Mission: Downer

[rc45]

Title: DOWNER

Author: Coconut

Rating: R-16 at least; (inaccurate) drug usage, violence. Grammar, spelling, style and punctuation bad enough to make hardened copy editors cry into their espresso.

PPC-ers: Trojanhorse, and Agent Sparky, who is free to a good home if anybody wants to continue chronicling his adventures after this.

Author's Notes: This fic would not have been possible without the inestimable assistance of Agent Paddlebrains, who not only provided betaing services but also grabbed the reins and dragged Trojie kicking and screaming through entire sentences of this atrocity at a time. Thanks also go to erowid.org - useful to legal ends for perhaps the first time ever.





Late 2005 HST

Agent Trojanhorse, freelance Bad Slash agent, Uncanonicality Sniffer Dog handler, lover of music, and walking encyclopaedia of grunge, was practicing her guitar peacefully in her response centre one grey-corridored day in the PPC Headquarters. Her partner, Agent Soulshadow, and her own sniffer dog, Deimos, were on extended and unlimited sabbatical to help work out some of Soul's more delicate emotional issues, like fiery rage, before she set fire to any one of a number of fictional continua. This left Agent Trojanhorse, or Trojie, at a bit of a loose end. Her immediate superior amongst the Flowers that Be, the Queen Anne's Lace, had taken her off LOTR work for a few weeks, saying that the Fanfic Explosion seemed to be dying down lately, and wouldn't it be nice for Trojie to not have to disentangle the intimate bits of elves for a while? Trojie could hardly argue with that, and so she had settled down in her Response Centre, nurturing her Quantum Weather Butterflies and playing her guitar. But the last week had been too quiet; she hadn't even been asked to help sort out the newly-formed Department of Angst's inexperienced Agents' problems for a while, and so while she calmly and with creditable focus rehashed the greatest hits of her favourite artists, she was constantly expecting the sound of her Response Centre buzzer in her ear at any moment.

After nearly a week of this expectation, she was suddenly and unequivocally proved correct.

[BEEEEEEEEPBLOOODYBUGGERINGBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!]

Despite having firmly expected this, Trojie still leapt two feet into the air and came down hard on her rear end, guitar clutched in iron fists and squealing feedback into the air.

'Shit! Shit! What is it this time?'

Absinthe, helpful as ever, licked Trojie's face in a comforting sort of way, if one's idea of comfort involved enough saliva to drown a sub-Saharan village. Trojie pushed her aside with some effort and reached for the console. Pressing 'Print', she waited for the pages to scroll out.

She picked up the first one, and began to read.

{Coconuts pityful Work...}

He lied in his bed with his hands behind his head, starring at the ceiling. He awaited her arrival. Every car that passed thuse,use, his heart skipped a beat. She was out with his daughter, his one pride, his life. He knew what she was doing, what she’s allowing his daughter to see, but there’s nothing he can do but wait. One car passed and slowed down. He didn’t get up, he just sat there. 3 teenage boys hung out the windows shouting:
“YEAH KURT WE LOVE YOU!!” and threw something at his window. He didn’t flinch, he only mumbled “fucking teenagers…get a life and stop worshipping me” to himself.

Trojie put down the paper, buried her head in her hands, and shook for a few minutes. When she looked up again, it was with a strange, burning look in her eyes. She got up, and folded the rest of the paper up. She put it in her Bag, which she also filled with a copy of Journals, the With The Lights Out box set, and a small CD wallet whose contents were dedicated entirely to Nirvana. Slinging the bag over her shoulders, she picked up her portable stereo. 'Sit,' she told Absinthe. 'Stay. Mummy will be back soon.' With a hand only slightly trembling she activated a portal into the fic.

Vengeance's most unlikely tool was on her way. And although she did not know it, help was just behind her.



The portal dumped her unceremoniously in a shockingly badly-defined room. It was dimly lit, and there was a bed and a window. The combination of lack of any other kind of description and constant tense-shifting meant that the room occasionally ceased to exist entirely, the poor abused Universe not knowing if it was in the past, present or future, leaving its contents floating in some kind of ethereal nothingness, then popping back into existence, broom-cupboard-sized, expanding to the size of a ballroom, and then shrinking and disappearing again.

