Your Local Agent

Day 1

At this point she is perfectly used to things going awry. To the Winx girls making a mess of her plans. But it is no less annoying this time around than it had been any other time. In fact, she would wager that each stolen victory is more aggravating than the one before it.

Sometimes she swears that the universe itself is working against she and her sisters. Conspiring to take them down; those silly faeries always have help from the outside whether they ask for it or not. The universe seems to hand them each and every tool that they need. And Icy is growing tired of it!

And her sisters…she swears that they are losing competence with each skirmish. “Would you pay attention Stormy!” She snaps, having watched the woman get fooled by one of Mirta’s illusions a second time. “And to you, Mirta, everything about you is annoying me right now! Your stupid tricks, your good attitude, and your little t-shirt.”

The little wannabe witch seems to curl in on herself. Shrinking before her eyes. Icy wishes that she would shrink until she disappears completely. “Pumpkin?” She pauses. “You like pumpkins so much, maybe you'd like to be one!” The magic crackles on her fingers. Fueled by a frigid hatred, this spell is going to be particularly brutal.

She should have known that, like most things these days, that it wouldn’t go her way. 

“Leave her alone!” Bloom shouts as the spell leaves Icy’s grasp. 

“Too late, fairy.” She sneers.

She finds that her mood is steadily getting better. Perhaps they won’t get the dragon fire this time, but she will have vengeance and entertainment. “Why do you two look so horrified?” She asks of Darcy and Stormy. They better not be going soft on her. They don’t actually pity Mirta, do they?

They don’t pity Mirta, she understands at the last moment. They pity her.

She has only a brief second to comprehend this and just as soon as she does, her own spell engulfs her. 

It wraps her up, envelopes the entirety of her body. And by the time the golden sparkles of her curse dissipate she doesn’t have a body at all. Not in the sense that she once had.

“Well that clearly didn’t go as planned.” She hears Stella’s light and lilting voice and that insufferable giggle. “What a shame.” She ends with a dramatic, taunting sigh. 

This is the exact sort of humiliation that will be particularly grueling to shake off. Of course she might not have to worry about that at all if she is going to live out the rest of her life as a pumpkin, the victim of her own spell. 

Day 2

It is humorous at first.

Stormy has an absolute riot; Darcy hadn’t realized that there were so many pumpkin puns.

But then a week's worth of spellwork goes by and they still don’t have their sister back. 

Stormy’s jokes start to taper off. Darcy had stopped laughing at them on day three. She is certain that Stormy only kept it up to lighten the mood. Stormy never has been particularly good at dealing with the serious stuff. 

In her defense, it is quite hard to take a pumpkin transformation seriously. 

But Icy’s leaves are starting to brown and it becomes apparent that this goofy little trick is more sinister than they had assumed. Darcy’s stomach flutters—she hadn’t taken her sister for a murderer. A bully and a bitch for sure, but a murder? 

They are quite dreadful and they revel in that but they aren’t outright evil, are they? 

They aren’t killers.

“You didn’t know about that, did you, Icy?” She asks. Not that she will get an answer. Sometimes she feels as though she is talking just to talk, Icy hasn’t really given any indication that she could hear the outside world. But it does seem appropriate to talk to her just in case. “I’m not much use.” She murmurs. “I don’t have the kind of magic that it takes to fix this.” She can’t name a single witch that does. “And I don’t trust Stormy to try.”

“Hey!” The witch calls from her own bed. 

“Full offense, Stormy, but you’d probably blast her to bits if you tried.”

Maybe she is imagining it, but Darcy swears that she feels the slightest bristle, a light rustle of leaves. 

“I’m helping in my own way.” Stormy insists. “I always turn the radio on before we leave the dorm so that she can at least suffer with good music.” 

“Your taste in music is questionable.”

“Your taste in clothing is questionable.”

“Stormy, we have the same fashion taste…mostly.” Darcy likes to think that their banter helps. That it might add a sense of normalcy in a bizarre situation. Sometimes she still expects to hear Icy yelling at them to knock it off. And every time that the scolding fails to come, she feels a prickle of loss.

“Speaking of questionable…” Darcy begins. “Maybe we should…get help with this.” 

“From Griffin?”

“From the Winx.” Darcy lets the suggestion hang there for a moment. “They have the right type of magic for this. We might have to swallow our pride.”

“That’s completely humiliating!”

