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Dew glimmers, iridescent, holding the entire world upside-down in its tiny, tense sphere where it rests along the delicate line of a spiderweb.
At least, that’s what Shiro would have seen if he’d noticed it stretched across the path.
He doesn’t. He walks straight into the strand rendered invisible by his angle and the lighting. It clings to the skin of his cheek and his neck, the itchy, sticky sensation making his shoulders rise. He stops to bat at it in the middle of the trail, dragging at his face and trying to clear his skin of that horrible crawling feeling.
Shiro remembers reading somewhere that spiderweb is stronger than steel. He isn’t sure that’s anything more than one of those vaguely true factoids that get passed around on the internet because no one has ever bothered to verify them, but he would almost believe it, here, looking around at the other silken strands hung across the path like Christmas decorations, shining silver with each dot of vibrant water condensed along their fragile lengths. He wonders how many strands of spiderweb it would take to bear his weight, and then promptly decides he’d rather not know.
With the web finally off, Shiro ducks under other strands, careful to miss them with his pack. Even if they’re in his way, there’s no reason to bring the whole web down. Something spent a great deal of time and energy building that, and besides, there’s no telling where their inhabitants might be lurking. Bringing down the web might mean inviting a spider into his hair or clothes, and Shiro really would prefer not to do that.
Shiro would consider his fear of spiders to be healthy. They have too many legs with too many joints that move in eerie, alien, too-coordinated ways like a doll in a horror movie. There’s a reason the image of a spider with a fly caught in its web is considered menacing. Nothing should have that many eyes or fangs like those. The idea that one could be on you at any time, just waiting for you to glance down and see it scuttling over your bare skin, is something Shiro is fully cognizant of. And he’s been around Japan long enough to have a solid knowledge of just how large they can get. The memory of a particular run-in on Okinawa still makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
In comparison, here further north, it’s unlikely that Shiro will run into anything that fills him with as much dread as the sight of that eight-limbed, furred, hand-sized slowly-stalking creature. And yet he’s come across a fair number of large arachnids sitting in wait at the center of their fine and detailed creations, their bulbous abdomens swinging back and forth as their webs sway in the breeze. Especially here in the mountains, where the trees grow thick and full-leaved and close together, where the underbrush is undisturbed by humans, it’s not unusual to see them strung up among branches, busy at their work, spinning, spinning, spinning.
Shiro tries to shift his thoughts away. Even the idea of spiders always gives him that unbearable sensation that something has attached itself to his skin, that something is sliding around just underneath the surface of his epidermis, that thousands of pinprick legs are dancing over him at once. But he knows, realistically, barring the occasional redback, spiders can’t actually hurt him. Even if they do land on his skin, a thought that makes his shoulders tense, no harm would ever come of it except possibly to his peace of mind. He’s safe. His fears are irrational. He raises his prosthetic to rub at his flesh arm and redirects his attention to the kilometers he still has to go before he makes camp tonight.
Summer has finally settled itself, humid and oppressive, over Kyoto Prefecture. The air is dense, even up here in the mountains. Somehow, it always seems like it should be cooler where there are less people. That the throngs waiting for the subway contribute to the weather, that the heat that radiates off the bodies of the salarymen and the office ladies as they click-clack down the sidewalk in waves are the origin of the sweltering air, and that moving away from them should make it more bearable. But by that logic, it should be frigid out here. Shiro isn’t sure that he’s seen another human being all day today, or yesterday, even.
The upside to this is that there’s no one here to tell him where he can and can’t go. The downside, of course, is that there’s no one around to gently remove the spiders from his surroundings. Shiro sighs.
From the distance comes the faint sound of running water. With the sun beginning to bear down on the day, it seems like a good time to stop and eat. A stream would not only provide an excellent backdrop and some much-needed relaxation for his feet, but while he’s eating he can boil some water and refill his canteen.
It’s as he’s listening for that water that he thinks he hears something else.
There’s just a rustle in the underbrush. There’s just a shifting of leaves on vines and ferns and branches. There’s just a stick snapping.
From the sound of it, it’s big enough to be a bear, but the jingle of the bear bell attached to Shiro’s pack should be enough to keep a respectful distance between them. This sound is close, close enough that when Shiro turns, startled, towards the source of the sound, he expects to see its creator there, just off the side of the path. But he’s only met with the lush, cheerful green of unimpeded growth, spilling onto the trail.
Maybe just some deer then, hunkering down amid the ferns. Maybe the wind pushing severed branches around, or the shifting of eroded earth. It’s probably nothing.
Shiro listens for the water again. It’s somewhere off to his right, which means he’ll have to leave the path, but from the sound of it, it’s not very far. The undergrowth isn’t quite as thick in patches here, and he thinks he’ll be able to pick his way through it. His long pants and high socks have already been doused in bug repellent, so he’s not afraid of ticks. What he is afraid of, he realizes as he takes the first tentative steps into the greenery, is one of the large spiders in their webs above dropping down onto his shoulder. The idea fills him with dread, but he refuses to let his illogical anxieties stop him. Leaving a bright trail marker on the tree beside where he left the path, Shiro continues in.
He’s about eight or nine paces in when he hears a rustling again. It’s definitely behind him, and it’s strangely irregular against the light push of the breeze. It’s a living thing, absolutely. It must be a large one, because Shiro can’t imagine a squirrel or a bird making that much of a ruckus. But when Shiro turns, once again he sees nothing.
In fact, he sees worse than nothing. He sees nothing where something should be. His orange trail marker is noticeably missing from the tree he attached it to.
The sound was probably made by it falling. He must not have attached it well enough. Or maybe a deer wandered by and knocked it down. Regardless, he fishes a second one out and attaches it to the closest tree here, because at least from this point he can still see the path and will be able to find his way back on his return.
He returns to his search for running water, stepping over thickets of thorns and brambles, not thinking anything of it. At least not until there’s a shuffle-rustle-crackle from behind him once again. He spins abruptly. But there’s nothing. Absolutely nothing but the thick trunks of old trees and the leafy vines laced up their sides, the spread of ferns and the bright green bursts of saplings, the deep shadows cast by the thick canopy above. Even his second orange trail marker, bright against the greens and browns of the forest, has disappeared.
Frowning to himself, Shiro begins to backtrack towards the spot where the marker fell, concerned that if he goes any farther without a guide, he’ll lose the path. But when he reaches it, he can’t find the marker among the turned-up leaf mold or the brush, and when he looks up, he can’t see the path anymore, either.
With an anxious twinge, Shiro begins to inch in the direction that he came from, but strangely, the sound of running water seems to be getting louder. He wonders if somehow he got twisted around in the mere moments he was without the trail markers, and which direction would be best to go in to reach the trail again. He’s well-aware of the dangers of being in the forest on his own without a path. He continues forward, looking around for any sign of where he might be, but he finds nothing but the swaying low-hanging boughs of trees.
