HomeRating: PG
Spoilers: Through the end of PKWars.
Disclaimer (lovingly snurched from kazbaby ‘cause it’s just sooooooo true): Not mine. If it was, we'd have a Farscape channel.
Author’s Notes: (1) “Cursum perficio” is Latin for “I finish the course.” It is also an exquisitely beautiful Enya song. I’m a sucker for the title thing. I know this. Plus I only write while listening to Enya and this has been my modus operandi since I resumed writing fanfic again in 1996. Enya is love. (2) This makes brief reference to another story of mine, The Kick Inside. It’s not required reading for this one, though.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Somehow she had come to believe in the most irrational of ways that he would not die.
The absurdity became true clarity only now, as it unfurled before her in full view, bio lights spilling gentle warmth into a cascade of gold draped over his motionless body and open-eyed, vacant gaze. He stared at nothing and she stared at him, watched his sightless eyes and kept vigil and nursed their child and would not eat until she could not nurse, and would not sleep because exhaustion held no meaning. It was as if he were willing time itself to stop, as if the universe held its breath and galaxies paused in their rotations, watching, pondering a verdict.
He would not die. So ludicrous an idea, such a feverish, confused daydream. She had been broken completely by the Scarrans, dismantled, methodically disassembled in a way she had thought herself above, in a way she had thought impossible; drugs and soft voices and screams and heat torture and even prayer, that most childish of false trusts. And when Djancaz-Bru had failed her, as all myths must, she called up her own strength and willed survival from visceral places, blood and bone. Yet in the end even the fiercest soul will fracture and crack, and when she felt herself spilling, pouring out into the abyss, the awareness stirred deep, mingled with drugs and delusions, that there was no escape without him. Even as she flinched from him, thinking he himself only a nightmare when he came for her, she still knew. When she could no longer fight, her mantra became not lost hope, not the acceptance of regret and pain, but simply his name.
Only ever Crichton.
The faith she placed upon him then she did so like a bloody albatross, a crown of fire, crushing in its weight, epic, nothing she had any right to demand of him. Yet somehow she knew that he would accept it, that he already had, that he needed it as she needed him.
Half-upright, arms and legs bound in a grotesquely elegant dance of spiraled metal, she said it plainly, surely, without hesitation.
I am not a Peacekeeper.
She was more. She was more and she was his and he would come for her. She was the key, the keeper of stars, the one thing, and he would come. He would come.
And he had. He had come, had defied hopelessness and come for her as the invincible and obsessive fury of legend darkly told, and he had rescued her from so much worse an end than simple death, and those who would challenge him paid dearly. And later when she came to learn how he had bartered with his own dark shadow, offering up his conscience, his very essence as bargaining fodder, all for her, only for her, it surprised her that still she knew him to be a good man and felt no remorse, no anger, only awe at the intensity of his devotion.
When they had returned so very soon again to face their demons, she knew now that though her body had healed, her psyche had still not quite been whole, and she was still flushed with the bottomless confidence of rescue and return. She was so certain of both herself and of him that when he leapt upon the negotiating table, bomb and boot bravado throwing dissonant shadows against the collective faces of those who had terrorized them both for so long, she wondered not if they could accomplish his goal, but only how and when. She watched him and he threw small sidelong smiles at her, knowing and intimate, and filled her to overflowing in a way she had feared only a cycle ago would surely shatter her. Now it made her glow, made her fingertips tingle.
You and your timing.
Some unknown bird of prey circled them and flashed sunlight from the bright blue of clear sky. Timing, time, never enough time. She still did not quite believe anymore in death, and it seemed his expression mirrored her own, even as the bird banked toward them with open claws and cried out in rage. She knew at least that whatever befell them, it would be they two, together, and she kissed him powerfully as they shattered in more than metaphor. There was the dim awareness of two bodies fusing into one then fragmenting, splintering, and there was no pain, just darkness.
Awakening crushed against him still, blinding golden flash. Brought back again from the precipice, they had not died. He had not died.
She had married him. She had married him, this human, and she had mingled her blood with his, irreversibly contaminated, and she had borne his child. She had given him all of her, whatever little he did not already have. She had given it freely only to find it simultaneously kept and returned, and she knew then that he was hers as well, and that they owned both themselves and each other in a singular joy that grasped at the very edges of her understanding.
You don’t just protect me. We protect each other.
She knew too that he was her charge just as she was his. The promise was not his alone to make. When he had spiraled into the wormhole and returned, bloody and bursting with the power to tear apart the fragile filaments of space and time, she had feared for his sanity, for his mind and his decisions and his conscience...
And yet still, somewhere, somehow, she had come to think that he could not, would not die. That leaving her in death as the pale shard of him she had loved so long ago on Talyn had left – that this was one of the only things he would not do.
Until she had seen him dissolve before her eyes, crumple and collide with Moya’s cold floor with a loud slap, she had believed it.
So childlike, so foolish.
And now she sat and absently caressed the back of the infant sound asleep in her arms as she scanned the face of John Crichton and searched for signs of life. He was not burning, cheeks not stained with ruddy heat, yet he looked so like the Living Death. She remembered more of that, of the first collection of weekens on Moya with him and the promise she had exacted from him in the midst of her weak and febrile suffering, spurring on the death of his so-human naïve optimism before she ever had such a right to… she remembered more of that than she had ever shared with him.
It seemed even then she was pushing, insisting, demanding more than he knew how to give. And all the while she deceived herself – and him – into thinking it was the reverse.
His eyes were desolate, so empty, and a sudden surge of terror clutched at her stomach with gaunt, skeletal fingers. The image of a pulse pistol at his temple, a last infinitely loving sacrificial act, flashed across her vision so clearly that the tears spilled over to trace down her cheeks before she was even aware of them. She wrenched her eyes tightly shut against the frail sight of him.
Do you love Aeryn Sun?
She knew he did, and she grasped finally the complete answer to what he had asked her in Moya’s hangar before she had left him at the flip of a coin. It was the one thing that had stopped her short from acting out the numbing, unbearable pain and ridding herself of the life that was then nothing more than a whisper of an idea suspended inside her.
Do you love John Crichton? he had implored, forceful, desperate, and she had only nodded mutely before breathing a small and fragile affirmation. Now she saw the whole of it, and this time it was anything but foolish.
Beyond hope.
Abruptly there was red. Red. Enraged red this time, not the red of old grief. It welled suddenly at her own lapse of faith, an abandonment of him and all he believed, and she shook herself vehemently out of her dazed and dangerous thoughts. She cradled the baby tightly against her and stood, unholstered her weapon, and hurled it violently, furiously down the waste chute, and it banged and rattled into the depths of Moya and far, far away from fear and despair and hands that might betray her.
Startled, the baby cried, and she stilled her too-swift heartbeat and rapid, shallow breathing and paced, soothing the tiny bundle with murmuring reassurance that calmed her as well as him.
Finally she found her pacing abate and her rage and panic subside in time with the quieting of her child’s cries, and she dared to step closer to John’s unmoving form until she was sitting beside him on the bed. She heard herself speaking, explaining, demanding that he hear her, demanding that he understand.
He would not die. She would not accept it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
| GO HOME |