Chioniphobia

Breakfast

Bunny raised an eyebrow. "Kill you?"

She sighed. "I know, I know, it's ridiculous."

"Everyone's a bit scared of the Reaper, mate. Someone tells you otherwise, they're either lying or stupid. Or Sandy."

"Or Pitch?" she suggested.

Bunny frowned slightly. "Eh, maybe."

"He seems to like her," Tooth added cautiously.

Bunny wrinkled his nose and put his ears back. "Don't think Pitch can 'like' anyone. Maybe he 'likes' the fear that comes with her."

Sensing a touchy subject, Tooth quickly steered back to safer waters. "So what did you need the teeth for?"

"A project," Bunny answered cryptically. "Speaking of, I need two teeth for this to work. Where's the other one?"

Tooth brought it out hesitantly. She'd peeked at the memories inside the first, but after the sight that had greeted her, she wasn't certain doing so again would be a good idea. Then again, when would she have another opportunity like this, to have a glimpse inside of Grim's mind, to understand how she felt?

Tooth took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Grim woke up in a strange place.

It was dark, which wasn't strange. What was strange was that it was warm and smelled of dried grass and clean fur, like an unnaturally tidy barn. It didn't feel like a barn, however: she felt no wooden floor beneath her bed of straw, and the walls were more like those of a den, with no timbers set in the packed dirt.

She sat up slowly, wincing at her aching head, when a clinking sound caused her to fall back into a lying position. Supporting herself on her elbows, Grim looked to the source of the clinking.

There was a figure- tall, and dark, but not Pitch. The shape was wrong. The figure was holding something, too. A bottle?

A blade?

The chains weren't binding her this time, and so she did what she would've done had her torturer not thought to restrain her with her own devices: she sprang forward and throttled them, squeezing her hands around their neck and

it wasn't them

it was him

she sprang off of him, hands shaking, scars blazing, head spinning from a night of alcohol and centuries of pain. Grim saw him get up, gasping for breath, saw his eyes wide and green and scared

and she ran, and ran, and kept running.

When her legs gave out (far sooner than her wings would've), she collapsed to the ground and stared at her hands, white and trembling.

She'd been born with gloves, black ones with claws at the ends. One day she'd been scratching at what she'd always assumed to be her skin and found that by pulling, her 'skin' slid off to reveal white flesh underneath.

She began scratching at her hands, her wrists, tugging at her skin as if it might come off and reveal something new underneath, something brilliant and wonderful and not ugly ugly ugly

Her white skin peeled away under her nails, but there was no new layer of skin, nothing beautiful hiding underneath. Just wet black muscle and tendon and vein, clustered together in an imitation of a mortal's flesh. No pulse in the veins, no blood flowing through, just cold liquid metal and the sense that whatever she was was natural, yes, but abhorrent all the same.