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For six months of his life, Nezumi had lived with a human prism. Shion reflected and refracted light everywhere until every miniscule hiding place for shadows were exposed. His presence dispelled Nezumi's childish belief that the bunker had no traces of light at night; Shion's white hair glowed faintly, but it was noticeable and blinding to the creature accustomed to the illusion of pitch blackness. Not long after he settled into the tiny room at the farthest edge of habitable land the parasitic city of No.6 and the neighboring West Block had claimed, the boy began to direct the light towards his heart, a dread that lessened and worsened in waves for no reason Nezumi could intuit at the time.
Had he known precisely when and how much he had fallen for Shion, Nezumi would have changed course before reaching the point of no return and would have remained ignorant of and immune to the pangs of loneliness. Or maybe if he did stop himself in time he would have never known solitude's opposite, the tenderness of company, to compare.
One afternoon in late December they had emerged from the underground dwelling to see the abandoned playground, the stairway to nowhere, and the junkyard hills overlooking the West Block and walls of No.6 blanketed in a thick, fluffy comforter of snow. Dark clouds promising more frozen precipitation hid the sun, yet its rays cut through and reached Shion. Even more than the warm autumn sun, winter's unfiltered air had a way to make the light harsher and brighter around Shion. He also radiated light from whatever feeling that made him smile at the snowscape.
Looking at him hurt his eyes, but Nezumi could not stop himself from catching a glimpse of his... Friend? Roommate? Companion? No man-made word in any language and no story ever penned has ever accurately described whatever they were.
"Have you never seen snow before, your Highness?" Nezumi nudged Shion's arm with his elbow.
His eyes continued to scan the environment as if nothing tried to interrupt him. If not for his brown, semi-durable coat, the boy would have completely blended into the white wonderland. "This is amazing..."
It's just snow, airhead. Nezumi bit the inside of his mouth to stop himself from ruining the wide-eyed awe and innocence of a boy who lived his entire life in a highly organized and protective bubble. The snow citizens in No.6 experienced had to be manipulated or artificial in some say for something so natural to leave Shion spellbound. And, if he were honest with himself, Nezumi preferred this glowing beacon over a fading flame endangered by the cynical outbursts of a capricious teenager.
The sky opened up and dropped specs of white fluff in the boys' hair and on their coats and scarves. With the ease and "grace" of every action he performed, Nezumi caught one on his tongue, and, after watching him capture three more, Shion sought the snow, only for them to land on his nose, his eyelash, his cheek. That struggle would be funny if it happened to anyone else, but, perhaps because of his own laughter at each failed attempt, the boy, once isolated from nature, became one with it.
Attracting light and snow alike without conscious thought, Shion was more angel than human. Nezumi was a child, longing to touch something so incredible, but he feared the slightest touch would make Shion disappear. So he kept his fidgeting hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and stole glances at the grinning idiot when his eyes recovered from temporary blindness.
"People say no two snowflakes are alike, but it's not really true." Shion broke the silence between and around them. "They tend to start out as simple six-sided prisms, with plates, columns, and branches developing based on the humidity and temperature of the environment in which a snowflake crystalizes. Fully developed snowflakes are more likely to have unique branches that grow from the plates and columns, but once they fall and leave the early stages of development, they lose the qualities that made them unique. Also, what we normally see are clumps of snowflakes that collide as they fall. By the time they hit the ground, a plant, a person, or a thing, the snowflake doesn't resemble its complete form when snow crystals interacted with water vapor in the clouds -"
"Okay, stop! Just stop." Whatever image of perfection before Nezumi that seized his tongue had let go with each unnatural word that erupted from Shion's mouth until he couldn't take it anymore. "You're killing the poetic beauty of a lie with your science and logic. It makes my heard hurt listening to you, so you can imagine how heartbroken a kid would be to hear you say that."
Shion's eyes, the blue-white world bringing out the red in his purple irises, met Nezumi's. "It's only technically untrue."
"You'd be amazed how easily a technicality can ruin anything."
"Well, that's a shame, because I don't agree with you at all," he replied with a small, yet confident smile.
"And why not? This I ought to hear." Acidic sarcasm spilling from his lips did not deter the shimmering prism in the slightest.
"Isn't beauty found in everything? Some things are beautiful because you don't understand them, but other things are beautiful because you do understand them. Science and logic can reveal something beautiful that was not known until it was discovered."
Brushing a layer of snow off the swing set and sitting down, Nezumi sniffed in derision. Were his mood not hampered by nonsense, he'd marvel at how this boy tricked his own mind into believing for a few seconds that he was the closest thing to perfection. "You really don't get it, do you, Shion? Beauty can't be quantifiable, and trying to do so with precise words and definitions cheapens its value. It's too subjective to be explained and understood clearly."
Shion joined him on the swing to his left. "If that's true, why is your definition more correct than mine?"
"I never said that."
"You implied it."
"You misinterpreted me and put words in my mouth."
"I've learned from the best."
"Shit, arguing with you is pointless!" Nezumi kicked the ground, sending him in the air and blurring Shion's appearance from the corner of his eye.
"Then stop arguing with me and make your point," said Shion, a tad more sharply than either boy was used to hearing. He took a deep breath and tried again when Nezumi stopped swinging to look at him properly. "What don't you like about what I said?"
"Practically everything." His knuckles whitened as his hand gripped the metal chains biting his palms. When Shion tried to meet his gaze, Nezumi stopped swinging and stared at the ground. "In the end, no one cares about how the world really works. To adults and children, lies are prettier than the truth. People like to feel they're special despite being no different from anyone else, but no one ever admits that truth out loud. Besides, what's so 'beautiful' about something losing what made it so 'special' not long after it's fully conceived?"
"Everything."
Until this moment, Nezumi did not think Shion could be any more insane. "What?"
