thewhitefluffyhat

Missing the rush and the sting and the intimacy of it all because Hornet will spar, she will, but she won't put her all into it, yaknow? If Hornet gave it her all at this point after everything she might actually cause damage, and she doesn't want to hurt Lace anymore. Not and mean it

But yeah, Lace starts throwing herself into stupid fights just to feel something because she also misses the sensations. She's not about to analyse this part of herself thanks--

That is until Hornet pulls her aside to have a stern talking to and somehow clocks the reasoning immediately and comes out with this brick in a glass house

"If it is pain you desire, I can provide it in a safe, controlled environment. I can rend your silk asunder and then bind your wounds easily, so why are you so eager to throw yourself into fights I might not be able to bring you back from--"

"Then tear me to shreds! Eviscerate me! Lacerate me! I want you inside of me so deeply, so completely that I cannot tell what of me is mine and what is yours--"

The trap I set for you seems to have caught my leg instead.

Lyrics from In A Sweater Poorly Knit by mewithoutYou

lace who worries about phantom. lace who lingers in the bellways and puts her head to the vent and listens to the distant echo of the exhaust organ. who dreads that day that one day the sound will fall silent. lace who fears that one day she won't be good enough for phantom anymore. or that she'll be too good for them. lace when she's scared that phantom will grow to hate her- or that they always have hated her. how couldn't they? lace who fears that the both of them know how imperfect and undeserving she is of this position. lace who worries that the only person she can trust to understand her has been breeding resentment for factors outside of her control.

lace who postures and speaks loudly because she is afraid of being wrong. lace who dances around questions because she is afraid of answering them. lace who stalls because she is afraid of pain. lace who throws herself into danger because she is afraid of complacency- afraid of adjusting to a life free from penance.

like. obviously hornet has spent long enough being a passive bystander to children being treated as pawns and tools for the greater good. and i think she would rather die than become like her father and continue that cycle. but like. even outside of all of that. i can imagine the concept of having a created wife to be really unnerving.

Do you think she ever like, has to stop herself from waking Lace up in the middle of the night to confirm that Lace is still alive? Or like, still herself? Or gets increasingly paranoid about her dreams because she can't tell if she's actually impacting something or if it's just all in her head? Or maybe even gets dueling anxiety about sleeping nearby someone (Lace) because her prior sleep murder involved close proximity but also the separation anxiety (also Lace)?

Which ends up as like, a weird desire to be sleeping kinda close to Lace but at a slight distance? Which is completely ruined by sleepy-her's desire to cuddle.

It could lead to her throwing up so many weird mixed signals and Lace is trying to figure out Hey What The Fuck but Hornet doesn't even have the words to start trying to explain the 15 layers of interlocking trama happening here.

this is an insanely cool idea I didn't think that much about. hornet has the knowledge about how dreams work in hallownest at least to some extent. that makes her so paranoid when nightmares happen to her, and she can't say for sure was it just a normal nightmare or Something Is Wrong.

I'll ramble some more under the cut

I totally agree, I think Hornet would be pretty unused to nightmares. One thing that's common with people in high stress, is the nightmares don't tend to start until you're out of the high stress. Not always, but Hornet strikes me as the sort. And Hornet like,,,, hasn't been out of the high stress situations enough until her downtime in Pharloom. Can't have PTSD if you're still in the middle of the trauma.

Most of Hornet's life has been the Trauma. First Hallownest, then Pharloom. Then finally, she's out. She's actually out. Made it out alive. Mostly whole. And she even has people again. Friends, mortals, people she's expecting to need to say good bye to someday, but also Lace. Someone who she doesn't have to lose. It's not an inevitability, and that makes it so much scarier.

And the thing with nightmares is, fixating on them tends to make them a lot worse. But Hornet wouldn't know that. So she's feeding her own anxiety, sleep depraved (something that also makes anxiety worse), and not talking about anything because she feels silly and incapable of words at the same time.

Lace would take it hard I think. Maybe. Like, she knows something's wrong with Hornet. And it's scary. Hornet faced down gods, void, everything and nothing without a trace of fear. But now something is scaring her, hurting her, pulling her away from Lace and Hornet won't even tell Lace what it is.

