Work Text:
The medibots — those not in the hospital themselves — told him that there wasn’t any point to visiting. None of them, especially Prowl, but none of them were waking up until they’d had a proper defrag from the disrupted dream and forced overload.
Medibots knew slag about Prowl sometimes, but Jazz didn’t blame them.
Assumption was that Prowl spent most of his recharge in privacy mode, playing around in his own personal VR sim. Speculation was that said sim was probably a replica of his office — a rumor supposedly confirmed when the tactician turned in reports and other work he’d completed while asleep. Laserbeak's — Soundwave’s — hack had scooped up all the privacy-mode Autobots and dumped them already in their helpless toy-avatars into the public sim to be shot by the cassette. Not that there had been many, considering the planned unveiling of Sunstreaker’s new Ponyville.
To all appearances, Prowl hadn’t been present, but Jazz’s fly-through looking for everyone before the shit had hit the fan (Jazz loved humans sometimes) had found him, in Zecora’s hut as Zecora busily rewriting her hacks that allowed her to use Zecora’s spell books to do office work, all the while muttering angry things about medics and who just couldn’t leave well enough alone and psychotic yellow artists who were too easily cowed by a pacifist new build. Cussing…in rhyme. Jazz’d stuck around for a bit just to get a recording.
His smile faded. This was no laughing matter.
Point was, Prowl’d been mucking around with the systems’ code when Soundwave’s hack had hit. He’d have seen what was going on before Jazz himself had. There hadn’t been anything either of them could do about it, but Jazz’d seen from Laserbeak’s perspective that the tactician had been trying to fight and hide when he’d been found. No one else had. Prowl would have been woken in his berth not just suffering from the twisted recharge and violent overload, but also with his tactical systems going full tilt and the inherent contradiction of receiving “fatal” damage. The crash would have been harder on him, but he’d offlined in combat. His systems weren’t going to take the time to do a good defrag. They were going to do the absolute minimum then bring him back up in combat mode.
And given that he’d offlined in a VR sim that had been taken over by the enemy… well, there was the possibility that his tac-net wouldn’t take his sensors’ word for it that he was safe in the Autobot medbay, among friends. He… probably wasn’t the only one who was going to wake up thinking this was a trick, for that matter, but Jazz doubted that the others would play along until he saw a chance to “strike back” or “escape” from the supposed hack, rather than protest. And who knew what his tactical systems would come up with in that case.
Which was why Jazz was sneaking into medical for a visit in the dark of night.
Well… that and he couldn’t recharge himself. He’d tried, using the field recharge units. Useful as they were (and Primus-sent for the few that hadn’t been caught in the attack) but he just wasn’t settling right into defrag. Nightmares.
Nightmares meant something different to a Cybertronian than they did to a human. Mechs collected bad stuff, but that didn’t mean it hung out in their minds very long. Their minds and perceptions affected the VR realm as Teletraan adjusted the sim to the needs and wants of the slumberers. Nightmares happened when a mech’s fears caused things to happen in VR.
After hearing Bluestreak’s story of surviving the attack on his home city when he was young, their human friends marveled that he was as well-adjusted as he was. Truth was, by Cybertronian standards, he was pretty much a wreck. Kid archived the files, but his emotional cortex kept pulling them up when he didn’t necessarily want to, and anyone who’d ever been in a VR sim with him (which was all of them) knew to watch out for avalanches. Poor mech’s fears could get Teletraan to make something fall on him in a gravity-free sim of interstellar space.
Bluestreak’s fears of being buried alive was somewhat of an extreme case. Mostly unusual because he still hadn’t dealt with and archived the fear millions of years later. For the rest of them, fears came and went, and if swords and sorcery with Mirage had conjured some suspiciously insecticon-shaped monsters for a while after the whole cerebro-shell incident… well Autobots chipped in and chopped the fraggers to pieces until they stopped showing up in MIrage’s dreams. Stabbing a Kickback-shaped undead dire spider repeatedly until Teletraan gave up on enforcing the rule against sneak attacking undead and just gave him his extra 4d6 damage had been fun enough for Jazz; Mirage-the-Icemage had taken Ironhide-the-Barbaian’s greataxe to the Bombshell-shaped one so hard Teletraan had rewritten his character sheet into a Bloodrager on the spot.
