[FIC] Ever After (Chapter 10/11)
Title: Ever After
Main Pairing: Jeff/Greg, with background Chip/Wayne and Colin/Ryan
Rating: R for language
Total Word Count: 17,890
Chapter Word Count: 1,793
Summary: Jeff’s a directionally challenged actor who can’t seem to catch a break. Chip promises that Jeff’s new GPS will be the solution to all of his problems, but why does it seem to cause more problems than it solves? Will Chip turn out to be right in the end? (Spoiler alert: of course he will. This is, after all, a fairy tale.)
Special Thanks: to sungreen70 for patiently (lol) championing this story from its humble beginnings in 2009, subtly (lol) suggesting I finish it while recovering at home from surgery, and going above and beyond as a beta reader despite all the other demands - including Hurricane Sandy and a presidential election! - on her time. You are amazing! ♥
As if in a trance, Jeff pulled over and slowed to a stop. He turned off the engine, leaving the keys dangling in the ignition. In the sudden silence that followed, his heartbeat was like thunder in his ears.
Chip was the first to speak. “Okay, let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “Did I or did I not just hear your GPS talk to you?”
“I... uh....” Jeff ran a hand over his face. Where to begin?
“Wait a minute,” Wayne said, his eyes narrowing. “It’s done this before, hasn’t it?”
Jeff was startled. “What makes you say that?”
“Because you look guilty as hell,” Wayne said. “And if this were the first time, you’d be out of the car like a shot and running up the street, screaming like a girl.”
“There’s still time for us to do that, right?” Chip asked nervously.
Wayne folded his arms across his chest. “Jeff, I think you’d better tell us exactly what’s going on here.”
“I... I really don’t think I can explain it,” Jeff said truthfully.
“Well, either you can tell them or I will,” Greg said, sounding more like himself than he had all day.
Jeff wheeled on Greg, and spoke as if they were alone. “Maybe you should tell me what’s going on first! Where have you been all week?”
“All week?” Chip repeated. “What do you mean, ‘all week’?” Receiving no sign that Jeff had heard him, he turned back to Wayne and spoke in a stage whisper. “What does he mean, ‘all week’?”
“Shhh,” Wayne said, watching the GPS avidly.
“I was... otherwise indisposed,” Greg was saying.
“Indisposed?” Jeff was incredulous. “How can you be indisposed?”
Chip lunged forward. “Yeah!” Both Jeff and Wayne looked at him. “Sorry,” Chip said, sinking back into his seat.
Jeff turned back to Greg. “Well?”
“I know I haven’t been completely honest with you,” Greg began.
Jeff snorted. “You think?”
“Hey, do you want to hear this, or not?”
Chip nodded. “We do,” he said emphatically, earning him a punch from Wayne. “Hey!” Chip protested, rubbing his arm. “What was that for?”
“Look, maybe we should go on to the bar and leave you alone,” Wayne offered, looking meaningfully at Chip.
Before Chip could protest, Jeff said, “No, no. It’s fine. Stay.” Catching sight of the satisfied smile spreading across Chip’s face, he added, “And try not to look too smug about it.”
“Are you done?” Greg said, his voice tinged with impatience. When he had the attention of his audience again, the colour of his screen deepened to violet and he said, “Okay. My name’s Greg Proops. And I’m... real.”
Jeff, Chip, and Wayne looked at each other, then back at Greg. “Real?” Chip echoed. “How can you be real?”
“I was on vacation in Helsinki three summers ago when I tripped and fell into a trash can outside the Sibelius Monument,” Greg said. He paused. “Did you know they have talking trash cans in parts of Helsinki?”
Jeff and Wayne nodded.
“No,” Chip said.
“Well,” Greg continued, “they’d been around for a year by then, and they were so popular that in 2009 they added recorded messages in English and a bunch of other languages.” He laughed bitterly. “Recorded messages. Yeah, right. That’s what they wanted everyone to think. But they’re tourist traps - literally. As soon as a tourist who spoke another language got close enough, boom, they were sucked in. And again, I mean that literally.
