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Durin wakes abruptly to a pounding on his door, and he sits up, rubbing sleep from his eyes, as Klee shouts through the aforementioned door, “Get up, get up! It snowed, so it’s time to play with Klee!” She bangs twice more on his door and then moves onto another; the faint sounds of small fists pummeling on wood echo through the walls.
Groaning, Durin glances toward the window, where the curtains are open just enough for him to see a blanket of fresh, white snow over the city. Excitement sparks in his chest, a fluttering of delight, and he jumps from his bed, throws open the window, and leans out into the crisp, cold air. He shivers but stares across the city, his eyes wide.
A week ago, a dusting of snow fell on the ground but it melted with the dawn, leaving only puddles and a few piles behind. This is his first snow—ever.
Distantly, Klee bangs on more doors. “Snowball fight! Snowball fight!”
He doesn’t know how she has so much energy so early in the morning, but if she wants to play, he’s not about to deny her.
He dresses quickly, just in time for a much more subdued knock on his door. He opens it to find a rosy-cheeked Aether wearing a grin and a heavy coat. Wanderer leans against the wall, his hat pulled low, his expression flat and inscrutable—but caught somewhere between irritation and reluctant acceptance.
“Traveler,” Durin says. “If you need something, now might not be a great time. Klee is…” There’s a distant shriek: Klee’s manic delight. Durin smiles. “Klee is Kleeing.”
Wanderer scoffs.
“That’s why we’re here,” Aether says. “We’re in town to talk to Albedo.” Durin perks up but doesn’t interrupt. “Got in really late last night—”
“This morning,” Wanderer mutters.
“—and woke up to the same thing you did.” Aether grins, nodding in the direction of the front door. “We’ve managed to deter her enough for breakfast, but then it’s time for a snowball fight. You want to join us?”
Durin practically vibrates. “Really? You want me to?”
“Would we be here if we didn’t?” Wanderer asks, shoving away from the door. “Come on. Don’t make us wait. I’m hungry.” He turns toward the stairs.
“Let me grab my jacket,” Durin says, and he ducks back into his room, excitement humming through him. There are so many things he’s never done, so many things he hasn’t experienced, and just the previous night, Klee was talking about the snow and playing in it and how much fun it could be. He’d been enthralled, entranced, and had wanted the opportunity to play like she did, with such uninhibited exuberance, but he’d figured adults didn’t do that sort of thing.
He grabs his heavy coat and, after a second, slips his stockinged feet into the snow boots he’d bought with Albedo just two days ago. Then he’s back at the door, where Aether is waiting for him.
“Let’s go,” he says.
Two hours and one very impatient Klee later, Aether has collected not just Durin and Wanderer but Kaeya and Albedo as well. The lot of them had tried to pressure Jean and Lisa into joining them, but both women were too busy, so it’s just the six of them now.
Klee, in heavy red snow gear, whistles as she prances ahead of them outside of the city, barely sinking into the foot of snow that fell overnight. Kaeya follows after her, somehow striding on top of the snow as well. It’s only the rest of them trudging through drifts that come up to Durin’s calves. He is, of course, delighted by this, and he runs his gloved fingers through the white dunes.
“It’s so cold,” he says.
“It’s snow,” Wanderer replies.
“And it’s the perfect kind for snowball fights,” Albedo says.
Durin glances at him. “There’s kinds of snow?”
“There are many classifications,” Albedo explains, “but most people would call this packing snow. When snow is at or near its melting point, it’s much easier to shape, allowing us to make snowballs and forts.”
“Klee got a head start,” Aether says, gesturing to a wide field where someone—Klee, Durin assumes—has already constructed walls of snow.
“She skipped breakfast,” Paimon adds. She flits around their heads, well out of the way of the snow, her only deference to the cold a hat that flops over her floating halo.
Durin pauses to take in the field: not just walls of snow, but two forts, too. The snow here is deep enough that Klee has (probably) used her Pyro Vision to melt trenches into it, though she’s the only one short enough to be fully in cover while going through them.
“How did she do all this already this morning?” he asks, marveling.
“Best not to ask,” Aether replies dryly. “Klee works in mysterious ways. She gets it from her mother.” He shoots Albedo a not insignificant look.
Laughing, Albedo holds up both hands. “I couldn’t explain, either.”
Klee does a circuit of her field with Kaeya in tow, and only when she seems satisfied with the setup does she return to Durin and the others, a grin plastered on her face. “Klee has invited you here today for a very important thing,” she announces, bouncing on the balls of her feet, which can’t be good for the bombs she surely has in her knapsack, but no one else seems particularly perturbed, so Durin says nothing. He’s curious, anyway, to see what all this is about. “And that,” Klee continues, very solemn despite her bouncing “is a snowball fight. The stakes are high.”
