VELVETEEN vs. The Thaw #2
And none of that changed the fact that when she’d arrived, she had been dropped into the storm; none of that could give her back the days she’d spent frozen to her core, transformed by whatever strange magic dwelt in Aurora’s mountain.
Maybe he’d been her friend once, and maybe he still thought of himself in that manner, but when she had needed him most, he had allowed someone else to step in and hurt her direly.
That was the sort of treatment she had received from her friends here on the shivering side of the calendar.
What kind of courtesy could she expect from her enemies?
Spring wasn’t her enemy. Not like Autumn sometimes was. So she couldn’t trust them the way her sudden warmth made her want to, but she didn’t need to fear them either.
What she needed was a way out of this room, and maybe something to cover her ass.
A sudden wave of fear hit her, and she clapped both hands over her tailbone, feeling for the cotton ball plume of a rabbit’s tail.
Sometimes the seasons and their associated holidays could be a little too literal.
Halloween, especially, had a tendency to turn her into an anthropomorphic rabbit just for the hell of it.
Her fingers found some more roots that needed to be brushed away, but they didn’t find a tail. A similar check of her ears revealed a lack of other lapine features. She was still, for better or for worse, shaped essentially like a human—but that had been the case in Winter, too, at the beginning.
She vaguely remembered a voice telling her that she’d been asleep for a week. So was this the beginning, then, or had she already been here long enough to be absorbed? It was impossible to tell.
“Hello?” She lowered her hands and raised her voice, looking around the small green space.
“I’m here. I’m awake. I’m ready to talk about whatever it is this season wants from me, and P.S.
, I’ll be a lot friendlier and more reasonable if you give me some pants first. I’m not down with the casual nudity. ”
The green walls did not reply. Velveteen sighed.
“See, apart from making me talk to myself, which is a little cruel, you’re putting me in a position where I have to choose between property damage or being trapped in a weird room made out of plants.
I’d really rather not start out by pissing you off, so if you could just come here and tell me what you want me to do, that would be awesome. Super awesome. Seriously.”
The green walls still did not reply. Velveteen, who was starting to feel rather foolish, crossed her arms and scowled at them.
“Do you really want to see me force my way out of here?” she asked.
“I just finished spending I don’t know how long in Winter, and we were not on friendly terms for most of my stay.
Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be. ”
Silence from the greenery. It didn’t even have the decency to look nervous.
Velveteen sighed. “All right, you asked for it,” she said, and lowered her arms, and reached out with the part of herself that knew how to stir a teddy bear to strange and temporary life, the part of herself that had, in Winter, crafted an army out of snow and set it against her enemies.
Her power had always been there, as calm and constant as the air she breathed, even when she hadn’t wanted it.
Even when she’d tried to bury it. Too many of the animus of her generation had died for Supermodel’s vanity, and she was stronger than she should have been. So she reached—
—and screamed, hitting the mossy ground on her knees as pain, immediate and intense, washed over her.
It felt like she was the one being ripped out by the root, and not whatever strange flowers had been planted in her flesh.
She gasped, trying to stop reaching, but she had started the process; she couldn’t stop it, even now that it was out of her control and hurting her.
She had to keep reaching until she found something, anything, to take the pain away.
Her questing mental fingers touched something bright and pulsing with hot, eager life.
They shrank back for a moment, aware that this was wrong; this wasn’t what they were for.
But the pain was so great, and the reach had been so far, that they couldn’t help themselves.
They snapped closed around the bright, pulsing thing like a trap, and pulled it into themselves.
From there, it spread to Velveteen. The pain stopped, like a switch had been flipped somewhere.
As the flowers that Persephone had planted in Velveteen’s flesh burst through the skin of her back and bloomed into riotous color, the animus herself wobbled, trembled, and collapsed.
Everything was still.
* * *
“That went well.” The speaker was a six-foot-tall anthropomorphic rabbit.
Somehow, this didn’t make him the strangest member of the little assemblage that looked down on the sleeping superheroine.
The standards were slightly different, in Spring.
