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Ice Castles
by BJ
I look outside and can’t suppress a shiver…
This has got to work.
It took months of planning. The idea actually came to me as I was sitting by the pool on the hottest day of the summer. How I got it was the weirdest part of all.
The Ice cube spent about twenty minutes clearing his throat, and kicking ice cubes into the pool before he found the courage to speak to me.
He was worried about Remy.
The Ice cube.
He sat down and talked quietly, and for the first time in as long as I’ve known him the boy showed some maturity. He told me that he happened to catch the elevator to the lower levels with Remy the day before. His voice dropped to a near whisper, he said he was shocked to see a hint of…he paused, and I had to promise not to kill him before he continued. He said Remy moved casually away from him, but it was in his eyes… he said he saw a hint of fear.
At first I laughed.
Remy’s not afraid of anyone in that joint. He could literally take down any of them with a thought. That Empathy of his is some powerful stuff. I know; I made him use it on me. I needed to know that he could handle himself again. He was nearly dead when he finally returned.
Not physically, though it took him months to get his wind back after… I mean mentally. He’d been wounded to the core when they turned their backs on him and walked away. It shattered something deep inside him. He’d let himself believe he had a family again, and a home where he was welcome. They never even looked back, THAT’S what nearly killed him. But Iceman wasn’t laughing and it hit me suddenly; Remy wasn’t afraid of him, he was afraid of what he could BECOME.
It was the one scar he would carry away from that whole mess, his Achilles’ heel.
COLD.
So the Iceman and me talked that afternoon. In fact, we talked several more times during the summer. He’s not a bad kid once you get past all the jokes. It took a lot of guts for him to admit to my face that he’d purposely hurt my lover in the past. I … respected that. It proved to me the kid had a heart. He was sorry now, that hint of fear on Remy’s face made him think, and now he wanted to help.
So now I’m standing here, waiting for the Blackbird to power down.
Waiting for my lover to see what I have planned.
The timing was perfect. He’s been away with Ro’s team for four days. He looks tired, but the smile on his face when he sees me standing there is beautiful. It lights him up from the inside, and it’s all for me.
I don’t say a word I just pull him close. I draw a deep breath, checking him for pain or blood.
He chuckles in my hair, and whispers, “stop that.”
I know he really loves that I worry about him, but he goes through the motions of being annoyed. It’s like Ro telling him to stop calling her Stormy. If he ever did she’d be devastated.
We walk to the elevator in silence. We don’t need to “speak” to communicate, a look, or a touch, can say more than a million words ever could. He’s totally focused on me as we walk toward the back door in the kitchen. Our cottage is around the lake, there’s a path through the woods back there. I’m sure he wasn’t looking out the window of the ‘Bird on the way home. I taught him a little relaxation trick to use after missions. He meditates until he hears the thruster’s power down.
His control of the Empathy slips sometimes, and long missions like this one used to leave him with migraines, and nosebleeds for days. I’m glad to have helped him with that. I hated watching the kid suffer.
No one else ever noticed. Not even Ro.
When I open the backdoor, he stops and gasps. It snowed last night. Before us is a perfectly flawless canvas of white.
“ Cher?”
“ It’s alright, I’m right here.” I wrap an arm around his waist, and we make the first prints on the
untouched white. After a few hundred feet I stop, and hug him close. “ Turn around and look,” I whisper.
Behind us all he can see is the mansion, and our two sets of footprints, “ See? That’s where we met. It took us a while, but that’s where we fell in love.”
He swallows, and looks me in the eye.
“ See our foot steps? Two sets, that’s how it’s gonna be from now on baby. Wherever you go, I go. Forever.”
I see a thousand different emotions in his pretty eyes. I see everything from wariness, which I expected, to my favorite… hope.
We continued down the path a short way. He’s tense, and shivering but I pretend not to notice until I sense the first stirrings of true distress.
“ I’m kinda tired Cher, was a long mission. Maybe we wait for a different day t’ take a walk?”
I give him a reassuring smile; “Trust me?”
I watch as my warrior child takes a deep breath, and shoves his unease about the cold far back into his mind. He looks me straight in the eye, and nothing more needs to be said.
He trusts me with his very life.
My hand slips from around his waist to his hand, and I lead him into the forest. The centuries old pines and firs tower over us giving us shelter from the biting wind, and the blowing snow. He stays close but doesn’t cower at my side. He knows I’d die myself before I let anything bad happen to him.
We walk in perfect silence through the trees until I see the clearing in front of our cottage ahead. Remy lets out a soft sigh, he trusts me with his life, but this fear of the cold was well earned. Having spent most of his life in the Deep South only magnifies it.
“Almost there now Darlin’.” The sweet smell of burning wood fills the air giving it false warmth that I know he can feel. WHERE the smell is coming from is the culmination of my plan.
We step from the clearing, and again he gasps. Before us stands a structure at least twenty feet tall, and completely made of ice. It’s magnificent in its shimmering beauty. Frosted in some places, clear in others with a chimney billowing a lazy curl of smoke; I am impressed, and that’s a hard thing to do.
“ Bobby’s been playin’” Remy whispers in awe, and to my surprise he pulls away from me and walks slowly towards what can only be described as the castle. It has towers and turrets that glisten, and send prisms of color out across the sunlit field. “I ’s so beautiful,” he whispers again before stepping inside.
A fireplace made of fieldstone takes up a great deal of the far wall of the ice room, and Remy wastes no time moving in front of it. I move up behind him, and pull him gently back against my chest as I rub his arms to help him feel warmer. The large bearskin rug from the cottage has mysteriously found a home in front of the huge fire, and he looks at me with a knowing smirk. I smile and kiss his hair then breathe in deep to fill my body, and mind, and heart, and soul with the scent that I cherish above all others. The scent that belongs to the man that I would kill anyone to protect, or die myself to save.
We settle on the rug, and with some slight of hand that made even my darling lover raise a brow, I
produced a blanket that‘s been warming by the fire. I also found a bottle of champagne and two glasses made of ice. I’m gonna have to remember to thank Bobby proper when I get the chance.
We spent the afternoon making sweet, slow love in front of the fire. Bobby ice is special it seems. No matter how much… heat… we, or the fire created, the ice castle never melted a bit.
Remy will always be apprehensive about the cold, and I will never fault him for that, but I think he will look at it differently after this day. He’s sleeping sweetly cuddled up in my arms now. I look down on my lover and kiss his brow. He snuggles closer, and I smile and kiss him again. I close my eyes and listen to his beating heart and am a little saddened that this perfect moment soon has to come to an end.
At least until the next ice castle we find in the clearing.
END