Categories > Books > Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy > Really Wild Things
Really Wild Things
1 reviewInterludes. How Zaphod and Trillian might've gotten along with each other when no one was watching.
0Unrated
I
"So," Tricia said as they walked out of the little flat, "Phil isn't your real name, is it?"
"Later, babe, later," he said, and held up a finger. "Gotta remember where I left my zarking spaceship..."
"Oh... right," she said, a bit taken aback, and not quite able to imagine how one could misplace a spaceship.
She followed him out of the building, shaking her head and idly wondering if she should have gone back for her bag. The idea that she was actually following an alien out of a flat in Islington and headed off to hunt for his spaceship hadn't quite penetrated yet; the whole situation seemed too bizarre to be believed.
Truth be told, she'd mostly come with Phil because he'd been such a daring bastard. She hadn't really wanted to go with him; she'd just started chatting with that fellow who'd been trying to get her attention all night, whatever his name was. He'd been clever enough, if a bit dull, but she'd figured that he was worth a conversation and maybe a few phone calls. She hadn't exactly done much in the way of socializing in the last five years or so, and she'd been thinking about easing herself back into it...
And then he'd come up behind her and started trying to pull her aside, going on about how he was from another planet. She'd been just about ready to pull away and tell him to sod off, and go back to her nice, normal conversation with a nice, normal young man - but then he'd pulled her into a side room and pulled the birdcage off of his shoulder. At first she'd thought that the second head was some sort of prosthetic, until he'd stuck his tongue out at her and waggled it around.
It had startled her enough to make her want to follow him out of the party and actually see what he was going on about. But now that they were out of the party, she was starting to wonder what she had been thinking. She should make some sort of excuse, maybe say that she'd forgotten her bag and that she really needed to go back and get it. Then she could get back to the party, maybe grab that young man who'd been chatting her up and go to some other party. Somewhere sane, somewhere that wouldn't attract silly two-headed people who liked to talk about spaceships...
"Oh, c'mon, where is it, the stupid -" Phil started, then paused. "Oh, yeah! Wait a minute..." And he reached out and pulled the birdcage off of his other head, which blinked in the sudden light, much as it had before. He looked around again, with both heads, and then laughed - also, with both heads. It was an unnerving sight; Tricia hadn't expected that head to actually work.
"Yeah, there we go! Now I know where it is. C'mon!" He grabbed her arm and started pulling her along. Tricia couldn't do much but follow him, trying her best to stay on her feet in those ridiculous heels of hers. She kept her eyes closed; it made it easier not to fall....
Finally they stopped. "There it is," he said smugly. "Take a look, gorgeous. What do you think?"
Tricia's eyes snapped open, and there it was - a flying saucer, big and real and solid, sitting right in the middle of the street. It was silver, with what looked like a large orange sash wrapped around it, which seemed like an odd touch. It was huge, shiny and utterly impossible.
She stared at it for a while, trying to make sense of it. Then she turned back to Phil, who was grinning smugly with both heads. Talking to him with those two heads was going to be a strange experience, she could tell; she liked to look people in the eyes when she talked to them, but which eyes was she supposed to look into? After a while, she comes to a reasonable compromise and stared at the space between the two heads. "It's.. it's amazing," she said after a while, and she can hear the awe in her own voice. "A real flying saucer! It's... I've never seen anything like it!"
"Oh, come on, baby! This is one of the old models," he said, and laughed. "You wanna see something astonishing, c'mon and hitch a ride with me. I'll be getting my hands on a real spaceship soon."
"What do you mean, a real -" But she never finished the question, as the rest of his sentence sank in. "You mean I can come with you? Really?"
"Yeah, it'll be great! We'll find the most fantastic planet in the galaxy, just you and me -"
Tricia didn't stop to listen to the rest. She stood up on her tip-toes, grabbed "Phil's" nearest head, and kissed it on the lips. When the other head started to protest - "Hey, c'mon, it was my idea -" she grabbed it and kissed it too, at which point the other protested.
Tricia didn't mind. She was too excited. She couldn't wait to see the galaxy. Explore uncharted space, find strange new cultures... it was more than she'd ever even dared to dream of imagining.
