come_sailaway | [CLOSED] Move him into the sun -

Entry tags:

[CLOSED] Move him into the sun -

Who: Arthur and Crichton
When: The morning after the event
Where: Cabin 127
Summary: Mistakes, it turns out, were made.
Warnings: Death and trauma will be all over this one, including a flashback. Also there's always a possibility that Arthur's strong frustrations with being disabled will come up.

He died, and it hurt the whole time he was dying.

Maybe Crichton saw Friday bring in the corpse -- wide-eyed, contorted of jaw, comically sunburned -- and tuck it into the folded-out sofa-bed as if to sleep. Maybe he slept right through the whole thing alongside a dead body! We're honestly not sure which is existentially worse.

Either way, the moment the clock ticks over to 6am, Arthur screams and curls up and grabs at the sheets and he's not falling? "John!" He's not falling. "John!!" He's not falling??? Fuck fuck fuck fuckf uckfuckfcukfuck fuckfuckfuck he just grabs white-knuckled on to the sheets with a lot of strangled whimpering and shaking.

In a moment he'll be present enough to realise his abdomen hurts, no doubt a symptom of trying to sail off the edge of the world with stitches in. The fine pink lobster sunburn has vanished as if never there.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Alright." Arthur can't hide that he's impatient to move, stitches or no, but he stays in place through a miracle of god and self-control. They will have come back just like him. He can't very well find them if he's doubling over in pain every three minutes.

He tries to think when he would have pulled the stitches. When they went over the edge, surely, but that leads him to remember the drop, and the screams that came out of all three of them, and the moments when he thought they would all hit water -- water that would go over their nose and ears and mouth -- choke their voices -- and involuntarily he imagines a dripping sound, and tinny rivulets, and the gentle crash of waves against the ship's hull takes on a different echo, as if falling onto tile --

He doesn't so much remember as have the memory slammed up, in full colour, in front of his eyes, as if he never even lost them. It happens fast.

He's playing the piano. He has to stop playing. He plays as if possessed. He can't stop playing, because he knows what comes next. But if he stopped playing there might still be time. He keeps playing.

He can see the pencilled notes, and the reminder to himself that he wrote and forgot above a scribbled treble clef; the clutter kept on the piano's top; the one chipped white key which had a mug dropped on it but which still works. He can feel the pedal creak under his foot, and the resistance when it reaches its lowest point. He can smell the cold shepherd's pie, on a plate nearby, that he forgot to stop and eat. He can taste the little hunger-buzz on his tongue that means he should have eaten it. He can hear the music. He can hear the unnatural quiet of the house.

Arthur's hands move, alternating between gripping the bedsheets and shaking, and tapping them as if they're keys; his face is a mask of anxiety. The air itself presses down in foreboding, like a ceiling bowed low by a flood. He pleads, "Stop," at the level of a whisper. "Stop."

The message is sent, so he slips the phone away into his pocket just in time to turn around and see Arthur with his hands spasming, whispering to himself desperately.

Cold understanding grips Crichton around the throat, closing off his air. He's seen that faraway haunted look reflected in the mirror before. He knows those sounds, the kind he makes when he's dragged into the throes of old horrors.

"Arthur," he says the name soft, but firm. "Arthur, come back. Listen to me."

He reaches for one of the man's hands when next he moves to grip the sheets. Warm fingers wrap around Arthur's, pressing them together, attempting to still them.

"Listen to my voice. It's John. Can you hear me?"

There's a response on the phone from Tendi, that simply says, "On my way." And sure enough, before too long, you can hear running up the hall, and there's a knocking at the door. "Hello? Commander?"

Arthur's face doesn't change; tears have started rolling down it, going more or less from 0 to 100 in a heartbeat.

He finally leaves the piano bench ("Please, hurry, please," because he knows what's at the end of it, even though he knows what's at the end of it). The floor under his feet is hardwood, the sound of his footsteps on it clear. But there's-- something else too?

Arthur's shaking on the bed, breathing fast and uneven; his hand struggles under Crichton's, because he can't stay here, he needs to move, it might be too late, it's already too late. Crichton's exact words don't come through, but he is aware of something, audible but distorted like a voice heard through deep water. Solid in a way the vision isn't. One or two words shine brighter than the others.

