Chapter Text
The familiar, grating shriek of Shrek’s roar slams it’s way into your cranium, causing your eyes to snap open as you groan. Blindly scrambling for your phone, you helplessly slide your thumb against the screen a couple times as you squint at the bright white lettering.
It’s too early for your eyes to start focusing quite yet, and you barely even register Shrek’s roar being cut off as you bury your face back into your pillow. You don’t need to look at the clock to know that it’s a crisp 7:00 am.
It’s revolting.
Resting with your eyes closed and your nose being crushed by the weight of your skull, you finally turn your head to the side after a couple of moments to squint at your phone again. The press of your thumb to your home key unlocks your screen, and you’re greeted with whatever the hell you’d been searching up last night. Squinting at the lyrics to ‘Baby it’s Cold Outside’ by…
Oh, right, that’s why you were googling that. You had a crisis at 3:00 am over who the hell sung that song. Michael Bublé – Of course. Your mother used to be obsessed with listening to him around Christmas time, and the sound of him serenading you for the entirety of November and December as a child still haunts you.
Clicking the home button on your phone, your eyes scan your screen in search of your Instagram app. Finding it quickly, you open it to see if anything new had been posted. Scrolling through your feed mindlessly, you pause to glance at the time in the upper corner of your screen. Ugh, you have about an hour before your morning class starts. Despite the pit in your stomach, you know for a fact that morning classes don't suck nearly as much as night classes do. Your back tenses when you’re abruptly reminded of your one class that went to 10:00 pm every Monday and Wednesday last semester.
Instagram is depressingly dry, as expected, so you sleepily struggle to think of what to do for the thirty minutes you designate each morning to lazing about. Your professor decided at the beginning of the semester that she’ll mark you absent for the day if you use your phone during your morning class, so you have to do something worthwhile while you still can.
Hmmmm. Archive of Our Own it is, then.
Pulling up the Michael Bublé tab again, you close it without thinking and perk up as you scroll through your options. Oh, hey, weren’t you just reading that amazing Whirl/Reader fic last night? You remember leaving a really long comment on it in a haze, and you cringe as you desperately hope that your sleep deprived brain didn’t come across too much like a raving madman.
You haven’t been sleeping well recently; for whatever reason, your head has been pounding for the past couple of days. It’s not a normal headache, either, or even like a migraine; it feels like you’re forgetting something important, or like intense deja vu is hanging over everything you do. It’s disorienting enough to leave your head aching up something fierce, no matter how many pills of Tylenol you snag from your best friend.
It’s pounding right now, actually; you’d been hoping the headache had maybe been caused by your insomniac tendencies, but despite nearly drugging yourself to death last night with sleeping pills, your headache remains.
Maybe it’s because you hardly drink any water? That’s what your health-conscious mother would tell you, anyways.
Scanning through your tabs, your eyes flicker over the various MSPARP and Cherubplay tabs before you finally catch sight of the familiar logo for AO3. However, as you skim through the titles, your brow furrowed in confusion.
Digimon? What the fuck? You don’t think you’ve ever seen a Digimon episode in your entire life. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Sonic were always your go-tos when you were a child.
Besides, why would you have opened a ton of Digimon fics anyways? Tapping on one of the tabs, it seemed like you were in the middle of a chapter as the page loaded up, but you had no recollection of ever reading it.
Deciding promptly that it’s too early to conduct a scientific research experiment by opening up your tab history, you instead open up a new tab and type out “transformers archive of our own” into the search bar. After hitting the search button, you wait impatiently as the webpage loaded up, still reeling from all the Digimon fanficitions.
You know for a damn fact that you weren’t high or drunk last night; hell, you’d gone to bed early because your head had hurt so much. The ache was pounding behind your eyes, now, making your vision blur as the pain got worse and worse.
It was reaching agonizing levels the longer you thought about Digimon, so you let the subject go temporarily as you focus in on the google search that loaded up.
At first, you wonder if you were hallucinating, blinking a couple of times as you stare at the images and video thumbnails currently spread across your phone screen. Then, you conclude that this must be some sort of publicity stunt for a new Transformers movie or something. The Bumblebee movie did slap, so you hope quietly that this new movie will go just as hard as you decide to click on one of the suggested videos. It seemed to emit a sort of ‘found footage’ vibe from the thumbnail, so you wonder what the new movie could possibly be about as your Youtube app pulled itself up.
You got a brief glimpse of the last video you were watching before the actual video starts to play, and you blink rapidly as the shaky quality of the film. A loud cacophony of noise abruptly blared from your phone, so you curse quietly and smack your finger against the side of your phone in a desperate attempt to turn down the volume. It takes a few tries, but you finally make it so the heavy breathing wasn’t piercing your poor eardrums anymore.
However, as soon as you have the sound thing settled, you’re struck by how… Not-Movie-Like this video seems. It was shaky, but not necessarily bad quality; most phones have good quality cameras now, but it’s filmed sideways and is pretty choppy. You think it’s filmed on Snapchat or something.
There’s a hulking, dark silhouette that can be seen over the trees in the video, and it’s clearly nighttime. The person’s heavy breathing hitched as two twin, bright, red lights turn towards the camera, and for a moment a face was vaguely visible before the video was cut short. Goosebumps crawled up your back, and you sit up slightly in bed as you skim over the title.
“TRANSFORMER SIGHTING *NOT CLICKBAIT* **WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST SEE**” wasn’t the most convincing title, but hey, people have to make their ad revenue somehow. Flicking your thumb, you open the description to read it and catch sight of the time stamp.
August 2016.
Right, okay. That’s… Definitely not 2019, but that’s fine. Maybe it was some kind of student film? Your youth had been filled with gushing over Homestuck and Marble Hornets, so you hadn’t been keeping up with all the Transformers happenings back then. Maybe this had been released and didn’t catch your attention initially? However, as you scroll through the suggested videos, you feel your heart sink as you see dozens of other videos almost exactly like this one. There are countless videos that capture the full visage of brightly colored figures fighting or walking through cities, forests, the desert…
The timestamps were all over the place, the earliest one being 2006. It was an incredibly grainy photo of who you think might be Soundwave, judging by the coloration and blocky silhouette. The camera zooms in on his face, and his glowing red visor remained imprinted in your vision as you blink rapidly. The video ends shortly after that, and you slowly set your phone down.
What.
The fuck?
This can’t seriously be happening, can it? There’s no fucking way this is actually happening. Not once did you see a reference to a cartoon or video game, or even the godforsaken Michael Bay movies.
It was almost like… Almost like…
Your breathing hitched, and you could feel your heart constrict as the world grew hot. Sliding your legs off the side of your bed, you stared at your socked feet for a long time as your head continued to race. It felt like you existed inside of a fishbowl, your pulse pounding in your ears as you did your best to focus on the here and now.
Of course your first thought was how this couldn’t be real, and it was like your mind was stuck on that fact, hiccupping and swirling as it hyperfocused on how none of this could be real, all of this videos weren’t real, and if they were how could you ever trust anything, what if everything really was a simulation, were you living a lie, how could you know who to trust and how, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if –
Pushing yourself off the bed, you burst out of your room and knocked on your best friend’s bedroom door, feeling your heart in your ears.
There’s no way the Transformers could actually be real, right?