In your dreams, Lordaeron basks in endless summer. It is easy to lose yourself in the fantasy of it, easy to stave off lucidity with a collage of half-remembered scenes from your childhood.

Here is the silversmith's workshop, the tannery, the herbalist's cottage on the edge of the lake. There is your father, your languages tutor, your golden-haired lover—

The boy who steals your school books for a day.

The prince who steals a kiss at a social event, hidden paces away from unseeing nobles.

The man who steals your heart with the promise of forever.

A thousand fragments of memory in an eternal Lordaeron summer.

You're on a hill overlooking a wide plain. It's some cross between the wheat fields in the north of the valley and the untamed meadows behind your childhood home. You lean against a familiar chest, eyes half-open, mind muddled with sleepy contentment. He is warm against you, one hand sifting through your hair.

The warmth is what snags at your mind like a loose thread.

"Why do you frown, dear heart?" A finger tilts your chin up, and you sigh into the gentlest of kisses.

"I'm dreaming," you whisper, or perhaps only think. You brush the thought away, instead throwing yourself headlong into the idea of this moment. It's easy as breathing to lay open-mouthed kisses down a sun-browned neck, to shed clothes with nimble, knowing fingers. Your body remembers the feel of rough hands and gentle touches, of unhurried kisses and warm skin on skin.

Your mind is less convinced.

You can feel the dream fracturing even as the memory of your lover rocks into you, even as you whimper at the almost-there pressure of it.

"Please—" You don't know whether you're begging the specter or your own subconscious.

You close your eyes to block out everything but the feeling, the feeling of being safe and warm and loved—

"Please—"

You wake alone. His name escapes only as misting breath in a bitterly cold room.

—Arthas.

It is shocking that your heat still finds you in this frozen place.

You shouldn't be surprised, but time has stood still since the gates of Icecrown shut behind you, and you with it. You haven't marked the days—an oversight, you think, some weeks into your… stay? Imprisonment? But by then it's too late and you're already untethered from any kind of calendar. If time marches on, it does so somewhere beyond these icy halls.

In any case, you think you're long overdue.

At the beginning, you guarded some fearful hope that things would not be so different, that if he cared enough to keep you like a princess locked in an ivory tower, your bond might still be intact. That hope withers in slow agony until it, too, grows cold and dies. You thought that confronting him would in turn force him to confront the last shreds of his humanity—and maybe it did. In more romantic moments, you can even imagine that he's locked you—his soft, human heart—away, untouchable even to himself.

But when the first shivers of your heat begin, you set your jaw against soft thoughts and instead face the bald truth: he is not coming. You called for Arthas at the gates of Icecrown, but only the lich king answered. If you let it, this place will consume you; Icecrown isn't made for the living.

You have to let go.

There will be time to mourn later, but you've wallowed in your own complacence long enough. You're feverish even in the too-cold tower, and when you imagine the misery that lies in store over the next several days, you nearly despair. Whether or not you escape this tower, you will spend your heat alone and shivering. You haven't had to weather a heat by yourself since…

Well, since Arthas.

That he is somewhere in this labyrinth of halls, entirely indifferent, is a bitterness on your tongue.

The bed in what is essentially your prison is piled with blankets and furs—the only concession this stark space has made for the temperature. You started a nest sometime in the early morning, not quite conscious enough to realize the implications. Here on the roof of the world, the days have grown brief and the nights stretch on forever. If—no, when—you make it out, you will be traveling in near-darkness. You shiver as you pick apart your nest for usable pieces.

There are sad few things for you to pack; you have no rations, no survival gear, and only as many layers of clothing as you can move in. You bundle the remnants of your last meal in a spare shirt and then there is nothing for you to do but wait.

You have grown very good at waiting.

The rattle of bones alerts you long before the iron door creaks open. You swing before you can even see the icy glow from the creature's eyes. It staggers under the ungraceful blow of your room's only chair, and you strike again, again, again.

