Page 17 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

But she is kind. On that, most everyone agrees. Persephone holds life in one hand and death in the other, and while she is too rarely merciful—mercy is not a strong suit of her season—she is almost always kind. It seems like a small thing. To those who have come before her, helpless and hurting, it is everything in the world. She is not the only member of the Greek pantheon to have endured into the modern day. Her husband, Hades, remains an active part of Winter, although he has long since turned all management of the season over to his jolly successor. Aphrodite can often be seen in Summer, and Demeter has been known to meet with her daughter in the golden fields of Autumn, bringing the Harvest in. So Persephone is not unique. She is simply the only goddess of her line to still take an active interest in humanity.

Where Persephone walks, new growth follows. This does not always endear her to people, as growth can be a very difficult, very painful thing. But she tries her best, and she keeps her season growing green, despite the changing ideas of humanity about what the spring should represent. She has learned to share her space with fertility icons and talking rabbits, and still she has managed to remain essentially, at her core, a good person.

May such high praise one day be heaped upon us all.

* * *

When Velveteen woke for the second time, she was no longer numb. She gasped and sat up, flailing at the small roots that dangled from her arms like cobwebs. They withered and broke off at her touch, falling to the ground, where they dissolved into so much dust.

That was the last straw. “Ew ew ew!” Velveteen wailed, leaping to her feet and running her hands down her legs, wiping still more roots away. Part of her noted the color of her skin and how warm it was, how wonderfully, realistically warm. That part of her was content. The rest of her was a little busy freaking out over the fact that she was still covered in tiny dangling roots, implying that whatever strange fruit they had sprouted was now embedded in her body.

Eventually, all the roots she could reach had been wiped away, and she was panting from the effort. Slowly, Velveteen calmed and took a deep breath, feeling the sweet, warm air fill her lungs. There was that word again: warm. She was warm, because she was no longer frozen.

She was also naked, surrounded by trampled greenery, and alone.

“Oh, this is good,” she muttered, turning to take a slower, more careful look around herself. She was standing in a grotto that seemed to have been crafted entirely out of living vegetation. It was sort of like being back in the Crystal Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle, except for the part where if she’d been there, the Princess or one of her kangaroo butlers would have appeared by now to scold her for stomping on the flowers. No. This was not familiar ground, and any similarities they shared would only serve to lower her guard.

This was the Spring, and in a very real sense, this was a foreign country. There were three seasons with a claim on her. This was the only one where she had never really spent any time.

“Look at it this way,” she said, speaking in part to hear her voice. It sounded different when it was supported by actual breath, and not just by air. In the Winter, she had breathed only to speak. Here, she was doing it to survive. That mattered. That mattered so much more than she ever could have guessed before it had been taken away. “You thought Santa was your friend, and he let the Aurora Bitch-e-alis turn you into a snow bunny. Spring thawed you out first thing. Maybe this won’t be so bad.”

She had a lifetime’s practice in the fine art of lying to herself. Even so, she couldn’t quite make her words sound believable, not even to her own ears. Yes, Santa had allowed Aurora to transform her into a snow creature, but he hadn’t been happy about it: she could see that now, with her emotions waking up and quietly recoloring her memories of her time in Winter, like Turnerization of the heart. He had always looked so sad when he’d seen her walking, frozen, through his winter wonderland. Given his druthers, he would have kept her as she was, patchwork and damaged and alive, and allowed her to serve the season as a friend, and not as a captive.

And none of that changed the fact that when she’d arrived, she had been dropped into the storm; none of that could give her back the days she’d spent frozen to her core, transformed by whatever strange magic dwelt in Aurora’s mountain. Maybe he’d been her friend once, and maybe he still thought of himself in that manner, but when she had needed him most, he had allowed someone else to step in and hurt her direly. That was the sort of treatment she had received from her friends here on the shivering side of the calendar. What kind of courtesy could she expect from her enemies?

Spring wasn’t her enemy. Not like Autumn sometimes was. So she couldn’t trust them the way her sudden warmth made her want to, but she didn’t need to fear them either.

What she needed was a way out of this room, and maybe something to cover her ass. A sudden wave of fear hit her, and she clapped both hands over her tailbone, feeling for the cotton ball plume of a rabbit’s tail. Sometimes the seasons and their associated holidays could be a little too literal. Halloween, especially, had a tendency to turn her into an anthropomorphic rabbit just for the hell of it.

