David was dead.

They knew it was true. They just couldn't prove it. Why else would he just disappear from the expedition so suddenly? What else could have happened to him? Contrary to what they heard, they knew he didn't just quit and go home. No, he was too dedicated and driven to do that. What they did know was that he had a habit of getting into trouble. Or rather, trouble had a habit of finding him, so it really shouldn't have been a surprise that something like this would happen to him in the dangerous Arctic.

All they had were clues that pointed to Rain's death, but nothing definite.

Not a body.

All they had was some bloody ice and a distraught Zanna. And they couldn't get her to talk about it, at least not enough to firmly establish what happened up there that night. All they knew for sure was David had been seriously wounded somehow and then something had happened to his body. From the disjointed recount they got from Zanna, some polar bears had taken his body.

They probably weren't going to get it back. Not after this long.

Not that they hadn't tried. For days they had searched, hoping to find some evidence that he was out there, still alive. They searched every square inch of land nearby and even went out of their way to search for their missing colleague. But they days turned into a week and a week turned into two, and they gave up hope that he was still living because even if he had still been alive when he disappeared, logic and math and everything else they believed in said he would be dead when they found him. It had just been too long.

They couldn't declare him dead. Not according to the university's standards. No. Before this hit the fan, they wanted a body as proof and no one could give that to them. Not that they hadn't tried. They had tried to recover it, but eventually the ice just...ended and there was no way to track the bears.

They had even checked in the water where the ice had ended, just in case. They had sent down a little camera that they usually used for data collection, but the water was deep and the waterproof seal on the camera had started to leak. They had to pull it back up before it broke completely and destroyed the equipment. But not before seeing something down there. A glove and a hat it appeared like on the monitor they were using. And they were connected to something, but it was too poorly lit to see. But it looked like a body. If that were the case, then Zanna had been mistaken. But that wasn't a big surprise. She had seen a horrible, horrible thing up there.

They tried to retrieve the hat and gloves and whatever, or whoever, it was connected to, but they were too deep in the water and the ice had begun to freeze over again. In the end, they had to settle for knowing where David was, but not being able to get to him. Somehow, that was worse than not knowing.

But, regardless of this, they couldn't get a clear enough image of what was under the ice, so they couldn't prove that David Rain had met his unfortunate death while on the expedition. He had just vanished. According to the university, anyways. They weren't going to take the blame for a dead student if they could help it and to them no body or no picture of a body meant that he wasn't dead, not legally. Just missing. If a body turned up, they'd change his status, but for now, he was just gone.

Nobody who was on that trip was fooled. They knew exactly what was going on as soon as the university released its official statement. If they said he was missing it became David's fault. He should have followed the guidelines we set up for his safety, which he agreed to. He should have stayed with his group; at the very least he should have stayed with his partner. However, if they said he was dead, then it became the university's fault, and their problem. They should have paid closer attention to their researchers. It was unsafe up in the Arctic, why send college students to do such a dangerous job, just look what happened under their "supervision".

The entire expedition was outraged when they heard about that. Rain was dead. They had seen his body in the footage themselves, but the school had dismissed their testimonies and the footage as not clear enough to verify. And now they were denying it? What was this?

A cover-up. It just reeked of a cover-up.

And they could do nothing.

Once again, they could do nothing as everything, as the truth, slipped out of their control and sank into the icy depths of the Arctic, never to be seen again.