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If it felt like an intrusion to see Hornet struggling, it feels like a violation to see her fully, unwillingly, unconscious. Lace has seen her asleep, sure, curled into a still ball that exploded into a whirlwind of claws at the slightest provocation.
Lace thinks that if she were able to sleep, she would be the same way. Lifetimes of fear and violence do not lend themselves to calm awakenings.
She takes a moment to wipe her pin clean of the vital fluids of the being that attacked them, then pokes Hornet harshly on the shoulder with it. Hornet’s body moves without resistance, rolling over until she is mask-down in the dust. The massive net of silk she’d used to trap the beast to the ground so that Lace could deliver the final blow has already torn in the wind.
Lace stares.
Reaches slowly down.
Picks Hornet up.
The growing wind buffets them both, but Lace pays little mind.
It’s strange to be so near to her without weapons bared. This close, Lace can see the setae that lines her shell; a deceptively sharp final line of defense. Were she a normal bug, she’d run the risk of Hornet’s setae lodging themselves in her vulnerable joints. Fortunately, disease is not one of her vulnerabilities. As Lace shifts Hornet in her arms, the setae scrape harmlessly against smooth silk.
She waits for Hornet to lash out, to move and tell her that this was all a test that Lace had failed, to which Lace would do… something unwise, undoubtedly. But that’s a trick Mother would have pulled, not Hornet.
Hornet’s head dangles from her arms as Lace begins to move them both to a safer hideaway than the crevice still mostly-filled with both the fraying remnants of Hornet’s silk and the husk of the being that had made the mistake of ambushing them. She doesn’t take notice of it until the terrain becomes steeper and Hornet’s horns begin to knock against Lace’s thighs. Lace has no ligaments and tendons to grow sore. She wonders what it feels like to ache as she re-adjusts her hold on Hornet until Hornet’s mask is tucked securely against her neck.
It’s a vulnerable position, but Lace has no hemolymph to spill should the spider she carries wake up in violence.
Sand and grit embed between her threads. Lace doesn’t look forward to the task of combing it free if—when—they find shelter. Visibility lowers until Lace is stumbling blindly along uneven ground, struggling to stand straight as the wind shrieks around her.
When at last her trek yields a cave, Lace doesn’t hesitate before entering its mouth.
The cave is small, scraped open by the harsh wind that buffets the surface. Lace lays Hornet down and waits, as though she would wake up the moment that Lace left her vicinity.
She waits a long time before she begins to suspect that Hornet won’t stir without some sort of outside interference.
Lace is not a healer. Her life’s purpose up until very recently has been to be a perfectly poised doll and although she’s exploring what else she could be without those labels, she’s very certain ‘healer’ is not among her options.
Lace considers what she could do next. She could leave Hornet, but that would be foolish and unwise. She doesn’t think she would want to, even if she could. For all Hornet’s many faults–being a brute, being an insufferable know-it-all, eternally looking for ways to help people— Lace likes being around her. She likes seeing how far she can push Hornet, she likes it when they fight, she likes it when Hornet pays attention to her. She likes how every day is different and new in a way it had never been with Mother. She likes how she can feel herself changing, for the first time in her long, long life.
So, she has to help Hornet. But how?
Lace doesn’t know much about living bugs except what she needs to know to take them apart piece by piece and make them beg for her mercy. She’s learned some about Hornet by virtue of living silk-to-chitin with her ever since Hornet had rescued her from the Abyss’ clutches and left Mother behind to drown in the void. She doesn’t think it’s enough.
She knows Grand Mother Silk’s silkspun children weren’t the first of her offspring to be made dependent on the silk she produced. Weavers required silk to function properly, to protect their mortal bodies from the ravages of time. The only difference between the silkspun and Weavers was that Weavers were able to harvest the silk they so required without using their creator as an intermediary. Lace feels an old, frayed fury rise in her at the fact that she and her siblings were made to have to beg for their mother’s scraps.
Lace has, in her crueller moments, experimented to see just how dependent her spider predecessors were on silk. She’s seen the way their proud forms shrivel and crumble when starved. It’s a surprisingly fast process.
