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crack_van2004-01-20 04:06 pm
thassalia.livejournal.com) wrote in crack_van2004-01-20 04:06 pm
Memento Mori by Kixxa (PG-13)
Fandom: FARSCAPE
Pairing: John/Other, sort of
Author on LJ:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kixxa
Author Website:
Why this must be read:
Farscape is all about the what if moment, the snap of the fingers that sends events careening in one direction or the other, the really bad choice that seemed like a good idea at the time.
At the end of Look at the Princess, Pt. 2, the audience was left with an unthinkable situation: John Crichton married and frozen, a popsicle for 80 cycles. Then, later, we find out there's a kid on the way.
Kixxa's Memento Mori shows us what would happen if time, as the audience knows it, had stopped at that point. What if John had woken up 80 cycles later to a different world and had to go on from there. As it turns out, many of the same issues still face him, including the conflicts abounding in the universe and Scorpius' obsessions with him and with wormholes. Life has not been kind to the others, and John is left with himself, his wife and child and the life he woke to. But things are just never that easy.
The writing is compelling, stark and lovely, drawing us in while still keeping us at the same distance that John Crichton himself exists in:
The hank of dark hair ripples over his outstretched fingers, a fugitive shadow even now. Still running because she runs, from the silk curtained mornings or the closeness of his touch. The curtains rise and fall - breathing as if alive - shadows dapple the tousled bed. The ghost sighs, rises and is gone.
John watches her leave like a thousand times before, but knowing that this time she will not return.
He rolls over and strokes Kat’s alabaster body to warmth and life, cups a hand around the fullness of her breast, presses his fingers into the well muscled flesh of her stomach.
She stirs, runs her hand through her pillow tangled hair, tries unsuccessfully to blink the sun from her eyes.
“Kat.”
“Yes,” her voice still as dark as the night as she turns and rolls into him. “Different kindling....” she murmurs drowsily ...
“...makes one hell of a fire.”
She laughs herself awake.
+++++
The explosions unroll lazily, one here, one there, like time-lapse photography, exquisite slow-motion studies. Unfurling large petalled flowers, waxing and waning in a shower of glowing pollen. They hang and shimmer and dissipate to blackness, a small hole of nothing where once a self-targeting defence cannon had glimmered solidly in the night sky.
The endless string of flying transports tugging through the traffic lanes brake sharply and judder to the ground. All eyes are turned to the sky. Stunned silence and nothing. Nothing but the bland glow of the endless stars. But then someone points and there the flower explodes again, slowly and silently, grotesquely beautiful. Shock morphs into terror; some of the crowd disappear as quickly as they came. The rest will stay and watch all night, and the next, and the next, and the next.
+++++
The Palace techs, weary and frustrated, turn their faces to the outer reaches of a black and furtive space, but the enemy is as vague and nebulous as the dispersed remnants of their floating defences.
“Who are they? We still don’t know. We can’t locate them - they are firing on us from beyond our scanner range. Predictions? It’s too random. There is no pattern - therefore no predictions. They have,” he licks his dry lips and shrugs his shoulders hopelessly, “harnessed the power of dark energy to fire upon us from such a great distance ... at a target so small ... the degree of accuracy that is required ...” And the techs collectively shake their heads and turn bewildered bleary eyes to their endless calculations, try to figure out trajectories, map out some form of defence or retaliation and try not to think of their husbands or wives or lovers. Of their children and their homes.
John watches their blank determined faces as they fire back into the dark void of space - watches the long spears of fission generated plasma stream into nothingness. Random arrows shot by frightened children. He murmurs something about ‘pinnin’ the tail on the frelling donkey’.
And when they get a short moment to themselves, they look at each other and blame the isolation - blame the cloister wall bristling with self-targeting defences that has for so long kept the rest of the universe at bay. As unwitting prisoners they have slept long and dreamed with their idyllic planet, gently caressed it into bustling life, created a history that made them strong, until they had needed nothing. Nothing that is, until the game was over.
The Royal Planet is an anachronism the creeping virus of homogeneity has finally been drawn to. The planet writhes helplessly on its blanket of stars, as seductive as a naked Venus who cannot see her lover.
