Chapter Text
Jazz could only watch on as Prowl practically fled from the hanger. The white and black mech disappeared into the dark, leaving a chaotic scene behind him. It would be almost comical if the threat of detention wasn’t the reason for Prowl’s hasty departure. Huntsgrave was steaming with barely contained anger down below. He can tell by her stance alone. Jazz knows that at least some of that anger is aimed at him, but that’s a problem for later. No, right now all he desperately wants to do is give chase, pin the other pilot down and ask the mounting list of questions that’s been piling up in Jazz’s brain. Why on earth would he bolt like that? Yeah he may have been detained for a couple of days, but mecha pilots were too valuable to have locked up in the brig for long. Unless he had committed some truly outrageous crime?
Jazz tries to shift his legs to stand, but they fail him miserably. He slides down to the cold metal of the catwalk floor, head swimming. Ok maybe he’s not quite fit to get back into Bebop. His hand reaches out for his dropped helmet but it's too far out of reach, fingertips brushing off the smooth visor glass. He just needs a minute. Then his limbs will obey him again.
“Come one man, I’ll get you and bring you to the infirmary,” a pair of hands reach under his arms and heave him up onto the stretcher, ruining Jazz’s plans of crawling back into Bebop.
The lights above blurr together in a neausating pattern so Jazz forces his eyes closed. The added motion of the stretcher being moved onto gunnery twists Jazz’s stomach even though he hasn’t had any solid food for over a day. With no kaiju to fight the stress of the last twenty four hours catches up. Fuck he’s tired, bones made of lead, limbs made of steel. Even just breathing seems exhausting.
Why did Prowl run?
Jazz loses track of time. One moment he’s still in the hanger and the next he’s being transferred to an infirmary bed. Someone shines another flashlight into his eyes, making him groan. There’s another person fiddling about Jazz’s hand. A heart monitor is taped to his finger and the cool bite of metal is placed across his forehead.
”Diddddd they catch up to Prowl?” he murmurs shifting into the bedding. Wow its actually so nice to be horizontal right now. And have his eyes closed. And not worrying about being ripped to pieces and brutally murdered.
“Jazz?”
Oh shit he had asked a question.
”Yep, yeppp, I’m awake,”
”As far as I know they are still looking for him. Dude just vanished, no one can understand how he got away so fast,”
Who was talking to him right now? He should know their name. Ah he’ll figure it out later. A soft blanket is pulled up, encasing Jazz in warmth. Ever since Felix took over as head medic the sheets in the medbay had been upgraded. They weren’t luxurious by any standard, but they were dangerously comfortable and something that Jazz found hard to resist on occasion. Now was one of those times.
”Look, get some rest. We are gonna give you an IV and wake you up in a few hours with some food, sound good?”
Oh. Yes that sounds good.
The next time Jazz peels open his eyes its to the tune of a pounding headache. He winces, the throbbing in sync with his heartbeat. It’s a familiar enemy, the consequences of being synced to Bebop for too long. Shit. He hasn’t gotten one this bad in a while. Though to be fair this was one of the longest times he’d ever been synced. His last record had been twenty-six hours before the brass had found out and put him on admin for a two whole weeks. Jokes on them, by the end of that whole affair admin were begging to never see Jazz again.
”How are you feeling Jazz, need something for the pain?”
Felix, bless him.
”Yes please,” he croaks mouth horrifically dry. It’s like the worst hangover of his life, except multiply that by a thousand and that your body thinks it’s a hundred times its actual size. Something cool rushes into his arm and the world becomes slightly less painful.
”I know eating is the last thing you want to do right now, but just have a little bit of soup and I’ll leave you alone,” the medic helps Jazz slowly sit up.
Damn it feels like he’s been run over and then smacked with a hammer for good measure. Once Felix is sure Jazz isn't going to immediately fall back asleep, a small bowl of lukewarm soup is passed into his hands. The first couple of sips is a struggle, Jazz’s brain not able to comprehend that his hand is no longer gigantic and metal but the disconnect resolves itself quickly. The soup appears to be vegetable, bland but it’s somewhat soothing on his throat. Jazz takes his time finishing it. Felix patiently waits beside him, occasionally checking his tablet until Jazz is done and takes back the bowl.
