Erin Ptah (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ptahrrific) wrote2011-01-17 11:58 am
ptahrrific) wrote2011-01-17 11:58 am
Entry tags:
Fake News: Castle Walls, part 5
Title: Castle Walls (5/8)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: (skip) Kidnapping
Pairings/Characters: Jon/c!Stephen, Olivia/Kristen, John/Larry, Sam/Jason
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.
The honorifics are Japanese, or at least the American otaku versions thereof; -hime is "princess", -sensei is "teacher". Bunshinjutsu is a technique straight out of Naruto. The bit about Olivia's name is true.
Decorative capitals are from Daily Drop Cap. For the rest of the story, see here.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
itful sleep and chaotic dreams made it almost a relief when a ring at the bell dragged Jon out of bed. He had only meant to catch a quick nap in the first place, so it was in decent if wrinkled clothing that he greeted Kristen, who forced a quick smile before looking over his shoulder. "Is Olivia here?"
Though he had just walked through that room, Jon followed her gaze anyway, just to make sure. "Uh, no. It looks like I'm alone."
Kristen frowned. "I don't think that's supposed to happen."
"It's really not," agreed Jon, digging his fingers into his temples. "Either Olivia decided there was somewhere she absolutely couldn't wait to go, and Stephen had to chase after her; or they're both conspiring to turn the very last of my hair grey."
"Oh, Jon, that ship sailed ages ago," said Kristen. "Are you sure it isn't Stephen who decided to leave, and dragged Olivia along with?"
"He wouldn't do that." It came out with less conviction than Jon had hoped.
"Right." Kristen squared her shoulders, packing a surprising amount of determination into her tiny frame. The velvet box that had been in her hand disappeared into an inside pocket, the better to clap her hands decisively. "You hit up Larry and John, get them to do a locator spell. I'll cruise the bar and put my sleuthing skills into action."
"Sure," agreed Jon distractedly. "I'll be ready to go in a minute. Gonna suit up first, just in case."
"Good plan," said Kristen. "And, Jon? Once we find them, you are going to go have a talk with Her Majesty and get some backup."
Jon couldn't have agreed harder.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
tephen!"
There was something wrong with his bed. It wasn't supposed to be this uncomfortable. Or scratchy.
"Come on, Stephen. Can haz awake tiem nao?"
A splash of water on his face. A few drops went up his nose; he sneezed, and was awake.
"Where...?" he croaked, casting around for the source of the unfamiliar voice. All he saw, lit by an unearthly bluish glow, was hay. Lots and lots of hay.
"Kidnapped Stephen iz kidnapped," said the stranger.
The memories began to return in fits and starts. Trailing Olivia down cobbled streets and under shadowed arches. Watching her stumble and waver on her feet, leaning on the strange blonde woman's arm. Trying to follow them into a little-used back entrance of an unfamiliar building, only to find a shield of ruby light blocking his way....
"There was a statue," he stammered, trying to get his bearings. The room was dark, lined with blocks of smooth stone, its floor padded with a thick layer of straw. All its light came from a dim blue column in the air, like a shaft of moonlight through a window, but without the window. "They take her in a statue, and I follow...Is that where we are?"
"Invisible memories," replied his companion sadly. "I cannot haz."
Stephen gaped. They had taken his glasses, but there was no mistaking the elegant lines of the woman seated a few arm's lengths away from him. He would have recognized her voice straight away, if not for..."Olivia! You speak Commedien!"
The princess smiled wanly at him. The light glinted off something metal at her ankle; when Stephen tried to sit up, he felt a matching shackle tugging on his own.
"Careful!" she burst out, as he struggled. "You haz a bukkit—"
Too late: his knee knocked over the jar, splashing its contents into the hay. Stephen grabbed it and set it upright, then tilted it towards the light to see only a couple mouthfuls of water left.
"They doesn't want us ded of thirst," explained Olivia, curling her hand around a matching jar at her side.
"Great," said Stephen, scooting over to avoid sitting in the puddle. "I feel safer already."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
ind Olivia Munn," whispered John, tossing the pinhead-sized emerald onto the map he had spread across the table.