The memory continues ruthlessly, but it also wavers just a little, as if drawn over his other senses on tracing-paper.

He starts to shake his head no, confused. He doesn't want to be followed. He doesn't want anybody else to see.

Edited 2022-09-24 13:02 (UTC)

Crichton can feel the buzz of his phone in his pocket, but his hands are too full to check. He assumes (hopes) it means she's coming. And the relief that washes through him when her voice comes through the door is immediate.

"It's open! You can let yourself in!"

He doesn't want to leave Arthur's side when he's shaking like this, afraid that if he lets go the man might do something to hurt himself while trapped in what Crichton can only assume is a very strong flashback... that, or he's having a complete mental break. That would make Tendi's arrival even more timely.

"Please hurry. Arthur's..." What? Losing his marbles? "In bad shape."

His attention goes right back to his poor battered friend. Pressure on the shoulder had helped last time, so Crichton tries again. Using the hand not currently trying to still Arthur's fingers, he grips Arthur by the shoulder and squeezes. "Arthur, I know you've been through a lot but you need to come back. Come back to me. You're on the Serina Eterna, you're in your room, you're safe. We're going to help you. Try to nod if you can hear me."

Like a nightmare after you've woken up, it still tries to cling to him. He even fights against rescue for a moment, because he's not seen it through to its end, and she's at the end, and he can't abandon her. But the hand on his shoulder is more solid and warm than anything he imagines reaching for. The voice -- Crichton's voice. It's Crichton's voice -- is more real than the splattering of water. That's Arthur's name. That's the name of the ship. Crichton's going to help.

The vision is in tatters around him. He manages to nod.

Tendi pushes open the door and quickly walks in, setting her medical kit on a table as she leans over Arthur, her tricorder out as she begins to scan. "What can you tell me about what happened?" The Tricorder beeps and hums, basic medical data beginning to flow past the screen.

"Ok, first things first. This should help with the pain at least." Tendi takes out her hypospray and gives a dose of anesthetic. "Now the wound. Once he's stable, we can start work on the more in depth problems." Tendi begins to work quickly, cutting away the torn sutures, as she begins to pull the wound back together, the regenerator healing the lacerations as she slowly moves across his stomach.

"What's his history? Is this something psychological, or did something attack him?"

"Crichton, who the fuck is this?"

Aaaand Arthur's back in the room!

"Oh, sorry! I should've introduced myself, but it seemed like it was an emergency. I'm D'vana Tendi, Medical Ensign. Treating you right now with some medical tech from my time, the wound on your abdomen should start feeling a whole lot better really soon. What's your name?" Tendi talks as she works, keeping her cheery tone as she sutures and heals the wounds.

Crichton's chest finally relaxes enough for him to get a full breath. Thank God, Arthur's back in the present.

"She's the friend I told you I was going to call. It's okay, you can trust her." Is he basing that strongly on the fact that she's Starfleet? Yes. But is he wrong?

As far as answering her questions about Arthur's history, he's going to keep it vague for his roommate's sake. "He showed up here with these wounds. I did my best to stitch them with my admittedly limited training. It was either that or nothing since he uh... didn't want to go to medical." Can you hear that bus he's throwing you under, Arthur?

"I'll let him tell you the rest of the story."

"Jesus christ," says Arthur hoarsely, scrubbing too late at his eyes and face. This is a lot! It's a lot to come out of one of your worst memories to find an unseen stranger poking and prodding you! It's a lot!

He knows what happened. It's not the first time it's happened. He thought it had stopped happening.

Physically drained and emotionally punch-drunk, he just. answers. quietly and obligingly.

"Right. Of- of course. The stitches... the stitches held until I- I- I- I made a stupid attempt at escape and... fell. I suppose I tore them in the fall."

"Ok just don't move, we're almost done with that part." Tendi brings the tools across the final cuts on his abdomen, and gives a nod. "There we go, all your cuts fixed, no problem at all! Do you have any other injuries or scars that I can clean up for you as well?"

Tendi begins to scan closer, bringing the medical probe over his head, carefully scanning around his eyes and forhead, moving around to the back. The readings are...strange. Medicaly, it's fine. No damage to the eyes or occipital lobe. In fact, it's too fine, in a way. The activity in that area of the brain is very very high, almost a static, as if it's being overridden.