You might have struck the ragged bundle of bones forever, but the chair splinters and instead you stand over the twice-dead corpse, ears ringing. You shake with either fear or exertion, and you wonder for the first time what will happen if you are caught.

Will this shambling corpse be your fate?

You've been locked away like an afterthought, but now you've shown initiative beyond that of a despondent ghost.

You step back and immediately freeze at a soft squishing beneath your boots. A panicked glance finds not rotting flesh, but a bright berry—one of many scattered about the room. You shake yourself mentally; of course the creature was bringing one of your meals. Now is the time for decisive action, not panic attacks. You gather up whatever fallen food is closest—bread, some roasted meat, a handful of the berries—and stuff it into your makeshift shirt-pouch.

The hallway beyond the relative safety of your prison-room is dark and cavernously large. It is also empty.

You step forward and do not look back.

You don't expect to be missed.

It's a strange oversight for an escaped prisoner, but somehow you've been thinking in terms of accidental discovery and not an active search. You blame the isolation. You've hardly existed for months, lost in your own head, and now you are very much reminded that you are tethered to this mortal plane.

For all that you only saw scourge minions for meals, it takes a surprisingly short time for your absence to be noted. You have a vague imagining of an undead kitchen roster and the sad, empty bones on the floor of your quarters. If the tight feeling in your chest is a little like guilt, you don't have the time or the mental space to acknowledge it.

The lower tier of scourge minions are not much of a concern; they are shambling constructs of little intelligence and as long as you keep your head down and your hood over the bulk of your face, you are all but invisible. It's the death knights that terrify you.

You hear of your own escape through them, the strange hollow echo of their voices shuddering up to you in an upper walkway.

"Normal duties are suspended until this situation is resolved."

You peer down through the metal mesh of the floor and quake at the sight. It's only half a dozen hooded figures, but you know from early reports that their number is far greater. How many stalk the halls between you and freedom?

The leader scatters them with a hoarse cry of, "Find her or it's all our limbs on the workshop floor!"

You press back into the shadows lest one of them look up. Your mind races.

You haven't even begun to map your way to an outer wall. You thought you'd have more time.

Your only option is to hide. If you can hide for as long as it takes for the initial fervor to pass, you can continue on with just the mindless scourge to worry about.

How long before they assume you've escaped the citadel? A day? Two?

You remind yourself to breathe. They haven't found you yet, and there are plenty of dark alcoves to disappear into for a time.

You stagger over the walkway and down an adjoining hall, careful to mimic the movements of the creatures you've seen.

Just hide and wait.

You're very good at waiting.

They find you on the second day, and you're almost glad for it.

Almost.

"Don't make this harder than it has to be." A gauntleted hand reaches through the arrowslit, beckoning. You can see bare bone in the gap between the gloves and dull chain mail.

"There's nowhere to run, omega."

You've known that, you think, as you've sat curled in the dark for the better part of two days. You feel… ill. The cramping has stopped and started, your body at war with itself as it wavers between heat and the primal fear of being hunted. Your head pounds with exhaustion and dehydration.

When the wretched death knights—still able to smell, apparently—found you, you made the only choice you felt you could. You slipped through a tall arrowslit in the citadel wall and dropped several feet to one of the icy, dagger-like protrusions that comprises the outer shell of the dangerous architecture. Your only options now are to give in and take the mocking hand, or to take the long drop and the abrupt stop, as the undead man has so eloquently informed you.

You've been deliberating this for long enough that you're no longer sure you can wrench your body upright to even take the offer, frozen as you are. You attempt to flex your numb fingers and wince at the tightness.

At first, with the armored death knights unable to follow you out of the too-narrow opening, a ghoul was sent to retrieve you. You nearly died in the ensuing scuffle, the space too narrow and slick to get a handhold, and although you managed—barely—to kick the ghoul off to its final death, you were left slipping and scrambling for several precious seconds. Whatever the minions' instructions are regarding you, they must not want you dead, because they switched to mocking, cajoling, and threatening after that.

You've nearly decided to continue freezing to death when the hand in the opening disappears. The silence that follows is alarming.

