Blue Eyes - Chapter 25 A
Oct. 15th, 2003 05:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
itsallovernowHate to do this, halving the chapter, but posting really does make me write, and I'm kind of stuck. So, this doesn't further the plot any, just extends the things we already know, but I'm gonna finish the chapter tomorrow, hopefully. And I think I've solved one of my problems. But you won't be able to tell here.
Chapter 25
Her jaw ached. So did her ribs, and she moved to absently rub them, but was reminded of her predicament by the bite of the cuffs around her wrists. They hadn’t restrained her at first, despite her initial struggle, but an escape attempt had found her immediately in the cuffs. Scorpius had smiled at that, had shaken his head as they wrapped the metal around her wrists, and she felt chilled, unhappy with his weird benediction. Of course, she hadn’t been certain who he was at the time. But she recognized him as a threat
He hadn’t questioned her, except to ask her name. She had refused to answer. Teyvn was bleeding out on the floor, and she kept looking at him, drawing strength, trying to stifle her fear with the sight of him, and the pull of her ribs and the throbbing of her knee helped to hold her focus. Civilians mixed with the helmeted Peacekeepers, and Scorpius nodded at one of the guards who left and returned with Kri. The girl was shaking, milky pale, and her eyes darted over to Anix, horrified and then slid back over to the visage of this oddity.
He reached forward to cup Kri’s face in one gloved hand. The girl tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip.
“Do you know who this is?” he asked, impeccably polite.
She tried to shake her head, but he squeezed tighter.
“Is this your father?” he asked, pointing at one of the Sebacean men standing in a corner near the entrance.
The guard’s motion was effortless, the pulse rifle leveled at the man’s head smoothly and instantly. Tears ran silently down Kri’s face. Scorpius brushed them away with a gentleness that reminded her of John, and then straightened, releasing her face.
“Kill him,” he said pleasantly, and Kri shrieked, a noise that was doubled, and Anix realized that she’d echoed the plaintive sound. The hybrid turned towards her and raised a questioning brow, but she remained silent and trembling.
“Anix,” Kri yelled out. “Her name is Anix Sun.”
The smile on Scorpius face broadened, and he nodded at Anix as if that had confirmed something for him.
“Sir,” one of the guards said urgently, “we need to leave immediately.”
“Very well lieutenant,” he replied. “But we need to send our regards to an old friend.”
He took a holographer from another guard, and said calmly into it, “Officer Sun, I have something I think you’ll want back.”
He removed the chip and pressed into Kri’s palm. “Please give that to Aeryn Sun,” he said to the sobbing girl. “And tell her I’ll be in touch.”
And with that, one of the guards grabbed Anix by the arm and marched her out. They wended their way through a labyrinthine series of hallways until finally reaching an exit that dumped them out into the chilliness of the evening and they made their way to a far more advanced marauder than the one’s Anix was familiar with, which took off silently, transporting them to a ship somewhat larger than a Vigilante. No one spoke to her, or questioned her, merely escorted her to a small room, shoved her in, and locked the door, leaving her hands cuffed. She sat on the bed, and allowed herself to shake.
***
Her hands on the controls of the Prowler were steady, the action so natural to her that she often felt outside of herself when she flew. She knew she would miss this, the freedom and the speed and the rush of motion. It had been the first thing that was hers and hers alone. Those moments with her mother were an odd dream, no evidence one way or another of them being either real or an immature example of wish fulfillment. But flight, that had been real. Something she’d held to her in secret, never sharing it with anyone, but also never allowing it to be taken from her. John’s innate understanding of that had been one of the things that had initially drawn her to him, in addition to the drilled in from birth training that told her to protect the weak and assess them for usefulness. She shook her head, pushed John Crichton out of her mind, and concentrated on flying.