After her eyes adjusted to the gloom and the constantly twisting dimensions, Trojie looked around, attempting to locate the subject of the fic. He lay on the bed, staring, as the author so eloquently said, at the ceiling. The sight of him was enough to bring tears to Trojie's eyes. Anorexic and lean enough to begin with even in real life, the author's treatment of him in this fic had reduced him to a skeleton with skin and lank blond hair.

The sound of a car pulling up made Trojie dart for the shadows, hardly in short supply in this room, where she waited for Courtney to turn up. Which she eventually did.

The front door opened loudly and he can hear shouted nonsense and things being thrown. She eventually stomped up the stairs and swung open the bedroom door where Kurt sat on the bed.

“Oh baby, whys it so dark? Setting the mood?” She laughed obnoxiously as she stumbled into the room, falling on the bed next to him.

The unexpected sound of another set of footsteps managed, fortunately, to dislodge Trojie from her tooth-grinding rage. She looked up, as another black-clad PPC agent stepped into the room. His hair was red, and cut into hedgehog spikes. He wore fussy little glasses. His boots were polished. He took out a notebook and started to write. Unable to contain herself any further, Trojie started forward.

'Excuse me?' she began.

'Ah,' said the strange agent. 'You must be the other Agent assigned to this fic. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Agent Sparky, from the Department of Technical Errors. I also specialise in divergent and damaging history. Which this plainly is. And you are?'

'Agent Trojanhorse,' said Trojie. 'Department of Bad Slash.'

'Interesting,' said Sparky, putting down his notebook on a handy furniture-shaped Bad Description. 'I wasn't informed that there was slash in this fic.'

'There isn't,' said Trojie helplessly.

'And yet here you are. This is odd, even for the Plants.'

'My speciality is RP musician slash. I guess that's why they assigned me.

'Oh ... I think I remember reading the memo about you,' said Sparky, puzzling Trojie. Memo? About her? The Flowers sent memos?

Sparky called it up on a small palmpilot type console, and then frowned. 'But this ... Kurt Cobain ... is registered as one of your, um ...' Sparky struggled for the diplomatic word, '... weak points?'

'Hence my surprise at being here. They normally don't let me within two hundred light years of him. I guess they ran out of other people who know who he is.' Trojie shook her head.

'Well, I suppose we'd better do something about this. The author has almost completely rewritten history here, you know. I've been training on the Discworld, and this loop is throwing things out of kilter. Two biographies are in the process of being written at the moment, as well, and you know as well as I do what happens if this loop replaces Real History.'

Trojie gulped, and then stood up straighter, glaring. 'I Can't Be Having With That,' she said. Sparky raised an eyebrow, then nodded.

'Are we going to have a problem?' he asked. When Trojie looked at him, her Determined demeanour dropping for a moment, he elaborated. 'What with him being your lust object, I mean to say.' Trojie shook her head, smiling only slightly manically.

'He's not my lust object,' she said, causing a moment of relief for Sparky (who had never understood this little quirk of female agents) before shattering it again with, 'He's just my God.'

*headdesk* sighed Sparky, and turned towards the RPs.

“Where’s Francis?” was all he could ask

“Who?” She looked at him confused. He cosee see her nose was all rosy and her eyes, bloot.
t.

'I think we might have to tag this author for investigation by the grammar and punctuation people,' said Sparky, making a brief note. He turned to Trojie for her agreement. Her face was white and her teeth clenched so tight that he feared for her dental bills. 'Trojanhorse?'

'Frances,' the Bad Slasher hissed. 'Her name was Frances. Because she was a girl. For the sake of all things Fender, she couldn't even get that right?!'

'Apparently not.' Sparky squinted at the other agent, then at the RPs. 'I have an idea,' he said. 'How about you let me, as the non-emotionally attached person here, deal with the actual chargelist and things. You can sit down there on that Undefined Furniture and be Mission Specialist. First question. Did this Courtney person drink?'

'Yes,' gritted out Trojie.

'To excess?'

'On occasion. Why?'

'Just making sure. Sit,' he added. Trojie obediently did so.

'And this Francis was ... the mutual daughter of our protagonist and antagonist?'

'Isthe mutual daughter, and yes. And her name is spelt with an E, not an I.'

'Point taken, my dear.' Sparky turned back to the RPs.

Trojie turned her own face to the scene and let the Words drift in front of her eyes.

