[G1] Digital Daggers
Oct. 13th, 2020 07:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dracoqueen22Title: Digital Daggers
Universe: G1
Characters: Prowl, Jazz/Soundwave, Ensemble
Rating: M
Enticements: Established Relationship, Secret Relationship, PNP, Betrayal
Description: Jazz does not ask; Soundwave does not tell, and it’s a secret they both keep from their respective factions. Or so they think.
For JazzWaveWeek, Day Three, Corrupt
Jazz never uses the same entrance or exit twice in a row. He can’t bear to be predictable, and it’s harder for people to track him if they can’t anticipate where he’s going to be.
Trust Prowl to be the only mech in the history of the universe to buck that trend. Jazz doesn’t know how he does it. What massive calculations run through that impressive brain of his, or what numbers he plugs into his theoretical programs to anticipate where Jazz is going to be at any time, but it’s annoying.
So when Jazz arrives at one of the many side exits, an emergency exit really, that involves an annoying climb through a narrow vertical tunnel, he wishes he could be surprised to find Prowl waiting for him.
Damn it. Every fragging time.
“I am not going to stop you,” Prowl says with that same damnable sense of foresight. “I know how much you need your… space.”
It’s the way he says space that is disapproving and chastising all at once. Jazz tries not to get his hackles up. Prowl means well.
Sort of.
“Good,” Jazz says, squaring his shoulders. Red Alert’s paranoid declaration that no one should leave the Ark for the next two weeks is ridiculous. “The Decepticons ain’t gonna lay quiet just cause Red’s got us on lockdown. We need intel, and I’m--”
Prowl holds up a hand. “As I said, I’m not here to stop you.” He gives Jazz a long look, searching his face. “You do best for us when you are left to your own devices. I won’t even ask where you’re going. I’m simply going to assume you at least gave Mirage a vague itinerary in the event you don’t return by an established time.”
“Do you take me for an amateur?” Jazz scoffs. “If you’re not here to stop me, then what gives?”
Prowl steps closer, holding out a datapad. “I just need you to sign this for me before you go.”
Jazz scowls. “Really? Paperwork?” He takes the datapad and powers it on, skimming through it to see what’s so important it couldn’t wait until he got back.
A threat assessment? Prowl tracked him down for a threat assessment? He must have nothing better to do. Maybe Red’s decision to go into a lockdown is getting to him, too.
Jazz plugs in, waits for the system to finish scanning and acknowledging him, and stamps his glyph on the dotted line. It’s a bit ridiculous. They’ve never worried too much about Jazz missing his deadlines on the threat assessments, but every once in a while, Prowl gets a bolt in his gears and suddenly wants everything to be tidy and proper.
Guess this is one of those times. Prowl will have nothing to do but stare at his piles of half-completed paperwork for the next two weeks. That’s the surest way to drive him mad.
“Here,” Jazz says, handing it back. “Any other paperwork or can it wait until I get back?”
Prowl gives him a long, searching look. It makes Jazz squirm for reasons he can’t put a finger on. “It can wait,” he says after an amount of time has passed from casual into awkward. He tucks the datapad away. “Please be careful, Jazz. You mean a lot to many mechs here, and to lose you would be a blow from which I do not think we can recover.”
Jazz frowns. Prowl only gets exceedingly formal when he’s trying to avoid saying something. Or when he’s trying to say something without actually saying it. He’s particular about his words, Prowl is, and given that his vocabulary puts most dictionaries to shame, no wonder.
Maybe Prowl is just in one of his moods? Jazz doesn’t know, but he can’t shake an uneasy squirm in his tanks.
He hides it behind a cocky smile. “Don’t worry, Prowl. I’m invincible.” He sketches a playful salute and runs away before Prowl can bother him with any more awkward conversation, or plant any more uncertainty on his shoulders.
He’s got a date, and he doesn’t intend to miss it.
~
It is impossible to sneak up on Soundwave.
Jazz has been trying for years, and if he is not caught by one of the cassettes, then his own field and emotions give him away. Despite Soundwave’s training and his own practice, Soundwave has centuries of experience on him, and Jazz cannot shield himself enough to hide from Soundwave’s empathy.
It is a good thing they are enemies in name only.
Soundwave waits for him in the old mine, a half-day’s drive south of Mount Saint Hilary. It’s been abandoned for a decade, stripped bare of anything the humans might find useful, and deemed too expensive to restore for any further use. It’s just large enough to house a couple Cybertronians in its depths, and the worthless mineral deposits make for ample shielding of Cybertronian tracking.
It’s the perfect place for a rendezvous. Jazz could have kissed Frenzy for finding it, if Frenzy wouldn’t have immediately socked him in the mouth.
“Waiting long?” Jazz asks as he arrives, stretching to ease the strain of having been cooped up in his alt-mode for a day.
“Negative,” Soundwave says, and opens his arms, wanting his cuddles first as always, and well, Jazz wants them too so he’s not going to fight about it.
