Authority fic: Changelings
Feb. 8th, 2005 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
buggeryI was looking for where I'd posted this, so that I could include it in my entry for the comics genfic feedbackathon, and going a little nuts when I couldn't find it either memoried or on my calendar page... when I finally realised I never got round to posting it to my LJ after the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
yuletide authors were revealed back at the beginning of January. ::facepalms:: I'd started to revise it after uploading to the archive, and then got distracted by other shiny things around LJ-land, and completely forgot that I hadn't finished the revisions and thus hadn't posted "Changelings" here.
I swear, I'd leave my head behind if it weren't so firmly attached to my arse.
Anyway, story. (: This was written for the 2004 While We Dream of Yuletide Treasure rare fandoms Secret Santa fanfiction challenge. Thanks go to my recipient,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lectito, for a truly inspirational Yuletide request ("Like the filthy monkey") -- though she bailed on her own assignment, never acknowledged the story I wrote for her and has now deleted her journal, this story probably never would have been written if she hadn't requested it, and that has to count for something; to lcsbanana and thete1, for providing a responsive audience when I needed one; and to liviapenn, for a fantastically thorough beta of the original version. Further thanks to Te for suggesting the POV change that, I think, dramatically improved the story in this version. You can decide for yourself after reading the original version on the Yuletide archive.
Oh, and this isn't -- quite -- DC comics fandom. It's The Authority, which is a comics title published by Wildstorm, one of DC's subsidiaries. Yep, the comic with the canonically gay superhero couiple.
Continuity note: Set between the storylines "The Circle" and "Shiftships" during Warren Ellis's run on THE AUTHORITY vol. 1 (1999). No spoilers, and you don't necessarily have to have read the Ellis issues, though having done so will (hopefully) add to your appreciation.
Changelings
As Jenny had requested before the briefing began, Angie had had the Carrier create virtual video-screens across the room. Even in the cavernous room Jenny had picked out for the occasion, the screens took up nearly the full width of the space. « Show them, » Jenny told her now via radiotelepathy, and Angie made the screens display news programmes from dozens of channels, all reporting different angles of the same story.
Angie could process the dozens of feeds simultaneously, and translate them for herself as well. So, she suspected, could the Midnighter. But the similarities in reporting outweighed the differences, so that the common theme was apparent. It hadn't been so many months since Angie was a more-or-less normal human, and she was pretty sure that the message Jenny wanted to get through was doing so.
After a long moment during which the room was awash in the babble of competing voices, Jenny gave Angie a pointed look. « Enough. » She froze display of the news images, and made the screens wink off.
"Over fifty million babies, people."
Jenny Sparks's voice was clipped, her anger lending a literal crackle to her tone. Aside from the fire in her eyes and the static in her mouth, an angry Jenny might be mistaken for a Jenny in need of a good night's sleep, a good shag, or a cigarette... if she weren't drawing angrily on a half-burned-down cigarette as she paced the room that had been designated for this briefing.
"Babies."
Now that she was no longer playing PowerPoint for Jenny's presentation, Angie observed the others briefly. Across from her, Shen maintained her calm demeanour, her hands folded on the conference table and her wings folded behind her, but her eyes were troubled. Angie could just see Jack without any more than her natural peripheral vision, seated between her and Shen in the chair beside the now-empty one Jenny had found herself unable to sit still in, frowning and not even trying to keep his eyes on Jenny when her pacing took her behind him. The Carrier's ports were nearly glare-free, but if Angie enhanced her visual inputs... her own reflection had one fist clenched on the table and a furrow bisecting the mirrored plane of her brow.
"Not a trace of whoever or whatever took them, or why," Jenny continued, then turned to Angie, raising an eyebrow for confirmation or denial.
Angie shook her head. "The Carrier's passive scans didn't pick anything up at the time or find any trace evidence left afterwards, and my own probes have turned up zilch."
"So we have a worldwide mass kidnapping and no leads whatsoever." Jenny looked ready to incinerate her cigarette, or eat it, when she brought it to her mouth for another pull. "And while I'm on the subject of missing without explanation, where the bloody hell is the Doctor?"
Everyone shifted slightly. The absence from the meeting of one-seventh of the team had gone un-commented-upon but not unnoticed.
After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Angie spoke up again. "He said something about needing to commune with the previous Doctors."
"Whatever that means," Jack muttered.
Jenny made a face. "Nobody cracks wise when you have your tea parties with Sydney, Edmonton and Johannesburg, Jack. If he's working on this mess rather than messing himself up... eh." She dragged on her cigarette again. "He still ought to've told me, or used the radiotelepathy, or a magic postcard, or the Carrier's fucking voicemail service. Something."
"He's still much newer at this than the rest of us," Apollo said. He and the Midnighter -- who was seated at the far end of the table, and creating the impression that he was sitting in a patch of shadow despite the room's evenly ambient lighting -- had remained silent through the meeting to that point. Angie glanced sidelong at Apollo, two seats down from her, and opened her mouth to point out that he had been the new Doctor longer than she had been the new Engineer, but Apollo continued, smoothly, "and he never asked for his powers. Yes, he's a screw-up at times, but..."
Apollo trailed off as the Doctor strode into the room, straightening his tunic unnecessarily and running a hand through his haphazardly-spiked hair to no productive effect. He stopped beside the table, but faced Jenny and spoke before taking a seat.
"Fairies."
Angie's optical sensors told her what she wouldn't turn her head to see: Midnighter baring his teeth, the new shape of his mouth nothing like a smile, while Apollo winced and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"What," Jenny said. It wasn't so much a question as a warning that the Doctor had better not be fucking around.
"That's what happened to the children," the Doctor said, speaking just a little too quickly, faintly out of breath. "The fairies took them."
Jenny just stared at him for a moment. Then she pulled a fresh cigarette from her pack, stuck it in her mouth, and took a long drag that made the tiny blue spark at the tip flare into a burning red cherry end. Smoke curled out of her mouth as she said, tone still flat, "You had best not be putting us on."
The Doctor shook a little, then shook his head jerkily. "N-no. No, that's what I saw in the Garden of Ancestral Memory." He enunciated the words just that way, with capitals. "I talked with the other Doctors. They... showed me how... I could... feel--"
Angie was willing enough to cut the Doctor some slack, in general, knowing first-hand how easy it wasn't to adjust to suddenly superhuman abilities, but this was ridiculous. "Creatures out of a children's story abducted almost every infant on Earth?" Angie inclined her head toward the Doctor and inhaled pointedly through her nose.
Apollo cleared his throat and shook his head. "No, he's clean."
"There's no fresh brain damage, anyway," the Midnighter said.
"Still," Angie said. "Just because we don't have any other idea what might have happened doesn't mean we should pick the first crazy idea that's suggested. I mean, even if there were such things as fairies, aren't they supposed to, like, help the occasional poor kid marry into royalty? As opposed to disappearing them by the millions?"
"Not every culture has the same traditions about fairies," Shen said. She was leaning forward now, her hands folded on the table. Though she was responding to Angie, her eyes were on the Doctor. "Buddhist texts speak of yakkhas, supernatural creatures who can be good or evil. Some help human characters in Buddhist legends. But there are also many stories in which unenlightened yakkhas or yakkhinis are quite bloodthirsty, and feast on human flesh. Think of... Atlantic sailors' mermaids and Mediterraneans' sirens."
