*raises the story from the dead* IT'S ALIVE! XD

Many thanks to everyone who's commented and poked at me about this story over the TWO YEARS ohgod since the last update! ^_^;; It's taken me awhile to get my writing mojo back, but seems to be working! I'm turning my thoughts back to my ongoing stories, and Ratchet and Jazz were the first in line. :)


Ratchet was so involved in being uselessly incensed over scandals that were millions of years old that he nearly ran into the Autobot waiting outside his quarters.

"So!" Jazz chirped, leaning patiently against Ratchet's door. "I heard a rumor!"

"Oh for-" Ratchet vented a sigh. Now he really needed more high grade. "I am going to have Aid scrubbing instruments for the rest of his life, I swear to Primus."

"Now, now, don't be hasty," Jazz said, hands up in a gesture that was, evidently, supposed to pacify annoyed medics. "From what I can tell, wasn't First Aid's fault. Poor kid IS gestalt bonded, and well... Last I heard he was spitting mad at Blades and Groove."

Those two were some of the loudest loudmouths on the Ark. It wasn't suprising at all that they would feel the need to share any juicy tidbit of information they'd gleaned from their gestaltmate. Ratchet sighed. He was really, really not up to this right now. It had been a long day. "Jazz, if I tell you that everything is fine and First Aid misunderstood, can this wait until tomorrow?"

"I don't know," Jazz said evenly, helm cocked. "Can it?"

Ratchet made a face. The Ark never slept, though HE desperately wanted to. Jazz was on the night shift, and Jazz was the biggest crafter, purveyor, and listener-to of gossip this side of Swindle. If he explained to Jazz, maybe Jazz would spread it around and by the morning, there'd be fewer mechs who thought their CMO was some kind of victim. Or whore. Or rapist. Or whatever iterations of the three were currently winding their way through the base's rumor mill. Primus...

Jazz laid a hand on Ratchet's shoulder. His field was a perfect shell of friendly/professional concern, not a wave out of place. It felt...odd, and it took Ratch a klik to realize that it was because Jazz was consciously modulating his field...in this case, to project a calm and calming EM profile. That wasn't something the average mech could do (or even detect), but Ratchet wasn't terribly surprised that Jazz had learned the knack. It was no doubt incredibly useful in spec ops work, especially for someone who had done as much undercover work as Jazz had.

Ratchet wondered if Jazz was doing it on purpose or if he'd just been using his field to lie for so long that he did it without thinking about it.

"Ratch? Seriously, you ok? I know that it's just a rumor, but I wanted to make sure you were all right." Jazz's visor brightened with wry mirth. "Part of my job, ya know?"

Ratchet huffed a soft laugh, thunking his helm against the door frame. "No, actually that should be my job." He reached over and punched in his code. "Come on. Though I hope you brought some high grade. I don't have enough for both of us."

Jazz dutifully pulled two cubes from his subspace, dangling them from his wiggling fingertips. "Never let it be said I'm an inconsiderate guest!"

"Never." Ratchet took one of the cubes as Jazz headed inside. The aroma was harsh, potent. Twinbrew. Ratchet downed the whole thing in one take. It burned pleasantly all the way to his tanks, knocked around a bit, and rekindled the banked fire in his lines.

"So. Want to tell me what the REAL story is?" Jazz asked, making himself comfortable on the couch. "I mean, I'm assuming that something's gotten scrambled somewhere."

Ratchet rubbed his temples. "You here as third in command or just being nosy?"

Jazz spread his hands, cube tipping but not quite spilling. "I can't be both?"

Ratchet just gave him a Look.

"I'm curious what you actually said, which I doubt is anything like what I heard." Jazz shrugged. "And if I get the story NOW, I can tell Prowl and Optimus that it's taken care of."

Ratchet fell back into the chair, frowning at the empty cube. "All right, tell me what you heard."

It wasn't as bad as Ratchet had feared, though entirely too full of misinformation and innuendo for Ratchet's liking. The term "morale officer" was used instead of the proper title, with all kinds of glyph modifiers attached for sexuality and coercion/nonconsent. The consensus seemed to be that Ratchet had been one of those manipulated into the position and abused. Jazz, to his credit, didn't compound the issue. He told it like he'd heard it, but his tone was matter-of-fact and slightly amused, not shocked or derogatory. "And," the head of Spec Ops said, "I'm assumin' that just about none of that is true, by the way."

