itsallovernow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
itsallovernow) wrote2003-04-18 02:46 pm
itsallovernow) wrote2003-04-18 02:46 pm
New Writing
I need a beta - mostly because I'm happy with this, but I know it's missing that whole plot thing. Characters, check, imagery, check, extended metaphor to the point of being a conceit, check, plot, goddammit, someone stole the plot. Oh, wait, there never was one. So, longer than Alien, a little angtsy, but not too bad. I'm not quite ready to post it anywhere else yet, so if there are any suggestions out there, I'm taking them!!
Latitude and Longitude, PG-13
Spoilers: ITLD, DWTB, and CK. Takes place before CK
When we’re lost, we create our own way home.
Part I - Straight on 'Til Morning
“Eventually, the ink will fade.”
Harvey has few comments nowadays, but sometimes he just can’t resist answering John’s niggling doubts with the kind of smart-ass obnoxiousness that has made John Chrichton the UT’s most unwanted. Hearing your own voice filtered through the freak who lives in your head, well, it’s just weird.
John answers him because there’s no one around to frighten or offend, “Some kind of amazing ink those Peacekeepers got there. It’s like the world’s greatest Sharpie”.
He moves his hand and arm through the light, angling the symbols so they appear more alien than they really are. After all, how foreign can mathematics be, whatever the symbols used to note constants.
Einstein’s time table indeed because John’s pretty sure by now that there’s no all seeing, all knowing creator God. If deities exist, they’re a series of capricious meddlers with a sick sense of humor. He waits for the Moirae to weave their web – that, that’s fate. You’ll die, but maybe not today. Death and taxes, he thinks smiling wolfishly at the cliché – constant to constant – while Harvey looks on with a large sewing needle in hand.
“I don’t think that’s the kind they use, Harv.”
The clone twists his lips and shrugs, indifferent to the particulars of the art of tattooing.
John stares back warily, “Never though of myself as the tattoo kind.”
Of course John Chrichton never thought of himself as the carry a gun, shoot first question never, blowing up innocents kind either. Now the talking to himself, living in his own head type, that, he’s pretty sure, he’s been since birth. Although this has become something else entirely.
On Elack, lighting is hit or miss and often the stars on command are the best source of illumination. He keeps meaning to crosswire some circuits for the ailing ship. He’d like to make it easier to direct just a little light, a little heat, into the areas where he spends most of his time, but John keeps finding himself distracted.
He charts her body in his mind, at night or on command, finding the sharp planes of her in the patterns of the stars he’s long ceased to name. Her curves war with equations for precedence, sometimes winding together so that her body glows pale blue and the elegantly shaped Sebacean numbers overlay her breasts and belly. He’s still reverent if frustrated, not knowing what new inscriptions she holds. The night on the false earth, convinced death was coming for them, he’d committed her flesh to memory, unaware that the landmarks that were to shape their future hadn’t even appeared yet.
He recorded with lips and tongue, fingers and eyes creating a permanent mental atlas. There’ve been other women since then, and he’s found that he can place the transparent guide over their bodies and trace a journey along their skin.
Lately, she’s taken more solid form, her long limbs brushed with sun and gold. He can add in the fecundity without a problem, but considering he has nothing left of her but maps and memories, he refuses to include the rivers and byways that he’s never seen.
Harvey’s scared of her. She gave him directions a few days ago and Harvey’s only recently found his way back, muttering something about being on a wormhole to nowhere.
As the color of the ink bleaches from his arms, as his shipmates stop asking him about the marks he periodically refreshes, as there are no more shipmates, as there is no one but Pilot left to ask him anything, he longs to permanently embed the secrets to wormholes - the frankly still elusive secrets - in his flesh.
To make lasting and visible his pain.
To leave his body as a road map so that when the universe finally kills him for good, there’ll be something left; his own stab at immortality. The paternity of the supposed baby is a little too uncertain for comfort.
But there are no needles, only paint and a dying ship and his dying pilot, a musical DRD, and Harvey who has decided on further consideration to root around in his brain and discover the proper instrument for indelibility. And of course, a half naked, very pregnant Aeryn who refuses to answer his questions and gets that familiar expression of stubborn unhappiness on her lovely face when the wormhole equations zip past her on the beach.
So John lets the ink evaporate. Without renewal, stagnation, and waiting and watching while he disappears into his own skin.
Part II - That Which Doesn't Kill Us Should Shut the Frell Up
At night, among the sounds of snores and movements, the noises of this unfamiliar ship and her fellow assassins, Aeryn fights against the pull of the past. Tormented space is even more roughly sketched out for travelers than the Uncharted Territories. It is a wilderness, a free for all, ripe and profitable for those who wish to sell death. She thinks of the tales of Coronado and De Gama and Richard Burton, meaningless names, but people John had both reviled and admired for their exploration, their drive to stretch past the known boundaries of their worlds. Most of his adventurers had met a bad end. She was starting to see why.
On Talyn, his hands would slide along the bones of her hip, the ridges of rib, the pout of her lip and line of hair along the base of her skull. She could see the vastness of stars through the window in their quarters, and as he touched her, he’d equate her body with the pathways they’d traveled, claiming the stretches in his name. His own warm star chart. She replied that he could name her breasts in his head if he felt it necessary, but that only made him seem more certifiable.
When he’d drawn constellations on the inside of her thighs, first with deral syrup, then with his tongue, she’d reconsidered. The experiment had almost ended in disaster when he’d tried to draw her body into the stars on the window, not realizing that the sticky sweet syrup was near impossible to remove without the aid of saliva. She’d laughed so hard watching him lick and suck it off the window that she’d been inspired to do a little licking and sucking of her own.
“On my world, we were still exploring the land last century,” he’d said. “Astronauts were the new Columbus, seeking out new worlds, or at least trying to think beyond the earth’s surface. It’s the unknown that’s so exciting.”
She’d looked at him and smiled, only vaguely understanding, and he’d gone on to tell her how early explorers had made these maps for settlers and politicians and sometimes simply for the beauty of discovery. That it was reward enough to be first. She stroked his temple, curled her hand around his neck, and murmured something indecent about new discoveries, and he’d said, “Here in the Uncharted Territories, our lives, now, they’re written on our bodies.”
She knows the truth in this. D’Argo wears his two campaigns proudly in the tattoos lining his chest and tankas. Other warriors she has known, other regiments and many of her current comrades, are digests of combat. She’d stretched her own tentative fingers towards Xhalax’s crosshatch of burns, and thought, yes, this would be worth my death.
In quieter moments, the lingering effects of her own personal family reunion laying fresh and heavy on them both, she’d speak her own body for him. She does the same thing now, silently, feeling her past rest in her skin.
This is the place where I didn’t die but was only burnt. This is the place where I didn’t die but was stabbed and this, the place nowhere near to killing me, but marked me anyway. This is the place that scarred when I was going to kill my mother. Every scar pride and proof that you’d lived. Here, and here and here, I didn’t die. Reconstruction was common among Sebaceans and flesh didn’t damage easily. But these lines and indentations were something to hang onto, a source of pride, winning against death.
John saw it differently, as something taken from her, not given, and he wanted to offer it back. This is where the Vorc bit you. Soft lips. This is where the knife went in, when Larraq… a sentence never finished, occasionally tears. This, from the accident when you were 13 cycles. Fingertips smoothing senseless flesh, eliciting an echo of feeling. This is where you broke your leg on the cliffs. Hands and mouth worshipping in prelude to sweeter spots.
When she thought about it, she marveled at the fact that her death, her actual failure in the face of survival, left no mark at all. She mentioned it to John, languid in his arms, trying not to imagine the charred wound that would have ended her mother’s life. He’d simply said, “Death is the ending. There’s no need to mark the destination.” And pulled her to him tightly, the day’s threat of loss hanging too sharply in the air.
She has new scars now that are all her own, that John Chricton has never traced or kissed or cried over. New places opening to fill her up.
Part III - At the End of the Day
They’d sat, close but not touching, motras apart really. Wormholes bled from his skin, swirled in the blank pool of his gaze. They’d razed her home. She saw her past and found a lie, because here, now, all her ties to the Peacekeepers had been severed and she’d wielded the axe.
The future, which she carried inside her, stretched out ahead, long and winding. The road to grief had been well lit, and she’d gotten lost along it. Finding her way back was proving difficult, not helped by the man beside her.
John’s wormholes were no solution. They’d taken him from her once, would undoubtedly do so again. He sat there, crouched over his notebook, not drawing stars but his death, copying down the fate etched into his skin. She couldn’t follow him this time and closed her eyes with a sigh.
Latitude and Longitude, PG-13
Spoilers: ITLD, DWTB, and CK. Takes place before CK
When we’re lost, we create our own way home.
Part I - Straight on 'Til Morning
“Eventually, the ink will fade.”
Harvey has few comments nowadays, but sometimes he just can’t resist answering John’s niggling doubts with the kind of smart-ass obnoxiousness that has made John Chrichton the UT’s most unwanted. Hearing your own voice filtered through the freak who lives in your head, well, it’s just weird.
John answers him because there’s no one around to frighten or offend, “Some kind of amazing ink those Peacekeepers got there. It’s like the world’s greatest Sharpie”.
He moves his hand and arm through the light, angling the symbols so they appear more alien than they really are. After all, how foreign can mathematics be, whatever the symbols used to note constants.
Einstein’s time table indeed because John’s pretty sure by now that there’s no all seeing, all knowing creator God. If deities exist, they’re a series of capricious meddlers with a sick sense of humor. He waits for the Moirae to weave their web – that, that’s fate. You’ll die, but maybe not today. Death and taxes, he thinks smiling wolfishly at the cliché – constant to constant – while Harvey looks on with a large sewing needle in hand.
“I don’t think that’s the kind they use, Harv.”
The clone twists his lips and shrugs, indifferent to the particulars of the art of tattooing.
John stares back warily, “Never though of myself as the tattoo kind.”
Of course John Chrichton never thought of himself as the carry a gun, shoot first question never, blowing up innocents kind either. Now the talking to himself, living in his own head type, that, he’s pretty sure, he’s been since birth. Although this has become something else entirely.
On Elack, lighting is hit or miss and often the stars on command are the best source of illumination. He keeps meaning to crosswire some circuits for the ailing ship. He’d like to make it easier to direct just a little light, a little heat, into the areas where he spends most of his time, but John keeps finding himself distracted.
He charts her body in his mind, at night or on command, finding the sharp planes of her in the patterns of the stars he’s long ceased to name. Her curves war with equations for precedence, sometimes winding together so that her body glows pale blue and the elegantly shaped Sebacean numbers overlay her breasts and belly. He’s still reverent if frustrated, not knowing what new inscriptions she holds. The night on the false earth, convinced death was coming for them, he’d committed her flesh to memory, unaware that the landmarks that were to shape their future hadn’t even appeared yet.
He recorded with lips and tongue, fingers and eyes creating a permanent mental atlas. There’ve been other women since then, and he’s found that he can place the transparent guide over their bodies and trace a journey along their skin.
Lately, she’s taken more solid form, her long limbs brushed with sun and gold. He can add in the fecundity without a problem, but considering he has nothing left of her but maps and memories, he refuses to include the rivers and byways that he’s never seen.
Harvey’s scared of her. She gave him directions a few days ago and Harvey’s only recently found his way back, muttering something about being on a wormhole to nowhere.
As the color of the ink bleaches from his arms, as his shipmates stop asking him about the marks he periodically refreshes, as there are no more shipmates, as there is no one but Pilot left to ask him anything, he longs to permanently embed the secrets to wormholes - the frankly still elusive secrets - in his flesh.
To make lasting and visible his pain.
To leave his body as a road map so that when the universe finally kills him for good, there’ll be something left; his own stab at immortality. The paternity of the supposed baby is a little too uncertain for comfort.
But there are no needles, only paint and a dying ship and his dying pilot, a musical DRD, and Harvey who has decided on further consideration to root around in his brain and discover the proper instrument for indelibility. And of course, a half naked, very pregnant Aeryn who refuses to answer his questions and gets that familiar expression of stubborn unhappiness on her lovely face when the wormhole equations zip past her on the beach.
So John lets the ink evaporate. Without renewal, stagnation, and waiting and watching while he disappears into his own skin.
