Bleak meter: Wobbles but comes down on dark (honeymoon's over already!)
Timeline: Between "Hunted" and "March of the Oni," roughly around the time of my one Christmas fic, "Wild and Sweet."
The first winter in decades for the First Realm was a series of new discoveries.
"How long did you say this whole 'winter' thing lasted?" Faith asked old Redskull.
"Are you already eager for it to be over?" Jet Jack butted in, groaning. "Chief, it barely even started!"
"Do you like having food?" said Faith flatly. Jet Jack cast an anxious glance back to the granary—even she realized its contents were dwindling much too fast for comfort—but still shook herself and scoffed.
"Life is rough, Chief, I get it. We're on the brink of death, sure. I know. But what else is new?"
Faith gave her an unimpressed look.
"You only see the bad side of everything," grumbled Jet Jack. "We'll be on the brink of death either way, whether you're grumpy or not."
Faith's gaze sharpened a little bit, and Jet Jack, surprisingly, seemed to pick up on it. Her tone softened.
"I get that you worry for us, Chief. That's good of you. But it won't hurt anyone for you to enjoy the good things about winter in between worrying. Have you even been paying attention to the good parts?"
Faith hesitated, then shrugged guardedly.
"You're missing out!" Jet Jack waved at the snow-covered village. "Seriously. Just look around. Take it in. Have you paid any attention to the snow? Have you seen your own windows?"
Faith made a face, but stepped closer to inspect where Jet Jack was pointing. Her window was coated with a delicate lacing of frost, swirls and sharp tendrils glittering in the light.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" said Jet Jack. Faith tilted her head silently and said nothing.
Everything froze. They learned for the first time to hack through the icy surface of their water tanks to drink, only for the hole to close over again within hours.
The snow was pristine but cruel. They learned to pack it, burrow through it, to trace patterns and leave dancing trails of footprints—and to wear gloves if you liked all your fingers intact. It was the first time they learned the agony of frostbite.
For the first time they learned how metal grew almost colder than the air. Concurrently they learned not to clamp your tools in your mouth while working anymore. Faith feigned weary patience with Chew Toy's struggles to detach his tongue from a wrench, and silently thanked her lucky stars that nobody had been around to see her learn the hard way.
Even your breath froze. Many of the Hunters who wore slatted metal masks abandoned them during the winter, as the vapor of their breaths collected on the cold metal and formed annoying icicles. Muzzle, who didn't have a choice, spent most of the winter with his mask frothing hoary globs of ice. Tendrils of his misty breath spurted in between.
The snowfall was fickle. The gentle dusting of flakes could easily turn into a blinding, howling curtain of white. Faith stayed out too long on rounds one evening, watching in grim awe as a towering shroud of snow swept over the village from the east. Then it engulfed her too, and her surroundings seemed to vanish. Wind howled in her ears; tiny driving ice particles stung at her face. She could no longer see the houses around her; she could no longer see her own footprints.
She stumbled blindly, her heart pounding. A part of her couldn't quite believe that the village hadn't simply dropped away from around her. Where was she? Where was shelter? It was so cold.
Her hands met a solid surface. Blinking through rimey eyelashes she recognized the doors of the granary. She knew roughly which way it was to her house from here. Still, each time she had to throw herself blindly out into the white void, praying she would stumble into another building she recognized and thus work her way closer to home. Each second she wasn't clinging to a wall, she was sharply aware that she might lose her path and keep wandering indefinitely through the storm. Even as she made it to her own doorstep and fell through her own doorway, she wondered with dread if any of her Hunters were still struggling outside, helpless.
Akron was the first who died. They found him just outside the village walls, his eyes crusted shut, his body swept clean by the wind except for a slanting drift at his back. His fingers cracked when Faith bent them, stiffened veins snapping and spewing splinters of frozen blood. Every piece of metal and leather on his body was coated with a delicate lacing of frost; swirls and sharp tendrils glittering in the light.
Prompt was "Frost."