After what felt like a whole day of non-stop flying, Airachnid didn't so much land as she did crash into the rust-coated ground, T Cog barely registering when to shift because her processor had been focused so intensely elsewhere. Her legs stretched out just before impact, heels digging in deep and leaving thin gouges behind her as she tried to slow herself down.
When she finally skidded to a stop, her legs burned almost as much as her rotors, with almost half her paint job scraped away by the rough wasteland beneath her. But she didn't even look at the damage, hardly felt the ache in her overworked rotors after so long spent doing nothing but growing back.
Still holding her servos like a vice across her chest, she only unfolded them when all she could hear was the whistle of dust through her vents, and the tiny muffled breaths against her frame.
Scorpia had been strapped in tight to her mother's pilot seat the entire journey, with barely a sound as Airachnid hurried to get her as far from Megatron as her fuel tanks would allow. Now she clutched her mother's chest, still enveloped in her servos as Airachnid pulled herself upright.
Her balance was shaky, legs still aching from the rough landing. In the shade of a fallen structure, a shrine of some kind, Airachnid braced herself against the worn metal as she sought safety. She never liked being left out in the open, especially on a planet she no longer recognised.
As Airachnid lowered herself against a crumbled wall, Scorpia tentatively climbed down to sit in her lap. "Mama?"
"Shh, sweetspark." Airachnid had to whisper as she tuned her audios as far as they would go, vigilant for any hint of danger. She thought she almost heard laser rounds sizzling somewhere under the rustle of dust caught in the breeze... but her daughter's voice chirping up again threw her off it.
"Where's Oppy?"
With a clipped sigh, Airachnid ducked her helm as her vocaliser rasped harshly. "Shush! You need to stay quiet, Scorpia!"
The scold came out louder than she intended, thanks to her stretched-out audio range. Before Airachnid could soothe her, Scorpia flinched away from her mother's looming optics with a whimper.
And just like that, her spark was struck with a lance of hollow static that made her gasp in pain. The spider had slaughtered entire species without a second thought, but the coolant-tinged fear from her own daughter flooded her with more guilt than she thought she was capable of. And it wasn't just because of Elita's influence creeping in like it always did. The bond between mother and daughter, stronger than even the one between sparkmates, was starting to crack where Airachnid's spark was still mending after all this time. She'd thought Megatron was the only threat to Scorpia… but she could just as easily hurt her daughter as her warmongering sire could.
"I'm sorry, sweetspark, I didn't mean…" She tried to cup Scorpia's face, but she still pulled away from her mother's touch. When the sparkling finally did let a claw stroke her helm, her optics still brimmed with coolant.
"It's just very important that you listen to me right now," Airachnid explained gently, whispering against Scorpia's helm. "You need to do everything I say, else we could both end up getting hurt."
Scorpia sniffled, tugging on the tangled wires that fell down her neck. "Is Oppy hurt? Why'd we leave him?"
"He's fine, baby. He's very brave." Airachnid reached out for the ember of her spark while trying to find a path to Optimus' own. This far away she wouldn't be able to feel if he was injured, but she still searched for just a flicker of her sparkmate. She'd know if he died, just like when he thought he felt her spark going out so long ago, but she wasn't about to wait around for that stab of agony.
"...So we need to be brave too," she told Scorpia, combing gentle claws across her braid. "Okay?"
Scorpia blinked her wet optics, chewing on a frown as she nodded up at her mother.
"That's my girl." Airachnid kissed Scorpia's forehelm, tucking her close to her chest again. With her daughter soothed, she continued her scouting attempts with audios pointed north and optics scanning everywhere they could reach. But she couldn't hear anything but her own hollow vents, couldn't see anything but the slow crawl of dust across the horizon.
Even when Airachnid eventually dropped her guard, it felt like a long while before Scorpia spoke up again.
"Mama?" This time she was so quiet, Airachnid wondered if she'd even said anything before she saw her daughter peering up from her chestplates.
"Yes, sweetie?"
"What this?"
Airachnid blinked in confusion. "This?"
Scorpia climbed down from her lap again, balancing herself on her knee while her peds wobbled and sank into the sandy rust below her. "Here," she said, stamping her peds like throwing a mild tantrum. "Went through big shiny door, then… came here."
Airachnid blinked again, this time cursing herself silently for not explaining anything sooner. She hadn't even thought of how overwhelmed Scorpia must have felt, stranded on a world full of death when the only place she'd ever known was Earth. This was her first impression of her home planet, treading the same ground she would have been born on in better times. Or perhaps never born at all.
