This, of course, drives both Swindle and Lockdown insane. Lockdown goes all stir-crazy, which makes him go crazy with nesting. This ends up driving Swindle up the wall when the salesmech works from home because Swindle gets really anxious that Lockdown's going to stress himself into early emergence. Eventually, Swindle asks why Lockdown doesn't want to go anywhere anymore. Lockdown tells his partner about how stressed he gets every time he goes out because of all the mechs invading his space.

Swindle isn't too pleased with what he's told. He's actually pretty peeved about it honestly — why is the world treating Lockdown like he's the problem in this scenario when there are strange mechs trying to lay their dirty servos all over his frame? Swindle asks if he needs to assign Lockdown any security detail or if the bounty hunter wants his partner to protect him when together in public. Lockdown gingerly declines security detail, but doesn't object to Swindle accompanying him while out and about.

The topic doesn't really come up for a while — at least until Lockdown has to get his prosthetic arm resized because of how swollen his stump's grown. Swindle takes his lover out to a reputable armory somewhere in town, and later, while Lockdown's prosthetic gets a tune-up, they decide to get dinner together. Things go smoothly enough — until Swindle runs into an old business associate while on his way back to the armory. Taking a look at Lockdown, the cloaks wrapped around his gravid figure, and his relatively mellow (by Lockdown standards, anyways) demeanor the bounty hunter carries, the business associate makes a remark that it seems that Swindle's finally caught and tamed a wild mech to be his conjunx and bear him some sparklings.

Lockdown doesn't even have time to react when Swindle grabs his old associate by the arm and begins to ream them out. The salesmech puts his associate on the spot, telling them that Lockdown isn't an animal, but is a mech just like him. Swindle then asks the associate to apologize immediately. When Swindle's old friend nervously says that it's just a joke, Swindle asks them if it would be funny if he compared their partner to a wild mechanimal that needed to be tamed. Swindle does not let up on the mech until Lockdown gets a hasty, nervous apology.

After the old associate scurries off, Swindle dusts himself off as if nothing happened. Clearing his throat, Lockdown brings Swindle's attention back to him. With a faint blush, Lockdown tells Swindle that while he could've defended himself, he's grateful for the salesmech's protection against such insulting, rude statements. Swindle sheepishly smiles, before he promises Lockdown that he'll make sure that his lover never has to put up with such slag in the future. He also pledges not to associate with such lowbrow mechs in the future.

(and they never correct anybody who assumes that they're conjunxes 😏🤭)

“Whoa,” the girl says, blinking. “Cool watch. What brand is that?”

“Uh—!” Miles claps a hand over the screen, which doesn’t stop the orange light from spilling through his fingers. “It’s, like, some foreign brand, you probably don’t know it.”

“You hit your steps goal or something?” she jokes as the watch continues to buzz.

Miles laughs weakly. “Yeah, something like that.”

Cupping his hand over the screen, he takes a glance to see what the alert is.

ANOMALY DETECTED. LOCATION: EARTH-1610. INCOMING ASSISTANCE: MIGUEL O’HARA.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Miles says.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” Miles tugs his jacket sleeve over the watch. The girl looks at him with a hint of concern, head tilted, earrings shining from the lights strung up all around the backyard. She’s really pretty. “Nothing’s wrong, I just, uh…” He sighs, drags a hand over his face. “I… have to go. I’m really sorry—it’s, like, an emergency, and I wouldn’t go if it wasn’t really important.”

“It’s okay. I get it.” She looks a little disappointed.

“No, I mean it,” Miles says. Mentally, he’s screaming at himself to rein it in because it’s not that serious, but he just hates the idea of her thinking he’s running away because she’s somehow less than. “You’re like, really cool and I like talking to you and if you’re still around when I’m done and want to hang out, I’d be down for that, but if you’re not around or just don’t want to, that’s cool too—”

A pair of lips press against his cheek.

