Uncharted Death Trip [Farscape, Crais/Zhaan, R]
Title: Uncharted Death Trip
Author: rydra_wong
Rating: R
Warnings: Spoilers through the end of season 3. Het. Blood. Violence. Theology.
Word count: 1357
AN: "Prompt: Farscape, Crais/Zhaan: warriors in repose - meditative."
The Bardo of the Moment of Death
There is a naked woman on his spaceship.
She is not the first apparition he sees, but she is the first not to disappear, fleeing round the corners ahead of him (Tauvo as a child, running giggling to hide, turban askew; Officer Sun in armour, a flash of pale face before the helmet’s visor comes down).
When he paces his second (third? twentieth?) circuit round the outer corridors, she is still there.
The doors should close automatically, but this one remains open (he has noticed a number of minor equipment malfunctions, but Talyn remains comatose; any repairs will have to be made manually). It frames a triangular slice of the room beyond.
She sits cross-legged, her robe in fluid folds on the metal floor beside her. The lights tinge everything with blood, but the bare skin of her back is nothing but blue, balm for his aching eyes.
“You are dead, Delvian,” he tells her.
She inclines her head thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose so. In a sense. But then, so are you.”
He was chosen early for training as a strategist, a commander. Still, he remembers flying combat - how time would sometimes seem to slow down, weapons fire drifting towards him so lazily that there was an eternity in which to respond, to tilt the prowler down and away, return fire before the enemy pilot could even react.
It is not impossible that the same phenomenon could occur at the moment of death. In all likelihood, this is nothing more than a hallucination, the last desperate firing of neurons distorting temporal perception as they are consumed by the blast.
A single moment extended to infinity in a dying brain.
The Bardo Of The Experiencing of Reality: Appearance Of Peaceful Deities
The stars outside the windows are unfamiliar. They do not move, regardless of the acceleration reported by the sensors.
“The Banik slave believed that you were calling to him,” he says.
She smiles serenely at whatever memory she is contemplating, and he feels a twinge of - jealousy? - sharp as toothache. “Perhaps I will be.”
“You don’t recall?”
“We both ended our mortal lives in starburst, outside the confines of ordinary space-time. Past and future have no meaning here.” Crystals have begun appearing in her room, pale blue and silvery pink.
“Then you still believe that this is real.”
She draws her shawl around her shoulders - a loose mesh, like the veins in a leaf after the rest has decayed - and turns her smile on him. “What else could it be? We are here to experience it, after all.”
“Our perceptions could be false.”
“The same could be said of all our perceptions.” Gentle and knowing, as if she was teaching a small child. “And yet, we perceive what we perceive. And we are here.”
The neural transponder itches, and he scratches at the back of his neck. Slowly, Talyn is waking.
He does not look forward to trying to explain to a hybrid warship that they are trapped in some sort of possibly-hallucinatory afterlife; it seems unlikely that Talyn will handle the news well. And yet, it’s almost a reassurance to sense him, after so many days of silence.
Both before and after their death.
He could not save Talyn. Could not help recognizing the image of his own mind and his own conditioning distorted in the infant ship’s violent paranoia, like a warped mirror. For better or worse, they are one.
It seems fitting that they should remain so.
“What do your people teach?” she asks, startling him from his thoughts. “Concerning life after death.”
He snorts. “There is no life after death. You go nowhere, you see nothing.” Familiar phrases, hammered into his head in preliminary training.
“But you weren’t born a Peacekeeper, were you? You came from farming people.”
It’s none of her concern, and he wants to tell her so. But she smells like the hydroponic greenhouses on his home colony.
“How do you remain so calm, priestess?”
The Bardo Of The Experiencing of Reality: Appearance Of Wrathful Deities
Talyn wants - something. Wants his mother, wants Aeryn, wants an enemy to kill; Crais can no longer guess. He accelerates wildly, panicking more when the stars remain static around them, then fires his pulse cannon into empty space until he is exhausted.
Cybernetic bleedback: sores bloom on Crais’s chest like acid burns.
Zhaan prowls the corridors, eyes yellow. Pustules form on her skin, beginning to bud.
“Meat,” she says. “I must have animal protein.”
“There is nothing in the galley,” he repeats wearily. “And if we are dead, then it seems unlikely that we require physical nourishment.”
The apparitions have returned; if he closes his eyes, he sees his brother’s face consumed by fire, corroding to a skull, to a puff of dust carried away by the wind from an invisible inferno.
Flying, falling; in space, every direction is a fall, and you can fall forever and never touch ground. Perhaps everything outside the ship’s windows is an illusion; perhaps nothing exists outside this tiny metal world.
“In John Crichton’s mind,” she says, sing-song and dreamy, “I found the story of a giant lily that smells like rotting flesh. Imagine that.”
