Ep. 1.5 - For Richer, For Poorer - Closed

[Deleted]

<<Jazz hopping over to the DMZ, late in the day after Sides and the Twisters come in, and after he's talked to Hide at the base, determined that Shadow is missing, pleaded with an unresponsive comm channel to contact him, and set all his best cats to finding her.>>


Jazz emerged from the groundbridge into a deserted, utterly familiar Atrium, and something tight in his spark (well, one of the tight things in his spark, and wouldn't a lot of the others ease when a certain stubborn cohortmate would pick up her damned comm) relaxed just a bit. He knew that there hadn't ACTUALLY been any fighting, but somehow it seemed miraculous, given what he'd heard from the others, that the place wasn't slagged from all that had gone on inside it.

His optics lingered for a moment on the opening that led down to the mine...and then he was heading for the medbay.

When looking for a Cleaver, medbay was always a good start.

[Deleted]

Sideswipe and Cat had bridged out an hour ago, the newly arrived Twisters were prowling around their new quarters (Cleaver suspected some 'decorating' was taking place using some of the shinier and danglier parts in the storeroom), and Moonshot was solidly holed up in the Rave Cave. Left alone and churning over all the slag that had been stirred up over the last few days, Cleaver had retreated back to the Medbay, checked on Sunstreaker and, satisfied with his ongoing stability, taken a few cubes of High Grade from the still store.

Two cubes of potently charged fuel later and her sensors felt fuzzy, her ventilations had eased and the manufacturing plant was running at peak capacity. High Grade supplied a massive energy boost to the chamber, and the richness temporarily convinced her systems that fuel was plentiful thus gestation could run quicker. Good for the sparkling, but bad for her when the charge wore off and her stripped internals ached at the sparkling protocols took a little time to realise that the binge had been just that and slow back down. Cleaver didn't tend to indulge in general, and certainly not whilst carrying for the horrific hangover it would cause.

There were times, though, when there was nothing else for it.

Flicking small cogs into a metal bowl placed at the far end of the medberth, Cleaver was sipping from the third cube for every shot missed. She'd exhausted the pile just as Jazz stepped in, laying a blade across the berth for stability as she palmed the cogs back out of the bowl to start over. The ones on the floor were scuffed about by the medic's pedes but left as losses.

"Hey Jazz," she greeted when she'd returned to the stool, optics narrowed with immense concentration as she stacked the cogs into short piles. It was... kinda difficult. "Wasn't expecting to see you around."

[Deleted]

Jazz looked at Cleaver, then at the cogs, then at the bowl, then at the half-empty cube of high grade (and if that was her first, Jazz would eat one of the medberths.) It had, obviously, been one of those days.

"Hey," he said, coming closer. "Sorry I didn't call, I uh...well. Been kinda running around since I got back, checking on everyone. Figured you'd forgive me for showing up unannounced."

He reached out a hand, laying it gently on her blade. "How're you? Every bit accounted for?"

[Deleted]

"Surprisingly," Cleaver replied with a significant sense of 'disconnect' in her tone, as if speaking aloud to herself and not another mecha. She was, in retrospect, suprised that Sideswipe hadn't at least thrown something at her earlier. Something other than words and 'wave, though those had been injurious enough.

You're a coward scrapin' for absolution on th' dregs of civil war, followin' misery 'round, lookin' for somethin' to "fix" to make yourself feel better.

I was dead – you got me, ripped me apart, hid it from your commander, and saved the day. And she ruined it because she’s a factionless do-gooder meddling in others’ lives.

You can't even say sorry right, femme.

She took the hand on her blade as permission, factored it in against what Jazz had been like before, and neatly hooked him up into her lap a second later. His solid, compact mass against her plates was instinctually reassuring, and she rested her helm against his to flick another cog at the bowl. It rattled inside and she grimaced, leaving the cube untouched. Tightened her arms a little around his body in not-quite-a-hug.

"Really fragged things up, an' I didn't even realise... 'mean, it just got this, momentum, and..." She shook her helm in a twitch, forcibly cutting off the processor thread and picking up the cube again instead. Drained it, realised that she'd have to let Jazz down to get another, and settled for just sitting like this for a klik instead. "How's everyone? Shadowrunner."

[Deleted]

<<Winging some details of how things'll go earlier than this. Let me know if anything needs to be changed!>>

Jazz leaned his helm against Cleaver's shoulder, wishing that she'd not finished that cube so he could snag it. He'd not recharged since he and Rhinox had arrived back at the base and everything had gone from happy fun times to disaster in 0.2 kliks.

Jazz vented a sigh, a thread that had been repeating ever since he'd asked where Shadow was...still repeating in his processor. Panicking will not help. Panicking. Will not. Help.