"You see," explained Larry, "we start with a full-size diagram of the Castle, and once the locator spell picks a quadrant we can break out a higher-resolution diagram of that area. For some places, we have maps with enough detail to get a person's location at street level."
Jon sighed. "I'm not sure whether to be more impressed or creeped out."
The emerald didn't shoot straight to one area, but bounced and twirled across the table; in the meantime, Jon's eye wandered around the room. Gold and glass cabinets held rough marble idols, the hilts of broken swords, delicate contraptions that seemed to be mostly gears. Locked boxes bore tantalizing labels like dragon scales and eye of newt, and Jon could have sworn he heard one of them growling. A bin in the corner held a crumpled newspaper, printed with a familiar masthead....
"Is everyone reading that thing?" groaned Jon, looking away from the provocative swirls that headed The Harlot.
Larry and John exchanged a look that he didn't like in the least. "Only to see what all the fuss was about," said Larry at last. "And there's a reason it's in the recycling."
"Don't worry about it for a second," agreed John. "We know you too well to believe a word of it."
"Wha...?" The editorial Jon had read, peppered with Stephen's surprisingly methodical translation notes, had only mentioned him in passing. It was mostly a critique on Gi Foar's reactionary attitudes towards women, which Jon appreciated, and an assertion that supporting a Gi Foarese princess meant endorsing those attitudes, which he didn't. "I picked up a copy a few days ago, but it didn't say much about me. Did something else happen?"
There went another of those deeply unsettling looks.
Before anyone could give him some answers, the emerald twirled straight off the paper and threw itself at John, bouncing into one of the pockets of his violet cloak like a squirrel diving to safety in its home tree. Jon stared from the wizard to the map and back again, incredulous. "Okay, what does it mean when it does that?"
"Nothing good," said Larry flatly.
John nodded, pale as a sheet. "Your princess is in another Castle."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
f looks could drill, the iron on Stephen's ankle would have been bored straight through.
Olivia had already run the same tests he was, tugging just hard enough to find that it was bolted securely into the stone. Their prison was just large enough that they couldn't quite reach each other, nor the beam of light which Olivia recognized as the vector for a transportation spell. The brainchild of a Gi Foarese wizard, no less. She wondered if their captors knew that.
"Thanks for following me," she said, when Stephen finally recognized the value of saving his strength. At least, that was what she tried to say; there was something off about her grammar, but she didn't know how to fix it. "Thanks for trying to help. I'm sorry I got you into this mess. I'm sorry for pretending I didn't know the language, too."
Stephen twiddled a piece of hay between his fingers, not looking up.
Then he replied, in flawless Gi Foarese, "I haven't been entirely honest with you either, Olivia-hime."
There wasn't much Olivia could do to that except fall over, the better to roll on the floor laughing out loud.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
ou lost the princess."
"'Lost' is such a strong word," protested Kristen. "We more sort of...misplaced her for a while."
"I see." Leaning over the bar, Sam spoke out of the corner of her mouth. "You have checked all the dressing rooms, right?"
"You're not helping!"
Jason chose that moment to lean on the bar, smiling his most dapper smile. "Ladies, please. Whatever this is, I'm sure it's nothing that can't be solved through reasonable discussion. Or, if that fails, naked jello wrestling. I already have the jello."
"Later, honey," urged Sam. "Right now, Kristen is in need of your detecting skills."
A far-off look came into Jason's eyes. Half to himself, he said, "The moment the dame walked into the bar, I knew she was trouble."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
y the time Olivia's outburst of hilarity tapered off, Stephen was starting to worry that he had misremembered everything, and blurted out some hideous insult without knowing it.
"Well, frak me," she giggled at last, sweeping unruly locks of hair out of her eyes. "You don't even have an accent. How did you manage that?"
Stephen hugged his knees to his chest. "When I was young, I belonged to a group of siblings who were...let's say...fans. They knew Gi Foar has the best songs, plays, graphic serials, novels, poems, everything. And they wanted to get their hands on all of it, whether or not it was available in Vulpin. So...."
"...you were part of an illegal translation circle," finished Olivia. As if she should have expected nothing less.
