Frozen Inside

Frozen Inside
Twice Verse #4. Being happier than he's ever been since he got here doesn't stop Dub's past from rearing up every once in a while, especially in snowy weather.

-----------------------------

Healing a broken heart, especially one that's been ruptured twice, is an uneven process. Some parts require more stuffing to flesh it out than others, and some threads are trickier to re-sew, and sometimes patches of its skin scatter far into the distance, leaving an incomplete product behind.

Now that he has made the first step and he is back in the picture of his raven love, Dub's recovery begins. Coaxed out of silence, he speaks (through ex-doctor Wood) to the yellow rabbit, Lemmy, and a couple of other boxed-up toys he finds in the bedroom without animals on the doors. He meets Ina for the first time, with bunches in her hair and bounces in her feet, and he tries to suppress the reminder of his pre-commitment days long enough for her to pick him up and toss him to the ceiling.
All the while, he catches up with Wood. He forgives him one breath at a time, dropping reminders of his feelings every so often. He never acknowledges them, but most times, just having them in the air is enough.
Strangely, he finds himself rediscovering the little things about the outside world. Bedtime is still as concrete here as it was in there (Ina is a toddler, after all), but he doesn't have to be asleep on the dot of then. Other rules no longer apply too. He can move from room to room without a human keeping tabs on him, for example; and music and the smell of food cooking both exist again. Time has a permanence to it now, no longer undefined, but a clear morning, afternoon and night that he can keep track of until he knows for sure he's spent two weeks and three days at the house of Wood.

Life is better for Dub than it has been for ages.
But healing, nonetheless, is an uneven process. The bits the balm hasn't got to yet can be easily chafed, turning all good done into harm. And the irritant can be, as it is today, something as simple as a resting snowflake...

===

The first blade has already fallen, but several of its brothers dance down after it in the lamplight, every one supposedly unique. A particularly big one spins on its own axis; another zigzags down, shrinking and growing near the window. One alights gently on a plant outside before falling off and coming to a gentle rest on the ground, waiting for its clone to land on top of it.
Dub watches from the living room sill.

Such a sight would comfort him if he were anywhere but here, in any mental state but this. Instead, there's a darkness to it, one that overshadows everything that reminds him of his past.
Ideally, he would have been watching since he first noticed the change in the weather, with somebody else by his side. It's what he's supposed to do. First fall, last fall. It's a protocol with him. Them.
He wonders if it's snowing back where his home used to be. If they're in sync.

"Dub, is everything all right?"
The voice catches him off guard; it turns out Wood has entered the room when he wasn't looking. He sounds concerned.
"Yeah," he lies. "Sort of. Just went to watch the snow."
"You could have told me that before you ran off. You don't just leave in the middle of dinner without asking, it confuses Ina."
"Sorry."
He reluctantly turns back to the evening, stretching his legs along the width of the sill in an attempt to get comfortable. It doesn't take.

Fortunately, Wood stays. "Do you like the snow?"
"Mmhm."
"So do I." That's a relief - more things in common that they share. "It's like visual closure for the year," he continues. "The signal to set off the world's hibernation, and for its end too."
"Typical you, putting meaning to it. I just like it cos it's beautiful." Albeit a beauty that pales in significance and serenity next to the raven in the room.
"Same as me, then, but not in so many words. ...More the falling than the final product, though."
"Yeah, me too."
Something jolts him on the inside, but he can't place it.

He thinks he hears claw steps on the carpet in the awkward pause. Is he coming to join him? "This is the first time it's snowed since you got here, you know."
"Yup. Came here on a sunny day, I think." He knows. He remembers making that vital decision in a slush-ridden garden on the day they reunited.
Perhaps that's part of what's tripping him up. Questions linger loudly in the spots of his head where the stars used to be, drowning out all else. If he'd found the strength to leave Wood alone (unlikely as that may be), would this be different? Would he be doing it right? Would he still be happy?
He presses his hand gently against the window pane, and his faded reflection does the same. One life and another separated by a single pane of glass.

