Love
and Lies
By: Master
Solo
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of this.
Characters: Why spoil the story?
Genre:
Infinity. Yup, I just made my own genre.
Blackarachnia stood on the ledge with her weapon trained first on Optimus and then on Starscream. The son of a slagheap would pay for betraying her, for leaving her behind, but he was neither the first nor the most logical target, for eliminating the Maximal would give the black widow spider an advantage. Or would it? The other Maximals would turn on both the spider and the Air Commander if she shot their leader and outnumber the Predacons. That was certain death and thus unacceptable. However, she had the feeling that she had much to learn from the Air Commander.
Grr… just shoot, damn you! Blackarachnia thought in frustration; she had no time to argue with herself. The black widow pointed her weapon back at Optimus Primal and fired, hitting her target with near-lethal accuracy. Her optics then met Starscream’s, which registered a look of surprise and then something else, something that inspired an excited and unnatural jolt in Blackarachnia’s circuitry. She tore her gaze away and gave a supposedly emotionless sneer that somehow turned sweet.
“Don’t count on it.”
“I won’t,” retorted Starscream.
A sly grin tugged at the corner of the femme’s soft, gold lip plates as Starscream urged the shocked and angered Maximals on, unwittingly moving the spider’s agenda to take over the Predacons a step ahead of her schedule. Sometime during the battle that the possessed Predacon ordered, the spider’s optics met Starscream’s again and the lurch in her circuitry returned. The old Air Commander was not as readable as an open book, but he came pretty close. The multi-faceted bug optics registered both admiration for the femme’s cyber-venom attack on Optimus and a boundless reservoir of treachery and self-preservation techniques, some of which lead to fear. For someone who was not a spider, he looked as if he could be Blackarachnia’s male counterpart. As they approached the weakening Predacon base, the ship’s occupants rose to meet the challenging Maximals.
“Aren’t you going to attack Megatron, oh handsome Starscream?” She sauntered up to the Air Commander, who walked in order to remain unseen, and pressed herself flirtingly against his green form.
“In due time, my dear Blackarachnia.” Beneath the mask of confident charm, Starscream was rather unsettled and uncomfortable. There was something about the femme and her seductive, expectant glare. She wanted something from him and was not referring to anything that she spoke of. He dismissed the thought. There was nothing special about that notion, since everyone wanted something from the greatest Air Commander that the Decepticon Battle Fleet had ever had. He simply urged for the Maximals to go faster and as soon as the Predacons began to take casualties, the possessed robot rose to the air, making his presence known.
For a few moments, the Predacon had command of the Maximals, but those few nanoseconds were enough to provide the advantage that he so desperately needed in order to take over the Predacons. He threatened to lose his power when Primal reawakened, but the Air Commander still managed to win, if only by a margin that was too slim for his liking. Still, he had to thank Primal for distracting the other Maximals.
The war raged on indefinitely, with both sides taking gains and losses. Without fail, Blackarachnia remained as close as she could---sometimes uncomfortably close---to Starscream, as if she was watching his every move. At first, he despised her presence, because she was a black widow and because Starscream relied only on himself, but he quickly learned to don the mask of a lover and allowed for the spider to touch him, even kiss him, as distasteful as it was. Often times, Starscream wished that he had the opportunity to take Terrorsaur instead of Blackarachnia as his protégé. On that fateful day when he first possessed the imbecilic Waspinator and even more times, he came dangerously close to teaching Blackarachnia all that he knew. Had he not been dead, he probably would have done just that. He even came close to shooting the spider on more than one occasion, but each time, something about her stopped him. If only to keep up his pretense of being her lover and teacher a little longer, he would delay the shooting for another day. Those days turned into weeks, and weeks into stellarcycles until he was no longer certain of his web of lies.
At first, Blackarachnia was absolutely adamant that she was to mirror Starscream’s ways and prove herself, both as a black widow and as his student, but she grew more and more doubtful about her simple agenda day after day. At first, remaining in beast mode made it easy for her to push her doubts back, but the tactic was eventually rendered ineffective as the doubts became too strong for her to ignore. When she could take the hesitation no more she used what she thought was her only remaining, viable option and strode up to Starscream. He seemed uneasy, as if he was anticipating that move.
“You don’t know whether to kiss me or to kill me. I know what you’re thinking.”
Starscream tried to remain as eloquent and charming as he possibly could be, but the cowardly leader could not hide his fear. Blackarachnia not only knew most of his tricks, but she also knew the secret of his demise.
“I’m a black widow spider. I can do both,” she grinned as she pulled the Air Commander into an uncomfortable kiss with one hand and disarmed him with the other.
As golden lip plates smashed against forest green mandibles, their gazes locked onto each other and the two felt connected, fully seeing each other’s fears, pasts, and layers upon layers of deceit. That was what every moment since Starscream’s arrival had been building towards. They shared their treacherous, conniving, and scientific roots, and yet were completely different from the ground up. That was what made them fit each other like a puzzle.
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Endnote: I omitted many details, such as Maximal dialogue, on purpose because I wanted to focus on the romance, or rather, my perverted definition of the term. This is, after all, a response to the BWINT romance challenge. I can zoom in on bloody, intense action sequence by sequence if the fic calls for it (i.e. some of my so-called epics), but it just didn’t look right in this story. I hope that most of you would not want my head on a platter for doing this infinity. Everything that I left blank is meant to be open to interpretation since that’ll leave room for discussion. I assure you that there are several ways in which this can be canon to G1, though it’ll always be AU to Beast Wars and beyond.
Romance isn’t my thing, so concrit
would be nice.