace. He didn't resolidify his image until he reached the sheltered area in front of the double doors, looking back with mild sympathy at his Camaro, which sat out unprotected in the cold, windy rain.
Most people wouldn't have caught the Camaro's amusement at the oh-so-human preconceptions of what counted as annoying weather.
Most people weren't thirty years dead, haunting said Camaro.
Grinning and shaking his head at his friend, Samuel James Witwicky stepped forward, waited for the electronic doors to swing wide enough open, then darted inside the building. With a brief stop at the front desk to check in, he headed for room 139, bed A.
*
Reggie looked up at the knock on his door frame and straightened up, seeing the visitor who grinned carelessly at him. "Kid!"
"Hey, Simmons," Sam greeted him, walking inside the room. He took Reggie's hand as he set down the crossword/sudoku section of the paper, and gave him a firm handshake. No bleeding heart pity, Reggie thought in approval. The kid had learned well.
"Where's your partner?" he asked as Sam pulled up a chair. "Out in the parking lot?" Sam nodded. "I tell them they should build on some covered parking or something, they ignore me," he groused. "'No one's going to come see you in that kind of weather, Mr. Simmons'," he parodied one of the nurses. He shook his head and rolled his eyes. "Morons."
"Heh." Sam laughed in agreement. "They don't get it that weather doesn't mean as much to the transformers as to humans. Where's your roommate?" he asked, looking around.
"Bingo session." Reggie rolled his eyes. "No one around here seems to give a rat's ass about living to the fullest until the very last minute," he griped, knowing that Sam would understand how he felt. "No, it's all a long slow slide into death...."
Sam nodded. "Go down fighting. Choke the bastards as they try to swallow you whole."
"Exactly!" Reggie agreed, pointing at him. "People like us, with that kind of attitude, are the reason the Decepticons haven't taken over the planet." He sighed. "Wish I could be out there on the front lines again."
"Hey." Sam put his hand on Reggie's leg, smiling reassuringly. "You did your bit. Want a total of how many times you saved the planet?"
"Seven," Reggie replied, being up on the current "scorecards" for the main human allies. "Not a bad total for one life," he mused.
Sam was silent.
"Don't give me that, kid," Reggie groused. "We all go into the night at some point, and hell if I didn't live a lot longer than I thought I would some days. Just some things there's no fighting against. Human genetics, that's one of them."
"Yeah." Sam still looked a little sad.
"Besides," Reggie said softly, "I'm not afraid."
"Come on, everyone's afraid," Sam objected.
"I'm not. And you know why, kid?"
Sam shook his head. "Why?"
"Because I look at you," Reggie told him, "and I think about the fact that I haven't seen you age in thirty years, and it makes me realize that death isn't an end. It's only a new adventure."
*
Sam was very still for a minute. "You knew." No one was supposed to know. Or only a very, very select few who weren't Autobots, anyway. Simmons, friend and ally though he was, wasn't on that short list.
"Kid, I ain't dumb," Simmons told him. "Once I twigged, I did some digging--and you get as high as I did and you have a lot of leeway to dig through things people aren't supposed to see. Found an unfiled death cert for you, and some property transfers of everything that was yours to the Autobot forces. That pretty much filled in the blanks."
Sam breathed a short, sharp sigh of resignation, looking away, out the window at the yellow car that sat beyond in the rain. "I used to age the hologram," he confessed, looking back. "Mickey told me I sucked at it and to knock it off. She said I was making her feel old and I should let her have the illusion she wasn't getting there."
Simmons nodded. "So what caused it?"
"You remember that incident back in 2014 with Shockwave and that planet-buster bomb he'd built?" Sam asked. Simmons nodded. "He nailed me before I could defuse the thing. Totally vaporized. I was so focused on the job that I didn't even notice."
Simmons' eyes were wide. "And then?"
Sam shrugged. "Figured whatever I'd done to defuse the bomb, I could still be doing. I hacked his motor circuits and took down his shielding for good measure. Bumblebee... kept me afterwards. Kept me from going on to wherever dead people are supposed to go," Sam clarified.
"It didn't hurt?" Simmons asked quietly.
Sam shook his head. "I don't even remember dying," he confessed.
Simmons nodded. "Good to know. I always did wonder why you let Mikaela get away."
"We were already broken up by that point," Sam dismissed. "We were going different places in our lives, and we wanted different things. We decided we were better off as friends than as a couple."
"And then you get killed in action and that pretty much nixed any possibility of getting back together later," Simmons concluded.
"Yup." Sam nodded. "At least we're still friends. If she hadn't been able to have Mickey's kids for 'grandkids,' I think my mom would've found some way to exorcise me, just for not making her a grandmother."