“I was forced to be the English voice of the trash can during all my waking hours. It was easier to get through the day if I told jokes, and since I’d dabbled in stand-up comedy in the past, people thought the stuff I said was pretty funny. Visits to the Sibelius Monument were up 250% over the previous summer, and they had people driving their trash in from as far away as Estonia just to hear what I had to say.
“I thought I was going to be living in a Finnish trash can forever, you know? But I found out there’s this whole underground network of these so-called ‘recorded voices’ that are actually real people. It’s fucking global, man. And the people in charge of this network like to change us around so no one gets too suspicious.”
“The people in charge?” Jeff said. “There’s like this... trash can cabal or something?”
“Yes. But it’s not just trash cans, it’s everything. They call themselves Jawarhala.”
“Jawarhala?” Jeff said, frowning. “How do you spell that?”
“I don’t know,” Greg confessed. “I’ve never seen it written down.”
Jeff digested this. “Okay. So where did Jawarhala send you next?”
“Samoa. You know how they changed over from driving on the right to driving on the left a few years back?”
Jeff and Wayne nodded.
“No,” Chip said.
“At the end of my summer in Helsinki I was sent to Apia to be a talking walk/don’t walk sign. I was there for about six months, until pedestrians got the hang of looking in the opposite direction when crossing the street.”
“And then?” Jeff prodded.
“Nothing terribly interesting,” Greg said. “I was the iPhone app for Sydney Rail when they made major changes to the timetable in 2010. Australians really don’t like it when people mess with their trains, so I was there for a while. Then I was the interactive help menu for the latest release of Adobe Photoshop. That was pretty boring, although some of the pictures people take can be a little bit, you know, out there.” He paused. “And then I came to you.”
Wayne was nodding. “So how did Jawarhala decide when it was time to move you to your next... assignment?” he asked.
“It was whenever people learned what to do without my help. You know, like when the Finnish people stopped littering or the Samoans got used to driving on the left. As soon as I was no longer needed, they’d send me somewhere new.”
“I get it,” Jeff said. “When I learned to navigate around LA without your help, that meant it was time for you to go.”
“Right,” Greg said.
Jeff frowned. “But that didn’t happen this time. You’re still here.” Gently he traced the screen’s crack with a finger. “Was it this?”
A wave of purple undulated across the GPS screen. “No... no, it wasn’t that,” Greg said, a slight hitch in his voice. “Although that wasn’t a very pleasant experience.”
“Then…?”
Greg was quiet for a moment. “This time I didn’t want to go.”
* * *
Greg retreated into silence, and the Mini Cooper was quiet. “Okay,” Wayne said finally. “I think we’re starting to get the picture.”
“I’m not!” said Chip indignantly.
“Oh, for-” Wayne sighed impatiently. “What’s not to get? He’s trapped in there, and we need to get him out. We need a… a game plan.”
“It’s kind of like that old TV show Quantum Leap, isn’t it?” Jeff mused.
“Exactly!” Wayne said, snapping his fingers. “So why don’t we just do what they did on the show? You know, to get the guy to stop leaping.”
“He never did stop leaping.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, I know!” Chip exclaimed.
“Here we go,” Jeff murmured.
Chip ignored him. “What about Calvin and Hobbes?”
“Calvin and Hobbes?” Wayne asked, looking puzzled. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Hobbes became a real tiger whenever he and Calvin were alone,” Chip explained.
“Yeah, but how did he do it?” Jeff asked.
Chip thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s helpful.”
Suddenly Chip’s face brightened. “I know! What if we sing?”
“Sing? Sing what?”
“Something… I don’t know, relevant to the situation.” Chip drummed his fingers on the dashboard, then stopped abruptly as an idea came to him. “Tried to run! Tried to hide! Break on through to the other side! Break on through to the other side!” A shock of hair fell across his forehead as he launched into an air guitar solo.
Jeff pushed open the driver’s side door. “And I thought the weirdest part about tonight would be the fish bar,” he muttered, untangling himself from the seatbelt and climbing out of the car. He took a deep breath. The night air smelled of car exhaust and salt water, and was cool on his face.
