Once again, I took far longer than I should have getting this chapter out. University has kept me busy the last few weeks and the biggest problem was trying to figure out what kind of scenes to include in this chapter, namely development of the Dinobots. We're nearing the end of this story and I didn't want them to just be forgotten about until they were convenient, so I felt that a section featuring them was necessary.
xx
"When Dinobots get to beat up Megatron?"
It was the fifth time one of the beasts had asked that, three of them credited solely to Slag as he tried to entertain himself by carving up tree trunks with his horns. But this time it was Grimlock, bowing low to Wheeljack's level so his masked pout would have maximum effect. ever since they'd returned to the island the Dinos constantly switched between their robot and beast modes, but Grimlock seemed to favour the former. The Wrecker had known him too long to not know all his tricks by now, but he gave the Dinobot a pat on his snout anyway.
"Soon enough, buddy, soon enough," he promised, feeling a low growl under his palm from Grimlock's maw just as it was knocked away by Slag stamping up to slam into his leader's side.
"Slag not like waiting! Slag want fight!" The tricera-bot kept nudging Grimlock's side even as he toppled over, rolling onto his taloned peds under the cover of a giant dust cloud to ambush his impatient soldier.
"GRIMLOCK SAY WHEN DINOS FIGHT!" He lunged at Slag and scraped his denta along the Dinobot's side, a mortal wound on any other bot but barely a scratch to these rowdy walking tanks. Slag seemed more amused by the attack than angered, morphing into his beast mode and slapping his tail against Grimlock's jaw just as they were slammed by another of their group literally leaping into the fray.
"Snarl wanna join too!" His armoured plates protected him from Swoop's sudden airborne strike, and dirt soon covered everyone's armour as they jostled and rammed into each other. Wheeljack had seen it countless times before in his own squadrons, friendly fighting that honed the skills and sparks of brothers-in-arms. And unlike Wreckers, these ones had much less chance of dying in the field. He understood Agent Fowler's shock at how brutally these friends treated each other, but couldn't help also finding it hilarious how the human's jaw seemed to hang off its hinges.
"Now that the Pentagon knows this lot is on the loose, Megatron's gonna be the least of our worries," he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck and inching back as far as possible from the destruction the Dinobot's wrestling would surely cause. It wasn't just the tropical heat making him sweat a river, and even Wheeljack standing in front of him like a living shield didn't seem to make him any less anxious.
"They're rough 'round the edges, sure, but with some trainin' these guys could take on the entire Decepticon army by themselves," the Wrecker said. "Pit, they did near enough in the war."
"As long as they do it far away from me, they can have Megatron's sorry hide all to themselves," Fowler said, ducking suddenly as Swoop careened overhead to get a better vantage point of the fight. Wheeljack just shook his helm, pushing himself upright and facing the carnage head on and calling out to the ringleader.
"Listen, Grim, I'm gotta head back to base. You gonna be fine here with your new friends?
The Dinobot nodded with a servo around Slag's neck, preventing him from shifting into robot mode. "Grimlock keep Dinobots under control. Grimlock king!"
"You damn well better, else I'll be stuck with the property damage paperwork..." Fowler dusted himself down and quickly followed after Wheeljack into the cover of the trees, sighing in relief with the shade protecting him from both sun and death by Dinobot. Wheeljack let himself smirk at the human's discomfort as he opened up his comm channel.
"Yo, Ratchet, could do with a Ground Bridge here if you're not too busy countin' your rust stains."
"You know, Wheeljack, it's times like this I wish I just let you die from that servo you lost in Tesarus," the medic grunted, just one of many regrets he had stored away.
Wheeljack scoffed, knowing even the most grumpy of medics wouldn't let even the most irritating of bots die on their tables. "Yeah right, would've just gotten your sister to patch me up anyway..." He quickly closed the channel before Ratchet could yell at him, glancing down at the human as he tried to wipe his forehead dry. "You wanna shortcut back home?"
Fowler looked up at the Wrecker with a sudden bout of wide, darting eyes. "Uh, I actually have some more work to go over back in Washington, urgent stuff..."
In his limited experience of working with them, Wheeljack hadn't thought humans would be such bad liars. "You're still scared of Airachnid, ain't ya'?"
Fowler blinked, opened his mouth to protest, then sighed and deflated all in one nanoklick. "Of course I am! You'd have to be either a moron or five stories tall not to be!" A crash from the clearing nearby and the sound of Grimlock roaring made him pause and reconsider. "Then again, the two aren't mutually exclusive..."
Wheeljack took a knee in the undergrowth and gave himself a rare moment to be serious. He didn't know if Fowler had been given the whole Elita One story, and he wasn't about to give himself the job of filling him in. "Look, I know she left a bad first impression on you humans, and she ain't exactly popular with Autobots. But she's changed. I wouldn't even recognise her nowadays. And I'd even say she's the most valuable soldier we've got."
