Erin Ptah (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ptahrrific) wrote2009-06-19 03:10 pm
ptahrrific) wrote2009-06-19 03:10 pm
Fake News: Stay, part 2
Title: Stay (2/4)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Shocking haircuts, mortal peril
Characters/pairings: Jon, "Stephen", Rob R., Sam/Jason, Scarborough, Aasif
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Summary: Senateverse. While Jon follows along at home, Stephen embarks on a whirlwind tour of Iraq, complete with a haircut courtesy of Commanding General Rob Riggle.
Yes, I did put Senateverse!Rob in the Army instead of the Marines. Military readers, please don't kill me.
Stay - Part II
Jon didn't hear from Stephen the next day.
Not that he would have had time to deal with the man anyway, between the hearing in the morning and a press conference in the afternoon. One of the reporters tried to bring Stephen up, but Jon gave a quick deflection about the importance of not letting political differences become social walls, and now he would like to get back to the Democratic plan to fix the economy, which was certainly more important to ordinary Americans than who their politicians choose to eat with.
The day after that, Jon walked into his office to find the staff clustered around the television.
"Okay, what's going on?" he demanded, keeping to the back of the crowd rather than standing on tiptoe or trying to force his way through. He found his dignity was safer that way.
Sam, whose job included being undignified so Jon didn't have to, began elbowing people aside. "All right, everyone, shove off, senator coming through. Jon, you have got to see this. Your man's getting sandblasted."
On the edge of the screen, Jon caught sight of a sun-bleached landscape with a wide-open sky. "Is that Tehran? Did something happen with Jason?" His senior foreign affairs advisor had been sent to the region a few days ago. Reports had been regular, but if anything had gone wrong....
"No, Senator, that would be my man," corrected Sam. "Take a look."
At first, Jon couldn't think what he was seeing. (He was also mildly distracted by the Fox logo in the corner of the screen.) Then Sam snatched the remote and ratcheted up the volume.
"And you can't even get a drink around here!" cried a familiar indignant voice. "The suffering we put these brave men through for the sake of our country! And women, too, of course. But mostly men."
Jon boggled.
"What did he do to his hair?"
§
"The necksht time I run f'r Prezhident, I'm claiming thish ash military exshperience," declared Stephen through a mouthful of ice cream, as the woman next to him rubbed his newly shorn head appreciatively. "You shee Romney doing thish?"
After spending the morning being carted from site to site — a hospital, a school, an oil refinery — he was sitting down for lunch with a group of soldiers from the great state of South Carolina. Well, the soldiers were having lunch. Stephen had skipped straight to dessert. This country made Hell look like a skating rink; if they were going to provide eight flavors of ice cream, he was going to sample every one.
"It looks good on you," agreed the young man across from him. "Is this your first visit?"
Stephen swallowed before answering. "Yep. Love what you've done with the place, by the way. I never knew there were so many ways to decorate with grit."
It wasn't supposed to be a joke, but when a laugh circled the table, Stephen figured he wouldn't object. One of his visits had been to an Iraqi police station, where he got to see some of the officers in action. If the people who had trained those officers wanted to have a good chuckle, Stephen wasn't going to be the one to stop them.
§
After returning to his suite for the evening, Jon collapsed onto his couch, opened his laptop with one hand, and switched on the television with the other.
He had called the staff to set his TiVo, knowing that every other time Stephen did something half this dramatic, the story shot from network to network like a Ping-Pong ball in a clothes dryer. Even so, Stephen had only been in Iraq for thirteen hours, and given the time difference, most of those had been spent asleep.
So Jon wasn't remotely prepared for the avalanche of clips that popped up on his screen.
A quick trip to the Internet cleared things up for him. Stephen had given a press conference the day before, chock-full of sound bites for the media to pounce on and dissect, one by one. Jon tracked down a video of the actual speech and watched, with a mixture of amusement and horror, as the singularly quotable lines unfolded:
I'll be visiting Iraq: the country so nice, we invaded it twice.
I didn't even realize the troops were still there. I haven't heard a news story about them in months!
Apparently it's nice enough that some of the soldiers just want to stay, because they keep going back, again, and again, and again....
