Work Text:
Spring - 1st Year
You start waking up to the sun streaming down on your face. Everything is a little more clearer, a little brighter. You feel like you can breathe a little easier; winter has come to an end, and there’s always a pleasant breeze in the air. Well, that feeling isn’t applicable if you have allergies. But, you survive because of the allergy medication someone stuck in your backpack. A red sticky note and a hand drawn matryoshka doll is all you need to see to know who it is from.
You start writing songs about the brightness of spring, the anticipation before the sunnier days of summer, and about the love you feel during the spring months. Spring makes you feel like life is a little brighter; the beams of sun forcefully push all your dark worries into the shadows of a room that you don’t dwell in. You sit in the sun, basking in the hours of sunlight. The flowers spring up around campus and you start eating outside more. You gather flowers and keep them by your desk. Your dark red and black room looks a little odd because of the sudden addition of a violet and pink blob, but you get used to it. It looks nice, honestly.
Summer - 2nd Year
Ice cream dates, picking out dresses while you sit back and marvel at her beauty, swimming with your friends. All your worries are about your tan lines and not having enough summer clothes. You don’t think about exams or villains or graduating and going out into the world as pro-heroes for even a second. Those are worries for later, and later is not for a few months. You don’t give a flying fuck about later when summer is right now. When the carnivals, night markets, and music festivals are at their peak.
Days blend into nights, and nights blend into days. Each day seems longer than the last, but also feels like a fleeting moment at the end of it. So much time on your hands, but so little at the same time. More time to avoid your future and remain a teenager, and what feels like so little time to watch shitty rom-coms and laugh about it with your much engrossed girlfriend. Summer seems to end as soon as you think, “This summer feels so long.”
Fall - 8 Years After
Leaves crunching under your boots as you walk the familiar gray streets of your patrol route, promises of a fancy dinner after work, villains that seem to be too committed to the idea of fall aesthetics. You can’t help but laugh when you capture a villain dressed in a trench coat; a villain right out of a dark academia book of sorts. The colours of the city change, and the population does as well. Your hair is longer now, and she runs her fingers through to get rid of the matted areas — and the blood, but you both ignore it — and styles it into intricate braids and updos. The class group chat blows up when the rain starts pouring down, and some people are trapped inside their homes.
Pictures are shared; of new homes; children and the many many pets; new colleagues and injuries that are so common that it’s only something to laugh about now. She cuts her hair short for the first time in her life, and the surprising unfamiliarity startles you more than it should. The city changes too, at a rate that you can’t keep up with. Your work hours decrease, less villains emerge every month, and it seems that Fall is a season of peace. You stay home for longer. More time to bother your cats and your girlfriend who is writing yet another paper on some complicated science that you can never seem to understand. Chai lattes on your bedside table, leaves pressed between pages of a book, a more comfortable sort of unfamiliarity hanging in the air. It manifests in a more tangible sort of hopefulness. You spend the fall feeling hopeful; the world is changing and you like the new image that is being painted so far
Winter - 19 Years After
You still detest big fancy dinners, specifically the big fancy dinner your old class seems to throw every single year. You prefer the heat of summer a hundred times more than the constant chill of winter that you feel to your very core. You can only layer too much until you start looking like the snowman your kids make in the backyard. Most days are spent inside, curled up in your bed with cups of steaming coffee and tea and with a good book. Heroism seems like a thing of the past, and your costume sits in the back of your closet, collecting dust. Some of your classmates still seem to hold an affinity to their careers and carry on. Pictures of injuries and torn costumes pop up in the group chat every so often.
You fall into a rhythmic day, a pattern that you constantly follow but never get bored of. Every little thing brings you happiness, and you find solace in the fact that this is your life now. Days of chasing villains and holding up the fate of the world on your shoulders are over. You hold up items far above your head to tease your kids that desperately jump up and down in a fruitless attempt to get it. Days are spent hosting your radio show, playing music, teaching classes and embarrassing your wife in front of her home room class of hero hopefuls. Heroism is much like any other occupation now, and only one class is specifically a hero course.
Frosted over windows, towering whipped cream on mugs of hot chocolate, and lying to your friends’ kids that Santa is indeed a real man. Winter doesn’t change, and you find that you don’t chase change anymore. You much prefer this unchanging life. It’s peaceful, and this winter is nice.