Chapter Text
Ironically, it was Chromedome who first warned Prowl against bargaining with the fae.
Prowl had known already that it was a bad idea, of course. Everyone knew. Chromedome, old enough to have seen mechs who should know better make the bad choice anyways, had told Prowl bitter with personal experience that he set his prices higher just to try and make people stop coming back. That if you walk into a bargain with one of the fair folk they already know you’re desperate.
This is why Prowl goes to him, when he’s out of other options. He already knows Chromedome will hate him for asking. There’s a bitter satisfaction in that.
The breakup had been messy, for all that their actual relationship never progressed much past the mutual tension and teasing phase they had both been so good at into the actual emotional honesty that, Prowl has heard, is supposed to happen. Chromedome had vanished back to the Otherworld and Prowl had never expected to see him again.
Judging by Chromedome’s expression when he finds Prowl on the outside of his corner of sub-reality, he hadn’t expected to see Prowl again either. Tough. The war is rolling forward anyways. Chromedome should run away—he shouldn’t be involved with it—but Prowl can’t. So his only choice is to be the best.
They make the deal. Prowl gets the speed and precision of processor he needs to pull ahead, to win that many more battles. Chromedome gets all of Prowl’s memories from before joining the Autobots.
Prowl knows it’s a terrible deal, intellectually. It does help that after it’s over, he can’t remember why that is.
The second time Prowl makes a deal, it’s with strangers. He still knows exactly what he’s getting into—or, at least, he thinks he does.
The Constructicons are Otherworld mercenaries. Megatron pays them well, but not in deals. Rumors vary as to whether that’s because he knows better or because he’s already traded all of himself away—and of course, deals cannot be made with parts of another mech’s life, only the dealmaker’s own. Their combiner form confers on the Decepticons an incredible advantage. They cannot be killed, they cannot be coerced, and they cannot be threatened. But perhaps they can be tempted.
Prowl arranges a meeting with them expediently, by mapping out a route they will be taking between bases and placing himself in the middle of it. The speed with which they stop after rounding the corner of the canyon is gratifying.
“This is not an attack,” he says, once they have slowly come closer, surrounding him with weapons ready. “I want to make you an offer.”
The scoop of the front-end loader raises and lowers, as though assessing him. “What is it?”
“What will it take to make you stop working for the Decepticons?” Prowl asks.
They negotiate then and there, circling him in the canyon under the blazing alien sun. He’s not blind to their attraction, and not afraid to use it, cocking one hip to let the light glint off his rims and revving his engine when they circle too close. This, of course, only entices them to circle closer. Negotiations end up coming to an extended pause. That’s fine. He’s budgeted time for it.
In the aftermath, once panels are being closed and Prowl is resting in the shade provided by Long Haul, Scrapper reaches out one hand and trails it over Prowl’s still-closed spark casing.
“Tell you what,” he says. “Give us your spark and we’ll walk away.”
Prowl rolls away from the touch, back up onto his feet. “I’m not about to bond or die for you.”
Mixmaster catches him before he can leave entirely as a chuckle goes out from them in unison. “Nah. Not what we’re asking.”
“We could use your passion,” Hook says. “You’d be able to leave and go back to the Autobots. Free to move on with your little war.”
“We’ll take good care of it,” Scavenger wheedles. “No one else will get their mitts on it.”
“You won’t hurt,” Scrapper promises. “You’ll just never forget us.”
Prowl cannot weigh any part of himself—especially when it is only a part of himself—any higher than victory.
He opens his chestplates.
There is electricity left in his spark casing when they are done, pulsing rhythmically. His body still moves. His fuel pump still works. His processor still functions.
They thank him and leave. Prowl does not feel that he has lost something valuable.
The third time—the third time.
The last time Prowl goes to the fae is a mistake from start to finish.
He knows Mesothalus. He’s known Mesothalus for vorn. They are not allies. They are well-established trade partners and have both benefited from their acquaintance. Mesothalus is capable of far more than he provides the Autobots with in exchange for research materials, but what he provides is still substantive.
With the Constructicons gone, the Autobots are turning the tide of the war. It still isn’t happening fast enough. Casualties are mounting. Command requires something drastic. Optimus is hoping for a miracle.
Prowl knows better than to hope. He goes under the landscape, into the ground, to meet with Mesothalus as usual.