"It wasn't all illegal," pouted Stephen. "We didn't always bother working out the Vulpin versions, either. Especially when the original is so...I used to be able to recite the whole prelude of the Ring saga, okay? You can't hope to capture that in translation. It's too perfect as-is."
"No arguments here," said Olivia quickly. "Hey, can you still do it?"
"Bet I can," said Stephen. "Bet that would confuse the kidnappers, if they're checking up on us. Who would want to kidnap you, anyway?"
The princess slumped against the stone. "No clue."
"No clue? There's gotta be a clue. You'd know better than anyone what you have to be afraid of—you're the one who decided to run away from it, remember?"
"About that." Dark hair curtained over Olivia's face; she made no move to brush it away.
The truth hit Stephen like a box of rocks. "Someone attacked you on the trip here," he protested, trying to push it away. "Your driver died! It was in the news!"
"They attacked because I was running. Only important people run. Forty-third in the line of succession, all I had to do was keep my head down and wait it out. The driver...wasn't real, okay? You must have done enough reading to know what bunshinjutsu is."
Stephen didn't answer. All he could think of was how Papa Bear would have yelled at her, maybe slapped her, and sent her packing without so much as an extra pair of socks.
"I really did have to get out of that place," continued Olivia weakly. "I just—I figured you wouldn't buy it unless I hyped up the danger. I, um, I saw that article you were translating. The one that talks about how much it sucks to be a woman in Gi Foar, remember? They were trumping it up to support their point about how I suck for putting up with it, but they got a lot of it right. You would think it would be easier on a princess, but any kind of spotlight just makes it worse. There's that many more people who want to get their hands on...."
She shook her head as if to clear it, and left the thought unfinished.
"You want to know something frakked up?" she said instead. "I even lied to you about my name. I mean, Olivia's my middle name, but I've never gone by it before now. That's how much I needed to escape. I didn't even want to bring along what they called me."
Over the lump in his throat, Stephen murmured, "I know how that feels."
Olivia snorted. "You? Really? With your happy multicultural childhood and your geeky translating family?"
"They weren't my family," said Stephen. "I belonged to them. They bought me when I was eight, and sold me when I was fifteen."
"Oh," said Olivia.
Silence.
"How old were you when...I mean, how long has it been since you've...."
"Jon rescued me last winter."
"Geez," breathed Olivia at last. "No wonder you're so devoted to him."
Stephen meant to tell her everything then. How he had knocked Jon out and hiked miles through the snow, just to get back to his beloved master; how that master had torn out his soul, and in spite of everything Jon had opened up and reached out and given him the salve he needed to pull it back together. But the feelings were too raw, the wounds still fresh: he couldn't yet bear to share that part of himself with anyone who wasn't Jon. All he could manage was a small noise of agreement.
"I really am sorry if I've frakked that up for you too," said Olivia, in the barest of whispers. "It sounds like you needed the protection a lot more than I did."
"That's not how it works," insisted Stephen. "That's not how Jon works. He's not protecting you because Her Majesty said so; he's doing it because he thinks it's right. If you had come clean from the beginning, he still would have found some way to help."
The princess scoffed. "You can't know that."
Stephen lifted his chin, settling into the familiar role of self-assured defender. "Can so."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
uttering a string of low but creative curses, Larry shuffled the cards again. He kept one ear attuned to them while the other followed Featherwick's stream-of-consciousness analysis: "She's not on the big map. Why isn't she on the big map? Any run-of-the-mill protection crystal, we would've seen through by now. She's not dead, is she? Oughtn't to throw off the spell, unless they've done something absolutely ghastly with her body. Larry! Haven't you found anything useful yet?"
"The cards aren't cooperating," replied Larry. "It's like they think I'm asking the wrong questions. What good is that if they won't tell me the right questions?"
A terrific crackling noise from the corner of the room, as Jon re-crumpled the newspaper and lobbed it back into the recycling. "Have you tried to find Stephen?"
The wizards exchanged an uncertain look. "Jon," began Featherwick, "you were charged by the Queen Herself with the solemn duty of protecting Olivia. I know you don't always show Her Majesty as much respect as you might, but...."
Larry's "kill that thought" gesture came too late; Jon was already spluttering with disbelief. "I thought you said you didn't pay attention to that article!"
