A/N: OH GOD CHRISTMAS I LOVE CHRISTMAS. … Okayso really I'm not fond of Christmas but I love writing about it. Weird.

I overdosed on fluff. Had a seizure. Went to rehab. Got back on it.

But it was gooooood.

(And more stuff at the Big People website!! Read the smut beforehand, PLEASE. You really don't want to wash the taste of this fluff out of your mouth so ungracefully, no matter how hilariously OCD Prowl is. Oh, and there's a 'Christmas at the Factory' chapter in Odd Moments, for all y'all not watchin' dat shiyat. GIT AWN IT, GIT AWN IT.)

Now I'm off for another vacation, loveyabye!

Starry night

On Christmas Eve, someone began to yell outside of Lockdown's house.

Prowl froze, staring curiously from his veritable blanket and pillow fort on the couch. Torn from his precious car magazines, Lockdown grumpily went out to the back porch and looked down. A woman was bundled up in purple scarves and a long coat, burdened with three grocery bags and squinting upwards in the powdered-sugar snow.

"Hi there!"

"Aren't you s'posed to be at a confessional or somethin'?"

"Christmas is a very lonely time for perverts. I was on call to spread the cheer," she yelled back. She hefted one of the bags pointedly. "I just got off work and went to the store. Can I come in?"

"Get outta here," Lockdown growled. Prowl, walking up behind him but still keeping out of view, was shocked—refusing a woman who had come straight from a strip-club on Christmas, much less bearing gifts? But it seemed to be a routine, because Prowl caught sight of Torque rustling around in one of the huge brown bags she'd brought along, conquering her slippery mittens long enough to pull out a dark red bottle and wiggle it enticingly.

"I have rum."

"32 ounces'll get you an hour," Lockdown said after a considerate minute.

"You're an asshole," Torque called after him, disturbingly merry; Prowl actually caught a real smile on the huge man's face as Lockdown walked past him to go and open the door for her, and couldn't help as it spread to his own. He hadn't been expecting anything but a quiet evening the night before Christmas, and this promised to be anything but.

This would be… intriguing, at the very least; scarring at the worst. He hoped for the former and was braced for the latter.

Thankfully, the bags held more than rum, even though there was an ungodly amount of it.

Torque, after jumping mid-sentence at seeing Prowl perched somewhat awkwardly on the couch, laid out the cold food on the kitchen table, fussing with Christmassy things (including a string of actual blinking Christmas lights and a frozen pie she put in the oven with an excited bustle) as Lockdown flopped down beside his housemate and turned up the TV.

"So--Prowl, wow! This is a surprise," she exclaimed, looking back from sticking her fingers in the as-of-yet lukewarm mashed potatoes. "What's the occasion?"

He smiled up at her somewhat shyly.

"No occasion. Besides the, ah, holidays, obviously." He was plainly just confusing her, by the look on her face. He cleared his throat, mumbling, "I, uh. I…live here. Now."

"Oh. He lives here now," Torque repeated, too lightly for comfort. She looked at Prowl a minute longer, as though extrapolating and weighing something he could not fathom, then gave her old friend a sidelong glance that wasn't the least bit unsuspicious. "I leave you alone for a few weeks and you pick up a roommate?"

Lockdown just grinned, looking incredibly proud of himself for snagging such a young and sexy (though occasionally neurotic and always prudish) specimen of roommate. The three had seen each other every so often since December began, but all Torque knew was that Prowl had been hanging around Lockdown more often… which had prompted a serious talk from her that Lockdown waved off, but it would have been an entirely different (and far more serious) talk if she had known they were actually living together.

The older woman frowned as she got three plates instead of two.

"But seriously—today? I'd ask why you're here at all, aside from the fascinating company and the, y'know, food I slaved over all week, but what about your family? Are they too far away to visit, or—"

"Quit'cher naggin'. He's here and that's it."

She looked over her shoulder at the young, small man, frowning at Lockdown's tone, then hid it all too late with a beaming smile as she walked over.

"Okay. Well, I'm glad you're here. It's good to see you again, darling," she said huskily, and Prowl felt the truth and the warmth of it when she squeezed his hand briefly and smiled, then reached back for a red and white carton of liquid. "Eggnog?"

Lockdown made a sound of intense disgust and gulped another spicy mouthful of rum. Settling on the couch, Torque offered it to Prowl with an undue amount of hope, as though they would unite together in the love of sugary, disgustingly thick drinks and teach Lockdown a thing or two, but Prowl declined politely, even if it earned him a kicked-puppy look.

"It's my only sweet weakness," she explained as she poured herself a glass, pouting a little. "I got addicted when we used to make that awful trashcan punch around Christmas time and pour in eggnog to mask the flavor."

"How is it you got addicted and I can't even stand the smell of it?"

