Chapter Text
"This should be easy," Wilson says aloud, walking up to a large spider nest positioned in the center of the woods.
He'd told the rest of his campmates that he'd be out collecting resources, and spared them the details—poor Webber wouldn't have been able to handle it if he'd told them what he was going to do. Toeing the edge of the spider nest to alert the residents of his presence, he quickly jumps back as three spiders the size of pillows crawl out from the nest. The logs in the suit he's wearing thunk together as he moves swiftly, and he leans in to stab one before the other two can get a hold of him.
Wilson easily defeats the first round with ease, and the second round goes just the same, save for a lone bite from a spider that ducked under him at the last second. As he readies himself to fight the warrior spiders that reside inside—tending to his wound, making sure his log suit is on securely, and sharpening his spear—he is spooked by the sound of silk creaking and stretching, the sound that can only mean one thing. A spider queen emerges from the web and hisses, her fangs lashing out in front of her dangerously as she hisses with the force of ten men.
Suddenly, Wilson wishes he'd have told someone where he was going.
WHERE WAS IT?
WX-78 stares into the distance as they walk, long-lived irritation flowing throughout their circuits. They don't like fleshlings, and after one of the small ones made a comment about souls specifically directed towards them, they’ve just about had it. They left the camp about an hour ago in an attempt to find the Junk Yard, a secondary refuge they've taken hold of when all of the fleshlings have bothered them too much. There isn't anything set up there for them to last long-term, but it’s long enough for WX-78 to get their bearings straight.
The issue is, it's usually a half-hour walk from the base at most. In their haste and annoyance, WX-78 left the camp and did not take to processor as to where they were going. When they reach the edge of the land, the sun sets as evening rolls in. They turn around and suddenly take direct notice of their surroundings.
Spiders.
So many spiders.
They hope that running in the same general area they came from will lead them to… somewhere that isn't here. So they start running, taking on an awkward zig-zag pattern to avoid the attention of most of the spiders. As for the ones that do start following them, they choose to evade with the tried and true method of running until the spider gets bored enough to leave.
"Okay, okay, okay, okay, this is fine," Wilson says aloud. "This is fine. It's not like–eek!"
He veers to the right as a warrior spider tries to latch onto his arm. The spider queen hauls towards him, slowly and steadily, as she births spiders that are immediately conscious and ready for battle. A nurse spider pops out of her abdomen, and if Wilson knows anything, it's to take them out first. He dives for it with his spear, preparing to stab it, when a sharp pain in the back of his leg nearly sends him toppling backwards.
"Agh!" He turns around to see a warrior spider hissing, its fangs dripping with his blood, and pierces the offending creature with his spear. He steps on the carcass to hold it down and withdraws his weapon from the body quickly, sending purple spider entrails flying around him. Trying not to limp, he refocuses his attention on the nurse spider that's retreated back towards the queen, sending wary glances at the massive arachnid that continues her slow but deadly crawl towards him.
As it turns out, the tried and true method is, in fact, still tried and true. WX-78 looks back to the lone spider still on their tail, and it finally leaves them be.
"HAHA! RUN! UGLY BALL OF—OUFH!"
They run straight into a nurse spider, falling face-first onto the ground and skidding about three feet on the dewy grass, until their metal body leaves an indent in the dirt. They quickly turn around and stand up, wiping the dirt from their faceplate, spear already in hand.
"DIE!"
Without even noticing the spider queen (and Wilson) a few feet away from them, they lunge towards the nurse spider. Unfortunately, the spider queen notices them, and as they stab their spear deep into the nurse spider, they're suddenly grabbed by a large pair of teeth. They’re thrown multiple feet away from the chaos with a solid thunk.
WX-78 remains still for a moment, then raises a lone hand up to their faceplate. One of their visual receptors is cracked and the input is delayed, rendering it practically useless at this point. They pull it out, unplugging it from their systems, and toss it to the side. With the dead spider’s body still clinging to their spear, they stand up and look at the massive beast in front of them. They’re battered but ready as three menacing words are emitted from their voicebox.
"YOU WILL DIE."
Wilson startles upon seeing WX-78 of all "people" in the area.
"What the—what are you doing here?!" He screeches.
Wilson can only pay them so much mind as two regular spiders begin to close in on him at once, and he employs his classic bait-and-hit sequence of events.
"FLESHLING, THIS BEAST MUST DIE."
Without a second warning, they run at the spider queen and begin battering it, slicing at its dense legs and many eyes. It stuns the beast, but it is still able to get a few solid slices into the automaton. In the moments where they are not locked onto the target, they repeat the same phrase, their booming voice overtaking the sounds of spiders hissing and gnashing.
"YOU WILL DIE."
