When the radio had a working signal, which was a rare occasion as the truck was in the middle of some blustery mountain pass, the voice coming across the air waves had a concerned message for anyone listening: to stay inside and not venture out unless absolutely necessary, because a storm for the history books was blowing into town overnight. From where she sat in the passenger's seat of that truck, Sully gave a huffy sigh whenever she heard the warning, regretting ever making the decision to go out in the first place. Her eyes tracked up to the rear-view mirror, which, when not obscured by the almost blinding snow, allowed her to see the horse trailer they were towing, and that made her regret subside, if only slightly. How could she regret agreeing to help someone's horse out?
"It ain't too much further, is it?" the driver of the truck asked, speaking over the warning that was faintly playing through the speakers. "Road's kinda slick through here, and if it's gonna be much more drivin', we're gonna have to pull over and chain up or somethin'."
"At this rate, I don't even think pulling over's necessary." Sighing again, Sully turned her attention from trying to see the trailer to looking at the sheer concentration in the driver's face as he attempted to watch the road before them. "It shouldn't be too much further up the road though, Vaike. The snow's making it a hell of a lot harder to tell, though."
He chuckled, slowing the truck down as much as he could to take on one of the winding mountain curves. "Shoulda thought about it a bit more 'fore I agreed to bringin' ya up here. Or, at least, ya coulda warned ol' Vaike that we'd be drivin' right into the storm to do this." As he started to take the turn, one of the front tires hit a patch of ice obscured by the snow, sending them swerving a bit, and once their direction was corrected and they were presumably back on the road, he stopped the vehicle completely and opened his door, letting the whipping wind start blowing snow into the warm cab of the truck. "Yeah, ain't lettin' that happen again. Don't haveta help me if ya don't wanna, but I'm puttin' somethin' on these wheels so we don't go skiddin' off a cliff."
Without another word, he climbed out his door and slammed it shut, sending some of the snow that had collected on top of the truck cascading off the side. She gave a small laugh at the sight, especially when she saw that he had caused himself to get covered with the fine powder in the process. "What a dumbass," she said, undoing her seatbelt and turning the volume on the radio up a bit more. The voice of the weatherman was coming in with static, but she could still make out the important points of his message—and just hearing his talk of a historic snowstorm hitting the vast majority of Ylisse made her wish she was back at her house, doing something in the safety of its warm walls. "Then again, I guess I'm a dumbass too, even thinking that coming out in this was a good idea."
She leaned back in her seat, closing her eyes as she did. Between the occasional whistle of the wind and the garbled message of the radio, she didn't need much more as a soundtrack for her thoughts, which were focused solely on what had happened to end up with her and one of her coworkers in the mountains that straddled the border between Ylisse and Ferox at the same time a Feroxi snowstorm was moving south. It had all started that morning, when she had woken up to a phone call from the owners of a small horse camp in the mountains, a place that she knew very well due to the summers she had spent there. There were two ways to get to the camp, one coming from Ylisse and one from Ferox, and when the first big snowstorm came through the couple who owned the camp typically packed up their horses and went to stay with family somewhere in Ferox. It was a two-trip ordeal, with how small their horse trailer was and with how many horses they owned.
But in between the two trips, an avalanche had occurred somewhere along the road they had taken to get into town, leaving them unable to return to the camp to get their last horse. Knowing that someone in Ylisse would be willing and caring enough to make the journey for the rescue mission, they had called Sully with the sole purpose of asking her to go get their horse for them and to keep him safe until there was a way to reunite him with his owners. She accepted the job without a second thought; after all, she had spent a lot of time at the camp, so helping them out was the least of what she felt she could do for them. The issue with that decision was that, while she had a horse trailer easily handy, she didn't have a vehicle that could tow it.
That was when she had turned to one of her co-workers and partners in fighting crime on the Ylisse police force, because she simply couldn't do this task herself. Vaike honestly hadn't questioned a thing about the rescue mission until they were nearly two hours into the drive, and she was completely thankful for that due to the dangerous nature of what they were getting into. Once the warning on the radio started playing repeatedly, the questions began being asked, always starting with one that she hated hearing: "Are you sure we're gonna be makin' it back tonight?" It wasn't so much that she hated the context of the question (she was fairly certain it was because he was supposed to be working overnight, but it could have also been related back to his romance life), but rather that she hated not having a solid answer to give him. It was always a shrug and a perhaps, because the likelihood of them making it back relied solely on them making it there in the first place.
