Timeline: AU, one month after the events in DWTB. In this world Elack and Season 4 did not happen.
Disclaimer: I don ' t own the rights to this brilliant show, those belong to David Kemper, et al. I just am borrowing the characters to play with for a while. I promise, I ' ll put them back when I ' m through.
Rating: PG (for safety ' s sake)
Acknowledgements: This is all Kazbaby ' s fault, but the mistakes and/or problems are my own. Thank you to my evil plot bunny twin for her ideas and support as a beta.
Part One
Moya's hanger was empty and dusty when Aeryn stepped out of her prowler back into its golden interior. Her hair was slightly askew from its customary queue as she looked around the familiar docking bay. She unconsciously tugged on the bottom of her leather vest to straighten any creases and ensure that it would not encumber her should she be required to react quickly. She stepped forward with her usual grace and power, her eyes concentrating on possible dangers. She paused and shook her shoulders as if a cold breath suddenly brushed her back. She carefully drew her pulse pistol from its holster on her leather-clad thigh and held it in ready position as she stepped forward. Her boots echoed in the large room as she made her way out into the maintenance bay. A DRD scuttled into her foot. She jumped with surprise and then looked down.
"Moya, you startled me." Aeryn let herself smile slowly.
A voice like an annoyed accountant, sharp and yet precise broke the silence. "Welcome back, Aeryn. Moya and I are glad you have returned. Are you here to stay?" Again, the DRD butted her foot. Aeryn looked down and noticed for the first time that it was the DRD with only one antennae, John's DRD he called Blue for the color of the tape that dangled from the machine's broken eye.
"Hello Pilot. I am glad to be back. " Aeryn ' s shoulders and neck muscles relaxed for the first time it seemed in a monen as she felt the tension leave her body. She hadn ' t realized she was nervous about her reception by Pilot and Moya until her body betrayed her. Aeryn ' s life away from Moya had not been easy. Her face returned to its now customary stoic complexion.
" Pilot, what is going on around here? Where is everybody?" There was a long burst of static on Aeryn's comm unit.
Aeryn, now growing worried and slightly annoyed at the continued mystery as well as Pilot's silence and the DRD's bumping, rushed to Pilot's den. There, all alone next to Pilot stood Jool.
"Hello, Aeryn."
"Hello, Jool. Hello, Pilot." Aeryn stood with her hands on her hips, legs loosely spread, head erect and leather duster slightly floating behind her in the breeze that blew out of Moya's depths. She stared at Jool and Pilot, daring them to tell her what had happened while she was away. Both Jool and Pilot looked down and away from her challenge.
"Are you back for good? " was all Jool said (although her hair blazed red with her emotions).
Aeryn bypassed Jool without acknowledging her and approached Pilot ' s station. She reached out and stroked one of his claws. This was all the emotion she would allow herself. Pilot acknowledged the touch and her special connection with a nod and a blink.
"Pilot, when I commed you and asked if I could come aboard I could have been anyone. Why was there no welcoming committee? Why is the security so lax?" Aeryn frowned with frustration, "Will somebody please tell me what is going on around here? Where is Crichton and that old woman what ' s her name?"
Pilot looked at Aeryn as his limbs continued to monitor functions and maintain the living ship. "Aeryn, there was no welcoming committee, as you put it, because many things have happened while you were gone. As you know, D'argo, Chiana, and Rygel have left to pursue their lives. The old woman hides."
Aeryn nodded her head slightly and looked at Pilot, really looked, for the first time. What she saw startled her. Pilot's colors were faded, his shell was cracked and brittle. Aeryn sucked up her concern and let her mind and emotions return to the Peacekeeper facade she tried to maintain. Aeryn, whispered ominously, "Where is Crichton?"
"The lot you care!" Jool yelled. "You left and didn't look back. While you were gone finding yourself, Moya, Pilot, and I were sucked into a wormhole. "
"What. Has. Happened. To. Crichton?" Aeryn slowly enunciated every word trying to cut through the Interon ' s self-righteous anger hoping to avert a screaming jag.
"Jool, I don't care about the frelling wormhole. You are back now. I am asking you to tell me about John. What aren't you telling me?" She realized then, that she was frantic. During that long lonely monen with the mercenaries she had thought long and hard about the events of the previous half-cycle. She had realized that both men were John Crichton and she loved John Crichton, the man who taught her to be more. She had made the decision during a particularly stressful engagement to face that fact, cut her new ties to the mercenaries and return to Moya. She would confront her fear of the power of love and somehow make it up to the remaining John. All of her experiences away as well as her determination to right the wrong she had caused in her grief were wrapped up into her voice as she advanced on Jool and lifted her up on to Pilot's dock by her neck. "Tell me about John."
"Alright, alright" Jool gagged. "John went out in his module shortly after you left. We heard him comm that he was running out of air and fuel, but before Pilot could deploy the docking web bring him inside, the wormhole appeared and sucked us in. I don't know why or how, disaster happened, since no time had passed between when we heard Crichton's communication and when we saw his shuttle floating dead in space, it's windows fogged and cracked. All I know is that we were too late."
"What do you mean too late?" Aeryn knew the answer, as any deep space pilot does. She had to hear the words from Jool.
Jool rubbed her neck and looked at the floor of the den. Pilot looked down as well. Both beings closed their eyes to avoid seeing Aeryn's reaction to their terrible news. "Aeryn, Crichton survived."
Aeryn walked beside Jool down the golden corridors of Moya. Her posture as always was erect, her back straight and her steps sure. Her hand rested near her pulse pistol. She hoped that Jool could not sense her unease as the women neared John's quarters.
"I stabilized John's respiratory system and repaired the damage to his lungs," Jool stated in her academic manner. "The pulmonary embolism did most of the damage resulting in his spastic limbs." "His blindness, I'm afraid, is permanent. The good news is that his hearing should be back to normal soon. The main problem seems to be that his mind is completely frelled. We can't reach him. He just keeps mumbling equations and bits and pieces of quantum physics and cosmology."
Aeryn brushed by Jool, cutting off her diagnostic soliloquy. There, on the cot in the center of John's quarters sat the astronaut. His hands moved in random directions as he tried to reach for something only he could see. His legs jittered with every movement. He stared straight ahead out of the blackened pools of darkness that remained of his eyes.
Interlude in Space-Time
The swirling blue vortex gaped and billowed.
