Or Dance (G)

[CrystalMoon]

Or Dance
By CrystalMoon

Spoilers: Through the miniseries
Rating: PG
Summary: Filler fic for part 2 of the mini.
Feedback: Yes, of course!
Disclaimer: Farscape characters owned by Henson. I just play with them.


John rests his bloody palms on her belly and stares at it in wonder. Aeryn feels the kick on the left this time and she moves his hand just a bit until it’s over the spot.

“That one was harder,” she murmurs.

“Yeah.” John lowers his head into her lap, his fingers lightly brushing her stomach. “You’ve got a place kicker in there.”

“She’ll be able to defend herself.”

“Or dance.” John closes his eyes but keeps up a steady rhythm of stroking her belly as the baby settles down inside her.

Aeryn sighs. She runs her fingers through his hair and watches him lean into the movement. “You’re bleeding, you know.”

He shrugs. “My head’s killing me. It’s … full. Hard to think straight.” His eyes are still closed and it looks like he’s settling down for a nap.

“How did you get hurt?”

He mumbles something unintelligible.

“Let me clean your wound.” Aeryn shifts but John doesn’t move, his head heavy and solid on her legs. “John, get up.”

“Man, it really hurts.”

“I know,” she says, “but you’ll have to get up for me to fix it.”

“Okay.” He lifts his head and stands as if he’s a hundred cycles old, slowly unfolding his body from the floor, and blinking as if he’s not sure where to go.

Aeryn swallows her anger as she looks at him, looks at what he risked earlier, at what he’s still thinking of risking, and decides arguing won’t change John’s mind now, especially in the state he’s in. Instead, she stands, clutching his forearm as she almost loses her balance. She touches her stomach in surprise at the change in equilibrium. Then she turns and pushes John onto her old spot on the bed.

He sinks down with a grunt and begins fumbling with that frelling notebook of his, marking the pages with smears of blood, looking for all the world as if he were transferring the knowledge to the paper through his blood, his DNA. When did wormholes and Crichton become one in the same? When did he become the nexus in all this, the sole arbiter of universal peace or universal destruction?

Aeryn strides to the other side of the room. After wetting a rag and gathering some medicine and bandages from a lower shelf, she sits at his side, dropping the supplies between them. He’s gingerly touching the gash above his eyebrow, and it’s then that Aeryn realizes he has the exact same injury the other John had gotten before they’d left on Talyn. She draws in a quick breath as her gut clenches in a way that has nothing to do with the baby.

She slaps John’s hand away from the site. “You’ll make it bleed again,” she says much more harshly than she intended.

He grunts and lowers his hand. “I need my pen,” he mumbles. “Need to write everything down before I forget.”

As he starts to rise, she puts a hand on his shoulder. “In a moment.”

But John slides out from under her and begins rummaging in the things on his table, knocking over chess pieces and letting papers drift to the floor, finally chasing down a pen under one of the stools. As Aeryn watches him flip to a blank page in his notebook and scribble something down, she folds her hands around the bulge in her belly and tries to remember how Zhaan  managed to be so patient all the time. Finally, she calls his name – twice -- and he glances up as if he’d forgotten she was there.

“You can write while I bandage your head.” It’s not a suggestion, and Aeryn is almost pleased to see the sheepish look on his face.

As he sits once again, she attacks the streaks of blood on his face and neck. When his skin is clean, she gently cleans the gash above his eyebrow, aware of John’s pen scratching away at the paper the entire time, sketching some sort of device that looks like it could be used for torture, and filling the margins with one equation after another. As she squeezes sweet-smelling ointment on the gash and covers it with a bandage, his pen finally slows. Then it stops.

“I know we protect each other,” he begins, staring at his notebook, “I know that. But this is one thing that you can’t help with. I’m the guy everyone wants. I’m the one with the knowledge. Do you honestly think we’ll be left alone with this war on?”

Aeryn shakes her head. “The Eidelons may be able to stop the war. It doesn’t always come down to you.”

He glances at her. “They’re a long shot at best. You said so yourself.”

“Then we run. We hide. We take Moya as far into Tormented Space as we can and we take ourselves out of …”

John is shaking his head. “I wish we could, babe, but we’ve been running forever. They always find us, and in the meantime billions of people could die.”

“That’s not your responsibility.”

“Maybe not, but I can’t unknow what I know. It could stop the war. It’s so damn powerful, it could stop anything.”

“And how many lives will be lost using it?”

John shrugs and lets his head drop between his shoulders. “Don’t know. Thousands, maybe more.”

“And you can do that? Kill all these people?” She lets the incredulity show in her voice.

John meets her eyes, jaw thrust forward, fighting back tears, looking tormented and sad. “To protect you and the baby and stop this damn thing, yeah.”

Aeryn hates this, hates the word “wormhole,” hates the Scarrens, and the Peace Keepers, and the Fates more than anything. She wants to rip his notebook out of John’s hands and throw it out an airlock or blast it with her prowler. She wants to knock John unconscious and take him somewhere quiet and faraway, somewhere backward and primitive where they’d never heard of John Crichton or wormholes. She wants to make love to him so long and hard he forgets everything he’s learned this day.

“I’m sorry,” he says, reaching out to touch her belly and letting his knuckles graze across the fabric of her suit. “I’m really, really sorry. Maybe I won’t have to use the weapon. Maybe Fate will be on our side for once.”

Aeryn lets out a sharp laugh. She presses her hand on top of his. “I don’t like this. I’ll never like this.”

“I know.” He grabs her other hand and brings it to his lips.

Aeryn turns her palm, lays it against his cheek, and says fiercely, “We will make it through this.”

John nods. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Then they kiss, hard and urgent, tongues intertwining, thighs pressing against each other, John’s fingers curling in her hair. When they break it off they’re both breathing hard, and Aeryn can feel a tear run down her face. John wipes it away with his thumb.

“I need to talk to Pilot,” he says after a moment.

Aeryn nods as John bends down and kisses her belly. Then he grabs his notebook. Before he’s even out the door, he’s shouting for 1812 to meet him in command. Aeryn sits on the bed for a moment, undecided. Then she goes to the storage bin across the room, and pulls out every weapon she has. She dumps them on the bed and sets to work with a rag and a can of lutra oil. While she cleans a pulse rifle and while Crichton works on a doomsday machine, the baby inside her begins to kick -- or perhaps to dance.