Having two berserkers in the party had been the Chinese version of interesting until someone (who was not Jazz, that’s his story and he’s sticking to it) had convinced him that, given Mirage’s recent conversion to the d12 fanclub, maybe Siege Engineer would be something Ironhide would enjoy. Pocket ballistas were a thing now. Jazz was not sorry.
Nightmares (and the overcoming thereof) was a cooperative activity for Cybertronians.
Earth had been good to the Autobots. It gave them an infinite variety of forms to take in their dreams and offered just as many new ways to deal with their fears. It may be amazingly therapeutic to be able to solve all their problems with the Magic of Friendship, but for some fears that wasn’t enough. After watching “Feeling Pinkie Keen”, Bluestreak had immediately adopted a Pinkie Pie avatar, complete with Pinkie Sense, for every sim he participated in (except the Ponyville public sim, because Blaster had called dibs on the party cannon). Hearing Pinkie Pie the Space Marine call out that her “tail’s twitching!” in the middle of a battle against the Zerg, just in time for them to evacuate before the zerg leviathan randomly falls out of the sky will never get old. Even though it was happening less and less. Maybe because it was happening less and less. Mech had made more progress working through it since My Little Pony came on the air than in all the millions of years before.
But field recharge units didn’t have a VR, and in that context nightmares became something entirely different.
Defrag tried archiving the files, but emotions kept pulling them up. VR had safeties that kept any manifested fears from actually hurting anyone, but mecha didn’t. Jazz wasn’t at the point of hallucinating Laserbeak lunging out of the ceiling at him yet, but he was twitchy and cold. Sharp fear had settled into his spark to stay. And a twitchy, jumpy saboteur was a loaded gun waiting to go off.
Eventually he’d need to settled down with one of the field units and let it defrag his processor as best it could. It wouldn’t help with his new terrors, wouldn’t disarm him or make him any safer to be around than he was right now, but without defrag things would only get worse. Old, archived, files might get accessed and pulled into the fear until he was a raging paranoiac who couldn’t stand the sight of crystals or birds or something else innocuous that happened to cross-reference with the experience of watching Laserbeak shoot all his friends and comrades. And that was to say nothing of the physical effects of not defragging. Processors overheating with stress, electrical shorts, crashing like Prowl faced with room full of incomprehensible data loops were all eventual consequences of going without defrag.
Not yet though. Jazz could short himself one day’s worth to sneak into the medbay.
None of the medics saw him come in, but Ratchet scowled at him when he came in to check on the other senior officers. Jazz just grinned at him.
He kept his communications suite tuned into the command channel just in case there were any problems — he was the only functional senior officer, and as such he was on-duty until at least one of the others was repaired, up, and convinced the nightmare was over. If it really was over. Though as the hours wiled away and the Autobots, the ones that hadn’t been caught in the hack, recovered, Jazz became convinced that Soundwave and his symbiotes had acted alone. This wasn’t the opening salvo of a greater Decepticon plot. They probably hadn’t even told Megatron before their attack.
He imagined a torn spider web, coated in dew, loose ends flapping violently in the wind while the spider desperately tried to repair her home…
Decepticon power games. He scoffed softy through his vents, waking himself from the light power save mode he’d dropped into. It wasn’t defrag, but the medics had left him be anyway.
Prowl was… Jazz narrowed his visor. The medical readings hadn’t changed. They read that he was still in deep defrag and his tactical comp was firmly offline, but Jazz had a keen visor for lies and everything about the supine Praxan felt like a lie. Nothing concrete. Nothing logical. A feeling.
“Can’t prove a negative, m’mech,” he said to Prowl’s “offline” form. “You think you’re still dreaming. Soundwave’s in Teletran, in your processors… Everything you know about me, you’re assuming he knows. Anything you don’t I could try and tell you, you can’t verify and thus has to be assumed to be fiction. Am I right, m’mech?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Prowl’s comm suite was barely a blip on Ratchet’s medical readings. “I rarely know what you’re talking about. You are an illogical individual and I have no reason to give what you say any credence.”
