Chapter Text
The cabin was number seven.
Snowball stood in front of it with his duffel bag over one shoulder and his backpack over the other and looked at the number nailed above the door - a brass seven, slightly crooked - and told himself this was fine. He had agreed to this. He had filled out the forms, signed whatever they put in front of him, packed his bags, and shown up when Two said to, because he was going to win this competition. That was the whole point. Winning. Everything else - the camp, the cabins, the pine smell, whatever - was just noise he had to get through first.
Cabin seven.
It smelled like pine before he even opened the door. The whole camp smelled like pine - like pine and lake water and something faintly smoky from the fire pit area he’d passed on the way in. Snowball had grown up in a city. He had never had strong feelings about nature one way or the other, but this place was really going for it. Like it was trying to prove something. He’d seen less dramatic forests in movies.
He pushed open the door.
The inside of the cabin was small. Smaller than it had any right to be. Two twin beds, one on each side, with a narrow aisle between them that was fine for normal-sized people and that Snowball was going to have to navigate carefully. A shared dresser against the far wall, four drawers on each side, with a strip of tape down the middle. He looked at that tape for a second. At least someone had thought ahead. A window above the dresser looked out over the lake. A door to the right opened to a bathroom that was barely a bathroom - a toilet, a sink, and a shower stall you could not turn around in without hitting something.
Snowball set his duffel bag on the left bed, because the left bed was slightly further from the bathroom door and therefore slightly less likely to be disturbed by middle-of-the-night noise, and looked around.
It was fine.
It was functional. Not what he would have chosen, but workable. He’d dealt with worse. He was not someone who complained about things he couldn’t change - that was a waste of energy, and energy was for winning.
He unzipped his duffel and started unpacking. Workout gear first, on top of the dresser where he could grab it without digging. Then the rest of his clothes, shoved into the left side of the drawers - the tape made the boundary obvious, which was good, because he did not want to have an argument about drawer space. Toiletries on the left half of the bathroom shelf. Then, at the bottom of the bag, his books. He’d brought two, which was probably one more than he’d get through, but he wasn’t going to sit around doing nothing in the evenings.
He sat on the left bed and tested the mattress. It was fine. He looked out the window at the lake because it was there, then went back to thinking about the competition, which was what he should have been doing the whole time.
He’d done his research. He always did his research, even when other people didn’t bother. He knew the format, knew the general challenge structure, had a rough idea of what the next few weeks would look like. He’d looked at the other contestants during intake - sized them up the way he always did, quick and direct, not trying to hide it. Strengths, weaknesses, who looked like they knew what they were doing and who was here to make friends.
Most of them were not threats. That was obvious.
A few might be. He’d noted them. He’d remember their faces.
He didn’t have a cabin partner yet. Two had said the pairings were getting announced at the welcome dinner, which was in - he checked his watch - two hours and forty minutes. Until then the cabin was his, which was fine. Good, even. He’d use the time to get settled and then figure out his strategy for the first challenge, and try not to think too hard about the fact that in two hours and forty minutes he was going to have to share this space with a stranger for the foreseeable future.
He picked up his book.
He did not read it.
He looked at the window instead. The lake was doing that thing where the afternoon light made it look silver, which was - fine. It was a lake. It looked like a lake. The sky was a very blue blue, the kind you only got when you were away from the city, and he’d always - okay, he’d always noticed skies. That was a thing about him. He’d never told anyone because it wasn’t exactly consistent with his whole deal, but there it was. He noticed skies. He kept it to himself, the same way he kept a lot of things to himself.
He was still looking at the sky when he heard footsteps on the cabin steps.
The door opened with a bang.
Not an aggressive bang - not the bang of someone making an entrance on purpose. The bang of someone who had pushed a slightly stiff door with more force than necessary and then tried to catch it - too late, the momentum already committed.
“Oh - sorry, sorry-”
The voice was bright. That was the first thing. Bright and quick and already apologizing before the door had fully settled, already filling the space before the person attached to it had fully entered it.
Snowball looked up from his book, which he still hadn’t read.
The person in the doorway was - Snowball’s brain did something it almost never did, which was stall. He was not a person whose brain stalled. He was someone who looked at a situation and immediately knew what to do about it. That was one of his things. His brain did not stall.
It stuttered now.
