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“And you have to do this every year?” asked Anna, hefting another shovelful of snow and sleet and shifting it to the edge of the driveway. She took a moment to drop the shovel and adjust her gloves--they might have been fingerless but they still stuck to her cuticles. Alex had insisted she wear them, if she was going to be out here helping him. He still hadn’t figured out why she was so eager to help after finding out that Adine and Lorem didn’t have the arm strength for the job. Usually Anna wasn’t the type to selflessly go out in the cold while everyone else was hanging out inside, sipping cocoa. Admittedly, it didn’t ever snow this much on her homeworld either, so maybe she hadn’t had time to get sick of it yet.
“Every year I want to be able to drive out of my garage, yeah.” It wasn’t usually this bad, of course. Most years Alex would start putting down ice-melt before the snow really started to fall, but he’d been surprisingly busy these past few months. “Most of the time I don’t have help, though.” He elected not to mention that the job would have been a lot easier if that ‘help’ hadn’t thrust him into the upper echelons of council proceedings and malpractice trials.
“Yeah, you’re lucky.” replied Anna, bemused. Her shovel ground along the pavement as she got the smallest bits of snow, carefully clearing a relatively small area of driveway in the time it took Alex to deal with thrice the surface. Why was she working so slowly?
He walked over and put one hand over her claws on the shovel’s haft. Ordinarily guiding her like this would be an express ticket to laceration town, but given that she really hadn’t done this before he felt it was safe, and that feeling was confirmed when she didn’t immediately push him away. Instead, Anna tensed suddenly, her pupils widening. “Try holding the handle further down with your right hand, so you can get more leverage.” He guided her hand down the haft a few inches. It was quivering slightly, under the glove.
She pushed him away suddenly, regaining her composure. “I know how to do it!” For a moment, she hefted the shovel in an almost threatening manner.
“Then do it faster. The sooner we get this done the sooner we can get inside with the others.”
Anna lowered her shovel, frowning. “Yes... inside... with the others.” She sounded exhausted, despite the slow pace of her work.
Alex laughed. “I thought you didn’t like the snow, but hey, if you want to stay outside all day shoveling snow that’s your decision to make.” An idea came to him. It was probably a little mean-spirited, but she’d always responded well to that kind of thing. Well, she’d responded with motivation, at least, even if that motivation came from a place of anger, and that was what he needed.
After a few minutes, he had finished shoveling half of the driveway; Anna was finished with her half too, by any reasonable standard, but she insisted on keeping at it. “Well, that looks clear enough for me. I’m gonna go inside and warm up. Are you good out here?” Before she could respond, he picked up his shovel and walked towards the door, noting but not responding to the grumbling from behind him.
Anna’s claws tightened around the grip of the shovel. “I’ll be fine.” She kept pushing about the same bits of snow, even more halfheartedly--if that were possible. A moment later, a ball of wet snow smacked her in the side of the head, and she yelped, nearly falling over with surprise. Raucous laughter echoed from across the driveway, and she glanced over, wiping the snow from her eye.
Alex was standing in the snowy front lawn, having thrown his shovel aside. He had two more snowballs lying at his feet, and was nearly doubled over with amusement. “Oh man, the look on your face!” he snuck in, between chortles.
“You son of a bitch!” She balled up one hand into a fist and started walking towards him, only to get nailed in the face with another snowball. “Stop that!” Her pupils, when she opened her eyes again, were narrowed to nearly nothing. There was a predatory glint to them, but Alex didn’t panic.
Instead of a snowball, the next thing he threw was some advice. “Feel free to return fire any time you feel like it!” Then he threw an actual snowball, which Anna barely dodged. That exhausted his ammo supply, and he leaned down to start making a few more. This was the moment of truth; it was probably a good thing he’d kept the shovel within reach, given the chance that she might just decide to kick his ass and leave. Hopefully she’d remember what a snowball fight was, even if she’d never been in one. Also, he was realizing how long it took to make a snowball when you were distracted.
When Alex looked up again, he saw Anna for just a moment, on the other side of the driveway, then his vision went white. Damn, that snow was way colder when it was going up in your nose and eyes! This wasn’t his first rodeo, though, and with a practiced swipe he cleared his face and surveyed what had once been a driveway but was now a battlefield. Anna was situated behind a berm of snow, grinning like a fox and readying another slightly lumpen snowball. He lobbed one of his own projectiles and she ducked behind the berm before it hit, sending up a puff of snow. She was a quick study, but he had the advantage of experience.
More importantly, he had a plan. In the midst of her incoming fire--two dodges and a body hit--Alex began making a sizeable pile of snowballs. He couldn’t stop to make ammunition during the execution of this stratagem, so he needed a larger supply. Once he had five or six, he scooped the whole lot into the outer pockets of his coat, dodging another shot by leaning down at the last moment. Then he was off, cutting a wide swath across the street and attempting to flank Anna before she had time to find new cover. This might have been a fun distraction, but he was still going to win.
The street was, thankfully, empty. Before the collapse it might have been crowded with ground-dwelling drones delivering last-minute shopping and carrying people off to visit relatives, but there were no relatives outside the city to visit anymore and nobody had turned the drone nets back on yet. This was all to Alex’s advantage; he didn’t have to keep as close an eye out for cars in the midst of his flank. Still, it paid to be safe, so he did take a moment away from his focus on Anna’s emplacement to glance up and down the street, before rounding the berm and shouting a war cry as he readied his first shot.
She was nowhere to be found, though there were a set of surprisingly deep claw prints in the snow behind the berm, leading away from it and onto the driveway, where there was nothing to mark her path. “...Anna?” he wondered, stepping forward to look more closely at the berm. Suddenly, Alex froze, some primal fear instinct triggering as he felt the hot breath on his shoulder.
There was a smug whisper in his ear. “Gotcha.” She tackled him from behind, trying to push him down into the snow. It almost worked, too--Alex only just managed to get an arm out to break his fall. It was probably a good thing that Anna wasn’t one to partake in holiday food. After a beat, his arm wobbled and he fell on his side into the snowbank.
“Alright, I surrender,” he said, after laying stunned for a moment. When he looked up, he saw Anna standing over him, holding a snowball over his head.
“It’s over when I say it’s over.” He cringed and covered his eyes, waiting for the impact. Nothing happened, and he looked up again, confused. Anna had lowered the snowball. “It’s over.” She laughed, though not bitterly.
“Thank the gods,” replied Alex. He pulled himself out of the snow with a great deal of effort, noticing that Anna did nothing to help. Well, incremental progress was still progress.
“Did you do that so that I wouldn’t have to go inside?” she asked, a note of accusation in her voice. He nodded sheepishly. She suppressed a smile, though he could still see it in her eyes. “By the Creator, why do you always have to be so thoughtful ?”
“That’s not how most people react to getting snow thrown in their face,” he mused, dusting himself off.
Anna punched him in the arm, light enough to be joking but hard enough to get through his coat. “Shut up!” she laughed.
He rubbed his arm, hiding his annoyance, and reached out to take her hand. “Are you ready to go inside, then? Because my entire body is very cold and wet right now.”
She grasped it, claws now shaking only from the cold, not nerves. “Yeah. But you better warn me next time before you start something.” They headed inside, where the others had been waiting. He might have been being optimistic, but Alex thought Anna might actually enjoy the rest of the night. And hey, maybe they could do this again next year.