Chapter Text
The Nemesis thrummed low, deep beneath the ocean’s waves, far from the reach of sunlight. Water pressure pressed in against its hull like a clenched fist. Inside, the atmosphere was stale with recycled air, faint ozone tang, and the constant background grumble of strained systems.
Jazz sat alone in a dim comms alcove, hunched over a rust-pocked console.
Not Jazz. Ricochet.
For the last five months and counting.
A familiar identity—quiet, reliable, invisible. One of half a dozen names he could wear like a favorite polish and strip off without a second glance.
His plating had been dulled, his audial horns swept back into a standard minibot configuration, paint matte and grimed with artificial weathering—nothing flashy, nothing suspect. His voice modulator software had been rekeyed to produce a dry, clipped register—more irritated clerk than confident saboteur.
On file, Ricochet was an off-the-rack communications tech: mid-level clearance, noncombatant classification, posted to Soundwave's team after a prior injury. Perfectly average. Perfectly ignorable.
Which meant Jazz had to work very hard not to be himself.
He kept his movements tight. Mechanical. Reduced his expressions to subtle twitches. Laughed too little. Talked just enough. He let himself blend into the flickering shadows of the Nemesis’s backend operations while his processor picked apart every frequency running through the hub.
Incoming Decepticon reports. Outgoing patrol pings. Coded dispatches layered three deep under false signals. He let them drift past the surface of his mind, siphoned the valuable bits into a stashed relay tucked behind a faulty vent, where Hound’s shadow-band would pick it up during planetary syncs.
Everything was going smooth. For now.
Then—deep in his torso—a faint pull. He exvented through his denta—slow, shallow. It wasn’t new. Just… louder now.
Well. No. Not new exactly. It had been creeping in for a few decacycles now. Small things. Power dips, sluggish coolant lines, minor code inconsistencies. He'd chalked it up to the crap fuel they were issued and the algae-bloomed filtration tanks. The Nemesis was no place for fine-tuned speedster up-keep. Never had been.
After five Earth months of subpar energon and worse recharge cycles, his frame was starting to mutiny. Figures.
Still, the pulses were getting harder to ignore.
Jazz tapped the console with casual precision—just a tech running latency checks. His digits almost fell into a syncopated rhythm, the kind he used in Ops to steady himself. He caught it in time, scrubbing the impulse before it could ripple outward.
Alas, Ricochet didn’t do rhythm.
Internally, he pinged his systems again—quietly. The same internal shunt showed minor but steady power diversion from his tertiary systems. That wasn’t right.
Maybe Ratchet’s welds were failing. Something beneath his plating giving way—quiet and slow, like a fracture just waiting to split. Reformats were always uncomfortable, but it had been months. The seams should’ve fused clean. The slapdash paint job wasn’t even itchy anymore.
But he couldn’t draw attention. Couldn’t even look like he was monitoring his own systems too closely.
Because Soundwave was just across the room.
The communications chief stood silently behind a terminal, a looming statue in cobalt and steel. One servo rested on a data console, unmoving, visor burning red beneath his helm-crest. Watching a screen. Listening. Always listening. To comm chatter. To ambient noise. To stray thoughts in unsuspecting frames.
He tightened his focus, dropped his mental noise floor. No spikes. No untoward emotion. Just baseline function and bureaucratic boredom. Ricochet, through and through.
Ricochet cleared his vocalizer. “Routing subspace echo report to sector two,” he said flatly.
Soundwave’s visor flicked toward him. A long, slow blink of crimson light.
Then: “Acknowledged.”
Ricochet turned back to the console, pretending not to notice the minute tilt of Soundwave’s helm.
It was fine. Just another quiet cycle. Just a bit of flux in his reformatted wiring. Just—
Something inside him shifted again. Like a servo grinding to reposition something inside his abdominal plating.
He forced himself still.
He gritted his denta, forced a slow intake. He could handle it. He’d handled worse.
He’d handled much worse.
The console chirped. His fingers typed on instinct, encrypting a burst of outbound noise—jumbled code laced with glyphs in deep compression.
Ricochet leaned back, optics dim. He ran a light servo down his thigh, just above the plating seam. If the discomfort kept getting worse, he’d need to check himself properly. Diags still came back clean. Maybe during the next raid cycle. Maybe a trip to the surface. Maybe...
Soundwave’s visor hadn’t moved. But Jazz caught it—the soft flutter of micro-actuated wings shifting air. Too light for most to notice. Not for him.
A barely-there scrape of talons meeting steel followed half a cycle later. Buzzsaw.
Watching.
Jazz had danced across comm networks Soundwave built. He knew the rhythm. And the consequences. And that some scars don’t show up on the frame.
Ricochet didn’t flinch. Didn’t hesitate. Just slid another report into the queue.
All smooth sailing.
Just another cycle with the mechabeast breathing down his neck plating.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ops clock ticked over in his HUD: [T-20.12]
The mission clock gave him less than one full orn on the surface to set up and validate the new comms relay.
Ricochet only really needed a few joors to get the tower up to sync with the several other comms technicians on the same mission elsewhere. Jazz only needed about twenty-one kliks of that to hack the network, establish a siphon virus and quietly insert a remote explosion. The remaining joors weren’t for Ricochet. They were for Jazz.
