Author's Afterword
Last Seen Standingby aeryncrichton
11 May 2002
This story was written for Atana_Mirtai's "Last Scene Standing" challenge. The idea was to write your version of the last scene, or last episode of Farscape. The requirements included, John and Aeryn must be together, and neither one of them could die (clever bit of specifications there, LOL!). I figured this was going to be a slam dunk for me! J&A, shippy, whip out a nice little emotional ending, 6, maybe 7 pages, easy as pie! Wrong. This turned out to be the hardest thing I've ever written for Farscape, and the longest, too.
I'm not quite sure how it grew from my original expectations. I'd already had a freak-out after too many dark and gloomy post-DWTB stories and discussions and had written a firmly shippy story for J&A, giving them a toddler son, TJ. I decided that story was in the time frame specified for the challenge (about 522, by my calculations), and I'm a sucker for kids (and TPTB *handed* me a potential kid), so I decided to use TJ again. Besides John and Aeryn, Moya and Pilot, I thought, well, let's just keep the season 3 crew, D'Argo, Chiana, Jool, Rygel, Stark and Crais (yes, I think Crais and Talyn may have survived).
For a last scene story, I wanted some closure for John re: Earth, and that meant Jack.
Ah, I thought, Aeryn facing Jack alone, without John! That sounded interesting, and so I started there. It just kind of came out that TJ was teething, and that ended up forming a lot of the action, such as it is, in this fic. Aeryn met Jack, Jack met TJ, and Aeryn absolutely refused to let him know it was his grandson. Go figure. She was adamant about it. No way was she telling him anything without John. Aeryn was *very* uncooperative.
(Shipscat explained it to me later, when I whined about how Aeryn was being very uncooperative with everyone. "I think she's in a snit. He left her with a teething baby and uninvited relatives. How rude." Ah. That explains it, I think! And she did perk up quite a bit when John finally arrived back!)
Then I figured if this was a last scene of FS fic, I'd better have more of John than just him coming in at the end, and I *was* wondering where he was....besides "off with D'Argo." A throwaway on the first page about Rygel studying "missives from Hyneria" (and a comment from a beta reader wondering what Rygel was doing) set up the other half of the story. Our intrepid crew was attempting to help Rygel regain his throne, and John and D'Argo were off doing something related to that. I figured this small group of people didn't stand a chance of overthrowing Bishan themselves, but it made sense that an already-established group of Hynerian rebels would want assurances that Rygel was available. Thus was born the RugRats. (My husband came up with the name, and I loved it. It was SO John...)
And the story grew from there. Aeryn and Jack, John and D'Argo, both sets needed some things to do before I brought them back together and let John deal with his Dad, and Earth. John and D'Argo had a silly shopping trip, and an adventure with some incompetent thieves I tried really hard to keep from being copies of the blue guys in "I-Yensch, You-Yensch." Back on Moya, I found I had a huge cast of characters, and it was hard to keep track of them all, or have something for them to do. Crais and Stark went from participants to a reference to them being away (like John and D'Argo), to not even mentioned. I wrote and rewrote a couple scenes with different mixes of characters. I tore up the scene where Aeryn tells Jack and Ron that John is on their ship, and the humans explain how they got there, four times.
Eventually I had a revelation. I was *still* suffering from post-DWTB writer's block! I'd even set the story up so that John and Aeryn, although together, were physically separated. And Aeryn's mood had a good deal to do with *mine* after DWTB. And after I realized that, the story got easier to write. Somewhere along the line, when John came back and TJ stopped teething so she got some sleep, Aeryn became a lot more cooperative, not just with Jack, but with me. I was able to go back and make her not quite as stubbornly silent. Once she decided Jack was real, she got a lot less cranky, even though she wanted John to deal with this.
I knew I was taking a risk making TJ a fairly major player. But for me, true love plus happily ever after includes kids, and so I wanted to try to make it work. (Hey, it could be worse, in some of my 'Scarecrow and Mrs. King' fic, I gave Lee and Amanda twins!) I figured John would be the primary caretaker and doting dad, Aeryn a fierce and loving mom, but also no-nonsense. Since John was away, and he wasn't feeling well, TJ would turn to his mom, and she would certainly rise to the occasion. But still, he's a pretty well-behaved little boy. Again, I figured, Aeryn is his mother. There are going to be rules. There *have* to be rules, in this situation they live in, it's too dangerous to indulge a child's whims. And he's going to know the rules, even at this age. I figured the others would be like Aunts and Uncles to him, some more doting than others, but that he's John and Aeryn's kid, and they would be the main ones to deal with him.
