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“No, on a topographic map, this part should indicate the highest peak,” Goro snaps. His cheeks are red, but Akira thinks it’s equal parts anger and the biting wind that’s steadily started picking up as the sky darkens.
“It’s a napkin,” Akira says. “I think that’s beer.”
Goro pauses. His lips flatten into an unimpressed line as he takes the map—napkin—carefully into his own gloved hands and studies it for a long moment. He holds it up to the fading sunlight, already setting past the mountains and weakened from the clouds.
“Then we’re entirely lost,” Goro says, “because we’ve been following a beer stain on a bar napkin to our destination for the past six hours while we slowly turn hypothermic.”
As if on cue, the first snowflake of the impending blizzard falls on the very tip of Goro’s nose. It would be romantic, if they weren’t stranded on a mountaintop, well out of cell range, with no shelter. Goro swats the snowflake away and then pulls his muffler higher up over his mouth.
Akira looks up the mountain. There is quite a lot of snow there. Akira looks down the mountain. There is also snow there, and he knows that it’s a six-hour walk to get back down to the lodge, and that’s if they aren’t trying to walk through a blizzard.
He rotates the map a few times.
“Wanna keep going up?” Akira asks.
Goro stares at him like he has started speaking in complete gibberish.
“So we can freeze to death where no one will find our bodies?” Goro snaps, unimpressed.
“Our dead bodies will have a really nice view,” Akira says.
Goro makes a noise that’s half disgusted and half exasperated, but he takes Akira’s hand to lurch himself up over the notch in the mountainside they’d stopped to argue at. Goro doesn’t need Akira’s hand to get over the notch, because Goro routinely climbs large rocks with his bare hands, but the offer is presented as a flag of peace, and so Goro accepts it, because they don’t need to both be cold and angry.
“Assuming we have any visibility,” Goro says, his voice muffled through the fabric, “we’ll be able to make a better path from that ridge.”
Akira has some doubts about the visibility claim, because the snow is already falling harder, but he also knows better than to stop moving when they’re cold, so he digs his heels in to clamber over the next snowy obstacle.
Akira’s not quite sure when they wandered off the trail. They’d only intended to go for a climbing peak about half a mile off the way, but their map (drawn on a napkin at the bar they were in last night by a grizzled older man who claimed—perhaps falsely—that he’d scaled those peaks) had led them...
Somewhere?
Night sets in properly, and Akira wishes he was as warm as he’d been last night with about six fruity cocktails in him, sitting in a mountainside bar. Instead, he’s freezing on a mountain, because every December Goro gets antsy if he isn’t out doing something.
Climbing mountains, hiking, biking cross-country. Being as far away from boats as is humanly possible on an island nation.
As the sun sets, the chill sets deeper into Akira’s bones. He’s dressed for the weather, but there’s only so much his layering can do when the wind is howling as it rips through their clothing. Every gust stirs up the falling snow with the unpacked snow on the ground, and when it blows into Akira’s face, it feels like shrapnel.
“Do you see that?” Goro half-yells over the sound of the blizzard. He isn’t so much pointing as he is holding his elbow up in a specific direction, arm bent to try and block the worst of the snow from attacking his face.
Akira is simultaneously grateful and sad that he doesn’t habitually wear his glasses anymore, because they might fog up, but they’d also keep the snow from feeling like it’s slicing into his corneas.
“Yeah!” Akira calls back, assuming “that” is the ambiguously shaped black blob set into the mountain. His hand lurches forward to find Goro’s, and Goro doesn’t spare a glance behind him as he tightens his grip on Akira’s hand. The storm is intensifying too much for either of them to be able to keep a proper eye out for each other, and the light from their flashlights only goes so far in the chaos, so they just keep making their way forward, recalibrating their trail in between the gusts that allow them to see what they’re making their way towards.
It’s a house. Well—it’s a shack, Akira amends, as they get closer, but it’s standing, built under a rock ridge that looks a little like an avalanche hazard.
Goro and Akira don’t even discuss it. They break into a run for the last several feet, their footsteps sloppy and sinking into the fresh snow, and they’re both panting and out of breath when they manage to get inside, slamming the door behind them.
The volume of the wind is immediately cut in half.
Akira can hear his teeth chattering now. He’s not sure that’s an upgrade.
“Well,” Goro says, his tone tense with the effort to keep his teeth from chattering. “Perhaps we won’t die of exposure.”
Akira opens his mouth and immediately sneezes. It stirs up a dust cloud that makes Goro pull his muffler up even further, backing away to look around the shack. It isn’t large, but there’s a fireplace, predictably enough, and the walls and roof are all built sturdily enough that Akira isn’t worried about collapse.
“There isn’t kindling, but we might be able to use some of the furniture, if we’re not opposed to— what are you doing.” Goro’s voice drops into a flat, baffled tone as his flashlight shines onto Akira who is wrestling his way out of his damp snow jacket.
“Uhh,” Akira says. “Dusting so the whole place doesn’t burn down?”
Goro stares at him as he uses the jacket to slide across the floor directly in front of the fireplace, leaving a cleanish section of wood floor before them.
“It kind of worked,” Akira says.
Goro looks like he has a headache.
“Just give me the lighter,” Goro says, sounding exhausted. Akira sets the bag down and digs through it for the lighter as Goro takes out whatever tired aggression he has for the situation out on the table. There clearly isn’t power to the shack—there’s not even room for a generator—but there’s some old furniture, some canned food that looks like it’s pure botulism at this point, and a stack of old blankets in the corner that have definitely seen better days. And moths. A lot of moths.
