Set the World on Fire
By eternitywaits
She thinks it'll lie dormant, the snake made out of fire, twisting up and down the base of her spine, tongue licking at her insides.
Chloe has kept a tight hold on her rage since... Well, since forever. Senator's daughter, pretty, privileged. She doesn't have anything to be angry about. Maybe. That's what they kept telling her, her whole life.
Why does her mother drink so much? She never even noticed. No, that can't be right. She just never allowed herself to think about it before.
But on Destiny there is nothing for her to do but lie awake, filling the empty hours by replaying memories in her head, the details becoming crisper every time she takes them out and examines them.
But they're just memories now. Too late for her to do anything about them. Too late for her to act.
Chloe has only really let go of the rage inside her once. Once, those fire-breathing serpents leapt forth. It felt like her head was on fire, felt like she was becoming Medusa, or something else, something even more monstrous.
When Daddy died.
She still can't think about it without tears pricking at her eyes. Better tears than that horrible fire that took her body out of her control. She's never lost it so badly. She wasn't even Chloe Armstrong anymore. What was she?
And Doctor Rush didn't even deserve to be the focus of all her anger, he was just there. She still hasn't apologized for hitting him, shoving him to the floor and kicking him repeatedly.
But how terrible is that even if she's ashamed, she's also somehow elated? Some part of her enjoyed that power. Chloe Armstrong has never done something like that before. She's never acted out. It was like part of her was screaming "I'm here! I'm here and you can't ignore me!"
Was she ignoring her too?
Chloe takes a breath in the darkness, drawing Destiny's cool recycled air deep into her body. She closes her eyes and visualizes it quelling the snakes, dousing the fire. Her limbs tremble. She's not sure who she's angry at. Hasn't decided. Bizarrely, she doesn't feel she needs a specific person anymore.
Jason and Celina? Why didn't she punch him?
Her mother?
Scott and that girl he knocked up?
Strange. She's never felt this strong.
*****
Rush's grief is all tangled up in anger that simmers beneath his skin, eating away at the corners of his vision, creating black spots.
He buries it in work, God knows there's enough of that to be done, and for a while that fury broils quietly. Seethes. Hidden behind his eyes inside his skull.
The fire of his grief has been devouring him, mind body and soul, since Gloria died. There's no denying that. He's used the grief like a wall of fire to keep them all at a safe distance. Because they're not her, they're not her.
He's Dido, hoisting himself onto his funeral pyre while Gloria sails away from him on the glittering waves of eternity. He can picture her as an angel, with gossamer wings and diaphanous robes, laughing at him. You can't hate someone for dying.
But you can sure try.
Rush rubs his eyelids. He's tired. More than tired. So tired that there's no possibility of sleep, or even rest. He feels like if he stops working for even a moment, everything will slip away.
He couldn't ever keep up with her. She's leaving. He's just chasing her memory.
Pain, knots in his shoulders and in his neck. The headaches are continuous, the monotony broken only by degrees. He rubs the crick in his neck, ineffectually. Numbers dance in front of his eyes, and Ancient script, swirling letters, alien language, code. Something real. Something to concentrate on.
Park, Brody and Volker come and go. Eli chatters with them, becoming a liaison between the rest of the scientists, and Rush. Volker is too afraid to talk to him. He's not sure how he got like this, but he can't be bothered to do anything about it. He doesn't want to talk to them. He doesn't want to be friends.
*****
"Maybe it would help if you talk about it?" she offers quietly.
Chloe is the last person he expected to find here, as he makes his way back to the control room, having given in, at last, to an hour of fitful, tormented sleep. The others are gone, so it must be well into the night. What they're calling night.
It takes a moment before he realizes she isn't talking to him. She doesn't even see him. Chloe is seated in front of one of the consoles, hunched over it. Her forehead rests on the back of her hand, her long black hair spilling over her shoulder and over the console.
Chloe is muttering to herself, which is...disconcerting, maybe. Not his problem. Except that she's taking up his space.
