Chapter Text
When Rodimus thought about it, Drift was kind of weird.
He didn't remember exactly when he started fragging Drift — it couldn't have been that long after Rodimus had taken the helm of the Lost Light and properly settled in from its obligatory maiden disaster. Was it before Delphi? After Delphi? Rodimus had no idea; he had simply one day began smashing that. It was such a natural progression that it barely felt as if anything had become different in the first place — graduating to physically shoving his rod down Drift's throat honestly wasn't that radical a change from the probably professionally inappropriate degree of figurative fellatio in which they had previously been engaged. The amount of time Rodimus spent drunk probably didn't help his recollection any.
So, he didn't much think about how weird Drift was. He didn't actively think about Drift much at all, really — or perhaps Drift was simply such an omnipresent feature of his mind that he didn't need to. Drift was just always there. He did everything with Drift; he spoke to him constantly, spent practically all of his time with him, and generally made all of his decisions with the granted assumption that his third-in-command would remain effectively grafted to his hip. Drift was integrated into Rodimus's life practically to the point that he was imperceptible as a distinct entity, like his shadow, if his shadow occasionally came over and started jacking him off super enthusiastically.
Maybe the weird thing was how little all the weird things about Drift even registered. Most of it Rodimus just shrugged off with uh, yeah, I guess I'd be a huge tryhard too if I used to be a Decepticon, or haha yeah I guess killing like a million people and then hanging out with all their friends is probably awkward, or, 'achieving an asomatous apotheosis of the spirit via carnal commutation' is a metaphor for you're about to eat me out, right? Haha cool. Some of it wasn't so easily explained, though — like the fact he never made a damn noise while getting railed.
It wasn't just like Drift was a little quieter than normal. He had to be straight up manually disabling his voice box, because he certainly never had a problem producing copious amounts of unintelligible blather in other contexts. If you'd asked Rodimus a year ago if it would be weird trying to stimulate somebody who was just sort of sitting there, silently judging you, he would've been like, hell yeah, that would be super weird and probably awful, I will check out of having that experience. But it really wasn't weird — he barely even noticed it after the first time, and the first time wasn't weird enough to even bother asking what the deal was. Rodimus never had to ask what the deal was. With Drift, the deal was simply the deal, and the deal was chill.
While Drift lacked in acoustic bluster, he was almost obscenely expressive in every other metric. Rodimus spent his time with Drift with his attention rapt to the slightest of reactions, himself oddly hushed — or about as close as he could ever be voluntarily inclined. He couldn't hear Drift, but he could see it in the way Drift's optics flared in brilliant color, blind and uncontrolled until they sparked back into darkness; how the light of his hypercharged spark blared from the seams of his chest; from the straining tension in his cables, the curve of his frame arched up into every touch; the hitching of his vents and his trembling, gasping lips which formed words Rodimus needn't read to comprehend. And when Drift kissed him it was as if he were sure he were about to die, painfully desperate and charged with a passion that burned Rodimus as readily as it enflamed him — Rodimus was never certain what it was, how that felt, other than that it was dangerous and powerful and wild, and while he didn't know that he liked it, he nevertheless found himself wanting more.
And Drift was always, always willing to give more, of everything he had to give. Drift's hands grasped for him purposefully, and when he ran his shaking fingers over Rodimus's plates it was in worship; Drift hungered for the most basic of contact with a lustful ferocity. Rodimus could kiss him anywhere — the tip of a finger, his lips, the cables of his neck, between his thighs — and Drift would dissolve, utterly robbed of any semblance of composure or restraint. He surrendered so easily, and so earnestly needed to please. It made Rodimus feel ridiculously powerful.
Touching Drift itself was a thrill. His frame coursed with palpable energy; just running his hands down Drift's sides would leave Rodimus with a contact high, and he felt himself just as ridiculous and needy as Drift as they rolled and kissed and rut against each other as if everything weren't quite enough. Rodimus was absolutely obsessed with Drift's body, and all of the apparently inexhaustible pleasures it had to give. If he didn't nominally have a number of duties that required his attention as captain, he wasn't sure he would do literally anything other than bang Drift.
Not that Rodimus didn't make a damned good effort at doing so anyway. For instance, he had just spent the last two or so hours eating Drift out. Like, just that, and he wasn't even close to bored. It ruled, and because Rodimus was an implacable titan of bestial prowess, he was completely prepared to keep going for the next six hours to Hedonia. The only thing that stopped him was Drift.
Drift's vocalizer sounded run ragged when he enabled it, even for all the work it hadn't actually been doing over the past hours. "Rodimus," he called out — but not in, like, a hot way. When he did let himself speak, it was never in the hot way. He actually wanted Rodimus's attention, apparently. Rodimus looked up from between Drift's legs to meet his gaze, but before Rodimus could ask what he wanted, Drift burst into laughter. "Haha, sorry, your face — it's just — yeah."
