Learning Curves (R)
Some sexual situations, but nothing graphic.
'~'
Aeryn frowned in concentration, determined to master the task at hand. She was a former Peacekeeper Officer. A prowler pilot. One of the elite. She could do this. No matter how frustrating and fiddly and, curse it all, primitive. Taking a firm grip on the small brush in her right hand, tongue slightly protruding from her mouth in total concentration, she used a spare finger and part of her thumb to unscrew the cap from the tiny tube she held in her left hand. Then she squeezed the tube, just as John had already shown her several times.
"Frell!" Aeryn cursed out loud as a slug of white paste squirted out of the tube, landing on the reflecting surface in front of her. All save one lump which fell into the shiny, white bowl of the hygiene funnel. What had John called it? Think… Oh yes…. Sink!
As Aeryn pondered on her limited Erp vocabulary, a pair of strong arms gently encircled her: large, male hands, softly settled over hers like giant gloves.
"Hey Aeryn, let me help," John's voice quietly and seductively rumbled in her ear, his warm breath tickling enticingly at the nape of her neck.
"I want to clean my teeth, Crichton. Not recreate." She growled back at him. Except that wasn't strictly true. She'd be quite happy to recreate at that precise microt. Indeed, the feel of him pressed up against her back, crotch to eema, his arms folded around her, his breath hot on her cheek, made it difficult for her to think of anything else. But she had a mission to accomplish, and she wasn't going to be distracted, no matter how pressing, insistent and inviting that distraction might be. "Concentrate on the task at hand," she demanded.
"I am," John replied. "And a very nice one it is too." As he spoke one of his hands strayed briefly to cup her left looma before it returned to resettle on her wrist.
"Show me." Aeryn demanded, jerking her hands to indicate the tooth-cleaning apparatus. Crichton chuckled in her ear, sending a shiver of lust coursing through her mutinous body. "Yes, ma'am," he added, grinding up against her once more.
Fighting back the competing urges to either force the impertinent deficient away from her with a well-aimed blow or to frell him where he stood, she allowed his hands to guide hers through the actions that they needed to learn to survive on his planet.
"You line them up. Carefully touch the tip of the nozzle to the edge of the brush. Now, squeeze…. Gently," Crichton whispered, guiding her hands with his own. A small bead of white paste emerged from the tip of the tube, coming to rest on the delicate hairs of the brush. Mission accomplished.
Unfortunately, Aeryn found the whole experience to be almost unbearably erotic, straining to the limits her ability to concentrate on learning the task at hand. Her focus was not helped by what he had been doing with his nose to the soft skin behind her ear. Nor by what his lips were now doing with her earlobe. Curse him, did he have no idea about observing proper protocols? In the Peacekeepers it was strictly forbidden to recreate in any way during training exercises.
"You look nice as a blonde," John mumbled into her ear, giving the lobe another gentle nip with his teeth. He was referring to her newly-dyed hair, which was piled in an elaborate bundle atop her head and held in place with a silvery ornament. She had been reluctant to colour her hair, but had conceded that it was an easy and sensible precaution to help them avoid detection. Having it up also seemed to help and indeed encourage John's neck attentions, allowing his beard to tickle her unimpeded. She couldn't quite decide if that was a good or a bad thing.
In addition to changes in hairstyle, John had been keen on growing his facial hair as a disguise, causing Aeryn to shudder and protest at the memory of how he had looked when they had rescued him from Acquara. They had eventually reached a compromise, although John had remarked that his short, heavily styled beard and moustache made him resemble Crais. This, in turn, had resulted in Aeryn eloquently and enigmatically raising an eyebrow, smiling and pouting as if to suggest that she might find that quite attractive. And that, of course, had led to recreation, something which they seemed to have been doing a lot of recently.
"Was my natural hair colouring not to your liking?" Aeryn asked, a warning tone edging into her voice to match the slight stiffening of her body.
"Yeah, but we have a saying on Erp: Blondes have more fun," John purred back, his tongue and lips once more trailing down her neck, across her shoulder and then back again whilst the weight of his body pressing against her pushed her groin up against the sink.
"You'll pay for this, Crichton," she remarked as evenly as she could manage, trying to keep her balance without putting a hand down on the sink or the wall. Her warning elicited a chuckle from John, which shook her body almost as much as his. However, he was already lifting the toothbrush up towards her mouth. She barely managed to add "Later," before she was silenced by a knob of toothpaste and a toothbrush landing on her tongue.
