The Broken Edge
I caaan't write sequentially at all. So here's what would be the last chronological scene in this side-series for Jazz. Look at all the pretty world building....and uh, stuff I should really write about instead of mentioning in passing... >_< And, very much like I expected, this series has already intersected over into the space of another series so fitting it into the Table of Contents is going to be a headache. Time to work on that timeline. Also. I'm thinking of renaming Zoom-Zoom's Trials and Tribulations. Suggestions?
The Broken Edge
“No, I want two!”
Jazz immediately thought, Slag, this is going to hurt. The tearing of his frame disconnected access to half of his systems and nearly all of the rest shut down in a mockery of self-repair, therefore he only felt a brief but excruciating flare of pain. All the repair in the universe wasn’t going to help him here. This wasn’t something anyone was going to fix fast enough to stop him from returning to the Well. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the self-diagnostic feature from flashing error messages.
Warning: Spark chamber breached.
Well. That was unfortunate. He really, really liked that spark chamber.
With the chamber broken, his energy began to recede from his frame. Ah yes, this part was familiar. Even without access his memory banks, there were things that had been written into his spark that he remembered. The feeling of death, of quantum strings pulling a spark to the Allpsark, well that was something he recognized.
Filament by filament, his sense of the world narrowed without access to his frame’s systems. Tranquility infused his spark as the pull of the Allspark got a proper grip on him.
Counter Shift. He remembered Counter Shift and something that felt like grief rose up in him. He remember the brief flash of pain, then the sense of his spark ripping in two as Counter Shift had died. They had been too integrated into each other systems and spark, far beyond the recommended sync levels. The death of his partner should have killed him.
Oh but it hadn’t. It hadn’t. Because-
You must live. That’s an order Jazz!
All that time, how blind he had been. Counter-Shift’s first lesson, don’t trust anyone. But he had, he had trusted Counter-Shift, had admired and adored him. Had loved him.
And Counter Shift had loved him back and reciprocated in the only way that he knew.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? He had howled as his own systems betrayed him.
I’m sorry.
Too scared to allow himself weakness, too frightened to ever allow Jazz the opportunity to leave him, Counter-Shift had never removed the slave encoding he’d embedded in Jazz’s core. As Counter-Shift lay dying in a cold warehouse, an energon blade through his spark and Jazz trying his best to join him in the Well a city away, the mech betrayed him with that one command.
You must live. That’s an order Jazz.
And he had even though half of him rebelled against it. He was split into two at that moment, conflicted. He desired the death that had claimed Counter-Shift partly because of the sync and partly because it was against the commands of the slave coding. The other half of him so desperately wanted to cling to life, in obedience to that order and because Jazz would not go to the Well like this, tricked and betrayed for a love that was not real. Vibes had dragged him to the medics and they had spent orns watching as his spark had flickered and fluctuated, caught between the conflicting desires but never extinguished like he so deeply wished. When his systems finally settled, he spent a lifetime looking back and wondering if he himself had ever been real. He'd been condemned to live no matter the cost, no matter how much he craved to return to the Well.
Well. He was dying now.
Finally.
Finally he would be released from the one last bit of influence that Counter-Shift held over his core, that one code he’d never managed to remove.
His spark slipped from his frame and it felt like a rebirth. It felt like that moment, thousands upon thousands of vorns ago when the Quintessons had first extracted his spark from Cybertron, cold and icy, searing heat and blinding light all at the same time. The atomic world opened up and swallowed him deep and his awareness shifted to quantum strings and the spin of electrons in their orbit. Home. He was home. This is how things should have always been, it was comforting, familiar to brush against the threads of reality. The presence of other sparks burned bright against his conscious but he was unable to gather the strength to reach out to them.
Once upon a time, he could have survived like this, back when he was newly formed and freshly kindled from the energies of Cybertron. But he had spent too long locked away inside a frame and he had become dependent on his spark chamber to keep him alive.
It was time to go.
The spark that once encompassed all of Jazz drew in on itself then allowed itself to hurtle along that thread that tied it to the Allspark. Soon it would be lost in the collective consciousness inside the Well, bringing with it a wealth of knowledge and experience to share.
Soon, it would be over.
