Chapter Text
The curse at the back of Optimus’ vox only vaguely sounded like his own voice. Orion had once spoken that way. He’d almost forgotten the sound of it. He tried to let the curse out, but all that emerged was static.
His quarters were still bare. His berth was still empty. Elita was still dead.
How he cherished these memories of her, even as they taunted him. Perhaps that was exactly why they were happening to him. Or, if he refused to believe the Matrix was still punishing him, maybe they plagued him to ensure that, despite everything, he knew that she still loved him as he loved her. As if he could never forget that.
Even in her absence, in the gulf of his spark, Optimus knew that he still had so much to fight for. The Allspark was waiting for him. He had given it to Elita because it was all he had to give, but it hadn’t died with her. She hadn’t taken it with her to Archa Seven. He’d wondered about that, in the centuries after. He still wondered about it today.
Ratchet had warned him it wasn’t healthy to speculate. Of course she’d left it on Cybertron, where it belonged. Of course she hadn’t known what would happen to her that day. And of course Ratchet was right.
And yet Optimus still wondered. Even when he ordered the Allspark to be fired far out of Megatron’s reach, far away from his own anger and grief, he wondered if it was right to leave Cybertron’s only hope of life stranded in the dead of space. His own burden was the Matrix, and his broken bond. The Allspark was all he had left of that bond– a broken promise not just to Elita, but to Cybertron and his Autobots.
He had failed to stop Megatron from poisoning their home. He had failed to save Iacon and the priceless knowledge in its halls. He had failed to end Megatron’s tyranny before it spread all through the galaxy like a galactic tumour. And until he set those failings right, until Cybertron was ready to welcome him home, the Allspark would remain severed from its source.
And Optimus was the only one who knew where it was. If he died, his successor would inherit the knowledge as well as the Matrix. Primus would choose someone else worthy of saving Him and their people– even if it took thousands of years or millions upon millions for them to emerge, the next Prime would surely do better than Optimus.
But he didn’t plan on dying any time soon. Elita would never forgive him for joining her before his time. He doubted anyone, not even the workhorse Ratchet, would be awake with him at this hour. He lay in his empty berth, in silence, until he heard footsteps in the hangar.
Ratchet was preparing the energon rations for the day. He didn’t seem surprised to see Optimus awake.
“Good rest?” he asked. Optimus didn’t want to answer, so he offered a different question.
“Did Arcee come back?” He spoke her name softly, wary of summoning her with its sound.
“While you were sleeping.” Ratchet nodded in the direction of the other rooms, which were on the opposite side of the hangar. “She didn’t say anything, but she must have taken Jack home. No-one’s seen him since he went after her.”
Optimus tried to consider that as a good thing. Of any Cybertronian or human, Jack was the only one who could defuse her. He was too fragile for her to truly ever be angry at him.
Furthermore, they both had ample reason to despise Airachnid. When they learned the truth, it would either unite them in their hatred or tear them apart. Jack might have been able to forgive it, with enough time for a worthy apology to grow. Whether or not he’d ever forgive Airachnid herself was… doubtful.
The more Optimus tried to think of the best way to tell everyone, the more keenly he knew that it couldn’t be done. There were no magic words he could say that would make the Autobots understand why he’d done it.
“Our fuel stores are starting to show a dent,” Ratchet was saying at the back of his mind. “We should scout for a mining operation soon to make up the deficit.”
Optimus nodded, though he was only half-listening. Even the existence of a sparkling wouldn’t be enough for the Autobots– Arcee would say he should have taken her and left Airachnid behind. Unlike Ratchet and Wheeljack, she didn’t understand how much sparkling relied on its carrier.
She might have thought of becoming one herself, when the war still looked like it might have been won on Cybertron. Before Tailgate was taken from them.
“Optimus?”