The person in the doorway was tall - not as tall as Snowball, because almost no one was, but tall, still ducking slightly under the low doorframe. He had hair that was somewhere between gold and copper, the kind of color that looked like it shouldn’t be natural but probably was. Duffel over one shoulder, backpack over the other - same as Snowball had arrived. Bright yellow t-shirt. Shorts. He looked like someone who had played a sport in high school and never really stopped, which was a type Snowball recognized. He was looking at Snowball with hazel eyes that were doing something Snowball didn’t have a word for.
Open, he thought. That was it. The eyes were open. Like a window that hadn’t been closed in a long time.
“Hi,” said the person in the doorway. “I’m Lightning. I think we’re.. I think this is my cabin, too? Number seven?” He held up a piece of paper, a cabin assignment printout, as evidence.
“Snowball,” Snowball said.
“Oh, cool, I was hoping.. I saw your name on the list and I was hoping you’d be here. We were in BFB together, right? I feel like I barely got to talk to you there.”
Snowball looked at him. “We were on opposite sides of the split.”
Lightning blinked. “Right, yeah.. I know, I just mean before all that. You always seemed-” He stopped, reconsidered. “Never mind.” He stepped fully into the cabin and let the door close behind him, and looked around with the quick, comprehensive attention of someone taking stock. “Nice view,” he said, looking at the window.
“It’s fine,” Snowball said.
Lightning looked at him with an expression that was somewhere between amused and curious, like Snowball was a puzzle he’d just decided he wanted to solve. “Adequate,” he repeated. “Okay.” He moved to the right bed - the correct choice, the only remaining bed, but he moved to it without any apparent resentment about the lack of options, dropped his duffel on the mattress, and looked at the dresser. “I see you’ve already called the left side.”
“The tape was there.”
“The tape was there,” Lightning agreed, smiling at the dresser like it had said something funny. “Very organized. I like it.” He unzipped his bag and started unpacking, which he did in a way that was almost the opposite of Snowball’s method - not chaotic, exactly, but organic, things finding their places through a process that looked more like improvisation than system. He talked while he did it.
“So I’ve never done one of these before,” he said, shaking out a hoodie and folding it, sort of, and putting it in his drawer. “The whole living-with-people-you’re-competing-against thing. I’ve done regular competitions but this is different, right? Different kind of pressure. Have you done something like this before?”
“No,” Snowball said.
“But you’ve competed a lot.”
“Yes.”
“Cool.” Lightning glanced at him - just curious, not competitive about it, which was a little disorienting. “I’m a little nervous, honestly. Not about the actual competing. More the living-with-people thing. I’m an only child. Never shared a room.”
“I’m also an only child,” Snowball said, and then wasn’t sure why he’d said it, because it was more than the question required.
Lightning looked at him with those open eyes. “Yeah? Does it bother you? The sharing?”
“No,” Snowball said. He paused. “I’m good at adjusting. You have to be, if you compete a lot.”
“That’s a good quality.” He said it like he actually meant it, which was a little surprising. “I’m working on it. I tend to get attached to things being a certain way.”
“Yeah, that’s going to be a hell of a problem here.”
Lightning laughed. It was.. it was a good laugh - loud, real, the kind that crinkled his eyes. Snowball noticed this. He noticed it the same way he noticed the sky thing, which was to say he noticed it and then immediately felt like he shouldn’t have. Most people performed their laughs at least a little. This one wasn’t performed at all.
“Probably,” Lightning agreed. “I’m aware. I’m working on it.” He placed a pair of shoes under his bed with a care that was kind of at odds with how he’d folded everything else, which Snowball noticed. He was someone who had specific things he was careful about. Snowball could respect that.
He filed it away. Useful to know.
“What are you reading?” Lightning asked, nodding at the book on Snowball’s nightstand.
Snowball told him.
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to read that. Is it good?”
“I haven’t started it yet.”
“You brought it, but you haven’t started it?”
“I just got here.”
“Fair point.” Lightning sat on his bed and looked at the window and the lake beyond it, and was quiet for a moment - the first moment of quiet since he’d entered, and it was not an uncomfortable quiet, which was the thing Snowball noticed. Some people’s silences were loaded. This one was just a silence. “The lake is really nice,” Lightning said, after a moment. “I grew up near a lake. Not like this - smaller, more of a pond, really, but we called it a lake because it made it sound better.”
