Mark of Snow 6
by K. Stonham
first released 7th February 2019
The music was thumping, the colored lights were flashing, and the uptempo songs were even mostly ones Jamie knew and liked. An evening away from his "ink blots and paint pots," as Beth had put it, was turning out better than he had expected. He flashed her a grin-speaking over the bass beat was near impossible-and let the music and the crowd take him.
His projects and reading assignments had been driving him mad. Both his curricular and extra-curricular activities ate up time, and too often left him shy on sleep as he tried to finish up an exercise on perspective, or slog through another chapter in one of North's technical books that made magic seem as dry and tasteless as sawdust.
(If he ever finished them, and college, and had some free time, Jamie had sworn to himself he'd write new books for North's library, ones which actually made magic seem, well, magical. He owed it to the next generation of wizards to make their studies less miserable and headache-inducing than his own. He doubted North had ever even opened these books, because there certainly was no wonder in them.)
But for now he had the music, and motion, a magic of another sort. His heart was beating in time with the tempo, and his body was moving, part of a crowd, and he felt like he was filled up with effervescent sparkles.
I wish Jack could dance like this, he had a spare thought. Because he was pretty sure Jack would love this too, but being intangible to almost everyone over the age of twelve put a damper on bouncing along to music in a crowd.
But Jamie wasn't, and Jamie was here, and it was... exhilarating.
He felt happy, and free.
Until he was elbowed in the back, which jolted him out of his groove. "Hey!" he said, turning to protest, but he couldn't tell who it had been, if it had even been deliberate.
Light caught his eye. Jamie's hand was glowing a pale ice blue, and it didn't change with the strobing of the party lights.
His breath caught, Jamie pulled his hand in close, hoping no one else had seen.
But it didn't matter, he realized, if he hid his hand. Because he caught sight of a mirror, and he realized that all of him, head to foot, skin and clothes alike, was glowing.
His heart rate shot up. He couldn't catch his breath as sudden panic kicked in. He wasn't a Guardian. People could see him. They would see him. And then there would be pictures, and questions, and tests-
Shoving through the crowd, Jamie ran.
Page after page, the book had grown. The text, for all that it took up less space than the pictures, was harder to get right. Jamie had plotted the story with Jack, both of them trying to find just the right words until they ended up punch-drunk and silly at three in the morning. Now the story and completed illustrations were tossed at Jamie's vast editing crew (the Burgess gang, as well as his college friends, many of whom could now see his co-author).
"Maybe I should sign up for creative writing courses," Jamie grumbled one night, working his way through three different sets of red-penned pages. Almost all the edits were contradictory. And they were starting to blur in his vision. Maybe he needed some more Advil. Or some Red Bull.
Jack, laying on Jamie's bed with his legs stretched up the wall as he worked through his own set of edited papers, wiggled his toes. "Maybe," he said. "Dunno if you've got room in your schedule, though."
Jamie grimaced. "Yeah, no. Not unless I want to either burn out or push graduation back a year."
Jack made a dismissive noise through his teeth. Then he slowly lowered his set of pages down onto the bed and flipped over. He considered Jamie at the desk for a moment.
Light as a snowflake, he tumbled and ended up perched on the back of Jamie's chair. Leaning down, he looked upside-down into Jamie's eyes.
"Jack...?" asked Jamie.
"Shh," Jack said, and just kept looking. Slowly his eyes widened. "There you are," he said with a dawning smile.
Jamie quirked an eyebrow.
"Hands," Jack requested.
Leaving his pen on the desk, Jamie raised his hands until they held Jack's.
"Close your eyes," Jack said, and did so himself.
Jamie obeyed even as Jack's head drifted closer to his, until they were touching palm-to-palm, forehead-to-forehead.
"Do you feel that?" Jack whispered.
"Feel what?"
"It's like your heartbeat, but it's not. It's your magic. I can feel it here," Jack squeezed Jamie's hands, "and here." He rocked his head a little, rubbing their foreheads together. "Can you feel it, Jamie?"
