John stopped by the central chamber for a days worth of rations and water and returned to his quarters. If they weren’t arriving for another day and some, then he saw no reason to go slip sliding around the ship. Unfortunately, the longer he remained in his quarters the more he realized his arns were spent simply waiting for Aeryn to return.
He tried to distract himself by recreating his star charts, but if his central star on every chart, labeled still ‘Aeryn’ wasn’t enough make him feel hollow, the memories that came with each system sometimes left him gasping and on the verge of tears. Sylmun, where they had found that intriguing little bazaar and Aeryn had spent the day plying him with food from every vender, excited that he could finally sample some of her favorite treats. He smirked at his cleverness, he had renamed it LaGasse. Trojo, where men were considered chattel and Aeryn had been forced to draw on several Amazonian women before they made off with her ‘breeding stock‘. Well, that hadn’t been a very nice world, but his ego had enjoyed it. Syn-Zuk, where pod repairs had forced them to share a room for the night and he had woken early the next morning to find her nestled against him. He remembered feeling her intake of breath against his rib cage, taking the liberty to run his fingers through her hair. When he felt her stir he had rolled away from her, knowing she hadn’t been ready for that small, unconscious intimacy.
He had been torturing himself for two or three arns when he decided a shower was in order. A good long shower, use up all the hot water on the ship kind of shower. If the pain wouldn’t wash away, perhaps he could at least burn it off.
He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, not moving, his head resting against the shower screen, the water scalding his back when he realized there was nothing he could do to escape. Even the shower itself brought back memories, though these less pleasant. Aeryn with heat sickness, the temperature rivaling a West Palm Beach afternoon and Zhaan trying to keep her alive long enough for them to solve the problem. He and D’Argo had left the soldier and the cleric in the shower, hoping for the best. If the situation hadn’t been so desperate, he would have taken a moment to stand there and enjoy the sight of her draped over the privacy screen with her underclothes clinging to her wet frame. But that wasn’t a scene visited often.
It was all this inactivity that was doing him in. He turned and slid to the floor, his back pressed against the screen for support. All this waiting. When they were actually doing something, he didn’t have time to think. He focused on the matter at hand and there was no time for ruminating on problems he couldn’t solve. But it had been nearly a week now of waiting to get from point A to point B and his hyperkinetic mind was starting to get the best of him. He thought about the message from his Other. He would have done the same thing, try to return some of the hope that had slipped. But had the other John counted on Aeryn shutting down totally? Had he expected them to at least be able to pick where they left off and find friendship? How much time was he talking? At this rate, he’d be dead and buried before she realized they were the same guy. How often do you get a second chance with a dead lover? Well, that was very much the problem, wasn’t it? He wasn’t the same guy. A few months ago they were, but not anymore. And as for being dead and buried, well dead was a highly likely possibility these days. They still had a command carrier to take out.
John knew it wasn’t all about him. It was about a woman who had never been taught anything about emotion becoming paralyzed by grief. It was about spending three cycles teaching her it’s ok to feel, without ever preparing her for the consequences. They were both emotional road kill at this point, deer caught in the headlights, and the more he thought about it the more he retreated into his own pain. It was unbearable carrying both his and her sorrow.
John remembered the days when his biggest issue was getting the funding for whatever hare-brained idea he had managed to pull together. Like the Farscape project. And even then it hadn’t caused him any ulcers or anything. As much as he despised it, he knew that if push came to shove, Dad always made sure his son was employed. Jack Crichton was a pragmatic man who wasn’t above throwing his weight around rather than let a good idea get drowned out in the politics of blow-hard politicians and bureaucrats. John always knew if he was making a mistake Dad would let him take his lumps, but Jack Crichton wasn’t going to let someone outside the family dictate what was a mistake and what wasn’t.
John looked at his hands. Pretty pruney. He looked down at his chest, which had become a bright shade of lobster red. He gingerly pressed the skin, the indent making a momentary white mark. He wondered if he had actually given himself burns.
Behind him, he heard the bump and rattle of another person in his quarters. He knew her step by now, and after the soft thud of removed boots he heard her pad in bare feet around the room to her side of the bed.
He wondered how shriveled he’d get if he decided to just sleep in the shower tonight. He reached over his head and turned off the knob, deciding his father would kick his ass from hammond side to travelin side and back again if he ever caught him wallowing in that much self pity. The man’s wife had died, and he had moved on. Not unscathed, but he got up and did what had to be done every morning since. Aeryn wasn’t even dead.
He stood up and reached for his towel, wrapping it around himself and stepping carefully out of the shower.
Aeryn looked up from the bed, her face impassive. She returned to cleaning her boots. “What happened to you?”
“Nothing. I took a shower.” John pulled a clean Tee and a pair of military issue boxers off the shelf.
“In what? Acid?” He looked down at himself again. He could see the object of her concern, if you could call the coolness of her comment concern.
“Just a shower,” he looked at his notebook, left on the table when he had tried to abandon his train of thought. Small, neat and precise corrections had been made to his chart. Not a child’s writing, someone used to holding the pen but not writing the English alphabet. He looked up at the screen partitioning their bed and smiled. There was hope yet.
“Thank you,” he said, when he felt her settle in for the night.
“I don’t like to see a job completed incompetently,” came her reply. He felt like he was living with a schizophrenic. Not that things had been so much different before, but at least he never felt like he was treading on private territory for discussing something as innocuous as a book.
“Perhaps, if I could just see the old star charts…” John pressed just a little bit. He licked his lips and sighed when he only encountered silence. Who knew quiet was such a weapon. “I’m sorry.”
“You’ve already said that.” Silence and ice.
