Spoilers: up through Dog With Two Bones

Rating: R (some difficult topics)

Summary: J&A angst, some Butch and Sundance.

Disclaimers: Blah, blah, blah. Not mine.

Huge thanks to my betas: Aeryncrichton and WalkingTheBeam



DISPOSSESSION



PART 1b

*************

Aeryn had come to her senses not long after they had dragged her out of her prowler, the uncomfortable feel of two strong hands gripping her upper arms and towing her along a large corridor breaking through her shrouded mind. She had recognized their uniforms and gradually deduced her surroundings as they went along. She was in a Directorate scout ship. Two Marauders, ten prowlers, a total crew of fifty her mind had rattled off immediately. And three holding cells…

The iron grips had tightened painfully on her arms as she had struggled to a steadier footing, signalling her slow returning awareness. A quick glance around had told her she would have gained nothing by rebelling then, two other well-armed troopers had been accompanying them to a cell into which she had been unceremoniously thrown without a single word spoken from her captors. She had squatted against the wall facing the entrance of the cell and waited for their return, keeping a mental count of the passing time, already missing the feel of her pulse pistol against her thigh.

Two arns later, she had calmly concluded that if her captors had needed any information from her, they would have come asking for it by now, which could only mean that she hadn't been fast enough to erase her Prowler's flight recordings and that they were most certainly headed toward Moya's last known position if not there already. She had been able to feel the strain of the ship's maximum speed as the cell's yet thickly padded walls had faintly vibrated against her back. For a moment, thinking of those left on Moya, and Moya herself, she had somehow wished that she could have succeeded at erasing the recordings and been interrogated instead, hoping then to buy the others enough time to starburst away safely. Yet, when the door to her cell opened to let in the same group of four well-armed soldiers, she fought hard to keep her resolve at the thought of the fast- upcoming interrogation.

She could have smirked at the overblown security measures taken by her captors to squash out any attempt at escaping she could have tried. Not only was she tightly bound with double overlooping manacles but the four soldiers accompanying her wore such powerful weapons she could have sworn they were in to seize an entire compound of rebels. And they were skilled too, certainly not some rookies likely to get too close or inattentive, they moved in a precise choreographed ensemble that left no space for temerity. A long time ago, she would have most certainly smirked in misplaced pride but, this time, the corners of her mouth didn't even twitch. She knew what the next step was and when they finally stopped, she was sadly not proven wrong.

The unmistakable acrid smell assaulted her senses as soon as the doors swooshed open. She had never been able to determine why medical facilities seemed to smell the same way all over the universe but they did. She had been in enough of them to know they did. And that doctor standing by the other side of the room was just like any other doctor and using the exact same tools and cures, except his assignment today was slightly different. He was not here to nurture the wounded back to health, he was here to make sure prisoners would live long enough through whatever torture was inflicted upon them to reveal the information they held. She had never had to interrogate a prisoner herself, not in the harshest ways at least, she had been a Prowler pilot and interrogation was not part of her normal duty but she knew the procedures and had been required to sit through and watch a number of interrogations over the cycles. She had seen doctors entering the interrogation room when the prisoner passed away, started convulsing or bled too profusely, she had seen them treating the tortured body to prevent an untimely death, giving it enough boost to last a while longer so that the interrogators would get the needed information. The best interrogators knew exactly what pain was best to inflict and when to pause, others needed doctors to correct their mistakes.

She tried to keep her face blank as she saw the man approach her with an injector in his hand, even though her whole body strained to jerk away from the incoming threat. She felt her heart sink to the spot where her stomach should have been, had it not gone missing a few microts earlier when the door to her cell had opened. How could I have been so stupid?! She inwardly yelled.

This wasn't even threatening in itself and it shouldn't have been, not for her anyway. The drug in the syringe was just a sedative so that the doctor could examine the prisoner calmly and assess his general physical condition to let the interrogators know what their margin was before the battle of wills could begin. In other times, she would have let him inject her without the slightest resistance…

Protection, first and foremost. No unnecessary risks. Those had been recurrent in the guidelines.

She scrutinized his impassive face and debated for a microt whether or not to tell him straight away and avoid being given drugs that would potentially harm the fetus, because, he would find out on his own soon enough. It had taken that juvenile doctor on the medship only two microts to confirm her suspicions and hardly a hundred more to declare that the fetus was healthy and developing normally. He had even had the time and nerve to frown at her patronizingly when she had mentioned her heavy drinking on Valldon and then had encouraged her to forgo such dreadful habits in the future and find quieter occupations. She had dutifully nodded her assent while images of pulse fires and explosions had run through her mind and then she had gone back to Moya as if nothing had changed. Yet, in the end, it was him who had met an untimely blazing death when Talyn had panicked and blown the medship to smithereens.

