Fic: Star Differs From Star [1/1]
Look, fic! Specifically, fic for kaitsy_kait, who requested Pete/Patrick based on this video. Um. There's a Discworld character in there? Which is pretty stupid of me, because it's your fic and I don't know if you like them, but everything you need to know is in there.
Star Differs From Star
Pete/Patrick
PG
~2,000 words
All the quotes are lifted from A Matter Of Life And Death.
he’s fallen in love. that complicates things.
Lu-Tze is a genius. This is not pride or vanity, it is a simple statement of fact. He is a near-legendary philosopher, an adventurer of unlimited bravery and resourcefulness, a saint-like spiritual leader, a fighter of unparalleled strength and speed and a landscape gardener of not inconsiderable talent. His personal hygiene is beyond reproach. All of which, he reflects, makes his current position particularly undignified.
“Oh yeah,” says one voice.
“Oh God,” answers another.
The mattress above Lu-Tze dips suddenly, its springs screeching in protest and dislodging a coating of greasy, choking dust.
There are some who say that the great philosopher Lu-Tze is a man of infinite patience.
They are almost right.
-
Somewhere around third base, Pete’s date goes very, very quiet. And still. And strangely cold. “Sarah?” he tries. “Sara?” Looking up, he can’t help but notice that Sarah-Optional-H doesn’t seem to be moving. At all. Her eyes are stretched wide, staring blankly at his bedroom ceiling. She doesn’t seem to be breathing.
Pete swears, then shakes her, then swears some more when she won’t move. He considers calling an ambulance. He considers calling Andy, who’s usually good in a crisis and whose car probably has enough trunk space to hide a girl with questionable vowels. He considers calling United Air and booking a one-way ticket to Canada.
Without taking his eyes off the corpse on his bed, Pete reaches down and gropes across the floor for his pants. He touches fabric, grabs a handful of it, and yanks it into his lap before he notices that it is, in fact, part saffron-coloured robe and not, as he had hoped, the dirty denim of his jeans.
Lu-Tze clears his throat.
Pete screams.
“Don’t worry,” Lu-Tze intones. “She isn’t hurt. I’ve just had to take you out of time for a bit.” He looks apologetic.
“The fuck?” Pete gasps, wishing fervently that he’d opted for baseball instead of soccer. Field hockey. Lacrosse. Anything where the equipment had some heft to it. “How did you get in here?”
“It’s a bit complicated.”
“Fucking try me.” The guy’s tiny, bald and geriatric-looking. Pete figures he can take out one undersexed pensioner by himself, even if said pensioner seems to be able to kill nubile young blondes with the power of his mind.
“I spliced through time,” Lu-Tze explains. “There’s been a mistake, and -”
“Holy shit. Is this like that David Niven movie? Am I - ?” Pete glances at Sarah-slash-Sara and back at the monk, then lowers his voice, “am I dead? If it is like the Niven thing, then it’s your fuck up and you can’t take me ’cos we’re totally in love.”
“You can’t remember her name.”
“We’re above that. Our love is transcendental.”
“Nevertheless,” Lu-Tze attempts again, “it is vitally important that I -”
“And if I am dead I’m totally appealing because seriously, what the fuck have I done in the last twenty hours that could have killed me? I crossed at the stoplights and everything, I swear.”
Lu-Tze contemplates stepping back in time to a more convenient period of the boy’s life, possibly when he was pre-verbal. “This has nothing to do with David Niven,” he insists, “and everything to do with you buggering up the fabric of time.”
Pete screams.
-
“I did not scream,” Pete reiterates for the tenth time as he rummages through his mother’s kitchen cupboards. There has to be tea in here somewhere. “For the record. When face-to-face with a time-travelling ninja monk from space, I gave a cry of…of awe, or something. Something masculine, okay?”
Lu-Tze nods sagely and seats himself at the table next to Mrs. Wentz, who stands frozen halfway through turning a page of the TV guide. “The shelf above you.”
“Wha - oh, right. Okay.” The can Pete takes down claims to be tea, but is in fact full of pungent, brightly-coloured powder. “Um,” he says.
“I’ll manage without the tea, really.”
“No way, dude. You’re a time-travelling monk. You’ve brought me sage wisdom from a parallel world. There totally needs to be tea.”
“I’m pushed for time,” the monk explains, gesturing at the pack strapped to his back. It holds two slowly rotating colums, each glowing slightly and emitting a low, droning hum. “The machine’s winding down, and I’ve got places to be. This isn’t a social call.”
Pete’s eyes widen. “You have a time-travelling jetpack?”
Lu-Tze is above rolling his eyes. Just. “The message,” he says deliberately, “which I am supposed to impress upon you is: do not miss the bus, and if you do, don’t mention his jumper. But first and foremost, do not miss the ruddy bus. Make a good first impression. History depends upon it.”