“What happened to all your piety, priestess?” he snarls. “I thought you had dedicated yourself to the worship of your gentle goddess.”
She laughs, and the sound scrapes along his nerves. “Bialar! You’ve seen me with a pulse rifle in my hands. I murdered men before you were even conceived. And the great Goddess was never, ever gentle.”
Her fingers trail across his cheek then, tug at his collar like the tendrils of a vine.
He slaps her, open-handed, and she smiles at him, teeth bared like an animal, then punches him in the stomach.
When he’s picked himself up off the floor, she’s still there. Watching him. He pushes her backwards towards the bed, wanting her to fight.
But she spreads her arms wide and lets herself fall, gasps “Yes” and “Peacekeeper”, laughing when he shoves into her as if he’s trying to bury himself alive in her cool flesh.
Afterwards, she sprawls across the bed purring, while he pulls his pants closed and fastens his jacket. Her eyes are blood-red.
He reaches down to the floor without looking, visualizing a piece of jagged metal - shrapnel from an explosion he saw once, perhaps. His fingers find it. Memory tells him that there was nothing on the floor before.
He doesn’t know why he hesitates, sleeve rolled up and sharp edge poised; he has performed vivisections before. Still.
It takes him a microt before he can cut into the skin of his own arm.
“Take no more than you need,” he tells her.
When he wakes, she is kneeling astride him, pressing one thumbnail into her wrist. The liquid that oozes out is milky and sharp-smelling, like sap.
She lets it drip onto the welts on his skin, into the gash on his arm, and each droplet is like cold water in a desert, quenching the pain.
The markings on her body remind him of the patterns that receding waves leave etched into wet sand, or light refracted through rippling water.
He closes his eyes and imagines a world of leaves.
The Bardo Of Rebirth
“Do you suppose we’ll ever be allowed to leave here?”
“Allowed?”
Zhaan is leaning with her forehead pressed to one of the bulkheads, hands spread against the metal. She has taken Moya’s pain before, she says; now she can share some of Moya’s soul with Talyn.
Through the transponder, he can feel the stillness, as if Talyn is listening to something. Like a child listening to a lullaby.
He rubs at the back of his neck and thanks Djancaz-bru (in whom he’s never believed) that there are some things the neural link doesn’t transmit.
“A crooked branch can never grow straight.” It’s not until he hears the words that he realizes he’s spoken aloud. A proverb, something his father used to say.
Zhaan shrugs, easily, lightly, without opening her eyes. “Roots are twisted,” she says. “How else could they find water?”
Author: rydra_wong
Rating: R
Warnings: Spoilers through the end of season 3. Het. Blood. Violence. Theology.
Word count: 1357
AN: "Prompt: Farscape, Crais/Zhaan: warriors in repose - meditative."
The Bardo of the Moment of Death
There is a naked woman on his spaceship.
She is not the first apparition he sees, but she is the first not to disappear, fleeing round the corners ahead of him (Tauvo as a child, running giggling to hide, turban askew; Officer Sun in armour, a flash of pale face before the helmet’s visor comes down).
When he paces his second (third? twentieth?) circuit round the outer corridors, she is still there.
The doors should close automatically, but this one remains open (he has noticed a number of minor equipment malfunctions, but Talyn remains comatose; any repairs will have to be made manually). It frames a triangular slice of the room beyond.
She sits cross-legged, her robe in fluid folds on the metal floor beside her. The lights tinge everything with blood, but the bare skin of her back is nothing but blue, balm for his aching eyes.
“You are dead, Delvian,” he tells her.
She inclines her head thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose so. In a sense. But then, so are you.”
He was chosen early for training as a strategist, a commander. Still, he remembers flying combat - how time would sometimes seem to slow down, weapons fire drifting towards him so lazily that there was an eternity in which to respond, to tilt the prowler down and away, return fire before the enemy pilot could even react.
It is not impossible that the same phenomenon could occur at the moment of death. In all likelihood, this is nothing more than a hallucination, the last desperate firing of neurons distorting temporal perception as they are consumed by the blast.
A single moment extended to infinity in a dying brain.
The Bardo Of The Experiencing of Reality: Appearance Of Peaceful Deities
The stars outside the windows are unfamiliar. They do not move, regardless of the acceleration reported by the sensors.
“The Banik slave believed that you were calling to him,” he says.
She smiles serenely at whatever memory she is contemplating, and he feels a twinge of - jealousy? - sharp as toothache. “Perhaps I will be.”
“You don’t recall?”
“We both ended our mortal lives in starburst, outside the confines of ordinary space-time. Past and future have no meaning here.” Crystals have begun appearing in her room, pale blue and silvery pink.
“Then you still believe that this is real.”
She draws her shawl around her shoulders - a loose mesh, like the veins in a leaf after the rest has decayed - and turns her smile on him. “What else could it be? We are here to experience it, after all.”
