Part 10

Jazz came out of the cell tired, sore and not a little twitchy. He plopped down on the floor next to Ratchet's chair, venting hard, and took the offered energon cube with a nod of thanks.

"You doing okay?" Ratchet asked. "You look beat."

"I just talked a Decepticon down from the edge," Jazz said, sighing after a long drink. "S'worse than watching to see if Prowl's gonna glitch. At least he just kind of slumps over a bit."

"Soundwave's kinda dramatic that way, huh?" Ratchet leaned back in his chair and flipped a few diagrams on his console. "He's doing okay in there. Holding steady."

"Think he'll crash again?" Jazz asked.

"Maybe," Ratchet said. "His logic circuits are still pulling overtime. But I think you did it. If he doesn't crash for the next hour, he should be outta danger."

"Good," Jazz said firmly. "'Cause I don't wanna do that again."

Jazz took another long drink, finishing the cube, and tossed it idly between his hands. He didn't like watching another mech crash. It felt like watching a long death. Worse was when the mech came out of a crash with missing chunks of himself. That Prowl was still Prowl was enough reason to believe in Primus. For crashes as violent as Soundwave suffered, Jazz was amazed he'd come back each time to the same mental spot.

"There's no doubt then," Ratchet said. "Soundwave's really defecting."

Jazz tilted his head. "Yeah."

"That'll make for an interesting report to Optimus," Ratchet said. He glanced down at Jazz, his tone overly casual. "So...how'd you talk him into it?"

Jazz tilted his head just enough to see him from the corner of his optic. "Now I know you ain't insinuating what I think you are."

"Hey, I don't think it was anything trashy," Ratchet defended himself. "That's First Aid. Found out he's one of the worst ones for that slag."

"And you let him live?" Jazz chuckled.

"Couldn't help it," Ratchet vented. "He said he doesn't read anything but fluffy romances and no hard interfacing. Said it helped with the stress of the job."

"And you believed him?" Jazz laughed. "You're getting soft in your old age."

"You know what he gets like," Ratchet grumbled. "It's not like I found out until his slip today. And...well, it's not really so bad. Not once you get over the shock of it, I mean."

A long hiss came from Jazz's filter as it cleared. First Ironhide, now Ratchet. And Red Alert had read enough to bother Ironhide. If things kept up this way, soon the whole officers cadre wouldn't mind the damn stories. Except for Jazz.

The sound of pedes on the steel floor came from the corridor. Jazz half smiled even as he stood up in one fluid movement. One of the few perks of his rank was that there were only a handful of bots he had to stand up for, and only the quietest one of them purposefully scuffed his pedes so that Jazz didn't startle.

"There you are," Jazz said. "Finished running Blaster over the coals?"

Prowl's face remained neutral. "Blaster has been quite useful in narrowing which stories Soundwave might have written. You seem to have featured quite prominently in all of them."

A snort of repressed laughter sort of snuck out of Ratchet, who squashed it with a quick cough of his intake.

"Soundwave was writing stories?"

Jazz crossed his arms and found the far wall suddenly fascinating.

"Quite a few," Prowl said, holding up his datapad. "All of them in the Spec Ops Mission series. Jazz's Raid on the Cloud Seeders' Hanger, Strict Discipline Between Officers, He Wouldn't Surrender, Soft Cables for Decepticon Desire-"

"Okay!" Jazz groaned. "We get it. Soundwave's got a thing for me."

He shot a look at Ratchet, who was no longer hiding his snickering. With an apologetic wave, the medibot sat back down and went back to monitoring Soundwave's processes.

"Not just a thing," Prowl said. "Yes, you feature heavily in them, but all of them involve you offering strong arguments to join the Autobot faction."

"Huh." Jazz pursed his lips, mulling that over. "You think he was working out his issues?"

"I think so," Prowl agreed. He tucked the datapad away again, looking over Ratchet's shoulder. "How is our prisoner doing?"

"Steady, now that Jazz stabilized him," Ratchet said with only the ghost of a smile at Jazz's expense. "He's still on the floor, though. Hasn't moved since."

"After all that flailing, I ain't surprised," Jazz said. "And why me? Why not write about Optimus? He's the one good with speeches."

"Serious?" Ratchet turned in his chair, rolling his optics at him. "You can't figure out why he chose you?"

"Hell, Blaster would make more sense," Jazz said.

Prowl lifted his head slightly, picking his words carefully.

"You're the one who would understand the Decepticons the most," he said, "since you're the one most often observing behind enemy lines. Your unconventional outlook would make you the most likely to listen and offer an argument."

"Nah," Ratchet said with a broad grin. "It's easier than that."

Jazz and Prowl both looked at him.

"He's shiny," Ratchet said with all the confidence of an official diagnosis. "Compact enough to be cute, dangerous enough to take seriously. And shiny. Look at that visor and tell me he ain't."

