Chapter Text
The first Cybertronians born on Earth came without warning or ceremony, without applause or anticipation. Optimus Prime had been in the middle of a sentence, relaying something to Arcee that he could not remember the importance of, when the Matrix informed him of the arrival. There was no voice, no blossom of light to herald the news.
He simply knew– just as he knew that the sky was never as empty as it looked, and that his home was gone forever no matter what else he did, he knew that someone of his kind had just been born.
“Optimus? You still with us?”
Arcee had to stand on the very points of her peds to get his attention. If he’d taken any longer to acknowledge her, he likely would have found her climbing on his shoulders to bang her fist on his head.
“Yes, Arcee– apologies, my mind was… elsewhere for a moment.” He tried to hide how literal the phrase was for him with a cough of static. “You were saying?”
Arcee blinked once, stopping short of rolling her optics (likely only because Optimus was right in front of her).
“I was saying that the kids are gonna be out of school for the next few months.” From how she sighed, she was clearly repeating herself. “Something they call ‘summer vacation’. We figure they’ll be spending a lot more time around here, so we should probably make more accommodations. Jack keeps asking when we’re gonna get a snack fridge… whatever that is.”
Optimus nodded, though he was looking right through her. “We should consult with Agent Fowler on what can be brought in. I’m sure the government expenditure can account for a… fridge. Excuse me.”
He asked for forgiveness only after he started walking away from Arcee; he would have preferred a more graceful way to dismiss her, but Primely manners were the last thing on his mind at that moment. No one else around him seemed perturbed– Bulkhead continued training with his wrecking balls, Bumblebee told a story to the humans with Rafael translating from Primal Vernacular to English, and Ratchet didn’t falter at all at his console– which only confirmed that the Matrix was correct.
(If it had been wrong, then that would have been just as worrying for different reasons.)
Even without the Allspark, even so far away from Cybertron, Primus’ children were not only surviving, but willingly making more of their own. It should have been a cause for celebration, yet all Optimus could feel was confusion.
The Matrix told him that the child was on Earth– in fact, on the very same landmass he was now standing on. Clearly it wasn’t Arcee who had given birth, and she was the only Autobot on Earth who was capable of such a feat. The only other of her kind on the planet was Airachnid… but it was just as unlikely to be her as well, for reasons that were just as obvious.
Were there others on Earth that he didn’t know of– hiding from the humans, just as the Autobots and Decepticons were? Surely no one could enter the atmosphere without someone noticing… though he recalled that the United States, the country that had sheltered him and his soldiers for the last three years, had as many enemies as allies; just as Iacon and Kaon were historic rivals on Cybertron, Earth’s own territories were drawn out in ancient blood. If an alien appeared on the other side of the planet, in a different sky, another government could easily shelter them without any other one knowing.
But that was a concern for another day. The newborn was in the United States, which ruled out most unknowns. It had to be a femme already on Earth…
There was only one way Optimus would ever know the truth; finding the new mother and child himself.
“Ratchet. I require a Ground Bridge.”
The medic must have been engrossed in his work– he hadn’t even noticed that Optimus had retrieved two energon cubes from their stores, and he started when the Prime appeared next to him. Even so, he always managed to hide his surprise.
“Very well.” Whatever report or research he was working on was swiftly cast to one side as he pulled up the control panel. “What coordinates?”
Optimus did not know, though the Matrix was kind enough to at least give him a direction from its magnetic pull towards the new unfamiliar spark. “Take me to the other side of the country. I will know what I’m looking for when I’m in range.”
Ratchet was about to say something, and if it was anyone else asking for a Bridge he absolutely would have, but he reserved any words until after the configuration was done.
“So… what are you looking for?” he asked, while Optimus had been rehearsing how to break the news to his closest friend. Of any Autobot, Ratchet was the first who deserved to know. Yet that wasn’t what Optimus told him.
“The Nemesis has recently been sighted in the area. They have been tracking energon readings more often than usual. I believe there may be some left for us to commandeer, if we are quiet about it.”
He didn’t know why he had to lie. Perhaps only to not give his team any hope before he knew if it truly existed for them all. Morale had already been shaky ever since Bumblebee’s T-Cog was stolen– if Optimus wasn’t careful about it, a new spark appearing out of nowhere could spell relief or disaster in equal measures for everyone.
Ratchet rumbled his vox, averting his gaze like he always did when he thought something too good to be true was on the horizon. “Well, Primus knows we could use some…”
The medic pulled the Bridge lever with his usual show of effort. Usually he wouldn’t even consider firing up a portal unless there was a team of at least two ready to go through, but a Prime was someone to make exceptions for.
”Go ahead, Optimus. Be careful.”
Even though Optimus knew he’d become very good at lying, he hated that Ratchet had believed him so easily.
