Ollie lunged at him in an instant and chomped down on the child’s cheek. Asel let out a shriek, then burst into loud laughter. Feeling the tiny vibrations against his lips, Ollie pressed them together and planted kiss after kiss on that white cheek.
“You’ll be okay staying home, right?”
At his next words, the child raised his hand and wrote letters on Ollie’s palm.
Where are you going?
“I’m going to find some eggs. The kind that gives a big rush of vital energy all at once.”
Together…… go.
“Together?”
That small head moved up and down. He paused to think for a moment. Birds don’t lay eggs in winter. That left no other way to get eggs besides stealing ones hidden in the trees or homes of Tree Folk. Fortunately, Asel — being Ground Clan — didn’t feel the cold, but Ollie would also need to climb trees, and he worried about the child getting hurt if left alone during that. He was about to shake his head to say no, but the child reaching for his hand again made him stop.
Together. With you.
It was nothing special. Probably just the child’s way of whining because he didn’t want to be alone. But for some reason, Ollie couldn’t dismiss those utterly simple words as just something said in passing. In the end, he let out a deep sigh and went on.
“Alright. But you can’t wander away from my side.”
The child nodded, smiling wide. Ollie stilled that head bobbing so energetically it nearly made a sound, and pressed a brief kiss to the top of it. Thinking, with a touch of reluctance, that he couldn’t very well go inside someone else’s home and steal their eggs.
The forest had lost the lush green it had shown off all summer, and white snow had settled over the bare, thin branches. The two of them passed through it all, leaving crunching sounds scattered in their wake.
“Be careful. It’s slippery.”
Where soft snow had piled up was easy enough to walk on, but the patches where the ground had frozen over were quite slick. Ollie walked slowly, without hurrying. Stepping on untouched, pristine white snow turned out to be more enjoyable than he’d expected.
“Come to think of it, we haven’t come out since it piled up like this. Asel, is this your first time walking in snow? What do you think?”
Asel played happily, touching the snow this way and that with his bare hands.
“When the weather gets warmer, let’s come out more often. It’s a bit rough right now, it’s so cold.”
The child stepped lightly forward and nodded. Asel wore only a thin shirt with a vest over it, but he didn’t seem cold in the slightest. Feeling just a little envious of that, Ollie looked down at the child thoughtfully.
“Stay here for a moment.”
He spotted what looked like a promising spot for eggs, low enough to reach. With a hopeful expectation, he raised himself up on his toes and checked the hollow.
Contrary to his hopes, inside the deep hollow nothing but faded, withered leaves tumbled about. There were a few broken egg shells here and there, but. Abandoned nests higher up might still have eggs remaining, but in weather like this they would be frozen solid, with not a trace of vital energy left in them. He was also worried about leaving the child alone while he climbed, and feared Asel might insist on coming up with him, so he decided to save it for another time.
After a few failures like that, Ollie’s cheeks had bloomed as red as they could possibly get. They looked like they were blazing like fire, but if you pressed a hand to them they’d be as cold as ice. The child, who had been gazing quietly up at him, stopped Ollie in his tracks and tugged his hand downward, as if to say — look at me.
“What?”
He gave in without resistance, folding his knees and crouching down. Their eyes met, and Asel raised his small hands and placed them on both of Ollie’s cheeks. The heat of him — burning like lava — made Ollie startle.
“Haah…… that’s so warm……”
The child grinned and cupped his cheeks more firmly. Snowflakes drifted gently down from the branches, shaken loose by the wind. In the all-white forest draped in quiet stillness, the two of them giving off their faint little warmth — they felt like the only beings in this entire forest.
Every lonely, tedious, sometimes infuriating thing that had ever happened to him had happened in this forest. He had cried here so hard the forest itself seemed to shake, and had come home dripping blood after being beaten. And now, he felt a warmth greater than he ever had before. His frozen cheeks and hands were stiff enough that even small movements were a struggle, but he had no doubt they would melt away like snow before long. Because Ollie was not alone, and beside him was a small life sharing warmth fiercer than anyone else’s.
“Asel. Thank you.”
At the head that tilted quizzically to one side, Ollie only smiled quietly.
