A/N: You might want to read 'First Impressions' to get a little sneak-peek at the history between Torque and Swindle, or you can just look at their personalities and KNOW that they hate each other by default :D

OH GOD THE ANGST IS OVER EVERYBODY DO THE MONKEY-DANCE. Thank you all for being so patient with me. Seriously. You know what's stupid? When I started the Anicon-Memory-Wankery arc, I seriously thought it was going to be, like, five chapters.

HAAAAAAAAAH.

Thanks for sticking with me, guys. Love you.


Assumptions


They were back on the tiny red and black ship, F's own carrier long out of range. Lockdown was settled in his quarters with Prowl's limp shell, simply holding the little bike in the way he needed to until Prowl could reboot to a well-constructed falsehood.

Torque had already updated the other bike's data-pad and cleared the history, then rearranged his room in small, strange ways, nicking his shuriken slightly and ruffling his eternal tree, planting sourceless hints of Prowl's supposedly continued existence. Together, the mech and the femme arranged life as it should have been, albeit with the singular weakness of the bounty hunters' gutted accounts.

"We'll build it up again. We'll do it so fast it'll make your gyros spin."

Then, quieter, to himself—dislocated from credits because he didn't seem to be talking about money anymore, but something deeper to make up for the loss of glowing blue and red almost touching.

"We'll build it up."

To top it off, the two barely had enough energon left to fuel themselves, much less the ship. They were at poverty level, stranded in a relatively primitive sector, and they had not come all this way to fall to something so simple. Lockdown had given up too much for that, but there was one thing he couldn't do for himself. That's what she was there for.

"Lockdown, old buddy? Is that—"

Even as it made her tanks churn, that's what she was there for.

The main comm-screen flashed on, the brightly lit ship on the other side of the line nearly blocked out by the bulky mech leaning so close to the lens that his olfactory sensor nearly touched the glass. Upon sight of the small femme, however, he froze down to his gears, then fell back into his seat with a dull slam.

"Oh. It's…you," Swindle grimaced, purple optics narrowing to unabashed slits. It was a level of ugly, candid dislike few had ever seen before—to match, Torque's optics were already malignant shards.

"Yes, it is. I would say it's a pleasure to see you, but I wouldn't want to waste your time."

"Heh, isn't that clever. I bet you worked for a millennia or two on that one, did you? Only expected, running on sixteen bytes…" Swindle muttered to himself as he nicked at his facial plating, then flashed the three-wheeler a shining grin that was nothing but a modified snarl. "Did you call for a reason, sir? Because I'm a busy mech and chatting with obsolete models isn't exactly on my to-do catalog."

"We found Prowl."

"Really? Well isn't that just swell?" the arms-dealer exclaimed, leaning back and hoisting his massive pedes up on his terminal. He gestured breezily, optics elsewhere. "Glad to hear everything's back to rights. Tell him to call me if he needs a gun or two, sounds like he needs to step up on his personal protection—"

"How long did you know?" she demanded, vocals reduced to a vicious whisper. "I just want to know."

"That's classified," he said and snapped his digits, using that plastic voice that nonetheless had a creak to it: that of plastic slapped or stung. Torque's dentals clacked together.

"So that's all the responsibility you're going to take."

"My only responsibility is for my merchandise, little biddy. Anything else is clearly not featured in the contract, and anything off the contract isn't my problem."

"You could have told Lockdown anytime. You could have saved him."

Evidently it hadn't all been as thoughtless a move for the arms-dealer as Torque assumed: Swindle suddenly straightened like he'd had a wire yanked, pedes hitting the floor with a boom, optics alight.

"I could have saved him—and at what cost? Do you know even know what kind of client confidentiality I broke to even give the old 'bot that? It was practically self-detonation, what I did for him, and you all seem to be forgetting: I didn't steal that damned Autobot! That doesn't--I didn't do a thing! I didn't do anything, I just did—my--job," he snarled, slamming his servo down on his terminal.

