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It is a dark and stormy evening—or at least according to the BBC, it is supposed to be. Somewhere, it probably is; but tonight in Winters it merely snows, dusting the grass in soft crystals and bathing the whole wood in an unearthly shade of silence.
It is a warmer night than most, which means that the snow is sticky and wet. It clings to everything, including you, the adolescent boy by the gate that starts when the silence is broken by the damp, heavy thump of a tumbling mass of snow.
You stubbornly maintain your post and wait, shivering just a little, but you were born here and raised here and you are used to the cold.
You are waiting for someone, have been waiting all day and were waiting with Max earlier. He went in, though, because he got sick of waiting. You have been anticipating this for weeks, months, and Maxwell got a telephone call yesterday that said maybe, maybe you could stop waiting today. And you took that chance because, like Max, you are sick of waiting.
You stamp your feet anxiously, for warmth. It doesn"t really help much, but you haven"t given up on this person after all this time, and you aren"t going to give up now.
You are waiting for the boy who is your best friend, who has been your best friend, who will continue to be your best friend if you have any say in the matter. He is blonde and shy, but if you steer the conversation in the right direction, he will talk for hours as if he had memorized volumes. His words will occasionally go somewhere over your head, but he manages to combine a childlike enthusiasm and wonder with a staggering intellect in a way that you could listen to for hours. And he would look at you with gratitude in his frosty blue eyes, as if to tell you thank you for just listening, and you would smile at him in a way that says no problem.
He walked right out of your life (and once back in to preserve it), off saving the world. He had looked at you that night, the night he left, such that you knew you couldn"t make him stay, and you figured that probably wouldn"t stop you from trying. It did, though. You handed him a peppermint candy and you just reminded him to know where his towel is and come back safe and he hugged you. He hugged you the longest he"d ever hugged you as your best friend, and a part of you didn"t ever want him to let you go. But you were afraid to tell him, and he let you go.
When the first stars start to show you realize with a fast sinking heart that you should retire for the evening. But you can"t, not really. You wait for your friend and sure enough, God knows how much later, you see a shape coming up from the lake, and you squint at it but you don"t call out because it could be the monster watching club but the second you see that spun gold that you love and the light glint on those familiar spectacles, you are running on numb legs, and you don"t even mind the icy sting on your knees any more at all because he"s back, he"s safe and you have to hold him to make it real before his shape dissolves back into the night.
And until you reach him standing there, looking at you like a spectre, he looks as if he might.
His expression is blankly observing until your arms are securely fastened about him and you are smiling up at a familiar visage that is at least five centimetres higher up than you recall. And then he hugs you right back, like the night he left, and again you never want to be let go but you are still afraid to tell him and he lets you go. This time, you mind less because he"s following you back up to the school now, and you are grinning in a fashion you will later recall as somewhat foolish. You don"t care, however, and your contentment is contagious because he is smiling too, but there is still something haunted in those frosty blue eyes of his, and it hurts. As you take his cold hand—and feel the scars, calluses, which his battles have left him with—you know you will make your friend smile with his eyes again. Somehow.
But you must get him out of the snow first.