"What do you mean 'another solar day'?" D'Argo bellowed. He and Chiana stood in the middle of her quarters, Jool still asleep and neatly tucked in under Chiana's fire silk linens.
John frowned at her sleeping form. It hadn't stirred, even in light of D'Argo's outburst.
"Uh, Chi, what's up with Sleeping Beauty here?" He walked carefully over to the bed, rested the backside of his hand just under her nose. A soft breath tickled his knuckles.
Chiana smiled at him. One of her mischievous cat smiles. "She couldn't sleep last night so I gave her a little something."
"Jesus Chi, what the hell did you give her, a knock upside the head?" John noticed Aeryn frown from where she stood with her back pressed against the latticework of the cell door. She kept herself apart. Attentive but aloof. John noticed Aeryn seemed uncomfortable, suddenly, around the young Nebari.
"Oh, relax. Zhaan used to give me something when I used to wander the ship all night. I think she was afraid I was going to steal a transport pod or something. Look, I just gave her a few drops."
"Chi, you don't know how that stuff is going to react to Interon physiology. How irresponsible can you get?" John lifted Jool's head but it lolled uselessly to the side.
"Look, if I could have I would have mind cleansed her just to get the thought of Crais touching her out of her mind. This was the best I could do. She's breathing. She's quiet. Life is good." Chiana nodded her head emphatically to punctuate each statement.
D'Argo looked back and forth between the three of them, John, Jool, and Chiana. Even though John couldn't hear it, he could almost see the growl building up in his massive friend.
"Ok, one crisis at a time. Jool's ok. You probably gave it to her enough arns ago that she would have had a reaction to it already." John gently laid her head back on the pillows and arranged the covers over her again. "Now what's this about ANOTHER solar day?"
"I'm just the messenger. If you don't like what he has to say, go see him yourself. But he says we strayed off course because Talyn thought he detected signals from other Leviathans."
"Ok, then, let the orgy begin." John looked expectantly at Chiana.
"Except they weren't Leviathans. They were false radio signals."
"Who the frell sends false Leviathan radio signals?" John and Aeryn looked at each other.
"Peacekeepers," they answered simultaneously. "It's how they capture Leviathans," Aeryn finished, her hand moving instinctively to her side arm. Tell her there was a Peacekeeper aboard, tell her there was a Peacekeeper a light year away, it always invoked the same reaction.
"Ok, then Junior had enough common sense to high tail it out of there. Right? Please Chiana, I don't want anymore bad news." Chiana looked nervously at John.
"Pilot thinks so, but can't say for certain. He just knows that we wasted time getting there, and now we've wasted time getting back to our original destination."
"Great, two horny Leviathans, and a command carrier. Throw in a bottle of champagne and we got us a party." John pressed his hands to his eyes and shook his head as though it might offer him a fresh perspective. It didn't. "How's our good captain holding up?"
"Pilot said he's complaining that the DRDs won't clean his quarters." Chiana answered.
"Yeah, well, God only knows what he'd do to a DRD right now. Someone has remembered to feed him, right. D'Argo?" John looked at the Luxan. "D'Argo. Hey, Heavy D…now is not the time to play Prince Valiant." He nudged his friend, snapping D'Argo out of a deep reverie over Jool's sleeping form.
"Food. Yeah, I left him with plenty of food cubes." John noticed D'Argo's eyes weren't lustful as he had suspected, but sad.
"Don't go there, man," John thought, "love never goes anywhere good."
Aloud, he said, "So we got another two days of this. Day after tomorrow, we drop anchor and send Captain Lucky planetside for a quickie. Let's just hope it's what the doctor ordered." He paused at the
door, turning to look one last time at Jool. She seemed alright, and Chiana hadn't acted with malicious intent. Maybe one of these days he'd take some of Zhaan's sleeping medicine himself and nod off for about a week. In front of him, Aeryn froze, her body pressed against the door as though she were trying to become one with it.
How he had taken for granted their casual familiarity with each other. Those days when he could rest his hand on a shoulder, rest his palm at the small of her back as they moved through the corridors, press up behind her at a console or work table. And now, they couldn't even share the same space. He stood only the length of the doorway in front of her, trying to catch her eye. She occupied her sight with a point just down the hallway. "God," he thought, "cut me, kill me, just don't treat me like a pariah."
When her eyes zeroed in on his it was like a predator tracking prey. He'd experienced warmer gazes in the snake house at the zoo. He bowed his head and scratched the back of his neck. "Look," he said, "I realize this little trip has dragged on longer than anticipated, so if you need to change rooms by now, I'll understand."