She'd have to make a real trip of it, of course. And maybe she'd change her name to something a bit more spacy, just for fun. It was a pity that she'd forgotten her bag, but it couldn't be helped. "When can we leave?" she asked.
"Well, hey," he said, grinning, "how about right now?"
"Sounds good to me," she said, and took his arm. They walked onto the ship together, and Tricia's head never stopped buzzing with excitement. It didn't even seem all that important, at the moment, that she hadn't even learned this man's real name. She could take care of that later.
For the moment, space was up there waiting for her, and she could hardly wait.
---
II
"...and the lady that I'd been talking to? The one who was trying to get my ticket? She was turned into a vending machine!"
Trillian sighed inwardly as Thor went on, and toyed with her drink, a bright green cocktail with a little umbrella in it. Odd, how one could find cocktails with little umbrellas anywhere in the galaxy, even on planets where it apparently never rained.
"I mean, really, a vending machine!" Thor continued. He hadn't changed much, since she'd met him at that party - how long ago had that been? She wasn't sure. But he was still very tall and strong, and he still had an enormous hammer, and he still talked a lot. "And not only that, but she didn't even work properly! Can you imagine a more ignoble fate than that?"
"No... no, I don't think so." Trillian tried to smile brightly as she said it. It wasn't a dull story - after all, she'd never heard a story about a woman being changed into a vending machine before. She felt like she should have been more interested in it anyway, since it was about her home, or at least some version of it. She wasn't sure she understood what had happened to it, yet - something about dolphins, she'd been told. And it also wasn't that Thor was unattractive; he was a good-looking Thunder God, all things considered, and he did have a certain naive charm, even if Trillian didn't find him quite as interesting as she had the first time they'd met.
She couldn't deny that she was disappointed, though. Her conversation with him wasn't creating the response that she'd hoped for.
She stole another glance at the bar - specifically at the crowd of people around the bar. There were quite a lot of people there, people of all shapes and colors, and they were all gathered around one particular person. And that person, if he was behaving true to form, was holding a drink in each of his three hands and telling them all sorts of outrageous and improbable stories about his wanderings through the galaxy; he had quite a few of those, after all. She tried to tell herself that it wasn't his fault; he just enjoyed the attention too much to really notice that his girlfriend was being flirted with.
Trillian couldn't deny that she'd been interested in Thor, first time they'd met - he'd been quite appealing at that Party, after she'd realized how sick she was of Zaphod's pathological sulking. He had seemed like her ticket to a better life - but hadn't that been what she'd thought Zaphod was, when she'd first met him? She'd been stuck in a humdrum life, looking forward to a future on the dole, and he'd arrived with his spaceship and had turned it all inside-out.
She wasn't looking for any more tickets. She just wanted to try to make things work, that time. She could thank Arthur for that; ever since Krikkit, she'd realized that she actually did love Zaphod, at least when he wasn't in one of his moods. But she wanted to know if Zaphod felt the same way.
"So," Thor continued, "I went to find my father - you've probably heard of him, real old bastard, used to be Lord of the Aesir but now he just sleeps all day -"
"Yes, that's nice," Trillian said. Her patience was about to run out. It was time to use more desperate measures. "Come over here for a minute, all right?"
"And then I - what?" Thor blinked. "I thought that you -"
"Just come on. There's someone I want you to meet." She took his arm and led him over to the bar, elbowing her way into the crowd.
Zaphod didn't notice her at first, as usual. "...and then I said, 'look, if you don't let me in, I'm going to have my ship bombard this planet and blow everything up,' but just as a joke, you know? Don't know why the zarking idiot had to arrest me..." He looked up and blinked. "Oh! Hey, baby, where'd you run off to? Don't you wanna hear this one? You've only heard it a couple dozen times -"
"No, that's all right," Trillian said sweetly. "I just wanted to introduce you to someone, sweetheart." She said the last one loudly, for the crowd's benefit. "This is Thor. He's been chatting with me all night -"
"Chatting!" Thor rose up to his full height. "I've been telling her a real tale of heroism, not merely chatting!" He glared down at Zaphod with burning eyes, eyes that would have terrified most mortals. "Who the blazes are you, anyway!?"
