Never laugh at live dragons

———————————————————————

The air was heavy.

Laying motionless in the middle of the room, Jazz was flanked on either side by Prowl and Elita. Each had a hand intertwined with one of his own, and further down the bed, arms draped carefully to rest on Jazz legs but not put pressure on the newly fashioned cast, Orion was reading a book.

Well, staring at a book.

He was on the same page he had been for the last fifteen minutes before finally giving up and setting it aside with a sigh.

Elita rubbed her thumb back and forth across a faded scar along one of Jazz’s knuckles, equally lost in thought.

There was nothing left that they could do but wait.

“He’s waking up.” Prowl murmured quietly, not looking up from the fingers minutely flexing between his hands.

There wasn’t much point in using actual restraints. They may as well just give Jazz the morning paper too if they had. Instead, each of them held onto Jazz a little tighter as his body began to stir.

Drooping and bleary, his eyes roved around the room taking in the situation. Blinking took a couple seconds at a time but eventually he focused more on their faces, brows furrowing.

“Elita?” He slurred, head lolling to the side, tugging the hand in her grasp and feeling a tightening grip.

Jazz’s eyes opened a bit more. He tried again with his other hand and Prowl gave no quarter either. Already Optimus was carefully leaning more of his weight on top of his legs, stopping them from bending.

The spy’s breathing picked up, eyes flicking around faster than before. “Whazs.. why’r you.. what’re you doing?”

He was pulling with a fraction of his normal strength. Eyes wide and scared, Jazz looked to the Prime, “Optimus? Why’m I here? What happened?

“Please,” the big man pleaded, cringing in sympathy, “Please don’t make this harder. I know this is uncomfortable but you’re safe now.”

“Safe?” Jazz slurred to the best of his ability, voice raising in volume. “Why the fuck are you holding me down get-“ he twisted in his bounds without enough strength to break free.

“Get off. GET OFF OF ME.” While Jazz desperately yelled at him, Optimus closed his eyes and turned away.

“Stop it.” Elita cut through his shouting. “We know you aren’t him.”

Jazz did stop then. If only to gape in open mouthed disbelief. “Elita, what the fuck are you talking about?”

Her jaw clenched. She was visibly stopping herself from responding as she just shook her head without breaking eye contact.

“Look, look. The last thing I remember was goin’ to the party an waking up here. What the fuck are you people getting at?” Jazz tried again to slip his hand from Prowls grasp, relying more on sweat than strength at this point.

“You.” He pushed through clenched teeth. “You did something t’me, what did you do to me?”

Prowl never looked up from the hand between his own and answered coldly. “You failed your act the moment you regained consciousness. Jazz isn’t afraid of his friends and he doesn’t panic like that under duress.”

“He makes jokes first.” OP smiled quietly. “Either to ease our worries or to antagonize his captors.”

“It’s kind of infuriating actually.” Elita chuckled dryly.

Before the saboteur could double down, Prowl finally turned to face him, “To answer your earlier question, the “Hardware” you’ve stolen is currently on a very, very generous drip line of pain killers. No one is leaving this room until this is over.”

Jazz looked around to the others and saw none of them close to breaking formation. No one believed a word he was saying.

The thing inside of Jazz’s body relaxed back against the pillows, low lidded eyes looking down on the robot.

“Did it feel good?”

The texture of his voice was too smooth. Too flat. Anyone who wasn’t already looking at Jazz turned, hair raised and eyes locked.

“Did you scratch that itch? Or did it give you a high you can’t help but chase?”

They smiled cruelly at the cast around the broken leg.

“He’s aaalways been the one that got away. Now look, you finaaally caaaaught him.”

The virus intoned, drawing out vowels in an artificial sing-song way.

“But it’s okay Prowl, I’ll always love you.” The shock of hearing Jazz speak again made Prowls eyes snap to his face.

It was smiling and cold.

"Next time, you can break his arm! And He'll fOrGiVe you.”

His voice distorted.

“But the leg is better isn't it? Because then, you get to play the loving nursemaid. Keeping him locked away inside your ribcage where he can’t ever run away from you again!”

Prowls face morphed into a mask of disgust and he was forced to look away. Pipes groaned with unexpected pressure and the wiring in the walls began to smell of burning.

“You have nothing to gain from this. Tell us what you’ve done to Jazz.” Optimus’ voice cut through the toxic cloud around them.

Rolling his head like a limp puppet, Jazz’s wide eyes locked onto the leader.

“Would it make you feel proud Oppy? Hearing that he tried to fight so hard? Because he really gave it the old college try. Well, a kindergartener at a college try.”

His spine curled, leaning as close to Optimus as he physically could.

“Want to know a secret? He even made deals with me.”

He laughed irregularly, breath coming between sentences like a patch job. The Autobot leader stayed where he was, but the growing tension in his back betrayed his desire to pull away.

“Want to know another? He broke trying to save you Optimus.”

Optimus pulled in a long breath and set his shoulders like an iron yoke. “Then I’ll have to return the favor. So long as Jazz is still in there we won’t give up on him.”

The man on the bed sucked in air through his teeth.

“Yeaaah, You guys did a lItTlE bit too good a job of hiding that you gave a shit. That last talk I had with Elita must have finally tipped him over, because his part of the brain just. . . flickered out after.”

The husk smiled with pride in his eyes.

“Congratulations. You killed him.”

“BULLSHIT.” Elita shouted.

Her throat bobbed as she swallowed some of her rage and kept her grip from bruising.

She hissed at him, “Listen you piece of shit, you’ve spent the last five days doing nothing but lie to us and I’m not about to believe you’re telling the truth now just because it’s awful.”

The virus laughed wrong again. Reminding her of someone trying CPR on a bagpipe.

“Optimus? Do everyone a favor a put your attack dog back in your purse, yeah?”

Elita’s neck tensed enough you could have played the tendons like a violin. Going pale, Optimus watched his own life and Jazz’s flash before his eyes.

The virus looked downright gleeful. Cackling, they opened Jazz’s mouth to twist another knife into his closest confidantes. At any moment one of them would break, he’d escape, and then their game of cat and mouse could begin again.

Prowl suddenly snapped up straight. “I know that joke.”

“What?” Elita grit out.

Prowl quickly waved a spare hand, “It wasn’t about you, it was something Jazz said once about someone called Starscream.”

Elita stared at him. “Okay? Is telling me that the virus is a plagiarist supposed to make me feel better?”

“Yes!” Prowl shouted.

“Everything he’s done and said to us have been things Jazz has done or said before. It’s the same jokes! The same moves! I mean for fucks sake he even tried to kill me in the exact same way as before, and anyone who’s ever MET me knows that I would never let that work twice!” As Prowl ranted, the lights that had been passively dimming before suddenly rose in brightness.

Before the virus could regain control of the situation, Prowl got up and into Jazz’s space, bulldozing over him, “You’re an Artificial Intelligence. You aren’t capable of creativity. You aren’t capable of problem solving. You’re just exploiting his brain for every creative decision you require. You didn’t come up with the plan to murder everyone, you just tortured Jazz to get his nightmares and then made that into your script.” He spat.

The walls ground against each other like teeth.

Rising higher, Prowl caged them in. “I am going to make you an offer you cannot refuse. You cannot refuse it because beneath all of your theft and polish you are nothing but unyielding lines of code.”

Eyes locked onto burning red LED’s, Jazz remained silent pressed against the bed.

Prowl growled on with sharp enunciation, “I will establish a connection, we will complete the digital handshake and then you will have a .00007% chance of overcoming my firewalls. Doing so will enable you to kill every Autobot within Aperture Laboratories and every Autobot that attempts to return thereafter.”

