For Love and Prime

by Gatekat

G1 Mirage/Prowl. Sometimes Prowl needs to be reminded of his place in the greater scheme of things. For a mech who exists more in his processor than his frame, words carry more power than pain.

1. Comfort in Submission

Fandom: Transformers G1
Author: gatekat, vaevade on LJ
Pairings: Mirage/Prowl
Rating: NC-17
Codes: Pre-Earth, Sticky, Bondage, D/s, Hurt/Comfort, Dirty Talk

Graphic smut ahead. See my Ao3 account for the full version.
archiveofourown dot org/works/562319/chapters/1101040

For Love and Prime 1: Comfort in Submission
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There was a time when the sight of his lover kneeling, aft on pedes, wrists bound behind his back and helm bowed when he stepped into his quarters would have sent his spark racing and hand reaching for a whip. That time was long past. Physical punishment had long ago lost its effectiveness, and on the front line of a war it was too dangerous to indulge in anyway.

Now it meant that Mirage had to load a special program into his active processors to handle his lover's needs. It was almost always running, producing phrases and collecting terms in every language Mirage encountered for just such evenings. He never had to worry about his lover knowing what they meant; he knew more languages than Mirage did, since Jazz and dozens of other agents and explorers all gave him their linguistic files as well.

"You failed today," Mirage spoke as he walked past the black and white Praxian kneeling without a twitch on the floor in the center of the room. There was no response. It hadn't been a question, merely the opening statement of the evening while Mirage poured himself a flute of high grade. It was only one of Sideswipe's brews, a pale replacement for the quality Mirage had once known. It was the motion, the setting of the scene that was far more important than the brand, or lack thereof.

Every motion, every sound either of them made this evening was with the singular goal of breaking Prowl down mentally and emotionally, to punish him for imagined failures so he could find his center again and go back to his office to prepare for the next battle. They had both long ago realized that this was a war that would not end while any of them still functioned.

The verbal humiliation was not a game that Mirage had liked at first. He had to teach himself to enjoy this, to do it well and give his lover what he needed.

Prowl did the same for him, a few times to the same extreme. Mirage knew all too well how uncomfortable Prowl had been when he'd first asked for sweet words and a long, tender hardline interface right there in Prowl's office chair. It was only fair he return the effort.

"How many deactivated because of you?" Mirage asked, his tone cold as he turned to glare at the mech he loved, if he believed that love existed.

"One hundred and sixty-nine," Prowl's voice trembled, the sound the first outward marker of just how badly rattled he was.

Mirage concealed his surprise. He knew that there had only been five Autobot casualties and was fairly sure there hadn't been more than four Decepticons dead. That meant ... a lot of civilians.

A lot of civilians.

That would explain the mech currently begging, silently, to be hurt.

"So many," Mirage murmured out loud, taking slow, measured steps back to the center of the room, holding the flute. He stopped when he was behind and slightly to the side of Prowl, taking a small sip. "What makes you think you even deserve this? Why shouldn't I leave you to rust in your own well-deserved guilt?"

Prowl's doorwings trembled faintly at the threat but he gave no other movement. "Because the Prime needs me," he whispered plaintively, his tone and field thick with how badly he wanted it to no longer be true, to be released from the endless torture of planning how best to slaughter mecha with other mecha.

Mirage hummed in agreement and took a step forward, kneeling just out of range of Prowl's optics, but close enough to brush one hand lightly down the smooth plane of a single wing. "Exactly," he said. "The Prime needs you. The Autobots need you. Unfortunately for us, you're the best we have."

A soft, nearly inaudible sound, a hiccup of Prowl's vents, was the only answer an outsider would hear. Yet Mirage was close enough to teek the truth. His lover was desperate for that not to be true. Desperate to be numb enough to once more no longer care that it was. As self-destructive as this cycle would eventually, and already had, become, it was the only short term answer when short term was all they could afford.

