Chain of Evidence (G)

Originally posted 6/12/05

This is Kansas filler....well, Kansas-tag filler, anyway.

It's been kicking around in the back of my head -- and started on my hard drive -- for quite a while before it finally came together. I just wondered what was going through Jack Crichton's head while he waited on Moya for John to turn up....

Many thanks to imloco2, shipsister, ScaperRed, and MadScientist for betas on this one, and thanks to those on Kansas who put up with my "for a fic" questions! And thanks, as well, to KernilCrash and Kazbaby for screen caps of John's quarters! You guys rock!

Rating: G
Setting: Kansas tag
Spoilers: Through Kansas
Disclaimer: Not my characters, not my universe, but I love them to pieces, and absolutely no disrespect is intended!

Chain of Evidence

Jack Crichton's stomach had tied itself up in knots. This was not an exaggeration. He could definitely feel his insides curling around themselves, his stomach churning acid. When he was younger, he'd craved this feeling, the one that said he was going faster, going farther, going somewhere no one had ever been before, and there was just a chance he might not survive the experience. It made him feel more than just alive, and he'd sought it out, as a pilot, as an astronaut.... And those had been good times, exciting times, and he looked back on them with satisfaction. But age, and most especially, loss – first his wife, Leslie, and then his only son John – had taught him to despise what he called the rattlers.

He sat on the edge of the bed, feet firmly on the floor, hands clasped between his knees, fighting down the queasy feeling in his stomach.

These rattlers had nothing to do with the fact that he'd just had a ride on the Shuttle, long after he figured his flying days were over. Or, for that matter, the fact that he was in an honest-to-God alien spaceship with at least one honest-to-God alien aboard, though that was certainly a kick in the pants!

No, the rattlers were in his stomach because the bed he was sitting on, the room he was in, belonged to – assuming the alien woman with the mass of red curls was telling the truth – his son John.

John Robert Crichton, Jr., who had been lost in space and presumed dead four years ago.

Jack wasn't at all sure what to think.

They'd never found a trace of John's body after the Farscape disaster, not even a scrap of wreckage from his module, and for a while Jack had clung to the hope that his son might somehow be alive. That somehow Farscape 1 would come limping home, its pilot safe and sound. That hope had faded with time – after all, John had had only limited consumables with him – and Jack had at last accepted that he would never see the boy again.

And now here was this alien, offering him hope again, with a story about John somehow traveling through a wormhole in space, to emerge at the other end of the galaxy and be picked up by a passing spaceship. Part of him said it was insane; part of him wanted desperately to believe.

But, John was conveniently absent, if in fact he lived here at all. That was part of what was bothering him about all this...the idea that he was being played for a fool. That somehow these people – not that he'd seen more than the woman at this point, though she said there was a pilot on the ship as well – were using his dead son for reasons of their own. He couldn’t imagine what they thought they had to gain by lying about it but they were alien, not human, after all.

He didn't think he could take that, having his hopes raised in this fantastical way, and then having them dashed again, if it was all some kind of unfathomable hoax.

Still, the redhead – Sikozu something-or-other, her name was – undeniably spoke English fluently. She didn't even have an appreciable accent. She'd given everyone at IASA heart failure when she answered the hails of the previous Shuttle crew. And it was that fact, coupled with her claim that she had learned the language from a human named John Crichton, that had gotten Jack his ticket back into space. His orders were to ascertain whether or not his son was alive and part of this ship's crew. In this post-9/11 world, no one was taking anything on faith.

Sikozu had chosen to stay in the landing bay with the human engineers who were vetting what certainly appeared at first glance to be the Farscape 1 module. She'd sent Jack on to what she said were John's quarters, with three or four little yellow robots as guides – and no doubt, he assumed, also tattle-tales, if he went somewhere she didn't want him to go.

He'd only glanced around briefly when he'd entered the room, heading straight for the bed because his knees had gotten shaky when he reached the doorway. That's when the snakes in his gut had started rattling, maybe because he'd realized it was moment of truth time.

So, now, here he sat, eyes closed, attempting to pick up some vibes that might tell him John truly lived here without actually searching the room. It wasn't working very well, not that he'd really expected it to, but he was reluctant to get on with what his gut considered "snooping."

Seriously, though, he wondered if there would be anything he could recognize as John's. The boy hadn’t had much with him when he went into space four years before, just basic survival gear. Surely his possessions would all be new, acquired in deepest, darkest outer space?

Well, he wouldn't know that till he actually took a look, would he? Time to pay for your flight, Jack, he told himself, shaking his head.

He opened his eyes and took a deep breath and looked around the room. It didn't seem to have much of a stamp of personality on it, which made him wonder if his little robot pals had brought him to the right place. Only one way to find out, he reminded himself.

