Notes: This fic is a prize for Fairady, who correctly guessed the answer to one of my Mystery Fics. Hope she likes it. The Coldfire Trilogy does not belong to me: I only worship the creator. This story contains mild hints of slash - blink and you'll miss it. Consider yourself warned.
Like fire, I raged uncontrolled. I knew nothing but my purpose, which I thought was within my grasp. He cooled me off. He brought my mission into reality, then made it real.
Like ice, I melted before him. I was nothing, full of cold and unfeeling. And then he came, and all the walls I had built up against emotion, against my humanity, disappeared completely, like a snowflake in a candle's flame.
Did I ever mean anything to him? Was I simply someone that he had to put up with to sustain his hellish existance? Why did he remain? How could he have cared at all? And yet... didn't he?
What did he ever see in me? How could he know, after meeting me, that there was still some humanity left, deep inside me? How could he know, when I myself didn't? Yet somehow he did. And for some reason, he felt that that was worth saving.
He never realized how much good was still in him. For all his ego and past great deeds, he had himself convinced that everything good about him had been sacrificed with his family. I somehow instinctively knew when I met him that he was not what he appeared. Perhaps it was something in his eyes...
He never saw how human he really was. I think maybe that's why he felt connected to me. Both of us denied our humanity. I to stay alive, he for his mission. He couldn't be human. He had to sacrifice that to be a Priest. Could I help taking revenge for his revealing my humanity to me by doing the same to him?
I was aghast when I found myself starting to care. He had always seemed a monster to me, from the day I met him. Wehn had it changed? Why had it changed? How could I feel anything for a being made of ice?
When I began to feel things for him, I somehow realized it to be inevitable. Like a moth driven to its death by courting the flame, I craved his warmth at the expense of myself. It seemed simply fate that I would be drawn to him. Funny, because I never believed in fate.
We slowly became each other. He took some of my light to him in exchange for some of his darkness. We became more and more alike, until at the end it seemed as though we were perhaps cut from the same cloth after all. In the end, we were both human.
I tainted him. And he let me. Somehow he let himself take my darkness. I didn't want to give it to him. I didn't want to abandon the shadows that had cloaked me safely for so long. More than that, I didn't want to infect his purity. I needed to believe that there was still good in the world. The good that I had helped to create.
How did I so quickly lose everything I believed in? After meeting Tarrant, the world seemed suddenly to make less sense than it had before. Everything that had seemed so clear-cut was lost in shadows and shades of gray. I had nothing left to believe in. Except Tarrant. Somehow, I could believe in him.
How did everything so quickly become meaningless? Everything I had ever strived for: life, a chance to see my dream. All of it meant nothing. I had to finally realize that the one thing I had given my very soul to achieve had been placed beyond my reach by the act of giving it. Everything I had ever hoped for was gone, denied me by my own ambition. The only thing left with any meaning at all was him. He stood for what I had created, when everything else was lost.
In the end, perhaps neither of us changed the other more or less. Maybe if it had turned out differently, if I had not lost him... How could it end this way? We were so close to winning.
And yet it turned out the same. Again I thought I had won, only to be denied my reason for trying in the first place. I became once again human. But I no longer have Vryce. The irony is stifling. It is only the same. Perhaps it will only ever be the same. He won. He made me human. And because of that, I cannot even recognize his presence.
Perhaps I finally understand how he felt.
or
Oh God, that was hideous. Let me complain to the author.