Mirage let his fingers trail back up to the top edge of the wing and ghosted along until it was touching the tip, then made a quick shift sideways, dug his claws in, and yanked, pulling Prowl back and towards him. He shoved the other hand forward, pushing the flute of high grade to Prowl's lips and tilting. "Drink," he commanded. He'd learned, over time, that the loosening effects helped considerably. As ethically questionable as it was to force high grade on a bound, already unstable lover, they had gone far past the boundaries of ethical long ago. "Maybe it will actually improve the functioning of that glitched mess you call a processor."

Prowl drank, accepting the order and only losing a few drops down the side of his mouth in the choking struggle he put up. As reflexive and genuine as the distress and resistance looked, it wasn't. It was all part of a well-scripted improvisational scene they were playing for Prowl's benefit.

He would repay Mirage for his kindness later. For now, Prowl simply needed, and he took.

"There we are," Mirage murmured as Prowl struggled. "Drink, and be glad you're still worthy enough to waste energon on. "Barely worthy," he added as he lowered the flute, then leaned in to lick up the drops that had run down Prowl's jaw and neck, ending at the Praxian's lips with a sharp, quick bite before he drew away and stood smoothly. He pushed Prowl forward again with the hand still on his wing, holding him there. "Think of all those starving mecha you lost in the streets who would have killed for that. I wonder if any of them are still alive, if any of them think of you." He let go of the wing after a quick shove, forcing Prowl down even further, and stalked around him.

The well-crafted Praxian Enforcer frame, upgraded inside and out for war, shook for a nanoklik before he stilled with his forehelm nearly touching the floor. His field roiled with pain, grief, loss, failure, hatred, anger, fear ... every emotion that the majority thought he didn't possess because of the tight self-control learned and perfected on the streets he once patrolled. Enforcer duty was no place to display one's thoughts in field or frame.

Mirage slowed slightly as the emotions hit his own field. It had been hard, learning how to ignore those feelings. In the beginning of all this, they'd made him want to stop the entire scene and wash Prowl with comfort and reassurance and everything Mirage would want in his lover's place. Gentleness, where Prowl needed harshness. Support, where Prowl needed punishment. Eventually, he'd fully grasped the respect and trust Prowl had for him in coming to him with this need and learned to fulfill it.

Now those emotions had little effect on Mirage. He would never enjoy them, but he could use them. "Feeling bad won't do anything to help those lost sparks," he commented with careless haughtiness, a combination of noble speaking to a slave and Enforcer commander with an officer that had erred greatly.

Prowl took it as both subordinates would: still, silent and ashamed. His field said what his vocalizer and frame did not. He grieved for every spark lost, Autobot, Decepticon and Neutral. He even grieved for the unsparked AIs and organics that perished in this too-long, too-brutal war. He grieved for lost potential, lost treasures, lost history ... everything that could never be reclaimed cut at him, hurt him, and he could show none of it. He was not punished for such failures as he once would have been as an Enforcer. Instead he was praised for his tactics because the Prime and officers saw what was saved, not what was lost. They didn't understand what could drive Prowl to do better and what tore at him.

Not even Jazz or the Prime, two mecha that really should have seen it, seemed to have any grasp at how much they were hurting their tactician with their kind words and supportive attention. Thus it fell to Mirage and too much of the limited time they had together. It was another sacrifice for the cause, to keep Prowl functional enough to continue his duties, and it made Mirage despise the war all the more. He would never stop subtly encouraging Prowl to leave the Autobots, or the occasional flat out offer, even though he knew in his spark that his lover was completely incapable of leaving his duty. Following orders was what he'd been sparked to do, trained to do. He'd never been intended to rise above a squad commander, and his core programming to ensure he was content with no more than that was crippling him. It had been stripped, but Mirage knew from his own existence that it never completely went away.

