Work Text:
It’s always the trek back north that’s the hardest, when the body’s shell has gone soft and pliable from southern heat. Sometimes weeks have to pass by before that shell can readapt and harden itself to the colder air.
For Snufkin, it’s a transitional period that he takes a masochistic delight in. He likes it when his environment tests him, when it puts him in his place and makes him remember how he’ll always be walking along a knife’s edge of survival when he travels. It keeps the respect alive and well inside him.
He knows he is only a few weeks of walking before reaching the hollow of Moominvalley. This knowledge makes him feel a little sick and it makes him walk just a little more slowly to draw it out.
The worn leather of Snufkin’s boots only does so much. Even if the snow is packed-down, the cold still bleeds through the soles and makes his feet numb. He wonders what it would be like to get frostbite. Better yet, what it would be like to get frostbite when he is so close to Moominvalley and be all but physically dragged into Moominhouse for mandatory bedrest and a regime of grandmother’s increasingly bizarre cure-alls.
A lusty cry from a passing cardinal jolts Snufkin from his train of thought and he stops. He feels the weight of his rucksack and rolled-up tent cutting into his shoulders.
Snufkin isn’t quite sure where he is. He doesn’t much mind that. He’s spent the last few days trekking through a deciduous forest packed with thin birch and fat oak still naked and leafless. Old snow lays about in patches that cling to life from a grokish wind.
Through a spider’s web of branches, Snufkin can see that the sun is starting to set. The light is turning pinkish. Maybe it would be good to set up camp soon.
He walks for an hour more before he finds a small nook alongside the trail that’s flat and wide enough to pitch his tent and start a fire. He lets his rucksack roll from his back with a satisfied grunt.
Snufkin loves the routine of setting up camp. There’s something so romantic to be had in being able to make a home wherever one likes, to be able to look at a bit of ground and ask it to be slept upon for just one night.
The nook he’s found is good for tents, but bad for backs with a hard-packed reddish clay and not much in the way of grass outside of a few gnarly blades that cling to life. It’s perfect.
Pitching a tent is something he can do by muscle memory at this point. It is both a blessing and a curse, more so the latter. Snufkin isn’t one who enjoys letting his thoughts wander too deeply into the philosophical and personal.
Keeping his paws busy on things helps keep the bad thoughts from slinking in, their teeth gnashing with nibling hunger, but some things take so little of his brain that he can’t help but think about how Moomintroll must still be asleep.
Snufkin stutters to a halt midway in stamping down a rusted peg with the line of his rope held taut in his paw. His brow furrows.
Thinking about Moomintroll when he is so close to the valley is never a good idea. Rather, its historically always been an idea that has ended badly.
The tent peg rises up under his boot. Snufkin huffs and presses it back down.
With his tiny home magicked up from a bundle of canvas and rope, Snufkin works on setting a fire. He keeps a chipped shard of flint in his pocket, usually rattling about with his mouth organ.
He sets off to work in gathering some dried up wood, another mindless task. Any fool can tell a good piece of firewood from a lousy one.
Well, Moomintroll always had trouble. Snufkin recalls a time, long ago, when he was given an offering of soppy pine logs that had been left to mildew in the shade. Moomintroll, of course, hadn’t realized that they were poor for burning. Snufkin had taken them anyway.
“Stop it,” Snufkin mutters to himself. He hasn’t used his voice in so long that it croaks and strains even with those few words. The sound of it just makes him more upset as he picks up another branch.
The Joxter had once told him, in one of the handful of times that Snufkin had ever interacted with him, that loving someone took far too much effort to have any worthwhile gain in the end. He had regarded Snufkin with a lazy and half-lidded look and said “the way you’re going; you’ll never be as free as you seem to think you are.”
The way that his father was somehow able to read right to the core of his heart with just a look made Snufkin want to flee southwards, to reach the blue of the ocean and never look back.
With a bundle of sticks and branches large enough to light, Snufkin arranges them in a pile. It only takes a few clicks of a rock to the flint before a spark erupts into a wisp, then a flame, and then a true campfire.
