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The tree has already been lit, a bright illusion of warmth and nature against the flat Midgar sky and the biting cold and concrete and brick and occasional marble that make up the architecture of the upper plate.
With it, so too have the courtyard speakers crackled into life, cheerful, familiar music to encourage people to open their wallets, as much as their hearts.
Santa bring my baby back to me, Santa bring my baby back-
Rude waiting. Waiting even though ten minutes have passed, fifteen minutes, and she is never ever late. But she said that she would be here, as she has been there every other time they’ve planned to meet and he is still someone who has the capacity to believe that that won’t change. He can’t help but feel conspicuous though. One person, standing alone beneath the tree in an ocean of families and couples.
They are in love, so she will come.
They are also supposed to be enemies, and near-traitor or not he is a Turk and that means considering, however glancingly, the possibility that she will not. He believes she will. Needs to believe it as much as he wants to believe it. But he’s willing to give himself the congratulations of rigor for even just considering...
He fingers his phs in his pocket. Checks his posture; he’ll draw even more attention looking too formal, as music jingles on out of the shops that line the square and down from the tree itself, and if it wasn’t just a little too on the nose, he’d be amused at the lyrics echoing his doubts.
But his baby…
His baby, Chelsea, with her wit and convictions and all the bravery it takes to stand up to the company, and her chestnut waves. She doesn’t come.
And he waits.
And she doesn’t come.
And he waits.
And she doesn’t come.
He hates the cold, has always hated the cold. Has never had much of an endurance for it.
He endures it now. Hope a thing burning charcoal-red in his chest. Hope like the little chemical warming packets they’re given on cold weather jobs, wilderness jobs, jobs that send them up to Icicle, to stuff in their pockets and gloves and boots so that they can do what they need to, no matter the conditions. So that he can do what he needs to, be where he needs to, tonight.
Hope that extinguishes like a handful of snow dumped over that charcoal, when he finally does hear his name called out, across the square. His name. Wrong voice.
He doesn’t need to look at Reno’s face, as he crosses to him, hands fisted and shoved deep in his pockets, to know what he’s going to say next. It’s in the tense, chain-link hunch of his shoulders and the gaze that, when he does look, lands in the lights a little to the left of Rude’s shoulder, rather than his face. She isn’t coming. He doesn’t ask for details. He doesn’t need to know the way and why. Knowing won’t change anything, and he doesn’t need to make this worse for himself, for any of them, if the worst of his fears about that way and why are correct.
“C’mon, man. Let’s go home.”
They do. A near silent walk, an awkward shoulder length between them. Rude, his hands folded around himself, tucked up in his armpits against the cold and a pride he does not have the energy to manage. Reno, walking along the raised lip of a barrier around the library, around one of the sharp-edged green spaces scattered across the upside.
That is the year that Rude decides he has actual opinions on holiday music.
He will, it turns out, have many years to refine those opinions.
That year, rather than saying anything more, Reno unwinds his own scarf as they come around an edge. Drops it unceremoniously over Rude's shoulders, before he runs out of raised ledge and has to drop himself back to the ground, the shorter of them once again.
And there is a moment, just before he steps off, that Rude thinks that Reno is going to let himself fall into him, and readies himself to take his weight -
But he doesn't. His boots hit the cobblestones, and he keeps walking. Puts himself a few paces ahead.
That was that year.
That was that year, but the torn out thing in Rude's chest wouldn't close along with it, over the next few weeks.
“I said turn that shit off.” Rude hadn’t even noticed his partner watching him until he sends a tumbler cracking off the back wall of the bar, next to the radio. The glass ricochets, the bartender ducking, the splatter of ice and gin. It’s only the cover of his shades that saves Rude from looking as surprised as the rest of the bar.
Reno doesn’t look angry. Doesn’t look anything. Certainly doesn’t look anything like the easygoing flirt that had been sitting next to him before his thoughts had drifted.
The bartender turns that shit off.
Rude suspects that has something to do with the suits they’re both wearing, More to do, probably, with the slight spark of electricity dancing in his partners fingers. An empty threat, Rude knows. Reno wouldn’t actually fuck up a civilian if he didn’t absolutely have to for a job. Definitely not over their choice of seasonal music. Radio station.
But he’s the only one here who Knows That. And knows that that’s what Reno is banking on.
It works.
The grin slides back onto Reno’s face, the threat out of his hands like warm water.
