clayforthedevil | A Decent Story In It Somewhere

Bahorel charges ahead of Enjolras and into the red-walled caverns he shares with Prouvaire, still bouncing from the recent adventure. He charges in not because he's in any hurry, but because if he doesn't charge everywhere right now he's going to start shouting even more loudly than he already has been on the way down the hall.

"--but then the beast doesn't even stay around to laugh at us? Unkind! And showing no sense of-- ah! Jehan! Did you leave too? We've been away for months--at least on our side--how far did you wander?"

Jehan is in a costume that might be called medieval, if someone had only a general idea of what medieval dress was like, based mostly on illustrations. It involves a liripipe, to the apparent delight of little Marguerite.

But Bahorel's not wearing anything less picturesque at the moment. More unusually, neither is Enjolras. Bahorel, at least, is delightedly aware that they also both look like they stepped out of a fantasy story, and even more delighted that they have.

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Milliways looks no different. Even the outdoors holds the same February chill, and he thinks the piles of half-melted snow and spring mud may be precisely the same as they were before he and Bahorel were pulled into months of another world.

It's reassuring, and it's deeply disorienting.

He follows after Bahorel, with a great deal less charging and bouncing, but there's a quiet electrical energy in him, coiled deep. It's partly the ever-present concern about their friends, buried deep during those months but resurging now that there's the chance to learn how they are and what's happened here. It's also, even more, the fierce joy of what they just witnessed, and took part in.

...And yes, there's his outfit. He'd mostly stopped finding it strange, in their time in that other world, to wear tunic and trews and low boots, with his cockade still on one shoulder and a red scrap of fabric tied around one arm to show a more local allegiance. But now he's back here, back -- not home, never home, but here at Milliways where the rest of his dearest friends are -- and it feels odd again.

(Also the damn sword has been glowing since they got in range of the building. It went dim briefly in the hallway, but lit up again as soon as Bahorel opened the door. What the hell, weird over-decorated magic sword.)

But here is Jean Prouvaire, dear and good, after months of not seeing his face; looking dreamy and surprised and healthy and well, and Enjolras feels a rush of relief and deep affection at the sight. And he's dressed in clothing that looks -- well, indeed, not all that unlike their own. Which could just be Prouvaire, but could also be something a great deal more unusual. Enjolras listens with interest for the answer.

Jehan carefully lifts Marguerite from his head and cradles her in his arms. "Months," he repeats. "It's been hours here since I last saw you, and I wandered very far in the realm of the spirit, but my body never left this room."

He takes in their clothing, tunics and trews and boots--all clearly worn, not bright new costumes. Not that Enjolras would dress up in costume anyway.

"You've gone farther than I, it seems. But what's that sword?"

It's glowing, and now so is Jehan.

It's something Enjolras is casting an irked look at, is what it is.

(As the door clicks shut behind them, the sword goes dim again. Mysterious thing. It remains covered in way more gold wire and gems than Enjolras considers necessarily for anything, although admittedly that's a low bar.)

"hah, hours! And there we were worrying." Bahorel, already rooting around in the kitchen, shakes his head at their recent-past selves.

But he stops to announce with fitting seriousness, "That sword is nothing less than the weapon Enjolras pulled from a stone, where it had rested for ages, in defense of the innocent, at great Peril."

It is hilarious. Bahorel hardly manages to keep a straight face to the end of the sentence.

"--And it keeps glowing, we don't know why."

Jehan had been half-slouching, half-sprawling, but now he sits bolt upright.

"It's dimmed now," he observes. "But--pulled from a stone! Truly?" He turns his gaze on Enjolras. It's not difficult to imagine. Enjolras, dressed like a medieval Scot, striding up to the stone, resolute and dauntless, drawing the sword out with one smooth gesture, holding it up to sparkle in the sun.

"Yes, it does that too."

The dimming. Enjolras sounds distinctly exasperated on the subject.

"It wasn't lodged there very tightly. I don't know why anyone put it there to begin with. The blade's sound, in spite of the rock, so it's useful enough in spite of how it looks. But Bahorel keeps making a big deal of the whole thing."

Which Prouvaire will no doubt understand, far better than Enjolras, and he knows and accepts that, but -- come on, Bahorel. He needed a sword, that one was there, and that's an end of the thing, right?

He starts unbuckling the sword belt, with the efficient grace of someone who's not only generally accustomed to weaponry, but has gotten a great deal of practice with this particular bit of equipment in the recent past. A completely unintended side effect is that Prouvaire will get a better look at how well all that gold matches his hair!

What's that, Enjolras? You want a highly dramatic retelling of just how that sword came into your possession?

"Ah, don't let him mislead you, Jehan; I nearly wrenched an arm off trying to take that sword myself. It was rooted in the soul of the earth!

--And there it might have stayed, resting in its village, like any forgotten monument-- but that the Sorcerer King chose to send his army of the dead against the villagers on a day when we were there too."

Bahorel is still terrifically excited, but he's also plainly not joking now. Actual sorcerer king, Jehan! Actual undead army!

"--But I make it sound like that was an accident. You know, I think the old king might have attacked that day for the same reason his army lost-- meaning to forestall it. That very sword, I mean."

At least someone else here knows how that sort of thing works. and will understand the theory.

Jehan has pulled over his laptop and begun typing furiously.

Everything Bahorel is saying is perfectly logical, of course. "Did the sword dispel the army of the dead?"

That is, in fact, not what he wanted! And even after having heard this retelling numerous times, he's not yet resigned enough to not grimace at Bahorel.

