[TF Tidbit] Fractured 02

Series: Transformers
Title: Fractured 02
Characters: Prowl, Jazz, Ritochet (mentioned)
Summary: "Whatever this thing fed off of --sparks, energon, hopes and dreams -- Jazz was about two clicks away from not being here for it.
Warnings: Body horror, injury, spooks
Disclaimers: I do not own Transformers. This is written purely for fun.

~~*~~ 

“Wake.”

Lightning and ice shot through his frame, racing through every fan and circruit. Everything hurt. Being dead shouldn't hurt so much. He would really like to just go back into stasis and not have to feel how stupid he had been.

Cold pinpricks crawled up his arm. A warning if Jazz had ever felt one.

“‘M up.” His mouth felt fried, and there was a crackle of charge at the edge of his field when he took a moment to rest his optics. “Stop zapping me, I’m up.” Primus-damned doctors with their twitchy fingers. One of these days he’d get one that actually had a bedside manner.     

There was a nasty glare from the light above, when his optics came online. Black, static motes covered his vision. Slag, he was in bad shape. Cracked armor, fractured struts, his visor was damaged but that was nothing a reboot couldn’t handle, and his audials must be broken, too. There was some kind of weird reverb with the doctor’s voice.

“...I’m not dead?”

“No.”

Proximity alarms belated reported the figure sitting next to him. Jazz eyed the mech’s general direction after getting his racing pump under control. “You sure?” His short-term memory cache was giving off errors, but he was pretty sure that he remembered dying. It made his processor ache trying to put them in order.

He let his head thunk back to the berth when the other mech didn’t answer. Guess it didn’t matter that much. Someone had to have dug him out, if there was a doctor to patch him back together. Ugh, this was going to cost a pretty credit. Mechs that could bring someone back from impalement were way above Jazz’s paygrade. Ric was going to have an absolute fit once he found out-

“No.”

Jazz quick-reset his processor. “I’m sorry?”

“I am not a doctor.”

Ice poured down Jazz’s backstrut. “No?” he asked. There were all kinds of unsavory mechs that could have pulled him from the hole. Discreetly, he hacked away at his fritzing optical feed. “Nurse then? Concerned passerby?”

“No.”

“I hate to tell you, mech, but I don’t got anything of value on me.” Jazz was basically good as dead, sitting here with all these damages and no doctor. Frag. If he ended up in a chop shop, then Ric was the least of his worries.

“You, uh, got a name?” Jazz grabbed desperately for something to keep them talking while everything rebooted. If he could splice together a neural block and overcharge the capacity on his engine, he could get the hell out of dodge - broken struts or otherwise. His optics cycled back into focus. “Or something that you want? What’s the deal...”

Jazz trailed off in horror. His chest was a gaping wound, metal plating ruptured outward. Crystals clustered about the edges, and there looked to be a whole, solid sheet of it further in. He could see his own spark.

“Oh dear god-” The staticy figure that Jazz had thought was a mech, sharpened into a monster made of broken crystals. It loomed over him, eyes intently focused on his face.

“We are called Prowl.” Dangerous, deadly claws hovered a few inches off Jazz’s chest. “And we have work to do.”