VELVETEEN vs. Santa Claus #2
The voice from the mountain chuckled. “I do love your spirit. Too many people think that Winter is only extremes. The cold of the exterior, where the wind can strip the flesh from your bones before you realize that you’re dead.
The warmth of the hearth, where gifts are given and lives are reaffirmed.
They forget that the in-between exists even in the stable seasons, not just in the liminal ones. ”
“So what, sarcasm is one of my superpowers now?”
“My dearest, my darling, my dark December girl, sarcasm has always been one of your superpowers. Now you say that you were taught never to walk down into the dark after an oracle. That’s not a bad lesson, I’ll agree.
But if you don’t walk down into the dark after me, you’ll stand in that hall forever.
The only way out is forward, and my season has already begun to have its way with you. ”
Velveteen looked down at her cold white hands. There were no lines on her palms, she noted dispassionately: they were as smooth as sheets of ice. “I noticed.”
“Then hear, and understand me when I say to you again that the only way out is forward. If you want the chance to wear flesh instead of frost, you’ll come to me.
You’ll let me see you. You’ll do what you promised, and you’ll serve the season.
Maybe you’ll learn that there are advantages to being what you are now.
Heartless creatures rarely suffer the way that warmer things do. ”
Velveteen frowned into the darkness. “I didn’t volunteer to give my heart to the Winter. I have someone waiting for me back in the real world.”
“But you see, that’s why you had to give your heart. You promised us a fair try. How can you give us a fair try if all your thoughts are for the man you loved and lost and wouldn’t let go?”
It was impossible to argue with the logic of the voice from the dark, and worst of all, Velveteen realized that she didn’t care that much.
It was academic, the sort of thing to be talked out over cups of cocoa, not shouted passionately under a mountain.
So much passion came from the idea of the heart, and these were the Seasonal Lands, where ideas were everything.
“Now will you come to me, or shall we wait a little longer?” asked the voice, once Velveteen’s silence had stretched out long enough to be taken as agreement.
“I still don’t like this.”
“You still don’t have to. Now come.” Velveteen went.
* * *
The darkness in the tunnel was absolute, closing in around her like black velvet curtains and blocking out everything, even the faint, glittering sparkle of her own icy skin.
Velveteen gritted her teeth and kept walking.
She had come too far to turn back now, and besides, where would she have gone?
As the voice from the mountain was so fond of saying, the only way out was forward.
Backtracking would have just meant going through this clinging darkness a second time, and she didn’t have the patience for that.
“Fucked-up times five thousand,” she muttered, and kept walking.
As if that had been some sort of profane, improbable password, the darkness began to dissipate around her, replaced by a delicate, rosy light.
It was like walking into the sunrise, only colder, the sort of beauty that only came from frozen things, and never warmed them at all.
Velveteen took another step forward, and the darkness broke completely, shattering into stardust and replaced by that bright, rosy glow.
The center of the mountain was empty, a vast, gem-studded cavern with diamonds and amethysts growing from the walls.
They didn’t cast the light, but they refracted it, throwing it back and forth until every corner was illuminated, leaving nothing unseen.
The light’s source sat on a throne that seemed to have been carved from a single garnet.
Velveteen stopped, squinting and raising one hand to shield her eyes as she tried to see the figure better.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hello, Velveteen,” replied the woman, and her voice was kind but not warm: there was no warmth in her.
Maybe there never had been. The glow made it impossible to pin down the details of her face.
As it shifted, shading from palest pink to rosy red, her skin tone seemed to shift with it.
She was all races, and no race, all at the same time.
She was plump, like the hunters who thrived at the top of the world; she was thin, skeletally so, like the unprepared souls who stumbled out into the snow after starvation took its toll.
“I’ve been waiting a long, long time to meet you,” continued the woman.
“My children have always thought very highly of you, and I trust them. They say that you could be one of mine, and I can see that potential in you, in the form you crafted for yourself when you were given access to my heart. You could easily be a Winter girl, my dear, and you would be happy here.”
“Currently made of snow,” said Velveteen, crossing her arms across her chest. It should have been a warming gesture, but like the woman in front of her, there was nothing about her that was warm. “Not so sure I want to be a Winter girl if it means being made of snow.”
“You may change your mind before your term is done,” said the woman.
“I promised service, and I promised to fairly consider the suits of all three seasons that want me when I was done,” said Velveteen. “That means you have to let me go at the end of my term, because otherwise I can’t fairly consider Spring and Autumn.”
“True enough,” said the woman, with an amiable nod.
“But you chose to come to us first, and when you were the given the opportunity to reshape yourself, you chose heartlessness. That means something. That means more than you can understand, as yet. Believe me, all will be clear before you’re done here. ”
“Oh, swell. That makes everything better. I mean, who cares if you’re being weird and obscure and dumping me in blizzards and turning me into snow now?
Everything’s going to be clear before I get to go home.
Call the fucking papers.” Velveteen scowled.
“I still don’t know your name. It might be easier to trust you if I had something to call you. ”
“You aren’t the most polite supplicant I’ve ever had,” said the woman.
She leaned back in her throne, watching Velveteen thoughtfully.
“You may call me Aurora, if you must have something to call me. Names are limitations we place upon the world to try and hold it static. Without them, things would be much freer to choose their own incarnations.”
“I’m currently made of snow,” said Velveteen. “I really like having a name to hang on myself, to remind me that I’m still the same person.”
“But that’s the rub, isn’t it? You could be a blizzard if you set your name aside. You could be a glacier, a snowfall, a glorious pattern of weather moving across the living Winter. You tie yourself to the form you’re in with the name you refuse to let go.”
“And that’s exactly why I’m not letting go of it.” Velveteen dropped her arms, gesturing helplessly to the snow creatures that clustered around her. “Not everything can be limitless and unformed. Sometimes you just want to be a person, and not a theoretical concept.”
“Theory is easier. Theory hurts less.”
“Theory loves less, too. Theory hasn’t got a heart, and never gets to risk breaking it.
I’d rather be thing than theory.” Velveteen paused, suddenly realizing that she had been running her mouth at a woman who appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be the Winter.
Then she shrugged. She’d run her mouth at worse. “Thing is a lot more fun.”
“We’ll see,” said Aurora. “Velveteen of the Calendar Country, do you swear yourself into my service for the duration of a season, to see what it means to be of the cold, and to be able to fairly decide who, if any, may have you when your time is done?”
The air grew heavy with intangible meaning. Velveteen’s earlier realization came back with friends. This hadn’t just been a conversation: it had been an interview, and an audition, even if she still didn’t fully understand what she was auditioning for.
The only way out was forward. “I do,” she said.
Aurora smiled. “Good,” she said. “Then we begin.”
* * *
The sky over Santa’s Village was clear. Too clear, almost: there were normally a few cotton candy clouds dotting the horizon, completing the picture book scene that the pastoral little town presented.
Image and idea were everything here, and how many children who had drawn the village had given it perfectly clear, perfectly cloudless skies?
The lights danced and shimmered overhead, painting everything in blue and green and purple, the colors of a great and beautiful bruise.
“She may not come,” said the Snow Queen again.
There was a faint touch of sorrow in her tone.
Jack Frost glanced at his wife—so beautiful and so alien, even after their centuries together; he loved her as a candle loves a flame, and knew that even if they were together until the end of time, she would never love him half so fiercely. She never could.
But that wasn’t to say she didn’t know how to love. She knew, for all that she might have wished she didn’t. She could be hurt, and hurt badly, because it was so hard for her to love at all. “She’ll come,” he said. This won’t have been for nothing.
It wouldn’t have been for nothing. It couldn’t possibly have been for enough.