Title: Black and White and Red
Pairings: Prowl/Jazz, Prowl/Jazz/Blaster
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Hasbro owns the Transformers, I'm just borrowing them for my own amusement. Lyrics to "Angel" owned by Massive Attack, also borrowed.


You are my angel
Come from way above
To bring me love

It was not the healthiest thing for a person to do, Blaster knew - to sit alone in his quarters brooding when there was probably something more interesting going on somewhere in the universe. Beyond his door he could hear shouts, laughter; orange light seeped through the crack under his door, providing his only illumination. Outside his door was music, activity, the yan principle - that was Blaster's world, his mindspring and inspiration.

Within his room, the echoing-silent void of yin threatened to engulf him.

Her eyes
She's on the dark side

Jazz and Prowl. Somehow everything in the base revolved around Jazz and Prowl, never mind what the Crisis of the Week was or who was having their regularly scheduled mental breakdown. Whenever there was trouble, it seemed, there was Jazz, elbow-deep in it and laughing, his voice bright as Venus' reflection in an otherwise starless sky. And where there was Jazz, of course, there was Prowl - looming, watching calmly, impassively, like a full moon.

If anyone embodied the twin principles, yin and yan, those two were it. Black-on-white-on-black, interlocking so tightly and completely: an unbroken circle. No room, in this perfect embodiment of the universe, for Blaster's diode-jangling beats and his syncopated rhythms. No room for red.

Neutralize
Every man in sight

He'd practically thrown himself at Jazz since the day they'd met, but while Jazz had flirted back with something approaching enthusiasm he'd never let Blaster too close. He hadn't understood at the time, of course - everyone else finds me irresistible, why not you? - but things became clear the day he noticed Prime's golden-boy tactician sitting by himself in the lounge, tapping idly on a datapad. He'd crossed the floor to stand behind him, lifted an arm to tap him on the shoulder... and found himself being dragged away, caught in a friendly armlock that nevertheless threatened to snap his elbow joint. Jazz had pulled him as far as the doorway, growled "Mine" in his audial, and slipped away like a wraith, leaving Blaster with only a soreness in his arm and a ringing in his audial to let him know that the saboteur had even been there.

The next fortnight found him on the arm of a
pretty young thing with vapid eyes and high energy tolerances, whose black-and-green chrome finish even complemented Blaster's own paint job. Parading his new interface-partner around, he'd swiveled his head meet Jazz's visored gaze. Jazz had smirked, given Blaster a thumbs-up, and gone back to his card game; Blaster felt the cold and dark of yin creep over his insides.

To love you, love you, love you ...

That yin had remained, congealing into a stasis-field around his spark, even as he filled his days with white and noisy yan - music, battle, and one interface after the next, all of it blurring into a mass of meaningless light and color in his processor. His last target had been Tracks, in his early days just as much a swinger, but the Corvette's responses had been ambivalent at best... and of course, the day he met Raoul it was all over.

Every other Cybertronian on this planet was either square, or Decepticon; which brought him back to Jazz and Prowl.

You are my angel
Come from way above

Which, Blaster supposed, left him right back where he started... forever to stand outside that perfect circle, watching it spin in its endlessly delicate balance, flirting at its razor-edge, aching but always at the distance of a reverent, fathomless micron. He was not a god or Buddha, to consume the darkness and perish in the light; his was the sphere of a mere mortal, and to touch what he could not have was to destroy the universe.

There were times when Blaster hated red.

To love you, love you, love you ...