"This is Cybertron," she said. "It's… where we come from. Me, Optimus, Grimlock, everyone like us. It's where we all used to live."
Scorpia lifted a ped up, watching the sand trickle back into the wasteland, then turned her attention to leagues of scorched metal laid out around her, completely oblivious to how many bots were buried in every direction.
Or perhaps not as oblivious as Airachnid thought, from what Scorpia told her next.
"...Don't like it," she decided, scrambling back into her mother's lap like the ground was trying to swallow her whole.
"I don't either," Airachnid admitted. "That's why you were born somewhere else. But it didn't always look like this. Not on the outside, at least." She sat back and watched the skies, the patches of bare darkness where stars would shine through before disappearing behind the thick smog from fires lit centuries ago- as if other worlds only dared to glance at the ruined shell of this one for an instant, for a terrible glance of what might happen to theirs one day.
Or, depending on how many light years stretched between her optics and the stars, what might have already happened. Cybertron wasn't special with its home-grown apocalypse, after all.
"If you looked at it from just enough of a distance… it used to be beautiful."
From afar or from ground zero, the planet held no allure. Its Golden Age was a joke everyone was in on and which no one laughed at, all glittering armour plastered on thick to hide the decaying skin underneath. Airachnid had the privilege of seeing just about every level of Cybertron's crumbling society; once part of the deceptive facade, shining smiles to distract from the energon running through the back alleys, then pulled through the cracks with her sparkmate being elected as Primus' champion, thrust into a world of warfare she doubted she would have lasted long in even without Archa Seven sending her right back to square one, to the unfamiliar underworld on the other side.
Without Archa Seven, she might have known Cybertron was doomed regardless a lot earlier. Elita seemed to know that from the very start. Without Archa Seven… she wouldn't exist. Scorpia wouldn't exist.
Airachnid looked at her daughter again, lost in those beautiful optics so like her own with only the lightest flecks of blue light showing through, only just registering that she'd asked something.
"What happened, Mama?" Scorpia repeated, tugging on her mother's servo.
Airachnid took hold of her hand, every single tiny digit laid across a single claw, as she contemplated telling her the truth, the only truth she could bare to tell her.
"...I'm afraid you won't know until you're a lot older, sweetspark," she said.
Scorpia blinked once up at her mother, those streaks of blue almost interrogating her further, but she looked away with acceptance. No matter how strong the bond between mother and daughter, she couldn't possibly know what Airachnid was actually thinking, couldn't possibly understand it. The loss of her brother so young was bad enough, any more anguish could break her poor poisoned spark in half.
"Why we here now?" she asked instead, watching the shifting dust again as it trembled in the dead breeze, crawling across the wastes along with the shrug of the planet's death throes.
"Because Oppy's going to try and fix it," Airachnid told her, almost laughing at how simple it sounded. "But it's not going to be easy. That's why we had to leave him. So we don't get in the way."
Scorpia still held onto her mother's chest, clinging like only a sparkling desperately could. "Does Oppy…?" She didn't finish her question, and though Airachnid probed her spark for the rest of it she couldn't find what she meant. Maybe Scorpia didn't even know, too young to put all her thoughts into words. Airachnid could only guess at how to answer.
"Of course he loves you, sweetie. Just like I love you." She pulled warm servos around her daughter, but Scorpia's spark wasn't soothed. It crackled like a broken bulb held aloft in a bright cavern, its struggles barely noticed in the rest of the light. Static arced as a hostile fuzz started to take over, threatening to cut off Airachnid's bond as something sinister closed in on Scorpia's spark.
"Mama…" She whimpered a nanoklick before Airachnid's panic kicked her in the processor.
"Scorpia?" Airachnid tried to pull her spark closer, but another sensation was tearing at her focus. This one was physical, a tremble underneath her as the ground seemed to shift and quake under an unknown weight. Vibrations send dust and grit up into the air, clouding the horizon even as a shape seemed to form in the storm. Something colossal and strange, unmatched by anything else on the planet… feeling it arrive almost scared her as much as Scorpia's scream did.
A wail, a cry of agony, it pierced her spark harder than her audios, like a laser arrow gutting through her and leaving behind nothing but a searing, frantic wreckage as she fell apart. Whether that was Airachnid's feelings or her daughter's, she could no longer tell.
"Scorpia! What's happening, what's wrong?!" Airachnid held her tightly, claws and back legs pressing into her armour trying to find where the pain was coming from. Scorpia squirmed and swatted at some invisible force, trying to writhe out of her mother's grip.