Sitting still and concentrating, Jamie realized he could. That it was easy, even. He could feel it tingling, humming, in his snowflake mark, in his hands, in his head. Even down in his toes. "Yeah."
"That's you," Jack whispered. "Everything you were, you are, you ever will be. It's your center, and what you can put into this world. It's amazing, isn't it?"
"Jack, I glow. I'm a nightlight, nothing more." Jamie had tried, and he'd practiced, and that was the extent of what he could do. He was burning out from his workload and the stress, and he knew it. He hadn't told Jack that he'd gone to a party with Tom and Beth a couple weeks before. Hadn't told him what had happened. He'd nearly had a panic attack, and even now remembering that slip of magic threatened to turn Jamie's stomach into knots. He'd been either ten seconds or one power outage from everyone seeing.
He couldn't tell Jack.
Having magic was all well and good, until you realized it could cross a line and leave you isolated, a freak.
Jamie had read too many X-Men comics to trust human nature.
"Sandy glows, and I wouldn't want to get on his bad side," said Jack softly. "And so does the Man in the Moon, and he's the most powerful of us all. Besides," and Jamie felt Jack's eyes open briefly then close again, eyelashes brushing Jamie, "I seem to remember you at ten, turning a tsunami of fearsand into dreamlight. Don't you even try to tell me that's worthless. No selling yourself short, Last Light."
His eyes shut, Jamie took a breath, and tried in vain to believe his best friend. But just now his magic felt more like a low-key curse.
He shook his head. "I'm not you, Jack. I'm not awesome like that. I'm just some little mortal that glows."
Jack opened his eyes again, so so did Jamie. Jack shook his head slowly, still smiling fondly. "You've got no idea how amazing you really are, do you? If there's half a dozen living humans who can use magic, I'm surprised."
"Maybe you should stick more magic in ten-year-olds, then."
"I'll stick to my favorites, thanks."
Jamie was getting, for lack of a better word, harassed by his magic.
It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, read his fortune cookies.
No matter what station he turned it to, the radio kept playing Katy Perry's "Firework."
And even his professors kept commenting about the play of light in his work.
"Okay, you know what," Jamie told himself, "you need to get a grip. Not everything is about you. About... that."
Except that somehow it was.
Because after he had finished a still portrait of books and fruit, pulling his pencils away the paper...
The image peeled up from the page and momentarily assumed a three-dimensional semblance before fading away.
Jamie swallowed, and remembered a bunny drawn in frost coming to life and scampering mid-air around his room.
The next time he visited an art gallery, he had to leave fast because the paintings kept stepping out of their frames to walk around. And then there was what happened when he set foot in the school's art studio...
"Shoo," he now told the kittens who had clambered down off the page of his sketchbook. Jack wasn't around; the weather had turned too hot, and he was probably camping down in Antarctica for a while or something. Penguin-sledding, maybe. North's books completely lacked any indices, and Jamie's frantic flipping through the sections he hadn't yet read had netted him nothing. So he didn't know who to ask about this new development.
Or at least he didn't until a polite knock came on his window and he turned, half-expecting...
It wasn't Jack.
It was the Sandman.
(Why had he thought it would be Jack? Jack's knocks weren't polite, they were perfunctory. He'd been coming in through Jamie's window for so long, he knew he didn't need to knock any more.)
"Sandy!" Jamie said. It had been a while since he'd seen the dream-giver. "Jack ask you to check up on me?"
The Sandman waggled his hand, a little bit yes, a little bit no.
Then his eyes widened as he looked at the four inch-long kittens, outlined in ink on white paper, who were climbing over Jamie's hand. A question mark appeared over his head.
"Um, yeah. My magic's leaking," Jamie confessed. "Do you... do you have any tips?"
Sandy coaxed one of the miniature felines onto his hand, where it leaned into the skritches he gave it. Then he looked a question at Jamie.
