I'm not reposting all the warnings. If you didn't read them in Pt. 1, then on your head be it.
Times and Measurements (from TFWiki)
vorn = 83 years
decivorn = 8.3 years
meta-cycle = 13 months
stellar cycle = ~7.5 months
deca-cycle = ~3 weeks
mega-cyle = 93 hours
orn = 1 Cybertron day
joor = 6 hours
cycle = 1.25 hours
breem = 8.3 minutes
klik = 1.2 minutes
mechanometer ~ meter
kil ~ kilometer
[* * * * *]
Pt. 30
[* * * * *]
Jazz turned his head under the direction of the hand cradling his chin. It slid back up to resume petting his helm. Soft micromech pushed into the metal of his face, rubbing circles. They spiraled in and out, concentrating here or there as a stubborn smudge of soot clung to him. Self-repair had already regenerated most of the paint, but the color nanites weren't all settled in. Rough gray a fraction darker than his usual silvery color peeked out from under the soot in places as Prowl meticulously polished off the burnt layer.
Humans polished their vehicles to bring them to a shine. Cybertronians polished themselves for the same reason, often, but every medic doubled as a detailer for a reason. Regenerating paint took energy; better for a medic to paint on a layer of nanite-rich paint to spare a wounded mech's depleted nanite stores. Every decently-supplied medbay held a nanite colony or two where the medics cultured excess nanites. While a mech's self-repair system regulated his internal nanite colony, frequent small injuries from skirmishes or even sparring could drain a frontliner's colony as fast as life-threatening damage. The medbay's colony served to repopulate exhausted stores during surgery, after battles, and especially via preventive measures.
Everyone knew that chemists mixed the best drinks, but medics were the most generous. Full tanks kindled a primitive trust no matter how wary the mech. Even Rung, the furthest thing from a physical doctor the title allowed, used feeding energon goodies to his patients as a way of establishing a connection. Ratchet, Jazz swore, had Mirage-level stalking abilities when it came to finding Autobots who needed a nanite boost. First Aid could be counted on to ply anyone who looked peaky with a warm mug of energon so thickened by nanites it barely qualified as liquid. Hoist skipped the mug and used the nozzle on his arm. The humans had been extremely uncomfortable watching that, but, "Fraggit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a cow!" had become his standing joke with Sparkplug.
If it was a patient and needed fuel, then a medic would provide a cube chock-full of supplements, boosters, and nanites. Rumor had it that the Decepticon medics barely waited for dead patients to die before siphoning their energon for processing. The dead were then used to refuel their living patients. Flatline didn't have such a gruesome reputation just because he transformed into a hearse. Decepticons still trusted him enough to take the fuel, however, so that likely said something about how much trust feeding actually bought.
Medical-grade energon: tasted like slag, worked like a charm.
Keeping their patients topped up between battles helped, but medics had other means to help. Repainting was one. Externally supplying the nanites for self-repair meant a mech didn't have to tap his internal stores. It was easy to tell how bad a unit was doing supply-wise by how battered their paintjobs were. Everyday life put its nicks and dings into people even outside of combat. It was part of the price metal beings paid for existing. Emergency medbays on the frontlines typically slapped a layer of nanite slurry on bare metal, leaving mechs looking weld-scarred for longer periods because hasty batches of paint lacked color pigment. The thinner their supplies stretched, the less nanites were added to each batch, and the patchier the unit looked.
Applying a coat of any color paint over bare metal spared self-repair the energy of generating the color coating, but the wrong color paint took more energy than the right color. The closer a color matched, the less energy a mech's self-repair system had to invest in tweaking the coat of paint. That didn't take into consideration a mech's patience, since conversion could be a spotty, prolonged process that made even the prettiest paintjob look awful. Sunstreaker hated looking even temporarily off-color, so he violently abhorred applying paint in the wrong shade.
The Earth crew had had the luxury of customized cans of paint colors produced by the humans. Given the time and resources, Ratchet been able to grow a separate nanite colony to supply each mech, colonies transplanted into and stored in their color-matched paint after synthesis. It didn't resemble the paint the humans sold them once he was through culturing each can, although the naked eye wouldn't notice the difference. Human eyes couldn't see the telltale signs of nanites swarming through the liquid. Spike had once commented on the gritty texture of the paint Ratchet had been using, but the liquid felt smooth and inert to a human's senses. Nanites in paint activated upon contact with living metal, not human skin.
