Last and Alone – Secret
Part 2
Rating: K+
Characters: Perceptor, Jazz
Warnings: None
Universe: G1-ish/Last and Alone/Monolith
Disclaimer: I, in no way, shape, or form, own the Transformers© franchise or the characters it contains. They belong to Has/Tak, No infringement intended. Any OC's are to my knowledge are solely mine.
Summary: Perceptor was once part of a gestalt, but the others were destroyed. Since he should never have survived the deaths of his teammates, it's a painful secret he has kept for thousands of vorns. An unexpected continuation of a prompt I took on. It only pretends to have a plot.
Part 2
It was a couple of days after the battle that Jazz made his way to the Med Bay. The odd comment from Perceptor about gestalt mates had hung in his processor. He would have dismissed it as a re-boot quirk, if not for the look on Perceptor's face. The look had been honestly horrified. It was a look Jazz could have pictured on say Prowl's face if Prowl had just given over to the cons every password, security protocol, battle procedure and tactical weakness for each member of the Autobots. Well that would have been the look on Prowls face just before his processor crashed anyway.
So, in the time since the battle, Jazz had done everything he could, short of talking with Perceptor directly; since the scientist was obviously avoiding him. And short of hacking Ratchet's medical files on Perceptor to see what might have been meant by the comment. He had discovered vorns ago, that no matter how good he was at hacking – and face it, he was confident he was one of the best - Ratchet somehow, someway, always, and he really did mean always, knew when he had snooped. It was indeed a mystery, since Ratchet was no hacker. Pit, Ironhide was better with computers than Ratchet. For Jazz, all in all, over the vorns, it had proven to be far safer for his armor and general health to just flat out explain to Ratchet what he wanted and why. Hopefully his reason (story) would be a good enough one.
He strolled through the doors of the Med Bay like he owned the place. Part of that was just his normal flair, but the rest was an attempt to throw Ratchet off step a bit since this was the medic's home field. In that second aspect he failed miserably, again.
"It's already up on the terminal in my office." was Ratchet's greeting.
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Jazz huffed, cycling air through his vents as he shut down Ratchets computer terminal. Absolutely nothing in the medical file indicated that Perceptor was or had ever been part of a gestalt. At least the word gestalt had never been mentioned within the file. So, maybe it had been a re-boot quirk. Still, he kept coming back to the expression on Perceptor's face, a mere
fraction after he had answered Jazz's question. That had not been any quirk. So what did it mean anyway? If Perceptor had once been part of a gestalt team, did that really change anything?
Well yes it did Jazz realized. If Perceptor had once been part of a gestalt, then he was still part of a gestalt. While he did not fully understand the gestalt bond or the technology involved, he did know that just like twins, gestalt members lived and died together. Kill one and that killed the rest. It was considered the greatest weakness of the gestalt technology. Followed immediately by damage one member hard and serious enough and you had a good chance of distracting the rest of the team to the point of uselessness. The less experienced the team and the more team members you damaged seriously, the harder for the remaining ones to function within normal parameters and efficiency levels.
So if Perceptor was part of a gestalt, where was the rest of his team? Jazz wasn't a tactician like Prowl, but he could certainly see the advantage of another Autobot gestalt to counter the Decepticon ones. Or maybe that was it, maybe the rest of the Percy's team were Decepticons? And that tossed up a whole other set of headaches within his processor. Security, traitors, double agents and more problems started clamoring to be heard in the Special Operation Officers head.
That a gestalt member would turn against his teammates was hard to believe. He had read everything the science team had reported on gestalts when the Autobots had acquired the Aerialbots. As part of the Command Staff he had been present for the interviews of the individual jets after returning to earth and things had settled down. It could be that the Aerialbot team was just so very young, but from everything he had read, been told, and seen in the interviews, it should be impossible for a gestalt member to separate from his team. Right or wrong, an individual always sided with their team. There had been enough pushing and shoving between the Aerialbots and Protectobots to prove that. Though, curiously, it had not prevented Silverbolt and Hot Shot from taking a few romps together in each others berths.
Jazz found his CPU brought back to the question of 'If Percy were part of a gestalt, where was the rest of his team?' And why was he so hung up on Percy being part of a gestalt? The more he thought on it, the more difficult the concept became to wrap his processor around. And yet, his intuition continued to tell him that there was more to that battlefield answer than a re-boot quirk. This puzzle was not going to be solved without talking to Perceptor. Yes, it was time to find the microscope.