#rbing here too for good measure

[pensivetense]

Also self-rbing my dumb little Annabelle ficlet because today/tomorrow are the last days I can pretend that she’s not evil and I’m uhh in denial

Full text under the cut bc I was too lazy to do that the first time I posted

The world is delicate beneath Annabelle’s hands. In a sense she’s always been aware of this; how easy it is to crush something irreplaceable with a single careless hand, how a single word can undo a lifetime’s trust. It used to paralyse her sometimes, and that was before she saw the threads of the pattern weaving it all together, how a single misplaced touch could cause a ripple to spread out and beyond the reaches of even her sight. How much destruction might be wrought with a breath. It amazes her how brashly and confidently some people stride through their own lives, as though any misplaced thread might not so easily lead to disaster.

That is how it happens, after all. A strand here, a pull and a tug there, a thousand little choices which are by themselves insignificant lining up in a perfect domino progression, and the world ends.

::::

She’s seven years old when she first sees the spider under the mirror after her bath, and runs sobbing out to tell her father to come and kill it. It’s nothing at all, just a little brown house spider, harmless save to the gnats. It terrifies her.

::::

Mikaele is a loud, brash man, to Annabelle’s first impression, and this surprises her. For all she’s heard about him, she’s never actually met him, and she expects... well, she expects the single man who outwitted the apocalypse to have been more careful, somehow, more wary.

But Mikaele Salesa is all loud, booming laughs and quick smiles. He says what he thinks, and does what he wants, and when she knocks on his door about a week after the Change (insofar as such things can be measured) he welcomes her in with no fuss and a surprisingly small show of the fear that she knows is skittering across his nerves.

“You must be Annabelle Cane,” he says, warmly enough. “Come in, come in. I’ve heard all about you. Though I must admit, I am surprised to find you on my humble doorstep. That,” he gestures vaguely outward, towards the edge of the bubble of normalcy that Annabelle can feel but not see, “that is your world, no?”

Annabelle shrugs. How bold of him, to greet a servant of the Web so familiarly. The Web is present with her always, but is weaker here, and all of a sudden she doesn’t know what to say back; the words tangling themselves in the twisted threads of future and past and consequence until she can’t tell which ones are right, which ones are good, which ones will make him tolerate her presence until she leaves with his protection.

“I missed the sun,” she says.

::::

She’s seven years old, hair plastered to her shoulders and still dripping wet with the speed with which she fled the bathroom.

Her father glances up from where he’s sat, poring over a book, withdrawn into the shadows of the table-side lamp and blank to the noises of his wife and children around him. “You’re a big girl, Anna,” he says absently. “If you want it dead, kill it yourself.”

::::

There are so many ways she could kill Mikaele. She sees them in the lines that tangle over his head and hands and heart, around his lungs and his throat. A knife-slash here, a blunt-force impact there. The twist of too many quick hands on his neck.

Some barely require her input at all. He’s got a weak heart that will give out given the proper encouragement, and there are, of course, a thousand ways to have an accident in a house as big and old as this.

Of course, he’s not exceptional in this regard. People are so delicate, and the consequences of their actions oftentimes so severe, she wonders sometimes how anyone ever dares to move at all. It’s fine for her, of course; with spidersilk threaded through her hands and limbs and mind she knows how to dance her steps along, causing only the ripples she wishes to cause and leaving the rest untouched. Of course, she dances her steps most often to the harm of those around her, but at least she knows what she’s doing when she does it. At least the harm is foreseen.

::::

The next night the spider is still there. None of her brothers or sisters have killed it—she’s surprised by this, but then again, they’d probably just failed to notice it. She can’t keep her eyes off it, afraid that if she glances away, even for a moment, it will vanish and reappear under her foot on her head or in her mouth.

“The spider’s still there,” she says to her father, assertive as she can but with wobbling uncertainty in her voice.

“Is it?” says her father, and turns back to his book.

She stands there for a moment, wide-eyed and jittery with nerves, then walks slowly back to the bathroom and stares at the spider for a long moment as it spins its web, uncaring of her, before losing her nerve and leaving again.

::::

Mikaele’s afraid of her, there’s little doubt about that, and yet he remains surprisingly, stubbornly unwary. He invites her in. He plays her songs on the piano, sometimes, when she’s not holed up in her room for fear of the looseness in the threads that usually pull at her limbs and straighten her spine, and he makes jokes to her even when she doesn’t laugh.

He shares his food with her. She hadn’t expected this, but he never seems to begrudge her hunger.

The food is his lifeline. The taps still work, and there’s plenty of air and light and shelter (and booze), but when he runs out of food he’ll die. He’s got his pantry stocked full of nonperishables, of course, but they can only last so long. The pantry is his timeline, the dwindling stocks in it marking out the time remaining to him.

When it becomes clear that Mikaele is rationing neither her nor himself, Annabelle takes it upon herself to cook. There’s not a ton of variety, but there’s a decent stock of spices and dried legumes and she knows her way around a vegan kitchen. Mikaele always appreciates her efforts, at least.

Sometimes when she cooks she imagines how easy it would be to lace it with poison.

