Rosetta. Rosetta! Spike quickly thought back to everything she knew about the garden fairy. Snowball fight: screaming in terror. Tobogganing: screaming in terror. Skiing: useless and petulant. Snowshoeing: useless and petulant, shortly followed by screaming in terror. Romance: weak-kneed simpering. None of that squared in any way with the glare Rosetta was leveling her right there on the glacier. For a moment Spike entertained a mad wish that they might be on the other side of the crossing just so she could melt away and never have to deal with that glare again.

"Hi," Spike managed after an effort of exceeding difficulty. She felt proud of herself for getting that far and made sure to follow it up with as much eloquence as she could scavenge. "You, um, look angry."

"Sugar, we ain't good enough friends for me to be angry." And then she pulled a tiny mirror out of her coat and took to checking her hair in it, like Spike wasn't even worth her notice. Somehow this felt even worse. "But being a mama has taught me a lot about feeling disappointed."

Spike didn't have enough experience with the clumsies to recognize the word from that context, but it did sound like something Sled might have said at some point. "A mama? Like a… mother?" Not that that made any sense, because, well, pixies had Arrivals, not…

"Oh, I know, I know, I make it look good, don't I?" She gave Spike a lascivious wink from behind her little mirror. "My boy Crocky, well, he wasn't exactly a natural son, but after he im-per-inted on me, we learned to get along. And sometimes he visits, respectable boy that he is!"

"Crocky?"

"Hush! I'm reminiscing! Honestly, can't a girl get a word in edgewise around here?"

Spike raised a finger in protest, thought better of it, and bunched her hand into a fist instead. Rosetta was clearly crazy, but perhaps it wasn't too late to scare her off so Spike could go find Gliss and have important and necessary conversations instead of whatever this was. "Look," she said, "I'm glad we had this talk. My life is so much improved by the knowledge that fairies can be mothers! But if you'll excuse me, what I really need to do is fly off and talk to—"

"Gliss?"

"…yes."

"Hmmph." Rosetta's figure stiffened as she stood fully upright, radiating haughty disdain as visibly as the glow of pixie dust. Not even her frilly pink dress or its absurd white trim could dispel the feeling of terror she managed to instill in Spike's heart. "Honeybunch, Gliss has spent the last few days bawling her eyes out over you and thrown half her friends into a tizzy in the bargain. Everyone's been missing out on their beauty sleep keeping her company and looking for you! Now that I've found you, you are not getting off till I give you a piece of my mind."

"Oh yeah?!" Don't think about Gliss, don't think about Gliss crying, time for all that later, get through this conversation, get away from this garden fairy! She spread her wings out behind her like some sort of predator, but Rosetta didn't even flinch. "Well, excuse me for having my own problems! Do you think this has been easy for me either? Do you know anything about what it's like to have someone depend on you and want to go to them, want to do everything for them, but you have to go against everything you've ever known and believed and struggle every step of the way and not even know if it'll make a difference because maybe you're not good enough no matter how hard you try?!"

"Sure do."

The wind went out of Spike's sails in an instant and she collapsed to her knees without warning. The hard ice of the glacier stung through the impact, but she didn't seem to care. Every preconception she'd held about Rosetta was rapidly departing the glacier in search of comfier climes. "…really?"

"Painted peonies, that's why I came looking for you in the first place!" Rosetta's frigid demeanor was gone as quickly as it had arrived, and she wrapped a companionable arm around Spike's shoulder that Spike was certain she didn't deserve. There was warmth in Rosetta's voice but not exactly the most trustworthy sort of warmth. "Why, I reckon we've got just buckets in common, and that makes me the perfect gal to give you the kick in your behind to get things moving again between you and Gliss. Not that I know what she sees in you, but hey, everyone's got their weaknesses."

"But what did you do?"

"I am trying to tell you! You gotta understand, sugar oats, that I had things way worse than you. Everybody in the Winter Woods but you seems to think you and Gliss should get together! I had to go against eons of prejudice and churlish dismissal that us garden fairies would ever amount to anything, and the only gal that believed in me was a new Arrival I barely knew. But she didn't just believe in me, she needed me, and I started caring a lot less about looking good than making her happy!" She leaned in front of Spike to give her a wide smile that was about halfway between flattering and flirtatious. "So maybe there's something in your head keeping you from loving Gliss like she deserves, but if you dig down deep, I'll betcha you can break that streak."

Rosetta swished past in a whirl of pink cloth and flowery perfume, down into Spike's fissure hideout, where she spent the next several minutes flittering about and tutting and straightening the place up where Spike wouldn't have thought there was anything that could be straightened. As she worked she detailed—with numerous tangents, exclamations, and curious endearments, as well as instant reprimands whenever Spike dared venture a comment—her experiences at the Pixie Hollow Games, which Spike had written off as so much warm fairy fufurah. How she'd been so loathe to even try that she'd bungled her way into success, and that success had led into more successes, and one almost final, almost catastrophic failure… only to pull through at the last minute and succeed where almost no one had thought it even possible to succeed.

