VELVETEEN vs. Spring Cleaning
Velveteen walked through the green world and the green world moved through Velveteen.
She hadn’t quite mastered Persephone’s trick of pulling the ambient life out of mites and chiggers and other small, biting creatures and channeling it into flowers that would burst into bloom under her feet, but she’d managed to figure out how to snack on mosquitoes.
When she heard them droning nearby, she reached out with the silent, deadly hands of her power and yanked the life right out of the itchy little fuckers.
They fell to fertilize the soil, and she walked on, a little more fed, a little less inclined to accidentally injure people in the search for a good meal.
Sometimes she felt bad about what she did to stay alive.
It was hard not to, when she was vampiring her way through the world.
But when she really thought about it, she could remember smashing a thousand mosquitoes during her lifetime.
None of them had kept her fed, or served any real purpose, since they’d been wiped away with tissues and not dropped to the ground.
The way she fed now might be strange and hard to adjust to, but that didn’t make it wrong.
And besides, it wasn’t like she was eating squirrels.
Yet. That was the operative word: that was what made this season so terrifying, under its veil of flowers and its promise of balance.
The more adept she became at turning her appetite into an arrow and aiming it at the world, the more her hunger grew.
It was starting to scare her, all the more because she was a living thing, and eating came so easily to the living.
One day, she would think she was reaching for mosquitoes, and she’d find herself with a mouth—or a soul, technically—full of squirrels. Or kittens. Or people.
That was the big fear. People. She could kill people to feed herself, the opposite of what she’d done with Tad, where she’d nearly killed herself in the process of feeding him.
Becoming Marionette had never seemed so plausible to her before, especially since what Persephone had done to her by blocking access to her body’s natural reservoirs was exactly what had happened in the timelines where she was Marionette: dead bodies had no life to draw upon. Right now, neither did she.
“Getting good and tired of this bullshit,” she murmured, as she drained the life from a passing wasp and allowed it to fall into the loam at her feet.
Back in Winter, the living heart of the season had felt justified in twisting her into a statue of ice and snow and frozen heartlessness, leaving her unable to cope with the reality of her situation, or the fact that her boyfriend—who she loved, she was almost sure of it—was currently technically deceased.
When she’d arrived in Spring, with frostbite of the soul and hands that didn’t feel like hers anymore, she’d been transformed again, this time into an open channel with no reservoir of its own.
People kept changing her, and they never thought to ask permission first.
“Change never does ask permission, sweetheart,” said a voice like vermouth, filled with sweet bitterness and broken glass glittering in bead-choked gutters.
Like most things in Spring, it was a metaphor given flesh and unyielding reality.
“Change is like the tide. It does what it wants, and screw you if you don’t feel like going along with it. ”
Velveteen stopped and turned. Lady Moon was sitting on a mossy old rock in the middle of the field, filing her nails with a jeweled emery board.
Her gown was made of peacock feathers and bright butterfly wings, matching the mask that covered half her face.
It curved upward at an angle, forming the crescent shape of her namesake.
As always, her neckline was low enough to make Velveteen feel faintly uncomfortable, like she was supposed to start flinging Mardi Gras beads to pay for the view.
It wasn’t prudishness: she’d been a superheroine for most of her life, she’d seen a lot of cleavage.
It was the angle, the way everything about Lady Moon seemed to combine to say “look at my tits.”
“Could you maybe not read my mind without permission?” asked Velveteen. “I ask not because I think you’ll actually stop, but because this way I’m justified in hitting you with a brick if you don’t cut it out.”
“You’re always justified,” said Lady Moon. “It’s just that you’ll have to live with the consequences of whatever it is you choose to do.”
Velveteen looked at her flatly. Lady Moon laughed.
“You are a constant delight, and I am going to miss you sorely now that you’re on your way to whatever lies beyond the merry month of May,” said Lady Moon. She stood, her stiletto heels sinking into the ground. “Walk with me.”