I checked the rules of Risk, and apparently we can't win until we declare victory. Stupid rule. I mean, we didn't declare war either, and look how well that went.
I have deep, deep respect for our military men and women. I would do anything to understand the life of a soldier. Short of enlisting, that is.
This is entirely to support the troops, and has nothing to do with what any civilian back in the States might think of me. And you can tell him I said that.
§
"How do you bring democracy to a country that has been under a brutal dictatorship?" asked Stephen, sitting back in his nice plush chair in the office of the executive.
He had shooed the attendant film crews out of the room for this meeting, leaving only a handful of soldiers accompanying him. His staff might be watching, after all.
"Difficult," replied Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, who was, as far as Stephen could figure out, the Joe Biden of Iraq, except without the foot in his mouth. "Very difficult, especially in this part of the world. But we are making progress. With the help of this wonderful U.S. military."
He didn't quite smile, but his eyes sparkled as he nodded to Stephen's bodyguards. Stephen felt his heart swell with pride on behalf of his country.
"It's so weird," he remarked. "Everyone I meet with says that! I mean, the reporters in the mainstream media keep telling you there's a lot of controversy about the occupation among the citizens of Iraq, but that's all their own left-wing bias talking. Whenever I approach the people on the street, just me and a couple of highly trained warriors with loaded guns behind me, they all say they're glad to have us!"
§
After lying uselessly in bed for an hour and a half, with one leg or the other twitching defiantly every time he seemed about to drift off, Jon got up, fixed himself some lemonade, and settled back down with his computer. He had gone through a fair sampling of the post-press-conference clips, all dating themselves with their stock images of Senator Colbert fully coiffed.
To Jon's surprise, when he found footage of the actual haircut, he heard another familiar voice.
"You would really do anything to know how it feels to be a soldier, Senator?"
"Of course, General!" exclaimed Stephen, now standing at a podium from which he had been addressing the troops that greeted his delegation. "Except for actually enlisting. I have a medical condition that prevents me from doing that, you see. It's called cowardice. But as far as everything else goes, I'm all set. I've got my camo, and my flak jacket, and...."
"No, no, I see that," interrupted Commanding General Rob Riggle, MNF-I. "It's not about what you need to have, Senator. It's about what you need to get rid of."
"You're not going to make me give up my exfoliating loofah, are you? Or my raspberry-scented hair gel?"
"Nope." Riggle tapped his own mostly-shorn head meaningfully. "Your hair."
Stephen laughed nervously, then looked around the audience for support. To nobody's surprise but his own, none of the attending members of the most disciplined fighting force in the world made a sound.
Turning back to Riggle, he stammered, "Sir, while I am very mindful of the fact that you could break me in half like a twig...."
The general raised an eyebrow. Where Stephen's arched eyebrows looked like a form of fine and derisive calligraphy, Riggle's were more like two-by-fours being held at the ready.
"...you could break me in half like a twig," finished Stephen. "All right. Let's do this."
As Riggle approached with an electric razor, a titter ran through the crowd. Even the general himself was grinning, not unkindly, at the exaggerated expressions of thinly veiled despair on Stephen's face. As the first large tufts fell to the ground, Jon realized he was smiling too.
More importantly, he was watching. And if the view count on this video alone was any indication, he wasn't the only one.
§
As he walked down the street in the open-air market, Stephen was actually kind of relieved his hair was gone.
Yes. That's it. Relieved. In heat like this, a full head of thick, dark, impeccably gelled hair would only make him swelter even more than the long pants, long sleeves, and flak jacket. You were better off shaved, even if it meant losing the most glorious of coiffes.
Stephen would have shed a tear, but it probably would have evaporated.
He didn't notice the projectile aimed at his head until he was tackled by two soldiers and thrown to the ground.
There was a flurry of activity around them, including the sound of guns being drawn and aimed. For a few heart-stopping moments Stephen was petrified. Never mind that he was being held down by two members of the sharpest, coolest, and sexiest fighting force in the world — someone had attacked them!
And then he caught sight of the improvised missile: a shoe, landing in a puff of dust on the ground just in front of a stand of glassware.
