"How do you think Olivia is coping?" Aeryn asked. She was nursing her new daughter whilst seated in the rocking chair which John had built for her after D'Argo had been born.
"Hmm, what… oh, well enough, I guess." John shrugged as he sat on their bed, keeping D'Argo entertained and away from his mother. It had been a couple of arns now since he and Noranti had wrapped up his twin's body and placed it in storage, to be dealt with further at a less hectic time. It was a couple of arns more since the confrontation with the Scarrans. An awful lot had changed in those arns, for everyone, but at least the threat of the Scarrans was averted, he was back home on Moya and his Aeryn had safely given birth to a healthy daughter. They still had no clue as to the fate of the other Aeryn, though.
"She will expect us to stay, to go down."
"Yeah, probably."
"And?"
"I don't trust the spooks down there. Politicians and half the scientists and top brass either." John mumbled whilst butting knuckles with his son. It was hard to keep a clear head, all things considered, but he knew how he felt about things like the threat that Earth posed to him and his family, regardless.
"They will be looking for leverage to use against you." How could she be so rational, so calm, he wondered, after everything that had happened today? Must be that famous Peacekeeper training and discipline coming through once again. She was right, of course. Even if he could trust Collins and Hobbes, which he wasn't sure about, there would be others. Others with an agenda. Others he couldn't trust.
"Yep," he nodded and gave a wry grimace. "Things are unstable, too. No knowing how things could pan out. You and the kids just couldn't go down there."
She didn't reply to that comment, lowering her eyes instead to their new daughter. When it was clear that she wasn't going to say anything, John cleared his throat.
"Umm, I'm going to head up to the centre chamber in a bit. See how everyone's keeping. Can I get you anything?"
"She's asleep." Aeryn nodded at their daughter then looked up at him. She leveraged her way to her feet before starting to pick her way stealthily towards the crib. "I'll come with you."
"Are you sure? Shouldn't you..?" John fell silent beneath her furious-looking glare. She'd never taken well to being told what to do, or to being told to take it easy. Looking away from him, she bent, laid the child in the crib and then straightened her back, working out a kink or two whilst a DRD rolled to a halt beside her, ready to assume baby-monitoring duties. She eyed it with a satisfied nod and turned and walked towards the door.
"Well, are you coming?" She asked, having paused in the doorway, fingers strumming on the door frame, turning her head to look over her shoulder towards him.
'~'
"But we do have two of the module now." John told the assembled crew, gathered in the central chamber. Even Pilot was there, albeit virtually, via the clamshell.
"That pile of dren?" Aeryn side-eyed him, rolling her beaker of juice around between her hands.
"Hey, play nice!" He replied, hands outstretched in front of him, gesturing like some sort of air-pianist.
"I'm not good at nice." But she smiled at him as she said it, acknowledging their private joke.
Olivia seemed a little shocked by the exchange, but John chuckled and reached out to rub his wife's hand. Aeryn smiled back at him.
"You could give one of them to Earth. Why don't you just give them back Furlow's module and that frelling weapon?" Chiana asked, slugging back a razlak, her third of the meeting. She had already made it clear that, whilst she didn't wish any harm to Earth, she also didn't want to countenance anything which might put her or any of her friends at risk on Earth's behalf. "Then we can leave."
"No. No way do I trust them with the wormhole weapon," John replied. He'd been over this so often in his mind over the years. Not the events of the last few hours, nor even a little alcohol, were sufficient to cloud his thoughts on that. He was very clear in his own mind where he stood on such things. "Frell, keeping the damn thing out of people's hands is what we fought so hard for, what Talyn and Crais died for."
"You can't leave us defenceless - what if another Scarran ship comes?" Olivia protested, appealing to her brother over the heads of his extraterrestrial companions. "Anyway, you took it down there before, what's different now?"
"Fixing it and using it to protect Earth is different to handing it over." John shrugged. He wasn't going to let anyone, not even his sister, talk him into dishing out wormhole weapons to all and sundry. "Besides, the frelling thing's bust again. Won't work, and they can't fix it."
