#prowlweek

"He can take one," Jazz said. "We just got out of a nasty battle, Prowl missed the officer meeting, Optimus needs somebody to set eyes on him. Gotta confirm he's not bleeding out on the battlefield somewhere."

"You can tell Optimus we set eyes on him," Skids said. "No injuries, just—stressed."

Stressed. Jazz hesitated, processing that; then nodded slowly.  "Okay. Got it. And I believe you," Jazz said. "But Optimus isn't gonna buy 'some of the troops said they saw him'—he needs an officer to lay eyes on him and make sure everything's fine."

Skids considered that and nodded. Getaway, though, planted one hand on his hip—covering a little more of the door with his elbow—and said, "He is fine. Sorry, but the big guy's gonna have to take our word for it. Prowl can't take visitors right now."

"I understand what you mean," Jazz said pointedly, "but I'm talking about Optimus. He's gonna insist—"

"Well," Getaway snapped, "I insist—"

Voice lowered, Jazz said, "Look, Prowl's a little overwhelmed right now, right? You wanna protect him, I respect that—I appreciate that—but I can handle it. I won't bug him, you've got my word. I promise."

"We've made a promise to him, and that's worth more to me than some random officer—"

"A random officer," Jazz said coldly, "who's known Prowl longer than you've been alive."

Getaway lunged a half step toward Jazz before Skids caught him across the chest and held him back.

"We're both on his side," Jazz said. "C'mon. If I don't go in there, Optimus is going to. And he's gonna try to get Prowl to debrief him."

"It's okay," Skids said to Getaway. "Jazz is fine, he knows how Prowl works too. Prowl can handle him."

Getaway remained tense a moment; then shrugged off Skids's grip, leaned on the wall beside the door, and crossed his arms and legs like he'd been casually hanging out there the whole time. Jazz gave him a wan smile and a nod of gratitude before opening the door.

The room was dark except for Prowl's biolights; Prowl flinched at the light from the hall. Jazz quickly slid the door shut and took a seat in front of Prowl's desk.

Prowl wordlessly turned his chair away from Jazz. Jazz bit back a chuckle. He knew why Prowl did it—seeing Jazz moving out of the corner of his optics, even just minute twitches and adjustments that Jazz wasn't even conscious of, would just irritate his processor even more—but it was still a hell of a greeting.

Based on what little Jazz had gotten out of Prowl's door guards, Prowl was in about the condition Jazz had expected: very still, completely unsocial, not a sound except for the extra cooling fans around his brain module loudly whirring at top speed. By what Jazz had seen of his face, his expression was completely blank, completely calm; it usually was whenever he was struggling under a crushing psychological load. He was twisting his hands around some small clicking objects that Jazz couldn't see but knew from experience were magnets. There was a lot of clicking. It seemed serious. So Jazz sat back to wait.

Whenever anyone doubted Prowl's capabilities as a strategist, Prowl was fond of dryly pointing out that he was capable of calculating the trajectory of eight hundred moving objects simultaneously. What Prowl didn't often point out was that he was incapable of calculating eight hundred and one objects (or whatever—he'd often tiredly told Jazz that it wasn't exactly 801, it was just that 800 was the maximum he was programmed to safely handle, anything over that was a risk), and that trying to go over the threshold overwhelmed his processor's capabilities. The problem was, if he saw objects in motion, he was unable to choose not to track and calculate their motion. If he saw it, his brain ran calculations. If his brain ran too many calculations, things started glitching. If too much was moving at once, Prowl's entire processor became unable to do anything but attempt to work through them all—along with the mountain of ever-growing error messages.

When Prowl had too much to process, he needed to hide somewhere until his head could work through all the calculations. Extra light added more calculations, extra motion in his sight added more calculations, trying to hold a conversation massively piled on more calculations. For some reason, calculating magnetic fields—such as the feeling of magnets in Prowl's hands—not only cut to the top of the queue of pending calculations, but rapidly deleted other items off the queue when few other things Prowl did could do so.

Jazz didn't have the faintest idea why magnets worked—Prowl had tried to explain once, got about five minutes into a long explanation about electromagnetic forces and the calculation thereof that Jazz lost track of about a minute into, until finally Prowl had to lamely sum up with "They... fffeel better?"—but if the magnets helped Prowl put his head back together when it was falling apart, that was good enough for Jazz.

Jazz wondered what had gotten Prowl this time. There'd been a lot of missiles flying around. He hadn't counted to see if there were over 800 in the air at once, but then he didn't have a processor that automatically forced him to count. Maybe it was just from trying to run tactical simulations and talk to everyone about them at the same time, sometimes that got him too. There was a reason Prowl was their head strategist instead of head tactician.

While Jazz waited for Prowl to get back to a place where he could talk, he pulled out his comm unit and texted Optimus: "Found Prowl. He's okay, just shellshocked." Optimus had a looser grasp on how Prowl's uncommon operating system worked than those who had known him better and longer did; they'd found shell shock was the closest metaphor that he could grasp. As long as Optimus knew that Prowl didn't want his brain to be doing what it was currently doing any more than Optimus did and that the best way to ensure it would stop doing that was to leave Prowl the hell alone in his office until it was over, they figured he understood enough.

Jazz had let Optimus know that Prowl didn't appear to be injured and that he'd get Prowl the notes on the officer meeting by the time Prowl said sharply, "What?"

"Optimus wanted me to make sure that you're alive." Keeping it simple and short, Jazz found, was the best way to ensure that Prowl actually managed to process the statement without adding to his already overworked processor.

It took several seconds for Prowl to reply: "Yeah."

Jazz gave him another few seconds to recover from sorting through that sentence before throwing a question at him. "Want me to leave?"

Another few seconds: "No."

Jazz nodded, sat back, and waited until Prowl was ready to say more.

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