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gt-brainrot · 18 days ago

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Spidersilk and Bandages, Chapter Two

In this chapter, Helena begins to accept receiving help, and Ursula worries about managing the mental and physical health of someone twenty times her size.

(a/n: Hihi! I'm back again! This has been eating at me for a bit and it's so nice to have it be totally done. Also, a token aplogy for not uploading in forever, but In my defense final year of college was tough as fuck. Anyways I hope you enjoy!)

((This is a wlw g/t story about a grievously injured paladin being nursed to health by a medic that's part spider))

The first chapter is linked here

Cleaning the wound was easier than Ursula had expected. As it turned out, humans weren’t all that different from elves, so her spell needed only minor adjustments. Likewise, sewing the wound shut went well. After the stitches had been finished and the wound bandaged, all that was left was to wait.

The human — Helena, she reminded herself — had been unresponsive since the morning, but she was still breathing evenly, presumably asleep. So Ursula slung up a makeshift hammock in the crook between the knight’s massive torso and arm, and lay down to rest.

~~~

When Helena woke up, she tensed immediately.

It was subtle. If Ursula were bigger, she never would have noticed. But as it was, the slight jerk sent her makeshift bed rocking back and forth.

Slowly and carefully, Ursula swung out of her hammock, using the hooked claw on one of her uppermost arms to lower herself to the ground. The human gave no explicit indication of being awake, but Ursula noticed her breaths had gotten shallower, and the massive arm her hammock was hanging from had clenched, trembling slightly.

Climbing to the top of the knight’s chest, Ursula came to stop around her collarbone. The human’s head was laying flat on the ground, face-up, giving the smaller woman a view of the skin under her chin. She called out to her patient.

“How are you feeling?”

Helena sighed deeply, trying and failing to hide a grimace as she stretched her torso. Ursula did her best to ignore the feeling of the ground she was standing on shifting beneath her feet, leaning in to the motion that came from the colossal knight’s exhale. When the human spoke, she did it through her teeth. “’Bout as good as can be expected, I suppose.”

Ursula chittered ambivalently, reached out to touch the human’s face, then decided against it. Instead she asked, “how can I make you more comfortable? Can I get you something to eat?”

Helena lifted her head to look at Ursula, crossing her eyes to try to bring the spider into focus, then sighed again and laid back down. “I’m really alright.”

Ursula stood stock still for a moment, completely baffled. “Well you’re absolutely not alright.”

Another sigh. Ursula idly wondered whether that was Helena’s primary form of communication. When she spoke, she was notably quieter than before. “Well, I suppose not, but you’ve already done so much.”

That irked Ursula, in a way that she was sure wasn’t entirely rational. She called out, being sure to keep her voice level. “Look at me again, please.”

Helena did so immediately. The human’s nose was at Ursula’s shoulder level, and she jabbed a finger into it, emphasizing her next point. “Listen. Right now, I am a doctor, and you are my patient. If I leave you aching or wanting for comfort in any way that I could have prevented, I will have failed. Now, what is it that’s bothering you?”

The human met her gaze for a long moment, face impassive, then dropped her head back to the forest floor. Ursula saw a blush the size of a small tent spread across Helena’s face, but when the knight spoke, her words were impassive. “Well, if you’re offering, I haven’t eaten in about a day.”

Satisfied, Ursula stepped back from the human’s face, clapping her hands together. “Yes, of course. I should have asked sooner. What do you typically eat?”

As she lifted her arm to point, Helena grimaced. “There were some rations in my pack, but I dropped it when…”

When her companions were killed. Right. Ursula looked in the direction she had indicated, into a nearby clearing. “Very well, I’ll go grab what I can carry, and return here shortly.”

“About that, just how much can you carry? Are you sure I shouldn’t go get those myself?”

“Oh you absolutely should not be walking for at least another day. I’ll grab enough for a meal, you sit down and rest.”

Helena let her head down again, grumbling incoherently at a volume that might have been inaudible to someone her size. Ursula heard it, and promptly ignored it, climbing down the side of the human’s torso and marching off towards the nearby clearing.

