Prowl x Jazz Anniversary Challenge - week 4
...And this is the second one:
Title: Lost
Author: zea_taylor
Rating: T
Verse: G1, pre-Earth
Warnings: angst, mentions of sabotage, with resultant death and destruction
Prompt: Week 4, #4 - "Save me, I'm lost"
Summary: He knew they couldn't stay. It still hurt to find them gone.
This couldn’t be happening.
Jazz walked the silent corridors in a numb daze. His irregular footfalls echoed back to him, the clatter of metal on metal far more jarring than the pain that accompanied each limping step.
That was old pain, damage the Decepticon medics considered too character building to heal cleanly or quickly.
The ache inside, the despair creeping over him with each passing sparkbeat - that pain was all too new.
It wasn’t that Jazz blamed his friends for leaving. He knew better than most just how many resources the Decepticons had chosen to throw at this base - far more than even its officers had feared. It had been that realisation that drove him to break cover and blow the outpost he’d been infiltrating. Jazz had resigned himself there and then to never seeing his friends again. He’d only prayed that reports of the blast would give Prowl the warning he needed, and that taking the garrison out of the equation would leave the tactician opening enough to act upon it and get their mechs clear.
But it shouldn’t hurt so much to find he’d done just that.
Jazz’s tired pedes carried him into the Rec Room and a thin keen escaped his vocalisor. Well known shapes beckoned him onwards, the dim gleam of his headlamps picking a familiar mural out of the gloom.
And, with the sight, the memory of seeing it for the first time amidst a flurry of laughter and speculation.
Sunstreaker had never owned up to the floor-to-ceiling painting that appeared between one orn and the next, not then or in the many cycles that followed. The image of Golden Age Iacon had belonged to them all, becoming the backdrop to all their revelry - a colourful reminder of what they were fighting for. Now it was washed out in the dim light, the golden towers of Cybertron’s capital tinged with sparkless grey.
Jazz gazed at it, heedless of passing time. His optics picked out the portraits of familiar mechs - some of them no larger than the tip of his finger servo - that Sunstreaker had scattered through his fantasy. All were cast into shadow, the softness and light the mural once held gone with the Autobots who’d brought it alive.
“Ah, mah mechs.” His murmured lament echoed back to him from every surface in the cavernous space - from barren walls and metal chairs, burnished by the afts of who-knew-how-many mechs. All gone now.
He turned and walked from the Rec Room, pushing down the memories with the same practiced ease with which he overrode the error messages from his damaged knee-joint. After near a cycle of being forced through the strain of training exercises, his self-repair had stopped even trying to heal the injury.
Surviving the explosion had been an unlooked-for blessing. He vaguely recalled staggering from the garrison complex, leaking energon as he went and dragging his left leg behind him, before collapsing amidst the few other survivors. He’d never expected to online again. Waking in a Decepticon boot camp, taken not for a saboteur but rather for an incompetent in need of remedial training - well, even his famously flexible processor had come close to snapping.
With over three hundred sparks wiped out by ‘an accidental misfire’ in the arsenal, the local commanders couldn’t afford to offline a single one of their surviving soldiers. That didn’t stop them making an example of the weapons division’s four survivors. The remedial camp had been a prison in all but name, escape impossible.
Physical escape, anyway. Jazz shuddered, remembering the comrades - never friends - who’d taken another way out, their grey shells tossed over the fence and left to act both as warning and cruel temptation. He couldn’t deny the idea of following their example had power, even over the strong-willed saboteur.
The Decepticon training sergeants hadn’t been gentle.
He limped onwards, memories of his life here overlaid by others, newer and burned into his processor by fire and pain. He’d buried himself in the persona he’d adopted, taking the sergeants’ blows with the bravado and poorly-hidden fear of a Decepticon nobody. He hadn’t let himself think about the Autobots he’d acted to save, or dream of returning to them. It was only in the darkest nights, when recharge was at its most elusive, that Jazz allowed himself a wry amusement at his predicament. Even now he was uncertain whether to be thankful for the Decepticon’s mistake, or insulted by it. It was clear the ‘cons considered infiltration of their destroyed garrison so far beyond the Autobots’ skills that the mere possibility of it hadn’t occurred to them.
