Chapter Text
Prowl almost dies when they are less than a day’s drive from the sea.
The pilgrim road has broken away towards the west, leaving them to take smaller tracks and paths over the plains and hills. The area is not well populated and energy sources are few. So, naturally, they are attacked by marauders.
Prowl doesn’t want to put Jazz’s people skills to this extreme of a test, so he speeds up his driving and shouts to Jazz to do the same. Jazz, built for speed, outstrips him almost immediately. This is probably for the best. Prowl theoretically has a weapon he can wield, somewhere in his subspace. He tries to transform his subspace, but something grates painfully and will not open.
“Prowl!” Jazz yells from ahead, and Prowl has fallen far enough behind that he can hear the bandits shouting. He swerves, trying to move in an evasion pattern, but clearly not well enough. Jazz has swung a U-turn and is racing back towards him.
“Leave me!” Prowl yells at him, just before a harpoon crashes through his rear windshield. The empty space within his chassis keeps it from penetrating all the way to his spark chamber. Barely.
The pain is distracting. The roar that rushes through Prowl’s senses, shortly after, is even more distracting.
He skids to a halt, overwhelmed by the thunderous noise of crashing that sounds like nothing he’s ever known. There’s an enormous wave of force radiating from—somewhere—and it pins him in place, too weighed down to even to tremble.
And then the pressure breaks. Prowl vents again, only now realizing that he had stopped. He cautiously raises his sensors, discovering that the brigands have fled, leaving only collapsed and torn metal behind them.
Unsettlingly, further examination reveals that those are the brigands, frames crushed and warped and rusted. Ah.
“Prowl?” Jazz says, and his voice is echoing far louder than it should. “Prowl, are you—”
“Your assistance, please,” Prowl says. “I can’t transform with this in me.” The harpoon had been well-aimed, interfering with the movement of several components in his transformation sequence. “It has not punctured any energon lines.”
Jazz yanks it out, leaving a hole punched in Prowl’s rear windshield, and Prowl carefully returns to root mode. His parts grate against each other in the transformation, but when he gets optics on Jazz he sees that the other mech is too distracted to notice.
“Your…” Prowl trails off. He cannot identify one particular feature. Jazz is simply glowing, from his seams and spark chamber and visor. The harpoon is loose in his grasp, and rust is spreading along the haft from under his digits. He’s staring at Prowl with distress on his face.
“You’re okay?” Jazz asks, desperate.
“It’s not a serious injury,” Prowl says, and glances past him. “And our attackers are thoroughly dead.”
“Serves them right, hurting you,” Jazz mumbles, and the spear breaks apart under his hand, disintegrating. “Did—I do that?”
“I think so,” Prowl says, and cautiously reaches out to touch him. Jazz pulls away.
“I can’t—” Jazz coughs, and a spurt of water sprays to the ground. “Prowl, I can’t put it back. It’ll hurt you.”
Prowl grabs his gauntlet anyway, ignoring the way the plating on his digits aches and bubbles. “Do what you did with the fish,” he orders, desperate, because they aren’t close enough, they don’t have time to waste, they can’t have come this far only for whatever strange magic has kept Jazz as himself to fail now. Nothing will be gained and too much effort will be lost.
Jazz shudders, and draws in a vent, and the glow fades minutely. The burning sensation of active oxidation against Prowl’s plating fades to a faint itch. He starts to pull his hand away.
Fast as a flash flood, Jazz grabs it, turning Prowl’s hand upward to stare at the rust under flaking paint. His visor sweeps Prowl’s frame, top to tires, and Prowl is convinced the rust hasn’t spread beyond his internals but that doesn’t seem to be making a difference now.
“I hurt you,” Jazz says, hollow, and his voice is starting to echo.
“It’s not important,” Prowl says, trying to pull his hand back. The grip on it is impossibly strong. “Jazz. We must keep going. Let me go.”
With another shudder, Jazz’s grip comes loose and Prowl reclaims his hand, folding down into a transformation. He is stable to drive.
Jazz flashes through a transformation sequence that looks like it has too many moving parts, and proceeds slowly and with the painful sound of shrieking metal, but soon enough he has settled on to his tires as well.
“Less than a day’s drive,” Prowl begs. “Please. Just a little more time, Jazz. Remember who you are. You said yourself you weren’t done.”
