A/N: Hi there! Sorry about the skipped update last week, kids. I was super-ill and had a Very Serious Chemistry Test D: Buh.

Back on track! …And mourning every sentence of this.

PS: Bitch move, Swindle. Bitch move.

Captive

It had been going on for cycles: a static-thick groan or a soft howl, grinding at their audio receptors. Grinding, piercing, penetrating. It echoed in the brown low-lit chamber, seeming to scour the length of the room then turn to cover the raw soundwaves again to rival a maddening fit of pacing. Finally, one of the mechs struck his chips against the table and called over his shoulder:

"Slag, idiot, f'you're gonna do that, short his vocalizer. Can't register myself processing."

It was useless to yell at the grunts: the mildly hive-minded creatures had no auditory units, only internal receivers for telepathic messages, but the vibration of a good haranguing sometimes startled the organic slaves out of whatever error were committing. Then again, with such limited activity on such a dirt smear planet, it was always a little satisfyingly enraging to yell, fail to get a response, then give the little suckers what they deserved.

When nothing happened and the tortured sound dragged on and on and on, long past its 'recognizable sentient fear' grace period and now nothing but a horrifically obnoxious, circuit-searing noise, Fender got up from the bare table with a metal-metal screech and strode over to where the stubby, fleshy creature hung on their newest arrival, breathing in deep, lusty toad breaths that bloated its ridged back in time. He smacked the Gordone away from the mech, knocking him twice to break the Spark-thrall and get his damned spindly digits out from the bot's wiring. Unseated, it hit the floor with a squawk and a thud, rooting around in the dust for a klik; brimming with aggravation, Fender dug into the mech's mutilated open neck until he found the ribbed wire that led to the vocals and shorted it with a callous burst of electricity from the handy node in his servo.

Once the moan dribbled down to a creak then halted entirely, he glared the creature away until it waddled behind one of the many rust-spotted racks with an evil throaty sound. The row of back-to-back, 60-degree angle restraint-tables created a little triangle of space that the creatures called their own. It was convenient enough—saved them from having to create a habitat for the smears. The smell was horrendous and in squirming out they tended to track their own brown-grey organic filth everywhere, but that's what olfactory blockers were for. Fender grimaced down to his girders and flicked a bit of waste off of the mech's chassis, then, in an almost bored fashion, proceeded to do a check-up.

As he expected, it was their new arrival—emphasis on new. The vicious gold-trimmed bike. Looked a lot smaller without his mods. Fender rattled the mech's glossy chassis paneling.

A bit of poking around near the black mech's indecently bared Spark revealed broken pins, all twisted at anguished angles. It was casual wear and tear: even if the 'bots couldn't rope their tensors or gears into anything if their function depended on it, chamber-plating was the most reinforced stuff Cybertonians claimed. Only natural. The Gordone sported a considerable strength and resiliency for their small size, however, and within a megacycle or two could get their calcified, quadruple-jointed digits into whatever part of a bot they desired—which was always the Spark.

They were slaves themselves, sad, squat and homeless. The Gordone, a paltry ninth-level organic race, ate a certain kind of energy: in the past they laid out on their crystal-laden planet and absorbed the light, but their nearby sun-star had gone out long ago, leaving them to starve in darkness. Boss had managed to salvage a few of them back before the Great War and inbred them to death in the dark of his ship; they now performed maintenance tasks that required little thought, like energon-dilution and tube-changing. They weren't paid a thing because, while they absorbed enough light to survive on the warehouse planet's surface and the foliage settled well in their strange systems, their bonus was simply to be let near their carefully maintained merchandise. Sparks were the equivalent of rapture to them, a bite-sized sun of the purest energy to be found in the universe. Left alone with the captive Cybertronians for megacycles on end, the greedy grunts were free to pry open any mech or femme's Sparkchambers and jam their dirty little servos—hands—right into the bot's vulnerable Spark and mess.

And, of course, feast.

So long as the Gordones painful attentions didn't offline the 'bot, and they never had, there was no problem. Boss even seemed to… encourage it. He got that face when his merchandise screamed at having the pulsing fabric of their center invaded by hard cold talons and a gaping mouth, radiating a locked-up, convulsive pain only enhanced by the soundless drape of the chains. As long as they were able to scream, that is. Fender and the other mechs (and that weird new shell-shocked femme) didn't take kindly to the sound and usually disconnected or shorted any vocals before they went mad. Their 'charges' could scream all they wanted, so long as it was never actually translated into shrieking, piercing soundwaves. It made no difference to the Gordone.