Her fingers found some more roots that needed to be brushed away, but they didn’t find a tail. A similar check of her ears revealed a lack of other lapine features. She was still, for better or for worse, shaped essentially like a human—but that had been the case in Winter, too, at the beginning.

She vaguely remembered a voice telling her that she’d been asleep for a week. So was this the beginning, then, or had she already been here long enough to be absorbed? It was impossible to tell.

“Hello?” She lowered her hands and raised her voice, looking around the small green space. “I’m here. I’m awake. I’m ready to talk about whatever it is this season wants from me, and P.S., I’ll be a lot friendlier and more reasonable if you give me some pants first. I’m not down with the casual nudity.”

The green walls did not reply. Velveteen sighed. “See, apart from making me talk to myself, which is a little cruel, you’re putting me in a position where I have to choose between property damage or being trapped in a weird room made out of plants. I’d really rather not start out by pissing you off, so if you could just come here and tell me what you want me to do, that would be awesome. Super awesome. Seriously.”

The green walls still did not reply. Velveteen, who was starting to feel rather foolish, crossed her arms and scowled at them. “Do you really want to see me force my way out of here?” she asked. “I just finished spending I don’t know how long in Winter, and we were not on friendly terms for most of my stay. Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be.”

Silence from the greenery. It didn’t even have the decency to look nervous. Velveteen sighed. “All right, you asked for it,” she said, and lowered her arms, and reached out with the part of herself that knew how to stir a teddy bear to strange and temporary life, the part of herself that had, in Winter, crafted an army out of snow and set it against her enemies. Her power had always been there, as calm and constant as the air she breathed, even when she hadn’t wanted it. Even when she’d tried to bury it. Too many of the animus of her generation had died for Supermodel’s vanity, and she was stronger than she should have been. So she reached⁠—

—and screamed, hitting the mossy ground on her knees as pain, immediate and intense, washed over her. It felt like she was the one being ripped out by the root, and not whatever strange flowers had been planted in her flesh. She gasped, trying to stop reaching, but she had started the process; she couldn’t stop it, even now that it was out of her control and hurting her. She had to keep reaching until she found something, anything, to take the pain away.

Her questing mental fingers touched something bright and pulsing with hot, eager life. They shrank back for a moment, aware that this was wrong; this wasn’t what they were for. But the pain was so great, and the reach had been so far, that they couldn’t help themselves. They snapped closed around the bright, pulsing thing like a trap, and pulled it into themselves. From there, it spread to Velveteen. The pain stopped, like a switch had been flipped somewhere. As the flowers that Persephone had planted in Velveteen’s flesh burst through the skin of her back and bloomed into riotous color, the animus herself wobbled, trembled, and collapsed.

Everything was still.

* * *

“That went well.” The speaker was a six-foot-tall anthropomorphic rabbit. Somehow, this didn’t make him the strangest member of the little assemblage that looked down on the sleeping superheroine. The standards were slightly different, in Spring. “I mean, she didn’t throw up or explode or anything.”

“Most people don’t explode,” said the woman next to him. She was dressed in a sequined ball gown, a feathered mask over her eyes and a dozen strands of brightly colored beads around her neck. She sounded bored, and sat like she would rather be at a party, drinking champagne and dancing the night away in the arms of a stranger. Lady Moon had that sort of air about her, regardless of the hour. “It’s a thing that people are, in fact, not terribly inclined to do.”

Geb was not present, being notoriously reclusive in these modern times, and much more inclined to hole up in his palatial palace near the fields of eternal harvest and write long, passionate letters to his wife, the sky goddess Nut. Several geese were attending the convocation in his stead. They hissed at Lady Moon in what might have been agreement, or might have just been avian cussedness. Even being the chosen avatars of the Egyptian god of Earth and Harvest couldn’t make geese good-tempered.

Lady Moon shied away from the open mouths of the birds. “I do not like these things,” she announced. “Geese should be fried, and not heard.”

“They understand you, you know,” said the lithe young man who was perching in the nearest tree. He had vines tying back his hair, and eyes the color of new spring leaves. Pixies buzzed in the branches around him. He was known by many names outside of the season, but here he was only ever called by his first name: “Jack,” which suited him ever so much better than “Peter.” He looked at Lady Moon with absolutely no sympathy, and continued, “When they peck your eyes out, it’s going to be because of moments like this one.”