Part 36
Embarrassment.
Regret.
Desire for Jazz's happiness.
Jazz ran through the file once more.
Embarrassment.
Regret.
Desire for Jazz's happiness.
Jazz turned the data packet over and over in his cortex, examining it from all angles, studying the time stamp and the unspoken emotion between the binary code.
And cursed himself again.
Prowl had sent this data packet the moment he knew he had screwed up, wrapping up all his embarrassment and regret at forcing the kiss from Jazz. Prowl had seen Jazz's relief at having work taking off his shoulders, had seen Jazz's vulnerability that he couldn't do the calculating that Prowl could... He'd seen Jazz's mouth part so invitingly that he had closed the gap and pressed what had been a very gentle kiss.
Prowl couldn't have known what Jazz had been through. It didn't make what he'd done right, but it wasn't the end of the world, either.
Embarrassment.
Regret.
The desire for Jazz's happiness.
Prowl was still in the interrogation room, trapped behind slagged, molten rubble, probably bleeding out from hundreds of shrapnel wounds.
And all Jazz would have left was this data packet.
He sat on the bent remains of a secondary blast shield door, flipping a gear component between his fingers as he idled. His face betrayed nothing but calm as he waited for the Autobot engineers to slowly clear the closest slabs of sheared steel and dangling electrical cords. Tackle set the heaviest pieces up and Block moved them aside, while Baud and Anion traced the live cables so that Red Alert could turn them off. Defensive laser grids had to be reset and disengaged; mounted turrets had to be locked down.
Meanwhile Prowl was dying.
Maybe.
Maybe he was already dead and greyed out.
There had been no transmissions after the panicked cry of an assassin in the interrogation chamber.
Jazz closed his optics and leaned on his kneejoints, wishing a spec ops bot was of any use during a search and recovery like this. Instead he was wrapped up in his own emotions.
Embarrassment.
Regret.
And a hope for the mechs inside to still be alive.
error
nvphaz . adm=89
stop processes: x0000x00000984 . sys
reset
reboot
mainsys..2223.0 online
Prowl awoke to a piercing agony in his wrist.
address 6x9889 . linksys not available
error
=0
begin
And in his neck cabling—specifically his main fuel line. If his emotional centers had come on by now, he would have felt a stab of panic. Instead he waited, knowing the helmache of a surge of nitroglycerin was coming, and instead issued the command to his coolant systems to begin as soon as possible.
nitroglycerin systems offline
He frowned. He knew they were offline. That's what a scheduled task was for—
Oh.
He ran the check again.
nitroglycerin systems empty
His tanks had shattered.
As more and more systems became operational and began reporting in, he ran a diagnostic—
self-diagnosis unavailable
—cursed and took stock of himself manually.
Shattered nitro tanks.
Shattered coolant.
Cracked seals on his fuel lines.
Cuts on his fuel lines, two severe.
Concussive cracks on his outermost armor. Negligible damage to his protoform.
The bomb had been mostly shrapnel, then. Poorly constructed, hardly normal Decepticon quality. Packing it with debris to explode ranked it little higher than a glorified pipe bomb. Its chief danger had been in how it moved around undetected—he would wonder about that when he could devote memory to the problem.
Where had it come from? Who had built it?
"Queries, unknown. No data as yet."
Prowl heaved a long vent.
"...thank you," he said between grit denta. "For reducing the bomb's output."
Soundwave chuckled once. "Prowl, courtesy unnecessary. Soundwave, defending self. Prowl simply along for the ride."
Prowl's emotion center came online just in time for him to frown at Soundwave's Jazzism.
"Prowl, finds Soundwave's speech patterns aggravating?"
"I..."
How had Soundwave realized that? Had Prowl revealed it through some facial tick? Perhaps his social protocols were not online.
"Social protocols, online," Soundwave said. "Apologies. Should have made situation known immediately. Defense: did not want to risk Prowl's emotional state."
"'Situation'?" Prowl echoed. "What situation? What has happened?"
"Result of assassination attempt. Bomb unsuccessful, but massive wounds sustained. Prowl would not survive until estimated rescue. Soundwave, similar state, if less injured."
"My diagnostics are not functional," Prowl said too quickly. "What are the overall percentages?"
"Estimated arrival time of Autobot rescuers, three standard hours. Prowl's previous estimated time of death, one hour. Soundwave, two."
"'Previous'?" Prowl demanded. "What have you done?"
"...Jazz, gave Soundwave the idea." A weary, long-suffering vent. "During initial kidnapping mistake."
"What have you done?" Prowl wished he could get up and shoot the mech. Or get up at all. Wait...was he on his back? What about his doorwings? Why couldn't he see?