Rodimus didn't exactly have a mirror on hand, but a quick touch to his faceplates gave him enough of an idea what he probably looked like. Primus — he had this stuff splattered on his forehead.
Drift also had a number of odd anatomical peculiarities, not the least of which being his decidedly overactive lubrication system. Considering the also odd undersizing of his array, it was more a blessing than a curse during proper interface. But for oral — it wasn't like Drift tasted bad, but perpetually gulping down mouthfuls of valve fluid over a long period of time was not Rodimus's foremost idea of fun. Instead, he elected to just let it run down his chin as it came — and in addition to turning whatever surface they happened to be upon into a slip-n-slide, it had the effect of completely saturating his face in fluids. He probably looked like a serial killer. Rodimus contemplated putting down a tarp.
Whatever. He didn't really care. It'd wash off. Rodimus wiped away the worst of the discomforting wetness and climbed up Drift's body to collapse beside him. "What's up?" he asked, propping his head up with his elbow. His free hand found Drift's and laced with it, absently playing with his fingers.
Drift looked to their hands with a small smile; from the sound of his vents, he was still coming down hard from the overload. Rodimus could feel the heat and electricity radiating from his frame. "I just — if you want to spike me, it should probably be, uh, soon. My systems are going to start malfunctioning if I overload more than... maybe once or twice more." Drift never glanced up from Rodimus's hand, transfixed where Rodimus was gently rubbing circles over the seams of his palm.
Rodimus laughed. "Does that happen? I've never had that happen."
"It — yeah, it can happen. It sucks."
"All right. But nah, don't worry about it. I'm good. I already jacked off a couple times. Haha, did you not hear it?" Rodimus sidled up closer to Drift, and shifted so he could slide his hand back between Drift's legs. It was like slipping his fingers into a vat of Teflon. "Touching you's enough."
Drift's vocalizer hitched as Rodimus probed inside of his body. Even as he returned to silence, Rodimus could see the shape of his name on Drift's lips.
Rodimus dropped his tone to a low rumble, and whispered, romantically, "Come on, sit on my face."
Drift did not require especially much convincing to comply.
***
Rodimus ended up getting Drift off another three times before he had to call it quits.
It was hard not to be amused by the sight of Drift collapsing into a heap, heaving and utterly drained. Rodimus laughed easily as he laid down beside Drift and triumphantly took in the fruits of his labor. Drift's frame was crackling from the charge now — Rodimus watched with fascination as static visibly arced between Drift's shifting plates. Okay, yeah, Rodimus could see how that might mess with your systems.
Drift shifted to lie on his side, facing Rodimus with a tired but thoroughly satisfied smile. Drift was tremendously easy to please. Rodimus just had to sort of be there to reduce Drift to ecstasy, and the amount of appreciation he mustered in response to actual effort was astounding. It was pretty gratifying for Rodimus to know he could affect someone so intensely.
"I didn't break you, did I?" Rodimus asked. He reached out to fondly brush his thumb over the edge of Drift's mouth; he could feel Drift's frame hum under his touch.
"Not — not quite," Drift answered, his voice disrupted by static. "I just... really shouldn't move for... a while."
Rodimus reached out to draw Drift against him; coming into contact with somebody so wired was an interesting sensation, to say the least. Everywhere Drift's body touched his tingled with electric energy — it occupied some nebulous fluctuating space between pleasant and unpleasant and Rodimus wanted to push him away and hold him closer in equal measure. He wondered how it felt for Drift.
Whatever the answer was, Drift wasn't in much of a state to communicate it. He pressed his face into Rodimus's neck, and wrapped an arm tightly around his waist; Rodimus shivered when Drift vented softly over his sensitive cabling. As the bright light of Drift's optics flickered and went out, and the buzzing energy ebbed out of his body, Rodimus realized Drift had straight up run out battery and powered down. Damn.
Like hell he didn't feel smug about it.
Left to his own devices, Drift would be able to build up a bit of power on his own in recharge standby. But just because Rodimus was so damn magnanimous, he extricated himself from Drift's death grip and exerted the energy necessary to jack him into the ship's recharging dock. Satisfied, he stepped back to observe Drift in his sleep. Yeah, I did that, he thought.
Drift looked peaceful, apart from the horrifying explosion of fluids covering his lower body. It looked like he'd detonated a bomb down there. That was going to have to be Drift's problem.
Rodimus left out some energon for Drift to find when he woke up and slipped away to his quarters' washracks. He was going to need to take some serious time to thoroughly excavate all of Drift's dried up gunk from his cracks. It wasn't as if Rodimus regretted the day's choice of recreational activities, but the impetus to maintain the flimsy veneer that he and Drift were not interfacing like a swarm of horny scraplets made cleanup a bit of a drag. Ugh. Sometimes he wished Ultra Magnus would just follow through on his threats to leave already so Rodimus could just do whatever he wanted, as was his right as captain.