Kaeya frowns. “Who taught you about stakes?” he asks quietly, rather rhetorically.
“The loser,” Klee says, ignoring him, “will have to do all Klee’s knightly duties for a month. And the winner.” She claps her hands together. “The winner will be Klee!”
“Bold words,” Aether says, putting his fists on his hips.
“Especially as we haven’t even drawn up the teams.” Albedo’s expression is serious. Very serious. Even Wanderer looks quite focused, as if he, too, has done this before, and Durin’s the only one who hasn’t.
“Wait,” Durin says. “Teams? What are the rules? What—?”
Paimon clears her throat. “Team Captains are Klee and Albedo,” she declares, and what follows is the shortest but most brutal verbal bloodbath Durin has ever seen as Albedo and Klee go head-to-head on who’s on whose team. Klee immediately chooses Kaeya, and Albedo responds by picking Durin—which Durin would be even more pleased about if he understood what was going on—and Klee follows up by picking Aether, and then Wanderer goes to Albedo’s side, scoffing and crossing his arms.
“Unsurprising,” he mutters.
“What is?” Durin asks.
“Being picked last.” Wanderer rolls his eyes. “Klee and Albedo are discounting the power of Anemo behind a snowball.”
Durin stares at him. “The power—we’re using our Visions?”
Clearing her throat, Paimon claps her hands together for attention. “The usual rules apply,” she says. Aether looks at her and then at Durin, pointedly, and she goes, “Oh! Right. The usual rules are as follows. Five minutes to make ammunition, then the game starts. Three hits and you’re out. Visions are allowed, but only snowballs are okay as weapons. So no making anything fancy out of snow.”
Everyone looks at Kaeya.
Kaeya throws his hands in the air. “You make a Cryo cannon one time,” he mutters.
“A Cryo cannon?” Durin asks, alarmed.
“That’s why there’s a rule against it,” Albedo replies, which doesn’t actually mean anything, really, when you get right down to it, and only serves to alarm Durin more.
“Isn’t this a game?” Durin asks.
Wanderer scoffs. “Not really.”
“I—” Durin begins, but Paimon starts talking again. “Deliberate headshots are also prohibited, since Jean isn’t participating this time around.” Which means, to Durin, there’s a world in which Acting Grandmaster Jean does participate—or did—and headshots were a problem that required healing.
He’s not entirely sure he wants to do this anymore.
“No flying,” Paimon adds, and Wanderer makes a dismissive noise. “Except for me, of course, and no targeting the referee!” She kicks her little feet. Aether pulls playfully on one, earning himself a glare for his troubles. “Targeting the referee is grounds for disqualification. Losers do the winner’s duties for a month. Winners get bragging rights and an easy month. We’ll flip a mora for positioning. Heads is the northern end, and tails southern. Team captains!”
Albedo and Klee approach, and Aether offers Paimon a coin.
“Since Klee won last time,” Paimon says, “she calls.” She flips the coin up.
“Tails!” Klee calls out, giggling.
The coin comes down, and Paimon reveals it: tails.
“Yay! Klee won!” She takes off toward the southern end of the field.
“I want a good, clean game,” Paimon shouts after her. “To your forts! Your prep time starts now!”
Everyone bolts, and Durin is a second behind, faltering, eyes wide. This seems way too serious for what’s supposed to be a game, but he catches himself and hurries after Albedo and Wanderer. By the time he makes it to their little fort, the other two have already started on a small pile of snowballs.
Durin lowers himself into the snow. “Uh,” he says.
“Start packing,” Wanderer says. “Quickly! Kaeya and Aether can make way more of these way faster than we can. Tch. Cryo.” He shakes his head.
Durin mashes some snow together in a semblance of a ball, starting a small pile of his own, as Albedo begins to speak. “Klee will launch a volley the way she always does: rapid-fire and dangerous. Mr. Guy—”
“Don’t ever call me that again,” Wanderer says.
“—you’ll shield us, deflecting the attack, while Durin and I flank them. Aether will melt anything we throw their way. Durin, you should try to do the same.”
Durin, struggling with his current snowball, looks up, wild-eyed. “I—what?”
“Melt their attacks before we can get to them but be careful. It’s cold enough still for water to freeze, so anything you melt will turn to ice in the tunnels,” Albedo continues. “While we flank, Wanderer, you’ll keep building up our ammunition. Hopefully we can get either Kaeya or Aether in our first attack, but if anything goes wrong, Durin, fall back.”
Durin sputters.
Albedo, as he speaks, removes three small sacks from a pocket, shakes them out, and passes one to Wanderer and one to Durin. “For your ammunition.”
“Why are you treating this like we’re going to war?” Durin asks, bewildered.
The other two round on him. “Because we are,” Albedo says, very, very seriously.
