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i. Aeryn
"what it is to need someone" (green-eyed monster)
She has phantom dreams for a week, two after she takes out the implant. Residuals. Of Talyn, of being Talyn; it never seems strange to be moving through space unfettered, and space is so much more alive than she thought. Well—she was raised in space, so rationally she knows about radiation, solar winds, quantum strings. But she didn't know. It's not a dead thing at all. All that energy on her hull, and it doesn't seem anything like a vacuum now, when she's sleeping.
Flashes of Crais: looking at himself in the mirror, welts red across his chest; looking at her. She shies away, but the emotion hovers, dovetails into a rush of childlike feeling at the thought of Crais, happy solitude, an easy give and take. Mine. Awake it's strange to look at him, feeling the ghost emotion of the ship that's holding them, a bond she doesn't belong to.
When she wakes, John's hand is on her thigh, loose with sleep, and for a microt she thinks she's still dreaming.
If she turns on her back in his bunk, she can tilt her head back so the window fills her vision, all that space. Until it's all she can see, blackness and distance, the stars swimming by.
ii. Harvey
Can Harvey know he's been doubled? He's a copy anyway, a copy of a copy, Scorpius shaved and grafted and still around by way of neural bleed. Who knows what the boogey man thinks about when he sits up late at night and watches dreams flicker by on the walls of John's mind? Or John's?
In the barcalounger of the subconscious, when it's so dark he can creep out from the dumpster, does it echo back to him from somewhere maybe light years off? Doubled dreams, merging and diverging, the same childhood carpets, the same terran sunshine, different starship hallways, mother and child, warship reds or Leviathan brown. Aeryn had or Aeryn wanted.
It's not like Harvey would care to talk to himself, himselves. He has John for that, and Scorpius, but he's much less certain how he feels about the latter these days. (Abandonment issues? smirks one of John's old girlfriends.) But more than one John Crichton in the galaxy? Harvey plays tennis in his sleep, mixed doubles, and the other side of the net is always hazy. Shadowy figures running and returning the ball with a satisfying thwack. John's dreaming again. He's not sure the galaxy can take that.
iii. Stark
"Yes, I'm an expert on dying. I'm just not an expert on you dying." (suns & lovers)
He lies awake for two hours or three after the rest of the ship (whichever ship) has gone quiet and dark for the sleep cycle, thinking of Zhaan, eyes closed, mind focused. He pushes aside the whispering of all the others, a million dying souls slipped through him like a sieve, to find her. The essence of it is fading already, but he coaxes his memory like a guttering flame: her face, her hands, her sweet, wise soul, willing her to come near him in his sleep. Even a shadow image, his own creation would be better than nothing, the day after day after day with her gone, with him alone. He falls asleep clutching his hope to his chest, hands tight, frowning, wanting. It never works.
iv. Scorpius
He's given the chip over to the most careful of researchers, to download and dissect, but Scorpius has always been a connoisseur of backup plans, multiplying his options. At night he plugs in and sets his subconscious to work – it's his own mind, after all, that was inside John, working away to ferret out his secrets, and who better to interpret himself than himself?
Asleep, though, he can't have the control, the logical precision he's cultivated so carefully. Everything comes in a rush, and he can't grab it and turn it and look at it the way he wants to.
Wormholes and John Crichton. Wormholes and John Crichton's face, the blue of wormholes when he turns around, and it's always just out of reach, he's always losing it, and John Crichton is always too close and too angry. In here he's almost as real as Scorpius is.
"Not too much fun, is it?" dream-Crichton says. "Say hello to Harvey for me."
It's mirrors facing mirrors, wormholes spiraling away, and the war is coming if he can't get what he needs. Patience, he tells himself every time he wakes up. He lies still to sort through everything he's seen, determine if there are any clues that point toward the weapon. If those extra moments help him settle back into place what's real and what isn't, that's only a fortunate side effect.
v. John
Aeryn, always, and every single time he wakes up alone.