"Nothing to worry about, Senator," said one of his escort, as they helped him up and shepherded him away, too quickly to see how the would-be protestor was being dealt with. "Just a prankster. Let's move on."
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Shocking haircuts, mortal peril
Characters/pairings: Jon, "Stephen", Rob R., Sam/Jason, Scarborough, Aasif
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Summary: Senateverse. While Jon follows along at home, Stephen embarks on a whirlwind tour of Iraq, complete with a haircut courtesy of Commanding General Rob Riggle.
Yes, I did put Senateverse!Rob in the Army instead of the Marines. Military readers, please don't kill me.
Stay - Part II
Jon didn't hear from Stephen the next day.
Not that he would have had time to deal with the man anyway, between the hearing in the morning and a press conference in the afternoon. One of the reporters tried to bring Stephen up, but Jon gave a quick deflection about the importance of not letting political differences become social walls, and now he would like to get back to the Democratic plan to fix the economy, which was certainly more important to ordinary Americans than who their politicians choose to eat with.
The day after that, Jon walked into his office to find the staff clustered around the television.
"Okay, what's going on?" he demanded, keeping to the back of the crowd rather than standing on tiptoe or trying to force his way through. He found his dignity was safer that way.
Sam, whose job included being undignified so Jon didn't have to, began elbowing people aside. "All right, everyone, shove off, senator coming through. Jon, you have got to see this. Your man's getting sandblasted."
On the edge of the screen, Jon caught sight of a sun-bleached landscape with a wide-open sky. "Is that Tehran? Did something happen with Jason?" His senior foreign affairs advisor had been sent to the region a few days ago. Reports had been regular, but if anything had gone wrong....
"No, Senator, that would be my man," corrected Sam. "Take a look."
At first, Jon couldn't think what he was seeing. (He was also mildly distracted by the Fox logo in the corner of the screen.) Then Sam snatched the remote and ratcheted up the volume.
"And you can't even get a drink around here!" cried a familiar indignant voice. "The suffering we put these brave men through for the sake of our country! And women, too, of course. But mostly men."
Jon boggled.
"What did he do to his hair?"
"The necksht time I run f'r Prezhident, I'm claiming thish ash military exshperience," declared Stephen through a mouthful of ice cream, as the woman next to him rubbed his newly shorn head appreciatively. "You shee Romney doing thish?"
After spending the morning being carted from site to site — a hospital, a school, an oil refinery — he was sitting down for lunch with a group of soldiers from the great state of South Carolina. Well, the soldiers were having lunch. Stephen had skipped straight to dessert. This country made Hell look like a skating rink; if they were going to provide eight flavors of ice cream, he was going to sample every one.
"It looks good on you," agreed the young man across from him. "Is this your first visit?"
Stephen swallowed before answering. "Yep. Love what you've done with the place, by the way. I never knew there were so many ways to decorate with grit."
It wasn't supposed to be a joke, but when a laugh circled the table, Stephen figured he wouldn't object. One of his visits had been to an Iraqi police station, where he got to see some of the officers in action. If the people who had trained those officers wanted to have a good chuckle, Stephen wasn't going to be the one to stop them.
After returning to his suite for the evening, Jon collapsed onto his couch, opened his laptop with one hand, and switched on the television with the other.
He had called the staff to set his TiVo, knowing that every other time Stephen did something half this dramatic, the story shot from network to network like a Ping-Pong ball in a clothes dryer. Even so, Stephen had only been in Iraq for thirteen hours, and given the time difference, most of those had been spent asleep.
So Jon wasn't remotely prepared for the avalanche of clips that popped up on his screen.
A quick trip to the Internet cleared things up for him. Stephen had given a press conference the day before, chock-full of sound bites for the media to pounce on and dissect, one by one. Jon tracked down a video of the actual speech and watched, with a mixture of amusement and horror, as the singularly quotable lines unfolded:
I'll be visiting Iraq: the country so nice, we invaded it twice.
I didn't even realize the troops were still there. I haven't heard a news story about them in months!
Apparently it's nice enough that some of the soldiers just want to stay, because they keep going back, again, and again, and again....
I checked the rules of Risk, and apparently we can't win until we declare victory. Stupid rule. I mean, we didn't declare war either, and look how well that went.
