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They think that they are witty, the older kids surrounding him. Adults nearby laugh along to the little mockeries and playful jabs that should be funny, probably, but the young boy with blue hair is not laughing. Each teasing lilt sticks somewhere deep and it hurts, it hurts, and he does not even know why but the snowflakes falling blur in his eyes.
A teardrop hits the icy ground below his feet; the other kids are still laughing.
"Hey!"
Stomping, snow-crunching boots march up behind him. One tiny mittened hand grasps around his bare, cold, wrist.
"Leave him alone you- you... jerks!"
From behind his blue bangs, the young boy looks over to the girl that is adamantly pointing one accusing finger (ineffectually, the mittens do her rage no justice) to his laughing-faced foes. He blinks once, twice, and she is still there beside him as the group begins to falter and scatter; the joke is over for now.
She is still holding his scrawny wrist when she turns to him, frowning as he shivers and tries to take his hand from hers.
"Hold on a minute..."
Digging with one hand into her pockets, rummaging through half-wrapped candies for something, she mumbles to herself as Sampo waits in mild terror; the last time another kid had told him to wait (and close his eyes, but he knew better than to do that now), he had ended up with coal and mine-cart grease thrown onto his feet, carefully concocted to be near impossible to wash out and easy to freeze, aimed directly into the holes in his shoes. He remembers vividly the thought that he would lose his feet in the Belobog cold.
"Aha! Here."
Two mittens, mismatched shades of deep blue like his hair and hand-made, a couple holes between patches lovingly added but otherwise intact and functional, appear in his vision. Stuttering, he hesitates.
"Take 'em, you'll freeze your fingers and then the Great Mine monsters will eat them like cold hot dogs.. s'what my mom always says anyway."
The girl shrugs, offering him no more explanation on that.
Taking a chance, Sampo carefully takes the offering from her with shaking hands (the wind has picked up again; it is so cold) and inspects them for any hidden pranks. Finding no funny-business, he slips them on and stuffs his now-covered hands hurriedly into his pockets to try and warm them up. Offering her a quick thanks, he makes an excuse to slip away, unsure of what to do or say to this new-found phenomena: a friend.
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He has been trailing her, wearing the mittens that she had given him, for a while now, waiting for something that he does not yet know to happen. Debts need to be repaid, he knows that much, and surely an opportunity would present itself soon.
It would.
One of the older kids, one he recognizes from the little group of bullies around town, snatches her lunch from her. Putting up a valiant fight, the girl tries in vain to snag it back, but only succeeds in spilling her would-be dinner all over the thief. Sampo scurries into the fray when the moment becomes heated, knowing exactly what is to come.
"You little-!"
There is a brief flash of terror in her eyes as she realizes that he is about to strike her, but the blow never comes. Obscured in smoke that makes her cough, an imperfect home-made concoction, a hand grabs her wrist and pulls. Running, running, dashing through alleyways, she finishes her coughing fit and catches her breath against the bricks that they have stopped to lean against.
Sampo brushes his threadbare coat off with his mittened hands and straightens himself, fidgeting, while he waits. Tilting her head, the girl looks to him and he can see the moment she recognizes who he is. A timid wave is all he can offer her before she grins, wide and true, and cackles.
"How did you do that? Did you get a good look at his face? Oh, I bet he was so mad."
Speaking faster than he can keep up with, she must realize that her excitement is a little too much for him to handle at the moment so she just stops and thanks him instead, now plucking at her own coat with a tinge of shyness. This time, he finds himself grinning a little in response.
Their friendship is sealed with a mitten-clad handshake, pilfered sweets for a late lunch, and laughter bouncing in back alleys.
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Sampo Koski never abandons his friends, but he does sometimes forget (or neglect) to keep in touch as often as he should. He outgrows the mismatched blue mittens of his youth, and his friend outgrows her sweet tooth; they move on as time goes by.
When he sees her, now all-grown-up, standing in the midst of a crowd with teardrops falling onto the ice below, snow falling as if in mockery, he cannot look away.
"Hey."
His hand reaches hers, carefully grasping her wrist and turning her towards himself. Looking over her as she tries to hide her eyes behind her hair, he notices that she is much worse off than she would like to let on. A glance to his left, where she is pointedly avoiding looking, tells him why.
A gasp leaves him, theatric? Maybe. Truthful? Definitely.
"Those- those jerks!"
Head whipping back towards her while he exclaims, causing a bit of a commotion amongst the crowd, he gapes. The look on his face makes her chuckle, a sad sniffling sort of laugh, and he considers it the beginning of a win anyway.
"They're really letting everyone go? That seems like a bad business strategy."
Sighing, she confirms the sign's unfortunate message; her job, and her coworkers' jobs, no longer exist.
"And they didn't even have the decency to tell us in person."
"Hmph. They just didn't want you to see the look of utter defeat on their faces I'll bet!"
Sampo stops his sentence to think for a moment, then snaps his fingers with his free hand, the other still covering her wrist; he has got an idea. Wary eyes follow him as he ushers her along the street, this way and that and turn after turn. He tries not to examine the fact that she is following him at all, with little to no questions asked.
