“She’ll give me hell and a half, but I’ve been on the Naughty List before.” Jackie Frost sat at the other side of her parallel self’s table, watching the pink-skinned girl with obvious concern. “I came to you because I needed help, and I’m not blind. I knew that you needed help as much as I did. I just couldn’t give it to you.”
“And now you can?”
Jackie nodded. “My Velveteen stopped animating her boyfriend. He’s asleep now, with the Princess, waiting until Vel can wake him up. We went up against The Super Patriots not long after that. They didn’t give us any choice.”
“What happened?” asked a voice from behind her—almost familiar, but not quite. Velveteen had never sounded so…thin, like a paper doll that had somehow learned to speak. Jackie managed not to jump. It was a near thing.
“We won.” Jackie forced herself to keep looking straight ahead. She didn’t want to see Marionette again if she could help it. “We took them on, and we won.”
Jacqueline’s eyes widened. “How?”
“The head of the corporation, in my world at least? It’s Supermodel. She didn’t die, or maybe she did die, and then managed to get back up again. She’s an animus, like Velma. She’s still sucking the good out of the world. That, and her pet psychics…it’s enough to keep her in power, even when she does things that no one should be able to forgive.”
“An animus,” breathed Marionette. “That makes so much sense. Yes. I can see it. I can raise an army against it. Everyone is afraid of me. If I tell them this will not just end me, but end a greater threat…”
Jackie couldn’t miss the sudden exhaustion that washed across Jacqueline’s face. “You’ll need to get your strength up, then,” said the girl who had willingly slaved herself to an undead horror, because when that horror had been alive, they had been friends. She gave so much.
She had so little left to give.
“I’ll do it,” said Jackie.
You could have heard a snowflake fall in the silence that followed. Jacqueline finally broke it, saying, “You don’t understand what you’re offering.”
Jackie Frost, who had never really had a reputation for generosity—and had never sought one out, to be completely fair; she was happy being the selfish spirit of Christmas, the child with outstretched hands and no thought for whether anyone else had any gifts beneath the tree—shook her head. “I do understand, and I know that it will hurt. But if you can survive it this long, I can survive it once, and she’s going to need you with her on the battlefield. I get to go home after this. You have to stay here. So let me do this one thing for the both of you, because you helped me once, and because it’s the right thing to do.”
Jacqueline smiled slowly, sadly. “We really are the same person, aren’t we?”
“No,” said Jackie. “But sometimes I like to think I could have been you, if I’d been a little more willing to share.”
“Just close your eyes,” said Marionette behind her, voice whisper-soft and hungry. Cold fingers slid around the back of Jackie’s neck. “It’ll all be over soon.”
In the end, of course, she couldn’t keep herself from screaming. No one who heard thought any less of her. How could they have? When your very essence is being eaten, it’s only natural to scream. And eventually, the screaming stopped.
Eventually.
The Princess didn’t necessarily enjoy drinking with the Fairy Tale Girls. They were too rowdy for her tastes, and their humor tended to be crass and inappropriate. It had taken her nearly a decade to make Brittle Red understand that racial slurs and transphobia weren’t funny, and while the weapon-toting heroine tried to censor herself, she still slipped sometimes. Beauty was quick to defend her, saying that she didn’t mean anything by it, and no amount of explanation seemed to get the point across. Still, even flawed people can be good people, and when the Princess called, they had come. That seemed to be worth a round or two of drinks.
Cinder had retreated to her usual silence. One of her arms had been smashed during the fight, and she was still piecing it back together; light could shine right through the gaps in her body, which was disconcerting enough to make the Princess glad that it was drinks, not dinner.
“That was a lot of fun,” said Rampion. “We should overthrow things more often.”
“Just remember that unless they’re evil, that’s a sort of supervillain thing to do,” said the Princess. “It’s better to be heroes. Keeps you out of trouble.”
“We’re always trouble,” said Snow Wight.
