Chapter Text
Prowl did not believe in luck.
He expected, with ninety-eight percent certainty, that his energon would freeze in his veins before the night was over. The wilds were incredibly dangerous, and mecha built in the cities rarely survived more than an orn without careful planning and provisions. He had no gear, no supplies to help him last the night (save for a dull switchblade Twistfoot left him out of courtesy ), and limited data on how to survive the freezing night.
Prowl did not make a habit of betting on low odds, so when he wedged himself into the rocky cliff for some shelter from the sharp winds and rapidly dropping temperature, he fully expected to not wake up the next orn. It was not luck that he onlined the next morning distinctly not-dead. It was just that he did not account for the presence of wildlings in the Primus-damned wilds .
He was moving before conscious-processing had fully booted up. The two wildlings trying to pry him out of his crevice fell back with his mighty (and slightly panicked) shove. Fritzing sensors accounted for several more nearby. Wildlings . Prowl knew nothing about wildlings. Rumor had it that they stole mechs from caravans or cannibalized mechs left behind. He was not going to leave it up to chance. Betrayed and cast out he might be, but he wasn’t going to just let someone else at his parts. He was in altmode and fleeing before any of them caught up with the realization that he was not a corpse .
Prowl spun out twice before he could gain suitable traction. A blue wildling, smaller than he but twice as fast, made an opportunistic swerve into his path. Years of honed responses flipped him into root mode, grasping low on the wildling’s bumper and lifting . Momentum carried him over, and Prowl chucked him into the path of a stunned, red wildling. Transformation back into his faster altmode was instinctive and he floored it.
Surprised shouts turned into eager howls behind him, and his sensors pointed out several pursuing him. They had no fliers - thank Primus, but their alts were clearly designed to handle the terrain way better than his was.
One severely underestimated how heavy and reinforced Prowl’s frame was to impact damage. The brown and white wildling had the gall to try and push Prowl into a ditch! Prowl cut his wheels sharply, and drove him and the wildling trailing too closely into that same ditch. They both went down with squawks of startled pain.
He ran one more into a pile of prickly crystals, and nearly drove a second wildling to the same fate, before the lot of them figured out taking him on one-on-one wasn’t going to work. It took every bit of Prowl’s processing power to keep track of them all once they started hazing him.
They are trying to box me in , he realized soon after. Two wildlings, stockier than the three Prowl had run off but not as fast, pulled up on both sides of him. He braked, but the nipping field at his rear tire warned him that a third wildling had taken up a post there. They kept pace with him, squeezing in the middle to cut out his manerverality and bring him back into the throng of wildlings. Every second that passed was another second closer to being completely cut off, and Prowl did not need to run calculations to know that was a bad idea .
A thought, reckless and desperate and the only possible way he had a chance of getting out of this, burst to the forefront of his processor. They were too close. Not just to him, but to the pack of wildlings speeding alongside them, too. His processor churned out a reckless, stupid idea, and Prowl had to be overheating because he went for it .
He braked hard, smashing into the wildling behind him with enough force to crack their grill, and cut sharply to the left. Prowl’s fender crumpled on impact, but the red wildling he targeted spun out. He felt a hand on his bumper for a moment, catching him just long enough to avoid a collision with a green wildling that had lost control of his turn, and then it was gone again as he rammed the wildling on his right. He took the first opening he saw, and swerved out of the chain reaction he had started, skidding neatly to the side as the chain reaction took out all of his wildling pursuers.
All but one.
His satisfaction died a sparkbeat later. A smaller, black and white wildling flipped over the mass of crashing wildlings and landed neatly outside of the crash-zone. His field reached out to Prowl in the following pause, catching onto Prowl’s sinking satisfaction-disbelief-astonishment with his own exhilaration-desire-determination. He grinned cheekily, waggled his hips and launched into altmode to charge him.
The chase began anew, except this wildling was smart . He couldn’t be tempted into crystal patches or tricked into ditches, and he stayed a healthy distance away from where Prowl could ram him. He’d learned from his wildling pack’s attempts, and Prowl struggled to gain any sort of lead.
