Ugh, I literally just remembered that I have school tomorrow. Where'd my weekend go? Anyway, aside from FF . net hating me some more, I'm back on track! *Whew* I certainly don't want to do that again. Now I hope you're ready, because Prowl's about to have an extremely bad day. n_n On the plus side, Bluestreak seems to get an idea. Now off to bed before I pass out...hope you love this next chapter! And sorry if there's some grammar mistakes. I didn't have time to double check it. Oh! And one more thing; the 'friendship making things worse' part that's in the summary - that comes into play here. *Mischievously giggles and rubs hands in villainous fashion...*
Thanks to littledhampir13 and annebellelennox for reviewing. I'm so glad someone loved all that fluff besides me! ;D
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Attack of the Valentines!
(aka: Valentine's Wanted)
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The Valentine Thief
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Over the next few orbits, Valentines started to appear everywhere imaginable. Every nook, every cranny, even every bot had Valentines plastered on them somewhere.
It was beginning to drive Prowl mad.
They coated the walls, the furniture, even the ceilings in some cases. They had been glued, taped, plastered to every available surface. Even folded into paper airplanes. They were literally on every available surface, in every available room, even on the un-available Ironhide, although Prowl thought that Chromia might have had something to do with that.
"It's like some kind of pink plague!" Prowl thought, not for the first time, as he carefully made his way down the straight halls of Iacon to talk with Optimus. This had to stop. It just could not go on. At least, not without Prowl glitching sooner or later, and the way things were going now, Prowl rather thought it would be sooner rather then later.
"Hey there Prowler, what's got your internals in a knot today?"
Prowl's optics flicked over to Jazz as the other mech joined him in the hall. He was the same easy self he was on any other orbit when the city was coated in pink paper.
The fact that Jazz wasn't even the least bit put out by these stupid papers made Prowl even more annoyed.
"Am I the only sane one left in this city?" He demanded irritably.
He caught sight of the little pink heart someone had glued on Jazz's armor above where his spark would be and realized that yes, yes he was. "And just what have you been up to?" The tactician asked Jazz without looking away from the corridor in front of them.
Jazz threw Prowl a smirk. "Nuthin'," he said, his tone implying that it certainly hadn't been 'nuthin', "just havin' some fun with the ladies." He said as he managed to peel the pink thing off of his armor without ripping it. Of course then it just got stuck to his fingers, no matter how much he tried to shake it off.
"Ridiculous," Prowl scoffed as Jazz gave up trying to shake the Valentine off with a shrug, "this whole affair is utterly ridiculous. Everyone's wasting time with these stupid things. It's getting us nowhere." He grumbled, eyeing the Valentine's plastered all over the wall next to him as the ones carpeting the floor crunched softly under his large feet.
"Ah relax Prowler, it's just a bit of fun. We've been at this war for what? Vorns now, yeah? We could use a bit of fun right now."
Prowl became more offended as he stopped cold in the hallways and spun to face the other mech. "If you think distractions are going to help us win-" he started to say.
Jazz instantly held up his hands to show he hadn't meant it like that. "Easy Prowl, relax, I never said distraction. I said we needed some fun is all. Remember that things aren't all gloom and doom all the time." He said easily enough, then he clapped his uptight friend on the shoulder and continued walking down the hall.
It took Prowl a moment to realize Jazz had stuck the stupid pink heart on the back of his shoulder.
"Fraggit Jazz!" Prowl snapped as he tried to rip the thing off of him, but ended up going in a circle before realizing he couldn't reach it. "I refuse to participate in this madness! I don't want to have these ridiculous things tacked all over me like a piece of furniture." He practically shouted as he gave one more try at getting the sticky heart off of him.
A few feet away, Jazz stopped and turned around to look at him. "Oh I get what this is about." He said knowingly, crossing his arms over his chest.
Prowl stopped fidgeting and fixed a stern optic on Jazz. "You…do?" He asked hesitantly. He saw the impracticality of this organic trend too?
Jazz smirked at the suspicious Prowl. "You didn't get one did you?"
All hopes that someone else saw the ridiculousness of the situation fled Prowl and he gave Jazz a flat look. "Get one what?" He grumbled, although he knew very well what the other mech was talking about.
Jazz pointedly look around at the elaborately decorated papers covering the walls, floor, and to some extent the ceiling, and then turned back to raise an incredulous optic ridge at Prowl.
"You serious about that?" He asked.
Prowl bridled slightly at the small grin that was trying to appear on Jazz's face. "No." He ground out, answering both questions at once. "At least not a real one, just a fake." He added as he joined Jazz farther down the hallway so they continue on their way.
