Work Text:
Tac net refused to cycle down and simultaneously refused to incorporate new data. It looped again as Prowl’s gyroscopes registered the ground sloping underneath Megatron’s steady stride. Trying to incorporate real-time sensor data while the tacnet was running endless forking strategy trees was causing some major inconsistencies edging towards incapacitatingly painful. He closed his audials and offlined his optics and focused solely on the generative possibilities, endless iterations of if/then sequences spiraling into wildly different circumstances. Times and places that could have been, should events have progressed differently. Prowl, lacking other occupations, became lost.
Prowl shifted his weight, fanning his doorwings to look for openings. There were none, of course, behind him in this little cave. The ambush that caught him and his squad was too well-crafted. The Polyhexian forces would surely not have made such a basic error as leaving him in a holding area he could escape.
Not if Prowl estimated their leader correctly, and he was sure he did.
The air stirred and Prowl couldn’t stop himself from drawing to attention. He was viciously aware that even aside from the indignity of being captured, he did not look his best—campaigning left precious little time for tending one’s paintjob, beyond the basics required to maintain health—but he still rotated his wings to an exactingly correct position, raised his shoulders, and smoothed his field.
“Hey, Prowl,” Prince Jazz said, strolling into his line of sight like he had all the time in the world. “Long time no see.”
This was true. It had been a long time. Prowl had spent much of it considering what he would say when they met again, planning out a hundred witty things and discarding them all along with another hundred embarrassingly sincere things.
“You look well,” Prowl said and then locked his jaw to keep anything else from escaping.
“Better’n you,” Jazz said, with a wonderful laugh. He bit it off before Prowl could really appreciate it. He seemed to do that a lot these days. “So. You’re a prisoner of the king of Polyhex, through yours truly.” Yes. Prowl could imagine he was. They had found out he was important, important enough to take captive instead of killing. “D’you know what that means?”
“You believe I will provide you with information.” It would be the reason they wanted him captive. At this point in the war he would know the better part of Megatron’s strategy.
“Me? Oh, nah, nah. I know you better. You don’t break.” It was satisfying to have proved himself in this, at least. Satisfying to see Jazz saying it. For all his other faults, it did not break. “Prowl. Do you know what you being the prisoner of the king of Polyhex means?”
Prowl considered this. Would he know? By now King Punch had a certain reputation, even if Iacon had repeatedly been foiled in attempts to smuggle spies into his court.
“I am at his mercy,” Prowl said. That was clear. Jazz would not flinch, or say anything to confirm what they both knew to be true. The king had none.
“Yeah,” Jazz said, leaning back. “S’pose I don’t have to warn you of the consequences of being caught escaping.”
Prowl had come to understand Jazz far better after their reunion. Enough to accurately shape his tac net’s probabilities. Jazz did not speak easily of what he wanted, but he always, without fail, spoke with absolute deliberation.
“I can imagine any escape would reflect poorly on your command,” Prowl said, returning the favor.
“You just worry about yourself now,” Jazz said, evenly.
Prowl attempted to reject that suggestion as unproductive, but tacnet produced a previously unknown override refusing to allow him to deprioritize his own well-being. He could not let the possibility tree of his own escape fall below 50%.
The advantage of a purely constructed scenario meant that he could pursue both options.
Escape was simple, if not easy. They were still in contested territory. All Prowl would have to do is wait for a suitable ambush as a distraction and make for his own lines.
It would have been even simpler if he had not also chosen to find a scenario where he could bring Jazz with him. It was not, technically, against the injunction to just worry about himself. He could not worry about his own well-being without also worrying about Jazz’s.
Tac net ran and reran scenarios until it found a causal chain of events where Prowl was able to delay the travel party exactly the right amount to be caught by an Iaconian patrol, gain the upper hand on Jazz, and transfer them both into a camp under Prowl’s control.
