Hey guys, and thanks for tuning into the next chapter of NR! 8D

I start off again with my usual thanks: Zapper90, GCFarron (haha, hug privileges, I like that! & thank you~!), OscarMerrinoz96, Mylaervain, Lightarcana, madapocket, the whitespirit, and Crystal! You guys really made me smile with all the concern for our awesome Hope, and thanks again for your continued support of me! And as always, hearts go to my muse, LadyAlaska. :3

So, since I know you're all wondering what happened next... I'll be quiet now and enjoy as always! :D

Chapter 42: Ice Bound Soul

Lightning tried to hang onto the snow beneath her fingers like the they were something she could use, past caring if the icy flakes froze her fingers into position. The desperate, painful heartbeats that wracked her chest felt like too much to bear, and she couldn't even begin to comprehend the hatred she felt for herself. Why didn't I care about him first? I thought I was here... to save them... I promised I'd protect him... I promised!

Sudden thumps of shoes on snow sounded behind her, but they were like miniscule crystals held up to the light of the sun: immaterial and insignificant. It was only when rough hands shook her shoulders that she was snapped from her own private hell, forced to accept the present.

"Lightning! Sis, what happened? Hope?"

She found herself looking up into Snow's panicked ocean blue eyes as he shook her, trying to pull her up from her frozen posture, but she didn't let herself move. Even the ice eating at her numb fingers, even being consumed by the icy black water, was better than what he was trying to make her admit. She felt her limp, numb body being dragged upright despite her soundless protest; as small, warmer hands closed around her own frozen fingers, she pushed Snow and Serah away from her, backing away a few steps, her eyes focusing on the spot where their ice floe had been - now only a few white fragments drifting aimlessly in the blue black water.

Snow's gaze followed hers. "No!" he shouted, preparing to launch himself into the icy water, only to be pulled back by Serah, tears trickling down her sister's pale cheeks as she tried to hold back her behemoth of a husband.

"No, Snow, you can't go! You can't! Please!"

Her sister had no idea how much Lightning wanted go to herself... if she didn't know how useless it was going to be, if she didn't know that her body would freeze within moments of contact with the icy water, if she didn't know that any more efforts on her part would be useless and utterly pathetic. She hadn't been there in the moment it had counted, and all she could think about in this moment was how willing she was to go back to that moment and take his place. Even that... would have been more acceptable future than this.

I'm... a despicable person. I don't... deserve to live.

Other emotions, feelings apart from self-hate, pain, and worthlessness were frozen inside her. She couldn't feel or think about anything else, and for a moment, Lightning wondered if she should do it anyways: jump in after Hope's vanished form, and continue in her worthless attempt to save him. If she happened to die... so what? She deserved to.

"Sis. Sis... I-I'm sorry." Snow's broken whisper was just above her shoulder, but she didn't want to turn to him. She didn't want to see the look on his face... especially since she knew her own was some similar rearrangement of his. "I'm such... a stupid idiot."

The words hit the most primal part of her instincts inside, fueling the angry feelings, and abruptly, she whipped around, the sudden anger seizing control in the absence of all other motivational emotion. "You're fucking right that you are!" The words wouldn't stop as the swift fury got the better of her. "What the fuck did you think you were doing? You..." Abruptly, the stream of hurtful insults trailed off; she couldn't continue. The words didn't apply to him. As stupid as his actions were, he couldn't have seen how they would turn out, couldn't have foreseen what the results of his intended good will gone wrong would be. The words applied to her.

She'd known what was happening. She'd known the moment both Hope and her had hit the water, and instinct had told her to save herself instead of him. She hadn't even thought about trying to grab him before the ice kicked into her system, sending her into the frozen realm of shock. She hadn't even thought about him when she'd dragged herself onto the snow encrusted land. She had only thought of saving herself.

He'd shouted for her.

In the moment that the ice had utterly engulfed her, she knew he had shouted for her to help him. And in that same moment, she hadn't been able to reply without filling her lungs with ice. If she was any more useless and worthless, then that moment proved it; in that heartbeat, she couldn't have given him a clearer idea about how she felt about him.

