Chapter Text
Smokescreen sat on a chair while Prowl slumped on the floor. The perp that Prowl had chased down earlier in the orn had been unusually heavy armed. Prowl had been lucky that the mech had only managed to graze him instead of punching a hole through Prowl's sensor wing, no matter how much it hurt. Smokescreen's hands were gentle as they used tools to clean the scoring and remove all the signs of charring and deformed metal. Prowl hissed as Smokescreen probed the surroundings of the wound where a thin tracery of cracks splintered outward, searching for weaknesses in his sensor wing's plating.
"Sorry," he murmured soothingly but he didn't stop working. The sooner the wound was cleaned, the sooner self-repair could start working properly, and the sooner Prowl would recover. Prowl was wound tighter than a tensor cable. When he was done, Smokescreen ran his hand lightly over the cleaned but still damaged wing, careful not to hit any sensors that would fill Prowl with pain from his injury. He might be done with his work, but there was something else he could do to help ease the pain and speed along Prowl's repairs.
Smokescreen pulled out something out of subspace that he had been waiting to give to Prowl as a gift but had been trying to wait for the right moment to offer it. It was a simple white box, completely unmarked, but the real gift was inside. Carefully, Smokescreen unsealed the lid, and immediately a distinctive scent wafted outward. From the way that Prowl straightened, head turning, he knew that his Core's olfactory sensors had picked it up too. It was a sharp, new-metal scent.
"Smokescreen?" Prowl asked, optics wide, focused on the shifting, shimmering pool of silver nanites in the box.
"It was going to be a gift," Smokescreen said, dipping a thin paddle into the container, "but I think this is a better cause than waiting, no?" The paddle was made of a special non-conducting metal so as to not accidentally bind the nanites to his own energy field or frame. He removed it from the box and lifted it to Prowl's injured wing. Smokescreen began filling in the cracks first, the cool, strange sensation causing Prowl to shudder slightly at the nanites went to work. This particular grade of nanites was rather high for mechs of their standing as they didn't simply repair damage. They numbed pain, repaired damage, and then melded seamlessly with the rest of the mech's coloring, if the area they were repairing was a single color. For a little while they would be weak, but soon they would be as strong as new, strengthening an overall structure if they were high enough quality. On Enforcers like themselves it was easy enough to match since their coloring nanites were all programed to a simple gloss white.
"A most... appreciated gift," Prowl said, the rest of his frame flinching when Smokescreen began filling in the pitted scores.
Smokescreen chuckled, "You don't sound very appreciative."
Prowl snorted but hissed again as the cool nanites were coated onto the insides of the worst of the wound. "I am. Trust me. Just hard to sound like it when actually being worked on at the moment." He let out a grating sound as Smokescreen pressed against the wound, sealing the nanites beneath a clear coating, but then relaxed nearly completely when the nanites began doing their job. He sighed in relief, silver streaked wing pressing against Smokescreen's open palm, "Thank you, my Wing."
Smokescreen pressed an air light affectionate caress against Prowl's wing tip. "I like taking care of you." He slowly moved his way across Prowl's wing, skirting the silver-streaked spots. When he reached Prowl's back, he swapped his hand for nuzzling Prowl's neck, "Always have."
"Liar," Prowl said lightly, teasingly.
Smokescreen hummed in amusement, "Oh alright, I admit it. I didn't always know you, so therefore I didn't always. I am a liar." He lightly traced teasing, aimless patterns against the surface Prowl's uninjured sensor wing with the very tip of his finger, making it flutter away from his touch and back into it.
"And a tease too," Prowl murmured, optics dimming.
"And a tease too," Smokescreen agreed happily, feeling Prowl's systems slowing down, "Going to recharge here on the floor?"
"Hmm?" Prowl's optics brightened a little, "...Ah. I shouldn't." Despite Smokescreen's disappointment at needing to move, when Prowl made a move to rise, the Wing stood and offered his hand, dragging the tired mech to his pedes. Somehow, they wound up in an embrace, Prowl's arms wrapping around Smokescreen's chassis to steady himself, and Smokescreen's arms thrown over Prowl's shoulders.
Prowl stared at him for a moment, but then he slowly lowered his helm to rest against the top of Smokescreen's shoulder, nuzzling closer. "Tired," Prowl whispered, leaning against him.
"My berth is right over there," Smokescreen reminded Prowl after a moment of checking the Enforcer's comm nets, "and the Commandant isn't going to be coming around for several joor at least."
"Mmm..." Prowl nodded his helm slightly, fingers absently stroking in small circles against Smokescreen's lower back.