“Get your head on,” Wanderer advises, “because they won’t go easy on us.”
They begin shoveling snowballs into their sacks, and Durin does the same, scrambling to get as many in as possible. He’s just topped off his bag when a shrill whistle splits the air.
“Your five minutes are up!” Paimon shouts. “Forces, advance!”
Wanderer rises from behind the walls of the fort, conjuring a wall of wind—and just in time. Durin scrambles backward, staring, as a veritable rain of snowballs falls down on them. The wind wall knocks those snowballs aside, protecting them. “Go,” he snaps, and Albedo’s off like a rocket to the right.
It takes Durin a moment longer to get his feet under him, and then he’s hurrying down the opposite path, trusting Wanderer’s wind wall to protect him. He has, he realizes, absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Has no idea what goes into a snowball fight—but he’s pretty sure they’re not supposed to feel this intense. He’s sweating under his warm jacket, his heart pounding so loud it’s in his ears. But it’s not so loud that he doesn’t hear the crunch of snow ahead of him.
He ducks down a junction, pressing his back to the wall, and waits, trying to breathe quietly, trying not to betray his own presence, and he reaches into his sack to grab a snowball, one in each hand. This is, he thinks, absolutely insane. But then Aether comes slinking down the trench, a trio of snowballs cradled in one of his arms.
Durin hesitates—and Aether must sense his presence, because he whips around, and Durin lets out a shout, and then he’s running down the length of the trench, lobbing snowballs backward. Aether lets out a whoop and gives chase.
“You can’t escape!” he shouts. “You can’t even fly!”
Durin spins around just in time to see twin missiles of snow flying for him. He thrusts one hand forward, melting both, and the water hits the trench floor, freezing rapidly. So rapidly that Aether barely has a chance to catch himself. He cries out as his feet slide over the ice, sending him flailing to his back, and Durin realizes he has to act quickly. He lobs a snowball each at Aether’s hip and chest as Aether slides across the trench, leaping over him to let him pass.
Out of ammunition for the moment, he sprints down the trench, reaching into his sack, grabbing another snowball as he takes a sharp corner.
“Don’t think you’re getting away from me!” Aether calls out, and Durin hears the pounding of feet behind him, too.
Maybe it’s not entirely fair, but he creates a shield of flame around himself, the fire whipping around him in a rippling globe. The snowballs Aether fires impact the shield with a thunk and a sizzle, and Aether makes a frustrated sound.
Durin rushes forward, blindly running through the trenches until one slopes upward. He takes that one, running up the slippery ground, and launches himself over the snowy wall at the end, quickly dispelling his shield.
A snowball hits him square in the back just before he drops behind the wall, and he grunts, shocked by the impact. Then he’s on his knees, a snowball in each hand. He lobs them blindly over the wall, trusting fate, and is rewarded with a shriek of surprise.
“Aether’s out!” Paimon calls.
“I’m not—”
“Out!” Paimon shouts, and Aether makes a sound of frustration from the other side of the snowbank.
A second later, he’s cleared it, and he’s smiling, giving Durin a lazy, two-fingered salute. “Nicely done, rookie,” he says, and he hurries to the edge of the field, hollering at Klee to throw her snowballs harder.
Klee. He’s shouting at Klee, not Kaeya, and for some reason that gets Durin’s hackles up. He peers over the top of the snowbank, and, slightly above the rest of the field, makes out Kaeya slipping through the trenches on his hands and knees, headed for the fort at the north end, where Wanderer is still deflecting Klee’s rapid-fire attacks. How she’s managing this without some kind of cannon, Durin doesn’t know, but Wanderer is about to get attacked, and he’s not going to leave his best friend unprotected.
Launching over the snowy wall, he slides back into the trenches, rocks to his feet, and takes off at a run. He taps into Pyro as he goes, slicking the path behind him so that anyone who travels up this path later—
“Albedo’s out!” Paimon shouts.
—won’t have an easy time of it.
Recalling the layout of the trenches from his vantage point, he hefts two snowballs, comes around a corner, and fires immediately. Both balls take Kaeya in the back, but it’s too late: Wanderer has three clods of snow sticking to his shoulders and chest.
“Wanderer’s out!” Paimon calls out. “Now it’s just Durin against Klee and Kaeya.”
But Kaeya’s taken two hits, and Durin ducks around a corner, panting. It’s just him.
“Don’t let me down, Durin!” Wanderer shouts.
“Come on, Durin!” That’s Albedo. “Get ‘em for us!”
Durin swallows, clutching a snowball in his hand. He holds his breath as Kaeya rushes by, going the wrong way. Or, well, the right way by Durin’s measure: because Kaeya’s foot hits that first stretch of ice, and he’s on his back a second later, all his snowballs flying over his head and socking him in the face, the chest, the stomach.
