Rain & Ice

00.02

From this point on, you could officially deem yourself to have powers of ice after conducting your personal experiments around the house. I'd like to see Old Man Hargreeves have this much fun with an experiment.

You can feel the shit-eating grin that spreads across your lips as you push your hands outwards to make an ice trail parallel to the stairs, leading down to the foyer in a build-up of reckless fun. Call it childish, but you deserve it after having your youth taken from you the moment you stepped into that horrendously boring room.

With a mental countdown, you step on and rush past blurry images of what once was a grand house, because as it turns out, there's nothing that grand about an empty building full of memories colder than your abilities. Half of the time, you're not even sure if you can call them memories.

You know enough to realize that memories are supposed to be filled with contagious laughter and serene happiness, not empty eyes and hollowed sorrow. To put it plainly, the word 'memories' shouldn't exist in your vocabulary as every passing image and snippet in your head is simply something that's not even worth remembering in the end—or at least most of them.

You slide past Grace who looks on with no surprise evident on her face, only returning the quick wave that you had sent before moving to tend to other household duties.

You face forward again, and you're lucky you had done so, or else it would have been even harder to explain the new phenomenon made of your powers to Viktor who walks in through the front door just in time to see you jump from the ice trail.

"Y-Y/n? Is that you?" Taking slow steps as a predator would towards prey, Viktor rakes his eyes over your figure for any suspicious signs that may indicate that you weren't who he thought you were. But then again, there was no way you could still look thirteen after all these years, right?

Little does he know how wrong you were about to prove him.

"Viktor!" Though you had been expecting to see him, it still shocks you how the years have matured him. You walk closer with arms held out, elated when he envelopes you in a hug. "I missed you, so much."

There's a crack in his voice that you don't comment on, knowing full well that your own voice would sound the same if you were to speak. But you do anyways. "I missed you too, Viktor." Another minute passes before you pull away from each other, smiling as you take him in. "How have you been, Vik?"

"How have I been? How about you? Where have you been for all these years?" It's easy to mistake his words for anger, but there's an underlying tone of concern that comforts you. "You know, classic Old Man Hargreeves. It's always care to the kids but never about the kids."

You laugh it off with a chuckle that fades fast as memories of being frozen in time flash through your mind. "He kept me in the house at least. I like to call it clingy, but there was nobody except me, stuck in some stupid capsule that kept me frozen in time."

Viktor responds in concern, shock, and most of all, sadness. "I'm so sorry you went through that. My god, all this time I just thought you ran away somehow and I was happy but hurt that you didn't tell me, but to think all this time you were trapped. I thought I lost my only other friend."

You smile gently at Viktor. "Don't apologize Viktor. This was out of our control as everything else used to be, but hey, I'm here now," You hold out your arms in a presentive manner to showcase yourself. "And the old man isn't. Pretty good tradeoff, right?"

You pause. "Five hasn't come back." It comes out as more of a statement than a question, but Viktor nods. "Just walked out one day during dinner and never came back—hasn't come back."