Fic: Dispossession (rated R)

[tazey]

Spoilers: up through Dog With Two Bones
Rating: R (some difficult topics)
Summary: J&A angst, some Butch and Sundance.
Disclaimers: Blah, blah, blah. Not mine.
Huge thanks to my betas: Aeryncrichton and WalkingTheBeam


DISPOSSESSION PART 1


“Stupid!” Aeryn shouted at herself as a spark burned her fingertips. “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” She nearly slammed her fists on her prowler’s consoles and caught herself right in time, she had done enough damage to those consoles already. She clenched her fists hard until her nails drew blood from her palms and breathed deeply to gain some control back. She couldn’t afford losing another feature on her crippled Prowler, she already had to repair her comms, her radars and her maneuvering controls; even her automatic environmental regulators were showing signs of weakness.

She had started not knowing exactly where she was going and what she would find there but now, she wasn’t even able to go anywhere. Why did it have to be so hard?

She had left. Alone. So fate had decided. She didn’t want to go but she had to and was relieved at the time that the outcome of the coin toss had turned out that way. It made it easier, for John. No more questions without answers, he had to bow before fate too. And he did.

She had kept her comms channel open for as long as her Prowler had remained able to receive a transmission from Moya. Pilot knew she had, even though he hadn’t said anything about it, he had just left his end of the comms channel open too, rerouting anything that could come his way and so she had listened to the farewells the others had said to John before silence settled in on Moya. Then she had heard him take off in his module and had listened to his ragged breathing reverberating in the confines of his small craft until her comms had gone dead, overcome by the distance she had put between them. Finally, with tears streaming down her face, she had lashed out on her craft, feeling an overwhelming urge to destroy whatever was in her way, striking blindly, unable to even keep her rage aimed at the sturdiest and less important features of her Prowler. She had to let something out and that had been the only way she had found but now, she was stranded in the middle of nowhere and she could only blame herself for it. A wry smile crept unbidden on her face. Even John can last longer on his own.

She let out a shaky sigh and resumed her repairs on her maneuvering controls. The first thing she needed was to be able to pilot her craft since she knew she could weave her way around this particularly empty blotch of space without comms and radars for now. Once her automatic course was restored, she would have time to take care of the rest.

She did not realize they were around her until it was too late, with no radars left to alert her of the danger and no comms to be hailed in warning for peaceful surrender. When the marauder loomed in front of her windshield, she had already lost consciousness, only halfway through erasing her databases. Peacekeepers knew their own weaknesses well and she could not have made it any easier for them. Their well-applied stun beam should only have further crippled her already crippled craft but with her weakening environmentals, she had not been able to compensate the intense heat the beam had generated on the hull and had quickly collapsed on her consoles. I’m sorry, John.


*************

“You have got to be kidding me…” John whispered in frozen stupor as he stared at the stretch of space before him. He blinked several times to make sure he wasn’t having a particularly not funny bout of sudden near-sightedness and then squirmed in his seat, trying to get a better look at his now empty surroundings only to realize with growing dread that they were indeed so. Totally and irreversibly empty.

He pressed his lips together and stared hard at the dark space in front of him, trying to squeeze some sensible thought into his mind and, failing to, resorted to the automatic reach of his hand for his data recorder, flicking switches on and off to force some meaning out of it. The device came bursting through life and sputtered endless lists of figures and charts.

“Frell…” John breathed out as the data slowly took form before his eyes.

“Finally!” Harvey interjected in a grunt.

John shook his head, his brows deeply furrowed in utter disbelief. “This can’t be…”

“John, John, John…” Harvey sighed dejectedly. “Sometimes I wonder if your eyes are connected to your brain.”

John simply ignored him and continued studying the puzzling data. The figures his recorder was displaying over and over again were hinting at two wormhole occurrences in the past few arns: one was located where Moya had been not long ago, the other farther away in time and space stood exceedingly close to the spot where D’Argo’s ship had blown the rogue Leviathan to inexistence and, as he read more of the data, he slowly came to realize that the weapon on D’Argo’s ship had generated a proto-wormhole able to blow up a celestial body the size of the Earth’s moon.

He eyed the data with growing despair. Would he ever see an end to the number of players involved in that frelling wormhole game?

It wasn’t even as if he had to actually interpret that data or extrapolate on it, the answer was as evident as if written in plain English: the weaponry on that old Luxan ship was undoubtedly based on wormhole technology. There was no denying it, no other possible explanation for the data swirling before his eyes. He cut off the display with a shaking hand, overcome with the unfolding repercussions of that finding. The thought had crossed his mind when he had seen the awe-inspiring power unleashed by the old Luxan ship but he was trying so hard not to think of wormholes at the time that he had firmly squashed it. Wormholes had always equalled a possible way home but that was no longer true, worse than that, it was dangerous and thinking of the home he would never have again crushed his heart in an iron vice.

Yet, it seemed that wormholes refused to abandon him and he was getting really tired of it. He dug the palms of his hands in his red-rimmed eyes and felt his weary body start to spin and fall…

 “So, which way is down?”

Harvey’s high-pitched quip startled him. His eyes flew open and failed to recognize his surroundings. Dark space with specks of light still shrouded him but he no longer was in his module. He groped for something to hang on to, panicked at the uncontrolled sense of weightlessness his body was experiencing. His outstretched hand gratefully closed over what felt like a handhold but an unexpected momentum brought him crashing against the invisible black wall the handhold was on and he let out a muffled grunt of surprise.

“Which way is down?” Harvey repeated with the same high-pitched voice yet now tinged with impatience.

John examined the strange jumpsuit he was in, feeling here and there pieces of padding that had protected his body from hurt when he had crashed against the wall. He moved slowly about, his body still experiencing some sort of null gravity banning any swift movement. Then he turned his head toward Harvey and blinked, unbelieving. Harvey was dressed with the same kind of jumpsuit and looking very much like an 8-year-old version of a Sebacean-Scarran hybrid.

“What the frell?” John muttered, looking around him as frantically as he could without sending his own smaller body into a spin.

“Down is toward the enemy’s door.” Harvey recited, insisting on each word as if believing that John was being particularly slow-witted and he pointed toward a lighter huge opening across from them.

“I don’t remember th…” John grew suddenly silent and looked at his surroundings again. He had never been in a place like this and yet it felt eerily familiar. He saw a group of kids dressed in matching jumpsuits position themselves around the opening across and realization dawned. “My memories are not enough, you also had to go through the books I’ve read and recreate them?!” He growled toward Harvey.

“And a marvellous job I did, don’t you think?” Harvey beamed.

“Frell off, Harv’!”

“Oh, come on, John! You loved that book!”

“Yeah. And you know what? I don’t wanna play anymore either.” He started crawling toward the battleroom exit on his side.

“All right then,” Harvey seemingly relented before catching John’s free arm in a strong grip and bringing his head close to his. “Do you remember when your third-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, told you to go and introduce yourself to your new classmates?” He susurrated in John’s ear.

John jerked away and banged his elbow on the wall, painfully this time. He couldn’t stop the lump from forming in his throat. This was one memory whose most intimate details he had never shared with anyone, one memory that, though extremely vivid, had seemed to escape the repeated and defiling plunderings perpetrated on his brain, one memory that he particularly cherished.

“Of course you do…” Harvey’s whispered words sent his heart stomping in his chest and his teachers’ voice floated in his mind.


>>>>> John? <<<<<


“No…” John moaned, trying to resist Harvey’s pull on his mind but the memory was so strong that it escaped the cradle of his arms and seeped through his fingers.


>>>>> John? Why don’t you take a few minutes to go and introduce yourself to your new teacher and classmates?

John gazed up at Miss Johnson with what he hoped looked like detachment even though his heart was thumping wildly in his chest. “Sure, Ma’am” he replied with a polite smile and his coolest well-rehearsed shrug. He silently said goodbye to Meg, Charles and Calvin as he put a stop to their eventful journey on Camazotz. For once, he had been happy to bid his time with a little bit of leisure reading while the other kids in the class finished their exercises, but this was so much more exciting.

He got up from behind his desk and swiftly made his way out of the class, aware of the stares following him to the door. He managed to keep his poise until he closed the door behind him and found himself in the school’s main corridor, entirely alone. His gaze immediately flew to another door at the other end of the corridor and a huge grin spread on his face. An irresistible urge to giggle accompanied him on his frantic race, his legs pumping silently on the corridor’s floor. It was over too soon, the distance covered in hardly more than 3 seconds and as he checked his surroundings once more and made sure he was still alone, he dashed around again back and forth between the two doors, racing so hard toward his goal that his heart felt like bursting through his chest and then he skidded to a stop, panting slightly, exhilaration reddening his cheeks and lighting his eyes. He raised himself on his toes to take a peek inside the classroom and spotted Mrs. Grimes, the fourth-grade teacher, sitting behind her desk. Even though he was actually not very fond of Miss Johnson, he would forever be grateful to her for asking his parents if they would agree to let him skip the rest of the third grade to move up to fourth grade immediately. His breathing abated slowly as he remained still before the door, his hand poised over the handle, readying himself to enter a new universe that he imagined to be full of greater and faster learning. Not to mention that DK would be his classmate now.

He was only mildly surprised to see another eight-year-old kid dressed in the scariest Halloween costume he’d ever seen sidle up to him.

“How do you feel?” The other boy asked with what seemed to be longing in his voice.

John looked at him, his face beaming in happiness. “Unique…” he breathed out and then his features grew suddenly serious and thoughtful as he tried to express himself further. “I can be me… at last. “ He gave the other boy a wistful and crooked smile to which the boy answered with a slight shake of the head…<<<<<


“You have to give up that line of thought, John,” Harvey’s words sliced through John’s memory but John refused to open his eyes, trying to hold on to the little boy he had been then, still seeing the small hand poised over the handle.

“I have,” John croaked. “The hard way.”

“No you haven’t,” Harvey corrected him. “You think you have but you haven’t.” Harvey’s voice became gentler. “You’re not unique, John. You’ve never been unique. Scorpius only went after you because you were easier to access… or so he thought. But he had other options. Wormholes have been a long-running obsession on this side of the universe, many have had a brush with them over the course of millennia: Tithians, Boorises, Phots, the ones you call The Ancients… even Luxans at some point, though everyone still wonders how those dim-witted warriors ever found themselves with wormhole technology. Even ‘they’ don’t know.”

John felt Harvey’s push on his shoulder.

“Open your eyes, John!”

Push came to shove and John slammed into a wall. His eyes opened reluctantly. They were back in the null gravity battleroom, still dressed in jumpsuits, still small but certainly not alone. Hundreds of other kids from different species were drifting in, pouring into the room from openings that seemed to be located everywhere.

“That’s correct. You’re not unique and you’re not alone. They aren’t either.”

John recoiled as Harvey’s concerned face intruded on his private space in the pressing confines of the module, sending the battleroom into oblivion. He averted his eyes and resolutely focused his gaze on his consoles and the empty stretch of space before him.

“You don’t have to bear the weight of the universe on your shoulders, John. Let it spin without you for a while, forget about wormholes and the likes… unless you really think they can help you get Aeryn back.”

John’s heaving at the direct stab to his heart turned into a fit of coughing. “Too late,” he whispered.

“It is NEVER too late.”

John chuckled ironically and coughed harder at the same time. “Say that to the oxygen tank. It’s empty,” he stated with a calm he had not expected to have. He could have sworn he felt the clone push him away to press his nose on the consoles and the frustrated growl in his ears was no less real. He cut off the blinking red light of the oxygen tank’s sensor and let his hand slide down in a caress on the consoles. There was nothing left to do. He wasn’t giving up, just surrendering to his abilities. An arn ago he still would have had the energy to fight his way to the other end of the universe but this was just so way out of his league. Alone, without fuel or oxygen and without Aeryn, gone God only knew where. One evil at a time, one impossible deed at a time was the best he could do. “You know, Harvey…” he turned and looked the clone squarely in the eyes. “I AM unique… to you.”

He smiled ruefully at Harvey’s crestfallen expression then leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms on his chest, settling in for what he hoped would be a painless death this time. He could already feel his conscience slipping away with the lack of oxygen in spite of Harvey’s accurate rendering of a wolf’s desperate howling.

>>>>> knock, knock, knock…

“Well, look who’s here!” Mrs. Grimes exclaimed in good humor as she ushered John in front of her class. “John has come to say hello.”

John shuffled on his feet, a bit ill at ease before the older kids’ scrutiny.

“As I told you yesterday, John will be joining our class next Monday,” Mrs Grimes continued with a reassuring squeeze on his shoulder, “and about just in time to help us out with the Halloween decorations.”

John finally caught DK’s gaze and gave him a conniving smile.

“Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, John?”

John looked at the attentive pupils before him and opened his mouth to speak… <<<<<


A gleam over a prowler’s dark hull suddenly flashed before his windshield and made his eyes flutter in automatic response to the stimulus.
“Aeryn…” he let out with his last breath.



*************

Aeryn had come to her senses not long after they had dragged her out of her prowler, the uncomfortable feel of two strong hands gripping her upper arms and towing her along a large corridor breaking through her shrouded mind. She had recognized their uniforms and gradually deduced her surroundings as they went along. She was in a Directorate scout ship. Two Marauders, ten prowlers, a total crew of fifty her mind had rattled off immediately. And three holding cells…

The iron grips had tightened painfully on her arms as she had struggled to a steadier footing, signalling her slow returning awareness. A quick glance around had told her she would have gained nothing by rebelling then, two other well-armed troopers had been accompanying them to a cell into which she had been unceremoniously thrown without a single word spoken from her captors. She had squatted against the wall facing the entrance of the cell and waited for their return, keeping a mental count of the passing time, already missing the feel of her pulse pistol against her thigh.

Two arns later, she had calmly concluded that if her captors had needed any information from her, they would have come asking for it by now, which could only mean that she hadn’t been fast enough to erase her Prowler’s flight recordings and that they were most certainly headed toward Moya’s last known position if not there already. She had been able to feel the strain of the ship’s maximum speed as the cell’s yet thickly padded walls had faintly vibrated against her back. For a moment, thinking of those left on Moya, and Moya herself, she had somehow wished that she could have succeeded at erasing the recordings and been interrogated instead, hoping then to buy the others enough time to starburst away safely. Yet, when the door to her cell opened to let in the same group of four well-armed soldiers, she fought hard to keep her resolve at the thought of the fast-upcoming interrogation.

She could have smirked at the overblown security measures taken by her captors to squash out any attempt at escaping she could have tried. Not only was she tightly bound with double overlooping manacles but the four soldiers accompanying her wore such powerful weapons she could have sworn they were in to seize an entire compound of rebels. And they were skilled too, certainly not some rookies likely to get too close or inattentive, they moved in a precise choreographed ensemble that left no space for temerity. A long time ago, she would have most certainly smirked in misplaced pride but, this time, the corners of her mouth didn’t even twitch. She knew what the next step was and when they finally stopped, she was sadly not proven wrong.

The unmistakable acrid smell assaulted her senses as soon as the doors swooshed open. She had never been able to determine why medical facilities seemed to smell the same way all over the universe but they did. She had been in enough of them to know they did. And that doctor standing by the other side of the room was just like any other doctor and using the exact same tools and cures, except his assignment today was slightly different. He was not here to nurture the wounded back to health, he was here to make sure prisoners would live long enough through whatever torture was inflicted upon them to reveal the information they held. She had never had to interrogate a prisoner herself, not in the harshest ways at least, she had been a Prowler pilot and interrogation was not part of her normal duty but she knew the procedures and had been required to sit through and watch a number of interrogations over the cycles. She had seen doctors entering the interrogation room when the prisoner passed away, started convulsing or bled too profusely, she had seen them treating the tortured body to prevent an untimely death, giving it enough boost to last a while longer so that the interrogators would get the needed information. The best interrogators knew exactly what pain was best to inflict and when to pause, others needed doctors to correct their mistakes.

She tried to keep her face blank as she saw the man approach her with an injector in his hand, even though her whole body strained to jerk away from the incoming threat. She felt her heart sink to the spot where her stomach should have been, had it not gone missing a few microts earlier when the door to her cell had opened. How could I have been so stupid?! She inwardly yelled.

This wasn’t even threatening in itself and it shouldn’t have been, not for her anyway. The drug in the syringe was just a sedative so that the doctor could examine the prisoner calmly and assess his general physical condition to let the interrogators know what their margin was before the battle of wills could begin. In other times, she would have let him inject her without the slightest resistance…

Protection, first and foremost. No unnecessary risks. Those had been recurrent in the guidelines.

She scrutinized his impassive face and debated for a microt whether or not to tell him straight away and avoid being given drugs that would potentially harm the fetus, because, he would find out on his own soon enough. It had taken that juvenile doctor on the medship only two microts to confirm her suspicions and hardly a hundred more to declare that the fetus was healthy and developing normally. He had even had the time and nerve to frown at her patronizingly when she had mentioned her heavy drinking on Valldon and then had encouraged her to forgo such dreadful habits in the future and find quieter occupations. She had dutifully nodded her assent while images of pulse fires and explosions had run through her mind and then she had gone back to Moya as if nothing had changed. Yet, in the end, it was him who had met an untimely blazing death when Talyn had panicked and blown the medship to smithereens.

