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Rodimus adjusted the way his pedes were folded beneath him, trying to move his exhaust pipes far enough away from his thighs that they weren’t digging into the seam lines, but the way his knees jointed was not having any of it, and he found himself uncurling in his chair and letting his pedes drop back to the floor, tingling and sleepy.
He looked at them instead of the screen of his databank, idly shifting the platelets around his ankles up and down the transformation seams of his calves, watching them fractalize in and out of various states of solidity.
“Rodimus.”
Rodimus continued to flare the platelets along the tops of his pedes, watching the vents beneath shutter closed to compensate, spiralling metal vectorizations. Kind of astounding to think that it was really his feet doing that, something he’d had Ratchet rebuild a hundred times when he landed too hard or got them blown off carelessly by enemy fire.
The toes of his pedes split open and folded back against the heel, rolling up along the line of his shin before flicking back down to their proper root mode alignment.
“Rodimus. You need to sign it.”
“I know,” Rodimus said, leaning up on his elbows against the armrests and tucking his pedes back into the chair beneath him.
Minumus stepped up beside his chair, the side he was leaning most heavily on and eyed him with softer optics than usual.
“Do you not want to approve the request?”
“I do!” Rodimus blurted defensively, jerking up, “I do. I will.”
“Because, you know, it needs to be approved by the Captain, so it’s either you or Megatron, and only you can revoke his sentence-”
“I know! Primus, okay, I know. Look, pit, I’m signing it,” Rodimus grabbed the stylus from his desk and hastily scrawled the glyphs of his name onto the bottom of the docking request, before hovering over the send button, hand shaking, only but slightly.
“Rodimus?” Minimus asked again, looking up at him. Rodimus hated looking down at him- he was so used to the reverse, it made him anxious, uncomfortable, on edge. He wished everything would go back to how it was before all this slag happened, but now Minimus had shelved the armour-
And Drift was waiting in a shuttle orbiting the Lost Light and waiting for him to approve the docking request.
“I just-” Rodimus’s hand quivered again, “I don’t- do- do you want to put the armour back on? He might not recognize y-”
“He knows my field, Rodimus. Don’t stall.”
Rodimus knew Minimus was right, but Primus, he didn’t want to deal with this. He didn’t think he could deal with this.
He hit the send button on the request approval and slammed the databank shut, fisting his hands over his optics and crumpling forward onto the table with a groan.
“You did the right thing,” Minimus commented, and Rodimus made a sharp noise, before peeking one optic out from under his fists to glare at him.
“I know. It’s his fragging ship, whether he gave it to me or not,” Rodimus buried his hesd again, “Stupid fragger bought the thing.”
“Fine,” Minimus said, turning sharply, “I’ll take care of the docking procedures, then, get Drift and Ratchet properly sorted. Did you want to come?”
“I-” Rodimus ran his hands over the back of his helm, sighing deeply, “No, I can’t, I have too much paperwork to go through.”
“Rodimus, you never do paperwork.”
Rodimus whipped around to glare at him, “It’s never to late to start, Mags-”
The silence hung in the air, before Minimus turned quietly and keyed open the office door, “Fine.”
The door slid shut behind him and Rodimus let his forehead sink to the table, hissing.
The hallway was empty, the lights dimmed to account for the regular off shift, but still lit enough to see easily by. Drift had insisted on a solitary habsuite, a request he’d approved with another sloppy signature and little else, and he was a little- more than a little- overcharged right now, jittering outside of Drift’s habsuite, one hand fisted against the door as if to knock- and he couldn’t make it do so.
He had no right to speak to Drift. He had no right to be here, at his door at three in the morning, tipsy and afraid with apologies on his tongue- this was all his fragging fault no matter what Drift had said, and odds were that by now, with all this time to think about the situation, Drift had realized that, too.
He wouldn’t want to see him. He didn’t want to see him.
Rodimus turned sharply and stomped down the hallway, fists balled at his sides, before halting suddenly and pacing back to the door to knock again, only to stop and growl in frustration, pacing back away and down the hall.
Drift would never, ever forgive him. And how could he? Rodimus hadn’t forced him to see reason, Rodimus hadn’t looked for him, Rodimus had waited too long to make it right and still hadn’t done so properly. If Rodimus couldn’t even forgive himself, no, Primus, there was no way Drift could.
“Roddy?”
Rodimus didn’t dare turn around. He didn’t dare risk seeing the disapproval on Drift’s faceplates- he knew Drift wasn’t going to forgive him, but the confirmation as such would probably bury him.
Drift caught up to him when he’d dipped around the third unfamiliar bend in the labyrinthian hallways of the residential sector and down a dead end.
Rodimus was huffing and puffing, vents flared open and desperately sucking in air and the phrase “panic attack” echoed in his processor, but he couldn’t remember what it meant and Drift’s footsteps were moving closer, so he offlined his optics and tensed, bracing-
“I missed you.”
Rodimus onlined his optics, face to face with Drift, who looked more concerned than disaproving, whose hand was reaching for him, and he recoiled, violently, engine revving, straight back into the corridor wall.
“Frag- I- Drift- I didn’t-” he stammered, trying to reboot his blurry optics but it wasn’t working, and-
Drift hugged him.
It was like he’d grounded him, a blown fuse, and all that electricity, all that hate and hurt and guilt poured out of him and through Drift and harmlessly into the ground. It was just gone. Just like that. Like it was easy.
“I’m glad to be back,” Drift said softly, and Rodimus clung to him, fingers digging into the platelets of Drift’s back and trying to pull him closer.
“I’m glad you’re back, too,” he hissed through static, crushing his face into Drift’s neck, “I didn’t think- I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, and-”
“Better things than what I found have tried to kill me,” Drift laughed, “And all failed. When you- when you didn’t- when Mag- Minimus was the one who was waiting when I docked, I thought- you didn’t want to see me, that I-”
“Frag no, I wanted to see you, I just thought- I didn’t think I had the right to, after- I thought you wouldn’t ever want to speak to me again-”
Drift pulled their foreheads together quietly, in the dim light of the dead end corridor, “I missed you.”
Rodimus let his optics unshutter, still bleary with lubricant, “I missed you, too.”