Work Text:
Hornet hates Whiteward. It reminds her of the rot residing in the Soul Sanctum of her kingdom, of the unnatural exploitation of the lives of common bugs and the subsequent waste of their corpses. The darkened halls set her fangs on edge—something about the Silk that coats the Citadel seems more awake here. Malicious. It’s no great surprise when the corpses of the attendants and victims of these smothered halls come back to life. Most all of Hornet’s foes within the Citadel have been long-dead, hollowed out and infested by Silk strings, moved around by the puppeteer at the centre of it all.
Even still, the viciousness of the husks take her by surprise.
They fight with surgical and embalming tools, pushing her deeper into the bowels of the ward. She’s caught off guard when the ground shakes and the lurching husk of a Conductor writhes toward her, but what is one more fight against the thousands of other bodies she’s cut from their puppeteers?
The fight is brutal, but fast. Hornet’s needle strikes true again and again, until she can feel in her core that the fight is coming to an end. The writhing of the Silk within the husk is slowing, faltering. Hornet leaps toward the husk, her needle aimed at the centre of its mouldering bulk. One last hit, she thinks with grim determination. It sinks deep into the husk’s body. Silk spews everywhere as it deflates like a punctured lung.
Hornet stands there, hunched over and panting. It was bulkier than the others, and the other husks it manipulated as weapons were… irritating. Hornet wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and stands. That, she supposes later, might have been her saving grace.
She’s knocked forward with the impact of the blow, staggering on suddenly-wobbly paws before sinking to her knees. It takes a few moments for her even to realise she’s been injured—a precious few moments of confusion and anger before the encompassing, paralyzing pain sinks in. Hornet twitches, her body unwilling to move.
Beneath her mask, her fangs are spread wide, scenting the air. She tastes the air as she breathes, unable to do more than shallow, rapid pants. It tastes of silk, of rot and decay, of the metallic sweetness of haemolymph. She twitches again, her innards clenching around something cold and foreign. Her entire abdomen is a red-hot haze of pain.
Warmth trickles down her torso and over her legs. It’s the work of a seemingly eternal period of time to force her arms to move to feel out what had impacted her, and her shallow panting stutters as she realises that she’s been impaled from behind. A length of cold metal protrudes from her back, its head lodged somewhere deep within her guts.
Hornet’s vision swims as she reaches behind herself and takes the spear’s shaft, long enough that she cannot reach its end. She counts down from three, two, one, and pulls.
A mistake.
Something drags backward within her, and the trickle of warmth turns to a flood as Hornet’s lifeforce begins to spill freely from her entry wound. Not a spear, then, Hornet thinks with a dawning dread. She remembers the harpoons that her foe had summoned. Foolish, foolish! She should have recognised that same weapon now is lodged within her.
She knows that she won’t be able to cut herself free or bind herself whole from this, not while the harpoon tip remains inside her, causing further damage with every agonizing breath. Hornet allows herself twenty pants to collect herself, then bends over and pushes herself to her feet.
She sways like a drunkard where she stands, the foreign body lodged within her torso sending out pulses of red-hot agony. Someone is screaming, a shrill noise she takes several moments to realise is coming from her own mouth. She focuses her remaining Silk on the entry point as she staggers forward to the hatch door that is the only way out of the arena.
The bind replenishes only haemolymph, the wound unable to close around the harpoon.
It’s enough, it has to be. Hornet just needs to escape from the area into the Underworks, where she’ll—where she’ll—
She stumbles and falls forward. A hasty push makes her crash painfully down on her side instead of upon the embedded point. Still, the clotting her desperate binding had formed breaks apart and her recently-regenerated haemolymph spills free in waves.
She can’t do this. Her allies in Songclave are far from these cursed wards. To reach them, Hornet would have to drag herself across half the Citadel. She doesn’t have the Silk to heal herself again, she doesn’t have the grip to wrench herself free of the harpoon, she doesn’t have anyone that knows where she’s gone. Hornet loses a long moment of time.
When she comes to again, she can feel the loss in blood pressure.
She can’t do this. Already, her limbs are curling inward in a spider’s final, lonely embrace.
When hunting minded bugs, Hornet often finds there to be a moment of realisation when her quarry accepts their fate. There’s a flicker in their eyes, a laxness to their limbs as their claws grow loose upon their weapons. She’d always thought it cowardly. Why accept the inevitable when one could claw their way to the embrace of the void? Death comes for all in the end. It’s only sensible to spend one's final moments fighting.
She doesn’t see how she can fight this. She’d always imagined her death would be quick and bloody, not—
Not—
How embarrassing, to die here alone among the corpses of her prey. How sorrowful, that she will die so far from her homelands. How infuriating, that she was caught off guard by such a dirty trick. Hornet’s chelicerae, slowly clamping tightly shut from blood loss, spasm in a shallow sob.
