Has anyone noticed that the formatting for FFN is really fucked up? I upload something and 'Poof!' the document is all wonky when I go to look at it. The italics and bolding is just all... weird. It's really annoying. =/

Anyways, I know I mentioned to a few people that this chapter would be a few weeks before it got up. I didn't lie. At least... not at the time I said the words. I'm just super relieved right now that I finished a major paper for my Issues in Anthropology class, so I'm celebrating by posting this chapter. Now everyone can enjoy good fortune! 8D

For the very astute reader; Jazz's accent in his flashbacks, because I want to explain it. Even though they are portrayals of the past before Alpha Prime's Language Unification Act, Jazz retains a mild accent in Tyger Pax because Pax is not his native language, Kev is. So he still gets to use his little 'Ah's' and 'mehs' in speech. If he were speaking Kev, he'd lose his accent since it's his native tongue. Just wanted to point that out for shits and giggles.

My thanks so the awesome reviewers of the last chapter who totally made my life better with their reviews. Double thanks to the über-awesome reviewers who even went back and reviewed chapter 32 when they missed it before the posting of chapter 33. I love you people insanely much. Thank you so much to Prowl's-little-angle, Darkeyes17, Wind of the Dawn, renegadewriter8, Optimus Bob, Katea-Nui, sparklespepper, shantastic, Anon, evilbunny777, Fianna9, femme4jack, White Aster, Daklog73, camfield, VyxenSkye, Yuro-Faita911, Jessie07, Midnight Marquis, infinityinmirrors, Pruhana, TransformersLover95, abarai-san, MoonWallker, CNightJoy, Kida Bridger, Btch, NightBlooming Orchid, Pysche102, Demon Surfer, Peacewish, Sideslip, Deathcomes4u, Thanlanee, Uniasus, luinrina, smoking caramels, soundbarrier, StarscreamII, Faecat, A Lurker, and Wanderling!

Feel free to mention in your review you thoughts on what Jazz experiences during this chapter. I'm interested to hear your interpretations. ^_^

Chapter 34

"Tell me what you see," Xerxia ordered.

Jazz stood at the edge of the tallest structure in the capitol and looked out over the city. He stared for a few breems, and then said, "Ah see Tyger Pax."

"Wrong."

He didn't flinch when his master wrapped her heavy hand around the back of his neck. This was just another lesson. And it was so like her to start a lesson without telling him what she was going to try to teach him. Maybe it was evidence of her twisted faith in him to figure out her secrets without her having to say them. Or maybe she simply liked to watch him suffer. Jazz always leaned toward the second option. Some lessons took joors to figure out. Some took orns. His initiation, which felt like it had taken place a lifetime ago, had taken vorns.

Not that he was complaining. There was nothing he could do about it.

"Look harder," Xerxia insisted, putting pressure on his neck to force him to lean out over the ledge.

Jazz made the mistake of looking down and realizing that it was a lonnnnnng way down. He wasn't afraid of heights. He wasn't afraid of much in life. But he did think how inconvenient it would be if Xerxia pushed him off the edge. Since he didn't feel like learning to fly while falling to his death, he stared out at the garish landscape of Tyger Pax at night and tried to see what his master wanted him to see. What did every shadow, every fleck of dirt have to say to him?

Nothing.

It was saying nothing to him.

The same thing it had always said to him as he looked out over the landscape and thought about what it would be like to be somewhere else. Tyger Pax had never meant anything to him.

He revved in mild frustration.

"What was that?" Xerxia asked, expecting the right answer.

"Nothing," Jazz mumbled.

She snorted dispassionately.

He blinked, continuing to look out at the city that unfolded around him.

It was night. He had been planning to go out and terrorize the streets tonight, his training done for the orn. Xerxia had come into the dojo that evening and ordered him to follow her. He didn't dare disobey, so here he was, standing at the edge of the tallest spire in the capitol. There was no safety railing circling the ledge. No one was actually allowed to be up here; Jazz didn't bother to wonder how his master had managed to get them passed security. Questioning her was like his ability to feel fear- just another meaningless thing he'd given up on.

What did she want him to see?