Fowler still looked skeptical, staring past Wheeljack to where the Dinobots had calmed down only slightly. "Even better than the Dumbobots over there?"
"Swoop heard that!" There was a screech somewhere above them, but the Dinobot was knocked off course by a stray tail and crash-landed in the dirt far from Wheeljack and the human.
"That's not the problem, Wheeljack," Fowler said with a sigh, bowing his head into one of his hands. "My superiors didn't know that Optimus had Decepticons livin' right under our noses, but now that this place is swarmin' with even more unpredictable machines I'm gonna have to come clean about everything. You know how hard it is to convince just one officer that you're all worth the collateral damage you cause?"
Wheeljack was caught off guard by the human's secrecy, but he had enough experience with tight-bolted officers to know exactly why he was so worried. "Trust me, I know..."
"Then you'll also know that convincing a whole room of them staring down their noses at you is damn near impossible."
There was a pause as Wheeljack struggled with what else to say. It would be hard enough reassuring a fellow Autobot in this situation, but humans were literally a whole other league of being. "Well... I can't exactly vouch for the likes of Dreadwing, but we know what we're doin'. Optimus knows what he's doin'. He wouldn't be in charge if he didn't. As long as humans trust that, there's nothin' to worry about."
The human's skepticism lifted, only so slightly to replaced by a hard edge of resolve. "You better be right about that. Cause I'm the one who's supposed to be keeping you all under watch. And I'm the one who cleans up any messes you make." Despite his size, structural weakness and obvious onset of heatstroke, Fowler almost managed to make Wheeljack feel threatened. He was walking back to wherever his team was waiting just as a Ground Bridge finally appeared behind Wheeljack, hiding all sight of the Dinobots but failing to muffle the sounds of competition.
"I swear, it's like someone shrunk Magnus and put him in a flesh suit," Wheeljack said to himself after one last glance at the human stumbling through the undergrowth, wondering if he was regretting not taking up the offer of the Bridge.
xx
Airachnid didn't make it far before she found herself on the floor, her back plastered to the wall as she desperately curled around Scorpia, as if that alone would help save her. She didn't cry, but her optics itched furiously like something was impatiently crawling just under the surface of the glass; her numb spark could only feel the dullest ember of those closest to it, coupled with her daughter's confusion and fear.
"Oppy in trouble?" Even if she couldn't possibly understand why her mother was upset, Scorpia could piece together enough to trace the blame to Optimus. In her optics, this would be the first time he was anything other than a loving sire to replace her real one. This would be the first time she'd ever been disappointed... for her sake, Airachnid hoped it wasn't a moment she would remember well.
"Yes. He... did something bad. He didn't mean to, but... he hurt both of us." Airachnid deflated with a heavy sigh, knowing there was no use in feeling bitter about it but still unable to stop herself. Even without knowing about the Dark Energon, Optimus' mention of Soundwave cut far deeper than she knew he'd meant it to. For how could he know why the Decepticon let her escape, yet didn't help her once before then?
Was that just Elita being hurt, or herself being stubborn?
...Was this what Arcee felt, every time the Autobot looked at her?
Thinking about it only made Airachnid ache more, sinking lower as if she could melt into the floor and just disappear under the planet's skin. She almost pined for the solitude of Archa Seven... almost, until she remembered how thin the line between that and loneliness was.
"I love you, Scorpia," she whispered, dry lips and hidden fangs pressed to her daughter's helm, digits trembling across the braid of wires snaking down her spine. "You know that, don't you?"
Of course she did; even a sparkling understood love better than she ever could. Scorpia nodded as her confusion faded, drowned out by a bloom of something warm and beautiful that Airachnid knew she didn't deserve to be given. "Love you, Mama."
"I'm... so sorry..." Airachnid buried herself against her daughter, collapsing into herself and forming a jagged cage around her frame with her legs.
Anyone who walked past might have mistaken her for a shuddering pile of scrap, yet Ratchet didn't take the hint as he approached from the other end of the corridor. She could tell it was him, his slow steps due to age more than caution- though there was plenty of that as well in his heavy stride. There was a creak of old joints and a grunt as he lowered himself next to her and her bristling razor-coated shell. She moved the legs aside only to check if he was still there after a few silent klicks, and he had the gall to smile at her through the cage. A breem ago in this same situation she would have sliced through his faceplate, but he didn't even flinch as she lowered her knives.
"Still so sure that it isn't my fault, Ratchet?" she asked, more like a hiss than a question. "That my own sparkmate doesn't trust me enough to tell me that my daughter... that she might as well be dying?"