He’d taught them better. If the half-dozen greyed frames Jazz left behind at his new assignment hadn’t clued them in, silence from the three guards here would do so.
Three. All the hundreds of mechs who’d encircled the place a cycle before, and he’d found just three disposable grunts, guarding the miles of shadowed corridor and the empty shell of a base he’d once called home. The irony of it amused him, and he knew it would please Prowl too. The tactician had chosen this base to be as unstrategic and unthreatening as possible, and it had worked, giving them a haven for vorns, until the mere presence of Autobots lent the place a significance it would never otherwise have had.
Jazz paused, struck by the realisation that his aimless wandering had taken him deeper into the complex - treading a familiar path to the residential corridor reserved for officers. He stopped, fingertips caressing one door in particular, his optics hard as he studied its broken lock. Steeling himself, he palmed it open, and the air left his vents in a gasp when he saw what lay beyond.
Chaos reigned in a room that had once been the exemplar of order. The berth had been slashed with blades, furniture overturned, heavy bookfiles scattered across the floor. The wrongness tore at him, a choked cry torn from his vocalisor. It was as if not only the presence but the very spark of its former owner had been eradicated.
It was almost enough to break Jazz, to let loose the keens of despair building within him. Everywhere he’d gone in the complex, he’d seen evidence for an urgent but orderly withdrawal. Anything non-essential had been discarded, precious resources left behind rather than taken to weight the Autobots’ down as they broke free of the siege. Now, with his optics picking out one after another of Prowl’s precious bookfiles amidst the wreckage, a chill gripped Jazz’s spark and he wondered if the Autobots’ flight had been more urgent and desperate than he’d thought.
As practical as Prowl could be, would he truly have abandoned so many of his belongings, if he’d had time to plan the escape and health to enact it?
Jazz had accepted he was unlikely to see his friends again. He hadn’t asked Prowl about their fall-back plans. As frequently as Jazz moved amongst the Decepticons, he knew the tactician wouldn’t have been able to answer if he had. Now he paid the price for that ignorance. With the Autobots regrouping and sorties from the new base likely to be rare and secretive, it could be cycles or whole vorns before even he figured out their location. He had no illusion about his own ability to survive that long, alone and already injured.
Even so, he’d not doubted that Prowl had led his friends to safety. Now that doubt crept in. Jazz fell to his knees, arms wrapped around his chest-plates and processor numb, as he considered the alternative.
It was pain in his left leg that finally broke through the pain in his spark, the brutal practicalities of his existence leaving little room for finer feelings. He shifted, trying to straighten the leg out to one side, and as he did so, his visor rose, sweeping a berth-room he’d known as well as his own.
Jazz froze, his head tilted to one side, processor suddenly working with lightning speed. His visor brightened, gaze no longer roaming the destruction aimlessly but instead searching, looking from the gap where a well known painting should hang, to the shelves behind him, and then scanning the floor for the few books and very specific mementoes he knew Prowl valued most.
Hope swelling in his spark, Jazz stood. There was a new purpose in his step as he left Prowl’s room behind him and crossed the corridor to his own. This lock hadn’t been broken so much as simply ceased to be. A grim smile formed on Jazz’s lip-plates as he studied the wide spread of charring and warped metal that suggested his door too had been forced - with somewhat more explosive results.
He put his shoulder to the twisted door, forcing it to swing clear of the frame, and was unsurprised to find the same mindless destruction that marred Prowl’s room reflected in his space too. Already though, his processor was picking out the things that weren’t there amidst the debris, as well as those that were. His instruments were gone, neither on his shelves, nor ruined at their feet. Music disks scattered the floor but a single glance was enough to tell him they comprised perhaps half his collection. A second look and he was sure - the missing disks weren’t random, but rather the tracks he’d listened to most frequently or with greatest emotion, or those he’d searched for hardest and raved about into tolerant audios. The small gallery of image captures were gone from his berth-side table. His prized oils and polishes, his spare visor and the toolset he kept with it… all were missing from the debris that littered the floor.
Trembling, Jazz shifted the bed aside, hauling on the ruined metal frame with scant care for its jagged edges. A brush of finger-servos, a silent command, and the shelves behind swung forward, the bulky unit counterweighted and oiled to move silently.