“Whatever…where’s Francis? Our daughter? MY daughter…”
“Oh...HER…yeah she’s downstairs with the nanny”

He quickly got up to go downstairs to make sure that she was alright. He got to the door when a sudden smash stopped him. He turned around to see Courtney sitting on the, hu, huffing for air, and clenching the sheets in her hands.

'I'm ... not entirely sure what just happened there,' Sparky said, frowning at Courtney's twisted gyrations as she tried to sit on a hu. 'Charge for blatant lack of a beta-reader?'

Trojie simply growled in response.

'That'd be a yes, then.'

“Why are you leaving? Is there someone else?”
“What? No, I’m going to go see Francis!”
“Who’s that? Your girlfriend?”
“Are you stoned?! Francis! Our daugh…you know what, never mind. It’s not worth it.”
“DON’T YOU LEAVE ME YOU FUCK!”

'Are you sure it's wise for you to be watching this?' came Sparky's voice in her ear. Trojie jumped, and started to register her surroundings. Her jaw hurt. Now why would that be? she wondered. Oh, right. She unclenched, and felt the pain recede.

'As long as you are watching, I suppose this accusation of unfaithfulness on the part of Kurt is valid?'

'Bugger off!' Trojie protested. teeth returning inexorably to their gritted position. 'If either of them was cheating, it was Courtney. But nothing's substantiated. The accusation might be in character, though.'

'How about the 'are you stoned?''

'In character, both accusation and actually being stoned, but not at all suitable in this context.' Somehow it was easier to get clinical about this travesty.

'I rather gathered. Bad language?'

'Entirely in character.'

'Right.' More scribbling, then Trojie felt her arm being pulled. 'Come on,' said Sparky. 'We have to follow them.'

Trojie relinquished her seat on the Undefined Furniture, and followed the other Agent.

Suddenly Sparky pushed her against the wall and flattened himself beside her. There was a thunderous pounding and shaking, and something, or several somethings, huge and rather smelly, shouldered past at high speed.

'What the hell was that?' asked Trojie, once she'd recovered her breath. Sparky, wheezing, pointed to the relevant paragraph.

He made it halfway down the hallway when what seemed to be a herd of rhinos,

came trampling down the hallway after him. He quickly turned but it was too late. Courtney ran down after him and tackled him to the floor.

Kurt lay on the floor, apparently fighting half-heartedly with Courtney. A small male child, presumably Francis, appeared out of nowhere to witness the 'battle'. A scuffle, more like. As they observed the interloper, he began warping and stretching into a five-pointed star. It looked painful.

'What in Glod's name...?' Trojie asked.

'Typo,' Sparky explained. 'I think he's supposed to be staring.'

Courtney sent the inexplicable young boy to his room, accompanied by much shouting and wholly inappropriate language. Courtne then resumed hammering on the door behind which Kurt was slumped.

“LET ME IN! LET ME IU LIU LITTLE SHIT!!”

'I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest making this woman yodel is a charge.'

'Spot on,' Trojie growled. The words were barely distinguishable over the sound of teeth grinding themselves to bloody stumps.

“NO! Not until you sober up and realize how much HELL you are putting me through!”
“HELL? YOU THINK THIS IS HELL?!” she ran back down the hallway and charged at the door, knocking Kurt out of the way. He quickly stood up and faced the woman that was almost 2 times the size of him. His face was filled with anger and concern.

'That's got to hurt,' Agent Sparky said, jotting down another charge as Courtney ballooned in size, as though someone, probably the author if her previous disrespect for the RPs was anything to go by, had inserted a bicycle pump into an unspecified orifice. Trojie wasn't listening; her attention was focused on Kurt, who had dropped like a stone to the floor and didn't appear to be breathing. Before she could run over and begin mouth-to-mouth, the man stood and tried to pass his wife, who was still expanding.

There was more badly-typed and badly-written arguing, with overuse of the CAPSLOCK OF RAGE, and then Courtney started hitting Kurt. Who started hitting her back, and then stopped. The scene ended, or was abruptly cut off, with Courtney throttling Kurt and then smashing him over the head with an ashtray.

Trojie attempted to leap to her idol's rescue and was restrained by Sparky.

'Now, come on, be reasonable. He'll get up again, he'll be fine. Will you stop kicking me, please? I'm wearing shin pads under these trousers for this precise reason.' Sparky was not lying. When informed he would be undertaking a fic wherein the protagonist was beaten severely, with a woman who worshipped said protagonist as his partner, he had gone to the cupboard marked 'Kevlar bodyarmour' and stocked up. Eventually Trojie stopped flailing and turned once more to the Words. They would not prove to her liking.