“Thanks, yo. Something else is okay, just not that one.” With shaky movements, the bartender flips the radio back on, flipping through until the strains of a channel that have nothing to do with the solstice fill the bar, and slowly the people around them begin to move and talk again. “Sorry about the glass. I’ll pay ya back for it. Could I get another g'n't though? Spilled mine.”
They both get second rounds, and thirds. They win three rounds of pool and leave with one new drinking buddy and extra gil in their pockets.
It’s three years now, since Chelsea did not show up to watch the tree light, and when they pour themselves out into the streets of Upper Midgar with the rest of the closing crowd, they don’t talk about the fact that they’re avoiding streets too close to that square.
This time, he does notice Reno watching him.
“Hey, partner?” ---
--- “Alright there sweetheart?” He snaps back to attention and finds himself looking at a display of grocery sacks, emblazoned with snowflakes and glittery expressions of cheer. Shakes himself imperceptibly back to focus on the woman behind the register.
“My apologies. What was that Mrs. Cranson?” The owner of the grocery in this town is paused, a loaf of bread in her hand, looking at him. “I said are you alright? I know it’s just you out there dear and really Mr. Da Rocha, I can’t let you go driving home if something has you so distracted. Not with the ice storm that’s supposed to blow in tonight.” He holds up a hand, and she shakes her head, but resumes ringing him up
“I like it being just me out there, remember?”
“So you say, so you say. I won’t say I understand it. When the days get this short and cold, I have to tell you, I’m so very grateful my grandsons take their university breaks here rather than going all the way home and I can’t help but think how lonely that little house must get and-”
There must be a break in the wind, because the radio flickers back to life in the middle of her sentence, breaking through a different kind of snow.
the solstice tree is ready, the candles all aglow, but with my baby far away what good is mistletoe?
“Thank you, Mrs. Cranson. Here, give me Emil’s delivery for the week. I’ll have him call you when I’ve dropped it off, so you know I made it safely.” Or at least, that he’d made it three quarters of the way. He has no close neighbors. This is by design.
“Alright. Alright. I’ll take that deal, dear. But you do drive carefully, now.”
“I will.”
The car, when he gets to it, his own and Emil’s bags slowing him more on the way than they would have fifteen years ago, ten, is frozen shut. The bitter winds rolling off of Junons stone-dark sea cut deeper than they should. He waits for the defrosting spray he keeps in his satchel this time of year to work.
The song is still stuck in his head.
He drives, not gone 4pm (4pm, not 016:00 anymore), and the sky a line of grey-purple bruise where it is not just dark, and heavy. The snowfall, light, now, still necessitates his wipers, a rhythm in the quiet of the car where percussion doesn’t need to be. Yesterdays, the day befores, the last weeks frozen and refrozen layers of powder and melt and ice crust driven down to road, crunching now beneath his tire-chains, a steady hum, where chords don’t need to progress.
By the time he stops at Emils’, the lights in the old mans windows had become the only points of orientation in the distance, the handful of yards illuminated by his headlights the extent of the rest of the world.
“Come in, come in. Glad someone in the neighborhood is still young enough to drive after noon.”
Rude carries in groceries. A hot meal Mrs. Cranson had packed. A plain brown box that he’d been given along with them, which Rude had not investigated, but imagines is whatever someone in the city proper had picked up off a giving tree, or holiday charity list.
“You know I do appreciate this. I don’t know what I’d do, with deliveries down for the week. More of the good of the season that you show, back to you, Rude. I’ve got some tea on, won’t you warm up a minute?”
He accepts the well wishes. He refuses the offer. He gets back into the car.
The engine turns. The headlights flick back on, snowflakes glittering soft and bright as store-window-lights ____
____ “M’just sayin’,” Reno, at his side, walking on the outside edge of the sidewalk and looking around them, loose and flighty and distractable in a way that, on anybody else, would have had Rude tensely ready to yank them back up out of a misstep into traffic. “These upside fuckers - uh, well I’m one of ‘em now I guess but you know what I mean. These upside fuckers, so damn pressed about like the wrapping paper being perfect enough they gotta pay someone else to do it? Shit, ” He pops another roasted chestnut out of the little paper bag in his hands and into his mouth, starts to chew, and keeps on going, “Me’n the old gang used to like camp out outside store windows just to watch the movies shown through ‘em, and hope to catch some heat off the door. Get real problems, is all I’m sayin’, yo.”
