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The snow lets up one morning. The day dawns bright, dawns clear, hints of blue sky slicing through the snow-laden boughs above them, and they decide to make a pilgrimage to the plane.
They need fabric, what they always need these days; other than food, other than warmth, other than Lottie lucid and Shauna present. They need insulation. They need material.
When Tai eventually forces herself to clamber down from the attic- their room, she’d started silently thinking of it- Lottie is standing at the window, face drawn.
“If we’re going to go to the plane, we should go now,” she says, voice soft and facing away from the rest of them, but still heard, always heard, by each of the girls milling around the great room.
“Why, Lottie?”
Van, of course. Tai hadn’t known she was there, but she wasn’t surprised.
“We won’t have much time until the next blizzard,” Lottie responds, turning to look at them, to stare into Van like she was waiting for her to drop eye contact, which of course she never would.
“I mean, you guys think so, right?” and the mystique slips from her voice so quickly it gives Tai whiplash. Lottie twists her sleeves around her wrists, eyes big like they used to be under the hanging lanterns of her own backyard on the nights they would all get fucked up and lay around on her well-manicured lawn. Lottie’s eyes meet Tai’s, and she looks away instantly, like it burns. Nat was nodding though, rising from her seat by the door, and that made it basically decided, and Lottie was right anyway, that of course they would go when the snow let up, that all they could do was hope it wouldn’t return, never know , just like anyone else stuck and stranded and desperate might.
It was decided that Travis was going, and so was Nat, and Lottie was staying because apparently it was easier for her to bless other people than herself. Shauna was, of course, staying, which meant Tai had to stay, didn’t feel safe enough to let the other girl out of her sight when her days still consisted of sitting in the cabin with a vacant expression she only broke to roll her eyes at Lottie and get their portion from the meat shed, which she would emerge from shivering and blue-nosed but at least responsive. And they usually liked to split the six of them up with things like this, so Van was going. She probably would’ve gone anyway, but. Tai liked there being a reason.
/
They stand in heavy silence opposite each other in the attic, and Tai dresses her from the bottom up. Her cold fingers brush pale skin as she works methodically, painstakingly. She tucks a long sleeved shirt that was probably once Mari’s over her boxers and into Laura Lee’s old sleep pants, carefully buttoning a pair of thick jeans over them, pulling her own sweatshirt over her head and adding it to Van’s layers, smoothing it over the where the bone necklace juts out against her even ribs. Tai pulls the socks they’d mutilated into gloves over her hands, and through it all Van lets her. She’s unresisting, pliant under Tai’s decisive touch, allowing Tai to have her hands all over her and still avoid her gaze.
“Tai–” she starts, softly. “Tai–” and Tai squeezes her eyes shut, drops her head against Van’s collarbone, feels the up-down of her breath through her shoulders. She doesn’t really wanna hear it. “Nat and Travis do it every day. You know that. It’s not… we wouldn’t do it if it was a risk.”
Tai nods into her shirt. It's one of the more obvious lies they’ve told each other lately, but Van says it so convincingly, no trace of her usual humor even though it could almost be sarcasm.
And it isn’t, really, not that much more dangerous than spending another day starving and shivering, but at least she’s next to her when she does that, and Tai can watch her chest move, count her breaths. Tai lifts her head to look her in the eye and sees only sincerity and hunger and slight annoyance looking back at her. She slides her hands down to Van’s wrists at her sides. She’s pretty fucking tired of worrying so damn much.
“Just. Don’t freeze,” she says. Van’s gaze softens, and she nods. She swallows hard then surges forward to kiss Tai with her arms still pinned in place by Tai’s hands. She kisses her painfully hard for a moment, nose digging into her cheek, before Tai pulls back, stares her down, tries to make her eyes speak.
“Do you promise?” she whispers, so low her voice catches on the s. Van’s hand moves to her hand, holds it between them, tight against their chests.
“Promise what?”
“Do you promise not to freeze?”
Van’s nose scrunches, her face so soft her scars look like scratches.
“Yeah, I promise.” Tai fists her other hand in her collar, close to her pulse, pushes her luck.
“No, do you promise?” Van’s eyes flicker with confusion for a moment, humoring her without understanding. Tai’s acting on instinct, on the animal heart beating underneath her shirt. “And then you say, I do,” she continues.
“Yeah, I–” Van blinks, words faltering. Her lips tighten, start to frown, eyes dark and big and warning, telling Tai not to say something she doesn’t understand or else mean. Tai squeezes her hand harder, daring her. Almost.
