It is early. On the outskirts of the woods, the finches are starting to rouse in the trees, bringing life to the snowy world below. The sun peeks over the horizon, filling the tent with a muted, ethereal glow that builds along with the birdsong. Most of the world lies in peaceful sleep, tucked into their beds, content to rest a few hours more.
Black*Star decides that it's the perfect time to build a snowman.
He rolls out of his sleeping bag, careful to pull Tsubaki's sleeping bag back up to her chin when it pulls sideways. After making sure she is adequately tucked in, he slides the zipper down on the tent and throws himself soundlessly through the opening, blinking against the brightness of the snow.
He scans the area for optimal construction zones. It isn't hard to pick a spot, since the entire space in front of him is a sea of white. He decides on a place right in front of Soul and Maka's tent, to be sure they won't miss the stunning creation he's about to concoct.
After congratulating himself on a spot well chosen, he gets to work.
Within 15 minutes, he's built pretty big bottom and middle sections for his masterpiece. He doesn't do anything halfway. He doesn't have Kid's meticulousness, but what he lacks in detail-orientedness he makes up for in really really large, if misshapen, snowballs.
Just as he's trying to haul the second tier on top of the first, a zipping sound comes from Soul and Maka's tent. As he turns, he watches as Maka emerges, turns around, and freezes.
"You're… building a snowman," she says flatly.
"Yeah!" Black*Star says, arms stretched out towards his creation. "I was hoping to have more done by the time you got out, buuuut…" He scratches his chin and then shrugs. "A god could always use a helper."
Maka stands there for a minute, looking a bit skeptical. Or conflicted, like she can't decide whether to be happy or sad. But eventually, she leans down and picks up a handful of snow, watching it in her hand as it trickles to the ground around the new glove that Tsubaki had given her the night before.
"Yeah, okay."
They work in silence, rolling snow, pushing it along the earth. A quick jaunt into the forest earns them some sticks and rocks, and a bunch of pine needles to serve as a crown. When they return, they toss in their stick-arms and admire their handywork.
"Wanna do the face?" Black*Star asks as they look up at the snowman, towering a good three feet over their heads.
"I can't reach," Maka says, extending her arms to hand him the rocks. "You'd better do it."
For some reason, he feels like this is something she actually really wants to do, but won't say so, so he laughs and kneels down, patting his shoulder. "C'mon up," he says.
A tiny smile crosses her face, and she clambers onto his shoulders. Arms around her legs, he doesn't waver as she carefully positions each rock, concentration set into her face. There's one delicate moment where they topple a little as he reaches down to grab the pine needles, but after a moment of wobbliness, they make it back into the sky.
"This might take a minute, okay?" she says. "Tell me if you get tired."
He scoffs and rolls his eyes. "Yeah, okay Maka. I'll let you know."
She doesn't say anything, but she grins and grabs a handful of pine needles from the pile in the crook of her arm. She slowly pushes the needles into the snowman's head, on the top and down the sides until it's got a full head of pine needle hair. Their snowman slowly transforms into a gargantuan, sandy-blonde snow woman.
"...Kay," Maka says after several minutes, and he steps back and kneels down, letting her step off of his shoulders. When he stands up and looks at her, her face is streaked with tears.
"What are you crying for?" he demands, surprised. "It looks great! What's wrong with it?"
At this, a double-unzipping sound sends Soul and Tsubaki out of their respective tents with a flurry of questions. The most prominent is, of course, the usual one: "What did you do, Black*Star?"
"Okay, for once, I didn't do-" he begins, before Maka starts waving her hands to silence them.
"No, it's great, Black*Star," she says, looking at all three of them and wiping her eyes. "It's… it's exactly what I wanted."
Soul and Tsubaki drop their anger and look up at the snow-woman.
Everything gets a little tense, suddenly, which makes perfect sense to Black*Star, since their snow-woman is pretty awe-inspiring indeed, and he is glad that her majesty is being given the respect she is due.