The space behind was all but bare. At first he thought the impossible - that this, his sensor-shielded and spark-encoded vault, had been found and raided too. But no Decepticon would leave the two sweet weapons still hanging on their hooks behind, and Jazz had no illusion that the personal items he’d stored here - his last precious reminders of friends and family long gone - would hold any value for a Decepticon thief. They’d lie scattered and broken on the floor, the vault itself left open rather than resealed.
Instead they were gone, only one image capture left on the shelf to brighten the bare metal and reflect the dim gleam of weaponry. The frame was familiar, the image was not.
Ghosting forward, Jazz reached for it, turning it into his headlights and studying it with a sense of bemusement. The laughter that rippled through him grew, a note to it that was near-hysterical, another edge that was sheer disbelief.
Where Jazz expected to find a picture of the one other mech authorised for this safe - the only mech who knew Jazz’s music as well as the saboteur himself, and who would sacrifice his own book collection to carry Jazz’s treasures to safety - instead there was an image of a familiar crystal outcrop, and the memory of a long ago picnic under Cybertron’s ever-dark skies.
The outcrop had been natural, beautiful in its rugged irregularity, and almost half an orn’s drive from the base. Jazz would have been content simply to relax, soaking in the crystals’ vibration. Prowl didn’t know the meaning of relaxation. An impromptu lecture had flowed out of him, and Jazz had absorbed it, marvelling to realise there were few mechs left who knew as much about crystal gardens, natural or otherwise, as the Autobot tactician. He’d certainly be willing to bet that no Decepticon knew the secret of coaxing a crystal growth open, to reveal the hollow core and the secrets hidden within by generations of courting Praxians.
A broad grin spread across Jazz’s face.
He’d need to search out the guards’ energon supply and scour the base for anything else he could use. First though, he lifted down the blaster and rifle left for him, smiling as the familiar grips slid into his palms. And then he turned back, first to Prowl’s room and then his own, collecting up what Prowl couldn’t carry and the Decepticons had left intact, taking his share of the weight.
He didn’t doubt that this was just the first step of a longer and far-from-simple trail. Even so he set out with a new fire in his spark and a grin on his lips, knowing the prize waiting at journey’s end was worth any trial.
Title: Lost
Author: zea_taylor
Rating: T
Verse: G1, pre-Earth
Warnings: angst, mentions of sabotage, with resultant death and destruction
Prompt: Week 4, #4 - "Save me, I'm lost"
Summary: He knew they couldn't stay. It still hurt to find them gone.
This couldn’t be happening.
Jazz walked the silent corridors in a numb daze. His irregular footfalls echoed back to him, the clatter of metal on metal far more jarring than the pain that accompanied each limping step.
That was old pain, damage the Decepticon medics considered too character building to heal cleanly or quickly.
The ache inside, the despair creeping over him with each passing sparkbeat - that pain was all too new.
It wasn’t that Jazz blamed his friends for leaving. He knew better than most just how many resources the Decepticons had chosen to throw at this base - far more than even its officers had feared. It had been that realisation that drove him to break cover and blow the outpost he’d been infiltrating. Jazz had resigned himself there and then to never seeing his friends again. He’d only prayed that reports of the blast would give Prowl the warning he needed, and that taking the garrison out of the equation would leave the tactician opening enough to act upon it and get their mechs clear.
But it shouldn’t hurt so much to find he’d done just that.
Jazz’s tired pedes carried him into the Rec Room and a thin keen escaped his vocalisor. Well known shapes beckoned him onwards, the dim gleam of his headlamps picking a familiar mural out of the gloom.
And, with the sight, the memory of seeing it for the first time amidst a flurry of laughter and speculation.
Sunstreaker had never owned up to the floor-to-ceiling painting that appeared between one orn and the next, not then or in the many cycles that followed. The image of Golden Age Iacon had belonged to them all, becoming the backdrop to all their revelry - a colourful reminder of what they were fighting for. Now it was washed out in the dim light, the golden towers of Cybertron’s capital tinged with sparkless grey.
Jazz gazed at it, heedless of passing time. His optics picked out the portraits of familiar mechs - some of them no larger than the tip of his finger servo - that Sunstreaker had scattered through his fantasy. All were cast into shadow, the softness and light the mural once held gone with the Autobots who’d brought it alive.