He awoke several hours later in a daze. The sun had risen and the house was quiet. He quickly jumped up in fear for his daughters’ life. He ran throughout the house, checking every room, every corner. But no sign of them. He ran back to his bedroom, out of breath, sobbing. ”what did she do with her? Why would sh thi this? How could she!” he groaned in pain as he clenched his stomach andl tol to the floor. He crawled to the end table and reached in the drawer pulling out a black pouch filled with his ‘medicine’. He examined it for a few moments as if he was debating in his head. Without hesitating, he opened it up and filled the syringe, pumping the narcotic straight to his vein, throughout his body.

'I'm pretty sure you can't inject powder through a needle,' Trojie complained.

'You're absolutely right,' Sparky said. 'Quite aside from the fact that shooting up tends to be a bit of a ritual for users, a spoon, a belt and a lighter are necessary.'

'A belt?'

'For the tourniquet.'

'Gotcha. And the spoon?'

'Place heroin on spoon with water and --' Sparky checked his console, '-- citric acid, apparently, heat with the flame of a lighter, and then draw up into syringe.'

'How do you know all this?' Trojie wondered.

'Haven't you ever seen Trainspotting?'

The Bad Slasher shook her head.

'This is the other reason they sent me along. Your aversion to drugs is well-known.'

The stomach pain was soon lifted but he was now unable to stand. He kept nodding out. The phone rang but he made no effort to answer it.

'Well if you've done the research, does heroin actually make you all sleepy and unable to stand?'

Sparky checked his handheld console, which beeped reassuringly at him. 'Bugger,' he said.

'It does?'

'Says here nausea can affect many users. Would you say he took a large dose?'

'How in the hell should I know?'

'A large dose may produce dreamlike visual distortions. I suppose they could make it hard to stand up. Can aid sleep, it says.'

'Overall verdict?'

'Charge,' Sparky decided. 'For being too damned stupid to type "heroin" into a search engine and actually research the effects.'

'Excellent,' Trojie said, turning her attention back to the unconscious Kurt and the ringing phone.

The answering machine picked up the call; it was Courtney, being sickly and irresponsible, and almost entirely different in character to the author's previous attempt at writing her. Kurt responded, again making it clear that the author refused to countenance the idea that he'd actually loved Courtney in any capacity other than as a child-bearer. Then she made him fall down what the two Agents assumed were stairs, but as the Words said 'he just fell forward down all 23 steHe l' it was all a little unclear. Once again Trojie had to be restrained from demonstrating her efficient CPR technique.

'Can you just refrain from manhandling the poor man for five minutes?' Sparky asked, exasperated. 'Now sit and stay, because there's a temporal/spatial distortion coming up right --'

XXXX

'-- now.'

He awoken again several hours later, but this time in a bright white room. A familiar room. He slowly opened his eyes and gave them time to focus on the figure that was hovering over him. Courtney starred down at him with tear filled eyes.

'Now she's gone all star-shaped too,' said Trojie, watching as the blonde woman distorted. 'Now at least she and 'Francis' -- what are we going to do about him slash her anyway? -- at least they match.'

“W-where am I?”
“In the hospital baby. It’ll be ok…I had to come home I missed you so much, and I saw your body lying on the floor and thought you were dead!”
“Francis…where’s Francis?”
“God damnit Kurt…is that all you care about Francis?! Don’t you trust me to leave her somewhere safe? Y’know I love her too!!” She stood up from the hospital bed
“Well…You’ve yet to prove that to me!” He held his head in pain
“SHES WITH THE NANNY YOU FUCK!! TRUST ME!! LOVE ME!!”

'Sod this,' Trojie snarled. Sparky looked confused.

'I thought this was het?'

'It's an expression,' Trojie informed him, beginning the customary pre-exorcism Bag-rummage.

'Oh. Good,' Sparky said vaguely. 'What are you looking for?'

'This,' Trojie replied, standing up and brandishing a CD of Live Through This, and another of Nevermind. 'Not really heavy enough, but I've reinforced the corners with lead and added some struts, see?' She flipped open Live Through This, demonstrating the reinforcements for a moment, before flipping the case closed and taking aim.

