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“Jack?”
Rhys scrambles to his feet, hands hanging in the air in front of him. His fingers curl sporadically, touching something that isn’t there.
“Jack, look!”
It’s snowing. Elpis stretches white and icy beyond their shelter, a great plain blending seamlessly into cliffs and caverns, rock and snow. The ‘shelter’ is a Dahl waystation, ancient and abandoned, with graffitied walls older than Rhys himself, but it keeps the cold from biting, grants them time to find their way.
Not that they’re lost. Nothing like that.
Rhys stares as though he’s never seen the sky, bright blue kinetic barrier reflecting dully in his eyes, gating the way outside. His mouth is open, and Jack can’t help but watch him, caught up for a second in his fascination.
“It’s snowing, Jack,” Rhys says, because it wasn’t obvious, and turns to him with a smile wide enough to crinkle his eyes at the corners. He turns back to the barrier immediately, unwilling to miss a second.
“Yeah, Rhys, it’s snowing,” Jack says, tucked in the far corner of the waystation building, his knees pressed to his chest. He’s an angry ball of cold and tired and hungry, wrapped in Bullymong fur and winter leather, hood pulled snug over his head. He scowls at Rhys’ back, and his breath swirls white around him. “Four for you, genius. I should give you a pay rise.”
Rhys laughs, damn him. He grins at the world outside their stolen bubble, a child with his nose pressed to the glass window of a sweet shop. “If you paid me what I was worth, you’d bankrupt Helios,” Rhys says, and it’s no more smug than it is completely true, and Jack scowls even more. “I’ve never seen it snow.”
Jack folds his arms atop his knees, trying to warm his nose in the sleeve of his coat. It was snow. Who cared? You could see the same effect when Maintenance cleaned out the air conditioning ducts, and he’d never seen anyone put that mess on a postcard.
“Well, there you go, cupcake. Snow. That’s snow. Magical. Just friggin’ magical, like the rest of this goddamned assforsaken rock.”
Rhys smirks, and pushes his hands – one mittened, one metal - through the oxygen barrier. “I’m going out in it.”
“Oh no you fucking aren’t!” Jack is on his feet faster than logically possible with the amount of layers he’s wearing, stumbling forward like a particularly overweight penguin. He grabs at Rhys’ flesh arm and hauls, the barrier flickering closed again with a gentle fwip.
Rhys shrugs his arm away. He’s instantly annoyed, the tip of his nose still pink from the cold, and Jack supposes it might be cute if the situation were any less hellish. “Rhys,” Jack says, pushing the furry brim of his hood out of his eyes. “Rhys, baby, cupcake, honeypie with cherries and strippers on top. That-” Jack points. “That, is Elpis, kitten. Now I know you’re young and I know this exploring must seem pretty exciting to you, virgin as you are-”
“Virgin.”
“Don’t interrupt, cupcake. But this-” Jack turns to face the barrier, the blue shining off the toggles on his coat. He gestures, wide and sweeping. “This, Elpis – do keep up – is a hellhole. A scummy, vermin-infested, bandit-mongering hellhole!”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I will be damned if I let you wander around out there, on your own, with legs like those, in temperatures best found in cryo freezers, end up kidnapped with your entrails halfway to Concordia, have to blow the fucking place up and murder every nasty little bandit on the whole entire moon.”
Jack exhales. He’s glaring, crease deep between his eyebrows, and Rhys has to press his lips together to stop from smiling.
“So, what you’re saying is,” Rhys says, and pretends to look thoughtful for all of a second. “You’d blow up a moon for me?”
Jack gapes at him. “I’m gonna kill you,” he says, and storms back to his corner. He huddles there, wrapping his arms around himself like a sulking child. “The second we get out of here, I’m gonna kill you. And if you die horribly out there and leave me in this wasteland alone to also die horribly, I’m gonna find you, bring you the fuck back to life, and kill you again.”
Rhys tries to hide his snigger, turning back to stare out at the snow. It seems to be localised entirely to the small area around the waystation, presumably due to the pockets of atmosphere over Elpis’ larger mountains. The proximity to the lava rivers beneath the surface must cause the water in the lakes to evaporate, forming clouds, and hell, he’s no geophysicist. It looks beautiful, and Rhys sighs, gentle through his smile.
“I’m going out in it,” he says again, and ignores the way Jack puffs himself up like an angry cockerel. “Think about it! We’ve got at least two hours before the ECHOnet reboots and we can send a message to Helios.”
“Idiots,” says Jack. Rhys ignores him.
“You’ve driven off every Kraggon, every Kraggon’s mom, everything that’s even seen a Kraggon, in at least a 50 mile radius thanks to your bitching – which, if the ECHO doesn’t come back online, is probably loud enough to shout at Helios for help-”
“Did you not just hear me say I was going to kill you? I literally said it a second ago.”