Tyger Pax was a nocturnal territory, and the night was still young. It was the equivalent of dawn elsewhere. Darkness had set, but the denizens of the territory had yet to come online for work or play. The famous neon lights of the territory's capitol glared their garish colours in every direction, creating dizzying swirls of reds, blues, yellows, oranges, greens, and purples that reflected off the shiny walls and glittering windows. It made you feel drugged if you stared for too long. The harsh architecture of Tyger Pax was brought into sharp relief from the neon glare; lines that were already straight turned into razor edges. In between the relentless lights, there were pockets of inky blackness. Corners that did not quite catch the light. Alleyways that stayed dark no matter what. The filth of the city lurking in plain sight.

And then there were the bots who lived in Tyger Pax. They were part of the machine that kept the whole system going. Bots who worked to a clockwork mechanism; getting up at a certain time, performing their prescribed function, and then going back to recharge. Repeating it orn after orn. Even the ones who came to party- the tourists and locals alike who poured their hard-earned credits into the dance clubs, pleasure houses, high-grade, and drugs... they were all part of the system.

And Jazz was not.

He had never been a part of the system.

There was no anchor to hold him in place. No family to give him a home. No friends to say that he mattered. No one and nothing pinned him down to a single place. Technically, by Cybertronian law, he didn't exist at all. The records that had once said he was a citizen of the planet, written at his creation and stored at the Kaon Youth Sector, were now gone after the Sector had been decommissioned and a fire sparked by an electrical storm ravaged the warehouse where the files had been stored. His past had gone up in smoke.

He was no one now.

As free as a ghost, though not quite as dead.

Sometimes when night fell and his training was done, he lost himself in the frenzied lights and grind of moving frames. It was the madness he sought. Insanity was his escape, never the bots. He wanted the drinks and the drugs; the way they made the world suddenly bizarre and make sense at the same time. Sometimes he lost himself to the madness so completely that he didn't remember what happened. Those were wonderful nights full of sweet blackness or dizzying blurs. Only when he came online at dawn, he always found himself in his room at the dojo. Like coming online and discovering the nightmare was real. Energon crusted over his beaten knuckles, coating his fingers and down his chest as if he had painted himself with it. The sound of someone screaming rang vaguely in his audios. That kind of madness was setting in more and more often. He welcomed it. Took comfort in it the same way one revelled in the warmth of a lover.

Instead of staring at the city, he stared at the bots. They all looked so small.

"Ah see Cybertronians," he murmured.

The hand on the back of his neck tightened. It didn't hurt, but the weight of her arm was crushing. It was as if she were formed from the compacted mass of a dead star. Dense, heavy, and unrelenting. Come to think of it, her spark was probably made from a dead star, too; they were both black and rock-solid.

"Good."

She leaned into his side, required to lean up because he was a little taller than her.

"Tell me what you see inside them," she spoke into his audio. She had such a harsh voice. Even at a whisper, it was terrible to listen to.

"Inside?" Jazz wondered. Inside where? Their insides as in their pumps and engines and energon lines? Did she mean for him to go down there and tear them open? That would have been nothing new. He had watched Xerxia tear others open many times, and he was beginning to participate in the sessions. What would one more bot mean to him? But... no, tonight Xerxia did not mean to literally turn someone inside out. He was supposed to see something from up here, which seemed equally ridiculous. Even if he adjusted his optics, he would still only get a blurred vision of the aimless bots down below. What was inside them that was so important to see?

She forced him to lean a little farther over the ledge. Stray debris sitting by the tip of his foot tumbled downward, disappearing. A yellow cloud started to pass beneath them, lit up garishly by all the neon lights. It looked horrible.

"Look at them, Jazz," his master ordered. "I want you to See them."

He stared without seeing what she wanted him to see.

Xerxia shook him, as if the mild violence would get her point across.

"Look at their worthless lives wasted in oblivion. They will never accomplish anything of worth." She made a noise that Jazz did not know how to describe. He had never heard the noise before. "They see only what they're told to see. They never see what's really there."

She forced him out until he hung at such an angle that one slip would have him plummet to his death.

That heavy hand of hers was his only anchor.

Jazz did not struggle for purchase on the ledge. He wondered how difficult learning to fly was.

"You're not like them, Jazz. You've never been like them. I want you to see the world as it really is. See everything."

The cloud was gone. Jazz stared down into the little shapes of insignificant bots. He saw aerials in the air. Commuters on the transport ways. The peripheral movement of frames in the shadows doing all sorts of things. He did not care about any of them. They were all background characters in his life, populating the scenery only because it would be strange to see an empty city. They were as 2-dimensional as dirty graffiti.

