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fic_promptly prompts or for prompts from scribblesinink, who also betaed all the pieces. Lengths are 460, 700, 800, 235, 545, 355, 235, 580, 285, 220 and 645 words. Mostly John/Aeryn, but also appearances by Zhaan, D'Argo, Jool and Rygel.
Prompt: Author’s Choice - Author’s Choice - aliens speak perfect English, albeit with American accents
Perception
"Zhaan?" John hoisted himself onto a crate in the maintenance bay, drawing up his knees and folding his arms on top of them. "Can I ask you another question?" He hated bothering her, but she was the only one on this ship who seemed willing to help him out rather than laugh at him.
"Of course." She glanced up briefly from the medicine she was decanting from a larger bottle to a smaller one.
"Those translator microbes...." John reached down and scratched his ankle where the DRD had injected him, though it didn't hurt anywhere but in his head. "You all speak in your own languages, but I hear everything in my language, right?"
Zhaan nodded. "That is correct."
"So... why don't I hear everything in my own accent?"
"You do not?" Zhaan's brow twitched in surprise, though she didn't look up.
"No. It's English, all right, but it doesn't sound American. If anything, it sounds... Australian?"
Zhaan carefully stoppered the bottle she'd filled and then looked up at him. "That is another place on your planet?"
John nodded. "I spent a few weeks there when we were testing my module. They speak English too, but the accent's different."
Zhaan pressed her lips together for a moment, clearly thinking, before she replied. "I believe the translator microbes not only use the language you hear but also other cues about how you perceive the speaker, and then supply a suitable accent. You, for instance," she reached out and picked up another empty bottle, "sound to me a little as if you come from our central continent, where our people are mostly simple laborers." She made an apologetic gesture with her hands. "Forgive me, John. There is no offense intended. I know you are an intelligent man. But I also know your planet's technologies are primitive."
He nodded, accepting the apology, though he made a mental note not to ask any of the others what he sounded like to them. "So in my head, you're all Australians?"
Zhaan flashed him a brief smile and went back to filling the bottle. "Yes. There is something about how you see us and how you see these... Orstrayluns that is the same."
John ran his thumb over his lower lip, thinking. At last he said, "I guess I felt a long way from home when I was there. Just about the furthest I could go and still speak English. And I guess they felt a bit... weird to me. Alien." He made the same gesture Zhaan had. "No offense."
Zhaan laughed softly. "None taken. You are a very long way from home, John, and we are definitely 'aliens' in your eyes. But perhaps we will start to sound more like your people once you know us better...."
oOo
Prompt: any, any, Purposefully erasing one's own memory (a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?)
A cure for what ails you
"Distillate of Laka." Noranti held out the vial: dark and misshapen and looking like nothing good would ever come from it. "One whiff and the pain is gone, for a time."
John got up slowly, hesitating for an instant before he took it. Not that he was going to use it, but he knew the old woman meant well, and she'd only go on at him if he didn't accept the damn thing.
Aeryn was sitting in the hallway, where she knew he'd have to pass. Setting her ambush like the good little soldier she was.
"I hear I was a princess."
He broke stride, halted.
Yes, she'd been a princess: a horrible exaggeration of the worst stereotypes of the Southern Belles he'd known growing up. Hedged around and made unobtainable by Crais and Harvey. And not the game's princess, Stark's princess.
But Aeryn was his princess. Always and forever. From the moment he'd met her, he'd never been able to see the end.
The vial in his pocket pressed against his hip. One whiff and the pain would be gone....
He strode on. That wasn't the answer.
oOo
She was everywhere. No, that wasn't true. It just felt like she was everywhere. Even when she wasn't actually there, she was in his mind, in his memories. When she was there, it was a thousand times worse. He still wanted to touch her, to talk to her, to make her laugh. Even though she'd brought Scorpius on board and forced that promise from him; even though she hadn't told him about the baby; even though she'd hurt him more badly than anyone before, than he'd ever thought he could be hurt....
He loved her and he didn't know how to stop loving her.
Noranti's vial—Laka, was that what she'd called it?—was sitting on the table in his quarters where he'd put it down. One whiff and the pain would be gone....
He reached out his hand.
oOo
She was trying so hard, that was the thing. She knew she'd frelled up and she was trying to fix it. With the imperfect emotional toolkit her Peacekeeper upbringing had given her. Though, God knows, this stuff was hard enough even if you grew up human.
He wasn't doing such a great job himself.
And now she was talking English again. The other John had begun it, a few words, but he thought she'd stopped learning after that John had died. Then she'd started up once more. He'd sometimes stand out of sight watching her, seeing how hard she was working and how much she was trying. Another thing he needed to forget.
He reached into his pocket for the Laka. "Vibe," he corrected her. "It's a really bad vibe." A sniff. A second sniff, because one wasn't really cutting it any more....
oOo
Wormholes.
Wormholes, wormholes, wormholes. Scorpius wouldn't shut the frell up about them. But John wasn't going to give Scorpius wormholes. There was nothing in this universe would make him give Scorpius wormholes. Except....
Aeryn. Aeryn and her baby. He didn't care any more who the father was, or that she hadn't trusted him enough to tell him, with all its complications, as soon as she knew. It was Aeryn's baby and that was all that mattered. Even if the child was Velorek's, or the father was some other peacekeeper whose name she couldn't even remember, it didn't matter.
Only Aeryn. You could stick him back into the Aurora Chair, chop of his limbs one by one and feed them to him, shoot him into space, and he wouldn't blab. But harm one hair on Aeryn's head and the universe could go hang. He didn't want it to be that way: the lives of millions of people should matter more than one life.
But it was her life. And Scorpius could never know.
He took a sniff of the Laka. Another sniff. Another. The vial was almost empty. He hoped Noranti had noticed how quickly he was going through it now and that he'd find more in his quarters when he got back to Moya. Maybe something even stronger. Because, damn, this wasn't going to work much longer.
oOo
Prompt: Any, any, on the road between point A and point B.
At Close Quarters
"I've been thinking." Aeryn stopped next to John as he nibbled at a few tasteless food cubes. "Your combat skills are... inadequate at best."
"Gee, thanks." John pushed the food cubes around on the tray, trying to decide if the pink ones or the yellow ones tasted worst.