Fender got a little disgusted at it, even now. Even after a solid three centuries of working the circuit, the way the squat, hunch-back organics followed his movement with their engorged orange-filmed eyes; the way they waited at the pedes of a new bot, nearly paralyzed with slippery excitement at the feel of a fresh Spark burning nearby… it still disturbed him. There was always the thought of what they'd do to any of the workers if they happened to get themselves stasis-locked. Fresh meat. The tall mech's engine growled as he picked through the future-slave's chamber, ignoring the looming, silent pressure of the spurned Gordone's eyes from the dark of its filth-caked home-crevice.

The minor chassis pins were snapped and one of the key gears of his chamber was stripped, but it wouldn't offline him. His azure Spark, on the other hand, had been badgered into a desperately dense, wounded little ball, barely daring to pulse. Bad shape; delicately terminal. Painful as Pit, if the bleed-out feel of it was any judge. Fender reached in his pack and grabbed some putty, forcing the little bike's chassis paneling back together with an unhealthy creak and pasting the substance down the seam. It fused to the metal and hardened within cycles, leaving a clear line and a forty-megacycle job for the Gordone. His optics lingered on the ugly trail of solder looping the mech's chassis—the one injury he'd come in with.

"That should keep the little shaft-suckers away from him for a solar-cycle or two."

A few cycles later he was back at the table, picking his chips up. They gambled to pass the time. Fender couldn't keep his mind on the game—or the cautious pacing of the grunts behind him.

"Did you see him shaking earlier?" he asked after a while, ruffling his markers. "He's damn willful if he can even manage to rope his tensors into it."

"Yeah. Willful." They'd already seen willful from him. Capturing him had been enough of a haul. Tower nearly lost his arm. The other mech shrugged and squinted at his own markers. "Thought it was a she? Little top-heavy for a mech."

"What does it matter, so long as it's strapped up?"

"True slaggin' that."

They traded chips and thought more in the dull silence. Fender had seen willful. Or, at least seen the results of it.

It happened when they were getting the new mech situated. They had him strapped up by the arms and were working on chaining down his pedes when Boss scraped in with a cloud of red-tinted, furious expectation boiling around him, eyes locked greedily on the process. Unused to such personal attention or the rattling breath of their superior, they pressed on.

Quick and dirty, they popped his hood. The Pack was already installed—they weren't having any more 'surprise reboots'. Drawing oil-smeared wires from hanging hooks to the right and left, they hooked the bike in, maneuvering their way around the odd alien things in his chassis chamber and, finally, locating his memory core under all the foreign tech. One mech plugged into the glowing column, entered an override and coaxed a section of it outwards with a thick click; the other took a small black square and carefully ran it over the exposed surface, watching the luminescence dribble from each section touched. Soon the entire slide was a dead white. Clean.

Once he was properly wiped (the superficial scan came back as a meek, flat beep) and the dangerous black object was stowed away, Boss made a deep, gaseous growl and slithered closer, as though trying to sense—or force—something from the exposed, silent mech by mere raging proximity. Finally, he turned to Fender.

"Consider this one your personal whipping post."

Tower shot him a look from the other side of the table, cracked red optics wide. Then Boss held up a tentacle: the thick flesh-column was cleanly sliced off a third of the way, puckered suckers throbbing minutely. Already a too-glossy nub had begun to press its way out of the reddish muscle-thick mound (the mechs nearly ejected to see such organic gore) but Boss' face was stuck on fury and that meant he was entirely serious. When he rebooted right after being taken in, the pretty thing had apparently managed to get a slice or two in (and knock Fender out—thus, his ignorance) before they properly sedated him and took away his blades and the rest of his mods. Having an EMP generator was something of a god-tool among Cybertronians: no matter how skilled a mech (and they knew this one was skilled) one hard pulse and it was over for them.

But he'd gotten his shot in and that was all that mattered. Boss was pissed. Personally pissed—which meant this one might not make it to being sold.

They nodded. The Quintesson's deep-set fury eyes pulsed like flaking embers, continuing to watch with vengeful vigilance as they strung the shining new model up and shoved the oil-speckled feeding tube into his mouth and down his fuel intake valve, chains rattling as he actually twitched.

"I want it to suffer," Boss hissed, then turned and disappeared behind a rack of ever-choking, sightless femmes.

It.

It wasn't as though the workers were blind to what they were doing: the basic betrayal of their race. Or rather, it would have been a betrayal if they had any semblance of metal-metal loyalty. It was ironic, to see bots so malicious and selfish and flawed working for one of the only remaining creatures who had begun to hate their kind ever since they developed, in Spark-warmed software mutations and unexplained twistings of cold coding, emotions. It proved for them, in some small way, that these creatures deserved to suffer for deviating from the inflexible servile perfection the Quintessons had originally created. Their projects had gone so… astray.

