Erin Ptah (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ptahrrific) wrote2007-10-20 12:00 am
ptahrrific) wrote2007-10-20 12:00 am
Entry tags:
Fake News: The Thing With Feathers, Epilogue
Title: The Thing With Feathers, Epilogue
Fandom: The Daily Show/The Colbert Report
Rating: PG
Words: ~1600
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. Sue me not, please.
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.
Notes: Wikisource has Candide (and a translation). Not a great parallel, but an interesting one.
For the full table of contents, click here.
The Thing With Feathers
Epilogue
(here.)
It was such a beautiful day that most of the Sunday school classes were outside, meaning there were plenty of other teachers around; so Stephen felt free to give his whole attention to his book.
He was sitting on one of the benches at the edge of the playground when someone leaned on the chain-link fence and looked over his shoulder. "Good read?"
"It's ... interesting," admitted Stephen, looking up. The unfamiliar woman behind him was dressed in khakis and a gold shirt, her thick brown curly hair held back by a baseball cap with an owl on it.
"What is it?"
Stephen closed the book, marking the page with his thumb, to show her the cover. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, by Daniel Pinchbeck.
"I, uh, interviewed him a while ago," he said, self-conscious as he often was when discussing his career at church. "But I didn't read the book very thoroughly. To be honest, I figured it was just a record of a bad trip."
"It looks pretty New Age-y," agreed the woman. "Why'd you go back to it?"
Stephen considered this. "I had a bit of a bad trip myself," he said at last. "Not in the same sense, mind you."
"No, I wouldn't think so. Well, is it any better this time around?"
Stephen looked at the book and frowned. "Not really."
He paused, words hovering on the tip of his tongue about how the author was full of it, how he was either making things up or seeing things, how the real Quetzalcoatl was completely different. But while he was hesitating, the woman asked "Have you ever read Candide?" and he had to think about that instead.
"That's Voltaire, isn't it? Maybe. If I did, I don't remember anything about it."
"In the beginning, the hero -- the titular Candide -- believes that he lives in 'the best of all possible worlds.'"
All of a sudden Stephen was looking at her more sharply.
There was no change of expression in her eyes; they remained matter-of-fact, and he saw that they really were grey, not dull blue but the pure grey of steel.
"What happens to him?" he asked carefully.
"You might say he goes on a bad trip," replied the woman. "In the course of it, he finds that the world is more complicated than he was led to believe."
"And does he come out of it all right?"
"He ends up more or less where he started, but with a more realistic outlook. Rather than trying to put in order the nature of the world and get everything to fit that philosophy, he focuses on cultivating his own garden."
"And that is a broad comment on the human condition? What about people who don't have gardens?"
"Well, yes. It means all the things you need to take care of. Your family. Your friends. Your church. Your God. Your show. Your own little patch of your world."
Stephen looked very hard at her. The expression on her face remained placid, but her grey eyes gleamed.
"Can I ask just one question?" he said.
She nodded.
"Are they okay?"
Before she could answer, there was a wail of distress from the jungle gym: one of the kids had fallen, the first in weeks, the first since Stephen had visited all the classes to show off his cast. He leapt to his feet, eyes flicking between the scene of the fall and grey-eyed Athena.
She reached out and plucked 2012 from his hand. "They're fine," she replied with a smile. "I've got my eye on them. Now go cultivate your garden."
"Thank you," said Stephen, and sprinted towards the jungle gym, where his attention should have been all along.
---------------------
---------------------
(there.)
Visiting hours were from one to five on Sunday afternoons. Jon arrived promptly at one.
A helpful aide directed him to the dining room, where they found Stephen alone at a table by the windows. He was wearing a lavender collared shirt and dark pants, though his hair was less severely styled than usual and he had no tie. Ties, along with ropes and most sharp objects, were confiscated at the door.
He stood up immediately on seeing his visitor. "Did you bring them?"
Jon patted the brown paper bag under his arm. "They're all here."
"Oh, thank God. Come on, we'll open them in my room." He strode off, leaving the dishes and half a cup of chocolate pudding on his tray; Jon followed.
The room was neutral, like a hotel room only with less personality; the furniture was a plain light wood, the cream walls bare except for a couple of paintings of fruit over the beds, the beds themselves sporting eggshell sheets and ecru covers. Once in, Stephen grabbed the bag and plopped himself down on the rightmost bed, where he dumped a week's worth of The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal out over the covers.
"I wouldn't do this normally, but desperate times call for desperate measures." He picked up the topmost Journal and clutched it like a life preserver. "You know they won't let us watch television here?"
"I know, Stephen."
"Or use the Internet! Or even listen to the radio!"
"I know, Stephen."
"Or get phone calls! Or make phone calls, except for fifteen minutes at a time during designated calling times on Saturdays!"
"I know, Stephen. You told me yesterday. You spent most of your fifteen minutes telling me."
"And they keep us busy all day, with exercises and lectures and therapy and nonsense like that, so I have no idea what's going on in the world, and it's horrible, Jon!"