He hops up on the berth, straddles the much larger Decepticon, and leans in for a kiss. He is briefly stymied by the battlemask, and gives it a playful tap with his nose so Soundwave remembers to disengage it.
Takes a minute, sometimes, for Soundwave to remember that they aren’t actually enemies here in this place. There’s a special coding string they both run that makes it easier to fight on opposite sides of this never-sending stalemate of a war, but they’re supposed to put that on pause when it’s just the two of them in their secret mine.
Sometimes, one or the other of them forgets.
“There you are,” Jazz murmurs as the mask disengages with a quiet click, and he’s free to kiss Soundwave, like he hasn’t been able to do for the past three months.
Megatron’s been on a particularly crazy rampage, and it’s been all the Autobots can do to keep his wild plots in check. Optimus has them running ragged trying to appease the humans, rather than seriously thinking about effective means to end the war. There’s a reason this is less a war, and more a stalemate of two factions hurting each other because they can’t figure out something better to do.
It’s not Megatron’s fault alone.
“Missed you,” Jazz says as he strings kisses along the curve of Soundwave’s mouth. Large hands cup his hips, sweeping up along his back and sides, clever fingers tracing transformation seams and teasing at large enough gaps that bare his cables.
Hmm. Someone missed Jazz, too.
“Mm,” Soundwave agrees. “This disagreeable.”
“You’re telling me.” Jazz snuggles in closer, thighs bracketing Soundwave’s waist, his own fingers finding the hinges buried along Soundwave’s dorsal armor. “The Autobots think Megatron is crazy, but they’re throwing stones in glass houses. No one looks at what we’re doing and thinks, well, aren’t we crazy, too?”
Soundwave pinches a wire in his hip, and Jazz jerks. “No politics,” he reminds, and liquid warmth seeps through Jazz in the wake of the brief pain. Soundwave knows him too well.
“You started it,” Jazz grumbles. He drums his fingers on Soundwave’s panel. “Open up for me, yeah? I gotta get this charge for you out of the way.”
“Romantic,” Soundwave grumbles, the chastisement falling flat in the face of his field, hot and hungry as it sweeps over Jazz’s, and the quickness in which he pops his panel, baring the sparking insets of his ports.
Jazz mouths the end of Soundwave’s chin. “I’m the epitome of romance,” he purrs, sliding free his cable, teasing the connector over Soundwave’s ports before letting himself click home.
He shivers, the sensation of their tertiary systems synching up like sliding into an oil bath at the perfect temperature, like coming home. He waits, hovering, for Soundwave’s permissions to let him slide deeper.
Soundwave, however, is a tease. He grabs Jazz’s chin, tilts it up, to mouthe along Jazz’s intake cables, his denta scraping a careful pattern. His digital presence flirts with Jazz’s digital query, offering peeks at the pleasure behind his firewall. His secondary systems hum, restrained.
“Three months, sweetspark,” Jazz gasps into the cool quiet of the mine, his fans spinning fast and loud. “We can play a game all you want later.”
A rolling chuckle vibrates in Soundwave’s chassis, but he relents, and his firewall dissolves, Jazz surging forward to spill his charge through the connection. Soundwave visibly shivers beneath him, sparks of blue static crawling over his armor, tangling with Jazz’s own. He fumbles at Jazz’s dorsal armor, asking without words, and Jazz kisses him as he lets his own panel flick open.
It takes the space of two sparkbeats before Soundwave clicks into him, the circuit complete, ecstasy blooming inside Jazz in an electric surge. He moans, rising up on his knees, forehead pressed to Soundwave’s as he grasps Soundwave’s shoulders. He offlines his visor, soaks in the rise and fall and press of Soundwave’s field, as the pleasure rebounds, pinging back and forth, increasing exponentially with each pass around the cables.
Soundwave holds him firmly, holds him close, the press of his fingers an anchor to keep Jazz focused. He initiated the link; he’s responsible for keeping it under control, as hard as it is to manage with his desperate need to be deeper, closer, united.
They are safe, but not safe enough for the merge his spark craves. So he must settle for this, shared ventilations and shared pleasure, Soundwave’s field wrapped around him, and their systems linked at the most intimate level. It sends a riot of charge through his lines. Jazz shivers, but he holds himself in check.
He will see Soundwave shatter before he lets himself fall. And shatter Soundwave does, engine rumbling strong enough to vibrate their frames, charge spilling from his substructure, visor flaring bright, and his field rich and thick with ecstasy. He writhes beneath Jazz, caught up in the pleasured dance, and it tips Jazz over as well.
His vision goes white. His vents stall before spinning up faster, and his spark swells, too large for his chassis, but contained by his chamber nonetheless. His fingers dig into Soundwave’s shoulders, into his seams, and the crackling-fire through his lines sweeps him along.
Jazz pants, slumping against Soundwave, into his embrace, as his whole frame fairly hums with the lingering flashes of the connection. Their cables sway between them, but Jazz can’t bring himself to suggest a disconnect. There’s a special intimacy in being cabled up afterward, and the shallow pulses of wordless communication between them.