Zaphod didn't seem especially terrified. Trillian wondered how many drinks he'd had. "Oh, hey, c'mon, we're all real cool cats here, right? Real cool," he repeated. He quickly finished one of his drinks and tossed the glass over his shoulder, wehre it shattered on the floor behind the bar. He stuck that hand out for Thor to shake. "The name's Zaphod Beeblebrox the First, and I'm the hoopiest frood you're ever likely to -"
Trillian was never quite sure why she did what she did next. She would later chalk it up to frustration, or perhaps a bit too much of those green cocktails. Either way, she didn't let him finish his sentence. She slipped over to stand beside him and surreptiously jogged his elbow, sending his hand flying up in the direction of Thor's face. Zaphod still had a full drink in that particular hand, the contents of which went directly into Thor's face.
Thor bellowed. Zaphod stared at him and at Trillian - two heads came in handy for staring at two different people at the same time, she imagined. Trillian, who was starting to realize that this had been a very bad idea, simlpy grabbed Zaphod's arm and ran with him out of the door.
She didn't stay for the row, of course, but she heard afterwards that it had been quite legendary. They'd probably never be welcome in that bar again... or in that town, or on that planet. Not after Thor had blasted the whole planet with lightning bolts and crashes of thunder so loud that half the planet had been deaf for weeks afterwards.
Still, Trillian had to admit that the experience had somehow been very fulfilling, if only for the expression on Zaphod's face when the drinks had started flying.
---
III
"Look, Trillian, I'm telling you, we should've gone to one of those clubs for this!"
Trillian smiled lightly at Zaphod as they stood on the freshest, most tender green grass, near a beautiful field of pink and red wildflowers. It was a perfectly delightful day on the little planet, sunny and warm and pleasant, and the breeze smelled of fresh air, which was a rare thing in itself.
It was a nameless, private planet, one of the many that Zaphod had commandeered during his Presidency, and as soon as Trillian had looked at it, she'd known that it would be perfect for what she wanted to do. This wasn't so much because of the scenery; all of Zaphod's private planets had nice scenery. She was particularly fond of this one because of the abundance of high, sheer cliffs that towered over the scenery. They were, in fact, standing at the very edge of one at that very moment.
"You're worrying far too much," Trillian said lightly, determined not to have her anticipation dulled by anything.
Zaphod was considerably less enthusiastic than Trillian about the whole thing. "Me? Worrying? Look, I'm super-cool, all right? I could chill the desert planet of Alquaran all by myself for a year, and that's a really long time on that planet. I just think we oughta leave this kind of stuff to the people who are gonna be getting lots and lots of money to do it -"
"Really? I thought you were the one who wanted things to be interesting. 'Adventure and excitement and really wild things,' wasn't it?"
Zaphod shut up and looked momentarily confused. Shortly afterwards, confusion gave way to pure and screaming fear, mainly because Trillian had just jumped off of the cliff - and worse, because she had still had a firm grip on one of his arms at that moment.
They fell very quickly, as most people do off of a sheer cliff above a breathtakingly beautiful garden of wildflowers. Zaphod would have been distracted by the flowers, or by the fresh air, if he'd been a different sort of person - as it was he was screaming in terror, certain that he was falling, that he was about to hit the ground, and that it was going to really, really hurt.
He went right on thinking those things for half a second, before Trillian turned to him in midair - fairly impressive, considering how quickly they were falling - and kissed him on one pair of lips and then the other, moving back and forth in fast succession, while her two hands were busy doing... interesting things to the rest of him.
He stopped worrying - stopped worrying so thoroughly, in fact, that he hardly noticed that he and Trillian were both floating just above the meadow until quite a bit later.
He had to admit that Trillian could be very distracting when she wanted to be - but not until much, much later.
[end]
---
A/N: For Kat (kahvi @ lj.) My first attempt - actually my fourth, but my first attempt that could be called a success - at writing Zaphod/Trillian fic. There may be more in the future, but I have to be honest and say that most of my fic ideas for this fandom still involve Arthur, Ford and Fenchurch running around the galaxy together and having all kinds of crazy adventures. This was fun too, though, so we'll just have to see. grin
"So," Tricia said as they walked out of the little flat, "Phil isn't your real name, is it?"
