Is to can be crack tiem nao? ["Through the Thin Place" 1]
So I wanted to wait until I'd actually finished this to post it, as I'm wont to do with multi-parter fics. But then I set aside work on the first to write nearly the entirety of a sequel, and kept putting off finishing this, and realized that I'll probably never get around to the mega-editing job I'm convinced this needs. SO. Here it is, in all its unbetaed glory.

(I'll be posting a real, legitimate-type fic soon, I promise.)

Title: Through the Thin Place
Fandom: Transformers 2007
Part: 1-2
Rating: PG-13, for some unsavory language
Summary: Sam and Bumblebee manage to fall through a hole in the fabric of space/time, finding themselves in a world where their lives are a blockbuster movie.
Word Count: 4,429
Disclaimer: Yeah, Transformers? Not mine. No profit being made, it's all in fun, etcetera, etcetera.
A/N: Yeah, yeah, I know. It's a self-insert. Crime among crimes, as bad as Mary-Sue, except in this the author acknowledges what she's doing. Just...give it a chance, 'kay? "Anything can be pulled off by the right writer," right?

~*~

All over the world, there are places that transcend the natural. These are magical places, locales couched in mythology and lore, swatches of countryside purported to be home to things that inspire story and legend.

They’re held to be haunts of supernatural creatures, homes to things with abilities beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Some of the tales hold forth that these creatures come from other worlds—and this is closer to the truth than any of the stories surrounding these places.

There is not simply one incarnation of existence, there are many. These exist concurrently and in parallel, sitting alongside one another, each one separate and unique. There exist similarities, yes; in fact, many of them are nearly identical excepting one or two little factors. But different they are, and distinct.

Mostly.

These parallel dimensions rub against each other, and always have, and the contact long ago wore thin places into the fabric of existence. And it is in these thin places—magical places—that things can cross through.

**

It was a dark and stormy night, and Sam felt like a complete and total dink just for letting that thought cross his mind. Despite the triteness of the phrase, though, it was true. It was undeniably night, and there was a storm of remarkable ferocity lashing the countryside.

It was the kind of storm his parents (and driver’s ed teacher) had always cautioned him was better handled by pulling over and waiting out the worst of it. And had he been by himself he may have—but he wasn’t, and he wasn’t driving. Sure, he was sitting in the driver’s seat, and yeah, his hands rested on the wheel, but it was for verisimilitude only. The sleek yellow Camaro that was his rather fantastic ride drove itself.

The car was a better driver than he was.

“This storm is something else, isn’t it?” he asked, leaning back in the seat and letting one hand drop casually beside him.

“I’ve been through worse.” The voice emanated from the car’s stereo speakers. “But you’re right—for this planet, it is impressive.”

“You’re sure you’re doing all right?” he asked. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the car, it was just that he had a tendency to get nervous when the rain was coming down so hard he could barely see the Camaro’s nose through the windshield.

“I told you, I’ve been through worse,” the car replied. There was more than a little amusement in his voice.

“All right,” Sam started to say. Lightning cracked impossibly close, dazzling his eyes, and the thunder was loud enough to deafen even the roar of rain on the roof. Sam let out an involuntary yelp, which turned into a panicked shout as the car lurched and the wheel began to spin under his fingers. Though he couldn’t see out the windows, it was obvious the Camaro was out of control. He could vaguely hear, over the constant drone of the rain, the squeal of the car’s tires against the asphalt.

The car lurched again, and Sam bounced in his seat, and he was pretty sure they’d gone off the road. “I thought you had it under control!” he shouted over the din.

There was no verbal response, but the wheel continued to turn and the brakes released with a pop. The car rolled and bounced, and failed to lose speed. Sam gave up all pretense of driving and settled for grabbing onto the seat and the armrest, trying to dampen the jolting he was getting.

The brakes slammed on again, and the Camaro’s rear end swung around. Sam was thrown against the door, and cracked his head, hard, against the glass. His vision blacked, more than could be attributed to the hour of the day, or the clouds choking the moonlight.

Sam blinked rapidly and shook his head, rubbing at his eyes and trying to clear his vision. He was still strapped in the Camaro’s driver-side seat, but it was quiet—had the rain stopped? If it did, it had been weirdly fast, but…he blinked again. There was strong moonlight coming in through the windows. “Did I black out?” he asked.

The car’s engine was rumbling gently. “Yes, but not long.”

“Not long?” he asked. “The storm’s completely gone.”

There was silence in the Camaro for a long time. “I don’t think it’s the storm that’s gone, Sam. I think…it’s us.”