~~~

It took her nearly a quarter hour to get to the pack, and that was with Helena’s footprints providing a direct path. Ursula spent it mainly organizing her thoughts. She had dealt with larger creatures before, so why was it that Helena unnerved her so much?

She supposed it was mainly that Helena was a *person*. With many of her animal patients, she had to work while they were unconscious, usually kept under by magic. Helena was awake, and aware.

As Ursula rounded the trunk of a tree and found the leather pack lying on the ground some yards away, her mind wandered to just how the knight had looked at her. She had been calm, no outward signs of emotion other than vague tiredness, but being considered by a face the size of her entire body had awoken something strange in Ursula. Fear, nervousness, but also something else. Something she wasn’t quite sure what to do with.

Finally walking up to the bag, Ursula walked around looking for an opening. It was a satchel, designed with a large flap covering the opening. Luckily, it had fallen with the flap up, so all Ursula needed to do was unlatch the clasp at the top of the bag. Climbing up the side to do just that, she also caught a view of the clearing around her.

It was big and empty, in a way that told Ursula this was one of the places the Elves had left their mark on. The trees shied away from this place, letting a golden pillar of sun reach the ground below, where a field of Grass soaked in the warmth.

Interrupting the view were the bodies of the other humans strewn about the clearing, rising like distant mountains from the flat ground. Briefly, Ursula wondered what had driven them so far out into the forest, where Humanity was known only as a distant myth. She made a quick not to ask Helena about it later.

Unclasping the latch and letting the flap fall to the ground, Ursula climbed inside the bag to find several bundles of crackers, and what looked like some type of dried meat. The crackers were each a bout as tall as she was, and perhaps half as wide, bundles in stacks of four. Dragging one of these packages out and laying as much meat as she could fit on it, she strung a line of web across the cracker to use as a handle, and began hauling the setup back to Helena.

~~~

About a half hour after Ursula had left, the feelings of guilt in Helena were reaching a boiling point, and starting to shift into worry. Was she okay? Had something happened to her? Had Helena really just sent that little thing on what must have been a mile long hike to her, simply to avoid walking the two minute it would take to retrieve her pack?

Slowly, carefully, she began working herself up to standing. Cognizant of how this had gone the last time, she tried her best to keep pressure off the wound, rolling carefully over to her left side, then on to her hands and knees. There she sat for a moment, fighting off a wave of dizziness. Painstakingly slowly she walked her hands closer to her knees, leveraging herself up, and up, until she was finally in a kneeling position. Her wound began to burn from the effort, but she stayed upright. From here, she could-

“What the fuck are you doing?” The voice was loud, as though it were shouted by someone just a few feet away from her. Helena whipped her head around, squinting, until her eyes found Ursula a few yards away, standing near a pack of hard tack with some bacon laid over it.

After a moment, she replied. “It had been so long since you had left, I was worried something might have happened.”

“I’m completely capable of running that errand myself. I told you to stay put.” Ursula’s tone seemed tense.

Helena shrank down under Ursula’s ire, slouching a bit to make herself smaller, but not quite laying back down. “I didn’t mean to question your ability, I just thought I might be able to help somehow.”

Silent, Ursula started walking towards her, leaving the pack of meals behind her. Arriving at Helena’s knee, she began climbing the armor, coming to a stop on the top edge of her breastplate, right below her face. “I am helping you right now, because you are grievously wounded. That’s my job. If you try to help me right now, you’re only going to make more work for me in the long run.”

Helena looked down at the spider before her, ashamed at having angered someone who had already helped her so much, wanting to make it up to her, knowing that any attempt would just further insult her. Unsure what else to do, Helena closed her eyes and took several long breaths, trying to move as little as possible to not upset the passenger on her collar.

“Yes. You’re right. I apologize, I shouldn’t have strained myself like this.”

Despite her small size, Helena distinctly heard Ursula make a sort of hmph sound. Reaching a foot down and hooking onto her tabard, the spider began climbing off of Helena’s kneeling body. “Alright, thank you. Lay back down and tell me anything you might need. How are you for water?”

Helena began retracing her steps to lie back down, wincing with the motion. “I have a skin with me, but I emptied it while you were away. Is there a stream nearby?”

As soon as Ursula touched earth, she had started walking back to the abandoned meal. “There’s no need, I can condense enough water to fill that in about an hour.”

Finally resting on her back again, Helena stared at the forest canopy above her. “Do you use magic for that as well?”

She heard the response as though it were spoken directly in her ear. “I do.”

Helena turned her head, catching a glimpse of Ursula walking through the grass several feet away.

“And that method of carrying your voice farther than natural… How is it you can use so many magical techniques in such quick succession?”

There was a pause before Ursula replied. When she did, there was strain in her voice. She was carrying the meal again. “I’m not sure what you mean. Among my people it’s typical to know enough spells to cover a variety of tasks. Is it not so for humans?”

That unsettled Helena, to say the least. “For humans it takes decades to master even a single spell. Those that do are considered specialists in the field.” She paused. “How… old are you?”

Ursula laughed lightly. It wasn’t a human laugh, but more of a decidedly happy feeling series of chirps. Still, it was a clear and even sound, conveying a type of simple joy that put Helena at ease. “I’m twenty-three, thank you very much.”

Something about that tickled Helena’s mind, but she set it aside for the more pressing question. “So young to be so knowledgeable. If you were human you would already be one of the greatest mages in the world.”

There was a wry grunt from Ursula, and when she spoke next, she was near enough to no longer need the spell. “I had heard that humans had difficulty with magic, but I had no idea it was so pronounced. Wasn’t one of you casting spells before I found you?”

Helena turned her head to stare at where Ursula was now, perhaps a foot from her shoulder. “How did you know about that?”

The spider looked at her feet, as if ashamed for some reason. “It made… quite a ruckus for anyone who might have been listening, but I’m fairly certain I was the only one who was.”

“Oh, that was probably me and Maia. She’s the star apprentice of the Wizard of Blackwell, on track to take their mantle within the year. Her specialty is in making fire, so she can be really useful in combat.”

Then, Helena caught herself in present tense. Stopped. Tried to feel something, then turned back on it. Took a deep breath. In, and out. Grounded herself.

“The food is here, when you’re ready.” Ursula’s voice was soft, kind, and it only made Helena feel worse.

Still, she didn’t want to disregard her benefactor. she removed a piece of hardtack from the wrapping and broke a chunk off in her mouth. Kept it in her cheek while it softened up. Then, Helena turned to her host, most of the piece still in her hand. “Would you like some?”

