I'm not reposting all the warnings. If you didn't read them in Pt. 1, then on your head be it.
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Pt. 24
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If this really was a ploy by the Decepticons to disrupt the Autobots' social structure, Jazz was going to go out and find a hat in his size, just so he could tip it to them.
Ratchet, Wheeljack, and Ironhide bent over Prowl on one side of the table. The Autobot Second had been laid out on his back on the floor, although he'd regained consciousness soon after crashing. It'd necessitated Ratchet running Cybertron's fastest interception on the mech's self-modification software, but that's why Ratchet was the best.
Suppressing modification to Prowl's coding didn't delete the protocol backlisting what had been highlighted for change, but it did slow actual changes down to a crawl. The interception itself had caught the change that'd slipped spark and CPU out of alignment before further changes based on it had cemented into place. Ratchet had slammed it into reverse as quick as he'd caught it. The self-mod protocols had immediately begun searching another route around the blockage, and the medic was watching that new pattern of changes like a gyrofalcon.
Prowl had immediately tried to sit up and resume the meeting. Ratchet had caught Ironhide's optic and pinned the Executive Officer down before Optimus Prime had even needed to say anything.
"I'm operational," had been met with, "Barely!" and "That ain't the same as 'fine.'"
The protests had trailed off into a woozy mumble as Prowl's lock-away processor transferred control back to main processors. They'd rebooted slower, and the backlog of error hit when the transfer completed. Yes, Prowl had been operational. Prowl could take a direct shot to the head and be temporarily operational as long as half his main processor units remained online enough to operate his tactical suite while his lock-away unit handled bodily survival. That didn't mean he'd be okay afterward, which was why Ratchet remained hooked in to monitor his self-modification closely. Ironhide had a jack in as well, and Wheeljack had their monitoring output up on his HUD as he kept careful watch over the readings.
Deployed in small units without sufficient medical back-up, Prowl's survival stats came back in the iffy range. Every time he went out in the field it was a calculated risk. If he wasn't at the top of the tactical game, the attention paid to one soldier's survival might have been deemed too much, and he'd have been pulled back to permanent low-risk duty. The Head of Tactical was both too important and too good at his job to have that option.
Hence, Ratchet, Ironhide, and even Wheeljack clustered around him like concerned mother hens. The clucking could almost be heard. Prowl wasn't going down today, not on their watch.
Meanwhile, Jazz had gone back to his original side of the table to casually lean his hip beside Red Alert. Ironhide's chair had been kicked aside earlier, and he felt more like standing, anyway. It let him keep his visor on the Security Director's open helm and still see over the table to where Prowl lay. The other black-and-white Autobot stayed still, one arm over his optics and doors flat to the ground. Visible from under his forearm, his mouth set in an uncomfortable frown. Sorting out the inside of his head after a crash was never fun, but blockading against a slow-motion crash as it happened felt like staying upright at the same time as falling down. Chip Chase had once compared it to snowboarding down an avalanche: ongoing damage control keeping barely on top of an unstable situation.
Occasionally, Ratchet or Ironhide murmured a question. Prowl grunted a short affirmative or negative, frown steadily deepening. The tactician hated this lack of control over his own mind.
To give them room and time to work, Optimus Prime had relocated down to the opposite end of the table, where he currently had his elbows on the back of Blaster's chair. They were reading the Cassette carrier mech's notes on the debriefing so far, speaking in low voices back and forth under the cover of the song Blaster had playing.
Jazz couldn't help but think that the Decepticons would not be able to relate to this version of a leader. The Prime's typical nobility was completely absent now. The tall blue-and-red mech who led the Autobots rocked back on his heels, optics intent as he read but wrists idly crossed on Blaster's shoulder. Just as idly, Blaster's hand had come up to tap against the back of one large hand. Even as Jazz watched, the Prime's hands began tapping the same rhythm on the boombox's shoulder. Both of their heads bobbed to the chorus of the song.
That was as far from Megatron's violent charisma as anyone could get on any day. Charmed, Jazz smiled down the table. Neither mech noticed, intent as they were on their work in their tiny, music-filled corner of the world.
Beside him, Red Alert rearranged his arms on the table and turned his head until he could put his chin on them. "Talk to me, Jazz."
The Security Director's speech, usually as precise as any instrument in his box of tricks, sounded exhausted. It echoed a bit, too, coming up under his helm armor to emerge from the panel Ratchet had levied open for repairs. The lag wasn't severe - Ratchet had given his self-modification programming a stern talking-to about parameters instead of blocking it down wholesale - but it was noticeable. Red Alert wasn't out of commission, but he was in a temporary repair-state because of the half-installed circuit-bank in his head. It replaced what he'd shorted out earlier but hadn't yet been integrated into his systems. Ratchet had abandoned him for the moment to deal with the more pressing matter of Prowl's collapse.
Swiping a topic out of the swarm waiting to be spoken about, Jazz asked, "So what did Screamer do to you?"
Red Alert's laugh broke in the middle, but that wasn't from a glitch. Jazz's spark twinged. That right there was the normal reaction of a traumatized mech. Sadly, seeing those signs surface encouraged him. If Red Alert wasn't trying to hide the damage, it could be dealt with. The mech had a real avoidance problem.
Back on Earth, the spectacular glitch that had caused the Negavator incident had come from cumulative damage. Ratchet had confirmed it afterward. The increased paranoia Red Alert had displayed up until that final accident hadn't just been a side effect of running security for the Autobots on a strange planet.
In retrospect, it'd made a lot more sense. He could be an emotional mech, but most of the time, Red Alert channeled his passion into a frightening efficiency on duty. Looking back at his behavior leading to the glitch itself, it'd been easy to see him suffering a breakdown. In this particular case, the physical breakdown had led to a mental one.
This was - or had been - war. These things happened. Mechanical failure at least explained why he hadn't been able to explain his thoughts even to himself. That hadn't made Red Alert's return to sanity any easier. Facing his descent into burn-out had been nearly as traumatizing as piecing together his scattered memories. Owning up to what he'd done while crazy hadn't been as painful as admitting it could have been prevented.
Ratchet had hardlined into him for the force-download to screen him for Decepticon tricks, but Jazz and Prowl had debriefed him in person separately and together. Jazz hadn't liked what Red Alert had confessed during those times. They'd gone over the weeks prior to the incident together, and it hadn't mattered how professional any of them were. It hadn't gentled the realization that lack of trust had been at the root of the entire thing. Mechanical failure had started it, but not trusting the other Autobots enough to confess his increasing instability had spun Red Alert's glitch into something that had nearly killed them all.
At the very base of it all, the Lamborghini held a deep distrust of people with mental problems. He had a phobia of having a glitch of his own. Part of it was professional: Security personnel had a well-rooted wariness toward handicaps because the mental ones weren't easy to spot. The glitches Security couldn't detect right away were potential risks. Even if they weren't results of reprogramming or signs of undercover agents, undisclosed glitches were a weakness. The mechs who had them were the ones with notes on their files that forever after stood out as warnings to anyone in the need to know. They had to be compensated for, like any vulnerability.
That was the professional side of his fear, but the personal side was that those mechs were the ones Red Alert could never fully trust. Him, outside of his rank. War had not been kind to any of their minds. They were a species whose entire mindset could change by scanning a new altmode, or die if their minds slipped too far out of alignment with their sparks. Red Alert had witnessed too many changes, too many sudden glitches, too many hidden flaws that were exploited or turned out to be intentional. He feared glitches.
