[Fanfiction] Good to Fall Into
Title: Good to Fall Into
Genre: steampunk, drama, humor, a touch of romance, and a dash of angst
Characters: England, America, Tony, Lithuania, in this one, hints of US/UK and America/Lithuania
Rating/Warnings: PG for language
Summary: First in a steampunk AU series of one-shots I'm planning to write, called the Into Which My Daring series. Series will eventually be US/UK. In a version of Victorian England where airships are up and coming new technology and an order of magicians advises the queen, nobleman Arthur Kirkland meets someone he did not expect building an airfield on his family's country estate.
Good to Fall Into
Upon first setting foot in the rattling, metallicised, machine-infested strip of land that people were beginning-rather generously, in his estimation-to refer to as the airfield, Arthur Kirkland was struck anew by the sheer effrontery of the place. As well as struck by the assault on his senses produced by the cacophonous roar of cogs and steam engines, the acrid stench of oil, coal, and engine grease, and the general clatter and clang of any mechanical workshop.
A thrice-blasted airfield of all things, not two miles from the edge of the ancestral family seat. It felt like a personal insult, whether meant to be one or no, whether any of the family actually even spent any time there. It was a personal insult. At any rate, he was prepared to perceive it that way. And if perhaps his dislike of aviators and the mad science of aviation altogether was rather more than . . . well, what might be considered strictly rational, surely he had cause, and he refused to follow that train of thought any further. He clenched his hands into fists, then forced them to relax. There was someone-no doubt one of the staff of this bloody place-coming toward him. He put on his most forbidding scowl and crossed his arms.
The man appeared to be a mechanic, or, at any rate, he was wiping his oil-stained hands on a bit of rag as he loped toward Arthur, with a loose leather bomber jacket over his coverall. Arthur simply hoped he didn’t get too close. It would be a job explaining to Winston how he’d come to be covered in grease.
The man finished wiping his hands and shoved the rag loosely in a pocket of his coveralls just as he came to a stop in front of Arthur, a wide grin spreading over features smudged with what had to be a mixture of engine grease and other substances. He had wide, blindingly blue eyes and spectacles-nearly the only features Arthur could discern, considering the covering of grease, except that he was unfairly tall and rather ridiculously broad across the shoulders. A flight cap was pulled haphazardly down over his flyaway hair, which appeared to be some vaguely golden color under all the mechanical filth. Something of Arthur’s distaste must have shown on his face, because the man grinned widely and said, “Sorry ‘bout the mess.” The man-young man, if his voice were anything to go by, little more than a boy-flicked his hands as if to indicate himself. “Had to climb down into the guts of one’a the engines, see what’d gone wrong with her.”
Arthur could feel himself stiffening at the broad flat twang of that voice. Good bloody God, was all he could think. A Yank. Well, that was fantastic. Perfect. Just bloody fantastic.
Devil take it.
“Her?” he heard himself say.
“The engine!” the bloody Yank replied brightly, rocking back on his heels. “Ladies, they are, every one of ‘em. So, what can I do for ya?” His grin widened, his eyes almost hopeful behind those oddly incongruous spectacles perched on his nose. “Don’t get a lotta your fancy-pants style in here, gotta say-”
“I won’t be staying,” Arthur said in his most frigid tone. Head the damned American familiarity off at the pass. He carefully didn’t examine why his outrage was suddenly even more ferocious than it had been previously. Yes, perhaps he had a bit of a grudge against the Yanks. It was perfectly understandable, considering his-and, well . . . but that had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter at hand, any road. Even if this bloody damn interloper had been as English as Queen Victoria herself, he would still have told the man what he could do with this rattling deathtrap.
Right, then.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “Right. Well, I am Lord Arthur Kirkland. You may have heard of me, seeing as you’ve built this travesty against nature and mankind on the corner of my family’s ancestral land. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Duke of Clarence? But no, you’re a Yank, and you’ve probably never read so much as a word of Shakespeare. So I’ll make this very clear. I’m here to tell you to get your bloody noisemakers off my land.”
