Hey guys! The next to posts: the elements of fanfictions and fanfiction ratings are going to be merged into one for tomorrow’s post. Why? Because I had to work tonight and it is currently 1 o’clock in the morning and I have to wake of for class tomorrow… today… Ugh!

Anyhoot, here are the two parts of my own fanfiction I promised you. Actually, it’s more like two in one because it’s long enough to be two but I thought adding a chapter break would be awkward, so… yeah. Enjoy “chapters” two and three! We’ll talk more fanfics tomorrow!!!

Mel

P.S. I feel it’s only fair to let you know in advance that I haven’t actually done a thorough editing of these chapters/parts yet, so I apologize if they’re super crappy. Also, they may change slightly later when I do go back and edit them. Nothing major, though. I’ll let you know if there’s something new you need to be aware of 🙂

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Parts Two & Three: Breaking Into Downton

He’s crazy. He’s crazy and I’m being kidnapped. I’m being kidnapped by a blind guy. A blind guy? Really? What am I doing? Breaking into Downton? He can’t be serious.

“Downton Abbey, stop five,” a voice said over the intercom system of the bus, and Kara was startled out of her thoughts. Claude reached over and gave her arm a squeeze, pulling out a cane from somewhere—she hadn’t noticed he’d had one before—and gestured for her to follow him off the bus.

Kidnapping? Is this a kidnapping? Maybe early-onset Stockholm syndrome? Is that why I’m following him? What am I doing? Why am I not in London?

“Are you excited?” Claude asked, gingerly stepping down off the steps of the bus and onto the smooth concrete below. The smell of exhaust shot up her nose as the giant metal animal started up, moving away from them as if it couldn’t wait to be anywhere else.

She knew the feeling.

It was pity, she decided, pity that convinced her to get on that bus and travel two hours north of her destination—two hours away from her study guides and textbooks—to help this kid…do what? Help him to break into Downton Abbey, that’s what. She could feel her stomach cramping with knots. This was a bad idea.

“Can you see it?” Claude asked, badgering her from her thoughts. “Downton Abbey, the entrance, do you see it?”

Now that she was paying attention, she certainly did. It would have been hard for anyone to have missed it—the thing was like a glowing sphere in the midst of a cornfield—but it wasn’t due to a well-structured grouping of massive spotlights (like the Bat symbol) like she had imagined in her head. Instead, the entire fence line—beautiful wrought iron posts intermixed with rouge brick structures every ten feet or so—was covered in twinkling candlelight. Claude hadn’t exaggerated when he’d talked about the gifts. Stuffed bears, picture frames, toy bunnies worn from use, baby dolls with beautiful porcelain skin, letters in all forms and stages of handwriting, hand drawn pictures of a delicate oval face and waves of dark hair, all lined the fence, stacked on top of one another until it was hard to decipher one from its kin.

“Well, I don’t see any brail,” she said quietly to the blind boy beside her as others filtered past them to deposit their own donations to what was quickly becoming a shrine. No, Kara thought, it already is one. “What does the family think of this whole thing?”

“Dunno’, never met them.” He stepped forward cautiously, using his cane to probe at the mound of things before him, leaning down to place his letter on top of a pile of papers whose words were smeared from being exposed to the weather. Clearly they had been out here for a while. Claude used a stuffed bear resting nearby to weight down his brail poem, stepping away, back toward where Kara was inspecting a strange looking image—some kind of pop art, perhaps?—of the late Lady Sybil. The deceased girl’s tongue stuck out toward the camera lens, the various features on her face dyed the different colors of the rainbow, so that she appeared to look like a collage of strange parts.

“I’m not sure I’d find that flattering,” she muttered to herself. “I know art is up to the artist, but I can’t help feeling I’d be offended.”

“Well, she is dead after all,” Claude said, quoting her thought from earlier, “I doubt she cares much at this point.”

Kara nodded, realizing too late that it made no difference since he could not see her. “Point,” she said.

“Now,” he started, “what we talked about on the bus ride…”

Yes, his plan. Even Kara had to admit, it was a good one, something she probably wouldn’t have thought up on her own, but how they were going to execute it without seeming like…well, like they were executing a plan, she was not sure.

“Are you prepared to be extremely American?” he asked, his mouth turning up into a mischievous grin, and her stomach flopped again. She really should have thought about this more before agreeing to join a slightly-creepy stranger on his mission to—do what exactly, she was unsure. How did that old phrase go: when in Rome? Except the Roman Empire all went to hell in a hand basket. Now she rather had the feeling that she was heading in that same direction.

