Disclaimer: Characters belong to Rockne O'Bannon and are used without permission. No infringement intended.
Notes: I don't have any idea how Rockne O'Bannon and the creators of Farscape expect me to believe that a human male is not going to want to re-experience the equivalent of ten years of great sex.
First posted Nov 1999. Revised 28 Feb 2000

"Let me," said John Cricthon. "Your way and mine." His hands agreeable on her waist. His breath, rich with alien enzymes and exotic sugars, headier than distilled wine.

She laughed, leisurely. Tilted her pelvis forward and found him disarmingly, basically, bipedally male.

He made a small sound in his throat.

She did it again, and his hands tightened on her hips and he put his mouth to the corner of hers, breathing on her his gorgeous breath.

He was smiling against her skin when she said, "Do. Your way."

"Zhaan," with the intonation that presaged a glut of Crichton-speak.

Her thumb had the intended effect. She had surprised him.

His mouth gentled beneath her touch, firmed around the tip of her thumb. There was the barest hint of moisture. She felt the smooth plane of his teeth. He smiled, his lips gently sealed around her. He had an overbite. She felt it in the kiss. The smallest and most leisurely of kisses.

Stepping away from him, Zhaan removed her hand. His face glistened with saliva where her thumb dragged across his skin.

She extended her arm, "Walk with me."

His shoulder brushing hers the entire way, his fingers tangling with hers, he did.

John Crichton had simple skin. Pale hued, even in color except when she touched him. Then an intriguing flush infused the path left by her fingers, hands, lips, tongue. Its texture by turns soft and pliant, soft and resistant, dry, coarse, hairy, moist. Its color changing from pale to delicate reds at her touch and his own arousal.

"Picture'll last longer," John murmured.

Zhaan looked up from the nest of possibility between his legs.

His sculpted arms were linked behind his head, his gaze lazy. Her overshift pillowed his head.

She made a tiny circle at the juncture of his upturned leg and pelvis, lay her finger against the blue vein pulsing in that shallow dip of flesh above his thigh, the small bit of him that was only a little like her. That and his mouth.

His lips parted.

The thin ring of color around his enormous pupils vanished.

She brushed the smooth flat of her nail in the dip of tendon above his thigh. Paused.

He waited as he had been waiting since their first sex, content at her perusal. The scents rising from him invasive, delicious. The veins beneath his skin, the weave of his muscles and richesse of fat making what she'd thought his pure even color the subtlest of visual feasts.

The finger that touched him was joined by her hand, circled out over the lean plane of his hip, traced the masculine slant dividing his torso from his leg, slid over his hip and onto the pallet.

The side of his mouth twitched. Delight stretched both sides of her own.

She leaned forward, letting her arm take her weight, the sound of her hand on him much quieter than the beating of her heart. She pressed her other hand below his navel, stroked up to his ribs with her palm and onto the pallet. She leaned forward again, licked her lips, brushed her closed moist mouth over the lightly haired terrain of his chest, felt the pounding of his heart within his breast. Heard his breathing as ragged, for him. Advanced, stroke by slow stroke, letting her breasts touch him as she stretched over him, until her nose was level with his and her legs lay between his own.

He nudged her with his raised thigh. Pulled his arms from behind his head, trailing her overshift across her shoulders, the delicate weave exquisite against her sensitized skin. Not photic, but close enough and she moaned her appreciation.

He smiled.

His lips and gums were a lighter, earthier tint than the charming scattering of pigment on his shoulder blades and forearms he called 'freckles'. He gripped the base of her neck and enveloped her mouth with his own. The slick and pebbled wet of him amazing; beautiful and gentle the clutching of his limbs. His eyes staring into hers even as she flung herself into the sensation of his kiss, and received him into her body as she opened the gates of her mind.

Familiar blue-tinged unity where she re-experienced herself through his kind, exacting, optimistic eyes. Re-experienced encounters between him and her since he'd met her, since she'd purchased his freedom with her peace of mind, since he'd been lost from the ship and found.

The changes in her since his liberation had made her less fearsome to him, but more distressing. Beyond that distress, beyond that fear (always there) was the steady flame of his regard. Smooth, soft in color, unchanging, like the inside of a shell turned in upon itself, containing the song, soft and fierce as that of the captured ocean's, of his belief in her strength of will, her desire for good. That she was beautiful and gentle, in spirit and in form.

Gentle. Beautiful. Strong.

He spelled it out silently, slowly, quickly, hard, struggling to hold himself together as his body ground the lightening of his thoughts. She returned his gift of self, drew him into her with all she had as a woman of her people and a former Pa-u. Tilting and turning around him minutely and controlled, wringing the sweetest of sounds from his guileless frame with the greatest economy of movement. Displaying to him the treasure that she, and Moya, and the crew had in him, John Crichton, lover of life, hater of pain, resourceful, brave and also beautiful, gentle, strong.

She wrote it onto his skin, fired it across his synapses until his body twitched with it, his heart beat to it, his blood flowed through it. And something happened, something wonderful, unity of depth she had not experienced in so long, too long. Their individual biochemistries and consciousness obliterating the differences between them for one piercing, enveloping moment and they existed solely in the context of him in her and her in him and...perfect.

Zhaan opened her eyes to see the John's back, muscles like narrow dunes of sand at sunset, her hands deeply blue. Realized she rested on an incline. His arms bracketing her head, his hands braced against the floor, keeping him and her and the pallet from slipping completely off the frame.

"Oh," Crichton groaned into her neck. "I am going to hurt tomorrow."

