What warm she'd once had she'd taken for granted. With the winter creeping through cracked windows and bare branches, she felt it far more intensely. It might surprise her that Fernando doesn't huddle beneath a blanket or jacket of any kind- if she had really been paying attention.

Instead, the woman is gazing blankly into the flickering flames, mesmerized by the inconsistent heat it gives off. Only when she blinks and hears his voice does she pull back and peel off the blanket to take his offering.

"Hm? Sure. Just peachy."

Her thumb strokes the neck of the bottle and she does a double-take to finally take a look at what it is he's wearing. Though she makes no attempt to share her blanket - one he probably gave her - she does comment:

"Aren't you cold?"

FERNANDO SILPH

☉

Momentarily, with an exasperated grimace as her fingers slip against the lid, she struggles with her own bottle. Eventually it gives, fizzing with the threat to foam over. It doesn't, because she catches it against her tongue fast enough. The taste and the sting of carbonation force her one eye closed in an involuntary wink.

"Huh."

She muses, but it doesn't surprise her in any way. He spoke very little about literally anything related to him. This was something unexpected, and she accepts it as fact.

"I heard that that was just a thing people say to sound superior to others."

She frowns, unconvinced.

"If I don't come out smoking, what's the point?"

The crackle of the flames pulls her attention back again, but this time she hesitates and stops instead on Fernando's face. It lingers there, lost in thought, before following his line of sight.

"If you could live anywhere in the world.. where would it be?"

FERNANDO SILPH

☉

He recites knowledge as if reading directly from the pages of a textbook. It used to annoy her, and now.. she leans back in her seat and chooses to absorb his information. Whether she would act on it or follow through was another story, but her tongue lashings come fewer now and farther between.

"My skin is soft."

Even still, an objection. She cannot let him win every argument - not that this even was one.

Silence then extends between the two of them, kept alive by the popping and crackling of the fire as wood splits and falls to pieces. She sips at her drink, the sweetness encouraging. It relaxes and warms her from the inside out, allowing her to remove more and more of the blanket so that she doesn't look like a shivering bear.

"Do you think that it's impossible then to go back?"

She almost slips- the word home hops across her tongue, quickly replaced with something hollow.

"You can't do it now? In this life time?"

FERNANDO SILPH

☉

"You're allowed to want things, you know. You're allowed to do what it takes to be what you want, and where you want to be."

For a moment, she sounds exasperated- because in some manner she is. For a man so confident and set in his ways, he bent at the knee for just about anything.

"Is 'different' a bad thing?"

She sighs, glances away.

"Why Hoenn?"

FERNANDO SILPH

☉

Perhaps it is because what she wants him to take, he doesn't want, and she tells herself it is because he won't take what he wants. Her own selfishness prevails.

Regardless, Stormy pulls her attention away from his questioning stare to take a deep breath and sigh.

"What do you want?"

If he could live anywhere, but chose not to because it wasn't what he wanted, then why would that be what he chose? It confused her.

"I don't want Hoenn to fall like Kanto did."

FERNANDO SILPH

☉

Stormy blinks, her brows slowly come together. It was a big ask, bigger than she anticipated. She couldn't decide if it was selfish or selfless, wanting people and expecting people to live up to their full potential.

"Promise me you won't leave."

The wind gathers again, pushing the flames and stretching them closer and closer to her. Rather than be oblivious to the heat, Stormy finds herself automatically shrinking away from it. It burns where once it hadn't- and although it doesn't hurt even now, it is jarring to be able to feel it, even slightly.

FERNANDO SILPH

☉

"Because I can't keep losing people that I care about."

She wraps the blanket around her tighter- but the cold is mostly a figment of her imagination. Briefly, the woman meets his gaze, but her repeated confessions and his repeated, complicated responses prevent her from maintaining it.

"And Hoenn needs you."

FERNANDO SILPH

☉