Sunday's Melancholy, 12:30
Manchester City, England
Tammy's World, 1.3
She hadn't been able to suppress a shock of fear when Tam went head-first off the roof. Elsa was nothing if not a reasonable person—
or so she told herself, she told herself, thereby reminding herself once again not to take that for granted—but it was one thing to know, rationally, that your best friend couldn't possibly be hurt by something as mundane as falling several metres down to concrete, and it was another thing entirely to
believe that.
Enough so that she'd reached out to grab her, and as a result had lost her own balance. She wind-milled frantically but, alas, the cruel grip of gravity had her in its… grip.
Bang.
"Ouch—"
What the hell, neighbours. Don't leave nails sticking up.
She grumbled something inaudible, but which in her mind was a curse word. Not a specific one. She'd put her palm down on an exposed nail, and while it hadn't penetrated her skin—of course not—it
had ruined the elegance of her landing.
Tam would be fine. As she silently slid down to land behind the siblings, she thought Tammy's brother might not be. The way he was trembling, she felt her heart breaking a little just at the sight, and she was just about to say something when Tammy uncurled and sat up.
"
Ouch. That
hurt! Hey, Elsa! I thought you say it wouldn't hurt!"
Tammy looked so affronted—covered with concrete dust, her hair a mess—that Elsa couldn't help but chuckle a little. She looked like she'd fought a construction site, and lost, which made only a small difference from her usual leaf-grass-and-dirt-covered state.
"I said you wouldn't get hurt," she corrected. "There's a difference, especially since you insisted on breaking the road with your head. And you're not, are you?"
Tammy "hmm"'d, patting the back of her head. Slowly her face broke into a grin. "Yeah, I guess you're right. That was scary. Let's do it again!"
Elsa, who'd really rather not, largely stayed out of the ensuing sibling squabble. She reminisced, while Tammy told Jon everything that had happened. Their conversation had been a long time in coming.
— — —
In a weekend of her twelfth summer, while searching the hills for flowers to press, she'd come across an upside-down girl with a big grin and a bird's nest of twigs in her hair.
Elsa was, she'd been told, a girl with a future. She'd tried to live up to that, and her parents had aided and abetted her scattering of effort across a dozen different fields—save for the Incident with the Mascara, and her ill-advised attempt at learning how to pick up girls (because, she told mom, girls weren't icky)—the latter of which had earned the poor boy who'd taught her the undying enmity of a grandson-desiring mother.
That summer she was learning horticulture. Her father, a professor at the local university, had found her a student who'd teach her the basics in exchange for more lenient deadlines, and she'd set out into the local hills with a backpack full of specimen jars and reference books.
It was her first meeting with Tammy, a meeting which she'd later decide had been
terrifyingly representative. In school, she was nobody; a mousy girl, looking two years her junior, who spent her time ignoring the textbook and who ran away the very instant the bells rang. A classmate whose existence Elsa had thus far ignored, who had nothing to do with her cliques. In a forest…
Tammy held little care for the breeding of flowers, but a great number of tips for where to find them. She'd run where Elsa would walk, crawled where she couldn't go at all, and had generally showed little concern for the utter mess she was making of herself, but she'd been full of life and had an irrepressible energy, and before she could think better of it they were trying to outdo each other. Tammy always won those little contests, but then, in the blink of an eye, the day was over and she realised they were friends.
Her mother had tutted and frowned, explaining that her dress was beyond repair, but she'd smiled when Elsa described how it happened. The rest of the summer was spent together, Elsa for once choosing shorts, and it was easily the best summer of her life. She'd thought she had it all figured out. They were going to the same middle school, where she would draw Tam out of her shell like Tam had drawn her up trees.
Suzy had changed all of that. Her—persona, but at the time she hadn't found a suitable name. She'd been the first person in school to have one, the first person
anywhere as far as she knew, and she'd been scared out of her wits.
Suzy had hatched in her bedroom, only minutes after she first saw her egg.
(She remembered the scene from both sides. They'd both been scared, neither had known what was happening, but Suzy at least had some rough intuitions.)
It had broken all the rules.
Magic wasn't real, that was something her parents were clear on, and Suzy was magic. Inherently, obviously, from her size, her flight, her claims and her appearance, evidently magic. She couldn't accept it, so she'd run, leaving worried parents behind to curl up in one of their secret spots.
(She'd felt each word as a blow. Not the fear, but the denial; the claim that she couldn't exist, that reality didn't work that way. Each one had struck to the core of her nascent, terribly fragile self.)
Suzy had easily followed her there, but instead of something terrible happening—as she'd half-expected, having grown up on a diet of slightly-inappropriate fiction—she had watched a frightened, half-transparent fairy girl look at her with worried eyes from outside the leaves.
(She'd been half-mad with terror, fading from existence and scarcely comprehending why, unable to ask anyone but Elsa for help and unable to make herself seen.)
Something terrible
had almost happened—
Tammy had found her an hour later, and only after they'd talked. She'd almost killed her; her sister, her future, her self. Suzy had explained everything. That she was literally Elsa's future, her would-be self; Elsa, the way Elsa had always wanted to be. That she would disappear if Elsa couldn't accept her, and—though she didn't say this, would never have said this—that she had almost done something that could not be undone.
Tammy hadn't been able to see her, and Elsa had cried, half-convinced she was crazy, but she could see the strange costume that Suzy could give her. Which settled that, as far as Tam was concerned. Her friend had been far more put out that
she was the one to become a magical girl, and not her, but only jokingly—the next few days had been spent on a frantic search for supporting materials, all of which agreed that she'd probably have to fight monsters, so they'd both been relieved when no such monsters appeared.