Finding errors in his cerebral hardware had triggered his phobia in the worst way, not helped at all by the software errors tripped by the mechanical problems. Red Alert had been terrified of himself long before his paranoia turned outward on the other Autobots. If a mech's mind wasn't healthy, how could he be trusted with any responsibility? He couldn't be trusted to protect or defend. He couldn't be trusted not to suddenly flip out. He couldn't trust himself, much less expect anyone else to trust him. He'd been so afraid of everyone losing faith in him because of dubious mental capacity that he'd convinced himself everyone else had lost it. They'd turned on him, in his mind.
Everything he feared came to pass, but it was a self-perpetuating fear. Seeking help when he recognized the first signs of a problem within himself would have minimized any damage, but no. He'd tried to hide it, eventually talked himself into believing the Autobots were persecuting him instead of him actually having a problem, and the situation had spun out of his control.
Red Alert's fear of being labeled unstable had ultimately led to the medical file and SpecOps tag on him he'd been so afraid of. They stated precisely what he'd feared. It'd also forced him to talk about exactly what he'd been afraid of: mockery from the ranks, demotion, being avoided or pitied for a flaw instead of repaired, or even the repairs going further than helping and into the realm of actively changing him 'for the better.' The very idea of being dependent on medical aid for stability, for sanity, had repulsed him.
Sometimes Jazz hated his job. Watching Red Alert stare down at the floor while spelling out irrational paranoia in terms of personal flaws had been one of those times. Being there as back-up when Ratchet hardlined in to check access gates and processor logs from the inside had been another. But it was reporting Red Alert's total lack of faith in the Prime that had hurt the most.
Optimus Prime had led the Autobots for over six million years. Red Alert had been his Head of Security for a little less than five million years of that time. Jazz understood not trusting the other officers, because it ran well within Security's parameters to suspect everyone and everything, just like Special Operation's had emergency scenarios in place in case of defection or betrayal all the way up to the top. It didn't matter the person inside the position; in professional roles, even friends became suspect.
But not the top itself. Not the Prime. Optimus Prime couldn't be separated from his rank. He was the one mech who couldn't be replaced, whose betrayal would destroy the faction. If they didn't believe in the Prime, then how could they justify following him into war? Love him, hate him, dislike or feel apathy toward Optimus, yes, but no one in the Autobot ranks could doubt that the Prime would die for them. For the Autobot Cause.
To have fought beside, fought for Optimus this long and gained his friendship, but not returned it? In all this time, Red Alert still couldn't trust his Prime, his leader, or his friend not to throw him away for showing a hint of weakness.
Prowl could be a cold-spark slagger, but even he had shut off his optics and sighed at that part of the causation report. Red Alert had shrunk inside his armor when the Executive Officer bluntly phrased it that way. Jazz hadn't been able to keep his smile. Not that anyone had been happy, but he'd been trying to keep spirits up.
Optimus' optics had gone a sad, dark blue, but he'd shown no reaction beyond that as he'd read. The unfailing kindness he was known for didn't falter, either, before or after Red Alert's return to duty.
It wouldn't. Optimus had been hurt worse than that during the war, but rarely by someone as close as he'd felt to Red Alert. Finding out the relationship had been rather one-sided hurt the way driving through a swamp felt. It sucked a mech down into a muddy, cruddy low. Yet Optimus would never take his pain out on someone else, especially not for something like this.
Red Alert walked on eggshells around the Prime, now. There were things that took so much damage nobody knew where the breaking point lay. The Security Director desperately wanted to repair this breech between them, but there was no magic to make a hurt like that stop overnight. Making amends couldn't be rushed. Red Alert knew that.
The personal damage had been bad enough, but the professional damage hadn't been easy to fix, either. Refusing to admit there was a problem in order to avoid all the associated problems had only made the ultimate result worse. In not trusting any of the Autobots with his doubts about himself, the glitch had led to Red Alert trusting Starscream.
The mech's condemnation of himself had been harsher than any military tribunal's. He'd lost much of the Autobots' trust in him, yes, but the mechanical explanation for his behavior gave a legitimate reason for them to return quickly to treating him as one of their own, even if his remorse hadn't been painfully obvious. He didn't accept excuses from himself, however. His fearless self-confidence had broken. It'd taken Prowl's override codes, Jazz's editing, and Ratchet's biting sarcasm to weed out everything Red Alert piled on his own file after returning to sanity. He hadn't even asked before moving all of his personal effects out of his office on the Ark, just automatically assuming that he'd been judged unfit for duty.
That had actually been one of the easiest side-effects of self-doubt to counter; Jazz had made a point of leaving the security monitors unattended, and Red Alert had overhauled the schedule and been three shifts in before he realized the saboteur had just conned him into retaking his own abandoned rank.
The other after-effects were still ongoing. First Aid had been the Ark's makeshift therapist in cases where Ratchet wouldn't work - and after the force-download, he certainly didn't - and the Protectobot still spent hours every week just getting Red Alert to talk about trust issues instead of burying his head in duty and denial. Ignoring things wouldn't help. Red Alert had to deal with what happened in order to put it behind him and begin healing.
After all their time on Earth and the cease-fire here on Cybertron, First Aid had reported to the officer cadre that he believed them to be making progress. Bringing the Nevagator incident back up in this context tore the thin scab over tender emotional wounds wide open again. There wasn't an officer in the room who didn't regret the necessity of that.
At least Red Alert wasn't pretending to be okay. He turned his face down toward the table and huffed another laugh that wasn't a laugh. "He saved my life."
"So I gathered from what Ratchet said," Jazz said. He kept his voice level, nonjudgmental. "Kinda strange hearing that. I would've thought we'd have picked up on it before, Red. What'd you two find that makes Starscream your knight in shining armor?" He regretted his word choice even as he said it. Red Alert flinched slightly. He'd known Starscream couldn't be anyone's savior without something unsavory going on as well. That flinch told him it was going to be a doozy of a nasty footnote to the story.
"It wasn't so much what we found but what we didn't find." Blue optics flicked toward him before fastening on the cluster of mechs on the other side of the table. Prowl's motor made grumpy complaints for the fussing, but Ironhide had the smaller Autobot's shoulder pinned down under one knee. Prowl wasn't going anywhere until Ratchet cleared him. "My glitch," Red Alert said in a steely voice as he refused to back down from his own fear, "was caused by overheating of key components in my cerebral wiring. Entire connector circuit boards ceased functioning. I...lost much of my processor communication. Logic associations were internalized."
Jazz knew all that. "Yeah. I know. So?"
From Ratchet's report, he knew that Red Alert's core processor had completely separated from his archives, recent and older. Subprocessors had shut down. His tagging system had only been able to draw from a muddled pool of already-opened files, some important but by and large opened at random before the separation completed. Threat assessment had been scrambled by that. Information assessment had greedily filled in the blanks with anything he could grasp onto. That'd given those isolated logic centers still up and running nothing to conclude but a growing certainty that he couldn't trust any of the Autobots. Everything else he'd come to believe had been based on whatever Starscream chose to tell him, because he literally couldn't remember why he shouldn't trust the Decepticon who'd cozied up to him.
He tilted his head, but the Lamborghini still wouldn't look up at him. "Red. Red Alert? We've gone over this, mech. It wasn't your fault." Failure to report himself for repairs had been the only thing Red Alert could have been held responsible for in the whole mess, and he'd been slammed for that. Prowl had run him through the wringer even before Ratchet begun lecturing. Not only had it been about setting an example for those under their command, but about the importance of common sense for Red Alert personally. If he didn't regard a glitch handicap as a reason against promoting another Autobot, why had he assumed the rest of the officer cadre would be prejudiced against him?