"Except the psychological welfare officer part, no," Ratchet growled. "Was trained and licensed at Iacon Academy, and believe me, no one could have made me do twenty vorn of psychology, technometrics, and field modulation theory if they'd tried, let alone a hundred vorn of practice. I wasn't forced into it, and I was not TRAUMATIZED by it, except if you count by the amazing amount of mecha who can't manage their own love lives. And Primus, NO, that does not mean I was necessarily PART of them!"

Jazz held up his hands. "Didn't say nothing! I looked it up, Ratch, and I know YOU. I know you were above-board." He grinned. "Saw all the commendations you got, every review cycle, like clockwork."

"Yes, well, Rangefinder knew the value of having a happy crew, and he knew who to thank for that." Ratchet found himself smiling fondly. It'd been forever since he'd thought about Rangefinder and the rest of the crew from the Corona. It was so long ago, before the war and everything that had followed. He'd been busy but happy, and all he'd needed to worry about was keeping everyone else happy, as well. It had been...a good time.

When he came up out of his memories, Jazz was just watching him with a silent smile that Ratchet had always suspected meant "you're giving away more than you think you are." Before he could harrumph the conversation to an end, though, Jazz asked: "So, what brought this whole thing on? I mean, it's not like you've been hiding this old post of yours, but obviously you haven't been talkin' about it, either. Somethin' come up that hasn't for the past couple million vorn?"

Ratchet spread his hands. "Bad luck. That hit I took from Starscream's nullray scrambled my processor pretty badly. Aid fixed me up just fine, but it involved pulling quite a lot of coding from backups, and one of them was...really old. It altered some settings that reset me back to my psych officer sensor profile, and the extra data is kind of distracting. When I mentioned it to Aid, that brought up the whole psych officer drama."

"Aaaah, gotcha. N'then Aid bein' upset probably had his gestalt askin' what was wrong and-" Jazz's hands moved in an eloquent circle. "-everything becomes clear. And no doubt everyone'll be all up in your grill, thinkin' they know what's what."

"Of course."

"But you're ok, right? I mean, you said that the old settings are distracting. You can just set them back to normal, right?"

"No. Well, yes, I can, but from an ethical standpoint, I don't think I should." The medic paused, calculating what he could say without breaching medical confidentiality. "Let's just say that today I've noticed a lot of untreated problems. Some of them severe. I can't just ignore that, and I can't treat it without the psych officer sensor suite. So, it stays...for now. ...What?"

Jazz was looking at him now, gone still in a way that made Ratchet inexplicably nervous. "What kind of problems?"

All of a sudden, Ratchet knew, he was DEFINITELY in the presence of the Autobot's TIC. "...Psychological problems. Stress-based, mostly. Also maladjustments to emotional trauma, social integration problems... Pit, I don't know why I didn't see it before, sensors or not. We're a bunch of civilians turned into soldiers, dealing with more war and death than most of us were built for. Of course it would create problems, and they USED to be dealt with by psych officers, same as medics would deal with physical wounds. Now..." He spread his hands. "The only trained PO on the Ark's been focusing on the physical so long he's not even thought to be concerned for anyone's psychological welfare."

Aaaand, something he'd said had made Jazz relax. Mostly. Odd. "It's not your fault, Ratch. We NEED you to be concentratin' on puttin' our frames back together. And Smokey and I keep an eye on morale, you know that."

It wasn't the same, though Ratchet didn't want to get into it. Psych officers dealt with individuals, making sure that their cortex and meta were stable and high-functioning and that nothing was holding the patient back from being happy. That was not what Jazz and Smokescreen did. They were interventionists. Crisis-averters. Matchmakers, sometimes, for mecha who didn't know what they were looking for but knew they were unhappy. They were psychological paramedics, not doctors. They tinkered and tweaked the Autobots as a whole but rarely focused on one person for long, and there were some mecha who were just not amenable to their tone of meddling, for various reasons.

