Too Useful To Waste.

Summary: Both the Autobots and the Decepticons know how resourceful and inventive Sam Witwicky was. When Soundwave finds him dying after a battle, he wonders if he has a way to save Sam so his skills are not lost.

Warnings: Character death, minor blood and gore.

Rating: T for safety.

Disclaimer: Transformers belongs to Hasbro and DreamWorks/Paramount. I make no claim to the contrary.

Please read first! Before you accuse me of plagiarism, I want you to first know that I have asked for, and received, permission from LittleMewLugia to continue the snippet. This is a project we're doing. We both have a common start off point, but we want to see where we'll both end up. If you doubt me, please PM LittleMewLugia and ask. Thank you for you consideration.

Too Useful To Waste.

Chapter 1; Soundwave

It was after the battle that Sam Witwicky was found, broken and dying, and it was Soundwave who found him.

The Autobots had shielded him on the ground during the fighting, covering all ground routes into his location, but it was Sam's bad luck that Starscream had been looking for an opportunity, and seen one. All the Autobots, and Sam himself, were concentrating on the ground troops, temporarily underestimating the threat from the air.

It was the last time Sam would make that mistake.

Starscream had stooped down, like the bird of prey his alt-form was named for, but he was in robot form, not in plane form. His hands had lashed out and scooped up the human before anyone even realized what he was doing, and he pulled out of the steep dive, heading up and away with incredible agility and frightening speed.

Starscream was impatient, however, to rejoin the battle, and was not interested in taking prisoners, but wanted to get back to the battle. He figured that gravity would take care of his squishy victim, and dropped him, making sure there was a nice long drop onto an abandoned parking lot. Then, he rejoined the fray.

Sam had not died on impact, but he was dying when Soundwave found him. Soundwave thought that the human could have had valuable information, and wished Starscream had thought this through before dropping him like that.

He engaged his scans, in case his initial suspicion had been incorrect, but no, the boy was unconscious, his life signs slowing and becoming more erratic. Soundwave had scanned enough humans since arriving to know what was normal and not normal for humans.

However, even he checked twice when he found something that was definitely not normal for humans.

It had to be the boy's contact with the AllSpark during its destruction, he surmised. That had caused the human's heart to be infused with Spark energy. The AllSpark energy within him was not strong enough to generate a new body for him, but the protospark was instinctively trying to coalesce into a Spark, maybe in hope of going into the heart itself, as if it were an organic Spark chamber.

That meant there was a chance that the human's life and skills and knowledge need not be wasted after all.

Soundwave's hands were composed of an incredible assortment of interchangeable tools – like a Swiss army knife, but infinitely more versatile. Extruding the two tools he needed – one from each index finger- he used the sharp scalpel to slit the human's body open from neck to groin. Sam was too far gone to be aware of it, even when Soundwave cut away his ribs and the musculature around them.

Sam had merely minutes, if not seconds to live.

There it was, the Spark energy glittering over Sam's quivering, still-beating heart. Soundwave touched his probe to it, turned on the current. The Spark energy was drawn to the electrified rod, drawn up it to the bulb at the top, where it coalesced into a Spark. Soundwave was relieved: Sam's body had not been strong enough for the energy to have the time to do this itself, Soundwave had merely speeded it up, but he had worried that he'd arrived too late, and that the energy might have started to dissipate as Sam's body had begun to die. That seemed to be an invalid concern, he noted, as the last of the Spark energy joined the small but hot and very bright spark in the bulb. Soundwave activated the force-field to keep it from dissipating and turned off the current.

He lifted the bulb, no longer interested in the body of Sam next to him, which was now inert, the heart had stopped beating. Reaching into his chest compartment he searched for and located an empty cassette. He manipulated it into robot form, found it to be a non-flier, and triggered the opening of the chest plates. He lowered the probe till it was touching the Spark chamber, released the force field, and activated a negative current. Drawn by the current and by the Spark's own survival instinct, the Spark shot down the probe and entered the Spark chamber with a small sizzling noise.

The new Casseticon twitched slightly, but Soundwave closed its chest plates and folded it back into cassette form. As a blank, it had had no energy stores, so would need to recharge before it could online. How the boy would react on finding out the manner of his saving, Soundwave could not predict, but what mattered was that he had been saved. Any potential his new Spark might possess had not been wasted.

His sharp audios detected something approaching and the vibration frequency told him that they were Autobots. Folding into his SUV form, he accelerated away with his prize.

Soundwave knew the vibration frequencies of the Autobot's voices, too, so when he picked up the sound of the agonised keen a few minutes later, Soundwave knew that it was Bumblebee who had found Sam's physical remains.