A human - or machine - could be painted, but Cybertronians had personalized surface coloration that was as part of them as the raw metal underneath. The painted-on nanites synced up to a mech's self-repair system over time, becoming part of the mech. Paint never integrated into a machine or human the way it did for a mech, and Cybertronians generated their own surface coloration if they didn't paint it on. Painting on inactive nanites was the more energy and time efficient method, as self-repair ate a small but steady amount of energy to power the cycle if a mech didn't use paint.
Without external replacement, a mech's own nanites built a new shell of coloration under the old, smoothing away the scuffs of everyday life, but it could take a while. Replacement speed varied by health, age, and programming, as well as fuel levels. In ideal conditions, a mech naturally cycled through his top coat pretty fast as the nanites spent out their lifespans. Dead paint flaked away, revealing the next coat down in a natural cycle of replacement much like a human shedding dead skin cells.
Although comparing Cybertronian biology to a carbon-based lifeform wouldn't lead to many friends. Perceptor had seen the link immediately, of course, but the idea alone made Jazz's paint crawl, and he liked humans. Just…skin and paint. Not the same thing, nuh-uh. Intellectually, he understood the similarities between polishing and exfoliating, but Carly had done exfoliating as part of treating herself to a spa day. Polishing was for health as well as looks. Jazz could concede that exfoliating dead skin might be healthy for humans, but he'd yet to see a human doctor do it as a standard part of maintenance treatment.
Hoist had heavily approved of the Autobots' frequent trips to the nearest car wash. The water washes felt amazing - hey, mass amounts of solvent of any form had been an unbelievably expensive indulgence before the war destroyed city plumbing - but it was the hot wax spray and rub-down that were medic-approved. The less energy paint-nanites had to suck off their host's systems, the more battle-ready that host was. Heat and friction supplied a great deal of the necessary energy. Autobots on the casualty list after battle were painted and polished by the medic on duty as a matter of course, and rub-downs to slough off dulled paint and shine up were advised for everybody.
There wasn't an Autobot from the Ark mission who didn't have fond memories of their human friends polishing them any time they asked, if they even had to ask. Humans had a huge weakness for shiny, fancy cars. The Autobots had quite enjoyed taking advantage of that.
It had been easier than complicating relations aboard the Ark. Trading polishes between mechs had entirely different connotations than letting a human pick up the buffer. Crewmates trading a buffer could stray into inappropriate territory if they did it too often in public. Polishing didn't have anything sexual about it, but a casual observer could find intimacy where there was none to see. It depended on the mechs involved, the situation they were in, and sometimes, the rumors surrounding them.
Prowl polished Jazz, and nobody would dare make anything of it. Rank protected him. His icy, stern personality discouraged even the thought.
In public, at least. In private, he could let the other aspects of his personality come through, and the person under the officer craved contact. Ratchet had cleared Jazz for duty without cleaning him up, and the Porche had gone into the debriefing looking like he'd come off a used car lot. His seams were jammed with grime from Tarn. Dirt and superficial damage like burnt paint didn't need urgent medical attention, but Prowl had pounced on it. Polishing Jazz up was the perfect excuse for him to sit with Jazz's head in his lap, one hand idly stroking the side of the saboteur's helm while the other dabbed at the soot left by Thundercracker's spark.
Said saboteur didn't object in the slightest to this treatment. Offline, his visor was a dark band across a contented expression. His fans spun in a sigh, pushing out stale air as the micromesh left his face for a moment. A tin rattled, and Prowl went back to rubbing small circles a moment later. Fresh wax smoothed over the cleaned areas. Silky warmth bloomed in its wake as Jazz's nanites fed off the friction and heat of Prowl's finger to fuel their own efforts.
Blackened, dead flakes of paint flecked under steady pressure, rubbed at again and again until the soot loosened. Prowl's hand left his face to move the cloth to a clean spot, and it returned to rub wax into the bare metal. Repetitive motion stimulated nanite activity in the area. It wasn't a coat of paint, but it did help.
Jazz's doors hung lax over the edge of the recharge slab, utterly relaxed. They shivered. The sigh became a low moan, and his doors perked up slowly as a stretch ran the length of the prone mech. It started in his knee joints, gears turning, and tensile cables tightened in a spreading wave that straightened his legs. They parted slightly, stiffened to full extension, feet pointed and hips twisted flat on the slab, and the stretch continued up his torso as his hip twisting dragged kinked abdominal plating, cables, and wires out past his model specs. Metal creaked protest. Extras built into his frame groaned into extension. His shoulder tire pushed into the bed, supporting the sharp arch of his back, an arch pushed far past what his official medical files said he should be able to reach. Ratchet would fail to be surprised by that. He'd also fail to correct the record, which would spare Jazz the effort of hacking into secure medical files to change the numbers back to what he wanted seen.
