Velveteen vs. The Multiverse Read online

  Velveteen was a little warier. Santa had been good to them so far, and his toys were wonderful, but… “It seems a little too easy,” she said.

  Santa looked at her solemnly. “Nothing is ever easy, my dear, but that doesn’t mean that everything has to be hard. Be children tonight. Just for one night, be children. You deserve that much out of the holiday, and it’s a luxury that you won’t encounter very often in this life.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the Claw, voice going anxious.

  “Just that time is short, and childhood passes faster than we ever think it will.” Santa leaned over to ruffle the Claw’s hair, which was still brown and straight, just like it had been when he was a human boy. “Now run and play, all five of you. I’ll make sure the exchange goes smoothly when it’s time to send you home.”

  “Last one to the skating pond is a rotten egg!” shouted Jackie, and took off running. The other four, lacking any better ideas, followed her, and only Velveteen looked back.

  In a matter of seconds, Santa and Mrs. Claus were alone in the kitchen. Reaching over to take her husband’s hand, Mrs. Claus asked, “Well? What do you see for them?”

  “Darkness. So much darkness. It’ll take at least one of them, and maybe more, if they’re not careful. There’s love between them, and that may be the most dangerous thing of them all, because love is what opens the cracks that let the darkness in.” Santa stroked his wife’s fingers, still looking after The Junior Super Patriots—looking after the children. “They’re going to be hurt more than they’d think possible if you asked them, and they’ve all been hurt before, so damn badly. It’s inhuman what some people do to children. It’s just inhuman.”

  “But they’ll make it through? They’ll make it out the other side?”

  Santa pulled his hand away from hers, shaking his head. “I don’t know, Anna, I honestly don’t. It’s murky, like even they haven’t figured that out just yet. The future can always change, but for at least one of those four, there isn’t much of a future as things stand now.”

  “You don’t mean…”

  “I’m afraid I do.” Santa sighed heavily. “Maybe we’ll be lucky. Maybe the little animus will choose Halloween, and that will be enough to put paid to what’s hanging over them. If not…”

  “The future will be what it’s going to be. Isn’t that what you always say?”

  “Yes. But that doesn’t mean I can’t wish that I could change it.” Santa took her hand again, and they sat quietly, listening to the distant sound of children’s laughter.

  After that night was over, none of them would ever quite agree on what the best part had been. Yelena loved the Northern Lights, which she was able to grab and twirl around her like gauzy scarves. Aaron liked playing snowball baseball with the elves, who didn’t care if he occasionally blasted into a snow bank or lost control and went tumbling off into the sky. The Claw liked the icy water beneath the frozen ponds, where his lobster’s skin kept him from getting cold. He could dance through the water like Yelena danced through the sky, and he didn’t feel like a freak at all. Velveteen…

  Velma liked the toys in Santa’s Workshop. But most of all, she liked watching Yelena dance in the sky and the Claw dance in the water, and she liked the sound of Aaron laughing. She liked knowing that her friends, for once in their lives, were really happy. As she watched Yelena changing for bed, her own pajamas warm and comforting, she tried not to think too hard about what it meant that they had so little laughter in their lives. Maybe that was just part of being a hero. One more thing they didn’t put in the brochure.

  “Merry Christmas, Vel,” said Yelena, sliding into her bed.

  Velma smiled as best she could, lying down with her own head on her pillow. “Merry Christmas, Yelena,” she said. And to all a good night.

  VELVETEEN

  vs.

  The Secret Identity

  VELVETEEN LOUNGED AGAINST THE WALL of the movie theater, listening with mild disinterest to the screaming, crunching noises coming from inside the lobby. A piercing wail rose briefly above the rest, cutting off as abruptly as it began. Velveteen yawned. More crunching noises followed, along with a high-pitched male voice shrieking “LET GO LET GO DEAR GOD I SWEAR I’LL NEVER DO ANYTHING LIKE THIS AGAIN JUST LET G—” The words dissolved into more incoherent screams.

  The flip-phone clipped to Velveteen’s belt began ringing.

