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It happens on one of the slower days in the lab, where there isn't as much to do.
Angelique sees it while shuffling some some papers. A grant application here, a patent inquiry there, the water and electricity bills, and in between them all, a scuttling spider.
At first, she doesn't realize what it is. In a meager effort to protect her, her brain sees it as a little dot with spindly legs tangled over each other. And then her deductive reasoning catches up with her and she realizes it is, indeed, a spider. Inside the lab. On her desk. With a legspan the width of her palm.
Okay. Okay. Merde.
She doesn't yell, but her breath does catch in her throat loud enough that Howard's neck snaps towards her and Phillip twists his back to look at her while holding a bucket of fish out of the window to feed Nessie.
"Angelique?" Howard calls from his desk. He's already set his hands on his wheelchair to roll it back out. "Was that a shriek? Did something occur?"
"No," says Angelique, keeping an eye on it. It skitters too damn fast. She keeps her voice steady and feels around for something solid that won't shatter, not once lifting her gaze. Her proper desk manner rewards her with nothing of that sort. "Just another high bill."
"Oh, we'll pool funds together!" Howard says, though really it means mostly just Angelique and Phillip for now until his savings can catch up to their's. (Not that they mind when Howard's the reason they're both still around at all.)
Phillip doesn't let it go quite as easily. "What's the bill this time? The electricity again?" Nessie coos at him, and he gives her a pat on the head before starting to feed her the fish one-by-one. He used to do that back on the island too, Angelique remembers. She's fairly sure that's how they met-
No. The spider. Focus. Why's it so spindly? Why does it need to be that spindly?
"No, Ness," Angelique hears Phillip say over another coo. "One at a time, stop sticking your head in the bucket! You'll get indigestion again!"
"The bill's nothing too bad," insists Angelique, her hand finally landing on a sturdy paperweight. It'll be quick. She can just lie and say she that she isn't used to her prosthetic yet - dropping things is part of the learning curve. Nevermind that she's grabbed the paperweight with her real hand instead.
"You sure, Ang- Ack! Nessie! Stop that! Eugh!"
Angelique makes the terrible mistake of looking back at Phillip's cry. Nessie, in the spirit of sharing, is trying to feed Phillip a half-eaten fish. Unfortunately, her method of feeding means pushing the half-eaten thing against Phillip's face, slobber and all, while he desperately clings onto the ladder and tries not to fall. One hand clutches a rung, while the other grabs the bucket. "How- Howard! Help me out here! The ladder! Grab the damn ladder! Or the bucket, or- grab a damn thing!"
Howard rolls himself out from his desk near-immediately.
"Phil! Nessie, stop being a pill!"
Angelique nearly goes to help, but the weight in her hand reminds her of the threat at hand, and her horrible mistake of looking back sinks in. Quickly, she turns to the desk, and sees-
Nothing. The spider is gone. That- that can't be right. Did it skitter under some papers? Did she just imagine it? Maybe she did, and-
SCHLAP!
Angelique slaps the moving patch of brown in the corner of her eye with her prosthetic.
The realization hits with a sudden bloom of nausea in her gut.
Oh. Ough. She can't feel it on her prosthetic palm, but she wants to hurl at the sight. Through the slime, she can see crushed splotch of legs distorted further by the gelatinous green.
Okay. Okay. It's dead. She can just wipe it off against some scrap of paper or other and just pretend this never happened. Easy. Like that electricity bill. She- she'll memorize it. She's good at memorizing. And also good at forgetting, which she'll prove by wiping the spider off and-
.... It's not coming off. Angelique scrapes her hand against the edge of the desk. It does nothing. The image of the spider reminds, with even the same distortion. As though the image itself remains preserved.
A harrowing thought strikes Angelique. Every self-preservative instinct of her body begs her not to entertain it. And yet, she doesn't listen.
She turns over her hand, already knowing she won't see the spider on top of it.
The spider remains preserved in death, tucked beneath the slime of Angelique's palm like amber.
Angelique screams.
She can hear a bucket clatter to the ground and startled cry when Phillip falls off the ladder, and then another clatter when Howard's wheelchair falls backwards onto the floor with both of them on it.
There's no room to care about that. Not when there's a spider, which means there's more than one. Which means that any moment now they're going to swarm out from under the cladding, enveloping everyone and everything in the lab, because she just had to scream at the smallest brush with one and tell the rest that she's here. She shrieks again and struggles against the grip one has on her real arm, and it screeches, ready to sink its teeth in and rip-
"Angelique!"
Howard's shout brings her back to reality. He gazes up at her with concern from where he's sat in front, hair scuffed from his fall. He strains to lean forward out of the chair, fists clinging wrinkles into her labcoat lapels.
"... H- Howard?" she rasps. Right. He's here. He saved her the first time. Which means it'll be okay this time too.
