I'm not reposting all the warnings. If you didn't read them in Pt. 1, then on your head be it.
[* * * * *]
Pt. 7
[* * * * *]
"What was that all about?"
"Wish I knew, my mech, wish I knew." Jazz put his back to Ratchet's office door and slouched, armor ruffling up in a way that should have been anatomically impossible for a mech of his make and model. It stretched the extra weave of tensile cables that didn't come standard issue with said make and model, and Ratchet gave him a quelling look. Jazz obediently stopped before something dislocated. "He just - " He paused, shook his head, and restarted. "I don't understand how - " No, that wasn't right either. "I wish I knew," he repeated lamely, because he really did.
He headed Special Operations, and his first instinct in a situation like this was to gather more intel before making another move. How unfortunate, because his source of information had just stalked off in a spited huff.
Second instinct built on the first, insisting that action trumped waiting on the battlefield. Behind the scenes, yeah, patience was key. However, at some point Jazz had classified this whole mess as a new form of fighting. That had a bucketload of bad connotations, considering the fact that they were supposed to be in the middle of negotiating a peace treaty. Pump-level combat routines didn't care; they'd decided to classify 'courting' as 'potentially fatal.' That part of him saw Starscream walking away less as a loss of an informant than a move on the battlefield, and that required immediate reaction. A list of suggestions scrolled down the side of Jazz's vision: all things to soothe the savage Decepticon by seeming to promise a lot without actually delivering a single thing.
The fact that this list was peppered with lewd suggestions from one obviously malfunctioning subprocessor wasn't worth acknowledging.
The Autobot saboteur slowly spelled out events in the hall for Ratchet, knowing that Red Alert was listening in and passing on relevant details to the Autobot command cadre. He hesitated slightly over delving into his own response to Starscream's advances, settling at last for skimming the highlights. It wasn't like the footage from the corridor surveillance camera wasn't enough to fill in the blanks, but he'd rather not talk about it at the moment. In hindsight, it was more than a bit embarrassing just how much he'd responded. Starscream hadn't done more than a little creative groping, and Jazz had balanced on the very edge of endurance.
He kept his visor trained on the floor and laid out what the - 'conversation' - with Starscream had revealed. If there was an overtone of I'm Embarrassed to Exist in his voice, Ratchet had enough tact to not bring it up. Possibly because the Intimate Adventures of Ratchet & the Constructicons had been acted out in this very office not all that much earlier. Possibly because, for all their teasing and snarking, the Autobot command staff knew each other inside and out, and they knew when it was time for some prudent silence.
Silence was not on Jazz's list of conciliatory actions to get back in Starscream's good graces before the temperamental Decepticon started causing trouble. The Air Commander's parting words raised all kinds of alarms, and Ratchet's worried look confirmed Jazz's concern. They could think of very few good things resulting from "There seems little point in continuing this farce."
*"He took off the second he stepped outside,"* Red Alert reported, troubled. *"He's out of my surveillance zone. Should I consult with Soundwave?"*
That was asked reluctantly. Red Alert couldn't exactly be called paranoid when it'd been proven so very often that the Decepticons really were out to get him. He was a security specialist. Like all specialists in the war, he'd been identified and tagged for termination with extreme prejudice. As the war went on, the surviving specialists had become even better in their chosen fields. Red Alert was a fine example of what kind of specialist fighting superior forces and supply lines with leftovers and salvage could make out of a mech. Just because Autobots had been on the defense for so long didn't mean that Red Alert's counterparts in the Decepticon ranks didn't remember the nasty tricks he pulled on the offense. The tags had been tagged with additional kill orders, and then those tags had been flagged with ASAP notifications.
By the time the ceasefire had eased into actual negotiations, the Decepticon rank and file had elevated Red Alert to some kind of Autobot boogieman. It was an attitude that seeped in odd ways into the Decepticon Elite as well, even though they probably knew better after their time on Earth. Or maybe witnessing Red Alert chasing Laserbeak around the Ark's control bridge with a gigantic flyswatter had only increased their respect for the security director. Who knew what Decepticons thought? All anyone knew was that Soundwave and his Cassetticons had an unnervingly eerie way of always keeping Red Alert in sight.