Wilson, still reeling at their sudden appearance, shakes his head once and quickly kills the two spiders encircling him. He runs over to help WX-78, standing at the backside of the queen and flanking her so she's got attackers on both sides. For a moment, the spider queen remains stunned before attempting to sink her fangs into Wilson's torso. Luckily, he evades her just in time, skittering onto the ground and landing on his forearms. She quickly turns around to face WX-78 and hisses loudly.
Wilson regains his footing and begins trying to slice at her abdomen, reasoning that if he can wear that part down enough, she won't be able to hatch more spiders that complicate things.
WX-78 stares into the eyes of the spider queen that aren't swollen and bloody with their remaining visual receptor. For a quick moment that feels like an eternity, it's just that. Staring. And then the spider queen lets out a loud hiss.
WX-78 returns the favor, producing a sound that grates on their voicebox with a twinge of pain, a scream of rage and hatred.
Wilson's quick attacks to its abdomen during WX-78's scream leaves her unguarded.
"YOU WILL DIE!" They shout again, louder this time, their voice chock full of unbridled rage and finality. They run to the spider queen, lifting up a spear with the mangled remains of the nurse spider, stained in the blood of its own and the spider queen’s, and driving it deep into its skull.
Even as a pair of mangled warrior spiders come out from its abdomen as a last-ditch effort for protection, it is for nothing, as the spider queen finally succumbs to its wounds and dies out.
Wilson quickly goes to stab one of the two warrior spiders, not sparing a glance to WX-78. He won't admit it aloud, but their behavior is intimidating in a way that makes him tremble, just a little bit. Fighting for your life is one thing, but fighting for hatred of life is another.
He's unable to stop the second warrior spider from latching onto his leg, and lets out a stream of curses with teary eyes as he tries to kick it off of him. When it lets go, he stabs it headfirst until it finally stops moving save for mangled twitching.
He looks up to WX-78, panting and bleeding, with a mild look of fear on his face.
They are remaining still, creating a spider carcass kebab with their spear. As the day turns to night, they put on their headlamp and turn to him.
"HOW DID YOU END UP HERE?"
Once he catches his breath, he sits down next to the carcass to roll his pant leg up while they speak.
"I was initially just trying to take down the nest," he says calmly. He rummages through his backpack for something but then shakes his head, walking over to a nearby spider and rummaging around in its corpse with his bare hands.
"The spider queen chose an unfortunate time for me," he says, pausing, and sparing a glance at her carcass, "and her, I suppose, to spring up. How did you end up here?"
He finds what he's looking for, pulling out one of the spider's organs, then walks closer to WX-78's circle of light to sit back down and roll his other pant leg up. He applies the contents of the spider's gland, the casing still soaked in its purpleish-black blood, to the worst of his bites. He fights back a hiss of pain while WX-78 sits down.
"NOT THIS," they say, having no interest in divulging their secondary refuge. They take off their backpack and begin looking through it. When leaving the camp, they only had the items on their back, and so a few stale roasted potatoes is all WX-78 has as an option to eat right now. Luckily, whether they’re fresh or rotting, it all fuels the same, and they begin eating.
"Well, I'm glad you happened by. I'm not sure how that would've ended had you not been here." He finishes, wiping his hands thoroughly on the grass to remove the residue. Wilson grabs his backpack and puts it back on his back, wincing at the soreness of his legs. That's going to hurt tomorrow.
"I was meant to be back by now. I'm going to collect the resources from the massacre. I won't ask you to help, since you've helped me enough here," Wilson says, standing up. "Thank you very much, Mx."
They reply with a neutral hum. "I WILL RETURN TO THE CAMP AS WELL WHEN YOU ARE DONE HERE."
Ergo, WX-78 has not a clue as to where they are, and Wilson is their only chance to make it back to camp before the daytime.
"Alrighty," he says simply. Wilson extends a hand to them to help them up.
"I WILL SIT," they say, continuing to recuperate themself as they eat the roasted potatoes.
Wilson shrugs. He removes a torch from his belt loop and walks about fifty paces from the center of the fight, scanning from the left of the battlefield to the right side. He walks to each spider corpse and dissects them, taking out their pink glands if they're intact, or their silk glands if those are. The purple, acrid meat he leaves to rot, except for one or two chunks; he'd not brought very much food on him today.
Once he finishes, he's coated to the elbows with spider blood. He quickly locates WX-78 once again thanks to their headlamp, and starts a fire about seven feet away from them. He begrudgingly begins to roast the monster meat he'd gathered on top of the coals.
It's not exactly what Wilson would call appetizing, but he's hungry after such a long fight and the soggy carrots in his pockets won't do.
WX-78 simply watches, and at a certain point they remove the spider kebab from their spear and sit back down. They look at the spider queen's mangled face quizzically.
