VELVETEEN vs. Uncomfortable Resolutions #3
Her room had come with a set of flannel pajamas in her size, patterned with the little rabbit-eared hearts that Marketing had tried so hard to brand her with.
She had put them on out of necessity, nothing more, but as she moved toward the door, she was surprisingly grateful to be wearing something so all-concealing.
Whoever was in the hall knocked again. Velveteen swallowed a scowl and slapped her hand down on the security panel, letting Imagineer’s system read her palm print.
Only once she was confirmed as the person currently assigned to this room did the lock disengage and the door slide open, so much like something from an episode of Star Trek that it was almost comic.
The opening door revealed a well-built blond man in blue and orange loungewear, which was a lot less comic.
Velveteen—Velma, suddenly; she didn’t think of herself that way very often anymore, but she was out of uniform, and this was a moment for her civilian identity if there had ever been one—stared at him.
Aaron Frank, often better known as Action Dude, stared back.
Maybe because he’d been the one to make the approach in the first place, he recovered before she did, and asked, “Can I come in? I want to talk.”
“That’s all we’re going to do,” said Velma, but she stepped aside in silent invitation, making room for him to move past her.
He did exactly that, heading into the room and sitting down in the rolling desk chair next to the small workstation. Distantly, she noted that he hadn’t gone for the bed, and was relieved.
“What do you want, Aaron?” she asked, removing her palm from the sensor and turning to face him. After a count of five, the door slid shut again behind her.
“I want—oh, fuck, I want to know how to answer that question without crying,” he said. “I want you to trust me again. I want you to stop looking at me like you’re afraid I’m going to drown your puppy or something.”
“I don’t have a puppy.”
“Point stands.”
“If I look at you like I can’t trust you, there’s a reason for that,” said Velma.
She bared her teeth at him in something between a snarl and a rictus of fear.
“You were the first boy I ever loved. You were the most important person in the world to me. Even more important than Lena, back then. I trusted you. I was going to spend the rest of my life with you, unless some supervillain decided to stop me. I loved you.”
“I know,” he said, with quiet misery.
“And you—you—went and fucked everything up,” said Velma.
“You broke everything we had, and you say you did it because you were scared Marketing was going to hurt me, but you knew better. Even back then, you knew better. I was worth a lot of money, and they would never have done anything to mess with their revenue stream. You could have told them where to shove it, and they would have come up with a different storyline to maneuver us all through.”
“Yelena would never have let them.”
“If you’d been willing to stand with me, we could have convinced her of the truth. That, and the fact that there wasn’t going to be any big ‘tell all’ in the tabloids would have been enough to get through to her, eventually. So tell me in simple words: what do you want?”
“You,” said Aaron.
Velma blinked. “That was a little more honesty than I was expecting.”
“You say I was the first boy you ever loved. Well, you were the only girl I ever loved, and you still are. But even if I’ve fucked that up forever, I want you back on the team.
You want to make things better for animus heroes?
This is how you do it. You come home to the team with the best approval ratings in America.
You let the people see you in action. And they remember how much they love you.
” He paused. “Some of us have never forgotten.”
“You know, this would have worked on me if you’d said it before we defeated your CEO,” Velma replied.
“I hated you for a long time because of what you did. And yeah, that hate was mixed up with love, because The Super Patriots made sure I didn’t get the chance to move on.
They hounded me from one side of California to the other, until I gave up and abandoned my home state to look for something better.
I think I still loved you when I first went to Portland.
You coming to see me on the road was the last straw.
How could I hold out hope for a man who just showed me, over and over again, how quickly he’d throw me under the bus? ”
There was no point in telling him about the parallel universe where she’d met Victory Anna, the one where Polychrome had been the one to leave the team and Velveteen had been the one to stay, becoming an adult hero, adulated and adored—and maybe most jarringly, married to her childhood sweetheart.
That experience had reminded her how much she loved the feeling of Action Dude’s arms around her, and even more, how easy it would be to tumble back into life by his side, all the patterns and routines they’d established as much younger people.
Children in the care of The Super Patriots, Inc.
grew up fast in self-defense, and then stopped for a long time, spending years in a sort of semi-adolescence.
It was a four-color world, and it was tempting as hell to someone who’d been dealing with bills and day jobs and existential terror for years.
“Do you care about what I want?” she asked.
“I swear I do.”
“Then I want you to put the weight of The Super Patriots behind preventing this legislation from becoming law, and I want you to take me home, and then I want you to leave me the hell alone. I’m the only girl you ever loved?
You’re not the only boy I’ve ever loved.
Tag is good to me. He’s kind and he understands who I am, not who I was.
And even if there wasn’t a Tag in the picture, I’m not defined by who does or doesn’t love me.
I have a life. I’m finally a hero again, and maybe in three or four years, I’ll take you up on that offer of rejoining the team.
But right now, I’m happy where I am. So let me be happy for a little while. I’ve earned it.”
Aaron looked at her for a long moment before he sighed and stood again. “All right, Vel,” he said. “But you can’t be mad at me for caring about you. That wouldn’t be fair.”
“Was letting Marketing turn me into their sacrificial lamb because they didn’t like their poster girl being gay fair?” asked Velma. “‘Fair’ has never been part of the conversation for us.”
“We’re the adults now. We get to change that.”
Velma smiled thinly. “I guess we do,” she agreed. “Good night, Aaron.”
“Good night, Velma.” He walked over to the door, pausing only for a moment to look back at her. Then, without another word, he let himself out.
Finally alone, Velma sat back down on the edge of the bed and flopped over so that she was staring up at the ceiling.
“Fucked up times forty thousand,” she grumbled, and took the silence of the room around her for agreement.
* * *
Polychrome flew back in through the window of the room she was sharing with Victory Anna.
The gadgeteer didn’t even look up from the machine she was assembling out of the guts of the clock radio.
It was probably a gun. It looked like a gun, and under the circumstances, Polychrome couldn’t blame her for wanting a few more weapons close to hand.
Honestly, she was just relieved Torrey hadn’t started cracking open the mattress to get at the springs inside.
Slowly, she reduced the force of the light holding her off the ground, drifting downward until her feet were flat against the floor and her weight was back to normal. “Torrey?” she asked, voice small.
“Hmmm, Pol?” Victory Anna looked around. She must have seen something in Polychrome’s expression, because she put down her unfinished gun and pushed herself to her feet, moving to wrap her arms around the taller woman. “What happened?”
“Firecracker thought we were here so I could come back to the team and take back my old position, which she’s partially filling these days.”
Victory Anna frowned. “I thought Firecracker was one of the casualties of the fight against Supermodel?”
“The original Firecracker was. Firefly changed her name after the fight. She’s Firecracker now.”
“You mean the girl with the light-up buttocks?” Victory Anna’s frown deepened. “You were threatened by a woman with an illuminated bum?”
Polychrome snickered, too taken aback to do anything else. “Yes, I mean that one. But she doesn’t like it when people talk about her butt.”
“Well, I don’t like it when she threatens my beloved, so I suppose we’re even,” said Victory Anna. “Are you all right?”