As he lays there gasping, sucking in desperate breaths, Durin leans over him and pushes a snowball into his shoulder. “Sorry,” he says.
Kaeya grins up at him. “All’s fair in love and war.”
“Kaeya’s out!” comes Paimon’s shout. “Now we’re down to two titans of snow! Who will manage to win? Who will be victorious?”
There’s more shouting from the sidelines, the out party members cheering Durin and Klee both on, but Durin stays where he is for a long second, just catching his breath. He’s pressed under an overhang, but the barrage of aerial snowballs has stopped. That’s… alarming, actually. Klee must be on the move, and Durin has zero desire to get caught by her. He can’t stay here.
Ducking into the fort, he refills his sack and then scuttles down a trench.
If he were Klee, he’d definitely head for the fort, since that’s where Wanderer had posted up to defend him and Albedo. But surely she’d know that staying there would be too dangerous for him, because it’d be the first obvious place to check, so that means she’ll be trawling the trenches for him, but—
But she’s a kid. She doesn’t think like an adult.
And, indeed, as he ducks down a corner to pause and listen, he hears the distinct sound of Klee’s skipping feet crunching on the snow. She’s singing a tuneless song consisting of la-las as she comes closer, closer.
He has one hit on him, meaning he can take one more before he’s out. Right. Okay. Time to take a risk.
Durin grabs two snowballs and launches himself across the four-way junction. He hurls both snowballs down the crossing trench, and Klee lets out a startled shriek as he dives down the adjacent path, rolls to his feet, and takes off at a run.
“Hey!” she calls out from behind him. “Now Klee’s mad!”
Oh, good. The terrifying child with bombs is mad.
Snowballs hit the ground in front of him, behind him. She’s doing something to fire them off at speed—and he can only imagine her little arms windmilling as she throws snowball after snowball. He does his best to dodge, but they come hard and fast, and one clips him on the shoulder as he turns down another trench.
Right. Two and two, evenly matched.
His heart beats in his throat as he creeps down the side trench, approaching Klee’s previous position from behind. But when he leaps into the corridor, lobbing snowballs down it, she’s not there.
Bad. That’s bad.
He darts down another path, leaving a trail of ice behind him, conjuring a map of the battleground in his mind to remember which paths are no longer safe, slick with ice. Another turn, another. He—
Klee jumps out from her own path, and they stand there for a second, surprised by each other, before Durin darts down a pathway and Klee hurls a snowball into the space he once filled.
“Klee’s going to get you!” she shrieks, laughing manically.
Durin takes off at a run, whipping around a corner to take him to one of those ice-slick paths. He drops, sliding down it on his hip, as Klee comes around a corner, catches her foot on the ice, and drops to the ground with a cry of surprise.
At the end of the icy line, he rockets to his feet, whips around, and flings to snowballs in her general direction, hoping for the best. And as he ducks behind another wall of packed snow, he hears Paimon shout, “Klee’s out! Team Albedo wins!”
Red-cheeked and exhausted, they pile back into the Knights of Favonius headquarters, laughing—even Klee, who gets over her loss as Lisa greets them with trays of hot cocoa. “Boots off,” she says dryly, and Klee wiggles out of her snow gear, leaves it in the doorway, grabs a mug, and disappears into the nearby sitting room with another manic little laugh.
The rest of them follow after, leaving their boots neatly by the door.
“Klee actually lost?” Lisa asks.
“Barely,” Albedo says.
“It was two and two,” Paimon explains, punching the air as she zips around their heads, following them into the sitting room. “Klee and Durin both with two hits! And then Durin runs down an iced-over path, and Klee, not expecting it, follows! Slips! Woosh! Her legs went out from under her!” Paimon flips in the air.
“Klee did not do that!” Klee protests.
“You sure did,” Kaeya tells her, bopping her gently on the head as they all settle into settees.
Durin, abashed, leans toward her. “Klee, if you’re that upset, I can still do your chores for—”
“No!” everyone shouts at once, including Klee, which catches Durin by surprise.
She turns up her nose at him. “Klee lost this time,” she says. “But you just wait until summer when we play dodoco ball at the beach!”
Aether groans, sinking into his couch.
“What’s dodoco ball?” Durin asks, wide eyed, staring at the group.
Lisa laughs and presses another mug of cocoa into his hands. “Don’t worry about it yet.”
“Guys,” Durin says. “Guys, what is dodoco ball?”
But suddenly they’re all very busy with their cocoa, and maybe that’s not so bad, anyway. Because Klee decides, in that moment, that she wants Durin on her team, and it’s so strange to be wanted and accepted, but it’s wonderful, too, and Durin decides it doesn’t matter what dodoco ball is after all.