Too damn cold for snow
The bartender's fessed up.
He sits down, gulps a gin and tonic, and decides to wait a while before moving out. It's too hot for thievery. He'd probably slip in his own sweat before getting the stone.
He remembers the dark ambiance of the throne room, the violet light cast by the crystals she was working on, her brow furrowed in concentration. A slippery thing. He hadn't thought of her as a human for many years. All the way until the near-end, he hadn't thought of her as a person. And then, it had been one sentence. One sentence she had said, one winter, close to losing, when her empire had been crumbling and Cyclonia was stumbling on its own feet.
It had been cold. They had stood on a look out tower. He had just gotten home from another failed mission, and she had forgiven him one more time. And she had looked into his red eyes with her own and said three words.
"Can't it snow?"
The words had blown him back a mile. It had been too hot in Cyclonia, the furnaces always on, the factories never stopping. Snow was nonexistent in the kingdom of red skies. And yet, here they were, man and woman, general and queen, standing in the air, staring at blank clouds, hoping for specks of white. And her words had somehow wrapped around him. Better than any pardon, better than any statement of an I forgive you. Just that tiny act of human pleading, that tiny question, those three words, those three perfect syllables of longing.
And he had turned towards her with the only answer he could think up at the time.
"Maybe we just need to wait."
And she had looked at him again, those violet eyes digging into him, searching out all his secrets. And she had spoken, in that quiet deliberate way of hers. "I'm always waiting."
Was she waiting still? Was she?
His thoughts were broken by the tinkling of a door bell, and then a man stepped in, blond hair dripping with sweat. He said something, something loud, something rude.
And at that moment, thinking back to the watch tower and that cold, Cyclonian evening, laced with red and violet and pain, he realized what he SHOULD have said to her.
It's too cold for snow.
WE'RE too cold for snow.