"A wormhole could be constructed, according to Visser, by confining exotic matter to narrow regions to form the edges of three-dimensional volume, for example the edges of a cube. The faces of the cube would resemble mirrors, except that the image is of the view from the other end of the wormhole. Although there is only one cube of material, it appears at two locations to the external observer. The cube links two 'ends' of a wormhole together. A traveler, avoiding the edges and crossing through a face of one of the cubes, experiences no stresses and emerges from the corresponding face of the other cube. The cube has no interior but merely facilitates passage from 'one' cube to the 'other'. [1]
The loud bang and a rush of air as the shuttle explosively decompresses. Body paralyzed and then the shaking begins. Muscles taunt with rictus. Heart beating madly but no blood flows to starved veins. The mouth and nose freezes while the body heats and expands. The feeling of blood frying from the inside as a red vapor coalesced into the vacuum that now comprised the beloved pod. The gagging sounds of suffocating as lungs turn to mush. Skin pops in the extremities from expanding outward. Blackness and a feeling of nothingness as sound and light disappear in ear drums that explode, the capillaries in eyes bleed and the optic nerve dies. John floated in a red and blue swirling haze that no sound or light could touch. [2]
"What. Is. Happening. To. Me?… Happen Me To Be?'… Am I Me?" John's psyche struggled to communicate. Somehow inspite of the nebulousness of his grip on reality he knew he was frelled. He shivered and tried to figure out his situation, but nothing made sense. Was he here (where ever 'here' was) or on Moya? John reached out and touched the exotic matter that pulsed and flowed around him. "Quantum foam," his vagrant voice said seemingly out of his 'body'. He stretched his 'fingers' outward and felt a distinctly familiar contact. He 'yelled', "Avoid the Edges—Albert was right" before his last coherent thought tumbled into the quantum singularity as it collapsed.
Meanwhile, back on Moya in Real Time…
John's body felt a tenuous connection to his consciousness and he grabbed it with all his might. He felt the shaft of thought as it shot through himself and slammed home. John's body shook as his brain took in the flash of concepts and tried to interpret what he was receiving. He could feel the information inserted by the Ancients so many cycles ago rising to receive the data that completed the equations. His mind swirls and churns with the paradoxes of space-time and quantum mechanics. Unreality, alternate realities, and time shifts bombard him from within and without. He needed to tell, to let his crew mates know what was happening.
"Thorne and Yurtsever were right.…'strong gravitational fields …white holes…quantum foam," he mumbled.
Bits and pieces of theories, lectures, and the flotsam of wormhole technology fills the empty spaces in his mind; combining with the fields of anti-matter that maintains the wormhole holding him in its thrall. Exotic matter in impossible mixtures invades his psyche until nothing else exists where once there resided a man. He tried once again, saying, "Traversable…time travel" [3]
The more his body struggled to overcome its physical ailments and weird split, the more the Ancient's knowledge overcame him. Vagrant class notes from advanced physics courses taken in another life time parade across his mind beyond his control.
"The exotic nature of the edge material requires negative energy density and tension/pressure. But the laws of physics do not forbid such materials. The energy density of the vacuum may be negative, as is the Casimir field between two narrow conductors. Negative pressure fields, according to standard astrophysics, drove the expansion of the universe during its 'inflationary' phase. Cosmic string (another astrophysical speculation) has negative tension. The mass of negative energy the wormhole needs is just the amount to form a black hole if it were positive, normal energy. A traversable wormhole can be thought of as the negative energy counterpart to a black hole, and so justifies the appellation 'white' hole. The amount of negative energy required for a traversable wormhole scales with the linear dimensions of the wormhole mouth. A one meter cube entrance requires a negative mass of roughly 10^27 kg."[4]
Aeryn walked softly up and brushed her hand along his jaw. John tried again. Using every once of willpower, he raised his chin and 'looked' up but all was blackness. (Where was the light? Where was Aeryn? I'm so alone here.) And said, "Use the proper theory of quantum gravity. Morris knows."
Tears fell uncontrollably from her eyes. John heard her grief as if from another universe (so far away) but could do nothing as he felt his tenuous hold on reality shift once again. He opened his mouth to speak, but the Ancient knowledge again overcame him.
John used his stubbornness to force his hands to be his voice and once more broke through the miasma of theorems. John felt the soft touch of his lover's fingers as he tried to control his hands and arms but only succeeded in waving at her with increased tension. He forced a scream from his lips (Aeryn, help me!), "Casimir equations describe a negative energy field!" [5]
Suddenly he managed to control his spastic fingers and grabbed her hand and squeezed hard but then released it as he lost control once again.
There was a glimmer of a smile on his face and then it was gone and he starred blankly at her once again.
Part Two
D'argo landed Lo'La without incident in the spaceport of a non-descript commerce planet. He would only stay as long as it took to restock his foodstuffs and water and then he would continue on his journey to find Macton and avenge the degradation of his family's honor. He shook his tankas in frustration at the delay and snorted at himself. He grabbed his Qualta blade and shoved it into its harness without thinking. His burgundy tunic swung around his body as he stepped down the steps from his ship. He had enough currency that this digression would not last long, but first he needed a drink.
Chiana huddled in the filthy alley, her shirt torn and in shreds as she shivered and quivered from cold and shock. Her smooth gray face was muddled with black and blue abrasions and her usually clear black eyes were blue with tears. She clutched her waist and tried to pull her self together. "Hold together you dumb dreshnak; you've been through this before," she muttered to herself. Her tears continued to fall as she shivered uncontrollably. She pushed herself upright using the wall as support and staggered to the entrance to the alley. She looked both ways, on the alert for the fekkiks who raped and robbed her of her casino winnings. She guessed she won just one too many times. In a way, she guessed she deserved the treatment she had gotten. "I've been too long around Crichton," she thought. "He's rubbing off on me." She smiled sardonically through her tears.
Suddenly, her back arched and she began to tremble uncontrollably. Her black eyes turned white for a moment as she was thrown forward on her stomach. She lay there sweating and shaking as the fit ended. Slowly, she pulled her arms under her supine body and got up on her knees. She shook her head to clear it of the dregs of her vision. "Oh no! John!" she called out without realizing it.
Without really seeing where she was going, she staggered out of the alley heading for the bar for a drink. Her head collided with what seemed to be a soft wall. She looked up, and there standing with his fists on his hips stood D'argo. Now, she always believed in luck, fate, and magic, but the coincidence of literally running into the Luxan on this planet was too much for her muddled and troubled mind, and she burst out laughing.
D'argo looked down at Chiana as she hugged his chest and tried to stop her laughter. He smiled to himself, but to her he said gruffly, "What the hezmana brought you to this goddess-forsaken bar, as if I didn't know." Then, he roughly hugged her back and truly looked at her. "Chiana, truly, what have you been up to? You look a mess." She took his sleeve and dried her eyes and blew her nose.
"Oh a little of this, a little of that. You know me," she said trying to sound nonchalant.
"Yes, I do know you and that is why I asked you the question," D'argo responded back, his eyes creasing trying to figure out if Chiana needed saving once again. In spite of himself, he found himself worrying over the state of her clothes and her bruises. He knew she wouldn't confide in him the trouble she was in without a fight. He also knew that he needed to know, needed to not only to protect her from herself, but also the universe from this sprightly Nebari he still begrudgingly loved. By this time, the couple had entered the bar.
Looking up, Chiana spied the fekkiks she tangled with earlier. She let out a hiss and grabbed D'argo by the arm. "D'argo, we have to leave fast. I have some business that went wrong here." D'argo turned and looked at the five enormous, hairy aliens with the horns, brow ridges and very red eyes at the bar who were putting down their drinks and stepping away and towards Chiana. Their eyes looked menacing as they smiled aggressively revealing their serpent-like tongues and sharp teeth.
