Chapter Text
The command center thrummed like a well-oiled gearbox, dimly lit by the glow of consoles and holograms. Along the periphery, silent technicians moved, their voices confined to comms—shadows within the greater machine. At the center stood Prowl, stiff-backed and immovable, a web of cables tethering him into Teletraan’s core. His doorwings held taut, their faint, rhythmic oscillations the only betrayal of precise, unyielding focus.
Behind blue optic lenses, the room vanished and dissolved into an ocean of surging data —helm feeds, telemetry, parallel simulations. Every whisper of battlefield movement streamed into the tacnet—millions of datapoints every klik, each a bead of light in the surging tide.
Prowl absorbed it all. Routed it, filed it. Shaped chaos into discrete order. Thousands of probability branches flared to life; the weak culled, the strong converged—until commands resolved like a blade edge and struck clean. Prime’s Autobots moved across the field like pieces on a board—precisely where he and high command placed them.
Hardwired into the tactical center, external lines pulsed coolant through his frame, fighting the tacnet’s burn. Fans roared beneath his plating, vents cycling in controlled bursts as the system throttled full bore—maximum throughput, maximum thermal load. At his helm, his crimson chevron blazed as a heatsink, shedding heat in rippling waves that warped the dim light— strategy searing through his frame.
And through the storm of enforced order, he noticed.
Jazz.
Sim-branch generation rate: 1241/klik | Average command latency: 1.54 kliks (nominal).
Discretized resolution Δt = 0.9 kliks | Average stable solution horizon: T+2337 kliks (nominal)
Residual error < TOL | Stability: Nominal
Endstate projection: Autobot control | Gridlines secured @ T+872 kliks (Outcome probability: 89.7%)
The feed resolved into meaning.
Each micro-sim was nothing more than a sparkspin of change across tens of thousands of variables.
But together they scaffolded branches—whole futures strung from raw ticks of possibility.
Every Autobot moved as predicted, conformed to the model’s prevailing probabilities. Each one slotted cleanly into the lines of order he cast.
Except—
Jazz.
His Jazz.
Tiny deviations sparked red in the sea of green and teal. His optical ridge creased—just enough to shadow the edge of one crystalline blue optic.
Subject: Conjunx Unit Jazz: Pos: [43.21, -12.77, 2.03].
Vel: 8.2 m/s @ 214°.
Weapon-arm vector ψ = 31°, θ = -3°.
Pred. action horizon: flank left (Outcome probability 77.1%).
A trajectory bent 1.04 degrees tighter to cover. Exposure reduced by 0.14 kliks.
Minuscule. Irrelevant. Anyone else would have missed them. Prowl did not. He had fifty thousand vorn of data, and the model refused to treat this as acceptable variance.
None of it impaired effectiveness—Jazz was still Jazz, still devastating, still the blade in the dark. But the weightings had shifted. Subtly. Noticeably.
The algorithm flagged anomalies.
Prowl flagged Jazz. He always had.
Subject: Conjunx Unit Jazz — variance sustained — reassess.
On the ground, Prime’s frontliners clashed headlong into the scuffling line—Ironhide holding the push steady under a rain of fire, while Sunstreaker and Sideswipe launched themselves at a pair of green- and blue-plated seekers diving from the haze, optics flaring as they raked fire across the line. Metal shrieked as the fliers dragged them off balance, wings snapping wide and thrusters howling before the Twins wrenched free and pulled their opponents down in a brutal counter-slam. Their violence was noise, deliberate and overwhelming, a battering ram that drew every optic to the blaze.
To the side, Jazz and his Spec Ops team flowed like liquid, slipping between the Decepticons’ angular defense. Blaster fire strobed the haze, knives flashing silver before disappearing into armor seams. A spray of plasma cut wide. Jazz grinned, slipping past it, shoulder-checking a Vehicon into a dented heap. His blade punched into the mech’s knee joint, severing hydraulics, and the Decepticon stayed down. Jazz was already moving, his voice rolling over comms like polished metal—easy, confident, blade-sharp.
“: Mirage—vanish an’ slip left. Make ‘em nervous ‘bout that left flank. Hound, throw me a decoy push on that side, keep their optics off the proper line.”
The tacnet pulsed with confirmations. Mirage’s signal blinked out, gone from visual trackers, while Hound’s projection bloomed—phantom Autobots surging heavy on the left flank. The Decepticons’ formation shuddered, optics and firepower dragging toward the illusory threat.
“ : That’s the ticket. Spec Ops, on me. Cut right through their blind spot—three, two…”
The team slipped forward in perfect synchrony, predators following the rhythm of his count.
Then the comms shifted, his voice rolling straight into Prowl’s private channel:
“ : TIC checkin’ in, babe. Decepticon advance’s all tied up nice an’ neat.”
The console glowed under Prowl’s servos, HUD painting Jazz in sharp relief:
Baseline deviation σ = 0.041m across N = 4 prior samples.
Probability of chance occurrence < 0.15. | Statistical significance confirmed: 85.7%.
His optics narrowed, heat rolling off the chevron at his helm. Coolant pushed harder against internal manifolds, vents cycling sharper. His doorwings twitched in irritation. He forced them still.
A significance too high to discard. The data patterns whispered: something is different.
Jazz wasn’t just another datapoint. The data couldn’t quite quantify it—that pull in his spark, that instinctive ease of recognition. He was the one variable Prowl would never discard.
And that made the anomaly impossible to ignore.
“ : You’re off your typical vector,” Prowl said, voice flat and edged.
Jazz chuckled, the sound rich even through comms static. “ : Off my vector? Heh—sweetspark, ah’m flawless. They can’t lay a digit on me.”
For a fraction of a klik, his HUD held Jazz’s vector frozen, telemetry scrolling in silence.
Baseline mismatch: Defensive bias reconfirmed.
“ : You are running defensively biased,” Prowl pressed. “Outside your nominal variance. Are you injured?”
“ : Wouldn’t show even if ah was. Point is, defense kept my team upright, didn’t it?” Jazz’s tone was warm, lilting, entirely unconcerned. “ : Can’t fault me for watchin’ their backs. What’s our next vector lookin’ like?”
