Prelims are finally over, and to celebrate I got this written up (and as a bonus I'm pretty happy with how it came out.) In this I've tried to get Airachnid acting more in character without just using 'mother instincts' as an excuse for her being OOC (because let's face it, she'd probably be the worst mother ever in canon).
xx
"I fully understand that you most likely are adverse to the concept of settling in a human-modified area," Optimus confessed, wringing his digits anxiously. Airachnid had said little on the way to the island that would become her new home, but the tense hunch of her shoulders and her downcast optics spoke volumes. She was scared. "But there is little to no possibility of you or Scorpia being disturbed by humans, or more importantly, Decepticons." She was silent as her gaze swept over the ferns and under the canopies of the forest all around them. Optimus cleared his vocaliser. "If you wish, I could request that some foliage be cleared to allow you more spac-"
"It's... it's fine, Optimus," Airachnid assured, voice distant. She took small steps forwards, pedes crunching the carpet of twigs underneath them. Scorpia slept soundly in her servos, chirping tiny snores against her chestplates.
"Are you certain?"
"The forest brings back... bad memories." She turned so her side was facing Optimus. The sad smile she favoured nowadays flashed back at him. "But I've survived worse."
A rustle in the undergrowth signalled Wheeljack's approach, and he all but tore through the vines as he tried picking leaves out of his armour seams.
"North pier and beaches are safe, and forest doesn't look too bad," he reported, flicking a beetle off his shoulder. "Might see a few big animals around, but nothin' I'm sure you can't handle." Optimus wasn't sure if he approved of Wheeljack's smirk and wink towards Airachnid.
"If I can survive Wrecker company, then Earth creatures will be a relief." The sadness was painted back over with sass galore.
"Ouch. Two centuries past and that glossa's still as sharp as ever." Wheeljack rolled his shoulders while his smirk went lopsided. "The again, I would know-"
"Wheeljack." Something in Optimus' voice made his cables tighten and his frame stand to attention, turning to face the Prime. "I believe Bulkhead will be questioning your absence by now."
"Yeah, yeah, same old story." The Wrecker's optics were practically rolling out of their sockets. "He always did worry himself somethin' fierce." Wheeljack dipped his helm to Airachnid in a farewell before making for the Ground Bridge site, marked between two arching palm trees by a cross in the sandy dirt. Optimus could almost hear the comm line exchange he was having with Ratchet, and the frustrated groans the medic was no doubt making just before the Ground Bridge materialised. He waited until the hum had gone before speaking again.
"And before I depart, Airachnid-" He placed a hand on an audial plate, the inset blue lines glowing for a klick before his digits extracted something from his helm. It was much like a memory stick, small in his open palm held out towards Airachnid. Her eyeridges furrowed.
"What's that?"
"The frequency code for my personal communication line," Optimus explained. "It will allow you to instantly contact me, should you encounter any trouble. I realise I should have given it to you earlier-"
"But you know as well as I do that location can be tracked via comm lines, and you couldn't have me handing such valuable data over to Megatron in exchange for my life." Optimus's optics whirred in surprise as the words spilled from Airachnid's smirking lips. "After a few days of company, you Autobots aren't too hard to figure out."
Optimus cleared his vocaliser at that, dropping his servo as she took the code between her claws. "If there is a situation where you cannot formally address the problem, then a simple comm pulse will suffice to summon me. Likewise if Ratchet is needed, I can send him to you." Not that he expected she'd ever be pining for the medic's attention, but sparklings were unpredictable. Especially when they were living vessels of Dark Energon.
Ratchet still protested leaving Scorpia in such a fragile situation, without any way to monitor her condition outside of check-ups. Optimus had to convince him to even let Scorpia be sent through the Ground Bridge to North Sister Island, with all his arguments that even the slightest malfunction could be a biological disaster.
Optimus wasn't as worried. With what Scorpia and her mother had went through and survived on the Nemesis, he suspected the next steps to be easy.
Big steps, but easy to take.
xx
The base was abuzz when Optimus made his entrance, the humans already settled in after a long day of school and their guardians close by. Where Wheeljack and Ratchet were verbally dinging each other's armour over appropriate sparkling care, Optimus spied the scrubs of Jack's mother, June Darby, sitting as far from the bickering bots as she could get. That gave him an idea. Albeit a risky one.
"Afternoon, Miss Darby." She looked up as he approached, her weary scowl turning into a smile as she lifted herself out of her chair.
"Jack was wondering where you'd gotten to," she remarked, leaning on the railing of the steel walkway.
"Recent Decepticon sightings have forced me to take on further scout duties." Optimus had knelt down so he was near enough to eye-optic level with her. They flicked away for a moment as he tried to gather his thoughts into a sentence.
"On the subject of Jack..." Even from being in contact with humans for over thirty years, he was still unsure of much of their emotional functions. He knew he'd have to tread carefully here. "I wish to inquire about something I believe you have much experience with, though I recognise it as something... personal, and I will fully respect if you do not wish to share it." Her smile faltered and eyebrows knotted together in uncertainty, but she nodded nonetheless.