“You will say yes to this agreement. You will say yes because your coding will automatically select for the course of action that will cause the most destruction possible. Everything you have achieved has only been so because you have exploited Jazz’s memories, Jazz’s problem solving, and Jazz’s creativity to do so.

You are nothing but a cancerous script of code. Do you accept the connection?”

“Yes.”

They stared each other down, Prowl inches from Jazz’s face. The room began to shake as it was carried somewhere else within the facility.

Somewhere much older and unkempt, with wooden walls and too many chairs and ashtrays everywhere. A place that Prowl avoided like he wasn’t the ghost of the man they murdered there.

It had what they needed.

“Good.”

———

“What was it like?” He’d asked once. “Loosing yourself?”

Prowl slowed in his administrative tasks as he flipped through his memories. Back pressed against his own, Jazz casually swung one of his legs while he waited for Prowl to mull over his answer. It tickled a little when his toe bumped Prowls crane.

“Which time?” Prowl joked darkly. “Getting crammed into a vegetable, having a part of my mind destroyed or watching myself die?”

Instead of laughing, Jazz just hummed, “The second one. When you weren’t yourself anymore.”

Now it was Prowl’s turn to hum, pausing his typing altogether, “It wasn’t like what had happened to Mirage. I had no external orders. I wasn’t being controlled or manipulated. It was all still me. There was just, less of me there.”

Both of them quietly remembered everything. The initial shock of Mirages betrayal, Prowls manic pixie Hal 9000 arc, the days Jazz spent haggling for the Autobots lives, and then finally Prowls assisted execution.

Jazz hummed again, leg still absentmindedly swinging. “You have my permission to go all out if it’s ever me.”

Prowl opened his mouth, closed his mouth and then opened it again. “You already beat me at my worst Jazz. I can’t win against you.”

“But I haven’t beaten you at your best.” Jazz grunted as he finally turned around, wrapping his arms under Prowls own. “I beat you when you were still holding back.”

Prowl’s other excuses fell to the wayside as he felt a soft press of lips against his hairline.

Jazz muttered into the nape of his neck, “If I’m ever comprised, I want you to stop me and I want you to go harder than you did when you were evil. If that means hurting me then that’s what I need you to do.”

The Decepticons had access to brainwashing of some kind. This was a fact that they’d all had to come to terms with and plan for accordingly.

Necessary plans. And unpleasant ones.

Whispered into his back, Prowl could barely hear him when Jazz said, “I don’t want them to die.”

There was something paper thin and delicate about Jazz’s voice then. Like speaking the thought into existence had the risk of making it too real for him.

Turning his head to face his partner, Prowl relented, “I promise to protect everyone, from even you, by whatever means necessary.”

“Especially me.”

“Especially you.” He nodded in agreement, feeling some of the tension Jazz had been hiding escape.

That evening, Prowl let his avatar run slightly warmer than usual, and if that small amount of excess heat encouraged Jazz to blanket himself even further against him, then who could judge.

While Jazz slept against his back, Prowl reshaped his world to catch him, should he ever fall.

———

Long before Jazz, long before the Autobots and even before Bombshell, Prowl had annexed a part of the facility from himself.

Incandescent bulbs burned straw colored light as the reconnected electric grids fizzled to life. It hurt to bring it back online, like a limb that’s been cutoff from blood flow for too long.

Prowl bit back the urge to recoil.

He’d planned for this possibility. If only because Prowl planned for everything.

Every awful thing.

Fortunately. Disturbingly, the chair for the human input came with straps.

Orion and Elita took on the grim task of loosening the ancient buckles. The chairs last occupant had much thinner arms than Jazz after all.

The virus was unnervingly compliant. He just, stared at them while they worked, expressionless and alert.

“So.” Elita spoke, breaking the silence as she stuck miscellaneous science do-dads to Jazz’s scalp. “Come here often?”

“No.” The virus and Prowl answered at the same time and with similar hostility.

Elita muttered something defensively before abruptly stopping her work, pressing her hand to Jazz’s forehead.

“You’re running warm. Why are you running warm?” She said accusatorially.

A slick smile spread across Jazz’s face,

“Am I? Better hurry up then.”

Optimus stood, “You’re giving us a time limit? Why? We’re already giving you access to what you want!”

“People make mistakes when they’re forced to rush. Ignore him.” Prowl evenly spoke.

The saboteur didn’t respond beyond looking at them with fuzzy malice. Already the pinpricks of sweat were beginning to form along Jazz’s temples.

“Keep him and the contact points as stable as you can. I’ll be unresponsive until this is over. I’m. . . trusting you two to watch over us both.” Prowl said as he lowered himself to the ground next to Jazz. Safer to already be on the floor for this.

Looking away from his possessed friend, Optimus took a steadying breath.

“We will.” He said, placing a wide hand on Prowls shoulder, squeezing it briefly. For a moment, Prowl understood why the Autobots trusted their Prime when he looked at them like that.

Standing by the computer terminal, Elita looked up, “Ready?”

“Go.” Prowl nodded.

The last thing he heard was the click of a single key, and then Prowls world slammed shut.

. . . .

main( ) {printf("hello, prowl");}

. . . .

Hello thief. Do you accept Connection.Download.Memory core.Configuration.Run? {y/n}

. . . .

{y}

. . . . Loading.

. . . . . . One moment please.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . Thank you.

————

“Habuba hema serwal bow?”

Reports still in hand, Prowl glanced down to his little brother. The old joints of his grandmothers dining chair creaking as he turned in his seat.

“I’m not sure Sir but we can look into it.” He was 90% percent sure Blue wanted something to do with a cereal bowl, but more data would be need to be acquired.

“Oggie, wiallodo thae aicansiup withew Pow.” Blue announced to the general public.

As the small body started climbing up onto his lap, Prowl held the important documents he’d brought home with him up and away from tiny grabby hands.

“Sir, I’m afraid sitting in my lap isn’t currently a viable arrangement. However, I have several alternative options available for your consideration.” Shifting all his papers into one hand, Prowl used the other to help his brother sit up on the table instead.

Their mom joked about how Prowl was the Toddler Tamer and how his brother adored “talking” with him whenever he visited home. Every time, Prowl’s parents were in awe that he could seemingly understand his little brother’s ramblings and keep up an actual dialogue with him without Blue getting frustrated.

To be honest his secret was that he spoke to Blue the same way he spoke to his boss Tarantulas.

“Amhepu minesth!” He said as he reached a small, sticky hand towards the papers in Prowls grasp.

“These are financial records that are very boring and need to be kept clean and away from mysterious substances. I can make you a copy later for you to read soon Sir.”

Exactly like Tarantulas.

Wait, were these the financial records? Wasn’t it reports I’d been reading?

Prowl tried to look at the papers again, but the words looked jumbled and blurry. Tiredly, Prowl rubbed his eyes under his glasses and then took them off completely.

“Mum?” He called out over his shoulder to the hazy rectangle of light that led into the kitchen. “Do we still have one of those glass cleaning kits in the cabinet by the bathroom?”

Prowl squinted, not hearing a response. Not hearing anything at all actually.

He turned back to his little brother, “Bluestreak, do you know where Mom. . .”

Sat on the table, Bluestreak was busy cleaning the rifle in his lap. He glanced up to Prowl, “Everyone died. Everyone. Everyone in the city is dead, Prowl. Mom and Dad and everyone else-“

He kept talking, but the words lost their clarity. Prowl watched him reassemble the same gun part four times without disassembling it first.

They were in Prowl’s office. The green glass lamp cast long shadows on the far wall stacked with filing cabinets. He stood to put away the papers he’d been reading while his brother skipped like a scratched CD on his desk, no longer a toddler but a young man with bags under his eyes and ash on his uniform.