"Then you put it in your mouth and," John continued to whisper in her ear. "You move it gently around. Up and down. Not too firmly, not too softly." He gently moved her hand, and thus also the brush, in line with his instructions. As he did so his forearm brushed enticingly against one of her nipples, causing her whole body to tense with excitement. The arm-looma contact continued throughout his demonstation, making her fairly certain that he was doing it deliberately.
She had to admit that, despite her reservations about protocol breaches, John had a way with making lessons about Erp enjoyable. With his distinctive, hands-on style of teaching, things were definitely starting to perk up.
"Nggghh ggghh," she grumbled half-heartedly through toothbrush and paste.
"And you shut. Up." He daringly ventured with another chuckle. Aeryn wriggled in his grasp for a microt expressing her annoyance at his last words, feeling him stiffen against her as she struggled. However she valiantly resisted the urge to elbow him in the ribs or stamp on his instep or otherwise assault him. Only because this was a valuable learning experience and she'd be a fool to interrupt it, she lied to herself. Nothing at all to do with the way he was slowly rubbing himself against her back whilst they continued the tooth brushing lesson.
She would get her revenge as soon as they had finished their lesson. She would pin him to the bed and see to it that he made good, at great length and detail, on the promises that his body had been making. And after that he could show her how the shower facility worked one more time. There was something about the way it made warm rain that she found irresistible, and something about the sight or feel of her body under its spray that John seemed to find irresistible, too.
At some point though, she conceded to herself, they would have to do something other than frell. If nothing else, they would have to take a break to eat and sleep.
'~'
"One….ha ha ha ha ha," the caped and fanged puppet on the television intoned. "Two…. Ha ha ha ha ha," it continued with some animation. Aeryn, glued to the screen, found herself wondering if any humans had teeth like that. Then, for some reason, she found herself wondering what she might look like with such enormous fangs. "Three…. Ha ha ha ha." She dismissed the concept as ridiculous. This strange planet was starting to make her irrational, she decided. She'd be imagining herself as a med-tech or a lawyer next, she laughed to herself.
"Aeryn, I've been thinkin'" John moved between her and the television, interrupting her lesson and her train of thought. He lifted the remote control and turned down the volume, earning a disapproving scowl from the conscientious language student sat before him.
"I was watching that, John." Aeryn protested, a glowering frown causing her brow to furrow. "I need to learn your lang…"
"Yeah, I know, sorry." John interrupted, sitting beside her and handing her a cup of hot, brown liquid as if in the hope of pacifying her. She had been revolted by the taste of coffee, but had found tea to be pleasant, almost familiar, and so she was relieved to find that it was tea that he had prepared for her on this occasion. "Look, D'Argo and our ships, they've all been carted off Stateside, plus Oz is hardly my home turf." John continued, apparently oblivious to the fact that his idioms were completely unintelligible to her.
"Please try to make sense, Crichton!" Aeryn snapped back, thinking that, if the words that sometimes came out of his mouth reflected his thought processes, then it was no wonder that this planet was so backwards. She smiled slightly, however, at the pleasant memory of some of the other things his mouth could do.
"I think we need to relocate. To the US, not sure how, but…" he began again.
"You are still not making much sense, John," Aeryn persisted, a little less forcefully this time. It was clear to her that he was at least trying to put things in terms that she could understand, even if he still wasn't wholly succeeding in doing so.
John sighed heavily and twisted, leaning over the side of the sofa. He lifted his bag and rummaged through it for a couple of microts before pulling out a map. He turned back towards Aeryn, tossing the bag onto the empty seat on the other side of her, unfolding the map between them.
"Look, we're here, on this landmass. Our ships, and D'Argo, if he's still alive, are over here." He jabbed twice at the map to illustrate locations. Aeryn nodded. If John's assessment was correct then their ships and shipmate were half a planet away. They would need some sort of transportation to cover the huge distance, mostly ocean, which now lay between them. And they would need one of their ships to escape from this planet.
"If we can believe what Wilson and Cobb said," Aeryn replied with an arched, questioning eyebrow. After all, they had very little evidence that their ships had been moved. They had even less evidence that they should trust a single thing that her former captors had said.
"Yeah, true, but in that at least I think they might have been on the level." John sighed. "They'd wanna take our stuff to somewhere like Area 51, not keep it all stuck out here in the boondocks." Aeryn frowned slightly at his latest incomprehensible idioms, but decided that, given the context, she could deduce what he meant.
"Our ships are our only way off of this waste hole," she said, demonstrating her understanding of the importance of the module and transport pod. She could see from his face that he was resisting the urge to pull her up on her unsympathetic description of his home planet. Good. She did, after all, have plenty of good reasons to hold the place in such low regard, starting with Rygel's murder and working down from there.