"Miss Armstrong," he says.
She looks up at him, blinking blearily. "What are you doing here?" It takes her a moment, evidently, to remember where she is, "Oh, right. Still, it's a little late. Don't you ever rest?"
"Not if I can help it," he says wryly. He suppresses a groan. His head aches, splinters of red hot pain. His body feels heavy. Lack of sleep. He needs work to take his mind away from it. "Can I do something for you, Miss Armstrong?"
Her eyes soften and refocus, like she's taking in the room again, the flickering consoles, the alien machines, and Rush wonders, for the first time, how long it's been since he's actually seen her.
She was hanging around Lieutenant Scott and Eli, for a time. Lately, she's been conspicuously absent. She doesn't join the others for exercises. She's lost weight. She's gaunt on the way to skeletal, and her long hair is greasy and matted with snarls.
He approaches her - cautiously, remembering that he was the one to set her off, before - "Are you alright?"
"Tell me what this means," she says instead of answering, gesturing to the console she's leaning against.
He looks from her to the console, and back again, sighs, Destiny's databases, Ancient coding in swiftly moving lines, "You wouldn't understand."
"So explain it to me until I do."
"This isn't a game, Chloe," he practically shoves her out of the way, reaching for the controls, cycling through various screens, "I have work to do."
"It's not my fault, you know."
He's forced to twist around and look back at her. He's mildly surprised that she hasn't moved, what with his barging into her personal space, but she's still sitting there. She's drawn one knee up to her chin. Her eyes are dark.
"If I'd known I was going to get stranded in an alien spaceship when I was twenty-three, I might have studied astrophysics or engineering or-" she waves her hands in the air in wild, vague gesticulations, "something! Something else, something useful!" Her voice rises and then as suddenly as the rant started, it subsides.
"Chloe..." he stops. He doesn't have anything to say.
"Never mind," she says. She stands, finally, her skirt falls loosely over her frame. She seems to take up no space at all. And when she drifts by him, she's like a ghost, fading into the darkness.
He rubs at his neck, again, sighs. It's not his fault, either.
*****
The first time she catches Matt cheating on her, it's like something deep inside of her snaps, some tether holding back the snakes. Bright tendrils of flame shoot up inside of her.
She doesn't do it, though. She doesn't snap again. Instead, an icy cold washes over her, that extremity of iciness that burns. She feels her skin go pale as the blood washes from her face, and a stony silence settles over her.
Matt and some nameless female marine stare at her in surprise. She turns and walks out. She can hear Matt calling her name as she walks down the hallway.
"Chloe! Chloe wait, please wait! Chloe!" He's scrabbling out into the corridor, hastily rearranging his uniform, tripping over his own legs.
She doesn't wait.
*****
Second Lieutenant Vanessa James pats her shoulder awkwardly. She hasn't expected sympathy from this woman, but Vanessa's eyes express surprising concern. "I'm sorry," she says.
Pieces suddenly click in Chloe's mind - those too-sharp memories of the officer coming across her and Matt kissing, the tightness in Vanessa's jaw and her neck, the hard look in her eyes at the scene of them wrapped in a lover's embrace. At the time she'd thought the second lieutenant didn't like the fact that Matt was messing around while he was supposed to be on duty. Now...
"Was he with you?" she asks bluntly. She notices Vanessa's flinch. "Before me?"
The other woman pulls away, her mouth set in a firm, hard line. "That's not really your business, Armstrong."
Which is answer enough. Chloe turns to her for the first time. "Well, I'm sorry too," she says. "He didn't tell me."
Vanessa studies her for a moment, searching her eyes. She nods once, before turning to walk away.
Chloe sighs and flexes the muscles in her hands. She would have shoved Matt out an airlock in that moment, the snakes are bloodthirsty. She wonders how Vanessa dealt with the rage when she found them. After all, she had a gun. Chloe is glad they both chose to walk away.
But she's got her rage in her hands now. It's been hidden and buried for so long, she suddenly feels like she can take charge of her situation, like she can do anything.