“That’s true enough, but there’s a big difference between ‘oh, that’s Snow and Rose, they’re trouble’ and ‘oh, that’s Snow and Rose, call for an exorcist.’” The Princess shook her head. “Stay in the first column. It’s better for your health.”
“What will happen now?” asked Rose Dead.
“New management, new rules, and we wait to see how things settle out. That’s the trouble with living in the real world. Nothing ends easy. You don’t just get a pretty scroll that reads ‘happy ever after’ and takes your troubles away.”
The Fairy Tale Girls were briefly quiet, thinking about this. The stories that they drew their power from might be twisted, but they were still, at heart, hopeful; innocence fueled even the most monstrous of interpretations. Easy endings were all they really knew.
Finally, Brittle Red asked, “You wanna hear a joke?”
“No, I don’t believe I do,” said the Princess. “But the next round’s on me.”
The Fairy Tale Girls cheered.
“Jackie’s fine,” said Velveteen. “It took her a few days to get her strength back to the point where she could take a mirror home, but she said that dimension’s Santa was very nice to her, especially considering what she’d done for his daughter. She’s at the North Pole now, recovering. I’ll see her soon. She said to tell you that they’re going to take really good care of me while I’m there, and that you shouldn’t worry, okay? There’s nothing for you to worry about at all.” A tear ran down her cheek, landing on the glass, where it glittered like a diamond.
Velveteen looked at it for a moment before she took a deep breath and said, “So there’s something else I need to tell you, before I go…”
It wasn’t a surprise when Aaron showed up at the Crystal Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle two days after the battle. It was sort of a surprise when the Princess let him in. Velveteen (she never took the ears off anymore; she hadn’t thought of herself by her civilian name since she stepped into Supermodel’s office, and she was direly afraid she’d finally allowed that part of herself to die, sacrificed to the black chasm Supermodel tried to rip into her soul) was sitting in the library when she heard the sound of footsteps, and a throat being cleared. She looked up, and blanched at the sight of the Princess, in blue jeans and tank top, standing in front of a shamefaced Aaron. He was wearing tan slacks, a black T-shirt, and a hangdog expression, and he’d never been more handsome.
“You’ve got company,” said the Princess. “I’ll just leave the two of you alone, and remember, I can have an army of SWAT-trained raccoons in here in under a minute, so no throwing things, animating the furniture, or sex on the ceiling.” Then she was gone, moving with surprising speed for someone in heels that high.
“What are you doing here?” Maybe not the friendliest opening a conversation had ever had, but even as she spoke, Velveteen realized that it was the right question.
“I wanted to see you,” said Aaron, stuffing his hands awkwardly into his pockets. “I checked for you in Portland, and Yelena’s new girlfriend told me to go fuck myself. She, um, was pretty firm about that, actually.”
Velveteen snorted. “Let me guess: she threatened to shoot you with a gun that she physically shouldn’t have been able to lift, right?”
“Yeah. Also, who’s Epona, and why do I need to be worried about her wrath?”
“She’s a horse goddess. In Torrey’s original dimension, her worship was sort of the dominant religion. I think. Talking to her is ha
rd sometimes.”
Aaron smiled a little. “Yeah.”
He didn’t say anything after that. For several minutes, neither did Velveteen. Instead, they both looked anywhere but at each other, the awkwardness in the room slowly growing. Finally, grumpily, she stood and demanded, “Aaron, why are you here?”
“I wanted to see you,” said Aaron again. “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. Marketing said…they said that if I didn’t go along with them, they’d have to transfer you to the Midwest Division, because what we’d been doing wasn’t appropriate. They never out-and-out said it, but they made a lot of comments about how ‘support heroes’ don’t last long in the Midwest. I thought they were going to kill you if I didn’t let them make me a couple with Yelena. I’m so sorry. I thought it was the right thing to do.”
