Ep0.5 - Coming In Hot - Closed

[Deleted]

The promised high grade was the best-tasting thing that had spilled across Jazz's gustatory sensors in VORNS.

The twins were not the BEST distillers in the universe. However, they were damn good, especially if starting with something above fuel slop. And they'd only gotten better over the vorns. Jazz remembered trying some of their first efforts back in Kaon, remembered the line-stripping burn followed by the kick of a cityformer. Primus, he'd been afraid at first that they'd poisoned themselves, but then quickly lost all capacity to care.

THIS batch, though. Oh, this batch was perfect. The high grade slid over Jazz's sensors and into his tanks with a warm, electric-blue sizzle. It seeped into his system, turning every sensor report sharp, then pleasantly fuzzy, before moving on to his processor. The memory of the long, dark, quiet orns in space lost its chill, the terror of the crash its bite.

Jazz didn't always like to indulge. His wits were his biggest weapon, after all. But the rumble of vocalizers in his audios, the fields of the two mechs on either side of him, the very energon making its way through his systems was familiar, whispering of safety and friends and HOME. He let go, with gleeful abandon, taking every cube that the twins handed him and draining it dry.

Jazz had tried to resist the urge to invade their space (it was classic deep space syndrome due to social sensory deprivation, and Jazz knew it, but that didn't keep him from wanting to lean into them like a lovestruck youngling at every opportunity), but the more he'd relaxed, the less like a bad idea it'd seemed. Somehow, over the course of the cycle, he'd gone from his own couch to the floor beside the twins' couch, where he could hover, content, in the edges of their fields. The twins, like the good friends they were, had refrained from doing more in response than venting exasperatedly, making comments about turbopuppies, and handing him another cube before going back to reminiscing about the bad old days.

Jazz laughed at Sunstreaker's comment, helm clunking back against Sideswipe's knee carelessly. "Mech, you're STILL sore about that? Come on, you can't blame that one on me. It was NOT my fault that you decided to be an overachiever and show up early. You destroyed my perfectly-planned plan! Tell him, Sides!"

[Deleted]

“It was your fault,” Sideswipe pointed out, his EMF hazy with overcharge “I told you to sync time with me, but noooo you wanted to be a glory hound and run in there. I mean, yeah taking on twenty guards on your own is perfectly impressive but, you know, suicidal ish. Also, I had stop that one mech from stomping on your face. You concern me bro.” Bright blue optics flickered with glee. “But despite your basically blowing that whole plan and forcing us into a massive, three bream fire-fight, I’d like to point out that with some creative problem solving – and a lot of energon grenades – we still made the drop point in time with the goods.”

He gave a sort of mock toast of congratulations to them, kicking up his pedes on the stack of spare berth padding that they were using as a kind of make shift table and foot rest.

“Teamwork.”

The commando could not have said that word with more mocking and sarcasm if he physically tried, and having accomplished his addendum to Jazz’s story, he took another long burning swallow of high grade and let the electric static buzz of it just slide through every system. He shivered and knocked a fist against Jazz’s shoulder, grinning down at him with no particular thought in mind besides harassing the other mech. Jazz still had a touch of space crazy from being in the deep black so long alone so he was accepting punches as acceptable social currency for now… and to be honest Sides had been aching a bit for another Cybertronian that wasn’t A: trying to kill him or B: his brother.

“Course, you DID botch that one job, the… thing in Iacon. With the one femme. That crazy one with the mismatched optics. Tried to strangle me at the end of the job? I blame you personally for that one, while were on sore subjects.”

[sunstreaker]

"Slag you both. That was the best three breems of your fragging lives at the point. 'Sides, one of us had to get in there and get the party started. Might as well be me since they weren't gonna take me down anyway," Sunny rebutted, sounding perfectly superior and more than a little put out that the other two weren't appropriately grateful for the effort he'd expended on their part. "Pfft. Concern is for the weak. It's only suicide if you plan on dying. I wasn't planning on it."

He lifted his cube then, toasting himself and the truth of his statement before draining the rest of his cube. Repositioning himself on the couch so that his leg ran along Jazz's side (he was overcharged enough by this point to not really fuss about helping the other mech get over his space crazy), grinning as he drew himself a refill. "I remember that. She was about as glitched up as they came, but I woulda strangled you too for pulling that slag. Not Jazz's fault you didn't get the memo and she thought it was your fault."