“Where did you grow up?”
Lightning told him. Snowball knew the area - had driven through it once, years ago, on a road trip he’d taken alone that he’d told no one about.
“You?” Lightning asked.
Snowball told him.
“City kid,” Lightning said, nodding like this confirmed something. “That tracks.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing bad. Just.. you have the.. thing. The self-sufficiency thing. Like you’ve been navigating a complicated environment for a long time and you got very good at it.” He paused. “I mean that as a compliment.”
Snowball looked at him for a long moment. Lightning met the look without flinching, which was notable. Most people, when Snowball looked at them with sustained attention, found something else to look at. Lightning just looked back, patient and easy, like he had nowhere else to be.
“It’s an accurate observation,” Snowball said.
Lightning smiled. “Cool.”
He went back to unpacking. Snowball went back to his book. The cabin filled with the small sounds of someone settling in - the soft thud of a drawer closing, the zip of a bag, the creak of the bed frame as Lightning shifted - and Snowball found, to his mild irritation, that the sounds were not unpleasant. They were company without demand. Presence without pressure.
He read the first page of his book.
He actually read it.
---
The welcome dinner was outside, as promised, long tables set up on the grass between the cabins and the lake, the last of the afternoon sun going amber over the water. There were eight of them total - Snowball had done the count during intake - and they arranged themselves around the table with the careful, assessing casualness of people who were trying to seem like they weren’t assessing each other.
Snowball sat at the end of a bench. He always sat at the end of things when he could - it limited the number of directions from which he could be approached, and it gave him a clear line of sight to the rest of the table.
Lightning sat next to him.
Not across from him. Next to him. He’d come from the drinks table with two glasses of water and set one in front of Snowball without asking, without making it a thing, just placed it there and sat down and said, “They have lemonade too, if you want, but I figured water was safer, some of these camp lemonades are basically sugar delivery systems,” and Snowball had said “water is fine” and that had been that.
He was aware of Lightning beside him in a way that was disproportionate to the situation. Lightning was a large-ish person, reasonably, but not so large that his presence should have been this... present. And yet. There was a warmth to him, a physical warmth, like he ran slightly hotter than average, and he was close enough that Snowball could feel it in the air between them. He smelled like something clean and faintly citrus, which was the body wash from the shared bathroom, which Snowball had already clocked on the shelf.
He did not examine why he had clocked it.
Two stood at the head of the table - bright, relentless, the kind of energy that filled a space completely and left no room for argument - and walked them through the rules, the schedule, the general philosophy of the competition. Snowball listened with full attention, cataloging everything, noting the parts that mattered and those that were filler. Beside him, Lightning also listened, and Snowball could feel the quality of his attention - focused, engaged, not performative. He was actually listening.
“Cabin assignments,” Two said, and read them out. The teams were new - nothing like the lineups from BFB - but the cabin pairings had been randomized separately, lodging having nothing to do with who you were competing alongside. There was some shuffling, some glancing around to locate whoever they’d be sharing a space with. When Two read “Cabin Seven: Snowball and Lightning,” Lightning glanced at Snowball with a small, satisfied expression, like something had been confirmed.
“Already knew that one,” he said quietly, to Snowball.
“Obviously,” Snowball said. "That's kind of the whole point."
Lightning smiled.
Across the table, a guy named Firey - red-haired, sharp-eyed, clearly one of the threats Snowball had cataloged during intake - was watching them with an expression of mild amusement. Snowball met his gaze flatly. He raised an eyebrow and looked away.
The dinner was served and the conversation expanded the way it always did in group settings, branching and overlapping, people finding their conversational footing. Snowball participated minimally - he answered direct questions, offered observations when they were accurate and relevant, and declined to perform sociability he didn’t feel. This was his normal mode. It had served him well.
Lightning, predictably, was a different story. He talked easily and often, moving between conversations with the fluid comfort of someone who had never found a room he couldn’t warm up. He had a story about a duck that Snowball caught the end of, and then a story about a road trip, and then an opinion about the challenge format that was, Snowball noted, strategically astute beneath its casual delivery.
He was smarter than he looked. Not that he looked stupid - but he looked like he was smarter than he looked. Snowball had assumed Lightning was mostly charm - charm was usually a thing people used when they didn’t have much else going for them - but the strategy comment had been good. Actually good. The charm was real, but it wasn’t all there was. Understanding him was useful.