"He didn't say 'yakkhas,' Swift, he said fairies," Angie pointed out. It felt a little petty, but the whole idea still seemed so absurd.
Jack sat forward as well. "There are little people with magical powers, wilderness spirits, whatever you want to call them, in almost every culture. Europeans, Native Americans, Asians, Africans -- the beliefs just fade out more the longer people live in cities. But even in the largest cities there's at least the memory of belief, if not people who actually leave out offerings for the local fairies. Whatever name they may call them by."
"Okay, so everybody tells stories about them," the Midnighter growled. "But are they real?"
"Yes," the Doctor said.
"Probably," Shen agreed.
"Looks that way," Jack admitted.
Angie and Apollo shrugged. Hers was in acknowledgement of being overruled, whereas his appeared more a declaration of his usual open-minded curiosity.
"They're real," Jenny said. Something in her voice suggested she wasn't merely noting the consensus the rest of the team had reached. "Now. How do we get at them and get those kids home?"
"Well..." the Doctor began. Jenny gestured with her chin for him to sit down. He did; she turned her own chair round, propped one foot up on it, and continued smoking her cigarette. "The fairy realms are, essentially, alternate levels of reality."
"Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?" Jenny asked, eyes narrowing.
The Doctor grinned.
Reality strained, warped, and bulged around the Carrier's irregular shape. Angie was functioning as navigator, theoretically, but as was often the case the Carrier itself was doing most of the work, and the intricacies of it remained mainly lost on her. Monitoring the external displays made her feel like she was at least doing something, and was fascinating besides.
After a stretching, throbbing time, the dimensions' bounds sprang back into their accustomed places. The massive Carrier was left aground, not unlike like a ship on a reef, on a structure like a three-dimensional fractal spiral, fluxing bright and dim and through all the colours of the spectrum. Things -- creatures? -- and swarms of things flitted here and there above it, some diving in like stooping hawks, others apparently directing energy to crackle or shower or ebb at the shifting surface.
High above the Carrier, the arms of another not-fractal curled up, away... elsewhere. The swirls were neither a sky nor a structure forming a ceiling over the landscape; perpendicular to where the upper spiral seemed to have an apex, there was something like daylight, like sunshine filtered through a forest canopy.
"I feel like I'm in an Escher painting," Jack said, from over by the room's physical viewport.
"Yeah," Apollo agreed from beside him. "The directions don't go the right ways."
Angie added visual observation of her teammates to her multitasking in time to see Jack's shoulders twitch.
Jenny turned to the Doctor and the Engineer. "All right, people. What are we looking at?"
"I'm getting readings, but even the Carrier can't make sense of most of them," Angie reported.
"Show me," the Doctor said. At her raised eyebrow, he clarified. "Radiotelepathy. Create a virtual display. I'll help you identify as much of it as we need -- or as much as I can."
« All right, what is all this? » she asked him, and sent the widest-angle view from the Carrier's sensors.
"That works," Jenny said aloud, then joined Jack and Apollo at the bulbous port. Outside, the landscape seethed and the creatures teemed. There were clearly many types and sizes of them, all doing different things, and yet... "Hey," Jenny said, stabbing a finger at the view, clearly thinking along the same lines as Angie and not distracted by trying to integrate the Doctor's haphazard-seeming labels as she was. "It look to you lot like those things out there are attacking this place we're fetched up against?"
Jack and Apollo leaned in closer; Jack straightened up again almost immediately. The Midnighter came up behind Jenny and looked over her shoulder.
"That's exactly what it looks like," the Midnighter confirmed after a moment. "And..." His eyes narrowed. "Hell. There's more things out there than we can see. Look at the energies that they're attacking with, and where they're originating."
« Hmm, » Angie thought at the Doctor. « We should mark anything not visible to unenhanced human sight, too. »
"Hell," Jenny agreed. "A lot more." She glanced over her shoulder at Angie and the Doctor, but held off on interrupting their silent conversation. "Jack, I don't suppose anything out there is like a city?"
The Doctor's radiotelepathic image paused with one hand still pointing vaguely at a flock of creatures that made Angie think of reptilian valkyries. « Sure... you've almost exhausted my usefulness anyway,, » he answered, and noted that the valkyrie-things were actually three kinds of beings working in concert, none of them native to any of the landscapes within view of the Carrier.
Jack was shaking his head, his jaw working. "They look fairly compact from our perspective, but I get the sense that those... structures out there are actually vast, but fairly sparsely populated."
"That's what the data we're getting looks like, Jack," Angie said. "Okay, here's what we've worked out."
At her direction, a holodisplay shimmered into existence in the middle of the room, resembling the terrain outside but in static false-colour with topographic lines and scattered notations and what was, even to Angie, a bewildering pincushion of axes along which coordinates were marked.
About to explain the kyrligraphic system she and the Doctor had worked out at the speed of thought, Angie paused. "Wait. I--" She frowned as the Carrier commanded her attention. "All right... We're being contacted. By one of the creatures laying that siege, I think."
The Doctor looked at her, then at... nothing in the room. After a moment, he said, "I can... understand. Translate. I'll use the radiotelepathic link."
The image she -- presumably they all -- received was of a... being. It appeared to be reddish-orange in colour, but was clearly not humanoid, nor did it resemble any earthly animal. There wasn't anything obviously analagous to a head, much less eyes or a mouth. The Doctor's voice appeared to come from the image.
« You are here seeking the young? »
« The ones who look like us, yeah, » Jenny said. « Only little and helpless. Just born. »
The image undulated, and said, « Hatchlings. »
« We don't call them that, but yeah. »
« The translations aren't perfect. » This time the Doctor's radiotelepathic "voice" came from his own image. « I'm doing my best. »
Jenny waved a hand, physically and radiotelepathically. Her insubstantial self had a cigarette in that hand.
« We are seeking to liberate the hatchlings from the neighbouring realm where they are being held, as well, » the being went on. « Perhaps we could join our efforts? »
« If you have already identified any vulnerabilities in their defences, » Angie suggested.
Another undulation, and a twisting. « We have weakened the boundary in several places. There is one near to your beast of burden. »
"'Beast of burden'?" Angie repeated aloud.
The Doctor responded to her the same way. "Would you rather translate?"
« Will we be able to distinguish the enemy inside from your people? » Apollo asked the being's radiotelepathic image.
« Don't know yet. Need to smell you. »
« We'll meet you outside, » Jenny told it. Clearing her throat, she went on, for the others' benefit, "We'll go out through a port. I don't trust dooring in this place."
"Not if we can safely avoid it," Angie agreed.
"'Smell,'" the Doctor said, under his breath. "Now if the rest of you were going to question any of the translations, I'd think it would be that word..."
Angie lifted Jack out into the air, Apollo the Midnighter, and Shen Jenny, leaving the Doctor free to meet their contact.
The creature flew up towards them, decelerating abruptly out of an almost ballistic trajectory. It hovered in midair a moment, drifting closer to each pair in turn before approaching the Doctor.
« Not all of you are even able to fly? » the Doctor relayed via radiotelepathy.
"We have other talents," Jenny said, St. Elmo's fire licking along her fingertips. "You can understand us without the Doctor's translation?"
« Yes. » It paused briefly, and vibrated. « Your senses are not able to perceive many of my kind. This will be true for our enemies inside the boundary as well. »
"Well, that might complicate things," the Doctor commented.