"See them, Jazz," Xerxia murmured. "I know you can do this. Just open your optics and see them."

"See them," he mumbled, as if saying the words would suddenly make it true.

He stared so hard that his head hurt. His optics began to burn. His neck felt like it was going to snap in half from the pressure of his weight baring him down and Xerxia's hand keeping him up. The pain meant nothing to him. Hearing Xerxia tell him he could do something was the closest thing to encouragement he had ever heard out of her. He wanted to learn this lesson quicker than any other because of it. It was something she knew he could do.

He stared until the whole world started to blur together.

That fine line between the reality you understood and the madness of the true world underneath.

He stared so hard that he felt an energon line pop behind his right optic. A thin trickle of blue energon started to leak out from the corner. His frame was shaking so hard that every inch of him rattled. It didn't matter, though. Nothing else mattered.

Xerxia watched him, her relentless gaze piercing the back of his head. He could almost hear her voice in his head demanding that he get this right.

His vision started to black out. Fear and rage surged through him. He wanted to be able to do this one thing. He wanted to see! The world went fuzzy. Dark. Light. Dark. ...And then it happened. A shift. A small shift in the world. As if everything had suddenly tilted to the left and the only people to notice were the ones who were looking. It changed nothing, and yet everything could be seen from an entirely new angle. ...maybe that was just the deprivation of energon to his processor talking, but Jazz suddenly saw a world that was exactly the same as it had been before, and yet it was different somehow. The colours were brighter and blurred together. The sky seemed higher. The ground was lower. The bots were not so 2-dimensional anymore.

Xerxia felt the shift in him. The way his frame relaxed. His optics transfixed on the city. His temperature spiked. Air shuddered in his vents. His spark skipped several beats, its pulse erratic against her hand around his neck.

"Tell me what you see," she murmured, her voice still harsh, yet hypnotic at the same time.

"Ah can see them," Jazz breathed, the words a little slurred as if he was drugged.

"See who?" she pressed, wary to hope it had worked.

"Them," Jazz breathed hoarsely. "Ah see inside them."

"Describe it."

Silence settled between them for so long it seemed as if half the night had passed away before Jazz remembered how to speak again. The world had somehow shifted, and suddenly it felt as if words did not mean the same thing. When he tried to force them through his vocal processor, they felt like gunk. As he tried to press them past his mouthplates, they all felt like the wrong shape. The wrong flavour. The wrong meaning. He eventually forced himself to speak, but it was more like purging.

"That bot over there hates his function," he said, pointing to the bot sitting outside a skyscraper, washing the windows. Even at a distance, he saw the sluggish movements. The slumped frame. It had all been there before, but now it held meaning. The dim optics. The morose frown. Listless existence. He could almost hear the faded tempo of a spark that didn't want to live anymore. It was madness and he knew it... and he liked it. "He might jump and end it all if someone gives him the right incentive."

"Good. Very good," Xerxia breathed. Sweet praise, the likes of which Jazz had never heard before. "Try another one," she said.

Jazz was quite sure he was willing to try anything she told him to do if she would just praise him like that one more time.

Her grip tightened until he saw stars erupt in his vision. Black and white spots flickering in and out. He was lightheaded and nauseous. For some reason, it felt so good.

"There are two bots in that alley there." He turned his optics down to the pair as they writhed. "They hate each other, but they're sparkbonded to each other." He could see the way they crushed against each other with more violence than Xerxia had ever struck him with. A flash of the tiny pinpricks of their optics and he saw the infernal flame of rage and disgust. Caged animals. "They bonded on a whim. They regret it, but can't undo it. They don't want to commit suicide to end it, but they hope someone will sneak up and kill them."

Xerxia said nothing this time, but stared down at the spot Jazz had spoken of. Perhaps she could see the exact same thing, Perhaps she could see even more than Jazz. No matter how deep set her optics were, she always seemed to see more than she let on. There might come an orn when Jazz could see like her. This was his first time, though. He was doing pretty damn good for his first time.

The pressure in his neck finally became too much. He purged. Congealed energon spilled past his mouthplates. Luckily, he hung at such an angle that only an unfortunate passerby below was going to receive the mess.

He spat several times to rid himself of the taste. He made the mistake of trying to look back to see if Xerxia noticed. His head turned just a fraction. Not much more than to be able to see a sliver of his master's faceplate. Enough to see that the world had not only shifted in the city, it had shifted around her too. In that moment, everything inside him froze. His spark stuttered to a halt. He wanted to purge again.