"Multiple systems down to conserve fuel for both mechs."
A schematic unfolded in Prowl's mind. He saw himself, prone on his back, wings strained beneath himself. His base functions had been shut down to the most minimal levels—spark, cortex. A glowing line went from his neck cabling to another mech, their own functions isolated to a similar degree.
"Measures taken, drastic," Soundwave said. "Only option to achieve ninety percent chance of rescue and survival."
A nanoclick passed before Prowl understood what all of that meant.
They had survived the blast, marginally. Soundwave, waking first, had discovered how badly they were injured and realized they would not survive alone. He'd then patched his fuel lines into Prowl's, and then spliced his cortex to Prowl's to regulate the energon flow. And then shut down everything else between them. That was the pain in his wrist and neck—the jury-rigged splices.
They weren't actually speaking. Soundwave was directly in Prowl's thoughts.
"Is this your power?" Prowl gasped, realizing he wasn't actually gasping. "Is this your telepathy?"
"Negative. Telepathy, would strain systems and use fuel far too quickly. This..."
Soundwave winced.
"Soundwave, had not meant to take Prowl up on offer of crossing cables."
Prowl's deep embarrassment met Soundwave's wave of intense regret as both mechs crashed into one overwhelming, inescapable truth, painfully apparent now that they were linked.
Both of them wanted Jazz's happiness.
Red Alert did not leave his office to attend the emergency meeting. In fact, his office locked down to such a degree that he had to alter the duty rosters to note that Inferno would remain inside the office with him until further notice. Even if Inferno wanted to leave, no one could get in or out until the emergency was over.
Besides, it was an optional security measure that he took advantage of now—using Inferno as his mediator so that Red Alert's paranoia was satisfied that nothing could affect him. He had to stay as safe as possible. He was now shouldering the entire function of the Autobot base.
The main screen in the officer's meeting room showed Red Alert's office and Inferno awkwardly reading from the other mech's datapad. Only a skeleton crew of officers was present—Optimus and Ironhide, and Jazz after they pried him away from the blast zone. The rest were all scattered to their functions through the ark, trying to make do in Prowl's absence.
"We got a traitor on board." Inferno looked down at the report he'd been given, scratching his helm. "Something about...first level protocols being deployed? I don't know what those are—"
"You're not meant to," Red Alert whispered, his optics shut. "Read it—"
"But—" Inferno vented. "I got no idea what it means by 'secondary and tertiary adiabatic grid defenses being up', or what 'whole base lockdown and shelter in place' is—oh, I think I do get that part. But—"
"Rest assured, Inferno," Optimus said, tapping his fingers on the table. "The officers in attendance do know what that means. Please continue."
"Um, yessir, Prime. 'Frequencies regarding the third and fourth auxiliary lenses of the data consoles in the fourth wing'...oh, for—Red, you do realize simple mechs gotta be able to understand this, right?"
"Inferno...please. I am handling all base functions."
Inferno stared at him for a second, realizing just how much that meant. Pressing his mouth into a firm line, he looked down at the datapad again and focused. If Red Alert had sent him something like this as a fire alarm, Inferno would have been able to understand. He began to sum everything up.
"We're continuing to receive Soundwave's signal," Inferno said. "But it's weak and hard to keep track of. Soundwave had to reroute it through the surnet via the consoles in the interrogation chamber. If Inferno...uh, if I hadn't been checking the upload feeds, we would have missed it entirely."
"Primus praise the porn," Ironhide muttered.
"Is Prowl still alive?" Optimus asked.
Red Alert opened one of his optics slightly.
"Yes, if we're taking Soundwave's word on that," he said, and closed his optic again.
Optimus glanced aside at Jazz, who sat at the far end of the table. His friend was unusually silent, but Optimus had no doubt that Jazz was not only listening to everything but also filtering every active frequency for news. And probably refreshing the surnet for every update.
Autobot Forum :: Slice of Life :: Soundwave :: Prowl :: "S.O.S."
Authored by :: Mech-Superior
Warnings :: n/a
Part 1
Request for aid. Prowl, alive. Soundwave, alive. Three hours remaining.
Part 2
Request for aid. Prowl, alive. Soundwave, alive. Two hours, 59 minutes remaining.
Part 3
Request for aid...
"He wouldn't lie about that," Jazz said softly. "He knows he'd be dead the moment I saw otherwise."
"Can we get a message back to them?" Ironhide asked, although he knew they must have already tried.
