Heaven's Gate (G/NC-17)

[KernilCrash]

Heaven’s Gate

A Sequel to ‘Cloths Of Heaven’ / Story line continued in Cholak's Demon[/u]'

Word 6.0 Printable Version


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First posted:  November 10, 2002

Rating: G.   Part 5 is rated NC-17.
Category:  Alternate Universe.
Disclaimer:  The characters and vision of Farscape belong to Henson, Co.  I’m only playing with them a little bit in order to keep us all amused. 
Time Frame/Spoilers:  This story takes place after ‘Dog With Two Bones’.
Beta-Reader:  Scrubschick.   

Note To The Reader:  Please keep in mind that both ‘Cloths Of Heaven’ and the first draft of this story were written before any of the Season 4 episodes had aired, thus earning it the AU classification.  This story has been very heavily edited since that time, but I tried to remain consistent with the storyline developed in ‘Cloths Of Heaven’, which means it runs contrary to what has occurred in Season 4.
 
This story got yanked out of cold storage because of a request/comment from Scrubschick, and the last section was added very recently.  So aside from taking the credit for beta-reading, she also has to take the blame this time … the ending is for her.

The angst is for gbbarb, the Queen of Angst. 

Hope you enjoy it.

* * * * *

Part 1

Aeryn Sun stepped through the hatch of the small craft carefully, never knowing quite where John would be lying each morning.  His nightly twists and turns tended to take him all over the cockpit floor, turning his neat pallet of blankets and cushioning into a rumpled nest by morning.  He had somehow gotten himself tucked underneath the consoles this time, still on the layer of spongy hydrocell baffling they taken out of the sound dampening layer of the aft bulkhead, but curled into a ball between the two piloting seats. 

She knelt down, about to tug at one ankle to wake him up, but paused for a moment to watch him sleep.  The again-brown hair was rumpled, standing up in odd tufts and spikes on one side of his head and matted flat on the other, clear evidence of which side he preferred sleeping on.  There was a new scar on his back, a silvery track that wandered from the top of his shoulder blade almost to his spine, then making a fast accurate strike under his arm to his ribs.  She wanted to touch it, to trace its path with her fingers in order to explore the damage that it must have inflicted on its host, but he frowned suddenly, one hand twitching lightly in response to whatever he was seeing in his mind, and she backed away instead.

“John,” she intoned quietly.  “Wake up.”  She stretched to the full length of her reach and tugged his ankle.  She’d tried jostling his shoulder the first morning, and he’d had her on the deck with his forearm across her windpipe before she even knew he had moved.  They’d hung in that position for almost five microts, frozen just short of disaster while he made the transition to full waking awareness and was able to take the weight off her throat.  Each wakening since then had been made at a judicious distance from him, giving him plenty of time to pass out of sleep before she moved closer. 

Aeryn tugged at his ankle a second time, and the coiled body unwound all at once, spinning around to face her and bolting upright at the same time. 

“Crap!”  Crichton clutched both hands to the top of his head where he’d just smashed it against the underside of the console, falling back onto the rumpled pile of blankets and makeshift mattress.  “Damn that hurt!”  He continued to hold his head in both hands, the lean muscles in his chest and stomach showing plainly as he stretched back into the scattered bedding, waiting for the pain to subside. 

“You need to sleep somewhere else, John.”  Aeryn waited until the clenched eyes relaxed a bit before broaching a subject he’d refused to discuss several times already.  “This isn’t working.”

“Aside from the occasional concussion it’s working fine,” he argued. 

“You’re exhausted, you’re starting to make mistakes with the computations, and if we run into trouble you’ll be useless.”  She continued to crouch near his feet.  “There’s enough room in …”

“No,” he said emphatically, cutting her off while continuing to rub his head.  “We’ve been through this already.  You get the bunk, I get the camping equipment.”  One hand struck out blindly, finding the bottom of the console, followed by the rest of him as he sat up more carefully and edged out from underneath the equipment.  “Excuse me,” he suggested, gesturing for her to move back to he could wriggle out from between the chairs.  He worked himself free, then stood up, wrapping one of the blankets around him although it wasn’t cold in the cockpit.  He pointed at the hatch to the living quarters, raising his eyebrows in an unspoken question. 

“I’m done.  Do you want me to get us underway while you’re getting dressed?” 

“Sure.  No reason to hang around here, might as well get moving.”  He dragged his bedding through the hatch, tossed it into the storage area at the rear of the craft, then stepped into the small living quarters and pulled the door closed behind him. 

Aeryn knew his routine.  He would take a shower before getting dressed, removing the overnight growth of beard while he was in there, ultimately using up almost the entire remaining supply of hot water now that she had indicated she was done.  The ship’s systems would separate out the contaminants, use a distillation unit to purify the water, and the entire supply would be available tomorrow so they could start the routine over. 

When he emerged they would eat their First Meal rations silently, take turns piloting the craft exchanging only the information necessary for navigation, eat their Midday and Last Meal rations silently, and at the end of the solar day they would find an empty piece of space or a planet to orbit while they slept … separately.  It had been like this for fourteen solar days, and would almost certainly continue like this for the next six, resolving nothing before they reached Moya. 

Something deep inside her took it as a given that if they reached Moya and put themselves back into the company of their friends in their current icy standoff, their relationship would never proceed beyond the current level of polite tolerance.  Aeryn listened to the water start to run, ignoring the pending nav computations, and ran the possibilities through her head again and again.  After his small breakdown the first day aboard the prototype ship, John had withdrawn back into the angry shell he’d built around himself, unwilling to discuss anything that had happened to him during the preceding cycle and a half, equally disinterested in her experiences.

There was something damaged inside him, a deep festering wound.  It had nothing to do with the new scars she’d seen, nothing to do with the lean, slim body without any residual body fat, nothing to do with the almost feverish intensity that resided within him, the intensity that burned away any surplus weight and left him exhausted every night.  It had something to do with the crazed light she sometimes caught in his eyes when he thought he had turned far enough away from her that she couldn’t see his face.  The damage was evident in the speed of his reactions that left her recently honed reflexes wanting for quickness, and in the way the pulse pistol seemed to fit into his hand like it was born there … like it fit into the hand of a Peacekeeper. 

And the damage had been there, raging, whenever she had sat to his left in the pilots’ seats with her knife handle showing at the top of her boot.  Three days earlier she had turned unexpectedly to find him staring at it, the glare of madness in his eyes that magically transported her back to the last days of the neurochip when no one had felt safe around John unless he was in chains.  That night after they had separated to go to sleep, she had moved stealthily to the back of the craft and had jettisoned the blade as a precaution.  He was too quick now, too strong, and she didn’t know if the mad light was directed at her, himself, or the knife. 

* * * * *

Crichton finished toweling his hair and sat on the edge of the single bunk to pull on his boots.  Aeryn was right about his level of fatigue and the mistakes he’d begun making with the navigation calculations, but he didn’t see any way out of his present predicament.  He’d heard the voice in his sleep for the first time in a long time the fourth night they’d been aboard the ship.  It was the voice that begged, the voice that pleaded through a blood-clogged throat for him not to do it, not to drive the knife deeper.  The nightmare that had haunted him for the best part of a cycle had returned uninvited, but instead of being a participant he was a spectator this time.  The events were the same, but his impotent role as bystander was new and left him more shaken than the dream ever had in the past.  And the dream returned night after night, leaving him panting and sweating in his tangle of blankets every time. 

He stands beside the pair, watching with fatalistic curiosity as the taller figure in black leather holds the young Peacekeeper up by the front of his uniform, turning his head to one side so he won’t have to look into the dying eyes.  Dispassionate curiosity is his only emotion as the taller of the two figures stands hunched slightly to one side, the stolen fuel cell tucked precariously inside his jacket, threatening to slide loose if he moves too far in any direction.  The dying young one reaches up with one fumbling hand and pulls at a sleeve, crying in fear as his training deserts him, too young and inexperienced in the cruelties of battle to hang on to his indoctrination, even though it has been instilled since his recruitment as a child.

“I’m sorry,” the tall one whispers, and pulls the knife out, blood washing over fist and hilt, the black jacket pulling tight around his upper arm as he tenses for the second drive into Sebacean flesh. 

“NO!!!” he screams at John Crichton, his nightmare distorted voice traveling in surreal slowness toward the pair as he bellows to himself not to destroy the part of him that counted most.  Crichton’s face is obscured by a shadow as he turns to look toward him, toward himself, so he can’t see the expression there, but the hand drives forward, completing the preordained stroke.  “NO!!!  Don’t do that, don’t do it.  Stop!”  He is over a cycle too late.  The blood flows, the face falls, the body sags.  Knees buckle under both men, one in death, the other in the death of his spirit.  “No,” he cries to the one that still lives.  “There had to be another way.”

Someone pins him to the cold ground, steel instead of gravel under his face and a knee is grinding into the small of his back.  “John!  Are you all right?” 

He’d awakened that first night face down on the deck with Aeryn kneeling on top of him, using her entire body weight to hold him down.  ‘Not really’, had been the answer that he hadn’t spoken out loud.  He would have preferred that the entire thing was a bad dream start to finish, a hallucinated vision that had never actually taken place.  “I’m fine,” he had mumbled into the deck finally.  “You can get off me now.” 

Aeryn had eased off him, taking her weight away from his shoulders and spine.  “You were yelling.  I couldn’t wake you up any other way.”  Her explanation had emerged in a rush on shaky pulses of air. 

“What time is it?”  He’d tried to divert the conversation away from the expected question about his dream. 

“We went to sleep a couple of arns ago.”  She had knelt next to him on the cold metal of the cockpit floor, waiting silently for some sort of explanation. 

He’d felt the vacuum around them that first night, waiting to suck the confessional description out of him to fill the empty space between their souls.  His sweat-soaked hair and damp shirt had cooled quickly in the mild chill of the cockpit, but his shiver had been a combination of lingering dread and the unwillingness to revisit that moment in his life by explaining it to Aeryn.  “We probably ought to try and get some more sleep.”  He had turned away from the explanation that night, ignoring his own screaming need to tell her what it had cost him to survive, and he’d felt no inclination to reverse that decision since then. 

Crichton looked at himself in the mirror, grimacing at his reflection as he arranged the short brown hair into some semblance of order with his fingers.  That had been ten nights ago, and he’d managed to emerge from the dream every night since then without waking Aeryn.  He’d never had to suffer through it so frequently though, not even right after it had happened.  John licked an index finger and carefully wiped away a small smear of blood from a shaving cut, then examined the rest of his reflection critically. 

He looked like hell.  Even he had to admit that he wasn’t getting enough sleep, and the mistakes he’d made in the navigational computations to extend his time with Aeryn were no longer intentional.  He’d made some deliberate errors once or twice during the first couple of days to give them more time together, gradually increasing the length of their trip by one solar day, but the mistake he’d made yesterday had been unintentional and had nearly put them into the clutches of a binary star.  And their time together was turning into a trial, not a pleasure. 

