VELVETEEN vs. The Parliamentarian
Light filled the hallways of the Crystal Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle.
Bright sunlight at the moment, pure and clean and tinted with rose and gold, an eternal golden hour designed to entice photographers and flatter their subjects.
The Princess stood outside the room where Tad had slept away the long hours of his death, the room she knew would cease to exist as soon as its current occupants left it behind.
She just needed them to hurry up and do that, so that they could get on with the complicated legal business of bringing a man back from the dead.
But they weren’t coming out. She glanced over her shoulder to the door, trying not to let her impatience show.
They deserved a reunion after everything they’d been through.
No matter how badly she wanted to talk to Tad, or ask him what he’d meant when he asked for someone called Jackie.
There was Jacqueline, of course, but she had only ever been Jack, never Jackie.
Why, thinking back, she’d always lost her temper when someone called her Jackie, at least as far someone sweet as gumdrops and candy canes could lose her temper—
And that thought ran counter to the memory of a girl with white hair that glittered like new-fallen snow in the sunlight, who’d had a temper second only to her sense of mischief.
The Princess reached up and rubbed her temples with the index fingers of both hands, trying to ease away what felt like the beginnings of a migraine.
Right. She wasn’t going to do anyone any good standing out here and dwelling on things she couldn’t explain.
She needed to do something. She needed to talk to Tag.
The Princess looked toward a strand of climbing marigolds snaking up the wall. “How long have I been out here?” she asked.
Several of the flowers closed, leaving a few to turn toward her with petals spread wide.
“About fifteen minutes, then? Excellent. That means I’ve given them long enough.
Thank you.” Turning briskly, she opened the door and stepped back into the room, heading toward the glass coffin.
When she was halfway there she stopped dead in her tracks, cheeks turning an immediate shade of brilliant red.
Tag was still seated in the coffin, Velveteen wrapped around him and holding on for dear life.
There wasn’t room enough between them to slide a rose petal.
The Princess forcibly turned her eyes away, trying to give them a crumb of privacy, and waited for them to tire of kissing and touching one another, their hands growing more daring and their kisses getting more frantic with every passing second.
She wasn’t sure they’d noticed her coming back.
She wasn’t sure they’d noticed her leaving.
Neither of them was normally much for public displays of affection—the coaching they’d both received from The Super Patriots, Inc.
Marketing Department had been absorbed on such a deep level that restraint was fully inculcated into them; chaste kisses played better on camera than desperate groping—and she was quite sure they’d come to their senses soon.
Soon. Any moment now, they would realize she was in the room, or that she was aware of everything that went on inside her castle, no matter how hard she tried to avert her eyes. Dear Grimm and all the godmothers, they would realize before they started removing articles of clothing. Unless—
She glanced back at them, winced, and looked away.
They had already removed their masks, Tag holding Vel’s, Vel holding his.
For superhumans, taking off their masks was almost as intimate as taking off their undergarments.
That was just one of the many reasons she had never chosen or been required to wear one: too many fashion dolls of her had been sold to too many children under the age of ten, all of whom knew what removing a superheroine’s mask meant.
It was one of the places where she and her corporate sponsors had always been aligned.
The Princess risked another quick look. They were still at it, clinging to each other like letting go for even a second would result in an eternal separation. She cleared her throat. They kept making out like they were afraid the entire concept was about to be made illegal.
She sighed. She didn’t want to interrupt them.
She also didn’t want to leave them here to try and get any more intimate while they were inside a glass coffin.
Those things were expensive, and prone to breaking.
It wouldn’t be a good fairy tale if they went and got themselves impaled on shards of glass before they could get back to Portland.
But they seemed so happy, and it had been so long since she’d seen Vel happy—or since she’d seen Tag be anything at all, apart from the kind of dead that didn’t rot or rise, just laid still and drifted slowly into memory. She sighed again and turned her face back to the wall.
She could give them a little time.