Velveteen stared at him. Aaron had been the first of them to figure out how to play Marketing, how to twist what they wanted until it turned into what he wanted. But the flip side of that was that he had always put more faith in Marketing and in their power than Velveteen had. If they’d told him that she’d be killed if they didn’t break up… “They lied to you,” she said.
Aaron shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think that out of the three of us, I was the only one they told the truth. They wanted us to be more marketable. You needed one lie. Yelena needed a different one. I just had to go along with it.”
Velveteen sighed, looking down at her feet. “Why are you here, Aaron?” she asked, for the third time.
“I wanted to see you.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I just feel like…things with us shouldn’t have ended the way they did. They shouldn’t have ended at all. You were the love of my life, Vel, and you still are. I think you always will be. I wanted to see you, because I wanted to ask if there was any way that we could have a second chance.”
“A second chance.” Velveteen raised her head, looking at him. He looked back, hope and fear written baldly on his face. “You let me go because you thought they’d kill me. You stayed with them because …what, you thought they’d kill us both? You couldn’t desert Yelena? Where were you when they turned David into a supervillain, Aaron? Where were you when I couldn’t make the rent, when they sent the junior team to take me out, when they were wearing Yelena down to nothing? Where were you then?”
“Vel—”
“No. I am willing to believe you broke up with me to save me. It’s the sort of noble, shitty, self-centered thing you’re good at. But everything after that? Everything after that is on you. You were supposed to be a hero, Aaron. You were supposed to be my hero. I love you. I’m going to love you until I die, and that makes me furious, because you don’t deserve my love. You deserve the life you let Marketing design for you.” Velveteen was unsurprised to realize that she was crying. “Get out of here. I don’t want you, and you can’t have me, so go.”
Aaron looked at her for a moment. Then, finally, he nodded. “All right, Vel,” he said. “It was good to see you.” He turned and walked away, leaving her alone in the library.
She managed to stay on her feet until she heard the door slam in the distance. Then her knees went weak, and she collapsed back into her chair, sobbing.
More tears had joined the first one on the side of the glass coffin; Velveteen felt vaguely as if she should be wiping them away. But they were so pretty where they were, and selfish as it was, she wanted to leave something behind her when she left.
“I don’t know what he expected,” she said. “I don’t know if he thought that he could just walk back into my life and be welcomed with open arms or what, but I sent him away. I loved him more than anything once, and I sent him away. I just thought you should know that.”
She sighed. The sound seemed very loud to her own ears.
“So I guess you know what happens next. I promised the holidays a year, and I have to give it to them. You don’t break your word. Not to people like that. Not to anyone, if you can help it. You don’t need to worry about anything while I’m gone, okay? The Princess will be here, so you won’t be alone. Jackie will be with me, at least while I’m in Winter, and she’ll make sure everything’s fair. Yelena and Torrey are going to be the official heroes of Portland until I come home. They’re even living at the house, so that it won’t be standing empty.”
They were so happy together, Polychrome and Victory Anna, Yelena Batzdorf and Victoria Cogsworth, together the way they were always intended to be. And all it took was destroying two worlds and overthrowing the CEO of a multinational corporation to get them there. Privately, Velveteen didn’t think she’d ever be going back to that house on a permanent basis, even if she got to go back to Portland. After a year, it would be theirs, and they’d both waited long enough to be happy. She didn’t want to get in the way.
“I love you, Tad,” she said, and stood, bending to kiss the plane of glass above his face. It was still cool, unlike the warm spot where she’d been resting her head. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay? And maybe by then, I can wake you up. So just wait for me.”
Her footsteps echoed as she walked across the silent room to the door, and opened it, letting herself out into the hall. The Princess was waiting there for her.
“All done?” she asked.
“I’ve done everything I can do.”
“All right.” The Princess started down the hall. Velveteen fell into step beside her. “You feeling okay?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Velveteen laughed, a little unsteadily. “I just can’t believe it’s over. The Super Patriots are under new management, Yelena’s happy, things are finally starting to look like they might work out…and I have to go. I don’t want to go.”
