Author's Afterword
Guilt
by aeryncrichton
When Loco asked me about doing a story for this project, I wasn’t at all sure what to write. After all, Aeryn, alone, without John? You know me, major shipper…. But she’s a good friend, and I had post-322 writer’s block anyways, so I took a minute to think before I said “Maybe.”
And I remembered that back after “The Locket” aired the first time, I’d kicked around a lot of ideas about conversations between John and Aeryn after he, too, was stranded on the Favored Planet. One of the things that struck me at the time was that it was odd that she’d outlived *all* her children, and that, this being a fairly primitive planet, perhaps at least one had died in an accident. And, hopeless romantic that I am, I had her telling our John about how she had dared to name one of her children for him (well, she wasn’t *that* open about her feelings, but she did say she’d dared to name the boy ‘John’ – let *him* figure out why….), and how he had died as a boy.
So I said, okay, I could tell that story.
But when I’d originally thought of it, it was a very old Aeryn, telling John about an old sorrow, one a hundred cycles past. Could I write the story in the *now,* tell a story about a little boy dying, and the pain of that?
And I call myself a parent….
I went for it….
This is the first of the four “Locket” stories I wrote, and young John was mostly a cipher in it originally. You see him only dimly in Aeryn’s memory, bright, curious, obsessed with flight, and in the grief his passing causes his parents. Cerric sees Aeryn in him, and Aeryn sees John Crichton.
And then I wrote “More,” and fell in love with the tiny baby in that story.
When I decided we needed a story of the first time Aeryn missed an opening in the mist, the timing just worked out that it was young John who was the right age to interrupt her, with his fears. And we got to see a little more of this charming child.
And then KernilCrash decided to *help* me break your hearts – by writing the absolutely *wonderful* “Woggles” story…. That John is *exactly* the John I had in mind when I started this, and Aeryn was sitting in the transport pod, mourning him…..
About the fates – Our tough soldier Aeryn has always had an irrational streak – and even when I was telling this story for myself, back when she was telling John Crichton about the loss of his namesake so many cycles before, she told him that she’d dared to name him John, and the fates took him away. “If I’d named him Rygel,” she said with a small smile, “he’d be here today.”
aeryncrichton
Created on ... March 21, 2002