But he wouldn’t leave. She could see that cocky grin, the one he’d worn when he first successfully flew the transport pod by himself, when she’d let him get a taste of just what the Prowler could do, that same grin he wore when he teased her body into such a heightened state of arousal that her orgasm was so welcome it was almost painful. The way he’d pushed her to that state that last night, slow and steady, burning and so intent on making her scream that when he’d finally entered her, and she contracted around him, eyes stinging at the pleasure, body shuddering, she’d pulled him to her, trying to delay his own release. She had wanted to elicit the same feeling, and he’d let her, reveling in her body before breaking her hold and slamming into her, and then, finally, nestling into her neck and whispering against her skin that he loved her. She hadn’t had a response to that. Still didn’t, and the way that caught at her throat allowed her to finally swallow thoughts of him, and focus on the necessity of the situation at hand. She shouldn’t have been so moved by those words.
Her Prowler, and her prowess, had steered her to the correct coordinates, and a large ship hung heavily before her in the vacuum of space. Larger than her Vigilante, but not as large as a Command Carrier, it was a new class of ships designed specifically in response to the war. Fewer personnel, but faster flight times, more maneuverability and massive amounts of firepower. This ship was something that should have shown up on the radar, and it confirmed her suspicions of other spies on planet. Of course, if there was a conspiracy amongst the citizens of the planet, that would also account for what had been missed. Her soldiers were very good at what they did, but anything could be sabatoged. From this point on, though. It didn’t matter.
D’Argo was now in charge of her soldiers, of her unit. He would need to promote someone to act as a second, though. She also fervently hoped that he contacted Chiana quickly. Anix would need the familiarity of the Nebari, her support and strength.
Aeryn took a deep breath, focused on her daughter, and opened up a com signal. “This is Captian Aeryn Sun. I am alone, and unarmed.”
She really didn’t have the heart to say more than that, and she waited while the bay doors opened and two Prowlers appeared to escort her inside.
***
John was getting used to the throbbing pain in his head. He’d only had a day or two since he’d been thawed out that had been headache free. His eyes felt sticky, and vague memories of being knocked out by D’Argo, the hungover feeling of waking up from it, stole into his brain as he remembered the scene in the bay - Aeryn’s stillness and sorrow, the look on her face, and the slide into darkness.
“How are you feeling?” D’Argo didn’t sound all that concerned, but he’d asked. That was something. John opened his eyes, coming back into an awareness of his body outside of the pain in his head, and assessed the situation.
“Well, considering that my head hurts like a mother fucker and I’m tied to a frelling chair, not too bad.” His voice was thick with sarcasm, which D’Argo ignored.
They were in the small room that Aeryn and D’Argo had been using as an office. Maps and charts were spread out all over, and D’Argo was bent over the table, making notes, and giving orders to the stream of solidiers who kept coming through the door, studiously ignoring the human bound to a chair in the corner.
“Um, D, you think you could untie me?” He wanted to keep it light, almost afraid to ask why he’d been restrained in the first place.
D’Argo just turned back to his maps and shook his head.
“You’re now a prisoner of the rebellion,” Harvey said insidiously, and John shook his head, trying to get rid of the poohka. “Dammit, Harv, this is really not a good time.”
John decided to try another tactic. “Where’s Aeryn? Why wouldn’t she let me go?”
D’Argo huffed out a heavy breath, clearly fighting to control his temper, and turned to John with a pitying look.
“John, Scorpius may not even know that you’re still alive. There’s no reason that Be’Ann would have reported it to him, her orders were most likely to report on the activities of the rebellion. It’s unlikely that she would have known your importance.”
“D’Argo, gimmee a break. You and Aeryn both said that you’d used my name early in your careers for the shock value.”
The Luxan just glared at him. “That was a long time ago, John. And Be’Ann was young. Anyway, Aeryn would never have let you go on your own anyway.”
“Then why am I tied up? You guys think I’m gonna go running to Scoprius anyway?” He was trying very hard to remain calm, to not ask why Aeryn had gone, to not ask if D’Argo thought she’d be coming back.
“Not exactly,” said D’Argo absently, not meeting his eye. Then he sighed, and sank down into the chair, resting his chin on his steepled hands and looked at John. “Aeryn is a Captain in this rebellion. Capturing her would be quite a coup, dead or alive. She’s a worthwhile trade for Anix, who is just a child. Scorpius got lucky. I think that some of his troops were responsible for what we found out there in the desert, doing surveillance, or maybe planning their infiltration, I don’t know.”
John nodded at that.
