Velveteen vs. The Seasons

  Velveteen and Jack I exchanged a startled look before Velveteen asked, carefully, “What’s the Hall of Doors?”

  “That’s how Papa visits all the children in the world, of course. It used to be fireplaces, but not many children have fireplaces these days. He switched over to a closet-based access system in the 1950s. Why?”

  If Hyacinth had been looking for proof that Iris wasn’t her Iris, she would have received it in that moment, as the light-manipulator joined Jack I and Velveteen in staring at Jack II.

  Finally, Velveteen said, “Take us there.”

  “Of course,” said Jack II. He bowed. “Follow me.”

  They did.

  The Hall of Doors was located right next to the Workshop, presumably to make it easier for Santa to refill his sack. It was a large, ornate structure, rendered odd by the shining second door that seemed to have been painted over the first. Velveteen made straight for it, Jack I on her heels. Iris paused, looking at Hyacinth.

  “Cin…” she said.

  Hyacinth shook her head. “Just go,” she said. “If any part of you is mine, she’ll come back to me.”

  Velveteen plunged into the ghostly door, vanishing. Jack did the same. Iris ran after them. As she stepped through, her image split in two for a moment, one in white, one in black. The one in black disappeared an instant later, following the others out of the world. The one in white collapsed.

  “Lena!” shouted Hyacinth, running to kneel in the snow next to her girlfriend. The flickering door was gone. Somehow, that didn’t matter. “Hey. Hey. You okay?”

  “Alexis?” Iris opened her eyes and blinked up at Hyacinth. “I had the weirdest dream…”

  Hyacinth laughed, and everything was going to be okay.

  *

  The other side of the door was absolutely nothing. It wasn’t black, because black would have been something, and it wasn’t white, because white would have been something; it was nothing, stretching on forever.

  Velveteen, who could not, in fact, fly, made a small sound of dismay. “How am I not falling right now?” she asked, looking to her left, where Jack was clutching one of her snow globes and trying not to hyperventilate. “How am I not plummeting to my doom?” She looked to her right. Polychrome was there, incarnate once again in black and rainbows and a bewildered expression. “You, I get, but how are we not falling?”

  “Gravity only exists when there’s such a thing as up and down,” said Polychrome, sounding dazed. “I was inside a different version of my own head. Like, did that happen to you? Or did I get the special ticket for the what-the-hell express?”

  “Just you and Aaron,” said Velveteen. “Jack’s a metaphorical construct, and I guess the fact that this is technically my mission kept me out of my own head.”

  “Yeah,” said Polychrome. “Where is Aaron?”

  “He didn’t want to give up what he never got to have.” Velveteen’s expression turned briefly sad. “Jack wouldn’t tell me exactly what it was, which I think probably means that was a world where we figured out how to make things work when we were teenagers.”

  “It was,” said Polychrome, and reached for Velveteen’s hand, tangling their fingers together and holding tight. “We were braver there. I don’t know we found it in us, but we were braver.”

  “If we were brave there, we can be brave here,” said Velveteen. “It’s still in us. And if Santa Claus sent us here, it’s because there’s still something we can do. So we walk.”

  “How far?”

  “Until we find an ending. Jack, you with us?” Velveteen turned to look at Jack again, and stopped, eyes going wide. “Jack?”

  Jacqueline Claus, adopted daughter of Santa Claus, metaphor given flesh and now pulled outside the realm of fleshy concepts, offered her a wan smile. She was translucent, more like a girl projected on the air than a girl in any actuality. “I don’t think I can exist here,” she said. “Sorry about that. I hope this doesn’t mess things up for you.”

  “No,” said Velveteen, shaking her head firmly. “No, you are not going to disappear on me. We need you. We can’t get Jackie back without you.”

  “Sure you can,” said Jack. “Just make a Christmas wish, and maybe it’ll come true.”

  “Jack—” Velveteen reached for her, fingers closing on empty air. There was nothing there to grab onto.