Heat flooded Jazz's face and throat cables as Prowl actually looked. And tipped his head in appreciation.

"Very true," Prowl said. "Jazz is...shiny."

Jazz cleared his intake with a sharp glare at the both of them. "Okay, you two, we're talking about Soundwave now."

"True," Prowl nodded, conceding the point. "Is Soundwave up to an interrogation? His information grows less viable the longer we wait."

"Mm, can't say," Jazz said. "He's not sure where his loyalties lie right now. I don't think he's gonna go back to Megatron, but now we need to give him a reason to join us."

Ratchet turned and keyed up another window on his console, setting it to play. "You need to watch this before you start asking any questions. It's from Jazz going into the cell to when Soundwave finally stopped glitching. It'll catch you up to speed."

"I'll be up to speed," Prowl said, giving Jazz a look, "when I have the rest of the Third's report."

Rolling his optics, Jazz waved his hand at him. "You'll get it, relax. I just wanted to check on Soundwave before I started downloading the whole mess."

"You knew he'd still be crashing?" Prowl asked.

"Call it a hunch," Jazz half-shruged. "Guess I got a thing for mechs that glitch."

If Prowl's armor could ruffle, it would have. Suddenly Ratchet had sat back down and toggled a few switches back and forth, his head down with one audio up.

"Perhaps I was hasty," Prowl said with narrowing optics, "in letting you give me only the short version. What happened in Soundwave's interrogation chamber clearly affected you more deeply than you let on."

"It ain't like that," Jazz said, frowning as he faced him. "And you know it. I ain't one for being tossed over another mech's shoulder, but that wasn't a normal interrogation-that was Soundwave with more screws loose than if he'd been in a fight."

"And he never interfaced with you?" Prowl said, stepping closer so that they were bumper to bumper. "No crossed wires?"

"No," Jazz snapped. "And you'll see that when you get my download. But he's the biggest catch we've had in vorns and...I've seen what glitching does to a mech."

Jazz's voice dropped in pitch, and he switched to their internal communication relay. It didn't matter that Ratchet was there. He would have done it if they were alone. Something so intimate was only intimately spoken of.

I hate seeing you glitch, Jazz said. And I know what has to happen to bring you to that point. So when it happened to him, it just...I dunno. Struck a chord.

Dipping his head, shying away from looking at Prowl, Jazz took the Second's hand, holding it and worrying at it.

Crashing looks like it hurts.

After a moment's hesitation, Prowl returned the hold.

"It does," Prowl said abruptly, cutting off his internal relay. It was not something he could talk about casually, no matter how sparkfelt Jazz's feelings were. He squeezed Jazz's hand, trying to offer an apology that way.

"His crash...was very painful, then?"

Jazz nodded once. "I made him crash the first time."

A moment passed. When Ratchet realized that Jazz wasn't going to continue, he picked up, displaying the sequence of Soundwave's crashes from his first time waking up in his cell to when Jazz finally talked him down.

"He ain't the type to come back online better than before," Ratchet said, obliquely referring to Prowl. "He starts where he left off, so he was caught in a loop. His code seems fine, but since I don't know what he started out with, Primus knows if he lost anything."

"Then I'll use a light touch," Prowl said, letting go of Jazz's hand. "But this can't wait. Jazz, if you've been key to his stability, perhaps you should accompany-"

An alert sounded on the brig computer, a low level signal that didn't start up anyone's main battle subroutine. Ratchet tapped the button that brought up the Ark's emergency communication system and homed in on the source, the main entrance.

"Bumblebee calling Jazz, Bumblebee calling Jazz," came the bot's voice. "Or any officer if you're there."

Jazz leaned over Ratchet's shoulder and answered, mainly so that Prowl could hear the conversation.

"I hear ya, 'Bee. What's up?"

"We got a bit of a situation," Bumblebee said. "Visitors, actually. Four of them."

"Huh. Who?"

"Soundwave's casseticons," Bumblebee said, and now he sounded almost embarrassed. "I think they're trying to surrender."

Jazz shared a look with Prowl. "'Trying'?"

"Well, Frenzy's in the 'on his knees, hands behind his head' pose, but Rumble's frame won't let him get his hands back there, and Ravage and Laserbeak...well, it'd be funny if wasn't those little slags."

"I'm on my way!" Jazz said, already running for the door. He turned, doing a half-step and waving at Prowl. "You coming or what?"

Shaking his head, Prowl sighed and set about the work of outlining the questions for Soundwave. Tacticians were not designed for the snap judgments of dealing with an emotional standoff or surrender, but he could trust Jazz to deal with that, later analyzing the Third's field work. Then Prowl could get down to the task of deciding what to do with Soundwave's unholy terrors if and when they actually did surrender.

TBC...