He stood up in place beside the bed and dusted his hands against each other.

The room looked much the same as the rest of the ship. There were no square corners; the ceiling and all the walls were curved and ribbed. The floor was flat and smooth, though, for which Jack was grateful, and everything had that metallic color scheme, mostly gold and bronze, with overtones of silver and copper. Built-in shelves followed the curve of one long section of wall, three shelves high. It was mostly empty except for the top surface, which was cluttered with things Jack couldn't immediately identify. There were a couple of items in primary colors, red and yellow, that stood out from the rest just because they looked so different. Hell, even the bedspread he'd been sitting on was gold! Continuing the basic inventory, Jack noted a free-standing shelf that looked as if it would be right at home in his garage back in Florida, and something that probably functioned as a desk. It was oddly shaped, but there was a matching stool to sit on, and a table that would serve as a surface to work, write or perhaps even eat upon.

Nothing leaped out at him and said, "I belong to John Crichton," so Jack took a deep breath and headed over to what looked so much like the metal utility shelves he had at home. There were four struts supporting the shelves, and it looked like the position of the shelves might be adjustable. He ran his fingers down the nearest post, a little surprised that the surface didn't quite feel like smooth, painted metal. But, of course, he wasn't supposed to be checking out alien construction, he was looking for evidence of John, and he forced himself to really start searching.

The stuff on the metal shelves looked just about as mysterious as the things he could have found in his garage at home, especially when he was a kid. Mechanical parts...wire, connectors.... They could have been parts left over from rebuilding an engine or repairing a vacuum cleaner -- stuff you didn't do any more because nothing was repairable at home, but that John's grandfather had loved to do. The boy had never seemed to be that much of a tinkerer, he'd always been more interested in the why than the how, but maybe that was what he was doing here, too...trying to understand how six impossible things worked....

Jack wondered for the first time what it would be like to find yourself in a whole new world, where nothing was familiar. On the one hand, the new would be exciting, incredible to explore. That was a feeling he himself had been suppressing since he'd arrived here because he was so tied up in knots over the possibility of John being alive. On the other hand, surely you'd come to miss the familiar. Maybe that was what John was doing here – making things that they didn't have in outer space.

Oh, for Pete's sake! he snapped at himself. Don't assume anything! Except for that girl's English, and what looks like the Farscape module in the hanger, you don't have any real evidence at all that John is or was here! They could have found the module empty, or with the pilot dead, and maybe Sikozu had learned English from radio broadcasts traveling through space! It didn't prove anything.

He shook his head in irritation and moved on. The desk was empty, except for a small pyramid with some embossed symbols on it, definitely not anything John would have brought with him from Earth, though one of them looked vaguely Egyptian.

The built-in shelves gave him more to look at, though he was still hesitant to touch anything. There were items whose function seemed obvious – a pitcher, some closed containers that might have held liquid or snacks, cups – all neatly collected together in one spot. The red and yellow containers he'd noted earlier were grouped with these, though everything else looked metallic. There were a couple of small trays and a box that looked like they would hold small items, like you might use to throw your car keys and change in back home. But, once again, none of it would have been in John's survival kit four years ago, and there was no way he could connect any of it to his son.

Before he got to the far end of the top shelf, he noticed that one of the lower shelves in the middle of the long row held what looked like several stacks of neatly folded clothing. That made him realize he hadn't seen anything like a closet or a dresser in the room. Remembering that old saw, "The clothes make the man," Jack stepped forward and crouched down in front of the shelf to take a closer look.

What he saw didn't much make him think of John, though. So much black – even the socks and underwear! He leafed through the stacked garments gingerly and saw that there was a whole pile of black T-shirts, and a couple of pairs of black leather pants.

Well, he thought, just a little disappointed, that was not a look he'd expect to see on John. The boy had loved his jeans and flannel shirts, anything homey. Anything to be comfortable, and black leather did not strike Jack as comfortable.

Just remember, if he's not dead, he's been a long ways from the nearest Wal-Mart, Jack scolded himself. Keep an open mind.

Feeling slightly uneasy about prying into someone's property, whether it was John's or not, he pulled a shirt off the top of the pile to check the size. There were no tags, of course. He shook the shirt out and held it by the shoulders at arms' length. All he could say was that it seemed to be roughly in John's size range, the last time he’d seen John, anyway. It wasn't huge, it wasn't tiny....

He sighed and folded the shirt back up carefully and replaced it on top of the stack. He took a moment to straighten the clothing neatly, and in the process, bumped the pile of pants. His heart nearly stopped when he got a glimpse of orange hidden beneath the leather – an orange that absolutely echoed the shade of the flight suit he himself was wearing right this minute. It couldn’t be, could it? Heart pounding, he took the pants off the shelf and set them down on the floor, then removed the orange fabric.

