Page 58 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

Victory Anna sighed, looking around herself at the empty Hall before calmly, almost regally sinking down to sit on the floor. “One down,” she said, and there was no one there to argue.

* * *

“Daddy, catch me!” That was all the warning Epitome—golden boy of The Super Patriots, Inc., strongest man in North America, Hero Beat’s sexiest superhuman three years running—had before his seven-year-old launched herself off the balcony.

She was an incredibly good faller. She didn’t plummet; instead, she spread her arms, increasing her surface area, and dropped with all the grace and poise of an Olympic diver. He had a split second to admire her form before he realized two things in the same horrified moment:

First, that he both did and did not know who she was. Looking at her, he knew that her name was Katie, that her favorite color was purple, at least this week, and that she had a severe allergy to beestings, prompting every member of the family to learn how to operate an epinephrine injector. He knew that she loved puppies, interesting rocks, and singing along to Taylor Swift songs. He also knew that he had never seen her before in his life.

Second, he knew that she was falling, and falling fast. Whoever she was (his daughter), she didn’t know how to fly. Not yet, and maybe not ever. Superhuman genetics were still a largely unexplored field, and there wasn’t that much known about what circumstances led to powers being passed from parent to child. She was falling. She was going to hit the ground.

Technically, his powers didn’t include superspeed. Speaking practically, anyone who could fly was going to seem like a speedster to a bystander; he could dismiss gravity and move with a mentally-fueled self-propulsion that put him in the top percentage of human potential. Less than a second after he had registered the danger to the little girl, his feet were off the ground and his arms were snatching her out of the air, gathering her to him with an instinctively parental tenderness.

She was giggling. She had been falling, and now she was giggling, and her eyes…she had Velveteen’s eyes. No. She had Velma’s eyes. She had her mother’s eyes. She had her mother’s eyes, and she had blonde hair like his, and she was his daughter. She was his incredible, impossible daughter.

“Hi,” he said, sounding dazed.

“Good catch, Daddy!” she said, and squirmed until he put her down. Then she took off running, heading deeper into the house, off on some unknowable child’s errand.

Aaron—Action Dude, Epitome, whatever his name actually was—stayed exactly where he was, staring after her with wide, hungry eyes. Then he turned, finally looking around the room where he’d appeared. It was the sort of comfortable, lived-in foyer that he had seen in a hundred homes, including the one where his parents still lived. There was an umbrella stand next to the door, and a framed copy of Newsweek on the wall, showing him standing between Polychrome and Velveteen. The caption read “A new generation takes the skies!”

“What the hell…?” he asked, taking a step toward the picture. The glass, strangely reflective for what it was, caught his image and bounced it back at him. There he was. Aaron Frank. Blond hair and blue eyes and an all-American jawline that had triggered a hundred angry meetings with Marketing, all of them geared at making him pretend to be some flavor of Christian, some flavor of football star, some flavor of “you’ll play better in Ohio if you’d just.” If he’d just let them tell him who to be, the way he’d once allowed them to tell him who to love.

But he hadn’t done that here, had he? His uniform still held echoes of his old Action Dude persona: the blue, the cut, the positioning of his logo. But the orange was gone, replaced by a burgundy that he knew without even asking himself would echo the color of Velveteen’s current costume. This was a world where he had somehow managed to dig his heels in and stand up for what was actually important. He’d managed to stand up for himself. He’d managed to stand up for her.

“This isn’t fair,” he whispered, and the world didn’t answer him. Worlds so rarely did.

Like a man in a dream that he feared would end at any moment, he began making his way deeper into the house, following the trail blazed by (his daughter) the little girl. He hadn’t gone far before he heard her laughing. He followed the sound, and emerged into a room that was half kitchen, half greenhouse, with domed glass panels making up one entire wall. There was an island built into the middle of the room. There was Katie, sitting on a stool, kicking her feet and munching on a carrot. There was a high chair, holding a small child of indeterminate gender captive, like a miniature supervillain being brought to justice for their crimes. And there…there…

There was Velma. She was wearing her costume, or something like it; she was wearing the costume he guessed she would have had if she’d been allowed to grow into it, updating and refining it with every stage of her superhero career. It was still burgundy and brown, still form-fitting, but the neckline was gently scooped across her chest, neither a child’s turtleneck nor a sexpot’s plunge. Marketing hadn’t designed that neckline. She was wearing neither mask nor headband—this was a private moment with her family, either right before or right after patrol. A pair of fashion dolls were holding up a bowl of mash, while she steered a spoonful of the same stuff toward the smaller child’s mouth.

He must have made a sound, some small, almost inaudible expression of longing and dismay, because she looked up, and she smiled at him. Really smiled at him, the way she used to before he broke her heart and left her unwilling to trust him ever again.

“There you are,” she said. “I was starting to worry that you weren’t going to have time to grab something to eat before we had to go. Do you want some lasagna? I can reheat it for you. Or you can reheat it for yourself while I handle the kids.” Unspoken was the threat that if he asked her to fix his dinner, he was taking over childcare.

He wanted to take over childcare—he wanted it more than he’d wanted anything in years—but he had no idea how to handle children, and besides, he was about to take that smile off her face. He didn’t want to be holding one of her children when it happened. “Blueberries,” he said, in a low, almost strangled voice.

Velma blinked. “We don’t have any,” she said. “It’s lasagna or you could make yourself a sandwich. There are some cold cuts in the fridge. Or there’s Sho’s mash, but she’ll get mad if you eat too much of it.”

“I…” He stopped, shaking his head to clear it, and said, “You know, we made one mistake when we were kids.”

“What’s that?” asked Vel. She put down the spoon, standing up a little straighter. She was starting to look wary. That was a good thing. She might be less furious with him if she caught on without him actually needing to say it.

Who was he kidding? He was an intruder in her home. He had replaced her husband and failed to keep her daughter from jumping off the stairs. She was going to straight-up murder him once she realized what was going on. “Remember how we used to play ‘How Would You Know If I Got Replaced’?”

“Yes,” she said slowly.

“We didn’t account for the fact that maybe our code words would be different from world to world.”

Velma froze. Utterly froze. Aaron waited. He knew what came next.

When she started moving again, she was Velveteen, even without the mask and rabbit ears. Her posture was tight, her motions sharp; her every angle screamed “justice,” even if there was nothing here for her to fight. “Katie, why don’t you take your sister and see if you can find all those Legos you dumped out in the backyard?”

“Can’t the dollies do it?” asked Katie.

“They could, but this way it’s like a game,” said Velveteen. “Go on, now. If you can find them all before I come outside to get you, you’ll get a prize.”

“Okay, Mommy,” said Katie, and slid down from her seat, waiting until Velveteen had freed the smaller girl from her high chair before taking her sister’s hand and skipping toward the back door. Velveteen watched them go, posture still tense.