He lifted his head and wished he hadn't. Her frigid regard left him feeling emptier than he had that day aboard the foreign transport, when she had simply gotten up and removed herself from his presence. "It's not for you to understand," she replied softly, refocusing her attention on a point just above his left brow before walking with a stiff and stilted gait away from him. He watched her go, wondering what had caught her attention so earnestly. His hand unconsciously rubbed his temple, looking for something only she could see.
"Why do you do it to yourself?" Chiana interrupted his errant thoughts.
"What," he turned a scathing eye on her, but really didn't have the energy to hold it.
"John, just let her have some peace and she'll perhaps find the path back to you." D'Argo pushed a red curl of Jool's ridged forehead and stood up.
John nodded at his two friends. "I know, I know. But knowing what the right thing to do is and then actually doing it are two entirely different things."
"Indeed," D'Argo replied as John turned his back to leave, "that is the dilemma, isn't it?"
John stopped by the central chamber for a days worth of rations and water and returned to his quarters. If they weren't arriving for another day and some, then he saw no reason to go slip sliding around the ship. Unfortunately, the longer he remained in his quarters the more he realized his arns were spent simply waiting for Aeryn to return.
He tried to distract himself by recreating his star charts, but if his central star on every chart, labeled still 'Aeryn' wasn't enough make him feel hollow, the memories that came with each system sometimes left him gasping and on the verge of tears. Sylmun, where they had found that intriguing little bazaar and Aeryn had spent the day plying him with food from every vender, excited that he could finally sample some of her favorite treats. He smirked at his cleverness, he had renamed it LaGasse. Trojo, where men were considered chattel and Aeryn had been forced to draw on several Amazonian women before they made off with her 'breeding stock'. Well, that hadn't been a very nice world, but his ego had enjoyed it. Syn-Zuk, where pod repairs had forced them to share a room for the night and he had woken early the next morning to find her nestled against him. He remembered feeling her intake of breath against his rib cage, taking the liberty to run his fingers through her hair. When he felt her stir he had rolled away from her, knowing she hadn't been ready for that small, unconscious intimacy.
He had been torturing himself for two or three arns when he decided a shower was in order. A good long shower, use up all the hot water on the ship kind of shower. If the pain wouldn't wash away, perhaps he could at least burn it off.
He didn't know how long he'd been standing there, not moving, his head resting against the shower screen, the water scalding his back when he realized there was nothing he could do to escape. Even the shower itself brought back memories, though these less pleasant. Aeryn with heat sickness, the temperature rivaling a West Palm Beach afternoon and Zhaan trying to keep her alive long enough for them to solve the problem. He and D'Argo had left the soldier and the cleric in the shower, hoping for the best. If the situation hadn't been so desperate, he would have taken a moment to stand there and enjoy the sight of her draped over the privacy screen with her underclothes clinging to her wet frame. But that wasn't a scene visited often.
It was all this inactivity that was doing him in. He turned and slid to the floor, his back pressed against the screen for support. All this waiting. When they were actually doing something, he didn't have time to think. He focused on the matter at hand and there was no time for ruminating on problems he couldn't solve. But it had been nearly a week now of waiting to get from point A to point B and his hyperkinetic mind was starting to get the best of him. He thought about the message from his Other. He would have done the same thing, try to return some of the hope that had slipped. But had the other John counted on Aeryn shutting down totally? Had he expected them to at least be able to pick where they left off and find friendship? How much time was he talking? At this rate, he'd be dead and buried before she realized they were the same guy. How often do you get a second chance with a dead lover? Well, that was very much the problem, wasn't it? He wasn't the same guy. A few months ago they were, but not anymore. And as for being dead and buried, well dead was a highly likely possibility these days. They still had a command carrier to take out.
John knew it wasn't all about him. It was about a woman who had never been taught anything about emotion becoming paralyzed by grief. It was about spending three cycles teaching her it's ok to feel, without ever preparing her for the consequences. They were both emotional road kill at this point, deer caught in the headlights, and the more he thought about it the more he retreated into his own pain. It was unbearable carrying both his and her sorrow.
John remembered the days when his biggest issue was getting the funding for whatever hare-brained idea he had managed to pull together. Like the Farscape project. And even then it hadn't caused him any ulcers or anything. As much as he despised it, he knew that if push came to shove, Dad always made sure his son was employed. Jack Crichton was a pragmatic man who wasn't above throwing his weight around rather than let a good idea get drowned out in the politics of know nothing politicians and bureaucrats. John always knew if he was making a mistake Dad would let him take his lumps, but his Jack Crichton wasn't going to let someone outside the family dictate what was a mistake and what wasn't.
John looked at his hands. Pretty pruney. He looked down at his chest, which had become a bright shade of lobster red. He gingerly pressed the skin, the indent making a momentary white mark. He wondered if he had actually given himself burns.
