i had to do botany research for this godawful chapter i cannot believe this is what i want to do with my life//
Some people want to be your friend,
Some people just want to be free...
She had long grown used to fog on her breath.
She was familiar with the cold blooming in the center of her palms. The deadpan expression frozen on her face. The frost on her glasses.
Winter had swallowed her when she was just a child, and she was powerless to stop herself from sliding down it's throat. Down and down and down she had gone, and after all these years, she could still feel how she tried to claw herself back out under her fingernails. She met death as a girl, and wears it thick under her clothes as a woman.
Althea used to laugh. She used to smile, to cry, to visibly startle. Then the ice had found her features, and those expressions ceased. She hardly had the time to say a proper goodbye. It has all slipped through frozen fingers, transparent and blue in the light of change.
Who knew change could be so brutal?
It had only gotten worse, though, as time marched on.
Somehow, Althea found herself at the Archives, her cold fingers tracing over pages three times as old as she was. Compared to the people around her, she was simply insignificant. She was cold, unforgiving, the deadpan girl who trailed the closest available ymbryne. She knew what her co-workers whispered about her. She knew how they chastised her for being so clingy, but they didn't know why.
Althea was special, yes, but she wasn't important, and that knowledge seemed to eat her alive.
How many of her co-workers did she find dead that day, the day of the siege? The day when her ice bloomed not from her palms but from every pore, the day that made her more than the silent assistant.
The day that made her a protector.
Althea had watched a hollow devour a council member, the same man who had constantly pat her back as praise and spoke about her as if she was the most important person in the room. He had laughed at her lack of humor, and she had found him interesting.
She had stared at his mangled corpse. Then she had begun to scream.
Her voice had torn through her like it never had with her words- it shook something loose in her core, it had shattered the glass surrounding some unknown part of her. Cold poured from her lips, her eyes, her ears. It was endless. It was brutal.
It was beautiful.
It swallowed the building whole, as winter had once eaten her. She was something more, in the aftermath, in the fog that simmered from her mouth. She was a glory of the snow, the light blue flower dancing in the deep white. Chionodoxa forbesii. And she was an anemone, layered and impossibly gorgeous. Anemone Coronaria. She was thin and frail on the floor, shaking in the remnant of her panic. Gentle as a siberian squill, the flowers her mother would keep on the windowsill when they bloomed. Scilla Siberica.
Althea was everything winter offered. The quiet snow, the endless sea of soft white and blue ice. She was the cold that bit through layers of jackets, she was the breath of laughter from students walking home.
She was smoke on the horizon, a reminder of a warm home waiting for someones return.
...And the worst thing about me,
Is that I'm somewhere in between.