Miles shuts his mouth.

He can feel the waxiness of lipstick imprinting on his skin, and hears the gentle smack when the lips pull away.

“I’d like that,” the girl says, grinning now. “But right now, relax and go deal with your emergency.”

The earth is spinning. Miles can’t tell up from down.

“Okay,” he says dumbly, fingers touching his cheek. “Cool.”

“Cool.” She gives him a little wave.

Miles stumbles on his shoes on the way out, waving back at her like an idiot.

He’s so high on cloud nine that he nearly forgot what the emergency was in the first place.

“Miguel,” he says, tapping on the watch. “I’m here, where you at?”

“Oh so now Spider-Man is open for business?” Miguel grouches, voice tinny over the speakers. His projection flares up from the watch. His mask is on, the red outline of his eyes bunched up in annoyance.

“Not my fault I have a life here!”

Miguel shakes his head. “I’m in Queens. Sending coordinates. Apúrate.”

The call ends.

“Nice to see you too,” Miles mutters and pulls his mask over his face.

He and Miguel have worked together on a handful of occasions, with Miguel sounding greatly put upon each time. It’s not really fair—Miles likes to think he’s gotten pretty good at this Spider-Man stuff by now—but from what he’s heard through the gossip at HQ, Miguel is just kind of like that with everyone. Blunt. Snappish. Open in his preference for working alone.

If Miles had any say in it, he’d leave Miguel well alone. But their paths keep crossing somehow, and truth be told, there are far worse partners to have in a fight than the ninja vampire Miguel O’Hara.

“About time you showed up!” Miguel says when Miles finally makes it to the coordinates he sent.

Miles is about to respond when a blast of electricity snaps through the air, and Miguel leaps out of the way, catching the next building with his clawed hands. Miles swings after him.

“You know New York is big, right?” Miles says, following Miguel as he bounds over walls and rooftops. “And that we don’t have the same technology as, oh I don’t know, Nueva York eight decades in the future.”

“Yeah, well, while you were taking your sweet time, this guy’s been blasting through the neighborhood.”

Said guy possesses the power of electricity, it looks like. Kind of cool, Miles has to admit, until he throws an arc of lightning Miles’s way and Miles has to yelp and duck.

“Okay, I can see why you needed me,” Miles admits.

Miguel scoffs. “Right. Follow my lead, then do your thing.”

His thing. As if Miles hadn’t used it in the not-so-distant past to leech the very suit Miguel is wearing.

“You’re the boss,” Miles sighs.

Miguel doesn’t respond, just heads towards today’s villain with a powerful leap and a blur of red webs.

Miguel draws the fight away from the residential buildings and into a factory yard by the waterfront, arcs of lightning following him all the while. Electro, Miles learns from a handful of villain monologues later, doesn’t go down easily, especially after siphoning energy from the nearby power lines to make himself faster and more agile. But his fatal flaw seems to be his ego—Miles latches onto him mid-rant about some company called Oscorp, and in the ensuing tussle, Miles lays his hands on Electro’s shoulders and starts to drain him.

“What are you doing?” Electro demands, watching in horror as all the energy he gathered flows out of him and into Miles.

“Sorry, man,” Miles says. “Nothing personal.”

The ensuing venom blast is the strongest Miles has ever done. It leaves a smoking crater in the ground, Electro lying unconscious in the center of it.

Miles shakes out his hands, jittery from residual static.

“Finally,” Miguel says, landing on the ground next to him. He drops his mask, and Miles can see the disgruntled look on his face. “Thought he’d never shut up.”

“You’re welcome,” Miles says.

Miguel shoots him a glance before bending down to wrap Electro in webs. “Don’t get cocky.”

“Just saying, you’re lucky he ended up in my dimension.”

Miguel rolls his eyes, but it isn’t with quite as much annoyance as Miles has seen in the past. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking.

“You want a gold star or something?” Miguel says.