His doorwings jolted, sharper this time, betraying what the data could not. Feedback sang down his sensory lines, and it took every fragment of discipline to cage the movement—uncertainty locked in steel. Directives pushed across the link—clean tactical lines, stripped of doubt. Jazz’s signal pulsed back in steady confirmation. He muted the channel, but the tacnet ticked on, probabilities stacking into quiet unease.
Jazz was Jazz.
Prowl told himself that was enough. It had to be.
----------------------------------------------------
The Decepticon line buckled and broke beneath Autobot precision. The skirmish ended in smoking wreckage and secured lines. Prowl rerouted resources to mop-up, then initiated separation protocols.
Console jacks released with a metallic hiss, auxiliary coolant lines pulling free in a spatter of condensation. For a moment, he swayed, processor lagging as heat continued to radiate sluggishly from his frame. His knees bent, doorwings twitching, and he let himself fold down into the nearest chair with a controlled drop more than a graceful sit. Fans roared, venting steadily until the numbers indicating temperature in his HUD dimmed from orange back to green.
Chronometer marked 9.2 kliks to nominal range core temps — exactly within operational tolerance.
Around him, the noise of comms faded into the low murmur of officers drifting in for debrief, pedesteps clanking against the Ark’s steel floor.
The operation had ended without losses, an optimal result Prowl should have been satisfied with. Optimus certainly was—Prime’s ping came through the tacnet, calm and steady, noting the clean execution and praising the outcome. All operatives extracted, territory secured, Decepticons in retreat. By every metric, a success.
And yet Prowl’s processor wouldn’t let him rest. Threads replaying, recombining, reassessing.
In the command center, the Ark’s consoles glowed in that same low-light as officers stopped in with their debriefs. To them, Prowl was the picture of calm authority, his field held tight and professional, every trace of emotion pulled close. But under the rigid stillness, his processor whirred, partitioned, tacnet cycles burning themselves out on Jazz.
Familiar pedesteps broke the hum. Prowl didn’t need to look up to know who it was.
The enigma himself popped through the command deck entryway, dust and grime streaking black-and-white plating, muting the red and blue highlights beneath. His visor caught and reflected the glow of half a dozen displays. He was filthy, battlefield-smoke clinging like a second paint job. And he was smiling, strolling in with a field rolling bright, voice carrying its usual lilt as he tossed commentary to exiting mechs. To them, he was third in command, the Spec Ops lead—unflappable, charismatic, and deadly on cue.
To Prowl, he was a series of anomalies he couldn’t stop cataloging.
A break in the algorithm.
A constant dressed like a variable.
Prowl met his visor’s gleam—and noticed everything.
A dozen metrics filled his HUD: the angle of that smile, the wear-patterns in Jazz’s servos, the calculated ease in his struts. And a cube—42.1 kg of thorium-laced mid-grade— balanced loose between Jazz’s digits, but never once at risk of dropping. A gesture flagged with 98.7% certainty: he wasn’t going to leave until Prowl fueled, lest his poor underfueled frame collapse in the hallway.
None of it explained the shifts in behavior.
Jazz crossed the room, field rolling warm, the ration cube twirling in his servo like a set prop. He set it down with a clink and nudged it into Prowl’s line of sight as he slipped up beside him. His doorwings dipped outward in a loose line as if to mark the territory before he draped an arm across Prowl’s shoulder—settling into the space like the weight belonged there.
The command center still buzzed with quiet activity—officers trading reports, consoles ticking through post-battle logs—but none of it touched the space between them.
“Ya ever stop workin’, or are ya married to that console?” Jazz teased, visor gleaming with reflected light.
“I am ‘married’ to ensuring you return intact,” Prowl said, tone flat as a readout. His wings hitched down a full two degrees, betraying more than he wanted. “And you make that increasingly difficult.”
Jazz didn’t need to see them; pressed this close at Prowl’s side, he would’ve felt the smooth glide of Prowl’s joints as the wings dipped, the momentary drag of struts that gave his worry away.
“Oh?” Jazz leaned closer, field brushing deliberate warmth against his own. “That a confession, or just yer tacnet talkin’?”
Prowl paused. Too long, too noticeable. His HUD flagged even that hesitation as data. “…Both,” he said finally.
Latency duration: 1.34 kliks ( +0.78 kliks outside nominal)
Jazz hummed, pleased, and dipped closer still—visor grazing the side of Prowl’s helm, nuzzling at the seam of his neck guard just enough to make his fans trip a fraction faster. To Prowl, it was an inevitablilty—Jazz fitting into place as though he had always belonged there.
“Yer runnin’ hot again,” Jazz murmured, visor tilting as if he could see right through that careful mask.
“My cooling systems are functioning within acceptable parameters.” Prowl said, a shade too quick.
“Mm-hm. You were watchin’ me.” Jazz’s doorwings flicked in that loose Polyhexian way—casual, imprecise, a dialect without the layered nuance of Praxian cant. To anyone else it was background noise. To Prowl, it was a gesture without formal weight—just static ease—yet it burned across his sensory lines as provocation.
“It is my role to monitor all variables in the field.” He reached, almost without thinking, and let his digits brush against Jazz’s wrist — grounding, claiming.
“Right.” Jazz’s grin widened, lazy and knowing. “But I’m yer favorite variable, ain’t I?”
Prowl’s doorwings shivered. “…Constant,” he corrected. “You are my constant.”
For a moment, silence stretched — but his field betrayed him. Tightly wound, humming with low-grade unease no matter how carefully he masked it.
Jazz caught it instantly. His grin softened, affection threading sharp and bright through his own field as it brushed deliberately against Prowl’s. “Then quit fussin’. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me, Prowler. Promise.”
The battle was over. The reports were logged. By every metric, Prowl should have been satisfied.
But Jazz was no metric.
And the tacnet was unsettled.
Variance sustained. Subject: Conjunx Unit Jazz — reassess.
--------------------------------------------------------
Joors later, the Ark slept. Corridors dimmed for night-cycle, the command center dark but for the afterglow of silent consoles. Prowl remained at his post, doorwings angled rigidly as line after line of data cascaded across his vision. He told himself he was preparing for tomorrow’s maneuvers, but every predictive loop inevitably circled back to Jazz.
