Holly and Hoarfrost
by Shu of the Wind


The First Night

She doesn't believe in fairy tales.

Oh, she used to. Violet Parr used to be the most gullible girl on the face of the planet. She believed in all of it—Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny. She even believed in the Boogeyman. Then she wound up in fourth grade, when all the kids started to stop believing, and even though she threatened to stay up all night on Christmas Eve, and prove that Santa was real, her friends laughed at her, called her a kid, and went back to giggling about boys.

Her parents would never let her stay up to catch Santa, either. Dash snuck into her room at midnight on Christmas Eve to tell her that Mom and Dad were downstairs wrapping more presents, and produces some of the tangerines that always end up in their stockings. "I found it under Mom and Dad's bed," he says, and chucks it at her, because he knows she loves tangerines. She catches it, and holds it between her hands, though suddenly she wants to fling it out of the window.

"Dash," she asks, as he's on his way out of the room. "You don't believe in Santa, do you?"

"No," he grins at her, "of course not. Nobody other than kindergartners believes in Santa. Silly old Violet," he adds, laughing, and then with a whisper of wind he vanishes down the hall to his room.

Violet never tells anyone, but she cries herself to sleep that night. She stares out at the window and hopes, and prays, begging: Please. Please leave me something. Please tell me you're real.

But even the note that ends up on her pillow the next morning looks disturbingly familiar, like her parents wrote it. She leaves it in the bottom of her desk drawer, and gives her mother the tangerine.

She doesn't realize until many years later that it was that Christmas morning, that day, when she first realized that she could make herself invisible. She'd been making force fields, on and off, since she'd been younger than Jack-Jack, but invisibility had never been something she'd considered until she'd woken up one morning to be nothing. It seemed a very safe thing to be.


She's sixteen and gloomy when she starts to think about believing again. She's been stuck watching a whiny Jack-Jack all morning, watching him turn his hands into flame and back into flesh again, while Dash and her parents scuttle off to do elfy things. That's what her mom calls Christmas shopping, and it's always made her smile, but now she's a teenager stuck watching her four-year-old superhero prodigy of a brother while the Christmas tree blinks obnoxiously the corner of the room. She has a headache—probably from a full day of dealing with Jack-Jack all on her own—and the lights are driving her mad.

Jack-Jack makes a rude noise. When that doesn't get her attention, he tugs on her sleeve. "Vi, read a story to me."

"What story?" She's read all of them, twice by now, but there's no stopping Jack-Jack. He's insatiable. "Which one?"

"The one about the bunny."

The book about the Easter Bunny had been Dash's idea, and she can't help but curse him under her breath as she drags it out from under the huge pile of picture books that squats beside the couch. Jack-Jack curls up next to her, just a blonde-haired boy again, not an imp or a robot or a baby made of flame, and in spite of herself she smiles and tucks one arm around him. She loves her brothers, even though there are times when she could happily chuck them both out of a high-rise window, and Jack-Jack is probably her favorite of the two. Then she starts reading.

The story itself is fairly monotonous. She could probably recite it from memory by now. A little boy losing his way in a forest on an Easter egg hunt, only to follow a rabbit back home. It's a bit of a weird story to read around Christmastime, but it's Jack-Jack and she doesn't expect logic from a four-year-old. He startles her, though, when she reaches the part where the rabbit pops out of the bush. "He doesn't look like that."

"Who doesn't look like that, sweetheart?"

"The Easter bunny." Jack-Jack sounds like their mother; there's a hint of a lisp to his voice, but instead of making him sound silly, it just makes him adorable. When he gets older, she thinks, he'll get hell for it, but now he's just sweet. "He doesn't look like that at all."

Violet decides to humor him. After all, there's little else she can do, and she's bored anyway. "Then what does he look like?"

"Tall!" Jack-Jack throws his arms out so roughly that he almost topples off the couch. "Almost as tall as Daddy. And all grey. He has…those thingies."

"What thingies?"

He mimics throwing something. "You throw them and they come back."

She wonders who's been telling him tales. Jack-Jack reminds her of herself, back when she'd been little. Gullible enough to believe anything. "Boomerangs?"