But nobody could chide a mech about not being able to trust others. It'd been a long, long war, after all. Fear didn't have to be rational to be felt, common sense or not. Red Alert had been taken to task for failing his duty. He hadn't been chastised for his lack of trust.
However, Prime had delegated Red Alert's discipline to the other officers, removing himself from an already painful situation. That had probably made the biggest impression on the Security Director. Prime's sadness and disappointment should be weaponized. That stuff could melt sparks. It'd turned Red Alert into a little puddle of regret by indirect exposure alone.
The reason Ratchet had hooked him up to a monitor in this meeting had been because Red Alert offered an open port right away. Nobody could say he hadn't learned from his mistakes.
That didn't mean he had to be comfortable talking about them. "Starscream...I have a memory, just one. It didn't make sense, before. Ratchet - " Red Alert almost visibly made himself look up and take responsibility. "Both Ratchet and I assumed it was a hallucination because I was - I had those. Just a few." Ashamed, he looked down again. "Less than we'd thought, apparently, but some."
"Red?" Jazz crouched by Red Alert's chair, putting his hand on the other Autobot's arm. The mech knew him too well to see it as making himself smaller and less threatening, but going through the motions did help a bit. "Red Alert, I have to know. What'd he do?"
The mech turned his head away and swallowed as if a foul taste were creeping up his intakes. When he spoke, the words came out small. "He bled the heat off my cerebral wiring."
For a moment, it didn't make sense. That sounded too simple. Some sort of engineering problem or medical procedure, not something to make his fellow officer suddenly seem so intensely vulnerable. Jazz squinted up at him, turning that over in his head, and tried to connect it to anything.
"Electricity," Ratchet supplied quietly, and Jazz glanced under the table at him. "Starscream cabled in and absorbed as much of the excess charge as he could from Red Alert's generator. I looked for signs of access on his processors," he nodded toward the Security Director without looking up from Prowl, "and it didn't click that what I should have found going in was a dead mech. There should have been a melted lump of slag where his CPU is. I assumed - wrongly, and yes, I'm aware I'm an idiot for assuming anything around that featherless chicken - that the rate of temperature increase slowed between when I last got a reading off him and when we got him back to the medbay. If it'd stayed the same, anything touching a wire inside his helm would have fried, if not melted down to useless slag and caused more damage as it went. Sockets and insulation would have burnt up. There should have been fire, Jazz, not just some sparks."
The medic sat back on his heels but kept his neck bent to look somberly at Jazz under the table. "Much of the electricity his generator supplied for his processors, archives, and databanks got stuck in an endless loop powering nothing but the essentials in his head, and that charge had to go somewhere. It started radiating heat. I had a rough idea of what had gone wrong by the time we lost him because I was already getting overheat readings. And under stress, it's not like our generators dial back. He should have fried faster."
Jazz's visor narrowed to a thin blue band, but the hand on Red Alert's arm stayed gentle. "Red...what d'you remember?" He suddenly found the details of this memory very important. He wanted to know precisely how dead Starscream needed to become the next time Jazz came across him.
The armor under his hand didn't move, but Red Alert's vents blasted hot air onto him from strained systems. "I remember him kneeling over me and smiling and. And." A long hesitation. "And he said, 'Relax. You'll enjoy this.'"
The saboteur moved not a gear. He stayed motionless for a full minute, processing that, and then he said, low and quiet, "Red?"
If possible, Red Alert tensed further. All the officers did. Maybe Jazz sounded perfectly calm to those who didn't know better, but everyone in the room heard the intent to murder in that tone. "What?"
"Don't take this personally or anything, but I'm going to let go of you now and go hit a wall really hard. Okay?"
Plating rattled faintly as some of the tension drained away. He turned a wobbly smile on the smaller Autobot. "Okay."
Optimus sighed as one of his top officers went to beat on a defenseless wall. "As much as I wish we could straightforwardly condemn Starscream's actions - "
"Can't do it," Ratchet muttered. He sounded as if he loathed himself for having to interrupt. "The slimy rust-muncher took advantage of someone who couldn't stop him, but even if he'd asked, I'd have given the go-ahead. As the medic responsible for Red Alert's health on Earth, knowing what would happen if Starscream didn't violate him like that, I'd have called medical necessity and begged him to do it. Exposing his brain module wouldn't have vented enough heat. Bleeding off the excess electricity is exactly what I did when I had him back in a medbay, only I did it via a powerline instead of a hardline cable." He wiped a hand down his face, giving the angry black-and-white mech shaking in front of the dented wall a troubled look. "Starscream connected to a mech with no internal access to information to exploit, purely for sake of prolonging the functioning of that mech in order to use him for his own ends. But he didn't have to. He could have chosen to let him stagger along until he dropped, a lobotomized shell, but he didn't. Red Alert didn't have anything left in his head he could take, and he still saved him."
"He got a few hours more out of his new ally," Prowl said, factual but tired. This was obviously something the rest of the cadre had discussed before Jazz arrived tonight.
"He's smart enough to have known the Nevagator would have been his before the last of Red Alert's mind dribbled into nothing," Ratchet said back, just as tired. "He got nothing from the connection but a boost of charge and Red Alert's continued company. Maybe he was desperate for allies. Maybe he wanted the leverage for later. We don't know why he did it, Prowl. All we know is what we got out of a fractured memory file."
Jazz's hands hurt. He wanted so badly to wrap them around Starscream's throat and squeeze. "Let me get this straight. He raped Red," in front of him, the Security Director flinched down further in his seat and went on pretending he wasn't being talked about, "and saved him. We owe him as much as we hate him for this slag?!"
"Like I said," Ratchet said dryly, "the next time I see him, I'm going to punch him out and then do my best to interface him unconscious again once he wakes up. He couldn't have gotten me into a more complicated knot of ethics if he'd tried."
"Rusted backstabber probably did," Ironhide put in.
The medic fiddled with a cable, unplugging it and sliding in another. Ironhide crouched lower, apparently immersed in whatever the change had just brought up. Ratchet backed away a bit to give him room, looked over at Jazz again, and shrugged. "That wouldn't surprise me. He's the most manipulative ball of political grease that's ever picked up a gun."
"I know nobody wants me to point this out, but technically? He did what he promised," Wheeljack said without turning to face the table. "There are huge gaps in the readings, of course, but from what we recovered from system logs, there was no pain. Any other patient suffering a cerebral hardware meltdown would show neural receptors off the chart from direct contact or overcharge. Red's sensor system wasn't blocked. No disconnect from physical sensation, or even...well, everything should have hurt more, in fact. I'm not sure he could have sorted out his own systems enough to override anything."
Jazz flexed his hands and tried to dwell on the pain of battered knuckles instead of what he was feeling. There was no reason for this sense of betrayal. Logically, Starscream hadn't changed in the last two orns. Uncovering some background on Vos and the Seeker himself didn't erase the fact that Starscream was a treasonous bastard. He knew that. Using Red Alert this way shouldn't make Jazz any angrier than the times he'd pulled Mirage out of Vortex's clutches, violent echoes from a hasty force-download still in the spy's head. The cease-fire was recent, and they'd all done inexcusable things during the war. Finding out that Starscream's personal list of war crimes had a few more annotations than he'd known about a breem ago shouldn't infuriate Jazz this way.
