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Elizabeth feels like the cold is all she has known for a thousand years, perhaps more. Lightless black wraps around her, heat-absorbing suffocating all consuming black that claws itself behind her eyes and sinks into her bones. It is an icy, biting cold, and she cannot move. Her body does not clench up and shiver as she knows it should. Her heart does not beat faster, her arteries continue to deliver blood to her skin where it feels like her capillaries might freeze over.
She wants to set herself on fire. There are many, many words to describe what Elizabeth Rose Bloodflame has felt over the course of her life, but not one of those words could have been cold. Insane , certainly, and angry and distant and less than human, but never cold . She wants to be thrown into magma. She wants to let her skin turn to ash so her flesh can finally touch the heat of the earth and know warmth, she wants the sun to come back and eat her whole. She wants to burn in hell. Hell must be better than this .
But there is nothing, and she is cold.
Her fingers curl in on themselves almost instinctively, gripping the handle of a gun that isn’t there, because fighting is the only thing she knows how to do. She wants to shoot herself. She wants to die. Is this what death feels like? It’s nothing like she imagined.
Distantly, she remembers feeling life-blood-heat draining into unfeeling earth as she holds some poor man by the throat, pressing her hands to his skin trying to feel the warmth pour out of him like a lion chasing prey. Perhaps she’s known what death has felt like all along.
She’s losing feeling in her fingers. In her hands, her feet. She has a sudden horrible image flash through her mind, that they might somehow fall off. Struggling against the deadened sense of her muscles she curls in on herself, pathetic and alone, trying to save whatever body heat is left. Her arms wrap numbly around her knees and she presses her chin to her chest, and finally, she starts to shake.
Please, she wants to whisper, were her lips not too insensate to move, stop, stop, please.
There is nothing to answer but silence.
Elizabeth wakes up, gasping, the blue light of winter morning spilling into her eyes. She lays on the sterile tile floor, curled in fetal position and staring emptily into the air. She hears someone talk and doesn’t care to process their words.
Her head hurts, horribly so. That isn’t new. The doctors had mumbled something over her half-conscious body, her mind delirious from the anesthetic, about miracles and curses. They had left her with a numbly throbbing feeling in her skull and a clear view of dirtied medical instruments at her bedside, wet and shining and pinkish-brown. She can’t remember a time she’d felt sick looking at blood until then.
Collecting herself, she sits up. Her cell has two windows; one high up on the wall with thick, rusty bars that let in what she assumes is sunlight, and one barely large enough to put her hand through, set in the middle of a heavy steel door. At some point her breakfast had been slipped in, stale bread and cold milk and some kind of horribly greasy meat, with a banana that looks less ripe than her will to live. She picks up the bread delicately and stares at it, holding back the urge to throw up.
Someone knocks. She doesn’t answer. They knock again, and she manages a quiet groan, “What do you want.”
The rough voice of a guard says, “You have a visitor, Bloodflame.”
She pauses for a moment, trying to think past the fog that clouds her mind, then goes completely still. There is only one person left in this world who knows her name and thinks of it fondly.
“Tell her I will see her immediately.”
“You are not allowed to see her. She has left you a message, which I have been instructed to read to you, and that will be all.”
Elizabeth bites her lip in frustration. “Fine. Read it.”
The guard clears his voice with a kind of self importance that she wants to violently rip out of his body. “Last night I ate dinner alone. When the police pulled you away, your gun had six shots left, and they nearly emptied all six into your chest, they had it aimed right above your left breast pocket, had you not thrashed around the way you did and forced them to drop it and tackle you to the ground. I would invite you to eat dinner with me tonight, to cure me of my loneliness, if you were willing and able to consent.” He laughs, horrible and grating. “You have such interesting friends.”
Elizabeth pauses, processing this, then when the realization comes she has to hide a wild grin. “She has always been…rather eccentric.”
There is the distinct sound of tearing paper, painfully and deliberately slow, and she wants nothing more at the moment than to wrap her hands around his neck and squeeze until air and blood burst from his throat in a glorious explosion of catharsis. She settles for dragging a singular ragged nail across the floor, imagining the blade of a knife drawing across his throat. But it doesn't matter. She looks away from the windows and smiles, secretly, to herself.
Oh, my clever little raven, what would I do without you?
That night she does not sleep. She waits for her change of clothes to be sent in and carefully dons the baggy, unflattering uniform of a prisoner. She waits for the lights to turn off outside. She crawls into bed, the mattress thin and cold beneath her, and wriggles under the blanket with her front to the wall. She feels carefully in the left breast pocket, a small, sad thing designed solely for inmates to keep small tokens like notes from family or scraps of food. And just as she expects, her fingers brush against the smooth, cold metal of something she knows far too well.
Six bullets, exactly six.