"Yep!" He beams at her, showing off his missing teeth. "He has two of them and he threw them out my window and they went whoosh!" This time he does fall off the couch, and she catches him by the back of his shirt, yanking him back up before he gives himself a nosebleed. "And he talks funny, too!"

"Really?" Privately, she makes a mental note to have a word with Dash. He's been telling Jack-Jack weird tales again, she's sure. "What'd he say?"

"He said that we do good things." Jack-Jack looks about theatrically and then whispers, though there's no one here but them. "That…the Incredibles do good things. And that there's nothing wrong with believing in things that you can't see."

"That's true." Violet has no issue with other people who believe. She's not bitter about the idea of believing, only irritated about her own childish stupidity. But Jack-Jack sits and looks at her for a moment, and she cocks her head at him. "What?"

"He said he felt sorry for you, Vi," says Jack-Jack, and she blinks. "He said that you used to believe too, and that you still could, if you wanted."

"Believe?"

"In Santa Claus."

"And the Easter Bunny too, I imagine," says Violet, but her joke isn't taken well. Jack-Jack seizes her hands and squeezes.

"Vi-o-let, don't be mean!" He's really a very smart four-year-old, she thinks, as he shakes her wrists. "He says the letter was real, even if you didn't want to read it. You should believe, too. He's really nice, not scary at all." He looks at the book again, and then wrinkles his nose. "And he doesn't look like that."

"So you've said," she replies, but she's shaking inside. She's never told Jack-Jack about the letter from her parents, the one they tried to pass off as a letter from Santa. It's possible he could have gone through her drawers to find out, but then again, she keeps that one locked, because her jewelry's inside. (She still doesn't know why she kept the letter. She's just never considered throwing it out.) She's about to ask Jack-Jack who told him about this Easter Bunny, but then Dad's car pulls up in the drive, and Jack-Jack goes running off to shriek at their mother about food and presents and Christmas and toys and every other thing that a four-year-old tells his mother after three or four hours apart.

Violet goes back upstairs to her room as soon as dinner's over, and unlocks her drawer. The letter sits under a box of earrings and a diary from when she was twelve and desperately in love with Tony Rydinger (a long-since lost cause, but not one she regrets). The paper is heavier than she remembers, like parchment, and when she tilts it, the ink glows like gold.

For the first time, she actually opens it, and spreads the letter wide. It's quite short, only a few lines, but the handwriting—now that she knows her parents' writing better—doesn't look that familiar after all.

Dear Miss Parr,

I am sorry things have been hard on you lately, but I am sure that you are strong enough to get through it. You have been quite a spirited little girl, and have always made things very difficult to keep quiet!

Keep faith, little one. You are more powerful than you think you are. I can't wait to see you grown.

Sincerely,

North

She stares at it for a long moment. Then she shakes her head a few times, folds the letter back up, and settles it in its envelope. But it doesn't go back in the drawer. Instead, she puts it into the nearest book, less as a bookmark, more of a reminder.

She should ask her mother whose idea it was, between her parents, to give Santa Claus such a weird nickname.


The question flies out of her head for another year, though. Now she's seventeen, just broken it off with another boy—not Tony, though sometimes she wishes it was—and going through a bookshelf in preparation for packing up for college when the book with the letter literally falls into her lap. It's Christmas again, and she looks at the note for a few moments before taking it downstairs and showing it to her mother. Jack-Jack is off at a friend's house, and Dash is wandering around the way he usually does around Christmas time, dashing about, trying to find people who "need saving." She's not sure if he ever actually finds any, or if it's anything more than an excuse to wear the supersuit more often than necessary, but her parents don't complain, so neither does she.

"Mom," she says, and she watches her mother bustle around the kitchen. There's a bruise on Helen Parr's cheek that came from a fight they had last week; Violet's ribs are still creaking from it.

"Mm?"

"You remember that letter you gave me when I was little?"

"What?" Her mother turns down the radio, where Christmas music is blasting. "Vi, sweetie, what are you talking about?"

"You know, this." She waves the letter at her mom. "To tell me Santa Claus was real. You gave me a letter, remember?"

Her mother looks confused, still, so Violet offers the note. Helen looks even more confused—and slightly wary, too—when she unfolds the paper and reads the note before giving them both back to Violet.