So the Autobot Security Director had no desire whatsoever to approach Soundwave for help. Even if the Decepticon communications specialist probably had Starscream tracked at all times. Truce or not, nobody was foolish enough to think Starscream was subdued.
"Naw, Red. Let 'im sulk," Jazz said, letting Ratchet pull him upright. "Put out a general heads-up for everyone t' keep an optic out for him, but actively chasing the fragger's not gonna help anything."
He tried to brush the medic off with an, "I'm fine," but Ratchet briskly started examining him for damage anyway. Jazz shrugged and bore the poking and prodding. He didn't even flinch when the medic popped a hatch under his bumper and plugged in, inspecting his system status from the inside. It actually served to remind him of information the other Autobots needed to hear. "We've got bigger issues than one overclocked squawk-box. Seems that the Decepticons equate hardline interfacing with force-downloads."
Ratchet frowned, and Jazz had the feeling he was using the examination to keep his hands busy while he thought. The buzz of data streaming through the port was certainly distracted enough. Jazz's subprocessors whined complaints at the medic, citing sensor spikes from outside stimulus that would have had Ratchet's fans spinning again if not for the medical partition standing between Jazz's systems and the medic's. Blue optics went subtly wider, and Ratchet cocked an inquisitive look at him. The smaller Autobot locked down his own ventilation system before that could even get started again. He was not in the mood for instant replay.
The medic shook his head. "That's twisted. That implies that a substantial percentage of Cybertronians regard data interfacing as an act of war, and - that actually explains some standard protocol for handling Decepticon POWs," Ratchet finished slowly. "It's never occurred to me to wonder why there's always been a strict 'hands off' policy for prisoners, but no ban on interfacing. That implies the Decepticons have resorted to one, but not the other." His optics were troubled. "Implying that we didn't understand what we were banning in the first place. Are we regarding the same thing with such a wide divergence that we don't even define it using similar words anymore?" He looked down at the cables linking him to his patient and abruptly disconnected them as if the standard practice suddenly made him uncomfortable. "The humans have a generalized ban on all sexual activity that's written into their international code, what's it called - "
*"Third Geneva Convention, Part III: Captivity,"* Red Alert supplied. *"The language used has always been a sticking point for interpretation, too. I knew there's always been the risk that one of our soldiers might abuse a position of power as a guard to take advantage of a prisoner, but my primary concern has been that the prisoner would use interfacing as a bargaining tool or trick."* He sounded disturbed by this new line of thought. *"Of course it was to keep the Decepticons from 'facing their way free, but I never thought about it from the Decepticon perspective."*
"If every uplink feels like rape," Jazz said, shuddering at the thought, "those policies have been keepin' our guards from blithely violating Decepticons." Ratchet's presence running parallel to his data stream had sinister implications that had never crossed his mind. Another Autobot sharing his ports and meshing with his cortex was a feeling of openness. Welcome. But if a mech didn't know that feeling as anything but a threat, because Primus knew the Decepticons didn't trust each other…
"Tactile overloads are a socially acceptable activity among the Decepticon ranks," Ratchet put in. "No privacy required, apparently. What do you bet that this 'courtship' thing is actually negotiating the specific circumstances allowing two 'Cons to link up?"
Jazz rattled his tires in a negative. "I wouldn't take that bet."
"This has been one huge clusterfuck," his fellow officer used the human slang without irony, and it pulled an involuntary grin from Jazz despite the gravity of its delivery, "of an ongoing cultural misunderstanding since the beginning of the war. How does that even…just picture the situation in a holding cell." Bewildered, Ratchet shook his head, and Jazz took up the scene his mind's optics easily created.
"A Decepticon offers to overload his Autobot guard, who totally doesn't get the mech's meaning 'cause they're talking about two different things altogether. But the policy only bans touching, so our Autobot offers his cables in return because, y'know, it's technically allowed, and - huh, can you imagine the level of fear and hostility that just bodyslammed that Decepticon?" Nobody expected a POW to be relaxed, but now that he thought about it, the Decepticons had to know Autobot prisoner policies. Which, with only the 'hands off' part spelled out, probably explained just how defensive even low-ranking Decepticon prisoners got. Just because they had no information anyone was interested in didn't mean that they thought they were safe from the Autobots.
