Foot Falls* * * * *
Starburst Challenge 11 (hosted by Sunshine): Somewhere in the story, a character needs to express gratitude -- verbally, nonverbally, or even sarcastically. It can be a filler, AU, futurefic, whatever, with a one restriction: The story must feature the main cast.
Printer Friendly Word 6.0 version. (41KB .zip file)
Rating: PG for one or two moderately yuck moments.
Disclaimer: The characters and universe of Farscape are the property of the Henson Co. I have not made any form of profit off this little tale … unless you count learning more about writing fiction.
Time Frame: Future Fic, set approximately 9 cycles after PK Wars. John and Aeryn have two children: DJ (aka D’Argo) is nine cycles old, and their second son, Ian, is two going on three.
Test Drivers: PKLibrarian and aeryncrichton both saw this in its formative stages. Their input was critical to getting it right. In addition, PKLibrarian steered me past a few pitfalls, and got to observe first hand the kind of literary mayhem that occurs when the writer screws up the ‘science’ the first time around. (Yes, I botched the science completely, and had to fix it.)
Note to the reader: Once again, I am tackling a somewhat unusual writing style. This story is written in ‘Second Person’. At one point during the writing process, I decided that the story was too long to be done in this manner. Second person is more demanding on the
reader than the more customary first or third person, so I tried modifying the story into the more standard third person.
Lesson learned: Never argue with a story when the story thinks it knows best. You’re going to lose.
I wound up changing it back.
Hope you enjoy it.
Crash
* * * * *
You like the way your footsteps sound as you stride through the tier: the hard thump that resonates off Moya’s gleaming bulkheads each time your heel strikes the floor, the syncopated slap from the front of your boot, the quiet creak of flexing leather as you move forward, and then it starts all over again. Steady, assured, purposeful. Everything you haven’t felt for ten solar days. Your feet know where they are going; your emotions hover at the far end of the scale, threatening to explode in random directions at the slightest provocation. You are convinced the only thing holding you together is the aching fistful of muscles gripping the back of your neck. The clenched area at the base of your skull keeps you strong. It pulls your head up straight, yanks your back into spasming at-service brace, and snarls your stomach into tight-fisted knots.
You are hungry, tired, worried to the point where the prospect of shooting something no longer appeals to you, and you don’t know where you are going to find the strength to go on. Fortitude arrives from an unexpected direction. The fast patter of bare feet upon metalloid floor reaches you a split-microt before Ian’s high-pitched shriek, giving you time to brace yourself. He comes barreling around the corner, feet and fists flying, as naked as the day he was born.
“Mummy!”
He doesn’t bother to slow before slamming into your legs. The impact of his body isn’t much worse than getting your feet cut out from beneath you in hand-to-hand combat training, except in this instance you need to stay upright. He rebounds, recovers, retreats out of range before you can move to pick him up. A glimmer of light enters the darkness that envelopes every waking thought. You can’t help but smile. “Aren’t you supposed to be taking a bath?” you ask.
He jabbers out an unintelligible answer, swamping you with his usual mash of English, Sebacean, and Hynerian, with the occasional phrase in Pilot’s language tossed in just to ensure that you have no idea what he is saying. DJ jogs around the corner in time to save you. “Sorry. He got away from me,” is all he has to say.
He looks so much like his father. The single thought takes full command of your attention for several moments. He is still a child, not quite ten cycles old and wearing the bumbling roundness of youth. The hints of impending manhood are there though, provided you look hard enough. He has grown more than two denches in the last cycle, putting on height and muscle far faster than you ever would have guessed a child could; and the first hints of angular leanness lurk in the soft planes of his face and his torso. He has John’s eyes, and your ears; the Crichton self-deprecating grin, and your tendency to keep your strongest emotions hidden from view.
Nine cycles old is too young to shift this burden onto his slim shoulders. You want your first-born to be running through the tiers in the same manner as his younger brother: laughing, carefree, enjoying the moments when he manages to elude both his parents … but perhaps better dressed. He has taken charge of his younger brother without being asked, doing his best to act like an adult because he has figured out that you can’t do everything alone.
He is trying so hard.