“Hey,” calls a voice in Japanese.
Shiro starts. He wasn’t expecting to find anyone else out here, but it looks as though he’s stumbled across another hiker. He has conflicting feelings of irritation and relief; on one hand, he fears that this encounter could soon turn into a chatty timesink, but on the other, the woods are spacious and isolated, and while the feeling that you’re completely alone for kilometers in any direction is freeing, it’s also worrisome. Maybe they can help him get back to the trail.
“Hello,” he calls back. He gazes between the dark trunks of the trees and tries to catch more than a glimpse of the figure between the leaves. The man appears to be standing still, possibly near the water that Shiro can hear roaring in his ears.
“It’s hot, isn’t it?” the man says, predictably. His voice is rough, quiet, flint and whetstone, like it’s been a little while since he’s used it. Shiro can relate. The only time he’s spoken up here was when trying to coax a squirrel down from its high branch so he could snap a picture of it.
“It is,” Shiro agrees, stepping closer out of curiosity. The sound of running water grows louder.
The man neither moves towards him nor away. He’s no more than a silhouette against the leaves right now, features indiscernible.
“Can you help me?” the man asks.
“Yes, of course,” Shiro says quickly, trying to draw closer. “What’s wrong?”
Shiro feels a leaf bush against his left arm. Peering between the trees at the man, he raises his prosthetic to brush it away. The person beyond this grove of trees still hasn’t made a move either towards or away from him, but Shiro can now make out more of his appearance: dark, wild hair, fair skin, a lean build.
Whatever is brushing against his arm is stubborn. He tries to brush it away again, swatting at it like he would a mosquito or fly. But he finds that it holds fast, tugging at his clothes. He pushes past a throng of bushes and expects the feeling to subside, but it doesn’t. However, now he can clearly see the man.
He’s not much younger than Shiro, judging from his soft, clear skin and his angular features. His hair looks about as good as anyone’s out here this deep in these woods could be expected to look, though Shiro can tell from here that it’s wispy and soft. He’s dressed in a plain black cotton t-shirt, long-sleeved, torn and wrinkled and muddied in places. But most noticeably, his face, the curve of his cheekbones and the line of his jaw and the turn of his nose and the shape of his eyes, is heartrendingly beautiful. Shiro feels his heart trip, and quiets it. It’s not the time.
The man appears as though he’s crouched on the ground, or kneeled in the underbrush. Shiro can’t make out his lower half because of the tangle of briars and barbs that separate them, but he imagines that, standing, the man would be shorter than him. But then again, most people are.
“Are you hurt?” Shiro asks, concerned.
The man doesn’t answer the question right away, instead turning his intense, dark eyes, ringed with eyelashes like thick ferns, on Shiro. Something in the center of Shiro’s stomach hollows out. He gets the intense, sudden urge to turn and run, but he quickly dismisses it as his American paranoia of strangers. This man needs his help, and there’s no reason to feel like he’s a prey animal, wide-eyed and over-alert between these trees.
“Come closer,” the man beckons.
Shiro tries with a step forward, but something tugs at his arm. It’s that feeling again, the brush against him of a leaf or a branch, but this time insistent, gripping. His heart rate jumps at the contact, and Shiro glances down.
A silvery, gossamer fiber, as thick around as Shiro’s thumb, clings fast to his bicep.
Shocked, he stumbles back a step.
His back meets something, a number of somethings, sticky and slender and giving but when he tries to regain his balance, tries to lean forward away from it, he finds himself securely and firmly held. He tries to rip his arms away from it. He kicks with his feet. But every movement brings him into contact with more of what he sees now is an impossibly iridescent thread or rope. It shines with an obvious slickness, and with every motion he makes, every struggle, it adheres to him more strongly, in more places, until his limbs, his body, his pack and his torso and his hands and his feet are all ensnared.
Adrenaline floods his veins. He begins to hyperventilate. The strands feel uncomfortable on his skin, itchy, holding him firm, and no matter how much he shakes and stomps, it clings.
There’s a noise, and suddenly, Shiro remembers the man.
He freezes, and looks up, and meets the dark, glossy eyes of the stranger in the undergrowth.
The man rises to his feet.
To his eight overlong, spindly feet.
Shiro almost retches, almost blacks out, feels his mouth and throat go completely dry all at once. The thing that stands before him, because it’s not a man, or a human one at least, is the possessor of an enormous spider body from the waist down. Smooth fair skin turns to thick black exoskeleton, and an oblong abdomen stretches out behind him, from which sprouts eight long, sectioned, red-banded legs. His spider body is covered in fine, thin hairs, and Shiro sees claws at the end of his legs as he picks them up to draw closer.
And here is where everything, which Shiro thought was already at its most terrible, gets worse. Because watching the way this monster moves makes every muscle in his body clench tight with a marrow-deep dread. It has all the creeping unnaturalness of a spider’s movements, magnified by a million just from the sheer size of the creature’s legs and body.
When Shiro can’t untangle himself, he tries to shrink away from the monster as he draws closer until he’s barely an arm’s length away. He seems unaware of Shiros’s terror or his struggles, his face blank, his pace unhurried and confident. He pauses for a second, regarding Shiro, the dappled sunlight that pierces the canopy illuminating the red marks on his black body and the inhuman joints of his legs, before jerking into motion again.
He circles around Shiro’s back, looping to the front again, and then continuing in the same direction, and Shiro realizes he’s spinning more silk. As he stalks around, each of his eight legs moving in eerie concert, Shiro feels the fibers around him grow tighter, thicker. He struggles, grunts, but it’s no use. He opens his mouth and thinks to shout but finds his lungs failing him. The silk constricts around him, worse and worse with every turn.
Finally, all he can think of is addressing the man. If he is a man. But he spoke to Shiro, he used human words and human methods to trap him here. He must be at least capable of some kind of communication.
Shiro opens his dry, raw mouth.
“Please,” he chokes out, desperate. “Please. Don’t.”
The creature stops its circling. He looks at Shiro with his head cocked to the side, as though he had also been unaware that they were capable of communication. From here, Shiro can see how his eyes are almost fully black, with no sclera showing around the edges. Just a beady, gleaming obsidian. His hair, dark like shadows in the undergrowth, falls in uneven locks around his shoulders, made up of strands as silken as the web Shiro has found himself caught in.
“I forgot,” he says finally, in that same rough, low voice, “how much humans like to talk.”
Then, without any further words, without any warning, or any sort of preamble, the creature leans in close to Shiro’s face. He examines Shiro for a long moment, blinking those enormous glossy black eyes at him. And then, he bows his head and bites Shiro squarely on the side of his neck.
