So here's the deal. I loved this show. I loved this show. I just finished it about a month back, and that's all there really is to say about it. And the further I got, the more ideas I had to write about. I'd planned out over fifteen oneshots when I decided that it would be best to just... put them all together, in one place, in one multi-chapter story.
So I'll be writing a lot of these, and they will show up as chapters following this one – I already have a few more almost finished. They aren't connected, they aren't in order, and they are mostly off-camera type moments, or closer looks at moments that are on camera. John/Aeryn will be the primary focus, but I'll be exploring all the other canon pairings as well, and writing from pretty much every character's perspective over time. The timeline in this one is pretty vague for the first half, but it takes place after Human Reaction and leads up to the end of Season of Death.
So thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy this first entry. Reviews would be very, very much appreciated.
'SLIP'
(About slipping; because Crichton is immature and naïve and stupid and talks too much, but she loves him anyway )
Looking back, Aeryn isn't certain where exactly it all began.
There are a dozen possibilities, gathered together and sorted out and blurring slightly at the edges in her mind. Moments in time and the hitch of his smile, the slight way he tilts his head when he doesn't understand something, the unending references to places she's never been and things she's never seen.
The first time she kissed him, fire igniting at the narrow precipice between life and death, and the white-hot echo it left in its wake.
The night under a gathering storm on what wasn't Earth, gentle hands and the heat of his mouth pressing to the crook of her neck and the echo of rain's dampness on their skin – desperation that should have been there replaced by a resignation-laced need to connect.
She isn't sure. It doesn't matter. The only thing she knows for certain is that he has destroyed everything she has ever had and razed every belief the Peacekeepers ever implanted and worked his way past every defense meant to keep him out.
And she is definitely in too deep.
-N-
At first, he is frustrating – foolish and lacking all discipline, and so far from the Peacekeeper men she's used to that the contrasts eclipse just about everything else.
Somewhere along the way there is a swampy planet with very little sunlight, and a dark cave where he pulls her back to hide against a well and hushes her as they listen to the rattle of pulse pistols outside in the gloom.
"Your plans never work, you know," Aeryn tells him in little more than a snarled whisper, shoving his hand off of her arm but still leaning her head back against his chest and counting his quickened heartbeats as the wait drags on. John shifts immediately at the remark, tensing in what she anticipates as indignation – she isn't disappointed.
"Wait, wait, wait," he says, twisting his head around until he can give her the corner of a scowl, "Now this is my fault?"
"It was always your fault, Crichton," she replies easily, eyes flicking up to meet his, and one brow arching in an almost-challenge. "It usually is."
"Right. Because your plans are always so much better. Hey, if it weren't for me, most of you would be dead," he says archly, with the barest pull of a smile lingering near the very corner of his mouth. "My plans always work." At the look she gives him, he amends reluctantly, "Okay, fine. They usually work."
"After they fail no fewer than three or four times," Aeryn grumbles back, crossing her arms loosely over her chest and exhaling. Sweat has gathered at her hairline, as the planet's natural humidity works its way past her clothing. "I'm going to be pulling shrapnel out of my prowler for at least the next cycle, you know."
"Assuming we make it out of here," he retorts. Then, shrewdly, with a slight raise of one brow, "Hey, you know, this could count as a near-death experience. If you wanted to-..."
"Don't get any ideas," she says, cutting him off (but she's smirking now, too). "Or it'll be much closer to a near-death experience for you."
His only response is the slightest rumbling of his chest behind her as he laughs, and they don't talk anymore after that.
-N-
At first, his weaknesses are only a hindrance; a snag on which everything catches and a piece out of place that she just cannot set right.
His eyesight is poor and his reflexes are slow, and he's a decent shot with a pulse pistol but he's not particularly strong. Emotions reign over reason and plans are cobbled together from fantastical ideas and wishful thinking and that infuriating eternal optimism he always seems to have at hand.
These things become familiar to her quickly, and she learns to compensate – matching weakness with strength, emotion with reason. A mesh that proves more than formidable, to her surprise. He is separated from his home and she is an outcast from hers, and she thinks, maybe this is why they work together so well (when by all rights they shouldn't).
Somewhere along the way she is showing him how to disassemble and reassemble a pulse rifle, and he says, "You know, I am learning, Aeryn."
And she only blinks at him. "I know you are. You're learning slowly, but you are learning."