"Chiana, why do you always have to do things in a big way?" D'argo asked her as he swiftly drew his Qualta blade from its sheath. Chiana blanched and as always when she felt cornered, attacked her fears verbally by responding to D'argo "Why do you always assume I did something? Why can't you for once take my word that I am innocent?" By this time her voice had risen to a level where others seated around the action began to take notice. Chiana twitched with anxiety and her hair literally stood up on body tensed as her legs bent and assumed a defensive posture, she drew her small pulse pistol and pointed it at her enemies, moving it back and forth between each alien, and said "D-Don't you come closer. I've already tasted your hospitality and I-I don't want any more. You have your money, just leave me alone. Y-You should run an honest game. All I did was win."
The aliens paused in their advance towards the pair, they looked at the large Luxan with his equally large sword/laser weapon and at the fierce little Nebari and her little pulse pistol. Then, they looked at each other, shifting their large back and forelegs with indecision. They gauged their luck and their chances of successfully taming the Nebari thief and have more fun with her. While they ponderously thought their way through the stalemate, Chiana grabbed D'argo and started running towards the door. D'argo fired his Qualta to give them cover and rapidly followed her out. They ran into the alley where he first encountered Chiana. When no aliens followed, they relaxed and slowly sauntered to where D'argo parked the luxan spacecraft.
When D'argo and Chiana made themselves comfortable in the confines of Lo'La, D'argo turned to Chiana and asked peevishly, "What was all that about?" Chiana looked defensively away and stated "Don't wanna talk about it. It's over. L-let it rest." She tried unsuccessfully to pull her clothes together. D'argo quietly placed an extra jacket over her slim shoulders. Chiana looked at him gratefully. "Anyway, thanks for being there."
While D'argo looked benignly at her, Chiana suddenly proceeded to shiver and clutched D'argo's jacket closer as she remembered her vision. "D-D'argo, we have to return to Moya's last location. I-I think something terrible has happened to Crichton there and it has to do somehow with his frelling wormholes."
Part Three
Aeryn twisted her neck to relax her shoulders and back muscles. She had been sitting on John's cot holding his hand for arns. Earlier, she tried to get him to drink something, but his mouth wouldn't cooperate even when she wet his lips with the water. They had given up trying to feed him for the same reason. Jool had hooked up a tube to his stomach and was feeding him nutrients directly to keep him healthy. He had fought the intrusion until Jool and Aeryn sedated him and performed the procedure.
He moved his hands with the same repetitive twitching motions constantly speaking unintelligible equations. His voice becoming a dry rasp from the constant use which Aeryn tried to alleviate by dripping water into his mouth during his intermittent pauses to wet his torn and chapped lips and papery white tongue. His eyes appeared darker as the shadows grew around them. His head dipped and nodded as he grew more and more fatigued and the sweat dripped down the sides of his face, his shirt became soaked with perspiration . His legs jerked and swayed in time with his arms and hands. He kept clasping and unclasping his thumb and first two fingers in a familiar motion. Fatigue made her mind fuzzy and she couldn't quite remember why nor where she had seen him do this before. It was right at the edge of her mind...she just couldn't see it yet . Aeryn watched with growing concern as he never stopped moving and his mouth working through those syllables.
"All of these words, they must mean something," she thought. For the first time, she wished she was a tech or more than a mere pilot, so that she could figure out the mystery of where John resided in his mind. She moved her hand seeking to still his and let him rest, but he just grew agitated as if he was trying to communicate something out of his darkness and silence. Suddenly he howled and threw himself down, beating the bed with his back. Aeryn tossed herself over his body to prevent him from falling on to the floor or disturbing the feeding catheter, as she commed Jool. She rode out the violence all the while yelling at John to calm down and try to relax. But John was somewhere else far away where wormholes swirled in his brain and exotic matter ran through his fingertips and flowed over his body.
Jool came running out of Pilot's den where she was working with the large creature to find a solution to John's problem. Moya would not move from the location of the now absent wormhole until they found an answer. "What now?" she thought aggravated at the interruption. When Jool arrived at John's quarters and passed through the open gate, she immediately halted and gasped as the battle occurring. She grabbed the sedative dispenser she had kept by his bedside and moving quickly jammed it into John's neck. His struggles soon quieted as he drifted off to sleep. Both women sighed in unison.
Part Four
Lo 'La made a perfect three-point landing into Moya's landing bay and quickly came to a stop. Chiana couldn't stop the feeling of anxiousness she felt as the ship touched down, standing near the doorway of Lo'La waiting for it to open. Her feelings came off in waves, causing D'Argo's own nervousness for John to increase with each passing moment. He didn't think he could land the ship fast enough. Touching the control for the door, D'argo and Chiana ran down the stairs from the ship calling to Pilot as they came. Pilot quietly and quickly filled them in on the situation on board as they ran to Crichton's quarters. With D'argo standing by the doorway, Chiana entered the room and grasped Aeryn and gave her a big hug, startling the warrior with her fervor. "Are you alright Aeryn? We came as soon as we could. I had a vision. How is John?" D'argo slowly entered the room and gazed at the sleeping astronaut and then up at the three women.
"He's in the dren again, isn't he?"D'argo gave Aeryn a sad smile, wishing he knew what to really say as he gazed down at his friend's sleeping form.
Jool took that moment to whine, "Doesn't anybody notice, I'm here too. I went through hezmana, too. Moya, Pilot, and I were sucked down a wormhole and although no time had passed when we were spit back out, we found Crichton's module explosively decompressed and his condition was grave. I saved his life. I figured out how to feed him. Nobody acknowledges my obvious contributions."
As if on cue, the three others shouted together "Shut up Jool!"
Sighing in frustration, Jool crossed her arms with a pout as she thought, "They never appreciate higher reasoning."
Aeryn looked at her two returned companions, her shoulders slumped with both emotional and physical fatigue, "We have to think of some way to help him, but not here, we might wake him. As it is, Jool has had to sedate him several times for the feeding tube to be inserted and to allow him to sleep."
D'Argo walked towards the bed and saw the protrusion from John's stomach, "What do you mean to allow him to sleep?"
Jool took that moment to show her abilities once more, "The chemistry in his brain is imbalanced due to the damage. He doesn't seem to be able to fall asleep on his own, which means the longer he is awake, the more his body weakens."
"We need to discuss this elsewhere, before we awaken John, " Aeryn said as the man stirred on the bed. Each member of the room agreed and they followed Aeryn out of the room and to Command.
Arns later after much discussion between the remaining crew members, Aeryn again sat by John's side. She closely watched his breathing as he slept, her heart almost leaping into her throat as she thought about what she had thrown away, of the pain she had caused him. If she had not left, he wouldn't have been in the module mourning her departure. He would still be whole in body and mind. All of this was her fault, she didn't need to be told by anyone this bit of information, although Jool seemed to take great joy in the accusing glances she kept sending her way.
