♥ hourofthewitch wrote Frozen 1/2 for mng042197
Title: Frozen 1/2
Author: hourofthewitch
Summary:Spoilers/Warning/Triggers: I don’t want to give too much away, but expect some sexual situations, mild horror/spooky stuff, and dealings with (mental) illness.
Author Notes:First and foremost, I want to thank jandjsalmon for her tireless efforts towards making this exchange work and her limitless patience. It was (at times) a rough ride, with more bumps than I’d anticipated but I couldn't have asked for a better moderator along the way. As for the writer I wrote this for, I sincerely hope you enjoy. This fic is AU, though I tried to subtly incorporate elements from canon here and there. I hope I did the characters and your prompt justice! I was heavily inspired by the song you provided, along with this image I found.
FROZEN
One hundred and one days after she was born, her mother planted an Oak Tree in the yard. The very thought of the great Fiona Goode venturing outside in the middle of winter -naked- with nothing but a shovel, a bucket full of blood and an Oak seedling still makes her snort, but Cordelia has assured her on more than one occasion that’s exactly how their mother had done it. She’d done it like she does everything else in her life: with pride and determination.
Atop the waste of her birth, the tiny seedling was planted and as it had nurtured her during those nine months, so did it nurture the tree. It grew at an almost alarming speed, quicker even than she did, its roots fattening and digging deep down into the earth as its branches reached up and up and up in an attempt to cradle the sun, the moon, the stars.
Nowadays it stands tall, strong. Nowadays Zoe can hardly bear to look at it.
It’s like a mirror.
The Oak, like her, is rooted firmly in place. Immobile, trapped by cold, dense earth, exposed to the elements and the seasons. Zoe watches its leaves change -she hates it when the leaves change- and twirl and tumble inevitably down. A thousand little, stark reminders that winter will soon be upon them.
It will be her fourth in captivity.
~*~
“Jesus, will you stop slouching? The women in this family are known for our backbone; use yours.”
The knife and fork in her hands are cold, polished to perfection by a maid they don’t pay nearly as much as they could -as they should- but who sticks around, anyway, hovering ever close to the kitchen door just in case she’s called upon, which is often. There’s no pleasing her mother, after all, not really. The food is always something but just right: too cold, too hot, too fatty, too dry. Zoe’s shoulders feel stiff, arched forward as they are, the delicate shape of her collarbones clearly visible through her nearly translucent skin, her elbows growing sore from resting on the grand table’s edge.
“Why? It’s not like I need it.”
Across from her, Cordelia stills and looks up from her plate. Her fork trembles almost unnoticeably in her slender hand, but Zoe’s gotten good at watching -it’s all she ever does anymore- and catches the movement. A little flicker of emotion, nearly as telling as the visible way her sister swallows. Not food; a lump in her throat that their mother put there.
Zoe averts her eyes and turns them on the woman in question. Fiona’s all collected grace, her legs crossed elegantly under the table, regarding her with a slight tilt of her perfectly quaffed head, not a single blonde strand out of place. “I want to go outside.”
An almost exasperated roll of eyes, the corners of blood red lips pulling down.
“How many more times do I have to tell you before you finally learn? You can’t.”
“Yes, I can,” she bites back through clenched teeth, because she hasn’t had anything to lose in years now.
“Not with your… affliction.” Her mother has put down her fork, moves her hands in the air like she’s shaping the word with her fingers instead of her lips. She’s not meeting her cold gaze, rather looking down at the feast before them. Like her sister is.
It’s all an act; everything. The food, the silverware, the expensive cloth covering the table. Them.
“Bullshit. I’ve told you, I feel fine.”
“Well, you’re not!”
Zoe doesn't even flinch at Fiona’s sudden outburst, just presses her lips together and waits for her mother to collect herself again. Tap a pack of cigarettes on the table and worm a long, boney finger inside. Light up. Exhale. Smoke as white as her porcelain complexion, as fragile and constant as her dreams of getting out.
“The good doctor will be here for you tomorrow. We’ll see about taking a walk after his visit.”
“In town?”
Brown eyes narrow slightly. Her sister’s are cast heavenwards and to the side, as if by doing so she can avoid the conversation as well as their tense body language. “The property is more than big enough.”
Zoe shakes her head and scoffs, makes sure to make as much noise as possible as she pushes her chair away from the table and stands up.
“You can’t keep me here forever.” If she’s said the words once, she’s said them a thousand times. “Your madness isn't mine.”
~*~
That evening, she watches her mother through the crack in her bedroom door. The older woman is in her nightgown, a beautiful piece of clothing, black satin with intricate beading near the hem and neckline because even in slumber she won’t settle for anything less than perfection. Decadence.
Her vanity table is aptly named and matches the way Fiona feels about her appearance perfectly. Its marble surface is nearly littered with lotions, powders, makeup, ointments,… aids in her eternal quest for youth and beauty. Like Santa’s little helpers.
They can only work so many miracles, though, and the painstaking process of age catching up and digging its greedy claws in her mother’s flesh would be laughable, if it wasn't so unbearably tragic. If the glimpses Zoe catches of her mother’s reflection in the mirror didn't look like desperation, like something so unlike her mother at all.
For all her ridiculous claims to magic, she can’t seem to keep herself young.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall…” though her lips are curled up into a self-deprecating smile, she sounds tired. Her black nails -not unlike those of a panther or any other beautifully dangerous animal- push and pull at flesh that’s becoming weaker, all elasticity it may have once had having made way for deep lines and crow’s feet. The sagging skin near her throat almost seems to shiver, shake like a turkey’s, before she smoothes it back and away with both hands and meets her own eyes. Head on, unafraid.
“I’m the most beautiful of all.”
Zoe can taste the words in her mouth. The lie they tell.
~*~
The doctor comes and leaves again. He’s a spindly man, with glasses that remind Zoe of the glass containers jam is stored in and a hairline that has been steadily receding throughout the years, ebbing away never to be seen anywhere near his forehead again. He’s friendly enough, but he never says the words she wants to hear. He doesn't make her better.
He doesn't make her healthy enough for her mother to let her out of her golden cage.
She tells her sister about it one evening, when she returns home from work. Cordelia teaches almost 24/7. She teaches art at a local school by day and teaches Zoe everything else four evenings a week. Zoe wonders from time to time about Hank, about how they do it. How they keep a marriage alive that neither spouse is there to invest in. She doesn't know much about love -how could she- but she’s always bitterly assumed it requires living for the other person, if only a little.
Hank lives for himself, for his work. Cordelia lives to keep her mother happy, and to keep her poor, little sister educated. Sane.
They live for each other as much as the pair of black cats that run about the mansion do; when they’re not yowling and rutting mindlessly, they’re hissing and trying to claw each other’s yellow eyes out.
“I’m telling you, she’s paying him to make me believe I’m ill. I haven’t felt sick in over a month now.”
Cordelia looks up from the Art History book she’s reading, quietly reaches for her cup of herbal tea.
Zoe takes this as permission to continue.
“Please, you talk to her about me. I know you do. I’m better. I promise. I want to go out and see more than the same fucking woods over and over again! The same curtains, the same doors, the same furniture, the same rooms. She’s driving me up the walls. If this goes on much longer, before long I’ll be as crazy as she is!”
“Mother’s not crazy.”
They've had this conversation before. It’s always the same: Cordelia’s quiet defending of their mother’s madness and Zoe’s incredulousness. Her pointed looks. She’s giving her sister one right now.
“She thinks she’s a witch.”
Cordelia does that thing with her mouth that signals a mincing of her words. Careful consideration.
“Well, you can’t deny that she is very talented with herbs and plants,” she replies hesitantly, “and I can certainly imagine her flying around on a broom, cackling.” The smile she gives her is sweet, secretive. It reminds Zoe of her childhood, of hands in cookie jars and scraped knees, of forgetting to feed her goldfish. Of Cordelia placing a finger over her lips and not telling their mother about any of it.
Cordelia’s so patient with her. With both of them. It makes it hard to be angry at her about anything, but still…
“Don’t fucking joke about it. She already seems to think you believe all that crap.”
Cordelia sighs, turns back to her book, replies very quietly. “Maybe I do.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!”
She slams the door hard on her way out, stomps the stairs all the way up to her room and hopes the sound rattles her mother’s teeth, makes Cordelia pinch the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes.
They don’t get it; she’s in and they’re out.
~*~
She dresses all in black, dons elaborate hats indoors and pulls a veil over them. Plays pretend. She’s going to attend a funeral. Her mother’s, her own. She walks slowly, glides over the freshly polished hardwood floors, the scent of pine and citrus invading her nose as she takes deer-like strides and lets her fingers trail over walls that have become as familiar to her as the sound of her own heartbeat.
The portraits hang high, hang everywhere in the main living area, their subjects looking down their noses at her as she walks past. Her ancestors. “Great women of our clan,” as her mother always tells her wistfully. Witches.
