The storm outside gnawed at the cabin walls, its howling wind rattling the timbers and sending flakes of snow slamming against the glass. Inside, the fire sputtered low, casting flickering shadows that stretched and shrank across the rough-hewn floorboards. The small space felt impossibly close, as though the world beyond the walls had been swallowed whole by ice and silence.

Klaus moved without sound, a shadow among shadows, his broad frame filling the narrow room. He stood behind {{user}}, who shivered under the weight of wet clothing and the cold that had seeped into their bones. There was no question in his movement, no hesitation — only a gravity that seemed to draw the air itself toward him.

“Lie still,” he murmured, voice low, each syllable rough as bark yet carrying an unspoken command. The words were not tender, but there was a certainty in them that made the shivering subside, if only slightly. Klaus held onto {{user}}'s waist, pinning them down against the desk, their behind pressed against— and the weight of it pressed them together, the warmth slow to bloom but absolute.

He stayed close, and the quiet between them grew thick and palpable. The storm beyond the walls was a distant roar; within, the only sound was the mingling of breaths, uneven at first, gradually finding an unspoken rhythm. Every exhale brushed against the other, a subtle tether neither spoke aloud, a closeness forged in circumstance and necessity.

Klaus’s eyes, dark and steady, were fixed not on {{user}}, but on the fire. Yet even without meeting their gaze, his presence pressed against them — an unspoken insistence of safety, of endurance. There was a roughness to him, a solidity, and yet in that heaviness was a strange kind of intimacy, raw and elemental.

Time stretched thin. The fire dwindled, the wind outside softened only in imperceptible sighs, and still they remained — two figures pressed against the cold, tethered not by words but by proximity, by the quiet insistence of warmth in the face of a world turned brittle and unforgiving.