come_sailaway | [CLOSED] Move him into the sun -

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[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.

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You hear a voice too.

Just once, just frelling once, Crichton would love not to have been right. Getting that admission doesn't feel like a victory when it's wrapped in panicked whispering--when Arthur's babbling at the edge of madness makes the bile rise in the back of Crichton's throat. He's seen people look at him with that same raw terror in their eyes before... but only once. Only when Harvey was the one driving. When Harvey was the one attacking his friends and... killing Aeryn. He can't stand to see that look coming from Arthur now; he swallows hard and looks away.

"Whatever you think it is, it's not." The harsh edge is gone from his voice, replaced with cracking vocal cords just barely able to push out sound. "I'm not under anyone's control right now. But...yes. I had a voice in my head too. His name was Harvey."

Arthur closes his mouth, and makes fists with his hands, working to pull himself the fuck together. If his fingernails weren't so short they would be biting into his palms.

It's the change in Crichton's voice that really hammers home how he's acting, not towards a puppet of the King, but towards a person and a friend. He doesn't miss the depth of the implication of that right now, but... it only gets a pin in it, one of many pins.

"I'm sorry," he says, because that seems so much more important to start off with. His voice is tight, but under control; his face has ceased to be outright terrified and instead settled on what one might consider a baseline level of sorrow and anxiety.

Does he mean sorry for being a prick? Or sorry for Crichton having to deal with a guy in his head? Why not both.

Jesus christ. Crichton has one too. Jesus christ.

"In my world... several people have, have tried very suddenly to kill me because they were influenced by him." He says it because he owes Crichton some kind of explanation, some fraction of the trust he's more than earned. "But I... I know he's not here. I know that's not you. I'm sorry. I- I was startled."

"I'm sorry, too. I knew exactly what kind of crap you were dealing with and I still pushed you." In retrospect, laughing like a lunatic at a man who's just come down off a traumatic flashback wasn't a great move. Not one of his better mornings.

"It scares me how much we have in common," he admits. "I'm being hunted right now in my world, by several different groups. Not to mention the bounty on my head." His literal head. The constant paranoia, oh yes, he's intimately familiar.

"Can we start over? I've got no hard feelings, man. I don't blame you. I still just want to help. I want to understand."

Just about everything Crichton says is sparking off new questions, new concerns. And Arthur looks downright worried by the idea that Crichton's being hunted too, never mind that whoever hunts him would probably lack the motive or indeed the means to look for him on a cruise ship in a pocket universe.

"Yes," he says. "Yes, please, let's start over."

Honestly-- he would have said the same thing even if Crichton wasn't sorry.

"What does it mean?" He can't help but jump into questions. There are too many pins, and they're starting to fall off the board. "Does the captain know about this? Did he assign us to the same cabin on purpose? Are there more people on board like us?"

Of course he doesn't expect Crichton to have the answers to these questions, but he has to give them voice anyway.

Whew. Okay, good. Starting over is good. They can put a couple ugly moments behind them and hopefully sleep easier tonight for it. Assuming either of them are going to sleep much now. ...The coffee will help, right?

"I'd bet my left asscheek the Captain knew exactly what he was doing putting us together. He was probably taking bets himself on how long it would take for one of us to let it slip" Wonder how they did on that.

"I'm tempted to say there can't be that many guys like us around but I'm not putting anything past this place."

But, okay, besides those questions, Crichton has a much bigger one that hits closer to home. "Since you got here, have you heard from yours?"

Ooooo Arthur's eyes narrow as they talk about the Captain. Ooo he would like very much to punch the Captain in the face sometime.

"My first night here, somebody told me that the Captain aims to... harvest his passengers' suffering, in some nebulous way. I guess our fighting out the issue plays directly into his hands." His voice is sour. He's still... so tense.

But also, yes, big question. "Not a peep," Arthur mutters, and still he doesn't draw the line for Crichton between the John of last night and the voice of this morning. He's trying to remember if he's said anything else since he arrived. Anything else that'll give away more about John than he wants to, if and when he draws that line. "And yours -- Harvey -- you said he was in your head."

Take a number Arthur and get in line.

"Yeah, I heard the same thing. He's an emotional vampire or something." And that would make perfect sense why he would house two volatile nutcases in one space. Makes too much sense. All the more reason to not tear each other apart.

"He hasn't made a single wise-crack this whole time. And I've tried to get at him. Either he's playing possum, or he's really gone. But...I don't know. I don't feel any different." He always thought he would. The other Crichton had said to Aeryn that he felt lighter somehow. Then again, the other Crichton was dying of radiation poisoning.

"That's one upside of being here. Good riddance. I'm not gonna miss the bastard."

