A/N: Prowl gets depressed (and so do you XD). No, bounty-hunting life isn't all outrageous interfacing, witty banter and fun hunts :3 Our ninjabot was once a very good 'bot, and he's missing that moral commodity. Meanwhile, Lockdown still expects him to remain professional in all senses. Ooh.

This is a step back. Around the 10-year mark of these two, or close. Juuuust enough time for Prowl to be wretchedly unsure of everything around him.

(I know, I know, no plot advancement. Next chapter is exciting and very worth it, promise! Thank you again for reading! :snug: You have no idea how excited I got about all the Moot-theories XD You guys make my brain work for a living! Till next week)

Sometimes

He hated Lockdown, sometimes.

The feeling—unwelcome, putrid, professionally impossible—surfaced only in the dark. In the wandering stellar-cycles of his new survival (not life), there were times when he felt lost and staggeringly alone (not solitary) in his world. Sharp and sudden, Prowl missed those he had called friends and the short, sweet life they embodied.

Earth.

The daily flow and churn of pliant, nature-kissed existence. Detroit sunlight; the swooping overpasses and the crayon-green parks. Alien city, utter acceptance; green, yellow, blue and white plating. He remembered a smooth concrete base burgeoning with all forms of brightly-colored furor and the footsteps (yellow, buoyant and so eager) of an attention-voracious little imp, skittering and pattering between every room… doting on each of them in her own sharp-tongued, soft-skinned way. He remembered home and kept his optics off-lined so he wouldn't be forced to face the barren dark of his cargo-hold existence.

At times, he didn't know whether the memories would save him or kill him.

It was a nostalgia just as impossible then as it was when he was sitting in the ruins of their Detroit base, the acidic black smoke of the end of an era clotting around him: that life was destroyed far before he had ever agreed to Lockdown's proposition. It simply seemed… even more pristine, now; farther away, and lit with a buttery sanctified light. It destroyed him a little, to turn it over in his memory core, even though—especially since—it didn't make him think about the grey war and his own acts, including the last. It was just quiet, natural happiness.

In those odd moments where the myriad distractions of his new life proved empty, his brutal selfishness (a robust and flexible shell that could last for months, brought to shine by his oily satisfaction and a certain Undecided's wicked encouragement) became tired and cracked from the cold space air and constant travel and Lockdown's silence. Exposed and inundated, he wilted, quailed, curled up. These weak moments occurred more often at the beginning of his bounty-hunting life—and most often when they had just wordlessly delivered a young, up-and-coming social reformist, two terms strong in his battle against a rampant crime syndicate, to the fluid-spattered basement of the same syndicate's smiling leader.

Faced with those moments, Prowl regained the lamentable ability to feel. He felt horror, emptiness, and disgust, and his shields—his defenses and chilly logic coding—became a foreign entity.

Lockdown did it without a twitch. Lockdown strode forward, pushed the disheveled, weeping being into the waiting limbs of the dark-clothed flunkies… and simply held out his servo. He destroyed the hopes of half the continent, and all he did was grunt for his payment. It was astounding, sickening, how the flinty needs of one mech could ransack a century of progress.

Facing his crimes, Prowl felt wantonly destructive. Hateful. Impersonally evil. He told himself in the beginning that peace could exist in neutrality: that even if he was not explicitly for any one cause, he could avoid harming any others he sympathized with. But there was no room for such whimsy. Damage, the kind they peddled, was neutral: but what was damage if not negative?

Missions like those didn't come along very often, admittedly. It was more of an open market: bounties were posted on a continuous frequency-feed by governments, monarchies and rich independents, available to anyone anywhere with the proper armory. Lockdown and Prowl had their pick of hits. Price and competition were considered, distances (and dangers) were judged, and their decision rose as a cumulative cloud from all of those factors.

