Tales of the Parodyverse

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CrazySugarFreakBoy!
Sat Oct 28, 2006 at 07:40:31 pm EDT
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The Other End (of the Telescope) (Tie-In to Untold Fairy Tales of the Parody War #295: The Charge of the [Spoilers], or the Return of [Other Spoiler])
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#295: Untold Fairy Tales of the Parody War: The Charge of the [Spoilers], or the Return of [Other Spoiler]
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The Hooded Hood with plenty of fantasy violence and a two-and-a-half times normal size chapter
Fri Oct 27, 2006 at 07:36:45 am EDT
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The Other End (of the Telescope) (Tie-In to Untold Fairy Tales of the Parody War #295: The Charge of the [Spoilers], or the Return of [Other Spoiler])

… And in time, we won't even recall that we spoke
Words that turned out to be as big as smoke
Like smoke
Disappears in the air
There's always something smoldering somewhere …

She chided herself for her silliness.

It couldn’t be him, after all. He’d been gone so long …

And yet, his sigil shone in her hand, and Whitney’s words haunted her thoughts.

The cruelest trick isn’t to have your hope taken from you, but rather, to have a hint of that lost hope dangled in front of you, after you’ve already made peace with giving up on it.

She wanted to ignore the rumors she’d heard, from the fleeing villagers and the wounded troops, whom she’d stumbled across on her wanderings. She wanted to pretend that none of them had told tales of a young man with ginger hair and golden skin, dressed in green and facing the forces of darkness with laughter and mischief. The grown-up woman she’d become wanted her girlhood hopes and dreams to be dead, so that they could rest in peace.

And yet, here she sat, reflexively smoothing down her garments and brushing the hair from her face, at least until she caught herself doing so, at which point she forced herself to stop, and shook her head at the foolishness of her vanity, and of allowing herself to hope again.

Elisabeth “Bettie” Barrie was about to leave the encampment when he finally strode out to meet her, having been summoned by the messenger who had greeted her mount at the gate.

He was guffawing and trading what were obviously jests with his companions, a band of warriors even more extraordinary in appearance than himself, so he was distracted until he was nearly standing nose-to-nose with her, but she recognized him right away, rising to her feet as quickly as her eyes went wide with shock. She realized that her memories of him were truer than she’d let herself believe, because he was literally glowing, every bit of him.

… And in time, I could only believe in one thing
The sky was just phosphorous stars hung on strings
And you swore
That they'd always be mine
When you can pull them down anytime …

“Robyn?” she managed to choke out, causing him to turn toward her at last. His jovial expression fell in a matter of seconds, as he adopted an astonished stare that mirrored her own, albeit mixed with what appeared to be stunned confusion, until the voice she never thought she’d hear again finally spoke.

“Bettie?” Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove registered, in a dazed and uncertain whisper.

“Oh, it is you!” Bettie strangled the quavering sobs in the back of her throat, throwing her arms around him and squeezing him tight, before pushing him back to arm’s length and slapping him squarely across the face. “I had nightmares, worrying about what might have happened to you! It wasn’t enough that you left and never came back; it’s that you never said why, or sent any word afterwards! I couldn’t decide whether I was afraid that you’d died, or whether I wished that you had!”

“I know you,” Dream barely breathed, with tears welling up in his eyes, as much because of the hazy recollections, that were starting to rise to the surface of his consciousness, as because of the sting of her blow. “How do I know you?”

“You really don’t remember?” Bettie grasped, suddenly feeling guilty over her outburst, and caressing the strangely greenish bruise that was already emerging on his cheek.

“I think I’m … remembering in stereo,” Dream struggled to explain, as much to himself as to her. “It’s like, there’s my own life, yeah? But then, there’s all this other stuff, that’s just now sparking off, like striking a match to see inside an unlit room, and finding out it’s full of fireworks, except even with that, I’m not sure how many of those memories are from, you know, actual life experiences, or whatever, and how many of them are just regurgitated Disney bullshit.”

“We flew together,” Bettie prompted, smoothing back his bangs as she stroked his forehead.

“You were beautiful,” Dream recalled instantly, a lopsided smile spreading across his features.