She didn’t honestly believe that they would generously avoid harming the fetus, it was actually something they could play against her. Whatever she knew against the life of the unborn child. But maybe, it would be different, this child was different, the first Human-Sebacean hybrid, the child of the Peacekeepers’ most wanted man, the very dead yet achingly alive John Crichton. She braced herself, slowly raised her manacled hands to ward off the doctor’s approach and opened her mouth to speak but before she had time to utter the words she was still looking for, she was cut off by a burst of barked codes on the facility’s comms.

The doctor and his assistant, who had been working on a desk until now, sprang to life and began to swiftly and methodically place several pieces of equipment by the examination’s bed. She tried to recognize what drugs they were selecting for use, her heart starting to pound wildly in her chest. Medical emergency, unknown lifeform, Sebacean like physiology, revival procedures. Those were the translations of the codes she had heard. Two of the soldiers who had gotten her there grabbed her again and forcefully towed her back toward the entrance to leave the medbay. A flash of light off a syringe passed from hand to hand caught her eye and she craned her neck to take a better look. She thought it had looked familiar, like the one she should have used on John when they had been caught in the Flax had she not broken it in her fall. A brutal slap on her face put an end to her curiosity and she shook her head to clear the sudden dizziness.

They took the opposite direction from their arrival when they exited the medbay. She heard faraway shouts and pounding running feet coming from the corridor they had used previously. She fought the urge to turn back and look right away. It was too soon, they were still too far away, if she turned now, she would only get another violent slap if not worse and still not know who was being rushed in the medbay. She purposefully lurched to slow down the pace of the group of soldiers around her, making herself heavier in their grips, trying to gain a handful of microts as the noise got closer and closer. Just as they were about to turn a corner, she planted her feet firmly on the ground and jerked her upper body around. She caught a glimpse of another group of soldiers surrounding a gurney before a boot connected sharply with her right knee and sent her crashing on the floor. They dragged her the rest of the way and threw her ruthlessly back in her cell. She crawled to the opposite wall, her knee throbbing painfully throughout her leg and propped herself up against the hard surface. She closed her eyes and went through the glimpse again. Lying on the gurney, she had seen a black leather-clad form with brown hair that looked much too familiar.

John.


*************

John felt his body tense and spasm under the coursing waves of pain whose epicentre had blown his heart. This was not his death, he thought dazedly, it couldn’t be. His death was to be painless and this hurt like hell. His body started convulsing and he felt a strong pressure on his arm, a freezing liquid started to worm its way through his shoulder, pushing muscles and flesh aside as if it was too thick to flow normally through his veins; it spread across his torso and abdomen and the convulsions stopped. His sense of smell suddenly came back and an unmistakable acrid smell assaulted his brain with memories both familiar and repulsive. He had never been able to determine why medical facilities seemed to smell the same way all over the universe but they did. He had been in enough of them to know they did. And as much as he hated that smell and those places, he had spent some of his first nights curled up in Moya’s medbay because the smell had somehow reminded him of Earth.

He coughed as his lungs attempted to clear off the unwanted carbon dioxide and replace it with shakily inhaled oxygen. He tried to open his eyes but the light on his face was too sharp and his blurred vision failed to focus properly. He felt the shift in the air on his side as a form approached him and an overpowering sensual perfume filled his senses. Trouble, his mind screamed. All the women he had met on this side of the universe had only brought him trouble.

“Do you remember me?” The woman asked with a mocking tone.

He blinked several times to clear his vision but to no avail. “Fate?” He croaked, the intended irony failing to make it through his burning throat. He was rewarded with a warm laughter that gradually subsided into a seeping cold sneer against his ear.

“Yes.”

John got into another coughing fit and curled up on the bed to keep the pain in his lungs from radiating through his entire body.

Commandant Mele-On Graza let her steely gaze roam over the wretched body of the human and then threw a sharp questioning glance at her ship’s physician.

“Three arns,” the man responded matter-of-factly after a quick flick of the eyes to the results of his ongoing scans.

She nodded and left the room wordlessly, a determined smirk creeping its way on her features. It had taken her cycles to achieve her present position, three arns were but a drop of time in her project’s scope. Scorpius’ failure to obtain the human’s cooperation, either reluctant or voluntary, had been no surprise, the hybrid had never been one for politics and psychological manipulation. Frelling scientific minds! She would not make the same mistakes, she knew better than to be fooled by the apparent weaknesses of inferior species such as humans; John Crichton was certainly strong enough to propel her to the next level, even faster than she had planned at first. And for that, she certainly could wait three arns.

[tazey]

Spoilers: up through Dog With Two Bones
Rating: R (some difficult topics)
Summary: J&A angst, some Butch and Sundance.
Disclaimers: Blah, blah, blah. Not mine.
Huge thanks to my betas: Aeryncrichton and WalkingTheBeam



PART 2

*************

“Harvey! Knock it off!” John growled surly, trying to will away his throbbing headache. He opened his bleary eyes into slits to take a look around him.

“I’m bored,” the clone pouted by way of an explanation.

John spotted him sitting on the floor, propped against the bunk on which he was lying flat on his stomach. The clone was dressed in military fatigues and repeatedly throwing a ball against the door of what appeared to be a holding cell that smelled Peacekeeper all over, straight lines everywhere and practically no decorum. So, he was a prisoner again. “Just stop, will you? My head is hurting like hell.” He closed his eyes, looking forward to some peace and quiet but his bunk kept vibrating from the clone’s activity, jarring his teeth and perpetuating his headache. “Harvey!” he growled again, “I thought I had asked you to stop!” He propped himself up on one elbow to stare irritatedly at him.

“I have!” Harvey exclaimed in outrage, showing him his empty hands. “Hezmana, John! You are one cranky survivor!”

John’s brows furrowed in puzzlement, Harvey had indeed stopped his throws. “What’s this then?”

“What’s what?”

“This,” John put his hand on the metallic side of the bunk and felt it vibrating under his palm.

“I don’t know,” Harvey shrugged disinterestedly.

John took a roundabout look at the low lit cell. “We’re on a spaceship, right?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not falling apart, is it?” John placed his hand on the wall where the bunk was fixed and could feel the vibrations there too, though somewhat fainter and mixed with others. “These vibrations could be caused by some mechanical failure.”

“I doubt it,” Harvey replied coldly, still peeved at John’s behavior.

John bit his lip and put his hand back on the metallic part of the bunk. Concerned, he kept it there, trying to determine what the vibrations were. He soon detected a pattern, three short vibrations, three long, three short again, a pause and then the whole pattern would resume. He tried to dredge up technical data from his tired brain that could explain that sort of manifestation but found none. It wasn’t exactly surprising, he didn’t have such an extensive knowledge of spaceships’ characteristics this side of the universe. The only thing it reminded him of… realization dawned and he couldn’t help the scornful snort.

“Frell!”

“What?”

“Nothing!” John snapped. Mind frell. Been there, done that. He removed his hand and curled up on his bunk. “Nice try,” he muttered into the thin hard mattress.


**********

Aeryn felt the pain shoot from her busted knee to her entire leg and collapsed on the bunk with a grunt. She massaged her knee with both hands, trying to nurse it back to neural oblivion. She’d been going at it for an arn, alternately using her wounded leg to stand or kick but either way had only made the pain worse. And she still had received no reply.

She could think of many possibilities why, all of them with valid explanations but none was satisfying.

Maybe, in spite of her assumptions, her message was not getting through. The cells were thickly padded, made to either cut off all exterior sound or broadcast it on embedded loudspeakers, whichever would most upset the prisoners. After careful examination, she had determined that by kicking her bunk at the most horizontal angle she could manage, she would be able to send a vibration coursing along the wall, likely reverberating on anything attached to that wall, namely other bunks. Her cell was at one end of the group of three and it was possible that the vibration caused by her kicking was not travelling far enough along the wall.

She massaged her knee some more, wishing that she had been able to use Peacekeeper codes, that human morsh code message was too long for her knee’s sake. John had taught her that particular message one evening as they had been reviewing ways to relay information and status on one another should they have to communicate in different ways and she had taught him back a few codes of her own. But it had been on Talyn, with another John and even if this John had somehow learned about those codes, the Peacekeepers around them knew them too and would catch on the pattern.

So she had to contend with a message that asked for rescue when she was the one most likely to be doing the rescuing and with a total uncertainty as to whether that unsuitable message even reached its goal. Then again, maybe John could hear it, had recognized it, guessed it could come from her but was too angry with her to reply.

Maybe, they had not put him in a cell yet because he was being interrogated.

Maybe, he was in a cell but unconscious or sleeping.

Maybe, he was dead.

The door to her cell burst open and a now familiar group of four soldiers entered. They were back for her.


***********

Commandant Mele-On Grayza could not believe her luck.

She leaned back in her chair and tapped her nails on her desk. This, of course, would call for a little change in plans. She had not considered interrogating Aeryn Sun herself at first. Crichton was her main target, she had only very little interest in the Peacekeeper deserter and had meant for Cidra to run the interrogation, as part of her necessary training. But, the situation called for finesse and however efficient the girl had been on the last interrogation session she had conducted, she had nearly killed the prisoner. Not that his death would have mattered much but such risks could not be taken this time.

She called up Aeryn Sun’s record on her display and went digging for weapons. She smiled thinly as she reviewed the first entries. It seemed that Officer Sun and herself had had a similar start in life. Both had been considered flawed at birth, offspring of unassigned or contrary procreations, meant to join the ranks of those sent on secondary paths before they even learned to walk and yet, unlike her, Aeryn Sun had been left in the soldiers’ crèche, a favor from High Command for reasons left unclear. Her placement there could have been rescinded any time afterwards but the young Aeryn had proved to have top of the scale piloting skills and that had kept her from being pulled out of the soldier path. It was not enough, though, to have her procreation value upped to meet the required standards. Not only had her making been unassigned but it was also a deliberate violation of the rules by her parents. Such a flaw could not be tolerated in future recruits.

Mele-On snorted. High Command had such blind faith in its abilities to breed the best soldiers, even though every quarterly review brought a new batch of failures toward the Peacekeeper genetic excellence. Cidra, a pure product of that quest, had been pulled out of the so-called supreme way two cycles ago when her father had unexpectedly proved to have unwanted genetic traits for a Peacekeeper soldier, traits that had not been foreseen during the evaluation of his procreation value thirteen cycles before, when leadership and ambition had not equalled delusions of grandeur and murder. The girl didn’t even know why she had been pulled out, parentage was kept out of the recruits’ knowledge. Only those high enough inside the procreation department or the chain of command could access such information. Extensive tests had deemed her unfit for any tech or administrative work and, short of sentencing her to the living death, the training supervisors had sent her to serve under Mele-On’s authority. Cidra ‘was’ psychologically unbalanced at times Mele-On had to admit but she knew better than to trust Peacekeeper procreation tests blindly, she was a living example of their unreliability and so Cidra would prove under her guidance. The girl had interesting abilities and she would have use for someone like her in the future.

She flipped through the rest of Aeryn Sun’s record disinterestedly, flying and fighting statistics bored the hezmana out of her. Even though Mele-On had once envied those in the soldiers’ ranks when she thought her chances of promotion were slim, she had long since lost that feeling. Soldiers were hardly more than drones, very few had the slightest strategic or political abilities, their very education and training prevented that. They were not taught to think, only to obey orders. Truth be told, the average tech was smarter than the majority of soldiers. And people like herself, for all the scorn and the rejection they received from the soldiers’ ranks, they could never have been better prepared for High Command.

The procreation department would never list her in their files but High Command had a weakness for smart people and she had been so good, they simply hadn’t been able to ignore her anymore. Scorpius had followed the same strategy but the hybrid was too single-minded in his hatred of the Scarrans to seize his opportunities and truly rise inside the hierarchy.

Mele-On closed the outdated Peacekeeper record and opened the intelligence files her department had provided on John Crichton and his allies. Ex-officer Aeryn Sun was rarely singled out in those, except for the fact that she was never far from him. Yes, indeed, Mele-On thought to herself with a smirk. Aeryn Sun could very well prove to be Crichton’s weakness and in the meantime provide some useful information. Mele-On switched off the display and tapped her comms. “Cidra, my office, now.”


**********

“Where’s Bialar Crais?”

Mele-On Grayza observed with a disinterested expression the carefully neutral look letting the slightest feigned surprise shine through on the features of the woman before her. She could have enumerated all the Peacekeeper interrogation rules Aeryn Sun was dutifully following and knew the exact microt the answer was supposed to come.

“He’s dead.”

Unblinking eyes, flat voice. Excellent control, Officer Sun.

“Really?” Mele-On put a hint of sarcasm in her voice as she cocked her head to gaze levelly at Aeryn Sun. “How so?”

She knew that this questioning was not what Prowler Pilot Aeryn Sun had prepared herself for. She kept the excitement away from her face. When possible, she avoided using violence, which really had the deplorable effect of taking the thrill out of the chase and she thoroughly enjoyed the chasing time before the kill.

“You know how.”

Worried and puzzled, that’s it.

“How would I know? I wasn’t there.” Her eyes rounded ever so slightly to suggest genuine ignorance.

First blink. Ex-officer Aeryn Sun was flipping through the perfect Peacekeeper soldier interrogation guidelines, debating between following rule 58, enter your opponent’s game to gain time and information or rule 74, remain silent until further tortured. In the present circumstances, 58 was likely to win.

“Crais was on Talyn when Talyn starburst inside the Command Carrier.”

“And,” Mele-On prompted from behind Aeryn’s back. She had begun circling her soon after she had started replying.

“And?”

More puzzlement.

“And…” She came full circle to stand before Aeryn again, threw a not so furtive glance over Aeryn’s shoulder at the ship’s physician standing conspicuously four paces away then tilted up one questioning eyebrow.

First shifting of the feet.

“Leviathans can’t starburst inside confined spaces. The energy doesn’t dissipate, it destroys the Leviathan and all those inside.”

“I see.” Mele-On raised her eyes to the ceiling, her features drawn into a deep pensive frown. “You’ve spent some time on that Leviathan.” She stared Aeryn square in the eyes and made an emphatically long pause before pronouncing the particular name, “Talyn.” After Crichton’s, the gunship’s name was the one most mentioned alongside Aeryn Sun’s; that this Leviathan would bear her father’s name was the indication of an absurdly emotional inclination for a Peacekeeper Officer. “Would you agree on saying that he is no ordinary Leviathan?”

A long silence and then just a simple nod. Not trusting your voice to speak, Officer Sun? Or could that be an almost daring switch to rule 74?

“We’ve found the debris you left among the other Leviathans’ debris. Such a big ship and so little debris.” Mele-On allowed herself a frozen smile of sympathy. “Where’s the rest of him?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Everywhere.”

Mele-On felt the slight positive shift in her prisoner’s confidence. Time to change the game. “I don’t think so,” she murmured sweetly. “Why don’t you take some time to think about it too?” She turned to leave and stopped after two steps. “Oh, and in case you’re worried?” She mentioned casually over her shoulder as if she had just remembered it. “The stun beam has had no secondary effects on your health.”

She exited the medbay with a satisfied smile on her lips.


**********

John had to admit the final judgment would have to wait until he found out when this day was officially over. Otherwise, it was pretty much a tie. Yes, as far as busy days went, this one was fast approaching the top spot held in the steady hands of day one in the Uncharted Territories for the past three years, an incredible feat considering some of what had happened to him since then. But, then again, how could anything top: breaking quarantine, making a dream come true and seeing it turn into a nightmare, accidentally killing a person, meeting flesh and blood aliens, escaping imprisonment and death, having a life experience no one else from Earth was ever likely to have? Day one had such a uniqueness to it that it really should be pulled out of the race. Aliens aside, today had just been the crappiest day. He had buried a sentient spaceship, helped kill another one, said goodbye to his only friends, lost the love of his life, died of asphyxia, been revived to the painful end of undergoing interrogation by an ill-meaning military bitch, been mind-frelled for the umpteenth time and while he waited for the interrogation to take place, he was nursing a pounding headache and felt so physically weak that he was actually thankful for the tight bonds tying him to his chair and keeping him upright under the babysitting supervision of Miss Lord of the flies, standing silent and erect in a corner of the room.

His gaze drifted toward the girl and he took a good look at her. There was something truly eerie about her and the nickname had sprung immediately to his mind. She seemed to be no more than 15 years old with the gawky figure often associated with teens grown too fast, even though she wasn’t actually that tall. She had dark hair held in a loose braid, an olive-toned complexion and dark doe-like eyes that seemed unable to rest on the same spot for more than two seconds; the hand resting on the butt of the pulse pistol strapped to her thigh was hardly steadier. The more he looked at her, the more perturbed she made him feel. He didn’t know whether he wanted to hold her tight and let her cry her young heart out against his chest or kill her before she could kill him. Not so long ago, he would probably have tried to get her to talk, find out whatever he could from her about his situation, perhaps even win her sympathy but her sullen presence brought disturbing images of a similarly young Aeryn and he didn’t have the energy to drill through another fortress.

He frowned and brought his attention on Harvey. The neural clone was sniffing the air every other step as he prowled around what was most probably Grayza’s office. He thought he had recognized her voice in the medbay and later had his suspicion confirmed when the soldiers bringing him here had mentioned her name.

