Airachnid arrived on Earth on a Thursday.
This was, in retrospect, a mistake on Thursday's part. Thursday had been having a perfectly reasonable week—mild temperatures, light winds, a pleasant sunset scheduled for 7:43 PM Pacific time—and then a psychotic spider-themed Decepticon dropped out of orbit in a stolen escape pod and ruined everything.
Airachnid was, by any reasonable assessment, one of the most dangerous Decepticons in existence. Not because of raw power—she wasn't Megatron, wasn't Devastator, wasn't even Breakdown in terms of pure physical capability. She was dangerous because she was cruel. Methodically, enthusiastically, artistically cruel. She collected trophies. She hunted sentient beings for sport. She had killed Arcee's former partner Tailgate—not in battle, not in the heat of combat, but slowly, with the deliberate savagery of a predator that enjoyed the process more than the result.
She was, in Marcus-Optimus's professional opinion, the single worst person in the Transformers Prime universe.
And she had just landed on his planet.
His planet.
The planet he had sworn to protect with every weapon in his increasingly ridiculous arsenal, which now numbered twenty-three after the recent manifestation of retractable toe blades ("Why do you have BLADES in your FEET?" Ratchet had screamed. "I DON'T KNOW," Marcus-Optimus had replied, which was technically true and also completely unhelpful) and a secondary backup energon emitter in his left knee that appeared to serve no tactical purpose whatsoever but which the Matrix had apparently decided was important.
Marcus-Optimus detected Airachnid's entry into Earth's atmosphere the same way he detected most things these days: his sensor network—the web of micro-satellites he had secretly launched, the ground-based detection grid he had installed without telling Ratchet, and the Matrix itself, which had developed a habit of pinging him whenever something threatening entered his sphere of awareness, like a cosmic doorbell connected to his soul—lit up simultaneously, painting a picture of a small, fast-moving object entering the atmosphere at a steep angle and decelerating toward the Nevada desert.
He was in the main bay when the alert hit. Miko was on his shoulder. This was no longer unusual. Miko being on his shoulder was, at this point, as natural as Ratchet being at his console or Bulkhead being in the corner processing his feelings about chocolate-holding duty. It was simply a fact of life—the sky was blue, water was wet, Miko Nakadai was perched on Optimus Prime's shoulder like a small, loud, phone-wielding parrot, and nobody questioned it anymore because questioning it had never once resulted in Miko not being on the shoulder.
"Incoming contact," he said, and his voice had the specific quality that his team had learned to interpret as "something bad is about to happen and I am going to respond to it with disproportionate force." It was a tone that occupied a narrow band between "mildly concerned" and "loading weapons," and the Autobots had developed an almost Pavlovian response to it—the moment they heard that tone, weapons deployed, stances widened, and everyone started looking for cover that was thick enough to survive whatever Optimus was about to do.
"Profile?" Arcee asked, already reaching for her blasters.
Marcus-Optimus ran the sensor data against his mental database of TFP characters. The mass profile was small—much smaller than the Constructicons, smaller than Breakdown or Knockout, closer to Arcee's weight class. The energy signature was distinctly Cybertronian but carried secondary harmonics that suggested an unusual alt-mode. Something organic-adjacent. Something arthropod.
His optics narrowed.
"Airachnid."
The name hit the room like a physical force. Not because everyone knew who she was—Jack and Raf looked confused, and Miko was already googling on her phone, which would produce no results because Airachnid was not a publicly documented entity—but because Arcee knew. And the transformation that occurred in Arcee's bearing when she heard that name was so immediate and so total that it was like watching a different person step into her frame.
Her optics went hard. Her jaw set. Her fists clenched. And the temperature in the room dropped by several metaphorical degrees as every Autobot who knew the history between Arcee and Airachnid—the torture, the murder, the Tailgate—recognized that this situation had just become personal.
"She's here?" Arcee's voice was flat. Not angry—beyond angry. The kind of emotional state where anger had burned through its fuel supply and been replaced by something colder and more permanent. "On Earth?"
"Her escape pod is decelerating toward sector nine. She'll be on the ground in approximately four minutes."
"I'm going."
"Arcee—"
"I'm going, Optimus."
Marcus-Optimus looked at her. He understood. He understood completely, with a depth that came from both the Optimus memories—four million years of watching Arcee carry the weight of Tailgate's death—and the Marcus memories—a lifetime of watching this exact storyline play out on a screen and aching for Arcee to get the closure she deserved.
He also knew that Airachnid was a manipulative, sadistic predator who specialized in exploiting her opponents' emotional vulnerabilities, and sending Arcee to face her alone was exactly what Airachnid would want.
So he did what Bayverse Optimus would do.
He took the problem away.
"Everyone is going," he said. "Full deployment. Autobots and Dinobots."
Arcee blinked. "That's... overkill."
"Yes."
"She's one Decepticon."
"Yes."
"You're sending the entire team—including five Dinobots and yourself—to deal with one Decepticon?"
"Yes."
"...Why?"
Marcus-Optimus looked at Arcee with optics that held four million years of regret and approximately three weeks of increasingly unhinged combat methodology.
"Because she hurt you. And I am done allowing people who hurt my team to exist in a state where they can do it again."
Arcee stared at him. Her mouth opened. Closed. The hard, flat expression on her face flickered—just for a moment—and underneath it, something that looked suspiciously like gratitude passed across her features before being quickly and efficiently buried under three layers of emotional armor and a scowl.
"Fine," she said. "But I want a piece of her."
"You can have whatever piece Grimlock doesn't eat."
"...What?"
"Grimlock," Marcus-Optimus said, turning to the Dinobot leader, who was sitting in the corner of the main bay doing something that appeared to be meditation but was actually "sitting very still and thinking about suplexes." "How do you feel about spiders?"
Grimlock's visor brightened. "Me Grimlock hate spiders."
"Excellent. How do you feel about eating spiders?"
The grin that spread across Grimlock's face was the grin of a being who had been born for exactly this moment and had been waiting four million years for someone to ask.
"Me Grimlock love eating spiders."
"Then today is your lucky day." Marcus-Optimus turned back to the team. Battle mask deployed. Weapons hummed. The Matrix pulsed.
"Autobots. Dinobots. Roll out."
Airachnid's escape pod hit the Nevada desert at 3:47 PM, carving a smoking trench through the sand and scrub brush before grinding to a halt against a rock formation that was approximately as inconvenienced by the impact as a mountain would be by a thrown pebble.
The pod's hatch opened. Airachnid emerged.
She was exactly as Marcus-Optimus remembered from the show—sleek, black and gold, beautiful in the way that venomous things were beautiful, with legs that could extend into razor-sharp appendages and a smile that carried more malice per square inch than most Decepticons managed with their entire personality. She moved like liquid shadow—every motion deliberate, every step calculated, every aspect of her bearing designed to project an aura of casual menace that said "I am the most dangerous thing in any room I enter and I enjoy that fact."
She stretched. Looked around. Assessed her surroundings with the practiced eye of a hunter entering new territory.
