VELVETEEN vs. Everything You Ever Wanted #2
“Look. Do you see that?” Velveteen pointed to the nearest mirror. Like some of the others, it was reflecting the hall: they hadn’t reached it yet, and it had yet to summon up a parallel world for their amusement.
Unlike any of the others, its reflection of the hall showed a door on the opposite wall. “The door,” said Polychrome. “Shit. I wasn’t sure it was real.”
“Papa doesn’t lie,” said Jack.
“Yeah, he does, but not about things like this,” said Velveteen. She started to reach for the mirror, and hesitated. “If it’s reflecting the door, does that mean it contains the door, or does that mean the door is on the opposite wall?”
“Ah, good,” said Victory Anna, stepping briskly forward.
“A logic problem. Let us consider. Mirrors reflect: that is the nature of mirrors. But with each reflection, they lose fidelity. As I am the only one among us who will not actually trigger a window into another world by stepping in front of a looking glass, it would behoove you to stay where you are.”
“Got it,” said Velveteen. “Do your weird science thing.”
“My science is not weird,” said Victory Anna primly. “Improbable, perhaps. Arrogant, absolutely. But never weird. My science behaves with the appropriate poise and decorum at all times.” She continued walking until she was standing between the two mirrors in question.
She had no parallel selves to reflect; she had no other futures to explore.
The mirrors rippled like they were trying to tune themselves to a new frequency before settling on a simple reflection.
She smirked. “You see?” she said, looking back over her shoulder.
“I defy their programming. Magic is just science with the safeties off, and everyone knows that safeties are why your hair isn’t currently on fire. ”
Victory Anna turned her attention to the mirror with the door in its reflection, studying it for several moments before turning to look at the mirror on the opposite wall.
Logic said that it should have been reflecting a reflection of a door, continuing the back-and-forth exchange of images that defined the hall of mirrors.
Instead, it reflected her reflection, with no sign of a door.
“The door is in the mirror that reflects it,” she said, turning back to Velveteen. “Were it not, it would appear more than once. You may proceed to do whatever ridiculous thing you feel is appropriate.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence,” said Velveteen. She looked at Action Dude. “If you want to let go, now’s the time.”
“Nope,” he said. “I did that once. Worst decision I’ve ever made. I’m holding on from now on.”
Velveteen smiled a little and stepped through, Action Dude by her side. The world shattered into prisms of silver glitter around them, and was gone.
From the perspective of the three people still standing in the Hall, the two of them had disappeared completely. The mirror continued to reflect nothing but Victory Anna. She touched the surface experimentally, and grimaced as her fingers found only unyielding glass.
“Small problem, I’m afraid,” she said. “This style of travel only works for those whose cognates live beyond the glass.”
“Maybe it’s just because you’re alone,” said Polychrome, and took her free hand, offering her girlfriend an earnest smile. “I’ll take you through.”
“As you say, my Pol—but try not to be too upset if it doesn’t work. I want you back again. That means not becoming distracted by my absence.”
“I won’t, because you won’t be absent. You’ll be right by my side.
You’ll see.” This sincere proclamation made, Polychrome turned and stepped through the mirror, pulling Victory Anna with her…
or trying to. As her wrist vanished into the mirror, her fingers slipped out of Victory Anna’s, suddenly too slippery and intangible to be held.
Victory Anna sighed heavily. “Sometimes genius and perception are terrible burdens to be borne,” she said, turning to Jack.
“Well? Scurry through, winter-girl, and keep my beloved safe. Her friends as well, I suppose. I may not be currently well-inclined toward either one of them, but she is the dearest star in my sky, and they are important to her.”
“I’ll do whatever I can,” promised Jack, and stepped into the mirror, vanishing like the others.
Victory Anna sighed, looking around herself at the empty Hall before calmly, almost regally sinking down to sit on the floor. “One down,” she said, and there was no one there to argue.
* * *
“Daddy, catch me!” That was all the warning Epitome—golden boy of The Super Patriots, Inc., strongest man in North America, Hero Beat’s sexiest superhuman three years running—had before his seven-year-old launched herself off the balcony.
She was an incredibly good faller. She didn’t plummet; instead, she spread her arms, increasing her surface area, and dropped with all the grace and poise of an Olympic diver. He had a split second to admire her form before he realized two things in the same horrified moment:
First, that he both did and did not know who she was.
Looking at her, he knew that her name was Katie, that her favorite color was purple, at least this week, and that she had a severe allergy to beestings, prompting every member of the family to learn how to operate an epinephrine injector.
He knew that she loved puppies, interesting rocks, and singing along to Taylor Swift songs.
He also knew that he had never seen her before in his life.
Second, he knew that she was falling, and falling fast. Whoever she was (his daughter), she didn’t know how to fly.
Not yet, and maybe not ever. Superhuman genetics were still a largely unexplored field, and there wasn’t that much known about what circumstances led to powers being passed from parent to child.
She was falling. She was going to hit the ground.
Technically, his powers didn’t include superspeed.
Speaking practically, anyone who could fly was going to seem like a speedster to a bystander; he could dismiss gravity and move with a mentally-fueled self-propulsion that put him in the top percentage of human potential.
Less than a second after he had registered the danger to the little girl, his feet were off the ground and his arms were snatching her out of the air, gathering her to him with an instinctively parental tenderness.
She was giggling. She had been falling, and now she was giggling, and her eyes…she had Velveteen’s eyes. No. She had Velma’s eyes. She had her mother’s eyes. She had her mother’s eyes, and she had blonde hair like his, and she was his daughter. She was his incredible, impossible daughter.
“Hi,” he said, sounding dazed.
“Good catch, Daddy!” she said, and squirmed until he put her down. Then she took off running, heading deeper into the house, off on some unknowable child’s errand.
Aaron—Action Dude, Epitome, whatever his name actually was—stayed exactly where he was, staring after her with wide, hungry eyes.
Then he turned, finally looking around the room where he’d appeared.
It was the sort of comfortable, lived-in foyer that he had seen in a hundred homes, including the one where his parents still lived.
There was an umbrella stand next to the door, and a framed copy of Newsweek on the wall, showing him standing between Polychrome and Velveteen.
The caption read “A new generation takes the skies!”
“What the hell…?” he asked, taking a step toward the picture.
The glass, strangely reflective for what it was, caught his image and bounced it back at him.
There he was. Aaron Frank. Blond hair and blue eyes and an all-American jawline that had triggered a hundred angry meetings with Marketing, all of them geared at making him pretend to be some flavor of Christian, some flavor of football star, some flavor of “you’ll play better in Ohio if you’d just.” If he’d just let them tell him who to be, the way he’d once allowed them to tell him who to love.
But he hadn’t done that here, had he? His uniform still held echoes of his old Action Dude persona: the blue, the cut, the positioning of his logo.
But the orange was gone, replaced by a burgundy that he knew without even asking himself would echo the color of Velveteen’s current costume.
This was a world where he had somehow managed to dig his heels in and stand up for what was actually important.
He’d managed to stand up for himself. He’d managed to stand up for her.
“This isn’t fair,” he whispered, and the world didn’t answer him. Worlds so rarely did.
Like a man in a dream that he feared would end at any moment, he began making his way deeper into the house, following the trail blazed by (his daughter) the little girl.
He hadn’t gone far before he heard her laughing.
He followed the sound, and emerged into a room that was half kitchen, half greenhouse, with domed glass panels making up one entire wall.
There was an island built into the middle of the room.
There was Katie, sitting on a stool, kicking her feet and munching on a carrot.
There was a high chair, holding a small child of indeterminate gender captive, like a miniature supervillain being brought to justice for their crimes. And there…there…