Zoe feels like taking a knife to each and every canvas and ripping down.
Not a funeral; a collective burning at the stake.
~*~
She’s so lonely, it actually hurts. A nagging pain in her marrow and joints, a sharp tugging at the strings of her heart.
~*~
There’s a gramophone in the Mansion and Zoe uses it to play Chopin’s Nocturnes. All of them. Over and over and over again.
She lays on her bed, dangling one stocking-clad foot off the edge and staring up at her bedroom ceiling, trying to envision this illness that has supposedly taken hold of her. Today is a good day, but almost immediately after the doctor’s last visit she’d gotten sick again. Violently so. Throwing up all three of her meals and then some. She imagines what the virus looks like inside her body, her bloodstream. She imagines it caressing the inside of her veins with little tongues made of liquid fire, burning through her like the fireplace through wood. Quickly, without care or mercy.
She takes a bath. Cradles her bony knees to her chest and cries.
The water is freezing and the stylus waiting to be adjusted again by the time she gets out.
~*~
“It’s not right, she’s suffering!”
“What would you have me do, hm? Send her out there, to face all the horrors of this world? Unprotected?”
“She’s six months shy of eighteen, mother!”
“She’s afflicted, is what she is!”
“She’s lonely. She needs to go to school. To be with people her own age, not stuck inside these walls with- “
“Go ahead, Delia, with me. Say it.”
“…”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Voices through the walls.
~*~
Her mother’s taking an axe to her tree. It’s almost comical to see her, in her black dress that hugs her body like water and dangerously high heels, slightly wobbly on her bent legs as she swings it behind her head, hacks into the bark like the answer to life eternal awaits inside the tree’s core.
Zoe watches from her window on high, thinking about how supposedly the prostitutes in Paris used to walk through the Meat Packing district, the blood running through the streets coloring the soles of their heels the exact same shade of red her mother’s wearing.
When she’s chopped a considerable amount of bark away, has slashed and hacked at the stem, she wrenches a big chunk of wood loose and drops it in the bucket she’s brought for the occasion. Zoe’s heart aches and her fingers clench.
~*~
He isn’t Kyle when she first meets him. That comes later.
He’s the body guard.
The attack dog.
“What am I supposed to do with him?” She eyes the boy from her seat on the large divan. Wary, as if any minute he’s going to sprout another head, another mop of curly blond hair. He has his hands clasped behind him, his back straight as an arrow, legs spread slightly apart. He looks absolutely immovable. Solid build, strong shoulders.
The kind of posture her mother loves. She can tell; she’s practically glowing as she turns her attention back on her.
“You’re supposed to let him follow you around. Protect you.”
“Follow me around where? The bathroom? The kitchen? To the edge of the Northern wood and back again?”
There’s a slight tilt to her mother’s chin as she swallows the retort Zoe just knows she really wants to give to that, and manages a weak smile.
“To the edge of the Northern wood and back again… for now. Once you’ve seen the doctor and he approves… perhaps you may venture outside under his supervision.”
Under his supervision are three words she couldn’t care less about, because the only one that really matters has been uttered.Outside. She’ll be allowed outside.
She nearly springs up, unable to keep the excitement from showing on her face. Where her mother is as tough to crack as marble, she takes after her father. From what little she can still recall, he was always an open book, too. Right up until his pages closed forever, slammed violently shut. A bank robbing, a good man in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
Her mother calls it weakness. All it does is convince Zoe even more that her father didn’t die from a gunshot to the heart; he was already slowly being pressed to death, crushed under the weight of a woman like Fiona and all her desires and expectations.
It’s hard to live in someone else’s shadow, especially when said shadow reaches as far as her mother’s does. It’s hard to exist solely to keep a person happy.
“Come with me,” she tells the boy.
~*~
At first getting him to talk to her is like pulling teeth, which is more unfortunate for him than it is for her, really, because Zoe’s developed the sort of patience worthy of Saints and an insatiable hunger for the world outside, for his world. The world of a boy who doesn’t look much older than her, and if she asks herself once or twice why that is, why he isn’t a burly, mean-looking old man, she’s too busy trying to catch his eyes with hers to really give the question much further thought.
They’re like bottomless wells, his eyes. She could fall into them, easily, and get covered in either gold or pitch for her trouble.
She hasn’t yet figured out which one it’ll be.
“So how much does my mother pay you again to do this?” She asks, looking over her shoulder at where he’s sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor. Waiting.
“Enough,” it’s followed by something that could be a chuckle, could be a pained groan.
“Huh,” Zoe replies, opening her closet to look for her knitted scarf and hat. It’s getting chilly outside and she’s not taking any chances. There’s no way in hell she’s going to risk pneumonia when freedom’s so close in reach that she can almost feel the tips of her fingers brushing it.
“I guess it’s pretty easy money, following a girl around all day. One who can’t exactly run very far, at that.”
“I guess.”
She turns around, wraps her scarf around her neck, pulls her hat over her ears.
“You know, Kyle, you can use more than two words at a time.”
“I know.”
Zoe rolls her eyes and urges him up with a gesture of her hand, fingers twitching slightly as she curls them. He pushes himself up into a standing position almost immediately, rubbing the palms of his hands over his jeans-clad thighs and straightening his back. The movement isn’t very fluent, not like it should be. It’s jerky, rusty almost. Like an antique car roaring back to life after being hidden in a garage for over twenty years. It takes a little effort. Regardless, he’s so quick to do as she asks, she thinks, as he runs fingers through his curls and goes to open the door for her.
“We’ll go to the very edge of the Northern wood today,” she tells him, announces really. He doesn’t have a say in this; it’s bad enough her mother believes she needs an escort, and while Kyle has been nothing but compliant so far, he needs to understand that she’s not interested in any (future) suggestions he may have, or having her mind changed once it’s made up.
A simple nod and what looks like the beginnings of a faint smile.
Huh. Easier than she thought it would be.
“Good.” What she feels when she brushes past him can almost be described as excitement. Giddiness.
~*~
The cold weather transforms them into miniature fire-breathing dragons; the air’s reaction to the excess of water vapor in their breath it can’t carry. Physics, she knows, perfectly explainable, but it’s nice to pretend once in a while. That she’s anyone -anything- but a girl trapped inside a mansion, a family, her mind.
“Careful.” It’s Kyle, who rushes to place a hand on her shoulder and presses down, making her knees buckle a little. Zoe just barely ducks her head in time to avoid a thick, overhanging branch.
“Thanks,” she murmurs, the tips of her ears going red under her hat despite herself. She shouldn’t feel embarrassed -has no reason to be- he’s no better, no more important, than Moira is. Zoe’d been caught once by the maid in the bathroom, lighting matches under precious photographs of her mother and letting them burn and sizzle and crackle until by the time she was done nothing remained on the bottom of the claw-footed bathtub but a smattering of ashes. She hadn’t been embarrassed, then, even though she’d felt caught.
“…”
The blanket of wet leaves covering the ground makes a sopping sound under their feet as they venture deeper into the wood. High above their heads, birds chirp. Zoe makes a mental note to leave more birdseed out for them to find later. It looks like they’re going to have a hard winter, and she knows the only creatures her mother cares about reside within the walls of the mansion, those of her Master bedroom first and foremost. Herself and the older gentleman who calls on her from time to time.
“Do you have any family?” It’s a stupid question, because most people do in one form or another… parents, a brother, a sister… hell, a cousin or uncle twice removed. Then again, most of those people don’t agree to move in with their employers, no matter how much they’re paid to do so.
“Oh yeah, I’ve got a big family.”
“Really? Are they local?”
“Most of them are. There are a few who live overseas, though.”
“I’ve never been overseas,” she says, unable to keep regret from seeping into her voice.
Kyle turns his head to look at her as they walk. “It’s okay. I haven’t either. I’ve never even left town.”
A beat. She looks down at the ground and kicks at a branch with the tip of her boot. “Same here.”
They’re both silent as she leads them further into the wood. She doesn’t know much, but she knows the way. Knows the trees and bushes and every winding path between -beaten or otherwise- like the back of her hand. She takes care not to let her mind wander again, to pay attention to any stray rocks or snapping branches. She doesn’t look at Kyle, either; for the most part he walks right behind her, only coming up to walk beside her when the road she chooses allows him to do so. It’s a little strange to find that she doesn’t mind his looming presence as much as she probably should. She absolutely hates the fact that she’s being supervised, but the thought of leaving her mother’s domain in the near future already gives her wings. More than that, he feels oddly familiar. Like she’s felt the eyes on her back, heard the rhythm of his footsteps, the deep in and out of the breaths he takes, all before.
When she catches sight of the iron fence looming in the distance, the one that lines the property, she slows her steps a bit.
“This is as far as we can go for now.”
