Work Text:
Metal whines in pitches high as a skilled, curled claw pins it steady. An equally-coordinated hand reaches beneath thick platings, where the light doesn’t shine, until it finds the furthest gear. It spins the gear ‘round, until its intermittent clicking, reminiscent of a clock, ticks with finality. Like it’s struck midnight.
The hand retreats to reach for the rest of the mechanism’s outer shell. It was torn off a few hours ago. Now, filed down and patched up, its hinges absolve it of any irresponsivity. The project comes into full focus: a Cogfly, battered and bruised in a prior battle, is now shiny and new. A thumb brushes over a dim headlight of an eye.
Hornet doesn’t test the Cogfly right away. She rarely does. There is a superstition in it, she thinks, or maybe an outright fear. Finished things, Cogflies included, can ask questions. Hornet can barely answer herself. Silence pools around the workbench, because she decides it must, despite how the ache in her joints speaks to her.
There is always something unfinished, if she looks hard enough.
Hornet’s side grazes the back of her chair. Wood scrapes her shoulder, but doesn’t reach her skin, not through her matted fur. She had a cover for it, once. The workbench tends to accumulate scraps and sawdust, and Hornet tends not to clean it. Much like the Cogflies, the cover got torn up too. That battle hadn’t taken place on a battlefield. The only enemy had been her.
And still, the itch inside her is left unscratched. Her mind wanders. Her hands, idle, are some other bug’s workshop now.
Rays of a midday sun stream in from the Bellhome’s only skylight. They sprawl out on the floor like a flea, the tiled boards a bed, and Hornet’s tarsi, a pillow. Her furs stand on their ends. Beads of sweat dribble down her horns, but dampen her body before they stain anything material. She pulls herself out of the sunny streaks, but their heat clings.
A beam creaks under a weight, under someone that is not herself. Someone so quiet, they’re nearly forgotten. Dust lifts in their wake, clouding like clustered spores. The building exhales in the heavy way something old does when it rises. Hornet notices without moving, without looking. She heard it plenty before the house, and its inhabitant, sized her up.
A shadow casts over her, over the workbench, over the Cogfly. A round, tilted head. Arms swung behind a back. Fingers holding nothing but air, meeting only at the knuckle, as if to hold the other is a dare. To bide time that is unownable.
Hornet has seen this silhouette from sundry angles. Stark as it is, she’d never forget it.
She expects Lace to be watching the Cogfly–because to Lace, moving into the Bellhome meant moving into every facet of Hornet’s life. Lace claimed a side of the bed—but if you ask Hornet, Lace conveniently occupies whatever side Hornet wants. Lace freely spooled silk off Hornet’s loom. Lace replaced Hornet’s melodies in the gramophone with strange sounds. And now, as Hornet looks up at her, she expects Lace to confiscate her tools. To play with them ‘til they break.
Lace couldn’t care less about the Cogfly.
When their eyes find each other, Lace leans down. With no shame whatsoever, she side-eyes Hornet’s form, faltering until it shakes. Trained are her dilating pupils on the flexed muscles in Hornet’s arms. On the tense, presented ribcage, flared ‘neath Hornet’s cloak and fanned equivalently.
Hornet was lit aflame long before Lace came home. The spark of arousal dazzled about her gut when she woke, and caught fire despite Hornet’s ignorance. Hornet is suppressing a rowdy, rebellious rut. And Lace—inches from her face, and only forgiven from lack of knowledge—is not reinforcing any effort.
At the base of her stomach, where she will not be looked at, small, buggy sensory hairs wake all at once.
She stiffens at it, more irritated than alarmed. A classic rut indeed: the sensation isn’t wrong in its strength, but its lack of invitation. It’s a misfire. A plea whispered too early, to the wrong person. She waits for it to subside the way she waits out the numbness of pins and needles, or of wounds slept on wrong.
Lace must think she’s done something. Her perseverance holds the bend of Hornet’s chin; her eyes draw Hornet’s still intent, already slipping; her tongue flicks over her lips, thinking she’s won the right to Hornet’s maw.
Their mouths meet. A short, wet dose of bridging bliss.
Lace hums, a musing calm and content, but Hornet is silent. Hornet feels more down than up. A pressure sits low—lower than her abdomen, lower than her gut—and fills her body with an unmistakable bloat. The hairs peppered there bristle, anticipating further contact that doesn’t come. She needs something else to work on, anything at all to repair in the stead of Lace. Of herself.
When the kiss purses off, Hornet’s urges, rut or otherwise, do not go with it.
