One final fic for this year's collection.
Title: Petros Paniskoi and Moira
Author:
gehayiPlay/Poem: Midsummer Night's Dream/Peter Pan
Recipient:
the_alchemistRating: G
Word Count: 4228
Summary: Puck has always been, in his mind, the devious trickster hero. He's not prepared when a vengeful Titania and the stubborn descendants of Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius and Helena turn his story-and his life-upside down.
If Titania had never learned what Puck had done, things might have been very different. But, once Oberon had the Indian princeling as a page, Puck could not keep silent about his extreme cleverness any longer. He boasted to every elf, ogre, goblin, troll and dewdrop fairy about enchanting the Queen and making her love a donkey-headed mortal--"Well, they all are," Puck would say, laughing, "but seeing Her Majesty caressing the velvet muzzle of a human who was every bit the ass he looked...that was the funniest thing I've seen in a thousand times a thousand years."
The gossip-and fairyland ripples with rumors even when the news is stale, let alone such a juicy tale as this--inevitably reached Titania's ears. It was not long before Titania knew full well that all her subjects knew the truth, and that all were laughing at her.
It was bad enough that she had been enchanted and humiliated. But to have all of her subjects mocking her embarassment and chuckling over the ludicrousness of it all-oh, this was not to be borne.
Yet she could not sentence Puck openly in her court. Puck had been following her husband's orders, of this she had no doubt. While she dearly longed to avenge herself against her treacherous husband, such vengeance could not be executed openly. Such lack of subtlety and cunning would be seen as a dreadful flaw that anyone could exploit. And Titania knew full well that her sister Mab, who had been known not only as the Queen of the Fairies but the Queen of Air and Darkness, longed to reclaim her crown.
She had to find a reason to punish her husband's servant without seeming to do so.
And at last one day she found it.
It was the first of spring, and each creature in fairyland was celebrating its own way-some by feasting, some by dancing and some by telling stories. Now, Puck had no skill in decanting wines or crafting delectable viands that would make the finest sommeliers and chefs sob with joy, and dancing with him was rather like being battered by a blizzard. But no one told funnier or sadder or more adventurous tales than Puck...and small wonder, for the characters in his tales were invariably humans.
"You seem to know much of the humans, Puck," said Titania at last, after he had told a tale of a wicked and lazy boy in Macedonia. "Rarely have I seen a fairy who understands them so well."
Puck preened at this. "Indeed, it's true, Your Majesty. None know them so well as I."
A few of the cannier fairies and goblins glanced at Puck furtively and drew back a little. But Puck, unaware that he had just told an absolute ruler that she knew less than he, her husband's jester, continued to boast of his knowledge of human nature and his skill at convincing foolish mortals to do whatever he willed.
Titania frowned at this. "Yet you have all the powers of fairyland at your disposal," she pointed out, "and your skills as a trickster besides. With all of your gifts, bewildering mortals is but a trifle."
Puck gulped down some new-spring wine and then gave Titania a wicked grin. "I could do this, had I no more power than a honeybee."
"Yes, for you would doubtless convince some other fairy to act on your behalf," Titania said, the very picture of regal scorn. "You are most excellent at finding loopholes, dearest Puck."
Rage flicked across Puck's face like a flash of summer lightning-there and gone in an instant, but searingly hot and still lingering in the air even after it seemed to have vanished. "I need no loopholes to deceive mortals."
Titania laughed then, and Puck winced as if every syllable of her laughter was a stone striking him. "But you have never dealt with the stone-headed ones directly, have you? You whisper in their deaf ears and they believe that they have thought of something enormously clever; you rub ointment on their blind eyes, and they see realities they never dreamed existed. I wonder if you could do half so well were you in their place."
"I could and I would!" snapped Puck, swaying a bit. "Anyone can trick mortals, even the most helpless of mortals themselves."
The court tensed, waiting for an explosion. Puck had said enough to earn Titania's wrath ten times over.
But Titania merely smiled. "Well, perhaps you are right and perhaps you are wrong," she said in a placating tone. "But it is ill-done to quarrel at a feast; this should be a happy occasion. I pray you, Puck, tell us another tale."
And so Puck told another tale, and another, and another, until each guest-even Titania herself-fell asleep. Once Puck no longer had an audience, he too drifted off into slumber...just as the new day dawned.
