loverfirst

Biting. She understands what they mean by that now.

She has stripped off her gloves some minutes ago and is already feeling the nip of the air. The cold has never bit her before. Maybe it has and she just hadn’t noticed before. Or perhaps its bite used to come with an entirely different sensation; a sharp and crystalline slash of power that works its way from her core outward and into the air around her. That, she realizes, is the difference; the cold no longer comes from the inside out but sinks from the outside in.

It takes her fingers first and then her toes. She heard that that is how it starts; with the smallest body parts. Her nose follows shortly after that. It is a tingle it first, just a small little tingle that she thinks nothing of. She doesn’t remember the cold ever having created a tingling sensation before. She doesn’t recall cold having any sensation at all aside from detecting the plummeting of the temperature. But this detection had always been much like acknowledging when 11:59 becomes 12:00. She doesn’t tingle, ache, or ail when she looks at the time. And she had never tingled, ached, or ailed when she noticed the temperature go from balmy to frosty. If there is a feeling that comes with this acknowledgement, it is a rush. A sense of exhilaration, but nothing in a physical sense.

And it dawns upon her… She has never felt cold before. Not cold as it is meant to be felt. Not cold as most others feel it.

She has used her powers for some twenty years but she has never once felt them as nature had intended them to be felt; sharp, harsh, and ruthless. As the tingling that has taken the entirety of her hands grows into a sting, she realizes, with substantial dread, that she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like the cold.

But she will. She will grow to enjoy the cold. She will force her body to love it.

No matter how long she has to stand out here. No matter how red her hands grow. How swollen they get. She is an ice witch at her core. Her body will adjust.

It is when the stinging starts to feel more like having her cheeks slapped over and over again that the Winx girls and their headmistress urge her to come inside.

“Come inside now, dear.” The headmistress says. “You’re hurting yourself.”

This is a lie. She isn’t hurting herself. They have hurt her. They have taken what was hers. And they have turned it against her.

She won’t let them! She won’t let them steal her essence.

“I’ll get used to it!” She snaps.

The way that Faragonda bites her lower lip is not lost on Icy. And the witch resents the woman’s concern; the woman and the other headmasters had all had a hand in ripping her powers from her in the first place. Slowly, carefully, the headmistress informs her that, “that isn’t how it works.”

“It is!” Icy insists. She can withstand it. If she invites the cold back into herself, it will treat her well.

“You don’t have your powers to shield you.” As if she isn’t already plenty aware. “This weather will kill you before you can get used to it.”

“You should be wearing a coat!” Stella calls. “Or, at least, a pair of gloves.

But that would defeat the purpose. “I’ve never needed gloves before.”

“Because you have always had your magic, dear.” Faragonda presses. “Come inside now, what good will it do to freeze to death?”

She scoffs. The cold won’t kill her. It can’t. Can it? The tickle in her tummy tells her that, deep down, she knows the answer to that question.

“You aren’t going to readjust to the cold within a day.” Faragonda tells her.

So she’ll take it slow then. Build up a tolerance.

If Bloom can willpower her dragon fire back then Icy too can reclaim her powers by force. And she will. She swears it. She will.

.oOo.

The frigid breeze whipping at her eyes brings about a few involuntary tears that leave a frozen trail on her cheeks. A frozen trail that should not bother her in the slightest. But it does. It hurts quite terribly.

She is growing impatient. Days have turned to weeks and weeks turned into two months. Winter is nearing its end and her threshold for cold temperatures has barely expanded. In the first few days that she had stood in the cold, stripped of both her magic abilities and proper winter attire, she had lasted some 45 minutes and it wasn’t even that cold. 20 degrees and she couldn’t last even an hour. Pathetic.

Two months in and she can now last 50 minutes. Embarrassing.

She is something of a failure if she can’t withstand the cold at least a little longer than the average person. It is humiliating to see flower and nature fairies tolerate cold temperatures better than she.

Well she is done fussing with gloves and coats. Done dealing in increments. Today she is going to stand out here until her body does what she commands of it.

Her hands and cheeks are growing red with the cold and tingle unpleasantly. She knows—from years of causing it—that she had a mild case of frostbite coming on. If she persists in her refusal to cover her skin she will soon its full wrath and then go numb just like any other non-ice user.

She is on her 55th minute now. And it burns. Minute 55 burns. She didn’t realize that when the cold becomes frigid enough, it turns to fire. She finds that fire and ice truly aren’t so different at all after a certain threshold is crossed. Her skin reddens just as it tends to do when she spends more than ten unprotected minutes under direct sunlight. It starts to peel and blister. She has reached this level of frostbite before. Stage 2. The cold is still at the surface. But it will burrow deeper. That is its nature.

A stabbing pain that starts from her fingertips and radiates throughout her red and swollen palm. She grits her teeth. Ice crystals are beginning to form on her fingers. Crystals that she hasn’t conjured. Late stage 2.

