Based on "Predacon Rising." All characters are property of Hasbro. All flames will be used to bake potatoes and roast marshmallows; anti-Sentinel anything will be thrown to the pack of stray dogs that roam my neighborhood, and I'll laugh as they tear said anti-Sentinel attitudes to shreds. Thank you, and happy reading.
The room was eerily silent, except for the crackling of a stasis chamber, glowing with a sickly green light. Aside from him, the room in which Sentinel Prime stood was empty. He lifted his shield and lance slightly. "Wasp?" he called across the empty room.
A strange clicking sound, coming from behind him, filled his audios. "No, spider," a femme's voice purred. Sentinel turned and saw a purple, black and gold arachnid lowering itself to the floor. Four of its eyes seemed to glow a menacing Decepticon red. "I don't know what kind of weird organic horror you are," he called to the spider, lifting both lance and shield, "but if Wasp is inside that giant tin can, I want him out now."
The spider chuckled. "Still full of yourself as ever, eh, Sentinel?"It questioned in the same purring voice.
"You… You know me?" Sentinel asked, lowering his weapons slightly in surprise.
Suddenly, the spider transformed into a femme who shared the spider's purple, gold and black color scheme. Like the spider, she had four glowing carmine optics; most of her face plating was concealed by a black and gold helmet. Her whole frame was thin, but strong, and she held herself at attention like an Academy cadet. "I did once," she answered simply.
"A robot… with an organic mode? Eeeeew," Sentinel announced when he saw the spider's bipedal form. "There's is no way I would ever have anything to do with a mutant freak like you!"
The femme slowly walked toward him, her voice changing from a seductive purr to a flinty hiss. "That's not what you said when you dragged me along on your little 'treasure hunt' to a Decepticon warship," she spat. "You remember—the one with the unstable energon cubes, and the spiders?"
The better part of a life function's worth of memory flashed in front of his optics—memories mostly painful in nature; the most painful memory of all, a name. A name belonging to a soft yellow and turquoise femme, a name he hadn't heard, spoken, let himself think—
"Elita-One?" he breathed.
"It's Blackarachnia now, Sentinel," the spider-femme hissed, confirming Sentinel's suspicions (or were they hopes?), "thanks to you and Optimus."
Sentinel's CPU felt clogged as he tried to comprehend the magnitude of what was happening around him. "But I…" he stammered, "I thought you went offline."
"Well, at least you two managed to get your stories straight," Blackarachnia quipped.
"I never forgave Optimus for leaving you behind," Sentinel quickly told her. "It was his idea, you know. And-and Ultra Magnus—h-he wouldn't even let us go back to recover your shell!" The desperation in his voice was painfully obvious.
Blackarachnia considered these new facts. "Then I guess no bot is innocent," she replied slowly.
"I just never knew… never imagined something this… unspeakable could have happened to you," he mumbled. "How can you even live like that? I mean… it's horrible, it's disgusting—"
"Okay, okay, I get it!" Blackarachnia snapped. "It's bad, but it's not that bad, alright?!"
"No, it's worse…" Sentinel said quietly, stepping up to her. His hands shook microscopically before his grip on his lance and shield loosened, and they clattered to the floor. "I should have been there with you."
"What are you getting at?" Blackarachnia hissed. Sentinel's IQ may have dropped in the past few stellar cycles, but he wasn't stupid enough to stand in front of a Decepticon totally unarmed.
"Exactly what I said—I should have been there with you," Sentinel repeated. "I should have been there with you. I should have tried harder to save you…"
"For what?" Blackarachnia snapped. "To take me back to be torn apart in a science lab? I don't think so, Lover-Bot."
Sentinel flinched openly before looking down at his feet, which he now shuffled awkwardly. "I missed hearing you say that," he confessed softly.
"Say what?" Blackarachnia asked hardly, preparing to breeze past him.
The Prime's next words were soft, laced with memory and pain: "Lover Bot…" He reached out and caught her thin hand in his, brushing the back of it with his thumb. "I missed you."
The techno-organic femme looked down at their hands like she had never seen such a thing as two hands touching before. "You lie," she hissed, her eyes narrowing.
"No," he replied softly. "I… I did miss you." He paused slightly. "I never stopped loving you, y'know."
"Really," she replied flatly. No question, no interest… a mere statement.
