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He knew, he’d seen, that Rodimus had a steady hand. He’d sat there and watched as Rodimus scrawled scribbles and doodles and glyphs into the surfaces of desks and tables and weapons and the backs of datapads that weren’t even his, laser pen moving with a steady precision borne of vorn of practice, never faltering or skipping or wobbling, Rodimus not even looking at what he was doing.
And yet, he kept wanting to turn, to twist and take over, to seize the brush and do it himself.
“You know,” said Rodimus, his voice sounding far more irritated than the amused tone he’d taken the first time he’d had to say something. “If you keep twitching like that then I’m actually gonna slag this up.”
“That a threat?” asked Drift lightly, redirecting the nervous energy in his hydraulics to expel the hot air from the vents under his bumper, forcing his plating to lie flat and still once more.
“Yeah,” said Rodimus with a snigger. “‘Cause if I do slag it up then I’m gonna go ahead and make it even worse on purpose so it looks like I meant to do it.”
“Guess I better behave,” said Drift, smiling into the pillow under his face, finial twitching behind his head in affection and good humour.
“Yeah, less you wanna end up with a handprint riiiiiiiight here—”
Rodimus used the wet brush to trace inside a sensitive seam right at the top of Drift’s thigh plate and he yelped, leg jerking up in an aborted kick that clanged against Rodimus’s side and arms loudly over Rodimus’s laughter.
“You jackass—” said Drift, but he could hardly pretend to be angry through the laughter clouding his vocaliser.
“No seriously,” said Rodimus, giving up any pretense at seriousness and leaning more of his weight down against Drift’s legs. “Nice big public event, lots of people who barely know us outside of our outsize reps—”
Outsize was one word for it.
“—you gonna stop laughing? No? Any- way, lots of people seeing us all prettied up in our formal glyphs with a great big silver hand smeared up your aft proving to half of Cyber-frickin-tron how much I love grabbing on you, I mean, I’m basically a Prime in ways that actually matter—”
Only Rodimus would think that the ways that ‘actually mattered’ were the limited privileges associated with the weird, halfway-acknowledged, in-limbo state of his position in the eyes of the government.
“—so I mean it practically signifies that you’ve been chosen by the hands of Primus in some weird way, I think that counts as formal, it’s godly, you’re seeing godliness, how much more Primal and formal-dressed can you even get—”
Mind you, Drift enjoyed their halfway, liminal state of expectations that let them bullshit around figuring out what they wanted to do and accepted their half-assed explanations and only called them back on occasion.
“—Drift? Are you even listening to me?”
It let them make their own purpose. He smiled into the pillow under his face, and guessed. “Something about how you’ll make me see God?”
Rodimus snorted, gently dabbing a fingertip at the plating on his back and lifting to roll Drift over. Presumably dry, Drift slowly brought his optical sensitivity back up to look at Rodimus in the lights around their berth. Rodimus’s face was crooked with that smug little smirk he got when he thought he’d pulled one over on Drift. “Don’t I already do that?” he said with a quirk of his optical ridge, lip twitching up over the fang he broke and usually took pains not to show off.
His hands skated teasingly along the seams where Drift’s waist dipped into his hips. Flirtatious then, different kind of smug. Drift smiled back, letting his tongue slip slowly behind lips, just a flash that drew Rodimus’s eyes, straight to his mouth, the optics spiralling tight with focus. “I don’t think we have time for that now,” he said, dragging Rodimus’s gaze back up to his eyes.
Rodimus laughed, leaning in and kissing him.
When Drift glanced in the mirror before they left all the glyphs and swirls down his side and back to state and decorate his position, his official relation to Rodimus, and of course, Cybertron as a whole, were precise and elegant, familiar.
It wasn’t until later, at the event, when a jet he didn’t recognise looked a little too long at the section of glyphs curving down his back towards his hips that it occurred to him Rodimus might not have been entirely joking. He casually sauntered over to a section of the room decorated in black metal plates polished to a mirror, and leaned against a tall table that was there for the purpose.
It took a moment, but he found them, the more modern glyphs going down the left-most back of his hip, aft and thigh, right where he couldn’t see them without twisting, twining with the older, formal glyphs so they wouldn’t be immediately noticed. The topmost ones were an unbearably filthy ditty about handprints in spark chambers that almost made Drift snort. Underneath it however, it said, ‘Rodimus was here’ and Drift’s eyes widened, freezing in place as he realised what he was now wearing under his good polish.
When he looked up, Rodimus was watching him from across the room with that same, pleased smirk, optics dark and challenging.