Have they given up?

Do you want them to have given up?

You stopped shivering some time ago, but the eye that appears in the darkness of the arrowslit makes you shake all the same.

Arthas.

He doesn't speak, and the moment stretches, suspended in time. You can only see half of his face—less, really, with the helm—but the impact is no less for it. The lich king strikes an utterly terrifying figure.

You close your eyes, unwilling to continue the staring match. You've seen all you need to.

A soft shhhk of leather on metal jars you back to reality. You blink, unsure what has changed.

Something moves in the darkness beyond the window.

A single, pale hand reaches through the opening. For all the changes he has wrought, you still recognize Arthas's hand. You've held that wide, calloused palm in your own, have seen those fingers spread wide for emphasis when he speaks with passion. You've never seen it with this deathly pallor, however.

You sluggishly realize he has taken off his armored glove.

He doesn't beckon, just waits.

You could blame the cold, your hormones, or a fear of dying, but you know, deep down, that you take his hand because you have wanted this all along. You've craved his attention, sinister or not, and some acknowledgement of the bond you share.

It's a weakness, you think as you are pulled effortlessly back into the dark of the citadel, that will likely mean your demise.

Half dead as you are, it's hard to care overmuch.

You slump into unforgiving armor, too tired to push yourself away even if you wanted to.

(You don't.)

You wonder, vaguely, about the otherwise empty hallway. What does it mean that he sent his followers away? They know of you now, if they didn't before. Are you a liability? A weakness?

Does it truly matter?

(It doesn't.)

You're conscious enough to know that seconds tick by before either of you move. When you do, it is an involuntary, full-body tremor that nearly takes you to your knees. Or, it would have, if he didn't catch you.

This isn't the first time you've been swept into these arms, but it feels like it.

It's just as well that you don't have the energy to cry. Your throat aches with emotion all the same.

You don't look into his face as he carries you into the heart of the citadel. You stare instead at the pale strands of hair on his shoulder, stark white where they used to be golden. You have half a mind to touch them, to see if they still feel like silk against your fingertips, but your arms are lead. Your head, cotton-stuffed and heavy, lolls on a cold plated shoulder and drifts…

...further…

…away—

You wake boiling.

There's a scream caught in your throat, and you feel your limbs spasm entirely out of your control. You're panicking, eyes rolling—

Something is holding you down.

You pant through the initial shock, trembling and shaking. There is fel fire racing through your veins, burning your skin clean off.

What is—?

Where are—?

You're in a tub. There is something, some solution in the water, turning it an unnatural violet, and it hurts—

The hands on your shoulders loosen their grip.

You start, head lifting, and accidentally slide further into the tub. The water splashes your face and the feeling is not unlike salt in an open wound.

You hiss.

The hands pull you further up.

There is—

You are—

You are entirely naked. You dart a hand out of the water to grip the side of the tub, and to your vague disgust, skin sloughs off. Tender, new skin covers your previously frost nipped fingers, and you recognize the bath for what it is: a healing solution.

Your whole body is going through the rapid, uncomfortable process of being renewed to, if not full health, at least the perception of it.

Your body gives another, halfhearted tremble.

One of the hands lifts from you and reappears with a cloth, dipping it into the water and raising it to your face. You close your eyes and grit your teeth as the strange, familiar fingers wash away the damaged skin and tight, new skin takes its place. When it is over, you sag boneless against the wall of the tub.

Out of the corner of your eye, Arthas stands.

He is armorless now, and it is the first time you have seen him without his helm since he first donned it. His mouth is flat, no sign of his former good humor or charm. His eyes are a colder, brighter blue, electric in the low light. They are rimmed in red, made more stark by the pallor of his skin.

He meets your gaze, unflinching.

You might have thought that he would seem more… himself without the armor, but the armor is still there, even if you can't see it. He is still more lich king than Arthas.

You have never been self-conscious in front of him before, never had a reason to be. You sink further into the tub.

"Say something," you plead.