"Everything I draw, heck, every painting or sketch around me, just keeps walking off the paper!" Jamie burst out. "I can't go to class. I've been officially sick for the last three days because everything keeps floating off the canvases around me!" He felt tears in his eyes and welling in his throat. "Nothing in North's books is any help, and I don't know what I'm doing wrong." He took a deep breath and forced himself to continue. "I think Jack giving me magic was a bad idea, Sandy. I don't know what people will do to me if they find out, and I don't know how to keep them from finding out."
Sandy's expression was shocked. Wordlessly, he shooed the inkcat off his hand, back toward its siblings on the sketchbook, and moved closer to Jamie. He took Jamie's hands in his, and a glimmering sand figure flared to life over his head.
"Jack," Jamie identified the figure by the crook it held. The Jack-figure knelt over a sandscape, dug a hole, put something in it, and covered it back up. Clouds rained and sun shone down on the sandscape, then a vine popped up out of the ground. It grew quickly and flowered, turning its face up to the sky. "Jack planting something?"
The sand scattered then reassembled into what looked like a pumpkin seed.
"A seed?"
Sandy touched one finger to Jamie's chest, right over his snowflake mark.
"Jack planted a seed in me. A seed of magic?"
Sandy nodded.
Jamie laughed, half a sob. "I knew that. It doesn't help me now."
The Sandman huffed a sigh, then turned his attention to the inkcats. Carefully, he rubbed his fingers together over the head of one. Golden sand drifted down. The inkcat yawned, settled down on the paper, and went to sleep.
It was just a drawing again.
Jamie stared. "Teach me how to do that," he begged.
Sandy shook his head. He tapped at Jamie's chest again. You. He mimed talking. Tell. Pointed at the three remaining kittens. Them. A head tilt, two hands pillowed under his cheek, his eyes closed. To sleep.
Jamie took a breath. "I'll try."
Sandy opened his eyes, shook his head, gave a firm gesture with his finger. Don't try. DO.
Another breath. Jamie looked down at the kittens. He closed his eyes and reached for his magic, called it into his hands, his voice. Tried to hold them both steady. "Go back to sleep," he told the kittens, willing it. Forcing himself to believe it.
They would go back to sleep. There was no other option.
He opened his eyes.
They were just drawings again.
Jamie breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you," he told the Sandman wholeheartedly, but Sandy had already had his attention caught by another of Jamie's works.
This one stood on an easel, dropcloth still on the floor around it because Jamie wasn't sure it was quite done yet. He'd slopped on blacks and grays and dark purples in layers, building up razor-sharp texture. In the center of the picture was a young boy, almost eclipsed by golden light, holding out one hand to defend himself and the vague figures behind him (one had a shepherd's crook) from the wave of darkness crashing down on them.
Sandy reached out a wondering hand to the painting, traced the glowing figure in the middle. He hadn't been there for the moment Jamie had tried to recreate, had been subsumed in Pitch's nightmares at the time. Jamie only now thought to wonder if he even knew what had happened back then.
"I... tried to draw it," Jamie said. "I couldn't get the right feeling in ink, though, so I thought maybe paint..."
Sandy turned to face him, his expression aglow. And he caught Jamie in a tight, unexpected hug. Surprised, it was a second before Jamie returned it. His eyes drifted closed, knowing exactly what Sandy meant.
Thank you for protecting us.
For just a moment, Jamie knew he was protected in return, and that there was no longer any need to be afraid.
But just for moment, because then Sandy stiffened. Jamie opened his eyes, worried, and followed Sandy's gaze, looking out his window.
Aurora lights, North's panic button, glimmered across the sky.
Jamie's adrenaline kicked in. "Go," he said, finding his shoes. Unlike the Guardians themselves, the aurora borealis wasn't invisible to normal human eyes. It was extremely out of season, and extremely out of its geographical range. People would be gathering down below, on the streets, in the park. Jamie needed to find his friends.
Sandy shot Jamie a fast salute, and disappeared out the window, hopping into a golden sand rocketship, zooming off toward the Pole.
As Jamie yanked his laces into knots, he could only hope that whatever was happening, it wasn't as bad as last time.