The hot sting behind your eyes is the product of pride, not sadness. “He gets away from us pretty frequently,” you tell him. “You’re doing fine.” He needs more. You can see it in the uncertain rise and fall of his shoulders, and the way his eyes keep coming back to your face, searching for something. You try to give him the one tool he will need most in the days to come. “I am very proud of you.”
It helps. DJ smiles and hangs his head for a moment, pleased by the well-deserved praise. “Mom,” he begins, and then hesitates. The single syllable sounds as though he was about to say ‘Mommy’ and chopped it off at the last instant.
“What?” you ask when the silence goes on for too long.
“Nothing.” He scowls at the giggling, naked fugitive hiding in plain sight behind your legs. “Come on! Mom has better things to do than chase you around the ship,” he says.
Ian remains where he is, peeking around the barricade of your legs. He sticks his tongue out at his older brother. You have to stifle a laugh. “Help your brother,” you say to him.
He shakes his head, obstinate to the end, proving that he is undeniably a Crichton.
You turn it into an order. “Go with your brother. Behave.”
Ian crumbles. The delight disappears in the space of a single microt. He let go of your legs, plops down on his bare bottom, and starts to cry. He doesn’t wail or shriek. This is a silent shedding of tears that is totally out of character for your youngest son. He hunkers down in the middle of the corridor, abruptly lost and forlorn, and starts to weep.
“Come here,” you say, discovering in the midst of the brief sentence that you are talking to both boys. Ian comes willingly. He clambers to his feet, still crying, and this time reaches for you at the same moment that you bend down to pick him up. DJ moves more slowly, as though an absence of momentum can restrain his emotions the same way it keeps his movements in check. He fits comfortably against your left side, both arms wrapped around your waist, tucked in beneath your one-armed embrace. Both boys cling, drawing strength from you the same way you replenish your supply of willpower from their presence.
“I have to go,” you say after several microts have passed in peaceful, reassuring silence. “Can you help your brother?”
Ian nods. His head bumps softly against the side of your neck and the underside of your jaw. DJ doesn’t move except to tighten his grip around your midsection. You suspect he might be crying.
“I’ll be up in a little while. This won’t take long,” you tell them. “Get ready for bed, but you can stay up until I come to say goodnight.”
DJ rubs his face on your shirt, confirming what you suspected about unseen tears, and then steps away. “We’ll wait up,” he says. It is an echo of what John sometimes says when he heads to Quarters before you. Once again, your son is doing his best to be a man. You doubt he knows he is mimicking his father. He is doing it because it’s the only way he knows how to turn himself into an adult overnight.
They stand together, holding hands and waiting for something more. They want you to tell them that everything will be all right. You stand suspended in time, caught up in the memory of how John accomplishes that without speaking, thinking about the number of times he has laid a hand on one of his children’s heads, and provided them with love and security without making a sound. You remember watching, shocked to immobility, the first time he had tossed DJ into the air, caught the squealing, giggling toddler while he was upside down, and had gone galloping down the passageway with his son still inverted in his arms, bellowing at the top of his lungs. John knows how to be silly, and how to teach his children to play. He shows them how to be light-hearted, and how to find hope when their lives seem most dismal.
You are different. You love your children with an intensity and fierceness that John insists he can never equal. You can erase their fears and calm them when they are upset. When they wake crying in the night, you can put them to sleep with nothing more than the touch of your hand and your presence at the side of their beds. And despite all of that, you have never learned to lie to them in order to set their minds at ease. You cannot look them in the eye and tell them what they want to hear, even if a small falsehood means restoring their smiles and their happiness.
“This will all be over soon,” you say instead, which is the best truth you can summon. One way or another, it will all be over within a day, two at the most.
Ian looks happier. He races away in the same exuberant manner as he arrived. His bare bottom is the last thing to disappear from sight, the pale skin bobbing off into the distant gloom of Moya’s gently lit corridors. DJ lingers, watching you with an all too adult-like intensity. Whatever he finds in your posture and your expression, it causes him to turn away with slumped shoulders, now openly crying. He breaks into a run, chasing after his brother, fleeing from a situation over which he has no control.
You want to go after him. Not only to comfort your son. You want to join him in his retreat from life’s harsher realities. You want to find a dark, quiet place, curl yourself into a ball, and wait for someone to come tell you it’s all over.