Lightning found she was terrified and haunted by the thought that his last thoughts of her were that she hadn't come for him when he needed it the most.

There had been no choice but to keep moving, as much as the choice tore at his heart. Snow felt his hands curl into fists as he led the way. Serah had dropped back behind him, pulling her sister along by the hand. Her silence and non-resistant form were perhaps what scared him the most; for a moment, when he'd spared the effort to look back at her, he'd thought she'd finally lost it, finally snapped under the unrelenting pressure she put on herself.

And it wasn't like he didn't put the same pressure on himself. The thought of what he'd done had finally hit him, fifty feet from the lake's edge. However unintentional, he'd... I'm a fucking retard. Exactly like she'd said. When she shouted at him, he wanted her to continue, wanted to hear everything thrown out into the open. But instead, after only two sentences, she'd choked, and he'd seen the blaze of pain and guilt in her eyes. She blamed herself more than she had blamed him, and Snow wondered, sarcastically, if he was supposed to feel better at that.

The horizon was endless in front of them in the light of the dying sunlight, streaking the snow and ice a mosaic of colours in the shades of a million blooms of flowers. And at any other time, Snow would have found some joy in the beauty of the landscape. But today, all the resplendent colours did was remind him of blood, remind him of the fight they'd just survived.

He didn't think he could bear it.

"Snow?" Serah's quiet, scared voice sounded somewhere by his sleeve as she tugged carefully on it. "We should rest... Claire..."

She didn't need to say more. "I know, baby." He wished there was some way to make his voice sound more alive - if there was one thing Serah needed right now, it was a soft place to land. Instead, his dead tones just reinforced the scared, apprehensive look in her eyes. "You stay with Sis. I'll take a look around."

He forced himself through the remaining snowdrifts like they were composed of frozen acid instead of pure liquid, his boots tracking silent impressions in the soft snow. What he found though over the next small hill, wasn't a place where they could be at least partially sheltered from the quickly falling night. What he found were deep blue ice structures constructed serenely around a deep entrance set into the ground, leading to what he could only see as darkness.

The Ice Cliff Palace.

Ironically, they'd found it in the one moment they hadn't needed it. Snow didn't know who to curse for the cruelness of the situation, and he forced his feet to move, one in front of the other, as he made his way back to his wife and sister-in-law, hating himself with every step, every crunch of snowflakes under his feet.

Serah had gotten her sister to sit down on a rock, but Lightning looked like an impassive statue, hands twisted at her sides, not even bothering to clean the blood off the cut on her face or the ice that was slowly freezing her petal coloured hair into spikes. Only her eyes betrayed the fact that she wasn't an ice sculpture, and Snow hated the pain and agony he saw in them.

"Hey." The word was so empty and hollow in the vast expanse of white tinged with red and pink, purity stained with war. War... and love. Even the weather was reflecting what had just happened, and Snow hated everything from the fal'Cie created ground to the goddess Etro in the Unseen Realm for throwing them down this path. "I found a place."

His voice sounded so inadequate against the void opening beneath his feet that it made him wince.

Serah looked up at him, a small veil of relief lighting the indecision and fear in her eyes, before she tugged on her sister, trying to coax her to getting up. Lightning didn't move though, her fingers only gripping harder on the handle of the omega weapon like she could destroy her pain with it, and for a moment, again, Snow thought she had finally snapped. He watched her ice blue eyes close for a moment, as if she wanted to shut out everything that hurt her in the world, before opening them again, letting Serah pull her up.

He felt like he should have said something more, something infinitely more commensurate to elicit some sort of response out of her. He wasn't used to this, and in some way, he felt like he wanted her to shout, swear... anything.