The Arthas you knew would have smirked and said "something," or instead would have sighed heavily and asked what you wanted him to say.

This Arthas does neither.

Steady, cold eyes pin you in place, a butterfly on a corkboard.

"There is nothing to say."

You've never known him to be cruel.

You stand suddenly, dripping slightly viscous, purple bathwater. The head rush is immediate and fierce, but you brace yourself and scowl, blinking the spots from your eyes.

"Then let me go," you say. "There is nothing for me here."

"No."

He looks so much like your love, this devil does.

"Do you plan to kill me, then? To turn me into one of the creatures that wander these halls?" You bark a humorless laugh and gesture to your bare skin. "You have no other use for me."

"No."

"You used to be more eloquent," you snap.

"I used to be many things."

You can't disagree with that. You stumble from the tub, eyes burning. The floor is ice against the new skin of your feet.

A cold hand catches your elbow as you make to brush past.

"You came to me, omega."

"No," you say, looking for any hint, any shred of warmth in his gaze. "I came for Arthas. You just happen to wear his face."

A sharp laugh then, and not one you recognize. "Is that what you think? You delude yourself."

"Forgive me, then, for not recognizing the mass murderer under the charming façade," you say, the sharp words cutting you more than their intended victim. "You hid it so well."

You remember Lordaeron summers and the prince who embodied them. Before you stands winter incarnate.

"There is darkness in all of us."

You think of Stratholme, and for the briefest of moments, you see something break through his impassive expression and wonder if he is, too. You never got the chance to tell him that you understood. It was a terrible, awful choice to make, but you understood why he made it.

You don't know what possesses you to do it—the brief glimpse of humanity, the tension, the way your body still hasn't decided if a heat is a good idea—but you tip forward and press your lips to his.

Sometimes people make terrible, awful choices.

It speaks to the fact that you've never been a leader that yours have only ever destroyed yourself.

Darkness in all of us, indeed.

He doesn't move at first, and you begin to pull away, hurt, but thinking it for the best. You should have expected—

But then he responds.

The hand on your arm grips painfully tight, reeling you closer still. His kisses are harsh, devouring, angry. Cold fingertips leave bruises in their wake, mapping your skin with a fierce urgency that you've never known in your relationship.

There is no question where this will lead, and there is no breath spared to ask it.

One leg thrusts between your own and you shudder, the rough fabric of his trousers grinding against bare, sensitive skin. You are wet, you realize, unsure when that happened. There's a heady pulse between your legs, and you chase it, rutting against his thigh.

A hand catches you by the nape, tugs your hair so that your neck is bare, bent cruelly back so that you can only pant and whine against the brand of his lips and teeth. You let loose a long, loud whine when he reaches your nipples, when he pinches and sucks and bites and—

You are unceremoniously shoved onto a desk. Your palms skid over the surface, knocking over an unlit candle and painfully finding the sharp end of a quill. You hardly have time to get your feet under you, bent over as you are, before there is the sound of taut leather laces and your legs are kicked wide, and—

"Oooh—!" You can't help the keen, your breath leaving you with a great, heaving thrust.

He is not gentle, pinning you to the table with one hand in your hair, keeping you at an angle that lets him take his fill, lets him press against every soft, grasping part of you. It's wonderful, terrible, and heady, the sound of your wetness and his angry desperation echoing in the cavernous chamber. You angle your hips up just a touch higher, and nearly fly apart at the seams, his cock hitting the sweet, tender spot of you again, again, again—

"Arthas—Arthas, please—"

The tears you've been denying yourself are rising to the surface now, hot and sad and angry—

You feel his knot against your entrance, pushing, pressing. You cant your hips back, arch your back, silently pleading.

Please, Arthas, please—

He reaches around your bodies, two blunt fingers circling that little bundle of nerves, and it's so gentle—he's not supposed to be gentle—

You come apart as he knots you, breath catching on a sob.

A hand cards itself through your hair, catching on the same tangles it helped create.

You were right; this place will consume you. You just didn't realize it's what you've been waiting for all along.