Chapter Text
Pela stretches out in her chair, letting out a stifled yawn and dropping her pen unceremoniously onto the stack of documents. Though she loves her work, staring at the monotonous black-on-white of paper and ink, day in and day out, gets tedious after some time.
The officer stares out her window overlooking the city of Belobog, taking in the sight of the frigid city blanketed in a thin layer of snow. She skims over her disordered desk, papers scattered into hurriedly arranged piles, when she pauses on the empty coffee mug, still warm from previously being filled with hot chocolate, and thoughts of the drink bring with them the thought of Lynx.
The explorer was currently out on another expedition onto the endless plains, looking for only Aeons knew what. No matter how tall the hurdle, how cold the winds, Lynx always seemed determined to learn about this little frozen world of theirs. It was something that Pela had always found admirable about the girl.
She had invited Pela to accompany her on this expedition as well, and Pela would have given her right hand to come along, but she was already swamped with overdue work from her previous excursions. These days, a break for a Silvermane guard came about as often as the snow melted on Jarilo-VI. But then, they always did.
With a tired sigh, she shakes out her cramped hand before picking the pen back up. She’s about to continue the mind-numbing perusing of the documents when she feels a buzzing in her pocket. Curious, she pulls out her phone and checks her latest notifications, her heart fluttering a little when she sees it’s a message from Lynx.
‘Hey,’ the message reads, ‘how’re things back in Belobog?’
‘Just about the same as ever,’ Pela types out quickly.
‘Anything interesting going on with work?’
‘It’s about as enjoyable as it ever gets.’ Pela pauses before sending another message. ‘By which I mean, this work is so boring I could shoot someone.’
Lynx replies with a laughing emoticon, followed by the words: ‘Hang tight.’
Pela rubs at her eyes, searching for a distraction before she has to return her attention to the dull paperwork in front of her. ‘Found anything interesting yet?’
This time, the response comes in the form of a photo. It shows an icy cliff overlooking the endless stretch of the Snow Plains, all spread out under a navy blue sky. Along with the image is a line of text. ‘Remember this?’
It’s the same place where Lynx showed Pela her first aurora, where Pela had embarrassingly collapsed onto her knees, unable to take the scene due to how beautiful it was compared to the blank white walls and dense legalese of her daily life.
She smiles as she stares at the picture, letting the fond memories of Lynx fussing over her flow through her mind. She types out another question. ‘Why’d you go back there? Another aurora happening soon?’
‘No.’ The response comes. ‘Found myself thinking of you, so I walked back here.’
Pela’s face heated as she read the message. Did she not know how that sounded? That had to have been intentional. She closed her eyes with a deep breath, trying to collect herself. Pela must have paused for a beat too long, since Lynx had the time to type out another message.
‘Pela, do you mind if I call you?’
That was enough to set Pela’s heart thumping loudly all over again, but she doesn’t let it show in her reply. ‘Sure, just give me a moment to get ready.’ She uses the time to straighten her glasses and cap, taking a second to compose herself. Then, she presses the video call button.
The phone shows the ‘ringing’ screen for a moment before Lynx’s face pops up.
The explorer is dressed in her usual expedition gear, the white and blue fur-lined coat complimented by the matching scarf and leggings along with the fur-trimmed boots, all adorably topped off by the lynx-eared cap. All in all, she’s as cute as Pela remembers, and the flushed cheeks and reddened ears only serve to amplify the thought.
“He…y Pe…l!” Lynx’s voice comes in random bursts, crackling and buzzing through the chaotic static of Jarilo-VI weather.
“Hi Lynx!” Pela tries to conjure up a smile that she hopes doesn’t betray her nerves of speaking to the girl. Before that night, this would never have been a problem, but the smallest wind can mean the building of a storm.
Though glitched and broken up by the terrible connection, the beaming grin Lynx gives in response is enough to turn Pela’s insides to jelly.
The camera flips around to show what Lynx is currently seeing: a reflection of the picture she just sent set into motion, cold winds and hail blowing around a still cliff, all under a hazy blue sky. Even through a camera, the sight of it still draws a breath from Pela. Involuntarily, she lets out a quiet sigh.
The scene lingers in her mind even as the camera flips back around to show Lynx’s smug smile. She supposes she should be somewhat irritated by that, but she can’t quite bring herself to do it. The feeling might’ve been visible on her face, since Lynx quickly adopts a more fond smile and says, “I kno…aid before, b…do wish y…here.”
It takes a moment for Pela to fill in the gaps, but her face blooms red the moment she does, and she hurriedly shifts the camera away before it gets any worse. “Wh-?!” She stutters and stumbles through a variety of sounds as she tries to work her way back to a composed spirit, but there’s simply no use. ‘Aeons above, just how easy can I be?’
Thankfully, Lynx either didn’t realize what a crisis Pela was going through, or was just kind enough to let it slip without further comment. She seemed rather distracted, though somehow not by the view. Her voice crackles through the speaker, and even through the disruptions of Jarilo weather, Pela can hear hesitance, and almost…fear? “Pel? Ca…ay something?”