Simmons' eyebrows were high. "Does that work?" he asked.
"Don't know, don't care to find out," Sam replied.
*
"Sam," Bumblebee said, materializing his own human hologram in the doorway in response to the elevated stress levels he was detecting in the elderly human, "Mister Simmons. You should summon the nurse."
Simmons' eyebrows inched toward his hairline, but he made no move toward the call button. "Hey, Bumblebee. Long time no see."
"Simmons--" Sam said, but the ex-agent cut him off.
"The most they can do is give me a shot of something that'll keep me a couple hours," Simmons told him. "Your guys' own doc told me that I'm dying. Let's face facts here."
"Ratchet's knowledge of human physiology and medicine is incomplete," Bumblebee said softly, stepping into the room. "One of your own doctors may be able to...." He let his voice trail off. Simmons was shaking his head.
"The docs in these kind of places are here to make dying easier, that's all." In addition to his increased heart rate, a fine tremor had begun to shake Simmons' hands. "And if Ratchet doesn't know all there is about human medicine after nearly forty years studying it, I'll eat my hat."
"He sure still hasn't mastered tact," Sam quipped, though his expression was worried.
"Ratchet has never known tact," Bumblebee told his partner. "At least, not as a medic."
Color was slowly fading from Simmons' face, but if he felt discomfort he masked it with a smile. "Grab me that picture, would you?" he asked, pointing at a silver-framed portrait that sat on a table among a cluster of others, just out of his reach. Sam beat Bumblebee to it and the frame floated gently into Simmons' hands. He stared for a moment at Sam. "You do seances too?" he eventually asked.
Sam grinned wanly. "Table rappings and ouija boards are my specialty."
Simmons just looked at him, nodding thoughtfully. "Gonna ask a favor here," he said, finger tapping on the glass protecting the photograph. It was of a dark-haired dark-eyed young man in a military uniform. "This is my sister's grandson, Private John Daniels. First one since me to go into the 'family business.' Keep an eye on him for me, will you? He's a good kid. Smart, even."
Sam nodded. "Will do," he promised.
The irregularity of Simmons' heartbeat was beginning to show through to his breathing, but he took great care as he set the portrait back down on a portion of the table he could reach. His eyes met Bumblebee's. "I know I've said I'm sorry for what I did back then, with Sector Seven and holding you, but... I really do mean it. I was wrong. I'm sorry."
"You were afraid," Bumblebee corrected softly. "You had no proof we were on your side. It has long since been forgiven, Mister Simmons. By all of us."
"Reggie," the man corrected with an effort and a smile.
"Reggie," Bumblebee agreed. From either side of the bed he and Sam took Simmons' hands, holding on, feeling them tense as the spirit within the human body separated, after nearly eighty years, from the body that had housed it. Simmons bit his lip, the breath of what Bumblebee recognized as a Catholic prayer whispering from him, as the light faded from behind his eyes and they became glassy.
*
The two visitors were hustled aside as Danielle took in the state of the patient, yelling down the hallway for a doctor. It was too late, she knew that already as she tried to take a pulse. She tried not to let it upset her. Mister Simmons was a DNR, but she'd liked him. He'd had Autobots as visitors, and while she'd tried not to go all starry-eyed and fangirly, he'd introduced her to a couple of them in passing, which had been about the coolest thing ever. And he'd always been snarky and snide and willing to discuss politics with her, which almost no one else was.
When she turned to the two young men to tell them she was sorry and he was gone, though, they'd vanished. She stuck her head outside the door, but they weren't in the hallway either. Then the head duty nurse bustled into the room and Danielle forgot about the two men. Obviously they knew he was dead, and were gone themselves.
*
The car and its invisible spirit sat outside in the rain, watching through the window as the two nurses did their job. An old song with a hint of a country sound to it played quietly on the radio as a doctor came in to pronounce the death.
"At least it was easy," one said to the other. "He got to choose when he went... and he went with mind and dignity intact."
"He wasn't alone," the other said. "That was good. No one should have to be."
"Yeah."
"Sam... you don't want to go, do you?" Bumblebee asked. "Reggie seemed happy to cross over. If you want...."
"No," Sam replied sharply. "I'm not leaving you."
"Sam..." Bumblebee whispered.
"Whatever's on the other side, it can wait," Sam said. "Whenever you go, I'll go there with you. But not until then."
The Autobot was slightly shaken by his partner's vehemence.
"Besides," Sam said in a lighter tone, "I'm only fifty-five. That's not that old even by human standards."