Smelt it, the scenario of a prisoner trying to bribe a guard physically might not even been the part giving Autobot policies a bad reputation. Guaranteed, at some point in the war, an Autobot with too much kindness and a spark full of trust had tried to offer some poor Decepticon grunt a little hardline comfort. Turning it around, if the casual attitude toward physical interfacing was offered toward an Autobot...the expectations on both sides was terribly skewed. The fuel in Jazz's tanks curdled at how well both scenarios had probably gone over.
The black-and-white saboteur shook his head free of uneasy thoughts, then suddenly looked up. "Most of our POW policies are derived from the Enforcer Codes, right? Makes me wonder what the history archives might have t' say about the Enforcer presence in Vos. I know they weren't welcome, but now I think we gotta know why."
*"Primus,"* Red Alert breathed. *"I'm calling Smokescreen in for consultation tonight. We don't have the archives anymore, but Smokescreen knows every regulation he's ever had to eel around, backward and forward."* He cut out for a second, icon blinking off and then immediately on again to continue, *"Prowl's already started contacting other ex-Enforcers for any incident reports we can dig up."*
"Look for incidents outside of Vos. I doubt the Enforcers stepped foot outside their station in the city. It was only by Senate ruling that they even got that station. Praxus got the Enforcer contracts because it was one of the Tri-Peninsular Torus States that formed the core of the Senate's economic and political power, not because any of the other city-states wanted outside forces policing them," Ratchet warned. "The city-states were only nominally joined under Senate rule. Most of the Neutral territories debated every Senate ruling fiercely before allowing them, and the Enforcer stations were one of the more grudgingly accepted rulings. Vos was the political lead for the Neutral city-states, and it had a long history of independence before the Senate forced the Cybertron Unification Alliance through. I remember Starscream's speech before the Senate as Emirate, and he all but tore a strip off the Senators for attempting to enforce outside laws on city-states with law codes already in place." Blue optics squinted as the old medic pulled up memories long-archived. "Though that was just a side-note. His speech really focused on the emerging disparities in resource allocations by the Senate. They…weren't so blatant as they became later."
Yeah, later, when the Senate claimed the majority of every mine-share for 'essential developments' in Iacon. Jazz kind of wished he'd been around to hear Starscream lay into those pompous afts who'd starved Cybertron into civil unrest. Ratchet flicked one of his helm projections, chiding him for his impudent thoughts, and the saboteur grinned up at him unrepentantly.
Ratchet flicked his helm again and went on. "His speech wasn't well-received. In fact," the medic paused, perusing pre-war files, "that's odd. I don't recall the Vosian Emirate ever speaking on the Senate floor again. That's very strange. Starscream's nothing if not stubborn, but I'm inclined to say that he never came back to Iacon at all. I'm not finding anything in my Senate files tagged with his name after that."
"He probably flounced off with his wings ruffled and refused to go back 'cause they didn't roll over when he stomped his foot and told 'em to," Jazz commented wryly. "Her Majesty Starscream doesn't handle authority figures well when they don't bow to his pretty, pretty princess whims."
*"There may be a more concrete reason,"* Prowl said, his icon flashing online and dropping into the network.
Jazz couldn't help himself. "Screamer's ego is solid concrete sometimes."
*"As you say,"* the other officer agreed blandly. *"However, diva tendencies aside,"* Ratchet and Jazz splorfled in unison, curling about each other as they helplessly laughed at the Earth slang coming from Prowl, of all mechs, *"assassination attempts are enough reason for a snit. A sniper put six rounds through one of the Emirate Flight Guard and a perfectly aimed shot through Starscream himself."* The channel hissed white noise for a brief moment as Prowl let that sink in. *"It is unknown how Starscream survived a projectile straight through his spark chamber, but the Vosian embassy packed up and left less than two joors after the initial shooting. There was never more than a three-mech diplomatic party working in the Iacon embassy building again, and they made it clear they were there to pass on messages, not act as representative diplomats for Vos. The Senate was informed of the incident, but no official statement was ever issued. The sniper was never apprehended, and when Starscream next appeared in public, his science modification builds had been retrofitted back to warbuild armor and armaments."*
"Cowardice?" Jazz asked, letting information assessment mesh that with the Starscream he knew from the war.