Axle, shock absorbers, and brakes all ached pleasantly as his shoulder tire took his weight, and metal in his neck clicked as he burrowed the side of his face into Prowl's lap, shamelessly using the leverage to roll his hips some more, really stretching the joints. His chest pushed forward, a fraction sharper angle on the curve of his back, and his doors squeezed together to slide up onto the slab. Every part of him tensed for one brief, glorious moment of the stretch.
Prowl obligingly paused to let him finish.
His shoulders relaxed first. His back struts softened into a loose line. His doors spread, sliding slowly back off the slab. The saboteur went back to resembling a slumped sack of spare parts someone had dumped out on Prowl's recharge slab.
"Hedonist," Prowl chided. He went back to polishing.
Jazz hummed agreement. It was barely audible over the sound of his engine purring. That hardly mattered, since Prowl hadn't spoken out loud. The mild scold had come in packets of data transmitted through the cables connecting them, and Jazz's agreement cycled back the same way. The wash of energy from Prowl's end carried none of the chastisement of the actual word said aloud, and affection flavored by mischief skittered alongside the machine-level hum of contentment from Jazz's side.
Pleased gratification radiated back through the cycle. It wasn't physical pleasure, but Jazz reveled in it as if it were a hug. Hugs were good, too. He hadn't been expecting a flare of charge, anyway. He was hooked up to Prowl, not Ironhide. Different circumstances and a different partner meant a different interface.
Interface cables were rated for a high enough for full, nigh-immediate synchronization. The pleasure in interface came from delaying the build up to that point. Clicking in was just the beginning. Cabled in, a mech's processors went through the security rituals of transmitting recognition codes before computer access to the port was granted, and that waiting could turn into a tease of pinging recognition codes back and forth. In good company, friendly transmissions pulsed over receptors in an electronic touch as subtle as exchanged caresses. Transmitting a recognition code in a tripped rhythm set the mood as much as opening himself to a lover's code did, in Jazz's experience.
Then his processor had to locate and ask access at the correct gateway, guided there by his partner's permission. Access wasn't guaranteed. Tiny bursts of charge tapped on closed gateways like walking down a hallway trailing his fingers over closed doors. 'Are you behind Door Number One? May I come in? Please let me in.' Data rippled through the energy, pinging off the closed gateways as if searching for the lock one particular set of codes keyed, but denials were another cycle of transmission/reception. 'Not that door, hmm? Are you sure? I'll just press into the door and feel you listening to me on the other side.' Nonsense code and data packets of varying sizes tested the locks. Unpredictable transmission rates sharpened the experience, and transmission was only limited by port rating. Reception felt like anything between a continuous flutter teasing the wrong gateways or a heady pound on the right gateway, all the force and lust of interface teasingly withheld by passcodes correct to within one digit.
Done right, energy poured down the interface cables into a whirlpool of stymied data flow stirring on the borders of their cortex. Transmission speed built the more lovers pushed into the exchange. With nowhere to go, capped on either end, the cycle could only blur faster as they thrust more in, waited out the return surge, and thrust in again.
When the gateways opened at last, the pent-up queue of data would cascade into a mech's cortex. A throbbing crackle of electricity would spread throughout a his body at the exact same time. That was the moment when lovers felt each other. Processors met, set up a cycle, and pushed to achieve synced dataflow. Thought, physical sensation, and sheer machine-level feeling streamed in time, CPU to CPU. Software intertwined. Compatible ones meshed. Hardware strained to operate as one being. That was the real pleasure of interface. That was the homestretch before the end goal of overload.
Unless, of course, a mech took steps. Firewalls cut into the free flow of data. Security codes locked down software. Hardware buffers diverted or delayed energy transference. Lowering firewalls to a trusted lover turned the rush toward overload into a striptease, revealing pieces of a mech's mind in tantalizing glimpses of revealed self. The stop and start of hardware buffers titillated through physical jolts of amped-up charge. A swift, smooth acceleration toward synchronization, reset, and overload turned into a stepped climb of discharge and rebuild, rush and wait, until both lovers were on the cusp of tearing at their cables in frustrated, wanting, needy pleasure that grew tighter, hotter, and faster but never seemed to end until it did -
Come to think of it, one of the things Jazz had noticed in the back of his head as strange - not as strange as whipping someone to overload, but strange - had been how long it'd taken the Decepticons to interface. His spies had brought back a ton of videos of Decepticons fragging anywhere, anytime, but having watched things happen in the arena tonight, he had to stop and think about the length of time. There had been some quick tumbles among the spectators, yes, but nothing compared to crossing cables. It had taken a comparatively long time to bring Thundercracker to overload, and Jazz had no idea if that was unusual or not.
