Nameless Part One

The sky was grey, the light dim and faded; all around them the empty air seemed to whisper, "Remember me." They held hands and gazed upwards; when together they could forget everything, erase all traces of the poisoned days from their memories. Time passed and the world rolled on, speeding up, gathering momentum like a sphere set inexorably into motion; but their own insipid underworld stood still. Lying beneath the bare-branched sycamores they remained, dreaming of the river, too afraid to move for fear of shattering the ice-crystal pane of timeless perfection.
"If I was to die here," she whispered, "I would be happy."
Don’t speak, he thought, though her soft words fell like rain into the freezing desert of his mind. Don’t speak but please let me stay by your side.
They lay motionless for an unknowable time, clinging to each other as though both were a single entity, aching for warmth, for feeling. At last she sighed and turned to face him as the mercurial skies shifted above them. Her expression pierced him somewhere deep, somewhere in the void where his soul used to be. Her autumn eyes were dead and cold as ice.
“Dimitri.” She whispered his name while her fingers touched his face. They felt like freshly fallen snow feels before it is melted into oblivion by grey showers. He shuddered inwardly at her freezing touch. “Dimitri, close your eyes.”
Like one hypnotised, he obeyed without a second thought, though the sensation was discomforting- had the fading light not been visible through his closed eyelids, flickering fitfully between white and grey, he would have feared he had become one of the snowblind. Two hands pushed him slowly to the iron ground, where he lay gasping with the cold; the crisp evening frost began to melt against his back, seeping through his clothing to bite at his skin. Still he kept his eyes tightly closed. The heavy air stirred as she leaned closer; he could just about detect her scent. Gently, so gently, her hands crept higher, skirting his upper arms, stroking his tense shoulders; he heard her sigh quietly, before her icy fingers reached the skin of his neck. He took a sharp, shallow breath; gooseflesh broke out over his entire body. As she slowly and deliberately unfastened the buttons of his shirt, one by one, exposing more and more of his chest, his eyes opened wide in shock, he tried to protest; she silenced him with a look. He reeled, physically thrown backwards by the force of the glance.
“Dimitri,” she said softly, “let this be the last thing I do for you.”
No, he mouthed.
And as though to erase the words he had left unsaid, she delicately placed her scarlet lips around his; after a shocked second he responded, the kiss becoming more desperate with each passing moment. A chill wave surged through him like electricity as her hands caressed his back, filling him with a dull, numbing ache. Her body pressed urgently against his; as the pain increased, so did the compulsion to hold her, to love her, though he shook with the cold, and with something more than cold. His hands seemed to belong to someone else as they traced the outlines and contours of her body, so fragile and yet so substantial at the same time. The only remaining thing in the dying world which was still real to him. Their breath came in jagged gasps as each tried to equal the others’ advances. His thoughts became clumsy, yet he could not hold on to a single one. Something he had perhaps said once in another life came back to him out of nowhere, stuck on repeat.
Don’t speak but please let me stay by your side. Don’t speak but please let me stay by your side. Don’t speak but please let me stay by your side.
It seemed that her desire mirrored his; breathing faster, she ran her fingers through his hair and pressed her lips to his until they bled. The blood tasted like metal. He watched it fall on the snow as they writhed and coiled, absorbed in each other; watched it disappear under new snow as the sky moved and evolved through phases of dark spreading colour, bruise-purple, shadow-black. Finally she shuddered to a stop, her fire eyes smouldering the way they had used to do, a bead of his blood vivid on her white cheek. Her head tilted to one side, like a bird, and her voice in the dark stillness was just as lilting.
“You melted the ice tide in me,” she said, her breath cool against his shoulder, “and it froze again in you.”
With a devastating smile, she pressed her freezing hand to his heart.
All he knew was pain. He would have screamed, had he not been paralysed, pressed down by some invisible force to the new-fallen snow. Splinters of ice jabbed outwards from the place where she had touched him, lacerating his bones, tearing through his deadened veins. Each shallow breath rose laboured in his throat; his tear-blurred vision could just make out the white figure still visible though there ceased to be light.
“Dimitri,” she said as though from so far away, “I can’t do this any more. I can’t do it. I can’t go on like this. You understand why I have to leave it behind, don’t you?”
He was unable to breathe, let alone to speak, as the pain raged within him, racking him with convulsions which hurt more than the ice.
“Dimitri......you won’t be alone.....I am taking you with me.......listen to me....”
Somewhere through the torture-induced haze, the deafening roaring in his ears, he dimly caught vague, broken sounds- a sob, the rising breeze, carrying a fresh drift of snowflakes towards where he lay crumpled. Black exhaustion lapped at the edges of his consciousness; he welcomed it, begged it to intrude further.
The snowflakes landed on his face, in his unseeing eyes, and they did not melt.
The girl knelt beside him and kissed him with the air of a mother kissing her baby goodnight; tenderly, yet with fears for what is to come visible in her face. Then she looked down at the blood on her hands and kissed them too and lay down beside him.
All was still for an endless stretch of fluttering dark. The night watchful. Waiting for a reprieve. Too cold for stars.
Somehow, against all expectations, the sun rose weak in what had once been called the morning and cast a wan light over the frozen waste, the two motionless bodies in the snow. Pathetic and ragged they looked; starved like everyone else, worn by fear and sorrow. Struggling through a meaningless existence, fighting for each day. A life that they had never chosen. A life that had, inexplicably, chosen them. He was close to physical death. She would never wake. Two lives burned out like ice water to wavering candle flames.
Only the girl’s scent lingered, like a whisper in an empty room, a faint memory of her.