Lace looks up at her with eyes so white they almost glow, so wide they could be Pharloom’s moon. It’s a marvel, how quiet and patient she sits.
With the swiftness of one of its flapping wings, Hornet’s eyes flick back to the Cogfly. She should turn it on. Make sure it works. Test it with the others, ensure they don’t—
In a manner much more like her, Lace closes the distance again. Hornet’s mandibles are brushed past in favor of her bottom lip, which is dragged up by her mate’s.
Lace savors it. Lace sits for some thirty seconds before she starts to slip away, and a string of spit connects them for a moment too long, like a spider parting from its silver-lucent web.
Silk is highly flammable. Both of them are made of it.
The pressure crests into pain. An ache almost akin to ailment runs its course through her, spurning down her arms, fickly around her waist. She exhales hard, her throat a valve she can only open so far.
She fails to pull away. She heaves into Lace’s open mouth.
Lace doesn’t just breathe it. She sucks it, like Hornet is her oxygen, her life force. Then she moans. If Hornet didn’t know better, she’d think Lace high on helium or bested by flea brew; Lace’s sound is a downward whim, drunk only on love.
Hornet’s lower biology—segmented stubs undoubtedly bug-like—decides itself boisterous. Hornet’s wants and her body’s needs aren’t on the same edge, though both teeter. Her mind’s hyperfixation on the sheath between her legs is sudden and disorienting. It slips apart. It makes way.
She pants harder.
“Go on,” Lace giggles, probably thinking Hornet wants more kisses, more tongue-in-cheek. “Indulge.”
Lace isn’t wrong. Hornet wants for many things, and Lace is high upon the list. But unbeknownst to Lace is Hornet’s dishelevment—and Lace will stay that way, if Hornet can do anything about it. So Hornet shakes her head.
Lace’s bottom lip falls into a perfect pout. Her palms find Hornet’s sides, bringing cloth to nerve. Though she is taller, the forwardness of her lean, the bend of her neck, makes her small and soft and delicate.
Hornet’s heart skips a beat, then adopts a suffocating pace.
She fears that a flinch, even one, would free the rest of… Herself. So she is still. Stiller than prey tangled in a predator’s web.
It’s easier to be unmoving than to be precise. She learned that young, under Vespa’s watchful eye. For as watchful as the mentor was, her apprentice was fast, faster than a bumblebee takes to a flower. If she doesn’t move, she doesn’t demand. If she doesn’t move, she can pretend this moment is already over.
“Must there always be this…” Lace’s voice trails. “Disquiet?”
Lace is good at whining. Hornet is bad at ignoring it. Her mouth is dry. She swallows, but her throat stabs itself with unseen claws. “There is none.”
Lace squeezes Hornet’s flesh through the cloak.
Hornet bites her tongue to stifle a threatening groan. She tastes sodden metal. The gutturality manifests anyway: a growl rumbling in the depths of her chest, rising slowly but surely.
“I tire after such time spent tinkering.”
“So you growl like a beast…”
“Naturally.”
Hornet does not lie. She weaves sound just as she does silk: from within herself, coaxed outward subconsciously. Apparently, that speaks for most of her.
Lace’s eyes roll. Her hands slip down, fingers pinching ruffled folds, before falling free. Before she steps back.
Nothing becomes something. Hornet’s limbs, unable to curb the numbness, the fullness, plant firm on the ground. She nearly smacks her arm in her desperate, backward reach. The workbench anchors her body long enough for her mind to intrude. If only it weren’t so crowded.
Where there is clarity enough to think, the only thoughts are impatient ones. Frustrations, sexual and otherwise.
Lace clears her throat.
Hornet peers up at her from the downward angle, as if from under eyelashes.
“I know you well enough,” Lace hums, “to know when you lie.”
“I don—“
“Spider.”
There is a quiet pass in which both stay, staring, unmoving. Lace’s eyes are unreadable in their lidded, lustful state, and it’s for the best. Hornet focuses hard on her form. With chest falling and eyes closing, she almost keeps her instinct from overcoming.
Almost.
Lace finds purchase in her clumpy scalp. She pushes between tangles, then shakes out her roots. Her nails thread through the frizz. After a minute of good tousling, Lace’s hair falls flat. It frames her face in loose strands. It curtains her hooded, batted, catlike eyes—
Oh, her eyes. Staring with deadly intent. Piercing into Hornet’s soul and searching, not for answers, but for questions. For what to say. For exactly how to say it.
Hornet tears her gaze away too late. Arousal assaults her body. The spikey fuzz on the back of her neck flies up, untamable by her rubbing hand. The poundage crammed in her gut twists together, knotted beyond repair.
