[FICATHON] Fail Trying, for gehayi
Title: Fail Trying
Author: gileonnen
Play: 1 and 2 Henry IV, Merry Wives of Windsor
Recipient: gehayi
Characters: Falstaff, Doll Tearsheet, Mistress Quickly, Hal, Poins, Mistress and Master Page, Fenton, brief mentions of Hotspur, Kate, and Shallow
Warnings: Foul language, references to prostitution and sex droids, characters expressing misogynistic and fat-bashing attitudes and using ableist language
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jack Falstaff is a space pirate--but not a particularly good one.
Notes: I have taken some liberties with the prompt in order to keep the worldbuilding internally consistent; I hope that this will be acceptable.
There's a good deal to hate about piloting a freight scow in deep space--and certainly there's a good deal to love, as well; a good freighter is half the size of a small space station, packed with casinos and alehouses and licensed brothels. Even a bad freighter, a scant mile long and so pocked and pitted that no fool would try to bring it into the thermosphere, will at least have furnished its crew with basic amenities: two or three Dolls, a fair stock of hooch, and a working distillery.
At the moment, Jack Falstaff is piloting a truly dismal freight scow, and as the sleek pirate sloops trace complicated loops around the cargo hold, he curses the slow turn of speed on it--or, more aptly, the low speed of turn. He can't get the massive scow to swing its back end about swiftly enough to evade the pirates' lasers or disrupt their tractor beams, and he certainly can't outrun them.
"No!" he shrieks into the comm, well aware that the pirates are not on his frequency and determined not to care. "No, you can't simply sink your lasers into my hull without my permission! I'll have you know that I've stolen this shipment fairly--no one could say it wasn't fair, and now you just prance in here with your state-of-the-art sloops--I'll bet my left thigh that your fathers paid for them, you yahoos!--just prance in here and fix your tractor beams to--"
There are only two pirates, but frankly the squat freighter would be helpless against one. There had been an escort, which Falstaff had hijacked and programmed to fly itself to the Scottish Fringe; there had been a security team, but he had packed them away onto the escort. Right now, there is only Jack Falstaff and the Doll, which has some sort of suspicious fungus on its usable parts and a glitch in its vocal transceiver.
When it becomes clear that the pirates are not going to vanish if he wriggles the back end of the freighter at them, he puts the Doll on the comm and lets her hurl invective at them for ten clicks or so. It doesn't make them stop robbing his scow, but it does make him feel a bit better about matters.
By the time the pirates have departed, their own cargo holds full and each sloop dragging a mag-sled stacked with what they couldn't carry elsewise, Falstaff has resigned himself to the theft. "Take it, you bloody tossers," he mutters, dispatching a bevy of mech-droids to fix the breaches in the hull. "I'm a damn mile long! A hundred times your size! How much do you think you got?"
When he tells the story at Central London Station, of course, he will insist that they got nearly everything--but that's neither here nor there.
*
From a thousand miles out, Central London Station might as well be a small star. The entire outer hull emits a steady, piercing red light--a beacon to freighters, travellers, and commuters, like an ancient lighthouse in the stars. Central London, that oldest and greatest station in the London System, is home to just over seven million people, and at least three million of them are legal residents and visitors.
The rest are Falstaff's people: drifters from the Windsor colonies, Northumbrian raiders seeking a fence for what they've stolen, pirates of every stripe--even a fair-sized population of Frenchmen, although most are hard-working professional types who have the good sense to keep their mouths shut. It's not a good year to be French in English space.
Falstaff guides his scow to the Central London freight dock, then breezes through customs with a heartrending rendition of his misfortune with the pirates--corroborated, colorfully, by the Doll. He finds that he likes her rather well, even with the glitch. She's not a pretty thing, silver skin and chrome joints marking her very obviously a droid rather than a human being, but Falstaff has always thought that the more realistic Dolls are a bit eerie. Besides, her AI is quite good, or at any rate good enough to tell useful lies. "You're a sharp one, aren't you, darling?" he asks her, chucking her under the chin.
"Get your fucking finger off my face," she snaps, and suddenly a very strong metal-and-silicone hand has closed on his wrist and yanked it away. The Doll's fingers don't quite make it halfway around Falstaff's wrist, but she still handles him as though he were made of feathers and pasteboard. He takes a ponderous step back, blinking, and she hooks her thumbs into the belt loops of her coveralls. "Doll I may be, but I ain't your darling. Now, are you going to get my fucking sheath sanitized sometime this century?"
Falstaff makes it his first order of business to get her silicone sheathing sanitized. They stop in at the office of a halfway competent mycologist by the name of Doctor Caius--a Frenchman, but a decent chap for all that--and get the Doll a thorough scrubbing, which makes her feel almost charitable enough to stop haranguing Falstaff about what customs is going to do if they catch onto him.
"--with a goddamn hook," she finishes, triumphantly, just as they doors to the Boar's Head sweep open to permit them entrance. The proprietor glides down on them at once, greeting the Doll with solicitude and warm words; Mistress Quickly has had a soft spot for droids ever since she lost her right leg in the war and had to get it replaced. Cyborgs is people and droids is people, she would insist loudly, when her patrons sniggered about the specs on the latest model of Doll on the market. And it's on your heads to treat a Doll with a little consternation.