[T-17.92]
The Ark’s northern approach was quiet—battle-static still bleeding off in waves from the southern ridge, Decepticon firestorms hammering Autobot defenses down there as planned. Enough chaos to leave a hole in their focus. A ghost could slip through.
And Jazz was a good ghost.
He moved through the forest like a shadow in matte black and blue plating, slipping through infrared trip-lines and silent watchpoint patrols. No broadcasts. No noise.
The Ark recognized his encrypted ping, masked and filtered through half a dozen labyrinthine Spec Ops frequencies. The security field parted for him, and he passed through like breath over glass.
No fanfare. No alarms. Only silence and the low humming song of home.
His limbs felt lighter as he walked the corridor to Prowl’s secured command suite. The door hissed open the moment he arrived. Prowl stood inside, surrounded by ghost-light holoscreens. His doorwings were tense with unspent tension.
“Jazz,” he said. Not Ricochet. Jazz. Just that.
Jazz stepped in and sealed the door behind him.
“Miss me?” he said, with that lopsided grin that didn’t quite hide the excited hiss of his vents.
“You weren’t scheduled,” Prowl’s optics flicked to him, sharp and assessing. His doorwings gave the faintest twitch. “No physical dropoff planned for another 9.3 cycles.”
“Priority drop,” Jazz said, tone light. “Couldn’t scrub the encryption clean, and remote upload this size would’ve set off every bell between here and Vos. Have Blaster take a whack.”
He folded his arms. “So c’mon, chief. Gimme the state of the board. What’ve ah missed?”
Prowl's optics twitched sideways, locking a silent command into the console. In response, the holoscreens around him surged brighter—tactical feeds overlaying sector maps in shifting shades of red and green, dotted with Autobot and Decepticon sigils. Lines moved. Nodes updated. Ghost images of troop movements shimmered across regions.
Prowl didn’t speak immediately, door wings lifted by a degree, a telltale sign of focus. His optics flicked to a blank patch of holospace, and Jazz felt it—a faint rise in the room’s electrostatic hum, like a charge building. The ambient temperature increased a fraction. Subtle, but familiar.
Tacnet booting up.
Jazz’s audials caught the soft whine of shifting bandwidth, a sound most bots wouldn’t register—threaded code spooling into logic matrices, cold and clinical. Prowl was thinking in simulations now.
“Tarn sector’s unsalvageable," Prowl said flatly, gesturing toward the sim where Autobot signatures blinked out in rapid succession. “The Wreckers were pulled out two cycles ago—attrition curve inflected to vertical. Poor payoff margins.”
A red glyph flared. He tapped it once. It bled eastward.
“We’re reinforcing the Kaon-7 pipeline instead. If held, we box in the eastern front and choke their supply throughput to 38.1%.”
On the sim, Kaon lit up in pale blue. Red Decepticon vectors pressed in from three sides, bleeding energy where the models clashed.
Jazz tilted his helm.
“That’ll slow ‘em, yeah. But the ‘Cons won’t let Kaon-7 go easy. That front runs through Strika’s claws, and she don’t bend.”
“She’s already engaged.” Prowl’s tone was dry. “Ultra Magnus wants it locked down before another push. If we can sever the main energon artery, the Nemesis will have to rely more heavily on low-grade local siphons.”
“Yeah... that’s when the cracks start showin’. Folks get awfully pissy when rations get cut.”
Prowl cycled his optics sharply, “Projected outcome at current strength: 52.2% success rate. With you continuing to act as a data syphon in place onboard the Nemesis...”
The sim flickered. Energy values shifted. One red node dimmed.
“...79.3%. Desperation will make them careless.”
Jazz’s posture shifted, subtle. The rhythm of something coming together.
“Could get a lot done with that kind of leverage. They’re already cuttin' corners. The energon’s thin, and ah’ve seen field units limping in tah rotation without full repairs. Half the Nemesis crew is burnt out. The other half’s too twitchy ta notice.”
Prowl looked at him again—those icy optics piercing the false mantle of Ricochet to Jazz underneath. “If you can escalate that internal pressure—target morale, undercut chain of command subtly—we can force a collapse cascade without ever breaching hull.”
“If ya think it’s time, just say so. Ya know me, ah’ll do the rest.”
A sly grin. “Destabilization’s what ah’m built for.”
Prowl looks back to the holograms contemplative. “It’s cleaner than frontal assault. More sustainable, less…mess.”
Jazz exvented through his vents, long and low. “Still feels like dancin' through a minefield with a busted gyro.”
“That’s your specialty,” Prowl said quietly.
A pause.
Jazz’s voice dropped, more curious than deflective.
“Hows ‘bout ol’ Buckethead? Ah’ve seen neither plate nor mesh of that slagmaker. Heard some through the hub, but what’s ya take?”
Prowl’s optics narrowed.
“He’s pulled back out of Kimia. Most of his moves are being carried out by the lieutenants onboard the Nemesis now it seems—Soundwave, Shockwave, and in some sectors, Starscream’s overextending.”
Jazz huffed. “Starscream’s always overextendin'. Matches the vibes onboard righ’now.”
“This time, it may be intentional. If he’s trying to bait a challenge to command, we may have a window. But I need confirmation before we act.”