Those big blue eyes darkened, and the wide smile lighting the mechanic’s face was replaced with a scowl. “I’m not even on your land!” he replied. “I know, 'cause I checked, okay?”
“You're quite close enough,” Arthur snapped back, hoping his sudden flush wasn’t visible. It was true, after all; the airfield was not, precisely, on his land, but did two miles really make a great deal of difference? They were bloody airships!
“I’ve got a permit,” the airman said, and shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket, setting his feet as if he were preparing for a boxing match on the spot. “I got permission to put my airfield here. From the fuckin’ Crown, all right? So don’t go all high-an’-mighty on me, Mr. Fancy-Pants. I don’t have to listen to you or the stick up your ass.”
Something that felt a good deal like embarrassment and, perhaps, dismay sank heavily into the pit of Arthur’s stomach. He’d hoped it had just been the bloody cheek of these fools that spent all their time mucking about with aeroplanes to build the sodding thing there. But apparently, no luck there, either. “Oh?” he demanded before he thought. “Where is it, then?”
“In my office; I don’t cart the damn thing around with me,” the other man shot back. “Hey, Tony!” he yelled back into the clanking din that was the airfield behind him. “Can you grab the permit for our honored guest here?” He turned back and bared his teeth at Arthur in a smile that was very nearly a threatening snarl.
Arthur ignored him, tilting up his chin to gaze over the man’s head. He wasn’t going to lower himself to this man’s games.
There was a tense silence for a moment, broken only by the sounds of the airfield, the hiss of steam and the rush of air, before there was a loud bang, and the other man half-turned back toward it and yelled, “That sounded like a valve blew!”
Arthur rolled his eyes.
“Yes, the Spitfire’s engine’s been venting,” came the call back. A small man with his brown hair pulled back in a short tail came out from behind a tall stack of boxes. He gave a rueful smile. “Probably needs your expert touch.”
The man who’d been speaking with Arthur grinned again, his shoulders squaring. He practically puffed out his chest, Arthur thought in disgust. “My specialty,” he said. “I’m the hero around here, after all!”
The other man smiled. “Yes,” he said, before Arthur could say anything derisive about the likelihood of this grease-spattered mechanic being a hero, “something like that. And, you, sir?” he turned toward Arthur. Arthur had the impression of a pleasant face, perhaps almost pretty, beneath a covering of grime almost impressive as the tall fair man’s, and green eyes. He wore an apron over another set of coveralls. “Are you a client, perhaps? I’m Toris Lor-”
“Not in the least!” Arthur burst out, affronted, and drew himself up to his full height. “I am Arthur Kirkland, Viscount Trematon, if perhaps by some miracle you recognize the rank, and you are trespassing on my land.”
The brown-haired man looked pained. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “I mean, my lord, we didn’t realize there would be an issue with land rights, perhaps we could-”
“You’re too damn nice, Toris, that’s your problem,” the other man burst out loudly. “We don’t gotta apologize for being here; we were invited by the queen, well, her husband, but, still, we’re supposed to build a royal airship!” The enthusiasm with which he infused those two words practically boiled out of him and spilled into the air. “We’re not gonna apologize for the biggest chance we’ve ever had, got that?”
Toris just gave him a crooked smile. “No need to trample toes on the way,” he said. He had a slight accent, Arthur thought, not like the other man’s, something Continental.
“I’m afraid it’s rather too late for that,” he interjected. “I’ve come to demand that you remove yourselves from the premises, and-”
He didn’t manage to finish his demands, because some sort of two-foot-tall monstrosity made of metal with a domed, shining head, clanked up to them, spat out, “Fucking limey,” and waved a piece of paper about like some manner of deadly weapon in its tiny metal hand with . . . ah, did it have the correct number of fingers?
“Oh, hey, Tony!” beamed the tall mechanic, and he bent down to take the papers from the metal-thing’s-hand. Arthur couldn’t help it. He stared.
“Dear God,” he heard his own voice exclaim, “what is that-thing?”