There is no one to take care of this for you. Everyone on board Moya is relying on you: for strength, for inspiration, to make the impossible decisions.
It takes several microts to remember which way you were headed before you collided with Ian. You turn in circles, lost in more ways than one, and then remember that you had been on your way to Command.
As before, the rhythm of your steps, the measured cadence of boot heels hitting the floor in a predictable sequence, steadies you. It creates the illusion of purpose and certainty, as though with each unwavering impact your feet are saying that your life will return to sanity and order. For the moment, for the length of time it takes to reach Command, you have a destination. Your slow march provides a brief reprieve from the chaos that has ruled your life for what feels like an entire cycle.
It hasn’t been anywhere near that long. It has been only ten solar days since your life ran headlong into one of the horrific turns for the worse that at one time seemed normal. When you replay the preceding days in your mind, the events are compressed into a jumble of tactics, logistics, and the anarchy that is an integral part of caring for two young children; overlain by worry, exhaustion, and fear.
It happened so fast. Your life transitioned from cheerfully optimistic to an inescapable nightmare in less than ten microts. One moment your entire family was sharing dinner in the Center Chamber -- laughing, telling jokes, Ian making his usual abominable mess of everything within a full motra of where he was seated -- and a few microts later every waking moment tasted of nothing but ashes and grief. Time hasn’t changed that. The phantom flavor refuses to fade. Every choking swallow is laced with the harsh metallic tang of loss; every breath reeks of rot and disintegration.
For no logical reason you can assemble, it’s his boots you remember best. Each time you close your eyes -- whether it is in a vain attempt to catch a few arns of sleep or one of the increasingly frequent moments when you stop in the middle of a tier to rest your aching head against Moya’s cool, burnished plating -- the vision of John’s boots stumbling away from the table is waiting for you, lurking predator-like behind your eyelids.
He coughs, gags, coughs again, and then pushes away from the table looking strangely apologetic, as though some portion of what is about to happen is his fault. The leather-clad feet, always so graceful, so strong, so balanced, take five staggering steps away from his family. The boots are old. You bought him new ones over a cycle ago, but John insists on wearing this pair even though they are ready to fall apart. The fissures and creases are lined with dust from the commerce planet you visited earlier that day. There is a delicate crust of dirt clinging to the top edge of the soles, threatening to dislodge each time his weight flexes the layers beneath his feet. You watch, unable to raise your eyes from his feet to his face as a small segment breaks loose, floats to the floor in slow motion, and explodes into nothingness. He takes another step, shudders, and turns toward the table. Lesions appear on his face and arms the way individual raindrops had smashed down into denches-deep dust on the streets that afternoon, pummeling and destroying everything in their path. He raises a hand already littered with blossoming sores, stares at it in growing horror, turns panic-stricken eyes toward yours, and backs away.
“Stay away,” he says on the first liquid uprush of his meal. He gulps, fights to keep his stomach in check, and takes two more fumbling steps backwards. One foot lands squarely; it wobbles, no longer familiar with the floor. When he fights to regain his balance the soles let out a screech, the sound of a stricken animal in its final death throes. He tries again, forcing the words through a throat half-clogged with vomit. “You … kids … stay away. Stay away … from me.”
Four more erratic steps hit the metalloid floor, moving doggedly toward the door. You hear the hissing slide of leather on plating as he goes down for the first time. Ian is screaming, DJ is yelling incoherently, John pulls himself into the corridor, leaving an unpleasant smear in his wake, and you take your first uncertain steps toward him, moving like a battle-shocked cadet, conscious only of his boots.
The corridor is transformed into a runaway tapestry of golden starbursts dancing through a hazy landscape of water-blurred bronze. Temporarily blinded by the unpleasant sting of tears, you have to stop. You rest your forehead against the smooth plating, the only remedy you’ve found that eases the perpetual headache. At first you thought it was from tension. Later you decided it was guilt. Today, you are convinced it’s the outer manifestation of fear. At this point, you don’t care what the source is; all that matters is that you don’t like it. You felt like this one time before in your life. You never believed it would happen again so soon.
A voice calls to you from the distance of an entire lifetime. It is difficult to make out the sounds. “Aeryn?”
“Yes, Pilot.”