A banging on the window next to her startled her slightly, her eyes shooting open to see what was going on. She shouldn't have been surprised in the slightest to see Vaike standing there knocking to get her attention, nor should she have been surprised when he opened her door on her, the cold creeping in without warning. "Hey, bit of a problem," he said, holding two gloved fingers up just far enough apart that she could assume there was space between them. "Can't make drivin' safer if the road's almost purely ice."
"And how do you know it's ice?" she asked, not expecting him to turn around and show her his snow-covered back, presumably from him falling out on the slick road. "Oh. Well, damn. Guess you would know."
"Snow's comin' down a lot harder than I've ever seen it, too. Not thinkin' this was a good idea at all, so maybe we could kinda turn back and get home safe 'fore the storm hits home." Without closing the door, Vaike ducked down and started brushing caked-on snow and ice off from around the front tire of the truck. "Don't need Chrom killin' us for riskin' our lives out in this on a horse."
"Chrom understands that animal lives matter as much as ours do. I think he'd be angrier if we came all the way the hell out here just to turn around with nothing!" Shivering slightly and reaching for her jacket to cover up with, Sully couldn't help but roll her eyes. "Besides, you're not worried about Chrom killing you because of the horse. You're worried he's going to kill you for scaring his sister."
Vaike stood back up, a large icicle in his hand. "Please, as if that's what's got the Vaike worried about gettin' home safe. It's all about how Chrom's gonna handle it if I don't show up to work tonight to keep the town safe. No one else on the squad's got a truck that can handle the ice 'n snow."
"Well if your truck can handle ice and snow like you claim it can, we can easily get up to the camp, get the horse, and get home in one piece, so that we don't worry Chrom, or," she gave a small smirk, "your precious girlfriend either." For that add-on, he mimed stabbing her with the icicle he was still holding, before tossing it behind him and walking around the side of the truck for a moment. During that time, Sully couldn't help but let her smirk grow bigger, and a laugh escaped her. "Walking away after that damn great comment just proves you're more worried about her than your job, idiot."
The wind made his response hard to hear, but she was sure that it initially began as a bunch of yelling about how he was in fact worried about work and nothing else. By the time he came back within view, holding a tangled mess of tire chains in his arms, he was mid-sentence and visibly frustrated at something, although it wasn't at what he originally had been yelling about. "—and it looks like someone snagged half my chains out from the back of the truck and that means the trailer's gonna be slippin' and slidin' across the road and that ain't the best thing for it to be doin' when there's a horse in it."
"What do you mean, half your chains are gone? Don't you have them all in your hands?" Her smirk fading fast, especially after he looked at her and shook his head, Sully quickly put her jacket on and jumped out of the truck, the snow beneath her feet flying up as she landed on it. "You work on putting those on. I'll look in the back for the others. We aren't getting this far without going home with the damn horse."
"Got it. But I swear to ya, they ain't in there." Dropping the chains beside him, Vaike crouched down once more and sighed. "I know who's got 'em if they really ain't there. Knew I shoulda remembered givin' the chains out to a friend. Er, a boss? I guess?"
In the middle of a step towards the back of the truck, Sully froze and turned her head back to side-eye Vaike. "You mean you gave the other chains to Chrom?"
"He was comin' up to Ferox today too, y'know. Somethin' about pickin' up a house guest for the holidays. I told him that chains don't really work with l'il cars like his, but he didn't listen to ol' Vaike because he's the boss and I ain't." He looked up and saw that Sully was half-glaring at him. "What? Did I say somethin' wrong?"
"You knew the entire time that they weren't here. I'm not even bothering with looking." Having to hold onto the side of the truck to keep herself from falling on the slick ground, Sully turned back around and walked over to the still-open door of the truck, climbing back in and stomping her feet on the floor to get off all the snow that had collected in the treads of her boots. "Why did you agree to driving up here in the middle of a snowstorm if you knew you didn't have all the damn supplies you needed?"
"Because when someone says snowstorm, I don't think of somethin' like this! The worst 'snowstorm' the Vaike's ever been in wasn't anything like this! This ain't just a storm, not this time." He tilted his head back to look up at the dreary gray sky, the snow making visibility next to nothing. "I don't think we should keep goin'."
