A/N: Skim-read this chapter D: Seriously. I hate it.
I sincerely apologize for the angst, the length, and all the freakin Torque. Without her, this would all be horribly cramped introspection, so… consider her melodrama a necessary evil :[ Enhhh. ENNHHHH DON'T MAKE ME REGRET CREATING YOU DARLING.
First off, the name of the game here is 'don't trust Lockdown'—denial is his favorite hobby and he's had a freakin' long time to work on blocking out and distancing himself from certain memories, and making other 'bots believe it too. Yeeeeah. Torque's playing it safe and playing along for simple want of trying to make Lockdown understand the truth.
Oh god. Canon. Iactuallyrespectyou.
Two more chapters, and one of them is nicenice. Then... blessed equilibrium and a return to spotty and adorable one-shottage. Ohgoditsoundsdelicious.
COUNTING DOWN!
In the End
"Gotta get it out of him."
When she called in to check on them—a month's worth of silent hunts had passed since her fifteen solar-cycle stay on their ship—Lockdown wouldn't speak to her. Torque didn't press. Right before the huntress terminated the fruitless comm-call, however, he suddenly asked her to reroute to an old datapad he had and she did so with only an ounce of hesitation; when the screen activated, it showed the scratched-up interior of his quarters, which she knew was soundproofed.
Whether the seed of nausea took root then or later, it was hard to say. It was impossible to tell through her overwhelming anxiety, or the sick sensation she felt when seeing Lockdown's slack facial plating up-close from a static-torn screen. If it was hard leaving them alone, it was doubly hard to return. If the old 'bot thought to keep herself from anguish by staying away from intimate relationships, she consistently neglected to consider the pain of those dear to her--those 'bots she watched as attentively as though she could live through them by mere presence and tender investment, a grasping, voyeuristic habit no amount of millennia could break.
The two bounty hunters were silent—such dense, dark silence that she considered ending the new call herself because he just wasn't ready, he needed more time alone with Prowl--and then he said that, sudden and rough. She looked at the musclecar carefully, optics thinning slightly as her processor reached, connoted, stretched. He waited in front of his screen in the half-dark, one servo obscuring his ghostly facial plating.
"You have to get what out of him? The Direct Command software?" she asked at length, suddenly dreading the answer.
"Everythin'."
His vocals weren't weak, nor as pained as his creaking slump against the back wall of his berth, but the raw, paralyzed desperation in them still caused her insides to crumple.
"Lockdown. I'm sorry. It doesn't… work like that. You know that."
"Just the time he was gone. Just the circuit," he muttered fiercely, almost to himself. He gestured jerkily at the air, gaze trained on the opposite wall. "Ain't much. Get that out and he'll be fine."
He was in shock. The rigidity of his mechanics, the blank fierceness in his optics as his processor churned overtime, running in cramped circles and trying to find a solution to something that could never fully be solved. It was expectable. It was his first time trying to resume life with his broken partner, and hope would not arrive in a mere month. He had no escape from the other mech's pain, nor the new connection between them; anyone would quail at such an intimidating healing slope. The new reality was ugly, even if they were together.
Shock was one thing, but the thought that he could simply extract all the pain from his partner, like it was a virus or a chipped gear… it was so natural of him. Lockdown could deal with tangles of wires, but not the Spark-warm emotions those wires conducted like liquor or fire, especially when he could feel every seismic upset in his own old Spark. But it was impossible to affect the pain in any physical way. He couldn't simply take it away, it was in Prowl's banks and nothing would—
"Wait. Are you talking about… altering his memory?" Torque asked, plating warped in disbelief.
"Just a stellar-cycle. Ain't much," Lockdown repeated, vocals reduced to a static-thick rasp. He shook his helm doggedly, pressing a digit between his gapped dentals.
"What--no. How could you—"
There were many questions, half of them incredulous and rhetorical, only tailored to purge her pure disbelief because a month wasn't enough to pass judgment or give up hope, but she stopped at the fact that put an end to all of it.
"That's drastic. Too drastic—and he won't agree to it, Lockdown," she said tensely. "He'll never agree."
Lockdown knew that already, somewhere inside him. That's why he hadn't said anything about it.