She ran a finger gently across his jerking hand, she hated seeing the involuntary spasms course through his body. He let out a soft moan at her touch and she wondered if she was causing him pain even when she tried to comfort. John's unseeing eyes opened and he shook his head as if to rid it of cob webs. His hands again danced on the covers as he pulled himself up. He grasped with his thumb and forefingers. Aeryn suddenly realized what John was reaching for in his spastic manner-a writing implement. She remembered that he had once explained that on his world one wrote to think.
She ran to his table and ransacked it for any of the familiar materials, since she knew that each time he went to a commerce planet he purchased writing implements and paper . At last she found what she was looking for and shoved the writing implement and paper under John's hands. She grasped both hands and slapped the paper, thrusting the writer into his fingers. He shook his head back and forth uncontrollably and sought to grasp back at her repeated thrusts. Aeryn realized at that moment that although John somehow understood what she was trying to do, he was incapable of controlling his movement enough to use the tools she offered.
Aeryn held John's hand on the writer and guided it on to the paper. Suddenly, John smiled and said, "Planck's constant 'Read Carl Sagan's Contact ."
It gave Aeryn a small amount of pleasure to be the reason for the smile on his face, even if he didn't know she was that reason. After causing him so much pain, she wanted to continue to give him a reason to smile.
Over the next 10 arns, Aeryn wrote with John as he delineated wormhole technology on the paper, equations flowed from his brain like water as he swam in quantum mists. He was wired for wormholes, fired with wormholes and he wouldn't stop. The shadows once more grew under his eyes during this length of time as his body began grow weary once more. His hand became too hard to control after a point, but he would...couldn't stop it seemed. There was a point to these equations, a drive she couldn't see or feel, but somehow knew in her heart. He 'was' trying to get a message across.
When Aeryn wanted to rest, he grabbed for her hand, often punching her in the process. His gaze remained black with the blood in his destroyed eyes but his mouth moved with symbols and equations. Aeryn hadn't the heart to leave him. When even her Peacekeeper-based training could no longer withstand the constant movement of arm and hand on paper, she commed Chiana to take over and for Jool to sedate the equally exhausted astronaut.
Part Five
Chiana had been sitting on John ' s bedside guiding his spastic fingers on the paper for several arns. With the exception of her hand steadying his own, she hadn't moved a dench. She had no idea what the equations meant except that they dealt with the wormholes that had caused John nothing but heartache since he had left Earth. Noticing a line of sweat about to drip into John's eyes, she reached for a cloth close at hand and wiped his brow once more. She was really starting to worry about how much fluid his body was putting out and he could not ingest much to replace the lost moisture. Her thoughts drifted back to one of their last conversations before she left Moya.
She had been nervous as she approached John crouching on the floor, she could barely see the writing on his arm with it inside the small access panel near the floor.
She gripped the flashlight in her hand, "Hey. Hammond-side's tight. Looks like Moya's gonna be okay.".
Not looking up from his work, John said, "Yeah."
Hesitating, she didn't know what to say to him about leaving after all that he had done for her since they had first met, "Yeah..." Pausing for a moment, she swallowed and finally forced herself to say what was on her mind, "Hey, you know... you know what I said before about... about not wanting you to come with me?"
John turned his head slightly towards her, she guesses he was waiting for her to finish speaking her mind because he turned back to his work.
His patience with her sometimes drove her farbot, but it always helped her make her way to say the truth of how she really felt, "That wasn't exactly right".
"Pip, it's cool." What was it about him that always tried to comfort her and the others, even when his own feelings said otherwise, she could see the hurt in his body language at the thought of being alone. Kneeling down beside him, she wanted him to look at her...to understand why he couldn't come along.
Moving a little bit closer, she gave him no choice but to turn his attention to her, "I would love you... to come with me. But, you know, I... I gotta find my brother and... and he's in this resistance thing and... and as if I'm gonna find him... hangin' out with someone... who looks like...
"A... Peacekeeper? It's cool." He always seemed to know what she was thinking.
Her back ached , distracting her from her thoughts and she really had to go to relieve herself, but John howled in anguish each time she attempted to stand up. She had bruises on her head and arms from colliding with his banging head as it bashed the cot in his frustration. Every time he did this, she felt as if her heart would break, the idea of his body and mind being destroyed was devastating to see, but she knew it was his spirit for survival that kept him going...even when his own mind didn't know this fact.
Chiana felt that awful aura around her that meant another vision was about to erupt. She shook her head in frustration when suddenly her body lurched on to John as he sat on his bed and her back arched. Her eyes turned white and rolled up inside her head. She cried out, and so did John simultaneously, "Aaah!" Her body twitched and swayed in unison with John's. Together they mouthed wormhole physics.
"Space-Time horizons are defined on a Schwartzchild Diagram," the two wormhole travelers whispered.
"Time dilates on a Schwartzchild surface. The Kruskal Spacetime diagram reveals that the wormhole is dynamic and soon becomes unstable. Don't become trapped when the white holes collapse."
Through her link with the physical John balanced precariously on the bed as his body swayed and his blind eyes watered and blinked, Chiana "saw" the blue nauseous swirling chaos of the wormhole as she traveled in the blink of her white eyes to the center of John's current universe. She "saw" his poor consciousness trapped in the nexus of the two enormous gravity fields—the universe horizons that defined the wormhole. Her astral fingers touched the exotic matter swirling around John's "body."
"Frell, John," she thought. "I wish you knew I was here."
John turned in her vision (or was it reality) and looked at her with his keen blue eyes. "I do, Pip."
John turns his head towards the edge of the horizon as his body swings to follow, forcing Chiana, who now grasps his astral hand just as in reality she continues to hold John's real hand, to follow. Suddenly she glimpses what he is trying to point out. There on the edges of her perception was the wavering image of a huge mottled creature with many multi-colored tentacles and protuberances.
"What are you doing here where you don't belong?" The creature seemed to pulse with light that spoke to Chiana in a female's voice. "Go back while you can. You are hurting me with your presence." The creature continued to pulse and spread its protuberances tightly around John's body, binding him more closely into the wormhole's gravity field, the boundaries of reality. "It is bad enough that this creature," she said as she shook John's flailing body, "has entered my realm between the universe's horizons, but now you disturb my place as well. I am the guardian of the void between universes."
Chiana spoke diffidently to the huge critter. "Are you the creature we disturbed last cycle when Moya became stuck while starbursting?"
"Yes, I am." The creature continued to speak in a didactic manner. "StarBurst is technically the seam between space-time dimensions. Your container's power cells allow access and then it simply rides out the energy stream until pushed out at random."
"Y-You mean you are the felnick that threatened to k-kill us because we cluttered up your home?" Chiana's astral arms bent akimbo, her body swayed as she tried to force down the emotions while dealing with the god-like alien. "You finally guided us forward while Moya provided the thrust to return us to our proper place. I remember you now. What the frell is happening this time?"