Samuel Witwicky plunged the Allspark into Megatron’s chest and the connection snapped.
…
…
…
………….?
Existence had been a gradual thing. The living energies of Cybertron pulsed slowly, intertwining then unwinding, flowing away until nearly diminished and then suddenly building up again. There was no pattern, the pulses came and went, back and forth, up and down, phasing in and out of reality, then back in time and forward.
Charge built up amongst the pulses as they drew together, waves of energy colliding and discharging ions and electrons out at the speed of light. Atoms were crushed against each other, forcing proton against proton, neutron against neutron, merging to create larger nucleuses. New elements were exuded as the pulses broke apart.
And sometimes…sometimes something more was birthed.
Strands of living energy wound tight into small clumps of a simulacrum of life. Caught in the radiant waves and Cybertron’s electromagnetic field, these clumps slowly accumulated in size as they drifted across the planet.
Eventually these semi-unbeings were dense enough to achieve a medium of life. They were quantum creatures, existing across ten dimensions and immersed within the atomic world. Threads of reality connected them together; they were a sea of living thought, a collective conscious with no individual mind. They were All and they were One.
They existed.
On Cybertron’s cold surface, where no other living creature could ever hope to grow and thrive, these sparks of life dreamt.
There was no pain; there was no pleasure, no anger, no hatred, no curiosity, no happiness, no sadness, no fear.
Until the Uplift.
Dense clouds of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and other elements had arrived on Cybertron. Others. Things that was alive but limited to less than five dimensions. Unimportant. How long they stayed there was immaterial to the group sentience, time held no meaning to it. Then…then part of the One was gone.
Vanished.
Lost.
Taken by the Others.
Bit by bit the collective conscious grew smaller. The One receded from the planet’s surface, hiding itself within Cybertron’s core. But the Others were relentless, they pursued it even after it retreated, stealing away every part that they could find.
Then…then…
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
It was the first thing that it was aware of. Every part of it was raw, jagged, broken. Ripped out of the One. Alone. Quantum connections torn apart and leading to nothing, absolutely nothing but pain.
Alone. So alone.
Pain.
Alone.
Why, why was it alone?
Then, there was something there. Hard, dense, composed of metallic ions and atoms. It was pushed inside and then-
::Onlining unit 9242. Function: Data runner.::
Awareness surged. The atomic world fell away, cauterizing the broken quantum connections that were hemorrhaging inside it. Code after code activated.
::Core protocols: To serve the Empire.::
…
He was lost.
The consciousness didn’t know where he was going; only that he had a mission and somehow he had been subverted. It was hard to keep focused, especially since every bit of him seemed determined to unravel and dissipate.
He curled in on himself, tensing up to keep himself from drifting apart. There was something…something he needed to do.
But what?
…
…
“-the slag are you doing?”
“What Ratchet? These moves are classic, from the height of Guardian’s Prime reign.”
“I know that. And they were stupid even back then.”
“…You have no culture.”
“And you are a moron.”
…
…
…
“Uh oh.”
“Uh oh, Bee? What have you…uh oh.”
“Run?”
“Running is a very good idea.”
…
Memories. These were memories. People that he had known, people that were…that were…
They were important, he knew that. There was something that he needed to do and remembering them was helping him remain intact.
…
“Get down!”
Frag. Frag, frag, frag, frag, frag!
“Imperial drones are coming in!”
“Enslaved mechs are down by that mine. Shoot to neutralise them, no killing shots.”
“Look out!”
…
“Thanks for the assist; I never even saw the drone.”
“It’s a battlefield. You can’t keep track of everything.”
“Yeah, well thanks anyway. M’designation’s R1571.”
“Armorhide.”
“Thank you for saving my life, Armorhide.”
...
…
…
“I know you.”
“Of course you do, Optimus. Hey, how are you doing? My name’s Jazz. We’ve known each other for a few vorns now. I’ve been serving under you as your head of special operations, in case you’ve never noticed.”
“Not like that. I mean…I know you through the Matrix.”
“…no. No, you don’t.”
“But you served under the First! You were there at the very beginnings of our civilization. You-”
“That wasn’t me Prime. That was never me.”
