INTERLUDE
"THIS IS NOT YOUR PLACE."
Aeryn turned with a sudden startled jerk, instinctively falling into a defensive posture. She had been walking through a broad field lit by the stars, an odd shimmery energy on her skin, a jagged moon above, smashed and scarred by eons.
She turned about, hunting for the voice, and found it to her right on a large boulder.
There sat a strongly-built man garbed in black Peacekeeper leather, forearms resting on his knees. Down one arm the silver rank bars of Peacekeeper captains. His voice was a gravelly growl and it sounded …familiar. His face was shrouded in shadow - a single blue eye coldly burning from it.
"You startled me."
"I didn't expect you'd remember me."
The voice was harder than she remembered, deeper than she knew, colder than it ever should have been.
A ghostly face suddenly appeared at his shoulder. To her horror, the hated cadences of Scorpius whispered through the warm night air.
"Come – don't do this to yourself. Don't let her torture you so. Look at her… yes… beautiful and cold. Always cold – until she left you behind on Moya, of course."
That face sneered at her, more a snarl, a toothy grin of cold contempt.
"Go away." Deadly cold. chalky face drew back, vanished. The voice ghosted back.
"Ran away, how far she ran, like you never were… for you were to bear the pain for her, to wield the scars; sacrificial, so she could have him."
Aeryn stepped back, aghast.
"No! It wasn't that… no!"
She could see one icy blue eye glare back at her. There was no judgement there, only a flat and icy emptiness.
"I never was," the voice was so wrong!, "now I never will be."
She saw him rise. Something clawed and began to howl inside her.
"No. Don't."
The air was suddenly chilled, cold, the cold inside a crypt.
'Don't!" She yelled it at him, ordered it, demanded it.
He was walking away.
"You listen to me, damn you!"
He paused, only for a moment, over there shadows were raining, rolling this way.
"John Robert Crichton - you listen to me right now!"
The shadows enveloped him, caressed him as if he were one of their own.
"Goodbye."
It sounded as if it had come a long way, was as final as the fall of the headsman's axe. One blue eye turned back out to her, bright and cold in that darkness.
He never spoke again.
"It was a mistake."
The shadows reared at her defensively to protect him from her.
"Don't you dare!"
She took a few steps after him. The shadows whipped at her, like snakes, like whips and with a hiss it became a wall. She slammed into it with a desperate fury.
"Don't die!" She pounded on that black wall. It rang like glass, like a final bell. "Don't die!"
The wall was then gone and she staggered forward. There was nothing there, as if he had never been, just a deep darkness that seemed to be waiting.
"Don't die for me!"
She screamed into that blackness – a scream that rose and rose until all she could hear –
… a siren outside, its looping shriek washing past her window, red and blue light splashing on the walls.
Aeryn Sun wearily looked at the clock on her bedside table, sighed when she saw it was 4:15 AM, far too early for this dren, then down at the man sleeping soundly beside her.
Today he would be leaving, to work for his government, Earth's New Hero. They would be separated and she did not know for how long. They had been told "not long", but she was suspicious of the government's word.
She sighed inaudibly, tried to get the pillow beneath her head fluffed into some kind of comfort. The vestiges of a dream she could not remember were swirling deep down in her head and the taste of it unsettled her.
Something was very wrong.
John sighed, rolled over in his sleep and did not awaken. She looked at him carefully, nothing seemed amiss, his sleep untroubled.
It was just the upcoming separation, she told herself, the stresses she would no doubt encounter, the endless stupidities and frustrations dealing with bureaucrats and politicians and secrecy and silly human traditions and conventions. She didn't doubt it would all be uphill.
Sleep came back for her, she yawned, dug her head back into the pillow and closed her eyes.
Everything will work out, she thought, sleep claiming her.
Unbidden, the thought followed her back into her dreams:
I shouldn't feel so far from home.
The siren had long gone by. The silence lingered. Deepened.
We are our choices, a voice seemed to say in the silence of the room, just the air moving, not meant to be heard though spoken nonetheless. You more than any of us.
If Aeryn heard it, she gave no sign.
INTERLUDE ENDS
