A/N: This is probably the most relationship-serious chapter, I guess. Hope I didn't stretch it too far, because Lockdown IS still rational, but you can get hella-close to someone after spending sixteen-some-odd years living and breathing next to them. Plus, as we know, Prowl is an endearing little ninja! AND Lockdown is still human. … Er, mechanical.

Lockdown feels the urge to meeeeerge. (Forgive me, Primus, but I laughed aloud when writing the prostitute bit. So freaking brutish!)

To all readers: Hi! I'm pleased as pink if you're reading this by itself, but I would also HIGHLY suggest reading 'Deadlocked' before you go any further. It is the (thwarted) beginning of Prowl and Lockdown's partnership—Partners is an AU 'what-if' sequel--and the content therein will be referenced a lot in later chapters. Thank you!

Ultimate Turn-off

Every relationship had its tug and shove with berthroom rhythm, even if the bounty-hunting team had a system—not a relationship.

Normally, Lockdown did the chasing. Prowl came willingly, perhaps smiling slightly, but very rarely did he instigate… mostly because his dignity was too valuable (Lockdown took the fluid out of him for it) and the bounty hunter always preempted any possible urges he might have had with his own eternally-ready smirk. No, their rhythm came easily and stayed standard: Lockdown chased and quick little Prowl slowed down just enough to be caught and make the ritual satisfying at the same time.

After hard, oil-spattered hunts, however, the kid didn't dodge or sprint away. He turned around and, visor gleaming, pursued.

The hard-won violence and the sweet success aroused him; got his systems running so tight that the smallest scratch or innuendo would set him off and take his engines roaring and spitting so hard he vibrated. He was a mean little machine and a practical unstoppable force, all of his devious circuitry and skill programs running just as high and clean as his sex-drive. He tricked and lured and attacked. Lockdown wasn't used to being physically jumped and forced into a wall by such a lightweight model, but he wasn't averse to it—especially with the lusty way Prowl looked at him and the way they fought for dominance. His partner took him on head-to-head, for the sheer love of it.

In that oil-lust, none of 'coy' Prowl's finiky little preferences mattered: the bounty hunter didn't have to be concerned with upsetting him. He let go, pulling dirty tricks and relishing when Prowl dealt him the same with a sharp grin. They fell and fought and thrashed where they were, and had a Pit of a time. This was what Lockdown had seen in him that first time on Earth: the ninjabot's throbbing ego, his toothy want of dominance and his willingness to be dangerously powerful. Their sessions were always jarringly physical, but this was an all-out personal war, and it was damn good.

Afterwards, Prowl actually stayed with him. Maybe he was exhausted; maybe he felt vulnerable after such a draining and… unnaturally consuming rush of brutality, and wanted to be near someone. Maybe Lockdown grounded him and made his reserved side return, or he felt closer to the bounty hunter than usual and simply wanted to stay.

Whatever the case, Prowl rebooted and made no move to leave. He dozed comfortably in the crook of Lockdown's steaming green body, seeming to drink in their dissipating vapor and collective heat with a contented purr of his engines. Blissfully primal and unaware, knowing the hunt to be well-done and over with, with rewards on the way. The silent sentimentality wasn't something that Lockdown necessarily wanted, but he had to admit it was nice having the little machine there to pet and joke at. It was especially nice not to have the often stuck-up ninjabot exit his room like he couldn't wait to scrub himself clean, sullied processor and scuffed plating and all.

But it was in these not-necessary-but-grudgingly-nice moments that Lockdown started thinking outside his cherished box of objectivism.

A whispering bit of glitched code in the back of his processor said that, in untold eons, Prowl was the only one he'd ever found who was worthy of being his partner. Partner had long been a dirty word for him: a practical impossibility, a compromise and a liability. Someone to share with? No, Lockdown didn't share. He earned and kept everything. His independent-streak was a galaxy wide and a war deep: he didn't need anybody, but it wasn't that whiny, defensive type of solitude.

Quite literally, he had no need of anyone. He was a self-contained machine, efficient and vicious, feeding on ever-present conflicts among the stars and keeping himself happy. Damn, damn good life. No one to answer to but himself.