"I'm sorry to hear it, Stephen." He wasn't sorry that they were keeping Stephen occupied, of course; but for himself, Jon could imagine few things worse than going for a week without a scrap of news.
Still, he was a little hurt when Stephen sorted through the papers, found the earliest Times, and began to read the front page without so much as a glance upwards.
Jon waited until it became clear that Stephen intended not just to skim, but to read every article that caught his interest. Then he took a seat on the bed and reached over to pull the top of the paper down.
Stephen jumped to see him so close. "What? What is it, Jon?"
"I saw your schedule," replied Jon carefully. "There's some free time every day. You could read these during that time."
"Yeah, but Jon," replied Stephen patiently, as though explaining something to a rather slow child, "there are a lot of them."
Be assertive, Jon told himself. "Even so, you'll have time to read them later. You won't have time to talk to me later. I can only stay for a few hours, and then you won't hear from me until next weekend."
Stephen frowned, not putting down the section. "What would you like to talk about?"
"When you were in that other universe," said Jon. "Do you want to talk about what happened?"
From the way he set his jaw, the answer was obviously no. "I don't need to," he said shortly. "I'm fine."
"I thought you might want to talk about it. With somebody who was there, and who won't think you're crazy."
"I know I'm not crazy. So I don't need to think about it any more."
"But I want to know, Stephen..." Be assertive. Be direct. "What happened with that other me?"
Stephen drew his legs up nearer to himself and didn't answer.
"What did you do?"
His grip had grown so tight that the edges of the paper were beginning to tear.
"Did you try to..."
"I kissed him!" burst out Stephen, screwing his eyes tightly shut. "I was confused, I hadn't had my pills for a while, I was tired, it was a mistake, I wasn't thinking!"
"You kissed him," repeated Jon, "and not me?"
"I still thought he was you at that point -- I never should have done it -- I won't do it again -- please, just forget it, you weren't supposed to know--"
Jon leaned forward and shut him up.
When he pulled away, he opened his eyes to find Stephen's staring back at him, round and brown and stunned and wildly hopeful. It was, he decided, a look that he wanted to see more often.
"I'm going to do that again," he said, because being assertive was working pretty well so far; and then, because old habits die hard, he added, "if you don't mind."
Stephen threw aside the section of print in his hands and pulled Jon forward, legs shooting out and sweeping the rest of the newspapers off of the bed in one smooth motion; and from there he proceeded to make it perfectly clear that no, he did not mind in the least.
---------------------
---------------------
(somewhere.)
The cast came off, the book came out, the show went on, and Stephen went on tour.
"Do you," said Larry, in his deep and gravelly voice that carried more gravitas in every syllable than Stephen could fit in a whole show, "like him?"
Stephen didn't even need to think about it.
"I do," he said without hesitation. "I do."
Fandom: The Daily Show/The Colbert Report
Rating: PG
Words: ~1600
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. Sue me not, please.
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.
Notes: Wikisource has Candide (and a translation). Not a great parallel, but an interesting one.
For the full table of contents, click here.
The Thing With Feathers
Epilogue
(here.)
It was such a beautiful day that most of the Sunday school classes were outside, meaning there were plenty of other teachers around; so Stephen felt free to give his whole attention to his book.
He was sitting on one of the benches at the edge of the playground when someone leaned on the chain-link fence and looked over his shoulder. "Good read?"
"It's ... interesting," admitted Stephen, looking up. The unfamiliar woman behind him was dressed in khakis and a gold shirt, her thick brown curly hair held back by a baseball cap with an owl on it.
"What is it?"
Stephen closed the book, marking the page with his thumb, to show her the cover. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, by Daniel Pinchbeck.
"I, uh, interviewed him a while ago," he said, self-conscious as he often was when discussing his career at church. "But I didn't read the book very thoroughly. To be honest, I figured it was just a record of a bad trip."
"It looks pretty New Age-y," agreed the woman. "Why'd you go back to it?"
Stephen considered this. "I had a bit of a bad trip myself," he said at last. "Not in the same sense, mind you."
"No, I wouldn't think so. Well, is it any better this time around?"
Stephen looked at the book and frowned. "Not really."
He paused, words hovering on the tip of his tongue about how the author was full of it, how he was either making things up or seeing things, how the real Quetzalcoatl was completely different. But while he was hesitating, the woman asked "Have you ever read Candide?" and he had to think about that instead.
"That's Voltaire, isn't it? Maybe. If I did, I don't remember anything about it."
"In the beginning, the hero -- the titular Candide -- believes that he lives in 'the best of all possible worlds.'"
All of a sudden Stephen was looking at her more sharply.
There was no change of expression in her eyes; they remained matter-of-fact, and he saw that they really were grey, not dull blue but the pure grey of steel.
"What happens to him?" he asked carefully.
"You might say he goes on a bad trip," replied the woman. "In the course of it, he finds that the world is more complicated than he was led to believe."
"And does he come out of it all right?"
"He ends up more or less where he started, but with a more realistic outlook. Rather than trying to put in order the nature of the world and get everything to fit that philosophy, he focuses on cultivating his own garden."
"And that is a broad comment on the human condition? What about people who don't have gardens?"