The toasty warmth of it is an immediate relief. Snufkin feeds a few extra twigs into the fire’s maw and watches them sizzle into blackened spears.
“You’re in love, kit, and it’s a depressing thing to see,” the Joxter had once told him under a haze of tobacco smoke. “Half-mymble and half-mumrik, it’s a pitiable mix.”
“Why?” Snufkin had asked.
The Joxter had smiled in that lopsided way of his. “You’re doomed to be torn in two. The love you feel, the desire to settle, that’s the mymble in you. And all the while you’ve got the mumrik in you telling you to go, go, just go and leave it all for good.”
A loud pop sounds from the campfire and takes Snufkin back from that time, back from the Joxter all those years ago and back to a nameless woodland, a liminal patch of wintery travels where Snufkin can be just as nameless and just as without duty.
He feeds another stick into the fire. He wonders if Moomintroll will wake up early this spring, and if he’ll continue that infuriating tradition of waiting at the valley’s edge, flicking his feathery ears to catch the tune of his song.
Snufkin sighs and reaches for his rucksack. Undoing the top flap, he rummages around and takes out a woodgrain flask. The wood is purple heart, very pretty, a parting gift from a hemulen he had met a few months prior. It’s filled halfway with dandelion wine.
Sipping at it, Snufkin watches the world grow dim. No sunlight means more cold, even with a fire. He can’t help but be glad for the chill to his skin. The discomfort of it is enough to make his mind stupid, at least for a moment.
He finishes the last drop of the wine and places the empty flask to the side, to be left for someone else to find.
Last year, before Snufkin had left, his sister had pulled him aside.
“You don’t have to go this time,” she had said, her tone soft and carrying compassion that she only found herself able to give to her half-brother and sister. “You can hibernate with me and My. We’ve got the room for you.”
Snufkin had tugged his arm away with a disarming laugh and a mask of a grin. “Come now, you know I can’t hibernate like you can.” Granted, he had never seen reason to try.
“You’re so dense, Snuf,” Mymble had replied. “You’ve never had any brains in you at all.”
A screech owl cries out into the night. It’s close enough to make Snufkin wince in surprise and break from his fog.
The fire has gone out save for some orange embers under a mess of soot. Snufkin pokes at it with an extra stick and watches as the dotty sparks flitter up.
“Time to sleep, then,” he says to himself. His throat hurts even from those few little words.
The inside of Snufkin’s tent smells like cedar wood and tar. Like the stubborn fool he is, he doesn’t carry a blanket or pillow. Too much weight to bother with, especially in the south.
He hopes Moomintroll is warm in his bed. He always has a nest of quilts, all claw-made by his parents, gifts to keep the Groke at bay.
With nothing but the witness of creeps and woodies, Snufkin cries himself to sleep.
*
Moomintroll shouts aloud when he picks up the tune of Snufkin’s mouth organ and dashes to run down the path as fast as his stubby legs can manage.
“Snufkin!!” he cries. “Snuf!” Tears are gumming up the fur around his eyes and making it hard to see. He doesn’t slow.
The song, a tune of annual spring, keeps up in its joyful waltz.
Sweat mats down the fluff of Moomintroll’s white coat. His heavy breath whistles in a reedy and sharp way as he makes a narrow turn on the path, using his tail to act as a rudder.
And it’s then that he sees Snufkin there, only a few footfalls away, his lips curled in a smile under his instrument, eyes dazzled with wildness.
Moomintroll doesn’t leap to embrace his friend. He stops at Snufkin’s side and tries not to gasp too loudly as he listens.
The spring tune ends in a flourish of notes, and it’s when Snufkin takes away his mouth organ that Moomintroll hugs him.
“I missed you,” he sobs into the stiff fabric of Snufkin’s tunic and nuzzles his cheek with the blunt tip of his nose. “Welcome home, Snufkin. I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed you.”
It takes a moment for Snufkin to hug back.
When he does, he clings to the ends of Moomintroll’s fur and prays that his tears aren’t enough to seep through the troll’s fur.