“And the way you shot that exploding ice mushroom, which was probably visible from Pandora.”
Jack narrows his eyes, hugging himself tighter. The damn thing had shot so much ice at him, he may as well have been a margarita. He makes a mental note: Blanket Elpis in weedkiller, ASAP.
“So,” Rhys says, tugging his own coat a little straighter, pressing down the flaps on his woolly hat. He had that stubborn set to his jaw, lips just slightly pursed, and again, if they hadn’t been close to freezing to death in the middle of nowhere, it might have been adorable. “I’m making the most of it. You want to sit there like a grouchy a-hole, that’s your prerogative.”
He smiles sweetly, and steps out into the cold.
Jack watches the kinetic barrier shimmer, blurring Rhys’ retreating back. His Oz kit flashes up over his head, and Rhys seems to stand and stare for a moment before trudging on, kicking up slush with his boots. “Don’t you dare die,” Jack grumbles, and buries his nose in his sleeve.
*
The snow is… It’s unlike anything Rhys has ever seen.
Living on Helios was all he’d known for such a long time that he’d almost forgotten what it was like to be outside. The air was cold. It clenched in his lungs with every inhale, almost painful. Rhys took great gulps, wondering how he’d ever breathed recycled, filtered oxygen, kept in pipes and pumped through every room. He could feel it creeping over his skin, feel the cold coming up from the earth. It bit at his cheeks and stung his eyes, his nose was running and he already couldn’t feel his toes, and it was wonderful.
Jack had mentioned Eridium rain before, and Rhys was fairly certain they’d experienced some kind of torrential dust when they were on Pandora, but snow was something else entirely, something normal people never saw, the sort of not-quite-an-urban-myth saved for holiday holovids and computer-generated travel posters.
Rhys makes his way slowly from the waystation, slightly giddy with the weaker gravity, swirling his hand through the flakes of falling snow. It clings to his coat and dances around him as he walks, and Rhys laughs, breath white, flecks of snow landing gently on his Oz mask, and melting into nothing.
He laughs again, and collects a handful of fallen snow that was carpeting a nearby rock. The cold seeps even through his mitten, and for a wild moment, Rhys wants to press the freezing handful to his cheek, just to check. Instead he picks a target, and hurls the snowball towards the Eye of Helios. It arcs, high and lazy with the gravity, and misses Helios by perhaps a few thousand miles, landing gently in the snow some way away.
“Awesome!”
Rhys whoops, jumping two-footed in the air with a wild laugh, and quickly gathers up another mound of snow. He throws it loosely upward, and it flutters down around him in a shower of cotton, Rhys twirling in delight.
*
It surely won’t take long. Ten minutes or so for the cold to worm through Rhys’ boots and snap his toes, another couple for a Rathyd to find him crawling on his pretty ass and peck out his eyes, a little while longer before he’s screaming Jack’s name and begging help and forgiveness and eternal adoration. And then the ECHOnet will bleep in apology, Jack can break some engineers’ necks, and they can go home.
It doesn’t, however. Nothing happens, and Jack’s forehead starts to ache from glaring at the metal panelled walls. It’s not…right, without Rhys, especially in a foreign place. He’s frustrated, suspicious of every sound, stupid for suggesting they ever visit the incompetent Hyperion forward teams on Elpis in the first place. It was his own idea, of course it was, and if Rhys wound up half digested in a hole somewhere, it would technically be Jack’s fault. The thought made his stomach twist, and not just because it’d mean a whole pile of paperwork.
He kicks up from the wall, shakes the pins and needles from his legs, and heads out. “Rhys?” he calls, breaching the kinetic barrier. It sets his teeth on edge, and his Oz kit flashes safely up around his head as he begins to tramp through the snow. “Rhysie?”
Silence stretches for miles. Helios blinks smugly down at him, and Jack growls.
There’s sudden movement on his periphery, and Jack swears under his breath, removing both hands from his coat pockets, just in case. Of course he’s armed, but the snow is thick, not to mention annoying, churning around him like kicked up dirt, sticking to his gloves, the fur on his boots. Jack huffs, and the snowflakes scatter. “Rhys?” he calls again. “You still alive, cupcake? Because, uh… you know, I’d prefer it if you were! Just, just for reference…”
Something smashes into the back of his head, and Jack pitches forward. “What th-” There’s a triumphant yell from behind him, and cold starts to spread outward down his neck, seeping through his coat and scarf. He whips around, and Rhys appears some distance away, creased over in apparent hysterical laughter. “What in hell was that?!”
Rhys, still laughing, crouches slightly, shooting stance, and Jack can see the amber flash of his ECHOeye.
“Rhysie, kitten, what-”
A second snowball smacks him in the shoulder, and Jack yelps, stumbling backwards over his boots. Rhys shrieks with laughter, and for a wild second, Jack thinks if he never heard another sound, he’d die pretty goddamn happy.