“Aeryn knows that you’ve accessed some of the wormhole knowledge.”
John felt his body grow taut. “They’re just figures, equations, D’Argo. I can’t interpret them. Not yet.” He felt ice coat his words as the realization of what was happening started to sink in.
“If he’s not sure I’m alive, Aeryn can use me as a bargaining chip, can’t she?”
“Yes.” There was no sorrow in the response, no regret, but John had a feeling that the situation didn’t make D’Argo any happier than it was making him.
“Great,” he breathed out. “That’s just frelling great D’Argo. You wouldn’t let me do this by myself, but you’re gonna let Aeryn give me to Scorpy like a Welcome Wagon treat.”
“John,” D’Argo said softly. “She won’t do that unless she has no other choice. She doesn’t expect to come back from this, and there’s no reason to think that she won’t be enough of a prize.”
John desperately wished that his hands weren’t tied, he wanted to slam his fists into something, anger at Aeryn raging against fear for her. “Goddamnit, D’Argo, why’d you let her go?”
“Because this is Scorpius,” he said bluntly, growling. “Because no matter his obsessions, he is a Peacekeeper, and he will kill Anix, and he will torture her first. Do you understand that? She grew up among this rebellion, and if he knows who she is, he will torture her simply to make sure that she doesn’t know anything. If it was anyone else, Aeryn would have to let it happen, and deal with the fallout. But this is her daughter!” His voice raised at the end, and his fist came down on the table in the action that relieved a little of John’s need for violence.
“I know that, D’Argo,” he said quietly. “I want Anix back safely as much as you do. I’ve already lost one child to this war.”
D’Argo’s eyes softened minutely. “Perhaps we should have given you a choice.” He said, but he didn’t sound like he believed it and John shook his head.
“No. You were right. And we are at war.”
Harvey propped his feet up on the desk, his chair closer than John’s. “Then all we can do is wait, isn’t it.”
John glared at him, and said to D’Argo. “If you untie me, I won’t leave this room. I promise.”
***
Her greeting had been more or less what she’d expected, and she licked away the blood at the corner of her mouth. Of course Braca had survived the destruction of the Command Carrier. She wasn’t surprised that High Command had demoted him, and she was even less surprised when he backhanded her across the mouth. She didn’t flinch or struggle out of the grip of the two guards who had cuffed her wrists. She grinned ferally at Braca, the blood coating her teeth, and spat to the side. He hit her again, this time in the stomach, and she doubled over in pain, trying to breath through it and slow stood up as he looked at her assessingly, having barely broken a sweat. He stepped up to her, his breath hot on her face, broadcasting the supercilious calm that he’d always possessed.
“He wants to see you right away,” he said blandly, curling his hand around her throat. “But once you’ve served your purpose…” Braca let the threat trail off. “Well, then we’ll see. We have much to discuss.”
He stroked his thumb over her lip, smearing the blood and irritating the stinging cut. “I do think, Officer Sun, that you owe me for the destruction of my ship.”
And he’d backed up, and hit her again, the blow connecting with her cheekbone, hard enough to make her vision fuzz and blur. She struggled to remain standing, to walk forward without hesitating when Braca turned smartly and they all marched forward through the ship to meet Scorpius.
She tried to memorize the path they took, avoiding thoughts of the planet, of Anix in an effort to gather information on her surroundings. She’d never been on this kind of ship and while she could have walked, and charted a Command Carrier in her sleep, the layout of this was different, the buzz of soldiers almost foreign to her in this new environment. If she closed her eyes, she knew it would sound much like Moya or the Vigilante on a good day, full of people intent on their actions, but she refused to associate those things with this ship. She scanned the walls, the floors and people they passed and tried to retain everything she could. Then they were at the entrance to Scorpius’ chambers, and she could feel her heart beating hard against her chest as the door slid open and they marched her inside to confront the hybrid.
“Officer Sun,” she heard. A voice that had haunted her dreams, a voice responsible for so much that had happened to her over the past 16 cycles. “It really has been too long.”
She looked t ahead, seeing him clearly, and straightened her shoulders. “Captain Sun,” she said, trying not to swallow blood. “If you don’t mind.”