"So, unless we plan on spending the rest of our naturals on the lam…" John's voice trailed off, leaving the potential consequences hanging in the air between them, unspoken. Despite his strange words once again, to her surprise, she found that she understood his meaning.
"So, this is your world. How do you propose we get there?"
"Frelled if I know…" John sighed. His face falling into a glum scowl, he settled into watching the cookie-monster getting animated on the TV screen. After a short while John gave a slight smile and stretched across Aeryn to try to pull something else from his bag, which was still lying beside her on the couch.
"John! What the frell…?" Aeryn began to protest, annoyed that he was invading her personal space for apparently no very good reason. It was clear that he didn't have recreation, or even kissing or cuddling in mind. He was just intent on the contents of the bag, regardless of the fact that she was in the way.
"Cookie!" Came a voice from the TV, reminding Aeryn of how much John was interrupting her language lesson. She swatted at him and gently pushed him away.
"Chocolate?" John asked, withdrawing back to his side of the couch and holding out a small, garishly-wrapped item towards Aeryn with one of his goofiest grins. She frowned at him, wondering why he had turned suddenly happier. He removed a small square of the foodstuff from the wrapping and held it up to her lips. "Chocolate makes everything better," he explained with a wink, popping it between her slightly parted lips.
And, at least for a while, it did.
'~'
Aeryn stood in the produce section of the supermarket, frowning as she turned the strange, unfamiliar orange fruit over and over in her hand, trying to make sense of it, trying to make sense of why she was here and what she should do next.
She had been on a few supply runs before, especially since joining Moya. But even in her new life as a renegade, since leaving the Peacekeepers, she had generally stood guard whilst the others had made the purchases. But today John had gone out early, saying he had something important to do, related to their stay on his planet and their plans to find one of their ships. Hunger and boredom had driven her out of their room about an arn later, eventually bringing her to this market.
She had tracked down the cookies easily enough, although deciding which ones to buy had been more problematic. There were so many varieties and she had no idea which ones to choose. She had finally settled on something called Tim Tams, because they looked like they contained a lot of chocolate, and she liked that taste. Then she had decided that she might have better luck with less processed foods. That had brought her to the fruit display, where she had found herself almost as perplexed by the strange variety of goods as she had been in the cookie aisle.
She raised her eyes skywards in search of inspiration, only to spot what appeared to be a surveillance camera trained on the area. She quickly lowered her eyes again, not wanting to give the camera a full, square-on view of her face.
Was this what her life consisted of now, shopping for foodstuffs whilst waiting for the pursuing humans to catch up with her and end her life?
She was so lost in thought that she scarcely reacted as an impatient, overweight and red-faced female, somewhat reminiscent of Furlow, barged past her, intent on accessing a bunch of the greenish-yellow hand like fruit which rested at her eye level. Aeryn simply acquiesced, taking a step back and grunting, afraid to put her vocabulary to the test or to draw attention to herself.
How and when had she become so passive? Too scared to do or say anything for fear of drawing attention? It was not right. It was not who she was, who she wanted to be. It was less. She was a soldier, a pilot, a woman of action. It was time to take some. Accidentally-on-purpose knocking into the ample eema of the older woman, causing her to squeal in surprise as she toppled forwards, limbs flailing, into the fruit display, Aeryn dropped the orange, spherical fruit into her basket, lifted it, and made for the tills. A slight smile played across her lips, borne of a combination of the satisfaction of having discomforted the Furlow look-alike and from the determination that she would no longer allow her life to drift towards some unknown fate.
'~'
"John!" The fuzzy sound of Aeryn calling his name was accompanied by a hand rocking his shoulder. "John!" Her voice demanded again as the shoulder rocking continued. John opened a bleary eye to see the not unpleasant sight of Officer Sun staring at him in that intensely serious, deliciously cute, way that she had. To add to the perfection of the moment, she was naked, propped up on one elbow, only a few inches of white cotton sheet away from him.
"You want more?" John half complained, half laughed. "Couldn't you wait till morning?" Much though he found it amazing, incredible even, that they were now making love a couple of times a day, sometimes more, he wasn't sure how he felt about being awoken from his beauty sleep for an encore. A guy needed to rest sometime, after all. All the more so if he was having to live up to the frequent demands of an athletic and voracious woman like Aeryn.
"I'm worried that we can't go on like this," she explained, biting her lip and frowning as she stared at him. Her hand still rested on his shoulder, but, perhaps mercifully, she had not yet pounced on him demanding further sex. Then his mind processed what she had just said, and he was suddenly instantly awake and concerned. Was this Aeryn's way of broaching the Dear John moment?