“Jazz missed,” Soundwave murmurs, stroking down Jazz’s back, his field and their link echoing the sentiment.
Jazz hums.”You’re right,” he says, resting his head on Soundwave’s chassis, tucked under his chin, listening to the rapid oscillations of Soundwave’s spark. “This is starting to be disagreeable. Unacceptable, too. We’ve got to fix it.”
“How?” Soundwave asks.
Jazz goes silent. They are two of the brightest minds in the Autobots and Decepticons, but they have yet to devise a means to end the war that’ll lead to the least amount of bloodshed. Or an unagreeable concession on either side.
Megatron will not bend; Optimus will not bow.
The stalemate persists.
“We’ll figure it out,” Jazz says, at length. “We have to.”
Soundwave makes a noncommittal noise and strokes his back. The silence between them grows comfortably, though Jazz can’t resist playing a little music to set the atmosphere. It’s an instrumental piece, with a collection of pan flutes and piano and harps.
Jazz sets the politics aside. It’s been three months, after all, and he rarely gets time with Soundwave as it is.
They can discuss and debate and brainstorm later.
~
Jazz plans to be gone for the entirety of Red’s stupid lockdown, but he knows better than to spend the whole time with Soundwave.
He parts from his lover reluctantly, extracting a promise to meet again when the war permits, and vowing once more to devise a means to be together without it feeling like a massive betrayal to their own respective loyalties.
It’s not a betrayal, Jazz reasons, because he never tells Soundwave anything that would put the Autobots at risk, and vice versa. Jazz does not ask; Soundwave does not tell. The war does not exist inside their mine.
He’d told Prowl he was leaving the Ark to investigate, so Jazz does. He pokes around a few locations with rumors of Decepticon activity. He plugs into the human’s internet here and there, checking for insidious Decepticon hacking. He spies Swindle making a questionable exchange -- it looks like he’s dealing on the side with some smugglers, so Jazz notes it but doesn’t interrupt.
He doesn’t return to the Ark with any actionable intelligence, but at least he hadn’t left under a complete lie. By the time he gets back, Red will have loosened from his unreasonable paranoia, and the stalemate of a war will return to business as usual.
The Ark is weirdly quiet when he arrives though. He strides in through a different tunnel, this one larger, an emergency exit for the medical staff in the case of Decepticon incursion. It’s mid-day, which means a lot of Autobots should be crowding the halls, restless because of the lockdown, but there’s no one.
It sets Jazz on edge.
He pings Prowl.
“Please come to the bridge,” Prowl says, before Jazz can so much as get the question out. “There’s been a new development in the war effort. You’ve arrived just in time.”
That sounds faintly ominous.
Jazz frowns, but obeys, setting off into a jog toward the bridge. At least that explains where everyone is, because when he arrives, it seems like every Autobot has been crammed into the space, even the Dinobots. Optimus stands front and center up on the command dais, flanked by Ironhide and Prowl, but there’s a clear line through the crowd for Jazz to join them.
There’s also an image on the vid-screen, and for a moment, Jazz’s spark stutters in his chassis. Megatron, of course, is most prominent, but Starscream and Soundwave are visible to his left and right, a few other recognizable Decepticons lurking in the background. And they look… disheveled. If it was possible for Cybertronians to look disheveled.
Their armor has lost its luster, most of them faded to protoform gray as if their nanites have died off, unable to regenerate. Rust creeps across along visible weld lines, like old injuries have reasserted themselves. Their optics are pale and wan, their biolights visibly dim.
“This is low, Prime, even for you,” Megatron is saying as Jazz creeps closer, trying not to let his gaze linger on Soundwave but drawn to his lover nonetheless. He looks odd, and it takes too long for Jazz to realize why.
Soundwave is sitting. In fact, all of the Decepticons are seated, as if they can’t manage to stand on legs that look as if rust creeps around their knees.
“You would not have spoken with me otherwise,” says Optimus, his voice steady and confident, but leaks of his field suggesting his shame. “This has gone on long enough, don’t you think?”
Megatron growls, banging a fist on the arm of his chair. “You think a genuine peace can be created out of force?”
“The hypocrisy burns, doesn’t it?” Prowl asks, carved from ice, much steadier than Optimus. “You thought you would find freedom through violence. Strange how it is unacceptable when it comes from someone else.”
“This is not violence!” Starscream snaps. “This is a sneaky, underhanded, unconscionable--” He breaks off into a raspy cough, which he covers with his mouth.
Jazz realizes Soundwave is staring at him. Has been staring at him since Jazz arrived and made his way to the front, just to Prowl’s right. Soundwave has looked at no one else, he has not spoken, and there is an intensity to his gaze.
“And how,” Megatron grits out, through clenched denta, and a ferocious burn in his crimson optics, “would you have us debase ourselves for the cure?”
Cure?