“That mean ya want meh closer to Soundwave?”
Prowl looked to the side, gears of war thrumming through his white helm.
“If you can do it safely.”
Jazz gave a half-smile. “There ain’t such a thing.”
Prowl's wings twitched.
Prowl didn’t say it. He never did. But Jazz knew what was flashing across the back of those pretty optics—success probabilities, failure curves, survival deltas narrowing by the klik.
And somewhere in there, the hard truth: not enough margin to pull him back. Not yet.
“Then minimize the exposure. We’re already working on an extraction window. But if you can get Soundwave’s subchannel access logs...”
Jazz whistled low. “That there's a high shelf ta reach.”
“You’re tall enough,” Prowl said, deadpan.
That actually pulled a soft laugh from Jazz.
“You’ve reached it before.”
Jazz huffed. “Yeah. Last time ah ended up T-cog-locked in some soundproof tank with a sensor web in mah helm and a cube of seawater for dinner.”
Prowl’s optics didn’t flicker. “And you still broke him.”
“Only halfway,” Jazz muttered. “Only halfway.”
[T-12.03]
He turned, and then smiling brightly, pulled a slim drive from a forearm compartment dangling it teasingly.
“Ya want the verbal debrief too, or...?”
Prowl didn’t answer right away.
His icy optics lingered—longer than necessary—reading something in Jazz’s field, in the flicker beneath his frame. The tension behind his grin.
His doorwings fluttered. A soft movement. Then still.
“No,” he said at last, quieter now. “I want you.”
Jazz's visor flared once, static soft in his vents. His reaction was part laugh, part breath.
Then his smile shifted.
Less bravado.
More truth.
“Yeah,” he said. “Same.”
Prowl didn’t move at first—just looked at him, like he was still parsing field readings, like he was still waiting for the logic to catch up with the want. Then, slowly, his doorwings dipped low, fluttering again. The glow from the holoscreens cast soft lines across his faceplate, and then vanished as he gave the shutdown command.
The room dimmed. The tacnet quieted.
The only sound left was the quiet hum of their vents syncing, the subtle press of one presence against another in the low quiet of a sealed space.
Jazz stood still in the hush, one servo twitching against his thigh. He shouldn’t be here. This wasn’t on any mission docket. This was where the lines blurred, where outcomes dropped and margins narrowed and numbers lied. This was the softest place on the board—and the most dangerous.
He knew Prowl had seen it, too. Had calculated the spread and clocked the dip. Still not enough to stop them.
For just a little while—just a few breems, a few precious kliks—there were no orders, no deception, no war pulsing outside the door.
Just Jazz and Prowl.
No masks. No covers.
And silence enough to breathe.
------------------------------------------------
Jazz lay half-curled on the couch, pressing the heel of his palm into his midsection when Prowl wasn’t looking. The tension that had been winding in his core for cycles had eased—not vanished, but softened, like pressure vented from a sealed line. He didn’t question it. He could do that later. Just let himself breathe for once.
Prowl sat beside him, datapads in hand, back against the wall. His doorwings twitched occasionally, catching faint tremors in the room’s air circulation. He wasn’t reading, not really. Just holding the data like it anchored the moment. Every now and then he asked quiet direct clarification questions. Pretending Jazz wasn’t about to disappear again. Like smoke. Too fast to hold onto.
[T-9.37]
Finally, Jazz sat up slowly. He’d lingered longer than he should have already. Every extra klik here was one less between him and exposure. But frag, he didn’t want to leave.
“Gotta bounce,” he said. “This lil’ side trip already put mah behind schedule.”
He paused at the door. Looked back. Wanted to say something. Wanted to say everything.
He didn’t.
Instead, he smiled faintly and said, “See ya when the tide’s low.”
Then he was gone.
Just vapor in the breach.
----------------------------------------------------
Jazz transformed and prowled into the clearing near the dead comms tower. A quiet, burned-out patch just outside Ark radar range. The sun hadn’t even crested the treetops yet.
He swept the site once—quick, clinical. No signals. No motion. Just grass and silence.
He framed the scene.
Pede scuffs through the dirt, deliberate and erratic. A gouge from his shoulder where he slammed into the comms tower base. Carbon scoring on the ground, scattered by stray blaster fire. A spray pattern near the edge of the clearing—low angle, close range.
Fight choreography, Spec Ops style.
Anyone reviewing the scene would see desperation. Chaos. An ambush, certainly. Someone outgunned and losing fast.
Perfect.
[T-4.37]
His servo twitched, almost—almost—tapping a beat on his thighplate. Old habit. Four-count, sharp and syncopated. Just shy of a rocking bassline from a streetside gig millennia ago.
He stopped himself.
Ricochet didn’t do rhythm.
He dropped to one knee joint, fingers curling around the knurled grip of his pistol as it slid again from subspace.
No pause. No vent to steel himself.
Just execution—cold, perfect and brutal.
The shot punched clean through his thigh—plating splitting, strut snapping, cables parting in a spray of sparks and molten slag. Heat raced from the breach, metallic and sharp, spilling down his plating. He sucked in a sharp vent through his bared denta and let the leg fold, crumpling hard to the ground. Pain flared white behind his visor. Millions of years at war, and hits still stole his vents like the first.
