Frigid Night {Dr. Freon x Xinavee}

[Xinavee]

Frigid Night​

The Bastard! How could he?! The old Volkswagen beetle sped down the icy gravel road, turning past drop off curves and past tall evergreen trees encrusted in a layer of ice and heavy limbed with snow. Normally Vanora was an excellent driver, attuned to the road, but tonight she couldn’t even feel the warning signs of the back of the little beetle sliding back and forth on the road. Oh, the pelting sleet coming down through the thick trees had made her turn her windshield wiper blades on as soon as she had the lights on, but that hadn’t distracted her from the image of Jackson and Melissa making out when she came in with a load full of wood for the night.

This was supposed to be a nice little get away. It was supposed to be a time the four of them could just enjoy each other. Her parents even approved, knowing Melissa and she would be sharing a cabin and the boys their own. How stupid she had been! Couldn’t she read the signs? They must have been crushing on each other for months, and she was just dumb to think –

The winds began to pick up, and with the heavy burden of ice and snow already making the trees heavy, limbs began to crack and fall. So deep in her own thoughts, Vanora almost slammed right into the large tree downed over the path of the National parks entrance. She slammed on her breaks, bringing the little beetle into a spiraling spin. It didn’t stop. Instead, it slammed the rear passenger side into the downed tree and careened the car off the side of the embankment sliding down the steep hill.

Vanora could do nothing, her limbs tightening in fear as she saw the world spinning, tumbling, and felt her head slam into the side of her door, as the side of the car hit the ground. Silence, save for the wind that howled again. Vanora tested her limbs, and nope her knee wasn’t okay. Her foot moved though and she had several cuts, one on her neck and chest, another low on her side and thigh where part of the metal had dented in, and several small ones upon her face and hands, but other than deep bruises, she didn’t feel anything completely broken.

Unbuckling her belt she crawled out of where the windshield should have been and looked up the embankment. How far had she driven? A mile? Three miles away from the cabins? She looked back in the destroyed car, pulling out the blanket her parents had forced her to pack and wrapping it around herself. It wasn’t going to do much good for very long, and she made sure to wrap it as tight as she could about her coat before crawling, on her hands, and on her one good knee up the embankment towards the road. Rain had already begun to soak through the blanket, and coat, into her shoes and her hair. Tears were blurring her eyes, but there wasn’t going to be a rescue. She just had to keep moving.

Finding a downed stick she began to hobble back towards the camp, back towards some kind of warmth, maybe a phone, but with the biting wind and the ice pellets sticking to her hair and clothes it wasn’t long before she began to be completely exhausted. Nearly an hour had past by the time she made it back up the mountain hill towards the cabins when cold and chilling she dropped to her knees, no longer able to stand up and walk. She lay there a few moments, feeling the cold begin to soak into her bones where she looked up at the two cabins. The one she had felt betrayed and forced out of, and the other…

She turned towards it instead, weak and drained of all heat she roll over on her back not too far from the wood pile. Vanora just needed to rest a little while. To breathe and look at the snow fall into her face.

 

[Doctor December]

With the wifi out of commission due to the snow,
Max had been watching a movie on his laptop. To be more specific, he had been watching the very last of the special features on a DVD that he had thankfully forgotten to take out of his laptop on the trip.

What his coworker friend Jackson had promised to be a fun time had quickly become just as boring as life at home. Jackson had invited Max along so that Melissa, the lonely girl that Jackson's girlfriend, Vanora, had brought along wouldn't be a third wheel. But Max found absolutely nothing in common with Melissa, and when she went as far as laughing just a little too loud and a little too long at a clumsy spill he'd taken on the icy path between cabins earlier, he decided he'd be in better company by himself.

But now he needed something to do to entertain himself. There was no way he was going back over to the cabin. It would feel like an apology for getting offended, and he wasn't sorry for being upset that Melissa (and even Jackson) had found his accident so damn funny. He looked up at the fireplace, where the last chunks of hot ash were smoldering. A few logs had been thrown in early in the evening, but it had been neglected all night since. He dragged himself up from his seat, put on his coat, and headed out.

Near the wood pile, he stopped, not wanting to trip over a shape he spotted just a little to late. But as his eyes gave the shape focus, he saw that it wasn't just a fallen tree or large rock, but Vanora in a blanket, stubby, brittle, icy snow starting to gloss itself over her.

"Hey! Vanora!" he shouted, rushing over her and giving her a gentle shake.

Panicking, he darted over to the other cabin's window and knocked on the glass. "Hey! Jack!? Melissaaa!" But only then did he make sense of what he saw in the window- the two were asleep on the couch, snuggling with each other behind a coffee table with an empty bottle of whiskey sitting atop it. Great.

He ran back to Vanora and shook her again, this time harder, and started brushing collecting pellets of sleet off of the lenses on her glasses. "Vanora! Are you awake? What are you doing out here?! You're literally freezing."

 

[Xinavee]

‘Hey! Vanora!’ it was like a call from far off. Some distant voice and time that was nearly lost to her. She hadn’t responded, at least not in any way that could be understood, but it had called her, back from some dark depth, from some land that was not yet opened to her.
‘Vanora, are you awake?’ It was difficult for her eyes to open, and when they did the world was blurry. Her muscles were stiff but and tight, difficult to reach out, but they did, touching but not gripping, nor feeling Max in front of her.

“Max?” Her voice was soft and distant even to her own ears, “Don’t let me go.” She tried to turn, to roll and found she had little energy to do so, but she tried all the same to get up. “Help me?” She felt her glasses pushed about her face lightly as the snow and ice was cleaned off. At least she could see a bit clearer now as she looked up into Max’s face in the night air.

“Max!” She breathed, a bit stronger now with the visual connection. She wasn’t dreaming, and the cold was cutting into her, hurt like stabbing needles up and down her body. She opened her arms and clutched him to her. “Oh, thank god! Help me!” The blanket fell away like a hard brittle shell as she clung to Max, her savior. She could see the cabin, brilliantly lit up like a haven, so close and yet she never would have made it on her own. “I can’t make it on my own. My knee is..”

She glanced down. She could see her knee was swollen, but the rest of her was so cold the pain there was nothing in comparison, her hands and feet were ice, no burning useless clubs of pain, and the rest of her muscles didn’t want to listen either except for the command to cling to the only warmth available to her. She pressed herself against him, her cold face nuzzling into his neck as she held on, shivering.