"This is...strange. I've seen some things...sort of like this, but nothing to this level. It's almost like a Vulcan mind meld, but...way more intense."

"The fall?" Crichton is imagining Arthur somehow having blindly fallen from the deck of the ship.

Hearing Tendi's comment on what the scans find, however, his eyebrows shoot up. Mind meld? That's... alarming. Suddenly, he's very sure he doesn't want her to bring that scanner anywhere near him. God knows what it would detect in his brain.

"He was just having a, uh... flashback. Right, Arthur? Maybe you're picking up on that." Crichton doesn't really believe it, but he's starting to suspect something else fishy, combining this with the pieces of Arthur's story he got last night. If he's even remotely close to being right, he doesn't think that's the kind of thing Arthur wants to tell to a new stranger.

Waiting out the treatment gives Arthur time to recover himself, get his breathing under control, and banish the shreds of the past back to where they belong. Okay, they must have seen it, Crichton definitely saw it, but they didn't really see it, not the parts that Arthur saw and heard and felt. Nothing blew up on him back when Parker caught him having his problem, and nothing's blowing up on him now. Nobody's asking awkward questions about it. It's okay. It's okay.

It's almost comical how his first thought, at Tendi's question, is about the burn stinging his arm, and how only his second is the realisation that-- this isn't any medicine he's familiar with. This is something more advanced.

Could it do something for his eyes?

He doesn't have time to form the question before the... whatever-it-is that Tendi's using is humming theremin-like in his face. He holds mostly still, because, you know, medical procedure, but his head still tilts and moves away from the thing as it's brought around his head. His expression is uncomfortable, and it turns out he's completely justified, because he knows two of the words out of vulcan, mind, and meld and he does not like their use one bit.

Can she actually detect some trace of John with that thing?

Arthur remembers his hope on the day that he arrived here, that John was still in there, only silent for some reason. Should he let her look, based on that thin and thinning hope? Or would that only lead to his whole 'man with thing in head' secret getting spilled for nothing?

Chapter XXX
Allow the scan to continue: 5
Push the scanner away: 12
17 total votes

Making a snap decision, he reaches towards the high-pitched noise to push the scanner firmly away.

"Stop. I'm not interested in what the aftermath of my--" There's an audible reluctance in the way he says the next words, but he decides to to yes-and Crichton's cover story anyway. "--my nervous disturbances looks like."

Nailed it!

"What I want to know is whether the technology from your time--" And he doesn't even have to pretend to be eager here. In fact, he has to tone it down, in case he's headed straight for disappointment. "Can- can it do anything for blindness? Anything at all?"

"Well...yes, but not with these tools. I don't have access to a biobed, replicator, any of the kind of regeneration tech I would need to help try and fix that. But that's not the problem. Before you pushed away my tricorder, I did notice a few things. First of all, according to this, you're not blind. Medically, I mean. Eyes and nerve endings are...fine. The problem is that...well, it's like your eyes are overwhelmed. Like it's getting too much information."

Tendi gives a sigh and starts to look over Arthur for any more obvious wounds or scars. "If you want me to clean up any scars as well, just say so, but as for your sight, I have no idea. If we were on my ship, I could do something, I don't have any of my normal tools now. I just don't know what's causing this, it's nothing I've seen before. I've seen some results of a Mind meld, or a mental interface, I read about a group that was in pods, and mentally in a weird other computer relm, which is the closest I can get, but even that..."

Tendi gives a sigh. "Sorry I can't help more..."

I'm sorry, did she just say the words 'you're not blind' to him?

"I'm not..." He's gobsmacked. "What?"

Overwhelmed?

It takes a second to click, and then a nervous laugh briefly overtakes him, because the last thing he looked at -- the last thing he ever looked at -- well he still can't clearly remember opening the book or trying to read the pages, but given what he does remember afterwards, overwhelming is so accurate and so understated that it threatens to be hilarious --

"No. No nononono, that can't--" If it's not only that John had hold of them, but that they're busted, then-- no, that doesn't bear thinking about. "B-but that means they'll recover, right? I'm not looking at- at- at -- there's nothing to overwhelm them now. Wouldn't they get better? Even if it takes some time?"

