After Midnight

by DVSonne


Rating: Mostly PG, perhaps some PG13 for language and innuendo.

Summary: Aeryn and Crichton have a talk after they return from the false Earth.  Note that this was written as the first chapter to a novella in which Crichton and Aeryn attempt to rescue D'Argo and Chita-pet from prison. It may still be that first chapter; all I know for sure is that these issues had to be resolved before I could do anything else with John and Aeryn.  As it now reads, I think "After Midnight" can stand on its own as a post-Human Reaction vignette.

Spoilers: Straight through to "A Human Reaction," with many stops along the way.
Disclaimer: "Farscape" is not my property. It belongs to Jim Henson Productions, the SciFi Channel, Hallmark, Channel Nine Australia, etc. This story is a piece of fan fiction and in no way is an attempt at copyright infringement.  Rather, it is "the sincerest form of flattery." Those characters or situations not owned by the above are my own creation and I maintain rights thereto (note that this basically applies to the novella I'm planning -- if it ever gets done).

Archiving: Uhmmmm. Since this is my first net fic, I'm not sure how this works.

Notes: In writing this story on my wordprocessor, I used italics for foreign words" and for emphasis. Oh, and for ship names (*Moya* and the *Zelbinion*). Italics are indicated in this version by the use of the *asterisk* symbol before and after the italicized word.
(Editor's note: I put in italics, just didn't wanna change the notes.)

*****

Commander John Crichton, Astronaut, IASA, chugged down the fellip nectar in two convulsive swallows, then tongued the few drops clinging to the lip of the narrow-necked bottle. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Not bad. Not bad at all, especially when he remembered to forget that the drink was liquified animal protein. He'd refused to let Aeryn tell him what part of the fellip the vintners mashed, pureed, or pressed through a sieve for its juices. Ignorance was bliss. In this section of the universe.

Pushing up from the backless stool, John stumbled over to the refrigeration unit. He rooted around inside the unit, pushing aside half-a-dozen Hynerian brews that smelled worse than curdled goat's milk, and found four more bottles of fellip nectar. Carrying the slender amber bottles back to his table, he lined them up next to the twelve empties he'd already finished off. He studied the resulting pattern as though it offered a map to Sol. Then, picking up one of the full bottles, he unscrewed the cap. He planned to celebrate his return to the Uncharted Territories in style. Time for another drink.

Swiftly, John finished off his thirteenth bottle of fellip nectar. A metallic bitterness coated his tongue, and he considered switching to water. The thought died stillborn. Water offered nothing, certainly no surcease to the visions that haunted him both waking and sleeping.

Visions of Rygel vivisected. D'Argo cut and sliced and bleeding thick, toxic blackness. Pilot torn limb from limb. Zhaan left red-eyed and mad from her mating with a blue-skinned Lady Vader. And Aeryn...

Aeryn spasmed by the Living Death. Aeryn torn to pieces by a Vorkarian Blood Tracker's bitch. Aeryn questioned and tortured and injected and dissected. Aeryn dead.

Dead from Crais's hands, from alien hands... from human hands. Pale, manicured human hands protected from blood and guts and alien microbes by latex gloves. Human hands washed as clean as Pilate's. Human hands like his. Like his.

John swept his arm out, knocking half the bottles from the table. They crashed to the floor and slivered to pieces. One of the bottles had been unopened. The cold liquid hissed as it pooled on the warm floor. A DRD, one of the ones that looked and sounded like a compacted R2 unit, darted into the room. It chittered on three different wave bands when it saw the mess. Within minutes, two more DRDs joined it. They swept up the broken glass and mopped the spilled alcohol, then scittered away. The first DRD circled John's feet, as though sniffing for more damage, then spun and scooted off. No trace of glass or alcohol remained. Flexing his shoulders, John kneaded the back of his neck. Why weren't there DRDs to deal with guilt and nightmares as easily? Sweep them under some metaphysical rug somewhere, out of mind?

His gaze fell to the table. Two bottles of fellip left. Not enough. Not enough to bring oblivion. Not enough to stop the dreams. Not when fellip nectar was weaker than PX beer. Sighing, John reached for the closer full bottle. It might not bring the blackness he courted, but at least it muted the pain. He unscrewed the top and raised the bottle to his lips. The bottle clicked against his teeth and cold fellip nectar spilled down the front of his gray tee-shirt.

"Hey," he protested, wiping himself off, "who bumped me?" Setting the bottle back on the table, he looked around. "Rygel? That you, little buddy? No problems, I'm okay." Come to think of it, this was one of the few times he'd ever been in the mess hall when Rygel wasn't all *too* obvious. "Rygel?" John looked under the table. No one. "Pilot? Wheresh - where is everybody?" Whoops. He'd better be careful, how he bespoke himself. Didn't want to sound drunk, even if - especially if he were.

"The others are sleeping, JohnCrichton," Pilot's disembodied voice stated. Without one of the clamshell workstations, the symbiont's hologram could not appear in the mess hall. "It is early morning, ship's time. If you were planetside you would call this - predawn?"