When he awoke, many hours later, the palace had vanished, and he had become a human boy.
***
The spell had been in the wine. All could have been affected, even the queen, but Titania had taken care that Puck and Puck alone had named conditions for his own enchantment. And so now he was the most helpless of mortals-a naked child alone in the wilderness, unable to tap the power of fairyland or to use his trickster gifts of disguise and suggestion. A child with no more power than a honeybee.
He was confused beyond all reckoning, for he could remember nothing, not even that he he had been Puck. This was mercy on the part of the gods, for fairies are immortal, and they shape their world to suit themselves while scarcely thinking about it. As a wise man once said, it explains a lot about them.
A fairy mind, aware of the way things should be and yet forced to live in linear time and a world that changes slowly if at all, would run mad in two seconds.
But, though he could remember nothing, he was still a storyteller, and he told himself many stories as he made weapons, hunted for food, and wove dock leaves into a tunic to keep himself somewhat warm and dry. Most of the tales involved his adventures battling bears (though he saw none) and pirates (though he was in the middle of a forest) and savage Spartans and cruel Persians (though the forest was near Athens, which no one was currently trying to conquer). Occasionally he told himself a story that was so good, he decided it must have happened and so concentrated on remembering it...at least for a few days.
When he wasn't telling himself stories, he was climbing on things, teasing naiads and oceanids alike, and crowing in delight. Does that sound so surprising? The spell transformed him into a human boy with no magic and no memory...but it could not cause him to cease being Puck altogether. Puck he was and Puck he remained, with all of his recklessness, mischief and charm.
As time passed, the farmers who dwelt near the forest began to tell stories of a wild boy of the wood who crept about their barns and chicken coops, stealing milk and eggs and plaiting impossible elf-knots in the manes of horses and the tails of goats. A wild creature, they said, wilder and more heartless than any beast. Yet you could hear him singing or playing pipes late at night. A strange boy who never seemed to age. Some swore that he even flew, as swift and as sure as a honeybee. Surely a son of Pan.
In this, the farmers spoke more truly than they knew, for all Pucks were the children of the great god Pan. And when one day Puck, eavesdropping on a family telling stories, heard a farmer call him "a son of Pan," he knew it to be true.
"Bah," said the farmer's eldest son. "I've seen that boy, and he's no more a son of Pan than I am. He's just a runaway with a head and a heart of stone. But he'll go back to his family when winter comes."
Puck heard this and frowned, turning it over and over in his mind. Stone head-why did that sound so familiar?
He truly did not think he was a stonehead. But being as strong and as tough as stone...yes, that he liked full well. It didn't matter that "Petros" was more adjective than name back then. He liked it, and that was all that mattered.
After that, he was troubled no longer by who he was. He knew. He was Petros Paniskoi. Stone Boy of the Little Pans.
***
It was shortly after this that Petros Paniskoi began gathering lost and abandoned children and bringing them to the portion of the wood that was said to be enchanted. Why, he could not have said, save that they were an audience (and oh, how sorely he longed to have an audience that would clap and cheer!). He grew rather fond of the children that the people of Athens called "lost"-humble little Flaouta, who had the kindest nature and the worst luck; Myti, who was nearly as daring as Petros and who had a tendency to get chased by wolves; Elafra, who claimed to remember life before coming to live in Petros's wood; Sgouros, named for his curly hair; and Didymos Enas and Didymos Dyo, the twins, who were generally referred to as One and Two.
He did not realize that dwelling in the enchanted wood was why the children weren't growing up. Even if Petros had possessed his memory, all the children that he had ever seen-and there were very few in Fairyland-took hundreds, even thousands of years to reach maturity. As far as he was concerned, everything was perfectly normal.
Petros did notice, with some annoyance, that he had few opportunities to steal girls, as girls spent much of their time indoors learning to weave, sew and cook. This did not seem right to Petros; he felt he should have the same chance to steal girls as he did boys. Besides, having a girl-child in his gang might be interesting.
The fairies Peaseblossom, Moth, Cobweb and Mustardseed-the only fairies Petros could see now-steadfastedly tried to remind Petros who he was and that filching a girl from her family would not be a wise idea. Mortals thought of girls as helpless. The men in her family would think she'd been stolen by soldiers or slavers, or that savage beasts and cruel men had slain her. There would be no end to the searches. The Queen would be greatly displeased.