She's had a soft spot for people who weren't Falstaff ever since she'd clapped eyes on him, but since she clapped eyes on him evading payment on a rather large bill, he doesn't mind as much as he might.
"What's your apparition, dearie?" Mistress Quickly asks the Doll, taking her aside by the arm. "Tearsheet," the Doll answers, with a faint smirk. "Not that it's any of your goddamn business."
"Tch! Quite a tongue on you! Vocal deceiver, that is; never let it be said I'm not politically correct. Droids is people," she recites fondly. When Jack Falstaff attempts to slope off casually to his usual table, though, she fixes him with a distinctly uncharitable eye. "And you, Jack Falstaff--"
"That would be Sir Jack Falstaff; you know full well I'm a veteran--"
"Veteran of the war against sack," she snorts. "Sir Jack Falstaff, then. What do you think you're doing back in this establishment? After I said that you was in no uncertified terms not to set foot past my doors--"
"He's with me," calls a familiar voice from just past Mistress Quickly's shoulders, and she turns with a faintly exasperated smile.
The young man is handsome enough, in a fey and half-formed sort of way; he has oddly smooth skin and very bright eyes, and his lips are still small and soft as a child's. He wears his dark hair halfway down to his chin, and it lies smooth and flat against his skull. He looks like he was made in a factory.
Of course, he's the prince of England, so Falstaff's not going to tell him that.
"Fat Jack Falstaff," says Hal genially, spreading his arms to indicate that there's a space available (just barely too small, of course, because like most good-looking young men, Hal can be a right bastard about other people's bodies). "I heard you came into some fine merchandise on your way into London C." He says London C. as though he's earnt the right to it, as though he's a Londoner just like the rest of them in the tavern--and if he's a poseur, somehow everyone finds it in their hearts to forgive him. There's not many of his class that would want to pose as Central Londoners.
"Ill luck," says Falstaff, and he adopts a grave manner as he lowers himself into his seat (just barely too small). "Halfway--no, slightly more than halfway from Rochester, I was beset by an entire fleet of pirates!"
"A fleet, eh?" At the corner of the table, which is to say in the corner of the tavern, Ned Poins sits with his arm over the back of his booth seat and a bright green drink in his hand. He is a big man, tall and rawboned, with skin like warm chocolate and a smirk like the prince's. He wears his nails neatly manicured, each one varnished a green brighter than his drink. "How big a fleet are we talking about?"
"At least seventy!" Falstaff answers. He can't help letting a note of horror creep into his voice; he's at his best when he's telling tall tales, and he's well aware of it. "Thirty sloops and forty brigs, bare minimum--each one dragging a brace of grav-sleds behind it. I fought as bravely as I could; I must have knocked twelve of them out of the sky, but those old freight scows ... well, to say it plainly, they're just not as maneuverable as I might like ..."
He pauses there, because for some unaccountable reason, Hal appears to have snorted a pint of good Madeira across the table. Falstaff turns to him, gravely, ponderously, and fixes him with eyes that he knows must look very serious and pained. "I fail to see what's so damn funny," he remarks, which only makes Poins nearly choke on his drink.
"For God's sake," says the Doll--Tearsheet, was that her name?--as she rests her hip on their table. "Even I've figured it out by now."
Falstaff gives her an uncomprehending look.
"These wankers--" and she places a strong, chrome-and-silver hand on Hal's shoulder "--were our pirates. And they did it to make you look a damn fool."
At that, Hal and Poins fall over themselves at the table, clapping each other's backs and laughing fit to burst.
If he had any dignity, Falstaff would gathered it around himself and left their table. Having none, he swallows his indignation, calls for another cup of sack, and lets the boys laugh.
They're young yet--too young to have been in the wars, and for all Mistress Quickly thinks it doesn't make a difference having been if one didn't lose a limb, it does, and that's the end of it. While Falstaff was piloting a fighter out in the Raven's Spur Nebula, picking on enemy supply lines and earning a reputation as a fair soldier and the go-to sutler, where was the prince? When King Henry was a backwater nobody banished from English space, where was his son? In a bathhouse in bloody London C., drunk off his arse.
Too young to know what loyalty means, and certainly too young to be jaded to it. They don't know what they did; it was all a lark to them, and they didn't--well, they did mean harm by it, but not the sort of harm they dealt him.
Falstaff calls the Doll to sit in his lap, but she declines. He's never known a Doll to decline; they're not programmed to decline, but here she is declining. "Come on, love, just perch on my knee here--"
"No," she says firmly. "I just got sanitized."
"She's a tough nut to crack," Poins observes, still with that faint smirk on his lips. "Not sure you've got a big enough cracker for that one."
"No speculating on the size of Falstaff's cracker," laughs Hal. "Come on, then--another round for the table, Mistress, and two rounds for Falstaff. If his belly goes empty, he'd deflate like a balloon."