“…What?” He leaned forward in the seat, peering forward through the windshield. The car was idling in a swatch of overgrown grass surrounded by trees. He couldn’t be positive, but he was pretty sure the road they’d been driving on was bordered mostly by short-shorn grass. He definitely didn’t remember trees, especially not this many.

The speakers hissed softly as they delivered the car’s next pronouncement. “We’re not in the same geographic location as we were a few minutes ago. In fact, we’re all the way across the continent.”

“Wait. You’re saying that somehow, in the space of a few minutes, we…what, teleported across the country?”

“Something like that. Sort of. I…” There was another momentary silence. “I don’t really know.”

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” Sam muttered. He slumped back in the seat and passed his hand over his eyes.

“I can’t reach any of the others,” his car reported not long after, “on any of the available channels.” The voice sounded worried, and with good reason. While Sam didn’t even pretend to be able to comprehend a lot of the higher electronics involved, he was aware that his car could communicate with his comrades in more ways than one. That he wasn’t able to raise them was somewhat…distressing.

“That’s not good,” he pointed out, unnecessarily.

“Extremely not good, though I’m not detecting any Decepticons either, at least not nearby.” By nearby, he probably meant something in the vicinity of the continent, or maybe the hemisphere.

“So what do we do?” Sam asked.

“We figure out where we are, how we got here, and how to get back,” the car responded, without missing a beat.

“Well, that’s straightforward enough,” Sam said dryly. He sighed. “So what do we do right now?”

“I suspect we look rather conspicuous sitting in the middle of all these trees.” The rumble of the engine picked up and the accelerator depressed itself carefully. The car began to roll forward, nosing between two of the trees. “Let’s get somewhere a little more populous, and then we figure out what happened to us.”

Sam bobbed his head, knowing the car would pick up the non-verbal signal. He adjusted the seatbelt unnecessarily and put both hands on the wheel, as if he was driving. The car came out of the trees and onto the verge of a narrow lane of asphalt. He paused for a moment, idling; Sam had a chance to see the road bending sharply to his left, and curving more gently to his right. Then, with a lurch that rocked its chassis on its suspension, the Camaro pulled onto the road—

The glare of headlights whipping around the corner to the left blinded Sam.

What happened next was confusing; it wasn’t so much a series of events, to Sam’s perception, as a series of sensations. He heard the Camaro’s engine pitch up from a grumble to a roar, and the horn of one (or maybe both) of the cars began to blare. Brakes squealed, he was flung against the seatbelt, and the forest outside the windows spun into dark streaks, broken by the white glare of the other car’s headlights.

The spinning stopped. Sam groaned and shook his head. At least he hadn’t blacked out this time. “What, did you not see them or something?” he asked.

“I’m not omniscient.” The voice emanating from the speakers was defensive. “Are you all right?”

“Dizzy.” Sam unbuckled his seat belt and rotated his shoulder experimentally. It was bruised, and would probably be stiff tomorrow. Of course, that thought only reminded him that they didn’t know where they were, and he wasn’t even sure where the two of them would be tomorrow. “How about you?”

“Minimal cosmetic damage,” he reported. “I’m all right.”

“Good. I’m gonna go see who we almost hit.” He matched action to word, swinging open the door and stepping out carefully. His legs held him.

The Camaro had spun across the road, ploughing a furrow backwards in the weeds on the other side. The other car, a dark Camry sedan, had stopped at a slant, half-on and half-off the road, at the end of a long track of black rubber and disturbed soil. Two people—a tall, heavy-set man and a short, stocky woman—were standing on the side of the road, arguing. Even as he approached, the woman broke off and stalked directly towards him.

He could see as she came closer that she wasn’t so much a woman as a girl, one wearing an oversized T-shirt with flames splashed across the chest like wings. And at the base of the flames, in a yellow triangle, was a blocky symbol exactly like the one inset in the steering wheel of his Camaro.

**

Janella hadn’t had any qualms about running Shades of Death Road. It didn’t even bother her that they were doing it at night, and late, at that; she’d driven the road a couple of times, without trouble (if not without weirdness). But when Jessie had suggested that they let Travis drive, she’d been a little worried. Still, they were all sober, and he had his license, so she’d shrugged and acquiesced.

He was driving fast, too fast. But it was almost midnight, and it wasn’t like it was a Friday or Saturday night, so other than a few joking protests, she made no complaint.

Then they were flying around a corner, and there was another car in the middle of the road, and then she kind of lost track of things for a minute. When the car stopped moving, she got pissed.

She leapt out of the car and practically fell on the driver’s door, scrabbling at the handle. Travis opened the door hard, pushing her back, and stood. He was a big guy, tall and wide, and he cut an imposing figure in the moonlight, but she didn’t let that affect her at all. “What the hell is wrong with you?!” she snapped, flailing her arms and craning her head back to look up at him.