Time to put the mask on.
He set the weapon beside him, thumbed on his backup beacon—Decepticon frequency, timed to activate after he was fully in stasis. He’d practiced the timing dozens of times.
He wasn’t afraid.
Just tired. So tired lately.
He eased onto his side in the dirt, optics half-shuttered, servo drifting again—habitually—to just beneath his chestplate. No reason. Just a tic of his cover.
“C’mon, Ricochet,” he whispered. “Keep it together. Almost home.”
Just a role. Just a cover. But someone had to wear it.
He let his optics linger on the sky for a moment—just a sliver of violet over the treeline. Almost dawn.
The clearing wasn’t freedom, only a pocket of air before the sea crashed back in to drown him.
“You’re tall enough,” Prowl had said, dry as ever.
Jazz huffed a weak half-laugh aloud. “Y’better be right, Prowler.”
Then he flipped that switch in the hidden spot of his processor and let the ground come up to meet his helm.
----------------------------------------------
His optics flickered online with a soft click.
The medbay lights were dim, flickering faintly in time with the low pulse of the Nemesis’s power core. Jazz lay on a slab lined with cold mag restraints. Deactivated, for now—but his limbs still felt heavy. His HUD stuttered briefly before stabilizing, filters sluggish to reinitialize.
He tried to move. Groaned. Realized there was a tight ache wrapped around his thigh. Weld lines—fresh. The soreness was good. Real. Centering. Meant he hadn’t been dragged straight into a cell.
“Awake huh,” came a voice from the left.
Jazz turned his helm—and immediately regretted it.
Hook stood beside the table with his arms folded, one digit tapping against a datapad. He looked like he’d been watching for a while.
“You were found unresponsive near the secondary node,” Hook said flatly. “Blaster wound.”
Jazz didn’t reply. Just squinted and rasped, “How long?”
“‘Bout a cycle. I kept you under while the systems reinitialized. You had... anomalies.”
Jazz blinked. “Like?”
Hook clunked closer and flicked something across the datapad. “Energon levels: depleted, despite no signs of fuel leakage other than the obvious. Trace signals of metabolic overcompensation. Irregular thermal gradients.”
The list didn’t surprise him. Some lined up with his experiences as of late. Some was just Jazz. But the fact that Hook noticed? That chilled deeper than the slab.
“There’s also an irregular EM echo pattern—stray field harmonics trailing off your primary core.”
Jazz chalked it up to glitchy shielding. Wasn't new. The reformat had left enough rough edges.
Hook stared at Jazz for a long moment. Not accusing. Just... cataloguing.
“I’m prescribing supplements.”
Jazz blinked his visor slow, like Ricochet hadn’t heard half of it. “So my specs are off. Hardly a crisis.”
Hook’s gaze narrowed. “Your frame’s been reformatted. These partitions—” his optics flicked, cold—“are concealing modded architecture. That is not standard for a comms spec frame.”
Jazz's spark spun a smidge faster.
He pushed himself up slowly, trying to look annoyed instead of alarmed. “Got field-patched during the Kaon base collapse. Jury-rigged frame shift. Logistics didn't have time to do a full reconversion. That a problem?”
“Unreported reformatting is always a problem,” Hook said icily. “But if you're stable, I won't waste the parts.”
He handed over a small silver canister—engex-colored liquid sloshing inside. “Drink that. You’ll feel less like you’re deactivating.”
Jazz gave a lopsided frown, taking the vial and pretending not to feel the tremor in his servo.
“I like your bedside manner,” he muttered. “Real warm and fuzzy.”
Hook gave him a look like he’d very much prefered to have left him a blasted-through scrapheap.
He left the medbay without fanfare. Limped a little, but not enough to draw attention.
The corridors of the Nemesis were as hostile as ever—low-slung and snarling with poorly maintained wiring. Every wall buzzed faintly with the ship’s mood. Jazz kept his helm down, weaving his way back toward the comms deck, clutching the canister Hook had given him.
He didn’t drink it yet.
Every system in his body still felt off. Not just drained—but wrong. Reconfigured in ways that didn’t match his expectations. Something was pulling on his internals. Slow. Steady. Drawing from his reserves like a hidden system had spun itself online without permission. Like Ricochet was trying to shed off his struts.
He chalked it up to bad field patching again. Or maybe Hook had seen something.
He’d have to be careful.
He stepped into the comms bay of the flight deck.
And stopped.
Soundwave was standing at the main relay.
Not doing anything. Not even touching the console.
Just standing there. Waiting.
Buzzsaw was perched above on the rafters again, joined by Lazerbeak, optics shining.
Jazz forced his expression blank. “Reporting back in,” he said. “Cleared by Hook.”
“Observed.” Soundwave replied.
Long pause. The hum of static. Buzzsaw gave a single quiet chirp.
Soundwave’s visor tilted a fraction.
“Ricochet: Missing for 1.14 cycles.”
“Ambushed by Autoscum during the tower setup,” Jazz replied. Tone neutral. “Might’ve been offline longer than I clocked.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
Soundwave didn’t reply. Just stood there, silent and unmoving—reading him like a command line waiting to throw an error.
Jazz kept his field neutral, calm, just another drone at a terminal. But deep in his spark, something old and cold flickered to life.