Jazz’s optics widen behind his visor. He takes a surprised step back, only to collide with two large frames, Grimlock on his right, Inferno on his left, each setting a hand on his shoulder, each grabbing his arms and wrenching them behind his back. One of them clicks a set of stasis cuffs into place before the realization fully burns through him.
“I am asking for a truce,” Optimus starts to say, but his voice washes in and out of Jazz’s audials, a low buzz of betrayal tuning him out.
He looks up at Prowl, and Prowl is looking back at him with something like apology in his optics before he cycles them, and it’s gone. He turns away from Optimus and the negotiations, steps down from the command dais, Red Alert stepping up to replace him. He approaches Jazz, cuffed and guarded, the subtle press of a blaster at the base of his spinal strut a further deterrent, not that Jazz’s thoughts are coherent enough to think of escape.
“It had to be done,” Prowl murmurs. “This war has gone on too long. We are too few, and growing fewer. The humans suffer for our misdeeds, and if we don’t do something drastic now, there will eventually be none of us to fight.”
Jazz sucks in a vent, feels like he’s choking on it. “You used me,” he says, because he remembers the datapad, the threat assessment that they don’t usually worry about him signing, the odd look of apology in Prowl’s optics.
How did you know? He wants to scream. How could you? He wants to shout.
“It won’t kill them, but it will eventually put them in stasis,” Prowl says, as if Jazz hadn’t spoken. “It will be easy to subdue them then. This is merely an attempt to give them some dignity, to set the truce on their terms before we have to resort to mass imprisonment.”
It’s hard to ventilate. Jazz’s thoughts spin and spin, and the weight of Soundwave’s stare is like a brand on him, though his energy is currently spent on glaring at Prowl.
Prowl folds his hands behind his back. “Once the truce is set in motion, and sworn upon the Matrix, there will be a trial.” He looks at Jazz, and it’s impossible to tell if there’s disappointment, or chastisement, or disgust in the gaze. Maybe it’s all three. “I don’t know how or if Megatron intends to punish Soundwave. That’s his discretion. Yours is ours.”
“I…” Jazz doesn’t have any words. They’re locked in his intake, behind a barrage of rage and disappointment and guilt.
He doesn’t know what’s worse. He doesn’t know where to start in his outrage. He wants to argue: we care for each other, we never betrayed our factions, we only wanted something for ourselves that had nothing to do with the war.
“For now, we will treat the symptoms, but we won’t cure you,” Optimus says, words floating in one audial and out the other while the Decepticons silently rage and hate. “The cure will come with peace.”
“Peace,” Megatron echoes, snarls, and his optics are burning embers of disgust. “You’d best hope you keep that spy of yours somewhere safe, Optimus, because there is no treaty that can stop me from ripping out his spark.”
Jazz goes cold. Not for himself, but for Soundwave, whom Megatron cannot possibly ever forgive, whose idea of punishment is a blaster to the spark.
Prowl looks up at Grimlock. “Put Jazz in his cell, please. You know the one.”
“Got it,” Grimlock rumbles.
He and Inferno drag Jazz away, back through the crowd of Autobots whose expressions are a mixed bag of surprise and hurt and disbelief. Jazz doesn’t fight. There’s no escape here that won’t hurt someone he once cared about.
He can still see Soundwave, sitting silent in Megatron’s shadow, rust creeping around his old welds, his stare focused on Jazz and Jazz alone.
He wants to apologize. He wants to explain that this isn’t his fault, that he didn’t know what the Autobots were planning, that he’s sorry for whatever mistake he made to get them caught.
But Soundwave won’t hear him, and it doesn’t matter anyway.
“I hope it was worth it,” Inferno says as the doors to the bridge hiss shut behind them, his grip on Jazz’s shoulder as firm as a clamp made of duryllium. He looks down at Jazz, does a double-take, and then smirks.
Inferno pokes Jazz right in his mid-section. “Guess it took a little longer for you.”
Jazz looks down. There’s an old wound, an old weld here, long repaired by his nanites, but now there’s a hint of rust around the edges. He’d noticed a lingering fatigue in the past few days, but chalked it up to a bad batch of energon. That happens from time to time. The solar collectors go on the fritz or someone forgets to change a filter.
It probably hit the Decepticons faster because they are typically under-fueled. Prowl, of course, would have known this. Would have planned for it.
Had, in fact, planned for it from the moment he had Jazz sign the datapad. From the moment Red Alert made his “irrational” decision to put the entirety of the Autobots on lockdown, knowing Jazz wouldn’t allow himself to stay in one place, somehow knowing Jazz would go straight to Soundwave, and Soundwave would come straight to him.
“Guess so,” Jazz says.
Inferno snorts. Grimlock keeps his silence. They have nothing more to say as they take him to the brig, to a cell Jazz has never seen before, that he can only assume has been crafted with his unique talents in mind. They put him inside. They do not remove the stasis cuffs.
Jazz sits on the flat slab of metal they call a berth. His comms crackle static at him, though he doubts he has anyone to call.
His abdomen starts to itch.
Trust is a double-edged sword, the humans say, because the betrayal cuts both ways.
