Completed 3/13/09
A/N (Based on the Japanese "Yuki-onna" legend.) Written for Ship Wars at the LJ comm st_respect, Prompt 5: "Fairytales," a bit revised from the original post. This is what happens when you go on an Asian horror movie bender at 2am while writer-blocked.
***
Leonard knew they were going to die the fifth time Raktim fell.
His friend stared up at him with frightened eyes as he struggled to stand, scrabbling in the powdery snow, but Leonard was too exhausted to do much more than turn and wait. The blizzard was getting worse, needles of ice whipped into their faces at every turn by a merciless wind, and it was cold, soul-numbingly cold. He was shivering so hard it felt as if he'd blurred to a standstill.
They shouldn't have gone on the hike, not with the weather advisory the way it'd been. They'd only go for a little while, they'd said. Just along the same trails they'd traveled scores of times before – but Leonard wasn't familiar with winter in the Appalachia and the unseasonable blizzards that could roil up in an instant, being a Southern boy born and bred, and neither was Raktim, fresh from the heat of India.
Now they were lost, the familiar landscape whited out in a nightmare of snow, and he was tired, so tired. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew they were succumbing to hypothermia, but the alarm was dull. He—they—were too young to die; hell, he hadn't even completed his sophomore year. He didn't have the energy to care. Just to rest would be mercy.
They stumbled across the deadfall by sheer luck. Two fallen trees, one crosswise against the other, a pile of dead leaves and branches wedged into the crook. They crammed themselves into the makeshift shelter, huddling together for warmth, and waited for the blizzard to end.
The moon was high in the night sky when Leonard was awakened by a shower of snow onto his face.
Sleep fled in a flood of terror.
A hazy, black figure bent over his friend. Its breath swirled in white clouds over Raktim's face, a hand as pale as bone not quite touching his neck.
Raktim was motionless, but surely it was a trick of the light that made his skin seem to pale in the interminable moment before the figure turned. Leonard found he was completely immobilized as it studied him, eerie gaze as papable as physical touch. It was inhumanly beautiful, deathly white skin almost luminescent in the moonlight, eyes dark as coals in a narrow face as it bent towards him.
The trail of its fingers down Leonard's cheek was like the kiss of icicles, the chill curling deep into his soul. Blank eyes sucking him in, his sheer immobility just as frightening as this nightmare that was staring at him as if he was a particularly tender morsel to be savored.
It came closer and closer, and just as he mustered enough energy to force a scream, it touched its lips to his.
His mouth was rimed with frost as it pulled away. Breath was impossible, pressure on his chest like a weight.
It smiled.
Leonard snapped awake.
It was gone. Not faded away, just gone.
Raktim lay on his side next to him, sleeping. Leonard found he could move again and in the first spasm of reaction, he jumped up and pushed out of the shelter. The blizzard had stopped, harsh shadows picked out in cold light. Drifts of snow were piled high all the way to the entrance, absolutely pristine.
No footprints. Not even a scuff.
Deeply unnerved, he worked his way back into the shelter. He'd dreamed it, that was all.
Except that'd been most lucid dream he'd ever had.
He could still feel his limbs weighted down with dread, the sensation that something was sitting on his chest, forcing the air out of his lungs to the point of suffocation. His lips were still stiff and numb with cold, ice melting under his questing tongue.
He nudged Raktim, not wanting to be alone at the moment, then reached over and shook him when he didn't answer. He put his hand out in the dark and touched Raktim's face.
He jerked back, stifling a scream.
His friend was covered in ice, stone-cold dead.
When searchers found them the next morning, they found Leonard huddled next to Raktim's frozen body. Rocking slowly, unblinking.
He never told anyone what had happened. After a while, he managed to convince himself that he'd imagined the entire thing.
**
Leonard didn't think much on his life. The little ramshackle non-profit clinic kept him busy, and that was all he really needed: plodding from day to day, paying bills, buying groceries, visiting his daughter on the weekends.
It wasn't anywhere near where he'd thought he'd be at thirty.
