VELVETEEN vs. Global Warming #4
“Wait, what?” asked Velveteen. “How long have I been here?” Time ran differently in the Winter. She knew that, she knew that, but she hadn’t really been thinking about it being longer than the span of a season.
“Long enough,” said Aurora. “Longer than you think. So here is the thing you need to do for Winter, before we can allow you to leave. There’s snow in your veins.
There’s ice in your heart. They were put there with the very best intentions, and you’ve nurtured them all this time, feeding them on your own freeze. Now I want you to let them out.”
“I don’t—”
“Winter has given you life. Now give it back, and give us another hundred years of cold.” Aurora looked at Velveteen, and there was no love in her eyes: not now.
The time for kindness and making nice had passed.
Velveteen thought she preferred it this way.
At least they weren’t pretending anymore.
“Freeze the sky, and I will hand you to Persephone myself.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Yes, you do,” said Aurora. She stepped back, leaving Velveteen on the unsteady ground alone. “You always do.”
Velveteen looked over her shoulder to where the heroes of Winter waited. Jackie wasn’t with them. It would have been nice to have at least one person she could trust to catch her if she fell. Then, slowly, she turned back to the nothingness.
She knew from meeting Marionette, and from her own experiences with Tag and Supermodel, that the animating force she used to control her toys was less limited than she wanted it to be.
It was too big. She needed to draw borders around it and clamp them down, lest she start breaking things she didn’t want to break.
She also knew that here, in Winter, the snow was hers to command
—at least while it was running through her veins. So she gathered her strength, pulling it in until it felt like her entire body had become one thrumming nerve, vibrating with the effort of keeping it all inside.
She closed her eyes, and stopped trying to hold on.
The cold burst out of her like a door slamming open, the snow that had been gathering in her veins for a full year—as the Calendar Country measured time—breaking free and swirling into the nothingness.
Still, she kept forcing it out, and still, it kept flowing, filling up the world.
Velveteen dropped to her knees, and for the first time in all those long and lonely months, the cold bit into her knees, chilling the flesh beneath her tights. And the cold kept coming.
The assembled heroes of Winter watched as the explosion of ice and snow and infinite cold splashed itself across the void, recreating, inch by inch and mile by snowcapped mile, the landscape that had been erased by time and the slow march of human narratives.
All she was putting forth was cold, but that was all that was required for mountains, glaciers, even evergreen forests to unspool.
“She’s doing it,” whispered the Snow Queen, voice heavy with awe and wonder.
“Yes,” said Santa Claus, as he wondered—and not for the first time—whether Aurora’s insistence that they follow the old, painful ways had been born partially out of fear.
She had insisted from the start that she wanted Velveteen for Winter, but sometimes what a person said and what they meant were very different things.
With that much cold inside her, the girl could have challenged Aurora for her position eventually… and she could have won. “Yes, she is.”
I am going to miss her, thought Santa, as Velveteen drove her hands down into the snow and held on for dear life.
She was gasping now, and the white was bleeding out of her skin into the ground, replaced by a healthy brown.
But even that was paler than it should have been, like she was pouring more than just the cold into the Winter.
“Aurora, maybe that’s enough,” said Jack Frost. “She’s rebuilt half a sky.”
“She can give us more,” said Aurora. “She has it in her, and I want it.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” whispered Velveteen, and she pushed as hard as she could.
The last thing she heard before she slipped into unconsciousness was the beating of her own heart.
* * *
Persephone came from out the forest, and her footsteps left trails of snowdrops and crocuses behind her. The snow would cover them quickly, but their mere presence showed how close she was to the tipping point. Spring was calling her, and she had to answer, whether she wanted to or not.
“Is she ready?” she asked, when she was close enough to the group to speak without raising her voice. Persephone had never been one for shouting, outside of her own home.
“Here,” said Santa Claus, gesturing toward the sleigh where Velveteen, exhausted and human, lay curled in a bed of furs. The reindeer attached to the sleigh’s reins pawed at the ground and snorted, sending warm clouds of breath into the air. “We wore her out, I’m afraid.”
“Spring will be kinder,” said Persephone. She climbed onto the driver’s seat, flicked the reins once, and was away.
Velveteen never woke.