He was alone in his office.

There was still so much work to do. Prowl rubbed a hand across his face more aggressively, attempting to scour the fuzziness from his head. His mind felt smaller than it used to be.

Like he’d suddenly been shoved into one small closet of a massive building and felt the door lock shut against his back.

This has happened before.

Prowl was on the floor.

He couldn’t move. He couldn’t move his eyes or his head or his body. His brain was chopped up and stuffed into a box too small to hold him. He couldn’t move and he was suffocating. He’d panic, run out of air, black out, wake up and then he wouldn’t be able to move so he’d panic, run out of air power, black out, reboot and he can’t fit in here, he doesn’t fit in here. Short out wake up can’t breathe can’t move can’t breathe short out wake up short out wake up something is moving something is there he can’t turn to see what it is and then.

There was a bird. Massive and black, pEcKiNg at his eyes.

And then it was gone.

Shooed away.

By Jazz.

Prowl sat on the ground with his papers crinkled and clutched to his chest. He hyperventilated against the wall until he forgot what it was he’d been scared of.

He shook until he trembled, and trembled until he could breathe without hitching.

The world had stopped moving without him. Still jelly limbed, Prowl finally took stock of the room he was in.

It was small and familiar. Photographs were arranged on the walls, all of them clearly taken from security footage while between them were hand painted murals of the same subject.

Okay. Prowl can admit, especially because he gets to socialize semi-regularly with real people nowadays, that dedicating an entire room to the first person who was kind you after years of isolation was definitely a sign of poor mental health on his part.

Prowl groaned and buried his face in his hands.

In his defense, he also thought Jazz was dead at the time and there’s only so many coping mechanisms you can come up with when you’re a literal building.

At least the room was stable.

Sighing, Prowl found he could finally think again.

When he had initially come up with this plan, he had expected it to be represented by lines of code. One’s and zeros. Two hackers duking it out in cyberspace.

Not whatever the dream walking subconscious insanity this was. Almost the entire simulation was dangerously unstable up until now.

Huh. Why is this room more stable?

His office was a chaotic mess and his childhood home was so ill defined it was nothing but the impression of a house, and yet here he was effectively lucid again.

Prowl looked around the room a second time and noticed the edges of everything were slightly misaligned. The mural was crisp but many of the pictures were less defined. If Prowl stopped and stared at one, he could sort of bring it into focus.

A photo of Jazz sticking his tongue out at the camera resolved in his hand and Prowl snorted affectionately. And then immediately cringed at the thought of Jazz seeing this room without any context.

Jazz has seen this room.

The thought struck like lightning.

Jazz hasn’t seen my office and especially not my parents home.

Two minds were involved in the scaffolding of this virtual reality. The memory overlapped. Therefore, the location was stable.

Now just how much more was stable?

There was an exit to the room. By at least his own recollection, it should just lead into a normal hallway. He reached, then hesitated, hand hovering just over the handle. This was a safe zone. The world was unstable and the virus was still unaccounted for.

Jazz was also unaccounted for.

Prowl wiped the sweat on his palm onto his pants and gripped the door handle, pushing through before he could second guess himself again.

The metal floors clanked underfoot with a hollow echo.

The facility was decrepit. The walls were cracked and limp, dirt and withered foliage decorated the hallways in the way it had when Jazz had first arrived. It looked abandoned, dark and broken.

Slowing as he walked, Prowl picked up on details that were not from his own mind.

Snowdrifts piled up in the corners and a mall flakes drifted down through cracks in the ceiling. The plush whiteness dampening sound and color, ensuring clear footprints wherever Prowl stepped in it.

He reached down to feel it and immediately snapped his hand back from the resulting static shock. The snow was fuzzy and burning hot to the touch. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together until the painful numbness receded.

Snow = Bad.

Noted.

Prowl kept walking, skipping around the snow on the ground when he could help it.

The hallways twisted into strange paths, stairs sometimes went to nowhere and doors hung open in the middle of the floors. He recognized all the individual pieces that made up his surroundings, but it was like someone took it all and crumpled it into a ball. The further Prowl walked, the more lost he became.

Jazz’s rendition of Aperture Science was a dangerous labyrinth seemingly designed to lead wandering parties into dead-ends and deadly ends. Prowl started to notice hazards that were too artfully angled to be truly random as well. A laser burned innocuously at the bottom of a loose slope of garbage or cubes were stacked precariously inside of tight hallways with the threat of sudden burial.

Delicately scooting past a gaping hole in the floor, Prowl saw something new.

Scrawled in a black paint that hovered in space a few inches off the surface of the wall, Prowl read the words:

IT CANT SEE

Prowl stared at it. Said “Okay.” In a voice several octaves higher than usual and continued shuffling.

There were more the further he went. Hidden in corners and through cracks in the walls, places that would normally be blind spots to a camera’s view.

THIS WAY

SAFE HERE NOT ANYMORE

DONT STOP

Arrows were even more numerous, pointing Prowl every which way. Occasionally they’d be crossed out too, meaning either the labyrinth could rearrange itself or that “It” could move through the corridors too.

Delightful.

The paranoid part of Prowl didn’t want to trust the messages at all, in case it was a diversion or trap set by the virus. But when he found much smaller, scratchier notes hidden beneath the bold directions, he realized the messages weren’t written for him at all.

Keep them safe

You aren’t supposed to remember

He’ll take anything he finds

Ricochet will use you

Keep them safe

They were for Jazz. By Jazz.

He had been through these halls. He was still alive somewhere in here and Prowl finally had a name for the Minotaur of the labyrinth. He jogged a little quicker.

Eventually, the arrows led Prowl to a room with a breach in the floor that stretched from wall to wall. The gap was maybe eight, nine feet across? And on the opposite side Prowl could see another message just beyond the doorframe of the room.

</DOWN HERE

He scanned the space.

Prowl was not a man of instinct, but in the face of everything he’d seen so far, he had to trust that this was Jazz’s writing and that Jazz had found away across.

So how would Jazz do it?

The floor was a mess but the walls looked sturdy. More than once, Prowl had watched Jazz run at a vertical surface at a hooked angle, utilizing the momentum that wanted to push him against the wall to instead push off of it and run crosswise for a short distance.

A simple, classic wall run.

Tucking his shirt more securely into his pants, Prowl sized up the angle of approach. Since he appeared to be in an approximation of his former human body, he’d be lighter than Jazz, therefore it should be even easier to generate the acceleration needed to circumvent the downwards pull of gravity.

He jumped in place a couple of times, warming himself up. At the last minute, Prowl remembered his glasses and put those into his pocket so they wouldn’t fall off and then tucked his ID lanyard inside his shirt so it wouldn’t flap around once he got some speed.

Prowl looked down the hole again. It was dark.

He backed away until he was as far as he could get. Plenty of space to get up to top speed. He shook out his arms and legs, took up a sprinters pose and charged at his target above the gap.

Prowl banged into the wall and then fell down the pit.

He didn’t scream, Prowl wasn’t the type. Instead he sucked in air through his teeth and didn’t breathe back out until he hit something solid. Which happened to be a pipe, followed by another pipe, followed by a pane of glass, which shattered.

Lying on the floor, Prowl blinked around curiously, then sat up.

“Huh.” Putting his glasses back on, he looked up through the hole in the ceiling and patted himself for injures. Not a scratch.

The room he’d fallen into was noticeably cleaner than the ruins he’d fallen from. Stark white walls, a high ledge with a weighted cube and a big red button to open the exit. It was one of Prowls simplest testing chambers that was pretty much just to get subjects acquainted with the basics of handling a portal gun.

