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Chapter Text

Prowl watches the quintesson gate flicker once, twice, and then sputter out with a sad vwoomp. 

Before his TacNet can start running calculations on his dwindling survival rates, there’s a mouth full of sharp teeth and corrosive spit latching onto his arm. Pain receptors flare, sending errors to muddle his already cluttered processor and Prowl suppresses the instinct to buck away from the wriggling, worm-like creature. Instead he heaves against it, pressing the struggling mass against the cracked floor. The quintesson larva hisses and bites down harder. A system alert helpfully informs him that it’s breached his outer armor and is about to fracture his protoform. Prowl dismisses it and promptly shoots the larva in between its six eyes.

He has to manually remove the teeth from his arm. Rigor mortis fights him every step of the process, sending more sparks of pain through his frame. As the creature finally lands on the floor with a wet squelch, Prowl has a moment to take in his surroundings.

TacNet spins into motion, feeding him useless data about a long finished fight. Ballistics, blood splatter, cause of death of each and every one of the dozen bug carcasses scattered across the control room. There’s a gray, metal hand (Smokescreen’s, 89%) at the far end of the room, the circuits still sparking. Bright red of a chipped off chevron (Bluestreak’s, 33%) sizzling slowly in a pool of acidic saliva. A charred mark against the entry doors (Perceptor’s rifle, 98%), smelling of plasma and burnt organic matter. In one corner two serpentine bodies lay twisted in a knot (Sideswipe, 64%), a particularly long larva which had been used to strangle its broodmate (and Sunstreaker, 75%). Abandoned tools (Wheeljack’s, 55%) litter the floor around the now dormant quintesson gate. Prowl’s rudimentary understanding of instantaneous, molecular travel gives him about 13% chance of fixing it by himself. 2% if he takes into account his limited time. 

A quick system check reveals he’s relatively unharmed. Fuel lines in his arm are already clotting. One of the quintesson workers latched onto his left doorwing during the scuffle, snapping several of the lines connecting it to his back. Moving it makes pain pings cloud his vision, but Prowl doesn’t like the idea of being half blind to everything behind him whilst in the middle of an enemy stronghold. He folds the limb tight against his body and locks the joints in place. The sensors won’t be as effective this way, but it significantly lowers the chances of him shutting down due to the constant array of error codes his processor is working overtime to dismiss. 

Prowl resets his optics and considers his options. Fixing the gate is out of the question, and even if he managed to get it working (2% likelihood and dropping), he has no guarantee it will deposit him anywhere near his allies. His only viable alternative is running. 

The odds are better (14%) but still dismally low. The quintesson base is in full alarm, horns blaring and lights flashing. However, the fact that he’s not already been overrun by enemy combatants confirms his earlier theory that their squad of seven was not its initial target. The only reason why Prowl was even in the roster for this mission is because of how low the chances of them getting caught had been (<1%). He ran the numbers and judged it was safe for him to come along in order to get a personal account of the enemy base and combatants. He preferred observing battles to participating in them, but fist-hand experience would contribute to his future calculations.

What he failed to consider was that there’d be other lifeforms hostile to quintessons on site. 

There comes a point in statistical analysis where the numbers get so low that taking precautions against them becomes redundant. The chance of getting struck by lightning in a storm are low, yes (<0.0001%), but never zero. Still, it does not require carrying jump-starting cables on your person at all times just in case you might have to resuscitate a fading spark. 

(First Aid is an outlier and should not be counted in any statistics regarding the topic.)

Another statistical improbability (14,3%) is the fact that out of the seven mechs chosen for this mission, he is the one—the only one—left behind. Stranded. Prowl doesn’t subscribe to the notion of ‘luck’, but there are days when he feels decidedly unlucky. Because the objective, uncompromising truth is that Prowl is the least likely person out of their squad to make it out alive. He’s built for two things: analysis and speed. The first one to figure out where his target is. The second so that he can catch up with them. His TacNet is a tremendous asset for war strategy and active tactical support of the troops during battle. As long as he’s not the one fighting. 

Running the program is a considerable strain on the processor. In theory, Prowl can perfectly calculate the force, speed and angle of an enemy’s next move and exactly what to do in order to counter it. Realistically, TacNet sacrifices the speed at which he can move for the speed at which he can think. Prowl’s by no means defenseless; he’s a half-decent shot, excels at it when it comes to stationary targets. But font-line battles are anything but still, and ‘decent’ is not enough to see you through to the other side of a full-scale war skirmish. Or an enemy stronghold in full alarm.

Prowl approaches the quintesson database, already unspooling a connecting cable from his good arm. He stares at it grimly. If he wants even a modicum of chance to make it all the way through the winding building, he’ll need more data. The same data they originally came here for. But plugging yourself unprotected into an unfamiliar port is, to be frank, a very bad idea. Prowl is banking on it being connected to the base at large (68%) which would grant him access to floor plans and, Primus willing, some idea about enemy positions (<33%). There’s also a high risk he’ll contract some sort of virus (75%) or end up a victim of a hack (88%). But this information brings his success rate from statistically impossible (<1%) to a hard maybe (12%). A hopeful maybe (20%), if he can find whoever the quintessons are actually chasing, especially if they are another intelligent species (42%) and would be willing to cooperate (66%).

Prowl offlines his audials to let himself focus amongst the constant blaring. His good wing moves in a slow arch on his back, sensors wary to any movement behind him. He jacks in.

The terminal is, in fact, connected to the rest of the base. Prowl isn’t a hacker by Cybertronian standards, but he might as well be by organic ones. He contracts no viruses (as far as he’s aware) and slices through the flimsy firewalls, sifting through files and copying anything he deems useful onto his internal hard drive. Base plans, weapon schematics, construction notes on quintesson technology, location of major outposts. He stumbles onto a frequency attempting to send live data to the terminal and cautiously dials his own comm link to match it. 

He’s immediately hit by a string of hastily put together data nodes. He feels his internal fans kick into overdrive as he stills and tries to sort through it. They appear to be orders. Directions for all quintesson soldiers on site to engage in battle at the far end of the floor Prowl himself is currently on. He overlaps the visual representation of the directives onto a floor plan he’d downloaded earlier and gets a semi-reliable (72%) map. Updating it in real time will slow down his movements, but it’s preferable to running into enemies at every corner.

Prowl unplugs himself from the terminal. He marks his exit on his map, west of his current position, in the form of another gate. Where it takes him matters little, as long as it is outside of enemy territory. It also happens to be located in the same room where all the quintesson forces are converging. 

He stands in front of the heavy doors leading out of his pocket of safety and is once again hit with the unforgiving reality that he is not built for this. He isn’t a functionist—or, rather, not anymore. He’s seen the way Perceptor handles his rifle too many times to still believe in the idea that any one mech is confined to only that for which their frame has been designed. But he was good at his job. He enjoyed it. Life before the war, for him, was simple. Logical. He did what he was built for and he excelled at it. 
War requires change. Flexibility. Prowl… struggled. Struggles, still, to acclimate. 

If there’s one thing fighting an ongoing, losing battle with the quintessons has taught him, it’s the value of morale. A mech determined to win has a higher chance of achieving their goal. It’s not something easily calculable. It cannot be measured. Cannot be anticipated with any real accuracy. 

It’s also the most important factor in any given battle. 

Prowl had records in his memory banks of the countless (18) times the twins have come back from a fight they had virtually no chances of winning, for no other reason that they refused to abandon each other. Bumblebee continues to brandish the title of their luckiest scout. Prowl sees the way his optics light up every time Prime clasps him on the shoulder as he makes it back to base with half his systems non-functioning, and he struggles to incorporate it into his calculations.

So as he opens the door and carefully makes his way down the winding, dark corridors, Prowl does something he ordinarily never allows himself to do while running tactical for others: he tries to think positive.

There’s less than 1% chance for him to get out of here. But never zero. Double-edged sword in that sense, statistics. All he has to do is channel the unquantifiable, ethereal well of hope that his allies seem to have such an easy access to. 

A larva carcass squelches under his foot as he rounds the corner. Prowl cringes, vents out the heat from his processor alongside his frustrations, and walks on.

He weaves through the halls only half-aware of his surroundings, focused on his internal map and drawing the safest route for himself to get to his goal without running into any drones. The closer he gets, the more difficult the task. The enemies get more numerous, and Prowl can now clearly hear the sounds of battle. His remaining wing twitches restlessly. Screeching, buzzing, squelching. Two shots of some sort of firearm. The smell of burnt flesh. It looks like Prowl’s potential ally is more than capable of protecting themselves. That means higher chance of encountering an  intelligent life form (88%) he might be able to communicate with (>66%). 

Prowl peeks into the corridor swarming with quintessons. Most of the drones appear to be entering the room through the main entrance door. Their sheer numbers are to their disadvantage, squishy bodies clambering in two and three at a time, injuring their broodmates in their hurry. Several holes have been chewed into the walls, allowing the surplus of soldiers to scurry through. Amidst the cacophony of buzzing wings, scuttling legs and general screeching Prowl can clearly make out energy weapons firing and— 

He furrows his brow. Is that…music?

His doorwing twitches. Prowl spins around, gun at the ready. An injured drone, missing at least half of its four wings is rearing back, mandibles wide open. 

He squeezes the trigger. 

The drone spits acid before the bullet goes through its brain.

 
Prowl watches the arc of the smoldering liquid through the air. TacNet informs him where each individual drop will land on his frame in approximately 0.7 seconds. 

The pistons in his legs activate too slowly. 

The acid catches him across the tips of his doorwings (pain receptors flare and swarm him with error codes) and—more distressingly—some of it gets in his optics.

Prowl deactivates his left optic before the liquid even hits. With it completely shut down, the only indication that it’s melting right out of its socket is the warning pings he gets from neighboring sensors on his face. His right optic gets a single drop right at the corner, not enough to render it useless, but more than to make his vision blurry and the colors to start melting into each other. Prowl grits his teeth, dismisses burst after bust of pain alerts and refuses to offline it. 

In the background, music blares even louder. Quintessons screech. TacNet helpfully informs that his chances of survival are steadily approaching ‘getting struck by lightning’ numbers. 

Prowl pushes himself off the wall he was leaning against and hopes whoever is in that room will be his First Aid in a storm.

+++

Jazz tears off the stinger out of a C-two’s abdomen and stabs it into a C-one that was getting bold enough to snap at his mech’s foot. Ironhide likes to rag him for wasting fuel during battles, but personally, he thinks he’s plenty resourceful when the time calls for it. 

Like, to give a completely random example, when he’s stranded in a quint base somewhere in deep-space. Alone. No back-up, no comms, no nothing. Just him, his mech and The Prodigy’s Invaders Must Die blaring through Bebop’s speakers. Because if he’s gonna die fighting hordes of alien bugs, he’s gonna die with style, dammit.

(That particular upgrade cost him a bottle of fine brandy they’d stopped manufacturing back during the 2nd Wave. It was worth it. Brainstorm hates drinking alone, besides.)

Bebop’s energy reserves are dropping into low seventies. Her internal repair systems are patching up any scrapes left behind by corrosive spit and razor-sharp stingers, but Jazz is very much aware that he can’t keep this up forever. Problem is, he doesn’t have the faintest idea how the hell the portal he came in through works, and even if he did, he’s pretty busy right now.

He lines up a shot, Bebop’s targeting system tracking flight paths of the airborne quints buzzing above his head. He fires, the hot plasma searing through three C-twos in a neat line. A serpentine C-three chooses this moment to force its bulbous body through the front door. Serrated teeth rotate inside its massive mouth, tearing through any quints unfortunate enough to be caught in its path.

Jazz jumps out of the way before he shares their fate. The C-three slams into a wall and immediately swerves after him. The fuckers are fast, agile, and not particularly intelligent. Their main strategy seems to be barreling through anything and anyone indiscriminately. Another alien bug? No problem. A concrete pillar? Bring it on. Bebop’s energy sword? Must you even ask?

The C-three charges him, centipede-like legs skittering furiously on the floor. Jazz ducks behind a pile of rubble, forcing Bebop’s plates as flat to the ground as she’ll go. He unsheathes the claws on his left hand and digs into the ground with all the force of his mech’s pistons. He sticks his other hand out above his hiding spot, right into the path of the charging C-three, a long, shining blade sliding out of Bebop’s wrist compartment. Predictably, the quint does not stop. Jazz gets front-row seats to it getting dissected from maw to tail, like a giant, fleshy hot-dog bun.

No time to celebrate a clean (Metaphorically. He’s gonna be picking guts out of Bebop’s joints for weeks) kill. More C-ones and C-twos swarm him now that there’s no risk of their friend trampling them. Pistons groan as they heave a thousand tons of metal back upright. Jaws snap at his legs as Jazz jumps, activates Bebop’s thrusters and sends himself upwards. He grabs onto a metal pipe sticking out of the ceiling, prays it’ll hold under his weight, and flips his lower body until his feet land against the metal roof with a clang. Magnets fizzle into life and keep him there, hanging upside down and taking pot-shots at C-twos buzzing around him.

Unlike the C-three, the flying little shits are intelligent enough to figure out their fleshy prize is located squarely in Bebop’s chest. Used to be a time that quints went for the head. Sometimes around the 3rd Wave they got wise to the fact that if you take out the driver, you take out the rest of the mech. Jazz saw with his own eyes a C-four take out an experienced Mark-3 with a single, precise blow aimed at the chassis. It was a Russian model, too, and those guys specialize in building a mech like a brick shit-house. Was a sad day. 

Jazz fears he’s about to join that pilot in the afterlife. Bebop’s energy drops below fifty. He’s running out of time. 

Alarm sparks in his chest as he feels the phantom sensation of bug-like legs latching onto his back. He can’t see it, but he’s pretty sure there’s about to be a stinger shoved right through Bebop’s core and into his small, vulnerable body. Welp. They’ve had a good run. Shame about the old girl having to give up the ghost with him. She’s a gorgeous Mark-IV. Classy. Sophisticated. Could’ve served many years still, get that kill-count above thirties.

Jazz feels impact on his back. Not sharp, though. The C-two’s body thumps into Bebop’s plates and falls down to join other corpses below. There’s a hole in its head, positioned perfectly in between its six eyes. Now that’s what he calls surgical precision. 

His savior is on the other side of the room, near the dormant portal, gun still smoking. Beautiful, blessed black and white plates with a splash of red at the helmet. Oh, man, but Jazz has never been happier to see another mech in his life. Hope sparks in his chest, bright and infectious as he pushes himself off the ceiling with a whoop. He lands right on top of a C-one and skips towards his newfound ally, blade slicing through quints as he goes.

“Nice shot, man!” he yells, Bebop’s speakers carrying his voice. 

The mech blinks at him and scowls. Which, wow, okay, it has a face. Mouth, eyes, a nose—the works. Well, one of the eyes isn’t lit up, but still. It can blink! Jazz couldn’t even get the clearance to have Bebop’s visor display emojis, and not for the lack of trying. Meanwhile, this guy gets a whole, expressive face and—holy shit, are those teeth? His friend is saying something. With their mech’s actual mouth. Jazz is too preoccupied watching its lips move to comprehend the words. There’s a tongue in there. Now that’s just excessive, even for him. 

The tone of the voice gets more dire, pointing at something behind his back. Right—middle of battle, alien bugs that need killing. He sends the other pilot a lazy salute and spins around to spear a C-two that had its sights on that too-expressive face. Nuh-uh. Y’all aren’t messing with it until Jazz gets photos for Brainstorm to use as a reference later. 

He jumps back into fray with renewed vigor while the other mech messes with a computer next to the dormant portal. Jazz assumes this means they know how to activate it. He sneaks glances in between trading blows at that black and white frame. Bulky at the shoulders and chest with a tapered waist out of all things. It’s a marriage of hard metal plates, all sharp angles which contrast with the flexible, rubbery mesh that Jazz can see poking out in between its joints. He’s never seen a model like this.

He grabs a C-two out of the air, shoves it into the screeching maw of a C-one and shoots right through the first’s abdomen and into the second’s brain. 

Bebop is American built. Light on her feet but not completely stripped of heavier armor. His friend’s mech could be German? That intricate face doesn’t track, though. The wings on its back make him lean Japan, they like their flourishes. Color-palette doesn’t quite match their style, however…

Jazz jumps up, sets his thrusters sideways and tackles a C-one before it can get its maw on the mystery mech’s… aaand that’s a wheel. It’s got wheels. Maybe it’s a heelys type of deal?

Still on the ground, wrist deep in worm guts, Jazz points at the offending limb. “You seriously got wheels?”

The mech tears his eyes (eyes!) away from the screen and graces him with an quizzical look. Its wing tilts in accord with its head as if asking: What, and you don’t?  

“If we survive this, me and Brainstorm are gonna have a talk.”

Before he can complain further the mech presses a button on the console and the dim room is lit with the violet swirls of an activating portal. 

“No idea how you knew how to do that, man, but I could kiss ya right now.”

His companion doesn’t pay much attention to his attempts at conversation. The mech’s expression (expression!!) is stoic as it jerks its head in the direction of the mechanism in a universal ‘let’s get the hell out of here’ gesture. Jazz is only happy to oblige. 

He backs up slowly, clearing the way for the other pilot. The mech doesn’t move quite right. Jazz has a sneaking suspicion that’s got more to do with the way its remaining eye is flickering on and off repeatedly rather than design. He wards off the quints until he hears his companion shout something sharply. He still can’t make out the words, their meaning lost in the racket of energy weapons and angry hissing. Apparently, it was a warning, because a second later a hand grabs onto Bebop’s back plating and pulls. 

A quint latches onto his chest and goes through with him as his mech’s legs step onto solid, rocky ground. Jazz shoots it off, and then the next one that scrambles out of the violet haze, and the next. A shot rings out right next to his head and the metal ring of the portal shatters. A C-one screeches its dying breath as it’s cut off right in the middle. 

Jazz makes short work of the few C-twos still buzzing around, less confident now that they don’t have hordes of their friends to back them up. Once the last bug hits the ground, Jazz spins around to face the other mech. He’s dimly aware that he’s smiling like a madman, even if Bebop’s visor can’t show it. His friend is stock still, the single, flickering eye watching the ruined portal in disbelief. 

Jazz lets out a triumphant whoop and fires a single shot into the sky, the sound echoing in the sudden silence. It brings Bebop to an even, forty percent of fuel. Fuck you, Ironhide! He bounds over to the other pilot, giddy with relief and fully intent on delivering some major robo-hugs to tide him over until they find a more secluded spot to get to the good ol’ fleshy human-hugs.

The black and white mech falls into his arms with a little too much force. 

“Uh, you okay man?” he asks uncertainly. 

There’s no answer. Jazz holds the mech at arms length and, sure enough, its eyes are dark and its face slack. Maybe the other guy ran out of fuel? Their mech certainly looks like it’s been through it, with one of its wing hinges half-torn off and its armor covered in burns and scratches. Now that Jazz has the chance to take a good, long look he can see some nasty markings on its eerily human face.

He lowers the mech gently to the ground and kneels down next to it. He can hear a faint sound of fans spinning somewhere in its frame, which means its systems are still operational. Jazz frowns, dread pooling slowly in the pit of his stomach as he knocks on the chassis and gets no answer from the pilot within. Even sealed inside a dormant mech, if they’d make a noise, Bebop’s sensors should be able to pick it up. But all he can make out is the hum of the reactor core inside the mech’s chest.

All Mark-III’s and higher have built-in life support systems that allow their pilots to go weeks without food, water or rest. If something’s fractured, bent wrong, sliced open or stabbed, the mech takes care of it. If you fall unconscious, you get a nice, stirring shot of adrenaline. If the pilot isn’t answering, that means they’re either already dead, or on the way to be and their mech’s life support is shot.

“Oh, hell no,” Jazz mutters to himself, getting his hands on the mech’s chest, looking for seams that split the chassis open. “We’ve already pack bonded over shared trauma, no way am I letting you go this easy.”

The mech remains dormant. Jazz finally locates the seams (vertical, opening to the side rather than the horizontal standard). He hesitates for all of a second before whipping out both sets of Bebop’s claws and digging them in between the metal plates. 

“Real sorry for this, gorgeous,” he hums. He means it, too. A worse man (or a better one, depending on who you ask) would not chance damaging a mech in order to save its pilot. The hard truth is that you can always just get another person for the job. What you can’t just get is one thousand tonnes of sleek metal equipped with a nuclear core in its chest and a plasma cannon. Not unless you had the kind of money that a moderately-sized country makes in a year, collectively.

So yeah, Jazz will fully understand if his new friend is gonna be mad about the whole thing later. But he certainly doesn’t expect a gun pressed against his own chest plating.

Chapter Text

Consciousness creeps up on him slowly through a haze of pain pings and system alerts. TacNet spits out information he’s too dazed to fully comprehend, delving into the data packets First Aid had prepared for all soldiers on active duty.

Left doorwing’s connecting cables still severed, self-repair in progress (34%). Keeping the limb immobile will accelerate the healing process (218%), as will relieving the strain (4804N) on the remaining cables (143%). Left optic offline, self-repair unlikely to restore full functionality (<4%). Right optic functioning at 46% efficiency. Color receptors damaged. Calibrating lenses damaged. Self-repair in progress (55%). Energon lines cut in several (7) places. No major leakage. Self-repair in progress (81%). Rudimentary dents (34), punctures (4) and lacerations (11) in outer plating detected. Self-repair in progress (19%).

Strain in the pistons near his chest plates. A considerable (2585N) force bearing down against them. WARNING! While undergoing intense self-repair, exposure of the spark chamber is highly discouraged. It is advised to abstain from any strenuous activity, including spark merg—

Prowl’s hand shoots up. The barrel of his gun clinks against another mech’s chassis, stilling the claws wedged in between the seams of his chest plating.

The world is a blur. Colors melt into each other. His one functional optic tries to recalibrate, fails, and tries again, stuck in a loop propelled by Prowl’s panicked search for information (—RNING! It is advised to abstain from any strenuous acti—). The single wing on his back twitches restlessly, sensors kicked into overdrive in an attempt to compensate for his stunted systems. Prowl can barely make out a voice over the sound of his own vents cycling cool air to his overheated processor.

The only part of him that feels steady in the moment is the hand holding the gun. A single finger on the trigger.

The voice again. Smooth. Calm. None of the words register as familiar (auditory processing functional at 91%). Claws retract from the seams on his chest. Offending fingers slowly retreat back from his plates. More words, still incomprehensible (likelihood of processor damage—29%), still spoken in a soothing tone. Shock and fear bleed out of him in waves while the unfamiliar mech continues to babble. In their absence arises a long familiar emotion.

“What—” Prowl forces out through gritted teeth, voicebox tinged with static “—do you think you’re doing?”

The other mech is quiet. Prowl can see black and white plates, splashes of blue near the head and torso. Red accents pop up in places, stark color seeping into the rest of the frame. His optic recalibrates. There’s a flash of what he’s pretty sure (78%) is a visor, and then the world clouds over again.

There’s still no answer. Indignant anger pools in Prowl’s stomach. Hydraulics hiss as he gets up to his feet shakily, gun still aimed at the mech’s spark. Outer plates rattle as they rise, making him appear bigger than he is. His ally/assailant backs away from him, arms in the air in a placating gesture. Prowl doesn’t feel particularly placated.

“State your intentions,” he barks out curtly. It’s a pretense to give himself more time to process rather than any actual desire to hear the mech’s answer. He’s clearly proven himself untrustworthy already, or at least highly opportunistic, with no regards for even the most basic notions of decency.

And yet, he is backing further away, hands where Prowl can see them and frame low to the ground. Trying to appear non-threatening. His first instinct is to assume it is nothing more but a ruse. Except that Prowl is injured, and visibly so. He’d be an easy target (he almost was) for anyone right now, especially a skilled fighter.

It doesn’t make sense. Contradictory information grinds his thought process to a halt, processor already cluttered with rudimentary data gathered in the quintesson base. The mech is saying something. Prowl’s fingers shake on the grip of his gun. He locks the joints to force them still. Is his language processing module damaged? (WARNING! It is highly advised to abst—) Perhaps the quintesson database has infected him with something after all. Diagnostics start running on all his major systems (WARNING! Strenuous mental and/or physical activity may lead to a forced shut-down. Please contact your medic at the soonest possible—

“{Interrogative: Status.}”

Prowl freezes at the first understandable word out of the mech’s voicebox.

“{Interrogative: Status,}” the question repeats. Whistling sounds, short and clipped. Clicking interspersed with hissing. Not Cybertronian.

“{Interrogative: Status…}” sounding uncertain now. The mech’s frame slumps slightly, as if disappointed. “{Declarative: [Negation: Success of [Plan/Idea/Strategy]]…}”

He’s trying to communicate. In Quintesson, of all things.

Prowl resets his thought processes and cordons off any logic trees not related to what’s directly in front of him. He needs information. Data.

“{Declarative: Status functional. Declarative: Unit operating at 41% efficiency.}” No reason for him to lie about his injuries. They’re plainly visible. “{Imperative: State [Opponent/Assailant/Adversary]’s intention.}”

Prowl’s optic manages to calibrate for long enough to catch the sight of the mech’s head fins shooting up in surprise. He makes noises that mean nothing to Prowl, urgent and confused.

“Ah,” he struggles, hands flailing in the air as though he’s trying to grasp the missing words out of thin air. “{Exclamatory: [Negation: [Opponent/Assailant/Adversary]]. Declarative: Unit [Ally/Friend/Companion]. Declarative: Intention to [Assist/Help/Rescue].}”

Prowl gives him a dubious look. “{Interrogative: Intention to [Assist/Help/Rescue] by means of [Assault/Violation/Transgression].}”

The mech freezes. “{Interrogative: Means of [Assault/Violation/Transgression].} The Quintesson language might not specialize in conveying emotions, but the confusion in his tone and body language more than makes up for it. {Declarative: [Sorrow/Regret/Apology]. Declarative: [Negation: Intention of [Assault/Violation/Transgression]].}

Prowl reconsiders, optic narrowing. He does not appear to be lying. Or, rather, it makes absolutely no sense for this mech to lie. Based on his previous battle performance, if that had truly been his aim, Prowl’s spark chamber would be torn open already, gun or no gun. Playing dumb to cover up his intentions serves no purpose where a show of force would suffice.

This leaves him with two possibilities:

• A. This is a highly unstable and unpredictable individual who does not feel satisfied merely by forcing his victim’s spark chamber open to either personally snuff it out or use it for his own sexual gratification. It is important for this mech that Prowl trusts him, possibly due to some sick sense of satisfaction he will achieve by his later, inevitable betrayal.

Not as unlikely a scenario as one would think. Prowl has cataloged over five thousand Enforcer reports on his internal hard drive. A considerable portion (34%) lists the cause of arrest as ‘mental instability’. That specific tag is most often (78%) accompanied by the ‘erratic behavior’ tag.

(Some claim—to this day, long after Cybertronian government had ceased to function in any official, legal capacity—that many of those arrests were unjustified. Prowl cannot comment on behalf of his fellow Enforcers, but he has never personally made an arrest he thought was unjust. He does not see why others would.)

• B. This is not a Cybertronian, and therefore did not realize the nature of his transgression.

The latter would also explain several other inconsistencies Prowl has thus far managed to rationalize in other ways. He could not detect any traces of the stranger’s EMF, but it's a common practice (64%) to heavily obscure it in combat scenarios, often (>33%) by means of various external suppressants. Their apparent language barrier could very well be a result of one or both of their language processing modules malfunctioning. And, perhaps the most damning, the mech does not look quite right. Move or sound quite right. Prowl is also currently half-blind, so he did not initially aspire much weight to his personal account. But in hindsight, perhaps he should have.

Hot air cycles out of his vents in a sigh. He lowers his gun. The stranger perks up hopefully.

Before Prowl gets the chance to regret his decision, the sky behind them explodes in a roar of violet energy.

The portal spat them out onto a rocky plateau, deep orange stone that stretches for miles only to taper off into a steep slope leading right to a large body of water. The liquid is red, and its length melts into the horizon in Prowl’s still-blurry vision. The scenery perfectly accentuates the massive, purple quintesson warship that’s just finished making its way out of a hyperspace jump. It’s a great, round thing covered in rows of spikes and chitin plates that give it an appearance of a living organism moreso than a spaceship. It comes to rest above the rust-colored ocean and looms there in the sudden quiet.

Prowl is stuck staring. The size is… boggling. He’s seen plenty of other enemy warships. He’s also seen moons smaller than this. It simply must be a Flagship. TacNet stutters as it tries to estimate the mass of the structure, how many warp drives would it require to propel through space, how many quintessons could fit on board, how much provisions that sort of army would need, how many people would he have to send in order to sabotage food supply this large—

Something is pulling him backwards, further away from the slope overlooking the thing that’s been killing his people for years now. That plans on eradicating his whole species and turn any stragglers into slaves that will help it do the same to yet another civilization. His legs move on their own, walls of orange stone slowly swallowing the Flagship that Prowl has to figure out how to bring down if he ever hopes to help his people win this war.

“{Interrogative: Status.}”

His optic resets. He’s on the ground, wings pressed awkwardly against rock. The mech (not a Cybertronian, but clearly some vain of sentient technological life-form) is crouched next to him, hands hovering but never quite touching. He’s saying something in his own language again, although it sounds more like an attempt at self-soothing than communication.

“{Declarative: Status…}” Prowl hesitates. “{…functional. Declarative: [Negation: Unit fit for battle].}”

The mech is close enough that Prowl catches his head fins swivel down. “{Declarative: Enemy combatants (>2) en route. Interrogative: [Friend/Comrade/Companion] fit for movement.}”

Prowl nods, and based on the mech’s reaction, it seems to hold the same meaning in their respective body languages. He gets up somewhat shakily and starts following his companion blindly as he trudges over rocks and sand. He has to think. He has to come up with a plan (WARNING! Strenuous mental activity—). If he wants to begin to tackle the problem that is the Flagship, he first has to get back to the his allies. He has to find a way off this planet. Figuring out a plan of action will go considerably (384%) smoother once he has the time to self-repair and sort through the excess of data he’s stored up. In short, before anything else, Prowl has to rest.

His companion seems to have the same idea. He leads them through mazes of protruding orange rocks, head swiveling to and fro. Scanning? Prowl could not tell. He also… talks. A lot. Not Quintesson, not anything Prowl can understand. Some of the sentences tilt in a manner indicative of a question, yet he clearly expects no answer. It should be aggravating. (It is.) Prowl’s audio feed is the only sensory system that functions properly, however, and the voice proves comforting in its clarity.

They stop on the edge of a hill slumping sharply downwards. The mech makes a triumphant noise and slides down the rocky ground, one hand behind him for balance. Prowl watches dubiously as he disappears… into a wall. Wait, no. His optic recalibrates, the world coming into focus for long enough to reveal several holes in the walls of the miniature canyon. Caves. Cave systems, rather. The mech is peering into one after another, as if testing for something. Perhaps he’s outfitted with some sort of specialized scanning apparatus, because after dipping his head into each individual mouth, he confidently strides towards one and waves Prowl over.

He slides down the hill with considerably less grace than his companion. {Interrogative: [Safety/Reprieve/Shelter].}

In lieu of an answer, the mech simply gestures towards the mouth of his chosen cave with a grand gesture, a waiter motioning him towards the best table in a five star restaurant. Prowl frowns, reminds himself that it’s either this or certain death, and goes in.

The mech follows him and immediately brings the ceiling down behind them with a single, precise shot.

+++

Jazz is kind of killing the whole first-contact thing. Not in a good way, mind you.

He figures out that his new friend is in fact not a fellow mech pilot about the same time it dawns on him that he’s just inadvertently groped the guy. Well, he assumes it’s a guy. His voice sounds vaguely masculine by human standards, which means nothing in the grand scheme of ‘new species of alien that most likely doesn’t subscribe to the same bi-monthly gender newsletter Jazz is privy to’. Delving into the greater details of alien cultural intricacies isn’t really at the top of his list right now, though. That spot is firmly occupied by making sure this brand new, non-hostile extraterrestrial life doesn’t decide to drop the ‘non’ from its title.

Based on the way he’s glaring at Jazz right now, he’s not doing a great job. The alien is… coughing? Quick, short bursts of air intermingled with static escape the vents around his face (still extremely weird/cool). Bebop’s scanners pick out dust and small rocks flying out of what must be his… respiratory system? Does this guy have lungs? Jazz’s own air is provided by Bebop’s air filtration system, fine enough that very little can get from outside and into his own body. Kind of a must when there’s a chance you’ll be exploring any environment from deep-space to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. He didn’t realize robot aliens would have a problem with a little bit of dust.

