some cliche trope rubbish
because apparently I’m good for nothing else right now
“Heckyl,” Ivan yells, trying to make himself heard over the screaming wind. “Heckyl, be reasonable. I am trying to help.”
He dodges a bolt of lightning and tries not to get annoyed. He tries to see things from Heckyl’s perspective: he’s freezing, lost, possibly injured, doesn’t know where he is or what’s happened, and one of his sworn enemies has just turned up. A little suspicion and ire is perfectly understandable under those conditions.
He just wishes Heckyl would quickly get over himself and calm down. At least enough to let Ivan get them both out of the worst of the storm, because despite everything there’s no way Ivan is leaving the man out here to die of exposure. And die Heckyl will: he’s in his shirtsleeves and vest, with not even his coat to protect him. He’s completely vulnerable to the elements, and nobody from his motley crew is likely to mourn his loss or indeed try to come to his rescue. Quite the opposite. They’re far more likely to throw a party and cheer for the next new leader. Â
He must be very frightened, Ivan thinks, and that helps temper his irritation a lot.
“Heckyl!” he roars, wishing very hard that the wind would die down for just a moment so he could try and sound less aggressive. “I. Am TRYING. To help. Stop attacking me. And LISTEN. You are going to DIE out here unless you let me help you.”
The shadow of Heckyl, around ten feet away in the fluttering white flurries of snow, seems to straighten. And in a merciful answer to Ivan’s wish, the wind drops. The blizzard is thick but no longer howling in their faces, and Ivan can see Heckyl properly.
He was right. Heckyl does look very frightened. His hands are raised in an attack stance, preparatory to calling more lightning.
“Come here,” Ivan says, beckoning. “We will seek shelter together. I call a truce between us. Do you accept?”
“Why would you do this?” Heckyl replies, and his teeth are chattering viciously. He is already wracked with shivering. Much longer and he will start to become hypothermic.
“Because despite our differences, we are all each other has right now,” Ivan says. “We have a better chance of getting back home together. Now. Do you accept?”
Heckyl stands silent and still, the snow cascading down over him, gathering in his hair and laying thick on his shoulders, lining the folds of his trousers in white. Â
Then he nods, bringing his arms up about himself and hugging his own shoulders in a vain effort to keep warm. Ivan beckons once again: and as the wind starts to pick up once more Heckyl comes to him. They set off into the whirling whiteness without a word to one another.
 It takes almost an hour to find any form of shelter, and even what they find is not good. Visibility is incredibly poor - only glimpses when the wind drops allow them to see the topography of their environment. It’s a snow desert, barely a tree or a hill or anything except endless walls of white.
They find the cave only when Heckyl falls into it, and cave is being optimistic. It’s a scrape under an overhang which is hidden by drifted snow until they’re on top of it. Heckyl hurts his ankle in the fall, but actively snarls Ivan back when the knight tries to help him up. Together, in the lee of the overhang, they take stock of their situation.
A positive: it’s already warmer out of the wind. Ivan draws a relieved breath, looking out at the sheets of snow and wiping off his wet face with his sleeve. And it’s dry in here, aside from a line of snowmelt at the very entrance.
A negative: Heckyl is in bad shape, whether he wants to admit it or not. He crouches on the dry rock, trailing his injured leg and his breathing wheezing in his chest. His skin is almost blue in places, and ugly windburnt red in others. His fingertips outside the fingerless gloves are white and his hands are shaking. Ivan, with his cloak, has fared better. His face starts to sting as it warms slightly, and he is aware of a lightness of head, but he is otherwise functional. He sits down, rubs his hands briskly over his exposed skin to encourage the blood to flow again.
Heckyl is doing no such thing. He just huddles against the ground, making that painful hitching breathing sound, and not making any efforts to improve his situation. Ivan watches him closely for a few minutes, initially suspicious of a trap. No. It’s unfeigned. Heckyl’s stare is glassy and unfocused, his shuddering repetitive and uncontrolled. He’s slipping away from Ivan as Ivan watches, and Ivan will not sit idly by.
“Heckyl,” he says, loudly. Heckyl doesn’t even blink. “Heckyl.”
“What,” Heckyl hisses, almost automatically. It would have been more encouraging if it hadn’t taken a delay of almost thirty seconds for him to speak.
“You’re becoming ill. Come here and I will help you.”
“Heckyl,” says Ivan, as patiently as he can muster. “Your lips have gone blue. Unless that’s normal in your kind -”
“Then come here. I don’t want you to die. For one thing I can’t imagine any adversary we would get in replacement of you would be an improvement.”
Heckyl’s glassy eyes flick over Ivan in confusion.
“Was that,” he wheezes, “a compliment?”
“If you like. Now come over here.”
It takes another five minutes. But Heckyl does come over. Slowly, shakily, suspiciously - like a starving stray cat being tempted into a carrier by a well-meaning philanthropist. He shuffles across, dragging his foot, and settles about half a metre from Ivan, gasping a little with the effort.
Ivan decides he’s pushed it far enough with issuing instructions, and now takes the initiative. He moves, his own body aching with cold, and examines Heckyl’s ankle while Heckyl flinches and tenses and looks like he wishes he was anywhere other than in a situation where a Power Ranger is carrying out field medicine on him.
“It’s not broken. Just bruised.” Ivan smiles. “Good. Now look at me.”
Heckyl does. His skin is burnt from cold and Ivan is in no doubt that he will be in quite a lot of pain once the numbness goes away.
