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Once, Snow and Fire were set upon the same road and told that only one of them could reach the end.
Snow learned to move without leaving marks.
Fire learned to move so fast that nothing could follow.
They ran beside one another for many seasons, and the road itself grew used to the sound of them. When Snow drew close, Fire burned brighter. When Fire surged ahead, Snow answered with longer strides, as though winter itself had learned to hunt the sun.
Those who watched from far away said, This is balance.
They said, This is how the world keeps itself sharp.
In this story, Snow never slows in his endless pursuit, and Fire never looks behind him. The road ends, the dust settles, and the two vanish in opposite directions, satisfied and unchanged.
And everyone agrees this is how it must be.
There is another tale, darker and told at night.
It says that Snow and Fire should never have been allowed on the same road at all.
For when Fire runs too close, the snow melts beneath him, and when Snow leans too near, the flames stutter and smoke. The air grows strange. The ground remembers them long after they pass.
In this version, every meeting is a warning.
When Fire lingers too long in the heat of the baths, the elders whisper that he is burning himself hollow.
When Snow slips on wet stone and Fire is suddenly there, it is said that fate has bared its teeth.
People shake their heads and say, Two forces like this cannot share a path.
They say, Something must give way.
In this story, the road does not lead forward. It leads only toward dust.
Some prefer a crueler tale.
They say Fire loves only his own reflection, and Snow is merely another surface on which to shine. Fire runs not because he must, but because he wishes to be seen, and Snow remains because there must always be something left behind to prove Fire’s speed.
In this story, Snow is not chosen.
He is convenient.
Fire’s presence is thunder. Snow’s silence is mistaken for disinterest. Those who tell this tale laugh and say, It was never about Snow at all.
And Snow, in this version, becomes nothing more than a pale line in Fire’s wake.
There is also a story told by those who love rules, and where Snow and Fire are not forces at all, but instruments.
They rise. They run. They drink. They rest. They leave.
When Fire stands too long in one place, it is called inefficiency.
When Snow waits, it is called protocol.
Nothing is named that cannot be measured.
Nothing is allowed that cannot be explained.
In this story, there is no frost and no flame—only movement and recovery, cause and effect, order and repetition. Any warmth that gathers between them is dismissed as residual heat. Any stillness is blamed on fatigue.
This story has no mystery.
It also has no room.
The most dangerous story says this:
Snow cannot stop seeing Fire.
Fire cannot escape Snow’s gravitational pull.
They circle one another long after the road is empty. Fire learns the sound of Snow’s breath. Snow learns the weight of Fire’s shadow. The world narrows until only the space between them remains.
Those who tell this tale speak softly, as though afraid it might hear them.
They say Fire will consume Snow.
They say Snow will smother Fire.
They say this was never a meeting, only a hunger.
In this story, love is only another word for ruin.
There is one more story, kept in the space between breaths.
The race has finished. Snowy sits on a bench in the quiet after, pulling his gloves loose with slow hands. The cold in his fingers eases slowly, the ache of a grip held too long unwinding one careful movement at a time.
Red Eye stands nearby, breaths too shallow, his heat still trapped beneath his skin. His hands tremble as he reaches for the bottle at his side and misses it the first time. Snowy catches it before it can fall and guides the bottle into Red Eye’s hand. His fingers linger at Red Eye’s wrist, unhurried, and Red Eye stills beneath the touch.
For a moment, they remain like that, close enough for the air between them to relearn their shapes.
Snowy’s hand slips away first.
Red Eye takes a swig of water too quickly and coughs, laughing once at himself. The sound is thin and brittle, as though it has traveled a long way to reach his mouth. Snowy watches the adrenaline-laced tremors fade from Red Eye’s fingers, the way one watches frost retreat from glass.
Around them, voices rise and fall. Doors open. Light moves across the floor like water.
“Next time,” Red Eye says darkly, dropping onto the bench beside him, “I’m filing a complaint against any official who thinks that counted as a clean run.”
“Ah, yes,” Snowy says, calm enough to be irritating, absently tucking damp white hair behind his ear. “Because it was that pesky official who caused you to stall on the third corner. Terrible thing, that.”
Red Eye’s gaze narrows dangerously. Snowy’s mouth curves, small and private, as he leans in and plucks a stray twig from crimson hair. Red Eye sits in the aftermath of his own momentum; all dirt and leaves and torn cloth, the bright wreckage of a race that reached for a different finish and then fell back into the middle of the road.
Beside him, the pristine white of Snowy’s uniform tells a quieter story—a moment held too carefully, a gap seen a breath too late.
They look like two different ways of missing the same ending.
(Neither of them takes losing well)
They sit shoulder to shoulder in the narrow shelter of the bench and the quiet after motion, as though they have slipped into the margins of someone else’s story for a while. The O’rangers celebrate their victory, and the world (thankfully) forgets the ones who finished in seventh and fifteenth.
Sweat cools.
Breath finds its rhythm.
The ice-cold disappointment that threads through Snowy’s veins slowly starts to shift, settling into something quieter, something stored rather than spent. His shoulders loosen by degrees, tension folding neatly back into place.
From across the room, a voice rises. Clementin calls out that drinks are on him, loud and victorious, and the sound carries like a flare.
“Finally. Something I don’t mind getting behind,” Red Eye says, and it sounds closer to surrender than either would like. Red Eye pushes to his feet in one liquid motion and leaves the race behind, even as its ragged edge — anger and defiance and shame shorn close and worn tight against his skin — echoes within him.
He turns back to Snowy, hair the color of burning embers slipping loose and falling across his shoulder. Red Eye wears a smile too sharp to be careless, the heat of the race tucked away behind it with deliberate precision. Snowy recognises the grimace it hides, the shape of it familiar in ways neither of them names. The smile belongs to the room; Red Eye’s gaze does not.
After the smallest hesitation, Red Eye offers his hand.
“Are you coming?” Red Eye asks, as something-
- the fire of rivalry, the heat of ruin, the spark of wanting to be seen, the quiet flame dancing across a sheet of ice, the taste of ash -
flickers there, just beneath the surface.
There is no lesson in this story. No warning to age into wisdom, no ending shaped like a moral.
The light hums.
The floor is cold.
Snowy smirks, glacier-blue eyes as sharp as frost.
And across the room, someone laughs in a distinctively Pinkies way.