They’re on the outskirts of the main mall, where most of the shops are still outside, and the streetlamps and bike racks along the sidewalks are strung through with golden lights. A rich contrast, against the mako green of the reactors, and the flat not-quite-dark of the city sky. There is no snow, none that sticks anyway, not yet, but layers of ice spread across the roads, on bus stop benches, spiraled on windows.
They’ve come armed with a list of presents to gather for all of Rude’s, as Reno would assess, six hundred thousand siblings and cousins and nieces and nephews.
Reno pops another chestnut out of his bag, and this time lobs it in Rude’s direction without looking, as he doubles back to crouch in front of a window display. Rude catches it. Stops, turns. waits for him.
He’s looking over a splayed open set of sketch and graph books, and expensive all-graphite pencils of different hardnesses and softnesses, cases of all bound in leather. “Don’t Sunny got her like, final-final engineering shit next semester or whatever?”
Rude’s youngest sister. And she does. He’s surprised Reno had remembered.
He makes an affirmative noise. Leans down over Reno’s shoulder, just for a moment. Just to show that it is, indeed, a good thought. Then he straightens bringing Reno up with him by a hand fisted in his collar, and turning him around enough to get an arm around him, a hand on his hip.
“Look there. You want-?”
He points to the corner, where someone in a puffy red suit and hat is sitting next to a tree, covered in the kind of paper ornaments that invite the taker to bring a little more light to someone elses winter.
Reno snorts, and pushes away from him, but he doesn’t say no, and Rude knows to take that as assent, even as Reno is fishing the solstice list out of Rude’s jacket and tearing it, horizontally, down the middle.
“Yeah yeah, you go be all model citizen. Be right back.” And Reno ducks into the store they had just been looking at.
They’re back at about the same time, and Reno hands Rude a bag.
“Divide and fuckin’ conquer man,” He feels also, just barely, something slipped into his back pocket, and the ribbon of the gift request slipped out from between his fingers, before Reno is off again, paper ornament in hand and in the direction of the main mall, with a demand that Rude meet him in the food court in an hour.
Rude grins.____
____His own home, wood and stone and older than himself, is deep-water cold when he gets back to it. He probably doesn’t have to worry about putting his groceries away right away, but he does anyway. Even before he goes to turn on the lights properly. To light the paper and wood already arranged in the fireplace.
He puts the groceries away, turns on the lights, and lights a fire,only to step away from it again. Dig some of those groceries right back out. Smile a little wryly at what he’s grabbed for his own dinner - two of a handful of microwave meals that he makes himself feel more like he’s actually cooking by making them in the oven instead.
While those heat, he tries to use the time that will have to be spent waiting to pick up yesterdays newspaper. Finish the crossword he hadn’t yesterday.
A redberried girls name, Holly. A popular winter instrument, bells. To spend winter in a dormant state- He can’t focus. The house is quiet. Entirely. There is the crackle of the fireplace, soft. There is the wind outside, howling, but distant. Muffled by the already accumulated snow.
There is his own heartbeat. His own breathing.
The rustle of paper and the scratch of his pen and then, his own stillness.
He sits at his computer, in the ‘office’ corner of the one bedroom house, which he has no real use for these days, but feels too strange not to have. He sits and he watches the little blue dots of the app repeating themselves across the screen. Listens to the rounded, cutesy sound of its ringing in time with them.
“Rude! Hi! I can’t believe I almost missed you. I’m so sorry, I thought you were going to call tomorrow.”
He hears her, slightly choppy, before her camera starts to sort itself. Choppy at first. A blurred impression of movement and dark hair. A flicker. A still-frame of her turning to call to someone behind her. And then, finally, a few seconds lapse, her mouth moving out of synch with her words before the image catches up and then it’s just Tifa, worn but happy, tucking her hair behind her ear and smiling at him. The quiet, less self-concious one she saves for when she isn’t serving customers.
“I was.” Somewhere behind her, a door swings open, and Rude hears another flutter of once-familiar voices. “I missed you.” The door closing again, and in the background, he can see Strife, carrying boxes down the stairs, handing a few off to the neon haired person that Rude is starting to recognize as Denzels...whatever it is young people are calling each other these days. Clearly a gesture on Strife’s part to let them feel useful, more than them actually being of use. “Besides, I have no guarantee of power tomorrow.”
Tifas eyes widen, and her lips part, a heartsbeat of silent concern.
“That’s no good! Will you be alright? Do you need me to have anything delivered?”
“It won’t be the first time. I’m well provisioned.”