And she knows what she wants to do.
*****
Chloe marches to the control room, the one place she knows she'll find Doctor Rush. Park and Brody look up from their work when she comes in, but he doesn't. He absorbed in whatever he's doing, of course. He doesn't even spare her a glance when she stomps all the way across the room, her feet ringing on the metal floor, until she's standing directly in front of him.
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Brody exchange a nervous glance with Park. Rush still doesn't acknowledge her.
"Teach me to read Ancient," she says.
Rush finally looks up at her, in baffled, and perhaps mildly horrified, surprise. "What?"
"Ancient," she says, holding his gaze, "teach me to read it."
Rush looks at her like she's just grown another arm. Out of her forehead. Or like he's worried this is some sort of joke everyone else is in on and he's not quite getting the punch line.
"Miss Armstrong...Chloe...Why," he says finally, "are you wasting my time like this?"
"I don't think it's a waste of time to teach as many people as possible the language that operates the spaceship we're all trapped on," she says.
She places her hands firmly on either side of the control panel. "Especially given the likelihood that some of us will die before we get back to Earth. It only makes sense that you and your team shouldn't by the only ones who are able to at least read some of the entries in Destiny's database."
Rush stares at her like he can't quite believe that came out of her mouth.
"Yes," he agrees finally, albeit reluctantly.
Score one for the high school debate team captain.
"I can see your point. Fine. Volker can teach you, and any of the other civilians who are so keen to learn."
"Hey!" says Doctor Volker, the young sandy-haired scientist glances up from his post, "I didn't agree to-"
Rush silences him with a glare.
"No," Chloe says, shaking her head. "Volker can teach the others, but you're going to teach me, Doctor Rush."
"Oh really?" he says. Rush crosses his arms. He almost looks amused. Annoyed, but amused. "And why should I do that, Princess Chloe?"
She feels a hot blush creeping up her neck, but refuses to break eye contact. She is the motherfucking princess, alright. Matt's betrayals have finally snapped her out of the fugue she's been living in these past weeks since her father died, and she is going to claim her life back. She's Chloe fucking Armstrong and she gets what she wants.
"You are going to teach me to read Ancient, Doctor Rush," she says, leaning against the console and glaring at him. It's the glare she used on her competitors at Harvard, and it's a glare that says she's not backing down. "Because I'm not leaving until you agree."
He laughs.
Doctor Rush actually laughs. She's so shocked, she almost falls over. It's not much of a laugh, more of a harsh barking sound, really, but he seems as surprised as she is. He pulls his glasses off and sighs. "Alright, Chloe, if I agree to teach you Ancient will you leave me alone and let me get back to work?"
"Y-yeah," she says, nodding.
He turns back to the console quickly, but she swears she sees just the corner of a smile tugging at his lips.
*****
"I never apologized for hitting you," she says out of the blue, but it's too hard to work up to a proper apology.
They're sitting at one of the tables in the mess. Rush has been surprisingly true to his word. But then, he is quite surprising, generally. Maybe Young and the others are wrong about him.
He stares at her for a second, having been interrupted in the middle of explaining conjugating a set of particularly difficult verbs, and having to reassemble his entire train of thought. "And kicking me," he says, after a moment. He turns back to the notebooks spread out in front of them, "now this table only applies to verbs ending in--"
"And knocking you over," she says.
"Yes, and throwing me to the floor and accusing me of murder, yes, can we get back to the lesson now?"
"I was just trying to apologize."
He turns back to the papers, shifting one notebook to the side, pulling another closer. She doesn't think he'll respond again, but instead he says, "you didn't have to."
He doesn't look at her. "I know what grief is like, Chloe. You don't need to say you're sorry."
She stares at him while he refuses to look at her.
"You want to talk about it?"
The annoyance is palpable in his voice. "No."
"Fine then," she says. "Neither do I."
*****
But they do talk, several weeks later.
She tells him how she felt when Matt told her he had a son.