"And Phillip," he adds, tilting his head to her left.
"Phillip?"
"I'm here too," Phillip seethes between his teeth with visible strain. From falling off the ladder, no doubt. Though when Angelique turns to see him let his grip on her arm go, her eyes trail down to the solid paperweight by his boot. He follows her mortified gaze and clears his throat. "I'll manage," he says, with the sound of someone who clearly won't. "What- what happened?"
It's humiliating. She can't possibly admit this. She's a grown woman. She runs this lab. For God's sake, these are her employees.
But the way Howard looks at her with such understanding sympathy, the way he's already seen her at her lowest, the way that she's only still here because he's seen her at her lowest-
Well, she has to admit it at this point. He'll understand, even if Phillip doesn't, because neither she or Phillip are yet ready to talk to each other about what Morose had done to each of them on that Godforsaken island.
"I saw a spider."
She feels like she's five again, crying to her father that a boy at school had put a spider in her hair.
"A spider?" echoes Phillip, clearly trying very hard not to let the paperweight and fall off of the ladder bleed into his tone. To his credit, he catches on quick to correct it after Howard lightly kicks him in the shin with his good leg, and fixes Angelique a much more sympathetic look.
"A spider," echoes Howard, immediately much kinder. "On your desk?"
"It was on my desk," Angelique admits. "I... squashed it."
"And where's it now? I don't see it around."
Angelique diverts her gaze towards Nessie's window as a distraction while she turns her hand over. Nessie herself is nowhere to be seen, probably tucked away in her nest by the docks to hide after the chaos. It must have stressed her out, because she hasn't even poked her head in to grab the spilt fish off the floor.
"Oh!" exclaims Howard all of a sudden.
"Oh?" asks Phillip.
"It's not a spider at all!" Howard sounds excited, almost. Like greeting an old friend. He turns Angelique's green palm over in his hand to show Phillip, who himself cringes at the sight. (Thankfully, Phillip has the sense not to ask if it died from the initial blow or drowning inside her hand.)
"That's a harvestman!" Howard exclaims, moving her hand back and forth to magnify the view. "I remember them! My mother and I used to find them all the time! Though in old fruit, never in slime."
"I don't care what it is, Howard," bemoans Angelique, trying not to stare at it. "Just get it out. Please."
"Of course! I'll give you some recourse," he says gently. She can't feel him digging into her palm, nor how much care or lack thereof he does it with. She finds herself squeezing Phillip's hand with her free one, and the warmth when he pats it with his other hand.
"Aaaand... there! You can look now, Angie. There's nothing left to see."
True to his word, it's gone. There's a brown smudge on his lab coat she's going to pretend is from normal labwork. Her hand, a bit mangled, will mold itself back into shape in a few minutes, but she has more pressing matters to ask about.
"... Do they infest?" She's not an entomologist. Neither is Howard, but he has such enthusiam for the harvestman that she could easily mistake him for one.
"Not in places like these!" Howard says knowledgeably. "They prefer fruit, and to cluster on trees. No bite to them either, not like a spider. It must've wandered into the lab, rather be here than some summer-heated concrete slab."
"Oh." Well, that does help. Somewhat. Angelique thinks she'll be seeing harvestmen in her sleep anyway. "Thank you, Howard." It has more weight to it than just for the spider in the lab.
Howard must recognize it too, because his smile becomes more solemn.
"Of course, Angie. And... thank you. From me too."
With a nod, he wheels himself back to his desk as though nothing different has happened. Whatever he was working on earlier, he must have been incredibly into, because he's already back to scribbling down notes loud enough that it must leave pencil grooves in his desk.
"Angelique."
She realizes she's still grasping onto Phillip's hand, and awkwardly shakes it off.
"Ah! Sorry, Phillip."
"No, it's okay. But..." He scratches at his beard, appearing unsure. "Angelique, do you... Do you ever want to talk about what happened on the island?"
"Do you?"
"... No."
"Then, I'm fine, Phillip. Really," she insists. God knows he's not going to admit anything. It isn't fair for her to bare her soul for him if he's not going to bare his.
And that's okay. She's fine with that. He's fine with it too, if his polite nod before he gets to work cleaning up spilt fish means anything. Besides, there's nothing for either of them to bare. The Island happened: it's over, and there's nothing to do but focus on the present.
It's true: Angelique is fine. She's perfectly fine. She's fine enough to see Howard and Phillip off for the weekend at closing time. She's fine enough to give Nessie a good apologetic scratch under the chin before the six-legged beast tucks her head into the fur on her back like a swan and goes to sleep.
She's fine enough to go back into the lab, and lock the door behind her in case Howard or Phillip have forgotten something and need to come back.
She's fine enough to sit at her desk, clear her important papers aside, bury her face in her hands, and cry.