Wheeljack took longer than Airachnid expected to approach, seating himself next to her like Dreadwing aside from his tired, limp and lazy limbs dangling from hunched shoulders. Airachnid had always thought he looked rugged, weary but not weak. Now he just looked old.

"So how'd a dame like you end up in a place like this?" he asked, only some of the obvious exhaustion managing to break through his voice.

"Are you asking Airachnid or Elita?" she asked back, not sure how else to respond. Wheeljack didn't seem surprised at her doubt, or bothered by it as he shrugged.

"Can't really tell the difference between them," he admitted, rolling his neck with a hand rubbing the back of it. "Course, I... didn't know you as well when you were shelling out Autobot orders." He shrugged again, as if it was easier to let his frame speak instead of wasting words.

Airachnid remembered her days filling in for Optimus well enough, even through the aching haze of nostalgia, to smile at that. "I remember you, always on Ultra Magnus' detention list."

"Hey, that guy had it out for me, not my fault!" Wheeljack jabbed his digit at the air as if he was defending himself against the universe itself. She knew that feeling well enough, once again simmering in her own thoughts.

"So you kept saying…" The excuses he piled on Optimus and Magnus and any commander who tried to rein him in, she almost wished she could remember some of them. But it was still so strange to think of all the soldiers and officers she'd once known as enemies as old friends instead… which is why she didn't like to dwell much on the concept, why she kept herself apart from the other natural Autobots. Wheeljack at least wasn't a natural Autobot… like all Wreckers, he had some classic Decepticon in him. And like all Wreckers, he refused to acknowledge it. If only she could make herself so blind to her own nature.

"I told ya' though, didn't I?" Wheeljack asked, a rough scrape against her hazy conscience.

"Told me what?" she asked back, forcing all the usual contemplations right to the back of her mind.
"That you and Prime would make a good couple." He grinned, almost smugly, as if he'd known all along who she really was. That would have explained why he was never scared of her, why for the longest time she felt like he was the only bot she couldn't just kill and be done with.

But why didn't that stop her from hurting everyone else? Why wasn't there some hesitation, some faint echo of familiarity when she had Arcee or any other number of former friends under her claws? She couldn't answer them, but she couldn't stop pleading with herself. It was a cycle that would have torn her apart… if not for Wheeljack having another question entirely to pull her out of it.

"...I ever tell you I got a kid of my own?"
Airachnid blinked, legs snapping out in shock and almost grazing the Wrecker's already scuffed armour. "Since when?"

"Just before I landed on this rock. Guess my firewalls ain't as good as they once were..." He chuckled, a small sound from the cavern of his spark, as he pulled something from his subspace. The disk was just smaller than his palm, a holographic projector that beamed out a wavering picture of a sparkling shockingly similar to Scorpia. "Took this just before I... before I left her with one of my Wrecker buddies. Her name's Strongarm."

She couldn't have been older than a few breems in that picture, optics still glued shut and protoform still damp and soft. But even looking so young she still had her sire's features, the hard curl of her tiny mouth and the tight shrug of her weak shoulders around her face, as if protecting herself from something. Airachnid only realised just how small Strongarm really was when she noticed the blanket around her was actually Wheeljack's own servos.

"She's gorgeous…" Airachnid had to whisper to stop her vocaliser straining. Still her claws twitched, her spark pining for her own daughter even though she was only a short walk away, watched over by the beeping scout and the ailing Wrecker. She shook herself free of the need, settling her legs back where they belonged. "Who's her carrier?" she asked.

Wheeljack had been looking at the picture with the soft love of a far away sire, but now his expression turned to steel. "...A femme that didn't deserve her," he answered as he closed the projector. There was enough bitterness there to make Airachnid curious, but masked with enough hurt to stop her probing further. Instead she glanced over her shoulder at where Scorpia rolled in Bumblebee's lap, copying his chirps with splutters from her glossa while Bulkhead made an enclosure with his massive servos.

"...If we get through this, maybe she can have a playdate with Scorpia," she mused, the first time she'd looked to the future instead of lamenting on the lost past.

Wheeljack's smile returned halfway, a hopeful huff leaving his vents as he held the projector tightly. "If we get through this… I'll look forward to it." He pocketed his memory of Strongarm, pushed himself up with servos creaking as he stretched them out. "In the meantime, think I'll drop in on Grimlock, see if he's eaten any of Fowler's Friendly Firesquad. You wanna come?"

She almost said yes, but eventually just shook her helm. "I think it's best that I stay here. Tell him I said hello."

Wheeljack nodded, scarred smile and optics brighter now, his frame seemingly cured of its fatigue just by resting beside her. Though maybe the Wrecker was just eager to get away from Optimus as he approached, abandoning whatever work he tried to occupy himself with. He stopped before her, watching Wheeljack retreat before taking his place beside her like a heavy ghost haunting her.

"Are you alright?" It was a question he seemed to ask purely out of habit.

