A/N: Thank you to everyone who has reviewed - I very much look forward to hearing from readers, whether the reviews are positive or constructive criticism that might improve my work! Now, time for a detour into the Bay-verse...

Title: New Perspective

Verse: movie-verse

Rating: T

Warnings: angsty; set sometime after the 2007 movie, so spoilers for the Mission City battle at the end of the first film, but nothing thereafter.

Originally written for the ProwlxJazz community's 2011 Anniversary Challenge, week 1, prompt #12 – 'This place feels so unfamiliar and yet I know it well'

Summary: Some things have to be seen with our own optics before we can accept their reality.

Steel poles were cold beneath his hands, smooth and slick with condensation. Wooden footboards creaked, protesting his unexpected weight. He moved quickly but carefully, scaling the scaffolding unseen by human and electronic eyes alike. Mere seconds after his transformation, he was hauling himself over the building's parapet with a single smooth movement.

The wind caught his angular door-wings, and he flared them to steady himself. It was quiet here, between the vents, chimneys and scattered skylights. There was no one to watch, no reason to hurry. He allowed himself a moment to rest, letting his sensors adjust to the chill breeze at this elevation before rising from his crouch. Even then he was cautious, choosing where he stepped - not only to place his weight above sturdy roof joists, but also to avoid observation from the ground.

Humans thronged the streets below, irregardless of the late hour. From time to time one would glance up for a few seconds before going on, the habit of watching the skies so deeply engrained they didn't notice themselves doing it. They watched the streets here too, pedestrianising ever-larger zones of the city centre. It had been hard to get this close, harder still to do so without leaving a trail through human data-space. More surveillance cameras had been installed in this town than in any other American city, according to some reports. There were those who called the people of Mission City paranoid. After the death and destruction of one fateful day they had reason to be.

Prowl flinched, unprepared for the rush of memory that thought brought with it. Tremors of reaction flowed through him, just as they had the orn he found himself doubled up on a distant world, emotions too strong for his bondmate to block searing through him.

Anger. Horror. Fear.

Oh yes, there'd been fear, but also the courage to face it. Dimming his golden optics, Prowl lived again through his mate's determination. There'd been no running, no surrender, and only a single regret.

He was on his hands and knees when the world returned to full focus. For a long while, he simply stared at the litter under his clawed finger-servos, unable to bring himself to face the wider world. The streets below had long since been swept clean of that day's debris, even if it lingered in the psyche of human and Autobot alike. Burned out vehicles had been towed, buildings repaired where possible… rebuilt where necessary. This tower block was the last in the central district to remain clad in scaffolding, and even that would soon be gone.

Perhaps, before the builders left, they would sweep the rooftops too. For now though, the layer of fine debris ground under Prowl's weight, concrete dust finding its way past angular plating and into the joints of his hands and knees. Standing, he rubbed it between thumb and finger-servos, feeling the sting of spent cordite and the bite of powdered glass abrading his armour.

Human resilience was a fine thing. The more he saw of it, the more he understood what Prime recognised in these fragile organics from the start. Prowl truly admired a people who saw destruction and found the strength not to meet it with more of the same, but to rebuild stronger and better than before.

He'd stopped believing his own people capable of the same long eons before.

Even so, Prowl's spark ached with the realisation that if he'd come a solar orbit, or just a few deca-orns, later even this last evidence of the battle would have been swept into the past.

"Ya shouldn't have come here, love."

The melodic voice came from close behind him, pitched low so as not to carry in the still night air.

"Ya know how they worry."

Prowl didn't turn. He let the dust trickle between his claws and leaned forward on the building's parapet, scanning the streets below.

"I know," he acknowledged softly. "I had to come. I had to see…"

Golden optics played over the broad chasm between buildings and the road far beneath him. Its pavement was patchy, strips of fresh-laid concrete giving it a dappled pattern that overlapping pools of light from the streetlamps couldn't conceal.

Blackout thundered out of the sky, gouging a deep trench in the road surface as he came in to land. Humans scattered beneath him, the Autobots powerless to shield them from the debris flying in every direction.

His gaze rose to the buildings, their brickwork still pockmarked with bullet holes. Wide areas had been rebuilt entirely, the new brick never a perfect match for the old. Sometimes, the humans hadn't even tried, making a statement in the stark contrast between old and new.

The human military was helping – to the small degree they could. Their most powerful hand weapons were a mere irritant to Decepticon and Autobot alike. They kept trying nonetheless, hoping that a lucky shot might nick a fuel line, or just provide a distraction at some crucial moment.

