"Crais getting any better?" John asked, staring absently out the window of the central chamber. A nebula hung in the distance, and for a moment he found it odd how he now thought in terms of light years instead of miles.

"Not, exactly." D'Argo replied, pushing some food onto John's plate. "A man needs to eat. You've been moping around here since Aeryn got back and I can only suppose that frail human physique can only take so much starvation."

John ignored the food. "What's 'not exactly'?"

D'Argo motioned at John's plate. "Eat first."

John sighed and took a bite, wagging his fork at D'Argo. "I'm going to start calling you Aunt Ruth. Now, what's not exactly?"

"He's requested a little…personal space. For an arn or so."

"Oh man!" John shoved the plate away from himself. "How can you eat with THAT mental image going around in your head?"

D'Argo looked at his food and shrugged, taking another bite. "I'm hungry."

"Where are the girls?" John frowned, suddenly more worried than disturbed.

"Not anywhere near him. I sent him down to the tech quarters. Chiana is in the maintenance bay with Aeryn and Jool is in medical. They're all perfectly safe." D'Argo took another enormous bite and motioned back at John's plate. "Eat," he growled.

"Dude, I don't think so."

"What's the matter, John, don't humans--"

John cut him off. "Uh uh…yeah, we do. But we don't talk about it, as a general rule. And NOT at the dinner table." D'Argo shrugged again while John pushed the food around on his own plate.

John stared past D'Argo at the softly moving starscape. "I hate to sound like a six year old, but…are we there yet?"

"According to Jool," D'Argo answered, "because of Moya's 'condition' she's moving a little slower than usual, so we may not arrive at the commerce planet for an extra solar day or so."

"And this doesn't bother you?"

"I'd rather not be sliding around like a pair of mating flibisks, and I would rather not be sharing quarters with the likes of Crais, but there are advantages to circumstances that prevent your friends from running off and getting themselves killed." D'Argo stopped eating and stared pointedly at John.

John sighed and rested his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose. "So you're sitting this one out, big guy?"

"I didn't say that. What kind of friend would I be to go off and LET you get killed? But I'm still not going to enjoy seeing it when it happens." D'Argo returned to his meal.

"You're faith overwhelms me," John answered sarcastically, finally taking a bite of his own dinner.

John returned to his quarters to find Aeryn standing with her back to the door, her fingers gently caressing something. He knocked on the latticework of the cell door and she spun, a guilty look on her face as though she had been caught doing something she shouldn't. In her hands, a thumb still caressed Stark's mask.

John licked his lips, wondering what this meant. "Am I interrupting something?"

She set the mask quickly back on the shelf. "No, I was just wondering where Stark is."

Stark? Or the other John? "You know Stark. He's probably not even corporeal anymore."

Pulling herself quickly together Aeryn said, "It was just a passing thought. Nothing important." The tiniest hint of vulnerability, humanity, that he had caught in the set of her mouth, the cast of her eyes was gone in a microt as she straightened her back and lifted her chin.

"Your stitches," John nodded with his head, "they look like they're healing well."

"Jool is a competent surgeon. It's good to see she's found a purpose around here." John watched her move to the far side of the bed, out of his line of sight. The conversation was over.

It was perhaps a quarter of the way through his sleep cycle when John opened his eyes, feeling watched. It wasn't an uncommon feeling for him, considering since Harvey had taken up permanent residence he never was really alone anymore. Before Harvey, there was always the constant presence of the DRDs. But this was different. This was a palpable gaze. This was waking up an hour after you've snuck back into the house to find mom and dad on either side of your bed. This was opening your eyes to find Hubbel doing the doggy equivalent of the gotta pee dance with the leash in his mouth. This was waking to find your fraternity brothers have painted your finger and toenails bright fuchsia pink, and there's no acetone to be found in a ten mile radius. Whatever the circumstance, it was waking in familiar space feeling lost.

"Aeryn?" he whispered.

"John." His name came to him without any attempt to mask its volume. He felt the curtain between them shift and rustle, as though it were being pulled back into place. Had she been watching him sleep?

"Do you need something?" he asked. He didn't know what else to say.

"No." Silence. He rolled over, forcing his eyes to close though he was no longer tired. Then, "I apologize if I injured you yesterday."

"That's ok. It's not like the boys needed therapy or anything." And it was. She could have castrated him if it meant he could be lying here now, listening to her voice lose some of its chill.

When he was finally able to go back to sleep, his mind wandered into a lifetime that couldn't have possibly have been his, he and Aeryn, old and happy. The dreams were satisfying, and for the first time in monens, he awoke at the end of his sleep cycle feeling like he had actually rested.

They all looked at Crais who returned their stares with sheepish chagrin. "I have already apologized. What more do you want? My blood?"

"Don't tempt us, lover boy." John replied. He lay a gentle hand on Jool's shoulder. "You okay?"

She nodded, though her hair was still a bright flaming red indicating her true emotional state. John was used to her anger, and when he had initially heard her metal melting screams he hadn't hurried to see what the problem was. With Jool, it was always something. But the single tear that slipped from the corner of an impossibly green eye was too much for him.

"Ok, here's the deal. You get your own room. You get confined to your own room. Take a nap. Take a cold shower. Relieve some tension. I don't care. But if any of us catch you out and about until you are being escorted to a transport pod, we're all going to pick an appendage and make a wish. Got it?"

"Commander Crichton, I--" John held up a hand and Crais cut his thought short.

"I don't want to hear it. Let's just get through the next couple of days without anyone losing their head." John looked pointedly at D'Argo, who had his Qualta blade in rifle mode and aimed directly at the ex-Peacekeeper captain. D'Argo snarled but lowered the weapon.