"I was told he's trying to become a god," says Arthur harshly. "It's not hard to believe. Almost every time something goes wrong, it seems like there's a fucking god involved."

Okay there mister r/atheism.

"I don't know if I feel different." And uh, he makes a note that apparently Crichton was on worse terms with the voice in his head than Arthur was. Probably a more reasonable response to the whole thing, if he's honest. "Everything's changed so quickly, I don't... I don't know what my fucking baseline is any more. I've felt sort of-- loose, I guess, ever since he showed up, like- like I can turn the wheel but the car won't always listen. I suppose I always felt a-a-a bit like that, but he--"

His eyes are overloaded. They might not recover. He keeps circling fearfully round the thought like prey that can't turn it back on a predator. Even if he ever gets back home, John has ruined his fucking life, and if his eyes are yet another permanent casualty--

"He took my fucking eyes, Crichton." Arthur's voice intensifies into anger, into something trying very hard to be despair. "That's what happened to them. That fucking piece of shit stole my fucking eyes."

"You know... it doesn't surprise me either. He's he's already doing it to us, isn't he? Playing god." Power over life and death included.

Whatever other thoughts about theology Crichton might be about to expound on go right out the window with that last statement from Arthur. Crichton takes a horrified sharp breath in, and doesn't bother hiding how affected he is when he manages to squawk out his reply.

"He what?! H-how?" New fear unlocked.

"I don't know. I don't know! We hadn't worked out the- the catalyst, at least I didn't, and he said he didn't know, although lies are practically his native language. He didn't stop with my eyes: he took my hand, my foot--"

Arthur kneads his left hand erratically in the fingers of his right, to remind himself that he can still feel it.

"I have those back, but my eyes are still-- What if he'd taken my- my ears next? My mouth? My mind?"

Now that he's popped the cork on actually talking about this to another human being, apparently all the fears that have spun around his head a hundred times are coming out as well. With a sharp breath, he forces himself to shut the fuck up. Because the logical end to the thought is John controlling everything, and that very briefly happened, and he still remembers the-- the look on Parker's face. Jesus, the look on Parker's face. Arthur's mind is an intricate system of closed boxes, each one filled to overflowing with the things he can't deal with right now, and in one of those boxes is the last look on Parker's face.

The fact that he talked about the two of them almost in the same breath last night makes him feel physically sick.

Took his hand and foot? What the hell does that even mean? How does something just take these things? From the inside?

Oh, but it starts to make a lot more sense as Crichton is reminded of how Harvey had possessed him, taken his body for a ride while Crichton was shoved into the back corner of his own mind. He could see, hear, feel everything happening. He couldn't stop it. What if he hadn't gotten that surgery? What if the chip stayed in his brain, digging and digging until the separation between them barely existed anymore, too tangled in the web of Harvey's tendrils?

"A-Arthur I--" He cuts himself off with a noisy swallow. "I don't think what's going on with you is the same as what I have, unless someone implanted a chip in your brain too, but I know that I've been... I've had Harvey take control of me, too."

The lack of comprehension on Arthur's face when Crichton mentions implanting chips will probably answer that question. Arthur himself won't be answering it, because it's not even close to the most important part of that sentence.

The words "Jesus christ" come out of him as a punched-out breath. His hands cling to each other like they're throats, and separate quickly.

"Jesus christ," he says again, because just once didn't seem to cut it. Not for having your body seized, and controlled, and used to commit horrible acts by some cold and alien intelligence. They say that a problem shared is a problem halved, but on the contrary: knowing that he, Arthur, isn't the only sorry bastard to whom this has happened makes it feel so many times worse.

(He's definitely projecting a bit, though on this occasion the projection is entirely warranted.)

"I'm sorry." His voice is nearly toneless. "I, I-- I wouldn't wish that on anyone."

Should he take it as a relief that his counterpart here probably hasn't also been reverse-lobotomized with a second personality via technology? Is possession by a ghost or possession by a ghost in the machine more preferable? Who can say?

"I don't think anyone with a heart ever would." Crichton sounds not angry, not sad, just very, very tired.

"Why don't we just... start from the beginning? I'll tell you how I got mine if you tell me how you got yours?"

Arthur breathes in, and then out, and then nods, slow but decisive.

"All right." But he doesn't launch into it straight away. Where the hell does he start? The book? The basement? The case that turned out to underpin it all?

Abruptly, he takes in a breath and says: "My own stupid fault. Peter and I... Peter Yang, that's, that was Parker's professional name. He and I were investigating the- the disappearance of a girl, Emily MacFarland, and the search led us to an abandoned house with... well, with evidence of cult activity, though I had no idea of the extent of it until later on."

His voice is low. He rolls the bedsheets restlessly between his fingers as he speaks, remembering.

