Surprise, it's me again! School's been keeping me busy, but I thought I should at least post something. So while I'm still working on the actual update, here's a little side story from a series of Cross Ice Shorts I've written to place at random intervals, just to add more depth and intrigue... JUST KIDDING I JUST DID IT BECAUSE I FELT LIKE IT HAHAHAHA.

~Crimrose

P.S. Thank you for all the lovely messages, reviews, favourites, and follows! Y'all are actually the best, not a word of a lie.

Zero

She couldn't feel a thing. All she could see was white, flurries of white, mercilessly cascading down from the sky. There was a painfully heavy weight on her back some time ago, but it had since faded – rather, her back's ability to feel had faded, leaving her to only assume whether it could still be there or not. She couldn't even see her own body, and figured she must have left it behind.

The concept of death to a child is a rather complicated thing – in short, they could barely begin to understand it. The deaths of others was a concept they could grasp, if only somewhat; someone is there, and then they're gone forever, their bodies buried below the ground as her great-aunt Himeko was a year or so before. But dying themselves was absolutely foreign, unimaginable. The future itself was a concept as expansive as the galaxy, limitless and unending. She wasn't afraid of dying, because she still couldn't fully comprehend what it meant.

She still believed her parents would find her soon, even though she was completely buried in snow. They were her parents, after all; they always found her when she was hiding, always went out searching when her adventurous spirit caused her to wander too far. But now matter how much she got lost, or how far she went from home, they would always come for her. This time should have been no different, even if they were hours and hours and hours away from home in a place with no streets, or people, or houses. There were only miles, miles, miles of crisp white snow and fields of ice, with huge contraptions and fancy cameras to help her parents with their work.

When she first realized that she didn't recognize anything, that her parents, their coworkers, and the cozy little cottage they stayed in was nowhere in sight, she'd bawled and yelled, thinking they'd find her immediately. Her voice was merely carried away and drowned out by the wind, the snow falling and falling heavily from the sky, and when her legs had begun to feel like trying to move her father from a sleeping position, she'd taken a rest. The rest turned into sleep. Sleep turned into whatever it was she was in now, unable to move, barely able to breathe. She knew she had to keep yelling – how could anyone find her if they didn't even hear her voice or see her footprints? But she just… couldn't. Her mouth wouldn't open, her tongue wouldn't move. She was exhausted, physically and mentally, and wanted to let the darkness around her overtake her and suck her into a sleep as comforting as the naps she had at her mother's side.

Wiggle your toes, she thought to herself, but her mind just couldn't seem to reach them. Your fingers. A futile attempt. Your nose. No, noting would move. She'd cried a bit earlier, when she realized she was getting stuck, but the tears had crystallized right on her face and remained there, sealing her eyes shut and her eyelashes coated with icicles. Her gasping breath and wet sobs stuck in her throat, like she was choking on a chewy candy. She'd hurt a lot, at first, worst then when she'd fallen from the massive oak in her house's backyard and broken her arm, but she preferred that to the sleepy state she was currently in. At least that was something.

At that point she'd forgotten what warmth felt like, what her parents faces looked like, what her home looked like. All she knew was the black and white around her, the static on the television screen in between the channels they received at home. She wanted, no, needed to sleep. Her eyes were almost shut anyway, and she was perfectly comfortable, as far as she could tell. Her lids were heavy, so heavy. In all her seven years of life she'd never felt so tired, so she just slowly let her eyes drift closed the best they could when confronted with all the frost and ice. She felt like she was slipping internally, she didn't know how, and didn't stop it from happening. She'd wake up soon, and she'd be safe at home with her mother and father, all of this seeming like a bad dream.

Her mom always had to ease her into sleep, as she was afraid they'd have fun without her after she closed her eyes. We'll see you tomorrow, her mother would say. We can do everything you want to then. Just close your eyes and when you open them, we can play again. It worked, more often than not. She thought of her mother saying that to her now, and would have smiled if she could have. She'd see them tomorrow. This was no big deal at all; it could make a neat story to tell her friends at school. Maybe she'd be able to stay in the snow for the longest from now on, when they held contests about who could lay in it without a jacket and snowpants. She always lost – she was too used to being warm and coddled. Now, she'd be invincible. She could do anything.

