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Dancer/Finny Valentine Special #10 was made by Dancer (as posted by Finny, who hopes he won't mess it up) on 2/26/2003 at 8:50:11 PM.

Dancer/Finny Valentine Special #10

This is a bit of a departure from the usual way I write Dancer stories, and a bit of a diversion from the story we’ve got going, but it was in my head so I thought I’d indulge myself. This is me trying to write like Finny, in the sort of story that he puts himself into J And thanx again to HH for smoothing the edges and correcting the mistakes. He put in all the good bits! Sarah

We can be heroes, forever and ever. We can be heroes, just for one day…
Bowie

All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
Lennon/McCartney

Fin Fang Foom woke up with the girl’s black hair tousled across his face and she slept sprawled across his chest. He recognised her from the rosewater shampoo before he even opened eyes or took in a breath to scream. The woman he was sleeping with had to be Dancer.

His sudden intake of breath was enough to wake his companion. “Morning, Andy,” she smiled at him. “You’re up at last.”

Finny realised that he was in human form right now. He hoped Dancer was referring to him being conscious.

“Er…” he said.

“Don’t worry,” Sarah Shepherdson assured him. “I didn’t take advantage of you.”

“Right. So why are we…? I mean, what…?”

“Nor,” Dancer added with a mock-sulky pout, “did you take advantage of me.”

Fin Fang Foom scrabbled across the cave floor, away from the tangle of skins and blankets that were the makeshift bed. “What’s going on?” he demanded at last.

Dancer began her wake-up routine, a series of squat thrusts, star leaps, and bend-and-stretch routines that did nothing to make Finny feel more comfortable. “Best guess? Something cosmically bad has happened to the Happy Place. I think we might have shot its warranty.”

“This is the Happy Place?” Andy stared out of the cave mouth into the torrential downpour. “It looks more like the Unhappy Place to me. That’s where I was, last I remember. With Ziles. We heard the rest of the Legion and we were heading off to find them. And there were… giant childrens’ TV programme characters?”

“I see,” Dancer nodded. “Does the LL have compulsory drug-testing?”

“And then I woke up here,” the sometimes-dragon concluded. “With you, er, covering me.”

“It was cold,” Shep shrugged. “Anyway, I think somehow the Happy and Unhappy Places have got kind of merged, so we’re getting the extremes of both.” She thought about this a little more. “It’s probably something spiffy did,” she decided.

Finny had another nasty shock then. “I can’t change,” he worried.

“That’s what everybody says,” Sarah told him, “but you don’t have to be a woman-fearing hermit forever. With a little bit of willpower and self-motivation…”

“I mean I can’t change shape,” Andy Dean clarified. “I’m stuck as a human.”

Dancer nodded. “Yeah, I figured as much. I’ve not got my probability-altering powers right now either. I think they were reacting badly with an artificial Happy Place conduit that Enty built. And then some bad guys from that SHAG outfit tried to teleport to the space ship we were trapped on to get us, and I used my powers to send Yo, spiffy, and thuddy the other way to their command centre. And then I felt… odd, like something was out of phase. And Hey Presto! Here.”

“And I was here too?” Finny checked. “As a human?”

“No,” Dancer admitted. “You were face down in the mud out there after being trampled by tellytubbies. As a dragon. You changed to human as I got over to you. I dragged you out of the rain into this old cave that just happened to be filled with useful items like sleeping furs, jars of wine, and crude but serviceable kitchen equipment.”

“Okay,” Finny said. “I think I’m up to speed.”

“Not quite.” Sarah tried to break it to him gently. “I think I need to tell you about the teenage pregnancy problems of the Lair Legion…”

--------


“I think we’ve established that I’m not a natural predator in this form,” Andy Dean observed as Dancer dragged him out of the river.

“I thought diving in was just another example of your total commitment to the mission,” Shep told him, keeping her face straight. “Besides, you, uh, have a fish lodged in your pants. At least I think it’s a fish.”

“Yeah,” squirmed Finny. “A live one.”

Sarah reminisced as Andy rummaged around in his pants. “I think a guy used that line on me back in ’98,” she remembered. “Hey babe, I’ve got a live fish lodged in my trousers. Can you help me get it out? I think I hit him with a coffee-maker.”

Andy held the squirming trout in his hands so it couldn’t escape. With no obvious way to leave the So-So Place it was important to secure the basics of survival. “You’ve always been pretty confident, haven’t you?” he admired wistfully.

Dancer looked at him in surprise. “Gosh, no,” she told him. “Me? I’m incredibly shy.”

