-Snow and Generosity (1st Anniversary)-
She notices him long before he ever notices her.
Not because he is loud. Quite the opposite. He moves through the world like someone trying not to disturb the air. She watches the way he steps around puddles, how he apologizes to people even when they are the ones who bump into him, how he picks up fallen papers no one else cares about.
She keeps wondering how someone like that can exist.
In her world, people speak sharp and walk fast. Kindness is usually a currency, traded only when something is wanted in return. Yet he gives it out like it costs nothing, as if he doesn’t know he is supposed to protect it.
She sees it again during break - how he bends down to pick a flower from the pavement, the petals ruined but handled as though they still deserve gentleness.
"I wonder why he picks flowers," she thinks. People step over them all the time. People step over everything all the time. Why doesn’t he?
Sometimes she tries to explain him to herself. Maybe he doesn’t understand the world properly. Maybe no one ever taught him the rules - the ones about keeping your guard up, holding your expression steady, using your voice like armor.
Or maybe he understands it perfectly and chooses kindness anyway, which is somehow even harder for her to process.
She starts looking for him without meaning to. Noticing how he flinches when someone raises their voice, how he agrees to things too quickly, how he lets others tug him around without resisting.
He is gentle in a way that feels impossible. Gentle in a way that almost scares her.
Because if someone like him exists, maybe her idea of the world isn’t complete.
Maybe the world isn’t only harsh and rough.
Maybe she has been missing something.
She doesn’t speak to him yet. She doesn’t know what she would say. But she watches him pick another fallen thing - this time a pencil, cracked at the end - and she feels something shift inside herself.
A small, unfamiliar warmth.
And she thinks, for the first time, that softness might survive after all.
She doesn’t mean to overhear anything.
She’s just passing by the corridor when she sees him standing there, shoulders drawn in like he’s trying to fold himself small. In front of him, another student waves a stack of books, voice sharp enough to cut the air.
"You said you’d finish this for me. Don’t act like you forgot."
He opens his mouth, hesitates, then nods - even though she’s almost sure he did forget, because it wasn’t his job in the first place. The other student pushes the work into his hands and walks off without a thank you, without a backward glance.
He just stands there for a moment, staring at the pages he’s suddenly responsible for. Then he quietly says, "Alright. I’ll get it done," as if he owes something to someone who gave him nothing.
She feels something pinch at her chest.
Not sympathy - something sharper. Confusion, maybe. Frustration. A sense of watching someone play a game without knowing the rules.
He starts walking toward the library, slow and tired, carrying weight that isn’t his. She follows at a distance, not to spy, but because she can’t unsee what she’s seen.
She thinks, This is why people get eaten alive.
Not literally, but in the way the world does it - taking advantage, taking pieces, taking time.
She remembers all the tiny signs she noticed before: how he always gives in, how he apologizes even when he’s the one wronged, how he lets others steer him like he isn’t allowed to have his own direction.
Now it feels less mysterious and more... worrying.
Sitting at a nearby table, she watches him arrange the books neatly, carefully, almost respectfully. He looks like someone who was never taught that his time belongs to him. That "no" is a word he’s allowed to use. That people can take from you if you keep your hands open too long.
Maybe he really wasn’t taught the rules of the world.
The real rules. The ones no one writes down.
She rests her chin on her hand and keeps observing him, not with judgment but with a kind of reluctant curiosity. He works quietly, almost peacefully, as if he doesn’t realize he’s been cornered into someone else’s responsibility.
And she wonders - again, deeper this time - how someone like him has made it this far in a world that prefers sharp edges over soft ones.
But even more than that, she wonders what it means that she cares enough to notice.
She gathers enough resolve to walk toward him. Not to rescue him or anything dramatic - just to ask why he agreed again, why he lets people push him into corners they built.
But before she can speak, someone else reaches him first.
Another girl stands beside his table, hands on her hips, expression caught somewhere between irritation and disbelief.
"You’ve done this so many times," the newcomer says, voice not unkind, just tired. "Stand up for yourself for once."
He looks up at her, blinking as if the words are too bright to look at directly. But he doesn’t defend himself. He doesn’t argue. He just gives a small smile - gentle, apologetic - and turns back to the work in front of him.
The newcomer sighs. "You can’t keep letting people walk all over you."
He listens, nods, but the nod is soft and empty, like a leaf falling. No resistance. No promise to change. Just acceptance.
The main girl stands a few steps away, her own question dying in her throat. She watches the scene unfold as if it’s confirming everything she has suspected but didn’t want to believe.
He understands the words.
He moves his pencil across the page with quiet focus, as if the scolding were a breeze that passed through him without catching on anything.
The other girl eventually shakes her head and walks off, defeated by his calmness.
But this girl still remains.
She studies the way he smiles - small, harmless, the kind of smile someone uses to avoid conflict rather than express happiness. A shape he’s learned to wear. A shield made of softness instead of armor.
"He isn’t confused. He isn’t unaware."
"He knows exactly what’s happening... he just accepts it."
It’s stranger than ignorance. Stranger than innocence.
It’s like watching someone willingly stay in the rain, not because they enjoy it, but because they don’t think they’re allowed to look for cover.
She steps back quietly, the question she planned to ask now replaced by a heavier one:
How do you exist in a world that keeps taking from you,
and still smile as if nothing has been taken?
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