#turboferret

“If you think for one moment I’m going to step pede in that—that mess, you’ve got another thing coming to you!”

Soundwave stood in the drift, crystallized hydrogen molecules clinging to his plating and quickly melting from the generated heat within. He was aware of the tiny rivulets rejoining the snow and considered, briefly, dragging Knockout into the drift and burying him beneath it. It would be easy, but the fallout, he decided, wasn’t really worth the trouble.

A mech could dream, however.

<Environment: not harmful to Cybertronian lifeforms.>

<Knockout: fear based on irrational and unconfirmed bias.>

“That’s easy for you to say,” Knockout sneered, crossing his arms over his chassis (carefully!) and pacing the strip of asphalt bordering the shallow ditch and field of white where Soundwave stood. “No offense, but your plating has seen better days, and this paint job was hard to come by; do you know how difficult it is to fill in blemishes without a second pair of skillful servos?”

The unspoken hung between them, and Soundwave acknowledged Knockout’s loss with a small tilt of his helm. His feelers extended toward the snow, however, testing with quick, short jabs the feel of it. Snow, he discovered, was soft and cold, easily malleable and densely packed in areas where drifts from the days before had melted down into solid patches of ice.

Megatron hadn’t cared for the weather anomalies, but hadn’t explicitly forbid the crew from using their off-shifts to venture down to the planet to investigate. He hadn’t given expressed permission, either, but Soundwave felt it necessary to risk his displeasure in the name of science. Cybertron didn’t have anything quite like this. There was ice, yes, crystal shards that fell from the sky, causing damage and closing down entire streets and business, but snow...snow was different. It was soft and delicate, fragile, like everything else on this flimsy planet.

Playfully, he amassed an amount of snow into a pile and started to roll it in a spherical shape. Knockout made a noise from his place on the side of the road much like an engine trying and failing to turn over.

“Can’t we leave?” the grounder asked, his plating shaking with minute shivers. He wasn’t actually cold, Soundwave knew, but he was a very good actor. The mech’s comm carried an undertone of amusement as he answered.

<Answer: negative.>

<Soundwave: unsatisfied with current lack of knowledge of Earth’s environmental patterns.>

<Solution: further experimentation required.>

“My skid plate,” Knockout snapped. “You just enjoy watching me suffer.”

A lone feeler lifted and shook itself in Knockout’s direction, playfully flicking a bit of snow in his direction. The glob fell short, but Knockout gasped and danced out of the way regardless. Soundwave replayed a soundclip of the volante’s own laughter, recorded in secret several breems earlier, when they were still entangled with one another in the doctor’s berth. Knockout stilled and flared his plating, embarrassment overriding the small flush of pleasure that colored his EMF. Soundwave tipped the feeler toward him and continued to sculpt the snow-sphere, patting it into shape.

“Oh, we’ll see about that,” Knockout muttered. Frowning with disgust, he bent to gather handfuls of the horrid stuff, packing it tight into a smaller ball than the one Soundwave as toying with. The glitch loved stupid Earth ‘weather patterns’ so much? He could rust in it.

He hurled the snowball with the precision, certain that no matter how hard or well he threw, Soundwave would intercept and ruin his petty revenge.

But, it didn’t happen.

The snowball arced and fell, landing perfectly—perfectly—on the Third-In-Command’s helm.

Knockout’s hands flew to cover his gaping intake; his engine sputtered, and his pedes felt stuck to the ground. The very real flight response welling up in his chassis didn’t translate correctly to his struts, and he stood there, dumbfounded and—shockingly—elated with the feeling of having perpetrated something terribly dangerous.

The snow dripped from Soundwave’s helm, clinging to his armor as it slid down his sleek frame, leaving behind a slick of wet that Knockout followed with interest. Bolting seemed like a good idea, but he couldn’t move.

“I...don’t know what...came over me,” he said, voicebox producing an automatic and clipped version of the scrambled apologies racing through his processor.

Soundwave stared.

Knockout stared back.

The wind blew and the cold raced right through their circuitry; the doctor’s plating clamped tight against his protoform, but the other didn’t seem to notice.

Finally, long, bio-luminescent tendrils moved, slowly curling around the large snow-sphere at Soundwave’s pedes. Knockout watched, something in the back of his mind screaming at him to move; when Soundwave lifted the mass from the ground, the voice clicked into place and he realized it was his own, trying to save him from impending doom.

“Now w-wait just a minute!” he laughed nervously as Soundwave approached, eldritch form gliding through the snow as though it weren’t there. The snow glistened in the gentle grip of his tendrils, sparkling light reflecting off the billions of tiny ice crystals, and for one fleeting moment, it did look beautiful.

“Soundwave, stop—this isn’t funny!”

<Correction: situation highly humorous.>

“I’m serious, if you come anywhere near me with that—that thing, I’ll—“

<Suggestion: apologize.>

Knockout peeked out from between his fingers as Soundwave held the ice ball poised a few feet above his helm. Droplets of water filtered down the curved of tendrils and drip-drip-dropped into his plating with tiny little pats of sound he could only hear if he focused beyond the thrum of his engine.

“That’s it?” he asked, scoffing. “An apology?”

He received a solemn nod, which was more than he usually got. Well. That wasn’t a bad deal, if it kept all that snow from falling on his fresh wax and ruining an entire off-shift’s worth of self care. Knockout straightened and preened.

“Fine,” he postulated, “I’m sorry.”

A large, blinking question mark appeared on Soundwave’s visor and the doctor rolled his optics.

“I’m sorry for throwing snow at you,” he drawled. “Now can we please return to the Nemesis?”

Soundwave tilted his helm. The question mark warped into a smiley face, which then further warped into an imitation of a smiley face with two protrusions at the top of its shape, and a small forked tail at the bottom. Knockout had three seconds to ponder what that meant before he found himself enveloped in cold slush. It happened so fast he didn’t have time to flinch, and the cold seeped through his transformation seams and underneath his armor in a strut-achingly deep way to which the wind couldn’t even begin to compare.

Soundwave seemed pleased with himself. He flicked his tendrils at Knockout, ridding himself of a last few drops of water, and retracted them into his torso.

<Operation Snow Day: Success.>

Knockout shivered and took a shuddering in-vent, praying that he met with no reflective surfaces until he was safely tucked away in his personal quarters.

“Alright,” he shivered, “I suppose that was deserved. Have you considered, however….”

He bent down and quickly scooped up a portion of the slightly-more-squishy snow, rolled it into a crude ball, and hurled it at Soundwave, where it struck—SPLAT!--him right above Lazerbeak’s docking bay. The minicon shrieked indignantly and immediately ejected, flying away to a safer point where she could sulk indefinitely.

The wind rose again, but neither mech noticed.

Soundwave’s tendrils snaked free of their housing.

Knockout crouched against the drift.