It was exactly what his heart had hoped – An IASA flight suit, carefully folded. He let out a huge sigh at this first sight of something he recognized in this alien room. He rubbed the fabric between his thumb and first finger, recognizing the weave, though it felt thinner than the suit he was wearing. It was just a bit lighter in color than his, too, probably, he guessed, as the result of many launderings. He stood up then, holding the suit out in front of him, examining the mission patches, the zippers and pockets...and finally allowing himself to look inside the collar for the pilot’s name stenciled there.

There it was.

J. CRICHTON.

Right there in crisp, black block letters.

J. CRICHTON.

His knees wanted to go all shaky again, but Jack refused to let them. What else was it going to say? he told himself, clinging to his caution. Who else could it have belonged to? It's not like there were any other missing astronauts who might have left an IASA flight suit behind.... It didn't prove John was here now, only that he had been here, alive or dead.

Still.... Damn! This flight suit was the very last thing he'd seen his son wearing, four years ago as he boarded the Shuttle for that doomed flight.

Jack took a deep breath, and then, curious more than anything else, he bent down and smelled the suit. Odd. He didn't expect to identify a scent that was John – or even human. After all, the clothing was obviously clean. But he frowned at the scent on the clothes, an odd mix of, oh, the smell of damp air, just at the start of a thunderstorm, with a hint of something like cinnamon.

Well, old fool, he told himself, what did you expect? Tide? Downy? Who knew what kind of cleaners they had in this place....

He shook his head, because that thought was one step closer to believing. John's ship was here, his flight suit was here, and that suit had obviously been worn and cleaned many times before being relegated to the bottom of the clothes heap. If not by John, then by whom? his mind whispered.

This was a fool's errand, he told himself, the flight suit still clutched in his hands. His heart wanted to believe. So did his head, at this point. He wanted to believe that John had definitely been here, that John lived here. But unless and until his son walked through that door, there was absolutely no way he was going to be able to definitively tell IASA that the alien redhead was telling the truth about John's connection with this strange ship.

He'd just have to play this out, so he could honestly say he'd gotten all the facts he could and let the folks back on Earth decide what to make of them.

Feeling more relaxed than he had at any time since the arrival of this ship in Earth's skies, Jack folded the flight suit back up. He carefully replaced it where he'd found it, hidden beneath two pairs of someone's leather pants (John's?), and stood up, once again surveying the top shelf, trying to make faster work of it so he could get back to the hanger and the rest of his team. It was beginning to get creepy, bein' off here on his own....

Good God, was that a chess set?

He examined the board, growing less squeamish about looking at someone else's things. The board wasn't flat like you’d expect, it had a stepped surface, up to a couple inches high on the two opposing ends, but it was handmade, and divided into the right number of squares for the game, though of course, that could be pure coincidence. It was the forest of plastic and metal pieces occupying the squares that convinced him, though.... They corresponded perfectly with the pieces required for chess – kings, queens, knights, bishops, rooks, pawns – and not just in type, but in number. The shapes were reminiscent of the traditional ones, too.

Heart pounding again, he flashed on an image of John, maybe ten years old, playing chess with his Grandpa McDougal, brow furrowed in concentration. The boy had loved chess as much as he’d loved tossing a football around, and was just as triumphant when he won at either game.

This couldn’t be coincidence. It was chess, a human game. This was exactly the kind of thing John would make for himself, if he had time on his hands….

Jack picked up one of the pieces and wrapped his fingers around it. It felt solid in his hand, all hard edges and curves, and it felt cold. He closed his eyes, daring the piece to speak to him, tell him it was John's handiwork.

Of course, it didn't. Chess pieces don't speak, even in outer space.

And that niggling voice of reason piped up from the back of his mind, reminding him that even though he was beginning to believe that this was John's room, that these were John's things, it didn't have to be so. If you're willing to entertain the notion that the redhead learned her English from broadcasts from Earth, you have to concede that someone might have seen the damn game on a television broadcast, too....

Yes, he agreed with himself, it was unlikely. Hell, it was very unlikely. But it might have happened that way.

"But John did make it," he muttered defiantly, and then took a deep, cleansing breath. "I'm sure of it, even if I can't prove it...."

And then something else caught his attention, something else that looked familiar in this alien place. He put the chess piece down and walked over closer to be sure.... Yep. It was a beige IASA tote bag, complete with Farscape patches, sitting on the top of the shelf, leaning against the wall. After the flight suit, it didn’t give him as much of an emotional jolt as he would have expected, but it was one more solid link with John. It had to have been John's, no question about it, for the same reason the flight suit did: No other IASA tote bag had gone into space, and not come back with its owner.

