'Tis the Damn Season

Author's note: I got this idea from this song on Taylor Swift's new album Evermore. The appearance of the school and the memories are fiction--I don't think they all actually were that close back then, but it worked for this story. Hope you enjoy!

Kitee, Finland; December 26, 2006

If I wanted to know who you were hanging with

While I was gone, I would've asked you

It's the kind of cold, fogs up windshield glass

But I felt it when I passed you

There's an ache in you, put there by the ache in me

But if it's all the same to you

It's the same to me

Tarja hated the day after Christmas. Everything seemed so quiet, so empty, after the festivities of the day before. Just yesterday, the snow falling outside had seemed magical as she had watched it from inside the living room, singing Christmas carols with her father and brothers by the crackling fire.

Now, she trudged through the fresh snow with the afternoon winter sunlight beating down on her, wondering how it could possibly look so bleak. She walked past a house where a man was on a ladder in the driveway, pulling down a strand of lights and rolling them over a plastic claw. The unlit multicolored bulbs looked pale and washed out in the light.

Marcelo had left early that morning to go back to Argentina for work, but she had decided to stay in Finland for a bit longer. There was something about being back in her hometown that always brought her peace, which was something she was in desperate need of.

She continued walking down the winding road, pulling her scarf farther up as the sharp cold bit at her neck and face. After a while, the familiar path widened onto the entrance to the music school of Central Carelia, where she, as well as the other members of Nightwish, had studied when they were young. She hadn't been consciously thinking about where she was going when she was walking, but she wasn't surprised to find herself there.

Being back in Kitee always made her nostalgic for those years when, even though they hadn't been the happiest for her, the world had seemed wide open and everything had been so simple. And nowhere was the nostalgia stronger than right here.

The wooden building was covered with snow, and the large windows framing the main door were dark, but it was still the same as she remembered it. If she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend she was a young girl again, carrying her bag full of sheet music over her shoulder as she walked into the main hall. She could almost hear the orchestras playing and the sound of Professor Dimov's low, gentle voice with his Bulgarian accent, explaining a section of music to her.

And suddenly she wished, more than anything, to go back to those days. Before the media circus the past year had been. Before the fallout. Before Nightwish's rise to fame, before that day Tuomas had asked her if she wanted to sing for his band. Before any of it. Back to when no one had known their names, and they were just kids with dreams.

"It hasn't changed much, has it?"

A familiar voice jolted her out of her thoughts, and she jumped before turning toward the sound to find Tuomas leaning against a nearby tree, a shy smile on his face.

She blinked once to make sure she wasn't imagining him. "What--what are you doing here?"

He pushed himself off the tree trunk and took a step closer to her. "Same thing as you, I'd imagine. Reminiscing. Thinking about the good old days. You know."