#para:winter

Winter’s plan had been to just stop by the frat house and say a quick goodbye to Emmett before heading home for the holiday, but faced with the prospect of spending two weeks without her, Emmett had kind of purposely derailed her plans. He’d poured her an eggnog and patted a spot on his bed for her to sit and tell him all about what her holidays had in store, and right as he was offering to pour her another one, his phone had started vibrating like crazy. A severe weather alert. Winter had groaned when he’d showed her the warnings to stay off the road as a snowstorm rolled in, and even jokingly accused Emmett of rigging the whole thing just to keep her from leaving. But a quick search revealed that it was a real threat, and all Emmett had had to do was pout and say he didn’t want his best friend frozen to death in a ditch somewhere for Christmas to get her to agree to stay and wait the thing out. “May as well have another one, you’re gonna be here a loooooong time,” he told her, scrolling idly through his weather report and showing her how much snow was expected to fall on the house by hour radar before turning to pour her another drink. “Cheers!” Emmett declared, raising his class to clink against Winter’s. “Bet you didn’t know that winning Gamma Chi sweetheart was actually our way of trapping you in this house forever...” 

Gaston wasn’t really sure if this whole thing with Winter was going anywhere or not, but when he’d signed up for Matchmakr, he’d declared that he was going to be a one-lady kind of guy. He didn’t want to get the kind of rep that his twin used to have, so as long as he was seeing if him and Winter could be more than just makeout buddies, he’d stopped flirting with other girls on the app, hitting a definitive pause button. If today didn’t go well, maybe he’d consider hitting unpause again, but it was just making a gingerbread house... he didn’t really see what could go wrong. “Yo! I stopped to get some bonus stuff to use as decorations, hope it’s cool,” Gaston said, flashing her a thumbs up with one hand and holding a bag that had broccoli peaking out from the top in the other. “I got broccoli in case our house has normal bushes, and cauliflower in case we want the bushes outside the house to look like they’ve got snow on them, pretty smart, right?”

“Winter?” Emmett hissed when footsteps approached, hoping it was his friend. He’d been lying in this pumpkin patch for ages now, trying to stay as flat as he could until she could get out of the haunted house and answer his S.O.S. call. He prayed that this time it was really her, but he pressed his body flatter against the ground just in case, as if the pumpkins were actually hiding him from anything. He’d thought it was a great idea to jump over a huge pile of them to try and be cool, but he’d just sprained his ankle instead, and he’d been lying here with it propped on a pumpkin for thirty minutes, hoping the swelling would go down enough for him to be able to hobble home with his best friend at his aid.