If the Decepticons defined fragging as physical contact leading to overload, their interfacing took a whole lot longer than crossing cables did. Ironhide had said he considered the tamer tactile touching and such to be foreplay, but Jazz had cabled with Ironhide before. Even adding in the things they did before they jacked in, it had been over and done with fairly fast. The interface Jazz and Ratchet snuck in back in the medic's office had been over with in less than a klik once they stopped fooling around making out. They'd gotten too impatient. Tactile interfacing felt too slow.
Sure, a cable frag felt like forever on the inside. It wouldn't be worth doing with a partner as often as the Autobots did if it was only about clicking in a cable: snap-overload-done. Jazz could sync up to a porn download to self-service and get a quick overload if he wanted fast and cheap. Quality porn made the fantasy mech's systems a mirror to the real thing, but an imitation wasn't the real thing. Even with an external battery or generator, it always took more effort on his end, and that messed up the timing. It felt fake. Plus, he hadn't hooked up to a pornload yet that had a good discharge simulation. He liked feeling his lovers overload as much as he liked overloading. The backwash of physical pleasure through the circuit felt like a doubled overload, an echo almost as strong as his own climax.
It was more satisfying to plug in to a real person. A tactile frag might be slower, building charge through external means instead of internal energy trade, but isolating his mind and body might make it less satisfying as well. It had been plenty exciting at the time, but looking back over his memories of the night, he wondered if tactile interfacing would feel like sluggish, dragged-out self-servicing. It might be novel at first, but it could be boring.
Then again, Jazz never got bored of interfacing with Prowl, and there wasn't an overload in sight. Lack of interest wasn't quite as physically effective as an adapter plugged in place between jack and port, but it'd do in a pinch. As it was, most medbays had a selection of adaptors for pure mechanical compatibility issues. Even if Prowl didn't have his own, he could have gone to the nearest medic and asked for one. Jazz knew for a fact that First Aid carried an entire skein of them rolled up in a tidy little holder he pulled out in the most matter-of-fact way possible the second an embarrassed mumbling Autobot asking about safe interfacing sidled in.
Most of Special Operations had adaptors built into their interface cables. Security mechs had the luxury of being able to keep force-download equipment in external storage, but Spec Ops had to keep it ready for use at any time. Field interrogation and information retrieval waited for no one, much less for equipment retrieval. They kept it packed out of sight, of course, but eventually their regular partners found out one way or another. It was one of the unsavory aspects of being the Autobots' dirty fighters. Just having built-in adaptors fed the wariness many Autobots felt toward the division as a whole. The adaptors could be turned off at will, but they were still there.
Outside of an operation, Jazz's default setting for his adaptor was offline. Threat assessment could kick it online, and it had been thoroughly unpleasant the times that happened. Fragging without system sync tended toward one-sided tampering that echoed overtones of brutal interrogation. There were too many Autobots in the ranks who'd gone through a force-download, either as a prisoner or by their own faction, same as Red Alert. Jazz's agents had triggered more than their fair share of those poor mechs.
Firewalls and partitions delayed system sync. Adaptors gave the person on the other side a false system schematic to match data and energy input/output to, and it felt completely different. It'd be syncing up to a pornload except that there was someone on the other side of the adaptor, and generally the adaptor wasn't used with an overload in mind. The mech with the adaptor had protection, pushing out a measured level of charge and whatever data packets he wanted, and he only had to accept what charge and packets he wanted to pass through the adaptor. It made it easy to give nothing and download everything. Anyone without an adaptor was vulnerable to that one-sided interface.
Ironhide had used user permit overrides to tamper with the interface to Jazz, and Jazz used the same on his agents, but Jazz had allowed Ironhide into his cortex to slip the transmission in. An interrogator forced connection and hacked a gateway. That kind of interface was an invasion from the start. Tricking someone into an open connection via trust eliminated the time-consuming first step of a force-download. It wasn't nice, but it got the job done faster. Faster gave the victim less time to throw up defenses against a one-sided hardline, and it left less of a mess if a medic examined the victim later looking for traces of a hostile interface. Jazz couldn't count the number of mechs scarred on the inside where a supposed 'friend' betrayed them, but everything looked to be in order to a medical scan.