He knew that if he went to Prowl and asked him—asked him if he wanted to leave behind something that was keeping him from the rest of his function, that was senseless and barbaric and kept him crouching in his room for solar-cycles, servos clamped over his chamber in fear of his own damned circuitry—Prowl would simply look at him, wordless as always, and feel so strongly that Lockdown would need to put a servo to his own chamber, a sorrow not his own instantly worming past all of the hard plating he had spent a lifetime creating.
To the kid, it wouldn't be right. It was part of him and, just like the scar, Prowl didn't erase parts of himself. Even if they were killing him.
Lockdown sneered, nothing but a rote contraction of facial plating.
"Don't matter. His slaggin' obsession with not scuffin' a few bumps away doesn't mean a thing to me. This is bigger. I'll get him t'do it. Knock him out if I need to."
"No, it's more than that, Lockdown. It's more than, what, preference or superstition or want. It's—it's against his code of calling," she insisted, gesturing helplessly at the dark green night sky of whatever planet she was on. His engine slowed to a dirty whine.
"His what?" he asked guardedly, too slowly for comfort.
"Religion," Torque admitted finally, all too ready for the darkening of the old mech's optics and the scornful crackling pressure in his raw vocalizer.
"Prowl's too sharp to waste his function on somethin' like that," he growled in disgust, beastly head turning away. Torque pressed her thick digits to her optic crest in something like wounded impatience, vocals tightening.
"You j—Lockdown, do you think he spends all of his time meditating for nothing?"
Yes. No. Maybe. Lockdown thought. All this time, it seemed like nothing more than something Prowl did.
It only took a quick trip to his banks to remember the bike knotted up and perched primly on a berth or an outcropping of alien landscape a thousand times before, humming so softly and so warmly the impatient musclecar could only feel it in the tips of his spikes. He never considered what his partner was accomplishing by the recurring and ever-present ritual—foolish, as sharp little Prowl was always tirelessly working toward something --but the fact that it could be tied into his beliefs suddenly sent a prickle of vexation and sick, sick apprehension underneath his black plating.
Gathering his spikes around himself like the weapons they were, he was about to growl something but Torque interrupted him, one flat magenta servo taking up most of the comm-screen.
"Does he still practice?"
The look on Lockdown's marked facial plating told her that his last peaceful memories of the little bike included careful ritualistic meditation and sinuous Metallikato exercises, crafted to keep his stablizers attuned to his liquid needs. She nodded, cementing it before he had room to deny it.
"Then he still believes. You cannot possibly have one without the other. In all schools, it is the same, even my own."
"What does yours say about this?" he demanded after a long moment, glaring hatefully at the old femme—as though she were furthering this propaganda by her simple, eons-old existence. As though she, at least, should know better. She took the venom with a shake of her head.
"When you're speaking of manipulating your partner's memories, much less against his wishes?" she demanded, then paused, shuttering her optics to steady herself. "We still operate from the… basic hypertexts."
"You ain't allowed to fix what's wrong?"
"We are not allowed to interfere with the flow of natural events as they occur."
When Lockdown only rumbled in a poisonous timbre, looking away as his scratched segmented back-plating rippled involuntarily--all signs of the withdrawal of his attention and deadly impatience, both things lethal to Prowl at this delicate stage—she blew some air from her vents with a rough noise, heart-shaped face mournful.
"Lockdown, I know you think this is… no time for lessons in the metaphysical, but there's something you must understand about the way we were taught. It will help you understand why Prowl can't do this, even past the cost and the danger."
He simply looked at her through their small data-pad window, optics throbbing a dull, hostile red as he glared past the scratches on the screen; no longer bristling but no longer caring. She gathered her words for a minute, picking the right ones for him, but still looked at him in some base confusion before she began.
"The definition of sentience is varied, but there are those who still deny that we have centers—Sparks or connections, or a purpose beyond what we were crafted to do originally. We do not exist in the traditional definition of Being, in that we are… machines, technically, with advanced programming, mechanics and software, all of which are the components of artificial intelligence, something that, while impressive, actually denies a race recognition of their existence and validity by the universe at large. Artificial intelligence is still artificial. We are not.
