*****

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