"I thought of you every day after… that," he offered, still holding her hand. "I've missed you so."
"What could you miss about this?" Blackarachnia snapped, indicating her frame as a whole.
Sentinel's hand took leave of his senses and floated up to her cheek. "For one… I missed your face."
She slapped his hand away. "What could you miss about this?" she repeated tartly.
His hand floated back to its original position on her cheek, and he gently stroked her cheek with his thumb. "Everything," he replied simply. "I was so close to forgetting how beautiful you are."
Blackarachnia laughed harshly, but the prime wasn't deterred. Very gently, he brushed his fingertips over her cheek, knuckles brushing against her helmet.
The techno-organic struck his hand away again. "Back off, Sentinel," she growled. "For your sake."
"Please, Elita…" he softly pleaded. "Let me touch you again. For both our sakes."
Emitting a low growl, she lowered her hands and let him do as he would. Smiling reassuringly, Sentinel gently lifted the helmet from her head to see what time had done to his Elita.
Her face had become a mesh of the organic and technological—her optics, once a striking ice blue that danced when the light hit them just so, had split off to form two pairs of crimson optics. Her circuits, glowing amethyst to match the rest of her faceplates, remained, blending seamlessly with her organic half. The very shape of her face changed with the removal of her helmet—it took on the delicate, doll-like appearance Sentinel so cherished in Elita, but her hard optics and the way her lips were twisted into a sneer wiped the image away like a smear of dirt on his chassis.
So it was true… It was Blackarachnia now.
"Say it."
Sentinel snapped out of his partial reverie. "Huh?" he questioned, realizing Blackarachnia had spoken.
"Say it," she repeated, cold and steely. "Say it—'organic horror,' 'mutant freak,' 'horrible,' 'disgusting,' 'abomination.' Save us both the trouble, Sentinel."
"I… M… I…" he stammered, struggling to form even a simple sentence.
She seized his wrists and thrust him against the wall, knocking the wind out of his intakes. "Say it!" she snapped, pressing him harder into the wall.
Sentinel struggled to take a deep enough breath and choked out, "I can't."
Her death grip on his wrists loosened and she dropped him to the floor, making him gasp and struggle for breath. "What do you mean you can't?" she asked incredulously.
"I can't," Sentinel repeated, hauling himself vertical. "I can't… Not when it's not—ohh, Primus...—not true."
"Really?" Blackarachnia repeated, quirking an eye ridge.
"You're not a horror, and you're not… You're not anything of those things I said," Sentinel told her softly. No bravado, no rank, just himself at his humblest. "I was so wrong to say those things to you. Had I known who you were, I would have chosen my words far more carefully."
"Who I was," Blackarachnia repeated with a harsh laugh. "Who I was is dead now." She turned away from the blue prime, softly adding, "She's been dead for stellar cycles."
Making his approach known, Sentinel stepped up behind her and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. "She isn't dead," he whispered. "She just looks a little different."
Blackarachnia whipped her head around to look at him again, her whole face betraying her shock at hearing the words. "…What?" Not a note of sarcasm or malice touched her voice this time.
Very gently, Sentinel turned her to face him, and chose his next words very, very carefully. "I don't exactly know… what's going on, but the deepest part of my spark tells me that you're Elita-One… that Elita never died, she just… changed into something different… something just as beautiful as before."
Blackarachnia looked up at him; her words were soft and stripped of her former coldness. "You… You think I'm beautiful?"
"It's not a matter of 'thinking,'" Sentinel told her, ghosting his fingertips on her cheek. "I know it."
"Oh, Sentinel," she whispered into his chestplating, mech fluid pricking the back of her optics.
Very gently, he lifted her face to his with two fingers, and smiled reassuringly. Her hands lifted up to gently cup his face, and she pulled him into a soft kiss.
Sentinel's eyes widened in surprise at the sudden gesture of affection, but the emotion passed and was swiftly replaced by a warm, pleasant ache—the ache of happiness, of being loved—that filled his spark as he kissed her in return, wrapping his arms around her thin waist. Time at least had been kind to him in the sense that the kiss he now shared with Blackarachnia were the same as the kisses he once shared with Elita-One.
One femme… two names… One moment of all-encompassing happiness that Sentinel wouldn't have traded for all the fame, glory and rank the universe had to offer him.
- Fin –
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