  An observer who wasn’t either running for their life or being pummeled by the contents of a Build-A-Bear franchise location would have seen the bunny-eared superheroine smile as she checked the phone’s caller ID, straightening her domino mask with one hand and opening the phone with the other. “Tag? Hi! No, I wasn’t doing anything important…”

  More screams sounded from inside the theater. They were a little weaker than the previous ones, but still loud enough to earn a frown from Velveteen, who put a hand over the phone as she called, toward the door, “Can you finish it up in there? I need to take this call.” The screaming from inside stopped abruptly, accompanied by the sound of one final, convulsive “thud.” Velveteen smiled. “Thank you!” she chirped, and uncovered her phone. “Tag? You still with me?”

  “I am,” replied Tag, with cautious enthusiasm. “Am I calling at a bad time?”

  “What? No! Why would you think that?”

  “I don’t know. The screaming? I mean, either you’re in the middle of battle, or you’re answering your phone while you’re at the movies, which is tacky.”

  “Oh, no, it’s really no big deal. Just some of Cinemaniac’s thugs trying to rob the movie theater so he could use the projectors to bring an army of unstoppable rubber monsters to life and wreak havoc on downtown Portland.” A small procession of stuffed toys began emerging from the lobby, dragging unconscious henchmen along with them. “They picked the wrong movie theater to rob.”

  “Out of curiosity, where would one find the right movie theater to rob?”

  “Someplace that doesn’t have a seriously bored local superheroine missing her boyfriend? I mean, just as a thought.” Velveteen walked over to the first of the prone thugs, prodding him with the tip of her boot. He groaned, but otherwise didn’t respond. “I may have allowed my toys to take my aggressions out on these boys just a teeny-tiny little bit.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Broken bones, but no coroner.”

  Tag laughed. Somehow, coming from him, the sound was entirely affectionate. “You’re hot when you’re violent.”

  Velveteen’s army of toys began tying up the downed thugs, moving with practiced efficiency as they secured hands and tightened knots. Vel stepped back, letting them work. “So to what do I owe the honor of this call? Please tell me you’re not calling to say that you’re going to be out of town for another week. I’m running out of people it’s socially acceptable for me to hit.”

  “Actually, I was calling to tell you that I’m getting home tonight,” said Tag. “Want me to join you on patrol?”

  Velveteen paused. While the idea of patrolling with her significant other had its attractions—and was supposed to be the ultimate goal of all good superhero couples, since tandem action shots always played well in the papers—she hadn’t exactly worn the nice costume for tonight’s outing. Or brushed her hair. Or bothered to put on mascara. Why go to the trouble when she wasn’t talking to the press or setting up any intentional photo opportunities? Apparently, because boyfriends were like supervillains and would ambush you when they were least expected.

  “How about you meet me at the usual place instead?” she asked, hoping he wouldn’t notice her pause. “That’ll give me time to do the paperwork on this latest bunch of morons. Maybe we could grab something to eat?”

  “I’d like that,” Tag said. His tone turned serious as he added, “I haven’t forgotten what we talked about before, you know. The picnic, and the…talking.”

  “Neither have I,” said Velveteen, and swallowed hard. She liked Tag. She did. She really, really liked him. But did tha
t mean she was ready to take the next big step in their relationship? And if she wasn’t …and if he was…would the relationship survive until the morning?

  “I’ll see you there,” said Tag. “Later, Vel.”

  “Later,” she echoed, and snapped the phone closed. She looked around as she slid it back into her belt, finally spotting one of the larger teddy bears. “Hey, you,” she said. “Get over here and help me get these idiots bundled up for delivery. I have a date to make.”

  The teddy bear trotted obediently over, followed by the rest of her plush minions. Velveteen bent to help them, letting herself focus on her work, and not on the evening ahead of her, which suddenly looked a lot less like a pleasant date, and a lot more like one of those exams she was always afraid of failing. The ones that had Consequences. Velveteen knew way too much about Consequences. For one thing, she knew that she didn’t like them.