“I do.” Van says.
Tai nods, clean, decisive. Good. “I do,” Tai repeats.
Van looks at her like she can’t decide what’s just happened and what’s worse, looking or looking away. She gives kind of a breathless exhale, scrubs her hand over her face.
“You’re crazy, Tai,” she says. “You know that?” but she has this bubbling smile starting to take her over, peeling open her lips.
“I love you,” is all Tai says, and when she kisses her Tai summons all the warmth in her body and tries to breathe it back into her.
/
Downstairs, the others bustle around, preparing the team with the kind of energy only an event like this brings up, packing backpacks and prepping pieces of stretchers and rope. Tai takes Van’s jacket and starts stuffing it into a pack, along with the makeshift scarf she wears. By the door, Mari and Gen prep Akilah similarly. Lottie seems to be flitting carefully back and forth between Travis and Nat, who decidedly don’t look at each other, packing pieces of cardboard and fabric into their layers and whispering over them. Her usual mug is discarded on the windowsill, red around the rim and steaming.
Van reaches for the backpack.
“OK,” Tai starts. “Take it off when you’re walking. Don’t sweat. And put it back on as soon as you stop moving. Don’t let yourself get cold again.” Van nods, smirking a little, even then.
“Yes ma’am.” She narrows her eyes conspiratorially. “God, you’d think you’re gonna miss me or something.” Tai rolls her eyes despite herself, and Van leans forward like she’s gonna whisper something in her ear when Lottie approaches, lays a heavy hand on Van’s shoulder. She straightens instantly at the touch, almost military posture.
“Be safe, Van,” Lottie says gently. “We’ll see you soon. Take the way above the creek.” She hugs her tightly and barely presses her lips to her forehead. Tai’s stomach twists, and when Lottie steps back, she nods gently to Tai and then to Van again before slipping away.
Van’s eyes drain blue in the pale morning light, obviously nervous, and Taissa’s heart scrabbles at her throat, the sudden sense that it isn’t enough, it isn’t anything- the animal heart starts again, the protection of the pack, the protection of the kill- I can do my own fucking blessing, she thinks. Tai takes Van’s face in her hands before she really knows that she’s doing it, and presses one thumb over her lip, watches her eyes narrow with confusion, with a hint of barely lidded want. It's the kind of thing they can do now, in front of everyone, and its achingly funny to her that even here, even so far from everything and so close to themselves, they’d hid. Tai leans forward and puts her lips to her own thumb, so it's the only thing separating them. She’s acting purely on instinct, on desire, on the knowledge that she can anchor her better to this place, to her-
“Come back,” Tai whispers against her own skin, then squeezes her eyes shut, tips her head back. “Bring her back,” she says softly, and Van inhales sharply. When Tai opens her eyes she’s looking at her hard, blue eyes tight, and Tai seals it by pulling her in roughly, kisses her more deeply than she should, maybe, worries over her harder than she needs to, wants her more and worse and heavier than she can afford to. Van grips her by the waist and kisses her like she hasn’t been hungry this whole time until now. When Tai pulls away she's gasping, and the others pretend not to look, all but Shauna, who stares.
Van follows Nat into the woods, her hair stark and flaming against the snow until she is almost out of Taissa’s view, and she doesn’t look back.
/
Sometime in the past week Travis’s shitty Timex gave out, its small gray face no longer blinking with intelligible numbers. The light it emitted had been infinitely more valuable than the display for weeks at that point, considering it was the last means of telling time they had left, and it didn’t do Travis much good with no one to tell it against.
“Shit,” he’d said lightly, before handing it off to Nat to inspect. She banged it fiercely against one of the cabin walls a couple of times, and when it didn’t respond she'd nodded, deemed it dead but not useless, and the next Tai saw of it was as an improvised clamp, cinching one of Gen’s makeshift arm warmers to her.
There wasn’t exactly time. There hadn’t been for a while. There were just days, and in the moon there were months, and in Shauna there were seasons. And in the sky there was snow, and one day, there wouldn’t be. The days would push longer than the nights, and there would be no more snow, Tai told herself, pretended that she was so sure of the fact that she didn’t need convincing of it. The spring would come and it wouldn’t matter that there would never be hours or minutes again.
So she doesn’t know exactly how long it takes them, in the end, watching the sun move across the newly visible sky and estimating old, irrelevant units over it. The plane is a few hours' walk in good weather, easily reached in a day and easily returned. But the journey they’re making, through freshly fallen snow, is less walking than it is fighting. The first person to step on any untouched snow would sink through, down to the knee or hip, into the powder, and it would be graceless and arduous work to stand back up again in order to shove their body forward to make the next step, the work only slightly easier for the person behind. It would be slowgoing, Tai told herself. She could wait.
