Much further away, in the moon-drenched desert, the scene wasn't nearly so tranquil.

"Bee, if you don't tell me where Optimus and that fragging glitch he's with are, I swear to Primus-"

"How am I supposed to know where they are?! If you had just went through the Bridge with the entire fragging 'Con army behind us-"

"Both of you, calm down!" They'd been arguing from the nanoklick their peds touched back at base, and they'd finally breached Ratchet's breaking point. The medic-forced-peacekeeper took in both Bumblebee's and Arcee's stares, one quivering blue glow and one a razor fire that tried to burn through his armour. It was only slightly worse than what he'd been expecting from Arcee on her return. And Bulkhead, who knew just about everything by the time Ratchet heard the bickering from the foyer, was wise enough to stay in the safety of the medbay.

"The fact is none of us know where Optimus is right now, and he isn't answering his comms," Ratchet said, steady under the weight of Arcee's glare while Bee took the opportunity to back away from her. "But we know he's somewhere safe, and he'll come back when he feels it's necessary."

Arcee broke her glare to scoff and laugh all at once, a desperate mixture from a strained vocaliser. "You're telling me right now isn't necessary enough?!"

"I'm not saying I agree with him avoiding the situation like this, but-" He never got the chance to finish as Arcee surged towards him, like a rabid turbohound pouncing on an ambush.

"For all we know, Airachnid held him back and the reason he never came through the Bridge is because he's right back where I was, in Megatron's claws!"

"No, Arcee," Ratchet said slowly, though part of his spark carried a similar worry when he didn't see Optimus or Airachnid follow behind the rest of the team. "I know for a fact that Airachnid would not help Megatron, not anymore."

"Of course you'd say that, Ratch'," Arcee muttered, shaking her helm and moving away as he tried to approach her. "Because you knew all along that there was a Decepticon under our protection and you never said a fragging thing about it! Am I the only one here who hasn't lost her fragging processor?!" She was pleading to no one, her faceplate stretched with confusion taking over her raw anger at being even more thoroughly deceived than she'd thought. The depth of the betrayal was now taking its toll on her, draining her of strength as her servos fell limp and she suddenly came close to collapsing. Ratchet was there to brace her frail shoulders, forcing her to face him as the fire in her optics burned down to icy coals.

"Arcee, listen to me." He said it gently but firmly, kneeling so his face was level with hers as he held her. "Who do you think the parents of that sparkling you saw were?"

She didn't want to look at him as the realisation came slowly, a trickling epiphany as she pieced together what she saw on the Nemesis; the background details she hadn't noticed at first in all her anger, how terrified Airachnid looked at the sound of Megatron advancing behind the door. "Not... not her and Megatron?" She said it mostly to question herself, a quiet disbelief as she tried to imagine anything as innocent as the sparkling she saw with Optimus coming out of those two evil sparks.

"Would you go back to a mech who forced something like that on you, Arcee?" Ratchet asked quietly, letting one servo fall from her shoulder. She blinked, eyeridges furrowing, and she was shrugging the rest of him off of her before a stubborn scowl reasserted itself over all the other emotions fighting each other in her spark.

"That doesn't excuse anything," she declared, stoking the fire again even if it was just to convince the medic and herself that she was still angry. "It doesn't make up for everything she's done."

"No, it doesn't," Ratchet agreed. "But ever since she escaped from the Decepticons, all she's done is for the benefit of her child. That's the only reason Optimus helped her. He believes she can change, and..." In a rare moment of uncertainty, he hesitated on admitting just how much Optimus and perhaps Airachnid herself had managed to convince him, despite the doubt still clouding the evidence he'd been faced with time and time again. "And so do I," he finally confessed. "Because sometimes that capacity for forgiveness is all that separates us from the Decepticons."

Arcee was smart, she knew all that without Ratchet having to tell her. But just because the knowledge was there, of Optimus always having far too much faith in other bots, didn't mean she could put much faith in it. "You know he also believes she's Elita One?" she asked, almost laughing at just how ridiculous it was, above all else. There was a flicker of surprise in the medic's optics, but not enough to convince her that he wasn't already aware of it. "Cause I don't know if I can trust someone who looks at a monster like Airachnid and sees someone like Elita in her."

And Ratchet knew she was right, feared just as much as she did at how delusional Optimus might be in his lingering grief, but he wasn't given the chance to agree. At the main console, Bumblebee was trying to get their attention with a nervous stutter of blips.

"Uh... guys?" They both went to either side of the scout, staring up at the screen and the bright text it displayed, blinking rapidly as if all their optics were glitching as they tried to take in the words given so simply, so blankly through the coded systems that couldn't possibly understand the magnitude of what they were saying.

