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Jazz snarls low in his vocalizer, shoves his way through the Con base like it’s his job. Like he’s doing his job here, like very step of this isn’t betrayal on loop. No one cares, another red visored mech angry and grimy, plating emblazoned Con and fury more rebellious than it should. He finds the right door, hacks it out in the open and then stalks through dark corridors. Vents would be easier, and sometimes vents are easier, the fear less everpresent with metal at your back you don't have to guard it, except surprise. Shouldn’t have been a surprise. Vents too claustrophobic, like these tight corridors aren’t. Stupid .
The final door should be hardest to hack, but it’s only the appearance of randomness. A Mobius loop of musical beat. The genre of music escapes him in muscle memory in hacking until the code opens for him and a stream of jazz music plays in created audials, and Jazz banks the new anger like glowing red coals.
Prowl’s optics shine like glowing red coals, like call rubies fiery and burning but don’t mistake them for anything for cold and hard and brilliant in Jazz’s light.
His smile is as polished as any of Jazz’s own, and just as fake. Just as real.
“You asshole, ” Jazz seethes, lets the door close and relock itself down and isn’t that a familiar trick, letting walls down to let inside, only then raising them in a trap.
“Honestly, what were you expecting?”
Jazz ignores his words, grabs for his knives and while Prowl is defending against them, goes for doorwings. Nothing explicitly damaging, pain circuits will shut down automatically at that, just an attack of static and stimuli and white noise confusion, and would you look at that.
Prowl falls backward to the berth, confused and scattered, and Jazz straddles his chest, one knife to his neck, the other to his left pretty doorwing.
”Prettywings,” Jazz breathes, running an appreciative servo down the edge of one, and for all Prowl calls him catlike, he sure purrs for him, optics like garnets and servos warm in Jazz’s thigh wiring-
Not the goddamn time. Never was.
“This is a bit unexpected. Stressed?”
Prowl is dead still beneath him, so ever frozen Jazz might think him actually, but for the low rumble of vocalizer against his knife that travels into his so sensitive servos. Jazz sighs heavy and every inch of him poised and tense. Stressed.
“You used me.”
Not genuine surprise, but well formed enough Jazz feels almost touched Prowl’s bothering.
“Did you think this was anything else? I know you used my own slips.”
As if either of them was actually slipping by accident. No. Jazz did slip, slip and fall into what he can’t rightly call lust or fascination but is damned again and dead again if he’ll call love.
“Ya know what I mean. Should kill you right now.”
“Oh,” Prowl murmurs, pressing against his plating in a lovers move. “I would be honored.”
Truth, just fractured to be sharper. In Prowl’s slagged up mess of a processor, an end at Jazz’s servos would genuinely be an honor, a sign of respect. “No. Nah, maybe I oughta carve that computer out and take it with me.”
Prowl considers that. “It won’t work for you. I’m the only one it ever feels right with, isn’t that right, Jazz.”
Double fucking meanings, so funny. Jazz slides his knife up to Prowl’s helm and Prowl’s wrist dataport slides open in sychronity.
“What are ya playin’ at here?”
Prowl’s optics unfocus ever so slightly, so careful Jazz wouldn’t know without being so close to him. Sorting data.
“A gift. Tactical plans.”
Jazz laughs harshly, shoves static into it just to hurt the doorwings. “Like I can trust you.”
“I’ll let you get as deep as you need to.”
True. Damn. Deep sea diving, here. What’s the trick. You get deep enough in, you gotta go slow back up, or your own body kills you. Slow enough up something can grab you back down. Jazz jams his cord in, those firewalls still so much stronger than any Jazz has seen, falling in a doorwing’s graceful salute at Jazz’s first uncertain touch. Jazz isn’t nice, isn’t kind, tears through without precision or care. His Con is still beneath him and Jazz finds the marked data packets in Prowl’s cathedral mind, reads the stories in the stained glass windows into his thoughts, till he’s convinced they’re real. Convincing himself. Turns, Prowl firewarm plating under his, and. Caught. Easy in, hard out, firewalls burning like a kiss. Jazz slams every defense he has and they drop in the same instant, Jazz slamming back into his own body. Still over Prowl, but shifted. Prowl is half sitting up, doorwings flared, servos resting on Jazz’s hips.
“Satisfied?” Prowl murmurs.
“Too much data,” Jazz gasps, processor still scrambling back into stability. “Why? You’d sell that many of your bots out for…”
“Not mine,” Prowl says, a gaze leveled at Jazz that doesn’t require the connection in their wrists for Jazz to know what he considers his. Jazz shouldn’t find the thought so enticing. There’s a lot Jazz shouldn’t find so enticing about Prowl. It’s what else he might find that scares him.
“Not loyal to the Cons. Ever considered the Autobots?” The words are just patter, said so easily they roll smooth off Jazz’s glossa, stones polished by water and only examined for meaning by Prowl as an indulgence.
“Hm. Join me instead?”
Jazz scoffs. “No. Not a Con.”
“Not what I meant. Join me .”
The datastream ducks under Jazz’s firewalls before he can raise a guard, and a thousand hacks and viruses terrify him before becoming merely images, half formed fantasies. Jazz’s visor blue sapphire, Prowl’s optics red ruby, the same carbon structure for both, different only in color. Jazz kills Optimus, kills Orion Pax who was kind and gentle and believed and was dead with the Matrix puppeting him. The last thought not Jazz’s own but taking root, Prowl sets up Jazz’s assassination of Megatron, Jazz a blade so expertly wielded by Prowl’s servos.
”What then”
Doesn’t know if he says it out loud or merely thinks or thinks in a way away but Prowl’s images shift. Praxus burns, Polyhex drowns, a new city rises, new rulers. Rebuild. Renew. The pair of them. New Primes, new gods. Prowl seated, optics cold, a circlet around his helm, Jazz in his lap.