Damn them all to the Pit.
***
Universe: G1
Characters: Prowl, Jazz/Soundwave, Ensemble
Rating: M
Enticements: Established Relationship, Secret Relationship, PNP, Betrayal
Description: Jazz does not ask; Soundwave does not tell, and it’s a secret they both keep from their respective factions. Or so they think.
For JazzWaveWeek, Day Three, Corrupt
Jazz never uses the same entrance or exit twice in a row. He can’t bear to be predictable, and it’s harder for people to track him if they can’t anticipate where he’s going to be.
Trust Prowl to be the only mech in the history of the universe to buck that trend. Jazz doesn’t know how he does it. What massive calculations run through that impressive brain of his, or what numbers he plugs into his theoretical programs to anticipate where Jazz is going to be at any time, but it’s annoying.
So when Jazz arrives at one of the many side exits, an emergency exit really, that involves an annoying climb through a narrow vertical tunnel, he wishes he could be surprised to find Prowl waiting for him.
Damn it. Every fragging time.
“I am not going to stop you,” Prowl says with that same damnable sense of foresight. “I know how much you need your… space.”
It’s the way he says space that is disapproving and chastising all at once. Jazz tries not to get his hackles up. Prowl means well.
Sort of.
“Good,” Jazz says, squaring his shoulders. Red Alert’s paranoid declaration that no one should leave the Ark for the next two weeks is ridiculous. “The Decepticons ain’t gonna lay quiet just cause Red’s got us on lockdown. We need intel, and I’m--”
Prowl holds up a hand. “As I said, I’m not here to stop you.” He gives Jazz a long look, searching his face. “You do best for us when you are left to your own devices. I won’t even ask where you’re going. I’m simply going to assume you at least gave Mirage a vague itinerary in the event you don’t return by an established time.”
“Do you take me for an amateur?” Jazz scoffs. “If you’re not here to stop me, then what gives?”
Prowl steps closer, holding out a datapad. “I just need you to sign this for me before you go.”
Jazz scowls. “Really? Paperwork?” He takes the datapad and powers it on, skimming through it to see what’s so important it couldn’t wait until he got back.
A threat assessment? Prowl tracked him down for a threat assessment? He must have nothing better to do. Maybe Red’s decision to go into a lockdown is getting to him, too.
Jazz plugs in, waits for the system to finish scanning and acknowledging him, and stamps his glyph on the dotted line. It’s a bit ridiculous. They’ve never worried too much about Jazz missing his deadlines on the threat assessments, but every once in a while, Prowl gets a bolt in his gears and suddenly wants everything to be tidy and proper.
Guess this is one of those times. Prowl will have nothing to do but stare at his piles of half-completed paperwork for the next two weeks. That’s the surest way to drive him mad.
“Here,” Jazz says, handing it back. “Any other paperwork or can it wait until I get back?”
Prowl gives him a long, searching look. It makes Jazz squirm for reasons he can’t put a finger on. “It can wait,” he says after an amount of time has passed from casual into awkward. He tucks the datapad away. “Please be careful, Jazz. You mean a lot to many mechs here, and to lose you would be a blow from which I do not think we can recover.”
Jazz frowns. Prowl only gets exceedingly formal when he’s trying to avoid saying something. Or when he’s trying to say something without actually saying it. He’s particular about his words, Prowl is, and given that his vocabulary puts most dictionaries to shame, no wonder.
Maybe Prowl is just in one of his moods? Jazz doesn’t know, but he can’t shake an uneasy squirm in his tanks.
He hides it behind a cocky smile. “Don’t worry, Prowl. I’m invincible.” He sketches a playful salute and runs away before Prowl can bother him with any more awkward conversation, or plant any more uncertainty on his shoulders.
He’s got a date, and he doesn’t intend to miss it.
It is impossible to sneak up on Soundwave.
Jazz has been trying for years, and if he is not caught by one of the cassettes, then his own field and emotions give him away. Despite Soundwave’s training and his own practice, Soundwave has centuries of experience on him, and Jazz cannot shield himself enough to hide from Soundwave’s empathy.
It is a good thing they are enemies in name only.
Soundwave waits for him in the old mine, a half-day’s drive south of Mount Saint Hilary. It’s been abandoned for a decade, stripped bare of anything the humans might find useful, and deemed too expensive to restore for any further use. It’s just large enough to house a couple Cybertronians in its depths, and the worthless mineral deposits make for ample shielding of Cybertronian tracking.
It’s the perfect place for a rendezvous. Jazz could have kissed Frenzy for finding it, if Frenzy wouldn’t have immediately socked him in the mouth.
“Waiting long?” Jazz asks as he arrives, stretching to ease the strain of having been cooped up in his alt-mode for a day.
“Negative,” Soundwave says, and opens his arms, wanting his cuddles first as always, and well, Jazz wants them too so he’s not going to fight about it.