…
“Hey, where’s Optimus going?” Miko noticed him from leaving just behind Bumblebee, scrambling off of the couch with a sudden burst of energy that had been suspiciously absent when everyone else was cleaning up the mess of drink cans and wrappers that all humans left in their wake.
“We don’t usually ask.” Bulkhead only ever stopped what he was doing when he saw Miko running off somewhere– he’d developed something of a sixth sense for knowing when she was about to get herself into trouble. “Whatever it is, it’ll be important.”
The teenager scrunched her face up as the Bridge dissolved, and Bumblebee went right back to describing his first encounter with a combiner team to Jack and Rafael. It was a good story, sure, but once Miko’s immersion was broken there was no getting it back.
“He could at least say bye , couldn’t he?” she scoffed.
Bulkhead laughed, though there was no humour in how he shook his head. Then he told her, “We only do that if we don’t expect to come back.”
It was raining when he found them, as if Primus too was shedding tears alongside the rest of His children. At first, Optimus might have thought they were tears of joy, but he was quickly proven wrong in many ways.
Rain on Earth was a far different spectacle to the kind that once drenched Cybertron in its better days. Dark and ferrous clouds from the Rust Sea would gather over the nearest cities, warning all with insufficient armour to find shelter before the flood from the sky began– not of water, but of acid and oil. Those in Tarn and Kaon and Helex, where the eyesores of refineries and mines were kept away from delicate optics, had the worst of it. The fumes from the factories would turn the clouds into bloated pitch-black beasts that vomited thick toxic sludge onto the streets below, and the miners and fighters would simply trudge through the runoff on their way to another workday.
Optimus tried not to remember such stains on Cybertron’s past in the midst of this rain, the harmless water; cool and refreshing even as it threatened to drive rust into his hinges. It was a heavy downpour, streaming down his armour even as the heat of his engines made it evaporate into a fine mist around him. Maps of Earth called this part of the US ‘Maine’, on the border of itself and Canada. No missions had ever brought Optimus here until now, and he wished he’d had a chance to know of it earlier.
Where Nevada was desert and shrubs, cacti and crags, Maine was resplendent in its undergrowth. The trees grew far enough apart that he could move amongst them without breaking branches; tail enough that he knew anyone flying overhead would only see glimpses of red and blue that could easily be written off as light refracting through the rain in strange ways.
He would have liked to stay here, if he’d had the choice. But the Matrix told him to move on. He walked for another hour before the trees started to die away, though the plants at his legs were still choking out the soil. A cliff was growing in the distance, gathering grey and green across its imposing shape until it was sitting right in front of him.
It was still afternoon in Nevada, but here the evening was already throwing its gloomy drape out, making the rain clouds all the darker with its approach. When Optimus turned his head away from the setting sun, the cracks of the mountain face before him began to glow. And when he blinked, the light persisted.
There was blue on the rocks, wet and luminescent. The mountain was bleeding energon. It was a fresh mark, only now succumbing to the relentless hammering of the rain. Drip, drip, drip onto the stones, soon to be washed away without a trace. There was no other sign of life in range, no sparks or EM fields, nothing except the silent magnetic promise from the Matrix within him. Optimus engaged his guns before he went any further.
Unless the scene was of an immaculate murder, there was never only one drop of energon to be found. He found the trail, a series of spattered blue beacons, just as night hurried across the sky. There was evidence of someone desperately trying to rub or scratch the telltale stains out of the rocks and plants. They were obviously in a hurry– to get out of the rain?
Why were they out here in the first place, with a newborn sparkling…? If the sparkling was here at all.
Optimus assumed it was a Decepticon that he was tracking, because that was the only thing that made sense. If they’d been injured, Megatron likely wouldn’t waste time finishing them off. He’d expect them to run away and die by themselves, and saving him the effort would likely be seen as a great honour in their final moments.
The stains became thick streaks as the victim gave up trying to hide their trail, leading Optimus down the crumbling facade of the mountain. The stone wall narrowed to an opening which would have been invisible in the shield of rain, if not for the frame of familiar luminescent blue around the rocks.
As if to reassure him, the Matrix pulsed in his energon-stream. He was much closer now, though he still couldn’t pinpoint the source of new light burning at the edge of his existence. The fact that he could still feel it at least told him the energon trail was a separate phenomena, that he wasn’t too late to stop some horrible tragedy.
For his own sake, he focused on the fleeing Decepticon that was likely waiting for him, re-assessing their potential state as he descended to the end of the trail. He was able to make some firm decisions on what kind of frame he’d be dealing with– even a Prime in full health and state of mind struggled to move down the tumble of rocks, trying to manoeuvre himself so his plating wouldn’t scrape against boulders. His frame was large and cumbersome for work like this, so despite their injuries the Decepticon must have been nimble enough to traverse the stones without falling and snapping something off.