He locked the bars that covered the windows, then stopped short when he saw the graffiti. FUKING SKANK, it said in scrawling florescent letters across the clinic wall. Goddamn delinquent kids couldn't even spell. If that wasn't evidence of the epic failure of the public school system, he didn' t know what was. As he stepped forward to examine the damage, calculating whether it'd cost less to repaint the wall himself or report it to his insurance company, he saw an amorphous black form out of the corner of his eye.
He whipped around.
A man was standing there. Leonard made an internal grimace at himself. Just a guy, standing there against the flat bricks: head down, hanging black hair that obscured his features. Arms weirdly limp at his sides like the bones had been sucked out by a vacuum. Nothing more, never mind what tricks his tired mind came up with to shock five years off his life.
Leonard could've sworn there'd been no one there.
He'd been accused of being oblivious before, but this was just ridiculous. This was what happened when he pulled too many twelve-hour shifts powered by little more than caffeine and sheer cussedness.
Snowflakes were beginning to skirl down from a threateningly gray sky.
"Hey," he said to the guy, because the temperature was in the single digits and he didn't need a homeless guy or some nodder freezing to death on his own stoop.
"You okay?" he asked with more concern when the guy didn't reply, now pretty sure he was going to be home late to feed his dog at best, or he'd have to call an ambulance at worst.
He was leaning forward, hand out to the guy's neck to feel the pulse, when the bowed head snapped up without warning. Leonard nearly had a heart attack and stumbled backwards onto his ass.
"Man, you can't just stand there," he snarled, tetchy now because the cold and damp was seeping into the ass of his pants and his heart was galloping in his chest. "Get to a shelter or something, it's gonna snow tonight."
Silence. The stranger continued to stare with depthless, unblinking eyes at him, the planes of his face and the unusual points of his ears weirdly familiar. He was dressed in a long black greatcoat of a style that'd been popular a hundred years ago.
Unnerved, Leonard stood and snapped a finger in front of the guy's nose. No response. He suddenly realized he couldn't tell if the guy was even breathing; his own breath came in white puffs in the frosty air, but the air in front of the stranger was absolutely still. The feeling of deja-vu came back to him stronger then, dread coiling under his gut like thick smoke.
He shook it away. He was too old to be getting the creeps. Whatever was wrong with this man, it was likely drugs, not–not–
He pulled out the tiny magnum flashlight he carried on his keychain and shined it into the guy's eyes. No response. The pupils remained dilated, so large and black that the irises were swallowed up without even an edge – so large, in fact, that there were hardly any whites.
The guy didn't blink at all.
If he called an ambulance now, Leonard thought, staring at him uneasily, it'd take them thirty minutes to get their asses over to this side of town and even longer if he told them it was for a homeless OD. But he had to; it was snowing harder and he couldn't just leave this guy here. And all the homeless shelters were closed by now. He looked down, churning in his pocket for his phone.
When he looked up, the guy had vanished.
Not even an imprint left in the wet gray sludge on the sidewalk, as if he'd never existed.
**
He didn't know what he'd seen, but that figure had been deeply disquieting. Like a wraith in a vaguely remembered nightmare.
He was left with a chill that no cranking of the thermostat would thaw. He huddled in his office, staring out the window at the empty street.
It was snowing again.
**
It never tried to hide.
It just stood there. At the far end of the supermarket parking lot. In the distance down the block next to the crumbling pawn shop. Sometimes just across the street visible from Leonard's office window.
Just watching.
A man-shaped shadow, ramrod-straight, ominous in its unnatural stiffness.
It was obvious the guy – or whatever it was – was following him, but damned if Leonard could figure out how; he never saw it moving. He'd be walking to the subway and if he turned around quickly – he'd catch it out the corner of his eye: a still figure in the distance, illlumined only by astringent yellow streetlights in a suddenly deserted street.
When he looked again, the figure would be gone.
No one else seemed to notice.
He didn't dare to ask anyone, even Chapel, anything beyond a general iDid you see anyone standing over there?/i because, of course, the answer was always a confused no. He didn't ask too often. Chapel had a specialization in psychiatry, and sometimes her gaze was a little too penetrating.
Leonard wondered if he was going insane.
**
"Guess," Jim said, grinning.
Leonard groaned. "I can't believe you're wasting my time with this," he said, but he was laughing. God, it felt good to laugh. It felt like this surreal, gray winter had gone on for an eternity, and talking to his old friend from college always felt like a little piece of summer.
