And the Hero Will Drown (Lost in Space Remix) [Farscape, Jack Crichton, G]
Title: And the Hero Will Drown (Lost in Space Remix)
Author: simplystars
Fandom: Farscape
Rating: G
Spoilers: only for episode 1.01, Premiere
Summary: The stars look very different today.
Warnings: none
Title, Author and URL of original story: Drifting by keerawa
Notes: Many thanks to kernezelda for beta; you can blame her for the Bowie, too. *g*
And the Hero Will Drown (Lost in Space Remix)
For days, weeks, months - years - after his only son disappeared in the blinding blue bang-flash of an unforeseen space anomaly (some kind of wave, some kind of electromagnetic wave), Jack Crichton watched the skies.
He flatly refused to allow IASA to hold a memorial service for John; he stopped speaking to Susan for nearly a month, afterwards, for even suggesting it. He couldn’t bear to have his son’s name and face splashed across newspaper headlines and magazine spreads, his life reduced to a heroic footnote in a history textbook or an 8x10 glossy gracing IASA’s hall of other intrepid, doomed explorers - a space oddity.
And… Jack hadn’t been able to get that one song out of his head, a remake of David Bowie that John had listened to incessantly in high school:
Far beneath the ship, the world is mourning.
They don’t realize - he’s alive.
His son is not dead.
So Jack walks out into his backyard every clear night and gazes at the stars for hours. If Bobby is over visiting, it gives him an excuse to drag out and set up the telescope, ignoring the pity in Susan’s eyes; under the guise of teaching his grandson (so like John at that age, wide-eyed with wonder and enthusiasm, that same insatiable curiosity that demanded why and how and tell me, show me) he continues the search for his missing boy. Missing, not dead, because there had been no evidence of wreckage, no discernible field of debris, no cracked fragments of heat tiles or sheared bolts or cloth fibers (no bone, no shreds of pressure suit or melted slag that had once been a flight helmet) or even the smallest bits of the Farscape One. Jack didn’t care what the guys in the button-down collars said; nothing could just vanish without a trace. The module hadn’t broken up, hadn’t exploded, so it hadn’t been pilot error or mechanical failure, either, because something would have survived, plummeting to the ground in a tragic, fiery trail or left scattered and drifting in orbit, waiting to be collected and analyzed. But even IASA’s best and brightest eggheads couldn’t analyze what couldn’t be found, could they?
John wasn’t dead. Jack would know. He would have felt it - surely a father would have an inkling, down deep in his bones, if his child was lost forever… or if he’d been swamped by an invisible (electromagnetic) wave that rose from the abyss of space like some unholy Leviathan from the darkest fathoms of the sea, closing over his son’s head in devastating, deadly silence.
- in space no one can hear you scream -
Jack had shouted for John to abort, abort! again and again, but he’d been otherwise powerless to intervene, to snatch his boy back from the edge. He could only stand frozen, with fists clenched and heart pounding, and listen to the static cutting in and out, garbling his son’s last transmissions. (It gave him no comfort, afterward, that here hadn’t been any fear in John’s voice, no anguish or dread in those few final words, just chopped-up sentences and then sudden, deafening silence.)
Thank God that Leslie hadn’t been alive to see her son swallowed up by the gaping black maw of an uncaring universe. She’d loved all three of her children, but John had been her favorite; they shared an unshakable devotion that Jack had sometimes envied, and an easy communication that made the uneasy distance between father and son even more fraught with tension as the cancer, with grim, agonizing slowness, stole away the one they loved most.
Leslie would never have given up on John, so Jack will maintain the vigil for both of them.
He’d been so proud, that fateful day, all puffed up with it; he’d said as much on the long walk over to the launch pad, trying hard to be there for his son, supportive and reassuring - but had John really known?
Didn't matter how many times I went up, every time: rattlers. First EVA, first time I walked on the moon...
I'm not going EVA, Dad. I'm not walkin' on the moon. I'm just runnin' a little experiment.
Yeah, an experiment to prove your own theory. Do you have any idea how proud that makes me?
John never said one way or the other, never responded to Jack’s overture; he’d looked away, looked down, and then there was no more time - the mission awaited. But at that moment, Jack thought he sensed what he’d been hoping for, a tentative reach beyond the polite detachment that had built up between them since Leslie’s death.