"I'm sorry, sweetie, I don't think I ever did anything like this for you. Maybe you should ask your dad?"

Violet blinks. "I did. He told me to ask you."

"Hm." She turns back to her cream sauce. "Well, you know your dad. He might still be fibbing about it."

Violet nods, makes a noise that could be called "Yeah" in another language, and then hides upstairs again. She sits on the floor amongst the books, staring at the letter, for a good half-an-hour, trying to come up with reasons behind it. She could have misread her father, and he could really have been lying about not giving her the letter. She's much better at telling when someone's lying than her mother is, though, and she's positive that her dad wasn't lying about the letter. He'd really looked confused, just like her mom.

Dash she discounts immediately. He's bright, but not smart enough to forge a letter. Besides, his handwriting's too atrocious for something like this, and had been even worse all those years ago when it first showed up on her pillow. Jack-Jack hadn't even been born yet, so he's out, and there hadn't been any other family members around to do it. She can't remember her parents ever talking about siblings, she had no cousins, or aunts and uncles or anything. She'd never even met her grandparents.

So where had it come from?

A baddie. That's what logic tells her. Someone who'd sneak into a kid's room in the middle of the night and trick them.

But if it had been one of her parents' many enemies, why go to such lengths to make her believe in something that didn't exist? Why not just snatch her out of her bed and make them come looking? She'd run into some villains with weird plots, sure, but nothing like what her mind was conjuring now.

Where, then? Not her parents, not Dash, not anyone else. Except….

North?

No. Santa Claus didn't exist. He wasn't real. Isn't real, she corrects herself, Santa Claus isn't real. Can't be real.

Couldn't he?

She puts a force field around the letter rather than touch it, clambering back up onto her bed. Outside it's snowing, and the flakes flicker down past the traffic lights, casting strange patterns on her window. It'll be frosty in the morning. Leaving the letter on her bedside table, she crawls up into her window-seat, draws her knees up against her chest, and tries to think. And for the first time in many years, she prays.

Please, she thinks. "Please," she says. "If you're real, please, tell me." She feels the tears well up in her eyes, at the thought of what a miracle it would be to have all her old beliefs back, the wonder of what a child saw in the world, only goodness and pureness and happiness. Not this villain-infested cesspool she lives in now. Not with all these worries and cares that she has now. Just…pure innocence. "If you're real, any of you, like Jack-Jack thinks, please tell me. If you're a super, or just…a spirit, or something, I don't care. Just…please tell me. If you're real. Please."

She doesn't expect a response. She sits there for a long time, and she's certain she's not going to get one. But when the wind rattles at her window, prying at her lock, she leaps off the window-seat and calls up a force field, a shimmering purple shield between her and whatever invisible thing is trying to get into her room. When the window blows open, she grabs a knick-knack off the nearest shelf and chucks it. She has good aim, and always has done; it's why she joined the softball team in junior high, the archery club in high school. The figurine hits nothing, but she swears she feels—something. Something's there, in the room. Something's with her.

"I know you're there," she says, and her voice doesn't quaver like it would have if she'd been thirteen and shy. She's fierce. She's Violet Parr. She's Miss Incredible. She doesn't get scared of ghosts in the dark anymore. "Come out, whoever you are. I'm not afraid of you."

There's nothing. The wind whistles again, and the window-seat creaks. Someone's there, she's certain. She's absolutely positive. Then a gust of wind hits her shields, blowing cold air against the glow, and she watches an invisible hand write out words in chips of ice.

Jack Frost.


She doesn't see him instantly. It takes her a few hours and a lot of coffee before she can even consider believing it. But she sits with a force field up against her hands, like a desk, and watches him write in long streaks of frost that melt in the next breath. He's real, he says, and Santa Claus is real. Nicholas St. North, he writes, and then there's a little smiley face next to the name. The wind quivers as though someone is laughing. When she finally dares to bring up what Jack-Jack told her, about the Easter Bunny, another smiley face appears on her force field. It's the only hint that it might be true. That she's not dreaming.

