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The Heatwave of 2078, his father tells him, was the worst in the UN’s history. Temperatures levelled off at 204 degrees fahrenheit and stayed there for three weeks. Cars stalled in the streets, people roasted alive in their homes. The grasses died off, and the trees nearly did as well. It’s what lead to the rules regarding heat. Each building had to have an airtight, air conditioned garage connected to it. Each building had to have temperature-controlling stasis fields on all doors and windows. Each building had to be a shelter capable of sustaining people for a month, minimum.
Stiles has never seen snow. It’s been almost fifty years since snow has graced the Adirondacks. By now, only in the very heart of winter, directly on the South Pole, does snow fall, only a brief dusting of no more than an inch. Stiles sees photos of the stuff, of Lake George frozen over, with people skating across it in glorious fashion. He remembers a story his maternal grandfather told him, not long before he died in the August heat of 2096.
His grandfather told him the story of how his own father would take him outside, on cold winter nights, with a pot of boiling water, and throw it into the air, and how he would watch in delight at that water turned to a cloud of snow. Stiles contrasts the visuals of that with his own memories of he, John and Claudia sitting behind the stasis field on the front door, throwing ice cubes. Not understanding what it meant, he reveled in the moment those frozen blocks cleared the shadow cast by the tree in their backyard and touched unfiltered sunlight, they shattered and evaporated without having ever met the ground below. Not understanding his world was dying.
Derek Hale has always existed in Stiles’ periphery. He heard him tell the story of how his family got to Lake George on genealogy day in the fifth grade. Listening with almost laser-like intent as Derek skillfully worded his grandparents fleeing a place once called Beacon Hills, in California, just as the Mojave Desert finished eating it alive. He could see it so perfectly, a young couple, waking one morning to find that the desert they thought miles away now consumed their property, the trees around their ancestral manor withered and dead, the grasses turned from green to bone white in the cruel night hours. They’d stayed for a few weeks, eeking out an existence as the wood of the trees grew dry and hot enough to shatter and splinter, and the dirt turned to sand.
The desert consumed the continent, until only the Great Ontario Wall and the Mississippi, Ohio and Potomac rivers protected what was beyond from the gluttonous sands. A green patch pinned between the oceans on one side, and the eternal desert on the other.
Derek is a handsome boy, the same age as Stiles, and he’s never denied some baser attraction to the other teenager, though Stiles believe the other teen didn’t really know he existed. That is, until Derek approaches him one blistering March afternoon.
“Hey, Stiles? Could I have a word?” The sounds come out awkward and nervous.
He approaches the taller boy. “What’s up, Derek? Need some help with homework, cause I started charging people for that.” Stiles grins conspiratorially.
“No, but good to know. I was wondering if you wanted to go to Martha’s and get some ice cream?” Derek is looking at the floor, and only peaks up hopefully at him for a brief moment.
Stiles is admittedly caught off guard. “Um, sure. When? I mean, I’m good right now if you really want to.”
Derek’s infinitely colored eyes light up like the traitorous sun they orbit at that statement. “We might have to wait a bit, the daily rains are late today.”
Shit, Stiles forgot. The rains. The climate shift has turned the so-called Green Zone into a rainforest, where, for anywhere from one to two hours, the skies relentlessly downpour and then clear away just as quickly. People wait a few moments for the tars of the road and the concrete sidewalks to cool, and then go and revel, in little or no clothes, in the cooling water that pelts them from above. He considers for a moment, and decides to Hell with the rain.
“We can get ice cream anyway. Martha’s has umbrellas.” He shrugs.
Derek leads him out to his car, a Camaro a few years old. The heat outside has easily hit 140, but, inside, it’s a blessedly cool sixty five. The drive up Route Nine past the Great Escape is a few minutes filled with idle chit chat and discussion of their day. The theme park across the street has long been under a specially designed climate-controlled dome, kept at a cool seventy five year round, though dome is only a polite term. In reality, the barrier follows the semi-rectangular boundaries of the park and meets at the top approximately centered over the heart of the establishment.
At Martha’s, they quickly get their ice cream cones, as well as an ancient stasis field projector that barely brings down the temp to eighty degrees, but still spares their soft serve the wrath of the outside world. Sure enough, Derek’s warning was right. From the edges of West Mountain, they can see the clouds brewing. In a matter of moments, the world is dark as the downpour begins. For two or three minutes, the ground sizzles as it is violently cooled by the rain. After it stops, a few adventurous souls carefully poke and prod at the ground, and deem it safe. Then, the party starts.
People rush, in bras and underwear, and, in a few cases, less, and dance in the rain. It might do it daily, but the blistering heat is enough to drive the same celebratory dance each time the blessed rains come. They make the temperatures plummet for a brief hour or two, a break from the unwavering heat of the day. When a stark naked four year old breaches their stasis field and nearly knocks Stiles off of his side of the bench, Derek helplessly breaks into giggles.
“Oh, yeah, asshole?” Stiles grins at him, sticking his hand through the field to collect rainwater in his open palms. He hucks the liquid directly at Derek, who flinches, but is unable to block the spray of water directly to his face. “Not so funny now, huh?” Stiles grins in his perceived victory, unaware that a similar gout of rain is flying at his head until it makes contact. He splutters as it flies up his nose, but only grins at Derek.
They watch the rain go on.