“No, I mean I’M sorry. I’m sorry for being me, I’m sorry we have to share quarters…I’m just sorry.” He turned his back to her side of the bed and scooted to the edge so as not to accidentally bump her in the middle of the night. He wondered if this was going to be another night when he cried himself to sleep or languished in the pain of something tearing him apart from the inside out.
“My mother said,” she paused, but John had already heard her voice. Low, as though someone else were on this tier who could hear, and suddenly lacking its edge. Her mother… ”She said that when you lose someone you don’t lose them in pieces, but altogether. They are simply gone as though they had never been there.”
John rolled onto his stomach and tucked his crossed arms under his chest, supporting his weight. If he didn’t, they would do something stupid like pull aside the curtain and try to touch her. Try to smooth away the lines from her face, maybe kiss away some of the tears.
“Your mother said this?” he asked carefully.
“Before she died. It’s the only lesson she left me with.“ Then, softer, “The only one worth repeating.” He felt her shift in the bed too and wondered if they were looking at the memories of each other’s faces through the screen. “Why do you never speak of your mother, Crichton?”
John felt sick. Not just the mental sickness of thinking you should be unwell, but physically ill. He swallowed back the bile and tried to form a coherent thought.
“My mother--” Images grabbed him before words. Leslie McDougal Crichton. Loved her husband, loved her son and daughters with all the breadth and scope of her heart and raised them into loyal and outstanding adults. Yet, what in her realm of experience could have prepared her to raise a son to be a stranger in a strange land? The beast in his chest that chewed on him night after night found a new wound, worrying at the edges of guilt. For all that she had given her only son over the days of his life, he had been unable to repay in kind by being there for her death. Grief is selfish.
“Um, didn’t the Other say anything about her?” Not that he would have either, but this John hoped that the subject had come up between them already, that somehow the other John would let him off the hook. If she wanted to know about his mother, how could he deny her when she had just imparted on him the last and only ounce of wisdom her own mother had given her?
“He--we--the subject never came up.” Or had he refused to discuss the matter as well and she was just fishing now?
“Mom,” John searched for something to say that didn’t sound like a eulogy, but decided that everything you say about the dead after they’re gone is a eulogy. Parting words. Things you should have said a long time ago but always thought you’d get around to. “Mom was a good woman. Dad was a career pilot so it was just her and us most of the time. I think she did good, but that’s for others to say, not me.”
A soft sigh. “She did well.”
Anxious to keep her talking, whether or not the conversation should die a natural death John asked, “Was your mother what you expected?”
In the quiet John could almost see her chewing her lower lip in thought, staring at the ceiling, her hands resting lightly one on top of the other across her belly.
“No. But she was who I needed her to be.” He heard the ice creeping back into her voice. Something in the memory reminded her of who she should be. The curtain between them shifted as she moved away from it and his quarters were quiet the rest of the night.
John didn’t remember his dreams that night, but he awoke cold and sweaty, his limbs aching like he had just run a marathon and he knew he had dreamt of his mother. Her illness. Her last days. He hoped he hadn’t been loud enough to disturb Aeryn.
“I need your help,” he said, frustrated. The woman who had spoken with him in the wee hours of the night was gone, walls rebuilt in earnest, her commando persona in full control.
She looked at him out of the corner of one hard blue eye before returning her attention to the control panel on Moya’s command.
“Aeryn, c’mon, throw me a bone here. This mess,” John motioned at the shiny floor with is pen, “will be gone in the next day or so and then we have a command carrier to track down and blow up. You know command carriers, I don’t.”
“Moya has an extensive data bank. I suggest you make use of it.”
“Look,” John said, thinking aloud more so than actually talking, “I know it won’t take much to get Sparky to sell me down the river. Getting on the carrier won’t be a problem. However, I would like to get off the carrier with everything still intact, including my frontal lobe. I assume you have the same agenda?” He watched her hands moving over the controls pause for a moment before migrating to a new grid.
A suspicion crept up on him and he didn‘t like the look of it. “Aeryn, this isn’t a suicide mission. You do understand that, don’t you?”
She didn’t look at him. “I’ll do what I have to to accomplish the mission. You just worry about your part.”
“Hold the phone, Calamity Jane. No one has a part and there isn’t a mission unless the GOAL is for everyone involved to get out. Alive. And preferably in one piece.” John shrugged. “It’s whether or not we attain our goal, that’s yet to be seen.”
Puzzle pieces clicked into place and John suddenly wondered if Aeryn hadn’t returned from her Sabbatical just to wrap up the loose ends on her dead lover’s project before she decided to join him in the great beyond. He didn’t like the way that sounded. He didn’t like the way Aeryn looked. And the more he the thought about it, the more it made sense. She’d always said she hadn’t expected to live this long. Was she taking matters into her own hands?
Mentally, he knew what had to be done. But emotionally? Emotionally John was ready to scrap the whole plan, what little of it there was. Run far, run fast, let the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans blow themselves into another time zone and check his score card later. Lock Aeryn in a cell somewhere and do the job himself. Well, that thought was even less realistic than all the others.
“John, just worry about getting the job done. If you have a good plan, no one should get killed, right?” She made one last sweeping gesture of her hand over the control panel and minced out of the room.
He wondered for a moment if he should follow her but decided he just couldn’t handle the Dr. Jekyl and Officer Hyde routine anymore. He didn’t want to have to rely on Crais for anything, let alone life or death information, but at this point it was better than nothing. One more solar day, they would reach their destination and then they could all go off and get themselves killed. It was always good to have a plan.
END PART 7
Additional Story Links:
Part 1
|
Part 2
|
Part 3
|
Part 4
|
Part 5
|
Part 6
|
Part 7
|
Part 8