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Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/44843263.
Fandom: Dimension 20: The Unsleeping City
Relationship: Josefina Gatsby/Misty Moore
Rating: Teen and up
Warnings: Mentions of a canonical character disappearance.
Published 2023-02-07 for the Candy Hearts Exchange
Words: 3,397
The actress currently known as Myrtle Moon had lived through every age of New York since it was New Amsterdam, and in her expert opinion, New York in the nineteen-teens was a drag.
Some people liked it. Some stuffy rich people who patronized the arts liked it, and that was fine, for what it was worth; they hired Myrtle to sing for private shows, and they paid well, but the money was cold comfort when they didn’t really care.
Myrtle was old news. The beginnings of Broadway had been such a good time, but then Myrtle got older, Ziegfeld got popular with his micromanaged showgirls in their special underwear—you’d never have caught Myrtle striking static poses for a living in a petticoat picked out by her boss, no thank you—and there was a war and a flu and an actors’ strike and Myrtle was too old for all of it. All she wanted was to get enough adoration from her audience to scrape together the magical power for a new body. She’d had big plans for her last few lives, and she’d more or less realized them, but the old world had gotten stodgy.
Her rich patrons gave her so little by way of adoration that Myrtle funded her own comeback recital, a special one-night-only engagement that she flogged all over town as relentlessly as a political campaigner, scraping together enough audience members for one final ovation. She sang two encores before retiring to her dressing room and ditching the Myrtle identity for good.
Her new name was Hazel Villanova. Hazel had to scrimp a bit to earn back Myrtle’s money; she’d spent a lot of it on creature comforts during the last few lean years. Never mind. Myrtle was done with; Hazel was a bright young thing on the verge of a new decade. She was going to start wearing short dresses, befriend the up-and-coming, dazzle the directors, become the muse of some writer or composer who would make gorgeous music inspired by her, and to meet these influential new friends she was going to throw and attend the greatest parties—
On January 17, 1920, alcohol became illegal throughout the United States.
“Well, fuck,” said Hazel Villanova.
Not that Hazel was a stranger to the underground. She put a few discreet inquiries to her contacts in Faerie, checked in with the angel of Bethesda Fountain (more to maintain the relationship than in hope of social news—Em didn’t get out much), and discovered she liked Bobby Goodfellow’s suave new gentleman-gangster persona very much.
“Should I get into bootlegging, Bobby?” she asked him with a showy pout, accentuated by her new lipstick. Myrtle’s makeup had adhered to good taste for a woman her age, but Hazel liked painting her mouth red. Cerise, they called it in Paris. “Should I go to Paris? I don’t have to stay in New York.”
“We both know you’re not leaving New York, doll,” Bobby said, leaning toward her over the table of their corner booth at a bar in Nod. “Take a vacation if you want, but this is your home. Have you taken a look at this place lately?”
Hazel thought she had, but she blinked and took another look around. It was still classy, with wood-paneled walls brightened by mirrors—mirrors that showed more images than they took in, since this was the sixth borough, after all—but there was something newly furtive about the place.
“Liquor’s still legal in Nod, of course,” Bobby said, “but people are starting to dream about it differently. There’s a guard at the door, see? He’s not gonna go after anybody, or not unless that’s what they’re into, but it’s started to be part of the general idea of going out drinking. Wild, how their laws creep into the dream world. But that’s just part of what I wanted to show you. The other part is her.”
Hazel raised her pencil-thin eyebrows at him in a silent question, and he jerked his head in the direction of the bar behind him. It was an unspecific gesture, but when she looked deeper into the room, she saw who he meant:
Nod was pulling towards one person. The very colors of the room changed in her immediate environment—not radically, but gorgeously, daffodil yellows turning to a richer egg-yolk shade, blues going from dull to deep indigo, and the reds fracturing into every shade of red the dream world had to offer. The woman herself was chic, tasteful, dressed in a slim, shimmery-black dress and what looked at first glance like a fur shrug, but on closer inspection was actually a live white fox cuddled around her shoulders, whispering something in her ear.
Hazel leaned forward, fascinated. “There’s a new Vox Phantasma?”