"Perhaps I should have said laughable." Aeryn sounded mildly annoyed. "But I can teach you if you like."
John turned and looked up at her, startled. "You're okay with that?"
She held his gaze for a moment, before her eyes slid away. "It will make you a more useful member of the crew." Her tone was curt, with an edge to it that he'd learned signified discomfort.
He considered the proposition. She did have a point: the kind of moves that might have worked well in a scuffle with a friend or in a bar brawl back when he was in college had proved less than helpful in this part of the universe and he was tired of getting beat up. Although he had a nasty feeling the training would result in more than a few bruises. "Okay." He took in the fact she was wearing her workout gear. "Now?"
She shrugged. "If you wish."
oOo
She made him take off his boots once they reached the chamber that had been set up as a gym. Moving them into the middle of the mat, she began with the basics, showing him how to stand and how to block simple blows without leaving himself open to an attack from another quarter. After that, they sparred for a little and damn, she was fast: he was too slow to counter her once she saw he had the right idea and picked up speed. She hit hard, too: a couple of the blows that got through left him doubled over.
"You can teach me to hit like that?" he gasped, after the second time.
"Uh-huh." She waited until he'd caught his breath and straightened up. "But perhaps we should leave for this now. I should teach you how to deal with an enemy who attacks you from behind."
"Okay." Warily, he watched her turn and back toward him. She reached back and grabbed his right arm, wrapping it around her neck and drawing him closer so that her body was pressed back against his. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her hair, his other hand automatically coming up to rest on her waist. God, she felt good....
"So, your enemy has hold of you so." Her words brought him back to the present and her current intentions. Which were to show him how to escape his hold on her, not encourage it. He was half expecting her to use some kind of judo throw and flip him, so it took him entirely by surprise when she dropped abruptly, somehow making herself incredibly heavy so he couldn't hold on to her as she slid out of his grasp. As he let go of her, she whirled around and leveled him with a swipe of the arm around the back of his knees. He tumbled backwards, landing on the mat with the breath knocked out of him. She immediately pushed upright, back into her fighting stance, dancing away from him as she looked down at him.
"I guess that works," he wheezed. He held out his hand to her, and she helped pull him back to his feet.
"You bend your knees so." She showed him how she'd managed to drop so quickly. "Now you try."
Stepping behind him, she wrapped her arm about his body. God, that felt even better than the other way around.... He swallowed hard. Maybe they should call it quits for the day once he'd made the attempt, before she noticed the effect she was having on him.
Forcing himself to concentrate, he did his best to replicate what she'd done. He managed the first part, dropping out of her grasp, but she was out of reach of all but an ineffective swipe of his fingertips by the time he spun around. He put his hand down on the mat to steady himself.
"Good. That was good."
Looking up, he saw she was giving him one of her tense half-smiles. Which was better than he'd expected. He hauled himself to his feet, wincing slightly as the punishment he'd taken began to catch up with him. "Perhaps we should stop now," he suggested. "While I can still walk."
"Yes, of course." She nodded. "Tomorrow?"
"Sure." He suspected he'd be even stiffer tomorrow, but he had learned something. And enjoyed himself at times, perhaps rather too much....
Her smiled widened a little and she reached out and squeezed his arm briefly. "You did well today, John. There is hope for you yet."
He turned to watched her as she left the chamber. Maybe more than one kind of hope....
oOo
Prompt: Any, any, 6 Unbelievable Facts Your Psychologist Isn't Telling You
6 Unbelievable Facts Your (Uncharted Territories) Psychologist Isn't Telling You
You already know that getting shot through a wormhole, stranded in the Uncharted Territories on a living ship full of escaped prisoners, and being hunted by both an insane military commander and an obsessed military scientist will frell with your mental health. But here's six fun facts your psychologist won't tell you.
1. No one will ever get your pop-culture references. No, not even when you try to explain them. Especially not when you try to explain them.
2. Neural clones go both ways. Harvey may be pouring your mental pathways into his chip, but his personality is leaking out into your neurons. Even if you get that chip yanked out, that doesn't mean bye-bye Harvey.
3. Everyone will frell with your head: Ancients, Scarrans, Peacekeepers, Delvians, Traskans....
4. There are no good drugs in the Uncharted Territories. Whether you take them willingly or accidentally, or have them blown in your face by mad old women, none of them will be fun. (Best stick to the fellip nectar.)
5. When someone suggests you have either got to stop pointing guns at people or get a bigger gun, they probably don't mean that big: destroying the galaxy is a little extreme, don't you think? Though it might finally make people listen.
6. There's only one equation that matters and it doesn't involve wormholes. Just a little basic biology and biochemistry and an A, a C and a B.
oOo
Prompt: any, any, team spirit. Based on John and D'Argo drinking something very like a tequila slammer in "Incubator"
Practical Applications
"Bubbles?" D'Argo raises his eyebrows.
"Yeah. Fizzy drinks get you drunk faster. And they can make dren like this taste better." John gestures with his cup, which is half-filled with the cheap moonshine they picked up on the last commerce planet. He's already a little drunk, but he wishes he were a lot more wasted. Maybe then he'd be able to stop thinking about the other John, the copy, on Talyn with Aeryn.
"Bubbles?" D'Argo raises his eyebrows even higher, still sounding unconvinced.
"Uh-huh." Spotting Jool in the doorway, looking as if she's unsure whether to join them or come back later, he appeals to her. "Hey, Jool. You're a party kind of gal. Fizzy drinks are fun, right?"
She gets that expression on her face, the one that suggests she's trying to decide if his question is completely idiotic or merely asinine, before she shrugs and walks into the chamber. "I guess."
John waves his cup at her. "We should make some. Fizzy stuff. You're Miss Junior Chemistry Set, right?"
Jool glances across at D'Argo, who merely rolls his eyes. She turns back to John, frowning. "I guess."
oOo
Two hours later, John's very, very sober and wondering why the hell he wanted them to do this. He's lost count of how many times Jool's snapped "Do it yourself, then!" and had to be talked out of storming off. D'Argo's merely making disapproving noises now, which beats his earlier series of sarcastic suggestions.
But they've found something to sweeten the water and something to make carbon dioxide and a way to force the carbon dioxide into the water. Finally, Jool unfastens the flask of homemade soda and holds it out to John.