“Shit, man, sorry. Would’ve warned ya, but I don’t know quint for ‘timber’.” Bebop’s internal database has state of the art translators for any and all languages on God’s green Earth. And an experimental tool used for deciphering quintesson communication. It’s not like those guys are volunteering to teach them alien syntax on the weekends.

“You, uh, {Interrogative: Status.}” Tried and true, that one.

“{Declarative: Status functional,}” the mech answers, voice still ringed with static. He sways a bit where he stands, the wing on his back tilting in an attempt of counterbalance, and Jazz is half-ready to catch him if he’ll keel over again. The alien shakes his head one last time and sends him a scathing look. “{Interrogative: [Destruction/Annihilation/Elimination] of [Exit/Door/Opening].}”

“Yeah, no, again—my bad. Right, {Exclamatory: [Sorrow/Regret/Apology]. Declarative: Intention of [Stall/Stop/Hinder]…} ah… how do I… {…[Pursuit/Hunt/Chase].}”

Jazz saw a C-four drop off the quint ship. Rather, Bebop saw the little fucker by zooming in her sights on the hulking mass. There’s most likely more, C-fours like to hunt in twos and threes. They don’t have the strength or intelligence of C-fives, but they don’t need to. They’re scouts. Hunters. Have a nasty call that echoes for miles to let their bigger friends know where the next meal is. And his companion is leaking a viscous, pink liquid that Bebop’s olfactory sensors pick up with distressing ease, meaning the quints will have no problem sniffing them out.

Solution: pull the ladder up behind them as they go. Bebop’s sonic receptors picked up a sprawling cave network connected to this tunnel, and Jazz is banking on it having another exit. Worst case scenario, they dig their way out. Still their best bet at getting some time to lick their wounds without getting jumped by more enemies.

That’s a couple more words than Jazz can confidently convey in a language he doesn’t speak, though. Which is unfortunate, because his new friend doesn’t seem too trusting of his intentions. Not that Jazz can blame him.

“{Declarative: Acknowledged.}” the alien says. His remaining eye flickers in the gloom of the cave, and he looks… very tired, suddenly. It’s bizarre how similar his face moves to a human one. “{Interrogative: Status.}

It takes Jazz a second to understand he means Bebop’s and not their general situation’s. Her translation AI feeds him the same phrase he’s heard the mech use before.

“{Declarative: Status functional. Declarative: Unit operating at 93% efficiency.}” He hesitates and then adds, less confidently, “{Declarative: Energy reserves at 39%.}”

The alien mech nods grimly, mouth a thin line of worry. “{Imperative: Conserve [Fuel/Energy/Power]. Imperative: Units [Find/Locate/Establish] site of [Rest/Safety/Shelter].}

That Jazz can do. He hops a bit in place and motions the mech down the tunnel. Bebop’s got the immediate mile radius of the cave system mapped out already. His companion gives him a dubious look but dutifully follows behind. Something on his chest flickers and flashes brightly. A second later two beams of light illuminate the darkness. Bebop’s visor recalibrates while Jazz blinks his eyes rapidly to get rid of the dark spots. Headlights. Guy can’t see in the dark, then, or at least not too well.

They start down the tunnel, frames slightly slouched to avoid the occasional stalactites hanging from the ceiling. Jazz lets Bebop steer them safely through while he shamelessly ogles the alien in the corner of his vision. He can’t help himself. It’s a brand new species! One that isn’t hellbent on wiping out the human race! And he’s clearly just as or even more intelligent than Jazz. This is the kind of stuff they’ll be asking him to describe for the history books once he makes it back to Earth.

Do his friend’s people have culture? Cinema? Literature? Music? Do they dance? Play instruments? Jazz has a thousand questions spinning in his head and no way to ask them. He taps an uneven rhythm into Bebop’s thigh as they walk, restless. He’s a talker. The whole language barrier thing has been a huge bummer so far.

Then again, perhaps the alien wouldn’t appreciate being interrogated right now. He certainly doesn’t seem as excited about meeting Jazz. Maybe meeting aliens isn’t unusual for him? And then there’s the… ah, the thing Jazz is pretty sure was the alien robot equivalent of jumping someone’s bones while they’re unconscious. Bebop’s head fins swivel down, the frame reacting to his emotions. Not his proudest moment, he’ll admit.

Jazz is snapped out of his thoughts by the alien stumbling forward. He catches him under the arms before that too-expressive face gets a close and personal meeting with the ground. Jazz is ready to release him as soon as he’s sure the guy won’t crumble, but there’s a concerning stillness to his frame. He’s also (literally) hot under Bebop’s hands. Too hot for Jazz’s liking. 

He holds the mech at arm’s length and frowns. His eye is dimmed, face slack, staring into nothing. Same expression as when he first saw the quint ship blink into existence. Jazz had to drag him away before the C-four had the chance to catch a whiff of their scent. Clearly, whatever’s wrong with him goes above physical injuries, although he certainly isn’t lacking in those, either.

Jazz is considering whether lightly slapping the guy to try to bring him back to reality will get him punched out when that single optic blinks off and on again. The lenses inside visibly refocus and then Jazz is treated to that scowl which he’s quickly growing familiar with.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, my man,” he says, patting the mech’s shoulder lightly. And then, when he does not move away from Bebop’s hold, “{Interrogative: Need of [Assistance/Help/Support].}”

The scowl deepens. “{Declarative: Affirmative.}” A deep sigh. “{Declarative: Request for physical [Assistance/Help/Support].}”

Hm, how to do this. The mech is a good head taller than Bebop, top heavy and with those wings sticking out behind him. Jazz isn’t sure the old girl can carry him on her back. In the same vein, he’s too… curvy? In certain places that humans aren’t for a fireman’s carry. He’s pretty sure if he gets his hands aligned properly he can just…

Jazz keeps one of his hands on the mech’s back and uses the other to sweep him under the knees. Fingers dig into Bebop’s shoulder plates, small dents forming in the armor as the alien instinctively holds on to prevent himself from falling. He lets out a high, panicked sound that has Jazz biting his lip to prevent a smile. This is serious, life-saving business. He’s a professional, he can princess-carry an alien with a straight face. A wing slaps him indignantly in the side and he’s treated to another scorching look. It’s kind of growing on him. Like those grumpy cats that look so ugly they circle all the way back to cute.

“Ain’t far now,” Jazz placates cheerily, readjusting his grip on the smooth metal plates. He starts a brisk pace back down the tunnel. The mech still does not seem particularly pleased by his choice of transportation, but he stays quiet and holds on. His gaze turns distant again, his hold slackens, and Jazz wonders if there’s some sort of… stand-by mode, or something. He kind of looks like he’s dozing off, although it’s hard to say if it’s a conscious effort to conserve energy or a side-effect of being put through the wringer too hard for too long.

Now that he’s not panicking about the guy potentially dying, Jazz pays more attention to the readings Bebop’s picking up from his chest. What he previously assumed to be a central power core—the same kind he can feel humming somewhere behind his regular, human back—is definitely something more intricate. It still registers as an energy source, the readings radiating off it in electromagnetic pulses. Not the double-beat of a heart, but a steady ebb and flow of waves lapping at smooth, polished stone. It’s weirdly calming, and Jazz finds himself matching his own breathing to the steady rhythm.

They make it to a spacious little hidey-hole Bebop’s found back up on the surface. Two exits, enough room to fight alien bugs if it comes to it, lots of cover. Jazz gingerly places the alien on the ground in a corner with a good vantage point on both tunnels leading out of the cavern. To his surprise, the mech immediately swivels around until his back faces them instead, a single black and white wing swaying through the air slowly. Jazz brings Bebop to rest facing him. If something tries to crawl into their hideout, she’ll pick it up.

The alien’s headlights dim slightly. Jazz watches as he reaches one hand to where a human’s lower ribs would be located and suddenly there’s a bright pink cube in between his fingers. A liquid, similar to the one he’s seen bleed out of the guy, sloshes around in the receptacle.

Jazz watches, transfixed, as the mech tears off the top and throws it back like a shot. Something bobs around the mess of cables on his throat. Jazz feels his own Adam’s apple move as he swallows.

His staring must have gotten disconcerting because the alien shuffles awkwardly on the floor and then—with an expression as though he doesn’t actually want to—he procures another glowing cube and hands it to Jazz.

“{Interrogative: Unit [Compatible/Adaptable/Suitable].}”

Jazz picks up the… fuel? Food? Both? It’s a mess of components Bebop doesn’t have in her database but… her estimate is that, in a pinch, it could power her up. It could also cause her power core to explode.

“{Declarative: Emergency use only,}” he says and stows it in Bebop’s trunk, right under the main chamber he hangs out in. The mech watches it disappear with a curious glance, but does not object. He shifts, sitting up straighter and his single eye turns to bore holes into Bebop’s visor with an intensity that makes Jazz want to squirm.

“{Interrogative: Unit willing to [Cooperate/Collaborate/Conspire].}”

Jazz nods eagerly. “{Exclamatory: Affirmative.}”

The alien gives a curt nod in answer, not relaxing in the slightest. He’s already looking a tad steadier than when they were outside, Jazz assumes due to whatever was inside that cube. He seems to be turning something over in his head intensely for a long moment, posture ram-rod straight where he’s sitting, the wing moving languidly behind him.

“{Declarative: Current form of [Communication/Conversation/Translation] [Inefficient/Slow/Inaccurate].}”

“Took the words right outta my mouth, man,” Jazz hums, nodding along his agreement.

“{Declarative: Possession of [Potential/Likely/Viable] [Solution/Answer/Fix],}” the mech says, although his expression is similar to the one he wore when Jazz snatched the proffered fuel from his hands. He doesn’t seem too stoked about the idea.

“Hey, man, I’m game if you are,” Jazz says and shuffles closer. The alien eyes him warily but doesn’t move away.

There’s another bout of silence as the mech’s eye roves over Bebop’s frame. Jazz tries his best to look as approachable as he can whilst piloting a thousand tonnes of a killing machine. Head fins at half-mast, hands palms-up on his folded knees. Sitting criss-cross apple-sauce. Isn’t this just the cutest, least threatening little power-armor you ever did see? Ignore the alien guts sticking out of her elbow-joints. A little smiley on her visor would really complete the picture, Jazz thinks. He has to hark on Big M later for discarding that mod idea as useless.

It’s hard to say whether the act works on the strange mech. His default expression seems to be a frown. Or maybe that’s their species’ version of a smile? The sigh he lets out definitely reads as long-suffering. He extends his left hand and Jazz half-expects to be handed another cube. Instead, he sees one of the panels on his forearm slide away to reveal a long, coiled cable.

Jazz leans closer. The jack at the end doesn’t look like anything even remotely approaching Earth techno— holy shit, it’s moving by itself. Jazz flinches back slightly as the cable unspools on its own and hangs above the arm, almost expectantly. The alien’s eyebrow…ridge… thing, raises, unimpressed. Jazz is a bit too giddy about the fact that an alien is giving him sass to feel overly offended.

“Sorry, bud, but I don’t think it’s gonna fit,” he says and flips open Bebop’s maintenance panel at her hip. Various ports flash in the low light, none of them looking compatible with the alien jack.

It’s the mech’s turn to lean down, eye flickering rapidly for a couple seconds. He inspects the paneling with an expression of intense concentration. Then he leans back again and extends his hand towards Bebop’s hip.

“Woah,” Jazz whispers, watching the end of the cable start to shift, metal and rubber twisting apart only to bend together in a new form. When its transformation is complete, it looks eerily similar to the cables Brainstorm uses for running maintenance on Bebop’s systems, the only discernible difference being the coloration.

He whistles an impressed note. “You can just do that?”

The mech raises his eyebrow again and, yeah, okay, that is a decidedly smug expression. Still no smile, but they’ll get there eventually. Baby steps.

The cable snakes right next to Bebop’s port and hovers there. The mech’s gaze turns questioning. Asking for permission. There’s a voice in Jazz’s head that sounds distressingly like Ratchet, yelling at him that letting an alien life form he’s only met an hour ago jack into the only thing keeping him alive on an alien planet is the most idiotic idea he’s ever had. Jazz ignores it and nods a go-ahead to the mech, opening Bebop’s hip panel wider. He can almost feel the ghost-sensation of being smacked upside the head.

The jack slides home without a hitch. Bebop alerts him of the connection, Jazz accepts it, and then the alien is in.

Now, there’s a certain weight to piloting a mech. There’s the obvious, physical one, yes, but there’s also a thing, an other, hard and unmovable and unyielding, when you strap yourself in and the neural link connects you to the frame. It does not bend, but boy howdy can it break if you don’t know how to handle it. The trick is to figure out which parts move and how, learn the machine and make it an extension of yourself. Meet the other half-way and know that it does not buck back, it is simply there. Eventually it becomes something steadying rather than infuriating. For Jazz, it feels like having a dance partner who absolutely refuses to change up any of the steps. A bit boring, sure, but Bebop’s a classy lady. She won’t entertain no mix-ups in her choreography. He’s learned to respect it.

This is all to say, Jazz is used to a presence bigger than himself in his own head. He expects something that feels like Bebop, but, well, actually alive.

What he gets is just a faint stir of something prodding at the edges of his consciousness, at least initially. Tasting the waters. It feels... cold, but not unpleasantly so. Steady. The same feeling Jazz gets when he finally performs a manouver he's spent months training for. Perfection through repetition. Confidence born of experience.

And then it spills into Bebop’s systems and threatens to swallow him whole.

There’s so much of it, an awareness so enormous, Jazz feels like a little guppy paddling above a circling whale. It's everywhere in Bebop, so it's everywhere in him. He can feel it envelop the sensors of his mech, exploring each and every string of connection that travels through the frame and into Jazz's brain. Her firewalls give out with a whimper as it slithers by, scanning, looking, analyzing, and that sense of perfected confidence turns into something demanding, something overbearing. The consciousness stills suddenly and centers on him for what feels like hours but is realistically just a few seconds. It simply stares at him. Large, intimidating and fully engrossing. Panic sets in as Jazz realizes that this thing can easily take control of Bebop if it wanted to. Cut off his oxygen, pump him full of adrenaline until his heart pops, have his own hand rip him out of his pod and squish. Dealer’s choice.

None of that happens. While Jazz is still reeling, the thing snakes its way into Bebop’s language data base, plucks something out, and then promptly retreats. The jack disconnects from her hip panel. He’s half-aware of the fact that he’s panting, adrenaline coursing through his veins as his small, animal brain yells warnings at him about a predator. There’s a prick in his arm as Bebop administers something calming into his bloodstream.

And then, in perfect English, the alien says:

“You should consider upgrading your firewalls.”

Chapter Text

“What the hell, man? Give a guy some warning before you— what even was that!?”

Prowl listens to the panicked tilt of the alien’s voice with a frown. He’s retreated a couple steps away from him the second Prowl was out of his systems. His doorwing tilts away from the exit tunnels and towards the mech, tracking his movement through the dark as his single optic struggles to recalibrate.

“I did,” he says slowly—calmly—trying not to agitate the alien further. He’s struggling to understand the negative reaction. 

Light receptors catch the flash of the mech’s visor as it pops up from where he was cradling his helm. “Whuh?”

“Warn you,” Prowl specifies patiently. “I showed you the cable. You opened your panel willingly and expressed consent.”

“Well—” The alien throws his hands in the air indignantly. “I didn’t know you were gonna get all up in my business like that!”

Prowl tilts his head in confusion. At first, because he’s trying to process the turn of phrase. Then, when the meaning clicks, because it still does not make much sense. He assumed the mech understood his intention to copy the language packets he uses, which required Prowl to know where they were, first. When they were not freely offered, he went looking himself. He made no move to delve into any personal data, stored memories, or even system specifications. He could have, and easily. The alien’s internal firewalls were flimsier than even that of quintesson tech. Unusual (<33%), for a mechanical life-form, but not impossible, especially for those in early stages of evolution. 

“…what did you think I was going to do?” he asks, unable to fully rid his voice of the note of doubt. 

The alien, having slid down the wall opposite of Prowl, shrugs. Another overlapping body language element. Pattern, or coincidence?

“Dunno.” He seems calmer. Prowl gauges that there’s minimal (12%) chance of him drawing weapons at this point, and cautiously tilts his doorwing back towards the entrance. “Not that.”

“Does your species not practice interfacing between individuals for data exchange?”

“Not… really,” the alien says, unhelpfully. “Why are you British?”

Prowl’s processor blanks at the sudden change of topic. “I am not. I can not belong to any of your planet’s nations,” he says meaningfully. Perhaps he overestimated his ally’s intelligence after all.

The mech waves his hand impatiently. “Nah, man, I mean— You sound British. Posh.”

Another second where Prowl’s processor catches up with the word choice. “Ah. The… accent, is it? Your internal dictionary provides two ways to pronounce and/or spell various words. I defaulted to the first one provided.”

There’s an amused huff from the other side of the room. “You sound like Brainstorm. ‘s weird.”

Prowl resets his language module, this time using the other listed accent. “Is this preferable?” he asks, trying to keep his impatience in check. They should be focusing on other things, but he cannot risk alienating his only viable companion, even if he seems strangely opinionated.

The mech hums his appreciation and leans forward. Prowl can just barely register the movements of his head fins rising back up into their default, inquisitive tilt.

“So, you just… know English now?”

“Yes,” he answers easily, stapling his fingers together. “I took the liberty of downloading other language packets marked as essential in your database.”

“…there’s like thirty of them.” The mech considers him for a moment. Prowl keeps his gaze to the best of his blurry vision’s ability. “¿Hablas español?”

“Sí. ¿Preferirías este idioma?” he asks.

The mech leans closer still. He does not have an expressive faceplate, but Prowl can hear the smile in his voice. “Wie steht es mit Deutsch?”

Prowl suppresses the urge to roll his optics. “Ja. Zufrieden?”

“Eine mehr!” the alien insists giddily. “Something more obscure… A po polsku umiesz?”

“Tak. Czy to naprawde jest konieczne?” Prowl says, exasperated. “Powinniśmy skupić się na priorytetach. Na przykład, na opracowaniu planu działania. Also,” he adds as the mech finally decides to inch closer to him again, “your pronunciation of most of those languages is barely legible, so let us continue in English.” 

The mech makes a snorting sound that Prowl has never heard before. “I’ll have you know I had straight A’s in Spanish class.” He sits down in front of him, not as close as he originally was, but whatever distress the connection has caused him seems to be largely gone. 

Still, it does not escape his notice that the alien chooses the spot on Prowl’s right side. Opposite of the hand he used to initiate the interface. Accidental, subconscious or deliberate? There’s still no EMF to judge his ally’s emotional state by. Prowl begins to suspect that he does not posses one. It’s… frustrating. Not knowing his companion’s attitude towards him makes it harder to calculate how Prowl should approach their interactions. 

He decides to play it safe. 

“I apologize for…” he wavers. “…startling you. It was not my intention.”

“How about this.” The mech leans back on his arms, helm tilted towards Prowl. “You forget I did… whatever it was I did earlier to get you so trigger-happy, and I forget whatever it is you just did that put the fear of God in me. Deal?”

Logically, Prowl knows that it’d be much more advantageous to properly discuss why both of those situations were upsetting to prevent them from repeating in the future. He’d also much rather not have those conversations, so he nods his agreement. 

“Deal.”

“Awesome,” the mech chirps and leans towards him with renewed vigor. “And on that positive note, I’d really love to stop referring to you in my head as ‘the alien robot’, so let’s get the introductions out of the way.” He extends a single hand. “Name’s Jazz.”

Prowl stares at the limb. More overlapping body language. The likelihood of it being coincidental is rapidly lowering (<40%). The reasoning still escapes him, however. While not unheard of, it is not common (19%) for species originating from different planets to share similarities in their non-verbal communication, even in those with similar physical forms. In Prowl’s case, it is more likely (45%) that whatever this ‘Jazz’ is might very well be a different evolutionary branch of a Cybertronian life-form. Prowl’s ancestors were spacefarers, and natural social and physical chameleons. Adaptable by design. They could easily integrate into a society that wasn’t originally theirs. Many old legends speak of those mechs settling on their planet of choice, initially due to scholarly inquisitiveness, only to eventually decide to never move on, or to return to Cybertron, for that matter. That period of their planet’s history is often considered as the—

“Uh, you okay, man?”

Prowl’s head snaps up. He quickly cordons off the logic tree that was eating up his processor power. “Affirmative. My designation is Prowl.” He takes the offered hand. “Apologies. I have quite a backlog of data waiting to be processed. It is proving rather… distracting.”

The blur of Jazz’s visor sweeps up and down his frame. Prowl’s doorwing twitches in discomfort. “That why you’ve been tripping over your own legs?”

He lets out a long vent. “In combination with my physical injuries, yes. Loathe as I am to admit it, I am of little use until I take some time to recuperate, at least mentally.”

There is a beat of silence. “You mean like… sleep?”

Prowl checks his internal dictionary. “I believe that is the closest equivalent, yes.” He sits up straighter and puts more confidence into his voice. “I may be a liability in my current state, but the data waiting to be processed has a significant chance—” (67%) “—of being relevant to our potential routes of—”

Before he has the chance to finish, a loud, echoing clatter sounds out through the cave system. Prowl freezes, doorwing hitched up high as his audials strain to pick up any further noise. 

“What was that?” he asks once the echo subsides, voice pitched low and careful.

 “That—” Jazz says, uncharacteristically grim, “—is our cue to get the hell out of dodge.” Similarly stock still thus far, he climbs to his feet soundlessly, visor pointed in the direction they originally came in through. “We’ve got two C-fours hot on our trail.”

Prowl strains his audials, but the only thing he can hear is the sound of his own vents cycling louder as TacNet starts to analyze the exact dimensions of the room they’re in. “I’m not picking up anything. What is a C-four?” He needs more data. 

“Category Four. Can feel them scurrying around further out, trying to dig up the tunnel I collapsed.” Jazz taps his foot lightly against the ground. “C’mon, up we get,” he urges, turning back to Prowl, frame coiled with stress and ready to spring.

“I still don’t know what a Category Four is,” he says, frustration seeping into his voice. He can’t plan if he doesn’t know what he’s planning for.

“Four legs, nasty yell and an even nastier attitude.” Jazz, for his part, starts to get similarly exasperated when Prowl doesn’t immediately follow. “Like to call their friends over when they catch you, make it a real party. I’m not feeling too festive right now, though, don’t know about you.”

Quadrupedal with a distinctive yell acting as alert for other quintessons. He’s talking about Scouts. “How many?”

“Two. Do you need me to carry you, or…?” Jazz makes a hurried motion towards the exit.

Prowl ignores him. “We should stay here and fight.”  

Jazz lets out a frustrated sound, feet skipping in place. “Man, don’t get me wrong, I’m good, but I’m not ‘take out two C-fours without either of them setting off’ good.”

Prowl gets up shakily, his balance still disrupted by his second wing remaining folded against his back. “You do not have to be. I will take out the other target.”

“Yeah, okay, no offense, but—” Jazz slumps. “Actually. I ain’t got the time for your sensibilities right now. Your balance is shot, you keep zoning out on me and I’m pretty sure you’re at least half-blind. Your not taking out nothing, my man.”

Prowl redoubles his efforts to stop his frame from swaying. “My optic is undergoing self-repair. It’s functioning at more than 50% capacity already.” It’ll hardly be the main sensor he’ll rely on to make the shot, anyhow.

“Uh-uh,” Jazz says. “If your accuracy with a gun is about the same as you looking me in the eye rather than over my shoulder, then sorry, but I ain’t taking those chances. We run.”

He grabs Prowl by the arm and starts pulling them towards the exit. Prowl bristles, plates rising reflexively at the sudden touch. “You’re making a tactical mistake. There is a 71% likelihood of the Scouts catching up with us, which will inevitably end in a confrontation.”

“I’ve worked with worse odds,” Jazz grunts, trying to get Prowl’s arm around his shoulder in order to get them to move faster.

Prowl plants his feet and forces the mech to face him. His optic recalibrates, making sure he looks down directly into the blue visor. “But we don’t have to,” he stresses. “If we stay on familiar territory and prepare, we have 84% chance of dispatching the enemy without giving them a chance to call for reinforcements. Compare that with our odds out in the open—” (23%) “—or in a tight tunnel—” (7%) “—and the choice should be obvious.”

As if to accentuate his point, another crash echoes behind them. Jazz stares at him, unmoving, faceplate expressionless and frame tight with stress. 

For a moment, Prowl thinks he will turn around and leave. Prowl might have, were he in his place. They are still virtually strangers, and Jazz has no guarantee that his earlier statement about finding a potential escape route is anything but a lie meant to preserve his safety. What he can guarantee, however, is that leaving Prowl behind will buy him precious time to escape.

Jazz sighs. His visor momentarily turns to the ceiling with a soft curse before he jabs Prowl’s chest plate with a single finger angrily. “If we die here, I’ll find your metal ass in whatever version of the afterlife y’all have and haunt it until the end of time.”

And then, before Prowl fully processes all the words, he slides away towards the entrance of the cave, back plates scraping on rock faintly. A blade slides out of an invisible compartment on his wrist before his whole frame stills completely, visor dimming. 

“You’ve got three minutes until the cavalry gets here. Two until they’re in hearing range, so if you’ve got any pointers, let’s hear them now, Numbers.”

Prowl doesn’t question how the alien knows this, nor the validity of the data. He doesn’t have any other information to work with. “The tunnels are slim enough that two Scouts will not be able to enter at the same time. You take out the second one after it passes the border, I shoot the one in the front.”

“You make it sound so simple,” Jazz hums, voice pitched low. 

Prowl walks past him and takes position a dozen steps further on his left. Blue visor tracks his movements closely. He resists the urge to flick his doorwing in discomfort.

“It is.” Prowl retrieves his gun from subspace and assumes proper form, hand extended, hip cocked, before locking the joints in place. TacNet feeds him potential bullet trajectories, simulations of enemy movements, predictions about where and how Jazz will strike. “In theory, it is very simple. Cause and effect. We just have to choose one that favors us.”

Jazz scoffs. The blade on his wrist retracts, and whips out. The motion repeats again, and again. Prowl’s internal clock ticks down. 26 seconds until audible communication will alert the enemy of their presence.

“Try to stay low to the ground,” Prowl mutters just as his audials pick up the first footsteps down the tunnel. Jazz doesn’t get to answer.

They wait. Four pairs of legs continue steadily making their way towards them. Jazz’s visor dims further, frame motionless. If he has vents, Prowl can not hear them. He cuts his own off momentarily and dismisses the system alerts notifying him about his core temperature rising to dangerous levels. He doesn’t bother dimming his own optic. Quintesson Scouts are effectively blind. They rely on smell and hearing to track their prey. 

When the first alien clicks reach his audials, Prowl unlocks his left doorwing and lets it flare out. Instantly, he’s flooded with pain pings, but not enough to shut him down. The room becomes clearer, rock edges sharper in his mind, the planes of Jazz’s plating less blurry. TacNet eagerly accepts the new data and spits out ballistics with far higher accuracy ratings.

The first Scouts’ muzzle peeks out of the entrance tunnel. Nostrils flare. With a wet snort, more of the creature emerges and Prowl suddenly recalls that he has never seen a quintesson Scout in person. 

(The closest he’s gotten was the decapitated head Sideswipe brought back to base as a war trophy, and which promptly ended up in deep space when Red Alert was made aware of the fact.) 

He’s read detailed reports on the beasts, however. In fact, some of them were written by him after many hours of studying footage recovered from front-line fighters. And now it stood within reach of his own sensors. Sleek, scaled body with a whip-like tail and a triangular head lacking any optics. Quadrupedal, each limb ended in a set of cloven hooves. Thick whiskers run along its snout, twitching occasionally as it smells across the dusty ground. It comes to around Prowl’s midsection, although its entire body length trumps his, even in alt-mode.

It stops briefly just outside the entrance. Two sets of scaly folds peel away from the back of its head, revealing thin, delicate cartilage reverberating inside. Listening. Prowl’s joints strain under the stress of having to stay in one place for too long. He does not unlock them. A couple steps ahead, Jazz’s frame stays perfectly still despite the creature being within hand’s reach of him.

Sensing no movement or sound, the Scout stalks forward with a series of insect-like chitterings, hooves clacking on rock. Slowly, its broodmate follows it inside.

It arches its head up, nostrils flaring. The movement bares its vulnerable throat perfectly for Jazz’s blade to sink through and pierce the creature’s brain.

Prowl unlocks his joints just as the first Scout spins around at the sudden movement. The folds on its head peel away violently, and its snout splits into three sections that flare out, pointing at Jazz who is still attempting to retrieve his blade from the second Scout’s corpse. 

The creature’s chest expands as it draws a deep breath, ready to let out a scream loud enough to alert every other quintesson on this planet. Prowl’s doorwings tilt towards it, his optic recalibrates. TacNet draws a course from his gun, above Jazz’s shoulder, and into his target. Then it draws ten more possible angles of entry and calculates which one will prove the most likely to be lethal.

All Prowl has to do is adjust the position of his gun slightly to the left and squeeze the trigger. Recoil rattles the joints of his wrist. The bullet finds its target through the creatures open mouth, piercing its hard palate and lodging in its brain. The blood splatter is minimal. The Scout crumbles to the ground lifelessly, ears and mouth still flared out.

Prowl opens his vents and hot air rushes out of him with a relieved hiss. 

“Huh.” Jazz is inspecting the exit wound on the back of the Scout’s head curiously. “So you weren’t lying.”

“Why would I lie about a situation in which failure results in both of us dying?” Prowl asks, too tired to sound angry.

The mech abandons the quintesson corpse and stretches leisurely, blade slinking back into his writ. “Dunno. Still half-expecting you to sprout tentacles and try to eat me alive or something.”

Prowl musters up a scowl as his vents start to finally slow down. “That makes no sense.”

Jazz just shrugs. “Kinda par for the course when dealing with aliens.” He walks over to Prowl while he stores his gun back in subspace. “So, now that we’ve taken care of that, let me reiterate,” he says, faux-polite. “Let’s get the hell out of doge.”

“I still need time to rest,” Prowl protests. “We could stay here for just—”

“Nuh-uh!” Jazz interrupts him with a finger against his faceplate. Prowl flinches back. “I listened to one of your plans against better judgment, now you listen to me, Numbers.”

“That—” Prowl’s processor spins with several different things to refute. “—is not my designation,” he settles on, sourly. “I will only be able to provide us with an escape plan once I organize my deep memory, and I cannot do that while conscious.”

“Well, tough. We’ve got to keep on the move or the search party sent after this search party—” Jazz kicks one of the corpses. “—is gonna catch onto us. No use for an escape plan if we’re dead, yeah?”

Prowl chews on that fact for a moment, mouth pressed together. “I have to rest,” he insists. He does. He needs his processor to work properly. 

Jazz considers him, head fins tilting back slightly. They’re both quiet for a time. Prowl is trying to come to terms with the fact that they might realistically not be able to stop for long enough for him to recuperate mentally. It doesn’t cohere. He needs his mind functional. Needs it. Everything that makes him even remotely useful in this situation depends on his processor. He can deal with being physically compromised, with being carried around by a stranger if need be, with relying on him for protection. But the idea of not being able to think clearly for the remainder of this fiasco is highly distressing. He has to know what is happening, what should happen next, how to get them to that point, how—

“Alright, man, chill out before you blow a gasket,” Jazz says finally, snapping him out of his spiral. “For all I know you actually might, too…” he mutters quietly. “We’ll figure something out, yeah? Order of things: get out of the corpse room, then find a way to get you your beauty sleep while on the road.”

Clear directions. Specific tasks. He can do that. Prowl nods absently and when Jazz urges him to follow through the exit, he does. His legs move without much thought, headlights flickering on. System check comes back green in most areas, or at least functional. He folds his injured doorwing against his back again to give the limb more time to heal. The joints lock in place and the pain pings trickle down into nothing. 

“You can carry me,” he proposes as they walk. Jazz is choosing tunnels seemingly at random. Prowl has no choice but to trust him to know his way. 

“Believe me, Numbers, if I could sweep you off your feet and walk us out of here like a bunch of happy newlyweds, we’d already be halfway across the planet,” he says easily. “But you’re heavy and I need the energy in case we have to fend off something bigger than a bunch of C-fours.”

Prowl frowns, ducking under a low-hanging stalactite. “Half of that first sentence is incomprehensible. Why are you calling me that?”

“You clearly like statistics.”

“Only 11% of all our conversations thus far have included statistics. Hardly a reason for you to assign me an arbitrary nickname.”

“And you just made that number higher! Isn’t that something.”

“I accounted for my mention of percentages in that sentence in the number I provided.”

“…’course you did.”