“Not done,” Jazz murmurs, and the last word echoes around Prowl’s auditory processing like a ricocheting ball bearing, done done done done done done done.
“Come on,” Prowl says, and starts his engine.
He has the map, but Jazz is the one who leads them away, pulled forward with ever-increasing speed over the ridges and hills.
They encounter no more bandits.
When Prowl comes to a stop, it is not by choice. He is running excruciatingly low on energy. Absolutely not enough to make it to the shoreline, and not enough that he can afford not to stop at the fueling station and dwellings nestled in a crack in the hills.
He calls as much to Jazz, who skids to a halt and circles back.
“I can’t,” he says, voice somehow whispering and thundering at once. “I don’t think I can get back to my wheels, if I transform.”
“Wait outside. I can go in alone,” Prowl says.
“Don’t leave me?” Jazz asks, and his voice sounds in that moment the same as it did when they met. No thunder, no whisper, no roar, no sense of incomprehensible wonder and majesty. Just an ordinary mech, capable of fear.
“I won’t,” Prowl vows, and transforms back to root mode, staggering a little on his feet. He almost didn’t have the energy for that. “Do you need fuel?”
“No,” Jazz says. “No, I don’t.”
Prowl enters the fueling station and orders a cube high-octane blend that will process quickly. He hesitates over purchasing another, and then decides that it would be better to proceed with the optimistic assumption that he will need to reach another habitation after Jazz has returned to the sea. Both cubes in hand, he turns to leave.
“Prowl?”
Bumblebee is so far outside of Prowl’s current context of the world that he stands there staring at the mech for a solid five astroseconds.
“Prowl, it is you, thank Primus!” Bumblebee throws himself forward and claps both hands against Prowl’s arms in greeting.
“Bumblebee,” Prowl says, baffled. “What are you doing here?” Bumblebee is one of many pages of the Primal court, often called upon to run errands or messages for investigators or courtiers. Prowl himself has requested Bumblebee’s assistance many times. Often by name. The minibot is swift, efficient, and good at taking direction or initiative as required, and excellent at gathering information. Prowl has offered more than once to sponsor him for the requisite examinations required for him to become an investigator himself. Bumblebee has always declined, citing an extreme distaste for court politics. He’s professed himself happy with running around the capital or even the planet, doing errands of greater or lesser importance—mostly lesser.
“Looking for you!” Bumblebee crows.
“What?” Prowl shoves one cube in his subspace and starts to drink the other as quickly as he can, while Bumblebee fills him in.
“I only left Iacon two days ago, I really didn’t expect to find you this fast! Optimus—the new Prime, the one who just got chosen—he found the report on what Sentinel did to you and said it was wrong and stupid. Well, he said it was unjust and petty, but that’s what he meant. He’s checking all of Sentinel’s sentences of exile, but he wanted to bring you home as soon as possible, because he found yours first and said you’ve been out here long enough.” Bumblebee shakes his head. “You made yourself hard to find, Prowl! Your stipend use was really weird. We were starting to think you’d had a nervous break.”
“Ha,” Prowl says, having chugged the last of his cube. He can feel the blend hitting his systems. “Not exactly.”
“Let me just get some fuel and then we can go,” Bumblebee says, enthusiastically. “We’ve all missed having you around. And Optimus is better than Sentinel, really, he’s changing things. You’ll like him.” He starts to move around Prowl, heading for the counter.
“Wait,” Prowl says, and fumbles for the drive he picked up on one of his last stops and filled before the marauders attacked them today. “You should have this.” He doesn’t bother telling Bumblebee he can’t go. He doesn’t have time to argue, or to explain, and Bumblebee...shouldn’t follow where Prowl is going. It doesn’t have the last day’s events on it, but it contains everything else, as complete of a record of the investigation that became his life as he can make it.
“Okay?” Bumblebee says, accepting it without too many questions. “Can this wait?”
“It’s important to me that you have it,” Prowl says, to avoid saying ‘no.’
“Sure, Prowl.” Bumblebee sticks it in a subspace pocket and grins at him. “I’ll be right back.”
He probably is, but Prowl is already back off down the road again, following Jazz who has once again taken off like a bot out of hell. Prowl knows he can trust Bumblebee to deliver his last report. Jazz asked him not to leave.
Somewhere over the horizon, a hole in the world is waiting.
Jazz blows out a tire before they crest the final ridge.