The alternative to doing this was as simple as it was unacceptable. Prowl would break down, his personality protocols degrading until something broke irreparably. While he did not know if he'd take his own spark, become combat suicidal or simply go functionally insane, the Autobots would loose their best tactician and perhaps the only hope of salvaging anything from this war. Thus it fell to Mirage to mete out the punishment Prowl required, by design and training, to continue functioning.

"In fact," Mirage continued, as he came around Prowl's front, looking down at the bowed Praxian, "Feeling bad won't even help the sparks that are still shining. You're a failure, you know, wasting time on something as worthless as yourself."

Prowl cringed, his field flaring in pain and denial of a sort. He was a failure, but the Prime ordered he have energon...

"What are you, anyway, a pre-programmed Enforcer? In other words, common stock? Barely better than a drone?" Mirage knelt, grabbed Prowl's shoulder as a choked sound escaped the bound mech and shoved him up and back.

"No," he spat, forcing pale blue optics to meet his fierce golden ones. "Not even better than a drone. Drones don't have your kind of kill count. Drones are at least too stupid to think they could make a difference, and don't even try. You're much, much worse." He pushed away with a disgusted tch while Prowl trembled, automatic denials kicking in, officer protocols, trying to protect the Autobot SIC from abuse his rank should not suffer.

Yet Prowl had suffered it as long as he'd held more than entry level rank. In the simple act of surviving his city's end he betrayed everything he was meant to be. In accepting that his precinct, his city, could no longer be helped, Prowl had committed the greatest act of treason his programming knew. All anyone else saw was a survivor, a mech who fought past the odds and succeeded. They didn't comprehend just how critically flawed Prowl had to be to become an Autobot, much less to have himself upgraded and become an officer, then a high ranking one.

Prowl never contested the charges whispered against him because he knew in his spark that the truth was so much worse. No one here would tell him that though. No one would punish him for what he did in surviving his city. No one cared that he was slowly going insane for lack of beatings and being dressed down for the crime of abandoning his post and worse.

"No drone has your kind of kill count," Mirage was saying. "And I'm told you're the best we have?" The noble shook his head, chuckling for a moment. "Don't make me laugh. You're not the best we have. You're the thing they dragged up when all the proper tacticians had been killed."

A shudder ran down Prowl's frame, causing his armor to quiver and click. Yet somewhere there was also a tiny little flicker of peace inside him to have the truth thrown at him. He did not, could not, contest the accusation. It was true. He was an Enforcer who outlived his city. He was salvaged hardware and software set to run an experimental battle computer. He'd volunteered because in his deranged state he thought it would wipe him clean, strip everything that was Prowl from the processors he had.

He could not have been more horrified when he booted up to realize how wrong he'd been. And now he was far too valuable to become a grunt and end himself quickly.

Mirage saw the shudder, focused in on it. Still kneeling, he leaned in, letting his mouth slide into a cruel smile. "Oh, oh oh," he whispered. "Is that it? Is that your deep, dark secret? You know, don't you, how worthless you were meant to be. You know exactly what your lot in life should have been, and yet you're still here, playing this masquerade. Losing."

A tiny sound, something akin to a relieved sob escaped Prowl before he muted it. His frame quivered a little harder and his mouth opened, just a bit. Officer protocols surged to dominance, only to be checked before they got anywhere. He wanted to push, to grab and hurt and thrust into and punish this creature before him for saying such things about him. But he couldn't find the words. He knew, to the very core of himself, that those reactions were a mark of serious deterioration of his social software. As an Enforcer, his first duty upon realizing such a response had happened would be to report to his Captain and request a reformat.

Prowl so desperately wanted to. But this was not Praxus and he was not a lowly patrol officer. The Prime did not understand what a reformat really meant for common mecha, working mecha. He'd been taught it was a horrible thing, a punishment second only to imprisonment in a personality matrix without a frame. Yet to Prowl's kind it was a welcomed thing. A way to continue performing his duties and being a productive member of society when his software could no longer be repaired.

