Part 7
His captor froze. The small sounds of his vents, even the faint, normal creaking of joints absolutely stopped. Jazz would've thought that Soundwave had shut down if he hadn't seen those traitorous golden optics widening, taking in every inch of Jazz writhing on the floor.
Oh, like that, do you? Jazz's struggling turned rhythmic, pushing up his hood, then his hips, pulling the chain taut between his wrists just so the rattle-clink could echo around them. And each time, unseen, he bent the welded section a little more, a little more.
"Please," Jazz groaned, straining his axles, letting his engines hum loudly...then slumping back with a deep vent. He closed is optics and bit his lip. "This chain's driving me crazy."
Soundwave watched him as if the rest of the world had disappeared and nothing else existed. His mouth parted, and Jazz had the feeling of a predator quietly creeping up on its prey.
Wincing as if the chains hurt, Jazz gave a sharp snap of the steel and whipped his head to one side, venting hard.
"Jazz," Soundwave whispered, almost inaudible. "Vehicle model...incapable of holding still for long."
That explained it, Jazz thought. The aft's trying to make me go nuts staying still.
Worse, his playacting would be real soon enough. Vehicles craved movement, roaring down the open road, pulling tight turns, breaking all the rules and slinging themselves through the air to land safely despite the laws of gravity. If he didn't find some way out soon, he'd break something in the trying.
"I can't take it," Jazz said, using that as an excuse to dial up his wriggling. "Please, Soundwave, please?"
Soundwave turned completely on his hands and knees and reached out, holding his hand just inches above Jazz. Hovering, but not touching.
You can torture mechs 'till they scream, Jazz thought, but can't grab what's offered you on a silver platter?
He craned his neck, revealing vulnerable cording all smooth and supple, visible in the spaces between his armor. He had more gaps than most, temptingly revealing at all times, and now as he lay still, venting as if he would melt...
"So cruel," Jazz whispered.
Soundwave trembled as he gave into his own desire, stroking his prisoner's cables, fingertips trembling in time with Jazz's engines. His vents were too short, too loud. And the keening whine of his coolant release surprised both of them.
Gotcha, Jazz thought. Now what do I do with you?
"I can't..." Jazz said, looking up with what he hoped seemed like wanton abandon. "I can't control myself."
Neither, apparently, could Soundwave, who grew more confident in handling him. He put his hands under Jazz's back and pulled him up into his lap, drawing the smaller mech back against himself. Jazz groaned in relief as he moved, hands tight on the chain so he didn't lose his grip, and with tiny movements he continued to work at the steel.
Their position was the perfect range for a force download, and Jazz first wondered if Soundwave would try to read his thoughts. Trussed up and held like this, Jazz posed little threat. To his relief, Soundwave seemed more interested in exploring his frame than interfacing.
As the Decepticon's hands wandered up beneath the edge of his hood, however, Jazz tensed, unprepared for the sudden rush of sensation. No one had ever had their hands in the places Soundwave was searching, not even Ratchet. The inner plating didn't even feel the wind when he was driving, and having it suddenly touched, lightly stroked up along the sides-
He bucked, throwing his hood forward as he bent his spine enough that his head lay back on Soundwave's shoulder. The feel of the mech's hands only paused for a moment, however, then spread as Jazz's movement lay bare so much more of his inner workings.
"Jazz, very flexible," Soundwave said. "Query, how is battle damage avoided?"
"Jazz, very quick," he said through his clenched jaw, then hissed as Soundwave fingered the edges of his engines. "Oh Primus...Primus..."
"Sensitive as well."
Forcing himself to maintain control, Jazz tried to lower his hood only to have Soundwave grab the rim and hold it, keeping him bent back. Rather than exploit that weakness, however, his other hand glided down to his hip joints where Jazz's thighs were both splayed and tensed to hold his weight.
If he moved, his hood was pushed up further, so Jazz could only bite back his embarrassing cries as Soundwave's hand slipped up into the space under his pelvic rim. With fingers together, he swept the inside plating, drawing a burst of static from Jazz.
"Some interrogation," Jazz groaned. "At least gimme questions so you stop."
Another sweep of those fingers along his center pelvic plating. The noise coming out of Jazz was feral and incomprehensible.
"Query," Soundwave whispered in his audio, "this treatment, Jazz finds pleasurable?"
"I...I..." Jazz had forgotten about the chain, gripping it only as some kind of anchor to ground himself as his engines revved harder.