Cover chosen two strides closer to squad. Defensive spread favored over more optimal strikes.
Anomaly. Anomaly. Anomaly.
He forced the logs into a sealed partition of the tacnet’s operating drive, a corner of memory cordoned off with directory locks and access restrictions. It lasted all of a klik before the subroutines reached through the walls, error-flagging the “archived” data and piping it back into active review. Unease — alien, gnawing — pressed at the edges of his spark.
Later still, he found himself outside their quarters, optics dim in the corridor’s glow, as the door slid open in a faint hiss.
Jazz lay sprawled in the berth, wings slack, field thrumming steady with recharge. The battlefield grime was gone, plating catching faint glints of light where the black-and-white had been polished back to its usual gloss. Jazz’s recon mod scans swept him the instant he crossed the threshold, flitted across his codes, and stood down. Had it been anyone else, Jazz would have been on his pedes with a blade at their throat in an instant. Only Prowl earned this performance of easy carelessness—and even then, it wasn’t carelessness. It was a choice. A different kind of ease. A quieter truth.
Jazz’s spark-field hummed steady, warmer than baseline, spilling across the room like sunlight through an open doorway. Prowl stood in it, caught in that quiet warmth. The tacnet whispered across his HUD, permutations unfurling. He ignored them. For once, he didn’t want to see the calculus.
But even in the quiet, one truth lodged sharp in his processor: something was changing.
And he was the only one who noticed.
----------------------------------------------
The next cycle dawned with routine: skirmishes, patrols, Spec Ops reports stacking higher than energon rations. Routine should have been comfortable. Prowl immersed himself in logistics, feeding data through the tacnet until his processor hummed with the familiar grind of calculations.
And yet—
There it was again.
Jazz, slipping between Decepticon sentries with his usual grace, but the tacnet flagged the deviations relentlessly:
Cover: 1.12m closer than optimal to Bluestreak.
Strike: delayed 0.6s. Cause: Bumblebee repositioning (unexpected).
Prowl’s doorwings jerked up in irritation. It was not inefficient. It was not a compromise. But it was deviation, and deviation burned in his circuits like static.
He pushed the command across the tacnet, a clean directive slotted into the architecture:
User Directive: partition anomaly logs, archive until review.
The tacnet complied… for a klik. Then, red text scrolled back across his HUD:
ERROR: Archival function denied.
Priority alert: deviation escalating beyond tolerance.
Prowl’s optics narrowed. He forced another command. The tacnet replied with the same blunt refusal.
And Jazz — Jazz was laughing over comms, visor flashing as he vaulted a half-toppled turret tower and landed light on his pedes. “ : Spec Ops clear, Prowler. Mission success. Drinks on me tonight.”
The tacnet shoved an alert in red so bright it nearly shorted his optical relay.
Subject: Conjunx Unit Jazz — DEVIATION ESCALATING. IMMEDIATE MEDICAL INTERVENTION ADVISED.
Prowl went rigid. That phrasing was wrong. The tacnet did not demand. It reported, quantified, projected. Tantrums weren’t in its code.
He dug in.
Filters peeled back, subroutines unfolded. Lines of data scrolled across his HUD, raw and unbuffered: micro-shifts in Jazz’s spark resonance, fluctuations in field amplitude, infinitesimal delays between action and intent. Individually negligible, but stacked they formed a shape. A shape the tacnet flagged not as inefficiency, but as risk. As danger.
His vents hitched. Beneath the sterile syntax, something else threaded through—a cadence that wasn’t solver logic. Older. Instinctive. Not written into his battle routines, but into him.
Prowl’s doorwings ratcheted back, almost perpendicular to his back strut, vents drawing sharp. He traced the algorithm's path again, searching for noise, for error, for any out he could classify as tolerable. There wasn’t one.
The tacnet was certain.
Prowl’s spark whispered the same. Variance sustained.
--------------------------------------------------
Prowl intercepted him before the energon dispensers. Jazz was halfway through a lazy stretch when Prowl’s servo clamped firm around his arm.
“Prowler?” Jazz tilted his helm, visor catching the overhead light in a glint of surprise. His field rippled with familiar amusement, but underneath it pulsed quick and taut, the faint prickle of unease. “Ya look like ya swallowed a data stick.”
“You are coming with me,” Prowl said flatly.
“Am ah?” Jazz shifted in a fluid half-step, testing the hold. He could have slipped free—anyone else, he would have—but Prowl’s grip held steady, more plea than threat. “Where to—? Don’t tell me this is business when ah just clocked off,” Jazz said, voice easy, but his field flickered sharp around the edges.
“Medbay.”
For a klik, Jazz’s entire frame shifted—weight light on his struts, joints loose, processor already mapping exits the way only Spec Ops did. Not unexpected, but worth the risk. Then his field eased, deliberate warmth rolling outward like a cover story. “Medbay,” he echoed with a laugh, quick and bright and brittle. “Primus, Prowler. ah’m fine—” a fraction too quick, too practiced. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me.”
But Prowl caught that tiniest drag in the timing, the fraction of a pause before fine. Jazz had noticed it too, then. Whatever it was, he was dodging.
Prowl’s wings flicked higher up, edges trembling with contained anxiety. He knew Jazz’s proclivity for avoiding medical care—knew the vent shafts he favored, the excuses he spun, the way he could vanish into Ark’s guts and make Ratchet curse for decacycles. Prowl himself wasn’t fond of the medbay either, but Jazz was worse. If he let go, even for a klik, Jazz would slip free like smoke and squirrel himself away until the fuss burned out.
A few tables over, conversation dimmed, optics flicking their way. Mechs tried to make it look casual—Cliffjumper frozen mid-sip, cube hovering just shy of his intake; Perceptor suddenly very invested in his datapad. Most mechs only saw the stiff set of Prowl’s grip, the way Jazz leaned into it with that easy grin. But Bluestreak’s optics darted to the cant of Prowl’s doorwings—high, angled forward, edges trembling, broadcasting worry in a dialect only another Praxian would catch. Across the table, Smokescreen met his glance, the faint crease in his optical plating saying he’d read it too. Neither said a word, but the silence between them carried weight.