“I don’t mind,” he tells her, pocketing his hands in his jeans, and keeps walking. She doesn’t.
“I do.” She hates how bratty she sounds. Petulant, like a child.
He looks back over his shoulder at her and raises a cocked brow. “Do you want to turn back?” His next step is hesitant.
“No,” she concedes, “I want to see the lake.”
There are still geese on the water. Zoe wraps her hands around the wrought, iron bars and rests her forehead between them as she peers at the flock of birds. “They’ll disappear soon,” she tells Kyle, wistfully. “when it gets too cold, they migrate.” She sniffs, knows her nose must have turned a berry sort of red in the time it took them to walk from the mansion to the fence. “I’m surprised they’re still here, actually.”
“I’ve never seen them like this before.”
She looks over at Kyle, confusion making her brows knit together. “What do you mean?”
He licks his lips, doesn’t look at her, just straight ahead at the lake. “This calm. Quiet. Geese usually make so much noise.”
“Only when they’re in flight or feel threatened.”
“Guess so.”
It takes Zoe a second to tear her eyes away from his profile, but when she succeeds she does so with a slight shake of her head and in silence. Her fingers are going cold and so are her toes. She thinks idly of how she should have worn a thicker pair of socks, of all the different places she’ll visit when she’s allowed outside again soon, of how the color of Kyle’s hair and eyes matches the Autumn season pretty perfectly.
She thinks plenty but says nothing.
~*~
“How are you liking your new friend?” Cordelia asks a week and some change after Zoe has shown Kyle the lake. She looks up from the French textbook she has open on the arm of the sofa, props her arms -her elbows- under her and raises herself up into a kneeling position. She stretches languidly, hands balled into loose fists as she lifts them over her head.
“Friend? You mean Kyle?”
“Yes,” Cordelia answers, as she unbuttons her coat, folds it neatly over the arm she’s very nearly hugging her own waist with. “He seems very nice.”
Zoe eyes her sister, deducts from her body language and the fact that she has not yet slipped out of her heels or hung her coat away that she’s not planning on staying very long.
She shrugs, one-shouldered. “He’s okay. A little weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah. He doesn’t talk very much.”
Cordelia nods once, slowly, as if she understands, but it takes her a while to reply. “Well, mother doesn’t pay him to talk.”
Zoe frowns, because she didn’t expect that sort of answer from her.
“I know she doesn’t. You just asked me how I’m liking my new friend, though,” she points out. Cordelia looks like she’s been caught, drags her teeth over her lower lip.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“…”
“Maybe you should try to engage him more, if you want him to talk.” She looks pointedly around the empty room. Kyle’s nowhere in sight. Zoe told him she was going to study -inside, in the main living area, just down the flight of stairs- and wanted to be left alone. She likes him well enough, and he sort of fascinates her in a way she doesn’t care to think about for long stretches of time, but as welcome as his company is, his penchant for silence is not. It puts her off.
“Engage him how? I’ve asked him about his hobbies before. He said he doesn’t have any.” She wrinkles her nose. “Who doesn’t have hobbies? Even I have hobbies.”
She does, even if they’re tragically predictable for a girl who’s spent most of her teenage life by herself, with nowhere really to go but the next room down the hall, no one to talk to who’s not too far removed from her emotional world by age or blood. She’s an avid reader, has taught herself how to play the piano and is halfway decent at it. She excels at sketching, having decided that if she can’t go to the outside world, she can at least bring the outside world to her. The walls of her room are covered in her particular vision of distant lands. Uncharted territory.
“Find something you both enjoy doing,” her sister offers, “read a book together…discuss it. If nothing else, it will kill the time.”
“Maybe…,” Zoe hesitates, because a book club of two sounds rather boring, for one, and she can’t really picture Kyle reading, for another. He’s so stoic. “… at least until I can go out again.”
“Right.” Cordelia’s smile is gentle.
“Is it true the doctor’s visiting again at the end of the month?”
“That’s what I heard, yes.”
No nausea, no headaches, no throwing up since Kyle. Cross your heart and hope to die.
Zoe purses her lips and gets up from the couch, textbook forgotten as she walks up to Cordelia and flattens her skirt with her hands. “Okay. I’ll try it.”
~*~
Kyle’s not into it.
“You do remember that you’re being paid to be here, right?” It’s a dirty line, but Zoe’s at the end of her rope. She has her hands on her hips, the sunlight shining through the ceiling-high windows behind her casting a long, thin shadow on the floor’s carpet. It starts at the dainty tips of her feet and falls over Kyle’s body, his face.
He doesn’t seem impressed in the least. If anything, he only glowers at her from where he’s sitting in one of six armchairs positioned strategically throughout the library. A quiet, little reading spot harboring an angry boy. It’s the first time she’s seen him like this.
“I’m being paid to keep you company and protect you when you go outside, not to entertain you.”
Zoe’s jaw tightens because he has a point. It pisses her off; she got up early that day to carefully select her favorite books from the shelves. She’d arranged them in three neat piles on the writing desk, had already pondered which one she’d like to discuss with him first.
And now he’s being difficult about the whole thing.
“I’m not asking you to do a fucking dance or juggle a few cups in the air,” she huffs, “I’m asking you to read a book.”
“I’ll try the cups.”
Zoe narrows her eyes at him. She knows she can’t force him to read if he really doesn’t want to, knows that just because he’s working for her mother -for her- doesn’t mean she can order him around… but she’s also used to getting her way. The price her mother pays for keeping her daughter locked inside a cage is that it has to be a golden one. It’s been a while since she’s been refused anything but the outside world.
“Why can’t you just do this one thing for me?” She’s not pleading with him: she’s angry.
“Because I don’t want to. I’ll do something else.”
“I don’t want anything else.”
He doesn’t say anything in reply, just bunches his shoulders. Not budging.
Zoe knocks one of the piles off the desk with her hand, books tumbling to the floor, papers rustling. Kyle flinches briefly but remains otherwise unmoved. She wants to shake him.
“God, you’re useless!”
She storms out, leaves him to enjoy the solitude.
For three days.
~*~
She’s being awful but they made her this way.
~*~
“You’re not here to cause her distress! You’re here to protect her should she venture outside again in the future!”
The sound of her mother’s heels on the hardwood floor; Zoe can almost picture her pacing back and forth, routinely bringing her cigarette up to her lips. Fiona Goode’s a slave to no man, no woman, to nothing but her addictions.
She doesn’t hear Kyle but she knows he’s there, on the receiving end of her wrath, and she almost feels sorry for him.
“She’s a sensitive girl, she needs to be handled with care-“
Zoe doesn’t hear anything after that. She pulls the covers up over her head, clutches them hard and turns away from her bedroom door. From the world.
~*~
It doesn’t take her long to allow him in again after that. The word sensitive in her mother’s mouth might as well be a red cape waved in front of her bull-like eyes. She’s stubborn and can be just as deadly and ruthless as any beast when she wants to be. Sensitive in her mother’s mouth means weak, feeble-minded, ill… words with negative connotations she doesn’t care for. The days until the doctor visits again are being crossed on a calendar and she won’t see the date go wrong.
Kyle doesn’t need to apologize for shit -she does- but he tries his best to do so anyway and she bites her tongue in return.
It works for them.
“What do you wanna do next?” They’ve just finished their third game of Clue and Zoe’s tired of losing. She hasn’t answered him yet, is putting all of the pieces back inside the carton box when he continues. “Maybe we could go exploring?”
She snorts. Looks up at him through her lashes and smiles, indulgent.
“Fat chance. I haven’t seen the doctor yet, remember?”
“I mean here.”
“Here? Trust me Kyle, after four years? I’ve seen everything there is to see.”
“I haven’t.”
“…”
“What? I haven’t. It’s a big house.”
Zoe lets out a sigh and slides the box to the side, extends a hand to him as she goes to stand up, slightly clammy fingers closing around his when he takes it.
“Come on. I’ll show you something.”
Something is up all the flights of stairs in the mansion plus a ladder. The attic. Her mother’s sanctuary. It takes them a while to actually reach it, because if Kyle’s movements aren’t as jerky anymore, it still takes him some effort to take all those steps up. Zoe feels something akin to shame when she realizes she’s been meaning to ask him about the at times almost rigidness of his limbs, but forgot somewhere along the way.
“Take a look at this. Crazy, right?”
Kyle’s eyes go wide when they’re met with the sight of what Zoe likes to refer to as the nest her mother uses to lay all her mad, little eggs in. There’s a large pentagram painted in red on the dusty floorboards -Moira’s not allowed up… no one is - and her mother doesn’t have time for such a menial task as sweeping the floor. Herbs in various states of drying are tied with cord to the ceiling, lining the beams that support the roof Zoe has so often felt is going to fall down on her.