"Probably because you were convinced there was no point in the whole thing and spent most of said Christmases vomiting said trash-can punch into the backyard," she said delicately into her cup, squinting a little at the sweetness. Lockdown seemed to accept this after a second, giving a shrug and turning his attention elsewhere. She smacked her lips, eyed the milky tracks left by the too-thick liquid, then grabbed Lockdown's rum (with no small protest, as he was in the middle of a drink) and poured some into the eggnog, sighing, "Oh, memories. They seem so much sweeter when you're sitting fifteen years away and can't smell the puke."

Passing the bottle of rum back and forth, while Lockdown bitched at her to open another one as Torque bitched right back (and produced no logically sound point but still got him to hand it over to her with a grumble), the two old friends were fast on the track to getting quite drunk as their first step of Christmas celebration. Prowl had only been drunk, or drank at all, once before, and it was nothing to repeat—not because of any traumatic hangovers or misuse of alcohol, but the buzz made him feel horribly uncomfortable because it dissolved some of his frigid, precious control.

They ate dinner, both vegetarians averting their eyes from the grisly display of Lockdown tearing into his game-hen and muttering conspiratorially over their happy, brightly-colored Christmas vegetables. Once the food was gone and the pie cut into, however, Prowl was plied into tasting a few drinks that left him sputtering. Lockdown laughed his ass off as Prowl tried rum and had to run to the porch to spit it over the rail, and Prowl trudged back into the house to find Torque slapping at the huge man and telling him not to abuse the boy.

However much he drank from either's cup (which he began to realize was rather a lot as it changed from sips to gulps), it glazed his vision and made the Christmas lights into humming stars that seemed to warm the room with green blue and red and yellow alone, all comforting crayon colors that would speak to him for years to come of simple happiness and brown paper bag Christmases. It also loosened his tongue to the point where he asked some questions he'd been storing up for just such a judgment-bare occasion.

"So how did you, uh—how did you become a—stripper?"

"Ik-skuse me, mister," Torque said sharply, giving him the evil eye and a very intimidating jostle with her empty rum bottle. "You watchyer mouth."

"Uh. Excuse me?" Prowl said faintly, absolutely stymied.

"I'm notta stripper. I'm an eggsotic dancer," she said as delicately as she could with god-knew-how-many ounces of rum weighing her tongue. Lockdown shrugged his shoulders and snorted in disgust.

"Oh fuck you'n yer fancy words, the hell's the diff'rence?"

"My digniddy, ya bastard!" she snapped. Throwing Lockdown an offended look, she turned back to Prowl and gestured at the air as though conducting a fanciful ballet. "I don't strip, I dance! Eggsoti-cally!"

Drunk as he was, Prowl had to wince away when she groped her ample bosom far too adamantly.

"The boobies, they stay in! They stay right where they are, thank-you. And there is no-o-o-o touching, no sir, and no strippin'!

"So how do the other eggsotic dancers like the newest addition t'yer ass? They callin' ya Budderfly yet?"

Lockdown grunted when she popped him over the head with something, thankfully, softer than a rum bottle, but that (and her ensuing peal of laughter) still removed her right to the television remote.

"I was watchin' that!"

"You were watchin' yer rum," Lockdown growled, slapping the remote down far out of her reach.

"You, sir, are a rat-bastard son of a withholding bitch, sir," she said primly, enunciation perfectly restored with a mind-blowing and temporary amount of effort that required another triple-swallow from the aforementioned rum bottle.

When drunk, Torque sounded remarkably like Lockdown, accent and foul language alike. They came from the same town, it seemed, but didn't know each other while they were there—and that was all the story Prowl pried from them before another tangent began and all he could do was sit down and chuckle through his own haze. Torque talked on and on until Lockdown 'got his goddamn dick in a chip-clip', then they bickered and settled down, only to repeat the same, strangely comforting cycle late into the night.

Around two am, they all fell asleep on the couch together, full of food and company. Their skin and clothing glowed somewhat magically in the TV and the crayon-colored lights draped above their heads, made all the brighter by the deep navy sky outside and the white snow below them. Before they went too far into the sunrise of a holiday, Lockdown reached over as steadily as he could and pressed his mouth to Prowl's, jolting him out of the beginnings of sober sleep. The younger man kissed back as best he could, hanging onto the warm, firm sensation and twining his fingers into Lockdown's shirt.

"Merry Christmas," he whispered against the other man's lips when he pulled away, eyes closed. Their noses brushed, only intensifying the soaring feeling in Prowl's chest as the lights blinked softly around them.

"You too, kid."

"Do I get one?"

"Shut up, gal," Lockdown groaned, leaning back on the couch with a mighty muffled creak.

"Merry Christmas, Torque," Prowl laughed softly, but she was already asleep, and so was Lockdown. Sighing, Prowl leaned against his housemate's warm chest and pillowed his head on his shoulder, curling up and falling into the first good Christmas he'd ever had.