For the first time, he saw her.

As if the reality he had always known had melted away and left a raw wound where she stood. The lines were bolder. Angles sharper. She seemed so much more real than reality itself. Uglier and harsher than reality could ever handle. It hurt to look at her. Amber optics as bright as jewels stared back at him.

"I see you," he breathed.

"Yes, you do." The corners of her mouthplates curved up until a grin as wicked as poison twisted her whole faceplate. "But you don't know what it means yet."

And then she let go of him.

Prowl's fan caught on a piece of debris while he recharged, creating an awful grating noise.

It was jarring enough to snap Jazz from the memory he had fallen into. And really, he had fallen. Several stories, in fact, until a ledge stuck out too far and caught him. The impact had been so sharp that his chest fractured, cracking his sparkcase. He remembered the searing pain of having jagged pieces of metal clawing inside his spark. There had also been the curious disconnection from his own frame as the interfacial links between his spark and his frame were disrupted; he'd been partially paralyzed. His optics had shattered from the force of the fall, leaving him blind for several orns until Xerxia managed to convince some kind of associate of hers called 'A3' to come and fix him.

Even in his blindness, he never forgot the amber optics that had stared back at him.

It was one of the few times Xerxia had let him see her true gaze, instead of the blue one she normally wore. The side of herself that seemed to be made of reality itself. Throughout his long life, he only recalled seeing flashes of amber optics from dark places and odd spaces. His master was right: he still didn't know what it meant.

The moment she had opened his optics, though... it had been a turning point in his life. A defining moment when he realized the world looked better when it was spinning so fast that everything blurred together. He liked madness a little more than mundane. There was more to see inside every bot than what they wore on the outside. Back then, the more he knew about what was on the inside, the less he cared. They were all meaningless to him.

Prowl made another grating noise, distracting Jazz once again from his thoughts. The present world came back into focus, a stark reminder of exactly where they were. Several orns of flying and driving had brought them nearly all the way to the most southern point of the borderlands between Tyger Pax and Kaon. Not much farther from their position was the point where all six territories of the southern hemisphere merged. A dangerous place that could easily kill a bot from ambient EM energy.

In the old orns, it was said spark-eaters and frame-snatchers came from the poles of Cybertron.

There was no such thing as spark-eaters and frame-snatchers, of course, but the stories had once been sufficiently scary enough to keep naive sparklings and youngling online many nights in a row for fear of what might be lurking while they recharged.

During the Golden Age, the most southern and northern provinces in the territories had always hosted small populations. Not because they were eaten by monsters, but simply because living so close to the poles proved so difficult. It was the EM fields mixed with frequent frozen precipitation that resulted in conditions equivalent to a death sentence. Acid snow and ice formed from the ambient dihydrogen monoxide, sulphuric acid, and carbonic acid in the atmosphere; unique to the poles where it was cold enough to freeze the vapours. Snow and ice on their own were not too bad. It was kind of pretty to watch fat yellow-grey flakes of snow float down from the sky. Once that stuff started getting into a bot's frame, it was an entirely different matter. Ice could freeze up their joints, ruin their hydraulics, lock their processing units, and ice their energon lines. The resulting damages could be catastrophic. Best case scenario was that your systems went into stasis to preserve everything before it broke down. Worse case scenario, ice formed in your sparkcase and around your spark, slowly lulling you into a cold-induced recharge that you never woke up from.

Coming to this place had been the first time Prowl had ever physically seen snow or ice. He tried not to be unnerved by it. The most weather Simfur ever had was cloudy skies, cold winds, and acidic rainstorms bad enough to melt the paint off your aft. Snow and ice was rather foreign to him, alien even, and he did not know how to deal with it. Driving had proven difficult. He slicked and slid from one side of the uneven roads to the other.

Jazz had seen the white, fluffy slag too often in the colonies to be impressed by it. If you see snow and ice once, then you've seen it all. Until it learned to do a neat trick, it would always be boring. Not even driving through it offered excitement anymore. He'd driven in worse conditions. The most he could hope for was to keep the blasted stuff out of his frame.

So far so good, in regards to keeping himself ice-free.