She tells him how it made her feel angry, then guilty that she felt angry, and how she'd bitten all those emotions down and held his hand and tried to be supportive, because she was supposed to be the good one, and that was what a good person would do. Be understanding. Be supportive. All the while it had only added to the snakes and the fire boiling inside her.
She tells him how now that she's starting to let the fire back out, take action, take risks, like confronting him, she's beginning to feel more like herself, her old self, the self that hadn't got trapped in space and watched her father breathe his last.
"Confronting me? I'm not really that scary, am I?"
"I don't know, let's ask Volker, shall we?"
He grimaces. "I'll have you know, I was suffering from withdrawal symptoms when I exploded at that one."
"That one? He has name, you know. See? You are scary."
*****
Rush tells her about wife. Not much, actually. He's carefully vague, not even giving her the other woman's name, but it means something that he's talking to her about personal things at all.
She doesn't know what a funeral pyre is, but she gets a deep sense of his grief, rolling over her like waves of ocean and flame. She reaches out tentatively and touches his hand, relieved when he doesn't pull away.
She tells him about her mother, about her drinking, and about how she's not even sure why that enrages her so much, except that it does. "Can't she see she has such a great life?"
"You don't know everything about someone's life, Chloe," he offers quietly.
"But she's my mother! She's got every reason to be happy!"
"Were you?"
*****
Her knowledge of Ancient is progressing swiftly, which is unsurprising since she has nothing else to do all day but study it, going over it again and again, even when Rush is busy working.
Sometimes she practices her yoga, or talks with Eli, although he's grown oddly distant from her since she began taking her lessons with Doctor Rush, and she can't figure out why. She worries that it says something terrible about her that she doesn't really try to find out.
Rather than save their fledgling friendship, she spends more and more of her time exploring Destiny's long twisting corridors and secret places. Sometimes her only company is a kino that she sends ahead to check out various passageways. She concentrates the rest of her energies on learning her new language, and talking with the science team. She gains more and more of her strength back. She finally feels like she's moving forwards.
*****
Lisa Park is the first one to ask if she likes Doctor Rush.
She blinks at her, stupidly. "Sure I do. Of course. He's not nearly as bad as I thought he was, or as Young and the others would have you think."
"No," Lisa says, shaking her head and grinning mischievously, "I mean do you like Rush? Really like him?"
Chloe gapes at her. "Wh-what? Seriously?"
She hid her own anger and her own strength, even from herself, could she be hiding other emotions, too?
She feels herself begin to blush as Lisa dissolves in giggles, clutching her arm and pulling her to the side. "Oh my God! You'd make a terrific pair."
Chloe frowns at her. "Hardly."
"No, really. He needs someone. And he seems to tolerate your company."
"Yeah, he can tolerate my company, we better get married."
Lisa only grins at her, a huge, gleaming Cheshire Cat grin. "You should go for it! For both of you! You're too uptight. You both need to learn to relax and enjoy yourselves once in a while. You've been good for each other so far, right?"
Chloe catches herself thinking about it - he is handsome, in a way that continually catches her by surprise, and she does... Maybe she does want him. But that's messed up too, isn't it?
"No, no, no, no! Lisa! What are you doing to me? He's...well the age difference is just..."
Lisa dismisses her with a wave. "You're both adults, and you're trapped on an alien ship in deep space with no hope of escape. We might never see Earth again! You need to make the most of the opportunities life offers, don't you?"
Lisa's words make her world spin, and rearrange everything. There's a new flame smoldering deep inside her, she realizes, and it's not rage.
*****
And when we fell together all our flesh was like a veil
that I had to draw aside to see
the serpent eat its tail.
-Leonard Cohen (Last Year's Man)
*****
The first time they have sex it's frantic, and crazy, bordering on dangerously insane. She's the one who approaches him, and she's so worried he'll reject her and that the whole incident will only sour what little they have, she ends up throwing herself at him. The kiss is messy and desperate, and she moves her head too fast, causing their teeth to knock together painfully. Really painfully.