Now a tiny bit more alive with food and some morphine Jazz can actually think. And the first thing on his mind is Prowl.
”Did they get Prowl back?” he asks apprehensively “and did Blurr pull through?”
Feix raises an eyebrow before nodding dismissively.
“No, he lost us like immediately. Whoever built that mech made him fast. Blurr is… stable, at least for now,”
Jazz hums. Blurr has been struggling recently, always having some sort of issue during the most inappropriate times, though those events were always conveniently left out of the news reports. Privately Jazz thinks that Blurr had entered the programme way too late, already almost twenty when he had received his implants. Jazz had gotten his own at age twelve.
“Base not able to track him?”
“Nah the kaiju did a fucking number on the command hub. Long range communications and radar are both still out. They only got the proximity alarm back working a few hours ago. It’s a real mess and it was targeted too. Kaiju knew exactly where to go,”
“What? That’s why we lost contact in the middle of that mess?” Jazz says slowly, fully absorbing the potential implications.
“Jazz, they went straight to the radio tower. Never done that before, not to my knowledge. It’s freaked out a load of the command staff. Everyone’s on edge, though I think Prowl’s escape is bothering them too,” Felix brushes back some of his hair and sighs deeply.
“I don’t like that the kaiju are getting smarter,” Jazz says. Kaiju didn’t even usually attack military bases either. The appearance of spitters was bad enough, but this new behaviour? An uneasy feeling settled deep under Jazz’s skin. Were they ever going to win this war? Being a human was being a member of an endangered species at this point.
“Jazz speaking of Prowl, what do you know about him?” the medic lowers his voice, checking over his shoulder to make sure that they were still alone.
“What do you mean?”
”Like do you know where he came from? Command has been super quiet about him. They want him brought in immediately yet won’t give out information, only a picture of his mech, no pilot id,”
Oh. Okay that is a bit strange, even for MECHA standards. The organisation had never been a shining beacon for transparency and honesty but who knows. Jazz’s theory of Spec Ops seems to still be a good fit, except for the fact that it appears that MECHA had no idea who Prowl was either. His mech was way too small to be anything related to the Jaeger programme, their specialty in creating the absolute monster mechs capable of tangling with the Godzilla sized kaiju that came through every so often. Other nations had smaller programmes but Prowl didn’t have a strong enough accent of any kind to discern what country he could have been from.
“To be honest for most of the time I was with him his speakers and coms were broken so we weren’t really talking. Man I was super surprised to hear his voice on your med channel. He managed that kaiju attack really well though, I think that the was best tactical support we’ve ever had,” Jazz muses, making sure not to talk too loud.
“He was a bit of an ass, wouldn’t give me any information at all, said he was from Praxus. Ever heard of a place like that?”
”Praxus?”
”Yeah I googled it and came up with nothing. Jazz you said you met this guy in outer space right? Are you sure he’s even human at all?” Felix practically whispers that last part.
Jazz just stares at him, incredulous. Roddy had made the same point, even if he had been only joking at the time. Jazz would love to say that there was no chance, but his current job description was mentally linking up to a mech and fighting against ravenous aliens that arrived on Earth using portals. His life was the plot of a blockbuster sci-fi. He thinks back to the giant mech sized corridors and terminals and the vastly different style of construction compared to the kaiju warship.
Prowl himself was pretty weird, his mech was weird, his weapons were weird and he was able to read that glyph-like language on the space station.
Oh. Oh no.The blood drains from Jazz’s face.
”Jazz for fucks sake, did you not think about that option? Dude was asking basic questions and was very confused about the concept of docking his mech. What if he was an alien pilot? Different systems, different languages? He didn’t seem to understand me until he connected up to the base's network,”
Jazz’s brain has stalled, going over every single interaction he’s had with Prowl.
“He did almost shoot me the first time met,”
Felix fixes Jazz a thoroughly unimpressed look.
“Sometimes I wonder how you made it to adulthood,”
“Me too,”
Syliva Huntsgrave narrowed her eyes, brow furrowed deeply. She replays the footage again. Once more. Even with half her vision long gone, Huntsgrave knew that what she was seeing was real.
