A Heart So Cold

by Onomonopia


Let It Go

"How long has it been?" Twilight asked Fluttershy, who was sitting outside of Freeze's room with a look of worry on her face. She had been out there for an hour now, trying to get him to answer her pleas to let her in. Cadence, Twilight and Shining had shown up to lend a hoof, but he still hadn't answered any of them.

"Almost a full week now," Fluttershy said with worry as she raised a hoof and knocked against the door, still only receiving silence as her answer.

"I can't believe that he dropped the cure, can you?" Shining asked from behind the two, but Twilight and Fluttershy turned to look at him with a roll of their eyes. "What? That's what happened."

"There was obviously more to what happened than we saw," Fluttershy said as she knocked against the door once again, still getting no response. "Twilight, I hate to do this but I need to see how he is doing. Can you...you know...get the door moved?" Twilight nodded before using her magic on the door, moving it to the side slowly so that the ponies could enter. Upon entering the room, they were surprised by just how bare it was in there, with only a place for the snowman to sit as he gazed across the room at the ice sculpture of Nora, who still rested inside of the small snow globe.

"Victor?" Fluttershy asked as she walked over to him, looking into his eyes but getting no response. "Victor, it's us. Are you doing alright? Please answer or move or something." Freeze made no indication that he had heard them and Fluttershy looked to her friends for answers. Twilight nodded and walked over to Freeze, scanning him with her magic but shaking her head when she found nothing abnormal with him.

"Then how about I try," Cadence said as she stepped forward, using her magic not to scan Victor's physical state, but instead his emotional state. Her eyes widened in shock when she sensed that the crystal heart was almost completely out of power and for her that could mean only one thing. That his love was dying. "Something happened to him. The crystal heart is no longer receiving the power of love from him like it has been. That means that he isn't loving like he was."

"What do we do?" Fluttershy asked them, Twilight thinking about it for a moment before looking up at Freeze's still unmoving face.

"There is one thing that Luna taught me that might work," Twilight said as she prepared the spell, looking at Fluttershy with a nervous face before let out a hesitant breath. "Luna taught me how to send myself or other ponies into the dreams of others, so that we can see what is going on in their minds. Well, I believe that the only way to see what is wrong with Freeze is to see what's going on in his mind. I hate to ask this of you, but...you know him better than any of us, so you'd probably be the best pony to send in. Would you do it?"

"Yes," Fluttershy said with strength in her voice as she looked up at Freeze, who had still yet to move. Twilight closed her eyes and began to let her magic wrap around Fluttershy, who's eyes began to glow white as the magic took hold. A flash of light went off and Fluttershy closed her eyes, finding herself in a completely different place when she opened them again. She found herself in a cold looking laboratory, where Freeze stood beside a giant capsule that housed a woman inside of it, Fluttershy immediately knowing who it was. Who she didn't know where the two figures standing beside Freeze, looking almost identical in image.

"You couldn't even save her Freeze," the one in the black and gray said to Victor with venom in his voice, Freeze not replying as he continued to look into the tube at his wife. "All of the pain, all of the lives lost by your hands and only now do you realize how futile your actions are! All of your sacrifices were worth nothing and all the lives you took makes you just as bad as the men who tried to kill her. You're no better than them!"

"Lay off old man," the pure black bat said to the other one, placing a hand on Freeze's shoulder with a sad sigh. "Victor, I know that she was your everything, your reason for continuing to go on. But you have to move past this. You can move past this."

"No he can't kid, you don't know him like I do," the black and gray bat said with a shake of his head. "He won't move on. He's incapable of it." Freeze continued to say nothing as he continued to look into the tube, longing for the woman that was inside. Fluttershy heard the two bats talk to him some more before she took a deep breath and walked up to them, the two bats looking down at her as she approached but Freeze never moved.

"And who are you?" the pure black one asked, but Fluttershy swallowed her fears and narrowed her eyes at the two of them.

"I don't know if you're just figments of his imagination or what he thinks his conscious looks like, but neither of you are helping him right now," she said with a fiery fierceness that she rarely used. "Right now he doesn't need to be told that he failed or that he needs to move on, right now he needs someone to listen to him, to help him with his pain. And that's neither of you. So leave." She walked past them as she said this and they vanished back into Freeze's mind as she walked up beside him, watching as he placed a hand on the tube.

"I failed her," he whispered to her after a few minutes of quiet. "I failed her."

"No you didn't, you made the cure," Fluttershy reminded him. "All we had to do was get you back to your world so that you could give it to her." But this time it was Freeze who shook his head at her as he looked down to the pony, tears frozen to his cold face as he finally accepted the truth.