She's surprised that isn't enough to make him jerk hastily away. To her relief and delight, his arms snake around her waist, pulling her tight against him, and he's kissing her back, rough and possessive. She feels every inch of her own raw, aching loneliness reflected back in his touch. She wants to devour him.
They undress each other with shaking fingers, hardly daring to look at each other, and yet for some reason they don't turn out the lights. Their limbs are tangled, sweat-slicked mess of knots, their gyrations and moans seem far too loud. They must be echoing all over the ship, and they can't stop. They can't. They can't.
Afterwards they lie there, panting like marathon runners. She laughs. She doesn't know why. He looks at her like she's crazy, and she can't stop, she laughs so hard she's crying.
So this is what happens when you bind up all your emotions inside.
Rush looks at her like he's about to say something, then he shakes his head and falls back beside her again.
After a minute or so when the bizarre sounds she's been making have subsided he murmurs, "you're fucked up, lass."
She chokes in mock indignation and hits him with a pillow.
*****
His headaches are lessening, dramatically. He almost fails to register the lack of pain, or the insomnia, the feeling catches him unawares, a sudden realization, when did he become happy?
He tries not to let on, though. Can't have his team getting sloppy. Even if he is particularly pleased about the fact that Chloe massaged out that crick in his neck the night before.
"Good morning, Dale," he says absently.
He misses Volker's jaw drop open as he turns a corner, only vaguely aware of the sound of the scientist dropping his clipboard to the ground somewhere behind him.
*****
They don't know what causes the explosion in one of the seldom-used corridors of the ship. It's an old ship, after all, ancient in every sense of the word. Sometimes things just break, when they're that old. Sometimes they break suddenly, without warning.
Hot orange and golden fire spills out into the corridor in billowing waves. It sends hot air rippling over them, skin-searing heat. The corridor shakes in violent spasms like an earthquake, and people fall, slamming into the heated metal ground.
Screams and shouting flood the ship, over the roar of the fire, before Chloe and the little floating kino get there.
She sees it all, as a sort of wild, vivid tapestry unravelling in front of her - the twisting columns of ravaging flames, the growling fire. She hears the creak and whine of metal. Twisted bits of shrapnel rain back to the ground. People cry and scream for help. The kino buzzes ineffectually by her ear. Taking pictures.
The fire is swallowing the hall, alarms are blaring. Destiny has fire alarms? Maybe the alarms are only ringing in her head.
Chloe turns to run, only her heart hammering in her chest stops her with the sickening realization that she's got no where to go. She's on the wrong side of the fire.
This is why you shouldn't go exploring an ancient alien space ship by yourself, a voice tells her, serpentine, twisting up her insides as fear clogs her throat and clouds her mind.
She stands transfixed, staring at the fire that's quickly going out of control. Through the blaze, on the other side, Chloe can see soldiers pulling people out of the way, helping them to safety. And she's got nothing. Nothing but a kino and the rolling heat of the flames.
"Help! Help me!" Chloe shouts, lungs filling with burning smoke. Her voice dissolves into raspy coughs. She feels the heat so close to her face. "For God's sake help me!"
"Oh my God, someone's back there!"
"It's Chloe! Holy shit! Chloe! Chloe can you get around?" Matt's voice says.
"How's she gonna get around? Those bulkheads are sealed off, the fire's-"
Even as they're shouting the realization hits her. They're going to have to seal off this corridor.
Her heart is pounding faster and faster in her chest. Ohgodohgod.
*****
Rush looks up from the monitors, eyes wide. "What the hell was that?"
Brody clicks off his radio, pale, "Young says there's been an explosion," he lists the section and Eli brings up the map, glowing on the screens in front of them.
"Here, yeah?"
"How did that happen?" Volker asks.