Prowl squeezes his way through a particularly narrow passage, plates held close to his body. His doorwing scrapes against the ceiling with a flare of pain pings. On several occasions he has to partially transform in order to continue. Ahead of him, Jazz navigates the tunnel with an ease of someone who’s done it a hundred times. Prowl tries his best to follow the alien’s exact steps, but his frame is taller and not nearly as flexible. He doesn’t have retractable claws to grip onto rocks, either. 

Prowl’s plating rattles as he finally clears the passage and lets it shift back to its natural position. “I have more emergency rations in storage. Is your frame fit to consume energon?”

“Maybe,” Jazz says and vaults over a wall almost as tall as he is in a single, fluid movement.

“A frustratingly vague answer,” Prowl points out, taking much longer to pull his frame over the ledge. He hurries to catch up with his companion.

“It might power me up, it might make me explode. Might do nothing but clog fuel lines.”

Prowl scrunches his brows in thought. “Are those odds evenly split?”

Jazz gives him an incredulous look over his shoulder. “Man, I’m not drinking something that might make me explode, even if the odds are low.”

“Technically speaking, all fuel is combustible,” Prowl points out absentmindedly. “We could start with a low dose, see how your systems react to it.”

“Pass,” Jazz says and skips up the tunnel faster. “Shake a leg, Numbers. We’re almost out.”

Sure enough, the first vestiges of natural light are making their way into the dimness of the cave. Prowl switches off his headlights and follows them to the surface eagerly. 

The last stretch of the tunnel is almost horizontal. Jazz scales the ascend with little trouble, clawed fingers digging into orange rock, and extends a hand to help Prowl up. He ends up practically dragging him out of the tunnel and into the open with a scrape of plating against the hard surface. Prowl manages to keep himself from flinching, at least externally.

And then he’s lying on his back, doorwings pressed uncomfortably against the ground, single optic staring up at a blue sky with two suns, the first hanging low on the horizon, and the second still high. The result is a word that is bright, with almost no shadows to be seen anywhere. Especially where the two of them find themselves: a rocky, flat expanse with no protrusions to cast shadows in the first place. There is no vegetation, no fauna. Just orange rock stretching as far as Prowl can see. Which, admittedly, is still not very far. 

He can make out the quintesson Flagship in the south, just as colossal as he remembers it. Their traveled distance has done nothing to diminish its size. Before Prowl’s processor can get caught on catastrophizing over it again, Jazz claps his hands together with a ‘welp!’ and starts walking the other way.

“Where are you going?” he asks, alarmed.

Jazz turns around and continues walking backwards, arms spread. “Away from the big-ass alien ship. Duh.”

Prowl hesitates, shoots the Flagship one last glance, and hurries after Jazz. “But do you have any idea where you’re going?”

“Nope,” he says, popping the ‘p’.

“Do you have any course of action, or do you always just do the first thing that pops into your head?” Prowl asks, frustrated, finally matching his step.

Jazz turns to him, head fins at high mast and voice largely unaffected by the criticism. “I’m more objective focused.”

“And those would be?”

That blue visor sets its sights on the horizon. “Keep myself alive, get off this planet, keep you alive. In that order of importance. Right now number one on the list takes precedence, meaning we put as much distance between ourselves and the quints as we can.”

“We can’t just run forever,” Prowl points out. “The longer we dally in regards of constructing a plan, the less energy we’ll have on executing it, thus, less likelihood of success.”

“Okay,” Jazz agrees easily. “Let’s hear that brilliant plan of yours, Numbers.”

Prowl feels the first signs of real anger and kills his engine before it can rev out his frustrations. “As I’ve already said, I can’t formulate a plan until I rest.”

Jazz stops in his tracks and faces him, matching Prowl’s tone. “And as I’ve said, we can’t plan for shit if the quints get us while you’re catching some Z’s!” He sighs and continues, calmer, “We walk until we find shelter, or at least a place that’s easier to defend.”

“There’s no guarantee we will,” Prowl says.

“Still waiting for you to give me a better idea.”

Prowl considers their environment. Flat. Mostly even. Empty. “You could haul me.”

Jazz gives him an odd look. “Like… on my back? I said, man, I can’t waste energy—” 

“No, I mean on the ground. The road is suitable for it,” he explains patiently, despite feeling anything but. “Do you have a rope of some kind?”

Jazz, still looking dubious, raises his right arm. A panel below his wrist slides open to reveal a four-clawed grappling hook. “And this will be easier, how, exactly?”

Prowl stares at him. His optic recalibrates, bringing brief clarity to his vision, and he realizes that Jazz does not seem to have any elements on his frame indicative of a mobile alt-mode. For all Prowl knows, he might have no alt-mode in the first place. It would explain his confusion. 

TacNet feeds him simulations of the conversation he’s about to have. Prowl quickly cordons them off and decides it’ll be much more time proficient to simply give a practical demonstration. 

He transforms.

Chapter Text

Jazz’s general perception of Prowl so far can be described as something of an emotional seesaw. On one side, there’s the coolest, slickest piece of (living) technology Jazz—and the whole of humanity by proxy—has ever laid eyes on. He’s all gorgeous black and white plating, casually teaches himself thirty languages in a minute, and can make a shot most seasoned pilots wouldn’t be capable of in a mech that came straight off an assembly line, much less half-blind. 

But then the guy opens his mouth and the seesaw crashes to the other side, hard. Jazz fancies himself a person who can find something positive about anything, but boy howdy is it getting dire when it comes to Prowl’s personality. He’s starting to think they might have been better off communicating in quint.

Which, naturally, means that Prowl does something stupidly cool/freaky, and the seesaw soars back up. 

He falls forward. For a moment, Jazz is convinced he’s blacked out again and instinctively reaches out to catch him. He snatches his hands away when something bends in a way that looks distinctively unnatural. No joint should ever be at that angle, yikes. There’s a sound Jazz can only describe as shifting technology—gears grinding, metal sliding against metal, whirring of pistons. It’s hard to know where to look. The intended end result clicks for him when the wheels slot into place, deep black rubber contrasting with the orange rock underneath.

It’s a car. There really is no sidestepping that comparison: it’s got four wheels, what looks vaguely like a passenger cabin, and is low to the ground. Lower than an actual car, to the point where if there is a cabin behind those darkened windows, it’d have you laying down flat on your back. 

The vehicle is completely still. Jazz inches his way closer from where he took a few… strategic steps back when the transformation started. Curiosity wars with caution inside him as he slowly circles… Prowl? He recognizes certain parts of his frame. The wheels are obvious, and so is what he now realizes is a grill guard, eerily similar to the ones they use on the heavy-duty cop cars. 

Bebop brings up some stills of Prowl Jazz’s saved up and starts comparing the plating with different parts of the car. Everything matches up perfectly, although how half of them got to where they currently are is a mystery. Some of them seem a tad…misaligned, too. The parts that on a normal car would qualify as doors look especially clunky. The left one’s hinges are barely holding it together, revealing a little gap through which Jazz can just make out a mess of wires, lights and dials. 

He’s half tempted to pry it further away and peek inside. He’s also pretty sure Prowl is unconscious right now, on account of him not having given any sign of life in the last minute or so, and he already has a track record of touching him in inappropriate places while he’s snoozing. 

Jazz exercises self-restraint and chooses to crouch in front of the hood instead. 

“Numbers? You in there?”

No answer. Hm. 

“Prowl? Y’know, this is by far the coolest thing about you, so I really hope it didn’t kill ya.”

The car/alien/robot remains silent. Jazz rocks back and forth on his heels, thinking. Now that the cool factor’s wearing off, he’s once again aware of the fact that there’s an active pursuit after them. He’s itching to just turn around and start walking. He could also try to attach his grappling hook to Prowl’s grill guard and get on hauling, but that requires touching him, and Jazz isn’t too eager to get a gun in his chest again. 

The quint ship looms large in the sky behind the black and white vehicle. Decisions, decisions…

“I bet you’re gonna give me shit for this once you wake up,” Jazz sighs, taking out his grappling hook and letting the line unspool. “Which is crazy unfair, since you’re the one who keeps fainting on me.”

He doesn’t let himself linger on the possibility that his alien might already be dead as he takes a knee in front of the bumper. Jazz winds the line around Bebop’s right hand and definitely doesn’t think about all the myriad of ways in which Prowl could possibly kill him, either. He’s a highly advanced robot that can turn into a car, and Jazz is a little fleshy thing hiding inside a metal can. A highly advanced metal can by human standards, mind you, but clearly still just a can which Prowl could easily crack open.

Thing is, the ‘cool/aggravating’ seesaw Prowl is taking him on has nothing on the ‘helpless and injured/gonna suck my brain out through a bendy straw’ seesaw. That second one goes much higher, is generally more confusing, and makes Jazz’s head spin whenever he remembers the event which made his brain order its construction in his mind palace. He’s not easily scared. He fights giant alien bugs for a living, for fuck’s sake. But those guys don’t break into your mind and threaten to take complete control over the thing that has access to all your bodily functions. Without even meaning to, apparently. 

Jazz has made his peace with dying on the job back when he first got strapped into Bebop. Occupational hazard, and all that. That kind of violation, though? That’s a new, exciting, horrifying way to go he wasn’t even aware he desperately wanted to avoid. 

And Prowl keeps swinging between that—the massive consciousness that could trample all over Jazz without even noticing—and… a guy who can barely take a few steps in a straight line. It’s enough to give him whiplash. He’s used to dealing with uncertainties, it’s kind of his whole job description, but no one’s ever thrown him for a loop like this. It’d be impressive, if it wasn’t also deeply annoying.

But all of those pesky thoughts and emotions are for people who have other options to consider. And Jazz feels distinctly like a beggar right now, rather than a chooser, so he deliberately does not think about any of that as he winds the line connected to the grappling hook around Bebop’s frame in a makeshift harness. There’s just enough length for a couple loops around the arms and hips, and then he’s extending a hand towards Prowl’s hood, intending to steady the vehicle while he wedges the claw in between its grill guard. 

Four fingers spread across the white metal. Receptors pick up heat and translate the data for Jazz’s brain until he feels the ghost sensation in his own palm. Bebop asks him if he’d like her to administer something to slow down his rapid heart rate. He dismisses the request. 

There’s vibration under the hood that he first assumes to be an engine of some sort. But it feels too…subtle. A steady ebb and flow of tingling against his palm. Jazz finds himself entranced by the sensation. It reminds him of old electronics, the way they used to sing before people figured out how to quiet them down. A barely-there buzz in the air. Sitting in his living room and pressing his small palm against the bulky screen of the TV, feeling the electric fuzz dance over his skin, raise the hair on his arm. 

His ‘Ma would always turn the TV off before they started showing the news. He’d ask why, and she’d just smile tightly and usher him off to bed. Jazz would inevitably stay until the fuzzy sensation disappeared, trying to press his palm into the black screen with enough force to make the light parts of his skin disappear, until the back of his hand melted into the glass.

Something stutters to life underneath his palm and Jazz is pulled out of the memory. The tingling disappears under the rumble of a struggling engine. He stays frozen in place, unsure if sudden movements are a good idea right now. 

“Jazz…?” comes the now familiar voice, groggy and filled with static. The engine stutters once, twice, and then gives out. The car seems to almost sink even as small lights start popping up all over the frame in faint reds and blues.

Jazz lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding and falls back into a criss-cross, hands in his lap. Prowl sounds decidedly non-hostile, which is good. He also sounds like he’s fighting a hangover, which isn’t great.

“The one and only. How you doing, man? You blanked out on me again.”

“Apologies,” Prowl says, sounding clearer, but still sort of miserable. “The transformation sequence aggravated my injuries and forced me into a temporary shut-down. I might have… overestimated my ability to process through the additional pings.” 

Jazz hums something noncommittal, currently obsessed with trying to figure out where the voice is coming from. There’s something fascinating about talking to a car. 

“You’re a talking car,” he says out loud, just to have that sentence out there in the open where everyone can appreciate its ridiculousness.

“I… would not describe myself in those exact words, but I suppose you aren’t wrong,” Prowl concedes, sounding too tired to argue. “How long was I out for?”

“Ten minutes, give or take,” Jazz says, watching all the little faint lights shining around Prowl’s frame. “Can you still see me?” he asks, moving one hand in front of the windshield and waving.

“Yes. Please stop that.”

Jazz moves his hand to hover over the roof and wiggles his fingers. “How about now?”

“Yes.” Here’s that tone again: thinly veiled frustration. And then, more even, “You did not leave.”

“You have such a way with words, Numbers,” Jazz muses, watching Bebop’s arm soar through the air above Prowl. The lights flare up briefly at the closeness before fading again. “Makes everything you say sound like an accusation.”

“I was under the impression you were in a hurry.” The… boot? of the car springs up and slaps his hand away, startling Jazz into retreating. He may or may not have let out a frightened squeak at the movement. History shall never know.

Jazz clears his throat. “Still am. So, how about we get this show on the road?” He spins the grappling hook in between Bebop’s fingers meaningfully. 

Prowl’s grill guard shifts, the bars extending away from each other. Jazz takes that as an invitation and slides the claw in between them. They clamp back down once he removes his hand. Very weird. Very cool.

He gives the line a preliminary pull. It takes very little strength for the wheels to start rolling forward. Prowl is lighter than he looks, or at least lighter than a car of his bulk would be back home. Bebop’s systems calculate that this planet’s gravity is roughly two thirds’ of the one on Earth, which certainly helps. 

Sure enough, when Jazz starts walking and the harness tightens around Bebop’s frame, he can barely feel the additional weight.

“Is this form of transport sustainable?” Prowl asks quietly. He shows no signs of pain or discomfort at being pulled, but then again, it’s a bit hard to read a car. His voice is all Jazz has to go on.

“It’ll do,” he answers. In the corner of his vision, Bebop’s power levels blink from 35% to 34%. “So, is this the part where we play 21 questions? Because I’ve been prepping a list.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Prowl says flatly. “I need to enter a planned shut-down for my internal data-banks to properly process the surplus of information I’ve acquired from the Quintesson base. I will be fully unconscious for the duration.”

“What else is new...” Bebop’s feet leave cracked imprints in the orange rock. A second later they’re overlapped by two sets of tire marks. “How long are you gonna be napping for?”

There’s a brief pause. “Rough estimate is two hours.”

Bebop’s head fins droop. “And this’ll fix your fainting problem?”

Prowl lets out a sound that’s a sigh but not quite. “Self-repair can only achieve so much in such a short period of time, but it will certainly help. I will require proper medical assistance to fully restore my vision. For now, I will rely on my other senses. More importantly, once the data is processed, I can start looking for information about this planet. The existence of one Quintesson gate implies there must be more. All we have to do is locate them.”

“Piece of cake,” Jazz says with faux cheer. As Prowl’s voice drones behind him, Bebop’s sensors strain to make out anything ahead of them that isn’t orange rocks. No luck so far. 

“…are you satisfied with this arrangement?” Prowl asks after a lengthy beat of silence. Jazz can’t quite place his tone.

He shoots the car a quizzical look over his shoulder. “I can entertain myself for a couple hours, man. Snooze away.”

“That is— not what I meant.”

Jazz waits for him to clarify. He does not. The desert-like plain stretches ever forward. Bebop’s steps echo.

“I’m gonna need you to use your words here, bud. I’m no mind reader.” Can Prowl read minds? Did he peek into his thoughts when they were connected? Prowl, if you can hear this, please let me know by sighing in the most tortured manner anyone has ever sighed in.

Prowl lets out a tortured sigh. There’s also definitely some frustration in the mix, so Jazz’s mind palace most likely remains unstormed. “You’ve expressed several times now that you’d prefer to keep moving, and quickly. I am an obvious deterrent to that course of action. I’m trying to make it clear whether I can trust you not to abandon me while I am shut-down and completely defenseless.”

Jazz can’t help but snort. “Do you have any other options?”

“Yes,” Prowl says, matter-of-fact. “None of them have very high chances of success, however. But if you refuse to cooperate, I will choose them over you, regardless.”

It’s Jazz’s turn to sigh. “I am hauling your metal ass, aren’t I?” Or his… rear bumper, is it?

“Your habit of avoiding definitive answers makes you quite aggravating to talk to.”

Jazz turns around to face the car, not bothering to stop walking. “Pot—” He gestures to himself, and then to Prowl, “—meet kettle.”

“So does your insistence on using phrases I have no cultural or semantic reference for.”

“It means you’re kind of a dick, man.”

“Which brings me back to my point.” Prowl doesn’t quite raise his voice, but he sounds decidedly more heated. Bebop’s head fins perk up curiously. “You clearly dislike me. You seem to have little interest in making our cooperation easy. If you’d rather have us go our separate ways, you can just say so.”

Jazz makes a show of really considering it. For a moment there’s no sound other than Bebop’s footsteps and tires spinning lazily on the ground. 

“Nah,” he says finally, just as he can hear Prowl start winding up for another tangent. “You’re still my best ticket out of here. And…” Jazz attempts to put on a more reassuring tone of voice. “You don’t deserve to be left here all alone for the grand crime of being sorta annoying. Ain’t right.”

It’s still a challenge to collate the Prowl that appeared invulnerable in Jazz’s head and the current Prowl who seems to be at the end of his rope into the same person. At least now he knows you can get a rise out of the guy if you try hard enough. That’s one way to humanize him, he supposes. More importantly, it’s kind of fun. Prowl has expressed all of three emotions so far: calm, collected and dismayed. Maybe you could throw in smug. No real anger, though, but he’s starting to get there. Jazz gives himself eight hours (which is roughly how long he has before Bebop runs out of energy) to get him to really yell. Bonus points if he manages to do it over something of very little significance.

“So you refused to abandon me out of a sense of moral obligation?” Prowl asks after a while, sounding contemplative. And a little doubtful.

“Personal gain, too, if you want to be technical, and I bet you do.” Jazz readjusts the makeshift harness. “But… yeah. I know it might be hard to imagine, Numbers, but sometimes people do things for others out of the goodness of their heart.”

“Hm,” is all he gets as an answer. Weather Prowl doubts the validity of that statement in general or just in reference to Jazz remains unclear. Something about their exchange must have satisfied him, however, because next he says, “I’m going to shut-down now. I will be fully unresponsive for a time.” A brief pause, and then, quietly, “Be careful.”

The lights on his frame flicker out. Jazz is left alone.

“Just me and you again, old girl,” he hums out loud. 

In the corner of his vision, the percentage indicating power levels ticks down. Not for long.

“Yeah, yeah…” Jazz grumbles before perking up. “How about some music? Keep it real low, we’ve still got a tail to shake.”

(“I don’t think talking to your mech bodes well for your upcoming mental evaluation.”

“Mags, man, you are literally the only one on base who doesn’t do it. You’re the outlier here.”

“I fear that says more about the state of our pilots than me as a person.”)

He puts on a mix of Miles Davis’ livelier stuff. Bebop’s speakers vibrate with the smooth tones of a trumpet, and Jazz lets it sing its sweet song as he walks on. He doesn’t worry too much about alerting their pursuers. Whenever they decide to show up, he’ll be able to spot them from miles away on the flat plain. 

With the desert endless, his cargo rolling lightly behind him, and the soundtrack established, Jazz considers his options. 

Bebop’s going to run out of energy. This statement is slowly inching it’s way from the realm of possibility to cold, hard fact. He’s got eight hours left, and that’s assuming they don’t have to fight anything. So, realistically, he’s got something like four hours left. Maybe two. After that, Bobop’s going to enter stand-by, which leaves her completely immobile and siphons all left-over power into life-support systems. Ideally, this gives command time to find him and send a retrieval team. But since Jazz is off-planet, there will be no Powerglide to swoop in and give him a ride home. It’ll simply turn Bebop into a big, expensive coffin. One that Jazz will eventually suffocate in as the last of her systems go dark, since the atmosphere on this planet’s severely lacking in O2. Assuming the quints don’t get to him first.

So, that’s his current situation. As of right now, Jazz’s options as to how to deal with it look like this:

• A. Hope that Lady Luck presents him with a portal leading back to Earth in the next couple hours. 
• B. Figure out a way to fuel Bebop with the pink stuff Prowl gave him and hope she doesn’t explode.
• C. Die. 

Bebop’s sensors strain to try and pick up signs of anything other than orange rock on the horizon. No dice. The trumpet trills a melancholic note in his ear.

Oh, Miles, we’re really in it now.

With a sigh, Jazz takes out the cube from Bebop’s storage. The viscous liquid splashes languidly inside as he rolls it in between his fingers. What did Prowl call it? Energon? A little on the nose, but sure. 

Bebop’s scanners struggle to analyze the contents. Half of those compounds are made of stuff that definitely doesn’t feature on any periodic tables he’s familiar with. Jetfire would have a field day with this. 

Jazz still isn’t sure if Bebop will take to the fuel, but he’s willing to roll the dice at this point. There’s only one problem: this was made to be drank. With a mouth. A mouth that Bebop doesn’t have. There’s a little tear-away lid and everything. 

Mechs are fueled in the hangar, using a special mix the folks in engineering cooked up a long time ago, and which they actively work on improving through trials that result in something exploding more often than not. The fueling process also happens through an array of specialized equipment. One that Jazz doesn’t have on him, and even if he did, it’s too big for him to slot into place at Bebop’s hip. He can’t just… pour the stuff in there and hope for the best, as much as he’d like.

And here comes the real catch of plan B: Jazz is pretty sure that Prowl could do the trick from before to magic the necessary tubing into existence and feed Bebop the energon. Jazz would also rather die than let Prowl into his head again, and he has a sinking feeling that it’ll be a requirement for this whole procedure to work out.

He doesn’t want Prowl digging around in his head, partly because the experience, frankly, sucks, but also because as far as he knows, Prowl is convinced that Jazz is Bebop, and he has no intentions of correcting him about that one. He just has no idea what the guy will do. He’s perfectly content playing his cards close to his chest for now. Him? A meat-and-bones human? No, siree, not in this giant robot! Just metal and circuits in there, no fleshy business whatsoever.

“What is that noise?”

Jazz springs up with enough force to almost flip Prowl over to his hood. The car lets out a disgruntled noise as the wheels crash back to the ground.

“Jesus, man, don’t do that!” he yells, shooting him a scathing look, head fins pinned down. Bebop flashes him another request for administering calming meds. “It’s been like an hour, why aren’t you still asleep?”

“Apologies,” Prowl says, not sounding apologetic at all. Faint lights once again pulse weakly all around his frame. “The data processing is finished. I wrote a script for sorting through the files which targets certain key words. It utilizes a considerable part of my processor, but it allows me to stay conscious while it runs in the background.”

Jazz gives him a pointed look, head fins still pinned down. “Does that mean you can walk?”

The car, somehow, manages to looks bashful. “…it would not be advised. My self-repair works faster if I remain immobile, as well.”

Jazz tuts in mock disapproval and starts walking again. “Freaking pillow-princess.” He tunes Bobop’s sensors to keep track of what’s behind his back, just in case Prowl wants to give him another heart-attack. “And to answer your question: it ain’t just some noise, it’s music. Jazz.”

“Is it normal for your species to punctuate sentences with your own names?”

“I genuinely can’t tell if this is a serious question or your attempt at a joke, man.”

“You can safely assume I am always being serious.”

“Aaand you’re starting to sound like Magnus. Lovely…” Jazz sighs. “Jazz is a type of music. I like it, so I named myself after it.”

“Is… that normal?”

Jazz thinks that over for a second, head turning to look up at the sky. “Not really? Most folks around base go by a nickname, but it ain’t the case outside. Lotsa reasons why. I don’t pry.” He hopes Prowl won’t either. “Anywho, you’re one to talk. Are all of you guys named after fossil words?”

There’s a beat of silence Jazz has clocked as indication that Prowl is looking something up in the dictionary. “Our designation is usually linked to our purpose. I was under the impression humans were similar?”

Jazz scrunches up his brows. “How so?”

“Many of your names are linked with professions, are they not? Cook, Taylor, Smith, Fisher, Baker, Wright—”

“Okay,” Jazz cuts him off. “Point made. You’re not wrong about that, it’s just sorta… outdated? People tend to be a bit more proactive about it these days.”

“Hm. And this jazz—” Prowl waits for an especially soulful trumpet solo to finish before continuing, tone doubtful. “You enjoy it?”

Jazz snorts. “Yeah. Not a fan?”

“It’s… highly irregular.”

“Sort of the point, yeah.” Jazz gets an inkling about Prowl’s music taste based on that comment and starts to look through what he has saved up in Bebop’s memory. “Here, lemme play you something else.”

Unsurprisingly, Prowl is a big fan of classical music. Somewhat surprisingly, he seems to like the fast paced pieces much more than the slower arrangements. Vivaldi is an instant hit. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor gets an honest to god compliment, which especially tickles Jazz. He also seems fond of waltzes. 

“They remind me of the music composed for parade drills. They were a rare occasion in which live orchestras performed legally on Cybertron,” he explains after Jazz asks. There’s something about his tone that stops him from prompting for further details. They’re having their first-semi positive interaction! Jazz puts on more Tchaikovsky and makes a mental note to pry into the matter later.

After walking for another half an hour he starts to alternate between classics and more Miles Davis, with some Ornette Coleman and Alice Coltrane thrown in for flavor. Prowl continues to have no taste, but he valiantly weathers Jazz’s picks and withholds any too-scathing comments.

“I simply fail to see the appeal,” Prowl says after a pregnant pause which follows one of Jazz’s favorites. He has to speak up slightly over his laughter. “Music is supposed to be about harmony. Patterns. This is the antithesis to all of the fundamental rules of composition.”

Jazz is still grinning. “And who says that?”

“Common sense,” Prowl answers incredulously, prompting another amused snort. 

“It’s better live, I’ll give you that,” Jazz concedes. “You’ve gotta really hear it, man. There’s nothing else like it.”

“I’m sure,” Prowl says, dry as the rock under Bebop’s feet.

Which, speaking of, is starting to get really hard on the eyes. As much as Jazz is enjoying their jam sesh, there is still no end to the desert in sight. Jazz is weirdly glad in the moment for Prowl’s company, as questionable as it might be at times. He’d be going stir-crazy just walking on his own for this long with absolutely nothing to break up the monotonous landscape.

Well, there’s…something that just cropped up on Bebop’s sonic receptors. But it looks like—that can’t be right…

“Stop,” Prowl says suddenly, tone insistent. “I think I’ve found the file detailing the planet we’re on.”

Jazz takes a few more steps and does. “Uh. That’s great man, but we might have a problem—”

Prowl ignores him, apparently too preoccupied by whatever he’s reading through inside his own head. “Site I-310. Based on the sheer volume of records, this must have been a major outpost at one point. That’s good, it means more likelihood of a working gate.”

“Cool, cool,” Jazz says faintly, hurrying to disentangle the grappling hook from around Bebop’s frame. “Prowl, you should really come see this.”

There’s that sound of mechanical parts shifting again. “What could possibly be more important than finding a possible escape route? It seems we’re in luck too—there’s a larger base established near the northern pole; precisely the direction we’ve been heading towards.” Prowl, back as his robot-self is walking towards him, making animated gestures with his hands. He’s looking up at the sky, expression contemplative. “If we keep at our current pace, we should arrive in—”

Jazz grabs him by the arm and yanks back before he can plummet over the edge of the cliff. Prowl’s eye goes wide and bright when he finally sees the miles long death-drop below. The whole place so far has been so flat there is no way to see that the road just suddenly ends.

For a few, tense moments the two of them simply peek over the edge in grim silence. There’s a mess of green-gray protrusion at the bottom that could be trees but could also be more rocks. The terrain seems to be climbing prgressively further down. There’s a heavy mist over most of it that obscures any more details.

“This is bad,” Jazz comments. 

“It’s not ideal,” Prowl admits reluctantly, looking like he’s already trying to calculate the best way down.

Before either of them can say anything else, the perpetual silence of the planet is broken by a cacophonous roar. They spin around in unison to watch as the Quintesson Flagship, still  clearly visible in the sky behind them, opens one of the massive portholes on its side. It’s hard to make out at this distance, even for Bebop’s eyes, but something large and ugly flies out of it. Flies. There’s only one class of quints that big which also happen to come with wings.

Bebop’s power levels drop to 30%. Jazz swallows. “They’re dropping C-fives on us.” 

Prowl winces. “This is bad.”

Chapter Text

Prowl’s optic struggles to focus on the shape in the distance. He can sense Jazz fidgeting next to him, head fins pinned down. 

“What is it doing?” Prowl asks calmly, nodding towards the Quintesson Vessel. The brief rest has done wonders for his processor. He can finally think.

Jazz’s entire body language projects the desire for flight, his earlier relaxed manner now completely gone. “Just sorta… flying around the ship?”

He tilts his head. “Circling?”

“Sure.”

Prowl nods, satisfied, and turns back towards the cliff. “That’s good. It means they don’t know our positions. Gladiators—what you refer to as Category five—capable of flight often assist Scouts—that’d be Category four—in tracking persons of interest. It’s going to continue tracing progressively larger loops around the Flagship. That gives us time.”

“Do I want to know how much time?” 

“Enough.” 

Most likely. Based on their distance traveled from the ship, the speed at which the common winged Gladiator can fly, and his rough estimate of how high the drop is, TacNet is giving him some preliminary calculations regarding their chances of making it down before the Quintesson reaches them. They’re currently in the low eighties, but he’ll get a more distinct idea once he gets a better look at the next leg of their journey.

Prowl’s wing twitches. Jazz’s hand is hovering near his back while he leans over the chasm. For all that he’s been reluctant to directly touch him since their interface, he still seems to actively—almost instinctively—keep track of Prowl’s physical well-being and the potential need to support him. Prowl can’t say he’s too eager to have the strange mech touching him either, not while the ghost-memory of clawed fingers attempting to pry his chest plates apart is still fresh in his mind, but he does not comment on the fact. He can’t afford to focus on his own comfort right now, especially since Jazz’s reflexes might very well save his life.

“Enough time for what? Talk to me Numbers, c’mon,” he says, stress and frustration mixing in his voice. There’s the newly familiar sound of his wrist-blade sliding in and out of its compartment. Prowl catalogs it as a nervous tick.

“I thought it was obvious,” he says, not looking away from the stone wall stretching downwards. It must have originally been artificially terraformed to be a flat, vertical surface, but years of weather induced erosion caused its face to gain plenty of recesses and potential footholds. There are occasional shelves sticking out from the rock which should prove strong enough to support their combined weight. “We’re going to climb down.”

Jazz barks out a humorless laugh. “Yeah, no.”

Prowl turns to him with a frown. “Are you not capable of making it all the way?”

“Prowl, baby, if I had more power in these ol’ circuits, I’d have both of us halfway down already.” Jazz looks perfectly at ease walking along the edge of the cliff, inching his way closer. Head fins at half mast, he jabs a single finger at Prowl’s chest, not actually touching his plating. “Do you know anything about rock climbing?”

“In theory—”

“This is the furthest from theory you can get, man.”

Prowl stands his ground, doorwing tilting up in challenge. “It’s also procedural. I see the route we have to travel. I know what my frame is capable of. I can calculate how much strain each individual rock can take. All I have to do is chart a course based on the available data and follow it.” He slaps Jazz’s fingers away from his chest with a hard look. “This has everything to do with theory. I was built for this—for planning how to deal with scenarios like this.”

“Exactly,” Jazz scoffs, crossing his arms. “Planning. How about actually doing? I ain’t too eager to watch you plummet down like a sack of metal bricks.”

Prowl suppresses a sigh. “You won’t. I am confident in my ability to make it down this cliff.”

Jazz’s fingers tap a quick rhythm against his own plating. That blue visor stares up at Prowl, considering. “If you slip, there’s no catching you. Even if I’d wanna. You get that?”

He meets his gaze, unflinching. “I am aware, yes.”

“Fine.”

And with that, the claws on Jazz’s hands retract and, without as much as a glance back, he drops over the edge of the cliff. 

Prowl feels panic spark in his chest. The prospect of being left alone is still hardly ideal, and despite his eccentricities, he’s not eager to see the alien mech die due to overconfidence. But when Prowl hurries to lean over the chasm, Jazz is navigating the sheer wall with the same grace which accompanies everything else he does. TacNet struggles to keep up with his movements as he drops from one foothold to another, clearing jumps that border on suicidal, claws digging into the cliff face and sending small rocks tumbling into the abyss below. 

Jazz lands lightly on a wide shelf. He drops into a criss-cross, leans back on his arms, and stares up at Prowl expectantly.

“Was that necessary?” he asks with a scowl, voice raised slightly to make up for the distance.

“Waiting~” Jazz sing-songs. 

