Originally posted 1/26/07I love Jack Crichton, I love Aeryn....I love Jack and Aeryn interacting, which we saw far too little of in the series.... This is Terra Firma filler, somewhere between Aeryn taking Jack to see Saturn, and Jack deciding to throw in with John against TR Holt and company.... It was a bit of a challenge getting across what I wanted to get across, when I didn't think Aeryn would be volunteering much....
Rating: PG for some cranky language (fairly mild)
Setting: TF
Spoilers: Through TF
Disclaimer: Not my characters, not my universe, no money being made and no disrespect intended.... (And I'd much rather the actual owners were telling more FS stories instead of me!)
Thanks to Imloco2 and Shipsister for the betaing, and Auna for a driveby!
Alien Perspectives
“Fine!” Jack Crichton shouted at his son in frustration. He turned and stomped out of the make-shift lab where IASA’s best and brightest were still poking at the technology that John had brought from Moya. The elder Crichton headed for the parking lot, irritated that the automatic door didn’t allow for the satisfying bang of the front door at home. Now,
that had been a common sound during John’s teenage years, when the frequent arguments between father and son had usually ended with one or the other of them stomping out of the house in a huff, slamming the door behind him.
They hadn’t gone at each other like that since John was just a kid. Why were they doing it now? It was pretty damn foolish, he told himself regretfully. For God’s sake, John was almost literally back from the dead – Why the hell couldn’t they manage a simple civil conversation?
Because sometime in the last four years, his only son had gotten as pigheaded and uncommunicative as any teenager, that’s why! Jack’s mood swung from regretful back to pissed off.
His attention was distracted by the sound of an alien spaceship landing fifty yards away, within the secured perimeter. Recognizing Aeryn Sun’s fighter, he stood and watched as she brought the ship in for a perfect landing. She popped the canopy and climbed out, acknowledging his presence with a nod before she started a check of her craft. As seemed to be standard on those days when she took her ship out, she’d donned her own black leather clothing, rather than the more casual clothing that Livvy had lent her.
Damned if he didn’t like that girl for a lot of reasons, he thought, not the least of which was because she so obviously cared about his son. Jack had had an interesting, sideways conversation with her about John when she’d flown him out to see Saturn. More than that, it occurred to him suddenly, she, like the more obviously alien D’Argo and Rygel, had been John’s shipmate since the day he got dragged through that damn wormhole.... Without really thinking about it, he picked up his feet and walked over to her.
Aeryn must have caught the movement. She stopped what she was doing, and watched him approach, curiosity written across her all-too-human-looking face.
When he got there, he smiled, and she smiled back. “Would you tell me something?” he asked impulsively.
Her forehead wrinkled. “If I can....”
Her caution was disheartening, because he had a feeling it originated with John. He looked back towards the door to the lab, looking for any sign of his son. There wasn’t any, so he asked, “Can we take a little walk?”
“Sure.”
They walked off a ways on the tarmac, away from the building. Jack tried to decide if he really wanted to ask the question that was dancing around his brain. Would it be invading John’s privacy? Would Aeryn Sun even answer? Still frustrated enough about the fights he was having with John, he finally just blurted out, “What the hell happened to him out there?” He flung an arm towards the heavens in exasperation.
Aeryn looked at him for so long, he was pretty sure she wasn’t going to answer, and he felt really embarrassed for even asking. But then she took a deep breath and said, “He has been...challenged.”
Huh?
Challenged? What the hell did that mean? He barely stopped himself from sticking a finger in his ear to try to “clear” his hearing. She was speaking English, but even with translator microbes, he didn’t get it.
She smiled at him like she was used to these little communication failures, and tried to explain. “On Earth, John was a member of the elite. He’s highly educated, one of the very few chosen to leave this planet and go into space. Highly respected.” She looked at him for confirmation.
“That’s about right,” he agreed, even if he wouldn’t have put it quite that way.
“Then he was pulled into a very different world, a place where he couldn’t even open the doors. Didn’t know how to clean his teeth.” She shrugged. “Things any child can do.”
Jack chuckled. “He’s joked about that.”
Aeryn gave him a look of total disdain that offended the hell out of him, and he glared at her. She stared back impassively, and he finally realized that he deserved the scorn. Of course John would never admit how painful something like that had been!
When they got that settled, Aeryn spoke quietly. “In my life, I’ve seen...recruits...who are far away from everything they care about. Sometimes they just....” She paused to find the right words. “Sometimes they just give up. They die, or allow themselves to be killed in battle.” She licked her lips and looked him in the eye. “John has never given up.”
Jack stifled a gasp. He didn’t much like the words she’d just used: “Die.” “Be killed in battle.” With a knot in his stomach, he searched her face, trying to decide if she was just expressing things in the black and white terms of the soldier’s world she lived in, meaning only that John had had to do a lot of adapting to get along on the other side of the galaxy – or if she was hinting that John had been through hell in the last four years. He chewed on his lip and debated asking for an explanation, but he didn’t think she’d say anything more than she already had. He could tell his silence was making her nervous, but his brain kept on chugging along, and he had no choice but to keep thinking. He found he couldn’t bear to imagine bad things happening to his only son. So for self-preservation, he decided that
Adapt or die was the interpretation he was going to take. He glanced back towards the building where he’d left John, and his eye was again caught by Aeryn’s alien fighting ship, which in turn made him think of the rest of Moya’s crew. He felt the corners of his mouth turn upward, and he turned to Aeryn. “You all are getting along okay here,” he commented, with an emphasis on the last word. “You’ve been traveling all over the planet and you don’t seem traumatized.”
His observation seemed to amuse her. “We know John,” she answered easily. “He is...
better than many of you, but he is profoundly human. This place is not so alien to us.”
That simple comment took his breath away on so many levels, he couldn’t begin to sort them out. The trust it implied in his son, even when, as he well knew, Aeryn was uncertain about her own relationship with John these days. The admiration the word “better” bespoke. The fact that these strangers, these aliens, would accept this planet for John’s sake. But most of all, those two words,
profoundly human. They reached deep inside him and touched his deepest fears: the fear that John himself had become, in some fundamental way, an alien, lost to his family and to his world.
But there it was, in the words of an alien woman: However much he’d changed, John was
profoundly human.
Jack could feel his eyes burn with hot liquid he struggled to control.
Aeryn looked at him, uncertainty on her face.
He blinked twice, banishing the tears, and reached his hand out to touch Aeryn Sun’s arm. “I’m fine, I’m fine.” And he was. No matter what she hadn’t said about the past four years, no matter how carefully she’d put her words together, she had made him put aside the fear that had been growing slowly but steadily in the weeks since John’s return, every time they butted heads over sharing the alien technology, every time it seemed that John would never open up to him – the fear that he couldn’t trust what was going on in his son’s head.
Maybe, just maybe, he could stop being afraid, and just listen to John. Even when the boy was being as pigheaded and stubborn as a teenager.
Maybe,
especially when he was being pigheaded and stubborn.
Just maybe, John had a very human point to make about all this after all.
Jack cleared his throat and smiled at Aeryn. “Did you need a lift somewhere?”
She shook her head. “No. Another team of techs will be looking at my prowler shortly. I need to oversee them.”
Jack nodded. “I’ve got a meeting or three I should be at anyway. Damn, I hate this desk work!” Aeryn smiled sympathetically and then turned on her heels and headed for the lab to check in.
“Thank you, Aeryn Sun,” he said to himself as he watched her walk away. “If he lets you get away, I just may have to question his humanity after all. Or at least his sanity.”
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