Just a little something written purely for the sake of procrastination. Enjoy.
Never in his life had Larten Crepsley experienced such heat.
He and Arra had set off on their travels with such high levels of optimism. They both had memories of travelling the world with their respective mentors – though Larten had also travelled extensively alone – and they each had favourite places that they wished to revisit. He had insisted on taking her to Paris, and apparently she had insisted on taking him to a hell-hole as hot as the surface of the Sun.
"I hate it here," he complained bitterly, shaking his discarded shirt when he realized several hundreds of insects had made their home inside it in the five minutes since he'd taken it off. They had made their camp in some kind of forest – the colours and the sounds were beautiful, and the canopy above them made the perfect shelter from the Sun, but that didn't compensate for all of the inconveniences of living like complete animals.
Arra, sprawled on a log undoubtedly inhabited by thousands more insects, simply laughed.
"Paris was so pretentious," she said. "I can't believe you wanted to stay in a hotel."
Of course, she neglected to mention that she had not allowed them to stay in a hotel and had instead forced them into sleeping on the street with the rats. Larten groaned. The heat was giving him the most monumental headache, and their petty bickering about which of their favourite locations was better certainly was not helping.
"Are you not incredibly hot?" he asked, watching her begin the process of starting a fire to prepare their meal for the evening – she had captured an animal he couldn't even name and was deeply suspicious about consuming. The idea of sitting anywhere near a fire was unbearable to him, and he shrunk off into another shaded area a few metres further away.
She shrugged. "If you'd just calm down for five minutes, you'd probably cool off."
In their years at the Mountain he had never imagined he could want to strangle her to quite such an extent.
"Where do you want to go next?" she asked, seemingly trying to diffuse the tension between them. It had been clear since the start of their journey that they simply did not agree on as much as she had assumed they would. The cities he loved were dirty, noisy and infested with humans – and, she supposed, the places she loved best were a little wild, even for a vampire.
"London," he snapped, racing to think of the place that would infuriate her most.
Sensing that she might have pushed him too far, Arra took a brief respite from trying to start the fire and joined him on the ground where he sat, pouring bottles of water over his head in a desperate attempt to keep cool.
Arra simply shook her head, but instead of complaining that he was wasting the water, she simply took the bottle from his hand to take a sip and said nothing.
"You'd feel better if you took your vest off," she suggested. The man travelled in so many layers that it was hardly a wonder the heat caused him such unbearable distress. Encouraging him to take off his cloak, his jacket and his shirt had been battles in themselves. Arra sighed.
"I won't take us anywhere like this again," she promised, though she felt a little impatient with his inability to appreciate their beautiful, peaceful surroundings. "If you want to go to London, I promise I won't complain even when we get there."
Larten peered at her and wiped the sweat out of his eyes. "Will you let us stay inside a building in London?" he asked petulantly, and though she might have been angry at his tone, he looked so pathetic struggling to keep cool and keep the insects away from him in his thick trousers and leather shoes that she couldn't help but laugh.
"Alright," she agreed.
That seemed to briefly calm him down, enough that he finally managed to remove his vest and toss it over to his pile of belongings, many of which he feared might be stolen by ants while they slept. His arm was going numb where he had been leaning on it, so he changed position and rested it across his lap.
Beside him, Arra visibly jumped. At first he turned to her in panic, wondering what she could have seen in the wilderness around them to be afraid of, but then noticed that her eyes were focused on his forearm. Looking down, a jet black spider almost the width of his arm had made its home there, resting softly near the crook of his elbow.
Unable to help himself, Larten began to laugh.
"You do not mean to tell me," he said, finally beginning to see the merits of staying here. "That you are afraid of spiders."
Arra glared at him, but she could only keep her eyes away from the horrifying insect for a matter of seconds. "I'm not fucking scared of anything," she growled, which only made him laugh harder. "But that's practically a monster!"
His laughter had puzzled the creature, which scurried along his bicep and came to rest near his shoulder. Arra scooted backwards as it moved.
"I have told you before that I love these creatures," Larten reminded her, trying to coax the spider onto his left hand. "You never mentioned that you hated them."
Arra seemed to pull herself together and scooted closer towards him again, trying to look completely nonchalant. "I don't hate them," she lied transparently. "I was just shocked."
His head was turned away so she couldn't see, but he raised a disbelieving eyebrow at her comments. It didn't matter to him that she didn't see the beauty of the spider – he certainly could not see the beauty of having to live half-naked in the blazing heat inside a forest. But, as she had forced him here to understand her fascination with it, he decided he would force her to understand a fascination of his, too.
"I would like to take this one with me, when we leave," he suggested, managing to direct the spider into his palm and show it to her. She looked back at him like he'd just suggested that he wanted to become a Vampaneze. "Seba and I used to keep spiders when we travelled together," he reminded her. "Unfortunately, it became difficult to keep them in the Mountain. I would very much like to start collecting them again."
"Collecting?" she spat in panic.
Larten smirked and held his hand out. "Will you hold this one for me, while I fetch something from my bag in which it can live?"
Arra stood up, seemingly no longer caring that he would mock her. "Absolutely not," she said sternly.
"It probably is not venomous, Arra."