***
Sitting untied had a lot to be said for it, at least compared to sitting tied, but boredom and fatigue were settling heavily on John, and he itched to get up, run around, see Katralla, find something to do that wasn’t this agonizing waiting. He’d tried to focus for awhile on what D’Argo was doing, the mishmash of orders and intentions he was carrying out, but when he realized that D’Argo had now assumed all of Aeryn’s duties, acceptance that she was really gone, his stomach lurched sickly, and he stopped listening.
He was just about to ask if D’Argo would assign him a guard so he could go wander aimlessly about the palace, when his head lit up like a halogen lamp.
The swirl of blue, and the white strips of equations circled behind his eyelids, spinning rapidly into a blue funnel. His stomach lurched again, and he felt himself sucked into that vortex.
“Harvey,” he yelled, no longer caring if he was really yelling or just screaming in his head. “Goddamnit Harvey, stop this.”
He spun through the wormhole, ricocheting off it’s sides, until it dissolved into black and he found himself in a dank cell, looking over at Stark.
“Harvey, knock it off!”
But Harvey didn’t answer. He shivered, and looked at the crazy, cyclopean Banik who was eyeing him just as nervously from across the cell. “Hey Stark,” he said, startled, raising one hand in a careful gesture of greeting. “Long time no see.”
He could still feel his body, which ached, but not like it had before, not from exhaustion and the leftover poisons of D’Argo’s tongue. The pain was familiar though, and as bands of panic tightened across his chest, he recognized the pain, and his current location. He was back in the cell on the Gammack Base, waiting for another session in the chair, waiting to die and praying that Aeryn’s cure had found her.
He clutched his coat to his body, trying to fend of the chill of the cell, trying to figure out what was real, knowing he’d been sitting in a room on the Royal Planet, knowing he probably was still there, but this felt so frelling real. The cold, the pain, the nausea and dissociation, the fear, not only for himself, but for Gilina, and Chiana, and Aeryn, oh God, for Aeryn, pale and cold, and dying on Moya. The door to the cell flew open, and the figure of Scorpius stood there, looking thoughtfully at John.
“That’s much better,” he said.
Chapter 25
Her jaw ached. So did her ribs, and she moved to absently rub them, but was reminded of her predicament by the bite of the cuffs around her wrists. They hadn’t restrained her at first, despite her initial struggle, but an escape attempt had found her immediately in the cuffs. Scorpius had smiled at that, had shaken his head as they wrapped the metal around her wrists, and she felt chilled, unhappy with his weird benediction. Of course, she hadn’t been certain who he was at the time. But she recognized him as a threat
He hadn’t questioned her, except to ask her name. She had refused to answer. Teyvn was bleeding out on the floor, and she kept looking at him, drawing strength, trying to stifle her fear with the sight of him, and the pull of her ribs and the throbbing of her knee helped to hold her focus. Civilians mixed with the helmeted Peacekeepers, and Scorpius nodded at one of the guards who left and returned with Kri. The girl was shaking, milky pale, and her eyes darted over to Anix, horrified and then slid back over to the visage of this oddity.
He reached forward to cup Kri’s face in one gloved hand. The girl tried to pull away, but he tightened his grip.
“Do you know who this is?” he asked, impeccably polite.
She tried to shake her head, but he squeezed tighter.
“Is this your father?” he asked, pointing at one of the Sebacean men standing in a corner near the entrance.
The guard’s motion was effortless, the pulse rifle leveled at the man’s head smoothly and instantly. Tears ran silently down Kri’s face. Scorpius brushed them away with a gentleness that reminded her of John, and then straightened, releasing her face.
“Kill him,” he said pleasantly, and Kri shrieked, a noise that was doubled, and Anix realized that she’d echoed the plaintive sound. The hybrid turned towards her and raised a questioning brow, but she remained silent and trembling.
“Anix,” Kri yelled out. “Her name is Anix Sun.”
The smile on Scorpius face broadened, and he nodded at Anix as if that had confirmed something for him.
“Sir,” one of the guards said urgently, “we need to leave immediately.”
“Very well lieutenant,” he replied. “But we need to send our regards to an old friend.”
