Chapter Text
It was high summer – the kids’ last before they embarked on the wonderful and terrible journey that is High School – when Snowman finally realized her feelings about Spades Slick had gone soft over time. It was a startling realization, and one she didn’t really even notice developing until it presented itself at the forefront of her brain one afternoon, mid-way through watching I Love You, Man with Itchy and Die. Once realized, though, it was like she couldn’t stop thinking about it – it was a fishhook, and the shimmering shark of her consciousness had leapt on with unbridled enthusiasm.
Ridiculous, she told herself, buffing her nails on her overcoat and inspecting the polish. He’s a terrible little man. Normally that would be enough. But it wasn’t, not today, and her gut twinged with anxiety at that.
He’d been her Archagent, back when she’d been the Queen and they’d both lived in Derse. Her husband had hired him, without even asking her, and she could remember how small he looked in that black-and-white uniform, skinny and sharp with such green eyes. They’d played nice and shook hands until the King left and then she’d seized the front of his uniform and jerked him close and told him in no uncertain terms that if he put a toe out of line, if he did a single thing she didn’t agree with, his life expectancy would promptly become much, much shorter. And the little bastard had sneered at her.
She’d never really understood the concept of the kismesis until Jack Noir. Every single day she would get reports from him – the state of the kingdom, the condition of the people, the progress of the war with neighboring Prospit – and he’d sneer and smirk his way through them and every single time he’d finish with “I do hope that suits you, your Majesty.” It was disrespectful and blatantly flaunting his position in relation to the monarchy and God she hated him for it. What she hated even more was that he was brilliant at his job and she knew that if she fired him (or, as would have been appropriate, had him executed) she’d never be able to replace him. At the time, the way things were going with the war, such action would have been preposterous.
She hated that the kingdom needed that snarky little Archagent.
And then he’d realized that the Kingdom needed him more than it needed her. By then their kismesissitude was sealed – the exact moment was probably a couple years prior, on his desk, after too much alcohol and a screaming match – and she only watched him as the car pulled away, taking her as far into the desert as half a tank of fuel would get you.
Her only thoughts while she wandered the dunes, falling on the occasional oasis or spring with delirious fervor, was how much she fucking hated Jack Noir.
The first time they saw each other after their exiles, she’d almost laughed. He was in some dingy bar with his Crew – she’d only remembered them by their names on Derse that time – and the Droll, Clubs now, spotted her across the room and waved, genuinely happy to see her again. Jack, Spades, whatever, spun around, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, just for a minute.
He only laughed for a minute before she put a bullet through his shoulder.
The worst part then was that as dingy and filthy and disgusting as it was, she’d liked that bar. He was making a habit of getting her banned from places like that.
And the worst part now, she thought darkly, scowling at the TV while Itchy and Die remained oblivious, was that those memories weren’t doing it. She should hate him! He was Jack Noir, he got her exiled, he got her kicked out of that bar, he’d dogged her and teased her and mocked her fall from grace at every turn.
Her train of thought faltered. He had, was the operative thing. And then those grubs had turned up in that dumpster – the kids – and suddenly they all had other things to think about and hating one another took a backseat. She and Spades would see each other and throw a few knives – was it for old times’ sake? Oh, please tell me it wasn’t – but they both had places to be and shit to do that didn’t involve almost killing one another.
Of course, when the kids had gotten older she had stabbed him in the eye and then basically ripped his arm off. That had to count for something, didn’t it?
She didn’t feel bad about it. No, certainly not. Oh God.
Someone was nudging her in the side. Itchy had his head to one side, eyes narrowed. “Something on your mind?”
“No,” she lied.
“Only I thought you said you liked this movie and you been glaring at it for the last twenty minutes.”
“I don’t like the lighting.”
He and Die exchanged a look. “Yeah, okay Snowman. The lighting is . . . it distracts from the artistic merits of Paul Rudd’s performance,” Die snickered. “Got it.”
“You can both shut up.” She settled back into the couch, arms crossed over her chest, cigarette smoldering.
The problem was, she came to see as she continued thinking about it, she just couldn’t reconcile her memories of Spades Slick – Jack Noir, really – with her current impression of Spades Slick. Because he wasn’t that sarcastic little clerical jerk from all those years ago, not anymore. Now he was a harassed single parent with a casino empire and a modest crime ring. And he still had more piss and vinegar to him than any one person had any rights to, but raising Karkat had tempered it somewhat, made it less blatantly subversive and more just a facet of his overall ornery personality.
He was tolerable now. Or, worse, she ruminated, he was actually kind of funny.
Oh my God, she thought, I’ve started living in a romcom.
She stood, abruptly, and excused herself. “I left the oven on.” Oh my God, she had used that one.
“Been baking?” Die asked mildly, eyebrows raised, feet up on the coffee table. “Banana bread for everyone later?” Itchy giggled.
“You aren’t getting any.”
“Tears, Snowman. All my tears,” he called after her. She ignored him. She needed to talk to someone, fast, before she went all Sex in the City and called Slick and hung up the phone when he answered.
-()-
She spun out almost everything for Stitch, because the old man was the least involved with her on a day-to-day basis, and because she did genuinely like him. He listened to her as he fussed over the effigies and Lord English’s overcoat, pinning and stitching. Every once and a while he’d smile, or chuckle, which put Snowman off a little but she hadn’t been Queen for nothing. She carried on until she was satisfied that her story had been told, and then she sat back in a pile of discarded fabric and lit a cigarette.
“Well,” Stitch said through a mouthful of pins.
“Well?”
“Give me a minute.” One by one he stuck the pins into the overcoat and then he stood back, shaking his head. “Nightmarish monstrosity.”
“Stitch!”
