Rain

by huzzlewhat

"Aeryn?" Soft voice, low, urgent, soft hands with hard callouses touching her, shaking her, large hands, soft in intent, hard with use on her arms, her shoulders, her face. "Aeryn, wake up. You're having a nightmare. Wake up."

"John..."

The name a whimper as the vision fades into darkness, familiar darkness. Their bedroom. Strong hands on her body, holding her close. Face against her hair. Ghosts run in the face of warm breath, familiar scent, feel of pulse under skin.

"Cerric." She says the name as a confirmation, and he smiles against her temple, she can feel it.

"You were having a nightmare, Aeryn." Her breath, ragged in the dark, his hands smoothing her hair, his voice calm, soothing, waiting for her breathing to steady before he spoke again. "It... doesn't go away, does it? After all this time?"

"No." She took a deep breath, let her hand cover his, squeeze. "But it does get better."

"Easier?"

"No. Just... better."

"He would have been a fine man." Cerric's voice was quiet, and she felt the familiar disorientation, the rebalancing as she realized the difference.

"Yes. He would." She let him comfort her, let him think he understood, knowing that correcting him, explaining, would only cause him pain, because there wasn't an explanation, not really. Part of her curled in disgust at the deception, at allowing her beloved dead son to be used to cover her failings. She'd always been a soldier, always been straightforward and honest in a way that only soldiers were, but Cerric didn't deserve her burdening him with her truth, simply so she could continue to call herself honest.

She turned, curled into him, back to his chest, gripping his arms around her waist. He didn't say anything, only held her tight, and she was grateful. More grateful than he would ever know, for this, his silence. Their life together was marked by silence -- comfortable, undemanding. When they simply understood, or thought they did. She lay in the darkness, listening to his heart beat, the counterpoint of the rain.

It had been raining for ten days straight, from a gentle patter to alarming pounding and back, but never once stopping. Rain was good. Rain meant the ground was nourished, the crops would grow, they'd be well stocked come harvest, enough to last them through the dark times and into the next season, enough to fill their storehouses in the event that the rains didn't come next cycle.

But ten days was worrisome. The pond where John had once hunted woggles had overflowed its banks three days ago, and the river in the lower quadrant was swollen. She knew that Cerric was concerned, had seen the look in his eyes when he'd returned from the levee that afternoon. She'd simply handed him a cup of steaming manet tea and nodded. "It'll stop soon."

"It had better."

And tonight, the dreams had come. Again. She closed her eyes, did the calculations in her head. Two more days. Two more days, and it would be time. The dreams always came at their own time, on the same rhythm, each cycle, reminding her of her obligation, her ties to the past.

Just another tradition, after so many cycles. Over 100 now. Even when there was too much going on, too much activity, and she would get distracted and forget, the dreams would come, and she'd wonder how it could have slipped her mind, how she could have forgotten all about them, even forgotten what he looked like, the details engraved in her memory so that if asked, and no one ever did, she could tell them, because she knew these things, that his eyes were blue, that his hair was the color of the chilnek grain in the last week before harvest, that when he was pleased, he laughed, and when he was angry, he laughed, but differently, and she could tell them all these things, because she knew them, as items on a list, but she could no longer see him. And his voice, warm, sweet, curling somewhere in her belly, whispering, "Wake up, Aeryn. Time to go."

"It's still raining," she said.

"Yes." Cerric's voice was quiet, as always, but his tone was tight, coiled. And she knew that her nightmare hadn't woken him, that he'd been awake, listening to the rain.

"If it doesn't stop?" For the last three days, she'd been the confident voice that told him that it would be all right, that the rains would pass, but she was still a soldier, really, and she needed to know what the danger was, how to prepare.

"We have another day, maybe two. But if it doesn't..." He took a deep breath against her temple, breathed out slowly. Even in worry, thoughtful. "We cleared out the houses in the valley today. It'll give us some time, if the levee isn't enough."

"Will it be enough?"

"I don't know." That, in itself, an answer. The small dishonesties that she'd never allowed herself, the compromises with truth that people made in order to live together, to comfort each other.

"What's the plan?"

He smiled, again, she could feel it against her skin. How little she needed to do. Simply be confident and strong and there, and push him forward with her expectation that he would never be less than he was, or let himself falter with worry and despair.

And of course he had a plan. "We've built it up, but we'll have to do more. We'll dig soil from the fallow areas, carry it to the levee, build it up, pack it down."

Her mind was already working, thinking numbers and people and deployment... who was there, who was needed. The answer was simple.

"We'll need everyone."

"We'll have them, of course. Well, except for Rhys."

