Erin Ptah (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ptahrrific) wrote2010-01-24 12:24 am
ptahrrific) wrote2010-01-24 12:24 am
Entry tags:
Fake News: Castle Down, chapter 4
Title: Castle Down (4/6)
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Jon/c!Stephen, Jason(/Sam), Larry/John-O, Lewis, Kristen
Warnings: YMMV self-harm; angst; sad Stephen in snow.
Disclaimer: Two.
For the Report characters: They and their universe are property of Stephen Colbert, the other Report writers, and of course Viacom. Not mine. (Alas.)
And for the real people, the poem:
Please, make no mistake:
these people aren't fake,
but what's said here is no more than fiction.
It only was writ
because we like their wit
and wisecracks, and pull-squints, and diction.
We don't mean to quibble,
but this can't be libel;
it's never implied to be real.
No disrespect's meant;
if you disapprove, then,
the back button's right up there. Deal.
So much for this being a tale of helpless!puppy!Stephen. Now he and Jon get to deal, separately, with the fallout from Stephen beating Jon up and taking his stuff.
Cookies to anyone who spots the sidelong references to Narnia and/or Sailor Moon.
Decorative capitals, as ever, come from Daily Drop Cap. List of chapters here.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
eet, as any halfway decent survival guide will tell you, are the thing to watch. You can have the most advanced clothing, the finest protection spells, weeks' worth of food, and enough tracking ability to follow a unicorn through river country; but you're not going to get any farther than your feet will take you.
Stephen's feet had never been this pampered.
Okay, Jon's boots were too small, and they pinched at the toes. But they were mostly adjustable, and lined with something soft and woolly (possibly even wool), and made of what Stephen was almost certain was genuine dragonhide.
These boots were made for stomping into battlefields. They laughed in the face of forest.
Of course, since boots weren't everything, Stephen had grabbed a few of Jon's other things while he was at it. A warm coat, to throw on over his feeble tunic: it was too short by far, but the fabric was thick, and mornings were starting to get frosty. A handful of jewels with useful spells attached: one for fresh water, another to make searching eyes pass over him, and so on. A satchel's worth of food — well, some of that had surely been earmarked for him anyway, so it hardly counted as stealing.
Although, if you thought about it, none of it should count. He had been stolen first, hadn't he? Turnabout was fair play.
Thus reassured, he pressed on, boots crunching through dried and brittle leaves. He had no time to waste.
Papa Bear was going to be furious.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
'll be honest with you, Captain Stewart," said the Inspector, using the deep voice that meant he was saying something he thought was important. "Unless he stole something worth more than a two-bit wilderness spell kit and your best winter cloak, we're not going to have the resources to track this man far beyond the Castle."
Jon sat perched on the edge of his armchair, onto which he had been shooed after the detective checked for clues under the cushion (and turned up nothing but a paper clip, twenty-three coppers, and an old bootlace). "Nothing expensive," he said softly, twirling the ruby bracelet between his fingers.
He had mentioned Stephen's incredible knockout skills, but if they weren't going to go after the man, it was a moot point. He hadn't gone into detail about what they were doing before he was knocked out. Inspector Jones was known and renowned for many things; discretion was not among them.
"What about weapons? Battle plans? You didn't whisper military secrets into his ear during pillow talk?"
"How did you—?"
"A keen eye for detail and an ear to the ground," said Jones with great solemnity, giving his temple a couple of meaningful taps and nearly dislodging his fake mustache in the process. "Also, my wife runs the only halfway decent bar in the Castle. Now, give it to me straight: is the guy a security risk?"
Jon's shoulders slumped. "No."
Jones clapped him on the back in what was no doubt meant to be a gesture of manly camaraderie. "Cheer up, Captain. The whole army's shipping out to a Vulpine stronghold tomorrow; maybe you'll run into him on the way."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
ext to the tree in which he slept when it became impossible to pretend that he could walk any further, Stephen had knelt in the bare dirt and drawn a quick sketch of the stars.
He hadn't been able to see the constellations themselves for decades, but any idiot knew that the Ship sailed north, and he had been able to pick out the Hammer and the Leopard with enough certainty to guess his own position relative to Vulpis — to home.
When he jolted awake, sore and stiff all over from the rough bark that made a poor substitute for Papa Bear's mattresses, the sun was low in the sky: for morning or evening, he couldn't tell. At least, until he checked his star-map, now with drops of melted frost gathered in its shallow furrows.
Evening. It would be dark soon.
Stephen stretched his aching muscles, pulled off his glasses for just long enough to rub the dents it was pressing into the bridge of his nose, and got back to his march.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
utting aside his fears, his self-recriminations, and a veritable kudzu of wild speculation, Jon tried to pay attention to the briefing.