'NEW SPARK SIGNAL DETECTED. DESIGNATION: ELITA ONE'

Only Ratchet recognised the island outline shown imprinted on the display, but it hardly mattered with shock rippling through all three of them, replacing all logic and reason and rendering their processors blank slates and their vocalisers useless, stuttering things.

"Is that... is that right?"

"No... no, no, it... it can't... she can't be..."

Only Ratchet had a handle on his shock, despite his being the most intense of all. All he said through a thick veil of what might have been hope, or some kind of naive joy, was, "It seems we owe Optimus an apology."

xx

Optimus wasn't quite where his spark ended and his beloved's began, when he finally overloaded against her with their sparks a dancing supernova between them, or when he fell into a recharge that seemed to last for years. Because when he awoke; the cool stone underneath him, the rich morning outside starting to creep into the cave and, just as he'd seen and hoped for in all his dreams, his sparkmate still curled next to him in the embrace of his servos, he felt like he'd slept for the first time in the centuries since he thought he'd lost her for all time.

He only let his optics open once he was certain he could look at her without coolant filling his optics or his spark threatening to engulf itself. The shafts of sunlight reaching in set fire to the gold on her resting helm, the soothing shadows of their alcove blanketed her black armour, still reflecting the stars of their night spent together, and the honeycomb glow of her optics lay dormant and peaceful under her lids. He could feel her spark as a gentle simmer next to his, two candles flickering and wreathing flames together. As both Airachnid and Elita One, his sparkmate past and present and for all time, she'd never looked so beautiful to him as she did now.

She woke slowly, a thousand different lives passing by each time she blinked, and she didn't seem surprised to see Optimus in each of them, lying there in front of her with the soft glow spilling from his optics.

"Good morning," he said, patiently waiting for her to recover from the leagues of sleep and fighting the consuming urge to hold her again and lose himself in her spark. She hummed, a gentle lurch of her vocaliser, before tilting her helm up at him.
"Is that really all you have to say?" she asked quietly, though the amusement was still there. And it was obvious why; a night of planet-shattering interface with a thousand lost memories flashing between every climax, a reunion that transcended all borders of the Autobots and Decepticons and even the Allspark itself, and that was all he had to greet it with?

Of course Optimus had far more than that crowding his vocaliser, the love and gratitude and tears battering against each other until they were just stuttered sounds. All the words in every language in the galaxy wouldn't have helped him tell her how he felt, so he settled with the only thing that could. Even with their nodes still so numb, their lips tingled together with something stronger, sweeter than just electricity.

"You're quite good at kissing, Optimus," she admitted in a mumble, not quite pulling away from him even after they parted, accepting the cradle of his hand behind her helm and the play of his low vents against her neck, his voice a growl across her cables that crossed over the span of lost centuries.

"Would you love me if I wasn't?" It was a question they'd both asked each other in those better days. Whether or not she remembered that tiny flash of detail from so long ago, the same evenings he was thinking of with high grade and half-healed scars and Darkmount in flames around them, she smiled- though not as much as he was expecting, the embers of her optics dimming as they flicked away.

"Optimus... what I remembered-"

His digit was over her lips, not quite touching them, before he could stop it, desperation turned into a reflex. "Don't," he whispered, trying so hard not to make it sound like a plea. "What happened in the past does not matter right now." It would at some point, inevitably. But he'd make most of all the time before then. "This moment... you and I... that is all I want to care about. Anything else can wait."

For a long few klicks they just pressed against each other, forehelms met, a silent agreement passing between them. Then her claws, Airachnid's claws, slid off his audial fins as she made to push herself up. "I should still go get Scorpia."

She was at the mouth of the cave, the sunlight drenching her, when he was on his own peds and reaching for her hand. "I'm sure Grimlock is taking good care of her..." It was perhaps the only time he'd ever put faith in the Dinobot, but as Airachnid's claws fanned out to close around his hand it seemed the faith was well founded. Or maybe she was just as grateful for any excuse to stay with him.

"If you're really so confident in him... there's a hot spring underneath this cliff-" He knew he caught her off guard when he swept her into his servos from the squeal she tried and failed to turn into a less humiliating gasp. She kept glaring up at him until halfway down the mountain, when she relented to a pout that he could only ever think was adorable, even with her legs twitching in irritation. But as much as she tried to hide her complacency, the guilty and almost grateful resignment to being carried by someone else for once, she could never hide how her spark swelled against his, even with walls of steel between their chambers. Optimus let her stay silent, because for longer than he could remember his spark felt whole, and he was left speechless as well.

