"Negotiable Affection" is actually from Terry Pratchett's Discworld, and is therein a street in Ankh-Morpork inhabited by, ah, seamstresses, whose business is never sew-sew.
The "tek" is a term I borrowed from, stole off, or was inspired by, depending, Peacewish's "These Games We Play." Whenever a new chapter of that fic is posted, the noise you hear is my squeal of glee.
Prowl was running in the red when he found an unclaimed energon well on a little-used road fifty tek east of Iacon.. He drank deeply for the first time in three decaorn.
Fifty tek further, on a flat plain that gave sudden rise to Cybertron's energetic angular mountains, he found a cave to park in and sleep. He pulled in facing forward to see what or who else was there, found nothing, and pulled out again to back in.
He fell asleep to the gentle sound of the acid rain falling fifty feet away, at the cave's mouth.
Setting sunshine in Prowl's optics woke him.
He returned to the energon well to refresh himself, and went in the direction of Iacon; his chronometer said he'd slept away a full orn. The fighting, according to the news reports, continued near the city, but life within was so far undisrupted.
Somewhere in the first fifty tek of his ninety-five tek journey, his battle computer completed its computations.
The Autobots had already lost the war, it told him. Best to become a Decepticon. Winners lived, and losers died.
The ethical component was infiltrated by one or two neural structures, and leaped to them as a lover. Even with the thumb of destiny on the scales of right and wrong, he didn't want to become a Decepticon.
Still, it was the logical decision, and Prowl was, saw himself as, a logical mech.
DAY ONE
Outside Iacon, it was relatively easy to find the Decepticons. They had a large, a very large, bivouac set up to one side of the main city gates, those facing east. What had to be the camp followers - the high-grade vendors, the mecha and femme of Negotiable Affection, the specialized armorers - were following the camp in a comet's-tail arrangement: those with the money to bribe the camp guards closest to the gate, the poorer vendors and their poorer goods farther away. The Negotiably Affectionate held the outermost areas; those most willing to resort to violence, or who had protectors, were closest to the bivouac. The less desirable, those of the aging who had not started their own houses, and the unpimped were relegated to the edges.
Strung through the whole thing like odd beads in a necklace were the mid- and high-grade sellers. Most didn't bother with places to drink what they sold, and most purchasers imbibed while rambling. Prowl found shelter in the lee of a large tent, and got out of traffic flow while he drank a cube or two of the six of mid-grade he'd bought. The others he subspaced.
When he was finished, he joined the flow of mecha through the space.
"Punch daggers! Got some nice punch daggers!" yowled a small mech, whose stall bore the name "Swindle's Goodes." He had three or four of them out on velvet in front of him.
"May I?" Prowl said, picking one up.
"Sure, mech," said Swindle, if this was he. "Never ask a customer t'buy unseen. Got a board over there if y'wanna test its balance, though it ain't got no flight characteristics."
Prowl nodded, threw it anyway. It flew true for a punch-dagger, and the vendor retrieved it for him.
"You got the mod for this, mech?" Swindle said, taking his credits.
"No. I'll need the glove too."
Swindle, beaming, laid several out. The gloves all had the Decepticon icon on the back.
Prowl looked from that to the vendor. "Got any unmarked ones?" he said.
"No, mech, this's all I got."
"Swiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnndle!" bellowed a tall strong mech, striding through the crowd.
"Tell you what, mech," Swindle said, at high speed, subspacing daggers, sign, cash box, board, and merchandise, "you got yourself a glove gratis. G'luck with it, g'bye." The small vendor vanished at speed into the crowd.
Returning to the main area, Prowl looked at a boiling mass of civilians just inside the gates of Iacon. While he watched, a group broke out into the bivouac, and were repulsed into the city by the guards. One Iaconian fell, and did not get up again; he was picked up by some guards, and taken away. A femme broke through and ran after him, arm outstretched, crying, but was beaten to the ground and taken in a different direction.
Prowl wondered if this was what the gates of Praxus had looked like before it fell. He would never know now.
He stayed out of the reach of being defined as "dangerous" for an orn, listening to the sentries talk, trying to get a servo on the culture. Just hanging around.
