I'm Right Behind You (Part Five)

Did everybody vote today? I sure hope you did.

The story continues. Unable to contact Charlene, Sam hits the tubes and starts finding things out. (And by the tubes, I mean not only the series of tubes, but the 'Tube.)

Title: I'm Right Behind You (Part Five)
Rating: PG
Pairings: Sam/Charlene
Words: ~1700
Disclaimer: The usual two.

For the Report character fic: The Colbert Report characters are property of Stephen and the other Report writers. Not mine. Sue me not, please.

And for the real people, the poem:
Please, make no mistake:
these people aren't fake,
but what's said here is no more than fiction.
It only was writ
because we like their wit
and wisecracks, and pull-squints, and diction.
We don't mean to quibble,
but this can't be libel;
it's never implied to be real.
No disrespect's meant;
if you disapprove, then,
the back button's right up there. Deal.

Summary: It's just over a year after the birth of Samantha Bee's first baby; her career is thriving, her marriage stable. Then she meets this really, really hot woman. You can guess where it goes from there.

One - Two - Three - Four - Five - Six - Seven - Eight - Coda


I'm Right Behind You - Part Five

The clock on the wall chimed four in the morning. Samantha Bee hardly noticed.

She hadn't noticed much, for that matter, since arriving at home hours earlier. She'd barely taken a few minutes to call Charlene and leave a message before pulling out her laptop; she hadn't even bothered to take off her jacket.

A Google search for "Charlene + Stephen Colbert" was very instructive. "Related searches," it helpfully suggested: "Charlene + I Am Not Stephen Colbert." And then there were the actual results.

Stephen's fans were positively rabid, and no less so on this topic than any other; the Colbert fan boards (of which there were far too many) were littered with speculation about Charlene. What did she look like? Why didn't she appreciate Stephen? Was she crazy, or just stupid? There was even a subset of theories which speculated that "Charlene" was a code name for some other person. (Several fans slyly suggested themselves.)

When Sam found Jon's name among these speculations, she gave up on the fan boards altogether. The Colbert Nation wasn't going to be any help - it was impossible to separate fact from fancy with its members, probably because of Stephen's famed disdain for facts. Sam needed to go to the source. She needed to see what Stephen himself had said.

She turned to YouTube.

It had only been a month since Viacom and Google cut their deal, but both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report had made an amazing resurgence. So Sam was surprised when the first result for "charlene + stephen colbert" was not from Comedy Central at all, but a grainy rip of a twenty-year-old VHS tape with the MTV logo in the corner.

Sam actually laughed when she saw Stephen's terribly eighties hair. Then the lyrics started.





Jason woke groggily, the sounds of singing rabbits (it had been a weird dream) fading into the fussy wails of his daughter. He rolled over to prod Sam, only to find himself alone in bed.

He climbed out from the sheets, stepped into his slippers (or tried to; he missed one), trudged to Piper's nursery, lifted the girl out of her crib, and went looking for Sam. He found her at her laptop, completely absorbed in the flickering screen.

"Honey . . .?"

Sam jumped. "Jason? What time is it?"

"Dunno. But I think Piper wants her mommy."

Sam rose and hefted the fussy toddler out of his arms. "Oh, honey, she wants a change, that's all."

"Right, right." Jason yawned widely. "Can you take care of that?"

". . . Sure."

If there was a note of disappointment in his wife's voice, Jason was too tired to hear it. He simply smiled, kissed her on the cheek, padded/walked back to bed (depending on the foot one was describing), and collapsed with a whump onto the covers.




When Piper was outfitted with a fresh diaper, she wasn't inclined to drift off again right away. Sam ended up walking in circles around the toddler's room, attempting to be soothing. She was really not in the right mood for that job.

"Daddy could have changed you," she remarked as she rocked Piper back and forth. "Daddy could have gotten rid of the icky diaper and made you all happy again. But noooo, Daddy went back to sleep, so Mommy had to do it."

"Mommy," repeated Piper with interest.

"That's right. And meanwhile, Mommy's very worried because Stephen Colbert is apparently a stalker. Can you say 'Stephen', Piper? Say 'Stephen'."

"Steee-vun," said the toddler obligingly.

"Very good. Now, Stephen is cousins with Charlene. You remember Charlene, right, honey?"

Piper's face lit up. "Cholly!" she exclaimed.

"That's right! Now, Cholly - Charlene - looks a lot like Stephen, because they're cousins. Cousins means they hae the same granny and grandpa." And Sam would not have been surprised to find a set of twins among their parents, because Stephen and Charlene, now that she had thought to make the comparison, looked so much alike. Of course Charlene had looked familiar. Stephen's grin - when it was a genuine grin, not a smirk - split his face in exactly the same endearing way that Charlene's did. In fact, that similarity had mollified Sam somewhat towards Stephen's fangirls. How could they resist?

