In the depths of wintertime's food shortages, Monday to Saturday, it was noodle day; Emily Teagan and Xi-Wang Cheng would dine on noodles, because the meat situation in Chicago at that stage meant that the only animal protein you would get would be from a lifeform once called 'Mr Fluffy'. Xi refused to haunt the Chinese quarter to haggle better deals; they would end up with noodles and peas and beans and those little orange things that could be carrot but might be peppers with little sachets of that vitamin protein powder the government vans gave out that tasted kind of like burnt birchwood. Xi would add in a great deal of nasty crumbly chicken stock, which did not make the noodles taste like chicken but at least made it taste. Emily would add in onions because ostensibly they were vegetables. It wasn't too bad, but often Xi would recount things he would eventually rather eat than it, like his left arm.

Sunday was noodle day, too, but on Sunday Xi would exclaim "Hey, noodles!" in a very excited tone of voice so that maybe dinner would become more interesting. Strangely enough, it sort of worked.

" - and it's fried chicken and mashed potatoes."

Emily was a month or so away from her nineteenth birthday; she had crisp dark curls making slow descent to her waist, pinned haphazardly out of her eyes with glittery plastic snaps that looked like neon green daisies. She was wearing three pairs of knee-length socks, two scarves, a faded maroon knit shawl and a long cotton nightgown that extolled the virtues of Donald Duck, all of which made her look approximately sixteen. Xi - who was sitting next to her with both of their backs to the radiator and one blanket tucked around their shoulders - was twenty-six, in two pairs of socks and one scarf and worn sweatpants with an even more worn turtleneck and t-shirt proclaiming he was a member of the Tampa Bay Bucs. Noodles were good because he could drink them when the going got tough; his fangs gleamed in the dim lamplight as he struggled with the plastic spoon. He never wore his bandanna at home, and every so often he would lean his head back so that the tips of his chilled horns would press the blanket to the radiator and warm them.

"What kind of mashed potatoes?" He stabbed a plastic spoon at a pea. The servings were, at least, large, because there were only the two of them. There had only been the two of them for ever, or at least a year. "Throw me a bone here, Emmy-T. Mashed with butter?"

"Mashed with real yellow butter." There was a momentary unladylike slurp as she sucked a noodle into her mouth: living your Chinese bachelor slob bodyguard never does a thing for your manners. "With pepper and salt and the skins, and - gravy. And the fried chicken is just right, perfect, not too much fat at all, crunchy-golden-brown - "

Xi gave a slow, plaintively-orgasmic wail, the sort which inevitably always lead people in hearing distance to believe the wrong thing. "Oh, Jesus, you're killing me. Stop, stop." A spoon was very carefully lowered into the gleaming trap of his jaws; he sucked the contents in noisily. "Okay, that one was fried chicken."

"Your go, King Zombie." Emily's toes wiggled in her socks, her feet a little way away from the carelessly gleaming pistol of Xi's trade. The air was so cold it felt as though it might snap. Her voice was mock-stern: "Make it really good, understand?"

"Snickerdoodles." Her bodyguard sighed, intensely longing. "A huge fu - " Emily Teagan had Young Feminine Delicacy, which had to be noted. " - frickin' batch of snickerdoodles, right out the oven, too hot to eat with the cinnamon sugar all melty and good. When I worked down in Houston, somebody's grandma sent us a huge fresh bowl of 'em when we were working - " Hired gangsters had the best grandmas - "and they were... uhhnnn."

Shortages hurt Xi's sweet tooth the worst, because he had at least thirty. There was a splintering noise; another plastic utensil gave up the ghost.

"Aw, crud, there goes another one. Oh, well." Xi lifted the bowl to his lips and sipped, clumsy and careful, at the blistering hot broth. Good, on a cold night. Put roses in Emily's cheeks, or wherever roses were supposed to go. "Your go, MiMi."

"Xi, do you have to call me that?" More amused-flustered than at all angry. "It's undignified. Um... Strawberries."

"Strawberries?" Things were getting pretty desperate if they were already up to strawberries. Emily loved strawberries.