It’s not the feeling he had meant to cause. He is well stocked. He doesn’t mind the quiet. But it’s …nice. that she still cares, something warm and soft in his chest.
“If you’re sure…”
“Quite.” He shrugs, knowing there’s no untruth in what he says. “Besides. If I’m not back in town to pick up my mail in three days time, Mrs. Cranson will have the coast guard after me.” Another familiar voice, a flash of messy, brown hair at the very edge of the screen. “Denzel there?”
“Yes! He just got in last night.” She hesitates. “Should I call him over?”
“No. That’s alright.” He gives a shrug of one shoulder, and takes a beat too long to remember to follow up with, “...Let the kid settle in.”
Besides...
Besides.
Besides Tifa isn’t going to let any awkwardness grow, not when she knows perfectly well that Rude still loves the boy, now-young-man who isn’t his son, and Denzel still loves the now-old-man who isn’t his father. It’s just the time of year.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t make it out this year. It’s just, it’s Pim’s first real holiday with us…” She flushes, slightly, thousands of miles away and cheeks still pink and hot with a feeling of failure he wishes that he could brush away, with his fingers on her jaw, his thumb along her cheek. Then she shakes her head, flips her hair slightly ( a flash of Chelsea, light brown tossing in the place of Tifa’s dark locks, promising him that she’ll meet him at the tree. That they’ll run. Together, That there is a life out there for them). “You know…” she chews her lip. She turns her gaze from the slight off-center of the webcam. “You can always come visit us, too.”
A conversation they have had every holiday. Every holiday since the two of them, along with Barrett, and Cloud, had dropped Marlene off in her freshmen year dorm. A conversation that always starts, and ends, the same way.
“I know.And then, this year, more conciliatory than he’s felt in a while, “I’ll come your way in the spring.”
“Alright!” She brightens, and if she doubts his follow through at all, she doesn’t say so. “You’d hardly recognize Edge in the spring now. All the gardening projects have really taken off. There’s this one, I’m pretty sure Rufus had the whole thing planted specifically for Yuffie, where they keep samples of every kind of rose that exists, and are even making new ones!”
“It sounds pretty.”
“It’s incredible! Did you know that they mostly don’t even use seeds because-”
By the time an hour has passed, Rude is caught up on the most important of the bar gossip, Marlene’s active and apparently burning rivalry that has developed with her polisci advisor (not the major Rude had expected her to pursue, not one he’s sure is going to stick any more securely than religious studies had stuck, but he admires her refusal to be steamrolled), some less than well advised but highly entertaining solutions to situations that Denzel and his survey team have encountered in the slowly recovering wastelands, Tifas own recent forays into brewing soda to add to her tap list, and an interesting anecdote about Vincents last-week introduction to, and immediately developed obsession with, those chocolate oranges that one smashes on the counter, to split up and share.
For his own part…
It has been too cold, the wind too fierce, the waves too rough and insistent for Rude to keep up his usual beach-combing, and careful etching out of sand sculptures of the warmer months. His camera reel is full though, with that same stormy drama. Repairs he’s done and errands he’s run over the last week for his largely aging, largely equally isolated neighbors. His theories, intentionally and comically over-complicated, on the gas-station mystery paperback he’s in the middle of.
His life is small now, and made of small things. Something he’s chosen. Hers grows, shored up around her in brick and wood and steel and an ever-expanding web of connection, community, as she has ever shorn it up.
“Goodnight, Rude. And happy holidays. Stay warm, okay?”
“Goodnight, Miss Lockhart,” teasing her mildly, in his deadpan way. “You as well.”
“Rude…?”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. We’ll speak again tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“Goodnight. And give the kids my affection.”
“I will.”
They both wait just a little too long, and at the end, Rude isn’t entirely sure which one of them hangs up first.
Only that as the call ends, the picture flattening out and then gone, the final sounding bloop from the speakers, his home is still …still. The crackle of the fireplace within. The snowfall and wind without. No change.
It’s a quiet he sits in, for about five minutes. Then he gets up. Then he fills a kettle with water. Then he puts the kettle on the stove and turns it on. He carries the quiet, on his shoulders, for the few minutes it takes to heat. The few more it takes to steep a bag of tea. The kettle screech. The kitchen timer beeping. The quiet broken enough that he does, finally, turn his radio on. It takes a little searching, through the electronic snow created by the real thing, but he finds a station he likes. It’s carols still, but just instrumental. Classical.
