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She hears the crack echoing through the chilled air, and she knows exactly what’s about to happen. She’s frozen, watching the moment he realizes how much danger he’s in. A second later he’s fallen, disappeared into the icy water. She screams his name and runs. She slides in some places on the ice, torn between speed and care to not fall too, but he needs her.
She’s reaching into the icy water, praying he’ll take her hand. She’s screaming his name. He can’t hear her, can’t see her, can’t find her hand. It’s too dark down there and she can’t tell how far down he’s sunk.
She hears a panicked thud a few feet away, a pale shadow under the ice. She scrapes the snow, finding that pale hand pointing the glassy ice, reaching for freedom. She can’t slam the ice hard enough, can’t pierce through to reach him. She’s screaming, crying, and she can’t imagine how terrified he must be…
And then she’s in the water, sinking in the cold, looking up as he pounds the ice. There’s no one on the other side to pull him to safety. He’s trapped, and no help is coming.
She’s there, right in front of him, watching his arms slow, watching his eyes fade as he sinks. She’s screaming his name in the water, and somehow still breathing while he cannot.
She couldn’t save him…
Her eyes snap open, but she can’t move. She breathes in harsh gasps, clawing for air she shouldn’t have had a moment ago. It’s dark and she knows she’s not in the water, but for a moment she swore she was there.
And Albert was…
She whimpers, tears burning her eyes. She clings to the memory of his soaked hair as she cradled his face, listening to his ragged breathes because he was alive, so alive, and so desperate to breathe again. And it was real, she knows it was, but the nightmare was real too, so real.
“Albert?” she whispers, reaching out across the bed but her arm feels foreign to her, numb and heavy like a metal contraption has been tied to her shoulder in its place. But it’s hers, flopping more than reaching for him and finding no one in bed beside her.
She whimpers, because it couldn’t have been real. That nightmare couldn’t have, because she remembers the celebration for Christmas Eve the next night, watching the light in his eyes as he stared up at the trees adorned with candles. It was real.
So where is he?!
“Liebes?”
It’s soft and so, so far away.
She cries and pushes herself out of bed, nearly falling forward because her body still doesn’t feel like her own. It feels too heavy. Off center, numb. She holds onto the bed post, staring into the dark at the faint golden glow in the distance, the fireplace alight in the study and the tall shadow. She pushes forward, rushing to him and nearly falls again.
“No, no, no, no!” he whispers, catching her and holding her close. “Careful Liebes, careful, please.”
“Don’t you ever do that again!” she screeches, tears streaming down her face as she weakly clings to him.
“Victoria?” he says softly, lowering her to the couch and looking carefully at the streaks on her face that shine in the golden light of the fireplace behind him.
“Never again,” she whispers.
He’s not sure what he’s done and never allowed to do, so he touches his hands to her cheeks and brushes away the flowing tears. “I promise.”
She buries her face into his chest, her hand pawing wildly at his chest as she pulls his shift down to touch his bare chest with her cold hand. He shivers, remembering why he can’t sleep, and tries to pull her hand away. She’s too weak to resist, and he’s familiar with that.
He’s woken up to her whimpering, frozen and unable to move and wordlessly begging him to help her. The doctor can’t explain what happens to her, and all he knows is that pulling her off her back and holding her, rubbing his hand along the tight muscles of her neck and shoulders helps her.
“Another paralysis?” he whispers, pulling her close again and gently messaging her back.
“No!” she cries into his chest. “Why did you leave!”
And then he knows. “I couldn’t sleep, it was too cold,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“You weren’t there!”
“I’m sorry.”
“I watched you drown!”
And he knows.
“I’m alright, Liebes. You saved me, remember?”
“I didn’t this time,” she whispers. “I couldn’t save you.”
“It was a nightmare, and while it felt real, it wasn’t. You saved me, that was real. We’re alive, in our home, together. That’s real.”
She nods against his chest, the grip of her arms around him growing stronger as he rubs her back. Her hands are so cold, so he takes them in his hands and holds them close to his chest. He breathes warmth into them while she watches him, eyes shining with tears.
“Come sit beside the fire, let’s warm you up,” he whispers.
She’s still unsteady on her feet, and being so pregnant isn’t helping. He lifts her and carries her to the fireplace he was sitting at before he heard her weak whimper. They sit on the floor together, the fire warming their skin.
“You couldn’t sleep,” she says, looking up at him with such love.
“It was too cold,” he whispers.
And she knows.
He can’t look at the snow without remembering the heart-stopping moment he heard the ice crack.
He remembers the dark, frozen hell under the ice. His muscles growing weaker and slower. Reaching for the bright surface above and finding only ice, holding him down in the water as his lungs burn. He never felt so helpless.
He’s pulled away from his dark, frozen hell as she takes his hands together and breathes fresh warmth, rubbing them gently. There is no hell, only the woman who calls him her angel. This is his heaven, his home with the family he loves so dearly.
“I love you,” he says.
And she knows how hard those words used to be.
German isn’t a language that cares much for sentiment. It has so many words for emotions, words that never translate right into English, but it’s not a language that expresses love well. Comfort, home, loyalty, even longing. Not love. It’s such an honest language, to the point, but it dances around love. Even the greatest German poets of their time cannot express the multitude of loves he’s known since the moment she whispered his name.
And yet every term of endearment comes from that very word. Liebe.
In English he could express the happiness she gave him, how much he longed to see her, how dearly he held her in his heart.
But his love for Victoria felt so all-encompassing that no word, in English or German, could express it properly.
“I love you,” he says again, because he loves the way her eyes soften when he says it. He loves her.
“I love you,” she whispers back.