Starscream was a possible suspect– he hadn’t been sighted by anyone since his fight with Bumblebee over the T-Cog theft, and it was unlikely that he could bluff his way back into Megatron’s fold this time around. If his injuries were dire enough, he wouldn’t have been able to fly away. Yes, Optimus was certain now that it was the 'Con who was injured, else he would have been ambushed by now.
Even so, Decepticons were known to act desperately whether they were able to fend off danger or not— either fighting to the bitter end or, more commonly, fleeing from the battle with whatever they could save of themselves. And there was still no explanation for why a sparkling would be caught in the middle of such a scene.
The glowing barrels of the Prime’s guns burned through the darkness as he approached the mouth of the cave, pausing at the energon stains to scan his narrowed optics across the black beyond. Standing closer, he was able to study the way the fuel was painted on the rock. Unlike the clumsy smudges and accidental drops that had led him here, these marks were almost deliberate.
As if they were a warning.
"Back away, Prime."
That was not Starscream’s voice.
Optimus swung his guns towards the direction of it; a feral hiss embedded with a venom that he'd never encountered before. Deeper into the cave, two dull pink lights barely cut through the gloom. Their beholder had shied far back into the shadow of the shelter, away from the rain and the moonlight that threatened to break away her cover. There was only one Decepticon with eyes like those.
“Airachnid…?”
She was alone, no detectable Vehicon escort or hidden officers that Optimus could see or sense. From the fizzling of her energy field as well as the energon she’d already shed, she was severely injured.
Despite her warning, Optimus stepped forward.
"I said BACK AWAY !" Two of her back legs were bared alongside her fangs as weapons, ready to slice and shear his plates if he dared come into range of them.
Optimus halted, but did not retreat from her burning gaze. His optics, their reticules magnifying in the dark, could pick out only certain details of her tensed frame with the rest of her body hidden by the cave’s shadow. He could tell that she was taking the defensive stance– which, even with her injuries, wasn’t at all in-character for her.
(But, it seemed, old habits were dying for everyone in the wake of this new Earthly war. After all, hadn’t Starscream proved himself a restrained, almost amicable leader when Megatron had left to explore the space around Earth? Very, very strange things were happening indeed.)
"Has the damp gone to your processor, Prime?!” Airachnid continued to hiss, trying to fend him away with barbed words instead of talons. “Get away from me before I claw out–!"
Her threat ended in a cry of pain, and the pink lights of her optics were suddenly extinguished. What Optimus could see of her body now slumped to the granite floor; servos folded around her chest, helm bowed in defeat.
She was too weak to move, and the heavy loss of energon would have likely disabled her ranged weapons. The infamous hunter of the Decepticons, sadism and spite incarnate, now lay as helpless as a sparkling before Optimus. His gun hummed with its loaded charge of plasma, aimed steadily at the spider.
A single twitch of his digit would light the cavern with what was left of her energon. One simple reflex would end centuries of murder and redeem countless galaxy-wide genocides. His next actions would mean the life or death of more than just one person.
In that vital moment of indecision, the Matrix decided to let him in on a secret, and he realised just how true that fact was.
Airachnid was indeed as helpless as a newborn sparkling, with their blind optics and bare protoform… and their delicate web of EM fields; barely detectable, barely bigger than the growing sparks they protected.
"Where are your Decepticon brethren?" Optimus lowered his weapons as he asked, looking into Airachnid's eyes while they blinked open once more. She made a noise, like a scoff edged with razor-wire, swiftly followed by coughing. Thick droplets of fresh energon covered the distance between the two ancient enemies.
"What does it matter to you?" she growled. "They're far away from here. They won't care about my demise any more than you will. So just put me out of my misery, Autobot."
"You know I cannot do that, Airachnid.”
"And why is that?"
Optimus noticed how she crawled backwards towards the nearest wall of the cave despite her injuries, and the sharp edge of fear that had now crept into her voice. Perhaps it had always been there, and she could simply no longer hide it.
"Because," he transformed his gun back to its servo form, standing resolute against the background of thunder that had now arrived to herald the scene, "if I do, your child will die as well."
Airachnid's faceplate cycled through a spectrum of emotions; surprise, outrage, confusion– some that even Optimus did not recognise when painted on a fierce face like hers, some that came and went too fast for him to categorise, and some that reminded him of another femme from long ago that, like the rains in Kaon, he tried not to think about.
Finally, at the crest of her confession, Airachnid lowered her helm again against her knees in defeat.
"What gave it away?" she whispered, as if her vocaliser was about to permanently seal itself shut and these would be her final words.
"The Matrix tells me of every new spark brought into existence,” he told her. “But even without it, I know a mother when I see one. A new one, especially so."
When he entered the mouth of the cave, this time Airachnid did not force him away. She stared off at the sheet of hammering rain outside, turning her face away from the Prime so that he could not see it when brief flashes of lightning split apart the firmament. Her spider legs lay purposefully folded in a shield around her back, the joints twitching in random spasms.