Snowflakes cling to her lashes. And she is shivering now. Quite violently. But she won’t go inside, she absolutely refuses. She was an ice witch, this is supposed to be optimal weather.

“Icy, you’ve been out here for a long time.” Darcy comes to stand next to her.

“And I’ll be out here for even longer.” Icy folds her arms across her chest. She has no body heat left for bunching in on herself to have any effect. A good thing too. She isn’t supposed to have body heat. She never did when the magic was flowing through her veins. Nothing had been quite as unsettling as hearing Stormy comment, one evening, that her shoulder is actually quite warm to fall asleep against.

“Stormy lost her powers to but she isn’t standing outside in thunderstorms.”

“Thunderstorms are for springtime.” Icy refutes.

“Can you at least put a shirt on?” Darcy asks. “Usually people wait until the last stages of hypothermia to start taking their clothes off.”

“I know how hypothermia works, Darcy!” She snaps. “Just because I lost my powers doesn’t meant that I’ve lost my knowledgeability!”

“It was a joke. I didn’t mean…”

“Go away, Darcy.”

“But…I didn’t mean—”

“Go!”

She doesn’t want an audience for this. Not even a small one. She takes a seat on the snowy ground, her entire body ripples with pins and needles. Her entire body is a rather vivid shade of red.

She sits exposed to the merciless winter for 10 minutes more. And then 20. She can feel it slowly creeping its way in and growing. And that is the most unsettling of all, more than the burning and those sharp pangs. She can feel herself growing weaker. Can feel the cold burrowing beneath the surface of her skin and filling her very bones. Can feel herself dying.

They call for her to come inside again. But she refuses. She won’t leave this spot until her body accepts the cold once more.

“Foolish, stubborn woman.” She hears Griffin comment.

“Maybe she will listen to Stormy?” Faragona suggests.

She will not. She has decided that her body can either accept the cold tonight or succumb to it.

She can no longer move her fingers.

“Maybe we should let her have her powers back.” Bloom suggests.

.oOo.

She knows that she is reaching her end when the shivers subside and she ceases to feel. Her fingers are a blackish blue. Dead. Useless. Just like her.

“Let me warm you up, Icy.” Bloom offers softly.

“No.”

Flora holds Alfea’s main door slightly ajar and pokes her head through it. "You should really come inside now." The concern in her voice is wholly unveiled. And Icy is wholly unmoved by it. Juas as unmoved as she is by the look on the fairy's face.

She will die before she accepts that the ice no longer harmonizes with her. And from the looks of it, even Griffin seems unsettled, perhaps even distraught—apparently, despite everything, she doesn’t want to see Icy freeze herself solid either. She should have thought about that before she ripped away everything that made Icy who she was.

"Icy, please come inside before you get yourself killed." Faragonda urges again as though she hasn’t been suffering and slowly dying for months now. As if she hadn’t died the moment they took her magic from her.

To prove her persistency, she lays down, stretches herself out in the snow, feeling its cold gnawing at her bare back and thighs. She stares up at the sky as it coughs snowflakes down upon her. She lays long enough for those flakes to dust her face, breasts, and belly. And they keep falling. She will let them bury her.

It is still beautiful. Beautiful how the snow falls like crushed diamonds adding a twinkle of its own to the stars that it seems to fall from. Beautiful how pristinely it lays over the land in glistening rolling hills. How it clings to pine needles, extending their tips with translucent crystalline spikes. Beautiful in its engulfing silence. The way that it muffles the land around it so perfectly. How still it renders the world that it covers.

She draws a sharp breath, the chill that she inhales hits her throat in all of the wrong ways prompting a few harsh coughs. Her shiver resumes, not for the cold itself but for the realization that she simply cannot coexist with it any longer. That the winter has indeed fully and completely rejected her. It comes with a tightness in her chest, a feeling of suffocation.

A pair of arms slips under her shoulders.

"No!" Icy roars. Would have roared had she the energy to do so. What she manages is a strained mumble. "No, leave me here." It comes out as a slur that would have fallen on def ears anyhow. Already beaten down by the very element that had once made her strong, she hasn’t the energy to resist the arms that scoop her into them. She is so very drowsy. She thinks that maybe her mind isn’t all there. That it is cloudy. The cold makes her cloudy. Stormy would get a kick out of that.

"Thank you, Layla." She hears Faragonda mumble. "Bloom, a little warmth if you will."

"Let me go." She demands. Of course they don’t listen, there is no bite nor fury behind the command. Layla lays her down on one of several lounge sofas. Bloom is already hands glowing a soft orange. The fire fairy brings her hands to Icy's own blackened hands. Slowly the warmth radiates over her. And she resensts herself and her body that much more. Hates how readily her body welcomes and embraces the heat. How it craves that warmth.