Violet sits and waits for her parents to go to bed before heading downstairs to make coffee. She's certain she sees a shadow following hers, of a lanky boy with a staff in his hands, but when she turns around again it's gone, as though it never was. If this boy—because she thinks he's a boy, if his name and his wretchedly spiky handwriting are any indication—is real, like she thinks he might be, he might also be a super. He might be able to turn invisible, just like her. Only unlike her, he doesn't seem to be able to speak, or touch, anything other than her force field. But she sits at the dining table and drinks coffee, and wonders if she might be going crazy. It's not the weirdest thing that could happen to her, by super terms, anyway.

"If you're real," she says, and the frost on her force field makes a frowny face, and then another face, with the tongue sticking out. In spite of herself, she wants to laugh, but she holds it back. "If you're real," she repeats, firmly, "then I'm going to need proof, you know. I don't…believe. I'm not a kid, not like I used to be."

Can't believe your eyes? The frost scripts out, and she scowls at the place where he might be, if she's not hallucinating.

"I haven't believed in Santa Claus since I was nine years old."

There's a long pause. Then another curl of frost. Even if children don't believe in us, we don't stop believing in the children.

That pricks her. "I'm not a kid!"

Nope. Then a winky face. You're still cute though.

She feels blood rush to her face. "I never heard of Jack Frost being a flirt."

I can be. Along with a lot of other things. There's another shift to the air, mocking this time. What does it matter? Another long pause, so long this time that she thinks he's vanished, this dream of hers, back into the winds from which he came. She clenches her fingers tight around her coffee cup. Then the frost spirals forth again, a wonderful arcing pattern, and in it he scrapes words. You can't see us unless you believe, Violet. It's the way it's always been.

"But you're a super, aren't you?" She asks. "Stop being invisible. It's not like I don't know how that feels."

I'm not invisible because I want to be. He underlines this. I can't turn back unless you believe.

"That's stupid. It's not like you're a—a spirit, or something."

A long pause. That's her answer, she thinks, as she watches the opposite chair, where she thinks he might be, if he's even real. Ice flickers through the air. We've been waiting for you to believe again.

"Why?" she whispers, and she can barely breathe as she waits for the answer.

Because you never stopped.

She looks at the words, watches them as they melt away. Her coffee goes suddenly cold in her hands. She doesn't care about that. Violet Parr closes her eyes, and thinks back to being a child. She thinks back to that terrible Christmas Eve, the one where she sobbed herself to sleep and woke up with a mysterious letter on her pillow. She thinks of her brother, Dash, and his utter logic, his laughing face. Silly old Violet. She thinks of her friends in fourth grade, the ones who laughed at her for believing in the Tooth Fairy. A few tears hit the table. She wipes them away.

"They're real?" she asks, and even though she's really crying now, she can't be bothered to stop it. "San—St. North? And—and all of them?"

There's a cold touch on the back of her hand. Frost. It curls up into a pattern, and then builds into a shape in the air: a castle, high in the air, curving and twisting in fantastical ways. It flickers into reality, for an instant, and then vanishes again when doubt clenches in her stomach. She reaches out to touch where it was, and rebuilds it with the force field. It's not perfect, but it's close.

"I want you to be real," Violet says. "I'd give anything to have that back."

When she looks up again, she sees the vaguest of outlines; a gangly boy, just like she thought he would be, with that stick propped up against his chair. He's perched on the very edge of it, as though he's waiting to take flight, one leg drawn up against his chest, the other left to dangle. For a breathless moment, he's only an outline; then something inside her breaks down, and turns into the child she was. She is no longer on the edge of believing. She does. He is not maybe. He is.

He turns solid slowly, achingly slowly, and even if she's not willing to believe in Santa Claus—Nicholas St. North, she corrects herself, almost absently now—she thinks she might believe in a boy named Jack Frost, because there he is, across her kitchen table, with winter-sharp eyes and hair that flickers with moonlight. He's only in a hoodie, and his feet are bare, but he looks more at home in the cold than she ever does in her supersuit.

"Then I'm real," he says, and he grins at her. He reaches forward, and his thumb is frighteningly cold against her cheek as he wipes the tears away. "For as long as you believe."


A/N:

A cheesy crossover Christmas ficlet. There'll be a few more parts, and they'll be coming up soon, because I'm writing fast.

Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoyed!