itsallovernow | Citrine

Snippet 14 can be found here. Yeah, yeah. I know it's been a while. Blame Canada:)

And, for the record, most of this was written quite a while ago, so the medical jargon (and it's faultiness) have little to do with my current blood dilemma. Hee, but my unexpected accuracy cracks me up, as does my addiction to the CDC website.

The cold compression of Aeryn's fear stirs him. In the hospital, first training, and then speaking as a new doctor, he'd held the hands of women facing loss. Wives and daughters, sisters and lovers and friends. He'd seen the same things in their eyes and in their bearing: fear and anger and strength, hearts and bodies already preparing for the inevitability of loss. If not now, then soon, then someday. There wasn't - isn't - a way to shelter people from that moment, that icy sliver of realization, the freezing reality of mortality.

Simon can't read Aeryn Sun this far away, can't see a definitive expression on her pale face, but her mouth and her hands tell him that she's feeling something he can understand and it makes him feel sick.

She's not a human, not like them. Alien, no matter the justification, the cultural perspective her husband offers. She is not human. But the weight of loss rides her thin frame, and suddenly, his compassion flares like a match in a dark room.

Simon doesn't know what to say to her, or to Crichton and he's struggling for some sort of useful words when she lets go of the railing and sits down on the steps, awkward and weary.

"What did you find?" Crichton's voice is quiet, like he wants to couch this in something soft, wrap up the possibility in a blanket. His face is drawn.

"Maybe we should go back to the med bay." Simon feels more comfortable there, only sought the man out here under duress.

"Just tell him." Her voice was ragged, aggressive, and Simon swallowed, clasping the chip so tightly that it dug grooves into his palm.

Kaylee hovers between the two of them, a hand on the primitive ship, eyes darting with sorrow between the bearer and the recipient. Simone uncurls his hand and moves to the workstation, putting the chip down on the flat surface next to wrenches and cloths and things he can't identify but which for Kaylee are as familiar and precision as his surgeon's precision tools.

He takes a deep breath, and Kaylee reaches for Crichton, her fingers on his elbow. There's no tension in the man's body, just drooping fatigue and failure.

"How long do I got, doc?"

"My sister," he wants something to be a reference for all of the pain in this wide open bay. "My sister was taken, her synapsis stripped. She… there's nothing blocking the sensory input in her head, nothing to shield and shelter her. It's amazing that she's alive."

Even with the heavy anticipation of his fate bowing his shoulders, Crichton processes this information, eyes crinkling up in the corners with a flash of anger.

"'S a helluva thing to do to a kid. She gonna be okay?"

Simon shrugs, holds back the rage and his own fear. "I don't know. I don't think so, but I'll do whatever I can for her." He presses his hand to his jaw, scrubbing at his face, holding himself in. He's looking for a way to tell this man what he thinks, while the spector of his wife hangs over the scene, dark and distant and shut out. "I don't even recognize some of what's been done to you. I can't begin to tell you how much damage some of it has caused because I can't imagine how you survived most of it. Blunt trauma, invasive surgery. There are neural pathways that have been severed and reconnected, and I'm not sure they've all been reconnected correctly."

Crichton scrubs at his face, at the moisture on his eyelashes. "Had to do some triage on occasion doc. Needed to get some things outta my head." His voice is hoarse, and he chokes at the end.

Simon continues, knowing if he stops know, he'll never be able to finish. "The cross wiring is damaging the brain cells. It's like bad wiring in an electronic device. Eventually there will be a short, and the whole thing will fry out."

The chuckle is bitter, watery. "That's me, John Crichton, king of faulty wiring."

Simon sighs, and Kaylee asks in a small voice. "That ain't all, is it?"

He shakes his head.

"Spill it, son." Simon wants to slap away Crichton's compassion, but he's grateful as well.

"The stress to your body, to your mind is considerable. The headaches are, to the best of my knowledge, a response to this and the stress is causing blockages, like tiny blood clots, while the blood figures out where to go. There's been tech used on you that I can't even conceive of, but mostly it's been poorly done, like the doctor had never seen a human brain before."

"They hadn't. Not anyone's fault. Shoulda probably bled out more than once."

"What's that all mean?" It should be Crichton, or Aeryn asking that, but coming from Kaylee the question is like relief.

"It means there isn't anything I can do."