The mechanic scowled again. “He’s not a thing,” he said. “That’s Tony, he’s my buddy! I built him. C’mon, Tony, say hi!”
“Fucking limey,” the thing said again, then turned to the tall mechanic again. “The papers you asked for.” It had a horrifically high, squeaky voice that grated on Arthur’s ears and down his spine.
“You built him?” he repeated blankly.
“Sure enough,” the man replied. “Yeah, got it, Tony, thanks!” he added, and then shoved them into Arthur’s face. “There,” he said. “Papers. Y’happy?”
He was not, not in the least, but he still checked over the papers. Much to his disgust, they appeared to be perfectly in order. He glanced over the bottom, scowling at the sodding Royal Seal, of all things, you’d have thought Her Majesty would at the very least have bothered to inform him, and-
His eyes froze on a signature near the end of the last page. Jones, it read. Alfred. Alfred F. Jones.
He knew that name. In fact, he would never be able to forget it.
All at once, the paper seemed to burn through his gloves and into his flesh. He couldn’t get a deep breath, not entirely, his throat choking and closing. He couldn’t even manage to care that swallowing was suddenly an impossibility for him.
American. Golden hair. Blue eyes. Alfred-Alfred Jones.
It couldn’t be, and yet-and yet it very clearly was.
“Well?” the tall, blue-eyed mechanic-aviator-demanded. “You happy?”
Arthur’s hands were trembling. He ordered them to cease immediately. Cold sweat broke out on his hands, down his back, between his shoulders. He felt hot, and then deeply, chillingly cold. Dark stars danced in front of his eyes-bloody cheek, he thought disjointedly. He rather felt as if he might faint.
Somehow, with a ferocious effort of will, he managed a deep breath. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, “but, regrettably, everything appears to be in order.” He thrust the papers back into the-into-Alfred’s greasy chest and felt a vague sense of satisfaction as he flailed to catch hold of them before they fluttered to the ground. “Very well. Try not to poison the water or terrify the sheep to death, if you please. I hope very much not to see you again, but if the worst should happen, I will thank you to keep the conversation brief. And your flying machines will not, I repeat will not, be seen on my land.” He forced a smile that probably looked rather as much like a snarl as-as Alfred’s had, earlier. “Ta.”
Arthur turned on his heel and strode back toward the house. He didn’t once look back.
And if his hands were trembling again, or perhaps rather more of him than his hands, well, at least there was no one to see it, and it was a long walk up the hill to the manor.
------- -------- --------
Alfred didn’t get a chance to think about what had just happened right away, because the engine on the Spitfire, his pride and joy of a light airship, chose right about then to bust another valve, and he and Toris were busy making sure the airfield wasn’t flooded in boiling water and engine oil for a good half hour after Arthur stalked out of the place like his ass was on fire. But after they’d gotten the engine recalibrated, it all sort of hit Alfred at once, and he sank down to sit heavily on the ground, even as soaked in warm, oily mud as it was. He wiped one arm across his wet, sweaty face, noticed how filthy his hands were, then sank his head into his palms.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
“It’s all right, Mr. Jones,” Toris said bracingly, cranking the last of the gears. “We’ve got her all back together now.”
“Arthur,” Alfred groaned, pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes, and Toris went quiet.
“Oh,” he said, softly, after a moment.
Something in Alfred’s chest felt very tight, and it hurt, like he’d been socked there and pretty hard, right over his heart. He tried to take a deep breath and it didn’t really work; he choked on it and ended up gasping for a second before he buried it with a laugh. “Yeah,” he said, and dropped his hands, trying helplessly to force a grin. “Well, I fucked that one up pretty good, huh?”
“Alfred . . .” Toris said. His voice was very soft, and fond in a way that sort of ached. Alfred looked up at him with a desperate kind of hope he wished he could have hidden but that sort of just wanted to plaster itself across his face, apparently; he could feel it, out there all over the place. “It’s-it-it will be all right,” Toris continued haltingly. “Somehow, it will. At least you’re . . . ah, you’re here, at least, in the same country, anyway . . . he’s nearby, I-” he gave Alfred a pained, helpless sort of look.
