Some Like It Cool

[BlizzardeyeWonder]

[Daniel Ozanne continued from There won't be room for happy memories]

At some point, rolling snowballs and stacking them into snowmen took Daniel away from the mines and the nominal warmth of their rickety buildings, and into the forest. A trail of maybe four of the little guys marked - in wide intervals - his path here. Right now, he had the base for the fifth one, but he stopped. His breath condensed in front of him, and doubled back on itself. Perhaps it was seeking its own heat. Perhaps it was just a subtle breeze. Perhaps he was going against the winds of change, in some small way.

Only now did it occur to him he had basically no reason to make all these snowmen. Well, no practical reason, anyway. He had no guarantee that Marian would come back, or that she wasn't dead in a ditch somewhere by now. And even if she wasn't - then what? Marian was sure of rescue, but surely snowmen couldn't play into that somehow. Could they? He supposed theoretically if you made a big enough snowman or enough snowmen in a big, conspicuous pattern, someone flying overhead would take notice. But putting aside the logistics of getting a bunch of his classmates, who were being highly encouraged to kill each other, together to do so made his head hurt, and that was all for something that - for all Daniel knew - would get the simple reply of a mass collar explosion from the terrorists.

The collars... Daniel put a collar made out of a branch on the third snowman he made. He considered taking it off and snapping it in some act of petty rage against the machine but didn't at the time. If he retraced his steps, he'd do it in a heartbeat though. Those collars were the main obstacle to any rescue, because it allowed the people in charge to press the self destruct button at any time - ergo, they had to go, and Marian had to know that. How exactly was she (or her hypothetical rescuers) going to deal with that?

His breath condensed in front of him, and doubled back. The cold pricked his skin. How long had he been standing here, staring through the trees, contemplating?

At some point, he had to return to shelter. Maybe if he'd grown up in small town Quebec like his mom did, he would be more resistant to the cold. There were books with pictures of forested places from where she grew up in her room and on the coffee table, and he used to love looking through them. At one point, he thought, he asked if the family could go there. Mom had never said "no" to anything so quickly. To be honest, he kind of understood her now. As pretty as the evergreens in snow were, if he somehow got back home, he'd probably never want to see them again.

He wondered, idly, where Marian grew up. As much as he tried to strike up conversations with his classmates back home, he naturally couldn't get to everyone, so he didn't know anything about her aside from what she told him earlier - which was, to be honest, not that much. But that was hardly a bad state to be in, so early. There was something very boring about people who overshared, or at least Daniel thought so. Better to save something for next time, and the next, and the next.

...he hoped Marian wasn't dead. Really, he did.

And he hoped that when she declared she didn't need weapons, the world would let her have that. He didn't quite trust the world, though.

If Daniel didn't know anything about guns, now (while he was unhurried, alone) was the best time to fix that. The incomplete stack of two snowballs would make an excellent target, so he drew circles within circles on the second one.

Loading the gun wasn't that much of a problem (why was the thing open though? He trusted that the gun was probably well designed enough that nothing would like, fall out at a crucial moment, but it was still a little anxiety-inducing). Neither was aiming it, even if it rested quite awkwardly in his grip. (Somehow the... stock, was it? resting against his shoulder just didn't look right, probably didn't look right to others). To be honest, up until the point where his finger was on the trigger, the worst part of the ordeal was turning the pages of a paper manual without his freezing fingers dropping it in the snow.

And then he pulled the trigger.

[Daniel Ozanne continued in Bro, I'm Straight Up Not Having A Good Time]