[life in a cake pan]

Noin was damp and warm when she woke up. And alone.

It took her a few minutes to realize that she shouldn't have been.

And even when she did, she hardly had the energy to do more than blink before closing her eyes again.

~*~

"Noin?" A voice asked, somehow familiar, but at the same time not.

"Uh?." she breathed, but didn't take the effort to open her eyes.

"Wake up." He shook her shoulder, then was gone.

She stretched her legs into the snow, and opened one eye, then the other, before climbing out of the hole into the shelter of the ramshackle cabin into the bitter cold, which her clothes blocked only oh-so-well.

There sat Zechs. His hood was pulled over his head, shadowing his maskless face from her eyes. Noin realized with a start that he must have lost it in the fall. In front of him was a collapsible propane stove, on which was a pot of slowly melting snow. In his hands was a packet of instant something, both of which must have come out of the emergency bag Noin had grabbed. At even this feeble prospect of food, Noin realized exactly how hungry she really was.

She sat down next to him, but not too close. She was still a bit wary of his existence.

His face interested her. What could it bear that he would hide from the whole world?

Apparently, he didn't intend to tell her, or even show her. Not that she would have expected him to. He was careful to hide himself, even as he finished mixing the goo that was their meal and handed her the pan. She ate half of it, then gave him the rest. The only noise during the entire ordeal was the click of the spoon on the bottom of the pan.

After he was done, he went outside the cabin and scrubbed the pan with snow, cleaning it as best he could. Then, he packed up the stove and put them both in one of the corners of the cabin that was not covered in snow.

Noin was still hungry.

She looked around the small cabin, the dirt floor and the pile of broken boards to one side. The brick fireplace was crumbling, as were most of the walls, though they kept out quite a bit of wind and snow. What once had been a window looked a bit burnt around the edges, and there was no sign of the glass that would have fit inside the frame. Then there was the thick wall of snow that had been her bed, which she ached to return to.

Her companion's movement jarred her from her fluffy thoughts of beds and comfort, and she looked to see what he was doing. One hand gingerly rubbed the wrist of another, which was tightly but messily bound in cloth. It was his right hand, which explained the difficulty he must have had bandaging it. "Are you all right?" Noin asked, moving a bit closer toward him. The action sent a wave of nausea through her, and she paused, closing her eyes and placing her hands on the cold ground to brace herself.

Zechs moved closer in an attempt to help her, but she motioned him away.

"I-I'm fine." She gasped, and started to back away to the small hole in the snow. "I'm just tired." She crawled in clumsily and closed her eyes.

She looked like she was crawling into a grave.

Zechs shivered.