"Say what you like," Falstaff answers him tightly, "And I'll take it; no, I won't say a thing against you. It's bad manners to mock a boy who grew up without a father."
For just an instant, the look that Hal shoots him is laced with pure venom--and then he is turning back to Poins to remark on the Doll's chassis, cool and sexless as a man eying a new ship.
*
The word from the Scottish Fringe is--well, plainly, it's not good, which in a roundabout sort of way means that it's very good. War means that smugglers can turn sutlers, pirates turn privateers; it used to mean that knights got commissioned to serve conscriptions and muster troops, but since Henry IV has established a standing army, apparently that's off. What knights can do is engineer substitutions for upstanding members of the standing army who joined to fund their educations or because it was better than asteroid mining--because there are always poor young things desperate for money, foreigners seeking a straight pass to citizenship, and old warhorses desperate to regain their glory days.
And there are certainly always soldiers with cold feet.
"I see you've got ... what is that, five children?" Falstaff leans in to take a look at the tiny LCD screen that his prospect is holding across the faux-granite table. They are seated together in a shabby little restaurant, enjoying a perfectly respectable meal over business. It's certainly nothing as sordid as service evasion. "Ah, six, I see. Well, certainly it's no good for them to go hungry when their mother could be off earning a decent wage on the Fringe--"
"I'm desperate to work," she puts in anxiously.
"Do you have any pre-existing conditions that might hinder you in the noble service of King and Country?" asks Falstaff. She hesitates, and her mouth wrinkles up like a little dried fruit. It's a clear answer that Falstaff is patently determined to ignore. "No pre-existing conditions, very good--and your physical exam appears to be in order." He pauses to bring up one of a series of identical clean bills of health on his touchpad, then passes it across the table to her. "Fill in your weight and height; you can pass for twenty-four, can't you?"
At the next table, the twenty-four-year-old young soldier whom this mother of six will be replacing jogs her leg anxiously, her hands folded on the table and her eyes fixed on the bowl of greens that she hasn't yet touched. She is firm-bodied, fit, capable, well-trained--and terrified out of her mind at the prospect of the Fringe. She's paid a fair sum to get out of the fleet, and now all that remains is to have her verify her documents with a fingerprint signature.
Really, Falstaff is doing these ladies a kindness. For a fee, of course.
He realizes after a moment that the mother is staring at him across the table, her mouth still beaded up small and her brows lined. "I can't write," she confesses, after a moment. "I don't know what to put in the boxes."
"Well--that's never stopped our greatest generals from serving, has it? Let me put you to rights," he says as he retrieves the touchpad. He makes a quick estimate of height and weight, then offers the soldier the touchpad to sign.
"Thank you, Sir John," says the mother, and her eyes shine with gratitude. "Thanks, Sir John," the soldier echoes.
It feels rather nice to be called Sir John. He makes a note to be called it more often.
*
There's a good deal to love about piloting a fighter ship--it handles beautifully, for one; the thrusters synch perfectly, redirecting momentum easy as a dream, and it can both exceed the speed of light without a four-hour warmup procedure and maintain that speed for more than a few days at a time.
There are two things to hate about piloting a fighter ship, especially a really dismal fighter ship like the one Falstaff is piloting: namely, the pilot's chair is built for a man not above fourteen stone, and once he's squeezed into said chair, it's damnably hard to squeeze out to visit the loo.
By the second day, the Doll is piloting, and Falstaff doesn't feel the least bit slighted by it. She calls him up whenever someone opens a hailing frequency--"The other bastards want you, and I ain't answering!"--and she doesn't need to sleep or eat; all in all, it's the best possible arrangement. During the transit to the Fringe, Falstaff actually has the chance to catch up on his sleep.
There's no real, tangible marker for the Scottish Fringe; space isn't static, and beacons would get whirled away by some star's gravity or drift about in relation to the pertinent constellations. More importantly, thinks Falstaff, they might get nicked by young Scottish lads out on a lark.
There are, nonetheless, points that are unmistakably Scottish or Northumbrian--and what with the Percy family defecting, even Northumbrian territory has gotten pretty well bollocksed up. Even before they reach the Twine--a cloud of twisted particle streams arcing between a massive nebula and a far-distant star--they've already had a few skirmishes with the border lads. Falstaff sleeps through the first, and readouts later reveal that the Doll has acquitted herself ably; after the second, she earns a commendation from the king himself that Falstaff is more than willing to accept.
Somewhere out there, he knows, Hal is either making a name for himself or disgracing himself abominably. In the former case, Falstaff will have himself a powerful friend; in the latter, he'll be able to lend a consoling shoulder. In either case, he is not really interested enough to pay much mind to the chatter on the open frequency.
He is quite surprised to learn, halfway through the eighth day out and only a third of the way through a really enjoyable nap, that he is in a dispute with Hal over which of them has disabled young Harry Percy's brigantine.