They shared a laugh. Inside, an empty body's eyes were closed, the blonde nurse who had come in after them lingering a moment and, looking furtively around, placing two silver coins on the closed eyes to pay the ferryman. The two outside could have told her that the soul had already departed, but didn't.
And it's just a box of rain, I don't know who put it there.
"'Bee, what's the song?"
"It's by a group called the 'Grateful Dead'," the Autobot told him.
"Aw, man, they were old when I was born," Sam griped.
Believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare.
"So was Shakespeare," Bumblebee returned. "You still quote him."
"Yeah. So did Simmons... Reggie."
A metallic sigh. "He was a good friend. He will be missed."
And it's just a box of rain, or a ribbon for your hair.
"Yeah. He will."
Unnoticed by the nurse inside, the yellow car rumbled to life and slowly pulled out of the parking lot, alone only to those who didn't have the sensors to detect the spirit that remained with it by both of their choices.
Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there....
*~*~*
Author's Notes: Aside from any ideas of cultural differences between humans and transformers, being a ghost and haunted by a ghost respectively would, I think, give Sam and Bumblebee a radically different perspective on death than the common viewpoint. They know, after all, that it's not an end, just another stage. And to those who know pertinent facts about Sam, his deceased status could be really rather reassuring. Well, except to the Decepticons. To them, his deceased status would be annoying because it means they can't kill him.
The furthest I usually go with the idea of songs in music is chapter titles, but I really wanted that last lyric to end the story, so I intercut the song's final stanza with the story. Hopefully that's not too irritating. The song is "Box of Rain" by the Grateful Dead, who, unlike Sam [g], I like, having had their music as part of my childhood soundtrack....
The Valley of the Shadow
by K. Stonham
prereleased 10th October 2007
The rain was cold and wet when the yellow car pulled up outside of the nursing facility. The young man who flickered into existence inside the vehicle looked out through the windshield at the miserable conditions outside, and sighed. At least, he thought, his partner had snagged a parking space near the room the patient they were visiting was in. He opened the car door and listened to the rain hiss down on the pavement, the grass, the leaves of the trees outside, for a minute before he actually exited the vehicle.
Sam adjusted his hologram to be intangible so that the rain went through him rather than soaking in to him, pulled his jacket over his head in case anyone from inside was watching, and jogged for the front door at a reasonable pace. He didn't resolidify his image until he reached the sheltered area in front of the double doors, looking back with mild sympathy at his Camaro, which sat out unprotected in the cold, windy rain.
Most people wouldn't have caught the Camaro's amusement at the oh-so-human preconceptions of what counted as annoying weather.
Most people weren't thirty years dead, haunting said Camaro.
Grinning and shaking his head at his friend, Samuel James Witwicky stepped forward, waited for the electronic doors to swing wide enough open, then darted inside the building. With a brief stop at the front desk to check in, he headed for room 139, bed A.
Reggie looked up at the knock on his door frame and straightened up, seeing the visitor who grinned carelessly at him. "Kid!"
"Hey, Simmons," Sam greeted him, walking inside the room. He took Reggie's hand as he set down the crossword/sudoku section of the paper, and gave him a firm handshake. No bleeding heart pity, Reggie thought in approval. The kid had learned well.
"Where's your partner?" he asked as Sam pulled up a chair. "Out in the parking lot?" Sam nodded. "I tell them they should build on some covered parking or something, they ignore me," he groused. "'No one's going to come see you in that kind of weather, Mr. Simmons'," he parodied one of the nurses. He shook his head and rolled his eyes. "Morons."
"Heh." Sam laughed in agreement. "They don't get it that weather doesn't mean as much to the transformers as to humans. Where's your roommate?" he asked, looking around.
"Bingo session." Reggie rolled his eyes. "No one around here seems to give a rat's ass about living to the fullest until the very last minute," he griped, knowing that Sam would understand how he felt. "No, it's all a long slow slide into death...."
Sam nodded. "Go down fighting. Choke the bastards as they try to swallow you whole."
"Exactly!" Reggie agreed, pointing at him. "People like us, with that kind of attitude, are the reason the Decepticons haven't taken over the planet." He sighed. "Wish I could be out there on the front lines again."
"Hey." Sam put his hand on Reggie's leg, smiling reassuringly. "You did your bit. Want a total of how many times you saved the planet?"
"Seven," Reggie replied, being up on the current "scorecards" for the main human allies. "Not a bad total for one life," he mused.
Sam was silent.
"Don't give me that, kid," Reggie groused. "We all go into the night at some point, and hell if I didn't live a lot longer than I thought I would some days. Just some things there's no fighting against. Human genetics, that's one of them."
"Yeah." Sam still looked a little sad.
"Besides," Reggie said softly, "I'm not afraid."