He considered cranking up the rhotarri engines and finishing the trip in a hurry.  The coordinates Aeryn had given him for Moya could be reached in a single jump without excessive risk.  He could drop Aeryn off at the leviathan, say hi-goodbye to whoever was on board, and the pain would be over.  The others had chosen to leave a cycle and a half ago, pursuing their own goals.  There was no call to misplaced loyalty, no allegiance to be fulfilled -- he could bid them another goodbye and go his own way without guilt.  He could even return to his plodding life with Gallenn where the mindless routine smothered the constant ache inside his chest that got worse every time he thought of Aeryn or his friends.  John stuck his tongue out at his reflection.  “Wimp.  Suck it up,” he told himself, took a deep breath and went to join Aeryn for another long day in the cockpit. 

* * * * *

Aeryn had forgotten just how frelling stubborn he could be when he was hurt or angry.  John was staring out the front view port, his gaze carefully trained away from her even after four arns.  She had remembered his sulks with painful accuracy, but had forgotten the depth of his obstinacy.  Or perhaps he had gotten worse, she conjectured, trying to match her memories against this silent, sullen person.  Another half day wasted, another half day closer to Moya and the promise of an unfulfilled relationship for the rest of their lives.  The frustration that had been building over the past fourteen solar days was reaching nearly uncontainable levels.  She’d made her decision that she wanted to be with John Crichton, hunted for him for almost a full cycle, found him, battled through his anger to get him to admit that he still wanted to be with her … and couldn’t complete the emotional obstacle course. 

They needed more time together, she decided.  John would break down eventually, as long as there weren’t other distractions to divert them away from a much needed confrontation.  Aeryn got out of her seat without a word, headed for the hatch leading to the back of the craft.

“They won’t come out,” John said, examining the displays in front of him with exaggerated interest. 

She stopped halfway through the hatch.  “What won’t come out of where?”   

“I fastened the power relays into place so you can’t pull them again.”  He was still staring at the console, unrelenting.  “I did it a few nights ago while you were asleep.” 

Aeryn kicked the bulkhead in frustration.  “John, talk to me.  We need to discuss this before we get back to Moya.” 

He shook his head.  “You were right a long time ago -- what we need is less talk and more space.” 

“Then this entire trip is a waste of time.  You could have gone back to your life as a tech and I could have found some other transportation back to Moya.  Coming with me only makes sense if you’re willing to listen.” 

John sighed and nodded.  “You’re right.” 

A vibration of excitement ran up Aeryn’s spine.  He was finally going to open up, she thought.  He was finally going to work with her to resolve the wounds they had inflicted on each other. 

“You’re absolutely right, this trip is a waste of time.”  He flipped a large power switch, and an odd itching sensation crawled over her body from bottom to top.  “Kind of unpleasant the first time, but you get used to it with a little practice,” he said over his shoulder.  John’s fingers rapped a fast dance across a panel he hadn’t used yet, figures flashing into life on a display to one side.  “Say ‘Hello, Moya’,” he sang out and slapped his hand down on a palm sized activation circuit, depressing it with a single violent motion. 

“No, DON’T!” she yelled, realizing that he was about to cut their trip short.  There was an ear-splitting whine from the rear of the ship, the noise climbing from nearly subliminal to deafening in less than a microt, then there was a quiet crack and the view of the stars changed abruptly.

   * * * * *

[KernilCrash]

Part 2   

“Frell you, Crichton!!” Aeryn raged.  The last of her hopes for some sort of reconciliation with him evaporated as the starfield stabilized outside the craft.  “That wasn’t what I meant.  All we need is some time and privacy.  We can work this out.” 

“Shit.”  John hissed the word, drawing it out into an extended whisper.  He shut down the engines with a series of fast, slapping impacts against the control surfaces, then banged his fist angrily against the plating of the console.  “Chill out, you just got your wish.” 

“What do you mean?”  She stepped closer, scanning the readouts next to his elbow with the ease born of a thousand such moments.  “This isn’t where Moya agreed to meet me,” she concluded. 

“No shit.”  John unlatched the swivel base of his seat and spun around to look up at her.  “We just hit one of those funky little bumps in the road I told you about.” 

“Bumps?”  She remembered his explanation as to why the rhotarri engines would never succeed commercially.  “Where did we wind up?  How far off course are we?” 

“Beats the hell out of me.  You figure it out.  I’m going to take a walk.”  An angry thrust of his arms propelled him out of the pilot’s seat, leaving the chair spinning lazily on its base as he ducked through the hatch and slammed it shut behind him.  Aeryn considered going after him to continue the aborted discussion, but their current situation was a result of John’s unwillingness to discuss anything with her and it looked as though badgering him would only do more harm.  She slid into the abandoned seat, and began scanning the readouts, trying to get a fix on their position. 

* * * * *

Crichton stood in a corner at the rear of the cargo area, staring blindly at the inner bulkhead.  He hadn’t intended to come back here -- it was unheated and the temperature was probably only a degree or two above freezing -- but it was where he had ended up when his feet had stopped moving.  Every muscle in his body was screaming at him to get out of the ship, to get away, to run, to escape from the relationship that promised him more emotional discomfort than he could afford.  Meanwhile, his heart was urging him to turn around and walk back into the cockpit to be with Aeryn.  His body had won the battle long enough to drive him back here, but he’d run out of space all too soon. 

His current situation was his own fault.  Aeryn’s gentle persistence, her trick to get him alone and her quiet vow that she still loved him had all combined to convince him that there was still such a thing as ‘hope’.  There had been something in the cockpit that first day that he’d mistaken as fate, so he’d lowered his guard and deliberately set out on this three-week cruise.  He hadn’t bargained on the fear that stole into him every time he looked at her.  The primeval part of him -- the caveman genes that knew about surviving long enough to evolve, the part that had taken precedence during the first half-cycle of his exile when he’d been struggling to survive -- dictated that he protect himself from her, and he couldn’t figure out how to override the instinct. 

The hatch at the front of the small cargo bay creaked open, letting out a soft metallic whine as it eased open slowly  “John,” she called hesitantly. 

Her voice could still generate chills up his spine, that much hadn’t changed.  There was a part of him that didn’t want to answer, begging for an immature silence, but there were only three sections to the ship and his location was pretty much a foregone conclusion.  “Back here,” he answered, moving out of his corner.  She stepped around the environmental units, moving carefully through the narrow alley between the floor to ceiling atmospheric scrubbers, and her appearance generated the visceral pang that clobbered him every time he saw her. 

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered past a sudden tightness in his throat.  She came to a stop, a smile appearing despite her obvious surprise.  John stepped to one side, maneuvering so that a storage bin stood between them, completing the transition before he could even consider what he was doing.  He leaned on it, striving to look like he was simply resting instead of taking up a defensive position.  “Did you figure out where we are?” 

“We’re on the far side of the Veldan System, a little less than twelve solar days from Moya, approaching from the opposite direction.”  She looked around the cargo bay, assessing their supplies.  “Do we have enough food and fuel for the extra six days?” 

“Food and fuel, yes.  We’re short on water.  We’ll have to settle for being filthy by the time we get to Moya.  I’ll reset the purification system to start taking drinking water out of the supply for the shower.”  John scrubbed at his hair and then shook his head.  “We’re exactly opposite Moya from where we were before, aren’t we?” 

“Yes, it’s almost a perfect reciprocal course.”  She stepped to one side so he could move past her, heading toward the tangle of machinery that took care of their environment. 

“You realize we may have theoretically passed right through Moya, don’t you?  We should have waved hello on the way through,” John suggested, and Aeryn gave him a small shove from behind, telling him she knew better than to believe it. 

He’d been working with Gallenn posing as the nondescript mechanic for nearly a cycle, shuffling about in dusty coveralls, watching the transient crews come and go from the spaceport with the care of a fugitive but without the nearly psychotic level of wariness that had controlled his life the first half-cycle he’d been on the run.  If someone had asked him, John would have said that his reflexes and his reactions had returned to normal, relaxing to merely paranoid instead of pathologically high-strung.  But Aeryn’s unexpected contact, thrusting him forward without warning, triggered a vicious physical reaction, rolling forward on an unpleasant wave of memories.    He swung around as his elbow came up to shoulder level, preparing to lash back at head height.  He saw her surprised look as he pivoted, and tried to stop, but the strike was already well on its way, flashing straight toward her face. 

   * * * * *

Aeryn smiled as she nudged John forward, pleased by a return of the senseless jokes that had flowed from him even during the worst of times.  She saw his rear foot plant, recognized the signs of an impending attack, and began a weight shift that would keep her clear even as she struggled with her disbelief.  John wouldn’t do that, he had never been that jumpy … he’d never been that quick.  The strike that was designed to maim slowed at the last microt, his eyes widening with shock as his turn put more force behind the intended impact even as he tried to stop it.  His hesitation gave her the extra time she needed to slide under the strike:  turning, sliding in close, pivot, grapple, wrap the arm, other arm reaching behind to upset his center of gravity. 

“Klyo-feltras.”  The name of the maneuver emerged in a grunt as she set her hip and knocked him off his feet.  The combat technique worked best on an opponent already in motion, and John’s greater height translated into leverage that she could use to her benefit.  It was designed to bring the opponent’s head to the ground first, using weight and acceleration to crush the back of the skull, and Aeryn found herself desperately trying to break the momentum even as John was headed for the metal deck plates.  “Hang on to me!” she yelled as they went down together, both fighting to recover their balance, and flipped him far enough over that she landed beneath him. 

“Frell,” she gasped, feeling squashed.  His head had landed squarely on her stomach.  “Are you all right?”  John didn’t answer.  She scrambled out from under him, trying to lay him down slowly while checking him for damage.  He wasn’t breathing, but his eyes were open and he was making a series of odd faces.  “What should I do?” she yelled at him, hands hovering.  John shook his head, but he hadn’t begun breathing.  The mind-clogging precursors to panic interfered as she tried to remember his archaic assisted breathing technique, her memory diverted by the single thought that she may have fatally injured him. 

A long whistling breath ended her worries.  John wheezed and pulled in a second breath.  “What does --” he hauled in more air, “-- cryo trelkez mean?  Frozen chicken?” 

“Klyo-feltras,” she corrected.  “It’s the name of a combat technique and it translates roughly as ‘skull flattener’.”  She helped him sit up.  “Are you hurt?  You weren’t breathing.” 

“Knocked the wind out of me when I hit the floor.”  Aeryn shook her head when the explanation didn’t make any sense, watching in concern as he continued to wheeze.  “Good whallop like that can stun the diaphragm.  Doesn’t last long so it makes up for it by being very unpleasant.”  They staggered to their feet together and stumbled toward the cockpit.  “You’ve never had that happen?” 

“I’ve never heard of it happening to a Sebacean.  Lie down for a microt,” she ordered, steering him into the living quarters.  John went willingly but settled for sitting on the edge of the bunk, hunched over as he waited for his body to recover from the impact.  He glanced at her stare and looked away, studying the contents of the cabin.  She followed the direction of his gaze as he examined the shelves and their contents, her gear bag sitting in a corner with her spare clothing and weapons showing where it gaped open, his own gear strewn in an untidy collection along the wall at the foot of the bed.  He looked everywhere except at her. 

“Sorry,” he offered at last, “I don’t know why I did that.”  Aeryn realized that his spikey reticence was the result of embarrassment rather than another of his uncommunicative sulks.  His unjustified reaction was making him uncomfortable.     