Her mouth dropped open. "Probably?"
The spider sat entirely still throughout their discussion, seemingly completely at home in the palm of Larten's hand. Sensing that he hadn't succeeded, he covered his hand with the other and allowed her to sit back down again while the spider was trapped.
"I honestly don't hate them," she said honestly, in an effort to make it sound like she wouldn't completely destroy his sider-collecting hobby. "I just don't think it's entirely necessary for anything to have that many legs."
Larten smiled. He remembered trying to involve Gavner in his spider collection – the younger man had been determined to share his interest in the insects but had simply not been able to overcome his squeamishness. Though his intention had previously been to frighten her, now that she looked a little more receptive, he wondered if it wouldn't be possible to change her mind the way he had never been able to change Gavner's.
"Will you do something for me?" he asked quietly. Part of the beauty of the question was the knowledge that there was no possibility that she could ever say no to it. "I want to show you how beautiful they are," he explained, and though Arra rolled her eyes, she continued to listen. "But I assume you have seen all the typical things that people say are beautiful about them. You have looked at a spider's web?"
"Obviously."
"Of course," he said softly, opening his hands and allowing the spider to crawl onto his wrist. "Well, I have something to show you that might change your mind."
Arra grinned. "It's doubtful," she remarked.
He shrugged. "Allow me to try." He shifted closer to her, the spider balancing on his arm again. It had been a long time since he'd practiced – it had been a long time since he'd had a spider, since he and Seba had become incapable of keeping them – but he remembered the tricks he had learnt as a younger man and the ones Seba had helped him to learn relatively well. "I have a special understanding of spiders," he told her. "But, truthfully, they also have a special understanding of me. Barely anyone I have ever known has understood their true intelligence, with the exception of Seba."
Without saying anything else, he silently commanded the spider to climb along his arm, over his throat and along the length of his face until it came to a halt right on the top of his head. Arra gasped satisfyingly.
"Did you make it do that?" she breathed, seemingly amusingly worried that the spider might overhear her. He nodded ever so slightly, so as not to scare his new pet, and then commanded it to descend again and come to rest in his lap.
"How can it possibly know what you're thinking?" she whispered, unconvinced. Then, when he offered no explanation, she decided to test the theory for herself. "Make it go and sit on your shoulder."
He followed her orders with ease, and directed the spider to sit on the shoulder closest to her.
"Can it actually understand you?" she asked, puzzled. "Surely spiders do not all speak English. You can't possibly be talking to it."
Larten tilted his head in consideration of her questions. "You are right," he admitted, telling the spider to climb down and sit in the palm of his hand again. "To tell you the truth, I do not fully understand it myself. It does not speak back to me – it simply seems to follow my orders. Nevertheless, it is a creature with a mind and a thought process. It is not simply a pest, or a monster, as many people might think."
Arra nodded, feeling a little ashamed of her reaction. In truth, she was not scared of spiders in the way many humans were – she knew that they could not harm her and therefore they did not pose a threat. It was more that she simply didn't like the look of them, even down to the way they moved. But now that she could see this one responding to orders and behaving purely as a result of Larten's interference, it had a certain grace to it that she'd never noticed before.
"Does it only work on you?" she asked, still whispering.
"You do not have to whisper, Arra. I imagine that the spider does not mind."
They both chuckled, but Arra shot him a glare nonetheless. "What I mean is, if you passed the spider to me, would it still listen to you?"
Larten regarded her with amusement. "I thought you disliked them?"
She shrugged. "Let's just say that this intrigues me more than it disgusts me."
He grinned, and commanded the spider to climb from his hand to his leg, and then to cross between the two of them. Arra flinched the tiniest fraction when it first climbed onto her thigh, but then lay out a hand a little further down her leg for it to climb onto. As it settled itself into her palm, she brought the creature up to her eyes. Just as she had finished examining it, Larten imperceptibly allowed his hold on the spider to slip, but watched as she smiled as it climbed, entirely of its own accord, up over her wrist and along the inside of her arm.
"That's practically a miracle," she said reverently.
"Only spiders can understand," Larten told her. "I think they, like wolves, are natural friends of vampires if we would allow them to be – but even wolves cannot behave in the way we attempt to command them to, or at least I have never met a vampire who is able to control a wolf in this way. Spiders are creatures of the night, like you and I." he said, and watched the spider crawl off the ends of her fingertips and then away from them, back into the undergrowth.
"I thought you wanted to keep that one," she said, after watching it make its escape. "Why did you change your mind?"
"I did not," he grinned. "I was not controlling it after it settled on your hand. It left of its own accord, to my disappointment."
He had expected fury and possibly an injury for that, but instead Arra just hummed. He looked around at her in surprise, and she smiled back at him.
"Shall we find another one for you to keep?" she asked happily, and he reached out to caress the side of her face and kiss her. Before he could say anything else about how proud he was of her for overcoming her fear – for he believed it was a fear, and that she wouldn't have admitted it – she had stood up and brushed herself off.
"Where shall we look?" she asked, looking like an excited child. His headache was gone now, and though he was still unpleasantly warm, he was so delighted with her that he did not consider it important.
Perhaps they had more in common than they thought.