Alfred gave a short laugh and shook his head. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna help much,” he said. By any indication, it would end up just making it worse-at least back home he’d had the image of Arthur who existed in his head to keep him company. The contrast with the real thing was somehow even more painful. He rolled his eyes at himself. And that, thinking about that, got him a fat lot of nowhere, now, didn’t it?
Alfred reached up to run his hands back through his hair, shoving his aviator’s cap back on his head. He stared down at the muddy ground. He’d envisioned how that meeting was going to go so many times, so many different ways-but none of them had involved him not recognizing Arthur at first, or Arthur not recognizing him, and then Alfred realizing who he was talking to just in time for Arthur’s imperious demands to piss him off enough that he just started reacting, like a complete moron, let his temper get away from him, and then-Arthur had been demanding that Alfred just back up and leave, to go away from him, from all of it, to lose this one damn chance that he had for everything, everything he’d worked and busted his ass and fought for, the airships, the engines, all of it, even goddamn Arthur-
But apparently not Arthur, and oh, fuck, why’d he have to go and get angry like that, he always did that, with Arthur, anyway, lost his temper and fucked it up, sure, Arthur had been an absolute asshole, but he was like that and Alfred knew it and-
But he’d been giving him orders again, and it was just like-just like when he’d left, and-oh, just fuck it. “This was supposed to be my big chance with him!” he said desperately, looking up at Toris. “How did I just-just go and blow it like that? How? What the fuck was I thinking, Toris?”
“Probably that he was being an absolute . . . well, you know what I mean,” Toris said with his soft, lopsided smile.
That got Alfred’s lips to twitch a bit, even though he bit the bottom one to stop it. Toris smiled more widely.
Alfred leaped to his feet and smacked his palms against the sides of his coveralls. “Okay!” he said. “Enough moping! Doesn’t get anything done, am I right? We’ve got a ton of work to do and no time to do it, so let’s get this show on the road!”
“That’s the Alfred Jones I know,” Toris said, and patted the side of the engine. “Hear that, girl? Time to get some work done!”
Alfred didn’t want to look up toward the big house on the hill, he really didn’t, but as he burst out with, “Yeah, time for our most awesomely successful test ever, this time on the engine, you got that?” his eyes slid back up to rest on the house, and on the small figure striding resolutely up to its doors, hat in his hand so that the wind whipped through that straw-colored flyaway hair, and Alfred had to swallow against the lump in his throat.
He forced a smile onto his face and waded through the mud to get back to his girl. If he was going to build a royal airship, it was going to be the best airship ever devised, by golly.
End . . . for now.
Author's Notes: Set in the middle of Queen Victoria's reign, or thereabouts. Obviously, Prince Albert is still alive, as he's commissioned an airship from Mr. Jones and his assistant Toris Lorinaitis.
All the country characters are from the country they originally represented, the exception being Arthur's siblings.
Both magic and science do in fact exist. Most airships are run on steam. I'm envisioning a lot of gears, here. Obviously, flight was invented far earlier than it was in the actual timeline, which has altered history.
Winston is the surname of Arthur's butler. Arthur is the youngest in his family. His older brothers are a duke and an earl, and he has one sister. His oldest brother is the Duke of Clarence, a title which appears in Shakespeare's Richard III.
"British as Queen Victoria herself"--bit of a joke/sarcasm. Queen Victoria was of mostly German descent.
Tony is a robot that Alfred built--credit goes to ottful for this brilliant notion, and for the inspiration for this entire series.
Both the title of the fic and the title of the series are taken from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. The title of the fic comes from the quote: "Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth," while the title of the entire series came from this: "I wholly forgot who I was, and where I was. I became intoxicated with a sense of lofty sublimity, without thought of the abysses into which my daring was soon about to plunge me."
Alfred and Arthur knew each other as children and young teenagers. For now, that's all you need to know . . . . .