*"Entirely possible."*
*"Justifiable caution on the part of a governing official,"* Red Alert disagreed, sounding thoughtful. *"If someone outside the White House took a shot at Optimus Prime, we wouldn't let him go back to Washington, D.C. We'd reinforce his armor before we let him outside the Ark, too. A response from the American government like the Senate's would make us suspicious of just who ordered the shooting as well. Who's to say Vos simply refused to allow Starscream to put himself in that kind of danger again?"*
Ratchet walked over to lean a hip against his desk, crossing his arms as he turned that question over. "We're assuming Vos liked him as Emirate that much."
"How many terms did he serve, anyway?" Jazz followed the older mech, hopping up onto the desk to sit beside him. "Wait. I don't even know how the Emirate was…elected?" he hazarded. "Did he beat the former Emirate at Pac-Man? Disco dance-off a la 'Saturday Night Fever'? I know: horse shoes!" He beamed as Ratchet gave him a Look of I Am Unimpressed By Your Logic.
Prowl went one better and somehow managed to transmit that Look via just the tone of his voice. *"Election of the Vosian Emirate happened through the governing council casting votes. The governing council representatives were, in turn, draw by lot from the 26 city districts, along with 44 guild leaders and civil department heads. There were also an unspecified number of 'special interest group' representatives, including anywhere from three to fourteen representatives from the War Academy alone. My understanding was that the student body changed their representatives each semester to reflect current enrollment."*
They were all silent for a moment, digesting that. "…that sounds a lot fairer than how the Senators kept office," Jazz offered finally. While there had supposedly been elections for the Senate, Jazz had never heard of anyone ever voting. Or any other candidates than the Senators who'd been in office already. "Weird."
*"How it worked in theory differed from how it was actually practiced, I'm sure,"* Prowl chastised him. *"Starscream is a master of manipulation. As I'm sure you're well aware."*
Like Jazz didn't have the memory of Starscream manipulating his - right. Yes, he was well aware of Starscream's ability to give a mech exactly what he shouldn't want, vowing all the while it was exactly what he needed. "Gotcha."
*"I will have to make inquiries into how many terms Starscream…served."*
The term sounded all kinds of wrong applied to Starscream. Also to the Senators. Civil servants may have been the official classification for their jobs, but it just didn't fit. Jazz felt a twinge of unease that he was capable of looking back and making these observations about the past ruling body of Cybertron. He didn't mind regarding the Senate as being in the wrong, but having to put Starscream into the same classification area was doing a doozy on his worldview. Psychotic Second-in-Command of the Decepticons was something Jazz knew how to deal with. Emirate of Vos, a head of state arguably equal with the Senators Jazz had once been sworn to protect - not so easy to reconcile that in his mind.
Then again, the Senators had turned out to be, propaganda aside, a group of megalomaniac egotists. Starscream could slot firmly in with that group any day.
"He didn't outright say it, but he went fairly heavy on implying that the survivors of Vos followed him into the Decepticons," Jazz said. "He did say it was a group decision, but I'm thinkin' more along the lines of whether they'll be following him out of the Decepticons. He's puttin' himself forward as the mech who'll be restoring Vos." Starscream had an ego-bloating tendency to hype up his importance, even if it involved giving himself fictitious titles. "What's the latest draft of the treaty have to say 'bout that?"
The comm. line clicked as Bumblebee's icon blipped and dropped into the conversation. *"I'm not seeing anything to do with Vos in here. Maybe we haven't reached city governance assignment yet?"*
*"Not for Vos,"* Prowl corrected, *"but the Decepticons have provisionally claimed the areas of Kaon and the southern territories as their forces are still centered in the lower hemisphere. The reason Vos was chosen for the location of the peace negotiations is its central location in the Neutral territories, and the city structure remains more intact than Tarn. It's been an unwritten assumption that both factions would continue to use this city as a meeting point."*
"I don't think Starscream's ever gonna be a Neutral," Jazz asserted, "meaning that putting him in charge of a neutral meeting point's not gonna work."