"So long as I can touch them, I can put them out of commission," said the Midnighter. "But I can't hit what I can't see," he grated.
« A moment... »
Motes of red-gold glitter drifted inward, from the distance towards their guide. As the tiny lights coalesced around it, growing denser, they eclipsed the landscape, even the Carrier's bulk, and shimmered over the team's forms before contracting to surround the creature, and then absorbed into it. The creature twisted vertiginously, distorting, and reshaped itself as a mouse-brown figure, with arms and legs and a mop of dark, matted hair above glinting eyes. Its pelt or clothing was dappled like sunlight on leaf-litter.
"It's... a brownie," Angie whispered.
"You saw that movie, too?" Jack asked, smirking up at her.
"Nah." She winked. "I was a Girl Scout."
The brownie grinned at them, revealing sharp-pointed teeth. "You may call me Njaa," it said, in what sounded like strongly-accented English.
"We can understand you now," Shen said.
The Midnighter scowled. "What did you just do?"
"Simply adjusted your perceptions."
Apollo's grip on the Midnighter's shoulders tightened, a movement almost too subtle to be observed.
"All right," Jenny said. "Where are we hitting them?"
Njaa pointed toward a convolution of the boundary where the flow of light and colour had ceased, leaving the surface looking deadened, dull like stone or the bark of a tree. Purple giants swung enormous hammers, gouts of living fire inscribed glowing lines, and a flock of beetle-winged creatures rained down writhing shadows, but the grey-brown area refused to yield further.
"Let's do this, people!"
Angie flew into position first, letting Jack drop down towards the edge of the target area and firing one nanomechanical cannon after another, changing configurations after each shot to strike with different types of energy, gauging the effect each yielded. The Midnighter flipped onto Apollo's back and hung on as he dove in. Beams blasted from Apollo's eyes until right before he struck the surface himself like a post-human missile. He ploughed up a deep trough, then pulled himself out of it and rose for another attack. Still dangling in Shen's grip, Jenny directed bolts of lightning into the cavity; the electricity surged and crackled through coils in the stratum that resembled tentacles or tree roots, throwing embers even after Jenny's direct attack ceased. Readjusting her targeting system to the same area, Angie strafed quantum-disruptive and EMP blasts into the widening trench.
The Doctor floated toward the target area, zazen, his arms outstretched and his head back. A ring of mushrooms sprung up to encircle Apollo's trench, followed by one of star-shaped blue flowers and another of taller plants with yellow, slipper-shaped flowers, and then a ring of rounded stones pushed themselves free of the surface, each circle just outside the last. A final concentric ring of crystal spears stabbed up from the beleaguered ground just as Angie ceased fire to let Apollo stab back down in a second dive.
Debris exploded outward. Jack leapt down through the newly-opened breach, and Shen flew in with Jenny a moment later.
The Doctor dropped suddenly, uncontrolled. Angie swooped to catch him, and he revived in her grip. "I'm fine," he said, shaking his head to clear it. "Just a bit of feedback."
"Let's join the party, then," she grinned.
When they emerged into the inner realm -- where the siege point opened out of a gently-sloped hillside, not from local "up" despite its position on the entry side -- Jack, Shen and the Midnighter had already engaged the defenders, kicking and punching, while Apollo and Jenny provided air support, zapping any creatures who rose above the battleground. The Doctor floated free of her grip under his own power, and Angie put her back to Apollo's and began firing herself.
The figures they were fighting varied in size and shape and capabilities, much like the groups they had observed outside, but all of these appeared dark, darker than Njaa's brownie form. Some looked as though they were merely veiled in deep shadow or smoke, while others looked more as though they had been dipped in tar, and a few seemed to leach light out of their surroundings, like animate black holes.
Njaa's forces poured in behind the team and fell upon the shadowy forces like a wave, teeth and horns flashing, limbs swinging and magic arcing.
Jack's and the Midnighter's hands and faces were already bloodied, as were Jack's feet despite their tread adaptation, but they were maiming a swath through the dark forms as well as maintaining a perimeter for Jenny so she could focus on flying foes. Most of the ichor streaking Shen's skin and costume was not her own blood, though she bore a few deep scratches as well as some singeing along one wing. The Midnighter was grinning as he dodged physical strikes and blasts of magic and hacked at dark fairy after dark fairy. Apollo's gaze burned a shrieking, smoking line through the figures near his partner, and Midnighter's grin grew wider.
The more brightly coloured fairy-folk who had come with Njaa began wreaking enough casualties to provide the mortals something like a reprieve. They slowed their own rate of attack, as well, and eerie keening began to rise as creatures from outside began eviscerating or gnawing on dark-shrouded ones while they still struggled in the invaders' grip. From two flanks, the defenders redoubled their own efforts to repel the attack.
« Engineer, » the Midnighter called over the radiotelepathic link. « Can you scan to see whether those kids are here? »
« Sure. Good idea. »
« Midnighter? » Jenny queried.
« Something just doesn't feel right. »
« Hey, » Shen said. « Where's the Doctor? »
Angie gained altitude and surveyed visually, then added a search on the Doctor's biometrics to the scan for human-infant presence. Neither yielded any immediate results. « No sign of him from up here, » she reported.
« I haven't seen him since you two came through, » said Apollo.
« Nor I. » Jenny's mental voice was grim. » Doctor? »
The battle continued around them, and Angie automated both searches so she could focus on blasting wraiths and wyrms who came to close to her teammates on the ground. Jenny sent an orb of sparking energy rolling outward to buy herself some breathing room; the others switched to defencive-only tactics, letting the fight come to them.
« Doctor, » Jenny tried again. « Doctor, respond, damnit. »
She waited nother moment, then cursed, "Bugger," and zapped a phalanx of charging creatures. « People, we-- »
« --Wait-- » the Doctor cut in.
« Doctor! Where the-- »
« I'll be right there, Jenny. Prepare to stand down... »
"Stand down?!" Jenny was snarling, and electricity crackled round her hands and from her narrowed eyes. But the dark figures surrounding them were drawing away, disengaging from melee except with the invaders who had begun the siege.
A towering, demonic beast, bat-winged and tusked and drooling acid, was approaching, the Doctor clutched in one of its four arms. He waved to them.
« I'm cutting the Doctor out of the link for the moment. What are we seeing, guys? » Angie asked. « Mind control? Magic? »
The Midnighter shook his head. « I don't think so. Something about what we're seeing... »
« It seems... off, » Shen agreed.
« I don't think this place is supposed to feel normal for us, » Jack said, « but I know what you mean, now that I stop and look. Nothing is quite right. »
The demon stopped above them, approximately eye-level with Angie, took one of the Doctor's wrists in each of its upper claws, and stretched his arms, so that the Doctor dangled, crucifixion-style.
"Doctor!" Jenny cried, radiotelepathically and aloud.
Jack put a hand on her shoulder, shook off the shock he'd gotten and put the same hand back. "He doesn't look like he's in distress."
"He's conscious," the Midnighter reported, "and it looks like he's chanting."
"The general!" Njaa called out in warning. "He will slay your friend! Attack! Why do you not attack?"
The other fairy creatures were turning their attention to the giant demon as well, and Njaa leapt upward to attack, himself, despite his tiny size. While he was still mid-pounce, however, something happened.
