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“Do you like it?”
To most, the spider perched in the woman’s pale palms is unremarkable. A standard garden spider— an orb weaver, and more specifically, A raneus diadematus — it wouldn’t look out of place perched in one’s rose bushes or between the lattice of a fence. Its rounded abdomen is mottled brown, speckled with white dots, perfect for blending in.
It's a curious little thing, prodding at the flesh beneath it with its front pedipalps and a gleam in its innumerable eyes that hint at unspoken secrets. Oh, what sort of things has this one seen?
Annabelle brings herself to eye level with it, smiling.
“I like it very much.” When she speaks, she is genuine. Or, at least, as genuine as she can be at any given moment. That sort of vulnerability— honesty — is not in her nature; it’s not a skill she has nor one she is keen on trying to get back, if she even had it to begin with.
The woman carefully deposits the spider onto Annabelle’s shoulder.
“I found it for you,” she murmurs and then winces. “They sing so shrilly… They don’t like spiders.” It’s a quiet confession. As if Jane doesn’t want to upset her Hive by speaking such a thing too loudly. An admittance of fondness that Annabelle drinks in greedily but does not rush to return.
She can hear Jane’s breathing, or what constitutes breathing, in the ensuing silence. It’s wet, and rattles so hard she can feel the vibrations as she takes the other woman’s face in her hands. Intimacy holds hands with honesty, so it is painfully unfamiliar to her. It’s wrong, even.
But it’s late, and they are shrouded in darkness, and for a fraction of a second she can discard the threads tugging at her fingertips and focus on the sensation of Jane’s skin instead; clammy and peeling at the edges where the worms have worn their way through, but wonderfully freeing.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
When she leans in and presses their lips together she does not recoil though she has every right to. The Corruption is an inherently disgusting force, and its influence has not left Jane any the better for it. She tastes of pure rot. Sickeningly sweet, cloyingly so, but so sour it hurts Annabelle’s teeth. Putrid, earthy, and hot. Her lips are severely chapped, not unlike the papery texture of a wasp nest. It’s equal parts fitting and revolting.
Annabelle never minds these things. In fact, she revels in it. The disgust. The way she can feel the writhing of Jane’s skin beneath her touch. Jane hooks an arm around the other's neck and lets the other dangle limply at her side.
To an outside observer they may as well be normal. Two lovers sharing an embrace in the dead of night.
But of course, Annabelle can feel the eyes of that little spider— Jane’s little gift— watching her. Judging her. It whispers to her. The Mother of Puppets does not want this. It did not send her here for this. She has more important things to do, more threads to weave together.
She knows what’s to become of Jane anyway, should everything go according to plan.
But for a brief moment, so brief that no one could confidently call it a lapse of faith, she ignores the Spinner of Stories, and sears the sensation of this one last kiss into her memory. Her own private moment.
And then she lets go.
She takes the orb weaver off her shoulder and into her palm. When she looks up Jane is grinning. She can tell even through that mass of beautiful, matted, oil slick black hair, and Annabelle returns it with a thin lipped smile of her own.
“It’ll be light soon,” she says matter-of-factly, “you don’t want to be spotted.” It’s a statement, not a question.
“Lucky for you, I know the perfect place. Do you have any fondness for tunnels, Jane?”
Annabelle first met Jane Prentiss long before the Corruption sunk its mandibles into her.
She knew from the jump what the other was to become— or at least, had a vague sense of it, if not quite the specifics yet— and so she was to be the one to plant the seeds and get the ball rolling.
Nothing too large to begin with of course. Constructing a web took time, and many possible alternate routes, so she started small. She would visit the shop Prentiss worked at on occasion.
Sometimes she went by herself. Oftentimes she sent others in her place, either human or arachnid, she wasn’t fussed about it. She’d rearrange mirrors in that crystal shop, tilting them at just the right angles as to accentuate Prentiss’s insecurities. A stray pimple along her jaw, the unevenness of her skin texture.
She watched her and her friends— or those whom she paraded around with and called her friends. That particular mess and social implosion was not Annabelle’s doing, but it didn’t take a genius to see coming. It made Prentiss all the better suited for her purposes.
In all likelihood the Corruption would’ve gotten her eventually anyways, but even the smallest of nudges can snowball.