Miles shrugs. “Just a ‘thank you’ would be nice. Or even ‘good work.’” The smell of charred villain is cloying in Miles’s nose, so he tugs his mask off for some fresh air.

Miguel straightens, looking down at his watch to type in coordinates, and he says offhandedly, “Alright, alright.” He turns to Miles. “Good work—”

He stops.

Miles raises an eyebrow when a few seconds pass and Miguel doesn’t say anything. “What?”

Miguel points to his cheek. “Your mom kiss you before you left?”

“What?”

And then Miles remembers.

The lipstick.

“Oh!” he says, face turning so hot. “No, ’course not. That’s just, uh—”

—a girl he was trying to get lucky with. But there’s no way Miles is going to admit that to anyone, let alone Miguel.

“I told you I have a life, man. I do see people outside of Spider-Man stuff.” He brings a hand up to wipe the lipstick away.

A warm hand takes his chin.

Miles’s breath stops in his lungs.

He didn’t notice Miguel had gotten so close. His grip is firm, but not ungentle. He turns Miles’s head to look at him, and his face is… Miles doesn’t even know how to characterize his expression. Miguel has gone very still, his breath coming in and out of him in deep, even exhales. He’s staring fixedly at the kiss. His eyes are dark.

He rubs his thumb along Miles’s cheek in a slow, heavy drag. Wiping the kiss away. Replacing it with the burn of his own touch.

Miles’s stomach jolts, and his skin goes hot all over.

What is happening?

“M-Miguel?” he says hoarsely.

Miguel doesn’t hear him. He’s still looking at Miles’s cheek, and his lip curls slightly in disdain, enough for Miles to see the hint of a pointed canine. The grip on Miles’s chin digs in a little deeper.

“Miguel,” Miles says again, louder.

Miguel blinks. Clarity comes back to his eyes.

He drops Miles as if burned.

“Shit,” he says, stepping away. Miles’s skin feels cold without his touch. “I— Sorry.”

Miles opens his mouth to say it’s okay but the words get stuck in his throat.

“Are you okay?” Miles asks instead. His heart is hammering in his chest, hard and loud enough that surely Miguel can hear it.

“Fine,” Miguel snaps. He has one hand on his head like he’s fighting off a headache. “I just— I gotta go.”

He calls a portal. It bursts open in a familiar cacophony of orange light.

“Okay,” Miles says faintly, watching Miguel grab Electro with a handful of webs.

Miguel spares him one last look. Again, Miles can’t tell what emotion to read from his face. He’s struck by the urge to move closer, to find what Miguel keeps from him.

But then Miguel says quietly, “Good work today,” turns around, and disappears through the portal.

Miles is left alone in the cold night air, the silence heavy all around him.

He brings his fingers to his cheek, where his skin still throbs from the memory of Miguel’s touch. His stomach squirms.

Elias raises his brows.

“Uh. Bless me Father, for I have sinned?” the boy tries again. “My last confession was… never? Nineteen years, if that’s how this works.”

Nineteen. It isn’t so long ago that Elias has forgotten what being nineteen was like, making his way through seminary school. Though he suspects his background may be different from whoever it is on the other side of the wall, who hisses and murmurs, “Never gonna get this bloodstain out. Great.”

Now that Elias thinks of it, he can smell the metallic tang of it, the scent quickly filling the booth.

Alarmed, he says, “Are you bleeding? Do you need an ambulance?”

“Nah.” A sigh, the sound of the cushioned chair on the other side creaking. “I’ll be good in a few minutes. Just need some time to hide—uh, I mean, confess.” A pained grunt. “This wolfsbane is doing nothing for me.”

The more words he speaks, the more confusion Elias feels. But… he is here to serve a purpose. And he will stick to it.

He says, “And what have you come to share tonight?”

Silence. Even his breathing is imperceptible. Elias begins to wonder if he managed to slip out of the booth entirely when, finally, the boy snorts. “Where do I start?”