“Is your sniffing supposed to achieve anything?” He snapped at the clone with a grimace of annoyance.

Harvey glanced up, surprised and looking slightly guilty. “Huh?”

“Couldn’t you tell me what you know about Grayza instead? Assuming you know anything, of course.”

Harvey shifted uncomfortably on his feet, sending quick fearful glances around him.

John raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Did Scorpius have dealings with her before? Did he ever hear anything about her?” He asked in exaggerated clarification to prompt the clone into speaking, wondering at the same time if the girl might not have proven easier after all.

“She’s evil,” Harvey finally whispered as if afraid to be overheard. “Very evil.”

John snorted. “Very evil, right! That’s deep, Harv, that’s really deep.” He closed his eyes and wished his hands were free so he could dig the heels of his palms into them and rub them raw. “Would you care to elaborate? It’s not like Scorpius is a choir boy himself.”

The clone left the other side of Grayza’s desk and came to stand before John. He leaned forward to bring his mouth closer to John’s ear. “She’s overly ambitious and exceedingly good at not leaving traces of her actions. Scorpius believed that she was aiming for the top position at High Command, regardless of the people in her way.”

“I suppose they were adversaries?”

“No. Why would they have been?” Harvey asked, surprised by John’s question. “Scorpius never cared for High Command. He only wants to defeat the Scarrans.”

“How did he get to know her so well then?”

Silence greeted his question and he turned his head to stare at Harvey’s face.

“They were… acquaintances,” Harvey replied with clear reluctance.

John repressed a shudder. “Acquaintances?” He asked, enunciating each syllable in sickened disbelief.

The entrance door behind him swooshed open and an overbearing waft of powerful perfume assaulted his nose. Harvey quaked and vanished from his consciousness with a poof Samantha the witch would have envied.

Great. Thanks for the help, Harv! John thought, hearing the rustle made by Grayza’s clothes as she glided fluidly into her office.

She didn’t spare him a glance on the way, only nodded sharply to the girl in the corner, sending her into a clipped military walk behind him. She slipped into her chair and John held her cold assessing stare, bracing himself to remain upright on his chair without the help of the ties that the girl had loosened up in a quick and efficient manner, leaving him only with manacles on, before returning to her silent vigil in the corner.

“So we meet again, John Crichton.”

John remained silent at first, fighting against the urge to rub the sore spots on his legs and arms as he watched a victorious smirk spread over her lips. He sighed deeply and decided that he was not in the shape for amenities and mind games after all and would rather be done with it as soon as possible.

“What do you want from me?”

He watched her gaze wonderingly at the ceiling, unfazed by his abrupt question then stare back at him with the same cold assessing eyes. “What could I possibly want from you?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Personality, manners, push-up bras, wormholes,” he enumerated ironically.

“I don’t care about wormholes,” she replied with a sickeningly sweet tone.

“You should.”

She laughed lightly and shook her head. “Don’t let Scorpius’ obsessions fool you. Wormholes won’t matter in this war, none of the players have mastered the technology and it will remain so for quite a long time. When and if wormholes ever become necessary, there’ll be plenty of scientific minds to tap into.” She leaned toward him over her desk and gazed at him with a disturbingly benevolent expression as another waft of strong perfume assaulted his senses. “I want your death.”

“My death?!” John choked out. “Hey lady, you had it and you blew it! Shouldn’t have asked your doc to revive me!”

“Not that kind of death,” she corrected him calmly. “A public death, for everyone to see and ponder. The same fate awaits all of your associates.”

“Ooh, that’s cool, Roman circus games have always been my favorites!” John quipped in false bravado, perturbed by the iron determination he could detect underneath her silky tones. He slumped in his chair in a controlled casual manner. “So, when should I expect to die?”

“Soon.” Grayza leaned back comfortably into her chair. “Your group’s activities have been bad publicity for the Peacekeepers’ image of strength, High Command wants to show its affiliated worlds that such rebellious behaviors will be severely punished so as to regain some edge in its negotiations with the Scarrans.” She played idly with a couple of Peacekeepers data chips on her desk. “We already know where we’ll be able to find some of your crewmates, we want information on the others: the Nebari, the Interion, Crais and both Leviathans.”

“Crais is dead,” John supplied automatically. “Haven’t you heard?”

“All I’ve heard are rumours. I prefer accurate information.” She raised an expectant eyebrow. “Well?”

John looked at her in complete disbelief. “You actually expect me to rat on my friends? Just like that?” He shook his head and straightened on his chair. “And what would I gain from it?” He leaned toward her, placing his elbows on his knees for support. “No senseless beating? No Aurora chair? A quicker, painless death? Oh, or perhaps a true carrot, the opportunity to make it out alive with a heartfelt act of contrition and to hell with the others?” He asked in mocking tones. He wavered on his seat at the fleeting flash of light in her eyes, he could have sworn he had just been hooked to the line.

“No. You will die, painfully and publicly like the others,” Grayza replied coldly, then paused to lean forward again, “but your son will live.”

John braced himself not to let his voice crack on the words. “My son?”

Grayza flicked a switch on her desk and an image of the medbay sprung up between them on a transparent display.

John swallowed hard as he discovered Aeryn seated on an examination table, wearing just her shirt and underwear and surrounded by four well armed soldiers making sure she wouldn’t go anywhere. She seemed to be struggling to keep a calm composure. He clamped his hands into painful fists. The old woman had said the truth.

“You care for children of your own blood, don’t you, John Crichton?” Grayza’s words cut through his haze. “I seem to remember something about a Royal planet.”

John eyed her determinedly through the display, seething rage starting to coil inside him. You should have listened to me before, he thought, or remained ‘acquainted’ with dear Scorpy, he would have told you that’s a really bad strategy with me. “I see you’ve done your research, talked to some disruptors.” His gaze ran up and down her figure. “Probably would have made a good one yourself.”

“I was,” Grayza replied smugly. “The best ever.”

John’s gaze flicked briefly over her wrists then focused back on the display, disgusted by her oozing superiority. He observed the doctor’s back as the man was making preparations he couldn’t see on a table and then rested his gaze on Aeryn’s stiff figure. “And Aeryn Sun?” He asked in his most detached tone.

“Now, now, don’t be too greedy,” Grayza chided him almost playfully and cut the display before John could figure out what the doctor had in his hands as he approached Aeryn. “She’s not indispensable for that child to live anyway.”

John felt sick in the pit of his stomach. It was going to be a mind game after all and one huge gamble. Let’s hope the others manage to elude the Peacekeepers’ grasp for a good while and buy me enough time to find a way out of this latest mess. He stared at Grayza with cold calculating eyes.

“You’ve got the wrong John Crichton here. Not my shift, not my child.”



***********

John walked his way back to his cell on his own, surrounded by the soldiers who had pretty much carried him on the way out. Seething rage flowed through his system, keeping him up. He was dimly aware that the cell was probably under video surveillance and that he could very well ruin the deception he had managed to set up but he had to let it his rage out.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” He punctuated each swear word with a liberating kick to the only visible appliance in his cell, the bunk.

He didn’t know whether he was angrier at Grayza and the rest of the universe for handing him such impossibly frelled situations or at himself and the easiness with which the hurt, jealousy and anger had genuinely flared while he had told Grayza about his twin and Aeryn’s betrayal, digging deeper and deeper in his negativity until he had convinced her of the reality of his tale, earning himself a reprieve from what would probably turn into a physical interrogation in the future.

“Shit!” One even more vicious kick sent him stumbling backwards, the bunk protesting against the abuse with a vibrating feedback spreading along his leg. He massaged his knee and thigh, casting a dark stare at the rebellious furniture, then suddenly cocked his head at the metallic structure of the bunk. He took a step forward, kicked the bunk again for good measure and felt the vibration jar his leg again. He stepped back slowly and collapsed on the floor against the wall, facing the bunk. He rested his elbows on his bent knees and wearily rubbed his face with his hands.

I’m such a moron. It wasn’t a mindfrell.

He removed his hands from his face and rested his chin on his crossed arms, his gaze fixed on the bunk before him but not quite seeing it. And now what?

The more he thought about using the bunk to send a message, the more complicated it became in his mind. If Aeryn knew the Morse code for SOS, she probably also knew the meaning of it and that was one meaning he didn’t want to send her. He doubted that it was the meaning her own message had wished to convey but he didn’t want to risk a misunderstanding on her part. He didn’t want her to rescue him, quite the contrary, he wanted her to rescue herself, against him. He also doubted that she knew any Morse code message other than SOS, teaching someone Morse code meant teaching that person English or any other Earth language based on the same alphabet and as far as he knew, which wasn’t very far at all these past months, she couldn’t speak or read English. He brushed his lower lip with his thumb. Unsuitable means, unclear meanings, there just seemed to be no accurate way to communicate with her. He smiled wryly. As if that was a surprise. He could only hope that she would make the right decision and play along his game to protect herself and the unborn child.

Don’t let me down, Aeryn, he urged, staring at the empty bunk before him. Please make the right decision.

“She’s already done that,” Harvey pointed out, sitting next to him. “She left you, remember?”

The angry punch of the clone toward the dumpster felt sickeningly good.


***********

Aeryn tried to relax her grip on the bunk’s side but found it hard to let go. She was confused. Whatever message John had tried to send her, she had been unable to decode it and yet she was sure she had caught it at the beginning. And so, she had been waiting for hundreds of microts now, hands clamped painfully around the metallic structure, wondering if perhaps he was unable to go through with the rest, hoping that he would tell her what to do or say. She drew in a shaky breath. At least, he was alive. A sudden dread hit her. Unless, it wasn’t him making the vibrations…

She bolted up and started pacing her cell nervously. It was not as if she remembered enough of that morsh code to make sense of any frelling vibration anyway, much less a whole message. She punched the wall in frustration. John had not answered her first message and he would not know about her presence unless someone told him. Would Grayza do that? Was it something that was part of her agenda? Aeryn punched the wall again.

She had no idea what the tralk was up to exactly. She had thought the soldiers were going to get into the physical part of the interrogation when she had been left standing in the medbay after Grayza’s departure instead of being brought back to her cell. They had taken her there quite sometime before Grayza showed up, the medic finally running on her the tests he had been unable to run when John had been rushed inside earlier on. The information of her pregnancy was now officially out and she had been expecting her captors to use it as means of pressure. And in a way Grayza had, but all her questions at first about Crais and Talyn had seemed somewhat irrelevant. Aeryn wasn’t even sure that Grayza truly believed Crais and Talyn had managed to live through the starburst. She herself hadn’t even needed much deceptive strength to lie to Grayza. When Crais had made her promise to come look for them, he had only had the smallest hope of them living through it and had not wished to give Moya cause for further pain should he be proven wrong. He had even asked her to be careful not to give the others any hints of what she was going to do, reasoning that if the starburst left them in a near death situation, she would never make it in time to save them anyway. Yes, she roughly knew where Crais and Talyn had gone, they had starburst on the smallest possible vector, but only when she found them would she know whether she had to perform another burial or would help Crais nurse Talyn back to sanity.

She wearily rubbed her face with her hands. If only she could already be there. She sighed deeply. It had been easy making that promise to Crais, she had known she would have to leave once they were done with the Command Carrier, assuming they didn’t die in their attempt to destroy it. She needed a purpose that would take her away from John for some time while she tried to make sense of the confusion in her heart. She had wanted time to think, or not to think, and she could have done that whether they were dead or alive. But she wasn’t any closer to finding out about their fates and in the meantime, she was left wondering about her own situation.

Grayza’s last words had clearly been a threat and yet, she had been left standing idly and nearly forgotten in the medbay for half an arn under the soldiers’ supervision until all of a sudden the medic had asked her to remove her pants, sending a cold dread along her spine. She had been forced to comply only to watch him treat her wounded knee with disbelieving eyes and then be sent back to her cell, unharmed and in better physical condition. What the frell was wrong with these Peacekeepers?

Grayza was a former disruptor, Aeryn was sure of that. She had heard rumors about those people and Jenavian Chatto had confirmed some of them. They were the scum of the Peacekeepers ranks, children pulled out of the soldier way because of shameful genes, unbalanced personalities or failing scores, irreversibly contaminated on purpose and adept at psychological manipulations and political deceits, often said to be working for their own agenda amidst their missions. They were not supposed to ever truly become part of the Peacekeeper elite and yet Grayza had secured a Command position, which could only mean that she had had an outstanding record as a disruptor. She was an enemy to be reckoned with and John had had the nerve to threaten her with a pulse pistol on the Command Carrier, which was not an act that would easily be dismissed. Aeryn could sense Grayza was going to use her to get to John and perhaps she had already tried.

She paced even more nervously around her cell. What did John know? What would he trade this time? The frelling idiot just couldn’t help giving his life so others could live.

She flopped back down wearily on the bunk, staring at the wall in front of her.
 
You’d better not die in my arms again, John Crichton or I will kill you myself and make sure your death is as painful for you as it is for me.

[tazey]

Spoilers: up through Dog With Two Bones
Rating: R (some difficult topics)
Summary: J&A angst, some Butch and Sundance.
Disclaimers: Blah, blah, blah. Not mine.
Huge thanks to my betas: Aeryncrichton and WalkingTheBeam


PART 3

***********

Cidra was trying hard not to glance too often at the human as she escorted him to the Commandant’s office with four soldiers in tow. She would have preferred to already be there when he entered the room and observe his expression as he discovered what was awaiting him, but she had been so anxious about the outcome of the confrontation she had pitched to Commandant Grayza that she had barely slept at all during the short night and needed to reconfirm her impressions of the previous day as soon as possible. Besides, the Commandant had wanted a head start with the ex-Peacekeeper soldier to plant seeds that would fester during the confrontation and she usually preferred to run her interrogations alone, though sometimes she allowed Cidra to stay in the room when dealing with little known species.

The ex-Peacekeeper soldier, Aeryn Sun, was not the one Cidra was most interested in anyway. The human, John Crichton, was the key element. She felt a shiver of fear run down her spine, her only good look at him this morning had been quite unsettling. He had looked really tired as if he had not slept much either but his eyes were cold and determined. She swallowed hard and tried to reassure herself, she knew what she had felt the day before. She squared her shoulders determinedly at the sight of the door leading to the Commandant’s office. Where her training supervisors had often mentioned her disturbing behavior interfering with the morale of her unit while extensively using her to outline the weak elements of adversary units, Commandant Grayza had used the word gift and encouraged her to develop it. Cidra had found her place here and she didn’t intend to disappoint her superior’s growing trust.

She palmed open the door and signalled the human to enter before her. His body stiffened ever so slightly but his pace did not falter and he went to place himself on the empty chair next to the one occupied by the ex-Peacekeeper soldier. Cidra immediately tied him to his chair the same tight way Aeryn Sun was tied. He had recovered enough of his physical strength for the Commandant not to take unnecessary risks this time around with possible reckless behaviors. She tested the last knot and looked up briefly, unexpectedly catching a swift exchange behind lowered eyelids between the two prisoners. A wave of nausea hit her with the force of the emotions contained in that exchange. Stay focused, Cidra, she admonished herself fiercely, forcing her gaze to settle on the lifeless features of the desk before her, don’t lose control. She barely realized the soldiers had left and closed the door behind them as she rose to walk to her appointed corner. Trying to keep her hand from trembling, she reached down in her pocket and placed the pill the Commandant had provided her with earlier under her tongue then turned around and pressed her back against the wall for support as she prepared herself to watch events unfold.

She shouldn’t have worried so much. It was unmistakable now that she could actually see them together and she had picked the right one too. Pain. And hurt. And love. Those had been there in both prisoners, either raging or smouldering but never well hidden enough for her not to make out the truth behind the controlled words and gestures. Aeryn Sun was not a reliable target. Cidra had sensed too much confusion in her last night when she had sat, transfixed, before the control monitors as Commandant Grayza had interrogated the ex-Peacekeeper soldier again, seeking confirmation for the human’s tale. Aeryn Sun’s emotions had kept swinging from one end to the other and her overpowering sense of duty would end up sacrificing all concerned. In John Crichton, the love went deeper than the hurt and the pain and he couldn’t help hoping for more. Cidra repressed a shudder of dread mixed with eager anticipation. He was going to cave in. For Aeryn Sun and the unborn child.

“Well, well, well. Such messy times, don’t you agree?” Commandant Grayza asked to no one in particular, lounging comfortably in her high-backed chair behind her desk, her fingers curling and uncurling around a small square-shaped device. “Brewing wars, exploding carriers, twinnings and unwanted lives.” She sighed deeply. “I am so disappointed in you. I thought you would have proven different,” she added, looking at the human, “or learned to think outside your breeding,” she concluded for the ex-Peacekeeper. She got up then and walked behind the silent prisoners, tapping her finger pensively against her jawline, the small square-shaped device cradled in her palm.

At the Commandant’s sharp glance in her direction, Cidra made a small nod and immediately focused back on the prisoners.

