Page 79 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

“Good.” She let go. “Run along now. She’s not likely to stay out of trouble while she waits for you.”

He ran along. Admirably fast, too: the Princess wasn’t sure she’d ever seen someone run along that quickly when not running for their lives. Then again, maybe she still hadn’t.

Chuckling to herself, she closed the door and wandered toward the kitchen. After all that, she’d more than earned a little pie.

Half a continent and a time zone away, Action Dude jogged to catch up with Velveteen, who was making for the end of the alley like she was afraid her shore leave was going to be canceled at any moment. She barely spared him a glance as he stepped up beside her; the bulk of her attention was reserved for the empty street.

Nothing moved. Not even a raccoon. Privately, Action Dude thought that might be for the best: he couldn’t imagine a situation in which a raccoon would have committed crimes great enough to deserve the full force of Velveteen’s pent-up wrath. “Do you want to hit the rooftops?” he asked. “You can get a better view.”

“No fire escapes, and I’m really not feeling up to scaling a building,” she said.

Action Dude lifted an eyebrow in answer before allowing his feet to lose contact with the ground. Drifting, he waited.

It wasn’t a long wait. It never was. Velveteen turned to look at him, already scowling. “Show-off,” she snapped. “I don’t need anyone to carry me. I’m not a trainee anymore.”

“I never said you were,” he said. “But when one half of a team-up can fly and the other can’t, it only makes sense to take advantage. Don’t think of it as me carrying you. Think of it as you riding me.”

As soon as her cheeks flushed red, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. It was too late to take it back, and too late to avoid the finger she jabbed at his chest. “I’m not still mooning over you, got it? I got past that a long time ago. So if you’re here because you think we can start up where we left off—where you dumped me off—then you’re out of your fucking mind. Got it?”

“Got it,” said Action Dude wearily. “Honestly, I got it a long time ago. I fucked up. If I could go back and do it all differently, I…well, honestly, I don’t know if I would, because maybe if we’d stayed together Supermodel would still be alive and screwing with everyone’s heads, and Sparks would still be pretending to be happy when she was completely miserable, and I don’t know if I could live with myself knowing I’d been that selfish. But I’m also pretty glad I’m never going to have the chance to find out. So please, can you give me the benefit of the doubt for one minute, and let me boost you onto the rooftop?”

“I…” Velveteen stopped, looking at him carefully. Then, finally, she said, “Sure. We’ll have a better view from up there anyway.”

His smile was a fleeting thing, there and gone almost before it could fully register. He opened his arms. Velveteen turned her back on him and, with the ease of long practice and training, fell into them, positioning herself so as to be easy to hoist and even easier to drop. (When doing teammate transport, the onus was generally on the one being transported to protect the flier, rather than the other way around.)

Effortlessly, Action Dude launched himself into the sky, shooting upward at a speed that defied several laws of physics. Velveteen was heavier than she’d been the last time he’d carried her this way, but he was stronger, and it balanced out: it all balanced out, oh, this was where his equilibrium was, where it had been waiting for him for years on years. This was where he had always been meant to be.

By the time they reached the rooftop and he set her gently down, Action Dude was grimly certain of two things. First, that he had made a mistake by agreeing to be the Princess’s representative on this little adventure, and second…

Second, that he was a hypocrite of the worst kind, because if some cosmic force had appeared to him in that moment and offered him the chance to take it all back, he would have done it without hesitation or regret. He would have traded a world that wasn’t better yet, necessarily, but was getting there for a world where he had been smart enough to hold on tight and never let go.

He was so screwed.

Velveteen spared him a quick smile, just a few shades warmer than professional, before creeping to the roof’s edge and peering over. Her form was perfect. Her form had always been perfect. Out of their training class, she had been the only one who couldn’t handle a bullet without serious repercussions, and so she had been the one to work hardest at never getting shot.

After a moment’s silent surveillance she stepped back from the edge, straightened, and started for the corner, moving at a dead run. Action Dude realized what she was going to do a bare second before she did it. He zipped after her, grabbing her outstretched hands while she was at the peak of her jump and using himself as a sort of human trapeze bar, launching her onto the next roof. She rolled easily through it, getting back to her feet and resuming her run.

They fell into an easy rhythm, familiar and novel at the same time. How often had they used this pattern to canvass, him in the air but flying low, her moving under her own power as much as possible to increase their combined flexibility? How many nights, how many evenings, how many patrols?

Not enough. It could have been a lifetime—should have been a lifetime, the two of them against the world—and it would never, ever have been enough.

On the fifth roof, Velveteen stopped, creeping to the edge again before she gave a little hop of delight and signaled for him to come closer. She held up three fingers, then pointed. Action Dude followed the angle of the gesture. Three men lurked in the alley across the street, their attention fixed on a woman who was walking briskly toward them, rummaging in her purse the whole time. She was paying no attention to her surroundings, so close to her car that she probably thought she was home free.

Action Dude nodded. It was possible the men weren’t planning to do anything wrong. They weren’t wearing masks or carrying visible weapons. Superhero insurance covered a lot of things. Property damage, injuries sustained by individuals who had been actively committing a crime when apprehended, even injuries sustained by the people they had been trying to save. It did not cover injuries sustained by individuals who just really enjoyed lurking in alleys.

(Every so often someone who had taken the works of Philip K. Dick a little too far to heart would start babbling about “pre-crime” and the duty of the superhuman to protect mankind from itself. The hero and villain communities were united in thinking that this sort of thought-policing was a step too far for either good or evil, and had dutifully ignored—and occasionally poisoned; half of them were villains, after all—anyone who suggested it.)

The woman reached the mouth of the alley. One of the men reached out and grabbed her. She screamed, high and shrill and terrified.

Action Dude looked at the smile on Velveteen’s face and thought the muggers were about to learn a very important lesson about true fear.

* * *

Because it was Velveteen’s show, Action Dude had been more than happy to hang back in his charcoal-colored stealth suit and watch as she and her army of highly motivated toys descended on the poor, unsuspecting muggers like the wrath of a highly ironic god. She couldn’t fly, but she had mastered the art of using small flying helicopters, their vacant cartoon faces distorted into grimaces of malicious glee, to slow her fall.

It might have been better if the muggers had never seen what hit them. As it was, Action Dude was pretty sure that their prison terms were going to be followed by a lengthy time under the care of a psychiatrist. The one on the left, for example, was probably never going to see a fashion doll without screaming again. Those tiny stiletto heels were sharp. Anyone who thought toys had to be chrome and shaped like weapons to do damage had clearly never been besieged by an entire herd of angry plastic horses.

When the dust had settled and the screaming had stopped, Velveteen picked up the woman’s purse from the sidewalk, offered it back to her, and said, “Here. This is yours.”