He even settles back down with his newspaper crossword for a moment before he remembers that having turned off the kitchen timer for tea, he’s turned it off for dinner too, and he has to rush to rescue the slightly smoking contents of the oven, before the smoke becomes an actual problem. Luckily, it still falls within his bounds of edible. ____
____“Hey! The fucks going on in here, yo!?” They had arrived at the door, both of their arms laden with more presents than were probably necessary, or expected. But it was the first major holiday since the three of them had fallen into their constellation, and it would be the baldest faced of lies to try to say neither of them were nervous. Luckily, maybe, the presence of a low-key emergency jerks Reno entirely out of his fret and sends him bouncing through the door and towards the kitchen, depositing his armful of bags and boxes directly on the bar on his way.
“Sorry, sorry, the kids wanted to help and I got a little distracted. In the present wrapping flow, you know?”
“There is rather, a lot of-” Smoke. There’s a lot of smoke. Something Rude doesn’t actually need to articulate but can’t hide either, under an involuntary cough.
“Yeah, yeah, just like, next time warn us if we’re gonna need to come over and play fire brigade!” called from the kitchen, while Rude regathers the dropped things, and takes them along with his armload out of the bar area and up the stairs, into the living one, Tifa on his heels.
She chatters about how the kids are excited that they’re there. That she is. That she really had talked to Cloud and Barrett weeks ago and they had nothing to worry about. About everything she’s planned, or, well, had planned, for dinner, but Reno can save it right? And does Rude mind helping her with the last few presents?
He doesn’t mind. He also doesn’t really want to leave Reno unattended for too long, with how antsy he’d been the whole day. The whole last couple of days, honestly.
Not that Rude can blame him.
They get the last presents wrapped. Tifa sticks a couple of bows on the shoulders of his jacket, while his hands are busy. He ties a few loops of ribbon into her hair before they head back down.
When they do head back down, Reno, having enlisted and redirected the help of the kids, has in fact saved the food, cutting the burned portions off of everything and turning what’s left into bite-sized, pass around things. Something supposed to be fun.
It is.
And while they all spend most of the day running the bar and kitchen properly, when evening rolls around, and everyone is piled upstairs, Strife and Wallace handle clean up and pour drinks and are even basically friendly, Reno catches Tifa under the mistletoe, the kids about lose their minds at their presents, nobody goes to bed cold or hungry, it’s as close to a solstice at his own family home as Rude has had in years. ____
____ He finishes his crossword. He eats his also slightly burned trays of salisbury steak, potatoes, green beans, and what are meant to be brownies. He drinks his tea. He listens to the radio. Eventually, he puts the paper down, and picks up his book. Eventually, he he gets up, and pours himself a glass of whiskey, because he realizes he has read three pages, three times, and remembers nothing.
It’s a process he repeats twice more. The reading. The forgetting. The whiskey. The third time, he feels calm, finally, realizing that he wasn’t only now that he is. The third time, he takes a few extra minutes to make more tea, and add the whiskey to that, along with lemon, and no small measure of honey. The third time, he reads the three pages, and comprehends them, and even the chapter after that. He takes in a few new details: the smokey undertone of the scent the victims distraught spouse is wearing, the color of the umbrella left at the victims office door, a particular turn of phrase the author used the second time a particular ‘extra’ was mentioned at the cafe where the detective and said distraught spouse meet, and he revises his opinion on whether this is a butler-did-it verses a lover-did-it kind of mystery. Feels good about that.
The fourth time, he’s less steady than he expects to be. Lurches to his feet, rather than simply getting to them, and realizes he’s going to drop either his mug or the book, or both, and makes the executive decision, or as close to one as he can, to save the book.
The mug, empty, shatters on the floor.
He stands, just looking at it, for a moment, while the DJ talks. A soothing, forgettable tone, then the strains of a melancholy piano, a melody that evokes wind through leaf-bare branches. ____
____ Memory, sharp as the shards on the floor. A newsreal on the television, some ten years ago, The five year memorial of plate fall. A conversation that was never supposed to happen, and especially not the way it had. An angry, hurt teenage boy, shouting. A missile of shattered ceramic and hot chocolate exploding against the door-frame next to Reno’s head, that he has to duck and Rude has to sidestep.
The way that Marlene had run out after them, but had only been able to catch Rude, because Reno was already on their bike, helmet on and about to not be waiting for him.
The way that Reno had not seemed to actually see anything in front of him, for the next couple of days, for all that he otherwise looked like himself, sounded like himself, acted like himself.