Behind him, he heard the bump and rattle of another person in his quarters. He knew her step by now, and after the soft thud of removed boots he heard her pad in bare feet around the room to her side of the bed.
He wondered how shriveled he'd get if he decided to just sleep in the shower tonight. He reached over his head and turned off the knob, deciding his father would kick his ass from Hammond side to travelin side and back again if he ever caught him wallowing in that much self pity. The man's wife had died, and he had moved on. Not unscathed, but he got up and did what had to be done every morning since. Aeryn wasn't even dead.
He stood up and reached for his towel, wrapping it around himself and stepping carefully out of the shower.
Aeryn looked up from the bed, her face impassive. She returned to cleaning her boots. "What happened to you?"
"Nothing. I took a shower." John pulled a clean Tee and a pair of military issue boxers off the shelf.
"In what? Acid?" He looked down at himself again. He could see the object of her concern, if you could call the coolness of her comment concern.
"Just a shower," he looked at his notebook, left on the table when he had tried to abandon his train of thought. Small, neat and precise corrections had been made to his chart. Not a child's writing, someone used to holding the pen but not writing the English alphabet. He looked up at the screen partitioning their bed and smiled. There was hope yet.
"Thank you," he said, when he felt her settle in for the night.
"I don't like to see a job completed incompetently," came her reply. He felt like he was living with a schizophrenic. Not that things had been so much different before, but at least he never felt like he was treading on private territory for discussing something as innocuous as a book.
"Perhaps, if I could just see the old star charts…" John pressed just a little bit. He licked his lips and sighed when he only encountered silence. Who knew quiet was such a weapon. "I'm sorry."
"You've already said that." Silence and ice.
"No, I mean I'M sorry. I'm sorry for being me, I'm sorry we have to share quarters…I'm just sorry." He turned his back to her side of the bed and scooted to the edge so as not to accidentally bump her in the middle of the night. He wondered if this was going to be another night when he cried himself to sleep or languished in the pain of something tearing him apart from the inside out.
"My mother said," she paused, but John had already heard her voice. Low, as though someone else were on this tier who could hear, and suddenly lacking its edge. Her mother… "She said that when you lose someone you don't lose them in pieces, but altogether. They are simply gone as though they had never been there."
John rolled onto his stomach and tucked his crossed arms under his chest, supporting his weight. If he didn't, they would do something stupid like pull aside the curtain and try to touch her. Try to smooth away the lines from her face, maybe kiss away some of the tears.
"Your mother said this?" he asked carefully.
"Before she died. It's the only lesson she left me with." Then, softer, "The only one worth repeating." He felt her shift in the bed too and wondered if they were looking at the memories of each other's faces through the screen. "Why do you never speak of your mother, Crichton?"
John felt sick. Not just the mental sickness of thinking you should be unwell, but physically ill. He swallowed back the bile and tried to form a coherent thought.
"My mother--" Images grabbed him before words. Leslie McDougal Crichton. Loved her husband, loved her son and daughters with all the breadth and scope of her heart and raised them into loyal and outstanding adults. Yet, what in her realm of experience could have prepared her to raise a son to be a stranger in a strange land? The beast in his chest that chewed on him night after night found a new wound, worrying at the edges of guilt. For all that she had given her only son over the days of his life, he had been unable to repay in kind by being there for her death. Grief is selfish.
"Um, didn't the Other say anything about her?" Not that he would have either, but this John hoped that the subject had come up between them already, that somehow the other John would let him off the hook. If she wanted to know about his mother, how could he deny her when she had just imparted on him the last and only ounce of wisdom her own mother had given her?
"He--we--the subject never came up." Or had he refused to discuss the matter as well and she was just fishing now?
"Mom," John searched for something to say that didn't sound like a eulogy, but decided that everything you say about the dead after they're gone is a eulogy. Parting words. Things you should have said a long time ago but always thought you'd get around to. "Mom was a good woman. Dad was a career pilot so it was just her and us most of the time. I think she did good, but that's for others to say, not me."
A soft sigh. "She did well."
Anxious to keep her talking, whether or not the conversation should die a natural death John asked, "Was your mother what you expected?"
In the quiet John could almost see her chewing her lower lip in thought, staring at the ceiling, her hands resting lightly one on top of the other across her belly.
"No. But she was who I needed her to be." He heard the ice creeping back into her voice. Something in the memory reminded her of who she should be. The curtain between them shifted as she moved away from it and his quarters were quiet the rest of the night.
John didn't remember his dreams that night, but he awoke cold and sweaty, his limbs aching like he had just run a marathon and he knew he had dreamt of his mother. Her illness. Her last days. He hoped he hadn't been loud enough to disturb Aeryn.