Genre: steampunk, drama, humor, a touch of romance, and a dash of angst
Characters: England, America, Tony, Lithuania, in this one, hints of US/UK and America/Lithuania
Rating/Warnings: PG for language
Summary: First in a steampunk AU series of one-shots I'm planning to write, called the Into Which My Daring series. Series will eventually be US/UK. In a version of Victorian England where airships are up and coming new technology and an order of magicians advises the queen, nobleman Arthur Kirkland meets someone he did not expect building an airfield on his family's country estate.
Good to Fall Into
Upon first setting foot in the rattling, metallicised, machine-infested strip of land that people were beginning-rather generously, in his estimation-to refer to as the airfield, Arthur Kirkland was struck anew by the sheer effrontery of the place. As well as struck by the assault on his senses produced by the cacophonous roar of cogs and steam engines, the acrid stench of oil, coal, and engine grease, and the general clatter and clang of any mechanical workshop.
A thrice-blasted airfield of all things, not two miles from the edge of the ancestral family seat. It felt like a personal insult, whether meant to be one or no, whether any of the family actually even spent any time there. It was a personal insult. At any rate, he was prepared to perceive it that way. And if perhaps his dislike of aviators and the mad science of aviation altogether was rather more than . . . well, what might be considered strictly rational, surely he had cause, and he refused to follow that train of thought any further. He clenched his hands into fists, then forced them to relax. There was someone-no doubt one of the staff of this bloody place-coming toward him. He put on his most forbidding scowl and crossed his arms.
The man appeared to be a mechanic, or, at any rate, he was wiping his oil-stained hands on a bit of rag as he loped toward Arthur, with a loose leather bomber jacket over his coverall. Arthur simply hoped he didn’t get too close. It would be a job explaining to Winston how he’d come to be covered in grease.
The man finished wiping his hands and shoved the rag loosely in a pocket of his coveralls just as he came to a stop in front of Arthur, a wide grin spreading over features smudged with what had to be a mixture of engine grease and other substances. He had wide, blindingly blue eyes and spectacles-nearly the only features Arthur could discern, considering the covering of grease, except that he was unfairly tall and rather ridiculously broad across the shoulders. A flight cap was pulled haphazardly down over his flyaway hair, which appeared to be some vaguely golden color under all the mechanical filth. Something of Arthur’s distaste must have shown on his face, because the man grinned widely and said, “Sorry ‘bout the mess.” The man-young man, if his voice were anything to go by, little more than a boy-flicked his hands as if to indicate himself. “Had to climb down into the guts of one’a the engines, see what’d gone wrong with her.”
Arthur could feel himself stiffening at the broad flat twang of that voice. Good bloody God, was all he could think. A Yank. Well, that was fantastic. Perfect. Just bloody fantastic.
Devil take it.
“Her?” he heard himself say.
“The engine!” the bloody Yank replied brightly, rocking back on his heels. “Ladies, they are, every one of ‘em. So, what can I do for ya?” His grin widened, his eyes almost hopeful behind those oddly incongruous spectacles perched on his nose. “Don’t get a lotta your fancy-pants style in here, gotta say-”
“I won’t be staying,” Arthur said in his most frigid tone. Head the damned American familiarity off at the pass. He carefully didn’t examine why his outrage was suddenly even more ferocious than it had been previously. Yes, perhaps he had a bit of a grudge against the Yanks. It was perfectly understandable, considering his-and, well . . . but that had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter at hand, any road. Even if this bloody damn interloper had been as English as Queen Victoria herself, he would still have told the man what he could do with this rattling deathtrap.
Right, then.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “Right. Well, I am Lord Arthur Kirkland. You may have heard of me, seeing as you’ve built this travesty against nature and mankind on the corner of my family’s ancestral land. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Duke of Clarence? But no, you’re a Yank, and you’ve probably never read so much as a word of Shakespeare. So I’ll make this very clear. I’m here to tell you to get your bloody noisemakers off my land.”