He pours some into a cup and regards with satisfaction the bubbles that are clinging to the inside of the cup and rising up through the liquid to burst on the surface. Taking a cautious sip, he decides it's no Mountain Dew, but close enough.
Grabbing the bottle of booze he brought with him to the maintenance bay, he adds a shot to the soda. Covering the top of the cup with his hand, he slams it down on to the workbench, grinning as he feels the drink fizzing up against his palm. Hastily, he downs the mixture in one.
"What are you doing?" D'Argo and Jool demand almost in unison.
John smirks, already feeling a little lightheaded from the bubbles up his nose and the alcohol in his stomach. "Damn, that feels good." He holds out the cup. "It's called a slammer. Or a muppet. Try it."
D'Argo takes the cup gingerly.
oOo
Another two hours pass. John peers woozily up at Chiana, standing over him in the maintenance bay.
"What the hezmana happened here?"
"Uh...." John tries to lift up the empty flask and show it to her. D'Argo's head slides off John's left shoulder and he slumps face down in John's lap. Jool mutters something incomprehensible in her sleep as she settles herself more comfortably against John's right shoulder.
Chiana sniffs. "Good thing Pilot and I didn't want you for anything important."
As she stalks out of the room, John lets his head fall back against the wall. "Yeah. Fizz. Fun," he mumbles as he falls asleep again.
oOo
Prompt: any, any, losing the one thing that matters
Something Borrowed, Something Blue
John leans back against the wall, his closed notebook drooping forgotten in one hand as he stares out of Talyn's window. The bright star in the center of the view is glittering at him, as wordless as Aeryn earlier when she helped him out of his spacesuit and checked him over for injuries, her hands brisk and not particularly gentle.
He doesn't know why Talyn had a change of heart and opened the door for him at the last moment, though he's grateful for it. He's come close to death too many times now not to appreciate the reprieve, even though a part of him has been dead inside ever since he saw those security logs.
Against the quiet, ever-present hum of the ship, he hears the whine of a DRD approaching. He doesn't turn his head to look, but he's aware of the sound growing much closer as the DRD climbs the wall beside him.
"Found another maintenance job needs doing over my head, huh?" he mutters when it stops.
There's silence for a full thirty seconds, before the DRD beeps. Talyn's DRDs are larger and even crankier than Moya's, but the beep sounds... anxious?
John turns his head—and blinks. The DRD is holding out a pulse pistol. Not just any old pulse pistol. Winona.
He guesses it's a peace offering from Talyn, even if the little drannit did get the DRDs to steal it in the first place.
"Uh, thanks." He takes Winona and the DRD dips its arm in acknowledgment and gives a pleased bleep. John has no idea how he can tell it's pleased—it's surely the same bleep—but he can. With another bleep, the DRD reverses back down the wall and away.
John sits looking at Winona in one hand and his notebook in the other. Then he raises his head to look back out at the stars. Back out at that one unreachable star that is always at the heart of his sky.
Hanging Winona on the wall, he flips the notebook open to a fresh page. Winona's come back to him. Pity she's going to be the only one.
oOo
Prompt: Farscape, John, love letters
An Astronaut's Guide to Love Letters
He doesn't write her love letters. For one thing, she can't read English. For another, she'd probably laugh at him and call him a sentimental fool.
She'd be right, too: he'd walk through fire for her. Fly too close to a sun in a transport pod. Take a spacewalk with maybe not enough oxygen for the task.
Instead, he lies next to one of Talyn's windows and maps the stars in the notebook he picked up a few commerce planets back. He wonders if the other John, back on Moya, still makes maps as well, if he's managed to find another notebook, if not another IASA pen.
Though maybe it would serve him right for taking the notebook and Winona—when he has Aeryn, too—if the other John were to find a way to get back to IASA, to Earth, to Dad and Susan and Liv.
If the other John is making star maps, they probably look much the same as his own. After all, it's not as if they're any real use, when it's all done by eye and being able to starburst across half a galaxy in a few seconds means figuring out parallax is a bitch.
Yet he still makes his maps. Doesn't write love letters, but still marks that bright central spot in the middle of the page each time, and each time carefully labels it the same way, writing each letter with love.
oOo
Prompt: John is apparently sufficiently skilled at flying the transport pod in later seasons that Aeryn is willing to let him fly it even when she's in it.
Taking Wing
I.
"You really want to do this again?" Aeryn followed John across the transport hangar.
"Yup. You got anything better to do?" He glanced back over his shoulder at her as he climbed the steps up into one of the pods.
She grimaced. "Not really, no. I'm just not sure what else there is to learn."
"There's always something new to learn." He dropped himself into the main pilot's seat and began flicking switches. "Besides, you're a good teacher."
"I am?" She gave him a surprised look as she took the other seat.
"Yes, you are." He spoke in a distracted tone as he went on prepping the pod. "When you're not yelling at me."
Aeryn strapped herself in. "I only yell at you when you deserve it."
John grinned to himself. "I know. Pilot? We're ready. Hangar doors please."
"Yes, Commander." There was a moment's pause as Moya's systems went through the necessary cycles, and then they were lifting off and heading out.
John set a course away from the planet they were orbiting. "Thought we might try a few simulations of systems failures...?" He glanced across at Aeryn.
She rolled her eyes. "Very well."
John smirked to himself as they began setting up the first of them. Yes, these sessions were teaching him some valuable skills that could save his life one day. But mostly he just liked having an excuse to hang with Aeryn and have her get close to him as she showed him how to steer and what to press.
Even the yelling was kinda fun.
II.
"You really want to do this again?" Aeryn tried to keep the impatience out of her voice as she followed John up the steps into the transport pod. Not that she objected to him getting more experience in flying the pod: he'd been doing this for a half cycle or more and would still have struggled to pass stage one training. She just didn't see why he had to keep dragging her along.
For one thing, he was so damn slow to pick anything up. And he argued all the time. Well, maybe not all the time, but often enough. She tried to be patient, she really did, but she wasn't a teacher; she'd flunked that part of her aptitude tests decisively. Mostly she managed to bite her tongue—right up until she snapped: she couldn't recall one of these training runs that hadn't ended up with her yelling at him and grabbing the controls.
The strange thing was, John didn't seem to mind the yelling. Or her being sarcastic. And sometimes she even found she was enjoying herself, when things were going smoothly and he wasn't trying to steer them into a planet or tear the pod in half with a boneheaded maneuver. He'd tell her things about Earth. About what it was like to have been born on a planet and not in space. What snow was like, and eating sun-warmed figs straight from the tree, and catching fish in a lake with his father when he was a boy.
His world was so small and his people so limited, barely reaching out to the stars. Yet she liked listening to his stories, listening to him talk as she leaned close to help correct his course or show him which controls to press. Liked the way he looked at her sometimes when he thought she wasn't looking at him.
Maybe these training sessions weren't so bad after all.
oOo
Prompt: John's thoughts after Aeryn offers him the compatibility test
Passing the Test
John would have been happy to go on kissing Aeryn a while longer, but for her, he guessed, it was all about the test, because she drew back as soon as she could.
He waited for her to say something, but she just looked at him for a moment, her face guarded, before turning on her heel and stalking away.
He didn't need her to speak, though. The taste on the tip of his tongue as he watched her leave was sweet: sweeter even than it had been with Katralla. Although maybe it just seemed sweeter because it was Aeryn, because kissing her was sweet enough without the test.
He didn't need her to speak even without that sweetness. That she'd offered him the test at all, despite her evident reluctance, against her better judgment, told him something other than that they could have healthy children together. It told him that she wanted to. That, for all she kept pushing him away and walling herself off from him, she wanted to be with him as much as he wanted to be with her.
He understood, a little, how afraid she was. Heck, it scared him too, how much he wanted to make it work between them. But the knowledge that she wanted that too, even if she wasn't ready yet, gave him hope. Gave him patience. He'd thought he needed to push her and nudge her and guide her until she could see what he could see. Now he knew she could already see it. She was already walking the path beside him. He just had to wait for her, to match his steps to hers, and they'd reach their destination in the end—together.
oOo
Prompt: Farscape, Aeryn, chicks were born to give you fever
Twitterpated
"...wasn't trying to kill me. The enemy was a puzzle, with lots of different pieces...."
Aeryn's face is scrunched up with irritation and frustration, but John thinks she's still beautiful. In fact, as she goes on ranting about how she solved Rygel's little explosive problem, she looks more beautiful to him than ever.
It's not that anything has changed about her physically: she's still the same great-looking chick who was very much not what he was expecting to see when the helmet came off and he first laid eyes on her. And it's not that he didn't know already she was smart and capable: heck, she's already saved his ass more times than he can remember and she can handle her prowler better than most of those loud-mouthed Air Force jocks in the astronaut program at IASA could handle their F-16s. Flying something that complex as well as she does takes a lot of smarts. But Aeryn talking science? That's—.
"What?" she snaps at him and he realizes he's staring at her slack-jawed.
He brushes it off, makes a joke of it, although he also makes it clear—he hopes!—that he likes this new direction. But thinking back later, he sees this is the moment when he stops being merely very attracted to this woman and begins to fall in love.
oOo
Prompt: Any, Any character who could reasonably be considered an adult, "I need an adult!"
A Helping Hand
Walking past the open door to one of the cargo bays, John thought he heard a faint voice crying, "Help!"
He'd been on Moya long enough that he automatically pulled his pulse pistol from its holster and cautiously advanced through the door. "Who's there?"
"Over here!" The voice was faint and hoarse, but it sounded like Rygel. Didn't mean it was Rygel, of course. He kept his weapon at the ready as he rounded a storage crate and—.
"Whoa!" He pulled up sharply at the sight of Rygel's rear end sticking out of a narrow access hatch into a transport crate. Did the royal so-and-so ever wear pants?
Holstering his pistol, he moved toward the crate. "Gotta problem there, Sparky?"
"Crichton? Is that you?" Rygel sounded somewhere between relieved and mortified. "I'm stuck."
John flipped down Rygel's robe—he didn't need to look at that any longer than he had to—and seized Rygel around the middle. "What were you doing, anyway?" he asked, as he tried to pull Rygel back out.
"Just—oof!—checking on a few things," Rygel puffed, not moving.
"Right...." John didn't need translator microbes to turn that into trying to steal them. He tugged again, but Rygel seemed to be well and truly stuck. "Why didn't you use your comms to call for help?"
"I tried." Rygel let out another pained grunt as John pulled harder. "But I knocked my comms unit off and it's somewhere in the bottom of the crate. Ow! Watch it!" That last was directed at John's latest attempt to pull him free.
"Trying to help here," John snapped back. He wasn't surprised he was hurting Rygel; his stumpy body seemed to be firmly wedged in place. "I'll get Zhaan and Aeryn. Maybe—"
"No!" Rygel kicked his legs. "Don't! I don't want them to see me like this!"
John leaned a hand against the crate, panting, while he contemplated the situation. "Then what do you suggest?" To his disgust, his voice came out high-pitched. The little bastard must have farted.
"Just get me out!"
"Hmm." John took a pace back and took another look. The little so-and-so had gotten himself that far in somehow, so it must be possible to back him out the same way.
A memory came back to him: a kid at school getting his head stuck in some railings. Various suggestions, largely involving butter and other lubricants, had been made—until another child's mother had stepped up, twisted the kid's head a little and, somehow, the boy had popped free a moment later, rather sore but otherwise none the worse for wear. "I'm a midwife. It's like delivering a baby," she'd explained. "You just need to get everything at the right angle."
Well, it was worth a try. Likely Rygel hadn't been lined up quite the same way when he'd first wriggled into the opening.
Putting his hands back on Rygel's butt, John began to slowly turn him.
"What are you doing?" Rygel protested.
"Trying to get you out." John was waiting for the moment when he could sense less resistance. It came, and he tugged as well as turned.
With a sudden pop, Rygel came free. John staggered backward and sat down hard on the floor, Rygel on top of him.
"I'm free!" Rygel waved his arms happily in the air.
"Yes, you are." John picked him up and turned him around, so they were face to face, and gave him a shake. "Don't ever do that again, or next time I'll leave you for Zhaan and Aeryn to find."