Featherwick's voice sidled up an octave, but he stood his ground. "Well, no, not as such—but it got one thing right, didn't it? You did call Her Majesty 'dude' that one time."
Larry tuned out their sniping altogether, doing a shuffle in double-time.
"That was a mistake!" shot back Jon. "Which I acknowledged! And since she knighted me after that incident, I think it's fair to say she's not holding a grudge!"
"Gentlemen, please!" interrupted Larry, flipping over a card. Honestly, of all the people you would think least likely to get into a shouting match over a woman. "The cards are down with this plan. And since it's the first intelligible thing they've come up with all day, I think we should go with it."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
he last notes of the prelude of the Ring saga echoed around the walls of their prison. The verses didn't seem to fade so much as sink into the bones of the rock, leaving the world more layered, warmer and richer.
"'S beautiful," sighed Olivia, taking a sip of the limited water to soothe her scratchy throat. "Tolkien-sensei would have been proud."
"You think?" said Stephen, sinking to a prone position in the hay. His own voice was starting to creak; if he wasn't out of water already, he would be soon.
"Of course I do. Anyone hearing that would be moved. Unless they didn't have a soul, or something."
With a groan, Stephen flung one arm over his face. "That's not funny."
"Don't be silly. It's hilarious." Heartened by the resonance of Tolkien's writing, Olivia got to her feet and faced down the unblinking column of light. "You hear that, whoever you are? Great joke! Ha ha, very funny, you sure pulled one over on us! So now you're somewhere up there, yukking it up over how clever you are. Well, why don't you grow a pair, take the sandwich out of your mouth, and come down here and do your gloating to my frakking face?"
Again the walls rang, with a far different tenor this time. Stephen gaped as if she'd grown a second head. Olivia stood her ground.
She heard it before she saw it: the soft thrum of the spell called into action, the way the column flickered like a cloudy sky split by lightning.
"Well, great," muttered Olivia, as two strikingly attractive women stepped into the cell. "There go half my best insults."
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: (skip) Kidnapping
Pairings/Characters: Jon/c!Stephen, Olivia/Kristen, John/Larry, Sam/Jason
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.
The honorifics are Japanese, or at least the American otaku versions thereof; -hime is "princess", -sensei is "teacher". Bunshinjutsu is a technique straight out of Naruto. The bit about Olivia's name is true.
Decorative capitals are from Daily Drop Cap. For the rest of the story, see here.
itful sleep and chaotic dreams made it almost a relief when a ring at the bell dragged Jon out of bed. He had only meant to catch a quick nap in the first place, so it was in decent if wrinkled clothing that he greeted Kristen, who forced a quick smile before looking over his shoulder. "Is Olivia here?"Though he had just walked through that room, Jon followed her gaze anyway, just to make sure. "Uh, no. It looks like I'm alone."
Kristen frowned. "I don't think that's supposed to happen."
"It's really not," agreed Jon, digging his fingers into his temples. "Either Olivia decided there was somewhere she absolutely couldn't wait to go, and Stephen had to chase after her; or they're both conspiring to turn the very last of my hair grey."
"Oh, Jon, that ship sailed ages ago," said Kristen. "Are you sure it isn't Stephen who decided to leave, and dragged Olivia along with?"
"He wouldn't do that." It came out with less conviction than Jon had hoped.
"Right." Kristen squared her shoulders, packing a surprising amount of determination into her tiny frame. The velvet box that had been in her hand disappeared into an inside pocket, the better to clap her hands decisively. "You hit up Larry and John, get them to do a locator spell. I'll cruise the bar and put my sleuthing skills into action."
"Sure," agreed Jon distractedly. "I'll be ready to go in a minute. Gonna suit up first, just in case."
"Good plan," said Kristen. "And, Jon? Once we find them, you are going to go have a talk with Her Majesty and get some backup."
Jon couldn't have agreed harder.
tephen!"There was something wrong with his bed. It wasn't supposed to be this uncomfortable. Or scratchy.
"Come on, Stephen. Can haz awake tiem nao?"
A splash of water on his face. A few drops went up his nose; he sneezed, and was awake.