Her hands meet her mask, her knees touch her elbows. Despite the burning pain it causes, Hornet cannot stop her torso from curling in upon itself.
Static creeps in upon her vision, then turns to blackness with a gentle stillness. She can no longer sense her extremities, the waves of pain have slowed. A chill sets in that she’s felt one time and one time only: when she’d crossed the threshold to her father’s greatest sin. Death, then, is like the Void. Funny, that.
Some distant part of Hornet longs to catalogue the sensations of her body, compare it to the spots of Void she’d known: the Hollow Knight, the wandering vessel, every other vessel that she’d dispatched. Her thoughts are fraying, though, and she’s grown too tired to spin them into coherency.
So this is mortality.
Hornet lets herself drift.
Hornet, in the twilight muddle of her slow death, doesn’t register that something is touching her shoulder until she’s forcefully moved from her crouch-curl of dying to the air. The harpoon lodged in her torso is pulled on, and a low groan buzzes from between Hornet’s fangs.
The harpoon is tugged again, harsher this time, then air ruffles through her soaked setae. She’s cradled to something warm. She can’t move, her blood pressure long-since dropped so low that her limbs have frozen tight. Something hooks open her chelicerae, gentle but firm, forcefully exposing her fangs and stomotheca. A wad of soft material is placed within, and whoever—whatever— had stumbled upon her manipulates her chelicerae into an envenomation.
The Silk—and it can only be Silk, for the material immediately dissolves into a flow of soul through Hornet’s body— brings with it a new level of lucidity. And with it, the brief terror that she’d just been fed the puppeteer’s haunted silk and was to be enslaved as Widow had been, that the accursed scavengers of this ward have come across her corpse. But she’s unable to move still, the Silk reserves not nearly enough for a binding.
Another bundle is placed between her fangs, another clump Hornet is forced to swallow. More of the world begins filtering in around her. Blurred shapes made dull by the grey light of the ward, the sensation of air rushing through her setae as whatever is carrying her moves at high speed.
Then—light, dizzying and gold and exposing her captor.
The Second Sentinel doesn’t look as it runs, focused only on unwinding a spool of Silk Hornet recognises as the reserves that Grand Reeds carry alongside them and feeding it to Hornet in delicate clawfuls of white. The panic Hornet’s been feeling fades away. With it comes pain.
She can see her own haemolymph staining its cloak, smeared across the Citadel’s emblem in a thick swathe of white-flecked blue. She focuses on that hateful symbol rather than the sharp shape of the harpoon’s head where it protrudes from her abdomen, now visible in the light.
When the Second Sentinel’s stolen Silk reserve runs dry, Hornet forces herself to bind it. It’s not a proper binding, but it’s enough to replenish some of her fluids, enough to allow her limbs to unclench from their death curl. It’s agonizing work to uncurl an arm and dig her claws tight within the Second Sentinel’s cloak. It’s saying something indistinct, its voice warping and whining.
Hornet is unsure if she’d be able to understand it even if she was able to focus properly.
She tilts her face into the Second Sentinel’s cloak and breathes through the pain. So her mortality wasn’t to come today. Death, defied.
After a time, she’s set down so the lower half of her body is splayed upon a bench, the upper half supported by the Second Sentinel’s kneeling legs. Her abdomen hangs free, the harpoon weighing heavily on the organs it hasn’t penetrated.
The Second Sentinel speaks through a heavy stutter. “A-a-apologises, this s-s-sentinel must, f-for this wil-l-ll be p-painful.” A pause, then it reaches its hand out, fitting Hornet’s claws over the edges of its vambraces. “This sent-t-t-t-tinel w-will ensure ex-ex-extraction will be over quick-kly. Is t-t-there sufficient sup-pply of Silk for h-healing-g-g?”
Hornet breathes in as deep as she can and curls her claws tighter into the Second Sentinel’s cloak. She nods.
“Hook-k-k-ked, this w-w-weap-pon is. F-finishing it-t-ts path, this sentinel must-t-t.” It says something more, but Hornet is unable to comprehend its words through the glitching of its voicebox.
There’s a horrible scrape against her insides, sickening enough that Hornet’s limbs jerk inward yet again, her body unbelieving that this is anything less than instant death. A wail bubbles up in her throat and forces its way from between her fangs as that scrape intensifies, her innards getting squished as the point of the harpoon is forced further out and through her. She can feel her carapace getting pulled apart as the exit point widens, the harpoon’s retentive hooks ripping her open.