So he waits (for news that never comes) and wonders (where the hell are you, son; are you all right; are you ever coming home), even as he eats and sleeps and works and continues living his life. But the passage of time doesn’t heal the wounds of his loss, only dulls the initial knife-sharp pain to a strangely companionable ache, like a low background hum. A subtle but ever-present reminder of what was lost; the precious, vital parts of himself that were stolen away. So night after night Jack stares up at the moon and beyond, keeping watch as Venus and Mars twinkle on the horizon, and the Earth turns, and the night turns to day once again.
The moon remains every bit as lovely, all pale grays and shadows, and just as mysterious as when he set foot upon her, left impressions of his boots behind as proof: Jack Crichton was here. He’d followed in the footsteps of other American heroes, laid down a path for his own son to tread in his wake.
But John’s thirst had been for knowledge, his quest to blaze a trail into the wild, observing and recording and learning. Not quite his father’s son, in that; John hadn’t been the eye of a hurricane of patriotic propaganda designed to bolster waning American confidence in the space race - one small step for man, one giant leap for a superpower’s ego. They’d pinned medals on Jack, sat him between two beauty queens in the back of a Cadillac convertible for the ticker-tape parade, praised him for a job well done and elevated him from Jack Crichton, Everyman, to a hero’s pedestal with boys just like John worshipping at his feet, stars in their own eyes.
Jack rarely thinks of those times, now. Instead he remembers the stilted conversation, can effortlessly call to mind the last words he shared with his son before John had slipped away into nothingness, as if he’d never been born...
Son, I can't help being who I am. Who I was.
It's not who you are, Dad. I love who you are. It's being son of who you are. Look, I... I can't be your kind of hero.
No, you can't be. But each man gets a chance to be his own kind of hero. Your time will come, and when it does, watch out... chances are it'll be the last thing you ever expected.
What sort of legacy had he unwittingly left his son? What pearls of wisdom, what gestures of fatherly affection and pride that John could keep, maybe even cherish?
Platitudes about heroism, and the tenuous lucky charm of a silver puzzle ring.
Screw being a hero - Jack Crichton just wants his son back.
Author: simplystars
Fandom: Farscape
Rating: G
Spoilers: only for episode 1.01, Premiere
Summary: The stars look very different today.
Warnings: none
Title, Author and URL of original story: Drifting by keerawa
Notes: Many thanks to kernezelda for beta; you can blame her for the Bowie, too. *g*
And the Hero Will Drown (Lost in Space Remix)
For days, weeks, months - years - after his only son disappeared in the blinding blue bang-flash of an unforeseen space anomaly (some kind of wave, some kind of electromagnetic wave), Jack Crichton watched the skies.
He flatly refused to allow IASA to hold a memorial service for John; he stopped speaking to Susan for nearly a month, afterwards, for even suggesting it. He couldn’t bear to have his son’s name and face splashed across newspaper headlines and magazine spreads, his life reduced to a heroic footnote in a history textbook or an 8x10 glossy gracing IASA’s hall of other intrepid, doomed explorers - a space oddity.
And… Jack hadn’t been able to get that one song out of his head, a remake of David Bowie that John had listened to incessantly in high school:
Far beneath the ship, the world is mourning.
They don’t realize - he’s alive.
His son is not dead.
So Jack walks out into his backyard every clear night and gazes at the stars for hours. If Bobby is over visiting, it gives him an excuse to drag out and set up the telescope, ignoring the pity in Susan’s eyes; under the guise of teaching his grandson (so like John at that age, wide-eyed with wonder and enthusiasm, that same insatiable curiosity that demanded why and how and tell me, show me) he continues the search for his missing boy. Missing, not dead, because there had been no evidence of wreckage, no discernible field of debris, no cracked fragments of heat tiles or sheared bolts or cloth fibers (no bone, no shreds of pressure suit or melted slag that had once been a flight helmet) or even the smallest bits of the Farscape One. Jack didn’t care what the guys in the button-down collars said; nothing could just vanish without a trace. The module hadn’t broken up, hadn’t exploded, so it hadn’t been pilot error or mechanical failure, either, because something would have survived, plummeting to the ground in a tragic, fiery trail or left scattered and drifting in orbit, waiting to be collected and analyzed. But even IASA’s best and brightest eggheads couldn’t analyze what couldn’t be found, could they?
