darkcastle | i cannot ease the burden of your fears; or make quick-coming death a little thing

In mastering the dominion of fire, Vortigern had to understand its fickle ways as well as he knew himself. Life-giving, and a breathing thing, it was also capable of such great destruction, and agonising death. Among the ancient tongues he studied to crack apart its arcane secrets, some had called it the living death.

He did not deal in flame, now. Now, his greatest ally was ice.

It meant destruction in its own, too, in its own slow way. If fire blew souls from the body as quickly as it reduced flesh to cinders, then the creeping cold of this new magic followed their path, and was capable of drawing them back. Of preservation, of manipulation.

Fate had failed him. To take back what he had sold felt only correct.

The sky is white as snow, the sun hidden and diffused through blanketing winter clouds. At the edge of the giant expanse of lake, as clear as a mirror, Vortigern is kneeling. Listening. His heart still beats, but it's a sluggish, lazy thing, pushing blood through his veins out of a sense of duty and resentment, but this is mere physiology. Ice, death, doesn't remove all kinds of pain. Sometimes it crystallises it. A permanent part of him, now, woven into the walls of his heart, his nerves, his viscera, in the process of reconstruction.

As he winds magic around himself like a veil, his skin greys. His green eyes shine blue. He plunges his hands into the water, impervious to the sting of the cold as he reaches. He knows the fresh pain of Catia's life leaking away in his arms, between his fingers, staining his clothing; but he has mourned his wife for far longer.

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Always the water.

Time is, has been meaningless; she is a choked gasp always, the suddenness of pain, and nothing at all. She has no concept of yesterday or tomorrow or how long it has been or that it has been, only that last moment of realisation and the awful slipperiness of the cold wrapping itself around her, drawing her deep. Magic never her own drawn through her, her pain and his powering what she did not know, had not seen -

this is a new hurt.

Her lungs burn with the forgotten need to fill, and she chokes - she can choke, now? she can choke now - coughing water and struggling in strong (un)familiar hands, tangled hair blinding her and nothing cooperating, gasping for breath to scream and to remember how to scream and what screaming is.

Her eyes open.

He feels joy like heartbreak when his hands find other hands, arms, hair, clothing. Stronger than a man ought to be, Vortigern drags the thrashing body out and onto snow-dotted rock, half-collapsed over her. The taste of magic in the air dims. His cold hand holds her face, tipping it aside as brackish water gutters out of her lungs. That grip turns to touch, and then hover.

Vortigern hadn't wanted to lie to her, in those last moments. It's the kind of memory he ignored like a wound left unattended, leaking its poison, but he remembers it clearly now. Her kindness, her warmth. That he'd wept, even before she had died.

(Had died. Like he had not wielded the blade.)

No blades now, only hands, pushing aside her hair, fending off spasmodic struggles, rapid-blinking. "Elsa," he says, when her eyes open. He has changed, but his voice hasn't, not really. A touch huskier. Ageless in the past decades, she has otherwise changed too. Her skin is white with cold, the insides of her lips touched blue, her hair clinging like kelp.

He is -

different. The same. Vortigern Pendragon, still, unmistakable through all else; her hand rises without her say so (shaking; if not the cold then the shock) and finds his temple, her thumb drawing down over his cheekbone, her own brow furrowing. She had closed her eyes - had she? she does not remember - and now opened them to ... to what? It is beyond her immediate ability to decipher.

He is there, and that is as it should be.

Her first attempt to speak is a failure - her mouth opens but cooperates no more for words than it did to scream. She makes a small sound of most acute frustration in a throat rough from disuse; with effort, she says, "You," and does not, immediately, know what to say next.

Maybe why, but what possible answer might he have -

Does she fear that he could not answer, or that he could?

Her hand drops from his face to grope blindly at her side.