I could really see it going one of two ways, depending on Lace's impulses. If Lace's first impulse is to ask another bug for help, Shakra maybe, I'm sure they'd have noticed something was wrong too. I doubt they could pinpoint the problem, but they could probably notice that this only started to happen recently. Hornet never seemed scared or unsure when they met. Did something change?

And to Lace, something did change. She got close to Hornet. It'd be so easy for her to think herself the problem here, even if she doesn't know how. A toxic spiral of guilt and anxiety, avoidance behaviors between two people that never learned to admit to true vulnerability. One of them would have to break first. I don't know which of them it'd be. But one of them would have to break. (It's probably in a fight. I can't imagine Lace would take well to feeling ignored and rejected. I don't think violence would be the first thing she'd try, but she'd get there eventually. I wonder how far she could accidentally go before she realizes Hornet won't fight back. Not like she used too. Not without something holding her back. That Hornet would rather be impaled on Lace's pin than risk her nightmares becoming real).

On the funnier side of things, if Lace considered everything Hornet was going through (strange freezing up, waking up suddenly in the middle of the night, claiming to feel too ill to spar, etc) it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume Hornet got sick somehow and is hiding it. So Lace goes and gets herself some book on bug illnesses (really, how many can there be? 12? she can totally figure this out) and starts first trying to secretly diagnosis Hornet, but then implement whatever weird folk treatment the book recommends. Lace suddenly has some really weird hobbies and also food ideas, and Hornet doesn't get to opt out.

Honestly, Lace suggesting or insisting Hornet is sick with an illness/curse might actually be like, the only way she could get Hornet to talk more about her feelings. Because Hornet doesn't think she is, but she doesn't have a better explanation for all of this. And if she can put that layer between herself and her feelings, make it clinical, detached, something else's fault. I think that might be just enough of a buffer for her to be able to talk about some of this.

my initial thoughts about how they figure out hornet's anxiety and deal with it, was either yes, they fight and hornet breaks and tells lace what's going on; or lace figures it out on her own somehow, by watching hornet's actions, talking to hornet's other close friends like shakra and sherma in case they know anything/have their own ideas/observations. but the idea with both of them thinking it's some sickness is really fun, I'm going to ponder it some more.

so hornet knows she's not sick or cursed, but it's easier to think that she is, and now that lace suggests/insists that it might be the case makes her agree and see what ideas lace has for healing hornet. eventually she almost completely believes that some illness is the reason of her nightmares and anxiety. maybe this confidence makes her a bit less stressed and it helps with nightmares to some extent.

let's say this happens after lace and hornet already had enough fights and arguments over hornet's unusual behavior, lace is kind of desperate. she doesn't understand what's going on, she has assumptions, but how can she know for sure? what can she do? so she does whatever she can, which is assuming that hornet is sick. and when hornet reluctantly agrees that this might be the case, it's kind of a relief to lace. at least hornet isn't secretly mad at lace, doesn't want to get rid of her, uninterested in her company, etc. the fact that hornet cooperates would be enough for lace to narrow down her assumptions.

so they maybe set off on a journey in search of ingredients or whatever lace's bug medicine book suggests. if they weren't getting along after all the arguments they had, working together fixes that, and that's good for both, especially for hornet.

then as lace learns more and more from hornet trying to describe the "symptoms" of her "illness", she might begin figuring out what's actually going on with hornet. or that, plus she pieces it together according to some other observation she did before. maybe she talked to hornet's other friends and their suggestions helped her with realizing hornet's just anxious.

maybe while they're on this quest of searching for medicine, hornet also figures it out. partially at least. she begins voicing her problem to lace, and that leads her to some realizations. like, that she only has dreams about lace dying in horrible ways or getting lost or just leaving hornet. she knew it, but didn't fully realize what that would imply.

but then, I'm not sure what they would do. they both know nothing about separation anxiety. lace would get the main idea, that apparently hornet is worried she might lose lace. that would be a lot for lace. first of all, she probably realizes that shows how much hornet is attached to lace. normally, she would instinctively tease hornet for this, but now she can't, if she doesn't want to push hornet away or make her anxiety worse. then, lace has no idea how to tell hornet not to worry about her. she can't just say that, that's awkward and wouldn't help; she realizes she would only point out hornet's vulnerability this way. hornet wouldn't appreciate that.

meant to draw a continuation for this but I think I'm too lazy