She never intended to see the woman again after she was finished using her as a domino. A piece in the great Archivist puzzle. But there was… something about her. Through her unpleasantness and neurosis, there was something in her that was intriguing. Even moreso, after the Corruption began to take its hold.
She was an attractive woman, sure. Well kept hair, high cheek bones, dark eyes rimmed with mascara that was just a little too heavy handed. But that didn’t account for the strange way that Prentiss managed to burrow into the back of her mind.
It must’ve been one of the final days before her actualization as an avatar— before she became a part of the hive— when Annabelle happened to actually speak with her.
She hadn’t meant to. She was checking up on her progress after a long leave of absence (the Mother of Puppets has too many plans for her to stay in one place too long) and was being careless.
Maybe that was her ultimate undoing.
She was examining an amethyst in the quaint little crystal shop Jane worked at, keeping her distance, when she must have simply… lost track of her. One moment she was observing Prentiss out of the corner of her eye the next she was less than a meter away.
“Oh, that’s a lovely choice,” Prentiss had said, peering over her shoulder. As stupid as it was, Annabelle had to fight the urge to jump. "Amethyst's have many interesting qualities, you know.”
“Do they?”
“Oh, yes,” Prentiss nodded fervently and began to spout off about the energetic traits of the stone. Annabelle quickly tuned her out. Instead, she focused on the dark circles under the woman's eyes. The unfocused look on her face. Her manic smile which was just a touch too wide.
She wasn’t wearing mascara that day, but she could see faint smeared tracks on her cheeks that hadn’t quite washed away.
How long until she broke? At the time Annabelle had suspected at most a week. She would be gratified when only five days later when Prentiss was rushed to hospital and subsequently killed seven of the staff.
In the moment though, it was hard to imagine such a thing happening to this version of that same woman. This painfully dull, painfully human Jane Prentiss.
It must have been out of pity then, that Annabelle bought the amethyst.
Nothing more.
***
Annabelle was busy. As she always was. But when she directed Prentiss to Vittery’s apartment basement (all part of the grand scheme, of course) she managed to find the time to pay Prentiss another visit.
Just to check to see that everything was going smoothly of course. The Archivist needed to be marked and in order for that to occur he needed to come into contact with Prentiss.
So she was just doing her duty.
That was all.
Yet she couldn’t deny that a part of herself (a larger part than she cared to admit) was curious to see how Prentiss had changed. To lose one’s humanity so thoroughly always changes a person, but how much of the old self was retained always seemed to vary between avatars, in her experience. Personally, she liked to think that this is how she had always been. Whether that was true or not did not matter; when did truth ever matter to her, after all.
But was there any of the woman Jane Prentiss used to be left?
Looking at the mangled corpse of a person in front of her now, she doubted it.
Prentiss was wearing a torn scarlet dress and a faded trench coat, but underneath the layers of fabric her skin wriggled . Holes dotted her upper arms and much of her legs, though they seemed most numerous around her midsection, where several worms bit their way through her dress and fell to the floor with tiny wet thwaps. Those dark eyes were hazy, pupils dilated as she struggled to hold Annabelle’s gaze.
“You…” Prentiss drawled. “I know you…”
Annabelle blinked. Ah. So there was some amount of retained self. The woman reached a pock marked arm upwards, reaching, but was interrupted by a series of wet coughs. After a moment, she hacked up three small, writhing worms onto the ground.
“You have a good memory for faces,” Annabelle commented. Strangely, she could not bring herself to be put off by the worms. Their little silvery bodies were oddly… pretty. Like pearls. They complimented Prentiss’s eyes. “Do you have a place to stay?”
Of course she didn’t.
And so Annabelle led her to Vittery’s basement, poor sod. Prentiss didn’t make a go at her during their trip, or even when she settled into her new ‘home’ but Annabelle could sense the hive’s displeasure at her presence. Spiders did eat bugs, she supposed. But Prentiss herself did not seem to mind her.
Hmm.
When they parted, Annabelle assumed that would be the last time they saw each other.
She would be mistaken.
***
She didn’t know why she kept coming back.
She was simply drawn to her, no matter how much she knew she shouldn’t be.
There was always an excuse. Maybe she had forgotten to unlock the basement window for the archival assistant to squeeze through, so of course she had to come back. Perhaps an exterminator had been called when she wasn’t looking, and the Mother’s plan was going to be unraveled.
