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So take me and break me and make me strong like you.
I'll be forever grateful to this and you.
It's only you, beautiful.
Or I don't want anyone.
If I can choose it's only you.
"The No Seat Belt Song" - Brand New
The first thing Sam noticed when he came to was that he couldn't see. A few moments of of startled panic and then a familiar voice called out to him.
"You're going to have to online your optics."
He heard steps on the floor, the voice moving closer and then launching into a series of instructions that he somehow managed to follow and then the world went from black to grey static to color.
He stared up at a steel ceiling and heavy industrial lights, tried to blink and couldn't.
"I'll teach you how to use the optic cleaning components later," said the voice again and Ratchet came into view above him.
"Think you can you sit up? --Don't try to speak," the last was spat out quickly as Sam went to open a mouth that felt both familiar and undeniably strange. "Just shake or nod; I think you can manage that."
He nodded, paused, and then tensed stomach muscles that he knew were no longer there. He felt the barest tension along the area of his stomach. Not enough to sit up.
"That's what I thought," said with no condemnation but perhaps a little bit of bone-deep weariness. Then an arm was sliding under him, pulling him into a sitting position, and Ratchet's hands were placing his own flat on the table, securing him, helping him find a position that kept him balanced upright, if a little slumped.
Sam didn't need to look down to see that his own hands would now resemble the CMO's.
Instead he looked--as much as he could with his new eyes...optics—-around the med lab, empty aside from himself and Ratchet and...Bumblebee, curled up in a far corner, optics blazing blue as a desert sky and watching him.
"I couldn't--" Bumblebee started, his vocal processor giving way to static before coming back, hitching and faint with the faintest mechanical wail, "I couldn't just leave you there, Sam."