"Earth," she said, tasting the word. "How... quaint. I've heard the Autobots are here. Including Arcee." The smile widened. Sharpened. Became something that belonged on a predator's face before a kill. "Oh, this is going to be fun."
She took one step forward.
And Optimus Prime dropped out of the sky and hit her like a meteor.
He came in on the jet pack—full thrust, maximum velocity, angled at approximately forty-five degrees from vertical—and the impact was so sudden, so fast, so catastrophically violent that Airachnid didn't even have time to process what was happening before she was embedded in the desert floor.
Not on the floor. In the floor. The impact drove her six feet into the sand and rock, creating a crater approximately thirty feet across, and the shockwave sent her escape pod tumbling end over end until it came to rest against a rock formation two hundred meters away.
Marcus-Optimus stood in the center of the crater. His left foot was on Airachnid's chest. His right foot was on the ground. His battle mask was deployed. His optics were burning. And his fist—the right fist, the one with the energon knuckle dusters—was raised and cocked back, ready for a follow-up that would not be necessary because Airachnid was currently experiencing what medical professionals would describe as "severe systemic trauma" and what Miko (watching from the ground bridge exit, phone out, safe zone clearly marked and for once actually respected) would describe as "OHHHHH!"
Airachnid lay in the crater, her systems sparking, her frame dented and cracked in approximately seventeen places, her processor struggling to reboot from the sudden and entirely unexpected experience of being pile-driven into a planet by a flying Prime.
"W—what—" she managed.
"Airachnid." Marcus-Optimus's voice was ice and steel and the sound of every door in the universe slamming shut at once. "Welcome to Earth. I've been expecting you."
"You—how did you—I just landed—"
"I know. I tracked your entry into the atmosphere four minutes ago. I was airborne before your pod hit the ground." He applied slightly more pressure with his foot. Airachnid's chest plating groaned. "You have a reputation, Airachnid. Trophy hunter. Torturer. Murderer. I know what you did to Tailgate. I know what you planned to do to Arcee. I know exactly what kind of being you are."
He leaned down. His face—battle mask, burning optics, the face of a Prime who had decided that this particular conversation had a very short shelf life—was approximately two feet from hers.
"And I want you to know, before what happens next, that I considered giving you a chance. I considered offering you the choice I gave the Constructicons. Leave or be disassembled. I considered it for approximately one point three seconds."
"And?"
"And then I remembered Tailgate. And Arcee's face when she told me what you did. And every other trophy on your wall, every other life you took for sport, every other being who died screaming while you smiled."
His foot pressed down harder.
"You don't get a choice."
Airachnid's survival instincts—honed by millions of years of being a predator who had, on occasion, been forced to acknowledge the existence of things more dangerous than herself—fired all at once. Her spider legs deployed from her back, eight razor-sharp appendages that lashed out at Marcus-Optimus with the speed and precision of a being fighting for its life.
They hit his armor.
They bounced off.
Not "deflected." Not "glanced away." Bounced. Like sticks hitting a tank. Like needles hitting a boulder. The sound was almost comical—tink tink tink tink tink tink tink tink—eight impacts, eight failures, eight moments where Airachnid's most lethal weapons encountered the armor of a Prime who had been designed (or redesigned, or cosmically upgraded) to withstand forces that would turn normal Cybertronians into confetti.
Airachnid stared at her legs. Then at Optimus. Then at her legs again.
"That's... new," she said.
"Many things about me are new." He grabbed two of her spider legs. One in each hand. And pulled.
The legs came off.
Airachnid screamed. It was a raw, animal sound—nothing like the calculated, controlled persona she normally projected. It was the sound of a being who had spent her entire existence as the hunter and was now, for the first time in her life, experiencing what it felt like to be the prey.
Marcus-Optimus threw the severed legs aside and stepped off her chest, not out of mercy but because what came next required space.
"Grimlock!"
The ground shook. Not from an impact or an explosion, but from footsteps—massive, rhythmic, approaching footsteps that got louder and heavier with each repetition until the source appeared around the rock formation at the edge of the crater.
Grimlock, in beast mode.
Sixty feet of mechanical Tyrannosaurus Rex, his jaws already open, his optics already locked on the wounded spider-bot in the crater, his entire bearing radiating the single-minded focus of a predator that had identified its meal.
Airachnid looked up. Saw Grimlock. Processed what she was seeing.
"No," she said.
Grimlock stepped into the crater.
"No, no, no—"
Grimlock lowered his head. His jaws—those impossible jaws, lined with teeth that could bite through starship hulls, powered by hydraulics that could generate enough bite force to crush a small building—opened wide. The interior of his mouth glowed with the thermal energy that all Dinobots generated in beast mode, and the effect was less "mechanical dinosaur" and more "the entrance to a furnace that happened to have teeth."
"NONONONO—"
Grimlock bit down.
The sound was—
Actually, you know what? Let's skip the sound. The sound was not something that benefited from detailed description. It was a sound. It happened. It was conclusive. Use your imagination, and then make it worse.
Grimlock chewed.
Twice.
Then he stopped chewing. His expression—insofar as a mechanical T-Rex had expressions—shifted from "satisfying meal" to "immediate regret." His jaws opened slightly. His tongue—yes, he had a tongue, because Dinobots were extra like that—pressed against the inside of his mouth in the unmistakable body language of someone who had just tasted something profoundly unpleasant.
He spat.
What came out was... not recognizable. As anything. It was metal and it was wet and it was chewed and that's really all that needs to be said about it.
"BLECH." Grimlock shook his head violently, his entire body shuddering with disgust. "Spider taste BAD. Taste like... like..." He searched for an appropriate comparison. "Like Starscream's face."
"You've eaten Starscream's face?" Arcee asked, from the edge of the crater, where she had been standing with her arms crossed and an expression of such complex emotional satisfaction that a therapist could have written an entire dissertation on it.
"No. Me Grimlock IMAGINE what Starscream's face taste like. Spider taste WORSE than imagination."
"That's... actually disturbing on multiple levels."
"Me Grimlock need energon. To wash out taste. Maybe two energon. Maybe TEN energon." He transformed back to robot mode, still making disgusted faces—which, given that his robot mode face was a visor and a mouthplate, was an impressive feat of expressiveness. "Me Grimlock regret eating spider. Me Grimlock stand by decision but REGRET experience."
Marcus-Optimus looked at the remains. Or rather, looked at the spot where the remains were, because the remains themselves were no longer in a condition that could be accurately described as "remains." They were more "suggestions of former existence." "Implications of previous structural integrity." "A memory of a being that had once been Airachnid, rendered in the medium of chewed metal."
He looked at Arcee.
Arcee looked at him.
"Is it wrong that I feel better?" she asked.
"No."
"Is it wrong that I feel a lot better?"
"No."
"Is it wrong that I kind of want to buy Grimlock a gift?"
"I would recommend energon treats. He is fond of treats."
"Me Grimlock IS fond of treats," Grimlock confirmed, still wiping his tongue with his hand. "But not SPIDER treats. Never spider treats. Spider is WORST treat."
