(Written for a Tumblr drabble prompt #15:Which one screams about the spider and which one brings the spider outside?)
Carver Hawke hated being compared to his elder sister. No matter how kindly it was meant, it all sounded to him like "Why can't you be more like Lisbet?" Illogical as it might be, even comparisons about how much he was like Lisbet had this effect.
So Merrill's muffled laughter at the way he jumped when he almost stepped on a spider in her tent was not doing much to improve his mood. Especially not when she giggled, "Oh, Creators, you hate spiders as much as Hawke does!"
"I do not!" Carver protested, clenching his jaw but keeping his distance as the creature – not the giant sort they used to have to fight through on Sundermount, granted, but big and surprisingly hairy and way too many legs – scuttled, practically taunting, between him and the exit. "It's just a bug, Merrill. It won't hurt you."
"I wasn't worried!" she pointed out in glee.
"Neither was I!" he insisted, breaking himself from where he had stood frozen, jerking forward to stomp on the thing before he could think better of it.
"Wait!" Merrill gasped. He thought better of it, freezing again to glance her way.
"It's perfectly harmless," the elf pled, spreading her hands wide with that innocent look in her wide green eyes that he could never resist. "Let's just toss it back out into the forest. There are far too many mosquitoes in Ferelden anyway. Spiders are natural predators for bugs like that, the ones that really trouble us. Let this one do its job, Carver."
He finally nodded, but when he stayed put for too long, eyeing the spider from a distance, Merrill flitted forward and waved a hand at it as if to shoo it toward the tent flap. At first the spider froze, just as wary of the elf as Carver had been of the bug. Then it slowly skittered the direction she was encouraging it to. Then it drifted off to one side instead…and then, suddenly, came around and headed straight for Merrill.
She shrieked, first with surprise and then with laughter as she jumped out of its way. To his own surprise, Carver was laughing too as he watched her dance around the spider, now managing to shoo it a few inches towards the exit, now skipping back when it wandered too close to her again. "I thought they were harmless?" Carver threw back at her.
"Well, as long as they're outside hunting mosquitoes!" Merrill huffed.
"Look, if it's going to corner you in your own tent maybe I should just step on –"
"No! Really, Carver, don't."
He sighed. "Fine, then." And he ducked out of the tent, now that the spider had stopped guarding the entrance. When he returned a moment later it was still feinting back and forth with Merrill in that strange dance, so it was with a smile that Carver finally slammed down over it the bowl that he had grabbed from the stack by the cook-fire. With a scrap of parchment shoved under the bowl and some awkward attempts to flip the contraption over without flinging the spider at Merrill, soon he had the spider out in the wilds on mosquito duty and a grateful (still laughing) elf in his arms.
"My hero!" Merrill teased. "I promise I won't tell Hawke a thing."