“We both over-reacted,” she offered in return.  He’d tried to stop it, communicating more clearly than words that his reaction hadn’t been intentional.  “You’re not injured,” she checked again. 

“No, you did good.  That was a nice rollercoaster ride.  How ‘bout you?  You took the brunt of that fall.” 

“No damage,” she answered despite the warm spots on her back and her ribs that warned of bruises to come from where she’d cushioned his fall.  John was staring at something in her bag, and she tried to think what might be there that would draw his interest.  He’d always been more interested in what was inside her clothing than the garments themselves.  He shoved himself off the bunk, and reached into the jumble.  He came up with the empty boot scabbard for the discarded knife, turning to face her as he examined it. 

“I noticed you weren’t carrying it anymore.  Did you drop it somewhere on this enormous spaceship and couldn’t find it?”  The mild sarcasm came through clearly as he held the leather sheath out toward her.  Any truthful answer would sound either patronizing or paranoid, she decided, electing not to answer him at all.  “What happened to it, Aeryn?” 

“It’s gone.” 

“Because of me,” he stated.  She waited for his next response, the small cabin very quiet all of a sudden.  “Because of me?” he repeated with a different intonation. 

“Yes.”

“Afraid for me or afraid of me.” 

“I couldn’t decide and it didn’t matter.  Spacing it seemed like the best choice.  And afraid is too strong a word.  I was concerned.” 

John tossed the useless object back into her bag and sat down, staring at empty wall this time.  “This is no good.  I don’t want you to be afraid.  You shouldn’t be afraid just because I’m around.” 

“John, the only thing I’m afraid of is losing you.  I told you that fourteen solar days ago.  Over the last cycle I chased down more rumors, more false hopes, and more dead ends than a person could expect to find in a single lifetime.  I left you because of fear and it was the wrong decision.  I won’t let myself be afraid when I’m with you any more.”

“How did you find me?” he asked, continuing to stare at the wall. 

“I was about to give up,” she confessed.  “Every rumor said that John Crichton was dead.  Then I heard about a mechanic who could repair almost anything and told incomprehensible jokes.” 

“You came out here looking for someone because they told jokes?”  John finally turned to look at her, his disbelief apparent even as he gently mocked her.  Aeryn spread her hands to the sides and shrugged.  He scratched lightly at his chin for several microts, then got to his feet.  “I’ll reset that distillation unit to get more drinking water.  Why don’t you get us started toward Moya?”  He was gone before she could answer, leaving her literally with her mouth open, her next comment stalled by his fast change in mood and subsequent disappearance. 

Aeryn wandered slowly into the cockpit, considering his swings from tenderness to anger and back again.  The day they’d tricked him into fleeing in this ship he’d been arguing vehemently one microt, and sliding down to sit on the floor in defeat the next, as much as admitting that he still loved her.  Anger and silence had reigned since then, interjected with rare moments like the one in the cargo bay when he’d said she was beautiful.  She recognized the signs of inner turmoil, closely resembling her own endless days of indecision more than a cycle ago, and didn’t know how to help him resolve the conflict. 

The cushions of the padded pilot’s seat sighed as she slumped into them, adding a voice to her own silent exhalation.  She resigned herself to another twelve days spent trying to get through to him.  The control panels lit up, a flickering sequential illumination as deft fingers flicked control surfaces without the guidance of her thoughts.  Enduring his behavior would be worth it as long as it achieved something in the end, but even that outcome was uncertain. 

Her inner musings came to a stop when one of the displays didn’t react correctly.  Aeryn stared at the readout for the microts it took to focus her concentration on her task, then reviewed all of the panel’s settings.  “Frell,” she muttered and shut everything down, starting over and paying attention this time.  It came up the same.  The drive system wasn’t receiving any power. 

“John!  Did you pull the power relays for some reason?” she yelled back through the open hatch. 

“No, they’re still secured in place.  Pulling those out is your specialty,” he yelled back.  “Problem?” 

“A small detail,” she called, thinking that he was playing some sort of trick.  “The fuel cells show normal, but I don’t show any power being transferred to the hetch drive.”  She waited for the next part of his joke.   

John popped into sight in the short corridor, moving quickly toward the cockpit.  “That’s a hell of a small detail,” he said, leaning over her shoulder.  The dirt smeared fingers danced across the controls, but the readout tracking the power reaching the hetch drive still read zero.  “Crap.  I’ll check the relay circuitry first.” 

“You didn’t do this,” Aeryn challenged, feeling concerned for the first time. 

“Hell no.  Stay here and tell me if anything changes.”  He ducked through the hatch and disappeared.  “Anything?” his voice yelled several microts later.  Aeryn called back a negative then waited through a series of thumps and clangs.  “Shut everything down, Aeryn.  I think I know what’s wrong.” 

She did as he asked, then went to join him in the back of the craft.  When she got there, John had disappeared.  Aeryn checked behind what little machinery stood in the bay then glanced into the living quarters, the only other area of the ship, but he wasn’t there either.  The situation took on a nightmarish surrealism.  There was nowhere for him to go, but she was suddenly alone on a crippled ship.  She was about to yell his name when she spotted the bottoms of his tan boots hanging out of an access hatch in the side of the ship, right about where the nacelles for the rhotarri drive were located on the outside of the hull. 

“What have you found?” she asked, watching the feet shift as John squirmed in the tight fit.  The explanation emerged from the opening sufficiently muffled that her microbes refused to translate the phrase.  Aeryn peered into the confined space where he was working, trying to pick out any detail that would tell her what he was doing, but it was too dark.  She took a deep breath as her impatience threatened to turn into anger, the constant low-key stress of the past days robbing her of the ability to cope with the anything unexpected in a rational manner.  Five quick steps took her away from where John was working, using the motion and the small distance to get herself under control.   

“I found the problem.”  John slid out of the access tunnel, glancing at where she was pacing.  He scratched his earlobe with a single finger, leaving a smear of grease in its wake, and studied his boots for several microts.  “When I installed the new drive system I decided it would be easier to patch the power cables into the ones leading to the hetch drive instead of running a new set all the way from the fuel cells.  There are junctions with switching circuits in there and they’re frozen.” 

Aeryn watched the awkward stiff movements, thinking that it resembled inexplicable embarrassment.  She decided to ignore it in favor of solving their problem.  “Frozen like ice or frozen as in they won’t move?” 

“The second.  They’re set to shunt power to the rhotarri drive,” he nodded toward the engine nacelle, “and I think we really don’t want to try that trick again.” 

“Can you fix it?” she asked.  The jerky stance settled unmistakably into embarrassment.  “You can’t fix this, can you?” she attacked him. 

“I can fix it,” he protested.  “It’s easy to repair, but I kind of took another shortcut when I did that part as well.”  John continued his explanation, “It’s just that I have to do it from the outside of the ship.  I didn’t bother creating access from inside because I never thought I’d use this crate for anything other than test flights.”

It was his series of compromises that was causing the problem, she realized.  His look of discomfort was stemming from the choices he’d made when he built the prototype, but there was another component to the slumped stance that she hadn’t accounted for yet.  “Please tell me you have a spacesuit onboard,” she asked, testing to see if that was the additional problem. 

“I do, but it’s not a maintenance suit so it doesn’t have an oxygen scrubber.  I’ll have to do this in two or three tries, depending on how fast I can move and how long the air in the suit lasts.”  He slid around her, angling toward the airlock in the back of the ship.  “It’s not a tough job.  I’ll pull the cabling loose and connect it back into a permanent connection with the hetch drive.” 

Aeryn looked into the storage compartment as John began pulling the baggy black suit on over his coveralls.  It was empty.  “Where are the other suits?”  He merely shook his head and shrugged the shoulders of the one-piece suit into place.  “No others?” she asked in disbelief.  She was beginning to understand why he’d looked so uncomfortable.  The failure of the hetch drive was revealing a widespread carelessness, the unassociated factors combining into a sum that could have been lethal on any one of his test flights.  She watched him secure his gloves and seal the suit, considering what would have driven John to become so reckless.  He’d been rash or even hasty at times, but never so mindlessly negligent of basic safety precautions.

“I wasn’t exactly given the chance to stock this boat before departure,” he defended himself.  He slid a safety harness over the sagging fabric.  “The lifeline is on an autoreel.  If anything happens, hit that big switch over there,” he pointed to a large button beside the airlock door, “and it will yank me inside.”  The seal around the bottom of his helmet snapped closed with a loud clack, he picked up a fistful of tools, and then the airlock door slid shut behind him. 

   * * * * *

Crichton leaned further into the junction between the drive nacelle and the ship, struggling to attach the power cable to the circuit feeding the hetch drive.  His safety line tugged him away from his goal and he yanked at it angrily, frustration goading him into a foolish response.  The fast motion flipped a loop of cable toward him and he fended it off, but his yank had also pulled him away from the junction that was his goal.  His vision blurred slightly as he sighed in annoyance with himself, the momentary lightheadedness telling him that he needed to recharge the oxygen in his suit. 

“Thirty microts,” he murmured, pulling himself back into the workspace.  Thirty microts and he could be done and this would be over.  He tried to make the connection again, but his hands were shaking violently and the cabling missed by a wide margin.  “Steady,” he coached himself and tried again. 

The first repair had gone smoothly, but the one thing he hadn’t confessed to Aeryn before leaving the ship was that the suit’s heater was damaged.  It had been on his list of things to be taken care of, but he hadn’t intended to use this ship ever again, so the item had slid to the bottom of his priorities.  His two short stays in the airlock to renew his oxygen supply hadn’t been enough to warm him significantly, and going all the way inside would have wasted more of the ship’s air supply, so he’d chosen to keep working despite the increasing cold.  It had been a bad choice. 

“Suck it up,” he told himself, and his numb fingers responded by letting the splicer tool slip out of his grasp.  “Frell!”  He lunged after it, successfully capturing the critical item, but his feet flipped over his head in response, threatening to pull him away from the nacelle again.  “Just do it, John.  Then you can get some hot cocoa.”  He twisted the control for the suit heater again, trying to goad a little more warmth out of it, and pulled himself back into the cramped space. 

“Is everything all right out there?”  Aeryn’s voice blared into the comms in his helmet, making him jump.  She’d been checking on him at regular intervals; her call shouldn’t have startled him.  He took a deep breath to steady himself, ignoring the odd sparkling that fizzed across his vision for several microts. 

John flipped the comms channel open and tried to control his chattering teeth before answering.  “Almost done.  I’m reattaching the ssssecond cable now.”  He cursed mentally as his shuddering breath turned the one word into a hissing stutter.  The cable slid into place and he yanked himself forward, jamming it securely into the receiver.  “J-j-just securing it now.  Give me a mi … crot.”  His thumb refused to flip the switch on the splicing tool. 

“What’s the matter?” she barked into the comms.  “You don’t sound right.” 

“Little cold,” he squeezed out against the escalating shivers.  “Finishing now.  I’m fine.”  The splicer sputtered into life, energy arcing brightly in the dark, illuminating his target as he worked.  Aeryn was calling to him, her voice indistinct as he focused all of his attention on making the connection.  She was saying something about the autoreel as he wedged his hand against a support stanchion to steady the shaking.  “No!  Almost … d-d-done,” he yelled, afraid she would yank him in before he finished. 

