Farscape: Sing a Song
Disclaimer: The brilliance of Farscape, and all of its characters and locations etc. belong to their respective owners; I'm just borrowing. No copyright infringement intended!
Author's Note:Set somewhere EARLY in season 1, before "The Flax" I think. They were in my head, being snarky and slightly inappropriate and I couldn't resist. Also, because I want to hear Claudia Black sing. Hopefully John is in character, yes?
ovo
"I'm bored."
"You said that already."
"Well, I'm still bored."
"Then why don't you find something to entertain yourself?"
"You entertain me."
"Yes, but you annoy me, John."
Crichton groaned and pounded his fist lightly against his forehead. Aeryn frowned at him. "What are you doing?"
"I'm still bored," he repeated, smirking when she caught his hand and lowered it back down to the console. Finally, a reaction. Though to be fair, she looked a bit pissed. Crap. "Oh, come on, Aeryn. Cut me some slack!"
"Cut you some...?"
John cursed the translator microbes for the umpteenth time that week. "Nevermind. Look, we are stuck with no fuel – and no snacks – in this transport pod for at least another two arns until Pilot and Moya swing around to pick us up. I'm bored out of my skull; the least you could do is try to be a little more talkative. Barring that, it's either talk to my own hand until it starts replying, or knock myself out with it."
The expression on Aeryn's face was a cross between amusement and frustration. John realized that it was a look he'd seen a lot of since he'd come to Moya, but especially lately. "You humans have no concept of patience at all, do you?" she questioned, raising an eyebrow.
John shrugged. "None to speak of," he deadpanned.
A grin might have tugged at the corner of her lips, but it could have been a trick of the light. "Alright then, John. I suppose the others will be upset with me if I kill you to shut you up, so we'll try it your way first. What do you humans do for fun?"
John was pretty sure that she was kidding – about the killing him part, at least – but the word fun coming from her mouth sounded all kinds of sexy, and it was a minute before he could pull his mind out of the gutter enough to answer coherently, and in a way that wouldn't probably make her shoot him anyway. "Well, I mean..." What did he do for fun back home, anyways? "...There's a song, I guess. It's really more made for long car rides than a drifting transport, but I think it's close enough. We've certainly got enough time for it."
Aeryn looked skeptical. "Really? That's what you do when you're bored?"
No, but he could hardly suggest what he really wanted to do, could he? And he knew from experience that she wasn't interested in wormhole equations. "Okay, fine. Do your people have any songs that are more fun than Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer?"
"Peacekeepers don't encourage singing; too much room for creativity."
"What? No battle chants or victory cries? Tell me you at least have drinking songs."
"What?"
"Oh, gosh." What sort of culture didn't even have a real drinking song? He could have made a career of them back in college in the early days. "So you've never sung a song before?"
"There is a Sebacean death-song I heard once," she said after a moment of consideration. She propped her elbows on the console and leaned forward, her eyes unfocusing thoughtfully. "My unit was ordered to witness the burial of a great Commander who had won many battles for the Peacekeepers. Some of the recruits started to sing as a tribute to him when his body was jettisoned; they must have been from one of the colonies where order was not so strictly enforced." She was quiet for a minute. "I remember it was odd when they were not immediately ordered to be silent," she continued, "but I think that the Commander had hand-picked some of them for service. I suppose that High Command thought it was worth something that they were loyal enough to their commander that they would break regs for him. They probably wanted to try to breed for his qualities."
John tried to picture that; a young version of Aeryn standing silent in the middle of a crowd of singing Peacekeepers. That must have been something. He wondered if she'd wanted to join in, or if she'd been scared by the blatant non-conformity. "That must have been a hot topic around the water coolers for a while, huh?"
"Okay, that made even less sense than 'cut me some slag'."
Damn translator microbes. "Slack Aeryn. It's cut me some slack." He figured, though, that it was pointless to argue about it at the moment; it was still far too soon. They understood even less of his world than he did of theirs. "Did people talk about it after the fact?" he tried instead. "Or did High Command shut that kind of thing down?"
Aeryn shrugged. "I was transferred to my Prowler unit soon after. I don't know if anything more ever came out of the event."
She didn't seem inclined to talk much after that, and for once John wasn't inclined to push her. He figured that he'd gotten more than enough for his trouble with a (mostly) un-prompted story about her past. That would be more than enough to distract him until Moya came along to get them.
...Well, mostly distract him. Maybe. If only he could just abandon all things related to hormones.
Mentally, he started opening up bottles of beer and arranging them along the Great Wall of China. Ten thousand ought to be enough to numb his mind.
ovo
It was a few weeks later while suffering from insomnia, that Crichton heard her singing.
She probably didn't even realize she was doing it. She was walking through the halls and singing softly to herself, her voice low and smoky and seductively melodic. Quickly, John rolled over so that his back was to the door so that he wouldn't get caught listening to her impromptu concert. He was pretty sure that his face was going to split from grinning.
Unknowingly, Aeryn sang him to sleep.
fin.
Note: ...and tell me how that turned sappy at the end? :p