Here is a arts for you @soundwavereporting ! Hope you have a Happy halloween!❤🎃😊 Also sidenote, im actually really starting to full on ship coswave because of you you know!😆
IDW: Cosmos/Soundwave, Fun, organizing some kind of Halloween-themed holiday on Sanctuary Station
fic for @doorwingdings for the @transform-or-treat Halloween fic exchange! She requested Jazz/Prowl ala Pet Semetary. Hope I did the concept justice. This is vaguely IDW-flavored. cw for grief/mourning, alongside vague references to pretty much anything you’d expect from Pet Semetary.
“Y’know, I’d always thought of myself as level headed. Reasonable. Willin’ to do what needed to be done, say the right words to the right people, set your processor to it, and it’ll get done. I swore I’d never be one of those mechs who loses it after their sparkmate passes. That wasn’t me.
Taking him to the Acid Wastes was a mistake.”
It was not a legend, or even a myth. Jazz would have had to struggle to call it a rumor outside of the place it originated: a small town on the outskirts of Carpressa, straddling the border between a true city and the desolation of the Acid Wastes. The way the story went, the smelting pit was a relic from the Golden Age, built over a tunnel leading to the Afterspark itself. This tunnel, lined with veins of Primus’s own innermost energon, was the conduit to guide a mech to his final resting place.
Or to bring him back to the living world.
Its original name had been lost to time: there was no way the Primes and Senators would ever have deigned to have their bodies lain to rest in a ‘smelting pit’.
But it was a smelting pit, cold and lifeless as the gunmetal gray forms that had been buried there.
Through the haze of rage and grief, Jazz had reasoned that even if this didn’t work, if the smelting pit was just a figment of a mech’s overactive imagination, it wouldn’t do any harm. Prowl had held little sentiment or attachment to his frame: he, Jazz thought, would have done the same thing were he in Jazz’s place.
If there was a chance: even the slightest chance, that leaving a mech’s dead frame in the cold smelting pit would bring him back? Would bring Prowl back?
Jazz would take it.
“Here’s the secret: this whole thing, start to finish? A mistake. We never shoulda pressed our luck.
“I think Sentinel knows. He signed off on ‘Prowl’s’ request for an extended leave of absence way too fast.”
Jazz had also reasoned that if it didn’t work (which it would, it had to), this would simply be an unspoken incident he would shove into long-term storage immediately. He would take Prowl’s frame back to Iacon, let Sentinel or the stylus-pushers handle the details of the funeral. Jazz would fight for Prowl to be smelted in Iacon, not Petrex. And that would be that. He would wallow in his grief for a half-million years and come out of it smiling. And if the smile was a little tinged with insincerity, or his gaze seemed distant, well.
The last thing Jazz had reasoned was that it just wasn’t fair. If Prowl had to go out before his time, it should have been helping someone. The mech had a habit of sticking his nose into places it didn’t belong, and Jazz loved him for it. He had been investigating a mech named Render for selling contaminated energon cubes. If Render or one of his mechs had shot Prowl? Jazz would’ve been competing with Sentinel and a good chunk of his Security Services to get first shot at the mech’s spark chamber.
But an accident left no one to blame.
Not entirely true: Jazz could blame the mech operating the transport. He was a minibot named Greenspark, overworked and undertrained, barely tall enough to see the controls on the vehicle he was required to operate, nonstop, five cycles at a time. He could blame the company that had ‘employed’ Greenspark, who had recruited him from an employment agency that was shadier than a clearance sale in Kaon.
Shaking his fist at the world wouldn’t do anything.
So Jazz took Prowl’s lifeless frame to the cold smelter.
He bribed a mech with six hundred shanix to take him—them—there.
In hindsight, Jazz was certain he could have found it himself: it looked nothing like the nondescript smelters scattered around Kaon or Iacon. This place was massive, a testament to the opulence of the Primes and the mecha they favored. More crypt than smelter, Jazz privately thought, and had things been different, he and Prowl would have enjoyed spending a few days exploring the place.
It was a shared hobby of theirs, one they never had as much time to indulge in as either would have liked. Both enjoyed architecture and history, things that Cybertron had in excess. It was not an unpopular pastime among Cybertronians but prior to his grief-fueled research, Jazz had never even heard a whisper of this place.
As he lay Prowl’s cold, gray form on the ornately engraved platform, he wondered if Prowl had known. Had Prowl known, and kept it a secret? Had Prowl known what Jazz might do of the situation came to it?