Shiro cries out in pain. It stings, more than it should. He knows it’s broken skin by the way that his neck throbs at the point of their contact.
The world goes double, the trunk of every tree overlaid with a mirror image of itself. Spider legs, longer than Shiro is tall, kaleidoscope out in his peripherals. As the creature draws away a step, the throbbing in Shiro’s neck continues, but now he can no longer keep his head held up, or feel his toes, or move his hand.
This is how I die , Shiro thinks. A spider bite.
He has a brief moment where he wonders if there will even be a corpse to find this deep out in the woods before his thoughts dissolve into nonsensical circles and he succumbs to the black that’s filling in his consciousness.
When Shiro awakes, his throat is raw, his neck still throbs, and his body can’t move, but he’s alive.
At least he assumes he is. He’s in pain, so he must be.
At first, he can only hear. There’s running water, there’s the breeze in the trees. There’s something large skittering. The sound makes each of Shiro’s vertebrae feel unaligned, each of his joints wants to forcibly depart his body. His skin pulses everywhere with a million tiny itches.
Slowly, sight begins to filter in like fog evaporating under the sun. At first, just light and shadows, dancing, flickering, sunlight through treetops. Eventually, it resolves itself into shapes and colors. The dusty brown of well-trodden ground. The craggy, shadowed gray of rock. The walls of a shallow cave cup around him, and beyond its mouth he can make out the brown and green mess of the world beyond.
He’s still immobilized, his arms pinned to his sides, his legs stuck together. He can wriggle his fingers, but any further motion is stopped by an elastic force. When he looks down he realizes why: he’s now wrapped in crisscrossing strands of silk, forming a complete harness all over his body. His feet hover inches above the floor, the webbing connecting him to the ceiling. When a slight breeze passes through the cave, he sways, and feels nauseous.
He doesn’t see his captor, but the sound of too many footsteps just outside of the cave persists. He thinks of it again, the thing that must have strung him up like this, and feels his stomach roil. He thinks of the slender, tapered, sectioned legs, a rounded, ovoid abdomen, and the upper body of a beautiful young man. He thinks he might vomit.
He isn’t sure how long he hangs there, feeling nauseous, but it isn’t very long before that very creature makes its appearance. First, as thin, overlong legs carrying it towards the cave mouth, and then the human torso, now shirtless, chin high. Shiro represses a body-quaking shiver at the sight of it, the way his legs crawl over the ground, so foreign and deeply disturbing.
“You’re awake,” the creature says, more to himself than to Shiro, drawing closer.
His legs are banded, alternating black and red, coming down to narrow points as they reach the ground, and Shiro can’t take his eyes off of them. The hairs on them are light and fine.
“I’m not going to eat you yet,” he says. “I just had a deer a day or two ago but humans don’t come this way often. I’ll save you for when I’m hungry.”
Shiro tries to stifle the noise he makes inside his chest, but he’s not sure he’s successful. The creature eyes him, coming to a stop just in front of him, and looks into his face, almost warily. He raises his human arm to rub at his shoulder, and following its motion, Shiro notices for the first time a ropy, thick scar scored over the skin there.
“You have to stay up there, though,” he says.
The spider goes to turn away, his legs drawing up in a way that makes Shiro’s entire body seize, but he reaches deep inside himself for the dregs of his self-preservation.
“Hey,” he says, and his voice is scratchy, weak. He tries again, more steadily. “Hey.”
When he turns back to look at him, the creature’s eyes have widened in surprise.
Shiro tries to speak politely. He might be at the complete mercy of a horrifying monster who has plans to devour him, but that’s all the more reason to treat him with respect. He clears his throat and tries to make his case.
“Please don’t eat me,” he says. “I need to get back home. My co-workers are waiting for me.”
The creature is quiet for a moment, but he turns away quickly, his hair casting his face in shadow and hiding his expression from Shiro. He begins to use his long legs, bent and gathered in strange places, to pace towards the mouth of the cave.
“Why should I let you go?” he says, just before exiting the cave without a backwards glance.
Shiro considers calling after him, but he needs a moment to breathe without having to see an enormous spider before him. Shiro’s generally the kind of person who will trap spiders in his home under cups and then carefully, albeit nervously, let them out safely into the garden. If only the spiders would do the same for him.
The monster doesn’t come back for some time, though without any access to his limbs, Shiro’s completely loses track of what time is. What he does know is that he returns on stilt-like legs as the sunlight bares down harsh and warm outside the mouth of the cave, and he looks absolutely prepared to completely ignore Shiro, but Shiro has already learned he’s not going to get out of here by wiggling futilely, and he’s definitely not getting out of here by merely sitting here and waiting to be eaten. That leaves him one last option.
“Do you have a name?” Shiro asks.
The look the creature gives him is dark, all lowered eyebrows and distrust. Shiro thinks for a moment, under the weight and frosted heat of this gaze, that he won’t get an answer.
“I’m Shirogane Takashi,” he tries, pushing with all his strength past the panicked beating of his heart. “Everyone calls me Shiro.”
There’s no change in the creature’s expression, and he hasn’t moved from where he stopped yet. His stillness, in fact, is almost unnatural. He’s a predator used to lying in wait.
“You can call me Shiro, too,” Shiro says.
At this, one of the creature’s feet rises a fraction of an inch off the floor. It’s one on his left, second from the back, and it’s such a subtle movement that Shiro wouldn’t have noticed except that the creature wasn’t otherwise moving at all.
“What about you?” Shiro tries one more time.
No words. No movement. No reaction.
And then, suddenly, with short, rapid motions of all his legs, the monster spins around and darts for the mouth of the cave as though being pursued.
But then the creature suddenly halts at the mouth of the cave. He pauses for a beat, and then, over his shoulder, he spits out a strangely-accented single syllable that begins with a “k” and ends in a fricative. It doesn’t sound like any Japanese Shiro knows, except maybe the English loan word for kiss . Then, he launches forward again, and is gone.
Shiro works the word over in his mouth again and again, since with his hands bound and his body suspended, it’s the only thing he has to focus on. But even without that, he thinks he would anyway, determined to work out what the monster said. This sort of information might be the key to saving his life. The creature is capable of reasoning and speech. There’s no reason that he shouldn’t be capable of mercy and empathy as well.
At least that’s what Shiro tells himself as he whispers “ kiss, kiss ” to himself over and over, hanging uncomfortably in the back of a cave, his wrists bound to his lower back and his ankles pressed together.
“ Kiss ,” he says. “ Kiiiisu. Kiiiiiiiis. K— ”
He stops and blinks at the small shaft of sunlight that filters through the rustling trees outside and lands in the mouth of the cave.