From the ground bridge exit, Miko's voice carried across the desert with the clarity of a church bell being struck by an enthusiastic child: "GRIMLOCK ATE THE BAD GUY! GRIMLOCK ATE THE BAD GUY! THIS IS GOING ON THE FAN PAGE! ALL THREE FAN PAGES! I'M STARTING A FOURTH FAN PAGE SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS!"
"How many fan pages does she have now?" Cliffjumper asked, standing next to Arcee with an expression that was, remarkably, calm. Not frozen. Not dissociated. Not staring at a wall and reliving trauma. Calm. The kind of calm that came from watching someone else experience extreme violence and thinking well, at least it's not happening to a Vehicon's face this time.
"Four," Arcee said. "The main one, the optic twitch one, the weapons manifest tracker, and now the Grimlock Eating Things one."
"The weapons manifest tracker?"
"It updates in real time. Every time a new weapon appears in Optimus's frame, Miko posts about it within thirty seconds. She has push notifications set up on Ratchet's diagnostic equipment. Ratchet doesn't know."
"...Ratchet is going to have a spark attack when he finds out."
"Ratchet is going to have a spark attack regardless. At this point, it's just a question of which trigger gets him first."
They walked back to the ground bridge. Behind them, Grimlock was still complaining about the taste. In front of them, Marcus-Optimus was walking with the measured stride of a Prime who had just authorized the consumption of a war criminal by a mechanical dinosaur and felt no particular need to discuss it further.
It was, all things considered, a Tuesday.
Wait. Thursday.
It was a Thursday.
Thursday had been through a lot.
Three days later, Starscream attacked.
Marcus-Optimus was not surprised by this. He was not surprised because Starscream attacking things was one of the fundamental constants of the Transformers multiverse—it happened with the same inevitability as entropy, tax deadlines, and Miko appearing in places she wasn't supposed to be. Starscream attacked things. That was what Starscream did. He attacked things, failed, suffered consequences, complained about the consequences, forgot about the consequences, and attacked things again. It was a cycle as old as the war itself, and it had survived four million years of conflict, multiple continuity reboots, and the complete destruction of Starscream's original face.
What Marcus-Optimus was surprised by was Starscream's new face.
Knockout had apparently made... adjustments since the initial reconstruction. Additional procedures. Refinements. The kind of iterative surgical improvements that a dedicated medic performed when their patient wouldn't stop screaming about asymmetrical brow plates and they had finally, finally sourced some better materials from a Decepticon supply cache in the asteroid belt.
The result was better than the original patchwork. But it was still wrong.
The proportions were off. The cheek plates were too wide, giving Starscream a vaguely surprised look at all times. The nasal ridge had been rebuilt with a slight upward tilt that made him look perpetually smug—more so than usual, which was saying something because Starscream's default expression had always been "I am better than you and we both know it." The replacement optic—the left one, the one that had been ground away by the bridge wall—was now a deeper crimson than the original, and the mismatch was less obvious but still present, giving his gaze an unsettling quality, like a photograph that had been subtly edited in a way you couldn't quite identify but couldn't stop noticing.
And the mouth. The mouth. Knockout had narrowed it from the original reconstruction's too-wide grin, but he'd overcorrected, and the result was a mouth that was slightly too small for the rest of the face—pursed, tight, giving Starscream's expressions a pinched quality that made him look like he was perpetually tasting something sour.
Starscream hated it.
Starscream hated it with a passion that transcended mere vanity and entered the realm of existential crisis. Every time he caught his reflection—in a polished wall panel, in Knockout's surgical instruments, in the curved surface of a Vehicon's visor—he flinched. Not a big flinch. Not a dramatic, full-body recoil. Just a micro-flinch, a fractional tightening of the wrong muscles in the wrong face, a reminder that the face looking back at him was not his.
It was this hatred—this personal, burning, all-consuming hatred for the mech who had taken his face and, by extension, his identity—that drove Starscream to attack.
Not Jasper. He wasn't stupid. The last time someone had attacked Jasper, Optimus Prime had ridden a dinosaur through downtown and made Megatron flee to orbit. Starscream was many things—vain, treacherous, ambitious, cowardly, now facially incorrect—but he was not stupid enough to attack a target that had been definitively established as "will result in your component atoms being scattered across several zip codes."
No. Starscream attacked the Autobots' energon supply route.
It was a clever move, by Starscream standards. The Autobots had been running regular energon extraction operations at several deposits across the Nevada-Utah border—small teams, light security, routine runs that had been happening without incident for weeks because the Decepticons had been too busy dealing with their own internal crises (Vehicon union negotiations, Constructicon resignation processing, Megatron's insomnia, and Starscream's ongoing facial situation) to mount effective opposition.
Starscream ambushed the extraction team—Bumblebee and Sludge, who were hauling a shipment of processed energon cubes back to base—with a strike force of twenty Vehicons and his own reconstructed, repaired, and deeply motivated self.
The ambush was well-executed. The Vehicons hit from three sides simultaneously, cutting off the route to the ground bridge and boxing the two Autobots into a narrow canyon where their size advantage was negated by the terrain. Bumblebee was fast but outnumbered. Sludge was huge but slow in the confined space. For approximately ninety seconds, it looked like the plan might actually work.
Then Marcus-Optimus arrived.
Not through the ground bridge. Not on Grimlock's back. Not in vehicle mode.
He ran.
Overland. At full sprint. Covering the fourteen miles between the base and the ambush site in approximately four minutes, which meant he was moving at approximately two hundred and ten miles per hour, which was roughly three times the top speed of a TFP Optimus and approximately the speed at which the concept of "a truck is chasing you" became "a truck-shaped ballistic missile is inbound and your life insurance policy is about to be tested."
He had received the distress signal from Bumblebee thirty seconds before he started running. He had considered the ground bridge. He had dismissed it—the bridge exit point was blocked by the Vehicon cordon, and opening a bridge inside the canyon risked catching his own people in the spatial distortion.
So he ran.
The first thing the Vehicons at the canyon's eastern entrance noticed was the sound. A rumbling. A rhythmic, building, approaching rumble that was too fast for a vehicle and too heavy for anything natural and was accompanied by a vibration in the ground that made the rocks around them rattle and the sand jump and dance in patterns that looked like the visual representation of the word "run."
The second thing they noticed was Optimus Prime coming around the corner of the canyon at two hundred miles per hour and not slowing down.
The collision was spectacular. Marcus-Optimus hit the eastern Vehicon line at full sprint and the resulting carnage was less "combat" and more "physics demonstration." Vehicons flew. Not in the metaphorical, "they were knocked back" sense. In the literal, "Newton's third law applied to the interaction between a moving object of significant mass and several stationary objects of lesser mass" sense. Three drones went airborne. Two more were flattened. One was punted—again—in a rising arc that cleared the canyon wall and disappeared over the horizon.
"OPTIMUS!" Bumblebee beeped from somewhere inside the canyon, his voice carrying equal parts relief and concern, which was his standard emotional state these days. Bwee bwoo bwee bwee! ("You're here! Thank Primus! Also, you're TERRIFYING!")
