When Jazz slid inside the Med Bay, his optics focused immediately on Optimus and the Gladiator Twins across the room even as Ratchet reapplied the security measures behind him. He kept his frame relaxed, and his armor flat and nonthreatening despite the feel in the air.
Optimus was serious. The kind of serious that meant he was Projecting. When Primes Projected they took that aura they carried, and pressed it against those around them. It was rare that Optimus saw the need to assert himself that way, as he had worked with his bots so long that it was unnecessary.
Jazz reacted immediately to the aura of assertive-protective-demanding Optimus was Projecting, his subroutines kicking into high gear as he dropped to one knee, a fisted servo bracing his frame as he bowed to his Alpha.
The bowed position put him in a vulnerable place, exposing his neck and making fast responses difficult. The reaction was another carry-over from the Wandering Days, from before the Cities. Something programmed into subroutines. Jazz placing himself into a kneeling position was a nonverbal way to acknowledge his Alpha Prime, and a show of trust on his part.
Jazz didn't like putting himself into positions of vulnerability. As head of Special Ops, he especially did not like it. Granted, with most mechs, Jazz could and had put himself into such a position to lure someone close enough he could spring out of it and pull or prank- or, the deadlier option, sink his servo through a spark chamber using the momentum of the lunge from kneeling position.
Either way, Jazz had knelt, and stayed there until Optimus let up on his Projecting a bit. He rose up, turning to look at the Gladiator Twins. He took immediate note of their tenseness, their shielding behaviors, and the very real threat portrayed in their body language and the low snarl of their engines. His processor ran through hundreds of possible reasons for it, for Optimus' reaction, and what Ratchet would have been present for, and why despite their mutual trust, the Twins were still having this particular reaction.
There were not many reasons Jazz could come up with when he could see both twins were present and not the cause of the other's reaction.
"What happened?" the question was soft, his accent absent in the face of the serious situation. "Do I need to prep?"
"No" Optimus was the one to answer him, his voice steady "Sunstreaker found something while he was out two mega-cycles ago."
"Before Protocol went into effect" Jazz acknowledged.
"Yes." Optimus agreed. "what they found…" Jazz watched the way Optimus' armor rattled in a way that showed his shock, and found he was equally curious and worried.
He turned to the Twins, asking softly "What did you find?"
Rather than words, Sunstreaker moved to the side, and Sideswipe slowly allowed his servo to come into view.
Jazz sat down on the closest berth. "Oh" he whispered, lifting his visor, so he could look at the little miracle optic to optic. "Oh hello." He ignored the way his armor had rattled with his own shock, unable to control the response his awed surprise was so great. He hadn't considered this in all the situations that had run through his processor.
It had been a possibility Jazz dismissed, thanks to the Cataclysm Event that had taken out the Youth Sector, and the sheer impossibility of a sparkling on Earth. Even with the Allspark spending years on the planet, none of the humans would have known how to care for a sparkling well enough for them to survive even if the Allspark had sparked a little one into being in the first place.
Except there was, apparently, a sparkling on Earth.
He scanned over the little one that was staring at him with interest and curiosity. And then he did it again. And then a third time. The fourth was slow and deliberate, the furrow between his optic-ridges deepening. Very slowly his awed shock bled into horror and then rage. There was an instant where Jazz's armor seemed to heave on his form.
He was very aware of what the twins- who were running on Guardian Protocols- would do to him if his armor mantled aggressively as it wanted to do, so he fought desperately to keep it flat and smooth against his frame. The result was an odd heaving, shivery motion across his frame as he hissed the soft question "Why are there marks of torture on a sparkling?"
He noticed the aggressive revs of the twins' engines- having been a background warning noise until that point- spiking angrily. Jazz was a mech that had been on the warfront longer then the Earth had existed. More than that, he was Special Ops Commander, and Third in Command. He was a mech that had survived the streets of Cybertron in his youngling-hood, a mech that had taken a turn or ten in the Black Market Fighting Rings when credits were short in his adulthood.
Jazz knew intimately what deliberate marks of pain looked like. He had some permanent scarring of his own from a few missions gone bad. He knew what he was seeing as he scanned over the tiny seeker in Sideswipe's servo, was perfectly aware of each and every place Ratchet had healed, and the longer he looked the more options for the causes of the mech-ling's injuries came to his processor.
Jazz was completely and utterly furious in a way very few had ever seen. The last time Jazz had been this angry, Bee had had gone on a mission and come back minus a voice.
Bee had gone in to scout for information. It was supposed to be a quick easy mission. Instead, Bee had stumbled on a major planning session, with all the Decepticon major players present- including Megatron. It was an opportunity Bee couldn't walk away from. It would have gone fine even then, if he hadn't been picked up by Soundwave and reported.
Bee had fought viciously to get out of the Base with the information he had, made it out of the Base, and probably would have gotten away…if Megatron hadn't interfered. Megatron had gotten ahold of the scout's throat, was going to kill him, but Bee was determined and creative. One of Jazz's best operatives. He set off a controlled explosion right in Megatron's face-plates. The mech had dropped him, off the side of a cliff and thought him offline.
Bee had made it back to his extraction team, and through them made it back home for Ratchet to save.
Jazz had walked out shortly after Bee had gone under Ratchet's servos and wiped out the entire stronghold of Decepticons off the map as well as another two just to make a point before he came back.
This…this was different. This was worse. Bumblebee was trained to deal with situations like that, knew how to respond to them, how to hold himself together.
A sparkling had none of that.
Jazz keened softly, furious and upset in a way no words could express.
Optimus reacted instantly, locking his arms around Jazz's frame and picking him up. He took his Third into the Ratchet's office after getting a nod from the Medic so Jazz could destroy some things without the twin's trying to offline him. It was also the reason Optimus toted the smaller mech towards the office, as he would have had to walk past the twins to get to it, and in his state Optimus didn't think Jazz would have managed it.
Partly because Jazz would want to touch and check the sparkling and partly because the twins would have demolished Jazz for trying when he was so furious and twitchy.