Disclaimer: The usual. I don't own Farscape or any of its characters. The Jim Henson Company does.
Rating: K
Summary: As Stars requested, this is Moya/Pilot fic (with a little help from a friend) that takes place post ITLD. No sex, no violence.
Notes: Thanks to sarahjane for a fabulous beta
Here's to you, Stars.
And even when you've paid enough, been pulled apart or been held up
Because every single memory of the good or bad faces of luck
don't lose any sleep tonight
I'm sure everything will end up alright
~~~Audioslave, "Be Yourself"
Her grief is like the vapors on his planet, holding him down and threatening to suck him under with her.
Vacuum into space.
Moya shudders.
Her passengers won't notice, but it vibrates through his tentacles, into his claws, making them shudder over the controls.
He's shared joy. He's had his share of grief.
He was joined with her when she died, before, at the capriciousness of builders who'd wanted to make a point while Zhaan had stroked him in comfort.
Zhaan. Aeryn, once. Moya's former Pilot. Velorek, who'd tried to ease his pain the only way a Peacekeeper could.
Crais.
Talyn.
"Talyn." The name echoes inside him, coming up from Moya's belly, a roar, a whisper. His claws fall limp and he looks for comfort somewhere else.
Somewhere else.
Aeryn sits on a console beside Crichton, refusing to look at the human while Crichton crazily scrawls equations over his arms in thick, black ink.
The DRD cackles a sound to him.
"Not now," Pilot says with some annoyance.
The DRD reports his attempts to get Aeryn's attention, to nudge her off her perch, to bring her to the den.
To get her to say something.
Another DRD, its eyestalks looking first down one corridor then another, sees Chiana lying across her bed, staring. Then another, D'Argo, sitting across from Jool in the ship's galley, quiet. Raslak between them.
Rygel is nowhere to be found.
"Not now," Pilot says again. "No." Their actions are always his to see, should he choose to do so. They're united. A family. A unit. A team. None of them really wanting to be left behind.
Moya's cries undulate through him, the moaning of a dying beast. On his planet, the elders who'd never had the opportunity for space flight sounded like this when they went to die. They knew their end had come, and with it, the shattering of their long held dreams.
He and the other young ones had forced themselves to listen…
…listen to the cries of the unfulfilled. Of the dying dream. Of a life's failure.
"It's not like that, Moya," he says aloud.
His claws stroke a soft spot near life support and illumination, a spot he'd stumbled upon purely by mistake after she'd been burned. Before that, before freedom, his claws had been limited to a small set of commands; he'd never known anything more than the utilitarian about his host.
"You can't stop it, you know."
The DRD that sits at his console is squawking madly but he hadn't heard it through the din of his and Moya's thoughts. His claws still over the stricken Leviathan…his host, his charge…and his eyes gaze to the woman in front of him. Her eyes look tired but clear. Her mouth is a straight line, as straight as her spine, as straight as the braid that hangs between her squared shoulders.
"Officer Sun…" He doesn't know why he's startled by her presence.
She was there…and now she's here…He'd managed to lose track of the whereabouts of his passengers.
She shrugs a shoulder. "Talyn's dead. We go on. It's what we're bred to do, isn't it."
The last word really isn't a question.
"Aeryn…" One claw remains on the Leviathan. He extends the other out to her but she's too far from him to touch.
"We'll give him a proper burial." Her voice is flat, far away. "The burial he would want, the one he deserves."
"There's a leviathan burial ground…it's a sacred space."
She nods once. "They tell me that paying the proper homage makes a difference. That it 'helps'." Her lips twitch up in a smirk.
For a microt, he thinks her composure will fail her but it doesn't. It won't.
"I don't know that it's true." Her mouth is hard again and she turns from him without a touch, or a smile of reassurance.
Under his claw, Moya's quiverings have quieted.
"Yes, Moya. Officer Sun will make sure that we find the burial ground."
She hadn't said so but he knew it to be true.
#End#