There, in the centre of that mass of razor-tipped rods, Optimus could sense the small magnetic flux, the smaller spark within frantically ticking away.
Airachnid with a child. He had thought it an impossibility, yet it was in fact the only possibility. The only fact more surprising to him was that, from everything he could see, she was protecting it.
The only way any of it made sense was to believe that this femme was not Airachnid after all; not the one who had haunted the Autobots since the war had left Cybertron a hollow shell, not even the one that had found herself on Earth just mere months ago. She was a fading shadow of that Airachnid, a haunting of her former self.
Something had happened in those months since her arrival. Something that had shattered her, leaving her clinging to those tiny vestiges of her former self even as her personality was unwillingly rewritten into something foreign, something alien and disgusting to her. He could see it in how she shuddered, how her claws wanted to tear at her armour, how furious she was at herself for letting anyone, let alone a Prime, see her in such a state.
And now one question was left hanging in the air like a viral disease, waiting for the moment of infection; what had scarred her so much, leaving her so unrecognisable? There was only one possible answer that would leave her on the run, far from the Nemesis, with a newborn as well.
"May I ask who the sire is?"
Airachnid flinched at the mention of that word, her optics shuttering from a sudden and unmistakable flare of anguish. “Surely you already know.”
Optimus had hoped it hadn’t been him. But who else could it have been? Who else would she be running from?
"There was a reason why I left the Decepticons in the first place.” Her voice was now barely a whisper, almost drowned out completely by the thunder. “Why so many of us did. Ever since he found dark energon, he was never the same. Even back on Cybertron, we knew it. He wanted to bring back sparkling farms, you know. After you ejected the Allspark. He wanted soldiers… no matter what it took.”
Optimus had not known that. Though he did not show it he knew that the implications, the revelation that Megatron would go to such lengths, was staggering. His long-gone friend had no qualms with using the most devastating blueprints of the Senate, the enemy that had sent him down the path of war in the first place, out of sheer spite.
Making drones was easy, if you had the right materials– the Vehicons were always proof of that. But a true soldier, Autobot or Decepticon, needed a spark. And there were precious few ways to obtain one nowadays.
“So he… impregnated you,” Optimus almost choked on the word, “to bolster his numbers.”
But Airachnid shook her head. “He didn’t know I was pregnant.”
And then she finally lashed out– her claws sank into his chest, the red plates that formed part of his alt-mode. There was pain, but no energon to draw from. She didn’t seem to notice.
"If it wasn't for the Autobots,” she snarled at him, “I would never have had to go back there. Back to him … if it wasn’t for you , this would never have happened!"
Optimus was not scared of her anger, or of any pain she might cause him. Such fury needed somewhere to go, either towards herself or whoever was nearest, and he was the only other target available. A mother’s instincts would not let such feelings go towards a newborn, not even if the mother felt they were earned. But that only made such feelings more intense and bitter, and in need of someone to blame for them.
Then Airachnid choked, and not even the thunder could cover up the sobs that came from her throat as she released him.
“If you won’t kill me,” her voice simmered under the sadness, “then I should kill you instead. But I know I can’t. I couldn’t even kill him… and he deserved it far more than you.”
She wouldn’t say why she couldn’t, and Optimus knew better than to push his luck by asking. He believed her either way; she had so far only given him a superficial scar. If she truly wanted to hurt him– and he had no doubt that she wanted to– she could do much worse before he could put her down.
Rather than being grateful that she could do nothing other than weep, Optimus shared her grief. It was quietly terrifying to see the true impact of the War before him– the consequences wrought by Megatron that had left such a strong femme now struggling to even speak. And Airachnid was strong; as much as she was immoral and selfish, a manipulative and devious creature, not even Arcee would ever call her weak.
Arcee… what would she think of something like this? Her enemy, the source of so much of her suffering; now a victim of her own cause and cast out to rot.
The humans had a word for things like this; karma. ‘What goes around comes around’. Optimus wondered if Arcee would have thought something like this was too much punishment even for someone like her. Or, perhaps not enough .
No. No one deserved a fate such as this.
"Did no one else know of your situation?" he asked Airachnid, and it was the only way he could show any form of sympathy that she would accept. Even so, her glare sharpened to steel.
"Of course not," she growled, her claws scoring the rock beneath her with deep gouges. "If anyone did, it wouldn’t have changed anything. Do you know how it feels, Prime? To be dragged right back into Unicron’s hands when you thought you were finally free?"
Her mouth twisted into a shaking frown, and her optics burned brighter even with her fuel still bleeding away.
“I wanted to leave. When Unicron was waking up. I thought I could rally the others around me. I almost did. But then Soundwave…” She broke off own vocaliser. Optimus remained silent, and her helm fell forwards in an exhausted slump.
"Just go. Leave me and my burden to die with some dignity ."
Silence prevailed, save for the constant ambience of rain-soaked nature, for the next few tense moments. Optimus needed those moments to think of what to say next.