Unfortunately, Magnus and his stupid toaster slot head weren't actually going anywhere, and Rodimus didn't want to weather the six months of withering reprimands that would follow any hint that he and Drift were so engaged. Rodimus did his level best to clean his face; he had to return to the mirror three times to check for missed spots. There was always something stuck somewhere that got revealed when Rodimus assumed a certain facial expression. Eventually, he had to conclude that that was going to have to be the best he could do. When he emerged back into the main room of his quarters, reeking of chemical solvent, Drift was still sprawled out cold in his own mess.
For lack of anything better to do, Rodimus left his quarters to take a walk about the ship. Drift's capitulation was well timed — Rodimus figured they'd probably be entering within comms range of Hedonia fairly soon, so he just needed to kill a bit of time before then. He went down to the bar to have a little drink and idle chatter with the crew. Keep himself Cybertronian, you know. The last thing he wanted was to come off like Magnus.
It took much longer than he'd expected for Brainstorm to call him down to the bridge. He was starting to get antsy with nothing to do. Rodimus hated waiting.
He wasn't sure he recalled why he agreed to this in the first place. Like, sure, the drawings Brainstorm came up with of the Lost Light blowing up Decepticon warships with hyperpowerful proton missiles were super cool, but now that he was faced with the prospect of actually having to sit through the tedious negotiations, he was less enthused. Honestly, he wouldn't have even bothered to sit in if he weren't sure that Brainstorm would end up haggling them into a deal twice as illegal as whatever it was they were already involved in. Rodimus made a mental note to ensure Magnus was occupied for the transaction itself.
To his relief, Rodimus found that Perceptor was waiting with Brainstorm at the bridge when he arrived — that made things easier. He could really check out on this monotonous confabulation now.
Rodimus sat imperiously in his special captain's chair and commanded Brainstorm to hail the frequency he claimed was the key to mortiferous riches untold. Brainstorm and Perceptor were forced to stand at their captain's sides, because they weren't captain, and you didn't get to sit in the special chair unless you were captain.
The screen before them crackled with static for some time before they received an answer; unfortunately, the Hedonian alien who finally appeared on the screen was of a decidedly fleshy persuasion. It was wearing some ludicrously suspicious facial covering — to what purpose, Rodimus had no idea. Fleshlings all looked pretty much the same to him, distinguishable only by their inexplicable attachment to cloth bodily coverings.
Rodimus wasn't exactly an expert on alien facial expression — he hadn't the first clue what this thing's species even was — but from what he could see through its mask's crude eyeholes, it looked pissed. It had no idea they were calling, evidently; upon reflection, Rodimus probably should have investigated what Brainstorm was getting him into more closely. "Who is this? How have you contacted this number?" the alien hastily demanded. At least it spoke something Rodimus could understand.
Rodimus leaned forward in his chair and produced his most bold and winning smile. "My name is Rodimus Prime and I'm the cap—"
Brainstorm cut Rodimus off. "Whoa. I can't believe that number was actually real," Brainstorm said, gawking into the screen with incredulity. "And you aren't even an alien meatloaf hut or anything?"
The alien seemed poised to reply with admonishment, but Brainstorm's last comment caught it off guard. "I — Meatloaf hut?"
"Yeah? That's what you guys deliver out of your — delivery huts? It is, right? You know what I'm talking about — those loafs, the round ones, and they have your meats on them. I don't know what else to call them. You know what I mean?"
"Brainstorm," Rodimus tersely interjected.
"Look, I'm here to manufacture the deadliest weaponry in the known universe, not break down your dietary minutia —"
"Brainstorm."
"— see the briefcase? Of course you see the briefcase. No one who isn't extremely important is ever locked to a briefcase —"
"BRAINSTORM!"
Brainstorm wheeled on Rodimus like a whip, shouting back twice as loud, "WHAT?!"
"Brainstorm, you're making us look bad in front of the alien," Rodimus hissed. When he turned back to address the screen, he missed Brainstorm petulantly mouthing his words back at him with a sour face. "Sorry about him, he's new —"
"I'm not new!"
"— he's new and he doesn't know about things like not being insufferable. Anyway, we want to buy your missiles or whatever."
Something reminiscent of a sigh escaped the alien's rattling glutinous maw as it raised a mitt planted full of spindly fingers to pinch the space between its massive orbitals. "Who put you in contact with us?"
