A/N: Oh my Primus, I adore all of you! Your reactions are so funny; I'm downright shocked I managed to SURPRISE some of you with that move! Keep guessing, I love to see what you have in mind for the little swooning Elite and his new... FRIEND?

Oh Swindle, I know. Emotions are yicky and the world would be better if no one had them. (I actually wish I could have made him out as more of an evil ass, but… yeah.)

Also? Freakin' hell, Lockdown. Freakin'... hell.

Dead End

He never imagined that it would come down to him.

A flexible phrase, as it were, to come down—because as the months crept by, Swindle paid piecemeal witness to what could only be called a lethal downwards spiral in his long-time business contact. With his pretty Autobot toy ripped out of his close-quarter world, Lockdown actually… crumpled. He locked up, shut down, and, of all horrors, channeled every last iota of energy towards searching for the little leech.

Not just waiting. Not just keeping a sensor onlined in the hopes he might run across him after a while. Active, resource-draining, obsessively methodical investigation.

For weeks? No. No, weeks he could understand. It was the proper mourning for the termination of a tryst and an easily-coerced source of physical pleasure; the proper grasp-grope for an investment that had flown the coop. Swindle himself had priced those mods and he had to admit they were handsome.

But the old mech had been at it for months.

Swindle had never seen a 'bot throw himself into something so colossally hopeless—nor could he ever have expected it of a mech as cunning and realistic as Lockdown. All he could do was sit back and smile and shake his head with a 'Nothing today, chief' look and hope that the antique would break out of his little senile snit-fit with the proper proposal and following lucrative exploit. Just a good run, something to quicken his oil and get him back on track. He even held back on his own opinions and servo-rubbing impatience, only contributing the occasional nudge towards the ages-old conclusion that the little Autobot simply wasn't necessary to big guns and an even bigger cut of the meaty intergalactic payoff pie—what lovable, limited Lockdown had always held as his street-wise religion and sole concerns.

Even as the situation kept worsening against all odds and practical reason, leading to a toxic disinterest in collaborations and other silent sliding losses that even a fifty-fifty split couldn't match credit-for-credit, Swindle kept hoping—expecting--the next time he checked in with the other mech would find the antique lounging in his scratched-up chair like the crusty, appraising sloth he was, once more shining with a new chartreuse mod and an itch to use it on some unsuspecting bystander or a guilty-enough bounty mark. But no.

Eight some-odd months since Swindle had made the connection between his two clients. Eight some-odd months since Lockdown had simply stopped listening to him and answered everything with a slow, dark shake of his head. He was running down, pins slipping, gears sticking.

And it actually weighed on him.

It? His involvement in this puppet show, a nebulous non-concept and completely devoid of personal consequences! Swindle's only crime was passivity and utter client confidentiality, but every time he left listless, glaring Lockdown to the dark of a terminated commcall, the noose tightened; his compadre's slow spiral wound round his here-to-fore unknown crumple-zone. The arms-dealer had felt pressure before, certainly—been under as many high-stress business situations as a turncoat intergalactic emissary and never had a crack to show for it--but Primus, it was so uncomfortable! Maybe it was just impatience, maybe it was disgust, but it had never gotten into his tubing before, never dug in and scuffed his polished shell.

In the end, no one, not even Swindle, was truly amoral—or at least susceptible to the repercussions of others' morals. He wasn't going to get his business partner back at all, it seemed, unless something happened and watching a fellow entrepreneur and safe bet simply wind down and die in the void of his little partner's absence was maddening in some big-enough way.

Was it a smart decision? Certainly not. Was it a fair trade? A doomed situation in exchange for grievously misdirected hatred…

"Got… something for you, LD. No, hold on. It isn't a job. Not this time."

It was as good as turning his prized plasma arm-canon around and shooting himself in the chamber. Poof. Gone.

If Lockdown only knew what he had been dealing with, the amount of secrecy these clowns functioned under… he might even think his solicitor slightly heroic, but of course it didn't come across that way. Even so, the blocky mech might have escaped unscathed, tossed aside by Lockdown's haste: the superficial urgency of the long-rusted situation rendered the strangely quiet arms-dealer no more than a carrier of information and, once it was extracted, no longer of interest. But no. In his one moment of something close to kindness, Lockdown caught him by his piping.