"You're just scared you'll get it wrong," Jim taunted.
"Two?"
"Come on, Bones, this is me," Jim said. "Give me some credit here."
"Five?" Jim flapped a hand at him. His image on the computer screen froze for a second, broke into pixelated blocks, then resumed. "What, six?"
"Getting warmer."
"What the fuck, Kirk, are you telling me you managed to find more than half a dozen girls insane enough to–"
"Ten, Bones, an even ten." Jim grinned and leaned forward into the webcam so the entire screen was filled with nothing but his pearly whites and a rather unsavory view up his nostrils. "Say it to me baby, I wanna hear it."
"You lunatic."
"If by lunatic you mean 'godly stud'."
Leonard groaned into his palm. Goddamn Jim Kirk and his weakness for anything with two legs and a pretty smile. "Please tell me you used protection."
"A change in the script, Bones? You forgot to call me 'a herpes factory'."
"Thought that was a given, so I opted for the Cliff Notes today." Jim laughed and leaned back in his chair, lapsing into a musing, comfortable silence.
Then he said somberly, "I miss you, man." He was using Cliff Notes too, because When're you going to quit that burg and come back to San Francisco? You're wasted out there hung palpably in the air.
Leonard pushed his annoyance away. It was a common enough refrain from everyone he knew, and he didn't want to hear it. He especially didn't want to hear it at the tail end of a shitty January, when he might actually be tempted to give in. Jocelyn and Jo were here on the East Coast. End of discussion.
"Hell, kid–" his voice failed him at Jim's expression. "What the hell is that?" Jim asked in a queer voice. He was staring past Leonard's shoulder.
"What?" Leonard said, shooting a look over his shoulder too. There was nothing there except the hideous velour couch that'd come with his apartment.
"You have someone with you?"
"What? That's not funny." He realized he was cold. He'd set the thermostat to a comfortable seventy-two, but now the room felt like a walk-in freezer. His breath fogged suddenly and he stared back at Jim, eyes widening.
Jim's gaze had fixated on Leonard's arm. As Leonard watched, Jim's eyes grew rounder and rounder, and even in the washed out, pixelated colors of the webcam screen, he could see him pale. "There's a hand on your–"
"What?" There was nothing in the room with him, nothing near him but damn it was cold and his breath came in quick, panicked blurts. "Jim, not cool, that is not–"
"Bones." Jim had never sounded like that before, high and faint. "I swear to god I'm not – Wait, I'm screencapping this--"
The monitor flickered, frizzed, then blinked off with an electronic burp.
Leonard stared at the black screen stunned and more than a little freaked out, ice crawling down his spine.
A face was visible in the dull reflection, dark hollows in place of eyes.
Leonard shouted and threw himself backwards, toppling over his chair. The face was gone.
The phone rang, startling him badly again. It rang once, twice, the tone harsh in the deathly quiet, then cut off.
Fuck that. Leonard was no shrinking violet, and he even enjoyed Japanese horror movies, though he preferred American slasher films – but fuck this sideways, this was too goddamn real. This, this wasn't happening.
He found his husky-mix Tuna cowering under his bed. He promptly followed her example, doing something he hadn't done since he was seven: hiding under the covers, feet and hands tucked safely away, all the lights on.
He did not hear a voice whispering his name, did not feel the trail of a hand running along the edge of his quilt.
**
He felt pretty stupid the next morning.
His mind was just playing tricks on him. He was a man of science, goddamnit, and he wasn't religious or gullible by any stretch of the imagination. Ghost stories were for movies and horror novels and campfires, and until there was scientific evidence proving their existence beyond doubt, true belief was for the crazies and kids. What he'd seen last night was just a trick of the eyes, a product of his overactive imagination.
Or so he told himself. It didn't stop goosebumps from rippling up his arms when he saw the email from Jim in his inbox that morning, more than a shadow of last night's terror returning in a cold wash when he saw that it had a picture attachment.
He told himself he wouldn't open it. Nothing would be served by seeing this photo, even if it had evidence for Jim's wild claim – especially if it had evidence, because Jim had only added one line to his email: Seriously Bones, I don't know what's going on, but be careful. Call me so I know you're okay.
