#i'm good

It’s not like we can dump the whole thing on her at once. We leave the courtyard, head into a den in the castle where we can sit down comfortably. The first thing we tell her is that she definitely doesn’t have to worry about the Queen anymore, and she’s confused, but she knows we would never lie to her about something that serious, so that actually does a lot in terms of taking the immediate stress of not recognizing her current surroundings off of her. Breaking the rest of the news, as in the whole ‘multiple centuries have passed’ bit is…it’s kind of like we have to give her big general pieces of it, and then let her put them together, but then we have to actually come out and say it, because this is a woman from a world that could be completely transformed by magic at any given time. This is a woman who technically was supposed to transform the whole of the world she knew with magic. At first she’s operating under the assumption that whatever magic put her under transformed the world, and that while it’s probably a really big spell, she probably still has to do a really big thing to undo it, but the more we talk, the more I talk, about how the world is now, the more this… blankness settles over her, which is weirdly appropriate for a girl who is uncannily, inhumanly pale.

 And then because she gets quiet the prince and I kind of freak out and we’re both talking more, trying to explain more, trying more and more to tell Snow that ‘It’s fine, it’s seriously fine, we’re fine, we’re so glad you’re back with us.’ This eventually veers into the Prince telling this really convoluted story about something that happened to him down in Faerie with his eyes fixed on a single castle flagstone while Snow is blue-screening into space and then at last Snow suddenly blurts out, “I’m sorry, would you excuse me a moment?” And she just briskly walks off in her big stiff samite skirts. I forgot she does that sometimes. That thing where she’s really polite but you don’t know what the hell she’s doing and then she just kind of does whatever she does and there’s no way in hell you’re going to stop her. And Florian and I just look at each other for like 30 seconds before we both put 2 and 2 together that 1, she looks agitated and 2, she doesn’t know where the bathroom is, before scrambling after her.

With my big-ass ears I’m able to hear where Snow is going in the castle and course-correct after her but Florian keeps fucking tripping over me on stairs or Akira-slide-slamming into me whenever we have to turn a corner in these goddamn narrow hallways chasing behind her, but soon we reach her on the upper floors of the castle. Snow throws open a door, stumbles out onto the castle ramparts, and now Florian and I are freaking out like ‘Girl please don’t be sprinting toward the roof,’  but she stops at the parapets. And Florian skids to a halt a few feet behind her and I skid to a halt behind him except I miscalculate and end up smacking my face into the back of his forearm as he moves to stop me.

 Snow braces her hands on a crenellation and screams.

It echoes across the stones of the castle and the valley beyond. It seems to fill the whole sky. A long, high, anguished, snarling, raking-up-500-years-of-fury-and-despair-at-her-own-helplessness scream.  I feel every fiber of my body vibrate with the force of it. It’s the same magic as her song and it’s terrifying, but there’s no purpose behind this, and ‘no purpose’ is the very source of this scream. And then she screams again. And again. And again. And in these screams there is intent, there is demand. There is the Queen’s heart roaring against its fate. This cannot be. The world had better fix itself, right now, or…

Or what?

And I see Snow’s shoulders slump with that question as her throat finally gives out on that last scream. The sky seems to drink up the screams' echoes, overcast clouds shifting in sympathy, but they cannot change what they are and what is.

The fae made her to defeat an evil queen and unite three kingdoms. They did not make her to undo time itself.

And Florian is still for this, still quietly catching his own breath before Snow buckles against the stone crenellation and sinks to the ground. That’s when Florian finally walks forward and takes a knee on the stone next to her. He pushes a little strand of black hair that’s fallen loose with all the running and screaming back from her face. She takes his wrist before he can withdraw his hand, and buries the side of her face into his palm like he did with hers when she first woke up. She’s not crying but this low whimper seems to be stuck between her throat and the dip of her collarbone.

“Snow,” he says.

“Mm,” her eyes are squeezed shut and she sounds a bit like a wounded animal. 

“You should… probably rest,” the Prince says.

“I’ve slept so much already, she muffles into his hand, her voice a raw whisper. She doesn’t have to say the second half of that thought though. But how am I so tired?

“I know,” he says softly, “I’ll be here to wake you up. I promise.”

