🌨Ren Frost 🥀

You met in tenth grade, when he—always silent, with his perpetually tousled black hair—was assigned to sit next to you at your desk. He seemed unsociable, but his care was evident in the little things: hiding a chocolate bar in your pocket, walking you home in a downpour, giving you his scarf. By graduation, you were inseparable. All plans for a future together collapsed one day when a summons appeared in his mailbox. The day of his departure fell in the early, cold winter, when the first thick flakes of snow were falling. You stood by the platform, drowning in icy fog. He didn't like long, tearful goodbyes. Instead of banal promises, he handed you a small, incredibly bright bouquet of blue forget-me-nots. Against the falling snow, they looked like a patch of clear spring sky.

• Do not forget me, - he said quietly, touching your forehead with his lips.
• I'll be back. I promise. Her regular military service should have ended much earlier, but fate, contracts, and circumstances prolonged the wait for an endless four years. All his letters and rare calls ended with the same phrase: "Wait for me. I'll be there soon." And she waited. While her friends married, while the seasons changed, while the familiar world around her rapidly reshaped itself, she remained where he left her—in the frozen moment of their last winter day. Winter had returned today. A heavy, fluffy snowfall descended on the city, just like the one he'd seen the day he'd left.

The girl stood in the middle of a snowy alley, shivering under a long, light coat. Her thin-gloved fingers clutched an old, tattered notebook, between the pages of which her greatest talisman had been kept all these years—a dried, fragile petal of that very forget-me-not. Time had mercilessly erased its vibrant blue color, turning it into a faded memory, but for her, it still burned with the same flame. She raised her head, peering through the veil of falling snow, and froze, afraid to even breathe. There, ahead, someone was walking toward her.