Page 26 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

It was harder, this time, to wrench herself away; Velveteen was breathing hard, and not just from shock and pain. She took her eyes off of Persephone long enough to glance down at her hands, which were no longer bare; brown velvet half-gloves covered them, like the gloves she’d worn with the earliest incarnations of her costume, back when they’d still believed that manual dexterity was somehow connected to her powers. She looked back up. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?” asked Persephone. “How long have you lived in Spring, Velveteen?”

“Most of my life,” she replied automatically. Then she snarled, lips pulling back from enlarged front teeth, and charged toward Persephone with her knife held low and ready to cut. It felt like something inside of her had snapped. None of this made sense. Persephone was her friend—all her memories agreed on that, both the ones she was reasonably sure were true and the ones that insisted she had first come here when she was nine years old, student of the Easter Bunny, and grown up in Spring’s loving embrace—but friends didn’t try to kill each other. Not without good reason.

Persephone danced to the side, but not quickly enough; Velveteen’s knife caught the side of her arm. The green vanished from her blade in an instant. Velveteen glanced down at her own knife as she kept running. The black swirls were gone. So were the brown gloves. Velveteen ran her tongue quickly over her front teeth. They were back to normal.

“That’s a start,” said Persephone, and attacked.

* * *

They had been fighting for what felt like years. Sometimes Velveteen found herself with abnormally strong legs, and had to resist the urge to look down and see if her feet had been replaced by paws. Other times she stumbled, hampered by her dancing slippers and swirling skirts. None of the transformations had gone far enough to become the bulk of what she was; so far, she had always been able to claw her way back into the frustrated twenty-something who had grown up in the Calendar Country, tormented by Autumn, befriended by Winter, and passively coddled by Spring. But it was getting harder to resist, and tracks of black were starting to remain in her blade, even after she struck back.

“Why are you doing this?” she wailed. It hurt, everything hurt, every cut and bruise and new memory that overwrote the woman she’d always been, like she was just a character in someone else’s story, being inexorably revised. If it went too far, if the balance shifted…she might not understand what was happening, or why, but she understood the ways of metaphors, and the sort of stories that were told about the Spring. She understood that to grow, you had to bleed. If the balance shifted in favor of one of the women she’d never been, then the woman she was now would become the fiction, and they would become the reality.

Who’s to say that hasn’t happened already? It was a terrible question. She didn’t want to ask it, not even in silence, not even to herself. But… Which of these makes the most sense? Little girl stumbles over Easter Bunny; eleven-year-old jumps off roof; teenager passes out at the wrong party and attracts the spirit of the dance floor; twenty-something washed-up superheroine somehow magically catches the attention of the goddess of spring and becomes her student and gets a pretty dress and everything is wonderful? Her own life looked like a bad self-insert fantasy when she looked at it critically.

But it was her life, and if it looked less believable than the other options, that was because it was real. Experience and consequence and circumstance had embroidered every day into something rich and radiant, something too complex to be faked by a simple overlay of false memories. All the lives Persephone was trying to force on her were shallow. She was sure they would deepen if they became real, until they were just as bright and varied as the one she’d actually led. She wasn’t going to give them the chance.

Persephone lunged again. Velveteen barely dodged.

“You’re supposed to be teaching me balance!” she shouted. None of the others would look at her. A spray of blood had splashed across Lady Moon’s bodice, gleaming bright against the sequins. “You’re supposed to be teaching me how not to hurt people!”

“This isn’t about hurting you, Velveteen,” said Persephone. She wasn’t even winded, which was so unfair. “I offered you the chance to do this peacefully. You chose this path.”

“I—what?” Velveteen stumbled backward, far enough that Persephone wouldn’t be able to hit her without a running start, and stopped. “This is about the graveyard. This is about you asking if I would stay. You said Spring didn’t want me. You said I got to choose.”