"Come on, everyone's afraid," Sam objected.
"I'm not. And you know why, kid?"
Sam shook his head. "Why?"
"Because I look at you," Reggie told him, "and I think about the fact that I haven't seen you age in thirty years, and it makes me realize that death isn't an end. It's only a new adventure."
Sam was very still for a minute. "You knew." No one was supposed to know. Or only a very, very select few who weren't Autobots, anyway. Simmons, friend and ally though he was, wasn't on that short list.
"Kid, I ain't dumb," Simmons told him. "Once I twigged, I did some digging--and you get as high as I did and you have a lot of leeway to dig through things people aren't supposed to see. Found an unfiled death cert for you, and some property transfers of everything that was yours to the Autobot forces. That pretty much filled in the blanks."
Sam breathed a short, sharp sigh of resignation, looking away, out the window at the yellow car that sat beyond in the rain. "I used to age the hologram," he confessed, looking back. "Mickey told me I sucked at it and to knock it off. She said I was making her feel old and I should let her have the illusion she wasn't getting there."
Simmons nodded. "So what caused it?"
"You remember that incident back in 2014 with Shockwave and that planet-buster bomb he'd built?" Sam asked. Simmons nodded. "He nailed me before I could defuse the thing. Totally vaporized. I was so focused on the job that I didn't even notice."
Simmons' eyes were wide. "And then?"
Sam shrugged. "Figured whatever I'd done to defuse the bomb, I could still be doing. I hacked his motor circuits and took down his shielding for good measure. Bumblebee... kept me afterwards. Kept me from going on to wherever dead people are supposed to go," Sam clarified.
"It didn't hurt?" Simmons asked quietly.
Sam shook his head. "I don't even remember dying," he confessed.
Simmons nodded. "Good to know. I always did wonder why you let Mikaela get away."
"We were already broken up by that point," Sam dismissed. "We were going different places in our lives, and we wanted different things. We decided we were better off as friends than as a couple."
"And then you get killed in action and that pretty much nixed any possibility of getting back together later," Simmons concluded.
"Yup." Sam nodded. "At least we're still friends. If she hadn't been able to have Mickey's kids for 'grandkids,' I think my mom would've found some way to exorcise me, just for not making her a grandmother."
Simmons' eyebrows were high. "Does that work?" he asked.
"Don't know, don't care to find out," Sam replied.
"Sam," Bumblebee said, materializing his own human hologram in the doorway in response to the elevated stress levels he was detecting in the elderly human, "Mister Simmons. You should summon the nurse."
Simmons' eyebrows inched toward his hairline, but he made no move toward the call button. "Hey, Bumblebee. Long time no see."
"Simmons--" Sam said, but the ex-agent cut him off.
"The most they can do is give me a shot of something that'll keep me a couple hours," Simmons told him. "Your guys' own doc told me that I'm dying. Let's face facts here."
"Ratchet's knowledge of human physiology and medicine is incomplete," Bumblebee said softly, stepping into the room. "One of your own doctors may be able to...." He let his voice trail off. Simmons was shaking his head.
"The docs in these kind of places are here to make dying easier, that's all." In addition to his increased heart rate, a fine tremor had begun to shake Simmons' hands. "And if Ratchet doesn't know all there is about human medicine after nearly forty years studying it, I'll eat my hat."
"He sure still hasn't mastered tact," Sam quipped, though his expression was worried.
"Ratchet has never known tact," Bumblebee told his partner. "At least, not as a medic."
Color was slowly fading from Simmons' face, but if he felt discomfort he masked it with a smile. "Grab me that picture, would you?" he asked, pointing at a silver-framed portrait that sat on a table among a cluster of others, just out of his reach. Sam beat Bumblebee to it and the frame floated gently into Simmons' hands. He stared for a moment at Sam. "You do seances too?" he eventually asked.
Sam grinned wanly. "Table rappings and ouija boards are my specialty."
Simmons just looked at him, nodding thoughtfully. "Gonna ask a favor here," he said, finger tapping on the glass protecting the photograph. It was of a dark-haired dark-eyed young man in a military uniform. "This is my sister's grandson, Private John Daniels. First one since me to go into the 'family business.' Keep an eye on him for me, will you? He's a good kid. Smart, even."
Sam nodded. "Will do," he promised.
The irregularity of Simmons' heartbeat was beginning to show through to his breathing, but he took great care as he set the portrait back down on a portion of the table he could reach. His eyes met Bumblebee's. "I know I've said I'm sorry for what I did back then, with Sector Seven and holding you, but... I really do mean it. I was wrong. I'm sorry."