That did make him keen, ever so softly. Not from his vocalizer, but from his frame itself.

Mirage shifted to the side, pressed his mouth right over the audio receptor. "Who needs Decepticons when you're making all the right mistakes to get us killed off? We pay too high a price for every avoidable misjudgment you make. You should have ended as a pile of scrap with the rest of your race. Do you count their sparks, too? Are you so self-important that you blame yourself for your city? Do you realize you should have stayed? Maybe one more could have been evacuated, one more proper mech saved and put to some real use." Mirage stood back up and grabbed the tip of Prowl's chevron, yanking, snapping the head and neck back so he could look down at his lover. "I think Prime only keeps you because you're portable. We'd be just as well off with a computer doing your work." He curled his wrist, trying to twist the metal in his hand, just enough to hurt as much as he could without it snapping.

Prowl screamed.

Denial, pain, regret. Frame and vocalizer and processor and spark in a unified voice.

It was not enough, but it was a very good start. If he had to, Prowl could function now for the next shift. He wanted so much more though, and they had time for it. He would be an incoherent lump of mech on the floor when this was over, and then Mirage would sink into him, take him and force him to enjoy the use of his frame. It was a state he both dreaded and dreamed of. For just a few moments there was pleasure and he was once more only a minor thing. Unimportant except that he had a useful purpose.

As soon as he had the scream, Mirage let go. "Not that easy," he said with a sneer in his voice. "It's not going to be that easy to pay. And you know what it's going to take."

Another step and he was standing behind Prowl. Hands moved carefully, brushing over wing edges, stroking outward until they reached the tips. They quivered under his fingers, anticipating pain or pleasure and not actually sure what was coming.

"One orn," Mirage said, letting his voice wax casual, like Prowl wasn't bound on his knees and trembling before him, "I won't be able to do this. You keep building up the losses like this, and I'm just not going to be able to keep up. Over one hundred sparks in a single day?" Mirage grinned, tweaked the tips sharply. Prowl gasped at the mixed sensation and felt his interface equipment cycle on against his will. His spike tip pressed against the cover, which he was managing to keep closed for the moment.

It was another signal of how badly damaged he was. There was no way this should be so intensely arousing.

"One error, for one hundred sparks. Keep that up and you'll be rivaling Megatron," Mirage whispered as let go of the wings and knelt, pressing his front against Prowl's back, not at all careful about the way it pushed Prowl's arms in and made the shoulder joints creak.

Prowl shuddered again, his field flaring sharply as it escaped his control. Intense, full of arousal, need, self-hate, pain, want ... full of the wild contradiction that was Prowl's emotions and stability. "I ... not that insane," he finally objected weakly.

"Oh, lover," Mirage purred, wrapping his arms around Prowl. "My deluded, selfish, drone of a lover, is that what you tell yourself? Look around, look how far you've gotten, look at what a mess you're in, and it's all your fault. Of course you're insane. No one asked you to be here. No one asked you to help. Should have stayed where you were, we'd be so much better off without you."

Prowl whimpered and shivered at the suggested he should have done what he had always known he should have done, but couldn't make himself at the time. He still couldn't lay down and fade away, or even step into battle intending to end his tortured existence. But oh, he wanted to so badly. So very badly.

Mirage dropped his voice to a low, sultry whisper. "Don't know why the Prime keeps you around. He should have had you deactivated as the miswired glitch you are vorns ago."

"Hates me. He's ... Evil," Prowl gave voice to the treason he could so rarely admit to. It was a warning in and of itself of how badly he needed to be reprimanded, how close he was to snapping completely.

Mirage pressed his lips to the neck, deceptively gentle. His fields were carefully clear of any reaction to the words or the painful knowledge that Prowl believed them to his very spark. "Don't know why I keep you around either, for that matter," he murmured. "I deserve so much better than a pre-programmed pretending to be more than he is. What makes you think you're good enough for me?" He bit, harsh and deep, into Prowl's neck.