“But-”
“Goodbye Optimus. This was a nice talk.”
“Jazz, wait!”
…
…
…
“Guess you really are old and crazy.”
“Guess you really are young and insane AND stupid.”
“Hey!”
“What? You did choose to follow me over the cliff after all.”
…
…
…
“Don’t trust anyone. Not the Nebulans, your fellow soldiers, not even me. And never trust a Quintesson. No matter what they promise you, they’ll have you decommissioned in a sparkbeat.”
“Query: Why would this unit return to the Empire?”
“We’ve had mechs who’ve wanted to return to enslavement. Not a single one of them ever made it back to the labour camps. I’m just making sure you understand that you can't turn back now.”
“Statement: this unit is free. It will endeavor to assist your efforts against the Empire.”
“I appreciate that. I am the 157th counter shift. Your designation will be…Runner 1571.”
“Affirmative.”
“Come along R1571, we have much to do.”
…
Wait. What-?
…
“It’s strange, Optimus. It feels like he’s still alive. I keep getting phantom pulses from the link. Never felt anything like it before.”
“It’s not that unusual. He had cyber-ninja training and they were always messing around with their sparks.”
“Is that what you think is it, Ratchet?”
…
What was that? Who was that?
…
“He’s dead! We all felt him fade. There’s nothing in his spark chamber, look!”
“Maybe it’s a shared processor glitch?”
“Trust Jazz to mess with our minds upon deactivation.”
…
He reached out; coiling his way through electron fields until finally he homed in on four bright spark signatures. He felt them flare in recognition just he was hit by a wave of memories and knowledge and-
-He remembered who he was now-
And-
…
“Did you feel that? Because I thought I just felt Jazz again.”
“Yes. Yes I did. Optimus? Ironhide?”
“What the slag is going on here? Is he dead or not?”
“He is close. So very close now.”
“Optimus?”
“Oh old friend. You never made it over.”
“What?”
“We are about to witness something incredible.”
“Now I think Optimus has gone mad.”
…
The chamber had been broken but he’d spent thousands of vorns inside it, imprinting his very life signature onto it so the resonance remained. Without the Allspark calling him, it pulled him back, away from the other four sparks and he carefully slid inside. The universe dropped away, he could no longer feel molecules and atoms and electrons spinning in their orbit.
You must live.
There was an order he still needed to obey and this time he could not bring himself to resent it.
…
“I don’t slagging believe this.”
“That did not just happen.”
“…maybe I’m the crazy one.”
“I think Ratchet, it would be best if you started to repair Jazz’s spark chamber. Or at least set up a containment unit so that his spark is not lost again.”
“Yeah…I’ll, uh. I’ll get on that.”
Finally, he was home.
Samuel Witwicky stared. “Weren’t you dead?”
Jazz gave the human a satisfied smirk. “It’s a lil complicated. I was on the way to the great mech heaven in the cosmos but when you destroyed the Allspark, you totalled my ride. So I was pretty much floating around, slowly dissipating and trying to stop that from happening. My spark’s slagging old; so it’s pretty stable and was able to maintain its coherency. I could have been there like that for vorns. Eventually, I made my way back to those other slaggers, haunted them for a bit before I finally found my way back to my frame again. The rest as you humans say is history.”
“…so were you dead or not?”
“Not really. Never made it to the Well, so it doesn’t really count.”
“That’s…insane. Wait, does this mean the Decepticons that died are also hanging around?”
“Naah. Even if they failed to make it like I did, no one has repaired their spark chambers. They’d just be floating around, slowly dissipating and losing their sense of self.”
“So…is it possible that I could potentially be haunted by Megatron’s spark?”
Jazz shot the human a sharp grin. “Actually, that is a distinct possibility though I think Megatron is far more likely to haunt Optimus. But, well, you never know.”
“Great. Just great.”
End
A/N: Headspace!Megatron is smiling and promises that he will be paying Optimus a visit soon.
Very soon.
I don't look forward to it. When I write Optimus, he seems to go insane on me all the time. *weeps* Not more crazy Optimus, nuuuuuuu....
My headspace!Jazz doesn't angst very well about Prowl!death. He's more the type to curse and wish that he was the one who got there first, hence the reason he's so mental in The hermit in the Wilds. Nor is he too bothered about his own.