Zhaan laughed, and hugged his sides. Clasped her legs around his hips and jerked a little, pulling her and him, pallet and all, completely onto the floor.

"Ow."

"Are you injured? Perhaps we've overused some of your muscles."

He raised his head, his bleary expression smug and tender, "Oh, yeah. Gimme a minute, babe, we'll strain some more." His head dropped back to her breast. He squeezed a handy portion of her anatomy. She massaged his neck. He sighed.

Perhaps she should not have taken the physical lead. For all his strangeness, Crichton was basically, bipedally, male, of the same genus of the so very conservative and inflexible Sebaceans. The pallet had not been designed to support two, and Crichton's compact body was denser than it looked. She thought he might be sleeping when he said, "Whoah."

"Is something the matter?"

"You're Zhaan. Ex-Delvian priest. Blue. Everywhere. Almost everywhere."

A touch at the base of his jaw told her that his pulse was only a little faster than usual. His respiration normal. Physically, he was fine. Perhaps her madness had infected him. She hoped not.

"We had sex," he said.

"Yes." Explorative. Abundant. Very pleasant. "We had sex."

His stirred against her stomach.

He snorted. Tried to speak, only laughter kept getting in the way. "Holy," he chortled, "freakin' Captain Kirk."

Which of course, made no sense, but he was Crichton and was not to be encouraged. So she resisted the urge to ask him what in Hezmana was he babbling about.

"We need to talk," he said. Lay quietly on her for a moment and said, "Yeah, definitely." And lifted himself off her with his arms. His face whitened and he shook his head. She held his shoulder to steady him as he sat up.

He held her hand to him. "Talk about a rush," and looked at her, his face tense but radiant. Still pale. He coughed. She held his head between her hands, tilting it towards the light. His pupils, still dilated, contracted into thin dots.

"I'm fine, Zhaan. Great. Mind's never been clearer."

She folded her hands in her lap.

"You didn't damage me." His face took on an expression of singular serenity.

"What do you wish to discuss?"

"I finally figured out why it's taken me so long to, uh, take you up on your, uh, invitation."

"Invitation?"

"On that planet with the tanot roots that was really a peace-keeper power supply? You and me, sleeping in the room next door to D'Argo. You naked? Next to me?"

They had been sleeping.

"You had your hand on my, y'know."

"'Yino'?"

"My crotch."

She cupped said genitals, "Like this?" Stroked the length of him, "or like this?"

"Whoah, babe," he caught her hands, "I'm still a little beat."

Beat. When he said it, she wondered if it meant what he thought it meant. He was hardening and lengthening as she watched.

"My back is killing me and my spleen feels like it's got the hiccups. And I don't even think I'm even supposed to have a spleen anymore."

Another word the translator microbes refused to handle.

"Good sex is good sex. Unity's like ten years of great sex. Unity and Delvian-Human sex..." his thumbs rubbed her palms. "This could be addictive, Zhaan-- your way and mine."

"Your way is very like you."

"How's that?"

Crude but effective. Simple but profound. Sublime and direct. Familiar and strange.

"Indescribable? Incredible? Fanfreakingtastic? Feed my ego, here, Zhaan. I thought nothing could top Unity."

800 cycles of existence hadn't equipped her vocabulary for the reality of John Crichton. She kissed him. Tenderly, quietly, smilingly, the way he liked. "But you are still a little afraid of me."

"And part of you hates me for what it cost you to save me."

"You are John Crichton. I am Zotoh Zhaan."

He was shaking his head. Wonderment and lust, affection and satisfaction radiating from his body and, if she concentrated, from his emotions as well.

"Before I forgot, before, well this fades and you start wondering why you let me touch you, or get back into your mind--"

"And vice versa, perhaps?"

He shrugged. Crossed his legs. "You're the most like me on Moya, y'know. At least, at first I thought you were. Your values, the way treat everybody. Patient even with His Royal Pain in the Ass, Spanky."

His broken, but mending eminence, Rygel the XIV. "Not of late."

"Yeah, but see, I knew, just like I did that even if all my hopes for extra-terrestrial contact had been met with you, cause from day one it looked like you had all the best characteristics of Vulcans and Deltans..."

She had not heard of either those species.

"--You were going to surprise me. There are things you do, choices you've made, that I can't, won't ever, agree with and sometimes when I'm with you its painfully, unavoidably obvious that I'm living my wildest dreams, and sometimes, that dream I'm stuck in, is a nightmare."

Pilot's arm had been an acceptable sacrifice. Just as losing control over the madness, the darkness within her that had been waiting to devour her for hundreds of cycles for his odd sake and for Delvia, had been an acceptable sacrifice.

"Am I making any sense here?"

"You rarely do."

"Y'know, I've seen you thinking it but I never thought I'd hear you say it."

"Forgive me, John. I do not know what came over me."

"It's called intimacy. Go with it."

"This is part of you embracing your fear?"

"Exactly. And when I do that--"

"You're embracing yourself. Yes, I am familiar with the concept."

He had not meant to offend her. She would not be.

He tugged her forward onto his lap. "C'mere, self. Scare me s'more."

"Your spleen's hiccups?"

"Good hard scare's the only cure." He held her head between his hands, stared into her eyes, "Come back in here, darlin'. Walk into my eyes."

Zhaan touched her forehead to that of the strangely sweet Terran. His eyes were red-rimmed, which meant exhaustion. "You should sleep, John Crichton."

"I'll sleep when I'm dead."

Feedback is adored. I do respond. It's my first carnality-bite. Let me know if it bit (good or bad).