She hadn't changed much, but she'd changed some.
Perhaps most dramatically, the future her parents had claimed to see was now right there, and she wasn't…
quite… what anyone would have expected. Not even Elsa.
They were an odd couple, the two of them. Elsa understood that better than anyone else, but despite that—or because of that—they'd become inseparable best friends. Tam would be helpless without her, and she would be terribly bored without Tam.
— — —
"—I was wearing a skirt when I went out," Tammy said.
"Right." Jon shook his head. "Can't I talk to them, though? Even by proxy?"
"Um..." Tammy looked skittish.
Elsa broke out of her memories, noting a lull in the conversation. What had they been saying? …Ah.
"Allow me," she said. "I believe Tam mentioned that transformations require the persona to temporarily be absorbed. That is true, as far as it goes, but they aren't comatose for the period. Or perhaps I should say, we aren't…"
She smiled, then launched into a long explanation of the concept. Tammy frankly looked ridiculous, her clothing dusty and rumpled, but if she wanted to tell her brother
right now then Elsa would do her best to support her.
— — —
And then—
— — —
Everything hurt. What had happened? Where was she? She saw nothing but grey, and no matter how she blinked—
Blinking hurt. Her eyes hurt, her
teeth hurt, her toes had stopped hurting seconds ago and that scared her more than anything else. The world had gone away in an instant, leaving her in this nothingness, with probably a very short amount of time to get out.
She tried to move an arm, thinking perhaps she'd fallen in acid. It—dissolved—a ragged burst of pain tearing through her and leaving nothing behind.
Don't panic. Panic never helps.
But she couldn't feel her left arm at all anymore, and her right was searingly painful.
Driven by desperation she did the only thing she could think of, the only thing that
might help, taking hold of her will and magic and pushing
. Suzy's attack, scarlet ribbons that wrapped around anything they touched; with a bit of extra focus they wrapped around her. The outline of her body felt wrong, there were dips in all the wrong places, her feet were barely stubs and her arm was
gone, but—
relief—it worked, the pain fading to a dull throbbing in her everything.
Her heart was beating at two hundred at least. That had been far, far too close, and she was scarcely out of the woods. Actually, she was probably dying. She knew enough anatomy to know that you couldn't survive wounds like this, not without
immediate attention, and was she bleeding? Of course she was bleeding, probably, but was that even a thing she could do while transformed?
She'd never had a chance to find out—
The liquid surrounding her, if that's what it was, was even burning through her ribbons. Slowly, but while she could keep renewing them it was a constant effort of will to do so and hold them in place. On the flip side, she would definitely suffocate before growing tired. She didn't even know which way was up. She might be sinking, and she'd never know. Damn it, damn it, damn it, she was going to die after all…
She kept up that chant for a while, until it dawned on her that she wasn't, in fact, suffocating, and over the next few minutes she realised she wouldn't
immediately die. If she was bleeding, then the ribbons were holding it in. She most certainly wasn't going to check. She didn't need to breathe, which was useful, and she'd wrapped herself up against the environment.
She moved a finger, just a bit. It didn't hurt, but the acid nearly burnt through her covering just from that tiny movement.
That wasn't good enough, she'd exhaust herself before moving a metre, but she was clearly on to something here.
Focus, Elsa. The ribbons were a representation of her will, her soul overruling reality. Mind over matter. If that's how it was, then… this would be dangerous, since she'd have to split her attention, but if she… just… pushed…
Reality tore in half around her, and she fell, landing in a pained heap on the planks of the bench she'd been sitting on. Pained or not, her heart leapt. That had been hard—maybe the hardest thing she'd done in her life—but it had worked better than she could ever have imagined. She was back! Back in the normal world, where… she could…
Dull red light surrounded her, a twilight that should have cast deep shadows but didn't.
There was no sun to be seen.
Everything was reddish grey, even her clothes. She couldn't tell whether that was a true colour change, or simply a trick of the lighting.
In every direction she looked, the world ended in a red-and-black mottled wall. That was, except for where Tam should have been sitting, where the bench stretched into a prismatic tunnel that hurt her eyes to look at, but which seemed to pass beyond the wall without actually passing it.
The world was a sphere less than three metres across.
She had pushed outwards, willing reality to conform and defend her, and it had put her right back where she'd been. Except, now she was alone, and—it didn't hurt the way it should have, but, but—she frantically patted her left side. There was nothing left of that arm but a stub, which looked and felt like it had been put through a blowtorch.
Her feet—
She had never, ever, in her life, felt as happy as she did when she found she could wiggle her toes, and that they didn't hurt when she ran a—when she ran her hand over them.
She was barefoot, which seemed like the least of her problems right now. She was sore everywhere, but the only real injury seemed to be her missing arm. Whatever had happened, it had left her with that much. What
had happened? The situation reminded her, more than anything, of
The Langoliers—
Bad thought, bad thought.
An experimental step forwards showed that the bubble remained centred on her, and moving it didn't feel much harder than pushing through water. Potentially lethal water, to be sure, but she could keep this up for a while, and the world obediently phased into existence in front of her. She knew this neighbourhood. She could go home, or to school, or…
She wanted to curl up and cry, waiting on the bench for a rescue that couldn't possibly come. Instead she oriented herself in the direction where Tam should have been and, clutching the stump of her arm, walked slowly towards what she hoped would be her friend.
A/N: Wanted: Better Title. Rewards are potentially rich, and include such cameos as:
— Extra in a doomed adventure location.
— Extra in a fight against angels.
— Extra who passes by Amu without ever being noticed.
.