“Icy is already a pumpkin. And it’s her own fault. Might as well keep the embarrassment going. She’ll die if we don’t.”

“She’d rather.” Stormy grumbles. 

“Well I’d rather she didn’t.” 

Day 3

She hates Darcy for this and she hates the Winx girls for actually agreeing to help her.

They weren’t supposed to agree to help.

 She thinks that she really would rather let herself rot away than to suffer any of the Winx girls trying to reach out to her. Even if this does work, even if they do manage to reach her, she isn’t sure that she would like to look any of them in the eye afterward. She doesn’t want to face Darcy or Stormy either, she can’t imagine them ever letting this one go. 

All of Cloud Tower is going to have something to say about this one.

About the witch who cursed and made a fool of herself. 

She’s going to be a nobody again.

Worse than that, probably.

Day 4

Day four.

At least that’s what they tell her it is, she’s hasn’t been keeping track. But she supposes that she should. 

It is perfectly morbid and perfectly suitable for a witch to count down the days to her own death. Of course hers won’t come with the sleek and dark elegance of a deep blue coffin with silvery snowflake embellishments and bouquets of black roses and tacca chantrieri. None of the bleakly beautiful ambiance of the funeral rites. 

It would look just silly to put a rotting, molding pumpkin in a coffin. And a waste of time to put that pumpkin in the ground, even if it used to be a witch. 

Day 5

Flora is an unwelcome guest in this world that lays somewhere between the physical world and the world within her own mind. It is a strange place to be really; neither in the physical world nor the psychic world. Neither grounded nor transcended but suspended in some new type of in between. A meta-physical world that has no right to exist and no way of being truly comprehended. 

Flora holds out her hand just as she had yesterday. 

Icy refuses to take it just as she had yesterday.

“Please, Icy. If you want to be a witch again then you’re going to have to work with me.”

She would rather be a pumpkin.

Day 6

“Why are you being so stubborn!?” She has never seen Flora so flustered and frustrated and she takes a sense of pride in having been the one to achieve getting her there. “I’m trying to help you, you know?”

Icy laughs.

It is good to know that she can still bother a fairy even when she is at her lowest point. 

The look on Flora’s face…priceless. 

She forces another laugh. 

She has to. It makes her feel like herself. One of the only things that does. 

It is hollow. 

She is hollow. 

She probably always has been.

Day 7

She wonders what the lifespan of a pumpkin is. 

Day 8

“They miss you, Icy.” 

For some reason this makes her feel unpleasantly fluttery. It makes her feel the way that she used to feel when she was younger. When her hair was shorter and her face was free of makeup. When she still had round baby-cheeks and wide eyes. 

Anxious.

It has been so long since she’d been anxious that she’d forgotten what it feels like. 

She has worked hard to bury that part of herself and she intends to keep it buried.

“Darcy and Stormy need you. They won’t admit it but I can tell. All of us can.” Flora continues. “They want you to come back. Don’t you want to go back?”

She keeps her back to the fairy but she thinks that she might have let a slight nod slip.

Yes. She does want to go back. She does but, at the same time, she dreads what going back will look like for her. What it will be like. 

Day 12

Apparently there are blank spaces in her mind. Things that she, for the life of her, can’t recall. A handful of days that Flora remembers, but she cannot. Things and blank spaces that explain why Flora had gotten so frustrated so quickly.

 It comes with a potent sense of dread, this notion that she is losing parts of herself.

For how long will she be Icy?

When will Icy disappear and become just another pumpkin to carve.

Hopefully long before the rot begins.

Day 13

She misses the outside world. She misses the feeling of ice magic working through her veins. She misses the way her mattress feels after a long day. She misses the chatter and chaos of the lunch room. She misses food—ice cream melting on her tongue, a burst of mint and chocolate chip, she misses pretending that she hadn’t asked for sprinkles and that “they never get my damn order right”. She might just openly order her ice cream with sprinkles—the rainbow ones too—if she makes it out of this.

She even misses Magix history class and the shitload of homework that the professor always gives to the class.

She misses talking to Darcy and Stormy. 

Misses hearing their ridiculous banter and how it would keep her up at night and leave her feeling cranky and tired in the morning. What was the last thing that they had bickered over? Before she’d become a pumpkin they had been debating over whether or not Melouise and the Meloncholy Moon is a goth band or not. Apparently, they have been putting out some pretty fairy-esque lyrics lately. 