"I'd feel better if my claws were around Megatron's neck cables right now," she said, barely masking bitterness at being confined when her vengeance was just a Ground Bridge away. She'd have slipped through it herself if she wasn't so sure someone would have stopped her, most likely Optimus himself, whether or not he really did trust her.

The Prime didn't speak for a while, not until after she lay her sunken helm on her curled-up knees. "You know the real reason I didn't let you after Megatron?"
"What would that be, Optimus?" she asked numbly, expecting a wisdom-weighted lecture on the value of patience or something equally as naive and useless and quintessentially Autobot.

Her sparkmate did not meet that expectation, though. "The same reason I didn't allow myself to go. We would have both destroyed him," he answered, strangely solemn and bitter at the same time. As if slicing up the only bot worse than her in the galaxy would have been a bad thing, but for the wrong reasons.

"...I don't understand you sometimes, Optimus," Airachnid admitted, unfolding her knees from her chest with a hand over her neglected subspace. Optimus took that hand in his own before she could reach for the only thing she did understand about him, the last relic she had of Cybertron and the femme she used to be.

"Do you believe that I love you?" he asked, as if he could see the meteorite shard burning warmly in her subspace, almost rivaling the soft simmer of his optics.

"Of course."

"Then what else is there to understand?" And how could she argue with a tone like that, with lips still so tender against her own? She could feel the warm flow of air from his mouth, that searching current reaching deep to her fluttering spark and covering it wholly. His kisses weren't quite the same as those she remembered, but that may have been her fault. Elita didn't have acid on her glossa, fangs between her lips, so Optimus never had to be careful with her. And as much as Airachnid wanted to reach as deep as he did, she held back. She didn't quite trust herself enough yet, to stay calm while her spark was an unfamiliar inferno, while she struggled to keep her claws still between his gentle thick digits and while her legs fought the urge to pull his body closer to her own.

At least Ratchet's return interrupted things before they could go any further, for better or worse.

"Oh, get a room, you two..." The medic's tired scoff had both bots springing apart, more from shock at his appearance than shame at being caught. Optimus waited until his back was turned before sneaking another kiss to her, but Ratchet was too busy operating the Ground Bridge to berate them any further anyway. From the vortex at the other end of the base Smokescreen and Dreadwing came barreling through, with Arcee draped over the Seeker's shoulder, and it winked out as they skidded to a stop before the other Autobots gathering around them.

"Mission... accomplished," Dreadwing intoned through hard vents, pulling Arcee down from his shoulder and supporting her wobbling frame.

"Nailed it!" Smokescreen cheered, holding up the Omega Key and flipping it between his digits like it was a trinket (before Optimus wisely snatched it out of his hand).

"What happened to Arcee?" Ratchet asked, taking over from Dreadwing with a servo around her waist while Bumblebee supported her shoulders.

"Got smacked disabling Megatron's plasma cannon… but I'll be fine." She tried to shrug off the assistance, but was still stumbling instead of walking as she was herded towards the med bay. Bulkhead quipped something about "not being the only cripple in the base" as Airachnid watched her limp away with a sour knowledge glazing her optics over; for once not because of who she was looking at, instead because of who she was thinking of.

"So Megatron was there..."

Dreadwing followed her stare, his mouth pressed into an even harder grim line as his vocaliser rumbled behind it. "I sensed desperation in his movements, the way he tried to bargain for my return... the more he believes that he will lose in the end, the more reckless he will become."

Where Megatron was concerned, that was obvious to any former Decepticon. A reckless warlord was an infinitely deadly one... knowing that, Airachnid scooped Scorpia up from the ground into the safety of her servos before she could try waddling after Arcee.

"Well, only one key left to find now!" Smokescreen said, leaning against Dreadwing and not realising the scowling Seeker clicked the Phase Shifter on his wrist until he ended up toppling right through his frame.

"Actually, Smokescreen, while you were gone I set out to further decrypt the final data set," Optimus said as the rookie tried to not make himself look any more ridiculous. Airachnid reached out a leg that he could use to pull himself up, masking the lilts of laughter over Scorpia's giggles, while Optimus placed himself in front of the base's main console.

"It is not a set of co-ordinates like the others..." He passed his digits over the keyboard until a grainy bundle of blue pixels spread over the screen. "It is an image."

And the image slowly came into further focus, resolving into a sharp and familiar outline as the Autobots studied it, especially familiar to one in particular...

"Hey, it looks kinda like me!" Smokescreen blurted out a full nanoklick after everyone else had already realised that. At least he managed to figure out what it meant if there was an Omega Key inside him a little bit faster, from how quickly his enthusiasm drained away. "I-I mean... I've never seen that handsome mech before in my life-"

"Just get your aft in here, Smokescreen," Ratchet called out from the med bay.

"Yessir..."

xx

Even as the harsh sand whipping his frame turned to glass from the heat of his anger, Megatron didn't budge from where he'd lost his key, his literal key to claiming Cybertron for himself. He'd failed the first time, leaving himself nothing but ashes and corpses to rule over... this time, he'd orchestrate Cybertron's rebirth. He'd carve the planet's path from the very beginning.

