This time, I took both halves of the scene and pulled them back to the prompt.

I feel like maybe this is the first time I've actually done this right.


.


Noa liked snow, but only in the abstract. He liked looking at photos of mountains, or paintings of wide sweeping snowscapes. He liked watching snowboarding and skiing on television. He made dwarves and gnomes when he played World of Warcraft over and over and over again, just because their journeys started in the snow.

But the idea of actually visiting such a place, of driving or flying to somewhere with actual snow, seemed to insult him.

"It's beautiful," Noa would say, "and pure, and lovely. I love polar bears, and penguins, and snow leopards . . . more than I love most human beings, honestly. But I don't want to experience any of that! Are you kidding me? Listen. I may not have a normal human's sense of pain anymore, but that only makes it more important for me to respect nature. My mother taught me how important that was, in my old life, and I respect nothing more than the cold. Any place frigid enough to freeze water, I'm content to leave the fuck alone."

Ryo thought he understood, but it was still fun to poke fun at Noa about it. "Is that why you wear white so much?" he asked. "To showcase your admiration from afar?"

"You mock me," Noa said, "but if I did, it would be more thought than most of you plebeians put into what you wear. All the same, I am nothing if not a chivalrous soul. Mother Winter deserves well our devotion, and I'll have you know that I, sir, fully intend to offer it."

"Sometimes," Ryo said, "I think you might be reincarnated from one of Santa's elves."

Noa frowned. "I mean, Chichiue did wear red a lot. Ooh! Maybe we're descended from Krampus!"

Sputtering with sudden laughter, at how genuine Noa sounded if nothing else, Ryo was at an utter loss on what to say in response.

Ryo often spent time alone reflecting on the time he spent with Noa, trying to puzzle out what it was about this strange, strange man that so called to him, that pulled him in and refused to let him go. He didn't suppose he was surprised, really, but Ryo hadn't spent the great majority of his life puzzling out the mysteries of other people to not turn those skills inward from time to time.

One night, he remembered something that his mother taught him; not about nature, but about love.

She said: "Find the people who make you smile when you remember them. The people who make your world brighter. If you find yourself with someone who makes you laugh, who turns your problems into opportunities with just a few words, who makes you wonder what you possibly could have been worrying about all this time, who makes you struck dumb with all the wonders of the world . . . those are the people you want to keep near you. Those are the people you need in your heart."

Ryo thought that, more than anything, explained what made Noa Kaiba so special.

It was impossible to worry when he was around.

Noa always looked so confident, and he always knew what to say, what to do, to make any problem look small. He could take something so big, so looming, that Ryo couldn't see past its bulk, and dismantle it with such precision that soon enough it was all in pieces, and Ryo was stepping over it with ease.

Noa Kaiba could take a great wall of stone and turn it into snow.