"It's just a damn bit of snow. If we can deal with murderers and criminals at home, we can handle getting up to a horse camp in the snow. Just keep going slow and eventually we'll get there." He gave a small nod and got to work on weather-readying the tires that he could, a process that didn't take very long—to the point that Sully was sure they had spent more time sitting and talking than it had taken for him to declare the chains on the tires properly. By the time he was back in the truck's cab, the doors were shut, and they were on their way once more, it had been a good thirty minutes since they had stopped, and the snow had done nothing but pile up more in the meantime.
Driving was simultaneously easier and more difficult. The truck itself was gripping to the road, but the trailer it was towing was sliding across the road even worse than before, thankfully never once going off the road or causing the entire rig to jackknife. That didn't mean that there weren't a handful of stressful moments when the trailer would start skidding across the road and Vaike, trying not to let anything bad happen, would slam on the brakes and make everything temporarily worse until both truck and trailer were perfectly still. It was maybe another mile up the road, plus a few hundred yards down another road, to the horse camp, and that journey took almost as long as getting to the mountains in the first place had taken.
The camp itself was situated in a little clearing just off the main road through the mountains. It was a miracle that Sully had been able to notice the turnoff to get there with the snow blowing as hard as it was, but if she hadn't seen it when she did, they would have known that they missed it within moments, as right past the turnoff was where the avalanche had happened that was the entire reason they had been told to come up to the camp in the first place. Once in the clearing, finding the stables and, by extension, the horse they were there to rescue was the easy part. Or, at least, it was in theory, but with the wind blowing the snow to the point of obscuring nearly everything into vague shapes, it was a much more difficult challenge.
Parking the truck on what he hoped wasn't grass or other plant life, Vaike looked to Sully for what they were supposed to do next. "Well, I got us here. Now where's that horse gonna be at, so we can get it and go 'fore things get much worse."
"I'll get the horse, thanks. You get the trailer open and ready, and I'll bring the horse to you. Last thing we need is you making this all take longer because you don't know how the hell to handle yourself around the horse." Sully threw her door open and once again jumped out of the truck, but unlike the previous time she had done that, the ground was not as inviting to her feet, and she quickly lost her balance, falling down into a snowdrift that was easily half her height.
Having watched the entire thing, Vaike laughed and carefully got himself out of the truck, walking around to close her door and offer her a hand up. "Now we've both fallen out in this nonsense, yeah? Get back to your feet and get on gettin' that horse so we can get on outta here fast!"
She ignored his hand and got back up on her own, brushing the snow off of her the best she could, her hands stinging in the cold. "Should have brought myself some gloves for this," she muttered, before walking off towards the buildings she could faintly make out before her. Every step she took was in snow that was piled up to her knees, which made it that much harder to make real progress in any timely manner. Once she could feel the solid dirt of the paths around camp beneath her feet, though, she knew she was headed in the right direction, and once the snow stopped being as much of a nuisance, as it had been being blown away from the buildings, she was able to get to the stables much faster.
Before she entered the long building that she knew the horse was in, she turned back to see what Vaike was doing; to her shock, she couldn't see the truck or her companion at all, only the desolate white wall that was the snow falling. "He better not have left me here as soon as I walked off. What, is he so petty that he'd leave a friend stranded because she made some true jokes about him and his girlfriend? He better not be that much of a damn baby." Her hands and cheeks turning a bitter red from the cold and wind, she focused once more on the stable's door, opening it with little trouble and stepping inside. Although the owners of the camp weren't around, they had left the heating on inside for their sole remaining horse, who was standing in its stall just waiting to be rescued.
When the horse saw her approach, it began to huff and make noises that showed it wasn't thrilled with having someone that wasn't its owner approaching it, but Sully raised a hand and reached for its side, to pet it and show that she was friendly. It didn't take well to her frozen touch, but after a moment of her softly whispering to it alongside the petting, it calmed down and became willing to cooperate with her. As fast as she could, with no real desire to go back into the cold but no choice but to do it, she dressed the horse in a warm blanket and grabbed all of its equipment, finally putting its bridle on it and taking hold of its reins. "Okay, let's do this. Hopefully, if he's still here and isn't being an ass for no reason, Vaike should have the trailer set up for you, you big horse. It's not going to be a fun ride home, but it'll be better than you being alone up here." The horse whinnied, but was willing to follow Sully out of the stable and into the snow.
