VELVETEEN PRESENTS JACQUELINE CLAUS vs. Existence #2
“Not even for dear Jackie?” purred Aurora. “She thawed for you. If you want her to freeze again, we’ll have to get creative, and creativity costs. You know how close to spring our edges trend in this modern age. You know we needed you to stay.”
“Jackie was a selfish jerk, but she would never have expected Vel to trade herself to Winter in order to buy Jackie her own freedom,” said Tag. “She was never that kind of selfish jerk.”
“Oh, no?” Aurora sounded politely disinterested, like she was willing to listen but knew she wouldn’t hear anything she hadn’t heard a hundred times before.
“No,” said Tag. “If Vel’s trapped in Winter, who does Jackie have to poke? She always loved how hard Velveteen tried to toe the line when the line had no interest in toeing back. She wouldn’t give you her friends, not even to save her own skin. I don’t care how selfish she was.”
“We should never have allowed her to have friends. This would have been so much easier if she hadn’t.
” The light that filled the tunnel was getting brighter, all shifting shades of rose and summer sky.
“Snegurochka never needed friends. She had the snow her mother and Grandfather Frost her companion, and she ran in cold and clarity. This modern age froze her into something more mortal. Do you think I chose to punish one of my own for frivolous reasons? She was meant to befriend, not become. When she became, this became inevitable.”
“We just want Jackie back,” said Velveteen, voice tight. She advanced slowly, keeping pace with her companions. “We’re not here to overthrow you or cause any lasting issues.”
“You don’t even know who I am,” cried Aurora.
Velveteen stopped walking. “I know enough,” she said wearily.
“I know you were probably an animus like me once—we’re the channels for life and power, and shuffling us around seems to have been half the point of the Seasonal Lands.
So you were a real girl, and then you fell into whatever passed as the Winter in your day, and you were tested like I was, but unlike me, when it was over, you decided to stay.
And you froze solid. So solid that you became the foundation of everything else in the frozen world.
So solid that when you were finally ready to go, you couldn’t pull yourself free.
You needed another animus, but Supermodel had killed all the ones who would normally have been your targets, and you had to settle for me. ”
Aurora didn’t reply. Velveteen snorted and, into the sullen silence, said, “I’m sorry I was the best you had available, and I’m sorry that being your last hope wasn’t enough to make me fall in line, but I’m not going to be sorry to be here, looking for my friend.
Give her back to us, and we’ll go. Refuse, and it’s you against the five of us. ”
“You would fight the very soul of Winter in the heart of her own season?”
“I would,” said Velveteen. She straightened her fingers and balled her hands into fists, great wolves and bears of snow rising from the floor surrounding her little group. “And I think you know I’d win, or you’d already have made this physical.”
Aurora didn’t answer her.
* * *
Jacqueline Claus trekked across the plain that had no end, and she wasn’t cold, and she wasn’t tired, and she wasn’t entirely sure she was alive.
Or had she ever been alive? She was mortal, she knew that, had been mortal since the frost bled out of her bones and left her pink-skinned in her adoptive mother’s arms. Her biological parents were fey things, but she was as human as any child on the Nice List had ever been. But did being mortal make her alive?
It was the sort of question she would normally have taken to Carrabelle.
The Princess was well-versed in Jacqueline’s anxieties, and never made her feel silly or simple for having them.
She appreciated a good journey of self-discovery, even if it began with spiraling down into the grimmest parts of the soul.
But Carrabelle wasn’t here. Carrabelle would never be here, not unless she swore herself into the service of a Season, stayed long enough for her humanity to bleed away, and then found herself revised out of existence, thrown to the bitter chill of the margins, where forgotten stories and unnecessary secondary characters belonged. Jacqueline shuddered.
She loved Carrabelle—loved her in ways she might never be able to admit to anyone but herself, thanks to the limits of her best friend’s magic; Carrabelle was the Princess only so long as she held herself at the apex of her story, perfect and shining.
True love was a transformative thing. If she found it, her slide into queendom would commence immediately, and the fragile equilibrium she lived by would be lost—but Jack couldn’t wish her into the emptiness, and so she didn’t, only kept walking.
