Kick at the Darkness
Timeline placement: sometime after Season 4, potential spoilers through 4.22; takes place in the same AU created in "Morning Sickness"
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: The Farscape universe, and all that is in it, is not mine, but rather belongs to the Jim Henson Company. This is a work of fiction based in that universe. No copyright infringement is intended and no money has been or will be collected.
Thank you so much to my betas: KNS, Grippy, CrystalMoon, MoyasGhost, and Lee in Limbo
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Nothing worth having
Comes without some kind of fight
Got to kick at the darkness
'Til it bleeds daylight
– Barenaked Ladies, Lovers in a Dangerous Time
Prologue
It seemed like forever since Chiana had seen the faces of those she had come to love. She could hear their voices just fine and for that she was grateful, but she would give almost anything to be able to see them again, especially D'Argo. Almost. At the time, it hadn't seemed to be too great a sacrifice, using her "sight" to help Crichton, but now, after several monens had passed and still the most she could see was the occasional bright patch in the midst of all the darkness, the sacrifice seemed to grow heavier each day.
It was possible that her sight could be restored – Diagnosan Tikrel was almost certain of that. Then again, perhaps the procedure her friends were encouraging her to undergo wouldn't work. There was no way of knowing. Never before had she shied away from taking a gamble, so she was uncertain as to why it was so hard for her to commit to that step now, knowing that it would most likely return to her the world of color that she had come to crave.
Color. Now there was a concept. Where she came from, everything was shades of gray. Color was…different. Color was vibrant and full of life and energy, chaotic. Color drew attention to itself, drowned out all those more simple shades of gray and made them all but invisible. All of these things – vibrancy, chaos, life – were anathema to her people, though, and they would do anything to eradicate them for the "greater good."
Perhaps it was this struggle between two parts of her soul that was stopping her from plunging recklessly into a solution to her problem, as she normally would. Half of her wanted to take the chance, to risk not only permanent blindness – which she feared her current state might be, anyway – but also to risk brain damage or even death so that her sight could be restored. The other half of her wanted to take the safe course and do nothing, but that course would leave her blind, with only sporadic flashes of light to mitigate the dark.
She wasn't like Crichton; she couldn't live on hope – in this case, the hope that her sight would return to her on its own, as it always had before. All the previous bouts of blindness had only taken a few arns or, at most, a couple of solar days to fade. This time, though… This time she had been blind for nearly half a cycle.
Chiana sighed and rolled over to snuggle more tightly against the warm, solid bulk of the Luxan sharing her bed. She didn't have to make the decision now, whether to allow Tikrel to perform surgery or not. He would still be with them for a little while longer – at least until Crichton's baby was born. She allowed the gentle sounds of Moya and the even more comforting sound of D'Argo's breathing to soothe her to sleep. At least in her dreams, she could see.