Velveteen vs. The Seasons Page 24

  “What happens to a seasonal archetype who acts against their nature?” Memory was starting to slither into the forefront of Velveteen’s mind, slow and implacable and undeniable. A frozen world; a challenge unanswered; a transformative shell of ice and snow that had been somehow warm, like it wanted her to be safe more than it wanted her to be possessed. She hadn’t seen Jackie craft the dome that had kept her from the cold long enough for Winter to remake her, but she hadn’t really needed to see Jackie. She’d known that the other girl had been there.

  “It depends on what they did,” said Jacqueline. She looked at Velveteen, and while she didn’t nod, she didn’t have to: her expression of resigned acknowledgment was enough. “For someone who was the selfish side of Christmas, it would seem like acting to save a friend was within their archetype, right? Selfishness endangering the world. Unless that person knew that saving their friend would come with consequences. Unless they put someone else’s good ahead of their own. That would be an act of selflessness. That would be enough to cost.”

  “How much?”

  “Everything.” Jacqueline shook her head. “It cost her the world, and it cost me my world, and now everyone acts like this is where I’ve always been. Even Papa. He says I’ve always been his daughter, and I want to believe him, because it would be easier, but I can’t.”

  “Wait.” Action Dude put up his hand. They both turned to face him. “Are you saying someone revised reality, and rewrote all our memories, because this Jackie person kept Vel from dying?”

  “I never said she saved Velma’s life,” said Jacqueline.

  “You didn’t have to,” said Action Dude. “I mean, we studied you in class, after it became clear that the holidays weren’t going to leave Vel alone. You’re the charitable spirit of the season. The kid who gives all her presents away, who skips lunch so her classmates can eat. You don’t have a selfish bone in your body. Now you’re telling me that you used to be this Jackie girl?”

  “No,” said Jacqueline. “I was never her. I could have been. I wasn’t. And I honestly don’t know if…if I was pulled out of my own reality and into hers, or if I’m her, rewritten. Either way, I don’t remember being her. I just know that I’m not supposed to be here.”

  Action Dude looked from Jacqueline to Velveteen and back again before he said conversationally, “You know, I figured that when I ran away from home to join the fight, shit would get weird. I just didn’t think it would happen this fast.”

  “It’s happened faster,” said Jacqueline. “Not often, but I mean, it’s possible.”

  “You’re joining the fight?” asked Velveteen. There was a tremulous note of hope in her voice, something that would have sounded more natural coming from the girl she’d been back when she’d still believed the world was good, and that a boy named Aaron Frank would always be her hero. “Really?”

  “You were always what it took to make him take a stand,” said Yelena. She sounded amused. She sounded tired. These two things were far from contradictory. They were conjoined, entwined like the brambles that surrounded the castle.

  Velveteen turned. Yelena was standing on the edge of the castle wall, leaning against one of the gargoyles. She was still wearing the top of her black ball gown, but the skirt was gone, replaced by black leggings.

  She smirked at Velveteen’s expression. “Can’t really fly quietly in six layers of satin. Torrey thinks it’s great—this isn’t her era, but at least people aren’t running around half-naked all the time. I think it’s a little confining.”

  “When you spend your whole adult life in spandex, I guess it would be,” said Velveteen. “You going to attack me too?”

  “Nah.” Yelena’s smirk melted into a weary smile. “I missed you too much for that. You scared the hell out of us, Velma. We didn’t think you were ever coming back. And then the spin machine started up, and by the time we realized what was happening, it was too late.”

  “How long have you been standing there?” asked Jacqueline uneasily.

  “Long enough to hear you say that this isn’t your world, and that you’re supposed to be some girl that none of us remembers, except for apparently Vel, who was there when she disappeared.” Yelena shook her head. “You should talk to Torrey. She can tell you a few things about living in a world that’s not your own. I just wish you’d said something.”

  “The world’s healed up around me. It’s patched the holes where Jackie should have been. Like I told Vel, I honestly don’t know whether I was pulled here from another reflection, or whether I was her and got remade into me. Either way, I know I know I shouldn’t be here because I’m being punished for her sins. I just don’t know if it’s Aurora punishing Jackie by making her me, or the Snow Queen punishing me for not being her.”

  “I think this is giving me a headache,” said Action Dude.

  “Welcome to the club,” said Yelena. She sounded faintly amused. “See, if you’d just broken your corporate programming sooner, you could have been over the initial culture shock by now, and have joined the rest of us in dull acceptance of the fact that this the way the world works now.”

  “Brat,” said Action Dude.

  “Privileged jerk,” said Yelena.

  “Now it really feels like old home week,” said Velveteen. “Has the Princess calmed down?”

  “She’s getting there,” said Yelena. “Torrey’s talking her back to normal. She does fairy tale logic really, really well, when she needs to. But it’s bad, Vel. You got that, right? The Princess is hanging on by a thread, and it’s not up to her. Every time a child decides that she’s the bad guy, she shifts a little further from who she’s always been. Once she passes a certain point, I don’t think she’s going to be able to come back.”