“Dancer, you are the most extrovert person I’ve ever seen. How can you be shy?”

Sarah blushed. “I’m shy when I’m not hiding behind Dancer,” she confessed. “Dancer’s the confident one. The rest is just… me.”

“We all have masks to hide behind,” Finny assured her, surprised by the confession. “I, uh, I tend to spend most of my time as a dragon…”

“Because you don’t want to face the problems of being a human,” Dancer continued, surprising Andy again. “We all know that.”

“You… you do?”

“Of course. You’ve honed yourself into this… this model superhero you can be twenty-four seven so you don’t have to deal with the other stuff. From what I hear you and DK have been playing superheroes from the time you were both kids. Admittedly, he was around twenty years before that but I’m sure there’s a good in-continuity explanation for that somewhere.”

“Sure. You see the Chronicler was…”

“But that doesn’t matter,” Shep went on. “What it does mean is that you just haven’t given yourself the time to be a human because you’ve been so busy being a super-dragon.”

Finny shrugged. “People say I’m just a bitter middle-aged divorcee in the body of a twenty-three year old.”

Sarah regarded the bedraggled, gangling young man who dripped beside her back to the cave. “Are you sure you’re not just a secret dreamer waiting for the world to let you make it right?”

Finny beat the fish to death with a stone. “We have to get out of here.”

Shep went back to trying to start a fire with the sticks. It was a lot harder than the Girl Scouts would have her believe. “Because you aren’t used to coping with being Andy?” she suggested. “That’s only natural. You merged with Fin Fang Foom when you were just a kid, spent years in another dimension practising being a superhero, and then you’ve spent all your adult life with the Lair Legion. Doesn’t leave much time for Andy to develop much in the way of social skills.”

“I write stories too,” Finny offered.

“And very good they are too,” Sarah assured him, “but it’s another way of keeping the world away, isn’t it?”

“I’m not a people dragon,” Finny admitted.

Shep laid a hand on his sleeve, even though it made him wince. “You’re not a dragon at all right now, Andy,”

Andrew Dean went back to hitting the fish.

--------


“That was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever had in my mouth,” Sarah grimaced.

“It was kind of cooked on the outside,” Finny pointed out. “Well, the black bits were.”

“I never really liked sushi,” Shep went on. “We have to get out of here. I don’t think I could survive a diet of raw fish for long.” She considered this a bit more. “Mind you, a raw fish diet is pretty much the only thing I haven’t tried to keep my weight down.”

“I don’t like raw food either,” Finny admitted. “But I usually have the means to instant-cook it.”

“Useful to be a dragon, I guess.”

“Oh yeah. Especially at barbeques.”

“I mean, as the last member of an extinct species you don’t have to worry what to say to lady dragons, do you?”

“That’s part of the appeal,” Finny confessed.

Dancer ran her fingers through her tangled hair. She wasn’t sure how long she could survive without conditioner either. “One thing, though. When you take on human shape, like now… why that one?”

Andy looked down at his bean-pole frame and shrugged. “I don’t know. This is me. I mean, what I’d have looked like if I hadn’t merged with an ancient dragon’s body back when I was a boy. It just feels right. It’s one of the three forms I don’t have to concentrate to maintain.”

“Aren’t you ever tempted to, you know, bulk it up? Look like a movie star?”

“Aren’t you ever tempted to use your probability powers to make you rich and popular?”

Sarah understood. “I see. Yeah, sure I’m tempted. When I see how stupid and corrupt the world is and how unfair people are to other people and all the hurt and pain and stuff. And I know I could fix some of it, use my powers on a grand scale, make things so much better…”

“But?”

“But I don’t have the right. I don’t have the wisdom. I only have the power.”

Fin Fang Foom remembered the time Dancer had extended her will and summoned Galactivac the Living Death that Sucks to destroy the Skree Homeworld. “You’d be a scary villain.”

“The Skree genocide?” Sarah guessed. “I wake up nights screaming about that. About how I let myself be tricked. About what I might do if I went all Dark Dancer.”

“I get the same nightmares,” Finny agreed. “Only for me it’s what I could do if I really let go. If I was like… he was, the Finny before me. If I embraced the moral-less reptile that sees humans as food for the wyrm.”

Sarah and Andy looked at each other. “But we don’t,” Dancer said. “So we stay the good guys.”

“With great power comes great responsibility, as someone said,” Foom quoted.

“I think it was CSFB!, about every twenty minutes,” Dancer laughed back at him.

Finny realised how close Dancer’s lips were to his.