He knew what Soundwave did to mechs who lied. He still dreamed in static some cycles.
“Soundwave: Aware of report. Recovery: expected,” Soundwave said.
He crossed the room, sat at his station, and began pulling up interface logs. His fingers moved with programmed ease—motions too routine to betray the tremble still in his joints.
Soundwave didn’t move.
Didn’t blink.
Didn’t vent.
Then, finally—
“Comms backlog: extensive. Decryption protocols awaiting review.”
His tone didn’t shift. No accusation. Just an observation with teeth behind it.
Jazz didn’t turn. “I will endeavor to catch up, sir.”
Click. A long, slow pause.
Then—Soundwave turned. Smooth as glass.
Buzzsaw stayed behind a moment longer, watching.
Jazz kept his optics locked on the screen and his field dead flat.
Only when the door hissed shut did he allow himself to vent.
Low. Uneven.
He popped open the vial and drank the bitter liquid in a single long swallow.
He didn’t know what Hook had seen. Didn’t know what Soundwave suspected. Only that both had noticed something — and neither had said it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The seekers weren’t supposed to like Ricochet.
He was too quiet. Too odd. Not flashy, not loud, not obsessed with glory or kill-counts. He didn’t preen or pose or boast. He didn’t even fly.
But Skywarp had decided Ricochet was funny.
Not ha-ha funny. More like clicky-broken-in-the-head funny.
So now, almost every mid-shift cycle, Jazz found himself with a jet practically draped over his comms console, kicking his peds off the desk and rattling off a new stream of rumors at maximum volume.
“And then Thundercracker fragging walks in with a heat sink coil stuck in his leg strut—like, all the way in—and Blitzy’s just like, ‘that’s not my problem,’ even though he’s the one who threw it! So now TC can’t fly for a week and Starscream’s screaming about sabotage again.”
Jazz didn’t look up from his monitor. “Fascinating.”
Skywarp leaned in, now upside-down, dangling from the ceiling vent by his knees. “You wanna know what I heard yesterday?”
Jazz’s optics flicked sideways. “Sure, Warp. Enlighten me.”
The Seeker grinned.
“Swindle’s tried to sell Megatron a knockoff Matrix.”
Jazz paused just long enough to make Skywarp think he was impressed. “A knockoff?”
“With LED lights!”
Jazz barked a genuine laugh. Then, leaning in with the dry curiosity of a bored comms tech, he muttered behind a raised servo, “Please tell me Megs actually fell for it.”
Skywarp flipped to the floor, wings flaring. “Not yet. He did yell about ‘dim-witted charlatanry’ and almost shot Dead End though, which was awesome.”
Jazz tapped something on his screen, bundling up a packet of comms logs into a background data leak scheduled to hit Hound’s frequency in three joors. He angled his field just enough to keep Soundwave’s sensors from noticing the sub-layer chatter. Easy stuff.
“Anything fun floatin’ ‘round the hangars?”
Skywarp shrugged. “Shockwave’s throwing a tantrum again. Soundwave told him to choke on his own logic. Or, well—he implied that. Ravage hissed a lot.”
“Mm.” Jazz filed that away. Shockwave expanding labs was never good.
“Also!? Blitz says that outpost on Europa’s gone dark. Again. Weird, right?”
Jazz almost smiled. That whisper? He’d planted it two cycles ago.
He tilted his helm, frowned and said distractedly, “Could swear I’ve heard that somewhere.”
Skywarp grinned, wide and wicked. “You’re my favorite little grounder. You always listen.”
Jazz lifted two digits in a faux salute. “And you talk just enough to make my shift entertaining.”
Skywarp beamed, spinning out of his chair and making for the door, “I know, right?”
He paused at the doorway, purple black wings giving an excited flutter.
“Oh! Before I forget—party in Hangar Six tonight. Me and Blitzy scored high-octane engex from Swindle—real stuff, not that coolant-flavored knockoff—and I blackmailed Dirge into DJing. He’s awful at it, it’s amazing. You gotta come.”
Jazz didn’t look up. “Parties aren’t really my thing.”
Skywarp groaned. “Ugh. Grounders.” He flopped dramatically across the doorframe, one hand over his spark like he’d been fatally offended. “Always so stiff. You’re lucky I like weirdos.”
Jazz raised a brow ridge, not that Skywarp could see it past his amber visor. “Weirdos?”
“Yeah. You’re like... boring, but extra. It’s great.”
Jazz, fully channeling Ricochet, deadpanned awkwardly. “That’s new.”
Skywarp leaned in again, optics a warm glowing red. “You should come though. Seriously. No one’ll care if you’re freaky or don’t talk or spontaneously combust. It’s mostly just noise and cubes anyway.”
It was tempting.
Primus, it was tempting.
High-grade. Pulsing bass lines. Revved engines and static-charged fields. Fluttering, heat hazed dancing wings—kinda like—(don’t think about that don’t think about that). The chance to stop thinking, just for a few hours. Just be.
But Ricochet wouldn’t.
Ricochet couldn’t. So Jazz was grounded in the lie.
He didn’t get to want things. That was the trade.
Every cube poured meant another tell. Every movement tracked. Every smile suspicious.