"So, the humans have nothing to protect themselves with." Aeryn was ever the strategist. Gotta love a jirl with a fine military mind. "And neither do we." Ah. Problemo. He looked her in the eye. She looked back. He grimaced, feeling slightly sick. If the Scarrans sent another ship now they were indeed truly frelled. Right up the eema, as Chiana might say.
"We're just gonna have to sit tight for a bit, repair Furlow's module and the displacement engine and mind the shop till we can think of a better plan." John shrugged a shoulder, trying to keep both wife and sister happy. "Whether the powers that be down below like it or not." Hopefully that was that, for now. Hopefully it'd buy him some time so that he could think of something else, better, later.
A contemplative silence fell over the chamber. John was almost on the point of breathing a sigh of relief at the success of his plan when Aeryn spoke again.
"It won't have escaped your notice that the other John is dead from radiation." Aeryn challenged him, clearly far from placated, far from finished with their conversation. She glared in turn at John and Olivia, who both squirmed uncomfortably either under her gaze or from her implication that further use of the weapon was suicide. "Using the weapon killed him."
"Yeah, but, umm, he... the other me... he pulled the same trick at Dam Ba Da and survived." John tried to argue, tried to wheedle his way out of Aeryn's challenge, if only to fight another day.
"In his reality. Not in ours." Aeryn was choking back a tear now. "Our version of him died at Dam Ba Da." He was in trouble if they kept down this path much longer: His Aeryn, this Aeryn, had already lost him once to the wormhole weapon - she'd held John Crichton in her arms as he had succumbed to radiation poisoning back on Dam Ba Da. "We don't know whether using that thing was survivable in our reality. It killed our other John before he even got to use it." She continued, driving home her point, in case he had somehow forgotten.
John grimaced at that, whilst Olivia looked horrified. She turned pale and looked about ready to throw up. Chiana and Aeryn didn't look much better either. Only Noranti seemed blissfully unconcerned by all the talk of people dying... scratch that, of him dying, over and over. Did he really mean that little to the old woman, or was she just totally off her rocker?
"Ok. So if it comes to that, I'll just have to be careful. I've got motivation he didn't," John tried again, signalling D'Argo, playing in the corner, with his finger.
"Even if I accept that argument, which I don't," Aeryn responded, her eyes flashing with anger, "we've lost the Prowler, John. If the same thing happens again, I won't have an armed ship to watch your back with."
"Yeah I know." John nodded. "Can't say I'm over the moon about that."
"The Divine Eternal will provide," Noranti chimed in, beaming beatifically but not providing any evidence to support her assertion. Her strange pronouncement did at least serve one purpose, though: It managed to diffuse some of the tension in the room by providing a common antagonist for everyone else to redirect their animosity towards.
"What the frell..!?" someone shouted indignantly. John thought it was Chiana, but it didn't really matter. It could have been just about any of them.
'~'
"What are we going to do, John?" Answers, easy answers, had not been forthcoming in their crew conference and it had eventually broken up. Young D'Argo had needed to be put to bed, after which Chi had discreetly taken Olivia in hand, suggesting that they could 'babysit' him. It was really just an excuse to give John and Aeryn a little privacy: the DRDs had babysitting duties covered, after all, with Pilot able to summon his parents in an instant should they be needed.
John and Aeryn had soon found themselves on the terrace, wrapped in furs and each other's warm, loose embrace whilst Aeryn nursed their new baby daughter, who had woken up once again, wanting to be fed.
"I don't know babe. I mean there are other realities... uncountable. Some better ones, some worse ones."
"But this is the one we're in right now." He nodded. She knew that it would be hard, if not impossible for him to simply walk away from this version of Earth, to tell himself that there were versions that were not under threat from the Scarrans and others yet that were in even more dire need of help. She would have to see what she could do to make him see reason. "Although it isn't the one we come from."
"Whatever we do decide on, it's gonna have to be one hell of a good plan." John remarked, pulling her closer to his side. She tried to ignore the niggling thought that his plans always went disastrously wrong, taking comfort in the moment, in his embrace. She snuggled into his solid, reassuring warmth, feeling his heartbeat beneath her hand. She felt an icy chill grip her at the sudden thought of how easily that heartbeat could be silenced.
"I don't think we should stay or get involved."