Petros, who thought that they were all the same fairy, whom he had dubbed "Kampana" for her bell-like voice, ignored them. Humans would get tired of looking sooner or later. As for the Queen...well, what did he know of kings and queens?
And so, in between battles with princes from India (Flaouta always wondered where the princes got to between invasions, but Elafra said so scornfully, "Fancy anyone not knowing THAT" that Flaouta quickly fell silent) and pirates who rescued a Tyrian princess purely by accident, Petros searched for a girl. Not just any girl, of course, but the right girl. The one who would fit into his gang with ease.
***
Petros found her in the house of Hermia and Lysander. And her name was Moira.
The name gave Petros a moment's pause. The Moirae-the Fates-were inexorable beings of awe and terror. He could scarcely imagine a child being named for them. But in between that thought and the half-grasped realization that this might not be the wisest of ideas, Petros realized that Moira's parents looked weirdly familiar though he'd never seen them before...and every other thought went flying out of his head.
Slipping into the women's quarters where Moira slept was not the most of tasks; he merely had to wait until both Hermia and Lysander were out of the house. And, after Petros had waited a month or so, Lysander went off to a dreadfully important and painfully dull dinner with friends, while Hermia rushed off a few hours later to see her sick father. Once the servants were drinking and laughing in the kitchen, Petros flew into Moira's quarters.
"Think of what it would be like, " he wheedled. "You might be dancing acrosss the heavens, listening to the songs the stars sing. You might fly out to the middle of the ocean and trade jokes and tales with Poseidon's daughters." He glanced about the women's quarters, dismissing them utterly. "Or you could stay here."
Moira was dubious. "What if I don't like it?"
Petros felt the first flicker of impatience. None of the boys had thought of not liking it, not for a single second. Not that practicality was a bad thing...but Petros didn't expect ordinary humans to be practical about him.
"If you don't like it, I'll bring you back, of course," he said. "But I know you're going to love it." And he held out his hand.
But Moira didn't take it. "What about my brothers?" she demanded, shaking her black curls out of her eyes. "Can they come too?"
Petros glanced about, confused. "Where are they?"
"In my Aunt Helena's house," Moira replied. "Iason and Meander
aren't my real brothers. They're the children of my mother's best friend. We used to be best friends too-but now we're supposed to be too old to play together." A trace of wistfulness crept into her voice at this. "I miss them."
Petros didn't much like the idea of inviting along two extra people, but he could see from the pleading look Moira was giving him that she meant it.
"Oh, very well," he said with bad grace. "But first let's teach you to fly. I don't know what house they're in, and you'll have to show me."
"Teaching her how to fly" was certainly a euphemism. Petros told her the magic of powerful and joyful thoughts, which enabled her to float from the ground like a bubble. But once he had shown her that, he became enraptured by the thought of all the mischief he would wreak tonight...and promptly forgot to tell Moira how to steer, speed up or land.
Once he met them, he wasn't certain about Iason or Meander, either. In the first place, both boys, like Moira, were much older than the lost toddlers and abandoned infants that he normally stole. Meander was six, and Iason, at nine, was not only nearly as tall as Petros but, unlike Petros, had some of his grown-up teeth as well. This worried Petros for reasons that he couldn't explain. Nor was he cheered by the news that the elder boy wanted to be a fierce pirate called Iason Aimatiros. Petros made it his habit to fight pirates. And when Meander spoke of exploring and mapping the Wood That Was Not, Petros frowned, displeased. He was the one who was supposed to run about and have adventures. The Lost Boys were simply there to obey, to applaud and to follow. He was the leader. How could any of them go off and have adventures without him?
He wondered whether Iason and Meander would obey as automatically as the other boys. He doubted it.
Even though he'd promised Moira he'd take them too, he almost broke his word. Only the ingrained habit of centuries prevented him from doing so. Fairies will mislead and trick and speak sentences that have a dozen different meanings-yet everything they say will be true on some level. Small wonder. When your will and your word can reshape reality, you learn not to lie nor to allow sworn truths to become lies. For a lie-warped, twisted, yet believed in-can change not only the world, but you. And not in desirable ways.
