"I am not an idiot—"
"Prowl...colossal idiot."
Soundwave sounded so lost and bewildered by his sudden declaration that Prowl thought the other mech might glitch.
"Soundwave, sometimes lost to Prowl. Therefore...is Soundwave truly...inferior?"
"Do not indulge in an existential meltdown," Prowl ordered. "You are not allowed to have a crisis of self-worth while I am attached to you."
"But Prowl is an—"
"Yes, idiot, we've established that," Prowl said quickly. "Why? Why are you saying this?"
"Prowl...thinks Jazz indifferent to Prowl."
Pause.
Prowl thought to speak.
Hesitated.
Thought again.
"I have no evidence to the contrary," Prowl said slowly, as if testing that line of thought.
"Prowl, no right to call Soundwave 'out of tune' ever again."
Prowl pressed his mouth to a flat line. "Any romantic feelings Jazz has for me are at 57% and falling."
Soundwave glared back. "Your proofs?"
"Are not for your voyeuristic perversions!" Prowl said, emotionally recoiling from divulging that information. "It's private."
Soundwave froze.
"Proofs...tactile enough to elicit this response? Jazz Mourning Scenario requires recalculation."
"No, I—"
Prowl felt a rush of heat from letting that much slip. Now Soundwave knew that he and Jazz had been somewhat romantic. If they survived, Jazz would find out and refuse to talk to Prowl ever again.
Soundwave took his silence for confirmation.
"Prowl...very fortunate."
Prowl had no idea how to respond to that.
Jazz sat in his office, surrounded by a dozen datapads all stuck to his wall. His optics burned behind his visor—the tiny gears spun and spun to tightly focus on the swiftly passing rows of numbers and stations.
He didn't have Prowl's cortex for database mining, for sorting through categories and cells and columns and rows. Prowl would have dug up the traitor within an hour of rooting around the databases full of the minutiae of duty rosters and camera feeds.
Jazz, however, could have read spreadsheets for days and come up with nothing. Instead, he had simply set up the datapads for a quick visual feed, and he already had a helm-ache in his cranial servos that he knew wouldn't stop firing until he could recharge.
And he probably would have solved the mystery a little faster if he hadn't been distracted by a ping every minute. Or every few seconds, now.
Autobot Forum :: Slice of Life :: Soundwave :: Prowl :: "S.O.S."
Authored by :: Mech-Superior
Part 69
Request for aid. Prowl, alive. Soundwave, alive. One hour, ten minutes.
Author's Note: Internal chronos no longer reliable. Update speed only best approximate.
Jazz checked his internal clock. Soundwave was off by five minutes. If Prowl wasn't correcting him, then they were both counting too fast, even if they would never admit it. Even calculators could be scared.
Jazz wasn't a calculator. It would have been impossible to use Prowl's methods to find the decepticon in their midst—so he didn't try.
In all the datapads he'd set up, he wasn't looking for the bot with enough time to engineer a drone. And he didn't try to use the camera feeds that Red Alert had provided access to.
Someone had tried to assassinate Soundwave and Prowl. At the same time. This wasn't a simple traitor. This was someone who hated one of them enough to kill the other. A decepticon might think Soundwave's defection was a ruse, or that Soundwave could recognize another decepticon spy. That conjecture would lead Jazz down a terrible rabbit hole of paranoia and suspicion and what if's, and he didn't have time for that.
So he cheated.
The drone had walked through the base without being detected, right? He knew how to do that. A clearance activator that could fool the twins and lower level security checkpoints meant peeling it from someone's armor. He'd done that dozens of times while hiding in decepticon bases, slicing the activator from a dead mech's arm or chestplate and carrying it with him. A good device meant he could practically walk around like one of the 'cons—as the humans put it, he simply borrowed someone's work identification card and no one knew the difference. If the Decepticon high command ordered everyone to ping their position, he clicked the activator and he answered back as whatever mech he'd stolen it from. It took a very keen optic and audio to catch the difference. A drone with a clearance activator seemed just like a bot to anyone who wasn't looking right.
So now he simply called for everyone on base to ping their position and then compared that to their roster.