* * *
For most people, dying has always been a fairly one-way street, a final event to punctuate a life. For the superhuman, things are sometimes more complicated than that. The death of a super, whether hero, villain, or civilian, is never guaranteed to be anything more than a long pause.
The means of resurrection are many and varied, from the purely magical “true love’s kiss” promoted by the Princess and the Fairy Tale Girls to the ever-popular jumper cables and lightning favored by more scientifically minded superhumans.
Some swear by the Greek katabasis, literally journeying into one of several known afterlives to recover the souls of their beloved companions.
Others can see and interact with ghosts, and have been known to headbutt fallen friends back into their bodies.
Only one thing is for sure: the existence of superhumans has done a great deal to complicate our understanding of death.
Due to this deathly uncertainty, the process of declaring a known superhuman dead is complicated, requiring far too much paperwork, and featuring escape clauses at every level.
A superhuman must be confirmed dead by an independent clinician, and must remain so for five years to be officially listed among the ranks of the deceased.
Due to these restrictions, combined with the fact that the majority of superhumans are still made of meat and would pose a health hazard if not interred, the superhuman community has been granted dispensation to bury the technically living, as long as an autopsy has been performed.
The contradiction in this dispensation is highly reflective of the overall problem.
For the majority of superhumans, the greatest consequence of dying will be the loss, however short-term, of their civilian identities.
This mainly affects young superhumans still living with family members, who find themselves unable to overlook an unexpected resurrection.
Adult heroes, on the other hand, are most often positioned to recover gracefully from their temporary absences.
Some have even been known to refer to a period spent in undeath as “pleasant” or “a mood.”
The medical community finds this all very concerning, and wishes people would either remain alive or stay dead, rather than bouncing between states as if it were a recreational activity. The superhuman community does not seem inclined to care.
* * *
After another fifteen minutes had passed, Velveteen finally came up for air, pulling away from Tag long enough to bend her neck and rest her head on his shoulder, still not letting go.
This was, nonetheless, an improvement in the Princess’s eyes, as she could at least look directly at the couple when they weren’t actively making out.
“Y’all about done?” she drawled, pouring her accent on with all the force she could muster.
“Have you been there the whole time?” asked Vel, utterly mortified.
She reached for her mask and slipped it back onto her face with one hand, adjusting it until it was centered over her eyes.
Behind her, Tag looked equally embarrassed, but didn’t loosen his embrace, arms remaining locked around her torso.
The Princess took pity on them. “Not the whole time,” she said. “And it’s all right. The two of you have a lot of catching up to do. I’d just rather you saved any nudity for one of the guest chambers, or maybe your own home.”
“Are you still in Portland?” asked Tag, shifting his grip on Velveteen so that it was easier for him to sit up and look at her.
“Yeah,” said Vel. “Living with Polychrome—Sparkle Bright’s new code name—and Victory Anna. We’ve been pretty good housemates so far. No one’s died, anyway, and with those two, that’s half the battle.”
“Marketing approved a name change?”
Vel laughed, a short, stunted sound that echoed off the room’s vaulted ceiling. “You’ve missed kind of a lot.”
“I guess,” said Tag, and looked past her to the Princess, who raised an eyebrow in silent question. “Thank you,” he said.
“What for, sweetheart?”
“I don’t have the sort of power set that normally lends itself to coming back from the dead, and I wouldn’t ask anyone to walk into the afterlife to get me back. So I’m only here because you let us use your glass coffin.”
“Don’t forget about the apple, now,” cautioned the Princess.
“I have to get those from Snow Wight, and she never lets me forget it, either. But I was happy to help. Vel’s my girl, and I love her enough that I had to do what I could for you.
” The headache that had been gathering at her temples pulsed again.
There was someone else, wasn’t there, some other reason that she’d felt compelled to step in?
She swallowed the feeling of the world tilting out of true, suppressing it as much as she could, and breathed in carefully before she asked, “How did y’all meet, anyway? ”
Vel blinked, glancing back at Tag and looking faintly alarmed. “I don’t…Tag, how did we meet?”
He blinked at her. “How long was I dead?”