Never Give Up - Part 6 of 12
Title: Never Give Up
'verse: G1
Rating: T/PG-13
Length: 50k, 12 chapters
Characters: Jazz, Prowl, ensemble
Warnings: angst, cybertronian profanity, mild Prowl/Jazz, violence
Chapter 6
The Primus-forsaken tactician had lost his fragging processor! Judging by the reaction of his comrades they thought so too. Not that the Auto-wimps would do anything about it. They just kept pointing their weapons at him, as the fragging insane mech made his demands.
Behind Skywarp, Thundercracker whimpered - not aloud, but into the trine-bond. Skywarp clenched his fists, fighting the urge to turn and tear the contaminated armour from his unconscious trine-mate's frame. Even if he made it that far before the Autobots gunned them both down, what if it was too late? What if the acid had already got inside? Hook's idea of 'treatment' for a spark-systems injury was a quick shot to end his patient's torment. Shockwave had made it fairly clear the Seekers had outlived their usefulness too. He wouldn't raise a finger-servo to prevent Hook's 'mercy'.
Skywarp looked into optics that burned like icy coals and knew he had no choice.
His hand snapped out to encircle Prowl's wrist, his denta gritted as he forced his warp generator online, despite the injuries that nearly crippled him. He was screaming with pain even before something threw itself into the warp matrix, twisting space and mass and Skywarp's processor into a tight knot.
The Seeker fell out of his warp, skidding across a corridor floor, dazed by the pain spilling from tattered wings and the ringing in his navigation processor, even before his helm impacted the wall.
"…Ow…" The voice was unfamiliar at first. Then the pained tone vanished into a far more familiar growl. "Prowl? Prowl! If that…"
"Here."
The brief response seemed to reassure. The anxious growl turned into an angry one. "For frag's sake, Sides, shut up! My processor's killing me without you yelling! Let me figure out what the fragging Seeker's got us into…"
"What I've got us into!" Skywarp's optics rebooted with a flare. The Seeker pushed himself to his feet and was across the room, shoving the bright yellow pit-spawn into a wall, before the complaints from his abused systems had time to register. He swayed, not even noticing when Sunstreaker's servos caught his arms to hold him upright. "What I've got us into? You… you just jumped into an active warp matrix! And you're going to complain because it stings a little?" Skywarp could hear the tones of his absent trine-mate in his semi-hysterical screech. Where was Screamer when they needed him? "Are you fragging insane?"
The Autobot glared at him, the brilliant blue optics seeming to consume all the output from Skywarp's slowly rebooting processor. Then Sunstreaker snorted and released his arms, stepping past the Seeker that crumpled at his feet.
"I think Prowl's got that role sewn up for the day, don't you?"
"Sunstreaker!" Prowl's voice was sharp in rebuke. Skywarp blinked up from his heap on the ground, vaguely wondering when the tactician had got so tall. "That was unwise in the extreme!"
The yellow front-liner crossed his arms across his chest, and slag it if the scowling mech wasn't even taller. "Orders to keep you in sight, remember?"
"I'll remember that when next I require such blind devotion to my orders."
Sunstreaker took a step forward, and for a moment, Skywarp half-expected a Decepticon-style knock-down. Then the front-liner backed off a step, his grumble audible but incomprehensible.
"This is wasting time." Prowl's door-wings twitched, and he moved across the room, using a sparking left leg to nudge the dazed Seeker. "Skywarp! Did we reach our destination?"
What, the purple deck plates under Skywarp's cheek-plates weren't a hint? He half-pushed himself up, ready to say as much, when a new voice answered for him.
"I believe so."
Skywarp froze, still on the ground, half-expecting to see the red menace that Sunstreaker had spoken to a moment before. The voice was wrong though and Skywarp blinked in confused incomprehension at the Autobots' pale-blue spy. "How the frag did you get there?"
Of them all, only Prowl seemed unsurprised by the encounter, and they'd already established that the tactician was missing more than a few diodes.
"Mirage, status and location, if you please."