Night vision camera 4B had captured something truly intriguing. The trespassing pilot known as “Prowl” had somehow turned his mech into a vehicle and fled in the night, engine roaring on the camera’s feed. The crew sent after him didn’t stand an inch of a chance of catching up, already so far behind that they hadn’t personally witnessed the mech impossibly fold up into a completely different form. Huntsgrave zooms in to the maximum and replays it. The whole thing happens in a fraction of second, metal fluidly spilling apart and remoulding itself into a new, foreign shape.
This technology is unheard of and Huntsgrave has been around long enough to have ears in all sorts of pilot programmes across what’s left of the world. Nothing comes close to what she sees on the camera. She’s been careful with her questions, quietly acquiring each programme’s active pilot roosters, both the official and non-official versions. There’s no trace of a pilot code named “Prowl”. He doesn’t exist.
The Lt General seethes, fingers curling to tight fists under her desk. The motion aggravates some of her wounds, only increasing her anger. That such an asset has slipped through her clutches at a time like this. Several bases along the western seaboard had been attacked simultaneously. Highly unusual, a tactic that the enemy has never employed before. They never synchronised their assaults, always randomly targeting mostly civilian populations with the highest densities, not crucial military posts.
Kaiju had been only dangerous in their numbers and pure size, their demonstrated intelligence had been so limited until now. The source of their technology was still heavily debated, one assumption being that it had either been stolen or created for them by some unknown masters. Never before had they shown an inkling of organised thought behind their assaults. The emergence of spitters in the last few months had been a major blow to morale on its own, pilots suffering gruesome, grotesque deaths to their acid. Spitter attacks were brutal in that in most cases both pilot and mech were lost. If these trends continued, they would run out of functioning mechs in little under a year’s time.
Unacceptable.
Further irking her was the report that several classified files had been accessed during the assault. This unknown pilot had obliterated their cyber security with depressing ease. Less than a minute and Prowl had unfiltered access to their network. The MECHA commanders were beside themselves, convinced that the phiflered files would be splashed across the internet by dawn. The worst had not yet occurred, but it was only a matter of time in Huntsgrave’s opinion. The entire database had been copied, but was concerned the top brass the most was that even the most hidden files had been taken, files that even Huntsgrave herself was forbidden to have eyes on. Though, she knew well enough what potential dark secrets lie within them.
Had that been the plan all along? Befriend a MECHA pilot out in the field to gain access and steal intel?
Her tablet blinks, alerting Huntsgrave to a presence outside her door. She saves the footage and turns off her display, blue light flickering out of existence.
“You may enter,”
Pilot 1061 opens the door. He walks stiffly, like someone who’s rode a horse for too long, knees bending awkwardly. Typical for a pilot after a long deployment, Huntsgrave herself used to have that very same walk in her younger days. Jazz stands at a loose attention, posture sloppy. If he was anybody else….
”You are an idiot,” she says while motioning Jazz to take the seat in front of him. She’s angry at him but knows he had the best intentions, knows he’s trustworthy. Yes, if it had been anyone else that had brought this Prowl to the base they would be detained right now for treason.
”I have been told that before,” he laughs, sinking in the chair, blissfully unaware of the strings Huntsgrave had to pull to protect him.
She hadn’t expected to ever see him again. Not alive and whole, precious mind still intact. Only a handful of pilots had been dragged through kaiju portals before. Less than two had returned alive. The portals were too unstable, too unpredictable to explore. Never did they appear in the same spot twice. They weren’t like the massive undersea breaches that had been sealed before and mechs were too valuable to waste sending through almost certain death traps.
Jazz shifts slightly, trying to get into a comfortable position. Deep bags line his eyes but they still shine with a determined awareness. There’s a small, minute tremor to his hands but Huntsgrave knows that that will disappear in a day or two. The older he gets the more he looks just like his mother. Sometimes, in her weaker moments she imagines that it is Rita Gallant in front of her and not the dead woman’s son.
War has no time for such things as grief.