Those big blue eyes darkened, and the wide smile lighting the mechanic’s face was replaced with a scowl. “I’m not even on your land!” he replied. “I know, 'cause I checked, okay?”
“You're quite close enough,” Arthur snapped back, hoping his sudden flush wasn’t visible. It was true, after all; the airfield was not, precisely, on his land, but did two miles really make a great deal of difference? They were bloody airships!
“I’ve got a permit,” the airman said, and shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket, setting his feet as if he were preparing for a boxing match on the spot. “I got permission to put my airfield here. From the fuckin’ Crown, all right? So don’t go all high-an’-mighty on me, Mr. Fancy-Pants. I don’t have to listen to you or the stick up your ass.”
Something that felt a good deal like embarrassment and, perhaps, dismay sank heavily into the pit of Arthur’s stomach. He’d hoped it had just been the bloody cheek of these fools that spent all their time mucking about with aeroplanes to build the sodding thing there. But apparently, no luck there, either. “Oh?” he demanded before he thought. “Where is it, then?”
“In my office; I don’t cart the damn thing around with me,” the other man shot back. “Hey, Tony!” he yelled back into the clanking din that was the airfield behind him. “Can you grab the permit for our honored guest here?” He turned back and bared his teeth at Arthur in a smile that was very nearly a threatening snarl.
Arthur ignored him, tilting up his chin to gaze over the man’s head. He wasn’t going to lower himself to this man’s games.
There was a tense silence for a moment, broken only by the sounds of the airfield, the hiss of steam and the rush of air, before there was a loud bang, and the other man half-turned back toward it and yelled, “That sounded like a valve blew!”
Arthur rolled his eyes.
“Yes, the Spitfire’s engine’s been venting,” came the call back. A small man with his brown hair pulled back in a short tail came out from behind a tall stack of boxes. He gave a rueful smile. “Probably needs your expert touch.”
The man who’d been speaking with Arthur grinned again, his shoulders squaring. He practically puffed out his chest, Arthur thought in disgust. “My specialty,” he said. “I’m the hero around here, after all!”
The other man smiled. “Yes,” he said, before Arthur could say anything derisive about the likelihood of this grease-spattered mechanic being a hero, “something like that. And, you, sir?” he turned toward Arthur. Arthur had the impression of a pleasant face, perhaps almost pretty, beneath a covering of grime almost impressive as the tall fair man’s, and green eyes. He wore an apron over another set of coveralls. “Are you a client, perhaps? I’m Toris Lor-”
“Not in the least!” Arthur burst out, affronted, and drew himself up to his full height. “I am Arthur Kirkland, Viscount Trematon, if perhaps by some miracle you recognize the rank, and you are trespassing on my land.”
The brown-haired man looked pained. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “I mean, my lord, we didn’t realize there would be an issue with land rights, perhaps we could-”
“You’re too damn nice, Toris, that’s your problem,” the other man burst out loudly. “We don’t gotta apologize for being here; we were invited by the queen, well, her husband, but, still, we’re supposed to build a royal airship!” The enthusiasm with which he infused those two words practically boiled out of him and spilled into the air. “We’re not gonna apologize for the biggest chance we’ve ever had, got that?”
Toris just gave him a crooked smile. “No need to trample toes on the way,” he said. He had a slight accent, Arthur thought, not like the other man’s, something Continental.
“I’m afraid it’s rather too late for that,” he interjected. “I’ve come to demand that you remove yourselves from the premises, and-”
He didn’t manage to finish his demands, because some sort of two-foot-tall monstrosity made of metal with a domed, shining head, clanked up to them, spat out, “Fucking limey,” and waved a piece of paper about like some manner of deadly weapon in its tiny metal hand with . . . ah, did it have the correct number of fingers?
“Oh, hey, Tony!” beamed the tall mechanic, and he bent down to take the papers from the metal-thing’s-hand. Arthur couldn’t help it. He stared.
“Dear God,” he heard his own voice exclaim, “what is that-thing?”