“Disappointed hardly covers my feelings though,” Commandant Grayza continued in a pained tone. She circled back to sit on her chair and leaned over her desk. “To tell the truth, I’m appalled,” she affirmed with a stern glance, “and I don’t think your actions would yield any crowd support were it known that the weakest ones are those you are willing to sacrifice.” She cocked her head toward John Crichton. “You were offered the opportunity to save a helpless unborn child, but you have let petty emotions win over to deny that child a chance to live, even refusing to acknowledge him as your own, though any Diagnosian would conclude otherwise. You think you’re protecting your crewmates? Take my word for it, they will be hunted down and found, with or without your help, sooner rather than later and you will all be executed. This is not a threat but a promise.” She turned her attention to Aeryn Sun. “And you? I don’t even know where to start. You’re a disgrace to the parents who stood against the rules for you, a disgrace to the Peacekeepers’ values of loyalty and honor and a disgrace to your own flesh and blood that you would sell to save yourself.” She snorted derisively. “And some people say love is beautiful. Fools!”

Cidra squeezed her hands into fists. She could feel Aeryn Sun’s emotions flowing through her like heat waves and focusing on John Crichton only heightened their amplitude and frequency. It was working beyond her highest expectations. She blocked out her senses to fall back on sight only and felt her body expand inside the cracks as she embraced their pain and hurt. She knew she should have listened to what Commandant Grayza was saying to improve her own interrogation skills, she was much better at feeling the pain than inflicting it and there would come a time when she would need to master both. But today, she felt like indulging herself, for it would be intense but brief. The deeper the human would fall, the higher he would climb back.

Each precise stab widened the cracks even more, providing room for the hurt and the pain to dwell and throb. Cidra fed on the human’s features, translating the tiniest changes into waves of emotions. They pulled out of the tide together with his unexpected direct stare at Commandant Grayza.

“… accuracy of a report. Jenavian Chatto had most interesting things to say about you, John Crichton, but I’m afraid her judgment was gravely clouded for her to even think of recommending you as a potential recruit.”

Cidra was in complete awe. She learned so much every time she had a chance to see the Commandant’s strategies at play. While she had had John Crichton’s gaze set on her with her latest comment, Commandant Grayza had moved enough to lure him into trying to angle his gaze to take a swift look at Aeryn Sun but not too much to let him realize that that was exactly what she wanted him to do. He had been really intent on avoiding looking at Aeryn Sun, to keep up his attempted deception of complete indifference to her fate, but Commandant Grayza had now provided him with a temptation too great to resist. So he looked and he noticed. Cidra felt as if his spasming hand had squeezed on her heart and she found it hard to breathe. The pain of his understanding was crippling her. She glanced at Aeryn Sun. The Sebacean was still sitting tall and erect on her chair with her gaze fixed determinedly at an empty spot before her but her hair was quite damp by now and her face glistened with sweat, her cheeks glowing red from the heat. Cidra ran her tongue inside her mouth where the heat protective pill had slowly melted. It was working really well. She had not kept track of the Commandant’s use of the heat control device but she would say that the present temperature in the office was only five levels away from living death warnings and she wasn’t feeling any discomfort. She took deep breaths to relax and provide space for her heart to beat. Now that he had understood what was going on, it was only a matter of microts until John Crichton started to negotiate. It would be over soon and the overpowering emotions would finally leave her mind and body to rest.

Commandant Grayza placed a hip on the corner of her desk and fiddled with the device in her hand, making no attempt to hide the fact that she was cranking its switch up one more notch.

“Isn’t the temperature too hot for you already?” John Crichton asked, his voice dripping with self-contempt.

“No. Why? Do I look sweaty to you?”

He tried to shrug in spite of his ties. “It’s just that humans don’t stand the heat so well.”

“Don’t they?”

“Makes us stupid,” he muttered so low that Cidra almost didn’t hear him but she sensed the shift of his emotions toward anger. Her stomach contracted uncontrollably and she felt a surge of pity for him. Anger had come first but love would speak last.

“What a pity! I’ll be sure to remember that next time I meet with a human. I can’t believe I agreed we could have solved the Sebacean heat problems with the help of some human genes.”

Cidra’s breath hitched along John Crichton’s as they both caught the slight tightening of Aeryn Sun’s features.

“Commandant Grayza?”

Cidra nearly jumped up in surprise as the comms burst into life with the voice of the ship’s Second in command.

“I asked not to be disturbed!” Commandant Grayza snapped irritatedly.

“Except for this,” the man replied with calm certainty.

The Commandant’s attention immediately perked up. She briskly walked around her desk, sat down and swivelled her chair to face her desk. “Visuals only,” she ordered as she called up a view screen.

Cidra could no more see what was on the screen than the prisoners could but, judging from the victorious expressions on the Commandant’s features, she could tell that the topic of the message was an important one, though one she was probably not privy to. Commandant Grayza often had three paths able to lead to one end and rarely mixed the different people involved in those. Don’t go, Cidra silently begged her, please don’t go now. We’re almost there.

“Prepare a Marauder with an escort,” the Commandant ordered at last to the Second in command, “I’m leaving immediately.” She snapped the view screen close and stood up to face the prisoners. “Stay warm and cozy,” she told them with a smirk, “we’ll talk again very soon.” She tossed the heat control device on her desk and turned to Cidra. “Call the guards and see them back to their cells.”

Cidra nodded meekly at the Commandant’s fast retreating back. She watched the door swoosh open and close and yank the air out of her lungs. She pressed a fist against her mouth to suppress a moan of pain at the sudden crash down back to reality. The resulting emptiness had never felt so acute before. She turned away to face the wall and control the shudders running through her body until her stomach finally stopped rolling and her breath recovered a steady rhythm.

“You ok?” John Crichton’s whispered question took her out of her trance. She turned around and realized with a start that he had actually been addressing Aeryn Sun. Had she been out so long that they thought she had forgotten about them and therefore dismissed her presence?

“I’m fine,” Aeryn Sun whispered back.

“You sure?” He insisted, concern etched in his voice.

“Yes,” she snapped, glancing in Cidra’s direction.

“Aeryn, I…I’m…” he continued haltingly, looking at the floor, unaware of her forbidding stare.

Not between you, Cidra begged silently again, watching the two prisoners. I can’t take that on my own.

“Shut up!” Aeryn Sun urged the human.

“I know, I’m sorry, I…”

Cidra saw his eyes round up in surprise at the sight of the pulse pistol pressed against his forehead.

“Shut up! Just shut up!” She ordered him, her arm shaking wildly. “Shut everything up and stop it!”

“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?!” Aeryn Sun interjected.

“You stop too!” Cidra yelled at her, whirling to press her pulse pistol quiveringly against Aeryn Sun’s sweating forehead.

“Yo, Eve! You wanna shoot someone, you shoot me!” John Crichton shouted. “Come on,” he urged her, “be a good girl and kill me!”

Cidra stared at him uncomprehendingly, letting her hand holding the pulse pistol fall down along her side, her fury abating as quickly as it had fired up. “But you don’t want to die,” she murmured, her eyebrows creased in a deep frown. “The love in you blinds the hurt and the pain.” She waved the pulse pistol before his face in an admonishing gesture. “I can tell the truth behind your lies.” She saw his eyes slowly fill with something akin to pity, or perhaps rarer than pity, compassion, and she felt herself inexplicably drawn to him.

“Do you want to know a secret?” He asked her with a soft voice.

She nodded slowly, her mouth slightly agape.

“Just between you and me,” he added, making a gesture with his head for her to come nearer.

She took a step closer to him and leaned her head forward, feeling his warm breath wash over her ear. His feet caught hers in a vice and he took her with him in his fall, his head coming to crash against hers before she had time to raise her pulse pistol in the fall. Blackness came over her.


John landed heavily on his right side and grunted in pain as the back of the chair broke under him. He clumsily disengaged his arms from the mess, the manacles making the process more difficult and checked that the girl was well and truly knocked out. He squirmed on the floor to slide the ties away from his legs and finally managed to kneel gingerly, his hands still held behind his back with the manacles. He caught the key from the girl’s weapon belt and scooted behind Aeryn to place it in her hands, keeping his arms slightly bent to put his hands at the same level with hers.

“Can you open these?” He asked her urgently and felt her fingers work over the opening. His manacles gave way rapidly and he immediately turned to release her from her manacles and ties.

Her first reaction left him panting heavily with his back pressed firmly against the wall.

“That was a really stupid thing to do!” Aeryn fumed, her face a mixture of anger and worry.

“But it worked and that’s what matters!” John countered. And don’t feel like you have to thank me for it, he thought angrily. “She had to be stopped, she looked as if she was high on drugs and ready to pop.”

Aeryn released him abruptly and turned to pick up the girl’s pulse pistol from the floor. John waited for a second before moving, wondering if she was now going to aim it at him to stress her point but she went toward the desk instead and grabbed the square-shaped device.

He locked the office door and knelt by the knocked out girl to bind her tightly. She started to regain consciousness during the process and he gagged her to make sure she wouldn’t alert anyone then half carried her behind the desk to hide her from view. He propped her up as comfortably as possible.

“Any idea how to get out of here?” He asked Aeryn as he watched her examine their surroundings. He heaved a small sigh of relief as he noticed that her cheeks were slowly losing their red coloring. She didn’t answer him. He glanced at the girl’s face, with her wide-opened dark eyes eating half her face and got up to follow Aeryn through the door leading to Grayza’s private quarters. “What’s gonna happen to her?” He asked, nodding toward the room he had just left.

“I don’t know,” Aeryn shrugged, “That will be for her superior to decide.” She moved into the cleansing unit and stopped before a grilled opening. She yanked the grille away and peered through the opening then looked back at him. “Do you think you can fit through this?”

John raised his eyebrows. “Do I have a choice?”

“Not really,” she replied matter-of-factly, “we will never make it to the hangar bay by the corridors, too many people in too small a spaceship. The size of the conduits is in accordance with the rest.”

“I’ll squeeze in then,” John stated more convincingly than he felt and held out his hand. “Give me the pulse pistol, I’m going first.”

She looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “I’m going first. You won’t even know where to turn,” she pointed out.

“You’ll just have to tell me where to turn,” he insisted.

She simply shrugged his argument away and turned to climb into the opening. He grabbed her arm to stop her and she jerked it free angrily. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I want to go first,” he said firmly and stared hard at her. “You don’t know what’s at the other end of this conduit, it could be dangerous,” he added haltingly and bit his lip. “It’s different now, Aeryn. It’s not just about you.”

Her eyes narrowed menacingly and her hands balled into fists. “I thought you said it wasn’t yours!”

He felt the punch though she didn’t actually swing it. “I was only trying to protect both of you from harm!” He stepped toward her. “I had to improvise, it’s not like I had advance notice of what was going on!” He added accusingly and felt his anger flare anew. “I thought you said you didn’t care about it,” he blurted out, spurred by her stubborn stare. “I can’t believe you actually offered to let the Peacekeepers have its genes!”

“Grayza made that up,” Aeryn choked out. “I never said that!”

“Oh, then what DID you say?”

“I said… I said…” She shook her head in frustration, “Frell John, we don’t have time for this!” She straightened up. “I’m a soldier, this is a Peacekeeper ship, I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you? What the hell do you know about pregnancies and babies, Aeryn?” He shook his head wearily. “You took off to join a Peacekeeper assassin group! Do you really think you can wander around with such people, pregnant or with a little child?!” He took a shaky breath to try to control his temper. “It IS my child too, Aeryn. Why didn’t you trust me?”

A muffled whimper in the other room caught their attention.

“We don’t have time for this,” Aeryn repeated angrily and turned her back to him to climb inside the conduit. “I’m going first.”

“Fine!” John snapped. “Have it your way! It’s always about what you want anyway!”

Aeryn froze on the spot and heard him stalk angrily to the other room.

John stopped before the girl and bowed his head to look wonderingly into her young face, his hands pressed against his sides, rising and falling with his panting breaths.

Aeryn watched him kneel before the girl. Get frelled, John Crichton. I’m not waiting for you to save another lost Peacekeeper girl. She turned back toward the conduit and started her slow progress into the narrow tube.

John removed the gag from the girl’s face. “What’s your name?” He asked softly.

“Cidra,” the girl replied with a puzzled look.

“That’s a nice name,” John commented absent-mindedly. “Well, Cidra, I bet you’re a smart girl so I’m sure you’ll make it out of this unscathed, right?” He looked hard at her. “RIGHT?”

Cidra’s puzzlement grew then turned into understanding and she slowly nodded in agreement.

John replaced the gag and brushed his thumb over the red welt on her forehead where his head had connected with her skull. He got up and walked toward the other room, leaving her behind though he knew she had just lied to him. He sucked in his breath and squeezed into the conduit with great difficulty.


************

Even though his progress felt painstakingly slow, John soon caught up with Aeryn, or to be more precise, with her booted feet. She wasn’t moving forward and he snaked his head around to find out what she was doing. Her right arm was hanging out through an opening in the conduit and when she brought it back inside she was holding what looked like a grenade between her fingertips. She attached it to her belt and hung out her arm again. Approaching voices forced her to stop whatever she was trying to do and he saw her silently replace the grille over the opening. The voices and their owners seemed to want to settle in the room and Aeryn moved forward again with John following her in silence. They passed several bends until they reached the maintenance bay. The opening was thankfully situated behind a load of crates and John slid out of the conduit after Aeryn to hide behind the protective wall they created. He let his gaze roam over the premises, noting the positions of the ships and the personnel, mostly techs and too many soldiers. His gaze swept the length of the maintenance bay a second time then came to rest over his module and stopped. He could tell her mind had come up with the same idea when he felt her intake of breath by his ear.

“I’ll do it,” he cut in before she could actually speak up and held his hand palm up firmly in front of her, his gaze refusing to meet hers. He waited a dozen microts of heavy silence before turning to look at her, ready to stand firm before her stubborn gaze and was surprised to be met with an uncertainty that nearly weakened his resolve. His gaze moved back to his previous interest. “On your count,” he added calmly, his hand still stretched out before her. He felt the air shift around him as she reached for the back of her pants before grazing his palm with her fingers, sending a tingle through his spine. His hand closed over the PK grenade she had procured a short time ago, his thumb flicked nervously over the trigger mechanism.

“I’ll cover you,” she replied needlessly and his gaze didn’t even flicker his acknowledgment, too intent on his target. With her dark canopy gone, probably ruthlessly disposed of during his rescue, Farscape One stood in all her glorious white difference among the Prowlers and the Marauder in the Scoutship’s landing bay. A harmless dove in a murder of crows. A much-needed diversion.

They knew they had to take a Marauder to stand the slightest chance of long-term escape, a Prowler could not provide them with the necessary fire power and flying range and neither could Farscape One, unless they happened to be near a star with huge solar flares. Besides, he didn’t believe the Peacekeepers had had the presence of mind to re-supply her in fuel and oxygen just in case someone would like to take her out for a spin. The lack of fuel would keep the explosion from turning into a fiery blaze but the soft Earth materials were unable to withstand the power of a PK grenade without shredding into sharp metallic shards flying all over the maintenance bay, causing as much pain and mayhem as possible, opening a path for them to the lonely Marauder standing by the docking bay’s outer doors all the way across from their present position. The other Marauder had been gone for half an arn by now, along with a couple of Prowlers and, hopefully, by the time those ships would be able to track them down, they’d be long gone.

He saw Aeryn’s raised hand at the edge of his vision, her fingers slowly counting down as she waited for two soldiers to finish walking away from the Marauder. Three… two… One small shitty craft for them, one giant hope for me… One… 

They leapt out of their hiding in perfect synchronization, each knowing exactly what to do. John took two steps forward, using another stack of crates as cover and launched the grenade on its target with a smooth overhead throw. It landed in perfect aim on the pilot’s seat of his module before the fascinated eyes of the techs and soldiers close to it, bounced off to fall on the module’s floor and exploded immediately, sending bits and pieces flying all over the place. John instinctively tried to duck for cover behind the crates but Aeryn’s forceful shove propelled him toward the Marauder, running at full speed, surprised not to be hearing the sound of pulse fires yet.

This is too easy, his mind warned him as they stumbled near the Marauder’s hatch door and Aeryn went for the opening mechanism It’s never easy. Not for you. Pulse fires forced Aeryn to retreat a couple of steps to return the shots taken at them by a couple of soldiers hiding behind two Prowlers, distant enough from the explosion for the soldiers to have recovered their senses more quickly than the others. John pressed the mechanism and turned to take one last look at what remained of his ship in time to spot a third soldier aiming at them. He flattened Aeryn’s body against the Marauder’s hull to get them both out of the way but not fast enough. Pain exploded against his side where the pulse fire connected with his lower ribs. Some months ago it would have gone through fleshy parts but those had withered away little by little, leaving only bones and muscles.

Aeryn grunted as her back connected sharply to the ship’s hull and she felt the impact of the shot reverberating against John’s side. She swiftly snaked her left arm around his waist as he nearly lost his balance and hauled him backwards through the opening, firing blindly all around them, covering the largest possible angle. Her foot smashed against the hatch’s closing mechanism, breaking it at the same time and she let John’s body slide down on the floor behind the protection of the solid door to run for command, her heart pounding wildly in her chest.

She was about to slide in the pilot’s chair when a sharp searing pain suddenly shot through her body, cutting her in two. Her knees buckled, drained of all energy and her forehead missed the ship’s controls by a hair breadth as her body connected sharply with the floor unable to control her fall. Sweat poured profusely on her forehead as she curled up on her side trying to gain control of the excruciating pain. A low moan escaped her lips and she fought hard against losing consciousness. Her right hand rose up shakily to get a hold of the consoles.

