A/N: This little romp came from musing about a "drama" unfolding in my kitchen fish tank, go figure. The fish story appears at the end. Not meant to be profound or even particularly good. ;-) Just some classic ShepWhump and a downright indulgent ending! Story is finished. Let the Festival Begin!
Fairest of them All by t'pring
"Well, this is new," John Sheppard mumbled. The words felt like cotton balls on his dry, thickened tongue. The guard on his right arm shot a glare his way, then gripped even tighter as they walked. Probably shouldn't have said anything, he thought, but...crap! This is just...new. Not all of the bizarre imagery surrounding him could be accounted for by the drugs swirling through his bloodstream and buzzing between his ears.
He was being "escorted" down a long, cobblestone street bordered by some of the most spectacular buildings John had seen in the Pegasus Galaxy. If you like Greco-Roman architecture, that is. All the buildings boasted marble steps and porches, intricately carved wooden roofs and twisted iron trim. The columns on the porches were the only features that didn't look like they'd come from vomiting up a greek history book - most boasted grotesque, totem pole/gargoyle-like carvings in glossy black wood.
The crowd lining the street was even stranger. Every person (and there were a lot of them, two to three hundred) was dressed for a party. The fabrics on the women's dresses and the men's shirts were bright and luxurious. Cuffs, hems, and collars were decorated with elaborate lace and beads. The pungent tang of sweaty cloth was thick in the mid-summer evening's heat. Everyone was cheering the parade John found himself in, going along behind a juggling act and in front of a stately buffoon surrounded by pompous, fake-spear-toting, guards. Children were perched on parents' shoulders waving bright paper pom poms.
And every single one of them - from the youngest child, to the middle-agers in their prime, to the oldest crone - was...hideous. It was the ugliest bunch of people John had ever encountered all in once place. He kept blinking his eyes (that kept going too wide on him), trying to find a single attractive face among the lopsided, scarred, low-browed and buck-toothed bunch. He gave up when the guards growled at him and twisted his already bruised arms for staring at a particularly ugly woman wearing gold chiffon and a purple bow.
Maybe it is the drugs, he told himself. Beer goggles on steroids...and reversed. He really hoped so.
As he walked (stumbled drunkenly, to be honest), the crowd waved and jeered at him as he passed. The boos thrown his way were cheerful, happy even. It made him think of a melodrama a girl had taken him to, where the audience cheered the hero and booed and threw peanuts at the villain. His date had gotten pissed when he got a little too enthusiastic with his own projectiles and kept pegging the hero between the eyes, making him miss his lines. She hadn't been at all mollified by his suggestion that he was just "taking out the competition." That had been his last (and only) date with that woman, he remembered.
"No sense of humor," he muttered, remembering he was supposed to be pulling the silent routine only after the words had slipped out.
"Kill the Pretty!" a voice screamed from the crowd, just beyond John's escort. A splash of tepid water was thrown into his face and he spluttered for a moment, unable to wipe at his eyes. Sour drips dribbled down his neck and his black t-shirt stuck to his chest and shoulders in sticky dampness.
"Ho, there!" guffawed one of John's guards, sounding not at all upset, "Not yet, citizen. This Pretty is for Final Feast." John gulped.
Another cup of water drenched his shirt, followed by a handful of trash. The guards were laughing, offering up only token resistance as they walked along. Taunts of "Have some water, Pretty!" and "Not so pretty, now, are you?" were thrown his way...along with more garbage.
A particularly hard glob of something stung John's cheek and he snapped, overcoming the lethargy of the drugs enough to balk. He planted his feet, threw up his arms and slipped out of the guards' grasp rather more easily than he'd expected. He turned on his heel to run away from wherever they were taking him and made it all of three steps before his legs turned to jelly. He stumbled, forced his feet to take another step, then swayed drunkenly sideways. The harder he tried to move, the more his body betrayed him. He staggered in the opposite direction, fell to one knee, pushed himself halfway up one last time before landing on his butt in the middle of the cobblestone street.
"Get it out of my way," roared a deep and decidedly haughty voice. John was panting in great gasping wheezes as he looked up at the towering form of the dignitary who had been marching behind him. He saw a wild, black beard bordering a horribly twisted face at the top of the green, silk mountain. "Control the Pretty, guardsman, or you'll find yourself sharing its cage!"
"Yes, Lord Argyle!"
The guards hastened to yank John back to his feet, but they were grinning. John heard the crowd laughing and hooting with redoubled glee. More water and trash pelted him as they resumed the parade, but John's heart was still racing with the drug-induced, paralytic panic. He felt nauseous. The water on his head and neck just almost felt good.
John was just beginning to become aware of his surroundings again as the parade emptied out into a huge courtyard of inlaid marble and hundreds of gaudy topiary plants that looked like they might have once been pruned into tidy shapes, but had been left to grow wild. A large pavilion dominated the end of the courtyard and the crowds filled the space from one side to the other, leaving only a narrow passage for John and the guards.
"This is just really not good," he muttered again once the pavilion came more clearly into view. The ornate roof of the pavilion covered a cage about the size of Atlantis's gateroom, though not as tall. Black iron bars marched around the three open sides, and as he was hauled towards an iron gate, John could see that a wire screen separated the box into two halves. The middle screen looked decidedly weaker than the outer bars and seemed temporary somehow. Each half contained a low jumble of boulders in the center. John got the strong impression that the cage had been designed for animals - it looked just like a lion habitat at a zoo.
John was shoved through the gate and stumbled. Between the drugs and the uneven gravel flooring, he fell onto his butt again and decided he'd just stay there. The crowd outside the bars roared with laughter and pointed. John wrapped his arms around his knees and clasped his hands tightly together, trying hard to stop the tremors through his fingers. To distract himself from the nauseous feeling of the drugs, he watched the dignitary step in front of the cage and raise his hands for attention from the audience. The babble grew softer, but the rustle of fancy fabric and murmur of conversation continued.
