Originally posted 5/21/04Well, here I am with a second epilogue to
A Day in the Life..... I've since decided to give this series of epilogues its own title,
Fallout. Because that's what these are -- fallout from the events of
A Day in the Life, which brought up a whole lot of things that needed to be kicked around a bit. And
my John and Aeryn, after twenty cycles together, have figured out that sometimes you really do have to just let go and talk....in this case, about the implications of their youngest child's wormhole knowledge and responsibilities....
Rating: G
Setting: About 20 cycles post-BT, and the day after
Fallout, part 1 (TJ)Spoilers: Through BT
Disclaimer: Not my characters, not my universe (even if I do have my own little UR going here....), and no harm is intended!
Thanks to imloco2, shipsister and MadScientist for beta duties, and Casper F. Joke for a look-see!
This isn't going to make much sense if you haven't read the original fic (link above)....
Fallout:
A Day in the Life Epilogue...
Part the second, in which Aeryn faces some upsetting facts about her talented youngest child....
Pilot had announced that they were nearing a particularly well-stocked commerce center, and John and Aeryn were making an inventory of some of the more difficult to come by items available aboard Moya so that they could take advantage of the chance to re-supply where they were low. It was also a relief to have something ordinary to do, after spending the past several days playing at wormhole guardians.
They'd been at it for about an arn, systematically going through the storage bins and cupboards, talking about this and that in between marking items off on a checklist, when John cleared his throat and announced, "The boy says Merry's my favorite. Can you beat that?"
Aeryn grunted as she shifted the contents of the bin she was looking through and then said casually, "He's right, you know."
"What?"
"You do favor her," she repeated, adding, "All right, that's five spare nitinol coils. I think that's enough."
"I do not," John declared, checklist forgotten. Indignation rolled off him in waves.
Aeryn stood up straight and cocked her head, regarding him seriously. "How could you not?" she said, because it was so obviously true. "She understands you when you're rambling on about wormholes. When the rest of us have no idea what you're talking about. She feels what you feel when the rest of us can only watch, and worry." Her voice got sharper, and she could feel herself tensing without intending to at all.
"Now --"
Something in his tone pushed her over the edge. Aeryn found her mouth opening and words she'd intended never to say coming out of it. "You
took her into that wormhole against my express wishes! It didn't matter what I thought, you knew best!"
"Now just a doggone minute!"
"I know, I know. You had to. That frelling alien was calling her, too. She has the gift. The curse." Aeryn wrapped her arms around herself and looked away. "I knew," she blurted, from somewhere deep inside her. "I knew the moment you told me she could sense wormholes. She was just a baby...and I knew I'd lost her." Despite her best efforts, her eyes filled with tears.
John stared at her in astonished silence. He opened his mouth more than once and closed it again just as many times. At last he began, "You never said...."
"Did I have to?" she asked, looking into his eyes, arms still folded across her waist almost as if she were attempting to protect the child who was no longer in her womb, hadn't been for over thirteen cycles.
John rubbed his hand over his short hair, looked aimlessly around the room, and finally found his voice. Turning back to his wife, he said fiercely, "Baby, she's your daughter too. You carried her for nine freakin' months...she has your hair, ferchrissakes!" He threw his hands up momentarily in frustration, letting them fall back and slap against his legs.
"Maybe so," Aeryn said after a few microts, voice soft and low with strain, "but she's going to live your life. Your destiny, not mine." She chewed on her lower lip for a moment, thinking she sounded incredibly selfish and then shook her head. "Not any part of mine. There's none of me in her at all."
They searched each other's eyes for a moment, and then John's mouth softened, and he shook his head slowly. He reached out to brush a strand of dark hair out of his wife's disconsolate face.
The touch was too much, and the tears she'd been fighting spilled over and she screwed up her face and sobbed.
John pulled her into his arms and held her, face buried in his chest, stroking her long hair and just letting her cry it out. "It's okay, Baby, it's okay," he whispered, over and over till she pulled herself together.
Embarrassed even after all these years at the unintended display of emotion, she stood back just a little, but still within his protective embrace, and looked up at him. "I'm sorry," she said, unable to think of anything else to say.
He gave her a soft smile, and wiped the tears off her cheeks with his thumb. "Aeryn, what's this really about?"
She looked at him, her brow wrinkled in uncertainty.
John's mouth quirked into a small smile. "You can't tell me that you've spent the last eleven cycles grieving for a child who's right here with you. Sure, she spends a lot of time with me. More time than the other two, no question. But she needs her mom, too, and you've always been there for her. So," he said softly, kissing her forehead, "what really turned on the waterworks? Huh?"
There was nothing but sympathy in his voice, and a few microts ago she'd been criticizing herself for being jealous of John's relationship with their youngest child, but it still annoyed her to hear her feelings apparently being dismissed so casually. "A lot of time with you? Is that what you think?" she asked, struggling to keep the anger out of her voice. She didn't want to fight, there'd been enough emotional upheaval the past two days. "It's more than a lot of time, John, she's been your shadow from the moment you knew--" And suddenly, just like that, a lot of things fell into place.
John must have felt her intake of breath, because he let her loose, let her step back a pace without her having to pull away from him.