"That isn't what's happening here, Airachnid. You know that. " For some reason Ratchet whispered to her as she clutched Scorpia, perhaps too hesitant to raise his voice any higher. Or perhaps knowing he wouldn't be able to keep up the mask of optimism otherwise. "Just because her armour is... naturally weak, it doesn't mean she can't have a normal life. For all we know, this might just be temporary, or it might not even be an-"
"Stop." Airachnid's helm swung like a heavy pendulum, coming to rest on Scorpia when she could no longer hold it upright. "Just... stop lying to me, please."
To the old medic's credit, he didn't persist in the denial. He went silent, for so long that Airachnid thought he might have fallen into stasis. Instead he was just thinking of what else to say to her, how to hand over his blame to her.
"Fine," he said, still stubborn in his whispers. "I know you don't want sympathy, or any promises I can't keep. So I'll only say this. Don't blame Optimus, Airachnid. Would you have really felt any better about this, hearing it from him?"
"...No," she admitted. "But at least I would have known."
"And what would you have done, if you'd known?" Ratchet asked. "If you knew from the very start what would happen, before she was even born, would you have done anything different from then on?"
There were implications there that Airachnid couldn't stop hearing; would she have killed Scorpia herself, knowing she was doomed anyway? Would she have aborted the newsparks, given into that temptation to just tear them from her chamber and forget about them that haunted her grim pregnancy? Knowing how much she'd love her daughter, how much she'd still ache for her lost son, could she have gone through with it?
Or maybe there was more to it than that. If she'd known all along who she really was, would she have joined the Decepticons? Would she still have taken as many lives as she did? Would she have ever found the truth any other way?
Ratchet still looked at her, waiting for an answer.
"...I don't know," she said. "I try not to think about things like that. All I care about is what's happening now..." A chirp from her chestplates had her instinctively holding Scorpia to her chin, nuzzling the sparkling with a sigh. "What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to protect her?"
"You do what every mother does," Ratchet told her. "You keep her close, keep her happy, and keep her loved. Then hope for the best."
Airachnid huffed in her armoured cocoon. "I suppose medics do that more than any other bot."
Ratchet's vents mirrored hers, a heavy gust of stale air released in a shaky sigh. "I still haven't quite gotten used to it," he confessed, rubbing a hand over his weathered face as if he could somehow smooth the dents out himself.
Now it was Airachnid's turn to watch him with pity, though Scorpia distracted her as she gurgled around digits stuffed into her mouth like a makeshift pacifier. She let the sparkling bury her low warbles against her chestplates as she waited for Ratchet to speak again, or just leave her to her silence again. But it wasn't happening, at least not as far as she could see from the medic's stoney face.
"Your hinges will be getting rusty if you sit here any longer," she told him, and he seemed to jolt from a long sleep as he eventually took the hint with a minuscule smile.
"I'm not leaving until either you go and get some rest, or until one of us goes into stasis," he said firmly, with a low look at Scorpia in Airachnid's lap. The sparkling's distress had completely sapped her energy, leaving her curled up and silent aside from a whistle of tiny snores. Airachnid sighed as she pushed herself up on her back legs, careful not to jostle the sleeping sparkling.
"I suppose I can't be upset if I'm asleep…" She reasoned quietly with herself as she walked away, towards the quarters she shared with Optimus. She didn't look back at Ratchet, but she knew he'd be watching even as he answered a comm from far behind her.
"You know, Wheeljack, it's times like this I wish I just let you die from that servo you lost in Tesarus… WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY ABOUT MY SISTER?!"
Resisting the great urge to glance at the medic's outrage, Airachnid stifled a smirk along with Scorpia's audios as she slipped into the room- almost stumbling in shock when she found that someone else was already in her berth.
At least he kept to his side of it, vents trembling with mighty and distant groans in his recharge. Scorpia stirred when she heard them, a warble escaping from behind her hand while the other flopped towards Optimus' still body. Airachnid brought herself to the empty edge of the berth; letting her optics trace the tired lines of her sparkmate's face, the permanent firm lock of his jaw that could have ground his own denta to stumps. He looked his age only when he rested and let the mask of a Prime fall, yet even when they were closed his optics still made themselves so inviting behind their lids. She hadn't realised how much she'd missed him like this… still the same mech she woke up to centuries ago.
"Even when you sleep, you're still as handsome as ever," she whispered, hovering a hand so close to his cheek but not daring to touch. His vents let out a warm ghost of air across her arm, digging under the armour to make her protoform tremble. Holding Scorpia to her chest, she let her heavy helm fall to the berth surface, only turning her back to Optimus when she felt her optics closing over. A lazy hand found her sparkmate's servo, and she gently draped it over her as she curled against him. It tightened its embrace around her just as she joined Optimus in recharge.