That didn't change the fact that he wanted to find a copy of the cease-fire and feed it to the Air Commander with his fist still attached. Primus, he was so slagging angry.
A detached part of his mind watched the rage grow, analyzing it. Interesting. Going deep cover on a long-term mission to infiltrate Vos had begun to influence his emotions despite all logic. He had an inexplicable attachment to Starscream, now, and the betrayal of that unreasonable sense of closeness hurt. He made a note for his baseline personality to keep perspective.
He shook the fury off enough to speak. "Red didn't look like he was in pain." Despite his dead voice and borderline hostile glare across the table at Wheeljack's back, it was a question.
Ratchet looked up. Weary as the medic seemed, the slow droop of Wheeljack's shoulders showed more exhaustion yet. Jazz had to wonder how long they had been combing over and over the data. He doubted it was physical tiredness so much as sheer emotional strain. They were good at partitioning themselves behind professional walls, but that kind of data was always difficult to handle. The closer the people involved, the harder it was to handle events objectively. Red Alert seemed to be trying to disappear into the table. Even at one step removed, viewing a memory as a file from the outside, it had to be a personal ordeal for the Security Director as well as a professional nightmare. It likely hadn't been any more fun for the mechs forcing him to relive it.
"Aside from the assorted surges that caused the sparking we saw," Ratchet reported quietly, "by our calculations, the glitch stayed under dangerous levels despite constant build-up. Starscream must have kept it under control through repeated...treatment up until the last attack, when he was forced to use his null-ray and knocked the generator temporarily offline. Back-up batteries supplied far less power but supplied it through different connections, and the shot brought Red Alert's lock-away processor up into control, finally."
"No pain," Wheeljack agreed, just as quiet. "And from the spotty receptor records, the evidence suggests that he, ah. Not an overload, of course, because that would have required him to build the charge past the point it already was at, and that would have melted everything, but think of it like an extended afterglow. The part right after an overload when the charge evens out between you and your partner, ebbing down in controlled wa - "
"Please stop," Red Alert said in a shade above a whisper. Wheeljack's vocalizer clicked off immediately, but the Security Director's voice could still barely be heard. "Please just...stop. I do not think rehashing this is - is this necessary?" His helm twitched, as if he'd wanted to turn and appeal to the Prime but stopped himself. "The physical details are not important right now."
"They're not." Nothing else had to be said. Wheeljack had already turned, one hand extended and guilt clear in his optics. Optimus Prime caught his gaze and shook his head before the engineer could say anything, and Wheeljack's audio indicators lit a dim violet in apology as he stopped himself from reaching out to Red Alert. Optimus held his gaze. "I'm deeply sorry that we have to bring this up at all, Red Alert," their leader apologized, engine rumbling under his soothing tone.
If Optimus hadn't been focused on Wheeljack at that moment, he might have seen the miserable flinch from Red Alert. That sentence would have ended differently before Earth and the Nevagator. Jazz and Blaster exchanged a regretful look. For all their Prime's notoriously soft spark, he forgave far more easily than he forgot. They honestly couldn't tell at this point why he avoided referring to Red Alert the way he did the rest of the officer cadre. It could have been because he wanted to avoid pressuring the touchy mech, or because he truly didn't believe Red Alert to be a close friend any longer. Either way, the miniscule hesitation before substituting Red Alert's name instead of a habitual 'my friend' stood out like a stop sign between them.
Jazz had the clearance to register a blip on the communication network signaling that the Prime had opened a secure channel to Wheeljack. Whether or not he believed Red Alert regarded him as a friend, Optimus would still defend him. The engineer was in for a lecture from the Prime about letting scientific fascination overwhelm tact. Again.
Well, that wasn't new. Wheeljack had a lifetime supply of lectures on social awareness stored up to recycle for those times when the Dinobots got unruly. The flavor of talking-to directed toward him tended to be titled things like 'The World Is Not A Test Subject' and 'Don't Experiment On Anybody Without Waivers Signed By All And Sundry, No Seriously, Not Even On Yourself.' The latter came out of Medical personnel, most of the time at high volume and because he'd just been injured as a result of ignoring the previous medic who'd lectured him. He'd done pretty well at tailoring those lectures into educational series he half-jokingly called 'Don't Eat Fellow Autobots' and 'Other People Have Feelings, Too.'
Optimus Prime did his own work helping the Dinobots mature. He hadn't gotten through to Grimlock only by fighting him to a stand-still. Wheeljack's optics dropped, unable to meet his gaze anymore. Their leader was strong, but his power came from the strength of his convictions, not just his body. That was never more obvious than when he protected someone.
Red Alert shook his head, making himself sit up straight even as Wheeljack mutely went back to helping Prowl. "Don't apologize. It's…important information." There was a pause while he inhaled and pushed the stale air out slowly. His hands moved restlessly over the in-set console screen on the table, pulling up windows to study. It was reminiscent of someone picking up scattered papers and tapping them straight to redirect the conversation back to business. It was a painfully transparent attempt to gloss over the personal side of the Nevagator incident. "What I find to be the most important part is that it throws Acid Storm's song-and-dance about consent right out the airlock. Between force-downloading prisoners and Starscream helping himself to my cables, I think we can all agree that this courting business isn't about a fear of hardlining. If they were so paranoid," bad word choice, but he covered his wince well, "about crossing cables, then Starscream wouldn't have done it with me. Insane as I might have been at the time, he couldn't have known until he jacked in that I wasn't about to hack him. This supposed fear the Decepticons hold for hardline interfacing doesn't match up with that."
They went with the distraction, because dwelling on things wouldn't help him right now. Blaster leaned back in his chair and wavered his hand in midair at the Security Director while Optimus stood up straight and looked thoughtful. "Ya got a point," the Comm. Officer said, "but you got chunks of memory missing. Could be that you're missin' the whole contract process beforehand." He pulled a face. "Probably for the best, 'cause from what we've put together? Tactile negotiation's probably about settin' up a contract for stuff. You don't wanna remember being pawed at by - nevermind."
A quick reset of his vocalizer, and Blaster pushed on before Red Alert could do more than get a pinched, uneasy look. "Anyway, contracts look to be sealed by hardlining. I'm thinkin' the fear of hardline's because they don't do it casually, y'know? It's like signing a deal is for us. We do all the negotiating, but we don't do it with our hands, if ya follow me. But we don't put our names on the line without thinkin' hard and heavy on the consequences, am I right? The 'Cons are demandin' something more than just promises made and a signature. We give our word and some assurances if stuff goes wonky. They cable in, like some kinda lie detector. Dunno if anything we find's gonna contradict me," he shot an inquiring look at Jazz, "but the negotiations probably include how much access jacking in gives. The limitations have got to be hardcore."
Jazz shrugged helplessly. "I don't know." No, wait, he did know something. "We sure haven't seen Decepticons crossing cables all that often. If it's not done by a medic or an interrogator, I can't readily pull up any reports from my operatives about two 'Cons doing anything but clanging armor. I know I've got some, but it's like it just doesn't exist over on the Decepticon side. They just don't do it without war dictating it, or - bolt me." One dented hand went up to rub at a helm projection. "Run with this for a second. We thought it was a trust thing, but it might be a terminology issue. We're equating fear of a frag with fear of hardlining, but I keep getting the feeling we're missing what the Decepticons are really referring to, here. Starscream referred to 'the frag' being far off in our future, but he and Acid Storm haven't made a distinction between hardline or tactile when using the word with me. It's all been context I've been getting my interpretation from. Now think about that. If his current trine - er, duo? - contract doesn't expire until the treaty officially ends the war, then he's talking about a hardline interface to seal a contract between us."