  For another, she knew that she liked avoiding them even less. Whatever else she did tonight, she was going to see her boyfriend, and she was going to see what happened next.

  Maybe it wasn’t exactly heroic of her, but when one of the men started to wake up again, Velveteen took great delight in bouncing his head off the floor of the lobby. Not hard enough to concuss him (if he wasn’t already); just enough to make him stop moving. And then once more for good measure.

  And then it was time to go. Whether she was ready or not.

  One might expect the romantic lives of superheroes to be fraught with peril; they are, after all, superheroes. Everything else they do is fraught with peril, so why should their personal relationships be any different? Especially considering the well-established tendency of superhumans to become involved with other superhumans, it seems only natural that they would enjoy romances full of danger, disaster, and the occasional battle for the survival of mankind.

  All these things are accurate. The average superhero relationship will involve multiple kidnappings, mistaken identities, alien invasions, and supposed deaths before achieving a measure of stability. The trouble is that all these things do not prevent superhumans from also suffering from the slings and arrows of a normal romantic life. “It isn’t all spandex and starlets,” said Jolly Roger, in an interview given shortly before his well-publicized disappearance. “The hard parts don’t get any easier just because you can fly.” When pressed to provide details on “the hard parts,” he declared the interview to be over, transformed all the water in a six-block radius into rum, and flew away on his spectral pirate ship. Three days later, he was gone. And that, in its own way, tells us everything we need to know about superhuman relationships.

  When all else fails, we must turn to statistics. The divorce rate among minor heroes (those ranked below “marketable” levels, who may or may not be on active duty with one of the super teams) is roughly equivalent to the divorce rate among normal humans, if not slightly higher. The divorce rate among supervillains, when it can be tracked at all—something that is not always possible, as their public personas rarely include a spouse or children—is substantially elevated, implying that the strains of the superhuman lifestyle can put substantial stress on a marriage. The major heroes, on the other hand, reveal a frightening duality. Those who are on active duty tend to marry and remain married, their love seemingly enduring everything the world can throw at them. Those who are not on active duty, or who are removed from active duty, tend to become single almost immediately.

  This raises the question of whether superhuman relationships are any stronger than those of normal humans, or whether they might not be, in some ways, weaker…and whether The Super Patriots, Inc. might be engineering their more well-known and beloved family groups for their own benefit. How many of our role models are trapped in loveless relationships, unable to leave them for fear of being somehow penalized by the corporation which essentially owns them?

  Perhaps more chilling…what happens when the day arrives which makes this fear no longer sufficient to keep the heroes of the world in check? How long before our superhumans rise up, not for freedom or justice, but for the right to love freely and without fear?

  Velveteen—Velma—oh, she didn’t even know anymore, and that was half the problem—looked mournfully at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. One of the stuffed bears was adjusting the tilt of her rabbit-ear headband, the good one that she generally reserved for court dates and casual photo ops. One of her eyes was normal: mascara on the lashes, a little hint of gold eye shadow on the upper lid to make sure her eyes wouldn’t vanish into her domino mask if someone happened to snap a picture. The other was somewhere between a train wreck and a disaster: three shades of eye shadow, a jagged line of eyeliner, and a certain smudgy quality that could have looked sexy, but really just looked like she’d been finger-painting with her cosmetics. According to the book propped open in front of her, following their step-by-step directions would result in a “dramatic, feminine allure, sure to win your suitor’s heart as soon as the masks come off.” After trying five times to get it right, Vel was starting to think that the book had been written by a particularly nasty supervillain.

  The mascara wand bounced off the mirror, leaving a black smudge behind, and fell to the floor, where it rolled behind the toilet and disappeared. She glared at her reflection for a moment more before picking up the book and checking the back. “Intended for use by active members of The Super-Patriots, Inc. and their associated chapters; all rights reserved,” she read. The book promptly joined the mascara wand on the floor. She might not know much about doing her makeup for civilian occasions, but she’d be damned before she let Marketing tell her how it was done.