"A fake? How do ya get a fake Valentine?" Jazz asked as he laced his hands behind his head to look up at the ceiling as he walked.
Prowl slanted a look at the silver mech. "Sunny and Sideswipe." He grumbled darkly.
Jazz almost laughed at that, but quickly reigned it in to try and keep Prowl from sinking deeper into his gloom.
"Ah," he said simply instead.
They were a little farther down the hall when Jazz stopped and started searching his compartments. "Wait a minute, wait a minute, if the kids didn't give you yours then did they give me…?" He trailed off thoughtfully as Prowl stopped to stare.
"Jazz, what are you doing?" Prowl asked as if he wasn't sure if he really wanted to know what the snazzy mech was doing now.
He didn't answer him. "Aha!" Jazz cried instead as he finally pulled a little rectangular card out of subspace. "I knew I had it in here somewhere. The younglings must have given me yours by accident when they gave me mine so here." He said, handing over the card, front cover turned purposefully towards the floor.
Prowl slanted Jazz another suspicious look. True, they were friends, but that didn't mean he understood half the things Jazz did.
"What is it?" Prowl asked slowly.
"It's from the younglings," Jazz said as if it was obvious, "What? Ya didn't think they forgot about'cha did ya?" He asked, shaking the card at Prowl again.
Grudgingly, Prowl snatched the card away and opened it.
"Is there a problem?" Jazz asked a cycle later when Prowl didn't say anything.
Prowl gave his friend a flat look and held up the card so that the large 'To Jazz' scrawled across the front cover could be clearly seen. "This is addressed to you from Cloudraker." He stated.
Jazz looked at him and gave a little shrug. "Yeah, so?"
Prowl resisted the urge to vent a sigh, no matter how aggravated he felt. "So it isn't mine. What would I want with one of these cards that isn't mine?" He asked him, slapping the card back down into Jazz's open hand.
Jazz just shrugged, raising one shoulder in a fluid motion. "Look, I was just trying to cheer you up. Do you want it or not?"
Prowl tried to skewer him with a look. "No."
"Well alright then, you're loss." Jazz muttered before throwing the card back into subspace. He gestured for Prowl to keep going, earning another glare from the tactician.
They walked on a little longer, the only sound the shuffle of the papers beneath their feet.
The heart sticking behind his left should started to bother him again and Prowl tried to pull it off, but he still couldn't reach. Then when he wasn't paying attention to where he was going, he stepped on a pot of glue that some thoughtless bot had left on the floor. The bottle cracked under his weight and the glue coated the bottom of his foot, but he didn't notice until he took another step and a whole wad of Valentine's papers stuck to his foot, almost as if they had been attracted to him.
"Frag it…" Prowl muttered as he shook his foot only to get more pink and red wads of paper stuck to him. And then as if that wasn't bad enough, a door up ahead opened and closed, sending a great draft of air came rushing down the hall, stirring up papers and picking up the Valentine's that littered the floor.
They all flew upward with the sudden wind and latched onto Prowl like devious younglings, covering him as thickly as they did the floor.
Jazz heroically held in his laughter.
"AGH!" Prowl yelled, throwing up his hands with a loud rush of paper. "These things are everywhere! Whose bright idea was this?" He demanded loudly.
Jazz snickered and clapped a hand over his mouth to keep the sound to himself. Prowl glared at Jazz through a haze of red and white.
"What are you laughing at?" He asked darkly.
It took Jazz a moment to get himself fully under control. He shrugged, but couldn't resist smiling just a little bit. "Nuthin' Prowler, nuthin'."
"Who," Prowl glared at the surrounded offensive graffiti, "Put. These. Up?"
Jazz choked back a snicker. "I dunno." He admitted.
Prowl glared at him again before taking a few steps down the hallway.
Shuff, shuff, shuff, the papers went.
Jazz laughed behind him.
"That's it!" Prowl yelled, ripping off his new candy colored coating so that little shreds of paper flew around him like a cloud. "I'm confiscating these things and locking them up in my office to prevent any further foolishness!"
"If foolishness breaks your rules now, then we're all sunk." Jazz pointed out, unable to hide all of his amusement at the pink, red, and white be speckled Prowl.
Prowl held out a hand to the lieutenant. "Just gimme that card." He ordered calmly.
Jazz was not intimidated. "No," he told him, "you said you didn't want it."
"I don't want it," Prowl said, still overly calm, "I'm confiscating it with all the rest of the little pink nightmares. Now give it here."
Jazz crossed his arms over his chest and frowned at Prowl for the first time. "No."
"Give it!"
"No!"