I have deep, deep respect for our military men and women. I would do anything to understand the life of a soldier. Short of enlisting, that is.
This is entirely to support the troops, and has nothing to do with what any civilian back in the States might think of me. And you can tell him I said that.
"How do you bring democracy to a country that has been under a brutal dictatorship?" asked Stephen, sitting back in his nice plush chair in the office of the executive.
He had shooed the attendant film crews out of the room for this meeting, leaving only a handful of soldiers accompanying him. His staff might be watching, after all.
"Difficult," replied Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, who was, as far as Stephen could figure out, the Joe Biden of Iraq, except without the foot in his mouth. "Very difficult, especially in this part of the world. But we are making progress. With the help of this wonderful U.S. military."
He didn't quite smile, but his eyes sparkled as he nodded to Stephen's bodyguards. Stephen felt his heart swell with pride on behalf of his country.
"It's so weird," he remarked. "Everyone I meet with says that! I mean, the reporters in the mainstream media keep telling you there's a lot of controversy about the occupation among the citizens of Iraq, but that's all their own left-wing bias talking. Whenever I approach the people on the street, just me and a couple of highly trained warriors with loaded guns behind me, they all say they're glad to have us!"
After lying uselessly in bed for an hour and a half, with one leg or the other twitching defiantly every time he seemed about to drift off, Jon got up, fixed himself some lemonade, and settled back down with his computer. He had gone through a fair sampling of the post-press-conference clips, all dating themselves with their stock images of Senator Colbert fully coiffed.
To Jon's surprise, when he found footage of the actual haircut, he heard another familiar voice.
"You would really do anything to know how it feels to be a soldier, Senator?"
"Of course, General!" exclaimed Stephen, now standing at a podium from which he had been addressing the troops that greeted his delegation. "Except for actually enlisting. I have a medical condition that prevents me from doing that, you see. It's called cowardice. But as far as everything else goes, I'm all set. I've got my camo, and my flak jacket, and...."
"No, no, I see that," interrupted Commanding General Rob Riggle, MNF-I. "It's not about what you need to have, Senator. It's about what you need to get rid of."
"You're not going to make me give up my exfoliating loofah, are you? Or my raspberry-scented hair gel?"
"Nope." Riggle tapped his own mostly-shorn head meaningfully. "Your hair."
Stephen laughed nervously, then looked around the audience for support. To nobody's surprise but his own, none of the attending members of the most disciplined fighting force in the world made a sound.
Turning back to Riggle, he stammered, "Sir, while I am very mindful of the fact that you could break me in half like a twig...."
The general raised an eyebrow. Where Stephen's arched eyebrows looked like a form of fine and derisive calligraphy, Riggle's were more like two-by-fours being held at the ready.
"...you could break me in half like a twig," finished Stephen. "All right. Let's do this."
As Riggle approached with an electric razor, a titter ran through the crowd. Even the general himself was grinning, not unkindly, at the exaggerated expressions of thinly veiled despair on Stephen's face. As the first large tufts fell to the ground, Jon realized he was smiling too.
More importantly, he was watching. And if the view count on this video alone was any indication, he wasn't the only one.
As he walked down the street in the open-air market, Stephen was actually kind of relieved his hair was gone.
Yes. That's it. Relieved. In heat like this, a full head of thick, dark, impeccably gelled hair would only make him swelter even more than the long pants, long sleeves, and flak jacket. You were better off shaved, even if it meant losing the most glorious of coiffes.
Stephen would have shed a tear, but it probably would have evaporated.
He didn't notice the projectile aimed at his head until he was tackled by two soldiers and thrown to the ground.
There was a flurry of activity around them, including the sound of guns being drawn and aimed. For a few heart-stopping moments Stephen was petrified. Never mind that he was being held down by two members of the sharpest, coolest, and sexiest fighting force in the world — someone had attacked them!
And then he caught sight of the improvised missile: a shoe, landing in a puff of dust on the ground just in front of a stand of glassware.
"Nothing to worry about, Senator," said one of his escort, as they helped him up and shepherded him away, too quickly to see how the would-be protestor was being dealt with. "Just a prankster. Let's move on."