So here is my tribute to 9/11. Even though I was only five at the time, I can still remember the second plane crashing into the second tower and I can still remember watching them both fall. It was very traumatising. I hope nothing like that will ever happen again.

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the soldiers or any of the Transformers (other than the ex-human femme). And I am not the cause of 9/11.

P.S. My OC was used only to show the impact of the barely aware children of the world who had watched 9/11 happen.

Remember Them

Jazz was a happy-go-lucky mech. He was always happy. Nothing could make him unhappy. He attacked Decepticons with a flair only he could pull off. He was one of the fastest Autobots next to Sideswipe and Sunstreaker. He spoke with a tolerable gangster accent, and had an attitude that mirrored the attitudes of the "good" kids of the Chicago streets. He was Optimus Prime's Third in Command and the Prime's top intelligence officer. He was all-around type of guy who was easy to make friends with. He was friends with almost everyone on base.

"Ah don't get it," Jazz said before he crossed his arms. He was standing by the catwalk situated in the main hanger as Glen, one of his human friends, sat at one of the computers set up there. "Four hijacks, in the same day, an' the military couldn' do anything about it?"

"They couldn't do anything about it because it happened so quickly," Glen explained before he turned back to the computer and typed a command into it. A couple of pictures popped up, and Jazz leaned forward to get a closer look. One picture was of two tall towers in the middle of the city of New York, and the one next to it was of the dust cloud caused by the buildings after they had collapsed. "The planes were hijacked and none of the people at any of the control towers could contact them. They hijackers crashed the planes into the towers—when the second 747 crashed into the second tower, it was caught on tape." Glen typed another command into the computer and a YouTube video popped up over the pictures.

A black femme about as tall as Jazz walked up beside the silver saboteur and leaned in to watch the video was Jazz and Glen. Jazz was completely fixated by the video, so he didn't notice her presence. Jazz watched as the first tower smoked, and slowly he noticed the second plane approach the second tower from behind it. He could clearly see the 747 before it crashed into the tower. It exploded in a huge fireball, and Jazz winced as his brain quickly accessed the situation before it told him that all on board never had a chance. "Ouch." That was all he could say.

"I was five when it happened," the black femme remarked as they took a step back from the catwalk. Jazz looked at the ex-human with a sullen look on his faceplates. "I watched it happen—live. I remember the second plane crashing into the tower. I remember both towers collapsing. My mother gasped as she watched and people screamed as they tried to escape. It was traumatising."

Jazz nodded. "Bumblebee musta watched it. Ah think Ah'll talk to him in a bit." Jazz noticed the unsettled look on the femme's face. He placed a comforting servo on the femme's shoulder. "Ah'm sorry ya had ta see that, Twistette. But Ah needed ta do some research."

"Yeah, because you're the Intelligence Officer," she sighed as her doorwings drooped. She shrugged off the servo before she turned and walked down the hall and into the rec room. Jazz watched her go before he turned back to Glen.

"Dude, you'd understand how she feels if you had been there," Glen said before he got up, walked down the catwalk, and disappeared into the rec room as well.

Jazz nodded absentmindedly before he leaned in and looked at the pictures again. "Ya're right." If he had been there, he would understand why some of the soldiers and techs were so weighed down by this "Anniversary". He'd have to talk to Bumblebee, and maybe Lennox and Epps. They'd be able to answer the questions Glen couldn't answer for him. So Jazz walked out of the main hanger and began to track down a certain scout and a certain Colonel.

He found both of them just outside the base. Lennox was talking to Bumblebee about battle strategies that might be effective against the Decepticons. Though it seemed it was a little hard to understand Bumblebee because of the scout's reliance of the radio. "So we should try to break the main defence before we send someone into the base who can't be seen? Then we retreat?" Lennox asked in order to clarify.

Bumblebee nodded happily. "The fighting…"

"Good," Lennox said with a relieved sigh. He turned to look at Jazz as he approached the two. "Hey, Jazz."

Jazz smirked. Every time he looked at Lennox, he remembered the first time Lennox had seen him "alive" in his fifteen foot tall form. Lennox was so shocked that he had screamed the words he had been thinking instead of keeping them in his head. Yeah, seeing someone coming back from the dead was not something you saw every day. Ratchet expected Lennox to pass out, so he had kept the poor man in the med bay with Jazz. Lennox hadn't looked away from the silver mech the whole time he had been in the med bay.

