Title: Hey Jealousy

Rating: M

Universe: TF:Prime [ish]

Pairing: Jazz/Orion Pax

Warnings: PnP smut, lotsa fluff

Summary: Jazz returns after an assignment, and shows Orion the world.

So I was taking prompts on tumblr, and I got this one: *scuffs foot* Jazz/Orion Pax, jealousy?

Don't know a thing about the title, it just came outta nowhere. Took me a while to work out a version of jealousy that'd fit my headcanon, but the end result makes me d'aww, so it can't be that bad. This is also my first time having a go at plain PnP – if you want some sticky, holler for it; I can probably work in a follow-up XD

Details on Jazz – he's a chronicler, which are a sister-cadre to the archivists and part of the record-keepers' clade in Iacon; and an articulate minibot, which gives him kinda spider-monkey-like proportions and also puts him at 15' tall [if he stands up straight, something articulates don't tend to do] compared to Orion's 26'. He's also very much a cuddler :3 I haven't actually read either of the Aligned prequel novels, so Jazz' characterisation is basically an improv based on the canons in which I do know him – G1 and the half a movie before Michael Bay killed him off… wound back a few millennia, since young!Jazz is young :D

Orion Pax heard the music coming from half a corridor away, a brisk, exotic melody full of notes which leapt and curled in a looping, beguiling chorus, a familiar voice singing along at the top of his vocaliser range.

The door to his quarters slid open, and a double handful of silver minibot was suddenly crouched on the desk next to him. "How's it hanging?" Jazz said, a mischievous grin tugging at the corners of his mouth.

He was obviously very recently returned, if the colour of his visor was any indication. Orion tapped his own face between the optics and gave him a pointed look, wondering with a dull pang of longing where he'd been that he'd had it set to that shade of vivid orange. "I am well," he answered. "Your visor is orange."

"Low levels of Tyrest," the chronicler answered automatically, peering over Orion's arm at the datapad he'd been working on. "I kinda like the colour. I was wearing dark blue and rust this assignment – it looks much more stylish with the silver. Think I should keep it?"

"Grizzle will dump so many demerits on your file the stack will reach higher than your helm," Orion said frankly, naming the head chronicler, a famous discipline enthusiast. It did look good on Jazz, to be honest. He didn't know why it suddenly ached to look at.

He shook his head, and, standing, fought down a wave of guilt. "I do like it though," he added, sighing through his vents. He'd had the fifth shift: it was halfway through the sixth now, and he was only just beginning to catch up on his work. He'd been assigned to two new clients, both researchers, both sponsored by the Iacon Towers, whose manners they seemed to have absorbed. It had been tiring work, but for Jazz, he'd put on a brave face.

It wasn't good enough, unfortunately. Jazz cocked his head, then rose in a fluid motion and stalked along the desk, hopping neatly to the head of Orion's berth.

"What's eating you?" His voice dropped into a deeper register, layering harmonic echoes over the words. It was the latest fashion in Polyhex – and that Orion only knew because Jazz himself had told him. "They working you hard again? Tell me to go away if you want to rest, Orion, I don't wanna keep you up longer than you want."

Orion twisted, looking back at Jazz in surprise. "No! I mean, you don't need to do that. I like listening to you, and you must have a lot of new stories to tell."

"Then what is it?" Jazz grinned again, crookedly. "You found a lovely mech in the library and can't figure out how to tell her you think she's pretty?"

Despite himself, Orion laughed. "I wish. Some of the scholars are quite good-looking, but none of them are particularly attractive."

"Says you!" Jazz patted the berth with a long-fingered hand, his visor flickering amusement. "Come on, have a seat. How's about you talk to me for once?"

"About what?" Orion asked wryly, but put down the datapad and joined him, tucking his legs up neatly and resting his forearms on his knees. Jazz, so much smaller than him, slithered onto his lap, three-toed feet hanging over the side of Orion's thigh, his servos clinging to Orion's collar struts with the ease of much familiarity. Jazz' field sunk into his, gold-tinged and affectionate.