John continued to mouth equations while his body jerked and shook in the creature's grasp. His eyes rolled in pain while he yelled out "According to the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker geometry describing the expanding Universe a wormhole is the interface between space and time, the place of starburst. A tear in the exotic matter holding the wormhole's form would collapse the hole, going to zero velocity at infinity thus flattening the interior geometry. Any living thing would turn to goo."
"Is John saying that Moya starburst while in the wormhole? That then John, being in his module at the wrong place and time, touched the edge of the wormhole causing a tear in your world? And that now you keep him prisoner, plugging the tear with his body to keep space time from being frelled?"
"Yes." The inter-dimensional creature rumbled.
"How do we fix this problem? What will make you release my friend? He is dying! His consciousness can't stay in your world. You can't use his this way!"
"Your container must starburst in reverse back into the wormhole. I will repair the tear as the container thrusts its way back out. Bring me the living being whose soul I have captured, and I will release it because its purpose will have been served." With that, the creature roughly shoved Chiana out of John's grasp. John and Chiana cried out together as the link was brutally severed. Chiana collapsed in a heap on the bed insensate. John's body tumbled off the bed with the force of Chiana's fall, his arms and legs splayed out and twitching, his breath heaving huge gulps of air as his head rolled back and forth. It was an arn later before D'argo found them both as he came to check on Chiana's and John's situation.
Part Six
Panic almost set in when D'Argo saw them lying on the floor unconscious, comming the others about Chiana's and John's condition, he forced himself to wait for Jool and Aeryn. When they arrived, Jool immediately checked their condition and together the crew mates lifted John back on to his bed and revived Chiana.
"What happened here?" Aeryn asked Chiana as D'Argo helped her to stand up.
The Luxan looked at her, his eyes asking for patience as he said, "Aeryn, give her a moment."
Reluctantly Aeryn conceded as she went over to the bedside and took up the same cloth that Chiana had used before and wiped the sweat from his face. She moved her head out of the way as John's movements became even more agitated, swinging his arms as his hands opened and closed chaotically, his sweat covered head rolled while he blinked his blood filled eyes. Chiana, sitting across the room in the only chair, held her head in her hands as she fought the pain between her brows. When the world stopped spinning and the pain receded, she glanced up at her friends who had been waiting expectantly, each with their own personal versions of worry and dread running across their faces.
Clearing her throat, she tried to ignore its scratchy feeling and said, ¨I know what happened to John and it is not good. "
She thought to herself, "that's an understatement if I ever heard one. " Holding up her hand to stop the questions that were about to be asked, she continued, "You are going to think me tinked, but...but I have spoken to John and we need to work fast to save him."
D'argo, Aeryn, and Jool looked incredulously at Chiana, who returned their stares with her own brand of bravado, and leaning forward on the chair stated, ¨ I have a plan. "
"John has been trying to speak to us...in the only way that he can right now. His consciousness was tr-trapped when Moya was pulled into the wormhole, somehow...somehow another tear happened and that fekik creature that lives in starbursts...is holding him...keeping the tear from opening wider."
As Chiana said the word wormhole, John's head turned in her direction and howled, suddenly he began banging his head violently against the cot, his arms and legs landing hard against the bed frame. Aeryn gasped and ran to John, she grabbed his hand and pushed his 'pen' into his fingers and shoved it down against the paper D'Argo placed there for him. He faced her direction for a moment at her breathless exclamation and smiled. She noted happily the fact that his hearing had improved enough to understand something of the world around him as his hand moved on the paper.
Writing furiously with the help of Aeryn ' s hand, John said, ¨ Lewis Carroll used the Reinmann Cut as a basis for Alice and Wonderland . " The group could see the anxiety in John. His hands twitched and shook, his arms spiraled so that it was difficult for Aeryn to maintain her contact and control. John's jaw shook in concentration. His neck muscles bulged with the effort to keep control of his legs and arms, to no avail. Sweat dripped from his forehead into his blind eyes and down on to his already soaked t-shirt. He stated sadly, ¨ The Einstein-Rosen bridge didn't work. Kerr solved it. "
See! " Chiana said. ¨ H-He ' s trying to communicate with us, but no longer has the means, except that farhbot technobable and dren. " Chiana ran over to John ' s bed and grabbed his other hand. John looked up blindly and said, ¨ The averaged weak energy condition (AWEC), must be violated for the wormhole to work. Create a multiply connected space."
Chiana stroked his face with her free hand and said to the group, ¨ I believe he has been trying to tell us how to build a stable wormhole. Let's take John to Pilot and see if Moya is willing to use John ' s scribbles to create a wormhole. We need to reenter the wormhole, starburst back out and bring John home. T-That ' s what the alien in my vision wanted us to do. "
With Aeryn and Chiana both holding John ' s hands relatively stable, he calmed down, but continued his obsessive writing. He was tiring, but could not stop. He swung his head back and forth as if to ease the tension in his neck. His cheek muscles twitched and his teeth ground and chattered. Suddenly, his eyes rolled back in his head and he slammed sideways off the bed. Both Aeryn and Chiana followed him down. When Aeryn got up, she noticed that both John and Chiana were convulsing on the floor, their mouths frothing, theirs bodies shaking at the same fevered pitch. Jool, D ' argo, and Aeryn all tried to jump on the pair but were surprisingly violently thrown off as the seizure continued.
Inside Space Time
John saw Chiana as she materialized out of the swirling and undulating mists. She looked taunt and stressed as she gazed as him. " What?" He asked. Chiana's astral form swam closer to John until she could grab hold of his finger as it appeared and disappeared beneath the creature's protrusions. When she had a firm grip she called out, John, can you hear me?"
"Pip, yeah I hear you." John's body was immobilized by the tentacles twisted around his torso and limbs. He screamed in pain each time the monster tightened and released his body in time with the gravity field fluxes within the tear where the creature held him like the little Dutch boy in the story from his youth. All I need," he thought crazily, was Hans Brinker to pass by with his silver skates."
John, what was the last thing you remember?" asked Chiana.
John thought hard before he said, "I was in my module thinking about Aeryn and our situation...about her leaving me. She couldn't handle the idea that I might die in her arms...like the other." He swallowed the bile that rose when he remembered the flip of the coin, Aeryn's last words of good bye, Harvey's pestering, and the old woman's whispers in his ear. Um, then a loud bang, then nothing." John's face contorted at the renewed squeezing of his body. He took a good look around him and gasped. "What the hell! Pip, where am I?" Then, as if a lighbulb switched off, John's mind collapsed into the wormhole that held him. All he saw was blue swirling quantum foam and negative energy. His mind was aflame with equations.
She wasn't sure if John could hear her as suddenly his eyes shifted and took on a far off glare, John, hang on for a little longer, we're going to free you. We're going to starburst in the wormhole like the felkik monster wants us to." John heard none of Chiana's hope, because Harvey stepped from behind the entangled astronaut and monster. Harvey lay down in the exotic matter that flowed in and around the group. He had a smug smile on his ghastly face as he turned towards Crichton.
John's return to lucidity was just as abrupt as its banishment. "Harvey, it figures," Crichton thought. John didn't like that smile, it reminded him too much of when Harvey was establishing his control over his body. Opening his mouth to ask Harvey what was going on, he was surprised that the only thing that emerged were more equations. Equations that he had been working on for monens and was nowhere near an answer, but now he had the solutions at the edges of his lips.
Harvey stated calmly, and rationally "Dear John, all of this wonderful data generated by your current situation has reinstated my prime objective...that of collecting the wormhole technology locked up in your brain." Harvey stood up leisurely and walked over to where John was tied up in the creature's tendrils.
He placed his hand on John's shoulder, ignoring the creature who surrounded John's body as well as the waves of gravity and anti-matter flaring and shooting spires all around them.
"Keep thinking those equations. Let me help you in your research. For example...what exactly is the condition where wormholes the size of Planck's constant would develop stability? How do you justify Hawking and Hartle's theory of multiple parallel universes with Kip Thorne's exotic matter theory of wormholes?"
With each question, John found him answering without hesitation, the knowledge that he had fought to find for so long, flowed out of him as if water from a fountain and into Harvey's outstretched hands. He could see the clone's smile widen the more he spoke and it frightened him. The fear was pushed away as another question was asked and sunk down into the recesses of numbers and their constants, they wanted to emerge...needed to come out, and there was only one way...through him.
John felt a glimmer of reason resurface through the miasma of equations. He struggled in his prison and yelled in frustration. "Get the hell out of my mind, Harvey!" John knew then that Harvey had been feeding him questions and pushing the wormhole data to the forefront of his abused consciousness just as the creature had been keeping him immersed in the stream of positive and negative gravity fields, both opening the flood gates of the Ancient's knowledge.
"This can't be good," he thought. John felt his mental state waver between lucid and obsessively analytical. He hurt in every muscle, but especially in his eyes, which burned and ached, his ears that throbbed, and his arms and legs that seemed made of rubber. He knew his body was failing. He had forgotten that Chiana was still hanging on to his fingers for dear life. He felt her squeeze and looked over at her blearily.
"John, you realize that you are not really here, but rather your body is on Moya lying blind and paralyzed. We are going to get you home." John starred at Chiana as she repeated her promise. She faded from view along with his lucidity. The last words John heard as the wormhole engulfed him again were Harvey's saying, "John, I figured out how I can survive and prosper here in the wormhole."
Numbers...numbers were the everything and all of his universe, for how long...he didn't know. John tried to remember Chiana's words before she disappeared, but the more he concentrated on her face, the more the equations pushed it away.
"Don't worry about the Nebari girl..." He heard off to his side, and looking over his shoulder, he saw Harvey once more basking in the waterfall of exotic matter that flowed around them both. "We have other matters to consider, our survival...and the retention of this knowledge that is finally unlocked from your mind. I have learned a great many things since we have arrived here...one of which is...Even once your body dies, which it will quite soon I suspect, we can live on."
"Live on? As what? Casper?...and just which uncle are you? You seem more like Stretch to me..."
Harvey began to pace through the Schwartzheld field around him, "John!...enough of your Earth babblings, we have to act very soon. At this moment your mind is pure energy, as is mine, but I still cannot continue to function without your physical brain, its electrical energy, powering my thoughts and being."
Crichton could see the agitation in the eyes of the figure before him, "And just what are you getting at?" He didn't know how, but he was feeling breathless as he spoke, he could feel the creature's grip tightening around him once more.
"The rip you are blocking...we can use it as a doorway. The fields of energy vary, but once we cross through, your mind's energy will adapt and change...allowing both of us to function in the creature's dimension, but inside of this wormhole."
"No...no deal. Chiana said they are trying to get me back...I believe her, they would never just leave me here."
"I'm afraid John...you will have no choice. Once your body dies, there will be nothing to hold you any longer...and you will either stay here, being slowly torn apart...piece by piece. Or you can go through the tear and continue to exist, albeit another plane of existence, but you...we...I will survive."
Suddenly the creature shook him as he tried to pull himself from it's grasp, Harvey looked at him as he groaned in pain, "Shall we continue with the questions?"
Part Eight
In the wormhole, John's wavering consciousness rolled back into focus as the equations receded into the background. He blinked his eyes and tried to move his shoulders to alleviate the kink in his neck muscles, but found that he couldn't budge. The inter-dimensional creature's protrusions had crept up and around his neck during the last session with Harvey. Tentacles and protrusions now covered every dench of his body from chin all the way down to his toes. He frowned in concentration and cleared his throat, which was tight and sore. He tried to speak and his voice came out as a raspy whisper, "Hello there, I don't believe we've been properly introduced." He thought to himself, "Have to concentrate, have to give them time to come, have to keep clear…"
The creature opened its eyes and looked down at the trapped astronaut. It shifted its tentacles and body, further choking and squeezing John in the process. "It has intelligence?"
John grunted with the pain and tried to catch his breath in the shifting protrusions. He felt weak and disoriented with thirst and for some reason his eyes burned like a sharp implement had speared them, causing his vision to blur and waver. "Yeah, people question that all the time," he whispered with his hoarse voice.
John had no idea of how much time had passed since the last time he regained awareness. He felt like a sack of potatoes or a pig trussed up for roasting. "Yeah, that's what he was, roast suckling pig." John giggled hysterically and he hiccuped trying to stop them from escaping. "Christmas is coming, and I'm the main course. No, not the main course, the whole freakin' dinner." He felt his sanity shift as the blue swirling clouds of exotic matter again burned in his eyes, nose, and ears. He shook his head to clear it. "Must stay focused, think John, make a plan."
He worried about what the tsunami of information he had spewed forth had done to his ability to reason and think. He still fell a compulsion to fall into the wormhole equations head first, but fought it. His head hurt fiercely and he wondered whether Harvey was lurking about still sucking him dry. There was also this terrible feeling of loss and betrayal: Aeryn was with child and there was nothing he could currently do to resolve his issues with her lack of trust in him. All in all, he felt terrible both outside and inside and he knew that depression was sapping his willpower. Vagrant thoughts snuck in and out—was resisting really worth the effort? Maybe an eternity striving toward wormhole technology as pure energy was better than facing his friends on Moya and the loss of Aeryn.
He blinked to clear his vision, and said to the critter, "I know you need me to keep the tear in the gravitational fields from frelling the universe, but what do you need to fix the tear and let me go free? What can I do to help?"
"I am the guardian of the spaces that lie between galactic horizons. You have invaded my universe and broken the equilibrium of space-time. I hold your essence here to keep the boundaries between here and your reality separate. There is nothing you I need from you, little one, except your continued existence."
John's mouth dropped open and he gasped as the realization hit him concerning the true nature of his situation. He was the energy maintaining the wormhole. His mentality comprised the edges of the wormhole, the so-called tear in the creature's perspective. What the critter held, John's current essence, was composed of exotic matter and his negative fields kept the wormhole stable, actually maintaining the tear. In a way, John was the tear.