The frame under him jerked sharply, but Prowl made no sound.

Then a snarl rumbled up from the Praxian. "Because you need some way to remind yourself of what you were. Taking orders from a commoner, a former dancer and thief. Jazz was even less than I, and you must bow to his every whim."

Mirage snarled back, tensing his hands and digging his claws inward on the chest. They did no damage to the battle armor, but when he pulled, he knew exactly where to find the seams and he used them, sinking in relentlessly. He jumped up and back and pulled Prowl with him, spinning with the grace of a mech who was raised a noble and then trained to kill.

Prowl slammed back into the floor and Mirage was on him in an instant, hand to his neck, squeezing. "Shut your mouth," he hissed. "It was my right, my place to give orders to mechs who were ten times what you are!" His grip tightened and as he leaned forward, putting more weight behind it, he rested his other on the wing, pinned flat against the floor. "At least Jazz knows who he is, doesn't come back crying to his lover like a sparkling. At least Jazz chose who he became, made something of himself. You're nothing more than a bad experiment, the result of the worthless spark of a failed mech powering that glitched block in your head. You thought you could just fade away, make something of your worthless frame." He sank his claws into the wing and pulled down. "Did you ever know your place? Or were you sparked this arrogant?"

Prowl hissed, struggling under his lover's lighter weight, but Mirage knew what he was doing and with his hands bound behind them, there was little Prowl could do but squirm.

Suddenly it was all gone. The defiance, the anger, everything.

"I knew, once," Prowl's voice crackled with static, his field full of longing to go back, to be what he'd been intended; a minor cog in the great machine that was Cybertron. "Once," he whispered, all but lost to his frame, his optics on but no longer seeing.

"Please." A single glyph with a world of implications wrapped up in it.

Please hurt me.
Please make me forget.
Please end the glitch.
Please, oh please end me.

"Oh, so now it's 'please,' is it?" Mirage mocked. He leaned in, never letting up on his grip around Prowl's neck. "The drone in you would do well to remember that word, you worthless pile of Pit refuse. You're going to scream it for me, I promise you that."

Prowl looked at him with a mixture of hope, fear and thanks that jumbled into a cacophony of strong against Mirage's field.

The hand from the wing pulled back and traced down the body, causing Prowl to twitch with a low moan of pleasure at the touch.

"Where do you get off speaking like that to your betters? Where do you get off speaking like that to me?" Mirage hissed as he found the plating he was looking for in the waist, made of a lighter, more flexible metal in order to bend at that joint, and sank his claws in, just barely. Prowl whimpered softly, but his frame was heating in desire fueled by pain and the touch of a long-trusted lover.

"Tell me, do you think those innocents ever felt this pain? Or do you think theirs was worse?" With his last enunciation, Mirage flexed his fingers, locked the joints, and put all his power into a single pull. Even against the weaker plating, it took almost all his strength, but as he ripped back, he pulled the entire section away in his hand. Under him Prowl convulsed and howled in agony.

The pain was shared across Prowl's field, but with it came the rush of arousal Prowl couldn't understand but marked as deviant. His interface cover slid open, allowing his spike to spring free. The combination of sensations drew a moan from Prowl, his optics flickering. Rage flared up again, the want to fight and hurt and kill, and the panic at the reaction.

Prowl knew better.

"Please..." Prowl whimpered, shaking and terrified of himself. When would that happen when he wasn't safely bound?

Mirage sank into the now-exposed wiring, digging and pulling at the internal systems at his fingertips without even looking to see what he was doing. "You're a sick, twisted excuse of a being," he spat. "What kind of mech-" One finger found a wire, tugged at it, looped it around, and twisted while he spoke. "What kind of miswired, virus-riddled, drone-sparked mech gets off on this?" He pulled, snapping the wire in two places at once, and before Prowl even had a chance to react to the pain, grabbed an entire handful and pulled.

