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Prowl's HUD blares orange and red with code warnings the moment he comes back online. Eugh.
His processing centers activate separately of each other, fragmented and strange in a way that leaves him feeling… spacey. Emotional cortex, short-term storage drive, logic center, line of code by line of code. An unknown program boots up somewhere, but when Prowl tracks down the load time for it, he shoves it off to worry about for when it actually turns on. His helm has never felt so disconnected from itself. It aches fiercely.
Dizzy, Prowl only skims through bits and pieces of each warning tab, flagging the things that sound vaguely important with a little blue tab—transformation cog, or rhomboid sensory suite, whatever the slag that means. It passes the time as his engine hiccups and restarts. Motors kick back up, energon flow rises from their previous sluggish churn through his lines, and tactile feedback finally, blessedly returns.
Prowl cycles his optics. Visor—blue—Jazz is looking back at him.
::Hey, boo.::
They're—sideways, which is new. Shouldn't be possible, with stiff shoulder joints that don't push anymore than forty-five degrees in either direction, assuming resting position as the base. Prowl shifts his optics just slightly to take in the unfamiliarly soft material pillowing his frame. That would be it.
The room is quiet and dark. There's a window, just over Jazz's shoulder, but the curtains are drawn closed. A hazy rim of gold refracts faintly off Jazz's dimmed down visor. Prowl hazards a guess that the door is behind himself.
Prowl glances down. Their hands are twined together, fingers interlocked.
He looks up. "Jazz," he starts to say, then locks up as his staticky voicebox seems to echo and rebound viciously within the imaginary walls of his audial processing suite. Noise folds into noise fractures into static inside himself. His back—the rhomboid sensory suite, whatever the frag—twinges. Something drags along the sheets behind him.
::C'mon now, give yourself a klik,:: Jazz admonishes, gentle across the comm line. He brushes his thumb across Prowl's own. The touch is scorching. It hurts.
Another tab pops open on Prowl's feed, blocking out Jazz's nose and mouth with a neat energon-blue square. Rhomboid sensory suite: recalibrating.
Prowl opens his end of the comm line and sends an image capture of the pop-up. ::What is this?::
Jazz snorts, a little sound. It sears Prowl's neural net, but not as much as the first time. He hopes that it isn't a permanent fixture; he loved Jazz's laugh, before all of this.
::These old things! Well, new things, I suppose.:: Jazz shifts a bit on the cushions, tilting forward just enough to expose one of the door panels fastened to his back hinges. It's black and silver, sleek and angular, and Prowl remembers (oh, long-term memory recall is back online) when nothing but scorch marks and a jetpack resided there.
Prowl follows the black stripe of Jazz's door panel over his back, across his shoulders, sloping into a chrome finish that carves down across a smooth, weld-free bumper. Shimmery blue armor plates interlock across Jazz's chest, protecting his cog-slot—his occupied cog-slot, Prowl realizes.
(53% downloaded.)
::They look lovely, Jazz,:: Prowl says sincerely, and bears rare witness to the way Jazz's smile goes soft and gooey with affection.
::You're not too bad yourself, silly.:: Jazz forwards an image capture of his own over the connection. Opening it gives Prowl an image of his own frame, chrome and blue and black. And behind that—a pair of panels springing out from his back, wide and rectangular but curving along the top edge. A strip of black traces over the bottom of them, outlined with a narrow trail of blue.
He wonders, vaguely, where all that armor hid within the foil-strong plating of his original frame. His joints used to creak. He used to take his plates off from time to time, hammering out the dents that tore into his welds when an energon vein blew.
Jazz taps his knee against Prowl's. The sensation feels much—less, somehow. Easier, to process.
"How does this feel?" Jazz says quietly, risking a few words into the silence.
Prowl's vents release a guttering wheeze of relief. "Okay," he confirms, and Jazz's frame seems to melt into the—berth? Is this what berths look like? Maybe. Prowl will assume so, for now. "Just—quiet, for now. But okay."
Jazz nods and taps a vague, featherlight rhythm across Prowl's knuckles. One-two-three one-two-three. 3/8 time, he thinks. "Cool. The doors take a bit to recalibrate your sensory suite. I think that's what Ratchet said."
"The doors?" Prowl tries his own misshapen tap against Jazz's hand. His spark warms when Jazz smiles at him.
"I think your systems called it the rhomboid sensory suite," Jazz clarifies. "But it's just easier to say doors. Wings, doorwings, any of those. They're those entryway panels on the sides of your alt."
Because they have alternate modes now. They can transform.
Prowl's cog spins bright and bursting within his chest. He ignores that bubbling warmth to ask, "Did anyone else get them?"
"A few that we know, I think. Blue recalibrated pretty fast—I think he's helping out with reconstruction right now. I camped out with you to wait mine out, let everything get fixed up. Smokey's still out for the count, but I bet he'll be up and at 'em soon enough."