"Yo, Colonel Lennox," Jazz said before he nodded to Bumblebee. "Hey, 'Bee." His smirk fell from his face as soon as he finished greeting them. "Guys, Ah need ta talk ta ya about somethin'."

Lennox shrugged in a care-free manner. "Alright, fire away."

Jazz let out a sigh and leaned on one hip as he crossed his arms. "Ah've been hearin' a lot about the event called '9/11'. Ah've been doin' some research about it, and have realized that a lot o' people are affected by it. A lot of people died that day, but it happened, like, eleven years ago," he said. "Why are people still affected so strongly about it still?"

Lennox stiffened at the mention of '9/11' and Bumblebee warbled sadly. As Bumblebee's wings drooped, Jazz began to wonder if asking the Colonel and one of his friends was a bad idea. "It was a bad incident," Lennox said sadly. "There was no reason for all those people to die. The people in all four planes died, almost everyone in both towers died, including the firemen that were rushing up into the towers to save people. People in buildings around the twin towers died as well. Well over a thousand deaths were counted. Then the Pentagon was hit. The fourth plane was supposed to hit the White House, but never had the chance since the people on that plane managed to overpower the hijacker. They had to crash the plane…"

"Run to me if you need a shoulder…" Bumblebee sang sadly.

Jazz glanced at the scout before he hung his head. Lennox continued. "The world was in an uproar. None of the jets could get in the air fast enough. The planes had crashed just as the planes were taking off. I was at the closest base to New York, so I experienced the action at the base first-hand. They tried to go as fast as they could, yet it still took ten minutes for the jets to fly to New York. Everything had happened by the time they got there."

"Ah…see…" Jazz said slowly. "Sorry for bringin' up the subject." He turned and left the room, his serious mood deepened.

This anniversary is more serious than Ah thought…

"Yo, Wheeljack, whaddya need?" Jazz asked, grinning at the reaction he got from the bot who now preferred to be called 'Que'. After having his body rebuilt, Wheeljack decided that with a new body he should have a new name. Jazz hadn't quit calling him Wheeljack.

The blue Mercedes turned to look at him through his spectacles. "Ah, good, you're here. I need you to help me with one of my newest inventions. I think I have it perfected—I just need an 'Bot to try it out."

Jazz's grin turned into a smirk as he listened to Wheeljack's explanation. "Choosing meh makes meh feel so special," Jazz joked. An object on the table in the middle of the lab caught his attention, and he walked over to the table in order to get a closer look. The object, he saw, was small, round, and blue in colour. He could easily carry it in the palm of his servo—if it was meant to be carried. "Soooo…what is it?" he asked.

"It's a prototype for what I call the 'Decepticon Shock Probe'."

Jazz's mind blanked. "It's a device built to shock Cybertronians?!" he exclaimed, incredulous. "This thing could put meh in stasis fo' days if ya use it on meh!"

Wheeljack merely chuckled. "You don't need to worry about anything, Jazz. It's a prototype, and I have the settings on 'Reminder'. It will only send out a tiny pulse that you'll hardly be able to feel. You'll have to tell me how much you can feel though when I use it."

"So you control it with a remote?"

"Correct," Wheeljack confirmed with a nod.

"Fine…ya can use it on meh," Jazz said without a moment's hesitation. He sighed and glanced around. But when something suddenly clicked painfully into his right wrist, he yelped. He looked at Wheeljack. "What was that?!" he looked down at the source of his sudden discomfort. The DSP was sitting on his wrist now, with small clamps securing it down.

"It's meant to hurt when you put it on the Decepticon," Wheeljack said before he left Jazz's side and walked over to the table where the remote for the DSP was. He picked up the remote before he turned back and looked at the silver saboteur. "Alright, now focus and see if you feel anything."

Jazz nodded. Now this is why I had suddenly felt like I was going to become Wheeljack's 'Guiney pig'… He watched the scientist closely as he focused on the sensors in his wrist. Wheeljack nodded and pressed a button on the remote.