It was something like the concentric ripples on a pool when a single drop of water disturbs it, and something like a souffle falling, and it sounded like a gong being struck and like a death rattle. There was a wrenching sense of distortion, and suddenly their surroundings appeared no darker than the place outside had been, the trees robust and hung with vines and flowers rather than thorns and poisonous-looking fruit. Most of the defenders' forces were no longer visible, and those who could still be seen no longer appeared dark, only their lack of a fantastic shape out of human folklore setting them apart from the invaders.
The Doctor floated, hands joined with those of a gently-glowing figure no more than half again his height.
"Hell," Jack spat. "We were duped."
« We all were, Hawksmoor, » the Doctor answered. « Never mind that now. We need to drive Njaa's people out so I can help re-seal the gaping wound we've made on this place. »
The tide of the battle had changed dramatically. Njaa himself (itself?) was one of the first to flee, and when the other outsiders saw his retreat many of them followed. The holdouts were a few pockets where the invaders still had the advantage of numbers -- ratios which quickly reversed -- and individuals unwilling to relinquish the bodies of defenders they were still feeding on. Jenny, Angie and Apollo fired on the cannibals while Jack, Shen and the Midnighter added their numbers to the attackers surrounding the remaining invaders. The magic that had given the invaders visible and recognisable forms faded, belatedly, but by that time there was no longer any mistaking members of one group for the others.
Once all the attackers who were able had retreated, and all whose forms remained had been pushed, carried or thrown back through the breach, the Doctor and his new friend floated down towards where Jack, Shen, Jenny, Apollo and the Midnighter were already standing.
Angie alit to join them as well, taking her time descending so that she could pass along what her remote sensors had just relayed to her. « So if my probes' data is correct, the missing babies, or at least some of them, are here, » she sent. « I really hope we're not going to have to fight this battle over without any element of surprise. »
Jenny turned to the Doctor and the tall, vibrantly indistinct figure beside him. "Are our stolen babies here?" she asked baldly.
The Doctor winced, but turned to his new companion rather than answering himself.
"Yes," it said, its voice like an orchestra tuning to whalesong. "The human children are with us."
That pescito, Angie thought -- to herself, tempting as it was to be just 'loud' enough to be heard over the radiotelepathic link. I'm going to have the Carrier space him.
The Doctor held both hands up as anger twisted his teammates' faces. "Wait, wait. These aren't the fairies who took the children."
"What," Jenny asked, getting right in his face, "they're just the ones who have them?!"
The glowing figure shrank in on itself, dimmed and shifted shape until it resembled a meter-tall art-nouveau illustration of a fairy, golden-skinned and dark-haired, complete with the wings of a tiger swallowtail butterfly.
« From Escher to Bosch, and now to Mucha, » Apollo commented.
Jenny sent a radiotelepathic « hssst! » at him, though not without amusement in her tone. Jack and the Midnighter both smirked faintly, until they caught sight of each other's expressions.
"We keep the children here protect them," the fairy said, her voice less full and less loud though no less inhuman. "The others meant to do them harm."
« Eat them, » the Doctor clarified.
"We saved as many as we were able."
Shen stepped closer, flexing her own wings. "All right. Say we believe that. Why haven't you returned them?"
"Most of these children would not have been safe if returned whence they were taken."
The Midnighter snarled, but it was Apollo who spoke next. "Children can't be kept safe at every moment, but they belong with their families. People are sick with worry wondering what happened to their children. Humans' offspring are sacred to us."
The fairy inclined her head, her expression mournful. "Poisons in the air, the water, the very milk these precious ones feed on. Caretakers too inexperienced or too indifferent to meet children's needs. Anger and violence surrounding these infants, at times even directed at them... all these conditions and worse were discovered in all parts of your world."
« She does make a salient point there, » Shen noted. « We're trying to make a finer world, but it's not coming fast enough for everyone. »
« Not now, Shen, » Jenny snapped.
"Our first intention," the fairy continued, "was indeed to return all but a few to their original homes. Do not think that we chose lightly to bear the responsibility of keeping them among us."
"And what of your other responsibilities?" the Doctor asked.
"What would you know of our responsibilities, mortal?"
"Every human medicine man and herb-witch and mystic you have had dealings with are in me. I am the shaman of the Earth, the go-between for humans with all the other forms of life we share this planet with."
« I need more than words to convince her, » the Doctor continued. « I'll let you see what's happening via the link. You'll be able to disrupt what I'm doing easily -- but please don't. » He lifted his arms and turned to face the fairy. A green glow, through which the outlines of their forms could be glimpsed, englobed them. Radiotelepathic imagery revealed the the Doctor's appearance changing, along with the languages he used, as past Doctors spoke through him.
"I know you. I have always known you."
The Authority were assembled in a room with data display equipment and a conference table, but no outside viewports. I've had enough of unearthly landscapes recently, Angie had said to Jenny before the meeting, and apparently she'd agreed. Probably they weren't the only ones who felt that way, either.
Jenny was slumped in one of the chairs now, her eyes closed, letting Jack run the debriefing.
"As the Doctor arranged, the fairies are returning the babies at midnight -- midnight local time for each family -- right on schedule," Jack said. "Angie has figured out how to make semi-autonomous non-invasive DNA scanners, in case any of the parents dispute their child's identity, but--" he paused to check one of the display screens "--with the western Pacific, all of Australia, and most of Asia done, there've only been a handful of complaints or protests."
"The parents are just happy to have their kids back," Angie said, her voice quieter than she'd meant, but... it felt right.
The Midnighter and Apollo shared a silent look.
Jenny didn't move except to add, "Yeah."
"There've been a few incidents of people -- women, mostly -- claiming to have had a child stolen and not returned, but Angie and the Doctor have been able to identify the real circumstances in those cases. When necessary, they're referring the wannabe parents to Shen."
"How's she doing with the parents whose babies aren't coming back?" Apollo asked.
"Didn't you talk to her last, Jenny?"
"Yeah, but fuck if I can tell. She's not complaining or showing much sign of strain, but I know I couldn't handle that bloody job."
"Of course, the real crazies will be further west." Jack's smirk was humourless.
"Your countrymen and mine. Yeah, we'll probably have our hands full in another twelve hours."
"At least the fear of not getting their kids back at all has forestalled any rioting in the western hemisphere," Angie pointed out.
"So far," Jack said. "Feelings in the cities are running high."
Jenny took a last drag off her cigarette, made a disgusted face, and said, "Door," before pitching the butt through the glowing oblong.
"Never ends, does it?"
"Doesn't look to," Jenny agreed, "not for us."
[end]
Cross-posted totheauthority -- yes, there's an LJ community for AUTHORITY fans.
DC universe fanfiction by the Jack
Marvel comics fanfiction by the Jack
all Jack's fanfiction, all fandoms
yuletide authors were revealed back at the beginning of January. ::facepalms:: I'd started to revise it after uploading to the archive, and then got distracted by other shiny things around LJ-land, and completely forgot that I hadn't finished the revisions and thus hadn't posted "Changelings" here.I swear, I'd leave my head behind if it weren't so firmly attached to my arse.