She knew this place. Her mother—the one who’d raised her—had warned her about it, the ultimate expression of the Naughty List as it applied to the Spirits of the Season.
This was where they went when they were no longer the relevant version of themselves, when the universe decided it was time to revise them away.
This was where they went to be forgotten.
The question of whether she was alive seemed both pressing and utterly irrelevant.
If she was alive, she would die here, in the white and cold, shuffled off to the edges of the paper and no longer able to rejoin the story playing out only a short distance away.
Her body would rot in the white, gradually bleaching out to bones, white in their own way. Lost.
Really, the idea that she might not be alive was worse, because if she wasn’t alive, she couldn’t die, and this would be her new forever. Just the wind and the snow and her, trudging endlessly onward, looking for a harbor she would never find.
It was almost enough to make her sorry for what she’d done.
Only almost, though. If one moment of selfishness had been enough to expel her from her season, then she didn’t want to be there anyway.
She’d find a way out of this. Carrabelle would find her.
Carrabelle was the Princess, after all: she specialized in happy endings.
Jacqueline was so focused on her spiraling thoughts that she stumbled over her own feet, falling forward. She threw out her hands to stop herself—
And then she wasn’t falling anymore. A hand gripped her bicep, holding her upright.
“Get your balance back, girly-pop,” said a voice, dry and flat, without a trace of the uptalk and vocal fry that haunted her own throat, ghosts of the girl she hadn’t grown up to be. The stranger’s accent was uneven and familiar, out of place and out of time.
“Hi, Jackie,” said Jacqueline, shaking her arm free as she turned to face the version of herself who had never been allowed to be.
* * *
The flickering blue and pink of the aurora filled the hall as Velveteen pressed forward, now leading the formation of her friends.
She rounded a curve and the mountain opened up around her, becoming a massive natural cavern, the walls lined with quartz crystal spires the length of a grown man’s leg, each of them catching and refracting the light.
At the center of the room was a chair on a short pedestal, elaborate enough to almost qualify as a throne, covered in more crystals until it looked as unwelcoming as a frozen briar.
A woman sat atop it, seemingly unaware of the sharp spikes around her, and the light radiated out from her body, blurring her features and making it difficult to say what she looked like with any certainty.
She was old and young, short and tall, fat and thin, all at the same time.
She turned her head so that she was facing Velveteen and the others.
“You threaten me?” she asked, and there was a note of almost-amusement in her voice, a certain wry astonishment that made her sound like she hadn’t been surprised in centuries. “Me, who is the living heart of Winter, who anchors the season you refused?”
“We didn’t come here to threaten you,” said Velveteen.
“I did,” said Victory Anna.
“Not helpful, sweetheart,” said Polychrome. “We can talk about the wisdom of threatening functional gods in their own domains later, when we’re safely back home.”
“With our Jack,” said the Princess.
Aurora turned her attention on the ball-gowned superheroine. “Your Jack?” she asked. “You’d claim ownership over her now? I’m not sure she would thank you for that.”
“She’s my best friend,” said the Princess tersely. “She’s mine and I’m hers. That’s how friendship works, out in the world where the real people are.”
“I haven’t been there for a very long time,” said Aurora.
“Here, we’re unreal people, and we play by the rules that govern stories, not the rules that govern societies.
No matter which version of her you want to talk about, the girl you call Jack—and you’re not all talking about the same girl, don’t think I can’t tell the difference—broke the rules of her story.
She acted against the narrative baked into her bones.
That sort of thing has consequences, or the whole narrative structure breaks down.
Why should I risk the entire season I command to undo the willful mistakes of one tertiary spirit?
She’s not Santa. She’s not even Jack Frost. She’s just a story to tell the children when their hands are full of wrapping paper and their eyes are full of stars. ”
“Because this is entirely your fault,” said Velveteen.
Aurora’s head snapped around as she turned to face her. “What?” she asked, voice gone low and dangerous. “How dare you say that about me, when both times, Jack’s choice has been made to save you. If this is anyone’s fault, it’s yours.”