"The one thing I'm not selling, no matter the price."

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Title: Swindle-Bolivia's Discount Emporium (and Petting Zoo)

Warning: A Decepticon thinking himself superior to Autobots.

Rating: G

Continuity: G1

Characters: Swindle, Bobby Bolivia

Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.

Motivation (Prompt): Swindle - "The one thing I'm not selling, no matter the price." Also, this fic is a definite nod to "Thief" by Dierdre.

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It wasn't strictly true that Decepticons had no friends. Casting every single Decepticon out there as a conniving malicious bastard made no sense on the face of it, as even an army unit would dissolve under those kind of interpersonal conditions(1).

No, Decepticons had friends. Many friends, in fact. They just didn't tend to have them in the same social context as Autobots did. Autobots had this oddly narrow perspective wherein they saw the galaxy through rose-tinted optics. By their lights, 'bots hung out together and helped each other because of gooshy, rather nebulous feelings of love and fondness. Any other view of these helpful relations would be loudly greeted with indignant accusations of 'using another mech' or 'exploiting someone.'

In response to which arguments Swindle didn't even bother arguing anymore. It wasn't worth the hassle. Simple questions like, "Why do you hang out with him?" always forwent the obvious, if complex, tracing of personal history that explained the trading of favors, gifts, amusement, and needs that had gone into the present relationship between two mechs. Autobots denied those measurable threads of connection in favor of immeasurable, unreliable answers like, "I like him." Asking in turn, "Why?" was like banging his head against his own armor: it damaged his patience and did nothing to change the outlook of the stubborn Autobot he was trying to talk to.

Instead, Swindle sat back on his wheels and watched with judging optics the complex friendships shift among the Autobot ranks.

"See how long playing nice lasted there," he commented when Tracks snapped at Sunstreaker. The two vain Autobots proceeded to have a loud row. "None of those mechs want to be there," Swindle pointed out when other Autobots moved in to intervene before it came to blows. "That one there is an officer; his job is to mitigate these situations. The one with the rifle is weighing his own involvement against the potential difficulties navigating the new social dynamics of the Ark. Ah, see? He's backed out. I'd bet you sixty credits he's worked out some way to stay on speaking terms with both of them without crossing either. Interpersonal politics at work there. Horse-trading on past favors, if I know that one at all. The red one has to interfere, or half the Autobots will blame him by association. Military rank and necessity keep Sunstreaker in the Autobots, not any of the polite words they say out loud. If the red one wasn't so good with bargaining or if either weren't as quick in battle, they'd both be kicked out on their skidplates. Look at the way Tracks is lunging; interpersonal politics again. He can't hit first or he'll damage his reputation, and that'll lower his status among the Aubobots."

Tracks and Sunstreaker were being held apart by various mechs with long-suffering looks on their faces. "Heh," Swindle swished his windshield wipers at his small companion, "you just watch. Sunstreaker won't speak with him for a week, but they'll still associate and pretend to get along because they're trading wax jobs. If they didn't smile and swallow down the arguments, the other Autobots would accuse them of using each other. Goodness knows, they can't have that."

"An' they're suppos'd t'be friends."

"And they're supposed to be friends." The Decepticon made the contented sound of a bettor collecting his winnings as the two Autobots stormed in opposite directions, leaving the other Autobots twittering in their wakes. "I have a lot of friends like that. They just don't feel obligated to pretend to like me."

"Mmhmm." The dark human leaned back against the Jeep's windshield and stretched his legs out. The beer in his hand was warm where it had been resting against Swindle, and a bit of foam had leaked out of the can, over his thumb, and into the crack of the Combaticon's hood. In no time at all, the beer would dry enough to become sticky. It left the man's hands tacky and smelled like burnt popcorn when the Decepticon's engine ran hot. It was a familiar sensation for both of them.