  Jack offered one last, flickering smile, and she was gone, leaving the two superheroines standing alone in an endless, empty nothingness.

  “Um,” said Polychrome, after a long pause. “Does this sort of thing happen to you often?”

  “Disturbingly more often than I like,” said Velveteen. She looked blankly at the place where Jack had been. “I keep losing people, Lena. That’s been my whole life. Losing people. I lost my parents, and then I lost you, and then I lost Tad, and Jackie, and now I’ve lost Aaron and Jack. None of you should come anywhere near me. I’m dangerous.”

  “Everyone’s dangerous, Vel.” Polychrome squeezed her hand. “You lost me because I was a scared kid. I came back. You’re not going to lose me again. Pinky-swear.”

  Velveteen laughed, a little unsteadily. “I don’t think infinite nothingness cares about pinky-swears.”

  “Maybe not, but I do, and that’s what matters here.” Polychrome looked around the emptiness. “What do we do now?”

  “I guess we keep going.” Velveteen took a cautious step forward. The nothing continued to hold her up. “All right: looks like we walk. You up for this?”

  “Sounds fun,” said Polychrome, and followed.

  *

  Two women walked across an infinite plane, surrounded by absolutely nothing. They held fast to each other’s hands, as if they feared that letting go could mean being separated forever. It wasn’t an unreasonable concern, given the blankness around them. It was impossible to even tell if they were gaining ground, because there was no distance; only the emptiness.

  “This isn’t working,” said Velveteen. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

  “How could we tell if we were?” Polychrome shook her head. “I’m not tired. I feel like we’ve been walking for hours, but…I’m not tired.”

  “Jack disappeared. That means time isn’t really passing here. If this place knew about time, she’d still be with us.”

  Polychrome gave her a sidelong look. “You really don’t think she’s supposed to exist, do you?”

  “No. I don’t. If you could remember Jackie Frost, you’d understand why. Jack is…Jackie made more sense as someone I’d be friends with. Aurora assigned her to befriend me, so that Winter would have a way in, but she still made sense. She wasn’t just sugar cookies and smiles. She was snide and cynical and one of my favorite people. The idea that she’s gone forever because of me, it hurts.”

  “But we’re superheroes,” said Polychrome gently. “Even if you’re right—and Jack said you were, so I guess I believe you—we were always going to be taking bullets for each other. That’s part of being a team. And the way I remember things, Jack has always been on your team. That means Jackie would have been, too. If she took a bullet for you, she did it because she wanted to. Because she was your teammate, when I couldn’t be. That means she was a hero.”

  “She never liked you,” said Velveteen fondly. “She used to call you horrible names, and threaten to feed you bacon.”

  “Sounds like a real charmer,” said Polychrome. “I’m glad you had her.”

  “I’m going to get her back. I’m going to get them all back.”

  “I believe you,” said Polychrome. She looked around. “We’re not getting anywhere. Got any clever ideas?”

  “We could call for a taxi.”

  “Genius,” said Polychrome. She paused before saying, “You were always smarter than you thought you were. Even when we were kids, I knew it would be your team someday, no matter what Marketing said. I guess I was jealous. I thought you’d leave me behind.”

  “I would never have done that.”

  “I know th
at now. We grew up. That makes a lot of things easier.” And some things harder. Polychrome gave Velveteen another sidelong look. Some things so much harder.

  Sometimes she felt like the greatest gap between her and the woman who had been her best friend for so very long was experience. While Velma had been running from her powers and her past, Polychrome—then Sparkle Bright—had been turning into a professional superhero. She’d taken the advanced classes. She’d learned the tips and tricks and warning signs that Velveteen had never been able to study.

  This, all of this, was a test. There were chapters in her textbooks about situations like this one, and it fit every requirement of a test. They’d lost one person for each phase. Victory Anna in their world, Action Dude in the mirror-world, and Jack Claus here, in this shapeless plain. Polychrome didn’t need to be a genius to know that it was going to take a sacrifice for them to move on to the next level, whatever that was.

