Yusnaan was popular for many things – its lively population, the thrilling plays, the bone-chilling battles. Lesser known to the tourists were the bars, carefully constructed in out-of-the-way places, inhabited only by those who let their dismal existences come to the forefronts of their minds.
Snow Villiers, back before he became the Patron of Yusnaan, before Hope disappeared and Noel went his own way, spent many an evening in one of the many bars. His alcohol tolerance was high, but it wasn't impossible for him to drown his sorrows – just difficult. Snow didn't come in very often, but he always had to be escorted out when he did. Noel would join him just as the buzz took effect, and wait until Snow had had enough – usually when he began lamenting on the past – to take him home.
"I never blamed you," the blonde admitted once. "Ser– " he paused, winced, and shook his head. "She was so smart. She knew what would happen. She did it anyways." He looked up and laughed, the sound startling Noel. It was chilly and mirthless.
"Just like her sister, she was. If she could save the world, the consequences be damned. Her friends, her family, she would do anything to save them." He clenched a fist. "She sacrificed herself to save us, and – and – I don't blame you," he finished lamely, quietly, as if he didn't know quite what to say.
There were a few people in the wrong timelines that, when the gates all righted themselves, popped back up in the Academy Headquarters, and Sazh, Hope, and Noel stood stiffly as they waited for Snow's inevitable return. Bodies were tense as they finally saw him and pulled him aside.
Snow grinned at them immediately, his eagerness rolling off of him in waves. "Hope," he laughed, "you're all grown up!" He ruffled the now older man's silver hair before glancing at Sazh, his delight slowly wavering. "Sazh, old man, why the long face?" He met Noel's eyes last, and the faltering smile slid off his face like sludge. "What's going on?" he finally demanded. "What's going on? Where – where's Light? Serah? She's okay, right? Right?"
Noel began from the beginning, from the moment Caius left the Dying World to meeting Lightning in Valhalla and then Serah in New Bodhum, all the way to Caius using Noel's weapon against him and then, finally, to Serah's final vision.
Sazh had to look away. Tears slipped over his cheeks at the thought of such a bright young woman dying from such a cruel fate. Hope listened carefully to the story, his eyes downturned and a look of mourning etched onto his face.
Snow watched Noel intently, listening with his brows furrowed during his tale. He didn't speak a word. When Serah's fate was revealed to him, the three men witnessed something no one, not even his family at NORA, had ever seen: Snow crumbled like a child.
Noel learned something that day. Snow was a man of many facets. He played himself as a charming, charismatic man – full of smiles and laughter and talk of heroes. That day, he saw what that man, so strong and energetic and vibrant, was hiding underneath. All of his doubts, all of his insecurities, rose to the surface. The three men could only watch as Snow lost himself in his sorrow. Only so much could be done when a man loses the love of his life just when things finally begin to fall into place. Sazh attempted to comfort him; he had lost his wife and he, as a father, knew some degree as to how to console a crying boy, and that was exactly was Snow had been reduced to.
Noel, when interacting with a drunken Snow, typically listened only enough to hear the other man's husky voice. Snow's thoughts usually came out out of order, and Noel usually didn't think about this, but some nights Snow's life stories caught his interest, and the disjointed way Snow told them left Noel feeling more lost than he did before.
"I didn't know my folks," Snow mumbled once, sloshing his drink around before tossing it back. "Grew up in a Sanctum orphanage – tried not to let it get to me too much," he laughed. "I always told myself I'd have myself a big, happy family when I found the right woman. Told myself Serah was the one. I proposed to her after she told me she was a l'Cie, you know," he told Noel, nodding seriously. "Met Light a day later, and then one day after that we thought we lost Serah forever and then we got ourselves cursed.
"But I told myself," he backtracked, "I would find myself the right woman and we'd have a dozen kids, and I'd be there to watch them grow. I never had that." He paused.
"Did Hope ever tell you how we met?" he suddenly asked, his blue eyes burning into Noel's. When the dark haired man shook his head, Snow followed suit. "Hope doesn't like remembering it.
"I killed his mother," he stated. It was here that Noel's eyes widened and he began questioning Snow's alcohol levels. Still, he let Snow continue. "It's funny," the larger man said, "that my group was called NORA. His mom's name was Nora.
"I guess they must've been on Light's train, because it was one of the only ones that was busted open. There was a group of survivors hiding out, and we went over there to save them.
"So we get over there, and these survivors tell us they want to help fight," he choked out. "We would never have… we wouldn't have…" he faded off, eyes glazed over as he stared into the distance, envisioning the scene in his mind.
