Return to Ficlet Index
Pairing: Harvey, John
Summary: Musings and meanderings
Spoilers: None
Rating: PG
Notes: Unbeta’d, so blame me.
Disclaimer: I’m just a little link in a long conga line.
He hears Sparky groan suddenly and mumble something urgent, a stream of words, half sentences, incoherent. Hears the scuffling arms and legs tug against the heavy blanket, as he tumbles into a tight small ball. Searching for? Dreaming of...? He quickly checks his list of likely correspondences and chooses ...comfort, warmth, safety. Maybe he dreams of the enfolding warmth of an Hynerian tralk’s arms or the diffuse comfort of the orange Hynerian suns or maybe he is once again Dominar of Hyneria, riding roughshod on the praise of his loyal subjects. He smiles, pressing his teeth into the dark, faintly pleased with his elucidation. A checklist full of ticks, a gold star, a grateful smile from a dedicated teacher. And what of Chiana?
She sleeps silently, hardly moving on the hard mattress. In the blackness he can imagine her clutching at the sheet, her white hands strained whiter, knuckles pressing back secrets. Or maybe she hugs her thoughts to herself like a guilty child, her arms wrapped tight against her body, afraid of exposure. How foolish. How futile. She should know that secrets have a way of soaking out and staining all they touch. But then again, she is a child; she hopes as a child hopes, lives her life with a childish casual cruelty - he’s seen her tear the wings off countless butterflies. The plump bodies writhe around his feet.
A sudden soft footfall permeates through to his senses. Ah, that would be Sikozu. He wondered when she would make her move. The footsteps pause - he can almost feel her eyes scan John’s face - then hesitantly patter lightly away. Yes, yes, go and reconnoitre child of the Kalish, walk the atrophied corridors and gather all that may protect you. He laughs softly to himself, pictures himself on the rocking chair on the front porch of John’s youth, a black leather clad grandfather, respected elder, wise. Listen child, this is a dying leviathan. There is no more and no less.
John stirs around him and the comforting blackness begins to ebb into fitful colour, but just as suddenly the colours start to fade away. John rolls over and lies still. He knows that Crichton will sleep well tonight, scattering his nemesis John Crichton through each level of consciousness - Harvey’s antagonist made impotent through sleep.
He relishes this brief time between the onset of sleep and the onset of dreams. It’s when he can think clearly without the unwelcome buffeting and endless distractions of Crichton’s waking consciousness - he sniffs and considers - if one could call it that. His side of the mirror swirls with fuzzy dreams warmed by alcohol, fuelled by a tenacious hope he won’t even begin to try to understand. And always, John, so infuriatingly out of focus. Still struggling to keep those dreams to yourself. He sighs in kind conciliation, hands stretched out in the warm gesture of friendship - at best a pathetic waste of effort Crichton, one doesn’t need all the words to understand the book.
And then - oh exasperation! - in the few brief moments of Crichton’s clear lucidity, wormhole equations rise up and expand to smother the pain from the running sore of Aeryn’s abandonment. Oh the endless repetition, replaying the loop, a weary ennui; what did John once say - ‘it’s deja vu all over again’. Let it go John - he says softly, lovingly - let it go. Detach. He wears a saffron robe, his hand raised in blessing, incense smoke coils into the night.
Yes, John will sleep well tonight. The human - that most social of creatures - now has someone to talk to. Friends, tangible and real. Crichton won’t have to complete sentences for the dazed, befuddled pilot. Or, will not have recourse to call upon me.
Strange how humans, when denied outside stimuli, can become their own parasites, turn inward and eat at themselves from inside. And John had been a magnanimous host, had echoed in his loneliness, magnified it, made it real. Of course he’d offered advice, cajoled, entreated, tried skywriting in John’s stubborn mind. He’d pointedly been ignored, until he’d borrowed the wardrobe and played the buffoon. And yes, wasn’t the fool often wise in human culture? His wisdom cloaked by colours and bells? Listened to by Kings no less! And John had laughed at his antics and had sometimes conceded the point. Any victory, however small, was still a victory. His chest swells with medals, bedecked with coloured ribbons. A formation of jet planes shoot over the wooden house. A flag drapes across his knees.
Life should now become more interesting. He grins in anticipation, rocking slowly on the rocking chair, his medals clinking, a star streaks across the sky. Only humans could call a falling chunk of space debris a star and, stranger yet, make a wish on it. He smiles with tolerant amusement.
It was only a small thing but a curious outcome of the arrival of Chiana and the Dominar had been a palpable lifting of a heavy anxiety Crichton had been carrying for so long, that even he, (yes he admitted it), had become inured to.
Earlier on, a few days into their abandonment, when walking down an airless corridor searching for anything really - food, fuel, distractions - John had sighed and placed a hand on the spongy ageing flesh of Elack. ‘Bad feng shui,’ he had muttered wryly, sniffing cautiously at the stale air. And the dull thump of a blanketing anxiety John had felt, had settled even upon himself sunning on the beaches of John’s memories, a thickening cloud across the sun. And it was soon after that when John had erected the still, laboriously concocting an alcoholic drink by trial and error. And he had hated the dulling of his senses, the loss of his clowning influence, the ebbing of his power. A forced stifling lethargy of long summer days, bathing in cloying humidity, a boat becalmed on a glassy sea.
But power, of a kind, he had. Listen to the human’s music and John would - sometimes - hum the song, sing along with the remembered words. Tearing out the pages of the myriad of books John had read would - sometimes - stop him in his endless tracing of equations on the sagging walls of Elack. A pause, a brief flicker of wonderment as some dimly remembered title stills his ink stained hand. A favourite paragraph would bathe him in it’s inner light. But he had been cautious in his small victories. Greed of that kind had never been in his nature. Best to let sleeping dogs lie. A yellow hound lies contentedly at his feet, his warm brown eyes watching the hypnotic movement of the rocking chair. Tail wags lazily.
Strange, he could almost regard the human as a backward son, a concept he had stolen from Crichton’s memories, reels of film, flickering TV, yellowing pages. And after all these cycles he can feel his subtle influence growing, like what? Like something velvet and insidious. How luscious! - he must remember that for later. And he is a patient understanding teacher - rosy red apples tumble gently onto his desk, chalk dust powders the tips of his fingers - increasingly sure of predictions and outcomes. And yet, Crichton had given him life, had unknowingly nurtured him. He had read of the Virgin birth - and Him a Saviour as well!
Burning curiosity had impelled him to seek out the unusual circumstances of his birth. Scorpius smiling, panting - something unreadable, almost terrible, in Scorpius’s eyes. A quick thrust and the painful insertion into John’s brain, a grey welcoming womb. And John, screaming. A labour in reverse.
Hmmm. Endless musing, unusual meandering. He hasn’t always been so imaginative...as he watches, the pile of apples collapse across the desk and fall with dull thuds onto the porch’s wooden floor before rolling and dropping into the dry autumnal grass. A light, a halo he realises with a pang of shock, switches off above his head, plunging him into darkness. The rocking chair thumps down on broken rockers, jolting him from the seat and rattling his array of medals. The yellow dog runs howling off into the night. From somewhere in the far distance, laughter drifts lazily across the still air.