"Everything," Shion repeated as if it was self-evident. "No matter how it begins or ends, no matter what happens between the beginning and the end of its life, isn't every snowflake beautiful to someone?"
"That makes no sense."
"Something doesn't have to be special or perfect to be beautiful. And knowing more about it doesn't always make it less beautiful. It only doesn't make sense if one's perception of beauty is skin-deep."
He's not talking about snowflakes anymore, is he? Shaking his head, Nezumi ran a hand through his hair, lightly dusted in fresh snowflakes falling faster and in thicker clumps.
"Shion, I hate repeating myself, but I'll say it again for the sake of your selective memory. You have to work on your vocabulary. A bow has more range than your rhetoric."
The boy's laugh was so carefree with all traces of his earlier annoyance vanishing. "I guess I'm just not that clever. I've given up trying to live up to your expectations, Nezumi."
He rolled his eyes. "You are clever. You just don't always use that head of yours effectively."
"And you do?"
"What can I say? I'm a handsome, irresistible, multitalented man."
"For how little you make, you sure don't lack in confidence or drama. Or narcissism."
It was Nezumi's turn to laugh. "It's not just about the money, Shion. This -" He went to the middle of the playground, held his head high, and twirled on his feet, sending sparkling dusts of snow to the wind. "- is a lifestyle. Everything that makes me me can't be helped! 'I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a word I'm say-' Ack!"
The snowball hit him so suddenly that Nezumi fell into a small mound burying half of the seesaw. The snow met halfway up his forearm and cold moisture bit into his clothes. He glared at his attacker, preparing another throw. Such an innocently smug smirk stretched across the boy's face that it effectively killed whatever picturesque image of him, one with and inseparable from the snow, one could capture in this setting.
Nezumi dodged the second snowball as he rose to his feet and regained his balance enough to retaliate with his own fist-sized lump of deformed snowflakes. Even when the wind from the second half of the blizzard began to pick up, the boys assaulted each other with snow and tackled each other when building their ammunition took too long to make the other hurt. Even as the wind howled, only their laughter and movements disturbed the tranquility of the wonderland.
By the time they lay out of breath in the snow, the innermost layer of clothes were damp. The imprints made by their feet, hands, and bodies did nothing to ruin the otherworldly nature of "their" playground.
The stairs to the bunker were ten feet away, but neither Shion nor Nezumi wanted to move. They could die laying beside each other, watching the other catch their breath or a layer of snow build up on their rose-colored cheeks. Even in the bitter cold with Nezumi's fingers brushing the snow clinging to Shion's skin, he felt the warmth radiate from him as intensely as the light his pale, translucent form reflected and refracted.
He couldn't stop his own mind from conjuring the same trick again. Everything about Shion in this very moment was beautiful. Nezumi didn't care how beautiful, only that he simply was, and that only made looking at the human prism so much harder without his breath hitching, his heart racing, or his head spinning.
In his rapture he recalled the words from a book he found last week hiding beneath the first aid kit he last opened three moons ago:
"The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued."
Shion turned to look at him with something in his eyes that made Nezumi shiver. His fingers were a breath away from the snake that claimed a fifth of Shion's body. "Robert Frost?"
"I'm impressed, your Majesty. Reading may have been the second best thing that happened to you."
The boy raised an eyebrow, a modest display of sass in the midst of untamed affection. "Really? Not the best thing?"
"This humble servant wouldn't dare presume anything above his station."
Releasing an amused snort, Shion smiled and nestled his cheek rightly in his companion's palm. Nezumi was thankful he wasn't standing, for every piece of him not in contact with Shion lost all feeling. At the time he didn't know why this particular instance of physical contact made him feel like the ground opened up beneath him.
"Nezumi."
His heart constricted. "What?"
"Nothing. I just wanted to say your name."
This boy has no fear. "You're naturally insane, you know that?"
"I know, but a-am I not allowed to..." Realizing how crazy he sounded, Shion began to move away. "Never mind."
Somehow watching him move away felt worse than him broadcasting his shameless feelings. Nezumi's fingers reached out and tickled the tender patch of skin where Shion's jaw met his neck. "Shion."
"N-Nezumi?"
"Shion."
The boy's face glowed a vivid red in the pure white of his hair and snow. His cheek settled back where it belonged. It didn't take much, but Nezumi reveled in every earned expression of happiness. He smiled in spite of the cold biting into his skin and feelings becoming tangled with the organs in his chest. The crazy fool, Shion mirrored his expression and sighed his companion's name once more.
Never change, Shion.
For the rest of the day and until the sun returned, all words but their names were forbidden. The blizzard was coming, and Nezumi, no less insane, would not go back into the heated underground shelter, would not go back home to wait for days if need be for food and medicine to combat mild fever without this perfect human prism at his side.
Nuzzling against the feather-soft nightlight that gave new life to the books, mice, and human rat in the bunker, Nezumi prayed late that night with Shion's arms binding him with care and purpose even in the throes of sleep. He allowed this closeness if only to prevent the other from catching illness, he had knowingly lied to himself. No matter what happens, stay as you are, Shion. Don't let this world - don't let me - change you into someone you're not.
Every night since, together and apart, when years inevitably dull and weaken the integrity of memories, Nezumi kept that wish alive. He ached for those days, for that bunker they promised to return to after surviving their ordeals. He wasn't the one standing on that hill in a crisp early spring morning, but Nezumi had to wait too for the strength to admit he was as beautiful as his human prism so irrevocably believed. He'd wait forever if he could, but he couldn't if there was the slightest chance he'd return to find no one beneath those cherry blossoms.
If life were merciful, they'd meet again, ready and able to name exactly what they were without fear. Perhaps not entirely unique, but very much special, like snowflakes in all forms.