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It still takes John a few microns to get up from the floor and follow the stairs that seem to be the only way out of the room the Scarran had him in.
He goes up and up, focusing solely on climbing each step without falling over.
It’s not long before he reaches a rusty looking door which, after a couple of tries, opens and leads him to a small street, dark and narrow and out of the way. As he takes a couple steps, he catches glimpses of the deep purple sky of the commerce planet they were visiting, and he can’t help but feel a twinge of relief at the sight.
The street is not very different from what John vaguely remembers from the main market. There are more stalls closed than open, and the handful of people that he comes across don’t look twice his way even when he stumbles and a couple of craters tumble down as he tries to right himself up.
He drags himself towards what seems to be the end of the street, but when he reaches the crossing, he has to stop, unsure of which way to go.
He tries to remember where he was supposed to meet D’Argo and Aeryn before he was grabbed, but he fails to recall it, his mind slow and scattered. He ends up following the widest streets, the ones that seem to have more people mulling around and takes the strange faces passersby make at his appearance as a good sign.
John walks on and on and on, until he suddenly runs into what seems like a wall but turns out to be D’Argo.
“Crichton! We were supposed to meet and arn ago, where the frell were you!”
John stares at D’Argo, unseeing, the image of him in Earth clothes swimming back and forth in his head, and for a moment he’s there again, and he instinctually struggles out of D’Argo’s grasp, stumbling and falling on his ass, just as Aeryn reaches them.
Aeryn moves towards him, the look of exasperation replaced immediately by worry when she sees him. She kneels down next to him when he does not get up—not touching but hovering close, and that more than anything speaks of how terrified he must look.
“John? What’s wrong?”
The angle is all wrong. He closes his eyes, breathes deeply and wills images of loose curly hair and nurse uniforms to go away.
“There was—a Scarran,” he manages to spit out, slowly opening his eyes but not looking straight at any of them. Aeryn and D’Argo both tense as soon as the words are out of his mouth, scanning their surroundings, their hands hovering over their weapons.
“It’s okay—he’s...,” John continues, starting to sit up, swallowing hard, trying to order his thoughts somehow. “He’s dead.”
Aeryn grabs his arm to help him up. “You killed a Scarran,” she says, disbelief clear in her voice.
When John tries to think of what happened, his vision fades for a moment and he feels the overwhelming heat all over again, sees the disco ball turning and turning, its small dots of light falling on everything around him. Aeryn grasps his arm tighter when he sways, keeping him steady, anchoring him.
When he does not reply, D’Argo says, “We better take him back to the transport pod.”
They make their way to Moya’s transport pod, D’Argo telling Pilot and Chiana through the comms that they are on their way, while Aeryn guides John through the throngs of people in this part of the market. A cold breeze picks up when they leave the stalls and reach the field where ships dock, and John shivers, the air reminding him how sweaty he still is. It’s not entirely unwelcome, though, the momentary cold making him feel more like himself by the microt.
Rygel and Chiana are waiting there for them in the pod, a sour look on both their faces. Chiana’s frown dies as soon as she sees John bracketed between D’Argo and Aeryn. Rygel is not swayed as easily, and as soon as they are within earshot he starts complaining about John’s lack of respect and what he thinks of human’s capabilities in general. Chiana shuts his mouth before he gets very far and she asks, “What happened? Is he okay?”
“We found him stumbling around,” D’Argo starts to explain as Aeryn guides John into sitting on one of the steps inside the pod. “He says there was a Scarran and his pulse pistol and comms are missing.”
John tries to gather himself for a moment, breathing deep and trying to concentrate, and then does a brief retelling—as much as he thinks he’s able at the moment, which isn’t much.
He was searching through the piles of scraps of one of the stalls, not long after separating from the rest and—the next thing he remembers is overwhelming heat, and then waking up on the floor somewhere else, feeling like absolute crap, a Scarran next to him talking to one of the machines. He tells them about overloading his pulse pistol and killing the bastard, gives them rough instructions on how to get there and promptly tunes out the ensuing conversation as Aeryn catches up Pilot and Zhaan on what’s going on.
John doesn’t tell them of the hallucinations—how real it felt or how close he felt to actually losing his mind or of how very tired he is of every critter in the universe using Earth to frell with his mind.
Chiana sits next to him, draping an arm around his shoulders and pressing her forehead against his shoulder. John lets out a shuddering breath, and then Chiana is dragging him until he’s lying down with his head on her lap. She runs gentle fingers through his hair, in a way John tries very hard not to compare to how his mother used to when he was sick as a child.