“Check it out.” She saunters over to a leather bound tome her mother has left open. It’s placed neatly on an intricately decorated altar in the middle of the attic. “Her spellbook.” She makes the air quotes. She can’t help it; it’s all too ridiculous for words.
Kyle’s hesitating, keeping close to the ladder. Spooked by the cabinets full of curiosities that are lining the walls, no doubt. Her mother has a fascination for all things morbid -obviously- and thanks to her father’s untimely death, more money than she knows what to do with. It’s a combination that has resulted in a pretty impressive collection over the years.
Well, impressive if you’re into fucked up.
“It’s okay, everything in here is dead except for the toads over there.” She nods to the far corner. It’s clouded in darkness. Kept humid. “Trust me, I’ve checked.”
“I don’t think we should be here.”
“You think correctly,” she agrees, “she’d kill me if she found out I was up here. With you, no less.” Her words do nothing to erase the wariness from his face. “If she found out.”
Kyle swallows, eyes glued to a jar filled to the brim with eyeballs. “If sounds good.”
Zoe lets out a laugh. “She’s not really a witch, you know. She just thinks she is. I’ve got my illness and she’s got hers.” She shakes her head and trails a finger over the edge of the tome. For something so apparently old, the pages are razor sharp. She very nearly cuts herself on them.
“Ridiculous,” she mutters under her breath, and it’s almost an accusation. As if the book is the cause of her mother losing her sanity, instead of a mere result of it. She turns away from the altar and makes her way back over to Kyle. The poor guy looks like he’s seen enough. He wanted to explore, to have an adventure. She feels nothing short of satisfied that by doing something so simple as taking him up to the attic, she’s given him that and then some. He looks so freaked out, it’s almost disappointing.
“Relax, Kyle,” she drawls, and her grin could give the faded paper a run for its money as far as sharpness is concerned, “it’s just a bunch of Hocus Pocus.”
~*~
It’s difficult to do as she’s told and keep breathing steadily in and out when her heart is beating a tattoo against the inside of her sternum. The diaphragm feels cold against her skin, a little ice cube moving gently over the small expanse of her back. A reminder that outside, it’s finally started freezing. She clutches the front of her shirt with hopeful fingers, keeping the material up by clenching her arms to her sides. Her mother’s hovering over them, never straying more than a couple feet from her bed.
She’s clutching her pearls. Literally. Actual pearls. Zoe would have barked out a laugh at the imagery, if she wasn’t so damn nervous. So crazyfuckingexcited.
“Well, doctor?” It’s her mother who speaks. “Give it to us straight. No need for bullshit.”
The doctor sighs, takes the stethoscope away. Zoe instantaneously holds her breath.
“I don’t believe she’s ready yet.”
All the air in her lungs leaves her; it makes a wailing sound as it rushes through her windpipe and past her lips.
“No, I am!” She almost whips around to face the doctor, shirt falling forlornly back down to cover her bare stomach. “I haven’t been sick in so long, please!”
“You heard what the doc-“
“No! Shut up!” She cries, and it’s only because they have company -important company, at that- that her mother lets her get away with her outburst. Somewhere in the back of her head Zoe realizes she’ll have to answer for her brutality later, will most likely be punished for it, but at that moment she couldn’t care less.
“Please,” she repeats, as she turns her attention -her desperation- back on the doctor. “I have been taking all of the medication you prescribed, all of the pills. I haven’t thrown up. I’ve been feeling healthy. I even have someone now to see me safely home in case I faint or have a seizure.”
The doctor looks regretful. If there’s any doubt, though, any sign he might change his mind, she doesn’t see it.
“One more month,” he tells her resolutely, as he gets up and starts to pack up his leather bag. “The injection I gave you will help. I want you to join the outside world again, Zoe. Your mother wants that, too.” The woman in question stays silent, no doubt still shocked from being interrupted. Zoe can’t imagine it happening very frequently, if at all. “Give it one more month, and then I will allow you to venture outside. If you really do have someone to look after you…”
“She does, doctor,” her mother interjects, with a sweetness in her voice that doesn’t suit her, “I made sure of it.”
The doctor nods, snips his bag shut and walks over to the edge of the bed, to her, hand extended. Zoe’s slipped into silence somewhere between the words month and mother. Tuned out. Her eyes are watery and they decidedly look right through the man’s dress shirt. The offered hand is dropped awkwardly down again.
“Right.” Since she’s no longer acknowledging his presence, he turns to her mother. “I will see her in a month. Keep her warm in the meantime.”
~*~
She throws up violently that night, her head pounding so hard it’s almost humming. Something’s trying to crush her napes from the inside out. There’s a violent tremor in her bones she can’t seem to shake. Her hair gets in the way; it’s too long, sticks to her clammy forehead in long tresses. There’s snot running down her nose from the exertion of heaving and crying for the better part of an hour. It’s all very unglamorous. Humbling.
As she feels the cold tiles of the bathroom floor starting to take a toll on her bony knees, Zoe thinks she’s never going to get out. Never going to get better.
~*~
They try to comfort her but she won’t let them. She’s floating on an ocean, her four-poster bed a ship, the curtains her sails. The room is spinning, going blurry at the edges, and Zoe feels like burying deeper into the covers is the only thing that keeps her even remotely grounded.
Cordelia tries to bring her books. She flings them at the window, the door, her sister’s head.
Her mother tries to assuage her with promising words, pretty words, which later turn hard and impatient. ”Don’t be such a child! Get up right now!”
She doesn’t see anyone else for however long it takes her to get past the first stage of her voluntary, self-afflicted fever dream. She makes the covers go damp with sweat, starts screaming each time her mother tries to draw the heavy curtains of her room open. When she’s no longer deterred and allows sunlight into the room with a jerk of her arms, millions upon millions of dust particles spring to life in its rays. There’s frost lining the edges of the glass. Birds are hopping the bare branches of her Oak Tree in search of food. Zoe takes to drawing the curtains around her bed closed instead.
It’s Kyle who eventually opens them again.
She’s still lethargic but the nausea’s gone. The all too familiar sickness that has been terrorizing her for years now. Zoe’s slumped against the headboard, arms crossed loosely in front of her chest and head turned sideways, though there’s nothing but curtains for her to look at.
“What do you want?” She asks. Her throat feels sore and the sound of her voice sounds foreign to her ears. It’s been a while since she’s used it for anything other than screams and cries of sadness.
He’s standing at the foot of her bed, curtains in hand. She doesn’t look at him but she can imagine the expression on his face well enough. A little confused but maddeningly patient.
“I wanted to see if you’re alright.”
“Do I look alright to you?”
“No.”
At least it’s honest. Her eyes are still puffy from crying earlier, her cheeks blotted. She hasn’t bothered to take a bath yet. You could fry food in her hair, that’s how greasy it is. So yeah, it’s safe to say she’s had better days.
“Did my mother send you?”
“Yeah.”
Again with the honesty. She turns to face him, puffs up her chest.
“But I wanted to see you, anyway.”
“…”
“I did.”
“…”
He licks his lips, nervous, and looks lost. Like a little bird, fallen from the nest and left to its own devices by its parents. It’s painfully clear he’s far outside of his comfort zone.
“Right. I’ll just…” he goes to draw the curtains shut again.
“They’re never going to let me out, you know. She’s not.”
He pauses.
“The doctor said-“
“I know what he said!” She snaps, fingers digging into the flesh of her arm hard enough to leave little white marks in their wake. “He’s a liar. Do you know how many times he’s told me before to just wait one more week, one more month? Weeks turn into months turn into years, Kyle. Four of them.”
His shoulders drop and she doesn’t like the way he looks at her. With pity in his eyes.
“Stop.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
She gives him a knowing look and he shuts up, straightens his back a little. He’s towering over the mattress, which is pretty impressive because it’s a very large bed and she doesn’t think he’s actually all that tall. He’s just one of those people who demand space in a room, she supposes. Hard not to notice them or take your eyes off their frame once you have.
“Just come downstairs. Your mother’s out.”
She ignores him.
“I just feel like I’m going to be stuck here forever.”
“So, what? You’re going to lock yourself up inside your room? Make your world even smaller?”
He says it carefully, but Zoe narrows her eyes at him anyway. She feels like throwing a pillow at his stupid face. Wishes she had something heavier in reach.
“I don’t want to upset you it’s just…” he runs a hand through his curls, “I don’t really know what to do when you’re not around. Your mother didn’t hire me to sit around all day.”
“She’s out now?”
He nods. “Yeah.”
She sighs and flings the covers off her body. If he lets his eyes roam over her exposed legs, only to avert them quickly when she throws them over the edge and plants her feet on the carpet, toes digging in, she’s still too sullen to care about her modesty or propriety.
“Fine. I’ll play the piano for you. Let me take a bath first, though; I reek.”
He doesn’t argue, just nods and lingers near the bed for a moment before he realizes what she’s just said and makes a quick and quiet exit.