"You were afraid," Bumblebee corrected softly. "You had no proof we were on your side. It has long since been forgiven, Mister Simmons. By all of us."
"Reggie," the man corrected with an effort and a smile.
"Reggie," Bumblebee agreed. From either side of the bed he and Sam took Simmons' hands, holding on, feeling them tense as the spirit within the human body separated, after nearly eighty years, from the body that had housed it. Simmons bit his lip, the breath of what Bumblebee recognized as a Catholic prayer whispering from him, as the light faded from behind his eyes and they became glassy.
The two visitors were hustled aside as Danielle took in the state of the patient, yelling down the hallway for a doctor. It was too late, she knew that already as she tried to take a pulse. She tried not to let it upset her. Mister Simmons was a DNR, but she'd liked him. He'd had Autobots as visitors, and while she'd tried not to go all starry-eyed and fangirly, he'd introduced her to a couple of them in passing, which had been about the coolest thing ever. And he'd always been snarky and snide and willing to discuss politics with her, which almost no one else was.
When she turned to the two young men to tell them she was sorry and he was gone, though, they'd vanished. She stuck her head outside the door, but they weren't in the hallway either. Then the head duty nurse bustled into the room and Danielle forgot about the two men. Obviously they knew he was dead, and were gone themselves.
The car and its invisible spirit sat outside in the rain, watching through the window as the two nurses did their job. An old song with a hint of a country sound to it played quietly on the radio as a doctor came in to pronounce the death.
"At least it was easy," one said to the other. "He got to choose when he went... and he went with mind and dignity intact."
"He wasn't alone," the other said. "That was good. No one should have to be."
"Yeah."
"Sam... you don't want to go, do you?" Bumblebee asked. "Reggie seemed happy to cross over. If you want...."
"No," Sam replied sharply. "I'm not leaving you."
"Sam..." Bumblebee whispered.
"Whatever's on the other side, it can wait," Sam said. "Whenever you go, I'll go there with you. But not until then."
The Autobot was slightly shaken by his partner's vehemence.
"Besides," Sam said in a lighter tone, "I'm only fifty-five. That's not that old even by human standards."
They shared a laugh. Inside, an empty body's eyes were closed, the blonde nurse who had come in after them lingering a moment and, looking furtively around, placing two silver coins on the closed eyes to pay the ferryman. The two outside could have told her that the soul had already departed, but didn't.
And it's just a box of rain, I don't know who put it there.
"'Bee, what's the song?"
"It's by a group called the 'Grateful Dead'," the Autobot told him.
"Aw, man, they were old when I was born," Sam griped.
Believe it if you need it, or leave it if you dare.
"So was Shakespeare," Bumblebee returned. "You still quote him."
"Yeah. So did Simmons... Reggie."
A metallic sigh. "He was a good friend. He will be missed."
And it's just a box of rain, or a ribbon for your hair.
"Yeah. He will."
Unnoticed by the nurse inside, the yellow car rumbled to life and slowly pulled out of the parking lot, alone only to those who didn't have the sensors to detect the spirit that remained with it by both of their choices.
Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there....
Author's Notes: Aside from any ideas of cultural differences between humans and transformers, being a ghost and haunted by a ghost respectively would, I think, give Sam and Bumblebee a radically different perspective on death than the common viewpoint. They know, after all, that it's not an end, just another stage. And to those who know pertinent facts about Sam, his deceased status could be really rather reassuring. Well, except to the Decepticons. To them, his deceased status would be annoying because it means they can't kill him.
The furthest I usually go with the idea of songs in music is chapter titles, but I really wanted that last lyric to end the story, so I intercut the song's final stanza with the story. Hopefully that's not too irritating. The song is "Box of Rain" by the Grateful Dead, who, unlike Sam [g], I like, having had their music as part of my childhood soundtrack....
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 02:59 am (UTC)And I love you for making Simmons their friend, instead of an enemy. Agh, I'm all woobie now :
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 03:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 03:31 am (UTC)Simmons: *gives a long suffering sigh as he glances between the white and red armor clad human and the Autobot medic* Ok, Ratchet, this was one that I wasn't expecting to come up when I started working with you bots.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-11 06:31 pm (UTC)ummm
Date: 2007-10-12 12:03 pm (UTC)Re: ummm
Date: 2007-10-12 02:14 pm (UTC)I've been shown a couple episodes of Stargate SG1, and have read a little fanfiction of it, but don't know it well enough to fanfic it, and am not interested enough in it to pursue the fandom/series/universe.
Plus the differing governmental approaches to the existence of aliens in the Stargate universe and the Transformers universe make the two series difficult to cross well. Not impossible, just... difficult.