The way Rude had written it off. It was a bad time of year for Reno, always. ____
____ Well, he decides, perhaps that means it’s time for bed.
The mess can wait for the morning.
It’s only him here, after all.
So that is what he does. Goes to bed. And unfortunately, unwanted, dreams. Dreams about packages in the mail, arrived days after solstice. Thoughtful things, with carefully, but still imperfectly typed gift notes delivered with them. Things he could use, like touch screen cloves. Things Tifa would like, but never get for herself, like a pre-purchased spa-day package, to the place that she and Reno would sometimes get their nails done together. Things the kids need for school. Replacement parts for Strife’s bike, Wallace’s circuitry. The whole household.
Things none of them would ever be able to make themselves use.
Not after a frantic morning spent, having woken unexpectedly alone. Not after a call to Seventh that confirms that Reno hadn’t been there, and hadn’t called.
Not after Rufus had tracked them down, two days before solstice, that year, in the midst of their search, told him, and Tifa and Strife to take a seat.
When he wakes, and looks outside, he is glad that he checked the window first, rather than trying to open the door, because a solid two feet of snow had fallen overnight, that he would rather not let in.
He makes toast, He butters one slice while it’s still hot, and eats it one handed, while he cleans up the broken mug and scrubs at the dried dregs left behind with the other. He butters the second slice of toast and eats that cold.
The radio is still on. It’s usually almost purely classical. Today, apparently, it’s remained instrumental but decided the solstice proper requires a little more capitulation to the more modern sounds of the season. Surprising himself a little, he doesn’t roll his eyes at the upbeat cover of ‘all I want for solstice’ which, for all that it is orchestral, is still much too pop-y for his general taste.
He makes coffee.
He turns on the television, and watches old black and whites on silent, so he can keep soaking up the sense of silence that folds around the house from the outside. The sense of peace.
The first movie ends. He makes more coffee.
The next movie starts, and it isn’t like he has any other plans for the day. Nothing set in stone at least. Certainly, he isn’t going anywhere.
The next movie starts, and he gets about halfway through the opening credits (something he misses honestly, about newer movies, because who stays after for credits, anymore?)when he notices, sharply, in the way that the ripped edge of a chain link fence is sharp, that the song has most definitely changed to. Bouncy and brass and ____
Tifa and Reno dancing, laughingly around the kitchen, before Reno spins her off to him so that he can answer the knock at the door. Tifa, crashing into him with laughter, flour in her hair and a missed smear of frosting along her nose and cheek. The year before the last year. The year when all that they had made had, finally, truly, felt solid. That this is what it would be every year for the rest of forever.___
____ Rude turns off the TV. He turns off the radio.
He lays on the couch and listens to the wind. He thinks about the blank cold white outside.
He gets up, and goes to his desk, but he doesn’t turn on the computer. He had told Tifa he would call again today, and he will. But it’s early still, and he can’t-
He doesn’t want to wait.
He also doesn’t want to let himself do what he had done last year. Skip a week, and then use already being late as way to both excuse, and worry himself about the next until it became three weeks, until it was February before he’d written his first letter of the year. And as had been only fair, it had been a few weeks before Tifa had written back. Then a few more again, on his part. It was well into spring, flowers starting to bloom, before they had regained their usual pattern, one to the other, back and forth, each week.
It would have been entirely too easy to let that too, slide away. To let that corner of silence deepen and grow until all that remained of it was the glimmer of possibility that one of them would start again, and hope the other would follow.
Not this year.
He dates the letter for the first of the year, so that even if it takes a few days for the roads to clear again, he’ll have to send it, or be a liar.
[Dear Miss Lockhart,]
He starts, for lack of being sure of how else he ought to, and in hope that the title carries the same affectionate prodding as it had the night before.
[As I write this, I cannot tell you that I saw some of the locals and their families making snowmen today, though I would like to be able to. I also cannot tell you that I went to town, and treated myself to something nice for breakfast, as I have yet to leave the house for the day. I would like to be able to tell you those things, but more than that, I would like to be able to drag you along with me as I did. As I will think of what we might do in Edge come spring, I would dearly appreciate anything you had to say on the matter of next year-]
His pen scratches. Outside the snow falls. And small and closed up and alone as his home may be, Rude does not feel alone. He has the option to choose not to, just as he has the option to cleave deeper into it.
He chooses the paper, and her voice in his head. He chooses the promise of longer, brighter days.