For a few moments Prowl studied a small patch of open ground, a shady spot between two concrete cliffs. Bracketed by the road in front and cross-braced walls rising three storeys to either side, it was the legacy of destruction, of a single building in the row too damaged to salvage.

Brawl, crashing through walls and windows and humans alike. He had to be stopped. Ironhide's cannons were doing nothing, and all Jazz's strength could do little but nudge the Decepticon's aim. They tried nonetheless. These humans were innocent of the war the All-Spark had brought to their world.

Focusing his optics back on the present with a click and whirr, Prowl was startled to realise the concrete foundation had been covered in turf and gravel. A coffee-stall stood to one side, and benches surrounded it, wooden planters bracketing them and a slender-leaved sapling planted in the centre of the new space. A city garden. Life in the shadow of death.

A smile played across Prowl's thin lip-plates at the sight. He took courage from it and from the presence waiting patiently behind him. Even so, a thin keen escaped him as he raised his golden optics to the rooftop he'd been avoiding, his vision blurring with a memory far more vivid than those other, half-seen glimpses of battle.

Flung to the rooftop, systems damaged and shaken by the sudden flight. His visor shorted in a shower of static as his helm impacted with a force he was helpless to avoid. The human-built roof trembled below him and then creaked ominously, as pained by the weight pressing down on Jazz's chest as the mech himself.

"I had to…" Prowl's vents were irregular, keening sobs blending with the words from his vocalisor. "I had to see with my own optics, not yours."

Slender arms eased around Prowl's waist. Clawed fingers captured hands that he only now realised were rubbing his mid-section in remembered pain, entwining with their servos. He felt his mate's helm rest between his shoulder blades. Vented air caressed his door-wings, heated by the warmth of Jazz's spark.

Helm tilted back, Prowl swayed in his mate's embrace. A light drizzle was falling now, water droplets forming and rolling down his faceplates. His doorwings twitched and fluttered, caught between the warmth they craved and the cold, sharp winds of Earth. Debris crunched beneath his feet, and all around him – in the noise that rose from the streets, the diffuse glow that lit the city sky, and the constant stream of electromagnetic signals assaulting him – he felt the vibrant life-beat of Mission City and the humans that inhabited it. None of that had made it through the distance-strained bond. Only the snapshot images branded into his processor, and the intense, burning pain.

"This place feels so unfamiliar." He whispered the words, pulling Jazz's arms a little tighter around him. He couldn't stop his optics picking out scar after scar on the city's skin, analysing the flow of battle as he slotted each memory in its place. Always his gaze was drawn back to that same, anonymous rooftop. "And yet I know it so well."

Jazz keened quietly behind him, that one regret as clear in the bond now as it was the first time Prowl felt it – that Prowl had lived through this with him, and would bear that memory until the Well of Sparks welcomed him home.

"Ya can't live in th' past, Prowler."

"I can't forget it either."

"Never forget, love. Only accept an' learn an' go on t' somethin' new."

Jazz was drawing back from him now. Servos slipped free from Prowl's; his mate's comforting weight no longer pressed against the taller mech's back. The night's chill crept in, forcing the warmth to retreat until it was no more than a feeble glow around Prowl's spark. He kept his optics on the city, but Jazz was there at the very edge of his vision, the lithe silver mech glinting in the diffuse light.

"Look around ya. The humans do it all th' time." Jazz grinned, the blue glow of his visor brightening. "An' even I managed t' do that much."

Prowl's sigh was carried on a breath of laughter. Optics dimmed as he fought for composure, he felt more than heard Jazz's laughter in return.

"That's more like it." The silver mech was already out of sight, his voice floating back across the roothtop. "C'mon, Prowler. Best be getting' back. It'll be dawn soon, an' ya know Optimus an' Ratch are goin' t' come lookin'."

The eastern horizon was already tinged with pink. He couldn't stay. Taking one last look around him, Prowl walked slowly back towards the scaffolding, alone on the rooftop once more, but feeling warmer than he had for years.

It was impulse that made him hesitate, stooping to gather a double handful of the dust that crunched beneath his feet. It streamed between his claws, caught by the dawn breeze. He watched with sensors and golden optics as it carried across the city, an intangible cloud of concrete and glass dust and – for just one part in a million – tiny shards of cybertronium.

He no longer grieved for this last legacy of a long-gone battle. The memory of that day was written in the bones of this city and in the minds of its people, but Jazz was right. These humans didn't forget the past or cling to it. Instead they absorbed it, learned from it and moved on, all the stronger for surviving their ordeal.

Prowl climbed from the roof and set his wheels to the rising sun, determined to do the same.

The End