“The courier ship is almost in range of the docking web.”
Pushing yourself upright shouldn’t take every bit of energy in your body. “Do I have time to visit … him … first?”
Visit him. It is a pleasant, fictional description of a task that compels and repulses you in the same breath. If you were more bluntly honest, your question would encompass standing half a motra from a plexglass cryo-cylinder that holds the devastated body of the only man you have ever loved. John Crichton’s heart still beats … once every six arns. He breathes on a similarly slow schedule. And each time you sit down in front of the frost-coated plex, a little more of him is missing, eaten away by an inexorable disease with an unstoppable appetite for human flesh.
The voice that has kept you focused for ten solar days once again pulls you back from the edge of despair. “Aeryn.”
“Yes, Pilot. I’m sorry. Can you say that again?”
“If you wish to be in the maintenance bay when the other ship comes aboard, you will need to go there immediately. It is docking now.”
“I’m on my way.” You discover that you have strayed off course. This corridor doesn’t lead to Command. You turn in a circle, sort out your surroundings, and begin the short trek. “Has there been any change?”
The answer is so long in coming, you begin to wonder if Pilot has finally decided, after all these cycles, to take a vacation. The answer you dread arrives at last. “I’m sorry, Aeryn. There has been no change,” Pilot says.
No change means a slow change; a slow change means a slow gruesome death.
A sebacean would have died within a few instants. John’s robust, unaltered human immune system, accustomed to fighting off dozens of primitive diseases, held out much longer -- long enough to get him into cryo-stasis. But the stasis provided by a leviathan’s mechanoid systems is far from perfect. It can only slow his metabolism, not stop it. He lives, he fights; you spend arns wondering if there is any residual consciousness, whether John is in pain or is aware of what is happening to him; and the disease marches on at a similarly slow pace, ravaging his body while you are forced to watch and wait.
“I’m almost there,” you say to Pilot.
“Opening the hangar doors now,” he answers.
You take the last two corners at a run. It isn’t eagerness that speeds your footsteps. You want to be in the hangar when the courier ship’s hatch opens in order to make sure that this is not a trick. You are too late. Moya’s visitor has already emerged from his ship.
Dusty, well-scuffed work boots wait at the top of the stairs. They are the boots of a farmer, part of a disguise. Rough-woven pants, a knit tunic, and a baggy-sleeved shirt complete the outward transformation from high-ranking officer to nondescript menial laborer. He continues to stand like a soldier, however. His posture gives him away. Head up, back straight, feet close together at service stance: he can’t hide his origins. His right hand fidgets next to his thigh, searching for a weapon that is no longer there.
“Do you have it?” you ask.
“I have kept my side of the bargain,” he answers. “May I come aboard?”
“If you have what you promised,” you say. Both of his hands are empty. You brace yourself for an attack, suspicious, wary of his motives.
You continue to watch, assessing every shift of weight and twitch of his fingers, on the verge of doing something violent, while he steps back, reaches inside his ship, and then emerges, carrying a pair of cylinders. He scans his surroundings, perhaps looking for some sign of armed guards or an ambush, and then descends one slow step at a time. He stops short of the hangar bay floor. “Sanctuary,” he says.
“Provided those contain what we agreed upon, you may stay aboard Moya.”
He doesn’t move. “Hynerian dermifolica,” he says.
“Moya has been decontaminated. No one else is ill.” You have to convince him there is no danger. You can’t afford to have him leave without giving you what he holds in his hands.
What you won’t tell him is how you spent the first three solar days in a state best described as frantic anxiety: unable to sleep, unwilling to leave the boys for more than a few microts for fear that you wouldn’t be there when they showed the first symptoms of the disease. You will not describe how Pilot, consumed by guilt over an event he could never have predicted or prevented, had spent those arns obsessively decontaminating Moya. You will not explain how the air supply had been repeatedly flushed one tier at a time; how the atmospheric filtration units had been irradiated to kill off any living material; or how the entire fleet of DRDs had been set to work disinfecting every single surface, regardless of whether John had touched it or not. All you are willing to tell him is that Moya is as thoroughly sanitize as one Pilot and several hundreds DRDs could ever hope to manage.