"Well, yes. It means all the things you need to take care of. Your family. Your friends. Your church. Your God. Your show. Your own little patch of your world."
Stephen looked very hard at her. The expression on her face remained placid, but her grey eyes gleamed.
"Can I ask just one question?" he said.
She nodded.
"Are they okay?"
Before she could answer, there was a wail of distress from the jungle gym: one of the kids had fallen, the first in weeks, the first since Stephen had visited all the classes to show off his cast. He leapt to his feet, eyes flicking between the scene of the fall and grey-eyed Athena.
She reached out and plucked 2012 from his hand. "They're fine," she replied with a smile. "I've got my eye on them. Now go cultivate your garden."
"Thank you," said Stephen, and sprinted towards the jungle gym, where his attention should have been all along.
---------------------
(there.)
Visiting hours were from one to five on Sunday afternoons. Jon arrived promptly at one.
A helpful aide directed him to the dining room, where they found Stephen alone at a table by the windows. He was wearing a lavender collared shirt and dark pants, though his hair was less severely styled than usual and he had no tie. Ties, along with ropes and most sharp objects, were confiscated at the door.
He stood up immediately on seeing his visitor. "Did you bring them?"
Jon patted the brown paper bag under his arm. "They're all here."
"Oh, thank God. Come on, we'll open them in my room." He strode off, leaving the dishes and half a cup of chocolate pudding on his tray; Jon followed.
The room was neutral, like a hotel room only with less personality; the furniture was a plain light wood, the cream walls bare except for a couple of paintings of fruit over the beds, the beds themselves sporting eggshell sheets and ecru covers. Once in, Stephen grabbed the bag and plopped himself down on the rightmost bed, where he dumped a week's worth of The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal out over the covers.
"I wouldn't do this normally, but desperate times call for desperate measures." He picked up the topmost Journal and clutched it like a life preserver. "You know they won't let us watch television here?"
"I know, Stephen."
"Or use the Internet! Or even listen to the radio!"
"I know, Stephen."
"Or get phone calls! Or make phone calls, except for fifteen minutes at a time during designated calling times on Saturdays!"
"I know, Stephen. You told me yesterday. You spent most of your fifteen minutes telling me."
"And they keep us busy all day, with exercises and lectures and therapy and nonsense like that, so I have no idea what's going on in the world, and it's horrible, Jon!"
"I'm sorry to hear it, Stephen." He wasn't sorry that they were keeping Stephen occupied, of course; but for himself, Jon could imagine few things worse than going for a week without a scrap of news.
Still, he was a little hurt when Stephen sorted through the papers, found the earliest Times, and began to read the front page without so much as a glance upwards.
Jon waited until it became clear that Stephen intended not just to skim, but to read every article that caught his interest. Then he took a seat on the bed and reached over to pull the top of the paper down.
Stephen jumped to see him so close. "What? What is it, Jon?"
"I saw your schedule," replied Jon carefully. "There's some free time every day. You could read these during that time."
"Yeah, but Jon," replied Stephen patiently, as though explaining something to a rather slow child, "there are a lot of them."
Be assertive, Jon told himself. "Even so, you'll have time to read them later. You won't have time to talk to me later. I can only stay for a few hours, and then you won't hear from me until next weekend."
Stephen frowned, not putting down the section. "What would you like to talk about?"
"When you were in that other universe," said Jon. "Do you want to talk about what happened?"
From the way he set his jaw, the answer was obviously no. "I don't need to," he said shortly. "I'm fine."
"I thought you might want to talk about it. With somebody who was there, and who won't think you're crazy."
"I know I'm not crazy. So I don't need to think about it any more."
"But I want to know, Stephen..." Be assertive. Be direct. "What happened with that other me?"
Stephen drew his legs up nearer to himself and didn't answer.
"What did you do?"
His grip had grown so tight that the edges of the paper were beginning to tear.
"Did you try to..."
"I kissed him!" burst out Stephen, screwing his eyes tightly shut. "I was confused, I hadn't had my pills for a while, I was tired, it was a mistake, I wasn't thinking!"
"You kissed him," repeated Jon, "and not me?"
"I still thought he was you at that point -- I never should have done it -- I won't do it again -- please, just forget it, you weren't supposed to know--"
Jon leaned forward and shut him up.
When he pulled away, he opened his eyes to find Stephen's staring back at him, round and brown and stunned and wildly hopeful. It was, he decided, a look that he wanted to see more often.
"I'm going to do that again," he said, because being assertive was working pretty well so far; and then, because old habits die hard, he added, "if you don't mind."
Stephen threw aside the section of print in his hands and pulled Jon forward, legs shooting out and sweeping the rest of the newspapers off of the bed in one smooth motion; and from there he proceeded to make it perfectly clear that no, he did not mind in the least.
---------------------
(somewhere.)
The cast came off, the book came out, the show went on, and Stephen went on tour.
"Do you," said Larry, in his deep and gravelly voice that carried more gravitas in every syllable than Stephen could fit in a whole show, "like him?"
Stephen didn't even need to think about it.
"I do," he said without hesitation. "I do."
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