( Frozen 2/2 )
Author: hourofthewitch
Summary:Spoilers/Warning/Triggers: I don’t want to give too much away, but expect some sexual situations, mild horror/spooky stuff, and dealings with (mental) illness.
Author Notes:First and foremost, I want to thank jandjsalmon for her tireless efforts towards making this exchange work and her limitless patience. It was (at times) a rough ride, with more bumps than I’d anticipated but I couldn't have asked for a better moderator along the way. As for the writer I wrote this for, I sincerely hope you enjoy. This fic is AU, though I tried to subtly incorporate elements from canon here and there. I hope I did the characters and your prompt justice! I was heavily inspired by the song you provided, along with this image I found.
FROZEN
One hundred and one days after she was born, her mother planted an Oak Tree in the yard. The very thought of the great Fiona Goode venturing outside in the middle of winter -naked- with nothing but a shovel, a bucket full of blood and an Oak seedling still makes her snort, but Cordelia has assured her on more than one occasion that’s exactly how their mother had done it. She’d done it like she does everything else in her life: with pride and determination.
Atop the waste of her birth, the tiny seedling was planted and as it had nurtured her during those nine months, so did it nurture the tree. It grew at an almost alarming speed, quicker even than she did, its roots fattening and digging deep down into the earth as its branches reached up and up and up in an attempt to cradle the sun, the moon, the stars.
Nowadays it stands tall, strong. Nowadays Zoe can hardly bear to look at it.
It’s like a mirror.
The Oak, like her, is rooted firmly in place. Immobile, trapped by cold, dense earth, exposed to the elements and the seasons. Zoe watches its leaves change -she hates it when the leaves change- and twirl and tumble inevitably down. A thousand little, stark reminders that winter will soon be upon them.
It will be her fourth in captivity.
~*~
“Jesus, will you stop slouching? The women in this family are known for our backbone; use yours.”
The knife and fork in her hands are cold, polished to perfection by a maid they don’t pay nearly as much as they could -as they should- but who sticks around, anyway, hovering ever close to the kitchen door just in case she’s called upon, which is often. There’s no pleasing her mother, after all, not really. The food is always something but just right: too cold, too hot, too fatty, too dry. Zoe’s shoulders feel stiff, arched forward as they are, the delicate shape of her collarbones clearly visible through her nearly translucent skin, her elbows growing sore from resting on the grand table’s edge.
“Why? It’s not like I need it.”
Across from her, Cordelia stills and looks up from her plate. Her fork trembles almost unnoticeably in her slender hand, but Zoe’s gotten good at watching -it’s all she ever does anymore- and catches the movement. A little flicker of emotion, nearly as telling as the visible way her sister swallows. Not food; a lump in her throat that their mother put there.
Zoe averts her eyes and turns them on the woman in question. Fiona’s all collected grace, her legs crossed elegantly under the table, regarding her with a slight tilt of her perfectly quaffed head, not a single blonde strand out of place. “I want to go outside.”
An almost exasperated roll of eyes, the corners of blood red lips pulling down.
“How many more times do I have to tell you before you finally learn? You can’t.”
“Yes, I can,” she bites back through clenched teeth, because she hasn’t had anything to lose in years now.
“Not with your… affliction.” Her mother has put down her fork, moves her hands in the air like she’s shaping the word with her fingers instead of her lips. She’s not meeting her cold gaze, rather looking down at the feast before them. Like her sister is.
It’s all an act; everything. The food, the silverware, the expensive cloth covering the table. Them.
“Bullshit. I’ve told you, I feel fine.”
“Well, you’re not!”
Zoe doesn't even flinch at Fiona’s sudden outburst, just presses her lips together and waits for her mother to collect herself again. Tap a pack of cigarettes on the table and worm a long, boney finger inside. Light up. Exhale. Smoke as white as her porcelain complexion, as fragile and constant as her dreams of getting out.
“The good doctor will be here for you tomorrow. We’ll see about taking a walk after his visit.”
“In town?”
Brown eyes narrow slightly. Her sister’s are cast heavenwards and to the side, as if by doing so she can avoid the conversation as well as their tense body language. “The property is more than big enough.”
Zoe shakes her head and scoffs, makes sure to make as much noise as possible as she pushes her chair away from the table and stands up.
“You can’t keep me here forever.” If she’s said the words once, she’s said them a thousand times. “Your madness isn't mine.”
~*~
That evening, she watches her mother through the crack in her bedroom door. The older woman is in her nightgown, a beautiful piece of clothing, black satin with intricate beading near the hem and neckline because even in slumber she won’t settle for anything less than perfection. Decadence.
Her vanity table is aptly named and matches the way Fiona feels about her appearance perfectly. Its marble surface is nearly littered with lotions, powders, makeup, ointments,… aids in her eternal quest for youth and beauty. Like Santa’s little helpers.
They can only work so many miracles, though, and the painstaking process of age catching up and digging its greedy claws in her mother’s flesh would be laughable, if it wasn't so unbearably tragic. If the glimpses Zoe catches of her mother’s reflection in the mirror didn't look like desperation, like something so unlike her mother at all.
For all her ridiculous claims to magic, she can’t seem to keep herself young.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall…” though her lips are curled up into a self-deprecating smile, she sounds tired. Her black nails -not unlike those of a panther or any other beautifully dangerous animal- push and pull at flesh that’s becoming weaker, all elasticity it may have once had having made way for deep lines and crow’s feet. The sagging skin near her throat almost seems to shiver, shake like a turkey’s, before she smoothes it back and away with both hands and meets her own eyes. Head on, unafraid.
“I’m the most beautiful of all.”
Zoe can taste the words in her mouth. The lie they tell.
~*~
The doctor comes and leaves again. He’s a spindly man, with glasses that remind Zoe of the glass containers jam is stored in and a hairline that has been steadily receding throughout the years, ebbing away never to be seen anywhere near his forehead again. He’s friendly enough, but he never says the words she wants to hear. He doesn't make her better.
He doesn't make her healthy enough for her mother to let her out of her golden cage.
She tells her sister about it one evening, when she returns home from work. Cordelia teaches almost 24/7. She teaches art at a local school by day and teaches Zoe everything else four evenings a week. Zoe wonders from time to time about Hank, about how they do it. How they keep a marriage alive that neither spouse is there to invest in. She doesn't know much about love -how could she- but she’s always bitterly assumed it requires living for the other person, if only a little.
Hank lives for himself, for his work. Cordelia lives to keep her mother happy, and to keep her poor, little sister educated. Sane.
They live for each other as much as the pair of black cats that run about the mansion do; when they’re not yowling and rutting mindlessly, they’re hissing and trying to claw each other’s yellow eyes out.
“I’m telling you, she’s paying him to make me believe I’m ill. I haven’t felt sick in over a month now.”
Cordelia looks up from the Art History book she’s reading, quietly reaches for her cup of herbal tea.
Zoe takes this as permission to continue.
“Please, you talk to her about me. I know you do. I’m better. I promise. I want to go out and see more than the same fucking woods over and over again! The same curtains, the same doors, the same furniture, the same rooms. She’s driving me up the walls. If this goes on much longer, before long I’ll be as crazy as she is!”
“Mother’s not crazy.”
They've had this conversation before. It’s always the same: Cordelia’s quiet defending of their mother’s madness and Zoe’s incredulousness. Her pointed looks. She’s giving her sister one right now.
“She thinks she’s a witch.”
Cordelia does that thing with her mouth that signals a mincing of her words. Careful consideration.
“Well, you can’t deny that she is very talented with herbs and plants,” she replies hesitantly, “and I can certainly imagine her flying around on a broom, cackling.” The smile she gives her is sweet, secretive. It reminds Zoe of her childhood, of hands in cookie jars and scraped knees, of forgetting to feed her goldfish. Of Cordelia placing a finger over her lips and not telling their mother about any of it.
Cordelia’s so patient with her. With both of them. It makes it hard to be angry at her about anything, but still…
“Don’t fucking joke about it. She already seems to think you believe all that crap.”
Cordelia sighs, turns back to her book, replies very quietly. “Maybe I do.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!”
She slams the door hard on her way out, stomps the stairs all the way up to her room and hopes the sound rattles her mother’s teeth, makes Cordelia pinch the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes.
They don’t get it; she’s in and they’re out.
~*~
She dresses all in black, dons elaborate hats indoors and pulls a veil over them. Plays pretend. She’s going to attend a funeral. Her mother’s, her own. She walks slowly, glides over the freshly polished hardwood floors, the scent of pine and citrus invading her nose as she takes deer-like strides and lets her fingers trail over walls that have become as familiar to her as the sound of her own heartbeat.
The portraits hang high, hang everywhere in the main living area, their subjects looking down their noses at her as she walks past. Her ancestors. “Great women of our clan,” as her mother always tells her wistfully. Witches.