“No one else has contracted the disease,” you say, jumping straight to the most critical fact. “This may be a variant.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I touched him. I have not been infected. Neither have the children.” You wait, barely breathing, willing him to believe that the virus won’t kill every sebacean on board.
He does not notice that you have stopped breathing. His shoulders settle a dench or two, into a posture that is less defensive, he examines the visible portions of his new home one last time, and then he takes the final step. There is no sound as his thin-soled boots make contact with the hangar bay’s stained and marred plating.
You had heard the rumors several solar days before John had become ill. Commandant Miklo Braca had attempted to broker one power deal too many. Caught playing four different factions against each other in the ultimate Peacekeeper ploy to advance his own interests, he had fallen out of favor with everyone involved. Not one person from High Command down to the lowliest conscript would have anything to do with him. It was an impending death sentence with no set execution date. Stripped of all possible allies, with no one to cover for him or watch his back if he was ordered into combat, it was only a matter of time before he found himself facing ridiculous odds without a wingman, or wound up lying face down on a field of battle, mortally injured, abandoned by both his superiors and his subordinates.
“Does he have them? If he doesn’t, may I kill him?” The gruff voice interrupts your short-lived thoughts about timing and luck, and about how one Peacekeeper officer’s tactical error might be another man’s only hope for survival. Rygel appears from behind Braca’s ship, holding the miniature pulse pistol he had taken from you more than ten cycles ago.
You nod toward the objects in Braca’s hands.
“Can I kill him anyway?” Rygel asks. “There isn’t a person in this galaxy who will object if I do.”
Braca’s façade of calm slips. For the first time in all the cycles you’ve known him, he looks frightened. You wonder what he had to do to get those two objects, and what he has been through in the six solar days since you made contact. “He kept his word,” you say to Rygel. “Be careful with those.”
Rygel stuffs the pulse weapon inside his Dominar’s robes, takes the two gifts out of Braca’s hands and heads toward the maintenance bay doors.
“Rygel,” you call after him, meaning to tell him that you would follow in a few microts.
He spins around. “No. I will comm you when it is over.”
“I’ll be there in a few microts,” you say.
“No, you won’t,” he insists. “Let my doctors do their job. Whether he lives or dies, what happens over the next several arns won’t matter in the cycles to come. What will matter is that you will never want to recall what is about to happen to him.”
What Rygel means is that you won’t want to watch while they take John out of stasis and begin the frantic race to cure him before the dermifolica can destroy what is left of his body. The compassionate Dominar is trying to tell you that you won’t want to stand beside John’s half-thawed body, powerless to help, and watch tissue dissolve before your eyes; you won’t want to be herded into a corner of the maintenance bay, cut off from everything that is happening by a crowd of diagnosans and hynerian medical staff, with nothing to do except listen to John Crichton struggle to breathe with lungs that have been ravaged by the virus.
Rygel knows all too well what the next several arns hold in store. He has committed his wealth and the full reach of his power as Dominar of the Hynerian Empire to stopping the disease. The plague that Rygel and Noranti unleashed on the kalish border station ten cycles earlier had not been contained. The quarantine had failed. Since then, Hynerian dermifolica has mutated into more than a dozen strains, decimated dozens of planets, killed billions. It has become the enemy that no one on this side of the Scarran border knows how to stop. Rygel has spent the last ten cycles chasing it, searching for a cure, always looking for some way to stop the pestilence that to this day carries the tell-tale genetic markers that prove it came from his body.
“Officer Sun.”
Braca summons you back from the bleak vision of a future in which your children grow up without a father. “Aeryn,” you say to him. “If you intend to remain aboard Moya, then my name is Aeryn.”
“Aeryn,” he says. It sounds uncomfortable on his tongue. “It would be a good idea to destroy my ship.”
Your brain grudgingly agrees to concentrate on something other than John Crichton. “Talk to Pilot. Arrange to jettison it into a star. You’ll need a comms. They will get you one.” You wave a hand at a platoon of DRDs waiting to one side. Braca nods. “Can you find your way to --,” you begin, and then stop because you remember that you aren’t the only ex-Peacekeeper in this hangar bay who once served aboard a prison ship. “Of course, you can.”
“I’ll find an empty cell,” he says.
