Page 11 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

“Sorry, I left my watch with my other body,” said Velveteen.

“It’s about to be the Spring Equinox in the Calendar Country,” said Lucy. “Persephone is going to walk from Winter into Spring, and since you’re supposed to go there next, we figured you could go with her. It’ll be a little easier for you to grow back into yourself if you’re in the company of a harvest goddess. They tend to simplify things.”

Velveteen’s unnecessary breath caught in her throat as she went perfectly still, trying to make herself believe what the girl was saying. “I could…you mean I get to leave? I get to move on?” I get to have skin again, real skin, the color of worn brown velvet, and not this snowy bullshit? I get to have a heart, and a heartbeat? I get to be real?

“Yes, you get to be real, just like the rabbit you were named after,” said Lucy, and for once Velveteen was so overcome with joy and terror and delight than she couldn’t even get angry about her mind possibly being read. All the feelings were muted, but they were stronger than anything she had felt since the Winter had stolen her heart away. “You just have one more task to accomplish, and then you get to go. We’ll wait here for your word, and hope that you’ll choose us.”

“What do you need me to do?” Velveteen asked. Lucy told her.

Velveteen stared. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, you have got to be kidding,” she said. Lucy just smiled.

* * *

The edges of Winter were abrupt. One minute she was walking over frozen tundra, with an army of snow creatures behind her; the next, there was nothing but blackness, and the soft sound of melting ice dripping down into the nothingness on the other side. Santa flicked the reins of his sleigh, bringing his team of reindeer to a halt. Next to him, Mrs. Claus fidgeted with her knitting and tried not to look at the pale, silent girl who was standing so close to the edge. She wanted to call her back, to beg her to step away from the abyss. She didn’t say anything. Everything they had given up, everything they had risked, had been for this moment. She wasn’t going to ruin things now.

Jack Frost drifted down from above as Lucy stepped out of the trees. The Snow Queen did not walk, or float, or anything so common; she simply appeared, forming herself out of the elements as easily as one of Velveteen’s snow bunnies. Velveteen glanced at her, a calculating expression on her face, and then looked away.

If she could control the creatures she called out of the snow, and the Snow Queen was made out of snow, maybe she could control the Snow Queen. But only if she had to: only if the Winter refused to let her go. Some part of her still remembered what it was to have a heart, and that part of her urged caution. If she crossed that line, it said, she might not be able to find the way back.

There was a glimmer of light in the sky overhead. It intensified, and Aurora appeared, shining at the center of it all like a star. Velveteen turned her impassive gaze on the living soul of Winter. Any capacity she might have had for being impressed was long since gone; all she had now was waiting.

Velveteen waited.

“Hello, Velveteen,” said Aurora, and smiled with a thousand shifting faces, so that it was impossible to say what she had looked like when the smile ended, only that she had been beautiful in her delight. “Have you enjoyed your time with us?”

“Oh, it’s been a real treat,” said Velveteen. “Lucy says I get to move on to Spring soon.”

“Lucy is correct,” said Aurora. “You’ve been an excellent servant of the season, Velveteen. I hope you will consider that we have been kind to you, when the time comes to make your final decision about where you belong.”

Silence would have been the wiser course of action, especially here, where the world dropped away, where her term in service to the Winter was almost at an end. Velveteen struggled to keep her lips pressed together, willing them to meld like two sheets of ice. But she couldn’t. Waiting had become a skill of hers, now that she was frozen solid; silence was never going to be that easy.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she demanded. Her voice was too big and too loud for the silence at the edge of the world. It echoed, knocking snow off the trees and sending birds scattering into the air. “You froze my heart. You turned me into snow. You refused to let me have any contact with the one person in this season who’s actually my friend, maybe because oh, hey, this is a shitty way to treat someone who came to you in good faith. Now you hope that I’ll consider coming back to work for you forever? Why the hell would I want to do that?”

“I know you’ve been tired since you came here,” said Aurora. “I know you’ve been angry, and frustrated, and thwarted in the things you wanted to accomplish. But you haven’t cried, have you? You came here wounded and heartsick from the things you witnessed, and none of those wounds have pained you, because they belonged to another world. Did we freeze you? Yes. We took your pain away. We took your weeping away.”

“Tag needs me,” said Velveteen, voice unsteady. She didn’t want to believe what Aurora was saying. Sadly, even though she didn’t have a heart anymore, she remembered having one. She remembered how much pain she’d been in when she stepped through the wall between the worlds and landed in Winter’s eternal cold. She remembered funerals, and tears, and believing that nothing would ever be all right again.

She hadn’t had a single nightmare since she’d walked through the heart of Winter. There was something to be said for a life lived under a sheet of ice. It was a cold, cruel something, but still. It was there. She couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t.

“You would have woken him before you came here if you’d been certain that you had it in you,” said Aurora calmly. “The fact that you didn’t tells me you were unsure of your own heart, even before we had to take it away. All that uncertainty will return when you step into Spring. All that pain. All that grief. It was never destroyed, you know. It was only deferred.”

Velveteen was silent for a moment, considering Aurora’s words. Then she shook her head, and said, “Damn. I mean, I knew you were manipulative and willing to do whatever you needed to do in order to protect your season, and maybe I even respected that a little bit, but damn. You literally blocked off my ability to process grief, and now you’re going to dump me on Spring? Are you warning them? Do they at least get some sort of ‘how to handle your emotionally damaged superheroine’ pamphlet?”

“You chose who you would come to first,” said Aurora calmly. “It’s not Winter’s fault that we needed you to be capable of doing your job.”

“Right,” said Velveteen. “The part where it makes you emotional heroin is just a fun side effect. Let’s get down to it, okay? I don’t feel like listening to you anymore. Lucy said you had one last job for me to do. You want to tell me what you think I’m going to do for you?”

“You’re going to do what you were made to do, Velveteen, animus, most powerful life-bender of her generation, even if you never choose to embrace it the way you could. You’re going to save us all.”

“Swell,” said Velveteen. “That’s just what I always wanted to do.”

“No, it’s not,” said Aurora. “Isn’t it lucky for us that you don’t have a choice in the matter?”

* * *

Aurora led her to the very edge of the world, the place where the snowy landscape crumbled down into nothingness. The footing there was uncertain: Velveteen could feel the ground shifting and sinking beneath her feet, threatening to dump her into the abyss. Unlike Aurora, she couldn’t fly—she sometimes felt as if hers was the only power set in the world that hadn’t come up with some crappy excuse to let her take to the skies. She watched the snow falling into nothing with a wary eye, and wondered whether the last thing she was supposed to do for Winter was die.

“People used to think of Winter as an endless palace of snow, where the black mountains broke against the twilight sky, and the sun never fully rose,” said Aurora, as calmly as if they weren’t standing at the edge of everything. “They dreamt snowmen and ice bridges and cold. The Snow Queen and I both come from that era, you know. We’re older than anything else that remains in this world.”