Title: A Night on the Stage
Author: AsianScaper
Summary: An exploration of events when Zhaan made her sacrifice that Aeryn might live. Crichton becomes Aeryn's sole anchor during a brief rupture in her composure. Please R&R. Thanks.
Disclaimer: The characters are owned by Jim Henson, The Hallmark Network, and the Sci-Fi Channel. No infringement is intended.
Rating: G
Category: Romance/Drama
Feedback: Friends, enemies, please send your constructive criticism or anything else besides to asianscaper@edsamail.com.ph
Archiving: Permission is granted to those who ask.
Spoilers:
Dedication: For the cast and crew of Farscape. Also, Happy Birthday to Janine and Darrelle. This one's for you, too! -even if you don't watch Farscape. To batch 2002, for being such wonderful people. Also, for all the Scapers. =)
Author's Note: Forgive the lack of plot and the writing style. I just wished to explore the aftermath of certain events in the third season, especially the beginning. By the way, Zhaan's not dead in this story. Also, if you noticed, the flow is reminiscent of the rest of my Farscape stories.
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In the world of dreams, where the meager shift of realities happens at an unlikely pace, the mind can barely comprehend a promenade of pictures. As if the author of its motions, our eye's hidden spectacle, contrived to confuse a basic requirement: sleep and its assembled utopia already constructed to distract.
There, the favorite haunt of humanity's mechanics project the image of mist, moist tastes of a tongue's void, and sound that bends all the spaces between with a dash of indisputable truth. Sweeping across like a veil of ambience, the flashing décor of the mind, deep forests endure the careless prune of uncertain frost and summers mined from the granular silica of dunes.
Our slumber heaves vapor and ice to the sky for warmth and ineffaceable coolness of stature. Within the solace of clouds belched by heaven's climate, consciousness weaves the forms of clarity…
…And lethal restriction from the body's weeping.
Guilt is an art form, perfected to the peaks of insipidity.
Quietly, the creased folds of nascent grief in the clothing of nature's great content held a Greek god hostage through its anarchy. For were not the gods of old slaves to their own anger, pleasure, and pain?
Wake!
"What the frell…?" A curse from the vanguards of malice and ignorance, one that crossed the barriers of lingua and time's dwelling in a foreign, delicate place. "It's one in the morning and I'm awake!"
A smug expression deprived his face of remaining bliss. Dreams made skin's ingredient malleable to fantasy and candor. Wakefulness stole the components to its function.
"Pilot?" he called. "Are you awake?"
The communication system suddenly came to life in a flurry of sound, bristling to technology's constant frequency.
"Yes, Commander."
"Oh. That's good. Appreciate the company."
From the background, he heard a familiar voice, strewn with sleep's pill and reeling with hoarseness. Though blatant and rarely spiced with a tranquil pitch, it was a flute carved from bamboo charm. "Pilot, who is it?" Irritation was thorough in that female voice and Crichton winced. "Not him, too. Don't tell me he's coming here. Tell him he's not welcome."
"Commander, if you need anything that does not require personal contact, then I am willing to comply," Pilot said.
"That's very thoughtful of you, Pilot. What's wrong with Aeryn?"
"Nothing!" Aeryn shouted loudly. She seemed reasonably peevish to howl directly into the communication system. Knowing her, she would be sitting comfortably at the foot of Pilot's console, sprawled in delightful abandon for Pilot was a guardian of succor's dimensions.
Pilot briskly disregarded her and said, "Nightmares. I suggest that you be readily accessible to Office Sun. She seems very unsettled though I highly recommend that you avoid the Den, for now."
"Oh, right. What do you say to that, Aeryn?" His voice was a tender respite, a garland of flowers from an orchard of hope. It pierced through the hollows of distance and brought the sweet existence of his delicate offer to the room where his concern lay. "Aeryn? Are you still there?"
Silence crawled between the crevices of correspondence. "Misery loves company," he heard Aeryn finally say.
It was done softly, a plea that echoed its quandary to the very depths of a human heart. Crichton quickly departed from the comfort of his bed and proceeded to dress himself.
"Aeryn, honey. I'll be right there. Don't leave."
