Knees to chest, back wedged firmly into the corner, John tapped his fingers on his knees and remembered. He'd come out of his memories earlier to find he'd been rocking back and forth, and that had bothered him. It had seemed wrong somehow. Crazy people rocked themselves and muttered -- like the perfect picture of mental health he shared the cell with. So sitting with his back right up against the wall, angles of the corner comfortingly close around him, had solved that problem. No more rocking. He wasn't crazy. /That guy over there is crazy./

The crazy guy was crouched, swaying on his heels, singsonging something about Scorpius and his pretty, pretty chair softly under his breath, his voice rising every so often into a cracked, whinnying laugh that made John's skin crawl.

/Not gonna get like that. No fucking way./

So he sat in his corner, fingers tapping convulsively on his knees, and he remembered. Not like the memories being dragged out of him like a tooth with pliers in that pretty, pretty chair -- these were memories that he chose, that he controlled.

He filled his mind with memories that were safe, that were far away from here, from Moya, anything that couldn't lead them back to the others. In some dim way, he thought that if he could build a wall of safe memories, they wouldn't be able to break through it to the bright, shiny treasures they wanted -- the knowledge he'd never even known he had. And besides, these memories that he called up and wallowed in, immersed himself in, were a haven from the here and now. From being fresh from the chair. /That pretty, pretty chair./

So he sat and remembered. He remembered the name of his third grade teacher. He tried to remember the scores of every football game he played his senior year in high school. Every title of every song on every Eagles album. His phone number and address from when they lived in Annapolis. The posters that had hung on the wall of his bedroom when he was thirteen. The names of every girl he'd ever kissed.

Elizabeth Warner, in sixth grade. She'd stuck her tongue in his mouth and he'd jumped back like he'd been shocked. The red headed girl at that frat party his soph year in college -- messy, beer-tinged kisses in a stairwell, and he'd gone outside and puked in the grass afterward. All the girls and names and faces in between, and after...not that many, actually. He had a bad habit of falling in love and thinking /forever/ when the girl he was with was thinking /right now/. Forever was something that he had been sure of so many times, and never found till he stopped looking.

The clean-scrubbed faces and the scent of perfumes and the feel of his hands reaching for bra clasps faded away, replaced by a recent, clearer memory -- brighter and more sharp-edged and sweeter than any of the others. In this memory, he was coming out of the shower, rubbing his hair dry, blinded momentarily by the towel, and he could feel strong hands settling on his waist, pushing him up against the wall. The towel was pulled away and D'Argo was kissing him, drinking deep of him, laughing softly against his lips at John's gasp of surprise.

Wrestling playfully, they had managed to stumble backward toward the bed, never breaking the kiss, hands all over each other. D'Argo's clothes had been dropped on the floor, and John remembered the deliciously cool, slick feeling of pressing himself against him, his own body still damp from the shower, the contrast of cool exposed skin and heated, needy flesh grinding together making him shiver, even if it was only remembered.

It was so good, to tangle arms and legs together, to know that his pleasure was his partner's, to be so familiar with every sweet spot and the sound of every gasp and moan that he could lose himself in it and just be in it, just be focused on that moment with no worries about the future or if he was loved back as much. He /knew/ he was loved, knew /he/ loved, and it was so goddamn /good/.

/Thank God the last time was like that/, John thought, and then shivered again. He didn't want it to have been the last time, he wanted to have years yet to fight and love and sleep curled up next to D'Argo. He remembered how, not too long ago, they had just stopped leaving each other's quarters before everyone else was up and about, stopped pretending to not be sleeping together. Nothing was discussed, just one night D'Argo had settled down next to him after love and stayed there, very solidly going to sleep as if there was nowhere else he belonged, as if there had never been so many times that one or the other had gotten up, accepting drowsy kisses from the other and then going to their own cell.

Back before that had been the night they hadn't made love at all, just lay next to each other and talked, and John had gone to sleep listening to that rich, deep voice next to his ear, the words telling him about some awful, funny family gathering when D'Argo was a young boy, but the sound of it saying that he was safe, that he was cared for, that this was /forever/.

John threw himself into the memories with desperate force, clinging to them, trying to make himself feel that safe again. The images flipped past like a deck of cards, shuffled in the hands of a magician, and John lowered his head to his knees, the tears on his face unnoticed in the pure and almost physical rush of his memory. He tried to believe that the cold walls pressing against his back were D'Argo's arms around him and that none of this was happening and that he would wake up soon and tell D'Argo what a fucked up dream he'd just had.

He went further and further into his mind, and by the time the door opened again, he was sitting against the wall, head down, smiling into the darkness behind his closed eyes and feeling almost safe. He didn't speak when they finally picked him up and carried him to the chair, because he'd found his way home, even if only inside his head, and whatever else happened, he'd at least been there for a little while, where it was safe. Where everything was all right.

/He/ was all right, right up until the moment they lowered him into the hair -- /that pretty, pretty chair/ -- and when he started to laugh, he could almost hear D'Argo laughing with him.

END Part One