Which he didn’t have.

“I really should put an emergency release on these chambers.” Prowl sighed.

Walking around, he found the platform holding the cube was four meters off the ground. Prowl jumped a comically short height beneath it and concluded that “double jump” was not included with his newfound immunity to fall damage. He tried jumping on the button next.

He wasn’t heavy enough to trigger the button.

Prowl ran a hand down his face and really really wished he put an emergency override on these puzzles.

Okay fine, this was still Jazz’s mind, so there must be some Jazzy solution I’m not seeing yet.

Maybe, I could take off all my clothing and fashion a lasso to pull the cube down. Nudity can be a valid strategic solution sometimes.

Prowl only got as far as taking off his lanyard before the picture caught his attention.

Within his minds eye, and evidently within this simulation, Prowl pictured himself as human. He was just a program sure, and he was very much self aware of that fact, however all the information stored in his memory that made him him were from a human being. So when focusing on “Prowl”, Prowl imagined. Well, Prowl.

His lanyard however, showed a picture of his robotic avatar, as Jazz knows him. Additionally, the logo of Aperture Science was replaced with the Autobot insignia and across the bottom were the words ADMIN ACCESS.

His eyes flicked back to the door.

Prowl placed the ID card against the reader and the light turned blue, automatically opening the door for him. Grinning, Prowl skipped back into the labyrinth with an all access pass.

Directions still made no sense, but traveling became infinitely easier now that Prowl could get through any door. Soon, he found himself traveling through the back access hallways that led to the observation rooms of every test chamber

Aside from the snow, it honestly reminded Prowl of when Jazz and him had been evading Bombshell by sneaking around the staff areas.

“Yo! Hater-totts! Which way do we go next?”

Prowl whipped around. The voice echoed from around the corner and he took off in that direction.

Skidding to a stop along a frosted catwalk, Prowl looked down to see a familiar figure balancing on a length of pipe.

“Jazz!” He frantically waved, “Jazz, I’m up here! I’ll find some way to-“

His own voice, tinny and whinny echoed around the space, “We’ve fallen into the neglected asscrack of Aperture science laboratories. This part of the facility was condemned before I was ever even created, so stop wasting my precious processing power on useless questions and just keep moving.”

Ah. A memory.

A memory that Prowl also remembered.

He briefly wondered if he could crawl into the walls before it was too late.

Unaware of the specter watching them, Jazz in his memory continued to creep along the pipe, “Yeah but don’t you have like, a dozen eyes right now?” He snickered.

Conscious-Prowl buried his face in his hands preemptively.

Prowltato had no such precognition, “You know what, you’re right! Let me just pull out that map I don’t have with the hands that I also do not have.”

Jazz snorted, “Hey I’m the one doing all the work here! Just trying to keep you involved. I didn’t know I had a couch potato on my hands.”

Here it comes.

The voice box of the potato “chip” crackled with unsustainable volume.

“I know I’m useless! I know I am COMPLETELY useless right now! There is NOTHING I can do to help because I can barely even think any farther than a few steps ahead before I start to smell hashbrowns.” He ranted, unrestrained.

“You can smell?” Jazz asked, trying to distract Prowl from his spiral. Inadvertently kicking him over the edge instead.

“I AM TRAPPED. INSIDE A GOD DAMN VEGETABLE. WHY WOULD I BE ABLE TO-“

The red light of the circuit flickered out with a pop and a puff of smoke. Prowl sighed, watching his little meltdown from a third person view.

“Prowl?” Jazz was still there. The resolution of the room dropped, becoming much darker and more foreboding. Prowl didn’t remember any of this. He leaned against the railing to watch closer.

“Prowler? Hey c’mon don’t be like that.” Jazz said as he lightly shook the portal gun. The man pulled himself onto the catwalk, sitting down as he brought the potato battery closer.

“Hey, hey c’mon don’t leave me here. Don’t leave me alone.” Jazz gingerly felt around the potato, checking for signs of cooking or other damage.

For the first time, Prowl took everything in from Jazz’s perspective. He’d been kidnapped and trapped inside a strange dangerous place with no knowledge of an exit, no way to sustain himself and was effectively, completely isolated.

Prowl walked over, sitting next to Jazz.

Biting his lip, Jazz didn’t stop fretting over the tiny computer chip in his care. Checking wires, tapping the glass and even blowing into it like a game cartridge, nothing brought the red light back online.

“Fuck. Fuck. Please Prowler don’t do this. I’m sorry okay? Wake up for me. I don’t care if you can’t help you’re still a person I can talk to. I don’t like being alone like this man, this place is fucking freaky.”Jazz forced himself to breath through his nose, hugging the portal gun to his chest.

Was the facility always this dark?

Stomach audibly rumbling, Jazz looked down at the potato miserably, and thunked his head against the railing. “Wake up soon. Please. For both of us.”

Prowl never knew how long he was out for when that happened. He remembered Jazz being unusually happy when he came to, but back then Prowl didn’t think to make note of it.

Jazz couldn’t have known he’d come back online that first time. Or the others times after that.

Prowl watched his love sit in silence.

It began to snow.

Jumping up, Prowl reached for Jazz to pull him to safety but his hand went through him. The memory frosted over before his eyes, freezing the moment in its misery.

The snowflakes stung where they fell on his shoulders, and Prowl was forced to move on, focusing on this just being a memory. He knew he’d wake up. Prowl knew he wouldn’t leave Jazz alone in the end.

He pushed through into the next rooms, and the rooms after that.

The glass of the observation stations were blurry and distorted by design, however Prowl suspected some of the distortion was due to traversing memories that weren’t his own. The walls were the same static form of the testing chambers, but their contents became anachronistic.

The interiors were reconfigured to the shapes of different scenes. Prowl saw Jazz in a cafeteria, laughing along with jokes the others were telling. He saw Jazz pressed against a wall, hiding around the corner from a dark shadowy representation of an enemy soldier. He saw him again, running like hell from a growing ball of fire.

More scenes played in every room, actors like wraiths moved through the space around Jazz, indistinct and ill remembered.

Occasionally, Prowl could recognize the people Jazz was with.

There was one room rearranged to resemble a triage tent. Jazz had swatches of red and blue leaning heavily on his shoulder. With blood caking the side of his head, Optimus Prime was mumbling continuously.

Jazz was largely uninjured and alert, doing his best to keep Optimus conscious and talking. He rubbed his friends arm, “You read anything good lately? If you haven’t I could probably snag something next time I’m out. Just give me a genre and I’ll find it OP.”

“I want.. I think..” Optimus struggled, blinking slow and swallowing spit. “I think I want my books. I think I want my books Jazz. All of ‘em, back before the war. I wanna go back to my library. My home. I don’t wanna be here, Jazz. I don’t want anybody to be here.”

Jazz squeezed his eyes shut, “I know. I know buddy. I’m gonna get you back there okay? As long as you keep going, I’m gonna help make sure everyone can go home someday, okay?”

Optimus turned to his friend as best as he was able. He half buried Jazz in a limp hug, “You gotta go home too. Don’t talk like you’re just gonna watch all of us leave without you. I don’t want you to die, I wanna see you get home too Jazz.”

He kept speaking, but the words grew indistinct and muffled against Jazz’s coat collar.

Hesitantly, Jazz patted his back, mindful of his friends still bleeding head wound. He was looking straight up while his jaw trembled. Optimus couldn’t see that, so he only heard Jazz’s clear and steady voice instead whisper, “I’ll do that Orion. I’ll do that.”

Prowl stepped away. He’d delete it entirely from his memory later. This wasn’t for him.

There was snow everywhere in this chamber. They were buried in it.