"--cocksucking bastard, this kill belongs to Callsign 8-3-4-Theta-6, and you can boil your head in lye if you think that--"
"That's quite enough, Tearsheet," Falstaff cuts in, rubbing crusts from the corners of his eyes. "But, er, yes. Our kill--"
"Cripple," says Hal. Over the comm, his voice is even more snide than usual. "Hotspur's gone. His wife has arranged an exchange of prisoners; they gave us back Lancaster" by which he means his brother "and we let them rescue their fearless leader. Which you'd know," he says, and Falstaff can hear the smirk. "Because it's your cripple."
"So you acknowledge that it's mine," says Falstaff. He feels that he has mustered sufficient aplomb for what his chronometer tells him is three past six in the morning.
There is a long pause, and a sound like a hand being placed over the transceiver. When Hal responds again, his voice is newly mirthful. "Certainly. Your cripple, of course. I should never have suggested otherwise."
The gesture of goodwill leaves Falstaff gobsmacked. He glances at the Doll, who turns her ocular receivers to process him in return. The corner of her lips twitches a little, and he can't help smiling back.
*
When the king bawls him out and revokes his commendation for earning a cripple rather than a kill, Falstaff swallows the lump in his throat and tries to bluff his way back into the king's good graces.
He fails, but at least he fails in trying.
*
Somehow or another, Falstaff washes up on Windsor, where he engages is a brief bout of identity theft before he joins a perfectly respectable smuggling ring that specializes in knockoff athletic gear. It's a bit of a dull route, but Falstaff has begun to feel rather dull, as well. He leaves the Doll with Mistress Quickly in Central London Station--for although she's an admirable co-pilot, she's a bit striking for the quieter Windsor sort.
If he were a more poetic man, he might be given to speculate upon the purity of the air on a real, honest planet--or perhaps the vividness of light from a nearby sun, or the way true gravity feels beneath his feet.
Jack Falstaff has never been a terribly poetic man.
"You look a bit down at the mouth," remarks Mistress Page, setting a glass of wine before him with an inquiring sort of look. "A man of your age--it's either a lover, a creditor, or a child."
"Worse than all three," Falstaff answers with a soulful sigh. She is a beautiful woman, and she keeps a fine establishment; at his age, he supposes that those are the kinds of things of which a man ought to be conscious. (She's married, but he thinks that he can work around that.) He could do worse than to win her sympathy. "A boy I love like my own child--and I've fallen into his debt--I, who was never indebted to any man before--"
"Are you giving that old man my good Madeira?" demands Master Page from the counter. "He hasn't yet paid his tab--not once."
Mistress Page's face hardens at once, and before Falstaff can reach for his glass to guard it, she's snatched it back up. "Don't try to sweet-talk me with a sob story," she snaps, and scrubs at the table before him fiercely before she withdraws.
Falstaff retreats to the shipyard, only to find that his slim little brig has been seized in conjunction with an investigation of a smuggling ring engaged in illegal diamond sales. It's just a little flattering that he has been estimated so highly, although he can't imagine what will happen when the constabulary finds a fat shipment of knockoff trainers in his cargo hold. His smuggler contacts refuse to answer his increasingly urgent calls, and when he dials them at near midnight from a service station, a mechanical voice informs him that the number has been disconnected.
This may or may not be the case; it's dead easy to hire a Doll to read from a script. Whatever has happened, though, they're not answering.
With a heavy heart, he calls up the only man he really knows on all of godforsaken Windsor: Justice Shallow. The man is pathetically grateful to hear from an old schoolfellow, even in the middle of the night--he doesn't even give Falstaff a chance to get started on his sob story before he's insisting (between rheumy coughs) that Falstaff must come to visit.
They stay up until at least three, reminiscing about their old schooldays and the fine times they spent pranking the professors; they go to bed melancholy and spent.
It's easy to laugh at Shallow when his best days are clearly behind him.
It's harder for Falstaff to laugh at himself.
*
When he catches sight of Poins and Hal drinking on the patio outside Master Page's bar and kebab shop, Falstaff almost can't believe his eyes--but there they are, Poins with his nails and eyelids done in powder-blue, Hal with his hair in a brisk, military cut. The prince looks older, somehow more fully-hardened; he looks like a much better replica of a person than he had before.
They are speaking and laughing as they never did in Falstaff's presence, leaning in close to seize each other's shoulders when they laugh. After a long moment, a whiskery fellow with a weak chin--Kent or Fenton or some such--comes to join them, and they make precisely enough space for him at their table.
"Well," says Shallow, wrinkling his nose at their easy laughter. He folds his arms primly; for all he brags about his japes, he can't abide youth in the young. "That's a bad lot--I can smell it on them."
"Just a bit too far away to smell," replies Falstaff as jovially as he can manage. He stifles a cough in one hand and tries not to think about whatever he's picked up from Shallow. There is a devilish tickle in his throat that won't leave him be, although he's sucked on lozenges and downed sweet wine as dutifully as he can.
"Oh, I doubt it," Shallow answers. "A smell like that spreads, if you take my meaning."
*
When Falstaff finally books a berth on a passenger freighter out to Central London Station, he is coughing heavily. He disturbs the others in his cabin, who edge as far away as the close seating and his own bulk will allow. There are vids on the entertainment screen, but he can't make himself concentrate on them.
London C., he tells himself. Everything will be all right when I get to London C. There will be a place at the table for me.