He took a holographer from another guard, and said calmly into it, “Officer Sun, I have something I think you’ll want back.”
He removed the chip and pressed into Kri’s palm. “Please give that to Aeryn Sun,” he said to the sobbing girl. “And tell her I’ll be in touch.”
And with that, one of the guards grabbed Anix by the arm and marched her out. They wended their way through a labyrinthine series of hallways until finally reaching an exit that dumped them out into the chilliness of the evening and they made their way to a far more advanced marauder than the one’s Anix was familiar with, which took off silently, transporting them to a ship somewhat larger than a Vigilante. No one spoke to her, or questioned her, merely escorted her to a small room, shoved her in, and locked the door, leaving her hands cuffed. She sat on the bed, and allowed herself to shake.
***
Her hands on the controls of the Prowler were steady, the action so natural to her that she often felt outside of herself when she flew. She knew she would miss this, the freedom and the speed and the rush of motion. It had been the first thing that was hers and hers alone. Those moments with her mother were an odd dream, no evidence one way or another of them being either real or an immature example of wish fulfillment. But flight, that had been real. Something she’d held to her in secret, never sharing it with anyone, but also never allowing it to be taken from her. John’s innate understanding of that had been one of the things that had initially drawn her to him, in addition to the drilled in from birth training that told her to protect the weak and assess them for usefulness. She shook her head, pushed John Crichton out of her mind, and concentrated on flying.
But he wouldn’t leave. She could see that cocky grin, the one he’d worn when he first successfully flew the transport pod by himself, when she’d let him get a taste of just what the Prowler could do, that same grin he wore when he teased her body into such a heightened state of arousal that her orgasm was so welcome it was almost painful. The way he’d pushed her to that state that last night, slow and steady, burning and so intent on making her scream that when he’d finally entered her, and she contracted around him, eyes stinging at the pleasure, body shuddering, she’d pulled him to her, trying to delay his own release. She had wanted to elicit the same feeling, and he’d let her, reveling in her body before breaking her hold and slamming into her, and then, finally, nestling into her neck and whispering against her skin that he loved her. She hadn’t had a response to that. Still didn’t, and the way that caught at her throat allowed her to finally swallow thoughts of him, and focus on the necessity of the situation at hand. She shouldn’t have been so moved by those words.
Her Prowler, and her prowess, had steered her to the correct coordinates, and a large ship hung heavily before her in the vacuum of space. Larger than her Vigilante, but not as large as a Command Carrier, it was a new class of ships designed specifically in response to the war. Fewer personnel, but faster flight times, more maneuverability and massive amounts of firepower. This ship was something that should have shown up on the radar, and it confirmed her suspicions of other spies on planet. Of course, if there was a conspiracy amongst the citizens of the planet, that would also account for what had been missed. Her soldiers were very good at what they did, but anything could be sabatoged. From this point on, though. It didn’t matter.
D’Argo was now in charge of her soldiers, of her unit. He would need to promote someone to act as a second, though. She also fervently hoped that he contacted Chiana quickly. Anix would need the familiarity of the Nebari, her support and strength.
Aeryn took a deep breath, focused on her daughter, and opened up a com signal. “This is Captian Aeryn Sun. I am alone, and unarmed.”
She really didn’t have the heart to say more than that, and she waited while the bay doors opened and two Prowlers appeared to escort her inside.
***
John was getting used to the throbbing pain in his head. He’d only had a day or two since he’d been thawed out that had been headache free. His eyes felt sticky, and vague memories of being knocked out by D’Argo, the hungover feeling of waking up from it, stole into his brain as he remembered the scene in the bay - Aeryn’s stillness and sorrow, the look on her face, and the slide into darkness.
“How are you feeling?” D’Argo didn’t sound all that concerned, but he’d asked. That was something. John opened his eyes, coming back into an awareness of his body outside of the pain in his head, and assessed the situation.
“Well, considering that my head hurts like a mother fucker and I’m tied to a frelling chair, not too bad.” His voice was thick with sarcasm, which D’Argo ignored.
They were in the small room that Aeryn and D’Argo had been using as an office. Maps and charts were spread out all over, and D’Argo was bent over the table, making notes, and giving orders to the stream of solidiers who kept coming through the door, studiously ignoring the human bound to a chair in the corner.