“The fuck?” says Pete.
“What was that, sweetie?” asks his mother, glancing up from her TV guide.
Pete scans the room. There is no saffron-robed monk, and an apparent abundance of time.
Upstairs, Sarah-Easy-On-the-H screams.
there must be some way to appeal
“He get you, too?” Joe says when he straightens up, teary-eyed and gasping, and finds himself face-to-face with a bald dude in saffron-coloured like, robes. He looks kind of withered, but Joe thinks nothing of it. There are a few junkie types at every scene party; he was bound to run into them sooner or later. “Are they for a bet?” he asks, pointing at the guy’s robe before adding: “or are you like, Buddhist or something?”
“You’re laughing,” the monk-like man says, slowly. He looks confused.
“That was some pretty funny shit,” Joe points out truthfully.
“He set fire to your hair.”
“Well, yeah. Pete’s like that. I think he’s going to do Chris next, you wanna go see?”
“Your hair. It was on fire.”
“It’s Tuesday.”
“And this is alright by you?”
Joe shrugs. “He’s jumping out of a second storey window tomorrow. I get twenty bucks if nothing’s broken.”
The could-be-monk considers this. “I don’t know why I waste my bloody time on you people,” he says, eventually.
“Dude,” Joe says, impressed, “your backpack’s glowing,” and then -
-and then Pete’s laughing in his ear and slapping him on the back, and Joe doesn’t even have time to realise that everything had been much quieter a minute ago before he hears himself saying, “Was that guy with Andy?”
“What guy?”
“The Buddhist dude.”
Pete frowns, “I don’t know any Buddhist dudes, dude. Are you sure we didn’t like, burn through to your brain?”
we’re talking in space, not time
“I’m out of tea,” Andy says with a shrug. “I know it’s traditional monk fare, but it’s not like you gave me any warning.”
“How did you know I was a monk?”
“Firstly, you’re sweeping the hallway, and my landlord would never hire help. Secondly, you’re sweeping the hallway dust into symmetrical patterns, which would be pretty heavily zen for an agency cleaner. Thirdly, you’re wearing saffron-coloured robes and have an abacus strapped to your back.”
“It’s not an abacus.”
“Which brings me neatly to four: Pete called me up last year and wouldn’t shut up about some geriatric ninja dude who turned up in his house wearing a time-travelling jetpack.”
Lu-Tze is far too patient to sigh and far too wise to regret. However, he does sometimes think of the good old days, when time travel was an orderly and secret business, and then (and only then) he has been known to breathe a figurative (and only figurative) sigh of regret. “About Mr. Wentz - ”
“Make sure he catches the bus?”
“Don’t kill him before he does. I appreciate that may be frustrating, but. For the sake of History, do not punch him in the head any more than you feel is absolutely necessary.”
Andy looks thoughtful. “You know that could still kill him, right?”
Lu-Tze arranges his features into a suitably solemn expression. “We can hope.”
the training camp for a different world
Halfway through fourth period, Patrick gives up on algebra, turns to the back of his workbook and attempts to list real-life situations in which he might possibly be called upon to multiply fractions. He’s almost onto something, maybe, when Matt Henderson punches him in the thigh. Patrick sighs more wearily than a fifth grader should be able to, and pushes back his chair.
Matt blinks up at him from under the table, walkman in his lap, headphones clutched in his still-balled fist. “Come down here,” he hisses.
Patrick tucks his chair back in and picks up his pencil. Matt punches him again. “Seriously,” he hisses, louder this time, “get under the damn table.”
“No,” Patrick mutters back - perhaps a little too loudly, because Kevin is staring at him like he’s some kind of crazy person. “It’s Matt,” he says, and that seems to qualify things because now Kevin’s looking at him like Matt’s a crazy person and Patrick looks back like he’s grateful someone else understands, finally, and that’s when Matt punches him again.
“Hey, Pat.”
Patrick ducks down again, sees Matt grinning in the dark. “Why are you such an ass?” he asks. He meant to sound pissed, but it’s kind of hard to find the energy sometimes, with Matt. It’s better to skip straight to resigned.
“Because I rule,” Matt tells him, “almost as much as this song. Come her-”
“Matt? Matt? You’re not funny.” Patrick waves a hand in front of his friend’s face. He pushes his shoulder a little, trying to get a reaction, but Matt doesn’t seem to be speaking or moving.
Clearly, Patrick has slipped into a parallel universe. He takes a few deep breaths, just savouring the quiet, because when he pulls his head out from under his desk everything will be back to normal, and Matt will punch him in the kneecap and Kevin will help him walk to the nurse’s station because that’s just what happens in Math. It’s traditional.
“Patrick Stumph?”