John tried to take only small breaths to avoid requesting too much from his ribcage at this point. As far as he could tell from his hesitant prodding, his ribs were more likely cracked than broken but it still hurt like hell. He turned his attention toward the corridor through which Aeryn had disappeared, as the pulse fires outside the Marauder seemed to intensify significantly. The Marauder had not yet powered up.

“Aeryn?!” He called out to her. “What’s going on?”

The ship rocked as a more powerful explosion hit the hatch door.

“Aeryn!!” he cried out, thoroughly alarmed. “We have to get out of here!! Now!!” He awkwardly rolled on his knees and managed to stand up and limp his way towards command. His hand felt the shudder of metal as the ship finally powered up. “Aeryn, what’s the matter...?” He stopped short in his tracks as he discovered her ashen and sweaty face. Her hands were shaking on the ship’s controls yet hardly slowing down her usual fast-paced piloting skills. “Aeryn…” His voice croaked as he realized she had been hit as well.

“I’m fine,” she replied through clenched teeth, her eyes intent on their task. “Get the main canon working. We’ll have to fire our way out.”

John forced his pain away and flopped down on the other seat, his hands reaching immediately for the controls, his gaze fighting hard not to look at her.

The ship finally rose in the maintenance bay and pivoted toward the outer doors. One well-applied powerful blast was enough to break a hole to pass through. The Marauder shot out of the maintenance bay, fired a couple of crippling blasts at the Scout ship and soon blended its hull with the darkness of deep space.

[tazey]

Spoilers: up through Dog With Two Bones
Rating: R (some difficult topics)
Summary: J&A angst, some Butch and Sundance.
Disclaimers: Blah, blah, blah. Not mine.
Huge thanks to my betas: Aeryncrichton and WalkingTheBeam


PART 4a

*************

John could feel his muscles trembling with the sustained strain and redistributed the weight of Aeryn’s body with a jerky movement that brought a moan from her lips and a further cracking of his injured ribs. She had not wanted to land on the planet at first, she had not even deigned to mention the planet’s presence to him. Had he not happened to peer through a porthole as he was going through some repairs, he wouldn’t even have known it was there and that she was taking them on a flying vector away from it.

She had avoided the subject in command, sending him curtly on his way to repair the ventilation system and for a fleeting second as he had stood there before her shaking body, he had considered emotional blackmail, wondering if losing consciousness before her would make her change her mind but then realized that that was the kind of bad joke she would never let him recover from. Before his insistence that they stop on the planet to find some help, she had argued that it was too dangerous for them to stop there, hardly two arns away from their escape, that their wounds were only superficial and didn’t require a doctor’s attention. He had left his repairs half-way done and had marched back to command in seething frustration, planting himself before her, looking at her feverish eyes shining in her face covered with sweat. She had started the same arguments again with her upsetting superior soldier tone and he had gone ballistic at her words, his mixture of anger and fear managing to scare her for the first time that he could remember. Or maybe she had just been already too weak to argue any further.

They had hidden the Marauder near the hills outside of town and trudged through the thick forest for over an arn, all senses kept in alert by the incessant creepy sounds coming from the forest’s dark recesses, grateful for the pulse pistols they had found in the Marauder among all kinds of other weapons. He had offered to help her from the start but she had shaken her head and marched beside him with gritted teeth and a face drained of all colors until her knees had buckled beneath her and she had passed out. He had picked her up and pressed her body against his chest, too scared for her life to pay attention to his own pain, his heart beating frantically against her side, his mouth murmuring encouragements into her hair.

He spotted the first outskirts of the town with genuine relief, the sun was nearly set now and he didn’t feel like spending the night in the forest. He proceeded along side streets and narrow alleyways, glancing inside buildings through back windows, looking for some sort of medical facility. He couldn’t trust anyone to ask for directions, for all he knew, there could be a Peacekeeper outpost on the planet, even in this very town and he was not yet desperate enough to risk falling into their hands and ask for their mercy. Not yet, but soon.

His breath caught at the sight of what appeared to be a doctor’s office. He propped her body carefully against the building’s wall and raised himself on his toes to take a better look inside. Rubbing his arms to ease back the flood of blood into them, he examined the room carefully. No one was there at the moment but the place had the unmistakable feel of a doctor’s office with what seemed to be an examination table, several ugly looking surgical instruments and a desk on one side. Wafts of that repulsively familiar medical smell came to his nose and sealed his resolve. Keeping his eyes on Aeryn’s form lying against the wall, he approached the back door of the building and proceeded with a swift breaking of its lock that Chiana would have considered quite neat. Cracking the door open, he took a cautious peek inside and, satisfied with the absence of movement there, picked up Aeryn again with a muffled grunt.

He crossed the small and unlit storage room to the opposite door leading to the room he had seen from the outside. Pressing his ear against the cool material, he slowly pushed the door open. The room was still empty but he could hear voices in another room and unidentifiable noises from yet another one. On closer look, the medical equipment of the room seemed more technically advanced than it had seemed from the outside, the place even had a certain wealthy air about it that spoke of rich or numerous clientele, maybe both. If regular doctors on this planet were anything like human doctors, they would have fixed visiting hours and at this late time of the day, only the doctor, and an assistant perhaps, would be there. He carefully deposited Aeryn on the examination table and unholstered his pulse pistol, circling the table so as to be able to keep his eyes on the other two doors and protect her from whoever or whatever would come out of them while he approached the third one with the voices behind it, ready to point his gun at the first person to cross its threshold, hoping to find help.  He heard the voices fade away and panicked for a fleeting second as he realized they could be going for good and he’d be left here alone with her. But then he relaxed, the light was still on in the office, someone had to turn it off unless... He was cut off in his thoughts as a door closed on the other side and one set of slow and heavy footsteps came toward his position. His fingers tightened nervously around the grip of his pulse pistol.

He was so used to feeling dwarfed by the tall aliens he kept meeting that his weapon pointed at empty air at first and he had to lower it swiftly to bring it level to level with the face of that particular alien, whose muscular bipedal shape towered at five and a half feet at the most. He, or so it seemed, had a dark brown skin and blinding white hair, his features bore a resemblance to the Luxans’ leonine look and his dark eyes remained unfazed before the threat of John’s pistol. John circled him swiftly, his pistol still trained on him and peered through the door to make sure no one else was there. Satisfied, he finished closing the door and circled back to face the alien.

“Is this your office?” He asked with a nod toward the desk and the examination bed.

The alien only blinked once in answer, his deep gaze boring unnervingly into John’s.

“Good good,” John sighed in relief, “then you can help.” He stepped away from the alien and gestured toward the examination bed. “She’s… she’s wounded, shot with a pulse pistol about three arns ago,” he started explaining as he approached Aeryn’s form, waving his weapon around in his nervous babble. “She’s been sweating a lot and then she lost consciousness about a half arn ago…” He stopped abruptly, wondering why the alien had not moved one inch and just kept looking at him with the same unfazed gaze. “What?? Am I talking too fast?”

The alien didn’t reply. John licked his lips nervously and gave out a weary sigh. “In case you’re wondering, we’re not Peacekeepers.” He finally realized that he still had his gun in his hand and clicked it back into his holster. He walked back to the alien with his hands held before him in a peaceful gesture. “I’m sorry if I scared you, I never meant to hurt you, it’s just that…” He wished for a second that he had followed his own advice and stopped pointing guns at strangers’ faces in the first place. He swallowed hard before the alien’s impassive features and pressed his lips in a light grimace. “Please?”

He thought he saw sympathy in the alien’s eyes for a fleeting moment but as silence continued to stretch between them, his shoulders sagged in defeat. His hand hovered on his pulse pistol, he unholstered it again but presented it butt first to the alien, doubting that threats of violence would work in Aeryn’s favor. “Listen… kill me if you don’t like me but please…please… take care of her,” John finally begged him. “She’s in pain… she’s…” His voice broke and he had to press his hands against his sides to ease the pressure on his insides. He felt his eyes starting to fill in with tears.

The alien’s features finally registered some emotion and he moved past John towards the examination table. “Pulse fire you said?” he asked matter-of-factly with a voice that sounded like a low growl as he lifted Aeryn’s vest and shirt to take a look at the wound on her left side.

“Yes. One shot… I think,” John supplied gratefully in-between shallow breaths, wincing at the alien’s rough examination of Aeryn’s wound. He watched attentively as the alien grabbed what he figured was some kind of scanner and ran it over the wound.

“Hmm,” the alien mused aloud as he consulted the readouts. “It’s not a grave wound, not for a Sebacean anyway,” he stated in a clinical voice. “More blood than I would expect though…” He remarked, flipping her shirt back over the wound. “Could some of it be yours?” he asked as his eyes went over John’s own bloody wound.

“Huh… maybe… probably…” John stuttered, somewhat relieved that, despite the apparent roughness, the alien seemed to know what he was doing. “I carried her for a while…”

“She has a fever too… interesting…” The alien mused again and pulled Aeryn’s eyelids to check her pupils. “Within limits.” He brought his scanner over Aeryn’s head and started a slow descent. “Has she had any similar health problems before, any recent surgery or grave illness?”

“Huh… no but… the thing is… she’s… ” John swallowed hard, his constricted throat refusing to let the words through. The scanner came to a halt over Aeryn’s lower midriff. “She’s pregnant.”

“I see,” the alien stated tonelessly.

John felt a cold dread run down his spine. He heard a loud noise coming from the outside and reached for his pulse pistol right before the office door slammed open to let in a breathless and desperate looking younger alien.

“Don’t!” The older alien warned John but too late.

The newcomer’s eyes widened at the sight of John and the pulse pistol trained on him and he dropped his heavy bundle on the ground. A gross-looking critter fled from the blanket and went to hide in a dark corner of the room.

“Frell!! Oh frell!!” The younger alien exclaimed in despair.

The older alien wrenched John’s pulse pistol out of his grip and sent it flying across the room, freezing John into silence with a look of utter annoyance. He picked up the blanket on the floor and slammed shut the door leading to the outside. “What happened?” he asked the younger alien as he approached the corner where the critter was hiding.

“She swallowed Nuib,” the younger alien replied a bit embarrassed.

“Again?!” The older alien barked, sending the younger alien’s gaze to the floor. He sighed wearily. “Let’s hope she swallowed her head first this time.” He extended the cover between his two arms. “Get her moving,” he ordered him, gesturing toward the corner as he readied himself to intercept the critter on its escape course.

John watched in fascination as the two aliens set up their trap. Frenzied growls escaped from the dark corner and were answered by a cacophony of weird sounds from behind the office’s unexplored door. Oh God! Oh my God! John thought in horror as realization dawned.

“You’re a vet?!” He choked out, looking at the older alien, cold sweat running down his spine.

“A what?” The younger alien asked as he crawled on the floor toward the hiding critter and then realized John wasn’t looking at him.

“A veterinarian, a doctor for the animals,” John stammered, not believing what was happening, his gaze fixed on the scene unfolding before his eyes. He had screwed up again, at the worst possible time.

“Oh yeah! And a frelling good one too,” the younger alien exclaimed in earnest as the older one failed to reply. He lunged his right arm toward the dark recess sending the critter out, “best one this side of the planet.”

The older alien neatly caught the fleeing critter in the blanket. “Wouldn’t have to be if you people paid more attention to what I say,” he rumbled in an even lower growl than before, grunting as the critter thrashed wildly under the blanket. He looked up at the younger alien who had come rushing by his side. “Hold her head.”

“You! Don’t stand there gawking like a frelling kimo,” he addressed John, jerking him into a dazed motion. “Come here and grab her hind legs.” John went to kneel beside him, trying to determine where and what to grab exactly under the blanket. He fumbled for a while until he finally caught hold of two tiny appendages that he hoped were the said hind legs.

The older alien pushed back the blanket toward John’s end, revealing the critter as the younger alien followed his move to wind a muscular arm crisscrossed with fine-looking scars of various ages and lengths around the critter’s ‘neck’, which as far as John could tell was somewhere around the middle of the body. His gaze followed the older alien as he got up to fetch some medical instruments and then went back to the critter. The thing looked like a three-feet long crocodile fed with dioxines. It had a scaly sickly-looking grey skin, six very short legs and one of the foulest smells ever in the animal kingdom. His eyes rose in disgust and met those of the half-turned younger alien, who gave him a shy smile.

“She’s cute, huh?” The younger alien said with pride. He threw a quick glance toward Aeryn’s form on the examination table and then pointedly stared at John’s wound. “What kind of house animal do you and your mate have?” He inquired earnestly.

John gave him a blank look.

“They have a Pilar,” the old alien supplied for John as he came back wearing a thick padding on his right arm and carrying a huge metallic rod, a rope and a bag.

“Yeah, that’s regad! Pilars are so ruthless!!” The younger alien gushed. “Do you think you could let me handle yours for a moment?” He asked John haltingly, excitement lighting his eyes.

John’s blank look tinged with worry.

“I don’t use weapons myself,” the younger alien reassured him. “I swear I’ll be real gentle with him,” he even stated solemnly. “Or is it her?”

“Will you shut up for a microt, Dabaroo!” The older alien admonished the younger alien testily as he knelt down and carefully placed the bag by his side. “Their Pilar has had to be fully chained,” he stated grimly, staring hard at Dabaroo’s excited face, which immediately crunched up in concern.

“Aw, I’m so sorry,” Dabaroo apologized to John. “You must be so worried for your animal.”

John’s eyes flicked toward the older alien’s face and he nodded numbly to Dabaroo at the older alien’s silent urging.

“I had one too a couple cycles ago, a really strong one, nearly bit my arm off,” Dabaroo whispered conspiratorially to John. “Uru patched me up real good,” he added, nodding toward the older alien then made a pouting grimace, “though I’d rather he’d left me with bigger scars.”

John’s glance switched from the fine-looking scars on Dabaroo’s arm to Uru’s face.

“Let’s do this,” Uru only grunted in reply.

Dabaroo immediately straddled the back of the dioxine croco and heaved its cavernous mouth open with Uru’s help. John had to put his knee on the croco’s lower back to keep it still. Once Uru had managed to insert the rod vertically inside the mouth, he plunged his right arm inside and rummaged for a while before pulling out what John could best describe as a legless scorpion about a foot long with thick yellow fur. Uru immediately dropped it into the bag and closed the sash tight.

“Nuib!” Dabaroo let out in a relieved sigh as the new critter started to move wildly inside the bag. “Bad girl, Poatur, bad girl!” he admonished the croco lovingly.

Uru knocked the rod away and, as Poatur’s mouth clamped shut, tied it tightly with the rope. John got up with them awkwardly as Uru helped Dabaroo get a good hold of Poatur. Uru then grabbed the bag on the floor, gave it to Dabaroo and forcefully shoved him toward the door. “Don’t come back anytime soon,” he ordered him.

“Thanks so much Uru,” Dabaroo gushed. “Thanks sir,” he added, looking at John, “About your Pilar…”

“Humpff,” Uru growled and slammed the door to Dabaroo’s face. “Young people!” He flipped one of the switches on the wall, generating the roll down of curtains on the windows then went to a sink on the side and got rid of his thick padding. He also removed his jacket, which had been thoroughly dirtied during the intervention and proceeded to clean his hands and arms meticulously with a pungent liquid.

“Huh…” John started as he came to stand between Uru and Aeryn lying on the examination bed still unconscious. The alien raised an expectant eyebrow and John shuffled nervously under his commanding gaze. “Huh…”

“Huh what?” Uru sighed irritatedly. “You have someone else you can threaten?”

John felt the cutting words stab his heart and then slowly shook his head and took a step aside.

Uru finished his cleansing, pulled on a pair of thin gloves and approached the examination table. He turned on a huge light, bathing Aeryn’s colourless face in an even whiter glow then picked up his scanner and ran it over her one more time. John hovered by him, following his every moves and expressions, feeding his worry and hope from tiny flickers on the alien’s face. Uru turned off the scanner and went to a cabinet, leaving a clueless John by Aeryn’s side.

“Wait!” John recoiled at the sight of the huge syringe Uru was coming back with.

Uru sighed deeply again. “You don’t want me to sedate her?”

“No! I mean yes, of course, I want you to sedate her,” John stammered before Uru’s patronizing stare but he couldn’t help placing a halting hand on his arm as the imposing syringe neared Aeryn’s neck. “I don’t want her to feel pain.”

“She IS most probably feeling pain now,” Uru pointed out.

John grimaced and backed off again; Aeryn hardly stirred as the sedative was injected. He nearly stepped in again when Uru then proceeded to remove Aeryn’s pants before his sickly fascinated stare. New blood started to cover Uru’s gloves as he uncovered her once grey boxers, sending John into an escaping half-turn.

“Oh shit! Shit shit shit!” He exclaimed loudly, flailing his arms around in distress, pacing back and forth anxiously right by Uru.

He heard a slapping sound and a strong hand painfully clamped his shoulder. “Wait outside,” Uru ordered him firmly, deftly discarding his removed glove in the sink.

“What?! No, I can’t leave her!” John choked, turning back toward the table and then immediately averted his eyes, bile rising in his throat.

“You’re disturbing me,” Uru growled, “and that’s not good for her,” he added with a softer tone.

John resisted Uru’s push toward the door, trying to force himself into staying calm but his body started to shake uncontrollably.