"Whereas most beings fancy themselves spawned by some divine deity, but are in fact the process of evolution, we are actually made, part by part, program by program. Things have advanced since then, but we can identify our original makers and half of the galaxy scorns us because of it, believing our Primus-sent sentience to be nothing but a glitch in, what, unimaginably complex programs. There is a reason we don't interact much with other races: they think themselves above us, simply because we are the most fully inorganic creatures in existence and there are no other records of fully sentient mechanical beings."
"And?" he grunted coldly when she stopped, her yellow optics fixed anxiously on his dark expression. He heard her mechanics whine; her shoulder-plating dropped an inch, tired.
"And altering memories goes against everything we are, Lockdown, and everything we have been trying to prove for billions of stellar-cycles. Have you thought about how utterly insubstantial our experiences become—how insubstantial we become—when we can simply hook in and erase anything to our liking? Re-write our own realities?"
She asked it gently, husky vocals nearly fizzling out as she pointed upwards, to the stars and the gaping green-black chasm of space that littered the top half of her com-screen. She looked at the old musclecar as though she would reach his injured Spark from thousands of light-years away, warm him with the downy strength of her own by words and glowing yellow alone.
"We must submit to the flow of the universe. We must experience without choice. It is that one symbolic helplessness that earns us the right as sentient beings, and without that, Primus cannot give us our full potential. It is our divine state."
"--and we must accept pain if there is to be any growth. We must accept strife and confusion if there is to be triumph and peace. We began as machines, objective and flawlessly logical, before He Sparked us: why else would we feel pain, confusion, fear, if it did not serve a greater purpose? Primus is not so cruel, my students."
Compact black limbs slid through the thin air, with not a gear creak to their name; a subsonic hum of utter tranquility traveled up and down deep, masculine notes, making smiling music—music for his slow-shifting frame, music for his pure, strong Spark. His pedes made no noise when they touched the dojo floor, as often as they rose and fell in perfect time with his words.
"You must have faith. Faith is your greatest comfort and your strongest defense. There is no ultimate equation to function, but there is meaning in everything. There is something to learn from every misfortune and we are intended to learn it by Primus. To deny that is to deny ourselves and Him. Continue to do as you were crafted, young ones—but go forth and feel as He would have you."
And the old mech stilled after a final whir of his mechanics, smiling with a humble, knowing grace that calmed every kneeling 'bot in front of him, assuring them of their own triumphs over eventual pain; their fortitude against such destructive poisons as anger, ego, resentment and hatred. His message washed over them in waves of understanding, like silk or liquid malleable infinite chrome before it was set into a mold for a protoform, and they were young and glowing with the radiation of his ages-old love and goodwill and quiet power that seemed to echo like Primus himself—
"It is law. He can't compromise himself, his sense of being, even if it seems like the better option. That's why he was so upset to realize his memories had ever been wiped, even when he regained himself. Do you see how it is, Lockdown?"
--except for the heavy black mech at the back who couldn't pay attention through the tortured creak of his bulky knee joints in that wretched crouch and he heard every word but the gnawing pain didn't stop and he didn't—
"—ockdown?"
-- feel peace for the hundredth time and it didn't make sense for the thousandth time and he hated, Primus but he hated--
"It's fraggin' idiotic is what it is!" Lockdown burst out ferociously, with no simple irritation but a deep, learned anger that the other 'bot saw as strongly as shimmering heat.
It built her own outrage faster, her hot vapors rising as sharply as Lockdown's volume when the mech threw down the datapad with a heavy clatter, sending her screen spinning off into a cockeyed view of the half-lit ceiling. The grind of his vocals were farther away but all the more mangled and ugly for the tinny distance.
"Why the Pit would a mech—a damn smart mech, a practical mech--put so much time into some virused dead-end cult?"
"Lockdown—"
"Doesn't make any fraggin' sense, ain't logical. Restrictions, training, meditation—and for what? All for some promise of another plane and a god who never shows up until you're safe in the well and what fraggin' good is that? Sticky mass-input programming, that's all it is. That's all it is, no better than factions. Mech doesn't need that, he just needs his gears. S'just another way to control when all y'need to know is how to fight, all you need to know is how to beat the other 'bot's chamber in and even if it wasn't gonna keep him from fixin' himself I'd still—"
"Lockdown! Stop acting like this!" Torque barked, breaking the roar of his words by sheer volume and ferocity alone, unseen yellow optics flashing. "It isn't as if you're entirely ignorant!"