Then Prowl had fallen into his lap, and he decided to take a plunge or three. The coy ninjabot had called him partner first, that very first time he snuck onto Lockdown's ship, and the idea simply stuck until he… convinced the kid to follow through in a more permanent joint venture. The fact Lockdown had adapted so quickly to their 'partnership' after so long alone perturbed him, and that same insidious line of code insisted that he'd never find anyone else this good on this many levels: not only individually, but in relation to him. He and the weird little 'bot worked together in the domestic sense, whereas most partnerships were frigid, dispute-riddled and had convenience as their only lifeblood. It was a compelling, uncomfortable thought, but a ready one after sixteen stellar-cycles of coexisting with the wry ninjabot.

It almost made him want to… be closer with Prowl.

Almost like a merge. Maybe.

It wasn't a waking thought, to be sure. Primus, no; Pit no. It wasn't something that lingered with him, because when he had all his faculties the thought was beyond idiotic. No, it hit him when he was vulnerable: mostly when he was crouched over the moaning kid, bathed in the pulsating phosphorescence of their restrained Sparks with all the power in his grip and the memory of a clean, beautiful hunt in his core. It was a dumb, primal urge, not a well-meditated desire, and made merging seem like less of a damaging commitment than it was.

Interfacing? Yeah, sure, they'd played 'hide the Spark' before, but the two had never actually merged—never actually let their Sparks spill out of their chambers and fuse into one another down to their hungry cores. It was more like a brush of their eager energies, or a lick on the surface to bring their trapped Sparks underneath to a tortured frequency and a quivering overload. Every interface, he cracked Prowl's heaving chassis a bit, and that was that—and Primus, it was nothing to backfire at. But it had given him a taste of the kid's center, and now his greedy, hulking body wanted more.

He was gingerly addicted to the ninjabot after all these stellar-cycles, though he spent most of his time convincing himself he wasn't.

The act wasn't a curiosity, though: it wasn't as though he was dying to try it for the first time. He knew what it was like, merging. Bonding. Lockdown had merged once and only once in his younger (idiot) years, and it was no romantic endeavor. He'd done it with a whore and only because he wanted to. She hadn't even had a say in it.

It started as a normal business exchange, but Lockdown, always known for wanting more than his fair share, had brought it to another level. He'd overpowered the bite-sized femme and simply let his roaring Spark go. He'd wanted to experience it, so he did. It was easy enough: she was smaller than him and he'd half-bullied her out of wearing her chamber-shield in the first place (he could be a charming devil) so he could feel her more. The sensation was beyond belief, even with the model screaming like the dickens.

It was a full-system completion. It was the hardest overload he'd ever had and made him feel like he'd off-lined and gone to the Well—if the hallowed Well was full of nothing but rattling, all-consuming pleasure, liquefying and crystallizing in spurts so hard they brought him to convulsions.

She recovered faster than he did (Pleasure-Models had a reset time of forty-seven and a half kliks for professional reasons) and when he rebooted, she was deep in the task of murdering him with an interfacing toy. It wasn't like he'd scarred her, because Prostibots had a special virus-like program designed for wiping system-sync and Sparkmerge effects from their system, but he'd still broken her 3,720,957-customer streak of superficial interfacing and she was plenty pissed about that.

The second he'd disarmed and 'convinced' her not to kill him, she uploaded the neat little virus with a disgusted, invaded look on her face (already, his wasn't the cleanest Spark) and chased him out with a few heavy yet charmingly aerodynamic objects. A 'bot couldn't do that to a Model nowadays, or he'd at least be brought up in a court of law if so, but Lockdown had merged and he was satisfied. It was over: she wasn't involved with him in the slightest, because she'd purged him from her systems.

He, on the other hand, got his wish. Even after Lockdown exited the room, or the building or the planet, he could still feel her.

The merge had certainly worked on him: his untouched systems were quick to sync, and he didn't realize for another megacycle that he'd bonded with the anonymous Pleasure Model on a small scale. Her consciousness and essence lurked in his processor like a whiny visitor, or a digit wedged in his audio receptors. After the first three months, he wished he could take an acid-bath to his databanks just to drive her out. Her banal thoughts and upsets plugged along inside of him, no matter how far away he flew: it took him fifty solid stellar-cycles to get rid of that one obnoxious prostibot. He regretted it, Pit yes--not the actual act but the sentient, invaded taste it left in him. That one night was among his least-favorite but most enlightening mistakes.