A surge of defiance in Jazz at that. Not a pet, not Prowl’s toy, but the image crystalizes, and no. Not that.
In the image, Jazz sits on Prowl, on the new Prime, and uses the most dangerous mech on Cybertron as a throne .
Jazz pulls back and away, vents ragged, engine revving, systems onlining and pinging to allow access. Allow Prowl access. Jazz dismisses them but doesn’t deny them, swallowing hard. He’s sure his faceplates are warm, Prowl certainly a tempting heat below him, and with cords still attached to both their wrists, though Jazz isn’t sure when their servos had become interlocked.
“Well?”
Prowl’s smile is as beatific as a saint in stained glass, never you mind the bloodstains, like if you shone a light through him, he’d reflect bloody ruby red all over Jazz, like he hasn’t already.
Jazz looks at him and thinks that he’s not the only one who can wield another mech, that Jazz could have the most brilliant processor ever created in his own servos. More than Primes, they could be gods.
“No,” Jazz says. “Like pit.”
Hurt flares in Prowl’s face, raw and unguarded.
“You want it,” Prowl murmurs. “I know you do.”
Jazz shakes his head. “Just cuz I want it doesn’t mean I want to have it. No way.”
Jazz carefully disentangles himself, cording retreating and panels shut, servos feeling cold without Prowl. Nope. No. No fragging metaphors, no double meanings, Prowl spins him a beautiful story but Jazz knows Prowl is all numbers, and this is for Jazz’s benefit.
He pulls away, stands on slightly shaking pedes.
“Not doing this anymore. You join the Autobots, or I kill you. End of story.”
They don’t get the kind of story where they both live happily ever after exactly as they are. Some dragons need to die, and Jazz can play hero right now. It’s just a part.
“If you were going to kill me, you would have.”
Prowl stands too, doorwings flared, plating rising, threatening steps forward.
“Seems we’re at an impasse, spy.”
“Autobots,” Jazz says, “I know how you feel about Sentinel, but Optimus is better. I promise, Orion ain't dead in there, just more. Scaled up. Come on, Prowler.”
“You were a Decepticon once,” and how the pit does he know that, there are few things as hidden as that in Jazz, “you can be one again. Come here, love.”
Jazz shakes his head numbly, and Prowl sighs.
“Meet me in the middle then. Burn it all down.”
Jazz wants it. Jazz wants him. Jazz very rarely gets things he wants.
“No.”
Prowl sighs irritably, disappointed. Annoyed. Asshat that he is.
“Then what. You’ve made your feelings clear. No more stagnation.”
Jazz swallows. He could kill Prowl right now. Pit, he can see four ways to do it. He also knows Prowl has a damn scary processor probably splintering his frame and spark into a heat map of weaknesses.
“Orion is different. Better.”
Just mumbling out the words by rote, but come on. Jazz doesn’t want this. He can’t find an easy answer. Prowl probably can, but Jazz doesn’t like the color of his calculations. Too familiarly bloody.
“Just go.”
Prowl sits back down, doorwings slumping tired. Regretful. He crosses his legs, watching Jazz with crystal magnified focus. Jazz reaches deep down and finds irreverence and gaiety that rings sort of true.
“Are we breaking up?” He tries to make the hurt funny, but doing it for too long makes it fall flat.
“As if we were ever together. Just using each other, right?”
Jazz sits in the chair, leans forward into Praxian back padding. “Yeah. Yeah.”
Prowl reaches a servo out, touches Jazz’s face. Sighs. “I would have liked to meet you in a different world. On the same side. Without all the baggage of what we mean.”
Jazz nods, shifts his face closer into Prowl’s hand, soaking in every last bit of touch before he can’t.
“Not Tac Ops, or Spec Ops. Just us. A small life. A normal life.”
Jazz kisses him with a funny kind of certainty, pulls back with a grin.
“We woulda been bored outta our minds, babe.”
“Oh, absolutely, but even that would be a luxury we no longer have.”
“Eh,” Jazz shrugs. “This was on borrowed time the whole time. No hard feelings?”
Prowl smiles at him. “When I see you again, it will be on less friendly terms.”
Jazz nods. Kisses him one last time.
Jazz sees him again and it’s not really seeing for him, just a shot so precisely through his shoulder when it could have been his spark that Jazz knows.
Jazz sees him again, and it’s in another security briefing as another bot to kill and Jazz nods and kills the next in line instead and the next in line.
Jazz sees him again, and it’s on the battlefield, and he stands so tall and proud and cold, and a single short nod is all the warning Jazz gets to duck as a shot sears above him and he blows a kiss back, because why not.
Jazz doesn’t see Prowl reach out and catch it.
Jazz sees him again, and it’s treaty negotiations. And it’s fair, and it’s not fair, and Jazz thinks Prowl could probably speed it up, the both of them could, together, and he tries not to think that, because he had his chance, because he knows it wouldn’t go well, but they call it the treaty of second chances, and Jazz thinks maybe one of those second chances could be for them.
Jazz sees him again. Crystal Gardens. He’d never been before, before, but he thinks they did a good job restoring them. That he did. Of course, he’s probably biased.
Jazz sees him again, carefully organizing the rebuild, and he waits, waits til he’s off duty, waits til he’s alone and smiling faintly at a crystal with smoke still trapped in it from Praxus’s fall and Jazz steps close, puts a single servo between Prowl’s doorwings.
Jazz sees him turn, reach for an acid rifle no longer allowed to be there, and stills.
“Hey,” Jazz says. Waves. Prowl looks at him. Prowl reaches out, and gently takes his hand.
“Hello.”