He curses fluidly and filthily as he skids to a halt, the first words he has spoken since they stopped so Prowl could fuel. Prowl comes to a halt next to him and transforms so he can have hands, trying to find his toolkit.
“Do you have a spare?” he asks. Prowl does, but it is not the correct shape for Jazz’s needs.
“People have those?” he asks, and Prowl recalls that Jazz’s inner workings are more or less a mystery even to himself.
“Never mind,” Prowl says, because the subspace pocket where he keeps his tire iron seems to have rusted shut anyways. “We—we aren’t that far. We can walk the rest of the way.”
Jazz shifts back into root mode, slowly, the plates shrieking as they scrape against each other. He moves to a kneeling position, and then to his feet, the glow from his seams rising and fading and rising and fading.
Prowl takes a step forward and discovers that at some point his own knee joints have rusted. He falls against Jazz, who catches him.
“Coupla junk heaps, the pair of us,” Jazz mutters.
“You should—” Prowl tries to pull away, and Jazz’s grip tightens.
“Don’t leave me,” Jazz says again. “Please.”
They struggle forward one step and three working legs at a time. Prowl’s joints can be convinced to move, eventually, but Jazz is trying to hold back something that has decided it was never meant to be contained and is now acting with a vengeance.
“I remembered,” Jazz mutters, as they start the slog up a hill. Prowl vaguely remembers this bump of taller mountains from when he drove through this region on his investigations. “It’s coming back. Where I came from. Why I came from.”
“You remembered who made you this?” Prowl asked. His vents were coming in short gasps.
“I made me this. When I was myself, when I was the sea.” Jazz burns cold under Prowl’s hands. “I wanted to know. What it was like to be mortal.” He laughs wetly. “I loved to watch them, you know? Sing, dance, swim, play. They die, but they do so much—and they love each other—and I was lonely.”
“You did this,” Prowl says.
“I just wanted to know. I just wanted...to walk on the land. To know what it was like. To live. And I did it wrong.” A keen rises under his words, almost like the wind in the high mountains, but not quite. Prowl doesn’t recognize it. “My poor creatures. My poor storms. Why does—why does it hurt so much, Prowl? Being mortal?”
He sounds so confused. Prowl doesn’t have an answer for him. He’s not a philosopher.
“And I’m still—” Jazz shakes. “I’m still scared, I don’t want this, I don’t want to go back, Prowl, what’s going to happen? I don’t remember enough. I don’t fit.”
“You’ll fit,” Prowl promises. His left knee, closest to Jazz, is truly not working now. He drags it along, using his right one to propel him forward and leaning on Jazz to get through the worst of it. “You’ll fit. You’ll fit there like you never did here. Nothing will hurt.”
“I was going to kiss you,” Jazz said, mournfully, and in that moment Prowl wants nothing more than to stop and demand he make good on that right now. They don’t have the time for it. He keeps stumbling forward. “I was going to—I figured out how to hold myself back. How to want something without taking it. I was going to ask, and then it was too much again. I can’t tuck it back in.”
“It’s fine,” Prowl says, as they crest the ridge. “I won’t kiss you, then.”
Jazz laughs and it sounds like a sob. “Probably for the best.”
The ground slopes away below them, a short hill becoming a long incline becoming a swift drop. The landscape that has haunted every waking moment of Prowl’s existence since his exile from the court stretches bare and craggy before them.
“Oh.” Jazz’s voice is barely more than a whisper on the wind. From nowhere, Prowl can suddenly smell rust.
They practically fall down the last hill towards the specter of the waterline, still written into the rocks and metal of the shore. Jazz is glowing so brightly that even when Prowl deactivates his optics, he can still detect light from his side.
Under his feet, Prowl can feel the change from stone to sand. Jazz sets him down gently and he restarts his optics. He isn’t sure if the sun has set already or if Jazz is simply so bright that it doesn’t matter.
“You said not to leave,” Prowl says, and tries to get to his feet, but his limbs won’t move.
“I did,” Jazz says, soft. “But now I have to go.”
Lips brush Prowl’s helm, the rust burning hot now, and Jazz walks away. The ground shakes beneath him.
Jazz crosses an invisible line, and between one step and the next, the air explodes.
Most of the light is coming from Jazz. Some of it is coming from everywhere. The very sky over the seabed is bursting into water between one spark beat and the next, crashing and showering down.