Prowl doesn’t dignify that with a response. He straightens back up and unlocks the joints of his injured doorwing, flaring the limb out to test for acceptable range of movement. System diagnostic informs him that self-repair is 89% complete, with most left-over damage being negligible or merely cosmetic. The remnants of pain are manageable, although he might still keep it folded for a time once he makes it down. He can’t, however, risk being unbalanced during what he’s about to do.

With majority of his sensors in working order, he once again considers the face of the cliff (and actively ignores Jazz’s attempts at getting his attention). The angle is less than ideal, but he can sketch a preliminary course and update it as he makes progress and gains a better read on his immediate surroundings. 

Prowl marks his first target destination and—utilizing much more care than Jazz did—drops over the edge. His wings flare out, TacNet spinning into motion and eagerly accepting the new data stream. Prowl feels the remnants of doubt still clouding his processor disappear at the ease with which the program runs, now that his memory is no longer cluttered with a surplus of disorganized information. Potential paths spring up in the field of vision provided by his doorwings and TacNet makes short work of finding the one with best success ratios. 

He makes his way down. Slowly. Deliberately. Each move carefully weighted in the grand scheme of the entire journey, constantly updating and improving on the overall plan. His limbs moving is almost an afterthought to everything happening inside his head. 

“Sooo… What’s your favorite color?”

Prowl freezes halfway through reaching for another foothold, head snapping down. Jazz is staring up at him, legs swinging idly over the edge of the shelf he’s sitting on. He appears either unaware or unbothered by the structural instability of the rock below his frame.

“I’m preoccupied,” he says emphatically. 

He lets go of his handhold. His feet find purchase below a second later. The action brings him to be face-to-face with Jazz. 

“What, the big, bad alien robot can’t multi-task?” He gets up and stretches lazily with a rattle of plates. “Mine’s blue, by the way.”

Prowl does not look at him, already focused on the next step. “That information is useless to me.”

“Ouch,” Jazz says in a tone of voice devoid of any actual hurt.  “C’mon, man, this is gonna take forever with the snail-pace you’re going at. Humor me a little.”

Prowl flinches as Jazz jumps off the shelf right next to him. He can feel his frame stop suddenly somewhere below with a scrape of claws on rock. 

“I don’t have a favorite color,” he says flatly, hoping this’ll be the end of that conversation.

It’s not. 

“Disappointing, but not surprising. Okay, now you ask me something.”

Prowl squints down at where Jazz has managed to find another shelf to antagonize him from. This one is sturdier, but slimmer. “Why?”

He gets a shrug in lieu of an answer. “’s how the game is played.”

Prowl makes sure they’re at eye level again before looking Jazz directly in the visor. 

“No,” he says flatly, and continues further down.

“I’m gonna treat that as you skipping your turn,” he hums, undeterred. “New question: how long have y’all been at war with the Quints?”

He supposes it’s at least somewhat related to their predicament. “They’ve been present and antagonistic in our system for millennia, but the full-scale invasion spans merely four hundred and thirteen of your years.” It also wouldn’t hurt to get more data about his ally. “How about you?”

“Oh, y’know. Something in similar range, a lil less, maybe. ‘s been so long I stopped counting.”

Then again, getting a direct answer from Jazz borders on impossible. 

Prowl’s finger joints are starting to lock-up. He makes it to the next safe spot—what was once a tunnel burrowed deep under the planet’s crust, but what was turned into a mouth of a cave whenever the Quintessons decided to begin the terreformation process. The portion tall enough to accommodate his frame is shallow, but still provides ample space and sturdy enough foundation that Prowl doesn’t have to worry about it giving under his weight.

Or Jazz’s, who drops into a roll from above him. His doorwings twitch anxiously at the way the rock cracks in places where he first made contact. Still, the shelf remains stable. Below it, the empty space yawns wide and ever-present. They’re perhaps one fourth of the way there.

Prowl sits down a safe distance from the edge and sets an internal timer for five minutes while he goes about flexing the joints in his hands.

“So, what did you do before the invasion?”

Prowl’s optic focuses on where Jazz is sitting near the edge, one leg swinging casually over the chasm. It’s the first opportunity he has to properly take in his appearance with his vision actually functioning.

He’s entirely black and white plating, dark mesh and blue biolights. For someone as… animated as he is, Jazz’s frame is largely inexpressive, with the exception of his head fins. The blue visor takes up most of his face, leaving no space for a potential mouth. He only has four fingers at each hand and digitigrade legs, which contribute both to his impressive balance and his status as something distinctively alien. He almost resembles empurata patients. 

Prowl cringes. Victims. Empurata victims.

“I was an Enforcer.” He hesitates, once again wishing for Jazz to have an EMF to judge his reaction by. “My division specialized in pursuit and capture of especially evasive criminal targets.”

Jazz’s leg stops its relaxed swinging. That blue visor turns to stare at Prowl. “You’re a cop.”

There’s something about the way he says the words that has Prowl’s doorwings hiking up defensively. “I believe that is the closest equivalent, yes.”

“That explains… so much,” Jazz says quietly, like a revelation. 

Prowl can’t help but bristle at that. “Excuse me?”

Jazz shakes his head, visor turned skywards in thought. “You have a very specific flavor of ‘entitled bastard’ about you. This makes perfect sense.”

It takes conscious effort to stop his engine from revving. “You are making a lot of assumptions about things you cannot possibly begin to comprehend.”

“Yeah, I dunno.” Jazz gets up to his feet. There’s a stillness to his frame that Prowl doesn’t like. The only time he’s seen it before was when he was about to put a blade through a Quintesson Scout. “Based on that little comment you made about music only being legal during certain government gigs, I assume it ain’t the best of systems. And last I checked, law enforcement is pretty universally pro the guys who line their pockets with cash and ammunition.”

Prowl vents out the heat from his rapidly heating processor and tries to focus on massaging the kinks out of his joints. “I refuse to have this conversation with someone so ill-suited to speak about the minute intricacies of—”

“What, you think you guys have a monopoly on capital ‘b’ Bad Government?” Jazz snorts. The blade on his wrist slides out of its compartment, and then slowly retracts. Not a nervous tick, not this time. “Plenty of that where I come from. And no upstanding folks I know would willingly apply to help them.”

“I did not apply,” Prowl says, stopping what he’s doing to eye him warily. “I was constructed cold into an Enforcer frame.”

That does seem to give Jazz a pause. “You were literally born a cop?”

“It’d be more apt to say my body was built for the profession, but in essence, yes.” 

Jazz shakes his head. “Now that might just be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” 

His internal clock informs him the five minutes are up. Prowl shakes out his hands and approaches the edge of their shelf, already planning his further path down. “Hardly. In a lot of ways, I was one of the few lucky ones—I did not mind my assignment. More than that, I was content with it. Many mechs struggled with accepting the role in our society that corresponded to the frame the Senate has deigned to choose for them.”

“I mean, can you blame them?” Jazz stands by his side, arms crossed over his chest. His earlier hostility seems to be gone, replaced by an almost pensive tilt to his voice. “Back home they tended to at least give you a choice about what you wanna do, even if the selection was shit.”

Prowl cocks his head. “Was it? For you.”

He shrugs. “Was for most people who look like me.”

Before he can ask him to clarify what that means, Jazz jumps off the shelf. Prowl follows at a slower pace. Perhaps he was a victim of something vaguely equivalent of Empurata procedures after all.

Jazz seems to make a conscious effort to stay closer to him over the next leg of their climb. His uncharacteristic quiet is starting to make Prowl uneasy, so he decides to pick up the conversation again.

“I did,” he says slowly, as careful about his choice of words as he is about each precarious step downwards. “Blame others for their lack of conformity, that is. At least initially. I was under the impression that everyone was as inherently well-suited for their purpose as I was for mine. I saw non-compliance as nothing more than shunning your responsibility to the rest of society.”

“Must have been real difficult for you, huh?” Jazz’s voice sounds out from below him, sharp and bitter. “Dealing with all those criminals who just refused to listen to common sense.”

Prowl doesn’t rise to the bait. He’s had this conversation many times, with himself, and with others. Of all the things about his past that make him angry, ashamed or guilty, this—this just makes him tired.

“I’ll be the first one to admit that my actions often led to termination of individuals undeserving of their sentence.”

Prowl makes a longer leap to another wide shelf. Jazz is already there, legs criss-crossed and helm propped up on a fist. 

“You killed people for the government,” he says, matter-of-fact.

“I tracked people down for the government,” Prowl corrects. “What was done with them afterwards was out of my hands.” 

The rock under their feet feels unsteady. Prowl scowls, moving further away from the edge, trying to keep his footsteps light. TacNet pores over the web of cracks in the shelf, trying to locate the weak spots.

Jazz snorts, seemingly unaware of their precarious position. “Yeah, I bet telling yourself that makes you feel better.”

Prowl sighs and turns to face him, cracks underfoot momentarily forgotten. “I did very well carrying out orders that came from mechs unfit to assign them in the first place. I am not proud of that. But I also refuse to believe doing otherwise would have yielded better results.”

Jazz’s head fins swivel down doubtfully. “Uh-huh.”

Prowl shoots him a hard look. “I mean it. Many of the mechs I apprehended posed a real threat to others, regardless of whether their actions were justified or not. One misunderstood individual is not worth hundreds of innocent bystanders.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jazz raises to his feet languidly and starts walking to the edge of the shelf. “Clearly you’re the actual victim here, not all the people you threw into the meat grinder.”

Prowl frowns, not at the comment, but at the tremors underneath his feet. The part of the shelf Jazz is on is less stable than the rest of its surface. Still, it should hold under the combined weight of two Cybertronians, given the planet’s gravity. 

…Jazz is not a Cybertronian.

Prowl assumed he’s lighter than him due to his smaller size. 

The shelf proves him wrong and gives away under Jazz’s feet.

Jazz realizes what is happening a moment too late to grab onto the leftover edge. Prowl realizes it just in time to grab his hand before he falls.

He ends up on his front, arms extended over the edge to hold onto Jazz as he swings with the leftover momentum. Prowl can hear the crack of rocks shattering down below. TacNet takes this opportunity to measure the other mech’s frame. It is, in fact, heavier than Prowl despite their height difference.

Jazz’s visor keeps jumping in between the drop and Prowl. He doesn’t say anything, but his head fins are low and he’s holding back with enough strength to dent the metal of his fingers. 

Prowl’s struts are already protesting the additional weight. It takes considerable effort, but he manages to heave Jazz’s frame up to the point where he can get back up on what remains of their shelf. The two of them scramble to press their backs against the face of the cliff. 

“Hey, Numbers?” Jazz says after a while, looking straight ahead. He doesn’t seem particularly disturbed by the near-death experience.

Prowl, for his part, is still trying to get his vents to slow down. “Hng?”

“I have a hypothetical for you.”

He turns an incredulous look towards him. “What?”

Jazz is still busy staring off into space. “You’ve got folks back home waiting for you, yeah?” 

“Yes. What is this—”

“How many?”

Prowl’s mouth clicks shut. “Thirty seven.” Unless something has happened while he was gone.

Jazz nods. “Now, let’s imagine a scenario—doesn’t matter how it happened—but you’re in a situation where you have to make a choice: you can save yourself, or you can save all of them. Which one is it?”

“My team,” Prowl answers immediately. 

“Why?”

“It’s a simple equation; thirty seven lives are worth more than my singular one.”

The wind rustles some pebbles off their shelf, sending them tumbling into the abyss below. When he looks down, Prowl can see first signs of old, half-alive vegetation amongst the heavy mist which covers this part of the planet.

“Okay.” Jazz follows his gaze down, head tilted in thought. “Another hypothetical: same scenario, but now instead of your people I want you to choose a collection of thirty seven criminals that the government had you ‘track down’.” He curls two fingers of each hand while saying the last part, twice in a quick succession. The gesture means nothing to Prowl. “Do you still save them?”

Prowl hesitates. Jazz’s head fins droop, as though that alone is enough of an answer.

“I’d need more context,” he says finally.

“Didn’t need any context for your friends, did you.”

Prowl makes a frustrated sound. “The context is this,” he gestures to their surroundings. “The war. The invasion.”

“So simple math has different rules in different scenarios? Funny how that works.”

“You’ve tricked me into—”

“Admitting that you’re full of shit? You don’t need my help with that, man.” He pats Prowl gently on the shoulder on his way to start climbing down again. “Thanks for not letting me fall, by the way.”

Prowl grits his teeth and follows. Jazz’s pace is much slower, although he is not sure whether to assign it to his fear of repeat falling or something else entirely.

“The survival of my team—and therefore the only mechs capable of resisting the Quintesson threat—is imperative to the continual existence of our species. The same importance cannot be attributed to those who, if left unsupervised, would most likely have taken actions which would result in casualties.”

“Right. And it’s their fault, and not the people’s who made a system in which folks would rather throw away their lives than continue living in it.” Jazz shakes his head. “But hey, man, focus on the positives! Whatever shitshow you helped to hold afloat on that planet of yours was dismantled when the Quints barged in, yeah? That’s at least two planets’ worth of corrupt governments dealt with. Really, we should be thanking them.”

Prowl actually stops to stare at his retreating back in disbelief. “You cannot possibly be serious.”

Jazz laughs, light and humorless. “’m not. But, I mean, it did skip several really long steps in the whole ‘overthrowing the government’ gig. I like to think of it as a sort of… soft reset.”

Prowl can’t stop his engine from revving this time, adding a growl to his voice. “You truly think the respective invasion of our planets and annihilation of countless lives was a good thing?”

The answer he gets sounds almost nonchalant, which only serves to agitate him further. “Eh, not really. But it did fix some problems that really needed fixing.”

Prowl throws the hand currently not holding onto the face of a cliff into the air. “Thousands have died—!”

“Thousands would still have died to make sure that Senate of yours stayed in power. Same case for where I come from. And you’d be right there, helping them do it.”

“I should have let you fall down to your death.”

Jazz does laugh then, loud and sudden, like it was startled out of him, before dropping down a considerable distance. He continues to skip around at his earlier breakneck pace, and soon enough Prowl is left out of earshot, unless he decides to shout. He doesn’t bother. His processor feels like it’s clogged all over again.

The rest of the climb goes by in silence. Jazz asks him no further questions. If not for the fact that he stops every once in a while to lounge on an occasional shelf, Prowl would be convinced he’s decided to abandon him. He has to take progressively more frequent breaks as his joints protest the prolonged strain, and Jazz always happens to be somewhere in his line of sight. Prowl watches him, the casual grace with which he swings from foothold to foothold, how he leaps off rocky shelves with all the confidence of a creature not tied down by the forces of gravity, and he wonders how someone this competent can simultaneously be so needlessly infuriating. 

By the time he makes it to his last planned stop before reaching the ground, Prowl’s fingers are shaking as he holds them motionless in his lap. They’re just above the heavy curtain of mist that blankets what appears to be a forest of sorts, although it is still hard to gage at this distance if the ‘trees’ are truly that or just more rocky formations. The cliff face itself has long since lost its bright orange coloration, growing progressively darker, its consistency harder, as they descended. Doubled with the loss of natural sunlight over the cliff’s edge, visibility is getting quite low, and the horizon stretches in shades of blacks and dark blues.

Jazz is sitting at the edge of their current shelf, legs swinging, visor trained on what’s below them. He looks up at Prowl as he approaches, acknowledging his presence for the first time since they last spoke.

“Ouch,” he comments, nodding towards where the sharper rocks have dug into the soft mesh of Prowl’s fingers. Energon stains his hands.

“All minor injuries,” he reassures, although he can’t quite stop himself from wincing at the sight. He’s disabled the pain receptors in his fingers some time ago. “Nothing another medigrade cube won’t fix.”

Jazz turns away again, drumming an anxious beat into his thigh. TacNet files it away as another tick. “How many of those do you have left?”

Prowl considers him for a long moment. “Enough to spare,” he says finally. 

There’s a sigh, and with his head fins at half-mast, Jazz looks up to meet his gaze. Prowl is convinced he’s about to ask him to share, and is already calculating what intake they should start him with to ensure his frame is compatible with energon. It’d be best if he could get a proper read on Jazz’s specifications first, perhaps analyze some of his code concerning— 

Prowl’s thought process grinds to a halt when he sees Jazz’s head fins shoot up in alarm, visor flashing brighter. Then, before he can utter a single word, a hand lands on his shoulder with the uncomfortable tickle of an activating magnet, and Prowl is pulled over the edge. It all happens so fast that he doesn’t have the time to yell.

They’re still high enough that a fall has considerable chances of proving fatal. TacNet feeds him a constant stream of their survival rates dropping as the speed at which they plummet down rises. The numbers will reach zero before the two of them reach the ground.

 Before that can happen, there’s a sharp tug which, to Prowl’s surprise, does not manage to tear his arm out of its socket, and suddenly their fall is more of a swing through the air in a wide arc, still at highly dangerous speeds. 

But not lethal ones, it turns out. Whatever was holding them up snaps, and they’re sent tumbling over the sharp, rocky ground. Prowl has the clarity of mind to tuck his doorwings tightly against his back. He comes to a sudden stop by crashing into something tall and hard. Dislodged rocks rain on his frame, and Prowl presses all his plates close to his body to avoid them getting stuck anywhere potentially dangerous.

He’s still dazed, processor spinning, as TacNet gets to analyzing their new surroundings. The reason behind his earlier confusion as to whether he was looking at a forest or rock formations is that it’s both: what used to be some manner of tall vegetation has long since been petrified into more stone. What is left is a maze of gray, lifeless spires ranging in size from barely coming up to Prowl’s mid-section to being large enough to blot out the sky. Rubble in all shapes and sizes lines the ground, digging uncomfortably into Prowl’s back as he lays down on the ground, waiting for his systems to reset.

He’s about to attempt getting up when something grabs him by the chest plate and starts shoving back. Prowl is all but slammed against more rock, air wheezing out of his vents in a painful hiss as the delicate sensors of his doorwings flare up with pain pings. When his vision clears of the alerts, it’s to the sight of a blue visor right in front of his face and the entire length of Jazz’s frame pressed against his. They appear to be wedged into a hollowed part of a particularly big, fallen over tree trunk. With Jazz’s plates practically scraping the paint off of Prowl’s, there is just enough room to accommodate them.

“Do you have a death wish—” he starts angrily, before one of Jazz’s hands covers his mouth. The gesture does nothing to actually cut off his vocalizer, but its ridiculousness alone startles Prowl into silence.

Once the surprise wears off, he glares at Jazz, engine starting a low, indignant rev. He’s all too aware of the way their chests press together. It’s downright inappropriate. His engine gets louder, a clear warning that if Jazz won’t get his hands away and quickly, he’s going to lose them.

Jazz doesn’t seem intimidated, but his head fins pin down low and he starts shaking his head with vigor, tapping insistently at Prowl’s chest. His alarm is enough to quiet him down, just in time for Prowl’s audials to pick up on the sound of something sliding through the air. Something big. 

He locks all his joints, cuts off his vents and dims both his optic and all of his biolights. A second later the ground shakes as an enormous weight lands somewhere close to them. Prowl can feel the tremors travel through his frame as the creature takes step after step in their direction. 

It stops close enough that even with his doorwings held down, Prowl can sense its presence. Massive, scaled body, long enough that he cannot tell where its tail ends. Shorter hind legs and long, lanky front limbs with leathery membrane stretching in between them and its flanks. Spines running across its back all the way up to a stocky, triangular head where Prowl can practically count its serrated teeth. A thin, forked tongue snakes its way out from between them, tasting the air with a huff. 

The Quintesson Gladiator lets out a series of clicks and hisses. Prowl feels his processor start to heat up as TacNet seizes it up and spits out battle strategies on how to bring it down. Except that it has to use Prowl and Jazz as the only viable combatants, which means vast majority of them prove ineffective. 

The ground shakes again as the creature slowly stalks forward. He does not need his battle computer to tell him that if it finds them, they’re dead. Prowl tries to focus on something more productive, but his only alternative is Jazz, frame half on top of him, dark visor pressed gently against his chevron. 

He’s completely still, to the point that if Prowl didn’t know better, he’d assume he was dead. The only indication otherwise is the low buzz of the not-spark somewhere behind his chest plating. It creates no EM field, or at least none that Prowl can read. Jazz is also cold. The places where their plating connects are heating up steadily, leeching off the excess heat that Prowl’s frame is letting off to make up for his vents being closed. But everywhere else takes on the same temperature as their environment. 

His body is distinctly lifeless for someone so full of life. As though there is a line between his physical form and Jazz as a person.

The hand not covering his mouth is pressed against his chest. Three fingers have carefully wedged their way in between the seams of his plating to better hold onto him in their precarious position. Prowl’s spark gives out an anxious pulse as he remembers the last time those fingers were there, how easy it would be for them to pry him open. He has no choice but to trust that they won’t. 

And with another, calmer stutter of his spark, Prowl realizes that he does. If Jazz wanted him dead, he wouldn’t have bothered to try to hide him. Wouldn’t have towed him over the plain. Would have simply taken the energon instead of waiting for Prowl to offer.

He’s startled back to reality by a shrill scream. The Gladiator repeats it two more times, forcing him to cut off his audials before something gets damaged. Then the creature huffs and takes off with a flap of its winged forelimbs, kicking up dust and small rocks.

He’s not sure how much longer the two of them stay pressed together in the petrified tree. Prowl dares to at least open his vents back up when his processor warns him about overheating. Jazz does not comment on the fact, remaining deathly still.

His visor lights up after Prowl’s internal clock ticks over the fifteen minute mark since the Quintesson’s departure. He slowly removes his hand from Prowl’s mouth, as though he still doesn’t trust him to remain quiet, and carefully untangles himself from his frame. He slumps heavily against the other side of the hollow.

“You good?”

Prowl nods, and takes that as a sign that the coast is clear. He brings all his systems online again and starts running diagnostics to take stock of the range of his injuries after the fall. 

In front of him, Jazz returns the nod, satisfied. Their legs remain pressed together in the tight space, so Prowl can feel the slight vibrations of a quick, anxious rhythm he taps into the plating of his thigh. 

“Cool, cool. Great, even. Not gonna lie, I was sure you were about to tear my head off for a second there.” 

There’s an edge to his voice that Prowl doesn’t like. It sounds a bit like hysteria, like he’s not sure if he wants to laugh or cringe. His head fins are pinned down all the way, entire frame wound tighter than it was when the Gladiator walked right behind their backs.

“Jazz,” Prowl says slowly, carefully, all diagnostics screeching to a halt as he focuses his full attention on the mech in front of him. He feels distinctly as though he’s trying to calm down a panicked animal. “What’s wrong? Are we still in danger?”

“Nah,” he says with that same, stressed tilt. “I might be in a second, though.”

“Why?” Prowl scans their immediate surroundings, looking for potential threats. Nothing significant comes up.

Jazz’s visor flickers. Prowl almost jumps as his hip panel pops open.

“Because if you don’t jack into me in the next half an hour, I’m going to drop dead.”

Chapter Text

Prowl’s single, cold blue eye jumps rapidly between Bebop’s visor and her open hip panel. Jazz can practically see the gears working in his head. For all he knows, there might be actual gears in there, spinning extra fast to figure out what Jazz wants from him. 

Sure enough, after a lengthy beat of silence he asks, “What do you want from me?” 

And Jazz opens his real, human mouth, and for a moment nothing comes out for Bebop’s mic to pick up. He knows what he needs Prowl to do for him. Explaining why and how he needs it done without simultaneously making it abundantly clear that he’s a pile of meat and bones inside a fancy, metal exterior is another story. 

Fortunately, Jazz is pretty good at telling stories. Unfortunately, Bebop’s out of calming meds and he’s halfway to a panic attack. Describing the thing causing it in the first place—and in great detail—ain’t the ideal way to self-soothe. 

He focuses on the spot behind Prowl’s head and tries to imagine he’s in Magnus’ office, giving him a mission debrief detailed enough to put most men to sleep within the first three questions. A nice, boring, environment. No aliens, hostile or otherwise.

“Had to use my thrusters back up there to break our fall. Saved our asses from going splat on the rocks, but also ate through my power reserves like crazy. I’ve got half an hour left in me, give or take. After that it’s lights out for dear, ol’ Jazz.” 

“I… see.” Prowl’s face looks like he can’t decide if he wants to be concerned or condescending. “…and is there something stopping you from ingesting the energon I provided? If you still have concerns regarding compatibility I could suggest a dosage—”

“Nah, man, that ain’t it. This—” Jazz knocks a knuckle below Bebop’s visor. “—doesn’t retract. No mouth. I need some special equipment that you don’t really carry around with you on the daily.” Or ever. Small details. 

The face journey which follows that statement would be fascinating and hilarious in equal parts, if not for the fact that Jazz is still on the verge of a freak-out. Prowl’s eye narrows suspiciously, and he opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, probably ask some probing questions Jazz is scrambling to come up with a cover story for. But then his mouth clicks shut and he looks away. His expression twists into a brand new, fun emotion that Jazz clocks as guilt of all things, before he schools it into something more neutral. 

“Be more precise,” Prowl says finally, back to some semblance of cold and calculating. “How can I help?”

Jazz doesn’t wait for him to change his mind about the probing. “Can’t you… y’know?” He makes a vague motion with his hand. “Do the trick from before? With the cables, but the fuel ones this time?”

Prowl steeples his fingers together, thinking. “In theory, yes. I can analyze the outer socket and replicate the necessary cabling.”

Jazz perks up, head fins lifting hopefully. Maybe this will be an easy, wholly physical procedure after all.

“However,” Prowl says, and Jazz’s heart sinks. “This is an… unprecedented method of energon transfer. The cables have to stay connected to me at all times, meaning that the only source your frame can tap into is my own fuel tank. In order to ensure both yours and my safety during the process, I’d need to have real-time access to your systems to monitor for potential risks.”

Bebop’s helm thunks against the petrified bark as Jazz deflates. “Yeah, I had a feeling you were gonna say something like that…”

Prowl rises an eyebrow. “You are asking me to effectively tie my internal organs with you—an alien species that could potentially infect me with viruses you’ve developed full immunity to, but which could very easily prove fatal to me. More than that, if the energon isn’t, in fact, compatible with your frame and the transfer results in an explosion, it will destroy not only your fuel tanks but mine as well.” He gives Jazz a meaningful look. “So, yes, you’re correct—if we are to attempt this, I will require a certain level of access to some of your systems.”

“Okay,” Jazz says, Bebop’s frame stock still and his mind anything but. “Alright.”

After a moment where neither of them move, Prowl sighs. “I fail to see the reason for your unease regarding the idea.”

“Just—” Jazz grits his teeth, pulse spiking once again. “Don’t like anyone snooping around in my head.”

Bebop flashes him another warning about low energy levels. The timer leading up to shutdown ticks steadily down. An alien eye bores into him, that massive consciousness hidden behind it, waiting for a chance to swallow him whole. 

“You have… concerns regarding my intentions?”

“Oh, c’mon, man. Drop the pretense.” He taps a nervous beat into Bebop’s thigh. “We both know you can do whatever the hell you want to me once I let you in.”

“Gross exaggeration, but yes, your internal systems are virtually defenseless.”

Jazz really hopes the dirty look he shoots Prowl reads through the visor. “Are you trying to make this worse for me?”

He gets a flat stare back. “I am merely agreeing with your assessment. And while it is true, it is also insignificant in our current situation. I have no reason to harm you.”

“But you could.”

“But I won’t.”

“Well, how about I hold a knife to your neck for an hour, huh? Will it make you feel better if I pinky-promise I won’t damage anything important? I have shaky hands, by the way.”

“Your use of analogy once again proves to be both inept and largely irrelevant.”

The following silence is almost as heavy as the mist swirling in between the dark rock of the used-to-be forest. Jazz stares at the sky above and tries his best to forget where he is for a moment. It’s kinda hard when he can practically feel Prowl boring holes into Bebop’s visor. 

Still not looking at him, he silently shifts Bebop’s frame to provide better access to her panels in the cramped space. After a second, he hears metal move in front of him, feels the additional heat Prowl’s body gives off as he gets closer, the phantom sensation from Bebop’s plates picking up the change in temperature. 

There’s the telltale shink of metal shifting. He might not be looking, but his mech’s sensors still track the movement of the cable unspooling from Prowl’s wrist. He swallows. 

“Jazz.” Prowl’s voice is calm. Barely audible over his own pulse thundering in his ears. “May I—”

“Just do it,” he manages to force out from between gritted teeth.

“Can you let me finish?” The cable hovers over the port, like a snake ready to strike. “May I suggest something?”

“If all it comes down to is you condescendingly telling me to chill out, then I think I’ll pass.”

The sky is cloudless. It’s dim, but not quite dark, the planet kept in perpetual twilight by the virtue of its twin suns. It’s not the worst place to die, all things considered. Hardly the best, though. The company could be better.

Seems like it thinks so too, because Prowl lets out another long-suffering not-sigh. “The process will be much smoother if you remain calm and cooperative.”

“Whatever you say, officer.”

“Jazz,” he says tersely. “Arguing helps neither of us.”

“Dunno. Kinda makes me feel better, actually.”

Talking does feel nice. Takes his mind off of things. Stalls the inevitable.

There’s a frustrated growl—no, actually that’s not growling. Sounds more like… revving. Any doubts about the fact disappear when a hand grabs him by the chin and pulls Bebop’s helm down until he’s forced to meet Prowl’s narrowed eye. He can feel the vibration of an engine working somewhere in that frame, giving his voice a dangerous timbre. 

“For once in our brief acquaintance I need you to listen to what I say and answer my questions directly.” A beat of silence and then, quieter but no less intense, “Please.”

And Jazz, still stunned by the gesture, simply nods. The fingers holding his face are weirdly grounding. 

“How much time do we have before you deactivate?”

“Twenty minutes,” he answers absently. He’s never properly surveyed the damage done to Prowl’s missing eye. It’s not just… dimmed, or turned off or whatever. The socket is empty. The few remaining pieces of lenses are nothing but sad blotches of melted glass. No wonder he had trouble walking.

Unperturbed by his staring, Prowl continues, “That should be more than enough. Once you give me your consent, I will begin the interface. I will take nothing but the information necessary for ensuring a safe energon transfer. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, no, I get what you’re putting down,” Jazz says mildly, not bothering to wrench himself out of the grasp. “It’s just that I crazy don’t believe you, based on the last time we did this.”

Prowl’s brow scrunches in thought. “The previous negative experience is the main factor of your hesitance.”

“You barged into my head, stomped all over the antique rugs and uprooted the begonias, man. Not cool.”

“What.”

“It was vaguely traumatic, okay?” 

For a long moment, Prowl simply stares at him. It’s not hostile, exactly, but it doesn’t feel overtly friendly either. Jazz isn’t sure if he appreciates being looked at like he’s a problem to be solved. He doesn’t really mind the cradling, though. It’s funny in a kind of hysterical way—laughter through tears and all that.

“You need positive association with the process to counter the previous experience.” Statement, not a question. Barely a proposition. More like an order.

“Uh,” Jazz says smartly. 

This is not how he expected this entire thing to go. He kind of assumed they’d be done by now. Prowl would do his thing, Jazz would have a quick panic attack about it, and then they’d be on their way. Well, either that or his brain would be deep fried. Or they both would explode, there’s also that possibility.

Prowl removes his hand from Bebop and steeples his fingers together. “Exposure therapy. You need to spend enough time in an environment deemed dangerous for your subconscious to acclimate and stop treating it as such.”

Jazz narrows his eyes behind the visor. “Are you psychoanalyzing me?” He shakes his head. “Listen it’s…” He hesitates. “It’s nice that you’re trying to help, Numbers, but I’d much rather just get this over with asap. C’mon,” He nudges Bebop’s panel wider in an invitation.
 
“I am not being nice,” Prowl says flatly, not even looking at the port. “High levels of distress during the procedure can lead to an increased chance of something going wrong. I am not a trained medic. I need to focus all my attention on our systems, meaning that I cannot wrangle your panicked mind at the same time.”

“Okay, now I’m convinced you’re just making stuff up to torture me.”

“The opposite, actually. I am attempting to find a way to soothe you.” He cocks his head, the movement mirrored by the wings on his back. “Our connection goes both ways. You can, as you’ve put it, ‘barge into my mind’ the same way I can into yours.”

“Cool,” Jazz says. “How is that supposed to make me feel better?”

Prowl seems to hesitate slightly, and Jazz only clocks it because of how rare that’s been so far. “If you’d be amicable to the idea, I could give you free rein—within certain limits, of course—to take stock of my own processor before I attempt to retrieve the necessary data from yours.”

And here’s the thing. Is Jazz still scared shitless of whatever is about to happen? Yes, absolutely. No doubts about that. But Jazz is also—fundamentally, at his very core—a nosy person. Prowl clearly would rather not have him in his head either, which reveals a very important bit of information: Jazz can do some damage in there. Whether it’s purely physical (mental?) or of the emotional variety doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Jazz just got some potential dirt on him. 