Nobody says anything for a moment, until Tsubaki walks over to Maka, puts an arm around her and says, "She's beautiful." Black*Star nods enthusiastically.
"And…" Tsubaki hesitates. "And just because she might not be alive doesn't mean she isn't beautiful, and strong, and brave. And you can still remember her as being all of those things, if you want. She'll always be that way, if that's how you want her to be."
Well, she's totally lost him at this point, but as he watches Maka nod softly and sniffle into Tsubaki's shoulder, he figures he'll let Tsubaki break the news that, in fact, no snowmen (or snow-women, for that matter) are alive. He hopes she doesn't take it too hard.
Even so. For some reason, once they pack up and leave, Black*Star gets the feeling that the snow-woman watches them go.
They've been hiking for hours, and his minions are probably starting to get tired because Maka calls out for them to stop and pulls out a map.
"Okay, chief," Black*Star says. "Where are we headed now?"
"So, we're here," Maka says, pointing at the map. "We came from Stockholm to here-" She points again. "In the shuttle. That helped us cut off about a day's worth of walking. We need to get here," she says, dragging her finger up to a small town just inside the bottom curve of Sweden's eastern border. "We have about 12 hours of walking left, so we should be able to get there by tomorrow night."
"That's a long way," Black*Star says. She nods.
"I don't wanna see the Lights at all until we get there," she says. "We can hike at night if we need to, but I won't look for them until we get there."
Black*Star knows that if anyone has the self-discipline to ignore the Lights for several hours, it's probably Maka. And because he is never one to be outdone, he jumps on board with her plan, and spends the rest of the afternoon focused on watching the snow instead of the sky.
"She seems happier today," Tsubaki murmurs to him about five hours into their hike. Black*Star chalks it up to a good night's sleep. He's absolutely positive that a good night's sleep is a god's greatest treasure. Tsubaki seems to think he can sleep anywhere, but he knows there has to be a certain je ne sais quoi about a place for him to really conk out. He doesn't really know what that means – Soul said it to him once and he likes the sound of it, so he's been using it ever since. Anyway, apparently Sweden's got all of the good quoi.
In any case, Maka does seem happier, but to him, there's still something about her that feels muted, like he's watching a less-than-Maka that's going through the motions but is still holding back from something.
She's definitely a little bit better, however, because her lightness, after a heavy morning, has manifested itself in the very annoying habit that Maka often adopts when she is excited about something: reciting factoids.
"Did you know you can see the Northern Lights from as far south as Scotland?" she says excitedly, another fact in a long sequence of Northern Lights-related tidbits that has escaped her since this morning.
"I didn't know that!" Tsubaki says for the tenth time, and Black*Star genuinely can't tell if she's doing it to be polite or if she's actually interested in this useless stream of information. Either way, she's encouraging it, but Black*Star is finding it progressively harder to encourage.
"Yeah!" Maka says, because when she is Encouraged, there's no stopping her. "And they also come in several colors – blue, and pink, and—
"Okay, we get it!" Black*Star says, throwing his hands up in the air and turning to her. "Give the Resident Nerd bit a rest, will you? We're gonna see them tomorrow night anyway."
He thinks that only Maka will be pissed, but the looks that he's getting from Tsubaki and Soul are almost rivalling her irritation level, which he honestly hadn't anticipated.
"Chill, Black*Star," Soul says. "If she wants to talk about it, she can—"
"I know this is driving you crazy, too," Black*Star says, because he knows Soul's factoid fuse is shorter than his.
Maka, on the other hand, is recoiling like a frightened animal, like she might burst into tears, and he's worried that he might have to do the unforgivable and actually apologize. But instead, surprisingly, she does something she normally does. She straightens up, a switch flips, and she's livid.
"No," she says, eyes flashing as she pulls herself up to her full height, fists balled. "I won't stop, and you can't make me. Did you know the Northern Lights are caused by solar wind? And that they help absorb solar radiation? And that they normally occur between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.?! And-"
"Are you trying to attack me with facts?!" Black*Star exclaims. "No way. If you're gonna fight me, let's do it on even ground. Let's fight."
