**started as a Friday Night Fic prompt from Liason - Road to Nowhere**

**I'm going to treat this like a flash fic challenge.. each part will be an hour of writing**

Snow White & Rose Red

Elizabeth barely felt the doorknob in her hand. It slipped against her skin, tacky and unnaturally warm given that it was winter and her apartment didn't have a heater that worked. It took both hands for her to open the door and pull it open. A moment later she leaned against the wall on the other side of the hall, wiping a hand on her skirt to clean in.

There was half a thought that surfaced in her head. Lucky must have knocked something over when he came in the night before, turpentine or solvent. He must have knocked something over on a shelf and that's what she felt on her shoulder.

A few more steps and she was at the top of the stairs wondering why she was even outside. Wondering if she'd closed the door. Wondering what that noise had been, loud and echoing from the walls into her exhausted ears.

It seemed like the stairway was stifling hot, her skin bathed in sweat. She looked up and saw the winter scene just outside the door. Snow. She breathed the word in and out of her nose, almost as if she could smell it through the heavy outer door.

Snow.

She shouldered the door open and grabbed at the railing to keep herself on her feet. Her knees were already cold and she knew the steps just outside of her apartment were concrete. I wonder if you would hear the bone break with all that snow on the ground?

*S*W*R*R*

Lucky rolled over in bed and shook himself awake when he realized the other half of the bed was empty. "Liz, what the hell?" He rolled over, grabbing for her pillow and felt something sticky on his palm. "Dammit, Liz... what-"

He shot up in bed, his blanket falling to the floor, his free hand fumbling for the knob on the bedside lamp. "I swear to God, Liz, if you spilled something on the bed, I'm going to-"

It looked like a flower or something just as stupid. A handkerchief or something. Rubbing at his sleep deprived eyes he yawned and looked toward the bathroom, listening for the shower or the sink. Nothing

So Lucky reached over to grab it and stopped once he'd closed his hand around the dark red spot. Cotton, heavy with a sticky red splash of color. "What the hell?"

*S*W*R*R*

Elizabeth lost her slipper in a drift, her toes barely visible in the powdery snow on top, her red nails playing peek-a-boo with her shuttering vision. She lost her shoe and managed to stop a half a dozen steps later, barely aware of her surroundings.

She stopped and saw the dark green of the trees, like shadows beneath their white blankets of snow.

She stopped and realized that she wasn't going to get started again.

She was too tired.

She was in too much pain.

As she pitched forward into the drift she turned ever so slightly so that she was on her back staring up into the midnight blue of the night sky. She looked up and tried to understand the difference between the stars and the snowflakes falling down around her.

And then, she just didn't care any more.

*S*W*R*R*

He was running.

Running away from his friends, if that's what they were.

He'd been so used and pushed around by even those people that were his family that he could so easily believe that those that called him friend only did it to keep him around... doing things for them.

He was running and then he saw her.

She was, quite simply, a beautiful fallen angel. As if someone had taken a marble statue and tipped it back into the snow.

Her skin was alabaster, the barest difference in color to the pristine snow that nearly covered her like a blanket. And yet, there was color. The dark blanket of her hair, curled back from her face and frosted with snow. The palest pink of her lips that was nearly lavender, bleeding into blue.

Then, the color that made him move, pushed one foot in front of the other until he fell into the snow on his knees. Her shoulder was awash in blood, the flakes plastering against the wound, caking against her skin as her body struggled to pump blood through her damaged shoulder.

"Hey, wake up."

He looked at her, struggling to look beyond the splash of dangerous color that was pooling against her collar bone with a sluggish floe. He struggled to remember her name as memories in his mind pushed him to pull her up out of the snow and wrap her in his jacket... lift her up in his arms and carry her toward the boxcar that was still standing sentinel in the woods.

"Elizabeth... you have to wake up. I need to know what happened to you."

It really wasn't true. He had some idea of what happened to her. She'd been stabbed or shot... she was hurt and wandering around in her nightgown in the middle of the night.

He had an idea what happened to her, but he also knew something else.

"Hold on, Elizabeth, I'm going to get you help." She didn't reply, but she settled against him, turning her face trustingly into his chest with a soft sigh.

Someone had hurt her and it didn't matter why... even though he was going to find out who had done it. And, no one was ever going to hurt her again.