“We will do your official debrief first,” Huntsgrave grabs her tablet from the corner of the desk and thumbs open Jazz’s mission report. It’s half complete, several sections blank. She looks up unimpressed, but not surprised. They day they win the war will be the day that Jazz will turn in a report on time. Prepared for this, Huntsgrave takes out her keyboard and links up it to the tablet.
”Ah sorry about that, I couldn’t see straight for a while. Might be some typos too, my keyboard went missing again,” Jazz rubs the back of his neck, fidgeting.
Huntsgrave fixes him a stern glare but knows that any lecture she will give will fall on deaf ears. She’s lost count of the number of times they’ve gone through the same song and dance. Jazz will either disobey orders, piss off a superior officer or submit blank, useless reports. Sometimes all three depending on the day. If Jazz wasn’t such an excellent pilot he would have flunked out of the programme years ago with or without Huntsgrave’s clandestine interventions.
His behaviour still vexes Huntsgrave from time to time, with now being a prime example. They go through the disastrous events of the last couple of days, Huntsgrave hunting for every minuscule scrap of detail. About half way through she can tell Jazz is tiring, taking slightly longer on his replies. He digests her probing questions slowly, running them over thoroughly before answering. For all of Jazz’s loathing over writing reports, he’s a skilled orator, precise in his words when he wants to be. What he relays in person is much more interesting than what was recorded in his original report.
“You encountered Prowl on the unknown spacecraft?”
”That’s half correct, he was technically floating in space when I met him. I used Bebop’s grapplers to drag him in,” Jazz hums, fingers drumming lightly on desk.
”Did you encounter any other pilots out there like Prowl?”
”No, it was just him. Dude did run off for awhile but Bebop’s radar was still working and she didn’t detect anything else, only kaiju,”
Why was he out there alone? Huntsgrave has also looked through some of Bebop’s cam footage. The alien spacecraft has massive architecture, clearly designed for beings much larger than humans.
“You are seriously not going to arrest him right?” Jazz interrupts her line of thought.
“He unlawfully interfered with a MECHA base. Then he ignored orders to surrender and fled from custody. Jazz even if you did that you would have to spend some time in the brig,” Huntsgrave sighs, mentally ending the debrief there. Jazz looks wrecked in front of her and he clearly has some misplaced loyalty towards the fugitive pilot. Her next line of questioning may be better answered by watching the rest of Bebop’s footage instead.
”Okay, yeah I know that looks bad but I think he had like maybe, a tiny bit of oversync sickness?”
Huntsgrave raises a single eyebrow, further unimpressed by where this conservation is heading.
“And why would you think that?” she hisses. If it were anybody else in the room they would have shrunk back, fearing her infamous temper but Jazz just blinks at her. He shifts in his seat again, stretching out a leg.
”He was feeling damage as pain,” he says quietly.
Whatever anger that was brewing up burnt out instantly. Oversync sickness had crippled several pilots before scientists and medics alike realised what was happening. It was a slightly different beast to sync corruption, whereas the first affliction occurred due to sudden trauma to the neural link or spending too long linked in a single session. Oversync sickness was different in that symptoms crept up slowly. Insidious and quiet, pilots didn’t notice something was truly wrong until a tipping point had been reached. Alarming and abrupt sight and hearing loss were some of the milder consequences, but a major one was interpreting damage as real pain while piloting. A chaotic, usually irreversible rewiring of the brain was the cause. It was one of the rarer side effects of linking with mecha, but it was more common in older pilots. This was a huge problem as it forced their most successful and experienced pilots into early retirement. Due to the nature of the job, that pool of qualified people was already minuscule.
It was the reason Huntsgrave herself had to give up the pilot’s chair.
The implication of this is intriguing… The brass had been discussing the probabilities of Prowl being some sort of alien pilot. She had laughed originally at that idea but the more information she acquired, the less certain she was. How the hell did a human pilot end up so far out? No, it didn’t add up. Yet… It would be a massive coincidence for a completely different species to suffer from the same side effects as humans piloting mechs. The unknowns of all of this are driving Huntsgrave crazy. Being in the dark about this new player could get them all slaughtered if not handled correctly. She must get her hands on Prowl.
At any cost.