"M-Mama… it h-hurts, Mama!"
"I'm here, baby, Mama's here… just… try to stay still-"
Another scream, far too loud to come from such a small femme, ripped through Scorpia's vocaliser as she fell limp on the ground, convulsing like a hollow puppet filled with electricity. Airachnid didn't dare pick her up again, not when she could so easily snap a strut or be hit with static feedback. She could only sit back and watch as her daughter was seized by the same tremors shaking the planet to its core, coolant streaking her face as a grim and familiar glow started to bleed through her chest.
"No, no…! Scorpia!" Airachnid choked on her denial, even as she felt the Dark Energon reaching out to poison her daughter. It was cold, as cold as she remembered, like the icy jaws of a beast closing slowly around them; so slow because it knew they had nowhere to run, nowhere to escape its hunger.
Scorpia didn't scream anymore, even as the pain mounted. She couldn't even whimper, bleeding her tears as she clawed at her chest, curling up as if to stop something crawling out. Her armour, brittle and pliable as it was, was cracked along its surface, purple veins creeping like ice along her frail body, covering her in Unicron's mark.
And still, all Airachnid could do was watch, just as she watched her son's spark go out so many moons ago. That empty space in her spark where he should have been, which Optimus had almost managed to make her let go of, now burned with a threat to finally take his sister with him.
"Don't… don't, please…" Airachnid didn't know who she was pleading to, but didn't know what else to do. Coolant and acid mixed together at the back of her throat and hit the ground in thick drops that shuddered with the force of her cries, as much as she tried to muffle them.
She'd thought she had more time. Even just one more day with her, one more day to show her what their home was supposed to look like. She shouldn't be dying here. She shouldn't be dying at all.
In a kinder universe, she shouldn't have even existed. Airachnid made a fist, scoring her palm deep with her claws, as she tried to push herself up from where she knelt in the rust.
As if she wasn't angry enough, she heard the snarl behind her. Another one joined in by the time she turned around, and when she faced the Insecticons all five of them were now spitting towards her. She didn't wonder where they'd come from, or how long they'd been stalking up to her. She knew they were in striking distance, as old wounds started to itch beneath her coolant-stained armour. But they held back, scratching the ground as it quaked again.
Her back legs clicked, every wire coiled under her tense muscles, as the Insecticons rustled the film of their wings together. She licked her lips, acid dripping past her denta as she pressed her glossa into one of them. Her frown was coated in a corrosive shine as she threw their chorus of snarls right back at them.
"I'm only going to say this once."
The Insecticons chittered, a nervous sound that rolled out like the crunch of rusty gears. The largest, the one who met Airachnid's optics, crouched and growled, as if contemplating leaping for her.
Whether or not this worked, Airachnid had to try regardless, ignoring the throbbing scars from her first attempt. She didn't move her optics, not an inch from the creature's red glare, imagining Megatron in its place as acid bubbled past her throat. Her legs snapped wide, razors glittering on each end as she rose herself up, twice as tall and towering over the Insecticons.
And when she spoke, acid flying out and fleeing her rage, she could have stopped a gestalt in his tracks.
"Get. Away. From mybaby!" She had to spit out the rest of the venom building up in her mouth, hitting the ground just in front of an Insecticon, just before it tuned aft and ran. The others quickly followed, a hive mind even in defeat, and the leader gave a weak screech as he took to the sky.
Airachnid knew they'd listened to her; not just fleeing a threat, they'd heard her command, and obeyed without second thought. Whatever had blocked her from their frequency before was gone now, dissolved like the dust that hissed around her acid. Even so, she didn't collapse until they were out of sight, scrabbling back to where Scorpia still lay in the shadow of the fallen shrine. She bent over her daughter, her dulling optics and the jerking shudder of her chest as dust filled her vents. She'd stopped moving, only the slightest twitch and the cold husk of her spark showing she was still alive. For how much longer?
"I'm here, baby… I'm here for you."
She swept Scorpia into her servos, heedless of how the Dark Energon burned against her skin or of the familiar sense of dread trying to ambush her again. With acid still hissing on her lips, soft claws on her daughter's braid, Airachnid felt her daughter somehow manage to sleep. Her spark calmed, the storm leaving hardly a trace in their bond, and even the dread that seemed to follow Airachnid since that awful night seemed to leave her alone. Megatron wasn't here, she told herself, and she wouldn't let him hurt them anymore.
But someone else was. She heard his heavy peds under the mysterious earthquakes that seemed to slowly get closer.