She can hold back no longer. And the vulnerable parts of her, the inner parts, can’t either. Her folds drip with indigent fluid. The slipping of her length into the open air—gradual, in sloppy increments— elicits a gasp.
Lace’s gaze has dropped.
There’s a bulge in Hornet’s cloak. An obvious one. Try as she might to hide it—fingertip to her collar, she billows faydown feathers out—the cloak fails, and her body throbs.
“Full of surprises, aren’t you?”
Lace’s tone is all-too light and lifted, and almost humored.
“Do not tease.” The taunts leave Hornet buzzing with untraceable, unfathomable warmth. “It only worsens.”
“What worsens, exactly?”
“An inconvenience.”
“For you, maybe.”
Hornet’s brows furrow. What Lace is implying, Hornet can only wonder. “You are no bug,” she protests, but her mutter is closer to spoken thought.
It matters not to Lace, who has turned her back on Hornet. Steps light as a floating feather, she careens to the other side of the room—hands on her hips, she examines their tidy bed. She plucks a limp pillow off the comforter.
“Bug or not,” she calls over her shoulder, “I am most helpful.”
When she presents the pillow, each passing second devolves her smile. Hornet does not take it. Hornet blinks at it, eyes blank, slanted only with dullness.
“You are serious.”
“Yes?”
Her eyes flicker from the pillow to the fingers clutching it, indenting its case. Such a small frame. And yet, such strong arms. A fencer indeed, Hornet sometimes wishes Lace was flesh and blood, if only to mold some muscle. If only to hold, to grip, onto Hornet’s—
Hornet clears her throat. Sidelines her foul thoughts. “You are right here.”
“I will not always be.”
“Precisely why you—“
Lace shoves the pillow into her grasp. Unprepared, Hornet nearly lets it slip. In the resulting scrabble, her claws pierce holes in the seams. They scrunch into frizzy frays.
The sound goes straight to her groin, for she imagines it’s something else. That’s when it clicks: Lace thinks herself so clever as to teach Hornet. In the rare instance Lace is beyond Hornet, Hornet can pretend otherwise. Like Hornet is a problem to be solved. A tool to be fixed.
Hornet’s eyes trail high. They pass over Lace’s throat, perfectly unmarked and pure. She peers up at Lace’s expectant glint. Lace, so beautiful, so suitable, waiting for her to use a pillow. Hornet almost glares.
“Go on.” Lace purrs.
This rut is wreaking havoc on Hornet’s insides. The stressing, the pressing eyes on her, the culminating of teases and promised pleasure… Sweat gathers around her collar. She tugs at it, until the few buttons of her cloak come apart.
Fresh air washes over her like water, just cold enough, imagined running between her horns and down her back. Pooling on the seat. Though she breathes full, she still throbs, tortured by visions so vivid…
Yes, the fire still remains. In a flash involuntary, she juts her hips forward. Her first push into the pillow is promising. The silk is soft against her veins and imperfections; against her hairs, caught backward by the fabric’s nap. It hurts little, beyond the overwhelm of information.
But then she pulls back, and the drag drives her haywire. She chases an electrifying feeling, one that only exists in her head. She pistons up, over and over again. Her thrusts stagger. Her breath unevens. Her body begs, and she obeys, even when it hurts. Even when she tenses, stiffens, and every movement is forcing.
“No, no.”
She barely hears Lace’s scolding over her own heart, beating wildly in her ears.
“You’re doing it all wrong!”
The flat surface of the pillow—from which Hornet has yet to find purchase, and is still sliding atop—is tugged away. Hornet’s head hangs. Messy exhales take the form of defeated moans.
A het-up sob wracks her stomach.
It is not the failure that stings her, but the familiarity. Effort curdles into absence. Instinctually, she refuses instruction, even when she needs it most. Each attempt only sharpens her awareness of all that is misunderstood.
“I give up.”
Lace is idly fluffing the pillow. A clump of stuffing falls from one of its holes. She makes a frustrated face at it, lips pursed. Or maybe that’s at the string of precum darkening the cloth.
“So easily?” She asks. “How did you manage before me?”
Lace’s answer is wordless, a mere huff, because Hornet knows she can guess it. Hornet didn’t manage. Hornet locked herself away, or trekked into the wilds. Hornet only came back when she could pretend she was any other bug that didn’t have these sensories, these parts, these… Problems.
Lace’s knuckle finds her chin. Lace tilts her skull up, until she can see nothing else.
“Oh, my sweet,” Lace coos. “It’s just as I said.”
