come_sailaway | [OPEN and one CLOSED] I shall not forget how his laugh rang out.

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[OPEN and one CLOSED] I shall not forget how his laugh rang out.

Whomst: Arthur and you!
Whenst: September
Wherest: About
Whatst: Canon update, fraying at the edges, a rescue mission that's doomed before it begins, and also some flowers
Warningst'dve: Starvation/imprisonment, man going through it, more as they come up.
Visual Note: Arthur's come off a canon update where he sustained some injuries and was starved for a while, so he looks Bad. For the sake of brevity, I didn't describe him in full in every prompt, but there are details in the first one should you need them.

[CLOSED to Crichton] it was just as the light was beginning to fail

At 6am, in cabin 127, several things happen:

The record player, which hasn't been wound in some time, lets out the last of the tension in its spring with a noise that's more 'old music used in a horror movie' than 'cosy crackling gramophone'.

Arthur turns — or has turned, perhaps, sometime in the night — from a miserable but healthy man into a guy who looks like his last square meal happened before the first world war. He slept without a shirt, and so there's nothing to hide the prominence of his ribs — the livid blotches that might be bruising — the plethora of new scars. There's a nasty circle on his belly that must be what the bite Tendi healed would've eventually curdled into. There's a zigzag of electrical scars, scrapes as if he lost a fight with sandpaper, a pale and pitted chunk out of his throat, and one finger reduced to what looks like blackened bone. There's a good inch of dark, brittle beard flavour-saving dust and blood on the bottom half of his face.

Arthur wakes up, lets out a breath like he's suddenly in a lot less pain than he was a moment ago, lets out another breath like he's confused, and says aloud, accusing, afraid: "Wait— what did you do? Where the hell did you send me?"

And then, and only then, he realises that he knows the answer — that he knows, that he remembers, more, so very many more, people and places and events than he did when he was talking to Kayne just a moment ago.

[OPEN, deck zero] that I suddenly heard all I needed to hear

Ya boy has a mission. It's one he has no clear idea of how he's going to achieve, but what's new?

Arthur looks absolutely fucking godawful: see the prompt above, though he has, thank goodness, shaved since then. Nevertheless, he's energetic, borderline frantic, running both hands over the bulkhead door that seals the crew quarters, muttering to himself. They all came out this way once. There must be a way back in.

Anyone hovering nearby may catch key words such as 'drill', 'shapeshift', and 'explosives'.

[OPEN, around the ship] it has lasted me many and many a year.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane?

No, it's Arthur: floating unmoored across the deck a few feet in the air, clutching a half-blown dandelion like it's the only sane thing in an insane world.

He's located a wall with his cane and is trying to find some way of hooking himself closer, but tragically, all he manages is to push himself further in the other direction. "No, oh no nono come back-- ah, damn it."

If there's a very subtle note of hysteria behind his voice, it's because there's something weirdly funny about -- about going through everything he has, and then having to deal with floating. Not imprisonment, not almost dying every five minutes, but drifting on the breeze like a bubble. Not torturous, but ridiculous. He's almost tempted to remember how to have fun, just for the occasion.

[WILDCARD] wildcard

Wildcard!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Gone are the days when he'd try to argue sense into Arthur. For now, it feels like a smarter idea to go with this and see if he can get some answers. Maybe plot a couple of those landmines on a map for once without stepping on them? He can dream.

"What was the deal? Arthur--!" he starts to rise, thinking he'll need to catch Arthur after a bmp like that, but his roommate barely even slows down.

"What promise? I have no frelling idea what any of this means."

Luckily for Crichton, Arthur's thoughts are easy to scatter of late (it's one of the reasons he was kept in that pit, and it worked, it worked). They coalesce back around his questions.

Arthur grimaces. His breath escapes in an involuntary noise and then hisses back in through his teeth. "You'll say I'm mad."

It's not an excuse. That fact wouldn't have stopped him for a second, and still won't.

"So what?" Crichton can't quite keep a, frankly, mad giggle out of his tone. "Not sure how many stones I got left to throw about it."

"Fair enough," agrees Arthur. "I made a deal to get John back. The King took him."

"Took him? Out of your head??" Okay, so yeah you are fucking crazy, Arthur. What the fuck?

A sharp exhale, but not a hint of regret or apology. "I knew you wouldn't like it."

"Yeah, I wonder why??" He sounds like he wants to pick Arthur up and shake him. He probably could. "Not like I just almost died again in July after having Valdis try to suck Harvey's soul out of my body, or anything. I'd give my left nut to get that asshole out of my head and you made a deal to get yours re-installed?!?"