She didn't honestly believe that they would generously avoid harming the fetus, it was actually something they could play against her. Whatever she knew against the life of the unborn child. But maybe, it would be different, this child was different, the first Human-Sebacean hybrid, the child of the Peacekeepers' most wanted man, the very dead yet achingly alive John Crichton. She braced herself, slowly raised her manacled hands to ward off the doctor's approach and opened her mouth to speak but before she had time to utter the words she was still looking for, she was cut off by a burst of barked codes on the facility's comms.

The doctor and his assistant, who had been working on a desk until now, sprang to life and began to swiftly and methodically place several pieces of equipment by the examination's bed. She tried to recognize what drugs they were selecting for use, her heart starting to pound wildly in her chest. Medical emergency, unknown lifeform, Sebacean like physiology, revival procedures. Those were the translations of the codes she had heard. Two of the soldiers who had gotten her there grabbed her again and forcefully towed her back toward the entrance to leave the medbay. A flash of light off a syringe passed from hand to hand caught her eye and she craned her neck to take a better look. She thought it had looked familiar, like the one she should have used on John when they had been caught in the Flax had she not broken it in her fall. A brutal slap on her face put an end to her curiosity and she shook her head to clear the sudden dizziness.

They took the opposite direction from their arrival when they exited the medbay. She heard faraway shouts and pounding running feet coming from the corridor they had used previously. She fought the urge to turn back and look right away. It was too soon, they were still too far away, if she turned now, she would only get another violent slap if not worse and still not know who was being rushed in the medbay. She purposefully lurched to slow down the pace of the group of soldiers around her, making herself heavier in their grips, trying to gain a handful of microts as the noise got closer and closer. Just as they were about to turn a corner, she planted her feet firmly on the ground and jerked her upper body around. She caught a glimpse of another group of soldiers surrounding a gurney before a boot connected sharply with her right knee and sent her crashing on the floor. They dragged her the rest of the way and threw her ruthlessly back in her cell. She crawled to the opposite wall, her knee throbbing painfully throughout her leg and propped herself up against the hard surface. She closed her eyes and went through the glimpse again. Lying on the gurney, she had seen a black leather-clad form with brown hair that looked much too familiar.

John.



*************

John felt his body tense and spasm under the coursing waves of pain whose epicentre had blown his heart. This was not his death, he thought dazedly, it couldn't be. His death was to be painless and this hurt like hell. His body started convulsing and he felt a strong pressure on his arm, a freezing liquid started to worm its way through his shoulder, pushing muscles and flesh aside as if it was too thick to flow normally through his veins; it spread across his torso and abdomen and the convulsions stopped. His sense of smell suddenly came back and an unmistakable acrid smell assaulted his brain with memories both familiar and repulsive. He had never been able to determine why medical facilities seemed to smell the same way all over the universe but they did. He had been in enough of them to know they did. And as much as he hated that smell and those places, he had spent some of his first nights curled up in Moya's medbay because the smell had somehow reminded him of Earth.

He coughed as his lungs attempted to clear off the unwanted carbon dioxide and replace it with shakily inhaled oxygen. He tried to open his eyes but the light on his face was too sharp and his blurred vision failed to focus properly. He felt the shift in the air on his side as a form approached him and an overpowering sensual perfume filled his senses. Trouble, his mind screamed. All the women he had met on this side of the universe had only brought him trouble.

"Do you remember me?" The woman asked with a mocking tone.

He blinked several times to clear his vision but to no avail. "Fate?" He croaked, the intended irony failing to make it through his burning throat. He was rewarded with a warm laughter that gradually subsided into a seeping cold sneer against his ear.

"Yes."

John got into another coughing fit and curled up on the bed to keep the pain in his lungs from radiating through his entire body.

Commandant Mele-On Graza let her steely gaze roam over the wretched body of the human and then threw a sharp questioning glance at her ship's physician.

"Three arns," the man responded matter-of-factly after a quick flick of the eyes to the results of his ongoing scans.

She nodded and left the room wordlessly, a determined smirk creeping its way on her features. It had taken her cycles to achieve her present position, three arns were but a drop of time in her project's scope. Scorpius' failure to obtain the human's cooperation, either reluctant or voluntary, had been no surprise, the hybrid had never been one for politics and psychological manipulation. Frelling scientific minds! She would not make the same mistakes, she knew better than to be fooled by the apparent weaknesses of inferior species such as humans; John Crichton was certainly strong enough to propel her to the next level, even faster than she had planned at first. And for that, she certainly could wait three arns.