AN: Expect no chapter tomorrow because I just finished this one a minute ago and have to get to work... it´s almost 1am... Sigh.
PS: Big thanks to OPIv2 for being a frequent reviewer and giving me motivation to keep this crazy schedule. You rock!
To answer Rowena_Bensel: Since Airachnid will not be a part of Arcee´s tragic backstory there will be modifications but our spider-femme will play an unwilling part.
"Mayhem, you´re so dead!"
"Uh-oh."
When the team of bots that had just left the Nemesis went through their once again operational groundbridge the first thing they witnessed was a furious triple-changer heading their way or, more precisely, Mayhem´s way.
The Autobots moved away with haste, not wanting to get caught in the crossfire of a high-caliber sibling fight that had the potential for severe collateral damage. Arcee and Bulkhead positioned themselves next to the console while Bumblebee went to lay Fowler in a preemptively prepared human sized medical bed on top of the platform next to the console. He had no idea where the Makers had found it but did not complain, the poor man needed to rest.
"I can explain-!" The heavy-duty femme put her servos up in defense but still ended up crushed… by an overwhelming hug.
"I´m so glad you´re alright. Please, don´t ever scare me like that again." Whispered Silverbot.
Mayhem was flabbergasted. She´d acted on impulse, put her life and probably the Autobot´s on the line, risked running into the almighty Decepticon leader himself and even getting captured but nothing could have prepared her for her brother´s reception. And was he shaking? Holy Solus he was crying. He was crying over her careless aft and that made her feel like one of the Con´s lasers had pierced her spark.
"Erm, are you alright?" The femme attempted to lighten the mood but only got the mech to squeeze her harder. At that rate her back strut would snap in multiple places and Mayhem decided it was time to remove her face from being pressed against his armor. "The cons may have not put a lot of dents on me but you´re doing a great job. Seriously, kind of you´re crushing me here."
"Sorry." Silverbot immediately let go of his sister and wiped away at the energon tears staining his faceplate. Composing himself he cleared his voice box. "What you did was reckless, dangerous, life-threatening and a whole more list of words from here to Cybertron. With footnotes."
"But I did it for a good cause. Besides, you´d have went after me if you though I was in so much danger."
"He couldn´t." Called Radical from his sitting point on the platform he´d claimed as his. "There were some technical difficulties after you left. I suspect the government database I hacked had some safety precautions I overlooked in my hurry because I had to correct a ton of bugs right after the bridge closed. You all got lucky I managed to fix everything just before you commed in."
"Well, that explains why Bee and I couldn´t contact the base." Arcee looked at the small bot. He had some amazing skills not many could boast being part of their repertoire.
He smiled sheepishly and rubbed his helm while swaying on his pedes. "Yeah, sorry about that."
"Why are you apologizing? You didn´t just find Fowler but also kept our bridge functioning. That´s very impressive for someone so young."
Radical looked away in embarrassment, but there was something else to it in there as well, and responded in a soft tone. "I´m not that young, you know?"
The groundbridge came to life once again and the only three bots that should've been out of the base that day came though looking worse for the wear. The ones that had been left behind took in the sorry state of both their leaders and medbot before they nearly trampled over each other to get to them.
"Mom!" "Flare!" "Optimus!" "Ratchet!"
"Hold it!" Solarflare shouted and raised her arms, stopping the incoming stampede that was about to overwhelm her and the two Autobots. "Ratchet is in need of medical care so let the poor mech at least sit down first."
The crowd parted and Optimus helped Ratchet further into the base to sit on the ground with his back against the wall. The Autobots came to see what had happened with their leader and medic while the Makers preoccupied themselves with Solarflare.
"Bumblebee, go get me a cast from the medical locker." Asked Ratchet to the young scout. He got a beeped response and Bumblebee almost went running to go get what the injured doctor needed.
Focusing her attention solely on her Carrier´s state Mayhem took in the chipped paint and dents carefully. "What happened, mom? Did you fall off a cliff and fought with every rock on the way down?" She joked. It was her default for something that made her uncomfortable, jokes lightened every situation.
"I could ask you the same?" Solarflare pointed to her daughter´s scratched paintjob and minimal denting and peered over at the man lying on the bed. "Did you and your brother get into a fight again? And what happened to Agent Fowler?"
"Erm, well…. I asked first!" The heavy-duty seeker was about to get in an overflowing pot of trouble and she knew it. Her spark beat faster at what her Carrier would say about her little escapade aboard the Nemesis. She´d explode for sure.
"Tell me. Now." The eldest femme´s tone left no room for disobedience.