This was just like so many of the cycles they three had spent back in Kaon. Talking and laughing, blaming each other for their myriad screw ups that had sometimes been survived on pure luck alone. When they had used to hide out in either the twins' or Jazz's flat, waiting for the heat to die down. A sudden burst of drunken nostalgia spread through his EMF all the way to where the edges tangled lightly with the other two bots', making him pine obscurely for days that seemed, in retrospect, a frag of a lot simpler. Sunny fell silent then, staring moodily into the glowing surface of his energon and pulling back from the other two.

[Deleted]

Jazz was more than overcharged enough to feel that wash of morose sadness as something to be soothed. It was a sparktrait: if a friend is in pain, try to soothe it. And Sunny, no matter how sappy he'd find the idea, was a friend.

Still, Jazz wasn't so overcharged that he forgot who he was dealing with. He didn't move, just flared his field briefly with support, overtones of "yeah, I get you", and the barest touch of care.

Jazz whacked Sides in the knee, since he owed him a hit and hitting was almost as good as...well...something less violent. "I'll take the blame for Iacon, fine. Fell down on the research, I admit! Reaaaally coulda handled that last bit better, too. In my defense, that job was scrap from the start. Start to finish, just beggin' to go sideways and over the edge."

He sighed. "Still. Teamwork!" He said the word with considerably more sincerity than Sideswipe had...and found that his cube was empty and he had nothing to toast with. He pouted at the bottom of his cube.

[Deleted]

“Speakin’ of,” said Sideswipe a bit more loudly than necessary, aware as he always was of his twin and the cant his moods took at any given moment. “Once you’re patched th’ slag up and have some fuel in your lines, ya gonna jet off to the States?” He reached over the back of the couch and produced another fresh cube and tossed it in a little arc toward Jazz who caught it with the same fluid ease as if he’d been completely sober – eons of hydraulic memory making a mech dangerous even while inebriated. At a high enough level, high-grade messed with your judgement but rarely motor-function. The young commando settled back down, optics focused on the saboteur. “I’m guessin’ ya came callin’ out this way looking for Team Prime, not Golden Boy an’ me in th' POS.”

As he spoke, there was a secondary conversation happening – the flash and pull dialect of the spark-split, Sideswipe never even looking at his brother but all the while transmitting his the impish arrangement of his worries across their fraternal link. He understood without asking and shared the drag of regret – the longing for a world where they could take it back. The past three deca-cycles had been good, different, living without the war and without combat in a way they hadn’t even been capable of back on Cybertron, but on an alien world, alone. Sunstreaker and Sideswipe would never let on but the twins themselves – they had a touch of space madness. Staved off perhaps by each other, but having Jazz around reminded them suddenly of what it felt like to not be alone or in a fight. Jazz reminded them, much as they loathed it, of home.

And 'home' was dead world spinning.

“Ya know,” said Sideswipe quietly, still to Jazz, “Ya know you can’t tell ‘em were here.”

[Deleted]

Jazz broke open his cube while the words and glyphs circled in his processor. They flew like aerials in the mountains of Bad Ideas, deft and graceful for now but courting smacking into something at full speed and making a colossal mess.

"I figured," he said, quietly, leaning against Sides' leg, one hand flung out to lay next-to-but-not-touching Sunstreaker. "I'd never break your cover like that. Hope you know that."

He downed half of his cube, considering the next set of twists and turns. "I was...am...looking for Prime. M'tired of being on my own. M'tired of feeling...aimless. Ready to get back into the game. Ready to kick some aft. Ready to..." ...be part of a team again, he thought but didn't say. He opened and closed a hand helplessly instead. "...Ready."

He leaned back his head to look at Sideswipe nearly upside-down. "But I'll be careful. Careful as I can be, n'that's a lot, you know that. Tell 'em I came down somewhere, tapped into the 'net and found 'em because they're bein' skragging obvious...."

[sunstreaker]

The conversation continued easily between the other two mechs, but that was no surprise. Jazz and Sideswipe had always been voluble types, prone to spitting out whatever nonsense cobbled itself together in their processors without hesitation. It was like the two of them had never heard of "filters" or "restraint". But that was okay. It was good. It was something so ridiculously normal and so long absent in the twins' lives that it hurt like re-opening connections with a detached limb; you wanted it and didn't at the same time. He could feel it from his brother,a matched longing and discomfort, as well as from Jazz in the electromagnetics of camaraderie. This was why he could hang with these two mechs: as soppy and irritatingly slag soft as their undercurrents were, none of them openly acknowledged it. They simply recognized and moved on, never making it a thing. It was simply there, unspoken, but never taken for granted.