"Peter didn't like it. He was... particularly unnerved by a symbol carved into the basement door -- sort of angular, overlapping lines. He thought we were being watched, so we called it in to the police, and- and that's when they told us they'd already found her body. So we went home. And then... a book arrived on our doorstep. The same symbol was drawn on its cover."

And though he's speaking pretty tonelessly, there's still anger and frustration with himself in there when he says: "I insisted on reading it."

He laughs under his breath, short and mocking.

"Idiot. He was trapped inside. I-I-I let him out, I let him straight into my head. And the first thing he did-- the first thing-- he--"

Arthur struggles on the precipice of the confession. But he has no right to hide from his mistakes. Crichton deserves to know just how badly Arthur fucked up, the kind of collateral damage he leaves in his wake with every impulsive and poorly-chosen decision.

In a rush: "Parker. He ki- he killed Parker."

He has to stop there, give Crichton a chance to answer, to ask, to judge, to shout, to leave in disgust if he has to.

"How could you have known? If it just looked like a book...I would have done that same." Curiosity would have certainly gotten the better of him.

"Arthur... I'm so sorry." There's no accusation, just sympathetic horror. He knows exactly what it's like to carry that guilt around. He's experienced it in technicolor.

Gently, he reaches to take Arthur's hands, to stop them from digging into the bedsheets.

"It wasn't you. It might have been your hands but you know and Parker knew too that you would never have done that. I know it doesn't stop the guilt." His voice cracks as he says this, "God, do I know. But you have to keep reminding yourself until you can believe it."

Those hands curl into loose fists in Crichton's hands, trembling.

"I know it was him."

It's strange. This is something that he's just... not been able to tackle, really. In his world, it got pushed aside out of necessity, in a way that makes him queasy to think about: that was the only way he and John could cooperate, and they had to cooperate to stay alive. And then here, in this place, he's been... avoiding thinking about it. Thinking about escape instead. He's thought a lot about John, but not allowed himself to think too much about what he did before he was John. It was only when he put any of it into words last night that the fiction began to topple.

"I know it was him," Arthur says again, and for those five words there is anger and hate in his voice.

And then it fails him again.

"But Parker saw what he saw."

"I know." Crichton isn't going to try and say it's okay, because it's not. It never will be. Something like that? How could it be?

"But Parker's not the one who has to live with it now. You are. So you have to remember that you are not that thing and its choices weren't yours. You had to live with a parasite in your head but you didn't have agree with it."

There are days when Crichton tries to sit down and pull the strings to unravel where he is and where Harvey is in this addled brain of his. Their own relationship has always been adversarial and their goals fundamentally at odds. But Harvey is always there. And Crichton has found himself going to his inner demon more times than he's proud of to ask for help or advice. Because the mind of Scorpius is that of a genius. It's twisted, but still genius.

"Harvey made me kill the woman I love," he admits in a cold monotone. That's the only way he can get through saying it. "He took over me when he sensed I was trying to get rid of him. He made me collide my ship with hers over a frozen ocean and... she went under. I couldn't stop him. I just... couldn't."

Edited 2022-10-06 21:45 (UTC)

Well. He also didn't have to trust it, befriend it, let the things it did slide time after time. But guess what Arthur did.

Suppose what it comes down to is that he's just not that good of a friend to anyone.

Crichton's confession sends a cold wave through him, both in sympathy and at the similarity. Arthur takes in a sudden quiet breath, and turns his hands to grasp Crichton's in turn, for all the good it'll do.

"God," he breathes, at a loss for something more helpful to say. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." He feels as miserably bad for Crichton as you might expect, and the feeling wrestles in the pit of his stomach with growing anger: anger at their passengers, and anger at the mounting coincidences that mean the Captain knew exactly what he was doing when he put them together.

"This is a sick fucking game."

"I'm lucky," Crichton says, though that seems like such an odd thing to say after such a confession. "Because I... I have better friends than I deserved."

His fingers clench around Arthur but he plows on, needing to just bring the words up hard and fast like verbal vomit.

"I got her back. I got my Aeryn back. Zhaan, one of my crew mates, she used her own life energy to pull Aeryn back into life. I don't know how but I didn't... I didn't care. I had her back and that's all that mattered. But it cost Zhaan everything. She traded her on lifetime for Aeryn. That was my fault too." His fault for being obsessed with wormholes, putting Moya and everyone in danger, forcing Zhaan to make that choice. He'll always regret this.

"As for Harvey I... I tried to dig him out. I went to a brain surgeon. He cut the chip out but... it didn't work. He's somehow just part of me now. I didn't think it was possible to get away from him."

Sick game indeed. And yet, there's a part of him that is almost grateful that he's finally free from Harvey. It only took losing everything else.

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[CLOSED] Move him into the sun -

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