"But they're very different," she added to Piper seriously. "Charlene is sweet and nice and kind. We like Charlene. But Stephen is mean and bad and . . . overbearing and arrogant and egotistical and . . ."

The advanced vocabulary had clearly gone out of Piper's range, so she helpfully summarized. "Stevun bad."

"That's right, honey," agreed Sam, only half paying attention.

"Cholly good."

Sam stopped walking, swallowed hard. "Charlene is very, very good, darling."

"Mommy good," added Piper.

"Mommy tries."

There was a miniature yawn, and after a moment of stillness Sam realized Piper had fallen asleep after all. She laid the toddler in her crib and tucked a stuffed bear (the irony of which would have been lost on Sam before her night on YouTube) under her arm.

"Mommy would like it if Daddy would help a little," she told the sleeping girl. "But don't you worry, Piper. Mommy's going to help Charlene, all on her own. Because Mommy likes Daddy a lot, but Charlene needs Mommy."

She stroked Piper's hair, which was fine and soft and just a shade paler than her own.

"And I need Charlene," she said out loud. "But Stephen thinks he needs her, and until she doesn't have to be afraid of that, there's no way I can tell her."

The sky was turning grey outside; birds were beginning to add their calls to the muffled noise of traffic. Sam closed Piper's door behind her and looked at her own room; she could hear a soft snoring from within it. Then she turned the other way, aiming for the kitchen. It was far too late for sleep. She might as well put the kettle on.




It had been a long day on the set, but Jon Stewart was finally ready to go home. All he had to do now was grab a soda. He'd been thirsty for the past half hour, but had been distracted by a particularly nasty scuffle on C-SPAN. Now the notes were taken, the footage was earmarked for editing, and a series of jokes about Speaker Pelosi had practically written themselves. (Whoever said a Democratic-controlled Congress would be hard to mock?) Jon was finally free to focus on one very absorbing thought: a Pepsi.

He passed Sam's office on the way out; the light was on, so he poked his head in. To his surprise, the correspondent was fast asleep at her desk.

"Sam? Wake up!"

Sam woke with a start. The jolt shifted the heaps of clippings, scripts, and post-its on her desk; a fluttery sort of avalanche ensued.

"Sorry about that," Jon said quickly, coming all the way in and scooping papers off of the floor while Sam pinned those on her desk to keep them from moving further. "Hope I didn't ruin your nap."

"You did, actually. Thanks a lot, Jon," replied Sam in her Sarcastic Reporter voice, before smiling. "No, it's okay. Hand me that - don't worry, I'll get it back in order."

"It was in order?" asked Jon skeptically.

Sam stuck out her tonugue. "I have a system." Laughing, Jon handed her the papers he'd retrieved.

"Glad you got some sleep, anyway," he said as she methodically sorted them into (as far as he could tell) random identical piles. "You were pretty out of it this afternoon . . ."

Sam's light mood deflated before his eyes. The Pepsi would have to wait.

"That bad, eh?"

"Don't say 'eh', Jon. You're not nearly Canuck enough to pull it off."

"Sorry."

Jon clammed up, looked sympathetic, and waited.

"It's a long story," said Sam at last.

"You want to talk about it?" he offered, adopting his best you-can-lean-on-me look.

"No, I don't want to talk about it. I want to do something about it! . . . Besides, I know Stephen's your friend, so . . "

Uh-oh.

"Listen, Sam, I know Stephen can be a jerk. That's not news to me. But maybe - as his friend - I can help you deal with him."

Sam slapped the last of the papers down on her desk and eyed Jon skeptically for a moment. Whatever test she was running him through, he passed. "Pull up a chair."




Jon never missed the Report, so he'd heard the name Charlene. But he had always assumed she was back in South Carolina, or somewhere else out of Stephen's reach. It astounded him that she had ended up in New York, and then just happened to become so close to one of Stephen's former co-workers.

Charlene certainly didn't believe it was coincidence, and Jon didn't blame her.

"By this afternoon," concluded Sam, "her emails were bouncing, her phone number was out of service, and her landlord told me she'd moved. And maybe he's lying because she asked him to, or maybe she can move that fast. She's clearly done this before."

"She does sound like an old hand at it," agreed Jon.

"So I've been thinking about this all day, and I have no way to find her, and I feel like I can't sleep, and I don't want to go home, and . . ." Sam stopped. "I shouldn't have said that. Forget it."

"Will do," Jon lied. (Not that he won't try; but there's something here that Sam's not telling him, and until the mystery is clear to him, Jon isn't likely to forget the oddities.) "Listen, if there's anything I can do--"

Sam's gaze was suddenly trained on him with the precision of a scalpel.

"Anything, Jon?"

"Within reason," amended Jon hurriedly. "Some things are illegal, you know."