Jazz didn’t need the dialect. Vorn of battles and shared berthspace had made the connotations of Prowl’s doorwings plain as a field flare. His visor angled briefly toward the trembling panels, then back again, a wordless acknowledgment. Warmth rolled through his field, steady and grounding.
“You are not fine,” Prowl countered, wings rotating back at the joint. His thumb pressed into the white plating of Jazz’s forearm, an anchor. He spoke quietly, now, optics shifting from Jazz’s angled visor to their accidental audience, “Tacnet’s screaming at me, Jazz. I will not ignore that.”
For once, Jazz didn’t laugh it off right away. His helm tilted, visor catching the light, field tightening with a flicker of something sharp and unreadable. “...That so?” he murmured, voice pitched low, almost thoughtful. The weight of it lingered just long enough to register—before his grin slid back into place, crooked and easy. “Ya draggin’ me, or askin’ me sweet-like?”
Prowl scoffed, wings twitching. “Don’t act like I don’t know you. Dragging.”
-----------------------------------------
Less than a breem later, the medbay doors hissed open, light spilling sharp and sterile across gleaming floors. Monitors chirped, coolant pumps thrummed—the steady rhythm of the Ark’s lifeline. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and scorched plating—old battles etched into Ratchet’s walls. To Prowl, the tang carried unease: a reminder that even precision failed, and that control sometimes had to be surrendered—even to Ratchet’s trusted, steady servos.
Ratchet looked up from his console, scowl deepening the instant he saw who Prowl had in tow. His field bristled like a thunderhead.
“Oh, Primus save me.” The medic threw his arms up, already looking a klik away from manifesting a wrench to chuck at one of their helms. “What did you break this time, Jazz?”
“I didn’t break nothin’,” Jazz said cheerfully, though his arm was still locked in Prowl’s unyielding grip. His visor tilted toward the door like he’d already clocked half a dozen exit plans. “My conjunx here’s just feelin’ clingy.”
The remark earned a snort from across the room. Sideswipe lay sprawled on a berth, locked under a stasis field that hummed low to keep him from wriggling loose. Silver weld lines streaked fresh across red plating, bright where the armor was still knitting itself together. Monitors ticked steady readouts at his side, the occasional chirp marking integration progress. Sunstreaker stood guard over him, golden armor scuffed still with grime, optics razor-sharp. His field lashed the air, coiled tight and sparking with defensive menace.
Ratchet’s optics cut to Prowl. The tactician stood like a fortress wall, doorwings rigid.
“…You wouldn’t drag him in here without cause.”
“I have cause,” Prowl said, voice calm, though his field hummed taut. “Something is wrong. Find it.”
“Wrong, huh?” Ratchet’s growl was dry, but his optics narrowed, studying Jazz with a flicker of something sharper than annoyance. “Funny, ‘cause all I see is a perfectly functional pain in my aft—”
“See? Even Ratch thinks yer spinnin’ out,” Jazz cut in, visor gleaming as he spread his servos. His field pulsed sharp beneath the grin, betraying the smallest plea of freedom. “I’m fine—Ratch, tell ‘im ah’m fine.”
Ratchet snorted, his optics lingering on Jazz for kliks longer than the words suggested. “You’re a pain in my actuators, you know that?”
His attention shifted to Prowl, expression tightening into professional focus. “Alright. Out with it—what’ve you got?”
A datapacket pinged across the medbay’s local net, crisp and stripped of excess—condensed anomaly logs pulled straight from the tacnet. Patterns of micro-deviations, spark-resonance drift, field amplitude changes, all collated and weighted in Prowl’s meticulous report style.
“Residual anomalies persist across all iterations—” Prowl pressed.
“—ooooooh,” Sideswipe cut in from the berth, voice cheerful and sing-song despite the welds knitting in his frame. He grinned around the monitor leads, optics bright with mischief. “Somebody’s in troooouble.”
Sunstreaker’s field lashed sharp, a warning snap, but his brother only chuckled, smug even when pinned to the medbay berth.
Ratchet rounded on him with a snarl, scanner raised like he might lob it across the room. “Oh, a comedian, huh? Keep yappin’, I’ll give your welds something new to fuse with!”
Sideswipe snickered but went quiet, grin intact.
Ratchet spoke with the weary bite of a mech done with everyone’s slag. “I’m not doin’ this performance in front of that audience. Room 1, please.”
Ratchet jerked his helm toward a side corridor. A set of sealed doors slid open at his command, revealing a dim diagnostic room, walls lined with silent equipment. The lighting low, sterile white cutting harsh lines over polished steel.
Ratchet stalked inside, scanner in servo, muttering under his breath. Prowl followed, still gripping Jazz’s arm, unwilling to release him. Jazz trailed with exaggerated groan, visor catching the room’s glow as if he were about to step on stage. The door sealed shut behind them with a hiss, leaving the peanut gallery in muffled silence.
Ratchet gestured at the berth. “On. Now. Before I rewire that visor into a rearview mirror.”
Jazz flopped onto the berth with practised ease, plating clanking against metal. “Could watch mah own six an’ look good doin’ it,” he quipped, even as his nervous digits betrayed him, rattling off a jaunty staccato beat against the berth’s edge.
Ratchet ignored him, powering up the scanner with a quiet electronic ding. Pale light swept across Jazz’s plating, tracing seams, running down armor joints. “So what is it, then? Some shiny new mod you thought you’d sneak past me? Or did you let some gutter-mech weld scrap into your frame again?”
The scanner chirped. Ratchet frowned, swept again—slower. The light flickered across Jazz’s smirk, and then Ratchet’s steady medic servos faltered briefly. Jazz’s rhythm faltered too — a beat skipped, the offnote left hanging in the quiet. The tapping then steadied, slower now, stripped of flourish, a steady four-count that underlined the silence.
“Fraggin’ piece of junk—” He muttered, giving the scanner a sharp smack—only for the reading to flare brighter, more insistent.
The glow spilled across Jazz’s chassis, pulsing faint and rhythmic. Ratchet’s optics widened, intake working soundlessly as his entire frame went still.
For a klik, the medbay was utterly still.
