WARNING! "Slash" ahead. Just goopy angsty stuff, though. Nothing icky.


There are many people who will tell you that I can’t sit still for more than five minutes at a time. And, admittedly, those people are generally right. I like to keep moving, you see. Sitting still means that the world is moving and I am not, and for some reason that just strikes me as all kinds of wrong.

But there are one or two exceptions to the general Jazz-just-can’t-sit-still-for-the-life-of-him rule. One of those rare occasions is when I manage to find something that completely absorbs my attention so that I don’t realize that time is passing while I’m sitting still. A rare, really good movie, for instance, will sometimes fill the bill. Or there’s always listening to some new, interesting music that I haven’t heard a dozen times already. The other...

The other would be that, without fail, I can lose myself in just watching Prowl. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing, really. In fact, he doesn’t have to be doing anything at all. He can be walking across a room. He can be sitting somewhere, just thinking. Which he does a lot, of course. Or he can be – as he was doing now – simply recharging. Whatever he’s doing or not doing, for some reason I just never get tired of looking at him, of thanking Primus or any other deity that might care that he’s mine. All mine.

Whatever the case, I had made it something of a hobby to watch Prowl specifically when he was asleep. I wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was because he was such an unfailingly intense person when he was awake that I enjoyed seeing him at a time when he couldn’t be intense even if he wanted to be. I liked watching him when he was at rest, at peace, probably because he was rarely either of those things at any other time. And when he was peaceful, I found that I could be peaceful, too, that I could sit and just watch him for hours on end, if I was given the chance to do so.

So I found myself once again standing in the doorway of the small anteroom that housed our recharge berths, one shoulder leaning against the doorjamb, my arms folded across my chest, just staring at Prowl. This time, though, his rest wasn’t exactly…well, restful. Every once in a while some part or another or his body — a finger, a leg, his entire torso — would twitch, or a troubled look would cross his slumbering face. I wondered, as I often did, what he was seeing as he slept, what images were passing through his mind, what could possibly be bothering him so much that even the temporary oblivion of recharge couldn’t ease his mind...

But then, when I thought about it for a moment, I knew the answer to that. I knew that the past few days hadn’t been easy for Prowl, what with me being kidnapped and held captive by Starscream and his new Combaticons and all. Reliable sources—namely Bluestreak, the ultimate gossip source for the discriminating newshound—had told me that he’d never seen Prowl so wigged out as he’d been during the four days that I’d been Starscream’s unwilling guest, that Optimus Prime had practically had to chain him to Headquarters to prevent him from going off and trying to rescue me all by himself, more logical tactics be damned.

And, when I thought about it, I could see why that was so, on several different levels. For one thing, we’d simply never voluntarily been apart for so long, not since we’d bonded. And this separation, of course, hadn’t been at all voluntary. But much more importantly than that, Prowl knew—because Skyfire had told me and I had, in turn, told Prowl—that Starscream, my captor, was becoming more and more mentally unstable, and so he was exceedingly unpredictable. And the fact that he had apparently been gunning for Megatron... Well, that had all sorts of dark and scary implications of which only Prowl, of all the Autobots, would have been aware. So I was sure that he’d had himself worked into a tizzy, could just imagine what he’d been acting like while I was gone, as all sorts of horrible possible scenarios and fates ran through his calculating, tactically-focused mind. And on top of that, nothing was more apt to throw Prowl for a loop than when someone he cared about was in danger, especially if he could do nothing to help that person. He’d been so worked up over my abduction and absence that I’d been told that he’d refused to recharge while I was gone and, even after I’d returned, he’d still refused to rest until after I had done so. He could be so single-minded sometimes. Oddly, that was one of the things that I loved most about him...

But, finally, I’d managed to convince Prowl that I was perfectly all right, that I was recovered from my little unexpected adventure, and so he’d finally, grudgingly, toddled off to bed like a good little boy. Now, twelve hours later, he was nearing the end of his recharge cycle, and I’d decided that I was going to be there when he awoke. I knew, after all, that we needed to talk. About many things. And as far as I was concerned, the sooner we talked about them, the better.

As if my thoughts served as some kind of alarm clock or something, Prowl suddenly awakened, jerking fully upright with an alarmed gasp. His gaze jerked frantically around the room for a few seconds before it finally settled on my silhouette in the doorway.

I quirked a smile at him that he probably couldn’t see, given that I was backlit, and murmured a soft “Hi” at him.

That one simple word seemed to calm him a little. At least, his posture became a little less rigid, which was a start.

“Hi,” he said back to me, and I noticed that his voice was a little shaky, a little distracted.

Concerned, I fully entered the room, instructing the computer to raise the lights to half-intensity as I did so. I approached the recharge berth and sat down on the edge of it, getting my first real look at Prowl. What I saw wasn’t all that encouraging. He’d just woken up from twelve straight hours of recharge, but he still looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. I reached out to him, cupped his chin in one hand, raising his eyes to mine. Although I figured that I wouldn’t get a straight answer out of him, I asked him the question that was uppermost in my mind, anyway.

“You OK?”

I expected him to say that he was fine because that was what he always said in situations like this. So I was surprised when, instead, Prowl looked me straight in the eye and said, “I’m rattled.”