12 Roses

12 | Knee Deep in Snow

The next morning, you were the last to awaken and the dining table was barren of anyone eating breakfast, except Toge, who sat at the end with cold toast on his plate and his mask hanging off of one ear.

You glanced at the window, seeing the clear sky and the thin blanket of snow that covered the ground.

"Good morning," you greeted, feeling bad that Toge had waited. "Where's everyone else?"

"They went for a walk. They told us to follow if we wanted to."

You nodded and sat beside him, where a plate of untouched toast and eggs were. A part of you wanted coffee, but you already felt bad that the old lady might have been waiting for you to show up before giving up and leaving the table.

"Don't you usually wake up pretty early?" Toge asked. "Why did you wake up so late today?"

"No reason."

Except, you couldn't get the image of Maki's mangled, bloody body out of your head, nor the image of the casket with a person's face sticking out of it, frozen in eternal agony.

You had never viewed Suguru as an evil person, and you had never viewed Nanako and Mimiko as evil people either, yet they were in your dreams. It made no sense.

You had been up until 5:00am, went to sleep, woke up again, then fell asleep again. Lately, your dreams were like a show and you were just missing episodes, a consistent story but you skipped over chapters.

Toge noticed your troubled expression and placed his hand on your arm, making you let go of your fork and have it drop onto your plate with a loud enough clatter to summon the old lady.

"Is something wrong?" Toge questioned with his brows drawing together in worry.

You shook your head as the old lady took both of your plates, even though yours still had half a piece of toast on it.

When you got up, starting towards the front door, Toge took your arm. "What?"

"Look at the window."

You glanced at the window that illuminated the living room, which was across the dining room, and saw a raging snowstorm beyond the glass.

"It was clear just a few minutes ago!"

"I know..." Toge put his mask over the lower half of his face again. "We have to wait it out before we follow them."

"But they're out there, aren't they?"

You could tell that he was about to say something, but his hands hesitated, then dropped to his sides.

You had never actually seen snow before coming to the cabin, and to take it a step further, you hadn't get the sting of snowflakes hitting your face before.

Toge sighed and turned, startled to see the old lady standing in the archway that led to the dining room. The two of you looked at each other, unable to communicate to her what you wanted to do.

She, however, seemed to know exactly what you wanted as she disappeared further into the cabin, just to return with thick winter jackets that certainly didn't belong to either of you.

"You're not the only ones to try and brave the mysterious storms that come this cabin's way," she said to only one of you. "But you ought to be one of the ones who come back."

You glanced at Toge, who looked remarkably like someone who was just told that they were to be executed by electric chair, and he decided that he wouldn't translate for you. That made you all the more uneasy.