It doesn't snow in Port Royale.

I can go to Hereaft to enjoy it in my dreams if I want to. I can stride through my memories of what it was like when I experienced it for the first time in those months when I was away from the city. My family came up to visit around that time for a supervised day trip out of the facility. Applied Potential Labs'd already poked and prodded me enough and I'd been pretty evasive when it came to questions after the Exile Council told me specifically not to mention to any of the scientists looking at me about what I was really capable of. "No, I don't really remember what happened." "All I know was there was screaming and then I woke up and Mommy and Dad were real scared." "I can't make that plant wither, I'm sorry. I don't know how to do it." All lies, y'know? The Exile Council taught me how to lie to them.

Helped that I could see everything that was goin' on around me when I was out of my own body. They figured out that every night when I went to sleep everything about me flatlined but there ain't many machines, if any, that can track the soul. Ain't that something? Just a child, and I was going off of one fight for my life to another. Not the fact that I was flying away from myself at night, I've been used to that for years. I mean that... I saw what they were doin' in there. People strung up in big machines with their arms and legs spread all screamin' their lungs out while the room glowed around them. Big walk-in freezers full of amorphous bodies in jars. People all wired up with packs strapped around themselves like explosives being forced into openings in space and time against their will, yellin' desperately for someone to have some humanity when everyone in the room, myself included, knows they're stayin' the course. Ain't nothin' I can bring up that'll make any damn sense and I'm not sure if it's a good idea to tell it to someone other than the Council in Exile. Only thing savin' me from finding out more in the most awful way possible was playin' blind, deaf, and unable to speak truth to the world around me.

I got labeled a month in with the ability to go into "false death" that they said I was bestowed by after that one horrible day and given some exercises to try to use to control it... Didn't help, of course. They probably left things there because the optics of holding a child in a testing lab that they were also studyin' all sorts of nasty stuff in didn't sit well with anyone in that city. Got people breathing down their neck. They were willin' to stop trying to chase down the rabbit hole when they knew they weren't going to get answers. I was there when they labeled me with what saved me. "RESULTS INCONCLUSIVE: POTENTIAL OUTER-BODY ENTITY POSSESSION". Well, they were right about being unable to explain what was with me. Hard to put the pieces together when you keep on shufflin' them under the carpet and your pillow. Pretty sure that that label was already on its way considering that the lab was the one who reached out to my family and told them to come up and walk around the city with me.

Sebastian didn't really get what was goin' on back then and I wasn't gonna tell him. Parents didn't either. We had a handler following me, the main guy that interviewed me while I was in there and a bodyguard for him. Even as a kid, I could tell that man didn't have any good intentions for anyone... Didn't even know how to speak to kids. All cloyin' "age-appropriate" jokes and smiles like a shark's teeth, like it was his job to connect with me but he didn't know a single thing about kids outside of what he read in a book. I couldn't even imagine him as bein' one in the past.

We went out to eat, they got me some toys, and he fed 'em a bunch of shit about how I was safe and they were figurin' out what was going on with me and they were gonna release me soon out of the goodness of their own hearts. Only inkling of truth there was that I was leaving Empire City and goin' back home to Port Royale. The stuffed rainbow fish I got from that outing that was my favorite out of the bunch of plushes I got ended up with a bunch of other toys all slippin' away, thread falling apart, stuffing scattering over the years. It's gone to just memories and the fragments of ideals floating through my mind like so much detritus after a storm, ready to be fished out of murky waters and recherished. The burger I got was just a burger, veggie patty with cheese and tomato and onions and the fixin's. Talking to them was... It was a breath of fresh air, and I love that they came to save me in their own way even if I could see the fear on their faces, the worry, the doubt. I ain't ever gonna forget that.

Snow, though... Remembering how they were acting around me is... it carries that pain, y'know? Snow. Snow was and is pure. Snow was somethin' that didn't show itself to me past flecks rolling down a window and a chill around the glass, not until that day out. I remember just feelin' something wet fleck around my face before I looked up and I saw dots of white falling through the sky towards me. My soul radiated bliss through me as I stared up, reached, felt it touch to my hand. Those flakes were new to me in their full breadth, cold like a harsh rain but surprisingly far more gentle to the skin. I always thought from reading about Arctic explorers that it'd be more sharp and biting in its chill. It felt like it was comin' out of nowhere, carried by the cold. It felt like someone or something was heralding my freedom.

Even when I was younger I always thought that the things they told me weren't real still had something behind them. My parents said that I couldn't be talking to the bodies in the family business and getting answers back so it was not like I ever completely believed in their judgment. There's so much weird stuff in the world already, and where there's smoke there's usually fire. Why wouldn't there be some guy in charge of Christmas that could sprinkle a little bit of joy onto a kid that'd been havin' a real bad time of things?

Snow in Hereaft is... it's not as spontaneous as it should be. You can't share it with other people without them getting pissed with you or agreeing to it. You've gotta go past the public spaces for it where the restless dead reside and mingle and commiserate and kiss and make love and break up and fall back in love again over and over. Good luck gettin' all of those bastards to agree on making powder drift down. It doesn't snow in Port Royale, though. I gotta travel hours to get it as it should be.

Damn it, though, it's close enough. When it gets deep enough into winter, when the novelty sweaters start comin' out for parties and nothing else, when everyone's celebrating and enjoying themselves, I go to bed and leave my body and I go somewhere by myself or with another spirit that wants to feel this feeling too and I just let myself be free to be in snowfall. It takes me back to that day when it felt like the worst was behind me. I was standing in the middle of a dirty sidewalk with exhaust fumes around me with two men that were gonna hurt me if I said the wrong thing and a set of parents that didn't know what to do with me and all I could do was look at the sky stretched out in front of me like the next year, infinite possibility there for me. Mystery and wonder stretched out like a subtle tapestry in the sky. I remind myself that I'm gonna live my life how I want the best I can. There's only so much that I can do to give myself that, but...

Life's not worth living if you can't take the compromises and ground yourself through 'em, y'know? I'm here, and I'm gonna make it through things.

---

I got to experience actual honest-to-God snowfall for the first time in my life in January of this year. It's something I wanted to see for ages and I kept on missing it family trip after family trip and I was lucky enough to get it. My fingers bled from how frigid the wind was, but I had a blast. It's somehow wet and crumbly at the same time, it's wonderful. That's why I travel, to experience things that I never could elsewhere and span the gap with people worlds away from me that I absolutely cherish.

This side of Lysander is something that's kinda always been with him for ages since he was in his original incarnation and I wanted to lean into it this year.  munks was wonderful as always in showcasing the carefree vibes of the deer going all on the season and enjoying himself to the fullest. You can see and fave that original post over here.

I love my boy so very, very much and I'm glad I'm able to showcase him happy to celebrate the holidays like this.

Merry Christmas, y'all. I hope you have a great one. <3

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