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Arcee couldn't sleep.
That was nothing new. She recharged better on Luna these days, in the rudimentary block hangear of the humans scientists’ base. Over the hill they were making a sort of anti-scrapyard, once-abandoned Autobot ships towed in by the Jackhammer and repaired by Optimus with the Forge, set down in a circle to make a primitive little stonehenge of a village.
For her ‘house’ Arcee had picked out a sleek early-model passenger shuttle that some enthusiastic believer in dead Decepticons had once fitted with a laser cannon. It was compact but still maybe three times the size of her little apartment back in Iacon.
Call that progress, I guess.
But now she was on shift at Earthbase-1 and Earth was... complicated.
It was beautiful and Jack lived here, but it would be a while until her systems recognized it as something other than a danger zone, a blooming field of possible ambushes, the far-flung frontier where Cliff had offlined.
At least there was a familiarity, a known routine to these kinds of nights. She got up, she went down the hall to the console, for once empty of Ratchet. Lately Optimus had been doing some gentle, highly diplomatic version of putting their old workhorse of medic into a headlock and dragging him off to rest. She opened it, checked the groundbridge logs, then the perimeter access logs.
Nothing. Like always. It had been nothing for months.
Though, with other things being prioritized some of the primitive human lighting strips had burnt out and that one camera on the rear hangar entrance had been on the fritz for a week. But that was the entrance the humans used, you’d have to be smaller than Bumblebee to squeeze through it.
She went up to see Cliff. It was empty this time. Once or twice she'd found Optimus up here - ruminating or visiting or once, memorably, asleep upright.
That one time she’d scolded him for doing that in the open, but in hindsight there had never been a safer time to do that kind of thing. The Nemesis and its cargo hold of psychopaths were light years away.
I hope a hive of feral Insecticons eats them in their sleep.
With paralyzing venom. From the pedes up.
Speaking of, and this was the last part, hard but necessary.
She turned left, right, down the freight elevator where the corridors were dark. The base’s makeshift brig had hardly ever seen actual use. When they first started squatting here they'd stacked all the old human equipment in this room, against the walls; piles of desks and wires and tiny monitor consoles made for small organic hands.
When she had given June a tour of the base, the human said it looked like something out of a horror movie.
Arcee knew what those were now. She had watched several, with June, in her living room, when she’d been staying there. It was a… tactical decision, initially, getting close to June. At first Arcee had thought she was Jack’s supervisor instead of his carrier but it turned out in human society these were often one and the same.
Over time she realized their initial mistrust of each other was born out of similarity. June was the closest thing Earth had to the kind of no-nonsense sensible femmes that had been part of Elita's contingent.
(Now and again Arcee wondered what would have happened if she had gone with them. But she wasn't the sort of femme who only liked the company of other femmes. Honestly throughout her relatively long tenure as a soldier she hadn’t fit in much anywhere except for here. Besides, her comrades needed her. Sometimes she thought mechs were entirely too soft-sparked for war.)
Still, the 2D holovid was not frightening to Arcee, even when the ‘xenomorph’ was shown parasitizing the human crew it was a bit sad but not visceral for her. Technically it was just an organic eating another organic, like an over-dramatized xenobiology documentary. June however, had flinched and clung to her forearm, which was touching in a way.
"You know that you're holding onto an alien while watching “Alien,” right?" She’d said archly, tilting her helm and cycling her optics to try and show that it was a joke.
"True, and you’re a little less comfy than my nursing school roommates" June had said with a multilayered smile “just about as tough, though.”
Arcee wondered how rigorous ‘nursing school’ was, how many of June’s fellow applicants had survived. It was probably tactless to ask.
“Don't worry.” she’d said impulsively, ”the projectile acid could be tricky, but even if these ‘xenomorphs’ are not theoretical they’re within my size class and I’m pretty confident I could take one out before it ate you.”
June had looked at her with a scanning sort of stare and not the gratitude she had perhaps naively expected.
“Does it ever bother you? Being the smallest?”
“Size doesn't always equal strength with us the way it works for organic species. The others are not stronger than me. Just bigger, slower, more sentimental.
I'm third in command after Ratchet, you know! My kill count is second to Optimus-”
Something burned magnesium-white in her emotional subsystem like an errant circuit.
“And are these your markers of worth, for yourself?” June said, terribly gently, this random assortment of hydrocarbons who dared to look at Arcee and presume to give her compassion.
“Right now those are the metrics I have left.”
She should have gotten up and gone to the garage then. Humans understood disengagement-as-disapproval. Instead she’d remained on the couch awkwardly. The human had hugged her. Lacking tangible EM-fields they went directly to physical gestures. It was childish and forward. Arcee had let her cling, felt her filtration systems siphon out little particles of the human’s ambient biomass, the water droplets in her breath, her dead skin cells burning in the femme’s filters like little flames.
June was warm though. It wasn’t as disgusting as it could have been.
---
Now Arcee’s here in the dark at the door of Airachnid’s makeshift and entirely inadequate prison cell. Nevermind that the glitch is in status - she’ll escape. It’s inevitable. It’s only a matter of time. Arcee has to be ready.