"Hmm." Prowl ceases his tapping in favor of conducting a scan with his new doors. Small bursts of static skirt through the reading—the wings haven't fully incorporated into his systems yet—but it rings with a clarity that he's never experienced before. He doesn't have to look up to see the desk pushed against the wall by their pedes, or the bookshelf behind his helm. The wings pick up pedesteps in the hallway outside, even though his audials strain for anything beyond his and Jazz's vents.
All of the cave-ins he and Smokescreen got swept into, all of those nights spent staring up at the medibay ceiling, rhythmically closing and reopening the statistics tab that showcased his overall frame integrity dropping after every shift… it's so far away, now.
The world is so clear.
Jazz snickers, tucks himself closer. Dances the fingers of his free hand over Prowl's side. "I know, right? Imagine if we'd had this kind of tactile feedback when Darkwing was supervising. I bet we'd've all been on our way to captain rank by now."
"Given what we know now, I doubt we'd have been much happier," Prowl says dryly. His wings angle back a bit, and Jazz mirrors him with an amused huff. "I cannot recall any of the captains we knew ever meeting qualifications for an expedition off-site, despite our contracts stating the potential of that—"
100% downloaded. Advanced Tactical Suite launching.
A slurry of numbers and slippery data flash across the sudden bandwidth that keeps expanding and expanding in Prowl's drives, fritzing out his HUD for a few nano-kliks. He recognizes, vaguely, that his joints are freezing up, his optics flaring bright at the abrupt crest in fuel consumption (68%, 32% stress response). The—what—
"The numbers," Prowl sputters, but the glyphs drown in the influx of information. Jazz grips his side tight (58.2% concern, 34.7% anxiety, 7.1% frustration) and hauls him close, pressing Prowl's helm into his shoulder (theory constructed: offering comfort in moment of distress). Statistics, hypotheses, conclusions, percentages, more and more and more bandwidth all swirl together in a furious jumble, and—
Balancing gyros disrupted. Cause: restoration of transformation cog (98.2%). Suggestion: recalibrate balancing gyros at soonest opportunity.
Rhomboid sensory suite recalibration: 82.4% complete.
Emotional cortex overheating. Cause: heightened emotional response (negative 91.7%, positive 8.3%). Suggestion: cycle coolant through systems. Open vents to 70% capacity.
"Jazz—" Prowl chokes on it, crushing Jazz's hand close. "What is—I—"
"Let it run, Prowler," Jazz says right next to his audials (81%). "It's okay. Let it run." (99.8%)
Prowl lets it run.
The data… settles, eventually. Doesn't go away, but it quiets. The amount of bandwidth closes up as less information feeds through it. His overheating drives finally slow down, and his vents ease to a smaller configuration.
He leaves slight divots of warped metal along Jazz's knuckles when he finally releases the other's hands. "I'm… sorry," Prowl apologizes.
He feels Jazz shaking his helm above him, so he raises his own to meet his visor. Prowl can make out the outline of his optics from this distance. (78.1%) "Don't worry about it, babe. 'S just cosmetic, I can get that banged out with a hammer later."
Prowl nods, feeling strangely hesitant and very off-kilter.
His last waking memory before this had been Jazz's smile framed against the now-abundant Well of Allsparks, beaming as he twirled around in his new frame. As he tripped a step or two as his gyros re-balanced themselves. Prowl's own frame spun and folded over itself like everyone else's, cog turning in a discordant rush, but he'd paid it little mind—not when Jazz turned to look at him in a rush of glimmery paint and joy.
And then there were numbers flooding through his HUD, sparks flying off his frame, and nothingness.
"Percy called it an ATS," Jazz says, drawing Prowl away from his long-term memory files. "Advanced Tactical Suite. Said you'd had one all this time apparently, but it was locked and inert without a t-cog. It crashed ya, back at the Well. Ratch said he can't take it out."
Prowl nudges around at the steadily crunched-out numbers in his helm (13.9%, 47.82%, ongoing and ongoing) and frowns. "Just me?"
"Jus' you."
Prowl makes a face.
Jazz sighs. "Well, Smokey also has one, but—it's not at the same caliber yours is. His has significantly less RAM, and he can turn it off whenever he feels like it."
Flitting around in the settings of the ATS reveals that unlike Smokescreen, Prowl in fact cannot turn his ATS off unless he's offline or in shutdown. No power buttons, no deactivators, no toggles.
A frown settles over Jazz's lips. "Prowl?"
Prowl sighs. "I'll work with it. It may prove useful in resolving our conflict with the Quintessons permanently."
The frown fades, replaced by a grin full with a sort of resigned hope. He loops their hands together once more, holding steady like a promise. "I'm with you, Prowler." (100%)
Prowl's spark jumps at the loving oath, helpless and excited. This close, Jazz can probably clock it in his field (98.99%). Prowl ducks to hide his face against Jazz's chest again. When Jazz laughs against him, Prowl's lines burn with the elation of it all.
"You love me, huh," Jazz drawls out teasingly, pressing a kiss to Prowl's newly-armored chevron for good measure. Prowl, in response, squeezes him tight about his waist and pretends he isn't smiling into Jazz's bumper.
They'll be okay.
"I do," he murmurs, and shutters his optics. "Primes above, I do."