By the time the train sighed into the station, Alandra had begun to feel like a loosened thread.

Not unravelled — not yet. Just unspooled enough that the world around her seemed slightly delayed, like it was arriving a half-second too late for her to trust it.

The windows were fogged from other people’s breath and winter coats; the platform lights smeared into soft halos against the glass. Somewhere behind her, a child laughed, bright and sharp as a bell, and the sound made her chest ache with a strange, unnameable longing.

She stepped down into the cold.

The town was small in the way small things could still be complete. Garland draped across shopfronts like sleepy green lashes. Strings of warm bulbs looped over the street in careful arcs, each light a tiny insistence against the dark. Snow had fallen earlier and then stopped, leaving everything rimmed in white and quiet, as if someone had smoothed their hand over the edges of the world.

Alandra adjusted her scarf and told herself firmly that she was here for a holiday.

Christmas. New Year. A few days of pretending that time could be gentle if you asked nicely.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket, a familiar pattern she didn’t need to see to recognise. Another I’m here. Another coordinate. Another small anchor.

Sometimes, when she went too long without seeing him, her mind filled the gap with impossible things.

What if there was another lifetime before this?

Not a different timeline where she chose a different major, or he picked a different elective. Something more absurd. A world with sharper air and older silence. A place where the cold felt sacred instead of merely inconvenient.

A man with paint on his fingers and a star at his throat, looking at her as if she was something he could not quite place in any known taxonomy — and yet could not stop studying anyway.

It made no sense.

It also made her feel… homesick.

For a place she had never been. For a version of him she could not prove existed. For an orbit her body seemed to recognise even when her brain told her to be reasonable.

Alandra exhaled slowly, watching her breath bloom white and disappear.

Stop it, she told herself. It’s winter. You’re tired. You’re sentimental. You’re—

Her gaze lifted.

And the thought broke apart on impact.

Albedo stood across the street under a streetlamp that cast honeyed light onto the snow. He wore a dark coat and a turtleneck, gloves in his pockets, posture composed in that particular way he had — not stiff, not cold, simply precise. Like he took up space the way he approached lab work: with intent, as if he’d considered the most efficient configuration of the universe and placed himself neatly inside it.