He was pretty sure that was why he was paying attention.
“Hey,” Lightning said, low enough that it was just for Snowball, while a conversation about the sleeping arrangements in a different cabin was happening across the table. “You good? You’ve been quiet.”
“I’m always quiet.”
“You’ve been quiet in a specific way. Like you’re thinking hard about something.”
“I’m always thinking hard about something.”
Lightning looked at him with those open eyes. “Fair.” He paused. “What are you thinking about?”
Snowball looked at him. “The competition,” he said. “Strategy. What the first challenge is likely to be, based on the format they described.”
“What do you think it’ll be?”
“Endurance. They almost always start with endurance. Establishes who’s actually in shape and who’s been coasting. You can’t fake it.”
Lightning nodded slowly. “That’s what I thought too.” He paused. “You’re going to be good at that.”
“Obviously,” Snowball said.
Lightning smiled, and it was not a competitive smile, not a calculating smile, not the smile of someone doing math. It was just.. pleased. Like he was genuinely glad about this. “Cool,” he said, and went back to the larger conversation.
Snowball looked at his food.
He was aware, with a clarity he really did not want, that Lightning was going to be a problem.
Not the competition kind of problem. The other kind. The kind where someone was warm and actually funny and laughed like they meant it and had just handed Snowball a glass of water like it was nothing, and was sitting close enough right now that Snowball was aware of it in a way he couldn’t explain. And had looked at him as if he were interesting. Not a threat to neutralize. Just.. interesting.
Snowball did not like being looked at like that. He didn’t know what to do with it.
He picked up his fork and ate his dinner and told himself, with the firm conviction of someone who had been lying to himself for years and had gotten very good at it, that this was going to be fine.
---
It was dark by the time they walked back to the cabin. The camp had strung lights along the paths between the buildings - the warm amber kind, hung in loose loops from wooden posts - and they turned the dark into something softer, something that felt more like evening than night. Snowball walked with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the path and his mind in the organized, quiet place he went when he needed to process without pressure.
Lightning walked beside him and did not try to fill the silence.
This was the second notable thing about him. The first had been the laugh. The second was that he could just be quiet - actually quiet, not the kind of quiet where you could tell someone was waiting to say something. He walked with his hands loose at his sides and looked at the lights and the trees, and he wasn’t performing anything. He was just there. Some people were like that. Snowball had not expected Lightning to be one of them.
“Stars are good out here,” Lightning said when they were almost at the cabin. He’d tipped his head back slightly, looking up.
Snowball looked up. The sky was clear and dark and full of them - the kind of sky you couldn’t get in the city, where the light pollution killed everything. He’d forgotten it looked like this. He didn’t say that out loud.
“Yes,” he said.
“I forget about stars,” Lightning said. “Living in the city. You forget they’re just.. there. All the time. You just can’t see them.” He paused. “Kind of a weird thing to forget.”
“Most people don’t look up enough,” Snowball said.
Lightning looked at him sideways. “You look up?”
“Sometimes.”
“Huh.” Lightning smiled, and it was a small smile, private, like he was filing something away. “Me too.”
They reached the cabin. Lightning pushed open the door - more carefully this time, having learned the stiffness of it - and reached for the light switch, and the cabin filled with the warm yellow of the overhead light. It looked different at night. Smaller, warmer, more like a place.
Snowball’s books were on his nightstand. Lightning’s shoes were under his bed. The dresser now had tape down the middle and things on both sides.
“Bathroom first?” Lightning offered, gesturing.
“Go ahead,” Snowball said.
Lightning disappeared into the bathroom. Snowball sat on his bed and listened to the sounds of someone else’s nighttime routine - water running, the particular sounds of teeth being brushed, the creak of the medicine cabinet - and found that it was not as intrusive as he’d expected. It was just sound. It was just someone being a person in the same space.
He changed into the clothes he had slept in, sat on his bed, and picked up his book. He read three pages before Lightning came out of the bathroom, dressed for sleep, hair slightly damp at the edges from washing his face.
“All yours,” Lightning said.
Snowball went into the bathroom. He did his routine with the efficiency he brought to all things, and when he came out Lightning was in his bed with a book of his own - a battered paperback with a broken spine that had clearly been read multiple times - and the overhead light was off, replaced by the warm pool of his bedside lamp.