The water roars. Prowl never knew it roared. He never knew it could look like this, color and light and sound enough to sweep you away. He never knew that it was meant to dance, like the sea-light in the aquifers under Cybertron, like the motion of a crowd, like every drop is trying to go somewhere all at once.
It is magnificent. Prowl knows people have been saying that about the Rust Sea from the oldest recorded records to the day before it disappeared, but he feels like he is discovering that fact for the first time.
Slowly, the surging water coalesces into a retreating mountain, falling away from him and thundering into the distance. The air stops weeping. Prowl is alone on what is once again a beach, the water lapping at the ground. Waves come in, one at a time, gentle. A particularly large one rushes far enough to caress him, cool and soothing over his plating. Prowl closes his vents and offlines his optics.
The sea has returned. Because of him, the sea has returned.
The sea has returned, and Jazz is gone.
Prowl lays there, listening to the waves roll forward and break. He’ll get up. In a moment, he’ll get up, and find a way to move again, and go on. He doesn’t hurt anymore. There’s nothing to stop him.
Nothing except the ocean surging up to wrap around him, gentle as a lover’s touch and inevitable as the dark. He hears a warm, familiar voice chuckling as it carries him away.
Hey, Prowl. Don’t you know? I’m the sea. I take what I want.
Polyhex dances when the Rust Sea fills.
The waterwheels spin, the city itself in motion with joy. Feet pound against the ground. Mechs who have not gone swimming in centuries dive from clifftops and splash through newly-filled tidepools. The air is filled with music and spraying droplets and shouting, gleeful voices.
There are many new swimmers, but no one injures themselves in the water that day. Mechs who had been driving along the empty seabed find themselves pushed up to shore, far off their chosen path, but not stranded in the depths.
There are questions, well before and even after a certain scout returns to Iacon with a fantastical report. There are even more questions when the Rust Sea, breaking millennia of documented observation, begins to move. Initial reactions range from panic that the sea is attempting to depart again, to concern that it will become itinerant, to experienced hands claiming that this was just how the water was supposed to behave.
No one claims experience when half a day later, the sea moves back to exactly where it was.
The Prime dispatches investigators to count and chart these new tide-lines, how far they extend and how regularly they retreat and what, exactly will need to be done to accommodate for them as water shipping once again becomes a viable industry.
Nightbeat, Primal investigator, second rank—though the new Prime received his petition to be restored to the first rank promptly, and assured Nightbeat that he was open to the possibility—finds himself reporting to the outpost that was the residence of the previous Primal investigator assigned to the area.
It sits way on the edge of the regional capital, off on its own with a view of a little bay. Not deep enough to be useful for shipping, according to the depth charts, but pretty. It has a broad beach, too, perfect for sitting in the sun or—if you’re this one guy Nightbeat spots while he’s getting the door unlocked—driving back and forth. The mystery mech keeps swerving as he drives, just out of the reach of the waves. Catching a snippet of voices echoing up over the water, and being somewhat professionally nosy, Nightbeat sidles close enough to the bluff’s edge to listen.
“I told you, it’s just a matter of remembering the shape.” The voice sounds familiar, even to Nightbeat, who barely knew the guy. Bumblebee will be happy to hear Prowl’s alive. The car gets two wheels off the ground on its next spin, dodging away from a well splashed wave. “Stop that. You said you wanted to work on this.”
Nightbeat can’t hear the response of whoever he’s talking to. Someone underwater, maybe?
The car slides to a stop, pointing at the ocean. “It’s not a trap. Even now, it’s not a trap. It’s just a different possibility of yourself.” Only the lap of waves answers him, but he huffs as though in conversation anyways. Maybe the guy did have a nervous break. “You liked it while it lasted. You could like it again.”
For a moment, there’s only the sound of the water. And then, at the sea’s edge, a wave rolls in and instead of breaking it ripples and rises upright. A mech stumbles out, black and white and blue, and Prowl transforms up to catch him in his arms.
“There you are,” he says, more tender than Nightbeat has ever heard him.
The two mechs collapse into waves together. They don’t fall over into them, that would make too much sense. They just melt away into a splash where they had been standing.
Nightbeat considers the possibility that he is having a nervous break, and then considers that it probably wouldn’t make much difference and moves on with his life.
While he recharges that night, on the shore of a living sea, the waves roll out and back as steady as a sparkbeat. The Rust Sea and its tides dance on into infinity one moment at a time.