The universe had seen them too long as autonomous organisms. It was time to restart the trend, as it were, of seeing the malfunctions as commodity items. Slaves, bought and paid for. The Quintessons tried to… improve their merchandise and reverse-engineer their corruption where possible. It was impossible, however, to recreate the catatonic slaves they so desired: several hundred brutally botched surgeries and invasive hacks had sent mechs and femmes spiraling into screaming dementia and, beyond unsalvageable, those damned Sparks had always fizzled out in the process. They would never be unfeeling, but where efficiency failed, the remaining Quintessons, roving and vengeful and meticulous, learned to take great pleasure in making them feel altogether too much. They dedicated their eons-old lives to abusing and crushing those ill-gained emotions and sensations and all the abstract flowing things that had no home in cold metal.

Machines. Cogs and directives and fancy programming; tools of another race. So they were begun, so they will be ended—never truly autonomous, even in their extinction. After surpassing their directives, they will regret their ability to grow. To feel. Under us, they will beg to be reduced to obedient appliances. Anesthetized tools.

But we will not give them the honor of begging, the honor of voicing agony. The pain, superfluous and unintended, is only validation of the single resounding fact that they should not be. Flood them with it. Tell them, in this subjective sensory language they should be so cursed to understand, that they are abominations.

Make them suffer.

Perhaps that was why, from the instant they were captured, their creations were aware of every passing moment.

It would cost too much to put each Cybertronian into artificially-induced stasis, especially when considering the lengthy turn-over rate and transport time for intergalactic customers. Instead, a powerful 'hack-pack' was shoved into their sparking guts and wired into their mainframe, blocking any and all voluntary physical-mechanical output. Input—in the form of sensation, sounds and other stimuli—flooded their information highways just as cleanly as ever. It was technically a brand of energy-efficient stasis, since all voluntary physical mechanisms were nullified, but inside the paralyzed mech or femme the processor still whirred and the technomechanical innards still pumped and, most of all, the tender Spark still quailed.

They were still conscious, still feeling, but unable to react or fight. Unable to respond. Trapped. The most they could do was scream, but even that ended quickly. The workers sat by, counting their credits and deluding themselves that the silence was really silent; taking their pleasure and amusement from their brothers and sisters where they could. So it had been for millenia, so it would be for millenia more.

Once the sluggish card game was over and the green mech drifted off to attend to a commcall from Boss, Fender looked carefully over at the little black mech, stretched to all four corners of the restraint table by cuffs and scum-caked chains, long face upturned and visor blank. Then he got up. A Gordone skittered from under the bike's table; he kicked it before it could get too far, then bent and went to the bottom cuffs. The mech freed the bike's wickedly-shaped pedes and hiked the slender legs around his waist with a metallic squeal.

"Whaddya doin'?"

The other mech turned to look as Fender spared a thick servo to fiddle in the exposed circuitry of the bike's neck, carelessly gouging wires out of their casings to get to the one he needed… because ever since he'd seen the little black bike straddling that pile of junk, bursting with light, he'd wanted a piece. Boss, after all, said to take everything out on him. Direct order, even.

He was still pretty, even with that pink-caked tube snaking out of his slack open mouth-- and it'd been a long time since anything like that bothered him.

"Refreshing his vocals," he muttered, smirking slowly when the current caught and something wound up inside him with a stunned, almost apprehensive inhalation of electricity. The chains rattled. "I wanna hear this one."

It was hard, for Swindle, giving anyone benefit of the doubt.

It was a gift, after all, that didn't promise a proper return, but he tried his best where old business associates were concerned. Lockdown had never been anything but easy and deliciously predictable in his greed and relative ignorance. But this? The entire situation was bizarre, almost as though something were personally amiss with his business contact. He pressed on, but—no, after fifteen cycles working himself silly with all the bravado and amiable yammer he could muster, it wasn't his imagination.

It couldn't have been, not when Lockdown physically turned away from the commscreen for the fifth time and scraped his hook over that ugly-looking bare strip on his dark thigh, rumbling vaguely in answer to a crisp proposal and staring into the shadowy ship. There was no energy, no response; solar-cycle in, solar-cycle out, Swindle could at least count on juggernaut Lockdown to put a slamming halt to his energy and let him know, bare-faced and flat, that it wasn't going to happen. It was obvious that the arms-dealer wasn't going to get what he wanted this time, yes, but neither did Lockdown send his sunny proposals careening back into his facial plating with a snap and a comeback. Every well-loosed verbal arrow seemed to whiz around the hulking mech, warded off by the unfocused roam of Lockdown's narrowed optics as he paced in front of the screen, stride low and agitated.