“That’s about what I thought you’d say.” They were friends, but few mechs knew it. He assumed Soundwave had taken some hint, or was guessing based solely on Jazz’s reputation. Of course he was going to reject what he believed was a dream-dopplganger created by the enemy, try and maintain the animosity that other Autobots assumed was there, though they were perfectly civil to each other in public. So instead of arguing with him, Jazz pinged his report to Prowl’s comm suite and lay back. He couldn’t go back into power save as long as Prowl was awake and regarding him as an enemy, his own paranoia subroutines wouldn’t let him dismiss the threat, but he leaned back and dimmed his visor enough to maybe-fool Ratchet. “When you think you’ve found a way out, try not to hurt anyone just in case, k mech?”
He could practically see the gears in that battle comp trying to puzzle out Jazz’s actions, and what a Decepticon might mean by them.
He thought for a moment that Prowl would ask — you’re not going to try and stop me? — but he didn’t. He wouldn’t, not until he was reasonably sure he could trust Jazz and reality itself.
So he sat there, kicked his feet up onto the edge of the medley’s bed and let his visor dim, half a friend offering comfort and half a guard to keep the medics away as long as her could. Ratchet knew better than to come near Jazz while he was in power save. Not safe.
Spider webs… why was his mind wandering back to spider webs when he left it idle for a few moments? He wished he could connect to a VR, even just for a few moments. Teletraan would help him figure it out faster than this random thought. Those dreams — searching for meaning in the metaphor of the spark — were always interesting, full of random connections from one thought to another, snatches of music and conversation and long-archived memories pulled up and experienced as new tags were applied by the dream…
“You were in the sim as well. Your report indicates the cassetticons had a special revenge planned for you and that is why you seem untouched.” Jazz nearly fell out of the chair, flailing a bit before catching himself. He caught Ratchet’s look and grinned, making a careless gesture for ‘I’m just crazy’ with one hand and the overworked medic accepted that and went back to his patient. “It is a convenient excuse.”
“Yeah it is,” Jazz agreed, because from the POV of Prowl’s logic it really was. The fact that Prowl was asking questions… something in his logic wasn’t adding up. Whatever it was had to fight past the certainty that if Soundwave was in his head then nothing about Jazz’s behavior could be trusted… but he was asking, and that was a good sign.
“I assume Ratchet’s cleared you of Soundwave’s influence.”
Coolant flushed through his lines. What did Prowl think he should say? Should he lie…?
No. Nothing would convince him now that everything was real, but truth now might provide evidence later. “Soundwave didn’t hurt me none. Not like that. And Ratchet’s been busy.”
Prowl jerked, various medical alarms going off so suddenly that Jazz leapt away, combat systems spinning up and scanning the room for the nonexistent threat. “Jazz,” Prowl hissed as Ratchet rushed over, “I’m fine,” he snapped to the medic, “Jazz—“ Ratchet grumbled tiredly as he guided him back down on the berth. “Jazz needs to be checked.”
“Prowl… You need to rest and defr—“
“And I will,” the Praxan growled. “Jazz is potentially compromised.”
“Mech, I ain’t…”
“You are, until proven otherwise.” Prowl switched to comms again as Ratchet started giving him a lecture on the proper way to boot up after a trauma, which Prowl was very obviously not listening to. “They could have loaded any number of viruses into any of us from their take over of the VR simulation. Just because you do not have the same virus as the rest of us does not mean they left your processor clean.”
“Can’t fault your logic, m’mech,” He smiled disarmingly at Ratchet, who, now that Prowl was settled, had turned his medical fury on Jazz. “You good while Ratch checks me out, or you planning to take the chance to stage your cunning escape?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. A enemy-programmed illusion of you would have been sensible and seen the medic after that, if only to assure me you weren’t potentially compromised.”
Ratchet scowled as Jazz burst out laughing.
.
.
.
End