--Written By: Reality Obscured--

--Chapter I--

Author Note: This is a little spin-off from the "Unexpected" drabble of my "UN" series. Honestly, I didn't really know what I was don' when I started writing this. It...came out a little differently than I thought it would.

Warnings: Detailed scenes of mech torture…

nano-klick : 1/10th second

astro-second : 1/2 second

klick : second

cycle : minute

breem (1000 astroseconds) : 8.3 minutes

megacycle : hour

groon: 1 hour...roughly

joor (5 cycles or 50 breems) : 7 hours

quartec : 1/4 day

decacycle : 30 days

solar cycle/Orn (1 Cybertronian Day) : 20 Hours

stellar cycle (1 Cybertronian Year) : 400 Days

Vorn : 83 Years

Back Then…

The restraining cuffs were tight, biting into the metal of his forearms; the set around his ankles were doing the same. Whoever it was that managed to get the jump on him obviously didn't believe in taking chances. Or maybe they knew how Black Ops agents worked. Whichever was the case, Rhythm figured he wasn't going to get out of here any time soon. He could feel straps across his chest and thighs, too. It didn't take any measure of the imagination to suppose they were heavy duty. And, he was sitting down, so he was probably lashed to some kind of seat.

One thing was for sure. He honestly wished he hadn't turned down that sonic emitter upgrade Sledgehammer, the Black Ops medic, had offered. It'd be real useful in getting out of these bonds right about now.

A quick diagnostic told him that he'd been offline for nearly three groons. Considering all he could remember was lying down for a quick recharge on Prowl's berth two of those groons ago, whoever had done this had done a real professional job of it.

"I thought I told you to stay away from Prowl. You didn't listen, Rhythm."

Ah, yes. The magnificent voice of Sentinel Prime. Somehow this situation made just that much more sense. Rhythm powered up his optics, finding the massive Prime standing barely five meters away. Dark room. Metallic gray walls. His olfactory sensors picked up familiar scent particles in the air around them. Hot oil, solder, and electricity. Pit. He was in the "special" brig they took "special" prisoners to.

Wasn't he special.

"You haven't defiled that Spark of his with yours yet, have you?" Sentinel asked bitingly.

Only Primus himself knew better than Rhythm did how badly Sentinel treated "him", and of how little he cared. "What do you care?"

The rumbling reply was dark and amused. "Just needed to know if you'll know what you'll be missing."

Rhythm felt a pair of hands on his chest plates then, the owner a yellow-visored mech he'd never seen before. He tensed up, doing his best to keep the seams of his armor plating tight against each other and his chassis...only to completely freeze in place when the blade of an energon-bladed scalpel entered his line of sight. Sentinel had left his last comment so open, so vague, that Rhythm's CPU could only provide equally vague guesses as to what was going to happen to him now.

Now...

"I still don't understand why you won't let me just rip it out and replace the whole optical assembly." Ratchet said as he used micro-fine tools to run a check over what was left of Jazz's optical array.

"Keepin' it around so I never forget how I got it, Ratch'." Jazz replied smoothly. "'Sides, I see better with th' visor than I ever did with my optics."

Ratchet vented, mimicking the sighing sound Jazz was sure the medic had picked up from Sparkplug. Ever since the red and white found out about the condition of Jazz's abused and damaged optical assembly, he'd been pestering the saboteur about replacing it. Not that Ratchet knew how he'd managed to get them slagged up that way in the first place. Nobody knew...unless one counted himself and the memory circuits inside the deactivated remains of the other Black Ops agents. He still answered when Ratchet asked his usual question, and the answer was the same every time. He wanted to remember what Sentinel Prime had done to him. It was his reminder of who he had once been, why he had continued on, and who he had continued on for.

With practiced ease, Ratchet replaced the opaque white optical glass that covered the melted mass of wiring. He patted Jazz on the shoulder, and the black and white sat up, replacing and activating his visor. In a few astroseconds, Ratchet and his surroundings appeared before him.

"You know the drill, Jazz." Ratchet tapped his own chest in emphasis. "Open up."