That dream was all that stopped him giving up, the hope burning acidic and raw in the purple umbra of his spark, so bright that he doubted it was all his own desire... that doubt made him look again at the scraps of dusty paper still littered over his peds, too tattered now for him to re-examine. Yet he still stared, wondering why Dreadwing had such a useless thing in his subspace, until a dull beep against the roar of wind in his audios pulled him back to reality.

"Lord Megatron, there has been a development that requires your intervention." It was a drone's voice, the standard emotionless statement that Megatron never bothered to differentiate between different models.

"What sort of 'development'?" Megatron growled, almost impressing himself at managing to control the near-constant caustic anger flowing hot under his protoform.

"Following your departure, Starscream had retreated to a location somewhere in Earth's far southern hemisphere, with the Apex Armour in his possession. A squadron of drones followed him, suspecting that he had treachery planned, and... well, they have not returned. We were hesitant to take further action without your command."

Megatron clenched his scarred claws, catching wisps of sand between them. An unexpected betrayal followed immediately by a painfully predictable one. "Has the Ground Bridge been repaired yet?"

"Negative, my liege, we are still calibrating-"

"Then supply the co-ordinates of this location and I will investigate it myself!"

Whether out of fear of being to slow or due to some hardwired instinct, the drone didn't hesitate in answering. Megatron fed the co-ordinates into his navigation unit and went chasing through the gritty maelstrom after them.

"The only ones who follow orders around here are the blasted drones... has it really come to the point where loyalty must be programmed?" It was useless musing, but it helped to vent his anger before he entered the frozen slipstreams around the Earth's south pole, melting through the icy clouds as his spark hardened against the cold. Frost-crusted oceans and wastelands of snow instead of sand disappeared beneath him, the distance between his fist and Starscream's wretched face dissolving with every nanoklick.

Though even as he contemplated beating the betrayal out of his pathetic soldier, he was surprised at how the Seeker didn't even try to hide himself on the icy island he'd taken refuge on.

"Starscream!" Even encased in the Apex Armour it was obvious he was already terrified before Megatron bellowed after him; a mech didn't shake that much just from the cold. "What manner of fragging half-processed slagbrained treachery is this?!"

Starscream only half paid attention to the warlord rampaging after him, letting his optics dart elsewhere around the island and its sharp forests of frozen rock. "M-My lord... I was not planning betrayal! I... I was undertaking a personal scout of this area! Following... reports of mysterious signals originating from it!" The Seeker was hardly adept at lying, but this attempt was the most laughable Megatron had ever witnessed.

"Mysterious signals..." Megatron would have spat if his mouth wasn't filled with dry frost and disgust. "Is that what you call stealing my relics, running away like a coward? Only you would be stupid enough to forsake your amnesty so soon after it was granted to you!"

The Apex Armour only barely brought the Seeker to height with Megatron, but Starscream could have loomed over him in heels like spears and he would have still cowered under Megatron's glare. He pressed his back against a rock spire as Megatron marched onwards, putting on a very good show of terror and self-pity...

But it was a show that he couldn't keep up as a shadow started to fall over Megatron, one that greatly amused the Seeker for some reason as he started cackling behind the glass his pod. "You think me stupid, my liege? You are the one who just walked into an ambush!"

Megatron paused, again stilled by confusion as the shadow started to narrow over him. By the time he looked up it had already become a cone of impact, a screeching mass of metal suddenly descended on bladed wings. It pinned him to the hard ground, grating him against the rocks and digging deep into his armour with frantic strikes. Red optics, golden armour flashing in the ice, razors glinting as they gouged at him; by the time Megatron managed to escape from the whirlwind he was already covered in cuts. His heavy vents only made the wounds bleed more, but the cold air froze the energon as it bubbled out.

"What... on Cybertron-?!"

The wild beast returned to its perch at the top of the spire, like a Seeker adorned in bloodied knives and rusted metal and a predatory glare, so similar to its relative still screeching with laughter below.

"BEHOLD, MEGATRON!" Starscream still managed to keep his dramatic flair with the bulk of the Apex Armour, throwing his servos out as two more creatures emerged at either side of him, bristling with horns and plates and even harder than the frozen earth around them. "I have discovered something mightier than even your Dark Energon... DINOBOTS!"

Megatron had already scanned the so-called Dinobots before Starscream announced them, calculated his chances at surviving against the three, instantly rejecting the thought of retreating. Not when his sword was already drawn, his dangling servo forced back into its socket as the nanites stitched his weaponry circuits back together. Dreadwing's betrayal had hurt... but Starscream's would only give him a good excuse to send him to the Pit when he won.

"What are they waiting for, then? Another Predacon era?" This time Megatron did spit, energon and bile hitting the ground just short of Starscream's peds. "Or maybe they're just wondering why on Earth they're taking orders from a rat with wings?"

The insult at least wiped the insipid grin from Starscream's face before he gave the attack order.

xx

I know it's a little late to be introducing new characters, but I think these are additions most people will appreciate :D