She laughs softly. I’m going to give that woman my life one day.
Like clockwork, as she hears the bell of some city church chime out the hour, there’s a thump and a rattle outside her door. Metal clanks against metal, and there’s a small noise as a key finds a lock and turns. Her prison door swings open, the keys and a guard dropped unceremoniously on the floor before it, and the only culprit to be seen is a flash of blue that disappears down a corner further down the corridor.
She kicks the unconscious guard aside, revealing a familiar gun with even more familiar letters carved into it, red and blue on black. She smiles, picks it up. Loads it, spins it in her hand and sighs at how close the weight feels to home. Then she chases after her savior, stumbling slightly when her head throbs in pain at the sudden activity, but continuing on nonetheless. There is a muffled shout somewhere ahead of her, then silence. The halls get a little wider, they’re coming close to the front lobby now—
She hears one, two, three consecutive shots ring out, and the third one leaves her skull buzzing. She emerges into a large open room where security guards are already gathering, but there is no fear in her eyes when she raises her gun and cocks it. Five more shots, clean and precise, and five men fall sideways, clutching at their stomachs. Three others freeze, one after another, then collapse to their knees as blood seeps through their uniforms and stains the floor. Someone is screaming. Multiple people, actually. Alarms are blaring. But all Elizabeth has eyes for is the tall, elegant woman before her, with a bloodied knife and enchanting smile, staring back with all the adoration and longing in the world. Nerissa throws the doors open and drags her lover outside, and Elizabeth tastes fresh air for the first time in months.
The first thing she does is lose her breakfast all over the pavement. The gun in her hand clatters to the ground, and she staggers to regain her footing.
“I love you,” Nerissa says breathlessly, scooping up the gun as she shoves Liz into a seemingly random car by the street, though knowing this cunning woman it’s most definitely not random. “ I love you .”
“I love you too,” Elizabeth mutters, swallowing the taste of acid in her mouth, fumbling for the seatbelt. “I—”
Nerissa starts the engine and hits the gas pedal all in one smooth motion, and the car nearly throws both of them forward into the windshield. She smiles, manic and familiar and beautiful. “Have a nap, darling. I’ll take it from here.”
And almost like magic, Elizabeth passes out.
It’s cold again, worse than before. Indescribably so. But this time is different, if only by a little, in that she can see her own body. She can see how her fingers turn white and blue and gray at the edges, and she can see how violently her body is trembling. It is with a tired yet determined sort of anger that she clenches her fists, ignoring how her knuckles crack and her skin breaks dryly open. Her blood looks almost black in this lighting as it bubbles up then freezes as it reaches the surface, and it feels like she’s invited the cold directly into her veins.
She closes her eyes with struggle, frost flaking from her eyelashes. Her head pounds, the darkness almost seems to wrap around her skull and squeeze with a vengeance and she wants to scream, but her jaw is too numb and her throat feels as though it’s torn open and bleeding.
Suddenly she’s aware of the taste of iron in the back of her mouth and she feels her stomach convulse. She sees, in her mind, herself retching, watery pink-brown sickness rising up her esophagus and—
There’s nothing but acid in her stomach to throw up, sour and acrid and disgusting. She coughs and immediately regrets it, as cold floods down her trachea the moment she opens her mouth and settles itself in her lungs, gnawing and heavy.
She would do anything, anything , at this moment, to be alive again for two seconds longer. Just so she can know what it feels like to not sink into the void of death and carve it into her brain, so she can remember what it feels like to live.
Elizabeth wakes up to the cold still not having gone away. It’s dark when she opens her eyes, and she can’t feel her fingers. For a moment, she wants to go insane, she wants to claw her way out of this dream, she wants to tear herself and everything around her apart. But slowly she grows conscious of soft linen against her skin, the residual warmth of another body beside her, the soft breathing. She rolls over, blinking blearily, and sees the outline of her partner beneath the sheets, sleeping soundly as ever.
She’s still cold, though. The more she tries to ignore it the stronger the feeling is, of suffocating heavy air in her chest and numb fingers, her limbs shivering without end. She buries herself in the blankets, wrapping them tightly around herself. She rubs her arms, her hands, trying desperately to spark some heat from the friction, she curls into a ball and squeezes her eyes shut, but nothing helps. The frigid embrace of winter curls around her body and sinks its hands into her skin, pushing past dermis and meat and settling in her bones.
She opens her eyes again, and realizes with some difficulty that she’s crying. She blinks, once, suddenly aware of the tears blurring her vision.
The tears are cold, too. They streak down her face, cutting an icy path over her cheek, and she doesn’t have the strength or will to reach up and brush them away.
She hates this. She hates this so desperately. She wants to boil and feel herself melt away and evaporate. She wants to crawl into a furnace and curl up on the coals until they strip her flesh from her bones.