Rygel looked crestfallen for a moment. "All right," he muttered ungraciously. After a moment, he peered up at John, his eyes gleaming and his mouth twisted into his version of a winning smile. "Don't suppose you could rescue my comms unit as well, could you? That way I won't have to explain how I lost it...."
fic_promptly prompts or for prompts from scribblesinink, who also betaed all the pieces. Lengths are 460, 700, 800, 235, 545, 355, 235, 580, 285, 220 and 645 words. Mostly John/Aeryn, but also appearances by Zhaan, D'Argo, Jool and Rygel.Prompt: Author’s Choice - Author’s Choice - aliens speak perfect English, albeit with American accents
Perception
"Zhaan?" John hoisted himself onto a crate in the maintenance bay, drawing up his knees and folding his arms on top of them. "Can I ask you another question?" He hated bothering her, but she was the only one on this ship who seemed willing to help him out rather than laugh at him.
"Of course." She glanced up briefly from the medicine she was decanting from a larger bottle to a smaller one.
"Those translator microbes...." John reached down and scratched his ankle where the DRD had injected him, though it didn't hurt anywhere but in his head. "You all speak in your own languages, but I hear everything in my language, right?"
Zhaan nodded. "That is correct."
"So... why don't I hear everything in my own accent?"
"You do not?" Zhaan's brow twitched in surprise, though she didn't look up.
"No. It's English, all right, but it doesn't sound American. If anything, it sounds... Australian?"
Zhaan carefully stoppered the bottle she'd filled and then looked up at him. "That is another place on your planet?"
John nodded. "I spent a few weeks there when we were testing my module. They speak English too, but the accent's different."
Zhaan pressed her lips together for a moment, clearly thinking, before she replied. "I believe the translator microbes not only use the language you hear but also other cues about how you perceive the speaker, and then supply a suitable accent. You, for instance," she reached out and picked up another empty bottle, "sound to me a little as if you come from our central continent, where our people are mostly simple laborers." She made an apologetic gesture with her hands. "Forgive me, John. There is no offense intended. I know you are an intelligent man. But I also know your planet's technologies are primitive."
He nodded, accepting the apology, though he made a mental note not to ask any of the others what he sounded like to them. "So in my head, you're all Australians?"
Zhaan flashed him a brief smile and went back to filling the bottle. "Yes. There is something about how you see us and how you see these... Orstrayluns that is the same."
John ran his thumb over his lower lip, thinking. At last he said, "I guess I felt a long way from home when I was there. Just about the furthest I could go and still speak English. And I guess they felt a bit... weird to me. Alien." He made the same gesture Zhaan had. "No offense."
Zhaan laughed softly. "None taken. You are a very long way from home, John, and we are definitely 'aliens' in your eyes. But perhaps we will start to sound more like your people once you know us better...."
Prompt: any, any, Purposefully erasing one's own memory (a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind?)
A cure for what ails you
"Distillate of Laka." Noranti held out the vial: dark and misshapen and looking like nothing good would ever come from it. "One whiff and the pain is gone, for a time."
John got up slowly, hesitating for an instant before he took it. Not that he was going to use it, but he knew the old woman meant well, and she'd only go on at him if he didn't accept the damn thing.
Aeryn was sitting in the hallway, where she knew he'd have to pass. Setting her ambush like the good little soldier she was.
"I hear I was a princess."
He broke stride, halted.
Yes, she'd been a princess: a horrible exaggeration of the worst stereotypes of the Southern Belles he'd known growing up. Hedged around and made unobtainable by Crais and Harvey. And not the game's princess, Stark's princess.
But Aeryn was his princess. Always and forever. From the moment he'd met her, he'd never been able to see the end.
The vial in his pocket pressed against his hip. One whiff and the pain would be gone....
He strode on. That wasn't the answer.
She was everywhere. No, that wasn't true. It just felt like she was everywhere. Even when she wasn't actually there, she was in his mind, in his memories. When she was there, it was a thousand times worse. He still wanted to touch her, to talk to her, to make her laugh. Even though she'd brought Scorpius on board and forced that promise from him; even though she hadn't told him about the baby; even though she'd hurt him more badly than anyone before, than he'd ever thought he could be hurt....
He loved her and he didn't know how to stop loving her.
Noranti's vial—Laka, was that what she'd called it?—was sitting on the table in his quarters where he'd put it down. One whiff and the pain would be gone....
He reached out his hand.
She was trying so hard, that was the thing. She knew she'd frelled up and she was trying to fix it. With the imperfect emotional toolkit her Peacekeeper upbringing had given her. Though, God knows, this stuff was hard enough even if you grew up human.
He wasn't doing such a great job himself.
And now she was talking English again. The other John had begun it, a few words, but he thought she'd stopped learning after that John had died. Then she'd started up once more. He'd sometimes stand out of sight watching her, seeing how hard she was working and how much she was trying. Another thing he needed to forget.
He reached into his pocket for the Laka. "Vibe," he corrected her. "It's a really bad vibe." A sniff. A second sniff, because one wasn't really cutting it any more....
Wormholes.
Wormholes, wormholes, wormholes. Scorpius wouldn't shut the frell up about them. But John wasn't going to give Scorpius wormholes. There was nothing in this universe would make him give Scorpius wormholes. Except....
Aeryn. Aeryn and her baby. He didn't care any more who the father was, or that she hadn't trusted him enough to tell him, with all its complications, as soon as she knew. It was Aeryn's baby and that was all that mattered. Even if the child was Velorek's, or the father was some other peacekeeper whose name she couldn't even remember, it didn't matter.
Only Aeryn. You could stick him back into the Aurora Chair, chop of his limbs one by one and feed them to him, shoot him into space, and he wouldn't blab. But harm one hair on Aeryn's head and the universe could go hang. He didn't want it to be that way: the lives of millions of people should matter more than one life.
But it was her life. And Scorpius could never know.
He took a sniff of the Laka. Another sniff. Another. The vial was almost empty. He hoped Noranti had noticed how quickly he was going through it now and that he'd find more in his quarters when he got back to Moya. Maybe something even stronger. Because, damn, this wasn't going to work much longer.
Prompt: Any, any, on the road between point A and point B.
At Close Quarters
"I've been thinking." Aeryn stopped next to John as he nibbled at a few tasteless food cubes. "Your combat skills are... inadequate at best."
"Gee, thanks." John pushed the food cubes around on the tray, trying to decide if the pink ones or the yellow ones tasted worst.