  “One friend gone, another going…” Velveteen glanced at Jacqueline. “Nobody told me this could be the cost of going to the Seasonal Lands.”

  “Not even Santa can see the future,” said Jacqueline. “If he could, I like to think he would have tried harder to keep things from happening the way that they have.”

  “All right.” Velveteen took a deep breath. She was still so damn tired. The Seasonal Lands had all but used her up: she had nothing left to spare. She needed a month of soft beds and hot showers and heavy meals, things that would put the meat back on her bones. Somehow it was no surprise that she wasn’t going to get any of those things. She never did, when she really needed them. “We have to fix this. We’ve come too far, and we’ve fought too hard, for things to end this way.”

  “If you’ve got any suggestions, I’m ready to hear them,” said Yelena.

  Velveteen looked at her, shrugged, and said calmly, “We need to go see Santa.”

  None of them had an answer for that. Overhead, the fireworks continued to explode.

  The Princess sat on her (increasingly tarnished) throne, hands gripping the armrests so tight that it felt like she was going to break a nail. The petitioners standing before her on the blood-red carpet clustered tightly together, trying not to look like she terrified them. It would be easy to raise a hand and banish them to the thorny wastes, so easy—

  “Nope,” she said, and her accent was still honey and good red dirt, still Alabama all the way down to the core. She was still herself, down where it counted. “Not going to do that. Thanks for offering, though.”

  “Uh, Princess?” Velveteen looked around, searching the shadows that swarmed, almost impenetrable, in the corners of the hall. They were getting deeper. They were getting darker. And they were getting closer, which was not a comfortable feeling, given that they had no obvious source. “Who are you talking to?”

  “All the fairy tales the world has ever known, and let me tell you, they’ve got some teeth on them.” The Princess grimaced, leaning back in her throne. “I’ve known the Fairy Tale Girls for a long time. They’re a grim little band, and they reflect the darkest sides of our mutual stories, but they’re on the right side. They’ve always fought for good. I thought, if I ever had to cha
nnel those same aspects, that I’d be all right. Turns out I’m weaker than I guessed I was.”

  “You’re not weak,” said Vel, remembering her time in Winter, when freezing all the way to the bone had been so much easier than she had wanted it to be. “You’re overwhelmed. The Fairy Tale Girls got one story each. You’re getting them all.”

  “Too true. Too, too damn true.” The Princess pinched the bridge of her nose. The motif on her throne seemed to be shifting every time Vel looked away, now roses, now skulls. The skulls were winning. “It’s good that y’all have a plan that gets you out of here. I don’t think you should come back.”

  “What?” Victory Anna straightened, eyes wide and alarmed. “I can’t remain in Winter’s domain. My presence is enough to call the Snowfather out of your Santa Claus, and my aspect of the giving season isn’t meant to exist in your world.”

  “See, this is my life.” The Princess waved her hand vaguely at the group. “Most people hear that sentence, they’re going to assume you’re drunk. Me, I figure you’re sober and telling the truth and that you’ll explain things if I ask you about them, which is why I’m not asking. I don’t know who this ‘Snowfather’ is, and right now, I don’t actually care. It’s not safe here anymore.”

  “Why not?” asked Action Dude.

  The Princess turned her blue, blue eyes on him and smiled like the first frost of winter: cold and unforgiving and beautiful, in its own way. Velveteen, who had felt that frost consuming her, shivered.

  “Because you’re a good man,” said the Princess. “Look at you. The all-American boy, very picture of a prince, standing there with your one true love and her faithful friends—you’re a fairy tale waiting to start, and I don’t know how long I can resist you. All of you. I’m going to be the worst enemy you’ve ever faced soon enough, and it’s killing me not to do what my story wants. I can’t let it go. It’ll find someone else if I let it go, and it’s not clean right now. It’s going to do to them what it’s tryin’ to do to me. But I’ll sure have an easier time fighting it if I don’t have to look at your stupid heroes’ faces and remember that I’m never gonna be one of you again.”

  Jacqueline stepped forward, away from her friends, climbing the shallow steps in front of the Princess’s throne. The Princess watched her come with weary eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jack, touching her hand. “I really am. I’ll tell Papa what’s happened. I’ll get him to start the North Pole’s media counterattack. We’ll get you back. We’ll figure out how to make the children start believing in you again, and we’ll get you back.”

  “I sure do wish I could believe you, sugar,” said the Princess.

  Jack leaned in and kissed her on the temple, leaving a glittery smear of lip gloss behind. Then she jumped down from the dais and ran back to the others, pulling a snow globe out of a pocket concealed somewhere in the skirt of her gown. “Hold tight,” she said, grabbing Vel’s hand.

  Action Dude grabbed Vel’s other hand. Polychrome grabbed his, and Victory Anna grabbed hers. Jack stole one last glance at the Princess’s anguished face before smashing the snow globe against the floor. A swirl of marshmallow-scented snow swirled around them, and they were gone.

  *

  According to scholars and historians alike, superhumans have always existed. They may seem like recent additions to the world stage, but they have, in fact, been around for millennia. Their recent prominence is attributable to two major factors: an increased willingness to celebrate one’s neighbors for being able to fly or bend steel with their bare hands, rather than having them burnt at the nearest stake, and centuries of stories talking about the exploits of ostensibly fictional individuals doing the same things for the public good.