All Autobots pinged back...but one pinged a full moment later, and manually, too. The difference was subtle, pressing a button instead of ticking a cortex servo, and Jazz recognized it. He'd bet good credits that someone hadn't expected the roster check so soon, so they'd had to dig out a spare activator.
He was on his pedes and moving before he even confirmed the signal—down in the supply depot, amidst the shelves and mess of thousands of years of engines and armor pieces and old rifles. It was where he'd caught Bumblebee and Mirage what felt like eons ago, and he felt his spark clench knowing that he'd been the one to create a blind spot in that depot in the first place. It was a great place to hide illicit Deception gear and spiked energon. And now someone else had found it, too.
The corridor down to the depot was a long, straight shot. By the time he reached it, Mirage and Smokescreen came around the corners and flanked him, matching his pace just a step behind. Half a moment later, Bumblebee and Hound caught up and fell into step.
Should we really be bunching up like this? Bumblebee asked.
S'awright, Jazz said.
We make quite the convenient target, Mirage suggested. Especially if our spy finds the good stuff we hid in the shelves.
Trust me, Jazz said, bringing them up to the door. It's amateur hour in there. Time to show 'em what it's like when you play pro-league.
Most mechs, when about to burst in on their enemy, would kick down the door and yell something intimidating. If they needed to take prisoners, they would make threats over the barrels of their rifles. If it was a fight for their lives, it was battle cries and shots fired.
Both ways, Jazz considered stupid. Why go in through the door that the enemy knew about? That just meant concentrating their firepower on one place—he might as well paint targets on his hood. But he couldn't come up with a better entry point on the fly. Dropping in from the ceiling meant he could land on his target, but that would take longer than he cared to right now.
So he kicked in the door.
Hard.
Jazz rarely liked to show off the power he could generate. He was much more proud of his flexibility and stealth. Any mech could crush cans, but it took real genius to walk over those cans without crushing a single one. And harder still to stealth through metal hallways when he was made of steel that weighed several tons. But sometimes, during a real emergency, he could make a whole lot of noise.
The door came off its hinges, sheared clean from three inch thick steel, and flew through the room. There was a startled squawk, a single shot, and then the door was lying on whoever it had knocked flat. Her helm and her arm were visible and clear of the door, and with a snarl, she aimed at his visor.
His first shot blasted the gun from her hand. His second shot melted her hand. The third shot destroyed the elbow mechanism in her arm, and the fourth took her shoulder. The fifth shot struck the floor in front of her face, sending up sparks and shrapnel that disrupted her optics and sent them into shutdown, blinding her. And the sixth shot across her helm, grazing her positronic core, sent her consciousness fleeing from the pain and fear down into her spark, hiding in her chamber. The entire action had taken less than seven seconds.
While his mechs flooded the room and flanked either side, Jazz stood still and watched. Bumblebee and Smokescreen checked the entire perimeter, ensuring that the doors were locked, that they were alone, and that there were no traps set. Mirage had planted one heavy pede on the door and leaned his weight on it, keeping their mech trapped, with the end of his rifle planted right at the base of her neck cables.
Jazz didn't recognize her, but he snapped a quick image file and sent it to Optimus and Ironhide, who both identified her immediately. Flipside.
"Well, don't I feel useless," Jazz muttered to himself. "Wasn't even on my damn radar for a turncoat."
They already had her in a stasis lock and restraints. He left her to his mechs and turned his attention to the multiple datapads she'd spread out on the shelves around her. Each one was in the midst of uploading and sending files to an unknown destination. He manually shut down each one, thanking Primus that she'd made the mistake of wrapping up all of her information in huge bundles instead of small packets. Not surprising—even his own Bumblebee had made a similar error when trying to upload a deletion tool to his own datapad. The lag and transfer time meant the Decepticons probably hadn't received much if anything. The datapads would have to be scanned, but Prowl would have that done in—
He winced.
Anyway. He came to the last datapad, which did not have a file uploading. Instead there was a single communique, in all caps and multiple fancy font characters.
RE: AUTOBOT FICTION
DECEPTICON PURITY WILL BE MAINTAINED.