'Hang on!' Sparky yelled, jumping in front of Courtney and grabbing her, either to prevent her escape or to act as a human shield. 'There's supposed to be duct tape! The Manual clearly states --'

'Bugger the manual,' Trojie growled, and reached past Sparky to clout Courtney round the ear with the CD case.

'Hey!' Kurt complained, finally aware of the agents but too utterly woobiefied by the Author to put up more than a token protest. 'Only I get to hit her!'

'No you bloody well don't,' Trojie told him. 'You are not in favour of random violence towards the woman you love. Now sit down and shut up, the pair of you,' she finished, whacking both musicians on the back of the head with Nevermind.

'Can I --?' Sparky asked, nervously waving a roll of duct tape. Trojie graciously waved him toward their quarry.

'Be my guest, though I don't think they need it. Now, where are we...?' Further rummaging produced an extremely heavy bell and some dribbly candles, which Trojie lit before arranging them haphazardly about the room.

'Be-fucking-gone, spirit of evil Angst! Avaunt, inaccurate drug-use! Avaunt, bad-description-causing-anorexia! Avaunt, woobiefication! The power of GRUNGE compels you! RAAARGH!'

As the Author-wraith emerged from the two musicians, Trojie threw herself at it, and was only prevented from doing herself a grave injury on a hospital bedside cabinet by Sparky grabbing her ankles as they flew past his head, her rage giving her almost superhuman powers in this poorly-described world. He jerked her back to earth and gave her a ringing slap.

'You mad woman, stoppit. Neuralyse! Where's your neuralyser?' He rummaged in the pockets and Bag of the stunned Trojie, eventually coming up with the desired instrument. 'Sunglasses. Come on, put them on.'

Trojie fumbled her sunglasses onto her face

'Good girl. Now, hold the neuralyser.'

Trojie slowly wrapped her hand around the neuralyser, and then instinct took over. 'Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love-Cobain,' she said slowly. 'You are both reasonably happy and in love. Your daughter is called Frances and you both love her very, very much. Now go home.'

FLASH

'And now I'm taking you to FicPsych,' said Sparky.

'No!'

'Yes.'

'Don't wanna!'

'Yes!'

'Just take me back to my RC, pleeeeeasse?'

'If you promise you'll take Bleeprin, then okay,' said Sparky, giving in.

'Promise,'

They portalled, landing in the grey and mindwiping corridors of the Department of Bad Slash.

'It's this way,' said Trojie, wandering off aimlessly. 'Hello Lux,' she said, noticing her fellow Bad Slasher lounging in a doorway.

'Hi Troije,' said Luxury, bouncing up. 'And who's this?' she purred, trying to extricate Sparky's hand from Trojie's collar and insinuating herself between them.

'Sparky, Lux. Lux, Sparky. Don't even loosen your tie around her, trust me. Ahah!'

Trojie yanked open the door to her RC and ducked inside. 'Lux, let him get back to his department at some point today, yeah?'

'I will ...' Lux called, ruffling Sparky's red hair and dragging him away. All the DTE Agent could do in the face of this onslaught, apparently, was make gulping noises. Yes, things were certainly back to normal, thouight Trojie, as Absinthe engulfed her in slobber.

***

Trojie's Rant; You sick, sick bitch of an author. Don’t you dare try to tell me you’re a fan. Yeah, you’ve read Journals. I can see that. But did you really understand it? There’s a quick potted summary of how he felt about people misrepresenting him like you do, and it’s on the In Utero album. Track 4. Rape Me. Or better still, track 1 of the third disc of With the Lights Out. That’s his acoustic demo of Rape Me. That’ll give you some idea of what the FUCK you have just done. This is the kind of image that got Frances taken off Kurt and Courtney in the first place. I have never said this to an author I’ve PPC’d but I HATE you right now for what you’ve done to the character of a much beloved artist. It’s not even like he was someone in a book or a movie – Kurt Cobain was a real person, depressed, maybe, drugged, sometimes, but not deserving of this defamation of his character. And as for what you’ve done to Courtney . . . well, yeah, maybe Courtney wasn’t meek and mild, but she wasn’t like this. And you have to accept that they loved each other. Maybe it wasn’t some Elizabeth and Mr Darcy or Romeo and Juliet written-in-the-stars thing, but they chose each other and you have NO RIGHT to talk about their personal life like you know what was going on.

Pads's Note: Weeks, I've had, of the above. Thank Glod this thing is dead.