For Destruction, Ice
by AstroGirl
Lucy Cole has always been different, and she knows it. She knows, but she's the only one who does, because she's so very good at pretending. Say the right things, smile the right way, hide all the things you're really thinking, and everyone will believe you're boring, and vapid, and normal. It's the only way to get by, or so she assumes, until she meets Harry Saxon. Harry doesn't even bother to pretend. Harry only pretends to pretend, and it seems to work on everyone. Everyone but her.
"Mr. Saxon," she says, alone with him at last in some isolated corner at some dreadful cocktail party, "I do think that you're the strangest man I've ever met." The way she says it, it's a compliment, almost a come-on, and she sees that he sees that by the flicker of amused interest in his eyes.
"I am," he says, a statement of fact, matter-of-fact. "I suppose you could say that I march to my own drum." He smiles, a secret smile at a private joke, and it leaves her envious and charmed. She knows all about private jokes; there are so many of her own that she keeps deep in her mind, but she never allows herself to smile at them. Not like that.
"Let me hear it?" she says, because she thinks she can say strange things to this man, can be cryptic and wicked and odd, and with him it will be all right. "Your drum?"
His eyes widen, surprised but not displeased, and after a moment, he taps out a rhythm on her arm, humming along as he does. "Da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum." It's a marching beat, yes, martial and compelling. It's calling her somewhere, somewhere dark and wonderful.
On impulse, she puts her arms around him, rests her head against his chest. She can hear his heart beating... No, she can hear hearts beating, plural, and, oh, isn't that wonderful? She makes a tiny, surprised sound, and she feels his hand come to rest on her neck. He could kill me, she thinks, and she knows he really, truly could. The thought thrills through her, making her own heart skip deliciously.
"There it is," she says. "I can hear it, inside you. Da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum. Beating inside you. Something different."
His hand tightens slightly on her neck, enough to make her think that tomorrow she will have a nice, pretty bruise. "It's beautiful," she says, not moving, save to tilt her throat farther into his grip. "I want to dance to it."
He laughs, a high, happy giggle. It's the way she laughs when she's alone. His hand convulses once around her throat, exciting and painful, and releases her. His arm snakes around her body instead, pulling her close to him, closer to the lovely double-drumbeat of his hearts. "Lucy Cole," he says, slow and delighted, as if he's choosing her name to remember, out of all the names of all the meaningless human people here.
Swaying to the heartbeat-drumbeat, she nestles against him, smiling up at him. She doesn't know what he is yet, alien or demon, but she is suddenly sure of one thing. She has found the man she's going to marry.
For their honeymoon, he takes her to the end of the universe. She thinks this is terribly romantic... until she sees it. Until she feels it.
She stands on the bare, cold rock of the most badly misnamed place in the hundred-trillion-year history of the universe and stares up into the clear and featureless black sky. She didn't know that emptiness could be such a solid thing, but here it is, real enough to touch.
The universe is dead, and its cold, dark corpse stretches out into eternity. Lucy doesn't mind people dying, not really, but she doesn't like corpses. They're so cold, so sad, all the laughter and the screaming and the fun gone from them forever. She imagines herself ending up that way some day and starts shivering, unable to stop.
"Cold?" asks her husband, putting an arm around her, and he's so warm, so bright. Like a flame. He'll never die; he's promised her that. Perhaps if she stands close enough to him, she never will, either.
"I don't like it," she says. "Make it stop, Harry-- Master. Fix it. Do something."
He puts a hand on her shoulder, turns her around to face him. His lips are parted in surprise, but his eyes are shining, as if lit by flames. "Such faith you have in me," he murmurs, pulling her close. "Well then. I'll see what I can do."
And, oh, the things he can do! He remakes the human race for her and steals them away from the cold. He changes history, twists time, destroys the world and re-creates it in his image. He is powerful, her beautiful alien god. He blazes with power.
He gives her burning islands to warm herself by. He gives her the entire human species to be her playthings, and their descendants to be her children. He tells her that soon he will make her the queen of the universe, and she knows that he's speaking about a universe full of living things, shining suns, love and pain and life.
But he hasn't fixed it, of course. Not really. It's still there, the darkness and the cold. It's still waiting, at the end of everything. She can still feel it, a constant chill that nothing -- not love, not triumph, not destruction -- can dispel. It's always with her, in the back of her mind, in the corner of her heart. Even when she's looking at him, beneath the intellect and the passion and the power she can always see the emptiness at the end of time.
Sometimes she thinks that this must be what the drums are like for him, this aching, futile feeling of something inside you that can never be escaped, never denied. And it isn't, in the end, something you can dance to at all.