As he brushed roughly past Crais, the huge Luxan paused and said, "That does not necessarily mean the head on your shoulders."

"Understood, Luxan." Crais nodded, following him out of medical and in the direction of the tech quarters.

John heard a familiar click behind him and realized Aeryn had just holstered her weapon. Without another word she turned and left the room.

"Pip, why don't you take Jool back to quarters and let her take a nap or something?" John leveraged himself up onto a work table and tried to smile at the two girls.

Only Chiana smiled back. "Nap? Hezmana, she needs to bathe."

"Jool, you sure you're ok? You need to talk?" John patted the bench next to him, inviting her to take a seat.

"He, he was helping me with the boolite. I mean, we don't even know its name yet." Tears still slid unnoticed from one magnificent green eye. Chiana gently wiped it away for her. "And then he started saying all this dren about how exotic I was…"

"Oh yeah, guys just love to go for the 'exotic' line," Chiana interjected.

"And how he'd never been with a non-Sebacean before…" her face started to contort and John prepared himself for another wail but all she did was sniffle pitifully. "And I told him I wasn't interested in being his exception to the rule and then, and then…"

"Ok, ok. Jool, go take a shower. We get the idea. Just stay away from the tech quarters and hopefully we won't have to worry about Casanova bothering any of you girls until we get wherever it is we're going." John brushed his hand over her head gently as she walked past. It was meant to be a comforting gesture, but his fingers got caught for a moment in her ring curls and came away with a small pelt weaving it's way between his knuckles. As he tried to shake the clinging strands away, he decided it was probably a good thing Jool's outfit needed a shoe horn to get in and out of. It would have been unfortunate if he and D'Argo had to been forced to turn the good captain into sushi before he was done 'taking care of business'.

John sat on his bed scribbling in his notebook. He was hoping something would leap out at him, some answer to all his grand mysteries, the first and foremost of those being Aeryn. All he got was a lot of ruminating about his old notebook, about Stark's mask, about his place in the universe.

'Was I supposed to die? Am I supposed to be dead right now? Is that what the grand plan was? John Crichton, astronaut, got shot through a wormhole, fell in love and died. How's that for an epitaph? Zhaan always said believe in the plan. Time and patience. All things will be made known to you. I get the sneaking suspicion I'm not supposed to be here anymore, and the only plan the universe has for me involves fixing a mistake. Why would I want Aeryn to fall in love with me again if I'm only meant to be a transient presence in the part of the universe? In her life? What if she's destined for great things and I've already played my part?'

"What are you doing!" John jerked his head up at the sound of Aeryn's voice. The venom with which she spoke caused his pen to skid in a long thin line over the paper and what he had already written.

"I'm writing." John answered slowly. Was this a trick question?

"You couldn't ask me? You had to go through my belongings?" Aeryn moved as if to snatch the notebook from him but skittered wildly on the floor. Clutching the wall for support, her lips set in a thin line, she held out her hand.

"Hold it right there. This one's mine." Though completely unnecessary, John held the notebook over his head and out of reach.

"It WAS yours, Crichton." She flexed her fingers as if to say "give it to me, now".

"No," John answered, "this one IS mine. I replaced it when you and he jumped ship. If you've got the other one stashed somewhere, it's still safe. Although, I might add, that notebook was mine too."

"You replaced it. Of course you did." Aeryn muttered to herself as she crossed the room. She sat on the corner of the bed and took off her boots. John watched her and for the moment it seemed she had expended all of her energy on that one expression of crisis and was now defenseless. He was afraid to speak. He was afraid the sound of his breath would remind her of his presence and all the walls would return, fortified.

He looked at her profile, her wounds nearly healed by that amazing Sebacean physiology of hers. Her hair pulled tightly off her face in it's braid. One lip tucked into her mouth, her eyes heavy with burden.

"I…I'm sorry he died," John said.

She stood up and picked up her boots, moving around to her side of the bed and her protective screen.

"So am I," she replied. Her voice was unemotional, but it no longer clung to its hard, brittle timbre. He heard the click and clatter of her gun belt as she disarmed herself and laid it on the bed. In the past few days he'd grown use to her routine, and wondered if she had adopted the same one she had maintained as a Peacekeeper. Remove her weapons. Disrobe, shower, change clothes and spend the evening cleaning the goo off her boots and doing weapons maintenance. She rarely spoke, and for John it was like living with a ghost. Well, he thought, I suppose it's like that on both sides of the wall.

Later that night, John lay in bed, hands tucked behind his head, working on the courage to say something else. His doppelganger had warned him, 'she takes time'. Would this be pushing it? He felt her settle in, her incessant moving and shuffling finally coming to a standstill.

He opened and closed his mouth several times before the words actually came out. "Aeryn, are you talking to me now?"

Silence. He closed his eyes.

"I was never not talking to you, John, I just didn't have anything to say."

Fair enough. "My notebook. The, uh, other notebook."

"What about it?" Cool, careful.

"There's information in there I'd like to have back."

"There's information in there that's none of your business."

"Aeryn, I don't think I want to know the particulars of your relationship. You had one, that's enough information for me to wrap my mind around. But there were computations, star charts…" He turned his head as though he could look at her face.

Another long silence. "It's all I have, John. Don't ask me to give it back."

The grief in her voice was enough to make John lose his breath for a microt. Cruel. Cruel and selfish. "I'll, uh, try to recreate them from memory."

What else could he do? He wasn't about to demand the return of something she held dearer possibly than anything else in her life, except perhaps the person who had bequeathed it to her.

His unconscious ramblings were full of long empty corridors, the walls covered in a script that was familiar but unreadable, and the deep abiding and all pervasive feeling of being alone.