The Feroxi winter was waning. The daily snowfall had finally ceased and snow began leaving puddles of half frozen slush in its wake. Lon'qu wasn't fond of this part of the season in the past - there had been too many an occasion in his youth where he had lost his footing and had unfortunate scrapes and bruises on his forearms to show for it. He would have been moody.
He still had a irritable personality, but that was less about the weather lately. Lon'qu spent his winters in Feroxi alone and this had become the problem. No longer was he just a man, content with his craft and the call of Feroxian Khans.
It was her, That Woman. She had become the sheath to still his exposed edges. Having a warm blooded woman for a partner, she did things to the swordsman. In her, he found the thaw in his stoic features. He had become used to having her next to him. Her kind, as he so put it, had less of an effect on him. The world thought it funny, of course, that it would bring to him the strangest one in the continent.
Looking out the frosted window, Lon'qu contemplated the white landscape. Signs of warming weather was something Lon'qu began looking forward to; his wife, that was.
"Something on your mind?" Tharja asked, relieving herself of her thick woolen traveling cloak. She left it hanging off his side of the bed.
"No, not at all," he said, minding the ring on his hand with an absent roll between his thumb and forefinger. "You came back early from Plegia, this year."
"Certainly."
"Didn't you mention that you and Robin had bureaucratic matters to attend to?" Said Lon'qu.
"You mentioned in your last letter that the winter this year was going to be short," she responded. She matched his eyes with her own before she raised a hand to lightly rest it on his arm.
He closed his eyes. His muscles grew taut for a split moment before relaxing them under her touch.
"I took that as nothing less than a request to a woman to see her husband," Tharja said. "Am I wrong?"
He gave her a smile, as they stood still in this quiet moment. "No. You are not."
"Good. Next year then, we're spending the winter in the desert."
"What?"
"I feel positively stifled in this petticoat and the horrid cold. You owe me."