Author: gileonnen
Play: 1 and 2 Henry IV, Merry Wives of Windsor
Recipient: gehayi
Characters: Falstaff, Doll Tearsheet, Mistress Quickly, Hal, Poins, Mistress and Master Page, Fenton, brief mentions of Hotspur, Kate, and Shallow
Warnings: Foul language, references to prostitution and sex droids, characters expressing misogynistic and fat-bashing attitudes and using ableist language
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Jack Falstaff is a space pirate--but not a particularly good one.
Notes: I have taken some liberties with the prompt in order to keep the worldbuilding internally consistent; I hope that this will be acceptable.
There's a good deal to hate about piloting a freight scow in deep space--and certainly there's a good deal to love, as well; a good freighter is half the size of a small space station, packed with casinos and alehouses and licensed brothels. Even a bad freighter, a scant mile long and so pocked and pitted that no fool would try to bring it into the thermosphere, will at least have furnished its crew with basic amenities: two or three Dolls, a fair stock of hooch, and a working distillery.
At the moment, Jack Falstaff is piloting a truly dismal freight scow, and as the sleek pirate sloops trace complicated loops around the cargo hold, he curses the slow turn of speed on it--or, more aptly, the low speed of turn. He can't get the massive scow to swing its back end about swiftly enough to evade the pirates' lasers or disrupt their tractor beams, and he certainly can't outrun them.
"No!" he shrieks into the comm, well aware that the pirates are not on his frequency and determined not to care. "No, you can't simply sink your lasers into my hull without my permission! I'll have you know that I've stolen this shipment fairly--no one could say it wasn't fair, and now you just prance in here with your state-of-the-art sloops--I'll bet my left thigh that your fathers paid for them, you yahoos!--just prance in here and fix your tractor beams to--"
There are only two pirates, but frankly the squat freighter would be helpless against one. There had been an escort, which Falstaff had hijacked and programmed to fly itself to the Scottish Fringe; there had been a security team, but he had packed them away onto the escort. Right now, there is only Jack Falstaff and the Doll, which has some sort of suspicious fungus on its usable parts and a glitch in its vocal transceiver.
When it becomes clear that the pirates are not going to vanish if he wriggles the back end of the freighter at them, he puts the Doll on the comm and lets her hurl invective at them for ten clicks or so. It doesn't make them stop robbing his scow, but it does make him feel a bit better about matters.
By the time the pirates have departed, their own cargo holds full and each sloop dragging a mag-sled stacked with what they couldn't carry elsewise, Falstaff has resigned himself to the theft. "Take it, you bloody tossers," he mutters, dispatching a bevy of mech-droids to fix the breaches in the hull. "I'm a damn mile long! A hundred times your size! How much do you think you got?"
When he tells the story at Central London Station, of course, he will insist that they got nearly everything--but that's neither here nor there.
*
From a thousand miles out, Central London Station might as well be a small star. The entire outer hull emits a steady, piercing red light--a beacon to freighters, travellers, and commuters, like an ancient lighthouse in the stars. Central London, that oldest and greatest station in the London System, is home to just over seven million people, and at least three million of them are legal residents and visitors.
The rest are Falstaff's people: drifters from the Windsor colonies, Northumbrian raiders seeking a fence for what they've stolen, pirates of every stripe--even a fair-sized population of Frenchmen, although most are hard-working professional types who have the good sense to keep their mouths shut. It's not a good year to be French in English space.
Falstaff guides his scow to the Central London freight dock, then breezes through customs with a heartrending rendition of his misfortune with the pirates--corroborated, colorfully, by the Doll. He finds that he likes her rather well, even with the glitch. She's not a pretty thing, silver skin and chrome joints marking her very obviously a droid rather than a human being, but Falstaff has always thought that the more realistic Dolls are a bit eerie. Besides, her AI is quite good, or at any rate good enough to tell useful lies. "You're a sharp one, aren't you, darling?" he asks her, chucking her under the chin.
"Get your fucking finger off my face," she snaps, and suddenly a very strong metal-and-silicone hand has closed on his wrist and yanked it away. The Doll's fingers don't quite make it halfway around Falstaff's wrist, but she still handles him as though he were made of feathers and pasteboard. He takes a ponderous step back, blinking, and she hooks her thumbs into the belt loops of her coveralls. "Doll I may be, but I ain't your darling. Now, are you going to get my fucking sheath sanitized sometime this century?"
Falstaff makes it his first order of business to get her silicone sheathing sanitized. They stop in at the office of a halfway competent mycologist by the name of Doctor Caius--a Frenchman, but a decent chap for all that--and get the Doll a thorough scrubbing, which makes her feel almost charitable enough to stop haranguing Falstaff about what customs is going to do if they catch onto him.
"--with a goddamn hook," she finishes, triumphantly, just as they doors to the Boar's Head sweep open to permit them entrance. The proprietor glides down on them at once, greeting the Doll with solicitude and warm words; Mistress Quickly has had a soft spot for droids ever since she lost her right leg in the war and had to get it replaced. Cyborgs is people and droids is people, she would insist loudly, when her patrons sniggered about the specs on the latest model of Doll on the market. And it's on your heads to treat a Doll with a little consternation.