“Anywhere except Tier Four.” You don’t want him near the children. Not yet. Not until you are sure you can trust him. Braca nods again, and goes on standing beside the steps leading to his ship. “What else?”
He looks away from you, toward the outer doors leading to space at the far end of the bay. The light shines across his cheek, and that’s when you see the damage. Recently sealed wounds. Artfully hidden bruises. Something or someone had laid one side of his face open to the bone, very nearly taking his eye out in the process. Braca paid a heavy price to obtain his bargaining chip. He turns back, catches you staring at him, and shrugs.
“Scorpius,” you say, hazarding a guess.
“If Scorpius had caught me, I would be dead.” He pauses for several microts, staring at nothing, before admitting, “Security forces.”
The facts fit together into an easily recognized pattern. “They caught you in the medical sector,” you say with more certainty, “holding tissue samples that you had no right to be accessing.”
His answer is an unreadable stare. It doesn’t matter. You know what he was caught stealing. It is the price you insisted he pay in return for a refuge aboard Moya. You consider asking him how he managed to escape; then decide you don’t care. Braca made it here with the samples. That is all that matters.
With the help of Rygel’s medical staff, you came up with a simple yet impossible way to save John. Both the logic and the medical principals are linear and valid. Scarrans are immune to Hynerian dermifolica. Scorpius is half-scarran, half-sebacean. Sebaceans are offshoots of the human race. Scorpius, still firmly ensconced within the Peacekeeper hierarchy and therefore safe from any covert operation to obtain blood or tissue samples, is living proof that human and scarran physiology can coexist.
The answer rested in the medical research facilities aboard Scorpius’ Command Carrier. Any command officer of Scorpius’ rank, with as many medical challenges to be addressed as a sebacean-scarran half-breed habitually faces, would have an extensive supply of genetic samples safely stored away in case of an emergency.
“Will you tell him?” Braca asks, interrupting yet another dazed reverie.
You take a deep breath, pushing aside the exhaustion that continually derails your attention, and try to focus on the question. “Who? Crichton?”
“Yes. If he survives, will you tell him?”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” you say. It’s a lie. You have spent a good portion of the interval since Pilot reported that he had managed to locate Braca thinking about this exact question.
If John lives, will you tell him that he carries small portions of his most reviled enemy in his blood? If you decide to tell him, what words will you use to explain that it was his only hope for survival? The dilemma extends several steps further than that. You aren’t sure what this will do to John’s genetic makeup. Saving John means the moment may come when he says he won’t have any more children because he is afraid they might turn out one quarter scarran. Rygel assures you that a cure won’t have that effect. You have no way of knowing if he is right.
You wish John was here to explain it to you.
Braca clears his throat and shifts uneasily. Whatever he is about to say, it must be of monumental importance to make him this uncomfortable. When he finally speaks, it isn’t what you expected. “You didn’t need to honor the bargain. The hynerian was right. No one would care if you killed me. There might even be a reward.”
This is his way of saying thank you. He was desperate by the time you made contact: out of options and beginning to fear that he might be assassinated by any one of the multitude of officers he had double-crossed or out-maneuvered over the cycles, including Scorpius and Chancellor Mele-On Grayza. You had been able to extract an impossible price in return for the promise of a safe harbor, and he had accepted your terms with the kind of agreeable enthusiasm that only a dying man can express toward someone who has offered to save him. This is his best effort at showing his gratitude.
“I need to be somewhere else,” you say. The boys will be waiting for you. Enough time has passed that they will be ready for bed; they will be wondering where you are, worrying that something else bad has happened. You can feel their concern, taste it the way they must be right now. It is an itching ache in your stomach, a sick feeling near the roof of your mouth, metal-flavored and bitter-scented, leeching enjoyment out of every breath and leaving an acrid trail in its wake.
“Pilot,” Braca says to you, indicating the stolen courier ship with a sideward twitch of his head.
“Yes. We aren’t far from a sun. He can guide the ship until it is trapped in the star’s gravity.”
You part ways awkwardly, both of you behaving as though there is more to be said, some portion of your negotiations left undone or unaddressed. Comfort will require time. He is equal amounts prisoner and guest, not yet worthy of your trust. A first installment toward that goal has been paid. It will require many more before you start to relax.
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