・❥・One-Shot || The First Snowfall Ft. @sasorikigai & @bai-cheng (my other OC)
The first snowfall arrives like a blessing whispered against the world—soft, slow, reverent. Akari feels it before she sees it, that hush settling across the temple grounds, the kind that makes even her breath come quieter, gentler. She steps outside just as the flakes begin to drift in lazy spirals, each one landing with the delicacy of a promise kept.
Then—laughter. Bright. Unpolished. The kind that shakes winter from its bones. The sky temple's herbalist follows the sound around the courtyard wall, pulling her cloak closer—only to stop, warmth flooding her chest despite the cold.
BaiCheng stands in the center of the courtyard, snow clinging to his hair and shoulders like scattered pearls. Three temple children crowd around him, offering chaotic advice as he rolls a large ball of snow across the ground. He doesn’t look at them—he doesn’t look at anything—but he listens with an intensity that has always been its own kind of sight. His head tilts toward each voice as it rises and falls, expression pulled into that stern focus he wears when he’s doing something he refuses to fail at.
“No, no, BaiCheng-ge, you need it bigger!”
“Not that big! He can’t stack it if it’s too heavy!”
“You packed it wrong, it’s going to fall over!”
Akari lifts a hand to her mouth, barely catching the laugh that bubbles there.
It’s the first snow. And somehow she has found this.
Without thinking, she steps forward to help a little girl struggling to shape her own snowball. She kneels, guiding the tiny mittened hands with her own. “Here,” she murmurs, soft as snowfall, “gentle… but firm. Snow listens when you’re kind to it.” The girl beams up at her. BaiCheng stills for a moment, head angling toward the new sound of Akari’s voice. The faintest ease loosens his shoulders—a subtle shift anyone else might miss, but she has always noticed. He inclines his head slightly in her direction, acknowledgment and welcome woven into one small motion.
Soon she’s on the ground beside them, skirts pooling around her, fingers numb but spirit alight. Children gather sticks for arms, ribbons for scarves, stones for mismatched eyes.
“You’re giving him my good ribbon?” she teases one boy, feigning scandal.
He nods with grave importance. “He needs to look fancy.”
Akari sighs dramatically. “Well… style is a burden we must all carry.”
BaiCheng huffs—half a laugh, half disbelief. “He looks like he wandered out of the storage room wearing whatever he found first.” She nudges a snowball lightly toward his knee. “Shh. You’ll hurt his feelings.” The children cackle. BaiCheng shakes his head as if defeated by both them and her.
It’s that exact moment—her sitting in the snow with a crooked snowman, cheeks pink and eyes bright—that Hanzo finds her. He had come seeking her, a quiet question prepared on his tongue… but the sight before him steals the words clean away.
Akari—radiant in winter light, hair dusted in white, surrounded by children and peace he rarely sees her allow herself to touch. BaiCheng beside her, posture relaxed in a way it never is in crowded halls. Children tugging at her sleeves, asking where the next snowman should stand. Her laughter—soft, bright, unguarded—lifting into the cold air like incense.
Hanzo stops beneath the archway, breath catching in his chest. Snow settles on him; he pays it no mind.
One child tugs Akari’s cloak. “Akari-jie, he needs a hat!”
She searches the ground with exaggerated seriousness until she finds a small wooden bowl. Placing it atop the snowman, she nods with solemn pride. “There. Now he looks wise.”
“He is crooked,” BaiCheng mutters. “He has character,” she counters.
Hanzo feels a smile tug at his mouth—rare, warm, helpless.
Then Akari turns as though drawn by a thread, eyes finding him instantly. Her expression softens becoming something that belongs to him alone. “Hanzo,” she calls, breath fogging gently in the cold, “come join us.”
The world glows white around her. The children cheer. BaiCheng, head angling subtly toward the sound of Hanzo’s approach, gives a small nod of acknowledgment. And Hanzo steps forward—into the snowfall, into the warmth she gathers so effortlessly, into the quiet joy of a moment he never expected but will carry for a long, long time.
The first snow always feels like a blessing. But this—this is something deeper. A beginning wrapped in white, shaped by laughter, and held together gently, like a snowman made by many hands.
