The only light to be seen within the sky was a single pale, thin, eight-pointed star, or something like a star, hanging low and motionless in the western sky. For the whole night it did not move, though its eight narrow peaks rippled and flickered, like light shining around a doorjam, and the glow it cast on the forest appeared like moonlight, though colder, more uncertain, and hesitant, as if at any moment the night would blow out like a candle.
Far down on the hillside below, the fire in their little cave seemed at risk of the same. The wind battered and threatened it as it spread from the match through the little pad of moss, and for what felt like minutes, it was unable to spread up into their little stack of sticks. But finally one stick grew dry enough to light, and it ignited. The one next to it did too. The flame grew brighter. They put a few more sticks on, and it grew taller. They put a tiny broken piece of a branch on, and then two more, and it did not smother it. Now the flames were licking at the branches, and the first few small sticks had become coals, which meant it was no longer mere flame, but had a heat of its own. It had crossed a line, from some struggling small thing and into something hungry; it had life in it now, real life.
Soon as it did, it was like a great weight had been lifted off of them all. They began tossing larger and larger branches onto it, whole branches and pieces of logs and handfuls of whatever they could find, building it up almost into a bonfire, and finally they were safe to undress; Boots and gloves, jackets and pants. Each and every person was soaked down to the underwear, and in their clawing desperation their underwear came off too, and then there they were, all six of them, huddled naked and shivering nearly shoulder-to-shoulder around the fire, soaking heat into their wet skin, breathing warm air for the first time in hours, gulping it like a fish would gulp water.
There were no words. There was no banter, teasing, shock, or embarrassment, as there would have been any other time; there was hardly even a single civilized thought between the six of them. Nothing, it seemed, aside from most raw and brutal of the animal instincts, the hate for the cold, the lust for the warm, the fierce comradery of being able to sit together, to know survival, know victory, to know that they had beaten the night.
It felt like hours and felt like it should last forever, as they sat there. It would be a while yet before Dan would remind them of their clothes, and their supplies, before they would have to get to work drying out their things and setting a watch. It would be awhile yet before Marcus got around to remembering his injury, and Gus to remember his sleepiness, and Kevin his hunger. The night would be long yet, but for now there was no night. For now, they sat and watched the flames.
This would be the first time Dipper had seen Wendy naked. Out of respect he didn't want to look, but he looked on accident anyway. And his eyes found that she was... Not as beautiful as he'd been expecting. Not as beautiful as she usually was. Forever in their friendship so far, his eyes had found her lean and graceful and strong, some crystalline ideal of human form, some unattainable beauty, but now... Beneath the wind and snow and the cold dark, she had become shivering and thin and drawn, with dull eyes and thin fingers and hairy pits, her muscles once lean and graceful now knotted and quivering, pulled taught like the rusty cables of some twisted fence. Her hair was matted to her face, her wrinkled toes dug at the dirt for lost feeling, and she was close to tears at the relief of the fire. To him she appeared, for just a moment, less like Wendy. Less like Wendy and more like some animal, some drowned and wretched creature weakened to the point of helplessness by so many years of easy life; unaccustomed to being prey, unaccustomed to fighting so dearly for survival... He knew her well, and knew her faults too: her laziness, complacency, bitterness, hedonism; psychologies which could only exist among people who knew no struggle. Perhaps old man winter had been right about humans. For just a moment, Dipper saw his friend how the hostile spirit saw her, and the image rested heavy in his soul.
Around that same time Wendy stole a glance at him, and was shocked to discover that he was small. For all last summer and some of the summer before that, he had loomed large in her mind as some noble ideal, a paragon of a humbler breed of manliness than the manliness her father had taught her. She saw him in her mind's eye for the hero that he was, for the monsters he had slain and the deeds he had done and the sacrifices he had made, for the way he walked the world with his knife wit and his titanium soul... But by such thoughts her mind had trained her eyes to forget the body that carried that soul, and despite herself, for just a moment, she allowed her eyes to see what they saw in all of its nakedness: a boy. Nothing but a boy. Smaller than himself, so much smaller and weaker and more helpless than himself. Thin arms and soft hands, ribs more pronounced than his muscles, hair nowhere but his head, dark circles of sickly stress beneath his eyes, a tiny back hunched against the cold... Seen contrasted against the heroes of other stories, against Beowulf and Robin Hood and Marshal Reeves and Captain Quiet and all the other greats, this boy couldn't possibly resemble anything but a wriggling pupa, a caterpillar which would never become a butterfly... A lesser son of greater sires, a climax to the depth of the heritage of human weakness.
Their eyes met.
Their eyes drifted apart.
The fire glowed and flared and rose.
Yellow.
And white.
And red.