"Perhaps I should have said laughable." Aeryn sounded mildly annoyed. "But I can teach you if you like."
John turned and looked up at her, startled. "You're okay with that?"
She held his gaze for a moment, before her eyes slid away. "It will make you a more useful member of the crew." Her tone was curt, with an edge to it that he'd learned signified discomfort.
He considered the proposition. She did have a point: the kind of moves that might have worked well in a scuffle with a friend or in a bar brawl back when he was in college had proved less than helpful in this part of the universe and he was tired of getting beat up. Although he had a nasty feeling the training would result in more than a few bruises. "Okay." He took in the fact she was wearing her workout gear. "Now?"
She shrugged. "If you wish."
She made him take off his boots once they reached the chamber that had been set up as a gym. Moving them into the middle of the mat, she began with the basics, showing him how to stand and how to block simple blows without leaving himself open to an attack from another quarter. After that, they sparred for a little and damn, she was fast: he was too slow to counter her once she saw he had the right idea and picked up speed. She hit hard, too: a couple of the blows that got through left him doubled over.
"You can teach me to hit like that?" he gasped, after the second time.
"Uh-huh." She waited until he'd caught his breath and straightened up. "But perhaps we should leave for this now. I should teach you how to deal with an enemy who attacks you from behind."
"Okay." Warily, he watched her turn and back toward him. She reached back and grabbed his right arm, wrapping it around her neck and drawing him closer so that her body was pressed back against his. He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of her hair, his other hand automatically coming up to rest on her waist. God, she felt good....
"So, your enemy has hold of you so." Her words brought him back to the present and her current intentions. Which were to show him how to escape his hold on her, not encourage it. He was half expecting her to use some kind of judo throw and flip him, so it took him entirely by surprise when she dropped abruptly, somehow making herself incredibly heavy so he couldn't hold on to her as she slid out of his grasp. As he let go of her, she whirled around and leveled him with a swipe of the arm around the back of his knees. He tumbled backwards, landing on the mat with the breath knocked out of him. She immediately pushed upright, back into her fighting stance, dancing away from him as she looked down at him.
"I guess that works," he wheezed. He held out his hand to her, and she helped pull him back to his feet.
"You bend your knees so." She showed him how she'd managed to drop so quickly. "Now you try."
Stepping behind him, she wrapped her arm about his body. God, that felt even better than the other way around.... He swallowed hard. Maybe they should call it quits for the day once he'd made the attempt, before she noticed the effect she was having on him.
Forcing himself to concentrate, he did his best to replicate what she'd done. He managed the first part, dropping out of her grasp, but she was out of reach of all but an ineffective swipe of his fingertips by the time he spun around. He put his hand down on the mat to steady himself.
"Good. That was good."
Looking up, he saw she was giving him one of her tense half-smiles. Which was better than he'd expected. He hauled himself to his feet, wincing slightly as the punishment he'd taken began to catch up with him. "Perhaps we should stop now," he suggested. "While I can still walk."
"Yes, of course." She nodded. "Tomorrow?"
"Sure." He suspected he'd be even stiffer tomorrow, but he had learned something. And enjoyed himself at times, perhaps rather too much....
Her smiled widened a little and she reached out and squeezed his arm briefly. "You did well today, John. There is hope for you yet."
He turned to watched her as she left the chamber. Maybe more than one kind of hope....
Prompt: Any, any, 6 Unbelievable Facts Your Psychologist Isn't Telling You
6 Unbelievable Facts Your (Uncharted Territories) Psychologist Isn't Telling You
You already know that getting shot through a wormhole, stranded in the Uncharted Territories on a living ship full of escaped prisoners, and being hunted by both an insane military commander and an obsessed military scientist will frell with your mental health. But here's six fun facts your psychologist won't tell you.
1. No one will ever get your pop-culture references. No, not even when you try to explain them. Especially not when you try to explain them.
2. Neural clones go both ways. Harvey may be pouring your mental pathways into his chip, but his personality is leaking out into your neurons. Even if you get that chip yanked out, that doesn't mean bye-bye Harvey.
3. Everyone will frell with your head: Ancients, Scarrans, Peacekeepers, Delvians, Traskans....
4. There are no good drugs in the Uncharted Territories. Whether you take them willingly or accidentally, or have them blown in your face by mad old women, none of them will be fun. (Best stick to the fellip nectar.)
5. When someone suggests you have either got to stop pointing guns at people or get a bigger gun, they probably don't mean that big: destroying the galaxy is a little extreme, don't you think? Though it might finally make people listen.
6. There's only one equation that matters and it doesn't involve wormholes. Just a little basic biology and biochemistry and an A, a C and a B.
Prompt: any, any, team spirit. Based on John and D'Argo drinking something very like a tequila slammer in "Incubator"
Practical Applications
"Bubbles?" D'Argo raises his eyebrows.
"Yeah. Fizzy drinks get you drunk faster. And they can make dren like this taste better." John gestures with his cup, which is half-filled with the cheap moonshine they picked up on the last commerce planet. He's already a little drunk, but he wishes he were a lot more wasted. Maybe then he'd be able to stop thinking about the other John, the copy, on Talyn with Aeryn.
"Bubbles?" D'Argo raises his eyebrows even higher, still sounding unconvinced.
"Uh-huh." Spotting Jool in the doorway, looking as if she's unsure whether to join them or come back later, he appeals to her. "Hey, Jool. You're a party kind of gal. Fizzy drinks are fun, right?"
She gets that expression on her face, the one that suggests she's trying to decide if his question is completely idiotic or merely asinine, before she shrugs and walks into the chamber. "I guess."
John waves his cup at her. "We should make some. Fizzy stuff. You're Miss Junior Chemistry Set, right?"
Jool glances across at D'Argo, who merely rolls his eyes. She turns back to John, frowning. "I guess."
Two hours later, John's very, very sober and wondering why the hell he wanted them to do this. He's lost count of how many times Jool's snapped "Do it yourself, then!" and had to be talked out of storming off. D'Argo's merely making disapproving noises now, which beats his earlier series of sarcastic suggestions.
But they've found something to sweeten the water and something to make carbon dioxide and a way to force the carbon dioxide into the water. Finally, Jool unfastens the flask of homemade soda and holds it out to John.