"Where...?" he croaked, casting around for the source of the unfamiliar voice. All he saw, lit by an unearthly bluish glow, was hay. Lots and lots of hay.
"Kidnapped Stephen iz kidnapped," said the stranger.
The memories began to return in fits and starts. Trailing Olivia down cobbled streets and under shadowed arches. Watching her stumble and waver on her feet, leaning on the strange blonde woman's arm. Trying to follow them into a little-used back entrance of an unfamiliar building, only to find a shield of ruby light blocking his way....
"There was a statue," he stammered, trying to get his bearings. The room was dark, lined with blocks of smooth stone, its floor padded with a thick layer of straw. All its light came from a dim blue column in the air, like a shaft of moonlight through a window, but without the window. "They take her in a statue, and I follow...Is that where we are?"
"Invisible memories," replied his companion sadly. "I cannot haz."
Stephen gaped. They had taken his glasses, but there was no mistaking the elegant lines of the woman seated a few arm's lengths away from him. He would have recognized her voice straight away, if not for..."Olivia! You speak Commedien!"
The princess smiled wanly at him. The light glinted off something metal at her ankle; when Stephen tried to sit up, he felt a matching shackle tugging on his own.
"Careful!" she burst out, as he struggled. "You haz a bukkit—"
Too late: his knee knocked over the jar, splashing its contents into the hay. Stephen grabbed it and set it upright, then tilted it towards the light to see only a couple mouthfuls of water left.
"They doesn't want us ded of thirst," explained Olivia, curling her hand around a matching jar at her side.
"Great," said Stephen, scooting over to avoid sitting in the puddle. "I feel safer already."
ind Olivia Munn," whispered John, tossing the pinhead-sized emerald onto the map he had spread across the table."You see," explained Larry, "we start with a full-size diagram of the Castle, and once the locator spell picks a quadrant we can break out a higher-resolution diagram of that area. For some places, we have maps with enough detail to get a person's location at street level."
Jon sighed. "I'm not sure whether to be more impressed or creeped out."
The emerald didn't shoot straight to one area, but bounced and twirled across the table; in the meantime, Jon's eye wandered around the room. Gold and glass cabinets held rough marble idols, the hilts of broken swords, delicate contraptions that seemed to be mostly gears. Locked boxes bore tantalizing labels like dragon scales and eye of newt, and Jon could have sworn he heard one of them growling. A bin in the corner held a crumpled newspaper, printed with a familiar masthead....
"Is everyone reading that thing?" groaned Jon, looking away from the provocative swirls that headed The Harlot.
Larry and John exchanged a look that he didn't like in the least. "Only to see what all the fuss was about," said Larry at last. "And there's a reason it's in the recycling."
"Don't worry about it for a second," agreed John. "We know you too well to believe a word of it."
"Wha...?" The editorial Jon had read, peppered with Stephen's surprisingly methodical translation notes, had only mentioned him in passing. It was mostly a critique on Gi Foar's reactionary attitudes towards women, which Jon appreciated, and an assertion that supporting a Gi Foarese princess meant endorsing those attitudes, which he didn't. "I picked up a copy a few days ago, but it didn't say much about me. Did something else happen?"
There went another of those deeply unsettling looks.
Before anyone could give him some answers, the emerald twirled straight off the paper and threw itself at John, bouncing into one of the pockets of his violet cloak like a squirrel diving to safety in its home tree. Jon stared from the wizard to the map and back again, incredulous. "Okay, what does it mean when it does that?"
"Nothing good," said Larry flatly.
John nodded, pale as a sheet. "Your princess is in another Castle."
f looks could drill, the iron on Stephen's ankle would have been bored straight through.Olivia had already run the same tests he was, tugging just hard enough to find that it was bolted securely into the stone. Their prison was just large enough that they couldn't quite reach each other, nor the beam of light which Olivia recognized as the vector for a transportation spell. The brainchild of a Gi Foarese wizard, no less. She wondered if their captors knew that.
"Thanks for following me," she said, when Stephen finally recognized the value of saving his strength. At least, that was what she tried to say; there was something off about her grammar, but she didn't know how to fix it. "Thanks for trying to help. I'm sorry I got you into this mess. I'm sorry for pretending I didn't know the language, too."