“Primus’ rusting struts…” Ratchet vented out. “Tell me that isn’t—”
Prowl’s doorwings had ratcheted high without him noticing, edges trembling as the glow pulsed. Prowl’s gaze flicked sideways—caught that rare disbelief loosening the medic’s faceplate—then dropped to the readout. His HUD activity spiked all at once—tacnet latching onto the scan screen, parsing data in raw streams across his vision. Spark resonance amplitude. Harmonic frequency drift. Rhythmic fluctuation patterns.
Individually, anomalies. Together, impossible.
And for the first time in fifty thousand vorn, Ratchet’s scanners found the impossible.
The tacnet chimed a report-out, precise and clinical. Prowl’s spark lurched in its chamber, as if the universe itself had paused:
Subject: Conjunx Unit Jazz — classification error. New sparkfield confirmed.
-------------------------------------------------
The door slid shut behind them, and the Ark’s hum dropped away until the quiet pressed almost loud against Prowl’s audials. Night-cycle lighting pooled low across the berth, shadows soft where the medbay had been all hard, clinical edges. For three joors Ratchet’s voice had filled every klik, sharp as his scanners, the space glaring with sterile light and the unbroken drone of pumps and monitors. Now, in the hush of their habsuite, the quiet settled like a comfortable weight.
Jazz flopped onto the berth with a long, theatrical vent, plating clicking as he sprawled flat on his back, doorwings fanning out comfortably beneath him on tangled mesh sheets, visor tipped to the ceiling as he claimed the space outright.
He heaved an exaggerated huff, like the whole Ark was weighing on his chassis.
“Primus, Prowler. A bitty. Can ya believe it? …Though frag me if ah didn’t think Ratty was ‘bout tah pitch that scanner clear across the room.”
A laugh came quick and brittle, a practiced edge. “Guess that explains why ah been runnin’ all conservative out there, huh? Frame hidin’ somethin’ even ah didn’t know ‘bout.”
Ratchet’s words still echoed — carrier protocols — and Prowl’s wings twitched at the thought. Every variance he had logged fell into place around it. No malfunction. No error.
Just a single botched spark baffle—one anomaly in tens of thousands of systems, and yet here they were.
Prowl stood a sparkspin longer, doorwings held too high and pulled back from his frame, a posture more anxious than composed. He gave a small shake, forcing them looser, before crossing the short distance and settling neatly beside Jazz’s sprawled frame.
“It accounts for the variances,” he said, low but steady. “And it means you cannot remain in the field. Not while you are carrying.”
Jazz lolled his helm towards where Prowl sat. The grin was still plastered on, but his field hummed with a hazier buzz now, nerves threaded under bravado. “Figures. Yeah, can’t be sneakin ‘round ‘cons when ah’m broodin’ a bitty in the background.” His chuckle was quick, and stopped short.
Prowl didn’t answer with statistics or cautions. Threads of data pulled in from Spec Ops reports and various log datasets — a war map knitting itself together for a twenty-four-Earth lunar cycles corridor of safety — all running behind his optics while he sat still. He let his servo drift across the berth and found Jazz’s servo; their digits curling around each other the same way they had in the medbay—hard, sure. Jazz’s grin faltered and softened. He wiggled his digits lightly against Prowl’s before releasing, then pulled himself upright to lean into his shoulder with a hum that carried something like relief.
“Still can’t wrap mah processor ‘round it,” Jazz murmured, visor catching a light unit’s faint glow. His right servo rose and traced slow, meandering patterns along the bottom edge of Prowl’s furthest doorwing. The sensitive plating twitched under the touch. Projections still crawled in his mental periphery—routes, supplies, and surgical strikes. His systems wanted to plan; Jazz’s servo dragged him irrefutably back to now.
They stayed like that a long time—fields brushing in ways that tugged at the environment itself, polarity shifts inducing faint flickers in the lights. Digits mapped unspoken things into metal curvature. The hush around them wasn’t empty; it held possibility and a thousand deferred questions.
“We will have to tell Prime,” Prowl said at last, voice low. “But not yet. We have time.”
“Right.” Jazz’s answer was distant for a moment, thoughtful under the usual flippancy. He shifted, drawing his arm back from Prowl’s wing and slipping his servo between them, thumb tracing the back of Prowl’s servo in slow, grounding circles. “Guess our future looks a whole lot different than we thought, huh?”
Ghost-simulations flitted across his HUD—contingencies converging on the same horizon. Twenty-four lunar cycles. Not a figure this time, but a future: time to breathe, to build, to keep Jazz and their sparkling safe. The engine of it spun on, relentless beneath his calm.
Prowl’s optics dimmed as the datasets unfurled. His field answered, steady and grounding, a wordless agreement between two systems that had weathered worse.
Silence gathered, fragile and necessary.
Jazz released Prowl’s servo and tilted closer, tracing the arch of a doorwing with a reverence that had replaced fidgeting. The seams shivered beneath his motion, and Prowl turned into him—breaking the contact only to lean fully into Jazz instead. His own digits rose in answer, sliding across chest armor as if to memorize it anew—shoulder, arm, the interlocking plates of his sides, each stroke an unspoken vow.
Jazz stilled under his touch. The grin faltered, visor dimming like a sky at eclipse, and for a klik everything in the room seemed to tilt with the oncoming words.
“Our…” Jazz’s voice came out low, raw. A real, unadulterated smile graced his faceplates, his servo slid automatically to his own plating, palm pressing where the sparkfield pulsed brighter now, a faint harmonic hum that had been invisible until it wasn’t. “Primus, Prowler. Our bitty. …Ain’t never thought ah’d be on this side’a things.”
The smile lingered. “Kinda fraggin’ amazin’, huh? …an’ a lil’ scary as hell.”
Prowl’s doorwings lifted high and arced forward, framing Jazz in a gesture as close to shielding as instinct allowed. “Yes.” His vents stuttered, processor skidding on loops he couldn’t resolve. “Ours. In spite of everything.”
Jazz’s laugh came, but it was no cover this time — warm, broken, reverent. “Ain’t no op ever prepped me for this.” He pressed his helm against Prowl’s as their fields blended, until the now triplicate harmonics of their sparks resonated like a bass chord. “Don’t let me vanish in it, Prowler,” Jazz murmured, EM fluttering like a beacon. “Don’t let me stop bein’ me. Even if ah’m a carrier now…even if ah become somethin’ new.”