Bobby said something in response, but Hazel didn’t notice what it was, because the woman turned in her direction and looked right at her with big brown eyes as deep as dreaming, and Hazel quite forgot there was anybody else in the bar.
Hazel had many lifetimes’ worth of charisma, so it was easy, once she’d made her way up to the bar, to catch the Vox’s eye with a raised brow.
“Have we met?” the woman asked. She was young but there was a touch of huskiness to her voice. She looked overawed, not by Hazel specifically, but with the raw amazement you sometimes saw in brand-new Voxes.
“No,” said Hazel, “which is a real blank spot in your education. What are you drinking?”
The woman peered into her glass, apparently not remembering what was supposed to be in it, and the fox around her shoulders said, “Aspirations over ice.”
“That’s heady stuff,” Hazel said, “better stick to gin for the rest of the night.” She wasn’t sure it was actually nighttime; she never had a strong sense of time when she wasn’t in a show, especially when she came to Nod. She ordered a round of gin fizzes from the bartender, who accepted payment in the form of a sincere compliment for every drink. Hazel thought that was a high price, but the Vox seemed impressed by the way that she rattled off an observation about the bartender’s grace and attentiveness and then, for the second drink, said, “What if I compliment the newcomer, will that count?”
The bartender gave a lopsided grin and said, “Normally, no. For the Vox Phantasma, sure. We’re all very proud.”
“Well,” said Hazel, “tell me your best qualities and we’ll be all set.”
The woman looked a little overwhelmed. “I can do magic.”
“Sure, so can everybody here. What else?”
“I said a kind word to this arctic fox and it pledged to be my friend forever.”
“Nice, but that’s a story, not a quality. Tell me, are you very learned? Or perhaps very clever, which is not the same thing? Do you have a good eye for dresses or pictures; do you make people feel at ease?” The Vox blushed; in the kaleidoscopic intensity of Nod, her cheeks were a deep rosy brown that Maybelline would have killed for. Hazel leaned in closer and said, “Or do you not even know you’re so full of pure dreaming that the whole sixth borough is ready to fall at your feet?”
The Vox drew in a sharp, startled breath. The fox around her shoulders looked Hazel in the eyes and said, “You’re a hunter.”
“Oh, no,” Hazel said. “I’m a giver. Wait and see.”
They drank a lot of gin that night and danced to a lot of songs, old and new and never written. The Vox’s name was Josefina Gatsby, and she was a decent hoofer; what she lacked in practice she made up for in sheer dreamy ebullience. At some point the fox leapt onto the bar and started doing its own dances with some gnomes who’d shown up. Hazel was a little worried the Vox would be too naïve to pick up on Hazel’s intentions, but she didn’t blush as Hazel danced closer and closer to her during the fast jazzy numbers; she laughed and kept pace. When the music got slower, Hazel got bolder, with a, “This is your kingdom, sweetheart, you can do no wrong,” and a hand at the small of Josefina’s back. “But I’m a professional, I’ll lead,” and she did, though Josefina introduced a few ornamental flourishes of her own into the dance.
It was hard to tell, in Nod, what was desire and what was imagination, speculation, some mind probing at a possibility in a way that made it real. The difference was immaterial to Hazel, but mortals tended to care about it. If she wanted more than a dance, better to take this to the waking world.
“I’m an actress,” she said. “Come see one of my shows.” She magicked a comp ticket out of the air and tucked it into the neckline of Josefina’s dress.
So then she had to get a role.
The desire not to embarrass herself in front of Josefina was a surprisingly powerful motivator. Hazel threw herself into monologue practice, voice lessons, and dance class, determined to master the capabilities of her new body and start working as soon as possible. Auditions were time-consuming, of course, but it paid to have the patience of an immortal.
The first job she booked was small potatoes compared to what Myrtle used to do in her prime, but she got to put all aspects of her triple threat to use, the music was modern and fun, and it would make a good first line on her new C.V. She’d cast a little spell on the comp ticket she conjured for Josefina, so she could tell when it entered the theater. The night that she went onstage to perform for the Vox Phantasma, she put a little extra oomph into her high notes and high kicks, and she thought she got some extra admiration from the audience.