The splicer flickered out, slipped loose and spun away from him.  He watched without moving as it ricocheted off the interior of the nacelle plating, spun past his head and disappeared into space.  “Bye,” he called to it, feeling a little silly, and returned his attention to the power cable.  Two tugs confirmed that it was secured, and he pushed himself out of the hatch.  The panel was clipped to one side of the opening.  It would have to be unclipped, fitted into place and secured.  He stared dumbly at it, finally remembering that it would not affect the hetch drive if he didn’t close the hole.  “Fuggit,” he declared, and kicked himself toward the airlock. 

John watched with mild surprise as the ship sailed away from him instead of passing alongside as he’d intended, wondering if his sense of direction was that bad or if Aeryn was leaving without him.  He came to the end of his tether with a hard snap against his harness, creating a painful jolt from skull to heels, then began to spin as he headed back toward the ship.  “Incoming!” he called as he got closer, trying to spot the airlock.  But the darkness and the stars seemed to have gotten inside his helmet, creeping in along with the cold, and he never felt it when he collided with the hull and began another trip to the end of his safety line. 

   * * * * *

[KernilCrash]

Part 3

“Marshmallow,” John mumbled. 

“What?” Aeryn said from somewhere near his ear. 

“Somebody put me inside a marshmallow.”  He was buried inside something very soft and very warm, insulated from the entire universe.  His entire body tingled with the exception of a few areas that felt as if they were on fire, and there was a warm pressure against his back that felt like heaven itself.  He opened one eye to check out his surroundings.  Everything was a bit hazy -- as though his brain was made of marshmallows as well.  “What happened?” 

Aeryn shifted against his back, and John was wide awake as he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be in a bed with Aeryn snuggled in behind him, the warmth of her body restoring him to life.  He became fixated not on the soft pressure against his shoulders, but on the warm set of toes resting against the back of his right ankle, the small detail distracting him from almost everything else.   

“By the time I got you inside, you were almost frozen solid and you were hypoxic,” she explained into the back of his shoulder.  “It took arns to get you warm.  I finally used more of the baffling from inside the interior bulkhead.” 

John explored the thick layer of insulation that had been packed between the covers, identifying the squashy foam that was creating the blunted sensation he’d encountered upon waking.  “That wasn’t all you used to warm me up,” he suggested, thinking of her presence behind him.  “Did I get mouth-to-mouth as well?” 

“No,” she laughed against his back. 

“Bummer.”  He burrowed under the covers until they crawled over his ears, shutting out the cooler air.  “Did I finish?”  There was a vague memory of a cable splicer spinning off toward the stars, but he couldn’t remember attaching the second power line. 

“Yes.  We’re on autopilot, set at Hetch Five.  I’ll need to make an adjustment to our course at some point.”  Aeryn shifted against him, pulling herself tighter.  They were both wearing clothes, which he thought might be a good thing under the present circumstances.  “John, your fingers and some other areas were an odd color when I got you inside.  Is that bad?” 

He grabbed his attention firmly by the scruff of its neck and hauled it back from its obsession with the set of toes that were flexing against his heel as she shifted behind him.  He had to remember her question first, then considered the possibilities.  “Yellowish white?” he asked eventually, thinking that it would be a good idea if one of them got out of the bed. 

“Mmhmm.” 

He pulled one hand out from under the covers and examined it front and back.  Small details were still a bit blurry, but he could see clearly enough to make out the extensive areas of angry red tissue.  “Frostbite.  Doesn’t look too bad,” he murmured, flexing his fingers.  It explained the overly hot sensations scattered across his body at random.  He tapped one of the burning hot patches on his chin, testing to see if it was numb.  “Should be okay.  Any other damage?” 

“No,” she answered.  He started to slide off, sleep coming fast despite having Aeryn so close.  “John?”  Her voice drew him back just as he was almost gone. 

“Un huh?” 

“What is ‘Don’t do it?’” 

She had gone very still behind him, barely breathing as she waited for his answer.  John wanted to deny knowledge of the phrase, but he’d jumped when she had quoted his impassioned plea from his nightmare, startled to hear it voiced out loud without warning.  “Nothing important,” he tried, forcing himself to relax.

“I don’t buy that,” she said, her tone leaving little room for argument.  “Not when you yell it at the top of your lungs while you’re asleep.” 

That frelled any denials pretty thoroughly, he decided.  “It’s a nightmare, Aeryn.  It doesn’t really mean anything.”  The last thing he wanted to do was discuss that bit of his past while he was lying with her wrapped around him.  The insulation and his pounding heart combined to finally restore the last of his body heat and there was a rush of warmth from within, leaving his skin feeling almost chilled as he overheated.  “I’m warm now.  I can get up.”  He started to shove himself up, but she dragged him back down. 

“You stopped shivering less than an arn ago.  You’re still cold.”  Her hand slid beneath his shirt to press against his stomach, a splayed contact that burned against skin that remained chilled.  His body had been turned into a series of sensory contradictions.  It was the shock and dismay at the idea of having to discuss his dream that was making him feel hot and sweaty, an entirely psychological reaction that had overridden the signals that his body was putting out.  “Tell me about the nightmare,” she urged. 

“This is a really bad idea,” John objected, feeling more uncomfortable with their physical arrangement. 

“That’s three.  No more.”  Aeryn yanked him back down again, but moved away from him slightly, giving him more room. 

“Three what?” 

“Three miserable attempts to avoid answering my question.  Tell me who you’re shouting at when you yell that.”

“Me,” he offered shortly.  He’d been about to say ‘you’ just to shock her, but the truth had slipped out when the fast jolt in his stomach told him that maybe he was yelling at her in his dreams after all.  He might have been screaming at her not to set the events in motion that would lead to the inevitable outcome. 

“Why?” Aeryn’s voice nudged him closer to the event.

“To stop myself.” 

“From what?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” John balked, working his way across the bunk to get away from her touch.  Cooler air flooded beneath the covers where they gapped between their bodies.  The wave spilled down along his spine and he shivered, immediately chilled again.  Aeryn slid closer as a second shudder hit him and pulled the blankets tight around his shoulders. 

“It’s going to take a few more arns before your body recovers.  You were so cold; it took forever to get you warm.  I wasn’t sure you were going to make it.”  Her hand traced a small pattern against his back and then she let him alone except to provide warmth, dropping the subject of the nightmare as well. 

“Guarantee you won’t die in my arms again.”

“What did you say?”  He’d been asleep for a microt but he could have sworn he’d heard Aeryn’s voice repeating the words aloud.   

“Nothing.”  Aeryn sounded half-asleep herself. 

John stared at the wall, the pain of the remembered moment as raw and intense as if it had happened just yesterday.  He’d been fighting to hang on to the person who meant everything to him, her agony resonating within him even as a portion of him screamed that he wasn’t the one who had injured her so badly.  At some point over the last cycle he’d come to accept that it had been John Crichton -- with all his preferences, beliefs, and values -- who had caused Aeryn Sun that pain, just as his current set of behaviors had forced her to contemplate that loss again today.  She’d pulled him inside the airlock, obviously managed to drag him into the living quarters, gotten him onto the bunk, and then had waited through the arns to see if he would recover from his latest bit of stupidity.  She must have spent the entire interval wondering if he would die in her arms.   

“What words did you use?” he asked her quietly. 

“What?”  She sounded startled, as though he might have woken her.   

“What names did you call me while you were trying to get me in here?”  He edged back, making a firmer contact.

The air swirled warm across the back of his neck as she laughed.  “There was a lot of ‘frell’, a few ‘drens’, and I called you a budong at least once.  I also compared your lack of cooperation to Rygel at some point.” 

“Rygel?  That’s harsh.”  John fingered his cheekbone as he considered what he wanted to say next, finding a welt developing where he’d been frostbitten.  “I was yelling at myself not to kill a Peacekeeper,” he explained without preamble.  Aeryn was silent behind him, and he knew it sounded absurd so he added the part he hated to face.  “He was a young kid.  I stabbed him.”

“When did this happen?” she asked, sounding merely curious rather than probing for details. 

“Same day you left.” 

“Was this on Moya?  Did she get boarded?” 

John turned halfway over, peering at her to see if she was joking.  “No.  Didn’t the others tell you what happened after you left?”
 
“They said they didn’t know where you were, nothing more.  D’Argo said if I found you that you could tell me, and that if I didn’t find you it didn’t matter.” 

John rolled away again, considering the knowledge she’d lacked when she’d come looking for him.  “Why didn’t you assume I’d gone back to Earth?  Why did you keep looking for me?”  He wanted to know where she’d been and what she had done in the intervening time, but it didn’t seem all that important at this particular moment. 

“If you were gone, there was no where left for me to go.  I had no other choice.”  Her fingers wandered down his arm as if irresistibly drawn to him, unable to withhold from the contact that would assure her that he was there. 

Hope, fear, desire, grief, anger, love.  John decided to tell her about that first hideous day after Moya had disappeared through the wormhole.

An alarm chirped at them from the cockpit.  “That’s the course correction,” Aeryn said, sliding off the bunk.  “Stay here, you need to give your body time to rebuild energy.  You’re still cold to the touch.”  She felt the side of his neck for a microt, then tugged the covers up and was gone. 

“Frell,” he mumbled into the pillow.   

   * * * * *

Aeryn watched the yellow sun of a small solar system slide out of sight through the side portal of the cockpit then looked down to verify their trajectory on the navigation console, ensuring that the gravity well hadn’t pulled them off course.  She leaned to one side without conscious thought as John reached past her to set a cup of tea next to her elbow, wisps of steam drifting off the surface to dissipate almost immediately in the warm air.  His hand rested on her shoulder for a microt as he glanced over the readouts, a warm reassuring pressure that moved away too soon.

“I’d kill for a cup of coffee right now,” he sighed, sliding into the other chair.  He propped one foot on the corner of the panel and slumped into the padded seat, sipping at his own drink. 

“Four down, a little less than eight solar days to go,” she offered.  John grunted an acknowledgement.  Aeryn glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes, but his wordless answer seemed to be a result of low energy levels rather than bad temper. 

The atmosphere in the ship had been almost jovial since John had awakened mumbling something about ‘mush-mellows’ several days earlier.  He’d begun making physical contact, venturing small touches or leaning against her as he reached over her shoulder to make an adjustment to the controls as he had a moment ago, and he no longer pulled away when she reciprocated.  They’d begun to share some of their experiences, filling in a little of the enormous hole in their lives, building a rough framework of where they’d been and how they’d gotten there, although most of the details were still missing.  John continued to look away if she brought up any of her work with the group of ex-Peacekeepers she’d found, and he’d offered no more than amusing anecdotes of his own disjointed travels. 

Their only argument had occurred the second night after he nearly froze to death.  He’d been asleep by the time she’d returned from adjusting the auto-navigator that first day, and had slept through the night without his usual nightmare.  The second night he insisted on sleeping in the cockpit again, and she’d planted herself against the door of the living quarters, blocking his exit for nearly an arn as they yelled their way to a compromise.  She suspected it was her repeated reminder of the fatigue-driven anger that had goaded him into using the rhotarri drive that had beaten him down.  She’d bludgeoned him with that one incident, and he’d finally agreed to share the bed.  He’d insisted on positioning a ridge of the soft hydrocell foam down the center of the bed to keep them apart though, as though he thought she would attack him in the middle of the night. 