It was all bullshit of course, but she needed an excuse, lest she forget why she was here in the first place. Some of the Dread Powers gave their servants a great deal of autonomy; without a consciousness the control they exerted over their avatars was limited to their need to feed and the occasional twisted ritual. The Web was not one of these cases. The Mother of Puppets had plans for her, like everyone, and she had the ability to betray them.
Or maybe she didn’t. Free will was a silly thing, really, and Annabelle never could decide if it was real or not.
But regardless, she certainly felt like it was a betrayal. Every time she slunk into that dingy old basement she could sense it was wrong. And she kept coming back anyway.
Over time Prentiss became Jane, and their stilted talks turned to something more. Brushes of hands into embraces into brief kisses shared when Annabelle was weak willed and dumb.
She would never call whatever they shared love. That was the sort of idealistic, juvenile fantasy that didn’t fit either of them very well. They were fond of each other. That felt appropriately distant.
Annabelle was not there when Martin broke into Vittery’s basement, but she did visit to watch Jane try and lure him out, just once.
She should have been a horrific sight, pounding on this poor man's door. Scrapping at the wood with her chipping nails, worms crawling across her legs, all of them undulating in time with a silent song. Sometimes Annabelle wished Jane could have sung it for her. She would have sounded angelic, she bet, underneath the Corruption.
Instead of being horrifying, Jane is undeniably, strikingly beautiful. Posed as if she is a painting. She could be a statue, carved out of marble and displayed for everyone to admire. The same pearlescent color as those worms.
Annabelle was the only admirer here though. An art exhibit for one. Maybe that was for the best. She doubted anyone else would be able to appreciate her like she could.
She watched, silently, from the other end of the hall, and hummed. Perhaps she missed her calling with the Eye.
When dawn finally hit she left without so much as a goodbye.
There wasn’t much time left for them and she knew it. She would visit Jane again after Martin escaped, but only a couple times. Enough times to embed the memory of carding her hands through that mess of hair into her very being, yet not enough to satiate the longing slowly growing in her chest.
A shame.
Flashing lights illuminate the archive’s front entrance, casting the entire scene in a distressingly eerie glow. Annabelle stands just out of sight in a nearby allie. Observing.
There is a great deal of commotion. Elias Bouschard is speaking with the paramedics, expression a perfectly crafted mask of concern, meanwhile his archival team is being treated. The Archivist seems to have the worst of it. Most of his body is covered with reddening gauze and she can see the discarded worms on the ground from here. Good, she thinks.
Something hot and bitter is roiling in her stomach.
Good, that he is so thoroughly marked— that Jane’s hive did such a meticulous job. It almost makes the whole thing worth it.
But then she sees the gurney being wheeled out of the institute entrance. There is a white sheet covering the body of course, but she knows who it is at once. There is a piece of brilliant red fabric peaking out from under the covering.
She knew this was inevitable.
She knew this was her fate.
And yet…
The roiling gets worse. It boils, and threatens to spill over, washing away her usual indifference.
She knew. She knew. So why is she so undone by this?
Annabelle cannot afford to break. There are spiders in this ally; she can feel them watching her. Listening to how her breathing turns shallow. They know.
Jane Prentiss is dead. She served her purpose and Annabelle should be glad for it.
But when she crosses her arms in front of her chest the beating of her heart feels almost like the familiar steady writhing of larva. A horrible shiver runs up her spine and she has to stop herself from starting to shake.
She watches as the paramedics wheel away, off to A&E. They take her away too. She knows they will burn her body, and that Annabelle will not be the one to receive the ashes. She doesn’t even know what she’d do with them, but she foolishly wants them anyway.
That’s all it feels like she ever does: want. She wants, and wants, and wants. Vaguely, she registers wetness on one of her cheeks. A tear, leaving a track down her face. It is swiped away instantly, though the sensation of it haunts her skin.
Annabelle Cane does not weep, but she gets as close as she will ever dare.
As she walks away she casts one last look back at the institute. The worms littering the ground mock her. Tomorrow they will be gone, and she will have so much to do. There are endless threads to weave into a masterful tapestry the Web will be proud of.
But for now she traces her lips with her fingers, and savours the taste of rot.