Yes. Rhys. His arm still immobilized from his fall from the roof of the storage barn, slick with rain, beginning to leak into the precious store of grain. A mother's panic, as he'd been carried into her house, his face twisted with pain. Too-clear memories of another time, another child, who had fallen.

But Rhys was an adult now, and he was alive and groaning in her kitchen, and her white-faced panic had faded into customary affectionate gruffness as she scolded him for being careless, for causing a fuss, for his yelps of pain as she'd set the bone and wrapped it tight. And he'd grinned and seen right through her good-natured insults.

"He won't like it." As she said it she laughed, and Cerric breathed out his own laugh against her skin.

"No, he won't."

As his hands began to move across her body, she laughed again, low and throaty, and turned so that she could see his face. After, they lay together in contented silence, and listened to the rain.

She sat at the controls of the ancient vessel, running tests, checking power levels. It was still routine, unthinking, automatic, and her hands ran through the pre-flight procedure while her mind was distracted, lulled by the faint pounding of rain on the roof.

One more day. One more day. Time to go.

If only the rain would stop.

She finished her checks, and gathered her cloak around herself, stepped out into the wetness, paused as memory tugged, and tilted her head back to bare her face to the rain.

She'd loved rain, once, in another lifetime, in another world that wasn't even real. But it had felt real, it had all felt so real, against her face, her tongue.

One more day. And then she'd see them. It would be this cycle, she knew it. Fifty-five since the last time the mist opened; 55 before that when she had arrived. It had to be this time. If it worked on a regular pattern, it would be this time. And she would see them again.

*Time to go.*

She hadn't liked the look on Cerric's face that morning, hadn't liked the tightness around his eyes, the set of his jaw. It was bad, she knew, even if he didn't say it. It was bad, and he was worried, so she wrapped herself more tightly in her cloak, and made her way back to the house.

As she entered, he was standing by the window, hands braced on the table in front of him, simply staring. She stopped in the doorway, taking him in.

It was remarkable, how well she knew him. How after so long, his smallest gestures and expressions could communicate something to her. She hadn't known it was possible to know another person so well.

He was angry.

She didn't need a mirror to know that her brow was creased. Cerric angry was a rare experience, and it never boded well. He'd been with Callum . . . things had been strained between them lately, Callum was at a strange age of transition . . . perhaps he had said something. Or perhaps it was the council.

Whatever it was, she would deal with it. It was only fair, considering how often he'd acted as the steady weight to her far-more frequent explosions of temper. She would deal with it, or more likely, she'd get angry herself, on his behalf, and he would compose himself in order to calm her.

She made her step deliberately heavy to alert him to her presence. He sighed, tilted his head back, but didn't speak, didn't turn.

"Whatever it is, it must have been bad."

He ignored her inquiry, answered with a non-sequitor. "Is the transport pod functional, then?"

She accepted his deferral. "Yes. Still."

"When do you go?"

"Tomorrow. I thought . . ."

"It's still raining."

She hesitated. It wasn't like Cerric to interrupt her. "It will stop."

"And if it doesn't?"

"I. . ." She'd been trying not to think about that. "I don't know."

He turned, then, and she saw it. It wasn't Callum, or the council. It was her. Cerric was angry with her. "We'll need everyone on the levee. You said it yourself."

"I know."

"And you'd still go?"

She took a deep breath. "My friends. On Moya. They've lost enough time."

"And the people here, if the worst happens, will lose everything. If we can't hold back the waters, we'll lose the lower fields. The stored grain is already wet, and will mold and fester. There won't be enough time for another crop before the cold days come. It has been over 100 cycles, and the mist has only opened two times. Will you disregard us all for the chance that it might be three?"

She unwrapped her cloak, shook out the water, and hung it on the back of the door. "Are you asking me to choose?"

"The choice is there. I didn't create it."

She looked up, met his gaze evenly. "The rain will stop."

Shouts, yelling, invading her sleep, bringing her awake in a rush, her heart pounding, Cerric already out of bed and pulling on his boots. He'd taken to sleeping in his clothes, in preparation.

Face at the window, torchlight. Ragged voice. "The water's rising too fast. It'll clear the levee in three arns!"

"I'm coming," Cerric answered, his voice calm, steady, speaking for himself alone. "Gather the others."

The torch gone, bobbing away. Aeryn was up, dressed, jamming her feet in her boots. Cerric looked at her, but there was no time for discussion. She merely smoothed her hair back, fastened it tightly, and nodded. "Let's go."

They kept the teams moving, circulating, changing jobs, changing positions. When her back ached from bending and digging, she began carrying. When her hands were cut from the handles of the buckets, she moved to the top of the levee, tramping down dirt with her feet. When her eyes were bleary with fatigue and her body had been reduced to one shivering ache, she took a short rest, a drink of water, a bite of food, then back to the fallow fields and the shovels, digging.