No. Prowl wouldn’t do anything like that. Prowl—his Prowl, vibrant and alive, with shining blue optics that caught Jazz’s attention the minute he walked in the door of Kaon Security Services—would trust Jazz’s intuition. Because that had always been them, hadn’t it? Prowl’s logic, Jazz’s intuition. Two sides of a chic-chip, blurring into sameness when Prowl’s leaps of logic came out looking like a hunch or Jazz’s explanations same out looking like a intellectual-class mech’s thesis on statistics and probabilities.
Before meeting Prowl, Jazz had been certain he was complete. He still was his own mech—Prowl hadn’t changed that. But Prowl had come into his life and added something to it: a dash of comforting stability amidst the chaos of a mech trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy in post-Functionist Cybertron.
Now, Jazz was adrift, unmoored. Anchored only by the thin ray of hope that this cold smelter in the Acid Wastes might bring Prowl back.
His quick examination of the place had revealed no trace of corpses, which left two options: mechs came and took the gray frames away after it didn’t work. Or…
Jazz couldn’t bring himself to remain inside. He camped outside the cold smelting pit, optical visor trained on the entrance as he scanned for life signs.
As these things happened, he slipped into recharge.
Jazz awoke to see a mech standing in the grand entrance to the cold smelting pit. His optics registered it as Prowl: his Prowl, standing tall and proud. His frame still bore the damage of the injury; the plating on his torso was warped and dented, but he could see the hint of a spark shining in the early morning light.
“Jazz.”
Prowl’s voice was as flat as ever. Upon closer examination, Prowl’s armor was still desaturated; the brilliant red of his chevron was a muddy shade of rust.
He hadn’t realized he had leapt to his feet, closing the distance between them.
Prowl’s frame was cold to the touch.
Jazz didn’t care.
On the sixth cycle, he commed Sky-Byte.
They met in a Stanzian café. It wasn’t often Jazz visited; he preferred the real thing on his rare trips back to his home city, but today he needed a taste of normalcy.
He tried not to think of the way Render’s innermost energon had tasted on his lips.
“It’s about Prowl,” Sky-Byte said, without preamble.
Before Jazz could reply, Sky-Byte spoke:
“Grief-stricken ending
before lonely spark flies
beyond the carbon”
“Hell’s that supposed to mean?” Jazz asked, immediately grateful for the distraction.
Sky-Byte’s optics narrowed.
“It means you are in mourning.”
An hour later, Jazz returned home from the café with more questions than answers, accompanied by a slowly-growing sense of dread he couldn’t put a finger on. Prowl was still in the habsuite, secured behind the best locks shanix could buy. Jazz couldn’t find it in himself to muster up the energy to even pretend to be happy to see the thing that was inhabiting his conjunx’s frame.
Jazz headed into the spare room that had quickly been converted into a second bedroom. After a moment’s consideration, he locked the door behind him. He had spent half a day attempting to soundproof the rest of the habsuite to muffle the sound of the shuffling footsteps as he incessantly paced the rooms, before realizing the absence of sound was worse than the sound itself.
“I don’t need to go over all of it again. You know what happened. How I fed him.
“They were—are—bad mechs. Ones who others whisper about when they think no one’s listening. This latest one, Render? Made his fortune selling empty cubes wholesale to th’ Dead End’s energon distribution center, a hundred cubes a shanix. No need to waste money on mechs who can’t be bothered to take care of themselves. What he didn’t tell the center is the cube quality isn’t fit for a turbolouse, much less a mech.
“Or maybe he did, and they didn’t care.
“The number of bad mechs on this planet ain’t infinite.
“If you’re seeing this, ‘Byte—one of two things happened. No matter what, I need you to call Sentinel and get a security team up to my habsuite. The number and my auth codes are at the end of this message.
“I’m not tryin’ to get myself killed. I’ll take him down and be out of the habsuite before security shows up, or I won’t.
“Either way, I won’t be around. I’ll head to Staniz. Maybe Kalis. Anywhere but here.
Is late but here's my first entry for Jazz week! I thank the hosts of this event so much for organizing it for us! I look forward to all the works people make!^_^
Day 2: Martial Arts
Since all the bending in Avatar the last airbender is based on real martial arts, I drew Jazz as a waterbender.😊🌊
DAY 1: CRASH. He’s had a long day of work, let him rest.💓🚓💤
My contribution for Prowl week 2020! I’m so excited for this event and I look forward to all the wonderful works showing appreciation for the best cop bot ever^_^ Thankyou for hosting this, @prowlweek!😊