  “Do you really think you’re going to be able to rewind the world?” she asked. “To get everything back the way it was before you went away?”

  “I do,” said Velveteen. “There has to be a way, and Santa…he may not always tell us everything, but he doesn’t outright lie. Not even to me. He wouldn’t have sent us here if he hadn’t thought that this could fix things.”

  “So those three years would, what? Not have happened? Or we’d remember everything, only we’d be back at the start?”

  “I don’t know. I guess we have to get there to find out.”

  Polychrome took a deep breath. “I have an idea about that,” she said. “Remember how I used to fly with you when we were kids?”

  “Yeah,” said Velveteen. “We were smaller then.”

  “Relative sizes have stayed about the same. What do you say? Let me give you a boost?” Polychrome offered what she hoped was an impish smile. She didn’t want Velveteen to realize what she was doing.

  There was a pause before Velveteen shrugged and said, “Why not? It’s not like we’re getting anywhere just walking.”

  “Great,” said Polychrome.

  It took them a few minutes to find a carry that would be comfortable for both of them. They wound up with Velveteen riding piggy-back on Polychrome, her legs locked around the taller woman’s waist, her arms slung around her shoulders. Polychrome gripped Velveteen’s wrists like she was a backpack.

  “Hold tight,” she said, and launched herself into the colorless, spaceless sky on a trail of rainbow light.

  *

  Many people had asked themselves, over the years, just how high Polychrome could fly if she didn’t have to worry about silly little things like “running out of air.” Most of them would have had their questions answered if they had been present when she launched herself into the sky that had no borders, flying upward as fast and as hard as she could go.

  After two miles straight up, her rainbow trail turned into an oscillating swirl of colors, melting into one another like an oil slick painted in the air.

  Two miles after that, the colors vanished completely, replaced by a beam of pure, eye-searing whiteness. It was light without gradation, and it was as beautiful as it was alarming. Velveteen would have panicked, if she had been able to see it, but her eyes were squinted tightly shut against the rush of air, and she couldn’t see anything at all.

  “You’re going to fix everything,” said Polychrome serenely. “I believe you. I believe in you. You’re going to fix it all.”

  “What?” shouted Velveteen.

  “I said, I’m sorry,” said Polychrome, and exploded into light.

  It wasn’t a literal explosion: more the sudden conversion of all the nothingness around her into prismatic reality. Polychrome had created illusions before, but this was the largest, and the most complex that she had ever attempted. One instant, there was nothing; the next, Velveteen was tumbling onto a black and white floor, like a chessboard, like something out of a story, and she would have laughed at the sheer cliché of it all if she hadn’t been so damn scared.

  “Poly?!” she shouted, slapping the floor like she thought she could somehow make it disappear again. “Yelena?!”

  “There’s no rulebook to this place,” said an unfamiliar female voice. Velveteen whipped around to find herself looking at a dark-haired woman in a Grecian gown, with a spindle slung across her chest like the world’s most pointless fashion accessory. “Your friend, though, she remembered something from one of her lessons about ways this sort of terrain can be navigated, and she took a chance. We rewarded it.”

  “Where is she?” demanded Velveteen, scrambling to her feet. “Give her back!”

  “She forced us into visibility,” said another voice. Velveteen turned. A man stood behind her, dressed similarly to the woman, with hair the color of pomegranate seeds in the sunlight and an hourglass dangling from his belt. “It took everything she had. She’s falling, currently. She’ll fall forever, if you don’t make your case.”

  “What?” Velveteen looked back and forth between the pair, finally taking a step backward, so that she could watch them both at the same time. “Who are you? Where am I?”

  “You don’t ask who you are,” said the woman. “That’s interesting. Are you that confident in yourself, that you don’t need to ask who you are?”

  “My name is Velveteen. I’m a superhero, and I’m here because Santa Claus told me that if I went through a door hidden in a mirror, I could find a way to fix the world.” Velveteen paused. “Okay, when I say it like that, it sounds sort of stupid, I’ll admit. But it’s the truth.”