Memento Mori
Pairing: John/Other, sort of
Author on LJ:
kixxaAuthor Website:
Why this must be read:
Farscape is all about the what if moment, the snap of the fingers that sends events careening in one direction or the other, the really bad choice that seemed like a good idea at the time.
At the end of Look at the Princess, Pt. 2, the audience was left with an unthinkable situation: John Crichton married and frozen, a popsicle for 80 cycles. Then, later, we find out there's a kid on the way.
Kixxa's Memento Mori shows us what would happen if time, as the audience knows it, had stopped at that point. What if John had woken up 80 cycles later to a different world and had to go on from there. As it turns out, many of the same issues still face him, including the conflicts abounding in the universe and Scorpius' obsessions with him and with wormholes. Life has not been kind to the others, and John is left with himself, his wife and child and the life he woke to. But things are just never that easy.
The writing is compelling, stark and lovely, drawing us in while still keeping us at the same distance that John Crichton himself exists in:
The hank of dark hair ripples over his outstretched fingers, a fugitive shadow even now. Still running because she runs, from the silk curtained mornings or the closeness of his touch. The curtains rise and fall - breathing as if alive - shadows dapple the tousled bed. The ghost sighs, rises and is gone.
John watches her leave like a thousand times before, but knowing that this time she will not return.
He rolls over and strokes Kat’s alabaster body to warmth and life, cups a hand around the fullness of her breast, presses his fingers into the well muscled flesh of her stomach.
She stirs, runs her hand through her pillow tangled hair, tries unsuccessfully to blink the sun from her eyes.
“Kat.”
“Yes,” her voice still as dark as the night as she turns and rolls into him. “Different kindling....” she murmurs drowsily ...
“...makes one hell of a fire.”
She laughs herself awake.
+++++
The explosions unroll lazily, one here, one there, like time-lapse photography, exquisite slow-motion studies. Unfurling large petalled flowers, waxing and waning in a shower of glowing pollen. They hang and shimmer and dissipate to blackness, a small hole of nothing where once a self-targeting defence cannon had glimmered solidly in the night sky.
The endless string of flying transports tugging through the traffic lanes brake sharply and judder to the ground. All eyes are turned to the sky. Stunned silence and nothing. Nothing but the bland glow of the endless stars. But then someone points and there the flower explodes again, slowly and silently, grotesquely beautiful. Shock morphs into terror; some of the crowd disappear as quickly as they came. The rest will stay and watch all night, and the next, and the next, and the next.
+++++
The Palace techs, weary and frustrated, turn their faces to the outer reaches of a black and furtive space, but the enemy is as vague and nebulous as the dispersed remnants of their floating defences.
“Who are they? We still don’t know. We can’t locate them - they are firing on us from beyond our scanner range. Predictions? It’s too random. There is no pattern - therefore no predictions. They have,” he licks his dry lips and shrugs his shoulders hopelessly, “harnessed the power of dark energy to fire upon us from such a great distance ... at a target so small ... the degree of accuracy that is required ...” And the techs collectively shake their heads and turn bewildered bleary eyes to their endless calculations, try to figure out trajectories, map out some form of defence or retaliation and try not to think of their husbands or wives or lovers. Of their children and their homes.
John watches their blank determined faces as they fire back into the dark void of space - watches the long spears of fission generated plasma stream into nothingness. Random arrows shot by frightened children. He murmurs something about ‘pinnin’ the tail on the frelling donkey’.
And when they get a short moment to themselves, they look at each other and blame the isolation - blame the cloister wall bristling with self-targeting defences that has for so long kept the rest of the universe at bay. As unwitting prisoners they have slept long and dreamed with their idyllic planet, gently caressed it into bustling life, created a history that made them strong, until they had needed nothing. Nothing that is, until the game was over.
The Royal Planet is an anachronism the creeping virus of homogeneity has finally been drawn to. The planet writhes helplessly on its blanket of stars, as seductive as a naked Venus who cannot see her lover.
Memento Mori