The music box stood for more than a vorn in the arboretum of Tower Delus. The chamber stretched nearly twenty meters high, a curved dome of white glass that caught the starlight and gave the room a soft glow that reflected off the silver streaks set into the wall, the silver path set into the floor. Ebony stone, carefully carved and polished, lined the paths and ornamented the walls, ringing the music box and setting the boundary between the audience and the two bots within the box.
An expensive installation, the box was made of black steel nearly four meters high and consisted of two chambers-one above, one below. Just before a performance, a tower servant would very theatrically turn the shiny key almost as large as he was in the back of the box, and then the top chamber would lift up, revealing a small mech in the center.
White with black markings to match the box, the mech would lift his head and sing. Sometimes he moved his hands or leaned back to better enhance his vocals. He could do little else, welded to the base that he sat on, and when the chamber closed again, Jazz bowed his head and vanished with a heavy vent that contrasted with the light tone of his voice, vanishing into the darkness lit only by his faint visor.
Beneath him, in the unseen chamber, a second mech operated the numerous flywheels, levers and gears that would send a thousand small bells chiming, a hundred steel marbles along a tightly timed route to strike notes on a steel keyboard with string assortment. The music box could play an infinite number of songs, and every string had to stay tuned, every marble had to move at the right moment, every lever had to move at the right time. Within the chamber, Prowl sat surrounded by moving parts, perfectly still, his cortex wired into the box's mechanisms to keep it ordered.
Often, before the new Prime had taken office, Prowl and Jazz had roamed the tower, exploring the different levels and looking out of windows that looked over all of Praxus. In the darkness, the millions of tiny lights looked like stars, looked like marbles running along narrow routes, surrounding them in a music box as huge as the planet itself. Jazz listened to every conversation in the halls, made friends with some of the tower mechs who were willing to lower themselves to talk to the entertainment, and Prowl turned Jazz's improvised songs into the numbers and beats needed to play the tune.
Functionism seemed so far away at the time.,
Always a cult stewing beneath the corruption of the Senate, Functionism was something that the tower mechs should worry about, not the mechs content to sit inside their music box. Their few friends admitted that the Functionist creed of "a place for every bot, a need for every bot" made them feel criticized for being wealthy-that worse, the Functionists were gaining favor among the very poor who were promised energon and safe haven.
A vorn passed—a vorn of singing, wandering the bright tower halls, enjoying the gifts left behind by their adoring audience. Politics didn't matter. Functionist sympathizers, Autobot officers and Kaonite top ranked gladiators all left datapads or synth-treats as gifts for the music box mechs. No matter who gained power, every faction enjoyed music.
To their credit, the Functionist adherents listened to a performance before coming to a decision, agreeing that the best place for Jazz and Prowl was inside their box.
Permanently.
When the Functionists had him riveted into place, Jazz did not go willingly, kicking and fighting and even biting one of the big mechs forcing him down on his pedestal. While the other two mechs worked the fasteners, Jazz howled, screamed, worked his fingers into one of their armor joints and ripped out cords.
"We do not blame you for your anger," he was told. "It is simply hard for you to accept, being so used to the corruption of wasteful wealth."
"You will come to accept your function."
"This is your place. You will perform to your ability and receive to your need."
Knowing he would not win, Prowl went willingly, sitting still as their rivets pierced his frame and affixed him within the music box. The gray mechs, so well intentioned towards him, ensured that their energon ration would be included in the city deliveries every cycle, and then sealed the door after him.
For a cycle, locked in his dark chamber, Jazz keened until his vocalizer cracked. The tower medic, with a Functionist adherent behind him, admonished Jazz to calm down and accept his function—and when the Functionist was not looking, injected Jazz with an illegal slurry of nanites that slowed his cortex enough that Jazz's functions turned sluggish and he slipped into a long, long recharge.
"Wish I could do more for you," the medic whispered. "But you'll have to do for yourself here on out."
After several cycles, Jazz woke.
In his mouth, he held the sharp fragment of steel he'd bitten off.
Prowl? You still with me?
I would not leave you.
Jazz didn't speak for a long moment.
You got anything with you down there?
No. I can reach nothing beyond the levers of the machine.
Jazz tipped the steel between his fingers, flipping it back and forth. He could slide that steel across the energon cable in his throat and give himself a quick end. He could sit on his perch and sing whenever his cage opened. Or he could wedge that steel under one of the mass of rivets holding him in place.
For the next vorn, Jazz sang. Keened at night, softly so no one but Prowl could hear. And bit by bit, worked each rivet up, one piece at a time.
He saw Mirage in the audience almost every shift. He saw the medbot in the back when the workers were allowed to come up. The looks on everyone's faceplate had washed out, faded to gray, until every single bot looked like they were sitting in their own cages, and around the arboretum, Functionists in long plasteel robes monitored Jazz performing his function, ensuring that every mech's need was fulfilled and performed to. And every shift, the box closed up around Jazz and locked him away from the world again.