“Um, D, you think you could untie me?” He wanted to keep it light, almost afraid to ask why he’d been restrained in the first place.
D’Argo just turned back to his maps and shook his head.
“You’re now a prisoner of the rebellion,” Harvey said insidiously, and John shook his head, trying to get rid of the poohka. “Dammit, Harv, this is really not a good time.”
John decided to try another tactic. “Where’s Aeryn? Why wouldn’t she let me go?”
D’Argo huffed out a heavy breath, clearly fighting to control his temper, and turned to John with a pitying look.
“John, Scorpius may not even know that you’re still alive. There’s no reason that Be’Ann would have reported it to him, her orders were most likely to report on the activities of the rebellion. It’s unlikely that she would have known your importance.”
“D’Argo, gimmee a break. You and Aeryn both said that you’d used my name early in your careers for the shock value.”
The Luxan just glared at him. “That was a long time ago, John. And Be’Ann was young. Anyway, Aeryn would never have let you go on your own anyway.”
“Then why am I tied up? You guys think I’m gonna go running to Scoprius anyway?” He was trying very hard to remain calm, to not ask why Aeryn had gone, to not ask if D’Argo thought she’d be coming back.
“Not exactly,” said D’Argo absently, not meeting his eye. Then he sighed, and sank down into the chair, resting his chin on his steepled hands and looked at John. “Aeryn is a Captain in this rebellion. Capturing her would be quite a coup, dead or alive. She’s a worthwhile trade for Anix, who is just a child. Scorpius got lucky. I think that some of his troops were responsible for what we found out there in the desert, doing surveillance, or maybe planning their infiltration, I don’t know.”
John nodded at that.
“Aeryn knows that you’ve accessed some of the wormhole knowledge.”
John felt his body grow taut. “They’re just figures, equations, D’Argo. I can’t interpret them. Not yet.” He felt ice coat his words as the realization of what was happening started to sink in.
“If he’s not sure I’m alive, Aeryn can use me as a bargaining chip, can’t she?”
“Yes.” There was no sorrow in the response, no regret, but John had a feeling that the situation didn’t make D’Argo any happier than it was making him.
“Great,” he breathed out. “That’s just frelling great D’Argo. You wouldn’t let me do this by myself, but you’re gonna let Aeryn give me to Scorpy like a Welcome Wagon treat.”
“John,” D’Argo said softly. “She won’t do that unless she has no other choice. She doesn’t expect to come back from this, and there’s no reason to think that she won’t be enough of a prize.”
John desperately wished that his hands weren’t tied, he wanted to slam his fists into something, anger at Aeryn raging against fear for her. “Goddamnit, D’Argo, why’d you let her go?”
“Because this is Scorpius,” he said bluntly, growling. “Because no matter his obsessions, he is a Peacekeeper, and he will kill Anix, and he will torture her first. Do you understand that? She grew up among this rebellion, and if he knows who she is, he will torture her simply to make sure that she doesn’t know anything. If it was anyone else, Aeryn would have to let it happen, and deal with the fallout. But this is her daughter!” His voice raised at the end, and his fist came down on the table in the action that relieved a little of John’s need for violence.
“I know that, D’Argo,” he said quietly. “I want Anix back safely as much as you do. I’ve already lost one child to this war.”
D’Argo’s eyes softened minutely. “Perhaps we should have given you a choice.” He said, but he didn’t sound like he believed it and John shook his head.
“No. You were right. And we are at war.”
Harvey propped his feet up on the desk, his chair closer than John’s. “Then all we can do is wait, isn’t it.”
John glared at him, and said to D’Argo. “If you untie me, I won’t leave this room. I promise.”
***
Her greeting had been more or less what she’d expected, and she licked away the blood at the corner of her mouth. Of course Braca had survived the destruction of the Command Carrier. She wasn’t surprised that High Command had demoted him, and she was even less surprised when he backhanded her across the mouth. She didn’t flinch or struggle out of the grip of the two guards who had cuffed her wrists. She grinned ferally at Braca, the blood coating her teeth, and spat to the side. He hit her again, this time in the stomach, and she doubled over in pain, trying to breath through it and slow stood up as he looked at her assessingly, having barely broken a sweat. He stepped up to her, his breath hot on her face, broadcasting the supercilious calm that he’d always possessed.
