Chapter Text
It was snowing outside, and Ren was inside cleaning tables.
Her bakery had closed for the evening, but there were still people milling about outside in the snow. Twinkly lights were lining the outside of every building, including the full-length glass windows of her tiny bakery, a glittering ambient light all across the street. In the middle of the square stood a tree, sparkling with colorful lights and round ornaments. Candles were lit in all the windows around town. Candlenights was coming, it was snowing, and Ren was inside cleaning tables.
As a kid, she thought, this would have been the dream. There was still some childlike wonder in her, loving the lights and the snow and the music and the whole season. Ren didn’t hate Candlenights. Ren adored Candlenights, actually! It’s just that… well, the bakery was the dream, obviously, but she ran the whole place alone - she made all the food, she boxed it all up, she sent it out, she manned the counter. It was a lot of work. There wasn’t always as much time to celebrate.
Finally, she finished wiping down the last table and took a deep breath. Done. She grabbed her favorite jacket hanging from the coat rack at the door. A tiny bell tinkled as she walked out and headed to her car.
It was a long drive back to her house. Candlenights music was all that was on, and so she tuned in. As she was driving, the snow began to fall heavier, building on her windshield. It couldn’t have been safe to drive in, but there was nowhere else to go, so she kept driving. The snow was falling heavy now, and it was getting windier and windier and suddenly -
Stopped.
Ren’s car was stuck, stopped dead in its tracks in the middle of the road. “Shit,” she mumbled. Too far from home, too far from the bakery… Ren was stuck in a street she’d never been on, only passed through, and she had nowhere to go.
She groaned and laid her head on the dashboard. Of fucking course this is something that would happen to her. She was about to give up and sleep in her backseat when she heard someone tapping on the window and a muffled voice saying, “You okay in there?”
She looked up. Standing outside was an elven woman with nut-brown skin and freckles. Her hair was bleach-blonde, curly and cut short, just reaching her chin. Her brow was creased in worry.
Ren could feel the blood rushing to her face, but she tried to shake it off and stepped out of the car. The woman moved back, and standing near each other, Ren noticed how tall she was. She was barely up to this woman’s shoulder, but she craned her neck up a bit to look her in the eye. “Um, my car got stuck,” she explained. “I’m really far from my house, so… it’s not really looking good, honestly.”
The woman looked more concerned than before. “Oh. That sucks. I don’t live too far from here - if you need somewhere to stay, I have an empty room in my house you can stay in? It’s not the Hilton or anything, but it should work.”
Ren smiled and looked down a little. “No, no, I couldn’t impose…” Her voice trailed off.
The woman shrugged. “Really, it’s no problem. Here, I’ll take you. We’re going to have to walk, but it’s not too long. What do you say?”
Ren nodded and buried her face in her scarf. The woman smiled. “All right,” she said. She started walking, and then stopped. “Oh, by the way, my name’s Lup.”
“Ren,” Ren mumbled back. Lup smiled.
“Okay, Ren,” she said. “Let’s get going.” She started walking again, and Ren walked alongside her, blushing the whole way.
Lup’s house was a family home, which was a little confusing until Ren saw two other people sitting on the couch - one man with Lup’s same dark complexion, freckles, and blonde hair in a braid, the other a man with dark brown skin, dreadlocks, and piercing gold-toned eyes. “My brother and his boyfriend,” Lup explained. “They live here too, no matter how much I complain.”
The man who looked like Lup, presumably her brother, turned to look at Ren, and then he turned to Lup. “Did you find a girlfriend?” he said with a shit-eating grin on his face.
Lup went red. “Oh my god, Taako, fuck off!!!” she shouted, but she was laughing. Taako was laughing, too - a high-pitched, infectious chirp. Ren giggled a tiny bit too, and Taako put both hands on his cheeks and gasped exaggeratedly.
“Oh my fucking god, she’s adorable,” he said. “Where the hell do you find someone this cute? You lucked out, Lulu.”
“Fuck off,” Lup said, a hint of a smile in her voice. “She’s here because her car got stuck, okay? I’m being nice. Stop cyberbullying me and go back to your boyfriend, you horse’s ass.”
Taako shrugged and turned away from the two of them, resting his head on his boyfriend’s shoulder. Lup motioned for Ren to follow her, and they walked upstairs. Lup opened a door to reveal a small bedroom. “You can sleep in here,” she said. “If you’re tired, you can just crash, but we were gonna make dinner, so… you can choose whether or not you wanna stay up for that. Other than that, I… guess the place is yours? You can do whatever, I’m not, like, a cop. Just don’t, uh, break anything. We cool?” She shot Ren a pair of finger guns.
“We’re cool,” said Ren.
“Cool.” She turned on her heel sort of awkwardly and walked out. “Cool cool cool.”
Ren couldn’t help but giggle a tiny bit as she left. Lup looked just as confused and nervous as she felt, which was comforting, but the comfort quickly faded and was replaced by another wave of anxiety. Holy shit. She was in someone else’s house, who she’d never met before, in a part of town she’d never visited, only ever driven through. What the fuck? She needed to feed her cat, and go gift shopping, and call her mom… what was she even doing sitting in a stranger’s house and just being told she had free roam of the place? What was she supposed to do with that? The fuck?
Her train of thought was interrupted by the sudden and very important realization that she was… not going to be home for a while. She quickly went on her phone to look up the weather. Surely the roads would be cleared by tomorrow and she could go home, right?
The headlines said “Sudden Blizzard Hits East Coast, Snow Projected To Fall For Next 48 Hours.”
Fuuuuuuck.
Ren could feel hot, angry tears welling up in the back of her eyes. Fucking christ, she thought, don’t cry now, this is such bullshit. She needed to call a catsitter. Would she even be able to get home? Would she have to stay there for Candlenights? Fuck! Of course! Of fucking course this would happen to her, wouldn’t you just know it! She felt like she needed to scream, or break something, or something, and then those tears were out from her eyes and running across her face as she sniffled pitifully, sitting on a bed in a total stranger’s guest room.
Her eyeliner was going to streak, she thought, but she was still crying anyways, so what was the point? She groaned and buried her face in the pillow.
At that moment, there was a knock at the door. It was Lup.
“Hey, we have dinner downstairs, if you w- holy shit, are you crying?” She could hear the concern in her voice. She couldn’t tell if it made her feel better or worse.
“Yeah,” Ren said, her voice muffled by the pillow.
“Fuck,” Lup said under her breath. Then, at a more socially acceptable volume, “What happened? Are you okay?”
“Not really,” said Ren, face still buried. “It’s gonna keep snowing for two days. And I can’t get home until the roads are clear, which might be a week, and I need to go home for Candlenights and I have work for the bakery but I can’t do either of those things because my car is stuck in the middle of the road in the snow, and I’m stuck in a house with three people I don’t know and my cat probably misses me, so, things aren’t really going great.”
Lup clenched her jaw, clearly not sure how to console her.
Ren rolled her face out of the pillow and dried her eyes with her sleeve, smudging her makeup. “Shit,” she said. “Anyways, it’ll be fine. I’ll… deal. Yeah. I can deal.”
Lup smiled. “Okay. Well, if you’re good, we have chicken downstairs. It’s good, I promise. I might be bad at a lot of things, but I’m not a bad chef,” she joked. Ren laughed a little.
“Okay,” she said, sitting up. She’ll have dinner, what the hell. She’ll have dinner, and be social, and live in this house or whatever until the snow clears. She’ll be home for Candlenights.
She was sure of it.