Aeryn watched as he set his mug down on the floor and folded his arms across his chest.  John slid down a henta or two further in his chair, leaned his head against the back and closed his eyes.  There were several smears of discoloration across his face where he’d been frostbitten, and the skin on his hands was pealing, but there’d been no other adverse effects from his adventure repairing the ship.  The nausea she’d experienced during the first moments after she’d pulled him from the airlock made a brief repeat visit as she watched him scratch his chin for a moment then settle down.  She hadn’t known what would greet her when she’d pulled his helmet off -- John Crichton or another fixed blue-eyed stare.   

“You’re watching me,” he said as she continued to stare at him.  His eyes were still closed.

“How do you know?” she asked, but she could always tell when he was looking at her, it wouldn’t be any different for him. 

“I can feel it.”  John peeked at her and then closed his eyes again.  “I’m bored.” 

“I haven’t had a workout in days.  We could clear a space in the cargo bay.” 

He frowned slightly then shook his head without changing his position.  “No thanks, I already learned klyo-feltras this trip.  That’s more than enough.” 

“Disengage the gravity and work on zero-G techniques?” she suggested. 

“You get to pick up afterwards,” he said agreeably.  Nothing in the ship was fastened down, including the supply containers in the rear.  The living quarters would be an absolute shambles.

“Never mind,” she said quickly, provoking a laugh from John.  Aeryn smiled and stared at the console, thinking more about the gradual change in the man next to her than about how to pass the time.  One moment he’d be gazing at her as though she were the only object in the universe, and the next moment he’d storm off to be alone in the back of the ship, emerging an arn later as if nothing had happened.  The gazing and the talking were happening more frequently though, and the seclusion becoming increasingly rare. 

John shifted his position, pulling his head off the back of the chair and tucking his chin against his chest instead.  “We have enough water to risk a couple of showers tomorrow,” he offered, scratching at the beginnings of a beard.  The reclamation system wasn’t perfect.  They lost a small amount of water to each cycle through the purifiers, so they needed to make sure they had enough drinking water before wasting much on hygiene.

Aeryn got up and stretched, feeling hemmed in by the confined space.  She’d spent almost her entire life on spaceships, the sense of being enclosed usually serving as a reassurance rather than something that bothered her.  The shift in perception was unexpected and unwelcome.  She tried to think of something else as she wandered around the tight quarters, but thinking about the shower had led her to the memory of John’s cold body as she’d stripped him out of the malfunctioning spacesuit and his coveralls four days earlier.  It had been like touching a dead body, his flesh no less chilled than a corpse.  Working him into warmer clothing had been a torture; handling the cold, dead weight of his limbs had served as a reminder of what had happened and might happen again.  Swearing at him for his stupidity had only served to emphasize her fear that he might never wake up.   

Aeryn completed another circuit of the cockpit, searching for something to get her mind off the recalled trauma.  “How did you get the scar on your back?” she asked to divert her mind from the premature sense of grief. 

John covered his eyes with one hand and shook his head, his chin still resting on his chest.  “Don’t suppose you’d like to start with something else,” he suggested.   

“I didn’t mean to bring up something -- ”  He was blushing, his ears turning a bright red although she couldn’t see his face.  She waited, not bothering to finish the apology.   

“It was a fight,” he admitted at last, removing his hand only to stare at his boots.

“I figured that much out.” 

“A bar fight.”  John sighed and a very small grin appeared.  “I was perhaps a little drunk, and I kind of picked a fight with a guy at the bar.”  He looked at her out of the corners of his eyes, checking on her reaction.  Aeryn raised her eyebrows, waiting for the part he was deliberately leaving out.  “A big guy.”  She waited a little longer.  “A really big guy.” 

She slid back into the empty chair, propped her elbow on the console and leaned her chin on it, waiting for the rest.  John dropped his feet to the deck with a thump and headed for the hatch at the back of the cockpit.  “How big?” she asked before he could unlatch it. 

“He was a … pakmicrad,” he confessed. 

“Crichton!” she yelled in disbelief.  The adults of the species were fully twice his height and almost three times his mass. 

“It was a juvenile,” he objected. 

“So it was, what?  Only twice as heavy as you?”  She was struggling to smother a laugh, envisioning the look that must have been on John’s face once he realized he was in trouble. 

“A bit more than that.  It was almost full grown.”  He shrugged, making no move to open the hatch.  “I hit it once, and it decided not to get upset.  It just picked me up and set me aside because it wanted to finish its drink in peace.” 

“How long did the fight last?”  She knew she’d pushed too far when he turned his head away and rapped the latches loose with a fist.     

“That was it,” he said flatly.  “I punched it and it moved me out of the way.  End of story.”  He shrugged once and ducked through the doorway, pulling it shut behind him without any of his usual vehemence.  Aeryn turned to watch the stars through the forward viewscreen, wondering about the sudden reticence and all the parts of the story he hadn’t told her.  It was almost a quarter of an arn before she realized that he hadn’t actually explained how he’d acquired the horrific scar. 

   * * * * *

[KernilCrash]

Part 4

John flopped onto the bunk and stared at the ceiling, relieved that he’d managed to divert Aeryn’s attention long enough to avoid telling her the entire tale.  The first days of Gallenn’s hospitality he'd done little else than eat and rest, sleeping ten and twelve arns a day while his body recovered from an entire half-cycle spent as a fugitive.  Once the exhaustion had been conquered he’d begun drinking himself into a stupor every night, where the memories and the loneliness couldn’t reach him. 

On the night of the brief bar fight he’d tried to make a wager with Harvey that he could goad the normally placid pakmicrad into a fight, but the clone had declined to accept either side of the bet, going so far as to warn him that his insane venture could be fatal.  When he’d regained consciousness he had admitted to Gallenn that he knew a single blow from a pakmicrad could kill him, withholding the fact that he didn’t really care.  Picking a fight wasn’t an attempt at suicide, he’d argued, it was simply an example of very poor, very drunken judgment. 

“Yeah, right,” John growled to the empty room, admitting for the first time that he’d deliberately put himself in harm’s way that night because he couldn’t stand his life anymore.  He hadn’t wanted to die though; he’d only wanted to feel a different kind of pain than the one he’d been carrying around ever since Moya had disappeared down the wormhole.  He’d gotten far more than he’d been looking for when the irritated youngster had thrown him nearly five motras across the room.   

“What are you doing, John?” he asked himself, thinking of his current situation and the potential for more emotional destruction.  Aeryn was here, she was trying hard to rebuild their relationship, and she seemed committed to staying with him this time.  John sat up and shoved himself further onto the bunk to lean against the wall, staring blindly as he tried to compare his options.  Having Aeryn beside him felt so right it was nearly irresistible.  Her quiet smile filled the voids in his life like nothing else he’d ever encountered.  John gnawed absently on the pad of his thumb, jerking it away in annoyance when he became aware that he’d resumed the long discarded habit.

He considered returning to the cockpit to be with her, to feel her presence beside him like a shadow, like something that would always be there -- a given in his life -- but lay down instead.  A part of his psyche insisted that destruction waited for him, posing as a slim body of immeasurable poise and strength sitting at the controls to the ship.  So he stared at the wall and waited to see which vision would turn out to be the correct one. 

The hatch from the cockpit clanged against the stops, driving his introspection into retreat.  Aeryn stepped into the doorway, looking at him in concern.  He’d pulled himself into a tight ball, lying curled up on his side gazing blindly into space as he approached the moment when he’d have to make a decision. 

“Everything all right?” she asked, frowning slightly. 

“Yeah.”  He thought about the things he still needed to know.  “What made you leave your group of renegades?”  He didn’t really want to know where she’d been or what she’d done.  Envisioning Aeryn fighting and killing people because she’d chosen to lead that life wasn’t something that gave him any pleasure. 

Her frown deepened as she stepped into the small room and perched at the bottom of the bed.  “Survival was everything to them.  They were fighting for things that made a difference, but they did it without giving of themselves.  It was a shallow life.”  She looked around the room, her gaze coming to rest on a pulse rifle resting in the corner.  “There wasn’t any commitment beyond the oath they asked everyone to take.” 

John nodded, adding the explanation to his stack of data. 

“Can I get an answer?” she asked.   

“Sure.” 

“How did you get the scar?” 

He grimaced, acknowledging that he’d deliberately omitted the details the first time.  “I said the pakmicrad set me aside.  It was more like tossing me all the way across the room.  He didn’t mean to hurt me, but there was a coat rack thing on the far wall and the impact kind of hung me up there.”  Aeryn turned nearly white as he described the impalement.  “The part across my ribs is where I tore loose.  Gallenn scraped me off the floor and got me sewn up.” 

Aeryn’s jaw clenched, tension revealed by the muscles bunching slightly beneath smooth skin.  “Why did you start the fight?” she asked, looking at where her hands lay in her lap. 

John propped his head up so he could look at her more directly, instead of forcing his brain to interpret the sideward image it was receiving.  She was sitting stiffly erect, the Peacekeeper at attention as she waited for his answer, looking as if she were facing a firing squad.  “I don’t have a nice answer for that one, Aeryn.  Any version of the truth is going to sound cruel.”  She nodded, still looking down at her hands.  “Can you accept that I was drunk and leave it like that?” 

“For now.”  She got to her feet, stopping at the door with her back turned, her head still bowed.  “Do you want to fly or cook?  It’s time for Last Meal.” 

John laughed briefly.  Digging out another pair of the pre-packaged survival rations hardly counted as cooking.  They’d tried to concoct something more interesting out of the contents, but had given up after only two attempts, settling for ensuring that they never repeated the same edition of the rations twice in the same day.  “It’s the man’s job to do the driving,” he declared, trying to sound like John Wayne, “while the little lady prepares the dinner.” 

She gave him a look as she turned toward where the storage bins were kept in the cargo bay, then disappeared without a comment.  John rolled to his feet and headed for the cockpit, unsure whether she’d been amused, angry, confused, or ready to hit him in retaliation for his deliberately sexist comment.  He paused at the door and then reversed direction, meeting Aeryn as she returned with a meal in each hand. 

“What was that look for?” he asked, deciding to spend more time figuring things out instead of making wild guesses. 

She handed the rations to him, waiting as he hesitantly accepted one then the other.  Then she took his face gently in both hands and kissed him.  John closed his eyes as she made contact, replaying the rare occasions that this had happened in the past as she pressed against him a little harder.  She broke the contact just as he was beginning to think there was more to it, took the packaged rations out of his hands and stepped around him.

“I love it when you say things that make absolutely no sense to anyone except a human,” she said, and stepped into the cockpit.  John stood transfixed for several microts, then followed her, more confused than before he’d asked the question. 

   * * * * *

He knows he’s dreaming again, looking around the too-familiar landscape with the fatalism born of dozens of visits to this place.  The vision unreels before him, remorseless in its consistency, and he turns to watch, knowing every flinch and twitch before it happens.