Heck, Sis, if you cursed at me for being the retarded idiot I am, I would welcome that at the moment. Somehow, her lack of a response to everything outside of her own personal purgatory made him feel frightened of her mental condition than if she had snapped and pulled out her gunblade, an almost manic response to what was hurting her, like she'd done at the beginning of their journey. But instead, she was holding it all back, as if steeling herself against the inner torment was going to make it easier on her.

Why did things have to be this way?

The cold stone entrance to the underground Ice Cliff Palace shielded the wind, but no amount of heat was going to make her warmer. Lightning felt like she was never going to be warm again. She'd let Serah gently clean the blood off the mark left by the scythe, and she'd let Snow and Serah set up the fire near her, but even with the flames that dried her drenched clothing, she couldn't forget. The stinging pain on the left side of her face was only one outlet of her anguish; she'd refused to cast a cure spell on it: it was a distraction against the storm inside that was threatening to rip her apart.

Unable to say a word, she could only watch Serah cry herself to sleep against Snow, and she could only watch as the big man's tired cobalt eyes close as he finally nodded off too. But she couldn't. She'd purposefully found herself the coldest, most uncomfortable place to sit, her back against a jutting slab of concrete, right at the mouth of the entrance. The physical discomfort was a welcome preoccupation against the mental torture: she'd let him die.

There was no way around it, no way to deny it. I told you... I would never be able to detach myself from that moment! And he'd been the one to tell her she wasn't to blame. Do you still feel that way? Do you? Somehow, being angry dispelled the pain before it all came rushing back like a river flooding a broken dam. Dams never held back the water for long.

And Maker would be damned if she didn't! Feeling the energy of the grief consume her, Lightning forced herself up in one fluid movement, bracing herself against the gust of strong wind that blew back her damp pink hair.

She had to find him.

There was no way he could have survived in the water for that long, but it didn't matter. She still had to find him. The new sense of purpose erased some trace of the utter agony that wanted to drag her into its depths, but she fought back against it, her new resolve fighting the urge to wallow in her own despair.

A slim hand closed on her wrist, pulling her down. "Claire... don't go."

For the first time since this afternoon, Lightning felt words fight past her tightly closed lips. "Let go of me." She tried to shake off Serah's grip, but her sister didn't let go, instead just gripping her slender wrist harder.

"It's not going to help. Do you think... he'd want you acting like this?"

Something snapped again, as she felt the familiar flare of anger consume her, fed by the fierceness of her new purpose. She was shouting before she realized what she was saying. "How the hell do you know, Serah? How the hell do you know what he wants? And now..." And just like before, Lightning felt every scrap of fight she had left drain from her like there was something that fed off her the moment she got angry. Her next words sounded pathetically weak and pathetically stupid, but they were the truth she could no longer deny. "And now I'll never know."

Serah stood up too, and she could see that her sister was out of words to say, out of words that would make her feel better. Instead, she simply pulled her arms around her back, bringing them together in an embrace that Lightning knew she couldn't return. The similarity, the stark likeness to what had transpired just last night made her want to scream.

There was no way out of this.

"We go on. We finish this, okay?" Serah's desperate words were close to her ear. "I promise."

Lightning didn't want to hear anymore.

The blue light that pierced through the upper glass layers of the ice palace's ceiling bore down, hard, on the back of Serah's neck. The light danced playfully before her eyes, and any other time, Serah knew she would have found this place to be the most beautiful of the three shrines built in honour of the fal'Cie gods. Someplace serene, angelic, like it was unaffected by the storms of the outer world. How the light penetrated to an underground castle, she would never know, but it didn't matter. The amaranthine placidity of Etro's castle was accented by the constantly shifting blue light.

Inside though, the place was a maze, and Serah felt her hand tighten in Snow's as they walked together, slowly, taking comfort in each other's presence. Breathing in his husky scent, Serah had tried to convince herself her sister would be okay. But after the brief shouting she'd done last night, and the silence that had followed, Serah knew she couldn't convince her sister, couldn't get her to open up and let out her emotions. A stab of pity went through her chest as she remembered the thought that followed it.

No... that's what Hope got her to do.