So, sighing, he showed them how to fly. The boys took to it with ease; he had to give them that.
Too much ease, as it turned out. As the boys began zooming about in the air, they laughed so loudly that they awoke their tutor, who wandered into their room to reprove them...and then stood stock-still as he beheld the brothers racing through the air and saw Moira, her arms wrapped around her head to keep it from bobbing against the ceiling.
For a moment, he was silent. Then he shouted for the boys' parents.
Demetrius and Helena bolted for their sons' sleeping quarters. But though they sped so fast that they might have been trying to outrace thought, Petros was faster, and only had to bolt for a window.
They arrived scant minutes too late. The room was empty, and Petros's triumphant crowing was echoing from the gates of dawn.
***
If Petros Paniskoi had recalled who he was and had realized that he and the parents of Moira, Iason and Meander had met before, he might have said, some time later, that they had avenged themselves most cruelly. For the children were not what he had expected. Not at all.
Petros had thought-inasmuch as he ever thought these days-that Moira would spin tales at night for him and the Lost Boys as she had once spun them for her dolls, and that the rest of the time, she would mother them all, cooking and darning and making their lives more comfortable.
Moira, it turned out, had no intention of doing that. Oh, she had no objection to baking cookies or cakes now and then. But daily tasks of cooking, sewing, darning and spinning were another kettle of fish.
"I will not!" she snapped when Petros proposed this plan. "I didn't fly away to a forest that's half in the real world and half in Fairyland just to do the things my mother does every single day. What's the fun in being a grown-up at ten?"
"I thought that was what girls liked!" Petros protested-and meant it. Dimly, he felt that that was the way life was supposed to be. He did not remember that the fae weren't very good at separating sex from expected behavior, and that as a result, male fae tended to be almost parodies of what humans deemed masculinity, while female fae-like Queen Titania--were exaggeratedly feminine. Nor had he spent much time over the millennia getting to know humans personally before tricking or seducing them. So a stubborn little girl who would kick a pirate into the Mediterranean one minute and fall asleep cuddling a doll a few hours later baffled Petros no end.
Meander didn't think much of the role Petros had in mind for him, either, for Petros had decided that if Moira was going to play mother to the Lost Boys, he would be the father and Meander, as the youngest, would be the baby. Human women liked babies, didn't they? And babies liked being taken care of. What was the problem?
As for Iason, he was relentlessly logical, which got in the way of a great many of Petros's games. For example, Petros often merely pretended to eat while adventuring or fighting wars or boasting to oreads, and he swore that the imaginary feasts he gorged himself on were delicious. And the Lost Boys had always agreed. Iason, however, didn't think much of a supposed paradise for children where there wasn't any food. Nor did he see why any of them had to go hungry in a forest crammed with game, berries, apples, nuts, and wild herbs, much less why Petros felt that level of planning spoiled things. Remembering that the Lost Boys got hungry and needed food meant growing up and being responsible. Petros shuddered. Responsibility. The word tasted like poison on his lips.
To make matters worse, Moira and the Hindu princess Padmashri got on splendidly, each teaching the other new tricks and new techniques for fighting. After meeting Moira, Padmashri didn't even bother to wait for Petros to rescue her the next time the pirates kidnapped her. This annoyed Petros quite a bit. He was the hero of the story, tricking the villains who had dared to threaten a helpless damsel. Helpless damsels weren't supposed to conceal knives beneath their clothing, cut the ropes binding them, swim away from a rapidly submerging rock and then upend the villains' coracle, sending them flailing into marshy inlets just filled with crocodiles. How could he be the deviously clever hero without someone to torment and someone to save?
And Kampana didn't like Moira. As far as she was (or they were) concerned, things had been perfectly fine before Moira arrived; the bell-fairy had been Petros's trusted lieutenant then. However, Moira was neither a Lost Girl or a trusted lieutenant. She was going off and having the same sort of adventures that Petros did, and that simply wasn't to be borne.
It didn't really seem as if one brave girl, one sensible boy and one small boy who refused to act like or be treated like a baby could upset so much. But they had.
He liked them enormously. But he wanted things back the way they had been.
And so, one day, after a long and bloody battle with pirates who'd been harrying the sea lanes between Athens and Tyre, Petros announced that he was bringing Moira, Iason and Meander home. It really had been a climatic adventure, which made it a good place for their story to stop.
