VELVETEEN vs. Global Warming #3
“Tag needs me,” said Velveteen, voice unsteady.
She didn’t want to believe what Aurora was saying.
Sadly, even though she didn’t have a heart anymore, she remembered having one.
She remembered how much pain she’d been in when she stepped through the wall between the worlds and landed in Winter’s eternal cold.
She remembered funerals, and tears, and believing that nothing would ever be all right again.
She hadn’t had a single nightmare since she’d walked through the heart of Winter. There was something to be said for a life lived under a sheet of ice. It was a cold, cruel something, but still. It was there. She couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t.
“You would have woken him before you came here if you’d been certain that you had it in you,” said Aurora calmly.
“The fact that you didn’t tells me you were unsure of your own heart, even before we had to take it away.
All that uncertainty will return when you step into Spring.
All that pain. All that grief. It was never destroyed, you know. It was only deferred.”
Velveteen was silent for a moment, considering Aurora’s words.
Then she shook her head, and said, “Damn. I mean, I knew you were manipulative and willing to do whatever you needed to do in order to protect your season, and maybe I even respected that a little bit, but damn. You literally blocked off my ability to process grief, and now you’re going to dump me on Spring?
Are you warning them? Do they at least get some sort of ‘how to handle your emotionally damaged superheroine’ pamphlet? ”
“You chose who you would come to first,” said Aurora calmly. “It’s not Winter’s fault that we needed you to be capable of doing your job.”
“Right,” said Velveteen. “The part where it makes you emotional heroin is just a fun side effect. Let’s get down to it, okay? I don’t feel like listening to you anymore. Lucy said you had one last job for me to do. You want to tell me what you think I’m going to do for you?”
“You’re going to do what you were made to do, Velveteen, animus, most powerful life-bender of her generation, even if you never choose to embrace it the way you could. You’re going to save us all.”
“Swell,” said Velveteen. “That’s just what I always wanted to do.”
“No, it’s not,” said Aurora. “Isn’t it lucky for us that you don’t have a choice in the matter?”
* * *
Aurora led her to the very edge of the world, the place where the snowy landscape crumbled down into nothingness.
The footing there was uncertain: Velveteen could feel the ground shifting and sinking beneath her feet, threatening to dump her into the abyss.
Unlike Aurora, she couldn’t fly—she sometimes felt as if hers was the only power set in the world that hadn’t come up with some crappy excuse to let her take to the skies.
She watched the snow falling into nothing with a wary eye, and wondered whether the last thing she was supposed to do for Winter was die.
“People used to think of Winter as an endless palace of snow, where the black mountains broke against the twilight sky, and the sun never fully rose,” said Aurora, as calmly as if they weren’t standing at the edge of everything.
“They dreamt snowmen and ice bridges and cold. The Snow Queen and I both come from that era, you know. We’re older than anything else that remains in this world. ”
“Uh, congratulations?” said Velveteen. “I’d really rather not plummet, if it’s all the same to you. Gravity and I have a sort of tumultuous relationship. I think it sucks.”
“Isn’t it convenient for you that the anthropomorphic ideas about emotions and the heart didn’t put sarcasm there?
” asked Aurora. She was starting to look annoyed.
Velveteen could only see that as a good thing.
She found the living incarnation of Winter to be plenty annoying, and it was finally time to return the favor.
“Winter has changed. Everything changes.”
“And now you’re a Hallmark card,” said Velveteen.
Aurora, who had not maintained her position as the living incarnation of Winter by being easily thrown off track, ground her perfect, ever-changing teeth together before she said, “Jack Frost came before your beloved Santa Claus. He was the beginning of a sea change, of people learning to love the cold, to see it as something other than an excuse for blood on the snow. The Industrial Revolution didn’t put an end to people freezing to death, but it certainly slowed it down.
‘Wintering in Hawaii’ became something people talked about doing. ”
“I get that you’re being all mystic and ‘this is the folk process of reality’ here, but I’m pretty sure the people who lived in Hawaii had always wintered in Hawaii. Colonialism and having better boats doesn’t rewrite the world.”
“No, but it changes the stories people tell about the world—and while there were always Hawaiians, there were fewer of them than there were people who lived where the Winter had always been frozen to the core,” said Aurora.
“The more people tell a story, the more sincerely true that story will become. So when the people who had previously lived in the cold began viewing snow as optional, the story changed.”
“Uh-huh,” said Velveteen.
“Winter began to get smaller. The country, not the season itself: we lost land as the concept of our eternal snowfall lost minds,” said Aurora.
“More people were being born all the time, of course, so there were more people to believe in us, which kept us from melting away completely. It’s been a delicate balance for quite some time. ”
“Uh-huh,” said Velveteen.
“Global climate change, on the other hand, has been an unanticipated problem.”
Velveteen blinked. “Wait, what? Global climate change? You mean the thing the scientists argue about, and then the weather manipulators roll their eyes and go fix the latest drought because who the hell lets people go without fresh water just because it stopped raining?”
“How often do your weather manipulators change the weather to start a blizzard?” asked Aurora.
“No one complains when the sleet stops falling, or when the rain is a warm shower intended to kickstart a harvest. No one objects to the snow going away a little sooner. Maybe if we lived in a world without superheroes people would take it more seriously, and stop counting on some savior swooping in at the last moment to set the weather right again. But we don’t live in that world, and the system gets a little more broken every day. ”
“Pretty sure that if we lived in a world without superheroes, there would be no Winter to complain about not getting as many snow days,” said Velveteen. “What are you intending to do about it? I mean, what is my part in all this supposed to be?”
“You’re the most powerful animus of your generation. You heard me say that before, didn’t you? There’s no one currently living who can hold a candle to what you do with the beating heart of the world. You’re the strongest life-bender there is.”
“I don’t know if you caught this, or if you were too busy chilling in your mountain and fucking with people who thought they were among friends and hence would not be transformed into living snow golems while they weren’t looking, but if I’m the most powerful, it’s because Supermodel spent decades having animus killed as soon as they started to manifest,” said Velveteen.
“I only got away with existing because I had that whole ‘must have a face’ limitation going for me, and she thought it would be interesting to see what I turned into.”
“Have you ever heard the theory that energy is neither created nor destroyed, merely transmuted into something new? She killed uncounted animus, striking them down before they could mature into their powers. All that energy had to go somewhere. If she’d left them alone, you would have been the pretty little puppeteer they tried to convince you to become.
But she didn’t do that. She killed them, and some of their strength flowed to you, as the next loch on the line.
You’re not the only one to benefit from her wholesale slaughter of your kind.
You’re the strongest we currently have.”
Velveteen stared at her, too sickened and surprised to speak.
When she finally found her voice, it was to demand, “Does it work that way for all the power sets? Does everyone get stronger through killing children?” I have to kill her if she says yes.
I have to kill her and then I have to kill myself, because no one can know this, ever.
No one can ever, ever know. Most supervillains were good about leaving children out of their schemes.
If they found out that killing child heroes might make their creations and clones stronger, that would change.
Everything would change.
“No, just for you,” said Aurora. “Most of the energy goes where it will. But life likes to cleave to life, which means it passes one to the other, for as long as it possibly can. Right now, you are the strongest. More, right now, the world knows your story: the brave, maligned heroine who rose from retirement to topple a corrupt regime before vanishing from the face of the world. You’re still a tragic figure to tell stories about.
That won’t last much longer. The narrative is changing, and you’ll be a villain again soon enough.
So we need to act now, while the story is on your side. ”