DESTROY SOUNDWAVE, TOP PRIORITY. AUTOBOT INFORMATION, SECONDARY. ALL OTHER MISSIONS SECONDARY. KILL SOUNDWAVE AND ANY AUTOBOTS WITH HIM.
(¯`·.⋆ ⋆.·[ ÜMÜ ]·.⋆ ⋆.·´¯)
Jazz stared at the screen for several seconds. And felt his spark fall as Bumblebee peeked up over his hands at the datapad.
"UMU?" Bumblebee read. "But that's not a designation. That's like a surnet handle."
Jazz shut his optics.
"Surnet. As in...another pervy writer?"
Bumblebee nodded once. "You don't see that sparkly stuff much anymore—the fancy characters around the name. Must be an old writer."
Jazz's hand tightened on the datapad until he heard it start to crack. He pushed it against Bumblebee before he accidentally crushed it. Leaning on his mech, he ignored Bumblebee's startled squawk as the smaller bot took some of his weight. Instead, Jazz turned his attention to his mech standing on Flipside.
"Mirage?"
"Yes, boss?"
"Is she doing anything to warrant shooting her?"
"Um..." Mirage reset his optics and looked down at their prisoner, completely restrained and completely off-line. "No. Not at the moment."
"...dammit."
Jazz cursed a string of obscenities in his cortex. Damn the porn. Damn the pervs. Damn the war. Damn everyone around him getting off on war porn. Damn Prowl for being so damn stupid as to steal a kiss and so damn loyal that he waited for forgiveness. Damn Soundwave for being dumb enough to join the Decepticons and being so damn shiny.
"Sir—?"
"Bag her, tag her, drag her to Ironhide." Jazz sighed, infinitely weary, and turned on his pede. "Standard operating procedure. 'Least some of us should follow protocols sometimes."
"I...yessir." Mirage glanced at Hound, who shrugged, and then to Bumblebee, who likewise shook his head in bewilderment. "Where will you be?"
Jazz paused at the door, considering the question.
"Red's handling the base. Optimus is on security and Ironhide's managing the troops. Guess I got the time to follow Flipside's trail, see what I can find. See if there's any other spies I ain't noticed yet."
The self-recrimination in his voice made them all wince. They were Spec Ops and liked to style themselves as the best of the Autobot elite forces—other units did the same, but for mechs who frequently worked behind the lines and came back fractured, the morale boost was vital. And they held complete faith in their team leader. To hear him doubt himself...
Smokescreen cleared his intake. "Jazz, sir? We stopped her. And...yeah, Prowl and Soundwave are hurt, but they're still transmitting."
Jazz glanced over his shoulder at him, one eyeridge raised. The question in his look was obvious. So?
"So," Smokescreen continued. "This ain't...this ain't as bad as it could be."
Praxus. The dead city. His slaughtered city. It hung in the air between them, unspoken, and Jazz let the gallows reassurance steady him. If that was what they had to measure themselves against, the eradication of an entire populace of mechs—
Jazz heaved a long vent.
"I guess." He shrugged. "I'ma be at the blast site. One more pair of hands."
Another update came up on the surnet.
Autobot Forum :: Slice of Life :: Soundwave :: Prowl :: "S.O.S."
Authored by :: Mech-Superior
Part 109
Request for aid. Prowl, alive. Soundwave, alive. Thirty-three minutes remain.
Author's Note: Internal chronos no longer reliable. Update speed only best approximate.
Jazz turned before they could see his flinch. There were already dozens of mechs working on clearing the debris from the trapped mechs. What good would he really be? He didn't think he could focus on finding Flipside's cybernetic trail through the Ark's surnet, though he could at least try. But his pedes refused to take him to his office, and while he tried to devote at least a few megabites of processing power to the problem, he instead found his mind turning in on itself in brutal waking nightmares.
Prowl and Soundwave, crushed beyond saving.
Prowl and Soundwave, slowly bleeding out in the dark.
Prowl and Soundwave, unable to block out the pain as their frames sparked and short-circuited and crashed over and over again.
Prowl and Soundwave, completely cut off from the Ark, dying with only each other for company—
Jazz ducked into a small storage closet, closed the door, and keened.
