Chapter Text
“Bruno!”
The sound of Pepa shrilling his name in utter terror brought Bruno running. He automatically ran in the direction of the nursery before he remembered, ‘Oh, right, the new rooms.’ He located the door with Pepa’s figure and burst in to find her cowering against the wall of her bright, sunlit room.
In the middle of the floor was the object of her terror: a large, hairy spider.
“Oh, mier-” Bruno stopped himself from saying a forbidden word he definitely wasn’t supposed to know just in time. He really wasn’t much more of a fan of spiders than Pepa: he didn’t scream and run away or start shaking if one was nearby, but they were still scary-looking and he preferred to give them a wide berth. Which made it odd that Pepa had called for help from him, of all people. “Where’s Mamá? Or Julieta?”
Mamá was of course the best at dealing with spiders, but failing that, Julieta was the only one of the three siblings who didn’t seem bothered by them, deftly trapping them under a glass or bowl and carrying them away.
“They’re down in the kitchen, but they’re too far away and I needed help now!” Pepa cried. Responding to her distress, frost edged out from her feet towards the spider, which reacted by scuttling around even more – but not, unfortunately, away from Pepa, who wailed in distress. “Bruno get rid of it!”
“Casita!” Bruno called, hoping that the house would be able to move some floor tiles around or something to carry the spider away.
“I’ve tried that! Casita can’t go in our rooms!” Pepa said. Clouds were gathering over her head and Bruno really didn’t want to find out what type of weather would result from her increasing upset.
“Okay, Pepa, hold on, I’m going to get someone who can help,” Bruno said. He dashed towards his room, ignoring Pepa’s cry of “Who?” and, casting about, snatched up the empty glass that he’d brought up from breakfast and the drawing pad he’d been using to scribble things on. Then he rushed back to Pepa’s room. Pausing in the doorway, he summoned up all his courage and then pulled the hood of his ruana up over his head.
“Don’t worry, Pepa, I’m here!” Bruno said, trying to make his voice sound deeper. It didn’t really work, but it sounded funny and succeeded in startling a giggle out of Pepa. “I’m Hernando, and I’m scared of nothing!”
He ran towards where the spider sat in the middle of the room, then carefully knelt down and put the glass over it. Now came the tricky part. Breathing heavily, Bruno tried to slide the drawing pad underneath the glass so that he could move the spider. He lifted the glass slightly, and immediately shoved it back down with a squeak as the spider tried to crawl for the opening. He looked up at Pepa, expecting a jeer from his sister, but she was watching intently, white-faced.
Bruno took a deep breath and tried to become Hernando, the boy who was scared of nothing (whom he’d just invented). Hernando wasn’t scared of spiders, with their scuttling and their legs and their… okay, maybe it was better not to think that hard about what he was doing. But rats scuttled too, and he liked rats. Spiders were probably just misunderstood, as well.
Very quickly, Bruno shoved the drawing pad under the glass and kept the glass sealed as tightly over the top of it as he could. The spider was waving its legs a bit, but otherwise it seemed not to have noticed what had happened. Bruno stood up, shaky from the adrenaline, and quickly took the spider out of the room and down the main staircase to the hallway. He heard Pepa following him, probably wanting to make sure that the spider was really taken care of.
“You’re not so bad after all, are you?” Bruno asked the spider when he was halfway down the stairs, reverting back to his normal voice. “You look scary, but that’s mostly just because you’re different. We only have two legs, so we think having eight legs looks strange. But I bet you think we look really weird, having just two.”
“You know that thing can’t hear you, right?” Pepa pointed out, behind him. “Also, spiders are scary and that’s that.”
“W-well, maybe they don’t try to be,” Bruno countered. All the same, he was still a bit relieved when they got outside and he was able to release the spider onto the ground and watch it crawl away.
“Yay!” Pepa threw her arms in the air and then hugged her brother. A warm sunbeam shone down on them both. “Thank you, thank you! I’m going to ask Hernando to deal with ALL the spiders from now on!”
“Uh…”