+
It’s the fourth week of May, and the thermometer broke 180 at ten this morning. Stiles is lounging in Derek’s living room, the two having the isolated home to themselves for the day. Talia and Evan have taken Cora to see Evan’s parents in Diamond Point, and Laura has gone south to NYU for her freshman year of college. Even with the state of the art stasis fields the Hales have on their massive home, it’s not enough. The internal temperature is over 100 degrees.
The weatherman drones on about the upcoming heat wave in the third week of June, the yearly big one that usually kills between two and three thousand in the Green Zone, and Stiles shudders in dread at the thought of even higher temperatures.
“You ever wonder what the Big One must be like on the equator?” Stiles asks Derek.
The teen looks at Stiles with an almost haunted look. “No. My dad told me. He used to work for the UN, and he got sent to recover another team that got put down by a lightning storm in the ruins of Quito, in a country they called Ecuador. The city sat right on the fucking equator. He was a newbie, and they tricked him to taking his helmet off. He said the air was three times as heavy as ours, and it felt like breathing underwater. It can get above boiling point down there, so everything is just in this constant mist. They found the team, barely alive, hiding in some abandoned tunnels. If there is a Hell, I think it’s there.”
Stiles pauses, shocked. He can only imagine what the experience did to Evan if hearing it has left Derek, strong, grounded Derek, this disturbed by it. Even though it’s over 100 inside, Stiles hugs his boyfriend tightly, and then rushes away from the sticky sweat clinging to him.
Hours later, the distant sound of thunder rumbles in their ears, signalling the rains are here. They prepare themselves, and stand at the doorway overlooking the back porch. The rains begin their downpour, and the two boys wait the required moments for the water to cool the sunbaked surfaces of the outside world. They’ve done this before, kissed in the rain like they were living out every terrible early 21st century romance movie.
This time however, as Stiles shrugs out of his clothes, he looks Derek dead in the face as he takes a final step closer and slips off his boxers, leaving him exposed. With shock on his face, the other boy wordlessly does the same, and, totally naked, they step into the rain.
To both of them, it’s a blur. The sudden rush of bodies and wet, slick motion in the rain. It ends as the rain does, the harshness of the sun forcing them to Derek’s bedroom where, still sopping wet, they make love.
Pushing into the tight heat that is Derek is an exhilarating thing, awe-inspiring in its headiness, and glorious in its power. He sits, the other boy in his lap, and lets Derek set the pace, rising and falling on his member breathlessly. It doesn’t take much, to push him over the edge, spilling into Derek and, with a few brief flicks of his wrist, he brings Derek to follow as well. In the aftermath, they lay panting on his bed, catching their respective breaths between kisses and grins.
“I love you.” One of them says.
There’s a brief pause. “I love you, too.” The other responds.
+
It’s two days out to the arrival of the air mass that will bring the Big One upon their heads, when Derek presents Stiles with two plane tickets.
“Der, what is this...?” He asks, warily.
“You said you always wanted to see snow, and that you wanted to ride out the heat wave down south. It’s two ticks on a stratocutter to South City, right on the South Pole. They say it’s supposed to be the coldest winter in decades down there, that it might even get to twenty degrees! I talked to your dad, and my parents don’t care. If you want, we’re going out tonight.” Derek looks at him with wide, hopeful eyes. Those same eyes that Stiles saw as he asked him on their first date.
In a rush of emotion, Stiles pulls his boyfriend into his arms, kissing him all across his face, breaking only to repeat ‘I fucking love you.’ over and over.
The drive to Albany International is a long one, just over an hour, and Stiles is vibrating with excitement. They buy appropriate winter gear at a kiosk in the airport, and watch excitedly as the massive stratocutter plane taxis into their gate. Stiles had never checked their seats, so he’s shocked when Derek has procured them spots in the transparent-floored first class observation deck. He watches rapturously, pointing out the mountaintops of the flooded Cuba, the ghostly outline of the Florida peninsula, sunk beneath the waves. As they edge closer to the equator, he watches as, even from fifty two miles up, the eternal mist undulates in low, leisurely patterns, choking the world below it. An hour and a half after takeoff, they touch down in South City. It’s night, as the Winter Solstice is only a day away, and the temperature outside is twenty eight degrees. Inside the airport bathroom, the two men change into winter gear, and step out.
The cold is unlike anything either of them have ever experienced. It’s different than the crisp, dry cold of freezers and fridges. It is, instead, a natural chill that settles into the bones, calming the heat that has plagued them since birth. The skyscrapers are beautiful, modern structures reaching to touch the night sky, where the Aurora Australis dance above them on a moonless, cloudless night. Stunned, the boys walk towards the South Pole, a huge, red and white striped pillar that towers nearly four hundred feet at the heart of Polar Circle, in the center of the city.
As the two relish the chill, and stare in awe at the Aurora and the marker of the South Pole, they fail to notice the first snowflakes falling until one catches on Derek’s nose, which Stiles gawks at with a religious reverence. When the little ice crystal has melted, he plants a light kiss on Derek’s nose where it once occupied. People begin cheering as flurries fall almost inexplicably from the cloudless sky, white flecks reflecting city lights, glittering white contrast to the darkened sky and the red, greens and blues of the Aurora. Stars, leisurely falling from the heavens cover the Earth.
In awe, Stiles and Derek lean on each other, and laugh.