Page 86 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

“We all want to go home, darling,” said the Princess. “I guess for a change you’re one of the lucky ones. You actually get the chance. Who am I to stand in the way of that?”

Velveteen hugged her, hard, and ran off to magic mirror her friends, letting them know that she was coming back. The Princess watched, and sighed.

Who was she? Just one of the people who loved an animus without the sense Grimm gave the little wooden boy. Maybe, if they were lucky and the story was kind, that would finally be enough.

* * *

The rise of The Super Patriots, Inc. has been referred to as the greatest legislative hole of the modern era. It has also been held up as an example of corporate greed and the “free market” distorting and interfering with human rights, taking individuals and seeing them only for the potential profits they represent. Comparisons have been drawn to both unlicensed gun ownership and indentured servitude, with proponents on both sides agreeing only that it should not, should never have been allowed to happen as it did.

How it should have happened is a matter for even more intense debate. Most seem to agree that some form of control over the superhuman community was and remains absolutely vital: after all, people deserve to know what’s living in their neighborhood, don’t they? People deserve the opportunity to make choices about whether their children go to school with boys who can fly and girls who can start fires with their minds. The fact that any form of legislation would carry the potential to trigger another Super Patriots incident has been, by and large, ignored in favor of debating precisely what level of superhuman power will be required before registration becomes mandatory.

Interestingly enough, the superhuman community itself has been equally divided on the matter. While many seem to enjoy the freedom to live where they wish, offer their services without corporate oversight, and even go into non-heroic (or non-villainous) lines of work, others have seemed lost without someone telling them what to do. A tiger that has lived its entire life inside a zoo may still be a tiger, but it will not be well-suited to the wild, no matter how much it might wish to be.

In the end, far too many once-wild creatures will seek the safety of a cage.

* * *

Velma stood in front of her own house, in her own city, clutching the duffel bag of possessions she had accumulated while in the Crystal Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle and wishing she could find the nerve to ring the bell. Surely they’d be glad to see her. Surely they would open the door and wave her inside and tell her how boring things had been in Portland while she was gone. Surely. Definitely. Absolutely. And if she could just convince herself those things were true, maybe she’d finally be able to make herself move.

“This is stupid,” she muttered, and tried to lift her hand. It didn’t move. She glared at it. It remained stubbornly down by her side. Sadly, her legs had joined the mutiny, and so walking close enough to smack her head against the door wasn’t an option.

“This is Portland,” she said. “It’s going to rain eventually, and I’m going to wind up all wet unless I go inside the house. It’s dry inside the house.”

Still, she couldn’t seem to make herself move. Everything seemed to have frozen at the moment when the Princess’s magic mirror deposited her in the alley behind the old convenience store—at her own request, even. She had wanted to walk home in her civilian identity, to see the house the way she’d seen it for the very first time. If she’d realized that seeing the house was going to inspire bone-shaking terror, or that the terror was going to come with an awesome side order of “absolutely unable to ring the damn doorbell,” she might have gone a different route.

“Come on, Vel,” she said. “If you can’t even make it to the front door, maybe you’re not ready to go home after all.”

The door opened.

The woman on the other side—tall, thin, blonde, everything an organization founded on the idea of pushing superheroes as an aspirational lifestyle brand, something everyone wanted to be and no one could ever quite achieve, could ask for—was wearing a ratty thrift store sweater and a pair of sweatpants with one blown-out knee. Her short-cropped hair was obviously unbrushed, sticking out in all directions. She smiled. That, alone, was like coming home.

“Well?” she asked, spreading an arm as if to welcome the other woman inside. “Are you planning to stand out there all night like some sort of weird new garden statue, or are you going to come in? It’s supposed to rain soon.”

“That’s what I was just trying to tell myself,” said Velma, and took a step forward. After that, it was surprisingly easy to take the next step, and the next, until she was stepping onto the porch, until the other woman was sweeping her into a hug that smelled like fresh soap and lavender lotion. Velma buried her face in Yelena’s shoulder and closed her eyes, breathing deeply.

“Welcome home, you massive jerk,” said Yelena. “You were gone for way too long.”

Something popped in the house behind them, the sound followed by the acrid smell of smoke and an English-accented voice shouting, “It’s all right, I have a fire extinguisher!”

Velma pushed herself away from Yelena’s embrace and rolled her eyes. “Because there is absolutely no good reason for me to have stayed away, right?”

“Torrey hasn’t burned the house down,” Yelena protested. Then she paused, and added, “Yet. She hasn’t burned the house down yet. But we have excellent insurance, so I’m not overly worried. Are you hungry?”

“Famished,” said Velma, and was surprised to realize that she meant it. She stepped the rest of the way into the living room, leaving Yelena to close the door as she looked around. “New rug.”

“The old one caught fire.”

“New throw pillows.”

“Also fire.”

“Are those new curtains?”

“Actually not fire,” said Yelena. Velma turned to give her a dubious look, and she laughed. “Seriously, not fire. I accidentally disintegrated them with one of my light beams. So I bought new curtains. I like them. The old ones were so fussy.”

“Thankfully, I had no real emotional attachment to the old curtains,” allowed Velma.

“If I’d thought you had, I would have asked Imagineer to replicate us an identical set, and also I would have started seriously questioning your opinions about interior decorating. I understand ‘everything I own came from a thrift store’ chic. I do not understand falling in love with curtains that look like they started life as the bad side of a really ugly circus tent.”