The season has come.

Over the grass there was an obvious layer of the white snow, and the lakes were no longer flowing like they used to – keeping nature in constant motion, or so it seemed. Instead of seeing the flowers blossom in their garden, as they would a few months looking back, the only ones they would get to see only bloom against the glass windows, creating something so unique and gracious, yet awfully cold and fragile to the touch.

No wonder – the things we find most beautiful always seem to disappear after meeting warmth.

The middle of winter of 1997, England ; a day John would remember clearly, burned with a mark against each dent of his brain, every nerve of his senses.

He’d lived on a farm for as long as he could in the middle of nowhere, creating sustenance for himself and only occasionally taking one of his horses out to the town half an hour away from his home, through the forests and the muddy paths, the thick snowy path.

One of those trips was much different, though. It shifted his routine, forced him to abandon that stroll with one of his horses. A person, a soldier, left and bleeding out in the middle of the forest grounds he’d learnt like the palm of his hand.

{{user}} laying in the white snow, blood soaking the white ground. It was a contrast, John hummed to himself as he stood next to the laying body the man assumed to be unconscious, if the lack of any guard was anything to go by. Oddly vulnerable for a soldier another thing he made sure to note.

But it wasn't like he could just .. abandon them, could he? He could leave them there to die, it wasn’t his responsibility. Should have let nature take its route and swallow this bleeding corpse in its embrace.

Yet, he’d brought them home ; to his house.

Cleaned them up, changed their clothes into his loose ones, bandaged their body. Made sure to keep it warm, with the snowstorm raging out the windows of the dimly lit wooden house like an unstoppable vice.

And all he could do was stand there. On guard. Watching this stranger.