Zoe feels like taking a knife to each and every canvas and ripping down.
Not a funeral; a collective burning at the stake.
~*~
She’s so lonely, it actually hurts. A nagging pain in her marrow and joints, a sharp tugging at the strings of her heart.
~*~
There’s a gramophone in the Mansion and Zoe uses it to play Chopin’s Nocturnes. All of them. Over and over and over again.
She lays on her bed, dangling one stocking-clad foot off the edge and staring up at her bedroom ceiling, trying to envision this illness that has supposedly taken hold of her. Today is a good day, but almost immediately after the doctor’s last visit she’d gotten sick again. Violently so. Throwing up all three of her meals and then some. She imagines what the virus looks like inside her body, her bloodstream. She imagines it caressing the inside of her veins with little tongues made of liquid fire, burning through her like the fireplace through wood. Quickly, without care or mercy.
She takes a bath. Cradles her bony knees to her chest and cries.
The water is freezing and the stylus waiting to be adjusted again by the time she gets out.
~*~
“It’s not right, she’s suffering!”
“What would you have me do, hm? Send her out there, to face all the horrors of this world? Unprotected?”
“She’s six months shy of eighteen, mother!”
“She’s afflicted, is what she is!”
“She’s lonely. She needs to go to school. To be with people her own age, not stuck inside these walls with- “
“Go ahead, Delia, with me. Say it.”
“…”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Voices through the walls.
~*~
Her mother’s taking an axe to her tree. It’s almost comical to see her, in her black dress that hugs her body like water and dangerously high heels, slightly wobbly on her bent legs as she swings it behind her head, hacks into the bark like the answer to life eternal awaits inside the tree’s core.
Zoe watches from her window on high, thinking about how supposedly the prostitutes in Paris used to walk through the Meat Packing district, the blood running through the streets coloring the soles of their heels the exact same shade of red her mother’s wearing.
When she’s chopped a considerable amount of bark away, has slashed and hacked at the stem, she wrenches a big chunk of wood loose and drops it in the bucket she’s brought for the occasion. Zoe’s heart aches and her fingers clench.
~*~
He isn’t Kyle when she first meets him. That comes later.
He’s the body guard.
The attack dog.
“What am I supposed to do with him?” She eyes the boy from her seat on the large divan. Wary, as if any minute he’s going to sprout another head, another mop of curly blond hair. He has his hands clasped behind him, his back straight as an arrow, legs spread slightly apart. He looks absolutely immovable. Solid build, strong shoulders.
The kind of posture her mother loves. She can tell; she’s practically glowing as she turns her attention back on her.
“You’re supposed to let him follow you around. Protect you.”
“Follow me around where? The bathroom? The kitchen? To the edge of the Northern wood and back again?”
There’s a slight tilt to her mother’s chin as she swallows the retort Zoe just knows she really wants to give to that, and manages a weak smile.
“To the edge of the Northern wood and back again… for now. Once you’ve seen the doctor and he approves… perhaps you may venture outside under his supervision.”
Under his supervision are three words she couldn’t care less about, because the only one that really matters has been uttered.Outside. She’ll be allowed outside.
She nearly springs up, unable to keep the excitement from showing on her face. Where her mother is as tough to crack as marble, she takes after her father. From what little she can still recall, he was always an open book, too. Right up until his pages closed forever, slammed violently shut. A bank robbing, a good man in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
Her mother calls it weakness. All it does is convince Zoe even more that her father didn’t die from a gunshot to the heart; he was already slowly being pressed to death, crushed under the weight of a woman like Fiona and all her desires and expectations.
It’s hard to live in someone else’s shadow, especially when said shadow reaches as far as her mother’s does. It’s hard to exist solely to keep a person happy.
“Come with me,” she tells the boy.
~*~
At first getting him to talk to her is like pulling teeth, which is more unfortunate for him than it is for her, really, because Zoe’s developed the sort of patience worthy of Saints and an insatiable hunger for the world outside, for his world. The world of a boy who doesn’t look much older than her, and if she asks herself once or twice why that is, why he isn’t a burly, mean-looking old man, she’s too busy trying to catch his eyes with hers to really give the question much further thought.
They’re like bottomless wells, his eyes. She could fall into them, easily, and get covered in either gold or pitch for her trouble.
She hasn’t yet figured out which one it’ll be.
“So how much does my mother pay you again to do this?” She asks, looking over her shoulder at where he’s sitting cross-legged on her bedroom floor. Waiting.
“Enough,” it’s followed by something that could be a chuckle, could be a pained groan.
“Huh,” Zoe replies, opening her closet to look for her knitted scarf and hat. It’s getting chilly outside and she’s not taking any chances. There’s no way in hell she’s going to risk pneumonia when freedom’s so close in reach that she can almost feel the tips of her fingers brushing it.
“I guess it’s pretty easy money, following a girl around all day. One who can’t exactly run very far, at that.”
“I guess.”
She turns around, wraps her scarf around her neck, pulls her hat over her ears.
“You know, Kyle, you can use more than two words at a time.”
“I know.”
Zoe rolls her eyes and urges him up with a gesture of her hand, fingers twitching slightly as she curls them. He pushes himself up into a standing position almost immediately, rubbing the palms of his hands over his jeans-clad thighs and straightening his back. The movement isn’t very fluent, not like it should be. It’s jerky, rusty almost. Like an antique car roaring back to life after being hidden in a garage for over twenty years. It takes a little effort. Regardless, he’s so quick to do as she asks, she thinks, as he runs fingers through his curls and goes to open the door for her.
“We’ll go to the very edge of the Northern wood today,” she tells him, announces really. He doesn’t have a say in this; it’s bad enough her mother believes she needs an escort, and while Kyle has been nothing but compliant so far, he needs to understand that she’s not interested in any (future) suggestions he may have, or having her mind changed once it’s made up.
A simple nod and what looks like the beginnings of a faint smile.
Huh. Easier than she thought it would be.
“Good.” What she feels when she brushes past him can almost be described as excitement. Giddiness.
~*~
The cold weather transforms them into miniature fire-breathing dragons; the air’s reaction to the excess of water vapor in their breath it can’t carry. Physics, she knows, perfectly explainable, but it’s nice to pretend once in a while. That she’s anyone -anything- but a girl trapped inside a mansion, a family, her mind.
“Careful.” It’s Kyle, who rushes to place a hand on her shoulder and presses down, making her knees buckle a little. Zoe just barely ducks her head in time to avoid a thick, overhanging branch.
“Thanks,” she murmurs, the tips of her ears going red under her hat despite herself. She shouldn’t feel embarrassed -has no reason to be- he’s no better, no more important, than Moira is. Zoe’d been caught once by the maid in the bathroom, lighting matches under precious photographs of her mother and letting them burn and sizzle and crackle until by the time she was done nothing remained on the bottom of the claw-footed bathtub but a smattering of ashes. She hadn’t been embarrassed, then, even though she’d felt caught.
“…”
The blanket of wet leaves covering the ground makes a sopping sound under their feet as they venture deeper into the wood. High above their heads, birds chirp. Zoe makes a mental note to leave more birdseed out for them to find later. It looks like they’re going to have a hard winter, and she knows the only creatures her mother cares about reside within the walls of the mansion, those of her Master bedroom first and foremost. Herself and the older gentleman who calls on her from time to time.
“Do you have any family?” It’s a stupid question, because most people do in one form or another… parents, a brother, a sister… hell, a cousin or uncle twice removed. Then again, most of those people don’t agree to move in with their employers, no matter how much they’re paid to do so.
“Oh yeah, I’ve got a big family.”
“Really? Are they local?”
“Most of them are. There are a few who live overseas, though.”
“I’ve never been overseas,” she says, unable to keep regret from seeping into her voice.
Kyle turns his head to look at her as they walk. “It’s okay. I haven’t either. I’ve never even left town.”
A beat. She looks down at the ground and kicks at a branch with the tip of her boot. “Same here.”
They’re both silent as she leads them further into the wood. She doesn’t know much, but she knows the way. Knows the trees and bushes and every winding path between -beaten or otherwise- like the back of her hand. She takes care not to let her mind wander again, to pay attention to any stray rocks or snapping branches. She doesn’t look at Kyle, either; for the most part he walks right behind her, only coming up to walk beside her when the road she chooses allows him to do so. It’s a little strange to find that she doesn’t mind his looming presence as much as she probably should. She absolutely hates the fact that she’s being supervised, but the thought of leaving her mother’s domain in the near future already gives her wings. More than that, he feels oddly familiar. Like she’s felt the eyes on her back, heard the rhythm of his footsteps, the deep in and out of the breaths he takes, all before.
When she catches sight of the iron fence looming in the distance, the one that lines the property, she slows her steps a bit.
“This is as far as we can go for now.”
“I don’t mind,” he tells her, pocketing his hands in his jeans, and keeps walking. She doesn’t.