The spy, Mirage, cycled his optics, frowning at his second in command and at the obvious damage to the mech's frame. Shaking his helm, the Ops mech visibly decided to take Prowl's sudden appearance in his stride and ask questions later. He waved a hand vaguely around him as if in illustration. "Nemesis successfully infiltrated. Bumblebee was unable to secure entry and is continuing to divert the few remaining guards on the perimeter." He peered both ways along the corridor they'd landed in, before gesturing at the door in front of them and then glancing down at Skywarp. "As you pointed out before we left, logic suggests that Shockwave may be using Starscream's laboratory in his absence."
Prowl gave Skywarp another nudge with his pede. The tactician didn't look away from the Seeker's red optics, even when Sunstreaker retrieved Prowl's fallen acid-pellet rifle. He just extended his servos in silent demand. If Skywarp was in a mood to give any Autobot credit, the confused yellow front-liner might have got a look-in for hesitating to obey that order, and lost it a moment later when he shrugged and rearmed the crazed mech. Prowl ran a hand down the stock and barrel, door-wings twitching as he scanned the rifle without shifting his gaze from the prone Seeker.
A moment later, Skywarp found himself looking down the barrel of Prowl's rifle, aimed now unflinchingly at his spark, as it had been at Thundercracker's less than a breem before. He'd have liked to say something noble about how this was the better choice, but he was Decepticon enough to admit that it'd be a slagging lie.
"Sunstreaker, I assume you're still in contact with Sideswipe."
"Yes, Prowl."
"Good. Tell him to stand by." Prowl cocked the weapon, his optics still locked with Skywarp's. "I told you to take me to Jazz," he said quietly, ignoring the gasp that came from the twin at his shoulder.
"Screamer's lab!" The half-explanation tumbled from Skywarp's lips, fear for Thundercracker and for himself mingling into a single confused mess. "I can't warp into Screamer's lab! There're shield-thingies." His hands waved vaguely in mid-air, trying to make up for his lack of words. Prowl's stony gaze didn't follow them, wasn't distracted for a moment from the Seeker's optics.
Mirage was the one who frowned, looking at the door. "It's possible. I'll try to get us in." He moved to its control panel, half a breem ticking away as he fiddled with the lock. "This may take more time to hack than we have available, Prowl. We can't afford to have you captured here. You and Sunstreaker should look for a way out before…"
Prowl's door-wings drew up sharply, the Praxian gesture close enough to a Seeker threat display that Skywarp froze. It looked like even the grounders recognised the warning, falling silent and still. Prowl's helm bowed for a long, long moment of thought and Skywarp flinched when those icy optics turned back to him. Prowl's rifle jerked, gesturing for Skywarp to rise.
"Starscream may have taken steps to prevent Skywarp's unexpected appearance inside, but I doubt he'd bar his trine-mates entirely."
If there was any fight left in Skywarp his aching wings, not to mention the desperation he felt just to have this whole slagging nightmare over with, drowned it out. He splayed his finger-servos across the plate beside the door, letting it read the pattern of electrical circuits in his fingertips. Leaning his helm against the cool steel plate, he braced himself, pulled his energy field in tight against his armour, and grated out the voice-coded access override TC had insisted they both have. "Open up, Screamer, it's an emergency!"
If it hadn't been for Thundercracker, he'd have fled and left the Autobots to deal with what they found alone. Even with his trine-mate under threat, he was tempted. It took more courage than he thought he had just to step aside and wait for the reaction.
The box sat on the lab bench, non-descript from this distance but radiating the same sense of jagged wrongness Skywarp had felt since he'd teleported it here. The feeling had only gone stronger with time, the box leaking more and more of its energy into the room as Jazz's spark threatened to dissipate. The spark monitor above the bench was active, the captive spark's activity painfully weak. Jazz still struggled, his spark frequency bouncing through the range. Peaks and troughs in its output never paused, their erratic patterns disrupting the automatic programme that tried unceasingly to align the personality components to their resonant spark. The jagged trace Skywarp had seen in Shockwave's first experiments had faded though, becoming little more than an unsteady line, the earlier rhythmic pulsations replaced by staccato outbursts and the occasional pulse that faltered or skipped entirely.
Mirage took two steps into the room and froze in horror. Sunstreaker didn't even make it that far before snarling out an oath and flinging himself back against the wall, stance defensive and optics bright.