"I know that," Ratchet said. "But your interventions don't change the facts of what I'm sensing. I have to be objective, but I KNOW all of you. Even if we're not friends, you're all my patients, and suddenly I can feel a lot of pain that I haven't been treating."

Aaaaand there the tension was again, prickling at the edge of Ratchet's sensors even without engaging a proper scan. Had he always been able to read Jazz this easily? Probably not. Just like he hadn't been able to sit in officers' meeting and sense Red Alert's impending breakdown, before. The PO suite's tweaks to his default sensor levels (and the fact that he was now hyperaware of every EM field he came across) was just making life more...interesting.

Jazz was still looking at him. "...What?" Ratchet finally asked.

"What, what?"

"What's wrong? You keep...twitching, like there's a problem. I can feel it."

Jazz smiled, slowly, and that REALLY made Ratchet nervous, though he'd never show it. "Can you, now?"

"YES." Ratchet scowled, TIC be damned. "It's late, Jazz. You going to tell me what's got your wires in a twist, or do I have to guess?"

Jazz shrugged. "Just seein' what you can see. Sensor mod tweaks are always interesting."

Ratchet looked hard at him. "Interesting to spec ops, you mean."

Jazz's answering hand gesture was eloquent and still said exactly nothing. His field evened out back to the mirror-smooth finish it'd been before.

Ratchet debated whether to say something else. He could see several different directions Jazz's notoriously convoluted processor could be threading. He wasn't averse to discussion, but he was tired and his day had been long and annoying, and really what he wanted was to fall into his berth and recharge. "Look," he said, fingers rubbing his optics. "If I tell you that I'm probably not anything you haven't dealt with before in a slightly different configuration AND point out that I've got medical oaths that keep me from using my powers for evil, can this wait until tomorrow?"

Jazz thought about that for a second and held up his hands in defeat. "Sure. Look, not tryin' to make life more difficult for you, Ratch. You know me, just tryin' to see all the angles. If you're gonna have expanded access to intel, I need to know about it."

Ratchet groaned. "Pit, is that what you younglings think? Jazz, I'm not SOUNDWAVE. Psych officers aren't TECHNOPATHS. My sensor mods are upped like your audials are augmented, or Red Alert's. Someone stands next to me, I can tell they're upset, can see how their EM field is tweaking, same as just about everyone else. I'm just trained to PAY ATTENTION and QUANTIFY it, and without doing a full scan, I'm only as good at it as anyone else who knows what they're looking for. But just because I know Cliffhanger's angry, or you're upset, or Prime's stressed, it's not MIND-READING. The closest I'd come to having intel is being able to tell when you're artificially modulating your field, which is NOT GOOD for your systems by the way, and I hope to PRIMUS that you're not doing that all the damn time."

"Uh. Ur," said Jazz.

Ratchet, sensing weakness and the possibility of getting Jazz out of his quarters in the near future, narrowed his optics and deepened his growl. "Fragging PIT, Jazz. That's why I have to replace your harmonic amplifier like clockwork every vorn, isn't it?"

"Oh my, lookit the time!" Jazz stood, stretching and humming tiredly. "Well, so long as you're ok, Ratch, everything's fine, then! I'll pass on the good word, for what good it'll do. I imagine you'll still have a lot of nosy 'bots poking at you, but I trust that you can deal with 'em."

Ratchet carefully did not smirk at the sudden change of subject and instead mimed tossing a wrench, and Jazz cocked a finger at him knowingly. "Right. A'right, well, 'night, Ratch!"

"Good night, Jazz," Ratchet said, sighing as the door closed behind Jazz and sending the lock code with MUCH satisfaction.

He stared at the wall for a few nanosecs, considering, then made a note to see if he could get Jazz in for a psych consultation. What WAS the glitch using his modulator that much for, if he wasn't undercover? Ratchet suspected that Jazz had forgotten how to deal with mechs without having complete control over what he presented.

Either that, he thought, or Jazz was a Decepticon mole. Possible, he supposed, but not likely. If Jazz was a mole, they would have all woken up dead a long, long time ago.

Ratchet sighed again and shook his head, feeling very, very old as he stood and headed to his berth.