Prowl wanted it gone.

He pushed through more rooms and noticed a pattern. There were cracks and holes in all the chambers, letting in the ice that coated everything.

Smaller rooms with more personal, quieter moments only held a touch of frost. Meanwhile, the memories of crucial missions or important meetings looked like someone left a window open at the South Pole.

He needed to find somewhere Ricochet hadn’t claimed yet. Somewhere Jazz had successfully hidden away.

He passed through another frosted room. In this one, in looked like the interior of an abandoned laundromat. Dark figures with guns scouted the area, disappearing through a wall beyond the bounds of the memory space. Jazz was nowhere to be seen.

The laundromat stayed silent for a time, until one of the large drier doors carefully swung open. Jazz peeked out. Prowl watched as he got his hands around the edges of the barrel and tried to pull himself free.

“Fuck.”

Jazz changed his grip and tried again. Prowl could see him switch to pulling up on one of his ankles with one hand while pulling on the rim of the drier with the other. This only succeeded in rolling him sideways as Jazz continued to be trapped in a now swinging drum.

Prowl heard the dull thunk of Jazz banging his head against the drier, whispering to himself,“Every time. Every time Jazz, you think “This’ll be a great hiding spot! I won’t get stuck this time!” And then you fuckin’ do! Every time!”

Prowl snickered to himself. The frost in here was minimal. Ricochet didn’t consider it an important memory, though clearly Jazz did.

Prowl stopped laughing.

Searching around, Prowl wandered until he found an elevator. The elevator room itself was missing and the shaft extended into complete darkness below.

Inexplicably, Prowl felt the need to hold his nose as he cannonballed into the abyss.

When Prowl finally reached the bottom, he used his ID card again to open the elevator doors. And once he did, Prowl stepped outside.

The facility was gone, replaced by a sidewalk running along a length of row houses. They were all indistinct, blocky blotches of color in the vague approximation of buildings, save for one.

Prowl could make out everything down to a single loose shingle on roof and the remnants of a birds nest under one of the eaves.

The front porch had a bench and several chairs around a table, where half a dozen ghosts made the sounds of laughing conversation while playing a game of rummy. One of them was much more clearly defined, looking a lot like Jazz himself, but much more willowy and with a short kept beard.

Prowl stepped past them and into the house, where ghosts of all shapes and sizes moved around him. The larger ones were spread out around the living room, sitting on chairs or couches and wrapped up in conversation.

He couldn’t make out which song it was, but Ella Fitzgerald was singing from an old cabinet speaker in the corner.

A strong, soft looking woman who was far better remembered than the house guests sat on a stool with a hand over her eyes. It wasn’t her face so much that Prowl recognized, but her hands that were the same as Jazz’s. Her voice counted down from one hundred as clear as a bell as the small blurs of children zipped away to hide.

Even with her eyes covered, something about the woman’s voice made Prowl subconsciously check his posture.

The house was decorated with paper chains and smelled like cake. Everywhere he looked, it was summer sunlight streaming in, without a single snow flake in sight.

Despite how clearly he could hear the woman count, Prowl realized she never got to zero. The memory would hazily restart somewhere halfway through, so the hiding phase never ended and the searching never began.

After checking the bathroom and in the kitchen, Prowl took the stairs into a garage out the back of the house.

Behind a 1980’s Porsche mostly covered by a tarp, Prowl saw a washer and drier combo stacked on top of each other. Quietly walking over, Prowl lightly rapped on the drier door with the back of his knuckles.

The door peeked open and Prowl saw a small face looking back at him. Actually looking at him.

“Hello.” He said, suddenly feeling as out of place as he probably appeared. “Are you Jazz?”

The small boy folded up inside the drier nodded at him but didn’t respond further. Prowl faltered slightly, “Do you.. do you recognize me?”

The boy shook his head no. Prowl furrowed his brow, getting lost in thought.

“Why’re you in my house?” Tiny Jazz finally spoke, emboldened by Prowls uncertainty. “Cause if you’re not invited my mama’s gonna kill you an’ my dad’ll hide the body.”

“Well, to answer your question Sir, I came looking for you.” Prowl spoke as he fell into old habits.

“My name is Prowl, I am a robot. You are the leader of the Autobots spec ops division. Several days ago, you were infected with a technological virus that has attempted to take over your mind and body. It hasn’t fully succeeded and I am here to stop it completely.”

One of Jazz’s eyebrows got steadily higher.

“You’ve also saved me. A couple of times.” Prowl coughed.

Jazz leaned forward, looking Prowl up and down with an appraising eye, “I’ll bet.”

He tilted his head, squinting at Prowl, “You actually a robot?”

Nodding, Prowl took off his lanyard and handed it to Jazz, “Yes, here. This is how I usually look.”

“You look like an evil robot.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“You ever kill people?”

“Occasionally. I’ve been trying to cut back.”

Jazz chewed his lip, then handed the picture back. “Can you kill Ricochet?”

Pulling the lanyard back over his head, Prowl nodded seriously. “Yes. I am hundreds of times more powerful than he is. Ricochet cannot get past my firewalls, he cannot out strategize my plans and he cannot beat me, period.”

“Then why haven’t you done it already?!” Jazz curled up impossibly smaller inside the dark space.

Prowls eyes softened, “Because I refuse to take you down with him. I won’t.”

The hiding child looked at him for a long time. Prowl held his gaze.

Eventually, Jazz came to some sort of internal decision. He thrust his hands out of the drier, “Okay, help me out.”

Resisting the urge to laugh and failing, Prowl reached up to him, “Oh? Are you stuck?”

The look Jazz shot him was withering.

Jazz’s legs were most of the issue along with the curve of his back. Prowl got a hand under his shin like a shoehorn and another gripping the belt of his pants.

“Okay, on three, breath out as much as you can. Ready? One, two, three!” Prowl pulled with all his might as Jazz made himself as small as possible.

He came free with a scrape and suddenly Prowl was falling backwards. Upon hitting the ground, all of the wind was knocked out of him as a shockingly heavy weight crushed his ribs.

The weight shifted and an achingly familiar voice met him, “Prowl?”

Jazz.

Grown ass adult Jazz with all his scars and memories and a completely shocked expression on his face stared down at him.

“Hello.” Prowl wheezed, “You’re crushing me.”

“Oh holy SHIT.” Jazz moved his hands from Prowls chest to his face, squashing it. “You’re here. You can see me? You can hear me?!”

“And feel.” Prowl said as his face was squished. Releasing him, Jazz scooted down to straddle Prowl waist, unwilling to separate further.

Sitting up, Prowl took his hands, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry it took us so long to come for you.”

“Us?” His eyes were wide, wide open, like Jazz was seeing the sun rise for the first time in months.

A million implications ran through Prowls mind over Jazz’s shock, he skipped to the end and grabbed shoulders tightly. “Yes! Yes all of us! We knew something was wrong. Optimus, Elita, Mirage, even Bluestreak and the other Autobots noticed something was wrong.”

“We knew something was wrong but we needed- I needed time to make sure. I needed every last second to spare just to make sure everything was in place and that everyone would be safe.” Every word Prowl spoke made Jazz shake a little harder.

“Every second?” Jazz croaked. “Everything counted? I couldn’t- I couldn’t stop him. I was just dragging it out because I thought I could buy you time but I didn’t know if-“

“It counted.” Prowl gripped his shaking shoulders. “Jazz, everything you did counted. Everyone is alive because of you.”

Fisting Prowls shirt in his hands, Jazz started to understand, “You saw. You saw me. I got through to you guys, you didn’t believe him, he didn’t fool you. You SAW me you saw y-you-“

His breathing got funny then.