“ Keith ,” he says. “Keith!”
It’s weird, Shiro thinks. It’s a weird name for a terrifying monster living alone in the mountains around Kyoto. But it is a name, one he can use, and suddenly, his predator, his companion, seems a lot more human.
Shiro dozes a bit under the dregs of the poison and his discomfort, upright and arms cramping, and when he awakes again, the sunlight is slanting golden and green into the mouth of the cave, nearly lapping at the bound toes of Shiro’s boots. The creature is sitting at the entrance with his eight legs neatly folded around him. He’s occupied, Shiro can see, with a paperback in his hands that looks too familiar. He must have fished it out of Shiro’s pack when Shiro was out. He appears to be well-immersed.
Despite the situation, Shiro musters up a small bit of embarrassment. The book is a gay romance novel he only felt comfortable bringing along because he thought no one else would be out here.
It takes several long moments of Shiro wriggling in ever-fruitless attempts to escape before Keith notices he’s awake. He looks over his shoulder, makes eye contact, and then rises smoothly to his feet with a quiet, “ Oh. ”
Shiro watches, somewhat fearfully, as Keith scuttles closer, leaving the paperback in the dirt behind him. What he does bring, instead, is Shiro’s water bottle, which he uncaps as he draws closer.
“I don’t want you dying too soon on me and rotting,” Keith tells him, and comes so close to Shiro that he can see all the individual slender hairs on his legs.
Then Shiro is distracted by the lip of the water bottle, filled to the brim now, brandished at his face. Shiro can only assume that the water came from the river, and he doesn’t know if it’s safe to drink or not, but he figures he’s going to die anyway and his throat feels like the dusty floor of this cave. He opens his mouth and allows Keith to tip the contents of the bottle inside.
Some of it runs down his chin, and he splutters and coughs around the first mouthful, but after a moment, Keith fixes the angle and Shiro swallows several times before turning his head away. Keith pulls the bottle back.
“Thank you, Keith,” Shiro says, looking into his black eyes rather than at the peaks of his strangely bent legs.
Eyes that, following Shiro’s statement, widen.
“You speak English,” Keith says. And then in clean, unaccented English, “Are you American?”
Startled by the familiar, comfortable language, a rarity even in his usual daily life here, Shiro’s eyes widen in turn. The easy pronunciation of Keith’s very English name must have tipped him off, but that’s only the smallest of Shiro’s multitude of questions right now.
“Yes,” he replies, matching Keith’s English, surprised into simple truthfulness. “How do you…?” He pauses, not knowing what to ask first. “You speak English too?”
The eight legs shuffle as Keith half-turns, facing away from Shiro as though it’ll protect him from Shiro’s questioning. Even when he’s finished moving the ends of his feet lift and lower restlessly in the dirt.
“My dad was American,” he says.
“What?” Shiro blurts, caught off-guard, trying to puzzle out how a person with the body of a spider might get from America to Japan without appearing on the front page of every newspaper of every country in between.
“He was human,” Keith says simply, as if that’s supposed to be an explanation and not the impetus for a million more questions.
The loudest of which, in Shiro’s head right now, is: A human can make this?
He figures that could be rude, though. He isn’t sure which of the thousands of possible directions he wants to take the conversation from here, but his body makes the choice for him by reminding him that there’s something he can’t possibly ignore for any longer.
“Keith,” Shiro says uncomfortably.
Keith looks up, eyes already narrowed in suspicion. Shiro knows he won’t like what’s coming next.
“I have to pee.”
The stare that Keith gives him is long and penetrating, and there’s enough pressure on Shiro’s bladder now that he wishes Keith would get over whatever thoughts are warring in his head. Shiro doesn’t care if he’s going to get eaten at the end of this. He has to go now. That’s his only priority at this point, and he’d rather not wet himself, even in front of a monster who plans to make him his next meal.
“Please,” Shiro says, considering reverting to Japanese for all the respectful ways he could beg.
Keith sighs quietly.
“Fine,” he says, and moves somewhere behind Shiro.
Next thing Shiro knows, his bound mass is falling, but before he hits the floor, he’s caught and lowered gently to the ground. He lies there, immobile, as Keith looms over him, the horrifying legs close enough that a full-body shiver wracks through Shiro. There’s a knife in Keith’s hand, one which he then uses to hack at the strands of web that keep his limbs pressed together, dangerously close to Shiro’s skin.
Shiro only feels a little terrified, and when it’s over he congratulates himself on not wetting his pants right then and there.
Once freed, Keith helps Shiro to his feet. The skin of his hand is soft, but he retracts his touch as soon as Shiro is centered again on his stiff, wobbly legs. Shiro takes a moment to stretch and survey his options. But he decides his bladder is currently too full for him to stage a truly effective escape attempt, and he doesn’t know what lies beyond the mouth of this cave. Without rations, a map, or the satellite phone from his bag, he won’t make it far on his own, and he doesn’t want to squander the small goodwill he’s garnered so far from his captor.
As soon as he’s done stretching, anyway, Keith spins a line of silk that he attaches to Shiro’s arm, and then another to his ankle, like shackles. He lets a good amount of give fall between them before nodding to the mouth of the cave.
“I have lots of webs out there,” he says. “Don’t wander too far. I’ll catch you.”
Shiro doesn’t doubt that he will, and when he steps out into the twilight, he sees that Keith’s statement is true, if not severely understated. “Lots of webs” hardly begins to cover the sight that meets Shiro when he emerges from the cave and blinks in the sunlight. In every direction, white web stretches like pulled cotton candy, a silvery barrier hung in near-perfect tessellations. The image strikes a feeling deep into him: equal parts terror and amazement, the knowledge that he’s beholding some sort of incredible creation that few humans will ever see, coupled with the knowledge that this is the thing standing between him and freedom. Him and his life.
As soon as he’s done marveling at the way the sun glints off the web and makes it gleam, he walks as far from the cave as his tethers will allow him without coming into contact with the barrier of webbing, and relieves himself on the rock of the mountainside.
When Shiro returns to the cave, Keith looks almost surprised to see him. It’s probably the proper reaction. If Shiro had more confidence in an escape route, he would have tried for it. But those towering walls of web left him feeling hesitant at best.
“I was wondering,” Shiro says as he watches Keith draw in the strands of silk between them, obviously readying himself to bind Shiro again, “is there a less constricting way of keeping me prisoner? I could always just give you my word that I won’t try to run.”
Of course, that’s probably not true, but even trapped here with no escape, Shiro thinks he’d rather at least spend the last of his days in relative comfort rather than hanging from the roof of a cave.
Keith looks at him wordlessly, examining him, and Shiro feels nearly crushed under the weight of his eyes.