He pours some into a cup and regards with satisfaction the bubbles that are clinging to the inside of the cup and rising up through the liquid to burst on the surface. Taking a cautious sip, he decides it's no Mountain Dew, but close enough.
Grabbing the bottle of booze he brought with him to the maintenance bay, he adds a shot to the soda. Covering the top of the cup with his hand, he slams it down on to the workbench, grinning as he feels the drink fizzing up against his palm. Hastily, he downs the mixture in one.
"What are you doing?" D'Argo and Jool demand almost in unison.
John smirks, already feeling a little lightheaded from the bubbles up his nose and the alcohol in his stomach. "Damn, that feels good." He holds out the cup. "It's called a slammer. Or a muppet. Try it."
D'Argo takes the cup gingerly.
Another two hours pass. John peers woozily up at Chiana, standing over him in the maintenance bay.
"What the hezmana happened here?"
"Uh...." John tries to lift up the empty flask and show it to her. D'Argo's head slides off John's left shoulder and he slumps face down in John's lap. Jool mutters something incomprehensible in her sleep as she settles herself more comfortably against John's right shoulder.
Chiana sniffs. "Good thing Pilot and I didn't want you for anything important."
As she stalks out of the room, John lets his head fall back against the wall. "Yeah. Fizz. Fun," he mumbles as he falls asleep again.
Prompt: any, any, losing the one thing that matters
Something Borrowed, Something Blue
John leans back against the wall, his closed notebook drooping forgotten in one hand as he stares out of Talyn's window. The bright star in the center of the view is glittering at him, as wordless as Aeryn earlier when she helped him out of his spacesuit and checked him over for injuries, her hands brisk and not particularly gentle.
He doesn't know why Talyn had a change of heart and opened the door for him at the last moment, though he's grateful for it. He's come close to death too many times now not to appreciate the reprieve, even though a part of him has been dead inside ever since he saw those security logs.
Against the quiet, ever-present hum of the ship, he hears the whine of a DRD approaching. He doesn't turn his head to look, but he's aware of the sound growing much closer as the DRD climbs the wall beside him.
"Found another maintenance job needs doing over my head, huh?" he mutters when it stops.
There's silence for a full thirty seconds, before the DRD beeps. Talyn's DRDs are larger and even crankier than Moya's, but the beep sounds... anxious?
John turns his head—and blinks. The DRD is holding out a pulse pistol. Not just any old pulse pistol. Winona.
He guesses it's a peace offering from Talyn, even if the little drannit did get the DRDs to steal it in the first place.
"Uh, thanks." He takes Winona and the DRD dips its arm in acknowledgment and gives a pleased bleep. John has no idea how he can tell it's pleased—it's surely the same bleep—but he can. With another bleep, the DRD reverses back down the wall and away.
John sits looking at Winona in one hand and his notebook in the other. Then he raises his head to look back out at the stars. Back out at that one unreachable star that is always at the heart of his sky.
Hanging Winona on the wall, he flips the notebook open to a fresh page. Winona's come back to him. Pity she's going to be the only one.
Prompt: Farscape, John, love letters
An Astronaut's Guide to Love Letters
He doesn't write her love letters. For one thing, she can't read English. For another, she'd probably laugh at him and call him a sentimental fool.
She'd be right, too: he'd walk through fire for her. Fly too close to a sun in a transport pod. Take a spacewalk with maybe not enough oxygen for the task.
Instead, he lies next to one of Talyn's windows and maps the stars in the notebook he picked up a few commerce planets back. He wonders if the other John, back on Moya, still makes maps as well, if he's managed to find another notebook, if not another IASA pen.
Though maybe it would serve him right for taking the notebook and Winona—when he has Aeryn, too—if the other John were to find a way to get back to IASA, to Earth, to Dad and Susan and Liv.
If the other John is making star maps, they probably look much the same as his own. After all, it's not as if they're any real use, when it's all done by eye and being able to starburst across half a galaxy in a few seconds means figuring out parallax is a bitch.
Yet he still makes his maps. Doesn't write love letters, but still marks that bright central spot in the middle of the page each time, and each time carefully labels it the same way, writing each letter with love.
Prompt: John is apparently sufficiently skilled at flying the transport pod in later seasons that Aeryn is willing to let him fly it even when she's in it.
Taking Wing
I.
"You really want to do this again?" Aeryn followed John across the transport hangar.
"Yup. You got anything better to do?" He glanced back over his shoulder at her as he climbed the steps up into one of the pods.
She grimaced. "Not really, no. I'm just not sure what else there is to learn."
"There's always something new to learn." He dropped himself into the main pilot's seat and began flicking switches. "Besides, you're a good teacher."
"I am?" She gave him a surprised look as she took the other seat.
"Yes, you are." He spoke in a distracted tone as he went on prepping the pod. "When you're not yelling at me."
Aeryn strapped herself in. "I only yell at you when you deserve it."
John grinned to himself. "I know. Pilot? We're ready. Hangar doors please."
"Yes, Commander." There was a moment's pause as Moya's systems went through the necessary cycles, and then they were lifting off and heading out.
John set a course away from the planet they were orbiting. "Thought we might try a few simulations of systems failures...?" He glanced across at Aeryn.
She rolled her eyes. "Very well."
John smirked to himself as they began setting up the first of them. Yes, these sessions were teaching him some valuable skills that could save his life one day. But mostly he just liked having an excuse to hang with Aeryn and have her get close to him as she showed him how to steer and what to press.
Even the yelling was kinda fun.
II.
"You really want to do this again?" Aeryn tried to keep the impatience out of her voice as she followed John up the steps into the transport pod. Not that she objected to him getting more experience in flying the pod: he'd been doing this for a half cycle or more and would still have struggled to pass stage one training. She just didn't see why he had to keep dragging her along.
For one thing, he was so damn slow to pick anything up. And he argued all the time. Well, maybe not all the time, but often enough. She tried to be patient, she really did, but she wasn't a teacher; she'd flunked that part of her aptitude tests decisively. Mostly she managed to bite her tongue—right up until she snapped: she couldn't recall one of these training runs that hadn't ended up with her yelling at him and grabbing the controls.
