"Killing one without your help, oh, that could be dangerous, could it?" Horst shakes his head, dusting the air with snow as he follows Johannes back inside. As usual, Johannes has gotten a notion in his head to do something, and with typical Johannes Cabal stubbornness, he immediately wants to follow that notion through. Horst has spent days, months, and at times, years of his life trying to talk Johannes out of things. It rarely works.
The much more reliable way to get Johannes not to do something is to physically prevent him from doing it. It doesn't make him happy, of course, so it's not Horst's preferred method, but unlike the other, it always gets immediate results. That's really what Johannes is bargaining against, here, when he makes Horst the offer of an open-ended favor: Horst not stopping Johannes from going out in the snow to kill a giant snow-wolf. Horst helping him do the deed.
In the grand scheme of things Johannes has asked Horst to help him with before, on a scale of benign to nefarious (because Horst isn't sure he can recall anything that would start the scale any higher than 'benign'), this is probably not one of the worst things Johannes has ever asked him to do. This is helping him kill a wild animal that could possibly hurt them, and Horst has killed animals before. He's even killed a man before, or tried.
And Johannes is, if nothing else, a man of his word in many respects. And there are quite a few favors Horst could ask for.
"You really are a madman, Johannes," Horst says to his brother's back as they go down a flight of stairs to the third floor. "Are you sure you want to do this now? We don't know that enough of the snow's frozen through for us to walk on top of. We could wait a day."
no subject
The much more reliable way to get Johannes not to do something is to physically prevent him from doing it. It doesn't make him happy, of course, so it's not Horst's preferred method, but unlike the other, it always gets immediate results. That's really what Johannes is bargaining against, here, when he makes Horst the offer of an open-ended favor: Horst not stopping Johannes from going out in the snow to kill a giant snow-wolf. Horst helping him do the deed.
In the grand scheme of things Johannes has asked Horst to help him with before, on a scale of benign to nefarious (because Horst isn't sure he can recall anything that would start the scale any higher than 'benign'), this is probably not one of the worst things Johannes has ever asked him to do. This is helping him kill a wild animal that could possibly hurt them, and Horst has killed animals before. He's even killed a man before, or tried.
And Johannes is, if nothing else, a man of his word in many respects. And there are quite a few favors Horst could ask for.
"You really are a madman, Johannes," Horst says to his brother's back as they go down a flight of stairs to the third floor. "Are you sure you want to do this now? We don't know that enough of the snow's frozen through for us to walk on top of. We could wait a day."