VELVETEEN vs. Balance #4
“Let me guess,” she said. “This is where I’m going to be, when I finally die, unless I decide that I want to stay here in the Spring, in which case the grave will go away and I’ll live forever, frolicking in meadows and not worrying about supervillains or grocery bills or turning evil and sucking the life out of all my friends in the middle of the night. ”
“Yes,” said Persephone serenely. “That’s putting it a bit more…
viscerally than I would have chosen, but yes.
You don’t have to die. You don’t have to change.
You can be young and strong and healthy forever, if you stay here with us.
And there will be no more animus in the world, and things will be in balance. ”
Velveteen didn’t say anything. She couldn’t think of anything to say.
She would have been lying if she had claimed she wasn’t tempted.
Yes, Spring was strange, and its customs were still difficult for her to understand, but so what?
Everything was unfamiliar at first. If she stayed, she could learn whatever she needed to know.
She could even learn to be happy, and her friends would finally be freed from the need to worry about her all the time. She could be free. She could be…
“Wait,” she said, frowning as she turned to Persephone. “No more animus. You said no more animus. What do you mean?”
“Supermodel killed all the animus of her generation, and all but two of your generation, and now only you remain,” said Persephone. “If you stay here, there will be none. Absence is an innate balance. The world will adjust.”
Slowly, Velveteen frowned, puzzling her way through all the things that statement could mean. Then—cautiously, more than half afraid of the answer, but needing to hear it all the same—she asked, “What about Tag?”
“He sleeps the sleep of the lost,” said Persephone. “If you stay here, if you don’t go back for him, no one will ever wake him. Don’t mourn for him. He died well, and he lived a long, healthy, fruitful life. His balance has been served.”
“Um, what?” Velveteen turned to stare at Persephone.
“He’s my boyfriend. I love him. It’s not his fault that he got hurt, and I’m not going to stop mourning him, or loving him, just because you say his ‘balance’ has been ‘served.’ What does that even mean, anyway?
He died. He misjudged a situation, and he died.
There’s no balance in that. It was a senseless tragedy. ”
“All death is balance, for the life that came before it.” Persephone waved a hand. “This is balance. The only thing that stops it from being perfect is you, little animus, who still walks in the world and doesn’t lie down in fields of flowers. Stay here with us and there will be balance.”
“And if I don’t? If I say ‘golly, this has been a lot of fun, except for the part where it really hasn’t been, I’ll be going now’? Are you going to stop me for the sake of your balance?”
“No,” said Persephone. “I already told you, if you leave here with a better grasp of what you’re capable of, that’s going to be enough for me. I want balance. I want the world to be better than it is. That doesn’t mean forcing people to do things they don’t want to do.”
“Oh.” Velveteen looked back to the blank tombstone for a long moment before she asked, “If I stay here, there won’t be anyone else with my power set? Like, ever?”
“For a generation. Maybe more. Eventually, I’m sure, someone will find their way to Spring, and eat the fruit of these trees.
” Persephone reached out her hand. A nearby branch bent, and a pomegranate smacked into the curve of her fingers.
The skin had already split, revealing the ruby seeds inside.
She turned to offer it to Velveteen. “That person will have children one day. Twins, most likely. And they’ll be born with the ability to animate the inanimate, or to heal flesh, or to summon pictures from the page.
They’ll bring it all back with them. Animus will be born again. ”
“You know, I think the thing that sucks most about this is that it’s actually sort of tempting,” said Velveteen.
She took the pomegranate, turning it over in her hands.
“I don’t like it here. I don’t like what you’ve done to me, no matter how necessary you think it is.
But I don’t like being—what was it you called me?
I don’t like being a ‘weapon that walks like a woman,’ either.
I don’t want to be Supermodel.” And it was Spring that had opened that door, wasn’t it?
She had never known why anyone would choose to drain the life from the world until Persephone had stopped her ability to feed herself.
Sometimes efforts to help could hurt, even when they weren’t trying to.
“I don’t think there’s any risk of that,” said Persephone. “You care too much about people to ever go her route. It’s just that without finesse, you can…break things.”
Velveteen—who had once resurrected her boyfriend unintentionally, and was all too aware of her ability to “break things”—nodded. She shook a few seeds out of the pomegranate, popped them into her mouth, and swallowed, before she said, “I’m going back.”
“I thought you might say that,” said Persephone, and smiled. “Well, then, it looks like we need to speed up your lessons, don’t you think?”
“Bring it,” said Velveteen, and oh, the Spring was warm.