Ratchet’s hand was heavy on his shoulder. Optimus tried not to flinch from it, and when he turned around he saw that the medic was just as exhausted as he was. The light in his eyes was faint and soft, fueled only by fumes. He must have aged centuries in the last few days of knowing about Airachnid.
“You look awful, old friend.”
“Never mind that,” Ratchet scoffed. “You look worse. Talk to me.”
Optimus wished that he could.
“Is it Arcee?” Ratchet stood with his arms crossed as Optimus turned away. “You know how she is. Her spark runs hotter than anyone’s, but it cools down faster. I’m sure… when we tell it, it won’t…”
Optimus shook his head. He faced the Ground Bridge, though it was just an empty frame. He could have worked the controls himself, leaving Ratchet to fret all alone. He never would, but the option was there.
“I dreamed about her again.” Optimus sighed. “When I wake, there is a single moment where I believe she’ll be lying next to me. I can almost feel her warmth. And then it leaves me.”
He looked to his oldest friend over his shoulder, and his vision was blurry. “It hurts, Ratchet. Every time I see Elita, it hurts.”
And this was a hurt that no medic, not even one with Ratchet’s skills, could fix. He would still try, and it still wouldn’t do anything.
Ratchet was right, after all. He always was. Saving one victim of Archa Seven wouldn't bring another back.
“Moments like this always get worse before they get better.” Ratchet held out something soft to clear his eyes with. “You don’t have to go through it alone, Optimus.”
“I won’t.” The fibreglass cloth soaked up the coolant before it left his optics. “Where is Wheeljack?”
“He sleeps in his ship. Don’t know where he keeps it. If he’s anything like Bulkhead, we won’t see him until long after sunrise.”
Optimus returned the cloth, and the Ground Bridge lever was heavy as he pulled it down. “He’ll know where to find me.”
“Optimus.”
The vortex invited him in, but Ratchet’s voice held him in place.
“Remember that you’re needed here as well. I know it isn’t easy, with… how much we’ve had to hide. But the others still rely on you. You give them something more important than energon. They need hope. And they trust you more than you know.”
Optimus nodded without looking at him. Being distant now would only make the truth hurt worse when it finally came out. He had to prepare them for it. He needed them just as much as they needed him. And he had to know that they wouldn’t hate him so much for it.
Even if he deserved it. Even though he did deserve it.
✞✞✞
Airachnid reached out for Tarantulas’ claws, but all she grasped was empty space. The sensation of falling through that space hit her before it happened– and then the ground below hit right back.
Her first thought in waking from the daze was Scorpia. She’d been lashed to her mother’s chest for safety, but if she’d escaped the bindings, or if Airachnid had landed on top of her–
The sparkling cried out, but there was no pain in her vox. She was just as shocked from the sudden crash as her mother was. Airachnid felt her squirming, and could tell right away that no limbs were broken and no more of her legs had snapped off. Her own chassis was bruised and dented– nothing she couldn’t recover from.
Despite the thick undergrowth, crushed ferns and tangled vines beneath her, the sheer velocity of her fall was enough to rattle her gyroscopes and leave her surrounded by nagging system warnings. She dismissed them all with a weary snarl. The outside world was naught but the distant crash of waves on rock, waves on sand, and the hiss of her breath through her vents just before she finally opened her eyes. Her recharge hammock, weaved together from hundreds of her own web stands, was twisted around itself high above her. Despite her painstaking construction, she’d managed to roll over and fall right out of it.
Note for next time; closer to the ground, more surface area. Perhaps she’d be better off cocooning herself, if she was able to disguise the webs well enough that being encased wouldn’t leave her vulnerable. Or maybe the Prime would conjure a shelter for her. She’d have to hide her new injuries if he visited again. The last thing she wanted was an excuse for him to stick around and monitor her– or worse, more reasons for him to pity her.
Scorpia whined and shrieked against Airachnid’s chest, still not understanding what had just happened, only calming down when her mother squashed her own spark frequency to a lower pitch. Distress would always mirror distress. The only cure for a scared sparkling was to not be scared yourself.