"Go ahead, Optimus."
"You raised Jack by yourself, correct?" Instantly June's expression hardened, eyes blinking out the fresh chiselled stone of her face.
"Yes... I did." The sigh was heavy as it spilled past her lips. "His father left when he was five and... it's just been me and him since." On Cybertron, most single mothers were left so because their sparkmates had been killed in battle, though Optimus suspected that there plenty left abandoned by fathers in the planet's darker layers, especially in the so called Golden Age. Human females did not seem to differ greatly from femmes in that regard...
"Was it difficult, raising him without a father figure present?"
"Actually, no." Her voice had taken on a distant tone, not unlike the one Airachnid had displayed. "Not really, at least. Nothing much changed, I just had a few more responsibilities. It was all up to me to keep Jack fed and clothed and safe... it was hard on him, though. He still remembers his father. And over the years, it hasn't gotten easier." Her next sigh pressed her eyes closed, arms crossed over as she leant her back against the railing.
"What do you need to know for?" June asked, looking up again at Optimus.
"I'm afraid that is something I cannot disclose at this moment in time, Miss Darby." The apology was hollow in his voice. "But you have my deepest thanks, and my condolences." The smile was back, but not as bright as before.
"Did you have families, back on Cybertron?" Optimus was surprised at the human's question, never suspecting that any other race would have much interest in the culture of his own.
"Cybertronian family structure follows much of the same principle as those of you humans. Though some like myself are born of the Well and have no traditional 'parents', there are those who are born from a spark fusion between a mech and a femme." 'Or harvested in a sparkling farm. Or created in a laboratory under Protihex. Or spawned from Decepticon savagery...'
"A femme... like Arcee?" June's look was quizzical, stone chipped away to soft clay.
"Yes." 'And like Beta. Firestar. Lancer. Greenlight. Elita... all lost to the Allspark.'
"And like human women, femmes can 'birth' new sparks?"
"That is correct, yes..." Prime wasn't certain of where June was heading with her queries, but she took a moment of consideration before dropping her voice to a whisper, looking left and right for potential eavesdroppers. Optimus amplified his audio receptors to hear her.
"Optimus... is Arceecarrying a spark?"
Much of the base's interior was almost flattened as Optimus just caught himself from falling backwards, processor lagging as he tried to understand what June had said.
"N-No, no." Even his vocaliser was glitching in shock. "I mean, if she is, then I am not aware of it, but-"
"What ya' talkin' about?" Leave it to Miko to be distracted by a behemoth of a robot almost falling flat on his aft. She was still scrambling across the walkway and just stopped herself from hurtling over it by splaying her hands on the railings, lurching herself forwards and then backwards, her boots eventually finding solid ground. "Ugh, it's something boring, isn't it?" She was mock snoring over the rails before June could answer, with a knowing wide smile growing that Optimus didn't trust.
"Actually, we were just talking about baby Cybertronians-"
"BABY ROBOTS?! Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, that is so cute!" Miko was squashing her face together as she jumped up and down, making the metal underneath her ring and thrum with her excitement. "They'd be so tiny and have big eyes and crawling everywhere and-" She cut herself off to make a high-pitched squealing noise, barely hearing a distant groan of discomfort from Ratchet banging on his fragile audios. "Where are they, where are they? Ooooh, I wanna see them!"
"I am sorry to disappoint you, Miko, but there are no sparklings in the vicinity." He turned his optics on June. "Or the near future," he said pointedly, rising from his kneel to escape the sound of Miko's boots clanging on the walkway as she ran in circles.
"Awww, what? You got me all pumped up for nothing? Dude, not cool." But even as Prime was leaving, June was leaning across to whisper something in the young girl's ear. Her grin spread like wildfire, and she all but launched herself down the stairs and raced towards a certain blue femme.
"HEY ARCEE, CONGRATULATIONS!"
"Congratulations on what?" As Arcee's confusion sounded across the base, Optimus was already grimacing.
'Primus, give me strength...'
xx
Night came quickly after Optimus' departure, and Airachnid settled herself down in her new cave. There were human constructs nearby that she could have used as shelter, but she shunned them. They were too closed, too barren. She was used to the sifting of soil underped and soft brush of leaves falling on her armour, even if she didn't want to be. It was familiar to her, and in the wake of her life collapsing all around her, familiarity was what she needed to hold onto.
At least here she was closer to the sky, sitting on the crest of a hill inside the great ring of mountainside that the island thrust up from its left side. The outside world was naught but the distant crash of waves on rock, waves on sand, and the hiss of her breath through her vents.
It was her own private Archa Seven, for better or worse. All that could pull her out of it was the code now running through her processor and slipping down into her data banks, catalogued as Optimus' frequency.
