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Sons And Their Fathers
Sometimes weeks can go past without a single thought about Earth crossing John's mind. Sometimes it can be months. He feels guilty about it and imagines this is what it must feel like to be a man who's lost his wife and wakes up one morning with the realisation that he can't visualise the exact shade of her eyes any more.
It hadn't been like that in the beginning. Back in those early days, so long ago now, Earth had been Home. Every single thing he saw, every single thing he heard, was judged, understood, and compared, using standards that he had brought from Earth just as surely as he'd brought his IASA suit. Yeah, Earth had been Home. But those days are past. Now Earth is still home, but with a little 'h', home the way that a man might say, oh yeah, my hometown is Chicago, but I'm a New Yorker now… Allegiances change. The way you view the world changes.
Home is here now. Home is Aeryn. Home is his sons.
So weeks can go by without him thinking about Earth. Sometimes he wonders if the weeks would turn to years, if perhaps one day he would forget completely, if it weren't for D'Argo.
That boy is the spitting image of his grandfather.
It's moments like these, when John just sits and watches his son without the boy knowing it, that the thoughts of Earth crowd John's mind. D'Argo's face is knit in deep concentration as he leans over a set of lessons that his mother has set him. John looks at him and can't help but see his Dad there. Not his Dad as he ever knew him, of course, but his Dad, recognised from black and white pictures in the family photo albums. His Dad without a doubt.
It's moments like these that John wonders about his Old Man and how he coped with it all. It had been hard to have that conversation there on the moon – harder even to end it, to cut it off, to say goodbye and leave, and to know that that was that, for ever and ever. But as hard as it had been, he knew it was always easier to leave than to be left. The leaver had a plan, a purpose, a motivation. Or at the very least, some understanding of why he was leaving. But to be left put you in a position of – well – it left you lost.
How did his father deal with that? What did he tell Olivia? What did he tell Susan?
What does it feel like, to know that you will never see your son again?
D'Argo glances up at him and pulls a face at the expression in his father's eyes. John grins, and locks his pain away. The boy goes back to work.
All John knows is that he never wants to end up in the position he put his father in.
He never wants to find out how it feels for himself.