He stands beside the pair, watching with no more than his usual curiosity as the taller figure in black leather holds the young Peacekeeper up by the front of his uniform.  The taller of the two figures stands hunched slightly to one side, the stolen fuel cell tucked precariously inside his jacket, threatening to slide loose if he moves too far in any direction.  The young one reaches up with one fumbling hand and pulls at a sleeve, too young and inexperienced in the cruelties of battle to hang on to his indoctrination, even though it has been instilled since his recruitment as a child.

“Not this time,” he vows, “I won’t let you do it.”  He moves forward with the mud-bogged slow motion of a man wading through quicksand, his clown-clumsy feet slowing him to an impotent crawl while the knife is pulled free.  “Don’t do it,” he threatens the taller one.  “It’s not worth it.”  Blue eyes turn his way this time, face full of determination to live, to continue.

He lunges between them, shoving the young one aside, knife flashing in the dark, catching random rays of light as it spins away, flicking the droplets of future heartbeats as it disappears.  They grapple, each fighting for a type of survival, arms and legs tangling in an attempt to gain an advantage, until he doesn’t know if he’s the stopper or the stoppee in this dream. 

He slithers to one side, the dream Crichton’s body suddenly vulnerable as the fuel cell slips loose and he tries to recover it, and he finds a bit of leverage.  One arm in front, one in back, just as Aeryn had taught him, squeeze hard, and the breath stops in the fugitive’s throat.  Hands beat at him, clutch at his arm, an elbow pummels his ribs.  He hangs on.  The murderer Crichton is dying in his arms, prevented from committing the self-destructive act. 

They roll together, still struggling, now on their sides, and a hard joint smashes mercilessly into his groin …

John came awake with a gagging cough, rolling up against the bulkhead with a hard thump as he clutched at himself, near to vomiting.  “Aeryn?” he croaked.  He took in a small breath against the sickening ache between his legs and looked for her, knowing what he’d done in his sleep.  “Aeryn!  You okay?” he asked again in a panic. 

She was sitting on the floor in the corner, pulse pistol aimed at him, her breath rasping in through an open mouth. 

“Oh God,” he moaned, half in pain and half in remorse.  “I’m sorry.  That’s why I didn’t want to …” he gagged as the pain flowed outward one more time and finally began to ease.  “I should have stayed in the cockpit.  I’m sorry,” he repeated, wondering how he was ever going to explain trying to strangle her.  When he raised his nose out of the mattress she was on her feet, standing by the side of the bed looking down at him with a hint of what he thought might be compassion, the pistol held loosely by her side. 

“We need to talk, John.”  He nodded, pressing one hand carefully against the source of his pain.  “Tonight.”  He nodded again.  “As soon as you can breathe.”  He nodded a third time and buried his face in the pillow, wondering if she’d think him a sissy if he elected to puke on the floor. 

It took more than a few microts before he declared himself recovered and not permanently damaged.  The familiar forgiving smile he’d been hoping for by making light of his injury hadn’t appeared.  Aeryn settled herself at the foot of the bed, sitting cross-legged, the pistol close to hand, with what he considered her ‘don’t-frell-with-me’ expression firmly in place. 

“Where do you want to start?”  He’d already resigned himself to telling the entire story. 

“At the beginning.  Why did you leave Moya?  I thought you were going to stay there, take care of her and Pilot, and work on your wormholes.”  Her tone was accusatorial. 

“I didn’t leave,” he snapped back at her, a little harsher than he’d intended.  So he told her the entire story:  sitting in the module feeling betrayed and lied to, watching the leviathan slip into the wormhole, the shock, finding the planet with a breathable atmosphere, and all the events leading up to the moment when he’d slid a knife into the belly of a young Sebacean.  Aeryn watched him unwaveringly through the description, a small frown developing as he finished. 

She shook her head at his remorse.  “You had to survive.  If they had caught you, your execution would have been slow and excruciating.  Given enough time they could have forced you to give up the wormhole equations.”   

“I know that, Aeryn,” he shot back at her.  “But I wasn’t thinking of any of that when I did it.  All I cared about was making sure I lived long enough to find you.”  He shrugged uncomfortably.  “And you weren’t there.  After that, the Peacekeepers were always right on my ass, I couldn’t search for Moya and I had no idea where to look for you or any of the others.  I hid, dumped the module, lost Winona, changed my name, made myself disappear, hoping I’d have time to go back and find … all of you.”  He glanced up at her as he changed the end of his sentence. 

“I wasn’t John Crichton anymore.  One day I woke up and knew in my heart that I’d never find you, and had to face that I’d killed that kid for nothing."  He looked down at his hands, rubbing one palm with a thumb.  “For absolutely nothing,” John forced the words out, each syllable breaking loose from his lips with an effort.   

“You were still alive,” she asserted. 

“No I wasn’t, Aeryn.  Jack Crichton’s son never would have stuck a bit honkin’ commando blade between some kid’s ribs, looked him in the eye and stabbed him a second time.  He was no threat after the first one.”  He got to his feet, pacing the two steps to the wall before turning to face her, holding his hands out palms up.  “Do you know how hard it is to get blood off your hands?” he pleaded with her. 

“Yes, I do,” she said gently. 

“Tell me how?  Please?  Because it’s still there.  Where’s the big cosmological equation that says I have more of a right to be alive than someone else?  One puny human being doesn’t belong in this universe more than someone else, Aeryn.”  John grabbed a metal cup off a shelf and threw it angrily across the room, the metallic clatter not nearly as loud as his anguished yell.  They hung suspended for several microts, the quarters abruptly quiet. 

“You must have felt differently when you saved your life,” she resumed carefully.   
 
“I didn’t save my life for me!” he yelled at her.  He closed his mouth with a snap and turned his back to her with a frustrated gestured, taking a step so that he faced into the corner. 

Aeryn hadn’t moved except to turn her head as he paced around the small area, holding herself carefully as if a stray movement would ignite the tension, creating an explosion.  “You saved yourself for me,” she concluded, talking to his back.  He nodded, staring down at his feet.  “I had left you because you had died, so you weren’t going to let that happen again.  But I wasn’t there.” 

John nodded again, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly.  He leaned forward to rest his forehead against the joint of the two walls, continuing to stare at his feet. 

“If I hadn’t left, you would have been on Moya when she went through the wormhole and none of that would have happened.”  Aeryn continued her show theorizing, summoning out the agonies he wouldn’t admit to himself. 

“Yes,” John whispered. 

She moved for the first time, turning to sit at the edge of the bed so she could face him.  “If I had told you where I was going …”  She tried to work out how that decision would have affected John’s solitary journey.

“I could have at least dreamed I’d find you some day,” he finished for her. 

“Hope,” she concluded.  He nodded.   

Aeryn gazed thoughtfully at the rigid body for several more microts.  “When you hit the pakmicrad, were you trying to kill yourself?” she asked at last. 

“No.”  John turned to face her, sliding down to sit on the floor where she’d been huddled just an arn earlier.  He peered at her over the forearms he was resting on his knees.  “I wanted to hurt physically,” he said.  “I wanted to feel something that would drown out the other things that I’d been feeling for almost an entire cycle.”  He gave Aeryn a chance to say something, continuing in a more self-deprecating manner when she remained silent.  “I might have underestimated the amount of pain that thing could inflict by just a smidge.” 

“A little more than a smidge,” she suggested. 

“Probably.”  John ran his chin along his forearm, watching her.  “I forgave you a long time ago, Aeryn.  I understand why you had to leave.  I understand about needing to get away from something that hurts so much you can’t think straight.” 

She slumped forward, resting her head in her hands.  The relief that he could find his way to forgiving her was nearly buried under the guilt as she heard him voice an anguish identical to her own.  Several deeps breaths helped her shove the sting of tears back where they’d come from.  “Yet you’re still having the nightmare,” she said, thinking that his forgiveness should have resolved the source of his internal anguish. 

John rested his head against the wall, slowly fingering his lower lip with a thumb.  “It reappeared when you did,” he explained, watching her intently. 

“You still don’t know if the cost of killing him was worth what you gained,” she theorized, feeling mildly ill as she was forced to consider the depth of his uncertainty.  It meant that John might choose to leave once he dropped her off at Moya.     

“Guess not,” John’s voice sliced deep, cutting as fiercely as the knife he wielded in his nightmare. 

“Does it help that I’m glad you’re alive?” she asked, not giving up.  John pressed his lips against his folded forearms, just his eyes and nose showing as he stared at her without answering.  “I’m glad you didn’t let yourself get killed that day.  I meant what I said about not having any place to go if you weren’t around.”   

“I believe you,” he murmured into his wrist. 

They stared at each other, words expended, the gulf wider than the scant two motras separating their bodies.  Aeryn pulled her feet back onto the bed, tucking them beneath her to sit cross-legged where she’d started the discussion. 

She watched the same vacant look steal over him that she’d seen when she’d found him curled on the bed earlier that day.  She was alone in the room at that moment, John having gone somewhere entirely different.  The relief she’d felt when John had said he’d forgiven her had been so intense she’d felt as though she was about to pass out.  The entire time she’d been hunting for him, that was the stumbling block she’d assumed would be the hardest to get past.  She’d watched John’s anger fade over the past days, and the anticipated hurdle had been cleared with ridiculous ease, sweeping all of her anticipated worries aside to reveal the unexpected barricade.

“I think,” John began, then went silent again, staring off into space.  Aeryn waited, giving him time to make a decision.  “I think that if I trust you and you leave, that I’ll probably find a way to get killed next time, Aeryn.  I can’t do this another time.”  His eyes drifted across her, found something to look at on the wall to one side, then returned to stare at her.  “That last day on Moya, you said you could not do this again.  Tell me you don’t remember what that felt like.” 

“I can’t tell you that.  I remember it like it was --” 

“-- yesterday,” he finished for her when she hesitated.  Aeryn nodded.  “You can’t ask me to do this, Aeryn.  You know exactly what this feels like.”   

“I didn’t die, John,” she fought to retrieve the situation.  Defeat hovered a hair’s breadth away, waiting only for him to decide he’d talked long enough.  Losing this cautious battle meant that John wouldn’t be the only one feeling the hurt of abandonment, and she wasn’t sure she could stand being spurned when they’d come so close to reconciliation.  "I didn't die," she repeated, trying to make it sound less like an accusation.   

“You were as good as dead,” he countered.  “Maybe even worse.  I don’t believe he chose to die.  It wasn’t his choice to leave you.” 

Aeryn swallowed hard, giving herself a moment to calm down so she wouldn’t lash back at him.  “There was no ‘him’.  There was only John Crichton, only you.  Your decisions that time -- your choices -- got you killed.”  Another long pause stretched out as he continued to stare at her, unrelenting.  “Several days ago you made another choice that could have gotten you killed.  I didn’t give up when you made that choice; I didn’t leave.” 

“What about next time?” he asked her, hugging his ribs.  “Or the time after that?”  John tucked his feet closer to his body, pulling himself into a tight knot.  It looked as though he were trying to compress himself into a smaller body, and it looked painful.  “If you leave …”  John shook his head and laid his forehead on his knees, closing himself inside his own body. 
 