Huntsgrave makes sure to keep a cool, disinterested expression. She can’t let Jazz catch onto any of her suspicions, at least not yet anyway. He seems oddly attached to this stranger.
“I see. What makes you think it was oversync rather than sync corruption?” Huntgrave asks carefully. She still has dreams from her younger days. When her body was of steal and strong enough to crush kaiju with metal fists.
”I thought it was corruption at first. But, I don’t know, dude was too well put together? Didn’t really show other signs I guess. The only thing that stuck out was that his arm had damage, maybe the main support was broken. I grabbed it and heard it crunch and I thought he was going to drop right there. Didn’t mean to hurt him,” Jazz shifts again, this time in some discomfort, head resting heavily in one of his palms.
Huntsgrave sits and stews for a minute or two. Jazz looks at her, titling his head in concern. She gets up abruptly and boils the small kettle in the corner of her office for some tea. The action is to give herself some more time to think rather than actually wanting a drink. Real tea was something of a rarity these days, hard to come by for regular civilians. It was the same for coffee, only cheap synthetic substitutes were available now. Huntsgrave pours the steaming water into a pot and inhales the scent. She’s grateful for her small supply of actual tea, the rich aroma alone outcompeting its fake counterpart.
Jazz perks up when a mug of the warm liquid is placed in front of him, gluing his hands to it instantly.
“This was your mom’s favourite,” Huntsgrave says, returning to her chair.
Jazz hums in response.
”I am getting suspended or what?” He asks after a couple of sips.
“Yes. One week of suspension. You are banned from the base effective at 09:00 tomorrow. You know better and I cannot be seen to be favouring you over other pilots,” Huntsgrave sighs.
They both know that ship has long sailed. If Jazz wasn’t such a social butterfly Huntsgrave would be sure that the base would have turned on him for having preferential treatment. It did help that his piloting skills were legit, saving many of his colleagues over and over from grisly ends.
Jazz just nods his head. Bebop will be out of action for a few days anyway, but the suspension forces the pilot to actually leave the base for a little while.
“Go up to your father for a bit,”
“You know he hasn’t been talking to me,” Jazz grumbles.
”Too bad,” she replies, hiding a small grin behind her mug. Despite what Jazz may think, his father enquired about his son often.
Jazz finishes his coveted cup of tea and stands at attention.
”Permission to be dismissed?”
“Dismissed,”
Huntsgrave watches him as he gives a loose smile and turns to leave.
”Come back strong and rested, intel suggests that the next waves of attack are going to be rough,” she says.
”We’ll be ready for them,”
She wishes she had his confidence. The numbers don’t lie. At this rate they wouldn’t survive the year.
Her display lights up ahead at the touch of her fingers. She pulls up the video once more, freezing it and staring at the figure intensely.
She was going to make Prowl regret even entertaining the mere thought of escaping from her.
Even if she had to use lethal force.
Prowl onlines slowly. Nothing specific has triggered his activation sequence so he can afford to take his time. A rare treat while living through a war. The Praxian cannot physically recall the last time he let himself defrag for a full, proper cycle. His frame positivity throbs but he persistently ignores it, intently following each line of code in his boot sequence. Despite his physical condition not being ideal, the long, uninterrupted recharge does wonders for Prowl’s overworked processor. Perhaps, maybe he should have listened to Ratchet. Not that he’d ever admit that out loud. TacNet is last to come online. It's a massive, almost overwhelming presence in Prowl’s processor, yet he would feel adrift without it.
Overall it's not a terrible awakening. He pointedly ignores the list of injuries TacNet pulls up. No, right now Prowl sits deep into his new tires, wiggling them against the sand. It’s strange to feel friction, used to his hoover wheels on his previous Cybertronion alt. The new alt is slightly too small, an almost uncomfortable amount of mass has been shifted to subspace but it will work for now. Prowl spends a few clicks inspecting the changes to his frame. There’s reflective mirrors on his flanks, small seats and an interior built for housing passengers. It’s interesting to have separate controls for an organic to operate this form, not that Prowl would allow such a thing to occur.
