Chapter Text
the staghorn mountains, almost christmas.
The first time Aelin had retreated to a ski resort for the Christmas period, she’d been shocked. Shocked, not only by many people chose to spend time away from their families during such a time of community and family, but also by how many families chose to spend Christmas in a hotel. and not in the ultra-decorated, ultra-comfort of their homes.
She’d quickly realised she was being a hypocrite because wasn’t she just the same as all of those people? Avoiding her family on Christmas, choosing to spend Christmas morning declining calls, and watching the messages pile up during the moments she wasn’t skiing down the side of a slope.
And it was the fact of her reason that made her feel so much worse, she was avoiding spending time at home because ever since her father had died, her mother had brought home increasingly old men, with increasingly deep pockets. She was avoiding all of her friends, all of her family—but not her presents, she always emailed the address of the local post office to her friends and family—purely because she didn’t like her new stepdaddies.
To pile even more guilt on herself—Aelin sometimes liked to feel shit about herself, liked to think it gave her motivation, really it gave her an increasing bill for therapy—she’d been avoiding home for so long, that she now exclusively skied down Black Diamond slopes. She’d started out without gear, or even a clue.
She only visited for two weeks out of a year, to make matters worse.
By now, she recognised the locals, and the locals recognised her. in fact, she recognised the regulars at the ski resort, too. She knew which ones lived in the neighbouring towns during the snow season, knew which ones visited just for the weeks of Christmas frenzy.
Safe to say, she knew how to live her life at a ski resort, she’d been doing it for a long fucking time. Which meant she understood proper conduct when it came to skiing. She was no fool. Nor was she one to accept foolishness.
And if it led to sore knuckles for the next week, who cared?
In conclusion, when some dickhead with a fucking complex of some sort—she’d never sat down to memorise all of them, sue her—cut her up repeatedly, and refused to show some common fucking decency or even respect for fellow skiers, she’d make sure he was out of line.
So now here she was, bent down slightly, as aerodynamic as possible, skiing for her absolute life whilst chasing after the dickhead in the green kit who’d cut her up. So. Many. Times.
She focused on the snow, planning out the quickest route—and even then, she didn’t have to work very hard, she had it memorised—to get to him.
Maybe Aelin had a penchant for vigilante justice served with a side of her fists—sue her. She’d encountered every brilliant, fabulous, perfect person in her life due to her penchant, it had only done her good.
Up until the point the police had knocked on her door and issued her with a warning over a bar fight in which she’d punched a dude so hard, his friends called him ‘bobblehead’ afterwards. Now, she had to watch herself.
But who was going to drag out an already overworked police force to break up a fight, to break up Aelin doing a favour to the entire community at the ski resort? That was it, they would herald her a hero after, for eliminating a source of danger on the slopes.
She can hear the chants and feel the exhilaration of crowd surfing over her adoring fans. Yeah, this was going to be her best match yet, going to be her most famous.
Before she could fully comprehend it, the skier in green was just in front of her, slowed down and instead—practising? He seemed to be going over one position repeatedly, working his body into shapes that she didn’t want to know about.
She had the urge to laugh but instead pulled to a stop in the middle of a Black Diamond slope, pushing herself to the edge. The edge he was also on—oddly considerate for such a previously inconsiderate skier, but people had depth and were like onions when it came to structuring, so she disregarded her doubts. Being a dick about others once was enough to discount him as a quality skier.
“Hey!” she shouted, fumbling to pull down the fabric protecting her chin, mouth, and nose. He hadn’t heard her, so she tried again, “Hey!”
This time, he looked up—similarly pulling down the fabric over his face. Only, with a lot less fumbling, and a lot more skill. She hoped he thought her flushed cheeks were a result of the cold weather and not her sudden on-set embarrassment. He made a motion, to point himself, checking it was him she was talking to.
“Yeah, you. D’you see anyone else around here? Don’t play coy with me, dickhead. You know just why I’m here; you know full well you’ve been dangerous, reckless, and careless on the slope. You’ve cut me up seven times, and almost embedded yourself in a tree four times—and we’re only a third of the way down! I don’t enjoy fearing for my safety, nor others’, and I especially don’t like watching some dude’s brain explode over a tree trunk.”
She’d torn off her eye protection at one point, pulling them up to rest on her head. He’d followed suit, managing to make it look effortless, where she had fumbled, and plucked at the tight strappings. It was as if he’d done everything a thousand times before as if he was some kind of skiing master, a fucking Winter Olympics gold medallist.