Part II - That Which Doesn't Kill Us Should Shut the Frell Up
At night, among the sounds of snores and movements, the noises of this unfamiliar ship and her fellow assassins, Aeryn fights against the pull of the past. Tormented space is even more roughly sketched out for travelers than the Uncharted Territories. It is a wilderness, a free for all, ripe and profitable for those who wish to sell death. She thinks of the tales of Coronado and De Gama and Richard Burton, meaningless names, but people John had both reviled and admired for their exploration, their drive to stretch past the known boundaries of their worlds. Most of his adventurers had met a bad end. She was starting to see why.
On Talyn, his hands would slide along the bones of her hip, the ridges of rib, the pout of her lip and line of hair along the base of her skull. She could see the vastness of stars through the window in their quarters, and as he touched her, he’d equate her body with the pathways they’d traveled, claiming the stretches in his name. His own warm star chart. She replied that he could name her breasts in his head if he felt it necessary, but that only made him seem more certifiable.
When he’d drawn constellations on the inside of her thighs, first with deral syrup, then with his tongue, she’d reconsidered. The experiment had almost ended in disaster when he’d tried to draw her body into the stars on the window, not realizing that the sticky sweet syrup was near impossible to remove without the aid of saliva. She’d laughed so hard watching him lick and suck it off the window that she’d been inspired to do a little licking and sucking of her own.
“On my world, we were still exploring the land last century,” he’d said. “Astronauts were the new Columbus, seeking out new worlds, or at least trying to think beyond the earth’s surface. It’s the unknown that’s so exciting.”
She’d looked at him and smiled, only vaguely understanding, and he’d gone on to tell her how early explorers had made these maps for settlers and politicians and sometimes simply for the beauty of discovery. That it was reward enough to be first. She stroked his temple, curled her hand around his neck, and murmured something indecent about new discoveries, and he’d said, “Here in the Uncharted Territories, our lives, now, they’re written on our bodies.”
She knows the truth in this. D’Argo wears his two campaigns proudly in the tattoos lining his chest and tankas. Other warriors she has known, other regiments and many of her current comrades, are digests of combat. She’d stretched her own tentative fingers towards Xhalax’s crosshatch of burns, and thought, yes, this would be worth my death.
In quieter moments, the lingering effects of her own personal family reunion laying fresh and heavy on them both, she’d speak her own body for him. She does the same thing now, silently, feeling her past rest in her skin.
This is the place where I didn’t die but was only burnt. This is the place where I didn’t die but was stabbed and this, the place nowhere near to killing me, but marked me anyway. This is the place that scarred when I was going to kill my mother. Every scar pride and proof that you’d lived. Here, and here and here, I didn’t die. Reconstruction was common among Sebaceans and flesh didn’t damage easily. But these lines and indentations were something to hang onto, a source of pride, winning against death.
John saw it differently, as something taken from her, not given, and he wanted to offer it back. This is where the Vorc bit you. Soft lips. This is where the knife went in, when Larraq… a sentence never finished, occasionally tears. This, from the accident when you were 13 cycles. Fingertips smoothing senseless flesh, eliciting an echo of feeling. This is where you broke your leg on the cliffs. Hands and mouth worshipping in prelude to sweeter spots.
When she thought about it, she marveled at the fact that her death, her actual failure in the face of survival, left no mark at all. She mentioned it to John, languid in his arms, trying not to imagine the charred wound that would have ended her mother’s life. He’d simply said, “Death is the ending. There’s no need to mark the destination.” And pulled her to him tightly, the day’s threat of loss hanging too sharply in the air.
She has new scars now that are all her own, that John Chricton has never traced or kissed or cried over. New places opening to fill her up.
Part III - At the End of the Day
They’d sat, close but not touching, motras apart really. Wormholes bled from his skin, swirled in the blank pool of his gaze. They’d razed her home. She saw her past and found a lie, because here, now, all her ties to the Peacekeepers had been severed and she’d wielded the axe.
The future, which she carried inside her, stretched out ahead, long and winding. The road to grief had been well lit, and she’d gotten lost along it. Finding her way back was proving difficult, not helped by the man beside her.
John’s wormholes were no solution. They’d taken him from her once, would undoubtedly do so again. He sat there, crouched over his notebook, not drawing stars but his death, copying down the fate etched into his skin. She couldn’t follow him this time and closed her eyes with a sigh.
Beta
Re: Beta