The scenario being dependent on a base state which would cause Prowl to be captured by the Polyhexian forces necessitated the war being in a more complicated phase. A capture here was not as neatly followed by the conditions requiring Polyhex’s surrender as events had truly played out. Prowl found himself playing out an extend period of holding Jazz prisoner. And of course, Jazz being Jazz, he was disinclined to cooperate.
Prowl imagined that it would be simpler to play into Jazz’s assumptions that whoever held control of him was attempting to trick and trap him than it would be to persuade him they were on equal footing. The latter, of course, was not, technically, true. Prowl found himself engaging in elaborate pantomimed trades of unnecessary comforts under the pretense that it would bring him information.
Tac net, being very familiar with Soundwave, did not hesitate to portray him as relentlessly judgmental. Prowl ignored him.
“Hey,” Jazz said, eventually, from within a blanket that Prowl had presented to him with the suggestion that it might be advantageous for Jazz to share sensitive information. Jazz had made noises about considering it, but having acquired the blanket, had been disinclined to share further. Prowl hadn’t actually needed the information. This was an acceptable scenario. “How much trouble are you in for not getting anything out of me?”
“None,” Prowl said, in complete truth.
“Right,” Jazz said. Prowl suspected he had not been believed.
All probabilities suggested this state of affairs could proceed indefinitely, until affected by outside forces. Prowl let this scenario drift away, tired of holding even an imaginary Jazz captive, and examined the other branching possibility.
Not escaping was more straightforward initially, even if tac net balked at the potential threat to his survival. There was something peaceful in the possibility of resigning expected control of his life. In walking into a hotbed of danger alongside Jazz.
Imagination filled in the hallways of the Polyhexian palace, as he had last seen them, and the king glowering over the court as he had during that fateful audience that had been Prowl’s only glimpse of Jazz in his final upgrades for vorn. Tac net hiccuped trying to imagine dungeons and Prowl found himself chained to a wall in a replica of the catacombs under Yoketron’s estate.
For some reason, Jazz was there, hands running along his doorwings. Tac net flickered through the possibility of torture and threw it out as counter to self-preservation, and Prowl found himself once again being repaired after injury by Jazz’s steady, careful hands.
“You are not supposed to be doing this,” Prowl said, watching him.
“Oh, who can say.” Jazz’s visor would not look at him. “Maybe I’m trying to befriend you so I can get better information out of you.” Tac net agreed that was a strong possibility.
“Were you ordered to do so?”
“Now that would be telling, and that’s not the way information’s supposed to flow here.”
“Even when I am imagining you, I cannot imagine you as anything other than frustrating and difficult,” Prowl informed him.
Jazz smiled at that. Jazz froze at that. The simulation was no longer coherent. The wall Prowl was chained to rumbled.
Tac net’s simulation broke down and he found himself peering at the real world from Megatron’s arms. Jazz was standing at the bottom of his home’s mine shaft, looking back up.
“You climbed,” Prowl remembered. Jazz had gone up, like a spyder, and then back down. He was distracted from remembering this by Megatron’s setting him on the ground. His pain sensors were still disconnected, which had the curious effect of shutting off enough of his motion sensors that he couldn’t tell when he had stopped moving. If he had stopped moving.
“...over that won’t knock Prowl into the walls.”
“Please,” Prowl said. He didn’t want to be knocked into walls.
“Shut off now. You’re not helping.”
Complaining with his vocalizer was too hard. Prowl honked in protest. He did not need to shut down. He wanted to be present for this. The last time he had fallen unconscious he had woken to Jazz being gone.
A hand settled over his spark chamber. Jazz. This was acceptable.
“It’s okay,” Jazz said, soft and close. “I’m not going anywhere. Just recharge for me, yeah babe?”
Prowl pulled himself together enough to track Jazz’s presence. “You won’t leave?” He tried to turn to look at Jazz, but Jazz patted his spark chamber and shushed him back into staying put.
“Yeah. I won’t leave. I promise.”
That was enough for Prowl. He cycled his vents and let himself shut all the way off.