Waiting for a Decision

Tarantulas stared down at the body laying torn in his trap, and waited to feel something about it. Blackarachnia's empty optics didn't stare straight into his spark, or even stare. There wasn't any sort of intelligence left there to stare with, and bodies were just bodies. It took some kind of meaning inside the body to draw out guilt or triumph in the victor. Instead of accusation, offline optics pointed dead blankness in the vague direction of a tree stump only inches from her nose. Limp golden spider legs draped over twisted limbs that wouldn't ever move under their own power again, and the curves of her chest had warped with the force of the stone that had punctured its armor.

Inspired by Dinobot's defeat of Megatron, Tarantulas had rigged a trap of the hardest stone this mudball planet could supply and a tree branch. There was no metal technology to register on scanners, and he hadn't stayed nearby to put the local wildlife on edge. A single spider-light left close by had told him the trap had gone off without a hitch, and here he was, looking at the results. The tree branch had whipped around, at the perfect height, at the perfect angle, and impaled her spark. She hadn't even had time to scream. The angle of her body indicated that, in all probability, she had been looking away at the time and had died before the pain had begun to register. There was no expression of pain or surprise on her face. In fact, there was no expression at all. If someone had made art from the scene, it would be entitled "Fallen Beauty" for the stark simplicity of the stoic dead body amidst nature.

He hadn't expected that. He'd always found the she-spider to be almost demonically attractive, but he'd never expected to find her death…appealing, at least aesthetically. The concept had always held great fascination for him. There had been vast plots, other days with other traps that she'd escaped only at the last second, usually through quick thought on her own part or quicker actions by her Maximal allies. He'd chuckled his way through many days coming up with ways to kill her--and they'd all failed. To be completely honest, he'd come to expect her to evade his plots. His spider-light had informed him that this trap had gone off, and he'd more than half-expected her to be waiting here with a mocking smile and the trap reset under his feet when he arrived.

But she hadn't, and she wasn't, and she wouldn't ever, anymore.

And that, for some reason he couldn't comprehend, left Tarantulas feeling nothing. Nothing at all. Feeling as if he was in fact disturbing art--although he'd never once cared about such things previously--he ventured onto the tableau of trap and trapped and hesitated. After a moment of wondering what was wrong with his own reactions, he knelt down next to his prey's outflung arm. There was no panic in its positioning. Blackarachnia hadn't spent her last moment alive reaching out for help. Her pincer lay in turned back on itself in the unnatural repose of someone who had fallen without the ability to feel the pain of a kinked joint, and he stared at it for too long without really connecting it to the death of the she-spider. It just seemed too…wrong. It was as if he expected her to straighten out and attack him.

The trap had been sprung, and yet he felt caught. He didn't feel guilty--Predacons in general didn't feel guilt when their enemies fell, much less Predacon Secret Police--nor did he feel triumphant. Guilt he might have understood and dismissed as misplaced and neurotic; triumph, he had expected. This complete lack of feeling he didn't know how to deal with. After spending so much time in hate and planning, there should be SOMETHING.

His head lifted to regard her face. It was her expression, he decided. More than the loose-limbed pose of a dead 'bot where he hadn't precisely expected to see one, seeing no expression whatsoever on that dead robot's face threw him for a loop. If there had been fear and anger there, he could have gloated over it. She had known who had set death up for her, and gone to her death hating him. Or shock; shock would indicate she had at least SEEN death coming. He could have gotten satisfaction out of knowing that his trap had taken her down efficiently and without a chance at escape. Even resignation would have given him SOMETHING to react to.

Without something to react to, he was lost. It took actually killing his prey to realize that it was the chase that had driven him. For every trap he'd ever set for her, he'd waited with laughter ringing through his lair for the imagined response to the newest attempt at killing her. Maybe it would only be a baited comment in the middle of the next battle, or the ruins of the trap left behind and rigged to snag him in return, but there was a kind of tortured appreciation of the hatred and trickery between spiders in every exchange. There was challenge in the black optics, and that cynical twitch of her lips in reply to his chuckles.

No trap ever went according to plan in the Beast Wars; the odds had apparently caught up with them today. Here she lay, the plan complete, the trap sprung, and everything Tarantulas thought he'd feel falling flat in the strange, numb nothing filling his spark. No, not even numbness. He could feel, and it was the lack of anything there to feel that left him oddly vulnerable. He thought, in that disjointed way of a person stunned past previous experience, that he should apologize to her for not feeling her own death. He'd planned for it to be more of a struggle. Sorry about that.

He stood up slowly, still looking down at the dead body laid out like a scene from a tragedy he'd accidentally walked into without any sort of background on the story. It didn't look like Blackarachnia. It just looked like any other dead 'bot. There wasn't even a Maximal insignia his Predacon sensibilities could take pride in. The Maximals would eventually show up, however, and he should leave before they found him standing over their dead comrade. Slowly, a step at a time, he backed away from the fallen beauty. He couldn't manage to tear his gaze away from the golden drape of spider legs over tree roots. He had to leave. Silverbolt would be furious, and grief was an explosive emotion he knew better than to tangle with while it was fresh. Later, there would be a plan for dealing with the Maximals. Later, perhaps, when he could decide what it was he felt. When the waiting would be over, one way or another.

Tarantulas turned and fled toward his lair, afraid of what he waited for.

.

.

"I just killed Blackarachnia."

"How do you feel about that?"

"...I don't know."