VELVETEEN vs. Hypothermia #2
“She’s not coming here to become the Snow Queen,” objected Jackie.
“She doesn’t have the right powers. She’s here to be an elf for Santa.
” And maybe Santa herself, in another hundred years or so, when the myth changed faces again and the gentle soul who currently held its mantle in his broad, generous hands was allowed the opportunity to rest. Or maybe she would be an addition to the myth, a permanent helper, as Krampus and Black Peter were, only kinder and less inclined to harm.
All of Winter was open to her…assuming she could make it to safety before she froze.
“The season chooses the trials,” said the Snow Queen.
There was no mercy in her tone. Maybe there never had been; maybe the times Jackie had imagined it there were just that, imaginary, the wistful dreams of a little girl who only ever wanted her mother to love her.
“You should never have become her friend, Jacqueline. I tried to warn you. You did not listen. Consider this, then, your punishment: because you could not keep your heart from thawing for this girl, you get to suffer as you watch her freeze.”
Jackie—who knew full well that her friendship had been the honey trap that lured Velveteen into trusting Christmas, and by extension, trusting all the holidays, and the seasons that housed them—said nothing.
She just turned her eyes to the mirror, and prayed silently to the Northern Lights that Velveteen would make it through the storm.
* * *
Walking was the only thing keeping Velveteen from freezing to death, and she wasn’t sure how much longer she’d be able to do it.
“This is fu-fu-fu—” she stammered, before giving it up as a waste of breath.
She was too cold to form a coherent sentence, and for the first time, dimly, she realized that she could very well die out here if she didn’t do something about it.
Part of her wanted to object to the idea; after all, the holidays had been trying to recruit her for years.
Surely they wouldn’t kill her now, not when she was finally within their grasp.
But the bulk of her knew better, knew that the Spirits of the Season might look human—might even have been human, once upon a time—but that they weren’t human anymore, not even Jackie, who came closer than any of her compatriots.
They were perfectly capable of leaving her to freeze to death, and while they might mourn, they wouldn’t be sorry.
Well. Jackie might be sorry. Jackie probably would be sorry, because she’d spent too much time with people who were still mostly human, and she’d caught compassion from them like it was some sort of disease.
Jackie would probably cry and hug the Princess and apologize to Velveteen’s corpse.
As Velveteen would still be dead, she really didn’t think this was much of a consolation.
Velveteen stopped walking, and started filling her arms with snow.
Growing up in California hadn’t really taught her much about dealing with winter weather, but being friends with Jackie Frost had meant more than her fair share of trips to Santa’s Village, where building snowmen was considered an excellent way to pass the time.
The snow there was warm, true, and she’d always had people to help her, but the principle seemed like it would remain the same.
Velveteen rolled, stacked, sculpted, and shoved at the snow until she had managed to construct the rough outline of a man.
He was on his back, not standing up like snowmen generally were, but she needed him to have arms and legs, and those were things that she wasn’t really equipped to construct on a free-standing snow homunculus.
His face was set in a permanent scowl. “Please work,” she whispered, and leaned down, and touched the snowman’s forehead with shaking, frozen fingers.
The snowman opened his eyes.
He stood up like an avalanche happening in reverse, shedding snow in all directions as his outline winnowed itself down to the hard, clean shape that she had intended.
Velveteen collapsed, and the snowman was there to catch her, sweeping her into his strong, frozen arms. He was cold.
Of course he was cold, snow is always cold. Velveteen didn’t care.
“Take me to where it’s warm, Frosty,” she slurred, pressing her face into the snow of his chest.
Her cheeks and lips were already numb. It wasn’t like he could do her any more harm.
The snowman nodded silently, and the last thing she knew before the cold claimed her was the sensation of being carried through the white and drifted snow, over the river, and through the woods.
* * *
Velveteen woke on the floor of an icy cavern, curled up next to a blazing fire.
Everything hurt. She sat up slowly, wiping the snowmelt from her eyes, and blinked at the flames, which were dancing in a fireplace made entirely of ice, but which showed no signs of melting.
The ice was filled with colors, blue and green and dancing gold, like someone had snatched the Northern Lights down from the sky and frozen them solid.
