In between starting and finishing this chapter, I've been thinking a bit on how I've handled Airachnid over these past eighteen chapters, and how worried I've been about how others would receive her. Desperately I've been trying to present a reasonable balance of her being 'compassionate' (or as compassionate as she can be) to her sparkling while still being uncaring of the Decepticons and wary of the Autobots. I personally like her having a different, caring side, but I also understand that her sadistic-ness is what makes most of her fans love her, so I've tried to preserve that as much as I can.
But at the same time, I've realised that if I spend too much time trying to please everyone, then I'm not going to enjoy what I'm making. And I'm not trying to please everyone- in fact I was always expecting some form of fandom backlash against this fic (but maybe that's just me being paranoid) or others that I've written. In the end all I really care about is whether or not myself, other readers and Emmy, who without this fic would never have even been thought of, are happy.
Furthermore, I've recently become fed up with the fandom and all the things that have become popularised within it, all the things I hate but other people love and no matter where I go I can't get away from those things. Over the past few months I've tried ignoring them in favour of the more tasteful and enjoyable parts of Transformers that kept me loving them, but having to keep it up for months can take its toll and I'm just sick of putting up with it all. Anyone who follows my tumblr will have seen me announcing a 'break' from the fandom, where I'm trying to distance myself as much as possible from it to just calm myself. This doesn't mean I'll stop writing fanfiction- on the contrary, writing was one of the only things that made this fandom tolerable for me- but it does mean I'll be out of touch from the franchise for a while.
Finally, dreaded exams are very near on the horizon, and likely this chapter will be the last out for a few weeks while I try to catch up on studying and whatnot.
But with all that out of the way, we can continue with the Dino Daddy antics.
xx
It took two long, splintered hours of flying dust, scorching blasters and ferocious roars before Grimlock finally subsided and allowed Airachnid's webs to restrain him. Optimus suspected that it would have taken twice as long- or more likely that Grimlock would never have backed down- if not for her assistance, and he was grateful that he brought along extra cubes of energon.
"I'm fine, Optimus. You worry more than a maternity drone in a spark nest." Airachnid had helped herself to two cubes, but she refused aid for her pulled joints or protoform abrasions. "I'm not the one who had a tree slammed on top of me."
"Earth flora does seem to have a grudge against me..." Optimus muttered, remembering the ringing in his helm after a Vehicon drone knocked him off a mountain ledge with a tree trunk. He shook his helm as if he could still feel it.
"Flora and mechanical fauna," she added with a chuckle. "Grimlock really doesn't like you, Prime."
Optimus hmmed as he looked over to where the 'Dinobot', as he had called himself, lay flat on his side under a wide-leafed tree, pawing at the webbing still around his jaws. "And yet he shows no hostility towards you..." A high trill echoed through the forest then, from a tiny shape nuzzling into Grimlock's exposed side. "Or Scorpia."
"Strange, that," Airachnid agreed. "But I'm not about to complain. Whatever he is, as long as he isn't trying to shoot me, then that's good enough." Optimus could feel his archivist curiosity boiling at what could have brought the long-dead bot to Earth, or what caused his protective compulsions over the femmes, but he tried to set it aside for now. They were all safe, and Scorpia markedly happier with the Dinobot nearby, and that was all that mattered.
But there was one bit of curiosity that Optimus allowed himself to indulge.
"On another note, if I may ask, Airachnid... how did you come to join the Decepticons?"
"You do have your priorities straight, don't you?" she scoffed through a small smile. Those were becoming more common with each day, and Optimus couldn't help but feel pleased at that. "If you found a scraplet in your spark chamber, you'd ask it for directions to your fuel pump." A long silence came after her jape, and Optimus thought he wasn't going to receive an answer.
"They were the ones who lifted me off of A-7," she eventually explained, hugging her knees closer to her chest. "One of them, at least. Lockdown, I think his name was." Optimus had heard of the Decepticon bounty hunter before, though reportedly he was killed on a planet in the Regulon system not long after the Exodus. "He took me back to Cybertron; to the bots he called his masters. They were ... friendly, for an army of murderers at least... but that might have been just because I had no armor on." Her smile turned to a smirk when she caught the dark flare of heat that bloomed in Optimus' faceplate at that. "When I eventually received some, they put me in their training ranks. That lasted for all of two solar cycles; weapon handling, bomb construction, simple battle skills, I just seemed to... know it all." She took on a speculative tone. "Hmm, I think they were disappointed I didn't turn out to be so much of an uncultured savage to do as they liked with."
Optimus had never known before how Decepticons organised their own recruits, but it was strange to hear it being so similar to Autobots own procedures. Though he wasn't sure if they had any 'savages' on the field- apart from the one lying only a few feet away.
"After I flew through training I was shoved into the main army ranks," Airachnid continued. "But by that point it was late in the war, and everything other than drones were in short supply. Femmes and other sparse bots were reassigned off of the battlefields, and I became a torture specialist and interrogator-" Optimus tried to hide his wince at that, remembering how Arcee and Tailgate and countless other Autobots had learnt that the hard way. Airachnid noticed it, and her gaze fell slightly.
"Your Arcee would have told you all about that..." she muttered. "But before you try going on some Autobot 'redemption' speech, let me make one thing clear." When her optics looked around at him again, they were swimming in a familiar ferocity. "I am not sorry for what I did during the war." Each word was spoken slowly, punctuated with a flash of her fangs. "Not the torture, nor the murder, or even for Arcee. She has killed just as many Cybertronians as I have, just like every other Autobot and Decepticon. Just like you." Optimus wasn't sure if he had the words to contradict her, even though at the heart of her stance she was right. His hands clenched, distantly remembering the feeling of Decepticon energon dripping and drying in the metal seams.