  “All the identities you could have claimed, and that’s the one you’re going to go with,” said the man. He took a step toward the woman, and his clothing changed, melting into 1920s American finery. His hourglass became a pocket watch. “Superhero. Super. You don’t want to be ordinary.”

  “For me, this is ordinary,” said Velveteen. The woman still matched the man. She hadn’t seen her change. This was all getting a little cosmic for her tastes, and she really just wanted someone to hit. “Where am I?”

  “Where the Spirit of Giving sent you,” said the woman. “I am Ananke, and this is Chronos.”

  “We’re basically the template off which you were struck,” said the man—Chronos. He smiled thinly. “I’m a chronopath.”

  “And I’m a precognitive strong enough to adjust the world to fit the futures I see,” said Ananke. “I see that you are still confused. Remember when you had your power level assessed?”

  “Yes,” said Velveteen warily.

  “They told you the scale went to five.”

  “Yes.”

  Chronos smiled. “We’re the tens.”

  “…oh,” said Velveteen, after a horrified pause. “So you’re the reason everything is so fucked-up.”

  “We’re not gods,” said Ananke. “We’re just not equipped to live in the world the rest of you inhabit. We’ll break it simply by trying to walk in it like we belong there. So we live here, where things do as we tell them, and every so often someone from the ‘real’ world will show up and tell us that things have gotten out of hand.”

  “So say the word, little hero,” said Chronos. “We can put it all back in the bottle for another fifty years. No more heroes, no more villains. You’ll be free.”

  Velveteen jumped. “What? Wait—what? That’s not why I’m here.”

  Chronos looked bemused. “But that’s always why you’re here. You can only come once, you little mortal heroes, so that’s always what you ask for.”

  “No! I like being a superhero. Maybe there was a time when I didn’t, but I like who I am. I like my friends. If I weren’t a superhero, I wouldn’t know Jackie, or Torrey, or anybody. We would never have met. So no, I don’t want the powers to go away. I just want to go back three years and keep everything from going wrong.”

  “If that’s all—” Chronos reached for his watch.

  It was too easy. Velveteen glanced toward Ananke, who was shaking her head, very slightly. She was mi
ssing something.

  “Wait!” she cried. Chronos stopped. “If we go back three years, am I going to remember this?”

  “No,” he said.

  “So it’s all going to happen exactly the same way.”

  “Yes.”

  “But I won’t be able to come back here. We’ll be stuck with it.”

  He sighed, pouting like a child who had just been cheated out of a great prank. “Yes,” he said.

  “Is there another way?”

  “Yes,” said Ananke. “The Seasonal Lands are less temporally anchored than the Calendar Country. They can send you home the moment you left. No time will pass. No one will have the chance to miss you, or to exploit your absence.”

  Velveteen paused. She was missing something, she knew she was…and then she wasn’t. The inevitability of it all was almost poetic in its painful simplicity. “But that time, for me, will have passed exactly like it did in this timeline.”

  “Yes.”

  “Jackie…”

  “Everything has to cost, little animus. Even a second chance.” Ananke reached for her spindle. Somehow, it remained, even as her clothing had changed. “Will you take it?”

  All those laws, passed in her absence, designed to narrow the world when it should have been getting wider. Polychrome and Victory Anna, hiding from the world; the Princess, increasingly needing to hide from herself. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. Even Jackie would have agreed. Jackie never liked anything that made the world smaller than it had to be.

  “I’ll find a way to get her back,” said Velveteen. “For now? Take it all back. Three years, and I do my term of service to the Seasonal Lands, and this never happened.”

  Ananke smiled as she drew her spindle. “I’m glad I got the chance to meet you,” she said, and held it out, needle-first, toward Velveteen.

  I’m sorry, Aaron, thought Vel. It would have been nice to have been heroes again, together.

  Then she touched the spindle’s point, and collapsed on the checkerboard floor.

  Chronos and Ananke looked at her. “That was new,” he said.

  “Some things have to be,” she agreed. “Send her back. No cheating.”