Anyway, story. (: This was written for the 2004 While We Dream of Yuletide Treasure rare fandoms Secret Santa fanfiction challenge. Thanks go to my recipient,
lectito, for a truly inspirational Yuletide request ("Like the filthy monkey") -- though she bailed on her own assignment, never acknowledged the story I wrote for her and has now deleted her journal, this story probably never would have been written if she hadn't requested it, and that has to count for something; to lcsbanana and thete1, for providing a responsive audience when I needed one; and to liviapenn, for a fantastically thorough beta of the original version. Further thanks to Te for suggesting the POV change that, I think, dramatically improved the story in this version. You can decide for yourself after reading the original version on the Yuletide archive.Oh, and this isn't -- quite -- DC comics fandom. It's The Authority, which is a comics title published by Wildstorm, one of DC's subsidiaries. Yep, the comic with the canonically gay superhero couiple.
Continuity note: Set between the storylines "The Circle" and "Shiftships" during Warren Ellis's run on THE AUTHORITY vol. 1 (1999). No spoilers, and you don't necessarily have to have read the Ellis issues, though having done so will (hopefully) add to your appreciation.
Changelings
- THE CARRIER: Cruising the ganglia of the stellar metabrain...
As Jenny had requested before the briefing began, Angie had had the Carrier create virtual video-screens across the room. Even in the cavernous room Jenny had picked out for the occasion, the screens took up nearly the full width of the space. « Show them, » Jenny told her now via radiotelepathy, and Angie made the screens display news programmes from dozens of channels, all reporting different angles of the same story.
- Beside a virtual banner reading Jornal da Globo, a news-reader was saying,* "--city, a crowd of frustrated parents gathered outside police headquarters to demand--" (*translated from Portuguese)
Another newscaster, above a callsign beginning with K, led in with,* "--go live to Carmen Jimenez, in Springfield. Carmen?" before that feed cut to an interviewer holding a microphone for a distraught woman; the callsign remained in place over the remote footage. The woman raged, "I don't CARE about the other babies, I want my son back, and they're not even look--!" (*simulcast in Spanish)
A BBC reporter calmly intoned, "--milar phenomenon is being reported across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. While some nations are denying any disappearances, unofficial reports--"
Another station displayed a commentary-free view of an empty maternity ward nursery; a Cyrillic-character caption indicated the ward's location.
On a set dressed to resemble a library or study, a doughy, pasty-faced commentator propounded, "--be the Rapture? The Gospel of our Lord, and His Revelation--"
A sober-faced journalist was reporting,* "--representative for the police force, speaking to Aaj Tak on condition of anonymity, has admitted that not only the scale of these disappearances, but the lack of any apparent motive, means--" (*translated from Hindi)
Angie could process the dozens of feeds simultaneously, and translate them for herself as well. So, she suspected, could the Midnighter. But the similarities in reporting outweighed the differences, so that the common theme was apparent. It hadn't been so many months since Angie was a more-or-less normal human, and she was pretty sure that the message Jenny wanted to get through was doing so.
After a long moment during which the room was awash in the babble of competing voices, Jenny gave Angie a pointed look. « Enough. » She froze display of the news images, and made the screens wink off.
"Over fifty million babies, people."
Jenny Sparks's voice was clipped, her anger lending a literal crackle to her tone. Aside from the fire in her eyes and the static in her mouth, an angry Jenny might be mistaken for a Jenny in need of a good night's sleep, a good shag, or a cigarette... if she weren't drawing angrily on a half-burned-down cigarette as she paced the room that had been designated for this briefing.
"Babies."
Now that she was no longer playing PowerPoint for Jenny's presentation, Angie observed the others briefly. Across from her, Shen maintained her calm demeanour, her hands folded on the conference table and her wings folded behind her, but her eyes were troubled. Angie could just see Jack without any more than her natural peripheral vision, seated between her and Shen in the chair beside the now-empty one Jenny had found herself unable to sit still in, frowning and not even trying to keep his eyes on Jenny when her pacing took her behind him. The Carrier's ports were nearly glare-free, but if Angie enhanced her visual inputs... her own reflection had one fist clenched on the table and a furrow bisecting the mirrored plane of her brow.
"Not a trace of whoever or whatever took them, or why," Jenny continued, then turned to Angie, raising an eyebrow for confirmation or denial.
Angie shook her head. "The Carrier's passive scans didn't pick anything up at the time or find any trace evidence left afterwards, and my own probes have turned up zilch."
"So we have a worldwide mass kidnapping and no leads whatsoever." Jenny looked ready to incinerate her cigarette, or eat it, when she brought it to her mouth for another pull. "And while I'm on the subject of missing without explanation, where the bloody hell is the Doctor?"
Everyone shifted slightly. The absence from the meeting of one-seventh of the team had gone un-commented-upon but not unnoticed.
After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Angie spoke up again. "He said something about needing to commune with the previous Doctors."
"Whatever that means," Jack muttered.
Jenny made a face. "Nobody cracks wise when you have your tea parties with Sydney, Edmonton and Johannesburg, Jack. If he's working on this mess rather than messing himself up... eh." She dragged on her cigarette again. "He still ought to've told me, or used the radiotelepathy, or a magic postcard, or the Carrier's fucking voicemail service. Something."
"He's still much newer at this than the rest of us," Apollo said. He and the Midnighter -- who was seated at the far end of the table, and creating the impression that he was sitting in a patch of shadow despite the room's evenly ambient lighting -- had remained silent through the meeting to that point. Angie glanced sidelong at Apollo, two seats down from her, and opened her mouth to point out that he had been the new Doctor longer than she had been the new Engineer, but Apollo continued, smoothly, "and he never asked for his powers. Yes, he's a screw-up at times, but..."
Apollo trailed off as the Doctor strode into the room, straightening his tunic unnecessarily and running a hand through his haphazardly-spiked hair to no productive effect. He stopped beside the table, but faced Jenny and spoke before taking a seat.
"Fairies."
Angie's optical sensors told her what she wouldn't turn her head to see: Midnighter baring his teeth, the new shape of his mouth nothing like a smile, while Apollo winced and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"What," Jenny said. It wasn't so much a question as a warning that the Doctor had better not be fucking around.
"That's what happened to the children," the Doctor said, speaking just a little too quickly, faintly out of breath. "The fairies took them."
Jenny just stared at him for a moment. Then she pulled a fresh cigarette from her pack, stuck it in her mouth, and took a long drag that made the tiny blue spark at the tip flare into a burning red cherry end. Smoke curled out of her mouth as she said, tone still flat, "You had best not be putting us on."
The Doctor shook a little, then shook his head jerkily. "N-no. No, that's what I saw in the Garden of Ancestral Memory." He enunciated the words just that way, with capitals. "I talked with the other Doctors. They... showed me how... I could... feel--"
Angie was willing enough to cut the Doctor some slack, in general, knowing first-hand how easy it wasn't to adjust to suddenly superhuman abilities, but this was ridiculous. "Creatures out of a children's story abducted almost every infant on Earth?" Angie inclined her head toward the Doctor and inhaled pointedly through her nose.
Apollo cleared his throat and shook his head. "No, he's clean."
"There's no fresh brain damage, anyway," the Midnighter said.
"Still," Angie said. "Just because we don't have any other idea what might have happened doesn't mean we should pick the first crazy idea that's suggested. I mean, even if there were such things as fairies, aren't they supposed to, like, help the occasional poor kid marry into royalty? As opposed to disappearing them by the millions?"