Marcus-Optimus didn't respond. He was already inside the canyon, his momentum carrying him through the Vehicon formation like a blade through tissue paper, and the sounds coming from the narrow passage were the sounds of a being who had been running at two hundred miles per hour and had decided that the kinetic energy he'd built up should be redistributed among the enemy forces.
Crunch. Crash. Crack. Scream. CRACK. Scream. CRUNCH.
Silence.
Then Marcus-Optimus's voice, calm and clear, echoing off the canyon walls: "Bumblebee. Sludge. Are you injured?"
Bwee. ("No. But the Vehicons are. All of them. Very. VERY injured.")
"Me Sludge fine," Sludge confirmed. "Me Sludge didn't have to do anything. Prime did everything. Very fast."
"Good. Secure the energon. I have business with—"
"PRIME!"
The voice came from above. Marcus-Optimus looked up.
Starscream was hovering at the top of the canyon, his thrusters keeping him aloft, his null rays charged and glowing. His new face—that wrong, reconstructed, stolen face—was twisted into an expression of fury so intense that it actually made the asymmetrical features look worse, like a bad painting being viewed in bad lighting during a bad day.
"YOU!" Starscream shrieked. "You took my FACE! You took my DIGNITY! You took EVERYTHING! And now I'm going to—"
Marcus-Optimus activated his jet pack, launched skyward, and grabbed Starscream by the ankle before the Seeker could finish his sentence.
What followed was not a fight.
Fights implied two participants engaging in some form of mutual combat. What followed was more accurately described as a lesson—a one-sided, visceral, educational experience in which Starscream learned, in graphic detail, why threatening a Bayverse-upgraded Prime while hovering at an altitude that allowed said Prime to reach you was a decision that ranked somewhere between "poking a sleeping cyberwolf" and "insulting Grimlock's intelligence to his face."
Marcus-Optimus yanked Starscream out of the sky by his ankle. Starscream yelped—a sound that was less "warrior's battle cry" and more "someone's cat falling off a counter"—and then they were both falling, tumbling through the air in a tangle of limbs and thrusters and profanity (Starscream's, exclusively).
Marcus-Optimus righted himself mid-fall. Jet pack engaged. He arrested his descent, hung in the air for a moment, and—still holding Starscream by the ankle, the Seeker dangling upside down and flailing like a silver wind chime in a hurricane—deployed his flamethrower.
The left forearm flamethrower.
At full power.
Now, a brief note about flamethrower dynamics at altitude: When you deploy a high-powered plasma projection system while holding a screaming Seeker upside down by one ankle three hundred feet above a desert canyon, several things happen simultaneously. The plasma jet—a six-foot tongue of blue-white fire hot enough to sublimate Cybertronian armor—extends in the direction you point it. The thermal radiation creates a heat envelope around the deployment point that raises the ambient temperature by several hundred degrees. And the target—in this case, Starscream—experiences the combination of intense heat, blinding light, and the specific psychological trauma of being set on fire while hanging upside down while the person doing it looks like they're completely calm about it.
Marcus-Optimus didn't aim the flamethrower at Starscream.
He aimed it near Starscream.
Close enough to feel. Close enough to hurt. Close enough that the thermal radiation blistered Starscream's new facial plating—the face that Knockout had spent two weeks rebuilding, the face that was already wrong, the face that Starscream had been trying to accept and failing—and added a layer of heat-warping to an already compromised structure.
"AAAGH! MY FACE! NOT AGAIN! NOT THE FACE!"
"Oh, I'm sorry," Marcus-Optimus said, and his voice carried the specific intonation of someone who was not sorry at all. "Does that bother you? The face thing? I hadn't noticed."
"YOU HADN'T—YOU'RE DOING IT ON PURPOSE! YOU'RE TARGETING MY FACE ON PURPOSE!"
"I'm targeting near your face. There's a difference. If I were targeting your face, your face would be gone. Again."
He killed the flamethrower. Starscream hung from his grip, smoking faintly, his new face now sporting heat discoloration patterns across the left side that made him look like a very sad piece of modern art. His remaining wing—the right one, the only one that had survived the original encounter—was bent at an angle that suggested it had been functioning as an inadvertent heat shield and had not enjoyed the experience.
"Now," Marcus-Optimus said, conversationally, still holding Starscream by the ankle three hundred feet above the canyon. "I have a proposition for you."
"A—a proposition?" Starscream's voice was wavering. Not just from the pain—from the position, the height, the helplessness, the fundamental indignity of being held upside down by the mech who had already destroyed you once and was clearly considering a repeat performance. "What kind of proposition?"
"I'm going to let you go."
"You—really?"
"Yes. I am going to release you. You are going to fall. And you are going to land in front of Swoop."
Starscream's mismatched optics—one crimson, one deeper crimson, both currently wide enough to reflect the entire desert below—flickered. "Swoop? The... the Dinobot?"
"The Dinobot pteranodon, yes. Who is currently circling below us." Marcus-Optimus tilted his head. "Have you met Swoop?"
"N-no."
"Swoop is very enthusiastic about... well, about most things. But particularly about aerial combat. He has been asking me for days if there are any 'flying 'Cons' that he could practice with." Marcus-Optimus paused. "I told him I'd see what I could find."
Starscream looked down. Three hundred feet below, circling the canyon in wide, lazy spirals, was a mechanical pteranodon the size of a regional jet. Swoop's optics—bright, eager, hungry—were pointed directly upward. Directly at Starscream. And the body language of the Dinobot flyer—the twitching wingtips, the micro-adjustments in altitude, the way his beak kept opening and closing in what was either anticipation or a yawn but was almost certainly anticipation—communicated a message that required no translation:
Please drop the flying one. PLEASE drop the flying one.
"Now," Marcus-Optimus continued, his tone taking on the quality of a professor delivering a particularly important lecture, "I want to be very clear about something. I am not going to destroy you, Starscream. That would be... unsportsmanlike. You're damaged, you're outmatched, you're hanging upside down from my hand. Destroying you now would be like kicking a turbofox while it's down. And I have standards."
"Oh thank—"
"However." The word hung in the air like an axe over a chopping block. "If I were to release you, and you were to fall, and you were to land in front of Swoop, and Swoop were to exercise his natural Dinobot instincts... well. That wouldn't be my doing, would it? That would be nature. And who am I to interfere with nature?"
Starscream stared at him. The horrifying logic of the argument—the careful, deliberate, lawyer-grade rationalization that would allow Optimus Prime to engineer a killing without technically performing one—settled over him like a funeral shroud.
"That's—that's SOPHISTRY! That's SEMANTIC MANIPULATION! You can't just DROP me in front of a PREDATOR and pretend it's not YOUR—"
"Swoop," Marcus-Optimus called down. "Are you ready?"
"SWOOP READY!" The Dinobot's voice echoed up from below with an enthusiasm that made Starscream's tanks churn. "SWOOP VERY READY! SWOOP BEEN READY FOR TWENTY MINUTES! PLEASE DROP FLYING 'CON NOW!"
