Ep 1 - History Lessons (closed)

Jazz's steps toward the residential section were a bit slow. Not even because of the high grade. Having his frame threatened by a mech five times your mass was enough to burn through what had been lurking in his systems.

No, Jazz was poring over the room assignments. Fortress Maximus hadn't been assigned one yet, and Jazz debated taking the liberty of doing it himself. There were several ex-storage rooms at the end of the "residential" hall that would fit him. But to put him close to the ex-Decepticon he'd nearly throttled, or AWAY from? Jazz couldn't tell. The issue was going to have to be dealt with one way or the other. There was no way they could avoid each other even if Jazz wanted to (which he didn't). He just couldn't tell what would resolve things sooner...seeing Jazz go about his peaceful business or seeing him as little as possible....

He tabled the thought when he saw a familiar frame waiting in the hall. He smiled as he walked toward her. "Hey, Shadow. Back already? Kinda lost track of time."

It's not really important. Translation via Shadow-to-Cybertronian dictionary: "It's important to me but I think that I'm not important so in the grand scheme of the universe it's not important."

Jazz was getting good at engaging that dictionary. V. helpful, it was.

He bumped his shoulder against Shadow's. "Anything you need to talk about is important to me. No foolin'." Her field felt agitated, but he was glad that she'd sought him out to talk about it rather than stewing in it. And pretty quickly, too, as she'd seemed fine at the party.

He slowed to an amble. "You want to talk about this here? Or your room or 'Hide's?" Ironhide's room had become the default cohort gathering place. It had the biggest berth and the most pillows.

Jazz just stood there as the door closed behind him, optics resetting for a long moment. "You...frag, you didn't know, did you? I never...I never told you." Never told her, and her, conditioned since before she could remember to see the Decepticons as enemies. No nuance, no decision made on her own, simply....told unwavering and final truth like it'd been uploaded to her.

Primus on a shuttle, what the frag was WITH his past coming back to haunt him tonight?

Jazz started a light defrag, trying to clear out the last of the post-overcharge fuzz in his processor. He walked over to Shadow, sitting facing her with a pillow between them. "It's true, Shadow. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before. It...it didn't occur to me, to be honest. It's in my records in big sparkly glyphs and has been since I joined. Everyone knows, practically. Prime, 'Hide, all the cohort, just about anyone I've ever worked with or served under. I don't keep it a secret. It's just been so long, to most mecha it either doesn't matter or they find out right away and make it pretty obvious."

Jazz considered, like he'd learned to, not only what Shadow was asking but also what the fears behind it might be. "I was a Decepticon, megavorn ago. I'll tell you the whole story, but before that I want to say that it honestly has very little to do with me now. I'm an Autobot, and I have been forever, and nothing's going to change that. I switched sides because I chose to, because I thought it was the right thing to do, and nothing's changed since then. I'm here to stay, and I hope that my past doesn't make you question my loyalty or my feelings for you or anyone else in the cohort."

He turned up his hands, offering. "I'm still me. Same ol' Jazz."

First thing's first. Jazz crawled over to Shadow's side, putting an arm around her and tucking her--pillow and all-- in against his side. He let his field wash over hers, modulating to sync as best he could in a steady hum of affection and love. "No reason you should have known, hon. I just wasn't thinking. Going on pattern when I should have known better. It's not your fault."

He hiked his hip up on a pillow so he could press a cheek to the top of her helm. "And the answer is...complicated. Understanding it'll take knowing who I was, who Megatron and Prime were, what Cybertron was LIKE then." He vented a sigh. It was hard to know where to start. Especially since she was so young. She probably didn't even remember much of Cybertron before the war. Before the war had made all the things that he'd signed up to fight for moot points.

Best place to start was the beginning, he supposed. He leaned back. "Gonna tell you a story that I've never told anyone, 'kay? It's not a secret, really, not now, just...private. Still carries some stigma, even today, and most of all I like mecha to judge me based on who I am, rather than what I was built for. And I was built to be a slave. Oh, they didn't call it that, called it 'servitor class', but it was slavery, same as if I'd been chained in a mine. I was sparked, along with about twenty others who looked very much like me, to be a servant for a high-caste lord. We were trained to serve. Serving energon, cleaning, entertaining, keeping the lord's schedule, keeping the estate supplied and running smoothly...that was what the servitors did. We were brought online in batches and kliks later uploaded with the most basic of service techniques and some behavioral modulators to make sure that we were deferential and polite. And by modulators I don't just mean a list of rules and a fingershake. I mean that we were programmed to respect and fear the aristocracy. We were programmed to think that we should do whatever we could to please them and that to do anything else was unthinkable. Our very sparks were shaped that way."

Jazz smiled wryly. "You've seen how I am. I make peace. I smooth the edges. I negotiate. I like making mecha happy. And I'm willing to bet every credit I ever earned, begged, or stole that that was on purpose. I was MADE to bow to authority and avoid conflict. Which is pretty hilarious, all considered, I think you'll agree."



<<I'll try and break up storytime to give Shadow a chance to reply. Feel free to derail Jazz with questions at any point here. I'll drag him back onto topic eventually. >>

Jazz pressed his mouth to the side of her helm. "No reason to be sorry. If I didn't want you to ask questions about it, wouldn't have brought it up. And you always have the right to ask questions of cohort, hon. We may not answer, may give you reasons why, but you always can ask. Always."