"Later, babe, later," he said, and held up a finger. "Gotta remember where I left my zarking spaceship..."
"Oh... right," she said, a bit taken aback, and not quite able to imagine how one could misplace a spaceship.
She followed him out of the building, shaking her head and idly wondering if she should have gone back for her bag. The idea that she was actually following an alien out of a flat in Islington and headed off to hunt for his spaceship hadn't quite penetrated yet; the whole situation seemed too bizarre to be believed.
Truth be told, she'd mostly come with Phil because he'd been such a daring bastard. She hadn't really wanted to go with him; she'd just started chatting with that fellow who'd been trying to get her attention all night, whatever his name was. He'd been clever enough, if a bit dull, but she'd figured that he was worth a conversation and maybe a few phone calls. She hadn't exactly done much in the way of socializing in the last five years or so, and she'd been thinking about easing herself back into it...
And then he'd come up behind her and started trying to pull her aside, going on about how he was from another planet. She'd been just about ready to pull away and tell him to sod off, and go back to her nice, normal conversation with a nice, normal young man - but then he'd pulled her into a side room and pulled the birdcage off of his shoulder. At first she'd thought that the second head was some sort of prosthetic, until he'd stuck his tongue out at her and waggled it around.
It had startled her enough to make her want to follow him out of the party and actually see what he was going on about. But now that they were out of the party, she was starting to wonder what she had been thinking. She should make some sort of excuse, maybe say that she'd forgotten her bag and that she really needed to go back and get it. Then she could get back to the party, maybe grab that young man who'd been chatting her up and go to some other party. Somewhere sane, somewhere that wouldn't attract silly two-headed people who liked to talk about spaceships...
"Oh, c'mon, where is it, the stupid -" Phil started, then paused. "Oh, yeah! Wait a minute..." And he reached out and pulled the birdcage off of his other head, which blinked in the sudden light, much as it had before. He looked around again, with both heads, and then laughed - also, with both heads. It was an unnerving sight; Tricia hadn't expected that head to actually work.
"Yeah, there we go! Now I know where it is. C'mon!" He grabbed her arm and started pulling her along. Tricia couldn't do much but follow him, trying her best to stay on her feet in those ridiculous heels of hers. She kept her eyes closed; it made it easier not to fall....
Finally they stopped. "There it is," he said smugly. "Take a look, gorgeous. What do you think?"
Tricia's eyes snapped open, and there it was - a flying saucer, big and real and solid, sitting right in the middle of the street. It was silver, with what looked like a large orange sash wrapped around it, which seemed like an odd touch. It was huge, shiny and utterly impossible.
She stared at it for a while, trying to make sense of it. Then she turned back to Phil, who was grinning smugly with both heads. Talking to him with those two heads was going to be a strange experience, she could tell; she liked to look people in the eyes when she talked to them, but which eyes was she supposed to look into? After a while, she comes to a reasonable compromise and stared at the space between the two heads. "It's.. it's amazing," she said after a while, and she can hear the awe in her own voice. "A real flying saucer! It's... I've never seen anything like it!"
"Oh, come on, baby! This is one of the old models," he said, and laughed. "You wanna see something astonishing, c'mon and hitch a ride with me. I'll be getting my hands on a real spaceship soon."
"What do you mean, a real -" But she never finished the question, as the rest of his sentence sank in. "You mean I can come with you? Really?"
"Yeah, it'll be great! We'll find the most fantastic planet in the galaxy, just you and me -"
Tricia didn't stop to listen to the rest. She stood up on her tip-toes, grabbed "Phil's" nearest head, and kissed it on the lips. When the other head started to protest - "Hey, c'mon, it was my idea -" she grabbed it and kissed it too, at which point the other protested.
Tricia didn't mind. She was too excited. She couldn't wait to see the galaxy. Explore uncharted space, find strange new cultures... it was more than she'd ever even dared to dream of imagining.
