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She says, “I need medicine.”
It’s almost adorably juvenile. Medicine. A monolith; she doesn’t even know what she needs. She is reduced to a sad, wounded little thing with only the childish desire to feel better and having no way of getting it. Arachne stares down her nose.
“Do you?”
The girl—District Ten, her tribute, Brandy, Brandy, Brandy—repeats in her stern, even way of speaking, “Yes.”
Again Arachne almost laughs. As if one word answers aren’t what got her that black eye in the first place. She almost admires her tenacity. Flippantly, she shrugs and says, “That’s an awful shame.”
Brandy’s shoulders stiffen under her rags and Arachne doesn’t fight the disdainful curl to her lip. “I’m going to die in here.” She moves forward, and Arachne doesn’t flinch. She knows she doesn’t. She keeps glaring flatly down at her, as Brandy inches closer to the bars, on her hands and knees, like a dog. It’s like she doesn’t even notice she’s doing it. Only more pathetic.
She snaps, “Do you understand? I’m going to die.”
Arachne smirks. “Okay? Am I supposed to care? Is this you appealing to my better nature?” She leans back in her chair, lacing her fingers over her knees. “I’m flattered you think I have one, but I think you’re forgetting why I had you put in here in the first place.”
She cocks her head. She doesn’t stop glaring at her, but the way Brandy returns it is disconcerting. An animal with too-human eyes. It’s making her Arachne’s skin crawl.
With no inflection, she drawls, “You’re dead already.”
A thrill goes through her when she sees Brandy’s posture crumple a little. Arachne winds her fingers together to keep herself quiet—to make her sit in it for a minute. She watches Brandy try to gauge if she’s serious, as if she has any reason not to be. She’s lucky they didn’t kill her on the spot. She’s lucky Arachne was kept away from her for this long.
Something in Brandy’s eyes seems to know it, and for a brief moment Arachne doesn’t feel the throbbing ache under her jaw where a laceration is struggling to heal. But then Brandy just keeps coming closer to her, and Arachne has a vision of glass smashing, of being too surprised to be afraid, of choking.
She doesn’t flinch, but when Brandy’s fingers wrap around the crumbling iron bar, Arachne feels every muscle in her body tense to run.
Having been stuck in an underground solitary cell with nothing but a festering wound to keep her company, Brandy looks even worse than when Arachne had seen her in the zoo, but she sounds far from sick as she spits viciously from behind her teeth, “Is that what you want?”
Arachne wants her dead. Brandy keeps going, voice growing more raspy with every furious word.
“You want to watch me die of infection in a cage? Is that fun for you?” She grits her jaw, Arachne sees the muscles clench in her cheek. She’s not sure why the motion discomforts her so much. She can’t hurt her. Arachne is out here and Brandy is in there and she shouldn’t feel the phantom grasp of hands clawing at the front of her blouse and pulling her close enough to slash.
“I thought you Capitol assholes were more creative.”
No one has ever put Arachne Crane on her back foot. She bares her teeth. “I appreciate the classics.”
Brandy scoffs, an unattractive sound that fills the dank room and makes Arachne’s spine prickle. “I could die tonight. You’ll come back in a week to a body. That’s what you want?” She shakes her head, the ghost of something that could be a delusional little smile on chapped lips. She licks over them, making Arachne recoil, and then says, “You let them keep me alive just for me to drop dead by myself when you’re not even here to see it?”
It’s cheap. A dead girl bartering for her life. But Arachne can’t stop herself from pausing.
Because when she found out she was livid, trembling with rage when her father finally broke and admitted they hadn’t killed the impudent District scum that tried to murder her on live television. Seething with so much anger because she had refused to let herself be humiliated by it. When she’d demanded to see where they were keeping her she’d had half a mind to sneak in a kitchen knife and do it herself, since even the peacekeepers didn’t have the guts. They didn’t even pat her down today; Arachne could have killed Brandy now and no one would know until they came to empty her waste in three days.
And it would be within her rights. She’s the victim. She’s allowed to decide what they do with this vermin, her father said so, said she could do anything she wanted as long as she didn’t tell anyone that she wasn’t dead.
Brandy’s hers. So maybe she’s right. Arachne gets to kill her, no one and nothing else. Not infection from a bullet those idiots couldn’t even think to put between those big, wet, prey eyes. Those eyes boring into her now, begging her, and Arachne has her verdict. Because this is how it’s supposed to feel. This is how it feels to own something. No one gets to make her let it go.
She twirls her finger around one ponytail falling over her shoulder, skin prickling when she sees Brandy’s gaze fall on the action. Arachne can’t quite place why. Surely she feels the grime emanating off of every fiber of Brandy’s body. Lightly, smilingly, she says, “We don’t waste important things like that on trash. But, y’know, if you really need it…” She shrugs, coyly sliding her gaze to the wall. From the corner of her eye she sees Brandy fall forward a bit. Following her.
Cute, almost. Sad.
Arachne drops her ponytail and it falls in a loose coil against her chest. “Well, I guess we’ll never know until you ask politely.”
She can’t help but swing her eyes back to Brandy’s face. She just has to see the way she reacts, the tightening in her jaw, the furrow in her brow. The reddening of her cheeks as she bites down on an embarrassment Arachne pretends she doesn’t know, one she can guiltlessly preside over. Even Brandy knows this is how it’s supposed to work. Arachne’s willing to make this easy for her if she plays by the rules.
After all, hadn’t she given her that water bottle like she promised to? Brandy’s the one who caused all this with her little tantrum. Sore loser then, sore loser now. Poor baby with greedy hands.
Still, Arachne doesn’t like to wait. She purses her lips. “Hm. Maybe you’re not as sick as you thought.”