He was quiet for a long moment, because Primus, wasn't her question a hard one? "And this is me, Shadow. All that behavioral programming's long gone." Having been cracked open and scoured by TWO factions' spec ops divisions meant he was very, very alone in his head. "This is the me that I choose to be. Maybe I was chosen because my spark likes makin' people happy. But I won't hate that just because someone else liked it. This--" he tightened an arm around her waist. "--this is sparktrait. But what they wanted because they wanted me to serve them, I do now because you're cohort and I don't want to see you upset. It's like bein' born with tools...or weapons. Just because someone thought you would be useful that way doesn't mean that you can't take what they gave you and do what YOU want with it."

He wondered what she was thinking about all this, what with all the pits that Lab had dug. Some day he hoped that she could really face what Labyrinth had done to her, but he was fairly sure that this was not that day. Still, he'd been afraid that even skirting around the issue of personal agency might make her think too hard about it too fast. She seemed ok, though, which was a relief...since she'd surprised him enough that he'd not known he was skirting that particular issue until he was halfway through his explanation.

"And even aside from all that, no reason for secrets in this cohort. I want you to be comfortable with me, and that means that you should know the truth."

And there, Jazz thought, was the crux. Twice now, her focus had been on Megatron. Not the cause, not any issue, but on the leader and what he'd become. Which made sense, really, given how her life had been about the all-powerful leader that made her decisions for her, but it missed a lot of the context and real reason that Jazz had joined up. He wondered how much sense his explanation was going to make and how much was just going to be filed under "those strange, inexplicable things Jazz does".

He tried to queue up his thoughts. "Well...because he seemed to want the same things I did. I was living in Kaon at the time. I'd been there for awhile, living hand to tank, and I thought I'd seen it all: the corruption that kept the Council and all their lackeys at the top without anyone to stop them. How we were all expected to work for them, when they paid us barely enough to survive on. How a mech could starve to death just from sheer bad luck or old age if they couldn't pay for repairs. How hardly any good repairs were available, because hey, who'd want to come work for what we could pay them when they could get something better? How the priests wouldn't even think about sparking a working-class frame unless you could scrape up a good enough bribe, and even then they'd make you feel like dirt under their pedes. And that...that wasn't all. It was a thousand things like that: how they had everything and WOULD have everything, always, just because of where they'd been sparked, while we busted our plates mining their energon or cleaning their mansions or working in their factories or killing each other just for the drops that fell from their empty cubes."

Jazz stopped. It still made him angry. Still. Millions of years later. Because it had been.... "Unfair. It was unfair, I guess is what I'm saying. They didn't see us as mecha like them. We were cogs. Cogs in a machine that served them. They didn't care that we had cohorts to support or might have been just as strong and talented as they were. All they wanted us to do was stay where we were and keep making sure that they could live how they wanted. And they had all the power. There were laws specifically MADE to make sure that poor mecha like me couldn't advance. Couldn't live in certain places. Couldn't make more than a certain amount. Couldn't say anything against the upper classes. And when we did...when the first rumblings of dissent rolled through, when it became clear that the upper castes were dealing with some well and truly fragged off mechs that weren't going away...well, they just made us disappear. I knew mecha who were kidnapped, threatened, tortured, killed, all to protect the system. All to stifle dissent or just because someone mouthed off to the wrong person. All so we'd be frightened and crawl back to where they wanted us."

"And Megatronus...I don't know how much you know about him, from then. He was a gladiator in Kaon. Poor, stepped on by the elite, same as me, same as just about everyone I knew. He wasn't...as...." Jazz groped for the right words. The right words that she wouldn't take wrong. "...as hard, as unforgiving and cold as he is now. He was just a mech. A powerful, smart mech who wanted things to be better. And he was a great speaker. I can...I can still hear bits of his speeches in what I just told you. He was inspired and outraged and determined, and he had plans to make things better. To CHANGE things, which was, literally, a revolutionary idea, then. He wanted mecha to be fairly paid, fairly treated. He wanted to break the stranglehold the Council had on all of us, to tear down the laws that held us back. To make the economy more equal, to make it POSSIBLE for mecha like me to do something other than break my struts in a factory or hustle on the streets."

Jazz hesitated, rolling the old, old memories out of archive. His voice and field were wistful. "They were good ideas. Just ideas. And y'know what, I still believe that. There needed to be change. There needed to be justice done. And that's...that's why I joined up."

Jazz looked down at Shadow. "You have to understand...the Decepticons as they are now...aren't what they were when I joined. When I joined...they were fighting for freedom. Equality. Prosperity for all. Ideals that were...good things to strive for. Good things to fight for."

He shrugged a little. "So...that's why."

Jazz huffed a laugh. A bit on the dry side, but a laugh nonetheless.

The day when Jazz couldn't laugh at least a bit at the utter fragging tragedy that their race had become was the day Ironhide was sworn to magcuff him for his own and everyone else's good.

"Yeah. Does, doesn't it?" he said, his optics coming back from wherever they'd been. Shadow's field, clamped tight with fear, made him pulse reassurance to her. "It's hard to hold onto your moral high ground once you start killing people. It...spirals out of control. You can't control everyone, especially when everyone's so fragging angry. Innocents get caught in the middle, both sides say the other's full of monsters, and in the end...."

He shook his head, slightly, his glyphs trailing along with markers for here, now[/i}. "In the end, it takes a strong mech to hold onto that beast. And Megatron wasn't strong enough. None of us were. But it's hard...it's hard to see that when you're in the middle of it. Hard to see beyond the next battle, the next cube, the next...the next mission. Hard to see that you're no longer headed where you want to go, when the road gets dark."