Optimus awoke again with his helm pounding in painful concert with his spark. When he attempted to lift it he found it as heavy as lead, and the surface it fell back onto searing from the conduction of his overheating frame on the berth beneath him. He groaned over the frantic whirring of his cooling fans, and pushed himself up despite his lethargy, ignoring the dizziness at the corners of his vision. Somehow he managed to march valiantly back to the foyer of the base with barely a thought spared for his most recent relapse. As long as he didn't think about it, the agony in his spark would eventually subside...
He pulled back from entering when he saw only Ratchet present- the other Autobots having still not risen from their own undisturbed recharge. Optimus envied their easy comfort more than ever as he pushed himself to approach his old friend. One that he realised he had come very close to making an enemy of.
"Optimus." Ratchet's greeting was strangely surprised. "I-uh, wasn't expecting to see you awake so soon." Optimus raised an eyeridge over the medic's awkward tone.
'Soon?' But...surely he'd slept through the night? And it certainly wasn't rare for Ratchet to wake early in what the humans called mornings.
"How long was I recharging?" he asked uneasily, still mentally shaking off his sleep as Ratchet tried to keep his attention on his console.
"Just a breem," the medic answered in a mumble. Optimus would have groaned in more solitary conditions. No wonder he was so exhausted... but he could hardly drag himself back to his berth after seeing that. He was somewhat expecting Elita to be paying him another painful visit in the night, but there were very few memories of her that could have such an effect on him as their first reunion did. And now he was faced with a new problem- fixing the damage his outburst had done and delaying Ratchet's full discovery of the severe situation as much as possible.
"You were right." Optimus of course thought that Ratchet already knew that, but beginning with admitting his own mistaken denial was as good a start as any. "Because of the... relapses, I haven't been acting as a leader should." The medic sounded a grunt of acknowledgement. "Recently my actions have been selfish to my own conscience- no matter who else they might benefit in the end. If you will accept my apology-"
"No need, Optimus," Ratchet cut in with a sad, forgiving smile on his faceplate turned away. He easily recognised the regret in his old friend's tone- and something made him trust that his actions, however vague to Ratchet himself, were justified. Even with the depth of his knowledge of the Cybertronian psyche and the years he had spent in Optimus' company he couldn't even begin to imagine what his processor suffered through. Not to say that the medic was at all dismissing the whole 'Decepticon refugee' predicament, but Optimus knew what he was doing, and how to do it. Above being a dear old friend he was a Prime first and foremost- and his commander. Even if his vision was blurred from resurfacing past trauma and the immovable morals that both blessed and cursed all Primes, Ratchet would simply have to dust off that long-forgotten instinct called 'faith' and put all his swimming doubts in it to keep his Autobot loyalty close. For now, at least.
"In any case, right now we have a bigger problem," he continued, turning back to the screen displaying a co-ordinate map. "Bulkhead and Wheeljack haven't yet returned."
"Wheeljack?" Optimus asked, surprised to hear the departed Wrecker's name again.
"Yes, he arrived shortly after you left yourself. He didn't want to wait for your return, and Bulkhead went off with him. That was three breems ago." In that instant Prime took on the steel demenour that characterised a commander in thought. Now was the time to prove himself worthy of Ratchet's forgiveness. "I wouldn't expect Wheeljack to be spending any length of time within the base, but Primus knows where he might be dragging Bul-" A series of beeps from the console cut Ratchet's voice off, and he furiously typed in something as the map zoomed out and panned over to a different point.
"It's his signal," Ratchet relayed. "Over a thousand miles from here. And I would imagine Wheeljack is with him," he continued with a grimace in his tone.
"Attempt contact," Optimus ordered near instantly, expertly clearing his mind of all emotional clutter and focusing his blue-tinged sights on the task at hand- getting Bulkhead back home.