Airachnid was not scared. Now that there was no way for her to hide it, she wouldn't let herself be. Scorpia was always watching, observing and learning. Her whole world was only what Airachnid would let her see, and she had to be careful in that regard.
If she was to survive to adulthood, she would have to obey her mother. And if she was anything like her mother, she wouldn’t obey someone she didn’t respect. Airachnid could only hope that, so long as she never encountered her father, she would be nothing like him.
Eventually, Scorpia went quiet. A sparkling was never truly silent, not even while they slept, but their ambient chirps were reassurance that the fragile things were still alive. As Airachnid rolled onto her side, wincing silently as she pushed herself up, she found that something else had fallen down with her. Lying next to her was the deer skull she’d harvested just a few days ago, her one and only collection piece. Its empty eye sockets watched her with a dead mother’s approval, and she put her claws through those sockets to carry it to the beach with her.
On Archa Seven, she’d seen many skeletons– most of them she’d had a hand in creating. She’d always assumed her own rattling under her skin had looked the same; a hard skull, a thousand shards in each leg, a ribcage around her burning heart. It wasn’t until Tarantulas had shown her a dead Cybertronian in his lab that she realised how different her corpse would have been, lying in that lonely jungle.
It had been a long time since she’d thought so much of him. It was inevitable that he’d show up in her dreams. But that wasn’t just a dream– it was a rehearsed memory. Their very first meeting. Who knew how long she would have stayed in that cell if he hadn’t come along to take her out.
After that he’d rarely left her side, and no-one had tried to make him. She hadn’t realised how lucky she was back then, to have someone watching her. The Decepticon mortality rate was high, even outside of battle. Resources were so scarce and ranks were so important that those who couldn’t fight for their lives were left to die. Generals would be assassinated by their underlings every week only so that someone else would get their fuel rations.
It was no wonder that Megatron quickly resorted to using Vehicons for the bulk of his cannon fodder. But by that point, the damage was irreversible. The only commanders left alive were as bloodthirsty and selfish as the spiders Airachnid had briefly called her family, and she had admired most of them.
But beyond that, the war had no allure for her. Tarantulas had been too busy teaching her the essentials of survival to spread Megatron’s propaganda, and she doubted that he even believed in half of it. Just because Cybetron was her home did not make her a Cybertronian. She never understood why so many of them sacrificed their sparks for naught– a bulk order of idiotic suicide– any more than she had understood why she was so different from them. What did she care for the fate of a planet that she was dragged kicking and screaming onto, for the fealty demanded by a symbol forced onto her chest, which would rust as easily as any other dead metal on the battlefield?
The others eventually learned the same lesson during Cybertron's funeral march; when the hollow streets were left for the dead and the sky was choked with the promise of escape, the promise of hope flung out among the stars. And yet only a handful found that hope on Earth. Did that mean all those others were dead, or only that they knew to stay away from Megatron? Airachnid didn’t often wonder about that.
Tarantulas was another one of the hundreds who had deserted the Decepticons when Cybertron finally gave up its last breath. Some banded together and took ships for themselves, others scavenged what they could from the ruins of their war and took flight in desperation. He had told her to find him on Regulon Four, if she had nowhere else to go, and for whatever vain reason she had chosen the opposite direction.
She’d wanted to prove something. Truthfully, she’d been terrified of disappointing him. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but she did believe he was haunting her. With Scorpia hanging limp in her harness as she walked, she wondered when sparklings were supposed to start having their own dreams. She hoped her daughter’s would be brighter than her own.
Airachnid found the familiar beach by following the sound of the water. It was a slice of the island that she was slowly learning to navigate– only a sliver compared to all the space around her still left to explore. Prime must have given her ample land for a reason, but the only ones she could think of didn’t make sense to her.