Afterward, Josefina showed up backstage, looking for all the world as if she owned the place. Normally no one got that far without express direction from Hazel. Nobody else involved with the production was initiated into the Unsleeping City, but they still treated Josefina like royalty. The employee who brought her to Hazel’s dressing room actually bowed as he left, out of an apparent sense of confusion.
Hazel was in an old marabou robe of Myrtle’s, unpinning her sequined hairpiece. She grinned at Josefina in the mirror. “Hiya, dream girl.” She fished a hairpin out of her curls and turned around. “Enjoy the show?”
Josefina was in black again, surprisingly dressed down in wide-legged trousers—good thing this theater wasn’t too hoity-toity or they might not have let her in—and a blouse tied off with a white scarf at the neck. Josefina let her eyes travel down to Hazel’s stocking feet and back up to her eyes before saying, “Very much.”
So Hazel hadn’t been mistaken. She smiled more warmly. “You want to get out of here? I can be in my street clothes in two shakes.”
“I’d love to, but I’m afraid I have a question for you.”
“Hit me.”
“What do you know about the man-eating crocodiles in the sewers?”
Hazel took a step back. “Jesus. Are you telling me it’s a work night?”
“I’ve suddenly got a lot of those. People tell me you can help in a fight. Is that true? I could use it.”
“Sure, I can provide some inspiration. I’m going to need to change into my other street clothes, in that case.”
Josefina paused again, just for a breath too long, and said, “Take your time.”
Hazel was a little worried that two people would be too few, but it turned out she wasn’t the only one who had been working hard lately. Josefina was distractingly magnificent when she dispatched the last alligator with a spell thrown as precisely as a knife and told the assembled rats and cockroaches, “Tell them there’s a new Vox and she’s watching.” The vermin scattered to all the tunnels and boltholes they came from, leaving behind a quiet, empty station. Just the two of them, a lot of white tile, a handful of dead alligators, and the sound of blood dripping off the platform onto the train tracks. They hadn’t even gotten too filthy in the fight, although by that point Hazel wasn’t sure there was any amount of blood or muck that could have stopped her from striding up to Josefina and kissing her so hard she thought it might punch them right through this world and back into Dreaming.
They were a good team. They weren’t the whole team; the Unsleeping City was vast, and it had other protectors. Hazel knew a lot of them, the elementals and the vampires and the wizards and, for better or worse, the pixie mafia too. They all collaborated sometimes, depending on what was needed. But when it was just the two of them they always got the job done.
They were a good team in other ways, too. Josefina was the best hostess Hazel had met this side of reality, and she had money—she never liked to say from where, and Hazel didn’t press the subject, assuming that if the Gatsby family had stepped on some little people on its way up, Josefina was trying to make up for it now. She had a magnificent penthouse in Murray Hill and knew how to get in touch with all the most interesting people, so when she threw parties, she provided the guestlist, exquisite décor and catering, and a cultivated sense of exclusivity. Walk through one of her parties and half the conversations would be about trying to get close to the hostess. Everyone knew a little about her but nobody was as close as they wanted to be; nobody had access. Hazel would invite a few select guests from the flipside of town and sing for the room just long enough to leave ’em wanting more, and it was even odds whether dawn would find her in Josefina’s bed or out in the city chasing danger or information or a role.
She loved being young again. She hadn’t had this much energy since the Ulysses S. Grant administration. Everything in the city was wonderful and terrible at the same time, and she was in a position to help; she was making the art that she wanted to make; she was better socially connected than she had ever been.
Hazel felt an affection for Josefina that was, she imagined, like what humans felt for people they’d grown up with. The two of them had started out together, Hazel in her new life and Josefina awakening to her powers. There’s something special to a bond like that. But what Hazel loved most was this city of people who’d left their old lives behind; she sang song after song onstage about people busting out of their hometowns and looking for something better; she was ancient and couldn’t be tied down; and anyway, they’d said nothing between them about the future, or even about keeping in touch.
So it took her a long time—years, really—to notice that Josefina was less happy.