It had been several orns since they had set their ship down in a secluded part of the borderlands, covered it up with as much junk as possible, and left it there in faith that it would still be there when they returned. Travel had been hard and slow after that, only to get harder and slower the farther south they drove. Many places in the gorge were collapsed, forcing the pair to climb and slide and dance over unstable mountains of debris rather than drive. The towering walls of foreboding metal that soared up around them at heights that nearly obscured the skies entirely seemed to magnify the electromagnetic fields in the air. Storms localized within the gorges themselves played havoc on every sensor they had.

The small alcove they huddled together in tonight was not much. A hole tucked off the gorge, protected from the elements though not necessarily the ambient EM fields. Floor space was enough for one of them to lay down and the other to sit hunched against the wall; it was currently Prowl's turn to recharge and Jazz turn to keep watch.

The tactician was not resting well. He grunted often as if in discomfort. Despite the shielding Grimm had given them, he still suffered from nausea and dizziness due to EM sickness. There was an occasional episode where his spark would suddenly stop communicating with parts of his frame; at random times, his arms or legs might fall limp and numb. He might suffer the disturbing sense of double consciousness, realizing that he was a completely separate entity from the shell of metal he was currently inhabiting. He did well to hide his discomforts while online, though Jazz could see them regardless. Prowl found no relief at any moment of the orn or night.

His discomfort was further compounded by the torment of knowing that another brother had turned against him. Kingpin had been unfortunate, though he and Prowl had never been close. Hunter felt was a devastating loss. What if there had been something he could have done to keep Hunter on their side? What if he had been a better Autobot and spotted the chances of defection before it happened? If he had been a better bot, a better brother, if he had kept in contact with Hunter as Smokescreen did, would that have been enough to keep Hunter's loyalty? So many things for Prowl to hate himself over. Prowl further worried what this betrayal might mean to the rest of the mission. It was not likely that Hunter was in contact with Shockwave, given the above-top-secret nature of Shockwave's existence and movements, but that did not mean word could not get back to the Decepticons about the failed attempt on their lives. If the 'Cons could send bots once, they could send more. Prowl also dreaded what might become of Hunter if...when Jazz was set loose on him. Prowl knew too well that Jazz would show no mercy.

Jazz's conscience was, by far, several levels lighter than Prowl's. He had no such emotional attachment to Hunter. The mech had sold them out to the Decepticons and he was going to pay for it. Plus, Jazz still hadn't forgotten that Hunter had called him an idiot. He was going to pay double for that. The only impingement on Jazz's conscience was the fact that he knew he was going to hurt Prowl. A necessary evil, but that didn't mean he had to like it.

As for how the saboteur was handling the southern borderlands, he was coping. There was no escaping the EM fields playing havoc with his systems, but he was so accustomed to his own magnetic pulses that he supposed he was partially immune. One did not subject others to EM attacks without feeling some kind of backlash. His frame had adapted over time to compensate. Physical discomforts like nausea and vertigo meant little to him, though he did prefer to live without them if he had the choice. He had yet to hallucinate, or at least do so to a noticeable degree. His largest concern was getting Prowl through the gorge, as well as hunting Shockwave down.

The Decepticon scientist was proving as elusive as ever. Several orns of searching for him had yielded nothing, except for the desperate pleas of half-mad Neutrals begging for their loved ones to be found and returned to them. They had risked everything to come to the poles to survive the war; they did not want to lose friends and family to some monster in the dark. None were particularly helpful in giving Prowl or Jazz directions or even a hint of Shockwave's whereabouts. Now the Autobot and Neutral were low on supplies and patience, contemplating if their mission was a lost cause.

Jazz cursed softly. He hated feeling so useless!

He wanted to stretch his legs. The tension wires in his legs were starting to seize, especially on the right where his wound had yet to heal up completely. Prowl took up much of the floor space, so he resisted the urge to move. The poor bot needed the rest. He didn't need to be kicked in the faceplate.

A silver hand reached out, fingertips brushing warm, dark metal. Prowl grunted, but did not wake. Jazz vaguely thought about offering a mild magnetic pulse, but with all the ambient energy floating around, it probably wouldn't do as much good as it normally would. Pit, it might even end up frying Prowl's processor.

In need of a distraction, he pulled a cube from subspace and frowned at its half-empty contents. Running low on fuel. There wasn't enough dead bots around to cannibalize their energon. If they ran out, they'd be fragged. Shaking his head to clear himself of the morbid thought, he finished off the cube. The slight burn of liquified energy woke him up out of the slight daze he had not realized he was falling into.