“Don’t get mad at me,” he growled. “It was an accident.”

“You were driving too fast! Augh, I knew I shouldn’t have let you drive!” She lashed out at him with her hands fisted.

He shoved her. “No one’s hurt and your car’s fine,” he snapped. “It was an accident. Chill out!”

She snarled, but turned away, knowing that her anger was only fueled by the adrenaline of the almost crash. But he was right; no one was hurt and the car was fine—it hadn’t been an accident so much as a thrilling near-miss. Or so she told herself.

Someone had stepped out of the other car, so she left Travis behind and walked towards him. She glanced him up and down, a tall, skinny kid who didn’t look visibly injured, or even all that angry, and then looked at the car. That didn’t look visibly injured either, which was good, because she wasn’t much in the mood to foot someone else’s repair bill…er, again.

Then she realized what she was looking at. The car they’d very nearly t-boned was stunningly yellow, even in the broken moonlight, with two thick black racing stripes painted back from the hood. It was a sleek, modern, gorgeous…Camaro.

It was a Bumblebee car.

Janella felt a goofy smile break her face at the sight of it, her left hand going as if by instinct to the badge pinned to her jeans. The first piece of Transformers merchandise she’d ever bought, it was the Autobots’ insignia, and she wore it every day.

“Everyone all right?” the kid asked, and she looked back at him. Part of her brain informed her that he looked like Shia LaBeouf, but she had a tendency to over-estimate similarity of appearance, and anyway, it was dark out.

She switched her smile to a more normal grin. “We’re all okay. You?”

“All right,” he said. He rubbed her shoulder and gave a little half-smile. “No damage.”

“Car okay?” she asked, using the question as an excuse to glance at the car again.

He looked over as well. “Seems to be,” he said, shrugging.

“Cool,” she said. “So what happened? We came around the corner and there you were.”

“I’m, um, kind of lost, actually,” he admitted. “I was just, y’know, turning around.”

“’Kay,” she said agreeably, sticking her hands in her pockets. There was something a little off about his manner, but hell, it was Shades of Death road. No reason not to be nervous on Shades of Death after dark. There were rumors of all sorts of weird shit that went on up there, ghost cars and murders and mysterious happenings; it was a haunted place. Also, because of all the teenage joyriders who went Weird New Jersey-ing out there, police tended patrol the road frequently. “So everything’s all right?”

“Looks like it,” he said.

“Cool. Drive safe.” She grinned and turned away, hurrying back to her Camry, One-Eye—but not without another look at his car. Travis was still standing by hers, and Jess had gotten out as well. She met her friend’s eyes, and let the smile come back. “Did you see it, Jessie?!”

Jessie grinned back. “I’m still looking at it,” she said. “Bumblebee car.”

“Bumblebee car!” she squealed, giggling. “That almost made it worth it, Travis,” she added, smacking him on the arm. He grumbled something that sounded vaguely threatening. “All right, everyone back in One-Eye,” she said, waving her hand in a spacious circle. “Let’s roll out!”

**

Sam made a great show of looking his car over, waiting for the Camry to pull back on the road and away. When it was finally gone, he slid back into the driver’s seat and closed the door. “Huh,” he said.

“What?”

“Something weird,” he said. He ran his fingers over the symbol on the steering wheel contemplatively. There was no doubt that it was the same as the one that had been on the girl’s shirt.

“As weird as the two young women from the car we almost hit talking about me?” Bumblebee asked.

“That’s not weird,” Sam muttered. “We almost crashed. People tend to talk about it when they almost crash into someone.”

“By name.”

“What?”

There was a quiet whirr, and then voices that weren’t Bumblebee’s began to issue from the speakers. They were grainy and kind of staticky, but clear enough that Sam could recognize the girl he’d talked to as one of the speakers. He listened as they said something about a ‘Bumblebee car’ and started laughing.

“Okay, that’s weird,” Sam admitted. “The girl I talked to, she had this on her shirt.” He tapped the symbol on the steering wheel at ‘this’.

“It’s no coincidence, then,” he said.

“Huh,” Sam said. “Maybe we shouldn’t have let them drive away.”

“Well…I did take the liberty of accessing some of the electronics in the other car,” Bumblebee said, nonchalantly, “so we can track them down again, should we need to.”

“Do we need to?”

“I…don’t know,” Bumblebee said. “I’ve never been in a situation like this before, and if there’s some protocol for handling it, I don’t know it.”