If she wanted, she could run in any direction and hide there for days. She could probably hunt one half of the island to extinction and no-one would even realise until months after. It was simply too perfect for her. The only answer she could come to was that Prime really did trust her, which still made no sense.
Well. It was in her best interest to be trustworthy. But she’d never been good at lying. That was the main difference between her and the likes of Starscream; they both hated Megatron, but he could at least pretend that he didn’t when it would keep him alive. Airachnid couldn’t pull it off– she had too much pride that she couldn’t swallow.
But maybe that was exactly why Prime trusted her, if he really did. She didn’t bother putting on a mask. She didn’t pretend to be anything other than what she was, and what she had to be to stay alive. Even if she wanted to kill him, she wouldn’t have resisted the urge for this long.
And even if they were both the only living creatures on Earth, even if Megatron was just a bad dream and her bloodthirst was clawing at her throat, she still wouldn’t be able to do it. She wasn’t so bitter anymore that she would sacrifice her own life to take out a Prime, just to prove that she could. Just to prove that he was wrong to think she was worth saving.
She still didn’t believe it, though. No-one, not the Autobots, not even Optimus Prime, was wholly good. There had to be a catch, something waiting to ambush her. Compassion was nothing more than a trap. Tarantulas’ greatest compassion towards her had been teaching her that fact.
In war, in the Decepticons, no-one will choose to help you. No-one will come to save you. Loyalty didn’t mean much to the dead, and even less to the dying. But death was not a tragedy. In most cases, it was the reward for a life well lived. The only tragedy was a life put to waste.
That was another reason why she failed to understand Cybertronians. They believed in the Allspark, didn’t they? They knew a paradise awaited them. Why did they mourn when the ones they loved went there? They must have not loved them that much to begin with, to be so jealous of them that they couldn’t be happy for the end of their suffering.
Even to this day, Arcee mourned Tailgate. It had been millions of years. Airachnid didn’t remember how long exactly. Then again, she couldn’t even remember the name of every spark she’d taken under Megatron’s command. And Arcee had blood on her hands as well. Not just faceless Vehicons– on Cybertron, she’d claimed at least thirty different Decepticon lives. Even without the information she’d been carrying at the time, she was a high priority target. Airachnid remembered that much.
Maybe the real difference between Autobots and Decepticons was how well they remembered their kills.
A weight suddenly pulled on Airachnid’s chest, as Scorpia pried at her restraints with all her meagre strength. Two weeks old, and she was already able to manipulate her limbs. After her imprisonment and countless surgeries, Airachnid had taken longer as an adult to make herself useful.
She freed her sparkling from the harness and set her down on the sand alongside her souvenir skull. The sun was trying to rise, its light not yet blinding on the still waves ahead, and the humid seaspray was like a suspended rainfall around her. It would be another hour until it was above the horizon, and longer still until she expected Prime to appear– if he was able to get away.
Airachnid would survive a day without refuelling, but though Scorpia didn’t drink much energon in one sitting she did require it more often. Her tiny body was constantly using resources to grow, though her fuel tank would likely be the last organ to increase in size. Eventually she’d have auxiliary stores and batteries that she could pull from– assuming none of her organic ancestry would interfere with her development.
There must have been some benefit to waiting for protoforms to grow naturally over plugging a grown spark into an adult frame, but Airachnid couldn’t fathom what it could be. If she was Cybertronian, perhaps she would have understood why they chose to sacrifice so much time and energy on children when a Well-born spark could be gained so much easier. The Well had existed since the Imperial age, pumping out soldiers for the Cybertronian Empire, yet so many over centuries still chose to procreate the ancient way.
Airachnid’s own choice to be pregnant had been purely selfish. It hadn’t really been a choice at all. She’d thought it would save her, or at least give her some protection. And it had, in all the worst ways. She was free from Megatron only because he likely thought she was dead.
