The Holly Wreath

A Holiday Tale By Nyghtvision

Dedicated to Intrikate, who scintillates in Real Life and well beyond, and Believed in my gingerbread house.

The illustration for this fic can be found here: http// www . Deviantart . com / deviation / 26539520/ (no spaces.)

Have a look if you like, it may well give you a clue as to the next chapter.

In many Western cultures, holly is a traditional Christmas decoration, used especially in wreaths. --- www . wikipedia . org

The Beginning

When Holly Short was but a wide-eyed tweenaged fairy, struggling through the ranks of the famously gritty Lower Elements Police Academy, trying to survive only on ramen noodles and ambition, sneered at by her teachers and belittled at every turn, it seemed like she would never succeed in her dream of being a captain in the LEP. A dream? Her teachers called it a delusion. She had been the only female in history to survive a year at the Academy. It was a miracle when she received her second-year credentials. In her third year, she broke her ankles twice, her collarbone thrice, and, freakishly, survived a touchdown in the annual MudRugby match. It almost looked like Holly Short was going to make it to graduation. Only one other person in the entire school was happy about this.

He called himself Trouble, and he was one of her classmates. He was a popular boy. Sandy-haired and jade-green-eyed. Captain of the MudRugby team. Pre-selected for class valedictorian in his first year. His report card was studded with enough stars to build a minor solar system. During their years at school together, Trouble fell in love with Holly at least five times, in the goofy overdramatic I-shall-never-love-again way of a certain kind of boy. Of course he never told her about this, and over time the crushes faded, became embarrassing.

Trouble moved on, and found more adoring girls, girls who were not frustratingly oblivious to his charms; and then he would find Holly in a training room in the basement of the Academy, filthy and enraged and beating the living hell out of a goblin mannequin, and he would decide that he was in love with her all over again. But this story is not about Trouble. It is about ambition and fathers and the true meaning of Christmas.

So one day, when he was in love with Holly, she came down to the training room in the basement with a face like a molested fruit. Her body appeared to be one giant bruise, with scratches and bloody patches here and there for variety. Trouble jumped up.

"D'Arvit, what have you done to yourself!"

Holly blinked and swayed back, eying him with a Caribbean-sunrise-encircled eye. She had the air of someone trying to form a very sarcastic answer with a brain that had been used as somebody else's hammer. "I tripped myself," she slurred witheringly, "And then I ganged up on me and beat myself up, and then I did a sort of leap-y thing into a wall, sort of thing, and then I think I may have kicked myself in the stomach, and--"

Trouble stopped squeaking impotently and finally found his voice. "Holly!" He said with it, his face a mask of chivalrous horror. "WHO DID THIS TO YOU? WHERE WERE THE TEACHERS?"

Holly swayed under the barrage of capital letters and sat down hard on the floor. She blinked again, and put her hand in her mouth, and drew out a tooth with some surprise. She regarded it with woozy astonishment, and attempted to fit it back into her mouth. "It was the upperclassmen," she offered finally.

The upperclassmen were graduates of the Academy who had stayed to complete training. Rather than becoming LEP grunts and working their way up, these privileged few attended another year of classes and were fast-tracked into nice comfy officer jobs. The upperclassmen had it in for Holly, but as far as Trouble knew, they had never before stooped to knocking out her teeth.

Trouble quivered with the urge to knock more important things out of the upperclassmen, but a rare moment of common sense assailed him. He knelt down beside Holly, his long fingers flickering with blue sparks, and closed up the worst cut along her face. "Why, Holly?"

"Our grades were posted today," Holly went on, speaking around her intrepid self-dentistry. "Mine were good. It made them mad." Her dulled eyes lit and sparkled with that damn-the-torpedoes battle light, and she grinned gorily.

Trouble shook his head. "That's not what I meant. Why are you doing this?"

"What, the tooth? Do you know where it's supposed to go?"

"Not the tooth. This. The Academy. Why are you doing this? Even if you graduate, the LEP will hardly hire you."

"Oh yes they will," Holly said. "I shall be a Captain," and she sounded like a stubborn young child, despite her mouth full of blood.

"Holly, they wouldn't spit on you if you were on fire. They've tried to blackball you at every exam. Why don't you just…"

"Give up?"


"No!" Trouble said, because he was Trouble. "But… try something different?"

"Why?" Holly looked at him as if he had started speaking Shakespearean English.

"Because you're getting beat up!" Trouble's voice hadn't cracked and broken like this in years.

Holly gave him a scornful look and held out her bloody tooth. And Trouble loved her. He found the place where the tooth was supposed to go, and tried to figure out which way it was supposed to point, and dabbed it into place with more magic than was necessary.

Holly took it like a man – better than a man – which was the whole problem, really.

"Holly, please. Just tell me… why? Why do you have to do this? What does the LEP have to offer that is worth all this?"

This is why…