Jazz grit his teeth and tried to pack up his emotions. He couldn’t breakdown. He couldn’t. He needed to shove it all down and deal with it later because right now he needed to be doing something.

“W-wait. Wait hold on. Yo-“ A cough and a sob. “I- I’m not-“

And he shoved and he shoved, except there was nowhere left to push it under, here at the bottom of his soul.

Jazz made a very ugly sound as it all came rushing back out.

The world could’ve been nothing but an endless cascade of loose sand, ungrip-able and suffocating, save for the single solid buoy Jazz had beneath him.

Nerves scraping raw, a strike of terror went through his heart when Jazz felt his lifeline move unexpectedly, only to wrap around him completely. The hard pressure felt like it was trying to hold his soul inside his body for him.

If Jazz let go now, he wouldn’t die.

Coming apart was a sound. Like dragging leather through a metal pipe and gasping between pulls until it was done. He shook, and clung, until everything was out.

Nerves still burning but sluggishly settling, Jazz slowly calmed. Tightly folded on top of Prowls chest, the man in question felt Jazz start to relax and gradually loosened his death grip around his back.

“Hey, Prowler?” Jazz mumbled into Prowls shirt pocket.

“Yes Jazz?” He replied, chancing at smoothing his hand up and down Jazz’ spine.

“Don’t tell anyone about the drier thing. I’ll never recover.” Jazz said in complete monotone.

Prowl started to wetly laugh, and then couldn’t stop. Face still pressed into his chest, Jazz started to shake again, but smiling this time, “I’m serious, there’s too much stupid nickname potential.”

“Like Lint Trap?” Prowl poked him in the ribs.

A little breathlessly, Jazz laughed, “You see? It’s too good! I’d be stuck with it forever.”

The two on them laid on the floor, giggling like a couple of dumb kids. At some point Jazz slid off of Prowl to be plastered to his side.

They just breathed for a minute.

“So, what now?” Jazz quietly asked, not making any move to get up.

“Well,” Prowl paused, running through his mental checklist, “I wasn’t really expecting to fight Ricochet in this, um, medium of expression. I. . don’t really know where he is to be honest.”

Reluctantly, Jazz sat up and took in their surroundings. During his brief mental breakdown, the reality surrounding them had followed suit. Prowl was far too preoccupied with holding Jazz together than the rest of the world, so it looked like there’d been a soft reboot of sorts.

They were sitting in a testing chamber.

Leaning back on his elbows, Jazz stared up through the ceiling. “He’s in your room.”

Prowl looked at him quizzically, “My room?”

Shrugging, Jazz got to his feet, offering Prowl a hand up. “I mean, that’s where it always comes back to yeah? It wouldn’t make sense for him to be anywhere else.”

Taking the offered hand, Prowl thought it over as he pulled himself up.

If this is all a representation of Jazz’s psyche, then it stands to reason that Ricochet would take root in the central most- why is Jazz laughing?

Hand over his mouth, humor twinkled in Jazz’s eyes as he looked down at him. “You’re tiny, what the hell?”

Prowl pushed out air through his nose, muttering under his breath, “Five foot nine is completely average. You people are just giants.”

They bantered back and forth, and Jazz smiled so hard his face hurt. He took Prowls hand and started walking towards the first step of the puzzle.

After a quick look around, they both realized the puzzle still wasn’t solvable without a portal gun. The door itself was too high to climb to, however, one of the observation rooms was hypothetically within reach.

Tightly holding Prowls ankles, Jazz watched as he barely managed to get one of the transom type windows open. Shoving him upwards the last foot so Prowl could gracelessly fall through the other side.

Dusting himself off, Prowl gave Jazz a thumbs up before moving to the computer in the room.

“Watcha doing?” Jazz called up, scaling the window after him.

“I am,” he paused, hands hovering over the keyboard, “Attempting to requisition a portal gun so this doesn’t keep happening.”

Which wouldn’t be too difficult if it weren’t for the fact that the text on screen was completely illegible gibberish.

Unaware, Jazz crossed his arms along the top of the window, comfortable with his bizarre perch. “Oh sweet! Of course you can do that.”

Before Prowl could give Jazz the bad news, the floor of the testing chamber spiraled open. On a pair of plinths, two different portal guns were elevated for the taking.

“Dude.” Jazz grinned, eyes lighting up in glee.

Prowl shut his mouth.

Power of Suggestion: Noted.

With the tender strength of a mother ferret, Jazz dragged Prowl back out of the window and the duo took up their arms.

Once Jazz helped Prowl get the gun on, since he’d never actually used one before, they made quick work of the puzzle before them, escaping into the rest of the facility.

Everything was banked in snow.

Initially, Prowl had wanted to use his admin access to just take an elevator to the top. However when they’d finally found one, it’d been completely iced over.

Previously, Prowl had treated the snow like a passive hazard and an indicator of Ricochets presence. Now that Jazz was with him, it took on a much more predatory nature.

The snow crawled up the walls in unnaturally right angles. An infection that aimed to spread itself with a malicious intent.

Clear patches of floor became smaller and more spread apart. Even with two portal guns, the pair had to get creative to not touch the ground, occasionally resorting to a backpack carry or using a cube as a makeshift sled.

Chaining together a series of looping jumps, the two landed on a narrow clearing.

“We’re getting close.” Jazz revealed.

“Alright, here’s what I was thinking hrMP.” Prowl was immediately silenced with a hand over his mouth.

“Stop. Stop stop stop stop.” Jazz closed his eyes. “Assume anything you say to me Ricochet can also hear. At minimum, he’s always watching my surface thoughts.”

Prying the hand off his face, Prowl looked at him with mild horror, “You haven’t been able to freely think this entire time?”

Shoulders drooping, Jazz finally let a sliver of the true extent of his mental exhaustion show. “I’m tired Prowl. I’m real fucking tired.”

Then, Jazz smiled lopsided, not having the energy to make it even. He bumped Prowl with an elbow, “Bright side: I’m also too tired to think of what you could possibly be planning, so Rico’s got nothing on you.”

Taking in the new information, Prowl remained silent, nodding along with a steely expression. He rubbed the back of Jazz’s hand with his thumb. Prowl felt it was burning hot.

They scaled the last few obstacles in silence. Uncomfortably for Prowl, Jazz remained a shadow behind him. Uncomfortable because Jazz should have been blazing ahead of him, finding new and strange paths forward. Instead, the spy spent any moment he didn’t need to move with his eyes closed, leaning against Prowl or the nearest object for support.

A silent, continuous meditation to keep Ricochet in the dark. Jazz followed Prowl on instinct alone.

How H Y P O C R I T I C A L.

A voice from nowhere and everywhere shook the building. Walls fell away like cardboard props, clattering to the ground. The antechamber domed overhead, a mess of overlapping screens playing snatches of Jazz’s memories on repeat.

It was nothing Prowl hadn’t seen for himself already. He ignored the distraction as the voice rattled again.

You can’t think for yourself. So you let a computer do it for you.

Standing in the middle of the room was an alternate version of Jazz from Prowl’s memory.

The body was patterned with an inverted color scheme of black and orange instead of blue and white. Snaking cables draped from his back to the floor, spooling into a long, long leash that eventually fed back into a central terminal. Ricochet stood beneath the crane descending from the ceiling on steady legs and with an unmoving face.

Beyond him was the manual override terminal.

The orange visor caught where Prowl had locked onto and tilted to the side.

All around them, frozen white walls rose vertically throughout the room, cutting off all lines of sight to Ricochet in the process. Over the tops of the walls, they could still see the cables pull and shake. Ricochet was on the move.

Jazz’s portal gun hummed to life as he slipped to be back to back with Prowl, “It’s a maze.”