She didn't notice when her breathing stopped, or when she became unable to hear the muffled sounds of wind howling around her. There was just nothing. She just was not anymore. There was no sense of feeling disembodied, or wondering what had happened to her, because there was no her anymore to have that happen to. She was not waiting for tomorrow anymore, because for her, tomorrow would never come.

Something disturbed the darkness. A… sound, perhaps, if that's what it was, because what was a sound anymore? It wasn't like the screeching wind, or the hum of a lullaby, or the whispering of leaves on a dense oak tree. It was crunching, breaking ice and packed snow. It kept echoing, on and on and on, never gaining or lessening in pace. Louder, now. It was right there. So close it was almost piercing. Then –

"Oh, Jesus fuck." More crunching, faster than the first, louder and almost… angry? "What in Hell's name is that?"

"A child."

Voices. Those were… voices. They were people, talking, right there. The first was one recognizable by all children because of its impatience and temper. The second was absolutely deafening. It shook the earth, sent waves crashing, caused souls to shatter. She was again because of that voice. She could remember, she could hear, she could be awake within herself. There was a crazed thumping somewhere nearby, the insistent, feverish pounding of a snare drum, reverberating through her ears and body.

"Ugh," the first voice said. "Gross. I hate wasting time here; let's go before we see another. They're probably littering this nasty-ass place like imps."

"It's alive."

Her heartbeat. It had to be her heartbeat. She'd heard it before, seen it before, at the doctor's whenever she went for a checkup. He let her use the cold headphones to put up to her chest and her mother's chest, just to see if it was true. It was surrounding her, making her want to move, yet still unable to. The voice made her want to move more than anything, speak more than anything.

"Just leave it."

"Don't be like that." It was more soothing than the softest lullaby, the most luxurious of promises. She felt like she could take off running, or swim to the bottom of the ocean and come back up. "Its parents are probably searching for it. You go ahead."

"Whatever." The crunching – footsteps – went far away into the distance, until they couldn't be heard anymore. Dread filled her entire being; the voice couldn't be gone, could it?

"Do you want to live?" The voice finally asked her after an eternity of waiting, the way she'd felt that one time her parents had forgotten to pick her up at school. She wanted to answer, but she couldn't. Her mouth was… heavy, for lack of a better term. But something had to come out, something to make it stay, to make it help. Her mind raced, no thoughts going through it, just pointless images and untranslatable screams.

In the back of her throat, air got through. With all of her might, she breathed, "I want to play tomorrow," as quiet as the still air. It couldn't have heard; her mother was always telling her to speak up in the first place. She was going to go to sleep alone again, waiting for the tomorrow that would never come.

Instead, she broke. At least that's what it felt like. She imagined her body dropping to the floor like one of the porcelain dolls in her grandmother's collection when she'd been playing with it and watched its face shatter as she accidentally dropped it. There was that sound of breaking glass, the feeling of intense separation, and then just feeling. Her legs, her arms, her nose, her fingers, her everything. It was there again. She wasn't just floating in space. And it was freezing, and it was warm. It was so warm, her whole body felt as though it were wrapped in the fluffiest of blankets in her house.

She was being held in that way her father did when she pretended to be asleep, just so he'd carry her to bed and stay with her a little longer. Her legs and arms didn't swing with motion; instead she felt achey and cramped, as if she were being forced back together after being broken. Her eyes were cleared, yet the snow still rocketed down from the unseen sky, so her vision was blurry. She wanted to know who the voice belonged to, the one that made her feel like the chords of the koto in her dancing studio being plucked by the musician. It was strange, and it made her feel small, and safe as though she were in the arms of a family member.

Was she dreaming? Or had she actually died? She couldn't say; she was too young to muddle out the details. But she had been saved – from what, exactly, she wasn't sure. She squinted to look above her, trying to see the face of her savior, her knight in shining armour like from her story books.

Pure black eyes with rings of the blue of dawn stared back down at her, dark as the force that overtook her, warm as the body holding her. Even though she was taken back to the compound, embraced so hard by her sobbing parents that she nearly passed out again, she couldn't forget the warmth of whoever held her that day. She turned back to thank them, invite them inside, anything.

But they were gone, vanished into the screen of snow surrounding her.