“I mean, she didn’t throw up or explode or anything. ”
“Most people don’t explode,” said the woman next to him.
She was dressed in a sequined ball gown, a feathered mask over her eyes and a dozen strands of brightly colored beads around her neck.
She sounded bored, and sat like she would rather be at a party, drinking champagne and dancing the night away in the arms of a stranger.
Lady Moon had that sort of air about her, regardless of the hour.
“It’s a thing that people are, in fact, not terribly inclined to do. ”
Geb was not present, being notoriously reclusive in these modern times, and much more inclined to hole up in his palatial palace near the fields of eternal harvest and write long, passionate letters to his wife, the sky goddess Nut.
Several geese were attending the convocation in his stead.
They hissed at Lady Moon in what might have been agreement, or might have just been avian cussedness.
Even being the chosen avatars of the Egyptian god of Earth and Harvest couldn’t make geese good-tempered.
Lady Moon shied away from the open mouths of the birds. “I do not like these things,” she announced. “Geese should be fried, and not heard.”
“They understand you, you know,” said the lithe young man who was perching in the nearest tree.
He had vines tying back his hair, and eyes the color of new spring leaves.
Pixies buzzed in the branches around him.
He was known by many names outside of the season, but here he was only ever called by his first name: “Jack,” which suited him ever so much better than “Peter.” He looked at Lady Moon with absolutely no sympathy, and continued, “When they peck your eyes out, it’s going to be because of moments like this one. ”
“She didn’t explode because she’s an animus,” said Persephone patiently.
She had learned to be patient, with this group.
Spring was a mercurial country: it was only natural that the Spirits of the Season would be equally variable in nature.
“She can harness and process life. I fed her a very nice star-blossom, just to see what she would do.”
“What did she do before you planted her?” asked Jack.
Persephone’s patient smile became strained. “Don’t you remember when I told you who she was and why we needed her to come here? You’ve met her before, outside the season. Think, Jack.”
Jack frowned. “I don’t want to think. Thinking is what you’re for.”
“Mmm.” Persephone paused to take a deep breath. She knew better than to waste time in arguing with Jack, who rarely, if ever, bothered to remember anything he didn’t want to. “Before I planted her, she was an animus, just like she is now. She was simply a little more…self-sustaining.”
“Meaning what?” asked the Easter Bunny.
“Meaning she spent her own life force to do the things she did. She had a small internal pool of the stuff, and she exhausted that before she reached for anything ambient. She can’t do that right now.
I’ve dammed the access points. If she wants to use her skills, she has to find life elsewhere to fuel them—and since she can’t reach her own stores, she’ll have to use them if she wants to live.
” Persephone crouched down and smoothed a lock of Velveteen’s hair away from her face.
“Life cannot exist without death and rebirth. They’re connected for a reason.
I need her to understand that if she’s going to choose to stay here, with us. ”
“Um, not to be a party-pooper, since that’s not really in my nature, but we’re the most alive things in Spring,” said Lady Moon, taking a step backward. “What’s to stop her seizing onto us and pulling all the goodness out?”
“Nothing, really,” said Persephone. “She could turn sour, give in to the rot that sleeps at the heart of every living thing. I’ve walked the Primrose Path, where all the cultivars of other worlds are grown, and I’ve seen versions of her that sprout in darker soil.
Most of them go by ‘Marionette’ or ‘Roadkill,’ and they’re not suitable for Spring anymore.
If she chooses that life, we can’t stop her.
I don’t see it happening, though. She loves life too much to hurt anyone on purpose.
There are fruits and flowers and bright streams to sacrifice for the things she needs to do for us.
She’ll be stronger if she learns to be a river, and not a reservoir. ”
“There used to be more like her,” said Jack suddenly.
The others turned to look at him. He was frowning at Velveteen, seeming older and more present than he had only a few moments before.
It wouldn’t last. It never did. “Animus put the sun in the sky and the soil under our feet. They were everywhere. Where did they all go? They were supposed to be here. They were never supposed to be this strong, but they were supposed to be here.”