The Most Unlikely of Events 02: Jazz's Nightmare
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I lost everything I cared about that orn. My love in the shuttle crash. My Prime fell to Megatron. By the time the chaos was over I'd lost my rank and place when the new Prime installed those he trusted as the command officers and those entrusted to rebuild Cybertron. Truth be told, I can't blame him. In the moments I'm not hurting so much, I know I'd worry if he hadn't sent me away. I was in no shape to do much of anything good.

All I have left are my skills at sabotage and a vicious love of fighting. It dulls the pain, smoothes my processor's ragged thoughts and generally lets me believe for a few moments that there's still a purpose to my spark staying in this frame. I don't want there to be, but the war's taken the ability to give up from me. So I fight. I take missions that they don't even give to Wreckers. I pick fights with mecha that should be able to obliterate me. I do everything my coding will let me to end the grief that's consuming me until I can barely remember what it was I'm fighting for.

And I survive every damn thing.

All of it.

Believe me. I've tried to end it. Every I time boot up and most times before I cycle down I try to extinguish my spark, by code or blade or blaster. Once by stepping into space. Several times by aiming a shuttle at a star or rocky planet. I can't do it. Neither can I purposefully wipe my memory clean and start as a new mech. I tried that too. All my kill codes are predicated on there being a threat of being broken, of being hacked. Without that threat, I can't go near them. I'm programmed at the very core to survive.

So I survive.

Every vorn chips that much more of me away to the oblivion that my past is becoming. I can't remember much beyond my current target and the last few joors of Prowl's existence now. Maybe in a few more vorns the pain will end and I'll become a mech again.

Every orn, I wish the same thing. Every orn I deal with whatever is thrown my way, and I survive.

So when I powered up and looked up into a sky that wasn't my own, all I could think was, What now?

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I can't remember much, but I also know that I don't want to. Being shunted through the universe in recharge and still not dying seems like Primus's cruel practical joke on my life. The stars are strange. Prowl is still dead. I'm still alive. Very little else matters beyond the relief that knowing every moment I live is one less moment before my death. I hurt all over, my armor feels raw and scraped, my very protoform is sore.

I power my optics down again. The need to do, to learn, will become overwhelming eventually, but right now, I can still fight against it.

After a while, I realize that I can pick up radio signals of some kind. Strange clicks and whistles that sound as foreign as the sky looks. Scattered here and there are sounds I recognize, and my sluggish, unwilling processor places them as English.

Earth.

Prowl.

I stop listening. I try not to care. To pass the time, I see if I can hack my self-destruct sequences, but they evade me like they always do. Life it is.

The sounds nearby and the touch on my shoulder aren't nearly as alarming as they should be. When I power my vision back on, I find myself looking at a metal creature. It's clicking and whistling at me in that strange language. It's another biomechanoid, but not like any I've ever seen. Big too, bigger than Prime was.

In the end, I go with it.

I thought it was taking me away to be killed. I hoped it was.

In the end, what it actually did was so much worse.

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It's common knowledge that when two sparks touch, they form a permanent bond between them. We'd promised that to each other, Prowl and I. We promised that at the end of the war, no matter who won and who lost, we would unite.

I wish we had. I could have died with him, and never found myself here.

I knew that the creatures around me were interfacing. I knew what that looked like, how a mecha's frame arched when pleasure took it, crackling beneath the armor. I was pushed forward, expected to perform, but no one ever tried to touch my panels. It didn't take long to realize that the other whores were using a set of wires and external touches to pleasure each other. Not long after that, the owner of the establishment figured out that whatever they were using was incompatible with my systems. The data they tried to send over to me glitched and left the customers angry and unsatisfied.

But I could still touch. That seemed the same, at least, though they seemed to get more from it than I ever had. Strokes and pressure in the right places on a frame were easy ways to pleasure another, and I was quickly shoved to the bottom, the cheapest, easiest, most useless whore who really only served to amp a customer up while another used the wires.

The orn my life changed forever-again-a customer was asking about me. The owner shrugged and gestured me over, and I was pulled into the back. I would have fought so hard, if I'd known, but I wasn't ready to be pinned down by the larger frame. When I saw the light in the other's chest, sparklight, and my own was pried open, that spark pushed to mine, I screamed and fought.

This spark is meant for Prowl!

No one understood, no one cared, and my spark was given away to a stranger as he grunted and heaved above me. I stopped fighting halfway through when I realized that this would be a way to die. I could kill my rapist and let the break destroy me. I would not live bonded to him.

I would not live at all.