VELVETEEN vs. Balance #2
Velveteen snatched her hands away, already breathing hard.
“No, I’m good,” she said, forcing her fingers into fists and shoving them down into her lap.
Maybe if she just didn’t touch anything, she wouldn’t need to suck the life out of anything.
She’d never been big on dieting, but wasn’t fasting supposed to be good for like, the soul?
Spiritually, she was probably in dire need of losing a few pounds.
So she’d just keep her hands to herself until this was over, and she moved on to Autumn.
Nobody in Autumn cared about her the way Persephone did.
Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. In her experience, it was always the people who cared about you the most who hurt you the most. The two things seemed to go hand in hand.
And if she cared about Persephone, even in a slightly awed, slightly terrified way, that put her in an excellent position to hurt the older animus.
Persephone sighed. “You have to eat,” she said.
“I didn’t stop up your access to your own life force so you could starve to death.
If you’re worried about the damage you might do in the process of sustaining yourself, consider this: you’ve been to the Hall of Mirrors.
The Snow Queen showed you what might have been.
You’ve seen the worlds where you became Marionette.
If you let yourself die because you can’t bear the thought of remaining in balance, what happens when your eyes open anyway?
You’ll rise, and there won’t be any mercy to your hunger when that happens.
You’ll be just like Peter. Innocent and heartless and starving. ”
“I thought you said Jack was the one who died,” said Velveteen.
“I said Jack was the sacrifice,” said Persephone.
“Jack died a thousand times to set the stars in their places. Peter only died once. Once was enough. They weren’t always the same person.
Even here, we have our ways of downsizing, and they balance one another.
If you became Marionette, there would be nothing to balance you. We’d have to cast you out of Spring.”
Velveteen’s eyes widened. “You wouldn’t.”
“I would. I would weep for you, and for the damage that you would do to the world, but Spring cannot shelter someone who has no balance,” Persephone reached for another asphodel.
“You have to eat. You have to live, and you have to learn to live with yourself when your existence comes at the expense of more than just your health.”
“Are you secretly evil?” asked Velveteen. “Just as a data point. I mean, it won’t change anything, really, since I’m sort of at your mercy here. I just want to know.”
Persephone’s smile was fleeting enough that Velveteen might have missed it, had she not been watching so intently.
“You know, since Christianity became the big thing on the block, people really enjoy casting my husband as the bad guy. ‘He’s basically the devil,’ they say, and then Hades is responsible for all the world’s ills.
Never mind that my Uncle Zeus and his raging infidelity caused more problems than Hades doing his accounting ever did.
” She set her asphodel chains aside. “They reduce the story of our courtship and marriage to one of abduction, enslavement, and rape, and they forget that the Greeks were far, far more afraid of me than they were of him. My husband is a gentle man, and a gentleman, which aren’t always the same thing.
I was, and am, his Iron Queen. So no, dear, I’m not evil, but I’m not here purely to be kind. I’m here for balance. Balance hurts.”
“I don’t want to hurt people,” said Velveteen.
“But you do, Velveteen, you do. Come with me.” Persephone put her asphodel aside and stood, beckoning for Velveteen to follow. Several of the geese also rose, honking and ruffling their feathers as they waddled after the pair.
“I am not a fan of geese,” said Velveteen, as she hurried to keep up with the taller goddess.
Persephone looked faintly, distractedly amused.
“No one likes geese. I think that’s a large part of why Geb chooses them as his symbol.
He appreciates the fact that he’s the God of Earth and Harvest—same job as my mother, actually, which makes me feel like I dodged a bullet when she decided to go hang out in Summer—but has avatars that everyone hates.
Just ignore them. That’s what the rest of us do. ”
“I’m barefoot, and geese crap everywhere.”
“Ignore them, watch your step, and be ready to wash your feet frequently,” amended Persephone.
“Come on.” She waved her hand. A portal opened in the air, ringed by green vines and trumpet flowers.