He hadn’t thought about it in years, and now the first mental image of his mother that comes up is of her looking sick and begging John for his help.
John turns onto his side trying to curl into himself and closes his eyes tightly. He tries to focus on the lull of Chiana’s voice telling him about what Rygel and her got up to, and on breathing in and out—as deep as he can make them—in through the nose, out through the mouth, in and out until the images start to fade away and the nausea recedes.
The last thing he remembers before drifting off is D’Argo and Aeryn leaving the transport to check out the place John was kept in.
When John wakes up he just hurts.
It’s the kind of pain that comes from sleeping all night in a bad posture—muscles stiff and screaming after having spent way too long tightened in a way they are not supposed to—but instead of just his neck or back, it’s all over his body.
He doesn’t remember how he got to his quarters and the lack of memory sends a spike of panic through him that wakes him up thoroughly. Then he gets flashes of D’Argo carrying him through Moya and Zhaan giving him some sort of tea and carefully helping him drink it, and the panic recedes, his heartbeat returning slowly to its normal rhythm.
It takes him a couple of tries to get up from the bed, groaning and grunting every step of the way. He makes his way to the showers, and for the nth time in the last two cycles, he misses an honest-to-god shower—with hot water and enough pressure to undo the knots in his muscles.
When he finishes, he doesn’t exactly feel human again, but the generalized pain has subsided to a dull throb, and it’s enough to make him realize he’s actually hungry.
“Hey Pilot, how long was I out?”
His voice is hoarse from overuse, and for a hot second he remembers screaming—in a car going down the highway, tied to a chair, from the floor in a bar covered in moving spots of light.
“Commander Crichton! Moya and I are happy to see you awake. You’ve been asleep for almost 18 arns.”
“Are we still near the commerce planet?”
“No. We starburst as soon as Officer Sun and Ka D’Argo returned.”
He feels the relief down to his bones at Pilot’s words, even though he knows distance from the planet does not make them necessarily safer. “Thanks, Pilot.”
He hears their voices before he reaches the mess, and finds himself slowing down as he gets nearer.
“Scarran interrogation is famously hard to resist,” Aeryn is saying. “In the Peacekeepers everyone had heard the horror stories. It’s not something you just get out of.”
“Somehow he did, Aeryn,” D’Argo replies. “We saw the readings.”
It’s Chiana who catches his eye as he hovers near the doorway. “Hey, old man!”
“Hey, Chi,” he says, stepping in and ruffling the back of her hair softly before sitting next to her, his muscles complaining softly as he does.
“John, how are you feeling?” asks Zhaan, effortlessly calming in a way that makes him feel almost normal.
“Just peachy,” he says, and when Zhann gives him a chiding look that reminds him of Susan, he adds, “I’m sore all over—a shower helped though.” He squeezes her hand softly, a way of saying thanks without voicing it. “So did that tea you gave me.”
“I’m happy to hear that, John.”
D’Argo and Aeryn look almost tentative, and it feels so out of character for them that John can’t help but brace for all the questions that are sure to come.
It’s Aeryn who breaks the silence first.
“We found the room you told us about,” she begins. “The Scarran—he didn’t get the chance to send whatever he recorded and we destroyed everything that was left, but—it’s possible he informed his superiors from somewhere else when he captured you.”
John takes a deep breath, and pops into his mouth one of the crunchy-looking things in the plate closest to him. He tries to ignore the small tremor in his hand as he reaches for it, chews slowly, giving himself time to push down the terror that the idea of adding the space lizard version of the peacekeepers to the list of people after him.
D’Argo runs out of patience before John finishes chewing. “John? If they are looking for us we need to make adjustments before—”
“They wanted to know why Scorpius wants me so badly,” John says, cutting him off.
D’Argo growls at the same time Aeryn says angrily, “The Scarran in the Royal Planet.”
“Oh, lucky me,” John mutters.
Aeryn, Rygel and D’Argo start arguing about what it means for Moya and for the search for D'Argo's son. It does not take John long to tune them out, focusing on getting something in his stomach and trying to keep at bay the beginnings of what promises to be one hell of a headache.
John leaves the mess before they reach any decision.
He sees Zhaan giving him a worried look when he stands up, and he squeezes her shoulder softly as he leaves, trying to reassure her. Aeryn’s eyes follow him as he gets up, but she doesn’t move from her seat and her attention is pulled by Rygel’s arguing before John makes it out of the mess.