“I suppose I was,” Bettie conceded wistfully, even as she betrayed a flinching squint in her eyes, and the twitch of a frown at the corners of her mouth.

“Hey, you still are,” Dream reassured her earnestly, picking up on the subtle inflections of her regrets.

“No need for flattery,” Bettie flashed a brave attempt at a grin, which came across as a self-effacingly restrained smirk. “I’m a mother, not a maiden.”

“Fuck that noise!” Dream exclaimed in protest, his turn of phrase befuddling the Victorian era-born Englishwoman. “All that means is, you’ve gone from being Barely Legal to being a MILF!”

Bettie gave up on trying to translate his slang, and simply chuckled to herself. “I must admit, I never imagined you speaking in an American accent.”

“I never imagined myself without one,” Dream quipped sardonically. “The idea that I’d ever spell words like ‘centre’ or ‘favour,’ all fucked-up Ing-Land style, is not exactly one I’d care to contemplate.” Noting the patient yet pensive and expectant gaze that the eerily familiar older woman had fixed upon him, Dream’s tone turned serious. “I’m not who you think I am. My name is Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove, and I’m the Agent of Chaos, CrazySugarFreakBoy! Part of me wishes that I could be that guy for you, but I can’t. The guy you’re talking about lived a full century before the following turn of the century, when I became who and what I am. I’m not even old enough to have firsthand memories of what the world was like before Ronald Reagan was president, and even that’s pushing it – I mean, I remember MAD Magazine putting out that Oliver North coloring book, but – ”

“You’re so much the same,” Bettie rolled her eyes ruefully. “You’re even as scatterbrained as him. How can you know all the things that you do, and not be the same person?”

Dream ran his fingers agitatedly through his hair, before blinking in realization. “I’m not the first Agent of Chaos, and neither was he. There’s been, like, this whole line of us, all throughout history. Phobia clued me in about a few of them, Mumph worked alongside a handful of others, and the Librarian had research materials on a lot of the rest. Before and after your guy, we’ve been soldiers, slayers, scientists, spies, scholars, sleuths, savages, travelers, thieves, patriots, swashbucklers, paladins, spirits, heretics and heroes.”

“You’re claiming that you and he were … carrying on the same continuity of legacy, then?” Bettie summarized skeptically.

“In each Age, Chaos chooses an Agent, that best embodies both the Spirit of Chaos and the Spirit of that Age,” Dream sighed wearily, rubbing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose to ease the headache he felt coming on, as he slumped into a cross-legged seated position on the ground. “From what I gather, most of us never even guess that we belong to any preexisting lineage. The fact that I’ve figured out where I stand on that score is one of the things that makes me different, from the majority of my peers in this role. The other is that, just recently, I, um … heh, I kind of dived headfirst into the deep end of the well of Chaos, that all of its Agents draw from, and it’s changed me. I don’t know, but maybe, when I came back, I brought with me some of what they’d left behind. Isn’t that, like, physics, where every interaction involves some sort of exchange, or transference, or whatever? Even in Fullmetal Alchemist, the point of the plot is that you always have to give something to get something.”

Bettie had knelt down to remain at eye-level with him, but her own eyes were now averted and downcast. “So,” she concluded primly, pursing her lips together tightly. “You’ve inherited his role, and apparently, assorted snippets of his memories. But as far as you’re concerned, you’re not him, nor do you have any notion of what happened to him.”

“I don’t know why he left, or where he went,” Dream apologized, with such genuine guilt that Bettie actually found herself feeling sorry for the helpless-looking young man, as she returned his gaze once more. “But I do know that he never stopped loving you.”

Bettie’s controlled mask of proper British reserve gave way at last to the grief that she’d kept bottled up for so long, inside the chambers of her heart and the pit of her stomach, and even as Dream slowly pulled her into a gentle hug, with a quivering lower lip and tears trickling silently down his cheeks, she clutched at the backs of his shoulders and sobbed in muffled anguish into his chest.

… I know it don't make a difference to you
But oh, it sure made a difference to me
You'll see me off in the distance, I hope
At the other end
At the other end of the telescope.

- Aimee Mann, “The Other End (of the Telescope).”


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