Prowl’s field sharpened, grounding. “You are not your function,” he said, steady. “Not soldier. Not carrier. You are Jazz. That is enough.”
Jazz barked a rough laugh. “Always so fraggin’ certain, huh? Wish ah felt half that sure.”
“You do not have to be certain,” Prowl said, his field brushing steady against Jazz’s. “Not tonight. This proof requires only one fixed point. You—” his voice faltered for the briefest instant, “—you are the constant that holds.”
The tacnet ramped up to error codes at the edges of his HUD — ALERT: INSUFFICIENT PARAMETERS. ERROR: UNDEFINED VARIABLES — red text bleeding like static, but it all receded as Jazz’s servo traced slow circles on his own, as if drawing new glyphs there.
Doorwings trembled, then held, suspended in the silence between cycles—caught between the warnings in his vision and the warm insistence at his side.
“Prowler.”
Jazz’s voice cut through like a clean line of code, steady and grounding. His visor tilted closer, as if catching the faint reflection of invisible error glyphs chasing themselves across blue optics.
“Prowler,” Jazz’s voice was low and rough, field rolling warm and insistent, pushing past every analytic wall. “Yer spinnin’ up in knots. Let it go—just for now. Ain’t no system or report can tell ya what’s right here—me an’ you, bringin’ somethin’ new into this slagged-up war. That’s love. That’s real.”
Prowl throttled the noise down, let it quiet in the back of his processor until only Jazz remained.
For a klik Prowl’s vents stuttered, spark pulsing loud in the hush. “It is always you,” he said quietly. “Every choice I loosen, every fragment of control I let go—always for you. Every spin of my spark, always for you.” In the safety of this space, with Jazz’s field pressed warm against his own, he let himself yield. Something in Prowl’s control unraveled.
He leaned in until their helms pressed, and what came out of him was raw and hushed and not parsed by any other system but himself.
“I love you.”
Jazz’s visor flickered like dark stars. “There he is,” he vented, voice wet with feeling. His servo slid along Prowl’s wing, tracing until his whole frame shuddered. “Ya don’t gotta think right now. Just feel me.”
They kissed then—slow, at first, reverent. Prowl’s touch was cataloging and cherishing; Jazz answered not with quietness but with an unraveling, servos palming into seams, cooling fans spinning on in dampened Spec Ops silence. The kiss deepened, sharpened; where Prowl tried to remain measured, need cracked through. Jazz let slip a low, delighted sound between presses of glossy plating; Prowl’s engine throttled up with a low, spirited rev that shook the berth.
Jazz laughed into it, his grin flashing through the closeness. “Primus, Prowler—yer runnin’ hot again.”
That smooth, growling cadence slipped past every defense, and Prowl’s doorwings shivered into a sharp, seductive flutter. In a Spec Ops dossier, it could be catalogued as loss of composure. Jazz had another designation for it, coined with infuriating precision: ‘Frag Me Flutters’.
That visual tell—raw and uncontained—was the last boundary.
Jazz surged, field flaring high, pressing every line of himself against Prowl down onto the berth. Precision dissolved into passion, calculation into chaos. The room changed shape around them: what had been night-cycle coolness thickened into heat as vents cycled harder, fans and servo motors harmonizing into a heady hum.
Plating skidded faintly against plating—rough, intimate, friction made audible. Sparks bloomed where they met, golden currents racing seams until Jazz gasped as one ran down a doorwing and Prowl shuddered when another danced across his chest. The berth felt smaller, the air heavier, wrapped tight around their heat.
Jazz broke the kiss long enough to rise fluidly to his pedes. Prowl sat up dazed in the charged air, venting raggedly; Jazz reached down, black servos landing firm above his hip joints. “C’mon, Prowler,” he growled, low and dangerous. “Ain’t lettin’ you carry all this weight tonight.”
The phrasing made no sense — Jazz was the one building new life — yet Prowl’s vents caught all the same under that steady hold. Jazz tugged him forward, plating rasping as he yielded to the pull and was guided to the berth’s edge.
“Draggin’ me to Medbay like that—stern command tone, doorwings high, won’t take no fer an answer—Primus, that was fraggin’ hot,” Jazz murmured, leaning close until their helms nearly met. “Ya don’t get t’haul me in like that without payin’ up. Ya owe me, babe. Big time.”
Prowl’s cooling fans ticked higher, a surge he could not hide. The rising whine and heat were enticing in their own right; Jazz laughed, pleased, and pressed closer into it.
“‘Sides,” Jazz added, voice dropping to a husky rumble, digits stroking lazy circles along Prowl’s hip plating, “Ratchet says in a few orn, my spike’s goin’ off-duty. So. Wanna get in some overtime?”
The line was half tease, half blistering truth. Prowl’s wings flared; the sound of a turbo’d engine revving filled the space—arousal and assent tangled in one noise. Jazz arched a salacious grin, and where he had been brittle earlier, now there was fire and resolution.
“Debt’s due,” he whispered, words close against Prowl’s plating. “An’ ah intend to collect.”
He leaned in, and the kiss that followed was not reverent but claiming—quick and hungry with a darting glossa, then slower again as they chased one another between restraint and abandon. Sparks flared, fields crashed together, and each push met an answering pull: Jazz came forward with brazen heat, Prowl with steady, anchoring strength. Yin and Yang whirled—a tide of two halves becoming one.
Their systems cycled in tandem. Thrills of charge climbed and fell along seams, a shiver that traveled from audial horn to bumper to pelvis, leaving little hot paths where digits had trailed. The berth filled with the skidding rasp of plating, the audible click of black and white servos finding purchase, the thick, almost oppressive warmth of mechanisms that had chosen each other. Cooling fans wound high and the room grew hotter, the night-cycle light blurry through the haze of their zeal.
His HUD stuttered one final line of code—ALERT: INSUFFICIENT PARAMETERS—then even that bled to black, leaving only the wild, unmeasured rhythm of Jazz against him. Jazz was no equation that could be solved, no sequence that repeated; he was a song written in a shifting cipher, fragments revealed and concealed in equal measure. Yet Prowl had that melody etched in his memory core down to every key and shift, carried in the quantum entanglement of their bonded sparks. And now, together they had composed something new, its rhythm only just starting to hum under the layers of safety Jazz’s armor provided, notes derived from them both. A song he would protect at any cost.