She wants to burn .
Frustrated, she throws the blankets violently aside. A hazy idea surfaces at the edges of her sleep-addled aching mind and she stumbles to her feet, the smooth lacquered hardwood floor freezing beneath her with winter night air. This house, though she’d been kept from it for a while, is still her home. Allowing muscle memory to guide her, she feels her way along the wall with fingers rendered insensate by cold, and makes her way to the bathroom.
Half-dazed, she reaches for the shower knob with hands coated in ice and cranks it as far as she can, and cold mist hits her forearm as the water begins to run. She flinches back, gritting her teeth, and rubs at her skin as though treating frostbite, but the cold has already found its way into her veins. She wants to rip her heart out and bury it in the core of the earth.
Elizabeth catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, already fogging up with vapor, her face haggard and rough, shoulders trembling, skin and bone strung up in a mockery of someone she doesn’t think she can be anymore. She glares at her reflection with all the bitterness and hatred her heart can muster, and her reflection returns it all tenfold.
She looks away.
Her shudders grow more and more violent, and she feels as though her knees might give way beneath her. She hesitates for a fraction of a second before stripping her simple sleeping gown from her body, and almost regrets it as the cold nips at her bare back and stomach and legs. Like moth to flame she clambers inelegantly into the shower and stands beneath the burning water, her face tilted up to greet it.
The temperature is shocking, painful, even, but she doesn’t so much as wince. Her skin sets itself on fire, and it’s the first time she’s felt alive for a long, long time.
Nerissa wakes up to the sound of running water.
She blinks sleepily, rubbing at her eyes, and sits up. The alarm clock at her bedside blinks back at her, 4:32 A.M. , and she squints at it. That’s strange. Elizabeth wakes up early sometimes, but not this early. And after last night, with the prison, the fighting, she would have thought…
Her jaw clenches slightly as she realizes something is wrong. She slips out of bed, her eyes already scanning the room as she takes the knife that she’d been gifted a lifetime ago from beneath her pillow. The blankets on Elizabeth’s side of the bed are ruffled and disorderly, and the feeling of unease escalates to something closer to fear. She screams internally at herself for falling asleep right after the jailbreak, had she not promised herself to remain vigilant—
That’s not important. She makes her way to the bathroom as quickly and quietly as she can, and exhales softly, calculating her next move. There is little chance of the police having followed them, she’s made plenty sure of that, and if it were the police then they would not have turned on the shower of all things. It’s probably just Liz, she reasons to herself, but that still doesn’t answer why she’s up showering at this ungodly hour of morning.
Steeling herself, Nerissa holds her breath and knocks.
There’s no response. The water keeps running. But the door swings open easily, and the light inside is on.
“Liz?” She asks softly.
Silence.
Nerissa bites her lip, thinking, then pushes her way into the bathroom. As soon as she steps in she is hit with a wall of near-suffocating heat and vapor, and she holds back a choked cough. “Liz? Are you alright?”
Still nothing.
She blinks through the mist and sees the shower curtain left half-open, a pool of water already forming on the floor. She could really care less about the mess as she hurries a little closer, her concern spiking.
Elizabeth sits on the floor of the shower, knees hugged to her chest. Her eyes are hollow, and Nerissa shivers slightly at the sight; there are many words that could describe her beloved, but hollow had never been one of them.
“Liz?” Nerissa asks again, cautiously, and when she gets no response she furrows her brow. She reaches over to touch Elizabeth on the shoulder, but when the water hits her hand she draws back with a suppressed yelp. Good lord , that’s burning . Suddenly she notices the red blossoming across Elizabeth’s skin and her eyes widen, and immediately she turns the shower off. “ Liz, are you with me —”
Elizabeth begins to shake. Rocking, full-body tremors with chattering teeth, and Nerissa doesn’t know what to do. She presses her hand to Elizabeth’s neck and the skin beneath the drops of warm water is…so, so cold.
Oh, gods .
“Come with me, love,” Nerissa mutters, pulling her own bathrobe off to wrap around Elizabeth, holding her partner tightly around the shoulders and pulling her to her feet. Elizabeth all but collapses at her touch and Nerissa can’t help but notice how light her Scarlet Queen feels now, how weak and shaky and unsure. She wants to tear someone apart with her teeth.
That’s a concern for later. She pushes the anger and worry from her mind and drags Liz out of the bathroom, back to the bed. She turns the heater on, pulls out the extra blankets she saves for colder nights, and wraps Liz up in them as snugly as she can manage.
“You’ll be okay,” she murmurs, half to Elizabeth, half to herself, “you’ll be okay.”
The digital clock reads 5:16 A.M. when Liz first speaks again. Her voice is weak and gravelly and quiet. “Nerissa.”
