A/N: Yay!
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High-Grade
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Prowl was a mean drunk.
Of course Lockdown—a frequent and joyous indulger of over-charging—had tried to get him soused: he considered it part of his scoundrel nature and duty to induct the young 'bot into the realm of tossing back high-grade and reveling in the resulting molecule-deep euphoria. That way, at the least, Prowl would be mentally inoperable, not in a bar full of strangers, but safe in a contained area with Lockdown.
Safe was a relative term.
The ninjabot knew it was unavoidable. When his partner pressed a glistening cube of high-grade into his hands after a particularly successful mission (war-marked face vibrating with expectation as he growled "Celebration." in an entirely unconvincing manner), Prowl did not refuse it. He took a look at the humming cube, then looked back to Lockdown—then, figuring every possible infringement on his honor had already occurred and Lockdown's 'unknown motives' were all quite known, experienced, and most likely enjoyed, he sipped at the sweet Energon. Lockdown grinned and watched him imbibe it.
No mistake, Prowl was fun when tipsy. He laughed at himself—a strange, free sound—and staggered slightly, but mostly thought. He turned things over in his processor and his normally inexpressive face became awash with the emotions those deep, deepity-deep thoughts provoked. He smiled, glowed, and remained secretively quiet, but the vibrating vibrancy of his body was so different that Lockdown still liked to watch for a bit.
Any dirty proposition Lockdown made when drinking was met with an appalled look and something just short of a blush, but the kid was still amusing.
However, when he got honestly over-charged, things sometimes took a turn for the worse. First off, he was an easy drunk. Most times, he would drink himself into a smiling stupor and simply fall over, chassis awash with electricity-licking sensations and a lovely detachment—a far cry from the outrageously judgment-impaired sex-kitten behavior Lockdown had been shooting for, but still comfortingly standard. Otherwise…the first time he sought succor in slag-faced state, his sullen musings carried over. Overcharging tended to wipe all of a bot's maintenance personality programming away, and without one's 'façade', blocked problems and data surfaced with a vengeance and swarmed the memory core.
Prowl became grim and violent when he drank, withdrawing from any resemblance of sociable interaction and regarding his surroundings with a caged look. He did not speak, he did not make optic-linkage, and any attempt to approach him was often met with a sloppy preemptive attack. As far as Lockdown figured, the memory-shot 'bot was still somehow stuck back on Earth, fighting for his life and stuck in survival mode. Tension eating him from the inside out. Miserable. After seven stellar-cycles of war, he had a lot of gruesome material to pull from: Prowl would either fall into the good part of his memory core or the bad part of his memory core, and he got downright vicious when he fell into the bad part.
It made Lockdown glad, in a starkly satisfied way, that Prowl was with him now. On the other hand, it was also damn annoying to try and sweet-talk him out of his funks, or deal with his surly aft at all.
Once, fed up with sideways verbal negotiations, Lockdown tried to touch him—just a friendly grab of his shoulder. Without missing a beat, Prowl twisted and socked him in the gut as hard as he could. Lockdown struck back before he had a chance to process it, and a klik later Prowl was laid flat across the floor of his ship, arm nearly knocked loose from its sparking socket. Shaking his stinging servo and cursing in honest vexation, Lockdown hauled the near-comatose mech over his shoulder and dumped him in his room after a few rudimentary repairs to his scapular plating. Prowl rebooted with a sore shoulder and knowledge of a loss of control—an impression that their drinking session had gone too far somehow-- and Prowl didn't like it.
Lockdown wasn't half so eager to offer him high-grade after that, and Prowl simply never asked for it. There were other ways to celebrate.