“Why?” he can’t help asking, if only because he’s curious about Prowl’s answer. “You could probably make it to the Quint base on your own at this point.” 

Based on the volume of that engine rev alone, he absolutely could, and much faster than Jazz, low energy or no.

“My chances are higher with your help,” he says, and Jazz feels the cable that’s been hovering near Bebop’s panels press gently against the socket. 

He tries to focus on the conversation instead of the existential dread creeping in. “Even accounting for this potentially blowing us up?”

The phantom sensation of the jack on Bebop’s inner paneling makes him shiver. Prowl’s larger frame is looming over him, filling his vision, so he has no other place to look but back into that intense eye. He can just about make out the lenses inside spinning as they focus on him.

“I know it might be hard to imagine,” he says, just as Bebop alerts him of the connection. Jazz accepts before he can think too much about it. Prowl’s mouth twitches, and it takes his panicked mind a moment to realize that he’s smiling. 

“But sometimes people do things for others out of the goodness of their heart.”

And then he’s in, and Jazz is trying his best not to hyperventilate. He waits for the flood to come in, for that sensation of drowning in something much bigger than himself to appear. He imagines Prowl digging into the core of him; stripping the tonnes of metal that separate them until Bebop’s all gone and it’s just him: small and defenseless and completely at the mercy of this thing that speaks his language and emotes like he does, but with which he still has yet to find proper common grounds with.

But nothing comes. Bebop’s internal clock counts the seconds as they pass. Jazz is aware  of a vast space somewhere at the edge of his consciousness, but nothing slithers through. Slowly, his breathing evens out. Panic recedes. His mind still races, but his thought process turns into something more comprehensible. 

Prowl is perfectly still above him, expression neutral. Jazz doesn’t dare to move. But he’s never been good at sitting still himself, and once the worst of the fear is gone, curiosity—a familiar friend that’s led him to places he wouldn’t even go to in his mech—rears its head.

He has some idea on how to navigate mental head-spaces. First weeks of piloting a mech is building up your brain muscles until you can move the damn things a mere inch off the ground. They don’t come in with a bunch of levers and buttons to make them do things, oh no, you’ve gotta install those in your own head, construct the means by which you will control it. The helmet goes on, your brain connects to the network of wire-nerves, and you spend the next couple of months mapping out a body that is yours but isn’t, that lives its own life but doesn’t. 

It provides a concrete, unmovable foundation. You build walls around it. You fill it in like a house. You get shitty, second-hand furniture that you slowly polish until the wood shines. You put up the drapes that don’t match the carpets and never end up switching them because the ugly things grew on you. You make the machine a home you live in, and it takes a life of its own. In return, it takes care of you. Regulates brain chemicals, fixes wounds, replays the drunken sounds of your friends singing some old war-songs when you’re feeling down. 

Bobop isn’t just a suit of armor, she’s a house on legs. Cozy. Familiar. Safe. Jazz could navigate those mental corridors with his eyes closed and half-delirious and never trip once. 

As he carefully inches his way to the threshold between himself and the void, there is nothing to trip over. Vast, pristine, empty space. He stands there, trying to feel for anything approaching the hard, steady lines of Bebop against his mind, but you can’t just see stuff at a distance in here, you’ve gotta come up and feel it.

“Fifteen minutes.”

Jazz startles slightly as Prowl’s voice pulls him out of his head. Right. He’s dying. Time to take a plunge and see if he’ll swim or sink.

He takes a steadying breath and with a thrill that’s half-nerves and half-excitement, steps out of Bebop’s familiarity and into the deep, unknown waters. 

There’s a couple seconds where his brain struggles to translate what he’s experiencing into something comprehensible. Jazz can’t say he’s ever doubted Prowl being, well, sentient, rather than just some preprogrammed robot. And even if he is, it’s clearly at a level where the difference between organic-alive and metal-alive might as well not even exist. But feeling his mind, or processor, or whatever it is that makes him tick, makes it abundantly clear that Prowl is, in one way or another, very much alive.

If Bebop’s a house, Prowl is a mansion. Scratch that, he’s more like a space station. Jazz has been making clay houses compared to the sheer complexity of what he’s looking at. And it all moves. Shifts around in perfect harmony with itself. It’s so jarring compared to Bebop’s stillness that Jazz ends up dizzy trying to take it all in.

Something prods at the edge of his own mind, like a tap on the shoulder. Jazz focuses on it and freezes when he realizes that gentle touch came from the same massive consciousness that almost swallowed him once. 

It hangs above everything, heavy and ever-present, wrapped around the spires of Prowl’s head-space like the coils of a great, endless serpent. It moves seamlessly with its shifting environment, but its main focus right now seems to be Jazz, who is once again terrified out of his mind.

Apologies. I am attempting not to make my presence too overwhelming. 

“What,” Jazz asks out-loud, dazed. 

Prowl doesn’t open his mouth, yet his voice sounds out clearly in his head, You are deceptively fragile, mentally speaking. 

Despite the fact that the words are definitely not reassuring, Jazz feels a sudden wave of calm wash over him. Which should be concerning. It is concerning. Is Prowl mind-controlling him? Why is he not bothered in the slightest by the prospect? 

“What are you doing to me?” he asks, still calm. Logic tells him that’s bad. His current emotions just sort of shrug and insist not to worry about it. Which sounds very bad.

There’s what he can only categorize as a mental huff. I am not doing anything. I am actively ensuring that I do nothing to you.

And just like that the calm disappears, and Jazz is suddenly frustrated. There does not seem to be a source of the frustration, but he sure as hell can find a recipient, since he’s still right in front of him. “Bullshit, you are definitely screwing with me right now, I can feel it. I though we had an agreement about you staying out of my head!”

Before he can say anything else, the consciousness above him slinks nearer and reaches out, and Jazz is supposed to be afraid, he knows that, but all he can feel is a combo of concern and curiosity.

Calm down, the voice commands, and Jazz does. You have absolutely no mental barriers in place, so you take in whatever I project. You are effectively an emotional sponge.

Okay, that’s definitely bad. Jazz thought this was supposed to be safer for him, but so far it seems like ultimately it doesn’t matter if he meets Prowl on his own turf or away from home—the guy can still rock his shit regardless. Lovely. His brain will end up deep-fried after all.

You don’t seem aware of the fact, but having no mental barriers means that I am made aware of everything you project as well.

Shit. Fuck. He focuses very hard on not thinking about—nope, let’s turn our attention to something different. So, Prowl, what’s your review on Cello Suite No. 1? Your silence on the topic so far speaks volumes.

Jazz, focus. This won’t work in your current state.

Well, how do I fix it?!

Try to imagine a physical barrier between yourself and me. 

Immediately, Jazz imagines a great sheet of metal separating him from the rest of the constantly shifting head-space. The artificial calm remains, but now he can clearly distinguish between the emotions coming from outside and what he’s actually feeling. Which remains a fun mixture of stress, fear and a sort of giddiness that only appears when you’re so royally fucked it circles all the way back to hilarious. 

Jazz groans. “Why did I agree to this…?”

You had no other alternatives. 

Prowl is hovering. Jazz can feel him hover, with the distinct flavor of concern radiating off him in waves, which is weird—having such raw emotions blasted right into your head is weird, and doubly so from Prowl. He tries to push back against the hulking consciousness and it obediently retreats further back into the head-space.

He physically shivers when the gesture makes their minds brush. Prowl feels cold, just like the last time. It’s still not unpleasant, especially against his frayed nerves. He imagines a second sheet of metal in between them and doesn’t think anything else about the topic.

Feeling a tad more sure-footed, Jazz takes stock of his environment again. Prowl’s head-space is, despite its constant movement, extremely consistent. Parts of it shift to replace others, but the landscape as a whole stays the same. Pristine, meticulous, organized. Makes sense Prowl would run his own thought process like the navy. 

Everything in his own head-space was put there by Jazz. He’d describe it as something of an organized chaos. Cozy kind of cramped. In Prowl’s fortress of a mind, nothing seems familiar, but he can’t say it doesn’t make sense. It wouldn’t be half-bad, if not for the fact that the place’s owner is watching him like a hawk from every conceivable angle.

“Which part of this was supposed to make me more willing to let you snoop around in my head?”

The one in which I let you do just that around my own systems. There’s a note of exasperation in the voice. Now that Prowl’s retreated, it’s harder to make out what he’s feeling. I reiterate: my own access of your mind will be limited to the information necessary for the energon transfer.

Jazz still doesn’t know how to do the whole ‘thinking some of his thoughts at Prowl but not all of them’ shtick, so he sticks with speaking the old fashioned way. “Uh-huh, sure. So, where do we start this house tour at?”

Despite being an amalgamous, faceless blob in the confines of his head-space, Prowl still manages to give him a flat look. You are free to roam as you please. I will, naturally, restrict certain personal elements, but they’re hardly any of your concern. 

Jazz hums, feeling his way around the shifting environment. “Could someone better at like… mind espionage still break into those?”

They could certainly try.

He’s about to ask if mind espionage is an actual, real thing aliens could do, but he’s stopped by finding something other than just strings of organized thoughts. It’s more like… filing cabinets. Stationary data. All arranged in a perfect circle around a gently rotating, golden orb. 

“What’s that?” he asks, opening one of the cabinets to reveal stacks of manila envelopes. “And why does this section of your head look like a 90s office?”

You’re inspecting my transformation cog. The files are related to its function: records of alt-modes, transformation directives and the like. Prowl hovers somewhere behind his shoulder. If Jazz wasn’t going to die in the next ten minutes or so, he might have hesitated to snoop so shamelessly with their owner so close. Then again, if he truly didn’t want him looking through them, Jazz is sure he’d have slapped his hands away from the cookie jar already. 

And to answer your second question: I do not know what a ‘90s office’ is. I will hazard a guess that whatever it does look like is a reflection of what is most comprehensible to your own mind. I have never interfaced with a non-Cybertronian life-form, so the details of the process escape me, I’m afraid.

“Huh. Does that mean what I see and what you see in here is different?” 

Most of the files make no sense. There’s no actual text on them, not really, but Jazz can sort of… feel the information. It’s just that his human brain isn’t really wired to process it. 

Yes and no. It is a matter of hardware; the same set of data is processed differently by different equipment, but the original stays the same.

He finds an especially thick folder. To his surprise, inside it are photos. Or maybe schematics would be a better name. After flipping through a few, Jazz recognizes the individual parts as belonging to the car Prowl turned into earlier. He stops abruptly when he sees the engine. Now, he’s not a car guy, but he hangs around enough people who build mechs for a living to recognize greatness when he sees it.

Jazz whistles, low and impressed. “Prowl, baby, you have some serious horsepower under your hood.”

That’s— I— There’s a fire-hot flash of embarrassment. It leaves as quickly as it appears. Let’s move on.

Jazz blinks and suddenly the folder is gone from his hands. The filing cabinet slides closed with a resounding thud and then Prowl is gently pushing him forward and away from the transformation cog, a wall of nothing where his emotions previously projected quite clearly. 

The sudden contact is distracting, but oh, baby, Jazz just got a whiff of some blood in the water and like hell is he gonna let it slide. 

He grins. “Was this a come-on? Did I just come on to you?”

Prowl’s voice is perfectly neutral. I’d really rather not have this conversation.

“It totally was. C’mon, Numbers, you gotta educate me or I might accidentally say something raunchy again~” Jazz sing-songs.

Prowl stays silent and gives him a more insistent push. Jazz uses the momentum to stay ahead of him. Well, ahead of that small portion of Prowl’s consciousness which is focusing on him. He’s still very much surrounded from all sides.

“Sooo… in your opinion, is the engine more like an ass or boobs equivalent? Or is it—”

So help me Primus, if you finish that question I will throw you out.

And Jazz laughs, because of course Prowl is kind of a prude, and because, honestly? If he uses one of his last remaining breaths to fluster an alien by telling him he has an impressive rack, Jazz will suffocate a happy man. 

Before he can antagonize him any further, Jazz stumbles into a different kind of impressive rack. Rows and rows of high, wide shelves line this section of Prowl’s head-space. Jazz quite literary cannot make out the end of them. They just… keep going. The shelves are occupied by metal filing boxes, each with a number decorating the front, ones that he can actually read. They all have locks.

“And these are?” Jazz fiddles with one. DL-6, it reads in black font.

Case files.

Jazz looks at the rows of shelves in disbelief. “All of them?”

Yes.

“Do you really need to keep the details of every single guy you’ve ever bagged?”

They’re a very useful reference for tactical analysis, Prowl says mildly. He adds, almost as an afterthought, And these are not mine. I keep them elsewhere.

 Jazz gives the shelves one more long look and moves on. They’ve been keeping their ‘insults-to-words’ ratio pretty low, and he’d hate to ruin that by initiating cop talk again.

He still has mixed feelings about that one. If it looks like a cop, walks like a cop, and oinks like a cop, then, well… But on the other hand, he can recognize that there might be just a teeny, tiny difference between volunteering for the position and being, what, born into it? (Jazz has to probe into how that works at some point.) Still, end result is the same: a cop.

“How are we on time?” he asks, suddenly aware of how long he feels like he’s been in here. “Are you gonna have enough to do the the whole song and dance with the cables?”

I’m monitoring it. Prowl answers calmly. He’s getting better at following him around without simultaneously smothering him. It almost feels like they’re walking side by side. Time passes differently during a direct interface. You’ll get used to it eventually.

Jazz considers how that implies they’ll do this again at some point, but doesn’t say anything. This has been… surprisingly okay, barring that initial hiccup. Maybe Prowl had a point about exposure therapy after all. He still doesn’t like the idea of reversing their roles and having Prowl in his small, carefully arranged space, but he can… live with it, he supposes.

He startles when, out of nowhere, Jazz feels something vaguely familiar. He immediately zeroes in on it, feeling around the structure. It’s hard, cold, and unforgiving. Lifeless and unchanging in a place of constant movement. It’s also, Jazz realizes, connected to everything else in the head-space. Hundreds, if not thousands of data streams connect to the hulking mass, and suddenly Jazz sees it as an enormous, old lattice tower, power cables swinging in every direction, forming a spiderweb with the tower as its center. 

The metal whines under its own weight. The sea of cables swings dangerously, half of them looking ready to snap. Compared to the rest of Prowl’s head-space, it seems outdated. 

It’s the closest thing to Bebop Jazz has seen in here.

“The hell’s that?” he asks, still focused on the structure. 

Hesitation rolls off Prowl in weak pulses. My battle computer. 

Jazz presses against the metal beam and meets the same kind of resistance he knows from his mech. “This the thing that lets you do all those trick shots?”

Among other things. Prowl still sounds unsure. It is a piece of additional hardware that is considered… redundant by many. It used to be a standard-issue component of each Enforcer frame, but was rather quickly recalled due to its considerable drain on the processor.

Jazz cocks his head. “So it’s… poorly optimized?”

Prowl turns his focus from him to the tower. Jazz wonders what it looks like from his perspective. 

It is not a matter of optimization as much as compatibility. To ensure the highest possible computational ability, the Tactical Network is connected to every other system. Most mechs, even those who were constructed cold with the component already installed, found it invasive, unsettling, and/or in some way disturbing. It causes frequent crashes, slows down physical reaction speed quite heavily, and, in some severe cases, has led to personality disorders.

Jazz raises a brow. “How does a numbers machine cause personality disorders.”

I believe it deemed the parts of the processor responsible for developing and maintaining an identity as non-essential and thus better utilized for an incidental increase in computational power. 

“…has it done that to you?”

Prowl gives him the mental equivalent of a shrug. Opinions on the topic tend to differ.

Jazz stares up at the tower. Despite its clear difference from the rest of the environment, it doesn’t look dilapidated. It’s old, yes, but not neglected. “Why not get rid of it?”

I personally find the trade-off worth it. He nudges a bit closer to Jazz, like he’s tasting for his reaction. I’m, frankly, surprised you do not seem… unsettled. The mechs I interface with tend to stray far away from it. 

Jazz hums. “Guess it kinda reminds me of the way things work in my own head.” 

Prowl hums back, and for a moment they simply consider the alien-yet-familiar structure. Something shifts between them, then. For the first time, Jazz feels like they both actually understand what the other is trying to say. 

“Speaking of,” Prowl breaks the silence eventually. “We should get started. Do you feel adequately calmed down?”

Nerves still dance at the edge of his mind, but Jazz feels like they’re partially fried from the past couple hours anyways. “Won’t get much better than this, don’t think.”

They make it back to the threshold. Jazz can feel the familiar sensation of Bebop wrapping around his consciousness as he steps over it. He has a split-second of sudden claustrophobia after the sheer vastness of Prowl’s place, but it quickly disappears when he settles into the well-worn, steady angles of her. 

Prowl hovers at the threshold. A few tendrils snake out over it to prod at Bebop, and Jazz can’t help but wince. 

He takes a deep breath. “Okay, house rules; number one: you don’t haul all of your massive ass in here, there’s no way you can fit.” The tendrils retreat slightly. “Number two: be gentle. I’m build of freaking glass compared to you.” The tendrils come back, their touches feather-light against Bebop’s systems. “Finally, number three: you try to look at any of my specs that don’t have to do with fuel, and it’s on sight. Capiche?”

Yes. If you recall, I have been proposing the last of your rules ever since the inception of this plan. 

“Yeah, yeah. Make yourself at home, smart-ass.”

Prowl spills in. Carefully. It’s nothing like the last time, although it’s still initially overwhelming. Jazz can feel him analyzing several places at once, sifting through systems to find the ones detailing Bebop’s fuel lines and the way she processes energy. He tenses whenever one of those tendrils approaches the data banks detailing anything to do with the pilot. But Prowl keeps his word, and silently moves past them. 

Time passes, Prowl works, and Jazz watches. With every second he relaxes more, and soon he’s following the alien as he works out of curiosity rather than vigilance. Prowl radiates steady pulses of calm, collected and confident, and Jazz would be lying if he claimed it wasn’t reassuring.

Before long, he starts to feel himself nodding off. He’s had a long day. He’s either going to wake up after Prowl is done, or be blissfully unaware of whatever he’s going to do to him. Either way, Jazz doesn’t have it in him to care anymore. 

He’s vaguely aware of the now-familiar sound of transformation, feels another, wider cable slot into place at Bebop’s hip, and then he’s out like a candle.

+++

Prowl downs two cubes of energon and starts to siphon some of it into Jazz’s frame. He keeps the rations small for now and actively monitors his systems for any signs that the fuel might not take, or cause any inadvertently ill effects on his frame. 

It’s not pleasant. It’s definitely not sanitary. But they have little choice, and Jazz has made it clear in no uncertain terms that he will not survive without it. 

Prowl needs him. Yes, there is now a viable [42%] possibility of him making it to the Quintesson gate, but that’s assuming he will not be spotted by the Gladiator, nor the Scouts. His best chances [71%] are still with Jazz by his side. 

Assuming he will survive the procedure. His visor is dim, but Prowl can still hear his not-spark working somewhere beneath his plating, and moreso, he is aware of his unconscious mind nestled in the cramped spaces of his internal systems. 

Jazz’s fuel gage ticks up slowly. Prowl increases the dose incrementally, and waits. 

It takes him less than a minute to write a script to continue feeding him energon in progressively larger amounts. In another two, he has a second that monitors for any sudden changes in the systems which could potentially be affected by faulty fuel. This lets him focus his full attention back on Jazz.

His processor must have been clogged, if he ended up shutting down in a situation that has originally caused him so much grief. Prowl does not delude himself that he has chosen to do so out of a sense of personal trust. 

He brushes the edge of his mind against the smaller consciousness. He gets nothing back. The chances of him being made aware of anything Prowl does in the moment are minimal [9%].

Prowl considers the rest of Jazz’s small, primitive systems. He could very easily sift through them, find out whatever it is that Jazz deems so important to keep from him, and put it all back into its place before he wakes up again. Jazz would never know. By all means, it’s the logical thing to do. The more information he has, the better he can plan for their escape route. There is a real, tangible possibility [68%] that Jazz’s secrets have something to do with his own weaknesses, and taking those into account is incredibly important for strategical analysis. 

That’s what Prowl should do. It’s what would be best for both of them, in the end. Highest chance of success of their mission.

He recalls Jazz, wonder clear through his flimsy mental barriers as he stared at the TacNet. Prowl was used to having to defend his choice to leave the additional hardware installed to any mech who was made aware of its existence, so it was a novel experience to have someone react so positively to its presence.

(First Aid deemed it a health hazard. Prime called it cruel and unnecessary. Red Alert had concerns about the program potentially erasing Prowl’s personality and using his body to kill every other person on base. Smokescreen and Bluestreak both claimed it was detrimental to his mental state.)

(Only one of those statements was right.)

…

Prowl deactivates his scripts and busies himself by manually administering the next energon dose. He drinks another cube, flares his wings out to watch for potential threats, and doesn’t give any further thought to what lies in Jazz’s systems. 

At least for now.

Chapter Text

Once Jazz’s fuel tanks are filled to the brim, Prowl disconnects from his frame and disentangles himself from the cramped space of their hiding place. He lets his companion rest while he stretches his aching joints and runs system diagnostics. He’s fairly (87%) sure he did not contract anything from Jazz, and more time sitting still allowed some of his own internal repair to finish running its course. All in all, despite being sore, he’s in the best physical and mental state since the beginning of this journey. Even his doorwing injury is but a few spikes of pain which prod at him whenever he bends it too far.

Prowl considers their progress. According to his plans of the planet, they don’t have much distance left between them and the Quintesson base located at the north pole. The terrain, sadly, is not suited for traversal on wheels, or at least not the kind Prowl has. Petrified vines snake out of the ground at every step, and the rock is sharp enough in places to potentially pierce through the material of his tires. Besides, Jazz does not appear to have an alt-mode, nor any alternate way of movement that could keep up with Prowl’s speed. Still, he can’t help but mourn the notion of making it to their destination within an hour.

The mist hanging low over the petrified forest does not help with navigation either. Prowl flicks his wing to get rid of some of the condensation accumulating on the plating. At least he’ll avoid the discomfort of transforming while wet.

He makes his way back to Jazz and into their burrow, seeing as it is still the most cover their environment allows for. The alien mech does not stir as Prowl maneuvers his limbs away to make space for himself. He settles against the petrified bark, sets a timer for thirty minutes, and stares into that dark visor, thinking.

There is a non-insignificant (61%) chance that Jazz is a criminal. He has a distaste for law enforcement, is clear in his dislike of the government, and has alluded to his appearance being a source of hardship in life. The fact that he needs specialized equipment in order to refuel suggests that the last point is a deliberate change enforced by an outside party, most likely to limit his ability for escape and independent action. If it is, in fact, some vein of punishment delivered by the government, then it appears even more severe than Empurata procedures.

Jazz has also made it clear in no uncertain terms that those in power on his planet were corrupt. Being marked a criminal in an unjust system cannot be taken as a negative reflection of an individual. Assuming that Jazz has been telling the truth. In reality, Prowl has too little data to make sound judgment on Jazz’s character, and the distinction hardly matters, since he remains the only viable ally in his current situation.

Air escapes Prowl’s vents in a sigh. Not for the first time, he misses the simplicity of working for the Senate, of seeing the world in shades of black and white. He likes certainties. Ever since the Quintesson invasion, those have been few and far in between.

It’s better this way, he reminds himself, and promptly cordons off any thought processes concerned with his misguided nostalgia. 

One thing he is sure of, at least, is the fact that for all his… personal quirks, Jazz is useful. More than that, Jazz is deeply, frustratingly competent. He clearly has a lot of experience in the field and from what he’s seen so far, Prowl can confidently say that his effectiveness in battle rivals some of his own best units. And despite his clear dislike for Prowl, Jazz has consistently come to his aid, even at detriment to his own safety. Conclusion: it’s in his best interest to stay by Jazz’s side.

Another element Prowl can’t overlook is the strategic potential of making contact with the rest of Jazz’s people. If any of them are half the fighters he is, they’d be valuable allies against the Quintessons, something Prowl and his team are in dire need of. He’d be a fool not to consider the possibility.

Something to discuss once they’ve made it to safety, perhaps. Until then, he has to keep his focus on establishing an escape route. Weather that is with or without Jazz.

Prowl’s wing twitches. With four minutes and thirteen seconds still on the clock, the frame in front of him stirs. A visor lights up a brilliant blue, a pair of head fins slowly lifts up. Jazz comes online with a shake of his head and a stretch that has one of his knees digging uncomfortably into Prowl’s side. He nudges it away without a word.

“Jesus!” Jazz startles at the touch, apparently still only half-cognizant of his environment. His head fins pin down as he meets Prowl’s eye. “Is watching people sleep an alien weirdness or a personal pastime of yours?”

“I’m glad to see you’re feeling better,” Prowl says, noting the lack of any of his previous fidgeting. He calculates Jazz’s irritation is mostly (75%) fabricated. “How are you taking to the energon? I monitored the relevant systems during the refueling process, but you should run diagnostics now that you’re online, just in case.”

Jazz flexes his hands. “Feels good,” he says, before rolling his shoulders. “Feels great, actually.”

And then he’s wiggling out of their hiding place, somehow managing not to kick Prowl in the process. He watches as the mech unsheathes the blade at his wrist and goes through several different stances in quick succession. TacNet hungrily takes in the way Jazz uses his own momentum to shift from one attack to another. Prowl props his chin on his folded hands and indulges it. Values for velocity, mass, and drag fill his vision along with Jazz’s spinning frame. 

He thinks of all the plans he could utilize that frame for. Especially if he was allowed to have a closer look at its internal systems, the limits it had and what’d it take to push past them. He recalls all the strategies he’s had to discard for the fear of not having a soldier skilled enough to guarantee success. Watching Jazz cartwheel—one hand on the ground while the other has his blade slicing through the air—without as much as stirring the pebbles around his feet feels like finding an answer to a lot of Prowl’s problems. 
  
Jazz comes to a stop in front of him with a whoop, frame bouncing in place with excess energy. “Gotta hand it to you Numbers, that stuff is electric. Don’t think I’ve ever felt this ready to throw down!”

Prowl rises to his feet, leaving their burrow. “Again, I’m glad you are once more in fighting condition,” he mutters, circling Jazz slowly, eye scanning over him. “We should still be cautious of any possible side-effects.” 

Jazz’s head swivels around to follow him, still rocking. “I do feel kind of like you’ve hooked me up to a caffeine drip, yeah.” He tilts his head. “Which, speaking of, surprised you actually kept it above the belt during our hook-up.”

Prowl hums noncommittally, satisfied with his inspection. “I infer that you’re alluding to our interface, and the fact that I have not violated any of your systems, just as I have said I wouldn’t. Several times, might I add.”

“See, this is what I get for trying to give you some credit,” Jazz sighs, but he doesn’t sound especially displeased. “So, did that big brain of yours come up with a plan of action while I was power napping, or were you too busy staring at my beautiful, unconscious face like a creep?”

Prowl considers him. The jab has no real heat behind it. Based on his tone, Jazz is being playful. His entire demeanor seems much more loose and relaxed, visor bright and head fins at full mast. The prospect of running out of energy must have weighted on him heavily, indeed. Or, perhaps Prowl’s decision not to inspect his systems has won him more trust than he anticipated. He feels himself relax marginally in response.

“I have a viable route for us,” Prowl says, pointing to the north. “ETA is three hours, assuming we keep a steady pace and are otherwise uninterrupted.”

“And what’s the likelihood of that?” Jazz’s blade sinks back into its wrist compartment. He follows a step behind Prowl as they start forward, deftly maneuvering around any petrified growths in his way.

Prowl keeps his wings flared and his eye on the ground. “…not insignificant.”

“I feel like the fact that you’re not giving me an actual number is enough of an answer.”

He sighs. “The closer we get to the Quintesson base, the higher the chances of encountering some variation of their foot soldiers. They might not be aware of our position, but we can safely assume that they assume we’re heading for the most obvious point of exit.”

“What I’m hearing is that we’re walking right into a trap.”

Jazz is making the difficult terrain seem like entertainment more than an actual obstacle. His feet hardly ever touch the ground. Still, for all his zipping around, he makes sure to stay within Prowl’s line of sight, which he appreciates.

“Perhaps. It should hardly matter, as long as we get to the gate. Activating it is merely a formality, and both the facility and the planet at large have long since been abandoned. Hence, whatever awaits us will likely not be anything we haven’t seen already. At least not until an alarm is sounded.”

Jazz pops up into his vision, hanging upside down from a petrified branch. Prowl stops in his tracks, marveling at the fact that it manages to hold his weight.

“If the place is abandoned, how do we know the portal’s still got enough juice to send us where we need it to?”

Prowl flicks more condensation off his plating. The mist is getting heavier. “The report I’ve been referencing regarding what the Quintessons have dubbed ‘site I-310’ mark the facility as dormant, but functional.” 

Jazz, for his part, does not seem bothered by the wetness in the slightest as he swings gently to and fro. “And what if the report’s outdated?”

“Unlikely. Quintessons are historically very prudent in their records’ keeping.” Prowl never even bothered considering the possibility. 

Jazz looks at him for a few more seconds and then says, “Alright.” He swings away gracefully without another word.

Prowl’s optic recalibrates. He was expecting having to defend his stance more. “You… believe me?”

“I’m starting to believe you might have an idea about what you’re talking about,” Jazz answers lightly from ahead of him. “Sometimes, at least.”

“How generous,” Prowl dead-pans. 

“I try my best.” Jazz drops next to him. The forest is slowly opening up, the density of petrified trees thinning out to allow them to walk side-by-side. “So, if we’re done with the strategy meeting: what’s your least favorite color?”

Prowl shoots him a side-eye. “If I answer honestly, will you promise to do the same?”

Jazz thinks for a moment, visor turned skyward. “Can I ask a follow-up question?”

“Yes, assuming I will be given the same opportunity.”

“Fair. Any topic goes?”

Prowl hesitates. “You may refrain from answering if you so choose. Let’s be… civil, shall we?”

Jazz snorts. “You say that as though you’re not trying to rig my fun, icebreaker game into an excuse for digging for information.”

“Why would I have to ‘rig’ something into performing a function it had from the very beginning?” he huffs. “I’m merely trying to ensure that both participants respect the rules.”

Jazz holds up his hands in mock-defense. “Guilty as charged. And fine— I won’t lie. Cross my heart.”

Prowl knows better than to assume not lying is synonymous with telling the truth, but he’s hardly new at mind-games himself. “My least favorite color is gray.”

One of Jazz’s head fins lowers quizzically. “Why? Is that like… like a ‘black-and-white thinking’ metaphor? Do you just hate nuance?”

“No. It’s the most common plating color for mechs on the run. Hard to see against most Cybertronian roads and buildings.”

“Oh.”

“My turn. Are you currently on the run from your planet’s law enforcement?”

“Why, you eager to join them?” Jazz asks, sickly-sweet, some of that old hostility back in his frame.

Prowl takes his eye off the still-perilous ground to shoot him a scathing look. “You promised me an honest answer.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He lets out a heavy sigh, looking away. “Nah. I ain’t running from no one. Though I imagine there’s quite a number of folks blowing up my phone, and they’re sure to let me have it once I get back.”

“Friends?” Prowl wonders.

“The worst kind: the ones you’ve known so long they’re practically family.”

Prowl considers that. It’s still not the clearest of answers, but assuming it’s truthful, Jazz being on good terms with at least some of his people bodes well for the potential of an alliance. 

“Alright, I fessed up, now’s your turn,” Jazz says, and it sounds like he’s smiling, but the voice rings just a touch too sharp. “Who do you work for?”

“I technically don’t work for anyone,” Prowl hums. “Seeing as I get no monetary compensation for anything I do.”

Jazz tuts in disapproval, wagging his finger. “Don’t you get smart with me now, Numbers. That’s my thing.” He keeps Prowl’s pace, visor focused right on his face. “You admitted the last guy who gave you orders sucked. Well, I wanna know who’d you replace him with.”

Prowl turns his eye back towards the forest ahead of them. “I did no replacing. When our previous Prime—the de facto leader of our species—perished during the invasion, a new one was chosen, and our scattered forces followed. Me included.”

Jazz seems doubtful. “You don’t sound too fond of the guy.”

“I wasn’t.” Prowl vents out the heat gathering around his processor just from thinking about Optimus Prime. “He is an entirely too trusting, hopelessly altruistic, self-sacrificial fool with no experience in leadership, not a strategical strut in his frame, and just enough natural charisma to have most mechs swearing fealty within an hour of knowing him.”

“Sure sounds like someone worth knowing.”

“Yes, that is the general consensus on the topic.”