“Your skin is damaged,” he says, bluntly. “It will hurt. But it won’t kill you if we get out of here soon.”
“I s-s-suppose you have a plan,” Heckyl mutters, teeth clenched.
“Not really. But we will do nothing useful if we turn into icicles.” Ivan settles himself back against the wall, trying to get as comfortable as possible. “I won’t bite you. Come sit with me and get warm.”
The look on Heckyl’s face is a picture. And not a pretty one.
And he laughs. The laugh turns into a wheezing cough.
“You want me to c-come and snuggle with you n-now?”
“Certainly. I have a cloak. You do not. You are freezing. I fail to see the humour in the situation.”
“You will die,” he repeats, simply. “You would rather die than, as you put it, “snuggle”?”
Heckyl pretends to think about it.
Ivan closes his eyes and pulls the cloak tighter around him.
“If you’re still alive in the morning we can plan together.”
And he quickly dozes off, exhausted and cold, against a background of Heckyl’s laboured breathing.
 An hour later, and Ivan jolts awake to an alarming sound. Heckyl is much closer to him now, sprawled out on the floor as if he had crawled as close as he dared before losing his strength. The sound that woke him is a gulping whine, as if Heckyl can barely breathe any more, and Ivan hastens to him, takes hold of him to lift him from the almost-prone position.
Heckyl is barely conscious, his eyes rolled back to the whites, and he gasps uncomfortably as Ivan moves him.
“Idiot,” Ivan chides, gently. He drags the oblivious Heckyl back with him to the spot against the wall, and pulls him in against his body, covering them both with the fur-lined cloak. Heckyl is a lump of ice, every bit of his body radiating cold, and Ivan spends a good few minutes regretting his choice until - finally - Heckyl starts to warm.
The horrible whining breathing subsides slowly, quietens, and Heckyl’s body begins to relax. Ivan feels the shared warmth spread, doubling his own level of comfort, and closes his eyes again, satisfied by this turn of events and more confident now that they’ll both wake up in the morning.
Of course when Heckyl does wake up, he attacks him.
“Calm down!” Ivan bellows, finding himself with an entirely unwelcome lapful of flailing, startled alien. Heckyl has obviously no memory of what occurred overnight and is unhappy to find himself in the unwanted snuggling situation after all. He’s lashing out, and Ivan’s lucky he’s weak and tired and disoriented, because he’s easily subdued and after a few moments lies panting in Ivan’s grip, eyes flared to the whites like a startled horse.
“Good morning,” says Ivan in a gentler tone, with only the faintest hint of sarcasm. “Sleep well?”
“Absolutely,” says Heckyl, his voice ragged, “not.” He raises a trembling hand to his face and then draws it away sharply, hissing in pain.
“I did warn you it would hurt. Regardless. We need to move on.”
“I admire your optimism,” says Heckyl, whose questing fingers have now moved down to his ankle, “and I do so hate to be a downer, but -”
He flips back the corner of Ivan’s cloak that’s over his feet, exposing them to view, and Ivan sighs. That ankle is swollen, the bruising standing out in splotches of purple and red, and it’s probably utterly incapable of taking weight. But they don’t have a choice. They have to find some way to get off this planet and back home immediately, as they won’t survive long like this. And they’re not going to find that way home by sitting in this cave.
Ivan stands up, extends his hand.
“I’ll help you,” he says. Heckyl looks at that hand as if it’s a snake about to strike. “You can’t walk unaided. Let me help you.”
“Ugh,” says Heckyl, and hesitates: but he does, eventually, take the hand. Ivan gets him to his feet: and they head out into the blinding whiteness.
The snow has mercifully stopped falling, and now they can see for miles. It’s not encouraging. The planet surface is almost featureless under the undulating mounds of white. Ivan gets a better grip under Heckyl’s arm and moves them forward. It’s actually not as bad as he’d feared. Heckyl is limping, certainly, but he can dot his injured foot to the ground as he moves, keeping him stable in the snow. As long as Ivan keeps an arm around him they’re making relatively good progress.
They continue without break for almost an hour, then eventually Heckyl snaps: “Stop. Can’t you see this is - just stop. Put me down. We’re getting nowhere.”
“I’m not putting you down,” Ivan says, as patiently as he can muster. “You will freeze. And we will never get out of here.”
“Oh, we’re not getting out of here,” says Heckyl, evidently in an exhausted fury. “Can’t you see that? We’ve been sent here to die. Or rather I have. I imagine you just got caught up in the portal.”
“Such arrogance. We will get out of here,” Ivan says. Ivan’s certainty is like a rock. “And nor am I letting you die because you’re too pathetic to keep moving.”
“Pathetic?” Heckyl bristles. Ivan smiles a little, internally, and with only a small nudge gets them moving again. Â
To be fair to Heckyl’s innate cynicism, they would entirely not have got out of it alive: it is pure accident, and possibly a great deal of luck, that saves them. After a short few more hours it begins to get dark again. The snow starts up again. They are lost and exposed in a whirling blizzard, no shelter, no protection. Heckyl is worryingly silent, dragging at Ivan’s side, until a particularly relentless gust of wind pushes them both off balance: then he falls into the snowbank and lies still, not getting up.
Ivan, struggling to keep his footing, bends to him. His limbs are ice, even with the cloak. Everything aches or is numb. He isn’t really aware of the final push the wind gives him, and he joins Heckyl in lying prone in the drift, all consciousness fled.
He isn’t aware of the portal re-opening, swallowing them both, and depositing them back once more in Amber Beach. Right in the middle of the road outside the museum.
