Place.
s a n d e r C o h e n

He lives in a little corner far away from the business; a little cave full of pointless memoir.

There are regular discards, like books with no meaning and records with no melody. There are messages with no message and radios with lower frequencies than the one playing in his ear – buzzing along some kind of sickening heartfelt tune he can't tune out from. This memorabilia, he figures it's good to keep around so he knows what he's lost. But these trophies are long, long, long dead, wet with ocean water and iced soon thereafter.

His room looks like a palace.

One of those storybook palaces, the kind where everything glitters pleasure pretty; the place where everything sparkles that kind of unattainable color – so beautiful the crisp, crisp ice white. Even the frost in the air twinkles with reckless patterns, a kind of lazy circle that wraps around his neck twice and fails to kill him.

It is small, this palace, fit for its king who can no longer sit on the wooden chair with the same ease as, say, breathing. His legs are curled close to his body, his hands shielding his barefoot toes and that lonely, lonely, lonely frost leaving his lips.

But his fingers, now, they're hovering endlessly over his pretty box of pointless propaganda. He looks at a man labeled Altus through the striking poster with the same lethargic roll he casts at Andrew Ryan. His index finger and ring finger collide; sort of awkward with the way his hands are built, grasping firmly at a piece of paper stuck frozen in the ice. He tugs, and he tries hard to resist a high-pitched scream as his fingers slip, slip, slip away – back to hovering it is then.

Cohen really, really wants to leave.

He does, he swears this on his apprentices grave. The air here, it's different. It's safe – it's lonely. It's cold like an iceberg and he doesn't know how long he can keep rubbing his temples to keep this fuck - ing migraine down.

He swears he hears footsteps, but they're a sick illusion.

Because there is nobody here and he knows there hasn't been anybody for a long, long, long time.

He lives in a little corner far away from the business – a little hole in the ground fit for a king. The room filled with so many wonders of so many lifetimes, each more interesting than the next. And in this frost-bitten kingdom he waits for the ice to melt (and he's sure that one day God will love him enough to melt it), waits for the toys to unfreeze from their shelves. There are smiles to be had, masterpieces to create with these very same joys.

He basks in his treasure trove; his disgusting third-degree torment of a treasure trove—

But.

It is all his.