Water was everywhere, in the sky, soaked through layers of clothing, in knee-deep puddles in low places on the ground. She was wet to the skin, shivering with cold, yet bathed in sweat, too much water, too much earth. The mud sucked at her boots, caked her hair, and she kept digging. Hands slippery with sweat and mud and even blood now, she was sure of it, and she kept carrying. On the levee, feet sinking in, not good, it needed to be stable, it needed to be firm, on her hands and knees, pushing, hands in the earth, in the dirt, and what kind of a primitive species would name their planet after dirt anyway? One that didn't know any better, and fell in love with a place, and put their entire being into the land and forgot about the sky, and there it was, between her fingers and it wasn't just dirt, it was all about the rhythm and she would not let the water have the land, would not let all their work be for nothing, and frell her back ached, but the earth between her fingers was good, and cool, and it would work, they'd make it work.

"Aeryn." Cerric was next to her, and she blinked the falling water out of her eyes and looked up at him. "You need to rest."

"I ..."

"Let Finn take a turn here. You need to eat. Drink."

"Right." Her lips quirked in a faint smile. "Just what I need. More water."

He smiled back, and she could hear singing, a heavy, rhythmic singing. To keep time for the diggers, she knew. It mingled with the sound of the rain, the roaring of the water beyond the levee, all part of the same pattern, recognizing it, using it, because they loved the water, they loved the rain. It had lost its balance and threatened them now, but they still loved it, because the land needed the water, and it was a part of their life and their world that such things happened, and the cycle would begin again and next year, they'd look up at the sky and pray for rain. And she loved them all, suddenly, with a ferocity that shook her. The faces as they worked, the strain and the fear but the laughter and the singing and the called-out insults that meant nothing except that they loved each other, and they loved the land, and they would not let the water have it.

There was a choice, yes, but Cerric hadn't invented it. It simply was. And in the end, there was no choice at all.

Rhys handed her a flask, and she drank. He handed her food -- she didn't know how, but he'd kept it dry -- and she ate. She looked at him, could see the frustration on his face, knew the cause. His back was strong, his feet were rested, but his injury made him useless.

But there was something he could do.

"Rhys. I need you to do something for me." Cerric's gaze cut to her, and she looked back at her husband for a moment, then turned to her son.

Rhys nodded. He didn't seem surprised. Whether it was because he had been expecting it, or because Cerric had already talked to him, or simply because he was Cerric's son, she didn't know. "If the mist opens, what should I tell them?"

*Time to go, Aeryn.*

"Don't tell them anything." The words cut her, at a hollow place inside her. "Don't make any contact with them at all. Don't even try."

"But . . ."

"I don't want you going through the mist. I don't want you getting trapped. Promise me."

"I promise."

"And no contact."

"No contact. Right."

"I want readings. On everything. Get up there and keep the sensors operative, keep them running. I want the whole spectrum. You know..."

"Yes, I know."

"Good." She took a deep breath, wiped away the water running down her face. "We'll see you in a few days."

"If there's a dry spot for me to land on, you will." He laughed, the same fierce, determined humor that surrounded her, in all these people, and was gone.

Cerric pulled her to him, pressed a kiss, hard, to the top of her head. She leaned into him, tucked her face against his chest, breathed in. Scents of sweat, and mud, and spiced tannic, and Cerric, and the immediately identifiable non-scent of water. Too much water. She pushed away from him, squared her shoulders.

"I'll dig next."

Cerric found her on the hill, in the niarwon grove, didn't say a word as he approached, his boots leaving a dark swath in the silvered grass, where beads of water clung, catching and reflecting the sunlight. He merely looked down for a long moment, then sighed and lowered himself to sit next to her.

They sat, looking down at the settlement, saying nothing. The sunlight bathed the rooftops, the pathways between the houses. Three days ago, the mud of the paths had been black, uniform. Now it was patchy, areas of liquid darkness shading into ever-lightening browns, as the sun returned the mud to solidity, to simple dirt.

"Do you believe in fate?" She broke the silence. They'd talked of fate before, over the years, but always what she believed. He'd never answered her -- she'd never let him answer. But now she needed to know. Needed to know if he looked on fate as kind, even as it stripped her of everything. It was strange timing, indeed, that the rain had stopped so soon after Rhys had left, after it was too late for her to leave the planet. If it had stopped a day earlier, they wouldn't have needed her at all.

Time had bled and wavered after Rhys had gone; how long had they labored and struggled? It was nearly impossible to tell. Microts to microns to arns to . . . days? Had it been that long? It couldn't have been less than two days that she'd spent in the mud, but she'd washed and rested and slept and recovered before Rhys had returned, with a look on his face that had told her everything. She hadn't even needed to ask.