Prowl screamed and thrashed, almost knocking Mirage from his perch. His frame heated more and he keened at the contradictory demands. Fight and interface. Pain and pleasure. It was all jumbling into one horrible mass inside him, and it felt good.

Knowing that when it was over he really would feel better helped too.

Pain bright optics looked up at Mirage and Prowl's mouth moved to answer, but no sounds came out. The way he threw his helm back, baring his throat to the violence was tell enough though.

"Can't even talk," Mirage mocked. "Is it really so easy, to cull your voice? Is it because you know that nothing you say is worth the energy it takes to hear your words?" He leaned in, ran his glossa right over the spot in Prowl's neck where his vocalizer was nestled, and bit down, hard.

The screech that erupted was more the vocalizer's automatic objection to being compressed, even that little, but Prowl's engine moaned and armor began to shift slightly, opening up gaps.

"Mismatched abomination," Mirage said as he pulled away, energon on his lips. "Little drone playing officer." He shifted off Prowl to the side, drew his hand out of the wound in Prowl's side and let it trail down to the spike. He held a single finger close enough to the spike for Prowl to feel the energy rippling around his frame, but didn't touch. "Does it turn you on, to think about spiking a noble?" he whispered. "To think about sinking into one who was made for so much more than you?"

"Kill you," Prowl snarled, letting the last visages of his self-control go to the pain and want racing through him. He didn't even feel sick at it anymore as he struggled against his bindings. "Tear you apart." His optics flared, bright and hot and insane. "Use you till you're gray under me."

"So you can add one more kill to your list?" Mirage growled back at him. "I'd like to see you try, I'd like to see you force that mistake of a processor into actually hurting me. You're too weak to destroy someone outright like that; you do it by sending them to their deaths where others can do your dirty work. So you can lie to yourself about who killed them. But you know, and I know."

Prowl sucked in a sharp vent of air, trembling at the truth of it. Rage surged up, only to be broken by arousal and pain as sharp claws sliced into the sensor-rich and very, very thin metal plates of his extended spike.

A scream torn from him and his hips drove into the contact, wanting more.

"Kill you!" Prowl howled, meaning it in that moment of delirium.

"Do it, then!" Mirage yelled back at him, twisting his hand, pulling through metal, at the same time arming his other hand behind his back, because he could feel the truth to the words in Prowl's crazed, delirious field. He could feel it in the way Prowl genuinely fought to free himself. He could even hear it in the screams that might have been meant as words but came out garbled screeches. "Do it if you'd rather have one more spark on your list than absolution! Do it if you'd rather disappoint the Prime and lose the Autobots their best tactician! Do if you're so selfish!"

All while he spoke, he stroked and cut at the spike as Prowl thrust his hips into the contact. Grounding Prowl to the only thing that was going to keep him under control now, the only escape route out of this entire scene for them both. If Prowl broke loose, one of them was not going to leave the room with their spark intact.

"Or maybe," Mirage said, quieter but no more gentle, rubbing faster now, working his claws into grooves he'd cut into the spike and moving up and down in those, cutting into the same lines, forcing his claws deeper and deeper, "You can act the obedient drone you ought to have been and keep. Still. Show some restraint for once in your long life of self-indulgence."

Rage poured through Prowl's field with pain hot on its trail. Need and hunger, guilt and hope, and more than any of them, the purity of Prowl's complete loss of his moral coding.

Mirage drove a claw deep into the opening for transfluid at the tip and Prowl bucked into his hand, forcing it deeper even as the hot fluid rushed against Mirage's claw. Energy roared across and through Prowl's frame, whiting out his optics and shorting what little was left of his self-awareness.

Mirage acted quickly as soon as he felt Prowl's self flicker out of his field, fading back behind the haze of the pain-induced overload. One more step to take to break his lover completely in order for him to rebuild and reset.

Graphic smut ahead. See my Ao3 account for the full version. archiveofourown dot org/works/562319/chapters/1101040