“It is, it doesn’t, and I did,” said Persephone. She began stalking forward, moving as fluidly as the wind across a meadow. “Spring never wanted you. I wanted you, because you had so much to learn, and because of your power. You’re the last. You shouldn’t exist outside this season, not anymore, and I’m sorry, I truly am, but I have to make sure you don’t throw things even further off by going back. If you can’t stay as the woman you are, then I’ll cut her away, and make you into somebody new. Think of it as a fresh beginning. Any of us would be glad to be your mentor, your family and home. We’ll give you a past that hurts less than the one you’re giving up.”

One of Geb’s geese honked loudly. Persephone looked at it and sighed before looking back to Velveteen.

“Geb wishes to remind me that you asked a question I didn’t answer, and that I’m compelled to answer while we’re here, in the planting ground. Yes, I am rewriting the world. That’s what happens when a season changes one of our own. We change everything. Whatever you did in the Calendar Country will be credited to someone else. Whatever you changed will have been changed by another hand. We won’t leave a hole in the world—we’re more skilled than that—but we won’t leave an empty space for you to tumble back into, either. We’ll cut you away, and no one will ever remember your name.”

“You said you wouldn’t force me,” said Velveteen quickly. “You said you wanted to teach me, not break me and force me into a shape I didn’t want to hold. You’re going back on your word.”

“I’m not, though,” Persephone protested. “I said I wouldn’t force you. I’m not. You are the sum of your experiences, the culmination of every bruise and every scrape and every victorious smile. If I take all those things away from you, if I make you into someone who can stay, willingly, and lend your strength to Spring, instead of taking it back into the Calendar Country, where no one stands ready to counter you, I’m not forcing you to do anything. I’m just opening the appropriate doors.”

For a moment, all Velveteen could do was stare in horrified silence. Then she screamed and charged, knife held out in front of her like a lance.

Persephone didn’t dodge. The knife sank into her belly just below the sheltering frame of her ribcage, continuing its passage through her flesh until its hilt rammed up against her flesh and could go no further. Her own blade flashed white before it fell from her hand and hit the ground. She had time to smile, to whisper, “There you go,” and to press her lips against Velveteen’s forehead before she was falling backward, gravity pulling her away from the knife. She crumpled without another sound.

Velveteen hit her knees a split second later, gathering Persephone close and looking frantically around at the others, none of whom had moved. “Well?” she demanded. “What is wrong with you? Help her!”

“We can’t,” said Jack. He sounded genuinely apologetic, for whatever that was worth: at the moment, Velveteen felt like it wasn’t worth a hell of a lot. “I’m the only one of us who’s any good at dying, and I don’t come back all the way. Not for a long time, anyway. Persephone is a different sort of resurrection than I am. I can’t show her the path.”

“I’m more fertility than renewal,” said the Easter Bunny. “Sorry.”

“I’m all about the joy of living, not the cessation of dying,” said Lady Moon. “I dance while the plague rages outside the gates. I don’t see to the wounded.”

“So you’re all fucking useless, is that what you’re saying? Fuck you all.” Velveteen turned back to Persephone. Was the goddess still breathing? It was hard to say. She thought so. She hoped so.

Closing her eyes, she reached.

All living things had life to offer her. She had learnt that when she fought Supermodel, and had been reminded when Persephone had dammed up her own inner reservoir. Persephone had also told her that an animus in the Spring couldn’t feed themselves; they had to use the world around them. So when she hit the small, flickering thing that was Persephone’s life, she kept reaching, down into the soil, down into the bones of the world. She filled her hands, tightened them until they could hold no more, and then she pulled.

It was like sticking her tongue into a live light socket. Life flooded into her and through her, burning and lighting up the world. There was so much of it that she couldn’t have kept it if she’d wanted to; all she could do was channel it, forcing it through herself into Persephone.

It was no real wonder, under the circumstances, that she didn’t feel the seal on her own life force when it shattered and let her access her own power again. All she knew was that there was a little more life to give, and so she gave it, and gave more, until there was nothing else that she could hold. She collapsed, barely breathing, across Persephone’s body.