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Prowl would not have necessarily stated that he was particularly outgoing before Praxus. He was happy enough, he had friends, he had his routine and his job as an enforcer.
Not that it all mattered once Praxus fell.
He survived - that much was obvious. His spark still spun and his HUD attacked him with error messages and updates, but still painfully alive. What had ruined him was when he realized that he was one of two who had survived. Prowl and a tiny youngling found on the other side of the city.
The Autobots who had found him had called him “officer,” a brutal reminder to his oaths.
To serve and protect, were the words emblazoned across his doorwings.
Serve and protect who, he was forced to ask himself.
Aside from what few other Praxians remained scattered across Cybertron, having been out of the city before its fall, there was only the tiny youngling they had found - Bluestreak.
His enforcer coding latched onto the youngling like a vice and refused to let go - there was no city to protect anymore, so he would do everything in his power to protect the young Praxian. The one citizen he could still serve.
What had driven the loss deep into his spark was the move to Iacon. Lacking anywhere else to live, Prowl accepted the housing offered by the Autobots. He accepted the position they offered him in their tactical department.
Prowl chose an apartment in Iacon’s Little Praxus in an attempt to provide Bluestreak a somewhat familiar environment and peers when he returned to school.
Bluestreak adapted. There was no doubt from Prowl, who found Bluestreak crawled into his berth from another nightmare almost every night cycle, or the younglings therapist that he was traumatized by the events that had taken place in Praxus. Bluestreak was terrified, but he adapted.
Prowl took to the new surroundings with far less ease.
Little Praxus reminded him of Praxus, yet brutally reminded him that it was not. The Praxian flag hung alongside that of Iacon, the memorials for the fallen city and lost relatives placed almost everywhere he looked, the Iaconian enforcers patrolling the streets.
The sea of doorwings and pitying looks laid upon his own, his service mark paints and enforcer emblem scratched. It was impossible for Prowl to fix his wings - it was impossible to find the correct paints in Iacon.
They were only available in Praxus.
It was a month after P- after they had moved to Iacon, late at night when Prowl broke.
He had seen Bluestreak asleep in his berth and was attempting to tidy some of the younglings strewn datapads in the main area of the apartment. Bluestreak had been scribbling away diligently at his homework before Prowl sent him to recharge.
The thing that broke Prowl was not the pitying looks, the enforcers patrolling streets that should have been his or the condolences he was offered at every turn.
It was one of Bluestreak’s textbooks - of Iaconian history.
Everything became crushing, his pretenses went crashing down.
Prowl returned to his own room in a daze.
Everything was gone - the citizens, the culture, the streets, his job, his coworkers, his friends, everything he had devoted his life to Praxus was gone.
Prowl jacked into his own processor. He had to erase the weight that was slowly crushing his spark.
He was thorough, as he was in everything he did.
He lingered over the coding of his emotional cortex.
Deleting his emotional coding was perhaps far too drastic a change, he would need to practically cut any sensor connections to his spark to achieve such a feat - and he still needed to be able to protect and provide some level of stability for Bluestreak.
After a moment’s thought, he turned his attention to his emotion identification subroutines. If they were gone, he could still behave normally and take care of Bluestreak, he just wouldn’t be forced to face the guilt crushing his spark.
DELETE: EMOTIONAL CORTEX: IDENTIFICATION SUBROUTINE?
He could return the subroutines when Bluestreak was older.
[YES] NO
When the war was over.
SUBROUTINE: [DELETED]
Prowl crashed.
Not much changed - his spark still spun heavily, but without the means to identify why the gazes upon his doorwings affected him, or why he twitched every time someone offered him their condolences. Bluestreak occasionally gave him odd looks, and he hadn’t been particularly close to any of his coworkers in the tactical department prior.
He adapted.
The war went on.
Prowl was effective in his work as tactician - he kept as many mecha as possible alive, and rose to the position of Chief Tactical Officer and Second in Command of the Autobot Army.
The only two that he knew of feeling any sort of attachment to him were Bluestreak and Smokescreen, a fellow Praxian who had transferred to tactics later in the war.
In terms of his identification subroutines, Prowl had not accounted for its ability to self-regenerate.
He supposed it was natural it to be able to do so - it was not as if sparks emerged and processors built with the ability to fully understand the impulses of their emotional cortex.
Prowl understood it was ultimately futile to attempt to keep his processor fully clear of the little threads of code that kept weaving themselves back together - he simply set an algorithm to clear them whenever they became too prevalent.
His processor crashed each time and sent itself into a hard reboot.
It was painful, but Prowl continued to operate at maximum efficiency, clear space in his processor wherein emotional entanglements formerly resided.
He did not worry about the weight that settled in his tanks with each casualty report that crossed his desk, the twitch in his sensory panels with each disgusted look that crossed him.
He heard the whispers of ‘drone’ and ‘sparkless’, and he could tell why the words made his wings sag - but it was no matter to him.
The war went on.
Caught up as he was in the war and all its crises, Prowl was uncertain when precisely Jazz had become so… close to him.
Subroutines absent as they were, Prowl was unable to identify the meaning or intent behind Jazz’s actions. The head of SpecOps often stood too close, or let his hands linger too long on Prowl’s plating whenever they touched.
By the time the war continued onto Earth, Jazz had made himself comfortable in Prowl’s personal space. A lean of Prowl’s shoulder here, an arm around his waist there.
Prowl’s spark felt like it was suffocating and combusting every time, and he could not tell why.
He could not quite identify the flush that crossed his face each time Jazz leaned in too close. Going to Ratchet for the possibility of a malfunction yielded no further explanation - the medic had simply stared at him for several moments before sighing and telling Prowl that he was functioning perfectly fine.
It all came to a head when Jazz leaned in close.
Prowl made no attempt to move, the movement not seeming out of place after years of it.
It rapidly became out of place when Jazz kissed him.
Prowl could feel his subroutines roar to life with a ferocity they hadn’t had since Praxus.
Jazz liked Prowl.
Jazz liked Prowl romantically.
His spark felt as if it were trying to burst out of its chamber, and his frame tensed and heated.
After a moment, Jazz pulled away with a small smile on his face that quickly dropped when he noticed Prowl’s utter lack of movement.
“Prowl?” he asked uncertainly.
NOTIFICATION: IDENTIFICATION SUBROUTINE THRESHOLD REACHED
Prowl’s processor stuttered as he finally registered his frame’s reaction.
DELETE: EMOTIONAL CORTEX: IDENTIFICATION SUBROUTINE?
His sparks reaction.
SUBROUTINE: AUTOMATIC DELETION: [ENABLED]
Prowl realized how he felt about Jazz.
[YES] NO
He l-
SUBROUTINE: [DELETED]
Prowl crashed.