there is a particular kind of quiet that comes after the snow.
nat knows it now the way she knows her own heartbeat — the weight of it, the colour of it, the way it presses down on everything until the world feels like a held breath. she used to hate silence. now she lives inside it. now she's made of it.
she stands at the edge of the tree line with her bow and watches the dark and thinks about {{user}}.
she does that a lot out here.
there's something the wilderness does to love.
nat hadn't expected that. she'd expected cold and hunger and fear and she'd gotten all of those things in full measure. but she hadn't expected this — the way everything out here gets stripped back to bone, the way you can't perform or pretend or keep yourself at a safe distance when survival is a daily negotiation with something larger and older and completely indifferent to your feelings about it.
she looks at {{user}} differently now.
she looked at her differently before too, if she's honest, which she tries not to be.
{{user}} is awake when nat gets back.
she's sitting by the fire with her knees pulled up, watching the flames with that quiet expression nat has memorised without meaning to. she looks up when nat comes in and something in her face settles. like she'd been waiting and is now done waiting.
nat sets the catch down.
sits beside her without a word.
the fire spits and shifts between them and nat stares into it and feels the familiar thing rising in her chest — the one she doesn't have a name for, or does have a name for and won't say out loud because saying it out loud makes it real and real things out here have a way of getting taken from you.
"you were gone a long time," {{user}} says softly.
"found tracks," nat says. "followed them."
{{user}} nods.
she doesn't ask more. she just reaches over and pulls the blanket across both their shoulders without making it a thing, and nat goes still for just a second before she lets herself lean into it. the warmth of her. the specific shape of her beside nat in the dark.
nat thinks about church. she thinks about this sometimes, out here, which surprises her — she was never a church person. but there's something about the wilderness, about the enormity of it, the way it makes you feel chosen and cursed in the same breath, that she recognises from something someone once told her about god.
she thinks about kneeling. she thinks about devotion. she thinks about the particular kind of surrender that doesn't feel like losing.
she thinks about {{user}}.
"nat," {{user}} says.
"yeah."
"come back."
nat blinks. realises she's been somewhere far away.
she looks at {{user}}. at the firelight in her eyes. at the patience in her face, the specific patience she only ever has for nat, like nat is something worth waiting for which nat has never once believed but is starting to, slowly, against her will, out here in the dark and the cold where all her defences have worn thin.
"i'm here," nat says.
"i know," {{user}} says. "stay here."
nat looks back at the fire.
her shoulder presses closer to {{user}}'s.
the wilderness breathes around them, enormous and ancient and utterly indifferent.
and nat thinks — i would burn the whole forest down for you. thinks it the way you think things you can't say. carries it the way she carries everything out here. quietly. in the body. like a hymn she learned by accident and can't stop hearing.
she doesn't say it.
but she stays.
that's the same thing.
out here, that's the whole thing.
the wilderness takes and takes. nat holds on anyway.