Movement: a slow, dark shiver of movement beside him, just out of his
view. His eyes drifted from the curling pages of parchment for a moment,
but only far enough to register another of the symbols twisting around his
arm like a black ink vine. He returned to his attention to the task at
hand, and soon all motion had ceased but the quick scraping of felt on
paper. Lonely sounds echoed throughout the cavernous ship: the quiet hum
of Moya's song, the hollow padding of feet tiers below, the beat of breath
brushing the crook of his arm... He couldn't look at her again, couldn't
stand to see the unbreachable wall of pain in her tightly crossed arms and
soft petal eyelids. He knew what he'd seen in that face, worn and faded
from the wash of life. It was the same thing he'd seen in the contorted
features of Cokura Strappa, locked in the groping embrace of the Aurora
Chair; in the weathered, lamenting lull of Scorpius as he ebbed away into
the burning remains of his own ambitions; in Crais' dying grasp at
something more than the sum of his parts. In all these things he saw
himself, and was appalled at what he had become: John Crichton had become
the faceless, ageless, nameless killer. John Crichton had become regret.
