Awww thank you all for your lovely reviews on the last chapter, readers 3 Reading them put a grin on my face (as well as several giggles) and I'm absolutely ecstatic that people are liking this. Apologies in advance if I'm not releasing chapters fast enough, but when it comes to chapters I can't just write it all out in one go- I need frequent breaks to rest my mind (and fingers) that can sometimes last as long as a week, or even more. But I aim to at least start each chapter every week to have it ready for you all come the weekends :)
xx
"Have you thought of a name?"
Airachnid took a slow sip of energon before answering. Optimus had so far remained silent since the sparkling's optics onlined, simply watching the enchanting, young blue orbs and occasionally letting his own flick upwards towards her. His question almost made her splutter with spiteful laughter. 'Stuck with a Decepticon's brat and all he can think of is her name?'
"That wasn't exactly a priority," she mumbled, still savouring the last few drops of energon on her glossa. She set the empty cube down next to her, lying back on the rocks and pointing her weary optics to the ceiling. Nothing but granite darkness above. She missed the stars, celestial guardians that had constantly stood vigil for her. On Archa Seven, on Cybertron, even on the Nemesis... through even the tiniest windows she always saw them burning their print on the cosmos. Now they had abandoned her, and she'd never felt more spark-shatteringly alone. Just as she was about to fall into such a pressing void though, a sudden tug at her spark caught on her and drew her attention to Optimus. He lay like her against the rocks, one servo propping him up and the other holding the sparkling, whose optics burned even brighter than when they first whirred to life and locked intently onto the Prime. Airachnid realised why when she felt the tug on her spark again.
Optimus frowned at the sight of Airachnid holding a servo over her spark chamber and optics squeezed shut. He couldn't even begin to place where her obvious distress might be stemming from- either from the residual pain of sparkling birth, or loss, or something else entirely stabbing at the core of her emotional shell. She didn't move when he moved his servo to the remaining energon cube next to her, lifting it up and bringing it to the sparkling's mouth. Only now did her optics look away from him, and down to the energon being held to her lips. With a faint chirp she let the liquid slowly leak into her, sending her growing systems whirring and tiny spark alight with glee. Optimus smiled at the sparkling drinking away in his arms.
"You know why she's been staring at you all evening?" Airachnid queried, servos calmly placed on her knees and previous agony all but dissolved. Optimus pointed his optics to her and shook his head.
"She's imprinted on you," she stated apathetically, faceplate falling on her knees as they curled up to her chest. "For all she knows... you are her sire." Optimus took a moment to fully process the revelation, looking down at the sparkling with new eyes. She stared back as intensely as before, lip corners upturned. He numbly lifted his servo and raised his smallest digit in front of her. Emitting a series of joyous clicks the sparkling grasped the digit with all of her own, optics appraising it with unbridled curiosity.
'Sire...' It was common knowledge that sparklings developed an instant bond with whatever they first saw, but Optimus had never heard of it being so strong as to be imprinting. Almost as if to confirm Airachnid's statement, the child pulled on the digit to bring it closer to her and nuzzled her helm against it. Optimus didn't want to think that this was the same creature that he had threatened to terminate a breem ago as another digit stroked at the strange bump on the back of her head- a small tangle of metal wires that reached to her tiny neck.
Across from them Airachnid looked on with sickness still heavy in her spark. Just when she had reached the fateful 'things can't get any worse' checkpoint, those damn eyes just had to open. Those damn, blue beautiful eyes...
Wait, blue?
Airachnid had only noticed the abnormal colour of her optics then; a rival cyan to Optimus' own. If they weren't destined to be standard Decepticon red, then they should have been violet or pink as her own were... The night kept getting stranger and the moon hadn't even halfway crossed the sky. She could see its light creeping into the cave though, leaking through the cracks in the stones. Optimus notice her wistful stare at the tiny beams of light, the only indicator of the world outside this dark sanctuary, and Optimus shifted the sparkling gently in his hold as she chirped lightly.
"Perhaps the child would benefit from a small venture beyond this cave... and we might find inspiration for her designation..."
"'We'?" Airachnid asked with a raised optic ridge, suppressing her relief at the thought of finally seeing her stars again.