"Chloe, bless her heart, thought we could win." Rosetta smiled at the memory, a warm smile that didn't seem to be directed at Spike. "No idea why. But I believed in her, and, so… eventually I started believing in me too. If you ask me, this is your comeback moment right here, and we're going to give you any makeover you need to get you to win this thing and take home the girl."

Silence stretched on for several long seconds before Spike realized she was expected to talk again. "But I don't need a makeover!"

"This from the gal whose hair's growing in white at the roots."

"That's not what I meant and you know it. Look, Rosetta, I've been thinking while I've been shut up in here! I'm going to fly back to Gliss—I would be there right now if I wasn't talking to you—and I'm going to show her the time of her life and kiss her and live happily ever after."

Rosetta looked at her through half-lidded eyes. "Didn't you already try exactly that and then you chickened out?"

"Well…"

"So why should I believe you won't chicken out again?"

Spike looked down at the ice. When Rosetta—it didn't seem right to think of her as 'the garden fairy' anymore—put it that way, maybe she had a point. So she was in love with Gliss. Yay! So she wanted to spend more time with her friends and treat them better. Great! So she didn't think Gliss was an evil mastermind. Yippee! Maybe that had been refined a bit while she'd been in the glacier, but it'd all been true before she'd run away too. Sure, it was great trusting Gliss enough not to take complete control of her life and steal her every chance of making decisions, but that idea had come as a shock to her. It couldn't have been something she'd been worrying about since the very start!

Whatever had hit Spike in the heat of their kiss that had made her run away to begin with… she hadn't been thinking about that. She didn't know what it was. She had no way of knowing if it would happen again.

Tears grazed her eyes and she stared at Rosetta without any attempt to hide them. "Help me."

"I'll try." For that one fleeting moment there was no anger in Rosetta's words, no false modesty or constructed companionship or la-de-da girlishness or anything, only a simple honest statement by one fairy pledging to help another. It was enough to make Spike feel like they could win. "But," said Rosetta, her labored personality slipping back in with each syllable, "I don't actually know you too well. So maybe first off you could tell me who you think you are, and, oh, what it is you want."

Spike swallowed down an annoying lump that seemed to have found its way into her throat. "I'm smart," she said with less hesitation than was probably warranted. "I try to solve problems by thinking about them, and if someone tells me something I didn't know, I'll accept it and revise my judgments. I'm funny, but sometimes I'm too cruel, and I want to work on that. I'm lazy and unemotional and spineless and rotten. And I'm an artist." She bit back a smile at that last one—hadn't she been thinking of herself as an artist at the very start of this whole debacle? "I create beautiful worlds from frost, or, well, I can create them, but I don't like practicing as much as Gliss does. But I'm willing to change for her." She took in a deep breath. "I want to make our love the most beautiful artwork I've ever done. That's all."

"Aww, sugar." Rosetta's eyes were full and sad, and she patted her chest like it helped her contain her emotions. "That ain't art. Well okay, it is, but not any kind of art that's going to help you. Especially if you're the kind of artist who never actually produces anything."

"I produce plenty!" Spike could tell Rosetta didn't believe her, and maybe she didn't believe herself either, but she needed to defend herself. She couldn't go down without a fight. "Sure, a lot of it's just in my head, but it would look the same if I actually made it! It's not my fault that frost is forever melting when the sun comes out!"

"Mmm. See, love's an art, sure, but it's not the kind of art you make once and then forget about. It's the kind of art you do constantly, and it's the kind of art you do as a team, like me and my flowers! Gliss ain't one of your trees or rocks or whatever to put frost on, she's a real person, and if you want to treat her right, hey, you're gonna need to treat her right both together." Her face slipped from a sad smile into more of a smirk. "Take Sled… sure, I've got him wrapped around my little finger like a climbing vine, poor boy, but that don't mean he doesn't hold up his share of things."

The last of Spike's preconceptions—that Rosetta was weak and needed some serious help to stand up on her own and not follow Sled around like a lovelorn beetle—crumbled into powder, and with it went Spike's restraint. "But I don't know what to do!" she screamed, not at Rosetta but at herself, though that didn't stop Rosetta from jumping frightened into the air anyway. "Relationships are team efforts, yes, great, I'll keep that in mind! But I'm not in a relationship! How am I supposed to get in one, if the moment I kiss Gliss I think of something awful and have to run away again?!"

Rosetta had backed up against the wall, shrinking a little against Spike's miserable rage, and Spike tried to pull herself in a little at the sight. "How should I know?" asked Rosetta, somewhat weakly. "I still don't know what got into you when you kissed her last time!"

"I don't either!"

"Well, figure it out and then tell me." Rosetta came unglued from the wall, voice regaining some of its flinty edge from her initial appearance—which Spike supposed she deserved, after screaming like that—and started puttering around the little cave again.

Spike turned to a particularly reflective part of the cave walls and stared at herself, noticing the white from her roots seemed to have captured at least half of her hair already. Time was passing and she needed to figure out this one last question. She stood in absolute silence, ignoring Rosetta's little gasps and murmurs at what invisible troubles Spike had no idea, staring into the reflection and willing it to speak where she could not, slogging through memories and half-formed emotions and forgotten feelings, until finally—finally!—she recaptured the moment of her and Gliss there in the clearing and everything came together at last.

