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The War was over. Four million years of fighting, just like that. Cybertron had been reset, NAILs were coming home, and frankly Chromedome could not remember ever having this much free time, ever. Rewind managed to keep somewhat busy, with his search for Dominus having picked up in full with so many new mechs and so much new data to comb through, and his commissions from Optimus Prime to make historical documentaries for the NAILs to learn about their past.
Chromedome, in turn, found most of his days were spent going through a dusty backlog of books and sampling just about every restaurant, refinery, and shop he could find—whenever he was not tailing Rewind around and acting as a makeshift camera boom, that was. He could spend days sipping the hundreds of energon variants brought by people who had travelled the universe, watching the even broader variety of frames move around, and thinking about changing his own to celebrate the Great War's end—if he could just come up with something interesting to change it to.
But, even with Rewind's projects and Chromedome's slow but steady working of his way through everything the growing town had to offer, they still had several hours in the day left for themselves. Chromedome had not at all been surprised when Rewind suggested that they watched some apparently very popular animated Earth show that Swerve had gotten him, and which Swerve had apparently been uncharacteristically quiet about the plot of—simply stating that he wanted Rewind's opinion on the ending.
Chromedome got the required language pack from Rewind and settled down on the floor of the small room they had rented—the 'hotel' was little more than a hastily refurbished spaceship by an enterprising NAIL, but, it was clean and private enough for their needs while the rest of Cybertron was being retamed and rebuilt. And Chromedome would never complain about having to function as a chair for Rewind, especially if it meant he got to snuggle his tiny conjunx for the whole evening.
The show itself, though, was... confusing. He could understand the desire to use untested weapons against an overwhelming enemy, though the human characters' motivations was just too alien for him to fully comprehend—including why everything apparently depended on the underdeveloped humans rather than the mature ones. He did, however, notice the slight uptick in Rewind's EM field when the Evangelion-Unit-One showed up in full on the screen.
"You like the purple and green one?" Chromedome asked as the fourth episode came to an end and left him still completely in the dark about the actual plot other than the Apostles being enemies.
Rewind hummed an affirmative, zipping through the footage and paused on a clear shot of the lithe body. "The face isn't very appealing, but I admit the body's shape's quite attractive," he said.
Chromedome looked at the projection on the wall.
The slender waist. The long, thin legs. The columns rising from the shoulders, not entirely unlike his current, blocky smokestacks.
⁂
"Ain't the weirdest change ah've done, even dis week," the mech running the reframing shop had said while comparing Chromedome's sketch of Unit One to his current body. "Gonna 'ave to swap 'round a couple things, an' youse gonna get a new alt, but yeah, ah can do somefink similar to dis."
Chromedome had expected an adjustment period to get used to his new alt-mode, as he usually would. Even going from one type of car to a similar one meant slight changes in balance, torque, traction points, and gearing levels.
He had not expected that he would need just as much of an adjustment period to get used to his new frame in root-mode.
The reframer had done an impressive job, all things considered—Chromedome had spent all of his life with the same blocky, mostly rectangular build of many others; standard and common. But now, he would be hard pressed to find even a single straight line on himself when he looked in the mirror.
His legs were skinny, stripped of bulky armour and trimmed to little more than plating and thin wiring over the struts, drawing the eye up to his knees and further up. The pegs on his hips accentuated the slenderness of his waist and emphasised the width of his torso, and leading to the sheer bulk of his shoulders, exaggerated further by his new wheels to make his shoulders stand out. His exhausts had been removed from their blocky housing, letting them act as decoration, while lending height and mass. Even his finials had been adjusted, softening his face and making it seem rounder. And yet, he was still, recognisably so, himself.
It was a design that would have had no place on the battlefield. Too top-heavy, too thinly armoured, too unique to hide in a crowd.
Perfect for peaceful times.
And, once he had returned home and Rewind had demonstrated—repeatedly and very enthusiastically—just how appreciative he was of the new frame, Chromedome discovered that the new rounded bulk of his torso also happened to make him ideally shaped to give cuddles.