"Airachnid," he began. "If the Decepticons have done this to you…”
He stopped himself, knowing she would not appreciate any sign of pity, then retraced his steps.
“If they no longer welcome you, then you are a rogue. A neutral, in all respects. You consider yourself one anyway, do you not?”
Airachnid’s lip curled. “I consider myself many things. But I've never been a Decepticon.”
“So there you have it. In this moment, we are not enemies. So I cannot allow you to die when it can be so easily prevented. Especially not when you have a child in your grasp."
She scoffed again; refusing to meet his gaze, refusing to move at all. Maybe she couldn’t anymore, with all her energy now depleted. Still, Optimus had to press forward. He couldn’t leave her here to die anymore than he could leave one of his Autobots.
"Please, Airachnid... let me help you and your sparkling."
Yet more silence, more rain, more minuscule thuds from the newborn spark shielded at her back. Something like a sigh eventually pushed past her vocaliser, as the legs wrapped behind her started to coil out. Her servos reached behind into that unfolding arrangement, and her hands now held a tiny bundle of her own webbing.
The silk was a makeshift cocoon– she had probably used the last of her energy just to make the cover for her child. She cradled it close to her chestplates, near her spark chamber; helm dipped downwards, optics squeezed shut.
Optimus had seen such images far more times than he ever cared to remember. Mothers desperately shielding their sparklings from whatever lay ahead, be it an advancing armada or incoming grenade or flying shrapnel. Rarely did both, or either, make it out of those situations alive. And now Airachnid was hiding her child from a future that was as dark and cold as the earthly night outside.
He had seen mothers defiant to the end in an effort to protect their last link to their dying planet, and mothers-to-be sacrificing everything but their spark to stay alive, and those who never had the chance to carry being shot through their chambers... and the memory caused his own optics to flutter.
It was the second time he’d thought of her that evening, the second time in centuries.
"You both need energon," Optimus said, eliciting a condescending glare from Airachnid; a sliver of her old self still fighting to stay alive.
"And you just so happen to carry cubes around with you?" She frowned while running her claws down the sparkling’s cocoon with such gentleness that they didn’t seem like claws at all.
Optimus knew that smiling was not at all appropriate in the circumstances, but his foresight made it difficult to keep his mouth flat. "As a matter of fact, I do."
From his subspace he retracted two cyan cubes. Their fresh glow tore right through the dark, bringing Airachnid’s hungry face into full view. His hand only barely moved out of the way of her extended leg, the barb reaching to snatch the cubes up. When her grasp remained empty, she gave him a deep frown as he held the fuel out of her reach.
"When I give you this energon,” he told her, “I expect that your first move will be to attack me. Therefore, you must let me manually disable your weapon systems first."
For a nanoklick, Airachnid actually appeared to consider the offer– as if it was fair to her, as if she even had a choice– before she reluctantly nodded.
Optimus edged closer, keeping his optics firmly on the irregular twitches of her spider legs as his EM field tried to balance out the erratic crackle of her own. Those legs were always a cause of fascination, or at least curiosity sourced from revulsion. The Prime, like anyone else on his side of the War, did not know how Airachnid became a technorganic being, as those of her kind were known.
In fact, no one knew anything at all about her before she became a Decepticon. She had appeared out of thin-air, making her debut in the massacre of Crystal City with a swarm of Insecticons at her back, just in time to cause havoc for the evacuation of the Ark. After Cybertron was abandoned, she made a name for herself alongside the likes of Shockwave and Tarantulas, the Horrorcons and the Decepticon Justice Division. She presumably got bored by the time she defected; keeping to herself and her trophies all this time, until Earth and the Chaos God at its core drew her back into the fold.
"She hasn't made a sound," Airachnid said numbly, still so lightly running her talons down the blanket of webbing as Optimus cautiously knelt next to her. "Not when she was born. Not even when...”
She paused as the Prime took her servo, turning the palm upwards. Most weapons of war were external grafts onto frames that were never expected to see battle, so some wires were not housed safely inside the limbs. With enough precision, one could break enough links that the entire weapon would no longer function without repairs.
As Optimus scanned her limb for vulnerable points, easing his digits under her plating to snap the fragile circuits, he thought that Airachhid might just abandon whatever she was saying– before she finally exhaled through her fangs.
“...Not even when her brother was killed in front of her."
And Optimus froze, the only time in that surreal evening that he’d yet been shocked still. He had long ago realised that one never did just accept the everyday horrors of war– those that were common knowledge, and those that no one should ever know of. Just when one thought that they’d seen the worst of what their kind was capable of, a new grisly event lay waiting around the corner.
Hearing that Megatron had forced himself upon one of his own was horrifying enough. To then kill the product of such a union, to dispose of something so precious as a new life in a world where the old ones were quickly going extinct…
The Matrix had told him of two births. He’d been so stunned at the sensation of even one that he hadn’t even noticed when the other vanished from his senses.