THAT WOULD MAKE FOR A HORRIFYING HELMET, they think, grinning. As Wilson starts the fire, they turn off their headlamp and grab a straw roll from their bag as he gets settled.
"I AM GOING TO REST."
Wilson glances at them. "You don't want to walk back now? I just wanted to eat first. I can navigate at night."
They look around, the quiet hissing of spiders filling the night. "WE WILL DO THAT."
"Don't worry," he says, although he's unsure of if they're actually capable of worrying, "they always hiss before they're about to attack. You'll know if one's near you."
Being here the longest has certainly given him time to observe nearly every creature here, having died to nearly everything at least twice. WX-78 replies with a neutral hum.
Wilson pulls the meat off of the coals and frowns at it. He takes a bite and grimaces at the taste and the texture, neither of which are particularly appealing. Nausea quickly settles in on his stomach as he continues to eat, but he continues nonetheless. Food is food, even if it makes me want to vomit.
After he finishes eating, he stands up and stretches, and then yawns—by his view of the moon, he deduces that it's around midnight. He usually goes to bed around now, and the adrenaline from the fight has worn off, leaving him exhausted. Still, to be courteous to the individual who has been, by all accounts, his savior, he does his best to keep his composure. Once again, he extends a clawed hand down to them to help them up.
They look at his hand, and then stand up on their own, taking out and turning on their headlamp again.
"LEAD."
Wilson forces a smile. "Er, right," he says, first igniting a torch and then taking out his compass. He looks up at the moon, at the way it's casting shadows, and begins to walk back towards the camp, holding the torch far in front of him to make sure they're not going to get ambushed. Vaguely, he thinks about being wary of running into the tallbird nests he had to scramble away from on the way here, but it's fifteen minutes away. So, they keep walking.
"What, um," he starts, awkwardly. Silence is not particularly his thing, but neither is socialization, really, and talking to himself as he usually does would probably be frowned upon.
"What brings you here?" He asks, forgetting that he'd asked it earlier when the adrenaline hadn’t settled down yet.
"I WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING BECAUSE THE SMALL FLESHLINGS WERE BEING ANNOYING," they say, expanding on what they dabbled on earlier. "VERY ANNOYING."
Wilson grimaces, but doesn't say anything about that last bit. They can be frustrating at times, and not everyone is great with kids.
"Can I help you find... whatever it is?" He asks. Distantly, Wilson sees the entrance of the swamp he had to sprint through to make it over here. Vaguely, he realizes that there's a way to get back to the camp without going through there, which is probably the way WX-78 took, but navigating all the way over would be time consuming.
"NO," they reply, following him from behind.
A few minutes pass. Not a conversationalist, it seems. Maybe I could—ack!
Wilson stops in his tracks, extending his left hand back towards WX-78 and pushing them back a few feet behind him. In front of them, a tentacle springs out of the ground and slams around, trying to feel for the creatures that have walked into its range. Wilson's heart beats hard in his chest.
"Er, there's a swamp here," Wilson says, grinning nervously.
"IT WAS OBVIOUS TO ME, I GUESS NOT TO YOU," WX-78 brashly replies. They do not like following, but they don't know where the camp is, and he does, so they must follow.
Wilson grinds his teeth a bit at the comment. "Well, let me try to skirt around the perimeter of it and find the path. The tentacles tend not to be homed around there since the packed dirt is hard for them to insert their eggs into," he says, trying not to let his annoyance show.
He walks around, semi-blindly, until he notices his footsteps make a different sound when it falls.
"It's this way," he says with a sigh. He glances up to the moon again anxiously, knowing that they'll get back before sunrise but lamenting the lost time anyway.
"GOOD." WX-78 exerted a lot of energy today, and so their shorter replies are a mix of their usual neutral demeanor and sheer exhaustion.
All in all, they look forward to resting.
The both of them continue walking for some time. The sound of the merms running around in the distance makes Wilson a bit on edge, and he picks up his pace slightly to a soft jog. Once his feet make contact with rocks, about six minutes later, he abruptly stops once again. He's panting a bit—his time here has significantly improved his endurance, which was at a stark zero when he was first plopped into this hellhole.
"There's a group of tallbird nests over here. I nearly got my head pecked off on the way to the woods, so be careful."
"SOUNDS FUNNY," WX-78 says, but they’re silently grateful Wilson is in front of them. After a short time, they hear a tallbird snoring extra-loudly and get quite startled. Wilson hears it too and flinches, grabbing WX-78 by the arm and pulling them sharply to the left. He doesn't let himself tell them why, for fear the noise will wake up the birds.