Belatedly Jeff registered the sound of the rear passenger door opening and closing. There was the crunch of gravel, and then Wayne was standing next to him. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Some pretty freaky shit going on tonight, huh?”
“You could definitely say that.”
“So what do we do now?”
Jeff sighed. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Greg’s trapped in there, and I have no idea how to get him out short of summoning the Nursery Magic Fairy.”
“The what?”
“From The Velveteen Rabbit,” Jeff explained. “The boy in that story truly loved the rabbit, and because of that the Nursery Magic Fairy made the rabbit real.” He kicked a stone into the road and watched it bounce across the pavement. “Which is pretty much the opposite of Greg’s situation, if you think about it. A boy truly loves him, and because of that he’s stuck.”
Wayne stared at him. “You mean....”
“I know how this must sound,” Jeff said, running a hand through his hair. “It’s crazy, right? I’m in love with an inanimate object. Or what I thought was an inanimate object until about half an hour ago.” He laughed, but it was a sound without merriment.
Wayne was studying Jeff with a serious expression on his face. “Are you… are you sure?”
“He finishes my sentences before I’ve even figured out what I’m going to say. He’s there for me when I need him - hell, he’s there for me even when I don’t realize I need him. We can talk about anything. And he makes me laugh. I don’t know much about love, but when I’m around Greg I feel as close to it as I’ve ever been.” Jeff met Wayne’s gaze. “Am I making any sense?”
“I don’t know much about love either,” Wayne said with a rueful smile. “Who does? But what I do know is that it hardly ever makes sense.” He looked over at Chip, who was now gyrating under a streetlamp on the side of the road, windmilling his arm over a mock guitar. Wayne smiled fondly. “That one over there, he defies explanation. But for whatever reason, we fit.”
The two men were silent for a moment. “So I guess we’re back to where we started,” Jeff murmured. “Now what?”
“Well, you could give me a light,” came a familiar voice from behind them. “I haven’t had a smoke in three years and it’s really starting to get to me.”
Main Pairing: Jeff/Greg, with background Chip/Wayne and Colin/Ryan
Rating: R for language
Total Word Count: 17,890
Chapter Word Count: 1,793
Summary: Jeff’s a directionally challenged actor who can’t seem to catch a break. Chip promises that Jeff’s new GPS will be the solution to all of his problems, but why does it seem to cause more problems than it solves? Will Chip turn out to be right in the end? (Spoiler alert: of course he will. This is, after all, a fairy tale.)
Special Thanks: to sungreen70 for patiently (lol) championing this story from its humble beginnings in 2009, subtly (lol) suggesting I finish it while recovering at home from surgery, and going above and beyond as a beta reader despite all the other demands - including Hurricane Sandy and a presidential election! - on her time. You are amazing! ♥
As if in a trance, Jeff pulled over and slowed to a stop. He turned off the engine, leaving the keys dangling in the ignition. In the sudden silence that followed, his heartbeat was like thunder in his ears.
Chip was the first to speak. “Okay, let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “Did I or did I not just hear your GPS talk to you?”
“I... uh....” Jeff ran a hand over his face. Where to begin?
“Wait a minute,” Wayne said, his eyes narrowing. “It’s done this before, hasn’t it?”
Jeff was startled. “What makes you say that?”
“Because you look guilty as hell,” Wayne said. “And if this were the first time, you’d be out of the car like a shot and running up the street, screaming like a girl.”
“There’s still time for us to do that, right?” Chip asked nervously.
Wayne folded his arms across his chest. “Jeff, I think you’d better tell us exactly what’s going on here.”
“I... I really don’t think I can explain it,” Jeff said truthfully.
“Well, either you can tell them or I will,” Greg said, sounding more like himself than he had all day.
Jeff wheeled on Greg, and spoke as if they were alone. “Maybe you should tell me what’s going on first! Where have you been all week?”
“All week?” Chip repeated. “What do you mean, ‘all week’?” Receiving no sign that Jeff had heard him, he turned back to Wayne and spoke in a stage whisper. “What does he mean, ‘all week’?”