The sword gets dropped onto the couch, scabbard and belt and all. Ugh, annoyingly aristocratic trapping around a useful weapon of unfortunate necessity, you can just stay there for a while.

"They don't like light," Enjolras says, peeved. This has a distinct air of a response he's had to give many times.

(In other words: yes it totally did, but do we really have to phrase it like that?)

"And it wasn't an army. Not all in one place like you're making it sound, Bahorel. He had one, yes, Prouvaire -- he was a villain; well, he was a king -- but we never faced more than a small company at the most. Those villagers deserve far more credit for their steadfast resistance to all his attempts to control them. We only helped a little at the end."

This is absolutely true, and Bahorel won't disagree either, he knows. But is it also a pointed shift of focus? Yyyyyeah it might be.

Bahorel is absolutely not going to argue about the villagers! "They fought like wild! Like free souls against a tyrant must! Ah, you should have seen it, all of it!" For a moment, it's almost a sad thought; then Bahorel snaps his fingers.

"--You can't, not all of it, but some--hold on--if the thing still works after all---" he roots around in the bag he's been carrying for what perhaps seems a touch too long before bringing out the "camera phone" Joly's been teaching him to use. "--It was utterly useless for calling anyone, of course, but I took photos when I could--not the battle, we were fighting for our lives--ha, not our lives, there I must allow for inexact language! But-- ah, here we are! This was after it had calmed down, you can see them leaving."

...Yes, it's a picture of Enjolras holding up the glowing sword, warding off an undead army, looking severe and heroic and as dramatic as a couple of Romantics could ever want. Sorry, Enjolras.

Bahorel smiles at Enjolras as he hands the phone over to Prouvaire, not exactly apologetic but slightly sympathetic, at least.

"-- We were losing ground, you know. Whatever else you want to call it. It made the difference."

Jehan takes the phone. "Sublime," he says. Marguerite, looking down at the screen from Jehan's shoulder, mews her agreement. The dull-faced corpses, desecrated and turned into puppets by this Sorcerer King's wickedness, fading away before glowing steel wielded by an implacable Enjolras, and the determined villagers. It's the stuff of poems and paintings. "Do you have a picture of the villagers, or the Sorcerer King?"

Enjolras, glancing at that picture as it passes him by, sees... a picture of himself, and a situation he remembers. Yep.

He doesn't really have what one would call an artistic eye.

"I know," he says to Bahorel, relenting a little from his friendly exasperation. (They've had this discussion, too.)

"It's only your interpretations I think are unwarranted."

"I'm just saying, I know how these things get told. You know kings have abandoned their reason and planned campaigns over stories with far less logic." Yes, by now it's a familiar argument, and Bahorel's letting up too, tapping at the screen of his phone. "--Those are the villagers. Look at those eyes! --Everyone had something like that, the first village we came to, everyone had whiskers; it must be very easy there to know where a man's from! --Except us, everyone marked us out as strangers right off, hah,not much chance of avoiding that! But it was good, it was good, it made sure no one thought we stood with their rivals. -- Here's that first village, from a month or so before. -- I told everyone we were from Carabas, to keep things from spilling back over, you know. The law's the law even if there's magic about it, and the law doesn't need to have a true name off us any day."

There are some who'd disagree, probably! He doesn't care.

Jehan looks at the eyes, squinting--they're set on the sides of the villagers' heads, and have pupils like thick horizontal lines, not unlike Djali's. And then the whiskers!

"Of course," he says. "Carabas is an excellent alias in any case. Did you have any trouble making friends, looking as unusual as you did there?"

"Some, yes. We managed, but we were clearly foreigners."

Which is fine. They were, after all, and it didn't end up impeding the important things.

"--But Bahorel, you've left out the most important part." All the rest can wait, for all that some of it's interesting, and other parts are things Prouvaire will no doubt be interested in. "The king there, the sorcerer, he was overthrown. By the people. They joined themselves together and rose up. There was an old law about when a tyrant might be declared unjust beyond what his subjects would support, and they made it their banner and their sword; they rose up, and he quailed, and his power was broken. When we left they were setting up a new government. A republic, Prouvaire. Not another tyrant, not the next-strongest sorcerer, but a real new government of the people. New institutions, the dawn of a new age there."

Now it's his turn to be glowing. And who in this room isn't, at a prospect like that?

No, he was getting to that! "Ah, now you've gone and spoiled the ending!"

--But Bahorel's grinning too, yes. And possibly what might be glowing in someone else who was possibly wearing less extremely black clothing. The end of the story's too good to care too much about how it's delivered. "It's true--it's really true. They were working out the new constitution when we left, I heard them arguing last night--a proper argument, not one person dictating over a few token corrections."

Edited Date: 2016-11-20 01:55 am (UTC)

An uprising against a sorcerer-king, a republic, a constitution, and an argument! Be still, Jehan's beating heart. Or rather, don't: Jehan revels in the excitement of a tale like this.

He sinks back against the pillows. "How fortunate you both are, to be part of it!" He pauses, patting Marguerite. "But how did you become part of it? Were you seeking out a quest?"

Jehan, have you met Enjolras.

He shakes his head, with eloquently bemused eyebrows at the question.

And doesn't bother to say anything about magical fiery creatures and accidental world-crossing, because Bahorel will have fun telling this part, too. Not to mention that however he tells it, it'll be much more in line with Prouvaire's sensibilities than anything Enjolras is capable of producing.