"Which hasn't stopped him from attempting to overload you via tactile." Optimus folded his arms and nodded. "Megatron has not spelled it out that way, but yes. I agree. The terminology we use is unclear. When we refer to interfacing..." Leaving the sentence hanging, he looked over to the cluster of specialists around Prowl.
"Almost always cables," Ironhide finished for him. The older Autobot grunted as he heaved up to his feet after disconnecting from Prowl at last. "Yeah, there's confusion waiting t' happen there. The 'Cons don't say it's 'facing when they're talking about cables?"
Blaster and Jazz wore identical expressions as their attention went internal to run searches.
At the table, Red Alert's hands worked faster at the console. "Ratchet, you were involved in the last hostage situation on Earth. I apologize for pulling up what must be bad memories - "
"I'll cope." Ratchet's hands didn't falter as they unhooked Prowl from monitor wires. The wire were then coiled them up to store in his forearms and side hatches. "Fresh situations are the best for analysis. I know it, you know it. Do it."
The Security Director nodded shortly and looked up the table at Blaster. The lag in his speech made his words come out slower and more slurred than his normal crisp efficiency, but he was no less alert for the repair lag. "How does the linguistic difference in the shift from NeoCybex to English affect hostile phrasing cross-referenced with sexual connotations?"
"Don't ask for much, do ya?" the communication specialist muttered, but he'd already taken over the entire end of the table for running the analysis on multiple screens. "Ya want it done right, I'm gonna have to yank everything from Earth to compare, later. Spot-check on Ratchet's word-by-word's pullin' up Vortex spoutin' some f-words, the Stunties sayin' it every other sentence, aaaaaand…" He went silent, optics flickering rapidly as he rescanned the data. "One use of 'mindfuck' in reference to force-downloading, two more referrin' to how the rest of us were gonna react to Ratch' gettin' captured. A buncha 'frag's that're Vortex asking Ratchet to agree - buff my aft if that don't make more sense in context now - but Soundwave's transmitted orders called the interrogation a 'download.'"
"Odd that 'fuck' wasn't used to talk about tactile interfacing, if that's what Vortex wanted from him. But slang use denotes minimal difference between tactile and hardline, language-wise. Intent?" Red Alert was doing his own scan series, Jazz saw when he approached the table.
"Can't tell. Judging a whole faction's language use by a mech whose specialty is messing with our heads ain't kosher." Blaster drummed his fingers on the table. "A frag's a frag, but not if you're Vortex. Vortex frags you, we already know there's gonna be cables involved. He's a walking mindfrag."
"A frag's not a frag," Ratchet disagreed, taking his seat again as Prowl gingerly resettled into his own. "I say 'frag,' I generally mean cables. When Vortex said it to me, I genuinely believe that he was referring to tactile." He didn't look distressed by remembering it. He frowned, but it seemed to be directed at the current discussion instead of past events. "He was already forcing open an access gate in my head. Even if he was asking in order to mock me, there had to be miscommunication going on, there. He wanted me to agree to a tactile, er, interfacing, but if he and I had been thinking of the same thing, it would have made a lot more sense. He would have clarified what exactly he meant if he'd realized I didn't understand on top of not wanting to." He stopped for a second, going over what he'd just said, and shook his head. "The terminology is confusing."
"'Fucking' would've been a better English word," Ironhide said as he hauled his seat back into place beside Red Alert. "More physical."
"Except that it's not used exclusively for physical sex any more than 'frag' is, not anymore. It's become slang for far more than bodily intimacy," Ratchet countered. "The reason we," he gestured around the table, "substituted 'fragging' for 'fucking' in English was the computer correlations make it a good equivalent with the sexual overtones of the words, along with some of the crudity of slang. Although not to the same degree?"
Blaster shook his head when the medic looked to his expertise. "English arbitrarily created a list of censored words. Sorta a media plus religion plus politics thing, from what I saw. That's what put crude overtones on historically common words. 'Frag' doesn't have that 'cause it's an English word for computers that we yoinked for interfacing. Don't think the humans ever quite caught on to th' fact we were talking 'bout us gettin' it on. They just thought...they just…" His face went utterly blank for a moment.
"What?" Optimus had been slowly making his way toward the opposite end of the table, but he stopped when Blaster trailed off. "What is it?"
"Oh." Red Alert was looking down at a surveillance file Blaster had just pinged over to his screen. "I remember that. Chip Chase once asked First Aid what exactly we meant when we said 'frag.' He was concerned we were, ah, cursing in front of Daniel Witwicky."
"Thought it was weird at the time because puttin' a kid in the middle of Autobot City during a war didn't worry anybody," Blaster said, "but Primus help us if we used bad language in front of him."
They all stopped to absorb that strangeness. Spike and Carly Witwicky had a unique set of standards for humans. It came from spending their formative teenage years in the middle of a galactic war, Jazz thought.
"How'd First Aid explain it?" he asked. He couldn't remember anything passing his inbox about this, so it must have been handled without a fuss.
Blaster and Red Alert looked at each other, dawning comprehension meeting apprehension on both sides of the look. "Computer terminology," Blaster said. "Hardline interfacing's the only version the humans know, because it's the only one they've ever had exposure to, via talkin' with us. Never once crossed my mind to say something 'bout, uh, any way else. I just - well, kinda smacked me just now that if they'd known fraggin' can refer to us having sexytimes they can relate to, we'd have offended a lotta people on Earth. Anything referring explicitely to sex how they know the act is kinda taboo." He reset his optics twice, unsettled. "Er...not that different than us, really. Just got a weirdly human take on it."
"It's our default to refer exclusively to hardline interfacing when we speak of interfacing at all." Red Alert's optics were a troubled navy blue. "But if the Decepticons were using the same words to refer to their own standard practices, we know now that they meant tactile interfacing."
"Why didn't the 'Cons pick 'fuck' instead of 'frag,' then?" Ironhide's face screwed up in frustration. "Can't be using the same words in NeoCybex. Right?"
"Nope. They are. Maybe it was the English connotations, or maybe they picked it up from us, but Soundwave's workin' from the same NeoCybex I use." Blaster shrugged apologetically when the red mech threw up his hands in exasperated frustration. "NeoCybex translation comes through pretty equal, or we'd have picked up that we're talkin' about different things way before this. We," meaning the Autobots, "toss the same words around in NeoCybex and English that the 'Cons do, but we almost always mean hardline."
"Right," Ratchet picked up, turning back to Ironhide. "NeoCybex doesn't have a word with the physical ancestor 'fuck' does, but it covers most of the slang meanings despite that." His voice dropped to a mutter. "When did NeoCybex become standardized? I wonder if anyone knows if Primal Vernacular had different meanings for it." He shook his head and raised his voice back to normal again. "I might be wrong, however. If Vos' local dialect used the same word to exclusively the physical side of interfacing, that could have passed unnoticed outside the city-state. Regardless of that, when we talk about fragging now, it's entirely possible to be referring to tactile or hardline by the same word."
"It's got different usage dependin' on just where it goes in the sentence," Blaster added dryly. "Trust me, I can have whole conversations with Kup usin' nothing but different intonations on the word. We all know how to use it depending on what we mean, yeah?" He grinned. "Any grunt in the ranks knows ya don't say it certain ways to a superior officer unless y'want insubordination slapped on your record." Ironhide, already reluctantly smiling at the reminder of Kup's many and varied uses of the word, barked a laugh. "It wouldn't surprise me at all if mechs used it differently dependin' on where they came from back before slag hit the fan."