He comes with the materials for a contract in hand. Not as usual.
“Prowl,” Mesothalus says, seeing the vial of his innermost energon. “What’s this? Re-negotiating so soon?”
“I want to make another deal,” Prowl says. “Not about your contract for the Autobots. About you and me.”
Most fae who deal with mortal mecha try to blend with them, like predators that hunt using camouflage. Mesothalus is not most fae. He moves like a shadow, sinuous and slicing. “Oh?”
His voice is, objectively, beautiful. Prowl can admire it from a distance, but proximity makes it clear.
“I want to deal for your services. I know you’re capable of more than you’ve been giving the Autobots. You can make something that will end the war.”
“Oh, you know me so well. Yes, I can.” Mesothalus draws closer, eyes shining. “And what will you give me in return, Prowl?”
The third time he goes to make a deal with a fae, Prowl has done his research. He knows better than to issue an open offer, especially now that he has so little of himself left to barter with. “You can have my firstborn.”
Potential is powerful. Potential is valuable. Prowl has never had any intention of reproducing. Once he has made this agreement, and has the necessary weapon in hand, he can go back to the Autobots and schedule an appointment for Ratchet to terminate his reproductive capacity for good. Should Mesothalus make a clause against that, Prowl will just refrain from interfacing again. It won’t be much of a loss.
The point of this war—the point of his choices—is to minimize suffering. He isn’t going to bring another being into this world. This is the best deal he can make—and more than that, it won’t hollow him out further to lose what he doesn’t have.
Mesothalus draws in a breath. A shiver runs along his plating, or perhaps it’s a trick of the flickering light. “Oh, Prowl . Now there’s an offer.”
“Do you accept?” Prowl demands. He wraps his hand around the vial of innermost energon so the trembling of the liquid is invisible.
“Oh, yes.” Mesothalus holds out his hand to collect Prowl’s offering.
When he takes it, their grips magnetize together. Prowl stumbles as he trips forward, Mesothalus dragging him into the dark.
The ride through the void to the Otherworld proper, not just Mesothalus’s in-between lab, is dizzying. Prowl’s gyroscopes can’t tell which way is up. The only thing he can sense is the magnetic attachment between their hands.
When they re-emerge into a space with gravity, Prowl stumbles again, Mesothalus’s grip guiding him down to a soft landing. A very soft landing. Padded. A bed the size of a room, with cables stretched across the ceiling, soft zaps of bioluminescence drifting between them.
Prowl has read about fairie bowers. He never expected to find himself in one.
Something of that must show on his face, because Mesothalus chuckles—the beauty of it is almost painful here, with no buffer of reality in the way—and draws him into laying down, stroking soft trails along his frame.
“Oh, Prowl. Such a generous promise. I know you will see it fulfilled.”
Prowl has no idea, afterwards, how long it takes.
He leaves. Despite the best attempts of Tarantulas to keep him—and Prowl knows his true name now, after enough time into the creation process to be sure it was going to take he whispered it into Prowl’s audial like it was a gift and not a threat and binding promise and a mark of confidence in his ability to hold Prowl here forever—despite tender words and vows, despite strategy games and fuel pressed lovingly to his lips, despite offers to lay the treasures of the Otherworld at his feet, despite the small frame in a cradle overhung with charms on cobwebs, he leaves. As was their deal, he leaves Ostaros behind.
Tarantulas had gushed about what their creation will be like fully-grown, a fighter capable of taking out an entire battlefield, a triple-changer. Perhaps he had meant for Ostaros to be the weapon Prowl had asked for. Prowl doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know, anymore. Their deal is never concluded.
He leaves Ostaros anyways. He suspects he would be a terrible parent, no matter what Tarantulas believes or wants. The Otherworld has its own dangers, but it is not part of the War. Not really.
When he stumbles back up out of the cave he recalls walking into a lifetime ago with a vial of his own energon in his hand and a plan he was blind to the implications of, only a night shift has passed.
No one seems to have noticed he was gone.
Prowl resumes his life again, hiding his feelings of stumbling unsurely through what should be quotidian routines. He refuses to let on what he has lost. He refuses to lose anything more to his own poor decisions, as the last recourse left to him.
After all. It is known. To give something to the fae is to forfeit your own right to regain it.