She could easily lead him into a trap with it. They both knew that. What was he doing then, handing it over to her? He'd given her too much charity for her to attribute it to that. Was he daring her to try something, challenging her?
Or... did he truly trust her?
She flung the now-empty code chip down into the dense ferns below, lost in the undergrowth before it even hit the ground. Primus, he kept complicating everything. She was trapped all over again. She should have ran off when she had the chance... she should have tried to.
But she did once. Dusty centuries ago, during Cybertron's funeral march, when the hollow streets were left for the dead and the sky was choked with the promise of escape.
The sweet, bastard promise of hope flung out among the stars. And yet only a handful found that hope on Earth.
'Some help you were,' she cursed up at those stars, winking down at her in mockery. Friends one minute, enemies the next. The story of every Decepticon's life. And every step of that life was littered with fallen false loyalties and lies.
Airachnid knew she wasn't the only one who deserted the Decepticons when Cybertron finally gave up its breath. Some banded together and took ships for themselves, others scavenging what they could from the ruins of their war and fleeing. She didn't like to call herself a coward. She wasn't afraid of the war, of dying for a miner's cause. What she despised was the utter mundanity of it all. War was so boring. What did she care for the fate of a planet she was dragged onto kicking and screaming, for the fealty demanded by a symbol branded on her chest, rusting as easy as any other metal on the battlefield graveyard?
She was not a Cybertronian. She didn't understand why so many of them sacrificed their sparks for naught- a bulk order of idiotic suicide- any more than she understood why she was different. Techno-organic, that was one of the first things in Primal Vernacular she had heard from medics trying to prod at her protoform, coming away with their own bleeding and scarred. Any restraints they tried to use on her melted in seconds under acid. Eventually Flatline had to bring in Shockwave, and he couldn't even find a data port to plug in a Cortical Psychic Patch.
It was still breems before they let her go, sweating coolant under the armour they strapped onto her as she was marched before Megatron himself. Talons tapping, scarred lips crinkling, damned red optics...
Airachnid didn't notice she was shaking until a whirr from her arms signalled complaint. Shuffling Scorpia's position so that she nestled into one chestplate eased her, helm nuzzling into the warm plating.
How could she love and hate something so much? Something that did nothing but ache her servos, waste her webbing and gnaw endlessly into her energon rations? She'd never liked sparklings, there were too many of them in adult-size protoforms where the Decepticons were concerned.
But for all that, Scorpia was the reason she was still alive. She frustratingly anchored Airachnid, forced her to take shelter in the cave where Optimus had first found them. And if Autobot pity was anything to rely on, she was the reason Optimus spared her.
That counted for something, she figured.
Flamewar had said her meteorite had come from a secret admirer.
'Perhaps the Universe is my admirer...'
Her hand was in her subspace, she noticed. Gripping the other reminder of her wretched mutant existence. With the night so clear the rock glittered even more, challenging her optics and biolights. She almost laughed at the thought of so many bots actually buying lumps of burnt carbon and sodium. Even when crystals mined from the blood of lower castes were hammered into them, they were just lumps dressed up as something valuable.
She was half tempted to send it falling the data chip, when a whine stopped her servo.
Scorpia's optics were wide with curiosity, miniature digits reached out and wiggling, waving in the webbing and grabbing for the piece of heaven held between the spears of her talons. With a passive grunt Airachnid let the useless trinket fall into her daughter's pining grasp. It was about the size of Scorpia's torso when she held it, hugging it close and cooing as it sparkled. Another thing about sparklings, they were easily distracted.
A smile crept onto her face when Scorpia started nibbling on the rock, scraping her growing denta along its surface. After a few seconds her face screwed up and her glossa leapt out, helm shaking as she tried to dispel the taste of granite. Airachnid almost jumped when she realised that the sound echoing around her was laughter. Her own laughter.
But there was something else echoing as well, tiny and almost lost in the timbre of her own vocaliser. Scorpia was looking up at her, face half-hidden by her chestplate so only her wide optics showed. She raised herself up slightly so Airachnid could see for herself.
"Mama."
The femme looked down at the sparkling as if she'd just grown eight legs (not that it would be that much of a surprise). Her latch mouth hung open, glossa still flicking and edges raised in an innocent, proud smile. Scorpia's first word... was that supposed to be important?
"Right. I'm your... Mama." The word hit Airachnid's taste nodes so strangely as it rolled off her glossa, realisation and confession released into the night. There was an unpleasant swelling in her spark, as if someone had pulled her chamber out, and Scorpia happily nuzzling close again didn't help it.
And then another grim thought struck her.
What if she never got her to shut up after this?
xx
Writing this also gave me a new headcanon for Airachnd- she hates red optics. Even before the incident with Megatron, the Archa spiders had dominantly red eyes and almost all the medics and scientists who prodded her when she was delivered to Decepticon hands had red optics and red somewhere on them. This added to her hatred of the Decepticons as a whole.