He didn't follow the technical side of it at all, the parts about exploitation of limits that it turned out were only theoretical, or distortion in the warp and weft of ley lines, or the dimensions of the crystalline matrix required to sustain a spell that powerful. From the carefully neutral faces of most of the officers around him, he suspected they weren't tracking it either.
As usual, it was Captain Black who put their collective frustration into words. "So Vulpis has a big honkin' gemstone with the power to strip people of their souls, which is so mindbendingly evil that its very existence gives wizards splitting headaches. Where do we go to smash the thing?"
"We don't technically know if it has the power to take souls yet," corrected Oliver. "They're certainly working on it. We had one of their early test subjects in custody, and he survived the experiment unscathed — at least, as far as we could tell. No way to double-check now."
Jon could feel every eye in the room deliberately not looking at him.
"Point is, we may still have some time before everything goes completely pear-shaped...."
"Just get out the map, John," interrupted Wilmore.
"Oh! Right." Oliver gave his wand a quick flourish, and a relief map of the Kingdoms spread across the round table. Tossing a pinhead-sized emerald onto the map, he ordered, "Show us...er...Fred."
"We didn't actually mean for that name to stick," admitted Wilmore, as the locator spell darted across the hills.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
etting himself totally clean was probably a lost cause, and it was much too chill to go swimming, but after crossing the fourth of the streams that blocked his path, Stephen couldn't resist stopping for a quick scrub.
The quick scrub turned into a long one, and the long one into a frantic one, as he knelt on the stones by the bank and went over the same areas of skin again and again. Hands. Neck. Chest. Face, especially the mouth. Behind the ears, even the stupid round one that always made him stand out in Vulpis. And back to the hands. Only when the cold of the running water had sunk into his pores, numbing his nerve endings to the roots, did he manage to tear himself away.
It still hurt. But it was a muted, distant kind of hurt, which sure beat the alternative.
He was crawling back up the bank, stumbling over loose rocks and tufts of brown grass, when he spotted a furry silhouette bent over his things.
"Hey!" yelped Stephen, launching himself towards the satchel. From this distance he couldn't tell if the creature had pulled anything out—until he spotted a glint of gold between its claws as it darted away. His glasses.
"Get back here!" he shouted uselessly, dashing after the thief. The chase lasted seconds: the creature darted into a tunnel that opened out of the nearest hillock, its entrance much too small to accommodate a person.
Stephen collapsed against the slope.
"Shake it off, pet," he muttered, trying to ignore how frail the words sounded. "You can do this. You already figured out the way; you don't need glasses or stars or anything else to get there. And once you're back, everything's going to be fine. Who cares if you can barely see? You never needed to see before."
He lapsed into silence, reaching for Jon's heavy tunic to wrap himself up, wishing it was Papa Bear's arms.
Before he could lace it up, he was interrupted by a hiss.
Stephen froze, staring warily at the tunnel entrance. "D-don't you hiss at me," he snapped at whatever might be lurking within.
He was answered with a series of inarticulate grunts — and then the gold frames arced lightly out of the hole and sailed through the air, skittering to a stop right at Stephen's toes.
Eyeing the tunnel suspiciously all the while, he scooped up the glasses with clumsy frozen fingers and fumbled them onto his face. The world around him snapped into glorious detailed focus.
"Thanks," he said cautiously.
Out of the still-impenetrable blackness came a raspy but unmistakable voice: "De rien."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
xactly what is our target going to look like, anyway?" asked Schaal, as she carved Oliver a slice of roast pork. Most of the birds had flown south by this point, and the small woodland creatures tended to be hibernating, so the army was carrying a lot more of its own food. On the other hand, her fire-starting skills were more in-demand than ever.
"Theoretically, a giant jewel," replied the wizard, shredding his dinner into manageable strips with a flick of his wand. "It's hard to do readings for too long without, well, 'horrible pounding migraines' would be putting it kindly, but the resonances indicate that it's probably saffer. Now, that's the old-fashioned term for—"
"Sapphire," supplied Schaal with a pixieish smile. "You don't have to do translations for me, Mr. Oliver."
"Lapis lazuli, actually. Doesn't make sense to me either." Oliver shrugged, then nudged Jon, who was perched on the log beside him and chewing silently on a thick slice of bread and jam. "Pass the baconnaise?"
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
nder the sheltering branches of a tall pine, Stephen nibbled on the pieces of a crushed scone and tried not to look at the sky.
If he didn't look at it, then he wouldn't see the gathering clouds advancing on the sliver of a moon. And if he didn't see them, maybe, just maybe, they didn't have to be there.