The hulking bot's long-dim optics flared scalding red at the description of the mods and his servo creaked into a fist… and Swindle lost. Even as he received the most welcome, specific news he'd ever hoped for and found an end to so many months of intense, smothering informational darkness, the old mech noted with a savage speed how Swindle wasn't preening: wasn't flourishing and grinning and asking for his payment ahead of the game even as he knew he wouldn't get it. The very rage that the arms-dealer had counted upon for his own inconspicuous exit doubled in the crucible of Lockdown's abused chassis. Things clicked and the look of blistering fury on the old mech's face as he cut the call off without another word (because Lockdown didn't have time to rage and accuse him of lying through silence when his insubstantial partner was still trapped) was enough to make Swindle wish, for the first time, that he'd been more of an aft about things.

But it was over. He'd done the hallowed, feared, suicidal right thing for the first time in his long, crime-spattered function and all he had to show for it was a curious, stunned buzz in his processor and the decidedly unpleasant knowledge that he would probably never again be welcome in Lockdown's ship or company. Never again would the other seek him out for drinks. Advice. The odd laugh.

Swindle took the loss of his almost-friend with a ponderous too-large quiet, all of the rattling collisions and acidic coincidental consequences leaving the arms-dealer with a single resounding question: one he knew would never be answered but by the final flickers of his Spark when the Well—or Pit—overtook him.

"Why," he asked the vast, impartial void of magenta-glassed space, thumbing haltingly at his chin, "does everyone insist on taking things so personally all the time?"

The thing that hurt the most?

"I can only give you the coordinates. You gotta do the RPMs yourself."

It had been beneath his pedes from the beginning.

Beneath his pedes or in front of his optics every time Swindle called in, always with that same impartial grin. How long had the filthy slagger been keeping this, coveting it like a Primus-damned piece of trivia? One, two, three—five months? More? All while he ripped through the stars, planet by planet, servos fastening on nothing.

Nothing.

All while Prowl disappeared further, planet by planet by star by star and a mirroring distance tire-jacked his insides, crunching vital warm components. Wrecking him in his empty ship.

Some part of him, old and shrewd, understood that Swindle had no reason to do him favors—that his partnership didn't matter in the slightest to the other mech's aloof, oil-slick machinations because it didn't pay off--but that part was eclipsed by the battered, howling majority that propelled him through the bright green undergrowth, the same undergrowth he'd crashed through for those four tenterhook megacycles when he thought Prowl was just out of reach. A rough facsimile of screaming scalding steam energy punched through his substructure in devastating rhythm: for months, it had kept him online whenever he passed the empty room and Prowl's little stone tree. It was mad, bare, insubstantial yet painful enough to keep him moving. Always moving, processor clouding and clearing in bursts.

Lockdown could say he had searched everywhere, but that would be a gaping lie and an impossibility. There were too many places to search. The sheer numbers—planets, leagues, countries, war-states, cities, swarming dumb inhabitants--of the cavernous galaxies had overwhelmed him on more than one occasion… and here he was. The entire time.

He knew no one left the planet. And he had stayed. For solar-cycles, he had stayed, hovering and scanning, Spark slamming in his chamber as it simply failed to make sense…

He found the wide, sloppily-hidden hatch after a megacycle of groping through the too-familiar foliage and cleaning up the coordinate approximation Swindle had given him. He kicked it up with a clang—nothing but waxy puppet green upon a metal lid, obvious as Pit but nothing to an organism-focused surface-scan because they had dragged Prowl under, smuggled him limp and fizzling at his receptors—and tore down the dirt tunnel, Spark condensing into a furious black sun as the underworld became darker and darker with every slamming step.

Lockdown burst into the main chamber and stopped, red optics flaring in the solid underground night. He didn't have time to think about whether it was suspicious that he hadn't been apprehended or tracked, nor the fact of what he was crashing into; he simply moved toward the promise of black plating and a smart blue visor. He flicked his night-vision on, poison-green cite mowing through the rows of black slabs arranged through the middle of the low-hung dirt chamber, broken only by sets of red and blue dots, all glowing faintly—

He felt the truth of it before he saw it in detail; before the night-vision recalibrated and fleshed the slabs out into slack limbs and distorted mouths and chipped gaping chambers with even dimmer Sparks. The chamber was too quiet, almost abandoned. The thick brown air carried only a Spark-deadening buzz as tangible as the suffocating stench. That buzz hit him and got inside his girders like an itch because even though they were all so still, he reeled briefly at the dead feel of so many Sparks, smothered into utter stillness in cold suspended bodies. Not offline—no, that would have been silent and still--but in the slow, maddening process of going offline. This wasn't a graveyard. It was a holding cell.

Torque. She was right.

Prowl.

