Snippet #2144851

How do you move on when all you can do is hold still?

Winter regarded him with icy eyes - she didn't think it was possible but at that moment he looked even more lost than she was. She'd felt a spark of anger when he'd kicked the strange food from the table. It was disrespectful - however empty the Empty Ones were, she couldn't bring herself to think of them as soulless, uncaring creatures.

"You're dead," he'd said. So I've been told, she thought. "Don't torture yourself." She'd been torturing herself her entire life, it would be strange to give up now.

Story had looked at her curiously when he'd said her name didn't suit her. Winter felt otherwise. She was numb. Cold - and as volatile as a desert of snow.

Nudging Story's feet off the table, Winter embraced the blonde man. She wrapped her pale arms around him and pressed his head to her chest, letting her silver hair fall over his body. "Being the Angel of Death seems like a pretty lonely job, don't you think?" Her voice was soft, like cotton snowflakes. "You feel real," she mumbled.

A wave of despair washed over her - a heaviness that suffocated her very essence and choked her heart through her throat. She abruptly pulled back from the man with yellow eyes and doubled over, clutching herself as she knelt on the floor. You'd think bipolar disorders wouldn't exist in Limbo. That in afterlife, at the very least, she would not have pain. It was ironic how she jumped from the building to escape herself and her life, just to end up with an eternity of Winter and the never-ending spiral of memories from her life.

"I bet you cut yourself," he says and it takes all of me and more, and there is nothing to take. I laugh and cry a little inside. Die a little more and smile - "Of course not."

He looks at me and it's like one of those dreams where you're naked and I want to shove my guts in my mouth and burn in Heaven, rip my scalpel through my thigh, throw my skull at a window and let the pain in my body overwhelm the pain in my heart.

Winter's flawless arms are filled with scars - when she arrived in Limbo, it was as if she'd been made anew. Her body was not broken from the fall and the scars from her mother, from Kaiser, from herself - did not exist. As if thinking about it made it a reality, Winter bled - the cuts on her arms blooming red. She stared, shock keeping her still. I'm breaking.

Unknown to her, the scars and cuts that were hers when she was alive were all in her head. Perhaps others in Limbo could see them and perhaps they couldn't. But they were not real - because in Limbo she was pure. At least, her body was.

Winter was trapped. In a life that was now over, she was keeping herself from freedom. Winter did not want to let her past go, didn't want to let her mental illness go because she was afraid. If she was no longer the Broken Girl, what would she be?

Winter would not snow.