::::

Her eyes are glued to the spider again, the spindly blond legs, the sand-coloured carapace. It’s done with its web, apparently, and is just sitting there in the centre of it, still as though dead.

“I’m not scared of you,” she says to it. It doesn’t do anything, just sits there indifferently.

“I’m not,” she says. “I’ve got scarier friends than you at school. My teacher’s scarier than you. My mum’s scarier than you, and so’s my dad and my brothers and sisters. I’m scarier than you.”

She grabs a tissue from the box on the counter.

“I could kill you right now,” she says. “I could... I could just squish you. I should just squish you.”

The spider twitches its front legs, rubs them together as though it’s cleaning its hands. She starts back and drops the tissue, and runs out into the living room without another word.

“It’s still there,” she says, and her father grunts and flips his page.

::::

“Peaches?” Mikaele asks, proffering a tin. “I cannot offer you anything fresh, of course, but I find these nice in themselves. A bit of summer, to go with the climate.”

Annabelle glances up at the sun and wonders if it’ll ever run out, if Upton is caught in an endless paradisiacal summer or if, should they wait long enough, the weather will chill and turn to rain and fog. It doesn’t matter, of course. This place will be long gone by then.

She takes the peach half hesitantly, and it tastes like the last remnants of things departed.

::::

Annabelle leverages herself up onto the counter, as she has done the past several nights, eyes glued to the figure in the centre of the web leaning over a captive fly.

“I was right,” she says, “my friends are scarier than you. Vic beat up Jamie today behind the gym. I didn’t even know she could hit that hard.”

She scoots herself forward, leans in.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” she whispers. “I started it. I told Vic about the book.”

The story spills out of her, and the spider, indifferent, continues to wrap its prey around and around until it’s nothing but a twitching bundle of white silk.

::::

When she captures and cocoons the Corruption-thing in its own shrieking slime, it’s with a certain vicious glee that she throws it back out again into a realm of the Desolation. Let the devouring flame take it, she thinks, and keep it in a place it can never truly die. How dare it approach the territory of a Daughter of the Web?

(How dare it blunder into their oasis, she doesn’t think. How dare it threaten this last fragile piece of safety?)

Mikaele cooks that night, in gratitude perhaps, or maybe he just sees that she’s definitely not up to it herself. Sapasui, if a heavily improvised version—they ran out of fresh vegetables months ago and tinned and frozen ones just aren’t the same. Still, it’s nice, and the noodles are filling. She chases them around her plate and watches them tangle and pull.

“Peaches?” she asks after dinner, and they share a can out on the veranda and watch the sky turn gold and red and indigo.

::::

“Look,” says her father, finally. “You’re a big girl, Annabelle, and quite frankly I’m sick of hearing about this. You want the spider gone? Fine. Pick up that tissue and go into the bathroom and kill it, and don’t come out until you’re done.”

She stands there for a second, startled and still.

“What are you waiting for?” he asks. “Go.”

She goes. Her stomach’s in knots and her hands are clammy, and she squeezes her eyes shut and turns her head away as she brings down her hand. She can feel the squish and pop of the spider’s body through the ply of the tissue, and when a fragment of web brushes the back of her hand she scrubs it over and over in the sink.

But it was easy, so much easier than she’d thought. It hadn’t eaten her or bitten her or turned to acid or venom and soaked into her hand. She’d just killed it. It was gone. A single motion of her hand was all it had taken. She feels a sudden, desperate surge of relief, and grins at her reflection in the mirror, giddy with adrenaline and triumph.

“Did you do it?” asks her father when she emerges.

Annabelle nods.

“Good girl.”

::::

Nothing lasts forever, of course. Her time runs out soon enough, and she knows by the tug of thread and the shift in the wind.

She doesn’t bother to pack.

She knows where Mikaele has hidden the camera, of course, and it’s only a moment’s work to retrieve it. She takes it down from its alcove and walks slowly out to the back porch and sits on the steps, cradling it, looking out at the oasis. Is it just her, or is there a crispness to the air that wasn’t there before, a scent of sap and dying leaves? The first blush of the last autumn of the world?

Mikaele finds her there several hours later, as she knew he would. He’s just done with his habitual afternoon piano, and, from the smell of it, his habitual afternoon wine.

He looks her over for a moment as she turns the camera over and over, examining the plastic retro casing and the spiderweb crack of the lens.

“It’s like that, is it?” he asks, and his voice is steady and offhand, as if she’d told him they’d finally run out of canned peaches.

She looks down at the camera in her hands and nods.

“Well,” he says, still light but with a hint of something underneath, “I can’t say I wasn’t expecting it.”

He sits down heavily beside her. “You know what I want,” he says simply.

“I do.”

::::

Annabelle is seven years old. She dances into the bathroom unthinkingly, ready to climb up into the counter and tuck her knees into her chest and whisper her day’s secrets into web and spiny legs.

She takes one look at the empty spot beneath the mirror and bursts into tears.

::::

As she walks away from the place which had been Upton House, Annabelle looks at the bloody strands trailing from her fingers, stretching out before and behind her and off into the shadows of the ruined world which seeps in to fill the void she’s leaving, and wonders if she ever had a choice, or if this was always, only, ever what she was.

Annabelle Cane I care you.