Finally, Jazz’s servo brushed across the smooth chamfered seams of Prowl’s searingly hot array plating, and the sound that broke from them both was raw, unguarded—a hushed moan shared between derma before either could stop it.
Prowl’s vents caught, engine thrumming ragged, but it was Jazz who betrayed himself most. His cooling fans roared, cycling high—so high the carefully tuned Spec Ops silencers couldn’t continue holding them down.
Prowl’s optics flickered at the noise, something primal answering in the rev of his own engine. His doorwings flared, fluttering with the honesty of it, and his spark surged bright beneath Jazz’s touch. He reached along their bond, without thought or hesitation, pressing to Jazz’s side of it how much he wanted. Wanted this, the sparkling, wanted Jazz. Anything that Jazz was willing to give him, he would gladly take.
Jazz grinned through the roar of his fans, wicked and wanting, visor dim with heat. “Ha,” he vented out, leaning in so close their field harmonics tangled together again. “My fans are blowin’ cover six ways to Kaon — and it’s all fer you, Prowler.”
He tapped a teasing syncopation of beats into Prowl’s modesty paneling.
An unspoken request.
Prowl’s array cover snapped back with a sharp snckk, and Jazz’s clever servo slid down—delicate, reverent—gliding across already slick mesh and dripping valve platelets. Prowl melted back into the berth with a strangled moan, sinking until he was half propped on a mound of mesh sheets.
Jazz curled over him, resplendent in black, white, and blue plating, strong lines gleaming, doorwings high and taut. His helm dipped low, visor catching the dim light as his derma found whatever plating lay within reach. He pressed searing kisses down Prowl’s bumper seam, mouthing hotly along the curve of his headlights, leaving condensation fogging across polished metal. Every graze of denta, every trail of glossa sent Prowl’s vents stuttering.
Meanwhile, Jazz’s servo traced through the folds with steady pressure, relentless and reverent at once, until it found the furiously blinking cherry node. Two digits circled it, teasing, coaxing—
Prowl’s optics pinched shut, helm tipping to the side as a ragged moan spilling out before he could cage it. Agony, bliss, both tangled as Jazz pressed lower, slipping into liquid heat.
“Can’t hide from me, sweetspark,” Jazz murmured against his plating, voice rumbling low between kisses. His derma brushed Prowl’s chest seam, glossa dragging hot and slow as he bit lightly at the edge of his bumper. “Ah got ya.”
The words struck harder than the touch, dragging a broken gasp from Prowl as he arched into Jazz’s hand, frame twisting to follow every motion. Jazz gave him no stillness—digits beginning to move in tantalizing rhythm, curling deep, while his glossa mapped slow, taunting patterns over bumper and headlights. Lubrication protocols surged into overdrive, valve mesh flooding slick around Jazz’s clever digits, every press sinking further into liquid heat until motion met motion—a molten glide—until Prowl’s intake poured with helpless sound, gasps, whines, fractured pleas venting ragged under the intensity.
Jazz didn’t let up, relentless in his chase to drive Prowl higher and higher. He mouthed higher, kissing across the sharp line of Prowl’s chevron, nipping until the tactician’s vents fluttered wild. His servo worked mercilessly, digits pushing deeper, pressing again and again against delicious clusters of nodes until Prowl’s hips rolled helplessly up to meet him.
“Primus, look at ya,” Jazz murmured, visor flaring bright as he mouthed along the seam of Prowl’s chest. His voice dropped to a low, reverent growl. “All that control—gone. Doorwings rattlin’, vents singin’—frag, Prowler, yer beautiful like this. Ain’t nothin’ sweeter than seein’ ya let go fer me.”
His digits pressed harder at the words, deliberate, coaxing another ragged cry. “Does somethin’ to me—watchin’ ya cut loose—watchin’ ya free. Drives me fraggin’ wild.”
Prowl’s calipers spasmed around his digits, iris mechanisms clenching tight in helpless reflex before cycling back, loosening again as if to draw him deeper. The fine metallic mesh fluttered against Jazz’s knuckles, every contraction betraying just how high his charge had risen. Jazz groaned low into the curve of Prowl’s bumper, savoring the way his valve gripped and yielded, gripped and yielded, a rhythm of trust that sang into his own systems.
“Yeah,” he rasped against heated plating, derma brushing the red chevron with every word, “jus’ like that. Frag, yer singin’ fer me, Prowler.”
Prowl’s servo snapped up, locking firm at the back of his helm, holding him there as his spark flared hard in answer.
Jazz plunged his digits deep before dragging slow and firm across trembling mesh, catching every sensitive node on the way out. Prowl jolted beneath him as voltage spiked sharp through his frame, but Jazz eased the pressure just before it could crest, dragging him back down into that hungry ache.
Jazz shifted, pulling closer and finally released his spike, hot and heavy against Prowl’s valve, and for a long moment they ground together—a delicious slick grind—holding on to each other like the only constants left in the war. Blue visor and optics locked, fields tangled, bond singing between them, every motion a wordless promise.
Jazz lingered there, rubbing in a steady, taunting rhythm, plating pressed flush to plating as he watched every twitch, every helpless sound spill from his conjunx, valve slick and spilling until it puddled at the berth’s edge—wanting no protocol could hide. When Jazz pressed closer, every slow drag across Prowl’s anterior node sent sharp jolts of charge racing through his frame. Prowl thrust up to meet him, hips angling sharp, dragging Jazz closer to that aching want, optics flickering as the pressure mounted, heat spiraling higher.
“Frag,” Prowl finally gasped, doorwings rattling against the berth. “Please.”
Jazz always played him like a prized instrument, never striking the first chord until he was perfectly in tune. Only when he had Prowl trembling on the edge, clutching at him with desperate digits, did Jazz shift lower and press forward—slow, relentless—until the head of his spike parted slick mesh—and slid home in one deep, claiming thrust.