And that seems to take him just the slightest bit off guard. "Oh. Right," he replies, the familiar uncertain furrow springing up between his brows. And with more assurance: "Exactly." And with a tentative look at her: "It'll get easier. Right?"
She shrugs. "Perhaps. I can't answer that with any accuracy – it's a question of just what your capacity for learning really is."
John apparently does not appreciate the answer, because he scowls at her and sets the pieces of the rifle down and crosses his arms indignantly over his chest.
Aeryn stares back, uncomprehending. "What? I'm just being honest, Crichton."
"You couldn't just... I don' know... lie to me, Aeryn? Pull out a good old-fashioned, 'Of course you will, John'?"
And he's been tolerable as of late, so she sighs and forces her expression into neutral - "Very well," she says, and then in as cheery a voice as she can manage parrots back, "Of course you will, John."
He just looks at her. And he blinks. And he picks up the pieces of the rifle again, and, shoulders trembling a bit with what she eventually realizes is restrained laughter, forces out, "Alright, you know what, forget I said anything. How do you do this part again?"
-N-
At first, she does her best to ignore his fixation with Earth.
Constant references and the ever-present desire to return mark everything he does and everything he is working toward, for the first few months of their traveling together. He wants to go home, and she cannot ever go home, so she refuses to discuss it and shuts him out when he starts in on talking about his distant world with all its strange customs and small, green men who train heroes. She doesn't understand, and she doesn't want to understand, and she really does not like to think about what will happen if he does find a way back.
And then, his fixation seems to be shuffled to the background – Scorpius's pursuit and Talyn's birth and Crais's abrupt switching of sides and everything else that happens in the wake of their destruction of the Gammak Base seems to sweep everything they cared about before to the side, and John just stops talking about it; still making his references, but not constantly seeming to pine for a planet he'll probably never see again.
(Aeryn welcomes the change, though she won't tell him that.)
Somewhere along the way there is a commerce planet on which Rygel and D'Argo spend a good solar day restocking, and the rest of them take the leave time on a neighboring planet with a tempered climate and lush scenery. And, there is a beach with crashing waves and white sand that stretches on either side in rising and falling dunes to meet the clear sky; Aeryn finds John standing barefoot in the shallows of the water, as it washes in around his mid-calf.
"You seem to like this planet," she observes, approaching, her hands loosely crossing over her chest as she stares down at the flurries of sand stirred up by the waves and the occasional tiny shell turned over and over in the current.
"Yeah, well..." John turns to grin at her, the sunlight catching on lingering droplets of water suspended in his hair. "It's nice. Reminds me of Earth." He pauses, nods pointedly at the combat boots she's wearing, and adds as almost an afterthought, "You should take your shoes off."
"No," she objects obstinately, but she does step closer, till she's standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in the surf. Then: "You have places like this on Earth?"
"Yup," John nods, staring back out at the distant point where the sea seemed to meet the sky. "Beaches. Like the one where you crashed, back on... Not-Earth."
"Oh," she says.
John's shoulders rise and fall as he takes a breath. "We'd go when I was a kid, in the summer. A vacation. If my dad was home. We'd swim and go fishing and all that, typical vacation stuff. But I remember the sandcastles the best. Me and my sister, we'd always build these... giant sandcastles. Try to outdo each other. 'Course, I was older than her, but still..." At Aeryn's blank stare, he looks at her, clarifies, "Sandcastles. Ya know. Castles built out of sand. They-..." He sighs when her expression doesn't change, dismisses it with a wave of his hand. "Never mind."
"Do they have a purpose?" she asks, squinting at him through the bright sunlight.
He looks a cross between amused and exasperated, at that. "No, they don't have a purpose, Aeryn. It was fun." His smile turns distant; distracted, as his thumbs hook in his pockets and his head tilts back towards the sky. "Sometimes, we'd try and make one that would last overnight. Build big walls around it, a moat, you know. And when – if – we came back the next morning, we'd always go check. But they never lasted. Just... smooth sand, where the tide came in. Like we were never there. But we kept trying."
Aeryn just stares at him, picking over the information word-by-word. "That seems rather pointless, John."
"Yeah, well, not everything has a point," he answers patiently, bending to scoop up a particular handful of wet sand from under the water, and sifting it through his fingers until he's holding just a rounded, pearly shell with a chip out of the edge in his palm. "Sometimes things are just fun. And we were kids."
"Oh," she says again.
