The wall is cutting into my back but I don't care. Oxygen is a long lost memory now, my mouth closed, a home for screams that so desperately want to be heard. I can feel fire and ice running through my veins, freezing every cell, every piece of me. I am empty. My heart cannot handle the lies of a monster, the lies that I so desperately want to be true, but would kill me if they were. I just want to sleep, and never wake up, to slip below the surface of the ice, and lie there, waiting for a darkness to swallow me whole. What a dream that would be.

The door opens, but I do not turn, I do not want to see his face. I don't want him to be real. I don't want to choose.

He is in front of me, but I look through him with blank eyes. If I don't move, maybe I'll disappear into the cement and paint, forming into a crack as simple and invisible as a ghost. He is speaking, but with soundless lips, touching my cheek, begging me to respond. His eyes are flashing bulbs of black and gold, but I see nothing. Feel nothing.

This is just a dream. I say to myself. This is just a dream. Wake up. Wake up.

But I do not find myself in my bed, with my loved one beside me. I am on the rough carpeted floor, on the coldest part of the earth. And my love is in front of me, trying to bring me back to life. He pleads with me, but everything is dulled, and my head is in a fish bowl, and everything is muffled and beautifully terrifying. His hands are on my cheeks, but I cannot feel their warmth, his lips are against mine, but I am a statue.

His arms are under my legs as he hoists me into the air, but I do not shift. I am stone. I am wood. I am a broken china doll, lifeless eyes inside a porcelain shell. Watching eyes stare as we fly through the halls, but I cannot see them. I cannot look back.

If I can't see myself, they can't see me. If I can't feel myself, they can't feel me.

I am laid down onto white sheets, but my numb legs couldn't feel the difference between fire and fabric. My head is put onto a mountain of pillows, and I sink into them. I haven't blinked for three hundred years, I haven't breathed for seven more. My heart does not beat inside my ears, because it does not beat at all.

There are doctors and nurses and panicked faces, putting a mask of air over my lips, and shocks against my chest. But how can they fix me? I am living in a nursery rhyme, with walls and eggs and royal knights. And when I fell, and cracked into a million shards, all of Octavius' doctors, and all of Octavius' love, couldn't pull me together again.

I see spots and blotches, black in front of my eyes. I feel like I've spent a day staring at the sun, waiting to see if it will turn me blind. I feel like I have dived into a pool of wet cement, to see how long it would take for it to harden around my heart. I feel like I have died, and come back to the greatest of nightmares.

I have been dead for thirty seconds. I still haven't closed my eyes. I so desperately want to shut them, and slip into an abyss, to escape the cruelty of air. But I finally see. My vision focuses on his face, his beautiful face. There is an ocean of tears falling down his cheeks, and he looks as broken as me.

If I let myself die, I will kill him, and Titan will win.

Titan will win.

No.

And finally, I breath.