VELVETEEN PRESENTS TAG vs. Being Alive
Being dead hadn’t been all that bad. It hadn’t been all that good, either; it hadn’t really been much of anything.
Maybe for people with stronger religious convictions, it would have been filled with choirs of angels or skeletons poling ferry boats across haunted rivers, or feasting halls filled with wide-winged women in metal breastplates, hosting an endless open bar.
It was hard to say. Tad had never really been religious—there were too many contradictions for that; he believed in gods, just not a singular God important enough to be worth worshipping.
And maybe death would have been more interesting if he hadn’t been sealed in one of the Princess’s glass coffins, sleeping away the days in a state that was more stasis than actual rest. He didn’t remember dreaming while he was dead.
Not even before Jackie had come to his door to tell him that he’d fallen during a fairly standard battle against a gadgeteer with an overly-ambitious robot army, and had been being piloted by his girlfriend for several months without realizing he hadn’t survived.
Tad wasn’t actually sure he wanted death to be more interesting.
He would have been happier if he’d never learned what it was like—or how much paperwork was associated with coming back to the land of the living.
He looked at the form in front of himself and groaned.
“Anybody know why the government needs a documented accounting of the location of all known birthmarks, blemishes, and moles?” he asked.
“Tragically, yes,” said Yelena, walking out of the kitchen to sit down across from him at the table.
She was carrying a slice of white cake on a plate, something so boring and basic that it barely qualified as a treat.
Seeing her with it was still mind-boggling.
The Yelena he knew hadn’t been allowed to eat carbs or sugar in years, and here she was, chowing down on icing roses like they were a hot new diet trend.
“All right, I’ll bite. Why do I need to fill this out?”
Yelena popped another bite of cake in her mouth before she answered, “Because that way if you’re a sophisticated robot double or some sort of nano-putty replica or whatever, they can check your documentation against your medical files and catch you before anyone gets hurt.
Take the Polaroid and lock yourself in the bedroom with Vel for an hour.
Maybe it’ll make the two of you less awkward with each other. ”
“I wouldn’t take bets on that,” grumbled Tad.
Yelena laughed.
“Can I have some of that cake?”
“You have legs.” She waved her fork idly at the kitchen doorway. “Go get it yourself.”
“What, no sympathy for the recently deceased?”
Yelena fixed him with a flat look. “You’ve been back from the dead for four days. Four long, awkward, annoying days.” She licked the frosting ostentatiously off her fork. “You and Velma can’t even be in the same room for five minutes, and it’s getting on my nerves. Fix it.”
“It’s kinda hard to fix it when she won’t stay in the room for more than the aforementioned five minutes,” he said sourly.
“I always thought fairy tale endings were supposed to be, you know, happy. Or at least heteronormative and fun to illustrate in the back of children’s books.
This is just dull and grinding and unpleasant. ”
“I’m sorry, are you complaining that Vel—our Vel, the girl who took decades to figure out I hadn’t been writing our initials on my notebooks because we were best friends—doesn’t have the level of emotional intelligence you want? Do you see the problem with this concept?”
Tad sighed heavily. “I do. I think she feels guilty because she was with me on the mission where I died. But that could have been any one of us. I didn’t die for her, no matter how many of the histories want to tell us how romantic that would have been.
I died because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and a fuck-off-enormous robot stepped on me.
I got squashed because I was slow and cocky and didn’t watch my surroundings closely enough.
That doesn’t have anything to do with Vel. ”
“She brought you back.”
“Twice, if you want to get technical about it. The first time was accidental, but it still happened, same as me dying. We don’t get to say ‘oops, that one doesn’t count, sorry.’”
“She was not in a good way when that went down. She’s better this time, because you’re actually alive, and not just a really fancy action figure.”
Tad wrinkled his nose. “Thank you for finding the worst possible way to describe that. So yeah, there’s some guilt in the mix, and I think also some fear that I’m sticking around because I feel obligated after the whole ‘true love’s kiss’ thing.
