Disclaimer: If I owned TF:A, do you really think Blackarachnia would only star in 5 episodes?
Becoming
Contrary to what Optimus believed, Elita 1 hadn't died in the fall to the cave floor. She hadn't been killed by the spiders, either, literally or metaphorically. No, what killed her was her boys' betrayal. They were supposed to come. They had to come! They …didn't. So Elita died, and in the dark caves below the planet, something new was born. It was a slow birth, a dead thing coming alive, but it was done. And so, many months later, the being who was not Elita and not yet Blackarachnia looked around herself and said: "I can work with this."
Elita had scoured the area around the ship, driven off the Spiders, even though she couldn't kill them on her own. She'd destroyed eggs, eking out a small territory to call her own, but she had never explored the ship. Bodies lay in the cargo hold, along the airlock, in entrances to the ship. Autobot morality had held her back, whispered things about disturbing the dead and angry ghosts. Secretly, shamefully, squeamish horror had also helped convince her to avoid the ship. Elita now pushed those thoughts away and set to clearing the ship. She couldn't afford to behave that way. She wasn't back home, where it was fine for her to stand back and let mechs do the heavy lifting. Several of the bodies were crushed into unnatural shapes, twisted by the crash and some were thick with rust. Limbs came off in her hands. She purged her tank several times, and returned to hauling bodies. Eventually, she learned to see them as objects, not former people.
When the shells had all been stacked against a wall of the cave, she turned to exploring the ship. No light shone within the dead vessel, corridors claustrophobic in the near total dark. Everything was muffled by a thick shroud of dust. Not even the spiders had entered here. She mapped out the ship with a single minded certainty, exploring the helm and maintenance tunnels alike. In the belly of the cargo hold, small ships were lashed to the floor. Not particularly maneuverable, she noted, but they had survived the crash more or less intact.
Several weeks later, Elita detoured by the weapon's room on her way out. She had been working up her courage since she entered the ship. There, Elita obtained a sword. It was a plain, deadly thing, designed to kill and maim. Such a weapon would be useless to subdue, would never find any purpose beyond war and battle. The autobot in her quivered at the thought of such a gory thing. Her power had always had peaceful applications, as suited a femme in peacetime. Elita located a sheath and weapons belt, and with some regret, slung it, sword and all, over her shoulder. She had no time for what should be, and she couldn't cling to some idealized past.
Elita hacked through the spiders with her weapon, learning by trial and error what worked, and what didn't. She had little skill with the huge blade, finding it heavy and awkward. Despite that, she was shocked to find she quickly came to love the weapon. It would not vanish after scant moments, was exclusively and entirely hers. With it, she had control over the nightmarish land she was trapped in. With it, she was no longer victim to whims of fate and the alien intelligence of the spiders.
Beyond that, it was friend and companion, never far from her side. All the lessons Autobots taught on fighting, none of them had been like this. Those lessons had focused on defense, evasion, responsibility. None had taught her what she learned in the caves: Battle and war, trickery and open combat- they were something worth doing, worth seeking out. It was brutal, yes. But there was such a fierce, wild joy in battle, something clean and untouchable in a successful ambush, something wonderful in luring spiders to their doom, something worthy in blood and bruises.
She acquired them, of course. Much to her ever growing disgust, her new flesh was weak, and easily torn. After injuring her face and head in several of her battles, she gave in, and searched out a new helm. She found it hidden behind the diminishing stack of energon cubes, previously sheltered by their shadows. She carried it to the underground stream she had discovered near the ship, and washed it off. Once finished, she leaned up against the rockfall wall, watching the river as her four eyes were reflected back. Decisively, she shoved her arms into the stream, scrubbing roughly to clean off gore from the spiders. She didn't have time to reminisce.
Elita 1 had never had an altmode before the caves. Even before she had become trapped here, some fledging notion, some fluttering spark of rage, had always stopped her. Femme's frames were so… delicate, and most of the alts available to them were equally flimsy. Why waste energy and time on something so useless? She despised her stupid, weak organic half, but her spider mode was better then any of the other options she had once been presented with. When she got rid of her current affliction, she would definitely consider an all metal version.
Now, however, her other form found many uses. With it, she could explore the caves without being attacked. Her understanding of the planet grew with each day. Some sort of soft, clingy stuff grew on the damp walls of the cave. Tiny, hard shelled things with wings fed off it, and in turn larger hard shelled creatures with many legs fed on them. Larger creatures still, ones that sent out burst of sound that buzzed against her sensors, feed on the Many-Legs. The Sound-Makers in turn were consumed by the spiders.
Elita hunted the Sound-Makers as well, using them to gauge the potency of her new poison, and as food source to augment the dwindling supply of energon cubes. Sentinal was wrong; there wasn't enough energon here to last one person's life time, let alone three. The first time she had eaten one of the creatures, she had nearly been sick. Her stomach rebelled against the first food it had ever encountered, and left her curled up in a tight ball of agony, but she had persisted. Lately, Elita found that she had even come to enjoy the taste of the meat, and it disturbed her more then the bodies from the ship once had.
After some endless period of searching Elita found the hole from which she and others had fallen. They may not have been able to ascend to it, not then, but now she could. Her boys would still be helpless in this situation. She felt a spike of smugness at the thought. Elita shifted to spidermode, then began to spin. She had once called the silk beautiful, and now she snickered at her younger self. Beautiful! As if that meant anything. The silk was useful, that was what mattered. She could escape the caves with it. One long rope of it attached to the sidewall as a guide, clawed hands reaching into cracks, and she was up the wall.
She pulled herself up from the lip of the hole, and stared. She had never seen anything so wonderful in her life. The ground was harsh and jagged, the air thin and acidic, the clouds an ugly bruised purple. But the sky arched, high and clear and perfect, and despite everything, she rejoiced. This, she had done. She had escaped the caves, with out help or sympathy. A sort of defiant pleasure swept over her, making her giddy. She spun around, and then collapsed on the ground, giggling like a new sparked protoform. She had done it! She lay there laughing until her lungs ached.
Despite everything, despite conviction, despite newfound strength, something in her chest ached when she reached the landing site. There was no sign of the ship, no message left, no memorial given. If she had died in that cave, nobody would have known, her body left to rot among the forgotten victims on the ship. She felt utterly and completely alone for the first time, the ghosts of her companions fleeing at this proof of their betrayal. There would be no rescue. Scowling, Elita shoved those emotions away. She wasn't some weak femme from the towers anymore, whose only use was to giggle and flirt. She could rescue herself.
Elita set herself to exploring the over-ground with a sort of single-minded intensity. She clung to the edge of the jagged rock spires, skirted weak ground, noted the spiky red mushroom-flowers. The sun rose and fell and had risen again before she was done. The light blinded her, made her flesh raw and sensitive. Elita refused to stop or find shelter. She was better then that. She would make herself better than that. After a while, a new thought came to her: higher ground. She hadn't paid much attention in her tactics class- she hadn't been expected to. Now she was grateful that she paid attention at all. Ignoring all her new instincts to avoid such heights, she forced herself up on of the highest peaks. Her persistence rewarded itself: she saw a long gouge in the earth, leading into the caves. As the sun set, the spiders swarmed out it, exploring the over-ground.
"The ship crashed through there," she noted, voice rough. It had been a long time since she had spoken aloud. "The ship crashed through there and skidded a long, long way, and caused the rockwall near the stream." There were tiny boats in the ships belly, she remembered. She could haul one out, over the rocks blocking the cavern, up the slope, out into the open air. It would take time, and effort, and sprained knees and torn muscles, but…
Someone who was finally not Elita said, "I can work with this."