“Shhh,” Wayne said, watching the GPS avidly.
“I was... otherwise indisposed,” Greg was saying.
“Indisposed?” Jeff was incredulous. “How can you be indisposed?”
Chip lunged forward. “Yeah!” Both Jeff and Wayne looked at him. “Sorry,” Chip said, sinking back into his seat.
Jeff turned back to Greg. “Well?”
“I know I haven’t been completely honest with you,” Greg began.
Jeff snorted. “You think?”
“Hey, do you want to hear this, or not?”
Chip nodded. “We do,” he said emphatically, earning him a punch from Wayne. “Hey!” Chip protested, rubbing his arm. “What was that for?”
“Look, maybe we should go on to the bar and leave you alone,” Wayne offered, looking meaningfully at Chip.
Before Chip could protest, Jeff said, “No, no. It’s fine. Stay.” Catching sight of the satisfied smile spreading across Chip’s face, he added, “And try not to look too smug about it.”
“Are you done?” Greg said, his voice tinged with impatience. When he had the attention of his audience again, the colour of his screen deepened to violet and he said, “Okay. My name’s Greg Proops. And I’m... real.”
Jeff, Chip, and Wayne looked at each other, then back at Greg. “Real?” Chip echoed. “How can you be real?”
“I was on vacation in Helsinki three summers ago when I tripped and fell into a trash can outside the Sibelius Monument,” Greg said. He paused. “Did you know they have talking trash cans in parts of Helsinki?”
Jeff and Wayne nodded.
“No,” Chip said.
“Well,” Greg continued, “they’d been around for a year by then, and they were so popular that in 2009 they added recorded messages in English and a bunch of other languages.” He laughed bitterly. “Recorded messages. Yeah, right. That’s what they wanted everyone to think. But they’re tourist traps - literally. As soon as a tourist who spoke another language got close enough, boom, they were sucked in. And again, I mean that literally.
“I was forced to be the English voice of the trash can during all my waking hours. It was easier to get through the day if I told jokes, and since I’d dabbled in stand-up comedy in the past, people thought the stuff I said was pretty funny. Visits to the Sibelius Monument were up 250% over the previous summer, and they had people driving their trash in from as far away as Estonia just to hear what I had to say.
“I thought I was going to be living in a Finnish trash can forever, you know? But I found out there’s this whole underground network of these so-called ‘recorded voices’ that are actually real people. It’s fucking global, man. And the people in charge of this network like to change us around so no one gets too suspicious.”
“The people in charge?” Jeff said. “There’s like this... trash can cabal or something?”
“Yes. But it’s not just trash cans, it’s everything. They call themselves Jawarhala.”
“Jawarhala?” Jeff said, frowning. “How do you spell that?”
“I don’t know,” Greg confessed. “I’ve never seen it written down.”
Jeff digested this. “Okay. So where did Jawarhala send you next?”
“Samoa. You know how they changed over from driving on the right to driving on the left a few years back?”
Jeff and Wayne nodded.
“No,” Chip said.
“At the end of my summer in Helsinki I was sent to Apia to be a talking walk/don’t walk sign. I was there for about six months, until pedestrians got the hang of looking in the opposite direction when crossing the street.”
“And then?” Jeff prodded.
“Nothing terribly interesting,” Greg said. “I was the iPhone app for Sydney Rail when they made major changes to the timetable in 2010. Australians really don’t like it when people mess with their trains, so I was there for a while. Then I was the interactive help menu for the latest release of Adobe Photoshop. That was pretty boring, although some of the pictures people take can be a little bit, you know, out there.” He paused. “And then I came to you.”
Wayne was nodding. “So how did Jawarhala decide when it was time to move you to your next... assignment?” he asked.
“It was whenever people learned what to do without my help. You know, like when the Finnish people stopped littering or the Samoans got used to driving on the left. As soon as I was no longer needed, they’d send me somewhere new.”
“I get it,” Jeff said. “When I learned to navigate around LA without your help, that meant it was time for you to go.”