Predawn. So it'd be what, about 3:00 am, standard time? That seemed about right. A time when haunts - and guilty consciences - walked free. John looked around. The mess hall was still well-lit. In the corridor, however, dimmed lights cast long shadows, turning Moya's warm gold and bronze walls shifting shades of tan, the floor a deep brown. One more drink and he might think himself the sole survivor on the Nostromo. Would Pilot warn him if something with double-jawed metallic teeth and a mean disposition position waited out there for him?

And god, wasn't he the maudlin one tonight. The shadows were shadows, that was all. With only five passengers to provide for - six if he wanted to include Chiana, but he'd just as soon not, thank you - Moya had allowed herself the luxury of downtime. Not a bad idea for a pregnant Leviathan. Or a sleep-deprived, guilt-ridden human.

Lifting the bottle of fellip nectar again, he sploshed more alcohol down the front of his tee-shirt. He grunted. At this rate, Pilot had better find a commerce planet fast, before he ran out of clothes. Those clothes Aeryn and Rygel didn't appropriate in the first place. Setting the bottle down on the faux-wood table, John frowned, then announced, "Pilot, I'm drunk."

Pilot responded after an almost imperceptible pause. "I believe that to be an accurate summation of fact, JohnCrichton."

The comment startled John into laughter. Lifting the bottle high, he saluted the air. "Here's to you, Pilot. You're the best damn drinking buddy a guy could have."

Especially if what a guy really wanted was exactly what he couldn't have. At least not in this lifetime, and not in this end of the universe: a six-pack of beer, a rainy afternoon, and a certain stubborn, intelligent, brave young woman next to him... John rubbed his temples. Whoa, now. That way led to memories. The memories he drank to forget. Time to change the topic, think of something else. Something beside Aeryn...

"Hey, Pilot, you ever hear this one?" Hands beating out the time and rhythm in the air, he sang, "'Wha'd'ya do with a drunken human, wha'd'ya do with a drunken human, wha'd'ya do with a drunken human, ear-lie in the morning?'"

"I cannot recall your asking me a series of repeated questions with exactly that-  that scanning pattern before, JohnCrichton."

"Yeah, well, I guess that's a great big 'No,' right, guy? Anyway, the rest of it goes like this, 'Put 'im in the...'." A small sound, unidentifiable, hooked his attention. He glanced across to the mess hall entrance. "Oh, hell."

Aeryn Sun leaned against the wall just inside the entryway. John had no idea how long she'd been there, but she still wore the dress and shoes he'd given her for a 'disguise' earlier that day, while they were... while they were on Earth. She looked beautiful, of course, but then he'd never seen her looking less than beautiful, not even in full PeaceKeeper Commando regalia. For all they'd been through, she looked remarkably calm and composed. She raised her left brow and said, "And 'Oh, hell' to you, too, Crichton." Straightening, she strode to his table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. She wrinkled her nose. "You smell like dren."

He bristled. "You'd smell even worse if you'd drunk as much as me." She reached for the remaining bottle of fellip nectar and he batted her hand away. "Get your own. That's my bottle, my nectar, my drunk on."

She pulled back. "Ri-ight, your bottle." Her tone compared human generosity with Hynerian, and not for the better.

John stretched out a hand. "Don't, Aeryn. It's just, if you take that last bottle I'll sober up too quickly. And I want... I need to be drunk for a good long time to come."

Aeryn looked at the bottles lined up on the table, then back to John. She shook her head. "Crichton, you could drink ten times as much fellip and you would still sober up inside two arns. Fellip nectar is designed that way." She snorted. "Why do you think it's one of the few alcoholic beverages allowed on PeaceKeeper vessels?"

Drawing himself up, John stared at her from bloodshot eyes. "Okay," he said, "okay, let me see if I got this straight." As he made each point, he drew a series of concentric circles in the air between himself and Aeryn. "You load up a sixteen-wheeler with this stuff. You drink till your kidneys are floatin' in brew. You get a buzz on, but you can't keep it up?"

Aeryn smothered a laugh. "I think you're the one who can't keep it up, John."

He waved the words away. "Out of the gutter, girl. We ain't talkin' trash, here."

"Pity."

"Aeryn, I'm try'na be serious. You mind?"

She held her hands up in mock surrender. "Please. Be my guest."

He stared at her a moment, wondering what she'd had to drink before coming to the mess hall. He'd seen her somber, serious, dedicated, determined, worried, happy. He'd seen her frightened, and scared. For the crew, for him, even for herself. But he couldn't remember seeing her playful before, and Aeryn in a playful mood, after everything that had gone down on that pseudo-Earth, was enough to sober him. He'd pulled a weapon on her, for gods' sakes! Hell, just thinking on that would be enough to sober him even if his drunk had come from battery-fluid-strong, down-home white lightning, instead of pissant weak fellip nectar.

And for that matter, what was she doing in the mess hall at three in the morning? In a dress she hadn't been comfortable wearing in the first place? His brow wrinkled. "You drinking, Aeryn? Or another figment of my imagination, maybe?"

"Not a drop. And as real as rain."