He also realized that the more Harvey sucked the wormhole tech out of him, the deeper he would be sublimated by the huge energy forces circulating around and inside him. The more he would loose awareness and become the negative field of the wormhole, ultimately loosing his life: both here and his physical body still lying on Moya. "Boy," he thought, "I hope those guys are taking care of me, cause I'm a long way from home." This is why the Ancient Jack said they would not actively give him wormhole technology. They knew that something inside his essence called the wormholes and could manipulate them. This place between universes coupled with Harvey's pressure brought the knowledge out too fast. Soon there would be nothing left of his consciousness but the equations that described his current state of being. He had to get Harvey to realize the danger to himself and his Pooka and get the critter to find another way to collapse the gravity fields, close the tear with him on the other side. He really didn't care where Harvey was left so long as he was free.
John unconsciously chewed his lip as he concentrated on the scientific riddle. Typically, when starbursting, leviathans passed through the Guardian's space via the center of a wormhole and never touched the edges or caught the attention of the creature. When Moya starburst inside the wormhole, John's module was drawn into the wake of the starburst and driven into the edge of the wormhole. The explosive decompression of the module opened its contents, including himself, to the singularity. Somehow, he had pulled its enormous gravitational fields into himself and was transformed and this energy surge attracted the Guardian of space-time. The Guardian trapped him and kept him captive because he was an intrusion. The Guardian had made a huge mistake —it thought John was just a convenient plug outside the tear. He had to convince the Guardian that not only was he the exotic matter keeping the wormhole open, but that he was also the solution to closing the wormhole and riding itself of the intruder. By freeing John, the Guardian could collapse the wormhole. The problem was that he needed to dive into the equations to figure out when in the rotation of the energy fields the best time to release him would be so as not to cause an enormous explosion, thus totally frelling both space and time. A terrible thought occurred to him—the more he swam in the blue tornado, the more difficult it seemed to be to retain his humanity. One more transition might be the end of him. "Why does it always have to be so hard?" he sighed. "Why is it never easy?"
"I am truly sorry to have caused you pain and wish to leave so that you can return to your peace." John said through gritted teeth as the creature tightened its hold on his neck, shoulders, stomach, thighs, and all the way down his legs. "You have made a mistake and keeping me prisoner is causing you great harm. By releasing my consciousness, you can close the wormhole as I am the only thing standing in the way of its collapse." John howled in anguish as the creature squeezed and shifted its protuberances as it mulled over his words.
"If I release you, the tear will increase until space-time is shattered. That is what I was placed here to prevent." Her carapace pulsed red, blue, green, and white as her voice rumbled in John's ears.
"I AM the tear!" John cried. "I hold the wormhole in place. Remove me, and the wormhole collapses harmlessly. I can tell you when the best time to push me out will be, preserving your world and saving me in the process."
"What of the other one who resides with you? What becomes of him?"
"I don't care, keep him as a souvenir, a reminder of my visit. Mount him on your wall. Place a stake through his heart. Just release me!" John was getting frantic, as he sensed his mind slipping back into the miasma of quantum foam and gravitational forces. He had to finish his talk with the Guardian before his time ran out. He sensed that this was his last lucid moment. Forever. "Just push when you get a signal from the other side. You'll know the time." John's awareness faded into the blue mist again. As John's identity dissolved, he thought he heard the word, "Agreed." He smiled.
Part Nine
D'Argo and Aeryn rushed to perform the pre-flight check on the transport pod. While D'Argo checked the cesium fuel levels, Aeryn checked out the internal systems, cursing all the while as her worry and fears compounded the slow progress of the safety review. Finally, both Aeryn and D'Argo shouted together, "Ready!" While D'Argo and Aeryn prepped the spacecraft, Jool and Chiana unhooked Crichton from the various tubes and bags used to sustain his life and manhandled his comatose body into a spacesuit. Earlier, they had rolled an antigravity cart into Crichton's quarters. When John was ready, except for his helmet and gloves, they rolled his heavy body on to the cart. During all this rolling, shoving, pushing, and once he was lying on the cart, and almost at the same second as Aeryn and D'Argo made their announcement, the women yelled "Ready!" Pilot and Moya chose that same moment to announce over the comms the appearance of the wormhole.
The blue swirling door into other realities and universes frightened Moya's crew as they gazed at its open maw through Moya's view ports. Jool had raced down to Pilot's den to provide moral support to the greatly apprehensive living ship and her pilot. She sat on Pilot's station and stroked his sweaty face. Pilot said hesitantly, "Joolushko, Moya is very scared of this wormhole. I know we promised to rescue Commander Crichton, but now we are having second thoughts." Jool comforted the visibly scared alien and said quietly, "Pilot, please let Moya know that we are doing everything we can to keep her safe, but we must rescue our friend who has done so much for us." Pilot replied for Moya, "Yes, we understand and we will try because the Commander is our friend too."
Chiana floated John down to the pod in the hanger bay where D'argo lifted him off the cart and into the pod. He then carefully strapped him in behind Aeryn for their flight.
Pilot announced, "Prepare for entrance into the wormhole. There will be quite a bit of turbulence I'm afraid ."And with that pronouncement, the living ship seemed to gather herself and leaped into the blue mouth of the tornado. It took all of her amazing power to maintain her position at the edge of the wormhole. Jool, in Pilot's den, said "Pilot, are you certain that Moya understands how to starburst in reverse on the correct trajectory based on Crichton's calculations. ? How will we know if they are correct or if they were the ramblings of his deranged mind?"
Pilot replied with annoyance, "Joolusko, now is not the time to raise such questions. We've been over these equations and they seem correct based on Moya's and the Commander's models. Now is the time to be quiet." Jool held her tongue. "Officer Sun, is Commander Crichton ready? I would suggest you launch the pod immediately, as Moya is ready to begin starburst." Aeryn acknowledged Pilot's communication and launched the pod into the wormhole.
"Brace yourselves, please." Barely had Pilot completed his sentence, when Moya's blue sparks of starburst power began engulfing the huge leviathan in reverse-beginning at its front and running through all the channels and pathways on its golden hull until it coalesced at its tail. And with a huge fireball of power, disappeared backwards out of the mouth of the wormhole, leaving the rolling pod in its wake alone in the blueness.
Deep in Space-Time
John's consciousness was drowning in the flux and foam of quanta. All he saw and heard were equations as they swirled and coalesced. There was nothing left of his soul, only mathematics and physics of wormholes defined his existence. With the last gasp of his life force, he signaled the Guardian that it was time. As John's soul died, Harvey let out a huge scream of anguish and yelled, "Crichton, I am not going to die today!" With that pronouncement, Harvey pulled on John's wavering consciousness still held in thrall in the Guardian's tentacles. Harvey reached into the images from John's mind that he absorbed during his time in residence, and found an image that equated with power and strength that the human could identify with. Pulling out that image he pictured himself as a riding a huge tow truck hooked to Crichton's rundown pickup truck, Betty. He pulled the wench and the huge pulleys on the truck slowly lifted Crichton's truck up off its back wheels. Crichton screamed in agony with vestiges of his personality.