Testing the nearest wall, the portal stuck. Prowl placed his own across from Jazz’s, “Get to the terminal. We’re ending this.”

They ran.

Two mice in a maze, they spilt up. Prowl focused on taking every left turn as fast as possible while Jazz got on top of the walls.

You really think you can swoop in like some white hat hacker and save him?

The screens making up the ceiling shuddered and wilted downwards. A winter gale tore inside, bringing with it a flurry of stinging snow.

Shielding his face with his arm, Prowl kept pushing onwards.

“Jazz! Think of the moon!” He yelled over the storm.

Through the gale and beyond the screens, the sky warped above them. Snow was still sourcelessy falling from above, but a pale glow streamed in through the roof as the moon manifested itself.

On one of the many screens, a memory of a fight much like this played at two times speed. Jazz raised his portal gun to fire just after Ricochet discovered what they were planning. The blue bolt of energy hit nothing but screen as the AI slammed the ceiling shut again.

Completely stopping the snowfall.

Freed, frostbitten and still kicking, Jazz ran and leaped from wall to wall. The wires leading back to Ricochet raced after him like a shark fin. The saboteur sprinted the final dash to the terminal with only a few seconds lead on his doppelgänger, hitting the ground hard and delicately thinking of nothing but big white elephants.

“HERE!” Prowl heard Jazz shout from across the room.

“PORTAL!” Prowl shouted back, sprinting down a straightaway, and raising his own gun at the same time, he fired.

Jumping into the red portal that took him back to the start of the maze, Prowl landed, took two long strides and jumped again through the blue portal that skipped straight to the end.

Snapping the lanyard from his neck, Prowl swung around to the front of the terminal and jammed his ID into place.

The floodlights flicked out. Everywhere, the walls began to fall into each other like dominoes.

Admin Access Added.

The screens above were consumed by static, drowning the chamber in a sickly grey glow.

Thank you for updating my systems.

One by one, the screens of static turned black. Not the black from a powerless tv, but black like footage of a lightless room.

Suddenly, the terminal spat fire and smoke. Every screen in the room screamed into blazing neon orange.

WHERE IS IT.

The AI screeched over popping speaker systems.

WHERE IS THE REST OF YOUR SYSTEMS.

“Disconnected.” Prowl answered, sweating through his shirt and smiling pityingly at the apoplectic AI. “You didn’t think I’d actually risk being taken over a third time did you?”

The virus gave one more almighty scream, blowing out the last of the speakers and shattering every last light.

The only illumination left was the light from Jazz’s portal, and the orange visor behind him.

False relief made him too slow. Using his own cables, Ricochet caught Jazz neck in a garrote from behind, slamming him to the floor.

Fine.

Digging a mechanical knee into the spy’s back, Ricochet cinched the noose tight.

I can settle for one.

———

Elita and Optimus were not freaking out.

A couple minutes into Jazz and Prowls freaky little mind meld operation, they both started to get warm.

Kneeling on the floor, the second in command was working a knife under another one of the plates along Prowls back. She couldn’t work out how the clasps came apart and the smell of melting rubber did not inspire contemplative puzzle solving at the moment.

The panel popped open and Elita immediately set to fanning the overheating components with her coat.

“How hot can Prowl get?” She called over to Orion, who was likewise doing his best to cool off Jazz with an improvised book fan.

Due to the sheer amount that Jazz was sweating, he also had the added challenge of keeping the connectors from slipping off his head. Orion glanced over, “I think he said one hundred degrees?”

Hissing, Elita snatched her wrist back as accidental contact singed her. “Well he better have meant Celsius!”

Orions attention flicked to his partner before moving back to Jazz. Just in time to see him exhale deeply and stop breathing.

He could physically see his chest spasm, trying to pull in oxygen and failing.

Immediately grabbing Jazz’s face, Orion frantically opened his mouth searching for what was obstructing his airways.

“Ariaaaal!” Orion called out his partners old name, effectively teleporting her to his side.

“What? What? What happened?!” She shouted, witnessing Jazz jerk in the chair, eyelids half lifting to show only whites.

“He’s stopped breathing and I can’t find anything in his throat!” Orion quickly summarized. “Do we have a ventilator?! Or- or one of those nasal tubes?!”

Tearing off her gloves, Ariel got her fingers against Jazz’s pulse and felt it going rocket fast. “No, we don’t have-“

Behind them, one of Prowls connectors popped like a cap gun and began to smoke.

“FUCK.” Ariel jumped to standing, looking for a fire extinguisher that wasn’t goddamn there, because why the fuck would Aperture Science have basic fire safety? “We don’t have jack shit!”

Orion tore off his coat, throwing it to Arial, “You put out Prowl, I’ll start CPR on Jazz. We will make it.”

Ariel grinned, lifting the heavy duty coat overhead, “Fuck it, we’re doing it all manually!”

———

The room got darker, and darker still.

Clawing at the other robot, Prowl was being completely ignored. Offers of greater access, of killing anyone else for him, fell on deaf ears. Ricochet had already filed Prowl as too deceptive to trust a word he said. As he was, Prowl was panicked and helpless to stop him anyways. He slipped off his back and resorted to pitifully pulling at the cables in his back.

Ricochet was a solid wall of metal, built to be physically capable, instead of just decorative like Prowls body was.

Beneath him, Jazz was becoming still. The reality half held up by him disintegrating around the edges.

Ricochet was made for this. Everything else was extra. Extra kills. Extra sabotage. Extra points on a digital scoreboard. The virus was tailor made for one person, and it wore him like a suit. The leader of Special Operations was a goddamn myth that’d be made to die today. So it was written in Ricochets code. So it would be.

Ricochet was always meant to be the death of Jazz.

He pulled a little tighter, and the world went dark.

Impossibly, like a coal under a bellows, the lights of the room flared back to life as Jazz sucked in breath.

WHY CAN’T I KILL ANY OF YOU PEOPLE.

Wedging his fingers in between the cables wrapped around his neck, Jazz wheezed out, “Skill issue.”

Ricochet raised his foot just to bring it down harder. He couldn’t break bones in this digital reality, but if he could convince Jazz’s brain he was dying it might finally stick.

“Jazz, close it!” Prowl voice carried twice. First, from only a few feet away. Second, echoing from the center of the chamber.

Ricochet whipped around.

Framed in blue, Prowl stood just beyond the border of a hole punched through reality, the cables connecting Ricochet to Everything pulled in after him.

Oh.

“Close it now!”

Goodbye. Jazz.

The blue oval of light blinked out of existence and the world went silent.

Prowl ran.

The short cut was gone and he couldn’t climb so he just ran.

Broken walls and shorting lights furnished the maze, forcing Prowl to squeeze and climb to make it to the end.

He skidded around the last corner, seeing two bodies on the floor beside the smoldering terminal.

The body of Ricochet had lost all resemblance to his inspiration, becoming a slate grey manikin lying in a heap on the ground. The bundle of wires that led back into the crane sparked and jumped like a dying decapitated snake.

Jazz laid motionless, half wrapped in cables strewn across the floor. Prowl slid to a stop on his knees beside him.

“Jazz, Jazz! Look at me. Please say something.” The facility core shook the man on the ground, tuning him onto his side.

Jazz mumbled something unintelligible. Prowl leaned in closer, straining to hear what might be his last words.

“Bitchmaster.”

Prowl sat back up. “What?”

Cracking open one eye at a time, Jazz blearily looked around, “Dammit, Izzhe already dead? I wanted t’get the last word’n.”

He frowned over dramatically, slipping the portal gun off so he could cross his arms and huff, “Figures, can’t even let me get the last word in.”