“She’s heavily sedated now,” Uru stated calmly, “She won’t know you’re here. All you’re going to achieve is delay and impair my work. I’ve dealt with situations a lot worse than this, fighting time to save people’s lives but I can not work properly without some peace and quiet.”

John opened his mouth to speak.

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Uru interrupted him.

John swallowed hard, bile rising in his throat again. He had not gone on a leap of faith in quite a long time but there was something in the alien’s calm gaze that tugged at his once trusting nature. His eyes travelled over to Aeryn’s deathly pale face and slid back again to lock on Uru’s unyielding gaze.

“You can do this?” He asked, his voice muffled behind the back of his hand.

“Yes.”

“And she WILL be all right?”

“She will,” Uru replied with the slightest emphasis on the pronoun.

John nodded wordlessly and walked away to leave the room but then stopped on the threshold. “Her name is Aeryn. I’m John… or Crichton… in case she asks for me.”

[tazey]

Spoilers: up through Dog With Two Bones
Rating: R (some difficult topics)
Summary: J&A angst, some Butch and Sundance.
Disclaimers: Blah, blah, blah. Not mine.
Huge thanks to my betas: Aeryncrichton and WalkingTheBeam



PART 4b

*************

John had closed the door behind him and had stood aimlessly right behind it, feeling miserable, his arms hanging limply by his sides. His right hand had brushed his thigh and he had realized with a start that he had left his pistol in the other room but had thought better of it than going back in to retrieve it. So, for lack of a more efficient means of defence, he had made sure the door leading to the outside was bolted shut and had draped the curtains over the windows, even though the night had finally fallen outside and the room he was in had been completely dark.

Pacing had been the best thing he could come up with afterwards but physical exhaustion had soon taken over and he had slumped against the wall by the office door, one arm draped over his injured ribs, his head resting against the wall, his eyes staring numbly at the outside door in front of him, his mind too tired to think.

He remained in his prostrated position until the office door opened and Uru’s gravel voice cut through his haze. “Your turn.”

John got up wearily, awakening the throbbing pain on his left side and followed Uru back in the other room. He blinked as he discovered Aeryn still lying on the examination table but now wearing pants three sizes too large and five inches too short, as well as a similarly oversized tee-shirt under her vest. He could see her deep and even breathing as he approached her and let out a sigh of relief at the sight of her face, which had recovered its normal complexion. He brushed stray strands of dark hair away from her forehead and felt its normal coolness; her fever was gone. His hand moved away from her face and hung back limply by his side.

“It’s gonna take her some time to fully wake up,” Uru told him as he rolled in another examination table from the storage room and placed it next to Aeryn’s, “I sedated her more than I could have but I didn’t want to risk her waking up and reacting irrationally to her surroundings until I was done.” He motioned for John to sit on the second examination table. “Take off your vest and shirt.”

John stood still, engrossed in Aeryn’s peaceful features. It had been a while since he had seen her face so relaxed and open. He had come to remember it only with lines of worry and pain crisscrossing it at all times.

“Take off your vest and shirt,” Uru repeated a little louder, yanking John back to reality.

“Thank you,” John murmured.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Uru replied gruffly, “I’m not finished.”

John went to sit gingerly on the examination table and proceeded to remove his vest with awkward moves, his muscles sore past discomfort. His tattered tee-shirt proved out to be a completely different matter; the material had become glued to his skin as his blood had dried away. He tugged at it a few times, wondering if he would have to just rip it off and be done with it.

“Don’t do that!” Uru scolded as he saw John’s gestures. “You’re gonna start bleeding again. Just lie down.”

John obeyed him and laid still as Uru cut his tee-shirt around the wound and attempted to soak the attached remaining material in warm water to unglue it from the wound as neatly as possible. John watched the proceedings with a detached eye at first but then his expression took a tinge of worry when Uru’s hands stood poised in mid-air after having removed the last of the material and puzzlement spread across the alien’s face.

“You’re not Sebacean?” Uru asked, shooting John a clearly perplexed look.

John couldn’t stop the ironic and rueful smile. “Story of my life,” he murmured back. Uru raised an inquiring eyebrow. “Just pretend I’m one,” John told him off-handedly, “it won’t make much difference.”

Uru pressed his lips firmly together and blew air noisily through his large nose. “Fine!” He grumbled and went to discard the tattered remains of John’s shirt. “Who cares if I happen to puncture anything that is significantly different from Sebacean physiology?!” He picked up his scanner and ran it over the wound.

John’s face crunched up apologetically. “OK then...” he let out a deep sigh and bit his lower lip, “I’m a human,” he started explaining calmly, “from a planet called Earth that no one has ever heard about and, unfortunately for you, the only human this side of the universe…” his gaze slid toward Aeryn lying next to him on the other table and he smiled sadly, “… except for a little while.”

“You’ll have another chance,” Uru stated matter-of-factly at the sight of John’s expression of longing.

John looked up sharply, surprised by his perspicacity and assurance.

“If you follow some basic precautions.”

John’s brows furrowed in perplexity.

“It makes more sense now,” Uru nodded to himself as his speculative gaze left Aeryn’s face to look back at John. “The fetus was viable,” he started explaining, leaning to his left to bring his tray of medical instruments closer to him. He selected a syringe filled with a yellow liquid. “So, whatever differences there are between Sebaceans and… Humans, they do not seem to ban the production of healthy offspring between your two races.”

John swiftly cast his eyes down, unwilling to let Uru realize he had had another human in mind.

“However,” Uru continued, glancing at Aeryn, “her Peacekeeper biological status makes that quite special.”

“She’s not…” John started and stopped at Uru’s ‘don’t give me bullshit’ look. “Not anymore… she left them many cycles ago.” He gasped slightly as Uru injected him with the yellow liquid.

“But she was one of them, right? And I’d say that’s what caused her to lose the fetus,” Uru affirmed, picking up a sharp instrument from his tray, “well that and the wound of course which was essentially superficial for someone like her yet instrumental in the loss. It triggered an immune reaction, hence the fever, that rejected anything alien from her body. A Sebacean fetus could have pulled through. Your hybrid child certainly did not stand a chance. A regular Sebacean might not have had such a problem but Peacekeepers have enhanced immune systems and in her case, it worked as efficiently as programmed.”

John closed his mouth and pressed his lips together; he had been listening religiously to Uru’s explanation. “I see,” he murmured.

“So, if you really want to have an offspring together,” Uru continued in a lecturing tone, his hand waving the sharp instrument in the air to stress his words, “you’ll have to make sure she remains in a biologically friendly environment and away from anything that might bring her physical harm for the entire duration of her pregnancy.” He paused for a second. “And of course, it’d be better if you didn’t try again before another quarter cycle.”

John ran a weary hand over his face, almost tempted to laugh out loud at the unintended irony of Uru’s words. “Some of that shouldn’t be too difficult,” he quipped humourlessly and then grimaced as Uru’s fingers dug sharply into his hip to hold him still. He closed his eyes for a second, expecting to feel some pain from the instrument knifing through his flesh but none came; the yellow liquid had probably been a painkiller.


They lapsed into a mutual silence as Uru proceeded to treat John’s wound. Though John wasn’t watching and couldn’t feel a thing either, he could tell from Uru’s deep concentrated silence that he was doing a delicate job and that the resulting scars would be minimal and heal quickly. However, he was pretty sure that his entire left side would bear the mark of the alien’s fingerprints for quite a while. Uru had a way of gripping his body that, at first, had nearly made John remark that he wasn’t going anywhere but after a while, he had concluded that it was more likely that Uru didn’t realize his strength or the humans’ more fragile constitution and he gradually learned to accommodate himself to his rather rough ministrations. Besides, there was something… comforting about that discomfort. Something… familiar…

“Turn on your right side,” Uru instructed, starting to roll John himself as he spoke.

John willingly complied and settled himself on his side, his right arm squeezed under his head, his left arm folded before his chest so as not to hinder Uru’s access to his side and back. His eyes came to rest on Aeryn’s peaceful profile.

Where his mother had always been all softness in her embrace, his father had always held him tight to a point of near painful discomfort. Yet, as much as he had enjoyed the warm protective cocoon his mother wrapped around him, he had craved the sheer physical strength of his father’s arms, especially as a young child when he would be carried and pressed against his father’s chest, parts of his body sometimes going numb from the sustained pressure. Back then, he had never needed anyone to tell him his Dad was a super hero, he knew it in his child’s body, in the sense of security before danger those muscular arms gave him, for only a super hero would have such palpable strength. Only later did it occur to him that his dad, like many other fathers, had simply been awkward in his embrace, going for tighter instead of more comfortable the way mothers do. Still, when his height had kept him from being carried around anymore, he had missed that embrace with the extra bit of strength that had seemed to diffuse through his own powerless child’s body. He was a super hero’s son, bound to become a super hero too.

He felt Uru’s hand slide along the back of his lower ribs, following the outlines of the wound; fingerprints  pressed against his spine.

“I’m really sorry about pointing a gun at you earlier…” John murmured without turning his head.

“Hmmm…” Uru mumbled dismissively.

“I haven’t always been like that, you know…” John ploughed on, feeling the urge to justify himself, “pointing guns at people’s faces…” He held his breath as Aeryn turned her head toward him and sighed softly. Her eyes remained closed and her breathing even but he could sense that she would wake up soon and the lines would reappear on her face and tension stiffen her body. He exhaled a shaky breath, reached out his hand tentatively toward hers, lying palm up along her side and delicately traced the outlines of her fingers and of her palm with the softest caress of a fingertip.

“I wasn’t prepared for all this dren, not at all,” John started again in hushed tones, shaking his head slowly. “On my planet, I was a scientist, the only weapons I ever held were at the country fair to win plush toys for girls and the only politics I cared about were the ones that would enable me to finance my space project.” He paused, wondering when Uru would tell him to shut up but the alien continued his task in silence and John couldn’t keep the words inside anymore. “One day, my ship gets thrown out here and I fall in the middle of a battle between escaped prisoners on a Leviathan ship and a Peacekeeper vessel trying to arrest them. I get lucky enough to escape a crash that sends a PK prowler to extinction and earn the undying hatred of the PK captain whose brother was piloting the prowler. As if that wasn’t enough, some ancient race decided to plant wormhole knowledge in my unconscious, making me the Uncharted Territories’ most wanted man.” His fingers moved upward to draw meaningless figures on the softer skin of Aeryn’s inner wrist. “For three cycles now, I’ve put all my strength into surviving through fear and pain, torture and manipulation, I’ve tried to find sense in the incomprehensible, I’ve done my best to make things right whenever I could but the picture is just too big for me. All I’ve ended up doing is screwing up more times than I care to remember, hurting and killing people myself without so much as a second thought…” He brought his arm back against his chest, his eyes boring into Aeryn’s sleeping face. “I hate the person I’ve become.”

The pressure finally eased completely from his back and reappeared on his shoulder. “Sit,” Uru simply said, helping John to get into a seating position.

John rolled reluctantly away from Aeryn, swung his legs over the table and sat, facing Uru, who was looking back at him with a pensive frown. John cast his eyes down and sighed deeply. “And now, I’ve probably bored you to death with my moans of self-pity,” he looked back up apologetically, “but it feels as if you’re the first normal person I’ve met in such a long time.”

The ghost of a wistful smile tugged at Uru’s lips and gave his features the trustful quality John had sensed in his behaviour. “I could say the same thing about you,” the alien replied, his gentle tone a stark contrast to his previous gruff remarks.

John nearly chuckled then shook his head in strong denegation.

“That boy, Dabaroo, that came bursting in before?” Uru asked him while skillfully applying a healing bandage on John’s fresh scars. “Every morning, I wake up wondering if today is the day I’ll have to attend his burial ceremony. I nearly buried his arm two cycles ago.”

John’s brows furrowed in puzzlement.

Uru sighed deeply and picked up a large roll of white material. “This planet is one uneventful place save for one particularity, we have the most diversified array of dangerous wild animals.” He started corseting John’s chest with the white material, looping it around in several tight circles. “For whatever reasons, ages ago, people started keeping those beasts as house animals, taking pride in having the most dangerous ones close at hand. I started as a wildlife doctor and soon found myself treating owners and animals alike, since their shared existences usually result in numerous ‘accidents’ ranging from minor bites to deaths for both. When you simply can’t pry them apart, you end up treating both at the same time. Here, scars and funerals define your social status and half the days are spent attending burials of all kinds: men, animals, body parts the beasts felt like ripping or the owners like keeping at bay.” He tucked in the last end of the white material and John gratefully lowered his weary arms. “I delivered Dabaroo the day his mother lost her life to a Batom and have kept an eye on him since then. I had been hoping to keep him away from all this and it worked for a while but peer pressure won over and he’s just like the others now, excited about his next animal, hoping to buy one that will outgrow his others in ferocity and dangerousness.”

“Your people are strange I’ll admit but I don’t see how you can find me normal in comparison,” John remarked softly.

Uru’s gaze bore into his. “At least you question your life. They never do.”

John smiled ironically. “I wish my questions brought some answers.”

“You survived in a dangerous environment for which you said you were not prepared. You must have found some answers, even if you don’t like them.”

John’s gaze dropped to his hands, resting on his lap. His face froze into a mask of pain. “I don’t.”

“That woman, Aeryn, you obviously love her very much.” Uru paused and watched John’s silent assent. “You were starting a family with her, something you can still hope to do, build on that.”

John tried to swallow the lump in his throat, amazed at how outsiders could so completely misread the situation when unaware of the facts. “It’s too late, she’s lost to me.” He let out a deep sigh and continued haltingly.  “At first, I just tried to earn my keep with the others on the ship and think of a way to go home. I did what I could to become what they needed me to be… what Aeryn wanted me to be.” He stopped, trying to keep the tears from welling up in his eyes. “I even hoped that I could have it all, Aeryn and Earth. It was a difficult road but, little by little, I changed for her, she changed for me and we were to find each other somewhere midway. Apparently, it could have worked perfectly that way but… perfection got frelled. I lost her.” He finally found the courage to look up again into Uru’s deep gaze. “All that time, I’ve lived through her eyes and now when she looks at me, I can tell she doesn’t like what she sees…”

An insistent pounding on the outside door startled them. John immediately looked for his pulse pistol and spotted it, lying on the ground in a far corner of the room. Uru had remained still, his hand on John’s knee to keep him still as well. The pounding continued.

“Stay here,” Uru instructed John in hushed tones. He went to pick up the dirtied jacket he had discarded earlier on and the thick padding as well then left the room, closing the door behind him, but not before throwing John another commanding look to remain quiet.

John turned around to check on Aeryn and felt a jolt of electricity as he found himself staring into her wide-opened eyes. He brought a shaking finger to his lips, signalling her to remain silent and motioned for her to stay put. She nodded wordlessly. He slid from the examination table and walked cautiously across the room to retrieve his pulse pistol. His ears, tuned toward the other room, were unable to make sense of the muffled sounds he was hearing. He bent down with difficulty to pick up the gun on the floor and when he turned back, saw that Aeryn was now standing up beside her examination table. He nearly scowled at her but the door opened again and it was Uru who gave him that look. John swiftly holstered his pulse pistol.

“That was Dabaroo,” Uru informed him, getting rid of his jacket and thick padding again. “There’s a group of Peacekeepers on the other side of the town looking for two armed Sebaceans. He came to see if I was alright.”

“Nice boy this Dabaroo,” John said with relief.

“Unfortunately,” Uru sighed with a sad smile.

He seemed only mildly surprised to see Aeryn standing up and John wondered if Uru knew exactly when she had awakened during their conversation.

“They will be searching this place soon.”

“We’ll be going right away,” John said immediately, picking up his own bloodied jacket. The material itched against his naked skin but it was still better than nothing. “We don’t want to cause you any trouble. We’ll just leave the same way we came.”

Uru strode toward Aeryn, picking up a small cylinder on his way. He planted himself before her. “There was nothing I…” he started in a gentle voice.

“I know,” she interrupted him curtly, her hand brushing absentmindedly against the bandage on her side.

He cocked his head at her then simply nodded before her stubborn expression and opened the cylinder, taking her hand and placing a green pill on her palm. “Swallow that,” he ordered her with the same gentle voice and looked on as she complied, “it’s a stimulant, it will help you recover your strength. You’ll take one every six arns for the next two solar days.” He handed her the cylinder and went to open a cabinet from which he retrieved her holster and pulse pistol. “I had to dispose of your clothes, you can keep the ones you have on now.”

Aeryn replaced her holster and clicked in her pulse pistol. “Thank you,” she murmured.

John came to stand next to her and extended his hand toward Uru. “Thank you for everything.” Uru extended his hand as well after a moment’s hesitation and John grasped it and kept it in his longer than usual, his gaze locked with the alien’s to strengthen the bond. “Goodbye.”

“One last thing,” Uru said as their hands separated. He went to a refrigeration unit nearby and retrieved a small white crate the size of a shoebox. “This is yours.” He held the box between John and Aeryn. “But, if you prefer,” he added before their puzzled looks, “I can have it buried for you.”

“Oh…” John let out, understanding dawning in a rush of adrenaline. He glanced swiftly at Aeryn whose face had suddenly paled and jerkily extended his hand again. “I’ll take care of it.” He placed the box inside the crook of his left arm, wondering how it could feel so light and heavy at the same time and then started toward the storage room. Aeryn followed him automatically with Uru in tow.