"I can fight you however I want, you started it!" She's starting to yell, now, and when her voice breaks a little, realization hits him.
"… You haven't gotten mad yet, have you?" he says, watching her. "Since it happened. You haven't gotten to yell and scream and really get pissed, have you?" Tsubaki and Soul's eyes latch onto him, and he knows Tsubaki, at least, is trying to silently drag him back from what he's about to do. But he knows Maka, too, and in many ways, he might know her anger better than anything else.
"I'm mad now," she says shrilly, anger making her words sharp. "Happy?"
"Yeah, good," he says, taking a step closer to her. "Get mad! Get so mad that you can't deal with it! Let's take it to the top of that hill-" He points to a hill to their right, craggy rock exposed in bits beneath spots of white. "And just scream."
"Hey, uh," Soul says. "We have like, a schedule, and we probably shouldn't, y'know, be trying to run up random mountai-"
"Stay out of it, Soul," Maka snarls, and Soul throws his hands up in resignation.
"Worth a try," he mutters as Tsubaki pats his shoulder.
Before Black*Star fully turns back to Maka, a competitive burst behind her eyes sends her tearing across the ground, anger propelling her towards the hillside as sparkling snow curtains whip behind her in the wind.
"Hey, no fair!" Black*Star shouts, running after her, leaving Soul and Tsubaki to fend for themselves in the snow.
She's fast, but he's got quads the size of baby pigs, and he almost catches up to her as she makes it to the incline of the hill. They scramble up side-by-side, and although she halfheartedly kicks at him a few times, he knows she won't really knock him down. When they leap over the crest of the hill, resting on its rounded top, they're both panting slightly.
"Still mad?" he asks, sprawled on his back on the rock.
"Yes," she grits, sitting up and glaring at him.
"Good," he says. "Why?"
"Because you're an ass."
"100% true," he says with a thumbs up. "Why else?"
She pauses. "Because you didn't want to listen to my facts."
He jumps to his feet, which honestly leaves him a little winded, not that he'd ever show it. "Yes, I hate facts! They're the worst! But why else! Get pissed, Maka! We're here, and there's nobody else to hear you scream! Let's go!"
He watches her redden, because she knows what he means, and she's already angry, and this is something they are both good at: letting their anger simmer, broil until it breaks the surface, and when it breaks, the floodwaters rage forth. He watches the temperature rise, and waits for her to spill over.
"I'm mad because I'm lost!" she explodes.
He waits.
"I'm mad because she's not here!" she continues, eyes slamming shut. "And because she was never here! She was never where she was supposed to be! Are you happy?!"
He opens his mouth to answer this, but as she turns to the sky, he realizes that maybe she isn't talking to him anymore.
"Are you happy?" she yells again, snowflakes coming to rest in her hair as she faces the wind. "You wanna know the worst part? I miss you anyway! I miss you so much that I don't know what to do with myself! Why aren't you here? Why did you leave me?"
She stills, then, and after a moment, she turns to Black*Star with a grim expression. "I see what you mean," she says. He stares at her, entirely unsure of what she means.
"C'mon," she says, waving him over. "Let's just yell about it."
Yelling is, admittedly, one of his favorite things, so he walks to her side with a grin, and that's what they do.
They scream. They scream until their lips start to freeze, until the wind screams back at them, its own bitter anger clawing at their faces. They scream because it's easy to scream when your mother is missing - had been missing for as long as they could both remember - and the bitterness that she leaves behind cannot be dislodged with tears alone. They scream because they are fighters, because they are strong, strong of their own making, their own efforts, and look what we did without you, what we didn't need you for. Because the strength within them is too much to bear, and if they hold it all in, they'll explode. Screaming keeps them from sealing everything in, from bursting into dust like the curtains of ice that cascade down the glassy mountainside.