Finally, left with brutally limited time before his next scheduled engagement and no other option but to loosen the other's vocalizer in whatever way he could, Swindle finally took the sticky plunge. He… inquired.

"What's wrong, LD? You look like you've slipped a rod!" He hid the brisk quadruple-tap of his impatient digits under his commcamera. "You're gonna wear a hole in little Moof's floor if you keep that up!"

Much like his plastic-glossed grin, the blocky mech's calculated chuckle didn't even make a dent on the stiff silence of the ship. Lockdown stopped as though reined in, straightening his thoughts out with a hair-pin screech-screech-screech on his plating, hook jerking back and forth over the raw metal. Finally, he refreshed his optics and grunted over his spiked shoulder:

"Kid's gone."

"Oh no! Bad luck, guy!" Swindle fake-exclaimed then lowered his voice to a husky near-conspiratorial whisper, cupping it behind his purple servo. "How much did he take off with?"

Lockdown stiffened and hissed, digging his choice weapon into his own plating so fiercely it almost made the smile drop from the other mech's face at the resulting screech. The tall mech inhaled, fans chugging unsteadily, then moved over to his navigator's chair.

"Didn't take off with anything. S'just… gone." When Swindle peered at him expectantly, the bounty hunter bowed his head and grumbled into his servo, "Swear, he was stolen."

"To be stolen, someone has to do the taking," Swindle reminded him helpfully, waggling a digit. "Who in the universe would want to snitch your sidekick?"

Lockdown's engine growled warily and—Swindle couldn't believe he was saying this—a little bit weakly.

"Quints," he rasped.

"C'mon now, big guy. That's a little excessive," the arms-dealer chortled thickly, so thickly—he'd never, after all, taken Lockdown for a conspiracy theorist! But Lockdown didn't react, red optics guttering maroon. He just shook his head and thumbed his hook, grinding out:

"No other reason."

"You sure he didn't just leave?" He shrugged when Lockdown glared at him, continuing, "'Cos let's face it, Lockdown, you are definitely not what he's used to! He just hung around for a century or two: that's barely a trial run, guy. In fact, I bet he couldn't wait to run back to his little Autobot buddies! You know that kind, the propaganda programming never quite--"

"They're all scrap. Dust back on that…planet. And he wouldn't do that," Lockdown insisted, grappling with something just out of reach of his processor then turning viciously, one digit between his worn dentals. Remembering, too painfully well, the curl of the kid's body against his and the way he let his wrist be bitten with that smile. The feel of him. The wild white-blue shudder of his…

Lockdown clenched his fist, shaking his beastly head. His Spark flickered.

"Wouldn't just… take off."

"Yeah, 'cos you know people!" Swindle scoffed slickly, popping his joints with a flourish. "Well, all's well that ends well, right?"

Lockdown's optics narrowed to evil slits. Swindle chuckled, rolling his thick shoulders.

"Okay, maybe not! Let's go with 'these things happen for a reason'—just take it as it is, pal. He's gone, you're not. Now, how about we talk business?"

Lockdown didn't respond, visual field fazing out again. Then he clanged into his chair and mumbled something—probably about having to go—and the arms-dealer vented a gust of air and deflated a notch, rubbing at his optic shutters. This was going nowhere.

"Alright. You want me to keep an optic out for him?"

The bounty hunter remained slumped in his chair, looking up at him with tattoos twisted with mistrust. It sounded uncommonly generous for an exacting mech such as Swindle—and he knew Swindle.

"Just in my quadrant," Swindle said, raising his servos as though assuring him it was no deviation of character. He made a clicking noise, then, 'firing' one like a gun. "Anything more and it'll cost you."

Lockdown nodded slowly, glowering at him thoughtlessly.

"If you find him, I'll give you somethin'."

Swindle's huge optics widened further with a blank electronic chirp. The offer was not insultingly vague as it seemed: it was altogether startling. The purple and tan mech's flat face twisted at the idea of a blank check from his so-very-exact friend, but he covered it up in time to rush the goodbyes (not that now-catatonic juggernaut took any notice, lost as he was in his own foggy old processor with the hook already at his leg again) and sign off. He sat for a few cycles after, digits plucking at the arms of his chair, optics narrowed.

