VELVETEEN vs. The Retroactive Continuity #3
Velveteen, who could not, in fact, fly, made a small sound of dismay.
“How am I not falling right now?” she asked, looking to her left, where Jack was clutching one of her snow globes and trying not to hyperventilate.
“How am I not plummeting to my doom?” She looked to her right.
Polychrome was there, incarnate once again in black and rainbows and a bewildered expression.
“You, I get, but how are we not falling?”
“Gravity only exists when there’s such a thing as up and down,” said Polychrome, sounding dazed. “I was inside a different version of my own head. Like, did that happen to you? Or did I get the special ticket for the what-the-hell express?”
“Just you and Aaron,” said Velveteen. “Jack’s a metaphorical construct, and I guess the fact that this is technically my mission kept me out of my own head.”
“Yeah,” said Polychrome. “Where is Aaron?”
“He didn’t want to give up what he never got to have.” Velveteen’s expression turned briefly sad. “Jack wouldn’t tell me exactly what it was, which I think probably means that was a world where we figured out how to make things work when we were teenagers.”
“It was,” said Polychrome, and reached for Velveteen’s hand, tangling their fingers together and holding tight. “We were braver there. I don’t know how we found it in us, but we were braver.”
“If we were brave there, we can be brave here,” said Velveteen. “It’s still in us. And if Santa Claus sent us here, it’s because there’s still something we can do. So we walk.”
“How far?”
“Until we find an ending. Jack, you with us?” Velveteen turned to look at Jack again, and stopped, eyes going wide. “Jack?”
Jacqueline Claus, adopted daughter of Santa Claus, metaphor given flesh and now pulled outside the realm of fleshy concepts, offered her a wan smile.
She was translucent, more like a girl projected on the air than a girl in any actuality.
“I don’t think I can exist here,” she said.
“Sorry about that. I hope this doesn’t mess things up for you. ”
“No,” said Velveteen, shaking her head firmly. “No, you are not going to disappear on me. We need you. We can’t get Jackie back without you.”
“Sure you can,” said Jack. “Just make a Christmas wish, and maybe it’ll come true.”
“Jack—” Velveteen reached for her, fingers closing on empty air. There was nothing there to grab onto.
Jack offered one last, flickering smile, and she was gone, leaving the two superheroines standing alone in an endless, empty nothingness.
“Um,” said Polychrome, after a long pause. “Does this sort of thing happen to you often?”
“Disturbingly more often than I like,” said Velveteen.
She looked blankly at the place where Jack had been.
“I keep losing people, Lena. That’s been my whole life.
Losing people. I lost my parents, and then I lost you, and then I lost Tad, and Jackie, and now I’ve lost Aaron and Jack.
None of you should come anywhere near me. I’m dangerous.”
“Everyone’s dangerous, Vel.” Polychrome squeezed her hand. “You lost me because I was a scared kid. I came back. You’re not going to lose me again. Pinky-swear.”
Velveteen laughed, a little unsteadily. “I don’t think infinite nothingness cares about pinky-swears.”
“Maybe not, but I do, and that’s what matters here.” Polychrome looked around the emptiness. “What do we do now?”
“I guess we keep going.” Velveteen took a cautious step forward. The nothing continued to hold her up. “All right: looks like we walk. You up for this?”
“Sounds fun,” said Polychrome, and followed.
* * *
Two women walked across an infinite plane, surrounded by absolutely nothing.
They held fast to each other’s hands, as if they feared that letting go could mean being separated forever.
It wasn’t an unreasonable concern, given the blankness around them.
It was impossible to even tell if they were gaining ground, because there was no distance; only the emptiness.
“This isn’t working,” said Velveteen. “We’re not getting anywhere.”
“How could we tell if we were?” Polychrome shook her head. “I’m not tired. I feel like we’ve been walking for hours, but…I’m not tired.”
“Jack disappeared. That means time isn’t really passing here. If this place knew about time, she’d still be with us.”
Polychrome gave her a sidelong look. “You really don’t think she’s supposed to exist, do you?”
“No. I don’t. If you could remember Jackie Frost, you’d understand why.
Jack is…Jackie made more sense as someone I’d be friends with.
Aurora assigned her to befriend me, so that Winter would have a way in, but she still made sense.