His frame was burning, practically churned smoke out of his vents the farther they drove. The pace the wildling set behind him redlined his endurance, creating heat sinks that bogged down his thought processes and killed his reaction time. Prowl was not built for this, and the terrain was unforgiving to inattention.
He tried everything to shake his tail. The black and white wildling skirted just out of sensor range, going silent just to appear again any time Prowl took a moment to gain his bearings or expel the heat boiling beneath his frame. He would come out of nowhere to tag his rear bumper, field playfully skirting outside Prowl’s own withdrawn field, only to pull away with bubbled laugher when Prowl pushed back in anger.
Frustrated and exhausted, he turned down reckless option after reckless option as his processor kept spitting them out. (No, trying to jump over a ravine would not lose this mech. No, swearing like a construction mech would not deter him. And yes , taking a stand and trying to fight a wildling that wasn’t slowing down was still a bad idea.) The wildling had taken to drifting, blatantly taunting him with showy tricks that threw him for a loop trying to figure out what the pit he was doing .
The blowout of his tire caught him off-guard, and sent him careening head over bumper into an automatic transformation. He crashed hard into the ground, unable to process fast enough at this point to stay on his feet. He had barely stopped moving when he heard the echo of another transformation, and the whisper quiet of the wildling’s rush to his side.
“No!” Prowl yelled, swinging wildly to the side. He was off-balance, and for all the wildling’s showboating, he had taken advantage of Prowl’s crash with the speed of someone paying close attention. Any moment now he would feel the sharp thrust of a knife, or spear, or whatever weapon the wildling carried on his person. He was not going to die this way!
The wildling danced around his swings. In contrast to Prowl, he was thoroughly enjoying this. Determination and joy flared in that EM field, and it took all of Prowl’s training to keep his increasingly desperate field tight to his armor. Prowl landed a sharp hit to the wildling’s shoulder joint - he saw that arm seize up - and thought for a moment that he could slip away.
Then he was on the ground. The wildling upon his back, fingers curled into his collar and driving him down with all his weight. Prowl scrambled, spitting curses and smacking him with his door wings, doing everything in his power to get up-up-up-u-
The wildling rode out Prowl’s fight, refusing to be knocked off no matter how Prowl wiggled, struggled, and swore. Distressingly, Prowl’s frame grew more and more unresponsive. His vents opened wide, choking with dirt and sand as they tried to divert heat off of his protoform. Severe-heat warning screamed at him, and soon it was all Prowl could do to lay still as his systems locked up.
Clarity caught up with him some time later with the static of a heat-induced reboot cluttering his thoughts. He was propped up in the shadow of a rock, legs stretched out and hands tied securely in front of him. What….?
“ Ey, ey ,” the wildling called out to him, field soothing along Prowl’s edges. Cooling metal ticked throughout both their frames, but Prowl’s alone trembled with the effects of overheating. The wildling encouraged him into a position better for cooling down, casually tutting in approval as Prowl’s systems loosened up.
What was he doing ? Prowl stared wide-eyed and incredulous at the black and white wildling diligently working. A claw-tipped hand, gentle and confident, proceeded to seek out and clear his clogged vents. He was murmuring nonsense, sneaking glances at Prowl from the corner of his visor. Reassurance colored his field, backed by triumph and joy and a smattering of other emotions Prowl could not pull apart with his processor still running hot.
Prowl jerked his field back tightly to his frame. “What do you want? ” (How long had he been broadcasting?) His fans hitched when those claws brushed the sensitive inner workings of his vents. “Stop that!” Prowl shook his frame and snarled through his engine when the wildling gave him a sly smile. “Stop - just tell me what you want!”
Why go through all this effort if he just wanted parts? Prowl knew next to nothing about wildlings and their customs. What motive could possibly drive this wildling to chase him so far, then be so - whatever this was - after catching him?
It remained to be seen if the wildling understood Standard Cybertronian, but he had picked up on Prowl’s confusion. Carefully, deliberately, the wildling traced a glyph onto Prowl’s chest, and then mimed the same one on his own chest. His field insistently cycled through reassurance-triumph-joy again.
...What in the pit did that mean ?!