The next morning, he let the shift change happen before he approached the new sentry.
He did this carefully, palms out, servos up. "Hello," he said in his calmest tone.
The sentry looked him up and down, his arm cannons charging. "Whadda you want?"
Prowl took a deep breath. "I want to join up," he said.
"Yeah?" the sentry snarled. "We ain't takin' just anymech, mech. What kinda skills you got?"
"Armed and unarmed combat, and a battle computer."
The sentry leered. (And smelled bad, Prowl realized. Too long between trips to the washrack. He took a step back.) "So you want me to pass you on up to my corp'ral, right? Gonna cost ya, mech."
Prowl took out a relatively large credit slip, and a cube of the mid-grade he had bought. Holding them too far apart to be grabbed simultaneously, he said, "Which one's your pleasure?"
The sentry debated, then, as Prowl had hoped he might, took the mid-grade.
FORTY BREEM AND TWO MORE BRIBES LATER
Prowl was shown into a large black tent, containing a large black mech.
Megatron looked up from whatever it was he was doing, and nodded to another large mech, this one mostly silver, who rose from his own desk and went to stand behind Megatron. This mech had something like a drawer in the center of his chest. Prowl had not seen that configuration before.
A buzzing began in his ears. A fine time to have the mid-grade finally kick in, he thought. He should have had some plain energon first.
"Good orn," the Lord High Protector said. "Designation Prowl?"
"Yes sir."
"Why are you thinking of joining us?"
"You have the upper hand, sir. It's more likely than not that you will win the war."
"Mm. You have no personal loyalty to me?"
"I have never met you before, sir."
"Mmm." The mech looked at him for a long, long moment, and Prowl found himself hoping that the Autobot camp wasn't too far away. "What's your history, Prowl? Where are you from?"
"Praxus, sir. I've been an Enforcer there my entire working life."
The mecha both looked at him for a long, long moment, and the buzz in his ears increased until Megatron said, "Why didn't you surrender when I broadcast my offer to all Praxian Enforcers?"
"I was on duty at the time, sir. I was not free to do so."
The buzz died back a little. The two mecha exchanged glances, and it was quite obvious that they were comming one another. Then Megatron said, "And you have a battle computer."
"Yes, sir. The upgrade is fairly recent, about six decavorn old."
"Who did the work?"
"It was performed at Checkup's clinic. I believe the surgeon's name was Hook."
There was a moment's very busy silence. Then Megatron said, "And you've fully integrated it?"
"So far as I am aware, sir. I've had no problems with it."
The buzz died. Megatron said, "Welcome to the ranks, Prowl. If you'll wait outside my tent, I'll have someone come for you, and they'll start you on the process of becoming a Decepticon."
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
When the tent flap dropped behind him, Soundwave said, "I: have commed med bay. Hook: will choose a subordinate: to install the remote offline switch."
"A little strange that he didn't lie to us during the interview."
"Even stranger: he does not know: who I am: or what I do."
"Is that so?" said Megatron, looking directly at Soundwave, but obviously a million tek away. "Well, our little Enforcer can prove himself on the battlefield first. If he's willing to kill for me, and willing to tell me the truth no matter the cost to himself, we'll see what use we can put that battle computer to."
"A: good plan," Soundwave monotonized. Megatron went back to work at his desk, and Soundwave, after discreetly checking that this was not a trap, did the same.
THE NEXT ORN
Prowl stood to attention in front of his new sergeant's odiferous tent. Too many nights' worth of exhaust had accumulated in it.
The punch bit twice, and the Decepticon insignia was part of his armor. Prowl didn't wince, exactly; he screwed up his faceplates and then relaxed them.
"Congratulations, yer a 'con," said Braceweight, his new commander, and thumped him on the arm.
"Sir, thank you, sir."
"C'mon, we'll get ya yer bunk." Braceweight's gait might have been graceful, years ago, before he got beaten to slag and badly repaired too many times; now it was a sort of rolling lurch. As they went down crooked lines of patched, worn tents, he glanced at Prowl, said, "Most o' these're shared by two mecha. You wanna berth alone, you gotta make it worth my while."
Prowl sighed, and dug his last cube of mid-grade out of subspace.