The rush of sensation demanded more output from his servos, sending a flood of power and electricity to wherever Soundwave touched. He'd never felt such intensity, and he strained at the chains holding him, trembling with effort.
Jazz felt his servos begin to spark, felt innumerable hums of power along his cables. His fluids pounded through him in a heady rush that overwhelmed his audios. In a moment, he'd overload-
-which sent a spark of panic through him. Overload meant system reboot, and system reboot meant being helpless and unaware. Unacceptable.
Survival routines launched in his cortex, shunting off fuel to the engine and rerouting excess energy to his emergency batteries, then to his cortex. The world slowed down for several seconds as his thoughts sped, processing data faster than was safe. Several neural lines burned their insulation as he overclocked.
Somewhere in all that, he realized that he'd snapped the chain.
"Query," Soundwave whispered again. "Jazz, enjoys this?"
Even better. Soundwave hadn't noticed.
Venting in shaky bursts, chuckling weakly, Jazz felt the prickles of sensation die down. Soundwave's hands still made his plating oversensitive, but overload was no longer a threat.
"Not bad," Jazz said, biting his lip as a final current sparked somewhere inside. "But it takes more than that to bring me over."
Silence.
"...Soundwave failed?"
Jazz paused. A Decepticon shouldn't be able to sound so spark-broken at failing to make his prisoner overload. Oh, this probably wasn't part of Spec-Ops Mission 98. This needed salvaging and their conversation needed redirection.
"Don't feel bad," Jazz smiled, laying his head back on Soundwave's shoulder again. "You got technique, but no Decepticon'll ever throw me into overload. Now, if you were an Autobot on the other hand..."
That comment earned him sudden dumping on the floor. He kept the broken pieces of the chain in one hand, grunting as his helm hit the ground. He was going to have a biting headache after all this.
"Soundwave's loyalty, unbreakable." The Decepticon walked away, standing at the door with one hand on the control switch.
"But are you unbreakable?" Jazz asked.
Soundwave didn't move.
"'Cause you're finally seeing it, ain't you?" Jazz said, leaning up on one elbow. "That Megatron ain't in this for Cybertron or even his Decepticons. Megatron is out for no one else but Megatron."
This time Soundwave's head tipped forward and his shoulders dropped. His hand curled into a fist and struck the wall, but without any real force. He didn't argue, but he didn't turn around, either.
Jazz watched him, gauging how far he could push. Everyone knew that Soundwave was the Decepticon's most loyal officer. He might not be second in command, but he was the one mech Megatron trusted at his back. Starscream stole any opportunity to try to usurp command, but Soundwave followed orders even if Megatron looked dead.
"What was it like?" Jazz asked, trying a different angle. "At the beginning, back on Cybertron?"
"Certainty of cause," Soundwave answered. "Senate, corrupt and diseased. Megatron..."
There was a hitch in his vocal processor that took a moment to self-repair.
"Megatron," he tried again, speaking despite his uneven vents, "brave and inspiring. Heroic."
Pause.
"And now?"
Slowly, Soundwave tipped forward, leaning heavily on the door. He put one hand over his face, muffling the low static in his throat.
"Mad," Soundwave whispered. "Power hungry."
Jazz vented out for a moment, then took advantage of Soundwave's turned back and pushed himself up on his knees. One link at a time, he quietly slid the chain out of his axles.
"Then why don't you defect?"
"Impossible!"
Jazz froze in time as Soundwave whipped around, fists clenched. The golden optics blazed as he spoke, his voice mixing with static.
"Carrier models, programmed for loyalty! Once given, impossible to abandon."
Struck by how agitated Soundwave grew, Jazz could begin to see why the mech had caught him and begun this strange kind of confession. Harboring such intense doubts about Megatron was chewing Soundwave up inside, and now the enemy was the only one he could talk to. So this was the real reason for Spec Ops 98, and maybe all the other books, too. He'd tried to write away his fears and instead needed to act them out.
Which meant that Jazz would need to find out all the books he'd written and then read them. A hell of a reward for surviving interrogation.
Later. Right now he had a Decepticon to help defect.
"What happens," Jazz asked, "if the mech you gave that loyalty to...doesn't give it back?"
Soundwave looked away, his fists moving in front of himself as some kind of protection against what Jazz was saying. Jazz wiggled on his knees, doing a mental fist pump. Yes, got him on ropes, time to put him down.