His engines hiccoughed, stuttered and revved unevenly. Coolant flushed through his system as steam wafted from his overheated processors, and condensation gathered on his faceplate and hands, dripping on the floor. His optics sparked, and he reset them several times, leaning on the wall as his internal gyros tilted without the visual data.
Two more of Soundwave's forum updates passed.
Jazz found a pile of cleaning rags in a bucket, and he dried off his faceplate. The visor would hide the red rings around his optics from the sensors burning—his self-repair functions would see to that soon enough anyway. And his gyros and coolant and engines were beginning to stabilize.
Jazz had seen plenty of friends killed. This was no time to fall to pieces. He came out into the hallways again as if nothing had happened, the only sign of his distress the faint hiss of a last drop of coolant sliding down his throat cabling.
Prowl and Soundwave would survive. Or they would not. This was war, after all. War meant casualties.
And Jazz meant to make his own casualties.
Twenty-seven minutes.
Maybe.
The passage of time was impossible to tell. Soundwave's internal chronos had failed, and he could not count the seconds by the consumption of fuel. The neon pink energon swirled in slow circles that flowed at an impossible speed through their spliced cords. He assumed that he had begun to hallucinate.
Prowl was no help. The other mech had gone quiet, refusing to speak. Soundwave might have thought that Prowl had died except for the faint hum of the other mech's processors working in the background, conserving energon at their lowest output.
Another update passed. Soundwave began to think that they really were not going to survive. He couldn't hear any rescue efforts around them. The debris was simply too deep to dig down to them. Not in time to save them.
He heaved a vent. What would it have been like to have Jazz here instead? Jazz would have known how to survive. Jazz would have escaped the worst of the explosion, dug his own way out, and been in the mess hall before shift change. Or he would have killed the assassin with one shot before the fight even started, and there would never have been an explosion at all.
And he would have had a witty little quip after pulling the trigger.
Twenty minutes.
Maybe.
Soundwave opened a new file.
Autobot Forum :: Slice of Life :: Jazz
Authored by :: Mech-Superior
Part 1
Jazz felled the assassin with a single shot. Thereeee was no sound no sound no sound, only a long silennnnnnce as the body fell###ll.
"Stop it," Prowl said. "You're glitching."
Soundwave huffed. "Prowl, silent all this time. Should continue excellent work."
"I might die," Prowl snarled, "but at least I will do so without having to listen to you write perverse stories while I am connected to you."
"Not perverse," Soundwave said. "Accurate. Account of Jazz in battle."
"You've never seen him fight," Prowl said.
"Have seen records," Soundwave said. "Witness accounts. Faced him, albeit in brief skirmishes."
"At the tail end," Prowl said. "While he was blowing up your bases."
"More than Prowl has seen," Soundwave muttered.
Prowl wondered if their anger would spend their energon more quickly and found that he didn't care.
"I've seen more than you've seen."
His implicit meaning stung Soundwave to the core. That it was a betrayal of Jazz's trust rebounded and stung Prowl in return. And that hurt was obvious to Soundwave as well.
Eighteen minutes.
"Jazz...loves Prowl?"
The emotions flowing back and forth could only be sorted vaguely as Prowl's, vaguely as Soundwave's. There was hurt—did Jazz still love Prowl? Could Jazz love his former enemy? There was hope—Jazz had loved Prowl, had fallen for Soundwave. Envy—Jazz had called Soundwave 'shiny,' had happily crossed cables with Prowl. Connected as they were, it was increasingly difficult to tell where emotions began and stopped. Understanding meant studying the emotion, determining its source. And that meant understanding both of their hurts together.
Ten minutes.
"This conjecture is meaningless," Prowl said. "We will be dead soon."
"Conjecture, meaningless," Soundwave agreed. "Jazz, would not want both of us simultaneously."
Prowl rolled his optics, even if just mentally. "You're insane to think he'd want you."
"Clarify: Jazz finds all mechs he interrogates 'shiny'?"
"You are not shiny!"
Soundwave paused with the feeling that he had missed something. The feelings swirled around too quickly to grasp, but he would be damned if he didn't exploit the single greatest advantage he'd ever been given. Prowl was literally wired to Soundwave's own cortex.