“Not you.” He hobbled over to her and collapsed into his chair, picking up his cup of cold tea and glaring at the coat. “I tell him the coat isn’t his all-access pass to space-time, don’t make the continuum his personal playground, but does he listen? Of course not, he just skips off with that schmuck in the blue box. Feh!” He took a sip of tea. “Who needs ‘em.”
Snowman cleared her throat, as politely as she could manage. Stitch sighed. “I told you this would happen, didn’t I? Those two kids of yours, running around together, you and the man seeing each other all the time, I said to you, I said ‘Snowman, you keep meeting up with that meshugener, and you can kiss that kismessisitude goodbye,’ but did you listen?” He threw up his unoccupied hand and apparently addressed the ceiling. “Does anybody ever listen to Stitch? Everyone comes for advice and I tell them, I do, but nobody listens!”
“Yes, Stitch, and I was stupid not to listen but this is a problem.” She looked away and frowned. “I require council.”
He snorted. “Well fine then your majesty, council I can do.” He stared into space then, just for a minute, and took a gulp of tea. “Thing is, you and Slick . . . you, really, were so used to everything being Jack Noir and the Black Queen, yeah? Now you’re just Snowman and Spades Slick and there’s no power dynamic in it anymore.” He shrugged. “It’s hard to hate someone when you can both just walk away from the situation, which I get the feeling you’ve been doing, hm?”
She looked to him sidelong and tapped the ash off the end of her cigarette. “Maybe.”
He shrugged. “And people change. See that effigy over there?” She followed his gesture to a discarded effigy, cast into the corner. “That was Crowbar’s. Now it’s schmatta, all because he went and got sweet on some girl.”
“That affects the effigies?”
“Everything affects the damn things.” He scowled at them. “Usually I can repair but matters of the heart are more difficult.”
Snowman got up abruptly, grinding her cigarette out on her chair absent-mindedly, deaf to Stitch’s complaints. She stalked around her own effigy, feeling her own hand around her waist, down her back. She looked around it to Stitch, wild-eyed. “It’s not new!” but her smile faltered when Stitch grinned, his scar pulling a little and reminding her of the last person in the world she wanted to think about. “How old . . . ?”
“Six months ago, just after Midwinter Solstice.” Midwinter . . . shit. The scarf. “Took you a while, I’m surprised.”
She laid her hands on her own shoulders and sagged with the phantasmal weight. “God I hate him.”
“I’d argue that at this point.”
She returned to the chair, brushed the ash onto the floor amidst the old tailor’s grumbling and fell into it, head in her hands. “What do I do, Stitch?”
He sighed loudly and grabbed his pipe off his desk, out of the piles of pincushions and miles of measuring tape. She waited for him to pack it, light it, and take the first few puffs. “Two options, the way I see it,” he said, before she had the chance to prompt him. “You find some way to keep the hate alive – and I don’t envy you that – or you give in and admit maybe your kismesis can swap colors.” He blew a cloud of smoke and visibly winced as a large tear ran down the side of Lord English’s coat. “But what you’re hating now are just memories and that’s it. They’re too old.” He got up with some effort and a grunt, joints clicking. “Both of you have moved on with your lives – you’re not a Queen anymore and he’s not your clerk. Time’s a bitch.” He grabbed a pincushion and tape and crept over to the coat as quickly as his knees would allow. “Not that you respect that you schmuck.”
“Lord English catches you saying that kind of thing and he’ll have you killed,” she mused, although she was much too absorbed in her own thoughts to pay attention to his answer.
“If he has me killed he won’t have anyone to fix his coat. I’m not worried.”
She leaned back. “So do I tell him?”
“Well I’m not saying we should tempt fate –”
“I’m talking about Slick, not Lord English.”
He rolled his eyes and shot her a look. “You do what you want! Might as well tell him because if I had to guess I’d say the schlemiel already knows! He liked the scarf, didn’t he?”
“He wore it.”
“Well there you go.”
“He did it out of spite.”
“To be fair, you did rip his arm off.” He dug around in his pocket for a spool of thread. “Can put a man off you, doing that kind of thing.”
She put her face in her hands, elbows propped on her knees. “I wish I hadn’t.”
“Feh!” He tugged at the rip in the coat and chuckled. “And he wore that scarf every day for the rest of the winter. You two haven’t hated each other for a while, Snowman.”
“. . . This is a disaster.”
“This is growing up.” She looked up, eyes wide, but his back was turned. “You don’t stop just because you’re suddenly a Queen, or an Archagent or a mobster or whatever society decides means you’re an adult. Or at least, you don’t want to. Can you imagine what a nudnik you’d be if you did? I told your daughter the same thing two weeks ago, by the way.”
“Which one?”
“The one that’s suddenly realizing she has feelings.”
“Ah.” Snowman stared at the floor for a while then. People change, oh God how they change. You wake up one day and suddenly you can’t be bothered to hate the one person in your life you’ve always hated, and in fact you kind of like them. “But then I won’t have a kismesis anymore.”
He waved blindly to her effigy. “Think again.”
Her brow furrowed. “Who – Quarters? It has to be! That smug jackass is my kismesis?” She pounded her fist on the arm of the chair. “That fucker! God I hate him! How dare he? He wasn’t to know Slick and I –”
“Language, miss, please,” although he was trying not to laugh as he said it.
She jumped up again, grabbing her coat off the back of the chair. “Thank you, Stitch, for your advice. I’m going to go talk to Slick: maybe he’ll stab me.”
“Good luck with that.”
“Keep an eye on my effigy.”
“Oh, indubitably.” He watched her go and then shook his head, grinning despite the pins in his mouth. “Completely clueless, I don’t know how she does it.” As he finished the last few stitches, mending the tear, the overcoat’s sleeve detached from the rest of it with a violent shredding sound, and floated down to land on his head. “A broch!”