She sent a telegram round to Josefina every once in a while, offering tickets or drinks or an introduction to some mermaids living in the East River, and sometimes Josefina would answer and sometimes she wouldn’t, but the times that she didn’t got more frequent as the decade unfurled.
Hazel tried asking around in the Unsleeping City, but it was hard to get an answer. The wizards of the Gramercy Occult Society only heard from Josefina occasionally, and they didn’t know where she was if not actively working on something with them. Josefina had a family somewhere who supplied her with money, but they didn’t come to her parties or show up much in the stories she told, so Hazel didn’t really know who they were. The Bleecker Street Dragon, the Williamsburg Golem, and the Bethesda Fountain Angel only knew of the Vox Phantasma by her reputation. For someone so widely connected, she’d left a shallow mark.
That seemed incorrect, but Hazel didn’t know what to say or do about it, and anyway Josefina hadn’t disappeared; she showed up sometimes, and they would have a good time together. There were just increasingly large gaps between those times.
Maybe it shouldn’t have taken so long for Hazel to realize she was the only person in a position to do something about it. Maybe she should have taken the initiative herself, somehow. As it was, it was April of 1927 when the little white fox came to Hazel’s apartment complex and parked itself outside the front door to wait for her.
Hazel saw it there as she arrived home from a rehearsal. She stopped short. “Well,” she said, looking around; the doorman to her building was standing just inside the glass front door into the lobby, watching to see if she was coming in. Hazel cleared her throat. “What a well-behaved little dog,” she said. “I wonder if its mistress has lost it.”
The fox looked up at her with its head tilted to one side. It was sitting upright with its tail wrapped nearly around all four feet. “She doesn’t know I’m here. Will you come with me?”
Hazel bent over as if to pet the fox. “Can I get you a piece of ham, sweet puppy? Is there anything you want?”
The fox showed patience with her playacting. “You don’t have to bring anything. Just come.”
So she followed the fox, not to Josefina’s building as she had expected, but to a high and lonely place uptown, overlooking the East River, where she could see a figure in black staring into the distance.
Hazel approached carefully, the fox hanging back. “Heya, dream girl.”
Josefina turned around slowly and seemed unsurprised to see her. “Hi, Hazel.”
“Is there some important dreaming going on up here?”
“No. Maybe. I’ve been dreaming…well, you know. I’m always dreaming. But there’s been someone there, lately.”
Hazel raised an eyebrow. “A good someone?”
“I don’t know,” Josefina said thoughtfully. She turned to look back, away from Hazel, and the fox came up to wind around her ankles. “Might be dangerous. Might be an adventure. I feel like whoever it is is waiting for me.”
Hazel narrowed her eyes. “Sweetheart, take it from one of the fair folk: something powerful waiting for you in the darkness is usually not a great idea to pursue.”
Josefina didn’t answer. The distance between them, Hazel thought, was so precise that it could have been a weapon crafted for her, if any of her enemies were clever enough to do it. She was close enough to be hurt by whatever was going to happen here, and far enough that she couldn’t see how to stop it. After a long moment she took Josefina by the elbow and said, “Maybe let’s go find a cup of coffee.”
That wasn’t the last time they saw each other. There would be years, yet, of parties and shows and nights out and nights in. But that was the day that Hazel remembered the most often in later years, revisiting it like an old photograph and fraying the edges in the process. Somewhere in that conversation she had missed her cue. Should she have coaxed? Persuaded? Sweet-talked? Tempted? Even in retrospect that all seemed too dangerously fey; fine to try on some humans, but not on her. Not on a creature of dreaming.
Perhaps she should have said something human. Hazel wasn’t a person who made commitments, and she loved the theater more than any person—that had been true ever since she followed that silly Morris dancer across the ocean and then ditched him for New York itself. The city, the audiences, and the stage would remain after Josefina was gone, no matter how long a lifetime she had. Might have had. Could have had.
“I’ll miss you,” Hazel could have said, if only she’d realized it was true.
Instead, she woke up some mornings remembering the specific sunny chill of early April after a rain, the distant gaze of a Voice of Dreams losing touch with waking life, and told herself, “I’ll do better next time.”