"Tomorrow will be better," he muttered, drawing his knees up to his chest so he could wrap his arms around them and rest his head.

Prowl's innards gurgled, prompting Jazz to cast him a pitying look. As soon as they got back to civilization, he was force-feeding his partner filter cleaner. Or he would convince Ratchet to replace every filter in the bot's frame. Whichever seemed more fun when the opportunity arose.

In any case, Jazz patted Prowl comfortingly even if the tactician remained ignorant to the gesture.

A shuffling noise raked the saboteur's attention to the mouth of the alcove. To his surprise, he realized it was snowing. Grey-white flakes with a vaguely yellow tint; more dihydrogen monoxide than sulphur. Not very acidic. The fall was thick, though; from what Jazz could see, it was nothing but a white wall of swirling fluff in the inky dark. How had he missed the start of the storm? He must have been more distracted than he thought if something as important as weather conditions had escaped him.

With his gaze now fixed on the outside world, the shuffling outside that had first gained his attention had him abruptly jolting up when it came again. It was the soft shuffle of metal feet scuffing through heavy snowdrifts. Tensing, squinting into the gloom, Jazz immediately saw that it was not just random noise echoing off jagged formations. There was shape to it. Not a perfect shape, nor a defined shape, but a figure nonetheless; something dark and quick that moved like the flicker of flame-shadow, its edges fading off into nothingness. The shuffling stopped, and the creature making it seemed to realize that it had caught Jazz's attention. Jazz did not see the thing move, but he knew, he felt, it swing its head toward him. There was no optical light; not red light, blue light, or white. Despite the lack of light, Jazz knew right down to his spark that someone was staring at him with a stare that saw right through him. Pierced him like a spear straight through to the core.

A creeping, crawling, prickling sense moved down his back.

A thick snow flurry briefly swirled across the mouth of the alcove, obscuring the figure for all but a moment. The way cleared, but the shadow was already gone.

"Slag it," Jazz hissed, knowing damn well that if someone was out there, they weren't out there by coincidence. As nimble as the wind, he hopped over Prowl's prone form and threw himself into the night storm. In a bid to keep the elements out of his frame, he air-locked himself as he might when in space, and engaged his battle mask for added security. Both hands slid down his sides to confirm his blades were in place. Right where he left them, their hilts butted comfortingly against the heels of his palms. With scanners that were nearly useless and optics almost blinded by the storm, Jazz searched in all directions for the spy that was soon going to die.

"Alright, where are ya, ya little fragger," he murmured lowly.

The wind howled through the gorge so hard that it tossed him from his feet.

"Jazz..."

Something colder than the ice slid through him. It seemed so impossible, but he knew that voice. That horrible, wretched, grating voice like sandpaper against gravel, dragged up from the darkest depths of the past as if risen from the dead. He spun, searching desperately. Everything was so dark; how had he been able to see something through the darkness unless it had been something darker than shadow? Above the howl of the wind, he heard the pounding beat of his spark in his audios.

And above the rapid staccato of his spark, he heard her call again, "Jazz..."

Not far ahead in the gorge, the figure with the faded edges materialized through the snowdrifts. She was waiting midway up a collapsed heap of rubble. He could not see the details of the intruder, but he knew exactly what she looked like. His memories of her would never fade; they had been ingrained inside him as deep as the deepest scar. Her thick, squat form had not changed in all the eons since he had last seen her. That heavy armour that no amount of punching or kicking could ever pierce. Those thick spring-loaded legs that could deliver shattering kicks powerful enough to throw an opponent through a wall. Through the storm, she was just a shadow, though Jazz imagined her faceplate unchanged by time just like the rest of her. Still ugly and full of indifference.

"Xerxia?" Jazz breathed, watching the creature as she watched him.

A hand waved, beckoning him to follow. Her unsteady fire-flicker dark shape moved on as if untouched by the storm. She crested the top of the heap and disappeared.

Without consciously bidding his frame to do so, Jazz ran after her. He clawed his way over the rubble heap, slipping and sliding as the ice-slicked metal refused to hold his weight. He came to the top only to catch on an exposed pipe, flipping forward. His chest hit the debris with enough force to start an avalanche that he surfed all the way to the bottom. Tossing. Tumbling. The world turned into a dizzying kaleidoscope of whites, greys, and blacks. He could feel his paint being scraped off chip by chip until he was thrown from the mess at the bottom. Scrambling to his feet, he searched once again for his master.