"Are you sure you're all right?" Wood asks again, and there's more insistence in it.
"Why?"
"You're not answering my questions again."
"You didn't ask any."
"Yes I did. I asked if you'd ever seen snow in this country before."

He cringes. He hadn't even heard.
"Fine, yes I have and no I'm not," he says, retracting his hand. "But it's not something you can control."
"How can either of us be sure of that if I don't know what it is?"
Dub scoffs bitterly. "Can you bring him back here to watch the last snow of the season with me?"
"Bring who back?" ...Then, in a guilty tone, "Oh. You're right. I can't. But I can let you vent to me, if it will help."

Dub is tempted, he isn't going to lie. The more out in the open he gets it, the less it will hurt on the inside. And the less hurt on the inside, the more Wood could love him too.
On the other hand, he doesn't like thinking about the past these days, even when he doesn't have a choice. He much prefers putting all his focus on the toy he came here to be with.
Rather than admit that, though, he asks, "If I say I don't want to, will you keep asking anyway?"
"Probably. You said nothing at all to me for two of the three months we've known each other. We still have some catching up to do, and this will definitely count as that."

This - the guarantee of bringing the two closer, rather than the hint - is incentive enough.

"All right. But stop me if this isn't making sense to you," Dub begins, choosing his words carefully for both of them. "Before I got here, me and... him. We watched the first and last snow falls together. Did I say that already?"
"You mentioned it, yes."
"Well, that's what we did. It's something we share, the two of us. Shared. Just another part of the routine." A tainted tradition.

He looks back out the window; the flakes still tumble through the sky, catching the lamppost light.
"The first time I saw snow here in Germany... that was the first one Max missed. That, and the one that was kinda responsible for getting me committed to begin with."

===

The memory behind Dub's words takes his mind, and that of the listener, back to the tail-end of November. The final day of the fateful holiday, their 'just the two guys' trip, his human's self-bought Christmas present.
("In November?"
"Max's really really early Christmas present.")
The images play in his head all over again as he speaks of it. That quick last trip to the beach, to watch their new plane on a string fly. The lost track of time. The sounds of a crowded airport, the pressure, and then the...

When the familiar shaking of withheld sadness starts in his hands, his love tells him he can skip that part. So he gratefully fast-forwards to the next coherent section of the story - the start, in fact, of all that he could remember before.

===

It's a tight squeeze back here. He can hear the consistent pounding of feet over the top of unrecognisable music; all he can see is a piece of brown floor and a bright green therapy ball on a blue mat, and even that is upside down.
What a thing to wake up to, Dub thinks. One minute sleeping in a rented hotel room, the next minute trapped in god-knows-where, and no signs of an exit route. Maybe he's in a suitcase or something. Dammit, Max, you know I like head room in my suitca--

His thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a gear change and the stamps getting louder. The wall his face is pressed against pushes back, dragging him vertically, smearing him against it like a bug on a window.
"Ow-- Ow! OWW!" he cries as it starts to legit hurt.

As if on cue, the whirring comes to an abrupt stop and the walls are brought to level again. Some fumbling noises, a voice, and then a hazel eye arrives at the gap, looking for its disturbance. Upon spotting the by now very confused turtle, the pupil shrinks, and quicker than he can register it the way is opened and two large hands have dragged him out of there to right side up. Maybe now Max can explain why I'm--

Wait. This isn't Max. The man has stubble, for a start, and Max isn't quite as pale as he is. And it doesn't help that as soon as he opens his mouth to interrogate him, it's clear he doesn't speak a lick of English.
Dub falls back on checking where he is as a starting point. He starts at the green ball, and to its left finds not a suitcase, but a wide-backed treadmill next to several others with thin backs, paused and opened up. He guesses that explains the position shifting, but... How did he get behind a treadmill of all places? The hotel doesn't have a gym. Does it?
His trail of vision leads to a wide glass wall, circling around the place and looking out to a dark, busy street. Definitely not the hotel.
Where is this place? Where is he?