"Strawberries," she confirmed. There was that soft, dreamy look, making her eyes go dove-grey. "Sweet, big, red ones. And you bite them and all the juices run down your chin."

It was too cold to move away from the warmth of themselves and the radiator, thigh-by-thigh. Xi had long since given up the mild indecency of such physical familiarity with a teenage girl, particularly when it meant the difference between their frostbitten bits falling off and their not-so-frostbitten bits staying on. "Cream?"

"No cream." Emily liked healthy, though Xi didn't like healthy when it meant her arms and legs got thinner and thinner all for the want of a couple Snickerdoodles. A teenage girl shouldn't be deprived of cookies. "Just... Strawberries. Bowls and bowls of them." There was a note of wonderment in her voice; not bitterness, because Emily was rarely bitter, but awe. "I can't remember the last time I had real strawberries."

He would have given up all the milk duds in the world to give her them. "Emily - "

"Don't worry." She gave him a smile sweeter than strawberries in summer, cherries in autumn. "I have noodles."

Xi found that if he clenched his jaw just right he wouldn't spill any; less dismally, the pair continued masticating, warming their gloved hands on the bowls, huddling up to the radiator. People would die in Chicago tonight, of exposure and of cold.

That set him into action; he downed the rest of his bowl, shaking himself free of the blanket, pressing it to her shoulder as he moved away from his young charge. These days, he felt more like some mystical daddy-bodyguard than anything else, though the cream of her skin could have never been attributed to the warm gold of his. "We better sleep in here tonight, honey. I'll go get the pillows and what-have-you."

"I hope everyone is all right. I should have checked on them before dinner." She set the spoon down in her bowl. Trust Emily to be more worried about somebody else's skin than her own. "Mason's apartment isn't very well-insulated and Samuel has a fever, and the temperature is miserable."

"Below miserable, Emily Katya." He always rolled her middle name with particular relish when he rarely said it, when he was being extra affectionate, stretching it out to three velvety syllables: Kah-tee-yah. "I'd say it's gone to downright depressing. Scoot your butt up, you get radiator side."

"But Xi, you'll be co - "

"Confucius say, 'He who sleeps chillside will get reward in afterlife.' I get to sleep next to a nubile eighteen-year-old, who gives a damn for the cold?"

She smiled wryly and swallowed the last mouthful of noodles, socked feet buried beneath the avalanche of blankets and pillows Xi dumped on the floor. Trust Xi-Wang. Her bodyguard started making haphazard sense of it all, pushing pillows aside, stewing blankets, nesting in the hopeful preparation for Spring. "Hop in before I freeze my butt off, Emily-T, Jesus Buddha Confucius Christ - "

He drowned her in more blankets once she rolled in, slipping in beside her and tugging the blankets momentarily over their heads as if that would make things warmer, the world blacked out for a few minutes with no stars wheeling overhead. Emily took the rare comfort of resting her cheek on one of his broad shoulders, lumpier and warmer than the pillow.

She thought about Mason. She thought about everybody on her little mental list of mutants who ought to be thought about, and what they would need tomorrow. She sent a prayer out to God that they were warm and safe, that their haven would be untouched by misery, that everyone she loved be there tomorrow morning.

"Xi?" It sounded louder in the muffled darkness.

"Yeah?"

"When I get the ingredients - " she snuggled closer - "I'm going to make you a big batch of cookies."

"That's a relief. I can live now, honey. I've been without cookies so long, everything looking like cookies now. You're starting to look like a peanut brownie."

"Oh, Xi."

"Munch, munch."

"Try not to eat me in my sleep." Not a real worry and they knew it, though when he had nightmares Xi panicked and gnashed to beat the band and when he threw a fit it was worse.

"I'll try not to dream of chocolate pie."

... Now she wanted chocolate pie. "Goodnight, Xi."

"Night, Emily Almond Joy, my pizza with no pineapple."

"You're ridiculous. Sweet dreams."

They were sweet. He dreamt of strawberries and sugar, of winters with all the heat and light you could want, of a time when soup didn't leak out his mouth like he was a geriatric senile old man and of noodles banned for being crimes against humanity.