Blackness boils through her vision, but Hornet clings like a wretch to wakefulness. If she loses consciousness now, there will be no reviving her, for the Second Sentinel is unable to guide her body through a bind the way it can guide it to eat. Her abdominal plating, already penetrated, cracks open entirely as the widest part of the harpoon’s tip is drawn through her shell. The final slide of the broken-off handle is a relief in comparison as it whispers smoothly past the carnage the harpoon’s head has left.
Hornet cannot hear the Second Sentinel’s words beyond a metallic squealing noise. She is unsure if it is coming from herself or from it.
A firm pressure on the gape of her wound, and Hornet concentrates, forcing every scrap of Silk within herself to the surface in a desperate bind. Then, at last, unsure of her success in healing but knowing there is nothing more she can do, she surrenders to the black.
When she awakens, she is staring up at the strange jut of an armored chassis. Her head is laying upon something soft, and there’s a rhythmic stroking alongside her horns that sends a soothing fizzle down her spine. It takes her a moment to realize she’s looking at the Second Sentinel’s chest, its golden carapace bare for once of its everpresent cloak. She shivers, and the Second Sentinel’s careful petting stills. It draws her cloak tighter around her body with a gentleness Hornet had not thought possible.
It’s humming, she realises, its warped voicebox smooth in song. She doesn’t recognise the tune, and wonders who had taught it the melody. Or perhaps it was a composition of its own?
She lifts up a leaden arm and gingerly touches the wound. The Second Sentinel’s humming cuts off, a hand flashing out to support her arm. Embarrassing Hornet has been made so weak. But, nonetheless, she finds herself grateful for its support as she traces her claws around a crater in her abdominal plating. It makes sense, she supposes, that such a grievous wound wouldn’t be healed by just one binding.
Hornet breathes. Her throat is scraped raw from screaming, and it takes the work of several moments to find her voice. “Thank you.”
The Second Sentinel’s quartz eyes flicker as it looks down at her and then slowly, deliberately lowers its face to hers and rests their foreheads together in a reassuring nudge. Hornet hasn’t been mask-to-mask with another being in… oh, she cannot begin to think how long. It soothes something deep within her, and she realises that she’s begun buzzing faintly at it in affection.
It doesn’t respond—how could it, when it lacks the body parts needed to produce that noise?--- yet Hornet can hear the ticking of its cogwork heart kick up a notch.
“I would have died in that pit had you not intervened,” Hornet says. She’s been close to death before, but never in a way that required another’s salvation. Before today, it had always been Hornet who saved herself. She’s not sure how to feel about the intervention. She knows she’s grown softer in Pharloom, but…
“Y-y-y-y-yes,” the Second Sentinel says.
“Your glitch seems to have worsened. Were you injured?” Hornet asks.
“N-n-n-no,” the Second Sentinel says. She can hear its voice modulator click on, off, on again, but it says nothing more until, “T-t-this sentinel can-n-n-not experience emot-t-t-tion by D-d-directive of the C-c-choir.”
Ah. “I am sorry I worried you, Gilded One,” Hornet, well familiar with the ways a construct could sidestep their programming, said. She reaches up and the Second Sentinel helps her press the back of her hand to the smooth plating of its face.
They remain there for a long while, hand-to-face-to-mask, the Second Sentinel’s form pouring off heat in a way Hornet suspected was the result of an intentional overclocking. She trusts that it would not hurt itself in an attempt to keep her comfortable, so she allows herself to enjoy the warmth. After a time, the Second Sentinel begins humming its song again.
When Hornet feels able to move again, it’s the work of a mere twitch for the Second Sentinel to hastily return to their stiff-backed seating position. Their humming has cut off, and Hornet misses the warmth of their body over her own. It helps her sit up and patiently waits until Hornet has overcome the blinding rush of pain. She looks down at its lap and realises that it had wadded up its own cloak as a pillow for her. The fabric is a filthy, bloody blue.
She should repair the cloak for it, she thinks.
But not now. Not yet.
The Second Sentinel had brought her to… Hornet isn’t sure where. The architecture indicates it’s somewhere within the Cogwork Core—and indeed, Hornet can feel the shudder of the massive gears of the Core if she concentrates— but despite her wanderings, this room is one she’s not found on her own. It’s open, empty but for the bench she and the Second Sentinel rest upon and a pile of components and linkages. It’s clear that this room is one that the Second Sentinel has claimed as its den, and Hornet refuses to examine how it makes her feel to have been allowed within.
“D-d-do you require m-more Silk?” the Second Sentinel inquires, stuttering reduced to its usual. The whirring of its internal fans is slowing down. With them, the Second Sentinel’s warmth leeches away.