There’s a pleasant, consistent heat warming his plates even in the shade of the shed. In full sun the heat would probably be uncomfortable but right now the Praxian was content to bask in it. The landscape around is bathed in sunlight, signaling that it is the middle of this planet’s solar cycle. Sand and dust are all that Prowl can see across the horizon. Nothing else stands out, only small dots in the distance that resemble other structures and the occasional patch of towering green plants.
Deciding to stop putting it off, Prowl pulls up his HUD and checks on the status of his irritating amount of damage. Nothing has really changed, other than the wounds he reopened scanning his new alt were dutifully closed again by self repair during his recharge. Coms are still down, Prowl is not optimistic that his own systems will be able to fix that. The Praxian deliberately ignores anything regarding his broken strut, the limb pulsing with discomfort the moment he came online. Everything else is not too terrible considering the slag that has occurred in the last cycle. His energon is at an acceptable level for now and Prowl does not want to go through the inevitable pain of transforming to refuel, that’s an issue for later.
He pushes his sensor range out as far as it can go looking for any signs of life, organic or otherwise. When he’s satisfied that nothing is going to jump out and try offline him, Prowl looks through his data caches. He has a nice bit of stolen data to parse through and starts to feed it to TacNet.
The organics call themselves humans. They are a fragile species, carbon based with no protective shell to speak off. What they lack physically seems to be traded off with an ability to adapt through any means. They appear to have decent levels of intelligence for an organic species, the ‘mechs’ they have built proving a strong understanding of mechanics at least. From what Prowl can gather they haven’t expanded far into space, their dramatic fight for survival against the kaiju hindering any scientific progress not relating to fighting being abandoned.
Which is a problem, as it immediately removes Prowl’s first plan of stealing a ship. The kaiju appear to have ships at their disposal but are rarely seen, preferring to advance using portals. Human’s only have one recorded sighting of a kaiju ship in their entire history of engagement. If Prowl had a stylus in his hand he would have probably crushed it. He vents deeply and keeps going until he comes across the files containing specs for the human’s mech suits.
Prowl is no engineer, but skimming through complicated blueprints has him in both parts intrigued and a little disturbed. Somehow these organics have figured out a way to connect flesh to steel, minds linking up to a frame many times their size. The path to that achievement has been written in their own blood, hundreds of them dying just attempting to perfect the technology. It reminds Prowl of the Decepticons, in particular of Shockwave and his foul handiwork. Thousands of files document the extreme negative effects of such technology on their pilots. Everything from permanent disability to premature death seem to be an acceptable risk. Brutal and efficient, the files reduce each life to a mere point of data, nothing more, nothing less.
These humans are determined to survive, even if the cost is to sacrifice their own souls. Prowl can’t help but feel a tiny bit of begrudging respect for them.
Prowl spends some more time combing through his stolen goods. He particularly focuses on all intel regarding kaiju. The invaders mirror the humans in their frightening ability to adapt, new and horrific forms emerging whenever an effective countermeasure is developed. The two species have been locked in a biological versus mechanical arms race, neither side refusing to submit to the other. Though in the long term, humans will become extinct. Their own strategists warn of their doom and Prowl’s quick calculations only confirm their grim predictions. It’s not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
Prowl finds the whole thing cruelly ironic. The Autobots were honestly in no better position. The timescales may be vastly different, the Autobots still had the capacity to fight for another millennia or so but the outcome would be the same. Prowl had been ruminating on the numbers for several vorns now. It made each new Autobot death burn more caustic than the last.
He hasn’t had the spark to tell Optimus, the omission of the truth, a constant dirty stain on his plating. The Praxian suspects Interlock may have a suspicion, the flier had always been eerily perceptive about such things. He vents deeply, dropping even lower into the sand, EM field saturated with shame before shifting to self-loathing.
Prowl still hadn’t adjusted for the potential loss of Optimus and the others.TacNet has the simulation ready, sitting neatly and ominously at the back of the queue. It lurks like an unwelcome presence that Prowl had been able to ignore until now. He shoves it deeper down the queue like a coward and goes back to the human data.
No point focusing on the far future, not when the current present is as unpredictable as a geostorm on the rust sea.
Prowl had to get off this rock.