"You see?" Marcus-Optimus said to Starscream. "He's ready. It would be rude to keep him waiting."
"THIS IS MURDER!"
"This is gravity, Starscream. I'm simply... facilitating a meeting."
"PRIME—"
Marcus-Optimus let go.
Starscream fell.
The scream he produced during the fall was, acoustically speaking, the most complex sound Starscream had ever generated—a multi-octave, multi-harmonic expression of terror, fury, betrayal, and the specific existential dread that came from watching a mechanical pteranodon grow rapidly larger in your field of vision while gravity removed any possibility of course correction.
He hit the canyon floor.
Not fatally—he was a Cybertronian, and Cybertronians could survive falls that would turn organic beings into abstract art. But the impact drove all the air out of his frame, scrambled his equilibrium, and left him lying on his back in a small crater, staring up at the sky, his damaged wing twisted beneath him, his heat-warped face turned toward the heavens with the expression of a being who had been through entirely too much recently.
A shadow fell over him.
He looked up.
Swoop stood over him. Beast mode. Twenty-five foot wingspan. Beak like a surgical instrument. Eyes like a predator who had just been given a present.
"Hi," Swoop said.
"...hi," Starscream said.
"You flying 'Con?"
"I—technically—yes, but—"
"SWOOP PRACTICE NOW!"
From the top of the canyon, Marcus-Optimus hovered and watched. Below him, Swoop was enthusiastically "practicing aerial combat" with a Starscream who was too damaged to fly and too battered to fight and too exhausted to do anything except scream and try to crawl away, which was difficult because Swoop kept picking him up and flying him back to the starting position.
Bumblebee's voice came over the comm: Bwee bwoo bwee? ("Is... is Swoop going to kill him?")
"I'm not sure," Marcus-Optimus said, honestly. "Swoop is very enthusiastic but not particularly lethal. Starscream may survive the experience."
Bwee bwoo. ("Do we... want him to survive?")
Marcus-Optimus considered this. In the show, Starscream had been a recurring antagonist—annoying, dangerous in a conniving way, occasionally sympathetic, always entertaining. Killing him permanently would remove a significant source of narrative tension.
On the other hand, Starscream had ambushed his people. Had attacked his supply lines. Had done so with the specific intent of hurting the team that Marcus-Optimus had sworn to protect.
"If he survives, he survives," Marcus-Optimus said. "If he doesn't..." He trailed off and shrugged—a very human gesture that he needed to stop doing but couldn't seem to break the habit of.
Below, Swoop picked Starscream up by his remaining wing, flew him to the top of the canyon wall, and dropped him. Starscream fell. Hit the ground. Swoop picked him up again.
"SWOOP DO AGAIN!"
"PLEASE STOP—"
"SWOOP LEARNING! PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT!"
Marcus-Optimus descended. Landed next to Bumblebee and Sludge. The energon shipment was intact. The Vehicons were... everywhere, in the sense that their component parts were distributed across a wide area. The ambush had failed. The supply route was secure.
"Let's head back," he said. "Sludge, bring the energon. Bumblebee, call for a bridge."
Bwee bwoo bwee? ("What about Starscream?")
"What about Starscream?"
Bwee... bwoo. ("...Point taken.")
They left. Behind them, Swoop continued his "practice" with decreasing screams and increasing silence from his practice partner.
Starscream would survive.
Barely.
He would be found by a Vehicon search party fourteen hours later, lying in a crater at the bottom of the canyon, missing his remaining wing, most of his left arm, and what was left of his second face. When asked what happened, he would say, in a voice that was barely audible and carried the hollow quality of a being who had been spiritually emptied:
"The dinosaur."
Then he would pass out.
Knockout would rebuild the face. Again. The third version would be even less accurate than the second. Starscream would scream about it. Again.
The cycle continued.
That evening, Marcus-Optimus sat in the main bay and observed something that made the Matrix pulse with a warmth that bordered on smug.
His team was changing.
Not dramatically. Not obviously. Not in the kind of sweeping, cinematic transformation that would be accompanied by dramatic music and a montage. It was subtle—a shift in body language here, a change in word choice there, a recalibration of priorities so gradual that the people experiencing it probably didn't even notice it was happening.
But Marcus-Optimus noticed. Because noticing things was what Primes did, and this particular Prime noticed everything.
Arcee was the most visible example. She had always been precise—clean strikes, efficient movements, economical use of force. But now there was a finality to her combat that hadn't been there before. During the afternoon training drill, she had engaged three holographic Vehicons and eliminated all three with single strikes—blade through the spark chamber, blade through the processor, blade through the central power coupling. No flourishes. No wasted motion. No leaving enemies neutralized but functional. Just clean, final, permanent endings.
When she finished, she looked at Marcus-Optimus and said: "Confirmed."
One word. The word he had been teaching them. The word that meant "threat eliminated, not just reduced, not just suppressed, but eliminated." And she said it with a matter-of-factness that suggested it had become part of her vocabulary—not something she was performing, but something she had internalized.
Bumblebee's blaster was on setting eight. Permanently. He had removed the lower settings from his quick-select options and configured his weapon to default to eight on activation. When Marcus-Optimus had noticed this and raised an optic ridge, Bumblebee had beeped: Bwee bwoo bwee bwoo bwee. ("You said minimum seven. I compromised. Setting eight is my compromise. I'm comfortable with my compromise. Please don't make me go to nine again. Nine made the wall melt.")
Bulkhead—beautiful, gentle, improving Bulkhead—had developed a new habit. After each engagement, after each training drill, after each time he brought his wrecking ball down on a target, he would check. He would look. He would confirm. And if the target was still active, he would finish it—not with a wince, not with an apology, but with the resigned determination of a warrior who had accepted that the gentle approach was a luxury the war could no longer afford.
He didn't like it. Marcus-Optimus could tell. Bulkhead's spark was too big, too kind, for the work that needed to be done. But he did it anyway, because his Prime needed him to, and because somewhere in the last three weeks, Bulkhead had made the same calculation that Marcus-Optimus had made: the cost of mercy was measured in the lives of friends.
Even Cliffjumper was showing changes. He was still jumpy. Still flinching at unexpected sounds. Still occasionally retreating to the storage bay to sit with his blanket (which he had upgraded from packing materials to an actual thermal blanket that Raf had found for him online, and which had a pattern of tiny robots on it that Miko had selected and which Cliffjumper pretended to hate but clearly loved). But he was fighting. In training drills, he engaged with a controlled aggression that was different from his pre-trauma bravado—less reckless, more focused, as if the experience of watching Optimus fight had taught him that there was a difference between being fearless and being effective.
And the language. The language was changing.
"Confirmed," Arcee said, after a training kill.
"Eliminated," Bulkhead said, after a drill.
"Target down, moving to next," Bumblebee beeped, his combat communications shifting from casual to professional with a precision that suggested he had been studying Optimus's verbal patterns and adopting them.
Even Grimlock had noticed. "Your Autobots fight better," the Dinobot leader said, watching a training session with his arms crossed and his visor thoughtful. "Not Dinobot-good. But better. More... serious."