“Well, if you don’t agree, why follow him?” Jazz tilts his head inquisitively. “Or are you just in it ‘cuz it’s convenient?”

Prowl can’t help the amused snort that escapes him at the notion. “Oh, Primus, no.” 

Next to him, Jazz almost crashes into a wall of petrified bark. 

“I’m sorry, did you just laugh?” He stares at Prowl with a mixture of shock and giddiness. “Stop the timer everybody! It only took us like twelve hours, but we finally proved it’s been possible this whole time!”

Prowl ignores the jab and continues, a sardonic smile still on his face. “There is nothing convenient about being the mech in charge of keeping Optimus Prime alive. He’s rather opposed to the idea, in my experience.”

“Which brings us back to my point: why bother?” Jazz asks, rubbing at a dent in his chest plating.

Prowl looks up at the cloudless sky. Somewhere, among the stars just barely visible in the planet’s dusk, his team is left to plan their next steps without him. The more reasonable of them have already accepted that Prowl is most likely dead, and are—hopefully (52%)—focusing their efforts on figuring out how to disperse his workload among themselves. Prowl is good at his job, but he’s also, ultimately, dispensable. Everyone is. Smokescreen can do his job, although not as well (brilliant strategic mind, but prone to relying on luck more than statistics). Red Alert could fill the position of Lead Tactician, if he’d only find a way to temper his anxiety (excels at preventative measures; needs a second party to keep focus on the most viable threats). Their Second in Command is who’d Prowl give his position to if he had to choose, as much as it pains him on a personal level. 

He does not think that many are mourning him. Bluestreak, perhaps. He’s always been too sentimental. But Prowl is hardly a popular mech. He also knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Prime did. Most likely still does. Because their leader treats any and all loss of sentient life as though he had been the one to pull the trigger, irrespective of whether he was even in the same solar system at the time. Soldiers are indispensable. Calls for help must always be answered. Information and resources only accessed in the conventional, ‘humane’ ways. 

Adjusting to his… mindset has been a long and arduous process. Why bother, indeed? It’s a question Prowl has asked himself many times—slouched over data pads, racking his processor for ways of reconciling his leader’s ideals with basic logic and common sense—and the answer he settles on is always the same.

“Because for all his shortcomings, when I carry out an order given by Prime, I am confident that it is the most morally sound decision that could have been made on the matter.”

Despite what some may think, Prowl is not sparkless. When he worked as an Enforcer, it was with the conviction that he was helping Cybertron. The Senate took to describing them as the tools with which the Prime’s will was enacted, and Prowl enjoyed it. He liked being effective. He liked being useful and gladly let himself be used. He saw his work as essential for keeping his people safe, saw any detractors as wanting to bring harm to his planet. 

He was largely mistaken. When that realization dawned, Prowl was in denial. He has enough self-awareness to admit that he still is, in part, in denial. And then, when the Senate crumpled and he was asked to choose a new master, his main concern was the same that Jazz has raised: how to choose correctly? If he is a tool in someone’s hands, how to ensure it never strikes unjustly?

You give yourself over to Optimus Prime.

Jazz is quiet for a moment, following Prowl’s eye upwards thoughtfully. “You don’t have a moral compass, so you let the guy who does order you around.”

“Yes,” Prowl says simply, because it’s the truth. “Is that answer to your satisfaction?”

“Surprisingly enough, yeah. It is.”

Prowl nods. “Then I pose the same question: who do you work for?”

Jazz tsks. “Should have made a rule about no doubles.” He bounds a few steps ahead, not bothering to look at Prowl as he continues, “Real stand-up guy. Cares about the little man. Only person who’d have me on the team, and the only I’m willing to work under. Though it’s a very liberal definition of ‘work under’. I treat orders more like… suggestions.”

“I can imagine,” Prowl says dryly. And then, when it appears that Jazz has no intention of telling him more, “That’s not very exhaustive.”

A blue visor turns to stare down at him from where Jazz has made it a few branches high on a particularly tall tree. “Let’s leave it at that: you trust your boss to make the right call, yeah? Well, when I have to make a tough call, I trust mine to understand why I had to do it.”

Prowl squints up. “Is your… organization even legal?”

“Eh.” Jazz drops down next to him. “Legal’s whatever you make it, these days.”

He feels his doorwings hike up. “Surely, there has to be some sort of chain-of-command. Someone who sets down rules to follow.”

“Yeah, his name is Ultra Magnus. I have a feeling you two would get along just great,” Jazz says cheerily. “Also, watch out for the hole.”

“You cannot possibly tell me whatever resistance remains on your planet is ruled by a— the what?”

Before he can take another step, Jazz throws an arm in front of Prowl to stop him from stumbling into a cavity in the stone. It’s big enough for a minibot to fall down, although he would not make it far with the sheer volume of petrified vines snaking over the opening and sprouting from within the walls deeper in. 

“They started popping up a while ago. Been getting bigger.” Apparently satisfied that he won’t fall in, Jazz removes his hand. “Deeper, too. Can’t make out the end.”

Prowl crouches in front of the hole. If he strains the sensors in his doorwings, he can just make out another alteration in the ground that must be a tunnel somewhere to their right. He hovers his hand over the opening and feels a slight, warm breeze.

“Nothing to be concerned about,” he says calmly. “Most likely the remnants of old fauna native to the planet. Long extinct, mind you, so the likelihood of an ambush is low.”

Jazz looks down the hole, head fins tilted curiously. “Any idea where they lead?”

“Some manner of animal burrow, I’m sure,” Prowl hums. “We should move on.”

They do. The forest thins out as they go, until it can barely be categorized as such. And with each missing tree, a new opening yawns in the ground. They start to increase in size, too. Soon enough they’re more than wide enough for Prowl’s frame to fit inside. It’s impossible to make out how far down they go, their open mouths spewing more hot, moist air from within, closer to the planet’s core.

“You sure this is ‘nothing to be concerned about’, Numbers?” Jazz asks as they stop in front of the largest tunnel yet. At this size, it’d be more apt to categorize it as a small crater.

Prowl stares down the dark opening with a troubled expression. They’re halfway to their goal. The petrified forest is all but gone, but the burrows are arguably worse, since they require them to circle around their circumference, and the paths in between them are getting progressively slimmer. More than that, the mist has gotten warmer and denser. Visibility is low, and Prowl’s sensors only span so much distance.

He turns to Jazz. “How confident are you in navigating our current environment?”

“Pretty confident. Mostly worried about you and your two left feet.”

“I can make out what is around me well enough,” Prowl assures. “I struggle with anything long-distance, however. It’d be best if you took lead in guiding us forward for now.”

Jazz taps his foot on the ground, as if testing for something, before stepping ahead. He turns around to look at Prowl. “You sure you don’t wanna hold hands or anything? I won’t laugh at you for saying yes, but I will laugh if you fall down one of these and I have to fish you out.”

Prowl hesitates. “Do you still have the line you used to tow me with?”

He barely finishes speaking before Jazz is handing him a length of rope with a claw at the end. Prowl attaches it to the grill guard on his chest plating without a word, and then they’re off.

Jazz leads them through the maze of pathways, walking slower than his usual pace. Prowl follows his footsteps exactly, wings flared wide to try to make out details from the heavy mist. Between them, the line dangles loosely, never quite touching the ground nor going taut. 

There’s the now-familiar tap-tap-tap of Jazz’s fingers drumming against his plating. 

“You’re tense,” Prowl says, not bothering to phrase it as a question. 

Jazz’s head fins pin down low. “Got a bad feeling.”

“Is it supported by any actual evidence?”

 “I don’t know, man, look around us. Whole place is creepy as hell.” The drumming intensifies. “Nowhere to run if something tries to jump us.”

Prowl frowns. Emotional distress tends to negatively affect performance. After a moment of deliberation and a weary sigh, he says:

“What’s your least favorite color?”

Jazz stops, head snapping back to look at him. Even with no EMF, Prowl can practically feel his excitement. “You know what this is, Numbers? Growth.”

“Please just answer the question.”

He huffs, amused, and starts walking again. “Don’t have one, actually. Pass.”

Prowl stares at his retreating back. “This is the question you decide not to answer?”

“What can I say? I’m a lover, baby, not a hater.” Jazz maneuvers around a fallen tree and a medium-sized tunnel and watches as Prowl does the same, albeit somewhat less deftly. “Mind if I hit you with one?”

“I don’t guarantee an answer, but you may ask.”

Jazz twirls a loose section of rope in between his fingers. “Any hobbies?”

“No.”

“‘No, I won’t answer’ or ‘no, I’m a sad, sad man with no hobbies’?”

Prowl clears the obstacle and levels Jazz with an unimpressed stare. “I don’t have the time for hobbies.” He motions to their environment. “On account of all of this.”

“Oh, come on,” Jazz starts walking again, backwards, visor still trained on Prowl. “Even you’ve gotta have something you do to relax.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Do you?”

“Music. Listening to it. Playing it. Composing, if the mood strikes.” 

Prowl assumed as much. When Jazz doesn’t stop watching him expectantly, he sighs again. “I suppose there’s something, although I’m not sure it qualifies as a hobby, considering that I did not pick it up voluntarily.”

Jazz sidesteps a hole, head fins shooting up eagerly. “Do tell.”

“I… have a pet,” Prowl admits lamely.

“Huh.” Jazz thinks on that for a moment. “Didn’t peg you as an animal guy.”

“I’m not,” he says. “Whatever that means. It was a stowaway on our ship.”

The look he gets is dubious at best. “And you of all people decided to give it a loving home?”

“No. At least three different mechs attempted to take care of it before me. When it became clear no one willing was also responsible enough to make sure it doesn’t die—”

“You picked it up because you’re secretly a big softy?”

“—Prime assigned the task to me,” Prowl finishes flatly. 

(“Optimus, sir. With all due respect, I do not have time for this. The amount of work I have to do—”

“Is precisely why I think this should prove a most-needed distraction, my friend.”)

The conversation reminds him that without Prowl on base, there is no one to take care of Green. Proper care. His wing twitches queasily when he thinks of all the things that can potentially hurt it. Organics are fragile. And Green will gladly eat poison if offered.

“What even is it?” Jazz asks, finally turning around to look at where he’s going.

“A flyt,” Prowl answers, still somewhat distracted by his worries. Green has very specific dietary needs. Its approaching its shed, too, meaning that it’ll be in a foul mood, and he does not trust half the mechs on his team not to retaliate if it ends up chipping their paint.

“That’s nothing. You just said nothing.”

“It’s a…” He looks through his limited data bases on Earth fauna. There does not seem to be a direct equivalent. “…winged lizard?” A query comes up, although it is categorized as long-extinct. “I believe it bears some similarity to your dinosaurs.”

Jazz does actually stop at that, turning to stare at Prowl. “You have a pet pterodactyl?”

“Pteranodon would be more apt, seeing as it does not have teeth.”

“That’s not— You know what, never mind.” Jazz shakes his head, but he still seems abnormally excited about the topic. “Forget that thing I said about you turning into a car being the coolest thing about you. This is now the coolest thing about you. Pet dinosaur…” he mutters in disbelief. “What’s his name?”

“Green.” Prowl hesitates, before adding. “She’s a female of her species.” 

He updates his data banks concerning English pronoun use. He’s inferred from the limited dictionary he downloaded off Jazz that animals were strictly in the ‘it’ category, but the assumption must have been incorrect. Although it’s hard to judge with Jazz’s frequent deviation from standard word patterns. Data obtained from only one source can hardly be called reliable, but Prowl has nothing else to go on. 

It also does not help that he never quite understood the point of gender above its biological function for organics. Cybertronian as a language has no concept of it, and the Senate strongly opposed the use of any loanwords from cultures which did. Prowl mostly thinks the whole idea is too socially convoluted in ways which do not concern him to pay much attention to.

He considers asking Jazz for a clarification, but the mech is already walking towards him.

“Numbers.” He puts his hands on Prowl’s shoulders, visor staring intently up into his eye. “I’m about to ask you a question—maybe the most important question I’ve ever asked you.” 

He pauses. Prowl waits, resigned to his fate. 

“What color is Green?”

He gives Jazz a flat look. “I think it’s pretty self-explanatory.”

“I know,” Jazz says, and the grin is audible in his voice. “I knew before I even asked but I just had to hear you say that yes, you did name your pet dinosaur, who is green, Green.”

Prowl rolls his eye, removes Jazz’s hands from his shoulders, and pushes him forward to get them moving again. Jazz laughs and lets him. 

The tapping stops. Prowl congratulates himself on a job well-done.

Chapter Text

They spend the rest of their time walking through the maze of mist and bottomless pits in relative silence. Whenever Jazz feels himself getting tense, he imagines a green pterodactyl (pteranodon?) sitting on Prowl’s shoulder like an overgrown parrot. That doubled with the fact that he’s missing an eye has him well on his way to becoming a pirate. All he needs is a peg leg now. The mental image is enough to keep most of the anxiety at bay.

Not all of it, mind you. Bebop’s systems are in full gear, sonars mapping out their surroundings where her visor fails to make out the details through the fog. She’s primed to pick up any legs skittering frantically on the ground, hear the echoes of long bodies moving through longer tunnels stretching underneath them. If there are any alien worms intent on sneaking up on them, Jazz will know.

That’s not his concern. Hell, the C-fours that are still surely tracking them down aren’t his concern, either. Those are things Jazz can deal with if it comes to it, especially now that Bebop’s supercharged on energon, which, by the way, seems much more economical than the mix she’s used to. Jazz is ready to fight, more than that, he’s itching to see what the old girl can do with all that power. 

His main problem is walking behind him, face twisted in concentration, eye firmly on the ground. 

If they have to fight, Jazz is gonna be fine. Prowl, though? Not so much. Sure, he’s a decent enough shot, if all they get jumped by is a bunch of worms then he’ll probably be fine. But if that C-five finds them? Prowl is going to end up as a chew toy. That, or he’ll stumble into one of those tunnels during the scuffle and suffer a death taken straight out of Looney Tunes. 

You don’t play around with C-fives. They’re big, mean and intelligent, each equipped with its own fancy set of add-ons designed specifically to kill you. Most pilots, even experienced ones, don’t survive a one-on-one encounter with a C-five. Jazz doubts that they’ve collectively killed more than a hundred of them, and it tends to be a pretty considerable team effort.

In short: if the beastie they’ve seen flying around sniffs them out, their best bet is still running. Could Jazz take it? Maybe. He’s confident about his ability to survive it, at least. He gives Prowl a minute at best. The guy’s clearly not used to being in the field much, and you can’t bring a C-five down with a couple trick-shots. Especially not the thing the Quints sent after them. It’s been a while since Jazz has seen one that size—almost twice as long as Bebop is tall and a flier to boot. 

So, yeah. He’s a bit concerned. There are reasons why Jazz is the singular member of their SpecOps division. For one, the government refuses to give them more funding. But mostly because people tend to… drop around him. Majority of the Mech Program focuses on the Vanguard—pilots who specialize in what is supposed to be damage prevention, but is realistically damage reduction. Jazz never had much luck in that. He has a knack of surviving low odds, but they usually include inventive ideas that tend to create a lot of… collateral. Drop him in the middle of a Quint base and he can do some real damage and come out the other end with nary a scratch. Don’t assign him bodyguard duty if you actually care about the target surviving. 

He can do it. Has done it in the past, especially when the going’s been rough and they’re running low on people. But he works much better when he has something to kill and a lot of space to work.

All that is to say, Jazz doesn’t feel particularly optimistic about keeping Prowl alive if they start fighting anything substantial. And at this point he’s willing to admit that he’d at least prefer for the guy not to drop dead. The whole process of activating the Quint portal to get him back home will be much easier if he has someone who can use their damn consoles. Jazz could probably figure it out. Maybe. But why give himself more work when he doesn’t have to?

Prowl is also… not as much of an asshole as he could have been. Still a bastard, though. Jazz’s general rule of thumb is to never trust cops, and it’s served him pretty well for all his life. It still feels a little apocryphal to his own character to even give the guy the benefit of the doubt, but he’s willing to make an exception, on account of the fact that he doesn’t really have any other options right now. And because, from what he’s gathered so far, Prowl isn’t a cop by choice as much as by indoctrination-since-birth. Creation. Assembly? Whatever. The point is, he at least admits whatever he did wasn’t exactly the greatest. Jazz can work with a retired cop. The bar is on the ground, but at least it exists.

He looks over his shoulder at where Prowl’s eye is still firmly focused on the ground. The line of his grappling hook dangles loosely in between them. His fingers twitch, resisting the urge to quite literally yank on Prowl’s chain.

He settles on the proverbial sense of the expression.

“Yo, Numbers.” 

A single black-and-white wing twitches. “If you’re about to ask me if we’re there yet for the fifth time in the span of half an hour, I regret to inform you that my answer remains unchanged.” 

Jazz smiles and says nothing more. He considers himself something of a professional button pusher, and Prowl has plenty of those, unsurprisingly. 

He has Bebop set a timer for five minutes. The numbers tick down in turn with their footsteps on hard rock. 

Eventually, they trickle down into zeroes. 

“Hey.”

There’s a heavy sigh behind him. “Your single-minded devotion to this specific practical joke at my expense would be admirable, if it were not so utterly and completely devoid of any actual humor.” 

“I dunno, it’s been treating me pretty well.” He huffs an amused sound. “Also, anybody ever mention you get all verbose when you’re annoyed?”

Prowl takes his eye off the ground for just long enough to shoot him an unimpressed look. “The higher the frequency at which I speak, the lesser the chance of you asking more inane questions.”

“And the more time for you to listen to your own voice,” Jazz nods sagely. It’s a pretty nice voice, at least. 

He’s about to set a new timer, (this one for seven minutes, because he’s absolutely sure Prowl is tracking the numbers) but stops when Bebop picks something unusual from the mist ahead of them. 

“Prowl—”

“I refuse to engage in any further conversation until you at least find a new question to pointlessly repeat over the next hour.”

“That’s great, actually, since something just came to mind,” he mutters, cautiously approaching the anomaly. Behind him, Prowl slows down as the thing steadily starts to take shape among the surrounding it fog. Jazz waits until they’re standing side by side, both dwarfed by what’s in front of them, before pointing towards it. “The hell’s that?”

Back when they first met, as what she sure thought was a fun icebreaker exercise, Whirl showed him her collection of animal bones. They were mostly of the small to medium variety, pristinely assembled considering that their owner only had seven fingers to work with, each and every one mounted on a little stand and displayed as full skeletons. She claimed they were all ‘locally sourced’. Some of them were definitely not from Earth. Jazz decided not to ask for more details.

The real pièce de résistance was the snake skeleton stretched across one of the walls. Jazz knew nothing about snakes, but based on the shape and size of the fangs hanging right next to the bed, he deduced it was venomous. 

“Three hundred and sixteen pairs of ribs,” Whirl said with the pride of a mother showing off her favorite child. 

Jazz watches the rows upon rows of ribs taller than his mech and wonders what she’d have to say about them. They lack the sheen and polish of anything in Whirl’s collection, old and chipped, missing large chunks in places. It looks like the thing gave up the ghost on its back, the sharp claws of its ribcage reaching hungrily towards the sky. They stretch all the way into one of the larger tunnels, the skeleton’s back end disappearing down and into the dark. The two of them happen to be standing at its front, eye to eye with the the angular skull inside which rows of once-sharp, serrated teeth sit ominously. Jazz counts at least three sets of jaws. 

“Partially fossilized remains of the local fauna.” Prowl doesn’t seem too impressed by the skeleton, regarding it with mild disinterest. “As I’ve said: long extinct. Nothing to concern ourselves with.”

“What the hell did the Quints even do to this planet if this is all that’s left of the locals?” Jazz wonders out loud, circling the skull. He saves some photos to show off to Whirl later. He’d take a bone for her, too, but for all he knows, those things carry some alien version of smallpox which’ll end up wiping out half the humanity. 

Prowl follows him as Jazz weaves in between the ribs, making sure the line still connecting them doesn’t get tangled. “What they eventually do with all the planets they conquer: they repurposed it.”

Jazz knocks a knuckle against one of the bones. “Into what?”

“An incubator.” Next to him, Prowl picks up a chipped off tooth from the ground and turns it over in his fingers. “They analyzed the native flora and fauna, collected samples and  proceeded to cleanse the planet of anything… inconvenient.” He discards the tooth and folds his hands behind his back. “Whatever their method, it has left any organic based lifeforms fossilized. It’s not detailed in the files, but I would assume the high level of terraformation contributed to the process.”

“Okaaay…” Jazz says slowly. He stands inside one of the maws of the skeleton, Bebop’s form framed by the circle of teeth. There’s something almost familiar about them that he can’t quite put his finger on. “And when you say ‘an incubator’ do you mean what I think you mean?”

“It’s used for breeding, cloning and bioengineering soldiers,” Prowl says mildly, as though he was describing the weather.

“So… they raise their kids here or something?” Jazz asks, only half-listening. Bebop pulls up reference photos and starts comparing the teeth to different things she has saved up on her database. 

Prowl tilts his head quizzically. “Offspring…? No. I do not believe the Quintessons reproduce in places other than their home-world.”

“Wait.” He lets Bebop run her tests while he focuses back on Prowl. “So what are they incubating here?”

“As I said, their soldiers,” Prowl says slowly. Jazz just looks at him with a sinking feeling in his stomach. “…were you not aware of the fact? The Quintessons—true Quintessons, not the creatures they engineer for their armies—hardly ever move off-world. Some of their bigger ships have generals stationed on board, but other than that, they do not take active part in the wars they wage.”

Jazz feels a bit like throwing up. “So you’re telling me that this entire time, we haven’t even been fighting the actual guys that have it out for us? Just their lackeys?” 

He supposes it makes sense. They knew Quints had a language, had technology indicative of a highly advanced civilization, yet anything they ever fought didn’t seem to have the kind of brain power necessary for creating any of that. Doesn’t make the confirmation any less depressing. 

“I’m afraid so,” Prowl says grimly. “They have mastered the art of war. They lose no people of their own and stage battles far away from their own turf. It is nigh impossible to make any moves against their empire that actually affect them in any substantial way.” His wings sag downwards. “They have conquered and destroyed countless civilizations. They will continue to do so, at least for the foreseeable future. All we can hope for in our current state is to reduce the number of resources at their disposal and try to ascertain our own survival.”

Jazz chews on that for a moment. He’ll have to report this to the command. He’ll have to watch all their faces sink.

“You’ve gotta have some sorta… I dunno. Five-year-plan,” he says finally, trying not to sound like he’s in the bargaining stage on grief. 

Prowl’s shoulders hike up slightly. He looks away. “I do. Although, realistically, it’s more of a five-decade-plan.”

Jazz is about to ask for how long has it been a five-decade-plan, but stops when Bebop gives him a match for the teeth he’s been looking at. Not a perfect one, but still similar enough to catch his attention. 

“Is it just me—” he asks instead, slowly, taking in the whole of the skeleton again, “—or does this corpse remind you of something.”

Prowl raises an eyebrow. “Well, it’s only natural that it would, considering that this specific creature was used as the blueprint for what would later become one of the staples of the Quintesson army. Category… three, I believe was what you called them?”

Jazz presses his palm into the side of an old, crumbling skull of a thing whose bastardized descendants he’s killed hundreds of. What if in a couple years, a couple decades, his own bones will litter the ground somewhere on the empty husk that’s left of Earth? 

“Y’know, never thought I’d feel bad for these guys.” 

Prowl watches him, expression unreadable. “Quintesson soldiers can hardly be called alive. They’re ruled by an artificially constructed set of instincts superimposed on them by their creators.” He turns his eye to the skull. “There is nothing to mourn.”

Jazz shoots him a look. “You ever listen to yourself, man? That sounds horrible.” He gestures emphatically to the skeleton. “That might be us one day.”

“It won’t be,” Prowl says with a sudden hardness in his voice.

Jazz lets his hand slide off the cracked bone and turns to face him. That ticked Prowl off. More importantly, why did that tick Prowl off? The alien stares back at him, almost challenging Jazz to contradict him. 

He tilts his head, thinking. “You said Quints take samples of anything they conquer. Those are for making more Frankenstein-soldiers.” 

Have they done that to humans? C-fives attack cities, but as far as Jazz knows, they never abduct anyone. Then again, with the sheer number of casualties, it’d be impossible to tell whether someone who went missing was buried under the rubble or taken away for freak experiments. Besides, would Quintessons even be interested in humans when there are giant robots to sample from?

Which brings him to his point:

“They ever try to kidnap any of you?”

Prowl glares. It’s hard to describe it as anything else. Jazz has a feeling he’s not actually angry at him. 

“I don’t know,” he says finally, like each word is a struggle to get out.

“You don’t know,” Jazz echoes, doubtful. 

Prowl’s eye burns with a cold, blue light. “Soldiers go missing during missions all the time. It is impossible to determine what happens to them afterwards.”

Jazz walks closer to him until they’re almost chest to chest. The line connecting them spills messily at their feet. “Sounds to me like you’re missing a couple corpses.”

The wings on Prowl’s back flick upwards. Jazz is reminded of those birds that puff their feathers out to make themselves look bigger and tougher than they actually are. “There is no way for me—or for anyone, for that matter—to know. It is not a variable I can take into account when issuing orders.”

“But you do know,” Jazz counters, because Prowl would not be getting angry if he didn’t. “You know there’s a chance that if you send someone out there, they might end up in a test tube. And I bet the number’s pretty high, which is why you haven’t shared with the class.”

For a second, Jazz is sure Prowl is going to punch him. He’s close enough to his face to see the way the lenses inside of his working eye shift, take focus as they stare down into Bebop’s visor. He can feel the hot air whistling out of the vents on his face. 

But then he leans back and away from Jazz. He pinches the bridge of his nose, heaves an audible sigh and turns around to start walking. “Let’s move on.”

Jazz blinks, thrown off. He hurries after Prowl before the line manages to yank him forward. “What, that’s it?”

“Yes,” Prowl says, voice and expression completely neutral.

He takes lead in guiding them around before Prowl manages to stumble into one of the holes. The skeleton disappears into mist behind them. 

Prowl is smart. He must have considered that the Quints are kidnapping his people. Apparently, he’s the one sending them out to be kidnapped, too. Is this a guilt thing? Washing his hands off the responsibility, since he technically has no way of knowing? Jazz supposes he shouldn’t be surprised to hear that out of the same guy that delivered folks to the doorstep of the powers-that-be and didn’t bother wondering what happened once the door slammed shut.

Jazz shoots him a couple more glances over his shoulder, but Prowl remains fully closed-off. So, this is one of those buttons that shall not be pushed. Duly noted. He stays quiet and lets him cool off a little.

They walk on. The line connecting them is almost taut, stretching as far as it can go without actually pulling. 

Minutes pass. The mist slowly recedes, tough the number of tunnels does not. Bebop’s scanners still monitor their surroundings and Jazz tries to focus on the data she’s feeding him instead of the two bombshells Prowl’s dropped on him today. So, their years of struggle against the alien invaders probably won’t amount to anything, ever. So what? Jazz isn’t about to just lay down and die. If the most he can do is make his inevitable death a real nuisance, then he’ll work extra hard at that. Spite is a powerful motivator. 

“We’re here.”

Jazz is snapped out of his thoughts by Prowl’s voice. He’s stopped, eye turned to the horizon where a silhouette of a building is just barely visible through the weakening mist. Square, blocky, all hard angles and dark colors. Difficult to see any details at this distance. One thing that is noticeable, however, is the ground getting progressively more… purple. It’s been just gray rock under Bebop’s feet for most of their walk, but the grounds near the facility appear a sickly, deep color that reminds Jazz of rotten plums. It also seems more earthy, finally some actual soil instead of just cold, hard stone.

“Final stretch…” he mutters, visor trained on their goal.

Prowl, apparently deeming it clear enough for him to lead again, overtakes Jazz without a word, face a mask of determination. He watches the rope grow taut slowly, and follows.

They’re maybe twenty minutes away from the facility when Bebop picks something up again. Jazz immediately stops. It’s just a slight tremor in the ground, but with how otherwise still everything is on this planet, it’s unmistakable. 

Prowl turns back to him with an annoyed twist to his mouth, but it quickly dissolves when he sees Jazz stock still, head fins at attention, listening. He freezes.

More tremors, more numerous this time. And then Jazz hears it, too. A barely-there, faint  click. 

“C-fours,” he says, already looking around for some potential cover and finding absolutely nothing. “Coming this way, and fast.”

“How many?” Prowl asks immediately.

“Too many for us to try that trick from before.” 

Bebop has already calculated the distance between them and the facility. Jazz won’t make it before the Quints catch up to them. 

Prowl, on the other hand, can turn into a car with a souped up engine. Assuming he can see well enough not to drive into a tunnel, he could probably outrun their pursuit, and maybe even the C-five if it comes to it.

Which, based on how he’s eying the Quint base, he fully realizes.

It hits Jazz then: Prowl is gonna dip. He lets himself feel the peculiar mix of hurt, disappointment and relief for all of a second before he shoves the emotions into a neat little mental box and throws it away to be examined later, preferably when he’s not under active threat of dying. Or never. 

He’s not surprised. He just… started to hope, is all. 

Jazz is a big boy, though, he can take it. More than that, he kind of gets it, too. Prowl needs to get back to his people and the only reason why they’ve stayed together this long is that there wasn’t really one for going their separate ways. But now Prowl has a chance to get the hell out of this nightmare planet, and he doesn’t need Jazz for it. He can’t say he wouldn’t have done the same in his position.

So, Jazz starts looking for a way out for himself. Any moment now Prowl will remove the claw from his grill guard and drive off with a roar of an engine. Which is good, because it means pursuit will focus on the noise instead of Jazz scurrying around. Realistically, he only has the one way of going, and it’s downwards. He’s just gotta find a hole that actually leads somewhere. Preferably one that’s too narrow for a C-five to fit through.

Bebop’s scanners strain to try to map out the tunnels stretching deep under their feet. Too steep. Too narrow. Collapsed. Can’t see the bottom. Collapsed. Dead-end. Jazz starts walking, looking for more options, except—

Except Prowl is still attached to him, so he can’t. The alien is stock still, single eye jumping between the facility in the near distance and Jazz. His face is a mask of intense concentration.

Jazz stops his search to stare at him. He’s hesitating. Why is he hesitating? 

“What the hell are you waiting for!?” he whisper-shouts, all too aware of their pursuers superior hearing.

“I’m—” Prowl seems as conflicted about his own indecision as Jazz. “Thinking.”

“About what? You could be halfway there already!”

Prowl’s frantic gaze focuses right on Bebop’s visor. “You don’t know how to activate Quintesson gates.”

“I’ll figure it out.” He tries to sound more confident than he feels. “Always do.”

Prowl’s eye narrows, like he can sense Jazz is talking out of his ass, which—fair. And he still doesn’t leave. 

The cynical part of his brain wants to assume Prowl has an ulterior motive. He can’t really imagine that the guy who admitted to having no moral compass would choose to help him because he’d consider it ‘the right thing to do’. But Jazz also has no clue what Prowl could possibly be getting out of keeping him alive and by his side at this point. He’s had plenty opportunities to fuck him over, and didn’t. What variable is Jazz not seeing that’s skewing Prowl’s numbers towards staying?

He reconsiders his general read on the alien’s personality. Maybe he was right to hope. Maybe there is more to this guy than meets the eye. The sole fact that he’s hesitating right now makes him interesting. Consider Jazz intrigued. 

This leaves Jazz with a choice. Prowl will, potentially, stick around, and if he does, Jazz will have to update some of his immediate plans. He’s very much aware that they’re on a tight schedule, and Prowl has been, historically, not the best at making snap decisions. 

He decides to make the choice easier for him.

Jazz stalks forward and unceremoniously grabs the rope of his grappling hook, real close to the claw wedged in between Prowl’s grill guard, and yanks him forward. Prowl stumbles, eye going wide, before he catches himself, Jazz’s grip on the line forcing him to lean down until they’re almost at eye level despite their height difference.

“Alright, Prowl, here’s the deal.”

A blade shinks out of the wrist compartment on Bebop’s free hand. He presses it, gently, against the rope connecting them.

“All you have to do is scoot just a little bit back, and this’ll snap. You’re free to drive off into the sunset, get back home, and we never see each other again. Everyone lives happily ever after.”

Prowl’s eye tracks the movement of the blade. “Or?”

Jazz tilts his head. “Who says there’s an ‘or’?”

“You would already be gone if there wasn’t an alternative you’re interested in,” Prowl says, sounding surprisingly put-together considering his position.

Jazz makes him wait a couple more moments. He knows Prowl must be crunching numbers regarding his chances of making it to the facility on time. He knows Prowl knows they’re getting smaller with each passing second. 