Post-pumpkin, she recalls them fighting about which songs to play for her while they went to class.  Flora says that they had been arguing during one of those days that she can’t remember. Flora insists that she had told her to get them to shut up because they had been annoying her. 

Now she can’t hear them at all. 

Now she would give anything to let them completely aggravate her. 

Day 15

She has thought about what Flora had said. About Darcy and Stormy missing her. She can’t imagine that they are doing too well without her guidance. And what kind of sister and leader would she be if she left them to fend for themselves. 

“Good morning, Icy.”

It very much is not. 

And morning means nothing to her anymore here in this space where the sun doesn’t exist and day and night are the same damn thing. There is color in this world; it is mostly an inky blue with swirls of glimmering white, silver, and baby blues.

“Will you work with me this time?” 

Icy opens her mouth to reply but she finds that she can’t remember how to move her lips, where to rest her tongue, how to shape her mouth to produce the right sounds. Had she a physical throat, she would swallow hard. Had she a physical stomach, it would sink. 

She hadn’t even considered that refusing to speak to the fairy would leave room for the ability to talk to slip away. 

With ample dread, Icy resigns herself to the knowledge that she can’t remember how to talk. She practically doesn’t remember what words are. 

And maybe that sense of terror appears on her face because Flora drifts closer to her. And this time she doesn’t push the fairy away. 

“Look at me, Icy.” 

She does. 

Spectral Flora places her hands on Icy’s spectral form. 

“Watch my lips move.”

She wastes a whole day reminding Icy of how to speak.

Day 16

“Am I dying?” It is the first thing that she asks upon finding her voice again and she isn’t certain that she is using the right words. Little by little she is losing fragments of her humanity. There are many words that she cannot remember; words that stubbornly cling to the tip of her tongue until they fade entirely. “I think that I can feel myself withering.”

Flora shakes her head. “You’re fine, still a bright orange…”

Icy would not call that fine by any means. She has been described in many ways; evil, cruel, frigid, bitch, horrible, a nightmare, and even on occasion, ugly and unfashionable. Orange is not on that list and she thinks that she’d rather get called unsightly than orange.

“And your leaves are really bright!” Flora finishes. “Anyways, sweetie…”

And she would rather get called ‘orange’ than ‘sweetie’, ‘sweetheart’, ‘cutie’, or any variety of those appalling things. If she had hands she would use them for slapping. But she has leaves and vines and she has no idea how to move those. 

“...pumpkins can live for eight to twelve weeks.”

And a witch can live for over one hundred.

“So, at worst, you have fifty-six days to live.” 

She is on her sixteenth day as a pumpkin. So she has less than even that. 

Day 17

She is losing her memories too. 

The ones that she has had the longest. 

Even the ones that she treasures the most. 

Broom & Doom Fest, 1997; it is printed on banners at the ticket booth and on the map in her hand. The map that she flips over to find today’s lineup.

She has circled the bands that she most wants to see. She has done so for all three of the days.

There is a certain energy, frantic and charged. 

As soon as the gates open everyone is hauling ass, straight to the acts that they want to see the most.

 It is already pleanty loud, and as the day goes on, it grows louder still, invigoratingly so. She and Darcy  keep towards the back of the crowd. Stormy is somewhere in the throes of it, lost in the pit and probably going feral…absolutely batshit insane to the beat of the song. 

That was never Icy’s scene. 

It was never Darcy’s either. 

Music is best enjoyed without fretting over whether or not her nose will bloodied by the end of the show. Music is best enjoyed when she can close her eyes and feel the vibrations of the guitars and drums in her chest as they burst from speakers taller than small houses. 

The world smells of leather and cigarettes and Darcy’s breath smells of booze. Icy isn’t exactly sober herself. Probably the both of them will find themselves passed out in the field by the end of the festival. And she wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Today has been a good one.

The three of them are about to start their first year at Cloud Tower.

Their first year as witches.

And what a better way to establish oneself as a witch than to listen to ‘Hanna Howler’ and ‘The Primordial Hex Band’. 

Darcy had been wearing that perfume that smelled like blackberries and a crown of bare branches and spiderwebs. Stormy had laced up her combat boots and jammed screws, bolts, and dull nails into her hair. Icy still wore spiked collars then and that silly snowflake charm bracelet. She still spiked the front of her hair too and tipped those spikes with icicles. 