"You're quite right, Swindle. You didn't do a thing," Torque said after a moment, facial plating almost blank. "You could have helped him, but you didn't."

Swindle simply fumed, hating the high and holy femme and her crucifying optics with all of his being, and tucked his stinging servo back out of sight: his left servo, patched sloppily with crinkled iron plates from where a potential client had slammed his oil-can down so hard it severed the neural network, just to say he wasn't interested. Especially with Megatron out of commission, the income hole Lockdown left couldn't be easily filled. The arms-dealer had been reduced to… trolling.

The state of his servo explained well enough how it was going.

"There actually is a reason I called, despite my obvious high regard for you and your warm Spark," the femme continued coldly. "Lockdown is down to his last credit. He needs energon."

"I don't remember a time when old LD couldn't speak for himself," Swindle grit out, baring his dentals in another poisonous chrome grin. A new energy sizzled in him at the mention of his old business partner—an energy that would not go to waste in chasing the old antique away. "I haven't seen the big guy in too long! Be a good little drone and get him on the line for me, and we can discuss it."

"He asked me not to call you. Specifically."

Functionally, it was truth.

There was a long, long, long pause between the two 'bots, growing longer still as Swindle reached to rub at his facial plating and realized how very, very deep this hurt was. But part of him still didn't understand, because they got the damn bike back, didn't they? They were back to the status quo, their connection commercially viable once more, and he had even helped—but he grasped at something not forthcoming to his compartmentalized processor.

Mainly, the reason callous, objective, professional Lockdown went to such lengths to avoid speaking with him.

"I have a milli-case in the back," Swindle muttered at length. His vocals were strangely hazy, like he didn't quite know what he was doing.

"A kilo-case." She glared stonily at him when the young arms-dealer looked up at her, optics startled wide. "I know you have it."

"Fine, a kilo-case," he snapped, turning and bending to manipulate screens and keys at his control station. "I'll… subspace it."

She waited for him to set it up, then frigidly exchanged coordinates with him. Once the glowing stack of fuel popped into existence, tied by wiring and landing with a rattling boom on Moot's scuffed floor, the arms-dealer suddenly stilled, hunching slightly. Optics abnormally dim, Swindle laced his digits together nervously and murmured into them:

"Tell him it's from me."

Torque looked him for a klik, as though summing up his very existence with the image before her, then shut down the comm-link.

"No."


It was time.

Half a megacycle before Prowl's scheduled reboot, Lockdown laid him out on his own berth, servos at his sides, and replaced each gold-lined piece of his partner with steady servos. All of the grey-brown filth from the dark hall was gone, wiped away months ago by those same servos. The exotic armor fleshed the bike out, mod by shining mod, into the 'bot Lockdown had fought for. Hunched by the berth-side, he waited.

It happened at the exact nanoklik the hacker had promised. Lockdown's old Spark nearly knotted at the rising hum of a reboot: the electric tide brought his tiny partner back to life with a tiny spasm and a flicker of aqua. Prowl stared at the low ceiling, refreshing his hidden optics blearily, then took a shuddering intake and looked over at the mech he would have never forgiven, had he known.

There was still the most terrifying of chances that the look would be blank, too blank, and speak of some irreversible butchering of his vital programming—but the small blipping noises the bike emitted, hue of his visor, the thin line of his mouth… all of it was intelligent, textured, and somehow beautifully naïve. Unhurt. Untouched.

It had worked.

"Lockdown?"

Hardly believing who was in front of him, in all his parts and pieces, (that dark year seemed to condense and hide somewhere in his piping, evil and cold) Lockdown refreshed his vocals.

"You okay, kid?"

"What… happened?" Prowl asked softly, sitting up. The heavy motion seemed to jumpstart his finer processes, sending a waterfall of information into his buzzy processor. He winced as all the pieces came rushing back and didn't quite fit: data, chronometers… it didn't match, even if it was a relatively small gap. Just to check (just to touch), Lockdown reached out and took hold of his glossy black and gold helm, scanning his visor and his audios for any 'damage'.