“I do.” She hates how bratty she sounds. Petulant, like a child.
He looks back over his shoulder at her and raises a cocked brow. “Do you want to turn back?” His next step is hesitant.
“No,” she concedes, “I want to see the lake.”
There are still geese on the water. Zoe wraps her hands around the wrought, iron bars and rests her forehead between them as she peers at the flock of birds. “They’ll disappear soon,” she tells Kyle, wistfully. “when it gets too cold, they migrate.” She sniffs, knows her nose must have turned a berry sort of red in the time it took them to walk from the mansion to the fence. “I’m surprised they’re still here, actually.”
“I’ve never seen them like this before.”
She looks over at Kyle, confusion making her brows knit together. “What do you mean?”
He licks his lips, doesn’t look at her, just straight ahead at the lake. “This calm. Quiet. Geese usually make so much noise.”
“Only when they’re in flight or feel threatened.”
“Guess so.”
It takes Zoe a second to tear her eyes away from his profile, but when she succeeds she does so with a slight shake of her head and in silence. Her fingers are going cold and so are her toes. She thinks idly of how she should have worn a thicker pair of socks, of all the different places she’ll visit when she’s allowed outside again soon, of how the color of Kyle’s hair and eyes matches the Autumn season pretty perfectly.
She thinks plenty but says nothing.
~*~
“How are you liking your new friend?” Cordelia asks a week and some change after Zoe has shown Kyle the lake. She looks up from the French textbook she has open on the arm of the sofa, props her arms -her elbows- under her and raises herself up into a kneeling position. She stretches languidly, hands balled into loose fists as she lifts them over her head.
“Friend? You mean Kyle?”
“Yes,” Cordelia answers, as she unbuttons her coat, folds it neatly over the arm she’s very nearly hugging her own waist with. “He seems very nice.”
Zoe eyes her sister, deducts from her body language and the fact that she has not yet slipped out of her heels or hung her coat away that she’s not planning on staying very long.
She shrugs, one-shouldered. “He’s okay. A little weird.”
“Weird?”
“Yeah. He doesn’t talk very much.”
Cordelia nods once, slowly, as if she understands, but it takes her a while to reply. “Well, mother doesn’t pay him to talk.”
Zoe frowns, because she didn’t expect that sort of answer from her.
“I know she doesn’t. You just asked me how I’m liking my new friend, though,” she points out. Cordelia looks like she’s been caught, drags her teeth over her lower lip.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“…”
“Maybe you should try to engage him more, if you want him to talk.” She looks pointedly around the empty room. Kyle’s nowhere in sight. Zoe told him she was going to study -inside, in the main living area, just down the flight of stairs- and wanted to be left alone. She likes him well enough, and he sort of fascinates her in a way she doesn’t care to think about for long stretches of time, but as welcome as his company is, his penchant for silence is not. It puts her off.
“Engage him how? I’ve asked him about his hobbies before. He said he doesn’t have any.” She wrinkles her nose. “Who doesn’t have hobbies? Even I have hobbies.”
She does, even if they’re tragically predictable for a girl who’s spent most of her teenage life by herself, with nowhere really to go but the next room down the hall, no one to talk to who’s not too far removed from her emotional world by age or blood. She’s an avid reader, has taught herself how to play the piano and is halfway decent at it. She excels at sketching, having decided that if she can’t go to the outside world, she can at least bring the outside world to her. The walls of her room are covered in her particular vision of distant lands. Uncharted territory.
“Find something you both enjoy doing,” her sister offers, “read a book together…discuss it. If nothing else, it will kill the time.”
“Maybe…,” Zoe hesitates, because a book club of two sounds rather boring, for one, and she can’t really picture Kyle reading, for another. He’s so stoic. “… at least until I can go out again.”
“Right.” Cordelia’s smile is gentle.
“Is it true the doctor’s visiting again at the end of the month?”
“That’s what I heard, yes.”
No nausea, no headaches, no throwing up since Kyle. Cross your heart and hope to die.
Zoe purses her lips and gets up from the couch, textbook forgotten as she walks up to Cordelia and flattens her skirt with her hands. “Okay. I’ll try it.”
~*~
Kyle’s not into it.
“You do remember that you’re being paid to be here, right?” It’s a dirty line, but Zoe’s at the end of her rope. She has her hands on her hips, the sunlight shining through the ceiling-high windows behind her casting a long, thin shadow on the floor’s carpet. It starts at the dainty tips of her feet and falls over Kyle’s body, his face.
He doesn’t seem impressed in the least. If anything, he only glowers at her from where he’s sitting in one of six armchairs positioned strategically throughout the library. A quiet, little reading spot harboring an angry boy. It’s the first time she’s seen him like this.
“I’m being paid to keep you company and protect you when you go outside, not to entertain you.”
Zoe’s jaw tightens because he has a point. It pisses her off; she got up early that day to carefully select her favorite books from the shelves. She’d arranged them in three neat piles on the writing desk, had already pondered which one she’d like to discuss with him first.
And now he’s being difficult about the whole thing.
“I’m not asking you to do a fucking dance or juggle a few cups in the air,” she huffs, “I’m asking you to read a book.”
“I’ll try the cups.”
Zoe narrows her eyes at him. She knows she can’t force him to read if he really doesn’t want to, knows that just because he’s working for her mother -for her- doesn’t mean she can order him around… but she’s also used to getting her way. The price her mother pays for keeping her daughter locked inside a cage is that it has to be a golden one. It’s been a while since she’s been refused anything but the outside world.
“Why can’t you just do this one thing for me?” She’s not pleading with him: she’s angry.
“Because I don’t want to. I’ll do something else.”
“I don’t want anything else.”
He doesn’t say anything in reply, just bunches his shoulders. Not budging.
Zoe knocks one of the piles off the desk with her hand, books tumbling to the floor, papers rustling. Kyle flinches briefly but remains otherwise unmoved. She wants to shake him.
“God, you’re useless!”
She storms out, leaves him to enjoy the solitude.
For three days.
~*~
She’s being awful but they made her this way.
~*~
“You’re not here to cause her distress! You’re here to protect her should she venture outside again in the future!”
The sound of her mother’s heels on the hardwood floor; Zoe can almost picture her pacing back and forth, routinely bringing her cigarette up to her lips. Fiona Goode’s a slave to no man, no woman, to nothing but her addictions.
She doesn’t hear Kyle but she knows he’s there, on the receiving end of her wrath, and she almost feels sorry for him.
“She’s a sensitive girl, she needs to be handled with care-“
Zoe doesn’t hear anything after that. She pulls the covers up over her head, clutches them hard and turns away from her bedroom door. From the world.
~*~
It doesn’t take her long to allow him in again after that. The word sensitive in her mother’s mouth might as well be a red cape waved in front of her bull-like eyes. She’s stubborn and can be just as deadly and ruthless as any beast when she wants to be. Sensitive in her mother’s mouth means weak, feeble-minded, ill… words with negative connotations she doesn’t care for. The days until the doctor visits again are being crossed on a calendar and she won’t see the date go wrong.
Kyle doesn’t need to apologize for shit -she does- but he tries his best to do so anyway and she bites her tongue in return.
It works for them.
“What do you wanna do next?” They’ve just finished their third game of Clue and Zoe’s tired of losing. She hasn’t answered him yet, is putting all of the pieces back inside the carton box when he continues. “Maybe we could go exploring?”
She snorts. Looks up at him through her lashes and smiles, indulgent.
“Fat chance. I haven’t seen the doctor yet, remember?”
“I mean here.”
“Here? Trust me Kyle, after four years? I’ve seen everything there is to see.”
“I haven’t.”
“…”
“What? I haven’t. It’s a big house.”
Zoe lets out a sigh and slides the box to the side, extends a hand to him as she goes to stand up, slightly clammy fingers closing around his when he takes it.
“Come on. I’ll show you something.”
Something is up all the flights of stairs in the mansion plus a ladder. The attic. Her mother’s sanctuary. It takes them a while to actually reach it, because if Kyle’s movements aren’t as jerky anymore, it still takes him some effort to take all those steps up. Zoe feels something akin to shame when she realizes she’s been meaning to ask him about the at times almost rigidness of his limbs, but forgot somewhere along the way.
“Take a look at this. Crazy, right?”
Kyle’s eyes go wide when they’re met with the sight of what Zoe likes to refer to as the nest her mother uses to lay all her mad, little eggs in. There’s a large pentagram painted in red on the dusty floorboards -Moira’s not allowed up… no one is - and her mother doesn’t have time for such a menial task as sweeping the floor. Herbs in various states of drying are tied with cord to the ceiling, lining the beams that support the roof Zoe has so often felt is going to fall down on her.