Decepticons didn't believe in cuddly warm feelings. They believed in concrete things like owing a favor here and cultivating a network of allies there. Things they could trade on. Swindle did tend to smile and smarm at most the people he met. He genuinely liked a lot of people; that didn't mean he didn't keep a running tally of how much they owed him - and he kept a gun handy for when liking had to take a backseat to business. That was fairly common in the Decepticon ranks. Entire social maps among the soldiers navigated battles and the aftermaths. The Autobots dressed it up in pretty words and niceties that Swindle wasn't even sure existed. Like…love. Did love really exist? Could anyone measure it? Affection? What was affection? Would it stand up to a missile strike, or take a piece of shrapnel for him?

He could list 14 mechs who would throw themselves in front of him during battle. They owed him that much. He could rattle off another, even lengthier list of mechs willing to carry him off the battlefield at some risk to themselves. Another list of mechs could be relied on to pay for his repairs or even repair him themselves. Swindle had made himself invaluable to the rank and file, and more importantly, to the officers of every unit he'd encountered. What his wide-reaching network of trade hadn't insured, orders from above could accomplish for him.

The Autobots said Decepticons didn't have friends. Swindle scoffed at that narrow-minded view of the galaxy. He watched the Ark's lovey-dovey interactions through the optics of an outside observer, and he narrated what he saw in Decepticon terms of give and take. And the human on his hood nodded thoughtfully every time.

"You know who has the most friends in the Decepticons?"

"Nuh-uh. You tell ol' Bobby."

"Starscream."

An incredulous sound filtered through a spray of beer, and then Bobby was coughing his strange air intake system clear. " - joking!"

Swindle hummed a negative, barely registering the spatter of warm beverage pattering on his hood. "He's got so much hanging over me, I'd break my own axle if he asked. But." He paused significantly, waiting for the slight shift in weight that meant the man was leaning forward, intrigued. "But he'd never ask that of me."

"'cause you're friends." Bobby wiped futilely at the stains on his jeans before giving up with a shrug and sipping the sad remnants of his beer.

"Because we're friends."

They both stopped to consider that seeming collision of ideas: the word as the Autobots used it, the meaning as the Decepticons deciphered it, and the delicate usage by, of all mechs, Starscream. The longer the silence went on, the easier it got to mesh it together. Easier to understand, even easier to accept, but easiest yet to just relax and open another can of beer. It was warm as only a can of beer in the hot desert sun on a car hood could be. Foam bubbled over brown hands and slopped onto the purple hood. Swindle's shock absorbers hissed as the Decepticon waggled his tires and settled into the sand: a quiet noise like a comfortable sigh.

"Hey. Swindle?"

"Yeah?"

"Be straight wit' me. We buddies?"

"Sure."

"Good."

A breeze barely stirred the hot air. Far, far off in the distance, Swindle's little spy camera — courtesy of his friend Reflector, who had been more than happy to pay off part of their debt by loaning it to him — continued to monitor the kicked-beehive activity of the Autobot base. One of Bobby's feet ticked in time to the song that had been on the radio when his Decepticon pal had busted through the wall of his trailer/office and abducted him. The song had stuck with him on a wild roadtrip across two states, one national border, and a ghastly stint of Montezuma's Revenge. Swindle absently tuned into a radio station currently playing that song, and for a couple minutes, Spanish lyrics crooned at the cacti and scorpions. It was a good song. They'd both associate hostage situations and being chased by Autobots with it for years afterward. Also, in Bobby's case, diarrhea.

Bobby shifted around a bit, trying to find a better fit between spine and windshield without much success. "'Cause, buddy, you still owe me thirty grand for all the cars ya junked."

"Oh, please. Ten grand at most. That old jalope out front didn't even have windows."

"Twenty-five grand. It had sentimental value. You could have called ahead. I'd-a moved it."

"Yeah, you'd have replaced it with something more expensive. Twelve. And it had to look real, you know."

"It was real, alright! You trashed my trailer! Twenty-two."

"You're crazy; fifteen. The point of being a decoy is to sucker everyone's attention, not to politely knock and ask if you'd like to go for a drive."