"You got caught in an EMP blast from some dumb fragger when we were fighting—he snagged my piece and overloaded it. Looked pretty huge," he muttered. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"I… I remember…" Prowl shook his head, visor denting delicately. "It's quite unclear, but I remember being on Tellum."

"Primus. You got… 'bout two stellar-cycles knocked out of you."

His tone was gruff, as though the bike was lucky it wasn't more. Prowl's expression alone—tight and distraught—said he wasn't of the same opinion.

"Two stellar-cycles?" he demanded, servo immediately going to his chassis, as though feeling for the tear in his snow-white memory core. Two stellar-cycles. Three-hundred and sixty-five solar-cycles. Eight-thousand seven-hundred and sixty megacycles. Gone. His processor raced, defining the gap and trying to close it. "Is there… any way to regain the data? File-recovery? It cannot be gone. We must have it backed up on Moot--"

"You're as updated as can be, kid. You'll just have to deal."

"Did anything of importance happen?" Prowl asked mildly after a long, long pause. He was grounded by Lockdown's hard vocals (and his partner's flinty expectations) despite the deep, sincere flinch of regret at losing a part of himself. But, he tried to tell himself, it was only a stellar-cycle or two. Less than a hundredth of his current life-span; a thousandth of all that was to come.

Logic didn't stop the sadness. Some of his function, so much more than binary recordings and stored impulses, was lost to the dark space void as if it—as if he—had never existed in the first place.

"Nothin' we can't do again," Lockdown rasped with a strangely tight smirk, patting the bike's thigh-plating. Prowl did the Prowl-equivalent of rolling his optics—a disapproving and singularly pompous twist of his mouth--then looked beyond Lockdown, where Torque was waiting by the wall, far enough away to be called respectful. Her expression was soft and sad for the spiritual loss she had just seen him cope with—one she understood all too well. At the sight of her, however, his long face suddenly went slack, then stiffened up.

"Hello, darling," she said gently.

"You lied."

"Wh—ah, what?"

The tense tone in his vocals, still slightly reedy, made both the older bounty hunters' substructures tighten fiercely. All optics in the room fixed on him, onlookers already fearing the worst in their ragged Sparks, Prowl raised a servo and pointed at the old femme.

"Something did happen. Something tragic. Torque," he said with lethal slowness, visor wide. "What were you thinking?"

It was like he had struck her. She froze, staring down, first at her pedes, then at her blank chassis—did she forget something, what did she forget that had given it all away—aching from the width and breadth of her disorientation and what was at stake. Then she realized she had forgotten something: the hideous bars of pink, blue and white marring her magenta plating. This was technically the first time he'd seen the racing stripes.

It hit her so hard she had to bend over, laughing so hard she nearly stalled.

"I'm not quite sure myself. Lethal lapse of judgment in my old age," she chuckled tearfully, then stepped forward and hugged the little bike to her chest-plating, hardly resisting the urge to kiss his audio unit. "I'm so glad you're okay."

"It is pleasant to return, even if you are not aware of where you have been," Prowl offered sagely, smiling at Lockdown over her shoulder-plating—optics only for his partner. Once the old femme disentangled herself, Prowl straightened and turned to Lockdown, expression incredibly un-concerned.

"So… everything else is fine?"

"Not everythin'," Lockdown said heavily, beastly head bowing slightly as though ducking an unpleasant truth. Torque immediately put up her blocky servos, chuckling weakly and edging towards the airlock. She took off with little more than a wave and good-wishes, saying only that she would leave the two hunters to discuss their financial issues by their lonesome. They saw her to the bridge, Lockdown moving alarmingly slow. She was out the airlock after promising to drop the two a line, leaving the bike and his partner alone in the bridge.

"Well?"

Lockdown bought himself time by stomping heavily to his navigator's chair and easing his broken body into it. He was obviously picking his words carefully, and that alone made Prowl's visor dent.

"We, uh… ain't so well-off."