“Hey, all that means is we get to make it up as we go along,” Sam said with a shrug. It startled a laugh out of the car, rendered tinny by transmission through the speakers.

“Oh, this is going to turn out well,” Bumblebee said, his voice wry. He pulled out onto the road, going more slowly this time, but no one came around the corner to surprise them. Without further incident, they left behind the unlucky corner of the road and accelerated for the nearest town.

**

“Mmm. Hungry now,” Janella said, pressing on the accelerator pedal and pointedly driving past the turnoff that led to her house.

“You know what? So am I,” Jessie said, looking surprised to find that she was. “Burger King?”

Janella glanced at the clock. “Too late. It’s McDonalds or Wendy’s.” She drove on, listening as Jessie and Travis began to debate back and forth which they preferred. She let it go for a minute or two, and then said, “Of course, I’m craving the Arches, and I’m driving, so bugger what you guys want.”

Travis tried to protest, clearly uninformed of the Rules of Janella’s Car; Janella let Jess explain while she drove. They pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot and into the drive-through lane.

It wasn’t a problem for the night shift to fill Jess and Janella’s small orders, but Travis wanted some bacon and chicken thing, which, of course, necessitated the pull-around-and-park. Janella cranked the windows all the way to admit what breeze there was in the muggy summer heat, and leaned back to wait.

After a few long minutes, full of the requisite complaints about the time it was taking for the food to come out, another set of headlights slowed and came into the McDonald’s lot. As the car turned and took the glare of its lights out of their eyes, Janella gasped. It was a bright yellow and black Camaro, and it had to be the one from before. There weren’t too many brand new yellow Camaros with racing stripes driving around Hackettstown. “Bumblebee car!” she exclaimed, bouncing in her seat and giggling.

Jess grinned. “Janella, I think he’s following you!” she said with a laugh.

Janella let herself sigh with theatrical ecstasy. “How cool would that be?” she said, turning in her seat to look out the back windshield at the Camaro. It had pulled around the building without going through the drive-through and parked in the corner of the lot. As she watched, the headlights went out.

“Wonder what he’s doing?” Jess asked.

Travis, ever the one to make an off-color joke, pantomimed exaggeratedly smoking a joint. Jess snickered, but Janella only rolled her eyes and turned to see if the food was coming out yet.

When she turned back, her eyes went to the rearview mirror, and she was surprised to see the kid-who-looked-like-Shia halfway across the lot and closing. She waited until she was sure that he was heading their way, then loosened her seatbelt and leaned out the window.

“Hi,” she said, all that she was able to manage of a number of witty openings that came to mind.

“Um. Hi,” he said.

“Something I can help you with?” she asked, wondering why he’d come over.

“Yeah, actually,” he said. “I’m…” He paused, looked briefly uncomfortable, and continued with, “kind of lost. Wondered if you could help me out.”

“I’ll try, but I suck at directions,” she said frankly. “Where are you trying to get to?”

She saw him glance at Jess in the shotgun seat and Travis in the back before he said, “I’ve got the address in my car.”

She stared at him when nothing else seemed to be forthcoming. “And…?”

“…Come look at it?”

Yeah, that wasn’t suspicious at all.

Now it was her turn to glance at Jess and Travis, both of whom looked just as leery about this prospect as she felt. But she was still hopped up on adrenaline from the almost-crash, and besides, it’d sure be nice to get an up-close look at that car.

“You guys wait for the food,” she said to her friends, unbuckling the seatbelt. “I’ll be right back.”

Jess grabbed her arm. “Want me to come?” she hissed in a low voice.

“Naw, I’m okay.” She grinned with a lot more cockiness than she actually felt. “I watch ninja movies, remember?” With that, she turned and opened the door, pausing to make sure her phone was in her pocket before following him.

Most girls her age would have had eyes for the behind of the tall, skinny, relatively good-looking guy walking in front of them—she only stared at the car. He glanced back once or twice, some furtiveness in the motion, and then turned around to face her. “Okay, I lied,” he said.

She felt the pace of heart quicken, and stepped back convulsively. “Yeah?” she said guardedly.

“I don’t need directions.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Listen, I just wanted to ask you something,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. She stiffened. “Um. What’s that, on your shirt?”

She blinked, taken completely aback, and gaped at him. That was probably the absolute last thing she’d expected to hear. While it wasn’t an unwelcome question, it was a weird one, at least for the circumstances. “It’s…it’s a Transformers thing,” she said, the bizarreness of the situation enough to keep her from flashing her nerd cred through a long, fan-jargon-filled initial explanation. “The Autobots insignia.”