If they were still out when it started getting dark, they would stop for the night rather than risk losing their way, huddled together in a pit covered in tree boughs, if they could find any. But Nat would be there, and she and Van had always been friends, or if not friends at least something that necessitated looking out for each other. Van would probably be trying to keep things as light as possible for Akilah, which would lighten them for her a little bit, and she would think of Tai, up in their attic, sitting awake with her hand bound to the wall, two anchors.
Her head spins with the conversation they’d had earlier- Tai wasn’t sure what she'd been insinuating, what she was playing at. She’d just wanted, suddenly and desperately, for Van to have something of hers before she left. Something attaching them.
Ever since the crash, whenever Tai’s not thinking, she’s running through the checklist in the back of her mind, the constant chant of need her whole body beats itself around: Food. Warmth. Van. Her body sings it, craves it, constantly, in that order. Food, Warmth, Van. In the summer it had been a litany, the list of worries and wants compounding, never-ending. Food, Water, Rescue, Van, Shelter, Shauna, Escape, Sleep, Fire, Akilah, Lottie, Nat, the others- and now so much of it was melted away, either solved for or given up on. Food, Warmth, Van. And as day by day food and warmth become harder to come by, more impossible, as she tries to ignore even the urges, it quiets to just Van. Van. Van. Van.
It becomes a beacon, singing out for her.
/
Tai doesn’t sleep, anxious and cold through the night, twisting the rope around her wrist again and again. The dawn starts out so light it's almost invisible, but she takes it as a sign that the day is begun enough to count and crawls downstairs to the great room. The only person awake is Lottie, quietly laboring over her kettle on the fire. Tai trusts Lottie about as far as she can throw her these days, but anyone who saw Tai do a throw-in from the sidelines knows she can throw pretty far. She glances up at Taissa and without speaking gets another mug, and the two of them sit tucked up on the windowsill, eyes out on the stillness of the snow.
It’s earlier than it should be when they hear them, and Lottie and Tai stare at each other at the sound of footsteps, rushing to their feet and out onto the porch just as the party emerges from the trees. Tai holds her breath, counts 1, 2, 3, and then red hair and the animal heart beats again. They’re soaking wet, panting, and between them carry piles of cushions and salvaged fabric, along with a huge chunk of the aluminum skin of the plane, suspended between Van and Travis on the makeshift stretcher.
Lottie moves like she’s going to rush out and run to either Natalie or Travis, and Tai grabs the back of her jacket, holds her firm.
“Let them come,” she says, but she itches, she aches.
Nat and Akilah are the first to approach them, Travis and Van busy setting the metal sheet down against the wall of the meat shed, and Tai hugs Akilah close, lets her press her small cold face into her hair, rubs her back.
“What happened?” Tai asks. “You’re so early.”
“We walked through the night,” Akilah answers, and though she looks exhausted, there’s a kind of glow burning in her eyes. “The moon was so bright, we could see everything. Even through the trees. We thought about stopping, but Nat and Van said–”
“We just wanted to get back,” Nat interrupts, disentangling herself from over Lottie's shoulder. “It didn’t feel right to stay any longer than we had to.” Tai hums, but her attention is elsewhere because Van and Travis have finished with the plane section, and quickly approach the little welcome party. Tai has to remind herself not to step off the porch in just her sock feet as Van lopes straight up to her and pulls Tai into her arms, strong and real and there, more there than Tai is, maybe, holding her down, holding her back.
“Hey baby,” Van says in her ear, and it's so clean and sweet and effortless that Tai doesn’t know what to do with it, almost doesn’t want it. She grips her tighter against her chest so she doesn’t have to look at her yet. “Did you sleep?” Van asks. Tai almost laughs. She’s the one who just walked all night through waist-deep snow.
“Not really,” Tai admits, but when she pulls back to look at Van she realizes that maybe that’s what she wanted to hear, was waiting to. She’s beautiful like this, flushed cold and scarred and with her teeth out, smiling at Tai even though, even despite. Tai pulls her inside, strips her into dry clothes and sits her by the fire. The others gather around the adventurers, and finally, Van starts recounting what happened out there.
Tai can only guess, but it's probably only a few more hours before the snow starts again in earnest.