“It’ll be easy,” he continued. “All you’ve got to do is create a distraction. Be loud, obnoxious, rude even. Draw people’s attention and I’ll slip inside—”

“And how do you plan to do that if you can’t see where the doors are. No offense, I know blind people are plenty capable and all that, but it’s not like you know this place that well, right?”

He cleared his throat, rolling his shoulders, and she assumed she had insulted him in some way.

“Sorry, forget I’ve said anything. A distraction, right? Well, I can try—”

She cut off when a dark car approached the iron gate from the inside, the mansion side, and a whooping cheer went through the waiting crowd that somehow, in a matter of seconds, seemed to swell from a few measly observers to a hoard of screaming fans.

All this for a reality show family? Strange ones, these Brits. Next thing you know they’re going to bring back the boy band.

She sighed. That was one thing that needed to stay in the nineties.

A mass of ten guards, men and women who must have been lurking in the shadows or simply appeared from nothing (because they certainly hadn’t been standing around before—Kara was sure she would have noticed a group of broad-shouldered men with arm muscles the size of watermelons lingering around the memorial sight), stepped forward to line the gate.

“What’s happening?” Claude asked, putting a hand on her shoulder, and Kara jumped. “Sorry,” he said, but he didn’t sound it in the least.

“Some guys pulling his car up to the gate, it looks like they’re leaving. There’s a bunch of guards and—”

“What’s the driver look like?” he interrupted her and she crossed her arms, not bothering to wipe the annoyance from her face.

“I don’t know, it’s tinted glass. A brunette maybe? I think he’s wearing a hat…”

“Is it a servant or a family member?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know? Do they make their help wear signs or something? Like, ‘oh, hey, by the way, just in case being called a servant wasn’t enough, now you can’t question it’?”

“American sarcasm is not as flattering as your people must think it is. A bit overused, don’t you think?”

A deep flush rushed into Kara’s face, and her fingernails dug into her palms. “I’ll tell you what’s about to be used, my hand as I smack it straight into your face in, like, two seconds if you don’t—”

The gates squealed, opening to let the car pass, just as the passenger window sunk down into the car door and Kara cut off. The man was in his late twenties maybe, with sandy brown hair and (what seemed like from afar) florescent blue eyes that creased along the edges as he pulled the corners of his lips into a grin. The crowd flared to life and he gave them a wave.

“Who—?” But before she could finish asking the question, a roar of voices erupted from the center of the noisy mob: Branson, Branson, Branson…

Oh, so that’s who that was.

Claude lifted his head, his eyes shielded behind a pair of dark sunglasses, though Kara could practically see his eyes flashing back and forth as if he were taking in the scene himself. “Branson’s leaving.” It was a statement, not a question.

“It appears so.” If her voice got any dryer, she was going to risk setting fire to the place. (She winced inwardly at the metaphor—it was a bad one).

“Good, good,” he muttered to himself, and she continued to regret her decision for tagging along. Sure, she’d told herself she’d have an adventure when she hopped the pond, but she was thinking more along the lines of visiting a different pub every night or striking up conversations with random people in the subway. This was not an adventure, this was crazy.

She inhaled deeply, focusing her thoughts away from the dark car as it pulled away from the house, the gates shutting behind it, and the multitudes of armed guards disappearing back into the dark (invisible) caves they had come from.

“What now? What did you want to do? What is it you need to break into that house for?”

“The Great Hall.”

That was all he said—that was his reasoning. The Great Hall.

“This is a joke, right?” She did her best to suppress the acid rising in her throat; the bitter taste equally on par with her urge to slap him across the face. She had come all of this way for a—what? A hallway?

“It has the best acoustics,” he said, shrugging.

Of course it does. She sighed. “So… what? You’re going to get in there and sing?”

“Something like that.”

“And you don’t think that that would, I don’t know, draw a bit of attention?”

“That’s kind of the point.”

I’m confused. She sighed loudly, “I’m confused.”

He didn’t say anything in response, only scanning his eyes back and forth as if he could actually see what was happening around them. For a moment she thought she saw them focus—the misty blue zero in on something over her shoulder—but then they were back to their passive opaqueness and her shoulders fell in anxious disappointment.

“How are your lungs?” he asked suddenly, taking a step toward her. She didn’t have a chance to answer; he wasn’t going to give her one. With a maneuver more sly than she was expecting (and way subtle for a blind guy) he drove his cane into the top of her foot, the bones crunching beneath its rubber tip, and she let out a shattering roar.

“MOTHER F—!”