The day had begun with singing along to one of Darcy’s favorite albums, like idiots, as they drove to the festival grounds.

The day ended with black lipstick stains all over her neck, chest, and belly. She can’t put a name to a single man or woman that kissed her that night. She wouldn’t want to. It would ruin the magic of it. The nostalgia. 

The night ended with she, Darcy, and Stormy on the ground, cackling at jokes that were only funny because of the alcohol, and counting strobe light flashes. 

Nobody would have known that they’d only just met each other the night before. 

That, that night had happened on a whim.

She will let every other memory fade before she lets that one go.

She will forget her name before she forgets the look on Darcy and Stormy’s faces.

Day 18

She doesn’t mind sharing that memory when Flora proposes that sharing profound memories might help  her reconnect to her humanity.

“That sounds like it was an amazing time.” Flora comments. “I think that maybe you aren’t as evil as you seem.”

“How do you figure that?”

Flora shrugs. “You seem to get close to people really quickly. I assumed that the three of you knew each other for…your whole lives.” She pauses. “You care about them a lot, don’t you.”

“Not really.” She shrugs. 

Flora laughs.

Until then, she hadn’t realized that she was such a terrible liar.

Day 19

Icy has started using Flora’s face as a gauge for how bleak and deeply hopeless her situation is. Today there are unshed tears in her eyes. They come after she finishes her story. She know, even before Flora tells her so, that she has missed a few details. 

“The festival was called Broom & Doom Fest. The year, 1997.” Flora informs her. 

Icy rubs her spectral hands over her face. 

She would never forget that.

She can’t possibly be forgetting it. 

But she is.

Along with what accessories she and Darcy were wearing and the name of her favorite song.

Day 20

She recalls less this time around. 

She can’t remember how the night had ended. 

She had forgotten that there were two other days of the festival.

Day 21

Icy isn’t one for tears. 

But Icy cries. 

She mourns the person that she is losing. Mourns the memory that she has lost. She doesn’t even know what it was, just that she had cherished it. Cherished it more than any other. 

And if she can forget that then what hope does she have of remembering anything else? The smaller delights. What if she forgets Darcy and Stormy entirely?

Somehow that bothers her more than the prospect of forgetting Icy…herself.

Day 22

She can feel herself shriveling, her leaves browning, parts of her pumpkin body sagging and she thinks that she doesn’t have much time.

It is only day twenty-two, Flora tells her. She might not even live for fifty-six days. 

Even if she does, she doesn’t know how much of her will be left when she makes it back to her physical form. 

Would she really be alive if she returned without her memories? Without all of the bits that made her Icy?

Day 26

Day twenty-three is her most desperate day yet. Icy, Darcy, and Stormy. She repeates their names over and over again for fear that she will lose them if she doesn’t. They are the Trix. They are witches. Over and over again she reminds herself of this. 

She repeats this until the names mean nothing. 

Nothing accept that they had once been important to her. 

She asks the other person her name.

“I’m Flora.” She says. “Fairy of nature.” 

The way she says it leads her to believe that she has asked this before. 

“And your name is Icy. You are the witch of ice.” 

Oh yes, they have definitely been through this song and dance before. 

Icy is crying again. 

Icy lets the fairy hold her. 

Day 27

It leaves Icy shuddering.

Shuddering and thankful that she doesn’t have cheeks that can grow warm and flushed. 

But there is some relief to be had in her renewed sense of shame. 

In the past few minutes…hours? Days? In the past few how-ever-long-it-has-beens Icy has relived her very best days and the days that she had yearned to forget. It is all so fresh in her mind now; her most prideful moments. And the ones that make her feel small and weak. 

And the fairy has, in some sense, lived them too. 

She knows now.

She knows who Icy used to be. 

What she used to be. 

She knows that Icy had been more of a fairy than a witch. Knows that she used to keep to her own little corner of any given classroom in her old high school. Knows that she had been timid and shy. Easy to victimize. 

And Flora knows that she was victimized. Scrutinized and picked apart until she hated everything that she was. Until she believed them when they said that she was an embarrassment. An embarrassment whose powers are weak and useless. 

Until she saw fit to change herself more or less completely. 

And now she is Icy.

She was Icy.

She is a pumpkin now. 

She is once again perfectly content to keep it that way.