Brainstorm postured ostentatiously, boastfully reclaiming his cause to speak. "I'm pretty savvy to the Galactic Interweb, or as those of us in the know call it, the 'gWeb'," he proudly proclaimed. "I was having a civil and reasoned debate about the comparative value of traditional rocket munitions against photon ballistics on the weapons subsection of a popular imageboard, and when I suggested that jet propulsion dominated the arms industry for a reason, a fellow poster informed me that if I ever found myself within Hedonia's orbit, I should call this number and be shown otherwise."
At first, the alien appeared skeptical of Brainstorm's claims — but after narrowing its bulbous eyes, it leaned its head offscreen to conduct a heated correspondence in a language Rodimus didn't recognize. It was a protracted exchange. When it returned to the screen, it looked wry. "S'grixlak informs me that you insulted his brood mother, and he intends to slit your throat and spill your blood upon the ground of his people," the alien relayed in disinterested deadpan. "He says, 'say that to my face, not online, and see what happens.'"
"Tell S'grexlax that it's not my fault that his brood mother is a quivering tower of lard, and that I'd like to see him try, and I challenge him to quite frankly come at me."
"I will not tell S'grixlak these things. I will instead tell him that you apologize and beg for his forgiveness. This is in your best interest."
"What? No! I am not going to look like a weakling in front of S'grixlax. Put S'grisklax on the screen immediately and we'll finish this here and now."
Thankfully, the alien elected to ignore Brainstorm and return to business. "Is this line secure?"
For the first time since the call began, Perceptor spoke up. "Ah, yes. Extremely. We are operating on state-of-the-art communications technology; our encryption protocols..."
Rodimus didn't know what it was, but it was almost as if his neural system had built-in self-preservation code to completely block out all external stimulus whenever Perceptor began speaking. His optics glazed over and he sat back in his chair in an effort to at least look important. When he received a notification on his handheld comm, he fished it out to read its contents as inconspicuously as he could manage.
Rodimus only remembered where he was when his audial receptors caught a comment that was clearly directed at him.
"Are you texting right now?"
Rodimus slowly looked up at Brainstorm with a dry stare. Who did this guy think he was? "Uh... yeah," Rodimus answered; he managed to pack enough condescending derision into the short utterance that if Brainstorm continued to flout his authority he'd have to be remarkably stupid.
Brainstorm was remarkably stupid. "Oh, excuse me. I didn't mean to interrupt your attempts to make us look good in front of the alien."
Ugh. What a pain. "I assure you that this conversation is of the utmost importance," Rodimus lied. He cast a pointed glance back at the screen and the exceedingly exasperated alien featured thereupon. "The highly advanced neural processing system of a Cybertronian Matrix-bearer —"
"He's not even really a Prime, actually," Brainstorm clarified.
"— is capable of executing more than one task at a time. I'm listening."
Rodimus so wasn't listening.
It appeared that Rodimus picked a good point in the conversation to put his comm away and resume paying attention; Brainstorm and Perceptor — mostly Perceptor — had managed to reach an amenable agreement with the alien and the shanix figure Rodimus caught wasn't too exorbitant. The Lost Light could swing that. The fleshling sent over the coordinates for where they would meet for the transaction itself, and closed the call without so much as a parting death threat. As far as alien communications went, this one hadn't been so bad.
Rodimus was going to have to put together a team to go down for the arms deal. It was probably pretty illegal, which meant he had to get rid of Magnus, and he also had to maintain some semblance of discretion. He'd bring Perceptor and Brainstorm, because they already knew, and he'd bring Drift, because duh. Did they really need more than that? Eh. Maybe he'd see if Ratchet would come along. He wasn't going to worry about it.
All that was left to do was make it the rest of the way to Hedonia without being bothered. Rodimus excused himself from bridge and briskly returned to his quarters; thankfully, no one stopped to harangue him about anything on the way.
He let himself into his room. Everything was just as he'd left it, including the sight of Drift curled in his berth. He hadn't intended to disturb Drift at all, but it seemed Drift had set his recharge alert threshold pretty low — he began to stir as soon as he heard Rodimus enter the room.
"Hey," Rodimus fondly greeted him; Drift smiled as he sat up, as inordinately pleased to see his captain as he always was. Rodimus crossed the length of the room with a purpose: he climbed onto the berth and unceremoniously slung an arm over Drift's chest, pushed him down and kept him pinned where he belonged by force of aggressive intimacy. It was kind of awkward with the ship's clunky recharge cable in the way. "You've got no business being up," Rodimus informed him with authority.
Drift seemed mildly surprised by being effectively body checked onto his back, but made no particular effort to resist the restraint. "I'm fine," he insisted. "I don't want to spend too much time asleep. I'll meditate later and —"
"You said you were tired," Rodimus reminded him. "So shhh. Shut off your eyes. Go to sleep. I'll be here, you big clingy loser. I swear, it's like I'm babysitting humans again."
Drift gave Rodimus a withering look, but acceded, "Maybe I'll get... just another hour. Then I'll be fine."