When, in spite of his carefully cultivated ignorance, the first flakes of snow drifted down out of the sky, he muttered a string of curses in both Jon's language and Papa Bear's, then cupped his hands around his mouth and breathed hot puffs of steam onto his skin.
Had to keep himself moving.
He tried to envision one of the pages of the workbook Jon had given him, the unfamiliar verb tenses lining up in neat little squares. To do; to be; to think; to love...no, verbs were too complicated, and anyway he couldn't remember half the conjugations.
Another page, then, this one covered with brightly-colored line drawings. Couldn't be simpler. Apples. Oranges. Grapes. And then....
What was Jon's word for bananas?
Stephen's mind seemed to be whiting out along with the landscape. He could see the page in his mind's eye, see the picture clear as day, but the text that should have been beside it was blurred, scraps of lettering flickering just out of focus.
So intent was his concentration that he slipped on some unseen patch of ice and went tumbling to the ground, sending his satchel flying.
As Stephen dragged his bruised limbs up into a sitting position, he realized that the bag had hit a rock and been jarred open, spilling gems and what was left of his food into the fine layer of powder that covered the soil. He groped blindly at the earth, unable even to see whether it was the jewels or ordinary pebbles his numbed palms were lighting on.
In desperation he raised his head to the heavens...
...and saw, gleaming even brighter than usual now that they had a skyful of flurries to illuminate, the Twin Searchlights.
Freezing tears began to roll down Stephen's cheeks.
He had made it. He had survived. Everything would be okay now. And he could forget about all the foreign words, for bananas and thinking and everything else.
He was in Vulpis. He could speak Vulpin.
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Jon/c!Stephen, Jason(/Sam), Larry/John-O, Lewis, Kristen
Warnings: YMMV self-harm; angst; sad Stephen in snow.
Disclaimer: Two.
For the Report characters: They and their universe are property of Stephen Colbert, the other Report writers, and of course Viacom. Not mine. (Alas.)
And for the real people, the poem:
Please, make no mistake:
these people aren't fake,
but what's said here is no more than fiction.
It only was writ
because we like their wit
and wisecracks, and pull-squints, and diction.
We don't mean to quibble,
but this can't be libel;
it's never implied to be real.
No disrespect's meant;
if you disapprove, then,
the back button's right up there. Deal.
So much for this being a tale of helpless!puppy!Stephen. Now he and Jon get to deal, separately, with the fallout from Stephen beating Jon up and taking his stuff.
Cookies to anyone who spots the sidelong references to Narnia and/or Sailor Moon.
Decorative capitals, as ever, come from Daily Drop Cap. List of chapters here.
eet, as any halfway decent survival guide will tell you, are the thing to watch. You can have the most advanced clothing, the finest protection spells, weeks' worth of food, and enough tracking ability to follow a unicorn through river country; but you're not going to get any farther than your feet will take you.Stephen's feet had never been this pampered.
Okay, Jon's boots were too small, and they pinched at the toes. But they were mostly adjustable, and lined with something soft and woolly (possibly even wool), and made of what Stephen was almost certain was genuine dragonhide.
These boots were made for stomping into battlefields. They laughed in the face of forest.
Of course, since boots weren't everything, Stephen had grabbed a few of Jon's other things while he was at it. A warm coat, to throw on over his feeble tunic: it was too short by far, but the fabric was thick, and mornings were starting to get frosty. A handful of jewels with useful spells attached: one for fresh water, another to make searching eyes pass over him, and so on. A satchel's worth of food — well, some of that had surely been earmarked for him anyway, so it hardly counted as stealing.
Although, if you thought about it, none of it should count. He had been stolen first, hadn't he? Turnabout was fair play.
Thus reassured, he pressed on, boots crunching through dried and brittle leaves. He had no time to waste.
Papa Bear was going to be furious.
'll be honest with you, Captain Stewart," said the Inspector, using the deep voice that meant he was saying something he thought was important. "Unless he stole something worth more than a two-bit wilderness spell kit and your best winter cloak, we're not going to have the resources to track this man far beyond the Castle."Jon sat perched on the edge of his armchair, onto which he had been shooed after the detective checked for clues under the cushion (and turned up nothing but a paper clip, twenty-three coppers, and an old bootlace). "Nothing expensive," he said softly, twirling the ruby bracelet between his fingers.
He had mentioned Stephen's incredible knockout skills, but if they weren't going to go after the man, it was a moot point. He hadn't gone into detail about what they were doing before he was knocked out. Inspector Jones was known and renowned for many things; discretion was not among them.
"What about weapons? Battle plans? You didn't whisper military secrets into his ear during pillow talk?"