Skywarp huffed. “Fine. Be boring. I’ll save you a cube. If you don’t show, I’m drinking it too and blaming you for the overcharge.”
Jazz rolled his optics theatrically. “Wouldn’t want to disrupt your reputation.”
Skywarp winked. “Too late.”
A static charge snapped through the air like a thunderclap, rattling the plating along Jazz’s arms a half-klik before Skywarp’s warp drive kicked dirt in the face of physics.
And then—
hmmMMM VOP!
Space folded with a shriek of pressure and light. Time hiccuped. With a shriek of air and one final grin, Skywarp vanished in a violet-blue ripple of disreality.
Jazz leaned back in his chair. Exvented. Long. Controlled.
It was too easy.
The seekers were arrogant, impulsive, and wildly unsecured. Skywarp especially. The jet was like a data sieve with afterburners and a loudspeaker — Jazz could slip whatever fake intel he wanted into his auditory cortex and just wait for it to detonate in the wrong hangar.
Today’s payload had been a lovely tidbit suggestion about Ultra Magnus transferring to Earth command. Totally fabricated. Jazz wanted to see how long it would take to reach Starscream and start a command shuffle panic.
He set a timer.
Four breems.
Maybe three.
But under all the careful lying and data-skimming, the ache in his midsection hadn’t eased. His internal systems still pinged irregularly. His systems flagged again—erratic draw, recursive drain. Something rooted deep, curling through his fuel lines like invasive code. He was starting to feel it now when he turned too fast. When he leaned wrong. When he vented.
He gritted his denta.
He couldn’t afford to be sick. Not now.
Not while Soundwave was still listening.
-----------------------------------------------
Jazz couldn’t rest.
Not recharge, not meditate, not cycle down. His spark pulsed too fast. His systems flagged internal alerts that didn’t quite ping right: voltage drifts, power redistribution, deep-cycle code twitching like it was prepping for a rebuild.
Jazz slid through the dim halls of the Nemesis like a shadow, silent and low. The refit plating—black and blue, matte—made him a ghost in the ship’s flickering gloom. The shift bell had rung two joors ago. Most mechs were in recharge.
Or off-duty. Or partying it up at Skywarp’s hangar rave.
The lower maintenance halls were empty.
In the dark, Jazz turned a hard corner, then squeezed behind a conduit cluster in the wall. Too narrow for a full warframe. Perfect for a Jazz sized mech.
It was quiet here.
Safe. (Safe as tank-deep on an enemy warship could be anyways)
He hooked his digits around an inconspicuous wall panel, and opened the stash - Mirage had planted this one. It still held the prize: a jury-rigged medical scanner.
Useful in deep cover. Especially with dual-partition masking running hot.
Jazz jacked in through his hardline, optics dimming. The interface bloomed across his HUD, a familiar glow of raw code and diagnostic trees. He initialized the prompt.
> SYSTEM COMMAND: INITIATE DEEP KERNEL SCAN
> PARAMETERS:
— Full Structural Analysis [QUEUED]
— Primary-Secondary-Tertiary Software Compilation Analysis [QUEUED]
— Masking Protocol Override [ENABLED]
— Partition Filter Override: [ENABLED]
The scanner cycled up, and began.
> STATUS: Scan Executing...
Code unfolded in layers—core registry, energy grid routing, spark containment patterns.
Jazz monitored it all with narrowing, intense focus.
He expected to see damage.
Maybe leftover artifacting from the reformatting that’d cascaded. Line or manifold buildup. Peeling plating welds. Maybe partition degradation or a parasite script.
What he didn’t expect was this:
[ERROR: Unauth. Resource Allocation – 27.6% of Energon Budget Deficient]
Jazz frowned. Power leaks? Maybe a background spike or—
[WARNING: Secondary Spark Lattice Detected]
No.
[Cross-Referencing: Inactive Gestation Tank Chamber 01→ ACTIVE]
No.
[SPARKSIGNATURE CONFIRMED: NEW-SPARK / DESIGNATION: NOT REGISTERED]
[Status: GESTATIONAL CONTAINMENT STAGE 4 / Structural Expansion: Inhibited by Non-Compliant Superstructure]
Jazz stared.
No. No, that—
He re-ran the diagnostic.
Same result.
Again. Again. Same numbers. Same spark.
There was a spark.
Inside him.
Not code corruption.
Not systemic rust.
A newspark.
He yanked the jack free, hiss of static loud in the tight space. Staggered back into the wall. Plating clanged.
His vents were too loud. His cooling fans kicked on hard. The dim hum of the Nemesis rose around him like a wave of indifference.
Well. That’s spectacularly bad.
He hadn’t known.
He should have known. The error readout file was—extensive. Layered. A slow motion triple-changer wreck in warnings on errors and errors on notifs.
His spark was still thrumming too fast, erratic against the pressure at his chest.
The false Ricochet partition buzzed at the edges of his awareness, decaying now—bleeding through with fragments he had meant to keep suppressed. Real ones.
Memory bloomed sudden and vivid across his processor.
Prowl.
Cloaked shadows.
Signal dampeners humming lowly.
Jazz slid through the vent system like smoke—silent, careful, practiced. Dropped into the tactical office like a ghost. Spec Ops mods well used.
The room was quiet.
Low-lit.