"I'm sorry to hear that, Airachnid."
And he was. There was no proper way to express it, no easy way to show his sincerity when Decepticons so often seemed to be an entirely different species to the Autobots. Though, while one hand held her servo by the wrist, the other placed itself lightly upon her palm. A gentle grip, meant to soothe and ground whoever received it…
So long as the ‘whoever’ wasn’t Airachnid.
"It’s nothing to be sorry for," she snarled, jerking her servo away from his touch. "He shouldn’t have existed in the first place. In the end, he's still a charred stain on the Nemesis floor... and his sister might as well be dead too."
She looked away again, but not before Optimus saw a single bead of coolant emerge from her eyes. Her servo fell back into place at her side and he took it again, this time with no resistance as he focused on the job at hand.
Once he found the cables that routed power from her tanks to her blasters, he’d only need to clip them to render her lasers and webbing useless. As for her acid and razor legs... well, he'd cross that bridge when he came to it– whether or not that bridge was just a few klicks away, ready to collapse underneath him.
As he performed the delicate work, privately wondering how Ratchet could do such procedures every cycle with stakes far higher than a broken blaster port, Airachnid talked to herself. Or perhaps to her daughter, who remained curled up tight in her cocoon by her unlikely mother’s spark.
“There was nothing I could do. Nothing else I could think of. I could only carry one at a time. She was quiet, but her brother… he would have given us away. I thought I’d hidden him. I went back for him, but… he was there. Of all the people who could have heard him.”
She spat, leaving viscous acid to burn a hole somewhere away from her. “I saw him obliterate the child. He didn’t even recognise it as his own. Which was a mercy, I suppose… and a valuable lesson learned.”
“Lesson?” Optimus finished the wire of the first servo, giving her a moment to hiss in pain. With her weapons disabled, at least some of her energon would go to more vital systems instead.
“That these children could not be easily disposed of,” Airachnid replied, not even mustering the strength to be angry at him for listening in. “You’ll expect that I considered the act myself. And I did. I never asked for these sparklings. They aren’t supposed to be here anymore than I am, and there was nowhere else for them to go. Even as I pulled my daughter from my chamber, I was thinking of how best to end her.
“But as her brother died… a part of my spark died as well. I realised then that these things did not just come from my core. They were tied to it. Quite literally, they are parts of myself that must be nurtured before I can take them back.”
Optimus had heard such a philosophy from an old swordmaster, from better days. Dai Atlas, his name might have been. Before the Well gave its last gasp of new sparks and doomed the fractured Cybertronians to a slow and sure extinction, bond-born sparks were a rare sight. People like Dai Atlas saw a beauty and vulnerability in rearing life within the body Primus had gifted, in taking what He had given them and using it to create something new and– though it might have been blasphemy to say so– better.
Orion, as he’d been known back then, had not known the truth in those words until he’d met the person he’d wanted to make something better with. A new Cybertron. A new way of life…
The death of a child was said to be like the death of a sparkmate. Neither were wounds that would ever heal. Now that he’d thought about her a third time, he knew that he wouldn’t sleep that night.
“Even knowing all that,” Airachnid continued, briefly saving Optimus from memories too precious to have any place here in the present, “I might have still been able to do it. To sever the last tie that binds. To save the parts of myself that still mattered. If not for…”
Her grip on her daughter tightened as she discussed the prospect of killing her, and as she looked up Optimus saw that her faceplate was now tracked by streams of coolant.
“If not for what?” he pressed.
Airachnid shook her head. "If not for my kin on Archa Seven. My family, I suppose. It doesn’t matter.”
Even as she turned away, Optimus felt the Earth and all around it fall away from beneath him.
Archa Seven.
He knew the place well. The planet, the system, the state of the War when it found itself there. It was a place that he’d hoped and prayed never to hear of again. The thunder above the cave mirrored the roiling thud of his long-broken spark.
His digits were closed tight over a line of wires inside Airachnid’s servo plating, and it took all his strength to bring himself to break the line.
With the former Decepticon now relatively disarmed, Optimus held the first energon cube near her. She swiftly grabbed and brought it to her lips, gulping the precious liquid down. It was empty in less than a klick, and she sighed deeply as her auto-repairs went to work. Optimus held out the other cube, which she took more hesitantly this time. With a glance at the Prime, she turned her back on him so that he couldn’t see her sparkling.
From this new perspective he could see that Airachnid's choice of using only two legs to threaten him with wasn't a choice at all; they were the only ones she had left. The others must have been lost somehow during her escape from the Nemesis… and with such integral parts of her alt-mode gone, she was truly stranded here.
“Tell me about them,” he said. “The spiders on Archa.”
Airachnid squeezed the empty cube with her claws, as if testing her own recovering strength, and raised her eyeridges towards him. “Why do you care?”