He gave them both just enough EMF to reassure them that everything was copacetic on his end, even if far beneath that Sunny felt completely pathetic for even feeling anything to begin with. Space crazy, PTSD, simply being homesick...nothing was a good enough excuse to justify this. The utter nonchalance of the situation was the only way the mech could ever deal with it without flinging the blackest insults he could think of at his brother and his friend.

"They are skraggin' obvious. How else could the Red Menace and I know about them without them knowing about us?" And just like that, Sunstreaker was back in the conversation like he hadn't missed a beat. "And they can't." The last word was underscored heavily, making it a black and forbidden thing.

[Deleted]

And Sides unconsciously mirrored his twin, EMF darkening for an astro-kilk so quick it was there and gone and unless one were attuned to the dual frequency that was a pair of spark-splits it was liable to be missed. Sideswipe knocked back another long mouthful of high-grade, the razor edge of Sunny’s disgust (also there but for a second) was enough to bring him to a sharp alertness despite the chemical warmth gumming up his neural net. Jazz was a smart Bot and he had a read on the pair of them and if he had a real read, he’d likely back of what got twin gladiators up in a steam. You got one twin riled, plates flared, looking vicious – that was one thing. You got them both tense that was a cohesive threat.

Sideswipe consciously fenced in the emotional end of his link, mitigating the emotional bleed down the line between them, though Sunstreaker’s tensions hit him like a shot of battery acid, a direct line of anxious straight to the spark. He glanced to his partner with a vague query before laying on his smirk again. He slapped Jazz companionably on the shoulder.

“Keepin’ secrets? Jazz keeps those for shits and giggles, bro.” The red mech swing his pedes to the floor and came easily to his feet, shrugging it all off. “So, how long ya gonna park it here ‘fore you take off for Team Prime?” He didn’t hide the note of mild mockery. He beamed brightly. “We’ll send fraggin’ postcards.”

[Deleted]

Jazz was drunk, but he'd have to be dead to miss the bright flashing "Bad Slag Happened Here" signs. He was really afraid that he could see the shape the bad slag was taking in between all the not-talking-about-it they were doing.

Twins captured on an Autobot mission. Twins get tortured, get loose, kill everyone on the raiding ship that captured them...and make themselves disappear, never making contact with the Autobots again. In fact, violently AGAINST making contact with the Autobots ever again.

Jazz could think of several Bad Things that could have happened, from an undercover Decepticon in the unit to deliberate malice to someone just royally fragging up. It made Jazz look forward to getting access to an Autobot mainframe again, where he could look up exactly who had been on that mission with the twins and whether or not they were still around. Because obviously some Questions needed to be asked. Possibly with knives.

Jazz kept his field free and easy: wall of support/backup/friend, that was him. "Dunno," he said, grinning and kicking out at Sides' ankle. "A bit. It'll give me a chance to learn the lay of the land." He wiggled his cube before finishing it off. "How long ya gonna let me sit around n'drink your high grade?"

The actual answer to Sideswipe's question was "until you two stop leaning on me just as hard as I'm leaning on you", but that, of course, went unsaid.

[sunstreaker]

Optics cutting to the side, Sunstreaker returned his brother's look and felt all of those split second datablips of emotion get pulled back and carefully stashed away. Sideswipe's uncharacteristic restraint both pleased and irked the golden warrior as he shrugged off the vague query with a brusque push. Everything was honkey-dorey so long as no one told. And this was Jazz, a mech who kept secrets for a living. He knew this, but that didn't mean that he trusted Jazz entirely. If the bot thought it would benefit Team Prime more than it would inconvenience them, Sunny would not put it past the mech to report their whereabouts like a good little soldier. That was also how Jazz was. Sunny wasn't going to be blinded by friendship like his brother would. Everyone was suspect.

Thankfully his thoughts were his own and Sunstreaker didn't have to worry about Sideswipe picking up on those. There would probably be another round of lid flipping if he could, but that was neither here nor there. What was, was Jazz taking up space on their floor, drinking their high grade, and being so stupidly drunk and alive as to flirt with his brother. That was another of those utterly normal things that had been missing from their lives for too long and well, Sunny was willing to put up with it. For now.