His rescuer only now pauses his rough-voiced talking. Crap, what did he ask? What's he supposed to say at this point? He asks the question again, harder, but still no understanding.
"Uh, sorry, don't speak German," he tries.
The man repeats himself again, slower.
"No- I speak English. Do - you speak - English?"
That time it gets through to him, he thinks. At least he hopes that's why he's now being taken to a side room with someone else within. He's not sure what the alternative would be.

"Can you speak English?" he asks after an incomprehensible conversation above him and a change of hands.
The new guy, less sweaty and more gangly than the one before him, nods. "I speak decent English, yes." The German accent is strong (in hindsight, even stronger than Wood's).
Relief rushes him for the first time since he emerged. "Oh thank god, maybe you can help me. Where am I, who are you and have you seen my owner? Dark guy, huge-ass bag on his back, wearing a bobble hat--"
"It's okay, calm down. I'm Anton. Eberhard is my employer. This is a 24 hour fitness centre." Huh, should have guessed. "He found you behind a body trainer. He's worried, by the way. Are you unhurt?"
He gently checks his own face and neck for bruises. "Yeah, I think so. Got a headache, nothing else serious." Nothing except the huge gap where the day should be, but he can't reach that.
"That's good. Anyway, there was no person with you, or Eberhard didn't see any."

"But I must have gotten here somehow!" the turtle protests.
"On your own, maybe? Do you remember?"
"...Augh, no. I must have hit my head back there or something because I can't think. All I remember about today is what just happened. Nothing before that."

("Probably a case of psychogenic retrograde amnesia," Wood interjects, and Dub's body takes a second out to get all tingly over the intelligence that's helped him fall for him both times.)

"What were you doing?" Anton prompts.
"We were gonna go home today. My human and I were gonna, I mean. I have to have got here through him, he had to return the car. Where'd you say this place was?"
"A fitness centre."
"No - I mean, where is the centre? Is it in town?"
"We are just outside an airport, if it helps."

Dub perks up. "Perfect! That means Max has gotta be somewhere around. You mind if I wait here for him to come pick me up? It shouldn't take too long."
"I do not mind. Eberhard might, but I'll discuss with him later," the other says with a smile.
"Great, thanks. I'll just head out front and look out for him." He squirms himself free of the human hands and makes for the door of the office.
"Will he see you?"
"I'm a talking toy turtle," he jokes; "how can he miss me?"

Once he reaches 'out front', time begins to pass differently, more slowly, like it normally does when one's waiting for someone to arrive and they aren't. Dub checks the nearest clock and it's just before 5:20, and he tries to keep a look out for the familiar human with the way too big bag on him in the crowd of passers-by outside, and he doesn't come yet, but that's okay, he might be looking for him in the airport itself, or extending the holiday for some reason, or driving back to the hotel because he left his portable Cluedo game in their room or his trunks in the laundry or something, and he wonders if Sheila has missed Max at all, and why she'd be so vindictive as to give him the "just wanna be friends" talk right on the night of the team's fund-raiser, and prays that either she's come to her senses or he'll find someone who will stay with him next time and not leave him in the dust like a frog on the road, and then after all that thinking he looks at the clock again and it's just after 5:20, and he lets out an irritated and worried sigh.

An hour goes by in this general vein, inter-cut by the occasional question and people looking at him funny. The employee comes to join him about halfway through to stave that off.

"You have not found Max yet?" Anton asks for the fourth time when it hits 6:15.
"No," he replies darkly for the fourth time. By now, he's started skipping to pass the minutes more quickly. Having a beep go off every seventy jumps and thirty seconds helps put the external flow into its proper perspective, but it's not easy to keep up the rhythm when he's distracted by a conspicuous absence.

"Perhaps you can stay here for the night until he comes? I can give you a bed in the drawer."
"What if he comes while I'm asleep though?" The timer buzzes and he stops to reset it. "I can't afford to miss him. And if he sees me slacking off without his permission..."
"Well, you have to do something. You can't skip forever. People are tripping over you."