FORTY BREEM LATER
"Nah, you done good," said Braceweight. "You're th' only one I had assigned ta me went straight through all th' levels o' trainin' in a single day. You might be ready to go with us when we get inta Iacon." He rubbed his scarred knuckles, one of which had recently come into violent contact with Prowl's cheekplate. Prowl, however, had thrown Braceweight with an Enforcer's trick, and pinned him.
"Sir," Prowl said, on the basis that this was always the correct thing to say.
The sparring area was simply a ring enclosed by ropes strung to posts. To get in, you pushed one rope down and the one above it up. The ground had been padded only lightly, and for that reason, both Prowl and Braceweight wore helmets, knee- and -elbow protectors, and spark shields.
Prowl had seen no reason to hold back. Neither had Braceweight, who said in his rotor-mixer-filled-with-small-rocks voice, "So yer last test is to take a drone out. Not down: out. You get th' difference? You ready?"
"Sir, yes sir." Prowl climbed into the ring. He had once shot and killed a mech on duty; he could do this.
He wasn't prepared, when the drone climbed into the ring with the slightly unsteady gait they all had, to face one painted in Escalade's colors.
"Clade?" he said, unbelieving, but that was Clade's unique diagonal chest stripe with the ball at one end of it.
There was no intelligence in the optics, and their light was very dim. Prowl knew it was possible to strip personality components out of the processor, but why? What twisted purpose could that serve?
"Friend o' yours?" drawled Braceweight. "If it was, then give it th' cleanest death you can, recruit. There ain't nothin' left in their processors after Hook gets done with 'em."
Hook. Hook. The one who had done his own surgery. Hook.
Prowl stood paralyzed as the drone lumbered toward him, no recognition of any kind at all left in Clade's optics. Prowl knew Clade did not recognize him as a sparklinghood friend, could not be sure Clade recognized him as another mech.
His friend was not in that processor any longer. He drew the blade he had been assigned, and moved forward.
When it was over, when the thing had stopped twitching and the spew of energon had dwindled to a trickle, then stopped entirely, Braceweight approached. He was about to throw an arm around the new recruit's shoulders when he saw the mech's optics, stopped well short of him, and said very carefully, "Prowl? You done good. Straight through the spark casin', so it din't – "
"He. Not it. He." Prowl's sword, dripping energon, was still out, point quivering, although he stood over the body with his head bowed.
"Sorry, sorry," Braceweight said hastily, "he din't suffer at all." He paused, knowing he was dealing with an armed bomb; it sometimes took some of them this way. A few breem later it seemed safe to say softly, "Come on, let's get the rest of your supplies, an' then you have th' afternoon off. My advice is ta have some high-grade."
Prowl banked the fire Braceweight had seen in his optics, sheathed his sword, and said only, "Thank you, sir."
Banked the fire, didn't extinguish it. Braceweight was grateful that he had put the new recruit into the single berth farthest from his own.
OPTIMUS PRIME'S COLUMN, THIRTEEN TEK FROM IACON
Optimus had learned to be less than surprised when Oversight sent Jazz to report directly to him. The mech swung down from a large flat rock about twenty feet over their heads, and Ironhide gave him a servo on the way down.
They had left the roads two joor ago. The rough country around Iacon meant that they were less marching than hiking; they did not expect to make Iacon before sunfall.
The spy bounced twice on his pedes on landing (Didn't quite stick that one!) and said, "Prime, report from Iacon on the fate of the Enforcers and their families."
Primus. Do I really want to know? But what Optimus said aloud was, "Report, please."
"It's only th' femmes an' th' sparklin's who were smelted. All th' adolescent and adult mecha were decorticated, an' are bein' used as drones." Jazz shuddered.
Optimus sighed, but did not break pace. "Thank you, Jazz," he said.
Ironhide waited until the young spy had returned to Oversight, and said to Prime, "It just keeps gettin' worse an' worse, don't it?"
Prime ran a servo over his faceplates. "Yes. Yes, it does."
THE NEXT ORN
Prowl got off a shot and didn't stay around to see if it hit, which was a good thing as return fire zinged stone chips off the building whose corner he'd taken shelter behind.