Lockdown froze mid-stride, red optics wide and blank as his processor locked. The datapad was silent, only crackling fitfully from the blow it took, then her vocals came from the damaged speakers again, far-away and hard.
"… You practiced."
"What're you talkin' about?" Lockdown said stiffly, optics averted even as she couldn't see him; even as he was alone in the dark room, servos slowly clenching and unclenching with his Spark steadily shrinking like someone had pried off his chamber and left the empty space between the stars to suck it out.
"I've known it for millennia—but only because I've had time to watch. Anyone else… I don't flatter myself, but your style has…diverged so heavily, no one else would catch it. Prowl would not. Has not. You never said a word, so neither did I." Torque vented air again, all anger decayed into exhaustion. She paused long enough to let him swallow his own exposure. "What school did you belong to?"
Briefly, Lockdown's visual field quailed, perception and resolution fluctuating wildly—only the slightest sign of the burst of chaos spawned by his suffocated Spark and the sudden involuntary activation of his deepest memory banks. He remained silent for a long time. Torque waited.
"Alkaline," he said finally, hating the sound of it.
"Prowl's dojo," she murmured. "How did you—"
"There's a reason we don't ask each other questions, gal," he interrupted her with a beaten growl, shocked into movement at the dangerous connection made by a single sharp processor a thousand light-years away: his haphazard steps echoed in the small room, even as she couldn't see him digging at his spikes and neck plating, gritting his dentals. "Not unless you wanna do what you should've done ages ago. Pack up and leave me right here. Me and the kid."
"I love you. I will always stay with you."
"You're a fraggin' romantic. Hopeless. Pathetic and stupid. Always will be, no matter how many more millennia you manage to whimper and crawl through," he snapped in disgust, resisting the urge to stride over to the upturned datapad and crunch it in his claw and end her tender husky monotone; crush the old femme along with it with a single crackle-snap of fiberglass. Hatred and fear coupled in his dim chamber, roughening his vocals, forcing him to spit more out. "Your goddamn Spark's gonna get you off-lined one solar-cycle and I'm gonna laugh and thank your fraggin' Primus you finally had the sense to die."
"That may be," Torque said quietly. He could almost see the flat line of her full mouth below the fathomless orange of her almond optics. "But I promise you: I will never turn you away, Lockdown, no matter what you did before I met you. It is only what you do here and now that can make me leave you, and even that will be a battle."
"Rust in the Pit, old mech," and the helmet was so goddamn heavy in his servos.
Lockdown leaned against the far wall, mechanics suddenly sagging under the weight of her words and the churn of his old Spark. He offlined his optics for a moment, shutting out the claustrophobic room and the tiny, shivering bike on the other side of the wall, who was catching his raw emotions like trembling sonic booms inside of his scratched-up chamber and worrying, worrying, worrying…
"Some things you just can't promise, gal. Don't press your luck."
This wasn't about him. Never had been.
The speakers buzzed when he picked the datapad up from the floor, settling heavily on his berth again. Torque studied him without a word, angular facial plating radiating sorrow. Lockdown ground his servo along his helm, vents hissing slightly, then texted it to her because he couldn't say it.
Kid's dying in his own processor. Something's gotta give.
After a moment, Torque nodded. Her entire function had been built off of beings, no matter how rare, needing her. It was the only way she survived, in between long stretches of blackness. Taking a steadying cycle of metal-heavy alien air, she started talking.
"You need to give him more time. You can't just… expect these things to be fixed. It's only been a month, Lockdown, what kind of recovery did you expect in such a short span? Especially after what he lived through."
"I'm tellin' you, this won't change. This is permanent."
"It will never go away, yes, but it will lessen with the right help! You need to have faith in him. You need to wait with him, help him, it's--"
They talked in circles. They talked about Prowl's pain: Torque asked questions, Lockdown nodded or shook his head, growling out answers occasionally, always with the same hollow look in his optics. No matter how many platitudes Torque offered—her words were reduced to trite cinders because she could say nothing that would fix Prowl--the only thing he was focused on was altering Prowl's memory. Saving the mech from himself and that one evil stellar-cycle tainting all the kliks before and behind the two mechs. He asked about it so many times she finally thought about it, Spark hurting—just to get it out of his processor and onto the longer, far more arduous task of healing his partner.