"Not every culture has the same traditions about fairies," Shen said. She was leaning forward now, her hands folded on the table. Though she was responding to Angie, her eyes were on the Doctor. "Buddhist texts speak of yakkhas, supernatural creatures who can be good or evil. Some help human characters in Buddhist legends. But there are also many stories in which unenlightened yakkhas or yakkhinis are quite bloodthirsty, and feast on human flesh. Think of... Atlantic sailors' mermaids and Mediterraneans' sirens."
"He didn't say 'yakkhas,' Swift, he said fairies," Angie pointed out. It felt a little petty, but the whole idea still seemed so absurd.
Jack sat forward as well. "There are little people with magical powers, wilderness spirits, whatever you want to call them, in almost every culture. Europeans, Native Americans, Asians, Africans -- the beliefs just fade out more the longer people live in cities. But even in the largest cities there's at least the memory of belief, if not people who actually leave out offerings for the local fairies. Whatever name they may call them by."
"Okay, so everybody tells stories about them," the Midnighter growled. "But are they real?"
"Yes," the Doctor said.
"Probably," Shen agreed.
"Looks that way," Jack admitted.
Angie and Apollo shrugged. Hers was in acknowledgement of being overruled, whereas his appeared more a declaration of his usual open-minded curiosity.
"They're real," Jenny said. Something in her voice suggested she wasn't merely noting the consensus the rest of the team had reached. "Now. How do we get at them and get those kids home?"
"Well..." the Doctor began. Jenny gestured with her chin for him to sit down. He did; she turned her own chair round, propped one foot up on it, and continued smoking her cigarette. "The fairy realms are, essentially, alternate levels of reality."
"Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?" Jenny asked, eyes narrowing.
The Doctor grinned.
- THE CARRIER: Breaching the bowers of Pettivisaya and Cocagne...
Reality strained, warped, and bulged around the Carrier's irregular shape. Angie was functioning as navigator, theoretically, but as was often the case the Carrier itself was doing most of the work, and the intricacies of it remained mainly lost on her. Monitoring the external displays made her feel like she was at least doing something, and was fascinating besides.
After a stretching, throbbing time, the dimensions' bounds sprang back into their accustomed places. The massive Carrier was left aground, not unlike like a ship on a reef, on a structure like a three-dimensional fractal spiral, fluxing bright and dim and through all the colours of the spectrum. Things -- creatures? -- and swarms of things flitted here and there above it, some diving in like stooping hawks, others apparently directing energy to crackle or shower or ebb at the shifting surface.
High above the Carrier, the arms of another not-fractal curled up, away... elsewhere. The swirls were neither a sky nor a structure forming a ceiling over the landscape; perpendicular to where the upper spiral seemed to have an apex, there was something like daylight, like sunshine filtered through a forest canopy.
"I feel like I'm in an Escher painting," Jack said, from over by the room's physical viewport.
"Yeah," Apollo agreed from beside him. "The directions don't go the right ways."
Angie added visual observation of her teammates to her multitasking in time to see Jack's shoulders twitch.
Jenny turned to the Doctor and the Engineer. "All right, people. What are we looking at?"
"I'm getting readings, but even the Carrier can't make sense of most of them," Angie reported.
"Show me," the Doctor said. At her raised eyebrow, he clarified. "Radiotelepathy. Create a virtual display. I'll help you identify as much of it as we need -- or as much as I can."
« All right, what is all this? » she asked him, and sent the widest-angle view from the Carrier's sensors.
"That works," Jenny said aloud, then joined Jack and Apollo at the bulbous port. Outside, the landscape seethed and the creatures teemed. There were clearly many types and sizes of them, all doing different things, and yet... "Hey," Jenny said, stabbing a finger at the view, clearly thinking along the same lines as Angie and not distracted by trying to integrate the Doctor's haphazard-seeming labels as she was. "It look to you lot like those things out there are attacking this place we're fetched up against?"
Jack and Apollo leaned in closer; Jack straightened up again almost immediately. The Midnighter came up behind Jenny and looked over her shoulder.
"That's exactly what it looks like," the Midnighter confirmed after a moment. "And..." His eyes narrowed. "Hell. There's more things out there than we can see. Look at the energies that they're attacking with, and where they're originating."
« Hmm, » Angie thought at the Doctor. « We should mark anything not visible to unenhanced human sight, too. »
"Hell," Jenny agreed. "A lot more." She glanced over her shoulder at Angie and the Doctor, but held off on interrupting their silent conversation. "Jack, I don't suppose anything out there is like a city?"
The Doctor's radiotelepathic image paused with one hand still pointing vaguely at a flock of creatures that made Angie think of reptilian valkyries. « Sure... you've almost exhausted my usefulness anyway,, » he answered, and noted that the valkyrie-things were actually three kinds of beings working in concert, none of them native to any of the landscapes within view of the Carrier.
Jack was shaking his head, his jaw working. "They look fairly compact from our perspective, but I get the sense that those... structures out there are actually vast, but fairly sparsely populated."
"That's what the data we're getting looks like, Jack," Angie said. "Okay, here's what we've worked out."
At her direction, a holodisplay shimmered into existence in the middle of the room, resembling the terrain outside but in static false-colour with topographic lines and scattered notations and what was, even to Angie, a bewildering pincushion of axes along which coordinates were marked.
About to explain the kyrligraphic system she and the Doctor had worked out at the speed of thought, Angie paused. "Wait. I--" She frowned as the Carrier commanded her attention. "All right... We're being contacted. By one of the creatures laying that siege, I think."
The Doctor looked at her, then at... nothing in the room. After a moment, he said, "I can... understand. Translate. I'll use the radiotelepathic link."
The image she -- presumably they all -- received was of a... being. It appeared to be reddish-orange in colour, but was clearly not humanoid, nor did it resemble any earthly animal. There wasn't anything obviously analagous to a head, much less eyes or a mouth. The Doctor's voice appeared to come from the image.
« You are here seeking the young? »
« The ones who look like us, yeah, » Jenny said. « Only little and helpless. Just born. »
The image undulated, and said, « Hatchlings. »
« We don't call them that, but yeah. »
« The translations aren't perfect. » This time the Doctor's radiotelepathic "voice" came from his own image. « I'm doing my best. »
Jenny waved a hand, physically and radiotelepathically. Her insubstantial self had a cigarette in that hand.
« We are seeking to liberate the hatchlings from the neighbouring realm where they are being held, as well, » the being went on. « Perhaps we could join our efforts? »
« If you have already identified any vulnerabilities in their defences, » Angie suggested.
Another undulation, and a twisting. « We have weakened the boundary in several places. There is one near to your beast of burden. »
"'Beast of burden'?" Angie repeated aloud.
The Doctor responded to her the same way. "Would you rather translate?"
« Will we be able to distinguish the enemy inside from your people? » Apollo asked the being's radiotelepathic image.
« Don't know yet. Need to smell you. »
« We'll meet you outside, » Jenny told it. Clearing her throat, she went on, for the others' benefit, "We'll go out through a port. I don't trust dooring in this place."
"Not if we can safely avoid it," Angie agreed.
"'Smell,'" the Doctor said, under his breath. "Now if the rest of you were going to question any of the translations, I'd think it would be that word..."
Angie lifted Jack out into the air, Apollo the Midnighter, and Shen Jenny, leaving the Doctor free to meet their contact.