“You would have to trust me.”  She slid off the bunk and knelt beside the huddled figure.  “I don’t want to be anywhere except beside you, John.  That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you since the moment I saw you slide out of that engine crawlspace in Gallenn’s repair facility.  I am here with you now, I’ll go with you wherever you go, and I will not leave you again.  That day on Moya I told you that I love John Crichton, and I still do.” 

John gradually untangled himself as she issued her vow, his head coming up until he could look into her eyes.  The intensity of his stare was disconcerting, forcing her to concentrate on her words to avoid faltering.  She sat back on her heels, the nearly manic look on his face suggesting that she’d lost him forever.  “What did I say?”  Aeryn asked, confused by his reaction and hoping she could salvage the situation. 

He shook his head vigorously, as if ridding himself of something.  “Um … never mind.  It doesn’t matter.”  He pushed himself upright then put out a hand to pull her smoothly to her feet.  “It’s been arns, we should get some sleep.”  He looked at the rumpled mess of covers on the bunk, still shoved into the heap where they’d left them.  “I’ll go back to sleeping in the cockpit,” he suggested.  John was relaxed, all of the habitual tension missing from his body, but she couldn’t decide if that was good or bad.   

“No.”  Aeryn retrieved her pulse pistol from the foot of the bed and shoved it under her pillow, hoping it would be enough to keep him nearby.  If she was going to lose him in the end, she wanted to make as many memories as possible during their last few days together. 

“Nice solution.  I try to kill you, you shoot me.  It has a certain balance to it.”  He looked from her to the door several times, then rolled into his spot nearest the wall.  “This is one of our all-time dumbest ideas.” 

“I don’t believe you’ll do it again,” she said, sliding in and pulling the covers up.  She stretched one hand over her head and dimmed the lights. 

“Aeryn?” John asked from the dark, shifting restlessly. 

“Yes.”  She was lying on her back, as close to the edge of the bed as possible, doing her best to ensure that John didn’t feel trapped -- physically or emotionally. 

“All right.”  He sounded pleased about something, but she couldn’t attach the unassociated phrase to anything they’d discussed. 

He wasn’t saying he was okay; he was making a statement that he was agreeing to something.  Aeryn stared into the dark, trying to remember which request had gone unanswered during their conversation.  It hit her like a physical blow, John’s quiet concession concealing the magnitude of his decision.  “You mean yes?” she asked back, light-headed with relief. 

“One more time,” his detached voice floated back, and she started to shake.  No combat assignment or Prowler detail had ever put her through more stress than she endured over the last several arns. 

“Can I come over there?” she asked, needing to be near him. 

“Of course,” he laughed, sounding as relaxed as he’d looked a few microts earlier. 

She rolled over twice, fetching up against his side with a thump.  “Thank you,” she murmured into his chest as one strong arm pulled her against him.  “Thank you, John Crichton.” 

“Don’t kill me, Aeryn Sun,” he whispered unseen. 

“I won’t.  I promise.”  The strong fingers that she hadn’t felt touch her for more than two cycles stroked her shoulder, exploring for a microt before holding her tight.  “What does that feel like?” she asked, inviting him to share what he was thinking at that moment. 

“Tomorrow.” 
 
   * * * * *

[KernilCrash]

Part 5:  Rated NC-17 for ‘adult themes’. 

Aeryn fumbled for the lighting controls, easing the illumination up until she could make out John’s hunched figure and the dark blob of his hair on the far side of the bed.  They’d fallen asleep practically intertwined, but she’d felt it when he had rolled away from her in the middle of the night, his body retreating out of habit.  Now it looked as though he was trying to merge with the bulkhead, tucked into the corner made up by the bed and the aft wall of the sleeping quarters with his back turned to her. 

She pulled a pillow under her ear and watched him sleep, aching for the day when he would resume his unflagging pursuit of her.  There had been times in the past when she could barely restrain herself from lashing out at him physically to get him away from her, but since he’d become the one to draw away she’d learned to miss his constant hovering presence.  No matter where she’d been over the last cycle, no matter how dispirited she’d become during the long search, the memory of his warmth and love had hung over her like a protective cloak, a single certainty that there was a haven for Aeryn Sun somewhere in the universe.  With two simple words last night -- ‘all right’ -- he’d wrapped that cloak securely around her, sucking her into the sanctuary she’d been seeking. 

The trip to Moya would take another seven solar days, barely enough time for them to learn about the things that had been endured while they had been separated.  Once they were back aboard with their friends, their time to sit and talk would almost certainly disappear under the weight of day-to-day life aboard Moya.  They’d found it hard to set aside time to talk in the past, there was no reason to believe that would change. 

Aeryn tugged at the covers, pulling them off John’s shoulders gradually so he wouldn’t wake, wanting to use every single peaceful microt available to get to know him again.  He was as heavily built as ever, the delineations of muscle, tendon, and bone blurred by total relaxation.  John sighed and shifted, burying his head in the pillow, the tendons in his neck showing clearly for a microt before disappearing beneath the tanned skin.  The scar on his back glistened in the dim light, resembling a benign trickle of water as it wandered from shoulder to spine.  She tugged the covers down further and squirmed closer to examine the brutal track, thinking of the internal pain that had caused him to seek this injury out.  There were several new scars on her body, but none as fierce as this one, none that would have caused as much damage as this would have inflicted. 

“Wha?” John mumbled sleepily.  She didn’t answer, hoping he wasn’t awake.  “Anything wrong?” he asked, pushing out of his corner. 

“Everything’s fine.”   

He looked over his shoulder, smiling sleepily at her.  “No more fistfights?” he asked, referring to his unknowing attack arns earlier. 

“You tried hugging me to death at one point, but I think you were awake then,” she said seriously, trying to keep a smile from taking over.  His pleased grin broke her resolve, the corners of her mouth tugging up before she could stop it.  Aeryn propped her head on one hand, asking, “Did I injure anything permanently?” 

“The boys have recovered.”  He gazed at her, studying her for several microts, then smiled as he said, “I like your hair like that.”  Aeryn swept the loose tendrils together where they streamed over her shoulder, and tossed them behind her.  “On the other hand, that’s not a bad sight either.”  He turned on his stomach and wormed back into the pillow without taking his eyes off her. 

Aeryn leaned forward to trace the wandering scar, John’s shoulder blades scissoring together as her finger approached the center of his back.  She stopped where the erratic arrow came closest to his spine, the livid tissue pointing like a destination marker, and probed, feeling the edges of the bony protrusions a fraction of a henta away.  “That was close,” she noted, continuing the journey along the smooth stroke of a rib, leaning across his back to find the end of the trail. 

“Bit messy,” he agreed. 

“Must have hurt.”  She explored a gnarled bump where the scar terminated on his side. 

“You don’t seem to understand just how drunk I was that night.”  He touched her ankle where it rested near his shoulder, tracing the outline of the bone with one finger.  “Probably helped me survive the impact.”       

Aeryn slid down next to him, fitting belly to hip and throat to shoulder.  “In that case, I’m glad you were drunk,” she said softly into his ear.  John turned to look at her, then slid his head tentatively across the pillow while checking for her response, and kissed her.  It was brief and so light as to barely qualify as a touch, but it was a kiss.  She waited, her chin resting against his shoulder, examining the blue eyes from an eye-straining distance of two hentas, and then he kissed her again, longer and with more need. 

John rolled away from her, pulling her after him as his back came up against the bulkhead with a loud thump.  She went willingly, letting him pull her against his chest, feeling the strong arms wind around her in an embrace that she hadn’t felt since Talyn.  His hand explored her back, wandering from her hips to the back of her neck, finding the wonderful spot beneath her ear and rubbing it gently with his thumb until her gut tightened and she needed something more than kisses to satisfy what he’d awakened.  She had shown the other one that spot, but this one couldn’t have known.   

“How did you know about that --”  The question disappeared under a sigh as his thumb circled there several times, resulting in a gut-tightening shudder of desire. 

John tilted her head back and lipped a caress on the underside of her throat.  “I didn’t.  I couldn’t reach any further around you the way you’re lying on my arm,” he laughed into her shoulder.  “It must have been fate.”  He nuzzled her, beard stubble scratching, his free hand joining the leisurely petting that seemed to have a purpose other than arousal.  This was John Crichton, making it difficult to remember that this man didn’t know her body intimately.  She closed her eyes, enjoying the tactile investigation of her surfaces, small touches interspersed with longer strokes, the arm beneath her flexing with tension as he kissed her again.  She burrowed into his warmth, looping a leg over his, finding a type of security that had been missing for too long. 

“That’s enough,” he announced, using the last bit of room between him and the wall to pull away from her. 

She opened her eyes to join in the joke, her smile fading when she saw that he was serious.  John gave her the tiniest of nudges, encouraging her to roll away from him, and she responded before she could think to stop herself.  “I thought … ”  She sat up, looking down at him perplexed.  “That was nice,” she observed, still uncomfortable with the role of initiator.  She didn’t know how to pursue him physically because she’d never had to before. 

“It was nicer than nice, but we’ve barely learned how to talk to each other, Aeryn.  Shouldn’t we work on that problem first?”  His fingers wandered lazily up and down her forearm as he waited for her response, sending out an entirely different message than his words. 

“No,” Aeryn said firmly, rolling into his arms, “we shouldn’t.” 

He gathered her in willingly, the last of the hesitation disappearing as he sat up with her and pulled her into his lap, holding her in place as he turned to lean his back against the wall.  She closed her eyes as he kissed her sternum once and then he slid her top over her head, freeing her breasts.  It was too close, it was unavoidable … it was exactly how he’d started that night aboard Talyn. 

He uses both hands to delicately finger the soft underside of her breasts, gazing at her as though he’s just discovered female anatomy for the first time.  His eyes move from face to shoulders to fingertips and onward, restlessly cataloguing her surfaces, gazing into her eyes for longer moments, watching her watch him.  He runs one hand down her arm, rubs a thumb along the underside of her wrist, surprising her with the fast tingle of pleasure generated by what she thought was an innocuous spot.  He fumbles for her hand, places his hand palm-to-palm with hers and intertwines their fingers, and she grasps him tightly as his other thumb brushes once across her breast, and then he lowers his head and touches her with his tongue.  She takes in a sharp breath, and he strokes her more firmly, his fingers clasped tightly although hers stretch open in reaction.  He sighs, his soft exhalation nearly lost behind Talyn’s hums, nuzzles her lightly between her breasts, and changes sides.

Aeryn ran her fingertips into the hair at the back of his head, breathing deeply as John’s lips found the second nipple and brought it to arousal with a slow, insistent coaxing.  She tried to pull her hand loose from his, to break the comparison, but he held her more tightly and sucked more of her into his mouth, working at her more vigorously with his tongue.  She let out a small cry of delight, and he laughed against her, shifting to get more comfortable beneath her. 

He shifts, the hard thrusting shaft inside his shorts making itself known as he explores the territory forbidden to him for so long.  Her hand is released and she wraps both arms around his shoulders, feeling the muscles slide under warm skin as he works at her a little harder, until her sighs turn into louder shuddering gasps and she is pulling at the back of his neck to keep him close.  He hums as he tips her backwards onto the bed, hooks his fingers into her waistband and her briefs are gone.