Persephone stepped through. Lacking any other options, Velveteen followed, and the portal closed again behind them.
* * *
They emerged in the middle of a field of briars. They grew in tangled hillocks, so wound around and through themselves that they created fantastic shapes, like natural, unspeakable topiary.
There were no flowers, no fruits; only the thorns, stretching out as far as the eye could see, turning the landscape dark and dangerous.
“Look.” Persephone waved her hand, indicating the thorn briars.
“They serve no purpose here. They’re not guarding a sleeping princess or providing homes for rabbits.
They’re just choking out everything else.
They have so much life that they’ve left none for the rest of the field.
This place is out of balance. So are you, Velveteen: you’re starving, and if you don’t eat soon, you’re going to become like these thorns, running riot, because you won’t have the strength left to contain yourself. ”
“You know, I really, really wish I wasn’t spending all my time in the Kingdom of We’ve Got a Metaphor for That,” said Velveteen. She shivered. Her gown of rose petals and clinging vines was thin, intended for warmer places than this. “Thorns bad, comparison pointy. Okay?”
“No, not okay,” said Persephone. “I swear, you’re trying so hard to be one of the good guys that you’ve forgotten how to listen. Do you eat meat when you’re at home?”
“Yeah,” said Velveteen. Her mouth watered, involuntarily, at the thought of a juicy hamburger, or better, a steak.
She hadn’t taken a mouthful of solid food since she arrived in Spring.
Hunger, constant companion that it had become, was more metaphysical than real: her stomach never ached, but her soul seemed to.
“The Marketing Department tried to convince me to become a vegetarian when I was a kid—they said it would fit well with my overall rabbit theme—but I just couldn’t stomach it. Literally.”
“Do you think the cow somehow survives the removal of your meal? Or that the carrot regenerates after you taste its flesh? Everything that lives kills. Maybe you only kill plants, or maybe you eat your way up the food chain, but there’s no such thing as a life lived without causing pain.
” Persephone knelt, wrapped her hand around one of the briars, and pulled.
The thorns broke through her skin, blood trickling from between her fingers and dripping down to the ground, but she didn’t let go.
She just kept pulling. “Everything hurts.”
“And now you’re an album by a bad Goth band,” said Velveteen. “I don’t understand what you want me to do.”
“I want you to stop being so focused on being good that you forget that sometimes a refusal to be selfish is the most selfish thing of all,” said Persephone.
“You’re hurting yourself. If someone were doing this to one of your friends, you would strike them down to make them stop, but because you’re the only one being hurt, you think it’s somehow right.
That it’s somehow fair. You haven’t earned this suffering.
Admit that you’re a living thing like every other living thing, and take what you need.
” She waved her unpunctured hand at the thorn field.
“I brought you here to make it easier for you to begin.”
“You brought me where, exactly?” Velveteen looked around the thorn field. “This is messy, but it has a right to exist.”
“Does it?” Persephone shook her head. “I wish you could have seen the Spring as it was when there was balance, before Supermodel did what she did to you. She made you the arbiter of right and wrong for all the animus in the world, because you are all the animus in the world. There were two, for a time—and we’ve all wondered, some aloud, some more privately, why she let the boy live; she can’t have intended to breed the two of you, even though like calls to like, and you found each other.
Maybe she remembered that balance mattered, on some deep level, and wanted to be defeated. ”
“What do you mean, ‘remembered’?” demanded Velveteen.
The idea that she and Tag had been drawn to each other because of their powers was almost offensive.
Sure, it was the fact that he was an animus that had caused Jackie to set them up on a blind date, and sure, it had given them something in common, something that they could talk about, but it wasn’t the reason they had fallen in love. Was it?
No, it couldn’t be. She had dated Action Dude first, after all, and Aaron was about as far from being an animus as you could get while still being in the realm of “is a superhero.” His powers were purely physical and purely his own, and her love for him had been just as pure and true as her love for Tag, before Aaron had gone and spoilt it all by being himself. His selfish, stupid, shallow self.