Title: The Kick Inside
Author: Birgit
Rating: PG-13 (i.e. T)
Beta: My dearly-loved SO Alex
Timeframe: Between Dog With Two Bones (end S3) and Promises (beginning of S4)
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em; wish I did...
Summary: Alone after leaving Moya, Aeryn must face the aftermath of her relationship with John.

Aeryn fingered the chit absently in her hands as she stood outside the clinic. The street was dirty, an unkempt, unpaved alley deep within the recesses of an unpleasant part of a town whose name she couldn't remember, on a planet she knew she wouldn't want to remember. There was nothing good here. Then again, there was nothing good anywhere.

It was dark, dangerously dark, the street pregnant with baleful shadows and half-glimpsed phantoms that, uncharacteristically, she barely noticed. The small print carelessly lettered on the wall above her head was not illuminated and the narrow road was only dimly lit by a single aging streetlight, and her attention was not there as she stared unblinking at signs flickering in the distance like fuzzy, half-remembered stars.

Stars. So many stars. She was nestled close to him, so unnervingly close, the two of them staring out his small porthole as she listened to him talking nonsense about naming stars. That one is my guide. I always name it Aeryn. My one constant. She had called him a plague. He had ruined her, contaminated her, ripped away all she thought she'd ever known and stripped it naked to stand shivering in its uselessness. She had called him a plague, and now he was naming stars for her and marking her as the center of his world.

The chit continued its destinationless journey through her fingers, tumbling over and over only to move back and begin again. Its weight reminded her of another chit, another coin. She suddenly flipped it up and watched it spin in the air, mesmerized by its revolutions as it moved until it fell and sank into the dirt with a soft, almost silent puff of dust.

Fate, he said. I love you, I've always loved you, and it's fate, we are fate, and then he was inside her and she felt him and her palm reached out to open flat against the stars, as if she could pull them in, as if they too were within her because they were a part of him. He was inside her, deep within, and she saw the stars for the first time in her life as her body arched against him and she said I love you too, love you, love you, and I understand this, and it is fate...

The clinic was still open -- always open, they said. Here for whatever you need, they said, as long as you could pay. They knew her name -- or at least the name she had chosen. They knew her name, and they knew she was coming back, knew why, knew she was supposed to be on the med-tech's table right now.

I'm very angry. Oh, he didn't know, how could he know that anger was all she understood, all she could say besides what he had taught her. I love you -- he had taught her that. I love you and I'm very angry. All the rest was a sickening, tangled knot in the well of her gut, a giant black hole she didn't comprehend that threatened to pull her into it entirely, to crush her with its own weight. I'm very angry. I love you.

And then he was gone and she was the one left alone to close his eyes for the last time.

Inside the building they knew her, and they knew that she should be there. As long as she could pay. She sank down, crouching, picked up the chit that had landed at her feet, and regarded it as it began another slow journey through her fingers. It was enough. She could pay. She could pay.

Death. Crichton was dead, and she felt dead, and she went to Valldon. She went and she drank and she dreamt of him. Do the dead dream? The planet knew, and she had communed with the dead, only to discover what she had already known; that the dead were dead and the living were somehow still here. The planet knew too that she also could choose death, wanted to die, came so very, very close... but she had been bred to survive. If you had lived... She had seen him there, felt him there, but he hadn't lived. He hadn't lived, and he had to leave, because it was the only way she could survive. If he would only leave, the emptiness would be enough, and she would be left alone with what she knew. He left, then, and she knew she was what she was bred to be.

Motionless, hunkered down alone on the dirty back alley street, her back resting against the grubby clinic wall, she watched the chit move, felt its weight against her fingers. What she was there for was easy, virtually painless, quick.

Yet she was not inside.

Seeing him there, in the hangar, grinning, waiting for her, she was unexpectedly on Valldon again, in the company of ghosts. His company.

Hello, John.

The raw power of it was more crushing than she could possibly have imagined. He threatened to fill her up again right there, take away the emptiness, take away her life. She strode past him into Moya's corridor before he could catch her, speak to her and resurrect what had to stay dead if she were to survive.

She had not known until the command carrier. A soldier's body is an efficient machine, and three cycles without a Peacekeeper med-tech's inspection was not good hygiene. The man had been precise, clinical, with pointed emphasis on the word officer as he told her. Officer Sun. He could not tell her how long ago, when, who, not without further tests she would not, could not submit to. There was no time, and she was so staggered by the words that struck her like an open-handed slap that her unseen wounds, the ones with a hue no tech could treat, broke free and ran red, red blood behind her eyes. She remembered nodding curtly, thanking him with a faltering voice, and walking out while he was still talking.

He did not tell her who, but she knew. It was fate, and she knew.

You died. I watched that happen, and yet you're still alive. I have to go.

Time was passing, and she was late for her... she was late. She stood up and turned to regard the unlit entrance. The building's door was faceless, nameless, blank -- a blank expanse of industrial red. Red. Peacekeeper red. Red like the blood she felt again behind her eyes.

She stood near the doorway and drew patterns in the dirt with the toe of one boot.

Do you love John Crichton?

She froze for a moment, staring at the door, and something deep within her stirred that she did not quite understand, something hidden, buried. Do the dead dream? Do the dead remember? Do the dead know?

Do they know?

She dropped the chit abruptly into the dirt at her feet and walked away into the night.

end