His hand touches hers, encouraging her touch to his face, although it's hard for them to feel one another, skin nipped numb by the cold and, you know, death, although they aren't entirely without feeling as magic bleeds away, leaving these wretched creatures to the decisions they've made. He's made.

Her hand slips away. Down. He pursues by taking her wrist, a clasp like iron that quickly gentles, without letting it go.

Had he pulled Catia from the black waters, from the Syrens' realm, he'd have wasted no time in asking her forgiveness. It's a harder thing, now, expressly because Vortigern does not know whether Elsa would grant it, or is even capable of doing so. "I brought you back," he says, barely above a whisper, almost to himself. Marvelling, eyes lapsed back to familiar green by now, clear and bright, zigzagging a study over her face. "I've brought you back to me."

She rasps, "Vor," in frustrated incomprehension - she is back, but how? And from where? And why did he send her there, why did he do what he had done, and he had done it, she comes back to herself and of a few pressing details she becomes more sure. Others slip away between her icy fingers, but--

She died. He killed her.

And now, impossibly, she is here and he holds her and Elsa does not feel in this moment equal to the task of deciphering it. She is worn out, wrung out, and the easiest thing in the world would be to be pliant now - to relax into familiar grasp, to simply accept. She remembers the hot shock of her own blood spilled, and cannot, quite.

"Vor," a terrible rasp, "what have you done."

He's brought her back.

"Shh."

He would rather she just accept. That she stop speaking so much, her words harsh in her water-logged throat. "Shh," he says, again, bent down to whisper it against her cool brow, his hand briefly tangling in her hair, bloodless knuckles whiter. This, too, is familiar, hard hands and smothering presence -- not that he'd ever lifted a hand to her, not until the night he killed her, but there was a latent kind of violence to the plunging depths of his moods, the keen edge of his passion. Tamable, in her hands.

"I'll explain all," he promises, unsure if he is lying to her. Past her crown, he looks out at the water. It ripples, ill at ease for the disruption he has caused. "Not here."

Always she had been able to soften him, before.

before.

Elsa, eyes closed a moment when he leans so near, is unsure by what gauge to measure if she believes his words. If he would lie to her. It is self-evident, now: he would. How can she know if he does, when she knew none of what was in his heart until it was plunged into her body? Time has passed, that much is clear, and the cold and clawing thing she thinks must be her own heart says Vor, I know him, and another, quieter voice whispers still? and is not yet unkind enough to wonder ever?

Her nod is a shaky assent. Not here. She doesn't know where here is, precisely, but if he means to take her away from the water then she is glad of that, at least -

at least that. And then, the rest.

She pushes herself up.

Vortigern moves as she does, first to get to his feet so that he can best bring her to hers. Embattled might be a good way to describe him; with time, with the elements, with himself, bright eyes tired and his garments less fine than she is accustomed to seeing. He wears leathers and fur, a cloak he removes from his shoulders to wrap around her. Coarse wolf fur tickles her throat. It is warm. It should be warmer.

Around them is a land unfamiliar to her. Mountains capped with ice loom in the distance, in shapes and configurations she's never seen. The forest is winter-bitten and hardy, the lake half-iced.

He glances back at the water before he puts his arm around her, guiding her from flat rock to beaten earth. "We're far from Camelot," he says, quiet. "From England. In a land far east, by my measure, on which no Briton has yet tread."

Her gaze travels up those distant mountains, and back down to the cold ground beneath her; to the cold man at her side, who is and is not a stranger. The darkest parts of old familiarity, and her still off-balance, still finding her footing from moment to moment as to in what moment, precisely, she is.

"Why have we come here?"

A concession, in choosing that question above many others - above repeating the one he did not answer. We is not concession so much as hope that feels vain; wrapping her hands around what once made sense and willing it to do so again. In her last gasps he had been apart from her in a way she'd been blind to until it was too late; she needs to believe he has brought her back for something other than what drove him then.

i cannot ease the burden of your fears; or make quick-coming death a little thing

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