"Can't… the EMP generator—can't that scramble memory somewhat?" she asked reluctantly, full mouth sad.
"Too unpredictable. Too wide-range. Blasts usually wipe out half a bot's processor and not the side you want. Jacks with personality programming too."
Their options ran out too fast, even if Lockdown was the only one truly thinking about it. There was a too long stretch of silence that became all too short when he actually spoke, hard and flat.
"We'll have to hack him."
It was as though Torque had been physically assaulted; a plug pulled, a tube yanked free from its socket, a piston slammed askew. All the color bleached from her optics before flashing an alarm yellow.
"No. You can't."
"I can and I will," Lockdown growled, hardly glancing up at her; the cruel, raw edge to his vocals betrayed the painful clench of his substructure. "He won't say yes but it's gotta come out. No other option."
"Lockdown, listen to me: you can't. If you care about Prowl in the slightest, you will not subject him to that. Nothing—nothing--is worth that."
Her vocals shook. He looked up, red optics reduced to slivers.
"You been hacked?"
"No."
"Then you've got no say."
"You have no idea what it consists of. I've seen it happen."
"Ain't the safest thing but it works—" he began, vocals rising momentarily before he glared at her. "Why're you so shifty about this?"
"I had…" she croaked, then trailed off, intakes catching as she put a servo to her helm with a faint mechanical whine. "No. I can't. I'm sorry, I can't."
The gutted musclecar started to say something, growl rising impatiently and almost hatefully, but she shook her head, putting up her other servo with a bluntness he didn't expect.
"I can't tell you," she said, grip shifting meaningfully to her auditory unit. "But I can show you. If you'll let me."
Steady as anything, she was offering a file transfer. He would have been shocked if he weren't so damn tired: no one could have paid him to view her memory files under any normal basis. They didn't ask each other questions, much less play voyeur to each other's messy experiences. But this had to do with Prowl—what he was planning on subjecting Prowl to, for sake of his function.
"Why?" he ground out.
"Because you need to know what could happen."
After a long, long pause, Prowl's exhaustion and low throb of anxiety filtering through their connection like a mortal wound, Lockdown nodded curtly.
Her optics dimmed to mournful flickering fireflies as her internals whirred, starting and stopping with difficulty, body preternaturally still under the night sky. After a few cycles, her optics returned to her original yellow, but her body kept the artificial aching shell-like stiffness as she snapped back a bit of paneling from her helm and drew out a thin black cord, plugging it into her data-pad at the bottom port.
"I've isolated it the best I can."
She stripped the abstract—emotional—data for him. She was at least that considerate.
Now he would be left with a scene as viewed by what they were without the claustrophobic glow of a Spark: objective machines. He unhooked a download cable from the old datapad, checking it briefly to see if it was compatible, then snapped it behind his auditory port. He felt the connection go live with a tinny electrical taste; the download was quick, straight into his cache memory. He disconnected and, without looking at the old femme, accessed the new file.
He knew right then, from the very first electronic tone, she lied.
The lines of abstract code were not just a brilliant, frantic undercurrent but a wrenching force—so much so that the rest of him (him, Lockdown, the hollow and scratched-up mech sitting stiffly against the wall with his black plating hovering a thousand miles away) locked up, throwing up firewalls at the outright invasion of another's picaresque consciousness. The defense effectively trapped the musclecar inside of himself, and he flooded whatever voided processor there was to flood.
Small room. Very small. No air. Badly lit—only glow from the scattered screens, flickering lettering and flickering Spark.
A femme—his femme, her femme, she still had a broad shoulder-span and a thin mouth and heavy pedes—lay on an operating berth, slender arms to her sides. Glider model, bright green. Willowy, precious. Her big blue optics were guttered out, sick with back-up lighting. Sick like before, no change from when she was sitting with her servos clamped around her arms, staring into space.
She was sick. Needed this. Only option.