Jim wasn't prone to hysteria and was possibly even less superstitious than Leonard, if his annoying tendency to laugh through and mock every single horror movie they went to see and his unofficial hobby of baiting evangelists were anything to go by.
No. He didn't need to see it. In fact, he very much needed to not see it.
He clicked on it anyways.
The picture was blurry, like most 'paranormal' photos seemed to be, but – but –
That was most definitely a hand. Wispy like mist and oddly blurred, but the shape was unmistakable. And behind his shoulder, a face. Turned sideways, as if it were nuzzling the back of Leonard's neck.
**
"I'm telling you, Bones. I don't believe in this New Age hoodoo either, but do a cleansing, a seance, something."
"Jim, that's retarded." They were talking on the phone, because Leonard was goddamn not going to use his webcam again until he figured out what the hell was wrong with it. Or what was wrong with Jim's.
"I'm serious, I'm really freaked out about this. You saw the screencap."
"It was just bad lighting. Dust on the lenses, the film, something."
"Digital cameras don't have film."
"No. Stop talking."
"Why're you in denial, man?"
"I'm not," Leonard snapped. "Someone's just out to scare me, and you're not helping." He'd told Jim of being followed, hoping Jim would just laugh at him and crack bad jokes about having a secret emo stalker named Edward, but instead Jim had freaked out just that much more.
Jim sighed. "Look, I did some googling–"
"Jim–"
"–and even the most basic search tells me you've got something fixated on you, Bones!"
"Oh my god, is James Tiberius Kirk a paranormal investigator now?"
"There're a lot of ghost stories from the Eastern Seaboard, you know that?"
"There's just more history here, kid. Stands to reason there're more urban legends too."
"You know, there was a really famous one from around where we went to uni."
Leonard was suddenly grateful that the sun had broken out of the cloud cover and was making cheerily bright patches of light on his cluttered office desk. "Really? I hadn't heard of any," he managed to say in a relatively normal voice.
"Yeah, this was something I heard around the campus parties and stuff. You probably were too busy being old and antisocial to listen to stories like that."
"It's called studying. Obviously something you have very little experience with."
"You want to hear this or not, you grouchy bastard?"
No, he really didn't. But he grunted into the receiver anyway.
"They said there was something haunting the mountains around the town during the winter, that it'd ambush lost hikers in the snow and kill them for their warmth." Jim's voice had abruptly lost its jocular tone.
The light went pallid as Leonard's teeth suddenly chattered, his skin crawling. Long-repressed memories bubbled to the surface like oily tar, black and viscous.
"Bones?"
He didn't want to know, but the compulsion to ask drove him as surely as the liquid terror that washed over him in a wave. "This thing have a name?" There was only the hum of a long-distance connection for a bit and Leonard wondered dreamily if Jim had been cut off before he answered.
"I forget exactly. Started with 'S'. Spack? Spock?"
Memories of burnt-out holes of eyes that sucked all his willpower away. The hideous cocktail of lust and fear that had jolted through him, as its deadly breath stirred against his lips. The icy fingers burning a frozen tattoo into his skin, marking him. A cruel smile of promise.
"Bones? You there? Bones?"
"I'll talk to you later, Jim," he said in a faraway voice, and hung up.
**
Chapel clucked over how stressed he looked. Tuna alternately hid or barked at empty space, bristling and growling. He postponed his visits with Joanna. Only his daughter would want to eat ice cream in the dead of winter, and she'd eat it with six-year old gravity, looking eerily like her mother in the fastidious way she wiped her mouth with a napkin every third bite. But the last time he'd taken her, she'd said, "Why is that man staring at us?"
She hadn't been talking to him. She'd been looking at the corner of the shop, where there was only a rickety shelf and a desiccated trailing plant.
He couldn't risk her attracting the thing's attention too, so the visits ended. Without the weekly custody visit, he did little except work. He tried to stay at work as long as possible. Shadows flickered at the corners of his eyes more and more frequently until he learned to duck his head and ignore anything that wasn't in direct line of sight.
The whispers that edged at the periphery of his hearing were harder to ignore.