She'd have to make a real trip of it, of course. And maybe she'd change her name to something a bit more spacy, just for fun. It was a pity that she'd forgotten her bag, but it couldn't be helped. "When can we leave?" she asked.
"Well, hey," he said, grinning, "how about right now?"
"Sounds good to me," she said, and took his arm. They walked onto the ship together, and Tricia's head never stopped buzzing with excitement. It didn't even seem all that important, at the moment, that she hadn't even learned this man's real name. She could take care of that later.
For the moment, space was up there waiting for her, and she could hardly wait.
---
II
"...and the lady that I'd been talking to? The one who was trying to get my ticket? She was turned into a vending machine!"
Trillian sighed inwardly as Thor went on, and toyed with her drink, a bright green cocktail with a little umbrella in it. Odd, how one could find cocktails with little umbrellas anywhere in the galaxy, even on planets where it apparently never rained.
"I mean, really, a vending machine!" Thor continued. He hadn't changed much, since she'd met him at that party - how long ago had that been? She wasn't sure. But he was still very tall and strong, and he still had an enormous hammer, and he still talked a lot. "And not only that, but she didn't even work properly! Can you imagine a more ignoble fate than that?"
"No... no, I don't think so." Trillian tried to smile brightly as she said it. It wasn't a dull story - after all, she'd never heard a story about a woman being changed into a vending machine before. She felt like she should have been more interested in it anyway, since it was about her home, or at least some version of it. She wasn't sure she understood what had happened to it, yet - something about dolphins, she'd been told. And it also wasn't that Thor was unattractive; he was a good-looking Thunder God, all things considered, and he did have a certain naive charm, even if Trillian didn't find him quite as interesting as she had the first time they'd met.
She couldn't deny that she was disappointed, though. Her conversation with him wasn't creating the response that she'd hoped for.
She stole another glance at the bar - specifically at the crowd of people around the bar. There were quite a lot of people there, people of all shapes and colors, and they were all gathered around one particular person. And that person, if he was behaving true to form, was holding a drink in each of his three hands and telling them all sorts of outrageous and improbable stories about his wanderings through the galaxy; he had quite a few of those, after all. She tried to tell herself that it wasn't his fault; he just enjoyed the attention too much to really notice that his girlfriend was being flirted with.
Trillian couldn't deny that she'd been interested in Thor, first time they'd met - he'd been quite appealing at that Party, after she'd realized how sick she was of Zaphod's pathological sulking. He had seemed like her ticket to a better life - but hadn't that been what she'd thought Zaphod was, when she'd first met him? She'd been stuck in a humdrum life, looking forward to a future on the dole, and he'd arrived with his spaceship and had turned it all inside-out.
She wasn't looking for any more tickets. She just wanted to try to make things work, that time. She could thank Arthur for that; ever since Krikkit, she'd realized that she actually did love Zaphod, at least when he wasn't in one of his moods. But she wanted to know if Zaphod felt the same way.
"So," Thor continued, "I went to find my father - you've probably heard of him, real old bastard, used to be Lord of the Aesir but now he just sleeps all day -"
"Yes, that's nice," Trillian said. Her patience was about to run out. It was time to use more desperate measures. "Come over here for a minute, all right?"
"And then I - what?" Thor blinked. "I thought that you -"
"Just come on. There's someone I want you to meet." She took his arm and led him over to the bar, elbowing her way into the crowd.
Zaphod didn't notice her at first, as usual. "...and then I said, 'look, if you don't let me in, I'm going to have my ship bombard this planet and blow everything up,' but just as a joke, you know? Don't know why the zarking idiot had to arrest me..." He looked up and blinked. "Oh! Hey, baby, where'd you run off to? Don't you wanna hear this one? You've only heard it a couple dozen times -"
"No, that's all right," Trillian said sweetly. "I just wanted to introduce you to someone, sweetheart." She said the last one loudly, for the crowd's benefit. "This is Thor. He's been chatting with me all night -"
"Chatting!" Thor rose up to his full height. "I've been telling her a real tale of heroism, not merely chatting!" He glared down at Zaphod with burning eyes, eyes that would have terrified most mortals. "Who the blazes are you, anyway!?"