Pela, for her part, has barely pulled herself together before she responds. “Y-yeah, go-” she clears her throat, mostly to buy time. “…go right ahead.”
“I-” Again, there’s another, stronger hint of that hesitance that Pela heard in her voice earlier. For as long as Pela had known her, Lynx had never been one to hesitate, to take a step back. Never before had she ever seemed so unsure. The pause is long enough for Pela to step in.
“Lynx?”
“I love you.”
This, Pela hadn’t been ready for. She didn’t deny that she had been waiting and quietly hoping to hear that, but even so, those three words sent Pela’s mind spiraling out of control, and completely blanking it out at the same time. Love? Lynx? Her? What? The how’s, why’s, what’s and when’s are a complete loss to Pela’s barely functioning brain. Indeed, she feels like she’s unable to string any sort of vaguely cohesive sentence together. All she hears is the ringing of those three words echoing through her mind, playing themselves over and over as Pela stares blankly at the camera in her semi-catatonic state. Even her body has responded to the shock, as she doesn’t even feel a blush rise into her cheeks.
“...el! PEL!” Lynx’s voice comes as though from the far end of a mile-long tunnel, and somehow Pela shakes herself out of astonishment to look at the camera.
She only catches a glimpse of a rapidly approaching wall of white snow and rocks before the screen goes dark.
Involuntarily, Pela screams. “LYNX!”
Of course, there’s no response from the black layer.
Though her mind was frozen in place just a moment before, it’s now racing with thoughts so fast that Pela simply acts. Without another moment, another second wasted, she’s grabbing her coat and dashing out the door, sprinting towards the exit of the SIlvermane Guards’ Administrative building.
And into the storm.
~~~
‘Damn it all.’ Pela thinks, trudging through knee-high snow at an agonizingly slow rate. Frigid winds tear at the jacket she hurriedly threw on, a gloved hand kept on her hood even as the gale threatens to blow it down. With each step she takes, thoughts and images flash through her mind.
Thoughts of a girl clad in blue-white snow gear, a beaming grin clear as daylight on her face. Images of the same girl, falling through a blizzard, screaming though no one is around to hear her. A scene of cyan cloth and fur-lined fabric strewn across bloodied and jagged rocks plays out in her mind, white snow tainted by the bright crimson of blood.
And the bright, burning smile she might never see again.
‘No.’
Pela shoves those grim thoughts back down into the dark recesses of her mind, but every minute that passes without sign of Lynx brings those horrid images rising back up, like bile rising through her throat. Pela has never been especially faithful to Qlipoth, but slowly, she finds herself muttering prayers and wishes.
She loses herself in the desolate world of her mind, the darkness of the thoughts she keeps thinking, the bleakness of the scenes she keeps seeing, only to be warded off by a half-muttered prayer to the aeon for safety, to be kept at bay by the flickering hope that Lynx will emerge unharmed from a nearby corner, that shining smile evergreen on her face.
She only returns to her sense of self, only stops walking for a moment when she realizes where she is.
Somehow, in the endless expanse of the Snow Plains, Pela has ended up exactly where Lynx was when she called. The image in front of Pela congeals with that in her memory: the stretching, yawning horizon of the Snow Plains, all visible underneath her like a neverending field of clouds. From where she stands at the top of the cliff, Pela marvels at the scene for a moment, feeling like she’s on top of the world. For but one, frozen second, she stands still.
It is at that moment when she feels the wind pick up. No, it’s not that it ever stopped. She’d just grown used to it, and momentarily forgotten that one ever-present fact.
Jarilo-VI is cruel.
She turns on her heel, desperate to put distance between herself and the edge, but the gales have returned in full-force. Her footing is unstable because of the sheer panic…and Pela slips. The blizzard buffets and blows her this way and that, and she flails her arms to grab onto something, anything.
Her gloved hands catch onto the edge of the rocky cliff, and she hangs on for dear life even as she feels her fingers begin to slip further and further. Her legs scrabble and scratch at the uneven cliff face, struggling to find purchase, and the clawing of her fingers grows more frantic. With all her strength she tries to heave herself up and over, but reading paperwork hasn’t exactly made her athletic.
Her hands slip.
For one, long second Pela watches as though detached from her own body, a feeling of weightlessness enveloping her. The sky above seems frozen, the permanent fog of snow unmoving and unblinking. And then she’s falling.
Biting wind streams past her face, tearing off her hood and stinging her eyes. She yelps involuntarily before her mind snaps into cold focus. Through partially closed eyelids, Pela judges the distance she’s falling probably won’t kill her, though it will definitely break some bones. At least, if she falls into snow.
She quickly discards that hope when she notices the collection of rocks that sit waiting at the bottom of her fall.
Thinking fast, she sees that she might be able to push off the cliff face and potentially get enough space to avoid the rocks, if only by a slim margin. She flips and turns through the air, estimating another ten seconds before she hits. As soon as she can, she braces her legs, bending knees all the way to her chest, and kicks out at the first moderately flat plane of stone she sees.
She soars through the air, barely missing the rocks with just inches of clearance, slamming into the ground arms-first. She bounces for a moment, the momentum of the fall turning into a tumbling, chaotic roll, ending with her in a sprawl.