"Hmm?" He stroked her hair from her brow. "Why so?" She knew that he hadn't yet accepted that they had to leave. Perhaps a solution that they could both feel comfortable with would turn up? Or, realistically, perhaps she'd just have to make him understand why they couldn't stay, instead.
"Our plans never work. Whenever we get involved, things go wrong, people die. More so with these alternate timeline things. Remember the peace memorial? The Jocacean nurses?" His hand stilled. Of course he would remember how their interference had inadvertently led to a steady worsening of events, culminating in the deaths of the nurses and their young charges. She decided to let him remember that disaster for a few microts, to dwell on the inadvisability of them meddling in realities that were not their own.
"But what about Liv?" Well, at least he had a good point there. If they left, would she stay, or would she want to go with them? Or perhaps do something else? She hadn't been happy with the idea of them leaving, earlier in the central chamber.
"We'll just have to ask her," Aeryn considered Olivia's likely reaction. Surely she'd want them to stay, to protect Earth with the wormhole weapon as best they could? Aeryn would have to make it clear to her that that was not an option.
"Hmm," John grunted, as though considering the radical option of talking to his sister.
"And I'm not happy about you using that thing again, either," she stated, deciding he had had enough time to dwell on either talking to his sister or the horrific events at the peace memorial. She hoped she was clear about her emphatic rejection of any plans to stay here and use the wormhole weapon again, but, just in case, she had decided to repeat herself until it was clear that John fully understood how she felt.
"Hmm?"
"The displacement engine. Three times you've used it and twice you have died. Those odds are not good, John." He stirred beneath her. Perhaps he was just trying to get more comfortable?
"Fourth time's the charm?"
"Not funny, Crichton," She snapped back.
"Then what do we do?" He lifted his hand and began to gently, slowly stroke the hair on the side of her head.
"Hope that the Scarrans have been scared off?" Frankly, she didn't much care. If the choice came down to her small, hard-won family or a planet she hardly knew in one of an untold number of alternate realities, it was no contest as far as she was concerned.
"Hope and stay or hope and go?" She considered his question for a microt. Neither option was ideal: One involved an open-ended commitment to stay here, where she and her children would never be safe or welcome; the other left this version of his home world defenceless against further Scarran attack. Besides, if they stayed, what would they do if the Scarrans returned? As far as she could see, staying was just an invitation to John to do something stupid. But how easily would he accept going? How would that make him feel? Would he blame her for leaving, for anything, real or imagined, which might then happen to this Earth? She sighed. Regardless of her fear that he might blame her if they left she could only see one practical way forwards.
"John, I'm not sure what more we can do here. We can't go down to Earth, not in this reality. It would be too dangerous for us."
"We can't just abandon them," he pleaded. She could feel him trying to catch her eye, to harness her will to his. She refused to cooperate, keeping her eyes and her attention on their daughter.
"John, we cannot protect Earth in every reality." She insisted. "You know that."
"I don't see..."
"This is just one reality, not even our own." She elaborated. "We have to accept that there are timelines where we can do nothing to protect Earth. And then there is our reality, where perhaps we can make a difference, to all sorts of things. Perhaps we have done all we can here?"
She could feel John shaking his head, seeming to still be in denial. His hand had stopped stroking her hair now, but still rested on her head.
"We have stopped the Scarrans here, John." She continued. If he was not going to speak then it was up to her to do so. "Sent a message. But this isn't our reality. Would you leave the timeline where we belong unprotected? Would you risk that? Would you leave Rygel without our support? And then there are our children. And Chiana, Pilot, Noranti even. We cannot stay here. We don't belong." She could almost hear him thinking in the short silence which followed her speech.
"Yeah, no, I know. You're right. You're always right," he seemed to whisper, perhaps with a hint of resentment, under his breath, although he must surely have known she would hear. She let it pass: As he seemed to have conceded her point, she could afford to be magnanimous. "I just need a little time. It isn't easy..."
"When is it ever?" Aeryn asked, burrowing deeper into her husband's side. Together, and in silent contemplation, they sat watching the beautiful blue-green orb, slowly spinning below.
She allowed herself a small smile, satisfied that she seemed to have won this latest battle. They would make their farewells and leave, if not tomorrow then perhaps the day after, or the day after that. It was simply a matter of time.
It was, after all, always simply a matter of Time.