The pillow returns. Folded this time. Creased down its center. Hornet’s cock rubs against the forced corner, and the wind is knocked out of her; her jaw falls agape, into Lace’s waiting gesture. Her head beads with slick, and somehow, the dripping sears her skin.
“I am most helpful.”
Lace’s hands cup Hornet’s. Fingers slot together before squeezing the in-betweens; Lace doesn’t ask, but instructs Hornet to relax, to accept. Hornet’s wrists are lifted, dragged, then pinned to the pillow. And Lace’s never stray too far. No, Lace hovers, Lace scrapes.
Lace tries to reason with Hornet. In whispers all-too hushed, she justifies the shift. Hornet doesn’t hear. Hornet is too focused on Lace’s breath puffing onto her ear. Lace’s hands inches from her mound. Lace’s body so close, yet so far.
Lace presses, hard, on the rounds of Hornet’s knuckles.
The pillow squeezes around her. Her inner thighs are shoved up against her length, her only solace being the dampness of her skin. Her hairs lift out, increasingly attentive to the weight holding them down.
She cries out, but by some divine intervention, she holds true. Her hips roll without leaving their seat. When her head falls back, her body does not fall with it.
“ …Up with an angle. Like so.”
Lace gingerly drags Hornet’s arms—and subsequently, the pillow—upward.
Hornet’s knees buckle. Her hair then lays flat; the way it wants to.
“Oh.”
“Sh.”
The lower halves of her legs twitch, trembling from the restraint she so desperately manages. When Lace drags the pillow back down, a whole second later, her toes curl.
“Once more,” Lace asks of her.
The upward stroke is consistently oppressive. The pillowcase is pushed out of the way by her sensitive head. When she leaks onto it in jerks of her muscles, the material is even more tantalizing, growing slippy against her bottom side.
Downward tests her. For an unbearable moment, she feels suspended.
Her sensories stick back up, one by one, thin smidges of black that waft through the air all at once. The front door to the Bellhome is shut tight, and yet a breeze trails up her legs. This back and forth of heat, then chill—of fire, then frost—is a cage of her own making. She wonders if it would hurt to cut the spines down.
Lace’s eyes are on them. They must be. In a split-second decision, to keep Hornet from bucking, she kisses Hornet’s collarbone.
“Breathe in.”
Hornet inhales until her chest expands. Until her lungs start to hurt.
“Hold.”
The pillow comes back up.
Her whimper is strangled. Her voice cuts out at various intervals, during which her breath obviously hitches. But Lace doesn’t slow. Lace doesn’t scold again.
“Out now,” is all she says instead. Her instruction, clear as it is, is forgiving. She drawls her words. “Loudly.”
Hornet does as told. Whether it’s Lace’s cooing or her efforts, she doesn’t know, but oh, how good it feels this time. A full-body shiver scrawls its name on her spine. Pleasure comes shortly after, spiraling up and out. A warmth that isn’t searing, but enveloping. Entrancing.
This song and dance repeats a few times over. Up and down. And, when Hornet embraces it, back and forth. Lace moves the pillow less. Reaches for Hornet’s hips more. Sometimes, to hold Hornet back—but usually, to pull Hornet in. To encourage her. Long nails pricking pinkened skin. A silk-spun molding a Weaver out of almost-thin air, not for the first time, and definitely not for the last.
At a point indiscernible in Hornet’s hazy mind, Lace’s presence dissipates. And Hornet whimpers like a flea left out in the rain. Is she alone? Her head cranes back, slit pupils flitting.
When she spots Lace—sitting on the edge of the bed, her legs crossed and swaying—her neck bends even further, preemptively. She thrusts readily enough for the pillow to tickle the inside of her leg. Her jaw drops. Her voice is tight, keening with want. A small price to pay to be, most definitely, as loud as Lace wants.
“Keep breathing,” Lace warns. But her words come out in pants. Hot and heavy. Under Hornet’s influence, in a way.
She nods, once, twice.
The sheer difference, from what was once charring her alive, is bliss. The gratification comes in waves that don’t crash, but bubble. A fizzing. A hulling back.
The silky pillowcase, loosened from all her efforts, drapes over the edge of the chair. It’s easy to scoop, but hard to hold. Like a strand of Lace’s hair.
Without thinking, Hornet pulls it further off—a mere half of the pillow still separated—and stretches it down, until it whines like her. On the next thrust, she cups it around her head. Holds it tight.
“Ohh.”
The results are immediate. She leaks freely into the fine fabric, precum soaking through to her fingers. She frees herself, but rubs her arousal as far as it’ll go; her skin reddens, her hairs vibrate, every nerve in her body soaks in the fruits of her labor.