Rush stares at the monitors for a moment, frozen. Then he snaps back, "we'll worry about that later," he says, fingers flying over the controls. "The first thing is to get that section sealed-"
"Rush!" Lieutenant Scott's voice crackles over the radio, "Come in, Rush!" Frantic, well they would be - "We've got someone trapped in here, Rush-"
"There's nothing I can do about that, Lieutenant," Rush snaps, still working. The console cycles through displays, the damaged section shows up flashing red.
"Rush..." Scott's voice, distorted by static, sounds like his voice is ripping out of his throat, like he's crying, "it's Chloe."
Rush's fingers fumble to a halt, frozen in the air hovering above the display. He feels like someone's thrown a bucket of ice water against his back. His bones freeze.
It's Chloe.
"There is still...nothing...I can do," he says, the words prying themselves out of his mouth, but he can't feel himself saying them. He has a strange moment of disconnect with his body, like he's outside, watching it. Is this what Ascension feels like?
Scott's voice, crying out in desperation, like physical blows against his skin, "For God's sake Rush, it's CHLOE!"
"Oh God, oh God..." Eli beside him, babbling and shaking, fumbling with the controls, not the ones for the ship, but -
One of the screens flashes and switches to the view of the kino. The kino she has with her.
Eli, you bastard.
Her eyebrows and eyelashes have been singed away by the flames, her skin is ruddy and coated in sweat. The kino shudders, the image jarring frantically and she suddenly grabs the metal ball in her hands (it must be burning her) and looks straight at the lens.
"Are you watching this?"
The images crackles with static as the fire expands.
"Are you watching this?"
"Nicholas...Eli, Lisa--"
Doctor Park turns away from the monitor, her hand pressed to her mouth, sobbing.
Eli is pale, shaking. His voice is high with hysteria. "You can't, Rush, you can't seal it off with her in there! She'll die! Chloe will die!"
"If I don't do it," says Rush - no one notices that she used his first name - "we all die."
"If you don't seal off this room, the ship -" she's raising her voice, shouting above the fire. He's watching, horrified, unable to move, barely breathing. His hands are frozen above the controls. She's only twenty-three.
It's Chloe.
"It's alright, I understand-" she looks up, away from the kino, and he can see the fire reflected in her eyes, and the look on her face, tells him something.
He can't stop himself before he shouts, "Don't, Chloe-"
"Funeral pyre. Huh. Now I know what that means."
He feels his heart twist up painfully. Don't do this to me. Don't fucking do this to me, not again.
Chloe looks back at the kino. "Do you know the story of the Pheonix?"
*****
The fire is burning outside her and inside her. The twisting army of fire serpents buried deep in her stomach rise to the occasion. Blazing wings incinerate her insides.
Chloe takes a step forward, then another. The fire licks at her feet and latches onto her pants. Oddly she doesn't feel anything in her legs. She feels her lungs burning from the smoke, and her face scorched by the heat.
Ahead of her the other marines have dragged Matt away. The huge metal circular doors are slowly sliding shut.
She can still make it. She can make it through the flames. She has a secret weapon. She has the fire inside. She has the fire and she has the snakes and she has strength now, please let it be enough. You fight fire with...
Another step, and another. She smells roasting meat. A distant part of her mind screams that her hair is on fire, but it's a distant part, it's so very far away. Her eyes only register bright hot white.
The fire inside her rises to meet its sister flames. And then there's pain. There's real pain.
*****
The doors slide shut with a cold, final bang that echoes through the perfectly silent ship. There are tears, lots of tears for the Senator's daughter. No one says a word.
That night Rush dreams about an avenging angel, her wings all burning fire, flames wreathing her flowing night-sky hair. And she's lifting up into the darkness, fire-wings beating like some unfathomable bird taking flight. She's soaring higher and higher, as he watches, leaving a blazing trail behind her, burning up the midnight sky as she rushes to meet eternity. As she rises, she leaves him stranded behind, bound in flesh and blood. He feels carved out, a dried out husk of life.
She's chasing the star fields with a shimmering gossamer white figure, and together they're both dancing far, far out of his reach.
FINIS