There were enough Autobots chary of his agents that he could understand why the Decepticons thought all cable interfacing to be rape. Jazz couldn't imagine what it would be like if distrust between mechs in his faction was the standard instead of the exception. It made his processors complain trying to picture cabling in as an act of interrogation, of war, or even of business, not a pleasurable form of intimacy. He obviously didn't really get where the Decepticons were coming from on this. That wasn't what interfacing was at all, to him.
The confusion was probably just as thick over on the Decepticon side of things. He was currently hooked up to Prowl. Someone like Vortex, who kept doing his utmost to seduce the prisoner he was interrogating, would look at the two of them right now and probably think they were hardcore soldiers in a mental deathmatch.
This whole situation made Jazz's head spin.
The delicate tendrils of foreign file retrieval paging through his temporary file cache paused. Prowl's fingers stopped, too. They stayed where they were, resting on burnt paint as the processor connected to Jazz's cortex backtracked. Prowl weaved through the hazy freeform train of thoughts that had passed him by, tracing through the various tags pulled up by Jazz's mind. Part of the saboteur's convoluted maze of a CPU was sectioned off by a slow defragment running in the background, but the rest of him was open to Prowl. Wide open.
"I would like to interface with you. May I connect?" the Autobot Second-in-Command had asked. Discomfort had bled off him, but he'd asked as promised. Even with just the two of them there in the privacy of his room, the question came out stiff, formal, and deeply perturbed. Explicitly asking permission just wasn't done.
Jazz had forked over his cables the nanoklik Prowl asked. "Yeah. Please do." Sense of propriety aside, Prowl still hadn't felt that Jazz could be completely trusted, and Jazz couldn't let that stand. Not as the Head of Special Operations, not as an operative, not as a fellow officer, and especially not as a friend. The Autobots couldn't afford Prime's right and left hand mechs estranged from each other.
Prowl had been somewhat taken aback by the cables thrust into his hands, but Jazz had simply flopped onto the recharge slab and waited. Faith took effort, but somebody had to have it. His adaptor had been offline, firewalls disabled, and processors at the ready for access. His training as a spy had screamed through threat assessment at him, straining to bring up his defenses, but faith was trust without proof. If he didn't have it, then they'd get nowhere. The unease sitting under the surface between them would molder into suspicion all too soon.
Jazz would not let lack of trust endanger the peace negotiations. Prowl had linked in to his cortex, full access at his fingertips, and Jazz hadn't asked for reciprocation. He didn't trust the tactician, but he did have faith.
Faith that paid off. After a moment of astonishment at the wide open interface, Prowl had recovered his dignity and gone about getting out his polishing supplies. It was a polite fiction to give his tacnet time to pick through the implications of Jazz exposing himself like this. By the time he settled down on the bed to get to work, he'd decided on a reaction.
Jazz now had full reciprocal access to Prowl's processors. Admittedly, Prowl's adaptor acted as a barrier by matching their specs, but the tactician wasn't hiding behind it. If Prowl hadn't lowered all his firewalls and opened access routes through the adaptor and into his own cortex, it might have triggered bad memories of interrogation, but there was a complete circuit open between them. Choked down, yes, but interfacing with Prowl always felt different. Matching specs from the start meant that there was no adjustment period. Systems didn't change during a matching interface.
What Jazz felt while syncing up to Ratchet or Ironhide was passion. This? This wasn't passion.
He stretched again, content with the gentle paging through his files. He was more than half-dozing. Shutting down into actual recharge tempted him, but running defragmentation on his processors gave him the rest he needed while letting him stay awake to ping his own fetch requests down the line. He didn't do it often. Prowl's occasional pause to chase down a tag he found particularly interesting merited Jazz's attention. Prowl sorting out social algorithms and organizing information wasn't going to give him anything but a headache if he tried to meddle.
They weren't interfacing to mine each other's heads for information. They were doing it for the feel of each other entwined through the cables, dataflow and energy matched together as Prowl polished the Jazz to a glowing shine. The smaller Autobot had begun the interface sprawled on the recharge slab, Prowl perched on the edge at the limit of their cables' reach, but the familiar pulse through the cables had been as much of a lure as the wax spread over his plating. Friction warmth and touch lulled him into a hypnotized trace of total relaxation. A stretch here, turning over here, a popped knee and rolling his shoulders across the bed, and Jazz had oozed across the bed to puddle into Prowl's lap.