Dancer was the one to turn away. “You know why we’re not going to be lovers?” she told him.

“Why?” Finny’s voice sounded odd to him.

“Because we’re better as friends,” Shep said. “Because we’re not Lisa and Jarvis, and we shouldn’t try to be. Because I’m not good at stable relationships with nice men. Because it would affect how we act as superheroes and people’s lives are at stake. Because I think Ziles loves you, and you’ve got to find out. Because you’re too good for me.”

“Not that last one. You know that.”

“And,” Dancer added, staring into the drizzle outside, “because we shouldn’t settle just because we’re trapped together here for the rest of our lives.”

--------


“It’s okay to come under the blanket,” Sarah assured Andy as the night became darker and the sleet began. “I don’t mind.”

“I’m fine out here,” Finny shivered. “Really.”

“Well I’m not,” Shep insisted. “Come and warm me up, hero guy.”

Andy allowed himself to be wrapped in furs with his teammate. “This is just business,” he warned.

“I was about to say the same,” Sarah assured him, “Although not in such a grumpy voice.”

It was very pleasant under the blanket with Dancer. Finny tried not to think about it.

“We need to find a way out of here,” the Makluan said.

“A different way, you mean,” Sarah noted.

“What?” Finny was baffled.

“You know how the Happy Place works, Fin. You get there by being so traumatised that you mentally retreat. If Yo happens to be nearby you get physically transported here. And you get out when you’re happy again. Really happy.”

“I’m not having sex with you,” Andy declared. “I already had that scenario with Ziles. And nothing happened, dammit.”

“Hey, there are other ways of being happy, Finny. I wasn’t the one who thought of the sweaty groany option.”

Andy blushed. “I wasn’t thinking about it either.”

Sarah chuckled. “Sure you were. Unless those websites about you and DK are more accurate than I thought. You’re huddled under a blanket with a hot babe wrapped round you, and you’re in the body of a twenty-three year old male. There’s a part of you that’s automatically reviewing the sweaty groany potential.”

“It’s a part of me that’s well under control, I assure you,” Finny said with dignity.

“I know that,” Shep told him. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be wrapped in a bed of furs with me. I trust you.”

“Good, because I… What websites about me and DK?”

“I actually respect a guy who doesn’t sleep around just because he can. It means he’s saving himself for somebody special, so it means something special.”

“Who’s running these websites?”

“And I guess I should apologise for setting you up on that date with Ziles. It’s just that you both seem pretty lonely and you get on pretty well when you’re not thinking about it.”

Finny dragged his mind back to the discussion. “Ziles is… well, maybe one day. In our own time. In our own way.”

“Don’t wait too long, Finny,” Shep advised. “She’s pretty special, and if you don’t see it some other guy will.”

“I can manage my own affairs,” Andy grumped, “And yes, I know that was a bad choice of phrasing.”

Sarah shook her head. “Look, I know you’ve had a few bad experiences. Killer fairies and interrupted weddings and Lania and so on. But everyone who falls in love gets hurt.” She looked away. “I have,” she admitted.

Fin Fang Foom realised how little he actually knew about the brunette in his arms. “Sorry,” he apologised for the entire male gender.

“Hey, you deal with relationships by hiding in cupboards, I deal with them by attracting every charming manipulative bastard in a ten mile radius and throwing my heart at them,” Shep quipped in a brittle tone. “Different strokes and all that. We both manage to avoid the serious commitments.”

Finny noticed how Dancer’s lips shone in the light of the fire they’d eventually got started.

“We have to get out of here,” he said again.

--------


“We,” Dancer told Fin Fang Foom, “are going on a date.”

“What?” Andy swallowed. It had been bad enough standing with his back turned while Sarah bathed herself in the ice-cold brook below the cave-mouth, hearing the splash of water on flesh and trying to curb his imagination. He hadn’t thought things could get any worse.

“We’re going to get out of here, Andy,” Shep told him. “But first we have to be happy. So we date.”

“I told you, Dancer, I’m not going to…”

“Are you saying the only way a man can be happy with me is if he gets to screw me?” Sarah demanded sharply. “That there’s no other way I could ever make a man happy on a date?”

“Er, no,” Finny backed off. “That would be a no. Really.”

“Fine. Then take me for a walk in the woods, pick me some flowers, talk to me nicely. Make me laugh. Show me a good time that doesn’t involve anything horizontal – or vertical with achy knees. Let’s date.”

“I’m… not really good at that,” Finny warned.

“That’s okay. I’m excellent at it,” Dancer assured him. “So we’ll average out.”