*"He seemed confident of his placement?*"
"Prowler, Screamer's attitude on a bad day makes confident mechs seem timid. I don't care what the treaty says because, like I said, I'm more worried that he has the survivors of an entire city-state followin' him still. No matter what the official words say, how the frag could anyone stop him?" Without restarting a civil war millions of years in the ending, and the tiny glow of hope near and dear to Jazz's spark flickered fearfully to think it.
Ratchet wrapped an arm around the smaller mech's shoulders and squeezed the tires, offering what comfort he could. The saboteur's visor tilted up to look at him, concern darkening the usual blue to a dark indigo. "Bumblebee, how's it going in there?" the medic asked, diverting attention a little while they pored over this new problem. "Megatron keeping his hands to himself?"
There was a short pause, as if Bumblebee actually had to think that over. Ratchet and Jazz blinked at each other. *"…yes?"*
*"You don't sound very certain about that,"* Red Alert said, sounding more than a bit cranky that he hadn't been permitted to install cameras in the meeting rooms themselves. *"What'd he do, smack Prime's aft with his elbow or something?"*
*"Or something,"* Bumblebee agreed more cheerfully. *"I set up next to Prime when the meeting began, and ol' Megs took me at my word."*
Ratchet and Jazz exchanged looks again. Well, if that didn't have ominous overtones. "And that word was..?" Jazz asked cautiously, visor asking a question of Ratchet. Ratchet shrugged back, free hand flatly gesturing cluelessness.
*"That I'm here to assist. Look, I don't know what slag Starscream's pulling with Jazz, but Prime's holding his own in here."* Jazz bristled; so he wasn't holding his own, eh? *"Somebody put down some rules in here early on, and Megatron's not toeing the line. They're arguing terms. Things are kinda hot, but by Primus' rusty camshaft, when have they ever cooled down between these two?"* Ratchet and Jazz were nodding in unison, because…well, yeah. Everyone had had those kind of thoughts about Prime and Megatron before. *"So long as they're not hitting each other, I'm keeping my trap shut and assisting."* Bumblebee's amusement could almost be felt, as could an overtone of indulgence.
It was a feeling familiar to the command cadre, and Jazz's lips quirked despite his indignation. Prime on the battlefield was a horrible thing to witness; they'd all felt ashamed for forcing the Matrix Bearer, a mech of peace, to become a brute. No matter how necessary, they'd never adjusted to such a thing. But setting Prime loose on Earth to diplomat his way around the globe had been more adorable than words could express. Ironhide had been caught more than once by human cameras wearing a sappy look on his face as he bodyguarded Prime during NATO summits: 'Aww, lookit our Prime kicking diplomatic aft! Aww, he's such a good leader, yes he is! Atta boy, Prime.'
Nine out of ten Autobots agreed: Optimus Prime could be so slagging cute sometimes.
Jazz chuckled softly and shook his head. "Yeah, alright, keep us updated."
*"Will do."* Bumblebee's icon flashed twice and went back into stand-by. Optimus' icon had remained in stand-by the whole time, even though everyone knew he was getting relayed all the relevant details from this conversation. It wouldn't surprise Jazz at all if he were listening in to the whole discussion and was just too embarrassed to log in.
Ratchet pushed off the desk and walked around it to sit in the chair. It was a functional piece of office furniture when not draped with a Construction-muddled medic, but Grapple had welded wheels on the bottom. Utilizing them just as intended, the Autobot CMO scooted back around the desk until he could grab Jazz's nearest foot with one hand. A thin sprocket wrench appeared in the other, and he proceeded to poke it into and around the tires, testing rivets and dislodging bits of grime. Basic maintenance to keep his hands busy. Jazz envied him that.
He leaned back and accepted the treatment, because a soldier never passed off the chance for maintenance. "Okay. Worst case scenario: we blow up. Itty bitty Autobot pieces, everywhere." Ratchet's hands paused. Red Alert's end of the line blurted static. Even Prowl's online icon somehow conveyed disapproval. Jazz grinned at the world at large, completely unchastened. "Just sayin'. I think getting the worst case out of the way clears the way for actual planning."
Ratchet tweaked something that shouldn't have been tweaked in that direction, and his patient yelped. "Fine, that's the worst that could happen. What's a step up from that?"
*"Starscream consolidates a powerbase and manages to retake Vos,"* Prowl said promptly.