"I can't be in love with Gliss," she said, almost unconsciously making sure her words were just loud enough for Rosetta to hear. "That's impossible."

"Why, of all the—!" Rosetta stopped and Gliss listened to several seconds of careful breathing. "And why is that?"

"Because these dates didn't do anything!" Spike whirled around to face Rosetta, enjoying the feeling of her spiky hair whirling along a moment behind her and slashing against her cheeks when she restabilized. "Nothing! Maybe they helped me notice some feelings I always had, but that's all. So after we were spying on you and Sled and then Gliss came up with the idea of dating a fairy instead of a sparrow man? I was terrified, because I knew it would be me but it couldn't be me because I can't be in love with her, so I tried to talk her out of it. That didn't work. I even tried to keep her away from Qana because of my feelings for her, these stupid feelings that just won't go away, but whatever they are, they're not love!"

"And why is that."

"Because we've known each other practically forever!" Spike was really getting into it, stalking up and down the cave and shaking her fists at anything that she could imagine needed shaking at. "Forever! And if she likes girls, and I've liked her since I can't remember when… we could have done all of this years ago and been blissfully happy. But we didn't. So we don't. So I can't."

After that there was a very long silence wherein Spike slowly calmed herself down and Rosetta stared at her without giving away so much as a hint as to what she was thinking. Finally she blinked and asked, "That's why you high-tailed it?"

"Yes."

"Spike, that is the single worst reason for doing something I have ever heard in my entire life."

"But…!"

"Not another word. At least when my Crocky tramples my lovely flowers I can tell myself he doesn't know any better! But you want to throw away the person who makes you the happiest, just because you weren't clever enough to think of it yesterday instead of today?"

"Rosetta, I know I'm an awful idiot, but—"

"You're not an idiot!" Rosetta groaned. "Good gosh, it's like the only thing you like better than being full of yourself is hating yourself. Isn't half the point of being clever just getting more clever with time?"

"I guess so, but—"

"So maybe you didn't see what was right in front of you all along. Big deal! Gliss's helped you see it now, and you're that little bit cleverer than you were before and you can have a girlfriend for a bonus!"

"But all those years! We'll have wasted so many opportunities—"

"Oh, stuff it." Rosetta flipped her hair in as universal an expression of dismissal as could be imagined. "Fertile soil is fertile soil, honeyglaze. If I don't plant a flower today because it's too hot out, hey, I can still plant it tomorrow. But more important…" She strode over to Spike and stood fearlessly close, their noses almost touching, refusing to break eye contact. "I want you to look me in the eye and tell me that all your life you've spent with Gliss was, I quote, wasted."

Wasted? Spike tried. Years of fun and laughter, of breaking boundaries and meeting new friends, of having adventures despite futile attempts not to, of late night conversations when everyone else was asleep, of practice and frost and snowballs and sports and trips to the mainland and Gliss… wasted? She shook her head. "It brought us closer together."

Rosetta nodded while looking immensely satisfied, though Spike had to admit she deserved it. "And when you first got those scary little romantic butterflies in your stomach, if you'd asked her out then and there—would that've worked?"

"Maybe?" Spike shifted uneasily. "I mean, she hadn't thought about girls then. But… even if she'd said yes, we wouldn't have been as close. Maybe it wouldn't have lasted as long."

"And are you ready to ask her now? No more chickening out?"

"Yes!"

"Well, we'll see about that one." Rosetta turned on her heel with a matronly grin. "You stay put for now, buttercake. I've got to smooth some things over for you before you get back, so unless you don't trust me…?"

Spike stared. Trust? The Rosetta who'd arrived at the glacier was not the Rosetta she'd thought she'd known, and had maybe cycled through several other Rosettas since then, but they'd all centered around an immense inner strength and a refusal to let other people screw up the world she wanted to live in, expressed any number of ways depending on what was appropriate. Maybe she saw Spike as just another stubborn plant in need of a little help blossoming? Spike, being a winter fairy, probably wasn't the best fairy to guess at that sort of thing. "I trust you to be utterly terrifying," she said.

Rosetta beamed at her. "Thank you!"

Away she flew, leaving Spike still dealing with some questions yet armed with a new confidence that everything was going to be okay. She was still young. Sure, maybe the optimal time to fall for Gliss had happened last year, or wouldn't happen for a few more months, or anywhere in-between. But it hadn't been the day they'd been confused by the Minister of Winter, and there was no use in worrying about the details now, not when the years of happiness they were definitely going to have together would far outweigh any not-quite-rightness about the starting timing. Unless Spike did something monumentally stupid—again—they were guaranteed love and companionship for a long time to come. She loved Gliss, and the past wasn't important anymore, and that was all she needed to know.

All in all, her renewed confidence made her all the more dismayed three days later, when Slush met her with the news that Gliss had agreed to go on a date with some other fairy.