And here he thought, so foolishly, that nothing could really mess old Lockdown up. Fragging Autobot. A blank check. He shook his head, engine puttering in deep dissatisfaction.

The unusually dour sound wasn't long in lasting. As always, the poisonously optimistic arms-dealer cleared and he turned to fiddling with things by his control station, thoughts gaining lacquered momentum. Within cycles, he was smiling again, content and heavy.

Because, after all, these things did happen for a reason.

Swindle was a multi-facetted 'bot. He dealt with a wide variety of clientele, all operating from different levels of illegality: he wanted maximum market coverage and there were certain things an Elite Guard turncoat could get him that an underground trafficker, no matter how well connected, couldn't. He played the field. All of it.

Sometimes the field played him, of course, but even that led to greater things. Through one of those long-ago slip-ups, he had gained contact with an… organization. It wasn't a business entanglement, but rather a business fling: frisky and flighty, they only showed up every so often, usually right when he'd forgotten about them--but always with a trade so lucrative Swindle was shocked he could ever begin to forget. He could infer what they did, of course, what with the spare chains and their strange merchandise, but how many plasma canons and bolt guns had he accrued from these mystery gifters? How quickly could he be coaxed to forget what he was never told in the first place?

Very quickly.

The only thing they (a scuffed and scattered clutch of mechs, changing little over the stellar-cycles and very little interested in chat) required from him were his business-savvy opinions. He gave his quotes for any variety of strange and exquisite mods they shoved under his olfactory receptors from Primus-knew-where, and the next 'casually' acquired weapon they usually sent his way. It was a bit pot-luck, true, but he did require the odd favor once in a while and it required very little effort on his part. Sometimes he even got an underhanded informational bonus.

A month and a half ago, for instance, he'd received a very interesting, very pleasing transmission.

His mystery contacts had dispensed with idle chatter immediately, promptly showcasing a collection of modifications for his subjective pricing. They were of quality, certainly, and possessing of a distinctly exotic flair, but that wasn't what caused him to stall and stare and stall further—it was because they were so very particular. One of a kind, even.

When they asked him (repeating stiffly, optics thinned) how much, he refreshed his vocals and scanned the glossy gold and black modifications with a keen glowing optic, one servo to his chin. Elegant golden horns sliced out of the pile, nearly obscured by the handsomely blocky shoulder-guards and the jump-jet boosters. All perfectly preserved. Perfectly… extracted.

"Thirty-thousand for the whole set."

The mech on the other end grunted and began to shut down the feed and Swindle waited just long enough before he pushed a servo forward, catching the other mech's optic.

"May I, heh, ask where you acquired…?"

"Classified," he answered, looking dully surprised that the question-dry, smiling arms-dealer had finally asked.

"I was just going to mention, guy…" Swindle began, chuckling slightly, "If you took those off a 'bot and he's still around, you'd better keep an optic on him. Extra security, if you know what I mean: armor like that isn't awarded to just anyone. Just a… y'know."

Wink.

"Friendly bit of advice. Free of charge."

And so he had done his good deed, turning what humble resources he had toward ensuring that those one-of-a-kind mods would fetch a reasonable price and adorable little "Prowl" would not find his way back to the bounty hunter's side in a million stellar-cycles. It was a sorely needed kindness, judging by the pile of wreckage he'd found in place of Lockdown but a megacycle ago. He still couldn't process it! If the Autobot had managed to butcher him so completely in under two centuries, think of the damage he could have caused after three? Four?

It was best, for the both of them, that he be taken out of the picture now in a curt twitch of fate's blade before Lockdown could lose his slicing business momentum completely and simply devolve. It wasn't as though he didn't have faith in the bounty hunter's withholding and unsociable nature, but if the sad, unnatural state of affairs had gone on any longer… Lockdown may have done something stupid. Something unthinkable; something stupid and ridiculous and impossible and, of all horrors, Spark-related.

But now?

The plate was clear. Prowl, long a too-personal detriment to the arms-dealer, was gone. Lockdown was trying to find him but, impatient as the snarling antique was, that wouldn't last long. He was growling now, but give it a stellar-cycle or five… he wound wind down. His natural, oily greed would boil up, feeding his lust for physical accomplishment and the scraps of others. The bounty hunter just wasn't crafted for dwelling, wasn't programmed for melancholy. He would tear forward and pick up a bite-sized PM on the way and things would return to normal—all with his cursed little Autobot rusting safely in a warehouse cellar somewhere.

Even if he didn't know the details, Lockdown would warm up to the idea in time. Swindle was sure of it. All it required was a little… smiling on his part, and he was in such a good mood today.