A/N: M'awww. PROWL.
(Of course I couldn't keep it happy. THIS UNIVERSE ISN'T HAPPY, why should Prowl be?!)
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Short Beauty
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Lockdown was willing to keep Prowl happy, provided it didn't cost him anything.
That guideline was fast blurring, however, in the realm of direct and indirect 'cost': he didn't intend on shelling out thousands of credits for the kid, but he found he often took losses while whim-catering, even if he didn't actually pay a cent for the small distractions the ninjabot took such pleasure in. Jobs flew by, money was missed. Calls were put on hold, all while Prowl remained delightedly ignorant of their livelihood draining away. He felt the money slipping away. Yes, it was hard to regret something you never had in the first place, but Lockdown had plenty of energy and determination to direct toward the skill and pulled it off magnificently.
Still, there were rewards to a happy ninjabot, and he wasn't lying: once Prowl had settled in, there was no place he wouldn't take the kid. No place at all.
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Lockdown leaned back in his navigational chair, looking decidedly to the left of the large, static-speckled comm-screen in front of him. This would have been fine, and even casual had the screen not been occupied, but it caused the purple-optic'ed mech on the other end to nearly grind his teeth. At risk of being ignored entirely even after fifteen cycles of plying the bounty hunter, Swindle put on a trust-bolstering laugh—a bit strained, as it was his fourth for the day—and snapped his fingers at his associate and sometimes-compadre.
"Cmon-n-n. I'm serious, Lockdown—this is a fine venture for the two of us, but time is limited!" He gushed, blinking quickly. "The whole planet will be down for their little festival: it's an in-out job! You wouldn't let an opportunity like this pass you by just to keep your mileage low, right?"
His wiggling enthusiasm could have choked a small organic, but Lockdown just shook his head.
"Y'know, I'd take you up on that. Except, uh… we're fine," he explained. He caught the 'we' pronoun and corrected it, vocals hardening a bit. His independence was very important, and expected from mechs like Swindle. "I'm fine money-wise. I'll just wait for the next bite: knock yourself out on Plunto."
Swindle was one of the most discerning mechs on his side of the galaxy. He was the temperature-taker, the perceptive one, the near-psychic businessman who knew just which way to dance for a sale and had the talent to back it up. He often came to Lockdown with deals that required a little more of a… servos-on approach, and the mech had never once let him down. Theirs was a golden link, built on convenience and practicality with no toes to step on and plenty of money underfoot. Very fun.
Things, however, had changed lately. His conclusion from this strange, half-megacycle exchange with his crusty bounty-hunting compatriot (one of many, and not the last) was that the mech was glitching all across the board, and the arms-dealer was more worried than he should be: purely in a practical sense, of course.
He couldn't exactly partner up with a clinically malfunctioning mech with nothing left in his logic drive but dead ports and expect a good return. Swindle scoffed at him good-naturedly.
"The Lockdown I know is never fine money-wise. Pit, 'fine' doesn't even apply to money! You look a little tense: what kind of a stationary mess are you in, bucko?" Swindle asked archly, shifting exaggeratedly as his purple optics flickered around, as though he could lean forward and see further into Lockdown's dark ship. "Hostage situation? Broken ship? I can't hear anything back there—is cute old Mood still chugging? You know, I've got a few—"
"I just can't go anywhere right now, and I don't want to." He paused a minute before finishing (gruffly, as though he didn't even want to): "And it's Moot."
"C'mon, guy, enough with the excuses! I need your muscle," Swindle professed, grinning. "I wouldn't trust this run to anyone but my sketchy bounty-hunting friend!"
"Can't, Swindle," Lockdown ground out. "I'm on a… pit-stop. Beta-CF5 quadrant."
The way he said it and looked to the left, afire with gripping-ripping impatience, made Swindle roll his optics in a moment of façade-weakness. It made sense. He'd been avoiding it in the starry hopes that Lockdown had more reliable logic-coding than that, but it made sense. It was the Autobot.
He worried (in his fascinated, condescending way) to see an accomplished fellow entrepreneur of destruction going so haywire over such a weird little mech. There were so few of skill out in the galaxy, Swindle couldn't afford to lose his top associate, but had watched Lockdown compromise and hack at his schedule to fit the adorable little fragger into his life. The fact that Lockdown was refusing a perfectly valid and deliciously lucrative adventure made the arms-dealer think the kid had wiped the hunter's coding when he was in stasis. Never should trust Autobots: Swindle didn't trust anybody anyways, but Autobots were more finiky than most. Afire with advice, but familiar enough with Lockdown to know he wouldn't accept it, opportunist Swindle realized their negotiation was over and settled for a possible satisfaction of curiosity.
"Is it the little lady?" He wheedled, giving the bounty hunter a gooey, knowing look.
"Kid likes organic stuff," Lockdown grunted, shrugging.
Swindle paused as he processed that idea, a strange expression itching at his flat face.
"You're on an organic planet."
Lockdown nodded.
