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badly_knittedTitle: Self-Doubt
Fandom: The Fantastic Journey
Author:
badly_knittedCharacters: Varian, Jonathan, Fred, Scott, Liana.
Rating: PG
Written For: Challenge 503: Bicker at
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drabble_zone.Spoilers/Setting: Funhouse.
Summary: As they make their way out of Apollonius’ zone, Varian is plagued with worry and doubt.
Disclaimer: I don’t own The Fantastic Journey, or the characters. They belong to their creators.
A/N: Quadruple drabble.
Heading away from the fateful carnival and out of Apollonius’s zone, Varian kept his eyes fixed on the way ahead, never looking back, not ready to face his friends, not after everything that had happened. He could still feel the tightness in his shoulders and back, lingering remnants of the stress he was sure they’d all been feeling almost since the moment Scott had first disappeared.
He’d thought that encountering physical violence had been bad enough, requiring him to reevaluate everything he’d thought he understood, but the cold, calculating malevolence of the ancient magician was something even more incomprehensible and chilling. To take someone else’s body, to deliberately overpower a living, thinking person’s will… That was something he couldn’t begin to understand.
Scott was still talking, and Varian answered the boy’s questions as best he could, but his own answers seemed unsatisfactory, no more than vague guesses with nothing to back them up. How could he explain something he couldn’t make sense of himself?
Behind him, he could hear the others’ footsteps crunching in the gravel and dirt. He could sense their presence, reassuringly familiar, real, natural, unlike earlier when the energy waves of one of his friends had been overlaid with a presence that shouldn’t have been there. More reassuring even than that was hearing their voices, Fred and Jonathan bickering amiably, the way they so often did, occasionally throwing comments and complaints in his direction, and Liana gently teasing them both.
He was their leader, not by choice but by circumstance, and he’d almost lost one of his friends, had nearly allowed himself to be fooled by illusions, images of Gwenith, his wife. The longing to have her back in his arms had almost been enough to distract him from his efforts to free Jonathan, and now that they were leaving the carnival behind, he had time to reflect…
If Gwenith hadn’t died, if he’d stayed with her and her people, what would have become of Jonathan? He hadn’t been strong enough to break free from Apollonius by himself, he was too unsettled in his own mind, a man, as the barker had insinuated, in search of himself. Jonathan, and perhaps Liana, would have been overpowered, Apollonius might well have escaped his captivity… It had only been chance that had allowed them all to survive intact. What kind of leader was he if he couldn’t protect his friends?
The End
He’d thought that encountering physical violence had been bad enough, requiring him to reevaluate everything he’d thought he understood, but the cold, calculating malevolence of the ancient magician was something even more incomprehensible and chilling. To take someone else’s body, to deliberately overpower a living, thinking person’s will… That was something he couldn’t begin to understand.
Scott was still talking, and Varian answered the boy’s questions as best he could, but his own answers seemed unsatisfactory, no more than vague guesses with nothing to back them up. How could he explain something he couldn’t make sense of himself?
Behind him, he could hear the others’ footsteps crunching in the gravel and dirt. He could sense their presence, reassuringly familiar, real, natural, unlike earlier when the energy waves of one of his friends had been overlaid with a presence that shouldn’t have been there. More reassuring even than that was hearing their voices, Fred and Jonathan bickering amiably, the way they so often did, occasionally throwing comments and complaints in his direction, and Liana gently teasing them both.
He was their leader, not by choice but by circumstance, and he’d almost lost one of his friends, had nearly allowed himself to be fooled by illusions, images of Gwenith, his wife. The longing to have her back in his arms had almost been enough to distract him from his efforts to free Jonathan, and now that they were leaving the carnival behind, he had time to reflect…
If Gwenith hadn’t died, if he’d stayed with her and her people, what would have become of Jonathan? He hadn’t been strong enough to break free from Apollonius by himself, he was too unsettled in his own mind, a man, as the barker had insinuated, in search of himself. Jonathan, and perhaps Liana, would have been overpowered, Apollonius might well have escaped his captivity… It had only been chance that had allowed them all to survive intact. What kind of leader was he if he couldn’t protect his friends?
The End