“Um,” said Velveteen, who had had no idea that she might be leaving soon, or what the spirit of spring celebration might have to do with it.
But if there was one thing she had learnt from her time in the Seasonal Lands, it was that when things made no sense at all, that was when you just had to roll with it. “Sure.”
Lady Moon—who had been a living lightshow, once, a rainbow dancing in the springtime sky, when the fireworks show of her hands had set New Orleans ablaze, a century gone and a hundred quiet bargains past—walked, and Velveteen followed, and the Spring went on.
* * *
Records of superhumans prior to the modern age have always been sketchy.
We know that they existed: that while some origin stories may be uniquely modern, others are uniquely archaic, children somehow gaining powers from poisons, flight powered by alchemy and mixed solutions of hensbane and lead, superstrength granted by glowing rocks that fell from the sky and gradually eroded the heart.
Superhumans have always walked among us, although it took a very long time for them to come out of the shadows and take to the skies.
Many of the older superhumans were canonized as gods or as metaphorical forces of nature, which may explain why so many of the reports of the Seasonal Lands read like attempts at romantic poetry.
When an avatar of Spring walks in beauty like the night, it is meant literally, and sometimes terrifyingly.
As there was no way to live among their original communities after they had been labeled gods, these early superhumans took refuge in whatever sub-realities or parallel realms they could find.
Many took on the mantles of Spirits of the Season, and faded from the normal human world forever.
It is interesting to consider the fact that some Spirits of the Season—Trick and Treat, from Autumn; the Snow Queen and Jack Frost, from Winter—have not only performed that most human of acts, reproduction, but have passed their seasonal affiliations on to their children.
Perhaps they are in the long, slow process of becoming something other than mere superhumans.
Given another few generations, perhaps we will have to contend with the fact that metaphors are literal truth.
* * *
“Where are we going, exactly?” asked Velveteen, after they had walked long enough in silence that she was starting to wish she’d brought shoes.
She went barefoot most of the time these days, enjoying the feeling of moss beneath her feet, but even she had her limits.
There were jagged rocks even in the Spring, and she was getting tired of stepping on them.
“I was supposed to have another flying lesson with Peter today.”
“How you’ve frustrated that poor boy,” said Lady Moon, shaking her head and clucking her tongue at the same time, like an irritated peahen.
“He’s so sure that you could fly if you were just willing to put in the effort.
Don’t worry about him pushing you off of a cliff.
He’s hardly ever chosen to do that, and on the rare occasions where he’s been moved to get physical, it’s been reasonably easy to distract him. ”
“…no one ever taught you people what the word ‘reassuring’ actually means, did they?” asked Velveteen, after a moment of staring at Lady Moon.
“Here’s a tip for the future: usually it means ‘don’t talk about people getting shoved off of cliffs like it’s something totally reasonable and cool and fun to do at parties. ’”
“Don’t be silly. No one ever gets shoved off of a cliff at one of my parties.
Not anymore, anyway. It was all the rage for a little while, back when the mode was Gothic and the manors were always perched precariously atop the tallest cliffs.
” Lady Moon’s smile turned wistful and reflective.
“The gowns were thin as moonlight, and the men were strong and terrible. It was a lovely era to be nostalgic for, and a difficult one to survive.”
“You know, I have absolutely no idea how I’m supposed to respond to that, so I’m going to go with attempting to change the subject,” said Velveteen. “How old are you?”
“There are three things wrong with your question, little animus,” said Lady Moon.
Her tone was suddenly cool, like that of a debutante refusing a dance with her rival’s brother.
“Firstly, you should never ask a lady her age. It’s insulting to her and degrading to you.
Secondly, you shouldn’t be so blunt when you redirect a conversation.
Be the reed that casts its ripples through the stream, not the rock that distorts everything it touches. ”
She went silent after that, still walking. Velveteen frowned and waited for her to continue.
When she didn’t, Velveteen cleared her throat and said, “And…?”
“And what?” Lady Moon sounded annoyed.