But then he begins to spin. For the first time since Shiro was taken by him, he gets to watch him work undistracted. Keith holds tight to the ends of the silk still attached to Shiro as a reminder that he’s still his captive, but Shiro doesn’t think he would have it in him to go anywhere right now anyway, because something about this creature at work is mesmerizing. With perfect precision, Keith begins creating strands of silk from his spinnerets, attaching one end to the wall, another to the craggly ceiling, drawing it down in loops before connecting it again in geometrical patterns, triangles, zigzags, and trapezoids. He walks as he weaves, leisurely pacing the room with each crisscrossing strand, even expertly scaling the wall at points to reach higher.
And at the end, he steps back and looks to Shiro.
“How’s that?” he asks.
“Wow,” breathes Shiro, because he, once again, suddenly finds himself awestruck.
Across the top of the cave hangs a symmetrical series of support strands, gorgeously and evenly constructed in a way that reminds Shiro of the lines in a stained glass window, a motif of a rising sun. They all run towards the center, where the strands weave together in thicker, more solid lines to create something in the general family of a hammock seat. The details are so intricate, the construction of it so well-planned, that Shiro can barely believe he just watched this being made with his own eyes. It looks like some sort of throne, if maybe a Halloween-themed one. He steps towards it, wondering.
“Will this hold my weight?” he asks, as though he hasn’t spent the past many hours hung from just a few lines strung from the ceiling.
Keith only snorts in reply, but his expression is expectant as Shiro places his palm in the center, pressing down to test it. His hand sticks, and though the web gives under the force, nothing breaks or tears. Almost excited to test it, Shiro hoists himself into it, his body sticking where it lands.
It doesn’t matter, though, because it’s perfectly formed for the shape of him, and is somehow far more comfortable than any hammock Shiro has ever laid in. He wishes he could have this as his bed in his room, before he remembers that unless he does something, he’s never going to see his room again.
“Thank you, Keith,” Shiro says earnestly, looking up at the creature who had just created this furniture for him. “This is incredible.”
Keith almost doesn’t respond, but Shiro thinks he sees some unusual redness on his cheeks. Are spiders capable of blushing?
“No problem,” Keith replies, before quickly scuttling out of the cave as though forest-dwelling monsters have dentist’s appointments and he just realized that he’s late for his.
Keith doesn’t return until the world beyond the mouth of the cave has darkened completely. Shiro can still see by the milky light of the moon, but Keith doesn’t so much as glance at him. Instead, he strides on his long legs to where Shiro’s pack rests on the ground.
“You need to eat, right?” Keith asks, diving into it. He pulls out a canister, still mostly full of nuts. “How’s this?”
Shiro, whose stomach has been growling painfully since midday, nods gratefully. “That would be great. Thank you.”
Keith grunts in reply. He brings the canister to Shiro and drops it onto his lap, where it sticks to the webbing covering him. Then he grabs his knife and frees only Shiro’s left hand, cutting out the chunks of web that held it to the rest of the silken structure. Shiro immediately stretches out his shoulder and then goes to open the canister, but as he does, he notices Keith biting into the handfuls of web he’d just cut away.
Keith notices him staring almost immediately and turns away.
“All spiders do this,” he says, sounding defensive. “It replenishes our protein.”
“I’m not judging,” Shiro says, mostly just excited to replenish his own protein. He doesn’t have the energy to judge anything right now, not after the day he’s had. Not while the enormous body of a spider stands next to him as he tries to one-handedly shovel nuts into his mouth.
It almost kills his appetite, the hulking figure of the spider in front of him and the constant fear that’s been gnawing at his nerves since he came here, but his body is in need of sustenance. He manages to choke down several handfuls of nuts before he can’t take anymore and screws the lid back on.
Keith must hear, because he turns back in his direction. Wordlessly, he snatches the cannister off his lap and deposits it back on the ground beside Shiro’s open pack. With his stomach no longer protesting painfully, Shiro’s greatest discomfort is the anxiety-exhaustion that’s dragging at his consciousness. Somehow, despite the situation, Shiro lets himself get pulled into sleep.
“Hey, Keith,” Shiro says. “Why did your dad come to Japan?”
Keith hardly looks surprised at the questions anymore. In fact, he’s put the paperback, which held his attention for a solid chunk of the morning, completely aside for them. Over the past few hours, Shiro has said, “Hey, Keith,” enough times that they barely sound like words anymore, but it’s the only thing keeping him from not going insane with terror or the aggravating inability to use his hands. In the beginning, Keith would only answer with a single word, if he answered at all. But Shiro began sharing stories of his own life, sometimes monologuing for minutes on end without any interruptions from Keith, and slowly, he’s begun to see the fruits of his labor as more and more words spill through the cracks.
“He liked hiking,” Keith replies. “He wanted to see new places. He used to travel all over the world.”
“Me too,” Shiro says. “I mean—I like hiking too. And I want to see new places.”
“Guess that’s why you’re here, huh.”
“Yeah.” Shiro grins. “Didn’t think it’d bring me to the inside of this cave, though.”
He almost thinks he sees Keith crack a smile, but it’s gone before it’s even fully there. Instead, he scuffs his toe-claws around in the dust some more, creating strange and intricate shapes and patterns.
“Have you ever been to Hokkaido?” Keith asks.
It’s the first question he’s asked Shiro rather than the other way around, and Shiro delights in it. He finds himself smiling before he can even start to answer.
“Yeah, my grandma’s family is from there.”
“Huh.” Keith tilts his head. “Me too. That’s where Dad found Mom.”
Shiro can imagine it: the expansive forests and snow-tipped mountains of the open north, the wild kilometers that stretch uninhabited seemingly forever, teeming with wildlife. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine all sorts of preternatural creatures living there undetected by humanity. He wonders what Keith’s mom looks like. If she’s like Keith or somehow more spideresque.
“There’s good hiking up there,” Shiro says, reminiscing on childhood trips to visit distant cousins where he found himself surrounded by emerald forests the likes of which he’d never known in America.
“Yeah,” Keith replies. Something in his black, glossy eyes grows distant. “We liked it. It was quiet.”
He turns sharp again, and he fishes himself back.
“But after Mom left, Dad brought me down here,” he goes on. “He thought it would be easier to take care of me if he could live in a city more friendly to foreigners.”
“Guess you couldn’t just move to Tokyo,” Shiro replies.
Keith looks for a moment like he’s going to laugh. The idea of an enormous creature straight out of a horror movie walking the streets of Tokyo is kind of funny. But instead, Keith lets his expression drop and shakes his head.
“Dad did his best but…,” he trails off, staring at the ground.
“It’s probably not easy,” Shiro says, “being human but raising a….”
“ Jorougumo ,” Keith says, scratching the kanji for it into the dust on the floor with the pointed tip of a foot. “That’s one word for us. We’re a kind of yokai .”