She wasn’t just sugar cookies and smiles.
She was snide and cynical and one of my favorite people.
The idea that she’s gone forever because of me, it hurts. ”
“But we’re superheroes,” said Polychrome gently.
“Even if you’re right—and Jack said you were, so I guess I believe you—we were always going to be taking bullets for each other.
That’s part of being a team. And the way I remember things, Jack has always been on your team.
That means Jackie would have been, too. If she took a bullet for you, she did it because she wanted to.
Because she was your teammate, when I couldn’t be. That means she was a hero.”
“She never liked you,” said Velveteen fondly. “She used to call you horrible names, and threaten to feed you bacon.”
“Sounds like a real charmer,” said Polychrome. “I’m glad you had her.”
“I’m going to get her back. I’m going to get them all back.”
“I believe you,” said Polychrome. She looked around. “We’re not getting anywhere. Got any clever ideas?”
“We could call for a taxi.”
“Genius,” said Polychrome. She paused before saying, “You were always smarter than you thought you were. Even when we were kids, I knew it would be your team someday, no matter what Marketing said. I guess I was jealous. I thought you’d leave me behind.”
“I would never have done that.”
“I know that now. We grew up. That makes a lot of things easier.” And some things harder.
Polychrome gave Velveteen another sidelong look. Some things so much harder.
Sometimes she felt like the greatest gap between her and the woman who had been her best friend for so very long was experience.
While Velma had been running from her powers and her past, Polychrome—then Sparkle Bright—had been turning into a professional superhero.
She’d taken the advanced classes. She’d learned the tips and tricks and warning signs that Velveteen had never been able to study.
This, all of this, was a test. There were chapters in her textbooks about situations like this one, and it fit every requirement of a test. They’d lost one person for each phase.
Victory Anna in their world, Action Dude in the mirror-world, and Jack Claus here, in this shapeless plain.
Polychrome didn’t need to be a genius to know that it was going to take a sacrifice for them to move on to the next level, whatever that was.
“Do you really think you’re going to be able to rewind the world?” she asked. “To get everything back the way it was before you went away?”
“I do,” said Velveteen. “There has to be a way, and Santa…he may not always tell us everything, but he doesn’t outright lie. Not even to me. He wouldn’t have sent us here if he hadn’t thought that this could fix things.”
“So those three years would, what? Not have happened? Or we’d remember everything, only we’d be back at the start?”
“I don’t know. I guess we have to get there to find out.”
Polychrome took a deep breath. “I have an idea about that,” she said. “Remember how I used to fly with you when we were kids?”
“Yeah,” said Velveteen. “We were smaller then.”
“Relative sizes have stayed about the same. What do you say? Let me give you a boost?” Polychrome offered what she hoped was an impish smile. She didn’t want Velveteen to realize what she was doing.
There was a pause before Velveteen shrugged and said, “Why not? It’s not like we’re getting anywhere just walking.”
“Great,” said Polychrome.
It took them a few minutes to find a carry that would be comfortable for both of them. They wound up with Velveteen riding piggy-back on Polychrome, her legs locked around the taller woman’s waist, her arms slung around her shoulders. Polychrome gripped Velveteen’s wrists like she was a backpack.
“Hold tight,” she said, and launched herself into the colorless, spaceless sky on a trail of rainbow light.
* * *
Many people had asked themselves, over the years, just how high Polychrome could fly if she didn’t have to worry about silly little things like “running out of air.” Most of them would have had their questions answered if they had been present when she launched herself into the sky that had no borders, flying upward as fast and as hard as she could go.
After two miles straight up, her rainbow trail turned into an oscillating swirl of colors, melting into one another like an oil slick painted in the air.
Two miles after that, the colors vanished completely, replaced by a beam of pure, eye-searing whiteness.
It was light without gradation, and it was as beautiful as it was alarming.
Velveteen would have panicked, if she had been able to see it, but her eyes were squinted tightly shut against the rush of air, and she couldn’t see anything at all.
“You’re going to fix everything,” said Polychrome serenely. “I believe you. I believe in you. You’re going to fix it all.”
“What?” shouted Velveteen.
“I said, I’m sorry,” said Polychrome, and exploded into light.