"Citizens!" Bellowed the pompous buffoon. He addressed the crowd with the air of a politician at a rally. "Tonight we begin the Festival of the Fair with laughter and merriment!" The crowd cheered. "For three nights, we celebrate without fear and without ridicule. For three nights, the Pretties have no power over us. For three nights," he raised his hands and the crowd screamed the next words along with him, "We are the Fairest of them All!"
"You have got to be kidding me," John muttered, completely nonplussed. He was in some kind of damn fairy tale and he didn't know how he fit in, exactly. Aside from being a "pretty". Whatever that was.
The buffoon was waving for attention again and the crowd quieted, if only marginally.
"Citizens! There is more to the festival than merrymaking free from the contempt of the pretties. The Festival of the Fair is a symbol of our inner beauty, of the strength of our inner beings. For at this festival, alone, do we triumph over the mockery of our forms. At Final Feast, we will witness the victory of inner beauty over that which is merely superficial. Welcome our champion to the pavilion!"
The dignitary swept his arms behind him and John couldn't help but follow the gesture. Two (much more serious looking) guards were wrestling a startling figure through the gate on the opposite side of the temporary fencing. The creature - John could hardly bring himself to call it a man - was dressed in a simple loincloth tied with rope. His bare and deeply tanned torso was thin to just-this-side-of emmaciated, but rippled with flat, wiry muscles. He was streaked with mud in patterns that almost looked deliberate. His sun-darkened face was lined with more mud below a wild shock of short, matted grey hair. One eye was milky white in a scarred socket. The other was bright and clear but...disturbing.
The guards gave him a shove as they had John, then closed the gate with obvious haste. The man didn't stumble, but froze inside the door like a cat, clearly scanning the room with an eye for detail and a mind for escape. When his gaze flicked through the wire towards John, he tensed further and John almost squirmed under the intense scrutiny. The dignitary quieted the crowd once more.
"The Final Feast represents triumph of spirit, symbolized by the contest between the Fair and the Pretty." John peered sharply at the dignitary. Contest? Between me and...who? The animal man? His heart raced a bit at the direction his thoughts were going and, just as quickly, he felt the drugs respond with a nauseating comeback.
"But today we celebrate power. Together we are powerful. For these three nights, we suffer no consequences for expressing the rage which is rightfully ours to claim. Tonight, we gather the embers of contempt and abuse and fan them into flames of retribution. Today...we take revenge!"
The crowd fairly exploded with glee at the words and the dignitary waded back into the courtyard. A frightening chant, "Revenge! Revenge! Today we take revenge!" filled the space.
A third set of guards was pushing through the crowd towards what John had thought was a flagpole of some sort, but as the people spread to let the guards and the dignitary intersect, he gasped and struggled to his feet to see more clearly. The pavilion was two or three steps above the courtyard, so he could just see the young woman hanging between the guards. She had long, wavy brown hair and a sweet round face and was dressed in a white cotton gown. She was hardly conscious, although she kept her feet under her. Probably drugged, too, John thought. A horrible feeling of dread was kicking up the flutter his chest and he grabbed at the bars to steady himself from his own drug cocktail.
It wasn't a flagpole.
The guards heaved the bemused woman onto a small platform nailed to the pole, suspended just above a huge pile of logs and kindling. John began to pant in horror, the drugs and emotion twisting his breath into ragged gasps. The woman was tied tightly upright, her chin lolling against her chest, unaware.
"Stop! Damn you to hell! Stop!" John found himself screaming as the dignitary accepted a torch from someone in the crowd and lowered it towards the logs. He shook the bars on his cage, ran to the gate and shook the door until the hinges rattled, still yelling.
His shouts were drowned by the hysterical chanting and screaming and cheering of the crowd. John paced, his heart pounding, so furious that, for a moment, the drugs couldn't compete.
"No!"
The logs caught instantly and roared into a huge pillar of fire, engulfing the woman in orange-red flames. The crowd cried out in unison, then fell almost silent, watching.
John spun away and leaned his back against the bars, fighting down nausea. He was shaking violently with disgust and rage and...fear. A growl was the only warning he got before a filthy claw reached through from the other side of the cage and raked down his cheek and neck, hooking on the collar of his t-shirt before he could jerk away.
"What the...!" he gasped, slapping a hand over the scratches.
The man/creature was prowling the other side of the temporary screen, his eyes wild and excited.
"Damn you!" John yelled at the thing, losing his temper. His fingers came away from his cheek with drips of blood on them.
"Sssssssssskk," the man hissed and lunged at the screen again, rattling the wire before prowling again.
John staggered to the far opposite corner of the cage and sank into a small ball against the iron bars. Behind him, the sound and sickening smell of the bonfire crackled in the dusky light of the courtyard. Somewhere, music began to play a lively jig.
"Look, Mama. The Pretty is sad!" piped a small cheerful voice from beyond the bars.
John shivered and curled up even tighter. He couldn't stop his mind from drifting to "the contest" he was supposedly going to have a part in. Three nights. Two days? That was long enough, right? They'd find him before then, surely. Teyla would be scouring her contacts for rumors about insane ugly people kidnapping normal people. Rodney would download every address in the gate network. Ronon would crack skulls until someone talked. John lifted his head and found his cellmate peering at him. It leaped at the wire, shook it til it rattled, then continued to pace.
"Yeah, don't look so smug, friend," John told it. "I'm not going to be around for this contest thing, so don't get your hopes all up." He dropped his head back on his knees. "They'll find me." He said the words for himself, this time. "There's plenty of time. They'll find me."
"Ssssssssskk," it replied.