Yokai . Shiro would be surprised at the term, and in awe and wonder that they do truly exist, if there weren’t already a supernatural creature standing before him. He’s willing to accept just about anything now.
“A jorougumo ,” Shiro says, trying the word out, puzzling over the kanji on the floor. “It sounds like your father cares about you a lot.”
“He did,” Keith says, shortly. “He’s dead now.”
Shiro feels his heart tighten despite himself, and looks up from the series of strokes in the dirt to meet Keith’s gaze. “I’m sorry, Keith.”
Keith shrugs and averts his gaze towards the greenery outside. “It happened a long time ago.”
Shiro makes the natural assumption.
“You’ve been alone since then.”
Silence settles over them. A gust of wind passes through the trees, rattling the leaves together. Cicadas sing, loud and uninhibited, and the reverberations of their chorus echo in the cavity of Shiro’s chest.
“Yeah,” Keith says. “I have.”
For the first time, Shiro thinks he sees Keith for what he really is. By the looks of his human side, he can’t be much older than twenty. He’s not a monster. He is a yokai , yes, a spirit of nature and the forest and the mountains, but he’s also a young man. He’s half-human. And he’s alone.
“Good thing you have me now, right?” Shiro says.
It’s a joke, a little bit dark given the context, but the look in Keith’s eyes when his eyes snap up is entirely too surprised, entirely too genuine. It sinks deep into Shiro’s chest and when he tries to breathe, he finds he has a hard time of it. Keith’s gaze is so consuming, and in this moment he’s nothing more than a helpless, beautiful person.
But finally, Keith cracks out a forced laugh, the first thing nearing true mirth that Shiro has heard from him. He averts his stare down to the floor.
“Yeah,” he says. “For a few days, at least.”
Would you keep me longer? is on the tip of Shiro’s tongue, but he decides it’s better not to press his luck.
“No one’s ever asked me my name before,” Keith says.
It’s the dead of night, judging by the darkness outside. Shiro had been sleeping, but he’s not anymore. He had probably felt Keith’s presence drawing near, and when he blinks open his sleep-crusted eyes, Keith is standing near him, staring out towards the mouth of the cave.
“How many humans have you eaten?” he asks groggily.
Keith starts, like he hadn’t expected Shiro to talk. Maybe he thought Shiro was asleep. Maybe he hadn’t been speaking to him at all.
It’s dark in the cave, but the moon is strong and bright outside. Shiro is sure that if he could see the sky tonight, he would see millions more stars than he could ever see from inside the city limits. He feels grateful that the night is warm, though he feels almost comfortably cocooned in his spiderweb hammock.
“Not many,” Keith replies, quietly, like it’s a secret. “But no one ever asked my name.”
“Well, Keith,” Shiro says, letting a little smile creep onto his face, “there’s a first time for everything.”
Keith doesn’t reply. He stands very, very still, and together they listen to the insects sing in the trees outside.
“You’re right,” Keith says finally. In the dim moonlight, Shiro sees him turn his dark eyes on him, his expression unreadable. “Sorry for waking you. Go back to sleep.”
Shiro decides to try. He lets his eyes slip closed again, lets his drowsiness pull him back under.
Just as he’s teetering on the edge, he thinks he feels gentle fingers combing through his hair.
Keith, at the very least, is an attentive captor. He gives Shiro water at regular intervals. Lets him out of his hammock-prison to relieve himself. Even takes requests for what food items to bring Shiro from his pack.
He’s not a monster. Shiro knows that now, and feels bad for ever thinking he was. He might be scary, take a scary form and do scary things, but he’s just trying to survive, like anything else in nature. Shiro feels like the cow that eats out of the farmer’s hand, waiting for the day that same hand will lead it to slaughter.
They spend the next day talking, and to Shiro’s enormous surprise, laughing. Keith doesn’t do it freely, Shiro notices. It takes a lot of effort on his part. But when he makes a perfectly terrible joke, or talks about something that catches Keith’s attention in just the right way, it comes out: Keith’s mouth stretched into a smile, his eyes crinkling at the corners, his husky, low voice stumbling over the laugh like he isn’t used to making such a sound.
It’s cute. Shiro knows that it’s cute. Knows he thinks that it’s cute, and doesn’t totally understand what to do with that.
At night, Shiro readies himself for another evening cradled in his spider-silk chair. He barely pauses to wonder how many more nights he’ll be sleeping here. He comfortably asks Keith to cut him down so he can have one last stretch and take a leak.
He wanders out into the dimming twilight and takes a look at the stars that are just starting to appear, east to west. It really is incredible out here at night, and Shiro imagines Keith, alone, looking up at these stars every night. He wonders if Keith loves them.
And distracted by them as he is, he jumps when he realizes Keith has strolled out beside him, his face angled towards the sky too.
Keith notices. Gives him a sideways look that makes something in Shiro’s chest hurt a little bit. He tries to fix it.
“You can’t see this many stars in the city,” he says. “It’s really amazing out here.”
“Yeah,” Keith replies, haltingly. “It’s cool.”
“I know the constellations. I can teach you if you want.”
Keith is already looking at Shiro when Shiro looks towards him, and it’s with an expression that’s impossible to read.
“Okay,” Keith agrees, and sidles in closer.
As he does, his leg brushes against Shiro’s arm. Instinctively, Shiro tenses and cringes away from it, feeling like an ice cube was just slipped down his spine.
Keith recoils in response, backing off several steps. Immediately realizing his mistake, Shiro turns towards him and holds eye contact, trying to communicate a silent apology, but Keith’s face remains carefully indifferent. They stare, and Shiro listens to the crickets.
“You’re terrified of me,” Keith says softly.
Shiro almost laughs. He settles on a wry grin instead. “You’re going to eat me. You’ve kept me suspended from the roof of a cave for days. What do you expect?”
But rather than smiling at Shiro’s joking tone, Keith frowns deeper.
“I know,” he says, “and I’m sorry. But that’s not what I meant.”
Keith takes a step closer on spindly legs. Shiro’s immediate instinct is for his eyes to snap to them, for the hair on his arms to rise on end at their alien motion.
“See?” Keith says. “I’m a spider. People don’t like spiders.”
Shiro flushes with guilt. Keith’s not wrong. Shiro doesn’t like spiders. Has always been afraid of them. Can’t stand the way they crawl and jump, the way their little legs scurry across a surface, their hairy exterior and their million beady eyes.
But that doesn’t mean that Shiro doesn’t like Keith. That doesn’t mean that Shiro can’t learn to like spiders.
“Keith, come here,” Shiro says with a resolute breath.