He wanders around Moya for a while, DRDs following at a distance.
He asks Pilot if there are any repairs that need to be done, and when there is nothing that takes him longer than five minutes to fix, he ends up in the maintenance bay where the Farscape module rests.
John tries to tinker with some of the latest modifications he had failed to get to work, but he keeps getting distracted. When he doesn’t get startled by the odd noise the DRDs nearby make, it’s by seeing things that are not there out of the corner of his eyes. His heart rate spikes every time, sending a rush of unnecessary adrenaline through his veins that won’t let him concentrate.
After an arn of the same, John gives up, feeling too hot and exhausted despite having been up only for a handful of hours, his head throbbing steadily right behind his eyes.
He makes his way back to his quarters with the intention of trying out the breathing exercises Zhaan had taught him and maybe having some of the leftover tea he saw on the table when he woke up. He takes the long way back, avoiding the rest of the crew and trying to go through the parts of Moya that he knows will be cooler—trying to fight the heat that little by little seems to have crept over him.
When he reaches his quarters, the first thing he sees is the chess match he had left unfinished before going down to the commerce planet, and suddenly he’s back in the bar, Scorpius right next to him, talking to him in an urgent tone while also playing the drums in the jazz band, and the heat is sticky and overpowering and his head is pounding in time with the drums and—
Aeryn’s voice comes from the corridor, cutting briefly through the noise in his head. “John? Pilot said you were here. You weren’t responding to comms...”
John tries to tune Scorpius out, presses his hands against his eyes, trying to get the images out of his head—hard enough to see white spots—but they are too much like the lights from the disco ball, covering everything and mesmerizing in a way that he’s not able to shake off no matter how hard he tries—
Aeryn finds him sitting on the floor, clutching his head and muttering to himself.
“John?”
When Aeryn’s voice cuts through the haze, the thought that this kind of thing is starting to become the norm crosses briefly his mind, and suddenly he is laughing, sharp and a little bit unhinged. He can feel tears escaping his eyes when he screws them shut again, trying to focus on Aeryn instead of Scorpius’ as he keeps talking over the bass rhythm that seems to have become the background music of choice in his brain.
He feels Aeryn’s moving his hands from his face, and then her cool hand is on his cheek, bringing him back to reality. “John—John, look at me. You are in Moya, you made it back.”
He forces himself to open his eyes, and when he sees Aeryn crouching in front of him, ponytail firmly in place and a worried look on her face, he shudders, the relief he feels is almost palpable. John leans into her hand, tangible and familiar and there, its coolness providing a momentary relief against the heat that seems to be everywhere.
“You are burning up,” Aeryn mutters to herself. “Pilot, could you lower the temperature in Crichton’s quarters, please?”
Pilot’s voice comes in just a moment later. “Yes, Officer Sun. Temperature lowered by 5 degrees.”
“Thank you, Pilot.”
Aeryn brings her other hand to the nape of his neck, and he sighs, tilting his head to give her better access. She stays crouched in front of him on the floor and does not say anything, her presence a calming anchor to reality.
They stay like that until Scorpius’ voice is but a tendril in the back of his mind, the pounding in his head has gone back to a throbbing and he is breathing a little bit more steadily. Aeryn helps him up from the floor and guides him towards the bed with gentle prompting. She leaves him laying down while she fetches a cup of Zhaan’s tea, helping him incorporate enough to drink it.
The lowered temperature is already noticeable in the chamber and after he shivers a couple of times, Aeryn pulls one of the sheets over him, tucking him in in a way that would make him smile and tease her under any other circumstances.
He still gives her a weak smile and before he can attempt to do anything else, Aeryn murmurs softly, “Not a word.”
Moya’s noises and the gentle cool breeze from the ventilation ducts lull him enough to calm any remaining noises in his head until only a dull headache remains. Aeryn sits next to him on the bed until he falls asleep, carding her fingers through his hair tentatively, keeping the voices at bay.
By the time he wakes up again, another day has gone by. His headache is completely gone, and only the odd muscle feels sore. The images from Earth that filled his head feel more like the lingering remnants of a nightmare rather than something inescapable and real, and the tight feeling of dread in his chest seems to ease a little with that distance.
John tells Aeryn a little bit about it when she asks—half-worried for him, half-curious about the reality of the horror tale she’s heard so much about all her life.