But I loved her before that happened. I don’t feel like I owe her anything. How can I make her understand that?”
“I don’t have any advice, buddy,” said Yelena sadly. “Good luck, I guess?”
“Thanks,” he said, so flatly that she laughed, and kept laughing as he got up and skulked off to the kitchen for a piece of cake.
* * *
Once death became a temporary condition, a whole new suite of complications were unlocked, each more difficult to explain to a civilian than the last. Most people considered themselves fortunate if they were able to survive an accident or illness; the idea that someone could come back from the literal grave and be anything less than grateful for it was virtually unthinkable.
But people who had died and returned showed a profound degree of difficulty when it came to resuming their old lives.
Many married heroes, finding themselves divorced via the simple expedient of “til death do us part,” chose to remarry their original spouses…
for a time. Those marriages most often ended in a more traditional divorce, and both parties had been heard to say that remarriage had been a mistake.
Death changed people. No one was questioning that.
Death also changed the survivors, and that seemed much more difficult for some to understand.
Even in cases where the formerly dead had been returned to life by what is colloquially referred to as “true love’s kiss,” love was not always enough to allow the newly resurrected to return to their former lives.
Too much had been changed, whether or not they could remember their time among the dead.
They were different now, and so was everyone else.
Love could do a great deal. Love could defeat death. But love could not bridge the unbridgeable chasm that sometimes opened between the living and the lost.
Which is not to say that no one has been able to successfully negotiate a return to the land of the living, only that such returns have always required, and seemingly will always require, a substantial amount of effort on the part of those involved.
Nothing can substitute for hard work when it comes to rising from the dead, and those who try to navigate the transition without putting in that work are very likely to find themselves alone.
Coming back from the dead is not for the faint of heart, as it were, and sometimes the worst impacted are not the people who would seem primed to experience the trauma of the moment. Death spares no one, not even those who have managed to defeat it.
* * *
The cake was good, and all the better because it had technically been stolen from Yelena, who had watched with amusement as Tad returned with a corner piece on his plate, all frosting roses and excessive amounts of raspberry filling.
He’d been most of the way through the piece before it occurred to him to ask: “Why do we have a cake?”
“Is it ‘we’? Because here I thought you were just eating my cake.”
Tad wrinkled his nose at her. Yelena laughed.
“Just checking—you’ve been here since you came back, but with the aforementioned avoidance behaviors you and Vel have been exhibiting, it’s hard to say whether you’re part of the household or just a really persistent guest. We have cake because Torrey and I saved one of the bakeries downtown from supervillains with a sweet tooth last week.
Like, a literal sweet tooth. It was three feet tall, it made a really unpleasant grinding noise, and it was going to eat the bakers.
We stopped it, and now they keep sending us cake.
I’m sure they’ll get tired of it eventually, but until they do, I’m going to enjoy the free assortment of baked goods. ”
“Huh,” said Tad. It was technically illegal for superhumans to extort the people they saved for any sort of payment, from cash to free coffee, but thanks to some legislators with a keen eye for human behavior, they were allowed to accept gifts freely given.
During the brief period when this hadn’t been the case, resentment toward superhumans had ballooned to dangerous proportions, since now they were not only pompous weirdoes who thought they were better than everyone else, they were pompous weirdoes who didn’t like Aunt Susan’s award-winning chicken casserole.
If you wanted your superhumans to belong to a community, you needed to allow the community to treat them like they belonged.
Spearing the last bite of cake with his fork, he looked up. “Where is Vel, anyway?”
“She’s at the hardware store with Torrey,” said Yelena.
“Not normally her job, but if she wants to take my girl shopping for springs, she is more than welcome to the task. I love Torrey like anything. That doesn’t mean I need another afternoon spent listening to her cackle over the potential applications of little pieces of metal that I can’t tell apart even if I cared enough to try, which I do not.
Really, her shopping trips just make me grateful that my powers don’t require any sort of outside component. ”
“Sounds exhausting.” He rose, taking his plate with him.
Yelena raised an eyebrow. “Where are you going?”