Slapping on a smirk of his own, Sunstreaker planted a pede firmly into Jazz's shoulder and shoved. "Yer small. We'll just stuff ya inta one of the footlockers and call it done. Feed you through a tube. How's that grab ya, mech?" Then he fixed his brother with a glare from under the rim of his helm, one long black and gold servo pointing at the other bot. "And there won't be any fraggin' postcards. Unless we go somewhere really cool. Because let's face it, Jazz falling on ours heads is probably the most exciting thing to happen to us in oh...forever."

Sunny's smile turned nasty for just a moment as he completely discounted their most recent misadventures with that huge ugly Decepticon who had somehow tracked them all the way to the back edge of beyond, and hid the smile by draining the rest of his cube in one long swallow. No point in bringing up the past, right? Even if the discovery of the whole calamity was looming nigh now that the Secret Keeper and Secret Finder was on board. Another pair of cubes was fished out, one tossed at Jazz with a "think fast!", the other for himself because apparently, Sunstreaker was not as well adjusted (neither to the idea that Jazz was actually here or that he actually was kind of happy to have Jazz here) as he originally thought and he needed to get nice again. He really didn't want to ruin the moment.

[Deleted]

“There’s plenty of excellent places for you to graffiti. Stop complaining,” said Sideswipe, setting his highgrade aside and slumping perfectly lazily in his seat.

Dim blue optics roved boredly to the back of the saboteur’s helm, certain that the unknowable contents therein were likely already drawing swift lines between the dot-to-dot variables of their words and getting a pretty damn clear picture of what had and was happening here. He also trusted Jazz’s good judgment and survival instincts to keep him from doing something dumb like… directly ask them about it. He’d worked with the Twins enough to know that on the subject of one another they tended to mute themselves hard. The bizarre universe of Sunny and Sides had been a two-mech show for eons and as good as Jazz was getting into heads the fact of the matter was that the Twins thought in uniquely twisted ways.

That didn’t change the fact they liked Jazz. Like actually liked him. On a scale from one (We like you.) to ten (Sunstreaker rips your face off while Sideswipe laughs.) Jazz was somewhere around a solid two or threeish. Nevertheless, he sensed his brother was attempting to remain socially acceptable through the vague notations of what he knew to be ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and the red mech pushed himself boredly to his pedes.

He kicked Jazz’s leg lightly. “C’mon. There’s a whole bunking section we don’t use. You can pick where ya wanna berth for the night.” He knew the implication of all the dead mechs not using the beds wouldn’t bother Jazz over much. Gray morality worked like that.

[Deleted]

Jazz rocked with Sunstreaker's push, stifling a giggle at the joking image. A memory of he and Sides hiding from a slagged-off mark in a very cramped storage locker bubbled to the surface, distracting him so much that he almost didn't get his hand up in time to grab the thrown cube.

Mmmm...Primus, that high grade was good.... Jazz let it distract him, let it loosen his hold on the processes that were worried about his friends. Because there were more than a few.

Something was up, something was off, he could feel it, could piece it together from what they'd said when they were angry or sniping at each other...they were in danger, and he didn't like that...didn't like that one bit. But asking head-on was not the way to deal with the twins. Either they told you what was bothering you or they didn't. And if they didn't, they wouldn't welcome you snooping in their business. Jazz had learned that the hard way: pissed off both of them and had to work back into their good graces afterwards.

So here, now, though Jazz wanted to ask what had happened with the Autobots, wanted to ask who Sides had gotten into a fight with, wanted to ask how he could help...he didn't. Wouldn't. Knew he couldn't.

He could feel the tension in both of them. (The happy, too. They were genuinely glad to see him, which warmed his spark and that was no joke.) The tension of things unsaid, deliberately unsaid, POINTEDLY unsaid, was thick in the room.

So yeah. Jazz let the warmth of the high grade slow and terminate his over-inquisitive processes. Nothing can do. They're the twins. Let 'em be the twins. Beautiful, stubborn fraggers.

Jazz tilted his head up, thumping his fist against Sunny's leg in farewell as he stood up, maybe exaggerating how much his gyroscope spun a little. Who, me? Somethin' to worry about? Naw, I'm just an overcharged old buddy. Nothin' to see here....

Jazz gave Sides a sloppy grin. "All this and a comfy berth to pass out in, too? I am so there. Lead on, my mech, lead on."

~end