Prowl tried to snatch the card away, but Jazz jerked the thing out of his reach and shoved him back with his other hand. Prowl stopped and stared at him, a little shocked that Jazz had shoved him, but then if there was a mech alive that wasn't intimidate by the fact that he was the Autobot second in command, it was Jazz.
But then, Prowl wasn't about to just lie down and take this either.
Prowl leapt forward, feigning a straight grab for the offending Valentine but then grabbing Jazz's arm and flung him over his shoulder in one smooth motion. Jazz wasn't even stunned when he kicked a leg to sweep Prowl's feet out from under him, sending him crashing to the floor.
What followed after that was probably the most impressive display of fighting prowess over possibly the worst reason ever. For the most part they were a flurry of movement, Prowl always thinking five steps ahead of the game and Jazz just so unpredictable at times that they were both roughly even throughout the whole thing.
"Didn't anybody tell ya that the SIC made illegal to steal someone else's mail after Sunny and Sides' stole all of his letters?" Jazz managed to ask as he stepped to the side as Prowl made another grab for his Valentine. He quickly grabbed the black and white's hand and bent his fingers back, bringing him to a grinding stop.
"Only if he doesn't have reasonable suspicion that the communication might possess sensitive material." Prowl ground out before slamming a fist into Jazz's knee joint, sending him to the ground next to him.
"Sensitive material? You read the fraggin' thing two kliks ago!" Jazz said before tackling the other mech.
It went on like this for awhile, them beating the energon out of each other but without actually landing anything that would leave lasting damage. They were both so focused on their fight, that they didn't notice when a small body poked his head around the end of the hall to see what was going on. They didn't even notice when he passed them in the hall and just snatched the Valentine in question right out of Jazz's hand and whisked it away.
"Wait a fraggin' klik!" Prowl eventually yelled, making Jazz freeze, one fist cocked back to just hit his friend in the face. "This is getting us nowhere!"
"True." Jazz said, but didn't lower his fist quite yet. Prowl could be sneakier than most people gave him credit for sometimes.
But when Prowl didn't move against him again, Jazz slowly relaxed.
"Just out of curiosity," Prowl said a moment later as they sat slumped against the wall, "how long did you think giving me that Valentine would work?" He asked Jazz next to him.
The other mech just shrugged. "Well I had to try," then he gave his friend another look and grinned crookedly, "although from the looks of it you've got more then enough Valentines now."
Prowl glared at him and stiffly left before Jazz could lose control over his laughter.
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Down at the end of the hall, Bluestreak surreptitiously watched the two grown ups around the corner. They didn't seem to notice that he'd taken the Valentine, which was good, because he didn't want to find out what rules Prowl had against stealing pretty bits of paper.
"He's got so many rules, I'm sure I've just broken a lot of them." The young bot thought as he looked down at Jazz's card. Clearly Cloudraker had made it. He always put that one thundercloud with the lightning bolt somewhere one his drawings. That and he had signed it.
"They must have made a lot of these things." He murmured softly to himself. "And yet not one for Jie Mei. I'd make her one if I knew how, but I don't, and I don't want to give her a bad one so what can I do then…?" He had thought he could just give her this one, but Cloudraker had clearly marked 'To Jazz' on the front cover so that wouldn't work.
"I should probably just give this back then," Bluestreak murmured, glancing around the corner again.
But then he saw that Prowl was coming down the hall towards him and he suddenly lost his nerve, so he ran off to the relative safety of the mess hall instead.
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Down the hall Bluestreak had abandoned, a very sticky, pink covered Prowl got to his feet with a rustle like a hundred paper birds leaping up and flapping.
"Where ya goin'?" Jazz asked from where he was still leaving against the wall. He hadn't bothered to get up yet.
Prowl held out his arms and purposefully looked down at the pretty decorative papers sticking to his frame. "To the wash racks. Why? Do you have something better I can do looking like some fluffy organic bunny rabbit?"
"Hide Easter eggs?" Jazz suggested helpfully.
Prowl slanted a glare at Jazz. "If she ever makes us go through that again then I'm banning all organic holidays forever." He said determinedly.
Jazz shrugged one shoulder in agreement, but his grin only grew wider. "Ya gotta admit though, that one was pretty funny. Our first organic holiday."
Prowl grimaced, remembering a very different story. "Our first organic nightmare." He countered.
"Ah now don't be that way Prowl," Jazz said as he pulled a knee up to his chest and casually slung an arm over it. He grinned as he pointed up at his now red and pink friend. "I bet if you had actually found one of those darn eggs, or even if you got a real card, you wouldn't be that way."
Prowl blew out an especially disbelieving snort. "Try me." He muttered sarcastically before walking away, occasionally shaking his foot to try and dislodge some of the paper restricting his movements.