"That…! That's Jazz…?!"
"We don't have any way of knowing that," Mirage cautioned. The spy shook himself, taking another tentative step through the unshielded and increasingly pained energy field that filled the lab.
"You think they'd do that to one of their own?" Sunstreaker demanded, blaster gripped tight between his finger-servos and back still to the wall.
"This is Shockwave's work." Mirage looked to be coping better than Skywarp would have given him credit for. Then the spy shuddered, and his distress showed clear and strong on his faceplates. "What if this is a trial subject?" He dropped his face into his hands. "We don't know. Primus, Jazz could be anywhere, could have faded already, and we can't know!"
Skywarp had been leaning against the wall for support. He braced to push away and speak up, not for the Autodolts' sake, but for Thundercracker's and for the sake of putting the poor fragger in the box out of his misery. That's when he noticed Prowl.
The Praxian tactician's door-wings were splayed in pure horror and his lips were set in a thin line as he crossed the room. There was a visible tremor in the mech, but he didn't falter, just walked into the miasma of spark energy that had driven even Shockwave back the day before.
"This is Jazz."
"Prowl…" Sunstreaker sounded uneasy, the front-liner bracing to gather his courage and push away from the wall.
On the monitor above Prowl, the spark monitor faltered and then flared. The mech's intakes stuttered in a gasp, his hand coming up to hover above the cluster of crystals and the exposed spark-chamber in a caress that never made contact. He looked up at Sunstreaker and Mirage, his optics a brilliant blue in the dim light.
"I've spent more time with Jazz than any other mech, alive or dead. I know his energy field against mine, both the one he projects and the one he tries to hide."
Mirage and Sunstreaker traded worried looks, Skywarp forgotten or ignored to one side. The spy drew in a deep cycle through his vents and took another step forward. For a moment Skywarp felt the former noble extend a rigid, tightly controlled energy field through the room. Then Mirage recoiled, stumbling back into Sunstreaker and then away as the unsettled front-liner snarled at him.
"Pain," Mirage whispered. "Distress. Fear. I couldn't get any sense of identity."
Prowl's optics hadn't moved from the scarred spark-casing, the personality nodes and the mechanism supplying both with energy.
"Jazz," he repeated softly.
"Oh, for frag's sake. Of course it's the slagging saboteur! You think Lord Megatron would let Shockwave do this to someone on a whim?"
Sunstreaker growled, his optics over-bright. "Might if it was Starscream. Couldn't help noticing your trine-loser wasn't in the fight."
Skywarp jerked upright from his pained slouch. His optics flared and his vents stalled. For the first time since Prowl and the little gunner shot him down, he forced power through his internal weapons systems, sending a shower of sparks through the energy-flooded air as his damage showed. Fury drove him forward. What Prowl had done to Thundercracker… it was harsh and way out of line for an Autobot, but it was war. Skywarp could deal with that. Not this. Even the thought that this could happen to one of his trine-mates…!
"Enough!"
Prowl's cry was accompanied by a flare in the all-pervasive energy field, a jagged sense of wrongness and angst that that sent spurs of pain even through Skywarp's locked-down field. Jazz's spark jerked from one frequency to another hard and fast enough to hurt even the strongest spark. It pulsed and stuttered frantically, before dropping down to a flicker that barely registered on the spark monitor.
"He can feel the conflict," Mirage whispered, horrified.
"Without spark-shielding and an armoured frame, he will feel every energy field in this room. Helpless. He feels so helpless." Prowl shuttered his optics, relaxed his vents and let his hand drop onto spark chamber.
The power drained from Skywarp's smoking systems. He would take the tactician out without a moment's hesitation if Thundercracker's spark wasn't on the line. That didn't stop the mech's act being one of the bravest slagging things he'd ever seen.
Prowl shuddered, his optics dimming and his door-wings trembling as pain wracked him. Skywarp expected him to snatch his hand back at any moment. He didn't expect the Praxian to hold his position, or for the saboteur's spark to pulse a little stronger and steadier in response.