"You hated that Grand Am. I think ya hit it on purpose. Twenty-one."

"You were incapable of selling it. You should be grateful I got rid of it. Sixteen, and I'm not going any higher."

"Yeah, y'are. It's the junkyard for it now. You hit that little yellow'un over the head with it. Police probably towed it for evidence."

"…slag, you're right."

"I'm never gettin' it back."

"Nope." The Jeep sounded far too smug about that fact. Bobbie gave him a beady-eyed look of suspicion. Swindle chortled. "I'm buying it from the impound lot. According to the police report, it has a perfect imprint of Bumblebee's face. I know somebody who'll pay good money for — "

"Twenty-five."

"Slaggoff."

"Pay up, buddy."

It was Bobbie's turn to snicker. Decepticon and human continued to bicker amiably, Bobbie's brown skin darkening under the desert sun and the Mexican beer mysteriously disappearing the way beer usually does. Far to the north, Autobots scrambled to track the conmech Combaticon and his human hostage while said hostage made his own observations about unstable Autobot friendships and stable Decepticon alliances.

Up in California, a true eyesore of a used car lot/petting zoo was inspected down to the last receipt by police and Autobots alike. They found nothing unusual about Bobby's business. Aided for years as he'd been by a chance encounter with a lone Combaticon, one Swindle by name(4), Bobby knew the value of a good front. The authorities found nothing at all wrong, not even a hint of anything to dig deeper into, and they dropped that angle of investigation to go chase different clues. Which was the point, after all. The man was a cheat and a fraud, but a legal one. No one had the slightest clue why a Decepticon, much less Swindle, would risk pursuit and retaliation by kidnapping Bobby B. the used car salesman. And while the Autobots and friends(5) wondered and investigated and were thoroughly distracted by the puzzle, Megatron's latest master plan went into effect in Scandinavia, right on time.

The duo spent six days in Mexico avoiding the resulting indignant uproar. They went first to Tijuana, because nobody in their right mind would think to look there for a Decepticon with a hostage. That's exactly why they spent three days there.

The other three days were spent out in the desert, baking in the hot sun. The days seemed to go on for entire weeks as the sun sluggishly inched across the sky. With so much time and so little inclination to move(6), they lazed about and talked about nothing, everything, and absolutely anything.

What Swindle would remember eons later, ages after the last human had evolved and Mexico had been forgotten as not even a word in history, was the weight of beer cans on his hood. Even after he changed his vehicle mode, he could feel the touch of aluminum; the curving lines teetered on their sides, and the perfect circles sat upright in pools of warm liquid. Sensor memories always the rooted the deepest, touch and scent and patterns staying on even after visual images and sound bites were corrupted by battle damage and emergency backups until the files were irreparably distorted. The tacky touch of human skin separating from his paint lingered long after the memory of human's jovial face blurred and smudged. He forgot the exact chemical composition of the atmosphere humans had breathed, but the white flash of a salesman's smile against dark skin stayed with him. The sharp reek of an unwashed, sweaty Hawaiian shirt crumpled in Swindle's backseat made it through to the present, yet the shape of the body that had worn it had inevitably been erased. He could recall the swinging cadence of Bobby's speech, although the sound of the man's voice degenerated into static in his memory files. The smell of engine-burnt beer survived virus purges, but not the topics of their many conversations had while the human drank.

The glittering, optic-searing sign on the asteroid Swindle owned, here and now, traced letters in an alphabet that had faded away before the pixels of the human's last picture had dissolved. Bobby B.'s face had outlived his language, but it had scattered to nothing under the invasive probe of a particularly hardline Autobot merchandise inspector. The conmech looked up at the last English words in the known galaxies and tried to pronounce them. He failed. The sign's words, if not the sign itself, had survived 16 relocations, the destruction of a planet, 3 civil wars, 44 battles, 696 customer brawls, 2 assassination attempts, double parking, and half a dozen tries at buying or outright stealing it from him. The sign survived, but the words were lost to Swindle.

