Left Behind by SebacceanBabe is a slight AU of Farscape. Beginning at the end of “Eat Me”, when Crichton and Chiana are left behind on the dying Rohvu, forcing them to save the ship and try to find their own way in the Uncharted Territories.
The fic can be found here
and here.
Left Behind contains examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg: Rohvu’s Pilot has had all of his arms eaten by the Xarai, and needs Crichton and Chiana to operate the controls for him until they have regrown.
- Ascended Extra: Belima, one of the Xarai, becomes part of Crichton and Chiana’s new ‘crew’.
- Berserk Button: Chiana flies into a rage when Belima suggests that they eat D’Argo (or a duplicate of him, at any rate).
- Breaking the Fellowship:
- The fic opens with Crichton and Chiana being ‘left behind’ on Rohvu; Crichton at one point reflects that he’s grateful Chiana’s still around so he doesn’t have to completely start all over in terms of making friends and allies in the Uncharted Territories.
- Later on, Furlow, Tokar and Reyna leave Rohvu to pursue their own agendas, leaving Crichton and Chiana on Rohvu with just Belima and Pilot, although Tokar and Reyna express hope that they will meet again later.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: In the end, Furlow basically leaves Crichton to die in an open airlock after stealing some food and fuel from Rohvu when Crichton might have been willing to share some of the data with her if she asked him the right way.
- Clone Degradation: Crichton and Chiana are each shown speculating that they are the duplicates because Crichton’s pulse-rifle and D’Argo’s blade each develop faults, suggesting that they are imperfect copies of the originals, although since Crichton lost his weapon and found another it leaves it open if he is the original or a ‘twin’. Crichton also observes that Belima, the only surviving Xarai, doesn’t demonstrate any sign that she understand the others and concludes that the translator microbes didn’t survive the ‘twinning’ after a certain point, although he speculates that this is only because the original was killed and all subsequent Xarai became ‘imperfect’ copies of copies.
- Closest Thing We Got: When Crichton is trying to disable Rohvu’s control collar, Harvey has to concede that he only knows what the collar controls look like from reports and plans as Scorpius was never on a Leviathan to see what they looked like for himself.
- Convenient Replacement Character: Rohvu’s Pilot is less confident than Moya’s Pilot, but he’s close enough that Crichton and Chiana find it easy to bond with him.
- Driven to Suicide: After over two cycles with only Kaarvok and the Xarai for ‘company’, after an impulsive starburst leaves most of his crew complaining about being lost, Rohvu feels so disappointed with himself that he vents some of his internal fluids, basically the Leviathan equivalent of slitting his wrists. The crew have to install a control that will basically cut Rohvu off from his own systems until they’re sure he won’t do that again, as well as head to the Leviathan burial space to try and find new parts to help him recover.
- Easily Forgiven: To a point; Belima is left locked in a cell when she tried to attack Pilot because she was hungry and tried to attack Pilot, but after a few days she is released again as the others are satisfied that she now understands what she did was wrong and they can offer Belima other sources of food.
- Everyone Has Standards: When Furlow purposes taking resources from the Leviathan Graveyard to fix Rohvu, Chiana expresses distaste at the idea of stealing from the dying, the rest of the crew making it clear that they may take parts from the dead but they will ask permission to take anything from a still-living Leviathan.
- For Want Of A Nail: Could apply, if one assumes that the Crichton depicted here is just the second Crichton from the show who didn’t get to the escape pod in time before it left (although it is equally open that he is a third Crichton who either nobody knew about or didn’t exist in the show, as Circhton observes evidence that there were definitely three different Chianas and D’Argos on Rohvu when the show only depicted two).
- Gender Flip: Although Rohvu was referred to as ‘she’ in the series, here Rohvu is established to be male (although it may just be that everyone assumed Rohvu was female in canon and Kaarvok and Pilot didn’t bother correcting that because Kaarvok didn’t care and Pilot wasn’t in a fit state to do so).
- Ghost Ship: Rohvu is in such a twisted state that he doesn’t even notice when Crichton accidentally damages other parts of his interior as they try to find somewhere they can carry out repairs.
- A Good Way to Die: When Rohvu needs a transfusion, Rohvu’s Pilot is willing to risk trying to find another Leviathan when he learns that the first Leviathan he contacted is Kala, one of the first Leviathans, as he feels they don’t have the right to ask a Leviathan as respected as Kala to basically die for Rohvu. However, Kala’s Pilot assures him that Kala is so close to death anyway that it would actually ease their suffering to know they are helping another.