For a long moment, Cerric didn't answer her, then simply huffed a quiet laugh. "I'm not that selfish."

Startled, she turned to him. "Selfish?"

"You want me to think that some... higher destiny arranged all of this so that you wouldn't leave? So that you would stay here with me? I believe in circumstances, Aeryn, and choices. I don't believe I'm so important that some greater purpose would flood the lowest field, drown Finn's chevalter, contaminate our grain supply, just so I could keep my wife. I'm not that arrogant."

She considered for a moment. "You think I would have left."

"Wouldn't you?"

*Time to go, Aeryn.*

"I don't know. I don't think so." She sighed. "Anyway, it doesn't matter now."

"It doesn't?"

"No." It had been her last chance, she knew. Faced with the possibility of going, what would she have done? She knew them, knew them well enough that she knew that they wouldn't have made it easy for her. And would she have wanted them to?

She looked down at her hands as if she'd never seen them before, stared at the dirt still encrusted under her fingernails. So different, from the old days. Early on, it had been chakkan oil, for her pulse rifle. Sometimes blood. Then, later, oil from her prowler's engine, when she was reduced to her own repairs. Amnexus fluid from yet another conduit that needed repair. And now, now it was dirt.

"What's easier, Cerric? To believe that I would have gone, or to know that I would have given them up?"

"Easier isn't right."

"No, it's not."

"You could have sent a message," he said. "Rhys could have told them."

She had to laugh at that. The idea of Crichton -- of any of them -- taking Rhys' message and accepting it . . . a strange man claiming to be Aeryn's son, and that she was fine, really, and that they should leave . . . the response from Moya was far too predictable. If Rhys had made contact, Crichton, at least, probably D'Argo as well, would have followed him. Followed him to the barren world and, too stubborn, stayed. Followed to the favored planet. And then they would have been here, in her world, among her family. Soldiers among her farmers.

"Rhys did well," she said. "I have readings from the beginning of the opening to the end." She'd only glanced over the data, but it had been enough to know. He'd gotten it all. No visual contact with Moya, and she wished that he could have at least seen the Leviathan, just so he knew that she existed, but with the thickness of the mist it wasn't unexpected. Rhys had suggested tenatively that if there was a ship, it might have gone, but she knew better. It would have been only a few days at most for them -- she would know for certain when she analyzed the data from the edge of the mist. Only a few days. Crichton was probably still pacing. She had lived more than a hundred cycles, and Crichton hadn't even slept.

"You'll go back next cycle, then?"

"Yes." She would, even though it was probably pointless. The 55-cycle pattern was confirmed -- with the full readings Rhys had gathered, she would be able to pinpoint the time down to the last microt. But it still might open before then. It would be on a different rhythm, though, a counterpoint. She should stagger her trips, introduce some randomness. . .

Entertaining the possibilities made her head spin. Too many variables. Too many possible permutations. Crichton would have loved it. But she wasn't a scientist.

If she had gone this time, she would have had to go forever. If she'd chosen to leave them while the waters were rising, she never would have been able to return, even if the mist hadn't opened. To know, for them to know, that she would abandon them so completely for the most impossible scrap of possibility. No, she couldn't have come back.

She bowed her head forward to her knees. The sunlight caught the silver glints in the hair that fell across her face, and she could feel the pinch of abused muscles at the base of her neck, low on her back. It had been days since the water's assault on the levee, since she had stood with her comrades and beaten back the intruder. And she felt it, every muscle, every bone in her body. Her body still did everything she asked of it. But for how much longer? She was feeling it now, more than she would have 55 cycles before, let alone 110, when she was a soldier, Moya's defender.

Fifty-five cycles from now, she would be an old woman. And her friends on Moya . . . they would have to defend her. Even if she went back to Moya, she wouldn't be who she was. She wouldn't be his radiant Aeryn Sun, his kickass PK, the first line of defense. She wouldn�t be his maybe-lover who was edging towards something, she would be someone who had lived it already, and intensely, and left him behind. She would be an old woman who had raised two children and buried one, who had knelt on a mud bank at the tail end of a 14-day stretch of rain and dug her hands into the earth and held back the flood waters because the land and the people who lived on it meant so much to her.

She was a farmer. And the man next to her, he was her husband, the father of her children, her partner, her life. And he believed, honestly believed, that if she'd had the chance, she would have left him. For a man whose eyes were blue, whose hair was the color of chilnek grain in the last week before harvest, and whose face she no longer remembered.

She slipped her hand into his, leaned her head against his shoulder. She could feel the surprise in him, the sudden tension, but he said nothing, only wrapped his arm around her and pulled her closer to him.

"I believe in choices, too."

********

huzzlewhat

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