Brandy falters and for the first time a sort of pained look makes it to her eyes. Arachne can see her arguing with herself. Her cheek swells and goes concave, gnawing her tongue, looking vulgar. Arachne considers her carefully, agitation rising in her throat the longer Brandy tries to field this. Doesn’t she realize she’s only hurting herself?
Arachne exhales sharply, making to stand. God, she’s too kind. Comes to visit the District bitch who tried to kill her and she’s still trying to be nice. She’s reminded miserably of the Plinth orphan and retches at herself. She turns her head and sneers at the bars and the animal behind them, “Guess not.”
She’s wearing a white skirt, long and shiny and just tight enough to accentuate her figure without being tacky. It’s essential in all of her carefully curated outfits to be formfitting but never garish. But Arachne wishes she’d worn something painted-on, the second she tries to walk away and feels herself being pulled.
It would save her to kick Brandy in the face. It would be satisfying. And Arachne hates herself for it, but she can’t, because seeing those beaten-red, split, filthy fingers wrap around the pure whiteness of her skirt, her heart stops.
Brandy grabs her skirt with one hand, and then the other, reaching through on either side of one bar, and Arachne can feel the heaviness of her hands against her calf through the material. She tells herself it’s hate, so distilled she can’t do anything with it, and that’s why she can’t make her get off. It’s the rage throbbing in her chest with her heartbeat that stops her from being able to react, that leaves her to stand there, stock still, bottom lip shuddering.
Brandy looks up at her from her knees, hands fisted in her clothes, the set to her mouth biblically severe.
She has to speak. Arachne wracks her brain to spit something, to hiss Get off me before I get you killed tonight but she can’t, not before Brandy finds her voice. Sounding like a blood clot being dragged from her throat, Brandy looks up at Arachne Crane and whispers, “Please.”
Arachne digs her nails into her palms until she feels them start to ache. At the same time Brandy tugs her skirt harder.
Tightly, hardly more than a whisper for fear of straining her throat, Arachne asks, “Please what?”
Just to see. There’s no glass here. No weapon. All she can do is pull at her skirt and Arachne would like to see how far down it goes.
Brandy narrows her glassy eyes. Voice thick, she spits between the bars, “I did what you asked. Do you get off to this or something?”
Despite the hammering of her heart Arachne barks out a laugh. She can’t stop giggling, in fact, even when she tries to collect herself, even when she tries to respond. The thought is so ludicrous she’s almost nauseous with it—the idea of something so disgusting, to be shared with some dirty District girl, is so far outside reality she has to laugh. She shakes her head, teeth clenching, and chirps, “Oh, gag me. God, you’re all just as gross as they say you are.”
Brandy shuffles closer to her, on her knees, dragging herself forward by Arachne’s skirt. (It’s going to tear. Why can’t she find the words to make her get off? Why can’t she speak right?) She swallows, hard and uncomfortable, distending her throat. Arachne curls her lip. Imagines serrated glass through the slab of pale skin under Brandy’s jaw, and the blood that would cling as it ran down to her chest.
“I need you.”
Arachne’s stomach turns. Those eyes are so big, looking up at her through her brow like a sycophant, bitten-raw lips pressed together. She’s pathetic. She’s so pathetic it hurts to look at her. Begging and groveling and still thinking she has dignity. Still thinking this is some gorgeous act of defiance.
Arachne peels back her lips—painted in her best lipstick, she’s wearing all her best makeup today, she looks her prettiest—and lets Brandy have the gift of seeing her filed-down fangs. “Yeah. You do, don’t you?”
She shakes Brandy off her skirt and meets no resistance, that vice grip falling away easily as she steps backwards, out of reach. She glances down—grimy creases in the white fabric. “I could have you killed for that alone, you know.”
She says it mostly to herself. But Brandy is still staring at her, gaze unwavering when Arachne glances up to meet it. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t blink. She just looks at Arachne from between those bars, hands fallen lifeless on the cement floor.
A strand of blonde hair so dirty it looks black has fallen into her face, escaped from the discolored scrap of fabric holding it back from all falling in a mangy mess across her forehead. Arachne brushes her own hair back as she notices it, even though she knows it’s securely tied into it’s bright red ribbons.
Arachne folds her hands primly at her front, savoring the feeling of her lacquered nails against each other. She wants Brandy to look at them, wants her to see Arachne’s ribbons and nails and her skirt, now stained. The dirt would come out with some soap but Arachne has already made up her mind, already knows she’s never wearing this skirt again. It’s tainted, now, would make her feel dirty whenever she put it on.
Arachne Crane has no need for imperfect things. Brandy eyes her like a calf to the slaughterhouse, because she is. As long as she’s in that cell, Arachne is her whole world. Her only thread.
She needs me. Needs me. Needs me.
Arachne will not forget herself. No one takes anything from her. Some messy peacekeeper isn’t going to steal her newest toy before she’s even gotten to play with it.
“The medics don’t have a lot of extra antibiotics laying around for insurrectionists.” She brushes her ponytail over her shoulder. “But since you’re being nice—“
Arachne grins, and finds she means it.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Brandy doesn’t thank her. Arachne doesn’t expect it, turning her back and brushing out of the cell with the twist of a lock. She stands on the other side of the heavy stone door, her fingers lingering on the latch. The peacekeeper manning the post eyes her warily, waiting for her to leave so he can do up the rest of the locks keeping Brandy exactly where Arachne knows she is. Keeping her safe.
She looks at him sharply and he flinches under his helmet. Good. Arachne Crane hisses poisonously at a nameless peacekeeper her father has employed and can easily remove, “If you don’t get her a goddamn medic and some antibiotic for the sepsis she’s getting, I’ll have you hung in front of your family.”
She’ll come back in two weeks, and as she settles in for the ride home, Arachne dozes off peacefully, knowing that what’s hers will always be hers, and no one else’s.