"You said yourself that she considers me her father... I believe that gives me the responsibility of her designation, if only partially." As if she could say no to that smile. She tried to push herself to her pedes, clawing onto the rock wall for support. When she tripped from taking a step forward she felt large servos close easily around her, and looked up to Optimus' concerned expression. But before he could ask if she was able to walk, Airachnid quickly collected herself and swept her child out of his other servo, marching past him to the cave opening at the front, neck held high and back legs clicking together. That simple show of haughty independance sent a shock through Optimus' spark that came out as a sigh from his vocaliser. Primus, even the way her hips swished in rhythm was like Elita's own! He trudged after her into the envelope of night air ahead, optics fighting back the coolant that filmed them over.
xx
"I'll talk to him," Bulkhead muttered to the other Autobots as Wheeljack marched to the base entrance, leaving a trail of heated frustration behind him. Ratchet exhaled in relief at the Wrecker finally taking his leave, who'd been pacing up and down the entire length of the base during his wait for Optimus' return. The medic was on the verge of lightening Bulkhead's workload and breaking something himself when Wheeljack blew a fuse and stormed off while yelling "Frag your damn systems, if Prime don't wanna be here then neither do I!" As Bulkhead trailed behind him, Arcee turned her gaze to Ratchet.
"He should be back by now," she noted with concern, crossing her servos across her chassis. "What if he's in trouble?"
"If he was, he would have commed for help," Ratchet reassured her, optics still glued to the computer panels. "Whatever Optimus is doing, he can handle it."
"Hmm," the femme voiced skeptically, leaning on a stack of boxes. "There's something up with him."
"He has been... rather on edge recently," Ratchet admitted carefully, tapping digits slowing their pace. "But I don't see it as anything to worry about."
Arcee's optics suddenly snapped wide, and turned back towards him. "Ratchet... do you think..." She paused uneasily before continuing. "They've... started again?"
"What's 'they'?" Bumblebee beeped, looking from femme to medic curiously. Ratchet took a brief look at the scout before his optics fell to the floor, and Arcee's darted around.
"You'd be too young to remember it, Bumblebee..." Ratchet mumbled while extracting himself from his station. "What we refer to is... something that Optimus suffered from during the war. Flashbacks and memories to something that he lost..."
"Well, spit it out doc, what are we talking about?"Bumblebee was expecting a glance of scorn from the medic for his impertinence, but he didn't even shoot a dagger his way as he walked with a solemn air next to Arcee. He answered with only two words.
"Elita One."
"Who's Elita One?" Ratchet's helm turned towards the question that Raf asked, looking up from his video game and giving a worried voice to the other childrens collective buzzing thoughts. They'd been mostly quiet during Wheeljack's tantrum and Arcee's worries, but now they looked to Ratchet for an explanation. At first he thought the medic wasn't going to answer, but he managed to huff a reply past his vocaliser.
"Elita was Optimus' spark mate."
"What's that, like a wife or something?" Miko asked, springing up from the couch and leaning on the railing.
"Ohoo no, a spark bond is a much closer connection than what you call 'marriage', though the concept is similar," Ratchet replied. "It is the ultimate show of commitment- two sparks joined as one."
"I heard of Elita," Bumblebee whirred in confirmation. "When I was out of duty after Tyger Pax, there was all these rumours going around about her. I never really listened to them though- too busy drowning in anaesthetic at the time." Now Ratchet brought out his glare at Bee's jab of humour on such a serious topic. He couldn't really blame him though- if he didn't listen, then he didn't know.
"So if she's so important to Optimus, how come she isn't here?" Miko asked further, resting her head on her arms. In the background Jack pressed his palm to his face; of course she hadn't caught the tell-tale grim tone that Ratchet spoke with. Then again, he was always like that.
"Ah," the medic began, turning his helm away for a second and letting his optics wander as he thought of how to explain it all. 'She was killed' wouldn't do. 'She's missing' was just lying. Luckily Arcee came up with an answer for him.
"She was taken from us," Arcee choked out, servos stiffly falling to her sides and faceplate twisted into a scowl. "By the Decepticons... by those fragging spiders..." Her helm snapped away from the gathered company and her peds carried her swiftly away from the foyer, stamping along one of the base corridors to her quarters.
"Woah... who glitched her hard drive?"Bumblebee beeped while Jack looked at the motorcycle fast retreating worriedly. Ratchet sighed before he gave an explanation for Arcee's explosive reaction.