John opened the door whose lock he had cracked a few hours ago and cautiously peered outside. His gaze travelled up and down the badly lit back alley several times. Satisfied with the absence of movement, he nodded toward Aeryn, waved a final goodbye at Uru and stepped outside, the cold immediately biting his body, a stark reminder that the protection of the last few hours was definitely gone.


*************

Aeryn took the lead as soon as they left the town’s outskirts, her superior eyesight proving decisive in the forest’s dense darkness. She hardly ever glanced at their orientation unit, marching ahead with an assurance John had trouble following as he stumbled over roots and earth mounds every other step.

Silence ruled between them and John found himself paying undivided attention to all the sounds around him. On their way in, he had heard numerous creepy sounds, regular forest sounds he had thought then but now that he knew the particularities of the planet’s fauna, he wasn’t particularly interested in finding out who or what exactly made those sounds. However, he became gradually aware of a change in the tonality of those sounds, less chirping and squealing and more growling. He started to look behind him any time he could, squinting hard to distinguish anything in the forest’s recesses and nearly bumped into Aeryn who had stopped without warning.

“We’re a metra away from the Marauder,” she informed him matter-of-factly.

“Good,” John replied, looking around him once more. “I don’t like these surroundings.”

“They’ll be expecting us.”

He nodded knowingly. “How many of them?”

“Four soldiers maybe five.”

“What’s the best strategy?” He asked in the flat tone she was using. A cold conversation was still better than no conversation.

“Surprise and maybe some distraction.” She started to move forward again, speaking to him over her shoulder. “You’ll have to move exactly like me from now on, Peacekeeper standard procedures on an operation like this call for…”

“Oh, shit!” John interrupted her.

Aeryn whirled around to face him, worried by his tone of alarm. “What?”

“How fast can you run?” He asked her softly, standing unusually still on his feet, his right hand resting on the butt of his pulse pistol.

She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Faster than you,” she replied dryly.

He thought best not to rephrase his question and nodded slowly toward a spot on his right. “Let’s hope I’m faster than them.”

Her gaze followed the direction he had indicated and came upon three pairs of glowing orange eyes a stone’s throw away from them, flashing in and out of her sight and changing positions between two occurrences.

“What are they like?” John asked in hushed tones. “I could only make out their eyes.”

“They’re large,” she whispered back, her eyes trained on the animals, trying to determine their physical characteristics while carefully avoiding eye contact. “Quadrupeds, hide not fur, bulky, strong jaws, probably pack hunters,” she enumerated slowly.

“Strong jaws?” He repeated, his shoulders sagging slightly. “Do they look like they can run fast?”

“Huh uh,” she replied non-committally, moving closer to him to better hide her scrutiny from the animals’ awareness as they kept moving around. “Their legs seem rather short and not built for speed but I wouldn’t bet on it. Didn’t that doctor tell you about the animals they have here?” She asked and immediately bit her lip, realizing her blunder.

He felt his heart leap in his chest at her question and wondered again exactly when she had woken up and what she had heard. “Only the general overview, he didn’t get into specifics,” he replied with his most casual tone, pretending not to have noticed her embarrassment and fighting over his own. “But enough to discourage me about meeting any of them face to face.”

Aeryn slowly shook her head and sighed. “I could kill the three of them before they have a chance to reach us, but using my pulse pistol will mostly make the soldiers aware of our position and that’s an advantage we can’t afford to give them. We’re too close now.”

John nodded in understanding.

Aeryn glanced at the animals again. “Perhaps we could use them…”

“As a distraction,” John finished for her.

“Yes.”

They locked eyes.

“And for now, we’re bait,” John stated more calmly than he expected.

“Yes.”

They resumed their silent walk, their senses, stretched to a maximum awareness, bringing them information about their changing surroundings. And more. They were tuned together, Aeryn still leading the way and John stepping in her prints, moving exactly like she did. She took them on a zigzagging trail toward their Marauder, sometimes even backtracking a little for reasons she only knew about and John trusted her enough not to question, though he started wondering just how long that last metra was going to be. The animals were closing in on them and…

“Aeryn?” He breathed out as silently as he could.

He saw her braid bob slowly up and down in acknowledgment. The number of animals following them had just doubled. She unholstered her pulse pistol without even a click.

John unzipped his jacket halfway, shivering immediately at the biting cold on his naked skin and tucked in the small white box he had been carrying, pressing it painfully against his sore chest. He couldn’t zip his jacket back up much but the garment would hold the box securely enough as such and he knew he was going to need his two hands. He grimaced in concentration as he tried to unholster his pulse pistol as silently as she had.

They broke into a wild run as soon as Aeryn caught her first glimpse of the Marauder’s shape, yet still too far away from it for John’s taste. The number of animals had increased again and they had been nearly encircled. Legs pumping in unison, they dashed between the trees, realizing that at one point they would find themselves right in front of the soldiers’ line of fire and with the animals breathing down their necks. John silently prayed that his legs would not trip on a root, slowing him down or worse making him fall. He couldn’t afford the luxury of losing a single millisecond on the animals; the latest glances he had managed to throw toward them had brought back in his mind the myth of the beast of the Gevaudan he had read about in his teens and, however awe inspiring he had found it back then, that was one myth he didn’t care to see up close and personal.

They heard shouts and movements ahead of them. With the ruckus they were making in their running and the beasts’ growls getting louder, the soldiers didn’t seem to care much about silence themselves. Aeryn suddenly disappeared from his sight a few feet before him.

“Climb!” She hissed at him and he reflexively grabbed her extended hand to haul himself up on the first low branch of a large tree. She grunted as his weight pulled hard on her arm and braced herself against the trunk to keep from falling. His left knee hooked around the branch and he released the pressure on her arm, balancing himself on the branch on his own. He swung his legs behind him before the beasts could make a leap at them, stood up on the large branch and swiftly climbed his way further up the tree behind Aeryn, well out of harm’s way.

The encounter below did not go well, for either side. Though the three soldiers who had come running in were clearly outnumbered by the dozen of beasts before them, they seemed to face up to the challenge rather well at first, their aims never missing their targets and the beasts growled in anger and pain. But the soldiers soon realized that it was taking more than one hit to put one beast to rest and found themselves encircled by an angry pack. And those beasts certainly did have strong jaws.

Aeryn brought John’s attention away from the gruesome battle. “The other soldiers must have already called for reinforcements,” she whispered to him. “And we’d better not wait for the beasts to remember us.” She pointed to the branch under her feet. “We can go from one tree to the next using branches like these. They’re not large but they’re strong enough to support our weight. Once we’ve put some distance, we can climb down again and worry about the remaining soldiers.”

John nodded wearily. He was having trouble breathing. The run had taken most of his already diminished stamina and the bandage was wound up too tight around his chest, only allowing him small hiccupping breaths. His heart was beating a wild rhythm in his chest, reverberating against the small box tucked in his jacket. A throbbing pain was starting again on his left side, the painkiller having finally worn out. He looked at Aeryn as she was positioning herself on the branch, hanging by her arms and legs to inch her way along since the branch was not large enough for her to walk on and wondered how she could still be going on so strongly. Maybe, he should have asked for some green pills too or perhaps it was just a matter of genes and his did not carry the inexhaustible physical strength codes. He knelt awkwardly and took his position on the branch, suppressing a moan of pain, when the strain on his arms threatened to rip his wound open again.

They put five large trees between them and the rat race. As he was inching his way on the branch leading to the trunk of the last tree, John came face to face with a pair of glowing green eyes belonging to an animal that, though significantly smaller than the previous ones, seemed to take a particular interest in him as its gleaming fangs soon proved. Of course, since this planet had a diversified array of dangerous animals, there were no reasons for those animals to be limited to ground territory. Trees were so much more fun, John thought ironically.

The animal slowly craned its neck toward John from the overhead branch it was balancing itself on. John’s left arm and side were so sore that it was impossible for him to hang on the branch with just his left arm so as to reach for his pulse pistol without falling. He fixed the animal’s stare with his own and tried to will it out of his way. Don’t even think about it, he silently urged it with all the power of persuasion he could put in his stare. The animal continued its slow advance toward him, unabashed but then squealed and bounced off the branch pursued by some other critter. John didn’t even sigh in relief, he finished his painstaking progress along the branch, climbed down the tree and let himself fall by the trunk next to Aeryn, his knees taking the brunt of the fall with an audible crack.

They made their way, unhindered, to the edge of the small clearing where they had left the Marauder. Two Prowlers were stationed next to it but no soldiers were in sight. Aeryn sighed in frustration and disappointment and John realized she actually looked nearly as worn out as he felt he was.

“They’re probably inside the Marauder,” she whispered to him as she continued to advance as close to the spaceship as possible.

Engine noises above their heads made them retreat momentarily into denser shadows. Three other Prowlers made a slow descent next to the other two, on the other side of the Marauder from John and Aeryn. Two fully geared soldiers left the Marauder to greet them.

“Idiots!” Aeryn hissed.

John didn’t have time to wonder about her comment that Aeryn, hidden from the soldiers’ view by the Marauder’s massive shape, had already broken into a run for the ship and he stumbled after her. Instead of going for the main hatch on the other side where the Prowlers were, she reached out for a nearly invisible latch and brought into relief some sort of ladder. They climbed along the hull and went in through a beacon launch hole that she opened as casually as techs before her probably had.

“Keep the main hatch secure. Don’t close it until I tell you to,” she ordered him over her shoulder as she trotted to command.

He nodded wordlessly, picked up a pulse rifle on the way and settled himself by the main hatch. He had no idea what was going on outside, he couldn’t see the soldiers but then, neither could they see him. The Marauder’s engines came bursting through life.

“Now,” Aeryn ordered over the comms and he smashed his fist on the closing mechanism.

Mayhem erupted inside the clearing as the Marauder fired on the Prowlers and smashed them to pieces before veering off abruptly in a steep vertical vector away from the ground.

[tazey]

Spoilers: up through Dog With Two Bones
Rating: R (some difficult topics)
Summary: J&A angst, some Butch and Sundance.
Disclaimers: Blah, blah, blah. Not mine.
Huge thanks to my betas: Aeryncrichton and WalkingTheBeam



PART 5

************

Aeryn brought the Marauder on a precise slide between the asteroids, going for the one that she had determined would provide the best shielding against Peacekeepers’ search sensors with its mass containing a high percentage of different metals. Hands clutched tensely around the maneuvering controls in her weariness, she proceeded to land the ship on the uneven surface with a smoothness she had not expected to achieve. Metal grated against metal and she powered down the engines. She stared blankly at the large asteroid field in front of her, half-hidden by the dark shapes surrounding the ship on all sides. This would have to do, there were no suns in close proximity for them to use. And they were safe here. For a while.

She ran her hands over her weary face and slumped against the back of the seat, relishing its familiar hard feel. She was exhausted, more exhausted than she remembered ever feeling. She retrieved the small cylinder from her pocket and looked at it wonderingly; six arns had not yet passed but her body had been thoroughly taxed since they had left the doctor’s office and she knew she would need the added strength. John would be expecting her… no… hoping to see her join him, waiting for her to be ready to.

Not long after she had finished a slew of contradictory flying vectors to confuse whoever would attempt to track them down and then proven her ability to fly the marauder entirely on her own, he had tried talking to her and taken her rejection without so much as a blink, as if he had expected nothing less from her. She had let him leave Command, his gaze sliding over her, looking at something she couldn’t see, lines of exhaustion marring his lifeless face and she had not said a word. On his way out, he had murmured that he had some preparations to make for a ceremony. A burial ceremony. She placed the green pill on her tongue and found it hard to swallow it through her dry throat.

She sensed the fresh scar of her injury beneath the clothes and the bandage. It was quite distant from her stomach, somehow curved around her side and deceptively small; she would have dismissed it as no more than a battle scratch in normal times. John had attempted to warn her but, running on anger and lack of time, she had not heeded his words. She slid her hands over and pressed them gently against her womb. She didn’t quite understand how she could feel so empty now where she had not felt full. Her pregnancy had remained a concept up until the pain had torn her apart. She had tried to discreetly learn the data relevant to Sebacean pregnancies and babies and had followed the meagre pieces of advice unquestioningly. She had tried to look at the world around her with different eyes, to sense the importance of the change in her but had found herself unable to grasp the true reality of it. Somehow, in the back of her mind, it had been as if she had known that she would not see the end of her pregnancy, that she had not expected to have a child, to give birth. Life did not accompany her, death did. Her failure had come as no surprise and she felt no regret, just an incredible tiredness in her bones from the stress of the past days and arns catching up with her at last. And that strange emptiness.

She had realized almost right away that she was losing the fetus, she had had her fair share of field wounds to know for sure that this pain was entirely different. And she had denied that knowledge until she had felt the blood start to seep through her spasming core and soak her underwear. John had marched into Command right at that moment and filled her hazy world with his emotions. He had stood trembling before her, his anger, worry, frustration and guilt overwhelming her and she had found herself unable to pretend any longer. Yet she had refused to admit the truth to him, had refused to look him straight in the eye because she had seen the fear of loss on his face, the same fear that paralysed her whenever he was concerned and it had crushed her full force. His fear had stripped him raw and she hadn’t been able to take anymore away from him. And so she had marched beside him in the forest, feeling her strength ebb away with each passing stride, her body burning with the fever and the heat of his own body next to hers. And when she had passed out, she knew exactly what his feelings had been.

She brought her arms up and clutched her sides tight. She had heard him tell the planet’s doctor that he had lost her but in fact, it was she who had lost him, shutting him out, running away and shutting him out, again and again and again. She didn’t feel strong enough to face his pain, it felt too much like her own. She was afraid of his ceremony, afraid of what it might do to her, afraid to remember ‘his’ burial on Talyn, afraid of him but… she needed it. The physical scar would heal and slowly disappear from her skin until she no longer would be able to sense it under her fingertips. She couldn’t let this memory slide away without giving it more reality.

She got up and marvelled at the potency of that green pill; her legs were steadier than she thought they would be. Yet her body felt strangely powerless in the loose fitting clothes, they did not give her the sense of focus her own clothes did, with their tightness holding her inside and their thickness protecting her from the outside. She thought for a fleeting moment of finding some regulation clothes in the Marauder’s crew quarters, of exerting herself in physical training, of curling up in a corner, of running away, of doing anything but what was coming up. Because he would be there and afterwards… It had been hard enough the last time, she didn’t want to say goodbye again. Not to his face, not when his eyes spoke of so much pain and his lips smoothed the lines between past, present and future.

She stared hard at the asteroid field on the view screen, letting its slow-moving spectacle lure her into a trance like state until she finally shook her head and took her first step forward. They couldn’t afford to wait for her to be ready, safety was an all too relative notion in their world.


************

John stood by the large porthole, staring at the asteroid field before him and waiting, not knowing how much longer he could wait.

His gaze fell on the ledge before him on its circling way between the porthole, the ledge, the room’s entrance and Harvey. It had done so every thirty microts in the past arn since the engines had powered down, failing to find any significant change in any of those. Asteroids still rolled by lazily behind the porthole, the ledge still supported his meagre excuse for a funeral vessel, the room’s entrance still remained empty and Harvey still stood at the edge of his consciousness in a dark corner of the room. And he let him stay there, because the clone was quiet for a change and because he could use his company at that distance.

Crais had told him briefly about the burial they had given his twin, putting his body into the Farscape One copy and flying it into a sun. He knew that the ex-Peacekeeper captain had observed him askew, trying to determine if he agreed with the choice they had made and he had nodded imperceptibly to save himself the trouble to answer, because he had no idea what he would have wanted, what he would want. He didn’t know if what he had just done was right or wrong, it was simply easier to go along the same lines. There were no suns nearby this time, only rocks of various sizes to crash into, but the box was white and he had made sure it would fly straight and burn brightly, leaving no trace for anyone to find.

He unclasped his hands from behind his back and placed his palm over the smooth surface of the transparent bubble-shaped material encasing the box. He had found the transparent bubble among other bits and pieces he had scraped together in the Marauder’s maintenance room to build that funeral vessel of unidentifiable shape. The material warmed significantly under his touch; he blinked and removed his hand. His gaze remained locked on the box lying inside the bubble on a mattress of various inflammable materials tucked neatly against it. He kept thinking of Snow White because of that illustration he had seen in the fairytale book he had been offered so many years ago and in which she had lain in a glass coffin, her cheeks pale and her hands piously joined over her stomach, waiting for her prince to come and rescue her. Aeryn had been that pale too on the Diagnosan’s ice planet, black hair spilling about her still face, her hands joined that very same way. Zhaan had been her prince.

He heard her footsteps and saw her faint shadow stretch all the way to his side from the threshold she remained at. He didn’t turn back, just picked up the object before him and placed it in the nearest airlock. He timed the different triggers, stepped back, pressed the release of the airlock and squinted through the porthole to distinguish the small vessel flying against the darkness of space, taking away from him more than he thought he had left inside. He fought hard against the lump forming in his throat as he ticked off the microts in his head. Fire burned brightly inside the transparent bubble before the funeral vessel exploded in the shortest-lived supernova effect.