Andy still looked worried. “What do we have to do, then?”

“Well, first there’s the getting-to-know-you bit. Hi, I’m Dancer. I’m twenty-two, I come from Ireland (although my dad’s English), I have one brother and one sister, and I like music, theatre, spicy foods, and men that are bad for me. I’d like to be a professional stage dancer but I refuse to use my probability powers of celebrity as a superhero to get there the cheaty way. My hobbies include charity work, saving the world, eating spicy food, and pretty naturally, dancing. You?”

Finny followed Shep along the path fretting as he went. “Er… me?”

“You. What do you like?”

“Being alone?”

Dancer turned round, hands on hips. “You’re not trying,” she accused.

“I like comics,” Andy admitted. “And books. And writing. And some music, mostly stuff nobody else likes. And helping people. And coffee.”

“Good start,” Dancer assured him. “And what scares you?”

“Apart from this?”

“Apart from this.”

“Well… I guess it’s failure. I worry about it all the time. What if I screw up and people die? What if I let my friends down, let my team down? What if I haven’t prepared enough, trained enough, researched enough? What if…”

“You won’t fail them, Andy,” Dancer assured him. “We’ll get out of this. We’ll do a rescue somehow. I promise.”

Finny forced himself to breathe. “What about you, then. What scares you?”

Sarah looked pensive. “Not being Dancer,” she admitted at last. “Having to cope in the world without my mask. Not having my powers, not having my life, not having lots of other people I can look after… this is my worst nightmare.”

She looked up wryly at her tall companion. “Are we having fun yet?” she wondered.

--------


Andy wasn’t used to sleeping with somebody else, and the weight of Dancer on his extended arm woke him with pins and needles. Then he saw the two people looking down at him.

“Dancer!” he warned. “We have intruders!”

“Oh, don’t let us interrupt your love-tryst,” Chronicler of Stories said cynically. “Please, carry on.”

“If you think that’s a love-tryst you really need to polish your mirrors more,” Xander the Improbable told him. “Anyway, here they are, as promised.”

“What’s going on?” Dancer asked, rousing herself from her slumbers. “Xander? Chronicler.”

“We’ve come to sort things out,” the Chronicler of Stories explained. “Or more properly, to get you to sort things out, before the whole Parodyverse collapses.”

“Okay,” agreed Finny. “But we’re a bit power-challenged right now.”

“Of course you are,” Xander agreed. “The Chronicler here shut down Dancer’s probability gifts to prevent any more damage to the narrative stream while we could get things under control. As long as Fin Fang Foom was near her he was affected by the dampening as well.”

“I’ve lifted that suspension now,” Chronicler declared.

Finny immediately shifted to dragon form. “What’s the status of the Legion?” he asked.

“I’m not the Dark Knight,” the Chronicler told him. “I’m not your friend.”

“You’re Greg Burch if he’d walked a different path,” Andy argued. “Help me out here.”

“Just fix the damned mess,” Chronicler demanded. “I don’t give out freebies.”

“Who does?” asked Xander. “The meter’s still running, by the way.”

“Can you get us out of here, at least?” Dancer asked. “I think Finny and I have concluded we’re never going to get out of here by being happy.”

“You don’t need to be happy right now,” Chronicler answered. “This is the So-So Place. You just have to be okay with things.”

Dancer looked at the dragon. “Are we?” she asked him. “Okay, I mean?”

“I guess we are,” Finny agreed. “Things could be better, but they sure as hell could be worse too.”

“Then you’ve met the conditions to get out of here,” Xander explained. “You can leave whenever you like. I think you’ll find only as much time has passed as you want to have when you get out.”

“Really?” Finny could think of some tactical uses for that.

“Just get this tidied up,” Chronicler answered. “Or I’ll tell Ziles about you and the dancing wench.” And he and Xander vanished in a puff of disapproval.

Dancer essayed a light pirouette to check that her powers were back. “I’m me!” she beamed.

“You always were,” Finny assured her. “I promise. One hundred percent you, powers or not.”

Sarah smiled. “Be Andy again for a moment,” she asked him. “Please.”

Finny shimmered back to human form again.

“Now don’t freak,” Shep warned him. “But remember this.” And she stood on tiptoe and kissed him.

After a few moments she stepped back. “There, you survived,” she pointed out to him. “You know, I bet Ziles is a pretty good kisser too.”

“Hmp,” answered Andy non-commitally.

“Come on, Finny” sighed the Probability Dancer. “Let’s go save the world.”

[To be concluded by….. Finnyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]