"Whatcha mean? The sex?" He asked with trepidation, it being the first concern which sprung into his mind. "S'Okay, we'll settle down… honeymoon period," he added hopefully.
"No, not the sex, John…" Her frown deepened, her lips parted in silence, as though, for whatever reason, vocabulary or emotional uncertainty, she didn't know what to say.
John began to wriggle more upright now, as his concern grew and his mind began to process other possibilities.
"What then? You worried about the sleeping together and stuff?" He asked, stealing a hand across to clasp her own. He remembered now some of what little she had told him about Peacekeeper relationships. This sharing a bed with someone, while you slept, was alien to her. It probably made her feel vulnerable, stretched her boundaries, challenged her views on what was acceptable between a man and a woman in a way which mere sex did not.
"Well, yes, that is… this is not what I am used to." Deftly, unconsciously, her hand flicked his over, retaining the hold but assuming the dominant position. "In the world that I come from, you don't connect with anyone openly. And never with any longevity." His heart sank slightly, fearing the worst was about to come. "But that was not what I was referring to." She continued, allowing John to release the breath that he had been holding.
"Then what?" John asked, slipping his second hand across their already clasped pair. Her lips worked without speaking. Her eyes flitted from meeting his to somewhere else and back again. His upper hand squeezed gently, reassuringly, he hoped. A few seconds later, she withdrew her hand, causing him to sigh. "C'mon, Aeryn. It's just you me and the walls in here." That seemed to do the trick in prompting her to speak.
"I'm not sure how much longer we… I can go on like this." She placed her hand, palm down, on the bed between them, splaying her fingers. John watched her hand, unable to look away. "I don't know how to live… trapped on this planet. Waiting for them to come. For the end to come."
John nodded, realising now what was worrying her, why she'd woken him up in the middle of the night, why it couldn't wait till morning. He looked up, catching her eye and giving a faint and, he hoped, reassuring smile.
"This isn't the right place for you," he acknowledged, as much for his benefit as hers. Sometimes the truth needed to be said out loud in order to be accepted as such. "It's not exactly somewhere you can thrive." He'd always assumed she'd be OK here, but with every day, every hour, he could see that it wasn't so. One way or another, living here would kill her. "I'll get onto it in the morning. Sort something out. Trust me, everything will be alright."
He grinned reassuringly at her and she smiled coyly back. Encouraged, his hand stole across the covers once more to try to claim hers. This time she did not pull away, but after a few seconds licked her lips whilst her fingers began crawling up the soft, sensitive skin of his inner forearm.
"Now, since you're awake," she said and rolled across him, a predatory sparkle in her eyes as she pinned him to the bed. Her long hair, freed from its elaborate plaiting, tumbled around their faces, tickling him slightly and then blocking out the outside world. He was left with nothing to focus on but her hungry lips as they locked with his and the sensation of her smooth, strong body as she seemingly tried to rub every possible inch of herself against him.
As she settled onto him he started to realise that he was falling for this beautiful, difficult, nay, cantankerous woman, and falling hard. It wasn't just that he felt guilt, and not some small sense of responsibility about bringing her to this dangerous, unsuitable place, his planet. This place where he had assured her that she would find a home. He did feel that responsibility, but that alone didn't cover it. There was something bigger, something deeper, a connection which he couldn't yet quite define. He was just starting to wonder if it might be love when her hand slipped between their bodies and seized him in a vice-like grip, causing him to discard any thoughts but those centred on the moment.
Grand plans could wait till the morning.
'~'
Despite the wall of sound coming from the television, Aeryn's finely tuned soldier's hearing easily picked out John's foot-falls as he approached the main entrance of their temporary quarters. She picked up the TV remote and turned down the volume, ready to turn it off completely once John entered. The show that she was watching wasn't that interesting anyway: just some sort of self-contained fiction about absurd human mating rituals. John had recommended that she watched it as part of her education about his planet. For reasons which were entirely unclear to her he had called it a 'chick-flick' and had expressed the opinion that 'it was the sort of thing that human women typically enjoyed watching.' After enduring over an arn of the show, that assessment seemed pretty unlikely to her.
Aeryn, being a quick learner, had progressed rapidly from Sesame Street through Hi-5 and then on to Home And Away and Water Rats. John had complained that her watching habits had led to her developing a slight Australian accent. Aeryn had proudly insisted that he was being a total drongo who should go and rack off. John had responded by telling her she should watch some American shows, and had sat her down in front of something called Stargate. That had been a few days ago and she had watched several episodes since. As soon as the latest one was over he had told her that she ought to watch the 'chick-flick' and then had gone out for the evening, saying he had something important to do. He had been out doing a lot of important things on his own these last few days and Aeryn was starting to get a little concerned by his behaviour.