It was a constant battle not to touch her. Run thick digits along her sides, lift her paralyzed weight and press her to his chassis. He ached. Primus, he ached. But knowing that she wouldn't look at him anyways, wouldn't be held even if she were--
He shouldn't have done this. He kept turning over what he'd said to her in his processor, the lies just to get her into stasis. She was so scared. No one could live, being that terrified, but that hardly justified the wires pouring from her helm and her blank face, her strapped limbs. He shouldn't have done this.
He didn't know what he should have done (waited, trusted, loved, stayed, tried), but it wasn't this.
He paced, anxiety choking him, wringing every wire raw. The hacker didn't talk to him, prepping the programs and infiltration devices. Had to keep himself from jerking at every noise.
Fear. Guilt. Self-hatred. Look at her. Look at her. Anxiety, ache--
--a mech convulsed and a datapad clattered to the floor, white lips retracting in a involuntary snarl, far-away yellow optics unwavering behind the fiberglass—
A time-skip. Who knew how long he waited, but the dark-plated 'bot (squat, sharp plating, no visible optics) plugged in and for the longest time there was nothing but silence as the hacker's plating shifted almost organically, tiny slats undulating. He felt the energy field grow. Tainted, hectic—almost excited. Then she started shaking.
It was nothing. The next message appeared on the screen, bright flickering green: it is nothing it is nothing stay away do not touch.
He could hear her plating clanking and tense stripes of grey sliced the monitors and it was nothing.
Then it wasn't nothing anymore. He felt something snap even if he didn't see it or hear it, and his femme started shaking, energy field ballooning and quailing madly, curdling into crackling black pain underneath her delicate plating. He was alone in that room, in intent and any other logical sense, but he stepped toward the small hacker regardless, raising his husky vocals above the shrieking equipment.
"What's happening?"
The hacker didn't move. He didn't move even when she suddenly screamed, long and piercing and unwavering, one anguished audiobit blasting out of her tattered vocalizer and saturating every dark iota of that unlit room. Her digits twitched, then she arched off the table with her elegant helm thrown back, followed by rough spasms as tensors started contracting at random, the product of mechanical-level chaos.
"She's—no! Stop it! Tell me what's happening!"
He couldn't stand it, very Spark roaring forward at its casing to get at her; when her vocals cracked out and her head snapped to the side, he charged forward and ripped the wires out of her helm ports, un-strapping her limbs and heaving her into his arms, safe in his arms. She went rigid, convulsing against him. He fell to the floor and the palpitation of her wounded Spark nearly locked him as well; it was so hysterical that his own clenched to a sick fistful of light.
He rotted, from that dense center, feeling all of his wrongs in a single moment. He felt the squeal of metal as he crushed her to him, nearly deaf and blind; she was radiating so much heat. She was lighter from having something inside her seared away, singed black and unsalvageable. His insides mirrored hers, curling and black. Paneling unhinged, scraped, creaking from her beautiful helm, ports singed. It was his fault, he'd—destroyed her—
--audio bits, smoke—static--
"Tell me what's hap-hap-hap-hap-hap-happening!"
She stilled.
Her Spark pulsed on, fast and shallow—then, nanoklik by nanoklik, it began to lose rhythm. It decayed into random bursts of energy, radioactive decay, and he pushed his thick servos over her little body, knowing the chaotic death-keen of a dwindling Spark. But that anguished, senseless state did not peter into silence.
Cradled against his empty chassis, she rebooted with a violent snap of static, optics burning blue, and clawed at his facial plating.
He cried out, jerking away. Half of his visual field blanked out with a crunching sound and a pulse of pain; she scrambled away, all clumsy animal clunks in the darkness. By the time he struggled to his pedes, clutching his bleeding optic-slot, she was at him again, glitching and swiping at him with viciousness only borne of a seared processor, limbs propelled by a messy, frenzied culmination of glitches and distorted reality. Her elegant facial plating was twisted in pain even as she turned the table over without a sound and leapt for him, mechanics squealing.