Cautiously, eyes guarded, Keith does. And as he comes closer, Shiro makes himself watch the way his legs shuffle, admire the way nature created them. They may still send chills down his spine, but he can admire the efficient design of them, the practicality, the beauty, even. He watches until Keith is in his space, face close to Shiro’s, body near enough that Shiro can reach out and touch.
Which he does. He extends a tremoring hand, and just before it makes contact, he remembers himself.
“May I?” he asks.
Keith doesn’t answer aloud, but he nods, his eyes glued to Shiro’s every motion.
Shiro begins at the place where Keith’s bare torso gives way to hard exoskeleton. He forces himself to look at it. At the surface of Keith’s skin, at the dark color of his tough exterior and the fine little hairs sprouting everywhere from it. The texture is unusual and smooth, and as Shiro runs his hand over it he marvels at its construction, at the way it keeps Keith’s body safe. He draws his touch over the front of it until he meets the place where Keith’s first leg branches off from his body.
There are seven sections of his leg, which Shiro counts as he runs his hand over them. He vaguely remembers from 9th-grade biology that they all have different names, but Shiro right now is more concerned about the complex way they fit together to form a limb that moves in the way it does. Something about it might strike some primitive fear deep inside Shiro, but getting to touch, to examine, to look closely at how each piece moves, how they work together, how they taper down to a small point where Keith’s sharp claws, three on each, dig into the ground. Keith is pliant in his hand, moving where Shiro gently prods him to, and Shiro finds he strangely enjoys handling the multi-jointed leg, watching how the different parts can bend.
When Shiro is done there, he slowly draws his hand back along Keith’s leg, hyperaware of Keith’s eyes on his every motion. He doesn’t want to look back up at him, afraid of what he’ll see in his face, so he focuses on Keith’s red markings, illuminated crimson under the moonlight. He brushes a thumb over the hairs, feels their give, and finds himself unusually unbothered by the contact with a spider.
Finally, he slides his hand back, unwilling to do too much exploring without fully knowing what he’s touching. He comes back to the place where Keith’s spine sprouts out of his exoskeleton and traces the short gradient between spider and human around to the side of his abdomen. Keith’s human body is lean, strength obvious in lightly defined muscles. His skin is smooth and strangely soft, though marked with scars. Shiro, feeling brave, allows his eyes to trail up Keith’s bare body, drinking in his abdomen, his chest, his shoulders, his neck.
Which brings him to Keith’s face.
Keith’s expression spikes straight to Shiro’s heart. He’s wide-eyed, his lips slightly parted, but softened all over, looking at Shiro as if he’s something unexplainable, something urgently special, something new and precious and pleasantly surprising. Shiro recognizes it, because he feels exactly the same when he looks at Keith.
It feels natural, at this point, to lean closer. Shiro’s hands aren’t on Keith’s exoskeleton anymore, but the very human, flesh-and-bone muscle on the sides of his abdomen. Standing like this on his long legs, Keith is a little taller than Shiro, and nearly tucked against his body, Shiro cranes his head to look up into his dark eyes.
Shiro stretches his spine, rocks forward on his toes to rise. Keith bends slightly, face growing closer. Shiro lets his eyes flutter shut, feels the pulse of Keith’s body beneath his hands, and breathes in deep, waiting.
Keith retracts abruptly, startling Shiro. He pulls back, retreating several spider steps before coming to a stop with his wide eyes on Shiro. Shiro, unbalanced, reaches out and puts his hand against the rock of the cave entrance.
“Sorry,” Shiro says breathlessly, not entirely sure about any of what just happened.
Keith doesn’t say anything, but he does look between Shiro, the cave, and the walls of web surrounding them, before beginning to inch his way towards the latter.
“You should sleep,” are his parting words before he scrambles up the webbing and escapes into the night, leaving Shiro standing there, feeling strangely but achingly disappointed.
It’s barely dawn when Shiro is awoken by the sound of frantic scuttling around behind him and the scrape of a blade pulled from its sheath.
“You can go,” comes Keith’s voice, and without warning, Shiro is cut loose.
He shocks fully awake and tries to gain his footing, but can’t catch his balance with his feet bound together and hits the floor. The sensation of the bruise that will undoubtedly bloom on his hip is nothing compared to the intensity of the bewilderment he feels.
Keith leans over him, slicing at the web that binds his wrists to his body and his thighs to each other. He remains seated on the floor, looking up at him in surprise, feeling the silk slip away from his limbs. When Keith is finished, he sheaths the knife and places it against the wall of the cave, and then sits back on his legs and surveys Shiro.
“I said you can go,” he repeats. “Get out of here.”
“Keith, what…?” Shiro starts, but realizes he doesn’t know what he wants to say. “Why? I thought—”
“I’m not hungry anymore,” Keith says.
You were never hungry , Shiro thinks, rubbing at his wrists. There are welts, painless but red, where the silk rested against his skin.
“Are you sure?” he finds himself asking.
Keith frowns down at him, his eyebrows low over his dark eyes, his eyelashes long and delicate like black spider web. Shiro is taken, again, with how exquisite his features are, and wonders if he walks out of this cave right now if he’ll ever meet anything so beautiful or mysterious ever again.
“Do you want to get eaten?” Keith says. “Get out of here before I change my mind.”
Shiro struggles to his feet, and with his knees shaking, takes one step towards the mouth of the cave. He doesn’t remove his eyes from Keith as he goes.
“Don’t forget your bag,” Keith says. His arms are folded across his chest but he raises a leg to point to it, where it sits, unharmed, against the wall of the cave.
The paperback isn’t inside. Shiro can see it laying open and facedown to hold Keith’s place on the other side of the cave. He makes the decision that Keith can continue reading it if he wants, and gathers the bag up into his arms before turning back to Keith.
“Well,” he says, about to attempt some kind of goodbye, but Keith’s eyes hold no emotion and his face is stony and his body is completely still. Shiro holds still, too, waiting for a sign, but when a moment passes and it doesn’t come, he looks away.
“Thanks for the hospitality,” he decides on, trying to lighten Keith’s oppressive mood, but not even the corner of Keith’s mouth twitches.
“Go,” is all Keith says.
So Shiro listens. Keith follows him outside the cave, goes to his wall of webbing, and holds part of it down with a leg, silently showing Shiro where to step over it. Shiro does, and just before Keith lets go and allows the webbing to rise between them again, Shiro turns around and gives him one last look.
Shiro was wrong. It’s not just his human half that’s beautiful, though that, too, is more breathtaking than any other person Shiro has ever laid eyes on. But Keith as a whole, his lower body, his exoskeleton, his legs, his existence as a whole, is a wonder of nature, a gift to the Earth.
Then Keith points off into the forest with a leg, and lets go. The web bounces back into place, and Keith is cut off from his sight. Shiro turns, and shaking the strange feeling from his gut, heads in the direction that Keith had gestured to.