Jazz had been a spec ops agent for most of his life, and a great deal of the rest had been spent on the streets, wheeling and dealing and doing whatever needed to be done to keep himself alive. His processor was tuned for quick thinking, multi-threaded factor analysis, and a good deal of plain old whiplash, bearings-to-the-wall decision-making. This did not, however, mean that he was rash, or irrational, or prone to useless activity, even in a crisis.

ESPECIALLY in a crisis. Panicking in a crisis got you nothing.

And this...this definitely qualified as a crisis. Ironhide toweringly angry and frustrated and under house arrest. Prime even more closed-off than normal. Bluestreak curled up in corners, popping stimulants so ou wouldn't have to recharge and deal with nightmares about Barricade. Cleaver the nucleus of the whole explosion and Shadow....

"Shadow's...no one knows where she is. She hasn't been to the base. Hasn't called in. Disabled her transponder and isn't answering her comm." Panicking will not help. "She's still on this continent, likely, but...we don't know where. We're looking, doing everything we can, but...nothing yet."

Jazz's one, thin hope came from the fact that Shadow's transponder had been manually shut off and had given no signal of trauma that one would expect if she had been deactivated. Jazz clung to that, to the reports that she'd been furious, to the idea that she was just hiding, rather than the quiet thread that suggested she'd been captured and that shutting off Shadow's transponder had been just the first part of the game.

Jazz had done everything he could think of. After he'd gotten done talking to Ironhide, he'd pleaded into a silent comm line for Shadow to just let them know she was alive. After comforting a shaking and clinging Bluestreak, Jazz had tried searching for the energon signal from her tanks, a hint of stray Cybertronian transmissions, ANYTHING.... He'd done everything short of driving around in circles in Africa, looking for her. In the end, he'd left Steeljaw hacking into and combing through satellite data, trying to track her down in real-time, because Jaws was, at this point on the lack-of-recharge curve, better at that than Jazz was.

Jazz had given Jaws orders to let him know the VERY SECOND he found anything even hinting at Shadow's whereabouts and stumbled through the groundbridge to find Cleaver, his spark spinning with the need to find as much of his cohort as he could because he was FAILING at finding all of it....

Not helping.

"Everyone else is...all right. 'Hide's under house arrest, Blue's a mess, but they're...safe." Jazz's hands closed around Cleaver's shoulder plates. "'N you're safe. Both of ya. S'good."

[Deleted]

Cleaver had assumed that Shadowrunner would have been back at the Autobot Base by now - either tracked down or coaxed back by her cohort. To hear that she was not only missing but hadn't been heard from since she'd torn out of the Atrium sent a sick chill across the femme's plates.

She realised she was squeezing the smaller mech and loosened her arms, though his grip back on her remained solid.

"You on-duty or can you take a cube?"

<<OOC: Apologies for the short tag - just wanted to ge this moving again. Feel free to puppet fetching and initial sips. Cleaver's gonna be keeping Jazz a hug-hostage for the time being.>>

[Deleted]

Jazz huffed a largely humorless laugh without raising his head from Cleaver's shoulder or letting go. In fact, since she was talking about getting something, he snugged his knees tight against her side to hold himself there just in case she moved. "Frag, yes, please."

Cleaver, after a silent querying glyph, just let him cling to her side as as she got up and fetched another cube. Jazz even helpfully reached out to steady them against the wall as she returned to her seat. He took the cube from her and took a good drought of it. It had a different aftertaste than Ironhide's still, not that Jazz noted it anything but in passing. The fuel hit his tanks--still low-ish from the road-trip--with a bloom of heat and eased warnings.

Only then did he reply to the rest of what she'd said earlier with a wash of support-care-cohort-available/open-need to talk?.

[Deleted]

Cleaver twitched her helm when Jazz offered back the cube, closing her hand across his hip and sighing into the grey haze of his misery. Something in the chamber rattled hot close to his helm and she pulled him, somehow, tighter to her chassis.

"Think you've already got enough on your pallet, love." Most of it my fault. And you don't even know about Sideswipe...

A short, bitter little engine rumble - agitation with herself. Her rotors flared outwards and fell back into rest in little jerks. "Don't need my..." She trailed off, Sideswipe's words burning in her audio receptors, and kissed the top of the centre crest on his helm instead, optics High-Grade bright. "M'fine. Safe, like you said. Still gonna be here when, whatever happens."

She missed Ironhide. She was horrified with him - the records of Barricade's shattered frame as vivid as Shadowrunner's flung file. She could understand, barely, why - cohort and vengence - but not how.

It didn't fit with what she'd known of him.

You cabling up with him?

Guardian. Autobot. Soldier.

The spark breacher?