He recovers quickly, but Rhys is already bounding away across the snow, grinning like a madman. “Hey!” Jack yells, frantically clutching at a handful of snow by his feet. He throws, and misses spectacularly. “Get back here you little shit!”
“Make me!” Rhys shouts, head appearing from behind a crop of rocks.
Jack kicks the ground. He drops to his knees, slapping snow into haphazard clumps in his palms, shuffling to cover behind an abandoned Dahl cargo container. “Oh you’re dead,” he hisses, and then louder, “I’m going to wear your pancreas as a hat, you know that?” He hurls a snowball.
“Hey, Handsome!” comes Rhys’ voice, lilting like song, “Your trajectory’s off!”
“I’ll frickin’ kill you, Rhys, I swear to god!”
He throws another, just as one of Rhys’ lands a foot to his left. Jack dives; scooting through the snow as Rhys’ head again appears above the rocks, scanning for movement. He waits, counts his breaths, takes aim.
“Holy-” The snowball finds its target, exploding across Rhys’ Oz mask in a shower of white. He keels to the side as if wounded, laughing and crying out in pretend agony. “I’m hit! I’m hit!”
“Ha!” Jack laughs. “You’re going down, Princess!”
“Not if I get you first!” A barrage of missiles comes arcing toward him, and Jack crashes sideways as though they’re grenades, snowball after snowball landing heavy behind his cover. He barks a laugh and scrambles into the open, freezing as he comes face to face with Rhys.
They stop, both panting, Jack adjusting his grip on his very last snowball. Rhys stares him down, dropped in fighting stance not twenty feet away, smiling like he couldn’t stop if he tried, and they both wait, daring the other to move. Rhys’ hair is sticking out at odd angles from beneath the brim of his wool hat, nose bright pink. Jack watches him breathe, just for a moment, lips pulled reluctantly into a smile.
Rhys’ darts forward. The snowball hits Jack’s feet in a cloud of snow, a warning shot, and Jack throws his back too quickly. It shatters way to Rhys’ side, and they both laugh, Rhys drawing his metal arm back.
“Oh, don’t you dare!” Jack shouts, hands outstretched in half-hearted surrender.
“Look at that,” Rhys says. “You’re out of ammo!” He squints, aiming perfectly with just a little ECHO input, and hits Jack square in the chest.
The snowball explodes, and Jack topples with a muffled “oof!”, back hitting the ground in a plume of condensed breath.
Helios is almost beautiful from so far down, Jack thinks, Rhys laughing as he hurries over, boots crunching. He emerges in Jack’s field of vision, bright and grinning, and Jack decides he prefers to stare up at him rather than the stars.
“Oh gosh,” Rhys says, and he’s snatching his breath, cheeks chapped and pink, waving his one mitten uselessly. “Hell, are you okay? I still can’t get used to this gravit- Ah!”
Jack swipes with his leg and Rhys trips, crashing down next to him. He scowls, and Jack quirks an eyebrow at him.
“Not cool,” Rhys says, and quickly adds, because he can see where Jack’s mind is going, “Pun not intended.” He dusts the front of his coat, wiping his nose with the back of his glove, and beams. There’s snow in his hair, shimmering beneath the transparent screen of his Oz kit, and Jack has to resist the urge to brush it out, fingers curling over Rhys’ arms as he shuffles closer.
“Good,” Jack says, Rhys leaning gently over him, chest to chest. “Because it’s fucking freezing. Cool has nothing to do with it, cupcake.”
“Hilarious.” Rhys smiles, and tangles his flesh fingers in the fabric of Jack’s scarf, metal palm flat on his chest.
“You know, I think my ass has gone numb.”
“Maybe you’ll stop putting half of it into your personality then, grouchy.”
“Oh! Oh my god,” Jack says, laughing despite himself. “Oh man, Rhysie, kitten, oh you are lucky I like you so much.” He wraps his arm around Rhys’ back, warmth radiating off him regardless of the cold, and Rhys plants a knee between Jack’s legs.
“Yeah,” Rhys says, quiet, mapping the stars reflected in Jack’s Oz mask, like some surrealist painting. “Yeah I am.”
Jack shakes his head slightly, resisting the urge to roll his eyes, and reaches up behind Rhys’ head. “Hold your breath, cupcake,” he says, and switches off Rhys’ Oz kit. He does the same for his own, and presses their lips hastily together, Rhys’ weight heavy on his chest.
Rhys exhales all his air at once, twisting his head into the kiss and opening his mouth, feeling Jack’s hand slip gently to his waist. His back arches. Jack’s lips are cold, tongue scorching hot, and he jumps when the tip of Rhys’ nose touches his cheek, the last of his breath shuddering between them.