She's had a soft spot for people who weren't Falstaff ever since she'd clapped eyes on him, but since she clapped eyes on him evading payment on a rather large bill, he doesn't mind as much as he might.
"What's your apparition, dearie?" Mistress Quickly asks the Doll, taking her aside by the arm. "Tearsheet," the Doll answers, with a faint smirk. "Not that it's any of your goddamn business."
"Tch! Quite a tongue on you! Vocal deceiver, that is; never let it be said I'm not politically correct. Droids is people," she recites fondly. When Jack Falstaff attempts to slope off casually to his usual table, though, she fixes him with a distinctly uncharitable eye. "And you, Jack Falstaff--"
"That would be Sir Jack Falstaff; you know full well I'm a veteran--"
"Veteran of the war against sack," she snorts. "Sir Jack Falstaff, then. What do you think you're doing back in this establishment? After I said that you was in no uncertified terms not to set foot past my doors--"
"He's with me," calls a familiar voice from just past Mistress Quickly's shoulders, and she turns with a faintly exasperated smile.
The young man is handsome enough, in a fey and half-formed sort of way; he has oddly smooth skin and very bright eyes, and his lips are still small and soft as a child's. He wears his dark hair halfway down to his chin, and it lies smooth and flat against his skull. He looks like he was made in a factory.
Of course, he's the prince of England, so Falstaff's not going to tell him that.
"Fat Jack Falstaff," says Hal genially, spreading his arms to indicate that there's a space available (just barely too small, of course, because like most good-looking young men, Hal can be a right bastard about other people's bodies). "I heard you came into some fine merchandise on your way into London C." He says London C. as though he's earnt the right to it, as though he's a Londoner just like the rest of them in the tavern--and if he's a poseur, somehow everyone finds it in their hearts to forgive him. There's not many of his class that would want to pose as Central Londoners.
"Ill luck," says Falstaff, and he adopts a grave manner as he lowers himself into his seat (just barely too small). "Halfway--no, slightly more than halfway from Rochester, I was beset by an entire fleet of pirates!"
"A fleet, eh?" At the corner of the table, which is to say in the corner of the tavern, Ned Poins sits with his arm over the back of his booth seat and a bright green drink in his hand. He is a big man, tall and rawboned, with skin like warm chocolate and a smirk like the prince's. He wears his nails neatly manicured, each one varnished a green brighter than his drink. "How big a fleet are we talking about?"
"At least seventy!" Falstaff answers. He can't help letting a note of horror creep into his voice; he's at his best when he's telling tall tales, and he's well aware of it. "Thirty sloops and forty brigs, bare minimum--each one dragging a brace of grav-sleds behind it. I fought as bravely as I could; I must have knocked twelve of them out of the sky, but those old freight scows ... well, to say it plainly, they're just not as maneuverable as I might like ..."
He pauses there, because for some unaccountable reason, Hal appears to have snorted a pint of good Madeira across the table. Falstaff turns to him, gravely, ponderously, and fixes him with eyes that he knows must look very serious and pained. "I fail to see what's so damn funny," he remarks, which only makes Poins nearly choke on his drink.
"For God's sake," says the Doll--Tearsheet, was that her name?--as she rests her hip on their table. "Even I've figured it out by now."
Falstaff gives her an uncomprehending look.
"These wankers--" and she places a strong, chrome-and-silver hand on Hal's shoulder "--were our pirates. And they did it to make you look a damn fool."
At that, Hal and Poins fall over themselves at the table, clapping each other's backs and laughing fit to burst.
If he had any dignity, Falstaff would gathered it around himself and left their table. Having none, he swallows his indignation, calls for another cup of sack, and lets the boys laugh.
They're young yet--too young to have been in the wars, and for all Mistress Quickly thinks it doesn't make a difference having been if one didn't lose a limb, it does, and that's the end of it. While Falstaff was piloting a fighter out in the Raven's Spur Nebula, picking on enemy supply lines and earning a reputation as a fair soldier and the go-to sutler, where was the prince? When King Henry was a backwater nobody banished from English space, where was his son? In a bathhouse in bloody London C., drunk off his arse.
Too young to know what loyalty means, and certainly too young to be jaded to it. They don't know what they did; it was all a lark to them, and they didn't--well, they did mean harm by it, but not the sort of harm they dealt him.
Falstaff calls the Doll to sit in his lap, but she declines. He's never known a Doll to decline; they're not programmed to decline, but here she is declining. "Come on, love, just perch on my knee here--"
"No," she says firmly. "I just got sanitized."
"She's a tough nut to crack," Poins observes, still with that faint smirk on his lips. "Not sure you've got a big enough cracker for that one."
"No speculating on the size of Falstaff's cracker," laughs Hal. "Come on, then--another round for the table, Mistress, and two rounds for Falstaff. If his belly goes empty, he'd deflate like a balloon."
"Say what you like," Falstaff answers him tightly, "And I'll take it; no, I won't say a thing against you. It's bad manners to mock a boy who grew up without a father."