What would Tarantulas think of her now, with all the mistakes she’d made? This time, she couldn’t chase the thought away. He was still in her head, digging his claws in deep. He would never go away, and once upon a time that would have comforted her.
There had been so much to learn on Cybertron. So much to teach herself. Decepticon doctors, the likes of Shockwave and Knockout and Flatline, had gutted and swapped out so much of her that she’d had to learn how to walk again. Tarantulas had been with her for every step, on all ten legs. He’d helped her choose her first alt-mode, and he’d shown her how to hide the pain until it no longer existed. He’d never once been disappointed in her because she’d tried so hard to give him no reason to be.
The first weeks had been the hardest. After each series of surgeries she had to stretch each limb, every day for hours, to stop them from locking up forever. She had to do it over and over again until the stitches stopped breaking open, and then start from the beginning.
Tarantulas had shown her a way to make it easier, if only by margins. He would play her music from the Cybertron she’d never known, so that even if she could not stop herself from screaming in agony, at least her voice was not alone. Eventually, she learned to dance, and eventually she didn’t have to keep doing it. But she did, because she wanted to.
The first time she’d seen herself in a mirror had been long after– when the surgeries and revisions were over, when the Decepticon brand was welded onto her chest. She would never know what she’d looked like before it, how much of her frame had been changed. Tarantulas had only told her that she looked perfect, and when he left her alone she danced in silence, for she had screamed so much that her vox simply shut down.
She hadn’t danced since her ship had crashed on this damn planet. Even on the Nemesis , when she’d thought she might be safe, Soundwave was always watching. Her dance was her own and no-one, not even Tarantulas, was allowed to see it. If she was allowed no privacy, she would at least keep that to herself.
But now there was Scorpia to consider. She was rolling in the sand now, lying on her side as she held the edge of the deer skull in her soft hands. With her mouth near the eye socket she seemed to be gnawing on the bone, as if she remembered how Airachnid had used her own fangs to peel the skin away. It was as morbid as it was touching, and she was sure Optimus and the medic would throw a fit if they saw it, and that much was enough to make Airachnid smile for a moment.
Other than the wildlife hidden away in the forest and shadows and her daughter staring up at her, she was truly alone here. She only had a fraction of the limbs she was used to having, and it had been so long since she’d tried in earnest…
What was the first dance she’d learned? The first song? She had to hum the rhythm in order to remember it, and even then it didn’t feel right. Her feet were clumsy even though she avoided the soft sand, and her arms cleaved through the air with a weight that was foreign to her.
What a waste of time. She should have been scouting the rest of the island, tracking the native predator and prey species, trying to find a permanent place to return to when nightfall came. She should have been setting traps, in case Decepticons or humans found themselves stranded here like she was. She could have fully submerged herself in the sea for no other reason than to watch the clouds, and it still would have been a better use of her time.
Yet she kept trying. Even though old scars were raking against new ones, even though she stumbled and made a fool of herself. The hum under her vents became whispered, half-remembered words, and at some point she was able to forget the weight of her frame.
It was only a distraction. It was all that it had to be. She was her own audience, and she closed her eyes as she always did. Time became suspended like the rain from the sea, and the sand no longer tried to sabotage her. She almost forgot where she was.
This was not Earth, or Archa Seven, or Cybertron. This was somewhere far away, where no-one would ever find her. If she just kept moving, she’d never have to leave. If she just kept her eyes closed, she could die here.
But her energy was not limitless. She lost her balance as she faltered, and her remaining back legs snapped out to catch her before she hit the ground. They sank into the sand like fingertips, and when she finally came to a stop she was hovering almost horizontal in the air.
She opened her eyes now, forsaking the brief peace she’d managed to trick herself into. The sky was bright now, the sun beating down above the ocean. And Scorpia was staring up at her, no longer gnawing on the bone. Some seconds passed before the sparkling chirped and clapped her hands together– and then, from behind Airachnid, another pair of hands soon joined in.