Sire to the bitlet still forming in her chassis, sharing his spark resonance even if he didn't understand it.

"Gonna be a while 'fore he's allowed off-base, isn't it?"

[Deleted]

Jazz obligingly plastered himself against her chassis, arms and legs winding around to give the biggest amount of surface area covered. His keen audios could HEAR her systems clanking and clinking and BUILDING. Building a sparkling. Whatever else happened, that was a miracle. Jazz could only hope that they could do it justice.

"It's...yeah. I've...got no idea what's gonna happen there. Never seen Ironhide this furious with Prime, nor Prime this furious with Ironhide, though he hides it behind that wall he gets whenever he needs to make Primely decisions. They'll work it out, somehow, eventually, just because they have to and really, what ELSE are they gonna do, but no idea how much they'll tear each other up in the meantime."

Jazz sighed. "Prime's...never really gotten how much Guardian coding 'Hide still has, I think. Has no idea...or doesn't WANT to have any idea what it MEANS. That coding'll sharpen 'Hide's focus down to a molecular point: do whatever it takes to protect what you're supposed to protect. Whatever. Anything. Because that's what the Guardians WERE. That was what they were MEANT to do: protect Cybertron at any cost. No one knew that eventually they'd get tossed at other Cybertronians. No one ever thought that that same coding can lead to...well." Jazz let his glyphs trail off into self-evidence and obviousness.

He shrugged slightly, the movement pressed into Cleaver's plates at multiple points. "We'll deal. All of us." Cohort. "Means you, too. Never too much on my pallet for cohort, hon. M'always here to listen. Might fall into recharge on you, but just, y'know, continue when I wake up."


<<We can take this however long you'd like on this, or move to gdocs whenever. S'up to you! >>

[Deleted]

"I... I know. Understand." The glyphs framing the words were entirely connected with Ironhide.

Cleaver left the cube on the berth, running a quick estimate on how long it would take to burn through the High Grade already running hot through her systems, and for the manufacturing plant to figure itself out again once it ran out and stopped bleeding her lines dry. It was gonna be... a little while before she could transform without purging mid-sequence, let alone fly safely. Tomorrow. She'd start looking tomorrow.

For now, though, she just shifted her plates about to better mesh against Jazz's chassis, burying shamelessly into his field and the warmth of his systems. He was solid in her arms, an anchoring point, another Cybertronian who wasn't hiding or missing or confined indefinitely away from her, or pouring pure rage and hate into her field so hard it felt like she'd been physically beaten.

Her field clenched, shook with the same high-pitched frequency of pain as it had before for just a moment before it was throttled back dwn. If she held Jazz any tighter she was going to hurt him.

::I don't know what I'm doing any more.:: she spoke over contact-comm., not trusting her vocaliser. Not wanting to make a sound, to even be a presence right now with an urge so sudden and powerful that it shook her.

She wanted Sunstreaker to wake up. She wanted to take a strut-saw to Barricade's spinal linkages. She wanted to leave before the sparkling emerged, before it could be found and taken and her plates stripped and parts slaved to crank out more. She wanted Shadowrunner to be okay and safe and home with her cohort with the Autobots. She wanted Ironhide here, because Moonshot was hiding and Sideswipe hated her and she was terrified of Barricade coming back with no one to stop him. She wanted to be less of a coward. Less of a Towerling. She wanted everything she couldn't have right now and despite the High Grade and Jazz's field and clinging frame it was all tearing at her processor again and it felt like she was coming apart.

::Everything's so fragged up. It wasn't meant to belike this.::

[Deleted]

Jazz offlined his optics, his field sliding in to harmonize in sympathy with the harmonics of regret and loss and self-hatred in her field and ease them with care-support-forgiveness-understanding. ::I know. You did your best. I know that, and Ironhide knows that, and this will PASS, sweetspark. It will.::

Jazz had on his to-do list to ask Cleaver what had happened, to get her viewpoint to add to Ironhide's, but that was obviously not an item for NOW, while both of them were exhausted and had more than a little high grade in their systems. Cleaver's field bled horror and hurt and self-loathing, and that was never a frame of mind in which to have deep discussions.

So, instead he pulled her close, microtransformations rippling over his plates to match her own, to allow him to settle against her, close as a piece of her own alt transformation. He tucked his head in against her chassis, his EM field lapping against her own: cohort-stability-support. ::Cleaver, dearspark, I know it feels like the smelter. I know. But we love you, and it will be all right.::

Love.

[Deleted]

Cleaver was silent for a full half-breem, optics cycled down and focussed entirely on the enveloping warmth and security of Jazz's field, so large, powerful and genuine it couldn't be ignored. He'd synced perfectly with her systems, and slotted their plates so tight and entangled that under other circumstances, they'd be a nanoklik away from cabling.