She waited for him farther ahead. The snow was so heavy that it made her seem as if she were only a 2-dimensional shadow against the gorge walls. A shadow that stayed on the walls long after its owner had walked away. The moment he saw her, she was off again. Knowing he had no choice but to follow, Jazz gave chase. He ran through the dark gloom. Ran even while drifts of snow smacked him in the faceplate and slicked around his ankles; ice crusting his silver armour. He stumbled every few steps on patches of hidden ice.

Why was he so desperate to reach her? What did she have that he could possibly want? He had been done with her for so long that she might as well have been dead to him. No, she wasdead to him. Dead for a very long time.

The wind blew hard through his audios.

"Jazz..." he heard her calling his designation.

As if a thousand lifetimes had not passed since he had last seen his master, he ran after her faster. Blindly, and perhaps stupidly, he tripped after his master with a desperation he could not quite place. Did he feel rage? If he caught her, would he wrap his hands around her thick neck and squeeze until her optics rolled back and her head popped off? Did he want to cut her to ribbons and throw each silver to the winds until she was scattered so far apart she could never be put back together. Or would he fall at her feet and wonder, not for the first time, why she had left so long ago and where she had been all this time?

No matter how fast he ran, he never got close enough to see her properly. She was forever out of reach. Either moving ahead of him so fast and surefooted that it seemed like the storm did not touch her, or standing in an unlikely place to wait for him to catch up. Every time the wind blew hard, he heard his designation being called- sometimes loud, sometimes quiet. Urging him on.

He followed her with his avid gaze as much as he did with his feet. The storm made her seem like a mirage. One moment she was a figure of solid substance, the next she was a shadow running on the walls. Howling wind and flurries of snow wiped away her footprints before they had a chance to settle. Jazz was forced to follow her with his optics, always tracking that elusive figure that seemed to exist only in the spaces between where the snowflakes fell.

They ran down a narrow off-shoot of the gorge. Through a labyrinth of this-ways and that-ways. Steps that ran up and stairs that ran down. A confusing, dizzying, terrifying chase through nooks and crannies and secret places that Jazz had never dreamed of existing.

They ran for so long it felt as if they were running toward the end of the world.

"Xerxia!" Jazz howled over the heavy winds. "Damn you, Xerxia, stop!"

Strangely enough, she did.

Her heavy frame came to rest at the very top of an incline. Behind her, the world dropped off into a sudden cliff. A gigantic wound deeper than the canyon cut into the surface of Cybertron. Above them, the gorge was partially covered. Snow no longer fell in heavy sheets. It fluttered like ghosts, small swirls and whirls drifting from the skies and down into the dead air of the secret crevice. The howling wind was only a distant scream. Xerxia turned slowly, somehow darker than the dark. Within that darkness, two tiny pinpoints of light glittered where her optics should be, though the colour was unclear. Jazz did not think it was blue.

"Ah-!" He panted in rage and exhilaration. The words that came out his mouthplates were not Main Cybertronian; instead, they came from the language of the land of Tyger Pax. For the first time in eons, he screamed in Pax. "I see you!"

He could almost feel her smiling, neither cruel nor kind. Maybe it was in pity.

The wind blew softly this time.

"You still don't know what it means, do you?"

Before his optics, she blew away with the snowdrifts as if she had never been there at all.

Jazz suddenly felt so cold inside that ice might as well have swallowed his spark.

"Jazz!" called a voice that echoed from behind him. He could hear pounding footsteps. The crunch and shuffle of snow. A living body was chasing after him, getting closer. "Jazz, where are you!"

His mouthplates opened a crack, no sound coming out. He couldn't look away from the place where his master had been standing.

Prowl came skidding around a corner, pale optics nearly white as he searched the gloom. His gaze finally landed on Jazz and he visibly relaxed. "There you are," he sighed, making his way over at a much more reasonable pace than what he had just been running. "You ran off so suddenly, I thought someone was attacking. Did you know you stepped on me in your haste to get out?"

Jazz blinked and stared, and then felt the word "sorry" slip from his mouthplates.

"It is alright. I hardly felt it." Prowl cast him a ghost of a smile. "You had me worried, though- running off like you did, like a mad mech. Your dampener is still engaged, so I couldn't track you by your spark. Thankfully, I tracked your prints in the snow."

