Dancing Lions

[niyazi-a.livejournal.com]

PG
IDW mid-LSOE, spoilers for Ongoing in general
Prowl/Jazz
none except spoilers for Ongoing and Last Story on Earth.
for the prowlxjazz challenge, prompt ‘eskimo kisses’ collaboration with vejiraziel who has been posting that amazingly gorgeous comic.   Thanks to wicked3659, who always is my Prowlguru and my best friend. 

“What happened?” Prowl had set it up, of course. Prowl liked control, every aspect, every angle.  This room’s lighting was precisely dimmed, the temperature just a bit chill. Jazz had learned to read the other mech’s mood from these little signs. 

Jazz supposed he should be grateful: Prowl was inflecting it as a question. Almost—almost—as if he cared. 

Jazz knew better. The problem with being Prowl is that Prowl had utterly lost the ability to be sincere.  Even to himself, at this point, Jazz thought.  Every emotion studied, analyzed, compressed.  Jazz could use emotion, work with anger, channel frustration: Prowl hammered emotions down, like plates of metal. He could be in a towering white-hot fury and look, and sound, and think…the same.

“You tell me.”   A deliberate needle:  Prowl hated when things were beyond his knowledge—the  unexpected, the unpredictable.  Special Operations thrived on both of those. One of the main differences between them. It kept them apart and bound them together: Prowl was no fool. He knew to fill his weaknesses.

Prowl’s mouth flattened, into something almost like a sneer, if the mech allowed himself to show even that much emotion. “You shot a human.”   

Jazz grinned down at the seated mech. Oh, these little power plays Jazz was long immune to. A game, really, intricate chess or a complicated, intricate dance whose steps were these minute emotions, the slightest timbre of voice.

 And here was Prowl, stripping off the top layer of the act.  It was never more than a veneer, anyway, with Prowl: one that fooled, one that was useful. Oh, the mech had feelings—lots of them. He just buried them deeper than the Well of Sparks, under a surface as barren as Cybertron’s.  But just liked the Well, they kept him alive. And Prowl knew that, too. He might compress his emotions, but he knew better than to quash them utterly.

 “I was defending our leader.  Tell me you’d have done different.” He could still feel the buck of the gun in his hand, like millions of other shots he’d fired.  What made this one any different?  He’d fired on reflex. As he always did.  Shoot first, think later.  It was not Prowl’s way, but it was his.

“Jazz.” A long ex-vent. “It is their planet.  We must observe certain protocols.”

“Protocols! He was going to kill Bumblebee.”  The visor flared with emotion, emotion Jazz wasn’t afraid to show.  His passion was his strength, his openness its own defense.  He had defended their leader. Not that he liked Bumblebee, himself.  But that wasn’t the point. It was about the war, winning the war. He knew that. They both knew that. The war mattered, and they were both simply two mere sparks, glittering and sharp, in the wake.

“Six years,” Prowl said, pushing to his feet, palms flat on the console. “Six years of hard work. Undone. In an instant.” Real? Another chink under the surface?  Or another gambit?  Jazz’s spark thrilled to the challenge.

“Hard work. Whose hard work?” Jazz jutted his chin. Who had spent four years incognito? Watching, monitoring?  And why were they currying human attention anyway? After Brasnya?

“It’s not about that. You or me or whoever did the recon.” Which was as close as Prowl came to a concession, granting the point.  Like his own battlefield: Prowl retreated from it only grudgingly. “It’s about endangering our partnership with the humans.”

“Partnership.”  Jazz’s mouth curled into a smile. “You don’t really believe that.”  For his part, he didn’t even bother to inflect it as a question.

A sharp look: one, though, tinged with respect.  One reason they’d been together for so long: neither could get an edge on the other. And they both liked it like that.  “What I believe,” Prowl said, an almost imperceptible tilt to his head, granting Jazz the point, “is unimportant. Or, less important than what Skywatch believes.”

“They didn’t see this coming. Or, they allowed it.”

“Both are within the range of possibilities.”  The slightest thaw in the tone, of recognition.

“And then, admit it.  My behavior.” Jazz tipped  his chin, stepping closer, half in challenge.

“Also,” Prowl said, “within the range of possibilities. Albeit slim.”

A corner of Jazz’s mouth quirked up in a smile.  “You know me. I like to play the narrow odds.”

An infinitesimal twitch of the mouthplate. “You do.”  Then the mouth  hardened, optics spiraling in. “It didn’t work out this time, though.” 

Jazz frowned, feeling it slip away from him. “We’ll handle it, Prowl.” A slight stress on the pronoun. We. They’d made it this far.  Together, mutual support, like two stone worn smooth against each other. But still stone.

“I can handle it.” Attempting to wall himself in.  Sometimes, Jazz thought, Prowl spent too much time in here, in his own processor.  Not enough in the field.  Where all the walls you built could get assaulted at once.

“No.” Jazz stepped closer, nearly chin-to-chin, mild in defiance. “You can’t handle everything on your own.”

Prowl gave a reverse-nod with his head, bridling. “And how would you respond if I said the same to you?”

“You know how I’d respond.  Probably with 100% probability.”

“There’s no such thing,” Prowl said, but the voice was almost warm. 

“Yeah. I know that. Just like I know how you’d answer.”  One hand twitched—a giveaway.  In the humming silence of the room, the firing pistons were an audible clitter. “Prowl. We both want to win the war.  We both paid enough for it.” 

“We must win.” The optics flared, hard and bright. 

“And we need Bumblebee.  We need a leader.”  He could see how the gears had turned, how Prowl had calculated all of this.  Probably long, long ago. Most mechs weren’t really alive to Prowl—they were clouds of probabilities, statistical coherences.  The war was an intricate, living web of vectors of statistics, shifting and moving like a sentient thing, more alive to Prowl than anything else.  Bumblebee as Bumblebee was one thing. Bumblebee as a leader was another—calculations too complex for Jazz to figure. 

Prowl could. Prowl did.  And he was a spider in the middle of a web, reading the trembling vibrations of these probability lines, shaking some of his own, casting his own stickier nets.

And Jazz? Jazz had become real to Prowl. Maybe it was Jazz’s very vibrant emotions, obvious passion. Maybe it was his skill, his reflexes that had attracted Prowl’s interest, a detached scientist’s fascination with a survivor’s skills.  Neither could probably point to how, or why, it had started. It simply was.  And the war stood in the way of that enough. 

Neither would allow it to stand in the way of the war.

It was grudging, but it came. “You’re right,” Prowl said, optics dropping down. They needed a leader. A figurehead, at least, something behind which both could move unbound.  And they exchanged a look and a nod.  “Right now, he’s useful.”

“Right now, the humans aren’t,” Jazz countered. 

“Right now,” Prowl began, and cut himself off, abruptly. Then, quietly, “you are.”  An admission, and the need thrummed under the words, something tiny and personal.  He leaned forward, his lip plates brushing Jazz’s, EM like hot velvet. “See,” he whispered, the word like a gem passed between their mouths, “that that doesn’t change.”

Jazz’s mouth stretched into a smile, pulling against Prowl’s, one hand coming up to brush the side edge of a door wing.  “You know how I play the odds.”

Comments

[femme4jack.livejournal.com]

The suggestion of intimacy at the end was sexy as hell. This phrase melted me EM like hot velvet.

Loved the edgy tension between the two, and the strong sense of their moral ambiguity, and the description of Jazz's open show of emotion, and Prowl, hiding his deep, but being kept alive by them. Prowl hammered emotions down, like plates of metal. He could be in a towering white-hot fury and look, and sound, and think…the same. I so love the elegent way you phrase your descriptions, saying so much in so few words.