"How did you—?"
"A keen eye for detail and an ear to the ground," said Jones with great solemnity, giving his temple a couple of meaningful taps and nearly dislodging his fake mustache in the process. "Also, my wife runs the only halfway decent bar in the Castle. Now, give it to me straight: is the guy a security risk?"
Jon's shoulders slumped. "No."
Jones clapped him on the back in what was no doubt meant to be a gesture of manly camaraderie. "Cheer up, Captain. The whole army's shipping out to a Vulpine stronghold tomorrow; maybe you'll run into him on the way."
ext to the tree in which he slept when it became impossible to pretend that he could walk any further, Stephen had knelt in the bare dirt and drawn a quick sketch of the stars.He hadn't been able to see the constellations themselves for decades, but any idiot knew that the Ship sailed north, and he had been able to pick out the Hammer and the Leopard with enough certainty to guess his own position relative to Vulpis — to home.
When he jolted awake, sore and stiff all over from the rough bark that made a poor substitute for Papa Bear's mattresses, the sun was low in the sky: for morning or evening, he couldn't tell. At least, until he checked his star-map, now with drops of melted frost gathered in its shallow furrows.
Evening. It would be dark soon.
Stephen stretched his aching muscles, pulled off his glasses for just long enough to rub the dents it was pressing into the bridge of his nose, and got back to his march.
utting aside his fears, his self-recriminations, and a veritable kudzu of wild speculation, Jon tried to pay attention to the briefing.He didn't follow the technical side of it at all, the parts about exploitation of limits that it turned out were only theoretical, or distortion in the warp and weft of ley lines, or the dimensions of the crystalline matrix required to sustain a spell that powerful. From the carefully neutral faces of most of the officers around him, he suspected they weren't tracking it either.
As usual, it was Captain Black who put their collective frustration into words. "So Vulpis has a big honkin' gemstone with the power to strip people of their souls, which is so mindbendingly evil that its very existence gives wizards splitting headaches. Where do we go to smash the thing?"
"We don't technically know if it has the power to take souls yet," corrected Oliver. "They're certainly working on it. We had one of their early test subjects in custody, and he survived the experiment unscathed — at least, as far as we could tell. No way to double-check now."
Jon could feel every eye in the room deliberately not looking at him.
"Point is, we may still have some time before everything goes completely pear-shaped...."
"Just get out the map, John," interrupted Wilmore.
"Oh! Right." Oliver gave his wand a quick flourish, and a relief map of the Kingdoms spread across the round table. Tossing a pinhead-sized emerald onto the map, he ordered, "Show us...er...Fred."
"We didn't actually mean for that name to stick," admitted Wilmore, as the locator spell darted across the hills.
etting himself totally clean was probably a lost cause, and it was much too chill to go swimming, but after crossing the fourth of the streams that blocked his path, Stephen couldn't resist stopping for a quick scrub.The quick scrub turned into a long one, and the long one into a frantic one, as he knelt on the stones by the bank and went over the same areas of skin again and again. Hands. Neck. Chest. Face, especially the mouth. Behind the ears, even the stupid round one that always made him stand out in Vulpis. And back to the hands. Only when the cold of the running water had sunk into his pores, numbing his nerve endings to the roots, did he manage to tear himself away.
It still hurt. But it was a muted, distant kind of hurt, which sure beat the alternative.
He was crawling back up the bank, stumbling over loose rocks and tufts of brown grass, when he spotted a furry silhouette bent over his things.
"Hey!" yelped Stephen, launching himself towards the satchel. From this distance he couldn't tell if the creature had pulled anything out—until he spotted a glint of gold between its claws as it darted away. His glasses.
"Get back here!" he shouted uselessly, dashing after the thief. The chase lasted seconds: the creature darted into a tunnel that opened out of the nearest hillock, its entrance much too small to accommodate a person.
Stephen collapsed against the slope.
"Shake it off, pet," he muttered, trying to ignore how frail the words sounded. "You can do this. You already figured out the way; you don't need glasses or stars or anything else to get there. And once you're back, everything's going to be fine. Who cares if you can barely see? You never needed to see before."
He lapsed into silence, reaching for Jon's heavy tunic to wrap himself up, wishing it was Papa Bear's arms.
Before he could lace it up, he was interrupted by a hiss.
Stephen froze, staring warily at the tunnel entrance. "D-don't you hiss at me," he snapped at whatever might be lurking within.
He was answered with a series of inarticulate grunts — and then the gold frames arced lightly out of the hole and sailed through the air, skittering to a stop right at Stephen's toes.
