Work Text:
Winter sharpens Brooke's movements in her typically warm room. It's summer, but the real season has no bearing on her. As far as she's concerned, it's a midwinter's day draped in a thick blanket of snow and cut into shape by sheets of ice.
Her assignment over summer break is to write a series of stories set in her assigned universe-- Ever After-- that follow various themes. The theme she's working on today is competition, and so she set Duchess Swan and Ashlynn Ella against each other in a figure skating match. It was a brilliant idea, and the words flowed easily, but she didn't account for the wind blowing from her pages, freezing her fingertips to her pen, the ink as thick as her blood feels.
Her room will be this sharply cold until the story ends, something she learned the hard way when she wrote Cedar picking seashells on the beach with little regard for the narrated temperature since Cedar has no concept of hot or cold. Her bones will rattle on as Duchess and Ashlynn bicker, and her wrist won't stop aching until a winner is decided.
She takes just a moment to rest, Shivering as she captures her wrist in her hand, rubbing it as she flexes her shaking fingers. Before pursuing narration, she knew that constant writing takes on the hands, of course, in the absent way anyone knows what their parents go through. That didn't prepare for the constant stress of holding a pencil, the winces as she slashes it into stories. Her parents are supposed to take her to get some glove they say will help, but they won't have the time to until next week. What's worse is that her winter gloves are in storage, with the rest of her warm clothes. She's usually spared the true harshness of cold on her joints by appropriate attire and the house's frantic heating system, but there's nothing for her today.
She cradles a hand to her chest, her breath as visible as the new lines forming on her paper. She can't help smiling through her blue lips, watching words form.
Maddie runs up to Duchess and Ashlynn, pulling her arms around them and ignoring the aggravated glares they're giving each other. "How about you two settle this tomorrow? We'll hold a whole big event for it-- and in the meantime, we'll all go and have some hot cocoa! How about that?"
Duchess and Ashlynn reluctantly agreed, with Duchess stomping off to figure out tomorrow's choreography and Ashlynn rejoining her friends.
Brooke sighs with a sweet sort of relief, taking a pencil into her rattling hand instead of her pen. Her conversations with Maddie aren't allowed into her final projects. They haven't gotten to romantic stories, yet, and actually talking with characters is strictly forbidden.
Thank you, darling.
I'm not Darling, I'm Maddie!
Brooke laughs, scratching out 'darling' and writing 'sweetheart' above it.
Better! Now, let's go somewhere warm.
Brooke nods, erasing their conversation and switching to her pen. She traces over Maddie's narration of Ashlynn and Duchess ending their conflict for the day, then continues it, following Ashlynn into the girl's dorm building.
Her room instantly fills with warm air, thick with the smell of hot chocolate and whipped cream. She can practically hear the Royal's laughter, as rich and vibrant as it is when she writes it down. She almost thanks Maddie, before remembering the rules of their worlds.
She writes it in pencil in the margins, then continues like normal, watching stars and mouse doodles blooming across the page from Maddie's hand.
She smiles through the sore buildup, her handwriting getting less legible as she hurries along. Ready to finish this day of the story, so she can break for the night and start tomorrow's work after she gets her dad to dig her winter coat out of the closet.
It takes what feels like an agonizingly long time, mostly because she's actually trying to rush, but finally, she gets to the end. She flops back in her writing chair, pressing her eyes closed. She blindly closes her notebook and shoves it out of the active zone, pulling open her desk drawer and fumbling for a pack of Post-it notes. She slaps it down on her desk and then kicks away from it, letting her chair roll across her floor and connect with her bed. She turns and spills forward onto it, taking some breaths and readjusting.
When Brooke loops herself back in with reality, she goes back to her desk and looks at the sticky note. Maddie is there. Well, not Maddie Maddie. A stick-figure Maddie. She can draw, of course, but Maddie feels more Maddie in stick-figure form. This stick-figure Maddie has her hand raised, her foot positioned just so, and a rock on the ground near her foot with little blades of grass around it.
Brooke lifts the notes with her left thumb, letting them fall down one by one. The very first drawing, at the very bottom of the stack, is a bust of stick-figure Maddie's face. As the other notes fall, it becomes a story just as well as the ones Brooke writes. The camera zooms out to view stick-figure Maddie in all of her glory, and follows her as she waves to Maddie, kicks over a conveniently kickably drawn rock, and does a little spin. It ends back on the note where Brooke started, and she can't help smiling.
Brooke collects the Post-it in her good hand and takes it over to a particular shelf, which she once used to display a rock collection. Now, each of the little square spaces is filled with the ending frame of another drawn adventure Maddie has given her. Her parents complain constantly at the rate she goes through Post-it packets, but she couldn't care less.
She settles the new gift down into the first free space her eyes catch on, smelling whipped cream-latent hot chocolate even after she's left her room for a snack.