Jazz started to grin sneakily as he watched Prowl leave a little trail of decimated Valentine's decorations in his wake.
"All right then…"
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About a joor later, Prowl was spick, span, and returned to his normal black and white coloring. He was positively beaming – or at least as beaming as anyone had ever seen Prowl anyway – as he walked up to his office door and keyed in the pass code that only he and a few select others knew. He was so relieved to no longer be any shade of pink that he even thought of humming as he stood there. He didn't of course, but it wasn't often that Prowl entertained the idea in the first place.
All thoughts of humming left Prowl's processor when his door slid open.
Beyond the door, coating every available surface inside, was that wretched color pink.
"What-" Prowl stuttered. "How?" He demanded nonsensically.
"Hey there Prowler," Jazz said as he randomly appeared down the hall, "Nice to see you've regained your natural color again. That whole piñata look just wasn't working for ya man. Hey, you all right there?"
Prowl's optic twitched, a sure sign of things to come, as he wordlessly lifted an arm and pointed inside his office.
Jazz turned to look. "Whoa."
Inside Prowl's office, his inner sanctum so to speak, covering every surface, hiding every sign of order the tactician had strove to attain were those fragging Valentines.
"I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense," Prowl thought as he went into shock, "First they coat every inch available in the city, then they cover every available bot, and now here they are again, in my very un-available office."
Large swaths of red and white covered the walls, floor, ceiling, and even his desk. Hearts of all sizes and colors had been cut out and stuck across the walls, seeming to dance across the bigger plains of red and white as if they were pointing at the overly logical Prowl and laughing, "Nyah, nyah, nyah!"
But the so called icing on the oil cake was the large, looping letters painted across the back wall.
X's and O's to our favorite XO! Love ~Your secret fan club!
A large pink heart surrounded the words.
"Well," Jazz said with a laugh as he clapped Prowl on the shoulder, "it looks like you got some Valentines whether ya like 'em or not."
Prowl could feel his processor slipping even as he turned to face Jazz with a complete look of shock on his face. "You had something to do with this." He muttered.
Jazz looked slightly surprised. "Me? That's not even my handwriting. If I had ta hazard a guess I'd say it was Moonracer and Firestar messin' with ya."
"No, no," Prowl said with enough calm that suddenly Jazz knew that he should probably comm. Ratchet now to save himself some hassle, "I know it's their handiwork, but I also know that you had something to do with it. Put them up to it or something."
Jazz shrugged. "In that case I don't know what to say." He said.
Prowl noticed that he neither confirmed nor denied any involvement on his part with that sentence.
"I see," Prowl stated, "then if you will please excuse me?"
Jazz nodded, knowing what was coming next.
Prowl took a step forward, and immediately crashed to the ground, his optics flickering erratically.
"Oh boy," Jazz murmured as he commed Ratchet to come get Prowl. The medic wasn't long in coming and soon enough Prowl was being carried to the med bay where Ratchet would short out the glitch and get Prowl back on his feet in no time.
Jazz waited until he was safely in Ratchet's hands before leaving. He couldn't resist giving Prowl's office one more look before leaving though. He chuckled and shook his head before heading towards Optimus' office to tell him that Prowl would be a little late for his daily report.
Four femmes were standing around the next corner, talking softly and giggling as the harried tactician was led away.
They froze when Jazz stepped around the corner.
Jazz watched them a moment in return, waiting to see if they had anything to say to him. "Ladies," he lifted two fingers to his visor in a small salute and walked past them when they didn't say anything. He was just about through their midst when he added an even softer, "Nice job," before disappearing around the next corner.
Behind him, Jazz heard Moonracer, Firestar, Beta, and Greenlight's muffled giggles turn into all out laughter.
~^..^~
Bluestreak was on his way to give Jazz back his Valentine when he saw the mess of Valentines coating Prowl's office. Someone had left the door open and he stopped and stared at the quickly cut cards and femme-like writing on the wall.
After a long moment, a large smile grew onto the youngling's face.
"That's it!" He realized and ran off. He suddenly had lots to do before he returned the Valentine after all.
n_n There's nothing like a best friend to drive you completely up the wall and land you in the med bay. :D It's like what they say about friends: Friends share their umbrella; Best Friends trip you, steal yours and scream "Run stupid run!" all the way back to the car. n_n;
And was that a hint for an Easter thing? Possibly! I don't really know! The idea came to me as I wrote and it's giving me deliriously funny ideas of Prowl in a bunny suit...Mwuhahahaha!
Now! Next time we finally get to see what our little Valentine's Thief is planning to do with his haul. And Aria feels a little down in the dumps, although there might be some mechxfemme sweetness in their too...but I'm not telling which ones! ;3