When he remains in place, Jazz continues, “You let me order you around for the next five minutes, no questions, no hesitation, and I get us both out of this mess alive.”

Prowl considers the rope, the blade. The lenses inside of his eye spin. Hot air escapes the vents on his face as he thinks. Then his gaze settles on Bebop’s visor resolutely.

Somewhere behind them, C-fours’ alien clicking gets progressively louder.

Prowl leans forward until the rope goes slack and his chevron almost meets Jazz’s forehead. “What do you need me to do?”

He grins. “You gotta let me stab you a little.”

It’s a testament to some level of trust they must share when Prowl doesn’t immediately make a run for it. He does seem to be hit with a wave of instant regret, but when Jazz holds out his hand expectantly, he settles his own, palm up, into it without a question.

He immediately grabs onto the limb and uses the still unsheathed sword to draw a line through the thick, black mesh that covers Prowl’s palm. It splits open, revealing lines and wires, sparking occasionally. More importantly, it gets Jazz what he was looking for: pink, strong-smelling liquid starts to seep out of the wound. There’s much less of it than there’d be blood on a human hand, but it’ll do. 

Prowl makes no indication that he’s in pain. He simply follows Jazz’s movements as he grabs reaches into Bebop’s storage compartment and produces a small piece of chipped off armor. He directs Prowl to hold his bleeding hand over it, careful not to let any of the pink stuff spill to the ground. Once the plating’s nice and bloody, he skips over to one of the larger tunnels and chucks it down, making sure it hits the walls on its way down. 

“You’re throwing them off our scent,” Prowl whispers, following a couple steps behind. 

Jazz shushes him. He reaches out for the injured hand again, waits until the edges of Bebop’s sword superheat and carefully presses the it to the wound. Prowl does wince this time as his palm is melted back closed. 

“Rub that in the dirt near the edge,” Jazz instructs quietly, already focused on scanning for more viable tunnels.

Prowl gives him a look that screams this is highly unsanitary, but obediently kneels and does as he’s asked. Bebop tracks the smell of burnt mesh and fresh alien blood/fuel slowly disappearing off of him. If they had more time, Jazz would have him roll around in the dirt for good measure, but as it is, this will have to do. 

Once Prowl is back on his feet, Jazz grabs him by the rope and starts pulling them forwards. Bebop’s scanners strain to map out as much of the tunnels underneath their feet as they can. 

Another dead end. Too small. Too steep. About to collapse…

He can feel Prowl stiffen behind him as more clicks fill the air. 

C’mon, he thinks, visor jumping frantically from opening to opening. Don’t make me out to be a liar.

There! A bit too steep than he’d prefer but there’s a nice, developed tunnel system that seems to actually be going somewhere. Just big enough for the two of them to comfortably fit through but that C-five would struggle to squeeze in there.

Jazz directs them to the edge of the hole. Prowl eyes the steep slope of it warily. The C-fours are too close for talking, so Jazz hopes the dagger he hands him speaks for itself. Prowl takes it with a questioning look. Understanding dawns on him as he watches Bebop’s claws pop out of their compartments while Jazz kneels by the edge, peering downwards.

No, he mouths silently, somewhere between disbelief and indignation.

Bebop has no mouth, so Jazz just nods his head resolutely and motions for him to grab onto his shoulder. He’s still debating whether to cut the rope. Its chances of helping are about the same as it ending up as a safety hazard.

Prowl’s expression spells some choice words for Jazz once they’re safe to speak again, but he does wedge his fingers in between the plating on Bebop’s shoulder, so Jazz counts that as a win.

He grabs Prowl by the waist and presses them together. He lets the plasma cannon slide out of its compartment on his free hand and uses it to shoot the side of one of the more unstable looking tunnels. As it starts to collapse onto itself with a horrible racket, Jazz pulls Prowl tighter against his side and tilts them forward into a slide down the steep slope, and into the darkness of the cavern.

Chapter Text

If they somehow survive this, Prowl is going to kill him.

It’s his last thought before the world turns into an array of sound and movement too fast and loud to comprehend. Rocks and earth scrape against his back painfully, tremors travel up and down his plating from the friction, amplified by the horrible cacophony of another tunnel collapsing onto itself somewhere near. Prowl’s audials note dangerous levels of volume from the combination of rocks falling and the screech of Jazz’s claws against the wall, desperately trying to slow their descent with one hand while keeping the other wrapped tightly around Prowl’s midsection. Each passing moment plunges them deeper into darkness, the walls lighting up with dull blues and reds of their respective biolights. 

The tunnel he’s chosen to throw them into isn’t quite at a right angle, but it’s a very near thing (78°). TacNet is slowing his thought process down, calculating their speed, mass, velocity, gravitational pull, force of impact— By the time Prowl gets enough clarity of mind to make use of the dagger Jazz handed him earlier, they’ve already been sliding (falling) for a couple seconds. He stuffs it into subspace for the sake of getting a two-handed grip on Jazz’s armor. 

Instead of wedging the blade into the wall and potentially (<33%) dislocating his arm in the process, Prowl tucks his wings tight against his back and plasters himself as close to the wall as he can, ignoring the flood of pain pings it brings. With a growl of his engine, he extends the wheels on his back and ankles until the rubber meets hardened earth and throws in the reverse.

They slow down with a sudden jerk. Jazz’s hold on the mesh of his waist turns bruising. Dirt sprays from underneath his tires and wedges in between his plates. TacNet feeds him more data about their change in velocity and Prowl can barely keep up with discarding it all to allow himself to think. They’re still plummeting down at deadly speeds and the darkness this far down prevents him from seeing the bottom of their descent. They’re going to crash at any second. 

What else can he do? Think. Think. Don’t panic. Don’t focus on your dwindling rate of survival (>3%), focus on how to increase it. 

Jazz shouts something he can’t make out among the noise. Four fingers leave his waist and find his hand instead, peeling it away from his shoulder and squeezing once. Prowl’s battle computer reroutes in an instant; Jazz has proven himself to be a reliable unit in highly dangerous and uncertain scenarios. Therefore, supporting him in whatever decision he deigns to make has more likelihood of saving them than anything Prowl could currently come up with. He squeezes back.

A second later the steadying fingers slip out of his grasp, followed by the shoulder he kept hanging onto with his free hand, and then he’s plummeting all by himself. Prowl stares, still dazed, as Jazz springs off the wall they’ve been sliding against and latches onto something in the dark. He manages to catch a flash of a blue visor staring right back at him before it disappears as gravity keeps pulling him down. Except—

Except there’s still rope connecting them. He has a second for the realization to sink in, and then the slack runs out and he’s wrenched away from the wall, tires still spinning wildly. He swings forward in an arch, the metal claw in between his grill guard pulling on his plates with enough force to cause warnings to pop up in his vision. He scrambles for the line, desperately trying to reduce the strain threatening to wrench the guard from the rest of his body. And, more importantly, to angle himself so that the rapidly approaching wall doesn’t damage anything crucial.

Prowl barrels into hard rock shoulder-first. Preferable to his back, since that would have almost certainly (94%) leave his doorwings inoperable, and him effectively blind. The impact still sends enough pings and warnings through his processor to force him into a temporary shutdown.

When he comes to, his internal clock informs him that several minutes have passed. He doesn’t even get the chance to run diagnostics before his systems start to warn him about the strain against his chest plates. Still only half-cognizant of his surroundings, Prowl sluggishly reaches out for the rope. His left arm protests the movement immediately, pain sparking up his sensors and forcing him to drop it back down. He wraps his remaining hand around the rope, heaves himself upwards until the strain decreases to acceptable levels, and locks the joints in place. And then he starts turning off pain sensors in the parts of his frame which flood his processor with useless, urgent pings. Yes, he’s aware of the damage. No, writhing in pain over it will not help it disappear faster, thank you for your invaluable input, dear body.

Once he’s sure the additional data won’t cause him to shut down again, Prowl lets his wings flare out and tries to figure out the severity of his situation and—preferably—how to get himself out of it. 

He’s swinging gently above a pit that might as well be bottomless for all he knows. The thing preventing him from falling into it is the same length of rope which should be attached to Jazz, whom he can’t see right now. Above him, in the far distance, Prowl can just about make out the sliver of natural light. The surrounding silence feels deafening after the avalanche of sound from moments ago. 

The joints in his arm are starting to protest having to support his full weight. Prowl squints into the darkness above him, trying to see where the line disappears to. After a beat of hesitation, he turns on his headlights.

Immediately, the rope jerks with movement from the other side. A voice, low but hopeful, echoes in the silence. 

“…Prowl?” 

He feels a wave of relief wash over him. 

“Jazz,” he says, and dumps the calculations TacNet was starting to run on how long it would take for his grip to give out. 

“Man, I have never been more glad to hear you speak,” Jazz rushes out, sounding similarly relieved. “Was getting ready to cut the line. Thought maybe the crash did you in.”

With the assistance of his headlights (and a great deal of twisting about), Prowl can make out the edge of a rocky shelf extending slightly from the wall above him. The rope snakes over it. Jazz must be on the other side. 

“Can you pull me up?” Prowl asks. His left hand swings limply by his side.

Jazz makes an uncertain sound. “I’m a bit preoccupied with making sure you don’t fall further in.”

Prowl thinks. Straining his injury will lessen the likelihood of recovery. His only alternative is swinging here forever, or until Jazz decides to let him go, so it’s still an easy choice. He forces his left arm up. Something grinds uncomfortably in his shoulder and even with the pain receptors turned off, he can’t help but wince at the sensation. 

Slowly, painstakingly, he pulls himself up. The process is steady, methodical and deeply disconcerting on a physical level. Once he’s halfway through, energon starts to stain the rope where his injured hand wraps around it. More travels down his side, slides over the plating of his leg and drips from his foot and into the abyss below. 

Jazz stays quiet while he climbs. Prowl would think him gone, if not for the fact that every once in a while the rope trembles with movement originating from somewhere on the other side.

When his hand finally reaches solid rock, it’s immediately met by four alien fingers wrapping urgently around it. The two of them scramble for a few moments, limbs reaching, grasping at whatever they can until Prowl manages to stumble over the edge and half on top of Jazz, the rope left to tangle between them.

Neither of them moves for a while. Jazz has one of his wrists in a death-grip, while his other arm is wedged awkwardly in between their frames. Prowl lies there strutlessly, still clutching desperately onto black shoulder plates. His vents spin loudly in the silence as he waits for his joints to stop rebelling after what he just put them through. 

Prowl eventually manages to raise his doorwings to get a feel for their surroundings. The rocky shelf they’re on appears to be the mouth of a smaller tunnel running perpendicular to the main one they fell into. It leads further into the dark, the ceiling just low enough that Prowl will probably have to slouch in order to walk it. The thought makes him even more reluctant to get up. His doorwings flag down again. He initiates a system check tiredly, deeply aware of the fact that he’s had to run more of them in the past day than he’d ordinarily do in the span of a month back on the ship.

The frame underneath him stirs, apparently deciding it’s had enough of staying still. “You know, there are easier ways to get me on my back than this.”

Prowl sighs, long and loud, and rolls off of Jazz with some effort until they’re laying shoulder to shoulder. “You are insufferable.” 

Jazz taps a finger against his wrist, somehow managing to hold onto it throughout his change of position. “And yet you chose to suffer me over an easy ticket home. ‘S been a while since I’ve been in a math class, but it seems to me like something’s not adding up here.”

Prowl manages to get himself into a sitting position and is about to respond, but stops when he realizes the state Jazz is in. There are scratches on his frame, deep and cutting, as well as dents that litter his plating, especially near the chest. That in on itself is bizarre enough after seeing just how untouchable Jazz appeared to be throughout their journey. More notably, his right arm looks like it’s moments away from disconnecting from his shoulder. Prowl can see sparking wires, the bright pink of energon bleeding sluggishly from in between torn apart metal and mesh. And lower, the line of the grappling hook wrapped in several coils around his forearm and fingers, some of which also appear to be on the verge of being pulled straight out from their joints. 

Prowl takes all the damage in gravely. “You’re injured.” That explains why Jazz was unable to help him up. 

“Well, you’re heavy. If I was built any less sturdy than I am, you and my arm both would have been at the bottom of this hole by now.” He shrugs his good shoulder, before motioning to Prowl’s own injuries. “Besides, looks like gravity wasn’t kind to you either.” 

“It can hardly be kind to anyone at such speeds,” Prowl mutters, massaging his temple. An injured-Jazz is a less-effective-in-battle Jazz, and there’s still high likelihood of them encountering hostiles at the facility housing the Quintesson gate. “Are you fit to keep going?”

“Sure,” Jazz says easily and gets up to his feet. He considers his bad arm for a moment, before swiftly cutting the rope of the grappling hook with the blade on his uninjured arm. “Not my first, one-armed rodeo. I’ll be fine.” A blue visor jumps up to focus on him, staring pointedly at the pink staining his limbs. “You?”

Prowl uses the wall to help himself up. “System check came back hopeful; legs are uninjured. Limited range of movement in left arm. Should be back to at least mostly functional soon,” he says, and fishes out another medigrade cube from subspace. Smokescreen always tells him he’s being overzealous with the amount of rations he keeps on his person, but by his calculations, he’ll certainly need every single one of them.

Jazz seems to hesitate. “You sure? Looks kinda painful.”

Prowl gives him a quizzical look, halfway through discarding the claw still attached to his grill guard. The bars are bent outwards slightly. “It is. Half my pain receptors are offline right now.” He turns his attention back to the claw, carefully pulling it free. The scrape of metal on metal echoes irritatingly. “Is that not how you manage to bear with your own injuries?”

“Right.” Jazz looks at his own arm, head fins pinned halfway. “Can’t feel a thing of this.”

Prowl tilts his head. “Is this a… regular practice for your people?”

“It ain’t for you?” Jazz walks up to him, motioning for Prowl to hand over the clawed end of his grappling hook. He raises an eyebrow in question, but does.

Prowl hums, watching as Jazz approaches the precipice of the shelf and leans over it. “Overriding any of your base programming is generally not advised. It can certainly be dangerous if done carelessly.”

That is something of an understatement. Manipulating pain responses can lead to certain… complications regarding the processor. Some medical professionals regard it as addictive, considering that it often acts as a gateway to abusing a mech’s pleasure centers until they’ve fried all their receptors, and the individual is left virtually devoid of any sensation. Hence, cracking your own systems and manipulating them in a way which does not end up as ultimately detrimental takes considerable skill, willpower and restraint. The necessary software wasn’t even legal back on Cybertron. 

That being said, TacNet could be utilized to achieve similar results, so Prowl did not technically break any laws by attempting the procedure, and it was a standard practice among most Enforcers, besides. Prowl wouldn’t consider his own initial attempts at it as entirely… successful, his battle computer had him coming back to it again and again with endless motivation. The simple fact remained: the potential risk—

“Doesn’t stop it from being really convenient,” Jazz says.

He wedges the claw of his grappling hook beneath his foot, pulls the rope taut by wrapping it around his good shoulder and promptly snips it close to the claw with his blade. The line is discarded unceremoniously. “Besides, I don’t think you’re capable of doing anything carelessly.”

It’s hard to tell whether the comment is an insult or a compliment. Prowl cuts off TacNet’s calculations on the topic before they force his vents to audibly pick up. 

“What are you doing?” he asks instead, watching Jazz throw the claw into the pit below with a flourish.

“Shh.” He holds up a finger expectantly. “Just curious about something.”

Prowl joins him by the edge, already counting seconds. The silence stretches, the air between them growing more grave with each passing moment. When the echo of the impact finally reaches them, it’s faint, metal striking rock with a quiet clang. 

“Pretty bad,” Jazz comments, visor turned downwards in thought.

With the weight of the claw, the gravitational pull on the planet, the speed at which sound travels and the amount of time before they heard it…

“Pretty bad,” Prowl agrees, cutting the calculations off before his own curiosity leads him to substituting the weight of the claw with his own.

“At least we don’t have to worry about anyone following us down here,” Jazz mutters, glancing back up briefly before turning to Prowl. “So!” He makes a motion to clap his hands together, which turns into more of a wave when one of his arms refuses to move. “Now that we’re not actively dying: do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

“The bad,” Prowl says immediately. 

“My sonar’s busted.” When that earns him little more than a confused stare, Jazz continues, “The fall shook me around more than I expected. Crushed the sensors responsible for navigation when eyesight isn’t enough to do the trick. In short: no more underground maps, and no more guiding us through hole-infested mists.”

Prowl considers that with a frown, looking at where his headlights illuminate their only available path forward. “That’s… not ideal, seeing as we might very well be stuck in underground tunnels for a while yet.” 

“That’s where the good news comes in! I got a preliminary scan of where we are right now before the sonar went dark, and it looked mostly linear. A couple dead-ends, but otherwise this tunnel system doesn’t seem too complicated.” He pauses, before adding quietly, “At least the beginning of it.”

Prowl raises an eyebrow. “There is always the possibility that it does, in fact, lead to a dead-end.”

“Which is a bridge we’ll cross later, when or if it becomes relevant. For now—” Jazz extends an encouraging hand towards the tunnel, “After you.”

Prowl looks at Jazz, looks at the tunnel, and with a heavy sigh lowers his head and enters. The tip of his chevron still catches on the ceiling. Jazz’s footsteps follow not far behind. 

The path twists and turns in every direction, both vertical and horizontal, but thankfully the angles are gentle and easy enough to traverse. Every once in a while Prowl’s headlights fall onto a fork, or a tunnel running perpendicular to the one they walk. Jazz calls out directions. He follows.

“Take a right over here.” Prowl turns right without a second of hesitation. “Can I ask you something?”

Tap-tap-tap. Rhythmic, steady, to the beat of their feet on rock. Not a nervous tic. Hm. “Are we still playing your questions game?”

“Sure, whatever,” Jazz says dismissively. “I’ll make it a simple one: Why are you in this tunnel with me right now?”

“Well, our only alternative was scaling further down this pit, and the conditions are considerably worse than—”

“Oh, you know what I mean, you fucking ass.” The tapping turns fast and frustrated before tapering off. Jazz sighs. “I don’t get you, man. I thought for sure you’d bail up there.”

Prowl doesn’t look back. He focuses on the uneven rocks straight ahead of him. “You thought wrong.”

“Sharp left— yup, right over there. Care to elaborate on why I was wrong?”

“No.”

Jazz makes a curious sound at that, which implies this conversation is far from over. “You know something I don’t? Is the whole Quint gate a scam to get me to a secondary location where you strap me to a table and strip me for parts?”

Prowl does look back at that, if only to send him a flat stare. “Be serious.”

“I am! I’m being very serious right now,” Jazz says in a tone of voice that is anything but. “Those are some major concerns of mine that I’d love you to clarify for me, because so far you have been rational to a fault, and that means you have a practical, pragmatic reason for why you’re here right now. But for the life of me I can not figure out what it is. So, I’m going back to my alien abduction theory.”

Prowl huffs. “No, you’re not. You’re being obtuse on purpose in order to annoy the answer out of me.” He hesitates in front of a three-way intersection.

“Is it— Take the middle one. Is it working?”

Prowl scowls, suddenly thankful that the tunnel is not wide enough for them to walk side by side. “It depends on how much longer—”

“Another left here.”

“First left?”

“Second.”

“Right, thank you— It depends on how much longer it takes for us to find a way out of here.”

The sensors on his doorwings catch the movement as Jazz shrugs. “Beats me. Map I had ended a couple turns ago.”

Prowl slows down, brows drawing in confusion. “What are you basing your directions on, then?”

“Nothing,” Jazz says nonchalantly. “I’ve been guessing for a couple turns now.”

Prowl twists around to glare at him. Jazz stares back, head fins high and unapologetic. “You are—” He stops, vents out the air from his rapidly heating processor, and continues much more calmly, “—very difficult to work with, at times.”

“If you hate my work-ethic so much, then why are you still here,” Jazz asks slowly, emphatically.

Prowl stares at him for a couple more seconds, before turning back around and walking away. He recalls the previous turns they’ve made and starts constructing a mental map of the tunnel system they’re in, in case they have to backtrack at any point. After a moment of silence, Jazz follows, further behind than he has thus far.

“I don’t hate your work-ethic,” Prowl says quietly when the silence between them grows tense.

“Ah, my bad. You hate me, in general, not just my work-ethic.”

“I don’t hate you, either.”

Jazz scoffs. “You have a really funny way of showing affection, Numbers. Or is that just the general disposition of all your species?”

Prowl doesn’t rise to the bait. But he can’t help but consider the question, no matter how much he’d rather not: why is he here?

It’s only a matter of time before Jazz tries to get the answer out of him again. With a sigh, Prowl chooses to spare both of them a lot of pointless arguing, and concedes, “I had to consider a lot of possibilities when deciding whether it’d be better for me to stay or leave. Truth be told, my chances of survival were evenly split between the two.”

“Okay, so what was the tipping point?”

Prowl slides down a gentle incline, careful not to jostle his shoulder. At the bottom await more corridors. His headlights illuminate passage after passage and he adds each splinter carefully into his mental map before choosing the first one from the left. He has no idea how much longer these tunnels stretch for. He has no idea if they will even lead anywhere. There’s a very real (37%) possibility that they will have to scale further down that pit they fell into, or worse yet, attempt to climb out of it. This whole incident has been one uncertainty after another and Prowl has too little data, too little experience in the field for any of it. 

“In the sea of chaos that this journey has been,” he starts slowly, once he hears Jazz join him, “you have grown to be my only point of stability. I do not know what is waiting for me behind the corner.” Prowl hesitates. “But I do know that whatever it is, you can deal with it. Or, at least much better than I can. TacNet likes your chances. It likes how reliable you are. It is… reluctant to let someone so capable slip away.”

Jazz stays quiet for a while, to the point that Prowl thinks (hopes) that perhaps he’s satisfied with ending the topic there. When he does speak, it’s thoughtful. “I get results. You have a program in your brain that’s obsessed with getting results.” 

“Somewhat simplistic view of things, but yes; you get results. My battle computer likes that.”

“Right.” Prowl can feel Jazz nodding to himself. “Your battle computer likes that.”

His doorwing twitches. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Jazz chirps innocently. “If it’s easier for you to admit that you actually like me by proxy of the program that—if memory serves—is intertwined with your personality on a deep enough level to cause disorders, then, hey, I’ll take that.” 

“That is— not at all what I was trying to imply.” 

“It’s okay, Numbers. Baby steps.”

Prowl glowers over his shoulder. “Is that truly the main point you took out of this conversat—”

He yelps as his foot snags on something and he’s sent barreling forward. His fall is stopped by a hand grabbing onto the plating on his back, leaving his face inches away from the very thing that tripped him in the first place. Prowl stares, half-suspended in the air, at a thick cable snaking its way out of the ground before delving back in between the rocks, forming a perfect arc for his foot to get stuck on. 

Jazz yanks him back until Prowl can steady himself. “Watch your step.” His fingers stay wedged in between the plates on his back. Prowl’s too busy looking down at the cable to notice or care. He crouches down beside it.

“This shouldn’t be here,” he says, touching the rubbery surface of it. Energy courses underneath his fingertips, low, dormant. 

Jazz shrugs. “’s just a cable.”

Prowl’s optic follows the coils of black rubber as it weaves in and out of the ground. He starts walking alongside it, ignoring all the other paths (although he still makes sure to mark them on his map). Jazz’s footsteps echo behind him, his fingers slipping away from his plating. “It’s not ‘just a cable’. This— Do you know what this implies?”

“Not really.”

“This—” Prowl points to the cable, looking back at him. “—should not be here. I have the plans of this planet downloaded; none of them mention underground facilities that’d require a power supply.”

Jazz doesn’t seem convinced about the severity of the situation. “Okay. So we have some undocumented cables on our hands. Isn’t that… good? If Quints were doing stuff down here they had to have an elevator. Or at least some stairs.”

Before long, the single cable turns into two. And then into three, four, five… They twine and twist together and apart, making it progressively more treacherous to navigate, bursting indiscriminately from all over the tunnel: top, bottom, the sides, all have the cables sprouting from them like unruly vines eager to snag an unsuspecting limb. 

“A potential way out is good,” Prowl admits, brows drawn in concentration. “But this is highly unprecedented. Quintessons keep a rigorous documentation of all their undertakings. They have to, with their empire engaged in several conquests at once and most of their ships unmanned by proper commanders.”

“As far as you know.”

“Yes. A knowledge based on years of espionage of that very documentation,” he huffs. “I’ve studied Quintesson reports extensively. I learned how to fabricate them, when certain operations required for it.” Prowl squeezes in between a particularly tight corner. “This exists for a reason, and there’s a reason why it was kept hidden.”

Jazz hums thoughtfully. “Question is, was it struck off the records for external reasons, aka not wanting you to find it, or was it an internal thing.”

Prowl considers that. “Elaborate.”

“Oh, you know. Someone gets orders, does a bad job of carrying them out, conveniently fails to mention that in their reports. Maybe scrubs off the evidence that there had been any orders in the first place. A thing gets lost, something or other forgotten, command rotates staff, a guy or two disappear under mysterious circumstances… and voilà—you’re off the hook. Easy enough to do when there’s an ocean separating you and your superiors. I imagine it only gets easier when it’s entire galaxies.”

“You have personal experience in the matter, I presume?”

“Nothing that can be legally proven,” Jazz says, clearly proud of the fact.

Prowl sighs. “Well, that’s… not impossible. Let us see the scope of whatever is down here before passing judgment.”

They don’t have to walk much longer to find out. Soon, a dim light starts to trickle into the tunnel, casting shadows against the cables snaking their way alongside the two of them. Prowl turns off his headlights as he finally leaves the cramped space and emerges into a well-lit, cylindrical chamber. The second his optic adjusts to the sudden brightness, he stops in place and just… stares. Jazz follows closely, arm braced on his shoulder as he squeezes from in between the mouth of the tunnel and his frame. And then he also stops. 

“Oh, you have to be kidding me.” 

The chamber is cylindrical in shape. Wide enough to rival a small spaceship and at least ten stories high. And it is easy to make that comparison, because running along its walls are more tunnels. Floor to ceiling, in uneven rows, ranging from too small for Prowl to even get his hand inside to large enough to easily accommodate a combiner. Cables snake their way in and out of most of them, black roots twisting through the ground to finally arrive at the center of the chamber where a single, metal pillar stretches all the way up to the ceiling. It’s surrounded by Quintesson technology: servers, screens and consoles, all covered in a fine layer of dust and rubble. And… something organic, in certain places, that Prowl chooses not to analyze further until it becomes relevant. Which he hopes it doesn’t.

He finally finds his legs again and slowly walks towards the center of the chamber, turning as he goes and trying to take in the sheer number of exits. 

“You don’t think they have an emergency exit sign anywhere, do you?” Jazz asks, similarly bewildered. “How the hell did they even get to most of these? No stairs, no nothing.”

“They flew,” Prowl mutters, eye scanning the walls methodically. “Quintessons hover. They don’t need stairs.”

“‘Course they don’t…”

Prowl moves further in, intent on seeing if any of the consoles are still operational. He can practically feel electricity humming through all the cables, so power should not be an issue. 

“Wait,” Jazz grabs his wrist, head fins pinned low. “Can you smell that?”

Prowl strains his olfactory sensors, but detects nothing. “What’s wrong?” he asks, voice dipped low. He hasn’t considered the possibility of someone being down there with the planet declared officially abandoned. Then again, the data he’s downloaded might not be as reliable as he’d originally thought.

Jazz lets him go, motioning for Prowl to stay behind him. A blade shinks out of the sheath at his wrist. “Something’s rotting down here.” 

He stalks silently towards the stack of consoles, crouched close to the ground and deftly stepping around any cables in his way. His injured side is turned towards Prowl, who reaches for his gun, just in case.

He reluctantly lowers it when he sees Jazz’s posture straighten out after circling to the other side of the pillar. The blade retracts. “Well. That explains it.”

Prowl joins him and winces when the smell finally registers. And at the sight. 

Hidden on the other side of the accumulated consoles are the rotting remains of two corpses, and the only reason why they even are distinguishable as separate entities is the partially cracked Quintesson shell. It’s been violently crushed against the assortment of tech, adding glass and metal into the slurry of foul-smelling organic material which stains most of the equipment on this side of the pillar. There are a few larger bones which have yet to start decomposing.

Jazz whistles, crouching down by the mess. “Yeah, that’s what high humidity and no maggots does to a corpse, alright.” He reaches out into the mess and procures an elaborate metal collar, holding it as far away from his frame as he can. “Unruly pets, do you think?”

Prowl gives the corpses a wide berth as he approaches to get a closer look. “It’s a shock collar,” he says after enough of the slop trickles off of it. “Looks like the Quintesson who’d worked here overestimated its ability to control one of their…” Prowl’s optic slides back to the collection of bones. “…experiments.”

“Or underestimated the experiment,” Jazz says, dropping the collar back into the slop. It lands with a wet squelch. “So, this used to be a Quint? The proper kind?” he asks, motioning towards the cracked shell.

“Before organic decay took its toll, yes. Based off the shell, they were a researcher. Military commanders tend to be bigger.” Prowl tries his best to make sense of the crushed machinery underneath the corpses without having to actually touch any of it. Or stepping within a touching distance. Jazz’s visor remains trained on the shell for a long while, which reminds Prowl that he’s apparently never seen a live Quintesson before. He seems to snap out of it eventually, shaking his head as if to dislodge a troublesome thought. 

The visor turns to Prowl, and then to the piles of broken screens and metal. “Think you can tap into any of these and get us some info? Maybe a map of the place?”

“That’s been my hope ever since we’ve seen the cables, but I’m afraid the… accident occurred right on top of the main console with the access port.” Prowl’s quite sure he can still see it. There’s a non-zero chance (8%) that he could still retrieve some data from it, but he’s already jacked into more unfamiliar systems than it’s strictly safe to without an outside check-up for malware. Also, it’s absolutely covered in rotten viscera. He’ll reconsider it if all else fails. 

“Wait, really? All of this—” Jazz motions to the sheer scale of the pillar and its accumulated tech, “and it’s useless because this guy fell on one keyboard?”

“From what I can tell, majority of it appears to be servers for storing and processing data,” Prowl hums. “Which makes sense; this place is cut off from the outside to maintain its secrecy. Hence: it’s all wired connection.” He points to the mess of cables converging at the pillar. “If the connection between terminals was wireless, I could maybe attempt to tap into it. As it is, the only way I know how to navigate Quintesson technology is through the ports they use for external hardware. Also—and I cannot stress this enough—I am not a trained hacker, nor do I specialize in alien technology. This is hardly my forte.”

Jazz is staring at him like he can’t believe what he’s saying. Prowl isn’t sure which part of his explanation is difficult to grasp. “You’re literary a—” He cuts himself off with a shake of his head. “Y’know what? Forget it. So, we have to find you a different computer.”

“Ideally, yes. Access to one should ensure access to the rest of the facility, and one of those consoles is bound to store floor plans. Based on where we are geographically, there’s a high probability—” (91%) “—that this compound is connected to the one housing the Quintesson gate. We simply have to find that connection and follow it to the surface.”

“Our options are ‘stumble around blindly looking for a computer’ and ‘blindly stumble around looking for an exit’?” Jazz asks doubtfully. “You’re aware this is going to take forever, right? There’s like a thousand tunnels in here.”

“It’s 316, actually,” Prowl corrects.

“I really don’t think how high the number is matters after the initial 50, man.” Jazz looks around the chamber as though trying to will something helpful to appear out of thin air. “There’s gotta be something we can do to narrow it down.”

“I already have a system,” Prowl says, matter-of-fact. “We’ll tackle the tunnels based off accessibility, size, and number of cables. None of that guarantees results, but it’s better than nothing. I’m afraid guessing at a correct answer is all we have for now.”

Jazz’s head fins swivel down with a tortured groan. “That’s gonna be so boring, though. And slow. And boring.”

Prowl ignores his whining, already making his way towards the first path on his list, located on the bottom. “We can always split up to expedite the process.”

Jazz follows behind him, feet dragging audibly on the ground. “No, we can’t. There’s a fresh fucking corpse in this room. I leave you alone and you’re gonna end up an even fresher corpse.”

“Your… concern is appreciated.” Prowl waits at the lip of the tunnel, watching Jazz approach sluggishly. “You are only making this process even longer than it has to be.”

The mech stops in front of him and gives Prowl a truly pitiful look, shoulders slouched and head fins drooping. “Numbers, this is gonna take ten thousand years. I’m going to run out of power and die.”

Prowl stares down at him, unimpressed. “No, you’re not. Not unless we happen to find a Gladiator in one of these tunnels, which I doubt.” He cocks his head. “Would you like to hear the actual time estimate of how long this will take?”