He felt ghost pinches at his carpal joints and his Spark convulsed; blazing numbness spreading like sepsis through his dry, cracked insides, Lockdown ran down the first row, optics locked on the ghastly parade of frozen shells, all rusting in the dark, clumped wires vomiting out of gaps in their armor. Several, dirty tubes still hanging from their mouths, had gone offline and still they hung, spotted with messy, toothy holes cut from into the armor where parts had been ripped out, old oil rimming the post-mortem wounds. Substructure tightening, Lockdown looked frantically for a sliver of teal visor; he looked for his small, dark partner whom he'd lost, who had been dying here, captured and strung up and suffocated at his warm, brave center for nearly a stellar-cycle while he groped and pushed himself into senseless methodical investigations--

Lockdown turned the corner, slamming down on something small and stooped that lurched across his path. He recoiled at the first real sound he'd heard, a bizarre raspy scream that sliced through the motionless non-air; a klik later, his swamped sensors relayed a warm, slick presence on the bottom of his pede. A crunched shell of something lay writhing on the waste-smeared ground, bright oily eyes bulging, wet organic innards opened and halved by the cold weight of his pede. It stilled, more fluids burbling out and staining the ground green-black.

He pushed on.

Rows. Rows and rows, dull metal and smeared with filth. Some all femme; some mixed. Nearly mad, he broke through another row, numbed to the vacant optics turned toward him from every shell and crushing the thought that Prowl wasn't there even though it made horrible sense for him to be--when the lights flickered on and he saw black and gold. Not on a table.

It was in a corner. All of him, down to the jump-jet boosters. Surrounded by scuffed, piecemeal modifications in green and red and orange and grey, elegant Prowl was piled like refuse on the grey-brown ground, golden horns still gleaming.

Something snapped behind him. Prying his optics from the pieces and deactivating his night-vision, Lockdown turned and a live mech was there, red optics wide and radiating vibrating, clean life. He kicked into instant motion as he saw the green mech move: it was involuntary and thank Primus that it was. Cursing, his target sprinted to the right into a row of 'bots and Lockdown pursued. The bounty hunter turned the corner in time to see the mech straighten and fumble with his EMP generator, arm out and shock still stretching his face. The hunter saw it but didn't register the eternal threat: he was restricted to hot-oiled primordial rage and the instant the deadly mod clicked in and sent a haphazard burst of yellow energy into the semi-dark, the mech was on the ground with a short clang.

Lockdown came down so hard he dented the other's abdominal plating nearly to his struts and he screamed in pain; the sickening hiccup sensation and cracking sound of a pressurized pipe breaking and flooding the other's insides with brutal air was cut off by the triple-click and vicious bray of Lockdown's chainsaw, yellowed blades rattling within inches of the other's face.

"Where is he?!" he roared over the other's doubled screams and the sound of his own menace, muscling the green mech further into the ground with his crushing claw servo, tightening dangerously over his chamber plating. "Bike model, gold and black! Where is he?!"

He repeated it, growing louder and closer until the mech stopped pleading to be let go or simply cursing in paralyzed fear. Finally, he wrung three words out.

"I—slag, I dunno!"

It wasn't good enough. Not after eight months. Tensors whipping tight, Lockdown slashed his chainsaw across the tender seam between the arm and the chassis-plating, digging hatefully into the sticky ripping sensation and the high-pitched scream. The mech arched, convulsing as sparks flew.

"Those are his mods!" the hunter snarled into his twisted face. "You have him, where is he?!"

The mech could no longer vocalize; reduced to hysterical static as oil and toxic-bright energon flowed from the dark hole, he convulsed for long, creaking nanokliks until his vocals suddenly snapped back in, distorted by the pain.

"He went… went out with the ship and he didn't come back! They sold him, Primus, please—oh god, Primus, please--"

They had shipped him out. Which meant he wasn't there. Which meant…

Bitter fear flooded his substructure. Prowl receded further into the darkness of the empty universe and the beautiful mods grew colder, more and more like remnants; Lockdown dug his claw into the other's chassis-plating until it cracked.

"Where are your records?"

"We don't keep records!"

Before he could process it—he didn't stare into the other's flickering red optics, did not stop to consider the quailing 'bot beneath him with any measure of direct fleshy vengeance—he succumbed to a death rattle. He succumbed to the fact that he wasn't going to get Prowl back, not from this Pit. Lockdown blacked out physically, impulses spurting directly from his wounded Spark: his claw came unseated with a squeal of metal only to be replaced by the ripping rattle of his chainsaw, plunging into the shielded glowing heart of the mech with a messy burst of sparks. The yellow Spark energy, hysterical and sizzling, jolted up his arm; the scum went offline with a single jerk, mouth stretched wide.