Jazz fell easily into the role of Unmaker's Advocate, taking a stance opposite the tactician. "Why's that automatically bad? So Screamer takes Vos. He seems pretty committed to restoring it, and that means playing nice with the rest of Cybertron. The flyers are a big chunk of Megatron's forces, but a combined Autobot/Decepticon assault could take them down."
Red Alert made a noncommittal noise. *"Assuming that Starscream cut all ties to Megatron, that would reduce future threats of violence from either of them. There's no way desertion could lead to future reconciliation, either. Megatron would never willingly let that much of his army go."*
*"Granted,"* Prowl conceded, "*but that's assuming too much. If Megatron has knowledge of Vosian courting culture, as Starscream informed Jazz that he does, then he must be aware of any contracts from before the war. If any of them are still in place, they'd threaten his power. It's far more likely that he has deliberately steered the treaty negotiations away from assigning Vos a governing body so that Starscream may claim it later, unofficially but not illegally."*
"So Starscream would remain under his thumb," Jazz mused, "and bring a whole planetary sector into the Decepticon fold."
Ratchet pried out a stubborn piece of grit. "The remaining cities here are destroyed or too weak to stand alone. The Neutral territories would follow Vos out of fear."
"Or maybe even loyalty," Jazz agreed.
*"It wouldn't officially be Decepticon territory, but if an entire surviving city-state population resettles itself and declares itself led by a mech who just happened to be Starscream, Air Commander of the Decepticons, it'd be hard to fight that through official channels."* Red Alert sounded more frustrated by the klik. *"It'd be like all the survivors of Praxus resettling and voting Bluestreak their leader. What could we do - declare that it's not what we want, so we're not going to let them do it?"*
"That brings back unpleasant echoes of Senate sanctions on the more rebellious city-states," Ratchet spoke up. "The Vosians are nominally Decepticons, unless or until they declare themselves otherwise. Do we even know that Starscream's not just blowing hot air out his afterburners? It's been a long time since the Senate leveled Vos. Starscream isn't well-liked in the ranks these days. He might have any support left."
"You're sayin' his confidence is misplaced?" Jazz mulled that over. "Wouldn't be the first time."
*"It would be wise to assign a tracker to him,"* Red Alert said, a little hopeful.
"Not shiny, Red-my-mech. That's explicitly against the terms of the ceasefire. And the truce. And it's already been drafted into the treaty." Jazz frowned as Ratchet knocked one foot off his lap and gathered up the other one. "I know Soundwave's making you twitchy, but - "
*"He's up to something."* Poor Red Alert, having to work in the same room as half the Decepticon command staff. The daytime shift brought most the officers of both factions to these temporary headquarters, and the central room had been designated some kind of mutual workspace. It split neatly down the middle: Blaster and Red Alert setting up shop on one side; Soundwave and the Reflector components on the other. Everyone else went in and out as negotiations required, but it was the official command location for two factions not quite at peace. Tension levels never dropped in that room. *"They're all up to something!"*
"They're Decepticons," Ratchet grunted. "I'd be more surprised if they weren't."
"That doesn't," Jazz stressed, "mean that you can spy on them. You have camera surveillance. You share it with Soundwave. You've bugged it to alert us if he tries to block us from seeing something. Take whatcha can get, Red!" There was an ill-tempered grumble on the other end of the line. It made Jazz feel bad, but it had to be brought up. "Look…I hate to do this to you, but how much do you remember from, well, from everything that went down with the Nevagator?"
Funny, it hadn't been cold in the office until right then. Jazz eyed Ratchet and shivered. The medic hadn't raised his head, but the hand rotating a tire was suddenly holding on a lot tighter than it had a moment ago. Jazz couldn't blame him for reacting badly. Due to the nature of Red Alert's damage, the security director had willingly submitted himself to a force-download. Ratchet had been the unlucky mech to have to go through with it.
Willing submission aside, such things left hard feelings like an aftertaste of bile. Jazz hadn't heard even a rumor of those two crossing cables since.
…okay, so maybe the Decepticons had something, there.