About halfway back to where she had remembered the truck being, she noticed that her footprints from going to the stable had already filled up fairly well with fresh snow, and everything around them had only gotten more covered and treacherous. Three-fourths of the way there, and she still couldn't make out the truck, further cementing her worry that she had been abandoned, although it was completely possible that the storm (which had done nothing but intensify in the maybe five minutes she'd been inside) was just obscuring her view even more.
"Hey, I see ya!" Hearing Vaike's voice was reassuring because it meant that he was still around, but she wasn't able to tell where it was coming from, until she heard the horse snort, quickly followed by a low groan. "Oof, next time, warn a guy that horses don't like bein' touched from behind, okay? Thing just kicked the hell outta me."
"Why are you behind us?" Sully asked, looking back to see Vaike standing there, doubled over from the horse kicking him in the stomach. "We didn't pass the truck, did we?"
"Snow's kinda crazy. Makin' us all make bad choices. You walked a giant animal right past the truck, ol' Vaike decided to follow and got himself kicked by the animal…it's all 'cause of the snow." He brought himself back upright and came to be standing beside her, giving a thumbs-up when he got there. "But yeah, truck's back a little bit. We should get goin' now before things get any worse than they already are."
She nodded, preparing herself to lead the horse in the correct direction, but a loud, deafening rumbling stopped her in her tracks. "Uh, don't mean to get negative, but that didn't sound like it was a good thing," she said, before turning her attention to the horse, which was beginning to act upset. "Shush, it's all okay, we're going to get you somewhere safe…"
"You get awfully nice to horses when you're around 'em. Maybe you should learn that sort 'a kindness towards people too." Putting a hand above his eyes to block the snow from blowing into them, Vaike tried to look into the distance to see what had happened, but to no avail. "Got any ideas about what to do? That sounded like somethin' just came off a mountain." He was met with silence, and when he looked to see what Sully was doing he found her still comforting the horse. "Okay, c'mon, we've gotta worry about ourselves and our safety here, not just keepin' the animal from bein' freaked out."
"Then you use what little brains you have and think of something!" She hadn't meant to yell, and she certainly hadn't meant to sound rude to the person who had helped her out so much already that day, but it had happened. Vaike dropped his hand, mumbled something about how he was just trying to get her opinion too, and he walked off, the crunching of the snow the only reason she knew that. She sighed and gripped the horse's reins a bit tighter, slowly walking to turn them both around. "Look at that, I'm a damn idiot. He hadn't left me here before, but he'll definitely do it now."
The roaring of the truck being turned back on, a sound she heard as she and the horse made their approach to the correct destination, only solidified that belief. At about the same time she began getting the horse into the trailer, she could see the truck lurching forward, snow being kicked up by the chains on the tires. It went straight for a few moments, before completing a u-turn and heading out towards the exit to the clearing, leaving her standing at the gate to the trailer with a horse that was starting to show that it was cold with shivers that wracked through its whole body. She sighed and stopped trying to put the horse into the trailer, instead preparing to head back towards the stable in the snow.
Another loud rumbling sounded off in the distance, this one causing the horse to jump in fear and begin trying to sprint off in whatever direction it could. As hard as she tried to stop it from being able to, Sully wasn't able to stop the beast from pulling her off in the direction of the buildings, albeit not the exact one that they needed to be headed towards. She was able to stop the unwilling movement after she was dragged through snow for a few moments, the horse panting and shaking in fear and cold. "You are n-not leading us t-t-to our deaths right now!" Her teeth chattering as the chill was beginning to sink deep into her bones, Sully began leading the horse in the direction they needed to be going. "I d-don't care if we've been left here for d-dead by that bonehead, we're not going to f-f-fall for it!"
She was so focused on getting back over to the stable that she didn't notice anything else that was going on around her, not until she heard what sounded like a honking noise right behind her head. It startled her, causing her to look around wildly, and when she saw that the truck had come back and was parked very close to where she was standing, her face, numb as it was from the cold, lit up in a smile. Vaike climbed out, slammed his door, and came to be standing beside her as fast as he possibly could, a worried look on his face. "Well, uh, good news and bad news?" he offered, seeing the look of relief that she was wearing fade away at the phrase. "Yeah, it's kinda ugly."
"S-share the news, will you? I'd like t-to not be out in the cold much longer if I don't have to." Since he had come to be beside her, she had stopped the movement back towards the stable, but when he motioned for them to keep walking, she had a sinking feeling that she knew what he was going to say. "Okay, w-what's the news?"