Dude has one job but goddamn if he’s not gonna do it.

Snow sleeps for a few hours and the Prince keeps vigil in a chair next to her bed. I’m huddled on the floor in the hallway just outside, and all I can think about is how selfish I’ve been, how cruel it was of me to inflict this world upon her. I broke her prince. I broke my friend. I should have never thought I was anyone other than the guy that moves rocks. Despair and exhaustion bear down on me, and a part of me wants to sleep for 500 years, too. But then I feel a hand on my head, and I find myself looking up into a face rendered featureless by the shadows of a mossy cloak.

“You have been very brave for very long, little one,” a kind voice says, “Rest now.”

I give a glance to Snow and her prince in the room a few feet away from me. 

“You underestimate them,” the voice is still kind in this assessment, “They will live. They will need you, but they will live.” 

With that hand on my head, a vision suddenly shoots into my brain. Not a little sapling growing out of a great felled tree, but mushrooms breaking up through concrete, oceans crashing down on tide pools, and the sun baking them, and then little fish hatching from eggs and hermit crabs moving to new shells. And then I black out.

When Snow wakes up, Seachnasaigh is sitting at the foot of her bed, and says “It’s good to see you again, Dearest Princess.” 

Over the next few days, the rest of the guys trickle in to the castle. They give me some shit for waking up Snow without them, but that mostly falls to the wayside of the miracle that is Snow walking around, albeit clearly disoriented. The prince is also an interesting novelty as for them as well. There’s a lot of questioning about him and Snow, but Florian fields everything terrifyingly well. I have to wonder if he shows more vulnerability with me and the way he handles the other guys is him using everything he learned in Faerie.

 It’s a joyful reunion that, as it lingers, feels more and more like a funeral. There’s a lot of talking. And a lot of cooking. And a lot of crying. Sometimes in a group, sometimes it’s one of the guys shuffling off on his own because he needs his own space. It’s hard to describe. All those years, there was this unrelenting continuity to the world that we just… rolled with, and now Snow is here, and all of a sudden we’re reminded of all the versions of the world that have risen and died in all that time. But with 7 of us plus the Prince, it’s kind of like the weight of all those years is split between us, but also everyone gets to share something they’re excited about from all the years she’s missed. Pasha plays a whole medley of music from the past centuries on his rebab. Appius brings her a big stack of physical books, and an e-reader. Psellus tells her about big universities full of people debating literature and all that crap. Grom sits and nods patiently as Snow runs through manic rants at how everyone is way calmer than they should be in the face of everything going sideways since she bit that apple. Seachnasaigh gives Snow a one-man performance of Waiting for Godot that he can really only pull off because he’s a shapeshifter. Dok brings her a Nintendo 64. Snow kicks Florian’s ass in MarioKart. Repeatedly. She might be working through some stuff.

 We make plans. First it’s a few weeks of fudging up a modern identity and documentation for Snow so that she can move around like we had to do with the Prince, then one by one, the guys have to get back to their own respective lives. The modern world seems to slice its way into our isolated castle like shafts of sunlight. Eventually we have to return to my city, where I help Snow and the prince pack for their trip with not-insane modern people clothes and other essentials. 

Over the next few months, Snow and the Prince travel around the world, spending time with the guys, learning about their lives and how the world has changed. I’m anxious to let them go. I mean, I just got them back, and holy shit I actually like her stupid boyfriend now, but I realize I need to give Snow the space to see the world for herself—well, the world and the other guys. In that time, I have to make peace with the possibility that without the Queen breathing down her neck, she doesn’t really have to come back to us. I’m facing the same terrifying possibility her prince was grappling with before he woke her up. She might not need us. She might not want us. This whole trip can just be a sort of orientation for the world as it is, and she can do her own thing once it’s all over. An “I really hope that doesn’t happen” part of me acknowledges that maybe this is what happens when you bring someone into the world when they haven’t been in it for centuries. Maybe you have to make peace with the fact that even in bringing them back, you’ll lose them. So like, I try not to think about that, for the next few months. Besides, it wouldn’t be that bad, if they really want to just make their own lives together, it’ll hurt, but as long as they’re safe it’s one less thing to worry about—and me and the guys can keep them safe.

But then after a few months, guess who shows up on my doorstep?

