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Serval doesn’t recognize Cocolia.
It can’t be her, this monstrosity, this thing that lurches and shivers with ice, it can’t be her Cocolia, it can’t. She recoils in horror as it reaches out towards her, a trembling thing that’s more claw than hand. A broken ring falls from the fingers, glinting in the snow, and Serval’s stomach drops alongside it.
“You kept it,” she says, not daring to pick it up in case it’s not the same but she knows it is, she’d recognize that ring from across the room if Cocolia had ever let her in. Ten years. Ten years! And she kept it.
Serval feels sick to her stomach. Who does that? Who keeps the engagement ring she never even wore when they were together, so cagey and cautious about their relationship being public, being known, who keeps it and wears it for a decade underneath her glove? Who would be so cruel in love?
The creature that absolutely, definitely is Cocolia staggers, wounds oozing dark liquid. She won’t last. She will die on her knees in front of Serval revealing this and Serval won’t even have the time to be angry at her, not like she deserves, and it could be enough to kill her too. A part of her soul and heart is withering alongside Cocolia and there's nothing she can do to stop the blood flow. Even as she dies, Cocolia finds a way to hook herself in Servalia and take her heart with.
Cocolia groans, the ice crystals that are her body crumbling as she does. Serval snaps out of her petrified stupor and comes to her side, hands stinging from how cold her body is to touch, but she perseveres because she can't do anything else. Helping Cocolia down on the ground is an ordeal, her body collapsing and shattering as they do, her breath a wheezing whistle. Underneath the ice, there’s a glimpse of her. A sliver remaining.
Serval lies down next to her, pressing herself close even as it hurts, jagged icicles tearing at her clothing and digging into her soft flesh.
“You really ruined something in me,” Serval whispers, cupping Cocolia’s face. It’s imperfect and painful but she’s out of time and she wants what she can’t have: a nice apartment in a quiet neighborhood, late breakfasts on Sundays, tangled limbs in the bed, Cocolia complaining that she never refills the soap dispenser. A sweet little life together.
But this is all she gets: a final, freezing kiss. It stings her lips, it wounds her, it’s never going to heal her.
"You ruined me," Serval repeats, but it's not true, not quite. She ruined herself never letting go, digging and scraping around inside herself for a decade to try and make sense of Cocolia's heart, and here at the end of her life Cocolia manages to undo every fumbling step to move on Serval has taken.
She closes her eyes as she feels Cocolia die, holding on to her until there’s nothing left. Her mind flashes through the life they should have had again and again, the sunlight slanting in over their bed, the sheets warm as skin, the kitchen a mess neither deal with. She feels the body breaking apart, the ice burning her skin, eyes screwed shut so tight as she repeats the images: warm light, soft sheets, fingers entwined, closed-mouth kisses on the jaw because Cocolia loathes her morning breath because when she lets go, that’s it, that's the rest of her life she has to live until the day she can beg Bronya to carve her name on the same tombstone as Cocolia.