(no subject)

[theamazingdalet]

Meet the players of Grace’s Last Reward (AO3)

          ↳ Day 7 ✩ Uriel // Seven

 

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“Ice that doesn’t melt at room temperature…” Seven rubbed his head. As he’d listened, he’d gotten a faraway look in his eyes, and was now frowning deeply in frustration.

“You remember something else?” Quatre asked him again.

“Almost, I…” Seven’s head snapped up, his eyes wide. “–that woman! She’s here on this ship!”

Startled, Balthazar pressed. “Who’s here?!”

Could he mean…Zero?

“You don’t know?” Seven seemed surprised. “Alice, the woman who won’t melt at room temperature.”

“I… actually, I did hear something like that,” Balthazar admitted. “She was a mummy on the Titanic, wasn’t she? But what do you mean she’s on this ship?”

“You must know about the ship that picked up the bodies after the Titanic sank,” Seven started, answering himself for Quatre’s benefit. “Two days after the disaster, the CS Mackay-Bennett sailed out of Halifax, in Canada, to collect the corpses. …the first class ones, anyway.”

He paused briefly for his audience to chuckle.

“But they pulled something else out of the water, too.”

“A beautiful, wooden coffin, and I do mean all wood. There were no nails to hold it together, it was so perfectly crafted. When no one claimed it, they decided to break it open.”

“Inside was a dead body like all the others, although they didn’t even realize it at first. The woman inside, the ‘mummy’ that had been brought aboard, was so lifelike she seemed to just be sleeping.

“Of course, the waters out there in the North Atlantic were freezing, so they assumed she’d rot eventually back on shore, but it never happened. Weeks, months passed, but even by summertime she stayed just as completely frozen as she’d ever been.

“The newspapers of the day started to call her ‘All-ice’.”

“Alice.”

Seven paused for dramatic effect. “And then…she disappeared. She was stolen, coffin and all.”

“And made her way to another cruise liner,” Balthazar blinked, slowly taking it all in. Seven, even Quatre, laughed at his “funny” commentary, and Balthazar blushed irritably.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Seven continued. “See, there was a thriving underground market in New York at the time - I mean a particular one: all millionaires, from all over the world.”

“The story goes, Alice was bought there that summer by an Englishman, Lord Gordain.”

“Lord… The one who bought the Gigantic?”

“The one who would buy the Gigantic, four years later,” Seven corrected him. “Before he died, in 1931, a friend asked him, ‘Where is Alice?’ Gordain had never told a soul, but right there, he said to his friend…
 

“Alice sleeps in a small chamber past the forest of knowledge, beneath the navel of the Gigantic.”
 

“…forest of knowledge…” Balthazar murmured in the silence. “Does this ship have a library?”

“Hell if I know,” suddenly casual, Seven brushed past him, reaching for the door. “Sounds like something to ask June, don’t you think?”