"We are speaking the same words but speaking entirely different languages," Prowl said, voice muffled by the way he held his face in his hands. The whirr of his fans cooling his overworked processors could be heard across the table. "That is fascinating, but what does it have to do with the topic at hand?"
Jazz had so many different information threads running right now he wasn't sure what the topic was anymore. "We need Blaster and Soundwave to go over the treaty tomorrow, together," he said firmly. The Communication Officer gave him a betrayed look. "Yeah, I know, but we need to get this out in the open with them right away. I doubt they understand our version of the language any more than we get theirs, and pretending otherwise is gonna bust us."
Prowl looked up, optics narrow, but a hand on his arm forestalled a protest. "This is not warfare," Optimus Prime said gently. "This is not an advantage to be held in reserve, but a potential pitfall to peace. If we are to ever reach an understanding, there must be open communication."
The tactician's lips set in an unhappy line, but he subsided.
It'd given Jazz the time to backtrack to what he'd been thinking of before fucking derailed everything. He leaned a hip against the table and crossed his left arm under his bumper to support the opposite elbow. His hand splayed open as he spoke to Prowl in particular, the others in general. "What all this has to do with what we were talking about is that we keep using the words without knowing what the actual definition is. Acid Storm talked big about consent, yeah." He nodded to Red Alert. "But we don't know what consent is to them. Does it mean just getting a 'yes' even if it's coerced," he nodded to Optimus this time, and the Prime shifted uncomfortably, "or from someone who can't make an informed decision?" Red Alert met his visor steadily. Jazz was glad the discussion seemed to have stabilized him again. "Mechs, we don't know what 'facing means to them. How can we know what their definition of consent is?"
That silenced the room. Optimus went still. Ironhide leaned back in his seat, scowling, while Prowl looked down at the table as if trying to center himself. Ratchet pushed up out of his seat abruptly and rounded the table to start work on Red Alert's open helm once more. Wheeljack scooted his chair out of the way as he went, and Blaster's neck turned to keep track of him.
Jazz pushed off the table, stepping out of the way and back toward the wall he'd beat up. "Look. I had two points, once upon a time." Back before he and Prowl had squared off and things had gotten heated. Medical emergency and discussion had cut off his second point, but now he returned to it, pulling in the fingers of his free hand and finally ticking off a second finger. "I've had it confirmed from three different Decepticons that Vortex and Skywarp are apparently under lockdown. No interfacing unless it's approved. Didn't think of it at the time 'cause of what was going down around me, but that makes me wonder what the legal definition of rape is over on there. They're so freaked out by showing cables that they claim they gotta negotiate contracts, but how exactly does somebody define rape when you're down to touching? We define it as, what, jack and port, right?" He glanced to Prowl even though he knew most of the legalities himself. He wanted to make sure people were following him. Prowl was frowning, but that didn't meant anything significant. Jazz was frowning. "But think about that. That's by our definition of interfacing alone."
Blaster winced, his own words coming back to haunt him all over again. "A frag's not a frag."
"Not when we're dead set on defining it as hardline or 'Eww, only perverts do that,'" Jazz pitched his voice into a nasal whine. He dropped the mocking tone for a dead serious one. "We've had whole vorn-long trial cases about somebody sayin' it was asked for after a night getting overcharged, or force-downloads we can't prove, and - frag, mechs! The stigma on rape's so bad because of the legal hang-ups, who knows how many aren't getting reported? Add in our code-level reaction to tactile 'facing, and we've made reporting anything gone wrong during anything but hardline an invitation to a reprimand, not help. We don't have a single law in place covering lack of consent in tactile fragging!"
Ratchet's hands stopped still as stone, fingers in Red Alert's helm. "That can't be right."
Jazz paced around to the other side of the room in order to see the medic's face as he said, "It's implied in our definition of interfacing, Ratchet. You want to define 'rape' to a court, it's jack and port, and that's it. Nothing else really registers as rape to us. Near as I can tell, we've got P.O.W. guidelines sayin' hands off the 'Cons, and rules of conduct covering molestation. If something went way beyond molestation into - oh, fragging Pit." Jazz winced in sync with Wheeljack, both of their shoulders jerking as their minds went the same place.
"How far does molestation have to go before it's considered rape? We don't even know," the inventor said, twisting in his seat to look back at him. His vocal indicators were a subdued grey. "The Decepticons probably have the legalities down because tactile's how they define their version of fragging. But we don't."
"Right. And if we're shaming anyone who gets an overload any way but hardline by saying it's wrong an' perverted, we're already telling the victims that they're gonna have a heap of shame dumped on them for coming forward, and even if they do…Primus." Jazz rubbed the bottom edge of his visor tiredly. "Can't press anything harsher than molestation. You know how easy it is to fight a molestation charge. Intent of the accused is a valid defense. The 'But he liked it!' argument still makes me hesitate, and I know better!"
Prowl's helm rose, and his optics were cautious. Ratchet had drastically slowed the absorption of new data into his base structure, but he could pick parts of the conversation apart without trying to take in everything. "Consent in tactile interfacing is slippery."
"Is it?" Jazz challenged immediately. Because what he'd seen tonight didn't support that statement. Wondering about consent had led to confused Decepticons who didn't understand why taking advantage of someone was even a risk. Acid Storm could have been playing him for a fool, but thinking about a society where the fear of rape didn't exist brought up all kinds of questions about the society he currently lived in. Whether or not the Decepticons based their fragging - either kind - on consent, it had opened Jazz's visor to the fact that the Autobots didn't.
There was absolutely no communication about this as far back as he could remember. There was only silence, and fear.
Prowl reset his optics at him, opened his mouth, and closed it again into a tight frown. His doors hiked up into a tense V behind him. "What do you mean?" he asked after a moment of reviewing his statement. Tacticians always wanted more information, and despite his distaste for the topic, Prowl knew Jazz had information he needed.
"I mean that our definition hasn't stretched to actually lay out what consent means, and our prejudice has made us look at that lack as a moral grey area instead of a legal gap that we should have noticed before now," Jazz said. "Yes is yes, no is no. We've got to have the same definition of that, but we've never applied that black-and-white moral structure to define where molestation becomes rape. We actively avoid most of the legal gaps around molestation, for Primus' sake! If it's tactile, we go hands-off and try not to think about it, or we condemn it. We do everything we can to avoid the issue instead of actually dealing with the slag it dredges up." He swept the others with a hard look. "You guys telling me you're okay with the bad mojo a molestation charge digs up? What's your first thought, right here an' now?"
"Because surely he could have fought back if he didn't like it," Wheeljack murmured. "It was just taken out of context. We were only rough-housing. My hand slipped."
"He's just wakin' up after recharge with a cargobay crammed with regrets," Ironhide grated. "He was sure into it at the time, sir. Anyway, we were just touching. No harm in a few touches."
"He didn't say 'stop,'" the Prime contributed softly. "I wonder," he said even more quietly, "how many ever said 'start.'" The part of Jazz's briefing packet on explicit communication must have grabbed his attention. No wonder, if Megatron had been chasing him around tables embarrassing him with attempts to open conversations about interfacing.
