Page 85 of Katya and the Young God

“This isn’t that heavy, it’ll melt by midday tomorrow,” he says, like she’s a child to be comforted and this isn’t mortifying. “You’d only be in danger if you slept outside or drove drunk.” He slows down a hair more, his shoulders back, lifting his face towards the sky, letting the snowflakes fall against his cheekbones.

It’s like he’s cut for this area, like his skin is hewn from the ground itself, and the snowflakes fall kindly in his curls, where Katya feels the icy chill melt down her neck and stick strands of her hair to her cheeks.

“You get used to it,” he says, after a long quiet moment. “I lived in Vegas for a few years and hated the heat, but learned to love it after a time.”

“Yeah,” Katya says, and she doesn’t like how small her voice sounds. “I wasn’t in the mountains for Afghanistan, I just got the desert part of it. That was brutal.”

“This can’t be worse than the desert of the Middle East,” he says, opening his eyes back again to stare at her in disbelief. “This is much nicer.”

Katya shrugs, looking out at the tall pines, at how the world blurs along the edges with the snow, at the pine needles sticking out from the thin white carpet. “It’s prettier,” she says, in agreement, and out of the corner of her eye Pieter gives her a small smile. “Afghanistan was beautiful in its harshness, Los Angeles in its chaos. I knew what to expect from those locations.”

Her cabin comes into view, and the snow is pristine with no footprints.

“They’d be stupid to not track me here,” she says, scuffing the snow with her feet. “We have to be missing some scrutiny or surveillance.”

“Vegas was beautiful for its nights,” Pieter says, but she can see his relief at the cabin as clear as day. “It was beautiful for how it never stopped being crowded, never stopped with a constant stream of strangers.”

She looks at him, and he’s not straining while carrying the basket.

“Siberia was beautiful for her ice, for her wolves, for her strength,” he continues, “Austria for the neighborhoods, for the small groups of people who would feed you the moment you asked. Bolivia for the sea, for the food you find everywhere, for how everyone smiles at you.”

She’s never been to those places, has no form of reference, but it must be easier to live places when you could teleport for most of your adult life.

“Seattle for the rain and how everyone always felt so busy. You can never find someone there who wasn’t actively busy. And here…” He scuffs his own boot into the snow, easily unearthing the leaves and moss underneath. “It’s like everything is a little bit kinder, a little bit softer, a little bit less sharp around the edges.”

“Especially like this,” she says, digging out her keys from her pocket. “How’s your side?”

He looks briefly disappointed, but he shrugs, looking out away from the cabin. “It should be fine.”

“You should be heavily fatigued and very sore,” she says, and he flashes her a smile, not disagreeing with her. “Stab wounds suck.”

“But it’s beautiful out here, and we didn’t die back at my cabin,” he points out, like that will negate the pain. “Snow is always worth any pain you might have.”

She pauses, her keys in her hand, but not climbing the stairs to her porch. “They didn’t let you outside, did they?” She asks, already knowing the answer, the lines of reluctance in his stride, the tension across his shoulders.

He gives her a scowl, but doesn’t dispute it.

“This is literally the first time you’ve been outside since the mountain,” she says, and he looks away. “That’s...cruel of them.”

He scuffs the snow again, and there are snowflakes in his curls again, one caught in his black eyelashes. “They were not preoccupied with a lack of cruelty.”

Katya looks back at the cabin, at the warmth obvious even from outside, then back at him. “Sit on the swing, I’ll go grab some blankets.”

The cabin came with a plethora of quilts, the like of which Katya’s only seen in movies, but she grabs an armful of them from the hall closet and kicks the door back outside.

Pieter sits, looking out at Stepan tromping and pouncing in the snow, stiller than she’s ever seen him. Like a statue, frozen and utterly inhuman. His hands clench into fists, like he can power through the pain by sheer willpower.

She tosses the quilts next to him on the swing, before sitting down herself, wrapping herself entirely in one. “I spent too long on those stitches for you to freeze to death,” she says, tucking her legs underneath the quilt. “I don’t care if you lived in an igloo for most of your life, use a blanket.”

“Excuse me, igloos are warm,” he says, grabbing one of the quilts anyways, before leaning against her. “I grew up in a drafty house that didn’t have nearly the amount of insulation that it should’ve.”

She leans back, and he’s warm, somehow. The porch is covered enough that the snow doesn’t fall on them, just on the steps near them.

It’s a strange sort of beauty, now that she’s not in it, now that she’s warming up, and she can appreciate it with a less critical eye.

She digs out for her phone and snaps a picture of the snow, of Stepan snapping at snowflakes, and it’s probably the most picturesque thing she’s ever seen.

Pieter leans in, and she shows him the picture, before sending it to Miri. “Do you send pictures of my dog to a lot of people?” He asks, but his voice is friendly. Companionable.

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