It’s the kind of lilting old-person voice that Patrick’s only ever heard in movies, and he turns round very slowly - noting, almost sadly, that his classmates don’t start moving as soon as he sits up - until he’s face to face with, well, the kind of old person you only ever see in movies: impossibly thin and wrinkled, with tan skin and fifty layers of robe which they somehow manage to do karate kicks in, and Patrick thinks this is the coolest moment of his young life. “You don’t pronounce the h,” he says, voice shaking just a little. “Uh. That wasn’t what I was going to say.”
The old movie man smiles an old movie man smile. Patrick smiles back.
“I,” says the old man, uncrossing his skinny arms and spreading them wide, “am a monk.”
This is possibly the most anticlimactic moment of Patrick’s young life. “Duh. You’re wearing robes. They’re saffron. Like you’re not gonna be a monk. Do you know kung-fu?”
“I am a Monk of History.”
“So no.”
The Monk grits his teeth. “Look, lad. You’re going to meet this bloke called Pete Wentz. You’re going to punch him in the face. Thing is, you can’t punch him in the face, alright? I know why you’d want to - the boy misses one bloody bus and he sends the whole continuum out of whack, I’d like to get my hands on him myself, but say no more - but don’t. He’s trying to make a good first impression and if you don’t play along the future caves in on itself and we all die or, more optimistically, cease to have ever been born.” He studies Patrick’s expression. “That’s a bad thing,” he adds.
“I have to save the world?”
“Basically.”
“By not punching someone in the face?”
“Yes.”
“Someone who isn’t Matt?”
“I’m glad you understand.”
“So I can punch Matt in the face?”
“Yes.”
Patrick thinks about this. “This means you’re not going to teach me kung fu, doesn’t it?”
“Pretty much.”
“But I still get to save the world.”
“Yes.”
“And punch Matt in the face when he does that thing to my knee.”
“As much as you like.”
Patrick weighs this up. “Cool,” he decides. “Is that a jetpack?”
you have only gained
Pete runs after the bus and plasters himself against the doors when it gets to a stoplight. The driver, a middle-aged woman with the kind of this-day-has-been-too-long-already expression Pete’s noticed on a lot of people who deal with him regularly, realises just as the lights flick green that he’s not going to get out of her way, and opens the doors.
“Sorry about that,” Pete tells her, grinning, “but I have to go save the world.” He pats his pockets. “Do you have a mint?”
-
Patrick opens the door and someone sticks their tongue down his throat. There’s really no other way to describe it.
And while, under more normal, signposted circumstances, Patrick might not be opposed to this particular tongue, or these particular lips or, really, any part of this particular person, the truth is that, having just opened his door on a seemingly cannibalistic stranger, he’s a little freaked out.
But he’s also spent six years training for this moment, so he clamps his arms to his sides and very carefully Does Not Punch Pete In The Face.
“Hi,” the stranger - presumably Pete - says, pulling back and grinning, “I’m Pete. And I’d apologise and all, but I was told to make a good first impression and honestly? If you don’t like me like that, the universe is totally screwed because I suck at most other things.”
Patrick continues to Not Punch Pete.
“Oh, but for today? Bass is not one of those things. Despite what you might have been told. Or witnessed. Or heard recorded.”
Patrick makes a noise.
Inside his house, the telephone rings.
Pete watches him, eyes slowly widening and one hand coming up to cover him mouth as realisation dawns. “Oh my God, you’re not Patrick. Are you Patrick? Please tell me this is your house. And that you’re him. Hi, Patrick. Please tell me I didn’t just make out with some random teenager again, oh shit…”
“I’m Patrick,” Patrick manages.
“Halle-fucking-lujah, it talks. Can I come in?” Pete pushes past Patrick and disappears into the house. Patrick, figuring that a master criminal would a) not know about the whole punching-screwing-up-the-universe thing and b) at least attempt to be subtle, heads down the hallway to answer the phone. Pete shouts something as he passes, but Patrick tunes him out and grabs the receiver before the machine can take the call.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Patrick.”
“Katie, hi!” Patrick grins, even though she isn’t there to see it. As if on cue, there is an almighty crash from the next room. “Look, is this real important? Because I think a psychotic just broke into my house and I - ” a dull thud and a triumphant yell of saved! - “look, can I call you back? Thanks. Thanks. Me too.”
Patrick takes a deep breath, thinks of the future of the universe, and puts down the phone.
(Somewhere, there is a book half-written in which you can read about how Pete hit snooze four times instead of three, how Patrick picked up the phone on his way to the door, how some asshole said something completely inappropriate about argyle just as his girlfriend broke up with him, how Patrick decided that, of the two, it would be easier to punch the guy, how he slammed the door and left Pete to nurse his nose on the doorstep and how History, because of thesnoozebuttonthejumperthephonecallthegirl, was never made. Somewhere, in a book half-written, Patrick opens a door and these words fade).