"That sounds like a euphemism," Prowl said warily.

"A what?" Lockdown growled, then didn't wait for an answer, settling instead for a blunt, painful, "We got about a grand left."

"In your account?"

"Between us."

"What?" Prowl exclaimed, visor flashing in shock. "Just… one-thousand credits?"

"We got enough to pay our way to the next job. We'll move from there." Lockdown said, as though focusing on said job would keep him from brooding over their empty accounts. When Prowl spoke again, his vocals were faint.

"What… happened?"

"Bad investment. Finally went in with one'a Swindle's bigger schemes. I was low. Y'loaned me all'a what you had. Bastard stole it and took off." Lockdown shook his head wearily, then finished darkly, "F'I could get my hook into that mech, he'd beg to be deactivated."

Prowl's optics widened. He had never trusted the hummer, for all of his apparent goodwill towards Lockdown. Indeed, this seemed like the foul move the bike had been expecting for decades, but he had never expected his shrewd partner to make it so easy for the slimy arms-dealer, nor on such a huge scale.

"But… all of it? That was decades worth of savings," Prowl began weakly, more baffled than upset. He was pricked at the idea of all that money disappearing, for the simple waste of it, but the fact remained that he had never cared much for money. It just didn't feel right. It seemed… out-of-character for Lockdown to actually borrow a sum from him. Prowl shook his helm, searching for the right questions to ask.

"What sort of pay-off could possibly justify an investment so rash? Furthermore, how could you have believed—"

"I'll pay you back. Y'know I'm good for it."

Prowl opened his mouth again, and, knowing anger was his best defense, Lockdown raised his mutilated vocals and slammed his fist on his arm-rest, glaring at the wall.

"Cork your fraggin' vocalizer, I don't need t'be told what I did! I'll fix it, damnit!"

Unnoticed amongst the gnarled clench of his innards, his engine roared right along with him, unfortunately producing a wholly unnerving and tinny rattle.

Prowl froze next to him, audio units suddenly fully alert, then stepped forward and forcibly shoved the musclecar's mammoth chair around, both it and his partner squeaking tensely at the hinges when Lockdown raised his servos--almost as though fending off a blow from a very enraged partner who wasn't going to take his excuses as to why his bank account was empty. Prowl knocked his arms aside and pressed both servos to the musclecar's chamber plating, then groped lower, elegant helm cocked to the side in a hard concentration. When he looked up into Lockdown's angry and baffled facial plating, his visor was a dangerous shade of teal.

"What was that?" he asked icily. Lockdown nearly sputtered, caught between shoving the smaller mech away and taking advantage of what looked like a change of subject.

"What's what?"

"That rattle." When Lockdown growled instinctively, his insides joined in, making Prowl's visor widen with a stunned and offended blip. "Sweet Spark, what have you done to yourself?"

Lockdown realized he was talking about the uncomfortable clanks and grinding noises coming from his chassis. They had been around for months, so long that he'd learned to put up with them and the squeezed, ugly aching they caused him. There were bigger things to worry about, like Prowl. Not liking this change of pace, even if it did offer him an escape from lying, the bounty hunter figured he'd get the whole thing done with right there, while Prowl was pissed.

"We're talkin' money, right now," he growled doggedly. "You can—"

"And in accordance to your stupidity, our financial situation is not one that can be resolved quickly," Prowl cut him off with steely vocals, searching out one last section of his crusty chest-plating before turning on his gold-rimmed heel and stalking from the bridge, gait furious. "It can wait. The state of your mechanics, should you be opposed to the idea of going into severe mechanical arrest in the next few megacycles, cannot. You will be in my quarters in twenty cycles."

"But—"

"Twenty cycles or I claim every credit we earn until your debt to me is paid."

The older mech was denied the last word again, this time by the standoffish snap of a sliding door. He waited a moment before bowing slightly and pressing his black-marked face into his servo. Somehow, he knew Prowl wouldn't bring up the issue of the loan again. So long as they had energon to fuel themselves and travel to the location of their next assignment, he was content.

