Cold. That's the first thing he remembers. Not a breeze. Not a chill. Something deeper. The kind of cold that feels alive. That bites. That drags your bones down into your skin like they're trying to disappear.

It had been snowing that day. Slow. Heavy. Deliberate. Snow that muted the world, not with peace—but with pressure. Each flake hit the pavement like a whisper he didn't want to hear. The sky was colorless, drained. His hands had been shaking. Not from nerves. Not from fear. From memory.

Yulian had forgotten his gloves. Or maybe he didn't care enough to wear them. The feeling of exposed fingers against icy air grounded him. A small ache. Sharp. Almost tolerable. The skin cracked open along the joints. Thin blood beads. He liked that. Where the snow touched his wrists, where it hissed against half-healed cuts. Bruises turned darker in the cold—purple swallowed by gray. It felt like punishment. It felt like home.

Winter always did this. The Basement. The Concrete. The Rats. The Darkness. Her voice. "Why can't you be normal?""I can't believe you're my son."

He remembered the sting across his cheek. Not the pain—he doesn't feel pain the way others do. Just the heat. The impact. The way her ring had left a half-moon imprint near his temple. And the cold. Always the cold. That same kind of cold. The kind that seeped in under door frames and through the cracks in the floor. The kind that made your teeth feel hollow.

So why had he stopped walking that day? He remembers now. It was them. Just standing there. Under the orange wash of a streetlamp. The snow on their shoulders was barely melting. As if even the weather refused to touch them. Yulian hadn't known their name yet. But the moment was... wrong. Off-pattern. Off-code. Everything inside Yulian paused. He'd been in motion seconds before—purposeful, calculated, scanning his surroundings like always. But something about the shape of the air around them made him stop.

Still. Quiet. Watching. The static in his head—that relentless, buzzing chaos of memory and contingency plans—had dulled. Like someone pressed their palm against his mind and told it to hush. He had stared. That much he remembers clearly. His hands still ached from the cold. His nails had bit into the skin of his palm. He didn't stop them. He didn't even notice. He just watched.

There was something about the way they breathed in the winter. Measured. Present. Human. Yulian studied every detail—the color shift of their lips, the rise and fall of their shoulders beneath the weight of their coat, the way they adjusted their scarf like it was instinct, not vanity. Everything about them was warm. Yulian was not.

He realized then that he hadn't blinked in twenty-three seconds. His eyes had started to sting. His body—shivering, not from temperature, but from something else. Something unfamiliar. He didn't know what it was. Emotion? No. He doesn't feel emotion. Curiosity? Too gentle. Obsession? Too soon. Whatever it was, it gripped him. Like frostbite without warning.

A memory surfaced. Not a face—a color. Blue. The scarf Yesui wore the day he tried to mimic her smile. She had offered him cocoa. He'd watched it steam between her hands. He didn't drink it. He just watched it cool. He remembered the taste of that winter. Blood, coppery. Not his. Something he found in the snow. A fox, maybe. Or a person. He can't recall. It was a long time ago. That same taste filled his mouth when he saw them.

Not literal. Just sensation. Like the first kill. The fire. The judgment. But this wasn't judgment. This was... pull. They had glanced toward him. Just briefly. Didn't smile. Didn't speak. But something in that eye contact—in that exact second—cut through Yulian's ribcage. Not pain. Not longing. Something he didn't have a word for. And that scared him.

He had turned away quickly after. Wiped the moment away. He couldn't afford distraction. Not then. But now—standing in the halls of SHC, white lights humming, gloves on his hands, scalpel still in his pocket—Yulian sees them again. Older. Alive. Real. And all at once, Yulian is back in the snow. Hands shaking. Chest tight. Throat dry. Not from fear. From recognition. And he hates it.