His depth-perception was fighting to recalibrate, only heightening his panic—he crashed into a screen, sparks burst from behind his back and she hissed deep in her vocalizer--he had to strike without harming her, doggedly, he had to--
She couldn't be stopped. She was destroyed but still moving but still hatingfearingdying, in the throes of a self-detonation that never took off. He fought, as best he could and as long as he could. He was dribbling energon all over the floor and down his heart-shaped facial plating by the time he caught her in his arms, crushed her servos to her sides and drove his fist into her chamber.
His digits twitched around and within her orange-white Spark before it simply stopped.
He went to his knee-plating, lowering her limp body to the ground. Optics black. His servo cooled with her dark chamber, frozen. The ruins of her chamber plating—her shattered chamber—crunched and shifted around his scratched forearm. He drew his servo out. Glass crunched.
Scorch marks on his fist. One digit non-operational, magenta plating ripped loose by a chamber-pin.
Her face was not blank.
Fast-forward-standing-up.
"I got in. I got in."
Dark bot. No face. No name, just a price.
He was dazed from having the connection terminated so quickly, when she was ripped out of his network. That half-lusty look on his not-face. He got off from the rush of invading her. The hacker put up his servos, vocals flat and trembling.
"Did what you asked me to. I got past her firewalls, just like you asked."
He stepped toward the 'bot. Another step. Another. Then a rush—his servos were in the hacker's neck wiring and his crushable body was against the wall and she was tearing at him, screaming her grief—
White.
For a long time, Lockdown stared at her angled image—nothing but a magenta and yellow blur--where the scuffed datapad had clattered to the floor from his numb servo. His vocals were frozen, blocked at the wires. He leaned forward and picked the pad up. Torque's sculpted mouth was heavy, expression beyond solemn, hedging on dead.
He had to tear the next excuse out of his churning fuel cells, seeing Prowl flat on a table.
"You were practically in the steam age then. Slag like that doesn't happen now."
"It does. It does and it will," she said icily. "They're barbaric, twisted ego junkies who only do it to defeat 'bots in their own processor. They don't care about the souls they hack at, they don't care."
"They do if you give 'em enough credits."
"And those are credits you don't have! Your accounts are nearly sapped and this is not a goddamn numbers game: no amount of credits is going to guarantee Prowl's safety. You are risking the one thing you hold dear in this function in a—a gamble that Prowl would never forgive you for anyways, even if he survives it! "
The terror as that willowy green 'bot started shaking on the table—as though she were being attacked at her bleeding Spark, someplace that should never be pried open—was still fresh in his banks. He was shaken by what he'd seen. It was the abstract that did it. Somewhere in him, he hated Torque for doing it, but her second-hand emotions drowned even the prickly betrayal.
"What happened?" he asked at length, deep vocals little more than a wounded vibration. It took her a moment to register what he meant. The old femme shook her head.
"He pressed her, trying to get into her banks. She fought back. We didn't know much about… I didn't know much about firewalls, that much is true. I didn't think that she would have hers sky-high and triple layered, terrified as she was of… everything. I wanted to fix her. Have her love me again, I suppose, if everything was going to be perfect afterwards."
She smiled bitterly.
"I thought it was the only option I had left. It never was. The hacker followed my orders—I didn't know what I wanted, I just wanted her fixed. So he just… did it, without considering her as a patient, without—" Shaken, she covered her optics, then pinned Lockdown with a painfully clear glare, ending sharply, "Do you truly want to risk Prowl's life over this?"
He thought about it, rumbling, wounded, and pressed his beastly white face into his mismatched servo. She watched him, simply waiting--then waiting for the right time. Her vocals were tremulous when she finally spoke, every word built on a mixture of faith and fear where it was impossible to tell which was stronger.
"Perhaps… perhaps he's right, love. What he—what we believe. As horrible as it is, maybe there is something to learn from this."
There was a long pause. Lockdown ended it with a tired wheeze of his vents, every millennia aching on his plating as he realized what she was saying.
"You want me t'settle down with him. Keep him safe."
All he had to do was look at her, because they both knew it was impossible. This was his way of life and he couldn't support another 'bot and himself. But she was desperate and so was he.
"It's difficult to think about, but… I'm saying you can use this to grow together. I'm saying he doesn't need a hack, Lockdown, he needs you."