"No response," Ratchet said, turning around with worried optics. Optimus evaluated both the screen and the quandary ahead of him. If Bulkhead wasn't responding his comm link was either disabled or, most likely, he was unable to answer.
"Lock onto his c-" Optimus began, but stopped as he remembered that Airachnid's location was still inputted in the Ground Bridge targeting system. With a shutter of his optics Optimus quickly amended his command. "Make a record of the current locked Ground Bridge co-ordinates, the enter Bulkhead's." Logging her location was a risk in that any other Autobot scanning through the records could find and use it- Ratchet himself would be a main suspect for such activity. Especially now that he knew the nature of Prime's secret- though not so much a secret as a vague confession now. Optimus kept such suspicion in mind as the medic saved Airachnid's co-ordinates and reset the system to accept the input of Bulkhead's. The Bridge vortex whirled to life in a flash of swirling light and humming diodes.
"Optimus," Ratchet called as the Prime made to depart. The old mech's frame was tensed and his optics wandering again. "If I keep my silence on the... current Decepticon situation-"
"I promised to show you them. And this is one I will keep in time." Ratchet nodded in acceptance of Optimus' answer, and watched him disappear into the warp. Somehow, in a haze of leftover trust and dormant moral barriers rebuilding themselves, Ratchet fought back the urge to see where those previous numbers led to even while they rested at his very fingertips.
xx
It was a good name, Airachnid reasoned with herself. Her newly christened child slept soundly in her servos, exhausted from frame to tiny spark. Airachnid herself was feeling much the same as she struggled to keep her optics open and focused on the high moon above- but why? What was it that forbade her from pausing her motherly sentry duty against the night's horrors? When Scorpia was still but a squirming mass of metal veneer and protoform, even with her previous primitive maternal instincts overriding her processor Airachnid had no qualms of falling prey to peaceful sleep. But now that her child bore a name... she allowed her optics to shutter wearily for a nanoklick.
Scorpia's namesake constellation was still branded into the shifting sky draped over her, heavy with the weight of the cosmos and its own heavenly children. Only now with Prime gone again- with another promise to return soon in his wake- could Airachnid let the stars lull her into something close to stupor.
'Hello, my old friends...' She was reminded of the days she spent on Seven taking glances to the sky and frozen nights melting into dark mornings. 'Dark' was as accurate a description as any for Archa Seven's geography- every square inch crowded with caves, forests and trees whose infinite lengths of roots and vines turned the planet into a criss-cross web containing the Universe's personal nightmares. Only once had she ever dared to challenge the twisted floor of snarling thorns and long-buried monsters condemned to the heart of the planet. A dreary day with a monochrome patchwork sky breaking through the gaps in the mesh of branches in the forest canopy. She had no scale of the time when the day took place, all she knew was that it was only shortly after... she awoke. Perched on a branch, under a break in the branches, lidded gaze lingering on the shaft of thin sunlight that streamed from the window of sky past her optics, bleaching the ferns and leaves curled out desperately to trap the rays as they finally fell to the feral shadows far below her. Just when she risked a look to those shadows from fear nagging at her, the fleeting rays swept the edge of something for the briefest of moments. Something shiny and curious... and calling to her.
Airachnid didn't remember or want to remember what she was thinking at the time, nor why she was there. She'd worked too long these many years to block as much as her early Archa years from her mind to start dredging them up all over again. In fact, the only way she could recall the day she dared to dive was...
Careful not to disturb Scorpia, Airachnid unlooped a servo from around her and slowly inched it to the opening to her pocket of subspace. From its edge she pressed two digits onto a rough lump of rock almost jutting out, extracting it and holding the shard up against the glow of the moon. Among the encompassing shadows hooking themselves along the length of the rock brilliant diamonds of light pierced through, though Airachnid never did find out what type of mineral had encrusted the stone. She'd been too preoccupied trying to survive every day to put any research into it. When she finally wrestled it out of the entanglement of vines and thorns what felt like hours later, she spent another long while simply looking at it, turning it in her still-strange claws and stroking the tiny craters that marked its interstellar journey to her palm. She only discovered it was a meteorite long after the Decepticons picked her up, when she was toured around Kaon as a new recruit.
