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The Director fell asleep in an instant, the venom barely had time to get into his bloodstream before he was out like a light.
Good.
Pulse was still slightly erratic, but strong, and evening out as he fell deeper into unconsciousness.
The doctor checked.
90 bpm. High, but not remarkably so, considering the circumstances. And not dangerous. No sudden or dramatic drops or spikes.
He double checked.
89 bpm.
Good.
The injection wound was already nearly closed. Blood clotting factor normal.
He checked.
No excessive bleeding. No allergic reaction or excessive swelling at the injection site.
He double checked.
He’d barely needed to graze him. He’d been exceedingly, exceptionally careful.
He triple checked.
No. Everything was normal. The director was simply unconscious. As expected. As intended.
He checked again.
With a frustrated chittering sound, the doctor pulled his many gazes away from the director’s neck. A voice in his mind that sounded annoyingly like the man himself chided him about “feeding the compulsion”.
The director thought Arachne was “obsessive”, “neurotic”, and “prone to ritualistic compulsions”.
The doctor himself would argue that he was “fastidious”, “detail oriented”, and “an enormous mass of something not entirely unlike a spider”. All of these traits necessitating the use of a more cautious and methodical approach to…
Well…
Just about everything.
How easy it must be for a man contained in one neat little package of skin and bone to talk about feeding into anxieties. About the fear associated with breaking rituals. How simple, for a being so simply constructed, to think it could be so simple!
…
87 bpm.
Maybe he was being a little obsessive, just this once. But who could blame him? Humans were just…fragile. He understood their bodies inside and out and understood the delicate balance that was their homeostasis. How easy it was to catastrophically disrupt it. How precise one had to be when handling them.
Doctor Arachne could be very precise.
It was what made him such an excellent surgeon. And what made it even remotely possible for him to exist in proximity to humans the way he did.
Sometimes very close proximity.
The director lay, limp, among the doctor’s dozens of arms. He’d be out for at least eight hours, with any luck, once he properly fell asleep. Arachne’s venom was an anesthetic, among other things. Under its effects, the director was knocked out, not sleeping, which did not rest the body but, once it wore off, he’d progress into a more natural sleep cycle.
The immediate effect was not overly dissimilar to the general anesthetic they used for surgery at the hospital, a fact the director seemed to find very funny.
Arachne did not.
Not when he knew how much more potent it was than anything their or any hospital could possibly get their hands on. How even the slightest miscalculation could be the difference between unconsciousness and total paralysis. Not just of the major motor functions, but the lungs, the heart, the brain.
…
83 bpm.
So sue him for giving in to the odd compulsion to even things out. It was better than the alternative. He couldn’t afford to be less cautious.
Giving in to another, albeit less “benign” impulse, he re-wove the silken wrapping around the director, tight enough that he could feel the man’s pulse thrumming through his webbing with every beat, while still trying to stay cognizant of his circulation.
There was a possessiveness to it he couldn’t deny, though he’d die before ever admitting it aloud, especially not to the man himself. Bound up tight in his silk, strung in his web, surrounded, enveloped even, on all sides, by the endless shifting mass that was him…
What could possibly exist in such a state, in such a place, that was not his? Was not all but a part of him?
A decidedly inhuman feeling. At least, in how it manifested within him; in how he relented to indulge in it. To hold the director like a prize, already won. A treasure to swaddle and store away. A meal to be saved and savored. Little ways to appease the parts of himself that could never understand something like the frail thing he ran countless limbs over, again and again, as something other than something to kill and consume.
It kept him from eating him, anyway.
He’d be pissed when he woke up and realized Arachne had had no intention of waking him before he got a full night’s worth of sleep, but it served him right.
Pushing himself so far past his limits for so long, getting himself into such a state, then just waltzing into the doctor’s room as if he didn’t stink like sickness, like weakness, like prey!
Did he have any idea how hard it was for the doctor to have sunk his fangs into the plastic pool instead of his flesh? To catch and hold him, unharmed? Did he have any idea the deep rooted instincts that his squirming in the doctor’s web set off? Did he have any idea how hard it was to even exist around fragile things like him? The vice in which Arachne had to keep himself at all times? The care he had to put into every single action?
Did he even remotely comprehend what restraint it took a creature like the doctor to scrape a fang with such aching delicacy across that exposed neck, just just enough to put him under instead of driving through his jugular and--
…
78 bpm.
Of course. He did.
People tended to think the doctor had a lack of self control. It was a fair assumption, with how frequently his form burst out of his scrubs at the slightest provocation. How his careful disguise fell apart at the first hint of irritation.
But, the director knew it was only the doctor’s immense control of himself and his form that allowed a creature only ever a hair’s breadth from devolving into an unknowable, impossible tangle of eyes, limbs, and teeth, to only have those comparatively tiny lapses.
That was the wonderful and awful thing about the director:
He knew. He always did. No matter what it was about Arachne, he always just understood!
Nothing, no one, should understand something like him. He existed in a state something like the director could not even comprehend! And yet he understood! Wanted to understand. Wanted to see every bit of him, know everything about him. And somehow each new thing he managed to pry from Arachne, he would just understand and accept with that child-like fascination like it came naturally to him! Like that kind of thing could just be easy!
It drove Arachne insane! Everything about that man was maddening!
The way he’d see a monster lunge at him, barely dodge out of the way, and, instead of running, spray it with a hose and scold it. The way he’d argue, petulantly, like a child avoiding bedtime, while tied up in the web of a creature that should have been dragged out of his nightmares. The way he should have turned away when he saw deeper and deeper into the heart of that thing, where it became less entirely unlike a spider and more entirely unlike anything that should even fit within geometry as it existed, where it was all shiny blackness and eyes, eyes, eyes, and instead he just kept looking!
Staring, eyes half lidded, heart racing from something more than the fatigue, with something that was not entirely fear but was entirely too terrifying for the doctor to possibly name, until the air felt charged with something that stirred a terrible yearning in Arachne. A sudden, almost painful wish that he could pull the man apart and spread him out into something infinitely formless like himself, reaching within until each part of both of them was encased in the other like some organic fractal, a living mobius strip of arms and eyes and self and for one moment it might finally feel close enough to sate some awful hunger he couldn’t, wouldn’t, name.
…
77bpm.
His pulse was evening out. That was good. He was probably passing from sedation to sleep. It had dipped right to his normal resting heart rate. The dosage of venom had been extremely precise, of course. Arachne was a surgeon, after all.
With a surgeon's precision.
And a spider’s temperament.