This wasn't anything like that, though - and it was a strange thing to be so close to another mecha, plates locked and fields freely - wantonly - merged, and it be purely for comfort and solidarity. The file Ironhide had shared with her of his old cohort piled and sprawled together like a creche of sparklings came to mind. This was what he'd been talking about, and struggling to see how a cohort wouldn't, even couldn't be like that.

Half a breem of Jazz's close, reassuring and patient silence brought her back from the edge, back into the muzzy haze of High Grade with the rest of the slag stewing underneath. Cleaver shifted her helm a little, rubbing the top of his with her jaw.

"Shadowrunner doesn't trust me. Hates me." No pain in it - just a statement of fact. Cleaver found herself looking at Sunstreaker. "Put her first, alright? I'll be alright on my own for a bit."

She shuttered her optics again and turned her face away, cheek grazing across one of the silver mech's horns. "Better off at it, even. Only frag things up for myself and not anyone else. 's been the problem - making decisions, scrap ones, that affect others. 's what happened with Megatron. Barricade was just... I had no idea."

The femme straightened a little, rotors shifting with a quiet buzz, still holding Jazz but no longer clinging to him like a lifeline. She grit her dente, optics hazing to near white at their edges. "He'll come back. Bastard'll do it just for fun."

[Deleted]

"Will," Jazz agreed, field glacially serene, with a roil of vicious protectiveness under it. "He's like that. He'll come back to hang about just because he can and because he knows it scares ya. Sadistic fragger."

Jazz's hand reached up, stroking along the cables in Cleaver's neck. His glyphs dipped tiredly, Kaon-inflected. "But he won't be back for YOU. If Megatron's himself again...well, he's done a lot, but he's always abided by a properly-agreed-upon Neutral zone. He's not gonna to let anyone hurt ya, not even Barricade."

And if he does, Jazz thought calmly, I get to join 'Hide in the brig, because I will ENJOY finishing what he started with that glitchsparked fragger.

His fingers petted over Cleaver's collar fairing. "Y'did your best, best as you could. Couldn't have asked for more. And I'm gonna take care of both you AND Shadow, if ya don't mind." He nudged her, their plates so enmeshed that it was a full-body thing. "We're lookin' for her. Have Jaws combing satellite footage for her, and I'll get back to it soon's I can. We'll find her. We'll bring her back. S'all that matters. Everything else...we'll deal with."

Shadow was alive. Shadow would be coaxed, wheedled, bribed, or carried forcibly back to safety, sure as Jazz'd drag her off a battlefield. And then, THEN they could deal with all the interpersonal slag. That was Jazz's story, and he was sticking to it.

[Deleted]

Jazz's field was always, no doubt in many diverse circumstances, influential. Convincing in its solid confidence, underwritten with the ever-present frequencies that made him so charismatic and willingly believed. Cleaver, cratered and exhausted, finally stopped lashing herself with a low hum of acceptance and gratitude.

"Need to sleep this off," she mumbled into his neck, rotors shifting with a slow whine. "Flying tomorrow. See if I can help narrow down the search."

When Jazz remained enmeshed with her plates, apparently content to remain seated in her lap with his arms tucked about her chassis, Cleaver cupped the back of his helm and pressed her mouth just above a sensory horn. "Thank you. You've made this day... bearable."

[Deleted]

Jazz settled in, humming contentedly at the kiss and the general downshift of Cleaver's systems. "Y'welcome, hon. And thanks. We really could use some air support on this, n'...it'll really help." Good for her, good for the cohort. Couldn't ask for better than that.

Jazz's systems were partitioned to the Pit and back, bits of him working furiously in a dozen directions: tactical, strategic, contingencies....all focused on Operation Get Shadow Back, part of the larger Operation Fix Cohort and Wrap It In Bubblewrap. He didn't want to recharge, wanted to keep all those threads up and zooming away, but he was exhausted. Too much fun with Rhinox, then too much slag happening to too important mecha. He needed recharge and a defrag desperately.

Jazz split the difference, queueing an abbreviated recharge cycle, during which a few of the more important threads worked in the background. It would be enough.

He vented a sigh, leaning into Cleaver's larger mass, pressing comfort-love-cohort into her field. He patted whatever parts of her happened to be under his hands, tucking his helm up under her chin. "Rest. Then fixin' scrap. S'good plan."

It was. Jazz gave his threads, then his cohortmate, one more check-over and a pat goodnight.

And he wasn't much of a praying mech. So he didn't pray. He did, however, inform Primus that Shadow was a good femme who deserved a break and that it would be supremely unfair for her to suffer due to everyone else's scrap and slag. Just, y'know, in case Primus wasn't paying attention.

<fin>