"You--"

It starts off angry, frantic, then gets quiet as Arthur tries to recall... just about anything about that.

"You didn't tell me."

And whose fault was that?

His voice is cold and hard. "Why would I? I was dead to you."

Arthur lurches like he's going to be sick, the air all leaving his lungs.

"So that's how it is." Brittle. How dare he. How fucking dare he. Three months ago that might have broken Arthur apart, but he's been through too much shit to take it now.

"You instigated that. You wanted it. You knew exactly- exactly what buttons to push, and you pushed them, and now you're still attempting to hold it over me. And you wonder why I would rather put my bets on John."

"Who's cabin did you run right to after, huh?? Yeah, I instigated it. I was out of my damn mind and I thought I deserved to die for what I did to you. I felt like a rabid dog who needed putting down. Harvey was holding my damn finger off the trigger or I'd have done us both the favor myself. You think you were the only one hurting?" He feels sick admitting to this, but Siffleur already ratted his ass out so it's probably nothing Arthur didn't already know.

"I was never going to be better than John to you. He got all the second chances. Apparently, including this one."

"You manipulated me to pull the trigger because you were sorry for hurting me."

Arthur's tone gives that about as much respect as he feels it deserves. Anything else he feels about all that, he doesn't let Crichton see.

"Yeah. I did. I told you, I told Valdis, I've told everyone, I'm not a good guy. But, frell me, I thought for one second that maybe if I texted you where I was you might actually be sincere about wanting to talk to me. You showed up and I realized my mistake. So, I thought maybe giving you the revenge you were craving might satisfy us both."

"At least," grates Arthur, "when John is cruel, he has the wit to make it about something I regret."

He doesn't mean it. But he does answer claws with teeth.

He sucks in a sharp breath, reacting as if he's just been slapped. But his voice stays hard and cold.

"Glad that's out in the open. You didn't want to hear my apologies, so I got none left to give you. I don't know what else you want me to say. If I could leave and put John here in my place, I would. We'd all be happier that way."

Arthur immediately feels in his gut the 'you've gone too far' heaviness, but what's his gut done for him lately? He barges on, derisive:

"Those were apologies?"

Because he sure doesn't remember hearing any others, not for this.

Crichton's last words almost get the response they're asking for. Maybe the one he wants to hear. The emotional butt of a gun to the head.

Arthur nearly says it. But he's starting to feel choked in here, the walls invisible but surely too close. How the hell did he escape from the pits, to be back in a prison again, fighting again, going in circles again and again? Circles sixty steps around, never a corner.

Dice move, with a sound as if they were whittled from Mr Faust himself.

"I'm back in the pit," Arthur says with a manic sort of despair. Not physically, maybe, but what's the difference? A prison is a prison is a prison. "I'm back. I never left."

"Does it matter now? It was never going to be enough." Like he never is.

He's standing there, wound tight enough that his limbs creak from even the slightest movement. He's waiting for the words to fall. Waiting for a reason to close off that tiny, tiny sliver of his heart he still left open. Arthur doesn't say them. Dammit. Dammit!

"What... pit?"

Arthur pushes out a breath and then drags it back in. His hands move unconsciously, thumbs curling in, then fingers.

"For eighty-five days we were trapped in a pit by the King." His voice is slow, and ragged like a sawblade is ragged. "He had tried... ev- everything else, I suppose, and it was meant to... to soften me up. Dirt walls, dirt floor, dirt air, dirt water, dirt... Sixty paces around in a circle, nineteen across, not even twenty. Not even- even twenty." Not that a twentieth pace would have made any difference, but it's amazing what you start to fixate on when you're stuck in a hole for three months.

"And we got out." He stops meandering abruptly, and snarls that, his point. Focus. "This morning, the eighty-fifth morning, the eighty... fourth morning, the morning had already passed the first day we were thrown in ... we got out. Do you understand that? We got out. Without John I would still be down there rotting, convincing myself I was holding out, talking to bones. Without John I wouldn't have survived even half of the things that have been thrown at us."

And in return, Arthur failed him. He swore not to let the King win, and the King made him a liar: not only in their confrontation, but long before it, in the bottom of that awful hungry pit.

"And the King took him. To break him." Arthur's breathing is harsh. He has to struggle to pull in air. But he carries on aggressively.

"You constantly think of him as Harvey, and- and that's partly my fault. But he is so much more than he was when he began! He cares, and he cries for others' pain, and he- he loves, and he has struggled and sacrificed every single day for that progress. Yes, I fucking tried to get him back, because he is my friend, because-- because I love him, and if-- if making unforgivable mistakes means he deserves to be taken and tormented by the King, then for god's sake, Crichton, apply the same standard to both of us!"