Prowl was still at his desk, the glow of his terminal painting his armor in pale blue. He didn’t look up. Calm, alert.
“You’re not scheduled for a debrief,” he said quietly and direct.
Jazz grinned faintly. “Didn’t realize ah needed clearance ta check on you.”
Prowl set the stylus down.
There was a beat of stillness.
Jazz crossed the room slowly, drifting to the edges, his field already brushing the edges of Prowl’s—testing, asking, trying not to betray how hard his spark was pulsing under his plating.
He didn’t speak again. Didn’t need to.
His precise digits found the edges of Prowl’s door wings with unthinking reverence. The Spec Ops rubber digitpad mods catching, dragging. Slow. Gentle. Prowl’s vents stuttered, but he didn’t stop him.
Didn’t say a word when Jazz leaned down and pressed their helms together.
Contact. Magnetic and unhesitating.
It started tentative. Familiar. The kind of closeness they stole in fragments—ethereral moments between briefings, between battles, behind locked doors. Hidden, secret, and true.
But then Prowl’s servos found his waist. Gripped. Anchored. Pulled closer. His field surged forward with a need neither of them said aloud.
Heat built in every contact point. Fans spinning up, charge crackling, vents rough. Jazz’s frame flexed as Prowl shifted beneath him—plating shivering, EM fields syncing, lower halves aligning with a soft, staticky hum that bloomed current up both their backstruts.
Heat rose in waves. Jazz’s visor dimming as his plating unlocked under Prowl’s firm, practised touch. Every vented breath slid over bared cabling. Static hissed where slick heat met charged plating. They slid into each other with a practiced ease—motion fluid, deliberate. Mutual.
Prowl’s helm tilted back. His vents hitched. Jazz leaned in, biting back a groan against his intake.
Charge built slow and sharp between them. Every system leaning forward into it. Syncing.
Rocking together in slow, instinctive rhythm, until it was too much to stay apart. Not rushed. Not frantic.
Precise. Thorough. Inevitable. Like everything between them had always been leading to this.
Jazz's servo skimmed along Prowl’s bumper, tracing seams, and paused. Just a moment. A wordless ask.
Prowl answered with a low nod.
Field permissions dropped. The world narrowed. Chestplating hissed and transformed away.
A heady reverent white blue glow illuminated the room, casting stark shadows of their entwined silhouettes.
Prowl’s faceplates were relaxed, open. Stripped back. His optics half-dimmed, hazy, drowning in light—drawn like gravity to the flare of Jazz’s aura as their sparks spiraled closer. He looked undone. Unmade. Beautiful.
Jazz’s servo slid up, slow and reverent, brushing the base of Prowl’s red chevron—so vivid against the glow—feeling the faint, charged hum beneath it. Enthralled by the way his touch drew out flutters of his door wings, like piano strings stirred by distant thunder.
They weren’t built alike. Jazz was improvisation—flexible in mind and soul, smooth chaos in motion. Prowl was precision, built from order and lines that never bent. Logic incarnate.
But here, in the universe between them, it didn’t matter. Chaos curved into order. Rigidity softened into rhythm. Push met pull.
Like balance. Like life. Like something older than war.
Between them spiraling orbitals of energy, pulsing plasma, like tiny young fusion stars, the thrum of existence.
Their sparks met in the next vent.
It was raw. Fierce. Electric.
Auroras flared—coronal plasma weaving between their frames in waves of breathless need. Jazz gasped, his frame shuddered under the flood of resonance, locked tight against Prowl’s.
Frequencies fused. Feedback surged. Memories and emotions flashed like laserfire and starlight in deep space. They moved in tandem, rhythm sharp now, deep and endless and right. Every thrust of code, every brace of limbs and static-slick slide of plating carried heat and lust and history.
A flood—light and heat crashing between them, grounding them to each other like nothing else ever could or had before. Prowl held him tightly through it. Arms wrapped around him like the whole world might fall away if he let go.
No words.
No promises.
Just this.
Just them.
Now, huddled inside the Autobot cache deep in a Decepticon warship, Jazz pressed his forearm hard against his intake, smothering the sound in his vents.
That had been the last time, the last time they’d merged, and the first they’d become one so deeply.
Before the mission. Before the mask. Before Ricochet.
He hadn’t known what they’d made.
He was trained for this. For missions going disastrous. Trained for spark-level horrors. Trained for frame failures and parasitic code and—
He slid to the floor, optics wide and unfocused.
Except—
Except maybe he did this to himself.
The setup had been clean. Purpose-built. A hardwired decoy interface grafted straight into his core systems: persona shell, false frame registry, synthetic memory layers. Enough to fool any scan short of Soundwave’s direct probe right off the bat. Even hardline connections would route through Ricochet’s fake consciousness first.
He’d buried himself—partitioned core functions, buried command trees, rerouted every alert system that could give him away.
He hacked his own mind, his own frame.
Normal for Jazz, all part of the gig. And he was great at it. One of the best.
And in doing so...
It appeared he’d buried more than his identity.
The gestation protocols must’ve spun up somewhere in the background during the frame shift. But the routing code—the notification trees—never reached his conscious stack, all tangled up in Ricochet.
Baffles be damned, a newspark.
A sparkling.
In him.