“Ah, mah mechs.” His murmured lament echoed back to him from every surface in the cavernous space - from barren walls and metal chairs, burnished by the afts of who-knew-how-many mechs. All gone now.
He turned and walked from the Rec Room, pushing down the memories with the same practiced ease with which he overrode the error messages from his damaged knee-joint. After near a cycle of being forced through the strain of training exercises, his self-repair had stopped even trying to heal the injury.
Surviving the explosion had been an unlooked-for blessing. He vaguely recalled staggering from the garrison complex, leaking energon as he went and dragging his left leg behind him, before collapsing amidst the few other survivors. He’d never expected to online again. Waking in a Decepticon boot camp, taken not for a saboteur but rather for an incompetent in need of remedial training - well, even his famously flexible processor had come close to snapping.
With over three hundred sparks wiped out by ‘an accidental misfire’ in the arsenal, the local commanders couldn’t afford to offline a single one of their surviving soldiers. That didn’t stop them making an example of the weapons division’s four survivors. The remedial camp had been a prison in all but name, escape impossible.
Physical escape, anyway. Jazz shuddered, remembering the comrades - never friends - who’d taken another way out, their grey shells tossed over the fence and left to act both as warning and cruel temptation. He couldn’t deny the idea of following their example had power, even over the strong-willed saboteur.
The Decepticon training sergeants hadn’t been gentle.
He limped onwards, memories of his life here overlaid by others, newer and burned into his processor by fire and pain. He’d buried himself in the persona he’d adopted, taking the sergeants’ blows with the bravado and poorly-hidden fear of a Decepticon nobody. He hadn’t let himself think about the Autobots he’d acted to save, or dream of returning to them. It was only in the darkest nights, when recharge was at its most elusive, that Jazz allowed himself a wry amusement at his predicament. Even now he was uncertain whether to be thankful for the Decepticon’s mistake, or insulted by it. It was clear the ‘cons considered infiltration of their destroyed garrison so far beyond the Autobots’ skills that the mere possibility of it hadn’t occurred to them.
He’d taught them better. If the half-dozen greyed frames Jazz left behind at his new assignment hadn’t clued them in, silence from the three guards here would do so.
Three. All the hundreds of mechs who’d encircled the place a cycle before, and he’d found just three disposable grunts, guarding the miles of shadowed corridor and the empty shell of a base he’d once called home. The irony of it amused him, and he knew it would please Prowl too. The tactician had chosen this base to be as unstrategic and unthreatening as possible, and it had worked, giving them a haven for vorns, until the mere presence of Autobots lent the place a significance it would never otherwise have had.
Jazz paused, struck by the realisation that his aimless wandering had taken him deeper into the complex - treading a familiar path to the residential corridor reserved for officers. He stopped, fingertips caressing one door in particular, his optics hard as he studied its broken lock. Steeling himself, he palmed it open, and the air left his vents in a gasp when he saw what lay beyond.
Chaos reigned in a room that had once been the exemplar of order. The berth had been slashed with blades, furniture overturned, heavy bookfiles scattered across the floor. The wrongness tore at him, a choked cry torn from his vocalisor. It was as if not only the presence but the very spark of its former owner had been eradicated.
It was almost enough to break Jazz, to let loose the keens of despair building within him. Everywhere he’d gone in the complex, he’d seen evidence for an urgent but orderly withdrawal. Anything non-essential had been discarded, precious resources left behind rather than taken to weight the Autobots’ down as they broke free of the siege. Now, with his optics picking out one after another of Prowl’s precious bookfiles amidst the wreckage, a chill gripped Jazz’s spark and he wondered if the Autobots’ flight had been more urgent and desperate than he’d thought.
As practical as Prowl could be, would he truly have abandoned so many of his belongings, if he’d had time to plan the escape and health to enact it?
Jazz had accepted he was unlikely to see his friends again. He hadn’t asked Prowl about their fall-back plans. As frequently as Jazz moved amongst the Decepticons, he knew the tactician wouldn’t have been able to answer if he had. Now he paid the price for that ignorance. With the Autobots regrouping and sorties from the new base likely to be rare and secretive, it could be cycles or whole vorns before even he figured out their location. He had no illusion about his own ability to survive that long, alone and already injured.