  The real trouble with doing your heroing out of a box of secondhand hand-me-downs and leftovers from your own teen years was the fact that you couldn’t really be picky about your sources. Vel reflected grimly on this harsh truth as she wiped the makeup off her face, scrubbing until only a few streaky mascara-ghosts remained. She was on her own for this.

  The bear made one last adjustment to her headband and hopped down from the back of the chair, while a fashion doll with an unfortunate mohawk tapped her high-heeled way along the sink, holding up Vel’s basic velvet domino mask in her unyielding hands. She waited there, her fixed plastic smile eternally patient, until Velveteen took the mask from her.

  “Thanks,” said Velveteen.

  The doll inclined her head, painted expression not changing, and turned to tap away.

  Vel sighed, turning back to the mirror. No makeup; hair in need of a trim, or a style, or something to make it look moderately more fashionable than mud; rabbit-ear headband that had seemed childish on her when she was a child, and now looked either cynical or pathetic, depending on your point of view. At least her uniform fit, and was even, thanks to the Princess’s mice, reasonably flattering; at least she’d been doing this long enough that she was starting to get some actual muscle definition back. Skin-tight velvet unitards weren’t forgiving on anyone.

  At least she knew how to conduct a midnight encounter when she was doing it behind a mask. Vel lifted the domino mask to her face, pressing down on the edges until they adhered to her skin. When she lowered her hands, Velveteen looked out of the mirror at her. Velveteen, child hero turned teen dropout turned surprise comeback. Velveteen, who faced down supervillains and Marketing and monsters, and still got out mostly sane.

  Velveteen, who was scared out of her mind.

  “Fucked-up times five billion,” muttered Vel, and turned to leave the bathroom. Like it or not, it was time for her to go. It was time to meet her boyfriend…for the very first time.

  One of the teddy bears turned the lights out behind her as she left.

  Tag managed to beat Velveteen to “the usual spot”—the roof of the downtown branch of the municipal library, which offered shelter from the elements, lots of interesting things to climb on, and, best of all, access to the rooftop storage shed, allowing them to tuck little things away for later. Little things like picnic baskets, and buckets of ic
e, and bottles of champagne. There wasn’t room in the storage shed for a table, but a few minutes with a Sharpie had been enough to fix that. The table and chairs he’d sketched into existence would only last for a few hours. That should be more than long enough.

  A scraping sound to the right brought his head snapping around and his heart surging up into his throat. The pigeon that had just landed on the edge of the roof looked at him blankly, cocking its head first to one side, and then to the other. Tag sighed. The pigeon cooed inquisitively.

  “I’m not going to feed you,” said Tag. The pigeon continued looking at him. Tag flapped his hands in a vigorous “go away” gesture. “Go on, shoo. Scat. Get out of here. This is a private party. Come back later. Shoo.”

  The pigeon fluffed its feathers, looking briefly like it was going to settle in exactly where it was. Then it turned, almost lazily, spread its wings, and flew away into the night. Tag sighed again, this time with relief.

  “Stupid bird could have ruined the entire mood,” he muttered.

  “And that’s in addition to providing the Princess with a blow-by-blow description of whatever goes on here tonight,” said Velveteen from behind him, in a conversational tone. “Not that I think every pigeon in the city is working for her, but well. When one of your best friends can talk to birds, you learn to be a little wary of anything feathered that hasn’t already been battered and deep-fried.”

  “Vel.” Tag turned, his smile lighting up his face like the halogen streetlights illuminated the street below. Faced with that much delight, Velveteen couldn’t stop a smile of her own from forming. She didn’t pull away as he reached for her hands, either. “You came.”

  “I did,” she agreed, still smiling. “I missed you. How was Canada?”

  “Cold. How were things here in Portland?”

  “Damp. Full of crime.”

  “I heard about some of that. Thanks for not turning out to be a supervillain while I was out of town, by the way. That would have really put a crimp in our relationship.” Tag froze, eyes widening behind his mask as he realized that he had just dropped the “R” word into casual conversation. Which was, to judge by the sudden tension in Velveteen’s smile, no longer exactly casual.