Old fic: Farscape - When Johnny Strikes Up The Band
My old Farscape fic is being migrated over to LJ for tagging purposes. Sorry if you've read it before! But feel free to read it if you haven't!
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Title: When Johnny Strikes Up The Band
Words: 729
Rating: Mostly harmless
Set: Towards the end of Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars
Spoilers: For PKW in the vaguest sort of way - to be honest if you don't know what happened with John and the wormhole then this will make no sense. Of course, it may make no sense anyway.
Disclaimer: Farscape does not belong to me.
Notes: This was written for the FarscapeFriday song title challenge to use a Warran Zevon song for the title of a fic. Of course, in a very non-predictable way, I use the one with Johnny in it. Me, obsessed? Naaahhhhhh......hee.
More notes: When I came back to this and re-read, it bits of it niggled at me. Nothing horrendously major, but enough to make me want to tweak it. So I went ahead and did it. Just moving some words about, changing a few others. I don't think I made it worse, anyway!
When Johnny Strikes Up The Band
John thinks Aeryn was born knowing how to shoot from the hip and disable a man with her bare hands. She's tried to explain the dynamics to him, but when you have such an innate a talent, such a skill, you don't always know how it works. Over the years, John has worked his way up from being dead meat to almost a hot shot. He can judge an angle, recognise a muscle shift as the fist bunches, he can duck appropriately. Aeryn can't explain what makes her turn and block a blow almost before the move is made.
The raw talent comes from inside, as inexplicable as ever.
When John was young, he wanted to be a musician, not a scientist or an astronaut. Wanted to play psychedelic funkadelic beats, feel the throb and pulse in his blood, and read the music like a first language. He tried to follow each melody and rhythm that spoke to him and drummed in his head, but he didn't have the talent, didn't have the right spark. Whatever key gene and missing miracle it was that could have wired him for that kind of genius took a different path.
Instead, he's good at putting numbers and theories together. Flowing down the strand of perception that tells him energy here will equal something extraordinary over there. He understands how machines think and reads their data like a concert pianist reading the notes on the staff. Here is his talent, here is his skill. Here it is in his geek boy brain and his test monkey hands, in his dumb luck and his endless curiously.
One thing he has no talent for is love. Oh, he's done it passably well at times, but has also done it badly. It isn't a talent so much as an accident, a stumbling trip into fast flowing waters where a bare knowledge of strength and rhythm and a deft touch is not enough to keep him afloat. His lack of skill has drowned him many times. That he is still alive is a miracle in itself.
His head is full of miracles these days, swirling blue miracles of a different kind. A head full of things that take skill and talent and he couldn't tell you how they work or what they mean. And he doesn't mean Winona, the pulse pistol that's never more than a heart beat away; doesn't mean that now he can shoot as well as Aeryn. That was never intuitive, that was learnt the hard way.
Now, in these last seconds, as his enemies and friends stare each other down, hanging in space, he is conductor, musician and scientist all. This talent of his explodes into life in a blazing blend of colour and cacophony as he sends the rhythm crashing into the audience. The heady miracles flow from his fingers like the straining, tangled whine of guitar strings, like a blow to the solar plexus. It's dynamic, it's the sound of the bass vibrating through his body, in his blood, it's vicious, it's a percussive riff which is intoxicating and this time there's a whole orchestra out there, baby.
All these years they've wanted him for a talent he could not define, could not comprehend. He'd been carried helplessly along by the syncopation that played him far and wide, as he read the notes inked into his skin.
Finally, right here, right now he is conducting the whole band, making them dance to his tune, to the music in his head, making the drums pick up the beat and letting funky sexy sax soak into his bones. He doesn't know how the harmony, how the dissonance ends, and if the coda will ever begin, though he has an idea, a glimmer, a hope, but all he can do is be a channel for the chords, the discords, for the fire, for the power, for the sheer damn firepower of it all.
He's risking everything on a breath-taking crescendo, on alien equations, on something he doesn't really understand, but he raises his hand and strikes up the band, anyway. It's a jam session for the heavens, it's a heady jazz, and it flows and grows, notes complex and spectacular, but sound doesn't carry in space.
He thinks that when the symbols clash and crash for the last time he won't hear a thing.
fic