~~~

Ursula had never had food like this before. It was strange and hard, and spent too long in her mouth. Still, she found it enjoyable, if only for its novelty.

Around the food, she had been working to keep Helena talking. It was clear that the human was grieving the loss of her friends, and Ursula wanted to keep her mind off of that topic as much as possible.

“So I heard you say you do magic as well? What’s your area?”

Helena’s responses were slow, though Ursula couldn’t tell how much was from general weariness and how much was from the reminder of her loss. “No area, really. I don’t actually know any spells, I just have a patron.”

Ursula pulled that thread a bit more. “I’m not sure I know what you mean, what’s a patron?”

Helena sighed again, clearly grasping for an answer. “She’s… My patron is the Queen of Pure Tones. She’s a god of justice and judgment. Those that follow her teachings can form a bond with her, giving them access to magical abilities beyond their own.”

Several dozen questions popped into Ursula’s head, most of which she stuffed into a pocket to be asked later. “And what are her teachings?”

A wry smile broke through Helena’s next sigh. “Are you sure you want me to tell you? They can be quite tedious to list.”

Ursula looked up from her cracker, into an eye the size of her head. This being that many times her size and surely experiencing several levels of intense pain, was worrying if she was bored. She giggled. “Really, I’ll tell you if I find it too dry.”

Helena turned her head to look up at the forest canopy. “Very well then. The first rule is to always be sure. Whether the action you take turns out to be right or wrong, be fully certain of the fact that it is yours...”

The lecture continued for perhaps half an hour. Helena found the repetition of the old words comforting, and lost herself in the rhythm. By the time she had finished, she was finally ready for a sound night of sleep.

#g/t #giant/tiny #sfw g/t #gtwac #wlw gt

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