“Yes, darling?”
“You.” Elizabeth wets her lips, seemingly struggling for words. “You came back.” It doesn’t sound happy, or proud, or like anything, really. Just a statement of fact.
“Of course I did.”
“Why?”
Nerissa doesn’t know what to say. She opens her mouth, and feels something in her chest shatter all over again, just the way it had when she’d watched Elizabeth’s body fall the first time. “Because you’re everything to me. Because I love you.”
Liz looks at her partner, blank and uncomprehending. She reaches out one shaky hand, clenching her teeth against how the exposure to open air almost overwhelms her with cold all over again, a silent question, and Nerissa responds by moving closer. Elizabeth’s fingers make contact with her raven’s neck and she shivers, but otherwise stays still. Those cold fingers trace delicately up her throat to her chin, following the line of her jaw and brushing over her cheek.
“You’re real,” Elizabeth croaks, as if trying to convince herself. “You’re alive.”
“ You’re alive. You’re alive, Liz.”
“I wish I wasn’t,” she laughs mirthlessly, eyes devoid of feeling. “Dying is the easy part, Nerissa, that’s the part I never told you, but I feel like you knew that already.”
“I—”
“How many times did you tell yourself that you would kill for me? How many times did you say you would die for me?”
“Countless, Liz, countless times, but—”
“Exactly,” Elizabeth murmurs, and Nerissa feels her lover’s thumb brush a stray strand of hair away from her face. “My raven, did you ever tell yourself you would live for me instead?”
Nerissa doesn’t have a reply.
“It’s my fault, really,” Liz continues when the silence drags on for a second too long. “I do have to apologize. You were good. I took your heart and I twisted it.” She pauses, as though chewing on her next words, then pronounces with audible difficulty, “I’m sorry.”
Nerissa wordlessly reaches up to touch Elizabeth’s hand, but Elizabeth flinches away, retracting her arm back beneath the blankets.
“I should have been the one to die for you.” Liz’s voice is barely above a whisper now. “It would have been my final apology. I should have died and you should have let me go. You are good, Nerissa, but I was made twisted. You were never meant to share my vileness and my insanity. If I died it would be one stain washed clean from your life, at least. It would have been a step in the right direction.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“It’s not true.”
“I had months alone in the hospital to think, Nerissa, and there wasn’t a minute that passed that I didn’t wish I were dead.”
“Oh god, Liz. Please. Please don’t say that.”
“Why—”
“I can’t lose you a second time.”
“You’re right. It should have been finished the first time around.”
“Well— no, Liz, no . I— when I find that godforsaken Ceres Fauna— I’ll kill her, Liz, I’ll kill her for you, I’ll make it hurt and—”
“No,” Elizabeth cuts in, and Nerissa looks her in the eyes for the first time. There’s something there that’s almost afraid. Almost. “Don’t. Don’t kill anyone for me. Promise you won’t. If I want someone dead I’ll do it myself.”
“But—”
“I don’t want to see more blood on your hands because of me.”
“But she hurt you, she nearly killed you—”
“ I hurt you, don’t you see,” and it’s a certain kind of agony in her voice that can’t quite be put to words. A certain kind of horror that comes from somewhere deep in the chest. “God, don’t you see, I did this to you, I—” Elizabeth chokes something back, and if Nerissa didn’t know better she would have thought it was a sob. “I want to die, truly and properly this time, my love, please. Don’t let me haunt you. Don’t bring me back.”
Nerissa pauses. Her eyes harden. “I’m going to get you some water,” she says resolutely. “Stay here.”
Elizabeth falls asleep at some point while the kettle is boiling. Nerissa pours out two glasses of hot water and sets them both on the nightstand, then climbs back in bed. Liz shifts a little, alerted by the sudden weight settling on the mattress beside her, and her eyes flutter open.
“How do you feel?” Nerissa asks.
“Cold,” Elizabeth replies quietly. She licks her lips dryly, trying to form another sentence. “It was cold. So cold. When I.”
When I died for you. The sentence goes unfinished, suspended between them like the moon as it eclipses the sun, but they both know how it ends.
Nerissa moves a little closer, raising her once-soft now-calloused hands to hold Liz’s face. There’s a small flinch, then stillness. “Does this make it better?”
Elizabeth swallows, and nods.
Nerissa presses a small, feather-light kiss to her lover’s forehead, then crawls into the blankets to hold her closer. Liz leans into the softness like a wounded animal, her body curled in on itself and still shaking, if only slightly.
“I love you,” Nerissa whispers with all the passion her breath allows. “And you’re going to fucking live, if not for yourself then for me, do you understand?”
Elizabeth exhales heavily. “Only if you do the same for me, my raven.”
“You’re going to be the death of me, my love.”
“I hope I’m not.”