Farewell, John Crichton. This universe was not for you.


************

Aeryn wavered on her feet, thoroughly disconcerted. That was not what she had expected; the whole thing was over before it had even started. She had watched the small vessel shoot through space and explode in a burst of light through the porthole, over John’s shoulder, bracing herself for the ritual parting words and none came. She had started taking into account John’s more subdued behaviour, the way he would remain silent for long periods of time, his feelings held away from his face but, she had expected him to say something, because he had always been able to come up with words and she herself didn’t know what to say. The last time, she had let Rygel, Stark and Crais take care of that part and all the rest too, she had just had the strength to stand in the room. She strained her ears and took two steps forward, wondering if perhaps she wasn’t able to hear his murmur due to the throbbing in her head but silence stretched into the room and he just stood immobile, staring through the porthole, his back to her, his shoulders straight, his breathing slow, not making any sound.

She felt more than saw his silent tears and a rapid glance confirmed her suspicion, she caught one splashing on his hand, hanging limply by his hip. Except for the hair on his hand and forearm reflecting the light like grass covered with morning dew, there was no outward indication of his crying and the quietness with which his pain just seeped from him tore her apart.

It had been easier before. The others knew the rules. Emotions were a hindrance to a soldier, a weakness to be avoided and she had been very good at that. Subtle too. They had all thought it came naturally to her, not realizing how much hard work it took to make it look natural, to master the art of the perfect Peacekeeper. She had been an obedient child, striving to follow orders and rules as best she could, even when they went against her instincts. She had born the physically and mentally excruciating trainings without a moan or a tear, at least none that anyone could hear or see. Her few chosen friends had always been among the strongest recruits, the ones less likely to have breakdowns that no form of recreation could cure. And for the few times they did, she had developed over the cycles strong skills for ignoring the moment.

She bit her lip and took another two steps forward to stand next to him, hardly a hair breadth away from him. Her entire side started to tingle from the proximity of his body. She heard his breath hitch in his chest then resume its slow pace, hers gradually coming to match it, their hearts beating in unison.

Retreat had rarely been an option, the shared barracks had made it hard to isolate oneself from the others and so she had had to face their breakdowns and confronted them with her perfect Peacekeeper behaviour, drilling the Peacekeeper words of strength and duty before their hearts could open and their tears could spill, shovelling rules and regulations over their emotions, all the while telling herself that it was for their own protection yet tearing up inside at the sight of their distress. Velorek had seen through her routine after a few solar days, John had only needed a few arns. John…

She stole a glance at him and saw his eyes flutter. She stole another glance and noticed that he had stopped crying. She stared at the same swirling spectacle he was focused on through the porthole and debated about stealing another glance or not. She cocked her head imperceptibly and caught the reflection of his face on the porthole’s glass. Her brows creased into a frown. She couldn’t see his eyes, he had closed them and his features were frustratingly blank.

John hadn't known about the rules and hadn’t cared, he had just kept pushing the walls. From the beginning, emotions had poured out of him from simplest to most complex and she had had to battle against the constant onslaught. She had fled his pain as often as she could, leaving him alone and miserable more times than she wished to remember. Her skills had been finely honed on Peacekeepers, not Humans and his unpredictability had often made her react bluntly to his needs to talk events and feelings through. Yet he had no idea how many times she had screamed and kicked in frustration at her inability to shake off ingrained habits. The most difficult part about ignoring the moment was not the ignoring, it was sensing the moment itself and then you could always choose between ignoring or seizing, the two paths held the same clarity.

She closed her eyes, trying to concentrate on words and felt his heart start to thump at a different rhythm, slower than hers and then the tingling started to leave her fingers, her wrist, her forearm… the moment was slipping away.

John himself did not just seize, he grabbed, poked, shook or cajoled until the words would finally come out and he had tried repeatedly to show her that emotions could make one stronger until she had come to admit it, only to watch him die in her arms. And breathe again.

She slid her hand inside his, her fingers grazing his palm on their way to intertwine with his. He crumbled on the floor, much to her surprise, taking her down with him. They fell in a heap before the ledge with her landing on top of him, wrapped around his curled body. She pushed on one arm to disentangle herself from him, their hands still clutched together, her gaze met his and she stopped scrambling.

The John she had lived with on Talyn had had cracks. This John was broken. She slipped her hand from his and wrapped her arms and legs tighter around him, lest he lose a piece. Loss was the emotion she understood best.


*************

Aeryn woke up to a sensation of wetness against her face. His tears, she thought at first but then realized they had to have been hers, spilling against his jacket. Her eyes felt puffy and full of sand and her face was pressed into his chest, his arms and legs wrapped tight around her body in a protective embrace. When had they changed positions? She wondered. She had been the one holding him, comforting him, hadn’t she?

She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, her head still throbbed a little and her throat ached. She licked her cracked lips tentatively. Her right leg was asleep but she couldn’t dredge up the strength to move, she felt too battle worn, her muscles cramped from the abuse.

If only he had been an injured Luxan, she could have pummelled his wounds until the blood ran clear again. But he was a Human with invisible wounds and, at first, she could think of nothing else than holding him tight, so tight that his frame had imprinted itself on her body, his bones poking her uncomfortably. He was leaner than she remembered. He had not resisted her embrace, lying heavy and limp against her, neither speaking nor crying, a dead weight in her arms and her mind had recoiled before the assaulting memories of another body slowly losing its warmth against hers. Her tears matting his hair, she had pressed quivering lips to his ear and repeated her croaked plea over and over until it had finally broken through his torpor. “Talk to me, John. Please.”

A jumble of words and emotions twirled around in her mind. His words, her words, hurt, guilt and love. She had thought she had experienced love’s two-edged sword on Talyn but, during the past arns, she had realized with awe and horror that its ecstasy could cut even sharper and deeper. She had counted too many fingerprints interlaced on the hilt of that sword, the freshest ones being her own, twisting the blade in his wounded heart. She had had a hard time making sense of his words, not knowing sometimes if he was referring to reality or dreams and hallucinations. Too many people had frelled with his mind, sometimes right in front of her unseeing eyes like that old woman. One thing for sure, he had lost his center when she had left and she had kept it out of his grasp when she had returned. Her foot twitched and pain shot through her numb leg. She shifted slightly to accommodate it to the returning sensations.


John held his breath as he felt her move and made a conscious effort not to wince in pain when she wrapped her arms around his chest to settle in a different position against him, afraid that she might move away. Her head came up and her face buried itself into the hollow of his neck. He let out a soft sigh of relief. Any second he could wrench away to make this moment last longer was worth whatever physical discomfort he would have to bear. He had not felt such peace since his time alone on Acquara even though his mind was still trying to process the roller coaster of emotions of the past hours.

Both had said things they had not wanted to say, heard things they had not wanted to hear and all things considered, he would willingly admit that he had behaved like a complete jerk since the crews had been separated. And that ‘he’ included his twin. One John Crichton was bad enough but two of him really made a mess and Aeryn had stood right in the middle of the crossfire.

He now had a better understanding of what she had gone through while she had been on Talyn and later back on Moya. Talyn’s murderous streaks, the retrieval squad, her mother’s death, his twin’s death, her time on Valldon and her mother’s reappearance and death again, something Crais would get a rightful punch in the face for if the damn captain was still alive, no matter how well intended his strategy had been at the time and no matter what he had done on the Command Carrier. And then, the shock of seeing him alive and well with his happy puppy face, the hurt and rejection they had inflicted each other, the news of her pregnancy, Talyn’s descent into madness, the carrier’s destruction, Henta’s death, their frelled-up goodbye in the cargo bay and all that had happened between then and now.

A little peace was the least they deserved for what they had gone through alone and together and yet…

“Aeryn…” His voice, still hoarse from the rough session, rasped over her name.

“I know…” Her voice sounded muffled against his throat. She sighed deeply and closed her eyes again, letting his warmth engulf her. “We should be going…” she murmured without conviction.

“Hmmm… yeah.” His mouth lingered on her hair, his breath tickling her scalp. He closed his eyes and tightened his grasp around her. “Whenever you’re ready to let me go.”

He felt her lips quirk into a rueful smile against his skin.


***********

Their emotional exhaustion overrode their sense of duty and their instincts to keep moving ahead of the hunting pack fell prey to the illusion of safety provided by their secluded surroundings, lulling them back to sleep. The asteroids swirling outside kept most of the starlight from filtering through the porthole in the powered down Marauder and the small room remained quiet and dark. They slept curled up together on the uncomfortable floor until the outraged rumbles of their stomachs became too loud to remain ignored anymore, the incongruity of the noises bringing the first genuine smiles on their faces. They trudged their way to the crew’s quarters and tried not to wolf down the battle rations they got their hands on. There was room for five persons around the table and yet they sat huddled together, finding it difficult to relinquish the physical closeness they had just achieved. It felt too cold to sit alone. A casual inquiry into the ship’s status brought them to their feet and moving. They had been here for two solar days.

Aeryn immediately left for Command to prep the ship and John got first pass at the shower. Two all around scans did not reveal any suspect presence nearby and she set the passive sensors on automatic sweep with genuine relief. They should have known better than to stay here for so long, ‘she’ should have known better yet she couldn’t bring herself to feel guilty about it. They just had not been ready to resume the game. She actually couldn’t remember a time when they had had such a long moment to themselves, certainly not on Moya and not even on Talyn. Internal security sensors confirmed that John had left the shower in the crew’s quarters and she rose from the pilot’s seat. It was her turn to wash and change while he would keep an eye on the ship until their departure.

She heard him rummaging in the crew’s closets on her way to the shower. Without breaking her stride, she stripped from her clothes, throwing them aside carelessly, not intending to wear them again. She indulged in an unusually long and rather hot shower, the water drumming her weary body with strong jets, flipped back to cold at the end and revved the dryer vents to maximum power. She walked briskly out, hoping to find some regulation clothes that would fit her. She rounded the walled recess to get to the crew’s closets and had to put a hand before her to keep from slamming into John, standing with piles of black-leather clothes strewn around him, dressed with just a pair of black underwear. Her palm connected with the skin between his shoulder blades and she was struck with the intensity of his reaction. Sudden heat flared and spread through her arm then disappeared almost immediately as he whirled around. Her hand stood poised in mid-air. His eyes rounded in surprise. And fear. She blinked nervously and her breath quickened. She felt even more naked than she already was.

He kept his eyes locked on hers, trying hard not to let them stray over her naked figure. She returned his gaze with the same intensity. Of their own volition, his hands rose to her hair, cupped her face; his thumb brushed gently over her quivering lips. He sighed shakily, suddenly hesitant. Her hands reached for his chest. They leaned toward each other, their faces so close that she caught the tiny flicker of pain in his eyes when her caress went over his wounded side. She gave him a quick apologetic smile and her nervous gaze left his to look at his wound. His slightly swollen scars stood in fiery red contrast to the black and blue hue covering half his side. His wound was clearly on the mend but her eyebrows still creased in worry at the sight. With a small dismissive shake of his head, he caught her hand in his as her fingertips traced the outlines of his cracked ribs. Their gazes locked again and fell together on the small pinkish line marring her otherwise perfect skin. In a monen it would be completely gone. Aeryn felt the tears sting her eyes, remembering Uru’s explanation that John had relayed to her, his hands stroking her hair as she had cried against his chest. The wound had triggered a strong immune reaction and if she had been more careful, it wouldn’t have happened. Yet, it wasn’t really so simple. It was not only what she did, but also who she had been and who she was. She had thought that she had given herself entirely but building a life with John Crichton required more than what she had been willing to sacrifice. He had left her and she had retreated too far back into her old ways to retain what he had given her during their time together.

She blinked back the tears furiously and stared hard at the John Crichton in front of her. He staggered before the fierceness in her eyes yet when her lips reached his mouth, he melted under their unexpected gentle touch. His hands found her hair again and gentleness soon turned into heated desire. He gasped as her cool hands found their way to the waistband of his underwear and reluctantly broke the kiss. He took hold of her head and rested his forehead against hers.

“Aeryn… this is not… safe,” he said, panting heavily, his breath hot and heavy on her lips.

“Can’t we… make it safe?” She murmured huskily, her body quivering in barely refrained desire.

His lips quirked in a wry apologetic smile. “I don’t think I’ll have… that much control.”

Her mouth claimed his again and he moaned under the silky invasion of her tongue. He crushed her to him, oblivious of his cracked ribs.

The blare of the ship’s alarms jolted them back to reality. They stared at each other, fear coursing through their veins.

“Proximity alert,” Aeryn explained haltingly.

John choked at the irony.

They grabbed the first clothes they could put their hands on and broke off for Command at a run.
 

************

A smuggler’s ship. A fucking smuggler’s ship using the asteroid field to avoid detection and store his stolen goods had triggered the Marauder’s sensors. John rolled his shoulders, adjusting his clothes to his shape and strode faster. At least, it had led them to this place. They might have missed it otherwise. He side stepped promptly to avoid getting rammed in by a large cart whose pusher couldn’t see a thing behind the pile of goods hanging precariously on it.

Meyr Me, aka smuggler’s haven, was a huge mother hen asteroid with many hatchlings in its wake. No activity was visible from the outside, the huge potato-like chunk had been carved like Swiss cheese and when no further digging had been possible, some businesses had branched out on the nearby smaller asteroids. The motley group of aliens running the place had denied them entry at first but after some forceful convincing involving unintelligible Earth gibberish, they had grinned in delight and John had wondered if they were not going to invite them to some VIP party to celebrate the theft of a Peacekeeper ship. If they had wanted, the Marauder would have gone on auction sale the second they had landed inside Meyr Me.

He had checked and double-checked the Marauder’s main systems while Aeryn had tailed the smuggler’s ship, suspecting that it could lead them to a place such as Meyr Me. He had wanted to make sure that everything would work properly until she could get in touch with Crais and Talyn or whatever was left of them. It had given him a distraction from the other very distracting thoughts he was trying to will away. He had been really frustrated at first but, after cooling down a bit, he had realized that the smuggler’s ship had thankfully kept them from jumping in too fast. They were still fragile and needed time, though he’d rather that time did not have to be spent separated. But he had to warn the others and find Moya and she had promised Crais.

He had left her in charge of providing fuel for the Marauder and gone in search of a passage on a vessel, taking several large weapons from the Marauder’s holds to pay for his seat and provide some pocket money. Aeryn would certainly have gotten a better deal than he had but since he would have to go through this quite often in the near future, he’d better start learning to do it on his own sooner rather than later. He didn’t really have to meet with her again, they could have informed each other of their proceedings over comms but that would have meant taking the easy way and that road eluded their feet.

He spotted her leaning against the Marauder’s hull, the large pulse rifle held in the crook of her arm deterring any unwelcome presence. Her head snapped up at his approach. He stopped before her and remained obligingly still under her slow perusal as she took in the dark brown pants, cream tee-shirt and the long brown coat with golden hues reminiscent of Moya’s interior that he had bargained for in exchange of his Peacekeeper black leather clothes. He flipped back the left flap of his coat at her look of worry. Her features visibly relaxed at the sight of the pulse pistol tucked neatly under his left armpit. He shrugged off-handedly. Some things you can’t get rid of. Not in this universe.

“Nice colour,” Aeryn murmured.

“Hmmm, I thought I’d try something different. All fuelled up?” He asked her matter-of-factly.

“Hmmm.”

“My transport is leaving in a quarter arn. I’ve got quite a good sum of money on the side,” he informed her. “Do you need any?”

“I’m fine. I sold a few items too.”

“OK. Good.” He shifted on his feet uncomfortably and gave her a sad smile.

She returned his smile and ran the back of her hand gently against his jaw. He shifted some more and was about to turn around and go when her question stopped him.

“What were the old woman’s words again?”

“What?!” He stuttered, completely caught off-guard. “The… uh… ‘better angels’ stuff?”

She cocked her head at him. “Yes.”

He took a shaky breath and rubbed his lower lip furiously. His brows furrowed in concentration. “Be forgiving, be kind, better angels,” he recited slowly and watched her nod sagely at each word, “her life, her world, on her time, you will know,” he paused and swallowed hard, “Aeryn is with child.”

She took a deep breath and looked at him with the most serious expression he’d ever seen on her face. “And you… say you think… she is a Seer?”

He returned her steady gaze with the same gravity. She held fast to the challenge in his eyes.
 
They didn’t say goodbye, didn’t look back on the other. Each could feel the invisible thread linking them, now stretching extensively to accommodate their new destinations yet always strong enough to pull them back together.

Soon.


**FIN**

[tazey]

Posted by Chrisc on November 7, 2003 at the old Bunny Board

Have just reread Dispossession. I had forgotten just how good it was. Thank you.

Posted by LaChata on December 30, 2005 at the old Bunny Board

Tazey,

I just read Dispossesion and want to congratulate on a truly beautiful fanfic. The characterizations were perfect and the dialogue inspired. I, myself am a translator (Spanish), editor and amateur author and have the bad or good habit of analyzing as I read. I try to learn different styles from different authors and I found myself writing, ?great, good dialogue, funny, and excellent description? in the margins. I really enjoyed the plot and the emotional depth. Thanks and Happy New Year.

And my answer to LaChata was

Thanks for the feedback, LaChata. You've certainly made 2005 a happier year to end with for me. 
Happy New Year to you too.