Jazz stares into the darkness of the tunnel. His visor seems to dim slightly. “I’d really rather not.” It then turns to bore into Prowl. His doorwings twitch at the intense attention. “You could be home right now.”

Prowl deflates. He sighs, long and weary. “I could.”

He looks down at Jazz, at his scratched frame and the hand hanging limply at his side, stained with energon that has recently been coursing through his own systems. Despite his injuries, Prowl knows better than to assume Jazz is even close to defenseless. He could see it in the way his posture changed when he’d first smelled a corpse, how battle-ready he still was.

He’s been keeping Prowl on his injured side. A show of trust, or something else entirely? And if so, is it unconscious, or deliberate? Is it meant to cover his own still-malfunctioning shoulder? Prowl doesn’t know. He could be back on the Ark by now. Or he could be dead. But Jazz is in front of him, real and certain, and he lets Prowl stay close to where he’s vulnerable and defenseless, and he keeps his sword arm in between the two of them and potential threats.

Prowl wants him off this planet. Primus, he wants Jazz off his planet, and whatever powers-that-be which mutilated him for daring to stand against them. He wants Jazz in his strategy room, wants his infuriating competence included in his plans.

He doesn’t know how to explain any of this. He doesn’t particularly want to. So he simply meets that blue visor with his remaining optic and says, “You would be dead if I had left.”

And Jazz seems to hear it for what it is. 

“Maybe.” His head fins rise curiously. “And the TacNet wouldn’t have liked that.”

“It wouldn't, no.”

Jazz huffs an amused sound. If Prowl was a sentimental mech, he’d describe it as sounding almost fond. Then he reaches out for his hand and taps two fingers against the inside of Prowl’s wrist, quick and gentle, like he did right after their fall, when they were still recovering from near-death. The fingers retreat as swiftly as they appeared, leaving Prowl slightly dazed as he processes the tactile data of alien digits against the softer mesh of his wrist.

“Just for the record,” Jazz says, already walking into the tunnel. “I’m going to complain the whole way. 

Prowl shakes himself off, forces his doorwings higher and hurries after him. “I expect nothing less,” he mutters. And then, reluctantly adds, “We can play your game.”

The tunnel is wide enough for them to walk side by side this time. Prowl settles on Jazz’s right, shoulder to injured-shoulder. 

He bounces excitedly, head fins shooting up. “I was hoping you’d say that. And—” He holds up a single finger. “To show my appreciation, I won’t use it to dig up dirt on you. Not deliberately, anyway.”

Prowl shoots him a sardonic half-smile. “How thoughtful.” 

“So, do you consider yourself a hopeless romantic?”

Prowl almost trips over a jutting out cable. Jazz’s laughter echoes in the tunnels.

Chapter Text

“You know,” Jazz says after yet another of Prowl’s tunnels of choice ends up in nothing but a pile of rubble. “I think you’re the first person to describe me as a ‘stable...’” He stops for a moment, thinking. “…anything, really.”

Prowl stops staring unhappily at the rocks blocking their path to instead stare slightly less unhappily at Jazz. “Truly? Even if your methods are unorthodox, I find it hard to imagine not appreciating someone as effective as you in a time as precarious as an active war.”

Jazz snorts. “Yeah, no, don’t get me wrong; the only reason why I’m still on payroll is because command can’t afford get rid of me.” He watches Prowl’s wings sag momentarily as the program in his head comes to the conclusion that it’s not worth it to try and sort through the rubble. Jazz can’t say he disagrees, considering that they have two working arms between them. Two and a half, maybe. “But I doubt ‘stable’ is the word they’d use.”

Prowl makes a noncommittal sound, brows still drawn together. “You’ve admitted to disobeying orders, so I suppose their misgivings are not unwarranted.” He turns around to face Jazz. His mouth opens, as though he’s about to say something more, before promptly clicking shut. 

Bebop’s head tilts curiously at that. Huh. 

Prowl starts walking back towards the main chamber without another word. Jazz falls into step behind him, noting the way his partially-crushed arm seems locked in place. Almost as though it’s been put in an invisible splint.

Bebop’s own arm swings limply by his side as he walks. It’s distracting. Throws off his balance. Right now it’s nothing but dead weight and a liability in combat. A liability that, if they end up having to fight again, Jazz will be forced to get rid of. Probably rip it off at the shoulder, Bebop’s already cut off any and all fuel valves in order to avoid unnecessary spillage. The only thing that’s stopping him from whipping out his sword is the fact that the difference in repair time for a mech with a messed up arm versus a mech missing an arm is months. And he’d really rather not be out of commission for that long—Rung likes to get his paws on pilots who aren’t on active duty.

Jazz shudders at the thought. Their resident mental health advisor will indubitably want to read his reports of this whole fiasco, and if Jazz lets on that he has any feelings whatsoever on the topic, it’ll end up in a visitation. One that isn’t just a gentle yet firm suggestion but an order enforced by the higher-ups. Meaning that if Jazz spends too long postponing it, Magnus will track his ass down and deliver it straight onto the too-comfortable rocking chair in Rung’s office. He’s a grown man, he can compartmentalize his issues all by himself, thank you very much.

The thought still nags at him when they emerge into the main chamber. Prowl is surveying the countless possible routes, hand on his chin and the single eye glaring at the walls as though a scornful enough gaze will manifest the correct exit. Jazz leans against the part of the pillar in the middle of the chamber not covered in dead Quint and leaves him to his calculations. Bebop’s visor turns to the ceiling, following rows and rows of tunnels. Her helmet thunks quietly against the metal behind her back and Jazz lets his own human eyes close for moment, cutting off the visual feed from his mech. 

He’s tired. The adrenaline of their escape has worn off and Bebop’s out of artificial stimulants to feed him. Jazz also needs to rest, proper rest, as in taking the helmet off and letting his neurons cool off before they fry from having to pilot a tonne of steel for an extended period of time. The only thing scarier than a visit to Rung is a visit to Ratchet about potential neurological damage. 

With a weary sigh, he opens his eyes before his brain tries to interpret this brief break as an opportunity for a nap. Bebop’s visor lights up and he’s once more treated to the sight of the rotten-alien-guts slurry and his own metal alien—

Not being there. 

Jazz stands up straighter, head swiveling around. He can’t see Prowl, can’t hear him. Bebop’s sonar is still busted, so he can’t sense him, either. There’s a sudden, chilling spike of fear piercing right through his chest and rooting him to the spot, limbs locking in place as proper panic creeps in. He’s back to laying on a narrow shelf in complete darkness, heels digging into the rock and coils of rope digging into his armor, crushing his fingers, palm, wrist—Bebop flashing warnings about the strain on her arm, broken fuel lines, spillage, snapping cables—and he’s not paying attention to any of that, Jazz is shouting Prowl’s name into the darkness. There’s no response, just the dead weight on the other end of the line, over the edge where he can’t see, and he can’t move to fucking check if Prowl is still alive, and he’s not responding and— God, Jazz is going to have to cut the line, Bebop’s arm isn’t gonna last forever, he’s going to have to lay there and wait for the sick crunch of metal smashing against rock down below and he’ll never know if Prowl was still alive for it or if Jazz was the one to— 

“Are you coming along?”

His head snaps to where Prowl has just emerged from behind the pillar, a single eyebrow raised inquisitively. Perfectly calm and wholly unharmed. 

Jazz cuts his mic before it can pick up his panicked wheezing and nods, following after Prowl’s retreating back. The sense of relief is strong enough to make him feel dizzy. He lets Bebop take care of putting one foot in front of the other while he puts his head in his hands and tries to calm his breathing. 

Okay, so maybe Prowl had a point when he was talking about the whole ‘only stable point in an otherwise unpredictable environment’ thing. Jazz doesn’t have the time or energy to process why what just happened did happen (that’s Rung’s job), but he does know that it’s objectively a very bad reaction to have. He can’t be developing separation anxiety with an alien. Except that this alien might be the only person who can help him get home alive, so when he really thinks about it, it could have been much worse, right? He’s being perfectly reasonable right now. Panic attack? What panic attack? Just a normal, down-to-earth response anyone would have had if they were in Jazz’s shoes.

Prowl stops in front of a rocky wall, eye focused on a wider tunnel above them, just high enough to be out of reach. “You’re quiet.”

Jazz clears his throat before reactivating his mic. “Well, I can only ask you about your favorite blank so many times before the repeated ‘I don’t have one’ stops being funny and starts getting sad.”

Prowl gives him a scrutinizing look. Jazz has never been more glad for Bebop’s expressionless helmet. He beats a quick rhythm into her thigh, motioning above them. “This our next stop?”

“Ideally,” Prowl answers, gaze still firmly on Jazz, but it melts into something less piercing. “I’ll require assistance, assuming that you yourself are fit to make it up there?”

“Oh, please,” Jazz snorts. 

He starts walking backwards, Prowl’s eye following curiously. Once Bebop gives him the green light, he takes a running start and jumps, the boosters at her legs activating with a flare of pink energy. Whatever energon is made out of, it’s got much more of a kick than the regular fuel they feed her, and Jazz ends up going just a tad higher than he anticipated. The tunnel is wide enough that he doesn’t splatter against a solid wall looney-tunes style, but he does have to roll in order to break some of his momentum, which further jostles Bebop’s already damaged arm. 

He gets back to his feet with a frown. Okay, note to self: recalibrate the boosters.

The cables seem especially numerous here and—unlike in all the other tunnels—actually arranged into some sort of order. They run in coils of twos and threes, tied together with bands of dark, elastic material. Leaning over the edge, Jazz can see Prowl looking up at him, expression unsure. He wedges Bebop’s foot in between an especially thick cable, tests to see if it won’t give under strain, and lowers himself to the ground. The wings on Prowl’s back dip low when Bebop’s arm extends down over the edge, but he walks closer regardless.

What follows is probably the most humiliating, inept display of two people trying to help each other up Jazz has ever had the displeasure of participating in. Prowl can’t jump all that high, and Bebop’s lack of two working hands means she can’t offer much assistance. There’s a lot of cursing and grasping and glaring. The less said about the process, the better.

Prowl does eventually end up scrambling his way up and next to Jazz, who is trying very hard not to laugh. Based on the look Prowl gives him, he’s not doing too well.

“Let’s just go,” Prowl says, dusting himself off. It seems more for the sake of his dignity than cleanliness, and regains him neither.

They move further down the tunnel, Prowl in the front with Jazz following, which lets him look around while still managing to keep an eye on those two wings bobbing steadily with each step. They may finally be getting somewhere; not only are the cables in their path neatly arranged, pink light emanates from the walls in weak, flickering pulses. It takes Jazz a good moment to notice that the lights appear to be embedded directly into the rock. It gives the tunnel an otherworldly quality he’s not sure he likes.

Ahead of him, Prowl hesitates before speeding up. “This is promising…”

‘This’ turns out to be a door, although the circular shape and general level of reinforcement seems more apt for a bank vault than a lab. Alien letters are etched into the dark metal, but whatever it says has been made intelligible by a combination of scratches, burns and the metal looking slightly… melted in several places.

Jazz considers that with a frown. “It promises something, alright.”

Prowl doesn’t seem too bothered, waltzing up to the side of the heavy door, his good hand sliding against the metal. “Coupled with the remains back in the central room, I think it’s safe to assume that the facility we’re currently in was, in fact, meant for some manner of genetic research.” He frowns. “What remains troubling is exactly why the Quintessons felt the need to keep it a secret.”

“My money’s still on internal affairs,” Jazz hums, leaning against the door on the other side of Prowl. “So…” he trails off, Bebop’s plasma cannon popping out of its compartment. The weapon whirls with energy. “Want me to blast this open?”

Prowl looks at him like he’s daft. Without breaking eye contact, he presses a finger against an incline in the metal. It lights up briefly, and with a hiss the door shudders into motion—triangular plates shifting away from the center to create a round opening. 

“…or we can try the handle,” Jazz murmurs, the cannon on Bebop’s arm disappearing with a sad click. “That also works.”

Prowl is still giving him a look, although it’s more considering than unimpressed now. “You really do not know anything about Quintesson technology.”

“Know how to break it. Been working pretty well for me so far.”

“You can’t break your way into setting up instantaneous molecular travel.”

Jazz wags his finger as he walks up to the door, vaulting over it in one smooth motion. “You think that, but I’m very talented at breaking things. I’d figure it out.” The thing sure does seem like it was built for floating ominously through the middle. No consideration for anyone earthbound. 

Certainly not for Prowl, who struggles in behind him with a scowl. “You’d end up sending yourself into deep space. Or destroying the gate altogether.”

The initial door leads to a relatively small compartment with an identical, heavy vault door on the other side, sporting similar signs of something very big trying very hard to get out. Or in. Prowl presses a finger against yet another panel and the way they entered starts to slowly inch closed. It’s an airlock, Jazz realizes belatedly, which bodes great for whatever they’re about to find on the other side. 

He taps his foot on the ground as they wait for the metal plates to slide together again. “I don’t see how any of that is a problem,” Jazz says quietly. “You’ll be the one handling the tech, I’m just here to play bodyguard.”

Prowl’s single eye shines ominously in the dim room. The first door finishes sliding closed with a click, but he makes no movement towards the opposite one. “What if I’m not there?”

“Then I’m most likely already dead after doing something stupid in the hopes of saving your ass.”

“What if I’m… incapacitated, then? What if you are the only one capable of interacting with the console?”

Jazz feels an odd spike of anxiety, quickly morphing into frustration. “Is there a point to this conversation? You know, other than to really drive home that I’d be fucked without your help?” He’s been hoping they’re past implied threats, but maybe flaunting power over others is how Prowl deals with stress.

“What?” comes the stumped reply. “I’m not— It was not my intention to—” Prowl stops, slides a hand against his face tiredly and tries again, calmer. “The objective truth of the matter is that there is no guarantee of me making it to the Gate’s console in a state fit to operate it. There’s a non-zero chance that even if we both survive up until that point, the circumstances may lead to a situation where you are the only one left to do it. Which is why I was going to suggest giving you instructions on how the process works.”

There’s a moment where Jazz simply stares. “But…?” he asks, not bothering to hide his suspicion, because there has to be a ‘but’. 

Prowl heaves out a not-sigh. “We don’t have the time for me to explain it verbally, especially not with your… elementary understanding of Quintesson as a language. I could, however, create a data packet with basic, ready-to-follow instructions.”

Facts click together in Jazz’s head. “Meaning you’d have to jack into me again in order to send it.” Prowl wasn’t trying to threaten him, this was his roundabout way of offering help.

“Yes,” he confirms, eye scanning cautiously for his reaction, as though he expects Jazz to spook at the mere implication. “It’d be a matter of seconds. Nowhere near as invasive as the fueling process.”

Jazz thinks on that. If this offer was made a few hours ago, he would have said no without a second of hesitation. No alien invaders in his head unless absolutely necessary. Now, though? What does Prowl have to gain from giving up his last bargaining chip? Yes, it ensures that if they make it to the Gate and Jazz is the only one on his feet, he can get them both through. But it also opens up the possibility of simply abandoning Prowl to fend for himself. Once he has the info, Jazz can turn around and keep trying the tunnels until he finds a way out. Sneak past whatever security is posted in the facility and just… leave. It’d be easy, fast and convenient. Certainly more convenient than trying to do all of that with Prowl and his two left feet trailing behind him. 

Giving up this information is an admittance of trust Jazz did not expect. Assuming that it’ll be legit, and not some bullshit Prowl strings together in order to lull him into a false sense of security. Which isn’t entirely out of the question, but if Jazz wants to be fully honest with himself, he has to admit that Prowl’s had plenty of opportunities to melt his brain, and chose not to. He sees no reason why he would now. 

A shudder travels down his spine. Underneath all the warranted suspicion, there’s also a good dose of curiosity. Prowl’s head-space, his hulking consciousness, the entire process of getting close and personal on a mental level with something—someone—that isn’t an inanimate construct—it’s exciting. Prowl showed him a brand new system—a novel puzzle, and Jazz wants to learn how it works, how to master it. He wants to see if he can figure out the rules well enough to break them.

And here’s an opportunity to start, out in front of him on a silver platter, with a little note attached to the side that reads: Trust me not to hurt you, and I’ll trust you not to leave.

“Okay,” Jazz says finally, not sure if the tingling in his fingers is excitement or anxiety. Before Prowl has the chance to answer, he walks closer, Bebop’s hip panel popping open. “Should we get ourselves more comfortable, or…?”

“That won’t be necessary.” Prowl’s voice is completely neutral. His eye hangs on Bebop’s  paneling for a moment too long, before coming back up to stare into her visor. Jazz is once again close enough to see the intricate lenses spinning inside, focusing in on him. “I’ll be quick,” he says, barely audible, and then a panel on his uninjured arm shifts open and he kneels down.

Now, logically speaking, Jazz fully understands that Prowl is a full head taller than Bebop, and this is is the most convenient position to do this in. It’s probably safe to assume that getting your face groin-height with someone does not carry the same implications for Cybertronians as it does for humans. Prowl certainly acts like this is nothing but standard procedure, so Jazz bites down on his tongue to keep himself form saying anything. Bebop’s visor stays pointed decidedly at the wall ahead. 

He feels a hand settle on his hip, hears the familiar sound of alien technology shifting apart and together, making something new. His pulse quickens, a steady beat thrumming in his ears a backdrop to the phantom sensation of a cable sliding against Bebop’s plating, inching its way towards her port.

In the corner of his vision, Prowl’s wings twitch upwards. “Ready?” 

Fearing the noise that’d tear itself out of his throat at this moment if he tried to speak, Jazz simply nods. 

The jack slides its way home—a perfect match. In the back of his consciousness, something opens, large and yawning. Last time it seemed terrifying, strange, an intrusion into a space that has never before been occupied by anyone but himself and the steady, angular corners of Bebop. That was some three near-death experiences ago, though, and as Jazz makes his way towards the threshold, any remnants of fear still lodged in his mind only serve to stoke his interest more. He’s learned how to introduce levity into piloting a mech and fighting alien monsters ten times his size. Give him a couple more sessions with Prowl, and he’ll be inviting him in while reclining on a mental hammock with a piña colada in hand to match. 

For now, he settles for not being sent into meltdown the second he feels something shift on the other side. It approaches slowly, steadily, as though trying its best not to spook a frightened animal. Jazz certainly appreciates it, but his impatience gets the better of him soon enough, and he reaches out on his own, brushing against a small part of something much bigger.

Prowl flinches away, stark surprise appearing for a second before fading away. Underneath it he feels the same as Jazz remembers—refreshingly cold, a sharp sort of focus that no longer seems so intimidating. He grins underneath the helmet, and the laugh bubbling in his chest has a distinctly hysterical tone.

Jazz, he hears in his own head, tinted with clear concern and— wow, okay, it’s still very weird to have feelings blasted directly into your brain, but it’s slowly morphing from bad weird to good weird. Are you… well?

“Oh, hell no.” Back in the physical world, he sets one of his hands against Prowl’s shoulder to steady himself, careful not to put pressure on anything that looks damaged. He focuses on the delicate looking cabling at his throat instead of his face. “Getting tired. The kind that a quick power-nap won’t fix.”

He can practically feel Prowl take in the information and update a bunch of calculations armed with the new info. I’m going to enter your systems and leave the data packet. How much longer can you function for?

As promised, Prowl makes his way in, still carefully, no sudden movements. Jazz lets it happen. “Dunno. Three hours? Five, at best. Might start passing out if we go past that.” He watches him slither around and feels distinctly numb about whether he goes anywhere he’s not welcome. Maybe his nerves really have fried.

It is quick. Something just… appears in Babop’s data banks and then Prowl starts to withdraw, meeting him back at the threshold between their minds. 

The instructions are hardly perfect, considering that I’m working with translating Quintesson into Cybertronian and then into English, but they should be understandable enough. I can update them into something more refined whenever we are no longer so strapped for time.

Jazz inspects the file. “Numbers, this is fifty pages long.”

Well, yes. Prowl seems almost embarrassed. Again, I can provide a more in-depth explanation at a later time.

Jazz decides not to continue that conversation. Instead, he approaches Prowl again, slower this time, and steadily lowers his mental shields. He tries to project gratitude, raw and open, hoping it translates. He thinks of this—of the file which singlehandedly allows him some independence after hours of second-guessing; he thinks of staring down a bottomless maw in the ground and having someone to hold onto as they jump down into it, of dying slowly in a hollowed out trunk and a hand grabbing him by the chin and forcing him to focus, of the same cable still wedged in his port which lets him experience this. And underneath all those memories runs a steady current of thank you, as genuine as Jazz can make it.

Prowl—mostly over the threshold now—is stock still, not a single thought leaking through. Jazz withdraws, satisfied with at least attempting to get his point across, but is stopped as that enormous consciousness keeps him in place. There’s a wave of fear at the reminder of how much power Prowl holds over him in here, but it fades as his respective shields start to lower, slowly, slowly, emotions peeking through and enveloping Jazz until he feels like he really is drowning, but maybe it’s not all bad, maybe whatever Prowl is doing to him allows for breathing underwater.

It’s the same gratitude he’s felt, increased tenfold, more stark, clearer. If Jazz is painting impressionist collages in his memories, Prowl’s printing out perfect snapshots with enough details to make your head spin: hanging over an endless chasm, Jazz’s voice the only point of reference in the dark. A heavy mist, low visibility, and a set of footprints ready to follow amidst the uncertain environment. The low growl of a beast ready to strike and the cold fingers on his chest, over his mouth, keeping them safe even in moments when Prowl wasn’t aware danger should be considered as an option. 

For a few moments, Jazz feels nothing but this—his own gratitude mirrored, amplified—an endless of loop that feeds in on itself until he’s dizzy with it, a feedback echoing thank you thank you thank you in voices that melt together into a strange amalgamation of both of them. It’s incredible. Intoxicating. Who needs morphine, next time he’s injured and Bebop’s out of painkillers just inject whatever is happening right now directly into his veins and he’ll be golden.

The cable on his hip detaches. As quickly as it appeared, the overwhelming feeling is cut off and Jazz is once again alone in his head, with the high slowly receding. He still feels a bit shell-shocked as Prowl stands back up.

He straightens up, wings bobbing upwards, hands behind his back. The picture of detached professionalism. “I assume the file is readable?”

“Uh-uh,” Jazz says, in a show of verbal prowess that truly couldn’t be matched. Still, he finds that as the whiplash fades, his mind is left a bit clearer, a bit sharper. Getting a swim in Prowl’s head really does feel like dunking your head under ice-cold water. And the social animal brain is really happy about all the positive emotional reassurance. “It’s good. I’m good.”

Prowl nods. Jazz swears he can hear his fans buzzing louder than usual in the quiet room. “After you, then,” he says and activates the door with a flick of his wrist.

Rejuvenated, Jazz rocks back on his heels and—once the opening is wide enough—jumps right through the middle. Bebop adjusts the thrusters for the additional power output and he lands on his feet in the next room, blaster out and ready to focus on anything that moves. 

The first thing that hits him is the smell. The corpse in the central room was enough to make him nauseous, but the sickly sweet smell of rot in here forces Jazz to fully cut off Bebop’s olfactory feed. It’s bad. Even Prowl, who didn’t seem affected by the stench before, brings a hand to his mouth with a wince. The source is… everywhere, really. Strewn across the room are corpses—Quints of all shapes and sizes—in varying stages of decay, mixing in with shattered glass and rubble on the floor of this used-to-be lab. Well, Jazz assumes it’s a lab based off the amount of vials filled with unidentified liquids and medical instruments sitting in cabinets on the far side of the room. Most walls are lined with devices—he can make out what appears to be a cattle prod, and an assortment of the same type of collars they’d seen on the creature in the central room. There’s more—some looking vaguely like firearms, others in shapes that betray nothing about their intended purpose, but it’s probably safe to assume they’re all meant for subduing unruly test subjects. 

They didn’t work too well, Jazz thinks as he surveys the room for hostiles and finds nothing but more rotting bodies. He counts three proper Quints, their shells cracked and scratched, accumulated near the right side of the room where most of the technology—screens and consoles on an elevated platform—is gathered. There’s a fourth shell right next to the exit, hard chitin split almost perfectly in the middle. Guy must have been mauled while heading for the door. Jazz feels a pang of sympathy despite himself. Mostly for the test subjects—ten of them, more or less. He’s going off the number of skeletons, but they’re all… weird. Hard to say where one starts and the other ends, especially on the left side of the room, where rows of large, cylindrical pods sit against the wall, each sporting a glass panel to allow for surveying whatever was inside at some point. Tubes and cables connect to both ends, the former filled with some sort of green, viscous liquid. The same stuff covers the ground in front of the pods that have either been opened or smashed open, adding to the general nastiness of the place.

Satisfied with the knowledge that whatever nightmares they’ve been breeding in here are long dead, Jazz lets Bebop’s blaster slide back into its compartment. He lets out a long breath. “This is…” 

“The consequence of poor safety regulations,” Prowl finished when appropriate words fail to come to him. He surveys the scene swiftly with a frown. “This laboratory appears underequipped, at least in comparison to what I’ve seen the Quintessons work with before.”

Jazz looks at the rows of borderline torture devices swinging off the walls. “This is underequipped?”

“For the amount of test subjects which seemed to be held at this facility? Yes, very much so.” Prowl’s eye hangs on the mess of consoles in the far corner. “Hopefully some of the tech is still operational…” he mutters, more to himself than anything, making a beeline in that direction.

Jazz follows, trying his best not to step in anything squishy. Despite being sure they’re the only living things in here, there’s still an uneasiness to being in the lab. Pink lights flicker overhead, causing the already morbid scene to appear even more menacing. The more he looks, the more disconcerting it gets—the scratches they’ve seen on the doors, they’re all over the room too, and on the consoles, which also sport a lot of bite marks.

Prowl approaches the largest screen in the tight semicircle of technology. An array of panels lights up at his touch, shapes and symbols that mean absolutely nothing to Jazz but which Prowl starts to press and tap with easy familiarity. Text in Quintesson flickers over the screen, scrolling too fast to make out anything concrete.

Jazz leans against a stack of servers and watches Prowl work, one hand zipping across the console while the other stays motionless at his side, face pinched in intense concentration. “Any maps on this thing?”

He gets a frustrated sound as an answer. “It’s encrypted.”

Bebop’s head-fin swivels in question. “Can you crack it?”

“Given enough time,” Prowl answers, distracted. “That’s not the problem. This is… I’ve never seen this level of security in a Quintesson data base.” His eye narrows, and with a grunt and an awful groan of metal grinding on metal, his injured shoulder unlocks, two sets of fingers tapping furiously. “Not to mention, half the data appears to have been manually deleted. Hundred of folders with barely anything in them. Research notes with no text attached. Image files missing contents…” he trails off. 

Jazz shrugs. “Someone didn’t have the time to get rid of all the evidence before they got their face bitten off.” He motions to the cracked shell laying closest to them. “My money’s on that guy.”

“There has to be more. The complexity of the encryption—it has to be shielding something.”

“There ain’t anything special about the beasties they’ve got in here?” Jazz wonders, Bebop’s visor sweeping over all the corpses. “You said there’s research notes. What’d they say?”

“Nothing but fragments,” Prowl hums, eye never leaving the screen. “Detailing nothing we haven’t seen before. All of the test subjects on this site were Gladiators—genetically spliced amalgamations of various species, most of them native to the planet. Most were unfinished, as well.”

Jazz winces at the choice of word. “Unfinished?”

“Once a genetic blueprint for a given Quintesson soldier is ready, their perfect clones are produced on a mass scale,” Prowl explains, as though he’s describing the weather and not the inner workings of an evil empire. “But getting to that point is a process—a mix of natural breeding and genetic modification performed on a subject as it develops. They’re highly unstable during that stage, both on a physical level as well as behavioral; base instincts of different species seldom play together nicely when forced to cooperate.”

Jazz thinks of the absolute terror he’s felt when Prowl first made an appearance in his head and shudders. Something occurs to him suddenly, and he asks, “They ever tried to work on something more… self-aware?”

Prowl’s fingers still. “The more intelligent the organism, the harder it is to manipulate into blindly following orders.” His movements resume, although there’s an uncertain tilt to his mouth as he continues. “All Quintesson soldiers are mentally connected to a net—a hive-mind, if you will. Being self-aware, having any complex sense of self at all—it makes the incorporation into the larger whole more difficult.”

“But not impossible.”

“Statistically speaking, there’s very little that’s actually impossible,” Prowl scoffs. “I can, however, confidently say that it is not likely.”

Jazz decides that he’d really rather not find out just how unlikely, at least not right now. Prowl has been widening his horizons in the worst possible ways. The command won’t like any of the info he’ll be bringing them. Assuming he survives. Honestly, Jazz is starting to consider whether telling them the whole truth is even the correct option here.

He clears his head of the idea for now. One crisis at a time. 

Jazz pats Prowl’s side lightly. “Holler when you find something useful,” he says, and leaves him to his typing, heading for the row of pods on the other side of the room.

“Don’t touch anything,” Prowl throws over his shoulder.

“Sure,” Jazz chirps, kneeling down to inspect the viscous green liquid spilled on the floor. Bebop’s scanners struggle to name all the elements it’s made out of. He gets a little on the finger of his non-functioning arm and there’s no sizzling, so it’s not harmful to touch. If you’re made of metal, that is. 

Something else catches his attention, now that he’s closer to the ground. It’s hard to tell with the decay slowly settling in, but several of the skeletons appear to have been picked clean. There’s still plenty of rotting meat around, but looks like something was getting hungry while cooped up in here. 

Jazz looks towards some of the fresher corpses. Dehydration must have gotten to them, in the end. Once again, he feels a pang of sympathy for the Quints. At least they got to tear into the creatures which had forced them into this poor excuse for a life before they went. He hopes it was satisfying, hopes that the fuckers died slowly and painfully.

With a sigh, Jazz rises from his crouch and looks up at one of the few pods which remains relatively unharmed. The clear window on the front is darkened, revealing nothing. There’s a console next to the pod, much smaller than the one Prowl works at but no less incomprehensible. He briefly considers whipping out that novella of a guide-book he’s been so graciously given, but thinks better of it. This is an opportunity for him to get some hands-on experience without having to worry about blowing up something important, right? A much better alternative to reading, if you ask him.

He hovers his palm over the console the way he’s seen Prowl do it. Nothing. Maybe this one’s busted? There’s no buttons, just an oblong, white shape rising from the ground, smooth and featureless. Jazz walks around it, inspecting it from all angles looking for… something, that’d give him a clue on how to activate it. He finds more nothing. 

On the other side of the room, Prowl continues to click away at his own console, text flying over the screen and glowing symbols appearing and disappearing under his fingers. He makes it look so effortless. Jazz squints at him, and then at the console. He tries hovering his palm over it again and gets… surprise! Still nothing. He lowers his hand until it’s almost touching the smooth surface underneath, hesitates for a second, and finally lets it fall all the way down.

The console lights up a bright pink under his palm. At the same time, in the very corner of her vision, Bebop spots movement. Jazz’s head snaps in that direction, and he’s met with a single, slitted eye staring back at him. And then a second, smaller eye blinking slowly open—this one’s pupil a horizontal rectangle, like a goat’s. 

Jazz jerks back, hand tearing away from the console as he scrambles to put distance in between himself and the creature. The second his palm loses contact with the white surface, it loses its glow. Immediately, the energy seems to transfer to the pod itself instead—separate sections lighting up pink. The previously darkened see-through window now reveals a writhing shape inside, a mess of feathers and scales and glowing eyes encased in the same green liquid he’s seen spilled across the floor.

Jazz backs away from the pod slowly, blaster at the ready. Somewhere behind him, Prowl’s footsteps echo as he abandons the console. He spares a glance over his shoulder and is met with a glare.

“I told you not to touch anything!”

“You know I treat orders more like suggestions!”

There’s a hissing sound from the pod, and Jazz brings his attention back to the problem at hand. The glowing sections on the device start releasing steam, followed by the green goop spilling slowly through the cracks. Something slams against the front once, twice. The third impact causes the pod’s lid to give out and clatter to the floor noisily, coating it in more viscous liquid. The thing that stumbles out is still covered in it, making it hard to make out anything other than it’s general shape. It’s roughly Bebop’s height, maybe twice as long. Sharp claws click against the rock underneath as it settles on all fours, a pair of leathery wings flaring out and folding again. A heavy tail thumps down behind it, dragging through the mess on the floor. As more liquid sloughs down its body, Jazz can make out clumps of white feathers interspersed by patches of grayish scales. A small, triangular head rises slowly, the beak at the end clicking menacingly. 

He stands frozen in front of the creature as two sets of eyes blink away any remnants of green still clinging to its face, before focusing—right on Jazz.