“I know. But sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to.” The Princess stopped in front of another door, offering Velveteen her hands. “You know we’ll be here when you get back. Take as much time as you need, all right?”
“I will.” Velveteen took the Princess’s offered hands. “I love you a lot.”
“Oh, sugar. We love you, too. Now go on. Go do what you need to do.”
Velveteen nodded and pulled her hands away as she turned to open the door. On the other side was a small green garden. At the center of the garden was a doorway made of braided candy canes and silver tinsel. She smelled snow. No one was waiting for her, but she didn’t really need anyone; this was a journey she knew how to make.
Head high, Velveteen stepped through the doorway, and was gone.
The Princess stayed where she was for a few minutes, looking at the empty space where the gate to Winter had been, where her friend had disappeared. Then, without saying another word, she closed the door and walked away. The story was finished, after all. There was nothing left to say.
McGUIRE BEGINS
by Paul Cornell
IVASTLY ADMIRE SEANAN MCGUIRE. (Hmm, that sounds like the first line of a Monty Python lyric. The rest of the song should express the singer’s enjoyment of various authors in a variety of assonant ways.) She writes from the heart, and this is obvious, and this, simply this, has gained her an enormous following of people who read her work and feel that she is like them and that her prose speaks both of them and for them. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what it’s all about, what this game all we novelists play is meant to come down to. It’s really simple, and almost impossible.
The book you’ve just read is an example of how Seanan stands for...well, I was about to say things, but really she stands for people, and they’re more complicated. Velveteen is ‘what if there was super hero prose that represented super heroes as if they were in the real world, but not the old real world, the new, more real real world, with knowledge of genre tropes and with people like us in it?’ (And I hope I’ve just then approximated what it’s like to be on the receiving end of one of Seanan’s information-heavy gasped speeches.) This represents a companion to similarly stacked sentences about zombies and cryptozoology. All of these books are an attempt to grab exi
sting genres and renovate them, often knocking a few walls down in the process.
I think my favourite Seanan moment was when she was a contestant in Just A Minute, an onstage game show I was running at Worldcon. She stopped the game to call up her mother to witness to the fact that she had not actually lied about a trivial fact, and thus conceded a point in the game. This call hugely entertained the audience, got Seanan caught up on how things were going at home...and won her the point. She does many things at once. And if she doesn’t like this game she’ll play her own instead.
I think, in a few decades, when she’s done everything and won everything, Seanan will make a fine old lady. There’s something of classic Americana about her. She’s clearly a product of American virtues. She’s simply decided that in her case they’ll be alt virtues. When she’s sitting on her cabin porch with a shotgun, chuckling about all the young people she’s wiser than, she’ll be redefining, just by sitting there, who you might expect to find in that cabin with her, why she might want a shotgun, and, what the hell, probably concepts like chuckling and porches too.
Right now, she’s already redefined everything around her. And I think she’s just getting started.
APPENDIX A
VELVETEEN AND ALLIES
VELMA “VELVETEEN” MARTINEZ
Assessed power level 4
Age: Twenty-four.
Age at time of power discovery: Unclear; presumed twelve.
Appearance: Velveteen is a Hispanic female of average height and weight, with shoulder-length dark brown hair, brown eyes, and pleasant features. She does not display any visible deviation from the human norm.
Power set: Semi-autonomous animation of totemic representations of persons and animals, most specifically cloth figures, including minor transformation to grant access to species-appropriate weaponry. Capable of short-term resurrection, although this will eventually prove fatal to both Velveteen and the resurrected if it continues too long.
Profile: Velveteen was acquired as a corporate asset by The Super Patriots, Inc. at the age of twelve, and was one of two animus recruited despite the standard injunction on individuals within that family of powers. She remained with the company for six years, departing on her eighteenth birthday after a conflict with her teammate, Sparkle Bright. This conflict was orchestrated by the Marketing Department, under the orders of the CEO.
Velveteen vs. The Multiverse Page 36