He hops up on the berth, straddles the much larger Decepticon, and leans in for a kiss. He is briefly stymied by the battlemask, and gives it a playful tap with his nose so Soundwave remembers to disengage it.
Takes a minute, sometimes, for Soundwave to remember that they aren’t actually enemies here in this place. There’s a special coding string they both run that makes it easier to fight on opposite sides of this never-sending stalemate of a war, but they’re supposed to put that on pause when it’s just the two of them in their secret mine.
Sometimes, one or the other of them forgets.
“There you are,” Jazz murmurs as the mask disengages with a quiet click, and he’s free to kiss Soundwave, like he hasn’t been able to do for the past three months.
Megatron’s been on a particularly crazy rampage, and it’s been all the Autobots can do to keep his wild plots in check. Optimus has them running ragged trying to appease the humans, rather than seriously thinking about effective means to end the war. There’s a reason this is less a war, and more a stalemate of two factions hurting each other because they can’t figure out something better to do.
It’s not Megatron’s fault alone.
“Missed you,” Jazz says as he strings kisses along the curve of Soundwave’s mouth. Large hands cup his hips, sweeping up along his back and sides, clever fingers tracing transformation seams and teasing at large enough gaps that bare his cables.
Hmm. Someone missed Jazz, too.
“Mm,” Soundwave agrees. “This disagreeable.”
“You’re telling me.” Jazz snuggles in closer, thighs bracketing Soundwave’s waist, his own fingers finding the hinges buried along Soundwave’s dorsal armor. “The Autobots think Megatron is crazy, but they’re throwing stones in glass houses. No one looks at what we’re doing and thinks, well, aren’t we crazy, too?”
Soundwave pinches a wire in his hip, and Jazz jerks. “No politics,” he reminds, and liquid warmth seeps through Jazz in the wake of the brief pain. Soundwave knows him too well.
“You started it,” Jazz grumbles. He drums his fingers on Soundwave’s panel. “Open up for me, yeah? I gotta get this charge for you out of the way.”
“Romantic,” Soundwave grumbles, the chastisement falling flat in the face of his field, hot and hungry as it sweeps over Jazz’s, and the quickness in which he pops his panel, baring the sparking insets of his ports.
Jazz mouths the end of Soundwave’s chin. “I’m the epitome of romance,” he purrs, sliding free his cable, teasing the connector over Soundwave’s ports before letting himself click home.
He shivers, the sensation of their tertiary systems synching up like sliding into an oil bath at the perfect temperature, like coming home. He waits, hovering, for Soundwave’s permissions to let him slide deeper.
Soundwave, however, is a tease. He grabs Jazz’s chin, tilts it up, to mouthe along Jazz’s intake cables, his denta scraping a careful pattern. His digital presence flirts with Jazz’s digital query, offering peeks at the pleasure behind his firewall. His secondary systems hum, restrained.
“Three months, sweetspark,” Jazz gasps into the cool quiet of the mine, his fans spinning fast and loud. “We can play a game all you want later.”
A rolling chuckle vibrates in Soundwave’s chassis, but he relents, and his firewall dissolves, Jazz surging forward to spill his charge through the connection. Soundwave visibly shivers beneath him, sparks of blue static crawling over his armor, tangling with Jazz’s own. He fumbles at Jazz’s dorsal armor, asking without words, and Jazz kisses him as he lets his own panel flick open.
It takes the space of two sparkbeats before Soundwave clicks into him, the circuit complete, ecstasy blooming inside Jazz in an electric surge. He moans, rising up on his knees, forehead pressed to Soundwave’s as he grasps Soundwave’s shoulders. He offlines his visor, soaks in the rise and fall and press of Soundwave’s field, as the pleasure rebounds, pinging back and forth, increasing exponentially with each pass around the cables.
Soundwave holds him firmly, holds him close, the press of his fingers an anchor to keep Jazz focused. He initiated the link; he’s responsible for keeping it under control, as hard as it is to manage with his desperate need to be deeper, closer, united.
They are safe, but not safe enough for the merge his spark craves. So he must settle for this, shared ventilations and shared pleasure, Soundwave’s field wrapped around him, and their systems linked at the most intimate level. It sends a riot of charge through his lines. Jazz shivers, but he holds himself in check.
He will see Soundwave shatter before he lets himself fall. And shatter Soundwave does, engine rumbling strong enough to vibrate their frames, charge spilling from his substructure, visor flaring bright, and his field rich and thick with ecstasy. He writhes beneath Jazz, caught up in the pleasured dance, and it tips Jazz over as well.
His vision goes white. His vents stall before spinning up faster, and his spark swells, too large for his chassis, but contained by his chamber nonetheless. His fingers dig into Soundwave’s shoulders, into his seams, and the crackling-fire through his lines sweeps him along.
Jazz pants, slumping against Soundwave, into his embrace, as his whole frame fairly hums with the lingering flashes of the connection. Their cables sway between them, but Jazz can’t bring himself to suggest a disconnect. There’s a special intimacy in being cabled up afterward, and the shallow pulses of wordless communication between them.