And if he'd thought the room temperature had plummeted to sub-arctic, the comm. line seemed to be forming icicles. *"I was thoroughly debriefed after that incident,"* Red Alert said stiffly. *"You should be well aware of that, considering the fact that you were part of an extensive interrogation aimed at revealing any hidden Decepticon sympathies I might have still held."*
"Whoa, hey, calm down," his hands went up defensively, despite the fact that there wasn't a camera actually in Ratchet's office. "I'm not questioning your commitment to the Autobots! It's just - " He sighed air through his vents, trying to clear out guilt he'd thought he was long over. Nobody had walked away from the Nevagator incident with positive emotions. "You're not gonna like this. Starscream's talking like he knows more about you than he should, and, uh, my thought is when you two formed that screwy alliance - "
*"He might have courted me."* Red Alert sounded sick, like his tanks were boiling over, but worse was the way his normal assurance fled. It left a small, insecure mech to whisper, *"Oh. Oh, slag. He might have - he might have - "*
Jazz winced. This was exactly the reaction he'd prayed he wouldn't get. "Fragged you, yeah. And maybe interfaced to seal the deal." He didn't want to think it, didn't want to picture Starscream pressing Red Alert back against the Nevagator, touching him the way he'd touched Jazz. Because the picture was undeniably hot, right until that mental picture included the way Red Alert's helm projections had been sparking from the sensor ports, indicating logic circuitry so damaged he couldn't have made an informed decision with a how-to manual from IKEA.
Starscream was the Second-in-Command of the Decepticons. Taking what he wanted from a mech incapable of withholding consent wasn't even a shocking concept, sadly. Worse, it would explain what Starscream had said about Red Alert earlier. When else would he have found out about Red Alert's deeply-buried spurts of wicked humor?
"I'm coming over there," Ratchet was saying, pushing Jazz's feet off his lap entirely, "and we're going over that download a frame at a time. Together. It was so badly distorted by the state of your cerebral processor units that I couldn't get any relevant information out of it before, but I wasn't looking for…this."
*"I understand,"* Red Alert said in that tiny voice, and Jazz's spark broke. He reached out for Ratchet, aching, and the medic met him halfway. This time, the connection slid into place without a medical partition between them, and they rocked together in shared horror as their fellow officer and friend scraped up enough courage to make a nervous request. "*Prowl, can you make time to join us? I know your meeting with the triple-changers ends in two breems, but the city-planning meeting with Grapple and Shockwave is scheduled immediately after the - "*
*"I will make my excuses,"* Prowl said gently. *"My presence will not be missed for the course of a single meeting."* Not at the cost of shoring up a mech torturing himself into an apprehensive wreck over something that he couldn't have possibly prevented. *"Please reserve Room 3C for our use. Unless you'd rather meet in Ratchet's office?"*
*"No!"* Red Alert caught himself, paranoid now about his paranoia. *"I-I mean, Ratchet's office hasn't been secured properly."* Unlike the primary building, which Red Alert inspected for bugs and nasty hidden Decepticon tricks several times a day. *"I'll meet you in 3C in two breems,"* that pathetically small voice said, and Red Alert's icon blipped meekly as it dropped off the network.
Jazz leaned his head against Ratchet's windshield and cursed fluently. It pulsed uneven flows of energy across their connection, and Ratchet's medical protocol-backed systems slowed the datasteam in response, reaching across the hardline to calm the flux. Eventually, soothed despite himself, the saboteur calmed enough for coherent threats. "If he took advantage of Red, I'm going to rip his wings off and feed them to him." he swore, engine a steady junkyard-dog growl under his words. "Frag the treaty, frag this stupid courting slag - it's just an excuse to jump a mech and make him do what you want!"
Skilled hands stroked the cables, pulling just enough to remind Jazz that he wasn't alone. Outside emotions swirled around him, a foreign intruder welcomed for the comfort he brought, and they hadn't moved from standing by the desk for half a breem. A glint of hard amusement stabbed into the soothing dataflow, and Ratchet projected a questioning feeling back.
"Nothing," Jazz said, voice muffled against clear glass. "Just thinking." Just thinking that if the warm armor in his grasp had been Starscream's, there would have been no shared silence, no experience and sympathy cradling his hurting mind with a medic and friend's reassurance. No wonder the Decepticons didn't go for each other's cables. Connecting to Starscream probably felt like sword-swallowing, or having a wall of razor blades fall on a mech.