She lets out a groan she barely hears over the howling of the blizzard, bracing to push herself up. When her arms don’t respond, she glances down. From the elbows down, both are bent at unnatural angles in various places along the limb, and at another time she would regard this as a problem over practically everything else.
But Lynx is an exception to all that.
Not even the pain has registered to her overloaded and adrenaline-fueled mind yet, so she sweeps the area through blurry vision, as her glasses are long gone. She hasn’t looked around for more than a couple seconds before she sees a bright streak of crimson trailing through the snow.
‘Lynx.’
That word in her mind is powerful enough to send her stumbling onto her feet, dragging overworked muscles through the dense snow. She struggles doggedly forward, only focusing on getting on foot in front of the other, following that red trail wherever it may lead.
As focused as she is, she doesn’t stop until she ends up at the mouth of a cave, the trail of blood ending right at its opening. Only then does she realize just how tired she is, the bone-deep fatigue even deeper than the biting chill. With one last, exhausted lunge, she dives into the cave, collapsing in a pile on the cold stone ground.
Her eyes slowly sway shut, the ache of her muscles finally catching up to her, the pain of her broken arms spreading to become a dull throb that echoes through her entire body. Just as she’s about to drift off, a voice snaps her back to alertness.
“Pela?”
There. Pela’s head snaps to the origin of the sound, a dark corner that she overlooked in her weary state. A shock of blond hair makes itself visible from underneath a torn, blue cap. The blue, fur-lined coat is nowhere to be seen, and the heavily bandaged leg and splintered arm are both soaked through with enough blood to make Pela start.
But that all pales in comparison to the feeling of sheer relief that washes through her when she sees Lynx.
She draws in a long breath, struggling to stand back up. “Lynx.”
The explorer hurries over, the horror and shock clear on her usually cheerful face. “Pela!” She gingerly grabs Pela by the shoulders, trying to keep from touching her any more than she has to. Ordinarily, that might have hurt her heart a little, but since her arms are both very clearly shattered, she supposes it’s thoughtful.
Uncaring, Pela hurls herself into Lynx’s arms, and the girl lets out a gasp of surprise, even as she carefully puts her arms around her, gently embracing the officer in a soft hug. Pela pushes her head closer against the crook of Lynx’s neck, the pounding in her chest beginning to grow.
The Landau manages to eke out a bewildered question. “How…how are you here?”
For once, Pela is tired of beating around the bush, partly because of the state her mind is in, and partly because her heart couldn’t handle much more. So she says the words that she’s been flipping over in her mind for the last few hours.
“I love you too.” She leans back to look into the girl’s ice-blue eyes. “That’s reason enough.”
A blush rises up through Lynx’s face at the words, cheeks coloring a rose-tinted red as the sentences register in her mind. Quickly though, she changes the topic. “Your arms.” She flicks her eyes down to Pela’s crooked limbs, fingers dangling uselessly like leaves off a dead tree. “You didn’t have to come looking for me.”
Pela tilts her head questioningly back at her in response. “I wanted to.”
Again, blood rushes to Lynx’s face, and the reaction to her words bolsters a feeling of courage in Pela. Without another word, Pela leans in and kisses Lynx. The explorer’s eyes widen in a way that only encourages Pela to keep going, the beating of her heart enough to drown out all else.
She doesn’t know how long that moment lasts. How long they stand there, heads close together, lips locked against each other, eyes staring into the other’s. Pela forgets about everything. The storm howling outside, the pain of her broken arms, the sheer fatigue of clambering through snow. All that exists right now is Pela, and the girl she loves ever so much.
Eventually, their faces pull apart. Pela is only distantly aware that an aurora has bloomed across the monotone sky, visible even from the darkness of the cave, but not even that can compete with the sensation she has just experienced, the beauty and love she sees buried deep in those pale-blue eyes.
They stare into each other, both uncaring and unabashed. A grin spreads across Lynx’s face, and Pela can’t help but smile back. A laugh bursts from the explorer’s lips. “Took us long enough, huh?” They drop to the ground, cross-legged over frozen gray stone.
The shine of her face almost makes Pela lunge for her again, so she looks away, towards the green-blue lights that stream across the gray expanse above, and Lynx follows her gaze. For a moment, she can almost believe that they are the only things that exist in the universe, two souls in a small isolated cave, staring at a swaying, colored sky.
Lynx speaks up once more, voice slightly more subdued. “Pel…how exactly are we going to get back like this?”
Pela tears her eyes away from the scene to look back at Lynx, who’s fiddling with her fingers worriedly. With her mind in the state it is, she can’t help but think that’s adorable. She’s still feeling like her heart will bounce out of her chest, and nothing has dampened her feelings yet, so she charges right on, fixing onto Lynx’s eyes with a bold stare.
“You know, I’m not so sure I care.”
Lynx stares at her for a moment, not understanding, but then a soft smile shows itself on pink cheeks. “When you put it like that, I guess I don’t either.”
This time, they both lean in. Their lips meet again.
And again.
And again.