First, they had to wait for it to snow.
The earth seemed to be standing ethereally still, day after day of icy blue passing uneventfully. The cold seeped into the city like a living thing, stalking the streets with chill breezes, but the ground remained bare and brown and hard as rock. Maybe it was the need for a little softness in a harsh world, but the men of the Shinsengumi were beginning to get restless.
"Another sunny day," grumbled Nagakura, stretching as he scowled up at the sky. He wasn't ordinarily one to complain about something this minor… but he couldn't resist mentioning the weather before anyone else, and that was the only thing he could think of to say. "The least the sun can do is give us a little warmth, if it's gonna be out all the time anyway. But no, of course it's freezing… just like always."
"Seconded," agreed Harada, letting out a light sigh, and ran his callused hands along the shaft of his ever-present spear. "Besides, all this sunlight seems like too much of a good thing. At this point, I'd almost welcome a blizzard just to change things up a little." The more he missed out on snow, the more he felt that he was missing an integral part of his own life—the natural beauty of Kyoto, the city he'd sworn to help defend.
"And I wanna have a snowball fi-i-ight," yawned Heisuke, falling dramatically back from his sitting position to stare up at the ceiling. Not that he was a kid or anything, since he was nineteen-and-one-twelfth years old, but clear weather like this was kind of boring. If it had to be this cold, the least the universe could do was offer a little entertainment now and again, he reasoned.
"Has it even snowed yet this year?" asked Okita, leaning thoughtfully back on his hands. Maybe it was just the fact that he was still half-dreaming, but all eternity seemed to have condensed itself into a single moment. In fact, it felt almost like today was the first day of all time, and nothing else before now mattered in the slightest.
"A couple times," responded Hijikata somewhat shortly, draining the last of his tea. "Not much more than that." To his dismay, he added silently; he rather liked snow, not that he'd ever admit to liking much of anything. It gave him all kinds of inspiration, which had been sorely lacking lately.
Saito—as usual—said nothing, sipping his tea and gazing contemplatively out at the courtyard. The others could talk about the sunshine all they liked, but he could feel the snow coming, even if he couldn't explain why. He hardly had a background in meteorology, but he'd experienced a peculiar sense of kinship with the cold for as long as he could remember.
Still, all of them felt it at one point or another, even if subconsciously: Kondou and Sanan, talking in the hall; Inoue, busy making breakfast; Shimada and Yamazaki, trudging home from their latest mission. Something new was coming for them, light and soft and quick like feminine feet or racing heartbeats.
Whatever change it might have been, it would hopefully be more agreeable than a second assassination, the first of which seemed remarkably hazy in Hijikata's mind this morning. And hadn't there been some boy involved—oh, what was his name? (On second thought, maybe he wasn't a person at all; more likely, he was just a stray dog. Somehow his presence all felt so unreal, more like a dream than a memory.)
It took all day for the sky to turn its telltale ominous gray, but by evening, the sun gave up on setting altogether and vanished behind a patchy veil of clouds. Whether it was just before or just after the sun officially dipped below the horizon that Yukimura Chizuru first set foot in Kyoto, no one could have said for sure; it would have been too dark to tell in either case.
As she swept into the empty city, the first snowflakes began to drift down, and with them, a sense of beginning and of belonging. As she hustled along the empty streets in search of Doctor Matsumoto's office, Chizuru had the strangest urge to break the deathly silence all around her—to speak aloud a story that had not yet happened.
For a moment, she struggled against the impulse, but… well, who was around to hear her? Taking a deep and smiling breath, Chizuru closed her eyes briefly and began. Finally, her only audience the falling snow, it was her time to shine.
I have legitimately no idea how often I'll be able to add to this, but it's started now! This installment was mostly a test to see if I could lay out the groundwork effectively, as well as to experiment with style and flow, not to mention how you all receive it.