“Check it out.” She saunters over to a leather bound tome her mother has left open. It’s placed neatly on an intricately decorated altar in the middle of the attic. “Her spellbook.” She makes the air quotes. She can’t help it; it’s all too ridiculous for words.
Kyle’s hesitating, keeping close to the ladder. Spooked by the cabinets full of curiosities that are lining the walls, no doubt. Her mother has a fascination for all things morbid -obviously- and thanks to her father’s untimely death, more money than she knows what to do with. It’s a combination that has resulted in a pretty impressive collection over the years.
Well, impressive if you’re into fucked up.
“It’s okay, everything in here is dead except for the toads over there.” She nods to the far corner. It’s clouded in darkness. Kept humid. “Trust me, I’ve checked.”
“I don’t think we should be here.”
“You think correctly,” she agrees, “she’d kill me if she found out I was up here. With you, no less.” Her words do nothing to erase the wariness from his face. “If she found out.”
Kyle swallows, eyes glued to a jar filled to the brim with eyeballs. “If sounds good.”
Zoe lets out a laugh. “She’s not really a witch, you know. She just thinks she is. I’ve got my illness and she’s got hers.” She shakes her head and trails a finger over the edge of the tome. For something so apparently old, the pages are razor sharp. She very nearly cuts herself on them.
“Ridiculous,” she mutters under her breath, and it’s almost an accusation. As if the book is the cause of her mother losing her sanity, instead of a mere result of it. She turns away from the altar and makes her way back over to Kyle. The poor guy looks like he’s seen enough. He wanted to explore, to have an adventure. She feels nothing short of satisfied that by doing something so simple as taking him up to the attic, she’s given him that and then some. He looks so freaked out, it’s almost disappointing.
“Relax, Kyle,” she drawls, and her grin could give the faded paper a run for its money as far as sharpness is concerned, “it’s just a bunch of Hocus Pocus.”
~*~
It’s difficult to do as she’s told and keep breathing steadily in and out when her heart is beating a tattoo against the inside of her sternum. The diaphragm feels cold against her skin, a little ice cube moving gently over the small expanse of her back. A reminder that outside, it’s finally started freezing. She clutches the front of her shirt with hopeful fingers, keeping the material up by clenching her arms to her sides. Her mother’s hovering over them, never straying more than a couple feet from her bed.
She’s clutching her pearls. Literally. Actual pearls. Zoe would have barked out a laugh at the imagery, if she wasn’t so damn nervous. So crazyfuckingexcited.
“Well, doctor?” It’s her mother who speaks. “Give it to us straight. No need for bullshit.”
The doctor sighs, takes the stethoscope away. Zoe instantaneously holds her breath.
“I don’t believe she’s ready yet.”
All the air in her lungs leaves her; it makes a wailing sound as it rushes through her windpipe and past her lips.
“No, I am!” She almost whips around to face the doctor, shirt falling forlornly back down to cover her bare stomach. “I haven’t been sick in so long, please!”
“You heard what the doc-“
“No! Shut up!” She cries, and it’s only because they have company -important company, at that- that her mother lets her get away with her outburst. Somewhere in the back of her head Zoe realizes she’ll have to answer for her brutality later, will most likely be punished for it, but at that moment she couldn’t care less.
“Please,” she repeats, as she turns her attention -her desperation- back on the doctor. “I have been taking all of the medication you prescribed, all of the pills. I haven’t thrown up. I’ve been feeling healthy. I even have someone now to see me safely home in case I faint or have a seizure.”
The doctor looks regretful. If there’s any doubt, though, any sign he might change his mind, she doesn’t see it.
“One more month,” he tells her resolutely, as he gets up and starts to pack up his leather bag. “The injection I gave you will help. I want you to join the outside world again, Zoe. Your mother wants that, too.” The woman in question stays silent, no doubt still shocked from being interrupted. Zoe can’t imagine it happening very frequently, if at all. “Give it one more month, and then I will allow you to venture outside. If you really do have someone to look after you…”
“She does, doctor,” her mother interjects, with a sweetness in her voice that doesn’t suit her, “I made sure of it.”
The doctor nods, snips his bag shut and walks over to the edge of the bed, to her, hand extended. Zoe’s slipped into silence somewhere between the words month and mother. Tuned out. Her eyes are watery and they decidedly look right through the man’s dress shirt. The offered hand is dropped awkwardly down again.
“Right.” Since she’s no longer acknowledging his presence, he turns to her mother. “I will see her in a month. Keep her warm in the meantime.”
~*~
She throws up violently that night, her head pounding so hard it’s almost humming. Something’s trying to crush her napes from the inside out. There’s a violent tremor in her bones she can’t seem to shake. Her hair gets in the way; it’s too long, sticks to her clammy forehead in long tresses. There’s snot running down her nose from the exertion of heaving and crying for the better part of an hour. It’s all very unglamorous. Humbling.
As she feels the cold tiles of the bathroom floor starting to take a toll on her bony knees, Zoe thinks she’s never going to get out. Never going to get better.
~*~
They try to comfort her but she won’t let them. She’s floating on an ocean, her four-poster bed a ship, the curtains her sails. The room is spinning, going blurry at the edges, and Zoe feels like burying deeper into the covers is the only thing that keeps her even remotely grounded.
Cordelia tries to bring her books. She flings them at the window, the door, her sister’s head.
Her mother tries to assuage her with promising words, pretty words, which later turn hard and impatient. ”Don’t be such a child! Get up right now!”
She doesn’t see anyone else for however long it takes her to get past the first stage of her voluntary, self-afflicted fever dream. She makes the covers go damp with sweat, starts screaming each time her mother tries to draw the heavy curtains of her room open. When she’s no longer deterred and allows sunlight into the room with a jerk of her arms, millions upon millions of dust particles spring to life in its rays. There’s frost lining the edges of the glass. Birds are hopping the bare branches of her Oak Tree in search of food. Zoe takes to drawing the curtains around her bed closed instead.
It’s Kyle who eventually opens them again.
She’s still lethargic but the nausea’s gone. The all too familiar sickness that has been terrorizing her for years now. Zoe’s slumped against the headboard, arms crossed loosely in front of her chest and head turned sideways, though there’s nothing but curtains for her to look at.
“What do you want?” She asks. Her throat feels sore and the sound of her voice sounds foreign to her ears. It’s been a while since she’s used it for anything other than screams and cries of sadness.
He’s standing at the foot of her bed, curtains in hand. She doesn’t look at him but she can imagine the expression on his face well enough. A little confused but maddeningly patient.
“I wanted to see if you’re alright.”
“Do I look alright to you?”
“No.”
At least it’s honest. Her eyes are still puffy from crying earlier, her cheeks blotted. She hasn’t bothered to take a bath yet. You could fry food in her hair, that’s how greasy it is. So yeah, it’s safe to say she’s had better days.
“Did my mother send you?”
“Yeah.”
Again with the honesty. She turns to face him, puffs up her chest.
“But I wanted to see you, anyway.”
“…”
“I did.”
“…”
He licks his lips, nervous, and looks lost. Like a little bird, fallen from the nest and left to its own devices by its parents. It’s painfully clear he’s far outside of his comfort zone.
“Right. I’ll just…” he goes to draw the curtains shut again.
“They’re never going to let me out, you know. She’s not.”
He pauses.
“The doctor said-“
“I know what he said!” She snaps, fingers digging into the flesh of her arm hard enough to leave little white marks in their wake. “He’s a liar. Do you know how many times he’s told me before to just wait one more week, one more month? Weeks turn into months turn into years, Kyle. Four of them.”
His shoulders drop and she doesn’t like the way he looks at her. With pity in his eyes.
“Stop.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
She gives him a knowing look and he shuts up, straightens his back a little. He’s towering over the mattress, which is pretty impressive because it’s a very large bed and she doesn’t think he’s actually all that tall. He’s just one of those people who demand space in a room, she supposes. Hard not to notice them or take your eyes off their frame once you have.
“Just come downstairs. Your mother’s out.”
She ignores him.
“I just feel like I’m going to be stuck here forever.”
“So, what? You’re going to lock yourself up inside your room? Make your world even smaller?”
He says it carefully, but Zoe narrows her eyes at him anyway. She feels like throwing a pillow at his stupid face. Wishes she had something heavier in reach.
“I don’t want to upset you it’s just…” he runs a hand through his curls, “I don’t really know what to do when you’re not around. Your mother didn’t hire me to sit around all day.”
“She’s out now?”
He nods. “Yeah.”
She sighs and flings the covers off her body. If he lets his eyes roam over her exposed legs, only to avert them quickly when she throws them over the edge and plants her feet on the carpet, toes digging in, she’s still too sullen to care about her modesty or propriety.
“Fine. I’ll play the piano for you. Let me take a bath first, though; I reek.”
He doesn’t argue, just nods and lingers near the bed for a moment before he realizes what she’s just said and makes a quick and quiet exit.
( Frozen 2/2 )