"Arcee was particularly close to Elita One... in many ways, she was both a mentor and a dear friend. After Optimus she was hit hardest by her... demise." The medic's optics shuttered solemnly at the memory of that day. When Optimus returned to Iacon, alone and with all the grief in the universe weighing on his shoulders...
"What was Arcee talking about when she said 'spiders'?" Ratchet's attention flicked over to Jack, who still had concern on his features. "Does she mean...Airachnid?" Even now, months since he and his mother had been hunted by the Decepticon, he still saw dreaded spindly razors when he closed his eyes.
"No, she was referring to the spiders of Archa Seven- a mostly uncharted planet distant even from Cybertron," Ratchet replied, calling on the little that was known about it. Archa Seven was virtually unknown before the war, and there was never the time nor resources to spare to mount a scout or investigation of the planet. After what happened there, no Cybertronian in their right mind wanted to even think about it, let alone set ped on it. He wanted to just leave the explanation at that, but the children looked up at him, waiting for him to continue.
"I'll take it from here, Ratch'." The medic didn't even notice Bulkhead returning until he heard his voice from behind, turning his helm to clouded, sorrowful optics. "After all... I was there." The Wrecker turned to the children, trying not to focus too much on Miko. He took a long look at the three of them, and heaved a deep sigh before he set off;
"Near the end of the war, Optimus had tracked the Nemesis to the planet, where it had landed after sustaining heavy damage in a firefight with the Autobot warship; The Ark. He was going to confront Megatron once and for all on its surface, while their armies fought against each other. By now, Optimus and Elita had spark bonded, so he forbade her from fighting with him to ensure her safety. But during the chaos of the battle Megatron managed to send Decepticons onto the Ark... and took Elita hostage. I watched Optimus with a sword to Megatron's neck, and above them a pair of Decepticon scum had Elita in their filthy claws... if he killed Megatron, they killed her. I watched him forced to disarm and let Megatron go... and I watched as he sent a fusion shot right into Elita's legs. He was aiming for her spark chamber but I managed to throw his aim off when I saw what he was gonna do. Of course the fragger was gonna kill her anyway..." Bulkhead's voice had slowly grown into a snarl over the course of the story, and his faceplate was twisted by rage as his engines growled with fury.
"Jeez..." Miko whispered with eyes teary and a hand at her mouth. Raf and Jack kept their gazes plastered to their shoes, not wanting to meet the glare of Bulkhead's optics.
"So where do the spiders come in?" Bumblebee asked impatiently, breaking the melancholy atmosphere with a strike of beeping lightning. Bulkhead immedietely rounded on him and spat out his answer.
"After Megatron maimed her, those things appeared all around the field before anyone could blink an optic. On top of all the casualties from their attack, there was a rock slide; she got buried, spiders swarmed her, spark signal went out, poof." Bumblebee flinched back from the intensity of Bulkhead's stare, optics wide and backstrut bent. It was a long moment before Bulkhead realised how close his enraged faceplate was to Bee's, and he pulled back with dazed eyes.
"S-sorry Bee, it's just... the look on Optimus' face when he saw Elita like that..." A servo rubbed his helm in discomfort. "I'd never seen him so...angry before. Or ever since." Ratchet hmphed something in confirmation, remembering the permanent look of grim determination that was etched into the Prime's faceplate since his return to Cybertron after Archa Seven. Determination to push onwards, to destroy Megatron, to hold back the guilt...
"Optimus only survived because their spark bond was still young; if it was a long-term bond, the loss would have consumed him and took his life as well. Over the centuries Optimus has dealt with it as much as he could, but he is still prey to flashbacks to when Elita One was alive. Arcee too had such visions after Tailgate's death- though on a much less devastating scale," Ratchet said. "Not dissimilar to what you humans call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We suspect that he may be suffering from an onset as we speak, possibly triggered by something."
'Something that he's going to have a hell of a time explaining to me.'
xx
"You seem unaffected at the sparkling having established such a bond to me," Optimus commented as he walked behind Airachnid, optics bright and alert in search of danger amongst the trees that lined the canyon, all but blocking out the sky. The femme was keeping close to the ravine walls, oblivious to everything except the path ahead and the child in her arms. She gave a simple shrug, slowly drifting along the cold dirt under her heels.