“He wants to see you right away,” he said blandly, curling his hand around her throat. “But once you’ve served your purpose…” Braca let the threat trail off. “Well, then we’ll see. We have much to discuss.”
He stroked his thumb over her lip, smearing the blood and irritating the stinging cut. “I do think, Officer Sun, that you owe me for the destruction of my ship.”
And he’d backed up, and hit her again, the blow connecting with her cheekbone, hard enough to make her vision fuzz and blur. She struggled to remain standing, to walk forward without hesitating when Braca turned smartly and they all marched forward through the ship to meet Scorpius.
She tried to memorize the path they took, avoiding thoughts of the planet, of Anix in an effort to gather information on her surroundings. She’d never been on this kind of ship and while she could have walked, and charted a Command Carrier in her sleep, the layout of this was different, the buzz of soldiers almost foreign to her in this new environment. If she closed her eyes, she knew it would sound much like Moya or the Vigilante on a good day, full of people intent on their actions, but she refused to associate those things with this ship. She scanned the walls, the floors and people they passed and tried to retain everything she could. Then they were at the entrance to Scorpius’ chambers, and she could feel her heart beating hard against her chest as the door slid open and they marched her inside to confront the hybrid.
“Officer Sun,” she heard. A voice that had haunted her dreams, a voice responsible for so much that had happened to her over the past 16 cycles. “It really has been too long.”
She looked t ahead, seeing him clearly, and straightened her shoulders. “Captain Sun,” she said, trying not to swallow blood. “If you don’t mind.”
***
Sitting untied had a lot to be said for it, at least compared to sitting tied, but boredom and fatigue were settling heavily on John, and he itched to get up, run around, see Katralla, find something to do that wasn’t this agonizing waiting. He’d tried to focus for awhile on what D’Argo was doing, the mishmash of orders and intentions he was carrying out, but when he realized that D’Argo had now assumed all of Aeryn’s duties, acceptance that she was really gone, his stomach lurched sickly, and he stopped listening.
He was just about to ask if D’Argo would assign him a guard so he could go wander aimlessly about the palace, when his head lit up like a halogen lamp.
The swirl of blue, and the white strips of equations circled behind his eyelids, spinning rapidly into a blue funnel. His stomach lurched again, and he felt himself sucked into that vortex.
“Harvey,” he yelled, no longer caring if he was really yelling or just screaming in his head. “Goddamnit Harvey, stop this.”
He spun through the wormhole, ricocheting off it’s sides, until it dissolved into black and he found himself in a dank cell, looking over at Stark.
“Harvey, knock it off!”
But Harvey didn’t answer. He shivered, and looked at the crazy, cyclopean Banik who was eyeing him just as nervously from across the cell. “Hey Stark,” he said, startled, raising one hand in a careful gesture of greeting. “Long time no see.”
He could still feel his body, which ached, but not like it had before, not from exhaustion and the leftover poisons of D’Argo’s tongue. The pain was familiar though, and as bands of panic tightened across his chest, he recognized the pain, and his current location. He was back in the cell on the Gammack Base, waiting for another session in the chair, waiting to die and praying that Aeryn’s cure had found her.
He clutched his coat to his body, trying to fend of the chill of the cell, trying to figure out what was real, knowing he’d been sitting in a room on the Royal Planet, knowing he probably was still there, but this felt so frelling real. The cold, the pain, the nausea and dissociation, the fear, not only for himself, but for Gilina, and Chiana, and Aeryn, oh God, for Aeryn, pale and cold, and dying on Moya. The door to the cell flew open, and the figure of Scorpius stood there, looking thoughtfully at John.
“That’s much better,” he said.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-10-15 05:25 pm (UTC)Tangling with URs and John going into his own wormhole.
like I said, evil.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-16 06:36 am (UTC)I can wait, but not gracefully, for the next part!
no subject
Date: 2003-10-16 10:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-16 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-16 10:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-17 05:49 pm (UTC)