Ten Quotes Meme... Second Ficlet (Jeeves and Wooster - gen, 930 words)
Again, the original meme was here... and this will take a while, but what can one do with these prompts??? (Don't answer that)
Not one of my regular fandoms this time, and I never thought I'd be trying Wodehouse (I leave such things to the Master, would never claim an iota of Plum's genius) and an AU Wodehouse at that, but when I read the required quote, from page 60 of Neil Gaiman & Kim Newman's Ghastly Beyond Belief, Bertie just jumped into it (and regretted it mightly, I'd wager :)
I should probably warn for utter utter daftness...
Jeeves and the AmaZenyan Princess
"If I do not please you," she screamed, "beat me or kill me!"
"What? I say, what what what?"
Let it never be said that Bertram Wooster was too easily shaken. Like that gloomy cove Hamlet, he was not one to cringe in the face of slings and arrows from outrage and - something, he'd have to ask Jeeves for the exact words.
But Hamlet, lucky blighter that he was, did not have to deal with six feet three of AmaZenyan Princess throwing herself dramatically at his feet in a swirl of purple and citron chiffon, which Bertie had to admit did not at all go with the Princess's glowing green skin, and shrieking at him to kill her in a voice like a high-pitched bloodhound baying over the moors.
Aliens, as every schoolboy knew, were rum blighters the lot of them, more flighty than Frenchies and with less ideas of decorum than Stiffy Byng on a helmet-pinching (or was it cow-creamer-stealing?) crusade. AmaZenyans were the worst, making the most painful members of his family and the most demented of his ex-fiancées seem meek and demure... and that was just the chaps.
Female alien chapesses... were unspeakable. Even when they let a fellow get a word in, which as a rule, he thought with the crushed gloom of a worm being lovingly eyed by its morning bird, they didn't.
Bertie shuddered, and tried to take a delicate step back. Suave and debonair and chivalrous to a fault where a lady was concerned, that was always his way... even when the lady put him horribly in mind of a statue of the Spirit of Britannia, with an hourglass figure carelessly overfilled in the journey from whatever heavenly sphere she cried from, and seemed to be not only carved from one of Aunt Dahlia's giant cactii but still sporting an appalling number of the thorns.
With a shriek that would frighten horses across three counties, she threw her arms around his legs; with a squeal, Bertie tried to disentangle his trousers and generations-of-England's best-bred legs from the spines that had embedded there.
"Oh, but I say!" A Wooster does not whine, so that sound he made could not be called a whine, but it was dashed close. "Jeeves!"
From behind him, Jeeves coughed, a soft, almost inaudible cough of great import. "A gentleman, sir, never contradicts a lady."
"Dash it all, Jeeves, I know that, but surely -"
Jeeves shook his head sadly. "Never, sir."
"Never?" A Wooster could and did, however, whimper, like a Pekinese puppy kept too long from its due portion of chicken. Bertie tried to imagine himself offing a green, spiny Princess, who was the size and had the muscles of a heavy-weight, and though he prided himself on the clarity and fervency of his mind, it quailed and turned itself into a pillar of salt.
"I'm afraid so, sir. However," with another, distinctly more encouraging cough, "the lady did imply that you must only beat or kill her," he paused and raised an eyebrow at Bertie's dramatic wince, "only if she does not please you. And of course, a gentleman would never admit to finding a lady unpleasing. However -" He paused.
Bertie brightened up, the obvious answer shooting like Cupid's arrow - or was it one of those one's of Hamlet's? - he'd better ask Jeeves that too - through the fog of terror clouding his brain like a host of lonely clouds. "Yes, good show old man!" He tried to turn back to the Princess, and yelped as the spines dug in harder.
The Princess stared up tragically with great, wounded eyes like overgrown purple gooseberries, as she dramatically rose to her knees. Bertie's yelp became a full-blooded yowl as he felt himself lifted off the ground.
"You please me, dash it all! You please me. Now please, do be a good sort and put me down!"
She did so, abruptly, and stared goggle-eyed at his sprawl on the ground.
Jeeves, whose bland and calm demeanour had not changed, bent to smoothly assist his master to his feet, averting a pained gaze from the rents in what had been a perfectly spiffing pair of Bond Street trousers. "As I was saying, sir -" he murmured.
"I do please you?" the AmaZenyan shrieked, showing signs of wanting to throw herself back at his feet, or rise and crush him to her massive and thorny bosom. "You do not wish to kill me?'
"No no no, not at all, my dear girl. I'm just so bally pleased, ecstatic, blissful, in absolute raptures. No beating or killing needed, I assure you."
"Sir..." Jeeves murmured again.
"Yes! We are one!" She cried and threw herself again at his feet.
"Absolutely..." He jumped back, and then her words sank in. "I say, one what?" The fog of fright in his brain turned as cold as a Scottish summer with startling speed, and whether or not a Wooster would and should whimper, Bertie unblushingly whimpered. "Jeeves?"
"As I was saying, sir -" Jeeves voice, though no louder than a mouse's cough, caught the attention as assuredly as Aunt Agatha's best and most stentorian bawl. "Under AmaZenyan xenogamy laws, which this country accepted in 1922 - August, I believe, or perhaps it was September of that year - to declare yourself pleased with a lady of rank is to make her an interplanetary offer."
"An offer? Offer of what, Jeeves?"
Jeeves looked at him with grave, pitying sympathy, and Bertie felt the icy fingers of a terrifying fate clutch at him like the Princess's crushing, spiky clasp, seeming to draw his feebly protesting form again towards that all too familiar Valley of the Shadow of...
"Matrimony, sir."
-end-
The quote, from page 60, was "If I do not please you," she screamed, "beat me or kill me!" originally by (surprise, surprise) John Norman in his Raiders of Gor.
PS - The first ficlet in the meme is here.