“Well, what weighs on your heart the heaviest?” Elias asks.

That earns him a laugh. Elias doesn’t have the faintest idea why, but he’s beginning to realize he can’t expect anything to go the way he imagines.

The boy says, “Say, Father. What if this heart isn’t mine?”

Elias blinks. “Can I ask what it is you mean?”

The confessor’s chair creaks, and the boy’s voice is closer this time to the window between them.

“What if this heart doesn’t belong to me? What if I took it from someone else?”

Elias takes a moment to consider it. A metaphor, surely—one that he’s too frazzled and too confused to fully unravel at this time, but he ventures a guess, anyway. “Do you think the feelings you experience do not belong to you as well?”

“I’m not sure how much of myself does belong to me.”

The words are glib, lilting through the shallow space between them. Elias tilts his head, and while this boy has no reverence at all for the booth, he thinks he can understand what he’s getting at.

“Then you feel you have little control over yourself,” Elias says.

A hum. “Think you’re getting somewhere, Father,” the boy says.

“And that troubles you?”

There’s a clack, clack, clack against wood, fingernails tapping a rhythm. “Control isn’t the problem. I’m good at that.”

“Then… experiencing those impulses in the first place.”

The tapping stops for a beat, then continues. “Hey, you’re pretty good at this stuff.”

“What impulses are you experiencing?”

“Man, all business, huh?” The boy makes a pained hiss, followed by the sound of something metallic pattering to the ground. “Finally. Dumb bullet.”

“You’re certain you don’t need an ambulance?” Elias says again, allowing some desperation to come through.

“I said I’m fine. Anyway.” A breath blown, like being wounded is a minor inconvenience. “Impulses. Well, some of the worst ones don’t bother me anymore. I’ve apologized to Scott for that one time. Though, uh, it’s an ongoing apology. I’m working on it.”

Elias nods. “Penance is a crucial step in the path of forgiveness.”

“Right. Hence me coming to save their sorry asses all the time.” The words are a little more slurred. There’s a thump on the other side of the wall, a hand slamming against it. “Shit, this hurts. Sorry.”

Elias rises from his seat. “I really think you need medical attention.”

“No! Christ, you can’t make me go back to a hospital if you dragged me there blind and gagged.” Elias blanches. The boy continues, “Just—keep talking, okay? I’m almost done. I’ll be out of your hair soon, I promise.”

Not exactly convincing. But something compels Elias to sit down, anyway. Clearly this one is… troubled. If he can help somehow, then perhaps the medical attention can come after.

So Elias swallows and says, “You said you’re always saving someone. Who?”

Another sigh, the heaviest one so far. “That idiot. That ridiculous, headstrong, beautiful dumbass. His eyes are blue. Like, real blue. You know?”

Elias can’t say he does, but. “What makes you feel you need to save him?”

“Because—” A pause. Then a breath, shaky. “You were talking about impulses? His middle name is Impulse. He just rushes in without thinking about the danger, the numbers, a way out. Someone needs help so he goes. Period. I have my work cut out for me.”

“You want to protect him,” Elias says. He doesn’t need to phrase it as a question.

A laugh again, smaller, more fragile. “God knows why.”

“There is a path for us all; one that He knows. Being here now, confessing, is the first step. And it sounds to me like you’re already trying to do penance.”

“Good to know there’s a twelve step program to this whole thing.” He sounds distracted, and there’s that smell of blood again, making Elias feel sick. Another patter of metal. A sigh of relief. “Finally. Just the wolfsbane, now.”

“Wolfsbane is poisonous,” Elias says.

“You’re telling me.” A clicking sound, followed by the smell of gas. It can’t be—

“Bless me Father for one more thing,” the boy says. “Is this what they call a venial sin versus a mortal one?”

“Fire is strictly forbidden in the booth.” Elias shoots up from his seat. If he calls 911, he can get paramedics and the fire department both.