"I don't call myself innocent, Airachnid, nor does any Autobot capable of surviving the war..." he said slowly. "But even I find it hard to fully excuse the past. Your past. I have placed it aside for the sake of aiding you these last few days, but you and I both know old wounds are not so easily healed."
"I did what I had to do like everyone else," she said emotionlessly. "Just be glad that I haven't had time to start it all over again."
Optimus didn't doubt her threat, from the venom sheen that her fangs started to glisten with. His tone was cold, distant, clipped like an Empurated Seeker's wings. "Understood."
The old enemy silence took over, joined with sighing vents and talons still beating a metronome melody on stone.
"I don't say it to be spiteful, Prime," Airachnid pointed out. "I'm just... used to being judged more harshly than others. I don't want pity, or prejudice. I only want to make it clear that I am no different from anyone else involved in the War, despite... physical differences, obviously." Talons tapped on the rock beside her to divert her motor functions. "I don't know or care to know how my kind was treated before the war, but I can personally vouch that it couldn't have been any better from during it." Optimus had never devoted much thought process to how techno-organics would have fared in war time- to his knowledge the Autobot ranks had never had a TO recruited, so it was always assumed that they were either killed or hiding themselves from the war in the Underworld or Cybertronian wilds. When Bumblebee and Cliffjumper rescued Arcee from Airachnid, they couldn't report much on her appearance, and Arcee never talked about the incident to others; especially not to Optimus. But before the war even the lowest caste bot was generally more respected than a techno-organic. Senator Ratbat's appointment shortly before Megatron's uprising did little to stop discrimination against them, with all his attention focused on enforcing the Senate's laws rather than helping his own people.
"In truth, my position in the Decepticons... helped my techno-organic traits", Airachnid confessed, folding her legs back over the rock to dangle over the hill side. "It fueled my instincts, the compulsion that I've always felt to hunt and kill. Like a Scraplet feasts on metal to survive, I felt that I had to kill to live. After the exodus I eventually did have to. I see nothing wrong with that."
"That is... understandable," Optimus concluded.
"No need to worry yourself with wondering when I'll start killing again, though," Airachnid assured. "Ever since re-joining the Decepticons, I haven't felt... anything. I suspect the pregnancy reset my organic protocols and switched from hunter to..." She trailed off, hesitant to call herself 'mother'.
"In any case, when I left Cybertron, I had to find other outlets for my needs, as well as a source of energy. Whenever I felt it rising, I had to hunt something before I tore my own ship apart." She sighed as she continued. "Furthermore, the Harbinger only had a limited store of energon that I could consume, but fortunately I found that I could draw fuel from organic matter. So I landed on other planets, hunting the native species for food and staying for as long as I needed." Her helm lowered again, and she pressed a hand to her lips to muffle her next sentence. "Usually it was when the population was dead."
"And you also felt the need to collect your victim's heads?" Optimus asked before he could stop himself.
She shrugged rather than throwing him the deadly look that he had braced himself for. "I got lonely, and bored. It kept me occupied."
"But Kaon had no shortage of distractions for the war." Thankfully she was smiling again, if only faintly. "By night and off-duty, I was a... dancer, you might say. Not like Autobot dancing, far from it, more like... well, I wouldn't expect you to know about Kaon's night clubs, but they were... places of quite ill repute."
When she finished with a light chuckle, she found that his optics had turned away, their light clouded and distant.
"Haven't fallen asleep, have you, Optimus?" she asked good-humouredly, met only with a moment of silence as Optimus closed his optics over.
"Elita was a dancer," he explained quietly. Her eyerides knitted together. 'That name again...'
"I almost envy you, Airachnid," he went on, sighing. "I do regret things I have done during the war."
Unlike Optimus, Airachnid had no reservations to prying. "Like what?"
"I let my sparkmate die."
Airachnid wasn't much educated on the rules of empathy, but she knew to let a pause seep through before pressing further. "What was she like?"
"Beautiful..." His digits spread wide as he gripped his knee joint. "The kindest bot I ever knew, wise beyond her centuries... I think you would have liked her, Airachnid." A snort of laughter was her response to that.
"Because obviously I'm the kindest monstrosity you've met?" Though her optics glowed mischievously Optimus still drew back from her.
"I-I did not mean-"
"I know what you meant, Optimus," Airachnid said gently, smirk failing her. "But you and I both know I don't get along with 'Bots, or Cons."
"Elita was different, though," Optimus said. "Like everyone before the war, she had friends who became Decepticons, but she managed to keep them. They were informers and data brokers helping us, all because they trusted Elita. She was the reason that the Autobots managed to hold out for so long. She also... she once said that your kind, techno-organics, should be as equal as any other bot. That-"
"It's a nice sentiment, Prime, but organic or not never made much difference when war came around," Airachnid pointed out, one eyeridge cocked. Optimus saw it would be fruitless trying to sway her scepticism, so he kept quiet.
"But don't get me wrong, she does sound... charming," Airachnid eventually admitted, contemplating Prime's words. "From what you say, I might have been able to tolerate her." Optimus made out her next statement in a muted mumble; "And if I was wise like her, I wouldn't be in this mess..."
"I can't imagine that you ever expected to become a mother."
"Not by a long shot," she scoffed to him, optics going hard for a moment. "But... for a former Decepticon, I think I've done alright." Her helm turned to where Scorpia sat on Grimlock's back, a short tangle of wire dangling over her shoulder as she pressed her helm down against his metal. "In a strange way... I'm almost glad I am one."