Stephen twiddled a piece of hay between his fingers, not looking up.
Then he replied, in flawless Gi Foarese, "I haven't been entirely honest with you either, Olivia-hime."
There wasn't much Olivia could do to that except fall over, the better to roll on the floor laughing out loud.
ou lost the princess.""'Lost' is such a strong word," protested Kristen. "We more sort of...misplaced her for a while."
"I see." Leaning over the bar, Sam spoke out of the corner of her mouth. "You have checked all the dressing rooms, right?"
"You're not helping!"
Jason chose that moment to lean on the bar, smiling his most dapper smile. "Ladies, please. Whatever this is, I'm sure it's nothing that can't be solved through reasonable discussion. Or, if that fails, naked jello wrestling. I already have the jello."
"Later, honey," urged Sam. "Right now, Kristen is in need of your detecting skills."
A far-off look came into Jason's eyes. Half to himself, he said, "The moment the dame walked into the bar, I knew she was trouble."
y the time Olivia's outburst of hilarity tapered off, Stephen was starting to worry that he had misremembered everything, and blurted out some hideous insult without knowing it."Well, frak me," she giggled at last, sweeping unruly locks of hair out of her eyes. "You don't even have an accent. How did you manage that?"
Stephen hugged his knees to his chest. "When I was young, I belonged to a group of siblings who were...let's say...fans. They knew Gi Foar has the best songs, plays, graphic serials, novels, poems, everything. And they wanted to get their hands on all of it, whether or not it was available in Vulpin. So...."
"...you were part of an illegal translation circle," finished Olivia. As if she should have expected nothing less.
"It wasn't all illegal," pouted Stephen. "We didn't always bother working out the Vulpin versions, either. Especially when the original is so...I used to be able to recite the whole prelude of the Ring saga, okay? You can't hope to capture that in translation. It's too perfect as-is."
"No arguments here," said Olivia quickly. "Hey, can you still do it?"
"Bet I can," said Stephen. "Bet that would confuse the kidnappers, if they're checking up on us. Who would want to kidnap you, anyway?"
The princess slumped against the stone. "No clue."
"No clue? There's gotta be a clue. You'd know better than anyone what you have to be afraid of—you're the one who decided to run away from it, remember?"
"About that." Dark hair curtained over Olivia's face; she made no move to brush it away.
The truth hit Stephen like a box of rocks. "Someone attacked you on the trip here," he protested, trying to push it away. "Your driver died! It was in the news!"
"They attacked because I was running. Only important people run. Forty-third in the line of succession, all I had to do was keep my head down and wait it out. The driver...wasn't real, okay? You must have done enough reading to know what bunshinjutsu is."
Stephen didn't answer. All he could think of was how Papa Bear would have yelled at her, maybe slapped her, and sent her packing without so much as an extra pair of socks.
"I really did have to get out of that place," continued Olivia weakly. "I just—I figured you wouldn't buy it unless I hyped up the danger. I, um, I saw that article you were translating. The one that talks about how much it sucks to be a woman in Gi Foar, remember? They were trumping it up to support their point about how I suck for putting up with it, but they got a lot of it right. You would think it would be easier on a princess, but any kind of spotlight just makes it worse. There's that many more people who want to get their hands on...."
She shook her head as if to clear it, and left the thought unfinished.
"You want to know something frakked up?" she said instead. "I even lied to you about my name. I mean, Olivia's my middle name, but I've never gone by it before now. That's how much I needed to escape. I didn't even want to bring along what they called me."
Over the lump in his throat, Stephen murmured, "I know how that feels."
Olivia snorted. "You? Really? With your happy multicultural childhood and your geeky translating family?"
"They weren't my family," said Stephen. "I belonged to them. They bought me when I was eight, and sold me when I was fifteen."
"Oh," said Olivia.
Silence.
"How old were you when...I mean, how long has it been since you've...."
"Jon rescued me last winter."
"Geez," breathed Olivia at last. "No wonder you're so devoted to him."
Stephen meant to tell her everything then. How he had knocked Jon out and hiked miles through the snow, just to get back to his beloved master; how that master had torn out his soul, and in spite of everything Jon had opened up and reached out and given him the salve he needed to pull it back together. But the feelings were too raw, the wounds still fresh: he couldn't yet bear to share that part of himself with anyone who wasn't Jon. All he could manage was a small noise of agreement.