"Good news is, we're alive and not dead. Bad news is, those rumblin' noises we heard were from snow fallin' off the mountain and onto the road back down to Ylisstol. We ain't offroadin' in my truck, not in this weather, so, uh…" His voice trailed off as he watched her gain a horrified expression upon her face. "Oh, ya don't like the sound of that, do ya?"
She shook her head, half in answering his question, half because it was hard to not start shaking at how utterly cold she was. "No w-way. I never asked to be stranded anyw-where with you, especially not in a st-t-torm like this." They were walking as they spoke, and they had come up to the stable door, which she had forgotten to close when she had gotten the horse to begin with. This allowed for them to get inside the heated building and become safe, momentarily, from the bitter elements. "W-we're really stuck here, aren't we?"
"Hey, the Vaike might enjoy jokin' sometimes, but not when it's that kind of serious business. 'Bout ran into the giant pile 'a snow coverin' the road because of how hard it was ta see out there." He watched her as she led the horse back into its stall, taking off the blanket it had been covered in, and once she had gotten the horse back to exactly how it had been when they had gotten there, she exited its stall and punched the wall as she did. "Whoa there, why're you upset like that? This ain't all that bad for you."
"Because this m-means that, until the road can be cleared, I'm stuck here in the mountains with you. And we both know that you're going to spend every minute of that time bitching and whining about how you wish you were at home." Vaike opened his mouth to give a rebuttal, but Sully silenced him by punching the wall again. "N-no, don't even try to say otherwise. You want to be somewhere very specific, and that place isn't here. I don't want to be here either, but I'll at least try to accept the fact that I'm stuck in a snowy hell for the next who knows how long. You won't accept it."
"Clearly I have accepted it, if I came back and didn't try drivin' over an avalanche scene!" It was then Vaike's turn to punch the wall, which he did with enough force to cause dust to shake down from the rafters overhead. "Yeah, it sucks that I ain't gonna be spendin' time with people who matter to me, but there's nothin' we can do about it now. We're stuck here, and we'll be livin' here as long as it takes for the road to be cleared."
"More like, we'll be living in your truck. There's no way we're sleeping in the horse stables at a summer camp for days." Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and counted to herself for a few seconds to bring calmness back to her body, then she re-opened her eyes and saw Vaike rummaging through his jacket pocket looking for something. "No, don't call anyone. What are you thinking, calling Chrom or your girlfriend will do anything for us? It'll just worry them."
"We've gotta let someone know we're stuck here," he replied, but he pulled his hand out of his pocket as he spoke. "Why not let a police chief know?"
She put her hand on her forehead and ran it down her face. "Because, Vaike, what good does that do us? There's no way they can get here to rescue us, so letting them know we're stuck will do nothing but worry them." Under her breath, she added, "At least, letting them know you're stuck will do that."
"Okay, so we don't tell the boss. That's cool. What d'ya think we should do when he starts callin' me in a few hours, wonderin' why I ain't shown up to work yet? He'll be more angry than worried, and there won't be any amount of us explainin' what happened to get him to not wanna kill me when we get home." For a moment, it seemed as if Vaike was going to punch the wall a second time, but as he pulled his arm back to do so, he let his shoulders slump forward and he hung his head dejectedly. "And that ain't even mentionin' how dear Lissa's gonna take knowin' that I'm out in the mountains with another woman."
Sully looked at her wrist to mime checking a watch. "Hm, seems it took you no time at all to bring your girlfriend up in all this. Can't say I'm even the slightest bit surprised. You keep moping about her, and I'll figure out something for us to do about what we've gotten ourselves into." He didn't respond, so she figured he was just going to start crying or getting overall sappy about the girlfriend he was so concerned about, and she took that opportunity to walk down through the stables a bit. Having spent a fair amount of time at the place, she knew a thing or two about the layout of the camp, so when she got to the end of the building to find a door, she had her suspicions about what was on the other side.
If there was one positive to the situation, it was that at least the door between the stables and the main house had been left unlocked. Perhaps the camp owners had anticipated the rescuer of their horse getting stranded and made it possible for her to be safe and warm if she did get stuck. In that situation, anyway, they wouldn't have expected two people to be crashing at their place for an unknown duration of time, and so she made a mental note to remember to tell the camp owners as soon as possible about her and Vaike both being stuck there because of the storm.
