Frozen Hearts II

He was in a castle of ice and snow, set alone on a mountaintop, distant and cold, surrounded by the silence of desolation. As he moved through the shimmering corridors, mocking in their reflection of his mutated form, he saw no soul but himself, and felt nothing but emptiness. He was utterly alone, and trapped in a maze of neverending winter, and the cold, lifeless ice.

"Victor," said a voice, a voice full of the sweet tones of spring, of love and light and laughter. He looked up to see her standing there, his angel, surrounded by a halo of light as if the sun itself shone out of her. The smile on her beautiful lips, warm and red and alive, was brighter than the light shining from her, and her beautiful blue eyes, shimmering with life and love, seemed to give him renewed hope. It transformed his cold prison into a gorgeous, magical, radiant palace as he breathed her name on his frozen lips: "Nora."

She held out a hand to him and he raced toward her, catching her in his arms and kissing her, feeling love and warmth radiating from her body…feeling…

But he had forgotten what love and warmth felt like. In his prison of ice, such tender feelings had been crushed, and when he kissed her and held her, he tasted only cold lips and icy skin. "Nora!" he gasped, horrified. "Nora, my love, what have I done to you?!"

For she stared back at him with frozen eyes, her entire body cold and blue and opaque, trapped in a lifeless block of ice forever. Her smile had gone, to be replaced with a look of fear and horror, caught forever in her cold, crystal eyes. "Nora!" he shouted. "Nora, no! No!"

"No!" roared Victor Fries, starting up from bed suddenly. He stared around him, wide-eyed, in the darkness, as his sight adjusted to the familiar surroundings of his cell in Arkham Asylum. His breathing steadied as his panic gradually faded – it had been a dream, a nightmare, nothing more.

"A nightmare," he whispered, burying his face in his hands. "Nothing more."

But this wasn't strictly true. The circumstances of the dream were basically his reality – since the accident that had transformed Dr. Victor Fries into Mr. Freeze, he was encased entirely in a world of ice and snow, able to survive only at sub-zero temperatures. His cell in Arkham had a temperature control especially for that purpose. And his beautiful wife Nora was there with him in his cell, only…she was more dead than alive.

His eyes drifted over to the stasis tube against the wall, where Nora lay asleep, frozen, waiting for her cure so she could live again. She had been sleeping for many years, like the princess in the fairy tale, and just as beautiful. Freeze wondered if she would ever wake up – each year that passed took its toll on his hope, but he had vowed never to give up until she was free of her ice prison. At least one of them could be.

He stood up, coming over to stand next to her. A peaceful smile was on her beautiful lips – it had been frozen there since the day he had said goodbye to her. He lay a hand against the glass over her cheek. "I'm so sorry, my love," he murmured. "Every day I live without you is another day I have failed you. And every night without you is hell on earth. A cold, icy, lonely hell."

She never responded – just continued to smile serenely, and this gave him courage and hope. He planted a kiss over her lips on the glass and then turned away from her, to his work table. He wasn't going to sleep again after such a nightmare, so work was the only alternative.

Strictly speaking, he wasn't allowed any kind of chemicals or equipment in Arkham, but the head doctor, Dr. Leland, had bent the rules to allow him to keep his materials with him. She had a lot of sympathy for Freeze's situation and assumed, correctly, that Freeze only committed crimes in order to have funds to continue his work. If he was provided with the materials he needed, he would have no desire to escape from Arkham, and this had proved to be true. Freeze was eternally grateful to Dr. Leland for her kindness, though he would never show it – he never showed emotion to anyone, except Nora.

He sat down at his work table, opening his notebook. The disease that afflicted his wife was complex – it was a very virulent form of cancer, which had infected her blood and spread rapidly. He had frozen it in its tracks, but if Nora were ever removed from stasis, she would be dead in a matter of weeks. And there was no cure for it. No matter how hard he worked and how close he came to developing one, the actual cure seemed to elude him. Just as the disease was complex, the theoretical process for generating a cure was equally complex. But Freeze was never giving up hope.

He collected the chemicals together, lighting a Bunsen burner and mixing them. Even the small heat from the tiny flame was like a blast of a desert wind on his flesh, but he ignored it, stirring the compound. He brought it to a boil and then removed it from the heat, studying the mixture under his microscope and waiting until the chemical had cooled to add the next ingredient.

And then a thought struck him. "I wonder if…" he began, reaching for his freeze ray. He shot a blast of ice at the compound, freezing it suddenly, and then slowly injected the new ingredient into it. The chemical slowly trickled in, mixing and merging with the compound. Freeze watched with baited breath as he gradually applied heat, melting the mixture, and then looked again at the microscope.

He didn't dare get his hopes up as he reached for a syringe, collecting the compound in it and bringing it over to Nora's tube. She had an IV in her wrist, and Freeze injected the compound into this. He studied the monitors attached to the tube, reporting on her vital signs and the progress of the cancer. There was no change since the injection of the drug, and his heart sank.

"I'm so sorry, my love," he whispered, kneeling down in front of her. She floated above him, like an angel, forever untouchable, forever unreachable, forever beautiful. "I've failed you again. But one day, I swear to you, my precious wife," he said, raising his eyes to her peaceful face. "One day I swear, you will awaken in warmth and light and life. But for now, there is only cold and ice," he whispered, bowing his head. "And for me, it is eternal."

A tear escaped his eye, and froze on his cheek. But Nora remained smiling.