/
The others generally busy themselves with the new bounty, drying or sewing strips of fabric, and Tai joins them. Outside, a small crowd has gathered at the fire pit, inspecting the metal sheet. She sees Travis and Van sitting together with their backs to the cabin, heads bent over some project.
When the snow hits, Van comes inside and stands behind Tai’s armchair. She rests one hand on her shoulder while she casually talks to Melissa, and Tai leans her head back. She doesn’t think about what the conversation they’d had before means, what it gives her, what she owes, but she’s closing her eyes and listening to Van’s voice as she talks. It marvels her sometimes that she can still find things to say, that her brain works beyond her immediate needs and surroundings still, making jokes, making meanings. She wonders if she makes a meaning out of them anymore, how Tai fits into her new philosophy- if she’s a transgression, an indulgence, or part of the natural order. How things were meant to be or how Van is making them.
They go to the attic early, tangled up around each other and exchanging messy, lazy kisses, the kind of looseness and affection they don’t usually afford themselves. They can’t exactly sneak off to the woods anymore, and ever since Shauna moved downstairs and Van up they don’t usually have the energy or the privacy for more than the quick and quiet- Van tense and shaking with one of Tai’s hands inside her and one tight over her mouth, running their hands underneath layers instead of peeling them off. Tonight Van sucks mark after mark onto Tai’s collarbone that will never even stand a chance of being seen, more languid than urgent.
“You should sleep,” she whispers eventually to the inside of Tai’s neck. “I know you didn’t while I was gone.”
"You didn't sleep either," Tai insists, taking up the rope beside them to begin knotting it around her own wrist.
Van shrugs a little, though her body betrays her exhaustion.
"You should've seen the moon. It was like it was pulsing, through the tree branches. Like a heartbeat. Nat and I just looked at each other, and we were both thinking..." She ducks her head a little, avoiding Tai's eyes. "It was like it wanted us home."
Tai bites her lip. It worries her, Van's desire to trust as huge and as dangerous as it had been the first time she'd kissed Tai, in the front seat of her mom's Honda, so terrified afterward that she'd fled from the driver's side of her own car and sat on the curb with her head in her hands.
Is that what this is? she wants to ask. Instead, she takes Van's wrist between her fingers and ties her in place. She fastens the knots over her pulse, tighter than usual, but judging by the way Van slowly inhales, it's the way that she wants them.
/
When Tai wakes up, Van is gone, and the light is long coming through the windows.
She’s not alone for long though, and soon she climbs back up, quietly like she’s trying not to disturb her, one hand tucked gingerly into her jacket pocket.
“Shit. Hi. Sorry,” Van says upon seeing her sitting up. “The snow stopped.”
“S’okay,” Tai whispers, still sleep-worn. “Do they need me down there? Is there enough wood?”
“They’re fine,” Van says. “Half of them are fucking with the plane skin and the other half are fucking with Misty, telling her that in the one Health class she missed Coach Scott taught a lesson on giving head. You’d only make it worse.”
Tai doesn’t laugh, but she nudges Van’s ankle with her foot and hopes she gets the message. She does, or at least had the same idea, and shucks her jacket off by their heads before crawling in beside her again, pushing her cold hands under Tai’s shirt until she shrinks away and laughs.
“We brought back a bunch of scrap metal,” she starts, abruptly. “It was parts of the plane that tore off. We thought we could make shit out of it, like, knives or something, but it's pretty weak. Um, if you heat it up though, at the fire, it bends a little.” Tai watches her talk, shuffling and overly casual, more eyes than girl.
“And I’m no blacksmith, and Travis helped– and he's pretty good at that kind of thing, if you can believe that… but, um… you just know that you’re the one that I trust the most to do something good out here, right?” and then her voice becomes so painfully sincere it hurts, it’s like glass between them.
“To make something good happen. And I also wanna be that person for you. So I don’t want you to think this has to mean something it doesn’t mean–” and Tai stops her, grabbing her hands gently.
“Van. What are you trying to say?”
Van swallows, reaches up into her coat pocket, and then looks back at Tai, all sweetness and shame.
“I, uh. I made us these.” She turns her hand back over to reveal two thin circles of silver metal, twisted and clumsily hammered into the shape of rings. Tai doesn’t get it, and then her whole fucking heart falls out of her chest. She’s silent for a second, and she must stare, because Van starts in immediately-
“We don’t have to, I know it’s so stupid, but–” and she puts on a silly accent, “if you’d make the happiest man alive– just with what you said earlier, I thought it might be nice to have something–” and Tai cuts her off with a kiss. Her heartbeats feel like they’re coming once per minute at most, her limbs uncontrollable. She leans in harder, pushes Van down hard onto her back, and she lets out a surprised little noise at the impact but kisses her back in stride. She folds her hands into Tai’s hair, and Tai wants to mark and have and eat. Van’s lip pulls between her teeth, not hard enough to break but nearly, and Van makes the kind of noise that has Tai automatically sliding her knee between her legs.