It had been hours before her sister had finally fallen asleep, and Serah had held her for awhile longer, unsure if Lightning was only accepting the physical comfort because there was no other way. Before gently letting go of her sister, Serah had seen the cut that was still on her face in the harsh moonlight that bounced off the snow outside, like a tribute to her pain; only she knew that her sister's pain cut much more deeply than a shallow graze across her pale skin. Serah hadn't, and still didn't, know how to comfort her, not when her own pain was so acute. She'd tried to hide it, tried to seal it away in the face of their pain, but she knew it would come out sooner or later. For the moment, though, she was determined to keep it in. I have to be strong... for their sake. Even if I'm hurting.

"So." Snow's usually boisterous voice was subdued, but it still echoed off the panes of glass that decorated the large antechamber they were in. He coughed slightly before moving on. "Any ideas, Sis?"

"No." The answer was short and curt, and she didn't turn around.

There were two paths laid out in the shifting blue gloom in front of them, and both of them twisted into the darkness, their ends unseen. There was no telling which way was the right way to go.

Her heartbeat was the only thing Serah could hear in the dim light as she watched the still form of her sister and the one of her husband, their hands tightly enclosed together.

How are we... going to keep going?

Cold.

Like trying to breathe rocks, Hope found that breathing the ice water was just as hard, if not harder. The ice attacked every inch of his skin cells, turning them from workable, moving limbs into ones that might have belonged to an ugly sea creature, one that never saw the sunlight. He'd tried calling out to Lightning, tried shouting her name before the water crashed over his head like a tidal wave. She hadn't responded though, and he could only hope that it was because she was in the same situation that he was in: water pressing in on every sense until that was all he could comprehend. There was no way it was the alternative...

And try as he might, there was nothing to hold onto, nothing to grip his hands into that would grant him the oxygen his lungs so badly needed. The cold was messing with his body, messing with his mind, because it seemed like there was nothing he could hold onto, his arms and legs beginning to be spun into a cold cocoon that wouldn't grant him release.

Blackness crowded at him even though his eyes were closed, and Hope knew that if he didn't get some air into his lungs soon, he would end up dying exactly like how the enemies they'd forced into the water had died. Clawing furiously through the liquid as if it was something he could hold, he found nothing except intangible sensations he couldn't hold.

Light... save me!

His own desperate thought made him wince, even in the face of the ice that was freezing his muscles. He couldn't rely on her for protection forever, couldn't promise to help her too when every life threatening situation made him turn to her guardianship like a scared little kid. But he really was desperate - instinct was beginning to win over cognition as adrenaline kicked into his system for the one last "fight or flight" reaction.

Hope found it strangely ironic that he couldn't do either of the reactions his body wanted him to make. He couldn't run from the world of water and there was nothing to fight. Nue was gripped in his right hand, but there was nothing for the weapon to hit. Briefly, he wondered if he should just give up.

Maybe that was easier, just letting the water in and invade his senses and drag him down into the depths. He couldn't even feel the ice that attacked his skin anymore - it had felt like fire when his skin had first made contact with it, but now it was just another wave upon wave of uncomfortableness that rocked at his failing consciousness.

"I don't have time to babysit you. You want to get tough? Do it on your own!"

The memory of Lightning's angry words to him in the Vile Peaks sliced through the fog like a blade, and the memory pushed away the thoughts of hopelessness instantly. She would be angry again if she saw him giving up so easily like this again, and this time, he was determined not to let that happen.

Desperate hands clawed upwards again, trying to find some form of purchase in the icy liquid, feeling a shock of pain rip through his body as his fingertips brushed the ice that had no doubt reformed over the frothy, still liquid over the lake's surface. The tips of his gloved hands punched through the thin surface that had spun across the black water in the time he'd been submerged, but there was nothing to grab even as frigid air seized his digits.

Even with his head threatening to break the surface, he couldn't hear any sound of struggle except his own. A sense of something like betrayal and panic was beginning to set in. Light wouldn't abandon me... right? She'd wait for me... right? Suddenly, strong hands seized his own, pulling the rest of his body from black into brightness.

