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Jazz keeps up the smile all the way down the corridor, as he gives the passing Autobots a wave or a casual salute, as he keys in the code to his door with fingers that, through long practice, are not at all shaking. Then he shuts the door behind him and slumps against it, ventilating hard.
From their hiding places underneath his armour, his tentacles unfurl slowly, hovering around him. Jazz hisses in relief as the long tendrils ripple, luxuriously stretching out all the kinks that tend to develop whenever an extended mission keeps him off the Ark for a few days running. If he was in the field alone, he might have chanced letting his tentacles loose, at least for a few moments – after all, even if he were glimpsed by a stray Decepticon (and really, who could spot the Autobots’ master of stealth when he didn’t want to be seen?), it would only add to the myth of Jazz. But the risk was too great with his comrades nearby, that only two living Autobots know what Jazz is; even the Prime is, thankfully, still in the dark.
So, nearly a week without being able to stretch. Nearly a week of all the tiny concealments – the deliberate alterations of his EM field, the subtly scented polish to mask his own scent in close quarters, pretending to sip at field rations – that he’s come to think of, for his own sanity, as merely an extension of the thousand and one little deceptions that a Spec Ops agent practices every day. Nearly a week without –
Primus below. With the ache under his plating finally eased, Jazz is able to register just how hungry he is.
He’s shaky when he gets to his feet, and his knees nearly buckle once, but he manages to stagger to the hidden wall safe and plug in the combination. Trembling hands seize the object inside, a metal sphere only a little larger than one hand’s breadth across. In one section, the metal has been peeled back like the skin of an Earth fruit. Ratchet charged it shortly before Jazz left on his assignment, and it’s still at full capacity: shivers of blue electricity spark their way across the surface and down the strands of cable that dangle carelessly from it.
Or rather, the arrangement appears careless, as if this were a real spark, ripped from a real chest. In reality, every detail has been copied precisely by one of the finest minds in medical science. Ratchet couldn’t quite replicate the taste, but it’s passable, and anyway, Jazz isn’t really in a position to complain – especially now.
His jaw unhinges, glossa snaking out, and he wraps it around the faux-spark, drawing it lovingly into his mouth. It takes some willpower not to simply swallow it, when he’s this hungry. Instead, he sinks his fangs into the gap in the metal. Synthetic spark energy spills across his glossa and surges through his fuel lines. Jazz can feel the tentacles thrashing excitedly in the air as he feeds, before finally sagging downwards as the energy hits his spark, and Jazz draws away, holding the fake spark between his fingers.
It’s still crackling with charge; it will last a good few weeks of careful feeding. He can’t afford to get carried away as he did just now, though. Ratchet has enough to do without having to constantly synthesise more spark energy to feed just one soldier, however high-ranking. Jazz has learned to live on the permanent edge of hunger.
He puts the spark back, and pauses in front of the mirror, tilting up his visor to expose the unnaturally huge optics with their pale, eldritch glow underneath.
Just a myth, after all, that sparkeaters don’t have reflections.
***
The temptations of a monster are not what Jazz would have imagined, once.
He learned during his first battle to steel himself against the savoury smell of spilled fuel; he would never have made it through the fight undetected if he hadn’t. The actual sight of a spark is harder, but even so, Jazz once carried a comrade whose chassis had been blown wide open to the medics’ tent; he could see the lush glow of the spark peeking out from behind the shattered armour, and feel its heat pulsing under his hand, but he still managed to resist long enough to get the mech to safety.
(Besides, day to day, it’s not difficult to shield himself from the enticement of a bare spark. Flatly refusing to sparkmerge during interface has earned Jazz something of a reputation as a playmech – charming enough in the berth, but not up for anything serious – and the other Autobots treat him accordingly, and that, too, helps hold temptation at a distance.)
No, the risk has never been that he’ll lose control of his hunger and turn on his fellow Autobots, no matter how great the temptation. He’s too aware of and too horrified by the possibility. It’s the lure of other transgressions – tiny, insignificant ones, that surely wouldn’t hurt anyone – that poses the real danger.