“I need to know what’s keeping your child alive. I suspect it is the same thing preventing you from killing me. So tell me.”
She scoffed, tossing the cube aside to be lost somewhere in the rain, and no other sound came from her for some klicks. Either something from outside had drawn her attention, or she had no interest in answering the Prime.
Optimus watched the rain with her. Even if she didn’t want to tell him, she would do it anyway just so he wouldn’t ask again.
“They’re like Insecticons, I suppose,” she eventually said. “Chitin instead of metal. Same number of optics. A single hive-mind, ruled by a queen. Thousands of them, deadly and efficient… and ferociously protective of their young."
The last sentence ended in a regretful growl. “I knew that even before this. I learned it the hard way. Their eggs glow like energon ore. I was so hungry that… you can imagine what I did. They didn’t kill me, at least. I was part of the swarm by then.”
She’d called them her family, despite the lack of love in her hiss. Acid and webs were exotic weaponry even among Decepticons, but hers were not artificial. They were a part of her just as much as her child was.
“They made you this way,” Optimus said, and she neither protested nor explained. “You consider yourself one of them?”
As little as he knew about the nature of technorganics, Optimus was conscious that this would likely be a sensitive subject. Though Airachnid had already revealed so much to him with nowhere to run and no way to kill him. She looked at him over her shoulder, her fangs almost covered by her lips, before she pulled them back in a mocking bark of laughter.
"You tell me, Prime. Am I Decepticon, or rogue? Am I even Cybertronian?" She turned around fully to face him, a hand pillowing the head of her cradled sparkling. “Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. It doesn’t change anything. Whatever my relation to those spiders… we both have that in common. And sooner or later, it will be my ruin.”
She said it bitterly, even as she held the object of her hate so tenderly, even as she slumped over with her broken legs.
"The instincts they gave me have never betrayed me before. Now I don’t even know what they’re trying to tell me. I have no say in it. If my brain had to choose between keeping myself or my child alive… I don’t even know which one it would pick.”
She couldn’t be a monster even if she wanted to be. And did she want to? It was impossible for even Optimus to say. He was left kneeling there, forced to re-evaluate everything he thought he’d known about her. She had instincts, like an animal without control of itself. She had been twisted into something new and unwanted once before, and now it was happening again.
How much of the Airachnid that had killed so many Autobots, so many creatures, was really her? How much of her was he seeing right now? Even without the loss of a child, the forced bond on her spark, the mutilation of her body… she didn’t know who she was. Who she was supposed to be.
She was in unimaginable pain, more than even she could ever inflict on another. Deep down, Optimus knew she deserved it. Deeper still, he knew that no one deserved it.
"What will you do now?” he asked, unable to think of where she could possibly go. “With the Decepticons behind you, and a sparkling to care for..."
Airachnid shrugged, a casual gesture in defiance to everything that had just happened. Her last two legs dangled uselessly from her back as she turned away from him to wipe new tears of coolant away.
"I'm a scavenger as well as a hunter,” she declared, even though it was just a meaningless label to cling to. “I'll adapt. As I always do."
"Energon is the one thing you cannot scavenge,” Optimus informed her, though she surely already knew. “You need a method of finding unclaimed deposits, and a way to extract viable fuel from—“
"No, I don’t," she cut in, her remaining legs jerking in newly-energised irritation. "I’m not like you. So long as I can hunt, I can live without energon… for a while, at least. I've survived one war already. I can make it through another… so long as Autobots stay out of my way."
" You have survived a war, Airachnid,” he corrected, “but no sparkling has… not without help."
The former Decepticon stared at him in slow-growing disbelief. She was smart, and she quickly realised what Optimus was offering her. The only thing he could offer, before he could leave her like this.
As he expected, her reaction was not one of gratitude.
"The day I believe the Autobots would ever aid me is the day I kiss the Allspark," she spat, depositing her wrapped sparkling back into the safety of the rotary joint at her back. “Assuming you didn’t break the thing when you launched it into the dead of space.”
Optimus chose to overlook the knife she tried to twist into him. "You are right. The Autobots as a whole may not help you. But I will."
Airachnid looked at him like he was a Minicon on stilts, like he was a Sharkticon beached at the edge of the Rust Sea– to summarise, like he was a fool. And she made a point to tell him such, just in case he didn’t quite get it.
"You are an idiot , Prime.” It was the most sincere thing he’d ever heard come from her fangs. “I have nothing to give that you or your Autobots would want. Why would you help me only to hinder yourself?"
“You don’t believe that a foolish Prime has a duty to help all those in need?”
“I can believe something stupid like that. But times have changed. You don’t have a wealth of resources to give away to anyone who asks for it. So answer me, properly. Why would you help me?”
Optimus straightened, feeling his jaw-hinge throb as he reset the plate. If she wanted a true answer, then he would give her it. It was the only thing he had left to give.