"I may or may not have followed Bulkhead to rescue Fowler who got captured by the Decepticons and held in their ship."
"YOU WHAT?!" And there was the explosion.
"Yeah…I knew you´d get angry."
"Angry doesn´t even begin to cover it! What you did could have ended with you either offlined or imprisoned! I know you shouldn´t base you actions on other´s emotions but dammit Mayhem, what would we have done if we lost you?! I have tried again and again to show you how your impulsiveness has consequences but you refuse to listen and I´m always afraid the day you do it´ll be too late!"
Mayhem looked down to the side, ashamed about being the cause of her Carrier´s emotionally distressed outburst. "I´m… I´m sorry. It won´t-"
"Don´t." Solarflare interrupted what she´d come to know by heart with a soft breath. "Please don´t say it won't happen again because it will. Can´t you see I care about you? I worry that one day your recklessness will be the end of you and today could´ve been it." With a dishearten sigh she cut off her rant… maybe her final one. "I wish you´d understand but I see you still have a lot to learn." The seeker turned away and walked over where Optimus was helping fit Ratchet with the cast Bumblebee had retrieved. "Please, let me help you with that. Optimus, get me the welder, please."
After the emotional display no one wanted to be the first to break the silence. They all looked lost on what to do about what they´d witnessed. Every single Autobot had never seen such a thing in a familiar context. Sure, superior officers had disciplined and yelled at their subordinates in front of them for insubordination before but seeing a worried Carrier yell at her offspring about how she was constantly scared about losing them was completely different.
"Still, we don´t know what happened with you?" Doomsday ventured with her question when no one else dare to ask why the three bots had returned damaged. "Was it that bad?"
"There was an altercation." Solarflare fastened the cast to the medbot´s arm and lit up the blowtorch to weld it shut. "Hold still or after you´re healed it´ll be harder to take this off."
Ratchet could not resist the urge to snap. "I´m well aware of that, I´m usually the one handling the injury."
"Sorry but I´m not used to my patients having medical knowledge."
Airachnid resisted the urge to perch herself up on one of the platforms or one of her webs, resigning to merely bringing her limbs closer and crossing her arms. "You can´t just say that without specifying what happened. Come on Flare, we´re worried about you."
"We engaged an army of Cybertronian warriors." Said Ratchet while observing the Maker tending to his injured arm. He did not like the thought of her handling anything remotely dangerous near his person after the encounter with the Decepticon leader.
"Zombies? You fought zombies and I missed it?!"Mayhem exclaimed excitedly before Silverbot bonked her helm and gave her a snarl along with an angry look. Right, she´d screwed up bad and now the shame was coming back in double.
"Bulkhead you exercised extremely poor judgement in allowing Mayhem to accompany you." The Autobot leader chastised the wrecker. The bot should´ve know better than to act on his own after all the time he´d been under his leadership.
Bulkhead looked thoroughly embarrassed at being called out on his mistake but he knew he deserved it. "It won´t happen again Optimus, I promise."
"But it wasn´t Bulkhead´s fault." Mayhem would be dammed if she let the wrecker get the blame that should fall on her. It was at that moment she remembered the intel she´d brought back with her and almost wanted to facepalm at forgetting about it in the first place. "I almost forgot." She took out her holopad and clicked the center button to display the image of the Decepticon computer with the complicated equations. "I was hoping Rad would know what it was since he´s the math expert."
Optimus leaned in close and called on the one bot he knew that could understand the diagram. "Ratchet, have a look. I could be of importance to Megatron."
The medbot, who had just finished getting his cast welded shut, stood up with help from Solarflare and close while R used his viewpoint in the platform to see as well.
"Hold it. Megatron? Is that who you fought?" Silverbot did not want to believe his audio receptors. "Mom?"
Solarflare could only nod to her son.
"Sainted Solus, those are-" Began Radical.
"Engineering space-time specs for a space-time vortex generator." Ratchet finished the younger bot´s statement.
Doomsday did a double take. She knew the other, more common, designation for the scientific term. "A space-time bridge."
"That is correct. He´s building one at the very moment. If he hasn´t already." The Prime could not conceive news more grim. His initial thoughts had been right, only in a smaller scale.
"The sooner he leave the better." The wrecker could not see anything wrong with wanting to get off the planet but he was the only one not seeing the bigger picture the construction represented.
"Bulkhead, a spacebridge runs in two directions. Megatron may not be using it to leave Earth, but to bring though his conquering army."
"The main event Megatron referred to, but the only place he could possibly recruit that many fallen warriors…" The realization dawned onto the medbot and he looked at his leader, fear evident in his voice.