He felt a small shock in his wrist, and it wasn't too bad. But then, suddenly, his world exploded and he suddenly felt some sort of falling sensation. His vantage point flipped before, with a roaring sound, everything fell into darkness. It seemed that another one of Wheeljack's experiments had failed. And Jazz had been caught in the middle of it.

Jazz slowly rebooted, his 'feeling' sensors coming on first, followed by his various other sensors and instruments before his optics finally onlined. Which an audible gasp, Jazz drew in much needed air before he looked around from behind his visor at what seemed to be surroundings native to an area that was called an "alley". These were common in cities and some towns. Though, the surroundings were not all that important to him, Jazz had to wonder why and how he had got here.

He got to his pedes and stretched his cables. He scanned the alley, and saw that there was only one other life form in it other than himself in it. It was a human, a homeless person, who looked up at him with wide eyes before she got up and ran from the alley. She didn't scream, but Jazz wondered why she ran from him. The Earth knew that the Autobots were the good guys and that they wouldn't hurt him. He sighed, figuring that he couldn't risk freaking more people out, so he transformed down into his alt-form, turned on his holoform—which was a man with light brown skin, blue eyes, and short, curly black African-American hair—and then rolled slowly out of the alley.

As he rolled down the center of this city, he began to realize that something was wrong. He had turned on his radio a few minutes after coming out of the alley, but he kept getting news reports of petty things he knew had happened back in 2001. But why was he hearing this? At first he had come to the conclusion that someone had accidentally started playing a recording instead of music, but as time progressed, he realized that he was wrong.

Somehow, he was back in the year 2001.

In the city of New York.

On the day numbered as 9/11—or September eleventh.

Aw…life just had to come back and bite him in the aft, didn't it?

Jazz came to a stop in front of the historic infrastructure that dominated the skyline. He couldn't believe his holographic eyes. Dwarfing all the buildings around them, was the World Trade Center. The twin towers even made him feel small compared to them. They were still up, so it meant that the tragedy had not happened yet.

But he didn't want to believe that this was actually happening. He took a deep breath and tore his eyes from the magnificent sight before him as the light turned green. "This is all just a dream. Ah was just knocked into stasis when the device malfunctioned. Ah'm actually in the med bay with ol' Ratch' scurrying to see if Ah'm okay. Ah'm not actually in New York on the day that the World Trade Center is attacked…" he was interrupted when the top of the north tower erupted into flame with the sound of a large explosion. Jazz's spark sank with dread.

After he drove through the intersection, he pulled off to the side and, after parking, climbed out of his alt-mode as his holoform. He rushed onto the sidewalk, now looking straight up at the towers where he was standing. From his vantage point at the base of the towers, he felt so utterly powerless. As the tower burned away and people began to flood out of the front doorway at the bottom of the north tower, Jazz got back into his alt-mode and simply watched.

So this was why people were so sad about 9/11. The people above the crash site on the north tower wouldn't have been able to get past the flames in order to escape. And the people within the plane that had just crashed…they never had a chance. One second they were there, the next second they were not.

Jazz sat there, thinking about this, but was shocked out of his thoughts at the sound of a second explosion. He climbed out of his alt-mode once again in order to see the extent of the damage. Both towers were smoking now. People were rushing out the bottoms of both buildings, screaming as they escaped with their lives. Some people came out with tattered clothing, showing that they either ripped their clothing on something, or had been briefly trampled at one point. Jazz looked at everything happening, in shock. The amount of devastation happening here, even though the two towers had been hit and were about to collapse, was to that when the Decepticons began to attack at the beginning of the war.

When the towers collapsed, he could get seriously hurt if he did not move. His internal chronometer had been counting down the time until the towers would collapse—which was exactly one hour after the second plane crashed—and that time was almost up. He hated that he couldn't do anything to stop this, to keep people from feeling so sad because of this day when no one could do anything to stop this.

As he heard the towers begin to fall, a bright light consumed him and he suddenly found himself back in Wheeljack's lab. With a sigh of relief, he deactivated his holoform and transformed up into his robot-form. He looked around before he noticed Lennox standing on one of Wheeljack's lab tables. He slowly walked over to the man and crouched down so that he could be more on his level. Then he opened his mouth. "Colonel Lennox, Ah think we should have a 9/11 memorial service."

"Run to me when you need a shoulder…" – "Run To Me" by the Bee Gees