"Oh, fun stuff," the chronicler said loosely, unhooking a hand long enough to gesture airily. "What's been going on while I've been away? No clade dramas? What's going on with you, anyway? It's been a while since I've seen you so…" he trailed off, tapping blunt claws against Orion's collar, "down, I guess. Your field's gone all fuzzy."

"Nothing, as far as I know." Orion listened to the rest of the sentence with a strange sense of mixed pride and guilt. Jazz had always been perceptive; it was part of what made him a good chronicler. Orion couldn't match that talent—but then, archivists did not need to.

The little puzzle pieces clicked into place. Orion fought down the urge to make a face.

"There, just like that," Jazz commented, tilting his head back against Orion's chestplates and staring expectantly up at him. "Tell me what's on your mind, hey? Promise I won't bite."

"It's silly," Orion demurred, letting his field flare. Jazz replied with a cheeky push back.

"The sillier, the better! Lay it on me, mech."

A flicker of uncertainty, before Orion forcibly hardened his resolve. "I missed you," he started, leaning back against the wall. "And I think I might be jealous of you."

Jazz' smile faded, a rare serious mood creeping through his field. "Hey now," he said softly, reaching out through EM frequencies to push reassurance into Orion's field. "Neither of those are silly." He considered Orion for a moment, his visor pulsing slowly. "Why would you be jealous of me?"

Orion stayed silent for a while, gathering his thoughts. "Because," he started hesitantly, optics narrowed at a spot on the opposite wall, "you know those datapads of mine? There is a lot of fascinating information in them, but it's all in glyphs chosen by one mech. There are places – historical, important places, whose meaning has been narrowed down to five or six specific glyphs. I can't know them from that the way the authors did; it would simply be… inaccurate, I suppose, to rely on them in that way. Whereas you experience them with your entire being, all your senses, and thus your understanding of it is much greater."

"Seen from that perspective, my understanding still isn't that great compared to the mechs who live there," Jazz pointed out shrewdly. "But I think I get your point – and yeah, it's not silly, Orion."

"It is," Orion said, shaking his helm. "I'm an archivist, I'm not supposed to live outside the halls. And I like it in here; I'm happy with being an archivist."

"Still doesn't mean being an archivist is all you can or should do." Jazz thought for a moment, then grinned. "Build up a few orns' worth of leave, and I'll take you somewhere. Praxus, or Crystal City. You might like the Sonic Canyons – there's a gigantic sinkhole in the middle of the system they call Primus' Cathedral. You stand in the bottom and sing, and your voice comes reflected back at you from a million different directions, in a million different tones."

Orion's spark tugged with want, echoed through his EM field in wistful rose-hue. Jazz grinned – and reaching up, popped the cover on Orion's digital interface array.

"I can show you if you want?"

Wordlessly Orion reciprocated, nodding his acceptance.

Jazz' nimble fingers drew out the tip of his connector, tracing clawtips across the sensitive metal. Orion shivered, turning Jazz in his lap so that they faced each other, the smaller mech straddling his thighs.

Jazz' reaction to the installation of his interface protocols had been something along the lines of: Whoa, fun stuff we could have been doing! And you never told us?! Orion, for whom the allure of the forbidden had never held much attraction anyway, had followed out of pure bemusement, watching as his best friend hopped in and out of berths all through the recordkeepers' clade for no better reason than that he could.

As a result, Jazz knew far more dirty tricks than any third-vorn youngster should. Orion didn't much care; it was him reaping the benefits, after all.

He startled as Jazz drew out his second cable, putting it to his mouth and gently holding the tip between his dentae while he plugged the other one into his own systems. Interface protocols took over, and Jazz' thoughts blasted across Orion's mindscape, little points of neon brightness.

/Pick your poison,/ the chronicler said flippantly, sending Orion half a dozen file names across the connection. In the real world, he sucked the tip of Orion's secondary connector into his mouth, sweeping his glossa around the sensitive tip, sending wet pleasure-signals branching through Orion's neural net. They both hummed at the sensation, Orion pulling Jazz closer against his frame and digging blunt fingers into the cabling and hydraulic lines bundled under Jazz' complicated plating.