"Precisely. We cannot allow Megatron to send dark energon through his spacebridge. If we fail the dead of Cybertron rise, swarm through its vortex and invade Earth, damming humankind to Megatron´s twisted rule."
"Yes, but let´s not forget we´re also stuck here." Airachnid cut in. "If he invaded Earth we´d have nowhere to run. All of us."
"Airachnid´s right. We have no ship, no spacebridge, and no nothing out of this doomed planet." The Forger stood closer to her son while resisting the urge to pick him up.
"It is not doomed as of yet. We will do our best to prevent that ending." The Prime reassured both factions. "But for now we all must recharge. The day was long and the battles harsh, a plan must be formed before we engage the Decepticons once more."
Late into the night, long after Agent Fowler was picked up by a medical team and everyone had retired to their quarters two lone Autobots remained in front of the console in the dimly lit main room. Optimus requested that Ratchet examined the specs Mayhem had brought with her for any type of flaws they could exploit in order to prevent Megatron´s plan from coming to fruition but the medbot hadn't managed to find any so far. But that wasn´t the main reason they were staying up late while the others recharged.
Footsteps echoed down the hallway and the console was left alone for the time being. The one they´d been waiting for had arrived at last.
"Solarflare, I´m glad you came to meet us." Optimus turned to the lone Maker standing behind them.
"Not like I had choice." Solarflare gave a deadpan glare to the Autobot leader.
"We all have choices."
She almost snorted at that statement. "You know, for someone who supports the equal treatment of all Cybertronians you know very little about the caste system and where Makers stood for eons after Solus´ demise."
"In any case, we must be made aware of your relationship to Megatron. It might be of importance."
Ratchet stood by patiently but wanted nothing more than to prove what he´d known since his youth. Makers had always stood to the side of Cybertronian society, living off a myriad of means but the most profitable had always been the offer of ´companionship´ for a fee and he´d witnessed that method strip some bots of shanix at the speed of the faster racer on Velocitron. They were devious tricksters who´d do anything to get paid no matter what and to the Pit with their victims. "Consider yourself lucky this is not a large scale Autobot team because you´d have found yourself locked up and under constant interrogation." He said.
"Wow, I´m being treated with common decency from step one by Autobots. That´s a got to be a first." Solarflare´s words dripped with sarcasm one step away from becoming venomous. She had a lot of old memories on what their faction originally stood for and those who controlled it. And she´d controlled some of them at one point.
"Don´t take that tone with us. We accepted you into our team and our home with no questions. Now´s it´s time for due explanations." The medbot was becoming impatient. Could she not see that any information on their enemy was vital?
"But that does not give you the right to my life´s story. You have to face the fact I am still a Maker. I may look like I trust you but only to an extent, don´t hold any illusions about wanting to know about my private life."
"Please, Solarflare. We need you to tell us what you know about Megatron. He is a threat to Earth and you are stranded here along with your offspring and friends. What do you think should happen if he were to realize his evil plan? None of us will be safe. None of you will be safe." Optimus pleaded with the increasingly agitated Maker.
At the Autobot leader´s words something snapped inside Solarflare. They did not want the truth but didn´t know it just yet but she would show them. She would make them leaver her and her demons alone before her emotions got the best of her and she said something she´d deeply regret. "You want the truth? Very well, here it is: he used to be a client during his gladiatorial career. After Victory passed the community found itself with dwindling resources because he used to give half or more of his winnings to our fund. Because of that I went back to doing what I did best before we bonded and it was around that time Megatronus became champion and looked for an ´entertaining´ way of spending his earnings. "
"You are saying-"
"I know what I said." The seeker cut off the Prime´s words. "We were a communal society, I did whatever I could to keep it afloat since the Council´s only donations came in the form of payments for ´certain services´ and in exchange to keep blackmail at bay. Well, all except one but that´s not the point. I hope not to have to repeat myself on this subject."
"Is that the whole truth?"
"Ratchet…" Optimus warned. An angry Maker was something to be reckoned with, especially one they seen fight alongside them against an army of Terrorcons.
"Hump, for that you´d have to ask him." She turned and started walking away with no room for discussion. She´d already said too much. "I´ll be going to my quarters. Goodnight."
The shocked Autobots could only watch the Maker walk away in her seething anger. They´d guessed she´d reveal something along those lines but to hear her admit to it in person made the whole situation seem more surreal than anything else. When the footsteps quieted to the night´s silence their language skills returned.
The medbot broke the silence they were left with. "There´s more to this story than she lets on but I doubt we´ll have any luck prying it out of her."
"Then we wait." Optimus put a hand on his friend´s shoulder. "In time Solarflare will speak the whole truth."