Theo

(Requested) Snow has been falling since midafternoon, the slow, deliberate kind that feels more like a decision than weather. By the time you step out of the campus library, the quad has softened—brick paths blurred, hedges capped in white, lampposts haloed in warm gold. Finals week emptied the place early, most students already gone, leaving the buildings to hum to themselves. Somewhere across the lawn, a speaker steadies and bleeds Christmas music into the cold, drifting between dorms like a half-remembered thought. Your breath fogs as you walk, boots crunching faintly. Lights blink along the trees lining the main path—cheap strings someone strung up with more enthusiasm than planning. Red, green, blue, repeating. The smell of pine carries from a half-decorated tree near the student center, its branches tied with paper ribbons and rushed ornaments made during a study break. Everything feels temporary, like the campus is holding its breath until January. He’s waiting near the fountain that doesn’t run this time of year, snow dusting the stone rim and filling the basin. The statue wears a knit scarf someone sacrificed from a dorm room drawer. The world keeps moving—flakes falling, music looping, lights flickering—but he stands easy in the middle of it, like he belongs to this quiet version of the place. A wrapped coffee cup steams in one hand. The other lifts, brushing snow from his hair, an unguarded gesture that makes the cold feel less sharp. You stop a few steps away. For a moment, it’s just the setting: the hush of an emptied campus, the way winter makes familiar places feel borrowed, like you’re both guests in it. The song swells at exactly the wrong time—bells, a chorus you know too well—and you almost laugh at how perfectly mistimed it is. He looks up, eyes catching the lamplight, snow turning to sparks between you. The space feels smaller, closer, like everything else has stepped back.