He shakes his head when she offers to clean up his scars. Wounds is one thing, but... look, he's just never liked the idea of completely erasing things. The scars he has aren't exactly badges of honour, but he'd feel dishonest if he brushed them off like dust.

Also, the very second Tendi says 'mind meld' again, Arthur interrupts, and he talks over her, and he keeps talking over her. "No. Listen. If all you can do is in the realm of -- of cuts and stitches and things, then that's fine, there's only my arm left at that point. Really, it's fine, I don't need anything else."

Arthur knocks the scanner away, and for just a moment it's pointed right at Crichton's head before he ~~panics~~ quickly ducks away from it like he's afraid it's a loaded gun. "Whoa!"

With that small personal crisis now out of the way, he zeros in hard on what these two have to say. Is it just his imagination, or did Arthur try very, very hard to speed past any mention of Mind and Meld?

"Arthur, you said you'd only been blind for four days before you got here. Maybe it's some kind of... shock? If you could manage to heal a little..." read: CHILL a little "Maybe it's possible?"

He turns to Tendi. "Could it? Could that be possible?"

Tendi looks rather nervous at this, "I...Don't know. I don't have my real tools, this stuff is useful, but this is some very deep level brain problems. Wish Dr. T'ana was here, she'd have a better sence, heck, she'd probaly have dealt with this before. I mean, she on more than one occasion had a crewmate turn into a puppet, and they were fine after."

Tendi gives a sigh. "Even if I knew exactly what was wrong, It's not like I can do anything about it, I don't have a biobed or anything." She moves over to Arthur's arm and begins to work on it, the skin healing as she moves the regnerator over the wounds.

"Do you see anything at all, or just blackness? Or is it white?"

Four days. Right. That thing he said.

"Well, four days and I... I left out a span where I was in the hospital. I wasn't awake for it, so it didn't seem... relevant at the time."

The medical setting, and the importance of the question at hand, force him to offer a little more detail. Aaaaand now no further questions need be asked!

Arthur's face when Tendi mentions crewmates being turned into puppets is... expressive, but he moves past it. His hand flexes as the mess of burn and bore-hole on his forearm starts to repair, and the constant low ache and sting of it fades in turn.

"It's black," he says, muted by disappointment. "Just black."

Arthur, if you could only see the look on Crichton's face. Yeah, that tiny little detail MIGHT have been useful.

"You were in the hospital... were you in a coma? You didn't think that might be relevant information to tell a guy doing home-brew surgery on you?!" He scrubs his hands down his face. "For the love of..."

God, his head... he can't shout, it hurts too bad. Arthur is patched up now, the worst should be over now, right? Except, no. Not at all. Because he saw the look on the man's face at the mention of "puppet" and boy does he have a growing list of concerns.

"Oh, also I should mention, When I say 'puppet' I mean a hand puppet. Like...a stuffed toy puppet."

Tendi continues to work, as if what she just said was totaly normal. "Also, are you OK Commander? You look a bit sick as well."

Crichton has reached his quota of weird crap that should not even be possible, so when she casually mentions that her crewmate was made into a literal stuffed puppet he just kind of... laughs an insane little laugh and puts his head in his hands.

"I'm fine. I'm just recovering from the worst hangover I've had in months, that's all."

"Uhhhhm, errr," says Arthur to the puppet thing. Good lord. He's going to have to inform Ryan that there's another world weird enough to give his train a run for its money.

"Listen," he addresses Crichton, mostly to clear this up but also partly to avoid thinking about about people getting turned into hand puppets. "Crichton, I am sorry that I didn't mention it, but it wasn't really at the front of my mind at the time."

It's amazing how far a coma can fall down your priority list when measured alongside other memorable events like 'accidentally murdering a lighthouse keeper with darkness ghosts' and 'getting shot to death'.

"Oh, if you're hungover, I could get you some Raktajino! It's what Klingons drink, and if you've ever had bloodwine, you know it's good stuff. Arthur, would you like a cup as well? I cna go grab some really quick!"

Tendi stands up, excited to help her new friends. "It'd be no trouble at all."

"I've never had either, but if it's Klingon, then that's just what I need." He'll get to you in a minute, Arthur.

"Could you please go get us some? That would be... so good of you. I'll owe you."

cw, a trauma flashback starts here

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