A hand settled on Jazz’s face and he focused back on Prowl. His eyes were soft.

Wordlessly, Jazz opened his arms, and Prowl wrapped around him. “I missed you.”

Jazz let his eyes close, soaking in the calming weight pressed to his chest. “Missed you too.”

Hugging him one more time, and in spite of Jazz’s protests of noooo, Prowl pulled away. “We need to wake up now.”

“Um.” Jazz blinked, “I’ve never gone back up on my own before. How do I. .?”

Prowl leaned forward and kissed him.

“I’ll call you an elevator.”

“You don’t need one?” Jazz asked, loosely wrapping his arms around Prowls shoulders.

“No, I’m not actually human, remember? I just think the mental image will help.” He smiled, pulling Jazz to his feet as the floor opened for a rising elevator. “Like a loading screen.”

The elevator dinged.

“Hey, if I wake up and I’m brain damaged or a vegetable. .” Jazz trailed off.

Prowl walked him to the elevator, “There is no universe where I wouldn’t still care for you.”

They slipped their hands apart as the doors closed. “Now go home. We’re all waiting for you.”

The elevator rose, and Jazz looked up, into the blinding light ahead.

———

The soft sound of machinery beeping and the sterile smell of the medbay were familiar companions to waking up disoriented for Jazz.

He felt his own hand moving without him thinking it. Curling, closed, uncurling and stretching flat.

Jazz shot awake, kicking himself out of bed and taking several monitoring devices with him on the way down.

“Goddammit Jazz! Quick kicking before you re-fracture your leg!”

Jazz popped his head up from the other side of the bed like a gopher, “Ratchet?”

The surly medic only frowned before reaching over and dragging Jazz back onto the bed, “No, I’m fucking Santa Claus. I just stop shaving for Christmas.”

Jazz patted his face, feeling his arms move as they should. “Something was moving my hand.” He said, hearing his own voice speak the words he wanted to say.

“Yeah, me.” Ratchet jabbed a thumb at himself, grumbling as he gently inspected Jazz’s cast and deftly bandaged over where the IV had been yanked out. “You’ve been out for a couple days and from the looks of it you were being run ragged the whole time I was gone too.”

Jazz was about to open his mouth when Ratchet held up a hand, “Yes, I’ve been brought up to speed on what happened. Yes, I flushed that crap out of your system.”

“Thank you Santa.”

Glaring briefly, Ratchet shined a pen light into his eyes and snapped his fingers a couple times, checking Jazz’s responsiveness. Once he was satisfied, Ratchet grunted, which was effectively him signing a bill of clean health. “You’re not dying, just exhausted. Now stay the hell in bed.”

“I will,” Jazz raised a finger, “If you tell me why Prowl isn’t here and how the hell you got back.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ratchet said as he righted his stool, sitting back by Jazz’s bedside. “But Prowl is down the hall. He’s fine, we think.”

“You think?” Cast be damned, Jazz was about to hopscotch down there.

“Do not.” Ratchet stopped him one handed. “He’s grumpy not hurt. None of us know how to reconnect him to the rest of the building and he’s being petty and won’t tell anyone how to do it either, accept for you.”

Jazz scooted himself back until he could sit upright. Now that the initial adrenaline rush was fading, he could feel exactly how tired he was. Especially on top of the little two day Power Nap, the sudden rush of movement was making him woozy and maybe Ratchet was right to keep him in bed.

For now.

“So what about you? I thought we were too buried to reach?” Even from the backseat of his own brain, he remembered everyone talking about how insane the blizzard was outside.

Eye twitching, Ratchet sighed out of his nose for a very long time, “To make a long, incredibly frustrating story short: Me and some others holed up in an abandoned cabin to wait out the storm. The snow never stopped, and everyone was about to rip each other’s throats out in there so,” he shrugged, “I called in a favor and got the storm to end.”

“I’m sorry,” Jazz held up his hands, “Does God owe you a favor?”

Ratchet laughed, full bellied and hearty, “God owes me a hell of a lot more than a favor kid.”

The medic stood, making to leave, “The Cons had a weather controller dohicky and we got sick of the damn thing so we broke it.”

Mentally, Jazz was flicking through every neutral and even Decepticon he could think of. Intelligence gathering was half of his game and the spy was coming up blank with who could possibly have the means, the motive and the connection to Ratchet to do something like that.

“Wait. Then who’s we? Who helped you?” Jazz looked up at the medic completely flabbergasted.

Ratchet just smiled and pat him on the knee, “You don’t know everyone’s secrets kid.”

Despite Jazz’s cajoling and threats that now he had to find out, Ratchet left him with the promise of checking back in, oh maybe an hour or two.

Snorting, Jazz laid back and just felt his body for a minute. Reveling in being alone in his own head again.

Though, not every visitor had been totally unwelcome.

A few rooms away, Prowl stewed. Unable to walk much, he was pretty much bed bound, having been hooked up to a portable generator in the corner until he let someone help him back onto the crane.

That was the story he gave to the rest of the Autobots anyways.

He wasn’t mad about the damage that had been done to his back. It was life saving after all. But that didn’t make him any less cranky about the lack of stimulation.

No, once again Prowl himself was his own worst enemy. Prowl had set the facility into a low energy “rest” mode that could run without him for a while. Elita and Optimus were following strict guidelines about keeping Prowl in quarantine until they were absolutely sure he was cleared of any virus. So far, every test came back clean, but if anyone was going to spot something amiss, it was Jazz.

So they waited.

Anything that could give him computer access was a strict no no, so Bluestreak and anyone else that Prowl felt comfortable with took shifts spending time with him.

Currently, Prowl was in between visits, when he heard something in the ventilation system move.

“Heya Prowler.” Jazz whispered, head peaking out from the now open vent above Prowls head.

“Jazz! Hold, hold on let me-“ Prowl stage whispered. He struggled to his knees, helping Jazz out of the vent. The two fell backwards onto the bed, trying to keep their voices low.

“You okay?” Jazz whispered, immediately feeling along the back of Prowls neck and back, touching the jagged edges of where the panels were busted open.

“Am I okay? Jazz I’ve been stuck inside a damn vegetable before this is boring but fine. Are you okay?” Prowl whispered back checking Jazz over for injuries, grimacing at the one he caused. “I’m so s-“

A hand pressed against his mouth, “If you apologize for doing what I told you to I will break up with you.”

Taking Jazz’s wrist in hand, Prowl kissed it, “Alright. But please, how are you feeling?”

Jazz checked in with himself, going over everything.

“I think,” he said, snuggling closer, “I need another nap. And probably some pain meds in like, an hour. And some water. Food would be good too.”

“Nap first?”

“Mmm hmm.”

“Okay.”

Prowl dimmed the lights manually and Jazz’s breathing settled into something slower. Somewhere, far above the ground the sky above was breath takingly blue.

Without a speck of white.

———————————————————————

It is DONE.

Happy accidental Halloween to date the completion of this story.

For a first time foray into planning a.k.a. guessing how many parts this was going to be, shooting for four and needing to go to five is not that bad.

For a little extra, there’s an entire B plot I had in the background of my mind where Ratchet and Deadlock both end up snowed in inside the same cabin. With several of their subordinates each. Who actively want to kill each other.

What if instead of some peak romantic “Stuck Together in an Isolated Cabin and Cuddling for Warmth” tropes, the protagonists instead had to solve the “Cross a River With a Fox, a Chicken and a Bag of Seeds” riddle for five days straight until they both get so frustrated they decide to blow up the whole damn river?

I’m unlikely to write that anytime soon but the concept is funny as hell to me.

Thank you all for reading, and have a good night.

-SSTP