Snow’s chopped her hair short, but it suits her, and the prince has discovered the magic of elastic hairbands to tie his hair back. They both look exhausted from their trip, so I open up the door and put the kettle on, and they’ve pretty much been here ever since.

The thing about living with one foot in two worlds is, I’ve had the time to set up a fairly comfortable living situation for myself. Obvious short joke incoming though, my loft apartment always felt a little too big for me. With Snow and the Prince though, it feels like the right size. It takes some adjustments at first, all things do, but me and those two eventually figure out our rhythm. Currently Snow runs these specialized storytimes at the local library, she tells a lot of the stories that me and the guys would swap with her, and a lot of the rest of her time is devoted to study on the 500 years of biology she missed, and also giving input on folk botanical remedies for different ailments to professors at the university. She’s working toward a proper degree so that her input is taken much more seriously on a broader scale, but that also inspires her to tinker on her own, so she kind of has to adjust with the whole “Hey Snow, something you made in your living room at 4 AM is not what we would call ‘peer reviewed.’” But she likes a challenge. It’s something to chew on. Something to work toward.

 The prince has kind of become this jack-of-all-trades errand boy around the city. He can’t seem to sit still. Any hour of the day I call him up he’s always up to some shit, not in a bad way, just in a “Dude, how,” way. But it’s kind of impressive. We’re at the point where we can barely walk down the street without someone he’s helped calling him out and saying, “He found my cat” or “He carried my groceries” or “He pulled me out of traffic and sat with me while we waited for an ambulance.”

I was so worried there wouldn’t be a place for them in this world, but it turns out this world still needs them. Like, badly. Maybe that’s how it is for everyone. God, I hope that’s how it is for everyone. Magic used to eddy and pool and Fae used to bestow gifts and move kings around like chess pieces, but maybe that’s not how our power works anymore—maybe it’s all broken up across lots of people, across a mycelium that can fruit into mushrooms that can break up through concrete at any given time, and all it takes is one person deciding to do a kind thing that sets off a chain reaction. Maybe all it takes is enough people willing to put their energy in the right place.

I wake up some nights and pad into the living room. Snow’s still awake, lounging on the couch, pale face tinged bluish in the light of her e-reader. It used to freak me out, the e-reader, even after all this time, I guess it puts me on edge to see the vessel of the Queen’s heart interacting with a plane of glass, but like… 90% of the stuff she’s reading is like… mushrooms. Or ethnobotany. Or a biography of Alexander Von Humboldt. She’s weird about sleep. There’s a lot of this world she wants to catch up on, anyway. The prince is sleeping crumpled in her lap, and she mindlessly traces her fingers through his shaggy dishwater waves between page turns.

 When you’re immortal, you have to be very careful about what versions of a person you’re going to remember, but I seared this image of her into my mind. No matter what happens, this is a version of her I have to remember, because this is a version of her I’m responsible for. I helped wake her up and bring her into this world, and whatever happens here on out is on me.

I know what you’re thinking—How can this be a happy ending? How can Snow exist in this world, see it for all its horribleness and cruelty, and this is her happy ending? I mean the short answer is, it isn’t an ending for her. She blinked and all of a sudden the world unfolded into something far bigger than she ever imagined, and she’s someone with magic stitched into her very being. I think she’s still going to try to save the world, but now she gets to pick what that looks like. 

I said me and the guys were like tide pools before, but also here’s the thing about tide pools: The creatures that live in them are designed to survive being smacked against rocks and crushed under water over and over and over again, but they also have to survive low tide—they have to survive with changing salinity and the beating sun and swooping seabirds and all this stuff. But they’re also nurseries. Hell, pools of super-gross lipid-y water left behind on a rock and heated by the sun were probably where multicellular life first emerged. We survive and we protect, but that’s also because we have to be these places where it’s safe to grow. Maybe Snow will do some crazy world-saving shit in the future, or maybe she’ll just save the world through the kindness she puts out into it, whatever she wants to do, I’m going to have her back for it. I am her tide pool, and I will take every wave this world crashes down on me to see her through to the end.

Maybe you’re just going to have to live with the fact that this is my happy ending, and I’m never going to stop working to make sure it’s Snow’s happy ending, too.