Written for Yuletide 2012. Thanks to rivendellrose for the beta!
When Susan was a child, her mother told her the story of Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden. The child of Frost and Spring, Snegurochka enjoyed the gift of immortality, and lived contentedly in her father's winter forest. Of course, it was cold, and she never knew the joy of flowers blooming, or birds returning to brighten the air with their song, but she had her winter pleasures: sledding down steep hills, skating on frozen ponds. Her cold heart was part and parcel of who she was and where she came from. She was a daughter of snow, and snow could endure forever in a place where it never warmed enough to melt.
Except that one day, a shepherd named Lel happened to wander into her father's forest, looking for a lamb that had strayed from its mother. He played his pipe as he walked, the music pouring out of it in a fountain of runs and trills, drifting through the silent forest to where Snegurochka was building a snow castle. The melody wrapped around her like a silver collar, tugging her toward its source. She ran to find who was making such beautiful music, leaving her castle with its half-finished towers and crenellations.
They found each other in a clearing, Snegurochka's cheeks red, her blue eyes bright, and her pale hair wild from her exertion. Her beauty dazzled Lel like sunlight shining on ice, and love fell upon him like snow. He out down his pipe and begged Snegurochka to be his bride.
("Why?" young Susan would ask. "He doesn't know her! Why would he want to marry her?"
"That's just how things happened in the old days," her mother would reply. When she was in a good mood—in the years before the Psi Corps found her, before the sleepers ripped her from them day by day—she would smile and touch her daughter's nose, and say, "Perhaps one day, Suzochka, you will fall in love, or someone will fall in love with you, at first sight. Then you'll know why it happened this way for Lel.")
Snegurochka's immortality exacted a price—daughter of the cold, her heart was frozen too hard for love to take root. She wanted desperately to feel for Lel what he felt for her, and yet she could not.
So she said she could not accept his proposal. He argued, asserting that he could make her happier than the winter forest, the sledding and the skating and the snow castles, but her frozen heart was firm, and he eventually understood that even the most impassioned arguments could not pierce it. Slumped and sighing, he left Snegurochka alone in the clearing.
Seeing the tears that glittered like frost on her daughter's cheeks, Spring descended to the winter forest. She touched Snegurochka's face, melting the girl's tears with her warm fingertips. "My child," she said, "do you desire to love more even than you wish to live forever in your father's forest?"
"I do," Snegurochka said, for now the prospect of forever without Lel was as dark and bleak as the long nights of her home.
Spring's own heart, tender as new leaves, broke at the thought of one day not being able to see her daughter frolicking in the forest, and not hearing her laughter ring through the chill air. Still, she said, "Then I will grant you that wish. You will love as a mortal, but you will also die as one." She kissed her daughter's hair, at once breaking the ice that encased her heart.
"Oh, thank you, Mother, thank you!" Snegurochka cried as she felt the change begin within her. The cold air, which had never bothered her before, now made her shiver, yet deep inside she was warmer than she ever remembered feeling. She hugged and kissed her mother, then raced to find Lel.
("I wouldn't do it," Susan would say. "I would play in the snow forever."
I would give up immortality in an instant if having it meant I couldn't love you, her mother once whispered in her mind.)
For three days and three nights the Snow Maiden searched, traveling ever farther from the heart of her father's lands. The snow thinned until it remained only in shaded hollows and on the north faces of mountains. Snegurochka saw her first snowdrops bloom, her first leaves unfurl.
On the fourth day, just as the sun was rising, she finally found the valley where Lel tended his flock. Seeing her, he dropped his pipe and his crook and flew to her side. "Snegurochka!" he cried. "You came for me!"
"I came because I love you," she replied. She was so happy that she felt she might float away, but at the same time, a strange weakness came over her, as though her knees were slowly turning to water, her head diffusing into mist.
Lel embraced her then, lifting her off her feet and twirling her with joy as the sun came over the horizon.
And as the sun's first rays hit her, shining warm and bright on this perfect moment, the Snow Maiden melted in his arms, becoming a fine white cloud that sparkled in the sun for the briefest moment before flying up to heaven.
One day at the end of winter, Susan, sick in bed with the flu, asked for a story. She was more than old enough to read one herself, but nonetheless, her mother obliged, telling once again the tale of Snegurochka.
Two weeks later, when sticky new leaves were unfurling on the birches and crocuses were peeping above the hard soil, Susan came in from playing with her dolls. She found her mother as pale as frost, as unexpected as snow in the springtime.
She had never thought to ask what happened after Snegurochka floated up to heaven, Susan realized as the gravediggers lowered her mother into the ground. Her mother had never told her what happened to Lel after his beloved died, how and if he had eventually learned how to live in a world irrevocably missing a piece.
She supposed she would find out.
Susan never told Talia the story, though she told her plenty of others. Talia had been taken in by the Corps at such a young age that she barely remembered living with her parents, and apparently fairy tales hadn't been much of a thing in the dorms. Susan had a stock of them from her year at university as a Russian history student before she ran off to join EarthForce, and could easily be persuaded to relate one over dinner or a drink.
"These rarely end happily, do they?" Talia asked once, after Susan had finished telling her the story of Father Frost and the girl who froze to death.
"'The Death of Koschei the Deathless' has a happy ending," Susan protested.
"Except for Koschei."
"Koschei wasn't exactly the nicest person around in the rest of the canon. He got what was coming to him. Most people do in these stories."
"I suppose." Talia took a sip of her drink. "Tell me another one."
Perhaps she never told the story of Snegurochka because she wanted to keep those few, precious memories of her mother, from whom she'd never disentangled it, to herself. Perhaps she feared that Talia, whose blonde hair and ice blue eyes recalled the Snow Maiden's own, would someday melt to water in her arms.
In the weeks and months that followed the implanted personality's destruction of Talia, Susan realized it was never the telepath melting that she should've been afraid of. It was her own heart cracking to pieces like the ice on the Neva in April, when the groans and sighs of its demise could be heard throughout St. Petersburg.
She did tell it to Marcus once, after a day when he'd been particularly trying, endlessly attempting to invite her to dinner with him.
"That's a terrible story!" he said when she finished, all wide-eyed and offended.
"It is a Russian story," she corrected. "Russians accept our fates. If we're meant to live in the winter, we don't go chasing after spring."
If the Psi Corps tore our family apart, we don't go chasing after telepaths.
"What about if the spring comes chasing after you?"
"It dies of exposure."
She thought that would be the end of it, but of course Marcus could never let anything go. "Spring could wear a warm coat."
"Good night, Marcus." She turned and stalked toward the lift, leaving him standing in the middle of the Zocalo, still calling to her.
"Mittens. A wooly scarf and hat!"
Despite herself, she smiled.
As she left Babylon 5 for what was likely to be the last time, Susan couldn't help but look out the window of the transport taking her to her new command. The station spun behind them, growing smaller and smaller as they left.
She hoped the ache in her heart would lessen as well, the further she went from the station that had twice let love fall on her like snow and then melted it in her hands. She had always assumed her mother told her the tale of Snegurochka just to amuse them both—that it was a fairy story she shouldn't take seriously. Now, she wondered if it had been a warning. Perhaps her mother, like Spring, had somehow known what the future held in store for her daughter and tried to caution her against the damage love would cause.
If it was a warning, then she would heed it. Snegurochka's icy heart may have made it impossible for love to bloom, but it was also frozen too hard to break. Like in all those old fairy tales, the third time was the charm. Susan was a daughter of the snow, and she would never let spring crack her heart open again.