Work Text:
Katsa didn't like snow.
It wasn't as though she had ever had anything against it before. It didn't snow that heavily in the Middluns, and she'd never had any occasion to be anything but only slightly annoyed by it, or to be slightly in awe of an unbroken field of snow. Mostly, she'd appreciated it for the purposes of tracking; it was much easier to follow almost anything in snow.
But that perspective had changed drastically once she had truly experienced all that snow could do. Nearly dying and losing Bitterblue on the mountains certainly put a rather bitter perspective on the formerly fluffy and innocent substance.
Now, she looked out on the white landscape with disdain, a frown evident on her face. She was in Nander, where it snowed more heavily than Middluns or Monsea (besides the mountains).
The young girls she was training, however, saw the snow differently, the youngest ones squealing with delight as they ran out into the white. She watched, almost baffled, until they started packing the snow into huge balls, rolling them along the ground with their mittened hands.
It didn't take long to guess what they were building; it was a man made of snow, and Katsa vaguely recalled seeing children in various cities doing the same on snowy days.
It was strange, seeing something that had nearly killed her being so innocently used. She could still remember the wind whipping at her face, the cold turning her fingers white; she didn't believe in dwelling, but the memories still came unbidden.
As the girls ran around, decorating their snowman with sticks and stones, Katsa walked out of the house, scooping up some snow in her hand. It didn't bother her, as it wasn't nearly so cold as the mountains had been, and she rolled it into a ball.
Snow wasn't an evil in and of itself, she decided. It was like any part of nature; what could be good in some amounts or in some circumstances could be deadly in others, through no fault of nature itself. It seemed sort of silly to even have feelings about nature; it was so much bigger than one person or even a group of people.
Katsa smiled as she watched the little girls running around, and announced, “We're having a new lesson. Start making snowballs.”