So what if a difficult vault across rooftops gets a little help from a tentacle that snakes out at the right moment to grab onto a ledge? Provided there’s no one there to see? What if successfully tracking down a particularly tricky Decepticon owes less to Spec Ops training than to enhanced sparkeater senses?
In all honesty, it’s only a matter of time before Jazz slips.
It’s in a corridor deep in the bowels of the Nemesis, when he and Mirage, on a simple infiltration mission, are surprised by a Decepticon guard. Stupid, really, the petty things that can end a spy’s life: a changed inspection schedule, a single enemy soldier where you don’t expect him to be. Mirage goes for his rifle but the ’Con is quicker, and there’s a burst of light -
- and then everything stops.
Mirage is standing with one hand pressed to his miraculously intact chassis, and staring at Jazz. So is the ’Con, whose still-smoking blaster is hanging limply from his fingers.
Hovering in the air between them – sliced nearly in half, and curling sickly in on itself around a wound that’s dripping energon – is one of Jazz’s tentacles, which took the full force of a blast that would otherwise have gone through Mirage’s spark.
The Decepticon opens his mouth to scream, but a second later, he’s falling backwards, blaster fire hitting him full in the throat. Jazz glances back to see Mirage shouldering his rifle again.
“Are you badly hurt, Boss?” Mirage nods matter-of-factly at the wounded tentacle.
Jazz blinks. “Nah, mech, they heal quick. You, uh – you seem to be taking the whole sparkeater-tentacles thing pretty well.”
“Oh, I already knew.” Mirage grins at Jazz’s expression. “We-ell, maybe not the details, but come on, sir. One monster knows another.”
Jazz stares at him so long that Mirage’s smile fades into uncertainty.
“Or… perhaps not?” Mirage frowns. “Jazz, are you really telling me that you – the best spy in the Autobot forces, and someone with asparkeater’s senses – never figured me out?”
“I try not to make a habit of sniffin’ my friends’ sparks, seeing as I’m not plannin’ on eatin’ them,” Jazz shoots back, but he’s already shuttering his optics to concentrate. With every other sense, he reaches out to Mirage, hunting for what it is that he’s missed all this time. He listens expectantly for the whir of his subordinate’s spark, while his lips part, allowing just the tip of his long, demonic tongue to slip out so that he can taste the crackle of spark energy on the air.
After a moment, Jazz things frag it and extends his tongue all the way, while tilting his head and straining as hard as he can to try and catch that frustratingly elusive spark pulse.
After another moment, he opens his optics.
“So,” he says softly. “I’m guessin’ that the disappearing act isn’t really down to your electrodistrupter, after all, is it?”
Mirage’s mouth quirks up at the edge. “The electrodisrupter is a prop. The invisibility, that’s more of a… side effect of my condition.”
Jazz asks it as gently as he can. “How long have you been dead, Mirage?”
For the first time, Mirage glances away. “Do you remember me telling you about the day the Decepticons levelled the Towers?”
Jazz takes in a sharp ventilation, and then says – more in wonder than in anger - “You spawn of a glitch.”
He asked Mirage, then, how he’d managed to survive the collapse of his home, and the answer has – heh – haunted him ever since: I didn’t, not really.
He just never realised the mech meant it literally.
Mirage is looking back at him sidelong, his optics unsure beneath the shadows of his battle mask.
Jazz suddenly laughs, and claps a hand on Mirage’s shoulder – which feels as solid as it ever did, even if he can detect (now that he’s looking for it) the unnatural coolness of the metal, the faint buzz of eldritch energy running through the mech’s form, a very different flavour on his tongue than spark energy. “A sparkeater and a ghost. Mech, I’m startin’ to think we’re actually scarier than the stories the ’Cons tell about us.”
“Are you kidding?” Mirage asks, playful smirk not quite hiding the way he lights up at Jazz’s touch. “There’s a rumour among the Decepticon high command that you’re Mortilus himself!”
“Well, then.” Jazz guides him towards the door. “Guess we’d better go live up to our reputations.”