Which he certainly was not—he couldn’t be, because those people knew how to ski, and this man evidently did not. Aelin could have kicked him in the shin she was mad at him. Her perfect brand of perfect vigilante justice.
It would be a perfect way to spend Christmas Eve, it could even be her Christmas present to herself.
“Thank you, for the concern. But I’m not about to flatten myself to a tree trunk, and also, by cutting you up, did you mean skiing perfectly safely across you, roughly 20 metres ahead of you? and if you did, I suggest you learn what skiing means.” His breath didn’t make little clouds in the air, and Aelin assumed it was due to the ice heart that he housed in his chest. He clearly was just as cold and just as frigid as the air was, a third of the way down a pretty fucking tall mountain.
i.e., he was very cold and very frigid. Perfect for riling up, pissing off, and beating up.
One of Aelin’s favourite things to do—under the large, umbrella term of vigilante justice, of course.
“Give it a rest, you think you fucking walk on water—”
“—correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what snow is? Again, correct, but I do believe it is water in a frozen-ish state. But don’t catch me out on the science of it all—I haven’t gone to a science class in over fifteen years—”
“—you’re just the type to say that, you know. I could tell. The second I opened my mouth and said what I did, I got a psychic vision of you being a pretentious, pedantic arsehole and telling me all that. Telling me all that and going all shy and bullshit.” He let her finish her sentence, but she was immediately thrust back into his delusional environment.
“Please spare me the lecture—you’d be more useful if you were dead, than giving me, me of all people, about how to fucking ski.” Before she could consider his words, her hand was flying out, slapping him around the face.
“Don’t you dare—how fucking rude, and inconsiderate, and inhuman do you have to be, to wish fucking death on someone. Someone you don’t even know—I genuinely, genuinely, pray that I never see you ever again.”
She felt so strongly that she’d order room service for the rest of her stay, that she’d stick to the baby slopes with all the incapable children, and parents who wished they were on Black Diamond slopes. She hated him so thoroughly that she’d willfully immerse herself in a child-rich area.
Gods, this man was clearly doing funny things to her. not only regarding her choices to avoid him but in her style of violence. She typically would punch someone—felt as though it would hurt more, and leave a deeper, darker, more painful mark.
This idiotic, stuck-up-his-own-arse dickhead deserved something so humiliating as to be slapped around the face. So hard that he twisted around, and was almost knocked off balance. That was what he deserved, with a nice defined handprint across his cheek—the cherry on top of the already perfect cake.
He shook his head and opened his mouth, but Aelin had enough self-preservation to understand that she needed to get out of there. Soon. As soon as possible, or else she was going to find herself with a wonderful mugshot.
Before he could get his sentence out, Aelin was sliding her eye protection down, and tightening the thick fabric keeping the bottom half of her face warm(ish). It seemed that no matter which brands she tried, or who she consulted on the matter, she came out with a snowy chin, and a nose verging on frostbite.
Clearly, she didn’t care too much, given that she was still skiing with the pain, and suffering it ultimately delivered to her doorstep.
She let her anger flow through her as she skied down the mountainside, taking riskier and riskier corners and jumps, though still somewhat more careful than she would be, with the knowledge her newfound arch nemesis was somewhere behind her. The scenery was slowly shifting around her, the thick, tall pine trees thinning out, making room for rocks, and the pale blue of the winter’s sky.
The snow was practically untouched due to the early hour, just a couple of sets of tracks that never seemed to stray far from one another. The chance someone was training was low—but Aelin knew of some hard-core skiers who never took a day off. If there wasn’t snow, they’d simply find an artificial slope somewhere.
It was dedication in a way that Aelin couldn’t fathom, nor could she aspire to it. The only thing she was just as dedicated to, was not being introduced to her thirty-seventh stepdad in four years.
The trees dissolved from her view, leaving only the sky and the clouds, and the glaring sunshine. Her eyes burned, but she couldn’t look away—mesmerised by the twinkling of it against the snow, the shifting particles in the air.
It was gorgeous.
All until a fiercely cut figure in green smoothed his way across the snow but five metres in front of her, having come from within the trees. It was dangerous, and she was pissed off. She was more than pissed off—he’d disrespected her, and all the fellow skiers on the slope, just to be a show-off, just to seem cool, he’d been rude, cold, and inconsiderate in the most horrifying of ways.
All Aelin could do was watch on as he threw up a distinct middle finger, his dark green a stark contrast against the white snow.
Oh, she’d get him, she’d get him.