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The snow starts just before midnight, dropping from a sky gone bright with the hushed promise of it. The first flakes are hardly more than whispers on the air, landing quieter than mouse breaths on the sleeping blades of brown grass and collecting in the shallowest corners of the roof tiles.
In minutes, the ground's shadows have roused themselves to shrink further under fallen leaves and closer to the edge of the house.
After an hour, the only shadows left are the trees.
At three, Yasha stirs from dreamless sleep to find the room washed blue with the damp smell of ice and the sky through the window shimmering like static.
The first snow.
Her movements are sleep-smudged but smooth as she sits up, careful to keep the draft from sneaking underneath the blanket, and slips silently from the bed before turning back to spend a moment just gazing softly at its only other occupant.
Beau is facedown in her pillow, one arm bent to disappear beneath it and one resting in the spot Yasha's arm had been moments before. She looks like nothing so much as a slumbering forest deity lost to time, bare shoulders painted with a thicket of dark hair and blue shadow like a mantle. The blanket draped over her is itself a whole landscape, hills and valleys mapped by the careless sprawl of their sleeping creator below.
Yasha's gaze holds something of the wolf now as she turns from the world in her bed to the one outside of the window, and the shock of icy glass under her fingertips tingles through her whole body as her skin comes alive with the longing that washes over her expression.
It is a night for running, and the want of it is an icicle in her chest, trickling memories of cloud-kissed treetops and the spray of snow underpaw down inside of her. The breathless sky is calling, and everything contained within Yasha's fragile and naked skin longs to sing its harmony.
Beau's sigh and the rustle of fabric when she stirs are a force of their own, and the sound of her brings the haze rising in Yasha's vision to a kind of simmer, a thrum in her chest where the long howl had yawned. When she turns, Beau is half up on one arm and watching Yasha from the bed with an eye gone moon-bright amid the shadows of her.
"Is it time?"
Her voice is a wellspring, a mossy rock dotted with wildflowers in the sun and the sound of it is a command that reaches for the tether to Yasha's thoughts and pulls her back. She feels the carpet under her feet, the brush of her hair over a breast, and when the rush of it fades, Yasha remembers what it is to be human a while longer. When she blinks, the forest deity and the world that rests on it is gone and in its place is Beau. Yasha's Beau, human Beau, Beau who sees her just as surely without magic as any of the gods in the stories from Yasha's tribe and loves deeper than them all.
She smiles, turns away from the window and towards Beau. "Not yet." The wolf has retreated from her for now, and the clean smell of the cold when Yasha breathes deep now carries with it something aching and familiar and altogether human - nostalgia. It's heady and vivid and light in her chest, and her movements as she crosses to the bed and sits beside Beau have a weightlessness to them.
Beau rests her head on the pillow again and reaches for the inside of Yasha's knee. "Tell me," she murmurs.
Yasha's hand traces lightly at the seam of Beau's undercut, at the place where bristle turns soft and long. "We used to run together at first snow," she says. "The oldest among us would wake first, like there was new life and they could smell it before us. The rest of us would feel the change little by little, until all of us were awake but for the very youngest." The shadows that form in the corners of her smile only serve to deepen its shape. "It was a kind of milestone, I suppose, the first Waking. We would go out and run as a pack, through the forest and down the hills, and call up at the sky." Her fingers in Beau's hair pause, and her eyeshine flares in the dimness. "I woke for the first time the year before I left."
The soft whizz of heavy flakes on the outside of the house feels louder now, but it falls away under Beau's whisper. "You only got to do it once."
Yasha nods, eyes faraway. "I haven't been able to go out in the winter," she says quietly. "The trees near town were too thin to hide me." She doesn't mention being kept inside during the Wander, doesn't bring the evil of the last two years across the threshold of her memory and speak it aloud in this room here with Beau, content and safe and watching the snow fall. There's no need.
"Do you want to go?"
It's a question that doesn't pull easy from anyone pack bonded to a werewolf, even less so from Beau. But her eyes when she looks over Yasha's face are earnest, and her hand where it rests on Yasha's knee squeezes gently when she says, "You can, you know. I'll be here."
Yasha's thoughtful gaze turns again to the window, the lightness in her chest solidifying into something with a diffuse sort of weight to it. It's hazy like the shadows from the moonless sky outside, indistinct like where the line of her ends and Beau begins when she leans down and presses their lips gently together.
"Run with me." Her breath on Beau's mouth, something hopeful and young in those blue eyes as a smile cracks across the sleepy face under hers.
"Yeah?" Beau whispers, and at Yasha's nod they both break into excited grins. Beau leans up to kiss her again. "Let's go."
The next two minutes are a flurry of whispered giggles and playful shushings as Beau scrambles into warm clothes with all the grace afforded to a human awoken during the witching hour, and when Yasha pulls a beanie down over Beau's ears and kisses her again it's only the promise of the snow that prevents her from undoing all of her hard work and enacting all of this light and joy on Beau's body instead.
They slip out the window and stand for a moment, just breathing and taking in the world and the feeling that they're the only two awake to see it. The cold fills them and surrounds them and quickens their blood, and the pile of snow that Yasha pushes Beau into a moment later muffles the indignant yelp of surprise that falls out of her.
Yasha's grinning now, a naked and wild thing at home here with all of the trees behind her. Snowflakes dot her hair and her lashes, melting on contact with her hot skin. Beau's body on hers when she launches herself up out of the snow to tackle her is its own kind of home, too, and the sky when their laughter calls up to it swallows the sound like an offering.
When Jester wakes in the morning and looks outside her bedroom window, she'll find a vast expanse of snow lying still and unbroken in the light of sunrise.
When she looks out the sliding glass door from the dining room, though, things will look a little different.
Footprints, unmistakably - she'll see two sets of them, half-filled with the remnants of the night's snowfall. Those twin trails will wind in tandem all the way until the edge of the treeline, where they'll scatter into nothing before re-forming into a single set of giant pawprints that stretch into the forest and over the horizon.
And Jester will smile and shake her head, and when Beau and Yasha drag themselves from bed the second time it will be to find a fresh pot of coffee kept warm for them on the counter.