Jack looked at the duffle more closely. Like the flight suit, it showed signs of use. Just so he could say he had, he unzipped it and looked inside. It was empty, presumably placed on the shelf for storage, between uses.

It made him wonder just where John had been since this ship arrived in Earth orbit a couple weeks ago – and what he was carrying his gear in right now.

Ah, hell.

You are an idiot, Jack Crichton, he told himself. You weren't supposed to get your hopes up! It's all circumstantial, you have nothing here that says John got here alive.

"Screw caution," he said aloud. "I've got a lot more than I had before!"

Determined now to finish up and get back to compose a report, he skimmed along the rest of the shelf, mostly covered with the same sort of unidentifiable odds and ends he'd been looking at since he got here. But near the end, was a leather-bound book. He picked it up, idly curious if he would be able to read whatever was printed there. He opened the book to a page at random – and the rattlers were back in force!

His stomach twisted up in knots again, as he looked at the hand-written pages. It looked like a diary, or a journal, or maybe a scientist's lab notebook – and the handwriting was unquestionably John's!

Book still in hand, he backed up until he reached the bed again, and dropped back down onto it, sparing his weakening knees. He opened the book again, this time choosing a page at random to look at closely. This page didn't have much on it, but he recognized it quickly enough as a crudely drawn star chart. There was a large star in the center, unlabeled, but the dozen or so smaller stars scattered around it in an unfamiliar pattern were dubbed, in John's neat handwriting, Annapolis, Canaveral, Houston, Edwards, Sawyer's Mill and more – every last one of them a place that had loomed large in the family history while John was growing up! Places they'd lived, places they'd vacationed, places where Dad had spent way too much time without them....

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.... Wait till he told the girls!

Shaking just a little, he flipped through the book a bit more, feeling more than ever like he shouldn't be invading John's privacy, but thrilled to be holding something that John had held, had written in. His heart ached not to be holding his son right this minute, but....

John is alive! Goddamn!

He was turning the book over in his hands, probably grinning like a fool, when he heard footsteps approaching and composed his face. The redheaded alien woman came into the room, causing some excited whirring among several of his robot friends, or tattletales, as the case might be.

"Well," she said, looming above him, "are you satisfied?"

His caution reasserted itself, and he said vaguely, "I couldn't prove it in a court of law...." He stood up and looked her over.

Sikozu pursed her mouth in obvious irritation. "This is your son's quarters. Look around. Surely there are things here that you recognize as his."

Jack shrugged. He wasn't prepared to tell her what he had, but he ticked it off in his mind: John's ship, his flight suit, and duffle. The chess set. And the clincher, John's handwriting in the notebook in his hands. He was absolutely certain that John had been here. Even the security-conscious US government would believe in the handwriting.... God! He savored that amazing reality for a moment before moving on to practical things. When John had left this ship, and why he wasn't back yet when the ship had been here at his home planet for weeks, Jack had no clue. Watching her watch him, he realized that Sikozu was nervous. "When is John coming back, if I may ask?"

"I'm not sure," she admitted, reluctantly, as if that fact annoyed her. "He should have been here at the same time Moya arrived. We followed his instructions to get here." Undoubtedly seeing the skepticism on Jack's face, she added earnestly, "I do have a lock on the signal from the ship he is in. It is coming this way, though it is impossible to tell its speed."

Jack frowned, but at that moment, another of the little robots with the waving eye stalks entered the room, drawing his attention. Instead of the ubiquitous yellow, this one was painted in swaths of red, white and blue, with something written on it in black letters.

Before Jack could move closer to take a look at the lettering, the robot zoomed into the room and began chittering at them. Jack had no idea what it wanted, but he was able to read what had been written on the side in black paint: 1812. What did that mean? Was it a name, like R2-D2? He'd be willing to bet real money that was John's work, too.

Sikozu obviously found the creature annoying. "It's all right," she snapped in response to its tirade. "This is Crichton's father. Crichton wouldn't mind him being in here!" When the robot began to ram their feet like a sheepdog trying to herd its flock, she shook her head and started for the door. She turned to make sure Jack was following, and said irritably, "Your son is entirely responsible for this DRD's erratic behavior!" She turned again and stomped off

It was all Jack could do not to laugh out loud in relief and happiness. John lived here, all right. He couldn't prove it, but he was absolutely certain of it now. John had a little robot buddy who was looking out for him, and Sikozu's attitude told him she definitely knew the boy. She wasn't faking that irritation....but she was also concerned about him getting back in one piece.

John lived on this crazy ship.

Jack grinned and scooted along before 1812 decided to use a cattle prod on him.

Come on home, boy, he sent silently out into space. We're waiting for you!