Simon hates that, hates the low sharpness in his gut, the scrunching eyes and face against that truth. That the medicine he's put his faith in is fallible. It's always been the worst thing he could say. Even an outside chance, a risky procedure or an experimental drug sounds like trying, this just feels like abandonment, failure. He prays that he'll never have to say the same thing about River. He meets Crichton's eyes, red and damp and angry. "If one of those clots gets too big, it'll burst or block the pathway to something vital, and you'll have an aneurism. It… it'll be quick. Painless."

" 'S good," Crichton says, nodding, voice low and soft.. "I'm getting' awfully tired of everything hurting all the goddamn time." He scrubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "You got an ETA for me doc?"

Simon shook his head. "I can't tell you, I don't have any way of determining that. I can give you some blood thinners. It'll help a little, maybe. It might make you tired, though."

"I'd, um, appreciate that."

He didn't hear her, should have heard her, the woman's heavily pregnant, had to walk down metal steps to reach them, but Simon didn't hear her.

When she speaks, her voice a low deep sound, a savaging of words and air, he wants to run, to move away quickly, grabbing Kaylee's hand and ducking for cover. Instead, he stays in the lee of her fury.

She squares off in the small spacing, facing her husband directly, jaw so tight and posture so rigid that he feels the waves of strength and what he takes for anger.

"There is nothing else that you know to do?"

She's clearly heard the conversation, but perhaps she needs to be closer to process the words. He's afraid to tell the truth, more afraid to offer false promises.

"No. I… I don't even know for sure what's wrong with him, let alone how to help. I'm sorry."

He risks glancing at her, eyes first sweeping over Kaylee and the stricken damp compassion on her young face.

Aeryn's cheeks are wet, although there's nothing soft, nothing giving or broken in her posture.

"You should have told me."

It's knifelike, sharp and cutting. Crichton doesn't look at her.

"This changes nothing." Her tone is fierce, accusatory.
"I never thought it would, babe."

Even now, in the face of her inexplicable anger, the man is gentle with her. Simon doesn't know whether to be shocked or touched, but he's undeniably relieved when Kaylee presses her warm frame against his side. Neither one of them should be here, caught in this intimate and wracking exchange.

"I will not give myself, give you or this child to the Peacekeepers. It is not an option."

"They might be able to help," but the words are a sigh, nothing hopeful about them, just a flat honest assessment.

"We would not be safe in their hands."

Crichton shakes his head, "You can't know that Aeryn. But we're no safer anywhere else. I don't know how to keep us safe, and neither do you." He's giving something up here, conceding a point and the soft misery of his voice wraps around everything in the room.

"It is not a good option."

"Since when have options meant good options?" Crichton isn't sardonic, or flippant. His voice is desperate.

Simon takes Kaylee's hand, nudges her to back away and they inch slowly towards the stairs. He catches site of Aeryn's fists clenched tightly, knuckles white and blood starting to show in the creases of the fine skin where her nails wrecked her flesh.

"I can't lose you again. I won't." Orders, and pain, sharp and blooded and full. Her words hurt Simon, the emotion in them, the cutting desperation that matches Crichton's defense. Other people, they, shouldn't be hearing these words, that tone. Simon's compassion snaps free like a band, thoughts of her alienness supplanted by this confrontation. He's felt that honed need, that ice pick stab of longing for solution, for end, for answers, for something better that just refuses to present it's face.

John doesn't let Aeryn's protests continue. The set of his jaw, the tilt of his head, says that he refuses to be trapped by her anger and fear. There's too much love in that gaze to let her hurt like this. Crichton grabsher wrist and Simon can't look away. He reaches for his wifes shoulder, risking life and limb, and jerks her towards his body, clutching her with vicious need, desperate as she claws at his skull, scratches at his back, holds him to her like a prisoner, like love and like prey.

It looks more like a fight than an embrace, brutal and hard and it's near impossible to tell where one body starts and the other finishes, matted black leather and dark hair and need. Aeryn clutches the back of his head, her dark blood smoothing into his hair and Crichton buries his face in her neck.

They're oblivious to the presence of others, and Simon whispers to Kaylee, "Let's go." He doesn't let go of her hand though, even when they descend the stairs into the crew quarters. He's not sure at this moment if he'll ever be able to let go.