Aeryn searched his eyes and saw only honest curiosity about what she was thinking. "She hasn't just been your shadow. You
made her your shadow. You knew. You knew this day was coming. That she was going to be pulled into, into--" she broke off in frustration, not knowing how to explain her perception of the demands the universe made on him, and now on their daughter, because of wormholes.
"You
didn't know?" he asked, sounding unaccountably pleased with himself.
Aeryn thought about it. Had he hidden the danger from her? Possibly. They'd talked a lot, when they first realized Meara had inherited John's wormhole knowledge, about protecting her from the dangers of people trying to take that knowledge from her, as Scorpius and so many others had tried to do with John. But never about it taking over her life, at least not that Aeryn had grasped at the time. Still.... "I...I think I must have known, at the beginning, it's why I felt I'd lost her.... But since then, I think I've thought of it as just a talent, a skill?" She looked up at John, in hopes he understood what she meant better than she did.
But he only tweaked his mouth into an encouraging grin and waited for her to figure it out, so she tried once again to put her feelings into words. "Like Talyn is a brilliant pilot," she said, "and Olivia loves planets, loves finding out how they're built and what makes one different from another."
"You mean, Merry is the wormhole genius."
"Yes. Meara is the wormhole genius. She helps you in your work. When she goes away to study, it will be wormholes. Like that." She looked away and added, "I could accept that for her."
John reached out and touched her cheek, causing her to turn back towards him and lean her cheek into his hand. "And old Einstein just rubbed your nose in the fact that it's a lot more than that," he said gently.
She took a deep breath. "And you don't seem to be bothered at all that she's never going to be able to live her own life," she accused. "That she's going to live in the service of wormholes!"
"No. Yes." He sighed. "I didn't want it for her, for any of them. Hell, I didn't even know the crap in my head could be passed on." He shook his head. "And I honestly didn't know if she'd get the full treatment," he swore.
"So you pretended it wouldn't happen so I wouldn't worry about it. You kept me from doing anything about it." Her gray eyes narrowed.
A prudent man would have trod carefully.
Not John Crichton. "Yes," he said bluntly. "I did my job as a Southern Gentleman. I kept my wife from worrying about something that she had no control over." When she started to protest, he continued, "Aeryn, she
was just a baby. You were freaked enough, and so was I, over the possibility of someone hurting her to try to get the wormhole knowledge, just like you'd seen happen to me.
That was something we could do something about. That was something we
did do something about. And yes, you were right before, I kept her close to me, so that if she did hear the siren song, I'd be there to help. You couldn't have done a damn thing about that, and you know it!"
"But we could have prepared her...."
"Did she look unprepared to you?" John asked. "She
wanted to go see what it was all about, Aeryn."
"That's what scares me," she admitted, voice tight again with worry.
John pulled her into a hug once again and held her tightly until she relaxed in his arms. He pulled his head back so he could see her eyes. "Aeryn. She'll be okay. She'll figure it out." His face softened, and he added with an exhalation too soft to be a snort, "Kids hardly ever follow the path you lay out for them."
She thought about it all for a little bit, and then decided once again to trust her daughter to her husband. It was a tremendous relief, because he was right about one thing, wormholes and wormhole aliens were his purview, not hers. But she was still concerned about Meara, barely a teenager, coping with the new demands on her life. She thought back to John's last comment, about children following the path their parents laid out. "You did," she said, and the expression on his face in response caused her to burst into much needed laughter. "Well, except for the part about getting shot through a wormhole, and marrying an alien and having half-alien children and little details like that," she elaborated, leaving out the bad things on purpose.
John thought about it for a moment and then admitted indulgently, "I guess I did at that. I fought my dad tooth and nail on general principle for a while, but....I did follow him into space." He looked at her smug smile and retaliated: "But you didn't."
She stared at him.
"You were born to be cannon fodder, Babe, and look at you. You are so much more...."
"It wasn't easy. And I had you to help me." She cupped his cheek and gave him her softest smile.
"And Merry has you. You're her mom, you love her -- and you know how hard it is to make your own life when you're born for a different one."
Tears threatened again, and Aeryn blinked them back.
"She needs you as much as she needs me, Aeryn. I can teach her the ropes about wormholes and Einstein and how to deal with an unrealized reality -- but you can teach her how to live
her life, no matter what anyone expects. Teach her how to be more."
She knew that wasn't entirely true, of course -- he'd taught
her how to live, and he could certainly teach their daughter. But there was something to be said for direct experience, and maybe she
could have some influence on her daughter's life....
Before Aeryn could get too sentimental, John cocked his head to the side and said, "Besides, you've already taught her to kick ass better than anyone I've ever seen. I don't think old Einstein has a hope in hezmana of bullying her...."
"You are impossible," she said, shaking her head, as all the remaining tension went out of her body.
He grinned back at her and said, "Only way to deal with the insanity that's our lives, Babe."
That was only too true, Aeryn thought. Meara and wormholes, the two would always go together. Through no fault of anyone, she had been born to it. But her father would continue to teach her the basics, and her mother would help her be more. And in the end, she would surpass them both.
Aeryn leaned in and gave John a gentle kiss. "Come on," she said, nodding towards the bin they'd been working on before they got distracted. "We've still got the rest of this list to get through."
Maybe she could take Meara to the commerce center with her tomorrow. Maybe they would get a chance to talk.
Click here for
Fallout, Part 3.
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