Somehow, that made him feel more ill than relieved.


Twenty cycles later, as per the ninja's orders, he was flat on the damnably narrow berth with Prowl perched atop him.

It would have been a temptation the old musclecar couldn't resist, if he wasn't distracted by the healing havoc the tiny mech was wreaking on him: Prowl was deep in abusing him with rattling, vengeful circuit-su vibrations that made things snap and pop back into place far more violently than Lockdown ever remembered. If that wasn't bad enough, Prowl also alternated between lecturing him about taking care of his already destroyed body and frigid silences intended to punish the larger mech, slapping his big servos away whenever Lockdown attempted to touch the small, genuinely pissed-off bike, even if it was to shift Prowl off of a plate he just realized was quite askew and sore.

More often than once, long face crumpled with edgy concern, the ninjabot murmured to himself how he had let this happen over that two-stellar-cycle gap as he probed all over his partner's creaking piecemeal body, attuning himself to the myriad of fractures and dislocations plaguing Lockdown's complex insides.

Lockdown told him they'd been busy. There had been no time for this stuff. Prowl took the excuse with something close to a sneer, silently dumping all of the ill-maintenance blame on Lockdown and his stubborn nature, and readjusted the other mech's socket pins violently enough to make Lockdown dig his digits into the berth.

"Ow! Y'little glitch!"

"Do you wish to detach your primary modifications and your servos before I begin on your abdominal cavity? Simply to make your outside mirror your inside, of course."

"Shut up."

Feeling more than a little sick, the bounty hunter sat back and let him do it, unaware until that moment of the crunching disservice he had done to his mechanics over the last stellar-cycle. Combining the absence of Prowl's regular circuit-su alignments with the way he'd neglected himself when searching for his partner… It made for a Pit of a readjustment. He winced and hissed where appropriate and only jerked upwards when Prowl bent and popped his main hood, peering into his dark insides. Lockdown growled and snapped his top down so fast it almost caught his partner's servos.

"Get your digits outta there!"

"I was simply checking if you still had pins in your engine," Prowl said as nastily as he could, then got back to work. He was not the type to let his petty yet satisfying revenge get in the way of his work, unlike Lockdown. He could multi-task.

Within half a megacycle, most of the hard stuff was done; the process softened into warm, fleshy vibrations that always put the large mech into hard stasis, washing up and down his sore frame in alignment with Prowl's silky servos. But once the pain was gone, there was nothing to distract him from the bike atop him, still all solemn ninja-business as he finished up the delicate processes, and that was a problem for a mech who had to pretend that he hadn't just regained the most precious thing in his function.

Processor fuzzy, Lockdown's big servos snuck up Prowl's slender legs; the bike knocked them away with a stern look. He hadn't so much as assumed the proper position again before his partner was sliding his servos along the sides of his pedes, grip both clumsy and intense. He propped Prowl closer to him, until he was nearly perched on his chamber plating, and the bike's visor narrowed, tiny engine giving a disapproving whine.

"I cannot complete the readjustment if you insist on mech-handling me, Lockdown," he said testily, using the other's name as a rare weapon. "And I am not at all averse to exiting this moment and letting you experience the effects of a half-completed alignment, which I promise is quite unpleasant."

"Cool your jets, kid," Lockdown growled blurrily, head lolling back. "M'just…"

There was something witty to say, but Lockdown couldn't manage it. Prowl was above him, Spark strong in his chamber, whole and healed; the mere weight of him, complex and safe, was enough to make Lockdown's center sore for more of him. The old mech refreshed his vocals and simply continued touching his partner's cream plating in an absorbed manner, almost piteous in its intensity, which didn't escape Prowl's notice any more than the sudden change in tone did. The little bike's visor dented cautiously, anger subdued.

"Lockdown," he said quietly, catching the other's attention far too quickly—even if it was just a flicker of his optics, it wasn't normal. The vibrations had loosened the bounty hunter's common sense and his imperative need to maintain the charade. The sound of his own name, in those cool vocals, was still too sweet to the old mech. "Did something happen?"