He knew that they had been important, once upon a time, but time had wrestled this from him. English was a language forever gone, and the individual sounds assigned to each letter had been forgotten. He knew what the sign meant, but he lacked the ability to say the words. It was a design now, instead of a name.

That depressed him briefly, although his expression never wavered. His optics dimmed as he chased the faint memory of the sound of a name, only a few syllables long, but with an internal bleep from a scan program, the damaged file deleted itself. After a moment, Swindle's optics brightened again. He stood staring up at the sign for a while more, but business called. He turned and went back inside. At the pressure door, he hesitated and glanced back.

The pop of a can opening, the sticky drip of fluid onto his hood, and the easy rise-and-fall rhythm of a carbon-based lifeform had imprinted in his memory, but Swindle knew that time would take it all away. Eventually, Bobby would disappear entirely. That was the price of making friends, even among Decepticons. Concrete things like memories and favors and specific reasons wore out and were discarded. Autobots clung to feelings, wringing vague implications out of fading importance. They mourned the soft, soppy, immeasurable bits and dwelt on their regrets. Decepticons…moved on when the network came undone, and it always did.

Swindle wasn't a sell-out. Not when it came to his friends.

The sign stayed up for now.

He owed his buddy that.

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Footnotes

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(1)The Stunticons were an exception to the rule, but like every exception, their exception had exceptions. They were all conniving malicious bastards. However, they were also a combiner team. Therefore, they had to work together. They didn't have a choice. From the outside, there seemed no possibly way to make the Stunticons function. Their very incompatibility skewed them like jigsaw puzzle pieces standing at right angles — with the out-of-nowhere effect that they worked together very well indeed, jigsaw puzzle pieces making a previously unrecognized 3D sculpture. It wasn't an intentional thing, but neither was their exceptional interpersonal viciousness. They were, as Vortex had explained to the other Decepticons(2), just very, very young mechs shoved into the midst of a war without any guidelines beyond jury-rigged programming and Megatron's orders. They'd get over their initial selfish youngling problems and adapt to socializing like normal Decepticons once they grew up a little.

In the meantime, the Stunticons managed to bond as a team far better than anyone expected. From their neurotic beginnings and mental problems blossomed such common interests as an adorably psychotic love of cats, an obsession with collecting McDonald's Happy Meal toys, and stockcar rallies. Vortex(3) had high hopes of slowly introducing them into the Decepticon ranks through the careful application of popular Cybertronian soap operas, as the Stunticons had a magnetic attraction to any TV showing As The Kitchen Sinks. That could easily transition into the common Decepticon addiction to wartime shows like All My Battalions. Except for the pregnancies, the shows were eerily similar…

(2)Mental health, like physical health, was supposed to be the realm of the Constructions. Two problems popped up with the Stunticons: A. the Constructions didn't really care enough to explain them to anyone else. Megatron's loyalty programming forced the Stunticons to obey and work (somewhat) with the other Decepticons, and that was good enough from the ever-too-busy Constructions' point of view. B. Vortex actually had a fairly good grip on what was up with the Stunticons. The Constructions had simply pressed him into service to explain the whole Stunticon Situation and associated baffling behaviorisms.

(3)From interrogator to babysitter/psychologist in the course of one conversation and a memo from Hook to Megatron. Scrapper forever treasured the look on the helicopter's face when the Combaticon realized that Megatron's order superseded any objections he had to his new 'promotion.' The scary thing was how rust-rotting good Vortex was at it. Understanding how mechs' minds worked applied to both jobs, apparently.

(4)But that's another story altogether, and it'll keep for another day. Besides, it would take up 44 footnotes all on its own.

(5)"Political allies," Swindle clarified. "Yeah, well, I voted for th' other guy," Bobby said back.

(6)Swindle claimed fuel was too expensive to waste on relocating, which was patently ridiculous when he broke out the solar panels. Bobby only stopped complaining when Swindle revealed part of the expense was caused by hauling the weight of 14 six-packs of beer. The obvious solution? Drink all the beer.