Being in a total state of dread at all times was draining, but day-to-day function continued despite life taking on the disjointed, skewed colors of a waking nightmare. If he'd been more psychiatrically oriented, he might have put it down to such convenient words as compartmentalization, or denial.
There wasn't a sufficiently scientific word for no choice. He ignored what he could, and just dealt with the rest.
Chapel gave him sharper looks when he began insisting that she stay in the same room with him, but he could disregard that. Her pragmatic, no-nonsense presence seemed to dull the sense of being watched.
But he couldn't always stick with Chapel even if he didn't feel pretty silly about acting like a little kid with the boogey-man hiding in the closet. He had to go home sometimes.
He was making tea in his kitchen when he looked out the window into the swirling snow and found empty black eyes watching him.
To his credit, Leonard didn't scream or drop his mug. He simply closed his eyes, counted to ten, and reopened them. The eyes were gone.
He shook himself and took his mug off down the hall to his study. When he reached the end of the hall, the hallway light flickered.
He stopped and turned around. He'd just changed the light bulb last week to an energy efficient fluorescent one. Now it was flickering as if it were going to give out at any moment, but slowly, like a long wink. There was nothing in the hallway. But each time it went out, there was a black silhouette against the lit kitchen doorway.
Blink.
Blink.
Each time the light went out, the shadow got closer.
**
It came to him that night, in his dreams or in reality, he didn't know, couldn't tell. It filled the room with a blackness that seemed to pulsate in time with Leonard's breath, and its hands were as cold as ice on his face, trailing down his chest in searing lines.
It kissed him, sharp teeth grazing oh so dangerously against his lips and he remembered that touch, oh yes – and that red thread of attraction and lust. I have come for you, it said to him, inhuman voice without inflection, black eyes gleaming against the gloom that filled the room like smoke. Leonard moaned, and somewhere he heard his dog crying as if from far away.
I have watched you for ten years.
"Why did you let me go?" he whispered to it, and there was no paralysis now – there was no point. There was nowhere to run. The hands he raised – to push away or embrace, he didn't know – went through the figure like mist.
You were aesthetically pleasing. So much...warmth. Those chilled lips closed over his again, cold tongue stroking, leisurely, teasing, tasting of the bitter North wind.
It was wrong, so wrong, the dispassionate words twining with the frozen touches all over his body, the lips tracking icy prints across his face and inhaling his every stuttered exhale with greed, but Leonard couldn't help but writhe in want and fear. He was cold like he could never be warm again, as if all the dark, dank places of the earth had converged into his room, sucking the heat out of him with every moan. A hand as cold as a glacier wrapped itself around his cock, the presence draped like a blanket over his form, pale, narrow face close to his, watching every shift of expression.
Leonard clutched at the mattress, caught between revulsion and white hot lust that spiraled high, heat sucked away as quickly as it was generated.
It was in him, it was around him, heavy and solid where it touched him, wraithlike mist where he groped blindly, and it moved with him in a slow undulation as it stroked him to completion. He went with it, its probing touches everywhere, feeling colder, increasingly colder, and as he shuddered into his climax that felt like it was being wrung from his very toes, he hissed, "Why?"
You belong to me. You've always belonged to me.
**
When Doctor McCoy didn't show up for work, no one really worried. It wasn't like him to not call if he wasn't coming in, but everyone agreed he'd been looking very under the weather for the past month, so it was no surprise. He was probably just taking a well-earned day off. Maybe he was even taking his daughter somewhere like he'd promised, and at least he'd picked a day that Doctors Chapel and M'Benga could cover for him.
Some began to wonder by the second day. Unfortunately, Leonard was vehemently anti-cell phones and usually refused to answer his on principle. He was a doctor, not an on-call med student, he'd said; nothing that urgent happened at the clinic anyway, at least nothing that couldn't wait. He didn't have a home phone.
No one really began to worry until late the second day, when a frantic Jim called the clinic. He hadn't been able to get a hold of Bones for two days, and Leonard had always been punctual in returning messages.
They found Leonard frozen in his bed, flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling with frost-rimmed eyes.
He'd died of hypothermia. How that'd happened in a well-heated room, covered up in his own bed, was a mystery no one could answer.
fin