Title: Once More With Feeling
Rating: PG/T
Pairing: SeiferxSquall
Summary: He wants to feel again, and only the fire can melt the ice to make it work.
Notes: As with Twilight Rituals, I'm moving this into the drabble collection as well, and taking it down as a separate fic.
Other Notes: I have a strange obsession with the 'fire and ice' theme.


"I want to feel."

He hasn't felt anything worthwhile for so, so long. He's felt emptiness, he's felt abandonment, he's felt pain and horror and the rush of battle, but that's not what he wants.

"Everything is just so cold inside of me."

It's the cold that bothers him more than anything else.

The cold wasn't always there. There was a time, when he was young, that he could enjoy the little things of life, such as the dancing sunset or the gorgeous sky. There was a time when he could feel things like joy and the thrill of lifeand not some artificial, cold, metal mask.

There was a time when he'd allowed himself to feel.

But after she left him, broke his heart into pieces, he stopped letting himself feel humanHe'd locked it all away, just because it hurt a little too much for him to take, and he couldn't stand that pain.

It was the best plan. Seal it up into a tiny silver box in the back of his heart, a place where no one can go and no one can find the key to.

That box had remained shut for the longest time. He had been an expert at keeping it frozen over, making it grow, making it become more and more beautiful, building up the gleaming crystal and making it so taunting and untouchable in the distance. He was the Ice Prince and Shiva's Lover; he was the blizzard given flesh and was pure, emotionless ice, and that was how he liked it.

Until he had tasted the fire, molten hot on his tongue and laced thick with promises and whispers that he knew were too good to be true, but were so tempting that he let himself fall with them, in a bout of mindless desperation.

"I want to feel something, anything."

It had been daring and rushed, full of too much emotion and too much adrenaline, and it had tasted like ash and blood wrapped into the reckless crush of heated bodies. Now that he looks back, it was probably too quick for a first, too rough and too thoughtless, and no meaning had been put behind it. It had ended in more cold than there had been before when the fire had pulled away and left him bare and alone.

But he kept coming back, kept letting the blaze drag him away and into the sunlight so he could melt before them all.

At first, it had only happened occasionally. Just once every other month or so, whenever the cold built up again and he needed to feel the fire hot and thick in his body, needed to have it tame the ice just a little bit and let him breath again.

"Just not this."

It was only a matter of time before it changed. Months dwindled down into weeks, and eventually even that wasn't soon enough, and it became a nightly ritual, sometimes gentle, sometimes so rough he'd be so full of feeling the next day he'd hide away from it all, from the fear of those foreign emotions that would linger in his mind and heart. Other times they would just lie down and cling to one another, as if life was slowly tearing them apart, letting the heat soak through from warm skin to almost too cool, heating him inside and out.

He's tried staying away, but it never works out.

The fire calls him back, and he's sprawled out once more, naked and vulnerable and revealed as the frost melts away, his face and body burning hot to a point where it feels like his flesh is on fire and he's become so feverish that he says things he knows can't be true, because that just isn't like him.

"I want the chill to be gone."

But he loves every moment of it. He hates himself because he loves it, because in these times, when the fire is overpowering and he can't think straight and his breath is coming in irregular, broken gasps, he can finally feel everything around him. The box shatters open and the contents pour out, drip down over him and along pallid marble, running in clear, smooth trails down his face, neck, and chest, dazzling with sweat and so tantalizingly beautiful in the muted lighting.

"I can do that."

And the fire is there to dry up the melted pieces of the box and make it better again, even if it hurts to face the failure and the emptiness, hurts so much that he cries out sometimes, without even knowing it. But the fire envelops him, soothes him, wraps around him and swallows him whole and presses back those yells with gentle kisses, and he knows that here, within the comforting blaze, he can simply feel human again.