Smokescreen laughed lowly, "Okay, you've had enough. I get it." He slowly walked Prowl backward until the backs of his legs were touching the edge of the berth and helped him lay down on it. Nudging his Core over, Smokescreen sidled onto the berth, arms wrapping around Prowl and holding him close. Despite Prowl's tiredness, caused in part by the mech's workaholic tendencies of previous orns, part by hard orn that had just ended, and part by the nanites siphoning his energy for healing, Smokescreen was near to purring from being able to hold his Core so close. They weren't able to find much time together recently. Smokescreen had just gotten a promotion and that had only left them with even less time together than usual.
He lifted his head and whispered into Prowl's audial like he was sharing a secret, "Love you."
Prowl's EM field wrapped around him, and Smokescreen felt Prowl's systems fall completely into recharge.
When Smokescreen came out of recharge, the first thing that he noticed was that Prowl was missing from the berth. The next thing that he noticed was that Prowl was stalking back and forth across his room, a data pad held in one hand as he worked on it furiously with the other. Smokescreen sighed, disappointed but not very surprised. That was his Prowl: workaholic extraordinaire. He propped his helm up on his hands, tilted slightly to the side, watching the faintly agitated twitch of Prowl's sensor wings. When Prowl swung by again with his uninjured sensor wing on the leading side, he reached out and gently grasped the edge of it, effortlessly derailing Prowl's pacing before he wore a path in the reinforced plating of the floor. "What has you in such a bad mood already?" Smokescreen asked lazily to Prowl's stiff back.
"Commandant Blacklist's new aide," Prowl said flatly, but he was nearly vibrating with restrained wrath, "is the spawn of the Unmaker and should be struck from existence as an aberration in the natural order."
Smokescreen let go of Prowl's wing and sat up, shocked by Prowl's level of fury. "Whoa... What did he do?"
Prowl thrust to data pad at him and resumed pacing, fists clenching and unclenching into fitfully. With trepidation, Smokescreen began to read. At first it didn't seem like anything special, besides being a rather dry read, but then Smokescreen's reading came to a screeching halt.
...new teams will replace the obsolete ones. The obsolete Enforcers will be decommissioned and the resources from their scrapping will be put used for funds. The most profits will be made if the highest quality parts are separated out for sale and the rest melted down for base metals...
The report clinically went into gruesomely excruciating detail on how each and every piece of them could be put to use. Smokescreen shuddered. Slant Shot had to go if this was what he was going to try to do... They were just lucky it wasn't Blacklist that was the one to come up with this. "The Elder's already seen this... plan?" The word was said like a vile curse.
Prowl gave a stiff nod. "He passed it on to Downlink as we have the most clade-members here, and Downlink wants all of us to attempt to contact one of the other Enforcer contingents."
"Us" as in Cores, Smokescreen assessed. And their Wings too. "Are we wanting to make it look like an accident?" Smokescreen asked neutrally, "Standard protocols?"
Prowl shook his head, "We decided that an accident would be best, but if need be, we would have something staged."
Spread the news that Slant Shot was a danger and needed to be vanished, and soon. They couldn't do anything about this directly, but if they could get into contact with Enforcers in a different contingent, a contingent that was not under Blacklist or Slant Shot's influence... Staging the mech's death would be difficult as usually it was hard enough thinking even as far as getting word out to other contingents. Further processing was mostly partitioned in a lateral thought path that was one of the ways that they thought traitorous things that they shouldn't be able to and follow through, even when they are not entirely sure why they are doing certain things.
That Prowl was able to say something like that out loud was a shocking reminder of the loosening of the obedience code.
"Really?" Smokescreen said, a little surprised for a moment, but then he nodded. "It makes sense," he muttered. Most mechs weren't usually directly out to extinguish them. Slant Shot looked like he was out for nothing but.
In a tragic accident the Commandant's new assistant, Slant Shot, died despite attempts to save him after a run-in with a mass transit vehicle.
When Soundcloud showed up the next orn both Prowl and Smokescreen greeted the news as it was certainly welcome, but they really hadn't expected their current bane to be run over by a bus. After asking a few more questions, Prowl dismissed his Voice.
"So... Was that planned?" Smokescreen asked curiously, unsure. It seemed rather fast for a response from one of the other contingents.
"Not so far as I am aware," Prowl said, a baffled note in his voice, "No matter how fortuitous it was."
"Huh." Smokescreen shared in the bafflement for a moment before he let loose a snicker. "What a way to go..." he snickered again, "...run over by a bus of all things." He let out a strangled sound, "Better yet, he did it all by himself, without any 'help.'"
Smokescreen sidled up to his Core and wrapping an arm around his waist, "You know it's funny, Prowl."
Prowl gave Smokescreen's crest an offhanded flick, "Hush, you."
Smokescreen simply snikered, completely unrepentant. Prowl just hated random events like these. Luck was something that Prowl had a standoffish relationship with, even though he recognized its existence, Smokescreen knew that he would have preferred that there was no such thing.
Prowl shook his head, a slight tilt of his wings being the only sign that he agreed with Smokescreen, "Fine. I agree. It is pretty funny."
Smokescreen beamed at the victory.