/This one,/ he decided, picking the file which bore a Tarn ident glyph. Jazz chuckled and pressed close against him, arching sinuously as he let Orion's secondary cable slip from his mouth. It reeled back into Orion's frame as the chronicler turned his attention to the cabling lining Orion's neck.

/Aha. Be warned, that one's got a few… extracurricular activities, shall we say./

/In light of what we're doing, does it matter?/ Orion asked, tilting his head back to give Jazz better access to his neck cables and sending the tactile data through to Jazz' own systems.

/You have a point,/ Jazz conceded. /Alright, brace yourself, I'm gonna play it back now./

Sensation exploded into Orion's sensornet, foreign EM fields flickering inquisitively over his own, light burning down from overhead floodlights, mechs pressing in all around him, he alone in the crowd knows—

—thick oily sludge that burned like fire down his intakes, dry-heaving once while the mechs around him laughed and patted his back soothingly, one or two of them perhaps more friendly than they ought to be and he makes a note of that for later, might as well have some fun while he's here—

—Towers that reach up into the upper atmosphere, higher up than he's ever been before in his life and he's screaming, gleeful and alive– there's a moment where Orion feels nothing but the wind as he loses his grip on the Seeker and falls, but it's not him, the berth is still solid under his aft and careful claws catch him, a jet in root mode grins down at him and he grins back, miles above the surface and totally unafraid—

—darkness, proximity pinging back three people in the small space below the ruined apartment block, his legs spread wide and wrapped around the frame that moves above him, hot charge that moved in a thick rush inside him as this mech peaked, a shudder as she groans her overload and he winds himself around her, arms and legs and valve tight, circuits whining energy but she's pulled back – no, we can't have that, someone wails and it's probably him, tail end warped into a blissful groan as someone new sinks inside him—

—"Insatiable, aren't yeh?"—

—sharp tang of energon and spark plasma, wet spatters on the walls and the rubbish that covers the ground and the smell of corrosion in the air, pools of acidic liquid lining the path and a few steps behind him, someone's following, trying to be stealthy but they've failed, failed the practical on both counts as the Enforcers spilled from the walls—

—later he'd watched the trial start to finish, pitifully short as the mech's collection of sylphs take the stand, battered bodies not quite back to standard. The Enforcers condemned him to reprogramming and Jazz doesn't regret it for a nanoklik—

—"Your cooperation was a valuable contribution." —

—"What's your designation, mech?" —

—"Prowl. Why?"

—copper braided with white platinum and grey-blue steel hanging overhead, miles of thin wire braid tracing the outlines of the ceremonial chamber, two slim, gracile mechs raised on a central dais facing Primus' Priest, prayer intoned in monotonous, short glyphs and then twin clicks in the silence and light peeks out from between parting chest plates, blue-white to bright gold and there's just a short glimpse but it'd been enough to make him uncomfortable, something so private bared in public just to satisfy the priest, but the Towersmechs are embracing—

—red optics, red optics everywhere and it makes him glad he'd had his visor outfitted with that spectrum of filter because Primus! it's bad enough as it is, he's already been propositioned by three gigantic gladiators on the basis of his frame type alone (he feels sorry for the sylphs in the crowd, few though they are) and—

—proximity warns him as the loose ledge gives way and falls—

—the crowd pushes forward—

—electricity peaks—

—he gasped out Jazz' name as he overloaded, shuddering through the rolling crest as waves of biting pleasure followed the charge burning through his circuits. Jazz arched in his lap, denta gritted, silent; Orion's overload had triggered his own.

Orion curled over Jazz' slight frame, arms wrapped around his shoulders, motor control glitches making his servos tremble as the aftershocks gradually left his system. "That was…" he started, and closed his mouth, unable to find the right adjective. Intense, scary, fascinating, incredible, bleak – "interesting."

"Next one?" Jazz suggested with a smirk.

"Next one," Orion nodded.