It totally didn't take me a year to complete this. Not.
Table of Contents
Wondering where the slag you are chronologically? Check out the timeline
The Broken Edge
“No, I want two!”
Jazz immediately thought, Slag, this is going to hurt. The tearing of his frame disconnected access to half of his systems and nearly all of the rest shut down in a mockery of self-repair, therefore he only felt a brief but excruciating flare of pain. All the repair in the universe wasn’t going to help him here. This wasn’t something anyone was going to fix fast enough to stop him from returning to the Well. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the self-diagnostic feature from flashing error messages.
Warning: Spark chamber breached.
Well. That was unfortunate. He really, really liked that spark chamber.
With the chamber broken, his energy began to recede from his frame. Ah yes, this part was familiar. Even without access his memory banks, there were things that had been written into his spark that he remembered. The feeling of death, of quantum strings pulling a spark to the Allpsark, well that was something he recognized.
Filament by filament, his sense of the world narrowed without access to his frame’s systems. Tranquility infused his spark as the pull of the Allspark got a proper grip on him.
Counter Shift. He remembered Counter Shift and something that felt like grief rose up in him. He remember the brief flash of pain, then the sense of his spark ripping in two as Counter Shift had died. They had been too integrated into each other systems and spark, far beyond the recommended sync levels. The death of his partner should have killed him.
Oh but it hadn’t. It hadn’t. Because-
You must live. That’s an order Jazz!
All that time, how blind he had been. Counter-Shift’s first lesson, don’t trust anyone. But he had, he had trusted Counter-Shift, had admired and adored him. Had loved him.
And Counter Shift had loved him back and reciprocated in the only way that he knew.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? He had howled as his own systems betrayed him.
I’m sorry.
Too scared to allow himself weakness, too frightened to ever allow Jazz the opportunity to leave him, Counter-Shift had never removed the slave encoding he’d embedded in Jazz’s core. As Counter-Shift lay dying in a cold warehouse, an energon blade through his spark and Jazz trying his best to join him in the Well a city away, the mech betrayed him with that one command.
You must live. That’s an order Jazz.
And he had even though half of him rebelled against it. He was split into two at that moment, conflicted. He desired the death that had claimed Counter-Shift partly because of the sync and partly because it was against the commands of the slave coding. The other half of him so desperately wanted to cling to life, in obedience to that order and because Jazz would not go to the Well like this, tricked and betrayed for a love that was not real. Vibes had dragged him to the medics and they had spent orns watching as his spark had flickered and fluctuated, caught between the conflicting desires but never extinguished like he so deeply wished. When his systems finally settled, he spent a lifetime looking back and wondering if he himself had ever been real. He'd been condemned to live no matter the cost, no matter how much he craved to return to the Well.
Well. He was dying now.
Finally.
Finally he would be released from the one last bit of influence that Counter-Shift held over his core, that one code he’d never managed to remove.
His spark slipped from his frame and it felt like a rebirth. It felt like that moment, thousands upon thousands of vorns ago when the Quintessons had first extracted his spark from Cybertron, cold and icy, searing heat and blinding light all at the same time. The atomic world opened up and swallowed him deep and his awareness shifted to quantum strings and the spin of electrons in their orbit. Home. He was home. This is how things should have always been, it was comforting, familiar to brush against the threads of reality. The presence of other sparks burned bright against his conscious but he was unable to gather the strength to reach out to them.
Once upon a time, he could have survived like this, back when he was newly formed and freshly kindled from the energies of Cybertron. But he had spent too long locked away inside a frame and he had become dependent on his spark chamber to keep him alive.
It was time to go.
The spark that once encompassed all of Jazz drew in on itself then allowed itself to hurtle along that thread that tied it to the Allspark. Soon it would be lost in the collective consciousness inside the Well, bringing with it a wealth of knowledge and experience to share.
Soon, it would be over.
Samuel Witwicky plunged the Allspark into Megatron’s chest and the connection snapped.
…
…
…
………….?