"No...She died long before I came here," he said in a whisper, the tube with Nora in it vanishing in front of him as he said this, leaving the two in a completely empty room. "I knew...all this time, but I just didn't want to accept it. She died happy...with a husband, with a family. But I couldn't accept that! After all I had suffered through and all the time I had been betrayed I couldn't accept that! I selfishly thought that if I could complete the cure I could have her again! That all would go back to the way it was! But I completed the cure...and she is still gone. She was...is my reason for living. And without her...I have nothing left. No reason to fight...no reason to live. Nothing." Fluttershy walked up beside him as he fell to his knees, gently placing a hoof on his shoulder.

"You did everything you could," she said to him gently. "And even though he didn't save her, you still helped us out many times when we needed you despite your...cold personality. You're still a good person."

"A good person? She is the reason I am...kind, the whole reason I exist," Freeze bitterly cried. "She is the reason I could commit such atrocities without hating myself, because it was for her. What am I without her? For so long...she has been my reason for so long. But now who am I? Because without her...I'm just another criminal with a gun. A criminal that should be dead."

"You can't mean that. That is not what Nora would want for you. What would she want you to do?" Freeze said nothing to her as he continued to stare at where Nora had vanished, but then he turned towards her and nodded his head once. The room began to spin as Fluttershy closed her eyes, opening them again to see that they were in the palace and Victor was standing in front of her in his armor again.

"She would want me to be happy, even without her here," he muttered with a cold expression. "But how can I move on, be happy, without her?" Fluttershy thought about it for a moment before Cadence walked up and asked what had happened.

"Nora died long before Victor got here," Fluttershy explained sadly, causing the ponies in the room to gasp as they looked up at Freeze. "And she was his only reason for living. Now I'm trying to think of something that will give him purpose, if I can. But I really don't know what to do."

"I do," Shining said with a nod before motioning for Freeze and the others to follow him. They did so and they followed him until they reached Freeze's lab. Shining opened it and walked inside, before turning to Freeze while motioning his hoof to everything in the room. "This can be your new reason for living."

"Why are you showing me my lab?" Freeze asked.

"Because you have worked miracles in here," Shining said as he walked over to his wife. "In here you managed to create a cure for my wife that both magic and medicine failed to do. In a lab you created your suit, which is stronger and more powerful than almost anything the ponies have created. You can work miracles in here Freeze. You didn't save Nora, but there are still so many that you could save with your gift. So many strange things happen in this land that we have no idea how to deal with, but maybe with your help, we can make the world a bit better."

"Victor," Cadence said in her regal tone, gaining her the attention of all in the room. "I have thought long and hard about you and what you have done. Deciding your punishment has not been easy, especially in light of recent events. But you do need to be sentenced. As ruler of the crystal empire...your sentence is that you will use what you have learned about dieses and help the ponies of this land. You once hurt them, now is the time for you to heal them." Freeze thought about it for a moment before he gave a slight nod.

"That is...acceptable," Freeze said as he looked Cadence to Fluttershy, who gave him a warm smile as she nodded her head.

"You said yourself that you took no joy in harming others and how you hated what you had to do," she said before looking around at all of the materials in the room. "Maybe this is how you can make up for it, by helping ponies instead of hurting them. Becoming a better person, doesn't that sound like what Nora would want you to do?" Freeze thought about what they were saying, debating what to do with himself. Nora had been his only reason for living, for existing, so could he go on without her?

'But they are right about one thing,' he thought to himself. 'I am tired of hurting others and I wish that I could do more for others. That is what Nora would want me to do. And there isn't anything I wouldn't do for her.' "Very well ponies, I can try," he said to them, Fluttershy getting a huge smile on her face as he said this.

"Then I hope that we can put what happened to us in the past week or so in the past," Cadence said with a smile as she walked over to Freeze, holding out a hoof to him. "Can we let bygones be bygones?" Freeze looked down at her hoof for a moment before he shook her hoof, Fluttershy smiling at the display. "Alright then, now that we have an idea on what you're going to do while you're here, I'll go tell the hospital here that there will be a new doctor helping them with medicines." She and Shining left as she said this, leaving the iceman alone with Fluttershy in his lab.

"I'm proud of you Freeze," Fluttershy said as she smiled up at him. "I'm glad that you're able to try and be a better man. I'm also glad to see that I was right about you, that you're not all bad." She turned to leave as she said this, giving him one last smile before she left him alone in the room. He then turned and walked over to where he kept the snow globe, picking it up in one hand as he looked down at it.

'Yes, I am becoming a better person, but it is not for me,' he thought to himself as he looked down at the globe. 'I will...try to be a better man, to help the ponies as you would have wanted me to. But everything I do is for you Nora. Always for you.' He put the snow globe back down as he thought this, leaving the ice lady to dance in the falling snow.