“Autobots,” he repeated. She’d expected derision or blank incomprehension, but his tone was thoughtful. Even in the dim light in the corner of the parking lot, she didn’t miss the way his eyes darted at his car.

“Yeah,” she said, bobbing her head. “They’re the good guys. Actually…” She trailed off, and looked over the Camaro again. “One of the Autobots transforms into a car exactly like this.” She smiled fondly. “He’s my favorite.”

The kid was looking at her with a truly odd expression on his face. “Your favorite?”

“Bumblebee.” Another girl might have felt ashamed of her fannishness for a franchise directed primarily at boys, or at least been unwilling to express it so openly in front of a total stranger, but not her. She knew that she probably looked—and sounded—absolutely psycho, but she didn’t care.

“I’m really surprised how much your car looks like him, actually,” she admitted; Bumblebee’s alternate form for most of the second half of the movie was a top-of-the-line Camaro, a model that was only just being released. It was strange that a kid so seemingly young had such a smoking car. Suiting action to word, she added, “I half expect to peek in the window and see—” She stopped dead.

There was the familiar blocky insignia, inset in the Camaro’s steering wheel. It was exactly the same as the one on her shirt, and pinned to her hip.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, taking a step backwards. “Oh my God,” she repeated, taking another. “Oh my dear sweet Almighty Tallest on the Massive above.” This time she tripped over her own feet and fell back onto the asphalt, scraping her palms and completely ignorant of the pain.

“Whoa! Are you all right?” the kid asked, looking surprised. She switched her gaze from the car to him, noting anew his striking resemblance to Shia LaBeouf. It was more than a resemblance, in fact. He looked exactly like him. If it weren’t for that, she would have suspected that this was the car they’d used in the movie, but she’d always been prone to flights of fancy. Her mind automatically skipped the more likely conclusion and jumped right to the weird one.

“You’re Sam Witwicky,” she said, her eyes widening.

He froze, half-bent with his hand outstretched, presumably to help her up. “What?” he said, guardedly.

“You are, aren’t you? Oh my God. You’re him.” She scrambled to her feet. “And if you’re him, then that means…” She trailed off, turning to stare with even wider eyes at the Camaro. She couldn’t finish the sentence.

He didn’t say anything immediately, and before he got a chance to make any response to her assertion, Jess called across the parking lot, “The food’s out! Let’s get the hell out of here!” She turned and looked over her shoulder, then looked back; the kid—Sam—had that deer in the headlights look.

“I…I gotta go,” she stammered, getting to her feet.

He grabbed her by the arm, preventing her from leaving. “You can’t tell anyone,” he said urgently.

“I won’t,” she assured him, without even thinking about it. He released her, and she backed away. He remained standing, watching her, until she turned on her heel and sprinted back to her own car.

“What’s wrong?” Jess asked as she opened the door and practically fell into her seat.

“Huh? Uh. Nothing,” she said. She pressed on the brake pedal and put the car in reverse. “Just…nothing.”

“Did he try anything?” Travis asked ominously, leaning forward between the two front seats.

She shook her head, looking in the review mirror at the Camaro. “No,” she said. “He just needed directions.” She looked over at Jess and forced a smile. “Now gimme my hamburger.”

**

Sam watched the girl who’d known his name sprint back to her car. He ran one hand through his hair, a nervous gesture, and only turned away when they’d pulled out. The Camaro’s driver’s side door popped open invitingly, but a gleam of silver caught the corner of her eye and he stopped.

There was a cell phone on the ground, where the chick had been fallen. He bent and picked it up, weighing it in his palm, before getting in the car.

“This changes the situation considerably,” Bumblebee said without preamble.

“Yeah,” Sam muttered distractedly. “This is her cell phone.”

“It is. And…?” As he spoke, the headlights snapped on and the car shifted into reverse, backing out of the space in the corner of the lot.

“Well, we should probably get it back to her. It sucks to lose a cell phone.”

“Does it? There’s not a lot of data on them. It shouldn’t be hard to recover.”

“Cell phones aren’t backed up on anything,” Sam explained. “Trust me. It’s no fun trying to find phone numbers again.”

“That’s…” Apparently, Bumblebee reconsidered what he was about to say and trailed off. He turned the corner and accelerated in silence. “It’s probably not a good idea to seek out someone who recognized us,” he said finally.

“Not even someone who said you’re her favorite?” Sam asked.

“…Well. If it’s really so much trouble to replace a phone, then I guess it’s our duty to return it.”

Sam laughed, then frowned. “Wait, how do we get it back to her when we don’t know, um, anything about her.”

There was definitely a smug tone in his voice when he said, “Leave that to me.”

~*~

Next part coming. Just...coming.