The seconds tick. Rhys hums and breaks first, switching his Oz kit on and inhaling deep, Jack’s hand insistent at his side. The mask flashes off a breath later, and Rhys is kissing him again, slow and shivering, Jack’s teeth prying at his bottom lip. Rhys licks, pressing his fingers beneath the layers at Jack’s neck, searching for skin beneath his scarf as Jack leans up and takes a new breath.
As soon as the Oz kit flickers away, Jack pulls him back down, kissing burning cheeks, pink nose and jaw, Rhys’ gloved hand settling against Jack’s neck, thumb stroking the skin beneath the clasp of his mask.
They kiss between each lungful of air, and the cold goes forgotten.
“Kitten…”
Rhys kisses gently at his jawline. “Kitten,” Jack murmurs, strained of oxygen, arching back to switch on his Oz kit. Rhys finally opens heavy eyes and does the same, breathing freely, settling his palm against Jack’s chest once more. His heart thunders beneath it, and Rhys smiles.
“Are you going to make a joke about how I take your breath away?” he asks, and Jack chuckles, rumbling, smirking up at the expanse of space. The stars stare back, and Jack feels a strange pride in their silence. That’s right, he’s mine, he thinks, and the stars say nothing.
“I’ll save it for when we aren’t dying of hypothermia. I’ve got a good one, promise.”
“Mm, I’m frozen,” Rhys whispers, and supresses a shiver, Jack huddling deeper into the cocoon of his clothing, the only barrier between him and the encroaching snow. His teeth clang together on cue. “I can’t feel my toes.”
“I can’t feel anything below your hand,” Jack says, shifting, Rhys pressing gently at his ribcage in response. The snow has seeped into the top layer of his coat, soaking the cuffs of fur on his hood and boots. “I think I’ve got ball frostbite. Actual ball frostbite. Frostbite of the balls.”
Rhys snorts and sniffles, wrinkling his running nose. “They’re arguably your best feature, so I’m understandably heartbroken,” he says, and laughs again at Jack’s raised eyebrows.
“Funny,” Jack says, stretching his legs as if to prove his point. “I think they’ve shrivelled up inside my body for protection. They’ve frozen and they’ll break and fall off and we’ll have to carry them back to Helios in an oxygen canister.”
“That would be a shame. We need those canisters for oxygen.”
“Oh my god, aren’t you friggin’ full of it today, hm? I should leave you here as Kraggon fodder, you cheeky little unsympathetic asshole.”
Rhys smirks at him, and the lights from Helios almost make his eyes look Eridium purple, bright beneath his eyelashes. He’s stroking idly at the front of Jack’s coat, as though he hasn’t noticed he’s doing it. “I’ll make it up to you,” he says, tilting his head, Jack reaching beneath his Oz mask to stroke a gloved thumb over his jaw.
“Goddamned right,” Jack says, and reluctantly pulls away, making to sit up. His teeth are chattering, voice tight. “Shower, a drink, and a blowjob, as soon as we’re home. Come on.” He pushes weakly at Rhys’ arm. “We need to set fire to something and try not to fucking freeze. I suggest we use that absolute abomination of a hat.”
Rhys laughs, and clambers shakily to his feet, brushing snow from his knees. He pats his woolly earflaps, to make a point, and Jack stands woodenly after him, wet and shivering.
“Seriously, cupcake, I bought you a new wardrobe, there’s no excuse.”
Jack swats clumps of snow from the trim of his coat, stamping his feet to kick his muscles into working. Rhys takes his hand, and together they trudge their way back to the shelter, snow already blanketing the indents of their footsteps, as though they hadn’t been there at all.
*
There’s an extraction team from Helios sent within the hour, and Jack sits huddled in the same corner of the waystation as before, Rhys held tight and warm against his chest. The fire is small, but thaws their frozen fingertips as they wait, the shadows dancing between the rivets on the walls, and Jack supposes if it weren’t for the surroundings, it might be fairly comfortable. A bit like camping. In a freezer. The company is tolerable, at least.
He presses his nose into Rhys’ neck and kisses him, open-mouthed and soft, keeping him captured in his arms as Rhys wiggles. “You’ve cheered up,” Rhys says quietly, stretching slightly to allow Jack better access. His hat and gloves lie abandoned beside them, thankfully not near the fire, puddles of ice water pooling beneath the soles of his boots.
Jack hums. He presses his tongue to Rhys’ pulse, sucking just hard enough to prickle, and smiles, all teeth, when Rhys squirms again against his chest. “Did you like the snow, kitten?” he says, hot in Rhys’ ear.
“Mm,” Rhys says, and tips his head back against Jack’s shoulder, feeling warmth finally begin to reach his frozen toes. “Beautiful.”
“Good,” says Jack. He tangles long fingers in the back of Rhys’ hair, and nips the skin beneath his jaw. “Because I’m blowing this entire frigid catastrofuck of a planet to shit as soon as we get home.”