"Prowl...does not find Soundwave shiny?"
Prowl, for his part, would not give in so easily. He shot back before thinking.
"No more than you would find me 'shiny'." And he dragged out the word as if it was disgusting.
"Prowl..."
Soundwave let the name hang between them, the thought at the edge of being spoken. They were about to die, after all. What did it matter? What did embarrassment matter?
"Prowl, not shiny," Soundwave confessed. "Earth police vehicle, not becoming to Praxian type. Blue clashes with red accents."
Prowl scoffed.
"But..." Soundwave continued. "Prowl eminently logical. Capable. Fought Soundwave to standstill and to victory, multiple times. Prowl...superior to most mechs."
Prowl paused for several seconds.
Seven minutes left.
"I don't need your compliments," Prowl muttered.
Six minutes.
Soundwave added several sentences to his last Jazz fic. They were badly mangled and glitched, so much so that Prowl was certain that Soundwave could no longer understand written language.
Five.
"And you don't need mine," Prowl said, more to himself than to Soundwave. "Jazz...thinks you're shiny."
Four.
"And he thinks you can discuss culture with him more than I can."
Three.
Prowl was certain he was going to die, for all intents and purposes, alone. Nevermind that he was stuck with Soundwave—the other mech was clearly lost in cortex-corruption and his own glitching. Prowl tried to access his chronos and found every single system shut down. It was impossible to tell how much time they really had left. Probably only a few seconds.
"Prowl, Soundwave, both superior. Jazz...our last battlefield."
Prowl winced at what would apparently be Soundwave's last words, and that their last fight would end in a draw.
Two.
One.
…
…
…
…
Prowl began to be very confused.
Had Soundwave's estimation been wrong by a few minutes? Prowl waited. And waited longer.
"—owl—"
He would have sat up if he could. He'd heard that! Not in his cortex but actually heard it!
"Pro—hea—?"
There was a strange itch at the top of his cortex. He tried to look up and felt a terrific rush in one direction, as if his frame were rising. Then the strange ether of consciousness he'd been in turned into the blur of digital numbers and flashing code, the scratch of dead pixels slowly repairing themselves until the world came into resolution.
He was on his back. He stared up at the words hovering in front of his screen.
A healthy frame is a healthy cortex.
Remember: in the washracks, it's half a breem with the sealant cream
This was not what he expected the Well of All-Sparks to be like.
His wandering optics reset at seeing Ratchet's snarling face, warning his patients that medicine could be taken orally or through their sluice shoot.
The medbay. He was in Ratchet's medbay.
"—okay, that should do it. 'Aide, how're the audios coming?"
"Should be online now, sir."
"Awright, good. Start on the energon cable I tagged green—s'best place to start untangling this mess."
Ratchet's face appeared over Prowl, in front of the posters taped on the ceiling of each medical berth, and Ratchet vented in happy surprise to see Prowl already looking around.
"Damn, if that ain't a sight for sore optics." Ratchet reached over Prowl for a rag and wiped energon and oil off his completely drenched hands. "Really thought you were a goner for a minute or two there.
"Fixing you up's gonna take awhile, what with the mess Soundwave made." Ratchet waved his hand to one side where Prowl assumed the other mech lay. "As hatchet a job I've ever seen, but gotta give that oversized boombox his credit. He kept you two alive long enough for us to get there."
Ratchet said other things—they'd actually been saved ten minutes ago but hadn't been in any state to realize it, that they were being pumped full of energon, that they'd have to rebuild his hood and half his face plate, that it'd be days of dedicated reconstruction—but the only thing that Prowl could take in was the screen above his head, the one that had several lines of code for all to see, plus a blinking cursor at the end.
Prowl, Soundwave, both superior. Jazz...our last battlefield.
Memory files. Ratchet had wired Prowl into the berth to access his cortex, and the memory files were along for the ride.
"And Jazz'll be here any minute," Ratchet said finally.
Prowl, unable to speak until his vocal chords were repaired and reinstalled, unable to move until his frame was brought back online, found that he'd exchanged the Well of All-Sparks for the most humiliating level of hell.