Weaving between branches sagging under the weight of snow, the two searched through abandoned nest after abandoned nest — poking and prodding, and coming away empty every time. But Ollie wasn’t discouraged in the least. It’s fine. I have Asel. These two sentences filled his heart so completely there wasn’t a sliver of room left for anything else.
“Let’s head back for today. My whole body’s gone stiff.”
He said it while moving his stone-stiff, creaking body, and the child, without any fuss, took Ollie’s hand firmly in his.
“Should I carry you…… never mind.”
Ollie had been about to offer, worried the child might be tired, but something that caught his eye made him close his mouth. And he walked on quietly through the forest, as though he had never spoken.
Two sets of footprints pressed side by side into the white snow, walking on, warmly together.
He was going home empty-handed, but he didn’t feel the least bit down. He even felt a little giddy. So, on a whim, he packed snow into a ball and threw it at the child — and that was how the snowball fight began.
Ollie, who might seem like a proper adult to a young child, was in truth not much of an adult at all. He threw snowballs at Asel with complete sincerity, and the child had no choice but to stand there and take hit after hit until his small body was buried in snow.
Only when the child, unable to contain his indignation any longer, threw himself at Ollie like he was going to tackle him did the one-sided snowball fight come to an end.
“Pfft ha ha. You dummy — when that happens, you’re supposed to throw snow back.”
He acts as though he’d fought a perfectly fair fight, despite never giving the child even a moment to pack a snowball together.
The child pouted his lips out adorably and whimpered, clearly sulking. Ollie wanted nothing more than to pinch that pouting mouth between his fingers and wiggle it around, but knowing the child would get furious and sulk even harder, he held himself back with every ounce of willpower he had.
“Next time I’ll teach you how to have a real snowball fight. What would you even do without me?”
He puffed up his shoulders and bragged shamelessly. The child turned his head away entirely in response.
“Come here. Aah — hurry up! Come here and hug me, Asel.”
Ollie stretched his arms out wide toward Asel. His head was still turned firmly away, but given how his sideways glances were gradually increasing in frequency, it was plain as day he’d come running before long. Ollie held back the laughter threatening to burst out and waited patiently. It was a patience quite unlike him — and yet it felt nothing but sweet.
Sure enough, the gaze that lingered on him grew longer and longer, and before long the child squeezed his eyes shut tight and went thud thud thud, running over and throwing himself into Ollie’s arms. He scooped up that warm little body without missing a beat, as if he’d been waiting for exactly this.
“If you were going to come anyway, why play hard to get?”
When Ollie kept teasing without stopping, the child let out a strange “Eek!” and rubbed his face wildly against Ollie’s chest.
“Ahaha, stop it. Alright, let’s go in now.”
At his words, Asel wrestled Ollie’s glove off with some effort, then wrote letters on his palm.
“You want to stay outside longer?”
The child nodded, with an uncharacteristically firm attitude. The tightly pressed lips seemed a little suspicious, but he soon let go of that suspicion.
With all the heavy snow lately, he hasn’t been able to come out — he just wants to play a little more. The only problem was that his frozen body was beginning to ache bit by bit. Still, he didn’t want to drag the child home against his will.
“Alright, shall we walk a little more then?”
They walked the snow-blanketed forest path hand in hand again. As they wandered this way and that around the house, snow would drop from the branches and land on them now and then — and every time it did, Asel would clap his hands in delight.
“You like it when snow hits me? You little troublemaker.”
He gave Asel’s cheek a light pinch. His frozen hands couldn’t even manage that properly.
As time passed, Ollie’s breathing grew more labored. His body was seized by the cold, and aside from the hand clasped with Asel’s, he could barely move. But Asel still didn’t seem satisfied, skipping his feet this way and that with cheerful abandon, stomping deep into the snow again and again. It never once crossed Ollie’s mind that any of this was the child’s mischief.
“Haah……”
Breathing out a dense puff of white breath, Ollie moved his stiffened legs. He made sure not to forget to flash a grin whenever the child looked up at him, as if to say he was perfectly fine.
And then — the child who had been playing happily came to a sudden stop.
“Why?”