"He won't remember it. Won't remember the hack or anything before it, and then he'll have a clean slate," he muttered, once more dark and hard. Whatever switch had been flicked inside of him, it was permanent. He looked at the old femme, optics rekindling. "He can't function like this. He can't and you know it."
It wouldn't be an option if the only issue was Prowl's pain--or Lockdown being unwilling to deal with it. It wasn't so. Prowl was literally unrecoverable. Lockdown very rarely felt things to the core of his being: this was a feeling he couldn't block out, much less argue against. For all intents and purposes, Prowl was offline.
"But he—"
"He won't survive," Lockdown roared, servo denting the data-pad with an ugly snap. "You've seen him, Torque! He's jumpy, he's scared as Pit, he's fraggin' wrecked—he needs to be able to function like he did 'cos I can't take care of him. I can't. I took him on a run last week. He locked up in the middle of a bust, nearly got both him and me off-lined and I can't afford that and neither can he!"
"It's too soon! You can't—you can't tell anything so soon—"
She was pleading now, but it didn't matter. Lockdown had reached the viciousness of truth and it came flooding out of him, even as Prowl shuddered, unwanted and whisper-like, in the background of his center. He hurt, he feared, he felt dirty and guilty and his fault and weak and it only got worse when Lockdown looked at him--
"He started doing replay. Somethin' about that place tipped him off and he was screamin' before long, kickin' at everything he could reach. Glitching. I could barely rope him in or get him outta there, and that's nothin' to what organics I was trying to cut down."
He shook his head with difficulty, reliving the pain and disappointment as that one job wrapped up: the stricken look on the kid's face when he came-to, the way he flinched from the servo on his tank and whispered about needing to be alone. He hid from their contractor's commcall as though knowing the alien would demand who the Pit that mech was who nearly cost them the job, and the bastard did.
Then Lockdown nearly lost them the bounty, with the slag he said. But Prowl felt the genuine frustration and fear mixed in with his partner's white-hot protective fierceness and it only hurt the bike further. It seemed Lockdown couldn't do anything right and he couldn't hide what was wrong. They were deadlocked and spiraling, doomed to a twisted existence with only the faintest pretense of hope.
"I know he's hurtin'. I know it, but if there's another thing I know it's that it ain't due for change. I feel it. He's gonna keep doing it and it's gonna kill him little by little. I follow what you say and I'm just gonna watch him off-line," he croaked. "It's gotta go and if I've got a means to make it go, that's it. He's gonna live. M'gonna make him live, whether he wants it or not."
"This will not disappear just because he cannot remember it. It will be hard, knowing," Torque said after an endless silence, nearly monotone. "Your loneliness—everything you went through for him, before and after--will be yours and yours alone."
"Ain't about me, Torque. It's him. Don't care how much it costs," he rasped, even though true cost is never measured in credits—something Torque brought crashing into him.
"You will never be able to Sparkbond. If you do, he will know."
He didn't say anything for a moment, feeling the truth in its echoing entirety—feeling it as he would have before, and as he did in that moment. The old musclecar pried at his spiked neck and felt something still inside of him. The only thing he could offer was the truth.
"Was never the plan."
None of this was in the plan.
Torque finally shook her head—finally accepting, in some small dark measure, the path he was determined to take. She steadied herself as much as she could, with Lockdown crumbling three galaxies away.
"I can't be… I'm in the middle of a job right now. There's another one after that and it will be at least another month before I can get to you, with travel-time. Just… stay with him. Try to talk to him. Just for a month. Is he… recharging?"
"Tryin' to," the mech said faintly, servo skimming near his burdened Spark and the invasive restlessness he felt there—but it was so faint, so hopeless that it didn't qualify as restlessness. It was just Prowl alone on his berth, waiting for him; needing the old mech even as he feared the resentment his intense reliance would incur.
"Alright. It's just a month. Try doing jobs without him. You managed before. Just--I'm begging you, don't make any decisions until I get there. Please."
He didn't acquiesce or refuse her assumption of his need of her, and his silence scared her more than any words could have. She began to shut her datapad down, pausing only at the power switch. Her ancient Spark pulsed painfully, optics focused beyond the screen, somewhere she couldn't quite see for all the memory files choking her replays.
"In the meantime, start… putting out queries."