She stops calling herself Icy. She stops answering to that name.

.oOo.

She stares at her hands, flexes the fingers that Griffin says that she is lucky to still have attached. That is all that she does these days. Stares. And she does so with hollow eyes. She doesn’t sleep. She doesn’t eat. She barely drinks. They should just let her go. Let her succumb. She hates the fairies anew. At least she has the nerve to call her actions what they are; evil. Those hypocrites still call stealing her powers from her a good thing. Perhaps it is for the greater good, or whatever, but they can’t even admit that their greater good involves destroying her. They are too scared to just outright kill her so they leave her to a fate worse than death. She thinks that they know that.

It is fine. It is just fine. She bids Darcy and Stormy wicked dreams and she steals away into the night. They don’t hear her go.

Tonight it is colder than it has been all winter. Window panes are completely frosted over and the walkway is a sheet of ice. Tonight the cold bites and snaps at her as soon as she steps out into it.

Tonight she has not come here to try to force her useless, cold intolerant body to embrace the winter. Tonight she has come to let the winter punish her for her weakness. Tonight she has come to and will let the snow blanket her.

The faeries can find her in the springtime.

It isn’t anything like she imagined it would be. Just like the first time her skin goes from pink and prickly to numb and blue-black. Just like the first time her shivers subside and movement becomes hard. Thinking becomes hard.

Unlike the last time her breathing grows shallow and slow. Labored. Unlike the last time her mind grows muddled. She tries to call upon her powers, but they don’t listen to her. There is an itch in her mind, a tickle that tells here that she is forgetting something. Her mind is working too slowly for her to put the pieces together.

Unlike the last time, the gravity of her decision begins to settle in.

Tonight she has set out to die. Tonight she learns that she is afraid of death.

.oOo.

She isn’t so lucky this time. She wakes up to bandaged hands and feet and a feeling as though something is terribly amiss. Something that she can’t place and doesn't place until the nurse comes in to change her bandages. She is glad that she is mostly alone when the last of them falls away to reveal one hand with only three fingers and another that is stained a dead black.

The sight of it makes her queasy. It is one thing to see the observe what the fury of frost can do when the end result is showcased on someone else’s body—she can marvel at it then. At the raw power. And another thing entirely to see how it disfigures her own body. She hadn’t thought it possible. Never in her life had she considered…

“We were able to salvage your right hand but the magic left staining…” They begin to inform her. But she can’t focus on it. She doesn’t care why her hand is still a death black. She doesn’t care why her other hand is missing fingers. She just cares that they are in the state that they are in.

She is ruined. Damaged. Broken in so many different ways.

The fairies have taken the cold from her. And the cold has taken her fingers and maybe her toes from her.

Her longing turns to resentment. And, in due time, her resentment to reluctance.

.oOo.

As Faragonda instructs her to lay down Icy gets the sense that she should be thrilled, Darcy and Stormy are. At best she feels nothing at all. She doesn’t feel much of anything these days. Cold, buries itself deep it numbs the skin from the surface to the bone and then it works its way in deeper still and numbs her emotions too.

Faragonda comes back with a tiny bottle, lavender in color, clover in shape, and crystal and magic in make. Within swirls a deep blue shimmery wisp that flashes silver when caught in the sunlight. It is, Icy realizes, a fairy variety of a vacuum. The headmistress uncorks the bottle and guides the magic swirling within towards Icy.

Icy who lays tense and still upon the bed. The magic hovers over her and she shudders. She thinks that it is supposed to feel sublime as her magic flows back into her. Ethereal as it fills her up. Fills that hollow place that had been left in its former vacancy. But she can only think of the way that the cold had so viciously consumed her. Had completely devoured her fingers and toes.

The chill of her returning magic crackles over her in the way ice creeps over a creek. Regardless of how it is supposed to feel, she cannot stop drawing comparisons to the night that she’d let herself succumb. It should feel, she thinks, exhilarating like plunging into glacial ocean waters. It should come with a burst of power, a feeling of invincibility.

It is nothing like that. Nothing like that at all. There is no sense of comfort nor empowerment when her magic slinks its way back into her. There is only dread. Dread as the frigid sensation envelopes the surface layers of her skin and slowly seeps its way deeper. Just as it had before it claimed her fingers. Slowly sinks bone deep and beyond. She waits for prickles and stabs and jabs that never come. She waits for that horrid, paradoxical burning sensation. And then she does. She swears that she does.

.oOo.

It isn’t anything that they have done wrong. The transfer of her magic back to her had been a success. Tests and scans come up negative for magic hindering illnesses. The same scans had shown that her body had readaped to her magic very readily, perhaps faster than average and her powers seemed quite eager to come back to her. They insist that, based upon the way that it had reacted to her, that her magic should be stronger than ever. They inform her that the problem is not external. She could have told them that.