Zaphod didn't seem especially terrified. Trillian wondered how many drinks he'd had. "Oh, hey, c'mon, we're all real cool cats here, right? Real cool," he repeated. He quickly finished one of his drinks and tossed the glass over his shoulder, wehre it shattered on the floor behind the bar. He stuck that hand out for Thor to shake. "The name's Zaphod Beeblebrox the First, and I'm the hoopiest frood you're ever likely to -"
Trillian was never quite sure why she did what she did next. She would later chalk it up to frustration, or perhaps a bit too much of those green cocktails. Either way, she didn't let him finish his sentence. She slipped over to stand beside him and surreptiously jogged his elbow, sending his hand flying up in the direction of Thor's face. Zaphod still had a full drink in that particular hand, the contents of which went directly into Thor's face.
Thor bellowed. Zaphod stared at him and at Trillian - two heads came in handy for staring at two different people at the same time, she imagined. Trillian, who was starting to realize that this had been a very bad idea, simlpy grabbed Zaphod's arm and ran with him out of the door.
She didn't stay for the row, of course, but she heard afterwards that it had been quite legendary. They'd probably never be welcome in that bar again... or in that town, or on that planet. Not after Thor had blasted the whole planet with lightning bolts and crashes of thunder so loud that half the planet had been deaf for weeks afterwards.
Still, Trillian had to admit that the experience had somehow been very fulfilling, if only for the expression on Zaphod's face when the drinks had started flying.
---
III
"Look, Trillian, I'm telling you, we should've gone to one of those clubs for this!"
Trillian smiled lightly at Zaphod as they stood on the freshest, most tender green grass, near a beautiful field of pink and red wildflowers. It was a perfectly delightful day on the little planet, sunny and warm and pleasant, and the breeze smelled of fresh air, which was a rare thing in itself.
It was a nameless, private planet, one of the many that Zaphod had commandeered during his Presidency, and as soon as Trillian had looked at it, she'd known that it would be perfect for what she wanted to do. This wasn't so much because of the scenery; all of Zaphod's private planets had nice scenery. She was particularly fond of this one because of the abundance of high, sheer cliffs that towered over the scenery. They were, in fact, standing at the very edge of one at that very moment.
"You're worrying far too much," Trillian said lightly, determined not to have her anticipation dulled by anything.
Zaphod was considerably less enthusiastic than Trillian about the whole thing. "Me? Worrying? Look, I'm super-cool, all right? I could chill the desert planet of Alquaran all by myself for a year, and that's a really long time on that planet. I just think we oughta leave this kind of stuff to the people who are gonna be getting lots and lots of money to do it -"
"Really? I thought you were the one who wanted things to be interesting. 'Adventure and excitement and really wild things,' wasn't it?"
Zaphod shut up and looked momentarily confused. Shortly afterwards, confusion gave way to pure and screaming fear, mainly because Trillian had just jumped off of the cliff - and worse, because she had still had a firm grip on one of his arms at that moment.
They fell very quickly, as most people do off of a sheer cliff above a breathtakingly beautiful garden of wildflowers. Zaphod would have been distracted by the flowers, or by the fresh air, if he'd been a different sort of person - as it was he was screaming in terror, certain that he was falling, that he was about to hit the ground, and that it was going to really, really hurt.
He went right on thinking those things for half a second, before Trillian turned to him in midair - fairly impressive, considering how quickly they were falling - and kissed him on one pair of lips and then the other, moving back and forth in fast succession, while her two hands were busy doing... interesting things to the rest of him.
He stopped worrying - stopped worrying so thoroughly, in fact, that he hardly noticed that he and Trillian were both floating just above the meadow until quite a bit later.
He had to admit that Trillian could be very distracting when she wanted to be - but not until much, much later.
[end]
---
A/N: For Kat (kahvi @ lj.) My first attempt - actually my fourth, but my first attempt that could be called a success - at writing Zaphod/Trillian fic. There may be more in the future, but I have to be honest and say that most of my fic ideas for this fandom still involve Arthur, Ford and Fenchurch running around the galaxy together and having all kinds of crazy adventures. This was fun too, though, so we'll just have to see. grin
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