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It started with a rock.
A very very shiny rock.
Rodimus could’ve just left it on the planet, which was full of weirdly shiny rocks like it, and he did really did try to, but something in his coding just wouldn’t let him.
When he was in Drift’s room later he realized exactly why he had grabbed it. There was a perfect spot for it on the right of his amica’s rock shelf.
It had a good enough aura to not end up out of the airlock as he saw it still sitting there over a week later.
Then it was a pen.
He found it in a bustling marketplace on a more mechanized planet so it was made for cybertronians. The pen was a beautifully polished silver fountain pen engraved with delicate red spirals.
Rodimus was so distracted by the shine of it that he ended up making it all the way back to the Lost Light before realizing he hadn’t paid for it. Whoops.
He made his way to the joint Captain's office and set it down in the middle of Megs’ desk along with a pack of paper he pulled from storage.
Megatron’s latest poetry night featured handwritten poetry.
Next it was a tape measure.
The thing sat in the back of a drawer in his room, and with a bit of polish, the sleek green metal shined to his liking once again. But Rodimus couldn’t think of a single time he had ever used the thing, and there was someone else who would appreciate it infinitely more.
So the next time he saw a pile of reports he knew were heading to Minimus, he tossed the tape measure on top of them.
That same day he saw the mech measuring the distance of the bulkheads from one another.
Soon after that there was a gear.
It was buried under a bit of rubble at an abandoned lab they had stumbled upon (maybe there was some evil science guy there but it definitely wasn’t their problem) and it just barely caught the sun enough for Rodimus to see it.
The bronze was about half oxidized, but that was easily fixable with a bit of the energex he had sitting around.
Rodimus slid it under Brainstorm and Perceptor’s door when it was fully shined up again.
He saw it worked into the seeker’s latest gun.
Then an old pre-war shanix he found on the floor in a hallway.
The design pressed into it was of some old temple, maybe one of the ones in Iacon? Either way it was something else shiny that reminded him of a certain couple.
When he passed Cyclonus and Tailgate’s table that night at Swerve’s, he dropped it on the table when they were distracted by Whirl getting his optic stuck in a glass. It took Tailgate’s super strength to pry the somehow perfectly Whirl head sized glass from its victim, but by then he was long gone and got to enjoy watching them marvel at what had appeared on their table.
Speaking of Swerve, Rodimus had found a glass ball made by humans.
Apparently you could do tricks with it? But it was easy enough to slip into an ice bucket when Swerve was on the other side of the bar.
Movie night that week had this human in some really tight leather moving around the same sort of ball and Swerve was attempting to copy him.
The next shiny thing to catch his optic was just a bit of metal from some strategy game he had never bothered to play.
It was a little figurine of a medic. Traditional red and white coloring on the figure itself with a shiny silver base. It was obvious who this needed to go to.
It was carefully balanced on Ratchet’s office window by the end of the day.
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Drift didn’t remember where he had gotten a new stone, but it had just appeared a few weeks ago with no explanation.
“Hey Ratty?”
“Yes love?”
“Did you put that stone there on the shelf?”
“No. Did you not pick it up from that planet with all the other rocks like it?”
“Nope.”
“Did you leave this in my office window?” Ratchet showed him a small medic figure from a game Drift hadn’t played in centuries.
“No. You know, apparently a few other mechs have gotten some random gifts as well. I’m gonna talk to Rodimus and see if he’s gotten one and wants to help me investigate who it could be so we can plan some sort of surprise for them.” Ratchet’s huff of laughter as he placed the figurine on the rock shelf was all Drift heard as he left the room and walked across the hall to Rodimus’s.
He hadn’t been in there since…well before everything. So his surprise when his amica opened the door for him to reveal piles of small shiny scraps and trinkets crammed through the place.
“Roddy, why do you have all of this?”
Rodimus shuffled his pedes. “I just like it, okay?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it, just why?”
“It’s shiny.”
“Have you been the one giving all the gifts out?”
“...Maybe.”
Drift hugged Rodimus. “Thank you for sharing your hoard.”
Rodimus practically preened.