Red Alert lifted his head, one optic offline where Ratchet had cut the power to that side of his cranial cavity in order to operate. Full repair lag made his speech slur where one side of his face didn't cooperate. "I can make it worse. 72% of molestation charges are dropped in favor of minor assault charges because prosecution consuls have a standard script explaining the difficulty of defending a victim in the optics of a jury of peers pre-disposed to blame sexual misconduct on the mech who may have invited the accused to take liberties. The dropped charges are rated as a lesser offense but more likely to end in a conviction. Offenders usually escape with a single shift of punishment detail and an assault tickmark on their records."
"I'm almost afraid t' ask how you know that," Ironhide asked, turning to look at him warily. Ratchet paused to give the Security Director a quizzical look as well.
"Security absorbed judicial proceedings when civil courts collapsed," Red Alert slurred. "Individual military courts are assembled by a ranking officer according to the Military Judge Advocate Guidelines, but the Code of Interplanetary Conflict mandates a central tracking system for the Autobots as a whole. Security keeps the history of charges as part of the neutral archive of disciplinary records, although I haven't uploaded them to the archive itself in millions of years due to security concerns." Namely, that Soundwave would hack the archive and mine it for information on Autobot criminal charges. That would expose too many weaknesses. Someone as rightly suspicious as Red Alert couldn't allow that, Galactic Council mandates or not. "I have the standard scripts on file. It hadn't occurred to me to read them until now."
Ratchet scowled. "That's how you fried this 'bank, isn't it? You brought up every rusted record on file at once and pushed your capacitor over its limits."
"It's important!" sounded much less convincing when Red Alert couldn't even control half his face. "The number of molestation charges over the course of the war - "
"No wonder you blew," the medic cut him off with a scowl directed at the problem, not at the Security Director himself. "At least tell me you found what you were looking for."
The pause before Red Alert replied was not reassuring. "I did. 72% of the charges are dropped to minor assault after advice from the assigned legal consul, because assault doesn't involve testifying in front of a jury of peers. In molestation cases, the victim must be available for cross-examination. The defense is allowed to question the mental and physical state of the victim in front of the jury, and casting doubt on whether or not the victim 'asked for it' is a legitimate defense." The working corner of his mouth turned down further. "Only 51% of the charges pressed through as molestation ended in a guilty verdict. 36% were dropped by the victim or dismissed after out-of-court settlement of the dispute. 3% were found fraudulent. The rest vary, but overall, there is a 43% return rate of the accused pressing charges for slander afterward just in cases of molestation charges." He grimaced as the officers made small noises of surprise and disbelief. "Once a charge is dismissed or dropped to a different charge, that change can be used as proof of slander. Even those who changed the charges to assault suffered backlash for the original charges. Overall, victims have a 78% punishment rate unless they're one of the lucky 51% of the 28% who managed to win a guilty verdict."
Jazz's vision swam, and he fumbled his way to a chair to sit down before he dropped. Prowl's door brushed against his shoulder, but it was Wheeljack who met his shocked look with one of his own. He'd theorized it was bad, speculating off of what he'd observed and what he could recall from hearsay, working with his operatives, and personal experience on juries. He just -
He hadn't known it was this bad.
Red Alert lowered his head slowly, ignoring Ratchet trying to stop him. "All molestation charges - even dropped - are recorded by my division. Unless a guilty verdict was reached, the charges are wiped from personnel records every 20 vorns, but the case records stays in Security. I have the history of dropped charges for throughout the course of the war."
"I'll have to run a better search later, but…" His forehelm gently met the tabletop, and Ratchet's professional mask showed a hint of worry as his fingers suddenly sped a bit faster. "Charges being raised at all are a blaring sign of something wrong, even if the criminal conviction of rape isn't attached. There's no way it's just ignorance about boundaries and questionable consent, or every offense would be a mech's last as he learned not to do that again." He rolled his head enough to look dully across the table at Jazz. "So why is my search returning the same mechs repeat offending over and over again?"
Appalled silence filled the briefing room.
"Rape is about power," Ratchet said quietly into it, optics down and words paced in a way that made Jazz think he was expecting someone to contradict him. Who? "Hardline interface enforces equality between the people involved. Corrupting that equality is meant to take power over someone else, whether it's to cause pain, take data, or siphon pleasure. Tactile rape can't be that much different."
"Processors are involved in the pleasure. We know that." Wheeljack's optics were unfocused, seeming to track down thoughts. "But the claim of being unable to stop would be impossible to verify after the fact. Overwhelming the processor with physical sensation is as possible with pleasure as it is pain." The fine mechanisms operating the blast covers around his optics screwed taut. "But that doesn't make sense. Pleasure's not a totally mental choice, but cooperation with it is. If it's forced on me, my body will cooperate no matter what my mind says, but that makes me the victim. If I'm the one inflicting it on someone else, then why do I keep returning to the idea that being led on or teased is a legitimate reason for..? Oh, this is a slagging mess. Hold on, I've got to sort this out." The inventor's optics went blank as he turned inward.
That was a chilling thought. Jazz followed Wheeljack's train of thought and was unsettled by his initial agreement. They weren't mere machines. The idea that rape was a natural function caused by the body overcoming the mind didn't add up, so why did his processors so quickly agree that consent was implied by someone flirting or teasing past some sort of nebulous point of no return? His visor dimmed to a confounded blue as he tried to track down the logic behind that.
Blaster's optics did the same, but he made a discombobulated sound consisting of three separate opening notes from popular songs. "Data assessment is in high gear, but my head's in slo mo," the mech complained.
"Think that's bad? I can top it," Ironhide said heavily. "I can. Frag if I want to, but I can. I just thought about what I'd've thought if Screamer had gone through with it and 'faced Jazz out there." The officers who weren't resetting their processors at the moment looked at him, and he scowled right back. "Coulda happened."
"It could have," Jazz admitted readily. "I'd have let it, if it'd have helped."
"Right. And what about Ratch'?" Ratchet shot him a glare. The Weapons Specialist shrugged. "You were in a room full-a Constructicons. It was gonna happen. I'm just thinkin' what I would've thought, an' that's got me thinking 'bout - well, how I'd've handled it before. What would I say if, say, Sideswipe came to me complaining that someone's chasing his tires and won't leave him alone?" He looked up and met their optics one by one, his own dark and unhappy. "Go on. Imagine it happening."
"You're a big mech," Blaster laughed, but it wasn't the kind of laugh that lit a room. It was the kind of laugh that waited in dark corners to mug someone. "Take care of it yourself. Just don't get caught."
The older red Autobot looked down the table. "Yeah, that. Or tell him to stop putting himself in the kind of situations where someone could do that to him."
It took a moment to sink in. Almost a minute total, as even Optimus Prime waited for Ironhide finish his thought.
But the thought was finished. That was the thought. That was the thought.
It was so starkly horrible because it was normal. That made it hurt more when the realization about it hit.
"Wait, what?" Jazz had to shake his head as that one processed. Because it made sense right until he thought about it. Really thought about it, in the context of sudden awareness of repeat offenders and how the Autobots' own laws had slapped them on the wrist while telling the victims to be quiet by punishing them for speaking up. They weren't teaching mechs not to molest or rape. They were telling the victims not to be victimized. Responsibility for the crime wasn't being put on the on the criminals. "Wait, what?"