But…huh. A breem and a half before Ratchet had to face bad memories. Enough time for some good ones.
Ratchet reset his optics, but the blue visor still looked up at him in strange determination. "What?"
Jazz pushed away, hands already reaching for his fellow officer and old friend. The cables disconnected with a quiet snickt that sounded the way disappointment felt, but he had plans. He went straight for the wheelwells on Ratchet's sides, and the larger Autobot jerked with a muffled moan as nimble fingers ran a ringing note around the edges. Ratchet's optics blinked again, but he reacted gamely enough.
His hands dove over Jazz's shoulders and dug the fingers between the armor plating protecting vulnerable back struts, and he dragged those fingers up. Jazz arched, keening. Every linkage running along the struts caught on those fingers, stretched, and snapped back into place with crackle of temporarily-interrupted function. The smaller Autobot's hands scrabbled at Ratchet's chest, searching for dropped cables, but the medic tsked.
"Not yet," he whispered, lowering his head to take one exquisitely sensitive, sensor-packed helm projection into his mouth. He laved it with his tongue, refusing to be hurried even as hands finally found his cables. Fortunately, they seemed unable to decide what to do next, and instead of plugging them in, the hands just kneaded them uncertainly. Jazz groaned, low and throaty. He blindly pushed into the slow slide of Ratchet's tongue as it traced the lines of miniscule armor gapes where the sensor nodes hid, and Ratchet smiled. "You like that?"
"Yes!" It had been a long day, and Jazz's body remembered all-too-well the way he'd been riled up before. Both of them had fans rattling away, and the office wasn't cold anymore. Excess heat billowed out of them.
"Patience." Ratchet wasn't in any better shape than his friend, but he was curious. This wasn't really something they'd done before. A little physical stimulation while linked up was pleasant, but it wasn't the circuit-melting pleasure the Constructicons had inflicted on him, or the slow slide of Starscream's hand on Jazz's hood.
"Patience is overrated," the black-and-white saboteur panted, pushing his vents open to their widest and still not getting enough circulation. Forcing his hands to drop Ratchet's cables felt like letting go of a can of coolant while walking on the sun, but slag it, he was curious, too! His hands rose, exploring Ratchet like the older mech was new territory. The path they took strayed as Ratchet switched to the neglected helm projection, apparently feeling that it needed some strong suction to make up for the lack of attention. They made it to their intended destination after some time, however, and it was the taller Autobot's turn to make an undignified sound of pleasure as Jazz swept his fingers over the curved surface of a pair of headlights Ratchet had thought were safely out of reach.
The medic managed a laugh through a moan, and his head dropped. "Go for the headlights?" he asked lightly.
Jazz laughed right back at him. "Hey, whatever works." He stroked again to demonstrate, and Ratchet's sirens made a very interesting meeble! noise as emergency lights briefly strobed the room with spots of red. Jazz bit his lip, fastening his visor on the way Ratchet's mouth dropped open as clever fingers wiggled between turning indicators and headlights. Ratchet was no beauty contestant; the curve of his mouth couldn't be described as anything nearly so flattering as 'lush,' but…
He stood tall, pushing himself up as far as he could until Ratchet got the hint and lowered his head to meet him. And no, as far as kisses went, it wasn't a Primus-blessed cosmic event to set the universe on its head. But it was the slow glide of a mouth that tasted of honesty and hard work, and that was enough to set Jazz's circuits aflame any day. He clawed at the hard glass of the lights under his fingers, and Ratchet's moan came out garbled because Jazz lunged upward to capture it.
No, Cybertron didn't move. But Jazz enjoyed it well enough.
He wasn't imagining another pair of lips at all.
Besides, it got Ratchet's chevron within range of a not-so-stealthy attack, and the whimpered cry that got could melt anybody's knee joints. Jazz licked and nipped, supporting more and more of the heavier mech as Ratchet subsided like a balloon losing helium. The only reason Ratchet's hands were the ones fumbling for their cables was because Jazz's hands were too full of wobbly-kneed medic to make the connection himself.
The circuit completed, and the blaze of white-hot shared pleasure drowned out every doubt lurking in their processors about why, exactly, they'd resorted to hardline connection in the end.
[* * * * *]
End Pt. 7
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