Minific: Color

[stainless]

Title: Color
Characters: Galvatron and Cyclonus
Verse: G1
Wordcount: 440+
Rating: K+
Warnings: Nothing, really.
Summary:  Minific for the comment fic party over at crimson_optics (come join us! Yes, you!)

For the prompt "Galvatron/Cyclonus, I want to paint you." Cyclonus is a bit embarrassed about his Lord's latest whim. After all, everyone will be able to see!

Slight hint of slash, but nothing explicit.

The brush dripped with paint, great globs of it falling to spatter the floor with unsightly, flamboyant purple. Cyclonus fought to keep his optics from flickering and his frown from deepening more than usual.

It wasn't so much that Lord Galvatron's idea was a bad one. Long months of battle, lack of resources, and deeply... personalservice to a capricious and often violent commanding officer had taken its toll both on Cyclonus' paint, and more often than not on the plating beneath it as well. Where he once had gleamed a regal purple befitting Lord Galvatron's empire, now he was a dull, scratched, dusty brown that only shone violet under forgiving light.

And it was an honor - a great and deep one that even now made his engines rumble with contentment and pride - that mighty Galvatron himself would deign to paint him. Feeling that brush on his plating thrilled him: he belonged to Galvatron, and if Galvatron had chosen to remake him this way, well, then he would be remade, however sloppy the paint ended up.

After all, no one would be able to question or wonder just who had applied Cyclonus's new colors.

But as uncomfortable as it made him to admit it, some small part of him doubted. An unwelcome part, an old part, a part from the time before Lord Galvatron that seeped through his loyalty subroutines and whispered Is this really wise? when the rest of him sought only to serve.

The others will laugh, it whispered. They'll call you glitched. They'll call you as insane as they think he is.

His faceplates burned with embarrassment he didn't want to feel. He was a soldier, a loyal Decepticon devoted to the cause and to the leader who embodied it. He'd been remade for Galvatron alone, devoid of any purpose beyond the one his Lord gave him. Ugly paint sloppily applied would affect neither his competence nor his prowess in battle.

He turned his head to look at his Emperor's face, willing himself to think only of what he saw there.

Lord Galvatron's optics were wide, wide and bright, surveying his handiwork as he swept the brush in broad, wild strokes over one of Cyclonus's wings. He grinned, capricious and fierce and possessive.

Cyclonus quieted. This was his Lord's will, and he would for the first time in his life bear his Lord's colors as his Lord wished him to bear them.

And that was all that mattered.