Mirage had been as frozen at the rest of them. Now he stepped forward, blue optics bright with concern. "Prowl, let go! You can't let him take your power reserves. We need you strong enough to get yourself out of here. You've got to back off until we figure out how to move him."
"No!" Sunstreaker folded his arms across his chest. The sceptical note was gone from his voice, and so was the aggression, but his voice was vehement as he spoke across the spy. "Slag it, no, Mirage!" He took a step forward, ducking his helm to meet Prowl's half-shuttered optics. "Listen to me, Prowl. Vorn or two back, I took a tumble off Starscream's back. Slagged myself up worse than usual."
His Ops companion stared at him, throwing his arms up in frustration. "Is this really the time for anecdotes?"
"Jarred my personality components, and got a taste of Megatron's ion cannon and Starscream's null-rays on the way down to round off my slagging-perfect day." Sunstreaker vented hard, his optics cycling. "Most of my internal sensors burnt out - even my heads-up display. Worse, my memory started glitching. My spark and memory nodes stopped talking to one another - just for a few microklicks at a time, and Ratch had me in stasis within a few klicks, but it was still the scariest pit of a thing I've ever experienced." Skywarp blinked at the open admission. Mirage actually gasped. Sunstreaker ignored them, optics for Prowl and no-one else. "I didn't know where I was, or what was going on, or even who the frag I was, only that I was in danger, and angry and pit-scared. Ratchet told Sideswipe that he'd only give fifty-fifty that I'd come out of it sane… if my spark managed to hold out under the stress of my frame coming back to full power."
"You survived," Prowl whispered, the words barely more than a shaped breath.
"I had Sides, holding onto me with all he had, telling me I'd be fine and making sure I knew he'd care for me, even if I didn't know who he was or who I was, or even what the words pouring through my spark meant."
Prowl slumped a little, his hand not moving from the box, but his door-wings dropping low behind his back.
"Jazz doesn't have a twin. He isn't bonded."
"He has you." Sunstreaker folded his arms, his voice low and intense. "It's been Sideswipe on Ratch's table too often for me not to watch a spark monitor when I see one, Prowl. He didn't react to Skywarp coming in, or Mirage, or me. But you… you were pretty slagging certain of his energy field instantly, and by the way his spark reacted, he read yours off just as fast. You're sensing more from him than any of us, and I'm betting that fragger Shockwave never steadied him like that, just be standing there. He feels you, Prowl, and I'd lay all Sides' credits that it's the only good thing he's felt since Shockwave did this to him. You let him go now and we might as well turn around and make the Seeker warp us out of here." He nodded at the monitor, dropping the optic contact. "That's a slagging weak spark, Prowl. He needs all the help he can get."
Prowl didn't argue. His free arm snaked around the box, bending down to draw it towards the edge of the high bench and in to his chest-plates. The spark monitor screamed and Prowl froze, his backplates rigid. He was feeling what the rest of them could only see on the monitor: the captive, unprotected spark reacting with shock and distress to even the gentlest movement.
Icy terror shot through Skywarp - of what the Autobots would do to Thundercracker, and Skywarp himself, if Jazz's spark guttered there on the table. He might have a less selfless motive, but his cry of fear was as genuine as those of the mechs around him when that end seemed inevitable.
Then Jazz's spark steadied. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it strengthened - still not close to the levels Skywarp had first seen, but burning brighter than it had for days.
With the Autobot tactician bent over the box, his chestplates almost touching it, it took Skywarp a few klicks to figure out what had changed. It was the second presence filling the room, the quiet note against Jazz's symphony of pain, that clued him in, even before he saw the pale light spilling between Prowl's chestplates.
Sunstreaker spun on the spot. Mirage dropped his gaze to the deck plates with a flush on his cheeks. Skywarp wasn't a prude by any means, but even he averted his optics as he realised what Prowl had done.
It wasn't full exposure. Prowl stopped his plating when it had separated by no more than an inch, and tight-sealed spark chambers still contained Jazz and Prowl both. Even so, it was an act of intimacy that sat uncomfortably with Skywarp's image of the implacable tactician. Spark energy spilled from him, no longer baffled by his frame, no longer absorbed into powering it. His shoulder-mounted canons folded away into their subspace pocket. His door-wings slumped, his optics dimming.