Lockdown may have seemed like a filthy and free pleasure seeker, and he was, but that sealed it for him. Merging was an intimate act—nothing to be messed with, as hot as it felt, because it compromised his independence and sanity. Got inside a 'bot faster than any rational feeling and struck like a virus. A vicious force of nature. He'd never do it again.

Then there was weird, silent Prowl, who made him think.

It wasn't as black and white a decision as many would assume. For several reasons, the traditional route to Sparkmerging was out of the question. First of all, he'd never show his Spark to his partner. It was a emotionally searing and implication-loaded ritual, obnoxiously intimate but not pleasurable: a preview of that you'd be getting out of the other mech once his Spark was molecule-deep in your own. He wanted to plunge his servos into Prowl's sweet, hot center until they burned away, but his own… he'd never consider that kind of unconditional vulnerability. He had too many secrets to keep in his line of work—they were just bits of information to him, but they'd become secrets once Prowl saw them.

Unbearably dramatic. Hated it. Not an option.

So the fact remained that he still half-lusted to merge with Prowl, but didn't want to expose his Spark. Didn't want anything that came after, and didn't, above all, want to give him a chance to refuse. He respected the kid, and forcing it on him didn't sound like respect. But in those energon-soaked rushes, both mechs as high on brutal success as the intimacy, when Prowl actually hounded him with a feral grin and maneuvered him into walls and berths with his black and gold lightweight frame, mean little Spark gleaming—Primus, he wanted to take it out of him.

He wanted to let go, take in, own and taste him. No, he wanted to quit tasting and start gulping. Own the kid down to his Spark. Consume him.

In his haywire, distracted moments where the kid made him proud and toasty and affectionate, a part of him compromised: that part said that if it was going to be anybody, it'd be Prowl, and he might as well do it. Just let slip in the middle of interfacing before the kid could do anything about it, and that was that. Merge and sync with him, make it so he couldn't really leave. Possessive, possessive. Part of him warmed to the idea of messing with the other's internals without even touching him, or sending sly little feelings into Prowl's head: like a vastly more private comm-call, which he already loved to tug the ninjabot's wires with.

He had the creeping feeling Prowl would refuse if asked outright, and he didn't know how irrationally angry he'd be if the kid did it out of fear, or even what that meant to him. He'd rather not think about it.

After all, he was abstaining out of common sense: the idea was too personal, too stupidly intimate—he didn't want to know about Prowl's deep thoughts and regrets and annoying morals, much less have ghost copies of them in his own databanks--and Lockdown still maintained that their bond was professional. It was, of course: Prowl was just a hot model and a damn good 'face, and who was he not to take advantage of that? If they merged, or even Sparkbonded, there'd be no clean exit for their partnership. No… neutrality. No ability to cut and run.

Still, the idea of being with the kid on that level--experiencing that hellishly awestruck sensation with a kindred Spark--brought up a host of uncomfortable possibilities.

Every time, Prowl trusted him to crack him just a little, and to keep his own Sparkchamber closed—perhaps relying not on trust (because neither did, so they said) but on Lockdown's natural aversion to the sickeningly romantic idea of merging. Every time. How easy would it be just to open up on him and fold back that black chassis like a pair of double doors? Catch him off guard.

Yeah, it'd feel good, but then there'd be the sticky consequences of it. First, Prowl would probably hate him for it. Then there was the fact his head would no longer be his own: that a connection of unconditional vulnerability would open between them and deepen with subsequent merges. Not only would he have to suffer Prowl's sentience infused with in his own, the kid could see past his facades just as easily. Bluffing would be a thing of the past. His core advantage, that of withholding information, would be gone, and he'd be tied to the little mech, and a bond like that would take centuries to fade. Would he ever irrationally give up everything he held dear just to feel something?

Never. The whole thing was impossible, damaging and ridiculous, and he knew it. A regular self-contained frag. All in all, a stupid idea, but it still was a thorn in his side whenever he was crushed around his trembling partner and Prowl's silent unreal trust was dumb and drugging in the hot air and his virgin spark throbbed and, just for a second, he felt he loved the kid. A little. Enough. At all. Just for a second.

Then it was gone—or he drove it out of himself by mechanically catapulting them both into blank ecstasy.

Love was his ultimate turn-off.