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The doctors say winter facilitates recovery—quiet air, short days, fewer stimulants to agitate the mind. I have my doubts. Winter, in my experience, merely strips the world to bone and dares one to keep breathing.
Yet she insists upon it. Claire Redfield. My unlikely keeper, my uninvited compass.
The facility sits on a hill the color of spilled milk. The windows are cathedral-tall, deceptive in their serenity, and every corridor carries a faint herbal scent, as if forgiveness can be steeped in tea. I walk them because she asks me to. I obey because she looks at me as though obedience isn’t pathetic.
Today the snow drifts high against the stone, softening the harsh geometry of the place. She stands in the courtyard with her gloves tucked in her coat pocket—always the defiant one, courting frostbite as if to prove to the world she is still alive.
“Alfred,” she calls, turning. My name is strangely gentle in her throat, stripped of its family history.
I descend the steps, each movement slow, studied. I am still learning the choreography of sanity. She waits with a patience that feels like a caress in itself.
“Cold?” I ask. My voice is fragile china; I try not to expose the cracks.
She shakes her head, loose strands of hair catching the pale light. “No. I wanted you to see this.” She gestures toward the barren garden. “It looks bleak, but it’s the first place patients start to feel normal again. Something about it helps people find themselves.”
A curious concept. Finding oneself. In my case, there is more rubble than self. But I follow her gaze. Snow gathers on the dead branches, turning them into pale filigree. Even decay can be ornate in the right light.
“You think I’ll find something?” I murmur.
She turns to me, and there’s no triumph in her eyes, no missionary zeal. Only an earnestness that is harder to bear than any scorn. “I think you’re capable of becoming someone new,” she says. “Someone you choose.”
The sentiment pierces me with almost surgical precision. Choice. No one in my world ever spoke of it. I was bred like a specimen, sculpted by madness and expectation. And now Claire, maddeningly alive Claire, offers me something as implausible as rebirth.
I lower my gaze so she won’t see the tremor that overtakes me. Lead me into your darkness, I think, ridiculous and dramatic, yet truer than anything I have spoken aloud. Her darkness is merely the truth of being human—frail, stubborn, compassionate. A realm I have never been permitted to enter.
She steps closer. I smell winter on her skin, the faint metallic scent of snow. “You’re shivering,” she says.
“I’m not cold.”
The lie is transparent. Not about temperature—about origin. I’m trembling because she is near. Because she is not afraid. Because her presence reorients the architecture of my world, gently shifting every misaligned stone.
Her hand brushes my sleeve. A small gesture. A devastating one. The silk of her glove grazes my wrist, and something unravels inside me, slow and catastrophic.
Just one caress, and I’m blessed.
I close my eyes. It is safer that way. In darkness, I can pretend I am someone worthy of this moment. Not the mad heir of a rotten dynasty. Not the boy who shattered beneath the weight of a dead sister’s ghost. Simply a man who has been offered warmth.
“Alfred,” she says, soft as thawing ice, “you’re not alone here.”
I inhale. Exhale. A whole lifetime occurs between the two.
When I open my eyes, she is still there—steadfast, painfully real. The garden is still bleak, the world still damaged, and I… I am still learning how to move through it without the armor of delusion. But her hand remains against my arm, anchoring me.
If winter is a test, she is the faint warmth that keeps the body from surrendering.
“Claire,” I whisper, the name prayer-shaped. “I don’t know how to begin again.”
She smiles—not pity, not triumph, just the steady glow of someone willing to share her lantern with a stranger in the dark. “Then we start small.”
Her fingers curl slightly, the gentlest acceptance.
In that moment, beneath a sky the color of old silver, I allow the possibility—absurd, terrifying—that her light does not demand my perfection, only my presence.
I do not know how long that will be enough.
But for now, I stay.