Day 28

She has seen sides of the witch that she hadn’t imagined seeing. She feels almost guilty for it. Icy had given her permission to look into her soul, but Flora still feels like an invader of sorts. She can’t imagine Icy giving her that sort of permission on a normal day, under any other circumstance. She knows that she is just trying to help but she still can’t shake the feeling that she is taking advantage of the woman’s vulnerability. 

“Do you mind if I give you a memory?” Flora asks. “You’ve shared a lot of secrets with me.” All of them maybe. Possibly things and memories that she hasn’t even shared with Darcy and Stormy. “So I thought that it would be good to share one with you.”

Day 31

Icy hasn’t said a word to her. Not since she’d seen those memories play out.

“I won’t tell anyone. If that’s what you’re worried about.” 

She shouldn’t be surprised that Icy is so good at giving people a cold shoulder. 

“I don’t look at you any differently.” 

At this Icy sniffs, a haughty, disbelieving sort of sniff. Her skepticism is completely warranted. “Yeah, I guess that it would be hard not to see someone differently after seeing their whole life play out.” Flora admits. “I don’t think that you’re weak, Icy.” She stoops down next to the witch. “Trust me, I’ve been working on lifting this curse for a month now. You could probably hex that Snowbell girl into oblivion.”

“She’d deserve it.”

Flora chuckles. 

Icy finally turns to her. “You think that that’s funny?”

Flora nods. “A little.”

“I didn’t realize that you had a sense of humor. Did you take a part of me back with you?”

Flora holds out her hand. “I’m hoping to take all of you back with me.”

Reluctantly Icy takes the fairy’s hand.

Day 32

She feels huge…no that’s not quite right. 

Long. 

That is more like what she feels. 

Long and weighted but not particularly heavy. And there is a tingle and twitch for every inch of her body.

Although she would very much like to be awake, she can’t seem to pry her eyes open.

Day 33

For some reason she had been expecting daylight upon awakening. But she certainly isn’t complaining, she enjoys the night more anyhow, and it is much less overwhelming. There are less sounds to bombard her and sight is muted. 

Icy winces, she is so stiff. 

It is quite a struggle to sit up. 

When she finally manages, her hair spills over her shoulders. 

It is so much longer than she remembers and she recalls it being absurdly long.

It is only when she brings her hands to her eyes and rubs them that full alertness settles in. She has hands. Hands with fingers that she can flex. And for the longest time she can only bring herself to stare. 

Stare until her fatigued body flops back onto the mattress. 

Day 35

She had forgotten how annoying it is to have a physical body. 

And how agitating it is to have that physical body squeezed. 

Squeezed by two witches who are extremely adamant that they didn’t miss her that much because that would be totally lame.

Icy thinks that her lameness tolerance threshold has increased drastically. Probably because she had set the bar so damn high. Turning oneself into a pumpkin is the pinnacle of lame and pathetic. Anything that falls short of that is tolerably lame.

“Welcome back, Icy.” Flora greets. 

“It’s dreadful to be back.”

Flora laughs. 

That’s right, the fairy is well aware that she is a terrible liar. 

While it may not be dreadful to be back, it is terribly intimidating. She won’t admit it to anyone but herself, but she isn’t certain that she is ready to go back to Cloud Tower. She isn’t sure that she can go back at all. “How bad is it?” 

“How much are the other witches laughing at you?” Stormy asks. 

Icy nods. 

“A lot.” Darcy replies bluntly.

“Great.” Icy grumbles. “Just perfect.”

“You can stay here with us.” Flora suggests. “Mirta did.”

“Not a chance, fairy.” She has dealt with a lot and she will deal with this. “What kind of witch would I be if I let all of those losers run me out of there?”

“All of the witches at Cloud Tower are losers?” Flora quirks a brow.

“All of them but myself, Darcy, and Stormy, yes.”

She can tell that Flora is trying to hide her amusement. Icy is still not entirely sure that Flora hasn’t taken a touch of her personality. And she isn’t sure that she hadn’t taken a little piece of Flora.

She can’t see any other reason as to why she feels slightly compelled to take Flora up on her offer to remain at Alfea. 

It sure would cause quite a scene if she chose to attend both schools. 

She has already caused a stir.

Maybe she will just keep that ball rolling.

She enjoys shaking things up anyhow. 

“I’m not going to regret turning you back into a witch, am I?”

Icy shrugs. “I guess that you’ll have to wait and see, Flora.”