Snow always reminded Verbena of Taehyung because of how much he hated it.

Having just gotten off a eight and a half hour shift, Verbena was not looking forward to trying to shovel her car out enough to drive through the snowstorm home. As it was, she'd already been working away at getting her tires unburied for the last half hour with a snow brush from her trunk. Eventually she let the snow brush lean against her car as she crouched down to start moving the snow with her hands; acting like a dog unearthing a bone.

Verbena and Taehyung had attended the same university in Seoul. Taehyung found her fascinating, wondering why a young lady from Maine would fly all the way to Seoul to attend college. He kept calling her exotic and his fascination with her and the way she lived in Maine with all that snow was what led to their close friendship. The friendship only lasted while they attended the university though. When they graduated, Taehyung was offered an internship at an up and coming research institution and Verbena - who barely had any money left to survive on - had to leave Seoul. Taehyung had offered to try to help her monetarily, but she didn't want to stress him out. The internship he had been given was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

They had ultimately left each other after four years of a close friendship with the promise to FaceTime with one another and stay in touch. It had held true for a while, but then - about a year or so since they had seen each other in person - the calls became fewer and far between until they were non-existent at all. Now here Verbena was thinking about Taehyung again; a man she hadn't heard from now in two years.

"He would just love this weather," she muttered under her shuttering breath.

Standing up when she thought her tires were mostly unburied, she clambered into her car. On days like this, it felt like a mobile coffin. It felt like if you were to accidentally come to a standstill, you'd be buried alive under the snow with heat and good music. She put her snow brush down on the floor on the passenger side of the vehicle as she slammed the driver door behind her. She was shaking and her gloves were soaked through. Verbena wanted to do nothing more than sit and unthaw some, but she also wanted to get home at the same time.

As she turned her wipers on and watched the snow being swept away only to be quickly replaced, she still couldn't get Taehyung off her mind. She had never gotten as close to a man before outside her family. Men in general had never treated her kindly. Even though Taehyung was absolutely brilliant and breathtakingly handsome, he had treated her - a nobody with mousy hair from a barely existent speck on a map - like she was a queen. Verbena couldn't help but to get her emotions tied up in their friendship and found herself hoping that someday maybe she would be more to him than just a friend. So far that day hadn't come, and it looked like it never would. Though Verbena tried not to be heartbroken like that, she knew Taehyung deserved better than her. He would just be someone that got away.

Shifting the car into drive, Verbena started the sloth like drive home. Visibility was horrible during the drive, leaving Verbena to chug along the slick roads at three miles an hour if that. The commute from her work to her small home that usually took her about twenty minutes took her instead an hour. As she turned into her driveway - trying her best to avoid the mailbox at the end - the snow just kept whipping and funneling about her vehicle. It made her house practically invisible to her as if it disappeared behind a sheet like some sort of horrible magician trick.

When she could see the wooden front steps of her house, she stopped her car. It ground to a heaving stop in the pile of snow outside. As she shut the car off, Verbena made sure her face was covered before grabbing up her purse and trudging outside to brave the storm once more. This was definitely a nor'easter like they had forecasted.

Locking the car, she kept her face tucked down into her scarf as her eyes tracked the ground to find the steps. It only took three steps to get up on to the slightly elevated deck. From there it was only a few more steps forward towards the door. Digging a key out of her pocket, she unlocked the door before pushing inside and shutting the door behind her; keeping the ferocious storm outside where it belonged.

Reaching out a hand to flick on the light switch, Verbena was able to immediately light the interior of most of her small cabin like house in the middle of the woods. It wasn't much, but to her it was home. Off to her immediate right was what consisted of the kitchen. It had a small countertop stove wedged between a sink on the left and a small expanse of counter on the right. Next to the end of the counter was a thrumming white fridge. The kitchen was laid out in an open planned way, ebbing into the small floor space where there was a small table set up with two chairs. Beyond that was the living room. There was a wood stove for heat off near the far wall. A television was mounted on the wall above a fireplace; a couch placed a little ways away from it where she normally spent most of her evenings. Off to Verbena's left was a short hallway. Two bedrooms laid off to the right; one used as a room to sleep in and another for her walk in closet. On the left of the hall was a bathroom and a coat closet.

Verbena felt like her home felt like a shoebox in many ways. It was snug and compact. It was much smaller than homes she had grown up in all along, but she liked it. It was cozy enough for her, especially on days like this when it snowed. Verbena made quick work of shedding her wet winter clothes, hanging them on hooks by the door to dry before wandering off into her spare room to find lounge clothes to wear. Once she changed, she went out to the kitchen to start preparing supper. She could see out the window above the kitchen sink that the storm hadn't let up in the slightest and didn't seem to have any plans to do so anytime soon.

In Verbena's search in the kitchen, she found a can of chicken noodle soup in the cupboard. Digging out a pan, she decided that soup sounded good on a snowy night. As she warmed it up and thought about how she was going to spend her evening, she heard a knock at the door. She figured that it wasn't anything, and was more than likely some sort of branch knocking against the side of the house. It wasn't until she heard the knocking again that she stopped what she was doing. She turned the burner on the stovetop down before walking over to the door.

Tugging open the door just as they knocked at it again, she was shocked to see that standing on her doorstep in the middle of the storm was none other than Kim Taehyung.

"Taehyung?"

