Arthur Lester (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
theotherright) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
come_sailaway2022-09-18 08:18 pm
theotherright) wrote in come_sailaway2022-09-18 08:18 pm
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.
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.
no subject
"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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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."
no subject
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."
no subject
"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?"
no subject
"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.
no subject
"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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
"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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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.