Eyeing the tunnel suspiciously all the while, he scooped up the glasses with clumsy frozen fingers and fumbled them onto his face. The world around him snapped into glorious detailed focus.
"Thanks," he said cautiously.
Out of the still-impenetrable blackness came a raspy but unmistakable voice: "De rien."
xactly what is our target going to look like, anyway?" asked Schaal, as she carved Oliver a slice of roast pork. Most of the birds had flown south by this point, and the small woodland creatures tended to be hibernating, so the army was carrying a lot more of its own food. On the other hand, her fire-starting skills were more in-demand than ever."Theoretically, a giant jewel," replied the wizard, shredding his dinner into manageable strips with a flick of his wand. "It's hard to do readings for too long without, well, 'horrible pounding migraines' would be putting it kindly, but the resonances indicate that it's probably saffer. Now, that's the old-fashioned term for—"
"Sapphire," supplied Schaal with a pixieish smile. "You don't have to do translations for me, Mr. Oliver."
"Lapis lazuli, actually. Doesn't make sense to me either." Oliver shrugged, then nudged Jon, who was perched on the log beside him and chewing silently on a thick slice of bread and jam. "Pass the baconnaise?"
nder the sheltering branches of a tall pine, Stephen nibbled on the pieces of a crushed scone and tried not to look at the sky.If he didn't look at it, then he wouldn't see the gathering clouds advancing on the sliver of a moon. And if he didn't see them, maybe, just maybe, they didn't have to be there.
When, in spite of his carefully cultivated ignorance, the first flakes of snow drifted down out of the sky, he muttered a string of curses in both Jon's language and Papa Bear's, then cupped his hands around his mouth and breathed hot puffs of steam onto his skin.
Had to keep himself moving.
He tried to envision one of the pages of the workbook Jon had given him, the unfamiliar verb tenses lining up in neat little squares. To do; to be; to think; to love...no, verbs were too complicated, and anyway he couldn't remember half the conjugations.
Another page, then, this one covered with brightly-colored line drawings. Couldn't be simpler. Apples. Oranges. Grapes. And then....
What was Jon's word for bananas?
Stephen's mind seemed to be whiting out along with the landscape. He could see the page in his mind's eye, see the picture clear as day, but the text that should have been beside it was blurred, scraps of lettering flickering just out of focus.
So intent was his concentration that he slipped on some unseen patch of ice and went tumbling to the ground, sending his satchel flying.
As Stephen dragged his bruised limbs up into a sitting position, he realized that the bag had hit a rock and been jarred open, spilling gems and what was left of his food into the fine layer of powder that covered the soil. He groped blindly at the earth, unable even to see whether it was the jewels or ordinary pebbles his numbed palms were lighting on.
In desperation he raised his head to the heavens...
...and saw, gleaming even brighter than usual now that they had a skyful of flurries to illuminate, the Twin Searchlights.
Freezing tears began to roll down Stephen's cheeks.
He had made it. He had survived. Everything would be okay now. And he could forget about all the foreign words, for bananas and thinking and everything else.
He was in Vulpis. He could speak Vulpin.
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WHAT WILL HAPPEN
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As usual, it was Captain Black who put their collective frustration into words. "So Vulpis has a big honkin' gemstone with the power to strip people of their souls, which is so mindbendingly evil that its very existence gives wizards splitting headaches. Where do we go to smash the thing?"
Hee, Captain Black. Awesome.
MOAR PLZ
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It's coming, it's coming!
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Oh, Stephen, I always say that with you, and I can't reeeeally shake my head at you, since I'm not sure how long you've been a pet, and you wouldn't get that Papa Bear would abandon you, so... (sighs and points) Little guy who wants you to see and wouldn't hurt you for any "shortcomings" and wants you
even though you choked him, but hey - scared ex-pet, dude ♥is on his way.So, hopefully any crazy people in Vulpin won't hurt you, though it is pretty freaking neat how fast and strong you can be. ... In time, you'll find your way, I think. >_> Here's hoping that whatever the future is, is better for you!
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Stephen has been a pet all his life. Sometimes a house pet, but he's evidently spent significant amounts of time as a guard dog ^_~
Unfortunately, he's going straight back to Papa Bear, which spells nothing but trouble for the near future!
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Wounded Stephen may be, but he's nothing if not loyal.
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Is it?
This rules.
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Thanks!
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*STARES AT PLOT* *WAITS* *HUGS STEPHEN*
\o/ Sailor Moon and Narnia! Seriously, the references to everything in this are making my head spin in an awesome way.
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And, hi, I think this is the first time I've commented. *waves*
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And, hello! Welcome out of the shadows of lurkdom! Enjoy the sunshine :D
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