He sent the command to transform his bumper away, baring his spark to open dank air.
His spark chamber, his glowing incandescent spark housed in crystal. And just above it, nestled in the support bracket—
A fried baffle.
One sad, melted braided copper ground wire, blackened and curled like it had given up halfway through a scream. A capacitor bead beside it had burst, scorch-marked at the edges. The whole unit looked like it had lost a fight with a blow torch.
He stared at it for a long moment.
Then let his helm drop back with a hollow thunk.
A bitter laugh clawed its way out of his vocalizer—short, staticky, stunned.
“Oh slag me sideways with a busted power converter.”
No wonder everything ached.
No wonder his plating felt like it didn’t fit anymore.
No wonder his limbs trembled when he stood too fast.
The forming protoframe was pulling from his alloys, from his trace-element reserves, from literally anywhere his body could spare mass.
He’d been bleeding himself into someone else.
“Lil' scraplet’s making a frame outta my parts,” he muttered, half in awe, half in disbelief.
He was on the wrong fragging ship. Surrounded by Decepticons. Surrounded by Shockwave’s labs. Surrounded by prying optics, telepaths, deep scanners.
“Primus,” he whispered to himself. “Ah’ve got’ta bitty.”
A beautiful little piece of Prowl, a piece of himself, combined.
He wrapped his arms around his midsection, frame curling tight.
He didn’t know how far along the newspark was.
He didn’t know how stable it was. He didn’t know if he could get out in time
Jazz’s mind tried to calculate. Risk trees. Escape routes. Enemy rotations. Supply caches. All of it warped under the weight of the new variable.
He wasn’t one mech anymore.
He was two.
In wartime. On a warship.
And only one of them was trained for this.
Jazz wiped his faceplates with a shaking servo.
“Primus,” he whispered. “Prowl…”
He needed to move.
He needed to run.
He needed to get out.
Now.
-----------------------------------------------
Jazz had a plan.
A real one. Not just the vague "I'll figure it out" nonsense he sometimes ran on. He’d mapped a crawl route through the maintenance ducts. Had a relay station preloaded with a microbeacon. Had a data cache tucked in an old seeker maintenance locker no one checked anymore. Had the next distraction event in three cycles bookmarked for his exit.
Simple.
Clean.
Spec ops textbook.
It would work.
It had to work.
All he had to do was make it to the third cycle.
He just needed to not draw attention.
The morning of his second to last cycle onboard the Nemesis, his internals cramped so hard mid-transmission that he almost fragged the comms station putting a clenched servo through the control board. His vents stuttered. He caught himself, barely, and hissed silently through his denta.
Then it happened again, and a few minutes later, again, stronger - insistent.
Every Cybertronian curse he knew, even human expressions cycled through his processor at breakneck speeds.
Keep moving. Keep normal. Trigger the distraction.
Jazz straightened up, rerouted the signal, and stood. Slowly. Casual-like. Maybe too casual.
A few mechs glanced up from their terminals. He turned to leave.
A calm exit.
One pede in front of the other.
“I’m going to do a manual check of the east relay,” he said casually over his shoulder to the nearest drone. “Signal’s been bouncing wrong. Want it sorted before command catches it.”
No one cared enough to argue.
He was halfway to the door when a voice snapped behind him:
“Ricochet!”
He froze.
Starscream.
Slag.
Jazz turned slowly, a neutral honorific expression sliding into place. “Yes sir, Air Commander?”
Starscream stalked toward him with that stiff-winged fury he did so well, optics narrowed and arms folded.
“Funny. I reviewed the system logs from yesterday’s raid. I didn’t see anything wrong with the eastern relay.”
Jazz’s spark stayed on twirling, forced calm, unbothered. “It was. Took a hit during the raid—kicked over to auxiliary routing. Emergency level.” A pause. “I patched it. Must have neglected to register the manual override, sir.”
Starscream tilted his helm. “Then why,” he said, voice dangerously sweet, “did two repair drones file a log noting someone in black armor sneaking into auxiliary systems just before the raid?”
A beat.
Ah frag.
Jazz kept his tone steady. “Probably misflagged a stealth trooper from the strike team. We were spread thin.” He offered a shrug, casual. “Check the IFF logs.”
Starscream didn’t even blink.
“I did. Guess whose ID wasn’t broadcasting?”
Jazz opened his intake—
—and didn’t get the chance to explain.
Because behind Starscream, Soundwave stepped into view.
Silent.
Still.
Lazerbeak sat on his shoulder.
The air buzzed for half a klik, a ripple of static like a frequency drop. Soundwave’s visor didn’t change, but Jazz felt the shift crawl over his plating. The entire flight deck felt it.
Soundwave turned to Starscream, and said:
“Ricochet: Providing falsehoods.”
The flight deck went dead quiet.
Starscream cycled his optics. Then smiled, slow, savage and wicked.
“Well. Isn’t that interesting—You almost made it. So what is it then, defection? Autobot spy?”
And just like that—Ricochet was gone. Shredded. Eviscerated.
Starscream's smile was all knives and sharp denta. “This is the best part. Watching the moment your little plan breaks.”
Jazz didn’t hesitate. Didn’t vent.
He spun and ran.
Just like he was trained to. Just like he always had.
----------------------------------