"He isn't responding," Red Alert said, speaking slowly as his cortex struggled to handle this additional task. "I think...I didn't dare risk overloading myself in connecting, but I think he's conserving energon. He would have set these updates on an automatic schedule as long as his spark is still alive."
"We already have mechs on rescue and Ratchet's standing by with Firstaid." Optimus rubbed his helm. He'd been in deep recharge when the alert came. "You said this was the work of a traitor."
"Yes..." Inferno scrolled down the rest of the datapad. "The bomb was a maintenance drone painted up to look like one of us. It was enough to get it through the halls since it was pinging as a drone, but the paint job and credentials got it by the twins and one step into the room."
"'Credentials'?" Ironhide asked. "Whose?"
"I do not—" Inferno cleared his intake. "Uh, Red Alert ain't got the processing power to devote to that. He can give you the codes and the data, but—"
Jazz's hand fell flat on the table.
"Send 'em to me," Jazz said. "I'll do it."
"...we need whoever it is alive for questioning," Optimus warned him.
"No prob, bossmech. They're be alive." Jazz tipped his helm back, but there was no grin, no humor, no warmth. "Not in one piece, though."
"Take your 'bots when you bring 'em down," Ironhide said. "Don't get cocky."
"You wound my soul." Jazz tapped his visor once. "Already calling 'em. If nothing else, they'll keep the damage down to a minimum."
Optimus watched Jazz silently rise from his seat, heading to the door with murder clearly on his mind. Maybe the traitor would survive. Maybe the spec ops bots would watch Jazz splash the walls with energon. But Optimus couldn't find it in himself to call Jazz back.
Prowl was Optimus' friend, and Soundwave had revealed his true vulnerabilities to him.
He might not like the violent solutions that war brought, but today he would not regret what Jazz was about to visit on that decepticon.
"You had no right to do this."
"Prowl, wanted to die in two hours?"
"I would have survived! Autobot engineers aren't as slow as you estimate—you don't even know them and have no concept of what to take into consideration—"
"Prowl estimations conflict?"
"That is immaterial."
Soundwave scoffed.
"Prowl, wishes to disengage?"
"Yes, Prowl wishes to disengage," he snapped mockingly, "but as you have rendered that option completely impossible due to your incompetence—"
Soundwave's indignation welled up like a tidal wave, strong enough to hold its own against the self-righteous calculator that had cowed whole armies before.
"Any other possible choices completely inferior. Soundwave, clearly superior."
Even though Prowl could not feel his coolant tanks and knew that there was no coolant in those tanks, he nevertheless felt a rush of cold through his cortex. And being this close to Soundwave's clearly undeserved arrogance had stretched his remaining sense of protocol out of shape.
"Your cortex was clearly damaged in blast," Prowl said, and if he'd been connected to his optics, he would have narrowed them to slits. "Your calculations are still out of tune."
"Prowl, would have died—"
"Soundwave, grammar inferior."
They both felt the flinch from that one. As Prowl continued the litany of Soundwave's seemingly endless faults, Soundwave cognitively stumbled back. He had heard the grammar jokes ever since they arrived on earth, but he hadn't expected something so small from Prowl, who could have drawn instead on their history of campaigns against each other.
In fact, the insults now were random, unconnected—"cheap copy cassettes and perverted hack"—as Prowl spun out anything he could think of to rattle Soundwave.
"Prowl, trying to distract me."
"I'm trying to make you aware of your complete and absolute inefficiencies—"
Soundwave, who had been concentrating on uploads to the surnet and listening for their rescuers, put those functions on standby. And now he turned the majority of his focus on Prowl, regarding the other mech's memory and front-end functions.
Prowl was similarly high-end. Normally they would outclass any opponent if the battle was on the field of their own cortex, but against each other, they were at a stalemate. Soundwave held a few more combat functions, Prowl more high-speed calculations, but they had maneuvered around each other for so many millenia that any advantage they had gave them an edge less than the margin of error.
So Soundwave wanted any edge he could get in this brawl. Which included cheap psychological shots.
"This is not a fight," Prowl snarled, hearing Soundwave's thought through their crossed wires. "This is a list of your errors, alphabetized in chronological order."
Soundwave updated his call for help.
Autobot Forum :: Slice of Life :: Soundwave :: Prowl :: "S.O.S."
Authored by :: Mech-Superior
Part 33
Request for aid. Prowl, alive. Soundwave, alive. Two hours, twenty-six minutes.
Author's Note: Prowl delirious.
"I am not delirious!" Prowl said.
Soundwave mentally smirked. "Prowl, not the one updating."
"Only because I never started writing glitchy pornography in the first place!"
"Jazz, calls it id fic."
Silence.
"You. Leave. Jazz. Out of this."