At the Pod
Checking once more that the thrusters would keep the pod stablilized at the edge of the wormhole, she walked over to John's lolling form. Taking a deep breath, Aeryn carefully locked the helmet on John's head and checked all of the fasteners to make sure they were sealed tightly. She had already sealed herself in her flight suit. She then opened the door on the pod after having clipped John on to a safety harness linked to the pod's body. She then floated herself and the unconscious astronaut out of the transport pod and into the wormhole. She let the current float them into the edge, and carefully so that she didn't come into contact with the masses of energy she could feel even through her space suit. Aeryn knew the danger of direct contact with vacuum and what it could do to the body, but she could see no other way to replicate the original accident other than to expose John to the cold and vacuum of space. She slowly pulled off his glove, knowing she was dooming him to frostbite or worse. She reached out with his limp arm and caused his hand to pass into the edge of the wormhole.
At the Edge of the Wormhole
The Guardian was attuned to changes in the music of its space. It noted that at the precise moment that his captive screamed, that the edges of the wormhole became began to resonate with a discordant energy signature. Trusting his strange small prisoner, the Guardian released its body and pushed it out from between universes back into the wormhole's empty center and into the waiting body of John Crichton.
Newton's Third Law of Thermodynamics states: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
When the Guardian released Crichton's consciousness, Harvey was just congratulating himself that he had managed to forestall John's return to his universe. He had backed the tow truck up and tied up John's pick up truck so that it hung from the tow truck's pulleys and levers. Just then, the truck with Harvey began to roll down a steep incline. John's body flew out of the pickup truck and hit the imagined road with a thud and rolled out of sight. The last thing Harvey saw was the open tentacles of the Guardian as it grasped the Pooka firmly. "This is worse than the dumpster," thought the dazed mental clone as it struggled in its new prison.
Back in Reality
John opened his blind eyes and shook his head groggily in his helmet trying to gain his bearings in the blackness of his world. He could feel almost nothing as he floated in the blackness, his arms and legs waving gently in the vacuum. As he regained consciousness, he felt an intense cold flowing up from his hand and clenched his fingers into a fist trying to escape the painful numbing. Aeryn, staring at Crichton's hand as she held his limp arm, felt him tense and clench. She released his arm in surprise as she looked into his rapidly frosting helmet face.
"John!" She cried into her comms.
At the sound of her voice, the last images he had of Aeryn in her Prowler flashed through his mind.
"We're in the hands of fate now. We have to trust in that" A tear fell down her cheek in response to the emotion she felt at their goodbye. "Fly Safe...Goodbye John Crichton"
Her Prowler turned away from the module and within microts she was out of his line of sight.
"Aeryn? You came back!" He responded. "But where are you?" His voice was soft, raw, and rasping, but its clarity blazed upon Aeryn's ears.
Aeryn laughed and cried at the same time, as she said, "Here, John, follow my voice. You are blind and we've got to get you back to Moya." Aeryn slowly pulled the stricken astronaut back into transport pod and closed the door. Both sat in silence with words of regret and hope hanging on their lips, but were scared to say, as she manuvered the pod away from the wormhole and returned them to Moya .
Much later in the ship's day, Aeryn sat with John's head on her lap on John's bed. One of his hands was heavily bandaged. A new tube that dangled from his left arm fed him nutrients and fluids to restore his weakened body. She absentmindedly stroked his hair to help him maintain his contact with reality. John, for his part, starred into his night, his hands and legs still dancing lightly on the covers. He was content for the moment, happy to be feeling little pain, although he knew he shouldn't feel so complacent with this physical predicament.
"Hey," he said with a voice still raw from very little moisture.
"Hey," she responded, smiling.
"Hey," he replied back at her, enjoying the comfort of this gentle game they played.
"Ok, " stated Aeryn, "You win, I'll start." She bit her lip in worry at the possibility of disturbing John's hard-won peace of mind. "I came back because I discovered something very important during my time with the mercenaries."
Fear of her answer caused him to hesitate before he asked, "What was that?"
"That there has always been only one John Crichton. I love John Crichton and always shall. I made a terrible mistake. In my grief, ... I forgot you. I have caused you terrible harm, caused you pain when I should have accepted your help in healing from my loss".
Her voice cracked with the memories of John dying in her arms, taking a deep breath, she tried to push back the well of grief that tried once more to overtake her. She felt his gentle touch on the hand that lay on top of his head and it gave her strength to continue on, " We could have done this together, but I let my lack of experience in these emotions get the better of me. Someone I knew once said that the pain of love is its way of teaching. In its healing comes a deeper feeling. A completion. Those wonderful nights and days, on Talyn were meant to show me what we could be. You and he, you are the same, unique and individual. Only experience separates you. I frelled up, I know this will never be enough to make it up to you...but I'm sorry."
John turned his face towards Aeryn's voice. He reached up with his twitching hand and reached out a finger. It danced as she guided it to her face. She kissed his palm gently. "It's all right Aeryn. I was so angry and resentful of you and him. I realize now that I would have taken the same shot at happiness as him. I too apologize that I didn't let you go without a fight. I should have.
"Be smart. She takes...time."
" It was what he told me to do. I was just so frelliing desperate after the Carrier ...and I realized something very important. You are what's important to me, what can so easily slip through my fingers. Earth will be there waiting for me to go back to. You...you are so much different. This is where I belong...by your side. So we both paid the price of our screwed up emotional states." John sighed. "You know, it's ironic that it took wormholes to finally get us both to see reason."
Then he frowned. "Aeryn, what happened? I have no memory after the big bang. I know I had an explosive decompression, but all I remember after that is blueness. I know I should be feeling more anxiety about my blindness and the fact I can't stop my body from shaking like a jumping bean , but I can't seem to get over how safe I feel with you. The good part, is Harvey is gone. I'm content. I know we'll see the bad parts out together , but with you I feel whole again . The rest doesn't seem to matter." John closed his eyes in exhaustion.
Aeryn watched John as he slept. As the tears flowed silently down Aeryn's cheeks she was glad that John couldn't see. She grasped John's good hand, and stated positively. "What happened is that you went away for awhile too and I realized again how much I needed you to feel complete. I won't let us be torn apart again by anything. I promise, if it is the last thing I do, that I'll find you a diagnostician and we'll heal you. Then we can go home wherever that will be, together always."
[1] Traversable Wormholes: Some Implications, by Michael Clive Price ( . )
[2] Human Exposure to Vacuum by Geoffrey A. Landis ( . )
[3] Traversable Wormholes, by Marcelo Maidana ( . )
[4] Traversable Wormholes: Some Implications, by Michael Clive Price ( . )
[5] Wormholes and Time Machines , by Fredrik Berndtson, John Gunnarsson and Johan Johansson ( ./~ )