"And he's out there. You brought him there. And he's just… out there?"
"Yep."
"What does he do: roll around in it?" He asked, all gushing bravado dropped and replaced with an intense, half-disgusted wariness. Lockdown smirked at the change. He could consider himself privileged to be one of the few to see Swindle's flinty, non-business side, but he couldn't appreciate what he didn't consider noteworthy. Everybody had alternate personality programming: it was nothing to get locked up about.
"He ain't defective, Swindle," he retorted, swiveling slowly in his chair to look to his left: apparently to wherever the former Autobot was hiding. "Pit if I know: too long en route and it's 'botanical system' this and 'nature reserve' that. He just stares at it, then comes back inside. But it does somethin' for him."
"Tell me you disinfect him when he comes back on board," Swindle deadpanned. Lockdown chuckled as he imagined himself taking the high-pressure air-lock disinfectant to Prowl as he reentered the ship. Kid would think he'd gone crazy. Might bolt out into the woods and never come back. Live like a wild thing.
Lockdown half-worried about that sometimes.
"He's sharp enough to mind his own crevices," Lockdown mumbled lazily. Swindle looked as though he'd been flushed with sour oil, then been asked for a refund.
"That's disgusting," he gasped.
Somewhere outside the ship's bridge, the familiar sound (and sensation) of a pressure-lock disengaging made Lockdown look to his left again. Moot went crazy if anyone approached the ship without a Tag, so that meant Prowl was done with his little organic sojourn; the hunter's face relaxed. Like a light had been switched on, Swindle's eager businessman persona dominated the screen again, all blank smile.
"Well, that's my cue to head off! Really disappointed, Lockdown, by the way," he professed, tone faintly and expertly mournful. "I was really looking forward to rushing Plunto with you, but your values seem to have taken an unfortunate turn for the relationship-constricted worse. You know, next time, you might not be the first one I come to with a find like this."
"Go ding your own over-modded diodes, hawkbot," Lockdown grumbled fondly, regarding the arms dealer from half-shuttered optics. "You know I'm the best around. You'll call me when you need me."
"But," Swindle returned ominously, "will I be there when you need me?"
The arms-dealer barely had time to shrug before Lockdown cut him off. He shut down the communicator screen and stood up, stretching and shaking away the 'conversation' and its implied loss… and the possible threat. Plunto would have been good, but they were in the backwater side of Beta galaxy, and the travel-time was impossible; no use whining about it. Already, even with Prowl barely inside, he felt life could get started again: no more pit-stops (they were Pit-stops for the action-obsessed hunter, really) for at least another month, and that was enough to relax and have a cube of high-grade over.
Prowl returned silently, stepping into the red-lit bridge with a steady, blind gait and something cradled in his servos. It was a moment before Lockdown sorted the fleshy pink bits of it and the curling stem from his partner's black plating, but it was a 'flower', and Prowl was holding it like it was a protoform, surveying it from every angle with that direct blue visor of his. Lockdown arched his brow.
As his partner watched, the ninjabot found an old jar, scalped together some organic nutrient-paste, poured in some water-like substance from the planet and reverently attended the little plant to the best of his abilities. Lockdown knew the punk was eccentric, and was usually able to abide it in silence and get on with what he was doing, but this intent, clinking circus pushed the limit of his skepticism. Finally, when Prowl placed the mini-ecosystem on his lap and tucked himself into a chair, he had to break the quiet.
"That's not gonna last three kliks once we're up," he grunted.
"I know," Prowl said heavily, caressing the blossom with one digit. "It fell. That's the only reason."
The only reason he'd taken it was because it was technically already dead. He never would have cut a flower, but he brought this one into his life for the short beauty it had.
Lockdown shrugged and rolled his shoulders, getting ready to push Moot back up into space. She seemed to yawn when he prodded her engines, lulled to sleep by the lush planet and its array of song-aerials that Lockdown couldn't give a broken shifter about, but otherwise ascended obediently into the atmosphere and beyond like a spiny red-detailed balloon. Prowl never looked away from the delicate blossom, absorbing it with every part of himself. Stealing moments from that jarred bit of life with its nutrient dish.
The instant the ship took off into deep space, the flower's cells collapsed and the beautiful life withered in the sudden rush of anti-atmosphere and crushing cold. It curled into a pile of dry brown-green dust. Prowl touched his forehead to the jar.
The flower had already fallen, but the inevitability of the death did not matter: Prowl had claimed and furthered a part of its agony. It should have at least been able to die where it wanted, but he had stolen it for bittersweet succor; singled it out and killed it through his selfishness instead of 'letting it die'. Lockdown would have been able to look at it in such a final way—dead was dead—but Prowl was sensitive to the journey it took before its spark was extinguished, and he couldn't help but think he'd served it ill. The former Autobot curled up in the dark ship and watched the dust settle and felt his sadness grow.
More than that, he watched a fragile organic creature die in a cold, unknown place and thought vaguely of a little earth female that he had loved more than life.