"I'm...I'm not...I'm not Taehyung," he said through chattering teeth.

Verbena had no idea why he would say that. She knew who she was seeing in front of her. There wasn't time to argue though. The man was clearly shivering so much that she was sure he'd create a mini earthquake if she let him continue to stay out there.

"Well come in. You need to come in where it's warm."

He nodded his head as he slipped inside; Verbena shutting the door behind him. As he stood on her welcome mat, he took a sniff of the air.

"What's that smell?"

"It's my supper," said Verbena as she walked off back into the kitchen. "Would you like some?"

"Yes please," he said.

Verbena nodded, unable to say anything since her mind was a constant whirl of questions. She hadn't seen this man in years, and now here he was on her doorstep in the middle of a Nor'easter without warning. It didn't make sense to her. She had a ton of questions and not a lot of answers. All she knew for sure was that now she had to prepare two bowls of chicken noodle soup.

Within minutes, she had two place settings set at the small table. In front of each chair was a bowl of hot soup, a spoon, and some water.

"Taehyung, come have a seat and eat. Then we can talk."

She took a seat at the table as she said this, looking towards the door to see that he was coming her way. Before he sat down, he held out a folded piece of paper towards her.

"What's this?"

"It's for you," he said in reply.

She took it with an arched brow, setting it down in front of her as he took a seat across from her.

"What's in the letter?"

"An explanation," he said, "Because I swear I'm not Taehyung."

She looked away from him again as she focused her gaze upon the letter that was now resting on the table. She stared at it without touching her own soup and was still debating whether to open it or not when a sound made her look up.

"Ow! Ow! Oh! This is hot!"

Verbena lifted her eyes from the folded letter she had been staring at to the man seated at the table across from her. He was furrowing his brows as he stared at the bowl of hot soup she had given to him. She figured that he might like it on a cold day, especially with how frozen he looked. She didn't know how long he'd been standing out in the snow. All she could tell was that it had been a while judging by his bright red face and ear tip. The yellow and plaid jacket he had on over a white turtleneck looked like it had been more of a sponge against the elements outside than anything else. The gray gloves he was wearing were thin and were the kind where the tips of the fingers were exposed. She could see them shaking slightly as he reached out towards the bowl again, trying to grab it up with his fingers with the same ending result.

"Ow!"

"It's soup. What are you trying to do?"

He looked up at her with those familiar yet unfamiliar doe brown eyes. It pained her to see them.

"It looks like a liquid, so I'm trying to pick this up to drink from it. I mean, aren't you supposed to drink liquids?"

Verbena sighed as she reached across the table to grab the spoon that rested on the napkin. She held it in front of his face. His eyes fixated themselves on it, looking at his reflection in the warped surface.

"What you have in front of you is soup, and this is a spoon. You use this to eat soup."

He took it from her hands after her small spiel, holding the spoon in both hands before trying to dig into it the soup like it was a shovel digging a hole. Sighing again, she got up from where she was seated, dragging her chair around the table to sit beside him.

"Give me the spoon."

He looked over at her and gave it over without question. She spooned some of the soup up before bringing it towards his mouth.

"It might still be a little hot, but it shouldn't burn your mouth."

He trusted her completely, opening his mouth like a baby bird did for their mother. She watched his lips close around the spoon before he let out a hum.

"Oh this is good!" he said as he swallowed it; his eyes lighting up. "What's the chunky stuff in the liquid?"

"Potatoes, chicken, maybe celery."

"Can I have more please?"

She nodded, spooning up some more and feeding it to him. She kept doing that for a few minutes before pausing so he could have a drink.

"How old are you exactly?" she asked as he put the glass back down on the table.

"Twenty-six I think," he said as he looked down at himself as if doing so would tell him his age.

Twenty-six would make sense to Verbena. That would be the age he would be. She still half suspected this might be some big elaborate joke on his part.

"And you're seriously going to sit here and continue the act that you're not my former best friend, Kim Taehyung?"

"I'm really not him," said the man in front of her; his dark brown hair kissing the tips of his reddened ears and frost-tipped eyelashes as he lifted his head to look back over at her. "And former best friend? He spoke so highly of you that I just assumed..."

"What's your name?" Verbena asked next, immediately cutting him off.

"All the questions you're asking can be answered in that letter I gave you; in the letter Taehyung wrote," said the man as he nodded his head at the letter she had left folded on the other side of the table. "Don't you want to read it?"

"I want the answer to come from your mouth," she said. "What is your name?"

Besides looking like the best friend she had lost touch with after university had ended, the man before her hadn't told her his name. All he had done was insist over and over again that he wasn't Taehyung, but that he had been sent by him.

"My name is V."

She looked at him; her eyes springing with tears at his answer. V looked over at her, looking concerned at her reaction to the name.

Maybe she really had meant as much to Taehyung as he had to her.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just...V was what he used to call me. That was his nickname for me since Verbena was too unusual for him to say over and over again."

V smiled softly before grabbing up the napkin on the table to wipe away the tears running down her cheeks. The man didn't know how to eat soup, but he knew how to wipe away tears. Of course.

"Where is Taehyung?" she asked. "I know I can read the letter. I just...I want to hear it from you. Start from the beginning, please?"

Even before V opened his mouth to begin his story, Verbena could already tell she wouldn't like what he'd have to say.