Jazz looked down and saw that there was only one set of footprints in the snow.

"Are you alright?" Prowl wondered as he drew close, able to see Jazz's expression in the dim light cast by their optics. He wore an openly spooked expression. The kind of look Prowl had never seen on the saboteur's faceplate before.

Jazz was still too stunned to think of any appropriate response to give. The lack of sound coming out of him worried his companion further, who proceeded to reach out and touch the side of Jazz's faceplate as if such contact would tell him exactly what was wrong. There was only a second of hesitation before he let his fingertips brush the saboteur's plating. The silver metal of Jazz's faceplate was cold to the touch. Glittering frost decorated the sharp angles.

"You look like you've seen a ghost," Prowl murmured.

A shiver when down his back. "Ah saw mah master."

Prowl jerked back a fraction in surprise. He blinked, casting his gaze around as if he would suddenly see someone else standing around. No one was there except for the wind, snow, and dark. His gaze returned to Jazz with something soft and cautious in his optics.

"Jazz, it was a hallucination," he said quietly.

"No, it can't... she was right there..." but even as the words fell out, he knew that what Prowl was saying made more sense than anything else. If not a hallucination, what else could it have been? It had been too long since he had seen his master; she might have been too mean to die, but what were the chances that she would live so long as to taunt him here, now, in this Primus-forsaken place?

"The poles can play tricks on us," Prowl intoned softly. "The EM fields can make us think we're seeing things that aren't really there."

"Ah know that," Jazz mumbled. He was numb all over. "It felt real, though. Like she was really here. Ah even heard her calling mah designation." He glanced back to the edge of the cliff where Xerxia's mirage had disappeared. A sad and bitter smile tugged at his mouthplates. "Ah still don't know what she wants meh ta see. All this time and Ah think Ah'm still a bit blind."

Prowl nodded, simply knowing that Jazz needed to say those things to get them out of his system.

"Ah was stupid ta run after ghosts," the saboteur sighed.

"You thought it was real," his companion reasoned. "You did the right thing by going after the possible intruder."

"Right." There came a click and a hum as Jazz undid the airlocking mechanisms on his frame. Vents opened back up to cycle out the hot air. Billows of steam exited from the sides of his neck, down his sides. Prowl did the same. He had run the whole way after Jazz, doing so while seeing double of the world. The storm that raged was doing nothing for his vertigo. When they tried to cycle icy air back into their frames, both bots choked at the frigidness, quickly deciding to seal their frames again and wait for better climates.

"Hopefully we will be able to find our way back to camp," Prowl intoned lightly as he looked back the way they came. This partially protected area preserved their tracks, but elsewhere they might not be so lucky. Without sensors to guide them, they were essentially lost.

"Yeah," breathed Jazz. He was looking in the opposite direction, toward the cliff. Even if she had only been an illusion, he couldn't shake the feeling that Xerxia had been trying to tell him something. Everything had always been a lesson with her.

"We should head back before we're iced over," Prowl pointed out.

"Give meh a moment," Jazz replied. "Ah wanna check something out."

One careful step forward. And then another. As soon as he was away from Prowl, the tactician stumbled. Standing for too long had made him lose his sense of balance. Jazz paid no mind. Instead, he crept close to the wall of the narrow passage, sliding along it until he stood at the ledge that soared down at a ninety degree angle. At first, there was only gloom, which was to be expected in such an unforgiving, lightless place. The longer he stared, it seemed like the darkness coalesced into distant shapes.

He could not believe what he saw at the bottom of the pit.

"Prowler," he called softly, looking back. Prowl was bracing himself against the wall, sick but determined. "You're gonna wanna see this."

"What is it?"

"Come and see." He stretched out his hand, waiting for Prowl to stumble within reach before he caught the mech and drew him carefully to the edge to look down.

Prowl tried to look down, only to find out that he could not stand it without feeling incredibly nauseous. It was nearly painful the way his equilibrium refused to even out, making him feel as if he were spinning in all directions when he knew that he was standing still. Without thinking, he placed his faceplate in the crook of Jazz's neck so that he did not have to see anything at all.

"Tell me what you see," he sighed.

"We found him, Prowler," Jazz murmured as he laid his hand to the back of Prowl's head. He grinned as the dim lights and foreboding military structure became more and more apparent. "We found Shockwave."