Eiskalt

The air turns cold again. The sun sets sooner.

Winter would like to say she’s not a vain person, but it’s not entirely true. She’s very used to thinking of herself as ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful’, given that it was a compliment often given to her as a child, at first by her mother (until she started hitting the bottle), then by visitors to the Schnee mansion.

What a beautiful daughter you have!

Subconsciously, Winter began to care about her appearance. She still preferred to focus on utility over fashion, hence the bun, but that doesn’t mean that she hasn’t spent time looking in the mirror, fretting over acne or oily skin or creases or freckles.

Winter: Violently.

With a name like Winter, she supposes it’s not surprising that most people think she’s born at the end of the year, when everything dies. It would fit her, she supposes. Cold. Unyielding. An end, or maybe a beginning. The darkest time of the year, when all one can do is the same tired routine in the hopes that better days are waiting.

It comes as a surprise, usually, when she tells people that she was born in mid-July. If she tells anyone.

On the outside, it doesn’t fit her at all. Pale skin, white hair, an ice sculpture come to life with a heart and demeanour to match. Winter looks, in every way, like her name.

But she hates that time of year. Hates it with all her being.

When the sun shines in the middle of the summer, it soothes her. When she feels the warm rays hit her skin, she feels as though the icy shell surrounding her might melt and she might be set free. She knows it will never happen. Nothing short of the sun itself crashing into the world could break what she had spent a lifetime crafting.

She tells no one that her favourite colour is orange.

She never breathes a word about how she sometimes takes a moment, just a second or two, to admire the way the blossoming or fading light paints the sky and the clouds outside her window as the day begins and ends.

What’s in a name? she wonders all too often.

Winter’s an odd muse. She’s not always around, but when she is, she basically sits down and says, “Hello again. Write this down, I’m not repeating myself.”

In the frozen room, far away from anyone else, Winter waits.

Her aura has depleted. Her body has been bruised, broken, and beaten. Her destiny has been shattered before her very eyes. Her sister has run. They’ve all run.

She’s not allowed to hope that they’ll escape, but she does. All of them.

When the alert on her scroll updates, removing Qrow’s face from the lineup, she’s actually disappointed.

She doesn’t know what she’ll do when it updates again and Penny is added in his place.

Winter waits, freezing and shuddering and in pain and with the corpse of a woman she had been getting to know for months on the ground a few feet away, and she knows she’s useless. What did it matter? What did any of these years mean, if all she has to show for it is nothing?

Nothing nothing nothing. Just like what Jacques would imply. Like what he would say.

Winter Schnee was nothing but a name, a shell, a heart that beat only because of broken promises and empty hopes.

She can’t even cry.

On the worst night of her life, Winter waits.

It’s almost that time of year again.