"I suspected something like it would happen," she said in a tone that was hollow as she dug out the lie underneath. Truthfully, in all her contemplations of her survival, the Decepticons and, reluctant as she was to admit it, Optimus himself, the implications of imprinting were the last thing on her mind. If anything, it had completely lapsed from her mind until she felt the sparkling's bond hook onto her spark and pull her into the network that had been crafted between the three bots. She didn't know how she should have felt about it all- angry? Annoyed? Maybe even... relieved?
Well, in the end at least it was better Optimus than Megatron. A Scraplet would have been better than that sick fragger. At least then she could just send a heel through its head and be done with it.
"We are nearing the end of the ravine," Prime voiced as the walls around them widened the further they ventured, ending an opening crowned by an arch and looking over a valley. Airachnid responded by quickening her pace, optics pointed forward as her view of the valley retreated, overtaken by the night sky above that slowly leaked into her vision. 'Almost there...'
Optimus was stumbling over the rocks as he worked to catch up with the femme, not wanting to leave her side for a klick. He didn't trust the cold and quiet evening ambience that hung like a blanket over them, nor did he trust her with the sparking. Airachnid brought herself to a stop at the very edge of the opening, still as the stars that were sprinkled across the swirls of blue and black so far above them.
If there was one thing Optimus could appreciate about Earth, it was its celestial viewpoints. On Cybertron atmosphere was near non-existent, offering a mirror into the black void of space that surrounded the planet and offered itself as 'the Universe'. But even with such an ideal sky, as Cybertron so quickly expanded the rise of the buildings, spacescrapers and fortresses that spiralled from the planet's layered, buried core all but cracked the heavens into a scattered, mismatched jigsaw. Even when Optimus could see into space from the very top layer of Cybertron or from the view port of the Ark, anything that would have been of interest or beauty was far out of sight and reach. At times he'd be lucky enough to glimpse a lone nebula or supernova amongst the pinpricks of stars, but the chaos of war left little room for appreciation of nature. But when he arrived on Earth so long ago, backed by only barest backbone of his Autobots, he took the time to admire this young, beautiful new world. One evening he stood alone on the crest of a bare plateau, silently watching in awe at the sky bleeding away its last colours of orange, red and streaks of purple. Blue, black and other darker palettes blended into the velvet night and the bright spokes of stars stabbed through, the single moon rising to join the blooming cosmos spread out before him. In the years since that evening, Optimus had never seen anything more magnificent on Earth. And from the look of enchantment in Airachnid's optics locked to the sky, he wasn't the only one so charmed by the sight.
"Scorpio," Prime muttered absently, noticing the particular arrangement of stars hovering over them; a trail of white dots ending in a triangle, with a single red star at the formation's heart. Airachnid glanced sideways at him in question, while her talons absently caressed the sparkling as it burrowed into the warmth of her chest.
"What the humans call the collection of stars above us- a constellation. They have many myths and traditions surrounding them, like the old stories of Cybertron." Optimus glanced along to her, expecting to see her yawning in boredom. But to his surprise Airachnid had torn her gaze away from the night and instead oriented it to him patiently waiting for him to continue. With a cough of his air vents, Optimus recited what he knew of the human's space-based speculations.
"They call it a 'zodiac'- one of twelve that leave their mark during each month of the year. It was said that if a human child was born during a certain month that they would have certain personality aspects and traits according to their zodiac sign." Airachnid still listened while her attention turned to the constellation, optics skirting the tail of the scorpion while a talon at the back of her sparkling's head curved around the small threads of metal that stemmed from there, following the movement of her eyes.
"Scorpio, did you say?" Optimus nodded as Airachnid contemplated the name, murmuring it under her breath. "Scorpio... Scorpia..."
"Are you thinking of naming your sparkling?" Optimus asked, optics flicking down to the child in question and meeting again with whirring blue lights staring up at him.
"It would be a fitting name as any. And I can't just go on calling her 'pest'." Even with her icy words Airachnid felt the frost over her spark melting away as Scorpia swept her young gaze over her protectors and parted her lips in a chirping smile as Prime knelt back down closer to her. "And Optimus..." He looked back up at Airachnid, back legs twitching somewhat nervously.
"It's our sparkling now," she corrected with a smile of her own.
xx
Note: Scorpia's brother would have been named Antares, after the star in Scorpio that is sometimes referred to as 'the Heart of the Scorpion' (thank you Emmy for that lovely idea, and the beautiful new cover image :) )