I fear no shadow, for mine is the darkness and the valley.
That had been a line somewhere in an old terran war film. She’d liked those. Almost a pity June had only shown her a few of them, citing something laughable about her being re-traumatized.
Still, it took longer than she’d like for Arcee to compose herself. Here, in front of this innocuous door.
On the other side of it, something went plink.
Without letting herself hesitate she wrenched it open and half-ran half-stumbled into a nightmare. A double set of hi-beams was throwing shadows onto the dust covered storage piles, twisting them into something grotesque, the little stacked computers had never looked more like a hill of minibot corpses, the stasis pod was open-
Airachnid was propped up, limp, her many limbs tweetitching feebly in a defrosting sequence.
Knockout was sawing her head off.
Arcee stopped. Her arm cannons had sprung out automatically, layering bluish light over the scene but she couldn't seem to move.
The Decepticon medic looked up.
"Shut the door, will you?" he said softly
Arcee shut the door.
"Look-” he continued, calm and infuriatingly casual, squinting down at his work - he was between switching saws. "Look, I'd apologize for cutting in line but I figured since I was the most recent one with a partner taken out by this ugly little bitch, it was almost like I had the priority. Capishe?"
Her EM field spilled over with some unnameable feeling but she couldn't think of a single thing to say.
"Come on, don’t give me that. You’ve had her for ages and she was pristine when I got here. The way these Insecticons regenerate you could have been cutting a leg off every other day for months.”
I was going to-
But no, Optimus would never authorize that sort of torture on a prisoner, even with the full context of Airachnid’s sins. There were cameras in the halls.
(Cameras that she could have turned off easily. And Optimus had been so busy these last few weeks.)
She didn’t know how to finish that thought.
Airachnid’s head rolled sideways another degree, half-frozen energon bleeding sluggishly over the tips of Knockout’s digits. Even with the more obvious threat over her shoulder it seemed like her optics were fixed on Arcee - dull, filmed-over but not altogether without spark.
Through it all Knockout looked supremely unconcerned.
"Call someone or don't. If you do, I'll be quick. If you don't, I can take my time~"
"You’re not going to let her defrost?"
The medic looked downright offended.
"What?! No, of course not! I miss Breakdown terribly but I'm not ready to join him just yet. Frankly I'm surprised you made it to the end of this whole fiasco with that kind of attitude. But just in case-”
Bending down he extruded a radial blade out of his other forearm and made a series of exact gestures. The proud huntress’ legs fell away like hollow reeds and clattered to the floor. Arcee stared down at them.
Knockout hummed approvingly and kept talking. “Besides, I have nothing to say to her. She killed him so quickly, you know, like a- like an afterthought. I read his final logs.”
He switched two of his digits to a clipper, reaching into the ragged incision point and pulling her throat cabling out so he could cut each one with long, lingering snips.
“Wing for wing." he hissed over the dying Insecticon’s helm in some sub-dialect.
Arcee’s usually reliable translation subroutines stumbled. Original audio: Vosian. Correction: Old Vosian.
She remembered one of Jazz’s intel files saying that the Cons had picked Knockout up somewhere near Velocitron but that didn’t necessarily mean he was from there. A Vosian grounder... That must have been an awful life. It seemed to fit though: preternatural vanity, performative cowardice, practical ruthlessness.
"I was going to kill her here. By myself.“ It was startling to hear herself speak. “Maybe even tonight, I think. I just took too long. I do the right thing now and again but I've never been a good person. I was better when I had Cliff, but now I think I'm worse."
"Oh, I know the feeling." Knockout smiled wanly. "Life goes on, sweetspark. You just have to keep driving."
He sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
Meanwhile the last torasic cable’s bleeding end smacked onto her chest plate. The medic gave a single decisive wrench, twisting the graceful spinal strut clockwise until a disk broke and the helm separated.
Airachnid’s limp, deadly arms sagged further, servos twitching feebly against the dirty floor. The light went out of her optics.
Knockout flourished his grim trophy, his smile gaining a vicious sort of vivaciousness. “And that’s that.” Then he held it out to her. "Want this? I figure it's the gentlemanly thing to offer."
Arcee took it numbly.
“Also, maybe think of getting your side door fixed.”
The Decepticon’s radio caught a 3am DJ and began to play a cheery little eurodance beat. With a medic's awful efficiency he bundled what was left of Airachnid's headless torso into a ragged tarp and then tucked it under his arm. His tires spun smugly behind his doorwings, gold-plated rims flashing.
"Well, this has been fun. See you never~” and with a sly little wave of his stained, unmanicured claws he was gone.
Arcee looked down at what was in her servos.
What was this feeling? Rage? Relief? Maybe nothing.
She didn't know what the right thing was. If she’d done it or failed to. Her servos trailed down over the neck assembly, the clean plate cuts and ragged cable edges.
Real, it was real.
She was gone.
Airachnid had died the same way that her old partner Tailgate had - bound, helpless. There was something righteous about that.
Moving like she was in a recharge flux, Arcee subspaced the severed helm, went back upstairs, and went to sleep.
~