He swings his torch in front of himself, nearly directly into the mass of a sleeping tallbird, and can't quite hold back his noise of surprise. When the bird croons and gathers itself into awareness, he stops remembering social boundaries and tugs WX-78 along by their wrist into another brief jog.
"I pissed it off," he harshly whispers, letting their wrist go, "we have to hurry." He continues straight, only hoping WX-78 trails him as quickly as he's going. Behind them, the tallbird warbles menacingly. Its quick footsteps trail behind them audibly kicking up some sandy soil.
WX-78 swiftly follows, grateful that they will not seem odd for running. They took out a week's worth of rage onto the spider queen, and they have no interest in another brutal duel. They continue to jog, and Wilson thrusts his torch in front of him to double check for enemies. When he hears the pitter-patter of their footsteps soften from dense soil to dew-damp grass, his shoulders loosen in relief.
"Okay, we're in the clear," he says, sighing. During this, his torch burns out, and he flinches, pedaling back to where WX-78 is to stay in their headlamp light while he makes a new one. He also pulls his compass out to make sure they're heading in the right direction once he gets the light situated in a way that he can look at it.
"HOW MUCH FARTHER?" They ask, standing guarded and tired.
"Er.. We've got a solid twenty minutes of walking through this birch forest, then about five through a savanna filled with beefalo—you'll smell them before you see them—and then another five minute walk to the camp from there."
"SO THIRTY MINUTES," they say. "MEANING WE ARE HALFWAY THROUGH."
"...Yes."
They continue to walk for some time, and at one point Wilson is so distracted by looking at his compass that he nearly barrels headfirst into a birch tree. He shoulder checks it instead, and he shouts in surprise. Some of the leaves from it fall onto his head, and he turns away from WX-78 in embarrassment and clears his throat.
The silence isn't so bad, suddenly.
WX-78 barks a taunting laugh from behind him. "THAT SKULL OF YOURS SEEMS TO BE DENSER THAN THE TREE," they say, and he can feel their amusement through their monotone voice.
Wilson hasn't heard them laugh before, but because it's directed at him, it doesn't seem like something he should consider to be a good thing. His face burns with embarrassment, and he sighs harshly.
"Oh yeah? If you're so—" he starts, cutting himself off. He bites his lip and considers the many foul things he'd like to say, but in the end he lets out a short, snippy, "Nevermind," hissing through gritted teeth.
They continue to walk, Wilson relying on the compass less as they approach the savanna. And after a few moments of silent walking, WX-78 breaks the silence by using one singular syllable to express the only emotion other than anger that they can feel: disgust.
"EW." It seems like Wilson was right with the Beefalo comment, as they cannot hear any snoring or stirring, and yet they can smell the beefalo.
Wilson glances back at them, saying nothing as they navigate through the savanna. When they approach the beefalo, Wilson takes a sharp left. Soon enough, they're surrounded by a layout of familiar trees, or at least ones familiar to Wilson, who's been living at this particular campsite for... well, he's lost track of how long, but the tree with the knobby base and that one tree with half the leaves missing tells him they're close to the campsite by this point.
WX-78, in passing the beefalo, unknowingly takes a souvenir on the bottom of their boot. After realizing this, they start to drag their boot with each step, and hope it goes away quickly. As they continue the walk, approaching the camp quickly, Wilson turns his head at the lingering smell. He doesn't say anything.
"You should know where you are now," is all he says before increasing his pace towards the front gate. It may come off as brash, but he's actually just so tired that he's unsure of whether or not he'll make it to his tent without passing out or not.
"I KNOW WHERE I AM, FLESHLING," they reply back. If not for their exhaustion, there would be more fire to their words. The both of them reach the gate soon enough, and Wickerbottom, who never sleeps, sits on a stump by the fire, as she usually does at night, reading one of her books. She greets them with a curt nod and a head tilt, asking silently for an explanation.
They turn to Wilson, tired, before turning back. "I GOT LOST AND ENDED UP FINDING THE SCIENCE FLESHLING FIGHTING FOR HIS LIFE."
"I was—" he starts, but then concedes. "Yes, that about sums it up."
Wickerbottom shakes her head. "Lucky you then, dear. You might want to get settled soon. The sun is due to come up in about five hours."
Wilson grumbles to himself, knowing that he'll have to haul his backpack filled with smelly organs and glands into the tent and how Maxwell will complain about it. He makes his way over to his tent, drops his backpack by the entrance, and slinks in, resisting the urge to flop down on the beefalo-woolen blankets. He crawls in and hits the pillow, and is instantly struggling to stay awake long enough to think about the night's events.
WX-78 says nothing, quietly walking towards the tent they unfortunately share with a fleshling. Getting quickly and quietly settled, they shut down for the night. They'll have a late morning and a new visual receptor to fix, but for now, they are going to take some well-earned rest.