“Right,” Greg said.
Jeff frowned. “But that didn’t happen this time. You’re still here.” Gently he traced the screen’s crack with a finger. “Was it this?”
A wave of purple undulated across the GPS screen. “No... no, it wasn’t that,” Greg said, a slight hitch in his voice. “Although that wasn’t a very pleasant experience.”
“Then…?”
Greg was quiet for a moment. “This time I didn’t want to go.”
* * *
Greg retreated into silence, and the Mini Cooper was quiet. “Okay,” Wayne said finally. “I think we’re starting to get the picture.”
“I’m not!” said Chip indignantly.
“Oh, for-” Wayne sighed impatiently. “What’s not to get? He’s trapped in there, and we need to get him out. We need a… a game plan.”
“It’s kind of like that old TV show Quantum Leap, isn’t it?” Jeff mused.
“Exactly!” Wayne said, snapping his fingers. “So why don’t we just do what they did on the show? You know, to get the guy to stop leaping.”
“He never did stop leaping.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, I know!” Chip exclaimed.
“Here we go,” Jeff murmured.
Chip ignored him. “What about Calvin and Hobbes?”
“Calvin and Hobbes?” Wayne asked, looking puzzled. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Hobbes became a real tiger whenever he and Calvin were alone,” Chip explained.
“Yeah, but how did he do it?” Jeff asked.
Chip thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s helpful.”
Suddenly Chip’s face brightened. “I know! What if we sing?”
“Sing? Sing what?”
“Something… I don’t know, relevant to the situation.” Chip drummed his fingers on the dashboard, then stopped abruptly as an idea came to him. “Tried to run! Tried to hide! Break on through to the other side! Break on through to the other side!” A shock of hair fell across his forehead as he launched into an air guitar solo.
Jeff pushed open the driver’s side door. “And I thought the weirdest part about tonight would be the fish bar,” he muttered, untangling himself from the seatbelt and climbing out of the car. He took a deep breath. The night air smelled of car exhaust and salt water, and was cool on his face.
Belatedly Jeff registered the sound of the rear passenger door opening and closing. There was the crunch of gravel, and then Wayne was standing next to him. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Some pretty freaky shit going on tonight, huh?”
“You could definitely say that.”
“So what do we do now?”
Jeff sighed. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? Greg’s trapped in there, and I have no idea how to get him out short of summoning the Nursery Magic Fairy.”
“The what?”
“From The Velveteen Rabbit,” Jeff explained. “The boy in that story truly loved the rabbit, and because of that the Nursery Magic Fairy made the rabbit real.” He kicked a stone into the road and watched it bounce across the pavement. “Which is pretty much the opposite of Greg’s situation, if you think about it. A boy truly loves him, and because of that he’s stuck.”
Wayne stared at him. “You mean....”
“I know how this must sound,” Jeff said, running a hand through his hair. “It’s crazy, right? I’m in love with an inanimate object. Or what I thought was an inanimate object until about half an hour ago.” He laughed, but it was a sound without merriment.
Wayne was studying Jeff with a serious expression on his face. “Are you… are you sure?”
“He finishes my sentences before I’ve even figured out what I’m going to say. He’s there for me when I need him - hell, he’s there for me even when I don’t realize I need him. We can talk about anything. And he makes me laugh. I don’t know much about love, but when I’m around Greg I feel as close to it as I’ve ever been.” Jeff met Wayne’s gaze. “Am I making any sense?”
“I don’t know much about love either,” Wayne said with a rueful smile. “Who does? But what I do know is that it hardly ever makes sense.” He looked over at Chip, who was now gyrating under a streetlamp on the side of the road, windmilling his arm over a mock guitar. Wayne smiled fondly. “That one over there, he defies explanation. But for whatever reason, we fit.”
The two men were silent for a moment. “So I guess we’re back to where we started,” Jeff murmured. “Now what?”
“Well, you could give me a light,” came a familiar voice from behind them. “I haven’t had a smoke in three years and it’s really starting to get to me.”