Hope felt himself being set down on solid ground, and for a moment all he could do was breathe, as someone draped something over him.

"So, you goin' for a swim there, kid?" It was a familiar voice, but one he couldn't place at the moment - his mind seemed to be still full of ice fragments. A small kweh kweh! solidified his perception of reality, and slowly, he opened his eyes, looking up into Sazh's crinkled brown eyes with a mix of amusement and worry. The chocobo chick fluttered happily around his head, picking at the icy strands that had melded into his platinum hair.

"Talk about a sight for sore eyes," he managed to get out, still trying to catch his breath.

Sazh ruffled the silver hair on his head. "Nice to see you too, kid. Where's soldier girl and the hero?"

What?

Hope hugged the thick brown overcoat to him, feeling grateful of its warmth before struggling to his feet. "They're not... here?"

The older man shrugged. "Nope, not a sight. Thought you would've known. Though I suppose Lightning wouldn't have let you go for that swim if she was." The joking tone was erased as the Sazh scrutinized him more closely. "You kids are alright, aren't you?"

Hope actually had about a million questions for the older man but he held his tongue as his gaze swept over the sight behind him. There were at least ten Guardian Corps hoverplanes in the ice and snow behind him, and several soldiers were milling around, preoccupied with techs in their hands, others polishing black metal weapons. Sazh caught his incredulous gaze.

"Surprised? Don't be. Long story short, we figured out what you kids were up to awhile after you left. See, those creeps you guys were chasing after decided to go out again for another shot at New Bodhum, and we figured out their plans because we caught the sneaks that had wormed their way into Pulse Management. So we decided to chase after you to give you kids a hand. Came in on time, did I?"

Hope felt a small chuckle escape his lips at the last comment. "You could put it that way." He glanced up again. "So... Light and Snow and Serah aren't here?"

The older man shook his head. "Nope. Lemme ask around while you warm yourself up, hm?" He walked away before Hope could say anything else. Still shivering, he clutched the woolen thing closer to him, trying to use its warmth to boost his own body heat. Rubbing the numbness of his arms, he cast another sweeping glance over the area - her distinctive pink hair was definitely not there.

Sazh was back before Hope could consider the emotional consequences of his current situation. "No sign of the others, but there are several sets of footprints leading north. I'd bet my buttons that's them."

Hope smiled as the man pushed him forwards towards a group of soldiers chatting several dozen feet in front of them: one of them had the blue stripes of a commanding officer. He waited awkwardly to the side as Sazh chatted with the officer, gesticulating animatedly with his hands for a few sentences as they talked.

The hand was back on his shoulder as they both started toward north, finding the pink streaks of dawn as the light reached its fingers across the milky sky. "So kiddo. You up for this?" The chocobo fluttered happily around them, its talons clutching his teal scarf as it flapped, chirping. Half heartedly, Hope tried to snatch it back - all that made the small yellow bird do was flap higher, out of his reach. He let out a sigh; he supposed this was its way of letting him know it was glad to see him.

There was no hesitation in Hope's voice as he turned back to readdress the question. "You bet."

Light... if you're out there, I'll find you. Time for me... to come looking for you.

So yeah. ;D

A little note about the above scene: the ice breaking part was always meant to happen, but the part where Hope 'died' wasn't planned until just a few days ago when I was discussing things with a friend and she suggested it; like I said last chapter, it was meant to parallel a future event. I feel kind of bad about it... tbh, I mean, being mean to Hopekins wasn't an intended act, but it turned out kind of interesting to write about, and it actually tied in with my reintroduction of Sazh more than what was originally intended. (Now that I think about it, it would be sort of weird if he just showed up and was like "hey kids, sup?". Now he actually kinda plays a role in it all...)

Anyways, yeah. 8D Leave love as always in reviews, and I'll see you guys tomorrow~!

Hearts!