Hornet takes stock of her reserves. Dry. It pains her to ask, but to lie would do neither of them any good. “Yes, I believe so.”
The Second Sentinel stands up smoothly. Seated, Hornet is at eye level with its petiole. “W-with haste, this sentinel will ret-turn.” It bows in that rapid, jerky movement of its, and then it’s gone.
Hornet allows herself to slump in its wake, let out the pained chitter that has been building since she first sat up. She ghosts her claws yet again over her newest scar. It’s painful to the touch, but at the very least the chitin she’s grown over it seems strong. She thinks it’ll be the work of one or two complete bindings before she is pain-free. She eyes the floor and contemplates standing up.
A twinge in her guts warns her not to. She sags back against the hard back of the bench, tipping her horns back over its wrought-iron top rail and breathing steadily, attempting to defeat the pain.
When the Second Sentinel returns, she’s fallen into a light meditation. She’s alerted by the familiar scent of oil and warm metal. It’s impossible to tell time here, deep within the Citadel’s core, but Hornet thinks it’s been a while by the apologetic quirk of its antennae. In one hand it holds a massive spindle of Silk. In the other, a bucket that smells of a delicate soap. It bows, approaches, and kneels before her, proffering the spindle.
Hornet picks it up and brings the Silk to her mouth, keeping a confused eye on the Second Sentinel as it sets down its bucket and withdraws a sodden rag.
“W-w-with your permission,” the Second Sentinel says.
Is it going to clean itself? Hornet supposes that she has smeared viscera over its chassis. “None needed, Gilded One. Do as you must.”
Hornet jerks when it presses the rag against the metatarsus of her leg, the sudden motion making her abdomen clench with pain. She hisses and bristles.
It pauses, looks up at her with an air of confusion. “Injured-d, are you?”
Hornet forces her setae to lay flat again. “Apologies. That was… unexpected. You do not have to clean me; I am more than capable of doing so myself.”
The Second Sentinel tilts its head in silent confusion. “A fav-vour, you would be granting this sentinel by allowing it-t-t to assist you.”
Hornet is unused to being assisted, much the same way she is unused to being rescued. It’s embarrassing, she thinks. Perhaps that embarrassment would instead have been humiliation if the Second Sentinel was a bug of flesh and shell rather than a construct. Here, though, tucked away in the Second Sentinel’s den with the understanding that the Second Sentinel was trusting her with its kindness, that embarrassment is overlaid by a warm glow. She nods in silent assent, and forces herself to stay still as the Second Sentinel begins to wipe her paws and legs free of her own haemolymph.
It’s excruciatingly methodical, although Hornet would not have suspected anything less. Still, Hornet has to fight to keep herself from squirming as it cleans between her plating. It has been far too long since another has touched her kindly.
Perhaps she’s become maudlin from her brush with death. The Second Sentinel’s careful grooming—not with mandibles the way a mortal bug would have, but soothing all the same— brings back honey-drenched memories of her youth. Hornet forces herself to focus on consuming the gifted Silk.
By the time the Second Sentinel has reached her upper thighs—a rush of heat in the pit of her stomach, although Hornet does not think it intends a proposition and in any case she is vaguely surprised her body can even stand to react like that, damaged as it is— she is able to bind for the third time that day.
The Second Sentinel withdraws at her direction, still kneeled before her as she whips Silk around her wound, forcing the buckled plating to bulge outward and newly-formed tissue to mature. The pain is sharp and cleansing, the subsequent relief immediate and encompassing. Hornet sags backward onto the bench in an humiliating display of softness, but—
Well.
The Second Sentinel has just carried her, dying, from the Whiteward. Somehow she didn’t think it minds.
It has placed a heavy hand upon her leg, its head cocked to the side and its antennae splayed in a wordless display of worry.
“Be at ease, Gilded One,” Hornet says, setting her hand atop its own. “It was merely relief. I am fortunate to be able to heal myself faster than mortal bugs.”
The Second Sentinel’s eyes flicker. It leans forward and bumps its face against her mask again in reassurance before withdrawing. “Your permission, t-this sentinel again asks.”
With the absence of pain comes exhaustion once more. Hornet dozes as it cleans her, blunted claws manoeuvering her limbs this way and that until she is at last free of her own lifeblood. She doesn’t register the Second Sentinel propping her back upright upon the bench, settling itself still and silent beside her as she slumps against its side and falls into a true sleep.
When she wakes, she will apologise for taking up its time and worry, offer to fix the cloak she ruined and pay it back for its tender care. When she wakes, she will continue her journey and leave this temporary refuge. For now, though, the memories of the day’s terror and pain slip from her mind on quiet grubsfeet, leaving only the warmth and rich scent of beloved machinery in its place.