But to his shock, the Lost Boys were far more eager to investigate the mortal world than they were to remain with him. Not that they weren't replacable, of course, but...well, he'd liked the ones he had.
He flew back to the Wood That Was Not, telling himself that it didn't make a bit of difference. This conviction lasted until he turned around for the twenty-seventh time to tell something to someone who wasn't there. At last he flung himself down on the mossy ground, rubbing his eyes. He couldn't weep, of course-even a fairy transformed into a human can't do that-but for the first time in his life, he desperately wanted to. He hated being abandoned like this. It was so...
"Humiliating?" And a woman's cool hand stroked his hair.
For one dreadful moment, Petros felt as if he was splintering into shards of glass, as if everything he was was being sucked into a maelstrom. And then suddenly both his memory and his old form returned, and he knew precisely who was sitting beside him and why she'd done this.
He thought of a thousand things to say and rejected them all. At last he sighed. "You gave Moira extraordinary strength. I tried every trick in my arsenal, and she would not heed me."
Titania shook her head. "I gave her nothing. The fault was yours, gentle Puck. You tried to use her life to tell your story. Small wonder she thought little and less of that." A sweet smile, as barbed as any scorpion's sting. "Perhaps you are less devious as a human."
This was an insult that Puck could not let pass. "If I had known that then, I could have convinced Moira to stay."
"Perhaps," said Titania, though her smile belied her words. "Wait a generation to be sure. Let the children grow up and believe it was all but a dream. Maybe this time you will convince one of them to stay."
And so Puck waited until the gossip about his failure faded somewhat, until Moira was wed and had a daughter of her own, Ianthe. And he did indeed convince her to come with him to the enchanted wood...though she only stayed long enough to learn how to fly and how to compose songs of unearthly beauty.
Ianthe's daughter, Margaritari, however, was not inclined to leave her home and go live in the forest indefinitely. "Why don't you visit Athens?" she asked Puck. "Or Egypt, or Tyre? None are anything like what you're used to, and I know you'd enjoy yourself."
Now, among fairies, considering mortals to be more than the subject of wagers and practical jokes is seen as horribly vulgar and even mockworthy, so it was not too surprising that Puck told her this was unthinkable and flew away in what seemed to be a huff. Yet, after that, strange people began appearing, both men and women, both in Athens and elsewhere-all with wicked, merry eyes and clever hands and witty tongues, all strangers and yet all fitting in somehow seamlessly. Some say it is impossible that they should all be the Puck...but then, we are speaking of a fairy that can put a girdle round the earth in thirty minutes.
Some say that he wearied of travel and mortals years ago, and dwells solely in Fairyland now. Others say that he is still traveling, still making unheard-of discoveries, and still persuading humans to his way of thinking by charm and cunning. Still others say that he is a pilot or a poet who, one way or another , is teaching humans how to fly.
Many insist that Puck must long since be dead. There is no way, they say, that he could survive in a world so covered in cold iron-which all legends say is death to fairy folk.
But then...the tale of Peter Pan is not precisely as you have always heard it, either.
***
End Notes: The Lost Boys have been given Greek names in this. "Flaouta" means "flute," which is the closest I could get to "Tootles"; "Myti" is a nib or a nose, and corresponds to "Nibs"; "Elafra" means "Slightly"; "Sgouros" is Greek for "Curly"; and "Didymos Enas" and "Didymos Dyo" basically translate to Twin One and Twin Two.
Wendy's name in the original is Wendy Moira Angela Darling, so she is Moira here. And Moirae, or Moirai, is indeed the collective name for the Fates--Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. Wendy's daughter and granddaughter are canonically named Jane and Margaret, so here they are Ianthe and Margaritari.
I could have gone with Ioannos and Miklos for John and Michael, but I wanted something with a bit more of a classical flavor. Hence, Iason and Meander.
In the original, John daydreams of becoming a pirate called Red-Handed Jack. "Aimatiros" is Greek for "bloody," which was the closest I could get.
"Kampana" means "bell."
"Padmashri" is "divine lotus." It's my approximation of "Tiger Lily." And there actually is a Greek legend about Pan and his twelve sons fighting warrior princes from India.