"Or when the cause changes so much that it isn't the same cause anymore?" Jazz said. "Do you owe loyalty to the dream if it ain't the dream no more?"
"Stop," Soundwave said, choking on static, backing up until he hit the door. "Autobot, silence required."
"If this Megatron ain't the same mech you followed before," Jazz continued, "then what's keeping you here?"
"Loyalty, most basic core programming," Soundwave cried out, pressing his hands against his optics. Sparks crackled behind his finger and, somewhere inside his cortex, Soundwave's own neural processors began to burn with the strain. "Disloyal carrier model, worthless. Soundwave, superior, therefore cannot be disloyal."
"And yet you confessed all this to an Autobot," Jazz said. "Megatron's enemy."
A high pitched wail of static and groaning servos followed, and Soundwave collapsed to one knee. Sparks fired along his joints as he waged internal war against himself. Core programming was everything from Jazz's need to move and Soundwave's loyalty to basic functions of processing energon or sending fuel from one end of his body to the other. To fight against one aspect of programming was as disastrous as fighting the other. They might as well try to tell electricity to flow backwards.
"You've already betrayed him," Jazz said. "'Cause you didn't want me here just to play out your little fantasies-"
"Silence," Soundwave cried, trying to cover his main audios. "Autobot will be silent. Autobot-"
"'Autobot, welcome to experiment and find out'," Jazz reminded him. "You'd already decided to defect. You just needed me to repeat everything you already knew out loud."
Soundwave glitched. Hard. Jazz had seen it happen enough times to Prowl to recognize the signs. His frame jerked and went rigid, then trembled and finally slumped against the wall, with tiny sounds of servos grinding and falling silent. His optics dulled and went out, staring at nothing.
Jazz stood up and went over to him, waving his hand in front of Soundwave's optics. No reaction. Satisfied, he leaned down and wrapped the chain around the Decepticon's wrists. The welding torch still lay where Soundwave had left it, and in a moment, Jazz had him effectively bound.
"Let's see if we can't get a ride home," Jazz muttered, scanning the empty room.
It was heavily lead-lined to prevent signals in or out, but he guessed that Soundwave hadn't brought him somewhere around other Decepticons. Was this one of their outposts? Well, first things first-he retrieved his visor and snapped it back into place, then set about trying to escape.
When the door wouldn't open for him, he knelt down and grabbed the edge of Soundwave's chest plating, pulling it back with a loud screech of tortured steel. The sound made him wince but he didn't stop until he revealed a massive set of wires, processors and chips.
"I really hope you don't wake up for awhile," Jazz muttered, beginning to pull out a couple of cords and stripping their insulation, twisting the ends together. "'Cause this'll hurt a lot if you do."
As much as it hurt when Jazz did the same to his left hand. Patching himself into Soundwave's sytems would have been a lot easier, but no way was he hooking his cortex up to Megatron's communications officer. There was always the chance that all of this had been a trick, and it was safer to simply hijack Soundwave's hardware than isolate and wrestle his software.
"Anyone out there?" he called, broadcasting via Soundwave on the usual channel.
Long minutes passed as he tried to boost the signal without triggering Soundwave's higher functions. Jazz tapped his fingers on the other mech's thigh, looking him over as he waited for Blaster to hear him.
Crumpled up like this, Soundwave looked like a broken doll, and his overly expressive optics looked soft and empty. Jazz knew it was normal for a mech to gaze into the distance after a glitch, but he cupped Soundwave's face in his hand, idly running one thumb under his optics. All those vorns of fighting and Soundwave had kept his visor and faceplate as a shield.
Jazz wondered if he was the first one to see the mech's expressions in all that time.
Thin and full of static, Blaster's voice came through about as well as if they were using a cup and string to talk, but it sounded beautiful to Jazz.
"-Jazz? Jazz, that you?"
He grinned. "Yup, ten four, good buddy. I had a hot load but I'm good to go. Could use a pick up, though."
"Roger that," Blaster said with a laugh. "Tracking you down now. Man, you have no idea how nuts we've been going over here."
"Oh, it's been interesting on this side, too," Jazz said. "When you send my ride, make sure it's got room for two."
"You bringing company?"
Jazz's smile only spread, satisfied as he looked over his prize.
"Oh, you'll never guess who I'm bringing home for dinner."
TBC...