The mechanic scowled again. “He’s not a thing,” he said. “That’s Tony, he’s my buddy! I built him. C’mon, Tony, say hi!”
“Fucking limey,” the thing said again, then turned to the tall mechanic again. “The papers you asked for.” It had a horrifically high, squeaky voice that grated on Arthur’s ears and down his spine.
“You built him?” he repeated blankly.
“Sure enough,” the man replied. “Yeah, got it, Tony, thanks!” he added, and then shoved them into Arthur’s face. “There,” he said. “Papers. Y’happy?”
He was not, not in the least, but he still checked over the papers. Much to his disgust, they appeared to be perfectly in order. He glanced over the bottom, scowling at the sodding Royal Seal, of all things, you’d have thought Her Majesty would at the very least have bothered to inform him, and-
His eyes froze on a signature near the end of the last page. Jones, it read. Alfred. Alfred F. Jones.
He knew that name. In fact, he would never be able to forget it.
All at once, the paper seemed to burn through his gloves and into his flesh. He couldn’t get a deep breath, not entirely, his throat choking and closing. He couldn’t even manage to care that swallowing was suddenly an impossibility for him.
American. Golden hair. Blue eyes. Alfred-Alfred Jones.
It couldn’t be, and yet-and yet it very clearly was.
“Well?” the tall, blue-eyed mechanic-aviator-demanded. “You happy?”
Arthur’s hands were trembling. He ordered them to cease immediately. Cold sweat broke out on his hands, down his back, between his shoulders. He felt hot, and then deeply, chillingly cold. Dark stars danced in front of his eyes-bloody cheek, he thought disjointedly. He rather felt as if he might faint.
Somehow, with a ferocious effort of will, he managed a deep breath. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, “but, regrettably, everything appears to be in order.” He thrust the papers back into the-into-Alfred’s greasy chest and felt a vague sense of satisfaction as he flailed to catch hold of them before they fluttered to the ground. “Very well. Try not to poison the water or terrify the sheep to death, if you please. I hope very much not to see you again, but if the worst should happen, I will thank you to keep the conversation brief. And your flying machines will not, I repeat will not, be seen on my land.” He forced a smile that probably looked rather as much like a snarl as-as Alfred’s had, earlier. “Ta.”
Arthur turned on his heel and strode back toward the house. He didn’t once look back.
And if his hands were trembling again, or perhaps rather more of him than his hands, well, at least there was no one to see it, and it was a long walk up the hill to the manor.
------- -------- --------
Alfred didn’t get a chance to think about what had just happened right away, because the engine on the Spitfire, his pride and joy of a light airship, chose right about then to bust another valve, and he and Toris were busy making sure the airfield wasn’t flooded in boiling water and engine oil for a good half hour after Arthur stalked out of the place like his ass was on fire. But after they’d gotten the engine recalibrated, it all sort of hit Alfred at once, and he sank down to sit heavily on the ground, even as soaked in warm, oily mud as it was. He wiped one arm across his wet, sweaty face, noticed how filthy his hands were, then sank his head into his palms.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
“It’s all right, Mr. Jones,” Toris said bracingly, cranking the last of the gears. “We’ve got her all back together now.”
“Arthur,” Alfred groaned, pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes, and Toris went quiet.
“Oh,” he said, softly, after a moment.
Something in Alfred’s chest felt very tight, and it hurt, like he’d been socked there and pretty hard, right over his heart. He tried to take a deep breath and it didn’t really work; he choked on it and ended up gasping for a second before he buried it with a laugh. “Yeah,” he said, and dropped his hands, trying helplessly to force a grin. “Well, I fucked that one up pretty good, huh?”
“Alfred . . .” Toris said. His voice was very soft, and fond in a way that sort of ached. Alfred looked up at him with a desperate kind of hope he wished he could have hidden but that sort of just wanted to plaster itself across his face, apparently; he could feel it, out there all over the place. “It’s-it-it will be all right,” Toris continued haltingly. “Somehow, it will. At least you’re . . . ah, you’re here, at least, in the same country, anyway . . . he’s nearby, I-” he gave Alfred a pained, helpless sort of look.