The creature flew up towards them, decelerating abruptly out of an almost ballistic trajectory. It hovered in midair a moment, drifting closer to each pair in turn before approaching the Doctor.
« Not all of you are even able to fly? » the Doctor relayed via radiotelepathy.
"We have other talents," Jenny said, St. Elmo's fire licking along her fingertips. "You can understand us without the Doctor's translation?"
« Yes. » It paused briefly, and vibrated. « Your senses are not able to perceive many of my kind. This will be true for our enemies inside the boundary as well. »
"Well, that might complicate things," the Doctor commented.
"So long as I can touch them, I can put them out of commission," said the Midnighter. "But I can't hit what I can't see," he grated.
« A moment... »
Motes of red-gold glitter drifted inward, from the distance towards their guide. As the tiny lights coalesced around it, growing denser, they eclipsed the landscape, even the Carrier's bulk, and shimmered over the team's forms before contracting to surround the creature, and then absorbed into it. The creature twisted vertiginously, distorting, and reshaped itself as a mouse-brown figure, with arms and legs and a mop of dark, matted hair above glinting eyes. Its pelt or clothing was dappled like sunlight on leaf-litter.
"It's... a brownie," Angie whispered.
"You saw that movie, too?" Jack asked, smirking up at her.
"Nah." She winked. "I was a Girl Scout."
The brownie grinned at them, revealing sharp-pointed teeth. "You may call me Njaa," it said, in what sounded like strongly-accented English.
"We can understand you now," Shen said.
The Midnighter scowled. "What did you just do?"
"Simply adjusted your perceptions."
Apollo's grip on the Midnighter's shoulders tightened, a movement almost too subtle to be observed.
"All right," Jenny said. "Where are we hitting them?"
Njaa pointed toward a convolution of the boundary where the flow of light and colour had ceased, leaving the surface looking deadened, dull like stone or the bark of a tree. Purple giants swung enormous hammers, gouts of living fire inscribed glowing lines, and a flock of beetle-winged creatures rained down writhing shadows, but the grey-brown area refused to yield further.
"Let's do this, people!"
Angie flew into position first, letting Jack drop down towards the edge of the target area and firing one nanomechanical cannon after another, changing configurations after each shot to strike with different types of energy, gauging the effect each yielded. The Midnighter flipped onto Apollo's back and hung on as he dove in. Beams blasted from Apollo's eyes until right before he struck the surface himself like a post-human missile. He ploughed up a deep trough, then pulled himself out of it and rose for another attack. Still dangling in Shen's grip, Jenny directed bolts of lightning into the cavity; the electricity surged and crackled through coils in the stratum that resembled tentacles or tree roots, throwing embers even after Jenny's direct attack ceased. Readjusting her targeting system to the same area, Angie strafed quantum-disruptive and EMP blasts into the widening trench.
The Doctor floated toward the target area, zazen, his arms outstretched and his head back. A ring of mushrooms sprung up to encircle Apollo's trench, followed by one of star-shaped blue flowers and another of taller plants with yellow, slipper-shaped flowers, and then a ring of rounded stones pushed themselves free of the surface, each circle just outside the last. A final concentric ring of crystal spears stabbed up from the beleaguered ground just as Angie ceased fire to let Apollo stab back down in a second dive.
Debris exploded outward. Jack leapt down through the newly-opened breach, and Shen flew in with Jenny a moment later.
The Doctor dropped suddenly, uncontrolled. Angie swooped to catch him, and he revived in her grip. "I'm fine," he said, shaking his head to clear it. "Just a bit of feedback."
"Let's join the party, then," she grinned.
When they emerged into the inner realm -- where the siege point opened out of a gently-sloped hillside, not from local "up" despite its position on the entry side -- Jack, Shen and the Midnighter had already engaged the defenders, kicking and punching, while Apollo and Jenny provided air support, zapping any creatures who rose above the battleground. The Doctor floated free of her grip under his own power, and Angie put her back to Apollo's and began firing herself.
The figures they were fighting varied in size and shape and capabilities, much like the groups they had observed outside, but all of these appeared dark, darker than Njaa's brownie form. Some looked as though they were merely veiled in deep shadow or smoke, while others looked more as though they had been dipped in tar, and a few seemed to leach light out of their surroundings, like animate black holes.
Njaa's forces poured in behind the team and fell upon the shadowy forces like a wave, teeth and horns flashing, limbs swinging and magic arcing.
Jack's and the Midnighter's hands and faces were already bloodied, as were Jack's feet despite their tread adaptation, but they were maiming a swath through the dark forms as well as maintaining a perimeter for Jenny so she could focus on flying foes. Most of the ichor streaking Shen's skin and costume was not her own blood, though she bore a few deep scratches as well as some singeing along one wing. The Midnighter was grinning as he dodged physical strikes and blasts of magic and hacked at dark fairy after dark fairy. Apollo's gaze burned a shrieking, smoking line through the figures near his partner, and Midnighter's grin grew wider.
The more brightly coloured fairy-folk who had come with Njaa began wreaking enough casualties to provide the mortals something like a reprieve. They slowed their own rate of attack, as well, and eerie keening began to rise as creatures from outside began eviscerating or gnawing on dark-shrouded ones while they still struggled in the invaders' grip. From two flanks, the defenders redoubled their own efforts to repel the attack.
« Engineer, » the Midnighter called over the radiotelepathic link. « Can you scan to see whether those kids are here? »
« Sure. Good idea. »
« Midnighter? » Jenny queried.
« Something just doesn't feel right. »
« Hey, » Shen said. « Where's the Doctor? »
Angie gained altitude and surveyed visually, then added a search on the Doctor's biometrics to the scan for human-infant presence. Neither yielded any immediate results. « No sign of him from up here, » she reported.
« I haven't seen him since you two came through, » said Apollo.
« Nor I. » Jenny's mental voice was grim. » Doctor? »
The battle continued around them, and Angie automated both searches so she could focus on blasting wraiths and wyrms who came to close to her teammates on the ground. Jenny sent an orb of sparking energy rolling outward to buy herself some breathing room; the others switched to defencive-only tactics, letting the fight come to them.
« Doctor, » Jenny tried again. « Doctor, respond, damnit. »
She waited nother moment, then cursed, "Bugger," and zapped a phalanx of charging creatures. « People, we-- »
« --Wait-- » the Doctor cut in.
« Doctor! Where the-- »
« I'll be right there, Jenny. Prepare to stand down... »
"Stand down?!" Jenny was snarling, and electricity crackled round her hands and from her narrowed eyes. But the dark figures surrounding them were drawing away, disengaging from melee except with the invaders who had begun the siege.
A towering, demonic beast, bat-winged and tusked and drooling acid, was approaching, the Doctor clutched in one of its four arms. He waved to them.
« I'm cutting the Doctor out of the link for the moment. What are we seeing, guys? » Angie asked. « Mind control? Magic? »
The Midnighter shook his head. « I don't think so. Something about what we're seeing... »
« It seems... off, » Shen agreed.
« I don't think this place is supposed to feel normal for us, » Jack said, « but I know what you mean, now that I stop and look. Nothing is quite right. »
The demon stopped above them, approximately eye-level with Angie, took one of the Doctor's wrists in each of its upper claws, and stretched his arms, so that the Doctor dangled, crucifixion-style.
"Doctor!" Jenny cried, radiotelepathically and aloud.