John wasn’t dead. Jack would know. He would have felt it - surely a father would have an inkling, down deep in his bones, if his child was lost forever… or if he’d been swamped by an invisible (electromagnetic) wave that rose from the abyss of space like some unholy Leviathan from the darkest fathoms of the sea, closing over his son’s head in devastating, deadly silence.
- in space no one can hear you scream -
Jack had shouted for John to abort, abort! again and again, but he’d been otherwise powerless to intervene, to snatch his boy back from the edge. He could only stand frozen, with fists clenched and heart pounding, and listen to the static cutting in and out, garbling his son’s last transmissions. (It gave him no comfort, afterward, that here hadn’t been any fear in John’s voice, no anguish or dread in those few final words, just chopped-up sentences and then sudden, deafening silence.)
Thank God that Leslie hadn’t been alive to see her son swallowed up by the gaping black maw of an uncaring universe. She’d loved all three of her children, but John had been her favorite; they shared an unshakable devotion that Jack had sometimes envied, and an easy communication that made the uneasy distance between father and son even more fraught with tension as the cancer, with grim, agonizing slowness, stole away the one they loved most.
Leslie would never have given up on John, so Jack will maintain the vigil for both of them.
He’d been so proud, that fateful day, all puffed up with it; he’d said as much on the long walk over to the launch pad, trying hard to be there for his son, supportive and reassuring - but had John really known?
Didn't matter how many times I went up, every time: rattlers. First EVA, first time I walked on the moon...
I'm not going EVA, Dad. I'm not walkin' on the moon. I'm just runnin' a little experiment.
Yeah, an experiment to prove your own theory. Do you have any idea how proud that makes me?
John never said one way or the other, never responded to Jack’s overture; he’d looked away, looked down, and then there was no more time - the mission awaited. But at that moment, Jack thought he sensed what he’d been hoping for, a tentative reach beyond the polite detachment that had built up between them since Leslie’s death.
So he waits (for news that never comes) and wonders (where the hell are you, son; are you all right; are you ever coming home), even as he eats and sleeps and works and continues living his life. But the passage of time doesn’t heal the wounds of his loss, only dulls the initial knife-sharp pain to a strangely companionable ache, like a low background hum. A subtle but ever-present reminder of what was lost; the precious, vital parts of himself that were stolen away. So night after night Jack stares up at the moon and beyond, keeping watch as Venus and Mars twinkle on the horizon, and the Earth turns, and the night turns to day once again.
The moon remains every bit as lovely, all pale grays and shadows, and just as mysterious as when he set foot upon her, left impressions of his boots behind as proof: Jack Crichton was here. He’d followed in the footsteps of other American heroes, laid down a path for his own son to tread in his wake.
But John’s thirst had been for knowledge, his quest to blaze a trail into the wild, observing and recording and learning. Not quite his father’s son, in that; John hadn’t been the eye of a hurricane of patriotic propaganda designed to bolster waning American confidence in the space race - one small step for man, one giant leap for a superpower’s ego. They’d pinned medals on Jack, sat him between two beauty queens in the back of a Cadillac convertible for the ticker-tape parade, praised him for a job well done and elevated him from Jack Crichton, Everyman, to a hero’s pedestal with boys just like John worshipping at his feet, stars in their own eyes.
Jack rarely thinks of those times, now. Instead he remembers the stilted conversation, can effortlessly call to mind the last words he shared with his son before John had slipped away into nothingness, as if he’d never been born...
Son, I can't help being who I am. Who I was.
It's not who you are, Dad. I love who you are. It's being son of who you are. Look, I... I can't be your kind of hero.
No, you can't be. But each man gets a chance to be his own kind of hero. Your time will come, and when it does, watch out... chances are it'll be the last thing you ever expected.
What sort of legacy had he unwittingly left his son? What pearls of wisdom, what gestures of fatherly affection and pride that John could keep, maybe even cherish?
Platitudes about heroism, and the tenuous lucky charm of a silver puzzle ring.
Screw being a hero - Jack Crichton just wants his son back.