When he finds himself stumbling onto the flattened Earth of the trail, Shiro takes stock of himself. Despite the days and nights bound and hung from a cave ceiling, he feels okay. The worst of it is the bite on his throat that Keith inflicted upon their first meeting, but to Shiro’s hesitant touch, it feels like it’s healing well and not infected. He has his pack and all the provisions inside, and his water bottle has been refilled with what is, to the best of his knowledge, clean water.
Here, he pauses to turn back towards the thick of the forest where he’d just emerged from the path. There’s no sign that he’d ever been there. Whatever underbrush he’d trampled through and branches he’d pushed aside blend in perfectly with the surrounding trees. Aside from the missing weight of the paperback from his backpack, it’s like he had never left the path at all.
He glances down at his arms, and sees that even the indentations from the silk have melted away from his skin. He looks up at the patches of blue sky peeking down between the shifting leaves and begins to wonder if he dreamt the entire thing.
Shiro has been walking for half a day when he sits down at a fork in the road to rest on a fallen log. His legs feel as though they had never had their vacation from hiking, suspended inches above the ground for days, and Shiro wonders how much time he really lost. He thought he’d counted in the cave: three days and three nights. If that’s true, then Shiro will have to take the path to the right in order to make it home in time for work on Monday. He had originally wanted to take the path to the left, which would have led him on a more circuitous route further into the mountains before bringing him back to civilization.
Something moves in Shiro’s peripherals, and his whips around instinctively. But he finds it’s only a spider lowering itself along a gossamer thread from a tree above. It’s about the size of a 500 yen coin, its legs banded in black and red, its dark body like a slowly-falling raindrop. Shiro watches, completely still, as it drops onto his arm, and then using its eight spindly legs, clambers over the hills and valleys of his sleeve before dropping onto the log and scurrying away.
A strange sort of loss pangs deep in Shiro’s chest. He imagines his life from now on: taking the right path. Arriving back in the city. Going home and showering the dirt from his skin and the memories of spider silk on him with it. Getting on his bike and weaving through the pedestrians on his way to work. Pausing beside a spiderweb strung up between a telephone pole and the side of a building. Looking for its master architect, its eight-legged inhabitant. Watching the spider’s graceful, coordinated movements as it constructs its snare, its home, and wondering how he ever could have looked at something so beautiful and talented and felt fear.
It’s not just left and right. There’s one more path Shiro can take.
Shiro stands and turns back the way he came.
The sun is setting, and it begins to dawn on Shiro that he might have to admit defeat.
How could he have ever expected to find what he came back for anyway? A yokai in the mountains won’t be found if it doesn’t want to be. Shiro has no reason to believe that Keith would have even wanted him to come back. This was a purely selfish journey, spurred by his own curiosity and the other feelings that simmer deeper in his stomach. As he noted before, there’s no sign of where he came through the foliage. There’s nothing distinctive about any part of the path. It could’ve been here that he found Keith, or ten meters down the trail, or fifty meters in the other direction. Without any sort of guide or sign, everything looks the same.
Shiro begins thinking about how he’s going to set up for the evening, and what’s going to happen in the morning. At this point, there’s no chance of making it back to work on Monday morning. He’s sure he’ll be able to make up some excuse about getting lost in the woods, which wouldn’t be too far off.
It’s okay, he tells himself, though his annoyance over missing work only parts to reveal a deeper, more biting anxiety.
That he truly did come back all this way for nothing. That the person he seeks will elude him. That he’ll spend the rest of his life smiling at every spider he sees, wondering if it will carry his feelings back to these mountains for him, this forest, inside a cozy, warm cave to Keith.
Shiro stops with his feet in the dust.
And he hears the sound of water running.
He thinks he’s imagining it at first. That it must be the breeze in the branches, the scurry of squirrels in the trees. But as he steps to the side of the trail it grows louder. Unmistakable. It’s definitely rushing water, like a river or a stream.
It could be any river or stream, he knows. Nothing about the woods around him right now looks any more familiar than the stretch behind him or the stretch ahead. But when he steps towards the treeline, he sees it: a bright orange trail marker, half-buried in the leaves at his feet.
Unhesitating, Shiro pushes into the undergrowth off the path, following the sound of the water and then, as he looks around and takes notice, strands of spider silk, thicker than any web he’d known before setting foot into this forest, suspended from tree to tree like streamers or strings of fairy lights. They gleam in the setting sun, iridescent and beautiful, and Shiro tramples through the forest, following their lines until they meet with others, and more and more gather into gorgeous, enormous structures of silvery-white strands, coming together to form masterful patterns and intricate shapes.
It all crescendos into a sight that Shiro once found terrifying, but now takes his breath away with the sheer wonder of it: the barriers of webs that surround Keith’s cave.
He remembers picking his way through from the inside, the places where Keith showed him he could step safely without getting caught, but right now he’s in a rush and he can’t see where he came through. Instead, he picks a spot where the webbing looks thinner and tries to push his way through, his arm thrust forward.
And finds himself promptly adhered to the silk.
It must cause a disturbance, because almost immediately, he sees a large, dark shape crawling towards him from the other side of the web. The huge body, the eight long legs, scuttle up the opposite side, and then, suddenly, there’s the body of a spider the size of a bear hanging over him, and the very handsome torso of a human leaning down to brush his hair from his face.
“Shiro?” Keith’s voice says, and he sounds breathless and shocked and disbelieving and hopeful all at once.
Shiro looks up into his face and knows right away that he didn’t make a mistake in coming back. Keith’s dark eyes are wide and soft. His lips, parted in surprise. His cheeks pink, his glossy hair falling in their thick waves. His lithe body curved over Shiro’s, balanced skillfully on the splay of his eight legs. And his fingers soft where they’re still outstretched towards Shiro’s face, resting lightly against the slope of his cheek.
They stare at each other, eyes locked on, and Keith takes one step downward, and then two, and suddenly Keith is in Shiro’s space. They share a breath. Shiro’s gaze trails, unbidden, down to Keith’s perfect mouth, and Keith takes the hint.
The kiss is sweet. Keith’s lips feel just as warm as they look, chapped but giving as they press gently to Shiro’s. Shiro lets their dry lips brush together, feels the exchange of their heat and their outpouring of emotions. It’s brief, but it’s enough, because Shiro knows it won’t be the last for them. He inhales Keith’s woodsy scent deeply and pulls back just enough to look him in the wide, joyful eyes.
“Can you help me?” Shiro asks, and he can’t stop the way his tone sounds helplessly fond, the way his mouth curls into an absolutely besotted smile. He gives a gentle pull against the web. “I’m a little stuck.”