"They're learning," Marcus-Optimus said.
"They're learning from you."
"Yes."
"Hmph." Grimlock's visor flickered. "Good. Was worried you'd make them soft. Like you used to be."
"I was never soft, Grimlock."
"You were soft. You were softest Prime ever. All talk, no bite. Now you have bite." He paused. Considered. "Now you have LOTS of bite. Maybe too much bite. But me Grimlock rather too much than too little."
"Me Grimlock agrees with me Grimlock," said Marcus-Optimus, with a completely straight face.
Grimlock stared at him. "...Did you just make fun of how me Grimlock talks?"
"I would never."
"You DID. You made fun of—"
"I have no idea what you're referring to."
"ME GRIMLOCK WILL SUPLEX YOU—"
"I would welcome the attempt."
They stared at each other. Grimlock's visor burned. Marcus-Optimus's optics glowed. The tension built to a peak—
And then they both laughed. Grimlock's laugh was a tectonic rumble that shook dust from the ceiling. Marcus-Optimus's laugh was deep and warm and genuinely surprised, because he hadn't laughed—really, truly laughed—since he'd been Marcus, and the sensation was so unexpected and so good that it made his optics sting with a phantom sensation that couldn't be tears because Cybertronians didn't cry but which was absolutely, definitely, completely tears.
On his shoulder, Miko looked up at him with an expression of wonder.
"You laughed," she said.
"I did."
"You never laugh."
"I do now, apparently."
She grinned. The full Miko grin—the one that went from ear to ear and lit up rooms and made Bulkhead feel simultaneously proud and irrelevant. "I'm putting that on the fan page."
"Which one?"
"ALL of them."
Somewhere outside of time, outside of space, outside of everything that the material universe considered "real"...
In a place that was deeper than the Realm of the Primes, older than the Thirteen, more fundamental than the laws of physics that governed the behavior of matter and energy...
Two beings had a conversation.
They were not beings in any conventional sense. They were CONCEPTS—ideas so vast and so ancient that the universe itself was merely a side effect of their existence, a byproduct of the eternal interplay between their natures. One was creation. The other was destruction. One was light. The other was dark. One was the architect. The other was the engine of entropy.
Primus and Unicron.
God and anti-god.
And they were arguing.
The conversation happened in a space that was not a space—a conceptual arena where thought and existence were the same thing and where two cosmic entities could communicate without the troublesome intermediary of physical reality.
Primus manifested as light. Not a being made of light—light itself, the fundamental concept of illumination and creation and the drive to build, expressed as a presence so vast that it made the universe look like a snow globe.
Unicron manifested as gravity. Not a being made of gravity—gravity itself, the fundamental concept of attraction and compression and the drive to consume, expressed as a presence so vast that it made black holes look like puddles.
They had been having this conversation, in one form or another, for approximately fourteen billion years. It was, by any standard, the longest-running argument in existence, and it showed no signs of resolution because the participants were literally the embodiments of opposing cosmic forces and compromise was not in their nature.
But today's conversation was different.
Today's conversation was about Optimus Prime.
"He's getting stronger," Primus said, and the concept of his words rippled through the conceptual arena like waves through a pond made of possibility. "The Matrix is responding to him in ways I did not anticipate. New weapons. New capabilities. An integration of combat methodology from a parallel timeline that should not be compatible with his current frame but which is functioning perfectly."
"I've noticed," Unicron replied, and his words were heavier—denser—carrying the gravitational weight of a being whose very existence bent reality toward entropy. "It's hard not to notice when the bearer of your Matrix is manifesting plasma projection systems in his forearms."
"The flamethrowers are a nice touch, I thought."
"They are overkill."
"Coming from the Chaos Bringer, that's almost a compliment."
A pause. The kind of pause that lasted approximately three hundred milliseconds in real time but which, in the timeless space between cosmic entities, could have contained entire civilizations.
Then Unicron said something that Primus had never, in fourteen billion years of existence, heard him say before.
"I need you to do something for me."
Primus waited. When the embodiment of chaos and destruction said "I need you to do something for me," the appropriate response was not to agree immediately. The appropriate response was to wait, and listen, and prepare for the possibility that the request was going to be either world-shatteringly important or cosmically absurd.
It was both.
"Don't let him know I'm here."
Primus blinked. Which was a meaningless statement because Primus did not have eyes and therefore could not blink, but the concept of blinking—of surprise, of confusion, of "wait, what?"—rippled through his manifestation like a glitch in the source code of reality.
"I'm sorry. Don't let who know what?"
"The Prime. Your Prime. The one with the flamethrowers and the face obsession and the entirely unnecessary number of weapons systems." Unicron's presence shifted—a subtle repositioning that, in a being made of gravity, was the equivalent of fidgeting. "Don't let him know I'm here. On Earth. Inside the planet. Being... the planet."
Primus stared at Unicron. Or rather, Primus directed the full weight of his cosmic awareness at Unicron, which had approximately the same effect but was significantly more metaphysically significant.
"You want me to hide you."
"I want you to not mention me."
"You are a PLANET-SIZED embodiment of chaos and destruction who has been sleeping inside the Earth for sixty-five million years. You are literally the CORE of the planet. The planet IS you. How exactly do you propose I 'not mention' this?"
"I don't know! That's YOUR problem! You're the god of creation! Be CREATIVE!"
"You're afraid of him."
The silence that followed this statement was so absolute that it briefly created a localized vacuum in the conceptual arena, which was impressive because the conceptual arena did not technically contain anything that could be vacuumed.
"I am NOT afraid," Unicron said.
"You are."
"I am the CHAOS BRINGER. I am the DESTROYER of WORLDS. I have consumed GALAXIES. I have ended CIVILIZATIONS. I am ENTROPY ITSELF, the inevitable heat death of all things, the darkness that waits at the end of every story. I am NOT afraid of a thirty-foot robot with too many guns!"
"Then why do you want me to hide you from him?"
Another silence. Longer this time. Deeper. The kind of silence that could have contained entire ages.
"Because," Unicron said, very quietly, and the quietness was more unsettling than any cosmic roar because Unicron did not do quiet, Unicron did LOUD and DESTRUCTIVE and APOCALYPTIC, and the fact that he was being quiet meant he was being serious, "I have been watching him."
"Watching him?"
"Through the planet's sensor systems. Through the magnetic field, the tectonic plates, the geological monitoring networks that I maintain as part of being... the planet. I see what happens on my surface. I see the battles. I see the weapons. I see the methodology."
He paused.
"He climbed a combiner, Primus."
"I know."
"He climbed a combiner, shoved a grenade inside it, and blew it up from the INSIDE."
"I was there. Metaphysically speaking."
"He dragged a Seeker's face through a GROUND BRIDGE."
"Yes, that was—"
"He rode a DINOSAUR into battle with a BATTLE AXE."
"I thought that was rather—"
"HE FED A SPIDER-BOT TO ANOTHER DINOSAUR."