Jack put a hand on her shoulder, shook off the shock he'd gotten and put the same hand back. "He doesn't look like he's in distress."
"He's conscious," the Midnighter reported, "and it looks like he's chanting."
"The general!" Njaa called out in warning. "He will slay your friend! Attack! Why do you not attack?"
The other fairy creatures were turning their attention to the giant demon as well, and Njaa leapt upward to attack, himself, despite his tiny size. While he was still mid-pounce, however, something happened.
It was something like the concentric ripples on a pool when a single drop of water disturbs it, and something like a souffle falling, and it sounded like a gong being struck and like a death rattle. There was a wrenching sense of distortion, and suddenly their surroundings appeared no darker than the place outside had been, the trees robust and hung with vines and flowers rather than thorns and poisonous-looking fruit. Most of the defenders' forces were no longer visible, and those who could still be seen no longer appeared dark, only their lack of a fantastic shape out of human folklore setting them apart from the invaders.
The Doctor floated, hands joined with those of a gently-glowing figure no more than half again his height.
"Hell," Jack spat. "We were duped."
« We all were, Hawksmoor, » the Doctor answered. « Never mind that now. We need to drive Njaa's people out so I can help re-seal the gaping wound we've made on this place. »
The tide of the battle had changed dramatically. Njaa himself (itself?) was one of the first to flee, and when the other outsiders saw his retreat many of them followed. The holdouts were a few pockets where the invaders still had the advantage of numbers -- ratios which quickly reversed -- and individuals unwilling to relinquish the bodies of defenders they were still feeding on. Jenny, Angie and Apollo fired on the cannibals while Jack, Shen and the Midnighter added their numbers to the attackers surrounding the remaining invaders. The magic that had given the invaders visible and recognisable forms faded, belatedly, but by that time there was no longer any mistaking members of one group for the others.
Once all the attackers who were able had retreated, and all whose forms remained had been pushed, carried or thrown back through the breach, the Doctor and his new friend floated down towards where Jack, Shen, Jenny, Apollo and the Midnighter were already standing.
Angie alit to join them as well, taking her time descending so that she could pass along what her remote sensors had just relayed to her. « So if my probes' data is correct, the missing babies, or at least some of them, are here, » she sent. « I really hope we're not going to have to fight this battle over without any element of surprise. »
Jenny turned to the Doctor and the tall, vibrantly indistinct figure beside him. "Are our stolen babies here?" she asked baldly.
The Doctor winced, but turned to his new companion rather than answering himself.
"Yes," it said, its voice like an orchestra tuning to whalesong. "The human children are with us."
That pescito, Angie thought -- to herself, tempting as it was to be just 'loud' enough to be heard over the radiotelepathic link. I'm going to have the Carrier space him.
The Doctor held both hands up as anger twisted his teammates' faces. "Wait, wait. These aren't the fairies who took the children."
"What," Jenny asked, getting right in his face, "they're just the ones who have them?!"
The glowing figure shrank in on itself, dimmed and shifted shape until it resembled a meter-tall art-nouveau illustration of a fairy, golden-skinned and dark-haired, complete with the wings of a tiger swallowtail butterfly.
« From Escher to Bosch, and now to Mucha, » Apollo commented.
Jenny sent a radiotelepathic « hssst! » at him, though not without amusement in her tone. Jack and the Midnighter both smirked faintly, until they caught sight of each other's expressions.
"We keep the children here protect them," the fairy said, her voice less full and less loud though no less inhuman. "The others meant to do them harm."
« Eat them, » the Doctor clarified.
"We saved as many as we were able."
Shen stepped closer, flexing her own wings. "All right. Say we believe that. Why haven't you returned them?"
"Most of these children would not have been safe if returned whence they were taken."
The Midnighter snarled, but it was Apollo who spoke next. "Children can't be kept safe at every moment, but they belong with their families. People are sick with worry wondering what happened to their children. Humans' offspring are sacred to us."
The fairy inclined her head, her expression mournful. "Poisons in the air, the water, the very milk these precious ones feed on. Caretakers too inexperienced or too indifferent to meet children's needs. Anger and violence surrounding these infants, at times even directed at them... all these conditions and worse were discovered in all parts of your world."
« She does make a salient point there, » Shen noted. « We're trying to make a finer world, but it's not coming fast enough for everyone. »
« Not now, Shen, » Jenny snapped.
"Our first intention," the fairy continued, "was indeed to return all but a few to their original homes. Do not think that we chose lightly to bear the responsibility of keeping them among us."
"And what of your other responsibilities?" the Doctor asked.
"What would you know of our responsibilities, mortal?"
"Every human medicine man and herb-witch and mystic you have had dealings with are in me. I am the shaman of the Earth, the go-between for humans with all the other forms of life we share this planet with."
« I need more than words to convince her, » the Doctor continued. « I'll let you see what's happening via the link. You'll be able to disrupt what I'm doing easily -- but please don't. » He lifted his arms and turned to face the fairy. A green glow, through which the outlines of their forms could be glimpsed, englobed them. Radiotelepathic imagery revealed the the Doctor's appearance changing, along with the languages he used, as past Doctors spoke through him.
"I know you. I have always known you."
- THE CARRIER: Transecting the syncline between the Transcend and the Beyond...
The Authority were assembled in a room with data display equipment and a conference table, but no outside viewports. I've had enough of unearthly landscapes recently, Angie had said to Jenny before the meeting, and apparently she'd agreed. Probably they weren't the only ones who felt that way, either.
Jenny was slumped in one of the chairs now, her eyes closed, letting Jack run the debriefing.
"As the Doctor arranged, the fairies are returning the babies at midnight -- midnight local time for each family -- right on schedule," Jack said. "Angie has figured out how to make semi-autonomous non-invasive DNA scanners, in case any of the parents dispute their child's identity, but--" he paused to check one of the display screens "--with the western Pacific, all of Australia, and most of Asia done, there've only been a handful of complaints or protests."
"The parents are just happy to have their kids back," Angie said, her voice quieter than she'd meant, but... it felt right.
The Midnighter and Apollo shared a silent look.
Jenny didn't move except to add, "Yeah."
"There've been a few incidents of people -- women, mostly -- claiming to have had a child stolen and not returned, but Angie and the Doctor have been able to identify the real circumstances in those cases. When necessary, they're referring the wannabe parents to Shen."
"How's she doing with the parents whose babies aren't coming back?" Apollo asked.
"Didn't you talk to her last, Jenny?"
"Yeah, but fuck if I can tell. She's not complaining or showing much sign of strain, but I know I couldn't handle that bloody job."
"Of course, the real crazies will be further west." Jack's smirk was humourless.
"Your countrymen and mine. Yeah, we'll probably have our hands full in another twelve hours."
"At least the fear of not getting their kids back at all has forestalled any rioting in the western hemisphere," Angie pointed out.
"So far," Jack said. "Feelings in the cities are running high."
Jenny took a last drag off her cigarette, made a disgusted face, and said, "Door," before pitching the butt through the glowing oblong.
"Never ends, does it?"
"Doesn't look to," Jenny agreed, "not for us."
[end]
Cross-posted to
theauthority -- yes, there's an LJ community for AUTHORITY fans.DC universe fanfiction by the Jack
Marvel comics fanfiction by the Jack
all Jack's fanfiction, all fandoms
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