This was the part he didn't like. He always felt so...vulnerable. All the same, he split his chest plates apart and let Ratchet get to the Spark chamber underneath. Ratchet had been taken aback the first time he'd seen the Special Ops agent's scarred and brutalized Spark chamber, but now? He didn't even flinch. War takes that kind of thing out of you, Jazz supposed. Eventually, even the worst of things didn't seem so bad anymore. It became part of normality.

His vocalizer had shorted out long ago, the severity and length of the screams too much for the hardware. There was nothing Rhythm could do but quiver, wishing to at least offline to end this. Several data cables were connected to him to keep him from off lining. His head had been lashed back against the seat when he'd begun thrashing earlier. His chest lay open and bare to the world, the armor cut away and on the ground at his bound feet.

Static and sparks spewed from his vocal processor as it received the signal to scream again. If he could've processed anything but pain, he would have likely thanked Primus that the other mech was almost done welding his Spark chamber shut.

Ratchet signaled that he was done, and Jazz closed his chest plates back, hopping off of the medical berth. "Well, doc? What's the report?"

"Take two energon goodies and call me in the morning." Ratchet good-naturedly replied while checking on his list to see who was due in next. "While you're at it, tell Prowl to get his aft in here. He's next."

Mandatory check-ups. They were the Pits, in Jazz's opinion, but Prowl was one 'bot who literally ran from them. Last year, Ratchet had spent several orns trying to track the tactician down. Strangely, and actually not surprisingly, Prowl's work as Autobot tactician and Second-In-Command hadn't suffered at all during the time of his so-called absence. When he reappeared later -only a megacycle after Ratchet declared Prowl a defective glitch and stopped looking for him- he denied running from the medic at all. He didn't say where'd he'd gone, either, and skillfully avoided any and all questions when asked.

There was a reason Prowl was called Prowl, Jazz mused, even if he didn't flaunt it. It didn't help they'd had to come in at least once an Earth week now to get checked up since they'd bonded.

--

It took a little doing, but Jazz eventually found Prowl deep inside the Strategy Room of the Ark, working on the wiring to the holographic display. It hadn't worked since the crash four million years ago. According to Prowl, Wheeljack, Ratchet, Hoist, and Grapple had better, more valuable things to do around the Ark rather than work on something like the Strategy Room. This was where he'd discovered Prowl had been disappearing to occasionally, and especially during most of his last check-ups with Ratchet. Whether anyone actually knew it or not, the tactician actually had some pretty good electronic skills programmed away in his hard drive. It came from learning the finer points of wiring during field repair.

The squeal of the pneumonic doors being forced open alerted Prowl to another mech's presence, and he didn't look up to see who it was. There was only one other mech who knew where he was in the first place. Jazz.

"Mandatory check-ups?" He asked.

Jazz walked over to the console, squatting down to get a better look at the half-submerged tactician. "Yup." He watched Prowl work for a moment before, "What'cha gonna do when ya finally fix it?"

"Considering the state of this room?" Prowl hmphed. "I have enough work to last me well into the early 2000 A.D.s."

Jazz settled down the rest of the way, lazily leaning up against the machinery near Prowl. The tactician himself was half submerged underneath the console--his top half with just his legs poking out. The saboteur allowed himself to process exactly how close they had been to having something once. Ever since that day on the battlefield, every movement, every conversation around the other felt strained.

When Prowl had learned to block his half of their newly formed bond, it had only gotten worse. He was at least thankful that Prowl hadn't denied him his friendship…what little they had of it left. He'd all but ripped away everything else after discovering the truth hidden in Jazz's Spark. It was more like he simply tolerated him now.

"Once the holographic emitter is in sync with the console AND working, I should be able to uplink my battle computer to it, enhancing it's capability and precision up to 150. There are times when my CPU alone can't keep up with the seemingly endless variables Earth has to offer."

Jazz lightly brushed his digits across his chest over where his Spark chamber was situated. The light pain was starting up again. "How long ya been at it?"

"The better part of the last two megacycles." Came the reply. "Why do you ask?"

"Just wonderin'."

He dropped his hand to his lap, content in just listening to Prowl work. He refused to regret what he'd done. He'd given up too much already. Ratchet's check-up could wait. The moment, for once, didn't feel strained or forced upon them. On the recently rare occasions that this did happen, he always let it fool him into believing that there was some kind of Primus-forsaken hope out there.