Alfred gave a short laugh and shook his head. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s gonna help much,” he said. By any indication, it would end up just making it worse-at least back home he’d had the image of Arthur who existed in his head to keep him company. The contrast with the real thing was somehow even more painful. He rolled his eyes at himself. And that, thinking about that, got him a fat lot of nowhere, now, didn’t it?
Alfred reached up to run his hands back through his hair, shoving his aviator’s cap back on his head. He stared down at the muddy ground. He’d envisioned how that meeting was going to go so many times, so many different ways-but none of them had involved him not recognizing Arthur at first, or Arthur not recognizing him, and then Alfred realizing who he was talking to just in time for Arthur’s imperious demands to piss him off enough that he just started reacting, like a complete moron, let his temper get away from him, and then-Arthur had been demanding that Alfred just back up and leave, to go away from him, from all of it, to lose this one damn chance that he had for everything, everything he’d worked and busted his ass and fought for, the airships, the engines, all of it, even goddamn Arthur-
But apparently not Arthur, and oh, fuck, why’d he have to go and get angry like that, he always did that, with Arthur, anyway, lost his temper and fucked it up, sure, Arthur had been an absolute asshole, but he was like that and Alfred knew it and-
But he’d been giving him orders again, and it was just like-just like when he’d left, and-oh, just fuck it. “This was supposed to be my big chance with him!” he said desperately, looking up at Toris. “How did I just-just go and blow it like that? How? What the fuck was I thinking, Toris?”
“Probably that he was being an absolute . . . well, you know what I mean,” Toris said with his soft, lopsided smile.
That got Alfred’s lips to twitch a bit, even though he bit the bottom one to stop it. Toris smiled more widely.
Alfred leaped to his feet and smacked his palms against the sides of his coveralls. “Okay!” he said. “Enough moping! Doesn’t get anything done, am I right? We’ve got a ton of work to do and no time to do it, so let’s get this show on the road!”
“That’s the Alfred Jones I know,” Toris said, and patted the side of the engine. “Hear that, girl? Time to get some work done!”
Alfred didn’t want to look up toward the big house on the hill, he really didn’t, but as he burst out with, “Yeah, time for our most awesomely successful test ever, this time on the engine, you got that?” his eyes slid back up to rest on the house, and on the small figure striding resolutely up to its doors, hat in his hand so that the wind whipped through that straw-colored flyaway hair, and Alfred had to swallow against the lump in his throat.
He forced a smile onto his face and waded through the mud to get back to his girl. If he was going to build a royal airship, it was going to be the best airship ever devised, by golly.
End . . . for now.
Author's Notes: Set in the middle of Queen Victoria's reign, or thereabouts. Obviously, Prince Albert is still alive, as he's commissioned an airship from Mr. Jones and his assistant Toris Lorinaitis.
All the country characters are from the country they originally represented, the exception being Arthur's siblings.
Both magic and science do in fact exist. Most airships are run on steam. I'm envisioning a lot of gears, here. Obviously, flight was invented far earlier than it was in the actual timeline, which has altered history.
Winston is the surname of Arthur's butler. Arthur is the youngest in his family. His older brothers are a duke and an earl, and he has one sister. His oldest brother is the Duke of Clarence, a title which appears in Shakespeare's Richard III.
"British as Queen Victoria herself"--bit of a joke/sarcasm. Queen Victoria was of mostly German descent.
Tony is a robot that Alfred built--credit goes to ottful for this brilliant notion, and for the inspiration for this entire series.
Both the title of the fic and the title of the series are taken from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. The title of the fic comes from the quote: "Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth," while the title of the entire series came from this: "I wholly forgot who I was, and where I was. I became intoxicated with a sense of lofty sublimity, without thought of the abysses into which my daring was soon about to plunge me."
Alfred and Arthur knew each other as children and young teenagers. For now, that's all you need to know . . . . .