“Jazz missed,” Soundwave murmurs, stroking down Jazz’s back, his field and their link echoing the sentiment.
Jazz hums.”You’re right,” he says, resting his head on Soundwave’s chassis, tucked under his chin, listening to the rapid oscillations of Soundwave’s spark. “This is starting to be disagreeable. Unacceptable, too. We’ve got to fix it.”
“How?” Soundwave asks.
Jazz goes silent. They are two of the brightest minds in the Autobots and Decepticons, but they have yet to devise a means to end the war that’ll lead to the least amount of bloodshed. Or an unagreeable concession on either side.
Megatron will not bend; Optimus will not bow.
The stalemate persists.
“We’ll figure it out,” Jazz says, at length. “We have to.”
Soundwave makes a noncommittal noise and strokes his back. The silence between them grows comfortably, though Jazz can’t resist playing a little music to set the atmosphere. It’s an instrumental piece, with a collection of pan flutes and piano and harps.
Jazz sets the politics aside. It’s been three months, after all, and he rarely gets time with Soundwave as it is.
They can discuss and debate and brainstorm later.
Jazz plans to be gone for the entirety of Red’s stupid lockdown, but he knows better than to spend the whole time with Soundwave.
He parts from his lover reluctantly, extracting a promise to meet again when the war permits, and vowing once more to devise a means to be together without it feeling like a massive betrayal to their own respective loyalties.
It’s not a betrayal, Jazz reasons, because he never tells Soundwave anything that would put the Autobots at risk, and vice versa. Jazz does not ask; Soundwave does not tell. The war does not exist inside their mine.
He’d told Prowl he was leaving the Ark to investigate, so Jazz does. He pokes around a few locations with rumors of Decepticon activity. He plugs into the human’s internet here and there, checking for insidious Decepticon hacking. He spies Swindle making a questionable exchange -- it looks like he’s dealing on the side with some smugglers, so Jazz notes it but doesn’t interrupt.
He doesn’t return to the Ark with any actionable intelligence, but at least he hadn’t left under a complete lie. By the time he gets back, Red will have loosened from his unreasonable paranoia, and the stalemate of a war will return to business as usual.
The Ark is weirdly quiet when he arrives though. He strides in through a different tunnel, this one larger, an emergency exit for the medical staff in the case of Decepticon incursion. It’s mid-day, which means a lot of Autobots should be crowding the halls, restless because of the lockdown, but there’s no one.
It sets Jazz on edge.
He pings Prowl.
“Please come to the bridge,” Prowl says, before Jazz can so much as get the question out. “There’s been a new development in the war effort. You’ve arrived just in time.”
That sounds faintly ominous.
Jazz frowns, but obeys, setting off into a jog toward the bridge. At least that explains where everyone is, because when he arrives, it seems like every Autobot has been crammed into the space, even the Dinobots. Optimus stands front and center up on the command dais, flanked by Ironhide and Prowl, but there’s a clear line through the crowd for Jazz to join them.
There’s also an image on the vid-screen, and for a moment, Jazz’s spark stutters in his chassis. Megatron, of course, is most prominent, but Starscream and Soundwave are visible to his left and right, a few other recognizable Decepticons lurking in the background. And they look… disheveled. If it was possible for Cybertronians to look disheveled.
Their armor has lost its luster, most of them faded to protoform gray as if their nanites have died off, unable to regenerate. Rust creeps across along visible weld lines, like old injuries have reasserted themselves. Their optics are pale and wan, their biolights visibly dim.
“This is low, Prime, even for you,” Megatron is saying as Jazz creeps closer, trying not to let his gaze linger on Soundwave but drawn to his lover nonetheless. He looks odd, and it takes too long for Jazz to realize why.
Soundwave is sitting. In fact, all of the Decepticons are seated, as if they can’t manage to stand on legs that look as if rust creeps around their knees.
“You would not have spoken with me otherwise,” says Optimus, his voice steady and confident, but leaks of his field suggesting his shame. “This has gone on long enough, don’t you think?”
Megatron growls, banging a fist on the arm of his chair. “You think a genuine peace can be created out of force?”
“The hypocrisy burns, doesn’t it?” Prowl asks, carved from ice, much steadier than Optimus. “You thought you would find freedom through violence. Strange how it is unacceptable when it comes from someone else.”
“This is not violence!” Starscream snaps. “This is a sneaky, underhanded, unconscionable--” He breaks off into a raspy cough, which he covers with his mouth.
Jazz realizes Soundwave is staring at him. Has been staring at him since Jazz arrived and made his way to the front, just to Prowl’s right. Soundwave has looked at no one else, he has not spoken, and there is an intensity to his gaze.
“And how,” Megatron grits out, through clenched denta, and a ferocious burn in his crimson optics, “would you have us debase ourselves for the cure?”
Cure?
Jazz’s optics widen behind his visor. He takes a surprised step back, only to collide with two large frames, Grimlock on his right, Inferno on his left, each setting a hand on his shoulder, each grabbing his arms and wrenching them behind his back. One of them clicks a set of stasis cuffs into place before the realization fully burns through him.