Ratchet started murmuring in a dead voice that chilled Jazz's tanks. "Don't walk alone when you're overcharged. Don't drink too much, and don't take high grade from strangers. Don't polish your windows if you're going downtown. Stay in the group. Look good, but not too good. Don't look like you're asking for it. Don't buy the expensive wax unless you're ready to slap hands away all night. Lock your doors when you go out, and don't transform out of altmode to unlock it unless the street's clear. Don't go anywhere on that street; you're practically advertising you're easy if you go down there. Get in the other lane if someone rides your bumper too long. Get off the street if they follow you, and find a group to join. Always tell your friends when you're going out, and when you plan on coming back. Keep your comm. on the inside of your forearms in case something happens." It'd become some kind of chant, the medic's volume rising. "Stop walking down the back alleys. You were asking for it getting your panels detailed in those colors. Why would you highlight yourself with that color if you didn't want it touched? No permanent harm, just some groping and grinding. You'll be fine with a wash and a good recharge. It's not like it went hardline."
Optimus was pressed back in his chair, hands flat on the table and optics wide. "That's…no. No!"
"I'm not saying you shouldn't call the Enforcers, but do you really want to put yourself through that?" Ratchet bulldozed right over him. "They're going to make a big deal of things, and you don't have much evidence. Paint transfers aren't proof. A system log's going to show you were riled up, too. You should have walked away before it got that hot and heavy. Why were you messing around like that, anyway? You obviously know him well enough that I doubt this is the first time you two have done this; why was this time any different? Did you two have a fight? You're just emotional. Give it some time, and you'll calm down. You're just playing hard to get. Your friend says the guy just put his arms around you a couple times; either you're lying, or he is. Who are the Enforcers going to believe with a witness there saying you didn't put up a fight? You shouldn't have started what you couldn't finish."
"Ratchet. Ratchet, what - " Across the table from the medic steadily spouting familiar phrases, Jazz shook his head violently. "Ratchet, c'mon, stop. Stop."
The Chief Medical Officer did, but when he looked up from locking Red Alert's helm panels shut, his optics were strange. The blue had shadows under the optic sensor lights and the focusing rings were of slightly different sizes. It looked like he was possessed. Haunted. "That's just from when I worked in Iacon Central's E.R. before the war. How long have I been blaming the victim?" He bowed his head. "What are we going to say to the ranks when Autobots start coming forward saying they were taken advantage of according to the definition of a crime we don't even recognize? Here we are condemning the Decepticons, but we're just beginning to understand that we've been passing judgment on our own victims for millions of years. We have no right say scrap about what the Decepticons consider consent and rape. We don't have the moral high ground, here. We're the monsters."
Ironhide laid his hands flat on the table and looked at them as if wondering what good their strength did him here. Optimus Prime seemed stricken, remorse for what he'd never before seen right before his optics crashing in on him. Jazz drew in a shuddering vent, while Wheeljack put an elbow on the table and pressed the fingers of his hand against his forehelm. At the end of the table, Blaster stared blankly at the screen in front of him like he hoped answers would appear out of nowhere. Red Alert lifted his helm off the table and looked up at Ratchet, repair lag processing out as systems integrated at last, but the medic had turned his face away from the rest of the officers. A furious kind of shame stood out from him like a cloud.
Into the stunned, wounded silence, Prowl spoke. "We are not monsters," he said, optics as level as his voice. "Monsters might realize their errors, but they would not seek to remedy them. We are Autobots. We have the 'moral high ground' by what we stand for, even if we cannot always live up to our own expectations." Optimus and Ratchet jolted, but the medic standing beside Red Alert refused to face Prowl. The Prime, however, did, and Prowl held out a hand to his commander in open appeal. "I…admit that I am not in complete agreement with everything that has been said, but I do agree that my mindset is compromised. I will provide a more objective perspective on this meeting once my information set architecture and logic algorithms are in alignment for information analysis. What I can tell even without my tactical processors fully online is that this is a pivotal moment for your personal beliefs, sir. We fight for your Cause, because we follow you as Matrix Bearer, leader, and the embodiment of what we wish we ourselves could be. You are an ideal," he said without appearing to notice that he'd exchanged his normally impassive mien for a frank honesty. The praise presented as fact had his Prime squirming, optics wide. "You are what we fight for, who we want to be like, and we want you to be proud of us. The Autobots, and by extension Cybertron, reflect your image. We are not monsters, because you are not a monster. I do not need a fully operational battle computer to know that."
"Whoa," Jazz said, so far under his breath only Wheeljack could hear, and the inventor just nodded his own astonishment in response.
"We have the moral high ground," Prowl continued, hand still outstretched to the Prime he believed so fiercely in, "because of you. You value life above all else. You would never condone abuse. You value the lives of even the Decepticons." A rueful grin interrupted the tactician's earnest expression for a moment. "As frustrating as that can be for the rest of us," Ironhide snorted wordless agreement, "it is a part of who you are, and we admire your refusal to compromise. We value life because you do. Your beliefs and our trust in them are what drive this attempt at peace. We have our own hopes, but at spark, every Autobot abides by the cease-fire because we fear disappointing you."
Optimus reset his optics. "I…Prowl, I don't know what to say. I'm humbled by your faith in me."
His Second's smile was small but sincere. "Then look at us, sir, and tell us that you see monsters in your reflection."
The Prime looked down the table, and Jazz had a sudden impulse to stand and snap to attention. Beside him, Wheeljack must have felt a similar urge. The inventor straightened in his seat instead, and the rest of the table followed his example. Ratchet, the only one already standing, did come to attention, finally turning back to face the others. The officers pinned their gazes to a point just above their commander's helm and awaited judgment for their sins.
Somber blue optics studied them. The weight of their Prime's judgment made Jazz quail inside his armor, and the truth of Prowl's words hit hard. The Prime's disappointment and sadness carried such an impact among the Autobots because he was more than their superior officer. He was…he was the Autobot Cause, and - for Jazz at least - a personal hero. Those optics carried all of the authority of an official trial and meant more to Jazz than any jury's opinion of him.
His spark cringed at the thought of Optimus looking at him and judging himself by such a tarnished mirror. Jazz wasn't the Head of Special Operations because he was a hero. None of them had clean hands after millions of years of war, but he didn't have a clean spot left.
Maybe Optimus' optics lingered on him an extra second because of that, but maybe not. The Prime turned his heavy gaze on the black-and-white mech beside him and sighed. "No."
"Sir?"
A large hand reached out to grasp Prowl's outstretched hand. "No, I don't see monsters. I see ignorance, my friend, but that can change. That must change, even if facing our faults is difficult. Learning our wrongdoings will not be easy, and education may be painful - but it's necessary."
Ratchet shivered, and Jazz looked across the table in time to see half a dozen emotions flash across the medic's face before he regained control. Hope was among them.
Nail him to the floor if he didn't know what that felt like. Emotional whiplash had just gone around the table, by the looks of it, and he was no exception. His spark felt about a ton lighter, buoyed by hope. Also by determination, because their Prime had the look of a mech ready to fight for what he believed in.
And because Optimus fought the good fight, so would Jazz. Jazz believed, but Optimus Prime personified that belief.
Prowl nodded and clasped his Prime's hand in return. "Ignorance may be bliss, but that is not an excuse to dwell in it."
"I sure was happier not knowin'," Ironhide said in a low voice, but the bitter words had no real emotion behind them.
"Welcome to my world," Red Alert snipped tartly.
[* * * * *]
End Pt. 24
[* * * * *]
[ A/N:This part was commissioned by Raditz Wyvern. By which I mean that I was paid to keep writing this story. I don't think I can put into words what it means to me that this story is so important to someone that I was paid to continue it. It's just…thank you.
Also, a massive thank-you goes out to the people on Tumblr who responded with their personal tales of what they had been told to do to "prevent rape." It was painful to read, but I tried to put it to good use here.]