"I really am sorry if I've frakked that up for you too," said Olivia, in the barest of whispers. "It sounds like you needed the protection a lot more than I did."
"That's not how it works," insisted Stephen. "That's not how Jon works. He's not protecting you because Her Majesty said so; he's doing it because he thinks it's right. If you had come clean from the beginning, he still would have found some way to help."
The princess scoffed. "You can't know that."
Stephen lifted his chin, settling into the familiar role of self-assured defender. "Can so."
uttering a string of low but creative curses, Larry shuffled the cards again. He kept one ear attuned to them while the other followed Featherwick's stream-of-consciousness analysis: "She's not on the big map. Why isn't she on the big map? Any run-of-the-mill protection crystal, we would've seen through by now. She's not dead, is she? Oughtn't to throw off the spell, unless they've done something absolutely ghastly with her body. Larry! Haven't you found anything useful yet?""The cards aren't cooperating," replied Larry. "It's like they think I'm asking the wrong questions. What good is that if they won't tell me the right questions?"
A terrific crackling noise from the corner of the room, as Jon re-crumpled the newspaper and lobbed it back into the recycling. "Have you tried to find Stephen?"
The wizards exchanged an uncertain look. "Jon," began Featherwick, "you were charged by the Queen Herself with the solemn duty of protecting Olivia. I know you don't always show Her Majesty as much respect as you might, but...."
Larry's "kill that thought" gesture came too late; Jon was already spluttering with disbelief. "I thought you said you didn't pay attention to that article!"
Featherwick's voice sidled up an octave, but he stood his ground. "Well, no, not as such—but it got one thing right, didn't it? You did call Her Majesty 'dude' that one time."
Larry tuned out their sniping altogether, doing a shuffle in double-time.
"That was a mistake!" shot back Jon. "Which I acknowledged! And since she knighted me after that incident, I think it's fair to say she's not holding a grudge!"
"Gentlemen, please!" interrupted Larry, flipping over a card. Honestly, of all the people you would think least likely to get into a shouting match over a woman. "The cards are down with this plan. And since it's the first intelligible thing they've come up with all day, I think we should go with it."
he last notes of the prelude of the Ring saga echoed around the walls of their prison. The verses didn't seem to fade so much as sink into the bones of the rock, leaving the world more layered, warmer and richer."'S beautiful," sighed Olivia, taking a sip of the limited water to soothe her scratchy throat. "Tolkien-sensei would have been proud."
"You think?" said Stephen, sinking to a prone position in the hay. His own voice was starting to creak; if he wasn't out of water already, he would be soon.
"Of course I do. Anyone hearing that would be moved. Unless they didn't have a soul, or something."
With a groan, Stephen flung one arm over his face. "That's not funny."
"Don't be silly. It's hilarious." Heartened by the resonance of Tolkien's writing, Olivia got to her feet and faced down the unblinking column of light. "You hear that, whoever you are? Great joke! Ha ha, very funny, you sure pulled one over on us! So now you're somewhere up there, yukking it up over how clever you are. Well, why don't you grow a pair, take the sandwich out of your mouth, and come down here and do your gloating to my frakking face?"
Again the walls rang, with a far different tenor this time. Stephen gaped as if she'd grown a second head. Olivia stood her ground.
She heard it before she saw it: the soft thrum of the spell called into action, the way the column flickered like a cloudy sky split by lightning.
"Well, great," muttered Olivia, as two strikingly attractive women stepped into the cell. "There go half my best insults."
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Jon borrowed the latest issue of the paper out of John and Larry's trash can ^_~ So that's where he picked up the rumor.
The more I read about RL!Olivia, the more I want to give her all the hugs. I just got ahold of her book, and while it has plenty of funny (and cosplay!) to balance things out, there are still some bits that just grab your heartstrings and yank.
Stephen has no idea who his parents were. Most slaves in Vulpis don't, unless there are exceptional circumstances. He was raised in a group home and purchased young, luckily by a family who wanted nothing more than a playmate for their kids.