For just an instant, the look that Hal shoots him is laced with pure venom--and then he is turning back to Poins to remark on the Doll's chassis, cool and sexless as a man eying a new ship.
*
The word from the Scottish Fringe is--well, plainly, it's not good, which in a roundabout sort of way means that it's very good. War means that smugglers can turn sutlers, pirates turn privateers; it used to mean that knights got commissioned to serve conscriptions and muster troops, but since Henry IV has established a standing army, apparently that's off. What knights can do is engineer substitutions for upstanding members of the standing army who joined to fund their educations or because it was better than asteroid mining--because there are always poor young things desperate for money, foreigners seeking a straight pass to citizenship, and old warhorses desperate to regain their glory days.
And there are certainly always soldiers with cold feet.
"I see you've got ... what is that, five children?" Falstaff leans in to take a look at the tiny LCD screen that his prospect is holding across the faux-granite table. They are seated together in a shabby little restaurant, enjoying a perfectly respectable meal over business. It's certainly nothing as sordid as service evasion. "Ah, six, I see. Well, certainly it's no good for them to go hungry when their mother could be off earning a decent wage on the Fringe--"
"I'm desperate to work," she puts in anxiously.
"Do you have any pre-existing conditions that might hinder you in the noble service of King and Country?" asks Falstaff. She hesitates, and her mouth wrinkles up like a little dried fruit. It's a clear answer that Falstaff is patently determined to ignore. "No pre-existing conditions, very good--and your physical exam appears to be in order." He pauses to bring up one of a series of identical clean bills of health on his touchpad, then passes it across the table to her. "Fill in your weight and height; you can pass for twenty-four, can't you?"
At the next table, the twenty-four-year-old young soldier whom this mother of six will be replacing jogs her leg anxiously, her hands folded on the table and her eyes fixed on the bowl of greens that she hasn't yet touched. She is firm-bodied, fit, capable, well-trained--and terrified out of her mind at the prospect of the Fringe. She's paid a fair sum to get out of the fleet, and now all that remains is to have her verify her documents with a fingerprint signature.
Really, Falstaff is doing these ladies a kindness. For a fee, of course.
He realizes after a moment that the mother is staring at him across the table, her mouth still beaded up small and her brows lined. "I can't write," she confesses, after a moment. "I don't know what to put in the boxes."
"Well--that's never stopped our greatest generals from serving, has it? Let me put you to rights," he says as he retrieves the touchpad. He makes a quick estimate of height and weight, then offers the soldier the touchpad to sign.
"Thank you, Sir John," says the mother, and her eyes shine with gratitude. "Thanks, Sir John," the soldier echoes.
It feels rather nice to be called Sir John. He makes a note to be called it more often.
*
There's a good deal to love about piloting a fighter ship--it handles beautifully, for one; the thrusters synch perfectly, redirecting momentum easy as a dream, and it can both exceed the speed of light without a four-hour warmup procedure and maintain that speed for more than a few days at a time.
There are two things to hate about piloting a fighter ship, especially a really dismal fighter ship like the one Falstaff is piloting: namely, the pilot's chair is built for a man not above fourteen stone, and once he's squeezed into said chair, it's damnably hard to squeeze out to visit the loo.
By the second day, the Doll is piloting, and Falstaff doesn't feel the least bit slighted by it. She calls him up whenever someone opens a hailing frequency--"The other bastards want you, and I ain't answering!"--and she doesn't need to sleep or eat; all in all, it's the best possible arrangement. During the transit to the Fringe, Falstaff actually has the chance to catch up on his sleep.
There's no real, tangible marker for the Scottish Fringe; space isn't static, and beacons would get whirled away by some star's gravity or drift about in relation to the pertinent constellations. More importantly, thinks Falstaff, they might get nicked by young Scottish lads out on a lark.
There are, nonetheless, points that are unmistakably Scottish or Northumbrian--and what with the Percy family defecting, even Northumbrian territory has gotten pretty well bollocksed up. Even before they reach the Twine--a cloud of twisted particle streams arcing between a massive nebula and a far-distant star--they've already had a few skirmishes with the border lads. Falstaff sleeps through the first, and readouts later reveal that the Doll has acquitted herself ably; after the second, she earns a commendation from the king himself that Falstaff is more than willing to accept.
Somewhere out there, he knows, Hal is either making a name for himself or disgracing himself abominably. In the former case, Falstaff will have himself a powerful friend; in the latter, he'll be able to lend a consoling shoulder. In either case, he is not really interested enough to pay much mind to the chatter on the open frequency.
He is quite surprised to learn, halfway through the eighth day out and only a third of the way through a really enjoyable nap, that he is in a dispute with Hal over which of them has disabled young Harry Percy's brigantine.
"--cocksucking bastard, this kill belongs to Callsign 8-3-4-Theta-6, and you can boil your head in lye if you think that--"
"That's quite enough, Tearsheet," Falstaff cuts in, rubbing crusts from the corners of his eyes. "But, er, yes. Our kill--"
"Cripple," says Hal. Over the comm, his voice is even more snide than usual. "Hotspur's gone. His wife has arranged an exchange of prisoners; they gave us back Lancaster" by which he means his brother "and we let them rescue their fearless leader. Which you'd know," he says, and Falstaff can hear the smirk. "Because it's your cripple."