She walked into the little kitchen of the cabin and saw that the window over the sink was completely covered in snow—something that made her feel slightly thankful that they had been stuck there after all. "I can't imagine what it'd be like if we were trying to get back out of these mountains," she said to herself, before leaving the kitchen to see what else there was of note in the small building. "Pretty sure we'd have killed the horse and possibly ourselves on those roads. Feroxi storms don't play around, it seems."
"Guess it's blowin' into town now, too." Sully turned to see that Vaike had followed her into the home, and he was staring at her with a blank expression. "Which ain't good for them, I guess. Don't really matter to us since we're here and not there, but still."
"How do you know it's starting to hit down there?" she asked, fully expecting to hear him admit to doing exactly what she had just said not to do and calling someone. It was a bit of a surprise to see him just pull his phone out and pass it to her, letting her see the numerous messages of weather warnings that should have been heeded. "Well, damn. If it's already getting bad down there, I can't imagine what it's actually like up here."
"Who knows, but the police force is definitely gonna be missin' my truck in all of this." He snatched his phone back and sighed. "Oh, and Chrom's whole family's gonna be missin' me bein' there for their festivities."
Sully couldn't help but roll her eyes. "Of course you're back to talking about that. So, okay, it's a few days before Christmas. You're telling me they start their celebrating now? Or is there something else that's going on that's so damn important that you're going to become a whiny bitch about it?"
"There isn't any 'whiny bitch' happenin' here, it's just a guy bein' hurt that he's off bein' stuck in the mountains while his future family's all warm and happy together." As she watched, Vaike walked over to one of the few chairs in the entire house and collapsed into it, the wood of the chair creaking at the force he fell with. "Kinda bites, knowin' that all their friends are there and ol' Vaike ain't. And that, with how this storm's lookin' to the people down in town, he ain't gonna be gettin' there any time soon."
"They'll have the road cleared in a couple days, tops. Then we'll be back in town and back home and everything will be fine. Hell, I'd even say a couple days might be a bit too long to be waiting. Once someone realizes we're here, they'll be sending all the plows they can to get us home safe. Maybe, for once, you being involved with the police chief's sister will do everyone a damn bit of good." Sully, approaching another window that was caked in snow, gave a chuckle. "Or maybe they'll leave you here to try and teach you a lesson."
"Hey! If anyone on the force does the teachin', it's me! They call me Teach for a reason, y'know!" Completely missing the point of what he had just heard, Vaike continued to speak on something irrelevant. "They'll come ta get us simply 'cause they won't be getting anythin' done without us around! I've got the big truck that can drive in anythin' and you've got the attitude that everyone's afraid to fight against! We're basically the most important officers in the entire town, and we're stuck in the mountains in a snowstorm!"
She laughed again at what he was saying. "Sure, we're important, but I wouldn't say we're the most important there is. If and when they come to rescue us, it won't be because of our job importance. It'll be because you're romantically involved with the chief's sister, and because I'm the 'other woman' that you need to be separated from." Those last words were spat like they were poison, as she truly didn't believe what she was saying. To her, there wasn't any point to letting anyone know that she was up at the camp with him, aside from the people who owned the place. She wasn't the important one there, and there wasn't any reason for her to try and think otherwise.
The room became silent after that, which Sully found odd as she would have figured that Vaike would have loved to argue with her on her point of them not being the best at their jobs. But when she began to hear rather loud snoring coming from the chair where her companion had seated himself, she realized that he must have dozed off somewhere in the middle of her talking. It had been a long day for them, after all, and he had been scheduled to work that night, so it logically was time for him to be sleeping, a fact she couldn't fault him on. Rather than disturbing him to continue on with conversation, she spent the time exploring the house a bit more, figuring out the basic things about the place in case anything came up and she needed to know where, for instance, the candles and flashlights were stored in case of weather-induced power outage.
She had no idea how long they'd be up at that camp, but it was better to be prepared for anything than to go into things completely blind. Which she couldn't say for them getting into the situation in the first place, but that was another gripe for a different moment.
A/N: A month after starting writing this (hello, NaNo 2k15 writing project!), it's finally time to start posting what has become a large Christmas fic endeavor for the ages. Over the next few weeks-yes, there will be double and triple update weeks-we'll be seeing this story come to life. Consider this part one of the first "day" of the story, with part two coming on Tuesday.
I hope everyone's enjoyed this so far and I'll see you back on Tuesday! :D