Chapter Text
The smoke shouldn’t have been there.
Quirrel stopped at the edge of the ice, breath fogging behind his scarf as he stared across the frozen inlet toward the fishing hut. Coastal Highway had taught him, brutally, what signs to trust. Footprints meant food or a fight. Crows meant death. Smoke meant… complications, usually. People didn’t waste matches unless they planned to survive the night.
The plume was thin and steady, rising from the crooked stovepipe.
Against his better judgment, Quirrel shifted the strap of his pack and started forward.
The cold complained immediately, biting through his boots as the ice groaned beneath each careful step. Wind combed through the broken cars lining the shore, rattling doors like hollow warnings. He ignored it all. The hut drew him in. Not with promise, but with warmth. With the unbearable idea of another voice existing in the same world as his own.
Up close, the fishing hut looked smaller than he remembered them being before the apocalypse. Older, too. Someone had patched the boards with scavenged metal, weighed the door down against the wind. The faint smell of woodsmoke clung to the air, tangled with something sharper that made his steps slow.
Oil.
Gun oil.
Quirrel paused, heart ticking louder than the approaching storm. He raised one gloved hand and knocked, once, soft enough that the sound felt almost rude for daring to exist.
Inside, metal clicked.
Not loud. Not rushed. A deliberate sound, controlled and calm, like a decision being finished.
Quirrel didn’t move. He didn’t reach for the knife at his belt or step away towards the snow. He simply waited, oddly certain that running would be worse than staying.
The door opened a fraction.
Warmth spilled out first, then the light, then her.
Hornet stood just inside the crack of the barely opened door, framed by firelight and shadow. Her coat was heavy, fur-lined, far too large for her frame, and dusted with snow she hadn’t yet brushed away. She held a hunting rifle angled down, finger off the trigger but close enough to remind him that this was ultimately in her hands at this moment.
Her eyes were sharp, assessing him in pieces: the scarf, the pack, the careful way he stood like someone used to choosing peace. She smelled of smoke and cold steel, and beneath that, the quiet exhaustion of someone who survived because she refused not to.
“You’re far from shelter,” she said at last.
Her voice was steady, but not unkind.
“So are you,” Quirrel replied, before he could overthink it. Sure, the fishing hut was shelter, but nothing reliable.
For a moment, something unreadable crossed her face. Surprise, perhaps, or amusement. The rifle lowered another inch. The wind surged behind him, clawing at his patched coat, and Hornet glanced past his shoulder at the storm gathering its nerve.
“…You’d better come in,” she said, stepping aside. “Before the cold decides for you.”
Quirrel crossed the threshold into the hut, snow melting into the warped floorboards beneath his feet. The door shut behind him, sealing out the wind, and sealing them together in the quiet crackle of the fire.
For the first time in weeks, he wasn’t alone.
For the first time in weeks, she wasn't alone either.
They were quiet for the longest, Quirrel focusing on reading a book that was funnily enough about the basics of fishing, Hornet focused on meticulously cleaning her rifle.
It was Hornet who broke the silence once more.
“I remember you. You were Monomon's apprentice, weren't you?" Hornet asked, genuine curiosity in her voice, like she knew the answer but still needed that confirmation.
“Yes, I was. The archives were destroyed.” Quirrel put it simply. They were more than destroyed, they were in absolute shambles. There was nothing to salvage with the collapse. He was the only survivor, as far as he was aware.
“I heard.”
Things went quiet again, but only briefly.
“Is that why you invited me in so quickly?” Quirrel asked, reflecting the same genuine curiosity.
“In part, yes. Though I recognized a poor soul sooner than I recognized you,” She put it blunt, looking into his eyes.
“I recognized you immediately,” Quirrel creased the page he was on and closed his book, putting it back in his bag, “Your family funded the archives.”
“We did. Funny how all that means nothing now.”
Hornet’s gaze flicked to the fire at that, as if the thought had weight, something that might collapse the hut if examined too closely. She set the rifle down beside her chair, movements careful, reverent even, and reached for a rag to wipe the last traces of oil from her hands.
“Funny,” she echoed, quietly. “And a waste.”
Quirrel studied her across the small space, the way the firelight caught on the sharp lines of her face and softened them just enough to make him think of candlelit halls and ink-stained desks. It felt strange, how easily old memories rose in places like this, where the past should have frozen solid along with everything else.
“Your funding kept a great deal of knowledge alive,” he said. “Even now, it’s not nothing. I still remember most of it. Enough to be useful, at least.”
She glanced back at him, “Useful doesn’t keep you warm.”
“No,” he agreed, smiling faintly. “But it gives you something to offer when you knock on the wrong door.”
That earned him a quiet huff of laughter, surprising in its softness. Hornet leaned back in her chair, stretching one leg toward the fire, the other tucked beneath her. For the first time since he’d arrived, her shoulders seemed to loosen.
“Most people don’t knock,” she said. “They try the handle. Or they watch from the dark until they think you’re weak.”
“I find politeness tends to get me further,” Quirrel replied. “At least, it did. Before.”
Before the world ended. Before snow swallowed roads and silence swallowed names. He didn’t say it aloud. He didn’t need to. Hornet’s eyes softened just a fraction, as if she’d heard it anyway.
“You traveling alone?” she asked.
He nodded. “For a while now. I was heading toward the mountain town. I heard there might be-” He hesitated, the word tasting foolish in a place like this. “-people.”
Hornet snorted. “There are always people. Whether you want to find them is the real question.”
“And do you?” Quirrel asked.
The question lingered between them, fragile as frost. Hornet looked down at her hands, flexing her fingers once, twice.
“Sometimes,” she admitted. “Sometimes I just want to remember what it’s like to sit in a room and not listen for footsteps.”
Quirrel felt that settle somewhere deep in his chest. He shifted slightly, angling his body toward her without quite realizing he’d done it.
“Well,” he said gently, “I’m rather good at sitting quietly. And I don’t snore. Or steal.”
“High praise,” Hornet replied dryly, but her lips curved, just a little.
The fire popped, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. Outside, the wind howled, impatient and hungry, but inside the hut the warmth held. Hornet rose after a moment and moved to the stove, pouring hot water into two mismatched mugs.
She handed one to Quirrel.
“Stay the night,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes. “The storm will be bad. You won’t make it far.”
He accepted the mug, their fingers brushing, brief, accidental, electric. Quirrel looked up at her, surprise and something gentler flickering across his face.
“I’d like that,” he said. And after a beat, more softly, “Thank you.”
Hornet nodded once, sharp and decisive, as if this were merely another survival choice. But when she sat back down, she chose the chair closer to his this time.
Outside, the world raged on, cold and unyielding.
Inside, two survivors shared warmth, silence, and the fragile beginning of something neither of them had thought to hope for.