Akira hears the fire start behind him as he beats the dust back out of his jacket. He tries to, anyway; there’s still a dirty gray-brown smudge down the back of it. Akira wrenches the window up, lets a small pile of snow in as he does so, and uses it to wash his jacket back off.
Success. The cabin has a more-or-less tidy space, his jacket is more-or-less clean, and Goro is only as exasperated with him as usual.
“Here,” Akira says. “Go investigate the blankets. I’ll make us coffee.”
“Of course you will,” Goro says, but he doesn’t decline. Neither of them had packed for a very in-depth stay—they’d been intending to hike back down to a lodge, after all—but Akira habitually travels with his pour-over on the basis that they’d never know when someone had a caffeine craving.
This isn’t the first time it’s come in handy.
Even lost in the mountains, Akira can’t abide by the concept of instant coffee, so while Goro makes noises alternating between disgust and resigned acceptance at the state of the blankets, Akira pulls out his hand grinder.
“These are more holes than blankets,” Goro says, as he shifts the passable blankets over. The worst two go on the ground to create a marginally acceptable surface to sleep on that won’t make their bodies ache in the morning. They’re not teenagers anymore, after all. If Akira tried to pull half the crap he did in high school, he’d wind up out of commission for at least a week. As it is, he’s pretty sure he’ll pay for this vacation with a nasty cold later, but, hey, excuse to stay home for Christmas.
“It’s warming up,” Akira offers as a counterpoint, which is true. The shack still makes ominous noises every time the wind hits it at full velocity, and Akira can’t see anything outside the window except darkness and snow, but it’s holding the heat in well enough that the feeling is returning to Akira’s toes.
Painfully. Painfully returning to his toes.
“Are you really trying to look on the bright side right now?” Goro asks, but there’s fond amusement coloring his voice.
“I mean,” Akira offers, “I’m here with you.”
Even after years of being around Akira, Goro still always looks a little surprised whenever Akira makes overt statements of affection. Goro blinks, startled, and then looks studiously into the fire, which does absolutely nothing to hide the way his cheeks are pink. Akira’s sure Goro'd blame it on the cold, if he pointed it out.
“In a remote shack that we might die in, our bodies never to be found by those who know us,” Goro replies, dryly. Akira hangs the kettle in the fireplace to boil, and tugs on Goro’s coat sleeve.
“It takes more than the cold to kill us,” Akira quips. If everything else had failed at killing them when they were still active phantom thieves, Akira doesn’t think anything can manage to kill them except, hopefully, old age, and that’s another forty or so years away, probably.
Goro shrugs his jacket off, obligingly, and Akira makes a bed that’s more of a nest, layering their warmest clothing in between them and the blankets. The blankets from the center of the stack are in slightly better condition, even if they smell like damp wool, and by the time they’ve sacrificed all their outerwear to the pile, it’s a satisfactory bed. By Akira’s standards, anyway.
“I’m taking your last pair of clean socks,” Goro informs Akira.
“We’ll do laundry at the lodge,” Akira replies, because they’ll definitely make it there... once the blizzard clears up. Goro snorts, but doesn’t bother to retort; he’s busy putting his wet socks as close to the fireplace as he can without them igniting. Akira wiggles his own naked toes. The air is still cold, but the blanket and clothing fort should work well enough.
Akira pours them both coffee into their travel mugs. The liquid steams up, and Goro wraps his fingers as securely as he can around the heated surface of the cup, letting the warmth seep into him.
“C’mere,” Akira says. He scoots over, and Goro sends him a baleful look, because Akira has positioned it so that Goro is closer to the fire, but it isn’t Akira’s fault that he’s always a furnace while Goro’s feet are ice cubes even on a normal night.
Goro goes, though; he settles down in Akira’s carefully crafted blanket nest with Akira’s carefully crafted coffee and listens to the howling wind and the crackling fire. Goro takes a sip of his coffee.
“We are absolutely,” he says, “going to burn to death in this shack.”
He says it in his television star voice, all cheerful and friendly, and Akira can’t help but laugh.
“The only burning is my—”
“Do not.”
“—love for you!”
“Shut up,” Goro says. He twists—carefully, because they’re both holding hot coffee—and sticks the frigid back of his hand against Akira’s neck. Akira shrieks, sets his coffee safely out of harm’s way, dutifully waits until Goro mirrors the action, and then attacks.
Neither of them are particularly ticklish, but that doesn’t matter when both of them have cold hands, and they wrestle with each other in a wild attempt to shove their hands up each other’s shirts. It would be sexy if Goro wasn’t dead set on winning. (Akira, privately, thinks winning involves seeing Goro take his shirt off, but he can’t just say that.)
In the end, Akira lets Goro shove a hand up his spine, because it leaves Goro open for Akira to lean over, shoving Goro’s sweater up and blowing a raspberry onto his stomach. Goro yelps and thumps his fist down on Akira’s spine hard enough that Akira reflexively bites, and then the two of them can’t contain their laughter anymore.
Akira settles down, propping his arms up on Goro and peering at him.
“Still cold?”
Goro rolls his eyes. “Don’t tell me this was all your plot to warm up?”
“It was a nice side effect,” Akira admits. He leans up to kiss Goro—he tastes like Akira’s coffee—and then the two of them settle back down, shoulders overlapping. Akira lets the silence drag out for a moment, sipping his coffee, before he speaks again. “We could tell ghost stories.”
Goro’s response is a quiet, sleepy, “Mmm.” Akira cranes his neck to peer down at him, and then smiles, dropping a kiss onto the top of his head. His hair is kind of damp. He’d be horrified if he noticed.
“Maybe later,” Akira agrees, and slips his hand down, entwining their fingers until both their hands are warm.