She cannot sense any silk within Hornet now, and yet… she remains stubbornly alive and unaging. She tilts her head and draws her hand down Hornet’s unmoving snout. Perhaps, she thinks, this was within her purview after all.
Lace closes her eyes and concentrates, withdrawing a small strand of silver from the depths of her body. It glimmers and grows numb as she snaps it off from herself. She hesitates. She’s not a medic, and never will be. She’s never nursed another being to health—she’s never even nursed herself. When Mother was still alive, Lace would run back to her the moment she began to fray, terrified of ending up like Phantom. Mother was always happiest when reweaving Lace, always happiest at the confirmation that no matter how much Lace loathed her—and oh, did Mother know how much Lace hated— she would always be dependent on her mother’s silk. After the abyss, Hornet had carefully rewoven all of Lace’s injuries instead. Lace had never cared about Hornet’s injuries. Why would she, when Hornet could heal herself in a lash of self-produced silk? Why would she bother to help someone that had the privilege of being able to heal without outside assistance?
This is new.
Many things are new these days.
Lace attaches her silk to Hornet’s carapace, and watches as the silk glows and vanishes. She waits a few moments to see if Hornet stirs before withdrawing another, longer strand of silver when Hornet stays unmoving. This, too, glows and vanishes into Hornet’s carapace. She can sense Hornet’s body absorbing and binding Lace’s silk to herself in a microcosm of Hornet’s ability to bind other beings. It sends a strange thrill down the seam of Lace’s back that she ignores in favor of maneuvering Hornet’s head to rest upon her lap.
It feels daring to be so close to Hornet, only to bring her closer still. Like this, she can feel the shallow puffs of Hornet’s breath ruffling the fraying in her silk.
Hornet’s black eyes are visible beneath the eyeholes of her mask. They’re strange in their smoothness as compared to the compound lenses of the bugs that infested the Citadel. Lace slowly reaches out and traces a finger along the rim of her mask’s eyehole, smoothing down its opening and down to where Hornet’s mask cuts off into her unmasked pedipalps and chelicerae. They twitch as she touches them, running her finger down the long length of Hornet’s fangs. At one’s tip, she grabs the chelicera and unfurls it until it’s fully extended. A droplet of venom gleams at the end. Lace presses her fingertip against its point before the chelicera twitches out of Lace’s curious grasp.
“What are you doing,” Hornet croaks. Then: “Don’t do that, I’m venomous.”
Lace giggles. Surely Hornet knew that she had no internals to dissolve. Still, Lace withdraws her hand from Hornet’s mouthparts to instead press it against one of Hornet’s horns. Now that she’s confirmed Hornet is awake, the dull dread that has been mounting in her threads has turned to a sharp-edged amusement. Hornet is inscrutable at the best of times—Lace cannot read the discomfort she knows Hornet must be feeling now. But, for whatever reason, Hornet doesn’t push herself off Lace’s lap or shake Lace’s hand free from where it’s now loosely wrapped around her horn.
So Lace doesn’t move it.
They sit there in silence, listening to the shrieking wind outside, until Hornet lets out a weak cough, her body spasming with the effort. Lace pauses before unspooling another long thread from herself and pressing it into Hornet’s chitin.
“You don’t have to,” Hornet rasps. “You don’t—I’ll be fine, don’t hurt yourself for me.”
“Is that concern I’m hearing, spider?” Lace says. She can’t help the delight that bubbles in her body at Hornet addressing her. Even if Lace could feel pain in her threads, she doesn’t think she’d hesitate to unspool herself for Hornet. She doesn’t tell Hornet that. It’s much better for Hornet to think that Lace can be injured after a fight so that Lace can hold her pain over Hornet’s head until Hornet caves and delicately reweaves Lace’s injuries. She likes that. She likes the way Hornet’s claws turn from vicious to gentle when it comes time to stitch Lace back together, as though Lace’s comfort is important.
Hornet’s silence turns judgemental and Lace laughs.
“My shell, delicate as it might be, is stronger than the loss of a mere clawful of silk. You yourself have divested me of more than this without apology. So why would you question that which is freely given?”
The judgemental silence intensifies. If Lace had thought Hornet was tense before, she’s practically vibrating now. But Hornet knows that she cannot argue this and win, not when she so regularly has run herself ragged for Lace. Lace allows herself to mockingly pat Hornet’s mask one last time before standing up. Hornet grunts as she falls onto the floor.