He had no idea about the Senate, Autobots or Kaon sympathizers until the bombs began falling. A deep rumbling filled the tower, ominous as it crept closer and closer, preceded by the screaming of jets overhead. And then an explosion of chaos as glass shattered, steel folded in half and the music box went tumbling out of its ring, landing sideways.
Jazz woke up with a deep pain in his pedes and the uncomfortable sensation of resting on his shoulders. When he looked around, he found a spot of light from a crack running down the music box, and as he twisted around, he realized that he was off of his pedestal. He swept his hand over his pede, and a dozen broken rivets slid out of place. He'd removed enough that the violent toss of their box had sheared the rest out.
Prowl? Prowl, you still with me?
No answer. Jazz pushed the broken lid out of the way and pulled himself over the edge. His pedes refused to move, covered in oil and transfluid that had splashed from his pierced armor. He found the door and vented in relief. The same throw that freed him had also cracked the weakened seal on the welded door, and with a few good hits, it broke down the sides and fell open.
Prowl lay crumpled on his side, optics wide open in shock. Jazz's rivets had sheared. Prowl's rivets had left jagged wounds with large chunks of armor still fastened on the seat. His circuits and gears showed where the armor had broken away.
There was no time to keen. Jazz put Prowl over his shoulder and leaned on the box to stagger upright, take one shaky step forward. Outside he heard screams and roaring jets and more explosions, the screeching of steel and the billows of heat sending smoke up hundreds of meters into the sky. They had to move, and Jazz coughed as he walked, leaning against the wall. Glass crunched underfoot as he headed to the the door, then started toward where he knew the elevators stood.
Something came down the hall so fast that it nearly crashed into Jazz, turning at the last second. Jazz couldn't see it, but he did hear the heavy stomps of someone following. He vented in at the sight of the mech, a jet twice his size with its nosecone for its head and energon splashed on its hands, oil splashed across the red decals on its wings.
The jet spotted him and slightly altered its aim, coming at him with a nasty grin.
Worked down to a mere sliver, the bitten piece of steel came up in Jazz's hand. Looking as if he'd just put his hand on the other mechs's abdomen, Jazz fell sideways as the jet stumbled past him. As the jet screamed and tried to stop the fluid flowing out of its sliced cables, Jazz crawled up after its and sliced the exposed arterial cable in its lower pede.
The screaming slowed, quieted, faded to nothing, and the jet stopped moving.
"Jazz!"
The familiar voice made Jazz look up at Mirage, who shimmered into view. The noblemech came and helped him back up, then wordlessly shouldered Prowl between them. Jazz noticed the hunting rifle slung over his back and the bullet holes stitching down his dangling left arm.
"What happened?" Jazz asked.
"Decepticons," Mirage said as if that meant something. "They're taking revenge for Kaon."
Somehow the elevators still worked. When they stepped out, Jazz clung tighter to Prowl.
Mirage brought them out into fire and slagged steel. The vast city of lights had turned into a conflagration, black pavement thrown up beneath craters roaring fire and smoke. Broken mechs and grayed out frames lined the road, and in front of them, another mech crashed down from impossibly high. It screeched, cracked open and faded to gray as its systems ruptured.
"Stay close to the walls," Mirage said, his voice shaking. "Under the smoke."
They were hiding, Jazz realized. The screaming overhead was not just enraged jets.
Mirage seemed to know where he was, taking them around the tower down into the lower levels, down a street lift into a private highway. Jazz recognized the tower symbols under the splotches of oil and transfluid. From the dead mechs scattered around the road, he knew something terrible had swept through here.
"I don't have enough room for everyone!"
Jazz spotted the small white ambulance in the shadows, his grill flashing in dismay. Beside it, another ambulance revved, impatient to go.
"Glad to see more survivors," the medbot said, "but one of you better be driving."
"I can drive," Jazz said. "Won't like it none, but I can roll long as someone takes Prowl."
"Give him here," the medbot said. "And let's go."
Jazz waited to see Prowl safely stowed beside a little red and gray Praxian that had long gone past keening and now just stared at some point in the distance. And then Jazz transformed, twisting so his bent armor would slide into place, and drew even with Mirage.
"Think I owe you one," Jazz said.
"After you killed that conehead?" Mirage said. "You have a funny way of counting who owes who."
The highway ran for hundreds of kilometers beneath the surface, used to safeguard tower deliveries from thieves and tax collectors. Now Jazz fled along the dark road, their headlights barely cutting through the darkness.
Later on, he would learn that they were the only mechs who made it out.
In the vorn after, Jazz covered up his ragged scars with thick paint and snazzy singing. Unable to walk without pain, Prowl covered his wounds by sitting at a desk, hiding behind a datapad and smiling only when Jazz joined him again behind closed doors. Still performing together, Prowl calculated the perfect rhythm, the exact measure and meter for the tunes that Jazz played on the battlefield. The song was discordant, the atonal key of a broken music box, but it was their function, a thousand different notes at the right moment, played effortlessly.