The sudden fullness blew through him, overwhelming and exquisite, calipers spasming tight as if to weld him around every ridge. The intensity of it broke something loose in Prowl: a raw, unrestrained keen tore from his vocalizer—high, sharp, utterly beyond his control—spilling into the dim room like a signal flare of rapture. The sound drove Jazz wild; he groaned low and answered with a deeper grind, visor flaring as his optics beneath them flashed brightly, and he pressed harder into the clutch of that heat.
“Prowler,” Jazz groaned through an invent, voice rough and shuddering, helm tipping until his visor pressed close to blue optics. Hilted deep, his frame trembled with restraint as pistons whined against the pressure. Prowl gasped raggedly, clutching at his backstruts, optics flickering as heat seared through his systems. Every ridge dragged exquisitely across calipers, the stretch and rightness of it splaying his doorwings wide, trembling with how completely undone he was.
It built slow, heat rolling like a tide as Jazz ground in deep, hip actuators driving a rhythm that was steady and consuming. His spike dragged across every caliper, every node and trembling mesh, each stroke a delicious glide of friction and fire. Jazz drew it out on purpose, savoring every twitch, every sound that spilled from his conjunx, until restraint began to crack and lust bled into speed.
Prowl thought of nothing—his mind blissfully empty from everything but Jazz, and the impossible light now burning around his spark.
It escalated—Jazz driving faster, rhythm tightening, each thrust harder, sharper. Prowl was reduced to broken sounds, punched-out ha’s and Jazz’s designation dragged raw from his vocalizer.
“Jaaazz—”
He relished it—the feel of Jazz’s spec-ops frame working with high-wound precision, pistons firing, gears meshing smooth, complex joints all rearing and pushing forward to fill him with exquisite, unbearable pleasure. Jazz was beautiful—in frame, in spark, in everything.
Prowl angled his hip joints, pelvic block tilting up to meet every thrust head-on. Jazz found the sweet spot—ceiling node—and hammered it without mercy. Prowl’s optics flickered wildly, charge spiking, his whole system thrumming at the edge of overload. All he could do was hold on for dear life as Jazz’s vents spilled scorching heat over him. He arched up helplessly, wrung raw and trembling, vents howling as fans pushed past safe redlines.
The charge spiked too high for his frame to hold, something, anything had to give—and Prowl’s chestplate cracked open, and a glimmer of light cutting through into the dim, night-cycle lighting of their habsuite. Sparklight tore through the dimness in silver-gold arcs, a torrent of energy flaring like the birth of a sun. The glow wasn’t steady—it twisted and curled, threads of radiance dancing in spirals that licked across the walls and washed Jazz in their brilliance. His visor caught the storm, reflecting galaxies of light as he groaned low against Prowl, pulled into the gravity of it.
Prowl’s crystal chamber rotated fully open, aperture widening until his core blazed unshielded, the light streaming outward in hungry, seeking ribbons. All that he was—stripped of circuitry, bare and undeniable—reached for Jazz.
Reached for his other half.
Jazz’s blue visor tilted down, locking with Prowl’s own blue optics. A question as heavy as gravity flickered through the space between them. Prowl’s doorwings lifted slowly, trembling high in answer, his spark pulsing bright with affirmation.
Jazz answered with a shuddering vent, armor shifting, bumper folding back as his own spark chamber cracked wide. His crystal turned, flaring open—and his spark erupted into view. Where Prowl’s spiraled gold like gilded lightning, Jazz’s was coolly radiant, a cascade of cobalt-blue flares burning bright and wild. The two fields collided like nova against nova, brilliance tearing through them in a storm of blue and gold. Energy lashed the air, slamming into the walls, rattling every seam of their frames. Jazz folded into Prowl, Prowl into Jazz, fields tangled, minds braided in a blaze of shared heat.
Between them, caught in the violent resonance, another light revolved into view as Jazz’s spark pulsed faster—nascent, defiant. A tiny orb of brilliance in orbit around Jazz’s spark, its glow fierce despite its size, a newborn star daring to hold its own against the collision of giants.
For a moment, they forgot how to vent, sparks stuttering in disbelief as the tiny star wheeled into orbit. It was impossibly small, unbearably bright—fierce. Theirs.
The newborn light pulsed between them, and their own sparks answered, resonance spilling through every line. Awe bled into urgency, the rhythm of their joined frames taking hold again.Jazz clung to him, vents roaring, hips still driving with piston-force, every thrust ringing through Prowl’s thighs with the force of a struck bell. Pleasure ricocheted back and forth between them through both the merge, the bond, and their physical frames. All amplified, magnified, a feedback loop with no end.
"Prowler—" Jazz choked, voice breaking into a moan as his vents roared, every line, every angle of him strung taut with the force of it. Prowl’s spark whipped and swirled in steady cadence, certain as battle, but this was no calculation. Within the hurricane of spark-merge he let the last barrier fall, forge seal opening at his will—deliberate, intimate, an offering of devotion to Jazz alone.
Heat coiled tight in the space between them, tension snapping as Jazz surged in, the head of his spike slotting into place just inside the entrance to his forge, and the shock of connection was blinding—white-hot, electric, overwhelming. Their frames blurred, plating melding, systems bleeding together until there was nothing but light and heat and the unbearable rightness of union.
Overload hit like a convoy collision. Jazz’s cry fractured into static, raw and unguarded—and Prowl’s own voice broke loose in answer, sharp and helpless, torn from deep within as the universe went incandescent. Energy cascaded through them, down and in and out again, a detonation that left every circuit ringing with tingling aftershocks. When their sparks finally unraveled and drew home to closing spark chambers, Prowl felt it—transfluid pumping into his tank in steady surges, warmth radiating outward through every line.
Jazz folded over onto him with a metallic clang, vents heaving, plating streaked black on white, white on black. Heat steamed off every seam. Prowl’s servos found his helm, steadying, pulling him close until condensation fogged between them. He pressed a soft kiss to Jazz’s forehelm, chevron and audial horn tinging off with a quiet, grounding dink.
Unseen by either, set into the walls of Prowl’s crystal chamber, was a twin to what they had glimpsed joors before in Jazz’s: a baffle gone dark, shorted and silent.
Unseen, another tiny, impossible kindled ball of light began revolving into slow orbit around the Praxian’s own.