"When?" he asked dully, then shook his head like he realized what the other mech meant. He had at least that much wit about him. "No."

"You're certain?"

"Few things," Lockdown murmured after a long pause.

"Such as?"

Prowl's servos were on his chest-plating, but they weren't moving. The subsonic hum had retreated into a sleepy undercurrent: he wasn't going to continue until he was given an explanation. Lockdown let out a deep rumble that hid his hesitation, then forced himself to say it steadily and offhandedly, dull as possible. Like everything was fine.

"We were on a planet. Some… jungle scrap heap."

"Mission?"

"Pleasure. You… wanted t'go."

"And you accompanied me?" Prowl arched a ridge, his visor lighting his thin smile velvet teal in the half-dark room. "I cannot imagine how I convinced you to."

Lockdown nodded. He remembered the comm-call argument, so flinty and natural, unknowing of what would rip them apart. The annoyance—the well-learned stubbornness, the perfect counterweight--in Prowl's far-away vocals now seemed like something to treasure.

"We were there for a few megacycles. Messin' around. Then these… fraggers came out and tried to take off with you."

"Take me?"

Naïve and light—that was the way he asked it, sharp visor quirking in confusion, because he'd never been strapped to a table until blood-red rust spread over his carpal joints, scream long-faded into a hiss of static.

"Pit if I know. Just… had a go at you. Had an EMP generator. Guess they caught you at a corner or somethin'." He refreshed his vocals, something crunching inside of his echoing chassis. "Y'called for me."

"It must have been serious, if I called," Prowl said uncertainly after a long moment. "What happened?"

"Scrapped em. Scrapped 'em all."

His vocals were nothing but a croak, like that of a chainsaw ripping through plating.

"And then?" Prowl asked softly, stilled on a mechanical level by the words and the tone and the tension he felt underneath him. Lockdown shook his head.

"Nothin'. We got back on the ship and just… kept on goin'."

"Lockdown?" he whispered.

There was no answer, verbal or physical. A prickly foreboding rose in his petite chassis at the untold emotions radiating from the motionless mech's center. His cream digits knit over Lockdown's chamber. He wanted desperately to share his anguish or simply to know what was twisting his beastly face, concern only outpaced by his confusion. Then suddenly, Lockdown woke.

"There's your story. Like I said, you didn't miss much. Everythin's fine. Now quit askin' questions and get on with it, I'm gettin' a kink in my struts from your damn berth."

He pushed the bike's tender servos off of his front, then turned his white head to the side, mechanics settling with a wheeze, and stayed there. After a second of hesitation, Prowl complied wordlessly.

Another round of soothing vibrations and the old mech was dead weight on the undersized berth, offline optics darker than Prowl had ever remembered. The decision to join him in recharge was an easy one: Prowl felt oddly exhausted after his awakening and the readjustment, and, even more oddly, in need of physical touch. Besides that, Lockdown's servos had locked around his waist before he lost power, black-marked facial-plating slack, dented with a combination of extreme sadness and a relief too haggard to offer solace.

Struck by the expression, Prowl simply looked as he had neglected to do for decades, no longer taking the other's fearsome but solid appearance for granted. Combined with the new scuffs on his loosely-held plating, the bounty-hunter looked so very…old. Old as one could never be when he had nothing in function to treasure and protect--and old as he could only be when he realized just how empty that function was without the mech he loved above all else.

An unspeakable unrest settling in his chassis, as though something deep had been disturbed within him, Prowl curled next to his partner and began to shut down with a quiet electronic tone. Lockdown was hard and heavy, Spark sizzling softly—comforting as nothing else could be. No matter what he lost or gained in the process of his function, Prowl's world was here.

The little bike pressed himself underneath the big mech's arm, visual feed losing resolution, and barely felt his Spark flicker towards the older mech's in a sudden, near-desperate twinge before he slipped away.