Author: Christi
Spoilers: Lost City Part I
and II
---
She comes to visit me.
I don’t know how she
manages it, seeing as I’m currently frozen deep in the heart of
At first, it was to run
tests. She’d come and purposely not look at me as she bustled about, taking her
little samples and poking around with the wiring on this thing. And at first, I
was relieved to see her, because if anyone can get me out of this charming
little ice prison I’ve managed to get myself into, it’s her.
But unfortunately, when
you’re frozen in a big block of ice, you have a lot of time to think. It’s not
really like you can do anything else-I mean, most of the knowledge of the Ancients
is gone by now, it just sort of…left me. So I don’t even have that to entertain
myself, and I’m stuck, not moving or breathing or being, just thinking.
Can you think of anyone
worse to be trapped inside his own head?
But see, it was OK,
because I knew it was just until she came to visit and poking around and trying
to figure things out. I could watched her and not have to be all alone, not
anymore. But that damn thinking got in the way again, you see.
Because time passed. I
don’t know how much time-it seems interminable, but it would when you’re playing
the part of ice cube. And she still came, without fail, but I was still in my
head, and I looked at her…and saw too much.
The shadows under her
eyes, the skin stretched across her too gaunt figure. The desperation in her
eyes when she glanced my way-something she had avoided at first but that was
happening more and more each time she came.
And it was getting worse.
She kept trying, kept
running her tests, but it was slower now, because she knew that she didn’t know
how to fix this. But she couldn’t seem to stop, and now I’m standing here
trapped behind a layer of ice, wishing she would.
She’s my only company in
the world, but I wish she’d stop coming.
Because seeing her like
this is worse than not seeing her at all.
I wish I could talk to
her, just for a minute. Tell her to go, give up. Go back to Pete, who we both
know was just a distraction, someone to keep you from doing something stupid
with me, but who’s actually a decent guy and at least has a normal body
temperature. Go anywhere, do anything, just get that haunted look out of your
eyes. I know that look, I saw it in the mirror every day before I met you, and
it’s a scary thing.
But she keeps coming.
The tests get shorter and
shorter, because by now they’re just a pretense to get her here. She does them
quickly because she knows they won’t make any difference, and then she comes
and she stares at me, and her eyes are so hollow that it hurts my frozen heart.
She touches the ice and I can almost feel her fingers against my cheek and it’s
too much, too hard, and she shouldn’t be wasting herself down here, not for me.
But she is, and she sits
there and she cries and something in me shatters-it’s too cold to just break.