- Hero of Another Story: Crichton appears to be this to himself at one point, when he hears reports about how he’s in another part of the Uncharted Territories with Aeryn, Crais, Talyn, and a Banik and a Hynerian (which he concludes must be Stark and Rygel).
- I'm a Humanitarian: Belima has to be ‘taught’ to get over her attitude towards this, Crichton making it clear to her that D’Argo’s corpse isn’t food and the crew needing to take time to re-affirm that eating Pilot’s arms isn’t acceptable behaviour once they can provide her with alternative sources of food.
- Mythology Gag: While visiting the Leviathan Graveyard, Crichton ends up humming ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ just as he did when stuck there between Seasons Three and Four in canon.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
- A minor example, but early in their time on Rohvu, Crichton and Chiana each express private guilty relief at separate points that the Xarai have already eaten Pilot’s arms, as otherwise he would knock them away from his control console while he’s flailing around in a panic (By the time his arms have re-grown enough for that to be a risk, Pilot is sufficiently calm for them both to be sure he won’t do that).
- Later, Pilot muses that Kaarvok’s time in control has ‘encouraged’ Rohvu to a degree of independence, allowing him to rescue Crichton from being sucked into space on his own initiative after Furlow disabled some of Pilot’s controls to stop him preventing her own escape.
- Not Quite Dead: Crichton bases his initial attempts to save Rohvu on the hope that Rohvu’s Pilot is just stunned rather than dead.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Crichton confesses that he has no idea who Kaarvok was, save for the fact that he was dangerous enough that the Peacekeepers set aside an entire Leviathan just to transport him and it still wasn’t secure enough.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Chiana is disturbed when she hears that Crichton is willing to flush all of the Xarai into space, after he found them eating a copy of D’Argo.
- Put on the Bus: To be exact, the rest of Moya’s crew (and possibly their own clones/originals) get back on their usual bus and leave Crichton and Chiana (originals or more clones) behind on Rohvu.
- Riddle for the Ages: Crichton explicitly wonders why the Peacekeepers didn’t just kill Kaarvok in the first place rather than trying to take him to a prison.
- Rule of Three: At least suggested, as it would appear that there were three different versions of Crichton, D’Argo and Chiana created on Rohvu. Crichton knows for a fact that he saw Chiana on the transport pod back to Moya before she shows up behind him, and yet he found a dead version of her in a corridor during a search, he finds two different corpses of D’Argo while running through Rohvu, and is certain that he was only left behind because there was at least one version of him on the transport pod.
- Sequel Hook: As well as Tokar and Reyna expressing a hope that they will meet again in future, the fic ends with Crichton and Chiana speculating that they will look for Nerri and try and join the Nebari Resistance, since returning to Moya and Talyn would just feel awkward at best after knowing that their crewmates have kept on going with their duplicates.
- Ship Tease: At one point Crichton and Chiana kiss (although Crichton quickly stops it), and the fic ends with the two of them contemplating their next move together.
- Shout-Out: When meeting a trader at an outpost, the alien reminds Crichton of Beaker (The Muppets).
- Sole Survivor: Belima is the only survivor of Rohvu’s original crew (in as much as she can be said to still be herself after so long being ‘twinned’ by Kaarvok), and is also the only surviving Xarai.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Rohvu and his Pilot survive, and Belima, one of the Xarai, escapes being flushed out into space with the rest when she offers Crichton some help.
- Token Evil Teammate: Furlow is this to Rohvu’s initial ‘crew’, as she only joined to try and get access to Crichton’s wormhole knowledge.
- Translator Microbes: Crichton and Reyna each observe that Belima doesn’t seem to have any translator microbes (Crichton speculates that she ‘lost’ them after being copied so many times) and she clearly has to learn how to talk again from listening to the rest of Rohvu's crew. Considering that she has been talking to Crichton, Chiana and a group of Sebaceans since the other Xarai were killed, Crichton muses at one point that Belima may have formed a new mixed language he jokingly terms ‘Nebaceanish’.
- True Companions: Crichton is certain that he and Chiana have been twinned as that’s the only explanation he can think of for why nobody from Moya came back to rescue them from Rohvu.
- Wild Child: The neural degradation she has suffered from being ‘twinned’ has left Belima this at first. She needs several days of instruction at least before Crichton and Chiana trust her not to try to eat Pilot's arms, and it takes further time until she shows any sign of starting to remember her pre-Kaarvok life.