She also had real questions she needed to ask him about Stargate, such as why the humans' adversaries were such bad shots and why hadn't John mentioned before that humans knew about aliens and wormholes and the like?
Despite their obvious scientific sophistication, Aeryn struggled to understand many aspects of the show. Besides her bafflement as to why the aliens were such bad shots, she also disliked how no one on the Stargate team took anything nearly seriously enough. Although she wanted to discuss some of these issues with John and hear his perspective, she had already decided that she just couldn't see herself working in a team as chaotic and undisciplined as that.
She lifted the human hand-gun, covering the front door as John made his entrance, as she did every time he came or went from their room. John held up his hands in supplication, just as he did every time he was confronted by his fierce companion pointing a pistol at him.
Aeryn slowly lowered the gun, watching with thinly veiled curiosity as John unpacked his bag onto their table.
"Not watching the movie?" John enquired, nodding towards the images on the screen. A woman was trying on impractical shoes in some sort of commercial shoe shrine.
"No." Aeryn responded. "Maybe if she were buying combat boots?" John laughed as Aeryn gave a quirky half grin. "What are those?" She nodded at documents in John's hand.
"Our way outta here," John replied, shooting her a satisfied grin. "Tickets, passports… " Aeryn scowled in incomprehension, such things being as alien to her as dentics had been to John. "We need 'em so we can get a plane over to the States."
"How did you get these documents?" Aeryn asked, not really understanding the details, but grasping the overall concepts from their previous conversations. She was concerned that, whatever these documents were, however he had got hold of them, acquiring them constituted a risk that they would be exposed to the authorities.
"Let's just say a wizard did it," John replied with a wink and a chuckle.
"No Crichton, I want to know. If you have compromised our security…" she jabbed at the documents, but otherwise left the implied threat hanging in the air.
"Look Aeryn, some people, they need stuff they can't get legally." He lifted his hands and gave an expansive gesture. "Other people can get them what they want, all safe from prying eyes. All safe from the law."
"You dealt with criminals!" She challenged him, taking a step into his personal space as her voice rose in anger.
"Look, I'm not proud, but it was the only way." John replied, not backing away, but rather placing his hands on her upper arms.
"And what did you do for them?" She spat back, shrugging his hands away. "In return?"
Crichton blushed and looked at the ground off to one side. He obviously didn't want to say.
"What did you do?" She repeated her demand, taking hold of his chin and, with a gentleness which surprised even herself, turning his head back so he had to look her in the eyes.
"Stole a few cars is all. Nothing worse than we've done already." He stared into her eyes, begging for, if not her approval, at least her forgiveness.
Aeryn considered the matter for a few microts before nodding her assent. As a Peacekeeper officer she would have commandeered transports as and when necessary. But she was more than that now, thanks to John, and she knew that it was wrong. Wrong, but unavoidable, and perhaps the least-worst option of what he might have done.
"Best thing now is we get on and get out of here, soon as we can." John backed off a step, lifted the documents and waved them gently in the air at shoulder height.
"Perhaps." She took the documents from him. He didn't resist, letting them slip through his fingers, trusting them into her care, just as she must trust both his assessment of the risks and the documents themselves if they were to follow his plan.
Aeryn turned the strange papers over and over in her hand, wondering if using them really was the best thing to do. Crichton had left them exposed here by acquiring them, by dealing with criminals. However, should they try to use these items, they would be exposing themselves in a different, far more immediate way. People would check the documents, people who would be on the look out for fakes, or perhaps even for John and Aeryn themselves. Crichton had insisted that they needed to travel to the landmass where their ships had been taken, his home… country? She had to agree with that. He had also insisted that they needed these slips of paper to do so. Otherwise they would be stuck here for good. Or until their luck ran out and they were caught or killed. Or Aeryn Sun shrivelled away into nothing. Yes, it seemed that taking the risk of using the documents was the least worst option.
"When do we leave?" She demanded, looking him in the eye. Now that she had assessed the situation, the risks of action and inaction, she was determined to see it through as soon as possible. She could not abide the idea of sitting around dwelling on the possibilities over and over again, frozen into inaction by thoughts of what might or might not be.
John nodded and reached out to reassure her with a hand on her cheek, showing his understanding of how her mind worked, sharing her need for immediate action. "Flights are booked for this evening."