“Our perceptions could be false.”
“The same could be said of all our perceptions.” Gentle and knowing, as if she was teaching a small child. “And yet, we perceive what we perceive. And we are here.”
The neural transponder itches, and he scratches at the back of his neck. Slowly, Talyn is waking.
He does not look forward to trying to explain to a hybrid warship that they are trapped in some sort of possibly-hallucinatory afterlife; it seems unlikely that Talyn will handle the news well. And yet, it’s almost a reassurance to sense him, after so many days of silence.
Both before and after their death.
He could not save Talyn. Could not help recognizing the image of his own mind and his own conditioning distorted in the infant ship’s violent paranoia, like a warped mirror. For better or worse, they are one.
It seems fitting that they should remain so.
“What do your people teach?” she asks, startling him from his thoughts. “Concerning life after death.”
He snorts. “There is no life after death. You go nowhere, you see nothing.” Familiar phrases, hammered into his head in preliminary training.
“But you weren’t born a Peacekeeper, were you? You came from farming people.”
It’s none of her concern, and he wants to tell her so. But she smells like the hydroponic greenhouses on his home colony.
“How do you remain so calm, priestess?”
The Bardo Of The Experiencing of Reality: Appearance Of Wrathful Deities
Talyn wants - something. Wants his mother, wants Aeryn, wants an enemy to kill; Crais can no longer guess. He accelerates wildly, panicking more when the stars remain static around them, then fires his pulse cannon into empty space until he is exhausted.
Cybernetic bleedback: sores bloom on Crais’s chest like acid burns.
Zhaan prowls the corridors, eyes yellow. Pustules form on her skin, beginning to bud.
“Meat,” she says. “I must have animal protein.”
“There is nothing in the galley,” he repeats wearily. “And if we are dead, then it seems unlikely that we require physical nourishment.”
The apparitions have returned; if he closes his eyes, he sees his brother’s face consumed by fire, corroding to a skull, to a puff of dust carried away by the wind from an invisible inferno.
Flying, falling; in space, every direction is a fall, and you can fall forever and never touch ground. Perhaps everything outside the ship’s windows is an illusion; perhaps nothing exists outside this tiny metal world.
“In John Crichton’s mind,” she says, sing-song and dreamy, “I found the story of a giant lily that smells like rotting flesh. Imagine that.”
“What happened to all your piety, priestess?” he snarls. “I thought you had dedicated yourself to the worship of your gentle goddess.”
She laughs, and the sound scrapes along his nerves. “Bialar! You’ve seen me with a pulse rifle in my hands. I murdered men before you were even conceived. And the great Goddess was never, ever gentle.”
Her fingers trail across his cheek then, tug at his collar like the tendrils of a vine.
He slaps her, open-handed, and she smiles at him, teeth bared like an animal, then punches him in the stomach.
When he’s picked himself up off the floor, she’s still there. Watching him. He pushes her backwards towards the bed, wanting her to fight.
But she spreads her arms wide and lets herself fall, gasps “Yes” and “Peacekeeper”, laughing when he shoves into her as if he’s trying to bury himself alive in her cool flesh.
Afterwards, she sprawls across the bed purring, while he pulls his pants closed and fastens his jacket. Her eyes are blood-red.
He reaches down to the floor without looking, visualizing a piece of jagged metal - shrapnel from an explosion he saw once, perhaps. His fingers find it. Memory tells him that there was nothing on the floor before.
He doesn’t know why he hesitates, sleeve rolled up and sharp edge poised; he has performed vivisections before. Still.
It takes him a microt before he can cut into the skin of his own arm.
“Take no more than you need,” he tells her.
When he wakes, she is kneeling astride him, pressing one thumbnail into her wrist. The liquid that oozes out is milky and sharp-smelling, like sap.
She lets it drip onto the welts on his skin, into the gash on his arm, and each droplet is like cold water in a desert, quenching the pain.
The markings on her body remind him of the patterns that receding waves leave etched into wet sand, or light refracted through rippling water.
He closes his eyes and imagines a world of leaves.
The Bardo Of Rebirth
“Do you suppose we’ll ever be allowed to leave here?”
“Allowed?”
Zhaan is leaning with her forehead pressed to one of the bulkheads, hands spread against the metal. She has taken Moya’s pain before, she says; now she can share some of Moya’s soul with Talyn.
Through the transponder, he can feel the stillness, as if Talyn is listening to something. Like a child listening to a lullaby.
He rubs at the back of his neck and thanks Djancaz-bru (in whom he’s never believed) that there are some things the neural link doesn’t transmit.
“A crooked branch can never grow straight.” It’s not until he hears the words that he realizes he’s spoken aloud. A proverb, something his father used to say.
Zhaan shrugs, easily, lightly, without opening her eyes. “Roots are twisted,” she says. “How else could they find water?”