He tells her how at first he thought it was a more unhinged version of what the Ancients did to him, shoehorning everyone into Earth roles that made no sense instead of going for the real thing to shake things up. He explains how he tried to get out of it the same way he did with the Ancients—how it failed and things just seemed to become more and more bonkers from there.
John glosses over the worst parts.
He mentions how they used his parents and his friends, but he does not tell Aeryn about the cold hand that seemed to squeeze his heart and break it all over again when they used his mom when she was sick—how it still does whenever the mental image appears in his mind.
He doesn’t tell her that by the end of it, he was feeling desperate enough to think dying was the only way to make it stop.
When she asks him how he did it—how he managed to get out—John has no real answer to give her, just half-hearted hypotheses about biology, machine adjustments and the difference in heat resistance between humans and Sebaceans.
Aeryn seems skeptical, but she doesn’t push.
He tells Chiana the funny parts, and hearing her joyously laugh at the idea of Pilot playing the drums in a music group or Aeryn as a nurse makes it a little bit better.
Life goes on.
On the fifth day, he asks Pilot to return the temperature of his quarters to the usual values, and after a week, he stops drinking Zhaan’s tea before going to sleep.
John still sees things that aren’t there, dark shapes dressed in leather that seem to disappear around the corner as soon as he looks their way. It happens less and less, and even though it scares the shit out of him every time, it almost becomes part of his routine.
They do not go completely away though.
At first, he wonders if it may be an after-effect of whatever the Scarran did to him. He scours Moya’s databases for information about Scarran interrogation, reading every mention Pilot finds—from the Peacekeepers equivalent to scientific papers to the handful of existing interviews with survivors —, but at the end of the day, he does not learn anything more than what he already got from D’Argo and Aeryn.
Everything he finds points out to the impossibility of what he did, and then they run into the Nebari and their frelling mind-cleansing, and somehow John does it again.
There was a quote one of the guys in the initial stages of the Farscape One project team was way too fond of saying whenever a problem reappeared. He would say it out loud for everyone to hear, as if it were a warning despite the teasing tone he used, Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence... I sure don’t wanna reach three!.
None of the issues they had in the project reappeared for a third time, and so John never got around to hearing him say what happened when you reached three.
He did search for it much later—in those days before the launch where he had little else to do but wait for other people to do their jobs. “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” Once was the Scarran, twice the Nebari.
John cannot get the idea out of his head.
He mulls over it, going over everything that’s happened once and again, trying to think of any possible scenarios where John’s worst nightmare is not the one everything seems to be pointing to with giant neon signs.
He comes up empty.
The thoughts seem to go away easily enough after a while, only to come back with a vengeance whenever he catches a glimpse of a dark shape darting out of his peripheral vision, and with each one his underlying unease grows and grows.
He’s with Aeryn on a commerce planet when it happens again.
He sees Scorpius at the door of one of the stores, grinning and staring straight at him right before disappearing behind a group of passing soldiers.
Before John knows what he’s doing, he’s dragging Aeryn by the elbow towards the nearest alley, pulse pistol already in hand. Once they are safely hidden, he blurts everything at once, not taking his eyes from the store where he saw Scorpious, his heart pounding frantically in his chest: the continuous visions of Scorpius, how he must have done something to him back in the Aurora chair—how it’s the only thing that explains how he was able to get away from both the Scarran and the Nebari.
“He did something to me, Aeryn,” he insists, his voice cracking, desperation seeping through.
Aeryn looks at him with a mix of worry and pity. “They are just visions, John,” she tells him, holding his head in her hands, trying to get him to focus on her as if that will help him believe her. “After we’ve rescued D’Argo’s son, we’ll look for someone who can help.”
He is not sure how much she truly believes him or if she’s saying it just to placate him, but somehow it is enough for the unease to recede.
It does not take long for his heartbeat to slow down, a calming voice inside him telling him that Aeryn is right, they are just visions—probably from the accumulated stress of these past few months. They will look for someone to take a look if they aren’t.
He is safe now, the voice insists, he just needs to calm down and everything will be okay.
John holsters back the pulse pistol and takes a deep breath. “You are right,” he tells Aeryn, smiling ruefully—almost embarrassed by what was clearly an overreaction. Aeryn looks at him like she does not quite believe him, but she lets go of him.
He starts walking back out of the alley before she can say anything else. “Come on, we still need to find those transponders before D’Argo starts yelling at us to hurry up!”
Everything will be okay.