Amusement washed through him. It had an aftertaste of exasperation as the saboteur nudged into Prowl's hands, urging the rubdown to continue. Oh, that just happened to deposit part of Jazz into the tactician's lap. Look at that. What a coincidence. Black-and-white plating curled up improbably small as Jazz scrunched more of himself into the limited space.
Prowl's amusement deepened. Jazz broadcast smugness back at him. Pet the spy, that's a good mech. The Jazzmeister was pulling off another impossible mission. He deserved a nice polish as a reward, yes he did. Prr-prr-prr.
Prowl, secret cuddle-bug that he was, gave his ridiculous behavior a pass. Jazz was being a demanding brat, but the silliness covered a more serious demand through their connection. His processors sought reassurance. Prowl wanted the physical contact his rank and duty deprived him of, and the assurance that his fellow officer and friend wasn't a Decepticon plant. Jazz wanted to know that he was trusted.
He'd gotten out of the meeting thinking that he wanted to fall into exhausted recharge alone. Wrapped in Prowl's presence, warm and needed, Jazz revised his wish list. He was starved for touch. Every hand laid on him tonight had been guided by an agenda he couldn't predict, and it had wound him tight as a spring. If Prowl hadn't nabbed him outside the meeting room, he'd have likely staggered out of his bunk and gone crawling into Optimus Prime's sometime before dawn.
The Prime gave awesome snuggles. If anything could convince Jazz that he hadn't been tainted or tampered with tonight, it was Prime-snuggles. He'd have felt ashamed of his weakness and guilty as the Pit for waking his leader up, but Primus. Jazz hadn't realized how far into his role he'd gotten until he tried to find the exit.
A light brush of curiosity touched the sense of shame. Charge spiked in a shrug back at Prowl. He was aware he didn't have to be ashamed of needing help. It didn't stop him from feeling it.
"I am here to assist," Prowl said to him, and the words rippled through his helm like Prowl's hand stroked over the outside.
Jazz sighed and burrowed further under Prowl's ample chest. He was hidden enough to feel stealthy about hiking his other shoulder up into the mech's lap. For lo, he was the sneakiest agent. Heh heh heh.
Apprehension threaded through the sense of weary calm they'd been holding steady for the past cycle.
Jazz stirred. "What?"
Words formed slowly, emerging from data packets conveying a gradual build of squirming unease. "Could you sit up? I would like to try something." Half-formed images transmitted, and Jazz frowned. Images of Smokescreen leaning on a table, trademark seductive smile in place. Images of Ratchet's hand sliding up behind one of Wheeljack's audio indicators. A single blurry image of Jazz himself, by the angle a picture from the security camera in the hall where he and Starscream had done their dance of politics and misunderstandings.
He groaned as he sat up. "Gravity got heavier. Right here. On me. Natural phenomenon that happens every time I'm comfortable, I swear."
Prowl accepted the attempt at humor but didn't cheer up. He didn't disconnect them, however, so Jazz took it as a good sign. The images clogged Prowl's output, growing fuzzier around the edges as tension pushed the tactician's charge higher. Jazz caught the data on the increase even though none of the energy increase got through the adaptor to him. The images became…disturbing. They weren't anything worse than Autobots necking in the halls, but attached to each image was a kind of dread that bristled almost aggressively. He was seeing them how Prowl did, as if they were subtle attacks. They crowded in on him in a hostile invasion of images pressing in from every side.
"Prowl?" What the frag was going on? Why would Prowl see this stuff as an attack? When had seeing scenes like this started to feel like an attack? Jazz had groped his aft before, but the joking around had been met with annoyance, not this. Whatever this was. What was this?
His surprise and worry bled into the connection, ramping up the tension in a cycle of climbing emotion, but Jazz couldn't - didn't want to - shut off the interface.
The tactician braced himself. Jazz felt it. Synced up as they were, they squared their shoulders at the same time and drew in a vent of cool air, doors forced down. It was a strange sensation. Determination boomed through the connection, blotting out the images and every other emotion as Prowl turned his head to look Jazz right in the visor.
"May I kiss you?"
[* * * * *]
End Pt. 30
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[ A/N: Commissioned by Comebackzinc. Thank you!]