Chioniphobia

Water

Grim has always enjoyed water, in all its forms.

She thinks it's funny, sometimes, how the personification of Death is drawn to something so inherent to life. Other times it seems fitting, seeing the destruction water can cause, leaving a mess for her to clean up in its wake. For Grim, though, water has a different association: meetings.

It was damp in the cave where her brother first found her. She had gravitated toward it because of the little flying creatures that nested there. Their skin stretched tight over their wings, with no feathers to cover them, but she'd still felt a kinship with these predators of the night. She'd watched them shriek and spin through the air, then return to the cover of darkness when daylight threatened to burn them. She'd watched them press together in clusters, snuggling close, the babes suckling at their mother's teats. She'd watched them lap with little pink tongues at the pools of damp that formed on the floor of the cave.

She'd missed them, when she'd first left the cave to go with her future brother. Once they'd established enough communication to do so, he'd taken her back to the cave. They'd both taken up residence there for a while, though he mostly came back there to sleep while she lingered in the shadows, imitating the bats' clicking and chittering, waiting by cavern pools to watch her creature friends lick up the water like little winged dogs.

After all the bats had died, she'd developed a fondness for dogs, especially black ones.

She'd had a black dog with her the night she'd been exploring some caverns and come across the shadow man. She'd been walking along the banks of an underground river when her dog had begun barking at something on the other side. She'd looked up and saw a tall, thin man, cloaked in shadows, watching them from across the running water.

The man had stared at them for a long while before speaking.

"It's typically considered rude to enter someone's home without being invited in," he'd remarked without heat. "Though I suppose it's too late for you to ask for an invitation now."

"You live here?" she'd asked as politely as she could manage. "I used to live in a cave as well. It wasn't nearly as large as yours, though."

He'd looked at her oddly. "And I should care because?"

"...Common ground?"

He'd glared at her then, eyes flashing silver in the dim. "Get. Out."

Before she could respond, he'd vanished.

It was the night at the lake that solidified the connection between water and meetings for Grim, which was appropriate, seeing as the lake itself had solidified, sealing ice over its hidden depths.

The boy had been floating there, eyes closed as if he were sleeping.

She remembers the chill of the water wrapping around her, even as she'd wrapped her own cloak around the boy. She remembers the cool softness of his skin as she'd pressed her lips gently to his face.

She remembers him almost seeming to glow as he was lifted up toward the moonlight.

She stares up at Mim, now, standing in the middle of the same lake despite it being the middle of a mild, warm autumn. Next to the lake, a record player starts the strains of a tune she'd thought especially fitting for the situation. She lifts up a hand.

"May I have this dance, old friend?"

Grim twirls in the moonlight, her toes not quite brushing the surface of the water as a beautiful tenor issues from the spinning vinyl.

With the stars up above in your eyes

A fantabulous night to make romance

Neath the cover of October skies

And all the leaves on the trees are falling

To the sound of the breezes that blow

And I'm trying to please to the calling

Of your heartstrings that play soft and low

And all the night's magic seems to whisper and hush

And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush

Can I just make some more romance with you, my love