Snowed In

Wingul stood with his arms crossed, looking out the window of the falling snow. They did not stop in villages often when traveling, but the distance between the capital and their destination left them with no choice. They were stayed on the second floor of the inn, which gave him a clear vantage point of the snow forming drifts on the ground below. It was wind driven and drifting toward the west, which meant that at the current accumulation rate per hour, by dawn, it would be –

"Glaring at the snow isn't going to make it stop," Gaus said, interrupting his thoughts in the middle of his calculation.

"We shouldn't have stopped here," he said, "the snow is falling too heavily in this region."

"There's no guarantee the next town wouldn't be hit by the storm."

Wingul closed his eyes as he sat down on the couch near the fireplace. He ordinarily would have leaned close to the fire to warm his hands up, but the traveling had worn on him. Gaius placed his arm around his shoulders and pulled him closer, until Wingul's head rested against his shoulder.

"Your hair is tickling my chin," Gaius commented.

"You moved me."

"You looked cold," he said, just as flatly.

"I'm sure you couldn't be more comfortable in a temperature like this," Wingul said dryly.

"It's a bit warm for me, actually," he said.

They didn't pay much more attention to the falling snow through the night, but the morning brought an unpleasant surprise. Not only was the room too cold, the windows were thoroughly covered in frost. Wingul woke up first, as he usually did, and walked over to the window after slipping out of bed to make a truly horrifying discovery. He looked down to see snow not too far away from the window.

The second floor window.

"Are we snowed in?" Gaius asked blankly.

Gaius stretched as he sat up, without any heed to the low temperatures in the room. Wingul just shook his head at Gaius, who cared so little about the cold that he didn't even have a shirt on.

While the inn had a kitchen and dining area that served breakfast on the first floor, being without any hurry to eat and depart didn't improve Wingul's mood. He paced down the breakfast buffet line with an expression that accidentally scared away a child who seemed to be approaching the muffin plate. The child scurried away before he could say anything.

He trudged over to Gaius, who was making the most sickeningly sweet waffle stack he ever had the displeasure of seeing. The Dawn King started with chocolate chips, then caramel, then syrup, then whipped cream, then more chocolate chips on top.

"That's disgusting," Wingul said flatly.

"No one is asking you to have the same preferences."

"There are sicknesses that stem from consuming too much sugar," he said warningly.

"An interesting fact," Gaius remarked, digging into the monstrosity of sweetness.

Wingul sighed and picked at his own breakfast, which was strictly free of anything sweet. As the menu of Gaius' usual cooks was too sweet for his preferences, he took every chance he had to have something different, such as eggs and hot sauce – a commodity nearly impossible to find on the dinner table in Khan Baliq.

Though the inn wasn't very large and didn't have much to see, Wingul still went on a walk of the premises in the afternoon after he worked through all of the paperwork he brought with him. It ended up not taking very long, as it was a small facility. When he returned to their room, he found Gaius casually chewing on an icicle while flipping through the pages of a book.

Wingul narrowed his eyes. "Where did you get that?"

"From the windowsill," he said.

"The water in that icicle dropped down from the windowsill above ours."

"And?"

"People have been doing goodness only knows what on the upper windowsill," Wingul said indignantly.

"What can people possibly do on a very public windowsill? In a small town, no less?"

"You'd be surprised," he said, too stubborn to admit that Gaius made a valid point.

Wingul took a seat beside him and plucked the book from his hands, though it was one he had read at least twice before. Gaius folded his arms around him, careful not to let the icicle touch him, though Wingul still kept a very close eye on it.

"Would you like an icicle?" Gaius offered.

"No."

For a snowed in prompt from Yume Hanabi! :D

I have an essay due in a short while and decided to finish this up instead.

Originally, Gaius said that he ate icicles, but it was changed to ice cream in English Xillia 2.

…I actually started this before X2 came out in English. Hahaha…