“I am asking for a truce,” Optimus starts to say, but his voice washes in and out of Jazz’s audials, a low buzz of betrayal tuning him out.
He looks up at Prowl, and Prowl is looking back at him with something like apology in his optics before he cycles them, and it’s gone. He turns away from Optimus and the negotiations, steps down from the command dais, Red Alert stepping up to replace him. He approaches Jazz, cuffed and guarded, the subtle press of a blaster at the base of his spinal strut a further deterrent, not that Jazz’s thoughts are coherent enough to think of escape.
“It had to be done,” Prowl murmurs. “This war has gone on too long. We are too few, and growing fewer. The humans suffer for our misdeeds, and if we don’t do something drastic now, there will eventually be none of us to fight.”
Jazz sucks in a vent, feels like he’s choking on it. “You used me,” he says, because he remembers the datapad, the threat assessment that they don’t usually worry about him signing, the odd look of apology in Prowl’s optics.
How did you know? He wants to scream. How could you? He wants to shout.
“It won’t kill them, but it will eventually put them in stasis,” Prowl says, as if Jazz hadn’t spoken. “It will be easy to subdue them then. This is merely an attempt to give them some dignity, to set the truce on their terms before we have to resort to mass imprisonment.”
It’s hard to ventilate. Jazz’s thoughts spin and spin, and the weight of Soundwave’s stare is like a brand on him, though his energy is currently spent on glaring at Prowl.
Prowl folds his hands behind his back. “Once the truce is set in motion, and sworn upon the Matrix, there will be a trial.” He looks at Jazz, and it’s impossible to tell if there’s disappointment, or chastisement, or disgust in the gaze. Maybe it’s all three. “I don’t know how or if Megatron intends to punish Soundwave. That’s his discretion. Yours is ours.”
“I…” Jazz doesn’t have any words. They’re locked in his intake, behind a barrage of rage and disappointment and guilt.
He doesn’t know what’s worse. He doesn’t know where to start in his outrage. He wants to argue: we care for each other, we never betrayed our factions, we only wanted something for ourselves that had nothing to do with the war.
“For now, we will treat the symptoms, but we won’t cure you,” Optimus says, words floating in one audial and out the other while the Decepticons silently rage and hate. “The cure will come with peace.”
“Peace,” Megatron echoes, snarls, and his optics are burning embers of disgust. “You’d best hope you keep that spy of yours somewhere safe, Optimus, because there is no treaty that can stop me from ripping out his spark.”
Jazz goes cold. Not for himself, but for Soundwave, whom Megatron cannot possibly ever forgive, whose idea of punishment is a blaster to the spark.
Prowl looks up at Grimlock. “Put Jazz in his cell, please. You know the one.”
“Got it,” Grimlock rumbles.
He and Inferno drag Jazz away, back through the crowd of Autobots whose expressions are a mixed bag of surprise and hurt and disbelief. Jazz doesn’t fight. There’s no escape here that won’t hurt someone he once cared about.
He can still see Soundwave, sitting silent in Megatron’s shadow, rust creeping around his old welds, his stare focused on Jazz and Jazz alone.
He wants to apologize. He wants to explain that this isn’t his fault, that he didn’t know what the Autobots were planning, that he’s sorry for whatever mistake he made to get them caught.
But Soundwave won’t hear him, and it doesn’t matter anyway.
“I hope it was worth it,” Inferno says as the doors to the bridge hiss shut behind them, his grip on Jazz’s shoulder as firm as a clamp made of duryllium. He looks down at Jazz, does a double-take, and then smirks.
Inferno pokes Jazz right in his mid-section. “Guess it took a little longer for you.”
Jazz looks down. There’s an old wound, an old weld here, long repaired by his nanites, but now there’s a hint of rust around the edges. He’d noticed a lingering fatigue in the past few days, but chalked it up to a bad batch of energon. That happens from time to time. The solar collectors go on the fritz or someone forgets to change a filter.
It probably hit the Decepticons faster because they are typically under-fueled. Prowl, of course, would have known this. Would have planned for it.
Had, in fact, planned for it from the moment he had Jazz sign the datapad. From the moment Red Alert made his “irrational” decision to put the entirety of the Autobots on lockdown, knowing Jazz wouldn’t allow himself to stay in one place, somehow knowing Jazz would go straight to Soundwave, and Soundwave would come straight to him.
“Guess so,” Jazz says.
Inferno snorts. Grimlock keeps his silence. They have nothing more to say as they take him to the brig, to a cell Jazz has never seen before, that he can only assume has been crafted with his unique talents in mind. They put him inside. They do not remove the stasis cuffs.
Jazz sits on the flat slab of metal they call a berth. His comms crackle static at him, though he doubts he has anyone to call.
His abdomen starts to itch.
Trust is a double-edged sword, the humans say, because the betrayal cuts both ways.
Damn them all to the Pit.