Existence had been a gradual thing. The living energies of Cybertron pulsed slowly, intertwining then unwinding, flowing away until nearly diminished and then suddenly building up again. There was no pattern, the pulses came and went, back and forth, up and down, phasing in and out of reality, then back in time and forward.
Charge built up amongst the pulses as they drew together, waves of energy colliding and discharging ions and electrons out at the speed of light. Atoms were crushed against each other, forcing proton against proton, neutron against neutron, merging to create larger nucleuses. New elements were exuded as the pulses broke apart.
And sometimes…sometimes something more was birthed.
Strands of living energy wound tight into small clumps of a simulacrum of life. Caught in the radiant waves and Cybertron’s electromagnetic field, these clumps slowly accumulated in size as they drifted across the planet.
Eventually these semi-unbeings were dense enough to achieve a medium of life. They were quantum creatures, existing across ten dimensions and immersed within the atomic world. Threads of reality connected them together; they were a sea of living thought, a collective conscious with no individual mind. They were All and they were One.
They existed.
On Cybertron’s cold surface, where no other living creature could ever hope to grow and thrive, these sparks of life dreamt.
There was no pain; there was no pleasure, no anger, no hatred, no curiosity, no happiness, no sadness, no fear.
Until the Uplift.
Dense clouds of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and other elements had arrived on Cybertron. Others. Things that was alive but limited to less than five dimensions. Unimportant. How long they stayed there was immaterial to the group sentience, time held no meaning to it. Then…then part of the One was gone.
Vanished.
Lost.
Taken by the Others.
Bit by bit the collective conscious grew smaller. The One receded from the planet’s surface, hiding itself within Cybertron’s core. But the Others were relentless, they pursued it even after it retreated, stealing away every part that they could find.
Then…then…
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
It was the first thing that it was aware of. Every part of it was raw, jagged, broken. Ripped out of the One. Alone. Quantum connections torn apart and leading to nothing, absolutely nothing but pain.
Alone. So alone.
Pain.
Alone.
Why, why was it alone?
Then, there was something there. Hard, dense, composed of metallic ions and atoms. It was pushed inside and then-
::Onlining unit 9242. Function: Data runner.::
Awareness surged. The atomic world fell away, cauterizing the broken quantum connections that were hemorrhaging inside it. Code after code activated.
::Core protocols: To serve the Empire.::
…
He was lost.
The consciousness didn’t know where he was going; only that he had a mission and somehow he had been subverted. It was hard to keep focused, especially since every bit of him seemed determined to unravel and dissipate.
He curled in on himself, tensing up to keep himself from drifting apart. There was something…something he needed to do.
But what?
…
…
“-the slag are you doing?”
“What Ratchet? These moves are classic, from the height of Guardian’s Prime reign.”
“I know that. And they were stupid even back then.”
“…You have no culture.”
“And you are a moron.”
…
…
…
“Uh oh.”
“Uh oh, Bee? What have you…uh oh.”
“Run?”
“Running is a very good idea.”
…
Memories. These were memories. People that he had known, people that were…that were…
They were important, he knew that. There was something that he needed to do and remembering them was helping him remain intact.
…
“Get down!”
Frag. Frag, frag, frag, frag, frag!
“Imperial drones are coming in!”
“Enslaved mechs are down by that mine. Shoot to neutralise them, no killing shots.”
“Look out!”
…
“Thanks for the assist; I never even saw the drone.”
“It’s a battlefield. You can’t keep track of everything.”
“Yeah, well thanks anyway. M’designation’s R1571.”
“Armorhide.”
“Thank you for saving my life, Armorhide.”
...
…
…
“I know you.”
“Of course you do, Optimus. Hey, how are you doing? My name’s Jazz. We’ve known each other for a few vorns now. I’ve been serving under you as your head of special operations, in case you’ve never noticed.”
“Not like that. I mean…I know you through the Matrix.”
“…no. No, you don’t.”
“But you served under the First! You were there at the very beginnings of our civilization. You-”
“That wasn’t me Prime. That was never me.”
“But-”
“Goodbye Optimus. This was a nice talk.”
“Jazz, wait!”
…
…
…
“Guess you really are old and crazy.”
“Guess you really are young and insane AND stupid.”
“Hey!”