“Because I believe that redemption can be earned by anyone who truly wants it. Because that sparkling you have is proof that some good, some very small sliver of good, might still make it out of this war alive. Because…”
He hesitated as he thought again– if this was something he wanted to acknowledge, something he wanted her to know– and his mind did not change.
“Because you are not the only one who lost a part of themselves on Archa Seven.”
Airachnid blinked, her eyes flashing once in a moment of surprise. “What did you lose?”
With great difficulty, his voice edged with hurt that had long ago lost its edge, Optimus told her. She wouldn’t believe him if he didn’t.
“A person. A soldier. A dear friend. Someone… who then, was my world."
It hurt to speak of her, but he didn’t regret doing so. To forget her, to consign her to the vault of his memories was a fate worse than that which came for her. If she only lived on in this one conversation, this one attempt at Optimus trying to save another victim of Archa for whom it was not too late, then it was worth the pain of remembering her absence.
“So answer me, properly,” he asked, deliberately mirroring her own stern demand. “Will you let me help you?”
She looked at him in silence, and for a moment the rain, the thunder, even the wind seemed to cut out so as not to interrupt her. It was a long moment, a sorrowful one, before she let herself give in to the inevitable.
"Very well. Until I find myself to be self-sustainable..." She had some difficulty getting her next words past a blockade of whatever pride she had left. "I will accept whatever help you will give to me. And my… sparkling. But I promise nothing in return. Now will you finally leave me alone?"
Optimus nodded– it was good enough. The only thing he wanted was something she could not yet give, not until she decided who she was and who she wanted to be. It would be a long road, and the sparkling might be full grown before she reached the end of it. But it was worth a try.
Just once, Optimus wanted proof that his belief in redemption wasn’t one he’d held in vain all this time. For if someone like Airachnid could change, then the rest of the Decepticons were not utterly lost.
With nothing else to be said, he rose to his feet. Airachnid turned away from him, happy to tell him to leave but, apparently, not wanting to watch him obey. It would take time for her to regain her strength, and even longer for the weight of her situation to settle in her spark. He would likely return more than once before then.
The pounding rain had washed the entrance of the cave clean, leaving no sign at all that a Cybertronian was sheltering within. Even with her weapons down, so long as she stayed hidden, Optimus was sure she’d be safe from Decepticon eyes until he met her again. Whenever that might be.
In all the time he’d spent interrogating Airachnid, the moon had taken centre stage in the storm clouds. Ratchet would be worrying by now. Optimus opened his commlink, a surreal feeling as he reconnected to the outside world. The moments he’d shared with Airachnid had felt like they’d taken place on another planet, in another timeline entirely. She was an entirely different person now, after all. Whether that person was better or worse would remain to be seen.
"Ratchet, this is Optimus. I need a Ground Bridge."
"Understood," came the medic's voice at the other end of the comm line, a sigh of relief punctuating the acknowledgement. Then, right on cue, a green-blue vortex yawned in front of the Prime.
“The person you lost.” Airachnid now stood in the dark of her refuge, only visible from her optics and the flicker of life behind her own spark. “What was her name?”
Optimus' affected confusion for his own sake, though it was a flimsy mask. "I never said she was a femme."
"You didn't have to. What was her name?"
He considered leaving without an answer. He hadn’t spoken her name in so long, not since Cybertron. No Autobots would dare speak it around him, and even though he could control his temper better now he let the others believe that it was a forbidden word. It was better that way.
If not even his own soldiers could say it, then why should Airachnid have the privilege of knowing it?
But in her eyes, Optimus saw no malice. She wasn’t asking out of spite, to mock him or turn his pain into leverage. Even though she absolutely would have if the situation was any different, even though he did not know why she asked, he told her.
“Elita One.”
He exhaled through a bullet wound in his spark. Airachnid did not flinch, though her stance changed ever slightly in the shadows.
“Did Megatron kill her?”
To simply nod would have been the easiest answer. But that would have been lying.
“He is the reason she is dead,” he revealed. “But he did not take the killing blow. That crime lies with the spiders.”
“I see.” Airachnid looked away, letting the secret apology for what her family had done go unspoken. With what she knew they were capable of, she did not have to ask for further details. “When… when will you be back?”
This was the hardest thing for her to ask– an admission that she truly needed him to survive. Another silence stretched out between them, broken only by the endless hammer of rain. Not sludge, or oil, nothing but harmless clean water. After hearing of what Megatron had done, Optimus still felt filthy as he stood there.
"Soon,” he told her, so desperate to fix everything his former friend had broken and sullied. “I promise."
Primes were supposed to keep their people safe, the history of their people intact, and to keep promises. Just because Airachnid was not yet willing to make them did not mean that Optimus couldn’t still set an example.
They’d be seeing a lot of each other from now on. At some point, she’d learn to not hate him for what he was. He knew it was possible; long ago, before Earth, he’d had to teach the same lesson to himself.