"It was a massacre," he finally uttered. "Hope's mom was one of the volunteers. She saved my life, you know. Every one of the other volunteers were dead, and I told her to stay put, but I couldn't reach my gun in time to get the machine, and so she grabbed the gun behind me and got it right in its eye before it killed me. She got hit right after."
Snow's eyes turned once again onto Noel's. "She told me 'moms are tough'." He laughed again, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. "Her last words were to 'get him home', but I didn't know who he was.
"Did you know Hope was on a mission to kill me in revenge? Such a strange thing, really – he's grown up so much since then," Snow muttered. "He had a knife on me and I was hanging from a ledge and everything." The light-haired man laughed. "You never met Hope when he was a kid, but we all knew him. He was hell-bent on killing me with that knife of Light's."
And then the man was laughing in earnest, but he was crying, too, and once more he switched topics. "I'm an orphan," he laughed, "and the only thing I wanted in life was to have a family, but family is – family means responsibility." The quiet tears still slipped from his eyes as the laughter slowly died. "I – I was such an idiot. I thought I could have a perfect wife and have a big family but I didn't think about – I didn't –" he stopped himself and finally brought a hand up to wipe his eyes.
"My life was saved by a woman who gave her life to save her son – and he's saved my life a dozen times over, and that same boy grew into a man who's saved the lives of an entire race. Having a family is all – is all smiles and sunshine, but you have to be willing to fight for them. And I couldn't fight for Serah," he wept. "Nora gave her life to save her son, and I couldn't for Serah, and now she's gone, and Lightning is gone – and I couldn't save any of them."
Noel sometimes recalled when he and Serah met Snow in the Sunleth Waterscape. He had hated the blonde brute for being so reckless, so careless. He hated Snow for diving headfirst into situations and not caring at all about what happened to those around him – or so it seemed.
When the Age of Chaos took hold of humanity, Noel saw a different man from the man at Sunleth Waterscape. He never left the frontlines, even after decades without any success. He pushed people to fight for something, even if it was a lost cause. But he seemed lost to himself, a glaze always in his eyes.
Noel would always remember what Snow himself said to him: "Seems to me, you and I are pretty much the same." When he recalled this, he couldn't help but to laugh at how adamantly he'd denied this. They were the same, he realized later. They both fell in love with a seeress, and neither could save them. The only difference was Noel had to be the one there when both of them died.
When he came into being in the New World, he found himself in a tribe. He knew them, had memories of growing up with them, and they knew him – some said they were even present when he was born – but he knew inside that something was wrong, that these memories were false, because he grew up in the Dying World.
He left them shortly after he awoke and made his way to where he knew, by some unknown knowledge, the nearest town was. From there he found the nearest city, and from there he sought the first bar. He couldn't place a finger on why that was the place to go – he just did.
A slight laugh escaped his lips when his eyes fell on the large blonde mass of Snow Villiers. It was a different Snow than he'd ever known – his blonde hair was tied down with a bandana and he wore jeans and flannel. This Snow also was behind the counter, and he was smiling down at a fair-haired woman sitting just across from him.
Noel took the seat next to the woman, eyes never straying from Snow, and when his icy blue eyes glanced over to meet his own he froze, and slowly a grin unfurled on his face.
"Well I'll be damned." The blonde whistled as he reached for a clean glass.
It was a stark contrast to the Snow Noel had gotten so used to on Bhunivelze. This Snow was the one he'd met on the Sunleth Waterscape, who was headstrong and cocky and unbearable.
"The Sunleth crew," Serah laughed beside Noel, her arms already wrapped around his neck in a warm hug, "together again," she breathed.
Noel chanced a look at Snow with Serah still embracing him, and the contented smile that Snow gave him said it all. Everything would be okay.
a/n: i have a lot of feelings about snow and how he and noel interact and haven't forgiven the writers for completely skipping out on their friendship in lightning returns (+novella). everything for snow revolves around serah and light, without even mentioning noel or hope, and there are so many possibilities about what happened after the end of XIII-2. there's 500 years and all we know is hope went missing after some 300 of them and snow and noel fell apart but like? i always wanted to know how noel would react to snow and hope's meeting and their travels as l'Cie? how snow would feel towards noel, considering noel IS the person who was last with serah (which IS touched on in the novels but not enough imo)? how would noel react to Operation Nora? how would he react to how snow was literally at the mercy of hope? like they are such similar characters but it's like everyone pretends it's one or the other when in comes to fanfiction, not both as friends. all of that plus my deep love for the snoel bro love fueled me to write this