Soundwave began to understand.
"Jazz...at center of this."
Beneath Prowl's anger, beneath his indignation at being spliced into another mech against his will, came the frustration of his surface thoughts being laid bare to Soundwave. He strained to lay a firewall that would push Soundwave out, but the simple fact of being hardwired to him made that almost impossible.
That Soundwave mentally scooted back to allow Prowl room for a firewall was just that much more galling.
"Jazz...elephant in our cortex."
"Stop that." Prowl longed for coolant. "Stop using the way he speaks."
Soundwave didn't answer. He felt the depth of Prowl's irritation and found that it wasn't entirely one-sided. Their emotions, like their components, were flowing in and out of each other and causing echoes in the other's cortex. Grudgingly, he set up his firewall to draw a line in their cognitive sand as to where his emotions started and the other's ended.
To his surprise, he found that the anxiety wasn't just coming from Prowl. Crossing cables was, for Soundwave, something done rarely. Too many mechs would have used it as a weapon against him. Not many mechs would have wanted to share cords with the best decepticon blackmailer. And he would never have done this with someone of the enemy...opposing...other...autobot...faction.
Soundwave winced. That glitch had made the thought slower than sludge to push through.
With their cortexes so intimately linked, their firewalls could only distinguish themselves from each other, not shield themselves from the other's thoughts. Prowl felt Soundwave's stumble.
"So that's what your glitching feels like."
The simple comment bit into Soundwave worse than the insults.
"Natural effect of changing factions," Soundwave snapped. "If Prowl changed faction, Prowl would sound as bad."
Soundwave wished he still had his faceplate and that he could somehow shield himself here in his cortex. And Prowl was staring at him as if he might study a bug—even without optics, Prowl's disdain was obvious.
"'Changed faction'?" Prowl echoed.
Soundwave paused, but there was no explanation. "Prowl, unclear. Clarify."
"You said you were changing factions," Prowl said. "That's the first time you haven't said you were simply defecting from the decepticons."
Silence. Or at least as much silence as Soundwave could muster with his embarrassment swamping him.
"Jazz, made convincing arguments."
"Oh?" Prowl asked. "What was his reasoning that won you over?"
Soundwave grimaced. "Soundwave's choice clearly made, if not verbalized. Reasoning unnecessary."
"We are still in the interrogation chamber," Prowl said. "Continue."
"Our vital signs, at negative output. No vibrations or tremors from rescue effort apparent. Survival for necessary timeframe unlikely. Thus, questioning of no use."
"I have never known the autobots to fail in a rescue mission," Prowl said. "Continue."
"Soundwave, chances of survival of attack at negative output. Questioning should discontinue as it will not matter."
"If you're going to die, then why did you patch me into your systems?" Prowl scoffed.
Soundwave did not reply.
"You must have known this would happen."
"...chance of questioning, over ninety percent, yes."
Prowl narrowed his optics. "Then why did you even try to save us both? You could have let me bleed out. No one would have blamed you."
Soundwave didn't reply.
"The few who would have known about this chance would have thought you wouldn't know. You could have risked your reduced chances of survival against my certain death."
Soundwave didn't reply.
"No one would have ever known you tried."
"...Jazz would have known."
Prowl frowned. "How?"
Soundwave didn't have to reply this time. His desire for Jazz welled up, washing over both of them, mirrored in Prowl's own jealous reaction. If Soundwave crossed cables with Jazz, the spec ops bot with dozens of download tools and malicious programs could have searched Soundwave's memory files just to satisfy his own curiosity.
But what actually surprised Prowl was the image of Jazz looking at Prowl's greyed out shell and empty spark chamber. Prowl had not imagined that. It was presented to him, unwillingly, from a reluctant Soundwave.
"Jazz, would have been sad."
Prowl looked at himself a little longer—it was a strange thing to see his corpse—and then studied how Soundwave thought Jazz would grieve. Quiet. Cold. Locking down every emotion for the sake of continuing the mission. The only hint at the depth of his feeling was in the slight trembling of his hands touching Prowl's frame.
"Your scenario is woefully miscalculated," Prowl said. "Jazz cannot stand to even talk to me. 57% chance Jazz mourns briefly and moves on."
His bitter resignation and even worse jealousy, stuck confessing this to the very mech that Jazz would likely move on with, were suddenly drowned out. Prowl startled back, rocked by the intense wave of incredulity that issued forth from Soundwave, who stared at him in shock.
When there was nothing but continuing shock for several nanoclicks, Prowl fidgeted and glared.
"What?"
Soundwave stared back.
"Prowl, idiot."
Tbc...