The strange thing was, John didn't seem to mind the yelling. Or her being sarcastic. And sometimes she even found she was enjoying herself, when things were going smoothly and he wasn't trying to steer them into a planet or tear the pod in half with a boneheaded maneuver. He'd tell her things about Earth. About what it was like to have been born on a planet and not in space. What snow was like, and eating sun-warmed figs straight from the tree, and catching fish in a lake with his father when he was a boy.
His world was so small and his people so limited, barely reaching out to the stars. Yet she liked listening to his stories, listening to him talk as she leaned close to help correct his course or show him which controls to press. Liked the way he looked at her sometimes when he thought she wasn't looking at him.
Maybe these training sessions weren't so bad after all.
Prompt: John's thoughts after Aeryn offers him the compatibility test
Passing the Test
John would have been happy to go on kissing Aeryn a while longer, but for her, he guessed, it was all about the test, because she drew back as soon as she could.
He waited for her to say something, but she just looked at him for a moment, her face guarded, before turning on her heel and stalking away.
He didn't need her to speak, though. The taste on the tip of his tongue as he watched her leave was sweet: sweeter even than it had been with Katralla. Although maybe it just seemed sweeter because it was Aeryn, because kissing her was sweet enough without the test.
He didn't need her to speak even without that sweetness. That she'd offered him the test at all, despite her evident reluctance, against her better judgment, told him something other than that they could have healthy children together. It told him that she wanted to. That, for all she kept pushing him away and walling herself off from him, she wanted to be with him as much as he wanted to be with her.
He understood, a little, how afraid she was. Heck, it scared him too, how much he wanted to make it work between them. But the knowledge that she wanted that too, even if she wasn't ready yet, gave him hope. Gave him patience. He'd thought he needed to push her and nudge her and guide her until she could see what he could see. Now he knew she could already see it. She was already walking the path beside him. He just had to wait for her, to match his steps to hers, and they'd reach their destination in the end—together.
Prompt: Farscape, Aeryn, chicks were born to give you fever
Twitterpated
"...wasn't trying to kill me. The enemy was a puzzle, with lots of different pieces...."
Aeryn's face is scrunched up with irritation and frustration, but John thinks she's still beautiful. In fact, as she goes on ranting about how she solved Rygel's little explosive problem, she looks more beautiful to him than ever.
It's not that anything has changed about her physically: she's still the same great-looking chick who was very much not what he was expecting to see when the helmet came off and he first laid eyes on her. And it's not that he didn't know already she was smart and capable: heck, she's already saved his ass more times than he can remember and she can handle her prowler better than most of those loud-mouthed Air Force jocks in the astronaut program at IASA could handle their F-16s. Flying something that complex as well as she does takes a lot of smarts. But Aeryn talking science? That's—.
"What?" she snaps at him and he realizes he's staring at her slack-jawed.
He brushes it off, makes a joke of it, although he also makes it clear—he hopes!—that he likes this new direction. But thinking back later, he sees this is the moment when he stops being merely very attracted to this woman and begins to fall in love.
Prompt: Any, Any character who could reasonably be considered an adult, "I need an adult!"
A Helping Hand
Walking past the open door to one of the cargo bays, John thought he heard a faint voice crying, "Help!"
He'd been on Moya long enough that he automatically pulled his pulse pistol from its holster and cautiously advanced through the door. "Who's there?"
"Over here!" The voice was faint and hoarse, but it sounded like Rygel. Didn't mean it was Rygel, of course. He kept his weapon at the ready as he rounded a storage crate and—.
"Whoa!" He pulled up sharply at the sight of Rygel's rear end sticking out of a narrow access hatch into a transport crate. Did the royal so-and-so ever wear pants?
Holstering his pistol, he moved toward the crate. "Gotta problem there, Sparky?"
"Crichton? Is that you?" Rygel sounded somewhere between relieved and mortified. "I'm stuck."
John flipped down Rygel's robe—he didn't need to look at that any longer than he had to—and seized Rygel around the middle. "What were you doing, anyway?" he asked, as he tried to pull Rygel back out.
"Just—oof!—checking on a few things," Rygel puffed, not moving.
"Right...." John didn't need translator microbes to turn that into trying to steal them. He tugged again, but Rygel seemed to be well and truly stuck. "Why didn't you use your comms to call for help?"
"I tried." Rygel let out another pained grunt as John pulled harder. "But I knocked my comms unit off and it's somewhere in the bottom of the crate. Ow! Watch it!" That last was directed at John's latest attempt to pull him free.
"Trying to help here," John snapped back. He wasn't surprised he was hurting Rygel; his stumpy body seemed to be firmly wedged in place. "I'll get Zhaan and Aeryn. Maybe—"
"No!" Rygel kicked his legs. "Don't! I don't want them to see me like this!"
John leaned a hand against the crate, panting, while he contemplated the situation. "Then what do you suggest?" To his disgust, his voice came out high-pitched. The little bastard must have farted.
"Just get me out!"
"Hmm." John took a pace back and took another look. The little so-and-so had gotten himself that far in somehow, so it must be possible to back him out the same way.
A memory came back to him: a kid at school getting his head stuck in some railings. Various suggestions, largely involving butter and other lubricants, had been made—until another child's mother had stepped up, twisted the kid's head a little and, somehow, the boy had popped free a moment later, rather sore but otherwise none the worse for wear. "I'm a midwife. It's like delivering a baby," she'd explained. "You just need to get everything at the right angle."
Well, it was worth a try. Likely Rygel hadn't been lined up quite the same way when he'd first wriggled into the opening.
Putting his hands back on Rygel's butt, John began to slowly turn him.
"What are you doing?" Rygel protested.
"Trying to get you out." John was waiting for the moment when he could sense less resistance. It came, and he tugged as well as turned.
With a sudden pop, Rygel came free. John staggered backward and sat down hard on the floor, Rygel on top of him.
"I'm free!" Rygel waved his arms happily in the air.
"Yes, you are." John picked him up and turned him around, so they were face to face, and gave him a shake. "Don't ever do that again, or next time I'll leave you for Zhaan and Aeryn to find."
Rygel looked crestfallen for a moment. "All right," he muttered ungraciously. After a moment, he peered up at John, his eyes gleaming and his mouth twisted into his version of a winning smile. "Don't suppose you could rescue my comms unit as well, could you? That way I won't have to explain how I lost it...."