When the muse called, his appendages hastened to follow. He found himself sprinting carelessly through the harsh array of grim corridors, avoiding the bright hue of DRD's tumultuously keeping to their appointments of damage and delay.
He stumbled into one of them and it warbled angrily at him, stubbornly jerking its bulbous body into his booted foot while he lay draped on the floor. The surface's deep amber hues secluded a feeling of depth and staring into a reassuring pattern of himself, he readily brought a hand to a throbbing pain on his forehead.
Prodding it gently, he took a sharp intake of breath.
It was a nasty bruise, deploring the loss of pain's opposite. He slighted the ambassador of his nerves and continued on, patting the DRD and apologizing with sincere regret. The bright yellow contraption struggled to understand his gesture and went on its way, trilling a tune of his stupidity.
When he arrived, the door opened to accept him, swinging sideways that he may enter. Only Pilot's console and his balcony of control was illumined to a peaceful shade of blue. There below the extensive console, he found a silhouette drawn from the melodies and course of loveliness. A fragile beauty declined by obnoxious fire yet claimed by the rampart of stars.
Aeryn hunched over her own legs, like a fetus contemplating its poise in fluid. Pilot gestured generously to her, his eyes explaining the various nuances of anxiety. An alien face, with alien constraint and unfamiliar freedom, spoke a common form of prose.
John Crichton slowly made his way to her and in touching her shoulder, was slightly terrified at the frost that hung at the edge of her delicate being.
"Aeryn?" Bending down and taking his place beside her like the musician, who plays at a queen's court; he swayed the air between them with a lullaby, a descant, and a ballad. Yet unlike the authority that blamed disrespect at a musician's audacity, Aeryn entitled her companion to enclose her in an embrace. Between his flesh and hers sprang the warmth fanned into wine's origin, the grapes that required the blaze of flame for survival during a wintry drama.
"Thank you." Her speech was a diminutive pebble in the Pandemonium of white water.
"Care to tell me what this is all about?" His inquiry was frail in its demands and granted a brief, cowardly escape. Aeryn Sun, however, did not pick the path tramped upon by ease. Instead, she gathered a trembling breath and oddly, remained still. It was a gesture of plaintive supplication for Crichton's ability to perceive.
And the question was painful for them both.
"Is it Zhaan?"
She grated her teeth together and obstinately stared into a wall with anger so tangible that Crichton could taste her hostility. Amidst her intent, a single tear scoured the line of her cheek and immersed her lips in salty seas of sadness. Her chin was feeble in its defense from strength's exertion.
Crichton, riding the winds and tides of his human growth, only pulled her closer and suddenly, her demeanor signed covenants with grief. She plunged his leather jacket into a deluge of sorrow.
Sebaceans deserved the pledge of sympathy from their prime remover. The creator served compassion through those who borrowed being. Aeryn Sun entertained rare trysts with a gift denied to her from the beginning, one that she was trained to melt into the cadaver of enemies and slaves. In so doing, her vestigial foundations built a frail edifice, which lacked the resolute shafts of humanity's pith.
And Crichton had been compensating with buttresses from his own benevolence, erecting a church hewn from the minerals enclosed in the luster of devotion.
"Aeryn, I'll do everything in my power to make things all right." He closed his eyes and in burying his face into her hair, was bathed in listless scents of ebony waterfalls. "I won't allow you to blame yourself for her sacrifice."
"I know," she sighed. "I know." She withdrew slightly and there it was; the ministry clothed in vestments of sudden concern. She touched his forehead with surprising gentleness. He welcomed the soft touch, which bestowed light and wonder into his heart. "You were not required to rush all the way here for my benefit."
She smiled amiably, a bend transmitting the very frequencies of gratitude.
"Happy," Crichton said, as he brushed a stray hair from her forehead of carved ivory. "Were the words of the poet. 'She was', quoth he, 'a fair gem from the realm of sun and wind, a cup of honey. A man might drown himself in such sweetness.'" He looked at her warmly. "A few words I salvaged from a book."
"I thought as much."
The laughter, which ensued, halted the progress of words.
In kissing their injury with mild reciprocation of sweet fondness, the drama ended and the ship called Moya tread the water of space, her heart present in the smiles two.
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-The End-