"Yeah, well..." Rain. Right. Nobody'd ever warned him about Sebaceans being telepathic. "Anyway, like I was saying, what's the point of alcohol you can't get blitzed on?" He knew he was acting like a drunk, fixating on a specific part of the conversation and constantly returning to it, but any subject was worth repeating, if it would keep his thoughts from returning to the topic that really haunted him.

Leaning forward, Aeryn rested her arms on the table. The temperature in the mess rose abruptly. John tore his gaze away from her and fixed it on his decimated row of bottles. Aeryn didn't react to the shift in temperature. "Crichton," she said, "there are almost seven hundred PeaceKeepers, from the lowliest grot to the highest command staff, assigned to a carrier such as Crais's. Even more to a destroyer like the Zelbinion. And that's not counting ancillaries. Techs, medical staff, service workers... add them to the PeaceKeepers and the body count more than doubles."

He nodded. "That's a lot of bodies getting drunk."

She smiled, the left side of her mouth hooking upward. "And drunk bodies - especially drunk soldier bodies - sometimes fail to follow orders, sometimes go just a little wild, sometimes even ask questions. So..."

"...so let them have a few hours to relax, then, 'Wham!' back in PK mode."

"An elegant solution to an age-old problem, don't you think?"

He reared back. "Elegant? Aeryn, your 'elegant' solution is as sadistic as anything Durka's dreamt up! Don't you guys ever get the chance to just blow the whole thing off?"

"That is what our training is for, Crichton, to ensure there is no need to 'blow the whole thing off'." Her wry grin mocked herself as well as him. "It usually works."

"I guess." Damn. He could feel his intoxication slipping away. "Barring 'irreversible contamination' and exposure to new ideas, new cultures."

"New ways of thinking."

John reached for her hand. She made no attempt to pull away. "I'm sorry, Aeryn." So much for drinking to forget. He'd sobered up in even less than an arn.

"Sorry?"

"For everything."

"That's twice in two days you've apologized for 'everything.' For what, exactly? The Benalii War? The Lomish Incursions? The Sheyang Disputation? The..."

"Whoa, whoa." Laughing, he held his free hand up to stem the tide of wars and battles he'd never heard of. "Point taken. I'm not responsible for the woes of the universe." He shook his head. "Ya gotta admit, though, I'm responsible for an awful lot of your woes." And why wasn't she flaying him alive - literally as well as figuratively, if Rygel's tales of PeaceKeepers were to be believed - for everything he'd done to her? For all the problems he'd caused? For getting her exiled from her own kind, and almost dead more than once...

Aeryn looked down to where he still held her hand and smiled. Turning her hand so she could return his clasp, she said, "And you're also responsible for an awful lot of my joy. I think everything balances out in the end, don't you?"

Joy. Hope. Love. Before his thoughts could register, he pushed away any naming of the emotion that surged through him at her words. It was too soon to name it, to bring it into the harsh light of reality. It would burn itself out. "That doesn't sound like you, Aeryn."

"I know." She looked past him, her gaze seeming to take in another place, another time. "John, PeaceKeepers are trained to deny the truth about their emotions, to deny they even possess any." Her words came slowly, as though pulled from memories she'd hoped to leave behind. John didn't think she even realized that, this once, she wasn't identifying with the PeaceKeepers. They remained 'they' in her explanation. "During cadetship, PeaceKeepers are only allowed to be... analytical, rational, neutral. They're taught that lo- caring for another is the most dangerous emotion of all, because it endangers everyone else in the Command. So when PeaceKeepers come face to face with a truth, or an emotion, they can't accept, they... they go a little crazy. Like Crais, like Macton." In the slowness of her delivery, he might have missed her slight hesitation, but he felt her fingers tighten around his. "I don't want to go crazy, John." With her free hand, Aeryn gestured toward the line of bottles. "And if this is because you don't want to face the truth, well then, I think it's time we bot faced the whole truth."

"Right, Ms Sun. And just what is the 'whole truth'?" He pulled free, unsure just where her "truth" would take them. Determined to bear with it no matter where it would lead. He'd complained that Aeryn only rarely shared her thoughts with him? Well, no more. And how much better he could understand her now!

"I know you'd like to bear the entire blame for what happened in the wormhole, John, but remember, we chose to come looking for you. We knew before we left Moya there was a chance we'd be greeted with suspicion, or even hostility, on your world. Frell, we all have stories of catastrophic first contacts with planet-bound cultures." She paused, then said, "When you told me you'd found your wormhole and asked me to go with you, I had to say no, to just let you go. I'd already said good-by to my entire life... And now, just when I was learning to care... you wanted me to leave Moya? To leave D'Argo and the others?"

He stared, fascinated, at her hands. Her voice was calm now, uninflected. Almost she could be discussing someone else's emotions and reactions. But her hands had tightened into claws that sought succor one from the other. "How could I go to Earth with you, John?" She shook her head. "It was too much, too much to ask, and too soon to ask it. I could not do it. Not then." A deep, shuddering sigh. For a moment he could not tell if the sound came from Aeryn or himself. "You promised me I would never be alone," she said, "but now... now you were going, and I could not, would not try to stop you, and I would be more alone than ever."


Go on to part two