"So you acknowledge that it's mine," says Falstaff. He feels that he has mustered sufficient aplomb for what his chronometer tells him is three past six in the morning.
There is a long pause, and a sound like a hand being placed over the transceiver. When Hal responds again, his voice is newly mirthful. "Certainly. Your cripple, of course. I should never have suggested otherwise."
The gesture of goodwill leaves Falstaff gobsmacked. He glances at the Doll, who turns her ocular receivers to process him in return. The corner of her lips twitches a little, and he can't help smiling back.
*
When the king bawls him out and revokes his commendation for earning a cripple rather than a kill, Falstaff swallows the lump in his throat and tries to bluff his way back into the king's good graces.
He fails, but at least he fails in trying.
*
Somehow or another, Falstaff washes up on Windsor, where he engages is a brief bout of identity theft before he joins a perfectly respectable smuggling ring that specializes in knockoff athletic gear. It's a bit of a dull route, but Falstaff has begun to feel rather dull, as well. He leaves the Doll with Mistress Quickly in Central London Station--for although she's an admirable co-pilot, she's a bit striking for the quieter Windsor sort.
If he were a more poetic man, he might be given to speculate upon the purity of the air on a real, honest planet--or perhaps the vividness of light from a nearby sun, or the way true gravity feels beneath his feet.
Jack Falstaff has never been a terribly poetic man.
"You look a bit down at the mouth," remarks Mistress Page, setting a glass of wine before him with an inquiring sort of look. "A man of your age--it's either a lover, a creditor, or a child."
"Worse than all three," Falstaff answers with a soulful sigh. She is a beautiful woman, and she keeps a fine establishment; at his age, he supposes that those are the kinds of things of which a man ought to be conscious. (She's married, but he thinks that he can work around that.) He could do worse than to win her sympathy. "A boy I love like my own child--and I've fallen into his debt--I, who was never indebted to any man before--"
"Are you giving that old man my good Madeira?" demands Master Page from the counter. "He hasn't yet paid his tab--not once."
Mistress Page's face hardens at once, and before Falstaff can reach for his glass to guard it, she's snatched it back up. "Don't try to sweet-talk me with a sob story," she snaps, and scrubs at the table before him fiercely before she withdraws.
Falstaff retreats to the shipyard, only to find that his slim little brig has been seized in conjunction with an investigation of a smuggling ring engaged in illegal diamond sales. It's just a little flattering that he has been estimated so highly, although he can't imagine what will happen when the constabulary finds a fat shipment of knockoff trainers in his cargo hold. His smuggler contacts refuse to answer his increasingly urgent calls, and when he dials them at near midnight from a service station, a mechanical voice informs him that the number has been disconnected.
This may or may not be the case; it's dead easy to hire a Doll to read from a script. Whatever has happened, though, they're not answering.
With a heavy heart, he calls up the only man he really knows on all of godforsaken Windsor: Justice Shallow. The man is pathetically grateful to hear from an old schoolfellow, even in the middle of the night--he doesn't even give Falstaff a chance to get started on his sob story before he's insisting (between rheumy coughs) that Falstaff must come to visit.
They stay up until at least three, reminiscing about their old schooldays and the fine times they spent pranking the professors; they go to bed melancholy and spent.
It's easy to laugh at Shallow when his best days are clearly behind him.
It's harder for Falstaff to laugh at himself.
*
When he catches sight of Poins and Hal drinking on the patio outside Master Page's bar and kebab shop, Falstaff almost can't believe his eyes--but there they are, Poins with his nails and eyelids done in powder-blue, Hal with his hair in a brisk, military cut. The prince looks older, somehow more fully-hardened; he looks like a much better replica of a person than he had before.
They are speaking and laughing as they never did in Falstaff's presence, leaning in close to seize each other's shoulders when they laugh. After a long moment, a whiskery fellow with a weak chin--Kent or Fenton or some such--comes to join them, and they make precisely enough space for him at their table.
"Well," says Shallow, wrinkling his nose at their easy laughter. He folds his arms primly; for all he brags about his japes, he can't abide youth in the young. "That's a bad lot--I can smell it on them."
"Just a bit too far away to smell," replies Falstaff as jovially as he can manage. He stifles a cough in one hand and tries not to think about whatever he's picked up from Shallow. There is a devilish tickle in his throat that won't leave him be, although he's sucked on lozenges and downed sweet wine as dutifully as he can.
"Oh, I doubt it," Shallow answers. "A smell like that spreads, if you take my meaning."
*
When Falstaff finally books a berth on a passenger freighter out to Central London Station, he is coughing heavily. He disturbs the others in his cabin, who edge as far away as the close seating and his own bulk will allow. There are vids on the entertainment screen, but he can't make himself concentrate on them.
London C., he tells himself. Everything will be all right when I get to London C. There will be a place at the table for me.