Crichton sits there, silent and numb. It's the only way he can survive the verbal razor wire Arthur's laying out in front of him. It's so difficult to divorce his hatred for Harvey from this. He can't... he can't picture himself ever feeling for Harvey what Arthur has come to feel for John. Friendship? Love? He could never. But it's Arthur's truth, not his.

Harvey has saved his life plenty of times, but only because that's what Scorpius commands. But, if there's no one commanding John...?

...if making unforgivable mistakes means he deserves to be taken and tormented by the King, then for god's sake, Crichton, apply the same standard to both of us!

He huffs out a long breath, sagging in place with it. He had it all wrong from the start. John was never the equivalent of Harvey. John was... Aeryn--a being born to cruelty who, with the right mentor, is learning to be a person. He could put his face in his hands and weep. What comes out instead is a crackle of insane laughter.

"I'm sorry. You're right. He doesn't deserve that. Neither of you do. I'm sorry that you're here again now when you should be there to save him. I'm working on a way to get out of here. I have to get Harvey out of the picture, first. But after that... I'll try as hard as I can to get you home. So you can get him back and screw that King."

Arthur didn't give himself time to wonder how Crichton would take all of that, but he's ready for it to be bad. For a moment it sounds like that's exactly how it's going to be, and he shivers at that laugh, bracing himself to...

Fuck. He doesn't know. He doesn't know. Maybe nothing at all. Everything he had left, he just poured out of his mouth. John's not here. Maybe whatever happens, happens.

What Crichton actually goes on to say... christ, it breaks him down. He didn't expect to have Crichton on his side in this -- maybe not in anything ever again, and especially not in this. Perhaps getting home to help John is a futile promise. The fact that Crichton is even making it means more than Arthur is able to say with tears starting to waterfall down his face like this.

"I- th- Thank you."

That promise is pretty much the only thing keeping him from sinking to the floor. He wraps his skinny arms around himself, cold and overwhelmed and exhausted, part of his soul stretched to breaking across the universes between himself and John.

The breath catches in his windpipe, makes him cough.

Don't thank me, he thinks. Not for doing what anyone who isn't a selfish, subhuman piece of shit should do. This shouldn't be that high of a bar to clear...

"You're going to make it through this," he tells Arthur. "I'm going to help you." Because that's the right thing to do and, God help him, he can't let himself slip any further into the mud. He loves Arthur, he's not going to let his friend suffer alone.

Crichton turns in sudden alarm at that coughing. "Hey, hey are you choking on something?"

Arthur wants to ask how, how he's supposed to get through this, how he's supposed to keep walking when every time something rips away someone he loves, it seems to take his heart and a couple of limbs with it.

He can't say it. Not for emotional reasons, but because something really is catching in his windpipe, like the grit that would collect whenever the bucket remained unfilled for several days.

"I just need," he begins, and then coughs about fifteen times more, and then wheezes "drink," starting to move a little frantically in what he thinks might be the direction of the bathroom. (It's not.)

"Sit back down. I'll get it," Crichton commands, with the same tone of a voice a nurse might use on an overly excitable patient.

He doesn't give Arthur any time to argue (as if he could right now) he just hops up and charges into the bathroom to fill a glass from the sink.

"Right here," he says, moving the glass into the path of Arthur's hand seconds later."

He doesn't sit, and has actually lost track of the direction of the bed, but he also doesn't have time to wander too much before Crichton is back. (If he hadn't already been crying then the sound of the tap might do it, along with the cool glass in his hand that he got just by asking.)

He holds the glass like a precious treasure, and drinks the water like it's the bar of chocolate Crichton gave him back on the day when they first met. And then...

And then it comes right up again in a racking cough, accompanied by some very wet purple-black petals.

Arthur says "shit!" in a panic, and drops into a prostrate position as if about to lower his mouth to the wet ground -- and then he makes himself freeze, trembling, not coughing but quietly muttering: "no, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay." There's more, it's okay.

Crichton's glad right about now that Arthur can't see the string of horrified expressions that cross his face, first at how precious that glass is held in Arthur's hand, then the coughing, the panic at spilling, and then... the flowers. His heart is beating so manically it feels like it wants to gallop off in two different directions at once.

Okay. Okay. Calm down. One problem at a time.

"Arthur! Frell!" He drops down on his knees beside Arthur, one hand laid protectively against his back. "Shit. You're... coughing up flower petals."

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cw: suicide

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