“It’ll just take a second.” The boy takes a few quick breaths, as if bracing himself. Then there’s the sound of something igniting, the smell of burning.

The boy chokes down a shout. Wood splinters on the other side.

Elias is bolting halfway out the door when the boy says, “Stop! No, no, I’m good.”

He sounds exhausted. Elias is feeling so, himself.

“What on Earth is happening?” he pleads, more to God than anyone else.

“Relax. It’s over now.” The boy still sounds pained, his breathing labored, but he isn’t slurring his words anymore. An acrid smell fills the booth now, something singed and herbal, on top of all the blood.

Elias squeezes his eyes shut.

“That’s better,” the boy says. “And by this time, hopefully the hunters have lost my trail.” The chair creaks again.

Elias jolts when the screen over the window rises.

Smoke trails through the grate. The boy’s face appears on the other side: dark hair falling over his forehead, framing his eyes that glow a bright, lurid yellow.

“Thanks,” he says, with a small grin. Elias swears his teeth are pointed. “And by the way, I’d be careful tonight, Father. Full moon’s out.”

"I'm just worried about my handsome conjunx and my unborn twin sparklings. Is it really a crime to worry and dote over you, Blitzwing?"

"Well, no. But by breathing down my neck while I'm trying to coordinate this fragging combat mission plan, you're making it impossible for me to do my job!"

At Blitzwing's side, standing at a distance from the couple of dunderheads, Starscream began to pout — a cross expression spreading across his faceplate.

"Oh, by the Allspark! If I have to keep listening to you two morons argue over literally nothing, then perhaps it should be made a crime." Starscream snarked.

From the rafters, hanging on a network of webs, Blackarachnia let out an uncharacteristic snort.

"Maybe if we petition hard enough, we make it a crime against Cybertron itself." She joked.

At Blackarachnia's remark, Blitzwing whipped his helm up to give her a withering look.

"Shut up, insect!" He exclaimed. "Ugh! Here I am — trying to advance the Decepticon cause, only to be met with idiots all around me trying to sabotage me. It's almost like you mechs want us to fall behind in the game of galatic conquest!"

Starscream gasped in offense, as Blackarachnia began to slip back into the shadows.

"You know, Blitzwing, maybe if we do fall behind, perhaps our lovely, lousy Lord Megatron will learn better than not to assign a idiotic mutated madmech that can't even see over his own bloated chassis and cockpit as his chief tactician." Starscream pointed a clawed servo at the gravid triple changer. "Then, after we envitably fail this campagin, you will all fianlly realize who should really be the Lord of the Decepticons!"

After Starscream's rant, an uneasy silence fell over the remaining trio of mechs standing in the command center. In an unexpected move, Blitzwing seemed to shrink into his own frame at Starscream's colorful insults, his shoulders slumping down in an attempt to make his prominent bump seem smaller in comparison to his chestplate. His face plate begin to whirl as the tactician tried to think of a good defensive response. Starscream watched with a smug expression as the triple changer began to fold like a house of cards.

"I…— I'm not a—" Blitzwing began to stammer. "I'm not a idiotic mutant! You're the idiot here, Starscream!"

"Oh, really? Is that all you have to say to me then?" Starscream taunted.

Blitzwing felt hot, angry tears fill his optics.

"Shut up, Starscream! You don't know what you're talking about." The triple changer barked.

At his beloved's distress, Lugnut attempted to pull Blitzwing into his arms, but the triple changer merely shrugged the bomber's off. Instead of further humiliating himself, the triple changer began to make an unwieldy exit from the war room, waddling away on unsteady pedes. Starscream snickered in amusement at the pathetic sight — before he suddenly bristled upon the feeling of a pincer grabbing tightly on one of his pauldrons. The seeker slowly turned his helm around to find Lugnut's set of five ruby quartz optics staring down at him.