He turns to Anton to point out no one's come in at all, which is essentially the root of the problem, but on the way around he notices that one of the thinner treadmills is now empty, and facing just the right direction for any runners to see out all the windows.
"Actually, there's an idea. Can you get that treadmill there set up? That way I can get fit without disturbing anybody, and I won't have to sleep," he suggests. "Again, only 'til he gets here. That sound fair?"

It must do, because the next minute Dub's on the walkway. "Start me off at five kilometres, 3% gradient? Thanks."
The floor starts moving underneath him, slowly at first, then picking up. He starts jogging, he goes into running.

He runs like his life depends on it.

===

Dub trains on the treadmill for another four hours or so. He's done a lot of exercise back home, so he has the stamina for it. When that's over, he has a roughly thirty-minute power nap on top of the electronic display, then starts up again. Max doesn't come all night.

He monopolizes the machine right through the next day. Anyone who comes up to ask him to let them have a go is met with a translated reassurance that he'll "be off soon". Countless soons pass, Max doesn't show, and Anton gives up passing the message on.
Later, he isn't so lucky. A woman with a pixie cut and what looks like a membership card eventually muscles him off the thing, and he turns back to skipping, but keeps one very close eye on her to make sure he gets first dibs when she's done. He does, and the two have a silent custody battle for it twice afterwards.

Five kilometres per hour slowly becomes eight. 3% gradient, 3.5, 4, 4.5%. He loses track of when it changes, when the music in the background switches to something else. He stops looking at the passing hours, and at his timer. The inner lights are always on, even as the sky brightens from black to red to blue and back again. At some point he gives up on the napping, staying awake purely on his own adrenaline.
He doesn't need to keep track of these things, he just has to run and keep looking. He has to work hard, keep fit, be fast. Top speed, high stamina, just like at home. Be worth it for the team, for Max.
He has to.

("Um, not that this anecdote hasn't been interesting so far," Wood interrupts, "but what precisely does this have to do--"
"I'm getting to that.")

On what will turn out to be the last day he does this, Anton once again asks if he's found Max yet, in a resigned voice. He just shakes his head and runs on.
"...Dub, listen. It's been a while since you first got on that trainer," the voice tells him. "Do you think you need a break?"
He shakes his head again. He can't afford to rest, not in a situation like this.

"Eberhard says you do. He thinks you've been training really hard."
"Well, tell him I'm not," Dub speaks at last, without looking at him. "If anything I'm not going hard enough. Am I at ten kilometres yet?"
Anton ignores him. "You've been running on there since you got here, waiting for your Max. When did you say that he would come?"
"I don't know, that's why I'm looking for him."
"That's our point. He hasn't yet, and--"
"And you standing there distracting me isn't getting him here any faster, y'know."

Strains of what sound like German hit his ears, followed by Anton apparently giving up on the tact. "It's been three weeks, Dub! Three weeks we've had you in here and people are starting to talk. Eberhard is talking, he speaks to me and the others about his concern for you, he goes on about it, the 'incessant hopping of the crazy turtle' he calls it--"

"I'm not crazy!" Dub snaps at that point, almost tripping in his exasperation. "I'm not! I just don't want Max to come in here and find me in a slump. Do you know how bad that'd look? Trust me, I'll stop running when he gets here."
"But you're going to wear yourself out if you keep--"
"Is Max here yet?"
"No, but--"
"Then leave me alone and call me when he is." With that, Dub tries to tune him out and stay focused.

The final salvo gets through anyway: "All we are saying is, we think you have a problem. Eberhard knows a place in the next town where they can talk to you about such things, if you think it will help."
"Unless. Max. Is here. Don't talk. To me."
After that, the human gets the hint and leaves Dub to it. In fact, nobody talks to him or even tries for the next few whatevers. All the better, for he needs no distractions, no breath wasted in conversation. He has to train. He has to find Max.

The sky goes dull again, and the people in the room migrate to where he can't see them. He still presses on, eyes scanning through the crowd of people outside, to the wall ahead. Still no Max.
The thrum of background noise fades and the music persists. He uses it to keep a beat, step step step. A while of this, then even that disappears, for the first time since he arrived. The blip for every metre ran fills in the gap.

Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep -

The words of before begin to sink in. Did he really say three weeks? He couldn't have done, he can't have been training for that long. If he's been running for such a large stretch, how is he still awake? How are his feet not falling off? Three days. That must have been what he meant. If it's been three days, he has a chance. Anyway, he can't sleep, partly because it's so bright in here, and he can still hear the noise, becoming abnormally loud in the otherwise odd silence.

Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep -

Why did he decide to do this? A part of him pipes up with that question, an inner voice that occasionally comes along in the aftermath of stupid decisions. But this wasn't one. He has to be fit for Max. If he slacks when he's not meant to slack, what will happen? Will Max get here and leave in disgust? If he falters, will he not arrive at all? Dub doesn't want to take the risk.

Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep - Beep -

But he is training. So why isn't Max here? Max has got to come soon. They have things to catch up on at home, where turtles can train without being called names. Cross country and wooing sessions and trips to Band on the Wall. They have to keep up their tradition, to start and end the holiday season. But how can they when he isn't here yet? The noise, bouncing in his upper ear, begins to distort to match his thoughts.

Still - No - Max - Still - No - Max - Still - No - Max -

He blocks it out. He can't get distracted again. He can't fall to the inside taunting, he can't focus on the rumbling outside, he can just keep looking for the familiar silhouette and get him in here please get in here why isn't Max here WHY ISN'T MAX HERE?!

At this thought, the lights respond by flaring brighter, blinding white and yellow, searing his eyes, and then it's gone to black and the ground stops rolling under him as the fitness centre is thrust into a power cut.

The suddenness of it all sends Dub sprawling onto his stomach; he almost hurts his face again. There's a crashing noise outside, then nothing else; the ensuing silence buzzes around him. He comes to his senses and pulls himself up.
...Steiff. It really has gotten dark. He can only see faint sketch lines where full reality should be.
He really has trained for a while too. Now that he's up on his legs and standing still, the aftermath swamps him in its embrace; he has to muster every ounce of strength he can to stay upright, and his knees appear to have become non-existent.

Somehow he manages to find his way to the ledge that leads him up to the glass wall, climbing onto it. Outside is more visible than inside, at least, but what he can see stuns him.
There is no one there. The street is completely deserted of people - nay, of life. He looks up; tar-coloured clouds fill the horizon above. He looks down; there's a giant crackling number on the floor, a five, or possibly a two. He looks to his right and spots a Christmas tree, draped in blinking coloured lights.

...Wait a minute, a Christmas tree?
When did that get there? he wonders, startled. When the hell did it become the Christmas season? It was November when he and Max were planning on flying home. If a tree is up now, that means it's winter. And if it's winter now, that means...

His thoughts are silenced, and confirmed, by a tiny speck of white falling from the heavens. It lands, and its many brothers dance down after it, fleeting, but solemnly. The world turns brighter, as if to mock him. His hopes are dashed.

Silently, he presses his face against the window and processes what this means.
First, he has been training for three whole weeks. A worrying development. Second, Max hasn't arrived to pick him up for those three weeks... not that he's seen.

Third, he is watching the first snow fall of the season without him, for the only time since the ritual began.

...

In the present day, Dub pauses. He looks back on the memory, with the benefit of hindsight, all that he knows now, feels now. And before it can slip his mind, he confesses to his love that a part of him might have known, even back then, that Max was gone for good.
And that he just hadn't wanted to admit it.

===

The Dub of the past stirs to a hand touching his shell. He realizes he fell asleep when he sees a steamed up imprint of his face on the glass. A blanket of white satin covers the roads in the crystalline morning; the number is half-buried underneath it.
If it hadn't been for that snow fall, he would have trained himself half to death.
This realization backed with the memory of the night before makes his limbs ache. He looks up resignedly at, and intercepts, Anton before he can rub it in his face.
"All right, okay, fine. You win. I give. I need help."