Lace immediately misses Hornet’s warm weight, but she’s already in action as she darts to the far end of the cave she’d dragged Hornet’s unconscious body into, picking up the heavy silk of Hornet’s cloak and depositing it ungracefully onto Hornet.
Hornet lets out a long sigh, but bears the indignity with no further protest.
“Surely you can dress yourself?” Lace taunts. She hopes Hornet will disagree, will ask for Lace’s help putting her cloak over her body so that Lace will have the chance to touch her again. She’d be good and keep her hands to herself. She’d only brush the flat planes of Hornet’s chest briefly; she wouldn’t let her gaze linger overmuch on the thinner chitin that peeks shyly out between the thick plating of Hornet’s legs. Hornet is unabashed of her body, borne of a different culture than that of Pharloom’s desire for cover and chastity.
Hornet coughs again before shaking her head.
Lace stifles disappointment as Hornet slowly pushes herself into a sitting position and begins the laborious process of slipping her cloak over the lengthy horns of her mask. It’s not a surprise. She’s known since the first time Lace had attempted to sling an arm around Hornet’s shoulders and Hornet had stepped neatly out of the way that Hornet doesn’t crave touch the way Lace does.
She doesn’t hover as Hornet uses the rocky wall to pull herself up. Instead, she’s thinking. While giving Hornet just enough of her silk to rouse her back to wakefulness wasn’t a hardship, Lace cannot give Hornet the rest of the silk she needs. The beast that had sapped Hornet’s silk lay dead outside the cave, but the storm outside rages far too hard to brave leaving to bring it to Hornet now to consume. Lace was not used to things such as weather and storms. Mother had never allowed her onto the surface above the kingdom of Pharloom.
When the wind had begun to threaten to blow Lace off her feet and Hornet had crumpled to the sandy ground, she’d panicked and thought Hornet dead—a feat she’d thought impossible as Hornet had survived Mother and the void alike. For a long moment, all she had thought of was fury that Hornet had abandoned her, fear of the inevitable to come, and—absurdly—jealousy, that a mere beast could have achieved what Lace could not. But she’d pushed through those emotions and pulled Hornet into her arms and sought shelter for them both.
Hornet coughs. It's stronger than it was before, Lace thinks. “I’m surprised you decided to stay. I’d have thought you would take off at the first sign of weakness—what happened?”
Lace looks her in her eyes before tracing her gaze over the delicately carved whorls in her mask. It gleams sharp and white against the gloom of the cave, concealing the head beneath. There’s a scratch on the side of the mask’s snout that Lace herself had left during their fight within the Cradle. Lace tries to reach for that blend of fury that had suffused her upon first laying eyes upon Hornet and finds there’s no anger to be had. The sharp edge of the mania that she’d sank into as the years under Mother turned to centuries has cleared into something stronger, more stable.
She can feel herself growing and changing in ways Mother would never have allowed her perfect and filial daughter to. The shape of the world seems clearer now that she’s no longer trapped in her gilded, unchanging cage. Her body is slowly growing greyer as the dirt of the surface cakes onto her. Although she once took pride in her pristine white silk, to be slowly turning grey is a relief as much as it is a release of expectation. That Lace is allowed to be anything less than perfect, that the person she depends upon doesn’t demand subservience, that Lace is slowly growing in confidence that even when they fight that Hornet won’t discard her and leave her to fray.
Hornet’s mentioned trying to seek out a way to store silk for Lace’s later use. Lace is still battling back the kneejerk terror of being discarded if Hornet no longer feels responsible for Lace’s wellbeing, but she’s removed enough from the initial suggestion that she can give it more thought. She doesn’t know if she’ll take Hornet up on the offer, if she’s ready to face a world alone. Not now, at least. Maybe not ever. But to have the option of freedom without guaranteed death is a gift beyond what Lace had ever imagined.
She owes Hornet more than she could possibly repay. Hornet had travelled to the end of the world with her—-for her and brought her back, severing Lace’s ties to her mother and breaking open her lifelong cage. Even now, Lace gets dizzy to think of it.
You happened, Lace thinks.