  Much as modern audiences have difficulty believing the intelligent people capable of coming up with brilliant mathematical and architectural theories could believe that disease was caused by vapors from the earth and that handwashing was thus optional, there was a time when most chose not to believe in the existence of superhumans. They were consigned to myth, legend, and cautionary tale, and remained that way for centuries.

  The rise of the superhuman in modern times is interesting in part because it has happened so swiftly and steeply, and in part because it seems as if it should have happened centuries ago. Unmasking is an inevitability, once there is a mask to remove, and while certain power classes have certainly become more common with time—a prehistoric technomancer, for example, would no doubt be indistinguishable from a modern earth manipulator—the birth rate of most superhumans seems to have been consistent throughout human history.

  What changed?

  Some scholars of superhuman history believe that we did, alongside the rest of humanity. They point to gaps in the historical record, to disappearances that were never solved, assassinations in locked rooms, and mysterious plagues known only from the graves they left behind, and cite them as obvious proof that history has been rewritten. Chronopaths and continuity manipulators are among the rarest of the superhuman types: most revise themselves out of existence before finishing high school, while others are known only by the holes they leave behind.

  It would not be hard, they argue, for a sufficiently powerful chronopath to rewind the world every time superhumans were revealed to the public, erasing their reality from the collective consciousness. By doing this over the course of centuries, it would be possible to prevent mankind from ever realizing its full potential.

  The question then becomes why? And if the answer is a good one, why has it ceased? Why has the modern age been allowed to grow ripe with heroes and villains, with superhumans of a hundred different stripes, sometimes seeming to darken the skies as they pass by overhead? If some cosmic force or secret organization has dedicated this much time to keeping the greater population ignorant of the existence of superpowers, what would make them stop?

  Is our world a soap bubble, waiting for the day when the secret masters of all decide that we need to be cast back into ignorance? Most importantly of all…is there anything we can do to stop it?

  *

  For Polychrome and Action Dude, the transit through the swirling snow was familiar, even comforting; they had been taking this trip, through this mechanism, since they were children, and knew that only good things waited for them on the other side. For Victory Anna, it was a tooth-grindingly wrong reminder of how much she had lost when her home reality was destroyed; the world might have accepted her as a part of it, but the Seasons never would. That was only right. Something had to remember that she didn’t belong here, if only to reassure her that she was not, in fact, mad.

  For Velveteen, it was all wrong. Traveling with Jackie wasn’t a swirl of warm snow and the scent of cocoa. It was a burst of freezing cold, like chewing peppermint gum with your entire body. It was mint and tingling brightness, that first slap of chill before the winter really settled any deeper than the skin. It was invigorating, it was impossible to ignore, and it was not a warm embrace and the scent of hot chocolate. This was not the way things were supposed to be. This was wrong.

  When the snow fell, they were standing in a snowbank. Well. Most of them were standing in a snowbank. Yelena was hovering a foot or so above it, the air around her lit up like the Northern Lights. Just the sight of them was enough to make Vel’s skin crawl. Torrey was standing primly atop the snow, her holiday-themed costume change having come with a pair of snowshoes. And Aaron…

  Aaron was sitting down in the snow, his weight resting on his hands and his face turned toward the sky, laughing helplessly. Unlike the rest of them, the passage hadn’t dressed him in a variation on his normal costume (which was probably reassuring; she’d always been a little weirded-out seeing her Jewish teammate and boyfriend dressed head to toe in Christmas colors, instead of something blue and white and culturally appropriate). Instead, he was wearing dark blue ski pants and an ugly holiday sweater stitched in snowflakes, stars, and snowmen wearing ironic beanies.

  “Oh, how delightful,
” said Torrey dryly. “The poor man’s snapped under the strain. Well, I never liked him anyway, and our time here is inherently short, due to the strain I place upon our environs. I say we leave him for the wolves.”

  “That’s not kind to the wolves,” said Yelena. Her own costume was still skin-tight, but was no longer midnight black: instead, auroras climbed from her ankles to her knees, and from her elbows to her wrists, while her normally rainbow sash was an ever-changing strip of winter sky.

  “No one is getting left to the wolves,” snapped Vel, and knelt next to Aaron, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Hey. You okay?”

  “I’m here,” he said, and beamed at her. “You look great. I love it when you have holly in your hair.”

  Velveteen resisted the urge to reach up and feel what Winter had done to her this time. She had skin, not snow; she could feel her heart beating. That was good enough for her. “Yes, good, you know where you are. We sort of rode a magic snow globe to get here, and that sounds weird even to me. But are you okay?”

  “I haven’t been here since I let them drive you away,” he said, and grabbed her, hauling her down into the snowbank with him. It was a child’s embrace, giddy and joyous and utterly platonic. Velveteen squeaked before she was sprawling in the snow. He didn’t let her go. “Santa didn’t let any of us come to visit after Marketing drove you away. We were all on the Naughty List.”