Despite himself, Skywarp's gun finger twitched. With his chestplates open, Prowl was vulnerable. Even a single shot could be fatal. With the Autobot's sensors and high-powered weapons systems offline, that shot might come from anywhere and it was tempting, or so tempting to take it himself. This was an act of trust that war-raised Skywarp still struggled to show his trine-mates, in the privacy of their own quarters. To do it in front of a stranger, for the sake of a mech he wasn't even bonded to…!
But the slagging thing was that it was working. Jazz's spark still jerked and shuddered, resisting forced contact with his memory nodes in some instinctual act of defiance, but it pulsed stronger and now Prowl's optics flickered in eerie synchrony.
Mirage vented, relief and frustration mingling in his expression. The spy's servos dropped to his hips as he watched Prowl very slowly, very carefully, gather the boxed spark to his own chest. Sunstreaker slumped against the wall.
"How the frag are we going to get them back to base?"
Skywarp shook himself out of his shock. He took a bold step forward, taking the time to shunt power out of his most damaged systems and reboot the navigation computer that Sunstreaker had thoroughly scrambled.
He'd had a pit of a day - a pit of an orn really since Starscream had gone and got himself banished. He was slagged when Megatron found he'd been captured, slagged when Shockwave caught up with him, slagged when Soundwave reviewed the lab access records, slagged if the Autobots extinguished too. He wanted to know what the 'bots' medics had done with Thundercracker. He'd probably already shocked Primus into spark-failure by actually praying for his silent trine-mate. He'd had enough, and there was no fragging way he was going to let this all be for nothing!
"You don't have to," he told the Autobots, forcing his aching thrusters to take another step. His vents stuttered, drowning in an energy field that was still far from happy, and if anything stronger with Prowl to reinforce it. He gasped in a sharp vent and forced it out again. "The thing about Screamer… he's pretty keen to keep me out of his lab." Another step, a quick check that the yellow menace was still on the other side of the room. "He never…" One more step. "Never tried to keep me in."
Skywarp let himself fall forward, his vents tight, his outstretched finger-servos just brushing the tactician's pede. Prowl didn't react; the cries of the others didn't matter. Skywarp reached into his bond, searching for his stasis-locked trine-mate - if Ratchet wasn't there, he slagging well ought to be - and warped.
Nothingness shouldn't hurt.
He didn't know much, couldn't remember one moment to the next, but he knew that much.
He knew what pain was - had memories of it seared into his spark, albeit robbed now of context or meaning.
He knew what he was feeling too. The constant pressure nagging him to cooperate with some outside force was wrong. It was alien, too forceful and too eager to make him do something. The bare flickers of spark-memory that remained to him told him he must resist. Coercion must always be resisted.
He didn't know, he couldn't, that the effort was draining him with each pulse of his spark, his energy spilling into nowhere and nothing, without a frame to reflect it back to him, and no feedback encouraging it to burn brighter.
His spark was weakening. His determination remained strong - and his frustration - although he couldn't have named either emotion. He only knew, instinctively, that they were his sole defence against the fear, pain and despair that threatened to unravel him.
He felt pressure, the curious sense that, as a mech, he'd have interpreted as being watched. He'd never felt it this strong, or this close, or tugging at him with so gentle a touch. At first he was curious, reaching out. Then the feeling flared and he struggled against it, against the violence and discord that threatened to jar his fragile structure apart.
And then he wasn't alone.
A calm that wasn't his own rushed over him. There were other emotions there too - fear, pain, grief - but it was the calm and deep affection that he recognised as familiar. It was those emotions he clung to and wrapped around himself. A presence reached back, opening itself freely to him in a way that he hadn't known from any other through this long ordeal. He marvelled at it, he needed it, he longed for it, and he knew it. It was like a part of himself that had been missing for the longest time, a stability he hadn't dared find and wasn't certain he'd ever possessed. The way it had come to him… the half-formed realisation that it could turn around at any moment and leave just as fast, was the single most terrifying concept he'd ever encountered.
Weak, confused and very afraid, Jazz latched onto his lifeline with all his strength, and without words, without thought even, Prowl assured him he'd never let go.