Frozen

Yuki hugged her text books as she entered history class. Unlike most of the other students, she quite liked history. It was one of her favourite subjects. This was not at all due to the teacher. In her opinion, with or without Paragon there, history class would be the same. He's such a lazy teacher- most of the time, he just made the read the text books. And at the rare times when he did teach, his unmotivated drawl made most of the class fall asleep. She detested him.

She headed to the back row, to the seat next to the window. This, she discovered, was the seat that would attract the least attention. Which was perfect, in her opinion. The bullies usually sat in the opposite side of the room.

But apparently not today. As she sat down, one of the most unpleasant boys dragged the chair beside her desk loudly, and took a seat. She tried to ignore him as she opened her text book. The boy proceeded to stare at her, to get her to react. She bit her lip and started to read. Well, it was more like she stared hard at the page with full concentration.

Yuki glanced at her (late) teacher as he gave the class an assignment. Napoleon? Didn't we already made an essay about him last year? She didn't mind, though. Napoleon his French Revolution was quite interesting. She then proceeded to staring down at her textbook some more, as the boy next to her stared at her.

Then, of course, the boy had to start ripping paper from his notebook, rolling them up into little balls, and throwing them at her face. Yuki resisted the urge to frown, and tried to keep her face calm. She scooted to the left- towards the window- a bit more, trying to get out of range. The boy smirked when she scooted, and kept up his rolling and throwing.

"Stop it, please," Yuki whispered giving him a perplexed look. "Make me," the boy snickered in reply. The boy's power must be related to the earth element or something of the kind, since next she felt little tiny pebbles hitting her. He did this so quietly, though, that no one else noticed.

One hit Yuki right in the corner of her eye- ouch. That one did hurt, more than the others. She blinked her tears back. "Weakling," the boy then said, as he threw more pebbles "nerd. Weak-"

The boy got cut of right there, since Yuki suddenly turned towards him whilst standing, her right hand out, yelling, "Stop it!" Ice shot out from her hand and right into the boy's chest, freezing him with his mouth open. She swayed in her spot, looking down in horror at the frozen boy.

What did she do... why.. why was that boy frozen there.. what.. she didn't mean to.. she didn't mean to.. Looking at the frozen boy made her head dizzy. But she couldn't seem to look away. It had been a while since an incident like this happened- her freezing another human. She had tried her best, but this boy was- he just- Stop trying to find excuses, she scolded herself mentally. You couldn't control your powers. You hurt him. It's your fault.

"I'm guessing you don't know how to unfreeze him?" she heard Paragon say.

Yuki just shook her head slowly, her eyes still fixed on the boy. Was this boy going to die? She was still swaying, hands over her mouth.

Yuki didn't realize Paragon had grabbed her wrist. She felt his warm palm against her cool skin, but that was about it. She was still drowned in her worry to be able to think much about anything else. But then as Paragon started to absorb her power, she felt Chikara- the ice dragon that inhabited her, the source of her powers-start to growl. The more Paragon absorbed, the louder Chikara growled.

When Yuki finally registered and felt Paragon's bone-crushing grip, she could hear Chikara let out a full-scale roar. She took a sharp breath and her bright blue eyes widened. She realized what Paragon was doing- or rather, had done- as he unwrapped his fingers. "No," she breathed weakly. He shouldn't have done that- what if he gets frozen too? No one knew the extent of her, or rather, her dragon's, powers.

She lowered herself to the ground awkwardly, trying not to fall too hard. She had already been weak from shock, and was now even weaker after Paragon took quite a lot of her power. It will come back, but it will definitely take time. She tried her best not to look at the frozen boy in front of her as she quietly answered Paragon's question, "Yes." After a few moments, she realized she should give him more information. "But I've never froze anyone fully before. The worse was half a body. A-and that person ended up permanently p-paralyzed." The last part was barely audible.

Yuki looked at Paragon, and she knew that the power that he absorbed from her was affecting him greatly- in a bad way. If he didn't get rid of them soon, she didn't know what would happen. She absolutely did not want him to freeze over.

"...what didn't work?" Yuki tried to calm herself as best as she could. The least she could do was answer Paragon's question properly, and she couldn't do that when she wasn't calm. She decided just to quickly tell him what happened last time. She wasn't quite sure why it didn't work. "Um, the last person was immediately brought to an extremely powerful healer at the hospital, and we all expected that the person could unfreeze and go back to normal. The ice melted, but the healer couldn't heal the limp that came with it. He just said the ice had done too much damage, and that it was too powerful." Yuki took a deep breath. "So perhaps healing didn't work because I need to unfreeze him myself? But I can't." The despair on her face was clear.

Yuki felt like she got slapped in the face, or like someone threw a bucket of water on her when Paragon told her to 'shut up'. Something just clicked, and she knew she really needed to get it together if they wanted to save this frozen boy.

"Have you ever froze an object before? One that wasn't alive?" he asked. "And...could you unfreeze it?"

Yuki nodded right away. The contrast between freezing and unfreezing dead and alive objects was great. She could unfreeze a dead object even without doing the guiding hand movements. Living things, especially human, were just so.. intricate. "Dead objects are easy to unfreeze- they're very different with, well, humans."