Flamewar. That was her guide's name.
"And over along this block we've got the newer barracks, some energon stores, missile silo to the left and cannons to pelt said missiles around the right. This used to be a view-point over Hydrax Plateau, but there isn't much to see there nowadays other than the graveyards. Somedays I miss the speedwa-"
"What's that on your neck?" Flamewar paused her rote at the interruption, turning away from the open viewing balcony overlooking part of the Plateau to look at the black-armoured femme she'd been stuck with today. She'd been silent throughout the whole tour other than affirming nods and sighs every now and then. At the sound of her question and her curious pink optics glancing from Flamewar's face to the thin loop of chain around her neck, hovering just above the arching flames on her chestplates, the older femme took on a smug look.
"Oh, this?" She flicked the lump of glittering rock. "Just a little trinket from an admirer. Pure Polaris meteorite joined with Gygaxian crystals. Rare enough before the war, but now-" She broke off with a scoff and a pair of digits rubbing at the precious jewel. "Course, with rarity comes a price- some femmes would kill for something like this."
"Right..." Airachnid said slowly, letting Flamewar lead on while she slyly slid a hand into her subspace. The word 'meteorite' struck a chord with her stellar-loving self- ever since she'd learnt the basics of the cosmos and its landmarks during her mandatory 'Decepticon Orientation' sessions she was fascinated by the sky and what lay beyond it. And to think she had a shard of that sky in her grasp... her hand tightened instinctively around the shard, and she refused to let go of it until her helm hit her berth that evening.
After she'd assimilated into Kaon's militant backdrop, Airachnid didn't see much of Flamewar after that except for the time the femme confronted her for 'taking her target' while on an interrogation mission- Arcee certainly had a lot of enemies among the Decepticon girls. If she recalled Flamewar was killed shortly before the exodus of Cybertron; a sniper caught the glint of that very same necklace she so proudly flaunted to Airachnid in the blurry mess of the battlefield (just as well her death was on the Hydrax Plateau, so they didn't have to budge her body).
Now that she looked over it all afresh , the spider didn't see much anyone familiar save for the drones and her commanding officers. And of course the Lord of them all... 'No. Don't think of him. Don't fragging think of that bastard...' When she opened her optics she found her helm buried into Scorpia's , who pushed herself deeper in her grasp and burrowed near her spark chamber. Primus, she couldn't even look at her child without painfully remembering where she came from.
Why would she care though?
Why should she care about... bonding with her? Or the problems that would surely meet such a task... A groan rippled through her systems and her helm slumped back against the rock wall. All she wanted to do was forget about it all until the morning and hope against all possible hope that the entirety of the past year was just a horrific dream, but that was too easy. It would be so easy to just let her optics snap shut and to let sleep wash over her...No. She was still alive. After all this slag, she was still alive. And she was strong enough to survive the past, present and whatever the damned future had hiding away for her. To let go was to give in, and to give in was weakness. She wasn't a Decepticon, she was better. Superior.
Why did Megatron take her? Because he believed it as well.
Why did he kill their first child? Because he was scared of anything that came from her.
Why did Optimus save her... Not again.
'Just start with the basics, Air...' she told herself through the pounding of her helm drowned in fatigue. She was a Decepticon. Not anymore. She was lost. She was stuck here. She had a child. She didn't want a child. But she loved it. Did she even know what love was? Her attempt at thought collection only amplified the processor pulsing tenfold. Airachnid was beginning to suspect that perhaps her injuries weren't all specifically physical. With a hand around her meteorite and another on Scorpia's helm though, talons stroking in circles as her helm dropped even further back against the cushion of the cave wall, the ache dulled slowly, until she had nothing else to keep her awake.