Following the dull roar of the waterfall and the screen of mist trickling through the ferns, Optimus found the spring simmering in the noon heat; studded with jewelled ripples as the sun scattered itself on the water. Insects clumped into lazy buzzing bundles and leaves sagged under the weight of condensation, but trees overhead kept off the worst of the heat from Optimus' burning back as he lowered Airachnid into the pool. The water met her armour with bliss and sighs, gentle waves washing off the messier aspects of their night together, and she reclined against the rocky edge with mist over her closed optics. She only opened them a few nanoklicks later when she heard the snap of metal clasps and scrape of plates together, and found they were coming from Optimus slipping so casually out of his armour.

"What are you doing?" she asked, eyeridges furrowed as she looked up at him over the deep grey of his protoform, his chest plates piled beside him. Part of him knew how she was struggling to not stare at the naked patches, like a human watching someone strip fabric away.

"Keeping you company, obviously," he answered, the steam obscuring his smirk as he joined her in the warm water. Though the pool could fully submerge Airachnid and her legs, it only came up to Optimus' waist. He wasn't quite sure what she was snickering at until he looked down and saw his entire lower half swallowed in the swirling blue, and his bare chest with its faint scars and packed cable muscles reflected back at him. Airachnid was still laughing as he surged towards her, splashing between a wave that crashed between them and cleared to show Optimus pinned on his back, on the shelf of rock that fringed the edge of the pool, with his sparkmate sprawled on his chest and somehow so much smaller yet so much stronger against him. The water was warmest on their mouths, just after long kisses, and Optimus only broke away early to confess one last thing, one last hope he had stored in the deepest part of his spark, back when it was cold and closed.

"Do you know how I knew you were still alive?" he asked her, and her surprise was enough prompt to go on with his hands cradling her face again, just to know she was there and she was real. "Every day... after Archa... I would look inside the Matrix for you. I'd ask Primus where your spark was, if you were safe with him. He never answered. For the longest time, I only thought that he was sparing me worse news from what I'd always feared. Or that he was just ignoring me. But now I know... he never answered because you weren't with him in the first place."

Airachnid blinked at him, her faceplate harder to read than a slab of Ancient Kaonian as the surface underneath went through a hundred different emotions all at once. She, or a part of her only recently resurrected, was trying to pick which one to show, which one she was supposed to be feeling, and luckily for Optimus she decided on delight. Their faceplates mirrored each other, long forgotten joy blending into one shared feeling of love and closure and justice in the universe; if not there in the whole of it, just on that one blue planet among billions, that was good enough for Optimus.

Then another wave drenched them, much less welcome than the splashing before, and Optimus was left floundering and spluttering like a Sharkticon on land until the water cleared from his unprepared tanks.
"GRIMLOCK!" At the Prime's bellow, the Dinobot held back from smashing his tail into another mini tsunami, seeing the steam rising from Optimus' frame as anger boiled away most of his goodwill. Airachnid retreated to the shore of the pool, tipping water out of her audios with undisguised laughs at Optimus' scowl.

"Hot water make you go extinct!" Grimlock insisted, smashing his ped down for emphasis and accidentally kicking even more water into Optimus' face. All smiles washed away in that nanoklick, and only one thing stopped Optimus from charging forwards and bowling the Dinobot over.

"Where is Scorpia?"
Grimlock snorted and tried to scratch at his maw with a laughably small servo. "Me leave baby with scaredy yellow bot," he said. Optimus blinked, and as suddenly as it came the rage was gone. Grimlock could only mean Bumblebee, here on the island and most likely as furious as the rest of the Autobots he'd abandoned last night. The past was catching up much sooner than he was comfortable with, and even Airachnid seemed uneasy at the news.

But of course she would be. It was her daughter in very unpredictable hands, after all.

xx

Apart from the last one this was honestly one of the hardest chapters I've ever had to write, juggling Optimus' emotions and trying to get them across in a way that fits his character (not to mention trying to figure out what Airachnid's reaction and mindset must be, having to accept that she was Elita all along). I did my best with it, but I doubt I've managed to pull it off so I apologise if some parts seem like they could have been written better or differently.

(And I know Airachnid will probably come across as OOC, but it's mostly because she's very overwhelmed in this chapter with everything she's just learned, Optimus' love for her as well as her past as Elita. For now she's content to just live in the moment whatever it may be, but as time passes and she meets the other Autobots she'll eventually have to confront what she once was and how she's changed, and whether she she'd rather be the femme she once was or the one she'd made herself into).