For someone who hates learning, this is something he's had to learn: when you are too angry to cry, screaming gets the job done.
He has to endure Soul and Tsubaki's chew-out when they come back down, but Maka's got a color in her cheeks that wasn't there before.
"I'm still gonna tell you more facts tonight," she mutters to him as they start walking again.
"Bring it on," he chuckles, and they set off into the snow.
"Dude, Maka, just come out," Black*Star says.
"I'm not risking it," she shoots back, tent fabric muffling her voice.
"It's cloudy," Soul says. "C'mon, there's a warm fire out here. I promise if we see the Lights we'll throw you back into the tent."
A moment of silence. "Are there s'mores?"
Soul unzips the tent a tiny bit at the bottom and sticks half of a wrapped Hershey bar in through the opening.
Another moment of silence, followed by the second half of a Hershey bar slowly sliding into the tent. "Okay, I'm coming."
The firelight is warm after a day of frigid temperatures, although the chilly night still threatens to encroach into their little circle of heat. They fight against it with chocolate and light conversation.
"Hey, Black*Star," Maka says after a while, staring at the fire. "Do you remember when we climbed up on the spires at the Academy, when we were little?"
"Of course!" he says, nearly jumping to his feet at the thought of doing it again. "That's the first time I ever made it on the roof!"
"Only because Maka cracked the code on the door for you," Tsubaki laughs, because she knows this story well.
"Yeah, it was awesome!" he echoes. "And we got up there and Sid was so mad and had to come up and get us down. It was the best!"
"I almost didn't go up with you," Maka says, her voice lowering as she glances at her boots. "I kept saying, 'What if I fall?'"
"But you didn't!" he said. "And we got the best view of the whole city!" He leans over to Soul for a fist bump, which is halfheartedly returned, although he does give an approving smirk.
"I didn't," she agrees. She pauses. "Do you remember what you said to me? I thought about it for a long time after that."
"Uh." He scratches his head. "Nope! But I'm not surprised. My advice is pretty je ne sais quoi." He looks over at Soul and wiggles his eyebrows.
"That's not how you…" Soul starts, and then sighs, putting his face in his hands. "Whatever."
Maka and Tsubaki both glance at each other and smirk, but Maka plows on in spite of his sophisticated French interruption.
"You said something like, 'What do you mean 'what if I fall?' That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. What difference does it make? What do you get for not coming up here? No sweet view, no bragging rights, no Black*Star telling everyone how great Maka is for getting on the roof. Also, it'll probably piss off your dad.'"
The other three laugh. "I can imagine that," Soul says.
"I remember, it was nighttime, and the whole city was glowing," she continues. "And I remember thinking… I can't believe I almost didn't come up here. And I thought, maybe some things are worth the risk. Some things are bigger than the fear of the fall."
They sit in silence for a moment, and Black*Star watches small smiles appear on Soul and Tsubaki's faces as they exchange a glance.
"So what you're saying is," Black*Star says, face morphing into a conspiratorial grin. "We should climb on the roof again when we get home."
Maka looks up at him and doesn't quite smile, but her eyes glow in the light of the fire. "Sure, Black*Star. I'd like that."
"Sweet," he says, cracking his knuckles.
Maka starts to say something else, but then shakes her head instead, gloves curling around the ends of her chair. Nobody presses her, so they sit together in silence, watching the flames until they crackle to embers. Eventually they decide to part ways, toss snow on the logs and slip back into their tents to sleep.
Tsubaki whispers to him, as they're going to sleep, that Maka's mom had loved snowmen.
"Of course she did," he says. "Everyone loves snowmen."
"I... think it meant a lot," she says. "That you made one with Maka today."
Oh. "Oh," he says.
"I just thought you should know… I think you're a pretty good friend, Black*Star." He can sense her smile in the darkness.
"Of course I am!" he laughs, but he mentally stutters at the compliment. Well, he does his best, anyway.
After all, he doesn't do anything halfway - especially not friendship. Even when all he has to give are screams and snowmen.