Even so, he’d not doubted that Prowl had led his friends to safety. Now that doubt crept in. Jazz fell to his knees, arms wrapped around his chest-plates and processor numb, as he considered the alternative.
It was pain in his left leg that finally broke through the pain in his spark, the brutal practicalities of his existence leaving little room for finer feelings. He shifted, trying to straighten the leg out to one side, and as he did so, his visor rose, sweeping a berth-room he’d known as well as his own.
Jazz froze, his head tilted to one side, processor suddenly working with lightning speed. His visor brightened, gaze no longer roaming the destruction aimlessly but instead searching, looking from the gap where a well known painting should hang, to the shelves behind him, and then scanning the floor for the few books and very specific mementoes he knew Prowl valued most.
Hope swelling in his spark, Jazz stood. There was a new purpose in his step as he left Prowl’s room behind him and crossed the corridor to his own. This lock hadn’t been broken so much as simply ceased to be. A grim smile formed on Jazz’s lip-plates as he studied the wide spread of charring and warped metal that suggested his door too had been forced - with somewhat more explosive results.
He put his shoulder to the twisted door, forcing it to swing clear of the frame, and was unsurprised to find the same mindless destruction that marred Prowl’s room reflected in his space too. Already though, his processor was picking out the things that weren’t there amidst the debris, as well as those that were. His instruments were gone, neither on his shelves, nor ruined at their feet. Music disks scattered the floor but a single glance was enough to tell him they comprised perhaps half his collection. A second look and he was sure - the missing disks weren’t random, but rather the tracks he’d listened to most frequently or with greatest emotion, or those he’d searched for hardest and raved about into tolerant audios. The small gallery of image captures were gone from his berth-side table. His prized oils and polishes, his spare visor and the toolset he kept with it… all were missing from the debris that littered the floor.
Trembling, Jazz shifted the bed aside, hauling on the ruined metal frame with scant care for its jagged edges. A brush of finger-servos, a silent command, and the shelves behind swung forward, the bulky unit counterweighted and oiled to move silently.
The space behind was all but bare. At first he thought the impossible - that this, his sensor-shielded and spark-encoded vault, had been found and raided too. But no Decepticon would leave the two sweet weapons still hanging on their hooks behind, and Jazz had no illusion that the personal items he’d stored here - his last precious reminders of friends and family long gone - would hold any value for a Decepticon thief. They’d lie scattered and broken on the floor, the vault itself left open rather than resealed.
Instead they were gone, only one image capture left on the shelf to brighten the bare metal and reflect the dim gleam of weaponry. The frame was familiar, the image was not.
Ghosting forward, Jazz reached for it, turning it into his headlights and studying it with a sense of bemusement. The laughter that rippled through him grew, a note to it that was near-hysterical, another edge that was sheer disbelief.
Where Jazz expected to find a picture of the one other mech authorised for this safe - the only mech who knew Jazz’s music as well as the saboteur himself, and who would sacrifice his own book collection to carry Jazz’s treasures to safety - instead there was an image of a familiar crystal outcrop, and the memory of a long ago picnic under Cybertron’s ever-dark skies.
The outcrop had been natural, beautiful in its rugged irregularity, and almost half an orn’s drive from the base. Jazz would have been content simply to relax, soaking in the crystals’ vibration. Prowl didn’t know the meaning of relaxation. An impromptu lecture had flowed out of him, and Jazz had absorbed it, marvelling to realise there were few mechs left who knew as much about crystal gardens, natural or otherwise, as the Autobot tactician. He’d certainly be willing to bet that no Decepticon knew the secret of coaxing a crystal growth open, to reveal the hollow core and the secrets hidden within by generations of courting Praxians.
A broad grin spread across Jazz’s face.
He’d need to search out the guards’ energon supply and scour the base for anything else he could use. First though, he lifted down the blaster and rifle left for him, smiling as the familiar grips slid into his palms. And then he turned back, first to Prowl’s room and then his own, collecting up what Prowl couldn’t carry and the Decepticons had left intact, taking his share of the weight.
He didn’t doubt that this was just the first step of a longer and far-from-simple trail. Even so he set out with a new fire in his spark and a grin on his lips, knowing the prize waiting at journey’s end was worth any trial.