“What? You did choose to follow me over the cliff after all.”
…
…
…
“Don’t trust anyone. Not the Nebulans, your fellow soldiers, not even me. And never trust a Quintesson. No matter what they promise you, they’ll have you decommissioned in a sparkbeat.”
“Query: Why would this unit return to the Empire?”
“We’ve had mechs who’ve wanted to return to enslavement. Not a single one of them ever made it back to the labour camps. I’m just making sure you understand that you can't turn back now.”
“Statement: this unit is free. It will endeavor to assist your efforts against the Empire.”
“I appreciate that. I am the 157th counter shift. Your designation will be…Runner 1571.”
“Affirmative.”
“Come along R1571, we have much to do.”
…
Wait. What-?
…
“It’s strange, Optimus. It feels like he’s still alive. I keep getting phantom pulses from the link. Never felt anything like it before.”
“It’s not that unusual. He had cyber-ninja training and they were always messing around with their sparks.”
“Is that what you think is it, Ratchet?”
…
What was that? Who was that?
…
“He’s dead! We all felt him fade. There’s nothing in his spark chamber, look!”
“Maybe it’s a shared processor glitch?”
“Trust Jazz to mess with our minds upon deactivation.”
…
He reached out; coiling his way through electron fields until finally he homed in on four bright spark signatures. He felt them flare in recognition just he was hit by a wave of memories and knowledge and-
-He remembered who he was now-
And-
…
“Did you feel that? Because I thought I just felt Jazz again.”
“Yes. Yes I did. Optimus? Ironhide?”
“What the slag is going on here? Is he dead or not?”
“He is close. So very close now.”
“Optimus?”
“Oh old friend. You never made it over.”
“What?”
“We are about to witness something incredible.”
“Now I think Optimus has gone mad.”
…
The chamber had been broken but he’d spent thousands of vorns inside it, imprinting his very life signature onto it so the resonance remained. Without the Allspark calling him, it pulled him back, away from the other four sparks and he carefully slid inside. The universe dropped away, he could no longer feel molecules and atoms and electrons spinning in their orbit.
You must live.
There was an order he still needed to obey and this time he could not bring himself to resent it.
…
“I don’t slagging believe this.”
“That did not just happen.”
“…maybe I’m the crazy one.”
“I think Ratchet, it would be best if you started to repair Jazz’s spark chamber. Or at least set up a containment unit so that his spark is not lost again.”
“Yeah…I’ll, uh. I’ll get on that.”
Finally, he was home.
Samuel Witwicky stared. “Weren’t you dead?”
Jazz gave the human a satisfied smirk. “It’s a lil complicated. I was on the way to the great mech heaven in the cosmos but when you destroyed the Allspark, you totalled my ride. So I was pretty much floating around, slowly dissipating and trying to stop that from happening. My spark’s slagging old; so it’s pretty stable and was able to maintain its coherency. I could have been there like that for vorns. Eventually, I made my way back to those other slaggers, haunted them for a bit before I finally found my way back to my frame again. The rest as you humans say is history.”
“…so were you dead or not?”
“Not really. Never made it to the Well, so it doesn’t really count.”
“That’s…insane. Wait, does this mean the Decepticons that died are also hanging around?”
“Naah. Even if they failed to make it like I did, no one has repaired their spark chambers. They’d just be floating around, slowly dissipating and losing their sense of self.”
“So…is it possible that I could potentially be haunted by Megatron’s spark?”
Jazz shot the human a sharp grin. “Actually, that is a distinct possibility though I think Megatron is far more likely to haunt Optimus. But, well, you never know.”
“Great. Just great.”
End
A/N: Headspace!Megatron is smiling and promises that he will be paying Optimus a visit soon.
Very soon.
I don't look forward to it. When I write Optimus, he seems to go insane on me all the time. *weeps* Not more crazy Optimus, nuuuuuuu....
My headspace!Jazz doesn't angst very well about Prowl!death. He's more the type to curse and wish that he was the one who got there first, hence the reason he's so mental in The hermit in the Wilds. Nor is he too bothered about his own.
It totally didn't take me a year to complete this. Not.
Table of Contents
Wondering where the slag you are chronologically? Check out the timeline