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The time must have been something close to 1 AM, but Sam certainly wasn't sleeping. And it wasn't even the weekend, which would have only been slightly better because then he could sleep in to make up for what rest he lost. He wondered, if he faked a cough, if his parents would let him stay home the next day. Or, uh, later that same day. Weird to think about it, already being "tomorrow"…
That was, if he survived long enough to make it till “tomorrow.”
Sam was cornered in the garage. He knew, realistically, his chances of getting out were pretty low. The only tool he had in such close quarters were his words, but those were being ignored. In any other situation against any other Cybertronian, he might have also had his relatively smaller size on his side, but there were no hidey-holes in here that couldn't be found. He was in this situation, and it wasn't any other Cybertronian: it was Bumblebee, and Bumblebee knew him too well.
Stitched-together snippets of radio chatter, crackling and interspersed with bursts of static, broke his attention away from the shadows of the garage and pulled it toward the bright yellow plating in front of him. “Let’s all just take a breather, right? Gotta calm down—” somebody said, sounding amused. A more serious voice announced: “This isn’t- this isn’t something we can run from.”
Bumblebee held his hands up in a placating gesture, like Sam was a skittish wild animal and he was trying to convince the little human that he meant no harm.
"Real funny!" Sam attempted to laugh, tried to pretend nothing was wrong, but it came out a bit strained, a bit hysterical. "C'mon, Bee. Move already, I'm going back to bed."
A shaking of the head, nonverbal communication he'd picked up easily from observing the native inhabitants of this planet.
"It's cold and I wanna go back inside," Sam tried.
"Please don't go, please don't go," sang the radio, but unlike the pleading tone of the singer, Bumblebee's bright optics held an intensity that left no room for argument. It wasn't a request.
Sam measured the distance between himself and Bumblebee and the door, a messed-up trigonometric problem that would get him nowhere. As if he could really make a run for it. He was paralyzed, locked in a tense game of who's-gonna-move-first for the past three minutes, and knew on a deep instinctual level that if he so much as stepped in the direction of the door, he'd lose.
And then what?
Or was he supposed to stand here, statue-still, until the sun rose? Until Bumblebee's optics stopped flickering red and he transformed his cannon back into a hand and his battle mask retreated?
The atmosphere was too thick; his mouth was dry. Echoes of blades longer than he was tall, of the roar of engines thundering across the sky, of explosions wiping out entire buildings flashed across his mind's eye. Suddenly, he felt way too small. Too cramped. He wanted to leave, and even if Bee was acting weird, it wasn’t like he was actually going to hurt him. This was probably him trying to… joke around, or something. Get the hang of that whole human hobby of “pranks.”
Of course Bumblebee would never truly hurt him.
Sam took that step.
The back half of the garage erupted into light and debris with the focused pulse Bumblebee’s cannon let loose.