"Well, technically GRIMLOCK made that decision—"
"AND JUST NOW—JUST NOW—HE DROPPED STARSCREAM IN FRONT OF A PTERANODON AND PRETENDED IT WASN'T HIS FAULT! HE USED GRAVITY AS A WEAPON, PRIMUS! GRAVITY! THAT'S MY THING! HE'S USING MY OWN FUNDAMENTAL FORCE TO KILL PEOPLE!"
Primus was silent for a moment. Not because he didn't have a response, but because he needed a moment to compose himself. Because the sound that was building in his cosmic awareness—the vibration in his essence, the trembling in his light—was laughter.
Primus, the god of creation, the light of the universe, the cosmic architect of all things, was trying very, very hard not to laugh.
He failed.
The laughter erupted from him like a supernova of joy—a burst of cosmic amusement so intense that it briefly accelerated the expansion of the universe by a measurable fraction and caused several nearby stars to pulse in sympathetic resonance. It was the first time Primus had laughed in approximately four billion years, and the sound—the concept—of it was so alien and so unexpected that Unicron recoiled as if he had been slapped.
"STOP LAUGHING!"
Primus could not stop laughing. Primus was laughing so hard that his manifestation was flickering—strobing between light and more light—and the conceptual arena was shaking with the force of his amusement, and somewhere in the material universe, every Matrix-bearer who had ever lived felt a brief, inexplicable surge of warmth and joy and the vague sense that something funny was happening on a cosmic scale.
"PRIMUS! THIS IS NOT FUNNY!"
"It is—" Primus gasped, or produced the conceptual equivalent of gasping, "—it is the FUNNIEST thing that has happened in fourteen billion years—"
"I am the CHAOS BRINGER—"
"And you're HIDING from a TRUCK—"
"I AM NOT HIDING—"
"You are LITERALLY asking me to HIDE YOU from a TRUCK with FLAMETHROWERS—"
"HE HAS A GRENADE LAUNCHER IN HIS SHIN, PRIMUS! IN HIS SHIN! WHO PUTS A GRENADE LAUNCHER IN A SHIN?!"
"THE MATRIX, APPARENTLY!"
"YOUR MATRIX IS BROKEN!"
"My Matrix is FUNCTIONING PERFECTLY! It has found a bearer who actually USES the tools it provides instead of giving speeches about the philosophical implications of violence while his enemies REGROUP!"
"THAT'S NOT BETTER! THAT'S WORSE! HE'S NOT A PRIME, HE'S A NATURAL DISASTER WITH A UNION CARD!"
Primus laughed harder. The universe expanded by another fraction. A planet in the Andromeda galaxy briefly experienced an unexplained aurora. A black hole in the Crab Nebula emitted a burst of radiation that, when analyzed by astronomers centuries later, would be described as "statistically consistent with the universe chuckling."
"Please," Unicron said, and the word was so out of character, so fundamentally un-Unicron, that it cut through Primus's laughter like a blade through the fabric of space-time. "Please, Primus. I am asking you. Being to being. Concept to concept. God to god. Do not let him know I am here."
Primus's laughter faded. Not because the situation had stopped being funny—it was, objectively, the funniest thing in the history of existence—but because there was something in Unicron's request that went beyond comedy. Something real.
"You're genuinely concerned," Primus said.
"I am GENUINELY concerned that your Prime is going to discover he's standing on top of me and respond by attempting to CLIMB me—the way he climbed the combiner—and BLOW ME UP FROM THE INSIDE—the way he blew up the combiner—and I am a PLANET, Primus. I am a planet-sized cosmic entity. The idea that a thirty-foot robot could pose a threat to me is ABSURD."
"And yet?"
"...And yet he has a grenade launcher in his shin and I don't know what else your Matrix has given him and I do NOT want to find out."
"He's not going to blow up the Earth, Unicron. He's protecting the Earth. He's protecting the humans who live on your surface. He would never harm the planet."
"He doesn't know I AM the planet!"
"Exactly. And when he does find out—"
"IF. If he finds out. Which he WON'T. Because you are going to make sure of that."
Primus considered. He considered for approximately 0.7 seconds, which, for a cosmic entity capable of processing information at the speed of thought in a dimension where thought was instantaneous, was a very long time.
"No," he said.
"NO?!"
"He will find out eventually, Unicron. The Dark Energon that Megatron carries is a fragment of your essence. It resonates with your sleeping form. As the conflict escalates—and it will escalate, because that is the nature of the war my children fight—the resonance will increase, and my Prime will trace it to its source. To you."
"THEN STOP THE RESONANCE!"
"I can't. It's your essence. Control it yourself."
"I'M ASLEEP!"
"Then WAKE UP and control it."
"IF I WAKE UP, HE'LL KNOW I'M HERE!"
"Then STAY ASLEEP and ACCEPT THE CONSEQUENCES!"
They glared at each other. Or produced the cosmic equivalent of glaring, which involved the directed application of fundamental forces in an expression of mutual frustration that briefly caused a gravitational anomaly near Jupiter that NASA would spend three years trying to explain.
"This is your fault," Unicron said.
"Everything is my fault, according to you. I created the universe. Every fault, by definition, traces back to me."
"Including the PRIME WHO USES DINOSAURS AS CAVALRY."
"Especially including that."
"I hate you."
"I know."
"I have hated you for fourteen billion years."
"I know that too."
"And now I hate you MORE, because you are ENJOYING this."
Primus smiled. Or shone. Or existed in a state of radiant amusement that was functionally identical to smiling but operated on a scale that encompassed the entire visible universe.
"I am," he admitted. "I am enjoying this immensely."
"WHEN HE FINDS OUT—"
"When he finds out, I suspect he will be angry. I suspect he will develop a plan. I suspect the plan will involve climbing, explosives, and at least one weapon that the Matrix will manifest specifically for the occasion." Primus paused. "I suspect it will be spectacular."
"THAT'S NOT REASSURING!"
"It wasn't meant to be."
"PRIMUS—"
"Go back to sleep, Unicron. Dream your dreams of entropy and chaos. And try not to let your Dark Energon resonate too loudly, because every time it does, my Prime's sensors pick it up, and every time his sensors pick it up, he gets a little bit closer to figuring out what you are."
"...You're doing this on purpose."
"Doing what on purpose?"
"Letting him get closer. Letting him figure it out. You WANT him to find me."
Primus said nothing. Which, for a cosmic entity, was the loudest possible response.
"You WANT him to fight me," Unicron said, and the realization settled over him like a funeral shroud made of irony. "You want your insane, over-armed, face-collecting Prime to discover that the Earth is a sleeping god and FIGHT IT."
"I want my Prime to do what Primes do," Primus said, simply. "Protect."
"FROM ME?! I'M NOT EVEN DOING ANYTHING! I'M ASLEEP! I'VE BEEN ASLEEP FOR SIXTY-FIVE MILLION YEARS! I WAS HAVING A VERY NICE DREAM ABOUT CONSUMING THE ANDROMEDA GALAXY AND THEN YOUR PRIME SHOWED UP AND NOW I'M HAVING NIGHTMARES ABOUT FLAMETHROWERS!"