“Wait, wait–” Van says roughly, pulling back heavily. Her doe eyes are blown huge as she looks up at Tai. “So you want it?”
Tai blinks. She wants Van, mostly. Wants her permanently in her corner. Wants her tied to her wrist at night. Wants sky and wilderness and Lottie to know that they’re bound together, that when she walks home, she’s walking home to Tai. There used to be a world where she would worry about these things, where she would find this ridiculous, but it's vague and hazy compared to the one she lives in now, where Van wakes up next to her every morning and builds the fires that warm her and follows Tai’s body unafraid through the snowy woods. She wants everyone to look at Van and see something of Tai somewhere other than her scars. She wants to give Van a reason to look at her and smile. Van, Van, Van.
“Yeah,” Tai says, and realizes she means it. “Yeah, I want it.” Van’s smile is irradiant, auroral beneath her, and Tai can’t help but feel giddy, the absolute absurdity of the situation creeping up on her. She wants it, and Van wants it from her. She pushes her face into Van’s neck and starts laughing, and then they both are, holding each other and giggling and Tai feels warm, warm, warm.
Van presents the ring with an overdramatic flourish and slides it onto Tai’s left hand ring finger. “My lady,” she says in an exaggerated accent.
“Ok, don’t do it like that.”
“Sorry.”
Tai twists it around on her finger, feels the cold metal and its slightly uneven shape. She tries to make it nothing, a teenage promise, and fails instantly because nothing about anything is frivolous anymore. It’s not like they really have the time to wait. There’s no other way this was going to go, and a million ways it could end. A million, or three. She realizes for a second that she’s going to feel the weight of it on her hand for the rest of her wretched little life, even when she takes it off.
Van sees her get quiet, and she starts running her hand slowly along the back of Tai’s neck, gentling.
“If something happens. Tai. You’re like… my next of kin. You get to choose.” Tai starts to move, to look at her and shake her head and shut her up, but Van's hand at her neck holds her in place, and Tai gets that she doesn’t want to look at her while she says it. “Just… I want you to know that you should have me, if it comes to that,” she continues, and Tai is closing her eyes, trying not to let it bleed through her ears, but she can’t because she hears it, she knows, has known it since she threw up bile into the snow, what she would do, what she would give. What Tai would want.
“I know,” Tai says. “I know.” She sits up so she’s on top of her, takes the other ring from Van’s closed palm. “You get that, too. You get that from me,” a permission, a command, and Van nods rapidly, her gaze the one she sometimes fixes on Lottie during her morning prayers, all flint and ice and hope.
When Tai slides the other ring onto Van, something inside her rears up and roars. She’d never quite pictured herself putting a ring on anyone’s finger before, not that the world out there would’ve let her. She likes the way it looks.
It’s Van who pulls Tai’s face down to hers, and she kisses Tai like she wants to be buried under her weight. Tai digs in, admits, acquieses. She nips at her lower lip, and when Van pulls her closer roughly by the hips, Tai can feel the cool weight of the ring pressing into her side. It stings a little, the newness, the honest tug. Tai dips her head and uses the hand in her hair to expose Van’s pretty neck and start kissing up it. The animal heart wants to claim, to mark, so she lets it. It's insistent and luxurious and Van’s soft breaths in her ear are becoming more and more overwhelming, and then she hits a spot under Van’s jaw that causes her to buck her hips forward and cry out. Their sweat is running together at their foreheads, at their palms.
“I love you,” Van whispers, and then she’s wrenching Tai forward so she’s on her knees above her, and Van is kissing along her waist, in, in, and everything.
/
It’s just them and Nat downstairs after, and they’ve barely been down for a minute before her eyes zero in on Van’s left hand and narrow. She immediately looks over to Tai, confirming her suspicions.
“Oh, you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” she says incredulously, eyebrows raised at Van, one of those looks passing between the two of them, and Tai decidedly stays out of it.
Van tries to roll her eyes, but she can’t stop the massive grin from spreading over her face. “Don’t you fucking start, Scatorccio,” she says, and Tai laughs, and she aches.