Official bounties weren't placed without a good reason (whatever the definition of 'good' was in subsector space wastelands), and Prowl could face those missions with apathy if not satisfaction. On those days, they did well—they did 'good', though Lockdown faced every job with the same smirking anticipation. It was the down-and-out jobs, the dirty, meticulous, intimate vendettas they had to take when no promising, subliminally positive bounty shone on Moot's screen… that wrenched at his Spark.

They needed energon. They needed oil; they needed weapons. None of that came without money.

When large bounties weren't on the market, they had no option but to survive. Still, Lockdown made the final decision on what target to chase, and that right wasn't without consequences for the silently hypercritical ninjabot. It wormed into his opinion of the bounty-hunter, even though the other truly had no choice—and it was for both his sake and Prowl's. No, Prowl's darkened mentality tried to make his partner more of a villain than he was, decorating his mind with hateful reasons to feed his gloomy despair, although Lockdown hardly needed the demonization to stir disgust and resentment, some days.

Lockdown himself was still Lockdown, as Ratchet had seen him in the cramped, filthy corridors of the Great War. He was still an amoral monster with a grinning religion of licentiousness and an armory of dirty habits. He still taunted and chuckled at prone prisoners' honest plight; he still took trophies. Prowl stayed away when the old mech set to his newest catch with an artistic buzz-saw, but even after he retreated to his quarters, he was unable to filter out the whiny, accusatory note of any one of Lockdown's extraction tools as he hacked and pried at all colors of thick mech plating. The bounty hunter set to butchering his prisoners with a fulfilled grin, carnage-besotted, perhaps laboring alongside a jaunty stolen radio signal, jazz vomiting out his speakers.

Prowl honestly had no hopes of changing the ancient mech (he knew his situation: he was an abided intruder and a barely-trusted investment) but to see something so indecent time after time and to know that his partner gained such pleasure and pride from it… was disquieting and disheartening. It made him doubt his staggering decision and left him in the dark. Prowl had been… good, once: who was he living and laboring with? It always turned his thoughts around, to see that explicit display of violence--and more often than not, wretchedly endeared to the hunter by a handful of stellar-cycles and scalding imitations of intimacy, he needed the reality check. Desperately.

Yes, he hated Lockdown sometimes: especially when those huge servos slid up and gorged themselves on his cream thighs, rubbing with a lazy expertise. Prowl cringed when the bounty hunter's hot, humming mouth scraped against his slender neck, green-striped bulk a vibrating press of heat and heavy life at his aft.

"You look like you're stallin' for somethin'."

Prowl twisted in a slow, dull attempt to free himself, but did nothing more than turn his head aside with an injured expression when his huge partner took to nipping the sensitive gold-brushed base of his wings with a delighted rumble.

"Lockdown, please…" he murmured in a suffering tone, feeling despair and revulsion couple in his dimly lit Spark-chamber. He squirmed tryingly against the bench he was seated on, but Lockdown's chassis pinned him from the back.

"C'mon. Don't be like that," Lockdown returned mischievously, practiced servos grating up to press and stroke at the wire-kissed cusps of the ninjabot's pelvic plating with a sweeping, grinning assumption. Stung, Prowl went frigid in his grip, engulfed in his own stiff, laboriously cultured resentment; despising everything from Lockdown's graceless, bold lechery to his arrogant ways; the brutal feel of his body to his addiction to excess.

Who was he, a quiet, controlled and fortified soul, engulfed by such a disgusting paradigm of arrogant decadence, who used him physically, sexually? There was a lens-flare of shame to the demand in the fact he had allowed himself to enjoy it for so long, but it only stoked the embers of confused but strident loathing.

But of course, he was quiet. Quiet, fortified and controlled.

Prowl abided, cold nausea pulsating in his innards, and his partner continued to molest him with bloated, ignorant pleasure, scattered crushes of mouth (kisses?) some sort of excuse for the indecent push and pry of his digits. Brutal, uncaring, reprehensible. Perhaps Lockdown noticed a stagnant hint of something in the usually pliant ninjabot, but Prowl was also abominably quiet when they indulged in each other, so he didn't know too much; didn't think to know the complex rash of insinuations Prowl was fabricating and whittling to razor-sharp points.