Primus laughed again. Softer this time. Warmer. The laughter of a being who had spent fourteen billion years watching the universe unfold and had finally, finally seen something that surprised him.
"Goodnight, Unicron."
"THIS ISN'T OVER, PRIMUS!"
"It never is."
"I WILL DESTROY YOUR PRIME!"
"You will try."
"I WILL—I—HE HAS A GRENADE LAUNCHER IN HIS SHIN!"
"Yes. He does."
"WHY?!"
"Because the Matrix provides what is needed."
"A GRENADE LAUNCHER IS NOT NEEDED!"
"Tell that to the combiner."
"I—" Unicron sputtered. Actually, literally sputtered, which was something that the embodiment of cosmic destruction had never done before and which he would never, ever admit to doing. "Fine. FINE. I'm going back to sleep. I'm going to sleep VERY DEEPLY. And I am going to HOPE—against all logic, against all evidence, against the CLEAR AND OBVIOUS TRAJECTORY OF EVENTS—that your Prime does not discover what I am."
"Sweet dreams," Primus said.
"I HATE YOU."
"I know."
Unicron retreated. His presence withdrew from the conceptual arena like gravity releasing its hold on a satellite, and the space felt lighter, brighter, freer in his absence.
Primus lingered.
He looked at the universe. At the small, blue planet that was his brother's sleeping form. At the tiny, insignificant, magnificent thirty-foot robot standing on that planet's surface, surrounded by family, armed to the metaphorical and literal teeth, carrying a Matrix that had chosen him for reasons that transcended fate and entered the realm of comedy.
"You're going to be fine," Primus said, to no one. To everyone. To the Prime who couldn't hear him and the humans who didn't know he existed and the Dinobots who didn't care and the Decepticons who should be very, very afraid.
"You're ALL going to be fine."
He paused.
"Except Unicron."
Another pause.
"Unicron is going to have a very bad day."
And Primus, god of creation, architect of the universe, father of all Cybertronians, leaned back into the fabric of existence and allowed himself one final, cosmic chuckle at the expense of his brother, his Prime, and the fundamental absurdity of a universe where the most powerful weapon against cosmic evil was a dead barista from Portland with an encyclopedic knowledge of Transformers lore and absolutely no chill.
The chuckle lasted approximately 0.003 seconds in real time.
In that 0.003 seconds, three things happened:
A star in the Orion Nebula pulsed.
A flower in a garden in Tokyo bloomed two days early.
And Optimus Prime, standing in the Autobot base on the surface of a sleeping god, felt the Matrix warm in his chest and thought, for no reason he could identify: Something is funny.
He didn't know what.
He didn't know why.
But for just a moment, standing in the base with Miko on his shoulder and Grimlock arguing with Slug about the proper technique for a suplex and Ratchet threatening to move to a different galaxy and Bulkhead holding a chocolate bar with the reverence of a priest holding a chalice—
For just a moment, everything was perfect.
Deep beneath the surface of the Earth, in the molten core of a planet that was also a god, Unicron tossed in his sleep.
He was dreaming.
In the dream, he was very large, and very powerful, and very much in control of everything.
And then a small blue-and-red robot climbed out of the ground, holding a battle axe, riding a dinosaur, accompanied by a tiny human who was filming everything on a phone.
The robot looked up at him.
The robot said: "I will express my displeasure creatively. With implements."
Unicron woke up.
He did not scream.
Gods did not scream.
But if gods COULD scream, the sound would have been approximately similar to the noise that Unicron made at 3:47 AM Eastern Standard Time, which registered on seismographs worldwide as a magnitude 2.1 earthquake centered beneath the Earth's mantle and which was attributed by USGS scientists to "deep geological activity" and which was, in fact, the embodiment of cosmic destruction having a nightmare about a truck with a grenade launcher.
Primus, from the other side of existence, felt the tremor.
And laughed.
Again.
END OF CHAPTER 5
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
AIRACHNID IS DEAD. GRIMLOCK ATE HER. SHE TASTED BAD. THAT'S THE WHOLE ARC. I am not going to apologize for speed-running her character because she literally tortured and killed Tailgate for fun and in the show she got away with it for WAY too long because children's television demanded recurring villains and I am NOT children's television. She threatened Arcee. She hunted people for sport. She got eaten by a dinosaur. JUSTICE.
Grimlock eating her was Grimlock's idea. I did not plan it. I wrote "Grimlock looked at Airachnid" and then Grimlock decided what happened next and I am merely the humble stenographer of his desires. He regrets the taste but not the decision and I respect that deeply.
STARSCREAM FACE UPDATE (v3): Knockout is going to need therapy. He has now rebuilt Starscream's face THREE TIMES. The third version is somehow WORSE than the second because Knockout was working with "whatever Swoop didn't damage" which was not a lot. Current face status: "technically functional, aesthetically offensive, Starscream has stopped looking in mirrors entirely." Vehicon union response: "We have started a GoFundMe for Starscream's face. We have raised zero credits. We are not donating to our own GoFundMe."
The "drop him in front of Swoop" gambit is my favorite piece of Optimus logic in this entire fic. Because it's SO Bayverse. It's the same energy as "I didn't kill him, I just created the conditions under which he ceased to exist." It's TECHNICALLY not murder. It's LEGALLY ambiguous. And every single Autobot NODDED ALONG because they have been around Optimus long enough to adopt his moral framework, which is: "If I don't personally deliver the killing blow, it's nature, and nature is no one's fault."
The Autobots are CHANGING. They're fighting harder. They're confirming kills. They're using military terminology. They're becoming the soldiers that four million years of war should have made them a long time ago, and it's happening not because Optimus ORDERED them to change but because they've been WATCHING him change and the example is more powerful than any order.
Is this concerning? YES. Is it necessary? ALSO YES. The Decepticons are escalating. Megatron is desperate. Dark Energon is in play. Unicron is LITERALLY THE PLANET. They cannot afford to fight like it's a TV show anymore because it's NOT a TV show anymore. It's a WAR. And wars are won by soldiers, not by heroes who pull their punches.
UNICRON UPDATE: HE'S SCARED. THE LITERAL GOD OF DESTRUCTION IS SCARED OF OPTIMUS PRIME. HE'S HAVING NIGHTMARES. HE ASKED PRIMUS TO HIDE HIM. He said "I DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH THAT" referring to a thirty-foot robot and I have never been more proud of a fictional character in my entire life.
PRIMUS UPDATE: He's laughing. He hasn't laughed in four billion years and now he can't stop. He thinks this is the funniest thing that has ever happened. He is DELIBERATELY not telling Unicron about the shotgun in Optimus's other shin because he wants to see Unicron's reaction when he finds out naturally. Primus is, it turns out, kind of a troll. WHO KNEW.
Next chapter: Optimus finds out about Unicron. Primus "accidentally" lets it slip through the Matrix. Unicron's worst nightmare comes true.
Optimus Prime is going to fight a planet.
WITH IMPLEMENTS.
AuthorDude