[crow]

"For the last time, no. No, I don't want to build a snowman, Kurt," said a young man tapping away at his computer. "So you can stop asking."

The 'Kurt' he was addressing was another man of a similar age, standing dressed up in full snow gear in the doorway of his room, holding a pair of mittens with a hopeful expression. At the first man's words, he visibly deflated. "Come on, Matty, don't you want to go outside at all?"

[crow]

'Matty' glanced in his direction, frowning, before returning to the work that he had been doing before. "Come on yourself, Kurt. What do you think I'm going to say?" he said. "It's freezing, there's no daylight, and I have work to do."

Despite his words, however, his tone wasn't cruel--- he merely delivered the facts in an offhand manner, neither looking for an argument nor particularly cross about being asked, even though it really was starting to get a little old.

[crow]

Matteo looked to be in his early twenties, with black hair bleached and colored in front, and a pair of expensive headphones draped around his neck.

His computer screen was open to several different programs, most of them for music editing. Now and again, he would lift one or both parts of the headphones over his ears, play a section, then put them down again to make edits. Right now though, he was in the midst of answering emails, so he hadn't put them on properly, like he usually would.

[crow]

Clearly, Kurt had seen an opportunity in this, and immediately put on his snow adventuring best, rushing in to catch Matteo before he got into 'the zone' again. There would be no talking to him after that. Even Kurt knew this, as tone deaf as he might usually have been to that kind of thing.

Having done all this, Kurt wasn't about to give in so easily. "Please, Matty?" he said, his voice verging on a whine. "You came all the way here, right? We should enjoy what it has to offer!"

[crow]

Hearing Kurt's words, Matteo sighed. It wasn't a new argument, but the same thing that Kurt had been saying all along. For whatever unfathomable reason, Kurt seemed endlessly excited about the snow... which was fine. It was why Matteo had brought him along. Gods and angels knew that Kurt needed a break from his job, even though Matteo wasn't getting a break from his own. There'd be almost no point if Kurt didn't have a good time.

That wasn't the problem. The problem was that he kept trying to drag Matteo along.

[crow]

The idea of Matteo going with him presented two problems. The first was that, like it or not, Matteo did have to work. It was his job that had gotten them out here in the first place.

If the people who hired him on found out that he had come here to play around... If he showed up and gave them subpar results, then that was a blow to his reputation, as well as his integrity as a professional. He couldn't do that.

[crow]

Be that as it may, though, he was pretty sure they wouldn't have minded if he went out to enjoy himself a bit, so long as the quality of his work didn't suffer.

After all, it was a music festival, and he was on good terms with the organizers. Certainly, they'd understand the idea of having a little fun for yourself if you were coming all the way out to a place like this. In fact, their mentality might not have been very far off from Kurt's.

[crow]

But then, there was the other issue with Matteo going out into the snow: He just didn't like the cold.

He didn't know what it was. It was probably just one of those things--- some people did poorly with heights, or were ticklish, or something like that. Matteo wasn't ticklish, but he really didn't do well with the cold. And unlike some people he knew, he didn't fare particularly well with heat either. Temperature regulation was a pretty important part of the amenities in his apartment.

[crow]

And sure, okay, it wouldn't have killed him to go out, but if he could avoid it, then he certainly would... But he also knew that Kurt wasn't about to take such a weak-willed excuse from him, if he had merely said he didn't want to go out because it was chilly.

Which was what Kurt would have called it. Being up here, in what was basically the Arctic frozen over--- would have been relegated to as casual a term as 'chilly'.

[crow]

Thus, Matteo had used his work as an excuse. It was a better one than his own lack of cold tolerance. Fortunately for Matteo, it was also consistent with his character. His workaholic tendencies were well known. It wasn't unheard of him to bury himself in his studio for days at a time, back at home.  It was much harder for Kurt to argue in the face of that.

Harder didn't mean impossible though. Their current situation was a prime example of that. It just meant that Kurt couldn't lobby quite as hard for the snowman that he wanted to build, despite his own wishes.

[crow]

"Kurt," said Matteo, trying to sound reasonable. "You know I have to finish my arrangement for the festival."

However, rather than listening to this excuse, Kurt rolled his eyes and sighed exaggeratedly. "You've been working on it since we got on the ship! Aren't you done with it by now? I mean, it's you, right? How long could you possibly need?" He looked more exasperated than anything else, probably having suspected for quite some time now that Matteo had merely been using work as a screen.

[crow]

That was the trouble of working with your friends, Matteo was finding. They knew you pretty well, after a while. Not that this wouldn't be true of a coworker or an assistant or something if they'd worked with him long enough too, but in that case, at least there was a professional buffer between them. Even if they knew about his personalities, or his personal shortcomings, there was a limit to how far they could push.

But with friends... Between friends, all bets were off.

[crow]

If they knew they were right about something and you were just being stubborn for the sake of being stubborn, then they wouldn't buy your excuses any more than they needed to--- which as it so happened, wasn't very much.

Kurt had the right of it too. Matteo couldn't even deny it. Sure, he had plausible deniability in the case of all of this, but Kurt wasn't the type to back down on that sort of technicality if Matteo chose to raise the issue.

[crow]

Besides, it wasn't like Matteo liked lying. He was trying not to make too much of a habit of it in his daily life. It was just that sometimes it was so convenient not to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

But in this case, Kurt really did know him too well. He was already finished with the bulk of his work, and the past couple of days had all been devoted to fine-tuning the arrangement that he had made.

[crow]

It wasn't strictly necessary, and the whole thing was already pretty much stage ready. It was just that certain parts could be improved, or he could play around with the arrangement here and there where he had a few different ideas he wanted to test out. That was what he had been doing with his adjustments.

After all, Matteo was good at his job. And since he was pretending that he was working, he'd figured he might as well get some real work done while he was at it.