“Wasn’t the worst idea, now was it?”
Lace’s taunts spur more out of her glistening holes before they can dry.
“Do it again. Conceptualize me this time, in that filthy mind of yours.”
Hornet squints through the ecstasy of holding herself, of feeding into her own grasp. She’s an obedient little thing today. If only Lace’s fingers returned instead, to take the place of her own. To peel her back and rub her raw. To wring her like an open spinneret.
When the visual inevitably greys, her eyes flutter back open at Lace. And Lace is staring at her.
“Bear with it a little longer, sweetheart.”
She doesn’t know if she can. Overwhelmed by the flush, by her body’s remnants engulfing her sides, she curls inward. Her thorax wiggles like shifting sand. Her exhales chatter like anxious winds.
This time, it’s Lace’s mouth in the back of her mind. Lace’s spit coating, instead of this rut-drool. Lace’s tongue swirling, instead of this drenched case. Lace’s mouth swallowing as much of her as either can handle. It’s wet filament either way; it’s sticky and sloppy and senseless.
“Lace.” She groans, before she can think twice.
“Hornet.” Lace huffs. “A little longer.”
Begrudgingly—with the most droned cry of her life—she clutches the chair’s arms.
Hornet’s hand on the back of Lace’s head, claws tangling in wispy hair. Hornet’s hilt at the base of Lace’s throat, almost daring to press on. Sliding out only to sink right back in, wetter every time. Using Lace’s mouth like this stupid pillow, spilling down her esophagus, eyeing the bob of her collarbone as she swallows Hornet’s heat away—
She catches herself seconds before speeding up. Before toppling over. She draws herself from the pillow’s folds.
“Lace.”
“For once, I am the spider,” Lace decides, “so this is my web.”
Lace knows what she was dreaming. And now, Lace knows what she needs. Hornet’s verbalities aren’t explanations, but pleas, begs. “Lace, I—“
“Must you be cut free?”
Hornet’s hips stutter. The blood rushing through her is a fuller-feeling adrenaline that just barely keeps her going.
“I sure would like to keep you. Eat you whole…”
“Please.”
Lace is smiling wide and earnest when she feigns her disgruntlement. She waves Hornet’s manners away, then rests her cheek on her wrist. “Alright then.”
She grips the pillow hard. Hard enough to drown it asunder, or rip it in half.
Each recurring thrust is better than the last, festering with ignition and ecstasy.
Her hips rut so fast, she no longer feels like she’s sitting, but hovering. Suctioning into the pillow like it’s another body.
For one long, jittery, tingly moment—for one perfect moment—there is nothing.
Her grunts are rhythmic and escalating. At some point, she screams Lace’s name, though she doesn’t mean to. When she heaves, she does so with her whole body. Had she been on the bed, she would’ve fallen over.
She slams the pillow down until it’s all she can feel. Static frizzles between her hairs, her frantic motions, and the silken sheet.
Each roll of her hips is punctuated by another spurt of release. In the past, what finishes her has been what shames her. Her face, otherwise expressionless, contorts with pleasure. Her maw, otherwise shut tight, is open wide and naturally noisy. Her body controls her before her mind, and her orgasm is a truly senseless thing.
Now, though, she tries to embrace it. Lace is watching, her eyes running over Hornet’s body like hands. Hornet’s sweaty, flexing body. Lace wants a show. So when Hornet runs dry, when her length falls flat and her legs go limp, she doesn’t follow suit. She bends over the pillow as if to claim it, to find its neck and mark it. She purrs like a tarantula contented posthaste.
The rut recedes. The slower she moves, the duller the blood-rush. She’s never been less aware of the world around her—but in-turn, she’s hyper-aware of her body. Of how it basks in the afterglow.
Lips meet her bare shoulder.
Lace is behind her. Lace’s fingers dance down her arm in-between each kiss. She rolls her arm outward, veins-first, into Lace’s touch. A thing so unbecoming. And only then does Lace wrap small arms around her waist, does Lace fully, tightly embrace her.
“Far more entertaining than a tool,” Lace teases. Cheeks rounded and malleable, she nuzzles against Hornet’s horn.
Hornet steals a glance over her shoulder, at the workbench. Despite the jostling, the Cogfly hasn’t moved an inch. It sits and waits, untested, unused.
Hornet doesn’t care for it right now.
She presses back into Lace’s frame, into Lace’s spread lap and plush head. To the side, she curls, until she’s hiding her nose in the nook of Lace’s neck. There she sighs, a breath so full and honest she need not breathe ever again.