It is her own mind, she is well aware of that. She swears that she wants her magic back. That she is thrilled to know that she is significantly stronger that she had been. But there is something in her mind, something deep down that does not.

The cold had rejected her and now she rejects it.

She wants new powers. Powers that she can use without finding herself back in a time that has already past, a day that has already come and gone at an hour that has already ticked away ages ago. A magic type that she hasn’t grown to loathe and dread all at once.

“What about the ice coffin? That was your favorite.” Stella says.

“That was always a more difficult spell.” She replies flatly.

“Well just conjure up a snowball or something.” Stormy shrugs.

Icy stares at her hands. Ugly, deformed, blackened hands. She flexes her remaining fingers.

She opens her mouth to say that she can’t but manages only a sigh. Pathetic. Ridiculous. She can at least try.

Reluctantly she stands up and extends an arm. She takes a breath and watches the magic slink down her arm, haloing it in a soft blue. Just as she always has, like watching one minute change to the next, she detects that shift in the air—that precise moment when warm becomes cool and cool becomes cold. This is usually as far as she gets.

After that, the ice begins to creep.

As it crawls across her arm her arm her breathing grows steadily uneven. She still feels it. It is all in her head but she still feels it. Still feels the cold. Still feels those white-hot teeth gnawing at her arm.

She shouldn’t feel cold the way that everybody else does. And she doesn’t as far as her nerves and pain receptors are concerned—doesn’t in the physical. But her mind…her mind is broken. Her mind sends phantom pain signals just as it sometimes allows her to feel limbs that are no longer there. “Fix me, Darcy.” She requests quietly as the magic dies on her palm. She swallows hard. She just wants to use her magic again. She just wants to be herself again.

“I can’t.”

“You have mind manipulation powers!”

“That I only know how to use to induce dread and fear. I can’t fix you but I can make you worse.”

She drops to her knees. Her hair falls over her shoulders and obscures her face. A good thing too; she is frustrated to tears. What kind of witch is scared of her own powers?

A foolish witch. The sort of witch who would be reckless and stupid enough to traumatize herself. She could laugh at that. She does laugh at that. A bitter, borderline hysterical laugh that has Darcy and Stormy exchanging looks.

Fucked up. She is fucked up and she can’t fix the way that she has broken herself. It’s a damn shame that she had never been able to break any of the Winx like this.

Her laughter dies away and with it her energy wanes. She slumps to the ground and nestles her cheek in the grass. Useless.

.oOo.

Spring has come and it has gone. Summer settles and then it rushes away for autumn to take its place. And then autumn too shows itself out with one final brisk gasp of wind. Icy watches the snow fall from Cloud Tower’s interior. She doesn’t know why she is here. She can’t use magic. She is basically the school’s pity project. She presses her forehead to the cool glass and shivers. She used to love this; the first snow. The sharp, pure air that only a winter night can bring. She liked to go outside, liked to climb to the roof and greet the snow like an old companion.

She hears the footsteps behind her but she doesn’t turn around. “Why don’t you join us?” Bloom offers. “Magix is hosting an ice skating party at Lake Roccaluce.”

She shouldn’t have left her door unlocked, especially knowing that the Winx girls, particularly Bloom, were about. It’s her own fault for assuming that Darcy and Stormy would tell the fairy to fuck off. “They hold that every year.” Icy mutters.

“And you didn’t go last year.” Bloom shrugs. “Are you really going to leave Darcy and Stormy to deal with me on their own.”

“They left me to deal with you alone.”

“Alright fine, I guess that we have to do this the hard way.”

“The hard wa—? What are you doing!?”

“I am going to carry you to Lake Roccaluce!”

“You can’t—”

“I did it before.” Bloom grins.

“Put me down, or I’ll…”

“Finally use your powers and kick my ass? I can’t wait.”

Icy’s face falls. And with it so does Bloom’s.

“I think that you just need to reconnect with your element. Ya know?” Bloom musters up a smile. “You need something that reminds you of why you like winter.”

It takes no effort at all to remember why she doesn’t. She only has to glance at her hands.

“I think that you still do.” Bloom says. “You just need a refresher. I’ll put you down if you promise to walk with me to Lake Roccaluce and go ice skating. You’ve always been good at that.”

She used to be good at a lot of things. She wants to be good at things again. She wants to enjoy things again.

She swallows. “Fine. I’ll go ice skating with you.”

“Great! I’m sure that Darcy and Stormy will be happy to see you there! I told them to meet us there and save us a cup of hot chocolate or two.”

“There better be two! I’m not sharing a mug with you.” Icy grumbles. She has already shared enough with the fairy; namely all of those embarrassing thoughts and feelings that she hadn’t been able to share with her sisters. She hates that Bloom makes it so easy. So comfortable.

“I promise that you’ll be using your ice magic again by the end of the night!”