That's one reason why Aeryn ends up spending a lot of time caretaking TJ when John gets back -- John *needs* time alone with his dad, and Aeryn's not going to shove TJ off on someone else, he's her responsibility. She supports John, and she takes care of their son.
TJ is modeled a little on my own kids. They're grown now, but I have some pretty clear memories of how verbal my older son was at the age of two, and I kept TJ to that level or a little below. (When Kelson was *just* 2, he swallowed a penny, which got caught in his throat. This necessitated a trip to the Emergency Room and a lot of unpleasant -- for him -- and frightening -- for us -- adventures before it was finally removed. They kept him overnight in the hospital, and he woke up the next morning and announced sadly, "Money. Mouth. No." There was a whole lot of meaning in those three words! LOL! TJ's comments like, "Teef. Ow," come from those memories.) The pots and pans, the climbing to get attention when adults get intense, the checking out the new face -- all are things I remember from "the good old days."
And then there's John and Jack. A favorite theme. The very first Farscape fic I wrote (not counting a very short addendum to "Eat Me") involved John and Aeryn going to visit Earth, so John could see Jack (and DK). The series *starts* with John and his father, and it seemed right that the series should end (in my fic) with John and his father....but this time, the son is truly his own man. They've each had 5 years to reflect on their relationship, and on what they'd say to each other if they only had the chance, and it was my job to make sure they got that chance.
Jack turned out to have as much of a mind of his own as Aeryn did. He assumed John was coming home with him. He assumed this was a horrible place. I hadn't expected him to do that. The dinner scene was a challenge because it had so many people in it. It was intended mostly to reassure Jack, to give him a feel for how John interacted with everyone, and help him understand that John truly had a home here. And it morphed into a "how to protect Earth" scene when Rygel announced that there was no way the humans were just going to stay home like good little primitives.... The challenge there was to cover possibilities without it sounding like a laundry list, and to leave open the possibility that John might be able to visit Earth one day. Making use of Rygel's coming re-instatement to bring up the idea of Hynerian protection for Earth was a nice way of tying back to that whole subplot.
Jack got the message -- John had a family, friends, a purpose, *and,* he couldn't go home. And when he knew he had to leave John behind, he started this really odd locker room conversation with John about women! I'm still not sure where it came from, and yet I think it came from his changing view of his son over the time he thought John was dead. He began to think of him as an adult, as a peer in some way. And so he brought up the idea of having a special woman in his life in a way he might with his buddies in the locker room. That last conversation, where Jack tells John how glad he is to know John has the things he always wished for him, and John shows Jack the terrace, and drives home the point that in many ways he has everything he always wished for *himself,* is the key piece of the father/son interaction. It's the point at which they both understand and accept that John is following his own path, and that it's right for him.
Oddly enough, although John and Aeryn hardly spend any time together in this fic, I think it's incredibly shippy. It's a given, it's understood, by John and Aeryn and everyone on Moya, that they are together. There's no question of it, no fussing about it. Aeryn's never concerned that John is going to leave her and go to Earth -- she's worried someone might try to take him (when she's not sure if Jack is real), but never that he'll leave. She's his strength, he draws on her, relies on her completely -- such as when he sees Jack for the first time. They are absolutely rock solid together. I'd thought there would be a shippy scene, maybe even shipper porn, at the end after John closed the wormhole, but....it really didn't need it. John and Aeryn are obviously happy together, John's already essentially said good-bye to his dad, so closing the wormhole isn't something that is going to be traumatic or final for him. No one needs reassuring, including, I hope, the reader. John and Aeryn simply *are.* So, I ended the story much as I began it, with Aeryn and TJ, and Aeryn's casual reassurance to her son, "Da will be right back."
My beta readers were invaluable with this one. Every single one of them made at least one suggestion, or asked at least one question, that lead to something I really like in the story, or that I think made a big improvement. They put up with my fussing, they encouraged me like crazy (because I was the one with quibbles more often than not, remember I was tossing out sections right and left often without even running them past a beta!), and I would never have gotten through this story without them. Many, many thanks to (in alphabetical order, LOL!): Atana_Mirtai, Imloco2, my husband Jim, Shipscat, Tazey, and Wiscaper.
aeryncrichton