It was a considerate thing to do. Snowball noted it.
He got into his own bed, turned on his own lamp, and opened his book.
They read in silence for a while. The lake made sounds outside - water sounds, night sounds, the occasional bird or something that might have been a bird. The cabin settled around them, the small creaks of wood in cooling air.
“Hey,” Lightning said, after maybe twenty minutes.
“Mm.”
“I’m glad it’s you. For the cabin.” He said it simply, without apparent expectation of a particular response. “I think this is going to be good.”
Snowball looked at his book. “You don’t know me.”
“No,” Lightning agreed. “But I think I will.”
Snowball didn’t answer. He turned a page. The lake went on making its sounds outside the window, and the lamp made its warm circle of light, and Lightning went back to his book, and Snowball sat with the strange, inconvenient, undeniable feeling that something had started.
He didn’t know what to do with that.
He read another page.
---
He woke up at six, the way he always did, internal clock precise and unforgiving. The cabin was dim, the early light coming grey and soft through the window, the lake beyond it flat and still and silver. Lightning was asleep across the room - Snowball could hear the slow, even rhythm of his breathing - sprawled on his back with one arm thrown over his eyes and his mouth slightly open, hair gone chaotic against the pillow.
He looked younger asleep. The brightness was still there - it was apparently just part of his face - but the rest of it was off, and he was just a person, slack and quiet. Snowball looked at him for longer than made sense and then looked away and told himself it was just because he was still waking up.
He got up quietly, went to the bathroom, dressed, and went outside.
The camp was still. Six in the morning, first full day, and no one else was up. The path lights were off. The sky at the horizon was going pale, and there were still stars above it. The air was cold and smelled like the lake. Snowball stood on the steps and breathed it in. He wasn’t thinking about the competition for once, which was unusual. He usually woke up thinking about the competition.
Just the morning. The light. He was allowed to just stand here for a minute.
He heard the cabin door behind him.
“You’re up early,” Lightning said. His voice was rough with sleep, lower than usual. He was carrying two mugs. He had woken up, apparently registered that Snowball wasn’t there, and gone to get coffee for both of them before he was fully awake. Snowball stared at him for a second.
Snowball looked at him. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know.” Lightning held out one of the mugs. “How do you take it?”
“Black.”
Lightning nodded and handed it over. His own had something in it - creamer, probably, or sugar, Snowball didn’t look too closely. He sat down on the step beside Snowball, close enough that their shoulders were almost touching, and looked at the lake.
“Good morning,” Lightning said, to the lake or to the sky or to no one in particular.
Snowball drank his coffee and looked at the horizon and didn’t say anything. He had things he could have said. He kept them to himself.
They sat like that until the sun came up.
It was a deeply inconvenient way to start the day.
He drank his coffee and watched the light change and knew, in the way he knew things he didn’t want to know, that he was in trouble.
Not the competition kind.
The other kind.
The kind that started with a person in a doorway with golden hair and a laugh that was just a laugh, and a glass of water handed over like it was nothing, and two mugs of coffee at six in the morning, and that ended - he didn’t know how it ended. He didn’t have experience with this. He’d spent a long time not having experience with this, which he’d figured meant he just wasn’t susceptible to it.
He was not immune to it.
He was, apparently, susceptible to this exact version of it. To someone who was warm and actually paid attention and wasn’t intimidated by him and made coffee in the morning and had said I think I will about knowing him, like it was something he was genuinely looking forward to.
Snowball looked at his mug. He looked at the lake. He looked, briefly and against his better judgment, at Lightning beside him - at the profile of him in the morning light, the copper-gold of his hair, the easy way he held himself even half-asleep, the slight smile at the corner of his mouth that seemed to be his default expression when he wasn’t actively doing anything else.
Lightning turned and caught him looking. Damn.
Snowball looked away.
“Good coffee?” Lightning asked.
“It’s camp coffee,” Snowball said. “It’s adequate.”
Lightning laughed - the real one, already, first thing in the morning, unprompted - and shook his head and looked back at the lake, and Snowball stared at the horizon and told himself, one more time, that this was going to be fine.
He was already fairly sure it wasn’t.
But he was good at adjusting.
He would adapt.