Iacon in its death throes was an unholy mix of flames on the top stories of every sizeable building from Seeker strikes, and hand-to-hand fighting in the streets. The building in whose lee he was currently sheltering was a raging inferno on its top floors, and Prowl was beginning to feel the heat on his armor.
Since the rising of the sun this morning, he had found himself aiming for joints between the armor plates rather than spark casings: to wound, not to kill.
He'd seen no civilians at all so far. Had they been evacuated? If so, good.
Braceweight commed his squad, ::See th' buildin' up ahead with th' square top? S' our next objective. In yer own time, fellas.::
There were no femmes in Megatron's army.
Prowl squatted and snapped off a shot. Return fire came at about the height of his own spark casing, but now he had the shooter's location. He pulled a stun grenade out of his subspace, pulled the pin, overhanded it right next to the shooter, and scrambled after the rest of his squad without waiting to see its effects.
His battle computer, for some reason, applauded the choice of stun rather than frag grenade. Surely that wasn't logical, Prowl thought, running to the next cover. But then another shot took chips off the facade next to him, just below the large brass sign on one polished stone tower that said "Pediatrics," and, dodging inside the ground floor area, he forgot about logic in favor of locating the next shooter.
TWENTY BREEM LATER
::Oversight? I got civilians here, with sparklin's.::
::Roger that, Jazz. Stay put. On our way.::
The medical college in Iacon had taken Seeker fire and some of the larger buildings were aflame. The coneheads made a second run with pyrogenics that melted and dripped flame down into the basement of a building, whereupon it was toast.
The pediatrics ward building was smaller than those which had been hit, and still intact. Jazz had found a parent and her two sparklings in a broom closet there, the sparklings clinging to their carrier and screaming, the femme with a light in her eyes that made Jazz extremely unwilling to move quickly around her.
"Come on," he said gently, holding out his hand. "We need ta get you outta here."
The Autobots, at cost to themselves, were keeping a passage open to the south gate of Iacon. The city had neither northern nor western gates, sitting as it did in the encircling arm of a mountain; the Decepticons, figuring out that the 'bots were getting civilians out, had targeted the southern end of the city mercilessly. Many of the sprawled frames on the pavement here had no sigil at all, not of the 'bots, not of the 'cons, and not of the medical college. Everyday Cybertronians, going about a life that had ended in the middle of a war.
Jazz took the older sparkling, yellow and black, a Praxian doorwing model as all three of them were, and parked him astride one hip, using the other hand to assist the femme.
"There, there," he said to the children, or their mother, or all three at once. "Come on, we'll get out of here. There are people waitin' to get you outta the city."
"I ... don't know what we'll do after that," the femme said. "Our home, my job, was here."
"What didja do?" Jazz actually didn't care, but talking about her former life might keep the femme on this side of sanity.
"I was a medical secretary at the college," she answered. "My bonded is a doctor there. We came to have lunch with him."
"We're gettin' the college personnel out too," he said, praying it was true. "Let's go down this staircase instead'a tryin' an elevator. They stop, you're stuck."
"Jazz!" boomed a vocalizer the saboteur knew all too well. "You in here?"
"Yeah, 'Hide, comin' down the stairs."
"Best get a move on! Th' coneheads are comin' back with buildin' killers."
They picked up the pace. They were within two floors of the ground when the building shuddered to heavy hits, three at once all on the same side, and came down around them.
FIVE BREEM LATER
Prowl came to under a heavy beam, in the rubble of the last Medical College building he had passed.
When his processor cleared enough to assess his situation, he found the beam to be the least of his worries. Rebar had punctured his shoulder, fortunately missing the large energon line that serviced his left arm, but shattering his shoulder-strut on its way through and pinning him to the ground. His rifle had been crushed by the beam, which cleared him by a micro-tek or two. He could respire, but he couldn't take a deep inspiration: the beam compressed his chest very slightly, but hadn't broken any ventilation struts.
Someone shouted a name. He made the loudest noise he could in response.
A sparkling was crying nearby.
He must be delirious. Who would let a sparkling out in the middle of a war zone?