She stared at them for a moment, trying to figure out what they could mean, before she twisted and looked around herself.
The snowman—snow golem, really, considering how he’d been made—was standing against the cavern’s far wall, well out of reach of the fire’s warmth.
The fireplace was the only thing that looked manmade; everything else was blue glacial ice and hard gray stone, created by erosion and time, and not by any craftsman’s hand.
There was no furniture, and outside the cavern’s narrow entrance, she could see the blizzard raging on. She was trapped.
“Oh, isn’t this dandy,” muttered Velveteen, staggering shakily to her feet.
Her legs were still numb, but she could feel them, and they responded when she asked them to; there didn’t seem to have been any nerve damage.
“I get to skip freezing in favor of starving to death. Lucky fucking me. Why did I think Winter was the nice season again?”
The snowman didn’t answer her. He just kept watching her reproachfully, like it was somehow her fault that he was now trapped in pseudo-human form and standing within spitting distance of a fire, rather than enjoying a thoughtless existence as part of a snow bank.
Well, technically it was her fault, since she was the one who’d made him, but that didn’t make it appropriate for him to blame her.
It wasn’t like she’d volunteered to be dropped into the middle of a blizzard.
A blizzard… “Yo, Jackie!” Velveteen braced her hands on her hips and scowled up at the distant, frozen ceiling. “You’re magic mirroring me right now, aren’t you? I know you, you little voyeur. Tell your mom to stop trying to kill me! I didn’t sign up for this!”
“It’s rude to start an acquaintance with a correction, but actually, you did,” said a voice from the doorway.
Velveteen whipped around, nearly overbalancing on her frozen feet, and frowned at the young girl now standing there.
She was dark-haired and pale-skinned, dressed in a long white dress with a red sash that left her arms bare.
Her feet were bare as well; Velveteen could see the toes of one small foot poking out from under her hem.
There was a wreath of candles on her head, and she couldn’t have been more than twelve years old.
“You said you’d come to Winter. This is part of Winter.
The cold that seems like it won’t ever end, the freeze that has no thaw.
The Snow Queen may send the snow, but she’s only doing what the season demands of her. ”
“Who are you?” Velveteen demanded.
The girl smiled. “They call me Lucy, mostly. I’m a light in a dark place. That’s part of Winter, too. The candle that guides you home.”
“Home” was a word with a lot of meanings, and none of them really seemed to suit Velveteen.
Not here, not now, with the world freezing all around her, and her lover lying in a poisoned sleep in the Princess’s castle, and the people she’d loved moving on with their lives while she paid the price of taking favors from the seasons.
She shivered, drawing her arms tight around herself, and said, “Okay. Let’s go.
I could use some hot cocoa and a good, warm coat. ”
“It’s not that easy.” Lucy sounded sorry. That was something, anyway.
Velveteen snorted. “Of course it’s not that easy. It’s never that easy. Fine, they-call-me-Lucy, what do I have to do next? Build a team of snow huskies and use them to win the Iditarod?”
“Not quite.” Lucy reached up and removed a candle from her crown, holding it out in offering.
“You have to go deeper into the cold. You have to go to the heart of the season, and let it see you, and let it judge you worthy. If it decides you are, then your time here can begin. If it decides you’re not, then Winter will trouble you no more. ”
“As in ‘it lets me go,’ or as in ‘I freeze to death and it doesn’t matter anymore’?” Lucy didn’t answer.
Velveteen sighed. “Naturally. This is always how it goes, isn’t it? In for a penny, in for a pounding.” She walked across the cavern to take the candle Lucy was offering. “Can you at least tell me which way I have to go?”
“Let the lights guide you,” said Lucy, and stepped backward, into the snow. She was gone in an instant, wiped away like she had never been there at all.
“Oh, fuck this noise,” said Velveteen, fighting the strong and understandable urge to punch something.
Punching the snowman wouldn’t do her any good, and punching the walls would just damage her knuckles.
“Follow the lights, my ass—” She turned to go back to the fire, and stopped dead, cocking her head hard to the side as she attempted to process the change in the room.