Dreaming of White ✔ [Completed]

Chapter 7 - Elements Of Surprise

Three figures stood in the whirl of white noise and frost and ice.

A woman holding a gun, her face hidden beneath the hood of a brown down jacket.

A man in a dark blue uniform and a black beanie hat, his hands cuffed behind his back.

And a second man in a dark grey fleece-jacket, his hair speckled with snow. A huge smile was spread across his face and he was rocking back and forth on his heels with delight, hands clasped behind his back, mirroring and at the same time mocking the posture of the first man.

For a moment no one spoke. Then the man in the grey fleece-jacket let his arms swing forward, raised both his hands and gave the man in the blue uniform a cheery wave.

"Surprise."

The other man gasped, his eyes wide and wild, flickering from the woman to the waving man and back again. A single word escaped his mouth before he could stop it.

"Impossible."

Riddhima had disarmed and handcuffed him within less than a minute, the man apparently too stunned to put up any kind of resistance. Now her eyes were fixed on him and her gun was aimed at his chest, while she carefully slid his gun and knife into her backpack. Vansh was starting to move somewhere next to her, but she didn't need to look at him to know what she would see.

She could practically feel his brain shifting into next gear, knew his eyes were flashing with excited energy, knew the corners of his mouth were twitching, holding back the words she could almost hear tumbling from his mind to his tongue. She knew all it would take to set them free was one more word. And maybe an additional punctuation mark.

"How…"

That one.

And that one.

Showtime.

"Magic!", Vansh whispered with a gasp and a twirl of his right hand. When he saw the sheriff's eyes widen in something close to fear, he shook his head with a chuckle.

I could go all Gandalf on him and he'd buy it, he thought, knowing that he should probably stop feeding the man's delusions, but the temptation to continue, to keep playing, to keep messing, was agonizingly strong.

At least until Riddhima killed it by clearing her throat.

Spoilsport.

"Might come as a surprise to you", Vansh said slowly, stuffing his freezing hands into the pockets of the jacket. "But there is not such thing as magic."

The sheriff didn't seem convinced, instead fixed his gaze on Riddhima, watching her chest rise and fall, her breath steaming in the cold winter air. Alive. Clearly alive. He looked at Vansh accusingly.

"She fell to her death. I heard. She fell. You screamed."

Vansh shuddered, trying to ignore the memory of Riddhima suddenly falling once the ground gave way, of her slipping, scrambling, screaming, her terrified eyes never leaving his own. Worse than the memory though, was the thought of her eyes locked in an eternity of terror, everything that was her, gone from them forever. The image of her lying in a hole six feet deep with a broken neck or being impaled on one of the wooden stakes sticking out from the frozen ground. The thought of what would have happened, if he hadn't caught her wrist in time. His chest tightened and he tried to breathe through the sudden pressure and the equally sudden lack of oxygen in his lungs, forcing himself to focus on remembering what had actually happened instead of imagining what could have.

His breathing returned to normal.
His heartbeat didn't.

To buy a little time, he gave a shrug, at the end of which he pushed his hands deeper into his pockets.