Anton merely smiles sadly, accepting the apology implicit in the words, and leads him to the wider man, who's shaven since they last met. From what he can gather as a third party to the conversation, the 'place in the next town' is actually a clinic specifically designed for cuddly toys, the only one of its kind. It's almost fortunate that he's so close by.
It might be a drastic measure, but Dub's in no position to argue with it. He just goes with the flow, and they resolve to take him up there the next day.

It's dull and overcast when that day comes. He both hopes and fears it's going to snow again; it doesn't. The drive to the asylum takes a while, so Dub passes the time by staring out of the back car window at unfamiliar landscapes, finding pictures in clouds that make sense only to him.
The building, somewhat counter-intuitively, seems to be in the middle of a park. Eberhard takes him inside and stays with him for the bulk of the admission. Then, just like that, he is gone.

Apparently the usual head therapist is away, as the amiable pink-nailed nurse explains in his tongue, but that just leaves more time for him to settle in. She asks him a few questions; his name, how many owners he's had, if there's a history of mental disorders, why he came here. He answers them truthfully. What else can he do? Once they're done, he's pointed to what she calls the patient lounge, where his fellow plushies are already waiting.
As he makes those first steps into his life for the next several weeks, something occurs to him - to both of them, he's pretty sure.

Considering everything that's happened, all of his denial, all of the resistance before,

both the staff member and the newcomer himself are surprised by how little the latter is struggling.

===

His story is done, so the turtle trails off. Wood's moved more onto the sill throughout the telling, and is now beside him, looking at this more recent snowstorm himself. Now that it is quiet, he can see it's grown thicker, the flakes denser. It's like an avalanche of icing sugar onto a frozen world.

"Do you feel better? Did that help?"
Dub nods. "Yeah. Thanks."
A pause.

"A lot's happened since then," he adds when his raven makes no further comment. "Me meeting you. Me getting hurt. Me finding you again. ...None of that would have happened if I hadn't been snapped out of it by that snow."

"...Do you regret it?" Wood asks tentatively.
"Regret what?"
"Snapping out. Getting committed, meeting me, all of that."
"...sometimes," he admits. "I mean, Max wouldn't have come back either way, but. I wouldn't have known that, and I wouldn't have needed the... thing. But then again, I wouldn't have found you there and gotten so caught up in you and everything. Do you think I'd've been better off?"
"Emotionally, yes. Mentally, I really can't say." Wood sounds like he's trying to hide something, but Dub knows better than to press it.

Instead, he turns once again to the snow. "I guess it wasn't even that I was without Max then. It was, that was a huge chunk of it, but. Maybe more than that, it was that I was alone. I've always watched it with someone, and that was the first time I was on my own, and... I don't want this one to be on my own too, you know what I mean?"

"But you're not on your own." And the comforting ever-present voice is right next to his ear now, Wood sitting to his right. "You have me. If you wish."
"I- y- are you sure?"
"I did say I like this particular weather. There'll be no harm in sitting it out with you. I've done this much already, haven't I?"

The words to thank him again dry up before he can voice them. All he can manage is a smile.

Outside, there's still no sign that the onslaught of ice is even close to stopping. A wind's picked up, and the flakes ebb across at a diagonal in jagged lines and curves. The cold, bitter hypothetical of a world without Wood. In here, the warm reality of one with him.
Closure on both sides.
He rests his head on Wood's shoulder. He stiffens, but then accepts it without protest. He's so comfortable. So nice to be next to. The noiselessness is not awkward now, or unnecessarily loud, but a soothing presence. No more needs to be said.
The darkness and sadness and bitter memories are gone.

Dub changes his answers from before. If he were back with his betrayer, he wouldn't be happy. Not like this, with his love in this place.
He doesn't regret a single one of his decisions.

Not one bit.

===

"Wood? Thanks for that."

"For what?"

"Watching with me. You didn't have to do that."

"I owed it to you. Are you ready to come upstairs now?"

"I think so. I do feel better."

"Good. Ina's going to want to play with her fire engine, if I know her. She usually does in this weather."

...

"Are you coming?"

"I love you. You know that, right?"

"Come on, Ina's waiting for us."