"I could show you how to build one," Crichton adds, looking at her sidelong, and tosses the shell to her.
She catches it reflexively, squints at the pale exterior. "We aren't children, Crichton." And, holding up the shell for him to see: "I don't know what to do with this."
"Yeah, but it would be-..." John shakes his head, relenting. "Fine, Aeryn. We don't really have the stuff – shovel, buckets, things like that – to make one, anyway. At least, not a good one." He reaches out, closes her hand around the shell without a word, and she doesn't pull away from him. "Just... keep the shell, all right? Keep it. It's a... you know, a gift."
So they don't build a sandcastle. But Aeryn does tuck the shell into a pocket of her vest, and she does eventually take off her boots, tossing them back up on the shore next to John's, and he seems to want her there so she stays and lets the cool water splash against her ankles as the sun begins to set.
-N-
At first, he is just Crichton.
And, she doesn't need him, with a kind of razor-edged desperation founded in their own mutual displacement from the places they knew as home. And, she doesn't find herself depending on him in combat, not as a vaguely-useful accessory, but as a partner who she can trust. And, she doesn't love him.
And then one day she finds that she does.
Aeryn doesn't know much about love, but she knows this much: she would kill for him and she would die for him, and she would move the galaxy if it kept him safe – and that is her definition, the box that love fits into for her, and that is the best she can do.
She loves John Crichton.
And it's a frightening realization.
-N-
At first, she doesn't know how to deal with his apparent descent into madness.
He is slipping, slipping away, and quickly. This is not something she can ward off with guns or a desperate plan, either – not when the slip is taking place within the confinement of his mind, and not when he refuses to let any of them in to help. He has whole conversations, arguments, debates with a person who is not there. He fixates on his chess game with something bordering on obsession, for arns at a time. And sometimes he just sits and stares at nothing, and that is the scariest part of all.
"Are you going to be all right?" she asks him with furrowed brows from her place in a nearby chair, watching him skeptically through the shadows of his darkened room as his hand trembles waveringly over a chess piece.
He doesn't answer, for a long time. The slanted light from the hall falls in fractured patterns over his face, highlighting the lines of tension there, the dark circles underlining his eyes. And then he just looks at her, and says, "I don't know."
Aeryn says nothing. And John says nothing. He just abruptly sweeps an arm out, knocking the chess pieces over (some of them scatter across the floor). And he sets his elbows on the table and he drops his head into his hands and gives a shuddering sigh, and she doesn't think she's ever seen him look quite this vulnerable.
(She doesn't like it.)
"I meant it," he mumbles at length, muffled. "When I said that my mind was all I have left. I'm don't belong out here. I'm not... used to this world, like you and the others are. So this? This is it. It's all I got."
And Aeryn doesn't know quite how this works – they didn't cover any of it in Peacekeeper training, of course – but it feels like the right thing to do, to look at him and say, simply, "No. It's not."
John doesn't speak, but after a pause he lets one hand drop to the table, palm up, trembling almost imperceptibly. Aeryn stares at it in confused silence, until she realizes that it also feels like the right thing to do to cross the short distance to the table and let her hand rest lightly in his.
He grips it tightly. And they are very, very quiet.
-N-
At first, she wouldn't have imagined that this would be her end.
A frozen lake. Death, at the hands of the man she loves, his mind stolen by some neural chip that would have stolen him from her soon anyway. The sick-empty feeling of resignation settling into it's place below her ribs. Strangely, it takes fear with it – replaced by numbness like that the water below will bring, she is certain.
Crashing through the ice, the shock of meeting frigid water, the last glimpse she gets of a stark-cold sky. And Crichton's name, a sound torn away from her on the back of a gasp, as the icy waves engulfing her tear her life away. These are the last things she knows.
And darkness, that is the end.
-N-
Afterwards, she is not sure where they stand. Or what to do. Or where to go next.
She is alive, when she shouldn't be. And Zhaan is dying, paying a price that is not hers to pay. And John is safe.
(And John is safe.)
He takes her face in his hands and kisses her, and it is so right, and his hands are warm and and the angles of his back sturdy under her fingertips as she tugs him closer, and she loves John Crichton. Which is why they cannot let this be. Because he's frelled up her life and her rules and now he's frelling up her judgment, and the cost for that is just too high.
But she will do everything in her power to make sure he stays safe.
It's simply something she has to do.
Disclaimer: This wonderful show sadly does not belong to me. I claim nothing.