Stopping in front of Nat's clinic, he throws his arms wide and presents the location to her in a sales pitch meant to make her laugh; it works.
The door opens.
"Care to tell me what the ruckus is about this time, Koski?"
He hurries to explain.
"Hey now, I was just giving a dear friend the grand tour! She's an excellent helper, very knowledgeable! And I just thought to myself, Sampo, you have got to bring her to the clinic and convince her, yes convince her, to help out there. She'd be an excellent addition to your staff. I-"
Natasha groans, telling him to save his breath, she ushers the young woman into the building. With a wary glance over her shoulder, Sampo watches with a true grin as his friend disappears into what is sure to be her newfound profession.
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He awakens with a shaky inhale, mentally hyping himself to sit up in the darkness. Counting down, he tenses. Three, two... one-
The hand suddenly splayed on his chest presses him firmly back down. Is this the punchline to a life's joke?
"Don't you even think about it, Sampo Koski. Getting you to this bed was difficult enough once, I am not doing it twice."
Sampo groans, nope, no joke, a little pathetically but he hopes it conveys his feelings all the same. Vision still slightly spotty every time he tries to lift his head, he opts to close his eyes fully and continue laying where he is at, letting the voice of his friend speak to herself as he drifts in and out of consciousness.
"-ould've left you in the cold, let you get eaten by Great Mine monsters, I swear."
Her grumbling continues even as she tenderly, gently, tends to what he assumes must be a gash on his forehead, or maybe it's just a headache and there is actually a gash on his abdomen or maybe that's just-
He does not know, and the room is spinning so he does not particularly have the energy to care; besides, he reasons with himself behind a mask that grins at him even in his sleep, he is in good hands (no mittens between them this time, and that makes him laugh, an inside joke somehow sticking even deeper when his ribs ache as he chokes on a chuckle).
Days pass as he gradually recuperates, head ringing less and less as the sun rises and sets, rises and sets, each day the beginning and end to a well-worn joke that still makes Fools laugh; he laughs too, at her frown of concern, at the bandages on his head, at the squeak of her shoes (melting snow across the floorboards mucking the room, not cold enough to freeze anybody's toes).
Scolding him each time, each laugh, her face is no mask and cannot hide the exasperation or fondness in her eyes. Thinking, surely, that she would not play such a cruel joke on an old friend, Sampo places his bet. Starting with grasped wrists again, whenever she comes too close to change his bandages; then, clasped hands, lacing his long fingers with hers as they idle nearby when she squints at him, trying to decipher how he is feeling, if he is improving. Soon he is tugging her closer, willingly, of course (the joke is no fun if she is not in on it; he wants to laugh with her, not at her), until she sits on the bed near him. Letting her play with his soft blue hair as she sighs and sets to work on whatever papers and files she has handy, content to let him vie for her attention in this way.
The bout of flu that he seems to have caught, either from his time out cold in the snow or from his proximity to other patients, takes its time in going away. The gash on his head and his side heal slowly. He relishes in his friend's attention when he coughs and pales, her hand at his back, in his hair, over his arm tenderly makes him grin through the sickness and the lingering pain; what a joke, he thinks, to be this close and yet so far to the thing that almost everyone searches for at least once in their lives, and to have found it where he feels he had begun, perhaps where he will end- oh, wouldn't that be theatric? The audience would love that, he is sure.
His healing wounds twinge with pain, but his fever is gone and his throat should be better; she tells him this as his head rests in her weary lap like a lazy, pathetic, blue ferret. Lolling his head upward, he can see the dark circles under her eyes; his gaze pierces her as she opens her mouth to speak.
She coughs; a rattling sound that startles him, and her as it seems, echoing in her lungs in a mockery of what his must have sounded like mere days ago.
"Ah, and you think ol' Sampo is the reckless one. My dear friend, it sounds like somebody's been neglecting themselves? Hmm?"
The glare she levels him does little to dissuade the smirk in his voice, and when she coughs again, he is all too eager to repay his debts right away.
"Not to worry, oh, not to worry! Sampo Koski always takes good care of his loyal friends! Sit tight!"
With that, her world spins in a blur of colors until she is the one laying on the bed and he has moved to stand, fluttering about so quickly that she does not really see him moving at all. Gathering medicines, food and drink, an extra blanket (and probably stuffing his own pockets), he makes his way back towards her.
If he had been touchy when he was sick, she thought, he was downright clingy while she was sick. Flopping himself down next to her after cajoling her into taking a dose of familiar medicine, he wastes no time in cuddling right up to her. She knows he has given her plenty of time and space to kick him out or away, knows he would go willingly if she kicked him off of the bed, but, in truth, he is a warm and solid presence behind her that she eagerly rests her sleepy head on.
Days of gentle affection, hand touches and holds, soft combing and brushing through hair, come to a head as they both fall into the last laugh of the moment- a nice nap after all of that hard work (how funny is it to reward stress with rest, when one always seems to stem from too much of the other, eh?). Cracking open one eye, first to the viewers he is sure are watching (you'll break his heart if you're not entertained, afterall) and then to his dear friend, he tilts his head ever so gently to press a single kiss to the crown of her head.
In her dreams, the kiss feels like elation.