The beam shifted, the rebar was withdrawn, and there was a mighty roar around him as more dust and more debris rained down. The beam shifted again, more slightly this time; the sparkling screamed at the top of his or her lungs, and a shock ran right through the Praxian. Prowl began to wriggle himself free; he couldn't leave a sparkling unattended in this mess ...
He couldn't use the arm to support himself, either. He did a sort of three-point crawl toward the sparkling, never in a straight line, skirting debris, homing in through his audials. Thick dust clouded the air, and Prowl could barely see his servo in front of his faceplates.
When he found the little one, a small graceful mech, Autobot sigil, lay moaning, half-conscious, curled around the wailing sparkling. A large cube of building material lay touching one arm. The sparkling was frightened but seemed unhurt; obviously, the Autobot had been protecting the child. Beyond them, a femme and another sparkling lay dead in the ruins, energon in a wide pool around them.
A large black mech, Autobot sigil again, staggered upright, and came toward them. Prowl heard his cannons charge, and said, "There's a sparkling here, and I'm in bad shape. I'm no threat to you."
"Put yer servos up!"
"I can only raise one," Prowl said, and did.
The other swiftly disarmed him, finding even the punch dagger. Prowl, on his knees and one hand, kept still and let him; given his level of damage, the battle computer said, that was the best strategy. He wasn't quite prepared for the other to push him down, pin him, and disconnect his comms, but ... it didn't seem to matter.
The sparkling crawled over to Prowl just after the mech had stasis-cuffed his uninjured wrist to the other ankle and gone to his comrade, and curled up in his lap, which startled the Praxian considerably. But then, he was the same basic model as the sparkling, who needed comfort more than anything, and whatever else Prowl was, a coldsparked mech was not it. He couldn't hold on to the kid like that, so he put his helm down onto the sparkling's, and hummed a nursery song. The child began to quiet.
The other mech woke up, and there was a quiet conversation between the two Autobots. The larger black mech crawled back to Prowl.
"You gimme yer word you won't try to escape?"
"I give you my parole, sir."
"Good." The stasis cuff around his wrist was removed, and refastened above its fellow, on his ankle. He put the arm around the sparkling, who wrapped himself even more closely around Prowl, sobbed twice, and fell silent. Prowl couldn't tell whether or not he was asleep.
"How bad you wounded?" the Autobot said.
"Rebar pierced my shoulder through-and-though, shattered the strut."
"Lemme see."
The black mech's big hands were fast and rough in doing field repair, but the pain diminished, and the steady ooze of energon down Prowl's chest and belly plates lessened, then stopped. "I'm Ironhide," the mech said, servos still busy. "That's Jazz. What's yer designation, 'con?"
"Prowl."
"Little one asleep?"
"I don't know."
"You okay just holdin' him fer a while?"
"Could you help me lay down while I do that?"
"Yuh. Here."
His hands were strong and his EM field calm, which was reassuring to both Prowl and the sparkling. Once Prowl lay flat, the sparkling curled up in one arm against his chest, and Ironhide unsubspaced a therm-reg blanket to float down over them. He returned to his fellow Autobot; Prowl, optics closed, sliding into recharge, heard him say, "That's a rookie mistake!" and the lighter voice of Jazz replying ...
TWENTY BREEM LATER
Ironhide picked up Jazz and carried him across their dusty little prison, laying him down beside the 'con and the child, and got the blanket over all three of them. Jazz, who had forgotten to subspace his own blanket before the march, had broken both upper-arm struts when struck by a beam while shielding the sparkling from falling debris, and considerably worsened the original damage when he had avoided falling on the child from that injury. Ironhide himself had some dings and scrapes, but nothing like the other two.
He explored their prison, a half-dome bounded on every side by rubble, some of it quite sharp and dangerous, all of it beyond his strength to move. When he did push against the single solid surface he found, that wall creaked and juddered for a good distance on either side of him.
Ironhide sighed, and sat cross-legged on the floor dust-covered, rubble-strewn floor. He commed once more, and once more got no reply. He was too far away from Ratchet or Prime to use the cohort bond; he could only sense that neither had been injured, not the direction they were.
They'd come for the two of them, he knew, if they could. He went into recharge.