John knelt between her legs looking down at her, the dark shadow of his beard the only discernable difference until she looked into his eyes and saw the cycles of loneliness feeding a hunger that she’d never seen in John Crichton before. 

“I love you,” she offered, the only thing she could think of that might leach away the hurt.  His eyes rose from where he’d been slowly stroking her thighs and the blazing grin emerged, masking the remnants of the damage he carried.

“I love you,” he returned, and his thumbs rubbed hard against the hollows at the top of her legs, drawing her apart.  He hadn’t shed his shorts yet, hiding nothing as his erection thrust hard against the thin cloth.  The shorts were different, helping to keep them straight in her mind, because there was only one John Crichton.  “Are you sure this is right?” he whispered, rubbing the backs of her thighs and encouraging her to bend her knees.  And that was different too. 

“Yes.  This is perfect,” she answered, sitting up to embrace him.  One strong hand slid behind her hips, the other encircled her shoulders, pulling her firmly against his chest as she kissed him.  He lifted her easily, tucking her into his lap as he knelt on the bed, her pelvis rubbing hard against his thickening length and he shuddered inside her arms.  “Is this all right?” she asked mischievously, working her hips against him with a slow cadence.   

“Oh yeah.  Perfect,” he gasped.  She took his head in both hands and tilted it up to meet her, renewing her knowledge of his lips, enjoying the abrasive scratch of his beard.  She scrubbed her fingers through his hair, pushing it backward so it stood up on end like a ruff, then flattened it down, because she’d left it standing straight up on the other occasion.  John’s hand left the small of her back, questing lower to run smoothly across her buttocks, accompanied by a long sigh against her lips.  He looped it under her thigh and pulled her leg out to the side, then reached between their bodies. 

His fingers stroke her so gently, like no one ever has before.  She wants to watch, but her eyes close of their own accord as her entire body implodes, leaving only the sensation of his fingers moving between her legs.  He teases her, touching one finger to the point that begs for hard pressure, and then leaves it there, suggesting there’s more coming without actually giving it to her.  He lowers her into the pillows so his other hand can participate, ensuring that no surface goes unexplored.  Her breath begins to emerge in small yelps when he uses a firmer stroking, nudging her knee to one side with his own, then he replaces his finger with a thumb and she cries out.

She opened her eyes in time to watch him smile with delight, brushing one hand across her belly as she lunged into his grasp with her hips, hoping for more.  “Ssshhh,” he calmed her with his voice, and stroked her stomach where it was hollowed with tension.  “You are beautiful,” he murmurred, and yet a microt later he abandoned her.  He backed away, sliding his thumbs into the waist of his shorts, but that was how it happened before. 

“Let me,” she asked.  John returned to her side, moving close so she wouldn’t have to sit up, and she pulled hard against the front of the waistband to free his erection, and then tugged them down to his knees.  He looked down at himself, then at her, stuck because he couldn’t get the shorts the rest of the way off without getting up.  They laughed together at the impasse, and he stepped off the bed and kicked them into a corner when they dropped around his ankles. 

He turns toward her, his excitement apparent, and she views him for the first time, pleased with the hard lines of his hips, long angling hollows along his flanks, the forest of hair across his chest that thins to a dusting across his stomach, returning as a dark pelt as it drifts lower.  He’s no different than a Sebacean, his contours pleasing as he rejoins her in the alcove, ducking slightly because Talyn’s not full-grown, and he’s warm and hard resting against her thigh as he leans over her to kiss her once more.

John winced slightly as he straightened up from his embrace.  “Did I damage the boys?” she asked quietly, reaching to stroke the abused organs.  Every muscle in his stomach and chest sprang into clear delineation as her fingers delicately explored him, moving deeper between his legs to stroke the smooth skin behind his tightening balls with a single finger, tickling him one more time before moving down the inside of his thigh.  He closed his eyes and swallowed hard as he visibly hardened in response to her teasing.

She reversed direction, working her way back up the inside of his other leg until she reach the target again, running two fingers along his length as she watched his toes curl tightly.  One hand struck out toward the bulkhead in an attempt to steady himself, the other hand braced on her knee, and he let out a long shaking breath.  “Ohh, they’re fine now,” he panted.  “Yuh, they’re happy.”  She laughed, pleased by the look of mindless pleasure she could create with a single touch.  He shook himself once, then looked at her with the hunger back in his eyes.   

He takes his time, pausing often to kiss her, caressing her until she shakes from head to toe with unfulfilled desire.  No one has ever been this gentle or caring.  The hard pressure thrusts against her, retreats, returns to begin the pleasurable stretching of muscles designed for this one moment.  He leaves and she cries out with disappointment, but he declares her not ready and jacks her up to an unknown level of excitement.  And he’s inside her at last, supporting himself with his arms as he hovers over her, looking down at her with love in his eyes, and she’s warm and comfortable in a way she’s never known in her life.

Aeryn ran her hands along John's upper arms and over his shoulders, meeting his cadence with her own efforts, discovering that this was a leaner, stronger John Crichton, who could arch down over her to kiss her without strain, who could support her in a more pleasurable position with a single hand, and who was even gentler than he’d ever been before.  Her moment approached, summoned with the help of the long massaging strokes from behind her shoulders to her hips and back up her belly and ribs, and he straightened up so he could put his hands to better use, finding and encouraging the portion of her that cried out for a small touch.   

His quiet laugh sends an extra shiver down her spine as she cries out, the nervous explosion dissembling her body into a multitude of spasming delights, then putting her back together so that the one final overload of aching sensation can ripple from the core of her outward and leave her gasping for breath.  She looks up into the stubble-framed smile and can’t remember which one this is because there has never been anyone except John Crichton.  He massages her stomach as the last vibrations die away, and then he closes his eyes, diving deep into his own needs.

She caught one of his hands as he finished easing her hip to a position where a muscle cramp wouldn’t claim her, and interlaced her fingers into his so he couldn’t pull away.  Climaxing together was frantically exquisite, but she enjoyed this moment almost more, watching his jaw begin to drop, eyes barely open and unseeing as he listened to a single portion of his anatomy.  The tendons in his neck began to stand out as his breathing grew ragged, working loose in small grunts that were so quiet it sounded as though he were whimpering with delight.  Aeryn watched as the hollows developed along the fronts of his hips, the large tendons standing out like cables, and his hand clutched convulsively at hers as he came. 

She rocked her hips up, continuing the cadence but more gently as John’s head fell back on his shoulders and he froze in the induced rigor mortis of climax, every other body part malfunctioning as a single organ took over his life.  He let out a long sigh and took in another breath, his hand easing its grasp.  Aeryn shoved against him hard, coiling one leg behind his leg and thrusting into his hips, catching him before he was truly finished.  Her motions controlled him for the long extra moment, coaxing a continuation of the original ecstatic expulsion that brought a dark flush to his chest and ripped a long groan out of him. 

He grabbed at her hand, shoved hard one last time and then sighed, seeming to collapse as his head dropped and his muscles relaxed.  He let the rest of his breath out with a long groan, dropping down over her, catching himself on his hands to keep his weight off her. 

His eyes are still closed as she smoothes the sweat soaked hair back on both sides of his head and kisses him carefully, leaving him plenty of time for catching his breath.  “Oh lord,” he sighs after several microts have passed, and he opens his eyes.  “I love you,” he says, letting most of the weight of his head drop into her hands.

“I love you,” she says, guiding his head down to rest on her shoulder.  She rubs his back, liking the way the heavier muscles in his back taper to his waist.  He continues to gasp for air, so she gives him more time to recover, working her way up the knobby ridgeline of his spine, finding the wandering track across his back.  One set of fingers trace that proof of his identity, the other cups his jaw in her palm, a fit so perfect it must have been preordained, and brings him back for one more kiss.

“I love John Crichton,” she told him one more time. 

“Is that why you tried to kill me at the end?  I think my heart stopped.” 

“Do you need help with that artificial breathing technique?” she asked, rubbing the back of his neck. 

John lowered himself onto her, held her tightly, and rolled them over.  “Yes,” he answered, looking up at her.  Aeryn kissed him, taking her time, only breaking the contact when he sighed against her cheek. 

“Better?” she asked, lying down on his chest.   

“Uh huh,” he sighed, apparently content. 
 
The only noise for the next quarter arn was the almost subliminal hiss of the air circulating through the vents, punctuated at random intervals by the quiet ping of the hull adjusting to small inconsistencies in the near-vacuum of space. 

Aeryn drifted half asleep, thinking about John past and present.  Their time aboard Talyn had been a wonder of passion and tenderness.  It was as if someone had fused two elements that didn’t belong together into a single fragile construct that defied science every moment that it existed.  That creation had been irrevocably shattered by his death, leaving nothing but the razor sharp fragments. 

They had picked up the damaging shards together, ignoring the lacerations as they sought to build a new treasure out of the old.  She had provided the impetus, but in many ways it was John who had reached out to pick up the handfuls of slivers, bleeding from a dozen small wounds as they stacked the existing, familiar bits into a new pattern, and fused it together with their commitment to each other.  It wasn’t the rare and beautiful object from the past.  It was an uglier item, but they’d assembled it themselves, and it would be sturdier for their effort. 

They had time now -- time for him to listen to where she had been and what she had learned, and time for her to understand how he’d learned to survive on his own.  They had time now that he’d agreed to stay with her. 
 
“John?” Aeryn broke the idyll, shifting against him.

He yawned and stretched beneath her.  “Yeah?” 

“What made you decide to give us one more chance?”  She traced a small pattern on his chest with one finger.  “You made it sound like you’d decided not to risk it.”

“I had,” he answered, gazing at the ceiling.  He held her in place and shifted to one side, getting more comfortable. 

“What changed your mind?”  She rested her head against his chest and listened to him take a deep breath, the movement of air through his lungs a slow susurrence beneath her ear, providing a quiet background to the beating of his heart. 

“Do you remember what you said about being with me now, going with me, and not leaving?”  She nodded without lifting her head.  “The way you said it sounded a lot like a verse from one of Earth’s oldest religious texts.  It’s a passage about a guy who wakes up one morning and discovers that he’s been sleeping where the gate to heaven is located.” 

“I don’t understand how that made you change your mind.” 

He hugged her tightly.  “The struggle to enter through heaven’s gate would be an entire lifetime’s endeavor, more difficult than anything else a human being could dream up.  But the reward for success would be immeasurable.  It would make the entire effort worthwhile.”
 
Aeryn didn’t move for a few microts, overwhelmed by his description.  The only thing she’d forgotten about John Crichton was just how deeply he loved her, how completely he would commit himself once he decided it was what he wanted.  “And you made up your mind just like that,” she said, raising her upper body so she could watch his expression. 

“Just like that,” he confirmed.  A twitch of a grin flickered then disappeared.  Aeryn gave him a small thump against his shoulder with her fist, demanding that he share the hidden thought.  “I decided that the reward waiting for me was worth the effort.” 

“What was the reward?” 

He cupped her face in both hands and lifted his head to kiss her, one thumb moving across her cheekbone.  “You, Aeryn Sun.” 

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Thank you for reading,

Kernil Crash

Purveyor of Hallucinations