Lockdown jerked the limb free with a whir (fighting out of the now-grey metal slit and shredding the corpse's brittle plating, sending shrapnel into his own face) and heaved himself upright. Prowls mods still gleamed in the corner, a silent, still testament to what he'd been through before being thrown to some corner of the universe. Stripped. Disassembled. Abused.

Never knowing precisely when he stopped asking questions, Lockdown ripped into all of them.

He found them or they came running to the noise, three more of them. He didn't use the EMP gen, once more a cold presence in his arm. He fought them down. Crushed them. They all resisted, grasping for weapons or help, except for the femme. When she saw him, spattered with oil and energon and optics ablaze with barbaric hatred as he slammed the makeshift door off its hinges, she opened her arms and let him murder her. She sighed as she went offline, ravaged internals decompressing and he flung her body off of his numb chainsaw with a spray of dark oil, mirroring that damn red Autobot from so long ago.

Had he come so far? Had he gone back to his beginnings?

For a terrifying moment, it was as though nothing had changed; that Prowl had made no print on him and the quiet, smiling ninjabot had never existed at all and he was still tearing into jaded Autobot captains with nothing to lose. As though he'd lost what he had never had. But no.

He'd gone back to the beginning--come back only to lose him again. Prowl was gone. Couldn't be tracked. Could be… anywhere.

Lockdown stood over the broken, gashed body of the blue femme and his chainsaw quieted to a hazy, shocked growl. The old musclecar froze, staring into the dark of the small, filthy room he'd found her in. Body reduced to a shuddering husk, his Spark seemed to sound out: the frequency pressed into the dark air, seeking… a way forward. A future. An option.

The petrified waves came back empty. Dead end.

Once more, something moved behind him. Lockdown turned; wires as hot as a sun, he lunged and rammed the intruder against the carved-dirt wall before he realized what it was, every tensor utilizing the full heft of his horrendous two-ton poundage. Half blind, he bucked against the sinewy appendages that twined so fiercely around his wiry joints—until he jerked and gouged and cut one of them off and the thing squealed and the appendage thrashed on the ground and he pressed more and a wet crack resulted.

Venting air quickly, Lockdown looked down at the thing against the wall. Perhaps because it was hideous, or perhaps because he felt some primal shudder of recognition built into his very base coding, his optics widened and his processor seemed to void. Wounded and bleeding on the inside and outside, the thing waited. Though he couldn't understand it, he could feel it, manic and hateful. Staring.

"What the Pit are you?" he hissed finally, processor blown from raw shock. The creature laughed with bubbling difficulty, voice as rough as sin.

"Your creator. Forgotten and victorious."

Lockdown stared and stalled, insides grinding painfully. Then he pressed in, demanding the only thing he could think of. The only thing he thought of.

"Where's Prowl?"

Boss, one hundred millennia old and as toxic with hatred as with the slow sting of life, didn't know the name. He didn't need to.

"Where it deserves to be," it rasped thickly, eyes flickering a desperate brown-red through the mask-like holes of its warped face. "Where all of your kind deserve to be. With whomever paid the correct price."

He didn't black out.

Consciously, silent as the void his life was suspended in, Lockdown drew back and tore in. He destroyed and purged and murdered the creature down to his last throbbing spider nerve-cell, operating from inherent fear and frenzy and the chasm of eight months. For cycles and cycles more, gore flipping up and smacking the walls with slick noises, the old mech destroyed the screaming thing that had stolen his partner. Twice.

After the last recognizable feature was gone, gutted and gored and gashed into a greasy, fleshy lump of red, Lockdown staggered back into the main chamber. The hopeless choral buzz swarmed him, saturated and sapped him, beating his dark Spark into a quivering ball as he gathered up Prowl's perfectly preserved modifications in his huge gore-smattered servos, every gentle clank echoing in the dark.

He got a sack. Wrapped them. Carefully.

Then Lockdown took one long, blank look at all the rusted-at-the-wrists mechs and femmes, some of them models so old he could scarcely remember seeing the like in his own time, and searched until he found oil. Then, slopping the dark substance on the rows and rows and rows, he set fire to the last place Prowl had been.

He watched as the flame, subdued by the brown nitrogen air, ripped through the rows like razorblades and set them to a slow, total burn. Wires melted and weak Sparks shuddered into nothingness; the preserved horror and anguish of the frozen mechs whipped him into crushed silent paroxysms as metal warped and glass cracked. Because any one of them could have been his Prowl. Everyone of them was. Forgotten or betrayed or stolen. He left it to burn, poisonous smoke following him into the yellow sunlight.

Once back aboard his empty ship and leagues deep into black space, he sat in his chair and simply held Prowl's cold pieces in his lap, running his shaking digits over the helmet's brave wicked horns over and over and over.