Caught in the Snow

1. SFW

Quick note: All ideas, characters and setting belong to CapCom. If you don't want to see the rude bits skip any chapter marked NSFW, or if that's what you're here for they're easily marked so you can jump to it my fellow Heisenwhores! Enjoy!

Chapter 1. Well, what do we have here?

The snow falls one white fleck at a time, quickly drifting down to settle in pools of red. The lycans… they’ve ripped everything apart. The village sits in disarray, little more than broken houses and battered gates. There’s nothing left. Maybe a few stragglers, but not enough to call a community or ever re-form into a new one. Even the statues seem scared, as if they might be next to get shattered.

“Shoot,” she mutters into shaking hands, trying to warm them with her breath. It seems to freeze before reaching her palms.
In the distance a glow catches her eyes. The factory is still running. Usually, it’d be the last place that she would go. There are rumors about it, and the all too constant screams. Some people say that it’s just the machinery, but the elderly townsfolk said otherwise. Not to mention that village teens who play too near seem to disappear in the night. They said they ran off for a life outside of the village and its traditions… Nobody says much now, but those that are left take the local fairy tales much more seriously. The things they used to whisper about that factory were beyond belief. Then again, had someone told her that she would have to put a rake into her neighbor’s skull and run from a rabid priest this morning, she might not have believed it either.

The factory has fire though, and that means heat.
With her fingertips turning as blue as veins, she dredges through the snow. It crunches under foot in a way that seems to echo. To think, as a child playing with Donna and the other girls - they loved that sound. Things change when you grow up, though. Now an adult, it’s just a frozen drudge setting her out as a sitting duck against a plain white expanse.

She tries to hug the tree line as best she can but even that seems to stir up extra noise. At one point a crow flies out and startles her half to death. Honestly, one more good fright and she’s probably done for.

The factory, owned by Lord Heisenberg, a man she has only seen in the one picture at church, is a fifteen-minute walk. Her body is starting to set, as if she’s becoming a glacial carving. Her feet are numb all the way up to the ankle. The walk, drudge more like, takes nearly twenty-five minutes before she flops onto a patch of concrete.

“Damn it,” she says, looking at her hands. They’re scraped and wrinkled all at the same time. Luckily they don’t hurt in the cold. It almost makes her not want to warm up. Actually, no. Forget that. She’ll take whatever burning sensation she can get right now.

A cloud of breath leaves her full lips, dissipating as it freezes and sparkles in the air.

With everything she has left, like a dying sparrow in its last burst of energy, she throws herself at the building. Warmth emanates from it and she presses her cheek against the wall, sucking it in.

It’s so warm that it almost burns, but she doesn’t care. And then a voice comes and sends a shiver down her already frozen spine. “Well, what do we have here?”

The voice is smooth as honey and flecked with rust, giving it an almost dirty yet distinguished quality, like an old piece of coin. She glances around and there stands Heisenberg, tall and smirking in a way that is neither kind nor unpleasant.

He’s much better equipped for the cold than she is, with a long trench coat and hat. He even wears circular glasses that reflect the bright glare of the sun bouncing off the snow. Even without seeing his eyes, she is pinned by his stare – dark, intense and rich as the best bitter quality coffee. Speaking of, the aroma is strong on his breath, tangling with the heated metal, bloody tang and the faintest whiff of a cigar that swirls around him.

“Lord Heisenberg...” She hesitates. There’s a certain charm to his face, a rugged appeal to his beard, but that isn’t what catches her eye. There’s a weapon on his back, huge and rustic. The hammer is held in one hand, as if it were no more than an iron bar.

She looks at it and that’s when she finally succumbs to the frost and exhaustion; falling to the floor, faint.