Half-hints. Undetected implications that only sealed Lockdown's doom, so unjustly; secret requirements, with which Prowl set him up for calculated failure.

Engrossed only in the one-dimensional act of the present, Lockdown pressed wantonly against his seated partner and scraped his thick digits across Prowl's chamber-plating; his looming, invisible leer spoke clearly of his intent to rile. Prowl, finally unable to contain himself and his quiet biting month-long outrage, murmured frigidly:

"If this is your idea of respect, I may have been better off on Earth."

Lockdown's servo froze, then carefully drew away from Prowl's cold black plating, hanging in the air like a boneless arachnid.

"You didn't say stop."

It wasn't conniving. It was factual: even accusatory. Indignant, nervous static spat in Prowl's auditory units. Lockdown's hovering servo clanged down on the bench beside Prowl's leg, vocals a notch rougher, body unyielding at the ninjabot's back.

"I don't stop until you say the word stop: we agreed on that."

Prowl twisted invisibly, discomfited at such brusque negotiations. It was a safety word: a way to make certain that Lockdown never forced truly himself on his smaller partner. Rather, an excuse, when it was so glaringly obvious that he wanted nothing more than to be left alone. When the disdainful silence only stretched on, souring so quickly between their scraping bodies as Prowl's earlier (devastating) insult sunk in, Lockdown pressed him again, sincerely growling at this point.

"Anything else, whining and screaming included, is up for interpretation, kid. I don't pretend to know what turns you on."

"My apologies. I assumed you to be more discerning than that," Prowl countered dully, visor fixed on a single point on the floor. "I did not presume intimacy to be the conscientious course of action when your companion explicitly begs you away—"

"I don't stop until someone says the word," Lockdown snarled, hard-edged rumble hitting Prowl from the tender curve of his back and his audio units as his partner lurched forward, one servo clamping onto his unarmored shoulder. The bounty hunter wrenched him back a notch, leaving Prowl to glare at the ceiling as he rasped on. "I'm willin' to back off when you want it—that's respect--but you don't make up new rules and expect me to sync up with your twisted little processor. Don't play your slaggin' mind-games with me, brat."

It was said scathingly, as though Prowl was the most immature, petty, manipulative, fit-throwing youngling in the universe. And… at the moment, he was. He had practically begged Lockdown to make it a confrontation by handling the entire exchange so childishly. Provoking. Goading, so irrationally. He let the physicality go on longer than it should have, just to feed his personal vendetta; just to give himself… a reason. A reason to hate Lockdown.

Please. He needed to hate someone so badly.

Prowl made a small, stunned noise as Lockdown pushed him free and rose to his full height, glaring down at his suddenly hunched partner with something close to loathing in his gaunt face.

"This is a deal: takes cooperation from two sides. If you aren't satisfied with somethin' here, it's 'cos you're not doin' your part, partner," Lockdown hissed. "I sure as Pit always do mine."

Prowl's partner strode out of his dark quarters, door snapping shut behind him. Done. Finished.

Prowl, alone alone alone, sat soaked with a shame as hateful as it was wretched. Toothy inner prejudice disintegrated, he was ashamed for having tried to lure honest Lockdown out: he understood the conditions. Always had. He had made a miserable fool of himself, trying to squirm and imply the situation into something offensive and personal when… it simply wasn't. It wasn't personal.

Any of it.

No, he had used the other mech and whatever else came into his mad grasp in a desperate bid for someone to blame. Even then, when used as a weapon, the factual bite and measure of their relations—the concrete restrictions, the calculated safety word--always depressed him more than it should have. It was but one more… empty cause he could add to his dim Spark. Yet another lusterless facet of the dark, trustless life he had condemned himself to with a single, long-ago word: yes.

Sometimes, he hated Lockdown--but it was never more than he hated himself.